Category: BookLust I

Galton Case

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MacDonald, Ross. The Galton Case. Read by Grover Gardner. New York: Blackstone Audio, 2010.

I’ll see if I can sum this up without giving anything away or confusing myself. Lew Archer, private investigator, has been hired by an old friend (and lawyer) to find the missing son of a wealthy widow. The investigation appears to be pretty pointless. Son Anthony Galton ran away twenty years earlier when he married a woman not to his parents’ liking. They were so upset they ordered him to “never darken their doorstep again” which he hasn’t. Now, twenty years later mum wants to make amends and give her prodigal son his share of the inheritance…only no one can find him. Here’s what is found: Anthony took on the assumed name of John Brown and he presumably had a son of the same name, John Brown Jr. Now the real mystery is does John Brown Jr. deserve his share of the pie? Of course there are many, many more twists and turns to this mystery!

Reason read: Ross MacDonald was born in December.

Author fact: Ross MacDonald’s real name was Kenneth Millar (which makes me think of Kevin Millar).

Book trivia: I heard somewhere that someone wants to make this into a movie. I haven’t looked for evidence to support this rumor.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “I Love a Mystery” (buried on page 122).

Tattered Cloak

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Berberova, Nina. The Tattered Cloak and Other Novels. Translated by Marian Schwartz. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.

The Tattered Cloak is one of six novels in Berberova’s book of the same name. Well, she calls them novels. Each story is under 100 pages so ‘novella’ might be a better description. The six stories are as follows (with my favorites being the first two),

  • “The Resurrection of Mozart” ~ the  coming of World War II
  • “The Waiter and the Slut” ~ one woman’s tragic effort to stave off loneliness and growing old
  • “Astashev in Paris” ~
  • “The Tattered Cloak”
  • “The Black Pestilence” and,
  • “In Memory of Schliemann”

All stories are written in that traditional stark Russian way. Most of the stories leave you hanging in that, “and then what happened?” kind of way. For example in “The Resurrection of Mozart” the reader is left asking did they escape the war or did they wait too long?

Lines I loved: “…and Maria Leonidovna felt that he was about to tell her something she would remember for the rest of her life” (p 23) and “I feared life and I believed in it” (p 166).

Reason read: December 31st 1976 was the coldest day in Russia. I’m reading a Russian author to celebrate frigid Russia.

Author fact: Berberova emigrated to America after living in Paris.

Book trivia: None of the libraries in my immediate area had a copy of The Tattered Cloak. My copy came from the Brookline Public Library.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Russian Heavies” (p 210). Interestingly enough, Pearl calls the book The Tattered Cloak and Other Stories while my copy is The Tattered Cloak and Other Novels. I think Pearl’s title is more accurate but I have to go with what’s in my hand.

Complications

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Gawande, Atul. Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes On An Imperfect Science. Read by William David Griffith. Audio Renaissance: Picador, 1995.

You expect medicine to be a hard and fast science. Is versus Isn’t. Black and white. Cut and dried. Science simple as that. It is hard to imagine medicine as fuzzy, as imperfect and wishy-washy as gray area, but it is. Gawande doesn’t apologize for this less-than-exact science. He is pragmatic in his approach – sometimes doctors get it right and well, sometimes they don’t. The essays in Complications are scary and humbling. You hear about real cases. Real patients. Everyday people with seemingly normal lives. Your neighbor. You. Then you hear about the scary stuff. Medical mistakes. Doctors deferring decisions to patients. Surgeons operating with their hearts more than their minds…it happens. As hard as some of the information was to digest it was eye opening and a necessary truth.

Reason read: November is supposed to be National Health Month. Maybe that’s why I have two physical exams scheduled for this month!

Author fact: According to the back of the CD case Atul Gawande is a general surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.

Book CD trivia: I inadvertently listened to the abridged version of the book. Dammit.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Physicians Writing More Thank Prescriptions” (p 185).

