Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear (2003)

A very interesting take on the private-eye genre, lent to me by a colleague. Maisie Dobbs opens up her own investigative office in 1929 London - obviously quite an accomplishment. We see her investigating a possibly wandering wife, which leads to some questions about recently deceased WW I vets. Then the middle of the book takes us back to Maisie's childhood, where she starts working as a maid in a house of aristocrats, when he mother dies and her father can no longer take care of her. Her bright mind is noticed and she is sent to Cambridge, but she feels an obligation to help in the war effort and works as a nurse in France. This was the most intense part for me - seeing the war from a woman's point of view, sort of like a female shorter version of All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque. Then we return to London in 1929 and now we see how her war experiences have affected her life, and the mystery is strongly tied to the aftermath of the war. So in a sense, this was a historical novel. Plus I loved the London and Cambridge settings, both places I have been.

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (2006)

I love it when books come my way through serendipity. A student was looking for this book, we couldn't find it in the library, so I put out a search slip on it. Since I had requested the search, they brought me the book. It looked interesting enough to read.

This is a fascinating graphic novel about the Chinese-American experience intertwined with a traditional Chinese tale. There are three stories being told at once. One is the time-honored fable of a monkey king that wants to be a god. The second is about a Chinese-American boy who's family moves to a new neighborhood and he has a hard time making friends and finding his place in the school. The third is about a teen, who's life is being ruined by a crazy Chinese cousin, who displays all the negative Chinese stereotypical traits. I really liked this combination of traditional wisdom with today's world and a good glimpse into the experience of Chinese-Americans, in an appealing graphic novel format.

Hot Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman (2008)

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution-- and How it Can Renew America (full title). Friedman's The World is Flat was a major eye opener for me, that pulled together many of the bits and pieces I knew and filled in the gaps on how the world is connected. This book has done the same for me on energy and going green. Actually there were a lot of things I didn't know on how our energy grid and system work. He is calling for a major shift in thinking, especially in politics. I do hope people in Washington and the state capitols will listen.

I can't even begin to list all the things Friedman covered in this book. For me, it has given me hope that people are ready to go green. I was trying to be green back in the 70's and back then it was such a counter culture sort of thing, and people didn't get it, that over the years I gave up except for small things that everybody does like recycling. (I had been recycling for years, but when I got to Kalamazoo, there was no place to recycle, except for papers that you could take to the paper plant.) I think this book is making me think more of how I live my life - what appliances I should be replacing with more energy efficient ones, to really go through my house and replace all bulbs with energy efficient ones, etc. Plus I have been thinking about my footprint on this planet in this huge house for a while now.

The Last Kasmiri Rose by Barbara Cleverly (2001)

As Maria wrote in her note as she gave this to me for my birthday, this is not great literature, but the setting was definitely worth it. This is the first book by Cleverly from England. It fills in a piece of my big question about who did the English think they were declaring half the world their empire. This is about India in 1922, and the story goes back to 1910. It showed the life of the British in a military outpost in Bengal, and the relation to the local Indians. (American Indians were referred to as "red Indians.") I heard for the first time, or at least understood better, that the English were starting to divide the Muslims and Hindus (later Pakistan and India) which up until then had gotten along fine. The events in the book have the potential to be politically disastrous, as there are rumblings about Indian independence. Some of the British had grown up in India, and definitely considered it their home, even if they had to go study in England. Some of these knew Hindustani and other local languages and became friends with the Indians, though one of the points made in the book is that most British didn't even see the Indians around them, didn't look at them closely, couldn't recognize them, as they were just the servants. We get a glimpse of the Indian point of view from some of the Indian characters, but I'd like to get a better sense of this. When did their rage get big enough to struggle for independence"?

The book is full of foreign terms. I don't know if they are Hindustani or otherwise, but it took a while to get used to it. Sahib refers to an English gentleman, memsahib to a married English woman, ayah is a nursemaid. But there were times when I didn't understand the sentence, like "The burra sahib is in the kutch erry." A little dictionary would have been nice, but the language did contribute to the setting.

