What are you reading the week of February 25, 2022?

What are you reading the week of February 26, 2022?

The end of one month and the beginning of another month ~
the meteorological spring starts in a few days!

Sorry for jumping the gun ~ I have been thinking this is Saturday all day long!

I am listening to this novel via OverDrive ~

Legacy by Nora Roberts

>1 Molly3028: :-D Same here! It's been snowing all day, and my office is closed. I just suddenly remembered that it was Friday when I came back in from walking my dog.

I have a hundred pages remaining in Perhaps the Stars. It's a bit overlong, or perhaps the world is just too distracting at the moment.

Finished with The Department Of Rare Books and Special Collections. Meh.

Next up for listening is Lady Clementine by Marie Benedict

Finished No Way Back by J. B. Turner. Meh. Still reading Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey.

Added The Cipher by Isabella Maldonado to my rotation.

I started reading A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson this morning.

I'm listening to A Death in the Family and I'm loving every second of it. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is one of the best books I've ever read/listened to. Agee's gift with language makes the prose flow along like swans on a willow-lined stream.

I'm also reading The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters and it's not living up to the good reviews I've read. I will finish it, but I'm having a hard time caring about the plot and characters.

Knocked off The Airship ROMA Disaster in Hampton Roads yesterday. Finished Cyber Mage this morning. Working on Beneficial Bombing and Bibliostyle right now. The German Army and the Defense of the Reich will come after those. Not sure what my next novel will be.

>3 fredbacon: I have a friend who liked the first three books by Palmer in that series, but who is also less than impressed with the fourth book.

Finished from the library:
Clanlands Almanac by Sam Heughan and Graham McTavish
The Outlander duo is back! Enjoy a tour of Scotland through the year: people, places, and events.

Next up: Jane and the Year without a Summer by Stephanie Barron
New and #14 in Being a Jane Austen Mystery series! It's 1816, Jane has published Emma and earned some money from the sale. She's also not feeling well and goes to a fashionable spa.
I discovered this series in college and have enjoyed reading. It's been 6 years since Jane and the Waterloo Map (#13) was released so it's good to see Jane back for another mystery.

>9 Shrike58: I actually like it more than the third book, The Will to Battle. Perhaps I should qualify that. The first half of Perhaps the Stars is, at times, amazing. The second half has felt like a slog. (I have about 40 pages left to read tonight.) So I have mixed feelings about the fourth book. I would give it a positive review overall, but I still feel that it is overlong. The entire series is so intricately plotted and convoluted with such an enormous cast of characters that I feel that it deserves a second reading. At the very least, I think that I need to reread The Iliad and The Odyssey before I attempt it again. It would probably help to read Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan as well. *shudder*

Just finished reading the novel BEASTS OF NO NATION by author UZODINMA IWEALA

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Furious Hours – Casey Cep
Book on CD read by Hilary Huber
3.5*** rounded up

Subtitle: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

This is a combination of a true crime exploration of the serial killer Reverend Willie Maxwell, and a mini biography of Harper Lee.

Maxwell was well-known in his Alabama town even before his relatives started dying off in odd “accidents” which captured the attention of law enforcement and the ire of the many insurance companies from which Maxwell had purchased life insurance policies on said relatives. He kept his attorney, “Big Tom” Radney quite busy defending him against murder charges and suing the insurance companies to get what was owned to him. Maxwell was at the funeral of the latest victim when he was shot at point blank range by a grieving relative of the deceased. And Big Tom immediately became HIS lawyer to defend against the murder charges, despite the accused’s confession and the 340 witnesses.

Meanwhile Harper Lee has published her runaway (and still) bestselling novel, To Kill A Mockingbird and has helped her childhood friend Truman Capote with the research on his true-crime “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. The Rev Maxwell’s case captures her attention, and she begins researching the case(s) with the idea of writing a book.

I found the entire story fascinating, but then I am a fan of true crime books. I was completely captivated by Maxwell’s story and how that unfolded. And I, like many other readers, am eternally interested in Nelle Harper Lee, so was happy that I learned a few new things about Lee’s life, especially her own demons.

However, I think the author would have been less successful with this book without the Lee hook, and that somehow just didn’t sit right with me. So, three stars: I liked it; other true-crime or Lee fans will probably like it too.

Hilary Huber does a find job of narrating the audiobook. Her clear diction and steady pace made it easy for me to understand and follow the intricacies of the case.

I was wondering where everybody had gotten to! I am about 3/4 of the way through the maddening, horrifying, depressing but absolutely essential The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. I'm reading the 10th Anniversary Edition which includes an introduction/update outlining the ways in which the problem has deepened over the past decade plus.

Finished Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey. Disturbing dystopian future.

Added The Quarter Storm by Veronica G. Henry to my rotation.

Finished the very interesting Lady Clementine.

Next up for listening is Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz.

I just finished listening to A Death in the Family - it was brilliant. An all-time favourite.

Am taking a break from the classics to listen to a true crime story by Steve Jackson, whose books are always intriguing. This one is called Rough Trade.

I said I would finish The Last Policeman but couldn't. I found it dull. Instead I've picked up Austerlitz, which is a book I've been wishing to read for quite a while.

