Peachy Reads

I wanted to return to Bruges with Inspector Pieter van In after enjoying the first installment in this Flemish detective series,  The Square of Revenge .  Bruges really is the most captivating character in this novel, providing a wonderful backdrop to the police action, its streets frosted with a magical covering of powdery snow, its gothic and neogothic towers and facades transformed into so much iced gingerbread.   The plot, however, is a bit overcomplicated-- involving murders, Nazi gold, a conspiracy involving a forged copy of Michelangelo’s Madonna, and a terrorist plot to blow up cultural monuments in Bruges in order to drive out its middle class citizens to a proposed garden suburb built on the neighboring polder... need I go on?  It really didn’t hold together and when I said that the city of Bruges is the best character in The Midas Murders , it’s because Van In is so ugly and unlikable, at least in this installment.  The series has had...

Not since David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day have I read such a humorous and entertaining chronicle of an adult attempting to learn French. There are many funny language situations, made all the more amusing by the author’s apparent linguistic tone deafness.  Can a 58-year-old pick up a language like French?  He discusses this proposition with some experts and cites some linguistic theory behind the mechanism of language learning, interspersed with his dogged (and frequently laughable) attempts to master French. Alexander seems to eschew the traditional approach of memorizing verb forms and vocabulary (forever scarred by a battle axe school teacher), and instead embraces the purportedly effortless newfangled approaches of products like Rosetta Stone and social media with native speakers.  All of this is complicated with recurring medical drama he has with his heart (alluded to in the subtitle), problems that he speculates may be stress-induced due to his attempt...

This historical novel tells the story of abolitionist John Brown, a character already so over-the-top in every way that his persona might threaten to devour any novel that was written about him.  James McBride avoids this problem by enlisting a once-removed narrator in the person of Henry “Onion” Shackleford, also known as Henrietta after John Brown mistakes him for a girl and subsequently dresses him as one.  It’s a ruse that serves him well, as girls could more easily blend into the background and watch the unfolding action without taking part in the major skirmishes.  The story follows John Brown from the days of his Kansas anti-slavery raids, to his fund-raising lectures out east, visits with such notables as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, and finally the long-awaited, but doomed raid on the armory at Harper’s Ferry. The characters here are the strength of the book.  Some of the wild west portions (especially the part in the brothel) reminded me of L...