March books 2012

This month I've been a bit short on Non-Fiction. Just the one. It's Judy Robertson's Out of Mormonism, which follows the struggle of one woman to leave that religion.

There is only one plain fiction novel this month. It's Henning Mankel's History of Daniel that is eminently readable.

A lot of my reading this month has been in Historical Fiction.  My starter is Peter Carey's excellent True History of the Kelly Gang. Brilliant book that follows Kelly's development from poverty-stricken child to the desperate man making his last stand wearing his home-made armour (plenty of decent replicas about). One Victoria museum has a cast of Kelly's head made after he was hanged. I loved Anita Shreve's Sea Glass about a strike on the East Coast of the USA in 1929-1930. The Memory Man by Lisa Appignanesi is about a neurologist who attends a conference in Vienna and who is led from there back to visit the old death camps and towns of his largely forgotten Polish youth. He suffered under the Nazi's but survived to work beside a doctor in one of the post-World War II Displaced Persons Camps when he decided to become a doctor. Which he did in Canada. The whole novel is about recovering lost memories and is utterly enthralling. Karen harper's Shakespeare's Mistress follows the life in London  of the woman who Shakespeare was licensed to marry the day before he married Anne Hathaway. The last in this group of books is Red Plenty by Francis Spufford.  I really loved it. Each section has a summary of the true facts of an aspect of life in the USSR followed by illustration through fiction. For the aspiring historical fiction writer, this book is a good example of the actual process of writing.

There are only two thrillers this month. Derek Gecone's The Truant Officer and Jill Paton Walsh's Debts of Dishonour. I would recommend the latter as one worth reading more than once. 

And, so to Romance. Amber Dermont's The Starboard Sea is a combination of romance with a bit of murder on the side. Laurel O'Donnell's The Bride and the Brute is a glorious medieval romance in which the hero makes off with the wife of a monster knight. Birdie Jawoski's Don't shoot, I'm just the Avon lady follows the career of a seemingly hopeless single mother which eventually leads to a man. Cinderella the Intern by R S Mendelson is a medical romance. Replica by Lexi Revellian is a combination of sci-fi and romance and is a pretty good read.

February books 2012

So, let's start with Non-Fiction. It's difficult to know whether non-canonical gospels count as fiction or non-fiction, so I've counted them in here: The Gospel of Peter and The Gospel of Thomas. The latter, of which versions survive in Coptic and Greek, is filled with sayings of Jesus that suggest the world he wanted to see as a strongly moral and ethical one.  From the sublime to the ridiculous is Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a donkey in the Cevennes. It's old but still a good and entertaining read. Kevin Paul Woodrow, resident in Mallorca, had an accident that resulted in the amputation of a leg. He wrote to friends while he waited to be discharged. His main worry was how he was going to continue running his bar. The resulting book is called Letters from Mallorca and is a good, entertaining read. Michelle Williams, a mortuary technician, writes about her life serving both the dead and coroners in  Down among the Dead Men. Matt Gable writes about his life being abused first by his mother and then his father in Daddy Knows Best. Lily O'Brien writes about her life of abuse at the hands of Irish nuns in an orphanage in The Girl Nobody Wants.

I loved the story of the daughter of a Jewish murderer in Jerusalem contained in The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman.  Her father, brother and herself flee from the Roman in the wake of the AD 70 Destruction of the Temple. They join some other small groups on the way and part from them under varying circumstances. In the end they end up in the Masada fortress. The daughter and a friend manage to escape at the very last minute from the mass suicide and make their way to Alexandria where they practice as herbalists. I'm afraid that is the only Historical Fiction I've read this month.

Far too many Romances fell under my gaze this month. Most of them were very readable. First was Mona Risle's No more lies, then Jennifer Connor's Valentine Surprise. Frankie Valente's Dancing with the Ferryman is set in Shetland, which is a nice change. Lanie Kinkaid's Kelsey's Song is an enthralling story. Jeffe Kennedy's Sapphire is all about domination with a good twist at the end. Nikki Logan's Their Newborn Gift is set in the Australian outback while Nita Bruhns' Warrior's Bride is set in the USA in the context of native Indian life. Fred Limberg's Ferris' Bluff combines romance and thriller in a very convincing way.

