August Books

 Hi everyone.

     I'm back with another book post; this time with my books from August. Last month my reading choices were a little less all over the place, since most of my books  had something to do with  history, but they were all over in various time periods and places. August started out with me being in the mood for some more in-depth and longer books, so those of you who always tell me I read a lot of books (😏) you will notice that I don't have quite so many this month, but I also know that some of you will tell me, still a lot. 😏

     My first book for August was this 574 pages of reading (plus added index and a few other items at the end) about Catherine the Great. It was not a fast read, but wow, what an excellent book. 

      I'd heard of Catherine (II) the Great of Russia, and she was even a minor character in the fictional book The Eight that I read back in June. However, I don't remember my Russian history all that well, so when I saw the paperback version of this book for cheap at Costco (at least cheap as far as paperbacks go), I decided to pick it up and read it.

    Real life is sometimes way stranger than fiction, as was the case with this woman. Originally Catherine was Sophia from a minor German duchy called Angola-Zerbst.   She was brought to Russia to marry the heir to the kingdom named Peter, who for a short time became the emperor Peter III. However, he alienated several people including Catherine whom he wanted to divorce, the military because he wanted them to be Prussian in style, and  the Orthodox church because he wanted the country to become Lutheran (which was what Peter was brought up as in Germany). A coup happened and shortly after that Peter lost his life, making Catherine the Empress of Russia. Catherine's marriage was never a happy one, and as you might know, she had several lovers and children from those lovers.  

     This review is too short to really get into much detail about anything in this woman's life, and it only skims the surface of all the things that made Catherine's life unusual. Robert K. Massie did a great job of making it not only readable, but interesting.  I found the parts about the younger Catherine more interesting than her reign, but only a tiny bit more interesting (and only certain sections at that.). I also liked how the author briefly explained certain not obvious connections  to Catherine II like the French Revolution. That  series of events understandably  made monarchs in Europe worry about their own thrones.

     I also like the author's note at the end. It said he/the author spent 8 years researching and writing this book, and that he was going to miss Catherine now that he was finished. I think his pleasure in this woman's  company (at least from all the sources he used since Catherine lived in the 1700's) really showed through in this biography. 

     My only complete listen for August was this just over 30 hours, 2011 novel by Ken Follett that took up much of the month (mainly because I have to be doing something to listen to a book). In print I saw it was a 1000 page book. At that length it did take me awhile to get through my listen, but not because it was tough. This book captivated me right in the first chapter, all about Billy in the coal mines of Wales. And the narrator, John Lee, wasn't even one that I loved, but the story was interesting enough that after a while I didn't even notice what I didn't like about him. (Although I will say he did a variety of voices quite well.)

     This book is really about World War One, but in a broad sense. The story follows several families in various places. There is Billy and his family (including his sister Ethel) who come from a community of coal miners in Wales, Grigori and Lev who were 2 brothers who were orphaned in the Bloody Sunday peasant massacre in Russia,  Earl Teddy/Fritz Fitzherbert as well as his wife and sister who are wealthy landowners in Wales,  Count Robert von Ulrich who is a German and also Gus Dewar, an American who works for Woodrow Wilson's White House. And there's a whole range of other minor characters  like King George V of England and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany also. This may sound like a lot to keep track of, but they seamlessly fit together in this big story. That might be because the author starts off by cleverly telling each story and connecting them together right off the bat. 

      I can't say I knew a whole lot about World War One (or the Great War), and I definitely learned more from this book. I like how this story combined history with the character's personal stories and also how it connected the war to people's lives. It was definitely a book that put you right into the time and various places where this novel occurs.

     This is book 1 of the  Century Trilogy by  Follett. Like many of Follett's books, each is long, but the next 2 books are definitely on my list to read. I hope when I get to them they are as good as this book was!

     After I got about half way through the giant Catherine the Great book, I needed something lighter to read before bed, so I went with this book that 2 friends recommended to me. Daughter of the Mists was an enjoyable read and definitely was a good before bed book, at least compared the Catherine the Great’s biography  😀

    Hanna has come home to England after teaching for a few years  in China.  Before she went to China she was plagued by wild dreams, and although they disappeared while away, now that she is home they are  coming back. These dreams have to do with a woman named Brea who lived in ancient England during the time of the Romans. She is an Iceni, one of the groups of people who lived in the Norfolk area. She is a slave after being captured at age 13. If you aren't familiar with the Iceni (which I really wasn't although I knew the name Boudicca), you do learn a bit about them in this novel, although you learn a lot more about life in an ancient British Roman town. 

 

 This book alternates between Hanna's modern life and Brea’s Roman life, and you know they are going to intersect early on.  The characters are well done, and their stories are interesting. Besides the history, there is food, romance and some ghostly moments. There’s also a necklace that practically becomes one of the main characters in the book. 

    This is a light and enjoyable read. I really like the parts about archaeology and the views of Roman life. My one negative is that  it had a maybe a little too much predictable romance (in parts) for me, even though I liked the parallels between Brea in ancient Roman Norfolk and Hanna in modern day Norfolk. I wondered what was going to happen to actually connect the 2 women from different timelines together, and the author did create a lot of suspense for that event throughout the novel.

