February Reading

February is a short month but I seemed to find lots of time to read, there were many cold days in Montana and then there were flights to get to and from Mardi Gras.  Here are some of the best newly published escapes I enjoyed this month: 

The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb
   Ray has a gift and a dream—he’s determined to become a world-class professional violinist, and nothing will stand in his way. Not his mother, who wants him to stop making such a racket; not the fact that he can’t afford a violin suitable to his talents; not even the racism inherent in the world of classical music.
   When he discovers that his great-great-grandfather’s beat-up old fiddle is actually a priceless Stradivarius, all his dreams suddenly seem within reach. Together, Ray and his violin take the world by storm. But on the eve of the renowned and cutthroat Tchaikovsky Competition, the violin is stolen with a ransom note for five million dollars left in its place. Ray will have to piece together the clues to recover his treasured Strad…before it’s too late.
   With the descendants of the man who once enslaved Ray’s great-great-grandfather asserting that the instrument is rightfully theirs, and with his family staking their own claim, Ray doesn’t know who he can trust—or whether he will ever see his beloved violin again.
   The author is a black concert violinist who lives in North Carolina which adds to the power of the conspiracy. He currently plays with the NOVA-Annandale Symphony Orchestra.  

Black Cake: A Novel by Charmaine Wilkerson
   In present-day California, Eleanor Bennett’s death leaves behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a traditional Caribbean black cake, made from a family recipe with a long history, and a voice recording. In her message, Eleanor shares a tumultuous story about a headstrong young swimmer who escapes her island home under suspicion of murder. The heartbreaking journey Eleanor unfolds, the secrets she still holds back, and the mystery of a long-lost child, challenge everything the siblings thought they knew about their family, and themselves.
   Can Byron and Benny reclaim their once-close relationship, piece together Eleanor’s true history, and fulfill her final request to “share the black cake when the time is right?” Will their mother’s revelations bring them back together or leave them feeling more lost than ever?
    This is a story of how the inheritance of betrayals, secrets, memories, and even names, can shape relationships and history. So many secrets, twists and family memories but no recipe for black cake! 

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu
   In the twelve tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, and unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us.
   Open the book to any story and be captured by Kim Fu’s original and surprising insights. 

Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan
   Most of us give little thought to the back of the book—it’s just where you go to look things up. But Dennis Duncan reveals in this delightful and witty history, the extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past.
   Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Duncan uncovers how it has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office, and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists’ living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians and—of course—indexers along the way. Revealing its vast role in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, Duncan shows that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart—and we have been for eight hundred years. 

Against the Ice: The Classic Arctic Survival Story by Ejnar Mikkelsen,
   I do not have a desire to visit the Arctic, but I do love reading and watching documentaries about journeys to the land of ice, cold and hardship.
   Ejnar Mikkelsen was devoted to Arctic exploration. In 1910 he decided to search for the diaries of the ill-fated Mylius-Erichsen expedition, which had set out to prove that Robert Peary’s outline of the East Greenland coast was a myth, erroneous and presumably self-serving. Iver Iversen was a mechanic who joined Mikkelsen in Iceland when the expedition’s boat needed repair.
   Several months later, Mikkelsen and Iversen embarked on an incredible journey during which they would suffer every imaginable Arctic travail: implacable cold, scurvy, starvation, frostbite, snow blindness, plunges into icy seawater, impossible sledding conditions, Vitamin A poisoning, debilitated dogs, apocalyptic storms, gaping crevasses, and assorted mortifications of the flesh. Mikkelsen’s diary was even eaten by a bear. Three years of this, coupled with seemingly no hope of rescue, would drive most crazy, yet the two retained both their sanity as well as their humor. Indeed, what may have saved them was their refusal to become as desolate as their surroundings…
   Originally published as Two Against the Ice: A Classic Arctic Survival Story and a Remarkable Account of Companionship in the Face of Adversity. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who co-adapted the book into a screenplay, provides a new foreword to this brand-new edition of the classic exploration memoir, which was one of The Explorer’s Club’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century. Coming to Netflix in March.

THINK SPRING... 

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Book Club Suggestions

Book clubs have still found ways to meet and discuss books.  I am a member of two groups, both meeting via Zoom during these covid times.  One group brings people together from across the county-- some members had re-located, some were curious about what one of their favorite bookstores was providing and a few "locals" continue to join the conversation.

