Books Read 2015

Once again (2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009,2005, 2004, 2003, and 2002), I’ve kept track of what I read this year.

January

Strange Shores (2010/US 2014) by Arnaldur Indridason, in the Inspector Erlendur series, set in Iceland. This one differs from others in the series because it isn’t a police novel; it’s the story of Erlendur’s investigations into a missing person event from the past. Matthildur — a woman who lived in the town in which Erlendur grew up — went missing during a blizzard, but her body was never found. As Erlendur relentlessly questions the few people still alive who may know what happened, he also relives the day when he, his younger brother, and his father were lost in a blizzard, from which his brother never returned. The book is haunting, atmospheric, beautifully written. Not a traditional crime or suspense novel.

Borderlines (1990) by Archer Mayor, 2nd in the Joe Gunther series. This one is set in the fictional town of Gannett in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. The plot involves a back-to-nature cult that’s bought a lot of the real estate in town and runs the thriving restaurant, and a town divided for and against them.

Scent of Evil (1992) by Archer Mayor, 3rd in the Joe Gunther series. This one is set in Brattleboro, VT, where Lt. Gunther is based, and involves drugs, politics, wealth, and sex, an includes a high-speed chase, several shoot-outs, an unusual torturous death, and mistrust inside the police department. Good.

Objects of Desire: The Lives of Antiques and Those Who Pursue Them (1993) by Thatcher Freund. NF. Read for a bookgroup.  One of the more boring books I’ve read (and finished) in a long time. If you like the TV show “Antiques Roadshow,” you will probably like this; if not, not. The book weaves the stories of three main pieces of American furniture – an 1750s American blue blanket chest made in Connecticut, a 1750s Chippendale card table from Philadelphia, and an inlaid sofa table made in Salem MA, of the Federal period (around 1800) — with the stories of many American collectors, dealers, buyers, restorers, sellers, pickers, and auctioneers incuding Henry Ford, Henry Du Pont, Joseph Hirshhorn, Bill Stahl, Allan Breed, Wayne Pratt, Fred Giampietro, Israel, Albert & Harold Sack, George Samaha, twins Leslie and Leigh Keno, and others. Structured well and written serviceably (though a bit over-the-top in places) but the topic, items, and people are just uninteresting to me.

February

The Brothers K (1992) by David James Duncan, a novel about the Chance family, obsessed with baseball and religion (Seventh Day Adventist), headed by two strong parents, with four sons and two daughters coming of age in the 1960s. As many reviews say, it’s at times very funny and very moving. By turns a philosophical treatise, a page from Sporting News, a family confessional along the lines of Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors, an epistolary novel, a travelogue of India, a Vietnam war memoir, etc., it’s a complex family saga fueled by pain, loss, eccentricity, and an all-embracing love.

Fruits of the Poisonous Tree (1993) by Archer Mayor, #5 in the Joe Gunther series. In this one, Joe’s longtime girlfriend and a town selectman, Gail Zigman, is raped, leading not only to pain and suffering for Gail and Joe but also to “a media frenzy due to her political prominence, his involvement in the case, and her refusal to hide behind a shroud of anonymity.” Set mainly in Brattleboro, but also in Thetford, where Joe’s mother and brother, Leo, live.

The Dark Root (1995) by Archer Mayor, #6 in the Joe Gunther series. The focus in this book is on rival Asian gangs, who are moving illegal aliens, guns, and drugs from New York and Boston to Montreal, and doing violent home invasions, money laundering, and protection rackets. Joe works with the Border Patrol, the FBI, and the Canadian Mounties chasing rival gangs from Brattleboro to Montreal to White River Junction & West Lebanon NH, which was interesting for me, as I know this area and could picture the (on-foot) chase scene quite well.

The Ragman’s Memory (1996) by Archer Mayor, #7 in the Joe Gunther series. Plot involves the discovery of the body of a troubled teenager from out of town, a planned convention center, political bribery and manoeuvering, a missing local activist, and a World War II vet with PTSD in a nursing home, who may have seen the killer.

A Spool of Blue Thread (2015) by Anne Tyler. A book spanning generations of the lives of Abby and Red Whitshank. Set in Baltimore, of course. Lovely, as always.

