What I'm Reading Now

Continuing to read Luckiest Girl Alive, but haven't gotten that much farther.  Have mislaid Rebecca Mead's A Life in Middlemarch (feeling very Bridget Jones now), have read first ten pages of The Paris Architect (chilling right from the beginning), but I picked up The Bookaneer by Matthew Pearl - and while I would really like to get away from reading yet another historical fiction mystery, I have to say it's charming from the outset.  The narrator recalls when, as a 19-year-old, he worked as a waiter on the train and his favorite part of his work was when the book vendor came on the train.  Is it embarrassing to find yet another "book for book lovers only" with a high degree of twee on my reading list? Yes, it is embarrassing and all I can say is that I have known embarrassment before.  

Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal

I'm reading Great Kitchens and I'm really enjoying it.  I found out about it from a co-worker who said she really liked it.

From early in the novel:

Adam held out the pack for Mitch.  "You don't need to be in the kitchen?" Octavia asked, preemptively crossing her arms in front of her chest.

"Dirty little secret," Mitch said.  "Eva has saved my life.  She does everything I can do and people can't tell the difference.  I'm actually writing a book now, I have time to write a book."

"What's it called?"

"Tapas Girls and Bottomless Sangria:  Hot Times in Spanish Kitchens.  You know anyone who can help with a book proposal?"

This book, especially its opening, reminded me so much of Anne Tyler.  I ran through the first 100 pages.  The phrase that comes to mind is "the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie."  These modest, unpretentious people are very funny and sweet.

I read an article about the author, J. Ryan Stradal, and I got the impression that "food culture" wasn't that important to him personally - it was just the setting for the book.  However, talk about food is constant in this book, whether it's venison, lemon bars, heirloom tomatoes, artisanal bread, or lutefisk.  I'm amazed I haven't gone to get something to eat already!

The Rumor by Elin Hilderbrand

I enjoyed The Rumor.  I thought it was slight, however.


This is the first Hilderbrand novel I've read.  She lives on Nantucket Island, and I assume that her novels, like this one, are set there.

Nantucket sounds like a very nice place; I enjoyed imaginatively hobnobbing with its citizens.

This is a book about friendship as much as anything.  Two friends, Madeline and Grace, are at the heart of the novel.  Each of them is in a rocky patch, in very different ways.  Madeline is a novelist, and one who has known real success but who is under contractual obligation to deliver another novel and she's got writer's block.  Her friend Grace seems to have it all:  beautiful house, beautiful garden, two pretty and accomplished teenage daughters.

Grace is someone who came from money and who has refined and artistic tastes.  She loves her garden, and she loves to cook.  Her daughters are somewhat distant, especially the older one, who aspires to a modeling career.  Her husband is a successful real estate agent, and he is gone a lot - he's never far away, since they live on an island, but his hours as an agent mean that he's not around.

Grace does all the work herself on her garden, but she has a landscape designer and he visits the garden almost every day to talk to her about the design.

Grace and her husband, Eddie, pay a publicist to get a paper or magazine to do a spread on her garden, of which she's rightly proud.

Eddie is a realtor, and he's facing pressures in his business.  Business is slow.  He's always been a hard worker, and someone who needs to be available when his clients are available.  He feels that he has to be in the office so that he can be there when clients walk in.  As a result, he's never home during the day, and is often gone in the evening as well.  Of course, weekends are his busy time.

Meanwhile, Grace has developed a crush on her gardener, Benton Coe.  He's been gone for the winter, visiting Morocco, and when he comes back, he brings her first a tea set, and then macarons for the mint tea Grace makes with the tea set.

I felt that the Rumor was slight and fun - superficial in that, in part, it was about surfaces.  For instance, Grace has a potting shed, which is described several times.  It's as if the potting shed is a symbol of a certain kind of middle class aspiration and attainment, a token of "having arrived," and, of course, while Grace is proud of her garden and her potting shed, her lifestyle, which is an act of creativity on her part, is supported by her husband, who is not only struggling to keep his business profitable (and support Grace's lifestyle) but the stress is causing him chronic heartburn.  Grace is a wonderful cook, and Eddie can't eat the beautiful food she prepares because his heartburn is so bad. She creates stylish and delicious meals using the fresh produce from her garden, and she feeds her husband cheese and crackers because that's all he can digest.  Is it obvious that there's a disconnect here?