     

    And finally a mystery 😉. At least that's how I felt when I started reading this latest-to-date  book in the Matthew Venn series by Ann Cleeves.  I think it just seemed like I hadn't read a mystery for awhile because of the 2 long books that took me the first half of the month to get through.

      This book has a great small town, almost creepy atmosphere. Greystone is the seaside community that hasn't kept up with times and isn't a tourist destination. Plus at the start of the book there's a big storm going on with wind, rain, waves and the power going out. It's during this storm that the local life-savers are sent out to rescue a boat anchored in a cove. In that boat they find the body of Jem Rosco, a famous adventurer, TV personality and local son who "had blown into town"  and was going to stay until his companion arrived. But who really was Jem, who was his unknown companion, and why had he come back to Greystone? And even more important, who murdered him, and why?

      For Matthew Venn and his team, there are many questions and connections to solve. And then another "townie" is found murdered. The two men are connected by the woman they both loved as teenagers. And never mind, there is the family who closed the quarry that was an important source of income, as well the  religious group that Venn has broken away from. It's a small town with lots of connections.

      All of these Matthew Venn mysteries have been great, but this one has been my favorite.  A lot had to do with the characters, the nautical theme and the great atmosphere in this book. And of course, it's a really good twisty mystery too. 

     This next book, Trust, was my September book club book. I don't know if I would have ever picked it up if it hadn't been for my book club because it seemed to be mainly about money. And although it's always nice to have  a little bit of money, I'm really not that interested in money as a topic of a book. 

     HOWEVER, my initial thoughts were wrong about this novel. It is about money, but really it's a fictional story  about one man  (Andrew Bevel) who had an aptitude for numbers and who made a lot of money in the stock market. This book is set (mostly but not totally) in the 1910's-1930's.  However, how the author approached this topic is really fascinating. He divided the book into 4 parts: part one: a fictional novel about this man, part 2: his attempted autobiography, part 3: about his ghost writer and part 4:  his wife’s diary.   I had to look up about this book's set up, mainly because after reading part one and then moving onto part 2, I noticed a lot of similarities. But the names were different as were parts of the stories, and that had me totally confused. When I moved onto part 3 and noticed the names matched part 2, but the story took another turn, I needed a little internet help to square away the book's set up.

      Just knowing what each part was about made reading this story a new experience. I liked this book. It was not a hard read, nor a really long read, but like Catherine the Great that I wrote about earlier in this post, that was not a read before bed book. Diaz is a talented and creative writer, and although I'm still not interested in a book about money, I was very interested in the characters and their lives that he wrote about. And I liked the subtle twist at the end. 

         

     This next book was my read when Trust got a bit too heavy, like at bedtime. It's more of an older children's book, but I had never read it before. We did have an old copy in the house while I was growing up, which I think was something my mother had when she taught elementary school. This semi-biographical novel was published in 1948, so my mother, who was in college in 1948, was too old for this to be one of her childhood books.

     I really enjoyed this book. I can see why it is still in print today. The authors were 2 of the 12 children of Frank Gilbreth Sr. (along with his wife), and this book recounts parts of their childhood in Montclair, New Jersey. It was certainly not a boring childhood. The main character of this book is Frank Gilbreth Senior, a quirky father who made the children's lives very interesting. 

     Frank Sr. had no worries about walking into his children's classrooms to check up on them or bringing them surprises on his way home from work. You never actually know what his work was; it was something to do with engineering and maybe even concrete, since  one story is all about him building a concrete bird bath that never took shape and ended up being a pile of sand. Of course, since this is a children's book it is filled with  events that would make children laugh and maybe even squirm a little bit, but knowing exactly what Frank Sr. does for work isn't really all that important. This book was set in the early 1900's, I believe up to the 1920's, although very little actual time references are included. Of course, being a children's story, time frame really isn't necessary either. 

     All I know is I grinned and smiled a lot through this story, and I wish I had known about it when my daughter was younger as we could have read it together. 

     I finished the month with book 9 in the Maggie Hope series.  We’ve moved into 1943 and Maggie, after some harrowing situations in the last few books, is now defusing bombs left over from the German blitz of London a few years earlier. After being in those earlier stressful situations, she’s in rebellion and letting off steam by doing some dangerous things. It’s caught up with her emotionally. It’s been quite the journey from book 1 when she was hired as Churchill’s secretary to this point in the series.

    Maggie’s still dealing with the serial or what the book calls sequential killer from a couple of books ago. And then there’s her mother, a top German spy, who has escaped a British jail and hasn’t been found yet. Maggie isn't actively trying to find her, but she's a presence. Plus Maggie is dating Inspector Durgin of Scotland Yard, and that is an interesting relationship, perhaps not exactly all Maggie hopes it would be. He's the man in charge of trying to find the killer of the men whose bones have shown up in suitcases in the River Thames.

      This book has a darker feel than the last 8, which actually makes sense as the war drags on. I think people had to have lost a lot of the initial fervor as the war continued year after year.  I also like how Maggie has matured as time has passed and as she has become scarred by events and loss of friends. The author's done a great job of character development over these 9 books. There’s 2 more to go for in this series so I’m looking forward to seeing where Maggie ends up. And as I’ve said before, you definitely need to read these books  in order because this story is cumulative. 

    That's my book list for August. I love recommendations, even if it might take me forever to get to them. So if you've read something really good, pass it on. Please. 

     And if you've read through this whole post, thanks too.