I Spy

Sorry that I'm late in posting this review. I sort of lost track of time.

I recently read Winter of the World, a very long and detailed account of World War II written as a novel by Ken Follett. It was an extremely good book, but quite dark and detailed in its examination of this yucky war.

But because of my recent reading of this novel, I was somewhat apprehensive about reading Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, though I was intrigued by its description, and the fact that it was the first in a series. My apprehension was proven unnecessary.

Mr. Churchill’s Secretary isn’t a comedy; however, it is a novel about one of the more interesting facets of the war, and told through fairly light-hearted characters. I had read and heard before about the fact that spies abounded during WWII, and in fact there were posters posted during this period reminding people that any Tom, Dick, or Harriet could be a spy. But this was sort of an easier demonstration of this phenomenon.

Jen texted me one night and said, “I like this book. There are spies EVERYWHERE.” And so it was. I found myself trying to figure out who was the spy and who wasn’t. I was convinced throughout that John was going to end up being the spy, and was relieved when that wasn’t so. I also suspected Chuck and the twins. Must say I never suspected Paige.

I thought this book definitely had first-bookitis. Some of the plot themes were kind of predictable. For example, the three friends – Paige, Sarah, and Maggie – were blonde, brunette, and redhead – kind of like a Barbie Doll collection. Still, I gave Macneal the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps she was going for cheesy, sort of like a Dashiell Hammett mystery. She even featured martinis prominently in the book. And I loved all of her descriptions of clothes and hairstyles. It gave me a strong sense of time and place.

But, I found it confusing that Maggie got her job as Churchill’s secretary because Mrs. Tinsley got sick. Then, Mrs. Tinsley never came back?????? She was mentioned at the end of the book, but why didn’t she get her job back as his secretary?

I liked the presentation of Maggie as an independent-thinking woman who was ahead of the game when it came to women’s liberation.

  

It was somewhat unbelieveable to me that Maggie’s family and friends kept the fact that her father was alive a secret for so long. Why? Reality suspension I guess.

I also really liked the use of real characters mixed with fictional characters. I of course liked Churchill, but I also enjoyed the references to some of our most highly-respected people and their acceptance of Nazism, at least initially (e.g., Joe Kennedy). It’s interesting to note that there are two sides to most stories. While there is nothing good to say about the Nazis as they played out, it is interesting to be reminded about the economic conditions that made Hitler even remotely make sense to anyone.

Finally, I think it gave a good perspective about what war looks like from different perspectives. The Irish characters were only concerned about Ireland, and so they supported the Nazis as a way of getting to the British, for example. War stinks, but everyone has a different perspective about it. Still, I can’t imagine living the way people had to during the war, never knowing when the bombs were going to drop.

A good read overall.

Fall Book Selections

I am offering three book choices for our Fall (pre-Christmas) book:

In Need of a Good Wife, by Kelly O'Connor McNees
Violets of March, by Sarah Jio
Mr. Churchill's Secretary, by Susan Elia MacNeal

Email your vote to kzmclain@comcast.net by Friday, November 3.

Family Love ala Brothers K

The next time I read a 600-some page book, it better have been written by Tolstoy.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate long books. In fact, there is something wholly satisfying about sitting down with a good epic novel that has a lot of pages.  I enjoyed reading, for example, Fall of Giants, by Ken Follett.

Understand also that I didn’t hate this book. In fact, at times I totally loved this book. I just don’t think it needed to be 689 pages long. I started out absolutely enchanted; I ended up skimming some of the last chapters (or whatever you would call them) and being totally and entirely annoyed at all of the characters at some time or another.

Well, I don’t think that’s exactly true. I loved the father all the way through the book. I loved his devotion to his children, and his willingness to take on his rather difficult wife at times if he felt that they were being treated unfairly by her.

The first part of the book, as I said before, enthralled me. I loved the entire scene where the narrator and Papa are watching the game. I really enjoyed the sort of stream of consciousness from the narrator, who is fairly young at this point. Through his thought process, you learn about the characters. I thought that was a clever way for the author to help us to learn about the family. And the language was so dead on. The author NAILED the way a 10- or 12-year-old speaks. For example, take this excerpt when he is talking about how much he dislikes Roger Maris because of his boring style of play: I usually like watching home runs, but there is something about Roger Maris that makes even his homers boring ……Everett says he’s from Mars, which is why he’s named Maris, so maybe it’s a racial thing. Whatever it is, it worries me a little, because one of the things Jesus used to say was to love everybody the same whether they’re geeks, Yanks, Wops, Micks, Meredith Starrs or what have you, and when I look at Roger Maris I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to pull it off. I loved those lines because it displays the way a kid’s mind works, particularly a kid’s confusion about Christianity, so accurately.

