Category: Fiction

Center of the World

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Sheehan, Jacqueline. The Center of the World. New York: Kensington Books, 2016.

Reason read: Here’s a confession. I met the author at my father-in-law’s book signing event. I was embarrassed that I didn’t recognize Sheehan (or her work) despite her being  deemed a “best selling author” by the New York Times. In my defense, I would never buy her books for the library I manage. I highly doubt it will be on anyone’s syllabus soon.
My in-laws loaned me Center of the World and since it’s a signed copy I felt obligated to read it asap!

The concept for Center of the World is interesting. Kate, a budding scientist researching water quality in third world countries, finds herself in Guatemala during a civil war. After witnessing a horrible massacre Kate discovers there was only one other survivor, a Mayan toddler by the name of Sofia. Fearing for their lives as witnesses, Kate steals the child out of the country and raises her as her own. Twelve years go by and it looks as though Kate has gotten away with this illegal adoption, thanks to all the lies she has told over the years. However, her husband decides everyone, including Kate, needs to learn the truth. Add a government cover-up, a lost love interest, and a doting grandfather to round out the plot.

Small disappointment – I wanted to get to know Kate more. There were plenty of moments for further character development. For example, Kate leaves behind a lover in Guatemala. Supposedly Will is the true love who got away but there aren’t many opportunities for Kate to really demonstrate that loss. I would have liked to been a guest at her wedding to Martin. The hesitation before marrying the man who wasn’t her Guatemalan romance would have spoken volumes.

Book trivia: Sheehan is careful about dates. Each section of the novel is dated to set the reader in the appropriate place on Kate’s timeline. But, there is one detail that has me confused. In 1990 Kate meets Will, a “Peace Corp looking” kind of guy. After this initial meeting we jump into Will’s history (albeit without a benefit of a timeline, but we can assume it’s pre-Peace Corps; pre-Kate meet up). Here’s the rub – Will has a gift for learning languages and in talking to someone the language learning software Rosetta Stone is mentioned. Rosetta Stone, the learning tool, came about in 1992. Even if the man name-dropping Rosetta Stone was in the know way before 1992 Will shouldn’t have gotten the reference. Instead, he should have been confused by it.

Half of a Yellow Sun

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Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Half of a Yellow Sun. Read by Robin Miles. New York: Recorded Books, 2008.

Reason read: Half of a Yellow Sun was made into a movie – read in honor of the Academy Awards sometimes being in February and sometimes in March.

This is the story of five individuals during the short time of Biafra’s secession from Nigeria in the early ’60s. First is Ugwu, a young village boy sent to be the servant of a university mathematics professor. He knows his situation in Professor Odenigbo’s home is very good compared to other servant boys so he is careful not to “rock the boat” but all the while he keeps his ears and eyes open. His is a coming of age story of sorts. Professor Odenigbo is passionate and outspoken about the plight of the African continent, especially when it comes to political influences. Despite his strong opinions he is easily dominated by his mother. This weakness leads to his undoing, starting with his romance with Olanna. Olanna’s relationship with Odenigbo defies her parents and their thinly veiled wish for her to be used as a pawn to marry wealth or royalty. Her strength comes from acceptance and forgiveness. Much like her twin sister, Kainene (my favorite character in the group). Kainene has defiantly fallen in love with very British and very white, Richard Churchill. While the twins appear to be very different from one another they share the same underlying vulnerabilities. Finally, there is Kainene’s Richard Churchill. He has come to Nigeria to write a book about Igbo art. Instead he finds himself caught up in the secession and hoping to immerse himself in the new Biafra as one of its new citizens. Then there is the violence of war…

Swirling around these characters are issues of race, identity, and sense of belonging. There is one poignant scene when Richard admits to never feeling danger despite being in the midst of a brutal massacre. His white skin allowed him to remain outside the violence. Even his romance with an Igbo woman did nothing to threaten his sense of being merely an innocent outsider.

