The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (2013)

This is the third book I have read by Lahiri, and probably the best. She tells another in depth story of her people, but this one spans about 50 years and starts in India in a suburb of Calcutta. The boys play in the field across the lowland (of the title), an area that floods during the rainy season. We get a sense of life there, the boys go to school, eventually attend local colleges. Udayan sees the inequities of the world and becomes a revolutionary. Subhash becomes an environmental chemist and goes to America for grad school. Udayan marries Gauri, a philosophy major. Udayan dies early in the book and Subhash comes back to India and rescues pregnant Gauri from his parents by marrying her and bringing her back to Rhode Island.

There are many layers to this book that I enjoyed. As usual, I enjoyed learning about another culture, another historical period. I knew nothing of the student uprisings in India and may want to look into these more. The emigrant experience is always dear to me - the not quite fitting, the accent, the food, but also the wish to stay in America. Then the complexity of families - both what is expected of Indian families and then what happens to the family in the U.S. I also liked the act that libraries and academia played an important role in this story. 

The tale was told by the various characters of different generations, not necessarily chronologically, as memories brought us back to the past, filling in gaps of our understanding. Even Udayan has a voice at the very end.


I have a new state to explore. The only thing I remember about Rhode Island is visiting my freshman roommate's family in Newport and driving through it to Boston. It is a very New Englandish state and I forgot how much it is exposed to the ocean. I may take a loop around it when I attend a conference in CT next year.

The Tail of Emily Windsnap by Liz Kessler (2004)

I was looking for a young adult book to send to a relative in overseas and came across this in the best sellers for younger readers. Felt I had to read it before I sent it. I like books that combine today's world with magic or fantasy, and this one combines it with the mythical world of mermaids and mermen. I got a bit critical in my mind about the way some practicalities were treated, like writing and speaking under water, but if I let that go, it was a pretty good story of a girl looking for answers and finding herself. I am wondering if there are too many America focused references, but that may be OK too.

Emily lives with her mother on a houseboat. She doesn't have too many friends and has never learned to swim, but now wants to take swimming lessons. I don't think I will be giving too much away, when I say that once she hits water, she becomes a mermaid and she of course has to explore this new ability. She makes friends with a mermaid her own age - Shona. Besides a doting mother, who doesn't want to talk about her father, we also have the mystic Millie and the sinister lighthouse keeper Mr. Beeston.  I love water myself, so I liked all the images of underwater. Hope my relative likes this.

Saudi Arabia by Hunt Janin and Margaret Besheer (2003)

Cultures of the World series. I had our children's book specialist order various children's books on

countries around the world, as our ESL students sometimes have to write about their own cultures for their classes, and we had very little in simple language. I am having some Saudi students over for a dinner during the holidays, and when I saw that this book had come in, I decided to read it, so I do not make some great mistakes while hosting them.

It is embarrassing to say how little I knew about Saudi Arabia. I knew where it was and that much of it was desert, but there is much more variety in this large country. There is dessert, mountains, the big port city Jeddah on the Red Sea, and then the oil is on the east side and gets distributed to the world through the Persian Gulf. Of course the sacred Islamic cities of Mecca and Median are also there, in the western part.

I got a sense of their history and am now curious about Laurence of Arabia. (Let's see if I actually read the books I checked out by him and about him.) I did not realize that present day Saudi Arabia was only established in 1932. I had heard about the royal family, but it is now all in context, in a framework. Women did not get mentioned much and appeared in very few of the photographs. I have read about them elsewhere and am concerned about their status, but I will respect that this book for children was written to not be controversial and not confront Saudi beliefs. It looks like they have been amazingly successful at keeping Western influence to a minimum. The riches they have received from oil go towards the betterment of their society, building, modernizing, without allowing alcohol, immodesty and other things restricted by their religion to enter their social structure. Since women are not to talk to men not in their family, there is no socializing outside of the family, so no restaurants, movie theaters, art galleries. I would definitely like to hear more about this from the students when I next meet them. I also got a sense of their relationship with the U.S. (Yes it is about the oil, but not just.) Only through understanding will I be able to make a difference in this world.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (2012)

This may be one of the best books I have read this year. I just finished Looking for Alaska and then had dinner with a bunch of librarians and one said this was even better. I agree.

Hazel is sixteen and has cancer and has to carry around an oxygen tank everywhere. Life is pretty depressing until she meets Augustus at a support group. He has lost his leg to cancer, but is otherwise healthy. He appreciates her irreverent humor, and understands what it means to be sick. They share books and he uses his Make a Wish to get them both to Amsterdam.

Incredible insight into terminally ill teenagers touched me deeply. Since I listened to the audio version, there was an interview with the author at the end. Green was going to be a chaplain at one time and spent some time in a hospital with very ill children. He promised himself that he would write a book for them at some time, but it took a long time to come together. It was worth the wait.

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick (2010)

I know this was a bestseller, but where sometimes books start slow and they pull me in, that I am sorry to see them end, this one started out with an interesting premise and then seemed to drag on and I could not wait for it to end.

