Peachy Reads

Things aren’t always as they seem in this thriller that starts out with the gruesome discovery of a murdered teen in Bath, England.   Police begin an investigation into what they think may be a serial killing, but then things take a different turn.  Many of the characters in this novel harbor secrets—secrets about their childhood, secrets about how they make their living, secrets about money, secrets about what they do in private.   At first there doesn’t seem to be a connection between the seemingly divergent plotlines in the narrative, but in the end it all comes together in a rather clever way.   And the last chapter is a bit of a shocker.   This is not your typical psychopath-run-amok Mo Hayder novel.  Some may not like its pacing and the different directions the investigation seems to take, with lots of deadends, but I thought it gave it more realism.

Jeannette Walls’s gritty memoir The Glass Castle , an account of her wacky childhood, captured people’s imagination as evidenced by its sustained popularity.  The book stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 100 weeks and was in constant demand in the library and has been a popular choice for book clubs.  Now a movie is in the works, with Hollywood darling Jennifer Lawrence rumored to head the cast. The glass castle of the title is the fantasy house father Rex Walls promises his family he will build for them one day when luck turns his way.  Luck never does turn his way.  Certainly no glass castle, the reality of what he provides for his family is quite different—a transient life, food shortages,  living in tumbledown houses until the authorities start to sniff around, their father loses his job, or conditions otherwise become so unbearable that the family must move on.  Throughout their childhood of degradation, the Walls children seem to regard much of what’s thrown a

UK cover This detective novel gained popularity this summer when it was revealed that the enigmatic debut author was really none other than J.K. Rowling of the Harry Potter series. Cormoran Strike is a struggling gumshoe who doesn’t really need, and can't afford, the temporary office assistant the agency sends him one morning at the start of the book.   But they become a very good team as they untangle the mysterious circumstances surrounding the apparent suicide of a supermodel named Lula Landry. I quite liked this novel—for its sense of place in London, the strong and very contemporary characters, and their interpersonal dynamics.   My only criticism is that pace became a bit plodding in the middle of the book, but in the end it was a rewarding read overall.   Maybe if they had really been dealing with a debut author and not the publishing powerhouse that is JKR, the editor could have done his or her job and cut the manuscript down into a leaner, meaner machine.

The sound of the 70s for me is dominated by Linda Ronstadt belting out Top-40 hits like “You’re No Good,” “That’ll Be the Day,” “Heatwave,” “It’s So Easy,” and “When Will I Be Loved?”.  The doe eyes peering out from LP covers belied the powerhouse voice.  The LA music industry wanted a bona fide female rocker, but Linda was never comfortable in that role and she always defied classification.  When her fame forced her to sing her hits again and again in enormous acoustically-challenged arenas and the life on the road began to get to her, she decided to explore other aspects of her musical persona.  She followed her pop superstardom with collaborations with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton, Nelson Riddle, and explored her Mexican heritage with the enormously successful Canciones de mi padre , among other projects. There are some personal stories in this slim volume, but it’s mostly what the subtitle says—a musical memoir.  There is no gossip or mud-slinging, Jerry Brown and George Luca

This was one of those serendipitous finds that can happen when you work in a public library.  I was reshelving some returns on Friday when I noticed a book with my favorite place in Bruges on the front cover, Jan van Eyck Square. “#1 international bestseller” was written in large letters under the title, “European crime sensation Pieter Aspe” on the inside jacket flap, “the Flemish Georges Simenon”.  Well, okay then!  It was a great weekend read.  A fresh plot, good characters, a great sense of place in the wonderful Flemish historical city of Bruges and Flanders and Belgium beyond, even including Wallonia.  This is the first English translation of the Inspector Van In series, the second on the way.  There is a huge backlog of  Van In titles in Flemish just waiting to be translated for a larger world audience. Can’t wait.  Pretty near as good as Wallander.  Crack a Duvel and enjoy this one.  It may be the best thing to happen to Belgian crime fiction since Hercule Poirot.

