richardderus's second 2025 thread

This man has taken the concept to its apotheosis:

Reviews 1, 2, 3 are here.

THIS THREAD'S REVIEWS

004 All the water in the world : a novel in post #43.
005 Strange Pictures: A Novel in post #57.
006 Darkmotherland in post #100.
007 Harbingers: What January 6 and Charlottesville Reveal About Rising Threats to American Democracy in post #107.
008 The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom in post #113.
009 The Magic of Normal: Hope, Love and Beyond in post #124.
010 Booked for Murder (An Old Juniper Bookstore Mystery, #1) in post #The Forbidden Book in post #150.
012 Iron hope : lessons learned from conquering the impossible in post #162.
013 Fire exit : a novel in post #196.
014 Abalone and the Snake Goddess in post #221.
015 Written in bone : hidden stories in what we leave behind in post #230.
016 All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes in post #231.
017 Vantage pointin post #251.

All my threads in the 75ers linked somewhere here
My Last Thread of 2009 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2010 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2011 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2012 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2013 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2014 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2015 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2016 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2017 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2018 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2019 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2020 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2021 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2022 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2023 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2024 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.

All previous Burgoine reviews linked here.

THIS THREAD'S BURGOINE REVIEWS:
#001 The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store in post #164.
#002 North to Paradise: A memoir in post #168.
#003 Cold nights of childhood in post #171.
#004 Hidden in Snow (The Åre Murders Book 1) in post #173.
#005 My Friends in post #177.

All previous Pearl Rule reviews linked here.

THIS THREAD'S PEARL RULE REVIEWS:
#001 Mister Sandman (50%; p241) in post #178.
#002 A Valley to Harness: A Novel for the World's Revolution (37%) in post #181.
#003 To Be Loved: A Story of Truth, Trauma, and Transformation (43%) in post #182.

Seriously...not a great venue for normies here.
My 2024 goals are here, for reference.

2025 GOALS
I wrote an unprecedented 413 reviews in 2024, though certainly not all those books were read in 2024! I'm not counting books read, but reviews written. Decades of pilf from the review aggregators never got a real review written, just some notes on my computer. This year I went back to all my old computers and vacuumed notes onto a data stick. It's my purpose now to write at least a Burgoine review from those notes, post it here and on the DRC aggregator's site, and that will be my annual count.

For those who think I should follow the "books read in 2025" model, that's very interesting, and thank you for sharing your judgment with me. I will, however, be using the site the way I want to not how you think I should.

Numerical goals aren't really the point for me. I've shown I can meet or exceed them often enough now to think they're just unnecessary, and a little show-offy, for me. I will focus my efforts on getting my unwritten-review count down, and on focusing my efforts on reviewing #ReadingIsResistance titles.
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1Q25
2Q25
3Q25
4Q25

See >5 richardderus: for 2024 achievements & 2025 goals.
Monthly (and special hashtag events) wrap-up posts are linked below.
JANUARY 2025 IN REVIEW here.

See >5 richardderus: for 2024 achievements & 2025 goals.
Monthly (and special hashtag events) wrap-up posts are linked below.

Happy New Almost-thread, Richard!

GBBO and other special foodie projects will be linked here.

Well, let us hope that I can keep up better with this thread than I did with the last one, RD!

((Hugs)) and **smooches** and hopes that you have a wonderful Wednesday!

>8 ronincats: Welcome, Roni!

Your crown awaits.

>10 alcottacre: Thank you most kindly, smoochling.

Happy new one, BigDaddy!

Of course you'd have a new thread already, you posting machine!

Happy new thread!

>13 Crazymamie: Thanks, Mamie!

>14 ArlieS: Gotta have something to keep me off the streets, Arlie!

>9 richardderus: love it.
Happy new one, Rdear. Gentle hugs. 💖😘

>17 Ameise1: Hi Barbara! Thank you most kindly.

Congrats on joining the 2-thread club! And that ad up top? That's a bit... disturbing? Reminds of the first time I heard someone in a public restroom stall talking on their phone through ear buds. 😂

Happy new one, Richard!

>19 drneutron: I might be just a bit more accustomed to seeing men in their baths than you are, Jim. Thanks for the welcome!

>20 jessibud2: Thank you, Shelley!

Happy new one! I love the banana dolphins :)

>23 katiekrug: Thanks! Aren't they just about the cutest things ever?

Happy new thread, Richard!

Happy new thread, Richard!

My DH saw "hurkle-durkle" somewhere online within the last few weeks, and he's been using it a lot lately. Mostly to say he needs to get up and not "hurkle-durkle." I still do "hurkle-durkle."

Salutations on your new thread, dear fellow.

>1 richardderus: Love the topper. Your pal Hani is an expert practitioner of hurkle-durkle.

Happy Wednesday, Richard. Happy New Thread. Hooray for hurkle-durkle, even though that is a practice I rarely utilize. I am one of those spring out of bed oddballs.

I checked in the morning and you were still at your old location and now, here we are in the evening and pow! Happy new thread :)

Happy New Thread!

>25 swynn: Thank you, Steve!

>26 atozgrl: My life is now organized around hurkling my durkle, Irene.

Thanks!

>27 PaulCranswick: Thank you most kindly, PC. I would expect nothing less of the estimable lady!

>28 msf59: I will endeavor not to hold your...peculiarity of constitution...against you, Birddude.

Thanks!

>29 figsfromthistle: Thank you, Anita...gotta watch us old ones, we're slippery.

>30 SilverWolf28: Thank you, Silver!

Congrats on another nice new one, Richard! I'm happy to get in at least on the first day. Here I am an expert at hurkle-durkle and I had no idea! *smooch*

>37 LizzieD: Being retired is an automatic advantage, Peggy, and thanks!

A friend of mine used hurkle-durkle a couple days ago and I had to google it. She must pay attention to the word of the day. It's a wonderful word and I intend to use it (although I rarely engage in the activity itself) as much as I can in the new year.

>9 richardderus: Interesting fruit plate, Richard. I'm not a big banana fan, but Dave is . Maybe I'll serve up a plate like that to Dave someday. Happy New Thread!

>39 EBT1002: Morning, Ellen! It's a great word, and deserves its newfound Renaissance across the globe.

>40 vancouverdeb: I love it...whimsical and unserious, playful and pretty...what's not to love, Deborah?
Thanks!

004 All the water in the world : a novel by Eiren Caffall

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the tradition of Station Eleven, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York’s Museum of Natural History in a flooded future.

All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they've saved.

Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story—with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most—love and work, community and knowledge—will survive.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU

My Review: I really liked Station Eleven a lot. I'm a sucker for this story: After the Fall, now what? Maybe proof of this enduring fascination is my championing of Earth Abides (now a TV show) and Day of the Triffids. The genre presents a long tail of goodwill, then, as well as wide scope for action set in the present. This story is split between the present crisis...being flooded out of their home on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History...and how things came to be so terrible that this is where their home needs to be.

A really good story idea, one that has a lot of genuine and affecting emotional resonance; then uses up its narrative momentum by structuring the past as flashbacks. Once or twice, okay; more than that it becomes a real drag. Start the story in the past. Trust the reader to invest in the characters, and rip our lungs out by showing us in real time what's happening. It felt to me the author was cushioning the blow by using this method of storytelling.

So no fifth star from me.

Four stars were assured when this happened:

“Hell, it was happening, I saw it happening. But I couldn’t picture it, you know? I couldn’t picture how we’d lose the seasons, how it would be tropical heat in November, but still have blizzards that melted into heat waves. I couldn’t picture the way the storms come and then come back. Not the polar cold fronts in the south. Not the new hurricanes, the hot winters, the king tides, the typhoons going east then west then east again. It should have been easy to see. It was in the data.”

This is exactly and precisely how I've been feeling about others' apparent inability to retain the thread between the past climate events and their all-but-certain genesis. My problem is that I *can* picture it and am cursed with seeing it before my appalled eyes...it's like, in the space of thirty-nine years, I've moved from New York to Maryland. Without moving an inch.

I won't live long enough (I hope) to see this novel's world in the flesh. I expect that, if I'm cursed to do so, it will look a lot like this. It was Author Caffall's gift to me to make me a lot gladder that I'm really old and fairly infirm.

The reason I hope you'll read it, though, is that its sisters Nonie and Bix are the kind of kids we should all strive to raise. They are resilient, they are resourceful, they are respectful of the limited resources they can command and mindful of their good fortune, they are angry enough to work for more and humble enough to know what "enough" means.

They made the issues I had with the structure into cavils. Had I not had them to invest my emotional energy into, I would've enjoyed the story a lot less. As it is, I do recommend it, and hope you'll take this as your nudge to see what a wounded planet will do to heal itself.

‘Morning, RDear. Happy Thursday to you and happy new thread.

Well. I came over here yesterday when you had 7 messages and Roni had one. Now it’s 43 messages.

>1 richardderus: Oh my, that ad. It boggles the mind. I did have an Epson 9-pin printer at my first job as a manager in CA in 1986. The IBM personal computer, printer, monitor, and keyboard were $10K. I kid you not. Had to boot from the A drive, had 10MB memory. Orange/black monitor display.

I hurkle-durkled this morning, reading about 30 or pages of my newest smut before coming downstairs.

>5 richardderus: Your model for the year works for you, so there’s that. There are always going to be ‘should-ers’ – those who think you should use the site the way they do. Do they not understand the absolute freedom here within the scope of the TOS? (I got a lot of flack for the way I was using tags quite a while back, and just ignored it.)

>43 richardderus: Since I wasn’t interested in Station Eleven, I’m afraid this one won’t work for me either. But, as always a thoughtful and well-written review.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

>44 karenmarie: Morning, Horrible. I'm actually more surprised they let one of their laptops get that near water...but it's a funny reminder of how things've changed. My Dell Latitude laptop c.2002 cost $800...about $1500 now. It did next to nothing. I got it to write on and to watch porn, both of which it did fine; and I needed a card..."S card" sticks in my mind...to get wireless access.

If Station Eleven failed your sniff test this one's a non-starter for sure. Thanks for being kind. *smooch*

Good morning, Richard, just barely. Good afternoon too! I simply can't think about more books at the moment although I did love Station Eleven. I also loved Earth Abides, which Lucy lent me years ago after she read it. I can't speak for the video, but the book is solid.

Meanwhile, I'm on a Greek island headed for Constantinople with Philippa and Crew in Pawn in Frankincense. Like Mamie and *Count* I have a hard time reading something else. Even though it's a re-re-reread at least, I don't make a lot of headway. I'm looking up a lot more in my *DD Companions* this time. Fun and Games!

Afternoon, BigDaddy! Loved your review. I loved Station Eleven but have not read Earth Abides, so it appears you managed to hit me with two more book bullets (despite the flashbacks issue) - could you please read something in self-help or religion next? Or anything by Jonathan Franzen?

Hi Richard! Had a busy day yesterday and didn't get here -- so my "happy new one" is #48. Things really do move fast over here.

>43 richardderus: I really liked Station Eleven a lot. I did too, so I definitely will give that one a shot if I can locate a copy. Thanks for the review and recommendation!

BTW - I have already read Earth Abides so dodging that particular book bullet.

((Hugs)) and **smooches** for today, RD!

>46 LizzieD: Oooo, how much fun is it to go a-Dunnetting! The layers and rabbit holes she larded liberally into that series of stories...! I suspect, given their complexity, I grokked 10% of what was going on in them when I read them.

Keep >43 richardderus: in mind. Maybe its turn will come.

*smooch* I'll be by to visit here directly.

>47 Crazymamie: How do, smoochling. I;m *ever* so pleased I got you with Earth Abides...such an excellent, and for me formative, story.

No.

>48 RebaRelishesReading: I'm glad to have your visit and the happying it brings, #48 or #248. I've noticed that fast-moving thing...a big part of it's January syndrome and will calm down soon.

>49 alcottacre: Drat! I need to be more focused on your ABRs, it seems...well, you've read a really good story so you'll see some of the qualities in this read when it finally comes to the top of the stack.

>9 richardderus: LOL! Love the banana dolphins.

>43 richardderus: Wonderful review, as per usual.

I am still hurkle-durkling. But need to get going soon. ; ) Smooch.

>54 Berly: Hi Berly, the review is...well...I'm glad you liked it! *smooch*

Thank you for my crown, Richard dear! I knew I had to move quickly.

Hey, guess what my library's ILL coughed up for me today? Clues? French and graphic.

005 Strange Pictures: A Novel by Uketsu (tr. Jim Rion)

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The spine-tingling bestseller that has taken Japan by storm—an eerie fresh take on horror for fans of Hidden Pictures and Junji Ito, in which a series of seemingly innocent pictures draws you into a disturbing web of unsolved mysteries and shattered psyches.

An exploration of the macabre, where the seemingly mundane takes on a terrifying significance. . . .

A pregnant woman's sketches on a seemingly innocuous blog conceal a chilling warning.

A child's picture of his home contains a dark secret message.

A sketch made by a murder victim in his final moments leads an amateur sleuth down a rabbithole that will reveal a horrifying reality.

Structured around these nine childlike drawings, each holding a disturbing clue, Uketsu invites readers to piece together the mystery behind each and the over-arching backstory that connects them all. Strange Pictures is the internationally bestselling debut from mystery horror YouTube sensation Uketsu—an enigmatic masked figure who has become one of Japan's most talked about contemporary authors.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Visual horror...sequential art, film, artworks...isn't very effective on me. My idea of horror is Wrongness, and that's deeply individual in its iconography, therefore effective representation. I'm more afraid of people than Supernatural Forces because the Supernatural, by definition, can't be identified until we know all the laws of nature, and know that we know all of them. Until then, everything that happens, including things that break the known laws of physics, are simply unexplainable but still not supernatural.