Ralph Truitt is wealthy, keeps most of his small Wisconsin town employed, but is terribly lonely and unhappy in the winter of 1908. His first wife and daughter died and his son ran away from home years ago. So he places an ad for a "reliable wife" in a paper and Catherine Land shows up in the train car he sends for her. She throws her fancy clothes out the window and steps off the train in a simple black dress. Both of their pasts are full of secrets, though Ralph shares most of his with her, she does not reciprocate, but slowly starts liking and appreciating the man. He asks her to go after his son in St. Louis that some investigators have found for him. This is where it gets all complicated.

One of the parts of the book I liked was that Catherine learned most of what she knew from libraries. She never got to attend school, but her younger sister taught her to read and she just found libraries a good, safe place to be and worked her way through many books. At one point she starts fantasizing about a garden and reads a ton of gardening and botanical books.

I don't know why it felt like the book dragged and the winter seemed endless. For all of the story to evolve it seemed like many more months would have passed, but who am I to say. It was about grief, forgiveness, family, the possibility of change, so I can't say I didn't like the book.

The Fall of Giants by Ken Follett (2010)

I don't think I have ever really understood what happened in World War I. Ken Follett actually tries to explain it in an interesting novel format. He is only able to give us a glimpse into what the thinking was in England, Germany, Russia and the United States, but it points out the absurd reasons that brought much of the planet into this disasterous war.

We see a Downton Abbey type English family with a suffragette sister who falls in love with a German. They have a servant who is one of my favorite characters in the book. We see the trenches, the futility and huge loos of lives in trench warfare. It helped to see some similar scenes in Downton Abbey and then I felt I needed some more visual understanding, which is why I found the Eyewitness book on WWI in our children's book section.

Part of the action is in Russia, where we see the hard life of factory workers in St. Petersburg. I can't say I still understand all the events that led up to the Revolution, but I could see how in all that chaos the Baltic countries got their independence. The Western front was pretty set in a stretch between Belgium to Switzerland on the French-German border, but the Eastern front seemed to move all over the place.

World War I by Simon Adams (2001)

I have never really understood World War I and am now listening to a Fall of Giants by Ken Follett a long novel on the war. But I needed to visualize some of the things I was hearing, so I went to the children's book section and found this - Eyewitness Books are great. This one helped me understand this war by actually seeing the trenches, the equipment, the different players - both individuals and nations and groups within nations, the war on the various fronts. With a combination of short texts, photographs, artifacts, illustrations, it gave an overview where I could fill in details from Follett's novel. It still boggles my mind on what minor reasons the war was started and how it pulled in so many countries around the world. Follett's extensive book only covers in detail Britain, Germany, Russia and the U.S., and much of it happens in France, but the war involved so many more. I find the losses in lives just beyond comprehension - over 16 million dead, and over 20 million injured! I think I saw a recent number for US losses at about 400,000, and they got in the war at the very end. I will discuss it more when I describe Follett's book, but for now I am thankful for this insight.

Looking for Alaska by John Green (2005)

A book suggested by my goddaughter as a popular book for young adults. I can see why. It tackles all those heavy questions about life in an entertaining story. Miles has no friends in his high school, so he is ready for something different when he goes to Culver Creek Boarding School, and ends up rooming with the Colonel, who doesn't care that Miles - nicknamed "Pudge" - is a nerd. Alaska is this crazy girl into smoking and drinking and doing crazy things, but it makes Miles come to life. They ask many of the deep questions we have in our youth, and if we don't get too busy with everything, we continue asking throughout our lives. Author Green uses the religion class to insert Islamic, Christian and Buddhist ideas about some of these questions. The story is mostly about the group of students getting through a year together, making mischief where they can. There are two parts to the story, the Before and After part, and instead of chapter numbers, each chapter begins with the number of days before or after the breaking event. I enjoyed the way this book tackled a big issue I have seen students around me dealing with. No wonder it got an American Library Association award.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (2011)

I do not know why I picked up this book, I am not familiar with the author, but it

seemed outside the thriller genre, which I did not want to be reading for a while. Our narrator is looking back on his life from his retirement years and remembering school buddies, his first romance. Some things happen in the present that make him revisit those school years, analyze those relationships. The setting is Britain in the 60's, so just a decade before my own history. I liked his comment that the changes of the 60's did not reach everyone, it depended where you were and who you were. I was not that far removed from the time to know that things like dating and relationships were different back then.

I liked this self analysis, contemplating history, how memories of events differ, how we interpret what we see, hear about, remember. I feel I am spending some time on this type of contemplation, looking back at my own life. And then to make it even more relevant, there are a couple of suicides in the book by young people, and I am just dealing with one in my own life - a student I was working with on a few projects. You may never know what triggered that self destructive act.

