What are you reading the week of September 11, 2021?

I'm back to reading 1919, the second volume in John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy. It's a brilliant book, but the Joe Williams sections are difficult to read because of the racism.

Let's see, I knocked off Gods in Color and Selling Sea Power. I'm currently working on Assembling the Dinosaur. And I also expect to knock off A Psalm for the Wild-Built in the course of the coming week. After that, we'll see.

I'm reading The World Doesn't Require You: Stories by Rion Amilcar Scott. I've only read the first two stories so far, but it's off to an excellent start.

I'm about 3/4 of the way through The Giants and Their City: Major League Baseball in San Francisco, 1976-1992 by Lincoln Abraham Mitchell. It's not the best written book I've ever read, but it's enjoyable and the author gets quite a few insights correct about the relationship between the team and the town during the years being described. For baseball fans only, certainly.

Finished listening to the excellent Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker.

Next up for listening is Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri.

Just finished Julie Phillips' excellent biography James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, and it utterly blew me away.

By the time I became involved in science fiction fandom, Tiptree's real identity had been known for a while, and I had assumed it was simply a pen name taken because female sf writers of the era routinely used male (or gender-neutral) pseudonyms.

Nope. Large Economy Sized Probable Gender Dysphoria Definitely Conflicted Person Nope.

If you're interested in science fiction, read this. If you're interested in the feminist movement of the 1970s era, read this. If you're interested in psychology -- oh, hell. Just read it.

Trying now to ease myself into The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World, by Laura Imai Messina, which is my F2F group's current read. Kind of like coming away from a gourmet dinner on Friday and facing hot dogs on Saturday night.

This week I read The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard, read Life on the Ground Floor: Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine by James Maskalyk, and Binti by Nnedi Okorafor.

The Light Years is the first book in the Chronicles of Cazalet, and was peaceful and pleasant to read. I enjoyed very much the book about emergency medicine, as it was set in an inner-city hospital in Toronto, where I spent five happy years volunteering in their palliative care ward. Binti was a YA novel, creative, insightful, and really different in ways I can't articulate at 5:16 a.m.

Up next is Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline.

Finished listening to the lovely Whereabouts.

Next up for listening is American War by Omar El Akkad.

I finished The Giants and Their City: Major League Baseball in San Francisco, 1976-1992 by Lincoln Abraham Mitchell. This is a mostly fun book that traces the history of the San Francisco Giants, and the history of the city itself, during the era when the team was owned by real estate tycoon Bob Lurie. Mitchell's account is book-ended nicely, as it begins in 1976 with Lurie stepping in the buy the Giants in a last-minute act that kept the team from purchased by folks in Toronto who were going to move the team there, and ends in 1992 with Lurie's almost consummated sale of the team to moneyed interests in Tampa, before grocery store magnate Peter Magowan stepped forward at, once again basically at the last second, to save the team once again for San Francisco. Mitchell deftly weaves the team's up and (mostly) down fortunes on the field with descriptions of the political climate and events in San Francisco that led to the defeat of four separate voter referendums aimed at providing public funding for a new stadium to replace the horrid from its opening Candlestick Park. If interested, you'll find a longer review on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

I'm now reading the fascinating Sigh for a Strange Land by Monica Stirling, a somewhat fable-like novel about refugees from the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Still reading The Mists of Avalon, Scandal in Babylon, and Thunderbird.

One Good Turn
Kate Atkinson
3/5 stars
Jackson Brodie, ex-cop returns in this second book starring him. He is retired and has followed his girlfriend to France where she is trying to establish an acting career. Meanwhile Brodie gets embroiled in several incidents including a crime novelist whose so-called friend is murdered. I really liked his character in the first book but I had some trouble following all the different characters and plots in this book.

A Well-Behaved Woman – Therese Anne Fowler
Digital audiobook narrated by Barrie Kreinik
3.5***

The subtitle is all the synopsis you need: A Novel of the Vanderbilts.

Alva Smith and her sisters are left with nothing but their good reputation after the Civil War. William Vanderbilt’s family is wealthy but not accepted by New York’s premier families. A marriage between the two might improve both families’ spot in society. It’s a false hope, however. But Alva is determined. She uses her husband’s money to build new and lavish mansions, hosts her own grand balls, works to found the Metropolitan Opera House, and to ensure that her children achieved the stature she deemed appropriate.

She was no shrinking violet … she was a Steel Magnolia. Intelligent, cagey, and fiercely independent. Faced with a betrayal, she moved forward with a scandalous strategy. It was a courageous move, but she was determined. Among the causes she championed was suffrage for all women.

I thought Fowler did a great job of bringing this fascinating woman to life. Of course I had heard of the Vanderbilts, but I knew little of Alva’s background or of her political causes before reading this.

Barrie Kreinik did a fine job of performing the audiobook. I found her interpretation of Ava and the many other characters believable. This is the second book set during the Gilded Age that I’ve listened to this month, and I admit that I got a bit confused at times, thinking that an episode in the story of Jennie Churchill was part of Alva’s story. That’s my fault, not the book’s or narrator’s.

Starting on The Long Call by Ann Cleeves

Moonflower Murders – Anthony Horowitz
4****

Two books in one! A very interesting concept. Susan Ryeland is a retired publisher/editor who is approached by the Treherns, parents of a missing woman, for help in finding out where their daughter Cecily is and what has happened to her. Why? Because before she disappeared, Cecily mentioned that she had read a book by an author Susan used to represent, and that book gave her the solution to a real-life murder at the hotel her family owns and operates.

This is book two in a series featuring this literary detective, Susan Ryeland. And like the first novel, the secret to this one lies in a book Susan edited which featured the master German detective, Atticus Pünd (think Hercule Poirot). So, of course, Susan must re-read the book in question, and the mystery of what has happened to Cecily is interrupted after 227 pages, to allow the reader to experience the Atticus Pünd novel in its entirety, before returning to Cecily’s disappearance (and to the murder she felt she had solved using the Pünd book).

Sound confusing? Well, that’s because I am nowhere near the talented writer that Anthony Horowitz is. I was completely mesmerized by this book (these books?). I enjoyed the difference in style between the two storylines and was equally immersed in each mystery (or really three mysteries … the one that Pünd is solving; the murder that Cecily believed she had solved by reading the Pünd novel; the disappearance of Cecily).

I like Susan as a character, and I like Atticus Pünd. Both are meticulous and thorough and deliberate in analyzing the evidence they uncover. And I love the way that Horowitz plays with words

I haven’t read the first in the series – Magpie Murders - yet, but I definitely will, and I look forward to future installments as well.

finished Thunderbird by Chuck Wendig and Scandal in Babylon by Barbara Hambly.

added Empire of the Vampire by Jay Kristoff and Hammer on Bone by Cassandra Khaw to my rotation.

Started Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell- I am really enjoying it!

I finished The Great Starvation Experiment, the description of an experiment of starvation and rehabilitation done on 36 CO's towards the end of WWII. It was intriguing in terms of the effects immediate and long term of starvation but also for the portraits of many of the people involved.

Hamnet
by Maggie O’Farrell
4.5/5 stars
Set in England in the late 1500’s. A poor young man named John falls in love with Agnes who is a healer and knows how to make potions. Life is hard for them but they love each other and have three children. When their young son succumbs to bubonic plague, the family falls apart and John moves to London to work on the stage, write plays and earn money. Will John and Agnes’ marriage fall apart following this move or will they be able to come up to the challenge to continue to love each other. I thought this was a wonderfully written novel.

The new thread is up over here.