Reality stinks, mono- or a-theistic religious nuts. Miracles and superheroic gods are improbable but not impossible because nature is not even a billionth of a percent explained yet. Stay agnostic, it's the only defensible stance.

This effort at image-enhanced horror is very interesting, though I'm pretty convinced it's one of that most Japanese of stories, the eerie murder mystery. I've reviewed plenty of those. This is another one. It's...fine, perfectly readable (as a mystery), and in spots enjoyable. It's a complex puzzle, not at all easy or simple to solve. It defeated me. I was sure one particular thing was true, and it explicitly wasn't. That made the read much more interesting to me than it would've been if I'd been correct.

Like so many mysteries from Japan, the characters are more gesturally indicated than developed. Mystery-genre readers in the US are less tolerant of this than they could be; we tend to look for people to invest emotional energy in, not just puzzles that take place in a brooding ill-defined space. I think the ideal reader for this story, among my Anglophone audience, is likely to be someone who really enjoys Julio Cortázar or Umberto Eco.

I was not particularly enraptured by the read until after I finished it. This was more akin to a storyboard pitch to investors about an idea for a horror story connecting some...suspicious deaths that were or could've been Influenced From Beyond than itself a horror story. Thinking about the read, which I finished last night after taking a week to read (in my habitual scattershot way interspersed with other books), I realized I was very, very successfully manipulated from the off. A child psychologist explaining how a little murderer's artwork provided clues to the reality that child operated within initially felt a bit In Cold Bloody to me. Should I believe the narrative? Should I be interested in *how* or why? Or permaybehaps what....
That's top-quality misdirection for that to work on a reader with sixty years' experience.

Will you love it? I doubt it; I didn't. Will you enjoy reading it? See my comps, if you love them you might get a charge out of this off-kilter, well-crafted read.

>56 ronincats: ronincats: AND MANKIND CREATED THE GODS: A Graphic Novel Adaptation of Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained! What a treat for you! I'm glad you like the crown. *smooch*

As ever, galloping ahead with your threads, and looks like the new year has started off well on the reading front RD.

I bought a friend along:


I'm temped to make an acquisition!

‘Morning, RDear! Happy Friday.

>47 Crazymamie: I never thought to place an order with Richard, Mamie.

>51 richardderus: MM romance? Heyer?

>57 richardderus: Excellent review, currently not my cuppa but I’ve added it to my wish list.

*smooch*

>59 Caroline_McElwee: Hi Caro, happy you're here! And that is one beautiful watercolor, I love the colors and the way the artist used the forms to shape the volumes.

>60 karenmarie: Morning, smoochling. It's a perfectly nice day here, sunny and cold so not dank. I'm pleased the wind has died down, too as it keeps the room from feeling colder than it has to.

I don't think >57 richardderus: would blow your mind. If it's $1.99 that seems like the right price to add to your Kindle. I buy my MMs so, following my protect-my-freebies rule, I don't review the books I buy with my very own United States dollars or else what incentive would publishers have to hand over freebies.
***

Morning, BigDaddy! Friday Happiness to you! *smooch*

>51 richardderus: Understood. Never hurts to ask.

>57 richardderus: "Like so many mysteries from Japan, the characters are more gesturally indicated than developed." Brilliant. I had not thought about this before, but you are so right. "Mystery-genre readers in the US are less tolerant of this than they could be..." Also true. Happily, this is a book I do not need to add to The List, but I loved your review, so thank you, kindly.

>60 karenmarie: Karen, I thought it was worth a try.

Good afternoon, Richard. I just responded to your DD comments on my own thread.

I'm more afraid of people than Supernatural Forces Me too. This is the reason that prefer supernatural horror. I'll keep the Japanese book in mind for several years from now when the price comes down - if that happens. I'm sure I'll remember the cover. Thank you for your review, as always.

We will walk as soon as my DH returns from errands. This is likely to be our last easy walking day. We expect some rain over the weekend, and then the VORTEX arrives. Break our more woolies! *smooch*

>63 Crazymamie: Yeah, worth a try...not likely to work, though, since *ew*

Your idea about >57 richardderus: is solid. Just not necessary for you to acquire...I would never have buried it on a weekend but I'm not thrilled with the read, or pissed off that I had to read it.

*smooch*

>64 LizzieD: Heya Peggy! I imagine it will go on sale before too long, they'll be trying to boost it onto some bestseller list if they can. Hoping the Vortex goes easy on all of us...not eager for windy bonerattling cold, today's my perfect winter day with sunshine and 39° and very light breezes.

Belated Happy New Years, Richard! And happy new thread.

>57 richardderus: Looks right up my dark and slightly tweaky alley.

((Hugs)) and **smooches** for today, RD, and hopes that you have a fantastic Friday!

>59 Caroline_McElwee: It is actually a glass paperweight RD.

>67 Storeetllr: Thanks, Mary! I concur, >57 richardderus: is a good choice for your TBR.

>68 alcottacre: *smoochiesmoochsmooch*

>69 Caroline_McElwee: Really! That explains a lot, and enhances its luster in my eyes!

Happy new thread, Richard!

>62 richardderus: I can relate to Eye in that cartoon.

>73 Familyhistorian: Thanks, Meg, and indeed we all relate to the Eye some days...out-of-focus matters so much more when one's an eye.

Morning, Richard. The house is suddenly much quieter with Jack gone. Fortunately I am a big fan of quiet. I am joining some birding buddies this AM. I have to get out before the deep freeze returns tomorrow.

Enjoy your weekend, my friend.

Happy weekend *smooches*

>75 msf59: I myownself am quite a fan of quiet. Like, "no TV" quiet. No kid-noise kind of quiet can feel depressing, though I'm not volunteering at the kindergarten....

Have a lovely time, Birddude!

>76 bell7: Morning, Mary! I hope the weekend hands you excellent reads. *smooch*

>72 richardderus: I caved in and ordered one RD, it is so beautiful.

I'm sure you have seen the documentary 'My Octopus Teacher' it's been around for a few years on Netflix.

>79 Caroline_McElwee: Oh yay! You'll love having it around. Oh my, yes, I watched it three times! So involving a story (for me) and really quite well-told to boot.

Happy pre-Polar Vortex Saturday, RD!

>80 richardderus: Yes, I too watched it three times RD, playing it for others who didn't have Netflix. Will be rewatching it with my new friend when she arrives!

Have a wonderful weekend, RD! ((Hugs)) and **smooches**

>81 katiekrug: Back at'cha Katie, I'm going Outside today despite really not wanting to. I need to, but *grumble*

>82 Caroline_McElwee: I do that too, playing things from Netflix for those without. I'm more than a little amazed people in 2025 *are* without....

>83 alcottacre: Thanks, Stasia, you too!

Hiya, RDear. Happy Saturday to you.

>62 richardderus: The Kindle price is $13.99, so no. So you DO read some of the MM romances I write about and that you grumble about taking BBs for. I wondered why you didn’t review any of them. Great cartoon.

>66 richardderus: The vortex is going to be vicious, although our vicious will less vicious than up north. 3 nights in a row of 13F, below freezing temps during the day.

*smooch*

I shudder at the thought of the VORTEX. We may even get snow as the precip is coming up from the south, which is how we have gotten our big snows in the past, including the one in the early 70s that closed I-95 for days.

Be warm! I wish you some quiet and good reading and other pleasures as they come! *smooch*

Time for the weekly delivery of smooches. Hope your keeping warm, today is a decent day on the pain front, and that are good reads in easy reach.

>87 karenmarie: Heavens, Horrible, you cost me thousands a year! Of course I read 'em (and I agree with your ratings 99% of the time), but...well...I need the freebies. I've got my jammy jacket on, my flannel bottoms, the warm binky on the bed, and socks at the ready...vortex away, says I.

One of my Cali friends was going to make mushroom/potato rosti IN A PYREX DISH! The starchy sliminess is epically *ew* to contemplate. I'm glad she asked about the cooking time before embarking on the satanic cruise to the eighth circle.

>88 LizzieD: Hi Peggy...the Vortex will come, then it will go, and 45 will still be president to my chagrin. I've got supplies...butter, cookies...so am as prepared to outlast it as I can get.

*smooch*

>89 MickyFine: *aaahhh* Perfect image! Thank you, Micky...I'll get as close to it as I can.

‘Morning, RD. Happy Sunday and start-of-vortex-day for you.

>90 richardderus: You are bundled up and ready to go. I see that you’re going to get up to 5” of snow between today and tonight. And tomorrow, 27F. Brrrr. And ugh. Pyrex? For something that needs to be crispy/crunch? I have both a 10” nonstick and cast iron frying pan, so could choose. The recipe I found looks scrummy, to use one of your words.

Tomorrow will only be tolerable because after going to the dentist at noon and expecting a clean bill of health, I’ll stay in town and have lunch with Jenna and Hwan. I might even get to meet their cat, Tsunami, aka Baby Cat. I’ll be wearing all black. Wish I had a black armband.

*smooch*

Happy Sunday!

I hope you are staying indoors and keeping warm. We also have cold weather on the way ( -15 celsius).

Happy reading

>93 karenmarie: I'm well-bundled, and need nothing from the outside world, so I'll be fine...because the entire building's run by people who don't get to stay home snug in their beds. I'm so grateful for them!

Cast iron will always be my choice for rosti because it holds heat longer. Potatoes and mushrooms are both so wet the need for longer, slower cooking after the Maillard reaction is particularly acute. I forget that people don't know stuff like this as...furniture, stuff that's just *there*. Enjoy your daughter-boost. It's going to be more and more urgent as the enshittification of the US takes hold.

*smooch*

>94 figsfromthistle: Sunday orisons, Anita. I'm not budgin' outta my hidey-hole. Enjoying my books and my luxury of laziness!

Hello Richard, dear friend, i totally missed your first thread and you are nearly at 100 posts on your second before i get to you. I have starred you and wish you a Happy New Year dear friend, hopefully i will get to each new thread earlier, lol.

>97 johnsimpson: Greetings, John! I'm glad you came by. I didn't do a lot of reviewing on thread #1, didn't miss a whole lot there.

Morning, Richard. I hope you had a relaxing, peaceful Sunday. No school today due to the holiday which is okay with me, since it is currently -2F. Even colder tomorrow, so I am wondering if school may be canceled. We will see. Nearing the end of Monte Cristo. It has been a very long journey but fortunately an entertaining one.

006 Darkmotherland by Samrat Upadhyay

Real Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An epic tale of love and political violence set in earthquake-ravaged Darkmotherland, a dystopian reimagining of Nepal, from the Whiting Award–winning author of Arresting God in Kathmandu

In Darkmotherland, Nepali writer Samrat Upadhyay has created a novel of infinite embrace—filled with lovers and widows, dictators and dissidents, paupers, fundamentalists, and a genderqueer power player with her eyes on the throne.

At its heart are two intertwining narratives: one of Kranti, a revolutionary’s daughter, who marries into a plutocratic dynasty and becomes ensnared in the family’s politics. And then there is the tale of Darkmotherland’s new dictator and his mistress, Rozy, who undergoes radical body changes and grows into a figure of immense power.

Darkmotherland is a romp through the vast space of a globalized universe where personal ambitions are inextricably tied to political fortunes, where individual identities are shaped by family pressures and social reins, and where the East connects to and collides with the West in brilliant and unsettling ways.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is a lot to be said for ambition in storytelling. This book, for the first third, was destined for enshrinement in my hall of fame; the second third for my favorites list; and by the end for my "you should read it if you love, or need, a full-immersion wide-angle view of what chaos really does." You should know going in that women have significant challenges regarding consensual sex here. The centering of a transfem character's experiences made for sharp commentary on gender roles in a repressive, fascistic regime, yet also made my hackles rise. I have trans folk in my life whose potential feelings about this book's explicitness I constantly found obtruding in my reading.

It's not to say this is a pure negative. I'm all for people writing uncomfortable takes on the world as we find it today. The fact that Rozy is a person with agency, albeit in a very twisted system, felt both natural and unhappy. Her choices were severely limited, and yet also used to prove the point that pressure can cause a person to become more powerful the same way water under pressure can become a weapon.

The fictionalized country in the story was a background for me, a setting; the events played out on its stage. I was unable to get deeper than that, despite the story's evident desire for me to do so, by the sheer size of the cast we're following. It is always a risk to expand a cast beyond a handful of people. The great trick of numbing people to the reality of suffering is to follow Stalin's epigrammatic maxim: "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic." Like teaching history, telling a story in novel form only becomes less involving when you dilute your message (especially when it's essentially the same message repeated) beyond a certain point. I'm not clear if that was an intentional choice of metacommentary on the author's and publisher's part.

This story of the chaos and upheaval that attend a violent ending suffers from this dilution. It also tries its best to invest you in its very deeply felt observations on how cruelty ultimately undermines itself as it metastasizes. As ever, the issue of what is celebration and/or normalization arises as repetition of violent language and behaviors continues to assault one's readerly experience. This fine balance between intention and reception is always deeply personal. It crossed my internal line shortly after midpoint; I was too deeply interested in the results the author intended to bring to quit, as I ordinarily would have done. That's why I got as close as I did to a full four stars.

