What are you reading the week of July 10, 2021?

I finished up Alfred Wegner's The Origin of Continents and Oceans which was as interesting for what he got wrong as much as what he got right. The English edition was published in 1924. My elementary level science books in the late 60's were filled with geology "facts" that were known to be wrong even at that time. I distinctly remember looking at figures in the textbooks showing "land bridges" spanning the Atlantic Ocean from South America to Africa and the US to Europe. It was an idea that I found strange at the time since I had at least heard of "continental drift." The sad thing is that my youngest brother was still using the same textbook seven years later. We owe our children more than that.

For many people my age their science education was filled with obsolete ideas that were never corrected by further education. They see the world through half remembered, antiquated ideas that were known to be wrong when we learned them. And now they make our nation's laws and policies. We are doomed. I almost feel sorry for them, but they didn't have to stop learning just because they left school. How can real science education survive in a world bombarded by "Ancient Aliens" and "Ghost Hunters" and other pseudoscientific drivel that's more appealing to the masses? QAnon? We made him. "The night is dark and full of terrors."

On a brighter note, I'm about half way through Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed. Published in 1972, I read it as a teenager. Rereading it now, I'm amazed at how much I remember and how little I understood it at the time.

Enjoying this cozy audiobook via hoopla ~

The Body in the Garden: A Lily Adler Mystery
by Katharine Schellman

Right now I'm swapping back and forth between Crimes Against Nature and Fallout. I also expect to get to The Moons of Barsk this week.

I've been trying to read The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton, but I can't focus on it. So I've put it down for the time being and am going to read an odd-looking book called Oreo by Fran Ross. It was published in 1974 and made waves because it was about a mixed-race child. It went out of publication, but was recently re-discovered and re-printed.

fiished my re-read of Velocity Weapon by Megan O'Keefe. enjoyed it immensely again. started the 2nd book, Chaos Vector. otherwise, still happily ignoring The Mists of Avalon and Neuromancer.

Finished listening to the simplistic, predictable The Neighbors.

Next up for listening is All The Water I've Seen Is Running by Elias Rodriques.

>1 fredbacon: Thank you! I'm a public school teacher and it's frustrating and exhausting fighting an uphill battle at all times. Now I just read that a teacher was fired last month for teaching a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay and a poem about white privilege. You hit the nail on the head: "We owe our children more than that."

But I still have another week before I go fight the battle again, so for now I'm reading The Third Angel by Alice Hoffman. It was given to me by my mother-in-law after she read it.

Advise and Consent
Allen Drury
4/5 stars
Drury’s book published in 1959 revolves around Washington politics. The Secretary of State needs to be replaced and the President’s nominee is not a popular one. The story unfolds through the eyes of four politicians as they deal with the nomination and the potential scandal behind the nominee. Amidst the nomination storyline is also the space race storyline between the US and Russia. This is a very long book but I thought it was well written and interesting.

Enjoying this OverDrive audiobook ~

The Personal Librarian
by Marie Benedict
(a non-white passing as white/J.P. Morgan's librarian/book collection references
and descriptions/historical fiction)

Finished Afterlife and will be discussing it today with the F2F group. My review is pretty short, due to time constraints, but I enjoyed it.

Just started a LTER for The Lake House at Lenashee but stalled out when six of the books recently requested from paperbackswap.com all descended on my yesterday. (Dinner? Don't talk to me about dinner -- I'm reading!)

Just finished Amora: A Tale of Two Brothers by Noah Douglas. Was a very engaging fantasy novel that really immersed you in the land of Delucia and in engaging magic that draws from divine or demonic power!!!

Little Big Man – Thomas Berger
Audible Audio performed by David Aaron Baker, Scott Sowers, and Henry Strozier.
3.5***, rounded up

Berger’s novel purports to be a memoir/autobiography of Jack Crabb, written with the help of ghost writer Ralph Snell. “Snell” opens the prologue thus: It was my privilege to know the late Jack Crabb – frontiersman, Indian scout, gunfighter, buffalo hunter, adopted Cheyenne – in his final days upon this earth. He goes on to relate how he learned of the reportedly 111-year-old man living in a nursing home, who claimed to be an eyewitness to Custer’s Last Stand at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The bulk of the novel is Crabb’s first-person account is life experiences from about 1852 to 1876. Snell then returns in an epilogue to explain that Crabb died shortly after relating that last chapter (Little Bighorn), and he regrets that he was unable to learn more of Crabb’s many exploits through the decades.

I was completely entertained by this novel of the American West. Berger gives the reader quite the raconteur in Crabb, with a gift for story-telling and colorful language. By the narrator’s own account, he certainly has a gift for landing on his feet, managing to get out of more than one potentially deadly scrape by his wits or sheer dumb luck. As he grows from boyhood Crabb is kidnapped / adopted by a Cheyenne tribe, taken in and sheltered by a minister and his wife, “works” as a gambler and gunfighter, hunts buffalo, marries a Scandinavian woman who speaks limited English, and eventually becomes a scout for George Armstrong Custer, thereby witnessing the US Army’s defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Along the way he rejoins the Cheyenne tribe numerous times, listening to the advice of Old Lodge Skins, and relating much of the culture and traditions of that Native tribe, as well as what life was like for the European settlers during that time period.

If the scenarios stretch credulity, well that is part of the fun. We have always looked on the American West with a sort of awe and wonder, elevating many of the historical figures to the level of superhuman legends. Berger sprinkles Crabb’s recollections with a number of these people: Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp and Custer, among others.