I liked the succinct way that the author would get a point across – e.g. “yak butter” (remember that Mama was the first one to talk about yak butter when she was convinced she had experienced another life as a Tibetan) became synonymous with odd things that make total sense once you look at it.  Likewise, the disabled girl (Vera) who talked with a strong lisp because of a cleft palate, became the poster child for doing the right thing even if you felt uncomfortable doing it.

Surprisingly, I enjoyed all of the baseball scenes, and I’m not even a baseball fan. But I do love to see people (real or fictitious) who just love what they do, and I think that baseball often replicates life. Ups, downs, ins and outs.

Real life families are not like the families we saw on television in the 1960s. Instead, we often experience a variety of feelings about our family members at different times. The brothers and sisters in this book were extremely different from one another, and could be annoying or wonderful, depending on the situation. But they were all loyal to one another, no matter what. Oddly, even Mama was loyal, though she was often distracted by her unrelenting alliance to her religion.

The story of Irwin was very sad. There were a number of sad situations in this book, but that was, to me, the saddest. Yet, his story ended in a positive way. In fact, the book ended positively (except, of course, for the death of Papa). And again, I thought the ending was realistic. Not perfect results for everyone, just as in real life, but general happiness and love, which is what I think this book was all about.

Still, I think it could have been done in fewer pages!

End of the Summer Book Choices

The following book ideas are from Andrea Dunne, who posts comments as "Anonymous."

Paris in Love: A Memoir, by Eloisa James
Brothers K, by David James Duncan
Clara and Mr. Tiffany, by Susan Vreeland
City of Thieves, by David Benioff
Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

A couple of these books, most notably Brothers K, are particularly long. If a lengthy book is chosen, the length of time to read will be increased. So don't let length deter you from making the choice.

Please email your choice to kzmclain@comcast.net by Tuesday, July 31.

Thanks Andrea for your great choices.

The Doc is In...

Doc, by Mary Doria Russell, got my vote for this month’s book choice.  But, once I began to read it, I thought I might have made a mistake.  After about 20 pages, I checked to make sure it was fiction, because it was reading like a not-very-engaging biography.  I was afraid I wouldn’t finish it in time.  It’s never a good sign when I check to see how many pages I have left in a book!

But, I ended up enjoying it quite a bit. First of all, some little things made it readable.  I thought the chapter names were clever, although I don’t know what most of them mean in card-playing lingo, so if they were supposed to convey something, that didn’t work for me.  But, I always like it when authors name their chapters.  I also liked that she listed the characters at the beginning, and especially that she identified the few characters who weren’t real.  I love historical fiction, but I do like to know which characters and events are made up.

Mostly, I liked the rather unusual way she portrayed all these infamous characters.  Wyatt’s bad teeth had a profound effect on his personality, and I loved that Doc took care of that problem for him.  It’s such a mundane and ordinary dilemma for the larger-than-life characters.  In fact, I liked Doc the best when he was being a dentist.  He seemed committed to his profession as a way of helping people, not making money.  In fact, as Kate often pointed out, his dental work didn’t come close to making a living for them.  It made me feel sad for him that his health forced him to live in a place where he wasn’t likely to be able to practice the profession he loved.  Toward the end, his health was so frail that he couldn’t have practiced the profession in any case.

And Kate…quite an unlikeable character for me.  She had some issues for sure.  She was a different and unpleasant person when she was drunk, which was a lot of the time.  I had no problem with her being a prostitute; women in those days truly didn’t have many options.  But, she was nasty to Doc and just about everyone else.  On the other hand, she was there for Doc in his darkest hours, so I have to give her credit for that.

One thing that disappointed me was that Russell never showed the reader the shoot-out at the OK Corral.  I guess I was supposed to remember what happened there, but I don’t.  Since she referred to it throughout the novel, I assumed we’d experience it, and I wish she had put it in.  Now I feel like I have to do a little research and find out what happened.

Finally, I have to talk about the author’s digressions, two of which stood out to me.  At one point, she said that had James not talked Kate into going back to Doc, then everything would have turned out differently.  Doc would have married Belle, they would have been happy with many children, and even Belle’s parents would have fallen back in love because they were grandparents.  Wow!   That seems a bit extreme.

But, I loved the section where she described Fr. Alexander’s experience with the Indians, when he was taking the place of the beloved Fr. Paul.  Fr. Alex realizes that he’s sort of like Titus was to St. Paul—always second best because the man he was replacing was so loved and respected.  Once he found his peace with that, he was a better missionary to the Indians.  Random, but I liked it.

What did you like about the book?  Did any characters or events surprise you?  What do you think of Mary Russell as a story-teller? 

Howdy Pardners

The group selected Doc, A Novel, by Mary Doria Russell as our book choice. Discussion will begin July 15. Enjoy your early summer.

First Summer Reading Choices

Our book selections for our first book of the summer are provided by Jen. Your choices are:


Doc, by Mary Doria Russell


Bones that Float: A Story of Adopting Cambodia, by Kari Grady Grossman

A Dog's Purpose, by W. Bruce Cameron

Oxygen, A Novel, by Carol Cassella


Please send your vote to me at kzmclain@comcast.net by Sunday, June 3.