March

Bellows Falls (1997) by Archer Mayor, #8 in the Joe Gunther series.  Set in Brattleboro, Bellows Falls, and Burlington, with police forces from each town involved, the plot revolves around a controlling man who has created a network of drug sellers in various Vermont towns; he comes to the attention of the police here after he accuses a Bellows Falls policeman of having an affair with his wife, and then that policeman is found to have cocaine in his urine and in his house. One online reviewer of another book in the series describes it as “solid noir mystery” and “an offbeat New England tour guide, too;” next time I take the train through Bellows Falls, I will see it differently.

The Book Thief (2006) by Markus Zusak, for a bookgroup. I wasn’t excited to read it, knowing it was another book about World War II, and while it is set in Nazi Germany from 1939 to 1943, it’s a smaller, more personal novel than that. The tone – seemingly simplistic, but also self-consciously cryptic, or so it felt — was off-putting at the start but I quickly came to appreciate the narrator’s voice. The writing is moving, sometimes amusing, and elegantly understated, laconic, not dramatic, and simply factual at times, which makes it deeply stark and spare. I like that the novel employs the opposite of foreshadowing (often annoying in novels): future events are stated directly, not hinted at in or insinuated in some shadowy way meant to make the reader anxious. The plot centers on Leisel, a foster child of almost 10 when the story starts., who comes to live in a town outside of Munich with foster parents who are large-hearted, “good in a crisis,” and very poor.  I don’t want to give away any more of the story. I liked it a lot.

The New American Landscape: Leading Voices on the Future of Sustainable Gardening (2011), ed. by Thomas Christopher, with essays by Rick Darke, Eric Toensmeier, Toby Hemenway, Doug Tallamy, Elaine Ingham, et al., on permaculture, natives vs. non-natives, managing soil health, waterwise gardens, green roofs, gardening for wildlife, meadow gardens, the Sustainable Sites Initiative, the sustainable edible garden, climate change gardening, and while system garden design. Uneven but useful. The chapters on soil (surprisingly), wildlife gardening, and the discussions among several essays on natives vs. exotics were most useful for me.

The Disposable Man (1998) by Archer Mayor, #9 in the Joe Gunther series. This started out as a police procedural, with the twist along the way that Gunther is being investigated for theft, but the second half was a Russian spy thriller. Set in Brattleboro, West Townshend, Middlebury, the Northern Kingdom, all in Vermont, and in Washington DC. I could have skipped it. I guess there really isn’t enough ordinary crime in Brattleboro — even imaginary crime — to inspire more than a few crime novels without having to resort to Chinese gangs and the Russian mafia.

Still Alice (2007) by Lisa Genova, about Alice Howland, PhD., a cognitive psychology and linguistics professor at Harvard, who, at age 50, starts noticing memory lapses (forgetting to do things and not realising she has forgotten, getting lost in a familiar place, etc.) and soon learns she has early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Told from her increasingly confused point-of-view, with her husband and 3 grown kids as the other major characters. A quick read, a powerful story.

Breaking Creed (2015) by Alex Kava, starting a new series, I think, featuring charismatic dog search-and-rescue trainer and handler (and ex-Marine) Ryder Creed, who lives with his dogs in Pensacola FL; but FBI agent Maggie O’Dell — the protagonist of anotehr of Kava’s series — also has a big role in this book. Lots of extremely well-trained dogs of all breeds in this book, as well as traumatised military vets, and drug-trafficking, child-trafficking, and torture with fire ants, spiders, and scorpions.

Occam’s Razor (1999) by Archer Mayor, #10 in the Joe Gunther series. Set mostly in Brattleboro, though also in Montpelier, and in Portland, ME, with focus on political wrangling, hazardous material dumping, and the murder of a man killed by a train on railroad tracks and of a drug-using woman stabbed in her own home. Gail and Joe are working out their relationship, too.

The Attack (2005) by Yasmina Khadra (aka Mohammed Moulessehoul), originally in French. The novel takes on the themes of integration and assimilation, identity, terrorism, tolerance, sacrifice, healing and killing, happiness and suffering as it tries to come to terms with what creates a suicide bomber. Central is Dr. Amin Jaafari, a Muslim from a Bedouin tribe who has moved up in life to become a wealthy Israeli, a professional (a surgeon) living in Tel Aviv. The novel raises many questions about conflict, terrorism, and how we identify ourselves (and how others identify us) but for me it fails to really provide any complex understanding as to why Amin’s wife becomes a suicide bomber. That may be what’s intended; there are theories floated by many characters in the novel, but she doesn’t really match any of them, and Amin’s blindness as to who she truly was may represent our own in some way.