In her acknowledgements, Hannah mentioned that she had been fighting breast cancer while she was writing this book.  I wonder if that influenced the plot -- or the tone.  I wonder if her other books are a little big lighter, a little bit more whimsical.

I often wonder what are the purposes of the fiction novels I read.  Obviously, one is escape - both in the sense of escaping from one's daily reality and demands and also, in the sense of being allowed to see how the other half live, and where they live, and how and where others unlike ourselves live. Obviously, some books are art, or attempts at art, whether conscious or not -- and, equally obviously, most of the books I read do not fall into this category.  But what about a novel like The Rumor? Some might dismiss it with a wave of the hand, saying, "It's just escapist entertainment."  But why this particular escapist entertainment?  Why not Nancy Thayer, or fantasy or science fiction or crime fiction or any one of another kind of novel by any one of a number of authors.  

What I'm Reading Now

I feel a need to clear my palate, so to speak.  I started reading Jessica Knoll's Luckiest Girl Alive, and I saw right away at least three of the similarities to Gone Girl:  a) the author is a magazine writer; b) the protagonist is a magazine writer; c) the protagonist is concerned with the need to appear perfect and to disguise her true feelings.

I felt I was looking for something else, so I picked up The Rumor by Elin Hilderbrand.  I found the opening pages breezy, light and entertaining.  However, as the plot thickens, it seems a little less light.

I'll continue with it for now.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

I just finished this book last night, and I still feel strongly moved by it.

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris.  Her mother is dead.  She loses her sight to illness.  Her father, a locksmith at the Natural History Museum, dotes on her and trains her to use her other senses to compensate for loss of sight.

Marie-Laure grows up in the Natural History Museum, spending time with the curators and becoming an expert on shells among other things.  She finds the world of the Museum, with its scholars and specimens, magical.

Her father makes puzzle boxes for her for her birthdays.  She's very talented at opening them, and will find a treat inside.  Then her father begins to give her Braille books.  One of them is Jules Vernes' Twenty Leagues Under the Sea.  Her father makes a model of her neighborhood, which helps her to learn how to navigate the streets,

Werner Pfennig is an orphan after his father dies in a mining accident, when he and his little sister, Jutta, go to live with Frau Elena in a house with other orphans.  He's traumatized by his father's accident, and dreads and hates the mines.  The mines are where all the boys go when they grow up - when they're fifteen or sixteen. He pulls his sister, Jutta, around in a little wagon amidst the slag and coal heaps.

Werner finds a radio somewhere, and manages to make it work.  Late at night, he and Jutta sit up and listen to a science program for children that is broadcast from France.  Jutta is particularly fascinated, and begins to exhaustively draw pictures of Paris.  Werner begins fixing radios for the neighbors. Finally, a Nazi officer comes to the house looking for him; he wants Werner to fix his radio.  Werner is nervous, but he does fix the radio, and this leads to his being nominated for entrance into a military school.  As frightening as he finds the entrance exam, and as much as his sister profoundly mistrusts this turn of events, he feels compelled to accept any route that will permit him to escape the mines.

When the war comes, Marie-Laure flees Paris with her father to Brittany, where they live with her father's uncle, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War.  Meanwhile, Werner is miserable at his military school.

The book opens with the bombing of Saint-Malo, the medieval walled city on the coast of Brittany where Marie-Laure lives with her great-uncle and his servant, the redoubtable Madame Manec.

The narrative skips forward and backward in time, and the story is told through short chapters.  I think the short chapters give a reader a sense of time passing quickly, and also allows the reader to focus not only on the plot but the wonderful pictures the author creates.

Werner's experiences in the war reminded me of the film of Gunter Grass' novel The Tin Drum.  Marie-Laure's childhood in Paris reminded me of The Invention of Hugo Cabret by David Selznick.

I absolutely adored the first 100 pages with their jewel box quality:  the fascinating exhibits at the museum, the wonderful puzzle boxes, the streets of Paris and the Jardin des Plantes.  After the invasion, things become much less magical and much more frightening.  I found that my sense of dread was profound, so much so that I found it hard to return to the book after page 100.

