rosalita comes out tonight: Take 2

Hi, I’m Julia and I like to read. Now that I’ve passed the half-century mark (how did that happen??) I find myself becoming faintly obsessed about reading ALL THE BOOKS before I go to the clearing at the end of the path (obligatory The Dark Tower reference for you fellow Stephen King nerds out there). I'll try just about any genre once, though I would say my main focus is mysteries, historical fiction/nonfiction, and literary fiction (ooh, fancy). But really I read just about everything, although very little modern romance unless someone I trust says it’s good. Historical romance, a la Georgette Heyer, is cool, though, so go figure. I am large; I contain multitudes, as my buddy Walt used to say.

I took a hiatus from the 75ers in 2015 after getting over-involved in 2014 to the point where LibraryThing started feeling like a trial instead of a treat. I don’t want that to happen again, so I’m going to be taking it easy and giving myself lots of latitude to enjoy the group to the extent that real life allows me. That means no ticker, no huge list of touchstoned books read so far (I do have a Read in 2016 collection, though, if you ever want to get an overview).

I hope 2016 treats us all like the queens and kings that we are. We’re good enough, we’re smart enough, and doggone it, people like us!

Now that I can cross off “name-check King, Whitman, and Smalley in the same post” from my bucket list, let’s get started!


My Rating Scale:

= Breathtaking. This book touched me in a way that only a perfect book can do.
= A wonderful read, among my favorites of the year.
= A very good read; truly enjoyable.
= I'm glad I read this.
= Pretty good, with a few things done well.
= Average, and life is too short to read average works.
= A bit below average. A waste of time.
= Nearly no redeeming qualities. Really rather bad.
= Among the worst books I've ever read.

Julia---About time you started another thread, at over 300 posts on the last! LOL. Are you just trying to get ready for your reading retreat? Details please....

33. The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie.

Who killed a wealthy American heiress on the luxury Blue Train while traveling to France to meet her lover? Was it her about-to-be-divorced-without-a-pence aristocrat husband? Or her French lover who only wanted her for her jewels? Or someone else entirely? Fortunately Hercule Poirot is on the case to bring about justice. An amusing note: Last year I started reading the Miss Marple and Poirot series in order, alternately between the two each month. I thought I was due to read a Poirot but I was mightily confused when this one started out in St. Mary Mead, the little village where Miss Marple spends her days between solving murders. The "old pussy" doesn't actually make an appearance here, and Poirot eventually turned up to reassure me that I hadn't messed up my reading schedule, but I thought it was amusing that Christie gave a sly nod to her other series within this one. And now I wonder: how would Miss Marple and Poirot have got on if they did wind up trying to solve a murder together??

>2 Berly: Ha Kimmers, I was going to say exactly the same thing! Really good to see you back posting Julia. Happy New Thread. xx

>2 Berly: and >4 PaulCranswick: I don't know. I think 300 posts is a good number for those of us who don't keep such a madcap pace, don't you?

Julia I am counting down the days and soon the minutes!

I click click clicked my way over here...or more like, I tap tap tapped my way :)
Nice new digs And I love the Agatha Christie cover!

Hi Julia - Happy new thread. Violets - boy are you optimistic.

>4 PaulCranswick: Used to be the yardstick was 250 but 300 also works obviously. I took most of my threads to over 300 last year and may be part of the reason together with a crumpled RL that I found myself treading water so in mid-year.

My main point was it is great to see you back posting whatever number of posts you renew on. xx

Happy new thread, lady!!

Happy new thread, Julia!

>6 luvamystery65: Me too, Roberta! Can't wait to meet you!

>7 LovingLit: Thanks for making all that effort, Megan. I only hope it's worth the trip. That is a cool Christie cover, isn't it?

>8 BLBera: Spring is such a volatile weather time of year in the Midwest, isn't it? We've had some spells of lovely warmth up into the 60s F, but yesterday was thunderstorms and today is very windy, so those violets may not be poking their heads out anytime soon. Fortunately, my threads last long enough for spring flowers to show up well before I may have to create a new one.

>10 scaifea: Thanks, lady!

>11 Crazymamie: And thanks to you, too!

Happy New Thread, Julia! Maybe I'll keep up with this one a bit more effectively. In any case, I hope you are doing well and enjoying some good reads! Have a great retreat (she said with envy).

Happy New Thread, Julia!

ETA I just read Staked yesterday.

Love you opening picture, Julia. It's nice to know that soon I will be able to read outside and pick some flowers at the same time! Enjoy your new thread.

Hi Julia! I just noticed you have a new thread! I love the topper too but petals on my pages would annoy me.
Have a wonderful Friday and a great weekend!

Congrats on the new thread, Julia! I like that topper, too. Sounds like you have a fun meetup planned in Dallas.

34. Venetia by Georgette Heyer.

Venetia has reached the deplorably over-the-hill age of 25 without ever leaving Regency era Yorkshire. Despite her lack of exposure to high society, she has two young men dangling after her. Neither of them — not the stuffy and overbearing Edward nor the lovesick teenager Oswald — stirs her heart, however, and she has resigned herself to life as a spinster. Until, that is, the absent Baron who owns the estate next door comes back for a visit. Lord Damerel is a rake, a man with a terrible reputation after having caused a major scandal at 22 when he ran away with another man's wife. How could a well-mannered woman like Venetia possibly fall in love with such a dissolute example of manhood?

Well, really, how could she not? If you've read any romances at all you know this match is inevitable, but the road Heyer makes her lovers travel en route to the requisite happy ending is highly enjoyable. The two characters are extremely likable, as is Venetia's bookworm younger brother Aubrey. And she throws in a power-hungry, social-climbing woman, mother of the insipid girl Venetia's older brother married on an impulse, to provide a wonderfully hateful foil for Venetia's good-natured competency. And I loved Venetia's scheme for making her match with Damerel acceptable — instead of trying to rehabilitate his reputation, she decides to ruin her own!

I think I like this one so much because Venetia acts in a way modern women can relate to. She does not consider herself overly constrained by the conventions of the day that prevented women from having any kind of an independent life without the need for a constant chaperone or husband. And she and Damerel, far from fulfilling the usual romance trope of "hate at first sight", become fast friends and soul mates before they fall in love against all expectations except their own. It's a highly enjoyable story all around.

Note: I re-read this one to accompany Liz and Heather on a Heyer re-read project.

>18 rosalita: Oh good, Julia. I have Venetia but haven't read it yet. That's a very encouraging review. Venetia herself sounds like a great character.

Happy new thread Julia! Going back to your last thread I really enjoyed your review of There but for the by Ali Smith. I will keep an eye out for it at the library.

>18 rosalita: Venetia sounds fun - I'm looking forward to getting to that one.

>19 jnwelch: I would like to hang out with Venetia someday, Joe!

>20 souloftherose: Thanks, Heather. I hope you like Venetia as much as I did.

I love Heyer! : )

Hi, Julia! I love Heyer too, and I enjoyed Venetia. However, the very thing you loved about it - that modern women could relate easily to her - was the thing that put me off a bit. I felt that Venetia was too much a modern woman. (I say "I felt," because - what do I know about women of that era???) I love to see our differences in taste emerge. Interesting!!!!

Great comments on Venetia, Julia. I read it years ago, and she is one of my favorite Heyer characters. Very well put.

Request for Comments

Would anyone who has read The Return of the Native please tell me if it's worth continuing even if I find the beginning exceedingly slow and boring? I want to like it, I really do, but I'm finding it hard going. And of course I have a couple of other library books I really want to read whispering sweet nothings in my ear.

>25 rosalita: Well, I wouldn't say that it ever gets fast-paced... Do try to track down the Alan Rickman audio version, though - trust me when I say you won't care how slowly it goes...

>26 scaifea: I'm sure that's true, Amber, but I'm afraid that option is not available to me. I only have the ebook version from the library.

Wish I could help, but I've yet to read any Hardy....

ETA: But honestly, if you're struggling with it, just let it go. Life's too short!

>28 katiekrug: I've never read any Hardy before, either, so I can't tell if it's just his style or if it's this particular book. But honestly, how many pages of descriptions of the poetically barren heath can one dude scribble? I get it, it's desolate. LET'S MOVE ON.

It's due back in 3 days, so I'll give it that long at least. But if I haven't finished it by then, I don't think I'll bother renewing it.

Sounds like a reasonable plan.

It's been quite a few years but I remember thinking it was easier going than Jude the Obscure. That may not be a strong endorsement.

I haven't read it, but I'm a big believer in giving up on a book you no longer look forward to picking up....

I agree with Steve: It's WAY easier than Jude, which is like being dragged through sadness-inducing mud by the depressed robot from The Hitchhiker's Guide.

And, well, poopy. I now wish I hadn't donated my copy of the Rickman audio to the library - I would have sent it to you!

Julia, I loved Return of the Native, but Amber is right about the audio completely elevating it. The writing does not get better and the long nature descriptions continue, so if it's not working for you, dump it. Honestly, I gave the audio a five star rating, but I am not sure I would have finished it in print.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. It's starting to pick up now that actual people have shown up and started talking to each other, replacing (or at least supplementing) the pages-long dissertations on the wildness of Egdon Heath.

Have a wonderful Easter.

>29 rosalita: "I get it, it's desolate. LET'S MOVE ON."
Cracked me up.

I have the audio narrated by Alan Rickman queued up but haven't started it yet. Hopefully it doesn't put me to sleep while I'm driving!

>37 EBT1002: Apparently the audio performance of Mr. Rickman is first-rate, so you should be fine, Ellen. And I have to say that the regular old book has picked up considerably from when I sent out that cri de coeur. I'm enjoying it now, which I would not have put money on 200 pages ago.

>38 rosalita: Oh, that is good to hear. Enjoy!
(And Happy Weekend!)

Jeez, I ate up Venetia, Julia. I can see why you'd like to hang out with Venetia - me, too. That was a lot of fun, to have her not giving a hoot about all the mores and appearances that meant so much to others.

>3 rosalita: I'm always amazed at how many of Christie's novels feature trains. Of course, they were a common way of travel back in the day, making it a great setting for a murder.

Glad the book has picked up for you. : )

>40 jnwelch: Oh, I'm so glad, Joe! I had a good feeling that you would love it as much as I did. Didn't you love the scene when she was in London and her aunt was appalled that she kept asking to visit museums and bookstores. "You don't want people to think you're a bluestocking, dear!" Venetia would fit right in on LT, methinks.

>41 thornton37814: Yes, trains were a much more common and popular mode of travel back in the day, Lori. And it occurs to me that it also presents a tasty treat for a master plotter like Christie, because she gets to play a variation on the snowbound/captive audience trope, since the murderer can't come and go at will.

>42 Berly: Kim, you snuck in while I was replying! It has picked up, and the only question now is if I can manage to finish it before the e-book Cinderella turns back into a pumpkin in 21 hours. :-)

LOL. Good luck!!

I feel like I really mangled that metaphor but you're all smart people and you know what I mean!

>43 rosalita: Ha! Venetia would be a great LTer, you're right. I did love that bluestocking part. Museums and bookstores? By yourself? Outrageous.

You reminded me of her happy walk down the street with her scandalous but kind stepfather. :-)

35. No Time Like the Past by Jodi Taylor.

This is the fifth novel-length entry in the time-travel series featuring the madcap historians at St. Mary's Institute for Historical Research. As usual the inmates are running the asylum and catastrophe lurks around every corner as Max and her team travel back in time to rescue valuable artifacts from St. Paul's Cathedral during the time of the Great Fire of London in 1666, and to observe the Spartans hold off the Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C.

I read the first three novels in this series in a binge a couple of years ago, and then had a long wait before the fourth and a longer wait before I got to this one. Many things happened to Max and the gang in Book 4 and I found I had only a sketchy memory of many of them, which undoubtedly dampened my enjoyment. At some point I may try doing a straight-through re-read of the whole series to see if it holds together better.

36. Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy.

I did it! I persevered and finished off this book just 20 minutes before it was due to vanish from my Kobo in a virtual puff of smoke. After that slow start that had me despairing that anything was ever going to happen (and thanks to everyone for both the encouragement to continue and the permission to give it up), things did pick up and the plot moved along fairly briskly. As the rating says, I'm glad I read it, and I would read more Hardy. In the future, though, I'll be more judicious about how many of those copious footnotes to chase down, as I found more often than not that rather than adding to my understanding of the book they simply impeded the flow of the narrative and made it seem more choppy and uneven than it probably is in actuality. Too many of them were about minute differences between the manuscript version used here (the 1878 serial publication) and later editions, which would have been immensely helpful if I were studying it and looking to make comparisons. As just a regular old reader, however, I found I didn't really give a dingdangdoodle.

And I still maintain that I read more than enough about that damned heath in the opening chapters to last me a lifetime. Good grief, no wonder everyone in this book is so freaking depressed. They must have had to listen to Hardy describe their homeland one too many times down the pub.

37. Archie in the Crosshairs by Robert Goldsborough.

I'm on record as being extremely skeptical of attempts by other authors to continue beloved series. I generally avoid all such mutations scrupulously, but what can I say? Archie Goodwin was my first book boyfriend and I have a weakness for him still, even when he's written by someone who truly cannot hold a candle to the late great Rex Stout. It's not that Goldsborough is a terrible writer; he's just not Stout, and his Nero and Archie are not my Nero and Archie. They are the methadone to Keith Richard's heroin, if you will. And I? Well, I am a junkie through and through. The needle and the damage done, indeed.

>48 rosalita: I read the first some time ago and enjoyed it but never got around to the others. Sounds a binge is the best way to do them. And congratulations finishing the Hardy!

Hope you are having a lovely Easter weekend, Julia.

Happy Easter, Julia! Finally found your new thread. Great review of Return of the Native and good for your for persevering. :-)

I love the St. Mary's time travel series, but I stalled on number 3 like you. I hope to give it another go...Happy Easter!!

Happy Easter, Julia!

>29 rosalita: 'But honestly, how many pages of descriptions of the poetically barren heath can one dude scribble?'

Ha! This is my experience of Hardy too....

>50 rosalita: But well done on persevering and finishing!

Hope you had a good Easter weekend.

"...just 20 minutes before it was due to vanish from my Kobo in a virtual puff of smoke." LOL

Your comments about the perpetual descriptions of poetically barren heath cracked me up. Maybe since we walked across a lot of poetically barren heath along the West Highland Way, that will make those passages less painful. Maybe.

38. Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town by Jon Krakauer.

I'm sorry to say that nothing in this nonfiction examination of how the criminal justice system treats rape victims came as a surprise to me. I live in a Division I college town that like the University of Montana has a major sexual assault problem, both among student athletes and the student population in general. There have been six sexual assaults reported on campus during this spring semester alone, every one of them perpetrated by someone the victim knew. And outside of the university community, we have a county attorney who has become notorious for almost never pursuing charges against alleged rapists (and like Missoula, this reluctant prosecutor is a woman; it's probably sexist of me to find that even more appalling but I do).