The main character Tony is supposed to get a bit of money and a diary after the death of his old girlfriends mother. He tries to get the diary by contacting Veronica, the old girlfriend. She was not easy to understand in her youth and has become even more enigmatic in the present. She keeps telling him that he "just doesn't get it," but since she doesn't tell him anything, I am not sure how he was supposed to "get it." The only thing that was unsatisfying is the ending.Tony tries to figure out what happened to Veronica and his old friend Adrian that committed suicide and whose diary he was to have. In the end Tony seems to understand what happened, but I didn't. Again, the audio version of the book didn't help, but I listened to the ending twice, and still only understood a part of what Tony understood. I would have to go back to different parts of the book to see if I could decipher it. The book was still worth reading. I should take time and write down my own thoughts outside the snippets that appear in my blogs.

When I have questions about a book, I see what other people have said about it. If I want a better summary of the book, I can read it on the author's site. The book received the Man Booker Prize. I liked the quote in the Wikipedia from BBC news: " It's a quiet book, but the shock that comes doesn't break stride with the tone of the rest of the book. In purely technical terms it is one of the most masterful things I've ever read."  And then I go check out Amazon, because the reviews there are by regular people, not reviewers. There were plenty who did not understand the ending, and I didn't find any that did explain it (but there were hundreds of reviews and I only have so much time.) One review by Third Age Traveler had pulled out some quotes from the book (s)he liked, and those were memorable for me too, so I will repeat them here:

"...of course we were pretentious--what else is youth for?"
"...our fear: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature."
"If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience "the sixties" until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing."
"Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be."

Whiskey Beach by Nora Roberts (2013)

I thought it was time for another Nora Roberts book, and found myself in another mystery. Eli Landon found his wife dead almost a year ago, and has been fighting off accusations that he is the killer, but there is not enough evidence. He decides to get away for a while at Bluff House, his family home on Whiskey Beach a couple of hours north of Boston. His grandmother had a nasty fall and is recuperating in the city, so he will come and live in the house for a while. The house is being maintained by Abra Walsh, who has also been instructed by grandma to watch out for Eli and nudge him back to health. I don't quite remember a character like Abra in Roberts' books.She has left the corporate world behind and instead cleans houses, instructs yoga classes, does massage, makes jewelry, smudges bad energy from homes - all so new agey. I also think this is the first time I have seen massage (therapeutic) used, which can lead to other things between consenting adults. I did like the way Eli and Abra healed each other. The break-ins to Bluff House, another murder, lost family treasure, those of course add to the suspense of the story. Plus it is true that going through traumas lets people see each other in a different light and can bring them together. I also liked the fact that they were going though old family papers in the attic - very similar to my recently finished Orphan Train book.

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline (2013)

At the Barnes and Nobles in Silver Spring, MD, where I hung out with my 16 year old goddaughter for an hour or more, I found a display shelf with 30 books that looked familiar. I had read at least 7 of them and know I had looked at or heard of many of the others. This felt like a shelf of my kind of reading. I pulled up a chair and read the blurbs on each one, making a list of ones I really would like to read, so I can look them up in my audio book store. This is the one I chose to buy. We librarians keep talking about liking the feel of a book in our hands, and this one felt strange. It was a floppy medium size paperback that I could curl back to hold with one hand, but at times it flopped strangely. The long edge of the open pages were rough cut - I remember some of the Latvian books at home came with uncut pages, and you had to slice them open with a knife before you could start reading the book. You could also tell if a book was never read, if it was still uncut. But these pages had the same feel as the ones we cut open ourselves. And then, though it is a paperback cover, it has flaps, which can work as book marks for the beginning and end, but seemed to get in the way more than help.

I remember reading another book - Rodzina by Karen Cushman (2003) -about orphan trains that brought orphaned children from cities out west, supposedly to find new families, but often worked hard as servants and sometimes took the young girls as child brides. Author Kline has done thorough research and found that people who had been sent out on these orphan trains have been contacting each other, organizing reunions, writing books. I appreciated her acknowledgements to all the places she had done her research, including the New York Public Library that had lists of orphaned children from the Children's Aid Society.

What drew me to this book was not just the orphan train story, since I had read one of those already, but how Kline tied that in with a foster child of today. Molly has to do community service (for trying to steal a copy of Jane Eyre from the library of all things) and ends up helping this rich old lady clean out her attic of memorabilia, and they find they have more in common than anyone would have realized.

I felt the Kline did a good job of conveying that total feeling of abandonment and loss felt by both the Irish immigrant girl Nimaha in 1929 and current day foster child Molly, and 

English Girl by Daniel Silva (2013)

Silva was suggested to me by a younger colleague as a good thriller writer. In Latvian I have started calling these "burlaku romāni", novels about "burlaki" or bad guys that are suspenseful enough to keep me awake on long drives.

Madeline gets kidnapped while vacationing on Corsica. Soon a retired Israeli spy, Gabriel Allon, gets pulled in to look for her, as it turns out she has friends in high places at 10 Downing Street. We get taken on a wild ride through Israel, France, England, Russia and a few other European countries on the way.