Author fact: Adichie did a TED talk in July of 2009 on feminism.

Book trivia: Half of a Yellow Sun won the Orange Broadband Prize.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Africa, the Greenest Continent” (p 9).

 

March Musings

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What can I say about March? Personally, it’s the St. Patrick’s Day 10k road race. I’ve been injured so it’s hard to anticipate how well I will or won’t do. I went for my first outdoor run this weekend and ran 7.5 with a steady sub-10 pace. That felt strong! Happy girl! And speaking of strong, here’s what’s on deck for the books:

  1. Naked Lunch by William Burroughs – in honor of Jack Kerouac’s birth month. Jack and William were friends…
  2. Family Man by Jayne Ann Krentz – in honor of Krentz’s birth month
  3. The Brontes by Juliet Barker – in honor of March being literature month (over 1,000 pages!)
  4. Means of Ascent by Robert Caro – to continue the series started in honor of Presidents Day being in February (EB)
  5. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson – in honor of Maine becoming a state in March
  6. The Assistant by Bernard Malamud – Malamud died in March.
  7. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie – in honor of the Academy Awards being in February and March (HOAYS was made into a movie)

For Fun:

  1. Confessional: still reading Center of the World by Jacqueline Sheehan

For LibraryThing:

  1. I am supposed to receive Why the Grateful Dead Matter by Michael Benson as a January Early Review book sometime in the month of March…As an aside, there are a few other books I haven’t received and feel bad that I never read or reviewed them. I am sure they have all been published by now and so (I can’t believe I’m saying this) I’m going to see if a library has them. If they do, I will read and review as if I got them as Early Reviews from LibraryThing. The first non-early review I am going to tackle is a book I was supposed to received in 2009 – Sanctuary of Outcasts, a memoir by Neil White.

Remembering February

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So, February was a weird month. Being sick and injured didn’t help except that both ailments gave me more time to read. Turning 47 turned out to be not a big deal. Just another number in the grand scheme of things. The groundhog didn’t see his shadow either so there are less numbers in winter… And speaking of numbers – here are the books:

  1. A.D.: After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld
  2. Beautiful Place to Die by Philip Craig
  3. If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now by Sandra Loh
  4. Rocksburg Railroad Murders by K.C. Constantine
  5. As She Crawled Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem (AB)
  6. Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan
  7. Her First American by Lore Segal
  8. Down Where the Moon was Small or And I Shall Sleep…Down Where the Moon was Small by Richard Llewellyn
  9. Path to Power by Robert Caro – finishing TODAY!
  10. Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder (AB)
  11. Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes (DNF)
  12. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  (AB) – will finish in March
  13. The Art of Dying by Patricia Weenolsen

For Fun:

  1. Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano
  2. Center of the World by Jacqueline Sheehan
  3. The Ultimate Treadmill Workout by David Siik

For LibraryThing’s Early Review program:

  1. Liar by Rob Roberge

I also spent some time revisiting the Challenge list. Because of all the missed individual titles I wanted to redo the schedule. That took up a great deal of my time!

Tom Brown’s School Days

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Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown’s School Days. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911.

Reason read: to finish the series started in April in honor of George MacDonald Fraser’s birth month…even though this has nothing to do with George MacDonald Fraser.

Victorian-era literature always gets to me. I know that Tom Brown’s School Days centers on the manner and customs of the mid 1850s and is the basis for the Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser, but I found myself completely bored. Aside from the great illustrations this wasn’t the most entertaining of reads.

An odd quote, “They can’t let anything alone which they think going wrong” (p 5).

As an aside – Hughes called his readers either gentle or simple. I couldn’t decide which category I fell into.

Author fact: Thomas Hughes looked like Mario Balzic from the cover of Always a Body to Trade by K.C. Constantine.

