February's Books

 Hi everyone. First off let me thank everyone for their birthday wishes. They were much appreciated seeing a snowstorm wasn't exactly what I wanted on my birthday-smile.

I'm back posting today with my February books. I will try to keep my book reviews a bit shorter this month because looking back,  last month's reviews just went on a  bit. Smile.

This month, besides my February restless weather slump, I was also in a reading slump and several of the books I've read or listened to required some adjustment to my expectations. That change of expectations was actually a good thing because it kept me reading. There were also a few books this past month that I put aside because I couldn't get into them after a bit of a read or listen, and I didn't mention those in this post with one exception. 

Again, I write these reviews as my yearly reading list so I can look back and where it went over the year, but if you like books, please feel free to read on.

I really enjoyed reading the 4 (to date) published books in Keigo Higoshino's Detective Galileo series, and now that I've completed reading those, I thought I'd try one of his other books. Malice is  book one in this author's Police Detective Kyoichiro Kaya series. 

Here's a brief gist of the story. Kunihiko Hidaka is a best selling novelist who is murdered in his home. Two people visited him shortly before his death. One of those people is Osamu Nonoguchi; a long time  friend of the author as well as an author himself.  He is also a main character in this mystery. This novel is set up where chapters alternate between  the notes of one of the police detectives (Detective Kaya) and Osamu Nonoguchi's story. I can't remember having read a mystery told in this manner before.

Even though you know pretty early in the book quite a bit about the murder, the author takes you along through the investigation while throwing in many twists and turns. In fact, it becomes a good psychological thriller as you get further into the book. I liked the new-to-me set up of this book. And it's a good story in a different, somewhat less traditional style from the Detective Galileo books.

My first listen for February was this book, Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. Two of the women in my book group had read this novel, and they recommended it. The main characters in this novel are Tova, a 70 year old woman who cleans at the local aquarium; Cam, a 30 year old down on his luck man who ends up coming to work at the aquarium after several not so lucky turns in his life; and finally Marcellus, an octopus at the aquarium.

I loved Marcellus. He was the star of the show. It took me awhile to get into the rest of  this story because early in the book 1) I thought a lot of the storyline and dialogue was a bit predictable and also because 2) I thought the author made Tova and her friends  sound like they were much much older than 70. I know people look at being 70 in different ways, but in general,  I thought the author didn't show a lot of understanding of aging.  However, I stuck with the story for my friends, and I did find myself getting very involved with the characters and the story. (And the author did redeem herself when it came to aging.)

 For a while when I listened to this book it made me sad. Actually Tova made me sad.  Then I realized it wasn't the book, but Tova was in many ways like my mother, and I was sad because it was triggering some more delayed mourning. But if a book can elicit an emotional response of any kind, then I guess the author is doing their job.  I also really came to like the characters, even Tova. I not only liked them but was rooting for them. For someone who wasn't so sure for the first couple of hours if this book was worth her time, I must say by the end of this book I was hooked. When I say this was an excellent listen, I say it with the caveat that it took me awhile to get into this story, but once in, it was hard to have it end.

My next listen was book one of this popular mystery series. Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear is set in the late 1920's in London at the start of Maisie's detective career. 

Maisie has just opened her detective office.  

 A former soldier has opened a farm in the English countryside where severely scared and wounded soldiers from the Great War can go to live and learn to cope with their casualties.   I enjoyed (I'm not sure  enjoyed is the right word) how much of this book was centered around the Great War and the postwar traumatic effects so many soldiers  endured.  I've only  learned a lot of details about this war in the last couple of years, mostly from reading since  back in school when I was learning a bit of history this war was really brushed over.

 I thought there might have been too much time (in this story) describing how Maisie went from a teenager to when her detecting career started. Although this backstory was relevant and  tied together with the mystery, it was more than half way through the novel before we got back to the mystery that started in the beginning of the book.  I enjoyed both Maisie's personal story and the detective story, but I wish Maisie's story had been a separate book, spread out in sections through the whole book or  maybe even a little bit shorter. Or perhaps this book should have been labeled as historical fiction with a taste of mystery instead of being labeled a mystery.  Saying all that, overall this is a well written story, and I very much enjoyed it.  I will read more of this series, but I guess this particular volume wasn't as much a mystery book as I'd hoped it would be.

I  enjoy reading travel books, especially those that are also autobiographies of the author during a particular period of their lives.  According to the blip about the book on the back cover, the author, Suleika Joquad, almost died from leukemia shortly after she graduated from college. Then to restart her life once she was "cured", she took a cross country  USA road trip visiting people who were in contact with her during her illness. 

I didn't expect so  much cancer treatment in this book. That didn't make it a bad read, but it was certainly  heart wrenching. The author talks about how she started a blog  and did a 100 day writing project as a creative outlet that helped her through the worst of her treatment.  She connected with people while doing this, and these are the people that she visited in the second half of the book where the focus was her cross country roadtrip. It must have been hard to be in your early 20's and have to deal with such a devastating disease. As she said, when your friends are starting their lives, you are thinking it might be the end of yours. 

This book took me to a place I didn't expect to go, and it was eye opening. Although it did have travel in it, I don't think it was really a travel centered book as had been hinted at on the back cover. Saying that, this was an interesting and  very good story. And it was an autobiography of the author at that time of her life, which is the kind of book I mentioned when I started writing this review. Smile.

I wanted something different, light and not too long for my next listen, and so I decided to listen to this story called Ester The Wonder Pig. This is the book I started but never finished reading this past month. However, as I made it more than halfway through before I was done with this story, I had  formed enough opinions to write a short blip.

