What Are You Reading / Reviews - July thru Dec 2021

[James]

Lord Dunsany, Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley [1922] 274 pages

Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley is a fantasy-romance of chivalry set in Spain "near the end of the Golden Age." The hero, Don Rodriguez, sets out after his father's death to "find the wars" and win a castle. He is sort of a Don Quixote in his romantic imagination, but unlike Don Quixote he isn't confused about facts, and his romanticism is respected and is shared by some of the other characters -- perhaps one could say he is what Don Quixote thought he was or in a world which corresponded to his imagination. He is accompanied by a servant, Morāno, who is clearly modelled on Sancho Panza. Although there is one chapter in which they meet with a magician from Saragossa and have an out-of-body adventure beyond the Earth, the fantasy element is mainly just the unreal, romance world he lives in, which of course never actually existed, in mediaeval Spain or anywhere else. The real interest in this book is the poetry and humor of the writing.

[James]

Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland's Daughter [1924] 242 pages

The King of Elfland's Daughter is Lord Dunsany's best-known and best book. It was a re-read for me, but I read it so long ago that it seemed like the first time; it is the last of Dunsany's books that I am reading this time around.

The novel begins with the Parliament of Erl coming before their lord and asking that they be ruled by a magic lord; he agrees and sends his son Alveric to Elfland to seek Lirazel, the daughter of the King of Elfland, as his wife. He wins her early in the book. The introduction by Lin Carter says that while fairy-tales end there with the wedding and tell us that they lived happily ever after, Dunsany realizes that the marriage between an elfin princess and a mortal will not work so easily; they are incompatible in too many ways, and she returns to Elfland, while Alveric seeks to find her again -- but Elfland has removed far from Erl and he cannot easily find it again. As he goes on quest to seek Elfland and Lirazel, their son Orion grows up and rules Erl. I think that this is to give Dunsany a little too much credit for originality -- there are many stories in the Thousand Nights and a Night which follow the same plot, where a mortal wins and marries the daughter of a djinn-king, who returns home and must be sought again through long and difficult adventures. Dunsany does it well, nevertheless.

The Elfland of this work is not a trivial fairy mound -- these are the sort of elves that we meet later in Tolkien, one of the many writers influenced by Dunsany. As in all his writings, he presents the opposition between imagination and philistinism; the closest thing to a villain is the Freer, who curses all imagination and fantasy; while Dunsany doesn't call him the Friar, or identify the golden symbol he wears around his neck as a cross, it is evident enough what he is talking about. The parliament eventually decides they have had more magic than they bargained for -- but too late.

[Book Concierge]

Say You’re One of Them – Uwem Akpan – 4****
This is a collection of short stories, dealing with various social issues facing African people throughout numerous countries on the continent. All are beautifully written even when heart-wrenchingly difficult to read. Uwem focuses an unblinking eye on serious issues and while the reader is fortunate to not have to face such dilemmas, the reactions of the characters are totally understandable and relatable. The local English dialect used in some of the stories was sometimes difficult to get used to, but really gave a sense of place to the narrative.
My full review HERE

[James]

Oct. 29

H. P. Lovecraft, The Tomb and Other Stories (ed. by August Derleth) 190 pages
H. P. Lovecraft, The Lurking Fear and Other Stories (Beagle) 182 pages
H. P. Lovecraft, The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath (ed. by Lin Carter) 242 pages
H. P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Other Stories (ed. by Margaret Ronan) 255 pages
H. P. Lovecraft, The Doom That Came to Sarnath (ed. by Lin Carter) 208 pages

For my Halloween reading this year, after a detour through Lord Dunsany, I read, or in some cases re-read, these tales from the early master of modern horror, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937). The five anthologies which I had in my garage contain most of his fantasy writings apart from the Cthullhu cycle for which he is best known (perhaps I will read those things next October). There was some duplication, but altogether there were about forty works, including the complete novel The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and several novellas, as well as short stories and a poem. I should note that The Lurking Fear and Other Stories is the anthology published by Beagle; apparently there is another collection by another publisher with the same title but a different selection. With apologies to his more enthusiastic fans, Lovecraft is not as great a writer as Edgar Allan Poe, or even in my opinion Lord Dunsany, the two most obvious influences, but he is definitely better than most horror-fantasy ("weird fiction") writers since. A statue of Lovecraft was given as the prize for the World Fantasy Awards until 2016, when he fell afoul of the wokies who attacked it as a symbol of "racism"; while Lovecraft's views of Blacks were not particularly liberal, it seems to me that they were less a question of racism than of an "Old Native Stock" snobbery which was equally dismissive of white "foreigners" such as Poles, Lithuanians and so on, including Southern "white trash" (his expression.)

What I learned from the introductions and notes, especially those by Lin Carter to the two Ballantine anthologies: Lovecraft's father died in an insane asylum when Howard was very young; he was raised by his grandfather and later by his mother and aunts. He was an invalid in childhood and later on a recluse. He began reading at four, and was especially influenced by the Thousand and One Nights; he adopted the pseudonym Abdul Alhazred at five (later the name of the author of the Necronomicon which plays such a role in his later fiction); he wrote his first story when he was six. The five earliest stories which he preserved and later published date from between his fifteenth and twentieth years; they are included in The Tomb and Other Stories. After a hiatus of seven years, he began writing again in 1917. His stories up until 1919 are all grotesque horror stories in the tradition of Poe; that year he discovered the writings of Lord Dunsany and began writing nostalgic dream fantasies in his manner, although less humorous and always a bit "darker" than Dunsany. Throughout the 1920's he alternates stories in the Dunsanian mode, such as "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" [1919], "The Cats of Ulthar" [1920] and "Celephais" [1920] with stories in the earlier mode such as "The Moon-Bog" [1921] and "The Outsider" [1921]. Toward the end of the decade he begins to combine the two strands in works like The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and ultimately the Cthullhu mythos.

While his stories are mostly based on original ideas and truly are "horror", too often he relies on building up an atmosphere with vague and meaningless adjectives, interchangeable when not actually misused, such as "obscene", "monstrous", "hideous", "inhuman". "blasphemous", "nameless", "unwholesome" and of course "evil".

[Book Concierge]

Holmes On the Range – Steve Hockensmith – 3.5***
Well, this was a hoot and a half! I loved the brothers Big Red (Otto) and Old Red (Gustav) and how they worked together. Big Red narrates, as he is the more educated of the two, being able to read and write. But Old Red is the real fan of Holmes and his methods of observation and deduction, and it is he who finally solves the murder.
My full review HERE

[James]

Ander Izagirre, Potosi: Narrativa [2017] 204 pages [Kindle Unlimited, in Spanish]

Ander Izagirre is a Spanish journalist who writes in both Spanish and Euzkadi (Basque). Potosi: Narrativa is the book in Spanish which has been translated into English as The Mountain That Eats Men and which is this month's reading for the World Literature Group I am in on Goodreads. "The Mountain that Eats Men" is the nickname of the Cerro Rico just south of the city of Potosi in Bolivia, which since colonial times has been one of the richest silver mines in the world. The descriptions of the book on Amazon and elsewhere call the book a history of the Potosi mine or the story of a young minera (fourteen at the beginning of the book) whom Izagirre calls "Alicia Quispe" (as with many of those he interviews, he has changed the name for her own safety) -- but in fact it is much more. Essentially, it is a history of mining in Bolivia, or what amounts to the same thing, a history of Bolivia; probably no country in the world is a better example of the Marxist dictum that all history is the history of class struggle.

The first chapter, "En el pais de los tesoros", is set in the Potosi silver mines. It opens underground, where the author is interviewing an old miner (as he says, a rarity in Bolivia) he calls "Pedro Villca", and the first sentence is ""Las mujeres no pueden entrar a la mina" dice Pedro Villca." ("Women cannot enter the mines", said Pedro Villca.) There follows a description of the interior of the mountain and the current primitive methods of working the veins. The book then turns to a clearing high on the mountainside where Alicia lives with her widowed mother Doña Rosa and her little sister Evelyn. Throughout the book we come back to this family. Here we learn more about the horrible conditions of poverty and environmental contamination in which the mining families live in Potosi. There is also a bit of the early history of the region.