I'm not doing a good job, I fear, of expressing how deeply enfolding a tale is told here. I'm very much a fan of stories that require me to think and deeply consider the places and times and inhabitants of the storyscape before me. I think a read that makes demands on my deeper cognitive resources is a fun read. This story does that. I'm very interested in tales of messy endings that are inevitable and inherent in the setup of the world being built. This story could be the poster child for that. I was, then, very much on the side of the author and his project of elucidation.

But because of certain choices he made, it began to feel like it was just that: a project.

I wanted to end the read as much, or more in love with it as I started out being. I'm bummed that I couldn't.

That is such a thoughtful and honest review, Richard. Thank you for it - not one that is calling to me, but I very much enjoyed reading your thoughts on it.

Hoping Monday is kind to you. *smooch* And I loved "luxury of laziness" up there. Totally stealing that!

‘Morning, RDear. Happy MLK Day?

>95 richardderus: Glad that the folks who run your building consider their own comfort if not that of their residents.

I’d forgotten about the Maillard reaction. I know you’ve mentioned it before. I might add mushrooms and onions and 2 russets to my shopping list for a Rosti. Question: The recipe I see has 1 cup of finely diced onions and only 4 oz. of mushrooms. Would changing the ratio (like ½ cup of onions and 8 oz. of mushrooms) be okay? Signed, Not an Onion Fan

>100 richardderus: I’m sorry that a potential 5* book became a 3.75* book. Your explanation of your 3.75 stars makes perfect sense. I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but a full-immersion wide-angle view of what chaos really does." starts today here in the US and will, of course, ripple far and wide.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

>99 msf59: Morning, Birddude, happy freezy frosty cold Black Monday.

The Monte Cristo trip must be taken, I'm convinced, but it isn't a trip I'll ever repeat...too long, too arduous.

I hope the school cancellations are in abeyance due to warm weather.

>101 Crazymamie: Morning, Mamie! Thanks re: >100 richardderus:. I was really hard-pressed not to just blast the careless editing. I'm working hard not to impose on the authors and publishers, just tell them what the decisions and choices did for/to me.

Laziness is a HUGE luxury subsidized by others' hard work. I'm increasingly aware that privilege is enormously costly. *smooch*

>102 karenmarie: Black Monday survival wishes, sweetiedarling. I hate this.

I thought about the flipped proportions on the rosti...you're likely going to have a bit more moisture because shrooms are wetter than onions. If you cook the shrooms first and longer before you put the few paltry little onions you want, it should be okay. If you can, rather than mess with a classic *glower*, substitute Vidalias for real onions.

I suspect, based on the internal evidence, that >100 richardderus: is very much a sharp comment on the events unfolding today. It's not something I want to trumpet forth because I don't know that it will do the book any favors. *smooch*

Well, Richard, it's happening now. I can't think about it and certainly not countenance it beyond saying that we'll have to do our best to push through with as little harm as possible. I know you're the choir; apparently, I can't stop preaching.

>100 richardderus: I'll be on the lookout for it when its price is reduced with your caveats in mind. The author should thank you for your review because the only one I see on Amazon is completely negative and written (if I'm reading it correctly) after 23 pages. Besides, you wrote a good, thoughtful, honest review.

I'll join you in being thankful for the luxury of laziness. Stay warm!

007 Harbingers: What January 6 and Charlottesville Reveal About Rising Threats to American Democracy by Timothy J. Heaphy

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A crucial, clear-eyed assessment of what connects the 2 most influential moments of political violence in recent American history, and where we go from here
An unparalleled firsthand account from the foremost expert on American political violence, crucial for readers of Liz Cheney’s Oath and Honor, and How Democracies Die

This dramatic, revealing book offers an insider account of the planning and aftermath of the racist riot in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, and the insurrection at the US. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

As the lead investigator into both tragic days, Tim Heaphy has an absolutely unique perspective. Readers will travel alongside Heaphy as he organized his team and structured the massive investigations they were about to take, as he interacts with politicians and members of law enforcement, interviews planners, perpetrators, and bystanders, gathers and sorts evidence, and compels and records testimony in order to create a record for today’s voters as well as future generations.

In his page-turning book, he shares what he saw and came to understand about what those events say about state of American democracy. He examines how and why they took place with the hope that understanding the contexts of these events will be a crucial and helpful step toward avoiding similar episodes of political violence in the years ahead.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The manifold failings of the astonishingly huge, well-funded, and deeply entrenched domestic surveillance industry are laid out in this book.

I was taken aback on how much there was about the surveillance state I was correct to be paranoid about, and how little it did to prevent these acts of political violence from going ahead, or even getting off the ground. This is something that gives me the gravest kind of worry for the US as a still-slightly-functional civil society.

I will not tell you this is the most deft or entertaining read of 2025. It's dry, it's pedantic, it's explanatory not exciting. This being what it needed to be to convey its burden of information...and I use the term advisedly...I won't downrate it for being its proper self. A louder, more emotionally charged voice becomes part of the clangor of 2025's soundscape. I know more now than I did before I read this book about the ways and means used by the rebel forces within the US to bring about their desired repressive, totalitarian replacement government.

Project 2025 should have scared y'all a lot more than it did. I'm guessing most of you won't read this important informative book. Whatever your reasons are, they're not excuses. Very bad things are coming. Resisting them will be a lot of work and involve significant effort.

The option is passive acceptance.

Choose wisely.

>106 LizzieD: Thank you, Peggy me lurve, I do try to give my honest response without second-guessing too much of the creative process.

Lazy *smooch* for a restful day.

>107 richardderus: I need to read that one. When I saw that Trump had pardoned so many of the January 6 participants, I just shook my head. Is this what we are in for for the next 4 years? *sigh*

((Hugs)) and **smooches** and hopes that you have a terrific Tuesday!

Morning, BigDaddy! *Tuesday smooch*

>107 richardderus: Adding this one to The List. Loved your review - well done, you.

>107 richardderus: Yes, I will read this, tho even just the title is making me feel sick and heartsore. And afraid.

>107 richardderus: I'll read it, Richard. I am trying to be responsible while maintaining some kind of personal balance. You know. We all know. Thanks for the review.

*smooch*

008 The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom by Nancy Reddy

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Timely and thought-provoking, Nancy Reddy unpacks and debunks the bad ideas that have for too long defined what it means to be a "good" mom.

When Nancy Reddy had her first child she found herself suddenly confronted with the ideal of a perfect mother—a woman who was constantly available, endlessly patient, and immediately invested in her child to the exclusion of all else. Reddy had been raised by a single working mother, considered herself a feminist, and was well on her way to a PhD. Why did doing motherhood "right" feel so wrong?

For answers Reddy turned to the mid-20th century social scientists and psychologists whose work still forms the basis of so much of what we believe about parenting. It seems ludicrous to imagine modern moms taking advice from mid-century researchers, yet their bad ideas about so-called “good” motherhood have seeped pervasively into our cultural norms. In The Good Mother Myth, Reddy debunks the flawed lab studies, sloppy research, and straightforward misogyny of researchers from Harry Harlow, who claimed to have discovered love by observing monkeys in his lab, to the famous Dr. Spock, whose bestselling parenting guide included just one illustration of a father interacting with his child. Blending history of science, cultural criticism, and memoir, The Good Mother Myth pulls back the curtain on the flawed social science behind our contemporary understanding of what makes a good mom.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Misogyny begins at home. You drink it in with your mother's milk. She is, after all, "just your mother." That phrase resounds in my brain as one of the most invidious, viprously poisonous idiocies that passes unquestioned from many a mouth.

The myth of Motherhood is exalted...pedestalized...and thus an extremely effective weapon in misogyny's arsenal of control. A woman, a human female, is reduced to her biological capacity for reproduction. It is an important function but not, as the Cult of the Mother makes it, a predestination and (not incidentally) a life sentence.

The author's struggles with the reality of being a mother versus the snake-oil sold to her by The Cult of Mother led her into paths of research done during my, and my generation's, childhoods. It was done by men. It was deeply embedded in capitalist norms then being solidified, codified, and imposed to create a Cult of Mother to support a culture of mothers without agency since that belonged to husbands and experts. Never mind that the sample sizes were uneven and the methodology unreliable, uncintrolled often enough; never mind that a lot of the research designs adopted were unethical. Hear the Word of Your Lord And Master, woman: feel this or be forever lacking, wanting in human feeling, LESS THAN.

It's a vicious self-springing trap for someone in a deep emotional, existential, physical crisis often enough exacerbated by sudden and/or acute depression. Author Reddy takes us through the orthodoxies of our youth, hers too, and parallels them with her own struggles.

What this book sets out to offer the reader is a footing to view the mountain of garbage "science" and the reeking cesspits of "how YOU should feel" liberally sprayed with "...but it's NATURAL" as though Nature isn't the one and only source of all the ills and plagues of Humanity's time on Earth. Yes, it is. We too are part of Nature, not apart from, above it.

Our actions are natural, they can not be otherwise because we live within the laws of nature.

I offer four stars to the read, not docked too far for its lack of rigor...her models for that failing are the great and good of the subject's past...or for its tooth-gritting tendency to repeat itself...see previous parenthetical...but in recognition of its undeniable attack from within the fortress by a victim of The Cult of Mother, therewith to offer aid and comfort to others who experience what she has.

That deserves all five stars. I can't honestly warble my fool lungs out about the execution. It's above average and it makes its case clearly if anecdotally. It is a read that spoke my truth to me, so I resonate to its vibes.

Women: Do NOT settle for becoming what your biology hands you. Decide for yourself who and what you want to be.

Signed, A Pissed-off Man.

>109 alcottacre: Will it end at four? I'm not confident they'll stop at four.

>110 Crazymamie: Morning, smoochling, I'm glad the review appealed. *smooch*

>111 Storeetllr: Sick and heartsore is where we'r going to be living, my dear lady. Dammit anyway.

>112 LizzieD: It's a hard call, Peggy me lurve...but while we can we need to resist.

>1 richardderus: Happy New Thread!

>118 ocgreg34: Thank you, Greg!

I watched the proceedings yesterday up to the campaign speech. What I saw made me optimistic. Little acts of defiance.
1. The hat
2. Where's Karen Pence?
3. Where's Michelle?
4. The dignity and restraint of Biden

Good afternoon, RDear! Happy Tuesday, or as best an approximation as you can make.

>105 richardderus: Okay, I can cook down the ‘shrooms to remove the moisture. I think I have a yellow onion here, but I know for sure I have a Vidalia. Sweeter, and I’ll only use some. At least I have Bellas instead of white button. Thanks.

I’ve seen one headline, not read the article, not listened to the news, not looked at news online, either here on my laptop or on my cell phone. If I had a tablet, I wouldn’t look at the news there, either. Sigh.

>107 richardderus: I honestly don’t know how reading this book will help me resist things, my dear. I can continue to volunteer for our local Library, which will be under attack, and I can give money to a local food bank. What else can I do? Write my congressmen/women? If so, write to the ones who are sane, giving my support which I did by voting for them and occasionally throwing money at them, or write to the minions of the chaos demon, trying to apply logic to their irrationality and knowing it won't change a thing? I’m truly stumped.

>109 alcottacre: That is the only headline I’ve seen this week, Stasia.

>113 richardderus: I’ve tried twice to respond to this book and really want to go upstairs to take a nap. So I’ll just say that it’s a f***ing shame that we’re still discussing this, still having to tell women that biology is not destiny and that they can CHOOSE what to make of their lives.

Off to nap…

*smooch*

>120 benitastrnad: Biden, Mama Obama, and the Pence woman get props for failing to bend the knee in "respect" but how anyone could've sat in a nominally sacred space with a scumbag who gave a Nazi salute beggars my imagination.

>121 karenmarie: Good morning, sweetiedarling. I hope your nap was a long, Rip-van-Winkleish one and you're reading this after the funeral we so urgently desire to see.

If you never read >107 richardderus: you will, of course, never know what its facts might do to your ideas.

009 The Magic of Normal: Hope, Love and Beyond by Maky Zanganeh

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In The Magic of Normal: Love, Hope and Beyond, Dr. Maky Zanganeh, an indomitable businesswoman and biotech CEO opens her heart to share an extraordinary journey marked by resilience, hope, and transformation. Known for her relentless ambition and groundbreaking achievements in the biotech industry, Maky’s life took an unexpected turn when she was diagnosed with cancer amidst the global turmoil of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Her bustling life, filled with high-stakes projects and constant travel, was abruptly paused. The enforced stillness brought by her cancer treatments and the worldwide lockdown offered Maky a unique opportunity for introspection. Instead of succumbing to despair, she embraced this period as a catalyst for personal and professional growth. Her journey through treatment, combined with the stories of those she met along the way, forms the heart of this compelling narrative.

At MD Anderson Cancer Center, Maky encountered a wide range of individuals, each battling their own challenges with cancer. From the young couple facing a terminal diagnosis to the mother juggling the care of her two ill children, these stories of courage and love deeply resonated with her. These experiences not only provided solace during her own treatment but also reinforced her commitment to advancing medical research and innovation.

Maky’s professional achievements are as remarkable as her personal journey. She played a pivotal role in bringing revolutionary cancer treatments to the market, including the development of Imbruvica, a groundbreaking oral therapy for blood cancer. Her work has had a transformative impact on patient care, offering new hope and improved outcomes for countless individuals worldwide. These professional milestones underscore the book’s central theme: the profound intersection of science, innovation, and human resilience.

The Magic of Normal: Love, Hope and Beyond is much more than just a memoir; it is a beacon of inspiration for anyone facing life's interruptions. Maky’s story is a powerful reminder that even in the face of immense adversity, it is possible to find strength, purpose, and hope. Her dedication to medical research and her unyielding spirit offer a roadmap for overcoming challenges and rediscovering the beauty in everyday life.

