Mission to Paris by Alan Furst (2012)

Paris caught my eye again and caused me to pick up this historical fiction book about 1938, when Hitler is getting ready to wage war - with conventional weapons as well as political and psychological ones.

I am writing this on the eve of our own election, when I feel great fear for our nation, as I think it is a very important choice we are making this time. The final result is not clear, and even if reason prevails and my candidate is reelected, there will be close to half the population disappointed, thinking the other side could provide some magic bullet to all our problems. I do not want to get into these specifics, but into the feeling of uncertainty, which must have been felt throughout Europe in 1938. They thought that they had already fought the war to end all wars 20 years earlier, and now there were some that thought it wise to arm themselves against the Germans, while others thought it a waste of money and wanted peaceful talks and compromises. Now I would tend to be the one on the side of peaceful talks, but knowing history, and understanding from this novel that a lot of that talk was fueled by Hitler's spies, I begin to understand the uncertainty in France at the time.

Our hero is Frederick Stahl, an Austrian who has gone to Hollywood to act, but has been asked to film a movie in Paris. The Germans try to use him for their propaganda purposes, and he tries to avoid this as much as possible, but gets pulled into the intrigues of the war. There are lovely women around him, like Kiki from the German baroness' party or Olga, who he meets in Germany, or his own costume designer Renata, a Jew who has managed to flee Germany. One scene really hit me - when the film requires filming on location in Romania, but the company will not pay for plane tickets, and they have a substantial part of their crew that cannot be caught in Germany, as they have left illegally, they have a dilemma. The more wealthy actors and film crew pitch in to buy the plane tickets for those who can't take the train. Someone makes a comment about why can't all of France work this way. There was later some reference to the Jewish studio owners helping out, but I was wondering why they didn't realize the situation with the crew in the first place, but maybe they didn't realize the direness of the situation.

What starts out as just some uncomfortable situations and veiled threats, becomes a full blown thriller with guns and dangerous escapes, which makes for an exciting read.  Except then I realize how many people did not make it through and lost their lives at this time in history. I had never thought of the psychological warfare of this time and was glad to fill in one more small square in my understanding of history.

Girl in the Garden by Kamala Nair (2011)

I briefly saw the word Indian in the book info and thought it was going to be about American Indian roots, but turned out to be India Indian - different, but still good. A young girl, born of Indian parents in the U.S., travels with her troubled mother to India to visit her family and learns more about family secrets than she cares to. There really is a girl in a beautiful, mysterious garden. Much of the tragedies in the book had to do with parents choosing husbands or wives for their children. Family structures and relationships with the U.S. were interesting. I wish the author had expounded more on the ayurvedic medicine practiced in the Indian hospital. Still, a great window into another culture, both in our own country and back in India.

Fiftly Shades of Grey by E.L. James (2011)

I had to find out what the fuss was about. I knew I didn't want to listen to this in the car, so read this one in print. OK, so it had quite a lot of eroticism in it, way beyond the vanilla type portrayed by the likes of Nora Roberts. The writing wasn't great, but there was also a story, characters with issues, families, friends. Lots of cliche's, but kept me reading.

Anastasia or Ana Steele is forced by her roommate's illness to go interview Christian Grey, a very young successful businessman in Seattle. (I liked the Seattle/Portland references.) She literally stumbles into the interview, but as she is not a journalist nor has she researched the man, she asks the prepared questions, but then follows them up with blunt observations of her own, which intrigues Grey. He is to talk at her college graduation anyway, but he goes out of his way to contact her. The attraction is mutual, though Ana is inexperienced and does not believe this guy is interested. So we are treated to this whirlwind romance in a matter of weeks, but there is definitely a dark side to Mr. Grey, thus the "fifty shades of grey." Ana lightens him up, but it is complicated.

Turns out this book evolved from fan fiction from Twilight, and in the U.K. Amazon, this trilogy has outsold the Harry Potter series. I even saw this translated into Latvian. It has mostly been panned by critics, but is highly popular as female erotica, and seems to have revived the dirty book genre, which was left behind when porn became so available through the Internet. Seems also to be providing material for discussion in the feminism and women's studies ranks.