The second chapter, "El barón y la princesa" describes the author's second trip to Bolivia and is set mainly in Llallagua, about 230 km north of Potosi, the site of the "Siglo XX" tin mines. This chapter goes back to the turn of the century, when a ruined miner discovered a rich vein of tin and sold it to a speculator named Simon Patiño, who became the fifth richest man in the world. (I couldn't help thinking of the poor computer programmer who wrote DOS and sold it for a couple hundred dollars to his "friend" Bill Gates.) Patiño and the other tin barons did nothing to develop the country or diversify its economy; they controlled the government in the interests of their oligarchy and all eventually lived outside Bolivia. The author meditates a bit on the irony that the richest places in world in terms of natural resources are the poorest for the working classes. (This is not only true for mineral resources; the richest agricultural territory of the colonial empires was -- Haiti.)

The third chapter, "Todo a punto de estallar", continues the more recent history from the Revolution of 1951 under Victor Paz Estenssoro, which nationalized the mines and made a beginning of improving conditions for the miners, but ended up in bureaucratic corruption (I was reminded of the Egyptian Revolution of the same period under Gamal Abdul Nasser, and more generally of most revolutions from the Bolsheviks on) and eventually succumbed to the pressure of American imperialism which artificially depressed the world price of tin (as they later did with copper to overthrow Salvador Allende in Chile). There followed a series of military governments, a brief period of democracy, and then the second administration of Paz Estenssoro, who was by then a complete tool of the IMF and the multinational corporations, and who immediately undid all that he had done before, privatizing the mines (the more profitable given to the multinationals, the less profitable as "cooperatives"). This chapter has some very interesting information about the role of working class women in overthrowing one of the military governments and highlights the role of Domatila Barrios. This section is partly based on interviews with a leftist Catholic priest who seems to be a precursor of "liberation theology".

The fourth chapter, "Los que sobran", comes back to the Potosi region and explains the nature and role of the "cooperatives." Originally actual cooperatives of miners, who worked the least profitable parts of the mines, they were taken over by the bureaucratic leaders who treat them as their private property and employ and exploit the greatest number of miners in the country, mostly not "members" of the cooperatives, who make minimum wage or below and have no benefits. The cooperatives up until recently were exempt from most taxes, labor and environmental laws (and ignored those that did apply) and used those exemptions to "front" for the multinationals. The cooperatives employ almost all the miners in the country, which is to say most of the industrial workers, and account for about 3% of the total production, while the multinational corporations who own the technologically advanced private mines employ only a few thousand miners and account for the other 97%. The book explains the attempts of the leftist government of Evo Morales to bring the cooperatives under the laws and how the cooperative directors fought against his administration. (Last November I read a book by Tariq Ali which was partially about Evo Morales, the only other thing I have read about Bolivia. He has since been deposed by the oligarchy.)

The last chapter, "El Diablo", is about the violence of the miners' culture and the attempts of women to organize and change it. The book then ends with the family of Alicia.

This is a very bleak and depressing book; it shows that there is essentially no hope for the workers of Bolivia as long as capitalism continues to exist on a world scale. I don't know enough about the history of Bolivia, obviously, to judge whether all his facts and interpretations are correct, but there is nothing which doesn't ring true in the light of what I know about the United States and other parts of the world.

[Book Concierge]

At Bertram’s Hotel – Agatha Christie – 3***
Christie excels at creating complicated plots with many suspects and red herrings to keep the reader guessing. She has plenty of surprises in store with this one as well. I had, unfortunately for me, seen the PBS Masterpiece mystery series episode, so knew where it was heading, but I still found it fascinating to watch how Christie wove the elements together.
My full review HERE

[James]

Jorge Luis Borges, El Informe de Brodie [1970] 77 pages [in Spanish]

A collection of eleven stories, published 21 years after his previous collection El Aleph. Apart from the title story, which purports to be a missionary's description of a very primitive cannibal tribe he calls the "Yahoos" -- the allusion is to Swift, not the search engine -- and the most "Borgesian" story in the book, "Guayaquil", a dialogue about history, these are all what Borges himself calls "realistic" stories, mainly stories of violence similar to those in his poetry collection Para las seis cuerdas. While his earlier stories were influenced by writers like Joyce and Kafka, he tells us that in these he was trying for Rudyard Kipling. It's not that these are bad stories but they're not the sort of imaginative writing I was expecting from his earlier books.

Jorge Luis Borges, El oro de los tigres [1972] 47 pages [in Spanish]

Thirty one poems on a variety of his favorite themes: literature and history, time and knife fights.


Jorge Luis Borges, La rosa profunda [1975] 47 pages [in Spanish]

Thirty six poems, on the same themes as in El oro de los tigres, and a few on his blindness and old age (written in his early seventies.)

[Book Concierge]

Babylon’s Ark – Lawrence Anthony – 4****
Subtitle: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo
Lawrence Anthony was a well-known conservationist and advocate for animals, running a game reserve in South Africa when images on CNN of the war in Baghdad caught his attention. Horrified at the potential loss of wildlife at that war-ravaged city’s zoo, he had to somehow go help. And so, against all odds, he did. This is the story of his work there. It’s informative and exciting. It’s quite the adventure!
My full review HERE

[James]

Nicholas Hern, Peter Handke: Theater and Anti-Theater [1971] 122 pages

This short work on Peter Handke is volume five in a series called Modern German Authors: Texts and Contexts. Peter Handke, the 2020 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, has been writing for over fifty years, since about 1966; I read many of his books last year, including all his early plays. This book, published in 1971, obviously only deals with those early works. It begins with a short overview of the author, his reputation as an enfant-terrible, his provocations and self-promotion, his general ideas and political opinions (at that point more or less left-wing and anarchist). The greater part of the book, however, consists in analysis of his first eight plays. There is a short appendix of translated excerpts from the works discussed, and a bibliography of critical articles that had appeared about him by that time.

I wish that I had found this book and read it when I was reading the plays; I might have gotten more out of them. The series title refers to contexts, and that was what I was missing. I did note generally in my review of the Theaterstücke that he was influenced by Brecht and Beckett, but this book demonstrates how much in the plays was based on specific allusions to certain plays of Beckett and to Ionesco, most of which I haven't read. I didn't really understand how intertextual his writing actually was. He was also apparently very influenced by the later writings of Wittgenstein; I've only read the early Wittgenstein (the Tractatus) so I missed that also. To be sure, I did appreciate his plays more than his fiction -- but now I wonder how much of that was also intertextual.

Perhaps after I have read more of Beckett, Ionesco and Wittgenstein, all of whom are on my TBR list for the next two or three years, I will come back to Handke's plays.

[James]

Nawal El-Saadawi, Walking Through Fire: The Life of Nawal El-Saadawi [2001, tr. 2002] 251 pages [Kindle, Open Library]

Walking Through Fire is the second volume of Nawal El-Saadawi's autobiography (the first volume, Daughter of Isis, was about her childhood; unfortunately it is not available from Open Library). It has a complex chronological structure and is written in a sophisticated literary style which is reminiscent of her fiction. It opens in 1993, in Durham, North Carolina, where she and her husband Sherif (the English translator of the book) are teaching at Duke University. This first chapter is entitled "The Threat", and it soon returns to Cairo to narrate the immediately previous period of her life, how she was put on a death-list and eventually decided she had to go into exile. The actual autobiography begins in the next two chapters, starting about 1950 in the last days of British rule when she was a medical student and political activist for independence. She falls in love with a fida'iyeen, Ahmed Helmi, a guerilla fighter against the British occupation, and they get married. He goes to the front, and returns defeated and broken in spirit, betrayed by the government. Then follows the Revolution of 1951 and the rise of Gamal Abd el-Nasser. Throughout the book, the political events play a major role, as one would expect from a political figure such as Saadawi.

The fourth chapter skips to 1957; she is recently divorced, with a baby daughter, Mona. After rejecting an offer of marriage from another doctor, as soon as she completes her internship she convinces the government, which is expanding medical services in rural areas, to send her to her natal village of Khafr Tahla as the local doctor, despite their reluctance to assign women. The chronicle of her experiences as a rural doctor are quite interesting. The following chapter is on the war which breaks out over the Suez Canal, and the invasion by England, France and Israel. She takes military training, but the orders never come for the local recruits to go to the front. She points out that even with the country being invaded, the government of Nasser (undoubtedly the most anti-imperialist leader in the Arab world, apart from the Palestinian resistance) never dared to arm the people, though he demagogically promised to. Despite its claims to be "socialist" and a fairly extensive land reform, Nasser's revolution was top-down and limited to essentially bourgeois tasks; he feared the rise of a real revolution among the peasantry and the working class. After the war, she tries unsuccessfully to save a young girl in a forced marriage who is being abused by her elderly husband; the girl is returned to her husband by the police and commits suicide. Saadawi is reported by her time-serving superior for "inciting women against the divine laws of Islam" -- which would be the accusation against her throughout her working life -- and is transferred to a hospital for tuberculosis patients in Cairo. The book then describes her life in Cairo and the death of her mother and father.