The story itself actually got better towards the end. A woman has supposedly committed suicide, but a friend of hers feels it was murder that is tied to the deaths of four other women in earlier years, so she gets her big-wig uncle to bring in Joe Sandilands from Scotland Yard. Joe goes around the town and countryside seeing where the deaths occurred, interviewing various people, which is how we learn their stories. From this he ties them all together, and in saving the last victim finds the culprit. Again it was the individual stories that I liked the best. How they got to India, how they lived, how men had local wives until they were forced by society to take English women as their wives and what happened to the others. Fascinating country.

Book of Unholy Mischief by Elle Newmark (2008)

I can't resist novels about books, so this is historical fiction from late 15th century Venice, with word of the New World in the background. Seems like Venice has been the setting of quite a few books I've read, and I will have to visit it some day.

Luciano is an orphan, who gets nabbed while stealing a pomegranate in the market by the chef of the doge (chief magistrate) of Venice. But the chef makes him an apprentice, instead of punishing him, thus getting him off the streets, and he is even able to pass food scraps on to a couple of his friends still outside. Obviously the author is a lover of food, as the descriptions of the chef's meals and cooking just makes the mouth water. One can see she has researched food of those times, when potatoes had been recently introduced, tomatoes were considered poisonous by most, chocolate and coffee were not well known, etc. Though this was interesting in and of itself, the food and it's preparation has a deeper meaning in the book.

The buzz around town and in the palace halls is that there is a book out there that contains the secrets of alchemy, the elixir of youth, and love potions. Interesting that most of the people we meet want the book for just one of these purposes. It turns out to be knowledge being passed on through an unofficial network of guardians, and it contains things like the gnostic gospels. The powers of Venice are afraid of whatever knowledge it might contain and offer a huge reward to anyone who finds it, thus creating a frenzy among the populace.

Luciano is a clever lad, learns not only about the kitchen work, but spies on the doge and his guests to learn more about what is going on in Venice. He also is besotted with a novice in a nunnery. As he gets to know the chef better, they get involved in adventures surrounding "the book." All in all a fun read.

A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Tony Horwitz (2008)

I discovered that my favorite writer from last year - Geraldine Brooks, has a husband who is also a writer, so I just wanted to check out what he had written.

This book is an early history of the United States that ends with Jamestown and Plymouth Rock. Though I took my time getting through this, it was a pleasant read. I was definitely interested in this part of our history. In my travels out West I would come across historical monuments or museum displays mentioning the Spanish in the early 1500's - almost 100 years before Jamestown and Plymouth Rock. It all remained very vague to me. Tony Horwitz realized the chasm in his own knowledge between Columbus and the Pilgrims, so he started researching - starting in the library, then turning to letters and journals of earlier explorers. But then he did what I would love to do - he traveled to all the places, retracing the travels of the early explorers, trying to locate the places, visiting archives, museums, historians and regular people who are interested in the local history. The chapters include historical facts he has unearthed interspersed with stories of Horwitz's travels and the people he met, the celebrations he participated in. He expands on the things we might have learned in school or what we are told in tourist centers and how that differs from what really happened.

Horwitz starts with the Scandinavians and there was more than Lief Eiriksson, but seems like New Foundland was just too harsh for colonization, but they kept fishing the shores. Then of course there is Columbus. I remember reading some alternative histories of his voyages back around 1992. I guess it never ceases to wrench my gut on how many native peoples were totally annihilated in the Caribbean. But I just never knew the destruction the Spanish brought about on the mainland. Coronado was violent throughout his travels, but De Soto just wiped out whole Indian tribes throughout the Southeast. 

I marked off a passage which epitomized much of the book for me: "In history class, all we heard about was the Forty-niners and mountain men and Pike's fucking Peak," Walter (an Arizonan who can trace his ancestry to the Spanish) said. "Anglos called us 'chili eaters' and looked down on us as newcomers, even though we'd been there three hundred years before the so-called pioneers came west." (p. 147)  When I looked at the map, it was amazing how much of the US the Spanish explored before the English got there - along the California coast, then NM, AZ, TX, OK, KS then FL, GA, SC, NC, TN, AL, MS, AR, LA and only after all of those was St. Augustine settled.