I liked the fact that this was reflecting current day politics of Europe. I liked that Gabriel was on top of current events, but also a painter and art restorer, not a totally ruthless killer, middle aged, and that he appreciates and really loves his wife.

When it looked like the girl would be found fairly easily, I knew that wasn't going to happen, as the book was only a quarter of the way in. The various twists and  turs were quite interessting, maybe even confusing in the end.Once again I listened instead of reading the book, so it is not easy to flip back and reread some part.

I will keep Silva in mind when I need a book to keep me awake, but I think I have read enough of these recently. So hopefully I will read other genres for a while.

The Bookwoman's Last Fling by John Dunning (2006)

This was on the Lost Treasures shelf at my audio bookstore and since it was about a bookwoman, I just had to pick it up. At first I was distracted by the reader's voice, as he has done some of my favorite David Baldacci books, and it took a while to get into his new rough and tumble character Cliff Janeway. Janeway is a former cop, who is now running a used bookstore and is a specialist in old and rare books. He is called out to Idaho Falls to look at a very special private collection. Idaho Falls! I was just there this summer, proud to spend my one night in Idaho, the last state of the lower 48 that I had not yet visited. So I could visualize the farms, the Snake River. The main thing I remember was that it was very arid as I came in from the north, and then all of a sudden it became very green - irrigated by the Snake River. It wasn't clear if the horse pastures on the farm in the book somehow got enough water on their own or needed some irrigation.

I just looked up Cliff Janeway books in WorldCat - there are a whole slew of them, so I have another series to read.

Open Season by C.J. Box (2001)

When I was visiting a small library in Wyoming (see my blog post on Rural libraries in the West), which had a specially embossed shelf of leather bound Louis L'Amour books, I asked who was considered a contemporary writer of Westerns. Back in the day when I had a small bookstore, I had a certain part of my rural Ohio population interested in Louis L'Amour, Zane Grey and the likes. I read a few and realized they were the male version of romance novels with lots of action, mystery, outlaws, good guys, bad guys, and a few sexy women thrown in to boot. The man using the library computer suggested C.J. Box first. The librarian agreed. They mentioned a few more, including Tony Hillerman, whose books I read before I started this blog.

Open Season is the first Joe Pickett novel and Joe Pickett, instead of being a sheriff, is a game warden with a great supporting wife and two lovely young daughters. He is a family man, so no sexy ladies for him, but some of his more unsavory colleagues go for romps between the sheets. I had put a slip of paper in one place, where Box does a great job of describing the mentality of certain men and put these words in the mouth of one of the bad guys: "Men are promiscuous. ... We try to pretend otherwise, but deep down we know it's true. We wake up with hard-ons and don't really care who's next to us." The story has the usual mystery, murder, corrupt officials, greed, big bad oil companies, etc. There are quotes from and about endangered species legislation at the beginning of sections of the book, so obviously endangered species are an important piece of the story.

The setting again played an important role in my enjoyment of the book, and this one was set at the foot of the Big Horn mountains in Wyoming, an area I know fairly well, as I have visited my cousin there numerous times. Twelve Sleep County is fictional, but there really is a Ten Sleep, where a friend of mine recently had car trouble, and the Big Horn mountains are really there, and Billings, MT is the closest big city. So I could visualize Joe Pickett doing his job, traveling around the area, sometimes on horseback. The first time I camped out on my cousin's property, before he had even moved out there, a man came riding up to me on a horse.

I am aware that there are more Joe Pickett books, but I have too many other books stacked up to read, so I will let this author go for now, but when I head out West, I might pick up another.

Montana by Norma Tirrell (2006)

Time to finish describing the Montana books I read. This is actually a Montana guide book, but it was suggested by my friend that moved to Montana, when I asked her to suggest something that would give me a sense of the state. As a guide book, I did not read the whole thing, but read the first hundred or so pages that gave me an introduction to the land an people of Montana, the history, something about the wildlife, recreation, arts and old west customs like rodeos. I got a feel for the state, which is just what I wanted, before I traveled into those vast big sky spaces. After the introduction,  I would read up on what I should see in each region that I visited. there is a huge difference between open country, mountains, and places like Bitterroot Valley around Missoula. I read the 2006 6th edition of this book.

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini (2013)

I have read The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Hosseini, so I knew I wanted to read this, but was a bit reluctant, as the Thousand Splendid Suns was such a difficult read in the terms of the brutality suffered by women. Luckily, this was still an intense story, but less brutal. At one point the teller of the story says that enough has been written about the war in Afghanistan, that he will not repeat that, only as far as it affected the character himself, and even then that time period was skipped over quickly.

This is a story of deep connections between people. It starts out with brother and sister are separated when they are young, the sister being sold off to a childless couple in Kabul. We slowly hear the stories of the people around these two siblings - the uncle who brings the girl to the couple and serves the couple. After the man suffers a stroke and the wife and girl move to Paris, the uncle continues to care for the man until his death. During the war much of the splendor of the home is stolen, but later a group of international doctors rent the place. We hear the story of the woman and her adopted daughter in Paris. We hear the story of one of the doctors from Greece. This story seemed most out of place when I started reading it, but as the author pulled me into this man's story, it just reminded me how the fates of people from around the world get intertwined. We see what happens to the small village where the brother and sister grew up - interestingly from a child's viewpoint. We hear of the brother's fate in San Francisco from his daughter, though there were references to the brother's Afghan restaurant before we got his story.