Here is a list of books coming in paperback January through March, all worthy of good discussion among friends: 

The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine by Janice P. Nimura
   Elizabeth Blackwell believed from an early age that she was destined for a mission beyond the scope of "ordinary" womanhood. Though the world at first recoiled at the notion of a woman studying medicine, her intelligence and intensity ultimately won her the acceptance of the male medical establishment. In 1849, she became the first woman in America to receive an M.D. She was soon joined in her iconic achievement by her younger sister, Emily, who was actually the more brilliant physician.
   Exploring the sisters’ allies, enemies, and enduring partnership, Janice P. Nimura presents a story of trial and triumph. Together, the Blackwells founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women. Both sisters were tenacious and visionary, but their convictions did not always align with the emergence of women’s rights—or with each other. From Bristol, Paris, and Edinburgh to the rising cities of antebellum America, this richly researched new biography celebrates two complicated pioneers who exploded the limits of possibility for women in medicine. As Elizabeth herself predicted, "a hundred years hence, women will not be what they are now."  

The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson
   On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold the country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally—and willing to fight to the end.
   Drawing on diaries, original archival documents, and once-secret intelligence reports—some released only recently—Larson provides a new lens on London’s darkest year through the day-to-day experience of Churchill and those closest to him: his wife, Clementine; their youngest daughter, Mary, who chafes against her parents’ wartime protectiveness; their son, Randolph, and his beautiful, unhappy wife, Pamela; Pamela’s illicit lover, a dashing American emissary; and the advisers in Churchill’s “Secret Circle,” to whom he turns in the hardest moments. 

A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology by Toby Wilkinson
   From the decipherment of hieroglyphics in 1822 to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon a hundred years later, the uncovering of Egypt’s ancient past took place in an atmosphere of grand adventure and international rivalry.
   Acclaimed Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson chronicles the ruthless race between the British, French, Germans, and Americans to lay claim to its mysteries and treasures. He tells riveting stories of the men and women whose obsession with Egypt’s ancient civilization helped to enrich and transform our understanding of the Nile Valley and its people, and left a lasting impression on Egypt, too. Travelers and treasure-hunters, ethnographers and archaeologists: whatever their motives, whatever their methods, a century of adventure and scholarship revealed a lost world, buried for centuries beneath the sands. 

The Paris Library: A Novel by Janet Skeslien Charles
   Paris, 1939: Young and ambitious Odile Souchet seems to have the perfect life with her handsome police officer beau and a dream job at the American Library in Paris. When the Nazis march into the city, Odile stands to lose everything she holds dear, including her beloved library. Together with her fellow librarians, Odile joins the Resistance with the best weapons she has: books. But when the war finally ends, instead of freedom, Odile tastes the bitter sting of unspeakable betrayal.
   Montana, 1983: Lily is a lonely teenager looking for adventure in small-town Montana. Her interest is piqued by her solitary, elderly neighbor. As Lily uncovers more about her neighbor’s mysterious past, she finds that they share a love of language, the same longings, and the same intense jealousy, never suspecting that a dark secret from the past connects them. 

 The Promise: A Novel by Damon Galgut
   On her deathbed, Rachel Swart makes a promise to Salome, the family’s Black maid. This promise will divide the family—especially her children: Anton, the golden boy; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by feelings of guilt.
   Reunited by four funerals over thirty years, the dwindling Swart family remains haunted by the unmet promise, just as their country is haunted by its own failures. The Promise is an epic South African drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of history.  

 

Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction by Michelle Nijhuis
   In the late nineteenth century, humans came at long last to a devastating realization: their rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving scores of animal species to extinction. In Beloved Beasts, acclaimed science journalist Michelle Nijhuis traces the history of the movement to protect and conserve other forms of life. From early battles to save charismatic species such as the American bison and bald eagle to today’s global effort to defend life on a larger scale.
   Nijhuis describes the vital role of scientists and activists such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, reveals the origins of vital organizations like the Audubon Society and the World Wildlife Fund, explores current efforts to protect species such as the whooping crane and the black rhinoceros, and confronts the darker side of modern conservation, long shadowed by racism and colonialism.
   As the destruction of other species continues and the effects of climate change wreak havoc on our world, Beloved Beasts charts the ways conservation is becoming a movement for the protection of all species including our own.

Books are best discussed among friends drinking wine!

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FEBRUARY---So Many New Books, So Few Days!