This book is dedicated to those whose lives have been upended by illness or global crises, and to those who dream of returning to the simple, yet profound, magic of normal. Maky’s message is clear: you are not alone. With courage, community, and the relentless pursuit of innovation, we can all navigate the darkest nights and emerge into the daylight of hope and recovery.

The Magic of Normal: Love, Hope and Beyond is a testament to the transformative power of a trailblazing and entrepreneurial spirit. Maky invites readers to join her on this journey, sharing lessons learned and the enduring belief that with perseverance, we can all find our way back to the magic of normal.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Super-high achieving privileged lady gets smacked in the teeth by a scary medical crisis amid the recent global pandemic.

Damn...even her crisis is an overachiever.

This has the bones of an excellent, dramatically exciting story. What we get is a competent retelling of the events of a very interesting, laudably goal-driven life. There are no action items as one might reasonably expect from the title and publisher. Forbes Books is not the place I turn to for blood-stirring action stories.

Writing a memoir can often succumb to this "...then this happened, and I did that, but the other thing was still weighing me down..." rhythm that leaches the important events of their impact. We do not, in fact, need to know everything but need you to think deeply and with vulnerability about why things happened, how it made you feel, and what the results of that were. Otherwise it's a Wikipedia article with fewer citations.

I am morally certain that Dr. Maky would be a hit on a coffee date. I suspect she's a solidly skilled listener. As the one listening, I wish she had used some of that success-building listening, thinking about how others need you to deliver your message, writing this book.

It's A LOT harder than it looks to make reality interesting on a page. The events are worthy of a four, the telling of a two, so three and a half gets the nod.

>122 richardderus:
I was amused by The Hat! So regal. My first thought was of the Lone Ranger. Which of course is what the Hamburgler harks back to. Then it was so cute when it foiled the Orange Gasbags attempts to kiss the cheek of the Queen. As the late Madelaine Albright said fashion makes a statement.

The Nazi salute says all that needs to be said about the Oligarchs running things.

>122 richardderus: and >125 benitastrnad: I didn't watch, but I saw a picture of The Hat. I thought, "Ascot?" Good for the other 3!

The Nazi salute is a simple confirmation of what we all know.

>124 richardderus: I don't think so, but thank you for taking one for the group, Richard. you to think deeply and with vulnerability about why things happened, how it made you feel, and what the results of that were There you go!

*smooch*

>125 benitastrnad: It does say all we need to know about them. Scum of the earth. The Hat is one of those unexceptionable put-downs that make royal watching so...delicious.

>126 LizzieD: I was, by the end of the read, ready to rip this book a new one. It was, however, unjustified. The woman's unreflective acceptance of her undeniable talents' being nurtured and enabled by some immense privilege and good fortune doesn't change her trajectory's remarkable and interesting course.

*smooch*

>43 richardderus: That sounds like a good one. Making note.

The first three days of the new administration are fulfilling all the stuff we feared. I hate to fall back on "I told you so" but if I hear one word of WTF from anyone who voted for the scumbag, I will have no sympathy At. All. My concentration has been shit since the inauguration. My blood pressure at the dentist today was 108 over 78. I was shocked that it could be so low. It doesn't feel that low. Haha. Thank the gods for reading, painting, walking in the woods, and bourbon.

xo

Smooch, Richard. Thanks for the birthday wishes. I don't understand how the US Presidents can pardon people crimes. It just doesn't make sense to me. It doesn't happen in Canada by our Prime Ministers, but of course that's a different system.

>129 EBT1002: It is, so yay! Notes have this sneaky way of turning into books read, so I'm happy.

This is the worst of it...from now on there's the possibility of obstruction and delay. There's nothing worse than the idea of scum behind the rottenness With A Plan, but at least there's some way to moderate legislation.

My BP was 152/107 yesterday. I was firmly instructed to stay offline and read something fluffy.

>130 vancouverdeb: Morning, Deborah! I'm glad you're another year older because you're spending some of it here, and that's a Good Thing.

Heads of State can do that...your PM is only head of government. I imagine there's some mechanism for Royal Clemency in y'all's set-up.

010 Booked for Murder (An Old Juniper Bookstore Mystery, #1) by P.J. Nelson

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this atmospheric southern cozy debut, Madeline Brimley returns to the bookstore she inherited, discovering that small towns hold deadly secrets.

Madeline Brimley left small town Georgia many years ago to go to college and pursue her dreams on the stage. Her dramatic escapades are many but success has eluded her, leaving her at loose ends. But then she gets word that not only has her beloved, eccentric Aunt Rose passed, but she's left Madeline her equally eccentric bookstore housed in an old Victorian mansion in the small college town of Enigma. But when she arrives in her beat-up Fiat to claim The Old Juniper Bookstore, and restart her life, Madeline is faced with unexpected challenges. The gazebo in the back yard is set ablaze and a late night caller threatens to burn the whole store down if she doesn't leave immediately.

But Madeline Brimley, not one to be intimidated, ignores the threats and soldiers on. Until there's another fire and a murder in the store itself. Now with a cloud of suspicion falling over her, it's up to Madeline to untangle the skein of secrets and find the killer before she herself is the next victim.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Very cozy indeed. Slow of pace, low on suspense, modest stakes as a result...I never got the sense Madeline believed she was in real danger, always a risk in a mystery...but what I got was the balm of feeling at home.

A bookstore, a small town where you're a known quantity, a problem to solve that demands attention you'd otherwise devote to unhealthy rumination on unfixable crap from the past, all marry the needs of the moment and the desire to see ma'at served. It happens so seldom in the real world. I read on, certain I knew who was behind the deeds most dastardly (I was right, if it matters), coddiwompling along in no particular hurry to get to the end. This, by itself, this ability to go somehere I *knew* Rightness and Justice would prevail, was so soothing to my outraged sensibilities that I was happy to ignore my crotchets. A too-convenient aversion to cell phones was my biggest gripe about Madeline.

The pace is likely to put many off, though as a class cozy-mystery readers do not seem to me all that interested in how fast we're traveling. Unless the trip is, for some personal reason, unpleasant to them, the cozylover tends towards the vibe-reader end of things. This story is all about the vibes. Even Gloria, the new priest in town, failed to rub me the wrong way. Quite a feat for a religious professional.

So I got over the "three-stars-just-fine" hump. I couldn't go all the way to four because in a different context there's no way I'd get past three.

We are where we are, so three and a half grateful to be wiled away into a gentler place stars it is.

Dora >59 Caroline_McElwee: Is just as beautiful as expected!

>134 Caroline_McElwee: That's wonderful! It's always an extra pleasure when the real object is as lovely as the image one fell in love with.

‘Morning, RDear. Happy Thursday to you.

>123 richardderus: If you never read >107 richardderus: richardderus: you will, of course, never know what its facts might do to your ideas. I can live with that. Way too many books for way too few years left on this mortal coil.

>124 richardderus: The telling a 2… that’s what usually causes me to abandon a book, smut or otherwise. *smile*

>131 richardderus: I’m sorry your BP was so high.

>133 richardderus: Great review, and if I was interested in a new cozy series, I’d jump on it. I have a friend who proudly uses a flip phone. It is ridiculous, given the things she complains about not having access to.

*smooch*

>132 richardderus: I imagine there's some mechanism for Royal Clemency in y'all's set-up. Not really, or at least not in the same way - much more evidence based and controlled by the government. Very occasionally there has been a royal pardon retrospectively for someone who is dead. We find the whole idea of people being pardoned bizarre.

Morning, BigDaddy! I'm just squeezing in before afternoon.

>124 richardderus: Nope. But I loved reading your review.

>133 richardderus: Glad you found something to help you settle your blood pressure. You are going to need a big stack of those. I like cozy from time to time, but this one is not calling to me.

>136 karenmarie: I loved my flip phone - favorite phone ever, but no longer practical. I still have it though because it's so retro. Like me, it's vintage.

>136 karenmarie: Flip phones sound better and better to me because the new phones are ALL unchangeably infected with the seller's preferred data-theft program aka AI.

I'm always stressed...the scum ruling us doing their worst to harm as many as possible; the religious nuts who feed me their idiot diet that leaches whatever pleasure institutional food can provide; Old Stuff and his booze-and-cigarette reek, his TV etcetcetc.

Believe me, the PJ Nelson series is no great loss to your TBR. Pleasant is not worth going out of the way for.

*smooch*

>138 Crazymamie: I'm "midcentury modern" according to the boyfriend before this one...Heck, I'm as tall as a sofa is long, and prone to wearing inappropriate patterns, so yeah...

The Nelson series stops here for me unless Sara Beth at St Mutant's sends me another widget. Check it out of the library? mmmaaayyybe; Buy one? No.

Happy Thursday afternoon!

Don't know if y'all saw this bit about The Hat:

>139 richardderus: A lot of modern "flip phones" are smart phones with an even worse interface. They tend to run Android. I wouldn't expect them to offer decent privacy.

>142 ArlieS: Nothing offers any privacy, let alone decent. I don't expect anything to change in this regard as long as surveillance earns the scum profits. Nauseating how much of our lives is shaped by the insatiable greed of people who have more than enough already.

>114 richardderus: Neither am I, more's the pity.

((Hugs)) and **smooches** for today. . .

>144 alcottacre: *smooch*
We'll have to keep hollerin'.

Sweet Thursday, Richard. The recovery continues and I plan on going to work tomorrow. At least I have been getting some quality book time in and The History of Sound has been fantastic. You didn't happen to get an e-galley of this one, did you?

>146 msf59: Glad you're feeling a bit more the thing, Mark. Viking told me no on the Shattuck book, darn it! Spend a lovely Friday...the days are whippin' past me!

>141 richardderus: Lol!

Hope you have a fantastic Friday!

>141 richardderus: O.K. Not Ascot!!!!!

I'm sorry your bp was so out of bounds. It's hard to be alert without worrying, but do that. Take care of yourself, please! *smooch*

011 The Forbidden Book by Sacha Lamb

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Dybbuks.
Illegal printing.
A genderqueer lesbian with a knife.
Set against a backdrop of literary censorship and growing Jewish political consciousness, Sydney Taylor and Stonewall award-winning Sacha Lamb's sophomore novel is a soaring exploration of identity, survival, and ultimately, hope.

On the night before her wedding, 17-year-old Sorel leaps from a window and runs away from her life. To keep from being discovered, she takes on the male identity of Isser Jacobs—but it soon becomes clear that there is a real Isser Jacobs, and people want him dead. Her mistaken identity takes Sorel into the dark underworld of her small city in the Pale of Settlement, where smugglers, forgers, and wicked angels fight for control of the Jewish community. In order to make it out, Sorel must discover who Isser Jacobs really is—and who she wants to be.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Sorel, a lesbian about to be forcibly married to a man, decides that, on balance, she'd rather not, jumps out her window and desperately hunts down a new way to live her life.

Supernatural and political hijinks ensue.

Well? What's the hold-up? Have you one-clicked yet? Just go get the blessèd thing already! You need a chuckle or two, and a high-stakes plot to keep you flippin' the pages. Absent the very interesting and unfamiliar-to-me cast of Jewish folkloric creatures of majgickq, this might have been three-and-a-half stars; the dybbuk alone crests over the four line and we're not even into the head of a woman who so absolutely rejects her cultural and societal repressions across multiple axes; repression so inimical to her that she does the extreme thing of becoming something and someone she chooses for herself. That this happens to land her in deep waters she'd never so much as heard of before made me root for her even harder.

Lesbian or not, give this book to every tween girl you know. More particularly the ones being raised in repressive god-ridden hate cults. Sorel, whose one flaw as a character that I found a bit itchy is that she springs out that window as herself and remains unchanged by the end of the story, is an archetype I wish more young women saw themselves in. (This is also why my stars stop at four.) She is not deeply shaded, but brightly, loudly limned. This kind of person is exciting to meet, often difficult to know well; still more often than that, troublesome.

We badly need that kind of woman in 2025.

Grow a few more, gift this amusing, edifying look into the magical corners of Jewishness widely.

>137 SandDune: Recall that HMG "Pardoned" Alan Turing years after his death

>149 LizzieD: Thanks, Peggy me lurve. I'm usually high on the BP from bad genetic luck meeting constant daily stress. I take my meds as prescribed or who knows what horrors would eventuate.
***

Awomen.

>151 magicians_nephew: He wasn't the only queer they "apologized" for torturing to death after the fact.

Of course it's a meaningless gesture in a world that elects 34x-felon/grifter/Eussian asset 45 to the most powerful office in the world.

‘Morning, RD! Happy Friday to you.

>141 richardderus: As allergic as I am to news recently and anticipate being for the foreseeable future, I did see a pic of The Hat, and did see a pic of the chaos demon trying to kiss her. It was as sweet a middle finger to him as possible. I look forward to more of them in the next 4 years, although she’s despicable, too.

>150 richardderus: Just sent my DiL this title – as you know, she loves books about lesbians with weapons.

>152 richardderus: So much destruction, danger, and embarrassment coming the next 4 years.

*smooch*

Happy Friday, BigDaddy! I got nothing, but I wanted to share it with you. *smooch*

>154 karenmarie: Afternoon, Horrible, Hwan might really enjoy this read, though it's really very, very Jewish.

2028 might be even worse if what they promised in Project 2025 comes to pass but for now I'll say it can't come soon enough.

>155 Crazymamie: Thank you, dear Mamie, sharing all the nothing one has is what being friends is about.