It is an art to tell a coherent story from so many voices, each moving the story forward piece by piece. The fact that Hosseini could speak on behalf of so many characters of all ages, of both genders, from various cultures, even throwing in a gay character in the Afghan world, speaks volumes of his skill as a writer. Since I "read" the audio version, it too was interesting, as  it was read by various voices - both male and female with various levels of foreign accents, which also brought the story to realistic life.

Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fford (2003)

This is the second Thursday Next book and I should have reviewed it as soon as I finished reading it, but life got busy. There are way too many details I have already forgotten, which make these books so interesting. These books are intense to read, as you have to pay attention - they are full of literary references, funny names and the alternate world is just off enough. You feel you are in your own time and space, and then some major detail in life is so different, like mammoths still walking the earth, or the ability to travel to China through the earth's core in a matter of hours. And of course the Literary Division of the government which has to keep constant vigil that book characters act as they are supposed to.

I believe I said that things seemed to wrap up too neatly at the end of the first Thursday Next book. Well they all got unraveled. Her new husband was "time slipped" so that only she remembers that he existed as an adult, and she has to go into Poe's "Raven" to retrieve a bad guy she left there in the last book in exchange for getting her husband back. She has to figure out how to travel into books, as the machine she used in The Eyre Affair was destroyed. Fun, but intense.

The Hit by David Baldacci (2013)

I am now trying to follow the Will Robie stories by Baldacci. As usual, he does not disappoint. Robie is an assassin for the government and his latest assignment is to get Jessica Reel, a fellow assassin that has started killing other members of their agency. The two of them are at an equal skill level, and though they have been pitted against each other, they end up saving each other's lives. As Robie pursues her, he finds there may be more to the story than he has been told, and that they have a common, larger enemy.

Separation of Power by Vince Flynn (2001)

With the death of author Vince Flynn (at age 47), I want to work my way through most of his books, especially the ones with Mitch Rapp, the CIA superagent. This one is #5, where Irene Kennedy becomes the director of the CIA, but has enemies in those who don't like her straight forward approach. We have the usual corrupt Washington politicians, who will do anything to get what is in their best interests. 

Rapp has a girlfriend in this book - Anna Riley, a White House reporter. These types really can't have girlfriends, as they can be used against them, plus for the girlfriend it is hard to be with someone who is in constant danger. Rapp ends up working with a former lover living in Italy - freelance assassin Donatella Rahn.

Then they learn that Saddam Hussein is working on developing nuclear weapons in a basement of a hospital, and the only way to deal with this without enormous collateral damage is to send in Mitch Rapp. (read in the summer)

Manuscript Found in Accra by Paulo Coelho (2013)

I had to read some reviews to get the right perspective on this one. I was surprised that it was termed a "novel" as it is supposed to be a translation of some old texts found in Accra. I thought it actually was some ancient text that Coelho had found through a scholar friend, as stated in the "introduction." Then I thought he had translated the text to Portugese and now we have it in English. It felt like Kahil Gibran's Prophet, which I was very fond of in high school and maybe college. People were asking questions of a Greek wise man, called a Copt, and he was expounding on love, beauty, war, sex, etc. I was actually in a space where I wanted to hear things like this, but then slowly realized the concepts were way too modern. I recognized pieces from the Bible, but as the review from the Boston Globe pointed out, he quoted many ancient and contemporary wisdoms. So it really was fiction - or Coelho's wisdom put in a fictional setting. But I don't really care. As I said, I needed to hear some of these things at this stage in my life.

The Century narrated by Peter Jennings (1998)

This was technically not a book, but I found it in the audio book store. A great series of CD's recording the major events of the 20th century (up to 1998) with excerpts from recordings of people that shaped the century and of regular people that were there. Some well known writers, film makers and other famous people also comment, with Peter Jennings connecting the quotes with a narration about the century. This reminded me of what I had learned in history, what I had experienced, pulled it all together in a nice overview. It also surprised me with how many things I did not know, things I had not connected myself, especially about the years I lived through myself.

A Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy (2012)

I have seen Mave Binchy's books on the shelves, and finally decided to try one. This Week in Winter just happens to be on the current shelf of my audio book shop, so I am starting with this. Turns out this was her last book and that Binchy died days after finishing it. Turns out she is one of Ireland's most popular authors of all times.

 We have Stone House on the shores of the Atlantic in western Ireland. It is owned by three unmarried sisters and eventually all the characters described in the book become a part of Stone House, either working there or visiting the cozy hotel Chicky Starr creates out of the old house. I was especially drawn in by the first two stories of Chicky and Rigger. They each have a difficult past that they need to forget and create a future for themselves. 