Book trivia: I tried reading both an electronic and print versions of this. The full title on the 1911 electronic version was Tom Brown’s School~Days By An Old Boy (Thomas Hughes) with Numerous Illustrations Made at Rugby School by Louis Rhead, MCMXI. And to be fair, the illustrations were great. Introduction was by W.D. Howells.
The print version (published in 1918) was a little different. Title page reads, “Tom Brown’s School-Days By an Old Boy (Thomas Hughes) Edited by H.C. Bradby, B.A. Assistant Headmaster at Rugby School Illustrated by Hugh Thomson.” Interesting, huh?

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “George MacDonald Fraser: Too Good To Miss” (p 93). Except…Tom Brown’s School Days was not written by George MacDonald Fraser as I mentioned earlier.

Her First American

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Segal, Lore. Her First American. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.

Reason read: my college celebrated “Immigrant Awareness Week” in February.

Ilka Weissnix is a twenty one year old immigrant from Vienna. Arriving in New York City for the very first time, she is hungry to learn everything she can about America. Her cousin, Litvak, arranges for her to travel cross country by train to the wild, wild west. It’s in Nevada where Ilka meets her “first American”, Carter Bayoux. This is the 1950s so meeting Carter is blessing and a curse. Being an intellectual he is eager to show Ilka the world of artists and scholars. Being a heavy drinker  and a reckless romantic he also exposes her to jokes that aren’t always funny and a world that sometimes is unfair and unpredictable. Needless to say she is confused a lot of the time. But, it’s his drinking that really hit home for me. I live on the fringe of other people’s addiction and Segal does an amazing job bringing that harsh reality into the spotlight with subtle grace. Carter’s bouts of loneliness and helplessness are amplified through his constant summoning of Ilka to his hotel room as if there is a dire emergency. His brother’s inability to be around him is an indication of the shame Carter has brought to his family. And yet, Carter is surrounded by friends who obviously adore him.

I found this to be a fascinating read. At times I caught myself pondering American slang and thinking how strange it must sound in the ears of a foreigner.
As an aside, I have no idea why Lore wanted Ilka to travel all the way to Nevada to meet Carter. They both live in New York City so wouldn’t it have been easier to have them bump into each other there? The trip out west is just an odd blip in an otherwise mostly New York-centric story.

Most profound quote, “Like the series of points that make a line, the moments in which Carter did not pick up the glass made half a minute, a minute, five minutes, half an hour – became the morning Carter Bayoux stopped drinking” (p 82).
More quotes, “She was moved by the delicacy of his enormous sleep” (p 106) and “The prospect of sending her voice out among so many strangers made her heart beat and strangled her breath” (p 171).

Author fact: Segal was born in Vienna. Could Her First American be somewhat autobiographical in nature? Does she have a “first” American?

Book trivia: The cover of Her First American is from a painting called “City Activities with Subway” by Thomas Hart Benton (1930). Even though the story takes place twenty years later, the scene still works.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter simply called “The Immigrant Experience” (p 124).

And I Shall Sleep…

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Llewellyn, Richard. And I Shall Sleep…Down Where the Moon Was Small. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1966.

Reason read: to finish the series incorrectly started in December in honor of Patagonia.

Like Llewellyn’s first two novels, And I Shall Sleep… starts off with Huw and his mother’s little blue cloth, the one she “wore about her hair when cleaning” (p 1). This will become significant later, as you might have guessed.
And I Shall Sleep is the third and final book in the Huw Morgan series. When we join back up with Huw, he and his small group of Patagonians have made a new settlement in the Andes mountains. Previously Huw’s love, Lal, had decided to stay behind but early in And I Shall Sleep she changes her mind and joins Huw in the mountains. While this may seem like a good thing for Huw (since he was so infatuated with her in Up, Into the Singing Mountain), his attraction to an evasive Indio girl complicates the relationship. It doesn’t help that Huw is becoming more and more sympathetic to the Indio plight (“they were denied a land where their fathers had ridden” p 122), Interestingly enough, this new girl, Liliutro, is half sister to Lal. [Semi-spoiler alert: the inside flap reveals that mysterious Lili is able to lure Huw away from Lal so the whole time Huw and Lal are seemingly happy together I wondered when his betrayal would begin…and then when it did I regretted waiting for it.]
On the professional side, Huw’s trading company is getting bigger and bigger. He is able to travel to America and meet Henry Ford. As a businessman he grows more and more successful.

