What I'm Reading Now

I've just finished A Blind Goddess, by James R. Benn, which I really enjoyed.  The afterword stated that many of the things that happened in the novel happened in real life.  I think I probably enjoyed it as much as I did because it talked about issues other than the mystery (ies) at hand.

I've already started Suspect by Robert Crais.  I've read about two chapters.  The prologue has an interesting portrait of canine psychology which I think dog lovers will enjoy.

Still haven't finished My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead, of which I've read only two chapters, but I know I'll enjoy finishing it.

A Fine Summer's Day by Charles Todd

This is the 20th novel (or 21st?) in a historical fiction mystery series set in nineteen-twenties Britain.
The protagonist is Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge, who proposes on the same very lovely summer day that the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire is assassinated, an event which sets World War I in motion.

For fans of this series, this story is a kind of "origin story" and allows us to see the Inspector before he served in WWI.

I've never read anything by Charles Todd before.  Charles Todd is a mother-son writing team who live in Delaware and North Carolina, respectively.

I found that the novel immediately drew me in, and I hardly noticed the first 200 pages flying by.  I did something I used to do all the time but rarely do any more:  I read the last chapter to see how it ended.  I'm sorry now that I did that.  The last 100 pages seemed to me to drag, and I suppose knowing how it ended robbed those last 100 pages of any suspense.

The authors supplied plenty of information about the events that began the first World War, and I found that interesting because I'd forgotten what I learned in school.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

I've just finished The Girl on the Train and I'm a little bit stunned.  I really enjoyed the beginning of the book.  Rachel's thoughts are so cleverly arranged that you feel as though you're looking in at her through a crack in the door.  Slowly you realize how desperate she is and you feel increasing anxiety - her anxiety - that something bad, something very bad, has happened and that she is somehow involved.  Rachel's attempts to buck herself up reminded me so much of myself that I began to identify with her, and I found myself feeling anxious, guilty and shamed.

As I write this, I'm recovering from my shock and feeling that this is a classically and cleverly designed plot and novel.  Perhaps someone more widely read than myself will point out that the turning points of the plot would, if abstracted, be highly similar to several other hugely popular thrillers.  It's a great structure.  And it's hugely suspenseful, drawing you in from the very first and seeming to accelerate.

I have to say that what makes the book for me is the atmosphere of Rachel's character.  Rachel changes a lot throughout the course of the novel, although she remains a little lost.  (Perhaps the ending is wrapped up a little too quickly, a little too easily to be quite believable.)  Rachel's quite the liar - it'll make you cringe - but she's quite honest with herself.

9/27/15

As I look back on the book, I find myself thinking that is has a classic, Hitchcockian quality:  things seem normal, if bleak, and as the layers of the plot are revealed, you learn that things are really shockingly different from what you imagined.  Things that appeared to be normal are not normal.

I love the idea that the plot springs from an ordinary, everyday activity .. looking in the windows of homes from the train.  I think the very surprises of the plot, hugely entertaining as they are, leave me somehow unsatisfied.

I find myself thinking of The Secret Place by Tana French.  In French's novel, she captures the ephemera of human experience:  the feeling that you have about a person as they walk toward you or by you, those flitters of judgment and assessment that are perhaps unworthy and are quickly forgotten.  Like James, she captures the thoughts and communications and the underlying reality that are never spoken but which, when shared, are still part of the situation.  I've wondered if she invites comparison with James in this respect. I've also wondered if her work as an actor has influenced her sensitivity to perception.

 I think that psychological perception was very much part of what I admired in The Secret Place, and perhaps that's part of what I'm missing in Girl on the Train.  Girl on the Train is 336 pages and The Secret Place is 480 pages. Shorter is often better, and the readers in my book group would prefer shorter.  Many readers prefer plot over characterization, and I prefer characterization over plot.

Having said that, Girl on the Train is entirely successful, in my view, in achieving its aims.  If you like suspense, I'd highly recommend it.