Corregidora

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Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. New York: Random House, 1975.
Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992

The story of Ursa Corregidora is kick-you-in-the-teeth powerful. When we first meet Ursa Corregidora she is a 25 year old blues singer with a jealous husband. When Ursa disregards Mutt’s jealousy and continues performing in the bars he throws her down a flight of stairs causing her to lose her month-old pregnancy. After a hysterectomy Ursa repeatedly revisits her past, reliving generations and generations of slavery and rape. She has been brought up to believe that a woman’s worth lies in her ability to reproduce. Without a womb she is haunted by her ancestors. Physically, she is nursed back to health by her boss and soon his caring takes on a sexual element, one that Ursa has a hard time understanding or enjoying. And speaking of sex, there is a lot of it in Corregidora. Be forewarned, the language is necessarily harsh. This is a short but very powerful book. Read it again and again and again.

Two lines that made me catch my breath: “And what if I’d thrown Mutt Thomas down those stairs instead, and done away with the source of his sex, or inspiration, or whatever the hell it is for a man, what would he feel now?” (p 41) and “You don’t treat love that way” (p 46).

Reason read: Gayl Jones was born in the month of November.
Reason read again: As part of the Early Review program with LibraryThing, I requested to read this book again.

Author fact: Corregidora is Gayl Jones’s first book.

Book trivia: There is little information about Jones anywhere on Corregidora. There isn’t a photograph or “about the author” statement. It’s as if she wanted the work to stand for itself.
Book trivia part II: this was republished as part of the Celebrating Black Women Writers series.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “African American Fiction: She Say” (p 13).

Scar Tissue

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Ignatieff, Michael. Scar Tissue. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

From the very first page of Scar Tissue you are sucked in. The opening paragraphs are tragic and utterly real. You can easily put yourself in the story.
I am a big fan of clever one-liners and Scar Tissue is full of them, like “we are programmed to betray” (p 4). Truth be known I would have said “We are programmed to deceive” paying homage to one of my favorite songs of my youth, “Hotel California” by the Eagles. But, Ignatieff is right, betrayal is more in keeping with human nature than deception.

I grieved throughout this entire book. Told from the perspective of a middle aged married man with a family of his own, it is story of watching parents grow old and relationships change. The aging process is especially cruel when it is accelerated by Alzheimer’s disease. The mother the narrator loves dies in the mind right before his very eyes and he is powerless to stop it.  It is difficult to read about the mother’s slow decent into another reality; a reality where childhood happened only yesterday but the spouse she wakes up next to is a complete stranger. The struggle to understand takes its toll on everyone around the narrator. He becomes fixated on “being there” for his mother, especially after the sudden death of his father. His marriage and teaching position suffer until  there is barely anything left.
Probably the most poignant scene in the whole book is the narrator’s visit to an ALS patient and the distinctions made between dying with a sound mind as with the ALS patient and his mother, dying with a damaged mind but a healthy body.

I love it when books I am reading simultaneously overlap. Scar Tissue mentions Italian artist Andrea Mantegna whose biography is in Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Vol 2) by Giorgio Vasari.

Reason read: November is national Alzheimers awareness month.

Author fact: Google Ignatieff’s name and you will see he is all over the internet, but not for his writing. He has had a pretty substantial political career as well.

Book trivia: Scar Tissue was short-listed for the Booker Prize.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Mothers and Sons” (p 161).

Before the Knife

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Slaughter, Carolyn. Before the Knife: Memories of An African Childhood. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

Before the Knife is a very quick read. Sometimes I felt I was reading fast because I wanted to get through the truly disturbing parts. In truth they were always there, lurking  behind the words Slaughter didn’t say, or worse, only alluded to. Because Slaughter announces early on, in the preface, that she was raped by her father the knowledge is out. “…the moment when everything changed only really came the night that my father first raped me” (p 4). However, she promises her story is not about that horror in particular. True to her word, Before the Knife isn’t about that trauma but having announced it, we readers are always aware of it. We translate innuendo to mean abuse every time. The story of an African childhood is lost to the knowledge something darker is at play. What a different book this would have been if we didn’t know! As expected Slaughter comes back full circle to the first night of the rape, describing it in more detail. Why, I do not know. The entire book is a tangled and confused mess of emotions.

Line that punched me in the stomach: “But once it happened, we decided that it never happened at all” (p 4). Story of my life.
Line that brought me solace: :I hoarded his words in my heart for weeks and brought them out like a talisman any time I was at my wit’s end” (p 182).