Okay, so I finished my catch-up reading binge of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series with the latest installment Broken Homes , which is number four in the series.  It came out July 25th in the UK (and thus was prominently promoted during our visit this summer), but isn’t set to be published in the US until later.  Obviously I was captivated by this series, which takes the typical police procedural and jazzes it up a bit with some magical and otherworldly phenomena.  It has a great sense of place for Londonophiles, and the humor and sometimes snarky tone of the main character, Peter Grant, are a lot of fun. Broken Homes has a lot going on—murders and mysterious deaths begin to stack up so much so that it confounded me a bit until the very end, when everything suddenly made sense.  There is a surprise ending which is a real cliff-hanger, but Rivers of London no. 5 has yet to be published.  I hate to wait, but it’s probably a good thing, since I need to be reading other titles.

The UK and US titles and covers In a city as ancient as London there have to be a lot of spirits lurking about, so Peter Grant and his mentor are a sort of “odd squad” police unit that tackles the supernatural.  A series of unexplained murders begins to mirror the plotline of a Punch and Judy script, and the investigation centers on Covent Garden and the Actors’ Church of St. Paul’s on the piazza.  People are literally losing their heads over it, and by the end of the novel the market building at Covent Garden is in flames. The story is fresh, and the contemporary London setting is fascinating.  Peter Grant is a well-developed character, full of London slang, sarcasm, and witticisms.  This might just be Harry Potter for adults. When we were in London this summer, this series of detective novels was prominently displayed in all the bookshops and newsagents.  The cover art is certainly eye-catching.  My wife’s curiosity got the better of her and she bought this title, the first in

This is the sixth novel in the Saxon Tales series, and I’ve read them all.  I suppose the danger with writing a series of historical novels pegged to real historical events is that not every volume can have a significant tide-turning, earth-shaking battle. After all, Napoleon just had the one Waterloo.   Sometimes there is détente, an uneasy peace reigns for whatever reason, and great warriors like Uhtred of Bebbanburg sit around waiting for war to be called once again so they can do what they do best. These quiet times are just not very interesting to read about. In Death of Kings Alfred the Great dies and his passing leads to a struggle for succession.  The Danes are still a force to be reckoned with, but there are those Kentish men as well who aren’t necessarily keen on a single royal head of a unified England.  There is a lot of hemming and hawing and riding back and forth on horseback, and a little distracting story about “angels” foretelling the future.  Things don’t really

This wonderful novel, set in the first part of the twentieth century in England, centers on the character of Ursula Todd.  It is a book of alternate histories.  Each chapter takes up a version of her life and frequently ends with “darkness falling”.  She has this sixth sense that she can see the future, it’s all a little déjà vu , and indeed in some instances she tries to sway the outcome of events if she knows it’s going to go a certain way.  It’s a little like the movie Groundhog Day.  Interesting to see how differently things could turn out on the basis of seemingly inconsequential events.

I don’t usually get my book recommendations from Parade magazine, but this time I did.  And a good recommendation it was, too!  Josh Hanagarne is a father, a Mormon, a librarian, and a physical fitness enthusiast.  Oh, and he has a severe form of Tourette’s.  I basically downloaded this book because of the library angle ( it has an absolutely hilarious opening ) ), but was taken in by the other angles, as the author tries to come to terms with all the disparate, clashing, facets of his personality.  He finds that physical training is one way that he can control his Tourette’s, and even tries out Highland games as an extreme way to tame his muscle tics and uncontrollable impulses.   This is an interesting, frequently humorous memoir, mostly about Tourettes, but a lot about the positive influence of family in his struggles.  It’s a little off-beat, but ultimately rewarding.  You really don't need to be a librarian to enjoy this one.   Here’s a book trailer .