I am a long-time volunteer with the local rape victim advocacy center, serving as an advocate both on the crisis line and doing in-person advocacy for survivors when they go to the hospital for forensic exams. The number of women I have personally talked to who end up reporting their assault to the police is minuscule, and anyone reading Krakauer's accounts of how the women of Missoula were treated by the police, by the prosecutor's office, and by the general public will understand why.

It would have been easy for Krakauer to write a screed that vilifies the officials who make it so hard for rape victims to find justice, but instead he has served up a remarkably even-handed, clear-headed examination that not only points out all the ways the system goes wrong, but also the ways in which it can and does try to get it right.

One of the most disheartening statistics in the book is that while it focuses on Missoula, and while the situation there involving numerous sexual assaults committed by members of the football team received national coverage that characterized Missoula as the "rape capital" of the U.S., the truth is that the number of sexual assaults reported in Missoula is actually right about the national average for cities its size. That's not something to cheer about, at all.

I read Missoula a month or two ago and found it deeply disturbing. And from what I've heard from college aged girls here in CO and from a friend with a daughter at a school in WA, it certainly isn't just a Missoula problem. Great review, Julia.

>59 rosalita: That is a great review about a book addressing a dismaying problem, Julia. How awful for these young women who are experiencing the excitement of being on their own at college, only to be betrayed and assaulted by someone they have come to know.

I can't imagine that happening with our daughter. She would've been devastated, and quite possibly damaged for life.

When the touchstones start working again and you post the review, I'll thumb it.

>59 rosalita: - Excellent review.

>61 jnwelch: & >62 katiekrug: Thanks, Joe and Katie. It was a hard review to write, so I'm glad it didn't come across as either too preachy/screechy or too bland. I have now posted it if you'd like to apply the opposable digit.

Joe, probably the most affecting part of the book for me was Krakauer allowing some of the women he profiled to describe in their own words the ways in which their rape has damaged their lives irredeemably. As one woman states when her rapist is trying to negotiate a plea agreement that would let him off with no jail time, "He gave me a life sentence when he raped me; the least he should have to do is a couple of years in prison." And infuriatingly, the prosecutor was also in favor of a no-time-served sentence! Disgusting.

>63 rosalita: Opposable digit applied. :-)

I also gave your review my thumb, Julia - very well done!

>59 rosalita: Another thumb from me. Excellent review. I simply must read this book. I work on a Division I college campus and I chaired our President's task force on sexual assault prevention and response. I need to read this book. I just know it's going to hurt.

Hi Julia - I'm not a Hardy fan but I thoroughly enjoyed your comments.

Excellent review of Missoula - and how sad that it is such an important read.

Re: Venetia - I just finished The Unknown Ajax by Heyer, which I found extremely amusing. Predictable - it is a romance, after all - but the hero was playing stupid instead of being the smart-ass - and the smart-ass actually displayed some brain too. No one was really intolerably stupid in this one, which is what I usually find exasperating about Heyer books, and I got a few genuine LOLs out of it (usually from conversations between the hero and heroine). I should read Venetia next - I don't think I've ever read it. I'm finding, actually, that I've read fewer Heyers than I think I have - I keep picking up books I'm sure I've read and finding them entirely unfamiliar, very odd.

Thanks for all the thumbs!

>66 EBT1002: Ellen, it will hurt. And it will infuriate you. For me, the anger was worse than the pain, because the lack of support from officials made the pain so much worse for the survivors.

>68 jjmcgaffey: The Unknown Ajax is a good one, Jenn.

>59 rosalita: Great review. Discouraging topic....

I'm counting down until I meet you Julia!

Adding my thanks for an insightful review of Missoula. I've been going back and forth on when and whether pick that one up. Leaning now toward "soon."

>50 rosalita: Oh, Julia, you do make me laugh even though I agree with you about 'that damned heath'. The descriptions were never-ending it seemed. But, like you, I persevered and even upgraded my rating to 4 stars, though on my thread it is 3.8--the lowest I could go for a 4-star rating! I liked Tess better and am glad my copy of Jude the Obscure is in my donate pile! I may be done with Mr. Hardy.

39. Slade House by David Mitchell.

This book was the most recent selection for “One Library Thing, One Book” last fall, but as it had just been released in hardcover I did not participate then. The book finally became available to me via the library and I’m glad I was able to finally read it. I found it to be a delightfully creepy but not scary read, about a mysterious house in London that functions somewhat like the Hotel California — you can check out anytime you like but you can never leave. The book is set in the same universe as Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks but I don’t think it’s necessary to read that one before tackling this book. Highly recommended.

40. The Sound of Broken Glass by Deborah Crombie.

Duncan is a stay-at-home dad while Gemma fills in as a Detective Inspector in a South London precinct. It’s down to her to solve a series of murders involving barristers found dead in compromising positions. Reliably good stuff.

41. As the Crow Flies by Craig Johnson.

Walt’s down from the mountain and the weather has thankfully turned toward spring. As he prepares for his daughter Cady’s wedding Walt is drawn into investigating a suspicious death on the Crow reservation in Montana when a woman falls to her death in front of him and Henry Standing Bear. Along the way, Walt gives “sheriff lessons” to a headstrong Indian woman who's recently been named the tribal chief of police. I really enjoyed the mystery in this one, and the characters are always fun to spend time with.

This was read as part of Roberta’s Leaphorn/Longmire Reading Project.

42. The Unknown Ajax by Georgette Heyer.

A grumpy Lord Darracott is forced to acknowledge as his heir his grandson, who was born to his eldest son after he was disinherited. None of the Darracotts are inclined to expect much of the “weaver’s brat” from Yorkshire and Hugo doesn’t do much to try to improve their impressions of him. Of course, he’s not what he seems and heaping helpings of crow are choked down by the end of the book along with the requisite happy-ever-after romantic conclusion.

Re-read as a tagalong with Liz and Heather’s Heyer reading project.

43. Galileo’s Daughter: A historical memoir of science, faith, and love by Dava Sobel.

Last month I read Sobel’s biography of Copernicus, who caused an uproar when he concluded that the Earth was not the center of the universe, but rather revolved around the Sun. Copernicus died shortly after his revolutionary (no pun intended) book was published, and it was Galileo, of course, who bore the brunt of the Catholic Church’s ire when he endorsed Copernicus’ viewpoint. His unpopular opinion led to his being tried and convicted by the Inquisition. Despite this Galileo never lost his faith in God or his belief in both a divine Creator and physics. This book provides the nuts and bolts of Galileo’s story but it’s enhanced by placing it in the context of his relationship with his eldest daughter, who was a cloistered nun from the age of 13. Despite that, their relationship was close and devoted, and the transcripts of her letters to him through the years reveal that she also had a remarkable mind and a lively curiosity about the world her father was discovering. Recommended.

Read for the Nonfiction Reading Challenge Part IV: Religion/Spirituality.

44. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? by Jodi Taylor.

The sixth novel in the St. Mary’s time travel series finds the gang visiting the Valley of the Kings in ancient Egypt, the Pleistocene Era, Joan of Arc’s burning at the stake, and Richard III’s downfall at Bosworth Field. The historical bits are interesting enough to keep the rest from being too formulaic, for now.

Wow, lots of good reading, Julia. I'm glad you had fun with Slade House. Me, too. I'm also a Longmire fan and loved that Dava Sobel book. I feel like she hasn't put one out in a while. I wonder what she's working on.

Nice bit o' updating!

>76 rosalita: I finished As the Crow Flies earlier today, and I loved it, too. Lots of Henry, who is one of my favorite characters. A Vic-like character without the creepy romance. And Dog. And how about the baby's name!

>77 rosalita: Definitely one of my very favorite Heyers!

All great books and reviews, but the review and book Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town is both a sad one and excellently written. What a dreadful set of circumstances. Thumbed rather late in the game.

Returning back to LT after a brief hiatus-- lots of great reading here! Bethumbed your Missoula review. A young woman I am close to was attached in the past year in a home invasion. Can't say enough about how wonderful the prosecutor and police have been!

So thrilled about Bruce Springsteen and canceling his NC concert. What a bummer for his fans there, though.

Thank you for that lovely review of Galileo's Daughter, Julia. I've owned it for some time and just haven't picked it up for some reason. I read a Civil War book by Sobel and liked her writing. I'm glad there will be lots of Henry in As the Crow Flies. I just picked that one up from the library. Dog is one of my other favorite characters in the series.

>80 jnwelch: Glad you are also a fan of Slade House, Joe! I need to circle back and read Cloud Atlas at some point, as I think that's the only Mitchell I've not read yet. And good question about Sobel, though I think I still have a book of hers left to read — The Planets. Have you read that one?

>82 cbl_tn: Yes, the books are always better with Henry and Dog, Carrie. I don't mind Vic at all, though, so I can't agree with you on being happy she wasn't present in this one.

>84 vancouverdeb: & >85 michigantrumpet: Thanks for the thumbs, Deborah and Marianne! It's a tough subject handled very well.

>86 Donna828: What was the Civil War book written by Sobel, Donna? I took a look at her author page on LT and all I saw were books about astronomy and such.

45. The Nest by Kenneth Oppel.

A young boy who suffers from anxiety attacks and perhaps other unspecified emotional problems becomes overwrought when his newborn baby brother turns out to have significant health problems. He is visited in his dreams by a wasp queen, who promises to "fix" baby Theo. At first Steve is thrilled about this but he soon learns that what the wasps have in mind isn't so nice. I saw a lot of reviews around LT lately praising this book highly as creepy but not scary. I didn't find it to be much of either, even allowing for the fact that it is aimed at a YA audience. None of the human characters had much depth and the story as a whole seemed to be trying too hard to make a point. I was kind of rooting for the wasps, to be honest.

46. To Dwell in Darkness by Deborah Crombie.

Oh, woe is me! I have read the last book to date in this marvelous series and now I have to wait with everyone else for the next installment. Thank goodness Deborah fed me some series methadone yesterday by pointing me toward the Inspector Wexford series, which I've never read.

>88 rosalita: Ha! I'm sorry you didn't care for this one, Julia. I kind of love that you were on Team Wasp, though.

>87 rosalita: I have read The Planets, and liked it, Julia. My favorite may still be Longitude.

>91 jnwelch: I'm glad my lack of enthusiasm for The Nest didn't sting too badly, Amber. HA!

>92 rosalita: Oh, yes. Longitude is my favorite Sobel, too!

47. Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith.

The third entry in J.K. Rowling's pseudo-pseudonymous mystery series featuring one-legged private detective Cormoran Strike and his intrepid assistant Robin. I found this one to be extremely satisfying both as a mystery and as a character study. Both Cormoran and Robin are just deeply likable characters that I enjoy spending time with.

>87 rosalita: I can't rely on my memory anymore, Julia. There are too many books and authors in my head. The book I was thinking of is All Other Nights by Dara Horn. Not even close!

>94 Donna828: Ha! Well, Dara ... Dava ... that's not so far apart! I'm going to cut you some slack on that one, Donna. :-)

>92 rosalita: *SNORK!*

Hey Julia! What a lovely stretch of 4 star reads! Great reviews too!! I don't think Krakauer can write a bad book. Missoula is definitely on my reading radar! I'm glad you enjoyed Slade House. I read it last year and totally enjoyed it. I look forward to reading Bone Clocks because the world of SH was so intriguing! I want to read the Galbraith's ;) too. There is another book out by the name of The Nest but I think it is different from the one you read.

>97 Carmenere: Hi Lynda! The touchstone you used for The Nest goes to the book I read so I'm not sure what other book you are talking about? The Galbraith series is really good — I was going to say surprisingly good but only in the sense that they have a very different vibe from Harry Potter.

>74 rosalita: Julia, you've confirmed me in thinking I would like to read Slade House - creepy but not scary is about what I can cope with.

>77 rosalita: I'm looking forward to The Unknown Ajax this month - for some reason I keep leaving the Heyer's until the end of each month.

>78 rosalita: And a book bullet hit for Galileo's Daughter.

>88 rosalita: Oh, that's disappointing about The Nest as I'd also heard good things. I may still pick it up from the library if I come across a copy.

>93 rosalita: Ditto. I thought Career of Evil was the best Comoran and Robin yet, and I can't wait for the next one.

>99 souloftherose: I'm so glad I could hit you with a couple of book bullets, Heather! And when you do get around to The Unknown Ajax I'm going to need a primer from either you or Liz on how the whole inheritance thing worked because I did not understand it at all. Though of course I was willing to overlook it to enjoy the story. :-)

And I would not discourage you from giving The Nest a try as a library book. A lot of smart folks around here liked it very much!

>100 jnwelch: So true, Joe! They keep getting better and better. And now that Robin has gone and married that doofus Matthew, I wonder how that will effect her relationship with Cormoran? Inquiring minds want to know!

>101 rosalita: That's the number one question on my mind! Matthew is a doofus! How in the world is JKR going to get Robin out of that, or is she? What's going to happen with Robin and Comoran? Inquiring minds need to know.

>102 jnwelch: Exactly!

Dang you guys and your spoiler teases...I haven't read the third one yet!! LOL. Awesome string of books. : )

>101 rosalita:, >102 jnwelch: Yes. Agreed. Exactly. I loved the ending of Career of Evil, but now I NEED the next one.

>104 Berly: Just read it already, Kim! Then we can all speculate together on the ... thing. ;-)

>105 Crazymamie: I can't remember when Career of Evil was actually released, Mamie. Will there be a new one soon or must we wait?

We must wait. Career of Evil just came out last October.

>107 Crazymamie: Oh, boo. Well, at least now I know.

Jeez, I didn't remember it was that recent. You'd think we'd at least be allowed to talk to the characters in the meantime, so we can find out what's going on.

>109 jnwelch: I know, right?!

>109 jnwelch: Agreed! You'd think they would have Twitter accounts, as least.

^LOL!

>101 rosalita: If it helps, Hugo wasn't the son of the eldest son - that was the one who drowned. His father was the _second_ son, older than Matthew. Primogeniture gets wobbly with sons pre-deceasing fathers - but technically, it has to go down each line. If the eldest's son had survived, he would have beat out Hugo; Hugo beat out Matthew, and Matthew's two are at the end of the line. Since Hugh was disinherited...I guess he actually wasn't, just cast off. If he'd been formally disinherited, Hugo would have been a non-issue (I think, entailed property is not something I know much about). But Matthew knew Hugh was dead, and didn't know he'd had a son, so was confident of being the next heir until Hugo showed up.

And now I've read Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle, which is pretty good but not up to Ajax. Still haven't read (haven't found) Venetia.