Reason Read: November is another good time to visit Africa, only not Slaughter’s Africa. Most of the places she described are no more.

Author Fact: Slaughter has written a bunch of other things including Dreams of the Kalahari.

Book Trivia: This memoir does not include any photographs.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Dreaming of Africa” (p 76).

Hackers

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Hackers. Dann, Jack and Gardner Dozois, eds. New York: Ace Books, 1996.

Hackers is an eclectic mix of short stories about a techno-subculture called hackers. Most of the stories are written by well known and respected science fiction writers.  Each story is prefaced with a short bio about the author and many of them are authors already on my Lust list. The list of stories is as follows:

  • “Burning Chrome” by William Gibson
  • “Spirit of the Night” by Tom Maddox
  • “Blood Sisters” by Greg Egan (probably my favorite since I would have done the same thing had it been my sister.)
  • “Rock On” by Pat Cadigan (I didn’t get this one at all.)
  • “The Pardoner’s Tale” by Robert Silverberg ~ I liked this one a lot
  • “Living Will” by Alexander Jablokov
  • “Dogfight” by Michael Swanwick and William Gibson
  • “Our Neural Chernobyl” by Bruce Sterling
  • “(Learning About) Sex Machine” by Candas Jane Dorsey
  • “Conversations With Michael” by Daniel Marcus
  • “Gene Wars” by Paul J McAuley
  • “Spew” by Neal Stephenson
  • “Tangents” by Greg Bear (weird!)

Favorite line: From “Living Will” by Alexander Jablokov, “Gerald set his drink down carefully and put his arm around his friend’s shoulders, something he rarely did. And they sat there in the silent study, two old friends stuck at the wrong end of time” (p 111). This story in particular was very human and very sad.

Reason read: October is Computer month. I have to admit it took me some time to get used to words like cybernetic, fiberoptic and simstim.

Best lines, “That was the summer that I finally managed to hack into a Pentagon computer – just an office supplies purchasing system, but Paula was suitably impressed (and neither of us had ever guessed that paperclips were so expensive)” (p 50).

Author Fact: Since there are a bunch of authors I settled on writing about my favorite

Book Trivia: Even though this was compiled in the mid-90s, most of the stories are highly readable even today. the only element of the anthology that was dated was each introduction that introduced the author as “new” to the scene of science fiction writing.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Cyberspace.Com” (p 69).

Frankenstein

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Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003.

I am glad I had a chance to reread Frankenstein. Such a great book! Victor Frankenstein is a student impatient with a classical education. He becomes fascinated with unorthodox science and the engineering of life from human corpses. Left alone with his “research” Frankenstein creates a man more powerful in strength and size than average, and because his methods are crude, so ugly it is deemed a “monster,” a “daemon” a “fiend.” Upon creation Frankenstein immediately regrets his man-made monster and is relieved when it runs away.
Frankenstein is a cautionary lesson in the dangers of messing with science. It is also a commentary on assumptions and misunderstandings. When Frankenstein’s monster starts killing Victor’s loved ones Frankenstein misunderstands the message and makes assumptions about the violence. From the first tragedy it is unknown if it was an accident or not. It is a tragedy that doesn’t end well for anyone. The story of Frankenstein and his monster is told encapsulated in another story that brings us full circle. You cannot help but feel sorry for the monster. He is abhorred and misunderstood from the very beginning. His struggle to belong becomes a diabolical quest when Frankenstein tries and then refuses to create a companion for him.

Favorite lines, “To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death” (p 46), and “But I, the true murderer, felt the never-dying worm alive in my bosom, which allowed of no hope or consolation” (p 78). Okay, and one more: “During my first experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had blinded me to the horror of employment; my mind was intently fixed on the consummation of my labour, and my eyes were shut tight to the horror of my proceedings. But now I went to it in cold blood, and my heart often sickened at the work of my hands” (p 146).