I’m alternating between two books this week. Thrity Umrigar’s latest, Honor, and Peter May’s The Lewis Man. I picked up May’s book because the Umrigar was depressing but now the May book is just as sad and I dread what’s to come in both. They’re both really good though.

West Side Rising – Char Miller
With a forward by Julián Castro
4****

Subtitle: How San Antonio's 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement

I grew up in San Antonio. The all-girls boarding school I attended from kindergarten through 7th grade was downtown, on the banks of the San Antonio River. Still visible on the limestone walls of the main building’s second floor was a watermark from “the great flood.” I learned when I was in high school that the city’s famous River Walk was a WPA project begun as part of an effort for flood control.

I also grew up on the city’s West side. And each summer, the torrential rains so common in that season would flood our street, sometimes resulting in a raging torrent that carried cars for blocks.

This book explores not only the results of the city’s founding in a flood plain, but the political decisions – motivated by class and racial prejudice – that ensured that the areas poorest citizens would continue to suffer for centuries despite contributing tax dollars to help the wealthy stay dry. And how, a group of those West Side residents, fueled by yet another flood, marshalled their collective political power to achieve major changes.

Miller did extensive research, and it shows. But the parts of the book I most enjoyed were those that dealt directly with the 1921 disaster and its aftermath. I wanted more of the personal stories, but they went unrecorded for the most part. While I was interested in the political struggle to change the city’s focus on its majority minority population (and Miller does a great job of detailing the successful efforts of organizations such as COPS - Communities Organized for Public Service), the compelling disaster story seemed to fade.

One of Miller’s sources was a 64-page report written shortly after the disaster, titled “La tragedia de la inundación de San Antonio. Here is a section of Miller’s book that quotes extensively from that report:
The “San Antonio River hit the rich – it affected the big stores on Avenida C. The powerful houses of Houston and Commerce St. It must be said in its honor that it was greedy – it wanted riches and destroyed estates.” By contrast, Alazán Creek – “an imitation of a brook, a laughable pantomime, a thin and flexible snake” – proved ravenous. “It was the taker of lives – it was a cruel executioner who wiped out every poor soul it encountered.” Put differently, the river “swallowed pianos velvet rugs, Venetian moons of unparalleled beauty and wealth. Alazán Creek drowned children, killed women, knocked down men. And it was our people, the Mexican people, that succumbed defeated, whose poverty did not allow (them) to reside in a house in a pious neighborhood, a street near the center and out of danger. The sons of Mexico were the ones that fell asleep, unperturbed by danger, to wake up in the hands of a monster.”

A storm sewer drainage system was finally put into my parents’ neighborhood in the late 1990s. Every year, still, there are drownings in San Antonio as a result of flood waters – usually people who try to drive their cars through water covering the road and get swept away by the current.

For images of the various creeks – looking innocent when NOT in flood stage – visit
https://www.westsidecreeks.com/about-the-creeks/ In the green bar at the top of the page, hover your cursor on the “about the creeks” link and you can visit each creek in turn. Hard to imagine these little “imitation of a brook” waterways can rage into killer torrents – but they can, and do.

Just finished Upright Women Wanted, and enjoyed it. Gailey reaches a bit far sometimes in trying to make the dialogue suitably "Western" (especially when seeking out synonyms for "pistol"), but it was a fresh viewpoint and a fun combination of genres.

Enjoying this audio via hoopla ~

Beach Wedding: A Novel by Michael Ledwidge
(mystery about a cold case)

I'm almost finished with George V Never a Dull Moment and The Quest for Queen Mary. I have a library loans for Billy Summer by Stephen King and The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel so they're next.

Just finished Epicenter for Early Review. Fast-paced crime drama, but I thought the ending was very abrupt and neither resolved the main character's internal struggles nor left an obvious path for a sequel.

Still struggling along with Tesla, which for some reason is taking forever to get through.

>19 BookConcierge: I had not heard this. We lived in Round Rock, near Austin, and I know how fast things would flood.

Reading Dracula by Bram Stoker.

I have finally read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander twelve years after its initial publication. The New Jim Crow is an excellent, essential, infuriating, heartbreaking examination of the harms done to the black community, and by extension to America as a whole, by the War on Drugs. Alexander's writing is clear and direct, and her points well supported. It is only the subject matter that makes this book extremely difficult, but extremely important, to read. My somewhat more in-depth comments can be found on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

Right now I'm reading the novella, The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney, the first entry in the collection The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories, edited by Ray Bradbury and first published in 1956. After that I'll be treating myself (I hope!) to a Graham Greene novel, The Tenth Man.

Just finished reading the novel MUDBOUND by author HILLARY JORDAN
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Very slowly reading Runaway Horses by Yukio Mishima, working my way towards being halfway through the tetralogy.

I finished the Early Review book, The Art of Self Research. The book is a description of a project involving painting a self portrait, using an analysis of that portrait to paint another etc. The first 100 pages was an extremely repetitious description of the process. The analysis of the paintings was more interesting but since each attribute, from color, to materials, to words could be interpreted as a quality and its antithesis, that section too became repetitive. It's a book I would not have slogged through to the end if it hadn't been an early review book.

On my way to the library today to find a more pleasurable book.

The new thread is up over here.

>27 Erick_Tubil: I loved this book. Her second novel - When She Woke was very different!