Red House by Mark Haddon (2012)

Since Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time book was so fascinating, and I know I read another of his books, I thought I should read this one too, but was disappointed. It is about a family - two families - Angela and her husband Dominick, children Alex, Daisy and Benji, who go off on holiday with Angela's brother Richard, his second wife Louisa and her daughter Michelle. Angela and Richard haven't spoken much, and this time together gives them the opportunity to reconnect, straighten out some misremembered family history. Each family member is struggling with something in their lives, and this leisurely time in the country (someplace in the UK) gives them time to work on it.

Haddon does have a great skill into getting into the heads of different types of people, but in this case none of them really appealed to me. The kids more than the adults, but even there I found myself not really caring what happens to them. If I had to pick a favorite, it might be Alex, who is a teen focused on sex and does a lot of running to use up his energy and maybe to be in shape. He ends up being the adult taking care of problems quite a few times.

Haddon tells the story from the point of view of all the characters, so you do get to  see inside each of them. His style includes random quotes appropriate to each character, and stream of consciousness words. This was a bit disconcerting when listening to the book, as I did not know with which character these quotes and words were associated. I tried to find a physical copy of the book to see if there were visual clues if you read the book, but neither our library nor the bookstore had it. I looked at his previous book - A Spot of Bother - as that was also written from many viewpoints, but had no visual clues as to which character was being described. I also looked up my blog entry for A Spot of Bother and found that I had a hard time warming up to it, but in the end liked it. This one, not so much.

I knew others would like it, so the review in GoodReads says:" The Red House is a literary tour-de-force that illuminates the puzzle of family in a profoundly empathetic manner."

Innocent by David Baldacci (2012)

Needed a good suspenseful book for the road, so chose poor Baldacci again, and once again, he held my interest and kept me awake.

We have a new tough guy - Will Robie, an assassin sanctioned by some government agency. We see him execute two foreigners that are a danger to U.S. security. (I really hope our government does not do this, though the idea is tempting if you could just take out a few behind the scenes trouble makers, the world might be a better place. But where do you start, and where do you stop? And we have seen some things our government has done in the past, so I think we believe they just might be capable of this.) On his third job Robie balks, as it is a woman and she has a small boy sleeping next to her. When he doesn't shoot them, a sniper does so through the window. (Now that I know the whole story, that seems like overkill.) Well, the plot thickens considerable after that. Seems like a lot of innocent people are getting killed in a pretty sophisticated manner.

My favorite character was Julie, a stree-wise 14 year old, who holds her own with Robie. He keeps wanting to protect her, but she constantly surprises him. There is also super FBI agent Nicole Vance, who Robbie is assigned to help out, and the possible love interest in neighbor Annie Lambert.

I was wondering how all these things would tie together. Baldacci did it, but it did strain credibility a bit more than usual. So the enemy has unlimitted funds, but the logic in keeping Robie and Julie alive was unclear, and the enemy expected Robie to figure out and put together some pretty far fetched facts. Still, a fun ride.

Vixen by Jillian Larkin (2010)

I was going to stop listening to this book on numerous occasions, as it was such a teen view of love and relationships, but I stayed with it as the setting intrigued me, which is why I picked it up in the first place. I had recently read a non-fiction book about the prohibition, so this was fiction in the 1920's with speakeasies, flappers, mobsters, jazz, blues, hidden drinking everywhere. Most of the action took place in Chicago, and I have actually been to the Green Mill in Chicago today. The main characters are all rich society types with parents who are too busy to be involved with their children, who are supposed to lead these debutante lives, but are drawn to the exciting world of the speakeasies.

Gloria is the good girl, engaged to Harvard grad Sebastian, with side kicks Lorraine and Markus. Cousin Clara comes in, supposedly from the farm in Pennsylvania, but actually sent by her parents to get away from a wild year as a flapper in New York City. I could not take the teen-age "Oh, he looked at me, he must love me" nor when the relationships started getting serious, and in some cases mean and vindictive, I could not believe that this was all happening to 17-19 year olds. The story was told by the different characters, and so the story jumped around in time, as one character did not continue the story where the other left off, but jumped back or forward a few hours or days. In one place I was sure the author made a mistake, putting her characters in a situation that only happened quite a bit later, but in an audio book, it is hard to "flip back" to check it out. I liked the setting, that the author did try to tackle race and class issues, but I do not think I will read any more, as I just realized this was just the first in a series "The Flappers."

Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness (2012)

The second volume of this All Souls trilogy had come out this summer, so it was a good one to get back into audio books. As I said with Discover of Witches, the first one, I am not fond of vampire stories, and there were times in the beginning when I quickly tired of the vampire related passages, but all in all, another fun historical fiction read. Diana (a witch from the 21st century) and Matthew (I forgot how many hundreds of years old he was, but this vampire has been on the planet for quite a while) return to 1590 to escape persecution in today's world, answer some questions, teach Diana to control her powers, and look for an old alchemical manuscript. They land in Elizabethan England and it is definitely fun to see the author's take on Queen Elizabeth, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, and briefly William Shakespeare.They also travel to Prague and hang out with Roman emperor Rudolf II. I am sure many of the other characters - Edward Kelly, astronomer Thomas Herriot, and others are real historical figures. the fictional characters are entertaining too - Isabo Matthew's mother and matriarch, Pierre, the butler, Annie and Jack. But when we see a glimpse of the 21st century, I realized I had forgotten some of the fictional characters.

My favorite parts of the book involved the times Diana was learning about her powers. I liked the image of the world consisting of threads of different colors between people and things, that bind us all together. And as usual, I like any mention of books, libraries and research. I liked the fact that royalty and nobility dabbled in scientific experiments, had their own laboratories, considered scientists valuable to their courts, even if they were mostly interested in immortality, the philosopher's stone, and alchemy. I also liked that Diana had to learn to talk 16th century English, and to dress appropriately too. I think that would be one of my hardest tasks, to manage to move around in those huge dresses.

Carnal Innocence by Nora Roberts (1991)

Just had to read a Nora Roberts book now that I am home. "Innocence" in the title is the name of a fictional town in Mississippi. I couldn't resist and Google Mapped the name of Innocence in all 50 states and did not find one town with that name, just an Innocence Lane in the UK and a few establishments that used the name. Roberts didn't play off the name in the conversations of the townspeople, but pairing the name with "carnal" showed that the town was far from innocent. I don't recall Roberts going into so many details of a whole town's personal lives, but this time it was actually difficult to keep track of all the characters she had running around. Usually there are too few. Caroline is a world renowned violinist, who inherits her grandmothers home and needs to get away from her touring, her parents, her cheating boyfriend. Tucker Longstreet is the laid back owner of half the town, along with his drunken brother and sister who likes all men. Tucker and Caroline are our main love interests, but a major plot line is a serial murder mystery, with a good old local sheriff (friend of Tucker's) and Yankee FBI agents. There are the local hangouts - bar, cafe and beauty parlor, a sense of the heat of Mississippi, the land. As usual, just an enjoyable read.

Pamodināt Lāčplēsi. Vilis Lācītis (2011)

I picked this up because a colleague said it was about the new wave of Latvian immigrants in England today. Not great literature, but a quick read (127 pages) giving a glimpse into the daily lives of Latvians in England. It talks of a group of fairly young people, who work together in a construction firm, and their wives or girlfriends. Their language is full of slang and curses from Russian, English and Spanish, and I appreciate that it all gets translated, as I only understand the English phrases. I got more of a sense of why people are leaving and why they think it is worth staying. These were simple working folks, but they too philosophized about their country and their relation to it. There was a goofy plot about a terrorist wanting to blow up a dam and riff on jet ski's, but all in all fun.

Pateikt un pateikties by Anda Līce (2011)

This was given to me by my half brother to read, as it is written by a woman who married a distant cousin of ours and she mentions our sister, their childhood home and area. I started reading the book, but once I met Anda Līce, I was determined to finish reading the book, as I really felt a connection with her.   

The title translates into something like „To tell and to thank.” This is her life story, her family story, about losing her father early, being deported to Siberia with her mother, returning to Latvia, finding her way through schools and jobs, having a family. What I really liked about this book are the moments where she steps back and addresses her mother – this whole book feels like a conversation with her mother, but those parts specifically addressing her mother are in italic. They often include direct quotes from either her own or her mother’s letters, which make it all so much more real. I am now tempted to go back into my unkempt piles of papers and finding my letters from mom and dad. I don’t remember what they wrote about, but they wrote me often, especially in college. The other thing I like are Līce’s observations on the times, how they affected people, and her own philosophy of life. I would enjoy getting to know her better. Unfortunately, I have to give the book back to my brother, and I have been trying to find a copy of my own, but so far unsuccessfully.