Halfway through the book, chapter eight opens with her sitting before a blank sheet of paper and suffering from "writer's block." We are then plunged immediately and without warning into a surrealist nightmare resembling some of her later novels. When she comes back to the world, we find that it is the first day of 2000, the present time of the book, which she is writing. Then there is a memory flashback to the end of her first marriage, which explains some of the nightmare. The next chapter again begins in 2000 and again passes immediately into a flashback, this time to 1960, and her second marriage. It seems as if she is going to resume the chronological story, but instead the narrative for the rest of the book moves back and forth to various episodes of her life from the forties to the present, according to a logic of image association rather than chronology, just as in her experimental novels. The book ends with her on the plane to return to Cairo from her seven years in exile.

This is a very interesting book about a brilliant and committed woman. She died in March, 2021, at the age of ninety.

[Book Concierge]

Miss Benson’s Beetle – Rachel Joyce – 4****
Two women no one would ever consider as compatible form an unlikely team as they travel to the other side of the world in search of an elusive beetle. What they find is a strong vocation, and an ever-lasting bond of friendship and love. I absolutely loved these characters! There were times when I had to laugh at their foibles. There were times when I feared for their safety. And quite a few tears were shed as well. Ultimately, they teach us a lesson about courage and perseverance, about not being afraid to fail … or to succeed.
My full review HERE

[Book Concierge]

The Cobra Event – Richard Preston – 4****
A deranged, disgraced biotechnician is intent on releasing the deadly Cobra virus in New York, to kill as many “useless humans” as possible. This is a great thriller, that kept me enthralled and turning pages as quickly as I could. I’d read Preston’s nonfiction bestsellers, so I knew he had the research background to make this a very plausible scenario. I loved the details on how the teams of scientists, public health officials and FBI agents worked to decipher the clues. If you’re at all squeamish you might want to skip some of the autopsy scenes.
My full review HERE

[Book Concierge]

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox – Maggie O’Farrell – 3***
There’s so much going on here I hardly know where to start. There’s the mystery of Esme’s commitment to the mental, Iris’s mess of a love life, and the intrigue of Iris’s “brother, who is really no blood relation” Alex. I thought it was rather melodramatic as well as being disjointed, but that ending – that wonderfully ambiguous and ethereal ending! Well, she got an extra half-star for that final scene.
My full review HERE

[James]

Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night with Notes Anthropological and Explanatory (Richard Burton ed.) v.2 [Kindle, Project Gutenberg] approx. 350 pages

This volume is divided into two parts. The first part, which is about three quarters of the book, contains the rest of the material from Payne's Tales from the Arabic (see my review of supplemental v1.) This includes the sixteen stories of the chiefs of police (mainly how they were gulled by clever criminals, mostly women), a few romantic adventure stories, and another version of the frame story. The second half, written by W.A. Clouston rather than Burton, is composed of source notes, analogues and variants of the tales in this and the previous volume, giving texts or summaries of other tales which are either possible sources, parallels, or in some cases derived from the Nights, including Indian stories (e.g. from Somadeva's The Ocean of Stories), Persian and Turkish stories, and some from late Mediaeval and Renaissance Europe, mainly Italian and "Old English" (i.e. Middle English).

[Book Concierge]

The Whole Cat and Caboodle – Sofie Ryan – 3***
Book # 1 in the Second Chance Cat Mystery series, featuring Sarah Grayson, proprietor of Second Chance, a consignment shop in North Harbor, Maine, and her rescue cat, Elvis. This is a cute cozy mystery with a decent premise and a wonderful cast of colorful supporting characters. I love that the crew of senior sleuths is christened “Charlie’s Angels” … with a nod to the movie, NOT the original TV series! I’ll keep reading this series.
My full review HERE

[James]

Jorge Luis Borges, El libro de arena [1975] 88 pages [in Spanish]

A collection of thirteen short stories, this reminded me more of his earlier collections than the immediately previous El informe de Brodie. It is an extremely diverse selection. In contrast to the last book, only one story, "La noche de los dones", was about a cuchillero.

The first story, "El Otro", about a meeting with his doppelganger, and "Utopia de un hombre que está cansada" are in the tradition of his dream fantasies; "Ulrica" he calls his only love story, but the style is somewhat strange and mysterious; "El Congreso" is not exactly fantasy, but is about a strange political movement; "There Are More Things" is a horror story in homage to H.P. Lovecraft; "La Secta de los Treinta" is one of his imaginary heresy stories; "El espejo y la máscara" and "Undr" are fantasies about poetry; "El soborno" is a realistic story of academic politics which is very similar to "Guayaquil", one of the best stories in the previous book; "Avelino Arredondo" is a historical fiction; "El disco" is another fantasy; and the title story, "El libro de arena" was definitely in the same style as his most memorable stories in Ficciones and El Aleph.

[James]

Jorge Luis Borges, La moneda de hierro [1976] 40 pages [in Spanish]
Jorge Luis Borges, Historia de la noche [1977] 47 pages [in Spanish]
Jorge Luis Borges, La cifra [1981] 59 pages [in Spanish]

Three more short poetry collections by Borges, only one more to go. As with his other collections, I found these poems very uneven both in content and as poetry, but I thought they were definitely worth reading. There are many poems here which are what he calls "chaotic enumerations", that is lists of seemingly random items, in a style which he attributes to Walt Whitman. There are also a number of prose poems, especially in La cifra.

[Melissa]

Poisonous (Max Revere #3) by Allison Brennan
4 ★

A teen bully is murdered and no one seems to care. No one except her mentally-challenged step-brother Tommy. The murder has torn his family apart and he doesn’t understand why. When Max receives a letter from him asking for help, she can’t say no.

This book made me sad. Tommy is an amazing character that made my heart ache. He was so innocent and loving. I wanted Max to solve the murder as much as she did just for Tommy’s sake. The family turmoil was heartbreaking. Austin’s mom was horrible. It’s sad to think that there are really moms out there like that.
I found the mystery in this story quite interesting. I really did not know who the murderer was. I had a suspicion, but it was incorrect. I never thought it was who it was.
Max is still trying to get passed her kidnapping and all the mental manipulation that occurred. I feel like it’s affecting her relationship with Nick and I don’t like it. Her and Nick are good together. Max also needs to stop asking Nick about what is going on with his ex-wife. There may be very good reason he’s not telling her and she may not really want to know what it is.



Goddess in the Machine (Goddess in the Machine #1) by Lora Beth Johnson
5 ★

Andra wakes up after being in cryonic sleep expecting to be on a new planet with her family. What she finds is a strange world and no family. A thousand years has passed and the people of this world believe she is a Goddess who will save them all. Andra must rely on an exiled bastard prince named Zhade and his friends to pass as a Goddess and figure out what went wrong.

This book was so much fun to read. The language of Andra’s descendants is unique and challenging. It was fun trying to figure out what they were saying. After I figured it out I found myself replacing their words with the ones I use.
There are some pretty good twists throughout this story. I was pleasantly surprised many times. There characters are fabulous. Some are funny, some are hateful, and some are vengeful. It was a nice mix.
The technology used in the story is pretty inventive. Nano-bots of all kinds and the way Andra is able to control them. It’s a pretty unique story and I look forward to continuing the series.