April

All the Light We Cannot See (2014) by Anthony Doerr. Novel, for a bookgroup. Set mostly in France (also Germany, Russia) from 1934-1944, during World War II, following two stories, that of a blind girl, Marie-Laure, very interested in natural history and raised by her puzzle-making father, who is evacuated to her eccentric great-uncle’s house in Saint Malo, a walled French city attacked by the Germans in August 1944; and Werner Pfennig, an orphan boy who lives with his sister in a small orphanage near Essen, Germany, until he is chosen to attend the National Political Institutes of Education, an elite Reich school, where he excels in electronics. Many themes and motifs, including  mazes, birds, bees, the natural world generally, entropy, locks and keys, blindness and seeing, value derived from nature (coal from dead plants, diamonds from carbon), the past in the present, etc. A fast, readable book, but felt to me simplistic in terms of good and bad, heroes and villains.

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (2014) by Atul Gawande. Non-fiction. Gawande, a surgeon, writes about aging, independence, assisted living and nursing homes, dying, conversations to have about dying and medical care, and death, including his father’s recent death. It’s a topic that interests me and his writing is compelling, except for the middle section about nursing homes, the rise of assisted living, and the various forms assisted living can take, which was dry. He’s best when talking about how doctors and patients avoid important discussions of desires, fears, and how voicing desires and fears helps people (patients, families, doctors) make good choices from among confusing medical options, especially when all of the options carry major and perhaps unknown risks and downsides. The PBS Frontline show with Gawande on this topic is excellent.

 May

The Paying Guests (2014) by Sarah Waters. Set in a genteel 1922 post-war suburb of London, Champion Hill, this novel centers on 26-year-old Francis Wray — whose voice and thoughts basically narrate the third-person story — and her mother, who own a house but have been left with little money to maintain it, and their paying guests, Lilian and Leonard Barber. Len works as a clerk in an insurance company and seems to leer at Francis a lot. His and Lilian’s marriage is tumultuous. An NPR review sets out the basic conflict: “Frances has it bad, and that’s not good. Normally she’s an intelligent, reliable, resourceful young woman, a companion to her widowed mother, keeper of the large house on Champion Hill in which the two of them rattle about, now that the men of the family have died. But then Frances falls in love, and the carefully wrought edifice of her life collapses in a heap of passion and catastrophe.” Very readable, but also quite predictable.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry (2014) by Gabrielle Zevin. Funny, light novel about a curmudgeonly, widowed, young bookseller, who, through a series of events, has his life changed. Set on Alice Island, apparently off Massachusetts, the novel starts with a new publisher’s rep traveling  on a ferry to meet the bookseller, but soon we follow his life more than hers, until they come together again. I read this book in about 3 hours … quite light, yet surprisingly emotional at times.

Tucker Peak (2001) by Archer Mayor, in the Joe Gunther series. Southern Vermont ski resort has big problems, with protestors, drug dealers, embezzlers, etc.  I lost track of who the bad guys were, and why, part way through and never really got re-engaged.

I Remember You (2012) by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir (who writes a crime series featuring attorney Þóra Guðmundsdóttir ): Set in Iceland. Two plots alternate, chapter by relentless chapter, one involving three Rejkjavik twenty-somethings — a couple and their recently widowed female friend — who buy an abandoned house in the deserted and very remote fjord village of Hesteyri, reachable only by ferry in good weather, hoping to renovate it and use it as a B&B, and the other plot focusing on a psychologist who lives in the large fjord town of Isafjordur and whose 6-year-old son went missing two years previously.  The stories are complex and the reader glimpses how they might intertwine, but to tell anymore would be to give away too much. Ghost stories and plots with supernatural explanations don’t do much for me, though this one is well-written, certainly atmospheric, and held my interest most of the time. There are really no happy characters among the cast of dozens.

June

Bad Debts (1996/2013) by Peter Temple, the first in the Jack Irish series, set near Melbourne, Australia. Involves horse racing, gambling, government corruption, and basically men with guns and secrets to hide. I got lost with the large list of characters, the plot twists, and I had to look up some Australian terms and slang. The book was very put-downable – reading it over 2 weeks might be why I got so lost. I’ll try the next one and see if it’s more compelling.