David Downing's Silesian Station is a brilliant thriller set in Nazi Germany. Dougie Brimson's Thed Crew: trouble is their game is about football hooligans and how one particular group manage to outwit the police of Britain and Italy.

January 2012 books

I've done very little in the way of writing any book reviews this month. Too much going on at home. Cold house. Very cold. No central heating. Single-glazed windows upstairs.  Draughts whichever way you look. Snow.  Main task has been to collect firewood from the local woods for open fire in Living Room. Only warm place in the house. Landlord of this tied cottage has much to answer for. However, to books ....

I started my Non- Fiction reading this month with John Suchet's My Bonnie: how dementia stole the love of my life. It is an incredibly sad story of how their incredible life together slowly disintegrated over a period of years. It brings tears to your eyes. Not only is the book beautifully written, but Suchet's love for Bonnie spills over on every single page. Henry Davey's Thomas Tallis: Elizabethan Musician is a short, factual biography concerned more with the musician than with the life.  Justin Marozzi's The Man who invented history is a wonderful sort of travelling biography of Herodotus, the Greek historian. Anna Timofeeva-Egorova's Over Fields of Fire: flying the Sturnovik in action on the Eastern Front 1942 - 1945 is a carefully written account of her career in the Soviet air force. It tends to focus on heroic deeds both by her and her comrades. It also records deaths of her close friends with regret. It really only tells about her love of flying with little or nothing about the rest of her life. I do wish it had filled out her personal life. Never mind. I'm grateful we've got what we have. Tracey Engelbrecht's The girl who couldn't say No: Memoir of a teenage Mom is a well-written account of the difficulties she had being pregnant and then rearing her baby single-handedly. It's quite inspirational reading. David Catchpole's Jesus People is about the teachings of Jesus and how the earliest Christian communities came into being and what they believed. Excellent book with a thorough Bibliography. And, an important trifle, Charlotte Bronte's brief  Notes on Pseudonyms used by the Bronte sisters.

The best Fiction I have read this month is pretty eclectic. It starts with Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, that wonderful 19th century classic. Then Sofi Oksanen's Purge a brilliant novel set in Estonia controlled by the USSR. It says a lot for the translation, as well as the original, that this book keeps you turning the pages.

So Thrillers next. Cecilia Peartree's Crime in the Community is a pretty good read. As is Sarah Spann's romantic Wildflowers Come Back and Sue Fineman's On the Run. Katy Madison's Presumed Guilty until proven innocent is the story of the wrong person being identified by the community as a  serial killer. He had a bad past, so everyone assumed he was responsible. They didn't know he'd turned his life around. Until he was able to prove that the real killer was the sheriff who was the one leading the campaign against him. Gripping.

I only read one completely Romantic novel this month. It was Carol Manicelli's medical Emergency: Wife Lost and Found set in hospital. It's a really satisfying read when so many romances are rather straightforward.

And the last, is a rather silly Ghost novel S A Hunter's Scary Mary.

December 2011 books

Let's start with Sarah Wheeler's biography of Cherry - a life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard. This is a stunning book that fills in a lot of gaps in his own book of The Worst Journey. Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower: a voyage to war is an excellent account of the voyage across the Atlantic to New Plymouth, the founding of the settlement, relations with the Indian tribes there and how things went awry. Gripping. The last Non-Fiction I read this month was Harriet Anne Jacobs' Incidents in the life of a slave. It took her a long time to escape to freedom and is filled with her fear of recapture.

Historical fiction this month includes Edward Marston's The Repentant Rake, a murder set in Restoration London and two set in early white Australia by Kate Grenville: The Secret River and The Lieutenant. Both books explore the relations between Aborigines and the convict settlers, a consideration of Australia that is too often ignored.