[Book Concierge]

Listening For Lions – Gloria Whelan – 4****
This is a lovely YA / middle-school-grade novel with some important lessons about doing what is right, and honoring your parents and elders. Rachel is a worthy heroine; she’s intelligent, principled, compassionate and a hard worker. I love the way that she interacts with others and considers the possible effects of her words and actions before moving forward.
My full review HERE

[Book Concierge]

Cutting For Stone – Abraham Verghese – 5***** and a ❤
This is an epic story of twin boys, born of an Indian nun and a British surgeon in an Ethiopian hospital, but raised by two other Indian physicians and the staff of Missing Hospital. Verghesse is a masterful storyteller, who wields his pen with surgical precision. The landscape and characters come to life on the page, letting the reader experience the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures of Ethiopia and the hospitals both there and in New York where Marion finishes his training.
My full review HERE

[Book Concierge]

Devil’s Food Cake Murder – Joanne Fluke – 2.5**
Book # 14 in the Hannah Swenson cozy mystery series and she STILL hasn’t made up her mind on which suitor – dentist Norman or lawman Mike – to accept. Looks like the boys may be making the decision for her. Yes, there’s a murder, and yes, Hannah MUST investigate. But she also bakes a lot of goodies. The recipes are probably what I like best about the series.
My full review HERE

[Book Concierge]

The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna – Juliet Grames – 3.5***
In her debut novel, Grames explores the lives of two sisters and the rift between them. Spanning a century we follow Stella Fortuna from her birth in a small Italian village at the beginning of the 20th century, through her family’s immigration to America, to the birth of successive generations, until she is an old woman mostly confined to bed and still “at war” with her younger sister, Tina, who lives just across the street. I love family sagas and this one is epic. I really enjoyed this book but hated the title and device of “seven or eight deaths” – it just seems so contrived.
My full review HERE

[Melissa]

The Council of Mirrors (The Sisters Grimm #9) by Michael Buckley
3 ★

The final book in The Sisters Grimm series has sisters Sabrina and Daphne fighting to stop Mirror from destroying Ferryport Landing and their grandmother. With the help of their family and friends they may just be able to defeat him.

This has been a delightful series to read. The characters are funny and memorable. The friendships are strong and dedication to each other rules. Unfortunately we do say good bye to several characters throughout the book and the moments are sad, but it just makes the task of defeating Mirror more important. The whole series is a good lesson in friendship and loyalty.
Sabrina and Daphne have the sort of relationship that I think we all want with our siblings when we are young. They understand and respect each other. The also work great together. Sabrina listens to Daphne’s idea s and vice versa.
There is quite a bit of violence in the book, but plenty of humor as well. The illustrations are beautiful and very detailed.
I really like how the author completed the series. He did not just end it after the battle. We get to see Sabrina and Daphne 16 years later and then 16 years after that. It was a great conclusion.

[Book Concierge]

Concrete Rose – Angie Thomas – 4****
In this prequel to The Hate U Give , Thomas gives us the young Maverick Carter, a 17-year-old gang member struggling to find his path to manhood. I can really see how this young man, hardly out of childhood, is being influenced – by his peers, by his parents, by other adults in his neighborhood and school, and by the expectations of society. Thomas writes about a realistic urban environment for many families, with brutal honesty and empathy. She does not shy away from the serious social issues facing these families, nor does she offer platitudes or pat answers on how to address these issues.
My full review HERE

[James]

Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin: Texte de l'édition originale {1831] 416 pages [in French]

Although it comes near the end of the final version of the Comédie humaine, in the section entitled Études philosophiques, La Peau de Chagrin was one of the earliest of Balzac's novels written under his own name, two years after Les Chauans. Having over the past three or fours years worked my way through more than half the Comédie humaine, I was not expecting this to be what it was: a supernatural horror story, very different from his other works. This was Balzac's first commercial and critical success. As an early work -- and this was emphasized by the fact that the editor of the edition I read (Livre de Poche classique with an introduction by Pierre Barbéris) chose to reprint the original 1831 serialized version rather than the last revision for the Comédie humaine -- it is perhaps less well organized than most of his later novels.

The book begins with a young man, whom we later find out to be the marquis Raphael de Valentin, the son of a ruined nobleman, losing his last "napoléon" in a gambling house. This incident was originally a short story called "Le Dernier Napoléon", which Balzac unfortunately and rather inartistically turns into an anti-gambling tract (the original story was included as an appendix in the edition I read). Raphael then decides to commit suicide, but before throwing himself into the river he stops along the way at an antique shop. The scene at the antique shop is a masterpiece of horror writing. At the end, the Mephistophelean proprietor offers him the "Peau de chagrin". "Chagrin" here is a sort of play on words; it has of course the usual meaning, the same as in English, of embarrassment or remorse, but also the meaning of a wild ass or onager (the English "shagreen"), thus "Peau de chagrin" is both literally the "Skin of an onager" and also a "Skin of remorse". Inscribed with strange writing, Sanskrit or Arabic, the skin has the power to grant every wish of its possessor -- but for each wish it shrinks, and when it is gone the possessor dies. Raphael of course doesn't believe this, and facetiously wishes to be rich and at a banquet with lots of food, high society, and so forth. He leaves the shop to continue to the Seine, but is met by some friends who have been seeking him out to invite him to just such a banquet, and at the banquet he is met by a lawyer who tells him he has just inherited six million francs from an unknown uncle.

We then get a long flashback from his infancy to the time he was seeking to commit suicide; according to the editor's introduction this section was largely autobiographical, and it is written in Balzac's usual style of blending Romanticism with realistic traits. Then we pick up his story again a few years after he gets the skin. He is married to the wonderful Pauline, his former landlady's daughter who has also unexpectedly become rich -- possibly because Raphael wanted her to be. However, the skin has considerably shrunk. Here the horror story commences, as he tries everything possible to get rid of the skin or prevent its effects, but all in vain. I won't reveal the ending.

In addition to being a good story, the novel is an allegory of the theory that fulfilled desires come at the expense of life. It is also an opportunity as always for Balzac to satirize the bourgeois society of his time.

[James]

Navagatio Sancti Brendani [10th century] about 18 pages [Bibliotheca Augustana, html file, in Latin]

The Navagatio Sancti Brendani, or Navigation of Saint Brendan is an account, probably written around 900 AD, of a seven-year voyage of the fifth-century Irish Saint Brendan to find the Land of Promise to the Saints (terra repromissionis sanctorum). It is known from about 140 manuscripts, which all differ slightly in details; the version I read, downloaded from the Bibliotheca Augustana website, is a transcription of the Alençon MS from the eleventh century and titled in that manuscript Vita sanctissimi confessoris Christi Brendani. For those who haven't discovered it, the Bibliotheca Augustana is a great free site for classical, mediaeval and renaissance texts (and some later works in the common domain) in the original languages, but it consists of continuous html pages so it is difficult to get a real page count. The work is 18 pages of ordinary 8 1/2 x 11 paper, but would probably be somewhat longer if an actual printed book. The Latin is not particularly difficult, except for a handful of mediaeval words that I didn't know and were not in my Latin dictionary (based on the classical language.)

The story begins with Saint Brendan in his monastery, who is visited by his nephew, Barinthus. Barinthus tells him about his visit to his son (in Christ?) Mernocatus, who has established his own monastery on the Delicious Island; Barinthus and Mernocatus then travel in three days to the nearby Land of Promise. After Barinthus leaves for his own monastery, St. Brendan decides to find the island himself, together with fourteen volunteers from his monastery. They set sail, but it takes them seven years of sailing around in circles before they are allowed to reach the island they are seeking. Although some Irish (or Irish-American) chauvinists use this and similar stories to claim that the Irish discovered North America a half-millennium before Leif Ericson, the text is obviously not the account of a real voyage and they never reach any mainland, let alone the coast of America. What they find are miraculous islands peopled by angels in the form of talking birds and other fabulous places; they travel around in circles celebrating Christmas and Easter at the same places each year (including on the back of a giant whale.)

Now that I am retired I am planning to "fill in the gaps" of my reading in the classics, essentially in three simultaneous projects: one from the Odyssey to the ninth century, one from the tenth to the seventeenth century (beginning with this book), and one from the eighteenth century (starting with Blake) to the present. I'm not sure how far I will get on any of them.

[Book Concierge]

The Weight of Heaven – Thirty Umrigar – 5*****
Reeling from the loss of their son, Frank and Ellie Benton accept an opportunity to relocate to India to run a factory. But they cannot escape their grief, and Frank’s obsession with the son of a local couple drives a wedge between both couples. This is the third book by Umrigar that I have read, and the third time I’ve rated her work 5-stars. It is an intense and heartbreakingly real story. The tragedy of this couple’s story is inevitable though none the less shocking.
My full review HERE

[James]

Jorge Luis Borges, La memoria de Shakespeare [1983] 33 pages [in Spanish]

The last and by far the shortest of Borges' story collections, La memoria de Shakespeare contains only four stories. The first story, "Agosto 25, 1983" is like the first story of the previous collection a meeting of Borges with his older/younger double; the second story, "Tigres azules" is like the last story of that collection, about "disks" which are impossible to exist in the normal world; the third story, "La rosa de Paracelso" is about alchemy; and the title story is about a man who receives the memories of Shakespeare.

