BIASED: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do by Dr. Jennifer L. Eberhardt

 Finished Xmas Day Mo 12/25/23

I saw this book in a scene of the Netflix series 'GANGS OF OSLO'. 

The best example of hidden prejudice is when women and minorities complained that they were not properly represented in orchestras across the world. Management instituted 'blind auditions' where the judges were not allowed to see or hear musicians before they played. They were behind a curtain. After this change, minorities and women were more fairly represented. 

From the book's page at Kirkus Reviews:

"An internationally renowned expert on implicit racial bias breaks down the science behind our prejudices and their influence in nearly all areas of society and culture.

MacArthur Fellow Eberhardt (Psychology/Stanford Univ.; co-editor: Confronting Racism, 1998) challenges the idea that addressing bias is merely a personal choice. Rather, “it is a social agenda, a moral stance.” Relying on her neuroscientific research, consulting work, and personal anecdotes, the author astutely examines how stereotypes influence our perceptions, thoughts, and actions. Stereotypes, such as “the association of black people and crime,” are shaped by media, history, culture, and our families. A leader in the law enforcement training movement, Eberhardt recounts high-profile cases of police shooting unarmed black people, and she documents her own fears as a mother of three black sons. Though “more than 99 percent of police contacts happen with no police use of force at all,” black people are stopped by police disproportionately and are more likely to suffer physical violence. Only a tiny fraction of officers involved in questionable shootings are prosecuted, and convictions are rare. Through her work, the author teaches officers to understand how their biases inform their interactions with the communities they are charged with protecting and serving. She shares informative case studies from her work with Airbnb and Nextdoor, an online information-sharing platform for neighbors, when bias among the sites’ users led to racial profiling and discrimination. Eberhardt also looks at bias in the criminal justice system, education, housing and immigration, and the workplace. A chapter on her visit to the University of Virginia after the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville is, much like the book as a whole, simultaneously scholarly illuminating, and heartbreaking. Throughout, Eberhardt makes it clear that diversity is not enough. Only through the hard work of recognizing our biases and controlling them can we “free ourselves from the tight grip of history.”

Compelling and provocative, this is a game-changing book about how unconscious racial bias impacts our society and what each of us can do about it."

THE WRONG SIDE OF GOODBYE by Michael Connelly

 Finished Th 12/21/23

I had read this novel before but not this particular book. I probably have several duplicates of books by Connelly. 

Two Cases:

1) An eighty-five year old billionaire asks Harry to locate an heir. When the man went to Vietnam he had a girlfriend that might have been pregnant. She was and Harry locates this woman and her daughter. 

2) 'The Screen Cutter Rapist'- A man who was once a cop becomes a Los Angeles housing inspector. He's able to target the women's houses while on a legitimate housing inspection.

Maddie is in college and Harry recommends that she keep a dog bowl on the back step. This alerts burglars that there is a dog in the house. He wants to make sure that she keeps water in the dish to further 'sell the idea'. 

From the book's review at Kirkus Reviews:

"Harry Bosch, balancing a new pair of gigs in greater LA, tackles two cases, one of them official, one he struggles to keep as private as can be.

Now that he’s settled the lawsuit he brought against the LAPD for having forced him into retirement, Harry (The Crossing, 2015, etc.) is working as an unsalaried, part-time reservist for the San Fernando Police Department while keeping his license as a private investigator. Just as the San Fernando force is decimated by the layoffs that made Harry such an attractive hire, it’s confronted with a serious menace: the Screen Cutter, a serial rapist with a bizarre penchant for assaulting women during the most fertile days of their menstrual cycles. Ordinarily Harry would jump at the chance to join officers Bella Lourdes and Danny Sisto in tracking down the Screen Cutter, and he does offer one or two promising suggestions. But he’s much more intent on the private job he’s taken for 85-year-old engineering czar Whitney Vance, who wants him to find Vibiana Duarte, the Mexican girl he impregnated when he was a USC student, and her child, who’d be well past middle age by now—and also wants him to keep his inquiries absolutely secret. Harry’s admirably dogged sleuthing soon reveals what became of Vibiana and her child, but his discovery is less interesting and challenging than his attempts to report back to his client, who doesn’t answer his private phone even as everyone around Harry is demanding information about the case he doesn’t feel he can share.

Grade-A Connelly. The dark forces arrayed against the hero turn out to be disappointingly toothless, but everything else clicks in this latest chapter of a compulsively good cop’s odyssey through the City of Angels and its outlying neighborhoods and less angelic spirits."

MR. IVES' CHRISTMAS by Oscar Hijuelos

 Finished Mo 12/18/23

This is one of my hardbacks that I had never read, but I'm so glad that I finally got around to reading it. 

Pronounced: Oscar 'Eee- way- los'

Although it is Christmas themed, it is NOT a Christmas novel. 

A man reviews his life. He was a foster child who is adopted by a man who was also a foster child. 

He becomes an illustrator in NYC during the fifties and sixties.

His son wants to become a priest. Both father and son are practicing Catholics and their faith is deep and not corny. 

Christmas Theme: He marries the love of his life around Christmas and his son is murdered during the Christmas season. 

From Google Books: 

"When we first meet him in the 1950s, Mr. Ives is a devoutly religious man who, despite his beginnings in a foundling home, has fashioned for himself an enviable life. A successful Madison Avenue advertising illustrator, Ives is married to a vivacious, artistic woman, Annie, who shares his aesthetic passions and religious beliefs. Together they raise their children, Robert and Caroline, with remarkable fair-mindedness and moral judgment. Ives, who knows nothing of his own natural ancestry, is profoundly drawn to the Spanish cultures and language that have begun to flourish in 1950s New York City. Even after he has risen to a vice-presidency at the advertising agency, he continues to live in his unfashionable neighborhood in Upper Manhattan because he feels at home among his multi-ethnic neighbors, especially his closest friend, Luis Ramirez, and his family. But Ives' perfect world is violated when seventeen-year-old Robert is gunned down by a teenage thug at Christmas, just months before the young man is to enter the seminary. Having once considered himself as possessing "a small, imperfect spiritual gift", Mr. Ives finds himself lost without his son, doubting not only the foundations of his life but his belief in God. Overwhelmed by grief and threatened with a loss of faith in humankind, Ives must wrestle with his doubts and struggle to regain spiritual peace, perhaps even embracing the troubled young man who stole Robert's promising life." 

MEMORY MAN by David Baldacci

 Finished Fr 12/15/23

This is a hardback that Janny loaned me. It's another Amos Decker book and I was surprised to learn that his is the first book in this series!

Amos was injured in a football game and after the tackle he was able to remember everything. He also is able to 'see' colors that represent emotions. 

His wife, daughter, and brother-in-law were brutally murdered and in this book you find out 'why' and 'who'.

 There is a school shooting and this killer is linked to the Decker murders. 

A young hermaphrodite was raped and nearly killed and this trauma caused her to have more 'brain power' like Amos's condition. 

The hermaphrodite appears in the novel both as a man and a woman. 'She/He' interacts with Amos as a man and a woman and he is unable to recognize the deception until later.

This person targets Amos because in therapy (they both were treated for their 'advanced brain power) Amos said that he wanted to become a policeman and this enraged the hermaphrodite. 

She shoots up the school and kills the men that were responsible for her rape.

The school is near an abandoned military installation and this facility was crisscrossed with tunnels that were planned to be used as bomb shelters in the fifties. Amos is able to deduce how the shooter was able to commit the crimes.

An evil German is actually manipulating the hermaphrodite to make her kill.

Amos is able to kill them both. 

From the book's page at Kirkus Reviews:

"Perennial bestseller Baldacci unveils an offbeat hero with an unusual skill set and tragic past who takes on the evil mastermind behind a devastating school shooting.

Amos Decker went off the rails 15 months ago when the Burlington police detective returned home from his shift to find someone had cut his brother-in-law’s throat, shot his wife, Cassie, in the head, and strangled his 9-year-old daughter, Molly. The case still hasn't been solved, and in his grief and despair, Decker leaves the police department. After a bout with homelessness, he settles in as a small-time private investigator operating out of the hotel room in which he also lives. The 42-year-old Decker is overweight and out-of-shape, but he was once a professional football player. During his time in the NFL, he took a hard hit, and the traumatic brain injury induced a rare condition known as hyperthymesia—he can’t forget any detail about anything he experiences. When his former partner, Mary Lancaster, tells him a man named Sebastian Leopold has confessed to killing his family, Decker lies his way into the jail to see the guy. At the same time, a bloody school shooting takes place at his old stomping grounds, Mansfield High School, leaving many dead. The FBI shows up and the BPD brings the obese ex-cop in as a consultant. But could everything be connected? Once Decker starts unraveling the threads, it begins to look like it, and soon he’s following trails that no one but he can see, much less interpret. The killer’s motive seems tenuous, at best, and the killer’s trail is difficult to follow, but Decker, who has no discernible social skills and a tendency to abruptly disappear, proves a quirky, original antihero with a definite method to his madness.

Although the crimes and their perpetrators are far-fetched, readers will want to see Decker back on the printed page again and again." 

I am going to check the library and see if more books in the Decker series are available in Ebooks. 

THE MAN WHO LIKED TO LOOK AT HIMSELF by K.C. Constantine

 Finished Mo 12/11/23

An excellent short novel from the early 70's by a writer that I really liked. The novel features racist assertions and a negative attitude toward gay characters. But, these were accurate feelings of many people at the time and it was kind of refreshing to hear, although it did seem very 'out of touch'. 

From the author's page at Wikipedia:

"Carl Constantine Kosak (1934 – March 23, 2023), better known by the pen name K. C. Constantine, was an American mystery author.

His most famous creation is Mario Balzic, police chief in fictional Rocksburg, Pennsylvania. Rocksburg is a by-product of Kosak's hometown McKees Rocks, as well as the nearby cities Greensburg and Johnstown. Kosak is much more interested in the people in his novels than the actual mystery, and his later novels become ever more philosophical, threatening to leave the mystery/detective genre behind completely. In 1989 Constantine was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel for the Mario Balzic novel Joey's Case. In 1999 Booklist ranked Blood Mud among the year's best crime novels, saying (along with Brushback) "Constantine has given us two more superb police procedurals and a wonderful opportunity to renew our acquaintance with one of the most memorable characters in contemporary crime fiction."

From the book's page at Wikipedia: 

The Man Who Liked To Look at Himself is a crime novel by the American writer K. C. Constantine.[1][2] The novel is set in 1970s Rocksburg, a fictional blue-collar, Rust Belt town in Western Pennsylvania (modeled on the author's hometown of McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, adjacent to Pittsburgh).

Mario Balzic is the protagonist, an atypical detective for the genre, a Serbo-Italian American cop, middle-aged, unpretentious, a family man who asks questions and uses more sense than force.

As the novel opens, Balzic and Lt. Harry Minyon of the state police are hunting pheasant at the Rocksburg Rod and Gun Club when, after Minyon's dog bites Balzic, the dog uncovers a piece of human bone that shows signs of having been hacked apart.

It is the second book in the 17-volume Rocksburg series.

CINAMAN'S CHANCE by Ross Thomas

 Finished Su 12/10/23

This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I had never read. Ross Thomas is an excellent writer and I hope that Artie Wu and Quincy Durant are part of a series. 

The story concerns a missing woman. She was part of a singing group- 'Silk, Ivory and Satin'. 

Criminals are trying to take over an entire town on the California coast. They plan to make it a 'Sin Mecca' for the United States. 

From 'complete-review.com': {It offers an excellent synthesis of a very complex plotline}

"      Chinaman's Chance features Arthur 'Artie' Case Wu and Quincy Durant, longtime friends -- they grew up in (and the fled) the same orphanage when they were kids -- who have long been business partners, with 'business' being a stretch for some of the things they've gotten involved in. As someone who gets to know them, and the way they operate, comes to sum up:

they were rather interesting men -- certainly different, if not wholly admirable. But then who the hell was ?

       Wu has (entirely incidentally -- but it adds to the quirky color Thomas plays with throughout the novel) a vague claim to being the pretender to the throne of China, possibly being a direct descendent of the last emperor, P'u Yi, and their path has taken them far and wide -- from a year at Princeton to landing in jail in Mexico, to joining the Peace Corps and being stationed in Indonesia, then heading to Bangkok and cashing in on the Viet Nam war and then running a chili restaurant in Scotland.

       Now they're in California, Durant renting a house on Malibu Beach, while Wu lives with his wife and their two sets of young twins not too far away. The novel opens with Wu jogging on the beach, as he's been doing for some two months now, and tripping over a dead pelican, twisting his ankle. Conveniently, if not at all coïncidentally, he falls near a man walking his six greyhounds -- Randall Piers -- who offers to help him; Wu notes that his partner (conveniently, if not at all coïncidentally ...) lives right there, and Piers helps Wu into Durant's beachside house.

       As is quickly evident, everything has pretty much been staged so that the two partners can introduce themselves to Piers, and he can get a quick impression of them. Right down to the pelican, it turns out (which took a while to find, delaying their plan). From the furnishings to the Reuters newsprinter in the corner, they want Piers to see exactly what they're capable of and willing to do. They even mention one of their current projects: they've been offered a map of where a couple of million dollars lies buried in Saigon, money that was supposed to have been burned when the Americans ended their involvement in the Viet Nam war and fled the country, and they dangle it in front of him; Piers doesn't bite -- but then he's not really supposed to.

       Piers has a problem that he's been struggling with. He is married to one of the three Armitage sisters, who enjoyed great popularity as the singing group Ivory, Lace, and Silk -- their actual names. His wife, Lace, has gone on to movie stardom, and Ivory is dead, but Silk has disappeared from view -- ever since the congressman she was involved with died in what was ruled a murder-suicide, supposedly killed by his wife. Silk arranges to regularly receive some money from Lace, but she's gone underground and doesn't want to be found; she's obviously concerned that what the congressman was looking into could get her killed too. Lace and Piers want to find her, hoping to be able to better help her, but they've failed so far; after his run-in withWu and Durant Piers thinks they might be the two fellows for the job.

       The Viet Nam money-deal and the missing singer turn out not to be entirely unrelated, as Thomas spins an elaborate tale of connections and ambitions -- to cash in, as well as for retribution ("Retribution, not revenge. There's a difference"). It all leads and points to local Pelican Bay, where someone has established themselves in a variety of ways, exerting and consolidating control (and with inconveniences including the congressman in whose district Pelican Bay is conveniently swept out of the way), with very big plans for the future. Wu and Durant's experiences -- and the people they associated with -- in South East Asia play a role here too, with Durant having suffered greatly when things went south (and Wu having gone in and saved him) and now finding an opportunity to at least exact a bit of ... retribution (and to possibly cash in, big time, as well).

       The plan Wu and Durant hatch is an elaborate one, with different stages to it -- some only figured out once they get there -- but it unspools nicely. The final coup is the riskiest, Wu laying it out for Durant -- "It took Artie Wu nearly an hour and forty-five minutes to outline his ideas" -- and observing with considerable satisfaction:

     Wu smiled. "I thought you'd like it."

     "You know what the odds against it are ?"

     Wu shrugged. "We've got a Chinaman's chance."

     "That bad, huh ?"

     Wu stuck a fresh cigar into his mouth and around it grinned a big, wide, white, merry grin. "Nah," he said. "That good."

       There are some plausibility issues in how it all plays out -- a bit too neatly --, as indeed there are for most of the way, but this is a small flaw in an otherwise very enjoyable twisting ride. Thomas unfolds what's going on piece by piece, as the various plots -- what the various figures are after and how they're going about reaching those ambitious ends -- are only revealed (or figured out) piece by piece; it's especially satisfying to see how thought-through Wu and Durant's plan -- much bigger than initially suggested -- turns out to be. It all gets to be a bit much, and a bit too conveniently interconnected, but it's still a load of fun.

       Beyond that, however, what really makes the novel is the characters and how they're presented -- their attitude, their wits, their failings (and their histories). There are shades of grey to most -- though quite a few are definitely only in the darkest spectrum. Most everyone can be bought, if the price is right -- but the price is often very high. From the main bad guys to the police chief who isn't quite the patsy the powers-that-(would-)be hoped to the secondary and tertiary supporting cast and cameos, Thomas nails a lot of this just right. Wu and Durant, too are well-presented: a lot of colorful history, and then a good glimpse of their present-day demeanor, but not over-stuffed characterization. Confidence has a lot to do with it -- a lot of the characters are very self-confident (several of them way more than is good for them), which makes for entertaining encounters. And the real sad saps -- such as the self-sabotaging journalist who never made the big time (but knows a lot of the local secrets) -- fit in nicely too.

       One or two touches are a bit off -- Durant and the ladies (well, the surviving Armitage sisters) is hard to pull of well, and Thomas doesn't quite manage -- but otherwise Chinaman's Chance is really consistently well done. Yes, the plot is overly convoluted -- working, just, out, but also only because the sheer range and complexity allows Thomas to leave it fuzzy enough at its many edges -- but it's also pretty satisfying. And it all is a good deal of fun."

RADICAL CHIC & MAU-MAUING THE FLAK CATCHERS by Tom Wolfe

 Tu 12/4/23 

I watched the Netflix biopic on Tom Wolfe and I noticed that I had a copy of one of his non-fiction books in the stacks.

In two days I skimmed to the end of 'RADICAL CHIC' and glanced through 'MAU-MAUING'.

'RADICAL CHIC' is about a party that Leonrd Bernstein ('Stein'! not 'Steen') hosted for the Black Panther Party at his sumptuous townhouse in 1970. Wolfe is explaining the irony of armed radicals linking with some of the richess members of Manhattan's High Society. I thought that he was fair to both parties. 

He draws comparison to Marie Anntoinette's 'love' of the poor. She built a poor farm at her estate so that she could pretend that she was 'one of the people'. 

Wolfe would say that he was 'for the opposition' when asked if he was 'Left' or 'Right' politically. I like that. 

'MAU-MAUING' deals with the corruption in The Office of Economic Opportunities in San Francisco. 

I liked Tom Wolfe's fiction much better, but his non-fiction is well worth a look.   

DEMON COPPERHEAD by Barbara Kingsolver

 Finished Mo 12/4/23

This was a hardback that Janny loaned me. A terrific story and won a Pulitzer Prise and was an Oprah Winfrey Pick. 

The book is a harrowing tale of a boy's negative experience with the South's 'foster care' system in Appalacia, but some of the novel is hilarious. 

"Demon says that he had a teacher that looked like a shrunken head in a dress".

"Who in the world would name a boy child 'Woodie'? "Don't worry, he'll have a new nickname when he's five". They both say, "hard-on". 

From the book's page at Wikipedia:

"The protagonist and narrator is born Damon Fields to a teenage mother in a trailer home. He is raised in Lee County, located in Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, and nicknamed "Demon Copperhead" for the color of his hair and his attitude. As Demon grows up, he must use his charms and wits to survive poverty in the contemporary American South."

The only compliant that I could have was that 'Demon' seems so self assured and intelligent, but I guess that's the point. Sometimes highly pressurized environments can produce diamonds. 

I have a note to find more books by barbara Kingsolver.  

TINSEL by William Goldman

Refinished Su 11/26/23 

This is what was on the flyleaf of this ancient hardback; "Finished Sa 1/8/00-  First book completed of the last year of the century". 

There were so many characters and conflicting plotlines that I found it confusing. Also, it's a mix of real actors from the seventies and fictional characters from the mind of the author. This might have been mind blowing fifty years ago, but it's a little lame today. This was my least favorite novel by Goldman. 

From the book's page at Kirkus Reviews:

"Screenwriter Goldman (Butch Cassidy, etc.) is at his unputdownable best in fiction when using his slick knack for atmosphere and zippy dialogue as texture for genuine suspense--as in Marathon Man. In this bitchy Hollywood gossipfest, however, the only suspense is: Who will be cast as the lead in a film about Marilyn Monroe's last days, a role that Raquel Welch has already turned down because of the extensive nudity involved? Will it be desperate ""Pig"" Higgins--the bosomy sometime actress and ""hooker without portfolio"" who's shacked up in Vegas with the has-been rock-star who's doing the music for the picture? Or will it be sultry Ginger Abraham--long-ago victim of anorexia nervosa and bisexual ex-starlet, the only woman who ever really reached famed womanizer Julian Garvey (n‚ Garfinkel), who is producing this last movie (he's dying) along with his semi-catatonic son? Or will it be likable Dixie Crowder, ex-TV star (Daisy Mae in the Dogpatch series) now married to a millionaire Hollywood dentist-tycoon who loathes show-biz and will leave Dixie if she even thinks of acting again? Without any more plot than that, Goldman can only bounce around from character to character, filling in their sleazy show-biz backgrounds and mostly sleazy sex lives. Just about all of this is standard issue (especially the teen sex), with such predictable motifs as Pig's disastrous attempt at a breast-lift. . . a heavy irony right out of Valley of the Dolls. So why will Tinsel be read by many who eschew the pulp it so clearly resembles? For Goldman's stunningly cadenced, often hilarious movie-biz dialogue; for his mean-spirited, no-punches-pulled slashes at the business that has made him rich, complete with names named and other hinted; and for the occasionally inspired details of characterization and atmosphere (the opening chapter is dandy), which remind us that Goldman can be something like a real novelist when he tries. With so much going for it, Tinsel is never less than readable; but it can be read just about as well backwards as forwards--because this time Goldman has brought his bag of tricks and left the other talents at home. (By the way, in a cheap ending to a cheap book, Barbra Streisand gets the part, and Pig shrieks: ""With those tits is she gonna play it?"")".

THE FIX by David Baldacci

 Finished Tu 11/21/23

This is a hardback that I borrowed from Janny. It might be my favorite novel by Baldacci. 

'THE FIX' is the third book in the Amos Decker series and there are six books in the series.

"Amos Decker is shocked when he witnesses a crime right outside FBI headquarters: a man kills a woman on a busy sidewalk, execution style, before turning the gun on himself. As Decker replays the incident in his head and looks into the case, it only gets more and more puzzling. The victim and the shooter aren't connected at all, and there's no motive. Then the Defense Intelligence Agency gets involved and Decker is ordered to stand down, but rather than step back, Decker begins working with the DIA to solve this case, which has higher stakes than anyone realizes."

CENTRAL QUESTION: Why would a man shoot and kill a woman he did not know, and then turn the gun on himself?

 Amos Decker has two superior abilities: 

1) Hyperthymesia is an ability that allows people to remember nearly every event of their life with great precision.

2) Synesthesia- the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body. Example: When you hear music you see colors. Alex Decker 'sees' the color blue when someone is dying. 

From Google Books:

"Amos Decker, David Baldacci's unique special agent, who suffered a head injury that resulted in giving him the gift of a remarkable memory takes on another case in The Fix. Walter Dabney is a family man. A loving husband and the father of four grown daughters , he's built a life many would be proud of. But then the unthinkable happens. Standing outside the FBI Headquarters in Washington, D C, Dabney shoots school teacher Anne Berkshire in cold blood before turning the gun on himself. One of the many witnesses is Amos Decker; a man who forgets nothing and sees what most miss. Baffled by what appears to be a seemingly senseless and random killing, Decker is thrust into the investigation to determine what drove this family man to pull the trigger. As part of an FBI special task force, Decker and the team delve into the lives of Dabney and Berkshire to find a connection that doesn't seem to exist. What they do find are secrets that stretch back a lifetime and reveal a current plot of impending destruction that will send the world reeling, placing Decker and his team squarely in the crosshairs."

MYRA BRECKINRIDGE by Gore Vidal

 This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I've never read and I finished on Tu 11/16/23- "Thought provoking and hilarious".

For the first section of the book you believe the narrator is a woman, but actually it is a man waiting for 'sexual reassignment surgery'- Myron changes to Myra.

From the book's page at Wikipedia:

"An attractive young woman, Myra Breckinridge is a film buff with a special interest in the Golden Age of Hollywood—in particular the 1940s—and the writings of film critic Parker Tyler. She comes to the Academy for Aspiring Young Actors and Actresses, owned by her deceased husband Myron's uncle, Buck Loner. Here, she gets a job teaching, not just her regular classes (Posture and Empathy), but also, as part of the hidden curriculum, female dominance.

The spirit of the times is reflected in Myra's attendance at an orgy arranged by a student. She intends only to observe but suffers a "rude intrusion" by a member of the band The Four Skins, from which she derives a perverse, masochistic enjoyment. At an earlier regular party, after "mixing gin and marijuana", she eventually gets "stoned out of her head" and has a fit, before passing out in a bathroom.

As part of her quest to revolutionize Hollywood and American society, Myra preys upon a student named Rusty Godowski, and eventually anally violates him with a strap on. The rape leaves Rusty, previously a gentle lover, violent and brutish in regard to sex, causing his relationship with Mary-Ann, his girlfriend and fellow student, to deteriorate. The two break up, and Myra recommends Rusty to Leticia Van Allen, a casting agent who has sex with the young men she represents.

Still in the process of transitioning from male to female and unable to obtain hormones, Myra transforms into Myron, and, as a result of the injuries she has sustained in a car accident, is forced to have her breast implants removed. Now a eunuch, Myron decides to settle down with Mary-Ann.

I have read a few of Gore Vidal's novels and this one was totally different. For the late sixties this was probably outrageous, but these days it was pretty tame. Myron goes back to a man and today this wouldn't be allowed.  

THE BLACK BOOK by Ian Rankin

 Refinished Tu 11/14/23 after my yearly eye exam

One of my old paperbacks that I originally finished Th 5/29/14 and bought at the library book sale on Sa 1/18/14.

" When a close colleague is brutally attacked, Inspector John Rebus is drawn into a case involving a hotel fire, an unidentified body, and a long forgotten night of terror and murder."

There are 24 books in the John Rebus series. 'THE BLACK BOOK' is the fifth novel in the series.

Irn-Bru- an orange drink popular in Scotland for over a hundred years; "Scotland's other national drink". 

The novel features an 'Elvis Presley Themed Restaurant'; 'Blue Suede Choux'.

From a reader at 'GoodReads':

"In this outing, Rebus has to deal with his girl-friend who's had enough of him, his returning brother (an ex-con) with no where else to stay except with John, a flat full of late teenage university students on their own for the first time (and sharing his flat he's been forced to return to). And that's just his personal life. On the job, he becomes engulfed by a five year old murder, pursuing the investigation "on his own time" (and literally, too, as he is suspended at one point from the force), which leads to a gay bar / Elvis themed restaurant and ongoing encounters with ghosts from the arson of the Central Hotel where the body was found ... with links to organised crime in the present day. As the story threads come together, Rebus's personal and professional life become entirely entangled as a key piece of evidence to the old murder lands in his hands. And that's just the start of his troubles.

Rankin shifts between a third person narrative focussed on Rebus to the other characters as they uncover their own motives in the moment and on to richly detailed commentary about life and surroundings in the chief setting of Edinburgh. Dialects pop up; the Edinburgh lilt can be heard vividly; and local words are sprinkled into dialogue as a chef adds secret sauce to a favourite dish. Somehow, Rankin manages the verbal sleight-of-hand to conjure this Scottish setting in a way that seems entirely familiar, like ones own home town -- but wait, that's not true is it? And his winning character, Rebus, worms his way off the page like the best of the hard-boiled detectives, utterly convincing and sympathetic but no one's ideal of the perfect husband for your daughter. No wonder the series is occasionally dubbed "Tartan Noir"!"

SLEEP NO MORE by Greg Iles

 Finished We 11/8/23

This is a hardback that Janny loaned me and she got it at a yard sale. 

This is the story of a man who is happily married and meets a woman from his past. This woman claims to be 'a reincarnation' (?) of the love of his life who died almost a decade before. For almost the entire novel I was hoping that this was some kind of a 'long con' and it had nothing to do with 'shape shifting' or 'soul exchange;, but I was wrong.  

I guess I couldn't accept the premise and I thought it would have worked so much better if the man was being conned and not being visited by some kind of supernatural phenomenon. 

Part of a review by a reader at GoodReads:

"Set in Iles fictional town of Natchez, Mississippi, "Sleep No More" tells the story of John Waters. With his long-time friend Cole, Waters is part of an oil-drilling business that's had some solid success. He's married to Lily and they have a precocious daughter together. Their marriage looks great, but it's been on a shaky ground since Lily had a miscarriage several years before and they haven't exactly been connecting in a physical way.

Years before, Waters had a long romance with Mallory Candler, a beautiful woman who turned out to be a couple of tacos short of a combo platter. The romance took place in college and the couple aborted two unwanted pregnancies. This helped bring on some of Mallory's less desirable traits and led to her stalking Waters for a period of years. She was killed several years before and Waters hasn't forgotten her but has tried to move on with his life.

Enter Eve, a woman who claims she's been possessed by the spirit of Mallory. She comes to Waters and tells him this. Eve is a local real estate agent who has a certain reputation around town. Is she looking for a new fling with Waters or is she telling the truth? Waters is convinced it is Mallory and enters into an affair with Eve/Mallory. (It seems that Mallory can enter the body of a new host upon sexual peak only).

If it all sounds like it takes a huge dose of suspension of disbelief to make the story work, it does. But the thing is that by grounding Waters as he does, Iles takes a page from King or Richard Matheson and gives us an ordinary person facing extraordinary circumstances. Seeing how Waters reacts as the web slowly closes in around him keeps the pages flying, just to see what happens next. And Iles is willing to at least throw in a few things that are plausible reasons as to why this could be certain people in Waters' life trying to mess with him.

In fact, half the fun of the story is trying to figure out which twist is the right twist and which are red herrings.

According to the critical blurbs, "Sleep No More" was recommended as a beach read when it was first published. And that's exactly what it is. Iles has done some great stories and while this may not be his most profound or important, it's one of the more enjoyable stories he's told. Like a blockbuster, popcorn movie, don't think too much about it and just enjoy the ride. You'll be glad you did."

SLEEPLESS by Romy Hausmann

 Finished Sa 11/4/23

This is one of my recent purchases at Amazon Books. I received the novel on Tu 9/26/23. I got the book because I saw 'DEAR CHILD' (Netflix series) and was really impressed with the concerpt. This was a tale of a woman and children who had been kidnapped and held for many years. The book only concentrated on how it affected the victims and not very concerned about who did the crime and why. Usually, these type of books follow the perpetrator. 

'SLEEPLESS' is far to intentionally confusing. There are a couple of different storylines, at least two timelines, and each chapter is told from a different character's point of view. The writing is great and I could appreciate each individual scene, but the 'big picture' was beyond me.

STORY ONE: A young woman lives in a B & B with her grandfather and they watch old movies on a video cassette recorder during the long evening behind the night desk at the hotel. When she gets older she becomes involved with a man who dumps her. 

STORY TWO: A woman stabs her lover to death and contacts her husband for help. She tells her husband that she was trying to end the affair and her lover could accept this and tried to kill her. Her husband believes her and they develop a plan to pin the murder on somebody else. 

I'm only partially convinced that this is what happened and I don't like books that you need a scorecard to keep track of what's going on. 

Romy Hausmann is a great writer and I'd read something else if I could. I llistened to a podcast by the man who translated the book from German and I learned that she is writing a collection of 'True Crime' stories. 

From the book's page at GoodReads:

"t's been years since Nadja Kulka was convicted of a cruel crime. After being released from prison, she's wanted nothing more than to live a normal life: nice flat, steady job, even a few friends. But when one of those friends, Laura von Hoven--free-spirited beauty and wife of Nadja's boss--kills her lover and begs Nadja for her help, Nadja can't seem to refuse.

The two women make for a remote house in the woods, the perfect place to bury a body. But their plan quickly falls apart and Nadja finds herself outplayed, a pawn in a bizarre game in which she is both the perfect victim and the perfect murderer..."

An excellent review by a reader:

"This book is a unique enigma! It feels like you walk in the dark, collecting bread crumbs to find your way to the end of the tunnel which will lead you the bad witch’s candy house! You keep gathering missing pieces of puzzle : from different timelines, unreliable characters’ narrations.

Here are facts I gathered after reading nearly 50

pages: Nadja Kulka opens her eyes, fell from a cliff, probably pushed, suffering from concussion, blood oozing from her head, forcing herself to drive to some cottage in the woods after attracting suspicion of gas station owners. She’s carrying something in her baggage, wearing a wig( we don’t know why)

We are also introduced to Nelly Schütt by moving 5 years backwards: she’s young girl, with keen interest in black and white noir movies, working at her parents’ inn, having an affair with a married, older man which will be her ruin.

And we are also introduced Nadja’a workaholic and intimidating boss Gero and his free spirited, vivid wife Laura who was former assistant of Gero and resigned from her job to be stay at home mom to take care of her their daughter Viv!

And we also read so many letters describing chaotic mind of a woman who’s seen a therapist talking about her past: taking care of a woman named Martha! We don’t know who she is or to whom the were letters written.

All those storylines seem like separated but keep reading, be patient, the author is so smart, a mathematics genius: creating unique equations.

Eventually Nadja finds herself trapped in a very complex, dangerous game and only way to survive is confronting her past mistakes and unleashing the animal she’d locked inside!

I honestly didn’t like this book as much as Dear Child .

None of the characters were relatable. They did horrible things. They are mean, manipulative, cheater, killer, abuser, liar scumbags with psychopathic tendencies!

But this a creepy, ultra smart, well developed thriller with lots of cryptic mind games so dealing with very irritating characters didn’t affect my enjoyment!

But the bothering thing about my reading is at last third the pace was wobbled and I felt like the author had second thoughts about how she would end this story and which characters would be punished! Well, at the end she finally wrapped up well but the wobbling feeling left bad taste in my mouth!

I’m rounding up 3.5 stars to 4 enigmatic, chaotic, tragic, dark, bleak, harsh, intense stars!

I loved the author’s extremely dark and extraordinarily smart mind. I’m looking forward to read her future works."

SHAME THE DEVIL by George P. Pelecanos

 Finished Sa 10/28/23

This is one of my trade paperbacks that I bought at Powell Books when I went to Portland, Oregon- Tu 8/27/02. That was the vacation that I went to the west coast specifically to visit this book store and I finished the book the first time on the flight from Oakland to St. Louis on Sa 8/31/02. 

Another fantastic tale about the 'black & white' crime scene in the Washington DC area. 

In this book I learned about Dischord Records that promoted some dandy Punk Rock acts. 

PLOT: A robbery crew attempts to take out a pizza shop that was used by a criminal organization as a 'drop'. One of the robbers decides that they must kill everyone because if they left them alive they would become witnesses. 

Later, survivors form a group to deal with the emotional wreckage. They decide to get revenge on the killers. 

I loved the book and I'd read anything by Pelecanos.

From the book's page at Goodreads:

"Washington, D.C., 1995. What should have been a straightforward restaurant robbery goes horribly wrong. Several workers are shot in cold blood; the gunman's brother is killed by the police; a young boy is run over by a careering getaway car. Three years pass. Victims and their relatives gather in the aftermath, still trying to come to terms with their grief. But gunman Frank Farrow has other ideas. Now the heat has died down, he is on his way back to Washington, determined to avenge his lost brother - by killing everyone involved in his death."

From the book's page at Kirkus Reviews:

"After a three-book hiatus, Nick Stefanos rejoins the Pelecanos repertory company (The Sweet Forever, 1998, etc.) and delivers another bravura performance. Colorful, often violent, always passionate, it’s a remarkable group that Pelecanos has assembled for his saga of the seamy side of Washington, D.C., and over the course of seven novels his players have never failed to entertain. The curtain rises, this time out, on a routine robbery that goes horribly wrong, leaving five dead before it’s over. Among these is Dmitri Karras’s young son, and the effect on the elder Karras is predictably devastating: —I know now,— he tells his former business partner Marcus Clay, —there’s two kinds of people in the world: those who—ve lost a child and those who haven—t.— Three years after the fact, he’s still defined by his despair. Divorced, zombie-like, he’s a source of increasing worry to his friends. One of them contacts Nick Stefanos in the hope he can hook Dmitri up with a job at the Spot, the watering hole where Nick patrols the bar when he isn—t doing PI gigs. Object: occupational therapy, a last-ditch attempt to give Dmitri a reason for living that might transcend his obsessive desire to kill the killer of his son. And it works. Little by little, Dmitri begins to reassemble the pieces of a life. Then, almost accidentally, Nick stumbles on a clue he doesn—t really want to find because it will lead to a place he doesn—t want to go. Or rather, a place he doesn—t want Dmitri to go, which is into the path of the murderer he’s been hunting—a cold-blooded sociopath with his own all-consuming need for revenge. Vivid storytelling by a writer whose sense of the theatrical is a formidable strength and whose reputation lags way behind his talent."

LOST LIGHT by Michael Connelly

 Finished We 10/25/23

This is a hardback that Janny loaned to me and she picked it up at a garage sale. This is one of the later books in the Harry Bosch series.

I was surprised to learn (as was Harry) that his wife was pregnant when she broke up with Harry and went to Las Vegas to become a professional gambler. Harry and Maddie, his four year old daughter are introduced at the end of the novel. 

From the book's page at Wikipedia:

"Lost Light is the ninth novel in Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch series. It is the first Bosch novel to be narrated in first person; all prior Bosch novels had utilized an omniscient third-person style.

Lost Light is the first novel set after Bosch retires from the LAPD at the end of the prior story. Having received his private investigator's license, Bosch investigates an old case concerning the murder of a production assistant on the set of a film. The case leads him back into contact with his ex-wife Eleanor Wish, who is now a professional poker player in Las Vegas, and Bosch learns at the end that he and Eleanor have a young daughter."

Harry was working on a murder investigation about a young woman who was murdered. She worked at a bank that was in the process of loaning a movie production company two million dollars to use as a prop for a film. Money was stolen, people within the heist were murdered, and the culprits were never apprehended. As a private investigator, Harry figures exactly what happened and who was responsible. 

I really liked the novel in that it was concerned with only one, big case. Sometimes Harry works on a couple of separate cases and sometimes this is a little confusing. However, I would read anything written by Michael Connelly.  

RICH MAN POOR MAN by Irwin Shaw

Finished Su 10/22/23

This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I had never read and there is no record of when I bought the book. 

In the novel 'THE COLOR OF LIGHT' by William Goldman one of the characters mentions that he likes the author Irwin Shaw and his college professor denigrates his choice. I like the writing of both authors and I think that they are very similar. 

Basically it is the story of three siblings:

Gretchen- the oldest and has an affair with a richer and older neighbor. She's frustrated and unlucky in love

 Tom- The youngest and a fighter and a demanding man. He goes outside of the law to get what he wants.

Rudolph- He was the brother that the parents felt was 'most likely to succeed'. He becomes the richest of the siblings.

From the book's review at Kirkus: 

"This ever and everlasting novel, proceeding with styleless ease in the most readable fashion possible, spans some twenty years and the three lives of the Jordache children from their divided beginnings to their unified endings in middle age. First Gretchen, from her slatternly start at 17 with a rich failure who to a degree is instrumental in all their lives. Gretchen goes on to New York and a lackluster marriage, to Los Angeles and an exciting one with a film director until his untimely death. Then there's Thomas, the insolent delinquent who disappears for years to become a prizefighter, whom Rudolph (he's next) helps unknowingly, and who repays his debt to society and to the family fully. And last Rudolph, handsome, cautious, acquisitive, who does become a rich man but a responsible one. . . . Mr. Shaw's story keeps going with a self-perpetuating interest and with the kind of professionalism that say Jerome Weidman manifests although forfeiting anything which qualifies at a literary level. But it should be eminently marketplaceable."

From the book's page at Wikipedia:

"The novel is a sprawling work, with over 600 pages, and covers many of the themes Shaw returns to again and again in all of his fiction – Americans living as expatriates in Europe, the McCarthy era, children trying to break away from the kind of life lived by their parents, social and political issues of capitalism, and the pain of relationships. On the very first page Shaw subtly telegraphs the sad ending of the story, in the same way that the first scene of a film will often quote the last scene.

Originally published as a short story in Playboy Magazine, it became an international bestseller when published as a novel. The bulk of the novel concerns the three children of German Americans Mary Pease and Axel Jordache – the eldest, Gretchen, the middle child, Rudolph, and the youngest, Thomas. It chronicles their experiences from the end of World War II until the late 1960s."

The novel was adapted into one of the first television miniseries for ABC television in 1976.  

THE STORY OF ARTHUR TRULUV by Elizabeth Berg

Finished Mo 10/9/23 

This is a hardback that Janny loaned me because I wanted to read this author. She reminds me of Anne Tyler and I like the book. 

A man lives alone and spends his afternoons at the cemetery visiting his dead wife. He becomes friends with a young woman who becomes pregnant. He takes her in and also a lonely woman who lives next door to him. It's a tender and heartwarming story. 

From the book's page at Kirkus Reviews:

"In a small Missouri town, a widower finds solace by reaching out to other troubled souls.

Arthur Moses, 85, goes every day to the cemetery to eat his lunch at his late wife Nola’s grave. At night, he dines on whatever canned goods he can cobble together, tries to prevent his cat, Gordon, from running away, and dodges the busybody next door, Lucille, who keeps trying to entice him onto her front porch with her delicious baked goods. (This book depicts so many luscious-sounding confections it should come with its own FDA label.) One day at the cemetery, Arthur meets Maddy, a teenager with a nose ring, who hangs out there. They strike up a friendship born of mutual isolation, and she dubs him “Truluv” for his enduring devotion to Nola. As the point of view shifts among these three characters, we learn that Maddy, now a senior in high school, has been ostracized by her classmates. Her problems stem in part from the fact that her father, who raised her alone, irrationally blames her for her mother’s death in a car crash soon after her birth. A retired schoolteacher, Lucille, also in her 80s, never married because Frank, her high school true love, wed someone else. However, Frank has recently resurfaced and is trying to rekindle romance in their twilight years. Maddy’s social life consists of hookups with an older man she met at Wal-Mart, and one of these trysts leaves her pregnant. When her father urges her to terminate the pregnancy, she takes refuge at Arthur’s house. He and Lucille become Maddy's surrogate parents, and, by taking over housekeeping chores, Maddy helps them age in place. Both are childless and look forward eagerly to the birth of the baby, giving Maddy the unconditional moral and financial support she has always craved. The life-affirming messages are far from subtle, and the fine line between sensitivity and sentimentality is often breached.

Aims for profound but settles for pleasant."

I definitely want to read more by Elizabeth Berg.

THE CLOR OF LIGHT by William Goldman

 Finished Fr 10/6/23

This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I bought at The Book House on Sa 9/11/93 and first finished on We 11/24/93.

The story of Chub Fuller. His nickname is not because he is overweight, but when he was an infant he had 'chubby cheeks' and the name stuck. I'm old enough to remember doing research without the internet and it seems nearly impossible, but everyone did it. 

The story is of a young man who is trying to be a writer. He gets sidetracked as a 'researcher' and this becomes his prime source of income for a time. 

He has a a good friend called 'Two Brew' Kitchel. His nickname came from a drinking game. You must drink 60 shots of beer in 60 minutes. He stopped after two shot glasses and his name stuck. The book seems to say that this is impossible, but I think this is very doable. Five twelve ounce beers in an hour doesn't seem that difficult and I know I've probably come close.

From the book's page at Kirkus Reviews:

"Goldman, a first-class entertainer (Marathon Man, Magic), used to write slick, earnest, oddly false psychological novels; and this new book, about the ups and downs of young writer ""Chub"" Fuller, is an uneven return to that earlier style. In the novel's first third, Chub is an undergrad at Oberlin--discovering how to turn his troubled past (alcoholic father, unstable mother) into short stories, finding a mentor in crippled, flamboyantly brilliant classmate ""Two-Brew"" Kitchel. And since Two Brew's father just happens to be a top N.Y. publisher, Chub's stories soon appear in book form, with critical acclaim and paperback-bestsellerdom. But then, while working on a novel about his father, ever-bland Chub loses his creative energy, starts Manhattan drinking, tries Ohio teaching, makes money as a N.Y. researcher. He finds super-sex, love, and wedlock with his old dream-girl, divorcÉe B. J. Peacock--but B. J. is jealous of Chub's love for her little daughter Jesse, who dies in a feeble burst of deus-ex-melodrama. (Some material from The Thing of lt Is and Father's Day is recycled here.) Now 30-ish, Chub is on the verge of breakdown, surviving through a mutual support-system with aging, oddball super-model Bonita Kraus, a.k.a. ""The Bone."" Next, however, he finds super-super-sex with strange young Sandy, a TV addict who seems to have been involved with a psycho claiming to be the real Chub Fuller. So, for unpersuasive reasons, Chub now rediscovers his muse (""He was--stand back, world--writing again""), especially after Sandy commits suicide. . . or was it murder? As always, Goldman offers crisp details and dialogue, along with a few vivid episodes. (Chub's run-in with a psychotic, plagiarizing student; his research exploits.) Also, even if Chub's literary efforts sound more gimmicky than profound, some readers may enjoy the romanticized dramatization of life-material-into-fiction. Overall, however, Chub's soul-journey is superficial and murky, while the supporting cast is defined largely by quirks and nicknames; and, though there's enough cuteness and professional gloss to engage an audience at the start, this ends up as a mildly pretentious, very sentimental, unsatisfying rehash of familiar Goldman themes--from malebonding and childhood psychology to the-writer-as-hero/victim." 

In the book the author Irwin Shaw is seen as a hack writer and Chub defends his work. I found two books by Shaw on the shelves and I'm going to read them. 

DEAR CHILD. by Romy Hausmann

 Finished Th 9/28/23

An eBook from the library & I had watched the Netflix German series and this is why I got the book. I also ordered another book by Romy Hausmann called 'SLEEPLESS'.

This is a story about a woman who was held captive in an underground bunker for many years. The twist is that the bad guy grabbed a woman fifteen years ago and had a child with her. This woman died and he was kidnapping several woman to take her place as 'mom' to two kids. 

I liked the German TV show better than the book, but both were exceptional. 

The identity of the bad guy is not really developed and the real story is about the impact on the woman and the kids. 

A twelve year old girl and her brother who is about eight. Both of the kids are very small for their age because of a lack of vitamin D (no sunlight). They also must wear dark glasses all the time because they cannot take direct light of the sun. 

From the book's page at Kirkus:

"A father’s quest for his kidnapped daughter, gone 13 years, may finally have borne fruit.

Hausmann’s debut, translated from the German, revolves around a young woman who has been held captive in a windowless forest cabin on the border between Bavaria and the Czech Republic. As the story opens, she has escaped, one of her two children in tow, only to be hit by a car on the road just outside the woods. She’s in intensive care, unable to explain much of anything; her daughter, Hannah, though extremely intelligent, has developmental issues that make her unhelpful to investigators as well. Once it’s determined that the injured woman’s name is Lena, the police are able to connect her with a 13-year-old cold case involving the disappearance of a college student in Munich. The round-robin narration switches among Lena, Hannah, and Lena’s father, Matthias Beck. Matthias has been counting and cursing the days—4,825 of them—since his daughter went missing. Now, at last, he gets the call he’s been waiting for, and he and his wife accompany the police investigator, a close family friend, to the hospital—only to find out the woman in the bed is not their Lena. But wait—there’s a little girl in the hallway who is their daughter’s spitting image. Hausmann’s novel has been billed as Room meets Gone Girl for its combination of mother and kids locked up in a hidey-hole with dueling, often dissimulating, unreliable narrators. But both of those blockbuster antecedents are strongly character-driven. Here, possibly in the interest of withholding information, the author has failed to make the central characters seem like real people, and the supporting ones are barely outlined. For this reason, the reveals in the latter part of the book are less exciting than they should be.

The plot is sufficiently creepy and twisty, but without well-developed characters, the reader's buy-in will be limited." 

THE SECRET SPEECH by Tom Rob Smith

Finished Su 9/24/23 

This is one of my new paperbacks that I bought because I watched the movie 'CHILD 44' that was based on the novel by Tom Rob Smith. 

The premise is that Stalin was a brutal dictator and committed numerous atrocities against the Russian people. Nikita Khrushchev is portrayed as a reformer and he admits to these evil political excesses.

This is the second novel in a trilogy by Tom Rob Smith. The character, Leo Demidov was the detective that solved the 'CHILD 44' murder case. 

From the back of the book:

"A society trying to recover from a time when the police were corrupt and the innocent arrested as criminals. Detective Leo Demidov, former Secret Police Officer, is forced to ask whether the wrongs of the past can eve be forgiven. Trying to solve a series of brutal murders that grip the capital, he must decide if this is savagery or justice."

From the book's page on Wikipedia:

"USA Today praised it as a "breathlessly paced", "explosive thriller", going "even further than [the] acclaimed Child 44 in capturing the mood of the Cold War-era Soviet Union". Kirkus reviews gave it a starred review, calling it a "superb thriller, full of pitch-perfect atmosphere". Author Charlie Higson, writing for The Guardian, called it "a great piledriver of a read"."

REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD by Anne Tyler

 Finished Tu 9/19/23

This is one of the hardbacks that Janny loaned me. It's a new novel by Anne Tyler and was published in 2020.

A profile of a male character that was unique. A man alone who is a 'Tech Hermit' and fixes computers for home users. His cliental reminds me of myself when I call a computer serviceman. 

A slim novel and I read it in a couple of sittings. I really liked the book because it was so different. 

From the book's page at Amazon:

"Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit. A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life.

But one day his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses to call anyone in her late thirties a "girlfriend") tells him she's facing eviction, and a teenager shows up at Micah's door claiming to be his son. These surprises, and the ways they throw Micah's meticulously organized life off-kilter, risk changing him forever.

An intimate look into the heart and mind of a man who finds those around him just out of reach, and a funny, joyful, deeply compassionate story about seeing the world through new eyes, Redhead by the Side of the Road is a triumph, filled with Anne Tyler's signature wit and gimlet-eyed observation."

SHOEDOG by George Pelecanos

Finished Su 9/17/23

This is a novel that I got as an eBook from the library because I loved 'KING SUCKERMAN' by Pelecanos. 

It was a short novel and I liked it even more than 'KING SUCKERMAN'.

From the book's page at KIRKUS REVIEWS:

"Constantine, a drifter who's been too many places to care about anything that won't fit into his backpack, hitches a ride into trouble when Polk, the old man who picks him up outside DC, stops off, and gets turned down, for the $20,000 in dirty money his Korean War buddy Grimes owes him. Instead, Grimes enlists Polk and Constantine for another score: a pair of liquor-store heists that'll bring in enough for all three of them and the five other guys on the job. Within the hour, Constantine has casually seduced Grimes's classy girlfriend, Delia, and you probably don't need to finish this sentence. Don't skip a page of the book, though, or you'll miss a canny portrait of the shoe salesman (a stripped-clown echo of Nick Stefanos in A Firing Offense, 1992, and Nick's Trip, 1993) who teaches Constantine about Life, or a late-blooming noir retrospect that's so dead-eyed that the sentiment takes on a comic edge. More fun than a Late Show marathon—starting with The Asphalt Jungle."

The title refers to a character in the book, Randolph, who is a shoe salesman and one of the men on the robbery crew. There is a story about a dog who is scared to walk across a bridge. The way he makes it is to concentrate on the ground directly in front of his nose until he makes it to the end. This is the way that the shoe salesman relates to his job. "Head down, and concentrate".  

KING SUCKERMAN by George P. Pelecanos

 Finished Th 9/15/23

This is one of my trade paperbacks that I had never read and bought at Powell Books in Portland, OR; Tu 8/27/02. I'm amazed that I ignored this novel because I really loved it. In fact, when I finished the book yesterday I got another by Pelecanos novel as an eBook from the library- 'SHOEDOG'.

Set in the Washington DC area during the Bicentennial  1976.

Excellent discussions of music; O'Jays, George Clinton, Earth Wind & Fire

The novel begins with a bang. Wilton Cooper, a black criminal, is at a drive-in movie when he notices an ugly white boy walk into the projection booth and mayhem ensues. Cooper takes this psychopath for his partner in crime. This begins a murder spree that touches two friends, Dimitri Karras and Marcus Clay. The book is an over-the-top splatterfest. I loved it.

The beginning of a review at 'rap sheet' by Steven Nester:

"King Suckerman reads like a blaxploitation blast from the past, with its references to that film genre, the soundtrack of the era (this tale is set in 1976, and the U.S. bicentennial is only days away), the vocabulary of young black inner-city America (with a profusion of the “N” word), and the glorification of the urban anti-hero. But beneath all of that, inextricable from the nonstop action in this 1997 George Pelecanos masterpiece, is a spot-on critique of racism, cultural appropriation, personal responsibility, and the hypocrisy of popular culture."

http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-book-you-have-to-read-king.html 

IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE by Sinclair Lewis

 Partially finished Mo 9/11/23

This is a very old paperback that according to the flyleaf... 'I read to page 124 and skimmed to the end in April 2007'. 

Too much...I get the satire. I heard a Jordan Peterson podcast where he wondered how accurate the projections were about the future that were posited in 1923 about 2023. This is the problem with this book. It's impossible to read this as a modern reader without thinking of Donald Trump. It seems like all the 'Conservative' ideas were alive and well in the 1930's and still infecting our political system today. 

From an excellent post by University of Oxford:

"In 1930, Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and has since been praised for his satirical takes on materialism and consumerism in American culture between the two World Wars. His writing career began in newspaper and magazine journalism, and It Can’t Happen Here was written after he won the Nobel Prize.

It has become arguably his most enduring novel, perhaps due to the chillingly recognisable depiction of the rise of a populist leader in America. The novel explores implications of creeping fascism and far-right ideologies, many of which have gained popularity and mainstream coverage since the ascendancy of Donald Trump in the present day. Lewis saw totalitarian patriotic populism emerging in his own period and used the novel to satirise society’s failures to halt its ascendancy. 

In the novel, Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated by a fictitious zealot, Berzelius ‘Buzz’ Windrip, thanks to his appeals to ‘traditional’ values and his hateful position on immigration. Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor, bears shocked witness to this unexpected rise to power. Eventually, Jessup must go into hiding, and ultimately escapes to Canada. Readers may find an interesting echo of this in Margaret Atwood’s pregnancy dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), in which an exit into Canada is similarly presented as a political dissident’s only chance of escape. 

The extract from Sinclair’s novel here is the first chapter of the novel, opening with details of a Ladies’ Rotary Dinner – an event at which politicians, activists, and lobbyists present their causes and fundraise through speeches and networking. One speech in the scene is by General Edgeways. His rhetoric is war-mongering and self-congratulatory: ‘we must be prepared to defend our shores against all alien gangs of international racketeers that call themselves “governments” and that with such feverish envy are always eyeing our inexhaustible mines, our towering forests, our titanic and luxurious cities, our fair and far-flung fields.’ Some of these positions are repeated later in the extract by Mrs Gimmitch. She advocates for war to protect the United States from those ill-defined European nations suggested by the General. In this portrayal, Lewis lampoons the idea that American nature is inexhaustible, and presents the isolationist character of totalitarian ideology.

Opening with this dinner scene, Lewis creates at times hilariously exaggerated and insidious portraits of people who hold perspectives that make the election of someone like Windrup possible: the apathy of certain characters (Mrs Doremus suggesting the one voice in the room against an aggressively isolationist policy is a ‘silly Socialist’); the vehement pro-war sentiment of the local elite and industrialists (such as Francis Tasbrough, the quarry owner); and the capacity of third-generation immigrants to forget their origins and “pull up the ladder” behind them (Louis Rotenstern, a third-generation Pole who believes: ‘We ought to keep all of these foreigners out of the country,’ seemingly forgetting that his grandfather was born in Prussian Poland). In this way, Lewis establishes a social setting in which immigrants reject their cultural and ethnic identities women advocate for their own oppression, and local elites lobby for conflicts that can only be financially beneficial to themselves. These, the scene implies, are the circumstances under which far-right populism can foment and become successful. And so, the scene is set for the descent into Windrip’s Nazi-like populist regime, fuelled by propaganda. Journalist Jessup struggles to understand the shift in the political discourse, but finds that, despite his work, he is almost powerless. While he is not a wholly likeable character, Jessup is a plausible protagonist. Lewis writes him as a kind of everyman, flawed and at times even misogynistic, whose journey from the dining room where he hears ridiculous propaganda to the underground resistance is one that dwells on the necessity of individual action to resist the creep of fascism." 

 

THE WHOLE TRUTH by David Baldacci

 Finished Th 9/7/23

This was a paperback that Janny loaned me. 

CENTRAL THEME: 

'Perception Management'- From Wikipedia:

"Perception management is a term originated by the US military. The US Department of Defense (DOD) gives this definition:

Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator's objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations."

In the novel the chief CEO of Ares Corporation, Nicolas Creel is the premiere arms dealer on the planet. It is in his interest to keep a 'cold war' going between the biggest nations. He makes money selling to all sides of the conflict. The Ares Corporation uses 'Perception Management' to convince the citizens that this 'fake war' is necessary. 

Dick Pender and Katie James are the team that tries to stop the bad guys. 

Ares was the Greek god of War and Courage  

'Perception Management' sounds like exactly what Steve Bannon is attempting with his company, CAMBRIDE ANALYTICA.

The writing is typical of Baldacci and the concept is what kept my interest. 

REDEEMING LOVE by Francine Rivers

 Finished Sa 9/2/23

This is a trade paperback that Janny loaned to me and it is one of her favorite books. 

The book is Romance/ Christian Fiction for women. The writing is on the level of Harlequin Romance. 

The novel is set in the mid 19th century and concerns a woman who is stuck in a very 'G-Rated' sex work. She is called 'a soiled dove' which was an authentic term for a sex worker in those days. Basically, she hasn't had anyone in her life that treated her decently and she has been used by everyone except for Michael. 

This guy is portrayed as a 'man of god', but to me he seemed like a 'stalker on steroids'. The theme of the book is that Michael has been told by god that Angel is the woman for him. Many times she leaves him, but he follows her to 'The Par-a-dice Club' (her whorehouse and it's run by a mustache twirling villain)  and brings her back to his poor farm. Angel doesn't want anything to do with him and kind of wants to use him until she can get set up on her own. I was totally behind Angel in this endeavor and I was hoping that she'd drop hardheaded Michael and strike out on her own. Of course, Michael's wishes prevail and they fall in love and Angel raises a big Christian brood with 'the stalker'. 

It's an easy read and I don't think I've never read anything where I was rooting for the characters but diametrically opposed to what the writer was trying to project. 

A critique from the internet:

"Faith-based audiences are turned off by too much uncomfortable content. The romance fans are annoyed that so much time is spent on faith and the consequences of sin that they don't get as much of the fun in the romance as they want."

I felt that although much of the action took place in houses of prostitution the description of sex was positively nil. I don't know how you could be offended by any of it unless you were under eight years old, insane, or a Christian prude.  

The novel is a reimagining The Book of Hosea from the bible.

I noticed that this was made into a movie in 2022.

Part of a Washington Post review for the movie:

"Redeeming Love is an incident-rich saga populated by cardboard heroes and villains and outfitted with greeting-card sentiments and cartoon villainy."

This sums up my feeling about the novel completely....

NO WITENSSES by Ridley Pearson

 Finished Fr 8/25/23

This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I had never read.

It's a Police Thriller set in Seattle and deals with a 'product tampering case'.

The owner of a large food corporation is told that 'people will die' if his terms are not met. 

From the book's page at Publishers Weekly:

"A rare humanism and meticulous attention to procedural detail have marked Pearson's thrillers featuring Seattle cop Lou Boldt (Undercurrents; The Angel Maker). In the mournful detective's third match-up against a maniacal serial killer, Pearson outdoes himself by eschewing scenes from the murderer's point of view (and the pandering to bloodlust inherent in such scenes) in order to focus solely on the terrible toll wrought on victims and cops. Here the villain is tampering with products of Adler Foods, a giant company that he or she blames for a long-ago crime. The bodies of poisoned children and adults turn up everywhere as Boldt and his SPD/FBI task force, including series regular Daphne Matthews, a police psychologist, race to ID and trap the killer. Instead of forensic detail, Pearson this time highlights high-tech procedures: computer warfare against the killer's use of ATMs to collect a ransom; cutting-edge surveillance techniques. A tangled subplot about a possible culprit among the cops drags the suspense slightly but some extraordinarily tense cat-and-mousing between cops and killer more than makes up for it. This is a serial-killer novel that speaks to readers' hearts even as it jangles their nerves-and it's not to be missed." 

I would read more by Pearson, but I'd only rate this one about a 'C- plus'.

THE KILLER ANGELS by Michael Shaara

 Finished Fr 8/18/23

This is one of my 'newer' hard backs that I had never read. 

It's a detailed analysis of The Battle of Gettysburg around July 4th, 1863. 

It is told mostly from the eyes of the generals on both sides. 

Biggest Takeaway: The North was entrenched around the same Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg. The South had invaded the North and if they had pushed to take the 'high ground' on the first day of fighting they might have routed the Northern army. And maybe they could have won the entire war. 

An insightful review from the book's page at 'eriehistory.org':

"Michael Shaara’s novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, first published in 1974, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the next year. The book has been republished many times and is on the reading list for many U.S. Army officer programs as well as other military academies. The book was also the basis of director Ronald Maxwell’s 1993 movie Gettysburg.

The novel follows four main characters, two Confederate and two Union. Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet on the Confederate side, John Buford and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain on the Union side. Other characters are also featured, and side stories help fill out the cast. Written in the present tense and covering only five days from June 29, 1863, to July 3, the novel has a sense of urgency that is lacking in the prequel Gods and Generals and the sequel The Last Full Measure by Shaara’s son Jeff Shaara.

The story begins with the mysterious spy Harrison who first tells Lee and Longstreet that the Union Army of the Potomac, now under its new commander George G. Meade, has moved quickly and is close behind the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. The Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania has suddenly a new threat to contend with.  As Lee’s army moves into Southern Pennsylvania the climax will take place at Gettysburg during the first three days of July 1863.

Shaara says in the preface “The interpretation of character is my own.” While none of his interpretations will disturb readers of Civil War history, they help add insight and a personal touch to these soldiers. The reader gets to know them through their thoughts and conversations, also fictionalized, with other characters. 

It is hard not to notice an almost apologetic tone when dealing with the Confederates. “The Cause” is not about slavery, its about “rights”.  Union cavalry Gen. John Buford’s war weariness and fatigue are very real, especially in an army that has suffered defeat after defeat at the hands of Lee’s victorious army. Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, commander of the 20th Maine regiment who will hold the extreme left of the Union line on Little Round Top, is a college professor turned soldier and looks for some deeper meaning to the war. Erie County’s own Strong Vincent is also a minor character in the novel. It is Vincent who paced his brigade on Little Round Top’s southern face, leading to Union victory there.

Confederate Gen. James Longstreet is portrayed, accurately, as a man who doubts Lee’s aggressiveness at Gettysburg. Longstreet did not want to fight there, but Lee was determined. Their disagreements are respectful, but Longstreet has his doubts.

The majority of the novel focuses on only three parts of the battle, one on each day of the struggle. On July 1st, the first day, the focus is on Buford’s cavalry division that meets Lee’s somewhat hesitant assaults and buys time for the Union army to concentrate. The second day’s action is told through the eyes of Col. Chamberlain’s 20th Maine on Little Round Top. Truly a brave and determined stand, little or nothing is said of the fighting that engulfed the entire union line that day. This is one of the book’s strongest parts.  The Little Round Top chapter is riveting, if focused on only one small part of the battle.

Day three brings Pickett’s Charge on the Union center. Flamboyant Confederate Gen. George Pickett leads his division (and others) in a doomed assault that ends the battle and results in a Union victory and Lee’s retreat back to Virginia.

There is no doubt about the long-term effect the novel and the subsequent movie Gettysburg have had on the American public’s perception of the and battle. Shaara made no attempt to tell the whole story of Gettysburg. He chose to focus on certain participants and leave the rest to the historians. The 1993 movie led to a surge in visitation to the battlefield, especially to Little Round Top. Ken Burn’s The Civil War on PBS and a veritable slew of books about the battle have followed. 

Michael Shaara saw little of this, dying in 1988 at age fifty-nine of a heart attack. When I met Shaara in 1987, he spoke at length about his own heart problems and felt this played a role in Lee’s actions at Gettysburg. Lee died of a stroke in 1870 and there is no lack of accounts about his health during the Gettysburg campaign.

In the end, The Killer Angels is a novel, but a great one. It ranks with Stephen Crain’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) as one of the great novels of the Civil War. If you have never read it, give it a try. If you have read it, read it again." 

Fun Facts:

Robert E. Lee felt that novels and plays 'weakens the mind'.

George Pickett was a dandy with long hair and he wore a lot of cologne. 

General Chamberlain was a professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College. Nathaniel Hawthorne also attended the school.  

THE ORACLE by Edwin O'Connor

 Finished Su 8/13/23

One of my ancient paperbacks that I had never read and purchased at the library book sale on Sa 6/15/96.

I loved the book and I can't believe that I never read it until now. The author is a Pulitzer Prize winner and this is his first novel published in 1951. O'Connor wrote 'THE LAST HURRAH' and won the Pulitzer for 'THE EDGE OF SADNESS'. The author is known for his books about Irish-Americans and 'THE LAST HURRAH' is about an Irish-American political boss who makes a final run for public office. This book is available from the library on Hoopla. This book was made into a blockbuster film starring Spencer Davis in 1958. 

Christopher Usher is a radio broadcaster who is an unreliable narrator of the highest order. Not once during the entire story does he admit that he might NOT be the center of the universe. He only talks and never listens. His ideas are off-the-wall and are never subject to change. He's in a bad marriage, has a silly mistress, and his big boss has him on tenterhooks over a salary increase. This character could be a precursor to Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Rachel Maddow, or Ann Coulter. Today we have hundreds of these 'authoritative profession'.

..."It's perhaps that Christopher's greatest advantage (is) that he's disliked only by people that know him. He has five million listeners, almost none of whom know him, and with them he's wildly successful".   

It's an easy read and I finished in a couple of days. I loved it!

A link to the author's link to Wikipedia:

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_O%27Connor

THE BARON and The Chinese Puzzle by John Creasey

 This is one of my ancient paperbacks and there is no note as to when or where I got the book.

It's a slim novel and I skimmed from page 134 to the end of the novel (last page 175) on Fr 8/11/23.

"...follows the powder trail of an explosive situation with international fallout..." (on the cover).

On the back of the book:

"When former jewel thief John Mannering decided to attend the priceless Oriental exhibition he did not realize that someone was willing to kill to keep THE BARON away. He could not anticipate the political maelstrom, the misguided patriot, and the sinister plot which would trap THE BARON IN THE CHINESE PUZZLE."

The novel was published in 1951 and was John Creasey's first book. 

From the author's page at Wikipedia:

"John Creasey MBE (17 September 1908 – 9 June 1973) was an English crime writer, also writing science fiction, romance and western novels, who wrote more than six hundred novels using twenty-eight different pseudonyms.

He created several characters who are now famous, such as The Toff (The Honourable Richard Rollison), Commander George Gideon of Scotland Yard, Inspector Roger West, The Baron (John Mannering), Doctor Emmanuel Cellini and Doctor Stanislaus Alexander Palfrey. The most popular of these was Gideon of Scotland Yard, who was the basis for the television series Gideon's Way and for the John Ford movie Gideon's Day (1958). The Baron character was also made into a 1960s TV series starring Steve Forrest as The Baron." 

This was not a bad novel, but I just ran out of gas on it. John Creasey seems to be the poster child for 'hack writer' in that he had dozens of pen names and he would write in any genre imaginable. And obviously the reason for this is money. Nothing wrong with a guy trying to make a living, but this book just seemed to be 'connecting the dots'. Not bad, but not in the least bit inspiring. 

DARK MATTER by Garfield Reeves-Stevens

Finished Mo 8/7/23

This is one of my ancient trade paperbacks that I bought at The Book House, Rock Hill, MO on Th 10/19/95.  I never read the book although it is very much like a Dean Koontz novel.

You learn a little about Quantum Physics.

It begins with a 'kitchen table' brain surgery with the patient fully conscious and ends with global annihilation. 

TOE: Theory of Everything

Singularity: the instant before 'The Big Bang'

Xeno's Paradox: If crossing a street you take a half step and then half of the next step...you will never reach the other side of the street. If you divide matter in the same way, you would reach a point where you couldn't divide it because there would be nothing left. 

'E' equals MC Squared: Matter and Energy are points along the same continuum. 

Newtonian Physics says that when things are in motion, they begin to slow (regress), but at the sub-atomic level this is no longer true. 

A young genius has the backing of the US government to find The Singularity. The government wants to use whatever he finds for weapons of war and he wants to become god. 

The book that I read was an advanced uncorrected copy (I didn't notice any mistakes) and I checked the author on the internet and he has written several highly acclaimed books since then. 

BUTTERFIELD 8 by John O'Hara

 Finished We 8/2/23

One of my ancient paperbacks that I first read during the week of Su 11/8/92.

I'm glad that I revisited this one because the second time around I really loved. 

Set in NYC during the early 1930's and it's kind of like Jay McInerney 'BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG CITY. It's fairly shocking the way that Ohara deals with female sexuality. Gloria Wandrous's attitude is more like that of a licentious male character.  

Synopsis from the book's page at Wikipedia:

"The novel explores the life of Gloria Wandrous, a young woman having an affair with Weston Liggett, an older, married businessman. Set in New York circa 1931, it fills in her family background and sexual history, and it locates her within a circle of friends, their relationships, and economic struggles, providing a closely observed tour of "the sordid and sensational lives of people on the fringe of café society and the underworld". The minor character of Jimmy Malloy, a junior newspaper reporter, serves as O'Hara’s alter ego; he has the style of a Yale University graduate but not the means.

The title of the novel derives from the pattern of telephone exchange names in the United States and Canada. Until the early 1970s, telephone exchanges were indicated by two letters and commonly referred to by names instead of by numbers, with the BU represented on the telephone dial as "28," followed by four digits. In December 1930, an additional digit was appended to the exchange name. BUtterfield was an exchange that provided service to Manhattan's well-to-do Upper East Side, and BUtterfield 8 was still new when the novel was published."

