March Books

Hi everyone.  

First of all I want to wish everyone who celebrates Passover a wonderful start to your holiday.

 I thought today would be a good day to schedule  my monthly  reading/ books post. 

March was a very good reading month for me. I started off the month with a couple of light enjoyable books.

My first book for March was this World War 2 period novel and first in a mystery series by Susan Elia MacNeal. Margaret Hope becomes Winston's Churchill's secretary at 10 Downing Street. There’s a murder, some German spies,  worries that England will be invaded by Hitler’s armies, and also some IRA activity creating a tense climate in London.  And there’s a secret about Maggie Hope's life that a few people know but that Maggie herself doesn’t know as the book begins.

This is a novel that I found  hard to put down. I liked the history, the characters, the story line and how Maggie is one smart lady. The story had some action, and I liked how the author described wartime London, even though she wasn't there herself. Nor was I, but I felt like I was. She even writes a little historical note at the end of the book to describe why she wrote parts of the book as she did. Maggie Hope was not a real person, and the author makes no attempt to pretend she was. This story was just a fun,  fictional, fairly quick, and enjoyable read. I will definitely be continuing on with this series, sooner rather than later.

Amelia Peabody books are also an enjoyable mystery series to read, to reread, or to listen to. I can't believe it's taken me a year to get back to them. The Deeds of the Disturber is book 5 in this mystery series that I am rereading. It was originally published in 1988. I haven't previously read this entire series, but I read the first 12 or 13 books, including this one. However that was so long ago that I  remember characters but  not each book's storyline. 

Amelia Peabody Emerson works with her archaeologist husband (she calls by his last name Emerson) each winter in Egypt. She has become one pretty good archaeologist, crime solver and matchmaker, ignoring all the norms Victorian women are supposed to meet. This particular book takes place when the  Emersons return home to England after the winter of 1896's dig.  There is a mummy in the British Museum who is supposedly causing all kinds of havoc, mayhem and even murder.

Of course  Amelia decides to find out what's going on. This would be a boring book if Amelia ( as well as her trusty parasol) wasn't the main character. I'm also a fan of Ramsey, Amelia's 10 year old son who is extremely precocious, and who plays a big role in this book. Even  her husband Emerson is enjoyable in his slightly curmudgeony way. The characters are predictably fun, and besides a good story, I laughed quite a bit.  Barbara Rosenblat is the narrator, and she does a wonderful job with the voices, so much so, that when I read the actual book 4, I read it with her voice in my head. 

My next book was the Princess Spy by Larry Loftis. This book is the non-fiction story of Aline Griffith, an American who in the early 1940s wanted to do her part during World War Two.  I first noticed this book while perusing  Audible, and even though the audio-book was on sale,  I decided to read it rather than  listen to it. I'm glad I did because there were lots of names and scenarios over the course of this book that might have been hard to follow in a listen. Plus the included pictures were great to back up and helped explain the story as it wove its way along.

The author jumps right into Aline's story, and although it wasn't rough reading, it took me a little bit before the story pieces all fit together. And it really was just a little bit because by page 30 or 35 it all came together. (If it's something you might read, don't give up early in the book.)  Imagine wanting something more exciting in your life than your job as a model in NYC. You're at a dinner party, and you  tell this to the man you have just met and who is sitting next to you at the table. Low and behold, he is actually a spy, but of course you don't know that because since he is a spy, he isn't giving anything away. Then you find yourself being asked to attend OSS spy school. That's what happened to Aline, which is just the start to her adventurous life.

Aline is sent to Spain in 1944 to work in intelligence. I  knew nothing about that period of Spanish history except the name Franco, and this book does a great job describing what it was like  to be in Spain during the Second World War. Aline's life as a spy was  at times scary, thrilling, and pretty amazing. She also met and married into Spanish "royalty", so this book, besides going into the spy story, also talked about Aline's personal life, which was quite the story as well.

 Other than all the names in this book (and I'm not sure how the author could have told the story without most of them; nor were they hard to keep track of once the book pulled together), this biography was not a difficult read.  This book was a fascinating look into something new (for me)  that I definitely enjoyed.

My next book was this very short read by Sy Montgomery, a New Hampshire local and animal lover. As  you can see in the cover photo above, Montgomery is an accomplished animal themed book author. ( The Soul of the Octopus is a great book filled with information and stories of the time spent with the octopus at the New England Aquarium in Boston.) 

The Hawk's Way is the story of Montgomery's encounters with some hawks and her introduction to falconry.

