Peachy Reads

This was a serendipitous find on the library’s downloadable service.  Commissaire Dupin is a Parisian who was shipped out to the “boonies” on the Celtic fringe of France to continue his police detective career after he apparently stepped on some toes in the capital city with his sometimes unorthodox approach.  Brittany is as much of a character as any human character in this book—its landscape, its history, its culture, its language, its food.  I really liked Dupin and his constant need for quality coffee and a good entrec ô te.   The murder plot was captivating,  taking place in Pont Aven, the artists’ colony that most famously is associated with Gauguin before he went to Tahiti.  I had the feeling that I was reading a native’s view of the province, but found out later that Jean-Luc Bannalec is a pseudonym for a German author.  And so popular is the series in Germany that it has even been made into a television series.  I felt like it was...

OK, so only progressives are likely to pick up this book.  But Al Franken’s story is unique.  An outsider with a long background in show business, Franken  tries his hand at national politics.  Sound familiar?  Maybe it’s the new normal.  As funny as Franken is (and he does try to put a lid on it to give his office the serious tone it deserves), he’s extremely smart, and seems to have an excellent political sense, reaches across the proverbial aisle, and sees the “big picture”.  And, at least in the book, he inserts a lot of levity into everything.  I found it interesting to see how his campaign was organized, how at first he didn’t have the blessing of the Democratic leadership, how he clawed his way up the polls (without the apparent help of foreign agents), and suffered through a months-long recount, before finally being seated as the junior Senator from Minnesota.  It’s also interesting to get an insight into how Congressional offices ...

A food writer is on the rebound after a broken relationship (she ran off with her personal trainer).  A working trip to Montalcino, a hill town in Italy, is the kind of restorative getaway that he needs to put his life and career back on track.  Except the start of the trip seems to go so wrong.  After finding himself in an Italian jail after a rental car agent tries to hoodwink him, and due to an undersupply of available  cars owing to a holiday weekend, he has no other option than to drive a bulldozer from Pisa to his hilltop pension.  It’s  a humorous  prologue which nearly hijacks the entire story, but luckily there’s much more to the novel once the bulldozer is parked in the municipal lot at Montalcino.  As with most McCall Smith’s novels, there’s a lot of talk about life and about nothing, but human relationships are front and center, and by the end of it, Paul has things sorted out satisfactorily.

I went through a Sherlock Holmes stage when I was a preteen.  More recently I had downloaded an omnibus edition of Holmes mysteries to my Nook account for practically nothing since the stories are well out of copyright.  It wasn’t until now that I revisited one of the tales that I read years ago, one of the signature titles, The Hound of the Baskervilles .  I only remembered a vague notion of the plot, so it was definitely worth  taking up again.  There's a wonderful sense of place on the dark moor with the dusty ancestral home.  It’s a clever plot and the character of Holmes is unforgettable and survives the decades.

Bernie Gunther is sent to Smolensk, in Nazi-occupied Russia, to investigate possible war crimes that involve the assassination of thousands of Polish officers in Katyn Wood by Russian operatives.   Ironic that the Nazi regime would want to investigate war crimes, but the thought is that it will give them leverage against the Soviets when they reveal this heinous act on an international stage.   During the course of the investigation Bernie stumbles into other murders and intrigues and unmasks a double-agent in the process.   There are so many nuances and subplots in this complex novel, it really provides an excellent lens into the true history during a most complex moment in the second world war.

We were briefly in London in March and witnessed some of the transformative construction projects taking place at Paddington Station and along Oxford Street at Bond Street and Tottenham Court Road.  Currently Europe’s biggest engineering project, Crossrail will represent, when it is finished, the newest extension of the London Underground, soon to be called the Elizabeth Line.  This book gives a historical context for the East-to-West path across greater London and delves into some of the history that was literally uncovered during the extensive works to tunnel this line through Europe’s largest metropolis.  Bits of the book are truly fascinating, but it repeats somewhat, leaves other parts out  (Whitechapel, for example, since “it could comprise  a book on its own”) and a geographic approach clashes with a strict historical sequencing, sometimes making it a somewhat confusing read. If you are a London aficionado or a transport fan, this could nevertheless...

Being a longtime fan of Bill Bryson, and a Britophile, it was only a matter of time before I picked up this book. I’ve always found Bryson to be rather an unlikely traveler, and this, I suppose, is part of the inherent humor in his books.  His approach is a bit haphazard, and he sort of ping-pongs to all corners of Britain—the well-known spots as well as the “undiscovered” bits, and even the less attractive parts.    At the start of the book he proposes a diagonal axis, the “Bryson Line” from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath in Scotland, which he intends to follow, but doesn’t really. Rather, he seem to end up going just where he pleases—Sailsbury Plain, Cornwall, Wales, London, Norfolk, Yorkshire…  True, as others have noticed, in this volume he seems frequently grumpy and at times overly nostalgic for the times when every hamlet was defined by an independent ironmonger, a post office, a tea room, and a butcher.  But just as frequently he rhapsodizes about wha...