Last One Home by Debbie Macomber

I dreaded reading this book.  I thought the beginning was a little dull and a little stilted.  But long before I reached the end of the book, I felt as though I'd had the experience that makes Debbie Macomber the focus of such devoted fandom.

Cassie is a woman who's left a dangerously abusive marriage.  With the help of a women's shelter, she's gained skills as a hair stylist and has moved back to Washington state from Florida.

While she was married, her husband controlled her actions and movements, and she was not able to attend either the funeral of her father, or that of her mother (who died after she left her husband, but before she had any money to travel back to Washington).

Now she's working on building her clientele as a hairdresser, caring for her daughter, and volunteering to help other abused women.  She becomes involved with Habitat for Humanity, and she soon has the opportunity to use "sweat equity" to get a real house for herself and her daughter.

She has not seen either of her two sisters since she married her husband.  At the time she married, she was only eighteen, pregnant, and both her parents and both her sisters opposed her marriage.

A wrinkle develops when her Habitat for Humanity supervisor takes one look at her and decides that her long fingernails probably mean that she isn't a very good worker.  Another develops when her sister, who lives several hours away, offers Cassie furniture from their parents' home.  The furniture is in storage, and the sister only wants to pay for another month.  Cassie is desperate to have the furniture, not just because she has no furniture and no money to buy any, but because it's a link to the past and the family that she lost when she married her husband.

The novel is about reconciliation and healing and this is a frequent theme in women's fiction.  I can't help thinking that lack of reconciliation is an issue in the lives of many, and that that is the explanation for its lasting popularity as a theme.

A Walk To Remember by Nicholas Sparks

A Walk to Remember is account of a man in his fifties remembering his first love.

He's a high schooler as his story opens.  An average student, he likes to hang out with his friends.

Jamie Sullivan is the Baptist minsiter's daughter, a young woman who isn't popular with the other students.  To them, she seems so serious, and is always walking around with her Bible.

Jamie runs for student council president, and he wins.  One of his duties as student council president is to help decorate for the school dance, clean up afterward, and attend.  He needs a date.  He starts calling all the girls he knows, and soon finds that everyone already has a date to the dance.  He calls Jamie Sullivan and she agrees.

This sets in motion a series of events that make up the novel.

It's a wonderfully easy and quick read.  It's well written and very entertaining.  It is very sentimental, and the characterization is not as sharply drawn as that in The Secret Place.  The publication date on my book was 1999, so this isn't a new book.

I'll Be Seeing You by Suzanne Hayes and Loretta Nyhan

This is an epistolary novel, and it's very likely to appeal to folks who are also fans of The Postmistress by Sarah Blake and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Two women become pen pals because their husbands are overseas, serving in the Army and the Navy in World War II.

Glory is 24 and has only been married a few years.  She has a toddler and she's pregnant.  She lives in New England.

Rita is Italian, lives in Des Moines, and she's a little over 40.  Her husband is a professor and a biology researcher, and he volunteered even though, because of his age, he was too old to be drafted. Her son also volunteered and he's a sailor in the Pacific.  She's originally from Chicago.

The two women share their anxieties, frustration and loneliness.  Through letters, they grow close.

Under Rita's tutelage, Glory becomes a great gardener.  They comfort each other as they navigate tough family issues.

The story covers 1942 to 1945, and it's very eventful.  It's a heartwarming story of female friendship, and I enjoyed it.

And, the friends exchange recipes.  The first one is for beer bread (never heard of it before, but yes, you make it with beer).

The Secret Place by Tana French

I really loved this novel, and I highly recommend it.

Holly Mackey is a teenager, a boarder at St. Kilda's, a tony girl's prep school in Dublin.  Her dad is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad, and his name is Frank Mackey.  (Readers of Tana French's other mystery novels will remember him; her other novels are In The Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place, and Broken Harbor.)

The novel's story begins when she brings a photo to the police, and specifically, to Detective Stephen Moran.  The photo came from a bulletin board in the top floor hallway of St. Kilda's called The Secret Place.  It's a place where the students can share secrets, anonymously.