The author takes a falconry course at the home of a local woman. She ends up spending more time (once the class ended) with the falconer, getting more hands on experience as well as learning about keeping and working with hawks and falcons. I've had many hawk moments in my life (including one very memorable close encounter when I was a pre-teen), and  I love seeing them, along with other raptors, in the environment. But falconry would  not be something for me. Yet it is fascinating to read about. The author makes it clear the hawk is not a pet and is not your buddy either. They see you as their hunting partner, or maybe a better way to put it is that you are their hunting  apprentice.

I've read H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald a few years ago. That book is much more in depth on this subject than The Hawk's Way. However, this book is under 100 pages and is a really interesting short  read. 

From hawks I moved onto another Dinosauria book but this time it's all about the extinct members of that group.   Brian Switek is a science writer and a lifelong dinosaur enthusiast. What I liked about this book was how the author took many of the mysteries about dinosaurs and wrote about them. These mysteries include topics such as how dinosaurs would actually reproduce, were they social animals, and did they care for their young. 

Scientists don't have answers to all the questions he posed in this book, but he did debunk some of the former myths about them. For example, not all dinosaurs would be grey or drab green as was portrayed for so many decades. Not all birds are those colors, so why would dinosaurs' living relatives be those colors?

Each chapter was full of interesting information, and now I wish I had read this book before we went on our National Park trip last fall because the author mentions so many places we drove right  by (or close enough by) that would have been interesting to visit. Not saying we would have had time on our trip for those places, but it would have been nice to know about them.  I guess that means I have another trip on my wish list-smile.

I highly recommend this book if you like reading about extinct dinosaurs. And I also recommend it if you like visiting paleontological parks and sights. The only "issue" is that this book was published in 2013 so some of the info might (and probably is) already outdated.  Nevertheless, it was still a good read. 

My next listen was this book first published in 1958 by Paul Gallico. My Audible book comes with both of the stories shown in this book photo I showed above, but I only listened to Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris this time around.

Mrs. Harris is a fifty-something widowed woman who is a charlady in London and who has seen a couple of Dior dresses at one of her clients' homes. She yearns for one of these dresses and makes it her  goal to go to Paris and buy one. She believes her happiness will be fulfilled just by owning such a beautiful thing.  

And in  the process of Mrs. Harris getting the yearned for dress, she brings  some little bits of magic into several people's lives.

This book is a charming vintage story, but it is dated. Yet the fact that it is dated is part of the charm about it. Mrs. Harris took a little bit of getting used to because in some ways she seemed a bit naive and a little bit rough, but I think that is just my 2023 view of the  world compared to what my 1958 view of the world might have been.  By the end of the story I was Mrs. Harris' fan. I  enjoyed my listen.  This wasn't a very long book,  and it was fun to be brought back to a time when the world seemed a  bit bigger than it  does today. 

My next listen has been in my Audible account for awhile, and it seemed like this was a good time to listen to it. Once I listened to it, I actually wish I had listened to it sooner. Anne Glenconner was the daughter of a long time aristocratic British family and later in life became a Lady in Waiting to Princess Margaret. She knew both Princess Margaret and Queen Elizabeth for most of her life, and she was fortunate to be part of the Queen's coronation. 

And even though that  in itself was interesting, the rest of the author's life is even more fascinating.  Although she was not someone who yearned to be in the limelight, her life was  still wild, exciting, full of travel, busy with decorating homes, throwing parties and having experiences most of us never have or will have. Yet it was also sad and at times devastating. She lost 2 of her adult children, and even almost lost a third.  With such a rich and full life, you know the author has left out so many pieces, but what she has included caught my attention so  that  I was half way through this biography before I even  realized it. 

The Audible version was read by the author (who I believe is 90 years old). The shy girl sometimes came back out in her voice, as did the sadness  as well as the thrill of having fun. If you like royal related biographies, or even just very interesting biographies, I highly recommend this book. (And thanks Jeanie for recently mentioning it in a bookpost as I forgot I even already had it.)

As  mentioned in the first book I reviewed in this post, I'd be reading more of the Maggie Hope series by Susan Elia MacNeal.  And I did. This book, Princess Elizabeth's Spy, is book 2 in the series. This time Maggie is assigned to tutor the  teenage Princess Elizabeth in math. The story is still set during World War 2 mostly  in London and at Windsor Castle.

This book surprised me when it turned out that Nazi's were trying to kill King George VI and kidnap the future Queen Elizabeth. It wasn't the fact that the Nazi's were trying to do any of this which surprised me, but what was unexpected was how the author approached it.  This is where Maggie Hope, now a trained spy, steps in. 

I like how the author took a real situation and fictionalized it using actual characters as well as a whole cast of fictional characters. Those fictionalized characters seamlessly fit right in. There was action, well developed characters, and some fun reading. If you're looking for 100% true history this would not  be the book for you, but if you are looking for  a little fictional twist  that tells a great story then you'd probably enjoy this mystery. 