Happy Friday, RD! Hope you are staying warm and out of trouble

>158 ChelleBearss: Hiya Chelle, happy to see you here! I'm snuggled up and currently the TV is off so all's as happy as it gets.

>159 richardderus: I hope that condition remained for a good long time. I'm too sleepy to say more than *smooch* and I just saw that they put that disaster in Defense.

>160 LizzieD: Long enough that I fell asleep without the TV noise muttering dank idiocies in my ear. That is always delightful. *smooch*

If the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines don't mutiny, I hope they at least passively refuse to accept his orders.

012 Iron hope : lessons learned from conquering the impossible by James Lawrence

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The ultimate guide to mental toughness by James 'Iron Cowboy' Lawrence – the greatest endurance athlete in human history.

Lawrence’s accomplishments are nearly impossible to comprehend. In 2015, he set a Guinness World Record record by completing 50 full-distance triathlons in 50 states in 50 consecutive days. Yes, THE Ironman, 'the single most difficult day in sports'—a 2.4-mile swim, 112 miles on a bike, then a 26.2-mile run, all completed in under 17 hours. It is a race so intense that less than .01% of the population have completed one.

Afterwards, Lawrence subjected his body to exhaustive physical testing, to every genetic test known to science. The stunning discovery is that physically, James Lawrence is unspecial in every way. The secret to his bulletproof body is his bulletproof mentality.

How does a person develop the mental fortitude necessary to overcome incredible exhaustion, immeasurable suffering, and unfathomable pain in order to achieve impossible goals? With Iron Hope, that’s exactly what James 'Iron Cowboy' Lawrence shows readers how to do. Lawrence explains how readers can forge an iron will by making and keeping small promises to themselves again and again, amassing experience and building momentum until giving up becomes impossible. Combine a big dream with small improvements repeated with great consistency and make your goals and dreams a reality.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I read this because I am unable to fathom WHY anyone would do this insane thing to their body.

I still don't know.

What I *do* know is that doing this insane thing to his body afforded Author Lawrence great clarity about how he accomplished this absurd, OTT feat of effortful activity. He reports to readers the means by which he accomplished a feat of endurance and self-discipline that a vanishingly small number of us fellow humans ever even attempt, let alone accomplish.

There is huge value in absorbing this attitude: "do it to prove you can." Do hard things because they are hard, and along the way build the habits of mind that will make you unstoppable in areas that actually matter.

*oops* I didn't mean to type that out loud.

There it is, though. What earthly use is doing this to one's body? This smacks of the religious ascetics who do appalling things to themselves because god. In what way is this necessary, or beneficial to the world? As an example to emulate? I'd drag anyone I know to the shrink if they announced they'd got this idea for abusing their body in this way.

However much I decry the wasteful, expensive thing this lunacy promotes...that training costs, the supplements and dietary demands cost like crazy, donate the time and money to bettering the world you selfish thing!...I acknowledge the author's using the platform it gives him to have accomplished this as a means to offer practical, actionable advice on how to acquire the *habits* that got him there. He's offering good information, clearly and understandably formatted, explaining how and why this or that effort pays off in self-discipline; this is the thing I focused on, not the reason *he* was doing it but rather *how* he did what he did.

I devoutly hope the readers the book will get because the author did what he did will put his path to attaining an enviable strength of mind to more useful ends. It's the egotism, the selfish "MY victory" straight-male vanity of the exercise (!) that won't let me get to a full four stars despite the more positive uses the information can be put to.

Good morning, Richard. I hope you are well and the pain-levels are moderate or better. I am birding this AM, PB this afternoon, so all good here, plus my new book looks like another good one.

BURGOINE #001

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new housing development, the last thing they expected to uncover was a human skeleton. Who the skeleton was and how it got buried there were just two of the long-held secrets that had been kept for decades by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side, sharing ambitions and sorrows.

Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents—roused by Chona's kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA MY FRIEND MARK. THANK YOU.

My Review: Quirky neighbors living in a supremely hardscrable era, gettin' by and gettin' along with the help and kindness they so generously give without expecting a return. Thus, of course, assuring they get one.

In other words, Norman Lear's wet dream. Author McBride can write his socks off. The lovely prose masks the sitcom-from-1972 plot. I expect to receive brickbats for breaking orthodoxy, but there it is.

In the spirit the ARC was shared with me, Please let me know if you'd like this copy sent to you. Send me a DM with your address and it will go out media mail as soon as I can manage.

>163 msf59: What a good, solid Saturday of happy activity! I'm happy that's your day...mine's not painful, gout's under control, but...boo hiss...I have to go outside to get coffee. Ick!

How spoiled am I? But, like you, my current read's a solidly made engrossing one.

>164 richardderus: No brickbats from me...I didn't love it either. But interestingly, I thought there were good story elements overwhelmed by a style I couldn't engage with. Ain't books grand?

‘Morning, RDear. Happy Saturday to you.

>156 richardderus: I’m not sure if Hwan was raised either Christian or Buddhist, but she isn’t either these days. That goes along perfectly with Jenna’s atheism. I don’t think she’ll mind a book about a very Jewish lesbian with weapons.

>162 richardderus: Every day someone gets up and copes with temporary or chronic pain makes them a hero in my book. “Do it to prove you can.” is meaningless compared to “Do it because you must.” So, hard pass.

>164 richardderus: My book club will be reading The Good Lord Bird by McBride for April’s discussion, so I’ll pass on this one based on your skimpy 3.25*.

*smooch*

BURGOINE #002

North to Paradise: A memoir by Ousman Umar (tr. Kevin Gerry Dunn)

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The inspiring true story of one man’s treacherous boyhood journey from a rural village in Ghana to the streets of Barcelona—and the path that led him home.

Ousman Umar is a shaman’s son born in a small village in Ghana. Though his mother died giving birth, he spent a contented childhood working the fields, setting traps in the jungle, and living off the land. Still, as strange and wondrous flying machines crisscrossed the skies overhead, Ousman dreamed of a different life. And so, when he was only twelve years old, he left his village and began what would be a five-year journey to Europe.

Every step of the way, as he traveled across the Sahara desert, through the daunting metropolises of Accra, Tripoli, Benghazi, and Casablanca, and over the Mediterranean Sea aboard a packed migrant dinghy, Ousman was handed off like merchandise by a loose network of smugglers and in the constant, foreboding company of “sinkers”: other migrants who found themselves penniless and alone on their way north, unable to continue onward or return home.

But on a path rife with violence, exploitation, and racism, Ousman also encountered friendship, generosity, and hope. North to Paradise is a visceral true story about the stark realities of life along the most dangerous migrant route across Africa; it is also a portrait of extraordinary resilience in the face of unimaginable challenges, the beauty of kindness in strangers, and the power of giving back.

I RECEIVED A COPY FROM THE AMAZON FIRST READS PROGRAM. THANK YOU.

My Review: The original Spanish-language title is Viaje al país de los blancos which literally translates to "trip to the country of white people."

It is both more accurate and better reflective of the experience that the author endured. In racist white countries like ours, or like Spain, we tend not to think much about the grit and determination it takes to leave your home, your family, your culture, in order to get more stuff...like food, medical care, consumer goods...in the teeth of gale-force headwinds of hate. I'm bitterly ashamed of all y'all who voted in 2024 for an increase in this reprehensible, cruel, and ultimately futile behavior, across the globe.

Amazon Crossing only wants $2.49 for a Kindle edition. Definitely well worth such small change for a short, good read.

>166 laytonwoman3rd: No two people, from the author on down the chain of possession, read the same book...including the re-reader.

It is nothing short of miraculous, and makes me eager to know what others think about stories; often enough I've never thought of whatever they focused on.

>167 karenmarie: Sweetiedarling, >162 richardderus: would give you testosterone toxicity in five pages, so avoiding it at all costs is a very good idea.

>164 richardderus: might thrill and delight you! I've got one to send....

HAVING TO is, I think, the opposite of heroism...choosing not to because it's hard, that's the one I look down on. Looking up to someone who just gets on with it regardless is agreeable on a vanity level but normalizing the "do it anyway" spirit is more my speed.

BURGOINE #003

Cold nights of childhood by Tezer Özlü (tr. Maureen Freely)

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: The Bell Jar meets Good Morning, Midnight, by one of Turkey’s most beloved writers.

The narrator of Tezer Özlü’s novel is between lovers. She is in and out of psychiatric wards, where she is forced to undergo electroshock treatments. She is between Berlin and Paris. She returns to Istanbul, in search of freedom, happiness, and new love.

Set across the rambling orchards of a childhood in the Turkish provinces and the smoke-filled cafes of European capitals, Cold Nights of Childhood offers a sensual, unflinching portrayal of a woman’s sexual encounters and psychological struggle, staging a clash between unbridled feminine desire and repressive, patriarchal society.

Originally published in 1980, six years before her death at 43, Cold Nights of Childhood cemented Tezer Özlü’s status as one of Turkey’s most beloved writers. A classic that deserves to stand alongside The Bell Jar and Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, Cold Nights of Childhood is a powerfully vivid, disorienting, and bittersweet novel about the determined embrace of life in all its complexity and confusion, translated into English here for the first time by Maureen Freely, with an introduction by Ayşegül Savas.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I am always, always delighted that I'm not a woman. I'm even more delighted now that I've read this book. If you've read the publisher's comps with as little pleasure as I have, be warned: They are spot-on.

Seriously, straight women, if you dislike men this much, be a lesbian. There is no reason to endure what seems, from y'all's discourse, to be a neverending stream of controlling abusive relationships.

Transit Books charges $9.99 for an ebook edition. At least it's got interesting settings.

>164 richardderus: Richard, I loved Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. No brickbats here. Of course, you can dislike it. I really enjoyed The Good Lord Bird too for what that's worth.

>162 richardderus:, etc. I have almost always been apprehensive about starting new things, difficult or not. My charm (suggested by a favorite teacher) has been to look at successful people and think, "If _____ can do it, I can do it."

Cheers for another quiet day! *smooch*

BURGOINE #004

Hidden in Snow (The Åre Murders Book 1) by Viveca Sten (tr. Marlaine Delargy)

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The splendor of the Swedish mountains becomes the backdrop for a bone-chilling crime.

On the day Stockholm police officer Hanna Ahlander’s personal and professional lives crash, she takes refuge at her sister’s lodge in the Swedish ski resort paradise of Åre. But it’s a brief comfort. The entire village is shaken by the sudden vanishing of a local teenage girl. Hanna can’t help but investigate, and while searching for the missing person, she lands a job with the local police department. There she joins forces with Detective Inspector Daniel Lindskog, who has been tasked with finding the girl. Their only lead: a scarf in the snow.

As subzero temperatures drop even further, a treacherous blizzard sweeps toward Åre. Hanna and Daniel’s investigation is getting more desperate by the hour. Lost or abducted, either way time is running out for the missing girl. Each new clue closes in on something far more sinister than either Hanna or Daniel imagined.

In this devious novel by the bestselling author of the Sandhamn Murders series, discover what it will take to solve a case when the truth can be so easily hidden in the coming storm.

I RECEIVED A COPY FROM THE AMAZON FIRST READS PROGRAM. THANK YOU.

My Review: When what you need is a well-executed (!) murder to solve, Viveca Sten as translated by Marlaine Delargy will deliver what you're looking for. It won't break new aesthetic or technical ground. If that's where you want to go, know that going in. Characters and, imporyantly, settings are sufficiently drawn to make me care that they survived...or didn't...and since ma'at must be served, we know where we're headin' before we start.

I'm already reading the second one, that I bought for myself.

Amazon Crossing wants a piddlin' $2.49. Value for entertainment ratio 3:1.

>172 LizzieD: Hiya Peggy! I'm glad you're not one of the peevish posse that hates on those who don't agree with the h8r herself. I'm all for finding positives where we can in this world and hiking up our socks to emulate them. *smooch*

>145 richardderus: I honestly fear that Trump will try and amend the Constitution so that he can serve more terms. I know, probably stupid to fear that, but I do.

>150 richardderus: Already in the BlackHole or I would be adding it again. I very much enjoyed Lamb's When the Angels Left the Old Country last year.

>164 richardderus: Sorry you did not enjoy that one more and hope your next read is more to your taste, RD. I do not throw brickbats just because I like a book more than you do. Not my style. As far as I am concerned, everyone is entitled to their own opinion :)

Wow, you are on a bad run. I hope things get better for you soon reading-wise.

((Hugs)) and **smooches** and hopes that you have a wonderful weekend, RD!

>175 alcottacre: - Well, he's already got one of his minions in Congress to propose such an amendment, so I don't think it's stupid to fear he'd try :-/

RD - I liked the McBride more than you did, but to each their own!

BURGOINE #005

My Friends by Hisham Matar

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return, a luminous novel of friendship, family, and the unthinkable realities of exile

The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and although nothing does, we continue, inside our dream.

One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh.

There, thrust into an open society that is light years away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode in tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, an exile, unable to leave England, much less return to the country of his birth. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would jeopardize their safety.

When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face to face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him, but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.

A devastating meditation on friendship and family, and the ways in which time tests—and frays—those bonds, My Friends is an achingly beautiful work of literature by an author at the peak of his powers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Beautiful writing, like: "The question is, my boy, and it has always has been the most important question, how to escape the demands of unreasonable men" and "It’s hard work hiding things, you have to watch yourself, how you walk even, how you eat and sleep and I am terrible at it, you know it." All the sentences I liked were much on this model. The gestalt, unfortunately, never rose above my appreciation for the author's writing talent.

