It’s been a good week. You already read about the program with Norah O’Donnell and Connie Schultz on Monday night. Linda and I are already making more plans. We have tickets to see Mary Kay Andrews at a luncheon in June. She’ll talk about her forthcoming book, Road Trip. It’s set in Ireland! And, I’m hoping to get tickets to see Celtic Thunder in September, speaking of Ireland. Other than that, it’s been a week for reading. Some warm weather, but thunderstorms and tornado watches today.
I just started Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading. She might provide a few reminders for our Childhood Reading discussion on Friday, April 3. I’m not into it very far. The first section is about picture books, including the history of early illustrators, including Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway, and Arthur Rackham. I just reached her discussion of Maurice Sendak. I think he scared her to death as a child.
I love that it was her father who read to her. I’m looking forward to reading about the books she reads as an older child and adolescent. We’ll be talking about our own reading soon.
What about you? What have you been doing this week? What are you reading?
I loved last Friday’s discussion of Comfort Reads. I added so many books to my list. Thank you for sharing!
I loved the Comfort Reads discussion too, Lesa, AND now my list is a little longer as well.
i have Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading on my Kindle and am looking forward to it.
One of my favorite books of the year, so far, is Red Clay by Charles B. Fancher
Description
An astounding multigenerational saga, Red Clay chronicles the interwoven lives of an enslaved Black family and their white owners as the Civil War ends and Reconstruction begins.
In 1943, when a frail old white woman shows up in Red Clay, Alabama, at the home of a Black former slave—on the morning following his funeral—his family hardly knows what to expect after she utters the words “… a lifetime ago, my family owned yours.” Adelaide Parker has a story to tell—one of ambition, betrayal, violence, and redemption—that shaped both the fate of her family and that of the late Felix H. Parker.
But there are gaps in her knowledge, and she’s come to Red Clay seeking answers from a family with whom she shares a name and a history that neither knows in full. In an epic saga that takes us from Red Clay to Paris, to the Côte d’Azur and New Orleans, human frailties are pushed to their limits as secrets are exposed and the line between good and evil becomes ever more difficult to discern. Red Clay is a tale that deftly lays bare the ugliness of slavery, the uncertainty of the final months of the Civil War, the optimism of Reconstruction, and the pain and frustration of Jim Crow.
With a vivid sense of place and a cast of memorable characters, Charles B. Fancher draws upon his own family history to weave a riveting tale of triumph over adversity, set against a backdrop of societal change and racial animus that reverberates in contemporary America. Through seasons of joy and unspeakable pain, Fancher delivers rich moments as allies become enemies, and enemies—to their great surprise—find new respect for each other.
Interesting to note –
Charles B. Fancher is a writer and editor, and a former senior corporate communications executive for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He also worked as a journalist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Detroit Free Press, and WSM-TV, as well as a publicist for the ABC Television Network. Fancher was previously a member of the School of Communications faculty at Howard University and the adjunct faculty at Temple University. It appears that Red Clay is his debut novel.
This sounds very good Kaye, and I’ve added it to my online shopping cart at the bookstore. I remember hearing about the book before but had forgotten about it, so your post was a good reminder!
It’s been a good week over here too. It was our anniversary on the weekend. What did David and I do for excitement you ask? We played a game of rummy ha ha. I won that one, but overall he’s three games ahead of me since we started keeping track of them. 183 wins for him and 180 for me. We also ordered dinner in from our favourite Thai restaurant and ate it in front of the TV while watching Will Trent.
And for the first time this entire winter it finally snowed here yesterday morning! I was so excited. Lovely big flakes, quite a little blizzard. I went for a walk and was out there for well over an hour, just enjoying being the first one to walk in it, and listening to that special snowy crunch sound as I went along. I walked and walked and loved every second of it. A top ten activity for sure.
Two books this week:
THE ASTRAL LIBRARY by Kate Quinn
This book has been mentioned here a few times.
Briefly, Alix is struggling with some things: she’s still trying to overcome her feeling of abandonment from when her mother left when Alix was just eight years old; and she’s trying so hard to make ends meet and having to work three jobs to do so; and now even her meager bank account has been frozen because of dentity theft. She often seeks solace in the reading room at the Boston Public Library which is the only space where she feels safe and can escape into the world of books. One day she comes upon a door to a hidden library, wherein The Librarian helps desperate people like Alix ‘escape to new lives … inside their favorite books’.
But before this properly gets underway for Alix, it seems that previously-helped Patrons are being threatened and The Librarian is determined to help them, and Alix goes with her. What follows is a frantic race through the favorite books these Patrons escaped to. And further even more dire, threats keep on coming.
I like Kate Quinn’s books and am certainly not averse to a paranormal fantasy novel. But I’m sorry to say that I didn’t really enjoy this book. I just didn’t find it all that interesting, although the author’s love for libraries and librarians came through loud and clear. Alix didn’t resonate with me; for some reason I didn’t feel a connection to her, much of the book felt repetitive (especially Beau the costume designer’s far too frequent utterances of ‘Oh honey, no.’), and there was a fair amount of swearing which can work in many books but felt out of place and unnecessary in this one. I fully expected to like the book and I feel uncharitable for not doing so. Maybe my expectations were too high.