Everything I Never Told You (2014) by Celeste Ng, a debut novel, set in the 1970s, about a family whose members struggle with secrets, silences and unspoken longings, regrets, betrayal, little cruelties, feeling different and outcast. The death of just-16-year-old daughter Lydia, who drowns in a nearby lake, is the focus of the plot which looks back to the parents’ first meeting as well as studying the contemporary events around her death.  Reminds me of an Anne Tyler novel, if her novels were set in a midwest college town and explored what being American and looking Chinese felt like. The book explores longing and loss in depth. 5th-grader Hannah — used to being ignored, noticer of everything — is my favourite character.

July

Of Love and Other Demons (1994) by Gabriel García Márquez, a short novel set in a South America seaport around 1750. Told from the point of view of others, the story is about 12-year-old Sierva Maria, “the only child of a decaying noble family,” raised mainly by the black slave women, who is bitten by a dog who has rabies. Although she never develops symptoms of rabies, she is outcast, feared, and treated as though possessed by a demon by the clergy and others. In essence a book about our terror and vicitimisation of “the other.”

A Stranger in Mayfair (2010) by Charles Finch. Amateur detective and wealthy MP Charles Lenox, newly married to Lady Jane, takes on the murder of a friend’s footman when asked; but then the friend and his wife tell him in no uncertain terms to lay off the case. Set in Victorian London. Not terribly exciting but an OK read.

The Sea Garden: A Novel (2014) by Marcia Willett. About a young artist, Jess, who, through coincidence, comes to live with a family that she learns is related to her own family. Set in contemporary England on the Devon coast, the book uses flashbacks — including repetition of paragraphs two or three times when characters are remembering or thinking about what we’ve already been told — to tell a story about family, friends, betrayal and forgiveness. A gentle read, with lots of adultery. Too many characters for me to follow well but I liked the pace and slice of life feeling of the book.

The Sniper’s Wife (2002) by Archor Mayor, #13 in the Joe Gunther series. This one focuses on Vermont detective Willy Kunkle, whose ex-wife has died, and takes place almost solely in NYC, but ends at the defunct naval prison in Portsmouth, NH. We learn more about Kunkle’s Manhattan childhood, his family now, and his time with the NYPD and in Vietnam, as well as about neighborhoods in NYC, particularly the Lower East Side and Washington Heights. Joe and Sam come to town when Willy is arrested in a random bust of an illegal club. Plot pretty straighforward: Willy suspects Mary’s death wasn’t suicide or an accidental overdose, as it seems, and delves into the case with the help of the law and outside it.

The Gatekeeper (2003) by Archer Mayor, #14 in the Joe Gunther series. The  Vermont Bureau of Investigation is pulled into the case of the hanging of a drug addict and a young woman’s drug overdose in Rutland, VT, by the governor in an election year, expected to stop the flow of heroin into the state. Before Joe can really get going on the case, agent Sammie Martens goes undercover in Holyoke, MA hoping to gain info to make the VBI valuable to the locals and the state police. The plot focuses on Sammie organising a drug ring with criminals in Rutland, and to a lesser extent on agent Lester Spinney’s suspicions about his own teenaged son’s drug use. Joe doesn’t have much to do with the crime cases, but he and his off-putting girlfriend Gail are in another bad place together as she shuts him out after her niece is killed trying to rob a convenience store for drug money. Set in Holyoke, MA, and Brattleboro, Springfield, and Rutland, VT. The ending is a bit anticlimactic but in a realistic way, which is nice for a change.

Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (2013) by Daniel James Brown. The phrase “epic quest” really told me all I needed to know — that’s one of the types of stories I like least — but I read it because it was a bookgroup choice. It’s mostly well-written and well-structured, though repetitive, but the main problem for me is how predictable it is. Not just the history — what’s going on in Germany then, the Dust Bowl and Depression in the U.S., the perceptions of the elite East vs. the rugged West, how the ultimate boat race turns out — which of course we know now, but the predictability throughout of the boys’ characters and actions. They are not only portrayed as thoroughly “good” but the author can’t seem to think of enough synonyms for “good”: loyal, perseverant, committed, humble, honorable, graceful, civil, “good men, one and all.” It’s a pleasant, nostalgic, readable book, with a lot for the novice to learn about rowing. I felt like I’d read a light novel when it was over, though admittedly with some darkness lurking around the edges. The most interesting aspect for me are the details about the propaganda-driven framing and filming of the Olympics.