A friend who read this book said that the ending fizzled out.  Perhaps it did, but I didn't see it that way.  I thought that the brevity with which the end events were described were a reminder of the absurdity, brutality and randomness of violence in war.  There was another example of this from earlier in the book that has stayed with me:  Werner's friend forces men he meets on their travels to take off their boots and let him try them on.  He's a big man and he's looking for boots that fit.  When he finds boots that fit him, he just takes them, even though he knows a man without boots will die from exposure. The war was over for the man forced to give up his boots.

This man, who behaved in a way that certainly preserved himself, really loved Werner, I think, and certainly tried to protect him.  He also showed great tenderness to Werner's nephew in the monologue.

I think the epilogue permits us to see that Werner is not forgotten, and that the intensity with which he is missed is a reflection of his exceptional quality.  I think it's meant to be both a comfort and a balancing of the brutality and anonymity of war.

I think I read something about Anthony Doerr, or an interview with him, in which he said that he wanted to show that people are good. I'm not sure exactly what he meant, but perhaps he meant that people have the capacity for goodness even though they steal other people's boots.  It's a romantic notion, and a comforting one.

The European Union is requiring Google to disclose the fact that accessing its products, including this blog, leaves cookies on your computer.  Here's an article that provides more information: http://www.editweaks.com/2015/07/googles-new-european-union-cookie.html.  And here's another: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2953692/google-tells-its-publisher-partners-to-comply-with-eu-cookie-directive.html

Pleasantville by Attica Locke

This is the first book I've read by Attica Locke, and I really enjoyed it.  It's the story of a lawyer, Jay Porter, who's at a low ebb in his life when he becomes caught up in a series of events, including a murder, a criminal trial, some political dirty- and double-dealing, for which he's quite unprepared.  As the novel opens, he is gripped with grief for his dead wife and struggling to care for his two children.

It all starts with a break-in at his office in an old Victorian house.  He calls the police, and they come, look over the house, fill out a report, and leave.  Then he goes upstairs and finds an intruder who laughs at him before escaping out an upstairs window.  Downstairs, he begins to clean up the broken glass only to realize that the front window was broken from inside, not outside.  He then finds a business card with his address written on the back.  The front of the business card shows the name of a lawyer at Cole Oil. a local polluter whom he had successfully sued in a class action suit but which has failed to pay any part of the settlement amount.

He's disturbed and confused by all of this, but his grief-induced numbness is something he's feeling more strongly than fear or anger.

Shortly thereafter, an African-American girl is reported missing, and she was last seen in Pleasantville, an attractive middle-class African-American neighborhood in Houston.  This affects Jay greatly because he knows many people in Pleasantville and because this is the third such disappearance in several years, and his wife, as she lay dying, was particularly affected by the trauma of the parents of one of the other victims.

Much to his surprise, he finds himself involved in the disappearance/murder case, and eventually, manages to resolve the class action suit.

This book is wonderfully plotted, and very exciting. I enjoy accounts of courtroom tactics, and there's some of that here in the presentation of the criminal case he defends.

What makes this novel different from an ordinary police procedural is that Porter defends his client without solving the case, and, more importantly, the urban setting and the sharply drawn characters. Sometimes Porter tells you who these people - who he's mostly known for years - are, but mostly, their character is revealed through their actions, which is much more interesting.

If you like Scott Turow, or if you liked John Grisham's Sycamore Row, you'll probably enjoy Pleasantville.

Attica Locke is also the author of Black Water Rising, also featuring Jay Porter, and Cutting Season. And she's also a writer and co-producer for the TV show Empire.

A Blind Goddess by James R. Benn

Army investigator Billy Boyle is asked by an old friend to investigate the murder of a local policeman in World War II era Britain.

This is the second-to-latest novel in a series of novels about Army investigator Billy Boyle.

Like A Fine Summer's Day, A Blind Goddess is a historical fiction mystery.  A Fine Summer's Day was an "origin story," and explained the backstory of the protagonist. It's a great place to jump into a long and long-established series.

