What are you reading the week of December 10, 2022?

I read Iuliia Mendel's The Fight of Our Lives: My Time with Zelenskyy, Ukraine's Battle for Democracy, and What It Means for the World. It's a short, quick read. A lot of good background information on the first couple of years of Zelensky's administration. I remember when he was running for President of Ukraine. In the western media, he was portrayed as a comedian and his campaign and election was treated as a joke. He actually was educated as a lawyer with a specialization in constitutional law. He's an intelligent man with a strong moral code. I think the Ukrainian people saw that and understood it much better than journalists in the West. I think the only person outside of Ukraine who understood what he represented was Putin. I think that after their encounter in the Normandy Format meeting in 2019 Putin went home and immediately began plotting the current invasion because he understood what a threat Zelensky posed to his ambitions.

I'm now reading Andrey Kurkov's Ukraine Diary: Dispatches from Kiev. Kurkov is a Ukrainian novelist who writes in Russian. He lives in Kyiv and was present during the 2013-14 Revolution of Dignity. The book is excerpted from his personal diaries. I love diaries because they give you a (mostly) unfiltered view of how and what people were thinking during tumultuous times. Even if it is a single perspective, the immediacy of diaries give you a view of the situation on the ground that the history books can never reproduce.

Having several books going at one time means you have no books going at any one time, so I'm buckling down to wrap up British Submarines in the Cold War Era today, before making a forced march through Nona the Ninth. After that, we'll see; probably The Cherokee Diaspora will come after those.

I'm about a third of the way through Wolf Hall. I'm finding it quite as excellent as everyone says it is.

Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret
Steve Luxenberg
4/5 stars
Steve Luxenberg knew that his mother was an only child but then there was an episode that occurred at the doctor’s office when she talked to her doctor about a sibling that was institutionalized when she was quite young. The author had never in his life heard of this sister of his mother. It wasn’t until his mother’s death that the secret came out. He started to research his mother’s family and uncovered the truth about the aunt who he never met. I thought this was quite an amazing story and thoroughly researched.

Currently reading:
SF/F
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September-October 2022
The Trouble With Peace by Joe Abercrombie
Juniper Wiles and the Ghost Girls by Charles de Lint
Other
Trigonometry for Dummies by Mary Jane Sterling

The Last Coyote –Michael Connelly
Book on CD performed by Dick Hill
3.5***

Book # 4 in the Harry Bosch series has our detective on ISL – Involuntary Stress Leave – after an “incident” involving an altercation with his supervising officer. In addition to having had to turn in his badge and his weapon, his home has been condemned after the latest earthquake. He doesn’t agree that it should be torn down, so he’s sneaking into it and living there while doing repairs on his own. And he’s using his “time off” to investigate a cold case – a prostitute found dead in a dumpster in 1961.

This is a pretty dark episode in the series. But the reader gets to know much more about Harry and the way he operates, his background and what drives him. To say he suffers from PTSD is putting it mildly, but that trauma is NOT all related to his service in Vietnam. As his therapist helps to peel back the layers a slightly more vulnerable Harry comes out.

Still, this is typical suspense-mystery-thriller, with lots of action, many clues (including red herrings), more than one suspect, and a fast-paced plot. Any fan of the genre will be interested and engaged from beginning to end.

Dick Hill does a great job of performing the audiobook. I really like the way he interprets Harry, and despite his natural low vocal pitch, he does a reasonable job of voicing the women characters as well.

Chesapeake Shores Christmas by Woods (an O'Brien clan novel)

An Unexpected Amish Christmas by Good (a Surprised by Love novel)

Santa's Sweetheart by Dailey (a Christmas Tree Ranch novel)

Finished Juniper Wiles and the Ghost Girls by Charles de Lint. Liked it. Added A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers to my rotation.

I just started The Change by Kirsten Miller.

I finished the classic Evelina. It is a novel of letters with humor, sensitivity of relationships, and a bit of satire of the manners of both the privileged and the lower classes.

Letters From Father Christmas – J R R Tolkien
4****

This lovely volume – I had the centenary edition – duplicates the letters from Father Christmas which were sent to Tolkien’s children beginning in 1920 and continuing for the next twenty-three years. The letters relate the many adventures Father Christmas and his helpers – The North Polar Bear, elves, etc – have both in preparation for the big day and throughout the year.

Tolkien seriously disguised his handwriting / printing, using a very shaky hand that is quite difficult for these old eyes, so I’m grateful for the printed text accompanying the photos of each letter. If I were a young person I would probably try to memorize Polar Bear’s unique alphabet and use that to write notes to my friends (something I did with Tolkien’s Elven runes back in the day after reading The Hobbit). I much enjoyed the inventiveness of these missives and loved the hand-drawn illustrations of the Northern Lights, or a Goblin War, or a flood caused by … well, I won’t spoil it for you.

My only disappointment is that we don’t see any of the letters Tolkien’s children wrote back to Father Christmas.

Still, it’s a treasure to be enjoyed by more generations of both children and adults.

Currently in the middle of Let's Do It: The Birth of Pop Music by Bob Stanley and The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal.

My latest is Ladders of Years by Anne Tyler it was a lucky find from local charity shop, not far in and loving it.

I’m enjoying Mick Herron’s Slow Horses.

I have given up on a lot of the 8-10 books I was reading. I clearly was not that interested in them since I was never picking them up. So some are going back on my shelf if I own them to try again later and some are going back to the library. I’m more than 60 pages into Where the Light Enters by Jill Biden now and enjoying it.

Finished A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers. Enjoyed it. Haven't decided yet what to add to my rotation next.

I finished Smoke and Other Early Stories. This collection of stories are full of radical metaphors and inscrutable endings. Some of the metaphors, pulled out and contemplated individually are amazing and fabulous and some of the characters are memorable but overall the web seemed too dense.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald Off to a bit of a slow start. Hope it picks up soon.

Added Sword-Bearer by Jennifer Roberson to my rotation.

The new thread is up over here.