Jo and I went out to dinner at the Black Fin last night, had a nice evening with a couple we know and hadn't seen for 4 years or so. Today it's windy and rainy. Jo is out shopping and I'm watching The Fugitive (old TV episodes) and doing laundry. 😏 The puppies are watching the front door waiting for Mommy to come home.
While I'm sitting here I'm going to do an update; I've got some new books since the last update, including one that was dropped in my Little Free Library out front. I finished a book, one that I've had on the go since July. I'll provide my review of that book, as well as the synopses of the new books and the next book I'm going to start reading. Then I'll finish with my ongoing look at Women Author Whose work I've been enjoying.
Just Finished
"I purchased Capital by John Lanchester after my wife and I had enjoyed the 2015 BBC mini-series based on the book. It's been awhile now that I've had the book but I finally dusted it off and gave it a go.
I had a vague remembrance of the series and the book definitely helped bring back the premise and characters. The book follows a group of disparate characters who live on and work on an affluent street in London, Pepys Street. It's a great mix of personalities; Pakistani corner shop owner, Ahmed, his wife Rohinka, their children and his brothers; financial stock market analyst Roger and his free spending wife Arabella; long time resident, elderly widow, Penny and her married daughter, Mary (also Mary's son, Banksy type performance artist, Smitty), Polish painter, handy man extraordinaire, Bogdan, pretty Hungarian nanny, Matya (who works for Roger and Arabella); 'illegal' Nigerian immigrant and parking meter maid, Quentina and many other people associated with this basic group.
The story opens with mysterious post cards being dropped in the residents' mail slots, stating 'We Want What You Have'. This ongoing 'harassment' of the residents is always in the background, but the basic premise of the story is the lives of the residents and the story jumps between characters in each small chapter. We have Penny, widowed for a number of years, now in the slow process of dying, attended by her daughter Mary. You have Roger, living high off the hog, awaiting his Xmas bonus from the financial company who employs him, to be disappointed. Bogdan, industrious and hard-working, trying to save money to help his parents back in Poland, and his trials and tribulations with his love life. Ahmed, the elder son, keeping his family together, dealing with his mother back in Pakistan, while his younger brother deals with unwanted guest Iqbal (is he a terrorist threat?). Young Senegalese soccer phenom, Freddie Kano, moves into the neighborhood, trying to make an impact in the English premiership.
It's an interesting group, well-crafted story, filled with relationships, tragedies, life lessons and with a final finding in the mysterious letter-sender. You get a nicely crafted picture of the people, the street, their lives, all making for an entertaining story. I will say that it didn't blow me away, maybe because I'd seen the series, but even so it still seemed fresh and interesting. It was easy to put the book down but also easy to get back into the flow of the story and it flowed very smoothly from story line to story line. Most enjoyable. (3.5 stars)"
Currently Reading
"A teenage girl is held captive and brutally
tortured by neighborhood children. Based on a true story, this shocking
novel reveals the depravity of which we are all capable.
This novel contains graphic content and is recommended for regular readers of horror novels" 😬
New Books
"For Chicago sociology professor Amelia Emmet, violence was a research topic--until a student she'd never met shot her.
He
also shot himself. Now he's dead and she's back on campus, trying to
keep up with her class schedule, a growing problem with painkillers, and
a question she can't let go: Why?
All she wants is for life to
get back to normal, but normal is looking hard to come by. She's
thirty-eight and hobbles with a cane. Her first student interaction ends
in tears (hers). Her fellow faculty members seem uncomfortable with
her, and her ex--whom she may or may not still love--has moved on.
Enter
Nathaniel Barber, a graduate student obsessed with Chicago's violent
history. Nath is a serious scholar, but also a serious mess about his
first heartbreak, his mother's death, and his father's disapproval.
Assigned as Amelia's teaching assistant, Nath also takes on the
investigative legwork that Amelia can't do. And meanwhile, he's hoping
she'll approve his dissertation topic, the reason he came to grad school
in the first place: the student attack on Amelia Emmet.
Together
and at cross-purposes, Amelia and Nathaniel stumble toward a truth that
will explain the attack and take them both through the darkest hours of
their lives."
"It is the year 2058, and
technology now completely rules the world. But New York City Detective
Eve Dallas knows that the irresistible impulses of the human heart are
still ruled by just one thing: passion.