Winston Churchill once famously said of Russia, “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.”  The same might be said of Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Sweet Tooth , set in 1972 during the Cold War, when the UK was trying to define a new role in a postcolonial world in which the US and the Soviet Union were the key players, and there was money to be spent on culture wars. Muses, literary prizes, and bookstore readings aren’t usually the stuff of spy thrillers, and a novel that starts so promisingly as Serena is drafted as a secret agent, very quickly becomes something quite different.   Sweet Tooth definitely had its moments, and McEwan’s style is always a treat, but as a novel it just didn’t work for me.  The premise was credible enough I suppose, but just not that compelling in the end.  And then the whole unreliable narrator thing—didn’t McEwan already try that with Atonement ?  I used to so look forward to anything new by Ian McEwan, but the

The monarch butterfly of Eastern North America typically migrates thousands of miles in order to overwinter in the mountains of Mexico.  This journey is all the more miraculous since the route is completed by several generations of the insect (so there is no “memory” of the route by any single butterfly).  But this winter, in Kingsolver’s most recent work of fiction, Flight Behavior, due to fluctuating temperatures and other meteorological events tied to global warming, masses of orange monarchs drape the trees on the mountain overlooking the Turnbows’ farmstead in the Appalachian foothills of Tennessee.  Their sudden and unexpected appearance is seen as a sign of God by some, and a harbinger of environmental collapse by others. Entomologist Ovid Byron comes to Feathertown, TN, to study the monarchs, and Kingsolver uses his voice to deliver sometimes preachy sermons on how man is destroying his natural surroundings.  (An interesting point that Kingsolver makes is that preserving

If walls could talk… Ashenden is the story of a palladian mansion in the Berkshire countryside. It’s fictional, but based on a real house called Basildon Park (picture below). The book opens with the original building of the house and the delivery of the stones by river from a quarry in Bath, and then revisits it every ten years or so thereafter. It offers mere glimpses or snapshots into the lives of the people who reside in the house and its outbuildings, and the fortunes of the house itself—we see it in hard times, abandoned, reclaimed and done up in Victorian splendor, serving as a convalescent home after World War I, and a POW camp in World War II. This book has touches of Downton Abbey, but the reader doesn’t have much opportunity to become attached to many of the characters, since they rarely make it to the next chapter of the house’s history. I really enjoyed this one. It’s a brief history of England of the last three hundred years. from Wikimedia Commons

Nothing is better than embellishing a story with the retelling.  It’s a device that has characterized storytellers from primeval campfires to drunks on bar stools. Sedaris is the master of embellishment— transforming life’s mundane moments into absolute hilarity with his deadpan and usually more than slightly cynical delivery. He gives a bit of insight into his process in this book—journaling everything and highlighting the unusual or slightly madcap moments that make up only a sliver of his life.  Maybe 95% of his life is dull, but it’s the 5% that is repackaged in essay form that has made me a fan.  Is it fiction or nonfiction?  Who can say, but it is probably a little of one, more of the other.  This book has plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, but has some parts that don’t quite make the grade.  Still, I think it’s better than his previous book Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk , which I only found mildly entertaining. 

One day Joe, a Native American teenager, helps his father pull saplings that have taken root in the cracks of the foundation of their house. It turns out to be a metaphor for the cracked foundation of their own existence. Mother is late coming home, and their worry sends them out in the car to see if she’s perhaps had a flat tire. They see her driving at a fast clip towards home and further speculate that she’s forgotten that it was Sunday and the grocery was closed. They can never imagine the real reason for her lateness.  Their world is turned topsy-turvy when it transpires that she has been the victim of an unspeakable crime.  Because of the mish-mash of property boundaries that separate tribal land from federal and state land, and the fact that the perpetrator was a white man, bringing the criminal to justice is all the more complicated. Erdrich creates almost a legal thriller with The Round House , but its setting on the reservation makes it all the more interesting.  The