Steve Jenkins was conned into taking in Ester, a tiny pig, with a lie that she was a mini pig. It turned out that Ester was only a piglet, and that she would grow into one very very large pig.

I totally get how the authors fell in love with Ester. Intelligent animals  are capable of so many things that people in general don't give them credit for. And I also get why the authors became vegans because how can you eat pork or meat when your pet is a pig. I didn't dislike this book; in fact there were parts I really enjoyed. But this book didn't speak to me in the way I would have liked it to. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I learned more about pigs and their natural history.  I also would have liked it more if it focused on Ester's story rather than so many of the author's thoughts. This book definitely was directed at people's emotions, not  so much at actual porcine knowledge. 

Maybe I will eventually  finish the book because there were parts I really enjoyed. Had I actually been reading the book, I would have skimmed some of the parts that didn't speak to me.  Since I was listening and couldn't easily skip ahead, I reached a point I just didn't want to listen to this book any more. I put it aside and went for something a little more to my liking. 

My next listen after getting through much of Ester The Wonder Pig  was something very different. I chose this biography of Queen Victoria by Lucy Worsley. In this book Worsley picks 24 days over the course of the queen's life that made a big impact on her, the British public or  the world at large.  These days include her birth, the day she met her beloved Albert, the day she became queen, as well as some less obvious but still (in the author's viewpoint) pivotal days.

In Worsley's style, she not only focuses on just that one day. but she creates the whole story around the day. She  gets into some fascinating, more intimate items like journals, clothing, people's impressions, eating habits, and other personal effects to explain why this was a important point in the Queen's life and reign.

Worsley doesn't hold back, but I liked that about this biography. I learned a lot of new things about Queen Victoria's life. Even though so much has been written about this queen, this book makes it all very personal and accessible along with giving you lots of interesting  details. It also doesn't get bogged down in all the business ends of a very long and rich life. 

 

This next book, Murder in the Museum by John Rowland, was first published in 1938 and then republished in 2016 as part of the British Library Crime Classics. 

A professor of Elizabethan literature is found dead in the reading room of the British Library. Then his 2 academic rivals are also discovered dead.   Scotland Yard detective Shelley and his assistant Cunningham are on the case. Also, there is a private citizen who takes a big interest. Henry Fairhurst not only discovered the murdered man in the British Library, but is also the private citizen who becomes the amateur detective. He and Shelley work together to help solve the crime.

I liked this book.This was an enjoyable, quick read mystery. It was a bit simplistic of a story, not the storyline itself but  how quickly certain facts are reasoned through and how Inspector Shelley comes to his decisions. A more talented author could have made more out of this tale, even in 1938. Yet it was still worth the read, and as it was a pretty quick book to get through, it was something you could read in a single sitting (even though it took me a couple of sittings to get through it). 

I'm not a long distance biker, but after seeing the winter hang out for some Monarch butterflies in California in 2021, this book caught my eye. Plus it's another of those travel autobiographies that teaches you something at the same time.

Sara Dykman has done many independent long distance bicycle trips, but this time she was making a trek for the cause of the monarch butterflies.  You probably know they have lost habitat, food sources and have had to deal with pesticides and other chemicals sprayed into the environment. Therefore their numbers have decreased. 

The author begins her story in Mexico when the eastern  and midwestern monarchs are leaving on their spring migration. She follows them north. And in the fall, when they fly back to Mexico, she follows them south. This was one huge bike trip.

She intersperses events from the biking trip with butterfly as well as other nature related information.   For example, one thing I  didn't know was that originally  monarch butterfly habitat did not include the east coast of North America. And I learned several other things from this book as I read.

  I'm not sure I'd want to long distance bicycle, but  I enjoyed this book because I didn't know anything about the nature of long distance cycling trips. And of course reading about the state of monarch butterfly migration while also reading about the very long trip through the whole of the butterfly's eastern and midwestern range definitely illustrated  the bigger picture. 

And I'll end by saying it's amazing how athletic some people are to be able to bike 60 or more miles a  day.

My last book for February was  Dead Letters from Paradise by Ann McMan. Ester Jane (EJ) Cloud is handed a stack of letters addressed to  an unknown person at the medicinal garden where she volunteers. The question is, why have these letters been sent to this woman at that address since she is obviously not connected to the garden?  EJ works in the local post office's dead letter office so it is her job to figure out who should receive the letters. This event  happens in the first 15 minutes of the story, and it drew me in because I wanted to see if I could find out the answer about these letters.

The main character of this novel is EJ. It is 1960. She is 45 years old, living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and she grew up with a very puritanical mother. You could say early in this story she's hiding from the world and from reality. Then EJ gets a  metaphorical slap on the face  when she meets some of her neighbors, including the outgoing, eye patch wearing,  and boisterous 10 year old named Harriet (who goes by Harry). Changes going on in the world like  the civil rights movement, feminism, LGBT life, and other  phenomena of her time sudden become part of EJ’s life. 

This book  is written in an enjoyable  meandering style like I visualize southern life in 1960 would be. I didn't know Ann  McMan was a lesbian writer when I started this novel, as the blurb about the book never mentioned that. I only mention it here in case you  read this blurb and think this might be a book for you. I think full disclosure is only fair, although there's really nothing as explicit  as you find in many heterosexual books.  This book stands on its own as an enjoyable and literary style read, and I liked and enjoyed the story.

And there you have it. These are my books from last month. 

Thanks for getting this far if you're reading. Enjoy the rest of your weekend too.