As an aside: towards the end of And I Shall Sleep I was starting to dislike Huw a great deal. There is this one curious scene where Huw has just slept with a married woman and she announces she is going to tell her husband. The next day the husband comes to Huw to inform him I know what you did and oh, by the way, you should call the police because I put my hands around her neck….”Heard it go. Told you. I’m finished” (p 308).
And then there’s the scene with the puma…and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Quote I like: right from the beginning, the very first sentence grabbed me, “Dearly touched a heart can be with proof of love from an absent one” (p 1). This set the whole stage for me.
Other quote I liked, “A pity it takes so long to reach good sense” (p 99).

Book trivia: And I Shall Sleep… is sometimes called simply Down Where the Moon Was Small.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter simply and predictably called “Patagonia” (p 174). Note: both titles are indexed in Book Lust To Go.

Thirty Nine Steps

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Buchan, John. The Thirty-Nine Steps. New York: Buccaneer Books, 1996.

Reason read: in honor of my birthday I wanted to read something fast and fun.

It’s May 1914 in London, England. Scottish expatriate Richard Hannay has a troublesome visitor. That’s the first thing I would say about The Thirty Nine Steps. An American stranger has come to him with a wild tale of espionage and knowledge of a planned assassination. Because he was in the know, according to this stranger, Mr. Scudder, he had to fake his own death. He has come to Hannay to hide himself and his little coded book of secrets. However, imagine Hannay’s surprise when that same man is found with a knife so thoroughly through the heart it skewered him to the floor! Needless to say, Hannay is now on the run…with the cipher of secrets. With Mr. Scudder dead on his floor, surely he will be the number one suspect. The rest of the short book is Hannay’s attempts to hide out in Scotland, a place he hasn’t seen since he was six years old, thirty one years ago. The key to the whole mystery is a reference to “39 steps” in Scudder’s little book.

Head scratching quotes, “He had about as much gift of gab as a hippopotamus and was not a great hand at valeting, but I knew I could count on his loyalty” (p 22)

Author fact: Buchan was a member of Parliament and Governor-General of Canada.

Book trivia: This is another super short book, only 126 pages long. Originally published in 1915 and made into a movie several times.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “100 Good Reads, Decade by Decade: 1910s” (p 174). But wait! There’s more! From Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Oxford – nonfiction” (p 171). It should be noted that Thirty-Nine Steps does not take place in Oxford, nor is it nonfiction.

As She Climbed Across the Table

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Lethem, Jonathan. As She Climbed Across the Table. Read by David Aaron Baker. Maryland: Books on Tape, 2007.

Reason read: February is Lethem’s birth month.

I love Jonathan Lethem’s voice. The style he writes in is so casual, so sly you feel like you need to reread the words to make sure you haven’t missed something important or at least clever. As She Climbed Across the Table is told from the perspective of Anthropology professor Philip. The story he tells you is at once heartbreaking and humorous. His girlfriend and colleague, particle physicist Alice Coombs has fallen in love with a void, a tiny black hole. The only problem with this? The void, named Lack for obvious reasons, has refused Alice’s attempts to lose herself in his depths. This “lack” of affection on Lack’s part only makes Alice desire him more. Why? Because it seems as if he (because it has to be a he for Alice to love) has a personality capable of rejection. He will devour car keys and other items of significance, but not Alice.