[James]

Jorge Luis Borges, Los conjurados [1985] 54 pages [in Spanish]

The last poetry collection of Borges, and the last thing I will be reading by him this year. It contains 39 short poems, on a variety of themes. As always, I am not good at reviewing poetry; I liked some and not others.

[James]

Ana María Barrenechea, Borges the labyrinth maker [1965] 175 pages

A critical study of Borges' writings up to the time it was written (after El otro, el mismo but before Elogia de la sombra and El informe de Brodie), this is an expanded translation of La expresíon de la irrealidad en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges.

It begins with a short biography which describes the various literary movements by which Borges was influenced and gives a brief summary of his writings. The rest of the book traces his exploration of irreality in terms of various repeated themes in his stories, poems and essays, such as infinity, chaos, pantheism, time and eternity, and idealist philosophy.

In addition to casting some light on passages which were somewhat obscure, the book also shows how all the stories and poems fit together as part of an extended discussion and what issues Borges was concerned with. It also discusses the literary techniques he uses in the stories. More worthwhile than most books of criticism.

[Book Concierge]

City of Secrets – Stewart O’Nan – 3***
Set in 1945 Jerusalem, the novel follows Brand, a survivor of the Holocaust, as he tries to make a new life working with the resistance. I love O’Nan’s ability to put you into the mind of his characters – to understand their hopes, ambitions, and fears. But this was perhaps too intense for me at this time. I appreciated it more than I enjoyed it.
My full review HERE

[Melissa]

Queen of Air and Darkness (The Dark Artifices #3) by Cassandra Clare
5 ★

Death, love, curses, rebellion, war, disease…it’s all here. At 870 pages this book was chock full of everything. It was sad, intense and heartwarming. The characters continue to amaze me and I fall in love with them more during each book. The loyalty and love they all have for each other is a breath of fresh air.
Julian and Emma have to make some pretty tough choices and they did it with integrity and not a bit of selfishness. It’s always about the Blackthorn family and what will happen to the kids. Having Helen back helps, but it’s still very hard for Julian. Livvy’s death is a big part of the story and brought a tear to my eye many times. Ty is a strong kid, but her death shattered him.
There are some awesome surprises as well. The reader finds out more about Kit Herondale and I can’t wait to see what the author does with it. The book ends with an interesting scene that added many questions about the future of Emma, Julian and the rest of the Shadowhunter gang we love. The best surprise is the event of the century at the end of the book. I smiled the whole time.

[Book Concierge]

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror – Robert Louis Stevenson – 3***
Classic horror from a master of Victorian gothic fiction. I appreciate the atmospheric nature of Stevenson’s writing, and his use of psychological / moral themes. But the language seems over the top as compared to more modern writers.
My full review HERE

[Melissa]

Shattered (Max Revere #4) by Allison Brennan
4 ★

Investigative reporter Maxine Revere gets a call from an old friend whose wife is on trial for murdering their son. He has done research and found 3 other boys have been killed in the same manner over the last 20 years. One of those boys is FBI Agent Lucy Kincaid’s nephew, Justin. Max and Lucy team up to catch a killer and close some cold cases.

This was an excellent example of the right way to bring 2 different series together. Max and Lucy were an amazing team and worked very well with each other. Although Max was very upset about Lucy becoming her partner, I think the idea was brilliant. It really made Max think about her life and the choices she makes. Max had to let things go while working with Lucy and I think it made her better at her job. She saw things differently and realized that sometimes 2 eyes are better than 1.
Lucy’s family does not take the news of her helping solve Justin’s murder very well. Her father all but kicked her out of the house. I understand being upset that they will have to go through the pain again, but I don’t understand why they wouldn’t want to find out who murdered him. I’ve was very disappointed in the Kincaid family at this point. Dillon gets it and that meant a lot to Lucy.
The cases in this book were heartbreaking. Who would kill children and why? I don’t totally understand the reasons behind the killer’s actions, but I do sympathize with the heartbreak and anger the killer had.

[James]

Isabel Allende, La casa de los espíritus [1982] 454 pages [in Spanish]

Allende's first novel, La casa de los espíritus is the chronicle of four generations of the Del Valle and Trueba family from the beginning of the twentieth century to the military coup which overthrew the government of (the author's father's cousin) Salvador Allende (though neither he, Pinochet, or any other historical character is mentioned by name in the book). The novel is obviously very much influenced by Cien años de soledad, both in its overall structure and especially in the first third of the book (the most "magical realist" part) where many of the characters and episodes almost seem to be taken from the earlier novel (for instance, the supernaturally beautiful Rosa la Bella; the extravagant inventions and voyages of Tio Marcos; the servant Nana; and even the tree in the patio). The central role of Senator Trueba is in some respects similar to that of Colonel Bendija, although with very different politics; in both novels there is mention of a large and unknown number of illegitimate children who play a role in later events. About a third of the way in, the novel becomes more purely realist and the magical elements gradually disappear under the weight of the all-too-real political events. Running through both novels is the theme of political violence.

Allende's novel opens on the Thursday before Easter with the Del Valle family: the parents Severo (who has just decided to become involved in politics as a candidate of the Liberal Party) and Nivea (a suffragette), the servant Nana, and a number of children, of whom only two play a significant role in the book: the oldest (surviving) daughter Rosa, and the youngest, Clara. The central character Esteban Trueba is mentioned casually as Rosa's novio, who is working under miserable conditions in a mine in the north of the country to make enough money to marry her. (He comes from an originally wealthy landlord family which has been ruined by his father's alcoholism.) After a few pages of domestic events all crammed into that one day -- a scandalous comment by Clara at church which earns her the enmity of the fanatic Father Restrepo, who seems as though he will be a major character but actually disappears from the book after the first chapter, the arrival of the body of Tio Marcos, who is described later in memory flashbacks at several points in the novel, and of the strange giant dog Barrabás -- we arrive at the event which is at one level (the personal family level) the cause of all the tragic events in the novel: the death of Rosa, who is accidentally poisoned by a bottle of liquor meant to assassinate her father, in what is described as one of the first political assassinations in the country.

The next chapter is focused on Esteban Trueba. After years of hard and fruitless labor in the mine, he has finally discovered a vein of gold which will make him rich. The same day he learns that Rosa is dead. Angry and frustrated -- his character throughout the novel -- he turns the mine over to an overseer and ultimately decides to restore and live at his family's semi-feudal fundo in the countryside, Los Tres Marias. He succeeds in making this ruined ranch into a model, one of the richest in the region; he prides himself in having improved the material lives of his peasants, but treats them arrogantly as incapable children with no rights. From this point on, he functions as a symbol of the patriarchal feudal order, eventually becoming a Senator of the Conservative Party and a leader of the far right in the struggle against Allende and the socialists.

The third chapter turns to focus on Clara, an unusual girl with psychic powers. Ultimately, she marries her sister's former suitor, Esteban. To summarize the middle chapters of the novel briefly -- basically just listing the main characters: Trueba and Clara have a daughter, Blanca, and twin boys, Jaime and Nicolas. We meet the son of Trueba's overseer, Pedro Tercero Garcia, who from the beginning is closely associated with Blanca and who represents the political "left". We meet the strange French count Jean de Satigny. Blanca has a daughter Alba, who (as we learn in the Epilogue) is the "narrator" of the book. We meet the Nicolas' girlfriend Amanda and her brother Miguel. Most of this part of the book deals with the domestic affairs of the family.

Finally, in the last few chapters the book becomes entirely political, with the victory of Allende, the struggles of left and right and ultimately the coup of the Military Junta led by General Pinochet, and how these events affect the destinies of all the characters. The ending is very powerful. This is one of the best political novels I have read in a long time.

To end on a more personal note, I remember that when I was quite young, a woman from Chile visited our church and gave a talk about the country, probably to raise money for missionaries. What I recall, apart from the delicious Chilean food that was served that evening, was that she kept repeating that Chile was the one country in South America with an unbroken tradition of democracy, which had never had a military regime or a dictatorship. This boast, a matter of great pride to Chileans at the time, is mentioned many times in the novel; none of the characters, whatever side they were on (apart from Miguel), believes beforehand that a coup could ever take place in Chile. Perhaps Chile for that reason was the one country in South America where people could believe that a "peaceful road to socialism" was possible. I remembered this visit later, when the coup against Allende occurred. At the time I was living in New York City, and I was part of a group called the Latin American Solidarity Committee, which mobilized to organize demonstrations against the Pinochet regime and for asylum for various victims escaping from the terror of that time, which is described in the last chapters of the novel. It's impossible to really know what effect a movement like that has, but I like to think we helped prevent some deaths.