I enjoyed reading Joanne Harris's Blackberry Juice concerning the relationship between a young boy and an old man and how the latter influenced the former. Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicles is an extraordinary book. It's long, but the trouble is that once you've got beyond page two, you don't want to put it down, much to the irritation of your other half. And what happened during World War II keeps on coming back and being mirrored in the present.

Ken McClure's Pestilence was the only sci-fi I read this month. I did enjoy it, even though this is not my favourite genre.In the thriller/murder-mystery line I read a few. Alex O'Connell's Lost in Shadows is about gruesome gangland murders. Darcia Helle's Enemies and Playmates is both a romance and a murder-mystery as is Eve Gaddy's Too close for comfort. Tess Gerritsen's Freaks was my final murder of the month. They were all pretty well written and definitely enjoyable. I don't think it was obvious who the killer was in any of them, so the author's did their job well.

I always tell myself to leave the romances to one side, but each month I fail. They are all easy reads and most are page-turners, as well. So that explains why I tend to read them: light relief, I suppose. So to start with there was Lisa Mondello's  All I want for Christmas ... is you. Then Maureen Child's entertaining Wedding at King's convenience. Ruth Ann Nordin's A Chance in Time is a rather good romance set in the wild west before the 1848 Gold Rush. Linda S Clare's The Fence my Father built is pretty good. There is a really wierd family involved and war with a greedy landowner.

November 2011 book reviews

Green River Killer; a true detective story

Jeff Jensen and Jonathan Case

Dark Horse Books, 2011; 242

ISBN: 978-1-59582-560-5

In 1982 five women were found near Green River. They had all been strangled and most were naked. All were thought to be prostitutes. There were distinctive sexual activity associated with them all. By 1985 the number of victims had risen to twelve. Detective Ted Jensen was certain that they had all been killed by one man. He had served in the Navy for years and was married in the 1960s when he was required to work undercover on troublesome university campuses, identifying core ‘troublemakers’. Then he joined the Seattle Police Department as a detective in 1980.  Green River was more or less his first case.

            No killer was ever identified and so the case was reduced in importance, though Jensen was allowed to continue collecting information that might be useful. Over the following twenty years he accumulates 10,000 pieces of information that are eventually digitised.

            Eventually, in 2005, Gary Ridgeway admits to the killings. After preliminary interviews, they create a bunker in the police headquarters where Ridgeway is kept under lock and key. Jensen, by now, has retired from the police force yet is kept on for his knowledge of the Green River killings. He is involved in the extensive interviews with Ridgeway that take place over a total of 188 days.

            To start with Ridgeway would admit to killing certain women. The number steadily rose to about 48. But there was key information he was withholding in the interviews that really would identify him as the killer. Eventually, after being promised that he would only get a life sentence and not the death sentence, he admits that in every case he had had sex with each woman he killed. Sometimes several times. This was the key information the police were looking for. They now had the Green River killer.

            I’m not sure that the form of a graphic book is the best way to tell this fascinating story. I think a conventional text would have allowed for a more detailed account of this extraordinary tale. So much is missed. I’m sure that Ted Jensen told his son Jeff, the author of the text, so much more over the years. The graphics by Jonathan Case are good, but they don’t add anything to the tale being told.

 

Yours to Keep

Shannon Stacey

Carina Press, 2011;

ASIN: B004XVSVQW

Sean Kowalski returns home from completing his service in the army which included tours in Afghanistan. After a welcome from his family he arranges with his brother Kevin to stay in an apartment above his bar. Hardly has he moved in and put his kitbag down than an attractive girl knocks at his door. She announces herself as Emma Shaw, his temporary fiancée. He is shocked. It turns out that his sister, Lisa, and Emma are friends and that, in order to solve a problem, Emma has to have a fiancé.