Each character or couple gets their own section of the book, going back as far as necessary to get to the past that has landed in the current dissatisfaction with life. Rigger gets in trouble as a kid and keeps hanging out with the wrong crowd, Winnie has found a great man, but with a horrible mother, American John misses a flight and ends up at Stone House, a Swedish accountant loves Irish music, two doctors are deeply affected by patients that commit suicide, etc.  As they arrive in Stone House, their story furthers the general story, and at times their lives are intertwined. Chicky has created the warm setting, but the atmosphere is created by all of them, heals almost all those who come. I enjoyed all the stories of people's lives. I could only complain of the fact that it was a bit contrived to have almost all of them come out with major changes in their lives and futures to look forward to.

I may turn to Maeve Binchy when I need a feel-good about humanity type book.

Whistling Season by Ivan Doig (2006)

I wanted to read something about Montana or by a Montana author. I discovered

Ivan Doig, though the first book I picked up turned out to be about Seattle, so I didn't finish that. This IS about Montana and very close to the area I was visiting.

This is a wonderful story about a family, community and one room school house. The story is told by Paul, who is a superintendent of schools in recent day Montana, but he remembers 1910, when he was a student in his local schoolhouse. I always heard about the slogging for miles through snow to schoolhouses in other parts of the US and in Latvia, but Paul and his brothers rode to school on their horses.

Paul and his brothers Damon and Toby live with their father Oliver, who is the head of the local school board, farms, and works on the Big Ditch. (This last was the most unclear part of the story for me, I think it was meant to be an irrigation ditch or even some form of canal.) Their mother had passed away and the household of males is having a hard time with housekeeping and cooking. They see an ad in their paper from someone who "Can't cook but doesn't bite." They don't believe a woman can't cook, but Rose really does not, though she is a great housekeeper. She and her brother Morrie, who ends up teaching at the schoolhouse, change the lives of this family, and in a sense the whole community.

This book was more laid back than what I usually read, though there were moments of excitement. What the book did provide was a glimpse into the rural lives of Montana in the early 20th century with connections to the present day. It was heartwarming, uplifting, emphasized the importance of education, and gave me hope for humanity. The relationships between family members, students, neighbors - with all their different variations seemed realistic. Bullying and teasing have been a constant through the centuries, but I liked Doig's comment: "the politics I am in today could learn some civility from the playground kind..." (pg. 305) I enjoyed the way the focal family interacted and how they related to various difficult people around them. 

I got a better sense of how teachers kept eight grades going in one room - an incredible challenge. I know the kinds of things they learned are different from what I was taught or my child was taught, but if done well, it produced a thinking, literate populace. Morrie was the epitome of a teacher that could engage, and there were many examples of that. 1910 was the year of Haley's comet, and he focused the studies largely around that event. I did not realize that Mark Twain was born and died on the years of the Haley's comet.

I have a lot of books in my "to read" pile, but I hope to get around to something from Doig again in the future.

Kill Shot by Vince Flynn (2012)

Since Vince Flynn recently passed away, I felt like reading more of his Mitch Rapp books, and they are great to keep one awake on long drives. So it was what I listened to on my drive back from Wyoming. Though this book was written in 2012, it is the second in the series - early in Mitch Rapp's and Irene Kennedy's careers. I found my blog entry on the first Mitch Rapp book I read, where I comment on the ethical problems I have with America sending out assassins around the world, but I like Mitch Rapp and I must have bought into the idea, that maybe it is a simpler way of solving some major world problems.

Mitch has been putting away dangerous terrorists and drug lords around the world from a list that has been compiled by a seelct few at the black ops at the CIA, where he works. While killing a Libyan diplomat in Paris, things go terribly wrong and he has to figure out what is going on. On the home front Stan Hurley, who has his own issues with Mitch, thinks he has blown the assignment and to not reveal the black op side, feels Mitch has to be eliminated. We now understand how Mitch's personal ethical system evolves and why he tends to not trust anyone.

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (2012)

Barbara Kingsolver has written another great book. First of all, it gives us an

insight into the nitty-gritty lives of rural Tennessee, where they work hard only to eke out a living, where no one aspires to college and the science teacher would rather shoot hoops with the kids than teach. My favorite part was where an environmentalist reads our main character a list of what people like her  should do to protect the environment, like take a container to a restaurant for leftovers. The woman had not eaten out for two years and almost all the things on the list she never did, because she could not afford to. She asked if it counted as reuse that they were on their third motor in the truck.

The story is told from the view of Dellarobia (name after wreaths arranged with natural things) who is dissatisfied by her narrow life and it is a joy to see her blossom and grow during the book. She does love her husband Cub (son of Bear) and kids Preston and Cordie. She is bright and had dreams of going to college, but she got pregnant, married, and stayed in the small town. But she thinks, and her common sense way of looking at life fascinated me. For instance, at one point she wonders what it would be like to work next to men without the flirtation. I lived in a small rural town for a few years, and it was scary to me when I ran into some of the narrow thinking. Dellarobia gets involved with the scientists studying the butterflies and she realizes she is capable of learning and doing more than just maintaining a house, farm and family.