A Fall of Marigolds (2014) by Susan Meissner, a romantic novel set in New York City 1911, 2001, and 2011, interweaving the stories of two young women, the main one about nurse Clara Wood, who worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company at the time of the fire in 1911, and the secondary one set in contemporary times, about Taryn, co-owner of a specialty fabric store, whose husband died in the North Tower in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Both stories are about Love, with a capital L, and how it motivates us; both stories, particularly Clara’s, quite romantic in the sense that she is all emotion and imagination for 99% of the story.  A light beach read, even though the plot is anchored by the twin tragedies.

Practical Permaculture for Home Landscapes, Your Community, and the Whole Earth (2015) by Jessi Bloom and Dave Boehnlein. A good review of what I’ve mostly read in other permaculture books. Lovely photos. Emphasis on designing a permaculture garden, your own or a client’s. The chapter on soil was better than average on the topic. Read and discussed over a few months with a group.

The Wild Wisdom of Weeds (2014) by Katrina Blair, read for permaculture bookgroup. Blair writes first about her background and how she lives in and views the natural world, then devotes a chapter to each of “13 Essential Plants for Human Survival,” which are amaranth, chickweed, clover, dandelion, dock, grass, knotweed (polygonum aviculare), lambsquarter, mallow, mustard, plantain, purslane, and thistle. Food, medicinal, and beauty recipes are included. “The Earth’s Principal Rivers and Their Tributaries” on page 12 was one of my favourite parts of the book. She speaks a lot about seeing problems as resources and about creating abundance, and about the life force and “wild intelligence” of wild plants becoming part of us when we ingest them. Equal parts woo-woo with practical, useful information.

August

The Corsican Caper (2014) by Peter Mayle, a novel set in Marseilles and Corsica, mainly. Pretty bad. The plot and drawing of characters is incredibly simplistic. For example, when Sam decides to stand in for someone whom a brutal, murderous Russian has contracted to kill, Sam’s wife says, Well, OK, but be careful, and another character, whom Sam has just met, suggests that her beloved dog be part of the entrapment. Both of these reactions seems beyond belief to me, but on the other hand, the reader feels absolutely no sense of tension at all, so why should the characters?  The plot is that a rich Russian man wants the home of billionaire Francis Reboul and will stop at nothing to get it; meanwhile, Reboul’s friends plot (at many dinners, lunches, and other festive occasions) to outwit and entrap the Russian.  The only thing that kept me reading was the continuous descriptions of eating and drinking along the beautiful south of France. Mayle seems much better at non-fiction than fiction, based on having read this book and having seen his Year in Provenance.

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1994) by Laurie King, first in the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series. I almost put the book down after reading the contrived preface and prelude but read on because someone had recommend these books to me. In the end, I liked it well enough. The writing is good. The novel is set during WWI (1915 to 1919 in this case) in England as well as briefly in the middle east, mainly Palestine/Israel, and it is made up of a sort of caper, then a serious kidnapping case, and then a case that brings mortal danger to Holmes and Russell; I would have preferred one mystery but I accept that the author wanted the reader to see Mary Russell’s evolution as a sleuth as well as the evolution of Russell and Holmes’ relationship through these cases. I haven’t read any of the original Conan Doyle stories about Holmes, so perhaps many allusions were lost on me.

A Monstrous Regiment of Women (1995) by Laurie King, second in the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series. I guess I liked this better than the first one but it was still very put-downable. Lots of romantic thoughts by Mary about Holmes, which come to fruition of a sort in the end. At the crux of the story is Margery Childe, a charismatic spiritual leader of The New Temple of God, a sort of mystic suffragette group, in Whitechapel, London, which Mary is introduced to through her college friend Veronica Beaconsfield; several of Childe’s followers have died recently, leaving large sums of money in their Wills to The Temple.

A Letter of Mary (1996) by Laurie King, third in the Russell/Holmes series. This one involves an acquaintance of theirs, an amateur archaeologist,  who gives them a box and a manuscript she’s brought from Jerusalem and is soon after run down on a London street. Russell and Holmes (now married) both go undercover to investigate separate areas of inquiry.