[James]

Ernesto Sábato, El túnel [1948] 124 pages [in Spanish]

This year the World Literature Group I am in on Goodreads is reading one book from each of the major countries of Hispanic America (I say "Hispanic America" rather than "Latin America" because Brazil is omitted). For Argentina, the group chose Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, obviously the "right" choice because Borges is probably the most influential contemporary author of the region (apart from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whom he influenced.) The runner-up in the poll was this short novel (actually more of a novella) by Sábato. Since it is so short and I already had a copy in my garage-library, I decided to read it as well. (I will also be reading some more of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, even though he was not the winner for Colombia.)

The book is formally a crime story, narrated in the first person by the murderer, Juan Pablo Castel, in prison after his conviction for killing Maria Iribarne (or rather, as we can guess from the last page, in an institution for the criminally insane). It is first and foremost a psychological study, a frightening confession of a lonely, obsessed man who stalks a young woman (with her own psychological problems, apparently) and ultimately kills her out of a jealousy which the reader sees immediately has no foundation in reality. (It is not however a psychological "thriller", in that the narrator admits in the first sentence that he murdered her.) Actually it is somewhat more than that.

There are books which are often called "timeless", in the sense that, apart from references to particular historical events or technologies, one could imagine them as having been written at any point in a fairly wide span of time. Ficciones is an example; if I were given one of the stories in that collection without knowing who wrote it or when, without the mentions of cars or telephones I would be hard put to locate it more precisely than "probably twentieth century". There are other books which (and I don't mean this in any derogatory sense) are so closely connected with the concerns, ideas and style of a particular period that they could easily be located within say a ten year span. El túnel belongs to this second type. As I read it I was constantly reminded of other (apparently dissimilar) novels I have read: L'étranger and La peste by Camus, Sartre's L'age de raison trilogy, Waugh's The Loved One and Beckett's Watt among others. When I looked at my reading notebook, all of them were written within five years of El túnel.

What El túnel has in common with the other books of the late forties and early fifties is that the aberrations of the characters are not considered as psychological illnesses so much as exaggerated examples of a metaphysical human condition of alienation. The metaphor of the tunnel in which the narrator feels himself to be confined is not considered as something abnormal, but as the condition of all of us, although most people are too superficial or intellectually dishonest to recognize it; the narrator's insanity is just that he does recognize it and tries to break out of it through his relationship with the young woman he murders, hence his obsession. The narrator's desperate but futile attempts to understand and communicate with other people, and especially Maria, through a kind of parody of logical reasoning is what reminded me of Watt.

The edition I read, in the Macmillan Modern Spanish American Literature Series, was designed for use in American second-year Spanish classes, with an introduction and notes in English by the editor, Louis Pérez, and a glossary. The introduction I think makes one common mistake about this literature of the forties and fifties -- he says that the author was trying to describe the alienation of "modern" life. While in fact the feelings of alienation and isolation he describes are typical of "modern" [read: capitalist] life of a certain class, and this was explicitly the theme of earlier and later novels, the literary tradition of this period (often called "existentialist") does not locate it within time or class but considers it as a universal atemporal metaphysical condition of human life. Paradoxically, it was that effort to be "timeless" that is so dated. Today, we would read this as a purely psychological novel and it is well worth reading from that perspective, if we realize that it was not the author's.

[Melissa]

Lakesedge (The World at the Lake’s Edge #1) by Lyndall Clipstone
4 ★

Violeta Graceling and her brother, Arien, are forced to move to the Lakesedge estate with Lord Rowan Sylvanan because Rowan needs Arien’s magic to stop the Corruption that is killing him. Rowan is thought to be a monster by many of the towns’ people, but Violeta finds herself falling for him. Leta must face her own darkness to help save Rowan herself.

I found this story to have vibes of Beauty and the Beast and the Secret Garden. The Corruption that is killing Rowan is an interesting evil that I haven’t seen before. The way it rips through Rowan, Arien, and the land is truly terrifying.
Violeta tries too hard to protect her brother. She puts herself in danger many times because she will not listen to him. Overprotective is an understatement. She tries hard to change this, but in the end she still risks herself to keep him safe. It’s normal to want to protect your sibling, but she pushes too much.
Rowan is a tormented young man who has accidently destroyed his family and himself. He knows what he did was wrong and knows that using others to try to mend the Corruption may result in his own death. He is okay with this, but Leta will not let it happen. She is a very determined, stubborn young lady.
This story has a lot of self-harm in it. Leta and Rowan both cut themselves many times to fight the Corruption and summons the Lord Under. It has aspects of self-sacrifice and Satanism. Leta travels to the World Under and the way the souls are preserved is fascinating.
Aside from the darker parts, I did enjoy the story. The characters are loyal and determined. They never back down due to fear. They actually handle pain, physical and emotion, better than I would. I look forward to reading book 2 when it comes out next year.

[James]

Isabel Allende, Eva Luna [1985] 286 pages [in Spanish]

Isabel Allende's third novel, Eva Luna is essentially a very good story or interrelated stories about interesting and unusual characters, centering on the adventures of an imaginative girl and later young woman named Eva Luna who likes to tell stories, perhaps much like Allende herself, and who is the first person narrator of the novel. In a sense, this is a book about imaginative fiction as well as an example of it. The publisher's blurb refers to her "aventuras picarescas" and the phrase also occurs once in the novel itself; I think it is a good description. Perhaps I was a bit disappointed simply because I read this right after reading her first novel, La casa de los espíritus, which was a powerful political novel, and this is a very different kind of book.

While the earlier novel was set in Allende's native country of Chile and culminated in the reign of terror under General Pinochet after the overthrow of her relative Salvador Allende (the novel never explicitly says it is Chile or names Allende or Pinochet, but there is no question what it is referring to) this book is set in an unnamed oil-rich country on the Caribbean coast, which I would guess is intended to be Venezuela (where Isabel Allende lived for several years after the coup in Chile). Although the later part of the book deals with a hopeless guerilla struggle, the politics in this book seemed much more abstract and generic than in the earlier one; until the very end the narrator (the girl/woman Eva Luna) and the other major characters are not politically involved or even interested or informed about political events, and although Allende mentions them it is not a major theme of the book until the last chapters. The earlier novel began as "magical realism", obviously influenced by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and ended up as largely realistic. This book in contrast has few "magical" elements, all of which can be taken as belonging to Eva's imagination, and is in a more Romantic than realist style; the characters in the first book, although very interesting and individualized, were also "types" of the various social layers of the country, but in this book they are mostly all outside the norms of society.

When I say that this has few or any "magical" or fantasy elements, I mean supernatural or paranormal events outside physical reality; the book is full of fantasy in the sense of logically possible events which would never actually happen in any real world, and certainly not all to the same persons. The novel begins with the arrival of her mother, white and red-headed, barely old enough to crawl and not yet speaking, alone, filthy and naked on a riverboat in a small isolated and somewhat unreal mission town in the middle of a jungle. She is taken up by the missionaries and baptized as Consuela. When she reaches adolescence and after a strange afternoon cutting up birds which have gold in their stomachs she is sent to another convent in the capital city. Having no vocation for religion, she is sent out to work as a domestic servant for a strange doctor who has invented a secret method of embalming. Here in a scene possibly imitated from The World According to Garp she becomes pregnant by an apparently dying Indian gardener and gives birth to Eva Luna. How much of this is supposed to be "real" and how much the imagination of Eva we don't know, and that is true of much of the book; at the end she is writing a "telenovela" (i.e. television soap opera) based on her stories, which seem to be the same episodes as in the novel.

