The Double Comfort Safari Club / Alexander McCall-Smith

The Double Comfort Safari Club is number 12 in a series that shows no signs of losing steam. This installment again illustrates that the cases of the No. One Ladies Detective Agency’s number one detective Precious Ramotswe have less to do with sleuthing, mystery and intrigue and more to do with the vagaries of human nature. The occasional observations about life are wonderful in their own right, never mind the plot that takes the reader along with Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi to a Botswanan Safari Park. Here are two quotes that I marked (electronically in my borrowed library e-copy on my Nook) that I thought were worth coming back to:

p 9 That was the way the world was; it was composed of a few almost perfect people (ourselves); then there were a good many people who generally did their best but were not all that perfect (our friends and colleagues); and finally, there were a few rather nasty ones (our enemies and opponents). Most people fell into that middle group-- those who did their best-- and the last group was, thankfully, very small and not much in evidence in places like Botswana, where he was fortunate enough to live.

p 50 The realisation of our mortality came slowly, in dribs and drabs, until we bleakly acknowledged that everything was on loan to us for a short time-- the world, our possessions, the people we knew and loved. But we could not spend our time dwelling on our mortality; we still had to behave as if the worst would not happen, for otherwise we could not do very much, we would be defeated and give up.

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And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

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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 th...

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