1. A Quiet Life in the Country (Lady Hardcastle Mysteries #1) by T E Kinsey
I grew up reading Nancy Drew and Trixie Beldon mysteries. Lady detectives are my jam! I have always thought that I would make an awesome detective. Lady Hardcastle has moved to a small English town with her maid, Armstrong. She is somewhat recently widowed and Hardcastle and Armstrong (very masculine names, I just noticed) have had adventures before that they allude to. The two women are friends as well as being employer and employee. It's a relationship that the upstairs and downstairs people find inappropriate.
On their very first brisk walk through the country, Lady Hardcastle and Armstrong find a body hanging from a tree. What?! Yeah, a little convenient. But there are fun clues like the tipped over stump being too short for the man to stand on and still be hanging from the rope. The game is on for the two women.
It's a fun, harmless mystery with no questionable language, some humor, and nothing gory. I enjoyed the audible version, although I did have a hard time keeping so many characters straight.
I can't remember where I saw this, but on some list Fifth Business was called a classic in Canadian literature. What? Canadians have classic literature?! Just kidding! Of course they do. Why wouldn't they. I love reading classics from other countries to get perspective. I'm not sure yet what this book says about Canada, though.
The narrator of Fifth Business is a man named Dunstan Ramsay. He's a war hero, a teacher, a scholar, and a magician. More like a connoisseur of magic and miracles. Ramsay's life path is diverted one day when he is a boy and he dodges a snowball with a rock in it. The snowball hits the preacher's wife, Mary Dempster, who is very pregnant, in the head. Mary is never the same and Ramsay has the guilts like no one in the history of ever. Mary goes crazy, the baby is premature and sickly, the marriage gets ugly. Ramsay tries to help and he's bad at that.
Luckily (?) Ramsay goes off to World War I where he miraculously survives a terrible battle. After the war Ramsay comes back to his hometown. His interest in saints and miracles and magic has made him an easy mark for bullies. For some reason he stays friends with the kid who threw the snowball, spoiled rich guy "Boy" Stauntan. Ramsay is Boy's confession booth for their whole adult lives. Boy is as bad at being an adult as he was at being a kid. Boy marries the prettiest girl in town, makes a lot of money in plastic (I think - I know he made money), cheats on his poor wife and does a weak imitation of a father to his kids. Why does Ramsay stay friends with such a man? Because Ramsay is Fifth Business!
"Who are you? Where do you fit into poetry and myth? Do you know who I think you are, Ramsay? I think you are Fifth Business. You don't know what that is? Well, in opera in a permanent company of the kind we keep up in Europe you must have a prima donna - always a soprano, always the heroine, often a fool; and a tenor who always plays the lover to her; and then you must have a contralto, who is a rival to the soprano, or a sorceress or something; and a basso, who is the villain or the rival or whatever threatens the tenor.
So far, so good. But you cannot make a plot work without another man, and he is usually a baritone, and he is called in the profession Fifth Business, because he is the odd man out, the person who has no opposite of the other sex. And you must have Fifth Business because he is the one who knows the secret of the hero's birth, or comes to the assistance of the heroine when she thinks all is lost, or keeps the hermitess in her cell, or may even be the cause of somebody's death if that is part of the plot. The prima donna and the tenor, the contralto and the basso, get all the best music and do all the spectacular things, but you cannot manage the plot without Fifth Business!"
Isn't that awesome?! And Ramsay does do most of those things that Fifth Business does. I found the second half of the book much darker than the first half, but it was pretty dark all throughout. Not vulgar, but dark. So interesting and a really great ending.
This is another brilliant historical non-fiction picture book by Brian Floca. This time he's brought his poetry and amazing illustrations to the story of Apollo 11. Floca manages to describe the roar of take-off and the silence of the moon so well that it made me a little emotional. When I read this to Emil and Colin and I had to pause to pull myself together they both turned their heads quickly to see what was wrong with me. Nothing! Just reading a good book. :)
Candice Millard is one of my favorite authors. She writes about stuff I want to read! And she's really good at it. Thanks to her I know what a Boer is! (A person living in South Africa who has English, Welsh, Portuguese, and Spanish ancestors.)