In the epilogue Snell writes ”I leave the choice in your capable hands. Jack Crabb was either the most neglected hero in the history of this country or a liar of insane proportions.. It’s fun to imagine that some “everyman” did witness so much history first hand. His exploits could easily be the inspiration for “Forest Gump.”

The audiobook is performed by a talented trio: David Aaron Baker, Scott Sowers, and Henry Strozier. I do not know which narrated which sections, but they were all good.

Reading murder on the orient express...

Started The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party by Daniel James Brown.

>8 JulieLill: Advise and Consent is indeed a worthy and interesting novel (in my opinion). However, I tried reading one of Drury's subsequent novels and, well, that didn't go so well. Obviously, one's mileage may vary, but Drury's politically conservative and more than a little racist snark didn't go over well with me. The book I read was A Shade of Difference, considered, I think, the sequel to Advise and Consent.

I've just past the halfway mark of Barack Obama's memoir of his political career and, especially, tenure in the White House, A Promised Land. I'm finding it very interesting, indeed.

I finished Us Against You which is a broad story about a game, a town, and the people in it. At first I had some trouble keeping track of so many characters, but in the end, I was fully immersed in the town and the struggles of each character and how they impacted each other.

I finally read The Dry and could hardly stand to put it down. What a great story! Now I’ve started A Rising Man and although it starts slow in comparison, I think I’m going to like it.

>15 rocketjk: There are several sequels to the first book. I don't have the time to invest reading the rest of them especially after your comments on A Shade of Difference.

>18 JulieLill: Good choice! From my 2014 review . . .

{I}in this sequel, which follows many of the same characters as the first, Drury's political views get full play, to the detriment of the book. I don't say this just because I disagree with those politics, but because Drury's outlook is so weighted. Basically, all liberals are wrong-headed; they are gullible, deluded and/or phonies.

The action moves mostly from Washington down to New York City, to take us inside the workings of the U.N. and a cynical attack on American prestige and cultural values is underway. Oh, and by the way, anybody who, in 1966, was impatient about the rate of improvement of civil rights for blacks was just unrealistic and probably anti-American. The NAACP, for example, is recast in the book as DEFY.

The storytelling was still decent, but barely allowed to breathe for the heavy-handed political message. Drury wrote six books in this series all told. After reading Advise and Consent, I'd intended to read the whole bunch, but my mind's been changed about that, boy howdy.

Finished the powerful, provocative & prophetic Klara and The Sun.

Next up for reading is Eleven Sooty Dreams by Manuela Draeger.

So, good gravy... been busy, so here the last two weeks

Plays:
Dinner with Friends: A Play - Donald Margulies
I'm auditioning on Sunday.

Women Beware Women - Thomas Middleton
Did virtual reading last Saturday.
Damn Jacobean drama was insane!
Most of the cast dies in the final scene... poison, swords, pit of daggers... Crazy!

Spring Awakening - Frank Wederkind
Doing virtual reading tomorrow
1891 German drama, inspiration for the 2006 musical. Sex, violence, cameo by Jack the Ripper

"Forget Him" - Harvey Fierstein in Out Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays

Also:
A Murder is Announced - Agatha Christie
Over on the dry side - Louis L'Amour

>21 boulder_a_t: Break a leg!

The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
3.5/5 stars
This story, set in Ohio in 1941, revolves around the preteen Pecola Breedlove, an African American who is living in a foster home. Her biggest wish is to have blue eyes. She believes that if she has blue eyes that she will be loved. But things don’t go her way and she struggles with her life. This was Morrison’s first novel.

>17 Copperskye:
I also enjoyed The Dry the movie also gets great praise.

Just about finished The Cleaner of Chartres by Sally Vickers ,a very good read.

>24 aussieh: I didn’t realize they made a movie until I noticed it on my LT cover. I watched the trailer and it looks great - anxiously waiting for it to stream for free!

The new thread is up over here.

>15 rocketjk: Back in the '70s Drury had a series of bestsellers that I find oddly intriguing. I've never read them. As a teenager, I didn't have the money to buy such books, and I wasn't allowed to have a public library card. (My mother had a bit of a grudge against our public library.) I know that the politics of the books would abhor me because they are so stridently Manichean, but the memory of those bestseller lists still beckons to me. One of the novels, Preserve and Protect, centered around a presidential campaign with a liberal Vice Presidential candidate teamed with a conservative Presidential candidate. The novel ended with an assassination, but the victim isn't stated. He then followed it with two novels. In one, Come Nineveh, Come Tyre, the liberal survives and becomes President. Bad things happen. In the other, The Promise of Joy, the conservative wins and it's a golden age for America. How these became bestsellers baffles me.

Christmas in July ...


In Island Christmas – Nancy Thayer
Book on CD narrated by Tanya Eby
3***

From the book jacketIn this enchanting holiday novel, … friends and family gather on Nantucket for a gorgeous winter wedding with plenty of merry surprises in store.

My reactions:
‘Tis the season for improbable holiday romances with ice skating, decorating a Christmas tree, hot cocoa, snow, at least one person who is “not into Christmas and/or kids,” and one or more missteps on the road to that happy-ever-after ending.

I have to admit that Jilly, the mother of the bride, irritated me no end with her histrionics. The bride, youngest daughter Felicia, knew how to handle her, especially with the help of her older sister, Jilly’s “perfect” daughter, Lauren. The men were less irritating, but also less present. They tended to go off on poorly thought-out adventures with resulting trips to the ER. But all’s well that ends.

If it isn’t already a Hallmark Christmas movie, it would make a good one. Fun, fast, holiday read.

The audio version is capably narrated by Tanya Eby. She has clear diction and set a nice pace. Once or twice I was a bit confused about who was speaking, but it didn’t take long to catch up.