>113 jjmcgaffey: Thanks, Jenn. I think my problem stems from the fact that Lord Whatisface knew Hugo existed but never tried to ensure he could never inherit until after his eldest son and grandson died (when he apparently could have just disinherited the disfavored son, Hugo's father). It stretches credulity even more than Heyer usually does, and that's saying something.

I liked Sylvester a lot more the second time I read it, for some reason. And I hope you can find Venetia because it's great fun.

Well, he does spend some time saying he'd tried to find a legal way to leave Hugo out and failed, with vague mentions of entailment. It would have been fine if the drowned two - or either one of them - had survived. I don't know whether Heyer found some obscure legal point and created a story around it, or wrote this great story and skimmed over the fact that legally it makes no sense. It's fun to read, anyway.

>115 jjmcgaffey: My impression from reading was that he didn't start that effort to cut Hugo out until after the other two drowned, but maybe I misread that. Anyway, we completely agree on one point — it is great fun to read!

48. Sprig Muslin by Georgette Heyer.

I didn't mean to read this one now. I meant to read Salem, 1692 and I started it but am finding it very slow going. So when this Heyer popped up in a daily ebook deal at Kobo, and I realized it was one of the very few that I didn't yet own as an ebook I snatched it up. I thought I would read just the first chapter to refresh my memory about the storyline and realized I have actually never read it. So of course, I had to finish it. It's good, not great, and features a lead female character who is the most mendacious spoiled brat you will ever hope to encounter in a book, and a male lead who is rather bland and not as finely drawn as most of Heyer's heroes. Now back to the witches ...

49. From Doon With Death by Ruth Rendell.

Yeah, this isn't The Witches: Salem, 1692, either. I'm starting to think I am just not meant to finish that one, but we'll see. Anyway, this is the first in Rendell's Inspector Wexford series, which someone tempted me with recently. You can see flashes of what became a classic series here but overall it's a fairly ordinary murder mystery set in the 1960s. I'll keep reading despite the "Introduction to Inspector Wexford" piece at the back of the book that quoted Rendell as saying she hates Agatha Christie. What?! Blasphemy, I tell you.

>118 rosalita: Whoops! I guess I have read a Det Wexford book because I read From Doon With Death a couple of years ago. I didn't like it enough to continue with the series, though (or even remember the main character, apparently). I'll watch for your opinion on the next to see if I made a mistake!

>119 Copperskye: How quickly we forget! I would not read another one if so many people didn't insist that this is a great series, to be honest. But I know that the first book in a series is almost never the best so I'll give it another book or two to catch my attention before I bow out.

And on a happier note, I resumed reading The Witches: Salem, 1692 this morning and am plodding away with it. I can't quite put my finger on why it's not capturing my interest, as it's not at all poorly written and I am interested in the subject. I think it has to do with the fact that so far it's just a laundry list of accusations and not much analysis of why it happened. I'm also deeply annoyed (and unreasonably so since it was the standard of the time) with the way the trials were handled and the complete lack of evidence that nonetheless resulted in convictions. There are a lot of problems with our current criminal justice system but at least we no longer hang witches on hearsay evidence alone.

>120 rosalita: I found The Witches: Salem, 1692 to be quite a slow read (so much detail) and quite emotional as well - it's hard not to feel very angry (and a bit scared) about what happened. I think there was more analysis of what happened and why towards the end of the book.

Random Reading Observation #2

As I get further into The Witches: Salem, 1692, I'm realizing that I owe an apology to Diana Gabaldon. When I first read Outlander more than a decade ago, I thought all the fuss about what would happen to Claire if she was mistaken as a witch rather than a time-traveler from the future was a little overblown. Even when she was actually put on trial as a witch, I didn't really believe that it could have happened that way, with someone being convicted on the basis of absolutely no real evidence.

But that's pretty much exactly what happened in Salem, as more than 150 people were accused and 19 hanged for being witches, almost entirely on the testimony of hysterical adolescent girls and lies from vengeful neighbors. Even when one 71-year-old great-grandmother was acquitted by the jury, the judge essentially said "Gee, are you sure?" and they changed the verdict to guilty. Complete madness. If anything Gabaldon probably downplayed the danger to Claire and exaggerated her ability to escape execution.

So ... sorry, Diana!

R--Checking on Discworld with Heather. Also Stephen and Luxx might be interested!!

Rats. I had Slade House from the library and it was one of those weeks when I had gazillions of library books, all demanding my attention and all with a queue so I couldn't renew. Slade House was one of the ones that went back unread. I just need to put another hold on it.

I saw the author of The Witches: Salem, 1692 speak and enjoyed her talk. I stood in line for her to sign my copy but I still haven't opened it and started to read! I hope it picks up a bit for you (selfishly, because then maybe that will motivate me).

>122 rosalita: Great random reading observation! :-)

>123 Berly: I'm looking forward to it!

>124 EBT1002: That's the beauty of library books, Ellen. They are (almost) always there to come back to when we're ready for them. I hope you like Slade House when you do get to it.

The Witches: Salem, 1692 is picking up but I have thoughts that I will share when I'm finished. How cool that you got to hear Stacy Schiff speak about the book.

50. The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff.

A nonfiction account of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, made infamous by first The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (who was related to one of the most notorious judges in the trials) and later Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. Schiff makes clear at the beginning that virtually no official contemporary accounts exist of the trials and the events surrounding them, then proceeds to spin more than 450 pages out of hearsay, speculation, partial diaries, and accounts written years after the fact.

Still, it's not her scholarship that turned me off as much as her choices in how to present the material she had to work with. The first three-quarters or more of the book is written as if the accusations were true — she recounts women flying on broomsticks, Satanic baptisms, specters tormenting people while their physical bodies were miles away, and other wild accounts with a straight face and no attempt to explain or put them in context. By the time she finally gets around to examining how the three young girls who started the entire nightmare with their accusations might have come to be afflicted with hysteria, it was too late to redeem the book for me. In my opinion the account would have worked much better if she had interwoven the accusations and the scientific explanations of the phenomena more tightly.

As far as I can tell, Schiff did her homework and presents as much information as is available. She also is very clear not only about what we know, but what we don't know, which I appreciated. Not everyone will find her stylistic choices as off-putting as I did, so if you have an interest in the topic you might well find this book worth your while.

Book News You Can Use

I know there are a lot of LTers who also love the NFL, so I thought I'd share this neat story about Indianapolis Colts' quarterback Andrew Luck starting an online book club. Apparently he's been loaning and recommending books to his teammates for a while, and decided to open it up to fans. Now we just need to figure out how to get him on LT!

From the story: "I've been called the unofficial librarian of the Colts, which is kind of cheesy," Luck said. "But the truth is that I love to read both fiction and nonfiction and I feel strongly about the power of reading. So I thought, 'Why not start a real book club?'"

Andrew Luck Launches Book Club

>127 rosalita: Okay. That is SO cool!

>127 rosalita: Love that. Maybe he and Hermione should meet up.

>122 rosalita: The 'Pendle Witches' are a local history favourite in my part of the woods. Largely on the evidence of small children women were tried and killed / imprisoned. It's one of those historical events that I find really difficult to get my head round.

I've missed your whole thread up to this point, but I loved your comments about Hardy and Heyer so will resolve to do better in future.

>127 rosalita: - Now if he would just get rid of that awful neck beard....

>127 rosalita: I love that! I am already a Colts fan, so I'll enjoy following this. We do need to get him on LT!

>129 charl08: Yes, it just seems incomprehensible to me that those sorts of accusations were taken seriously enough to send people to the gallows. I don't know the details of the Pendle Witches case, but in Salem one of the biggest culprits was that the Puritan ministers were driving the governmental ship for the most part — indeed, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded as a refuge from persecution for the Puritans so they were large and in charge there in ways they never could have been back in England. What's appropriate to believe without visible evidence in religion is most certainly not appropriate when it comes to a government convicting and executing its citizens.

>128 Crazymamie: >130 katiekrug: >131 cbl_tn: It is very cool, and I'm not particularly a Colts or Andrew Luck fan. But I'm with Katie — the neckbeard has got to go!

>130 katiekrug:, >132 rosalita: Amen, Sisters!

Hi Julia, I've been catching up here. I read pretty much everything that Ruth Rendall ever wrote and I really enjoyed the Wexford series, but I have no idea if the series holds up today, somehow I have the feeling that it could feel quite dated.

I am so slow at getting through my series books but at least I have many, many more of Deborah Crombie books to go not to mention two more Cormoran Strike books as well.

>50 rosalita: Sorry about The Witches, Julia. Katherine's (qebo) response was unenthusiastic also, so maybe I should take a hint and get it off my reading list. Or go ahead and read it and get it over with.

>134 DeltaQueen50: I suspect the Wexford series gets better as it goes along, Judy, so I'll dive back in again soon. And you are so lucky to have all those lovely Crombie and Strike books to read yet!

>135 swynn: I'm glad I wasn't the only one who had qualms about The Witches: Salem, 1692, Steve. Maybe you'd like it, though. I hesitate to outright recommend not reading it because there are some worthy things about it.

>122 rosalita: Yes, the Salem story is very scary when you stop and think about it.

>126 rosalita: I think I liked the Stacy Schiff slightly more than you did but I agree that writing about flights on broomsticks as if they actually was a strange choice for a history book. And I also would have liked the discussion of possible explanations for what happened to have been included throughout the book rather than being stuck in one chapter at the end.

>137 souloftherose: The writing style and the organization were just goofy choices for a serious nonfiction history book, in my opinion. It was like she bent so far backwards to avoid sounding like a dry academic that she fell over into Huffington Post territory. Well, not quite that bad but I was struggling to finish that metaphor. :-)

Cool news about Andrew Luck, Julia.

I think I'll pass on the Stacy Schiff book; I think the things that bothered you would make me crazy, too.

Book News You Can Use

I think most of you know what a Little Free Library is — a small box located outdoors in a public area that contains books free for the taking. I think their motto is "Take a Book, Leave a Book." Anyway, the first-ever Little Free Library Festival is going to be held in Minneapolis in May. As that link says:

With special events taking place throughout the day and ongoing festivities like live music from the Brass Messengers, random acts of poetry, pop-up puppet shows, and a 100 Library Build, this is one festival you don’t want to miss!

Sounds like fun! I know Beth and a few other LTers are up there in the Twin Cities. I hope if any of you decide to go that you will report back.

I actually have a mini library. It sounds like fun. Thanks Julia :)

>141 BLBera: I thought you did, Beth. Will you go to the festival? I mean, pop-up puppet shows!

51. Ink and Bone by Rachel Caine.

What if the Great Library of Alexandria was not destroyed by fire all those centuries ago? What if it survived, and its leaders determined to never risk such a fate again by founding daughter libraries, or Serapea, all over the civilized world? And what if the zeal to protect the knowledge contained in books became so overwhelming that the Library took steps to make sure no one could own real books, ink and paper, except the Library, even to the extent of imprisoning Gutenberg and destroying his printing press prototype before anyone else ever learned of it?

That's the basic setup for Ink and Bone, a young-adult novel that features Jess Brightwell as a teen-ager sent by his book-smuggling London family to study at the Library in Alexandria — with a view to gaining access to ever more valuable books to sell, of course. Competing with Jess for the coveted placements at the Library are other young people from around the world, including a German engineering student named Thomas and a young woman from Oxford, Morgan, who is desperate to keep hidden the fact that she has a special power that the Library desperately needs to survive. If they discover her, they will imprison her for life. Can Jess save her? Can he discover the Library's secrets before they discover his?

I enjoyed this book quite a lot. The characters were engaging and clearly drawn while not quite sinking to the level of stereotype. If the writing (as to be expected in a book aimed at young adults) was a bit simplistic at time, the themes explored in the book are a cut above many YA novels I've read, including most recently The Nest and also the Ashfall series. There's a fair bit of magic and alchemy spinning throughout that adds a pleasing element of fantasy to the dystopia. And of course, a book about books is like catnip to all of us here at LibraryThing.

This is apparently the first in a planned series. I would definitely read the second one when it's published later this year.

Morning, Julia! A very nice review - I had wondered about that one. Onto the list it goes, so thanks for that!

Hoping that your Friday is full of fabulous!

Hey, Julia! It's been so long since my last visit but I just wanted to pop in to say HI!

Ink and Bone sounds great - onto my list it goes.

I don't think I'll make the festival. I have some other stuff going on that weekend. Maybe next year.

Glad you like that one, Julia!

>144 Crazymamie: >147 swynn: I hope you both enjoy it if you read it, Mamie and Steve.

>146 BLBera: It sounds like it would be fun. Maybe I could make it next year. We'll see how it goes.

52. At Bertram's Hotel by Agatha Christie.

I first read this one way back in junior high school, and I remember being quite puzzled about several aspects of it. I didn't really understand how hotels worked, for one thing, or what it meant to seem Edwardian, or what trains carried that made them so tempting to robbers (the Irish Mail Express? Why would thieves want to steal other people's mail?). And I didn't really appreciate Miss Marple, at least not the way I do now as I near the end of my chronological reading of the series. I'll be sorry to see the old pussy go. I've enjoyed getting to know her again and better. I can't help wishing that Christie had written more Marples and fewer Poirots, but such is life.

>149 rosalita: I appreciate Miss Marple so much more now than I did when I was in my early 20's. I also wish there were more Miss Marple's to enjoy. I am taking a BB for Ink and Bone - it sounds good.

>149 rosalita: I'm another one who thinks it does help to be older to appreciate Miss Marple. When you're young she seems to be from a world (an age) so far away from yours, it's hard to relate. She's become a favorite for me, too, and has managed to eclipse the clever Hercule Poirot.

At Bertram Hotel is now one of her best, for me. The mix of people, the atmosphere of the hotel, how she establishes herself in figuring out the mystery, all great.

>150 DeltaQueen50: I think you will like Ink and Bone, Judy!

>151 jnwelch: I think you're right about Bertram's Hotel, Joe. Didn't you wish you could go there and spend a few nights, drinking tea and eating real muffins (whatever that might mean to an Englishwoman of a certain age)?

>152 rosalita: I'd love that! :-)

I'd have to slip out for some coffee, but I'm sure no one would mind.

Hi Julia, I haven't dropped in for some time now. I think you have been reading some great books and I enjoyed your reviews. I have wanted to put up a Little Library for a while now but I'm not in a permanent situation so I'm hesitant about it but with the nice weather I might reconsider. My husband is certainly capable of building me a nice one. It sounds like so much fun! I have been crafting a lot so not on here as much as I should be, but I am going to try to catch up over the next few days. It's nice to catch up with old friends on here. Stop by my thread Julia! It may take a few days but I should have several new reviews done.

Hi Julia. It is incredible that you read so many books thus far. I'm having a slow 2016. But, when I look back at the books I've read, there are some real gems.

>154 mmignano11: How lovely to see you, MaryBeth! I will have to stop by your thread and see what you've been up to. It's nice to have you back — you were missed for sure.