Author fact: What an interesting concept – Mary Shelley, married to Percy Bysshe Shelley, writes Frankenstein in response to a challenge, “we will each write a ghost story…” (p 7); a competition of sorts among friends. Mary’s story wins. Ironically enough, it is her first story, written as an 18 year old who claims the story came to her in a dream. Another interesting twist is the preface to the Barnes and Noble copy is written by her husband but in Mary’s voice.

Book trivia: Over time Victor Frankenstein’s monster has become known as Frankenstein. Thanks to movies we all know the green man with screws in his temples and crude stitches running down his neck.

Reason read: Halloween is in October. Need I say more?

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust and More Book Lust. From Book Lust in the chapter called “Mechanical Men, Robots, Automatons, and Deep Blue” (p 150). From More Book Lust in the chapters “Horror for Sissies” (p 119) and “Literary Lives: the Brits” (p 147).

Outermost House

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Beston, Henry. The Outermost House: a Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1988.

Even though Cape Cod is nothing like Monhegan Island this was a great read for vacation.

Henry Beston built a two room house on Coast Guard Beach on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Originally the house was designed to be a summer getaway cabin but after two weeks Beston decided to see what it would be like to spend a year on the beach. During that time he wrote a memoir of the experience, recording everything he saw, heard, smelled, touched and experienced. As a result he published The Outermost House which became a best seller. Along the lines of Thoreau, Beston was enamored with living the simple life and experiencing nature in it most raw form. There were many times I found myself agreeing with Beston or being envious of his adventure. Even the storms that blew up the beach produced fascinating fodder for Beston’s book.

Favorite lines: “On its solitary dune my house faced the four walls of the world” (p 9), “Listen to the surf, really lend it your ears, and you will hear in it a world of sounds: hollow boomings and heavy roarings, great watery tumblings and tramplings, long hissing seethes, sharp riffle-shot reports, splashes, whispers, the grinding undertone of stones, and sometimes vocal sounds that might be the half-heard talk of people in the sea” (p 43) and one more, “Wraiths of memories began to take shape” (p 216).

Author Fact: Well, this fact isn’t about Beston. It’s about his house. His cabin on Cape Cod was named a national literary landmark until it was destroyed in the blizzard of 1978.

Book Trivia: Beston’s wife wouldn’t marry him until he had finished The Outermost House.

Reason read: October is National Animal Month.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Wild Life” (p 244).

To Kill a Mockingbird

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Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: Warner Books, 1982.

This is another one of those times when I have to ask who doesn’t know the story of Scout Finch? I’m sure many, many people refer back to the movie and that classic trial scene, but tell me, who doesn’t know Atticus Finch at least?

The story is told from the viewpoint of six year old Scout Finch, a tomboy living in Alabama during the Great Depression. She is looking back on her coming of age, remembering the year when all innocence was lost. Scout and her brother, Jem, are typical children growing up in the segregated deep south. Their widowed father, Atticus, is a county lawyer appointed to defend a black man accused of attacking and raping a white teenager. This is on the periphery of Scout’s life. She is more concerned with the monster who lives nearby. In the neighborhood lives a recluse of a man few have seldom seen. He is the subject of gossip and rumors and legends because his existence is such a mystery. Naturally, the neighborhood children grow up being afraid of him. Scout doesn’t understand this is a prejudice equal to the racial prejudice displayed in her town against her father for defending a “nigger.” As the trial draws near the community begins a slow boil until it erupts in violence. While the ending is predictable the entire story is so well written it should not be missed or forgotten. Read it again and again.

Favorite lines: “Matches were dangerous, but cards were fatal” (p 55) and something Atticus says at the end of the book, “Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I’ve tried to live so I can look squarely back at him” (p 273).

Postscript ~ There is a scene when Scout and Jem are taking to their black housekeeper’s church. The congregation sings “When They Ring The Golden Bells” by Dion De Marbell. All I could hear in my mind was Natalie Merchant singing the same song off Ophelia, last track.

Reason Read: September is Southern Month, whatever that means.

Author fact: Harper Lee has never wanted the attention To Kill a Mockingbird has afforded her. She shuns the limelight and has never written anything since.

Book trivia: To Kill a Mockingbird was made into an Oscar winning movie in 1962.