A year earlier, a student from the neighboring school for boys, St. Colm's, had been found murdered on the grounds of St. Kilda's.  All the students of both schools were interviewed, but the  police investigation has come to a dead end.

Now, someone has placed a photo of the dead boy on the Secret Place bulletin board, with letters cut out from newspaper or magazine, in the style of a ransom note, which spell out, "I know who killed him."

Detective Stephen Moran's career has also stalled.  He got a break early in his career, permitting him to become the youngest detective in the Cold Cases unit, but he's now been spinning his wheels there for several years; he wants to work for the Murder Squad, but sees no opportunity to get himself noticed.  Then Holly brings him the photo of the murdered boy she's taken down from the Secret Place.

Moran know that there's is one detective on the Murder Squad who doesn't have a partner because her partner recently retired,   He knows that this is his one big chance.  If he can get himself assigned to this case, and he can solve the crime, there's a strong chance he might get promoted to the Murder Squad.  If he can't solve the case, his time in the Cold Cases area will probably stretch out until his retirement.

There's just one more snag.  The detective who worked the case earlier, Conway, is a woman, who's tough, smart, combative and hugely unpopular.  Can he solve the case?  Can he get along with Conway long enough to do so?

This novel is really about teenage girls, and what's unique about this stage of mental and social development.  It's also about the tense relationship between Conway and Moran, and the mind games that they employ as they attempt to winkle the truth out of the teenage girls they're interviewing.

What makes this novel so wonderful are the sharply drawn characters.  This was also true of Faithful Place, the other novel by French that I've read.  And the dialogue.  French has a wonderful talent for capturing dialogue.  French carefully unfolds the details of the plot, Conway and Moran's relationship, and the girls' relationships.

It's a long book, with chapters that alternate telling the story of the girls, and telling the story of how Moran skillfully navigates distrustful Conway, the interrogations, and finally, Frank Mackey.  I tried to read the book in three days, and the first 200 pages just flew by, but I found I just couldn't do it. Expect to spend a week, and give this wonderful book the time it deserves.

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12/7/2018

The "Dublin Murder Squad" novels:
 this

1. In the woods

2. The likeness

3. Faithful Place

4. Broken Harbor

5. The secret place

6. The trespasser

Her latest novel, The Witch Elm (a standalone), came out in October.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

In the historical fiction novel The Nightingale, a French woman named Vianne Mauriac faces the start of the Second World War with great fear. First, her husband is drafted by the French army. After France falls and is partitioned, a German officer is "billeted" at her family home, meaning that he comes to live with her. Then her sister, who is just 19, leaves to join the Resistance. Vianne manages to survive in a world where civil order increasingly breaks down, food is harder and harder to get, and the oppressive practices of the occupying German forces become more dangerous for civilians.

This book is, in some ways, a departure for Hannah, who's written women's fiction in the past. However, at its heart, The Nightingale is about loss and forgiveness, and about the healing of families torn apart by loss and bereavement.

This book was an easy and very entertaining book to read, even though it's 448 pages.  The sentences are short.  Although the opening of the book, the exposition, initially moves along at a seemingly slow pace, it soons picks up and becomes a very dramatic and suspenseful novel, full of close and too-close calls.  The combination of the suspense of the novel, the heroic subject matter, and the short sentences make it a perfect book group book.

One review I read opined that Hannah does not quite have the style for a subject matter this serious (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kristin-hannah/the-nightingale-hannah).  I too, felt a lack when the relationships of the two sisters to the men they loved were explored.  The language and the content seemed similar to that of a romance novel.  But, this issue could be viewed the other way: that by presenting these men-women relationships in a very familiar way, Hannah succeeded in making history accessible to many more readers.

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Circling the Sun by Paula McClain

McClain is the author of The Paris Wife, a fictionalized biography of Hadley Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's first wife.  This book was hugely popular, especially with book groups.  It combined history, bohemian/artistic achievement and glamor, and marriage drama.  I'm not sure what to call what I'm calling "marriage drama."  