The story left me...unmoved. You look at stories in the light shone by the world at the time they're read, and I read this during the Israeli genocide of the Gazans. My symapthy for this privileged whiner was severely attenuated.

Random House charges $12.99 for an ebook edition.

PEARL RULE #001

Mister Sandman by Barbara Gowdy (50%; p241)

Rating: 3.5* of five (for this re-read)

The Publisher Says: Barbara Gowdy's outrageous, hilarious, disturbing, and compassionate novel is about the Canary family, their immoderate passions and eccentricities, and their secret lives and histories. The deepest secret of all is harbored in the silence of the youngest daughter, Joan, who doesn't grow, who doesn't speak, but who can play the piano like Mozart though she's never had a lesson.

Joan is a mystery, and in the novel's stunning climax her family comes to understand that each of them is a mystery, as marvelous as Joan, as irreducible as the mystery of life itself.

In its compassionate investigation of moral truths and its bold embrace of the fractured nature of every one of its characters, Mister Sandman attains the heightened quality of a modern-day parable.

I GOT THIS BOOK DECADES AGO, AND HAVE NO MEMORY OF HOW.

My Review: I read it in 1996 or so, loved it, and felt a re-read would be a fun thing. Queer representation has come a long way in thirty years.

I'm not as excited and delighted as I was in my 30s, and got more and more uneasy with the characters' poor communication skills, so I pulled thr ripcord at 50%. It's pretty well-written so I'm not warning you off. I'm just not that guy anymore.

It's out of print; there's an AI-generated audio version, should you wish to participate in the theft of authorial work.

>175 alcottacre: Like >176 katiekrug: says, it's a reasonable fear, Stasia. "They" won't mind ramming an Amendment through but causing a Civil War...but politicians are pretty alive to the truth that every tool is a weapon in the wrong hands, so MAYBE they'll forego this one.

My run is artificial...I'm writing up Burgoines and Pearl-Rules from all of January to post on my blog tomorrow.

>176 katiekrug: These scum disgust and appall me.

I've never known you to hoist a torch in a mob, Katie, you hate crowds too much.

PEARL RULE #002

A Valley to Harness: A Novel for the World's Revolution by Jason A. Bartles (37%)

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: The climate crisis is here, and no refuge is safe.
In the late 2050s, Henry seeks safety in Sediment Valley, an Appalachian retreat promising peace, prosperity, and a place to bake his delicious sweets. But the corporate powers of SustainAble have other plans for Sediment Valley and the geologic power it hides.

Henry soon meets Colson, a reserved butler for the founder of Sediment Valley, and Brisa, a tech genius with an outgoing spirit. Unbeknownst to Henry, both Colson and Brisa have concealed their motivations for leaving the violence of the outside world.

When they discover the true, terrifying plans for the valley and its inhabitants, Henry, Colson, and Brisa must learn to trust one another to save themselves, their loved ones—and the world.

Three isolated heroes face impossible odds. Can they work together to liberate the valley? Or is it already too late to act?

A Valley to Harness welcomes readers, new and returning, to the speculative future of The World’s Revolution.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Ambitious, tendentious, and ultimately can't avoid the risk of didacticism.

I agree with the author's story's thrust (do not trust tech bros and other Aynholes) but am tired of being thrust into with his rhetorical spear. I found nothing to leaven the dough I'm being asked to chew, just more cogent points. This is a novel; tell me a story that I can enjoy at some higher emotional, not solely fear-driven, level.

Two Doctors Media Collaborative thinks $3.99 is a fair price for a Kindlebook.

PEARL RULE #003

To Be Loved: A Story of Truth, Trauma, and Transformation by Frank G. Anderson MD (43%)
Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Trauma blocks love. Love heals trauma.

Frank was just six years old when he learned there was something wrong with him. Seriously wrong. But no one told him what it was. Instead, between attending weekly therapy sessions, navigating the passion and violence of his home life, and reading between the lines of dark family secrets, he was left to figure out for himself what the world expected him to be.

Despite an unstable childhood, his remarkable intelligence, caring nature, and desperation for love and acceptance carried him from the top of his high school class to the elite residency program at Harvard University, where he ultimately became one of the world's leading experts in the treatment of trauma. Along the way, his encounters with those suffering from abuse, addiction, and mental illness inspired a sense of purpose...and an earth-shattering awakening of his authentic self.

Ignited by this newfound identity, Frank embarked on a profound—sometimes painful—and redemptive journey that brought the love and acceptance he always longed for.

***
In To Be Loved, renowned trauma expert Dr. Frank G. Anderson shares the complicated experience of growing up gay in an Italian-American home that was at once fiercely loving and culturally close-knit while at the same time unaccepting, abusive, and rife with secret shame. With compassion, humor, and disarming honesty, Frank invites the reader into his formative experiences: coming out amid the LGBTQ+ carnival atmosphere of 1990s Provincetown, finding love and forming a family within the staid Boston suburbs, and coming home to confront his family's legacy of abuse. By forging paths for forgiveness, he found that his truth and tenacious spirit were stronger than his trauma.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: My rating reflects what I found to be an off-putting digressive style, one I felt was better suited to fiction than self-help via memoir. My Pearl-Ruling the book reflects how well the author, not much younger than I am, was at evoking the awful experience of being Othered by those you rely on for your existence, for your idea of Self.

Too much for me amid the Satanic Evil takeover of so much of the world by fascist scum.

Bridge City Books does not want you to buy a Kindlebook, at $22-ish. A hardcover is the same price.

>164 richardderus: Hmm. I have been meaning to get to this one for a while. Sorry to see that the star rating is a bit lower but I think I will read it in February.

>174 richardderus: It looks like you have hit a string of so so reads. Hopefully your Sunday brings you a 4* read!

Happy Sunday Richard
Skimming through I stopped at >90 richardderus: and realized I got potatoes, mushrooms and a cast iron frying pan, so I know what I’ll have for lunch today! :)

Some fascinating reviews here, I might have caught some BBs.

Stopped watching the news many years ago, but have online subscriptions to several liberal newspapers to support them, while I’m mainly reading just one of them, but in detail. Last time I avoided most of the articles on that president, hoping it would turn out to be just an accident for 4 years. Now it feels like the lily pond that is the world is being covered quickly from all sides with those regimes and I don’t know anymore where to look for a better narrative and encouraging vision. We have the “post fascists” in Italy and now even in my region. They look nice on the outside (internationally they behave quite well for the moment and mostly keep their right arms down in public), while restructuring everything on the inside, free journalism, the right to demonstrate, LGBTQ+ rights of course, all the usual steps. Austria is next, their far right party which is a successor of the NS party won the last general election. Ordered my postal voting documents, so I can at least compensate one vote in Germany in February.

I loved The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store but I'm not surprised that it didn't quite click with you. And we had very similar thoughts on The Forbidden Book. Each individual's response to a book is fascinating, isn't it?

Happy Sunday *smooches*

>183 figsfromthistle: It's worth reading, Anita, and will reward others more than it did me.

My string is an artifact, not a reality! I'm posting the ~meh~-minus books all now because my end-of-month blog post is out today. >182 richardderus: is the only one I've just finished. I was too lazy to write up the blah reviews as I went along. My hand hurts now, of course, but it's proof I'm working!

>184 Deern: Nathalie, the global recrudescence of fascism is appalling and disgusting and not a little terrifying. It's also not the first time since WWII but we forget...or are taught not to notice...how greed never ever sleeps.

Keep voting. It's the thing these scum most fear and hate. I'm so happy you're back among us!

>185 bell7: I'm glad you're not using the rose canes to form a torch for the mob, Mary, but I'm expecting it any day...The Forbidden Book is one where the very experienced readers are likely to reach very similar conclusions if by different paths. What makes the bookish social media so much fun is the community and its wildly varying ways of reading, tastes, methods, moods, needs, ideas....

‘Morning, RDear. Happy Sunday to you.

>177 richardderus: Tepid review of a book that doesn’t appeal to begin with. Pass.

>178 richardderus: A re-read can be dangerous thing, of course, especially as we realize we’re not the same person we were when we first read it. I’ll still pass, though.

>182 richardderus: Why read nonfiction that you Pearl Rule when I can read smut and get emotional satisfaction and a sexy HEA?

*smooch*

>189 karenmarie: Re-reads are infrequent for me at the best of times, and this experience is a big reason why. I'm not that reader anymore. I've got a limited supply of eyeblinks, using them to test the hypothesis "will this treasured memory hold up to modern-me scrutiny?" becomes less and less interesting and necessary to try.

Sunday orisons, dear Horrible.

Hello there, dear one! I am hoping the Chinese hits the spot and that the giant yam has been shown the door. The nerve. *smooch and a bear hug*

>191 Crazymamie: Fried pork dumplings and an egg roll...*happy sigh*

That stringy trump-colored sugarglop was in the bin before it could cool. *smooch*

Happy Chinese, Richard. My favorite restaurant wasn't taking take-out orders when I called, so I settled for something else. Maybe later this week since it is now firmly on my mind.

I do hope you have done your duty to all the Pearl-ruled for January. I'll always hope you have fewer in February. *smooch*

I hope you got the Pearl ruled tomes out of the way, Richard. Hope the week ahead holds happier reads. (Happier news would be good too.)

I think I enjoyed My Friends more than you did , Richard. I gave it maybe 4.5 stars, maybe 5 ? It was the best of the lot of the Booker nominees for 2024, I thought anyway. I have not yet read
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store . Your review does not make me want to rush to read it. which I haven't anyway. Better reads ahead, RD. *smooch*

013 Fire exit : a novel by Morgan Talty

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine’s Penobscot Reservation. On the far bank, he caught brief moments of his neighbor Elizabeth’s life—from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there’s always been something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from her and the rest of the tribal community. It’s the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.

Now, it’s been weeks since he’s seen Elizabeth, and Charles is worried. As he attempts to hold on to and care for what he can—his home and property; his alcoholic, quick-tempered, and bighearted friend Bobby; and his mother, Louise, who is slipping ever deeper into dementia—he becomes increasingly haunted by his past. Forced to confront a lost childhood on the reservation, a love affair cut short, and the death of his beloved stepfather, Fredrick, in a hunting accident—a death he and Louise are at odds over as to where to lay blame—Charles contends with questions he’s long been afraid to ask. Is his secret about Elizabeth his to share? And would his daughter want to know the truth, even if it could cost her everything she’s ever known?

From the award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez, Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit, is a masterful and unforgettable story of family, legacy, bloodlines, culture and inheritance, and what, if anything, we owe one another.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Twice in the course of this read I stopped to think carefully about the truth, encapsulated in the truism "every tool is a weapon," that the greatest evils come from the least expected places. Honesty, or simple vanity, or (as reality is next to never binary) somewhere on the spectrum defined by those endpoints, in claiming a daughter Charles has always known he fathered though he was never allowed to parent her thanks to the blood quantum laws (weapons of oppression formed into tools of exclusion by the Penobscots themselves) would ruin her life as it is. Does she still have that life? Why hasn't Charles, her immediate neighbor all her life, seen her at all in weeks? Has she moved away, run away or vanished under more sinister circumstances? He has no standing to ask any of these questions, an off-reservation neighbor in the eyes of the law. "To think that the reservation is what makes an Indian an Indian is to massacre all over again the Natives who do not populate it," thinks Charles.

Elizabeth's mother chose to have his child, who was conceived while Charles was able to live on the reservation thanks to his mother's marriage to a Penobscot man, Charles's alcoholic best reservation-dwelling buddy Bobby, by pretending she was his child...a Penobscot father. Charles's acknowledged paternity would have denied Elizabeth a place on reservation, thus her ancestral identity and such benefits as are available to Native Americans who pass the blood quantum tests. Adding injury to this insult, Charles's dearly loved Penobscot stepfather dies...hunting accident? darker tragedy?...so he must leave the reservation for good. A tool, a gift of identity and grudging economic benefit for Elizabeth, becomes a weapon to deprive Charles of a life he wanted. Charles identifies the weaponization of the tool of identity, of belonging: "It was {dead stepfather} Fredrick’s love that made me feel Native. He loved me so much that I was, and still am, convinced that I was from him, part of him, part of what he was part of. That was how I felt about Elizabeth—in truth, she was a descendant only from her mother’s side, and if that were to come out and she were taken off the census, would she feel any less Native? I didn’t think so."

Charles now wants his daughter found, and to tell her at last who her family truly includes. Armistead Maupin, a true treasure of a writer, activist, and thinker, titled his memoir of coming out after coming of age as a true Southern right-wing boy Logical Family. The journey, the destination, the idea of clipping "bio" from "family," all form part of Charles's heterosexual journey. He is more proof that the reality of love forming family not family necessarily forming love, is more than ever a bulwark against increasingly harsh reality. "I wanted to say it all: wanted to give her all the history that is hers. This past. This family. I wanted her to know, wanted her to understand what it meant that she was being stretched beyond the walls of her parents' house," her family of origin was not all there was to her...or his...world. As the story unfolds Charles grapples with claiming the bio- and logical family as his mother descends into dementia thus dying to him before her body finally dies. All of these are issues I've faced; I was totally engrossed, enmeshed in this multipart logical family struggling to be formed.

Charles spends the entire book obsessing over Elizabeth and his denied paternity, over the ethics of telling her this potentially tribal-membership ending reality...and it suddenly hit me almost three-quarters if the way through: Elizabeth is in her middle twenties! I'd simply never done the math. It changed everything to know this.