BookLust Twist: I can always tell when Nancy Pearl really loves a book. She’ll mention it even in a chapter it doesn’t belong in. In Book Lust it is in four different chapters, “Girls Growing Up” (p 101), “100 Good Reads, Decade by Decade: 1960s” (p 178), “Southern Fiction” (p 222), and “What a Trial That Was!” (p 244). To Kill a Mockingbird is also mentioned in More Book Lust in the chapter called “You Can’t Judge a Book By Its Cover” (p 238). Pearl is comparing Donna Tartt’s character, Harriet Dufresne (in The Little Friend) with Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Fire From Heaven

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Renault, Mary. Fire From Heaven. New York: Pantheon Books, 1969.

The story of Alexander the Great opens with Alexander as a young child waking to find a snake in bed with him. He assumes it is his mother’s pet snake, Glaukos. From there we are, guided by Renault’s excellent storytelling, witness to Alexander’s rise to greatness with fiction interwoven with nonfiction. For example, Renault wasn’t there for Alexander’s first battle and there is little documentation of it. So, the battle and subsequent kill at the age of twelve is purely fictional but Renault makes it easy to picture it as fact even if it is a little incredulous. With no ornament or artifact to take from the body as a trophy, Alexander saws off the head of his enemy.
Renault skillfully shows Alexander growing up, becoming more and more of a leader. Played against each other are his parents, the ever jealous Olympia and King Philip. Alexander learns how to manipulate them equally. Hephaistion starts his relationship with Alexander as a schoolmate and, as both boys mature, becomes a devoted friend with a level of intimacy that borders on homosexuality. Renault does not shy away from such relationships as they were commonplace.

“Was every enemy of his a hero to his son?” (p 76).
“Fear lay dead at his feet” (p 228).

Reason read: Back to school, let’s get a little Greek!

Author fact: Mary Renault is known for her classic works of Greek mythology. I read The King Must Die in high school.

Book trivia: Fire From Heaven is the first book in a trilogy about the life and times of Alexander the Great. I am only reading the first two.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “The Classical World” (p 59).

The Joke

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Kundera, Milan. The Joke. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.

It is important to understand first how The Joke is organized because to just read it without paying attention is like landing in a foreign country and driving without a map. The book is in seven parts, each part being the point of view of a different character until the 7th part. It reads like a musical quartet with Ludvik, Helena, Jaroslav and Kostka all give their perception of “the joke.” The story starts with Ludvik returning to his hometown after 15 years and knowing no one. He reminiscences about a joke gone horribly wrong. But when the reader gets to part II the point of view has changed without announcement. Only by paying attention to the table of contents do we know we are now getting someone else’s perception of the joke. The second thing to remember is the time and place of The Joke. Communist Czech. A person can be kicked out of the party and out of school for saying the wrong thing. While there are many jokes throughout the story it is important to note the original joke stems from a postcard Ludvik has written a classmate implying he is a Trotskyite.

Favorite quotes, “During a lifetime of switching beds I’d developed a personal cult of keys, and I slipped Kostka’s into my pocket with silent glee” (p 5). Odd.
“The young can’t help acting: they’re thrust immature into a mature world and must act mature” (p 76), and “Fantasies are what make home of houses” (p 124). True.

Reason read: September is a good time to visit Czechoslovakia.

Author fact: The Joke was Kundera’s first novel.

Book Trivia: My copy was translated by Michael Henry Heim.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Czech It Out” (p 71).

American Ground

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Langewiesche, William. American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center. Maryland: Recorded Books, LLC, 2003.

There is something so impressive when an author is given “unrestricted access” to his or her subject. To me, it inspires endless possibilities. When I found out Langewiesche was given “unrestricted access” to the cleanup after 9/11 I was excited. American Ground is the story of the physical breakdown, piece by piece, of the World Trade Center (hence the use of the word “unbuilding” in the subtitle). Probably the most fascinating part of American Ground was the unbelievable “territorial war” between the firefighters and the police, each believing their dead was more important than the other. There was a great disunity between the groups as the clean up continued. At the same time there were shining examples of people who selflessly went above and beyond to not honor find the missing but to honor the dead.