Even when he was very young, Winston Churchill wanted to be prime minister of England. His plan was to be awesome in a battle setting. That was his ticket! He tried to put himself in the most dangerous possible situations during colonial wars in India and the Sudan, but no dice. It was as a journalist covering the Boer War in South Africa in 1899 that Churchill finally had his moment.
Churchill is on a train (sitting duck for the enemy) that is derailed and everyone is taken prisoner, including Winston. It's not the worst prison - the Boers wanted to prove to the Englishman that they were not savages. Churchill wrote letters home and complained to everyone who would listen, and some who would not, that he should not be a prisoner of war! He's a journalist, not a soldier! But wait, he had a gun and he was leading the soldiers away from the train wreckage to safety... Churchill hears a couple of friends planning an escape and he's suddenly part of their plan. He's so loud, though! He's going to ruin everything! Ha! And he lives up to his reputation.
But! Churchill does escape and it's so thrilling I couldn't even stand it. Who knew?! Just like when I read about American heroes, Churchill appears to have been groomed for a long time to be at the right place at the right time having the right experiences to mold him. This is just a really cool book.
5. The Emperor and the Kite by Jane Yolen
"Largely ignored by her own family, Princess Djeow Seow spends her days playing with a kite made from paper and sticks. But when the Emperor is imprisoned in a high tower, only the Princess can save the day, flying her kite high up into the sky to rescue her father."
My boys are mesmerized by books like this. Something about another culture and the stakes being high for a kid speaks to them. The illustrations in this one are amazing.
6. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
I saw a trailer for the movie of this that comes out in December. It looked so stylish and cool and I love Agatha Christie mysteries (my jam, again). Then I saw that Johnny Depp is in it and I thought, "Meh. I'll read the book." Why is he so puffy and gross now?
Anyway. A train, the Orient Express, gets stuck in a snow drift and messes up a murderer's plan to kill a guy and get away with it. Now the murderer has to deal with Hercule Poirot being a passenger on the train and being awesome at solving mysteries. The crime is laid out, every person is interviewed, the reader has a reason to suspect pretty much everyone.
I have to agree with another sassy Goodreads critique of this book - it's not my favorite Agatha Christie because there is NO WAY to solve the mystery. It's SO convoluted! Come on! I enjoyed it anyway, but I like to at least have a chance of solving the puzzle.
This kitty loses it when she's told that her favorite foods are all gone and she's left with only 26 yucky vegetables in alphabetical order. In her rage, the kitty eats homework, bites Grandma, claws the curtains, and so on until she gets to letter Z.
Colin reads everything. Out loud. He reads every minute he can before school, on the bus, after school, in the van. I try not to stop him, but sometimes he needs to get dressed and eat and other stuff. I couldn't contain my laughter when he was reading this book. It was cracking him up and he had to stop and laugh several times. Adorable! It's fun to have a kid who is obsessed with reading.
This is a book about the refugees who made their way to the ships who would take them to safety. Sepetys focuses on a little group whose paths converged along the way. Each of them has a terrible story of loss and some have regret added to their loss. It's gut-wrenching and then it gets worse. They're all desperately trying to get on the ship the "Wilhelm Gustloff," an intended luxury liner that could accommodate 1500 people. More than 10,000 refugees were crammed onto the boat, which was then torpedoed by the Russians. Thousands of people died. I'd never heard of it. How could I have never heard of it?! I've read lots and lots of books about WWII, fiction and non-fiction. That's still crazy to me!
This is Young Adult Historical Fiction. I happened to ask one of my 12 year-old friends what her favorite book was and she said Salt to the Sea. What?! This is pretty heavy stuff. The author does a great job of putting us there and giving us different perspectives that are usually left out of official histories.