Something I read opined that with its publication, McClain succeeded in creating a new genre.  Another example would be Melanie Benjamin's The Aviator's Wife, which was also a very popular book group book. Circling the Sun is McClain's follow-up, and it's a fictionalized biography of Beryl Markham, pioneering female pilot from Kenya. I never read The Paris Wife, but I read more than half of The Aviator's Wife and I think Circling the Sun much more entertaining.

Beryl Markham was English; her father was a racehorse trainer. She suffered an early trauma: when she was very small, her mother moved back to England with her older brother.

In McClain's novel, Markham becomes close to a nearby African tribe, and makes friends with an African boy who becomes her lifelong friend and her partner in her horse training business.  As a child she was a tomboy; she loved to run.  One day, her joy in running led to her being attacked by a lion.

As she reached adulthood, her father became overwhelmed by debts exacerbated by currency fluctuations.  He sold up and moved to Capetown.  Losing the farm was hard for her. Her father offered to take her to Cape Town but strongly suggested she get married instead.  This set in motion a long list of events, including her getting her horse-training license at the tender age of 18, the first woman of any age to do so.

She mingled with the Happy Valley set in Nairobi, the folks who figured in The White Mischief story.  In fact, when the Prince of Wales famously visited Nairobi, she was there with her husband, Mansfield Markham.

I found this novel entertaining, lively, eventful and easy to read.  Many of the chapters were short.  I felt that McClain chose as her subject someone who was a pioneer and someone with an eventful and interesting life. 

However, as I suspected, McClain seems to have bowdlerized her subject.  This bothers me, and I can't quite put my finger on why.  After all, it's an entertainment; it's not history nor does McClain present it as history.  I guess I think that McClain presents Markham as having fewer lovers and more friends than her Wikipedia entry would suggest (I have no independent knowledge of the facts of Markham's life), and I believe that McClain did that to make Markham seem a more admirable character.  To me, that implies that succeeding in a man's world (by which I mean the world of horse racing) and writing West with the Night (a book which Hemingway seems to have greatly admired) are not sufficient to make her an admirable woman.

On the other hand, I admire McClain for having written The Paris Wife which interested so many people.  It's not just that you can't argue with success; it's that ( assume many readers were introduced to characters, places and ideas they would not have otherwise encountered.  And, if all a successful book club is, is an excuse to bring people together, that itself is an achievement and a worthy one.

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Reading now: Circling the Sun by Paula McClain and The Secret Place by Tana French

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I'm about a third of the way into reading Circling the Sun and I'm almost finished with The Secret Place - perhaps 100 more pages.  I'd recommend both books.

Circling the Sun is a fictional biography of Beryl Markham, who wrote West with the Night, a well-regarded book I haven't read.  Perhaps I will now.

And, a friend gave me Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch.  I read "The Prelude," and I hope I will find time to read the rest of the book.  I'm reminded that Rebecca Mead already wrote about Eliot as the chronicler of resignation and acceptance when she wrote a piece for The New Yorker about the fact that a quote commonly ascribed to Eliot, about starting over, was never uttered by her.

I also started James R. Benn's The Blind Goddess.  This is part of the Billy Benn historical murder mystery series.  I didn't know what to expect, and this book is not the latest book in the series or the first one.  But I felt that, while a reader who had read the other books might enjoy a whole host of associations that I could not, I really felt that it was very engaging from the first pages.  I haven't gotten very far at all; perhaps as far as page 20.

Presenting Pauline: a memoir by Pauline Fraser "as told to" Louise Brass

A war bride who worked in comedy revues and nightclubs before and during the war, as a child, teenager and young adult, and who also worked in Hollywood recounts her memories and her brushes with greatness.

When Pauline was a child, Margaret Thatcher's father owned a grocery down the road from her grandmother's house and she played with Margaret.  As a teenager, she went to school with Judy Garland.  As a film stand-in, she had tea with Glynis Johns.  She had a flirtation with British espionage during the war, before her mother put a stop to it.  She worked in a pantomime produced by a member of the Astor family.

Here's my favorite passage in the book, from pp. 106-107:

One summer evening in 1940, when the war was heating up, my mother and I were home alone, and she was cooking in the kitchen, when Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke on the radio.  His famous speech was being broadcasted about how we would all fight with anything and everything in our power to stop the aggressors, if they dared to invade our homeland.

His voice came across the airwaves in his heavy, guttural, determined "growl" that had become so familiar to the British people:  "..We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.  We shall fight on the beaches.  We shall fight on the landing grounds.  We shall fight in the field and in the streets.  We shall fight in the hills.  We shall never surrender!"\

My mother stopped what she was doing, looked at me doubtfully and said, sarcastically, "Oh yer .. oh fine."

But I was really flustered by the possibility.

"What will we do if the Germans invade England?  What are we going to do?" I asked her. "Supposing the Germans do land and they march down Charing Cross Road, and come up here and knock on the door?"

She went to the kitchen counter and pulled out a drawer and took out two sharp knives.  "I've got two knives here, one for you and one for me," she said.  "If they come through that door we get as many as we can."

I felt relieved knowing what I was supposed to do.  I felt better knowing there was a plan, even if it could have ended in a blood bath.  The plan that I was to knife as many Nazis as I can, and get it over with quickly.  Luckily, I didn't have to do that.

The Wives of Los Alamos by Tarashea Nesbit

This is fiction, but just barely.  It's a somewhat impressionistic group portrait of the women married to scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico.  This is the lab where the atomic bomb was developed.

J. Francis Oppenheimer makes an appearance here, viewed through wifely eyes.  Much of this novel is concerned with domestic life and the difficulty of making a life in a new place, far from friends and family, while loved ones are serving in the armed forces, often overseas, and while letters are censored, family visits are forbidden, and security concerns govern everything. The wives were often not told where they were going when they set off for New Mexico; while some wives may have known what "the husbands" were working on, it was never discussed (at least not in the pages of this novel).

I am reading this for my book group and I predict it will not be popular with the group.  One member has already said that it doesn't have any plot.  Of course it does.  Victories in Europe and defeats in the Pacific are the rising action; the climax is the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The denounement is packing up and going "home," and realizing the Los Alamos has become home and will be missed.  I didn't really enjoy it very much, but I'm sure that that may be in part because I was compelled to read it for my book group. Compulsion sometimes takes the joy out of things that would otherwise be enjoyable, as any of the Los Alamos wives could very easily point out.

The author writes in her acknowledgment that the idea grew out of a comment from an audience member when she presented some research on Los Alamos and the commenter wanted to know about the lives of the wives.  Many of the wives had bachelor's or even advanced degrees in math and the sciences, but they mostly accepted the mores of their day and accepted their "careers" as wives and mothers.  Nesbit portrays the wives as mildly disliking the few women scientists there, who because of their status, got bathtubs.

I thought of the showers there when I was washing off poison ivy oil today.  Water was not reliable; sometimes women would open the tap to get water for coffee and brown muck would come out. They were advised to take something I think may have been called the "Good Citizen Shower," when, to conserve water, they were advised to soap up before getting into the shower - only to find themselves covered with cold, sticky soap when no water came out of the shower head.

The Things We Save by Joanne Zienty

This novel is a self-published debut novel, and it is also the winner of the 2014 Soon-To-Be-Famous Illinois Author Project.

Claire Sokol is the child of first-generation Polish-American immigrants.  Her father is a WWII veteran and a steel worker on the South Side of Chicago.   Her family is a typical baby boom family until tragedy hits her family, leading to a slow unraveling of family ties and a series of traumatic events that rip the family apart and led Claire first to turn her back on her family and to develop a self-protective coldness, fear of intimacy and inability to commit.  Her situation is one that many of us feel; unable to process our childhood losses and to forgive our parents, we turn our concern to our adult lives, aware or unaware of the way those issues shape us and our actions going forward.

I just finished it on Monday, and I really enjoyed it.  I can't quite separate my feelings about the virtues of the novel from my admiration for the author, or the clever way that she used numerous pop culture references to give the reader a sense of "you are there."