>155 Whisper1: Thank you, Linda. I am quite a bit ahead of my goal but that's not necessarily something to celebrate, as I'm afraid it means I've been leaning too heavily on "easy" reads like mysteries instead of the more meaty stuff. But there's still time to turn that around. And after all, the numbers don't really matter.

I agree Julia, the fact that numbers don't matter is one of the things I like most about this group.

>156 rosalita: I don't know, Julia, I'm a big believer in reading the books you want to read, easy or not. That said, I tend to downplay the mysteries I read - "oh, it's just a mystery", like I need to make an excuse for my reading choices. That's probably why I usually read two books at a time, one a mystery and another not - one that I can admit to if someone (outside of LT) asks! Silly.

But anyway...I have never read a Miss Marble mystery! (what??) I really should make an effort and I'm going to make a point to try the first one.

Love Miss Marple and I am another BB victim here with Ink and Bone--nice review!!

>158 Copperskye: You're right of course, Joanne, and I don't judge other people for what they choose to read. I think we're all a bit harder on ourselves, though. And especially with people outside of LT, for some reason. Let's make a pact to stop doing that! And YES! You must try some Marple. You don't need to start with the very first unless you want to as they are very much self-contained books. I hope you like the old dear as much as I do.

>159 Berly: Thanks, Kim! I have my usual weirdo mixed feelings about hearing that someone has taken a BB on my thread — gratification that my review was useful and anxiety that you might not like it as much as I did. Talk about silly, right?

Julia, I missed that you'd created a 2016 thread but I found you! Hurray!

Ink and Bone is on my to-read list and looks like a fun one.

>161 bell7: I'm glad you found me, Mary! I must confess that you had slipped off my radar as well, as I've been trying to keep my thread-following to a more manageable level than I have in the past. But I've got you now, so I'll try to keep up.

I think you'd really like Ink and Bone, especially as a librarian yourself. I will look forward to hearing your thoughts when you get to it.

And now a general question for whoever wanders by the rosalita ranchero. Which of you has read And Again by Jessica Chiarella? I feel like one of you must have raved about this book, because it popped up in my Overdrive bookshelf the other day. That usually happens when someone here raves about a book and I check the library website to see if they have it. If they don't, I recommend they acquire it, and I always ask that I automatically be put on the Holds list if they do acquire it. I have absolutely zero memory of any of that happening, though, which is either hilarious or worrisome (let's go with hilarious for now)!

Anyway, on the assumption that someone here must have liked it I went ahead and downloaded it, and so far it seems interesting. It's a sci-fi novel wherein terminally ill patients are given the option of having their minds transferred to a cloned, disease-free copy of their physical body. I'm just guessing since I just started it, but I suspect there are going to be unintended consequences. :-)

Julia, I'm pretty sure it was Kim (Berly) that raved about that one.

Was that who it was? Thanks for your fabulous memory, Mamie!

Hi Julia! It's been awhile since I've read Miss Marple but I do have her scheduled for sometime this year.
I think all readers go through phases and it's perfectly normal for you to be in the mystery phase. Enjoy what you read and read what you enjoy!

53. The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson.

The question to ask yourself if you are contemplating reading this book is: Do you like grumpy old men?

If you do, you will love this tale of Bryson's journey around Britain, visiting bustling metropolitan areas, derelict seaside resorts, and beautiful and lively villages. And you won't mind that nearly every chapter digresses at one point or another into a rant against the modern world, whether it's government spending that can't see the value in preserving history or surly shopkeepers and publicans who can't see the value in being nice to their customers. And please, don't get the former newspaper copyeditor (BrE subeditor) started on poor grammar and bad spelling on signs. Seriously, don't get him started or he might never stop.

If you don't like or perhaps have had your fill of grumpy old men, you will still find a lot to like in this travel guide but you will occasionally find yourself speaking sharply out loud to the author: "Get over it, Bill!" As long as you are reading in private, you should be fine.

More than anything, this book made me long to take a trip to Britain and poke around all the lovely places that Bryson gushes over. He makes a point to not simply retrace the roads he traveled in his first British travelogue, Notes From a Small Island, which I adored and as far as I can remember was filled with sarcasm but not quite as much railing against modernity. Even with the ranting and raving, Bill Bryson is a first-rate storyteller and he clearly loves his adopted country despite its flaws. You could do worse for a traveling companion.

54. And Again by Jessica Chiarella.

Four terminally ill patients are chosen by lottery (more or less) to participate in a secret medical research project: They are cloned and surgery is done to transfer their memories and personality to their new bodies. They are given new bodies and sent back to pick up the pieces of their former lives. The four patients are very different from each other: A tattooed and wildly talented painter who was stricken with an aggressive form of lung cancer; a Chinese-American woman who has spent the past eight years in a waking coma, paralyzed from the nose down and unable to speak; a beautiful soap-opera actress who picked up a drug-resistant strain of AIDS from injecting heroin; and a slimy Republican politician with an inoperable brain tumor. They have nothing in common but the mode of their saving, and they each deal with the stresses of being "born again" in different ways. Author Chiarella does a great job making us understand and empathize with each character, and even though she shifts the viewpoint among the four of them it is never confusing or hard to follow. I found it impossible not to try to imagine how I would react to being in their shoes, and it wasn't an entirely comfortable thing to do. I'm glad I read it, and I expect I'll be thinking about it for a while.

I enjoyed Ink and Bone as well, and plan to read the next one when it comes out.

>169 ronincats: I'm glad you liked that one, Roni. The ebook I read had the first chapter of the next book as an extra at the end, and it seemed promising.

I learned today that author Bill Bryson will be here in Iowa City this weekend to receive an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Iowa. As many of you probably know, Bryson is a native of Iowa (Des Moines, to be specific) but he did not attend UI. I think he attended Drake University in DSM for a couple of years but never graduated. Obviously, not having a college degree has not hindered his career!

I had hoped he might be receiving his degree at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences commencement on Saturday, as I will be volunteering and could have seen him. But alas, the honorary degree is being conferred at the Graduate College commencement (which makes sense, I guess) on Friday night, which I can't attend.

Here's a link to the article if you'd like to read more:
Author Bill Bryson to Receive Honorary Degree From UI

I'm sure there's absolutely no connection to my having just finished his latest book, The Road to Little Dribbling, and Iowa deciding to bestow this honor upon him. Now I feel kinda bad about that 3.5 star review. ;-)

>171 rosalita: He was the chancellor at my university and did a lovely job raising money for young women from Afghanistan to come to study on scholarships. I liked his books before I knew that, but was impressed. How nice of UI to honour him.

I still have not read Bryson even though I have several of his books on my shelves. Which one is your favorite, Julia?

I have not visited your thread in eons and I'm not sure why not! Last month or the month before, like you, I became reacquainted with Agatha Christie. Like you, I read them in my teens. I read books I had not read in my teens ( at least I don't remember reading them ) and I'm not sure I caught the humour in the Agatha Christie's when I was in my teens. Such fun! I'm not much of a Bill Bryson fan, so I will have to ask my sister if she is fan of The Road to a Little Dribbling. She is a huge Bill Bryson fan.

>167 rosalita: I love a good rant, but can only read so much of one :) I have liked his books in the past, but can't help but think of him doing the things, just so he can write the book.

>172 charl08: That is so neat, Charlotte. He mentioned in Little Dribbling that he was chancellor at Durham University for a few years, which a colleague of mine who has studied and worked in the UK tells me is one of the top universities in the country. So well done to both you and Bryson!

>173 BLBera: Oh Beth, such a hard question! I realized when I looked at the list of his books in Little Dribbling that I've read nearly all of them. I thought his first Britain travelogue Notes From a Small Island was brilliant — it was the first Bryson I ever read and it was a delightful surprise. His memoir about growing up in 1950s Des Moines, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is sweet and hilarious, and you might appreciate it as someone from the Midwest. A Walk in the Woods is also really funny, especially if you like to hike (I don't but I still liked the book a lot). And in a different vein, his nonfiction history books, At Home and One Summer: America 1927 are both excellent.

>173 BLBera: Yeah, where have you been, Deborah?! Just kidding, I'm happy to have you stop by whenever you can. I think you are so right about Christie being more appreciated by readers with a little life experience (notice I did not say 'old' or 'older'). I suspect your sister will say that Little Dribbling is not as good as whatever her favorite is, and I would agree with her.

>175 LovingLit: Hi, Megan! I much prefer being the ranter and not the rantee, if you know what I mean. :-) It's interesting that knowing he visits the places he does for the purpose of writing a book is a turn-off for you. I feel like that's kind of the cornerstone of much travel and in fact much nonfiction writing in general. Did you ever read Nickel and Dimed? Brilliant book but Barbara Ehrenreich was not really poverty-stricken and trying to live on minimum wage. It didn't make the book any more powerful — to me, anyway, though of course reasonable minds can differ. And even, in my case, unreasonable minds!

>171 rosalita: What?! Oh, that's so cool!! I'm sorry you won't be able to meet him.

55. The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan.

A fictionalized account of the Wills and Kate Saga, if Kate was an American with a twin sister and Princess Diana was crazy not dead. More or less. The authors are the delightfully snarky brains behind the celebrity fashion site Go Fug Yourself and I really like their writing style. I am not a dedicated Royals watcher except for what is posted on GFY, so I have no idea of the actual history of the actual royal romance or how closely this book parallels reality. It's a fun, pretty lightweight romance that doesn't strain credulity too much (although I simply cannot imagine an American ever being in a position to meet and fall in love with the heir to the British throne while on a study abroad program), but it's an enjoyable way to pass the time.

I should say that I read this last year when it was first released, and re-read it now because the paperback has come out which includes a new "bonus" chapter. Normally I really hate that sort of gimmick (it's like including two new songs on a Greatest Hits album), but in this case I was pleasantly surprised to find that the ebook I bought last year on sale for $1.99 automatically updated with the new content at no extra cost so kudos for that, anyway.

>143 rosalita: You hit me with a book bullet for Ink and Bone. It sounds fun and that seems to be what my reading brain is craving at the moment.

>149 rosalita: Yes, sometimes I do wonder why there were quite so many Poirot books compared to Marple - reading Agatha Christie chronologically I'm currently in a very dry spell for Miss Marple books and am missing her.

>167 rosalita: 'The question to ask yourself if you are contemplating reading this book is: Do you like grumpy old men?'>

:-D I went through a phase of reading (and really enjoying) a lot of Bill Bryson's books but I may pass on this one.

>178 rosalita: - I had a similar reaction to that one. Is the bonus chapter worth reading? Or would a spoiler-marked synopsis be enough (hint, hint)?

>179 souloftherose: So glad to inflict a book bullet on you, Heather. (That sounds terrible, but you know what I mean.) I hope you enjoy Ink and Bone. As for the Bryson, I think you're safe to skip this one, especially since you live in Britain. For an American like me, the introductions to so many places and historical tidbits I had no knowledge of were priceless.

>180 katiekrug: Is the bonus chapter worth reading?

Honestly, I would say no. And emphatically no if you had to buy it to read it. It's written from Freddie's point of view, and is almost entirely an interior monologue about his emotional turmoil after kissing Bex the first time, and thinking he loves her, and then just as he's about to make his move Nick asks him to help win Bex back. Of course it's as well-written as the rest of the book but it didn't quite feel authentic to me. I don't think Heather and Jessica captured the "voice" of a young modern British male royal, as I had to keep reminding myself it was supposed to be written by a guy. So I say skip it, unless you have a half-hour to kill at the library some time.

>181 rosalita: - Thanks, Julia! Definitely skipping it :)

Smart move, KAK!

I've just spent a half hour going through my 2016 thread here to copy and paste my reviews (as skimpy as some of them are) to the books' review pages. In the past, I've generally only posted my reviews if a book didn't have many other reviews or if I felt particularly strongly about a book (and in some cases when one or more of you lovely people have requested it so you could apply a thumb).

So why did I change my mind? It was the rollout of TinyCat. I've been playing around with the idea of using it to give book recommendations to friends and acquaintances who ask what I'm reading or what I can recommend. You can customize the book display in TinyCat so that your own (that is to say, the owner of the LT library that powers TC) review is singled out. You can also choose to display other members' reviews or published reviews (if someone has taken the time to post those on LT).

Right now, the way TC displays reviews is pretty ugly — they are all one long paragraph and have no HTML coding like italics — so I haven't yet shared my TC with the world. (If you want to look at it, it's here.) But I've put in a request to have reviews display in TC the way they do in LT, and Tim has expressed an interest in fixing it so I'm hopeful that will happen.

So, have any of you activated TinyCat for your LT library? Do you plan to? If you have or will, what will you use it for? I'm always looking to steal be inspired by the ideas of others. :-)

I'd missed this entirely. Thanks Julia!

>184 rosalita: Intriguing, Julia. I haven't activated TC, and had no idea about the possibility with reviews you mention. Keep us posted. Right now that's the only thing I'd use it for, if Tim and the Timmers fix the display. But now I'm wondering what other uses it might have for a 75er.

>185 charl08: You're welcome, Charlotte! Do you think you'd ever use TinyCat?

>186 jnwelch: Once I enter more books that I actually own, rather than books I am reading from the library, I could see using it as an actual lending library interface for friends. There are features in TC that let people viewing your library "ask for more info" or "request to borrow" (not sure of the exact terminology because I haven't used that yet). That would be pretty handy. If nothing else, it may be an incentive to me to finally finish cataloguing all the books I own!

I'm sure there must be other uses, but I haven't done much exploring to see how other people are using it.

>187 rosalita: Thanks. Hmmm. Looking forward to hearing more as you and others use it.

>184 rosalita: I'd heard of TinyCat but hadn't realised it could be used to showcase books read and reviewed that way. And I see a personal TinyCat account is free. Hmm....

>189 souloftherose: Let me know if you give it a try, and what you think, Heather.

56. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein.

I've had this one on my wishlist for a long time, since I first started reading very positive reviews here on LT. For the first chapter or two, I was wondering what the fuss was all about, but then the story and the characters caught hold of my imagination and didn't let go until I'd turned the final page. A working-class young woman from Manchester puts her passion for flying to good use with the Air Transport Auxiliary, helping the British military by ferrying planes and servicemen between bases. She forms an unlikely but unbreakable friendship with an aristocratic Scots woman whose war work takes an even more dangerous turn, serving as an espionage agent in Occupied France. Their stories remain intertwined through joy and tragedy. Author Wein tells the tale through each woman's viewpoint, developing layers upon layers of story and characterization. I ended up caring very much about Julie and Maddie, and was sorry to see the book come to an end. There is apparently a sequel, but it's hard to see how it could improve upon the original.

