What are you reading the week of June 18, 2022?

I finished up A Herzen Reader which taught me how little I actually know about 19th century Russian history. Now I've got another void to fill. :-)

I've started My Friend Maigret by Georges Simenon.

I'm still reading L'amore nell'ebraismo by Catherine Chalier, La banalità del bene by Enrico Deaglio, Fuori dal Silenzio by Various Authors. Yesterday I started reading Since Sinai by Shannon Gonyou and today I'll start reading True Biz by Sara Nović

I'm just about at the halfway point 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, a memoir by Chinese artist and activist Weiwei Ai. This is my reading group's selection for his month.

This is farewell. I am on hospice care for Stage 4 Breast Cancer. It has been a 16 year battle and i am tired of the fight, so I have chosen to stop treatment. I am surrounded by loving family and friends, am no longer reading, so decided to say farewell. I have loved LibraryThing for many years. Home to true bibliophiles! Carry on my friends, as I prepare for the next step in the universal journey! Ferris

Still reading A Killer's Wife and All the Seas of the World.

>4 hemlokgang: choice of books and thoughtful reviews will be missed but understand your decision and wish you as much comfort as is possible.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat consists of a series of short descriptions of a number of patients with neurological problems, from omissions, excesses, and other aberrations. They are portrayed with compassion and an appreciation for their mechanisms for coping.

>4 hemlokgang: Wishing you easy and comfortable days, love and support.

>4 hemlokgang: Farewell hemlokgang. Hope to meet you someday on the other side. Thank you for all you have given the LT community. Be at peace.

I'm voraciously reading Humility Garden this week and will pick back up Troilus and Cressida now that the dust from home repairs has settled down.

>4 hemlokgang: Peaceful journey. You will be missed.

Just finished The Bride Test, which was fun, but predictable.

Getting ready to start The Other People, a thriller.

Currently working on Born in Blackness and Harbinger.

>4 hemlokgang: Wishing you a peaceful journey. Thank you for sharing your love of books with us all these years. I will miss you here.

>4 hemlokgang:

May you find peace, joy and a satisfactory Library Thing substitute on the other side.

Starting this collection via OverDrive ~

Agatha Raisin: The Complete BBC Radio Drama Collection
books by M. C. Beaton (full cast narration of 10 tales)

Starting today Gone Again by James Grippando. A Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction.

Hemlokgang you will be very much missed. I wish you love, peace, and comfort. ❤️

>4 hemlokgang: I am so sorry to hear this. You have been such an asset to LT and I have enjoyed your posts and insight about books. We have over 500 book in common. Go in peace and love. Angie

Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies
Alastair Bonnett
4/5 stars
While most of us live in suburbs, cities and in the countryside, Bonnett explores the unusual places that people live in, including cities that have changeable boundaries, islands where people live on that can disappear and reappear with the changing of sea levels, people who live on ships year round and he also discussed the re-population of cities that had been abandoned like Chernobyl and Wittenoom in Australia which was closed due to asbestos which was mined there. Very interesting!

>4 hemlokgang: I am sorry to hear your news. I wish you and your family peace and love.

I gobbled up The Other People in about 24 hours. I do have some minor quibbles -- Tudor is over-reliant on coincidence, and there's a paranormal aspect that only seems to exist to allow some characters to know things they couldn't otherwise know -- but it remains a compelling read.

I think I'll start Size 14 Is Not Fat Either, just for some comic relief.

>4 hemlokgang: I'm so sorry to hear this. When my father went into hospice care three years ago. He and my family new that it was the right thing for him at that time. I wish you a safe journey.

Finished A Killer's Wife by Victor Methos. Interesting turn of events. Next up is The Secret Witness.

The Women’s March – Jennifer Chiaverini
Audiobook narrated by Saskia Maarleveld
4****

Subtitle: A Novel of the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession

As the subtitle suggest, this novel focuses on the women who risked their liberty, and their lives, to win the vote for women, including women of color. Chiaverini focuses on three of the most important suffragists of the day: Alice Paul, Maud Malone, and Ida B Wells-Barnett, to tell the story of how the idea for the march was conceived and the struggles they faced in planning for the event.

In order for women to be allowed to vote, the men who held the power, had to be the ones to grant that power, and let’s be clear, it was white men who held the power. And they were not willing to do so. The women who demonstrated were frequently taunted and assaulted by onlookers. No matter how peacefully they tried to ask a political candidate, “Do you support women’s suffrage?” they were taunted and jeered at by the men in the crowd, bodily ejected by a group of policemen, and like as not, arrested.

But the women, themselves, were hardly united. The National American Woman Suffrage Association – known simply as “the National” – was focused on gaining suffrage rights for women on a state-by-state basis. Alice Paul, who had been offered a position organizing their open-air meetings, felt strongly that the way to go was to push for a constitutional amendment, and one that would include ALL women, including blacks, a stance that alienated the women suffrage organizations in the South.

Chiaverini brings these historical figures to life. The chapters alternate between these three central figures, showing how each approached the issue and the unique challenges each faced. The scenes of the march itself, and the near disaster it became due to the failure of the Police Superintendent to provide adequate security, are harrowing. And I felt as disheartened as the women themselves must have felt when they finally had a meeting with President Wilson and he dismissed them stating, “I have no opinion on woman suffrage. I’ve never given the subject any thought.”