Although I did like the idea of the ghosts in the hidden library – ‘people who die with too many books on their TBR stack … who don’t feel they can pass over until they catch up on their reading.’ I could see myself being one of them!
TOO OLD FOR THIS by Samantha Downing
Well, this was certainly a different type of story than I’ve read before. Equal parts completely farfetched, unrealistic, often downright disturbing yet strangely compelling to read.
Lottie, 75 years old and feeling her age somewhat, is enjoying retirement while living in a new town. In Spokane, where she lived before, she was suspected of having killed three people but was never arrested nor convicted. Still, to get away from the constant scrutiny, she adopts a new identity and moves to a small town in a different state and is living a normal quiet life – bingo with the senior’s group at church, cooking, and friends. What no one there knows is that she actually did kill those people!
Then one day her quiet retirement is shattered when Plum, an investigative journalist, knocks on her door hoping that Lottie is willing to be interviewed for a docu-series she’s doing about people who have been wrongfully accused of a crime. Lottie is suspicious. Somehow she needs to make this problem disappear.
And that’s just the beginning of the knocks on her door and awkward questions being asked and she soon has a lot of problems to deal with. Even though she wants to find herself a nice retirement home with no stress and no worries, it looks like Lottie’s going to have to come out of retirement for a bit.
This is not an edge-of-your-seat scary story but it’s still disturbingly entertaining because if you can put aside your disbelief that this seemingly normal ‘would you like some tea and cookies’ woman is a cold-blooded serial killer, and put aside the gruesomeness of her killing and disposal methods, you have yourself a story with a very different take on the thriller genre. With its short chapters which entice you to read just one more, and then just one more again, it’s a quick easy read which leaves you guessing till the very end whether Lottie gets away with it all or not.
We had a few days of temperatures around 80 but we’ll be back to the 40s and 50s again by tomorrow.
This week I read two books.
An ARC of Countdown by Sara Driscoll.
New Year’s Eve. New York City Harbor. When a gunman takes a billionaire and his party guests hostage on his yacht, the NYPD negotiating team and the tactical assault team get involved. But the more they talk to the gunman, the more off the situation feels, and they begin to suspect something else is at play. Can they figure out what’s going on before hostages start to die?
This was hard to put down.
East is East by Emma Lathen.
John Putnam Thatcher, a senior executive at the Sloan Guarantee Trust, travels to Japan to facilitate a deal between two companies. But negotiations are derailed by a murder.
This is an old series I read years ago and though it’s a bit dated I still enjoyed rereading it.
Lesa, I read there’s been a raft of Bigfoot sightings in Ohio, so keep your eyes open!
Spring has sprung and so has my allergies.
This week I read:
Poison and Prejudice by Daphne Silver; Our intrepid sleuth goes to a storage auction. There’s a lot of valuable merchandise in her locker, which she bought for her friend…and a dead body! Holy Darrel Sheets!
All’s Faire in Love and Murder by Cindy Samples; Our actress/sleuth is working a renaissance Faire, and the Queen is murdered. No beheading, though. Our sleuth investigates, and gets herself in a lot of trouble, but gets to the bottom of things. A local author who should be much better known.
A Touch of Treason by Gary Pnzo; Ninth book of the Nick Bracco series. Nick and his mafioso cousing, Tommy got to Sicily, where there’s the mafia (of course), Russian spies, and mole, and Syrian terrorists. I really like this series, but can’t take it seriously. I see it as an 80’s TV movie starring Joe penny as Nick Bracco, Barry Van Dyke as his sharpshooting partner, and Tony Danza as Tommy, the mobster with a heart of gold.
Harm’s Way by John Gilstrap; Missionaries in a South American country are taken hostage, and Jonathan Graves is recruited to rescue them. Pretty boring for this sort of thing.
Backstage Pass by JD DeCosta; a singer who almost made the rock and roll big time tells us about his life and the famous people he encountered along the way. Not too different than a lot of these, but the author didn’t have the money of the really crazy dudes. Probably for the best for him.
Ralph Compton’s Hell Snake by Bernard Schaffer; I think this is an attempt at a woke western, but the author was aware enough of his audience that he doesn’t quite go all they way, and we get a mess.
Hail to the Chin by Bruce Campbell; The second autobiography by the B movie actor goes into his time on the TV show Burn Notice, and making movies in Eastern Europe. His personality comes out on every page. I think it’s too bad he never quite got to the A-list.
We’ve hit the 80’s! And I’m making good progress in stuff at work this week, which makes me happy. I think the hardest stuff is behind me as far as this quarter end close goes.
Tuesday, I finished BROKEN TRUST, the third Laurel Highlands Mystery from Liz Milliron. This is her first series, and the last one I’ve gotten to, ironically. I’m enjoying it and looking forward to more soon.
I’m about a quart of the way into FROZEN STIFF DRINK, the sixth in a series from James J. Cudney. I have all eight books, and I’m going to finish. But I do struggle with this series. It makes me wonder why I am so determined to finish when I’ve been able to walk away from other series. I think part of it is I want to like this series.