Reason Read: September 11, 2001 is a day that will live in infamy. I don’t know of a soul who doesn’t know what I’m talking about when I say “nine-eleven.” I think it’s obvious why I chose this book for September.

Author Fact: William Langewiesche writes for the Atlantic Monthly where American Ground was first published in three parts.

Book Trivia: The audio version of American Ground was read by Richard M. Davidson, a professional actor.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “9/11” (p 171). Simple enough.

Eleanor Roosevelt

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Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume One 1884-1933. New York: Viking, 1191.

I think it goes without saying that Eleanor Roosevelt was a fascinating person both in and out of the political arena. What astounds me the most is how Cook could write such a thorough biography despite so much of Eleanor’s personal correspondence either lost or destroyed. I am in awe of what Cook could have done if she had everything ER had ever written or was written to her. Here’s what we do know – research has concluded that Eleanor had an unhappy childhood. She grew up shy and awkward. She a cold mother who died when Eleanor was eight and a father who was practically nonexistent. Research also supports her unhappy marriage to Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man who was clearly a mama’s boy and did nothing to hide his adulterous indiscretions. And yet, they made it work. All of Eleanor’s political and humanitarian endeavors and alliances are carefully documented. All the facts about Eleanor Roosevelt as a historical icon are there. But what Cook is able to illustrate in meticulous detail is Mrs. Roosevelt’s courageous, determined, caring personality. Once ER found independence she sought to better herself at every chance she got. She surrounded herself with men and women who would become lifelong friends. There is so much detail to Cook’s biography that you feel as though you’ve just had a conversation with Eleanor herself about her life’s work. My only complaint? As an “out” lesbian I felt Cook was trying too hard to find the lesbian angle with ER’s relationship with Lorena Hickok, among others.

Interesting line, “She knew it was possible to freeze the heart away” (p 217). An example of how little times have changed: “ER deplored the fact that Republican policies protected “big business and industry,” not the individual on the farm or in the family store” (p 403).

Reason read: Eleanor Roosevelt was born the in the month of September.

Author Fact: Cook published Volume Two of ER’s biography in 2000.

Book Trivia: Cook’s biography of Eleanor Roosevelt has been called “one of the best.”

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “People You Ought To Meet” (p 184).

Book Lust To Go and Other Lusts

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Pearl, Nancy. Book Lust To Go: Recommended Reading for Travelers, Vagabonds, and Dreamers. Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2010.

This was a gift from my sister; a very evil gift. Wait. I have to clarify – it was an unintended evil gift. She didn’t know it would wreak havoc with my life with books. I enjoy this kind of havoc. Really, I do. I am a glutton for punishment, to be sure.
But, back to reviewing Book Lust to Go. At first blush, Book Lust to Go appears to be better organized and with less mistakes in the index than the other Lust books. Just to give you a frame of reference I counted 60 books that were mentioned in the text of Book Lust but not included in the index. Eleven authors were missed in the same fashion.  27 Poems were missed in the index. Lastly, there were over 40 other miscellaneous mistakes (misspelled author names,  incorrect page numbers and so on and so forth) and this is just Book Lust. I haven’t counted the mistakes in More Book Lust. Book Lust To Go doesn’t have those problems…yet. To be fair I haven’t read the index yet. I’ll get to that eventually.
Another difference is there is less meandering. What do I mean by that? Basically, most of the books mentioned in a particular chapter are actually relevant to the chapter. In other Book Lust books there are quite a few “off topic” selections; books that have nothing to do with the chapter but mentioned anyway. I saw those mentions as filler. As with the other Lust books there is a fair amount of redundancy as well. Of the 540 books I have read so far 71 of them were mentioned in more than one Lust book and 69 titles received a double mention in the same book.
Two huge differences between BLTG and the other Lust books is the help Pearl receives with suggestions. Pearl admits she doesn’t travel and has asked other people for recommendations. How do I feel about this? Well, I always assumed Pearl read everything she recommends and knowing that isn’t the case is a little disappointing. The fact that it is blatantly obvious in BLTG is a letdown. The last difference I will mention is the interviews. None of the other Lust books have web interviews. I have yet to actually listen to one (too busy reading the book), but I will. This is something I am really excited about!