That first national march was a triumph of organization and courage, but it would be another seven years, until August 1920, before the Eighteenth Amendment was finally ratified.

While the novel itself is interesting and engaging, I really enjoyed the author’s notes at the end, where Chiaverini gives more details on what happened after the march. I had not realized before that Alice Paul drafted the first Equal Rights Amendment in 1922. I recall the attention the ERA received in the 1970s. It has yet to be ratified.

Saskia Maarleveld does a fine job of narrating the audiobook. She sets a good pace and Chiaverini’s writing helped to keep all these various female characters clearly defined.

Also finished Shadow: The Magnificent Machines of a Man of Mystery. It's the sort of book I call bed-time reading because it's too heavy to move far from one's bed!

The 13 Clocks
James Thurber
3/5 stars
I don’t know how to describe this book; it is more of a fairy tale about the princess, Sara Linda who is shut up in a castle with thirteen clocks which have been frozen. A prince who is disguised as a minstrel, and who has fallen in love with Sara Linda and is then given the task of finding the jewels of Zorna and restart the 13 clocks before Sara Linda could be released. Interesting!

I finished 1000 Years of Joy and Sorrows, a memoir by Chinese conceptual artist and political activist Ai Weiwei. I found it very interesting overall, though a bit flat in parts. Taking us through both his father's life and his own, Ai Weiwei walks us through Chinese history from the end of World War 2 through the present day. The author's father was a renowned poet who ran afoul, in a dramatic and tragic way, of Mao's Cultural Revolution, and the son continued in his father's footsteps as a cultural thorn in the side of the current Chinese regime. You'll find a more detailed review on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

Next up for me will be Frederick Douglas' autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.

Thirteen Hours – Deon Meyer
Digital audiobook performed by Simon Vance
4****

From the book jacket: Morning dawns in Cape Town, South Africa. A teenage girl’s body has been found on the street, her throat cut. She was an American. Somewhere in Cpae Town her friend, Rachel Anderson is, hopefully, still alive. Rachel is terrified, unsure of where to turn in the unknown city. Who can she trust? How long can she stay ahead of her relentless pursuers? Racing against the clock, Detective Benny Griessel desperately tries to solve the murder and bring Rachel home safe, all in a single day.

My reactions:
This is a hard-hitting, fast-paced, police procedural with a complicated plot, a second, unrelated (or is it?) killing, and multiple twists: drugs, human trafficking, the music industry, and, of course, Benny’s continuing struggle as a recovering alcoholic.

He's also been named as a mentor to a group of younger investigators, and Griessel is having a hard time with his recent assignment: Inspector Mbali Kaleni, a black woman, a Zulu, a feminist. She’s eager and intelligent, but lacks the experience of Griessel and his previous partners. And she has her own agenda: trying to equate the effort expended by the police investigating cases of dead black women with that expended in the cases of missing white women. This is an interesting pairing, and I’d like to see it continue in future books.

Simon Vance is marvelous, as usual, performing the audiobook.

>25 BookConcierge: Sounds interesting. I've enjoyed Chiaverini's "quilting" themed novels, but the ones that also dealt with historical issues (The Lost Quilter) were generally better than the others, IMHO.

At any rate, I just put Women's March on my PBS wantlist.

Just finished Size 14 Is Not Fat Either, which was okay but nothing to get real excited about. Cabot also wrote the Princess Diaries series, so I probably should have been ready for mostly fluff in this somewhat more graphic than usual cozy mystery, the second in a series.

Which brings to mind another tangent. The biggest problem I've seen in cozies (and I've dipped into a few) is that after one or two, it takes a **whole lot** of suspension of disbelief to accept that the average bookshop owner, caterer, bed & breakfast proprietor, cat-sitter, or mystery writer is going to routinely stumble over dead bodies and have to solve the crime because the cops are too dumb.

Maybe that's just me, and the readers who eat up the latest cooking-themed cozy (see what I did there?) are just looking to spend some time with a character they've come to enjoy.

Thoughts?

The Sword of Destiny
Andrzej Sapkowski
3/5 stars
This Witcher book is a compilation of short stories of the deeds and antics of Geralt of Riva and his companions. I enjoy Sapowski’s writing and the characters he has created. I am going to read Blood Of Elves next. Witcher Series

Enjoying this audio via hoopla ~

The Girl With The Make-Believe Husband: A Bridgerton Prequel
by Julia Quinn

From the library: 100 Things We've Lost to the Internet by Pamela Paul

My latest has captured me Seesaw by Deborah Moggach

The new thread is up over here.

>34 princessgarnet: Some things I don't miss. Over a decade ago, I was returning home from my parent's 60th wedding anniversary party when the windshield wiper motor in my car burned out at night in the rain in eastern Kentucky. The next morning, I looked up the nearest car dealership, punched it into my GPS and drove straight there. While I waited for the car to be fixed, I texted my brother, "What did we do before smart phones and GPS?" He replied, "We got stinkin' lost, is what we did!"