What are you reading now?: June 28, 2025

Currently working on The Turkish War of Independence, Potosi will follow.

Knocked off Rumor Has it (I found it so-so). Now working on Frustrated Ambition, to be followed by Barbary Station.

I'm about 60 pages into the 300-page Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, which is my book group's selection for this month.

I'm almost done reading Full Throttle by Joe Hill, and I've also been reading Recursion by Blake Crouch.

I'm reading The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. It's a very gripping novel.

I am reading The City of Djinns by William Darlrymle

I’m enjoying reading both Saints for All Occasions and Everything is Tuberculosis.

I finished Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy by Anna Politkovskaya. Published in 2004, Putin's Russia is a series of essays by Russian journalist. The book a look at the darkness at the heart of the Russian Federation. The author was assassinated a year after publication.

I'm now reading Looking at Women Looking at War by Victoria Amelina.

The Egg & I – Betty MacDonaled
1*

Betty MacDonald’s “memoir” of her life as a newlywed on a chicken ranch in the Olympic Penninsula area of Washington was a runaway bestseller when it first appeared in 1945. It was made into a movie which also did well at the box office. And MacDonald went on to write additional books.

I remember hearing my mother’s laughter as she read this book when I was a young girl. And I remember watching the “old” Ma & Pa Kettle movies on TV as well. (The characters were a spin off from MacDonald’s book.) I’ve had this book on my TBR since I was a young teen, I think.

But I was highly disappointed in the book. I do not at all like the way MacDonald portrays the local people, especially the Kettles, and really dislike the way she portrays the Native American population. To hear her tell it, they are all “drunk, lazy Indians,” and she isn’t shy about saying how much she dislikes them.

I have to give her credit for making a life “in the wilderness” with the man she loves, despite her own background of relative privilege. She endured a house with no indoor plumbing, a cranky “Stove,” extremes of weather, few modern conveniences. But she was young, fit and intent on supporting her husband’s dream. I loved the descriptions of the excellent food they enjoyed, harvesting from their own garden and from the natural world (clams, fish, game, etc.).

In a forward to the paperback edition, reissued in 1987, her daughters write that MacDonald would probably treat the Native Americans differently “today.” They state that she was just trying to make the best of a situation she found frightening, and that humor was a way to do that. Well, I know times were different then, but I don’t find denigrating others funny or charming or even excusable.

>8 BookConcierge: I played Betty in the play in high school! I recently picked up the book but haven't read it yet.

2025 Christmas-in-July selection,
audio via Libby ~

A Mountain Springs Christmas: A 3-Book Christmas Romance Collection
Christmas ~ Pact / Bet / Clause
by Meg Easton

Started: Behooved by M. Stevenson
Debut fantasy novel

A Cup of Friendship – Deborah Rodriguez
Book on CD narrated by Mozhan Marnò
3***

Also issued as The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul

Sunny is a 38-year-old American woman who has run from her bad choices, and found a “home” in war-torn Kabul, Afghanistan, running The Coffee Shop and (sort of) living with her boyfriend Tommy, who is a mercenary. She has collected a group of locals around her to help run the business, and whom she, in turn, helps, sometimes in defiance of long-held religious and cultural beliefs.

This is the author’s fiction debut, after her memoir Kabul Beauty School . I found it more engaging than the memoir, though Sunny displays some of the same faults the author had in her own memoir – being willfully blind to local customs, beliefs, traditions. Yes, the traditional treatment of women is appalling, but running headlong into the fray seemed not only naïve but extremely dangerous. That her business thrives is mostly due to the ex-pat community that she serves.

I did love Yazmina and Halajan, two of the women who work with Sunny in the coffee shop, and especially Halajan’s forbidden love story. However, one character’s complete turnaround was totally unrealistic.

There are two sequels, but I’m in no hurry to read them.

Mozhan Marnò does a fine job narrating the audiobook. I really liked the way she interpreted Halajan and Yazmina.

I have started reading Murder in her Stocking by G. A. McKevett I guess I am having a Christmas in July

On the Wrong Track – Steve Hockensmith
Digital audiobook performed by William Dufris
3***

Book two in the “Holmes on the Range” series of mysteries set in the American Wild West, circa 1893. The Amlingmeyer brothers are Gustave (Old Red) and Otto (Big Red), iterant cowhands but with aspirations to become detectives. Well, Gustave has the aspirations fueled by the stories of Sherlock Holmes, and Big Red takes on the role of Watson. This time out they’ve hired on as “Pinkertons in disguise” to ride the Southern Pacific and fend off the Give-‘em-Hell Boys, a notorious gang of robbers recently plaguing the railroad.

I really like this series, and I sure do wish I hadn’t waited so long to get to this second episode. In addition to the brothers, Hockensmith populates the books with an array of interesting and colorful side characters. One of the best things about the series is Hockensmith’s way with words. Here are some examples:
”When so much is sumptuous and shining, the gaudy spectacle of it is enough to make you forget, just for a moment, the ramshackle shoddiness of your everyday world.”

“I hadn’t just put my foot in my mouth – I’d dipped it in arsenic first.”

“I would say he was three sheets to the wind, only I think he had a good many more sheets a -flapping than that.”

William Dufris does a fine job of narrating the audiobook. I love the way he interprets the Amlingmeyer brothers, particularly Otto, who narrates the story..

A little early, but the new thread is up over here.