A Blind Goddess is not an origin story, but because one of the characters in this story is a childhood friend of Billy's, there's a lot of discussion of his teenage years in Boston when he met this friend. So, if you haven't read the rest of the series, you won't feel that you missed something important and you should not feel compelled to read the novels in order before you can read this one.

Billy is granted leave, but before he can leave, he's asked for help by an old friend.  His friend, Tree, works in an African-American anti-Tank unit.  His gunner has been arrested for the murder of a local policeman because the dead man had warned the accused, "Angry" Smith, from dating his sister.  The dead man's body was dumped in a local cemetery, on the grave of his father.

Billy feels the pull of old loyalties and can't walk away from this request.

What I found very interesting was the setting, and the discussion of racism and segregation in the military during World War II.

The books in the series are:

Billy Boyle

The First Wave

Blood Alone

Evil for Evil

Rag and Bone

A Mortal Terror

Death's Door

A Blind Goddess

The Rest Is Silence

Suspect by Robert Crais

Scott James is a Los Angeles police officer.  One night, he and his partner stop, on the way to dinner, just to listen to the silence in a commercial district.  All of a sudden, a Bentley pulls into the intersection in front of them, and is immediately hit by a truck.  A fire fight ensues, and Scott's partner, Stephanie, is killed.  A Gran Torino appears, and the gunmen pile in and escape.

Scott is wounded in several places, and has to have multiple surgeries, screws and plates to be put back together.  He's eligible for medical pension, but he's not really considered fit for duty, and he doesn't want to go back to being a patrol cop, but he can't face retirement, either.  He wants to find Stephanie's killers.  Then he hears that there's a position open in the K-9 unit, one in which police officers work with dogs.  He lobbies hard to be transferred to the K-9 unit.

The day that new officers are assigned their dogs, he meets a dog named Maggie.  Maggie is a military dog, a German Shepherd trained to sniff explosives and IEDs, who served three tours of duty in Afghanistan.  Maggie's handler, Pete, was killed in a suicide bombing/sniper ambush, and she suffers from PTSD.

Scott admires her loyalty:  Maggie never left her handler, even when she was shot by the sniper. She's had several surgeries, too.  Scott and Maggie bond almost instantly.

Maggie's not really fit for duty, either.  But everybody at the K-9 unit loves her, and they feel sorry for Scott.  They bend the rules so that Scott can have some time to work on Maggie's PTSD.

At the same time, the cops assigned to unravel the shooting and find Stephanie's killers have retired, and the new cops bring Scott in to give his statement again and give him a little bit of a summary of the case to date.  Before long, Scott's using Maggie's exceptional sniffing abilities to do a little extra-curricular investigation of his own.

I loved this novel.  It opens with a prologue that describes the ambush in Afghanistan from Maggie's point of view.  Maggie gets some more story-telling time later in the novel.  For me, Crais really created suspense equal to that I'd experience at a movie.  I found the rising action at the end of the novel really exciting, and found the happy ending that much more satisfying as a result.  I would heartily recommend this novel to any reader of thrillers and especially to thriller readers who are also animal lovers.

Robert Crais is known for the Elvis Cole/Joe Pike series but this is a stand-alone novel.

Interestingly, Crais worked as a television screenwriter on many popular TV series:  Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, Quincy, Miami Vice and L.A. Law.  Several of the novels I've read that were written by screenwriters seemed to me to be very proficient in giving a) lots of plot, b) hooking you right away, c) keeping the story moving.  The novels I have in mind are The Rosie Project and The Heist, Fool's Gold and I'm sure there have been others I can't think of now.  To me, Suspect felt different.  The exposition and characterization wasn't quite as detailed as it might have been in the hands of another novelist, but it seemed to me to have a certain satisfying depth.  I really enjoyed it as much or more as The Secret Place.  \

According to a friend of mine, if you enjoyed Suspect, you might also enjoy The Search by Nora Roberts.  Another book you might enjoy is Kill Switch by James Rollins.

Crais' follow-up novel, The Promise, is a continuation of the Elvis Cole/Joe Pike series.  But fans of Scott and Maggie -- Maggie, especially -- will be delighted to know that star in the story, too.

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.