The Moor (1998) by Laurie King, fourth in the Russell/Holmes series, this one set in Dartmoor in the southwest of England, where Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles was set.  The aged eccentric Rev. Baring-Gould has asked them to investigate an unexplained death on the moor and sightings of a ghost coach and dog. Again Russell and Holmes largely work independently on separate aspects of the investigation, with the bulk of the novel following Russell’s movements and thoughts.

That Distant Land (2004) by Wendell Berry, a book of 23 short stories about the people of Port William, KY, set from 1888 to 1986. Read for bookgroup. Excellent, lovely, moving, compassionate, funny stories about Tol and Minnie Proudfoot; Andy and Wheeler Catlett; Burley, Nathan, Hannah, and Thad Coulter; Elton Penn; Ben and Mat Feltner; Mart and Art Rowanberry; Danny Branch. Stories of hunting and tracking in the woods, tobacco harvesting, hog killing, whiskey drinking, the introduction of the Model A, dying and death, inheritance, going to the fair, selling livestock, parade floats, courting. Several predominant themes: mortality, getting lost and being found, memory, nostalgia for times past, forms of farming and technology, the farm vs. the city, small town life and community, what makes life worth living.

O Jerusalem (1999) by Laurie King, fifth in the Russell/Holmes series, this one set in Palestine/Israel, including in Jericho, Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem, in 1919, as the British are starting to leave the area after the war. Holmes and Russell are disguised for 90% of the book as Bedouin men and are accompanied through the book by brothers Ali and Mahmoud Hazr. My least favourite, a bit of a slog through the Arabic speaking, the landscape descriptions, the tunnel description, the coffee prep ritual twice daily, etc.  Glad I read it, though, because the characters reappear in her next book, and also because it provides some detailed political history of this highly volatile part of the middle east.

Justice Hall (2002) by Laurie King, 6th in the Russell/Holmes series, set mostly at a British manor house, and briefly in Canada. Marsh Hughenfort (aka Mahmoud Hazr from the previous book), younger brother of the Duke of Beauville, has returned to England as dutiful heir after his brother’s death, along with his cousin Alistair (Ali Hazr), who seeks Holmes’ and Russell’s help to unearth another heir so Marsh can relinquish the heavy title and go back to Palestine. Much of the book concerns unraveling the mystery of what happened to young Gabriel Hughenfort, the late Duke’s only son, who was executed during the last days of the Great War.  I liked the setting, and descriptions of the over-the-top fancy dress party with ancient Egyptian theme, but the plot was weak and some of the characters (especially the women) felt caricaturish.

The Game (2004) by Laurie King, 7th in the Russell/Holmes series, this one set in British colonial India as Mycroft sends Holmes and Russell to look into the 3-year disappearance of Kimball O’Hara (“Kim” from the Rudyard Kipling novel). Again Russell has to disguise herself as a man, again she has to hunt animals (instead of bird hunting as in Justice Hall it’s wild boar hunting — or pig sticking — here), again she and Holmes are largely separated and doing independent investigations, again a very large house is as much character as it is setting. The book has several distinct settings of activity: a 2-week shipboard to start with, a road journey near Delhi on foot with magic show and costumes, a languid time spent in a huge home in Khanpur (in disguise and out of it), and time spent with British government operatives. The maharaja at the center of the plot is a cruel, manipulative, sociopath whose behaviour heightens the suspense.

The Sweet Dove Died (1978) by Barbara Pym: Read in a few hours, another wonderful novel of the subtlety of relationships and motivations by Pym. A middle-aged woman befriends a man of about her age and his nephew, preferring the attentions of the nephew, who lavishes her with attention until he first meets a girl his own age and then a boy of about his own age. Rivalry, envy, jealousy, narcissism (mirrors abound), selfishness, greed, fear of aging and appearing vulnerable, and other interesting emotions and behaviours fuel the superficially simple story.

September

Dear Life (2012) by Alice Munro, a collection of short stories plus a few snippets of memoir.  On the plus side, I like her unemphatic, sometimes plotless way of writing. I like the disorientation so many of her characters seem to feel. Some of her turns of phrase are genius. On the other hand, most of the stories in this collection feel like they were crafted for a creative writing class. Admittedly, they’re better than most of what you’d find in such a class, but there is a writerly feeling about them that gets in the way of the stories for me. They feel less like real life and more like a constructed ideal of stories about conflict, mistakes, regrets, vices, fatal flaws. Probably in a few years I will recall some snippets and wonder where I read them. “Gravel” and “In Sight of the Lake” were my two favourites.