As an aside: When Alice repeatedly admits she loves Lack the way she used to love Philip, (but doesn’t anymore), I wanted Philip to be more rebellious. Here is he, allowing crazy, non-speaking, dopey Alice to live in the same apartment all the while refusing the advances of a beautiful and smart therapist who is practically throwing herself at him. Am I too cold blooded to think Philip should have developed more of a “screw you” spine?

Author Fact: This is not a fact per se…but, I ran into a photo of Jonathan Lethem and in it he looked sorta, kinda, somewhat like Mike Gordon from the band Phish. Not exactly like him, mind you. But, close enough to be his kid brother or something.

Audio trivia: David Aaron Baker does a great job with voice accents. The part when Philip is drunk is hilarious.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the obvious chapter “Jonathan Lethem: Too Good To Miss” (p 146).

If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now

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Loh, Sandra Tsing. If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now. New York: riverhead books, 1997.

Reason read: Loh’s birth month is in February.

Confessional: I finished this in a day. Not because it was my favorite book but because I was home sick.

This is the story of Bronwyn Peters and her boyfriend, Paul, trying to make it in the glamorous city of Los Angeles. Be prepared. This is a very dated (1990s) story and there will be times when you want to maybe slap the sh!t out of Sandra Loh. I grew weary of the plenitude of brand-name dropping that went on (Guess?, Porche, Sanyo, Motorola, Kohler, BMW, Berber, Dolce & Gabbana, Wamsutta, Crate and Barrel…to name a few), as well as hot-now celebrity names like David Lynch, Frank Zappa, Malcolm Forbes, and Madonna…
Confessional: there were definitely times I wanted to slap Bronwyn Peters. Despite listening to NPR and identifying with a Bohemian lifestyle, Bronwyn hungers for the lifestyle of $200 haircuts and Corian counters. She even convinces her struggling writer boyfriend to buy a condo in downtown Los Angeles after they come into a modest amount of money (clearly not enough for L.A. standards). They settle on a place they obviously cannot afford for long. Bronwyn knows full well they are out of their league and yet continues to plays the game to the hilt. Bronwyn’s one redeeming quality is her steadfast love for Paul. She stands by him through temptation and failure. In the end, If you Lived Here… is Loh’s platform for bringing to the forefront L.A.’s socio-economic class structure. She uses the riots as a backdrop to her commentary on attitudes, prejudices and the simple act of just wanting more.

Lines I liked: “Feeling like Bruce Willis is some sort of Dead Something action picture, Bronwyn gripped her flashlight” (p176), and “and because there was nothing else to do, she rolled over and stole her arms around her fellow, such as he was, because his was the body that was still there” (p 221).

Author fact: If you Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now is Loh’s first novel.

Book trivia: short, short, short!

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “California, Here We Come” (p 49).

Forgetting February

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Okay, so here it is, the first week of February and I never wrote a summary for January or looked ahead to February. What is this world coming to? I’ll tell you what the what. My life has been upside down lately. Between being sick and injured I haven’t been myself lately. Not working out has left me crank, crank, cranky! Not running has unhinged my balance. Being sick for the second time this winter doesn’t help.
So even though I blew it for January, here’s a redeemer for February. Without further ado, the books I will read (or have already read) for the month:

  1.  A.D.: After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld in honor of Mardi Gras
  2. Her First American by Lore Segal in honor of immigration month
  3. I Shall Sleep…Down Where the Moon is Small by Richard Llewellyn (to finish the series started in December)
  4. Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes (to finish the series started LAST April)
  5. Beautiful Place to Die by Philip Craig
  6. If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now by Sandra Loh in honor of Loh’s birth month
  7. Rocksburg Railroad Murders by K.C. Constantine (in finish the series started last month)
  8. As She Crawled Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem in honor of his birth month (an audio book)
  9. Liar by Rob Roberge (Early Review book)
  10. The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano (not on the challenge list; a recommendation by my sister)

Okay. So that’s a lot of books. But not really once you read my confessional: There were four that took a day apiece to read (Neufeld, Loh, Constantine, and Craig) and four more I have been reading for a while now (Llewellyn, Hughes, Roberge and Giordano). So, already a total of six are “in the can” so to speak even though it’s only early February. Clarification: I have a “new” rule for series. I’ll use the Constantine series to illustrate: I started Constantine’s series in honor of mystery month in January. When I finished the January book I didn’t wait until February 1st to start the second book in the series. True, I give myself a month to read a book but sometimes I don’t need that much time. If that makes sense.

