White Sky, Black Ice
Posted: 2019/03/18 Filed under: Book Reviews, Fiction, Lust To Go | Tags: 2019, alaska, book lust iii, book review, Fiction, march, murder, mystery, police, series Leave a commentJones, Stan. White Sky, Black Ice. New York: Soho Press, 1999.
Reason read: Alaska’s Seward Day takes place in March.
The first book in Stan Jones’s Nathan Active series has the task of painting a picture of who Nathan Active is. The character development is slow in regards to Active’s personality. Jones spends a lot of time building the backstory of Active’s adoption after his fifteen year old Inupiat mother gave him up. He was raised by a white couple in Anchorage and grew up to be a state trooper. Here’s the rub: he has been posted back in his little birth village of Chukchi where he feels torn between the cultures of his upbringing and the traditions in his blood. He’s an obvious outsider, being raised in the big city. But when atypical suicides start happening one right after the other Active decides to listen to his ancestral roots and dig in.
Confessional: because White Sky, Black Ice takes an environmental spin I kept thinking of Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver. She also tackles the theory that our planet is going to hell.
Author fact: Stan Jones launched the Kotzubue newspaper. He was also an editor for a couple of other newspapers.
Book trivia: White Sky, Black Ice is the first in the Nathan Active series.
Nancy said: Pear said nothing specific except to say White Sky, Black Ice is the first in a series.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the interesting chapter “All Set For Alaska” (p 14).
Fine and Bitter Snow
Posted: 2019/02/14 Filed under: Book Reviews, BookLust I, Fiction | Tags: 2019, alaska, book lust i, book review, Dana Stabenow, february, Fiction, murder, mystery, series Leave a commentStabenow, Dana. A fine and Bitter Snow. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2002.
Reason read: to continue the sequel started in January in honor of the month Alaska became a state.
Kate is back. It’s been awhile since we last caught up with the feisty private investigating crime solver. In A Cold-Blooded Business she and single dad, Jack, were hot and heavy. Now several books later Jack is dead and Kate is sort of looking after his son from a previous marriage. As an FYI – Kate’s grandmother has also passed. In time, this detail will become important to the plot. For now, Kate needs a distraction from the grief these dual deaths have caused and, oddly enough, it comes in the form of oil drilling in southeast Alaska. Drilling in general has been a sensitive subject to all involved but when longtime friend and park ranger, Dan O’Brien, is deemed too environmentally friendly and is forced into early retirement, it becomes Kate’s mission to save his job. It becomes even more personal when a good friend of her grandmother’s is found murdered just days after agreeing to help Dan keep his job. Is the drilling in the wildlife preserve connected to this most recent death? State trooper, Jim Chopin, is on the case and he asks Kate to help…in more ways than one.
Confessional – I that this was the perfect pairing with Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior which is also an environmental drama.
Like I liked, “The moose might kick your ass and the grizzly might rip it off and the wolf might eat it, but they wouldn’t talk you to deal while they got on with the job” (p 232). This is Dana’s way of saying yeah, I know the woman is holding shotgun to Kate’s face and talking way too much, but I need to explain some motives here before she pulls the trigger.
Author fact: Stabenow also writes science fiction.
Book trivia: A Fine and Bitter Snow is Stabenow’s twelfth story.
Nancy said: nothing specific about A Fine and Bitter Snow.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter “I Love a Mystery” (p 117).
Cold-Blooded Business
Posted: 2019/01/24 Filed under: Book Reviews, BookLust I, E-Books, Fiction | Tags: 2019, alaska, book lust i, book review, Dana Stabenow, Fiction, january, murder, mystery, series Leave a commentStabenow, Dana. A Cold-Blooded Business. New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 1994.
Reason read: Alaska became a state in January.
Disclaimer: A Cold-Blooded Business is part of a series and since this is my first Kate Shugak mystery I feel like I jumped into it blind.
Kate Shugak is a private investigator for the Anchorage District Attorney’s office. In A Cold-Blooded Business her assignment is to go undercover at RPetCo, short for Royal Petroleum Company based in Prudhoe Bay up in the Arctic Circle. John King, CEO of RPetCo wants to know who has been dealing cocaine to his employees on company time. His main concern is overdoses are on the rise. There has even been a death by drowning linked to drug use. “Get that dope off my slope” he urges poetically.
Small pet peeve. Teeny tiny, really. On page 142 Kate is yearning for peace and quiet since her boyfriend’s young son, Johnny, “had the television on from the time he woke up till the time he went to bed.” However, not even eleven pages later Kate’s exposure to television is described as limited to Bernie’s television at the Roadhouse “eternally tuned into a basketball game” or Bobby’s set which existed “solely to be hooked up to a VCR” (p 152 – 153). I probably wouldn’t have squawked if the contradictory details weren’t so close together.