The Aussies have their vegemite, the Europeans their nutella, but the sandwich spread that unequivocally and perhaps uniquely defines the American palate is peanut butter.  This book tells you all you need to know about peanut butter from its humble origins (no, George Washington Carver was not its inventor) to the consolidation of the triumvirate of national brands: Jiffy, Skippy , and Peter Pan .   Did you know that peanut butter tastes more flavorful when made from Spanish, Valencia, or Virginia peanuts and not the less tasty (but easier to process) florunners ?  A major “improvement” in peanut butter production was eliminating the oil separation which still characterizes natural brands.  Unfortunately for the consumer, the solution to a creamy, more stable spread was adding partially hydrogenated oil, this being the poster child for trans-fats, the nutritional bad boy in recent years.  (The U.S. government calls standard grocery store peanut butter trans-fat free because

Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt , has that folksy quality that harkens back to the gentility of a bygone age.   Maybe it’s growing up in rural Georgia, as she did, that defines her character to such a degree, and comes through so well on the written page. In any case, her musings and her thoughtful prose are always a joy to read. In this book she takes on a topic that resonated with me—saving seeds to plant for next year’s crop.  Why is this so important?  Well, with hybridization and genetically modified crops, farmers (and more and more, home gardeners) no longer are able to keep and replant seeds the following season. I n fact, in the case of farmers, in most instances it’s illegal for them to do so.    Remember that prize tomato that grandpa grew when you were young?  Chances are that variety is not in any seed catalogs any more.    This diminishes plant diversity and makes agriculture beholden to the big multinationals like Monsant

I heard the author of Going Clear being interviewed on NPR and was captivated.   What I knew about Scientology wasn’t much—its Hollywood adherents including Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley, John Travolta; its science fiction writer founder L. Ron Hubbard; and the fact that Scientology seems to be a near constant magnet for controversy.   This book filled in some of the gaps for me, including the foundation of their beliefs: …Teegeeack [Earth] was a dumping ground for thetans, it became known as the Prison Planet, “the planet of ill repute.”  The Galactic Confederacy abandoned the area, although various invaders have appeared throughout the millennia.  But these free-floating thetans remain behind.  They are the souls of people who have been dead for seventy-five million years.  They attached themselves to living people because they no longer have free will.  There can be millions of them clustered inside a single person’s body.  Auditing for Scientologists [focuses] on eliminating the

I’m always fond of a good alternative history, so when The Afrika Reich came across my radar screen, I snatched it up.  In this novel Germany comes out triumphant in World War II.  Great Britain negotiates a non-aggression pact with the Nazis that allows them to retain their empire.  Africa is now primarily divided between the British and the Germans, the Nazis pursuing their racial policy, a diabolical plan of shipping Europe’s Jews to Madagascar and eradicating native peoples and transporting remaining black Africans to the region of Muspel in the Sahara. Burton Cole is an Englishman with a mercenary past.  He thinks those days are long gone when he is made an offer he finds impossible to refuse—a contract to assassinate his nemesis, a despicable Nazi in the new German African territories, whose efforts at the aryanization of the continent are stomach-turning.  Plus he has a history with Cole. So starts a nonstop thrill ride that rivals anything that James Bond or Jason Bo

About two-thirds through this book I had just about decided that this might be my last Flavia de Luce novel. I do love Flavia, how could you not? She’s smart beyond her years, infinitely resourceful, indomitable, charming.   But this latest novel is just such a complex wedding cake of a mystery novel that I found it to be a just a bit overplotted.   When the church organist is found murdered, stuffed in the crypt of the church’s patron saint, Saint Tancred, Flavia jumps into action to figure out whodunnit.   Before she’s done she will have negotiated secret tunnels through the church yard (giving the vicar’s wife a fright in the process), swallowed a priceless diamond, forced her way into a manor house where she makes friends with a man-boy with webbed hands (whose father suffers from leprosy), survived an attempt on her life by a church lady and sustained burns in an ether explosion… Well, that’s really just the tip of the iceberg.   There is such an extensive cast of characters,