At the recommendation of a friend, I next listened to this light, cozy style mystery. Actually this book was a good deal on Audible, as I was able to get a collection of the first 10 books in this series for just 1 credit.

Albert Smith is a retired police detective. He has a service dog, Rex Harrison, who is actually a police dog flunkie.For something interesting to do during his retirement, Albert and Rex  take a tour of England to learn how to cook. In this story (book 1) they are taking a pork pie baking class when a human thumb turns up on top of the pork that the pies are going to be made from. 

This book started off a bit slow, which  might have been because the reader didn't read at the quickest pace.Yet it soon picked  up, and the story was quite enjoyable. Rex Harrison, the police dog flunkie, made me laugh, and I especially liked the story with the addition of Donna, a  teenage girl who worked with Albert on the mystery of the thumb in the pork. The author did a great job with the dog (although maybe not quite as good as the Bernie and Chet series by Spencer Quinn), and this mystery was a great listen. Of course since I have 9 more books to go with this Audible deal, you will be reading more about this series in other book posts.

Then it was time for a change of pace. My next and last actual book (for March) was Wild Swans, Three Daughters of China,  first published in 1991. 

This book is the biographical story of 3 Chinese women: a grandmother, her daughter and her granddaughter. This is their story through most of the twentieth century. It is amazing how brutal that century was in China, and it's also amazing how much change happened  during each of their lives. And I would imagine, since this book was published in 1991, that more could be said of the changes that have happened since then. The author, Jung Chang, is still alive as of my writing this post, and I wonder if she ever thought of writing a follow up chapter or two. 

Traditional Chinese society was not an easy place for many women, which was where we first met the author's grandmother. Her father "married" her off to be a concubine to a powerful man, and when she had his child, his actual wife wanted to take the child as her own. Instead the grandmother escaped with the baby, and they lived in hiding for a few years until the man died.  This baby grew up to become the author's mother.

We next move onto the Japanese period,  before and during  the Second World War when Japan invaded Manchuria and moved into other parts of China. I found this part interesting as my Dad was stationed there during the war. He often spoke about the poor conditions the Chinese lived in, and after reading about life under the Japanese militarist rule of the time, I can see why he would have said those things. 

The book then continues on to the fighting that continued in China after the Second World War.  The Kuomintang and the Communists were fighting for control of the country. That was not an easy time either, with more lack of food, more fighting and more killings.  Following that we have Mao's various campaigns and also his Cultural Revolution, which were more brutal periods to live through.  And much of the Cultural Revolution was particularly scary to read about too with beatings, deaths and intimidation so rampant.

This book was an eye opener and  an interesting story. It moved along relatively quickly, but it was a big book. It really didn't hold back about the lives of these women and what was happening around them. The author's grandmother and mother  didn't want to live by the traditional rules for the women, and that is especially true for the author's mother, who fought with the Communists after the second world war.  Even being part of the communist political party was not always easy to deal with, and life for many Chinese people was certainly precarious. This book also goes to show you how having ultimate adoration and blindness to one ruler can be frightening.

This book took some time to get through, and it wasn't always comfortable reading.  I learned a lot though. If you're looking for some  history in a personal style, then I recommend this story.

And my last listen  for March was another of those themed travel autobiographies that I  enjoy; this time the story was about Neil, a highly educated biologist who loved birds. When Neil was 39, he decided he didn't like his biotech job, so he quit. While trying to decide what was next, he worked on his birding list for the year. 

And that year became what is called a Big Year for Neil. A Big Year is where a birder tries to check off as many bird species as he/she can find in one calendar year.  I don't know about how it works in other countries, but in the US (where Neil lives) all your birds have to be in the US or in Canada. Much of this book describes Neil's superb big year.

 

Yet besides having his birding Big Year, Neil also had a year of self discovery.

I can relate in some ways to this book. Although I am not traveling with the goal of seeing the maximum new species of birds, I enjoy nature and traveling to new places. And after puttering around for a couple of years after retirement, I am trying to decide what is next for me. I have some ideas, and that includes more puttering around, but I'm also thinking it would be nice to accomplish something I couldn't do while working. 

I enjoyed this story. I liked learning about birding hot spots. I liked reading about Neil's struggles to re-define himself. And all along I wondered what would happen with Neil and his girlfriend Jerry ( Gerri? I'm not sure if that's how she spells it as I listened to the book). You'll have to read or listen to the  book to find out the answer to that question.

That's my reading list for March.  I have another big book on my nightstand that I moved off my bookshelves where it's been sitting for a decade.  Plus I have a few other books I hope to get to in April. And the new Dr Ruth Galloway book comes out later in the month.  But you never know where reading one book will take you. And as always, if you have any good recommendations, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks for visiting.