I will be adding two more:

  1. The Path to Power by Robert Caro in honor of Presidents Day
  2. Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder (audio book) in honor of February being the month we moved to Northampton (Kidder is a Northampton author).

the Solitude of Prime Numbers

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Giordano, Paolo. The Solitude of Prime Numbers. New York: Penguin Books, 2009.

Reason read: for fun…because my sister said so.

I don’t know what it was about this book that made it so difficult to read. I must have picked it up and put it down a hundred times before I finally got to the last page. It wasn’t that it was a horribly written book. In fact, just the opposite. It was so beautiful in a haunting, painful way that I could only read it in short bursts.

Alice and Mattia are two misfit loners who accidentally find each other as teenagers at a birthday party. Despite the fact they are thrown together on a malicious dare, they develop a bond of solidarity. To quote Pink Floyd, they were “two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl” recognizing the loneliness in each other. Except, their friendship does not develop as one normally would. They remain just as singular (primary, as the title suggests) as if they had never met.

Quotes that moved me, “They lived the slow and invisible interpenetration of their universes, like two stars gravitating around a common axis, in ever tighter orbits, whose clear destiny it to coalesce at some point in time” (p 136). Someone else liked that line. It was marked in the book. And, “Every one of them had a love that had rotted alone in their hearts” (p 144).

A lot like Rob Roberge’s Liar, I found this book took me a really long time to read. As I said with Liar, it wasn’t that the story wasn’t interesting. Only that it was too lonely for words.

Author fact: Solitude is Paolo Giordano’s first book.

Book trivia: Solitude won Giordano the Premio Straga award.

 

Beautiful Place to Die

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Craig, Philip A. A Beautiful Place to Die. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989.

Reason read: February is the month in which Massachusetts became a state and Martha’s Vineyard is the “beautiful place to die”.

You can always tell when an author has either spent time or lived in the area where his or her book takes place. The details are sharper, the descriptions more lovingly told…if that makes sense. There is a care to the words. Philip R. Craig is no different. Because of the way he describes the island of Martha’s Vineyard early on in A Beautiful Place To Die, you can tell he calls it home.

Jefferson Washington Jackson is a retired Boston cop/Vietnam veteran living on the island of Martha’s Vineyard trying to forget about the bullet still lodged in his back. To keep himself occupied he is an avid fisherman, a successful gardener (does better with vegetables than flowers) and a decent cook. After a friend’s boat explodes and someone he knew was killed Jeff finds a new hobby as private investigator. Along with a suspicious boat explosion there are rumors of drug busts and murder. There are plenty of little twists and turns to A Beautiful Place to Die so even though it is a short (211 pages) read, it is entertaining.

Quotes I love (see confessional), “Librarians are wonderfully valuable people” (p 122), “Women are the gender of reality” (p 174), and “When I’m king of the world I’m going to ban pay toilets as an affront to civilization” (p 175).

Side note: When J.W. tells Zee how he came to live on M.V. it reminded me of Monhegan. Many islanders can’t afford to buy a place where they grew up. They rely on inheriting family property to stay on the island…

Confessional: I have a crush on Jefferson Washington Jackson. Consider the facts: he gardens, cooks, appreciates librarians, understands a Barbar kind of day, likes Sam Adams beer and a clean house, has a sense of humor, has the same opinion of pay toilets, and is able to survive getting shot twice in 48 hours! What’s not to love?