Along with lady detectives, food stories are also my jam. We eat every day. We have strong rituals and memories that surround food, but it's never the focus of biography or life story unless the biography is about a chef.
I'm FASCINATED by everything that has to do with a food story. Preparing food for someone else is an act of love. Just last night I made rolls, roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, and steamed carrots with fresh basil. Few things give me more satisfaction than the perfection of that particular Sunday dinner. Making that meal well is my favorite way to show my love for my family.
In What She Ate, Laura Shapiro combs through William Wordsworth's sister Dorothy's diaries to get her food story. When Dorothy was young and living in a cottage with her brother while he wrote, she mentioned food in her diary at least every day. They had a garden, she got fresh bread from a local bakery, they got meat from a neighbor with a farm. Happiness! Later when William gets married, Dorothy no longer talks about food, but she becomes obese and a "victim" starved for attention. I find that so interesting.
My favorite sidebar in this book was in Rosa Lewis's food story. Lewis started out as a scullery maid and worked her way up to being the most celebrated chef in England during the Edwardian days. Lewis had nothing good to say about any of her contemporaries, but she gushed about Juliette Gordon Low's cook. (Juliette Gordon Low is the founder of the Girl Scouts. She was married to William Low, they had lots of money and they traveled the world. Gordon Low was from Savannah Georgia and she was born in 1860. Her cook was an African American slave.) I tried to find the cook's story, but it didn't exist. Isn't that remarkable, though? Southern food is very distinct and specific and they're proud of it. But, whose story is it? The slave cooks who made it? The people who ate it? What does the food say about them? (I found a book that is next on my To Read list about this very subject! I can't believe it exists!)
I thought the best chapter, food story-wise, was Eleanor Roosevelt's. She got into the economics of food for the home, but she was never a good cook. She and Franklin didn't even dine together. Eleanor employed a cook who was TERRIBLE at the White House and I think it was her way of sticking it to Franklin for cheating on her. Food is love. Food is also not love.
10. Solving the Puzzle Under the Sea: Marie Tharp Maps the Ocean Floor by Robert Burleigh, illustrated by Raul Colon
Marie Tharp's father was a mapmaker and she was taught to think big. Tharp looked at the ocean as a puzzle that needed to be solved. No one had ever tried to map the ocean floor, but Tharp wanted to try it. She spread out a huge piece of paper and researched all the measurements that had ever been made of the ocean floor. Slowly she put the puzzle together and made the map.
The book ended a little too abruptly, I thought. But, the illustrations are AMAZING. They look like they are part of a map. And anytime I can introduce my children to women like Marie Tharp, I'm happy to do it.
11. The Prestige by Christopher Priest
I watched the 2006 Christopher Nolan movie with Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale that was "based" on this book in August. Actually I watched it one and a half times. It was on while I was having a sew day and I couldn't find anything else. I kept pausing in my work and watching it. I have a hard time watching movies when I'm not doing anything with my hands. But I was completely engrossed in The Prestige.
In fact, so engrossed that I needed more. I listened to the Audible version of the book. It was the same basic story, two rival magicians in the late 19th Century who play escalating pranks on each other. The book starts in the 1990s with descendants of both magicians still feeling the effects of this long ago toxic relationship.
The movie came out 11 years ago, so I'm not spoiling it by saying that Christian Bale's character achieves his greatest illusion, The New Transported Man, by being identical twins with his double. The "trick" is always the simplest solution, but audiences want to be amazed so they come up with crazy theories about how the things are done. Same in the book - Hugh Jackman's character (Robert Angier) is so convinced that it's actually Alfred Bordon reappearing in another place on stage that he becomes obsessed with trying to figure out how he did it.
There is a very key difference in the book about how Angier tops Bordon's Transported Man. It still involves electricity (which was new at the time), Nikola Tesla, and creating a facsimile of himself that needs to be disposed of. But the difference BLEW MY MIND. The movie gave me the cold chills, but the book had such an unexpected twist. I don't know. It was deliciously spooky. Halloween reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment