Short post, lots of books...

I’ve been quite sick since last weekend and have barely been able to read, let alone write a blog post.  Still, I’m a bit better today so I thought I should at least give you the titles and short summaries of the books I managed to finish over the past two weeks.  

I finished our book club book, The Change by Kirsten Miller, but was too ill to go to the meeting.  This book tells the story of three women living in a Long Island tourist community. Nessa, Harriett and Jo, each in the throes of menopause, discover that they have special gifts:  the ability to commune with and command nature, the ability to see the dead, and possession of superhuman strength/heat. When a body is discovered in the bushes near the beach, the police write the death off as a sex worker who OD’ed, end of investigation. But Nessa, Harriett and Jo know this is not true, and they come together to find the identity of the dead woman and discover who murdered her. They meet obstacles at every turn, but fight back with their special gifts and find creative ways to uncover the truth while also seeking revenge on the men who used them.  I’m glad I didn’t go to the meeting, because I didn’t enjoy this book at all, and I hate going to a meeting where someone has recommended a book and I didn’t like it.  How do you talk about that without offending the person?  Anyway, I don’t think I would recommend this book to anyone, but don’t listen to me, as it was fairly well reviewed.  

Then I read the book I purchased as a “Blind Date with a Book” at our Christkindl Market in December, which I’d planned to unwrap and read on Christmas Day but that didn’t happen.  Finding Lucy by Diane Findley tells the story of Alison, a middle-aged woman who, upon the death of her mother, decides to steal a child.  She selects a gravestone for two-year-old Lucy Brown as a starting point, and moves on from there until she has successfully “rescued” a young girl from a poor, neglectful home and made her over into her own “daughter”.  Of course she has to move and start over as “mother and daughter”, but she manages this fairly easily. As Lucy grows up, though, she wants to know more and more about her past, a past that, of course, is all fictional.  Alison has her own struggles, obviously, but at heart, she truly thinks she’s doing the right thing.  Unfortunately, she didn’t anticipate all of these various complications, and the complex lies she would be forced to tell and keep track of over the years.  This book explores the many repercussions of abducting a child, not just on the child’s real family and community, but on the child and the new “mother”, too. It was pretty good, although I found it lagged about two thirds of the way in, but then picked up again to deliver a satisfying conclusion.  I’m not sure if I would recommend it, although Alison’s character was very interesting.  I wondered, throughout the book, whether she was on the spectrum, which, I think, would explain a lot.  I found Lucy’s adult character to be less interesting than her voice when she was a child, and I would have liked to read a bit more about the story of Lucy’s real family, but overall, it was a decent book that I think readers would enjoy. 

And I finished listening to a fabulous audio book, Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, narrated by Nicole Lewis.  I just learned that this is Reid’s debut novel, and wow, this is definitely an author to watch.  This novel, set in Philadelphia, opens with a late-night weekend call from privileged White mom Alix Chamberlain to her twenty-five-year-old Black babysitter Emira, begging her to come and take her three-year old out of the house for an hour, as there has been an incident and Alix doesn’t want Briar to see the police.  Emira is at a friend’s birthday party and is dressed for the occasion, but Alix says she doesn't care, she’ll pay double plus cab fare.  Emira needs the money, so she and her friend Zara go to the Chamberlain house and take Briar to the 24-hour grocery store down the street ("the Whitest grocery store in town"), where a customer alerts a security guard, who accuses Emira of kidnapping Briar.  This ends up being resolved and Emira doesn’t want to pursue it any further, but another customer, Kelley, records the whole thing on his phone and tries to convince Emira to go public.  The rest of the book follows the ways these three characters' lives intersect, their pasts and presents, and the underlying racial tensions that just won’t go away, no matter how often Alix and others may deny them.  This book had everything - plot, dialogue, atmosphere, characters.  It’s hard to believe that Reid packed so much into such a relatively short book.  And the narrator really brought the characters to life.  I think it’s one of the best books I’ve read or listened to in a very long time, and I would highly recommend it to just about anyone.  And I dare you not to fall in love with Briar - so cute!!

That’s all for today.  Stay dry and keep reading!

Bye for now... Julie

Post on a chilly, snowy morning...

We’ve had mild, snow-free weather up to this point in our coldest season, but I think we’ve caught up to our “snow quota” this weekend.  It’s been blowing and snowing since Friday evening, and I don’t think it’s going to stop until much later today.  Good thing I have a steaming cup of chai and a stack of good books to keep me busy!

I’ve always enjoyed books by British author Gilly MacMillan, such as Odd Child Out and I Know You Know, so I was quite excited to start reading The Nanny, which I had on my shelf.  When I started reading it, though, it seemed very, very familiar, and I wondered if I’d read it before or if it’s such a common plot that I read another book with the same storyline.  When I checked my blog posts, it looks like I started this book a few years ago but it didn’t grab me so I went on to something else.  This time I stuck with it, and it was ok, but paled in comparison to her other books, in my opinion.  This novel tells the story of Jocelyn/Jo, a middle-aged mother who, after the death of her husband and with no money and no family in the US, is forced to return home with her ten-year-old daughter Ruby to Lake Hall, her childhood home in a village outside of London, where her mother still resides.  She has never had any emotional attachment to her mother, believing her to be bitter and unfeeling, and has long been haunted by the disappearance of her beloved nanny, Hannah, during a dinner party when she was just a child.  Her own father died a few years earlier, so this move causes Jo’s compounded grief for the loss of both her father and her husband.  While she is having a tough time, Ruby seems to have formed a real connection with this grandmother she never knew.  When, during a boating excursion on the lake, Ruby discovers a skull, Jo begins to suspect that her past was not at all what it seemed.  Things become more complicated with the arrival of an unexpected visitor claiming to be Hannah, and what follows is a descent into Jo’s past where everything she believed is called into question, and she must discover who she can trust and what she can believe in order to save herself and those she loves before it’s too late.  This sounds like the kind of gothic tale I love to gobble up in a few sittings, and as I said before, it was ok, but not earth-shattering.  There were too many inconsistencies, and too many plot twists, and I found Jo to be a very frustrating character.  I think I enjoyed her other books because they are set in present-day, and maybe she doesn’t write gothic as well as regular mystery/thriller.  Anyway, if you are looking for a gothic mystery, this book may be a good choice, but I’ve definitely read better books in this genre.

That’s all for today.  Stay warm and pick up a good book!

Bye for now... Julie

Post on the last day of my holiday...

It’s chilly and snowy outside, which means it finally feels like winter.  I’m sad because I go back to work tomorrow and yet I still have so much I want to do.  *sigh* I’m not complaining, but I’m blaming my feelings of frustration on a book I was reading last weekend, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up:  the Japanese art of decluttering and organizing by Marie Kondo.  It all started with my desire to clear out and organize our “Alice in Wonderland” closet (a storage space under the eaves for which the door is only about 3 feet high - I need a bottle that says “shrink me” - or is it "drink me"? - to fit inside!).  While I was at my favourite used book store, I saw a copy of this book and thought it looked interesting, so I put it on hold at the library and started reading it after Christmas.  Well, it sucked me right in and next thing I know, I’m reorganizing my dresser drawers using a new and “better” way of folding so I can see everything, and my closets have also been weeded and reorganized.  Then I started on my bookcases… that’s another story altogether, but let’s just say that I never actually got to really, fully reorganizing and weeding the original storage closet, I just put everything back, but more neatly… I guess there’s always March Break! 

Anyway, my book club met yesterday for our first meeting of the new year to discuss The Queen’s Gambit by William Tevis.  As most people know from watching the recent Netflix series, this is the story of Beth Harmon, a girl who was orphaned at age eight when her parents died in a car crash, leaving her with nowhere to go, so she ended up at the Methuen Orphanage, where they gave all the children tranquilizers twice a day to regulate everyone’s moods.  While there, she stumbles upon Mr Shaibel, the custodian, who is playing chess.  Beth is fascinated by the game and is able to pick it up exceptionally quickly.  He agrees to teach her and they play regularly during Sunday mass, and Beth plays games in her head the rest of the week.  Fast-forward a few years, and she gets adopted by Mrs Wheatley (Mr Wheatley is hardly in the picture at all), at which time she begins to lead what we would call a “regular” life for a young girl.  But her fascination and true ability always lies in chess, and she begins to compete in tournaments, always winning despite having no formal training and playing against people who are much older than her.  This short coming-of-age novel follows Beth on her quest to compete in the World Championship in Russia, but I don’t want to give away any details and ruin the story, if you decide to read it.  Everyone loved it, and we all agreed that the Netflix adaptation did not stray from the original novel, which read almost like a screenplay, with not a word wasted.  We loved the intimate descriptions of the various characters, including Beth’s chess opponents, detailed descriptions of their clothes, shoes or physical attributes done briefly yet perfectly.  Despite the brevity of the book, Tevis was able to offer amazing character development, not just for Beth, but for other minor characters who don’t appear often, including Jolene, her friend from the orphanage.  We thought it was amazing that this middle-aged man could write so convincingly as an eight-year-old girl.  We discussed the relationship between Mr and Mrs Wheatley at length, as well as the possible reasons for the adoption.  We discussed the ending, which was excellent, the path that led Beth there, and what she might do next.  It was a great discussion, and while during my first reading I enjoyed it, now I want to read it again, keeping in mind some of the insightful points of our discussion.  Obviously I would highly recommend this book to just about anyone.  

That’s all for today.  Get outside and enjoy the day, but stay warm!

Bye for now... Julie

First post for 2024...

It’s the first morning of January and I’m ushering in the new year with a steaming cup of chai, a bowl of fresh fruit, and a blog post.  This used to be my routine but somewhere along the way it stopped and I was forced to write my posts during snatches of time in the early evenings, or sometimes not at all.  I’d love to go back to my original posting schedule, but I’ll have to take time to consider what caused the disruption and see if I can fix it. 

I finished reading The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, and it was fabulous!  This lengthy, detailed novel follows six friends beginning one summer in the early 1970s when they are fifteen and meet at an arts camp, Spirit-of-the-Woods, until the 2000s when they are in their 50s.  Ash and Goodwin are brother and sister, not twins, but very close in age and close emotionally, too.  They are from a wealthy family and have had no struggles in life except that the parents have high hopes for hard-working younger sister Ash, not so much for older brother Goodwin, who takes his good looks and privilege for granted.  Ethan is homely, not from a wealthy family, but enormously talented and has dreams of becoming a famous animator.  Cathy is a dancer who is very talented but is destined to have her dreams crushed because of her stature and other physical attributes.  Jonah is a shy, talented musician, the son of a famous folk singer, a boy who, despite his talent, seems at odds with his surroundings.  And Julie/Jules, sent on scholarship after the death of her father, is, to her surprise, invited into this clique of sophisticated Manhattanite kids, where she discovers a hidden talent for wit and humour.  She and Ash become best friends; everyone else slips in and out of the narrative, but the constant is the state of the friendship between these two women throughout the decades.  I don’t want to give any more details, as the draw of this book is the desire to know what happens next for these characters, who, for this reader, became almost like friends from my distant past - it kind of felt like peeking at Facebook posts to find out how and what they're doing.  I don’t normally enjoy long, detailed books, but this one kept me looking for opportunities to read so I could find out how each character’s life would unfold.  Readers are given insight into all of their lives, but the main narrator is Jules, and we learn, through her interactions and conversations with Ash, what everyone else is doing.  I didn’t love the ending, but overall, I thought it was a fantastic book, one that made me simultaneously want to reach the last page and also yearn for the book to never end.  If you enjoy books about the evolution of friendships, this might be a good choice for you. 

And since it’s the new year, it’s time for my “stats” and my “Best  of…” lists.  In 2023, I read 59 books and listened to 22 audiobooks. 

My favourite Adult novels were:  What we both know - Fawn Parker Enough about love - Hervé Le Tellier  Clock dance - Anne Tyler  The winners - Fredrik Backman  Camp Zero - Michelle Min Sterling  Tom Lake - Anne Patchett  Reykjavík - Ragnar Jónasson and Katrín Jacobsottír  None of this is true - Lisa Jewell  The interestings - Meg Wollitzer  Anomaly - Hervé Le Tellier  The house we grew up in - Lisa Jewell  The foundling - Ann Leary  I have added this new category, Best Rereads, since there were so many this past year:   The dinner - Hermann Koch  The wanderers - Meg Howrey  Autumn - Ali Smith  The plot - Jean Hanff Korelitz  Mindful of murder - Susan Juby 

Best Non-fiction: 

The Buddhist Chef:  100 simple, feel-good vegan recipes - Jean Phillippe Cyr 

Best Children’s and Young Adult novels:  Apartment 713 - Kevin Sylvester  Berani  - Michelle Kadarusman  Gnome is where the heart is - Casey Lyall  Simon sort of says - Erin Bow (YA)  Sorry for your loss - Joanne Levy (YA) The fort - Gordon Korman (YA) The cat who saved books - Sōsuke Natsukawa (YA/adult crossover)  Hana Khan carries on - Uzma Jalaluddin (YA/adult crossover)  But I think my absolute favourites of the year, those special finds that I will remember and talk about and recommend to others for years to come, are: The anomaly, The Buddhist Chef, Gnome is where the heart is and Simon sort of says.  That’s all for today.  Have a Happy New Year, and may 2024 be filled with plenty of great books and many cups of delicious tea! 

Bye for now… Julie

Post on Christmas Day...

It’s been a foggy, mild Christmas Day, but I still enjoyed a cup of tea and a long walk earlier.  Now it’s evening and I’m hoping to spend a few more hours reading before watching a bit of TV and calling it a day.

Unlike last week, when I had two books to tell you about, this week I tried reading two different books and didn’t finish either one.  I started to read Celeste Ng’s latest book, Our Missing Hearts, and spent most of the week reading it until I gave up.  This not-quite-dystopian novel, set in what might be the not-too-distant future (or it could be set in the present?) explores what could happen when an oppressive government uses a financial crisis (“the Crisis”), supposedly fueled by China’s market manipulation, to enforce something called PACT, or “Preserving American Culture and Traditions”, as a method of stopping people from protesting or otherwise standing up to authority figures such as police by threatening to re-house their children with “more suitable” families.  One boy, twelve-year-old Bird, feels called to go out and find his mother, a political protester and poet who left one morning three years earlier and never came back.  This novel was initially very gripping for me, but at about halfway through, I found it to be quite repetitive, and much less compelling or insightful.  I worried that it was just my response, that it might turn out to be a really great book, but the reviews were just so-so, so I gave up on it.  Then I tried the latest book by Heidi Perks, For the Last Time, but I got even less far into it, giving up after only a chapter or two.  Then I pulled a book off my shelf that I recently found in a Little Free Library, The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer, and at nearly halfway through this big 500+ page trade paperback,  I can’t put it down! 

I’ll tell you all about it when I finish, but for now, I’ll bid you good night and Happy Holidays! Bye for now... Julie

Last post for autumn...

It’s raining again tonight, as it's done these last few Sunday evenings while I’ve been writing my posts.  *sigh*  This has not been a very productive, inspired day… too much gloom.  But I did finish my second book for the week this morning, which is a good thing. 

I finished Ruth Ware’s Zero Days earlier in the week, and while it was not her best in my opinion (not suspenseful enough, less-than-believable main character, disappointing ending), it was certainly a page-turner.  Jacintha/Jack and her husband Gabe run a security testing company, and after finishing a job one night, while Jack inadvertently messes up and gets caught by security guards leaving the scene of the fake break-in, Gabe is being murdered in their home.  After discovering the body,  Jack stays with her sister Helena and her family while the police begin their investigation.  It soon becomes clear that she is being set up and that the police view her as their main suspect, so she goes on the run to save herself and find the real killer.  It was an easy, quick read, and I can’t seem to put my finger on exactly what was lacking from this story that made it less-than-great.  Maybe I just expected more - although I don’t always love Ware’s books, this one was better than some, not as good as some, just kind of middle-of-the-road for her.  If you’re in the mood for an unputdownable tech-thriller, this one will likely not disappoint. 

And the book I finished this morning is Flight by Lisa Steger Strong.  Set just a few days before Christmas in an old country house on the outskirts of a small town in Maine, this book focuses on the family dynamics of three siblings and their spouses and children who are getting together for the first time since their mother Helen passed away in the spring.  Martin is married to Tess and has two children; Kate is married to Josh and has three children; and Henry is married to Alice, but they are childless.  The elephant in the room is Helen’s house in Florida.  Martin wants to sell it and split the money, Kate wants to live in it but can’t afford to buy her brothers out, and Henry wants to sell it to the state so they can expand the nature preserve onto which this property abuts.  Since Alice has been unable to have children, she’s abandoned her art and is now a social worker, and she has a special place in her heart for one of her cases, twenty-three-year-old Quinn and her daughter Madeleine, who live in the nearby town.  This book looks at the relationships between spouses, between siblings, between parents and children, and between clients and workers, and explores different ways of parenting, different ways of being in a relationship, different ways we all screw up sometimes, but also different ways we sometimes get it exactly right.  It actually would have been a really good book if not for the choppy writing style.  For example, talking about Helen’s earlier life when she had money issues, Strong writes:  “She would struggle not to let the children know, to continue to send them gifts and pay for school and room and board and lend them money in those early years when they still asked - the years Martin paused grad school to teach high school because he couldn’t live off of his stipend and she couldn’t write the check she would have had to write to convince him not to work those years until Tess finished law school and got a job and he went back.”  Or when Tess is looking for her oldest child, she writes:  “Even as Tess rushed in, as she grabbed hold of Colin, pulled him off the scaffolding to hug him, as Kate watched him flinch and Tess stepped back, embarrassed, was clearly close to tears, Kate worked to catch a glimpse of (Henry’s art).”  This is fine if you want to stop the flow of the text to make a point, but imagine sentences like these in every paragraph, awkward, stilted ones that impede the flow of the story. It made this relatively short book seem fairly long.  Otherwise it was an interesting plot and all of the characters were very realistic, flawed yet strong and perfect each in their own way.  Since I now know what to expect with the language and writing style, I may have to read this again sometime, as the characters were really interesting, each ultimately wanting the same things but just going about getting there in completely different ways.

That's all for tonight. Stay dry and keep reading!

Bye for now... Julie

Very quick post on a super-busy weekend...

It’s been an extra busy weekend, with our Christkindl Market downtown, then a dinner out with friends for our unofficial “Festivus” celebration, and spending almost three hours this morning making my first ever Vegaducken (zucchini stuffed with Brussels sprouts and vegan stuffing, inside an red pepper and stuffing inside a butternut squash and stuffing, tied up and baked like a turkey stuffed with duck - which to me sounds like a vegan’s worst nightmare!!).  So I just have time to tell you very quickly about the book I read last week.

I tried a book I took out of the library but it didn’t grab me, so I took one off my shelf, Three Perfect Liars by Heidi Perks, a domestic thriller that turned out to be quite a page-turner.  There’s a huge fire at one of the new office buildings in the small city outside of London, a building no one wanted because it would ruin the view from the quay but one that was built anyway and housed the marketing firm of Morris and Wood. The whereabouts of Harry Wood, the owner of the company, at the time of the fire is undetermined, but there seems to be three main individuals suspected of starting the fire.  Laura Denning is just back from maternity leave, and while she struggles with leaving her son Bobby all day with her husband, she really wants to be back to work.  When she returns, though, she finds that Mia Anderson, the temp she hired to cover her maternity leave, is not only still there, she’s taken over Laura’s biggest client.  She was supposed to be a temp, so why is she still there, and why is she setting down roots?  Mia, of course, is still at Morris and Wood because she has her own agenda, but what could it be?  She’s friendly and approachable, and everyone seems to love her… except Laura, who does not trust her one bit.  Harry’s wife, Janie, gave up her career as a successful barrister in London when Harry wanted to expand his already successful London agency into this smaller city to the south.  She seems ok with this decision, but is she really alright with it?  And if she is, what reason could have compelled her to make such a choice?  This novel reminded me of Liane Moriarty’s books, like Big Little Lies and The Husband’s Secret, although Moriarty is the queen of domestic thrillers while Perks just lives in the same kingdom.  I enjoyed one of her earlier novels, Her One Mistake and I happened to have this one on my shelf, so it was the right book at the right time.  And I just got an e-newsletter advertising her newest book, For the Last Time, which I just picked up from the library.  I’m reading Ruth Ware’s recent book Zero Days right now, a high-stakes thriller that is proving to be an extra-compelling page-turner, so I may have to wait until the Christmas Break (in less than two weeks!!) to get to Perks’s latest book.

That’s all for tonight.  Stay warm and keep reading!! 

Bye for now… Julie