Telling an adult who can decide for herself what to do with the life-changing factual information is a duty. It's not optional. Her life is built on a lie, and that is unconscionable to continue to hide from a twentysomething. She's got the life experience to decide for herself if she wants to continue to lie to the authorities. How to handle the fallout, if she tells the truth. She's not a kid...and I also realized that Charles'a obsessive worry about why she's vanished is completely misplaced, even a little creepy.

Charles switched from being "poor old Charles" to being "pick your balls up, put 'em back on, and take action for once" Charles. At almost the same narrative moment, a major plot point resolves. I was left wondering what to think about this altered idea of and opinion about the character I'd invested in so deeply.

That is a very, very good reminder to check the facile, shallow interpretations at Author Talty's doorstep...his short fiction should've taught me that! There is no surface without structure around here. I can't quite finish that fifth star because I found some of Charles's passive acceptance and supine acquiescence unpleasant, if relatable throughout, but the awareness misdirection was truly *chef's kiss*

If you haven't read Night of the Living Rez, his story collection, by all means do. Starting here, or starting as I did with the stories, your decision to make Morgan Talty part of your reading universe is one you aren't likely to regret.

(Where the HELL is my 2022 review of the stories?! Panic stations until I find it!)

>193 LizzieD: It was a very happy Chinese indeed, Peggy me lurve. I needed All the scrummy MSG, the sodium and sugar, the meaty transfats...I do not like to feel deprived ALL the time.

Pearl-Rule reviews done for January...started one for February, since it's such a short month and I do not want to write for five hours straight again. It helped that I really HATED the book. *smooch*

>194 Familyhistorian: Howdy, Meg, they're done and posted. The week's started with an excellent read, see >196 richardderus:, from an author whose stories I liked and wrote a review of...that has very upsettingly VANISHED! Not on here, not on Goodreads, not on my blog...whereinahell is it?! I'm going bald(er) with worry.

>195 vancouverdeb: Everyone enjoyed Matar's book more than I did, Deborah. It wasn't a poor book. Just predictable for me. McBride's book was a little more disappointing to me, since I've liked his others. Oh well. The next book, >196 richardderus:, made up for it.

*smooch*

Morning, BigDaddy! Hooray for an excellent read! Not taking a bullet for that one, but I have added Night of the Living Rez to The List, so thanks for that.

*smooch and a bear hug*

>150 richardderus: ooh, definitely putting The Forbidden Book on my list, thank you

>200 Crazymamie: I'm glad to've book-bulleted you for that read, Mamie...but I've still got to find the review I wrote and would Swear An Oath I blogged and posted here as well as on Goodreads, for cryin' out loud it can't just *vanish* in the digital age! Where is it?! *aaarrrgh*

>201 norabelle414: Terrific news, Nora, and I hope Sacha Lamb's work past and future will please and amuse.

*smooch* for referring me to And Mankind Created the Gods and another *smooch* just on general principles.

>204 ronincats: You liked it! That's wonderful! I'm always happy when reads I liked are enjoyed by those I aimed the book-bullet at. Happy last-of-January reads, smoochling!

Enjoy mopping up the rest of January now that the bad stuff is done, Richard. And find that review soon to put yourself out of misery. *smooch*

>206 LizzieD: I'm more and more worried, Peggy, I looked on my data stick and no luck there either. I've lost something and that is deeply unsettling...what things I think are done and dusted, that in fact are not? *ulp*

>162 richardderus: I've never run an Iron Man, much less 50 on consecutive days, but I have run stupid distances for reasons I can't rationally articulate. I understand the impulse, after you've finished one challenge, to ask yourself "Can I do it faster?" "Can I do it farther?" "Can I do it longer?" and the feeling that well jeez, there's exactly one way to find out. I won't argue it's not selfish. It is. (With exceptions and also: what sport isn't?)

I'm chiming in to possibly add some context to Lawrence's discovery that he was "unspecial in every way" -- I read this as a response to much fuss made over claims of another extreme endurance athlete ("Ultramarathon Man" Dean Karnazes) that he has a super-efficient metabolism that clears lactic acid from his muscles so fast that he never reaches "lactate threshold." In this context, Lawrence's claim can be either inspiring ("You don't have to be a superhuman, you just have to try.") or toxic-testosteroney ("Shut up, Karnazes") or maybe both.

I haven't read Lawrence's book but would if & when I ever get back in that headspace. Thanks for mentioning it!

>196 richardderus: Adding Talty to the list of writers to check out. Thanks!

>208 swynn: The Lawrence book isn't all about himself in the same way that Karnazes is. He's not vain or boastful in that surface-gloss way. He's a symptom of how Manliness Is Important and how Hard Work Is Valor and other such flexes. I think what he offers is of value though the way he learned and uses it is less so. The man's not, in other words, the direct problem but an embodiment of a system I see as toxic to men and their development as whole human beings.

Everything in this our one and only life is somewhere on a bewilderingly complicated multipolar eleven-dimensional spectrum that even string theorists would quail at analyzing. Happy to see you here, Steve!

Good afternoon, RDear! I hope you’re doing well this Monday.

>196 richardderus: Excellent review. I followed your instructions and have just gotten Night of the Living Rez on Audible as part of my membership for $0.

>207 richardderus: I've lost something and that is deeply unsettling... I hope you can find it, because I agree that losing things is deeply unsettling.

I was a busy camper this morning, but am now home, back in jammies, and getting ready to get a brownie and head upstairs to read smut and nap.

*smooch*

>210 karenmarie: Horrible, it soothes my outrage at losing something to know it bothers you, too. I'm stumped and that's infuriating.

Smutsnooze well! *smooch*

Happy Tuesday, Rdear. A little ‘liquid’ art in the morning? *smooch*

'Morning, RDear. Happy Tuesday to you.

Smut read, nap taken, watched the last ever episode of Vera last night. Today is book sort/Virlie's.

*smooch*

>212 Ameise1: ...breathtaking...the highest expression of Art on the planet...glorious!

Thank you for starting my day so brilliantly, Barbara.

>213 karenmarie: Morning, Horrible, and enjoy that lovely day. I'm not excited by anything, but *am* looking forward to Old Stuff's drunk this afternoon so I can get a couple hours without him stinkin' up the place.

Happy Tuesday, Richard. Nice flurry of reviews. You got me with Fire Exit. I think I read another rave, a couple of months ago. It looks like it will hit 47F today, with plenty of sunshine, so all good here. I will be taking Juno for a stroll.

>208 swynn: ...after you've finished one challenge, to ask yourself "Can I do it faster?" "Can I do it farther?" "Can I do it longer?" and the feeling that well jeez, there's exactly one way to find out. I won't argue it's not selfish. I can relate to all of that. it's the way I feel about Bubble Spinner.

I HATE losing things, Richard. Mostly I misplace books, and that is more frustrating than I can say, especially when I have tagged them here and them moved them without retagging. *smooch* sends you better luck today maybe. (Now wish the same for me as I try to track down a couple of books that I need and have misplaced.)

>216 msf59: Thanks, Mark...I'm not as warm as you but I'm looking out on sunshiney pretty ness so I am contented.

Fire Exit is very, very likely to appeal to you. Its journey is one I can easily conjure you making with interested involvement.

>217 LizzieD: ..."Bubble Spinner"...?

Losing the review would bother me less had I not been utterly certain that I posted it to my blog! There are around thirteen hundred notes files and about five hundred partial reviews files on the data stick so, well, if I can't find something in that mass it's not surprising. But I remember making that post! And it is very much not posted. I've looked at every one of the 203 blog posts I made in 2022. No Morgan Talty. I've looked at every Tin House book I've cataloged. Nope.

::verschmeckeled::

I feel ya, Lady Liberty.

014 Abalone and the Snake Goddess by Christine Li

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Once a promising magician, Abalone has lost everything: her love, her voice, and her soul. For thirteen years, she hides behind the high walls of Jiankang, the imperial capital of ancient China, consumed by grief and silence. But one fateful new moon night, she crafts a forbidden love spell and calls upon the fiery magic of the dark Snake Goddess.

This powerful goddess, however, has plans of her own. Guided by ancient forces, Abalone must leave her sanctuary and journey into the wild swamps and treacherous mountains beyond the city. There, among the last rebellious heirs of shamanic tribes, she begins her true path: to reclaim her soul and fulfill her destiny.

When a young girl is stolen by ruthless hands, Abalone must decide whether to risk everything—again—and confront the shadows of a forgotten past.

Abalone and the Snake Goddess is a poetic and haunting tale of love, magic, and the dark, transformative journey of the soul. Perfect for readers of mythical fantasy, Chinese folklore, and stories of resilient heroines.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It's the Year of the Snake, and Satan only knows it's a very China-heavy news cycle with the AI-development wars going on. I'm always down for a history- and mythology-inflected story. Make all these things come together and voilà! The perfect time to review this book has arrived.

The first half of the story is about Abalone, our PoV, and her severely circumscribed world. The worldbuilding here is...patchy...it's not particularly cohesive as we come to know the people who hate Abalone, how the husband she loves loves her not, and how the resolution of that truly devastating problem comes to Abalone's attention. There are exactly no "why"s in this story.

That's when the conflicts kick off, the goddess who has the power to help her reveals the cost of asking for divine intervention, and what the stakes for the world are going to be no matter what she does.

Frankly this feels as though I'm reading part two of far longer story and I really need part one to get me to invest emotional energy into this character's worldview. The cultural stuff is very interesting, the ideas around divinity are fun to think through as events transpire, the atmospherics of the setting worked very well for me. If there's a part one, I'll gladly read it.

I think Abalone, as presented here, is not enough of a character to make me warble my fool lungs out about the read. It's okay, and has moments of genuine excitement; but it lacks that most helpful of things, a solidly investable main character, needed for me to shove it at you demanding you read it now.

Pity...it almost got all four stars.

‘Morning, RD! Happy Wednesday to you.

>215 richardderus: What happened with Old Widow and Merry Stuff? Did they break up? Sorry you don’t get more time alone.

>220 richardderus: I cannot believe the things 47 is doing. I’ve decided to start easing back into news, but it’s terribly disheartening, and I rarely do more than look at the appalling headlines.

>221 richardderus: I just went down the rabbit hole of Year of the Snake. Fun. I cracked up at the name of Abalone, because to me abalone is and always will be … any small to very large marine gastropod mollusc in the family Haliotidae, which once contained six genera but now contains only one genus, Haliotis.” – Wikipedia

Afraid I must pass, what with your “okay” and etc.

*smooch*

The domestic terrorists are in the White House.

Do not forget: We are still a nation of laws, and no one should think it's necessary simply to obey.

On Tyranny is a great resource, belongs on all bookshelves in the Felonious Yam's Murrukuh.

>222 karenmarie: You're wise to pass on it, Horrible. It's...aggressively okay.

See below for the Felonious Yam's latest idiocy. The vast majority of his bullshit is not self-executing.

Enjoy your Snake Year journey! *smooch*

LOL - aggressively okay.

Come on, LAW! Let's get with it. I wish it were not too early to impeach the bastard, but his Pluguglicans have yet to see how extraneous they are to his reign of terror.

I have followed Karen down her rabbit hole, but on the monkey path. Now I have to go feed the other house residents, who, you may point out, are not among the Chinese chosen animals.

*smooch*

Oh! Bubble Spinner It's a really, really, really old free game.

>225 karenmarie: Turns out I was right. This is part two. The publicist is getting me part one and we'll see how I feel after I've read it. I hope it's better than just aggressively okay after that.

>226 LizzieD: OIC any games beyond solitaire passed me by.

The billionaires will make it clear who has the shell-like ear of the monstruous malign marshmallow-brained microdick. My hope is this will wound the vanity of the scum and cause them to turn all twenty nails on the bastards.

Sweet Thursday, Richard. Not only will it hit 52F today but Jackson will be coming over later this morning. I should get some quality time in and there should be plenty of chuckles and smiles.

>220 richardderus: Nailed it!!

015 Written in bone : hidden stories in what we leave behind by Sue Black

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the Crime Writers’ Association ALCS Gold Dagger for Nonfiction—
A tour through the human skeleton and the secrets our bones reveal, from the author of All That Remains

In her memoir All That Remains, internationally renowned forensic anthropologist and human anatomist Dame Sue Black recounted her life lived eye to eye with the Grim Reaper. During the course of it, she offered a primer on the basics of identifying human remains, plenty of insights into the fascinating processes of death, and a sober, compassionate understanding of its inescapable presence in our existence, all leavened with her wicked sense of humor.

In her new book, Sue Black builds on the first, taking us on a guided tour of the human skeleton and explaining how each person's life history is revealed in their bones, which she calls "the last sentinels of our mortal life to bear witness to the way we lived it." Her narrative follows the skeleton from the top of the skull to the small bones in the foot. Each step of the journey includes an explanation of the biology—how the bone is formed in a person's development, how it changes as we age, the secrets it may hold—and is illustrated with anecdotes from the author's career helping solve crimes and identifying human remains, whether recent or historical. Written in Bone is full of entertaining stories that read like scenes from a true-life CSI drama, infused with humor and no-nonsense practicality about the realities of corpses and death.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A step back from the storytelling done in her first book, this book goes through the human skeleton to consider the way a life...and a death...affects the bone in question. I'm very involved as she discusses the ways we unthinkingly abuse our very skeletons, and the way that story is memorialized in the bones we leave behind.

Often enough the things that happen to us after we're born leave the most horrific traces. DO NOT READ THIS BOOK IF REPORTS OF CHILD HARM CAUSES YOU DISTRESS.

I was revolted in this book, more than the first, by the reports of the reasons people's skeletons show enduring damage. The harm we do, or tolerate being done to others, disgusts me. Author Sue Black has seen, understood, and reported on so much more than I will ever see or learn about...and yet she has maintained perspective, has developed immensely valuable skills, has made a positive difference in the social fabric of many communities and families. I am deeply impressed by her. I am awed at how much good a person whose career has led her down very, very dark paths following horrifyingly evil actors has and can do.

It is not for everyone, but if you can endure the child-harm descriptions, this is a weirdly hopeful story. Author Sue Black is facing horrors to restore the rents people have torn in ma'at.

Fred Rogers taught me, "look for the helpers," whenever there's a tragedy. Sue Black is who he meant. At this moment in time, I appreciate knowing there are still helpers out in the world.

016 All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes by Sue Black

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: For fans of Caitlin Doughty, Mary Roach, Kathy Reichs, and CSI shows, a renowned forensic scientist on death and mortality.

Dame Sue Black is an internationally renowned forensic anthropologist and human anatomist. She has lived her life eye to eye with the Grim Reaper, and she writes vividly about it in this book, which is part primer on the basics of identifying human remains, part frank memoir of a woman whose first paying job as a schoolgirl was to apprentice in a butcher shop, and part no-nonsense but deeply humane introduction to the reality of death in our lives. It is a treat for CSI junkies, murder mystery and thriller readers, and anyone seeking a clear-eyed guide to a subject that touches us all.

Cutting through hype, romanticism, and cliché, she recounts her first dissection; her own first acquaintance with a loved one’s death; the mortal remains in her lab and at burial sites as well as scenes of violence, murder, and criminal dismemberment; and about investigating mass fatalities due to war, accident, or natural disaster, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. She uses key cases to reveal how forensic science has developed and what her work has taught her about human nature.

Acclaimed by bestselling crime writers and fellow scientists alike, All That Remains is neither sad nor macabre. While Professor Black tells of tragedy, she also infuses her stories with a wicked sense of humor and much common sense.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Professor Dame Sue Black has spent a long lifetime giving those deprived of life and their families the closure she has learned how to give them, their families, and the Body Politic. This book is a report of how she has done this important task that offers communities and survivors a (sometimes partial) restoration of ma'at. She presented a TV show in the teens called History Cold Case. I've watched those shows with great interest, several times, and honestly never understood why there were only two seasons of it. There can be no end of distant-enough ancient cases to investigate. I suppose the ratings weren't up to more...yet our cultural moment is full to bursting with forensics-based fiction. Why this isn't still running, then, is deeply mysterious to me.

The facts that Author Black works with in her job are often only described in jargon; looking them up, that seems like a means she uses to buffer her readers from the full weight of the horrifying things humans do to each other.

Starting off easy, we're led through her early life at a spanking pace. Her decision to become a forensic scientist was oddly inevitable, though she was not and is not a gloomy goth type. I get the strong impression she'd be a right hoot to sit down with down the pub. Surprisingly she's been a lead investigator at the sites of multiple human-rights violations, like Kosovo. One would imagine this would rob a person of the will, even ability, to find perspective in her job's inescapable conclusions.

Not so. This is a rugged, centered, practical and skilled person. Spending three hundred-plus pages with her was interesting, informative, and...oddly...a lot of fun. Given the deeply unhappy subject matter, a fifth star wasn't likely to materialize, but all four that were available shine bright on this very well-made book.

I recommend it to y'all legions of CSI, NCIS etc. etc. shows, the many thousands of us who read Jimmy Perez and Jackson Brodie mystery procedurals, and to anyone who just likes to know weird stuff.

>229 msf59: Morning, Mark! It's nowhere near as warm here...only 35° for the high...but it's a lot better than 25° like it was there for a while. Enjoy the Jackson time!

‘Morning, RDear.

>227 richardderus: Ah. Yes, let’s hope part one is better than just aggressively okay.

>230 richardderus: Added to my wish list. ”If you look for the helpers, you’ll know there’s hope.” Gave me shivers. I love Mr. Rogers.

*smooch*

>228 richardderus: From your mouth to the populists' actions.

>233 karenmarie: Let's hope that indeed. I'm not rushing.

Are you SURE about >230 richardderus:? It could easily give you a decade's nightmares in a single sitting....

*smooch*

>234 ArlieS: Keynboard↔Divine inbox.

>230 richardderus: >231 richardderus: Okay, I might have to check these out.

One comment on your All That Remains review. you mis-spelled forensic scientist as firensic scientist.

I'm sure we won't rake you over the coals for such a little thing 😁 , but since you're a titan of reviews, but I'm sure you want to have it correct on your blog

>230 richardderus: >231 richardderus: Yes, Richard, but not now.

Best to you! We are having balmy weather, which is welcome if not normal for going into February. Hope you catch some kind of balm today! *smooch*

>196 richardderus: Adding that one to the BlackHole. Thanks for the review and recommendation, RD! Bonus: I just checked and my local library has a copy!

>220 richardderus: Boy, me too.

>230 richardderus: Oh, yeah, I definitely need to get that one. I very much enjoyed Dr. Black's All That Remains a few years ago. Thanks for bringing her new book to my attention, Richard.

((Hugs)) and **smooches** for today!

>231 richardderus: "anyone who just likes to know weird stuff."

Well, that sounds familiar. Thanks for the rec!

>237 mahsdad: I do want to correct it, and thanks!

I think you'd really enjoy these reads, Jeff. They're very solidly grounded in science and still tell good stories.

>238 LizzieD: It's 35° and sunshiney...that's my definition of balm, me lurve.

Whenever the day dawns for >230 richardderus:, i'd say go to it. >231 richardderus: now...a little less hearty a shove for the reasons of distress cited in >235 richardderus:, but still worth your time and treasure.

>239 alcottacre: Awomen on >220 richardderus:, eh what? I hope you enjoy >196 richardderus:, smoochling, and you're about the perfect reader for >230 richardderus:! Stay well, Stasia. *smooch*

>240 swynn: Heh, you don't say...you? A weird-knowledge enthusiast? Go know!

>241 richardderus:. Both are at the library as e-books, only Written in Bone is available on audio. For me, these types of books are tailor made for audio.

Do you have to read the first one to get the 2nd, or are they really independent?

>245 mahsdad: They're independent, in fact only share an author. No events are causally related between them.

Afternoon, BigDaddy! *Thursday smooch*

>230 richardderus:, >231 richardderus: I have these both in the stacks. I did not know about that tv show History Cold Case. Thank you for the content warning on the first one.

>231 richardderus: I read somewhere that the reason 'History Cold Case' did not continue is that Dr Black no longer wished to participate as she had so many other things on her plate. I am sorry but I cannot remember where I read it.

If you have not watched her series on 'The Secrets of Forensic Science' from the Royal Institution's Christmas lectures, you ought to check them out, Richard. I had a good time watching them despite the fact that they are really designed for teens and pre-teens. Here is a link to the first one (of 3) if you are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo18brJhK1I

>247 Crazymamie: Hi Mamie! I hope you'll enjoy them, but seriously...bail if it gets to be too much for you. *smooch*

>248 alcottacre: How do, Stasia! I've seen the RI series, but thank you for the link. I couuld stand to watch them again.

I hope that's the reason the show disappeared. It would make me feel better about it if it was her choice. *smooch*

017 Vantage point by Sara Sligar

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Succession meets Megan Abbott in this seductive Gothic suspense novel about the dramatic downfall of one of America’s most affluent families.

The old-money Wieland family has it all—wealth, status, power. They’re also famously cursed. Clara and her brother Teddy grew up on a small island in Maine in the shadow of their parents’ tragic deaths, haunted by rumors and paparazzi. Fourteen years later they’ve mostly put their turbulent past to rest. Teddy has married Clara’s best friend, Jess, and the three of them have moved back home to take over the sprawling, remote family mansion known as Vantage Point. Then Teddy decides to run for the Senate—an unnerving prospect made much worse when intimate videos of Clara are leaked online. The most frightening part is that she doesn't remember filming any of them. Are the videos real? Or are they deepfakes? Is someone trying to take down the Wielands once and for all?

Everyone thinks Clara is losing her grip on reality, but she knows the videos are only the beginning. Years ago the curse destroyed her parents. Now it’s coming for her. Brimming with palpable tension, Vantage Point reveals a twisted web of family secrets and political ambition that raises questions about the blurred lines between public and private personas and the nature of truth in the digital age.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Do I hope this is what happens to the richest .01% of families? Yes. Would I sit by and watch with huge schadenfreude while amplifying the most embarrassing, hurtful moments on social media despite the pain it might cause the family in question? Oh my goddesses YES! Extra speedy sharing if they issue statements deploring the hurtful invasion of privacy, and I'll find a way to automate the 24-hour-a-day posting process if they're tech scum!

This book and me? Destined to be besties.

Sounds like a five-star rave is incoming, doesn't it?

Nope. When the shock-twist ending is the same ending you've been telegraphing all along, you don't get five stars. It could be some meta thing, playing on my expectations for a twist in a thriller by not giving me one; I don't tend to read thrillers for that sort of playfulness (which is usually disappointing and annoying anyway). Why it bothered me was that the author was flagging the ending in what felt like every chapter, most unsubtly; then that's what happened; so why'd I read all this intermediate red-herring-ing?

Because this gothic, soapy, OTT strange-fest was fun. I liked reading it. It wasn't groundbreaking, or paradigm-shifting; no one promised me it would be. I was told I'd have a good time eagerly watching the twisted ending of a hypercapitalist family.

Check.

Would I have liked it more, if...fill in personal crotchet here? Sure, I can play that game all day and most of the night with almost anything. But this book delivers what it promises, and you'll have a good time getting there.

Hiya, RDear. Happy Friday to you.

>235 richardderus: True crime and forensics, crime fiction and forensics lover, so yes. On my wish list. And, I just requested the audio book of All That Remains from my Library. It continues to amaze me that as much time as I volunteer for the Friends of the Library, I forget to check out their e-book and audio book selections.

>251 richardderus: Pass. I like subtle telegraphing, but even if this one had it, I’m just not interested in serious schadenfreude.

*smooch*

>252 karenmarie: You're just nicer than I am, Horrible. My attendance at the guillotine woud've been daily.

Well...this isn't a surprise from someone who literally subscribes every year to Jacobin Magazine.

Happy Friday, sweetiedarling.

>250 richardderus: I am pretty sure that the reason that the show closed was because Black chose no longer to do it. I remember reading about it in an interview with her, but again, I cannot cite the source.

I should have known you would have seen the RI series already :)

((Hugs)) and **smooches** for today. I am off to cook lunch.

>253 richardderus: I’d be there with knitting needles flying.

Hey, there, RD! Happy Friday from the gloomy Lower Hudson Valley.

>254 alcottacre: It sounds likely enough to me, Stasia. *smooch*

>255 Storeetllr: I'm glad you will be there too, Mme Defarge. We can gloat together.

Friday orisons!

>152 richardderus: - Brilliant!

>258 sirfurboy: Depressing, too.

>259 richardderus: Well, yes, unfortunately.

JANUARY 2025 IN REVIEW
I'm not going to review anything else. It was a 24-review month. Fire Exit by Morgan Talty was the best read of the month; The Magic of Normal stank.

It's a craptastic month. It's not going to be better in February, or...well...no idea when it will not rot on ice. I'm coping by staying busy reading and reviewing. NGL there's a solid component of doomscrolling, too. This is an ugly moment; I think we're overwhelmed by moving too fast in response to too many events enshittifying our world too quickly to be processed. It's calculated to overwhelm and engender apathetic paralysis. Stay focused as best you can.

This is an ugly moment; I think we're overwhelmed by moving too fast in response to too many events enshittifying our world too quickly to be processed. I agree completely and couldn't have expressed it better, myself. This afternoon, I turned on the tv for a brief moment while working on a puzzle. PBS, no less. I listened to about 5 minutes (amazed I lasted that long) of trump in some sort of live news conference moment, opening his mouth and letting the garbage pour out. It truly boggles the mind. So I turned to a Canadian channel and there was our esteemed (not) premier, Doug Ford, doing the same. I turned it off and just watched a food show.

I think the only way I can cope is music, books, audiobooks, puzzles. And (sorry, Richard) c-a-t-s.

Dropping in to wish you a wonderful weekend, Richard.

Just here to speak and wish you more balm for the weekend. *smooch*

>261 richardderus: Have a virtual hug. Controlling the urge to doomscroll is hard. Escapist reading is at least more pleasant, but perhaps even less useful. *sigh*

>262 jessibud2: It's utterly unspeakable that we should all, everyone om the planet, be subjected to that grating whine all the time.

As long as no one tries to put the c-a-t-s in my purview, you should only enjoy, Shelley. I'm not required to participate, so go to it!

>263 figsfromthistle: Thanks, Anita. It's a lovely thought.

>264 LizzieD: *smooch*

>265 ArlieS: Any time I try to read something escapist, I am angrier than ever...something in me is abraded by the selfishness I'm displaying, so I judge my actions harshly.

So I'm not escaping at all. I guess my anxiety is not to be ignored in that Fatal Attraction-level determination to be felt. Thank goodness for therapy.

Hugs gratefully returned.

*smooch*

>270 ronincats: *smooch*

Visit my new thread here:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/368112

>261 richardderus: Well said, you. I agree with you. *smooch and a bear hug*

>273 Crazymamie: I'm glad we're in sympathy. *smoochiesmoochsmooch*

>231 richardderus: This is near the top of the TBR mountain RD. She is advisor to a number of crime writers including Val McDermid, and in return they support one of her labs.

>275 Caroline_McElwee: Her talents are huge!