She lives by herself in a large house owned by her grandmother. Her parents died when she was young and Cat, her grandmother, brought her up in this house. Later, she moved to Florida leaving Emma behind to run her landscaping business from the house. Emma is afraid that Cat wants to sell the house because it is too big for her. So when Cat says she is coming to stay with her for a month, she decided to find someone to act as her fiancé and live in the house with her. She hopes that this will stop any ideas of selling the house.

When her grandmother arrives, she and Sean meet her. And are awkward together. Cat notices this but says nothing as she is introduced to Emma’s fiancé. Sean and Emma share her bedroom but not the bed. They don’t know things about each other that they should have done had they known each other for as long as Emma says they have.  At a family BBQ Cat and Sean’s mother have a conversation in which they agree to conceal the fact that they both know that the engagement is a false one.

Over the period of the month they work together on her landscaping. Sean turns out to be very good at certain aspects of the hard work they have to do. Working together helps them begin to learn about each other.

By the end of the month, what had been a fiction becomes a reality. Cat hands over ownership of the house to Emma as she had intended doing all along. At the same time she has met a man her own age who might be suitable as a future partner.

This is a well written book that keeps you reading until you reach the end, when you wish it were twice as long.

 

Under Total Eclipse we will tremble like birds without song

Lee Vidor

Shakespeare-X Publications; 2^nd edition, 2011;

ASIN: B005IPR7WI

The focus of this book is the activities of the French Resistance in and around Cherbourg between 1941 and the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944. It demonstrates the commitment of men and women to undermining the German occupation. The book explores the continuous battle of wits between them and the local militia and German army/Gestapo. Jews are rounded up and sent to Auschwitz by train, which allows the author to spend a few pages describing the selection, the gas chambers and the crematoria in that death camp. He also spends a few pages describing the massacre of 30,000 Jews at Babi Yar at Kiev. One is a Cherbourg woman who makes her way back to Cherbourg by sleeping with every man who could help her travel back. Once back in Cherbourg she commits suicide after a short time.

            I’m not sure quite what the intentions of the author were in writing this book. Despite all the pretentious quotes and acknowledgements at the beginning that imply we are about to read a book full of new perspectives or details on World War II. In fact, so far as I can see, there is nothing new between the first and last pages. It is entirely derivative. More to the point, having said the novel is closely linked to factual events of the War, there is no bibliography or  further reading suggestions giving the interested reader an opportunity to explore the subject further.

            If you want to read an original publication on World War II why not read The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman, Anatole Kuznetzov’s Babi Yar,  Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem of the same name (incorporated in Shostakovitch’s Thirteen Symphony). I would have thought that Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad or Berlin 1945 would be most useful as well. There are so many good fictional and non-fictional accounts of World War II, the resistance in France and the Holocaust that I would recommend you read any of them before you read this book.

November 2011 Books

OK. Lets get down to business. I'll start as usual with the Non-Fiction. I don't know why I do this. Perhaps because it relates to the real world rather than to some fantasy created by a novelist or poet. Start with reality and then drift off through normal fiction and sci-fi into the wider realms of fantasy.

First off, I read Mark Stevens's Broadmoor Revealed which is an account of the creation and operation of this secure asylum for the criminally insane. Stevens has only been able to use documents from before 1900 for his research. He starts by describing how the place came into being and its design and construction. Then something on the running of the place. And then he describes a number of the inmates in some detail. It's an interesting book that leaves you wanting to know more, much more. Then there was Jeff Jeven and Jonathan Cape's biography of Jeven's father told as a graphic book, Green River Killer. I thought the story they had to tell was fascinating, but was definitely not impressed by doing it through graphics. All the interesting nuances that could have been used are lost. Peterson Anderson's book of 204 photos in World War II Photo Stories was OK to look through, but I felt it could have done with more narrative linking the photo stories. But, then, that's me. Max Arthur's Fighters against Fascism is about the Spanish Civil War (1936 - 1939) and Englishmen who fought on the Republican side. Too often we forget this war which the Germans and Italians especially used to test out their battle theories before using them for real in the Second World War.