Author fact: According the to back flap, Philip Craig grew up on a small cattle ranch in Durango, Colorado. The Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard is quite a departure from the wild west.

Book trivia: This is book one is the Martha’s Vineyard series.

BookLust Twist: from <em>Book Lust To Go</em> in the chapter simply called “Martha’s Vineyard” (p 142). No twist there…

Rocksburg Railroad Murders

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Constantine, K.C. The Rocksburg Railroad Murders. Boston: David R. Godine, Publisher, 1982.

Reason read: to “finish” the series started in December with Always a Body to Trade in honor of January being Mystery Month. Yes, I read them out of order.

Written in a much different time. When else can you have a Meet Me At the Bar kind of cop who has a priest for a drinking and gambling buddy (on the clock, no less)? Here are some other facts about Chief of Police Mario Balzic: he’s married and a father of two teenage daughters. His mother lives with him and he’s a wicked gin player. A senior in 1942 he joined the Marines fresh out of high school. As a tough but sensitive Chief of Police in Rocksburg, Pennsylvania it’s up to him to figure out who bashed in John Andrasko’s face with a soda bottle at the railway station. For Mario, this murder is personal for he’s known John since they were kids.

Quote I liked, “A man went goofy with grief, he saw to it that the victims were covered, and everybody went home to a hot shower and a cold glass of wine. What else did you do when somebody you loved got killed?” (p 181).

Author fact: Mario is a lot like K.C. in that both are military men.

Book trivia: The Rocksburg Railroad Murders is Constantine’s first book.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Big Ten Country: The Literary Midwest (Pennsylvania)” (p 31).

Checkmate

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Dunnett, Dorothy. Checkmate. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.

Reason read: I started the Lymond Chronicles in August to celebrate Dorothy Dunnett’s birth month.

If you have been keeping track, by the end of The Ringed Castle Francis Crawford of Lymond had returned to Scotland from Russia and it had been revealed he might have killed his own son. Also at the end of Ringed Castle Lymond was trying to return to Russia while still married to Philippa, but by the end of Ringed Castle it was obvious (at least to me) the relationship between them was changing. There were even hints of romance blossoming for Philippa. Maybe that was a spoiler alert for Checkmate?
Anyway, when we begin Checkmate the year is 1557. Francis Crawford of Lymond is back in France, now as the M. comte de Sevigny, leading an army against England. Despite his best efforts to divorce Philippa, their marriage continues to used as political leverage and controls his inability to return to Russia. He is ordered to fight for the French for one year before his marriage can be annulled. Imagine if we lived in that kind of society today! Philippa’s feelings for her husband continue to evolve slowly as she is still insistent on learning the truth of his parentage and lineage. It’s this dark secret that introduces the character of astrologer (“yon pisse-pot prophet”) Nostradamus to the plot. Note: Each chapter starts with a prophesy of Nostradamus in old French. It isn’t necessary to have them translated to enjoy the story. Because this is the last book in the series, Dunnett tries to put a bow on the conclusion to Checkmate. I don’t think it is giving too much away to say that one can leave the Lymond series feeling good about Francis’s future.

One detail that carried through the Lymond series was the issue of Francis’s come and go headaches and resulting blindness. I never could wrap my brain around the real cause of these debilitating migraines, especially when his mother says he doesn’t “need” them anymore.

Quotes I liked, “But the days are evil: iniquity aboundeth, and charity waxeth cold” (p 146), “The session ended when Mr. Pigault, full of his own beer, slid comfortably under the table” (p 153), and “Realization drew from him the power of movement” (p 158).

Author fact: Dunnett is also the author of the House of Niccolo series, also on my Challenge list; probably to be started a year from this August.

Book trivia: This is the sixth and final book in the Lymond Chronicles. I have to admit, I will miss Francis!

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter “Digging Up the Past Through History” (p 80).