After the birth of Eva, the novel moves in the second chapter to Austria, where a young boy named Rolf Carlé is growing up in a dysfunctional family with an abusive father. From this chapter on, chapters about Eva and chapters about Rolf more or less alternate, until they finally meet near the end of the book. Eva's story then continues with a series of "picaresque" adventures; her mother dies and she is adopted by her godmother, only referred to as La Madrina; after the death of the doctor, they move out (with no possessions but an embalmed puma) and Eva goes to work for another eccentric patron, an elderly woman who has discovered the "Materia Ultima", a sort of plaster of Paris which hardens into a kind of plastic. Here she is more or less adopted by another servant, Elvira. Eva runs away and meets up with a street urchin named Huberto Naranjo, who plays an important part much later in the book. After a few days on the street, she returns to La Madrina who takes her back to the patron. Later on, she works for another patron, a government Minister with unpleasant habits, then runs away again and meets up with Huberto, who installs her in the house of La Señora, a woman who runs a number of sex-related enterprises. Here she meets Melecio.

After Eva has lived with La Señora for a while, the neighborhood is raided by the police. Eva escapes and searches again for Huberto, but is unable to find him in the turbulence of the resulting events. She is found by a storeowner named Riad Halabi, who takes her to the countryside, to a small village called Agua Santa, where she lives for several years with him and his wife Zulema. Riad is called "The Turk" because he has a (fake) Turkish passport, but there are suggestions that he is actually a Palestinian refugee. After a number of years, she ends up being accused of murder, and after being cleared she returns to the capital, now basically an adult. After a few weeks of searching for work, she runs into a beautiful woman named Mimi -- who turns out to be the same person she knew as Melecio. They share an apartment for most of the remainder of the book.

Mimi is one of the most interesting characters in recent fiction. She is what today would be called a "transgender woman", before "transgenderism" or "antibinarism" became a fad and a fashionable cause for ex-feminist liberals. Allende describes her very sensitively and sympathetically, making her seem like a real person and not a one-dimensional symbol as is so often the case with more recent literature about gender questions.

About this time Eva meets Huberto again, and the political theme is taken up, which occupies the last few chapters. She also meets Rolf Carlé, linking up the two formerly separate strands of the book. Despite the weakness of the political theme, this was definitely a good read.

[Melissa]

Game On: Tempting Twenty-Eight (Stephanie Plum #28) by Janet Evanovich
4 ★

Diesel is back and hunting computer hacker, Oswald Wednesday. Unfortunately Stephanie is after him also for skipping out on his bond. Oswald is ruthless and has already managed to terminate some hackers that hacked him. Stephanie and Lula team up with Diesel to try to bring O.W. to justice.

It was so nice seeing Diesel again. He is mysterious and devilish. His cousin, Wulf, also makes a brief appearance. He apparently is keeping an eye on Diesel and making sure the job gets done.
Joe Morelli is still in Stephanie’s life and seems to really be attached. I wish I could say that the relationship is getting stronger, but it’s so hard to tell.
I was a bit disappointed that Ranger did not show up until half way through the book. He plays a big part in helping some hackers hide from Oswald and, as usual, helps Diesel save Stephanie and Lula.
Lula is great in this book. She has lost her mojo, which Stephanie seems to now have, and blames the alignment of the planets. Well, that’s what her spiritual advisor says. Stephanie’s mom has a new hobby too.
The story itself is very interesting and filled with constant action. Stephanie’s father even helps a bit since he has picked Oswald up in his cab a few times. Vinnie even makes an appearance and helps Stephanie attempt to run down Oswald. Everyone has a part in this book, even Grandma Mazur who helps keep Melvin, one of the hackers, company while he hides out at Stephanie’s parent’s house.
There is never a dull moment in the Stephanie Plum series and I look forward to the next book.

[Book Concierge]

The Midnight Library – Matt Haig – 2.5**
I was intrigued at the beginning, especially by the basic premise of getting to experience a different life, even if just for a few moments. I was also interested in the concept of parallel universes and found myself thinking about how my life might be different if I had made other choices. However, the novel just didn’t work for me. I grew tired of the one-sentence “Hallmark card” philosophy spouted by the librarian (or sometimes by Nora). And I could see the ending coming a mile off. The extra half-star is for the excellent audio performance by Carey Mulligan.
My full review HERE

[Book Concierge]

James wrote: "Isabel Allende,
Eva Luna

Isabel Allende's third novel, Eva Luna is essentially a very good story or interrelated ,..."

I also recently finished EVA LUNA. Review to come

[Book Concierge]

Even In Paradise – Elizabeth Nunez – 4****
This is a retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear set in the Caribbean. What a wonderful character study! Nunez had me on the edge of my seat a few times, even though I knew the basic story line already. I liked how she wove in current issues of race and class and the history of colonialism (and slavery) in the Caribbean.
My full review HERE

[Melissa]

Buried Beneath (Bishop Security #3) by Debbie Baldwin
5 ★

Camilo Canto, former CIA undercover agent and current Bishop Security employee, gets pulled back into his previous life and back in the radar of The Conductor, a ruthless criminal who wants Cam eliminated along with evidence he may have against The Conductor. Cam must find a way out while also helping, and saving, a young archaeologist that has caught his eye.

I absolutely love this group of characters. Nathan Bishop heads up Bishop Security and does a pretty decent job keeping them all in line. Each of them has a very unique personality and they all work great together. Twitch, the only girl in the group, keeps right up with them and their banter.
When you have a group of characters as diverse as this, I really appreciate the author devoting each novel to one of them. It lets the reader really get to know each character. I look forward to learning more about the others.
Cam has to emerge himself back into the persona of a really bad guy in this book and he finds it harder to do than before. I think it’s because of Evan Cole, the young archaeologist that he meets. He has feelings for her that he has never had for anyone before and he does not want to be mean to her. It was nice to know that she saw through it. The back and forth jabs these two take at each other is great and you can see their feeling grow.
The mystery of the caves and the treasure is quite intriguing. It’s a fun ride. Cam realizes something at the end that shocked me and I hope we learn more in the future.


Payback (Sisterhood #2) by Fern Michaels
5 ★

Some Women Get Angry. . . The Sisterhood Gets Even.

It is Julia Webster’s turn to get even with her husband. He is a U.S. Senator who has destroyed Julia’s life while advancing his career. To him she is just someone to make him look good to the public while he runs around behind her back. Well, she knows and now so does the Sisterhood. I was a bit nervous at one point because I thought their plan was going to fall apart. Julia had a hard time controlling her emotions sometimes and she said more than she should have. It all worked out though and the mission was accomplished. What the Sisterhood did is a bit tamer than the first book, but just as vengeful.
This was a quick fun read and I look forward to moving onto the next book and the rest of the series.

[James]

Mircea Eliade, Chamanisme: et les techniques archaiques de l'extase [1951, rev. 1964] 404 pages [in French]

A classic in a way (euphemism for outdated?), this was the first comprehensive comparative study of shamanism and related phenomena across many different cultures. First written in 1951, it was somewhat revised and expanded in 1964 at the time of the English translation. It was written to be accessible to the general reader as well as specialists, but it is not an easy book. Eliade begins by defining shamanism as a form of religious experience involving professional practitioners who use "ecstasis" or trance behavior to communicate with the spirit world, primarily as a way of healing but also as "psychopomps" guiding the souls of the dead to the afterlife. Shamanistic religion in one form or another is very widespread among archaic (hunting and pastoral) cultures, and is probably one of the oldest forms of religion, but at least today it is almost never the sole religion in a community; as a vocation of an elite group it coexists with other forms of religion involving larger parts of the community, and both influences and is influenced by the overall mythology and beliefs of the various cultures. He considers that shamanism in the strict sense is a specific subset of a more general, even older and nearly universal layer of archaic beliefs involving the afterlife and souls. He distinguishes shamans from other religious professionals such as priests and sorcerers by their use of ecstatic techniques. (I'm using the English "shaman" to translate both "chaman" and "chamane"; among the Araucana of South America and some tribes in Indonesia and elsewhere, shamans are female, and in some cultures they can be of either sex, but in most of the cultures he describes they are predominantly (but not always exclusively) male. In a few cultures, they are "transgender" females, which suggests that they might have been originally women, although Eliade considers that unlikely.)

Shamanism was first identified and studied among the cultures of Central and Northern Asia, particularly Siberia, (the word "shaman" is from the Tongu language via Russian) and the book begins each section by describing the typical forms in that region before going on to discuss the parallels among the Eskimo, the North and South American Indians, Indonesia, Oceania and Australia. There are fewer references to Africa although there are similar phenomena there as well. One thing which would have very much improved the book for me would have been a map of Northern and Central Asia showing where the cultures he talks about most are located.