Read for the Reading Through Time group's April 2016 theme: Women and War

57. Talking God by Tony Hillerman.

Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police find themselves far from the reservation, in Washington, D.C., following separate leads that converge into one murder case. One of the key plot points is the reigning dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile, giving this one an even more dated feel than the other books in the series to date. I didn't enjoy this one as much as the books set among the Navajo Nation, but it's worth reading if you enjoy the series. Here's hoping the next one is back in Navajo country.

I guess I've "activated" TinyCat - I saw the release post from Tim and went there, and fiddled with the settings a little. Do those of you who haven't done anything with it see the little cat tab on the header, or is that only if you've been there? It's a neat idea, but I haven't shown it to anybody. Hmmm...I have a widget on my personal site, I should re-aim the link to TC (currently it goes to my catalog). Not that anyone ever _sees_ that widget - I can tell when I've been fiddling with the site because my hits go waaaaay up.

58. The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally.

An extraordinary story of Australian sisters serving as nurses during World War I, and the ways that the war transformed a relationship that was cordial but distant into a loving embrace of family and sisterhood. It is filled with warmth and heartbreak, and finely drawn characters who assert themselves in the reader's imagination with quiet authority. The horrors of war never lessen no matter how many books I read about it, and Keneally's setting the novel at various removes from the front does nothing to blunt the impact. The ending is heartbreakingly satisfying, and it will stay with me for a very long time.

Read for the Reading Through Time group's April 2016 theme: Women and War

>163 rosalita: >168 rosalita: That was probably me who recommended And Again. :) I am glad you liked it--I share the same worry when someone reads something I recommended--will they enjoy it?! ; )

You definitely like the Hillerman more than I did. I think the narrator put me off--it was the first time I listened to the series. I pearl ruled it.

As to TinyCat, I opened it, but can't see why I would use it very much. I am so used to LT and I don't really share my books with anyone, but I will listen to the conversation to see what everyone else comes up with.

And last but not least, a five-star review! Nice.

Hi Julia - It's been a while since I read the Hillerman series, but I remember I didn't like the ones that left the rez as much, so I get your comments.

The Daughters of Mars sounds really great. I am always looking for good war stories with women. Is this based on a true story, do you know?

>197 BLBera: The author's note says that while some of the details were taken from wartime diaries and news accounts, none of the characters are specifically based on actual people.

59. Iron Lake by William Kent Krueger.

The first entry in the Cork O'Connor series, which I've seen mentioned on a number of 75er threads. It was fine. The ebook I got from the library is a 3-volume omnibus so I will probably continue through those books at least.

I think the first two are not as good as some of the later ones, Julia. I do like the Krueger books for the setting. I am up to the one with Copper in the title, so I haven't gotten too far yet.

I'm back, baby!...and to prove it, I shall belatedly butt into your up-thread conversation about The Unknown Ajax! :D

Heyer is quite correct about the inheritance details (c'mon, when is Heyer NOT correct??). Under the laws of primogeniture, the inheritance order in the Darracott family is:

Granville - Oliver - Hugh - Hugo - Matthew - Vincent - Claud

Hugh is dead before the story begins; the simultaneous deaths of Granville and Oliver make Hugo (son of the second son) the heir ahead of Matthew (third son) and his sons.

"Disinheritance" simply means that Lord Darracott cut Hugh off financially: like most aristocratic young men, he lived on the family money and had no income of his own. It didn't (and couldn't) alter his position with respect to the family title and estate.

There is no way that Lord Darracott can prevent Hugo inheriting the title, and because the estate is entailed, he can't stop him inheriting that, either. If there was no entail, Hugo would get the title but Lord Darracott could will the estate to someone else, most likely Vincent. Note, though, that Vincent couldn't afford to keep the estate running properly: it is the novel's underlying irony that only "the weaver's brat" has enough money to undo his grandfather's aristocratic mismanagement (and illegal activities).

>201 lyzard: I think I must have gotten confused about the birth order of Darracott's sons or something. Or maybe I thought "disinheritance" meant more like what we mean these days — "you're out of the will, chump!"

And thank you for answering the question about the quotations over on your thread. I was wondering about those, too! I knew Ajax figured into the Trojan War somehow but the Shakespeare bit was completely over my head, not having ever read or seen a production of Troilus and Cressida. I feel so much smarter now!

Julia, I haven't heard of TinyCat before. Thanks for telling us how it can be used. I don't post many of my reviews on the book's page anymore...only if I think I have something to add or if there are only a few reviews. I am too lazy to go back and add them! Maybe I'll change my mind if Tim pretties up the display. ;-)

I have a few of the Krueger books and plan to read them someday. I think my DH will like them, too. I had similar thoughts about our last Hillerman.

60. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury.

I've had this classic science-fiction title on the bookshelves for some time, and pulled it out on impulse when I was looking for something different than my recent reads. It wasn't what I expected, being more a set of interlocking short stories rather than a true narrative novel, but it nonetheless raises some very thoughtful questions about the nature of space exploration, the arrogance required to colonize another planet (with the obvious parallels to colonial forays on Earth), and whether humans are incapable of peaceable existence anywhere. For all the high-flying philosophical ideas contained within it, the book is extremely readable and only requires the reader to think as many deep thoughts as he or she can comfortably handle. In the introduction to the edition I read, Bradbury expresses bemusement that The Martian Chronicles has come to be classified as science fiction, since there are no technical whizzbang gizmos and his imagining of what Mars is quite at odds with the scientific reality (for instance, his Martian atmosphere is oxygen-based, though similar to a high-altitude setting). So if you are somewhat sci-fi phobic, fear not. Nothing here will make you feel stupid or regret not paying attention in high-school physics class.

  

61. Boundary Waters by William Kent Krueger.
63. Purgatory Ridge by William Kent Krueger.

The second and third in the Cork O'Connor omnibus. Not terrible, with some good elements. Probably not enough to compel me to continue with the series, however.

62. King's Ransom by Ed McBain.

Steve Carella and the boys of the 87th Precinct are called in to solve a kidnapping case with a twist in this 10th entry in McBain's long-running classic crime series. A couple of two-bit crooks have snatched a little boy who they think is the son of a shoe-factory magnate, but it turns out they grabbed the chauffeur's son instead. Will the rich man still pay the ransom, even if it means scuttling his plans for a hostile takeover of the company he works for? What do you think? As always, McBain's style of directly addressing the reader with his deeply philosophical meditations is appealing and renders the series a cut above the usual police procedural. And it's surprisingly techy for a book written in the pre-cellphone, pre-Internet 1960s. I could have done without the sign-of-the-times mildly hostile sexism, but that's what you get when you read books written in less-enlightened times. I still love this series.

>204 rosalita: Have you seen to old tv mini-series? Oh, it's fantastic! (by which I mean, Fantastically Crazy-Weird and Awesome)

Happy Tuesday, Julia! 4 stars for the McBain indicates I may have to look into this series. LOL I never thought I'd be the type to need a list of all the series's I'm working on but it's certainly looking like I need one soon.

>207 scaifea: A TV miniseries of The Martian Chronicles? I have never heard of such a thing. I wonder if it's been released on DVD? Must check ...

>208 Carmenere: I think the 87th Precinct series is considered one of the seminal exemplars of the police procedural genre. A lot of stuff that's considered standard now started with McBain. Series lists are both helpful and daunting. So many series! It's almost a relief when I start a new one and realize I don't want to continue it (as with the Cork O'Connor books I reviewed earlier).

>209 rosalita: It *is* on DVD, because we own it! Ha!
(See, now, if Scaife Manor moved to that lovely house on zillow, you could just pop over and borrow it...)

>206 rosalita: That's one of my favorites in the series (so far). There's also a terrific film adaptation, with the story transplanted to Japan, directed by Akira Kurosawa and starring Toshiro Mifune as the magnate.

>206 rosalita: Ellen started me on the Ed McBain series a few years ago. I really should get back to it. Amazon Kindle lends you a book a month and this series is available. Duh! I forget. Maybe when I'm done with Longmire I'll get back to it.

>210 scaifea: How many more reasons do you need to just move to West Branch, Amber?!

>211 swynn: Steve, I had run a bunch of them randomly (not in series order) back when I was in high school but now I'm reading them all through in order. The impetus was that a few years ago all but one or two of them were offered as Kindle ebooks for $1.99, and I couldn't resist grabbing them all.

>212 luvamystery65: I thought it would be something you'd like, mystery woman! As I said to Steve ^^ I bought the whole series as Kindle books a few years ago for cheap. Of course, free is good, too!

>213 rosalita: NONE. I'd move right now if I could. No, seriously. I'd LOVE to live closer to Iowa City - and you!

>176 rosalita: re: Nickle and Dimed. Yes I read that, and yes it annoyed me a bit that she did the things to write the book, but not as much as it annoyed me that in between the jobs and the motels she went 'back home' to rest up for the next session. I found that book very close to being great, but it just didn't hit the mark for me.

With travel books, I like the ones that don't seem contrived (even if they are). Some you can really tell they are manufacturing experiences to write about. Ew.

>204 rosalita: Oooh, enticing! Maybe I need to revisit Bradbury.

>214 scaifea: Honesty compels me to admit that West Branch-to-Dubuque would not be the easiest commute for Tomm, especially in winter, since it is all (or almost all) two-lane roads, I think, and there isn't really a straight-line route. But wherever you end up will be closer than where you are now, so that's good!

>215 LovingLit: I agree with your comments on Nickel and Dimed. An important but flawed book. And yes, you should read Bradbury! (And thank you for not pointing out that I had mistakenly pointed to the wrong post back up there in >204 rosalita:. At least I got your name right even if I didn't get the post reference right. Baby steps!

>216 rosalita: We are indeed looking (v. casually at this point) for houses between Dubuque and Iowa City. We're thinking about moving in a few years...

64. A Serpent's Tooth by Craig Johnson.

The ninth entry in the Walt Longmire series finds the Wyoming sheriff on the road, traveling between religious enclaves of splinter sects of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Walt's looking for the missing woman whose teen-age son has surfaced in his country, and along the way he stumbles into a vast quasi-governmental conspiracy involving the CIA and stolen crude oil. Things aren't any calmer on the home front, as he deals with daughter Cady's absence following her marriage and his uneasy relationships with his undersheriff, Victoria Moretti. I enjoy this series very much.

65. The Crossing by Michael Connelly.

By-the-books legal thriller starring Mickey Haller of Lincoln Lawyer fame and his half-brother, ex-LAPD detective Hieronymous Bosch. Bosch finds himself working the other side of the street when he agrees to help Haller investigate the murder case against Haller's client, who swears he is innocent. It's very serviceable and a quick read, but great literature it ain't.

66. Nemesis by Agatha Christie.

And so we come to the end of the line, the last Miss Marple in my ordered re-read. I'm sorry to say goodbye to Jane, who as always is the smartest cookie in the tin, the brightest bulb in the chandelier, the sharpest knife in the drawer. She takes on a posthumous challenge from Mr. Rafiel, whom we met in A Caribbean Mystery, and solves a decade-old multiple murder mystery without dropping a stitch in her nonstop knitting of babies' jackets and fluffy pink shawls. What a woman.

Go Miss Marple! Have you read The Tuesday Club Murders, Julia? Probably, and I forgot it. I love the way she outwits everyone in that one.

>221 jnwelch: I read those stories as part of Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories that I got as an ebook special a while back. One of the things I love about Christie is that while some people who don't know Miss Marple underestimate her, the police (and the other people at that dinner party) never do. She was ahead of her time in showing respect for elder women.

>222 rosalita: Well put. And don't judge someone by appearance and assumptions.

67. Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'Nan.

It's just a few days before Christmas, but there's no holiday cheer at the Red Lobster restaurant in New Britain, Connecticut. The corporate overlords have decided to close down the underperforming eatery, and it's left to Manny to make sure his rapidly dwindling staff keeps up standards on this last day of operations. To make matters worse, a snowstorm is moving in, making travel hazardous and giving both staff and customers even less incentive to go above and beyond.

O'Nan has written a book that is almost claustrophobic in its deceptive simplicity, with the entire narrative other than one scene set within the restaurant's walls. The manger, Manny, is imbued with a sad, quiet dignity that is complicated by his hopeless romantic entanglement with one of his employees. Most of his staff has already checked out mentally, but Manny can't keep himself from doing everything by the book and giving the few customers who show up a quality dining experience. He's anxious that everyone should walk away from this last night at the Lobster with good memories, an impossible task under the circumstances but noble even in its impossibility.

On a more superficial note, the glimpse "behind the curtain" of how a chain restaurant operates was also fascinating to me. I cringed in sympathetic horror as Manny and his staff tried to cope with a pint-sized terrorist, an unexpected large office party, and the elderly lunchtime regular who has no idea that his daily refuge is being yanked out from beneath his feet.

>224 rosalita: Nice review, Julia! Thumb from me. I might've given it a half star more, but otherwise I'm totally on board.

>225 jnwelch: I would not argue with giving it 4 stars, Joe. I may end up adjusting that rating — that happens sometimes when books get better or worse after I've thought about them for a while. But I'm glad you mostly agree, and thanks for the thumb! I probably learned about this book from your thread, so thanks for that, too.

>226 rosalita: Yes, I know that feeling. Actually, I totally agree with your review, just would give it a bit more star. I learned about this one from Katie and Mamie, I'm pretty sure, so the thanks can be forwarded to them. :-) That's one of the great things about this group; word gets around about so many good 'uns.

>227 jnwelch: After reviewing my own ratings scale posted up there in >1 rosalita:, I think 4 stars is probably more accurate. I'm going to make an executive decision and change it. :-)

>228 rosalita: Hooray! :-) Mr. O'Nan no doubt would appreciate it.

I'm not counting this in my books-read tally because it's a short story, but I read A Bad Night for Burglars yesterday. The title character is unnamed, but an introduction by author Lawrence Block says that this story was the jumping-off point for his long and delightful series of mysteries featuring Bernie Rhodenbarr, bookstore owner and gentleman burglar. That series is one of my favorites. This short story is, well, very short, but it has Block's characteristic clever dialogue and humor, along with a twist ending that I, at least, did not see coming. If you have Kindle Unlimited and you like mysteries in general of the Bernie series in particular, it's worth your time.

I should warn you that this review is impossibly long. Fortunately few people seem to be stopping by here these days but for those of you who do, please feel free not to read all of this. It's a subject close to my heart, and I just needed to get it off my chest.



68. The Devil Is Here in These Hills by James Green.

The history of labor relations in the United States (and quite possibly in other countries, though I’m not as familiar with those) has involved workers having to fight hard for every gain, whether it’s shorter workdays, a living wage, or safer working conditions. But even people who support unions forget just how bad things were for workers before unions gained enough clout to be effective advocates, or just what workers went through to earn the right to join together to bargain collectively. That’s where James Green’s book comes in. And we forget also just how little support wage workers got from their elected governments to protect them from illegal retaliation by corporate owners. In fact, one of the few constants in the story of the rise of industrialization in the U.S. is that government and law enforcement would always come down on the side of the owners over the workers.