Kingsolver would not be Kingsolver if she did not have some cause to share with her readers. The central event in the book is that the Monarch butterflies don’t migrate to Mexico for the winter, but land in Tennessee. As a scientist and his helpers come to research the butterflies, we learn a lot about the wondrous life cycles of generations of Monarchs. The author explains at the end of the book that everything except their landing in Tennessee is true. This leads to discussions of global warming and the destruction of habitats and milkweed as major issues for the survival of Monarchs. The professor's explanations got a bit heavy handed , but is an important issue.  I have to admit I have not been keeping on top of environmental issues as much as I used to and somehow have missed things like the 350 group. A friend just sent a link to an article on decreased Monarch population in Minnesota.

The last thing I would like to comment on is Kingsolver’s rich language and unusual metaphors. Since I listened to the book, I didn't get to mark down any passages, but here is an example: "He won people over in a different way, using his hands to push and pull his congregants as if kneading dough, making grace rise."

Black Hills by Nora Roberts (2009)

It look me a long time before I realized I had read this, but it must have been a while ago, and I had not recorded it in my blog. I chose this book, because it was set in the Black Hills of South Dakota, close to the region I was going to visit on my vacation.

This is Nora Roberts at her best. She gives us a glimpse into a profession - this time Lil Chance runs a wildlife refuge for mostly large cats that have been injured or are no longer wanted as pets. Her love interest Coop helps his grandparents take care of a horse farm that provide trail rides.

There is mystery - the young couple finds a dead body and ten years later stuff starts happening. We get a creepy bad guy and get to see his thinking as he warps his Native American ancestry. The mystery keeps the story suspenseful as the couple works through their differences.

Lil Chance and Coop Sullivan meet as kids when his parents send him to south Dakota to spend a summer while they try to work out their own relationship. Cooper, the city boy, is miserable until he finds Lily, who also like baseball and he learns to love horses. Over the years their friendship continues and grows. Then they separate to educate themselves and pursue their careers. Now when he returns to help his ailing grandfather, she is not sure she can trust him. I don't remember any of Roberts' books giving us that much background on her main characters. Plus there were other people around them we got to know fairly well - his grandparents, her parents, her colleagues. I enjoyed the side romance too.

The South Dakota setting was the main reason I picked up this book. I got a sense of the Black Hills and rural living, where Rapid City is the "big town."  And learned some more things about our wild cats.

Love Anthony by Lisa Genova (2013)

An amazing book on autism and unconditional love. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, as I really enjoyed the way it evolved. Two women living on Nantucket year round, which is deserted in the off season, like Saugatuck. You have to really love it to live there, as nothing is happening in the winter - businesses are closed, it is hard to make a living. Then during the summer you have to put up with the the crowds of tourists and summer people. You have to find something that can earn you enough off the tourists to tide you over, or be a teacher or something that serves the year round population. The local population is still active – they have families, sports & other after school activities, book clubs, a library :). I know I am totally digressing, but I am heading out to Montana, a sparsely populated state, that still creates a close sense of community with the few people it does have, as does a place like Nantucket. I like to understand how people live. Like where do the Vail store clerks and ski area workers live? Not in Vail – way too expensive. 

Beth finds out her husband has been seeing another woman and kicks him out. This triggers a self-examination that leads her back to creative writing and she seems to be fascinated by autistic children. Olivia has come to Nantucket to grieve the loss of her autistic son. She needs the space and time to heal. I liked that she discovered she could use her photography skills to earn some income.

This book is largely about autism, and gives us a great insight into the autistic mind. A mind a little further along the autistic spectrum than the person in the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time that is mentioned in this book. I liked these parts of the book best, and that both women learned something. The unconditional love depicted was also beautiful, touching and difficult.

This book made me think of my own life and taught me something, as a good book should. For example, a therapist asks a couple to write down what they need to feel wanted, happy, secure, and loved. The guy can do it easily, the woman struggles. Made me think what my answers would be. 

Raven Girl by Audrey Niffenegger (2013)

I had a total of about 45 minutes to spend at the American Library Association

annual conference exhibits (you can spend hours there), so I promised myself I would ignore all the book sellers and not even look at the list of authors signing books. But... on my way out of the exhibit hall, I saw a familiar unique name - Niffenegger. No line, she was just standing there signing a pile of books, so I went up to her. I got flustered and couldn't remember the names of her books, but knew I had read three of them. (The Time Traveler's Wife, Her Fearful Symmetry, and The Three Incestuous Sisters) So I got this, her latest book, half price, signed and all, and having met the author!

I read it on the bus ride home - a dark modern fairy tale of a postman who falls in love with a raven, and they have a little girl, who wants to fly, but can't as she has arms.  There are fantastic elements, and today's reality - as in the girl going to school and college. The story is accompanied by Niffenegger's hauntingly beautiful illustrations, which are perfect for the story. I loved the nest on the bed.
 