There were many things that set off my thinking, so I am glad I took my time with this book. I'll just mention one. What were these conquistador guys thinking? They traipse around a huge foreign land without any skills to provide for themselves except to steal from the Indians. Very unlike Louis and Clark who explored with hunters and gatherers. Seems like I've heard this in other historical books and novels - the supply line is critical to armies - and that is what these men were.

Another thing that is slowly getting clearer in my mind, is why, though I learned about Indians while growing up in New Jersey, they didn't really permeate my consciousness until I started traveling West. I didn't realize how many were destroyed - even before the English got here, and that many of the rest were forced westward. I learned about the Trail of Tears when visiting the Great Smokey National Park, but obviously that was not the only time Indians were cleared out of Eastern states. One of the most evil recent men was a registrar of vital statistics in Virginia, who altered records to weed out Indian bloodlines.

All in all a very fascinating story, but Horwitz ends his tale on a melancholy note (maybe not quite the right emotion), when he notes that though he has gathered all these updated facts, people till cling to and maybe need the myths like Plymouth Rock, Thanksgiving turkey and the Fountain of Youth.

Eclipse by Stephanie Meyer (2007)

Stephanie Meyer continues her story of Bella torn between her two loves - vampire Edward and werewolf Jacob. My favorite part was when she attends a ceremony with Jacobs clan and hears the story of how their forefathers got the ability to change into wolves. I knew the vampires would end up working together with the werewolves against the evil from the outside - and I liked that. The description of the fight was bizarre, but interesting. What I couldn't handle was Bella and her obsession with Edward. I found "gaimangirl" on Amazon agreed:

"What in the world do all of these people see in Bella? ... She's whiny, hypocritical, self-obsessed, co-dependent, moody, childish, sulky, I could go on, you get my drift. She has no goals, ambitions, hobbies, dreams, or talents. She shows no interest in the world around her."

I have similar complaints - what does she think she is going to do for "eternity" if she doesn't have a job, an interest, a goal, a hobby? She seems smart - when she was grounded, why didn't she read books, why reread Wuthering Heights a 100 times, when there are so many good books out there? Anyway, I guess I want to see how Meyer resolves everything, but I think I'll wait a while to pick up the fourth book. This is not Harry Potter, where the characters are richly developed. Harry got whiny for one book, but that was just that age, and he got over it.

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008)

Another incredible book for young adults, that sounded fresh to me. This takes the oft used post-apocalyptic scenario and combines it with reality shows of today. America is reduced to one wealthy city in Colorado and twelve outlying districts that each provide something for the common good. They each have to send a boy and a girl to play in the annual Hunger Games - a survivor type reality show, except the winner is the last person left alive. Our heroine Katniss comes from the impoverished coal mining area in the Appalachians. She has learned to hunt wild game to provide for her family, a skill that increases her chances of survival, but the officials who run the games always provide situations to challenge even the best contestants. There is an underlying theme of standing up to the oppressor, so I was thrilled (and a bit frustrated) when I read after the last page "end of book one."

Charmed (1992) & Enchanted (1999) by Nora Roberts (2004)

I don't think I've read any of her Donavan stories before, but I liked these. The magic is pretty blatant, but it is set in today's world with Wiccan lore thrown in. The Donavan clan are magical folk from Ireland and they fall in love with non-magical people and have to see if their love can survive the revelation that they are different. In Charmed Anstasia is a healer who falls for Boone, a children's book writer and illustrator who moves next door with his daughter. And in Enchanted Rowan Murray rents a cottage from a friend on the coast of Oregon to get away from it all, she befriends a wolf, which she seem to trust more than the neighbor guy, who just happens to turn into that wolf every so often. I liked her finding what she really wants to do with life.

Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin (2007)

This is the first book to Serpents Tale, a gift from a colleague. Adelia, trained in medicine in Italy, but especially skilled in reading the dead, is sent by her king to England to help King Henry with some murdered children. This was a fascinating look at 12th century England. It was scary to see the belief in the healing power of religious artifacts. Mind over matter can only go so far. I was again amazed by the level of medical knowledge of Adelia. I also liked her companions Simon, a Jew, and Monsuer, a Moor. I was looking for the person I knew she was going to fall in love with, but I didn't recognize him till the very end.