The Locked Room (2005) by Laurie King, 8th in the Russell/Holmes series, this one set in prohibition-times San Francisco, as Russell (Holmes with her) spends a couple of weeks reacquainting herself with her old home in the city, her family’s lake house; meeting the son of her parents’ Chinese servants; remembering the 1906 earthquake and fires; trying to get to the bottom of three dreams that have troubled her recently; and in the course of investigations, enlisting the help of detective and writer Dashiell Hammett. If you have an interest in San Francisco in the early 1900s, you’ll find this book provides an intriguing combination of ambiance and facts.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884/1999 – Norton 3rd Critical Edition) by Mark Twain. For bookgroup. Funnier than I expected, quicker and easier to read than I expected with the regional language and dialect, but I still don’t understand how this is considered a major classic. It’s the story of a teenage boy, living in the rural mid-west/south (Missouri), who because of his age, upbringing, and circumstances is somewhat of an outsider to the culture, observing the culture through eyes that are at times naive but always sharp. Early on, Huck escapes his violent father by taking off on a raft down the Mississippi from Illinois through Kentucky and Arkansas. He’s accompanied by Jim, a runaway slave, and runs into some characters along the way, like the shysters “the Duke” and “the King,” and into the feuding Gragerfords and Shepherdsons, before eventually meeting up with Tom Sawyer again. The Mississippi River is also a character in the book.

The Language of Bees (2009) by Laurie King, 9th in the Russell/Holmes series. Set in England, in Sussex and London, and a little in Orkney, an island off Scotland near Scandinavia. Started off well, with much about bees and beekeeping that was interesting, but before too long, I lost interest in the plot. The crime story is centered on a religious cult figure and his book, Testimony, and one of his followers, Yolanda, a woman from Singapore who happens to be the wife of Holmes’ newly found (again) son, Damian Adler, a surrealist artist to whom drug addiction, violence, and mental health issues are no stranger. Holmes seemed completely out of character in this one, barely heard from and when he was, all mushy about his grown son and fondly reminiscent about Irene Adler, the boy’s mother. One long section of the book is taken up with Mary’s harrowing flight in a small plane from London to Orkney; of course, flight was a new thing, and not for the faint of heart (which great pains are taken to show that Mary is not) even without wind, rain, a hungover pilot, a time crunch, and lack of landing strips. The book doesn’t really end, just says “to be continued.” Unsure whether I will.

October

The God of the Hive (2010) ) by Laurie King, 10th in the Russell/Holmes series. I should have followed my instincts at the end of The Language of Bees. I tried to read this book, for six weeks, never choosing it over anything else to read, finally getting to about page 250 before giving up. I lost interest pretty early on, when a toddler becomes a central character and Mary suddenly devotes her life to protecting this child. That’s the last one in this series I’ll be reading.

Devil’s Bridge (2015) by Linda Fairstein, #17 in the Alexandra Cooper series, except Alex is only present in about half the book, before being kidnapped. NYPD detective, and now Alex’s lover, Mike Chapman narrates the rest of the book as he and fellow detective Mercer Wallace try to find her and figure out a motive for her disappearance, taking us to the Manhattan waterfront — including Liberty Island, and Fort Washington Park (with Jeffrey’s Hook lighthouse) at the George Washington Bridge in their search on land and sea. The switch in POV worked fine for me, though the reason for her kidnapping was slightly implausible to me.