Train stations are the cathedrals of the modern age. And there is no better example than Grand Central in New York City. Enter through the stone portals from the bustling sidewalks of 42nd Street to the main concourse and you can’t help but be awed-- your gaze will be pulled to the celestial heavens, which in the case of Grand Central are reproduced in cerulean blue on the vaulted ceiling. February 2013 marks one hundred years since the beaux arts train temple in the middle of Park Avenue emerged as an elegant gateway to Midtown Manhattan (the present edifice replaced earlier buildings). The evolution of Grand Central reflects the history of the modern city itself. At one time an open gash of dangerous rails traveled by smoke-belching locomotives burned through NYC from 125th to 42nd Street, and pedestrians and other traffic risked life and limb to cross from one side of Manhattan to the other. Nearby inhabitants inhaled the fumes of the coal-powered machines and endured the noise

I had been intending to read this novel for a bit.  I think I've read everything by Barbara Kingsolver, but I kept postponing reading this 500 pager.  It came out in 2009, but it was the opening of the new exhibit  Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics, and Painting  across the street at the High Museum of Art that finally motivated me to buckle down and read it. I'm sorry I waited so long.  The history was fascinating, not only of the portrayal of the Kahlo-Rivera household at the time of their greatest fame, but of Trotsky's Mexican exile and eventual assassination, the Bonus Army riots of Washington D.C., and the Red Scare in the United States after the end of the war.  Plus there was all the cultural geography of Xochimilco, Teotihuacan, and Chichen Itza.  After reading about it, I wanted to plan a visit to Mexico City to visit the Bauhaus inspired Kahlo-Rivera house and see Rivera's murals at the Palacio Nacional.  The narrative revolves around the character of

The mysterious figure of Bertha Mason provides much of the tension in Jane Eyre , but what does the reader really know about her?  Rochester provides some details of her past, but is his account reliable?  Caribbean author Jean Rhys attempted to tell the story of Rochester's insane (and perhaps misunderstood) wife in her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea .  It's a sort of prequel to Jane Eyre .  I'm afraid Rochester doesn't come out looking good, though we always knew he had a bit of a wild side with his continental dalliances.  Anyway, there's a lot of interesting backstory about Bertha's origins in Jamaica, her real name, the tragic circumstances of her upbringing, and how she was established at Thornfield Hall.  Gosh, if Jane had only known all these details about Rochester, she might have taken St. John up on his offer of marriage.  All in all, Wide Sargasso Sea is pretty credible, but I missed Charlotte Bronte's flowery language, and of course the char

Jane Eyre .  I've seen several film versions of it, but until now I'd never read the novel.  Shame on me.  I was motivated to read it after it appeared on my daughter's English literature syllabus this year.  I didn't read it simultaneously with her class, but nearly so-- I was a month or two late.  Most literature from the 1800s always frightened me off in the past ( Jane Eyre was published in 1847), and I'm still not over my somewhat inexplicable Dickens-phobia (but maybe I'm coming closer to a cure).  Jane Eyre is amazingly accessible and a real page-turner full of unique characters and plot-twists.  Of course, I knew the secret of the madwoman in the attic, but what a treat it must have been in 1847 to read it with no spoilers.  Such suspense!  It really is a haunting story, full of tragedy, but one that is full of life and love as well.  I think I would have to say it's definitely a girls' book and I was surprised at some of the hints at femini

I can’t remember where I saw the review for this.  Somehow it caught my eye, but in retrospect I’m not sure why.  I've already had the sermon on the ubiquity of corn in our diet from Michael Pollan.  In the opening chapters of  Wheat Belly , William Davis explains how wheat has been so radically hybridized and modified in the last half of the twentieth century, that it little resembles the grain that our grandparents consumed and used as flour.  The “wonder wheat” that grows with tremendous yields worldwide is a gen-modified stubby dwarf variety that is resistant to disease, winds and stormfall (no amber waves of grain anymore) and will not grow without generous allotments of chemical fertilizer (no surprise there). No studies have ever been conducted on this superwheat’s compatibility with human digestion, since its fundamental makeup is radically different from its forebears. Davis suggests that eliminating wheat, all wheat, from our diet has manifold benefits, even for those wh