When a senator's
daughter is killed, the secret life of prostitution she'd been leading
is revealed. The high-profile case takes Lieutenant Eve Dallas into the
rarefied circles of Washington politics and society. Further
complicating matters is Eve's growing attraction to Roarke, who is one
of the wealthiest and most influential men on the planet, devilishly
handsome... and the leading suspect in the investigation."
"Yasuko lives a quiet
life, working in a Tokyo bento shop, a good mother to her only child.
But when her ex-husband appears at her door without warning one day, her
comfortable world is shattered.
When Detective Kusanagi of the
Tokyo Police tries to piece together the events of that day, he finds
himself confronted by the most puzzling, mysterious circumstances he has
ever investigated. Nothing quite makes sense, and it will take a genius
to understand the genius behind this particular crime..."
"Verticality,
architectural and social, is at the heart of Colson Whitehead's first
novel that takes place in an unnamed high-rise city that combines
twenty-first-century engineering feats with nineteenth-century
pork-barrel politics. Elevators are the technological expression of the
vertical ideal, and Lila Mae Watson, the city's first black female
elevator inspector, is its embattled token of upward mobility.When
Number Eleven of the newly completed Fanny Briggs Memorial Building goes
into deadly free-fall just hours after Lila Mae has signed off on it,
using the controversial 'Intuitionist' method of ascertaining elevator
safety, both Intuitionists and Empiricists recognize the set-up, but may
be willing to let Lila Mae take the fall in an election year.
As
Lila Mae strives to exonerate herself in this urgent adventure full of
government spies, underworld hit men, and seductive double agents,
behind the action, always, is the Idea. Lila Mae's quest is mysteriously
entwined with existence of heretofore lost writings by James Fulton,
father of Intuitionism, a giant of vertical thought. If she is able to
find and reveal his plan for the perfect, next-generation elevator, the
city as it now exists may instantly become obsolescent."
"It is a year since her
father's death, but Stella Darnell has not moved on. She still cleans
his house every day, leaving it spotless as if he might return.
Terry
Darnell was Detective Chief Superintendent at Hammersmith police
station, and now Stella has discovered an unsolved case in his darkroom:
a folder of unlabelled photographs of deserted streets.
The
oldest photograph dates back to 1966. To a day when Mary Thornton, just
ten years old, is taking her little brother home from school in time for
tea. That afternoon, as the Moors Murderers are sent to prison for
life, Mary witnesses something that will haunt her forever.
As Stella inches closer to the truth, the events of that day begin to haunt her too..."
Women Authors I've Enjoyed - Elizabeth Gaskell
English biographer, novelist and short story writer lived from 1810 - 1865, born in Chelsea and dying in Hampshire. Over the course of her life, she wrote 8 novels, and various novellas, short stories and non-fiction works. I have only read one of her short story collections so far but enjoyed very much. I have two others of her works yet to try.Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
"This collection of short stories contains 4 stories by writer, Elizabeth Gaskell; The Three Eras of Libbie Marsh (1847), Lizzie Leigh (1855), The Well of Pen-Morfa (1850) and The Manchester Marriage (1858). From the introduction by Anna Walters, they were unique not only because they were written by a woman but also for the subject matter. Popular at that time were stories of the upper classes, where women chiefly looked to be married to fulfill their lives. Gaskell's stories featured women as the protagonists, women who were of the lower classes, who had to struggle to live, single mothers, seamstresses, prostitutes. The stories are hard looks at life, but at the same time, feature tenderness, love and even optimism. I loved how she crafted these tales, well-written, well-described and thoughtful. They were very much a pleasure to read as Gaskell creates such excellent pictures and characters and stories. This was my first experience with Gaskell's writing and I'm very happy that I was able to experience her talent. (5 stars)"
"This novel is a study of the contrast between the values and habits of rural southern England and industrial northern England. The heroine, Margaret Hale, is the daughter of a parson whose religious doubts force him to resign his Hampshire living and to move with his family to a northern city."
"Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857) is a pioneering biography of one great Victorian woman novelist by another. Gaskell was a friend of Bronte's and, having been invited to write the official life, determined to both tell the truth and honor her friend. This edition collates all three previous editions, as well as the manuscript, offering fuller information about the process of writing and a more detailed explanation of the text than any previous edition."
A complete list of Gaskell's works can be found at this link. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.
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