What are you reading the week of July 24, 2021?

I'm reading Earth System History right now, and probably will be for a few weeks.

So, I finished up Soviet T-62 Main Battle Tank this morning. I'm about a third of the way through Middlegame. I'm finally going to have a copy of Metazoa in my grubby little mitts in the course of the day. Picking at a number of digital books online, but they're really part of next month's reading agenda.

Picked up The Ninth Life of Louis Drax by Liz Jensen. Saw the movie years ago and finally decided to read it.

still reading Ancestral Night and mostly still ignoring The Mists of Avalon and Neuromanceer.

Just finished reading the fantastic collection of short stories, Some New Ambush.

Next up for reading is Like A Sword Wound by Ahmet Altan.

I'm getting close to finishing The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley. It's been an enjoyable girl power adventure!

My latest is Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

Finished listening to the excellent What Strange Paradise.

Next up for listening is The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen.

Finished The Heron, an LTER.

This one teetered on the edge of being a very good book indeed, but needed one more merciless editing. Roberts has dumped every ghost story / time travel / pop-psychology trope she can find into the mix and, not surprisingly, sometimes has problems balancing them all.

Next up is The Invisible Life of Addy LaRue, which I started at more or less the same time as the LTER. Bad choice. They both deal with time travel, and Addy LaRue is such a good book that The Heron may have seemed a bit more tarnished than it really is, just by comparison.

I finished Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. I'm sorry it took me so long to finally read this sad, poetic wonderful novel. My further review can be found on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

I've added Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams to my "between book" stack, and I'll soon be starting Scoundrel Time, Lillian Hellman's memoir of her run ins with HUAC and subsequent blacklisting.

I'm still having trouble concentrating on books, so I ordered a couple of books for my reader by authors who have never yet failed to engage me. So I read The Wedding Party by Jasmine Guillory
and Dream Girl by Laura Lippmann. Both of them were just right as cures for the reading blues.

Am now reading a novel by Val McDermid called Dead Beat. McDermid is another of my never-fail authors. I'm also testing out Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia edited by Anita Heiss, which is a series of pieces by Aboriginal authors.

Just finished The Maidens by Alex Michaelides. I really liked his debut novel The Silent Patient, but this was so unsatisfying and the ending so out of leftfield that I won't be reading any future works of his.

Finished The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, and it was just terrific. It will definitely be on my Best of 2021 list

Now I have a question -- do you ever find a book in your TBR stack, and think "Where in the world did this come from?" It usually turns out to be a "mercy read" that somebody gave you with the best of intentions and you take it to keep from hurting their feelings and eventually it floats to the top. At least, that happens at my house. Does it happen at yours?

In fact, it happened this week. Something called The Glendower Legacy, which apparently was passed along by my mother, heaven knows why. It's a spy-vs-spy novel about a long-lost document from America's Revolutionary War era. I struggled with it for one evening before discarding it -- just not my genre. Nor my mom's. The mystery continues. She won't remember why she gave it to me (memory issues). So it just goes into the trade stack.

Up next is Nowhere Else on Earth, which is set in a Native American community in the south during the Civil War. Looks interesting. At least I recognize this one as something I requested from my swap group!

As far a drama, it's just been Shakespeare recently.
with
Henry IV part I - Finishing up after a couple of months. Generally the history plays are a bore, But the Henry IVths and Richard III are great.
And
As You Like It - I'm cast in a film adaptation by Shakespeare In The Woods, a theater company in Vermont. I'm Corin, the country shepherd. Sweet little part providing shelter to Rosalind and Celia and trading wit with Touchstone.

Mystery:
Last Bus to Woodstock - Colin Dexter
My First Inspector Morse... only so so.

No short fiction this time around.

Enjoying this audiobook via hoopla ~

Even If It Kills Her: A Bailey Weggins Mystery, book 7
by Kate White

I finished Vineyards Can Be Murder. A friend gave it to me since her cousin had written it.
It is a mystery centered around a vineyard as the title implies. I'm not particularly a fan of mysteries, and it seemed to start out slowly but did build up suspense and mystery as it progressed. I found myself caught up in the action.

I finished The Book of Kells: Art -- Origins -- History by Iain Zaczek. This is a coffee table book, with relatively brief text but lots of full color illustrations, describing this amazing late 9th Century Book of Gospels created by Irish monks, most probably on the Island of Iona. You can find a bit more info on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

I'm now on to Scoundrel Time, Lillian Hellman's memoir of her experiences with the House Unamerican Activities Committee.