The book begins with the selection of the shaman (due often to an illness or some other involuntary experience in Siberia, more often voluntarily sought through a "quest" among the Eskimo and North American Indians. In some cultures the role of shaman is hereditary, but still requires an ecstatic experience to become valid.) He describes (on the basis of ethnographic reports, etc.) the visions or dreams which reveal the shaman's vocation and constitute the real "initiation", often involving the themes of death and resurrection and voyages to heaven and the underworld. He then describes the "official" rituals of initiation which constitute the recognition of the vocation by the other shamans and the public. Then he describes various techniques and mythological explanations, the "auxiliary spirits", the costumes and other accessories, certain important motifs such as the axis of the world, the world tree, and so forth, and the functions of the shaman in their cultural contexts. From this point on, the chapters are geographical, and there is a certain amount of repetitiousness. One chapter considers the North American "secret societies" and the Ghost Dance Religion as attempts to popularize shamanic techniques among a wider part of the populations, and how they relate to the actual professional shamans.

The book next considers shamanism among Indo-European peoples and in India, China and the Far East. Here we can only talk about possible survivals, since these cultures were agricultural and even urban, or at least in close contact with cultures which were, for centuries before our earliest evidence. In regards to Greece, he considers the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice which involves descent to the underworld to find a soul and has close analogues in many shamanistic myths, some of the mythology of Apollo, and so forth. There is much less about Greece than I expected, since that is one of the reasons I was reading it. Not surprisingly there are more possible survivals in German and Scandinavian myths since they became agricultural later than the Greeks; he discusses in particular Odin as a shaman figure. He makes a point of not claiming too much, since the fact that some vestigial trait is part of the shamanistic complex does not necessarily mean that it was derived from shamanism as opposed to the older substrata that shamanism is a particular form of. He goes into this more in the next chapter, giving parallels to shamanistic ideas which are outside the shamanistic religion in the strict sense. I was interested in the point he made that smiths in the early days of metallurgy were thought to be shamans or have similar powers and attributes.

The book ends with a chapter entitled "Conclusions" but it was not a summary of the conclusions of the rest of the book but deals with a new theme: the actual origins and history. He admits that the Central Asian cultures which have been considered most "typical" of shamanism are heavily influenced by lamaist forms of Buddhism, but denies that shamanism is derived from Buddhism; he argues that these cultures are actually not the classic forms of the religion but hybrid religions representing the last stage of the religion. He suggests that shamanism in its specific sense may have originated as early as 25,000 years ago, and that the earlier beliefs it is based on may date from the beginnings of human culture, but does not claim that this is or could be proven. There is also a short epilogue suggesting that shamanist myths of supernatural quests may be among the first origins of literature. (And not just the origins; I noted many similarities to some of the stories in the Thousand and One Nights which I recently finished reading (e.g. the quests for the djinn wives who have returned to their own world) although they reinterpret the themes in accordance with Islam -- and then there's Gandalf.)

Eliade's introduction and a few footnotes indicate that he believes the phenomena of shamanism are genuine encounters with a real supernatural order; according to the biographical information on Wikipedia he himself believed that he had similar experiences beginning in childhood. In the text itself, however, he limits himself to describing the actual behaviors and beliefs, usually from earlier sources, and leaves the question of their "authenticity" for other books.

I should note that I am not an anthropologist, much less a "historian of religion", and have no qualifications to evaluate whether his historical interpretations are likely to be correct. He is definitely writing from a very idealistic viewpoint which I do not share. I did however find much of interest in the book. It was interesting to see the shamanistic myths which were later incorporated into other more developed religious mythologies and literatures.

[Book Concierge]

Eva Luna – Isabel Allende – 4****
I’m already a huge fan of Allende’s magical realism, and this book did not disappoint. I loved the many characters – from the Lebanese merchant to the petty criminal/guerrilla leader to the transsexual entertainer. As Eva tells the story of her life, she tells the story of this South American nation – of corruption, class struggle, feast and famine. The story comes alive with saints and ghosts, servants and political leaders equally profiled, skewered and cherished.
My full review HERE

[James]

Isabel Allende, Mi pais inventado: un paseo nostálgico por Chile [2003] 220 pages [in Spanish]

Subtitled "a nostalgic journey through Chile", this book is part memoir, part description of Chile and the Chileans. While I learned much about the geography, history and customs of the country, many of the social generalizations I would take with a grain of salt (and she admits that they are subjective, "nostalgic" recreations of her memory, hence the title "My invented country"); the real interest is in the book's insights into the life of the author and her family.

In particular, the history of her grandparents and her uncles and aunts was interesting because many of their traits and actions appear under other names in her first novel, La casa de los espíritus, which originated from a letter to her grandfather about the history of the family. It also confirms that the setting of Eva Luna is Venezuela, which I had assumed but isn't actually stated in the novel.

While Allende is a wonderful novelist, this nonfiction work tends to reveal more of her limitations, her naive political ideas which seemed more purely liberal than those of the socialist-leaning characters in the novel, although that may be because the book was written in the United States in the year following the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, when many people who should have known better became super-patriots for a time. She doesn't go that far, and does of course include quite a bit of the history of the coup and the results of neoliberalism in Chile.

She points out the coincidence that Tuesday, September 11, was also the date of the coup in Chile 28 years earlier, which was a major turning point in her own life, beginning her exile in Venezuela and later the United States. I've learned to expect that authors who write good political novels aren't always consistent in their politics.

The book is worth reading if you are interested in the background of her fiction.

[Book Concierge]

Love Over Scotland – Alexander McCall Smith – 3***
Book # 3 in the 44 Scotland Street series which follows a group of residents (current or former) of a particular apartment building in Edinburgh. There’s not much plot to these books, but just as in everyday life, things DO happen. There are moments of joy, or heartache, of success, or failure. People form attachments, or break off relationships, start new careers or find new enthusiasm for established routines. It’s a gentle read and a wonderful way to spend a few hours with old friends.
My full review HERE

[Melissa]

Two to Die For (Max Revere #0.1) by Allison Brennan
4 ★

Two novellas in one featuring Lucy Kincaid and Maxine Revere.

Spiral (Lucy Kincaid #12.5)

Lucy and Sean are on their honeymoon in Vail, Colorado enjoying the peace and quiet in the beautiful cabin Sean bought her as a wedding present. Their neighbor, Hank, is a delightful retired forest ranger and his dog, Bandit, likes visiting Lucy and Sean. When Hank disappears Lucy and Sean take a break from their honeymoon to find him. What else the find is shocking.

This was a nice quick read with an interesting investigation. Although Sean uses his computer skills and RCK resources, Lucy makes it known that she is not there as an FBI agent. She is there as a friend looking for a missing neighbor. She does use her title a few times, but still states that she is not investigating as an FBI agent. Although there are some unhappy moments, Lucy and Sean are now owners of an untrained golden retriever.


Retired (Max Revere #0.1)

Max takes on the case of a mysterious death at a retirement community. The victim’s friend, Lois Kershaw, calls Max in because she believes she was murdered.

The case has been mentioned in the other Max Revere books and I’m really glad the author decided to give us readers the whole story. Lois, Flo and Beau are a great group of friends and they are a hoot. They are determined to prove that their friend was murdered and they will do any Max asks them to do. There is no fear in this trio.
This was definitely an interesting case with an intriguing back story for the bad guys. What they did was just horrific and all done out of greed. I’m glad Max was able to solve the case and bring peace back to the Del Sol Retirement Community.

[Book Concierge]

Jamaica Inn – Daphne du Maurier – 4****
What a wonderfully atmospheric, dark, sinister tale! I shivered with the damp, cold fog, strained to see by faint candle or lamp light, listened to the alternating whispers and shouts of a rabble of men up to no good. Mary Yellan is a marvelous heroine. Young and somewhat naïve, she is still a strong woman, resolute and determined to make the best of her situation. Du Maurier’s plot is intricate and complex and had several twists & turns in it. I wish there were a sequel so I could find out what Mary Yellen is like as an older woman!
My full review HERE


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The Art Forger – Barbara A. Shapiro – 3.5***
Claire Roth is an aspiring artist who is making a living (just) by painting reproductions of old masters. And then she’s approached with an opportunity she cannot resist. Set against the backdrop of the infamous art theft at the Isabella Stewart Garner Museum in Boston – still the largest unsolved art heist in history – this is a marvelously intricate story. My feelings about Claire kept changing as I learned more of her backstory. Still, I was engaged from beginning to end and Shapiro kept me turning pages to see what would happen next.
My full review HERE