 We are only in the second month of the year and my reading stack has grown far to large.  Here is what I added to my list in February:

The Books of Jacob: A Novel by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft
   In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas—and a new unrest—begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumors of his sect’s secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs.
   Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk tells the story of Jacob Frank—an eighteenth-century Messianic religious leader around whom mystery and controversy swirl to this day. Narrated through the perspectives of his contemporaries—those who revere him, those who revile him, the friend who betrays him, the lone woman who sees him for what he is. The Books of Jacob captures a world on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence.
   I am a fan of Tokarczuk’s writing but need to postpone reading this 900+ page book until a month or two with more days! 

The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward by Daniel H. Pink
   Everybody has regrets, Daniel H. Pink explains in The Power of Regret. They’re a universal and healthy part of being human. And understanding how regret works can help us make smarter decisions, perform better at work and school, and bring greater meaning to our lives.
   Drawing on research in social psychology, neuroscience, and biology, Pink debunks the myth of the “no regrets” philosophy of life. And using the largest sampling of American attitudes about regret ever conducted as well as his own World Regret Survey—which has collected regrets from more than 15,000 people in 105 countries—he lays out the four core regrets that each of us has. These deep regrets offer compelling insights into how we live and how we can find a better path forward.
   The purpose of the book is to reclaim regret as an indispensable emotion and to show how to use its many strengths to make better decisions, perform better at work and school and bring greater meaning to your life. The three parts of the book are: Regret reclaimed, Regret revealed, Regret remade that explain four core regrets—foundation regrets, boldness regrets, moral regrets, connection regrets. 

How I Survived a Chinese "Reeducation" Camp: A Uyghur Woman's Story by Gulbahar Haitiwaji, Rozenn Morgat, Edward Gauvin  (on sale Feb 22)
   Since 2017, more than one million Uyghurs have been deported from their homes in the Xinjiang region of China to “reeducation camps.” The brutal repression of the Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, has been denounced as genocide, and reported widely in media around the world. The Xinjiang Papers, revealed by the New York Times in 2019, expose the brutal repression of the Uyghur ethnicity by means of forced mass detention­—the biggest since the time of Mao.
   Her name is Gulbahar Haitiwaji and she is the first Uyghur woman to write a memoir about the ’reeducation’ camps. For three years Haitiwaji endured hundreds of hours of interrogations, torture, hunger, police violence, brainwashing, forced sterilization, freezing cold, and nights under blinding neon light in her prison cell.
   These camps are to China what the Gulags were to the USSR. The Chinese government denies that they are concentration camps, seeking to legitimize their existence in the name of the “total fight against Islamic terrorism, infiltration and separatism,” and calls them “schools.” But none of this is true. Gulbahar only escaped thanks to the relentless efforts of her daughter. Her courageous memoir is a terrifying portrait of the atrocities she endured in the Chinese gulag and how the treatment of the Uyghurs at the hands of the Chinese government is just the latest example of their oppression of independent minorities within Chinese borders.
   The Xinjiang region where the Uyghurs live is where the Chinese government wishes there to be a new “silk route,” connecting Asia to Europe, considered to be the most important political project of president Xi Jinping.
   This Olympic month may be the perfect time to learn more about the Uyghur controversy. 

The Christie Affair: A Novel by Nina de Gramont
   The Christie Affair is told from the point of view of Miss Nan O'Dea, a fictional character but based on someone real. In 1925, she infiltrated the wealthy, rarified world of author Agatha Christie and her husband, Archie; a world of London townhomes, country houses, shooting parties, and tennis matches. Nan O'Dea became Archie's mistress, luring him away from his devoted wife. In every way, she became a part of their world—first, both Christies. Then, just Archie’s.
   The question is, why? And what did it have to do with the mysterious eleven days that Agatha Christie went missing? The answer takes you back in time, to Ireland, to a young girl in love, to a time before The Great War. To a star-crossed couple who were destined to be together—until war and pandemic and shameful secrets tore them apart. What makes a woman desperate enough to destroy another woman's marriage? What makes someone vengeful enough to hatch a plot years in the making? What drives someone to murder? These questions and more are explored in Nina de Gramont's powerful novel.
   I devoured Agatha Christie mysteries as a teenager but never knew much about her real life. Never knew her wealthy background and world travels. Now Death on the Nile is on the big screen and a novel reveals an eleven day disappearance and a real mystery in the author’s life.

 

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