November

The Nightingale (2015) by Kristin Hannah. (For a bookgroup.) Yet another novel set during WWII, this one centers on two estranged sisters, one single, willful, and living in Paris and the other settled with husband and daughter in the village of Carriveau. The best of this book is that it takes the reader almost day by day (or so it felt) through the daily grind and frequent horror of living in France from 1939 to the Nazi-occupation, starting in the summer of 1940, through the end of the war in 1945, and then 50 years into the future as one of the sisters, living in the U.S., is invited to a ceremony in France (present time occupies only a few brief chapters interspersed throughout the book). Women populate the book and the action; the men — other than a couple of Nazi officers, the sisters’ father in Paris, and a few French resisters — are absent, mostly off fighting, while the women are living on inadequate food, medicine, clothing, and heat rations; unwillingly billeting and feeding Nazis in their homes; burying friends and children; trying to find homes for orphaned Jewish children when their mothers are taken away; afraid to speak to or look at each other for fear of being turned in for some crime. The sense of how long it all dragged on, how hopeless it seemed when each month or so something more frightening, horrifying, disheartening, or debilitating happened, is driven home.  There is also quite a lot about running a Resistance escape route for downed Allied soldiers through the Pyrenees. Still, for some reason, I wasn’t really engaged in the story (I struggled to keep reading the book over three weeks) or the characters. I think it felt a bit predictable: good Nazi, bad Nazi; hiding places in barn and convent; simple comparison-contrast between the sisters’ personalities and actions, though of course both are depicted as heroines; melodrama rather than nuance at every turn. Even the sisters’ moral dilemmas and choices, and their feelings about their choices, which are played and replayed numerous times, feel hyped and fabricated. It’s mainly an adequately plotted linear story meant to demonstrate the strength of women in a crisis and to depict the hardship and terror of that time and place, diminished by a shallow romance and cliche characters, without the lyrical writing and complex themes of All the Light We Cannot See.

Thérèse Raquin (1867) by Émile Zola. A very dark psychological novel of utterly destructive violence, set in a dark, fetid corner of Paris. Thérèse Raquin is married to her cousin, the sickly, spoiled, self-absorbed Camille, by their selfish and possessive aunt, but even before this occurs, she has felt suffocated and repressed by cousin and aunt; the marriage brings things to a head, and when she feels her blood rising for Laurent, a thick-necked, lazy, calculating man, it’s not long before they are lovers. The book read like a morality play infested with an Edgar Allen Poe story of horror and cruel irony. As others have noted, the four temperaments hypothesis of the time is prominent: Thérèse is melancholic, Laurent is sanguine, Camille is phlegmatic, and Madame Raquin (the aunt) is choleric; motivation deriving from “blood” and “nerves” is repeatedly described. The central idea of the novel is that violence, once unleashed, destroys all.  Resentment (and its consequences) is another major theme, as well as imprisonment (claustrophobia, suffocation, paralysis), punishment (confession, guilt, revenge, hauntings), obsession. I grew weary of it about halfway through; the characters seemed unreal, simply stand-ins for psychological traits and reactions.

December

The Nature of the Beast (2015) by Louise Penny, 11th in the Inspector Gamache series, set in the village of Three Pines, Quebec, which can’t be found using a GPS. This book is based loosely on a true story, of Gerald Bull, a scientist and arms designer who created a massive missile launcher as part of the Babylon project. Gamache (now retired), Isabelle Lacoste, and Jean-Guy Beauvoir investigate after a young boy — who has found a huge gun in the woods and bursts into the bistro to tell everyone — is murdered. Elements of other stories are interwoven:  an American who fled to the town to escape serving in the Vietnam War, two strange Canadian intelligence service agents with secrets they won’t share, and, most interestingly to me, Gamache’s past service at the secret trial of a cruel killer — his role, as a citizen not associated with the case, to represent all Canadians and to hear, see, and absorb the horror of the crimes. The plot is complicated and though the ending made sense, it wasn’t very satisfying or elegant.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014) by Naomi Klein, non-fiction, for a group. We read this over about 10 weeks and eventually decided it wasn’t worth spending 2 hours per week discussing. There is really nothing substantially new here. If you are already someone who is aware of climate change and environmental politics, you may not know all the names (of people, corporate and non-profit entities), numbers (lots of them!), or the complicated relationships among “green” groups, politicians, and fossil fuel companies, and the anecdotes may be unfamiliar, but you will already know the gist of the book, which is that we are no where near doing anything as a planet about climate change, and our destructive ideologies and practices concerning energy usage, materialism, endless growth, etc., are already ruining the planet. If you are not into this stuff, or are a climate change skeptic, you will likely be turned off by what she says and how she says it. Her main suggestion for change is for all of us to become active locally, globally, in politics, in organizations, in big ways, collectively (not by simply turning off lights at home or using transportation less), to change policies, politics, culture, particularly in western, capitalist countries that use the most fossil fuel resources and emit the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, all in the name of progress, growth, jobs, military defense, and freedom. As I said, nothing new, and quite a slog through the weeds to get there.