As an aside, what irked me from the beginning is that Kate is supposed to go undercover as a roustabout on the slope but within her first week on the job she meets a former medic/acquaintance from another job and a trooper who knows her name. She has to lie and say she’s no longer an investigator. Later she rushes to the first overdose on the job. Bursting into the room she encounters the victim is her cousin and he’s just as surprised to see her as she is him. Finally, Cindy Sovaluk, a woman she meets in the sauna turns out to know her grandmother. So much for undercover when four different people know your name or are related to you!
As another aside, are yearling bears really harmless enough to tug on their tails?
Author fact: Stabenow lives in Alaska and definitely knows the culture. That’s the obvious. What isn’t as obvious is just how many books Ms Stabenow has written. Check out her website here.
Book trivia: A Cold-Blooded Business is part of a series. I counted nineteen Shugak mysteries and I’m only reading two.
Nancy said: Pearl said Cold-Blooded Business is “her favorite Shugak mystery” (Book Lust p 18).
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the unimaginative chapter called “Alaska” (p 17). I would have riffed off a Phish tune and called it “Alaska? I’ll Ask Her”.
Spring Sprung Titles
Posted: 2017/04/28 Filed under: Early Review, Fiction, NonFiction | Tags: alaska, Ann Cleeves, art, audio books, biography, books, Dan Simmons, Early Review, Elsie Lee, epistolary, Fiction, france, Guillermo Martinez, henry james, John McPhee, Kenneth Clark, Leon Edel, librarything, marriage, memoir, murder, mystery, NonFiction, Pamela Paul, romance, science fiction, Shetland, Sue Grafton, travel, WS Merwin Leave a commentWhat to say about April? I ran my fastest 10k while ill (go figure). I met two new runners and may have convinced someone to at least try. I don’t know where this acceptance to run with others is coming from. To share a conversation I had with someone: I asked where she runs. She replied she doesn’t have my pace, “nowhere near it” were her exact words. I answered I don’t have that pace all the time either. Me & my pace visit from time to time but we don’t make it a thing. She laughed and I saw myself ten years ago talking to someone who face-times with friends while running. I worried about her relationship with pace. But, this blog is turning into a thing different from reading.
So, without further ado, here are the finished books:
Fiction:
- Diplomatic Lover by Elsie Lee – read in one day
- Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martinez – read in two days
- Celibate Season by Carol Shields and Blanche Howard – read in four days (this book annoyed me and I kept having to put it down)
Nonfiction:
- Lost Upland: stories of the Dordogne Region by W.S. Merwin – confessional: DNF (bored, bored, bored)
- Coming into the Country by John McPhee
- Henry James: the Untried Years by Leon Edel
- Another Part of the Wood by Kenneth Clark – this was cheeky!
Series continuations:
- “F” is for Fugitive by Sue Grafton (I’m calling this a continuation even though I read “A” a long time ago.)
- Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons (AB + print so I could finish on time – today!)
- Blue Lightning by Ann Cleeves – another quick read (finished in four days)
Early Review for LibraryThing:
- My Life with Bob by Pamela Paul
Coming into the Country
Posted: 2017/04/26 Filed under: Book Reviews, Lust To Go, NonFiction | Tags: 2017, alaska, april, book lust iii, book review, John McPhee, NonFiction Leave a commentMcPhee, John. Coming into the Country. New York: The Noonday Press, 1977.
Reason read: in four months I will be visiting Alaska. I thought I would start reading about it now.
There is a little bit of all things Alaskan in Coming into the Country. To name a few: the trials and tribulations of traveling rivers via kayak, the must-know laws of sport fishing (for example, fishermen are prohibited from catching fish by anything but mouth. Who knew?), Juneau is two time zones away from Anchorage. There’s more: McPhee details the nature of Grizzly bears, the techniques of placer mining, the bickering over the new location of the state capital, marriage and survival, and my favorite, the people of Alaska (transplant and not). The people you meet in Coming into the Country are phenomenal.
As an aside, Pearl may have called Coming into the Country a “classic” but in a timely twist, the boom of oil in Alaska is anything but old news.
Quotes I liked, “The best and worst part of catching that fish was deciding to let it go” (p 77) and “On days when the mail plane does not come, the human atmosphere is notably calmer than it is now” (p 199).
Author fact: I already told you McPhee has a huge list of books he has written. And I already told you I have six of them on my Challenge list. I already reviewed “Crossing the Craton” a few years ago.
Book trivia: There are no photographs in Coming into the Country but there are several different helpful maps.
Nancy said: Nancy called Coming into the Country a “classic” (p 15).
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “All Set For Alaska” (p 15).