And, finally, an utterly incredible book. It's old. But that doesn't make any difference. It's Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World about Scott's 1910-12 expedition to the Antarctic. One element of the work there was to collect Emperor Penguin eggs so the embryology could be studied to test a theory about the evolution of birds. They could only be collected in the depths of winter in incredibly low temperatures. So low, indeed that Chery-Garrard's teeth cracked. It's a really moving book, especially the account of how they realised that Scott must have died and then, when they found how close he was to the next depot, they all felt guilty about not having made an attempt to put another depot a few miles further on.

So now it's fiction's turn. Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit is an interesting story set in Soviet Russia which is also a criticism of collectivisation. How he got away with publishing it, I don't know. Lovely story. Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood is an extraordinary love story set in Japan. You don't want it to stop, even though it has a firm finish beyond which it cannot really go. The translation into English is utterly superb. Lee Vidor's Under Total Eclipse We Will Tremble Like Birds has an interesting title and a disclaimer saying that the Holocaust really happened. But, I'm afraid, it goes pretty fast downhill after that. If a student of mine had handed an essay in that was written like this book, I would have handed it straight back and told them to go away and re-write it.

In the way of historical fiction I've only read Julian Rathbone's The Last English King. It is a fascinating story following one man from his Anglo-Saxon village, his career as a bodyguard and fighter for King Harold and then, having fought at Hastings, his further adventures as a pilgrim to Jerusalem. The story goes back and forth between the pilgrim and his companion s and past events in England. It's well structured, well researched and well written.


Thrillers have been quite a heavy portion of my literary diet this month. Three Philip Kerr novels about his excellent Berlin based detective Bernie Gunther, A German Requiem,March Violets and The Pale Criminal. These range from Berlin in the later 1930s to after World War II. If you didn't know your Berlin before opening one of these books, you will by the time you put it down. There is extraordinary topographic detail demonstrating Kerr's superb research. David Downing's Zoo Station is also set in Nazi Germany and is about how an Englishman married to a German woman spies for the Nazis, Soviet Russia and the UK simultaneously. This, too, has excellent topographic research on Berlin and its environs. Sara Blaedel's Call me Princess is about a demented rapist. The police follow clues suggesting it's one man, but to their horror, it turns out to be someone very close at hand. Victorine E Lieske's Not what she seems combines romance with murder - or should that be the other way round? Good read, though.

And, finally, romance. Sarah Morgan's Bought: Destitute yet defiant is a pretty good read. As too is Patricia Watters' Colby's Child set in the wild west of the USA in the  gold rush years. You will be pleased to know that the hero turns his back on gold for the heroine. And then there were Richard Crawford's Soul Mates, Shannon Stacey's Yours to keep, Janice Cantore's Accused and Bonnie Nadzam's Lamb. As you can tell, I enjoy reading these romances, but so many of them are formulaic that they tend to run together in a jumble in my memory. The trouble is that I've been suckered by Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and most romances I read follow in her footsteps.