In the author's afterward she tells how she wrote this fairy tale at the request of a choreographer for the Royal Ballet of London, so this story may become a dance sometime. I can see this. The movie Black Swan comes to mind.
 

Inner Circle by Brad Meltzer (2011)

In looking for a new author to follow, I picked this one up because I saw something about libraries on

one of Meltzer's book covers, and then realized I had to start with the first one in the series. The main character Beecher White works in the National Archives and archives are becoming more fascinating to me than libraries. I love it when there is more than a fast paced story in a book- when I learn about something. This taught me more about the workings of our National Archives and gave me a further glance into their storage caves in Pennsylvania. I had heard of them, but had forgotten. I have seen the archival caves in the banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, so could better imagine what these look like. The other interesting piece was about the presidency. I had barely thought about the fact that the President needs people he can really trust around him and how hard it is to get any privacy in that office. I did not know that George Washington had a secret spy group called the Culper Ring. Meltzer asks the question, what if they never disbanded?

Beecher White runs into a high school girlfriend and to show off brings her into one of the closed and secure rooms used by the president to read archival documents. I liked the image of the story's President Wallace coming to the National Archives on a regular basis to read letters and documents from his predecessors. They inadvertently find a 200 year old book holding secrets, a man dies suddenly, and we are off. We are never quite sure who is on whose side, who are the "good guys," but there are plenty of interesting characters - a barber, a doctor, a crazy man who tried to kill the president, and Clementine - the high school friend who's motives become more and more unclear as the book progresses. I will definitely read more of Meltzer's books.

Bared to You by Sylvia Day (2012)

Eva moves to New York City with her bisexual best friend and model Cary and

starts a job in an ad agency. On the first day she bumps into extremely rich and handsome Gideon Cross. There is instant attraction on both sides, and though Eva rebuffs him for a while, of course they end up together. Both have painful pasts, which actually does make them good for each other. Basic hot fluff.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (2001)

This is the first of the Thursday Next novels, and I should have read this first.
Thanks to my blog I could find that I had read Thursday Next in First Among Sequels, but my notes indicate the confusion caused by the pretty complex alternate world, which was more or less explained here. I know I was intrigued, because this series of mystery/thriller/science-fiction/fantasy is based on literature.

Thursday Next is a bright and resourceful woman working as a Special Operative in literary detection in an alternate England of 1985. Her father is a time traveler, who is wanted by some government agency, so he just pops in and out of Thursday's life for a few minutes. In this first tale, Thursday is called in to work with a higher level of Special Ops to deal with a dangerous criminal Acheron Hades, who has stolen a literary text. This is of critical importance, because if original texts are damaged, they damage all versions of the literary piece, and rewrite literature, which is of major concern in this alternate world. Big enough to create a whole government agency to police this - the Literary Division.

Fforde allows his characters to interact with literary characters, and Thrusday is one of the few people who can travel between the "real" world and literary ones. She had met Rochester of Jane Eyre as a child, and he seems to travel to her world to save her life at one point. Acheron Hades gets his hands on the original manuscript of Jane Eyre and starts changing the story. Thursday ends up going into the world and saving the story, but in the process changing the ending, which had bothered a lot of people. I had read Jane Eyre a long time ago, but it never impressed me, so I had forgotten the story, though references to Rochester and Jane appear every once in a while, so I was very happy that at one point Thursday retold the story for those of us who had forgotten it or never read it. 

There is so much to this book from the literary references (and I am not expert, so didn't get many, probably missed more) to entertaining concepts and names like the nasty Goliath Corporation and their man Jack Shit. It is one thing to read this name, but to listen to it on the audio tape over and over again, I actually found myself coming out with non-professional language at work one day.

We get much of Thursday's history, which is probably critical in understanding her in later books - her tour of duty in the Crimean War (an interesting alternate history), her brothers, her brilliant uncle, her former love. My only minor complaint was that too many things seemed to get resolved at the end of the book, but that is not enough for me to stop reading this series. Definitely want to try more.

Perfect Harmony by Nora Roberts (2011)

Two oldies, but goodies.

Unfinished Business (1992)
Vanessa was taken away from her home and on the road by her father to have a brilliant career as a pianist. When her father dies, she returns home to Maryland to figure things out, to understand why her mother broke off contact, to find what she really wants to do with the rest of her life. Brady, her high school love has returned home too, to work with and take over his father's medical practice. Obviously he woos her back and she finds where she belongs. There was a brief connection with another of Nora Roberts series set in fictional Cordinia, as Vanessa goes to play a concert there.

Local Hero (1988)
Hester and her son Radley move into an apartment where one of their neighbors is Mitch Dempsey, a writer of comic books. Radley worships him, as a comic book loving kid, and Mitch enjoys the boy's company, so becomes his main babysitter. Hester is cautious, thankful for the father figure Mitch provides, though a bit skeptical about his profession, but does not want to get involved if that will hurt her son in any way. Bit of a glimpse into the comic writing, producing and moving to movies world.