>17 rocketjk: Will be interested in your opinions on Scoundrel Time!

Started: The Fallen Kingdom by Elizabeth May (YA)
The finale and #3 in the "Falconer" trilogy

Just finished the heartbreaking and wonderfully written debut Crying in H Mart, a memoir by musician Michelle Zauner. One of the bests of the year.

Christmas On the Island – Jenny Colgan
Digital audiobook narrated by Sarah Barron
3***

Originally published in the UK as An Island Christmas

From the book jacket: It’s a time for getting cozy in front of whisky-barrel wood fires, and enjoying a dram and a treacle pudding with the people you love – unless, of course, you’ve accidentally gotten pregnant by your ex-boss and don’t know how to tell him…. Will Flora find the nerve to reveal the truth…? Meanwhile Saif, a doctor and refugee from war-torn Syria is trying to enjoy his first western Christmas with his sons on this remote island where he’s been granted asylum. … Travel to the beautiful northern edge of the world and join the welcoming community of Mure for a Highland Christmas you’ll never forget!

My reactions
There’s quite a lot going on in this book, #3 in the Mure series. I think I might have had an easier time of it had I read the first two books before tackling this one, as Colgan generally builds relationships over the course her series.

I do like the characters around which she builds her plot. Flora and Joel, Lorna and Saif, and the many residents of Mure who form a tight-knit community and are always ready to help out. Not every story line has the perfect HEA ending, but that’s true to life. It’s still a charming, story set against a holiday season that raises expectations and sometimes sees our dreams come true.

Sarah Barron does a fine job of narrating the audiobook. There are many characters to voice and she has the skills to pull it off.

The Old Gringo – Carlos Fuentes
1*

The novel is framed as the reminiscence of a woman. An old journalist heads to Mexico during the time of the Mexican Revolution seeking, not a story, but his death. He joins with a band of Pancho Villa’s guerilla fighters, led by General Tomas Arroyo, and witnesses events as they destroy all but the mirrored ballroom of a great hacienda. There he encounters a white woman, Harriet Winslow. Harriet had been hired as a governess for the owner’s children, but they had all fled by the time she arrived from the US, and now she is stranded and yet determined to stay and defend the property as best she can.

There has been much praise for this work; it was the first translated work by a Mexican author to become a bestseller in the United States. But I had great difficulty engaging with the characters and the plot, such as it was.

Fuentes interrupts the action with long stream-of-consciousness soliloquies by each of his characters. Some of these consist of one long sentence that takes more than a page of text to get through. Now, I’ve read other works with a similar technique – Jose Saramago’s works come to mind – and I’ve enjoyed them. But in this book, I felt that these interludes did nothing so much as interrupt the meager story and make me like the book even less.

Then there are the sex scenes. I’ll say this for Fuentes, he doesn’t pull any punches. But he also has NO IDEA how women think or what motivates them to act the way they do. These are nothing but a macho man’s fantasy. Enough said.

The Old Gringo in the story is based on Ambrose Bierce, an historical figure who disappeared shortly after he travelled to Mexico during that country’s revolution. But the name is mentioned only once towards the very end of the book.

One final note about the title of the English translation. The originally titled book in Spanish is Gringo Viejo, which does NOT include an article. So, the English title should not have that leading “The” either. A small irritation.

Utopia Avenue
David Mitchell
4/5 stars
This story revolves around the band Utopia Avenue and follows the story of the members of the band as they try to break into the main stream music business during the hey days of rock and roll in late 1967 and early 1968. The author also has them interacting with real musicians from that time period. Mitchell doesn’t disappoint in his latest novel.

I finished Scoundrel Time, Lillian Hellman's memoir of her harrowing experience with the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the repercussions the episode had on the rest of her life. I highly recommend it. I've posted a longer review on my 50-Book Challenge thread. I've also finished off a few "between books" (collections, anthologies, etc., that I read one story/entry at a time between the books I read straight through) which I will also be posting about soon. Those are:

Sorry for Your Trouble, a collection of short stories by Richard Ford, and

Adventures of Captain David Grief (a.k.a. "A Son of the Sun"), a collection of stories about the title character, a wealthy, Bruce Wayne-like South Seas adventurer, by Jack London.

Cheers!

I have just finished reading the novel THE WHITE TIGER by author ARAVIND ADIGA

.

The new thread is up over here.

Silver Tears by Camilla Lackberg

The Vines by Shelley Nolden