Octob er 2011 Books

OK. I’ve had a spell on holiday in southern Spain. In Andalucia – you know: Seville, Granada, Cordoba and Malaga way. If you haven’t been, you really should visit the Alhambra in Granada. Book online well in advance of your travel date, otherwise you may not be able to get in. Let’s get going with the Non-Fiction books that I’ve read this month. First off, I followed up last month’s Donne biography by reading Felicia Wright McDuffie’s To our bodies turn we then which explores in great detail aspects of his poetry and prose. It’s an eye opener. Then came the heartbreaking tale of how Zana Muhsen failed to rescue her sister from the Yemen in A promise to Nadia. John Man’s Xanadu is mainly a biography of Marco Polo, but is at least as much as about what China, Tibet and Mongolia were like when he was there. Fascinating. Linda Leaming’s Married to Bhutan is a love story with that country and its people. It makes fascinating reading. Stephen Hawkin and Leonard Mlodinow wrote The Grand Design which, as you might expect is about cosmology and the universe. It may need revision if those neutrinos have managed to travel from The Large Hadron Collider to Milan faster than the speed of light. But then a lot else will need to be rewritten as well. Haruki Murakami wrote about his marathon running habits in What I think about when I talk about running. And, finally, the mind blowingly stunning book edited by David M Wilson of The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott. The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott David M Wilson Little, Brown & Co., 2011; iv + 94 ISBN: 978-0-316-17320-1 This is the story of an incredible survival. When he saw how useful photographs might be in reporting on the 1901 – 1904 Discovery Antarctic expedition, Captain Robert Scott appointed Dr Herbert Ponting as the expedition’s photographer for the 1910 – 1913 Terra Nova expedition. The intention was for Ponting to record all the work – scientific and exploration – that the members of the team were involved in. When Scott saw the early results he asked Ponting to teach him photography. This was in the old, slow days of plate cameras and guessed exposures. Ponting also taught each of the leaders of the separate teams at Scott’s request. In those days the Royal Navy required its cartographers to sketch the landscape they were mapping. This applied to the Antarctic as to anywhere else. The difficulty here was that sketchers needed to do their work with bare hands in severely sub-zero temperatures, risking frost bite. So it was a slowish procedure. On one page in this book the sketches and photographs of one landscape are directly compared, to the benefit of photography. Scott may have been new to photography but he was a quick learner. To start with, his photographs are beautifully composed. Perhaps unintentionally, they also demonstrate the vastness of the hostile Antarctic environment compared to the frailty of human beings and all their equipment, dogs and ponies included. Scott photographed the early stages of the South Pole journey. They used ponies to climb the Beardmore Glacier. One photograph of the team spread out in a long line, with each man walking beside a pony hauling a sledge, suggests the individual’s isolation at times. Another photo of a sledge piled high with equipment, pulled by three men at the traces and a fourth man pushing tells us of the immensity of the task the Polar team undertook. In one sense, it is a pity the camera was sent back from the top of Beardmore because it was too heavy. But in another sense I don’t want to see the record of these incredibly brave men getting progressively weaker as they struggled back from the Pole having found that Amundsen had got their first. Once the expedition got back to England Frank Debenham pooled all the photographs. Later he passed them over to Ponting. He died intestate and insolvent. Somehow a set of contact prints of Scott’s photographs survived to be auctioned in 2001. The author of this book – a great-nephew of the Dr Edward Wilson, a member of the team that died – with the agreement of the owner of the photographs has compiled this incredible and beautiful reminder of that expedition. So now for fiction’s turn. Marilyn Chin wrote Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, a surreal collection of 41 linked stories about the adventures of a pair of Chinese twins whose grandmother owned a restaurant in California. Jody Hedlund’s The Preacher’s Bridge is a fictionalised biography of John Bunyan (author of The Pilgrim’s Progress) and his wife. Now for murder-mysteries and thrillers. Edward Marston’s The Amarous Nightingale is set in Restoration London. The setting is described in excellent and clear detail. The solution to the problem of finding the killer is a surprise, which is a good thing in a murder novel, I think. Dana Stabenow’s Fire and Ice is a murder set in Alaska which could be set anywhere in the world: it focuses so tightly on solving the murder that the setting is largely irrelevant. Arnaldur Indridason’s Jar City is set in Iceland and takes you deep into the heart of that society before exposing the killer. Tshombe Kelly’s killer can only be found through Sarah’s Diary. And is somewhat elusive. And, at last, romances. Sandra D Bricker’s Always the baker, never the bride has the talented pastry chef taken from the shop she works in to a new employment and, ultimately, to be her employer’s wife. Ciana Stone’s All in time combines romance with science-fiction, which is not always the best of combinations, but works this time. Sylvia Day’s Catching Caroline is a pair of slightly gruesome stories involving romance and vampires. Colleen Gleason’s Lavender Vows on the other hand, restores your faith in the romance novel. Christine Courtenay’s Trade Winds is a good story. My last romance of the month was Bella Andre’s page-turning From this moment on.