Link at Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BUtterfield_8_(novel)

From the book's page at Amazon:

"A bestseller upon its publication in 1935, BUtterfield 8 was inspired by a news account of the discovery of the body of a beautiful young woman washed up on a Long Island beach. Was it an accident, a murder, a suicide? The circumstances of her death were never resolved, but O’Hara seized upon the tragedy to imagine the woman’s down-and-out life in New York City in the early 1930s.

“O’Hara understood better than any other American writer how class can both reveal and shape character,” Fran Lebowitz writes in her Introduction. With brash honesty and a flair for the unconventional, BUtterfield 8 lays bare the unspoken and often shocking truths that lurked beneath the surface of a society still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression. The result is a masterpiece of American fiction."

RANSOM by Jay McInerney

 Refinished Fr 7/29/23

This is one of my paperbacks that I bought at The Book House, Rock Hill, Mo. on Th 10/19/95 and finished Fr 2/28/97. I got the wrist tattoo finished at Black Moon. 

Christopher Ransom is living in contemporary Kyoto and he is trying to 'find himself' through martial arts. His father is a hack television producer and wants Chris to return home. Ransom is friends with a man who runs a cowboy bar and at this bar he meets DeVito who hates Ransom on sight. The novel is about how DeVito tries to force Ransom into a death match. Also, Ransom's father has hired an actress to make Chris believe that she needs his help to escape the Yakuza. It's all a ruse and she's trying to get him to return to the US on orders from his father. 

The death match happens and Chris is killed. Literally he is cut in half and it was a total surprise.

I really liked the book and I'm surprised that it's not more well known. 'BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG CITY' is McInerney's biggest book. 

From the book's page at Amazon:

"Ransom, Jay McInerney's second novel, belongs to the distinguished tradition of novels about exile. Living in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, Christopher Ransom seeks a purity and simplicity he could not find at home, and tries to exorcise the terror he encountered earlier in his travels—a blur of violence and death at the Khyber Pass.Ransom has managed to regain control, chiefly through the rigors of karate. Supporting himself by teaching English to eager Japanese businessmen, he finds company with impresario Miles Ryder and fellow expatriates whose headquarters is Buffalo Rome, a blues-bar that satisfies the hearty local appetite for Americana and accommodates the drifters pouring through Asia in the years immediately after the fall of Vietnam.Increasingly, Ransom and his circle are threatened, by everything they thought they had left behind, in a sequence of events whose consequences Ransom can forestall but cannot change.Jay McInerney details the pattern of adventure and disillusionment that leads Christopher Ransom toward an inevitable reckoning with his fate—in a novel of grand scale and serious implications."

  

TIME TUNNEL by Murray Leinster

 Finished Su 7/23/23

This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I bought at the Warehouse Book Sale on Fr 9/29/07. I think this was the old Sears warehouse on the southside of town. 

From the back of the paperback:

"One end was in 1964-the other in 1804. People could go both ways. So could...things. For instance, brand-new "antiques" for the 20th century, and marvels of modern industry for the Napoleonic era." 

People in the present (first published July 1964) are using a time tunnel to sell 'antiques' that are in mint condition. This seems like a tremendous waste of what could have been possible. However, this theme of selling 'antiques' is very similar to PK Dick's, 'THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE'.

It's a short novel and an easy read. Not too memorable but I'd like to read more by Murray Leinster.

THE WATER IS WIDE by Pat Conroy

Finished We 7/19/23

This is a memoir that was written as a novel. In 1969 the author, Pat Conroy went to work at an all black school on an island off the coast of South Carolina. 

From the book's page at Wikipedia:

"The Water Is Wide is a 1972 memoir by Pat Conroy and is based on his work as a teacher on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, which is called Yamacraw Island in the book. The book sometimes is identified as nonfiction and other times identified as a novel.

Yamacraw is a poor island lacking bridges and having little infrastructure. The book details Conroy's efforts to communicate with the islanders, who are nearly all directly descended from slaves and who have had little contact with the mainland or its people. He struggles to find ways to reach his students, ages 10 to 13, some of whom are illiterate or innumerate, and all of whom know little of the world beyond Yamacraw. Conroy (called Conrack by most of the students) does battle with the principal Mrs. Brown over his unconventional teaching methods and with the administrators of the school district, whom he accuses of ignoring the problems at the Yamacraw school."

I really liked the book and it provided a look at various shades and varieties of Racism in the Deep South near the end of Desegregation. Sometimes blacks believed in the separation of the races because, "If The Man is happy then things will go well and if he isn't, then things could go very bad".

There was an organization in the book that aided municipalities in the implementation of of desegregation. The group would get both sides together to find the most efficient way to ease the pain of desegregation and attempt to end Jim Crow policies. I had never heard of this and I wonder if such outreach programs actually existed. 

THE KINKS KRONIKLES by John Mendelssohn

 Refinished Fr 7/14/23

In two days...

This is one of my ancient trade paperbacks. I originally finished this on Th 7/13/06 (nearly 17 years to the day) and it was in my work bag for about a week. And, then I refinished again on Sa 11/5/16.

John Mendelssohn was a writer for Rolling Stone and Creem magazine. He was an early fan of The Kinks and even wrote the liner notes for a few Kinks albums. 

The book is a great trove of information about the early Kinks. The story ends too early because the book was published in 1985. 

Fun Fact: The Kinks did not begin in sleazy bars and trashy nightclubs, but they got their start at high society parties. Robert Wace was a rich young man who fronted the Kinks because he wanted to be a singer. One night he got booed, and Ray offered to take over. 

Mendelssohn would review each individual song on the early albums and it was great having Amazon Music Unlimited so that I could hear each album as I was reading the book.  

KATE VAIDEN by Reynolds Price

Finished Th 7/13/23

This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I had never read.

This is one of the best profiles of a woman that I've ever read.

***By far, one of the most compelling and interesting novels that I've read in a long time. I really liked this one! 

A 47 year old woman reviews her life and confronts the fact that she abandoned her child many years before. She lost her parents when she was about nine years old. I think her father learned of her mother's infidelity and he shot her and then killed himself. She got pregnant by her cousin and gave up the child to her aunt. 

Lots of indecision and it seemed like how people actually think. 

From a viewer's review at GoodReads:

"I had Reynolds Price's novel "Kate Vaiden" (1984) in mind for a long time before finally being persuaded to read it by an online review written by a friend.. I proposed the book to my reading group as a possible choice among several other books each of which portrayed an individual American woman. The group chose a different book, but I went ahead and read "Kate Vaiden" (the last name rhymes with "maiden") anyway. The novel is unusual in that Price sets the novel in the first person in the voice of his primary female character. Novels in which the author writes in the voice of a person of the other gender are challenging and rare. Two recent examples of women writing in the voices of men are Siri Hustvedt's "What I Loved" and Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer-prize winning "Gilead".

Some reviewers have questioned whether Price (1933 -2011)has the understanding and novelistic skill to project himself effectively into the voice of a woman. Kate is her own person and an individual character indeed. As a young woman of 17, she abandons her baby son conceived out of wedlock. Price spends much of the novel trying to prepare the reader for this event. I thought he made Kate's behavior understandable and believable. As the story progressed, I became absorbed with Kate and her travails. I felt for her as she made her decisions, some good and many rash. The novel kept me involved with the heroine and her world.

The novel is set in the rural upper South, in North Carolina and Virginia. Much of the book is set in Macon, North Carolina, where Price was born, with substantial portions set in Raleigh, Norfolk, Greensborough, and elsewhere. Most of the action of the book takes place during the Depression and WW II era, with these large events contrasted against the quiet voices of individual rural lives. The book proceeds through the post-Vietnam era into the 1980s, with glances at civil rights, feminism, the anti-war movement, and other great changes which occurred over a relatively short time span.

The book is narrated by Kate Vaiden as a woman of 57. She tells the story of her life, especially of her tumultuous adolescence, with the hope that it will interest her son Dan, 40. Kate abandoned Dan when she was 17 and, at least up until the time she sets down her story, has had no contact with him. The book is almost a picaresque novel as young Kate picks up and moves many times and leaves a variety of people, relatives, lovers, and friends in her wake. The novel is sad as Kate abandons many people who genuinely want to offer her love, and Price made me sympathize both with Kate and with the others. Many of these individuals are themselves frequent lonely and searching. The novel is also a young woman's coming-of-age story. Abandonment, loss, and loneliness are important themes of the book as many of the characters, including Kate, her mother, the father of her baby, Douglas, her would-be lover Whitfield and others are orphans. Many people close to Kate die in the book: her parents, her first lover, and Douglas.

Precocious sexuality receives much emphasis in Kate's story. Her parents, Dan and Frances, have an apparently passionate but doomed relationship. After their shocking death, Kate, raised by her mother's sister Caroline and her husband Holt, begins a sexual relationship with a slightly older boy named Gaston who dies during Marine boot camp. Kate blames herself. The book includes strong portrayals of this relationship which stays with Kate all her life. After Gaston's death, Kate is molested by her older cousin, Swift. She then begins a relationship with Douglas, an orphan who can be tender and loving but also who has a tendency towards drifting and violence. Kate cannot bring herself to marry Douglas, who also comes to a violent death. During the story Kate has many other sexual relationships with men and friendships with women but she allows them all to fall out of her life. Price emphasizes the importance of marriage and commitment, parts of life which are denied to Kate. Late in the novel, Kate has a conversation with a teacher, Rosalind Limer, who has unhappily remained unmarried through life. Kate explains to Miss Limer her rejection of some of her suitors. Miss Limer observes:

"I won't try to judge what I didn't get to watch. But steadiness is what men seldom have to offer -- not in life anyhow, not in this green world. We're not promised that, in the Bible or any other book known to me."

Kate achieves a modicum of financial security. She is an independent, tough, perceptive, yet vulnerable and highly fallible woman. I came to feel greatly for her through her mistakes and misfortunes. The book also offers a portrayal of small town life in the upper South in the years leading up to the Civil Rights Movement. Besides Kate, one of the characters that Price portrays effectively is Noony, an African American woman slightly older than Kate who works for Caroline and Holt. Noony offers her own commentary on Kate and on her life. The novel is presented against a backdrop of religious themes, including sin, redemption, and what appears to be God's ever-present love even in harsh circumstances. This is a stunning novel."

I loved the novel and I'll read more by Reynolds Price.