West Virginia was one of the last coal-mining areas to be widely unionized, and coal operators used that to their advantage, squeezing workers’ wages in order to compete with lower prices against unionized mines whose higher labor costs resulted in higher prices. Which is generally fine; that’s the way capitalism works, or is supposed to. But capitalism is not supposed to actively suppress the civil and constitutional rights of workers, and that happened repeatedly in West Virginia coal mining towns (and of course elsewhere in the country). Miners were thrown in jail for gathering together in peaceful rallies, punished for expressing opinions that differed from those of the owners, and physically attacked and killed for trying to use work stoppages to put pressure on mine owners to recognize the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Miners who expressed support for the union were summarily fired, evicted from their company-owned housing, and forced to live in tent camps as they watched strikebreakers — almost always from out-of-state — file in to take over their jobs and their homes.

Green does an excellent job of detailing exactly how the extraction industries moved into West Virginia in the 19th century, largely owned by “absentee landlords” who did not care one bit about the local environment or the local populations as long as their profits rose every year. It’s a familiar story, but no less disheartening for its being so. Another familiar aspect of the story is the way that local law enforcement and politicians up to the state and federal levels not only failed to protect workers’ civil rights, they actively colluded to deny them. Mingo and Logan counties were sites of some of the most ruthless actions against striking miners by law enforcement, including the infamous “Matewan Massacre” in 1920, which was dramatized in the John Sayles movie Matewan. As if corrupt government-based law enforcement wasn’t bad enough, company towns (so called because the coal companies owned everything, from the land to the housing to the stores to the schools to the churches) were policed by private guards hired by the mine operators and not subject to the laws of the area.

People from Appalachia have a reputation for being strong, stubborn, and prone to violence. (Many of the characters in this book on both sides of the conflict are named Hatfield, all members of one of the families at the center of the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud.) So there should be no surprise that when miners were badly mistreated by the coal operators, and their rights were not only not protected by law enforcement but actively violated by the same people who were supposed to protect them, they turned to violence. There were two “mine wars” in West Virginia, the first in 1912-13, leading to the death of dozens of miners and mine guards before it was ended when the governor declared martial law and defused the situation by throwing many striking miners in jail.

The onset of World War I created a demand for coal that temporarily raised wages and stilled protest, but the postwar recession once again set miners in direct conflict with mine operators who slashed wages to levels far below that of unionized workers in many industries, not just mining. Tensions rose as the UMWA tried once again to organize workers, leading to the second mine war in 1920-21, which ended only when President Warren Harding sent federal troops to quell the violence and resulted in the virtual elimination of the UMWA in West Virginia. It wasn’t until Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in the midst of the Great Depression that lawmakers began to take real, positive steps to protect workers’ rights as they tried to unionize. Once the playing field was leveled, with the ability of mine owners to illegally fire workers and suppress their activities and speech, the union roared back and rapidly unionized West Virginia mines and signed contracts that provided meaningful advances in wages, safety, and civil protections.

One of the most thought-provoking aspects of this book for me was contrasting the difference in effect of nonviolent protest versus armed resistance in this place and at this time. In short, there was no difference. Neither tactic resulted in any long-term gains for the workers or the union. I came away from it thinking about the incredible waste of life that resulted from both mine wars, and how the loss of those lives accomplished nothing concrete or lasting. Green makes an argument toward the end of the book that the history of violent resistance created a determination and unity among the miners that made them quick to sign up for the UMWA once FDR cleared the way for the union to operate legally. In the end, I was unpersuaded by his argument. In light of what happened in West Virginia, I gained even more admiration and respect for the campaign of civil disobedience that Martin Luther King and others used in the 1950s and 1960s to make such huge gains for civil rights.

One other interesting aspect to spotlight in an already too-long review: Miners in West Virginia around the turn of the 19th to 20th century were surprisingly diverse in their backgrounds. There were plenty of white native Appalachian men, but there were also large numbers of new immigrants, especially Italians, and African Americans. One of the most heartening things I learned from Green was that the United Mine Workers of America was a leader in the notion of equal status for members of any and all ethnicities and nationalities. This is in stark contrast to some other union movements of the time, which struggled with integrating people of color into their membership without alienating white workers. Green doesn’t delve deeply into why the UMWA was so egalitarian, but it is implied that working in coal mines was such hard, dangerous work that anyone who could pull their own weight earned the respect of their fellow miners regardless of their background.

I wish every otherwise well-meaning person today who thinks unions are unnecessary, or even actively detrimental to workers, would read this book. Without the United Mine Workers of America, the industrialists who owned the coal companies in this country would have happily kept their workers ignorant, deeply impoverished, and risking their lives every day without any hope of a better life for their children. The idea that corporations would willingly provide the gains in wages, health and safety, and access to democratic due process without being forced to by union workers who fought and sometimes died protecting their basic human rights is laughable. And anyone who thinks that left to their own devices modern corporations would not revert to their former abusive ways has only to look around at the state of modern union-free industries like meatpacking, fast-food and other service workers, to realize that while few are actually being shot or thrown in jail these days, there is still work to be done in the area of protecting and supporting workers.

69. The Woman in Blue by Elly Griffiths.

Finally, a new entry in the Ruth Galloway series of mysteries featuring an academic archaeologist and her complicated life. The book itself isn't terribly new but my library finally acquired it this month, which allowed me to get my hands on it. Here, Ruth teams with DCI Nelson to discover who is killing beautiful young blonde women in the religious pilgrimage town of Walsingham. Ruth's involvement is more tenuous here than in earlier books, as there isn't much in the way of archaeology to the story, but that didn't matter to me. I really like Ruth and the rest of the characters, and the mystery plot was also solid and satisfyingly resolved. And now the long wait until the next book begins.

>231 rosalita: hi Julia
I do stop by from time to time and think you wrote a great review.

Hi Julia - I loved your comments on the Green book. I'll certainly search for it. I don't know as much background as I should, but I really appreciate my union. Teachers would be earning below the poverty level if it weren't for unions. And our rights are threatened every day.

Another fan of Ruth! I would like to have a drink with her.

>233 FAMeulstee: Thank you! My thread isn't very lively especially compared to some in this group, so it's nice of you to stop by.

>234 BLBera: Thanks, Beth. It was really good and kind of got me fired up about the state of unions in this country. Just what I needed in this election season. Ha!

Ruth is great! I can't think of another mystery series protagonist who is quite like her.

During the summer months (more specifically, the time between the end of the spring semester and the start of the fall semester) I work at our reception desk because we don't have student workers in the summer. We also don't get much traffic through our office (see the part about students being gone), which means it can be exceedingly boring unless one has a labor-intensive but uncreative project to work on. I'm sure my boss would prefer me to have a work-related project but that is still in the process of being refined, so in the meantime I spent a big chunk of time last week cataloguing every single ebook I have ever bought or downloaded for free from Kobo (my preferred vendor) and Nook.

I found that many of these books had already been catalogued in a slapdash way, by adding whichever edition came up first in the Add Books list at the time I bought or read them, but now that we can indicate a book's media type I feel the need to be more precise. So a lot of this work involved meticulously editing each record to reflect the proper ISBN, publisher, ebook-ness, and cover image.

What I learned: I have 283 ebooks combined from Kobo and Nook, of which 183 (gulp!) are unread. That is ... a lot of unread books. The only consolation is that they are not taking up space in my tiny apartment.

I haven't yet steeled myself to tackle my Kindle library, egads. A look at Amazon shows that I have 293 Kindle format books, so that will take about as much time as cataloguing the others combined.

My question for anyone who happens to wander by this conversational wasteland is this: How carefully do you catalog your books — both paper and ebooks? Do you care a great deal about getting just the right edition and cover, or are you content to catalog a la Goodreads and just make sure the title/author match? If you've chosen one method over the other, why?

>236 rosalita: I struggle with this Julia. I am not nearly as organized as you are trying but that is a goal of mine. This year I have really tried to organize my collections going forward with the exact correct book but sometimes what I want is not available. This is especially true with audiobooks. I have had some success by putting the title and narrator in the search engine to get what I want, but as I said before, sometimes the option is not available. Example is I did Heart of Darkness this morning. It is available but only with a generic cover. I don't know how to force a cover because it would give no other covers as an option. That is new because I've always had a selection of covers. Anyhow, I feel your pain because I think that ebooks are just as hard to get exactly right.

>236 rosalita: I am very carefull about the books and e-books I own, must be right edition, ISBN, cover etc. If the cover isn't on LT I scan it myself.
For the books I lend from the library I don't care that much, nice if it is the right cover, but no problem with a slightly other edition or not the right cover.

The last years I have been catalogueing the books that I culled in 2005, I still have the lists on my computer. The only problem is that I can't scan the covers and that for many of them there are no right covers on LT... so they remain without cover.

I am very particular about getting the right cover, but don't care about the specific edition, ISBN, or whathaveyou. I do like to note where I got a book from, and I always add the copyright to the Comments field because I have found this data in CK to not always be correct. When they added the format info, I began to use that, but don't plan to go back to add it to all the books I catalogued before they had the feature. I actually used to put the format in the Comments field, so I still do that, even though they have a specific place for it now. So it's in two places on some of my books... Let's see, what else? I try to tag books fairly consistently but am not always successful.

And if it makes you feel better, my Kindle library is 1094 books strong, of which only 69 have been read... *gulp*

PS: Um, I just found a bottle of whiskey in the guest room (shows how often I go in there!) - it was unopened, so I don't *think* you were taking secret nips of it, but I'm not sure if it was left behind on purpose or if I should mail it to you. The Wayne is eyeing it semi-lustfully ;-)

>236 rosalita: Well I feel embarrassed to admit that I'm not very good at the cataloguing. I forget to add books, I add the wrong edition, or the wrong format. I know because every so often I come across one that is madly wrong and feel compelled to fix it. I have worked out how to combine books recently, which I enjoy doing when there are various separately listed books.

Do admire those who are more accurate...

I'm more like Charlotte, Julia. A bit slapdash. I do admire those who are more accurate and organized.

Thanks for the good reviews. My wife is fascinated by archaeology, and I'm going to recommend the Ruth Galloway series to her. In the past she's enjoyed the Gideon Oliver series (as have I).

>237 luvamystery65: Ebooks and audiobooks are particularly difficult to find exact matches for, Roberta. I will usually pick the one that seems closest and then edit the book to remove incorrect information and change the media type, ISBN, etc. as needed. I don't listen to a lot of audiobooks so I don't know if you even have access to the ISBN numbers? One thing I've learned is that some ebook publishers just use the same ISBN that they used on the paper book that was the source file for the ebook, which is a bit annoying and leads to only being able to find books with the wrong media type to add and then editing.

As far as covers, if there is no member-uploaded cover that matches, I will select one of the Amazon covers that does and then save it to my desktop and upload it, so that it is a member-contributed cover. That is protection against Amazon changing the covers associated with the book's ISBN willy-nilly, which they have a tendency to do. You could also use Google Image Search to find a book cover image to save and upload, but it can be rather time-consuming.

>238 FAMeulstee: I have gotten pickier with my library books just this year, but previously I did it much the way you do. And I still just add whichever book comes up first when I am adding to my Wishlist, because who knows what final edition I'll end up with and all I really want is a reminder of the title/author when I'm out shopping.

>239 katiekrug: Thanks for those inspiring Kindle numbers, Katie! In a weird way, it does make me feel better. Even when I was only cataloguing haphazardly, I did always try to get the same/similar cover. As for the whiskey, I had intended to present it as a thank-you gift and then got discombobulated and forgot! It is from a local distillery and I think it's pretty good. Tell Wayne to have one for me!

>240 charl08: I don't think there's a right or wrong way to do it — whatever works for you, Charlotte. I do try to at least add books I've read so that I can hopefully avoid buying them again, but even with that goal I have hundreds of paper books that I have neither read nor catalogued.

>241 jnwelch: One of the best aspects about LT is the way we can be as obsessive or laissez faire with our cataloguing as we like, Joe. And I think Debbi will like the Ruth Galloway series. I am not familiar with the Gideon Oliver but I'll check it out on your recommendation.

>242 rosalita: Yes, try Old Bones. Some of the rest are lighter than others, but we've had a good time with them.

>243 jnwelch: But Joe, Old Bones is the fourth in the series! Surely you are not suggesting I should read them (gasp!) out of order?!

Ha! Oops! It's the first one we read. Sorry! *goes and sits in the bad boy chair in the corner*

>245 jnwelch: Ha!

>236 rosalita: I'm verging on the obsessive about getting the right details for paper, ebooks and audiobooks. I always edit the information when I add books and have to have the right cover. I store my ebooks on my PC using Calibre, which means I can use the cover I have for my ebook on LT, although the Project Gutenberg and other free classics often don't have proper covers so I enjoy myself choosing from the ones that other LT users have uploaded.

>247 CDVicarage: When I first started out I was fairly content to be pretty loose with books I didn't own, but for some reason lately I just suddenly decided I wanted to be more precise.

I use Calibre for transferring my Kindle and Nook purchases to my Kobo, but I haven't taken the step of dumping the Kobo books in there as well. I should think about doing that, just to have a copy on my own computer "in case" the online stores ever go belly up.

Julia - Only on LT could you get so many responses to a question about cataloging books! I love it. I have about 400 unread ebooks on my Nook. Most of them I haven't added to LT yet. I've been adding as I read them. I try to get the same cover for all my books and I tag the ebooks so I know where to find it.

Hee hee! The Wayne is doing a little whiskey happy dance. ;-)

>231 rosalita: Loved the review and couldn't agree more.

>236 rosalita: I was very careful when I initially catalogued my physical books in 2007-08, even scanning in the covers where needed, and with my older science fiction, there were a lot of books without ISBNs. Unfortunately, that was when LT had limited capacity, so all those scans are now terribly grainy poor quality. I replace them when I run across if better images are available from the cover choices, but haven't gone so far as to have a re-scanning project--and it would be quite a project.

I have always tagged my ebooks as Kindle, and my library books go into the Read but not Owned collection. I have to confess that I had not noticed the addition of the media tab, but I see that the few I have just checked have been correctly labeled. I do try to get the same edition and cover when I add books, and use the ISBN if I'm having trouble finding it.

>236 rosalita:, >248 rosalita: I actually use Calibre to get the books into LT. I edit them in Calibre to get title, author, publishing info as best I can, series info, TAGS!, etc right, then I choose (right-click on selected books)>Convert Books>Create a Catalog.... It lets me choose which fields (I've set the default to a pretty simple list), then creates a .csv file with those fields as columns. Then I manipulate it a little to match the LT import file - the columns need to be, in this order:
'TITLE' 'AUTHOR (last, first)' 'DATE' 'ISBN' 'PUBLICATION INFO' 'TAGS' 'RATING' 'REVIEW' 'ENTRY DATE'

I don't enter rating, review, or entry date - just leave those blank. And I deliberately delete any ISBN info. The trick is, if you import into LT without ISBNs, LT will create a record with exactly the data you have in the file - no searching for the proper book, it just goes in. You can also add, in the import process, a tag for that file's worth of books - I add _import(date of import). That lets me work on them until they're cleaned up. I paste the ISBNs back in to the LT record, for those books that have them - so they combine just fine (though just title and author also frequently combine fine). There's usually a few I have to hand-combine, but not many.

The nicest thing is that Calibre will export your tags, and LT will import them. So you can enter quite detailed tags and they'll be the same in both places.

Oh yes - and after I've done the import, I go back to Calibre and add a tag to that lot of books of _onLT. Then the next time I want to do an import, I make a Virtual Library out of books that don't have that tag, and get all the books I have in Calibre that have not yet been imported.

There's a huge leap in books in my library in mid-2013 - over a thousand. Those are all my ebooks that I had at that point. Now I have (checks Calibre) 2570 books...hmmm, a few more that I haven't yet gotten into Calibre, maybe 10 or so. Lots of ebooks! 363 marked read, though there are some that I've read as paper books and I just want an e-copy for rereading etc. I haven't marked those read or unread.

I import a bunch about once a month. I can work on those lots, and I've gotten most of them properly entered (fixed the ISBNs, tidied up publication and dates, added the series info (that _doesn't_ import, annoyingly)), and for some of them have made covers. That's the slowest part, because I want my ebooks to all have covers that say ebook to me - so I put their cover (a good cover - I'm not picky about matching what the ebook publisher put up if I don't like it, I'll find a better one and paste it in) into a frame that looks like an ereader. Take a look at my ebook collection, there are a lot with the cover done (and more that aren't...I'm working on it).

When I import, I put the ebooks into a Temp Working collection; after I've tidied them up, they go into the ebooks collection (though I don't wait until I've made the covers). Most of what's in Temp Working is that 1000+ single lump - it's so huge and I didn't get the catalog from Calibre done right and...

Oh, and if I have an ebook that I also own (or have read) a paper copy that's cataloged on LT, it shows up in the import as a duplicate. I tell it to "add shelves" (meaning tags) to the original copy, then use the _import tag to find those and tidy them up. They don't get special covers, or data - I leave that on the paper copy (if I own it) and just add them to the ebooks collection. If I read it from the library, I usually make it a normal ebook record and add a tag about where I borrowed it from (_ReadFrom:Library(whichever)).

If you want to do this, I strongly recommend that you try with maybe 5-10 books from Calibre and tweak your import process until you're happy with it, rather than trying to dump the whole lot in like I did. I'm now very pleased with my import process, but I've got this huge lump that need a great deal of editing...

>242 rosalita: For Amazon covers - you can do the download and upload, but if the cover's clean (doesn't have the stupid "copyrighted image" overlay on it) you can also do right-click, "save image location" (that's Firefox's language, the others are similar), paste the URL on the clipboard into a new tab, delete the junk in it (everything from the first dot to the last, in the section after the last slash) so you get ///long number&letter thing.jpg, and hit return to look at the resulting image. If it looks decent (it usually does), copy the new URL and put it into the Grab box - it comes out quicker and often cleaner (and sometimes larger) than downloading and uploading. It sounds like more work, but it's easier for me than download/upload.

I've read and enjoyed most of the Gideon Oliver books. The first ones are much better than the later ones - they get extremely formulaic, round about Little Tiny Teeth. Different settings, but hitting all the same notes. And I just read one, enjoyed it, then discovered I'd read it about 4 years earlier - I didn't remember it at all. That's not normal for me, I usually recognize a book at worst after the first chapter or two. Not this one, I reviewed it (both times) as "A nice standard Skeleton Detective book"...

As for cataloguing books, I am not too fussy about getting the exact right version. I do like to get a cover that matches mine and paperback vs hardcover. I also really like to add TBR to the books in my piles/ shelves , because I would lose track of what I owned. I also keep track of my kindle books on LT, rather than my kindle. My kindle is too confusing to me. As for unions, I don't think that there is the sort of backlash against them that I read about by some in the US.

http://canadianlabour.ca/why-unions/history-labour-canada

In Canada, about 30% of people work for in a union, and if not a union, often an association - which is overall the same thing as a union. I think that unions make working life better for all - whether they are in union or not, because it creates pressure on companies that are not unionized to do better . I do think that there is a difference between a public and private company based union. Those who work in unions for a private company that must make a profit have to make more concessions to the company , whereas goverment sector unions have more power as they are paid from the " public purse." aka taxes. A happy medium between the two is best. We are fairly fortunate in Canada, because our goverment mandates maternity leave ( 6 months with 60 % of your salary - to a maximum - and 1 year that your company must hold your job for you, unionized or not ). And we have universal health care - not perfect , but really quite good. We also have stuff like Fair Pharmacare for people making a lower wage - and even for those who make a big wage, but somehow have huge pharmacy bills. Most employers offer dental care packages, pharmacy care packages as part of your benefit package. Unions usually offer better coverage, but my neither of my two sons are with unions, but both have dental care, extra health care ( i.e - employer offers pay back for things like physio -therapy, RX's, crutches, , that sort of thing.) . But yes, fast food places etc still are dreadful.

Code Name Verity - one of the books in my minds wish list :)

Oooh, cataloging chitchat!!

(Whoa, sorry about the nerding.)

I fantasize about being more organized about this, but am too lazy to carry out my daydream wishes. I *am* particular about getting the proper cover, but that's about as far as I go. I'd LOVE to go back through and get ALL the details right for ALL of my books, but that's a Big McLargeHuge Project. Ooof.

Also, I have no ebooks, so at least I've got that going for me...

>249 BLBera: So true, Beth! I love reading all the different responses and seeing how other people choose to do it.

>250 luvamystery65: I hope so, Ro!

>251 ronincats: One of the advantages of ebooks is that I don't have to be at the shelves to catalog them properly I can just flip back and forth between the Kobo website and LT to enter all the details. I really do need to get going on getting all my physical books catalogued, though. Now that there's an LT app with the nifty scanning feature there's really no excuse.

>252 jjmcgaffey: What a terrific detailed explanation of how you import from Calibre, Jenn! I hadn't realized that was a possibility, so I'll have to think about maybe doing that for my Kindle books.

>253 vancouverdeb: A certain segment of the U.S. political spectrum that shall remain nameless has done an excellent job of pitting non-unionized workers against unionized workers by portraying unions as the root of all evil. It's a convenient scapegoat that distracts from the fact that it's the corporations and CEOs who are the real problem when it comes to stagnating wages and lost jobs, and it astonishes me that people continue to fall for it. This election cycle there have at least been some nascent signs that the blinders are coming off for some folks, and not a minute too soon, i say.

>254 scaifea: I hear you, Amber! I quake at the thought of re-doing all my physical books to be precisely right. The last time I did a brief stint of cataloguing I also took the opportunity to clear out a bunch of books to donate to the library book sale. My rationalization was that if they were moving into the Read But Unowned category they didn't need to be precise. Ha!

>256 rosalita: My rationalization was that if they were moving into the Read But Unowned category they didn't need to be precise. Ha! I'm right there with ya sister!

Cataloging kindle books? Ducks head in shame. I guess I should add them to the collection though. And what's Calibre? . . . Oh, an ebook organizer. Um, I'm not one of the organized people.

>231 rosalita: The Green book sounds interesting.

I recently read Jennifer Haigh's novel Heat and Light about the impact of fracking on the locals, set in the same Pennsylvania community that Baker Towers and News from heaven were set in. Unfortunately, I didn't like it as much as the other two. She still writes well, and I haven't figured out yet what was missing.

An ebook organiser. Ooh! I like the idea of that.
Also did not know Amazon change the covers. Will pay more attention to where my covers come from.

>258 markon: This is a no-shame zone, Ardene! As the kids say, you do you. :-)

>259 charl08: Yes, it can be disconcerting to pick just the right cover and then months later find out it is completely different! I don't mind using Amazon as a source to add books, especially ebooks, but I always go in and edit them and then choose a member-uploaded cover or upload my own.

A certain segment of the U.S. political spectrum that shall remain nameless has done an excellent job of pitting non-unionized workers against unionized workers by portraying unions as the root of all evil. Oh I am very aware of that in the USA, Julia. Very glad to hear that the blinders are starting to come off.

70. The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin.

The final book in Cronin's The Passage trilogy finally answers the question of who was the man who became Patient Zero, and what we wants from the ragtag segment of human civilization that remains. Cronin is a first-rate storyteller who, like Stephen King and many other authors who become very popular, is badly in need of a ruthless editor to help him rein in the worst of his verbose impulses.

It also doesn't help that it's been three years since the second book, The Twelve was released, which left me with only the foggiest memory of plot details from it and the first book. I considered re-reading at least Book Two to bring me back up to speed, but considering this one alone is 712 pages (!) I really wasn't willing to invest so much time when there are so many lovely unread books waiting out there.

The bottom line is I'm glad I read this just to finish the trilogy, but it fell a bit flat for me. In addition, there is an extended coda that gives new meaning to the word "anticlimactic". All in all, a valuable reminder that writing series of books that remain compelling and relevant is hard, y'all.

Hi Julia, I am having mixed feelings about completing Justin Cronin's trilogy. I loved Passage but was less enthused with The Twelve. I expect my overpowering desire to be a completest will dictate that I eventually pick it up.

So impressed with your reviewing prowess. I am lacking in that department these days....reading I can do, reviews can wait.

Regarding your union discussion (and preference for civil disobedience), have you seen the 1953 film, Salt Of The Earth? If not, I think you'd like it. It's a low-budget, far-away-from-Hollywood production about unionisation with an amazing back-story (short version: the production was harassed by the FBI to the extent of agents buzzing the locations in helicopters so they couldn't record live sound, and deporting the leading lady).

I buck the LT trend with regard to cataloguing, because for me the important detail is the original publication date, not the edition. I record the edition I have, but that's secondary. I also "cheat" with covers because there were so many amazing designs for the original 20s and 30s releases, and I tend to use those. (When I own these books, they've nearly always lost their dust-jackets, so it's that or plain cloth!)

Morning, Julia! I think I may need to have a books on Kindle challenge next year. I buy them when they're offered at a good price and never read them. One click is just so darn easy and so much fun :0}

>263 DeltaQueen50: I completely understand that feeling, Judy. Overall I'm glad I read it because it would have bugged me to leave the trilogy unfinished, but the first was the best book in this series by far. I wouldn't rush out to read it if I were you — I only read it because I had been on hold for it at the library for so long that I felt like I had to finish it once I started.

>264 LovingLit: Thanks, Megan! I am trying to be good about writing up my reviews promptly, even if they are pretty superficial. I know myself too well — If I don't do them pretty quickly after I read the book, I never will!

>265 lyzard: I have not seen that film, Liz, but I will try to find it! One of my biggest pet peeves about LT is how hard it is to find the original pub date, actually. I wish it showed on the main book page somewhere instead of being buried in Common Knowledge. Do you record it in CK or do you use another field?

>266 Carmenere: An e-book challenge is a good idea, Lynda. I was kind of shocked I had so many, since I never buy one unless it's on special. Must have been an awful lot of specials! I don't think I've ever paid more than $4.99 for any ebook.

>268 lyzard:

I am very, very wicked and anti-LT: when I "add book" I use the original publication, not the edition I have, and keep that as "the" date, adding my edition to "Publication" on the edit page. I therefore have the OPD for all my books and can sort by that.

You naughty naughty girl! I love it.

I thought you said your thread didn't get much traffic? Hah!! Look what you started with this innocent "how do you catalog your books" question!! LOL. For me, I always want the cover to be the same as my edition. And I try to use the ISBN whenever possible. If it isn't a match, I try to update the info manually. I love using my phone to scan books in now--much easier than typing in the name and then I get the right edition. I do find the audio ones the be the hardest to get right. Still working on that. I just started using the Aquired and Started Reading/Finished Reading boxes.

>270 Berly: I've done some test scans with the iPhone app and it worked beautifully. I just haven't been motivated enough to do a large-scale add yet. I still don't use the Acquired date, though I should, but I do enter Start/Finish dates and have for a few years now.

71. Summit Lake by Charlie Donlea.

A journalist recovering from her own personal trauma is assigned to look into the murder of a young law student in a mountain resort town. Despite being a complete stranger in an insular small town, being unable to interview any family or friends of the victim, and evidence of a clear cover-up and whitewashing of the event by the state and federal law enforcement, this journalist is somehow able to obtain a copy of the entire police file, access to the complete autopsy report, and the victim's private diary. Said journalist solves the case and in doing so brings closure to herself.

It's not that this is a bad book, it's just aggressively average. There are a couple of places where the author goes for a "shocking twist!" but they are telegraphed so far in advance that even I, who never figures out whodunit, figured out whodunit. On the other hand, it's a quick read and there's nothing overtly offensive or cloying about the writing. Approached with the appropriate level of expectation, a reader will probably enjoy it.

Disclosure: I received a free digital copy of this book as a perk from Kobo. I was going to make a snarky remark along the lines of "and it was worth every penny" but really it's nowhere near bad enough to warrant that. It's ... fine. Really.

Edited to add: OK, there is one thing that really bugged me about this book that I didn't mention in my original review. Toward the end, abruptly, with no buildup whatsoever, there is a huge honking "blame the victim" passage about the young woman who was raped and murdered. Her BEST FRIEND out of nowhere told the journalist that the victim liked men a little too much, liked having men on a string, and maybe led on the guy who ends up being the killer. It was completely out of left field and bizarre. Of course, the friend goes on to say "I don't think she realized she had that effect on men" except she also totally said she did, so WTF. Anyway, that really annoyed me even though it's just one scene of the book.

Your review of this "aggressively average" book made me laugh several times. Thanks!

>224 rosalita: I loved that one when I read it several years ago.

>273 Berly: I'm glad I could give you a chuckle or two, Kim! I just edited the review to add something really annoying that I forgot to mention originally. I don't think it will make you laugh, though.

>274 thornton37814: I remember there were a lot of folks around LT talking about it back then. You were probably one of the people who prompted me to put it on my Wishlist, Lori, so thanks.

>258 markon:, >259 charl08: The nice thing about Calibre is that it actually stores your books (OK, you have to install a plugin to remove the DRM. But if you're doing it so you can read it, I consider it fine - not to share, though). Which means that the books you bought on Kindle, on Kobo, on Nook, got through Early Reviewers, got at Project Gutenberg - are all in the same place, in the same list, and you can a) actually see what the heck you have and b) read any of them, or put them on a device for reading, without worrying where they came from or where on your computer they are. I store my Calibre catalog in Dropbox, which means that any place I have WiFi I can connect (with Calibre Companion on my Android phone) and pick up any of my books to read, without having to go connect to my own computer. It's really nice. And then there's the trick I described above where it will make a CSV file which can be imported to LT. Very useful.

>267 rosalita: Me too, about reviews. I _intend_ to review everything I've read. But especially when I'm reading a series in quick succession, there are quite a few where, by the time I stop and go do the review, I can't remember what happened two books back... I try to review as soon as I'm finished, that generally works well.

You know you can make a column in your catalog with CK:OPD? I've got that on my A view (my default) - it's so useful. And so easy to add, when I have the book and can see the copyright date (OK, that's sometimes not the real OPD, but close enough if there's no other data). I can't sort by it, but I can see it easily.

72. Toms River: A story of science and salvation by Dan Fagin.

Fagin's subtitle is a little misleading: In the end, there was no salvation for the families of Toms River, N.J., who suspected but ultimately were unable to prove without a doubt that environmental pollution from two large chemical manufacturers were responsible for a cluster of childhood cancers in their town. But science there is plenty, as Fagin painstakingly explores the evolution of our understanding of health hazards caused by exposure to chemicals and other environmental toxins.

To explain the issues involved, Fagin moves back and forth across the centuries to trace the evolution both of the study of what causes disease and the discovery and development of man-made dyes extracted from coal tar and other noxious substances, all of which required copious amounts of extremely dangerous chemicals to separate the gooey sludge into its component elements that could then be processed into dyes and plastics. From the standpoint of the 21st century it is horrifying to read how cavalierly these early chemical manufacturers treated the toxic waste that their manufacturing processes produced, generally dumping it into the nearest river or pouring it out on the ground. The problem, of course, was that no one knew the health hazards of exposure to these chemicals and even fewer people cared. And as the science improved, and the toxic implications became more clear, the drive for profits invariably triumphed over hazard mitigation.

I went into this book expecting to learn more about a big bad evildoer. But what I learned is that there was no one big evil entity in Toms River; rather, there were a whole lot of smaller evils working together to protect their own interests at a tragic cost to the citizens of Toms River. Sure, the two chemical companies who dumped most of the hazardous waste were to blame, but so was the local water utility, who conspired with the polluters to cover up proven contamination of the town's water supply because they worried about being able to meet the city's demands for water if they shut down the affected wells. And the local, state, and federal regulatory agencies who were meant to ensure that industry complied with safe disposal requirements were unwilling and unable to enforce their own rules, generally choosing to impose token fines or no punishment at all even when a company was caught polluting red-handed. And the people of Toms River bear some responsibility themselves: There were signs of potential problems with pollution but city officials looked the other way. They and the workers themselves were unwilling to risk angering the area's largest private employer, where blue-collar jobs were plentiful and paid good wages.

In the end, the catalyst to force local and state regulators to take seriously the existence of a cluster of childhood cancers caused by environmental pollution was a woman whose son was born with brain cancer (I honestly had no idea such a thing was even possible, and I found it a horrifying thing to contemplate). She gradually became convinced that her son and many other children had been hurt by contaminated water, and she gathered together the parents of other cancer-stricken children to demand answers.

Unfortunately, even once the forces of epidemiology were unleashed, answers were thin on the ground. Even after years and years and millions of dollars spent on water testing, case studies, and testing of potential carcinogens in animal studies, science ultimately could not prove that contaminated water caused the cluster of childhood cancers in Toms River. It was a frustrating conclusion, but Fagin did an excellent job of showing just how limited the science is into what causes cancer, and how hard it is to detect clusters of cancer in residential areas, even now in the 2010s. Fagin is careful to present the research results without bias, which makes it clear that while there was almost certainly a correlation between exposure to the tainted water supply and childhood cancer, no test or study was ever able to create a definitive causal link.

Fagin covers a lot of ground in this book, and sometimes the science and jumping back and forth in time got a bit mind-boggling, but overall I found it clearly presented and well-written for non-expert readers like me. I learned a lot, very little of it reassuring in terms of the state of our understanding of the dangers of chemical contamination or our ability to prevent the next pollution-caused health hazard.

Note: This book was read as part of the 75ers' Nonfiction Reading Challenge's June theme: Natural History/The Environment.

>277 rosalita: Me too! I appreciated the way that Fagin presents the complicated story from multiple perspectives. And especially liked the discussion of statistics and how effects that seem obvious are hard to prove.

>278 swynn: Absolutely. As a decidedly non-mathy person with only the vaguest memory of confidence intervals from college stats class, I found it it pretty easy to understand the gap between what seems obvious anecdotally and what can actually be proven. It gave me new appreciation for how scientists work and the limitations of what they can do.

73. A Murder in Time by Julie McElwain.

I nearly chucked this book after the first chapter (figuratively, since it's an ebook from the library). I'm glad I didn't, as it ended up being a more-than-serviceable time traveling mystery. The only downside is that it is apparently the first in an intended series, which I need like another hole in the head.

Kendra Donovan is an FBI agent in present-day America. She is part of a multi-agency raid on a terrorist hideout that goes awry, with bullets flying everywhere and people screaming and dying by the handful. That's the point where I nearly gave up on it, because it seemed so ridiculously like every other bog-standard espionage thriller. I mean, the kind of stuff Nelson DeMille probably writes in his sleep, only without the racism.

Fortunately, I kept reading and the book improved dramatically when — through a rather strained MacGuffin-y device — Kendra finds herself transported back to Regency England, where she finds herself living in the home territory of a serial killer of young prostitutes. She brings all her 21st century knowledge to bear on the problem while trying to avoid the suspicions of the Duke and other assorted aristocracy that she's landed amongst, who wonder just who she is and how she knows what she knows.

All in all, the 19th century mystery is entertaining. It's fun to see uber-agent Donovan try to solve a crime without having the modern crutches of DNA analysis, computer searches, and X-rays. And if the dialogue sometimes sounds like the author swallowed Georgette Heyer's entire oeuvre and then spit it back up on on her word processor's screen, well ... she could have had worse source material to draw from.

If you like murder mysteries, and you like Heyer's Regency works, you'll probably find this one to your liking.

Note: This book was offered as a Big Library Read by Overdrive, which is a program that allows unlimited downloads of a select ebook across all libraries that use Overdrive. The last book I read from this program was Shakespeare Saved My Life. There have been others since but none of them appealed to me.

Ugh. I just realized that my numbering was off on my reviews. Fortunately the mistake was only at #64, so I only had to correct nine entries. I really need to pay more attention when I write reviews ...

74. The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks.

One of my favorite authors comes through again. This fictionalized account of the life of David (slewer of Goliath, king of Israel) presents a beautifully nuanced portrait of a man imbued with the power to do great good and also great evil.

David's story is told through the voice of Nathan, the prophet who first foretold that God had anointed David to unite and lead the tribes of Israel. Nathan loves David deeply but is not blinded to his weaknesses. Brooks did a superb job of letting the readers feel Nathan's love and his pain for David, as well as his sense of helplessness to prevent the tragedies that informed the latter part of David's life. The secret chord of the title refers to David's tremendous musical talents, as a singer, lyricist, and harpist. Music and excerpts from what I presume are Psalms written by David fill the narrative, giving Brooks another language to help her readers understand David's power.

I was familiar only with the barest sketch of the story of David, so I'm not qualified to judge how much or in what ways Brooks took fictional liberties with the accepted narrative from the Old Testament. And I suspect there are elements here that someone who believes in the infallibility of the Bible would find troubling, if not blasphemous. But for me, it was an extraordinary story of an extraordinary man, told in the most lyrical way possible.

I read this book for the Reading Through Time group's themed read for the second quarter of 2016: Ancient and Biblical Times.

Hi Julia, just stopped by to say I love reading your reviews. I haven't been posting many of mine as they tend to be random thoughts rather than well-thought-out actual reviews like yours.

I am very lazy about cataloging my books. I try to get tha cover right and that's about it. I like the idea of tagging e-books. That would be easy for me as I don't read that many.

I hope your summer is going well. Please let us know who is going to be speaking at the book festival in October. I am still interested in making a trip up that way.

>284 Donna828: Thank you, Donna! I enjoy writing reviews, but I struggle with my nonfiction reviews which tend to turn into term papers if I find the subject matter interesting.

I don't think they've announced the authors for the book festival yet, but I will keep you posted!

There's an article in the July/August issue of The Atlantic magazine that I thought might be of interest to folks around these parts:

Women Are Writing the Best Crime Novels

The story starts by talking about Gone Girl but then goes on to look at the writing of a number of other women, including Laura Lippman, Megan Abbott and (one of my favorites) Tana French, among others. It's a really interesting examination of the ways that women writers are changing and extending the crime novel type in new and interesting directions.

Here's a quote from the article:

The female writers, for whatever reason (men?), don’t much believe in heroes, which makes their kind of storytelling perhaps a better fit for these cynical times. Their books are light on gunplay, heavy on emotional violence. Murder is de rigueur in the genre, so people die at the hands of others—lovers, neighbors, obsessive strangers—but the body counts tend to be on the low side. “I write about murder,” Tana French once said, “because it’s one of the great mysteries of the human heart: How can one human being deliberately take another one’s life away?” Sometimes, in the work of French and others, the lethal blow comes so quietly that it seems almost inadvertent, a thing that in the course of daily life just happens. Death, in these women’s books, is often chillingly casual, and unnervingly intimate. As a character in Alex Marwood’s brilliant new novel, The Darkest Secret, muses: “They’re not always creeping around with knives in dark alleyways. Most of them kill you from the inside out.”

And now I have a new list of authors to check out (happy sigh).

Hi Julia - The Atlantic article sounds interesting. I bookmarked to read later.

I've been on the fence about The Secret Chord, but your comments tipped me over; I placed a reserve at the library. I've been a Brooks fan, but I've heard so many varied reviews of this one, I've been holding off. Thanks!

>287 BLBera: Oh, dear. I didn't read any other reviews; I hope you're not disappointed when you read it, Beth!

>281 rosalita: Okay, you hit me with a BB. Onto the wishlist it goes.

>289 ronincats: Oh, yay! I hope you like it, Roni. I know you like Heyer — I'll look forward to seeing if you have the same reaction to the dialogue as I did. :-)

The library has it, there are four copies, all are checked out, and there are four holds ahead of me!

Wow! I don't know if you read ebooks, but because Overdrive selected it as a Big Library Read you an check out the ebook version without having to wait in line. I think it will be available until tomorrow if you are interested in checking it out.

75. Coyote Waits by Tony Hillerman.

The 10th entry in the Leaphorn/Chee series of Navajo mysteries. Chee arrests an elderly Navajo man for murdering a fellow police officer, then continues investigating when his erstwhile girlfriend questions the man's guilt. Meanwhile Leaphorn begins investigating the case from another angle. They both end up in the same place eventually and justice is more or less served.

While I continue to enjoy the insights into Navajo culture, I'm afraid I'm not finding these books very interesting as mysteries. Part of the problem is that I also don't find either Leaphorn or Chee appealing in and of themselves as characters (though Leaphorn is by far the more compelling, and I wish Hillerman would have dumped Chee and gone back to a solo protagonist). And I'm kind of tired of how the viewpoint switches back and forth between their perspectives as they work the same case from opposite ends of the reservation.

Ultimately, I feel like I'm learning something for my own good instead of being entertained, which is fine as far as it goes but it goes less and less far with every book.

This book was read as part of the Leaphorn/Longmire Reading Project.

75 books!! Way to go, Julia!

Whoo! Well done, Julia!!

I'm hoping to crack 75 myself this month. (Wish I could say I'll also have 75 reviews written... :D )

>292 rosalita: Julia, I do read ebooks, but our library doesn't have it in that format.

>294 porch_reader: Thanks very much, Amy! It's nice to see you here again. You were missed!

>295 lyzard: Thank you, Ms Liz. I've always said that reading's the easy part. It's the reviews that will kill ya.

>296 ronincats: Oh, that's too bad, Roni. Well, I hope the hold list for the paper copies moves quickly, then.

Congrats on 75, Julia.

Well done, Julia, passing 75 already.

Congrats!

Thanks, Beth, Paul, and Jim! On to the next 75 ...

76. A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer.

I'm following along with Liz & Co.'s chronological re-read of Heyer's Regency Romances, and this one is up next. In discussing last month's read, the uneven short story collection Pistols for Two (which I skipped due to having read it fairly recently and not having particularly enjoyed it), Liz opined that that collection may have been a way for Heyer to hold her publishers at bay while she worked on this book, which is one of the most complex of all her novels. After re-reading it, I have to say I agree with her, and also that all that complexity makes for a truly exceptional story.

Adam Deveril is a captain in the British Army, fighting under the Duke of Wellington in France, in the waning days of the first Napoleonic War. Shortly before Napoleon abdicates and peace is declared, Lynton is forced to sell out and return home. His father, Viscount Lynton, has died in a hunting accident and left a severely debt-ridden and mortgage-encumbered estate, along with two young daughters who need husbands and a wife to whom the word 'economy' is unknown. His financial advisor and others urge him to consider marrying a rich merchant's daughter to ensure his family's future, but he had earlier fallen in love with a beautiful young noblewoman and can't imagine life with anyone else. It doesn't take long for him to realize that he has no choice, and so in short order he winds up married to Jenny Chawleigh, a shy, plain, plump young woman whose father is both the richest man in London and a vulgarian whose blunt ways set Adam's teeth on edge.

This is Heyer, so we know there will be a happy ending. But it's not the one you might have expected at the outset, and there's much less of the author's trademark slang-soaked slapstick along the way. A Civil Contract presents a view of the aristocracy and the merchant class of Regency London that virtually none of her other books do, and it's deeply satisfying to see familiar character types from different angles. The hero is not perfect, and neither is the heroine, but the author's plotting and personality profiles are as close to perfection as she ever got, in my opinion. Enthusiastically recommended.

I gave A Civil Contract four stars - I think you had a deeper appreciation for it, but I did enjoy it - mostly :) I think I wanted more romance out of it...

Also, The Wayne finally opened that whiskey and seems quite taken with it, so thank you again!!

>303 katiekrug: I gave it four stars when I read it for the first time, Katie. It was only on re-reading it, and with Liz's comments about it being one of Heyer's more complex books, that I gained the deeper appreciation. And I did miss some of the goofy wordplay that Heyer is so known for.

I'm glad The Wayne is enjoying the Short's Whiskey!

Come on over to the new thread, if you've nothing better to do ...

>302 rosalita: Great review of A Civil Contract, Julia. Thumb from me. I'm bumping this one way up my GH tbr list.

>306 jnwelch: Please do, Joe! I think you will like it very much.