"I Want To Be a Surgeon"

This initial review of My Name is Mary Sutter is from Bec:

My Name is Mary Sutter was not my first choice of the books suggested, but I did think it sounded interesting and I looked forward to reading it. I’m glad it was chosen, because I really enjoyed it.

One reason I didn’t pick it was that I’ve read quite a few books set during the Civil War. That period in American history isn’t one I’m especially interested in, and I wasn’t sure whether I would find it easy to engage in the story. But, this was a different perspective of that war, in several ways.

For one thing, I liked that much of it took place right where I live, in Northern Virginia and Washington. Manassas, Fairfax Court House, Centerville, etc., are all places I’ve visited or driven past many times, and, of course I’m familiar with many of the spots mentioned in D.C. I’m always fascinated with what a small and un-lovely place Washington was at that time. So, the setting helped me get interested, because I learned a lot about what was going on in the city. I had no idea, for example, that many of the government buildings and hotels were turned into medical facilities.

I also enjoyed the focus on medicine and especially on the fact that the protagonist was a woman trying to establish herself in the medical field. I wasn’t surprised at the brutal descriptions of the wounds and sicknesses caused by the war. I was surprised that there were doctors and other medical people trying to do research to find out how some of the problems could be lessened.

In other words, I liked the book because it wasn’t what I expected from a “Civil War Novel.”

Mary Sutter was a good character. I could identify with her frustration at being shut out from a profession that she knew she would love and could excel in. Her persistence was almost comical, but it’s probably the only way she could have broken into that good old boys’ club. It was nice, but probably not realistic, that some of the doctors accepted her pretty quickly. On the other hand, considering the conditions, perhaps their desperation would have helped Mary break down the barriers. I found the depiction of Dorothea Dix very surprising! She’s always painted as someone quite saintly, but she certainly had some character defects in this book.

The character that bothered me the most was Mary’s mother. So many times in the book she didn’t give Mary the support she needed. Her attitude was that Mary was very strong, so she could take care of herself. Mary was strong, but everyone needs support, and Mary didn’t always get it from her mother. When Mary failed to save Jenny, she felt a lot of guilt. The fact that her mother not only didn’t help her get over it, but actually made Mary feel even guiltier was, for me, unforgiveable.

Finally, I liked the book because it was so well written. I read it quickly, and, in fact, had trouble putting it down. It wasn’t a page-turner in the usual sense, but I cared a lot about Mary and always wanted to find out how her life would turn out. And, can I just say that I like the happy ending! Good for you, Mary!

I would recommend this book to just about anyone. The female protagonist, the setting, and the medical plot thread all set it apart from most other books written about the Civil War period.

My question to everyone is this: What, if anything, surprised you?

Back to the Civil War

Votes are in, and we selected My Name is Mary Sutter: A Novel, by Robin Oliveira. Discussion will begin Friday, May 11.

Back to Book Club

Ethereal Reader has taken a brief respite, but it is back! It appears only a couple of members read the last book, so it is with great hope that more will participate in this month's selection and subsequent discussion. If you can think of ways to liven us up, please let ER know.

Thanks to Andrea, here are our book choices for April/May:

The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larsen
What Alice Forgot, by Liane Moriarty
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safra Foer
My Name is Mary Sutter, by Robin Oliveira

Please email your vote to kzmclain@comcast.net by Tuesday, April 3.

Another World

The thing I like most about reading is that a good book can take you away to a different place and time. Teresa Mendoza -- the main character of The Queen of the South -- described it really appropriately. She said that you are changed somewhat every time you read a good book.

I read a lot, and I can really become absorbed in a good book. It can take me away; however, generally, the books I read take me to someplace that I can imagine being and with people I can imagine being with. The Queen of the South was altogether different.

This was a world I can’t imagine even existing, though I am certain it does. When you stop to think about it, every character in this book was despicable, caught up in a life that was cold and heartless and full of hate and drugs and remorseless killing. It is from this world, and from this cast of characters, that we had to choose our heroes and our villains.

It was really a very weird experience for me, but I became thoroughly caught up in Teresa’s story. I can’t say I ever became fond of her, but I was absorbed in her life. She was a girl with no family, save the mobsters and narcos with whom she lived. Patty became her sister. Oleg Yasikov became her father.

If I could put her in a different life, I might have liked her. I certainly admired her keen intelligence and the way she made something of herself – more than something, actually (keeping in mind the world in which she made something of herself). And, within her own sordid little world, she had scruples. She didn’t kill Pote Galvez for example, because he had been loyal (in his own weird way) to her boyfriend and hadn’t raped her. In fact, she made him her bodyguard, and he became utterly loyal to her. But imagine being able to have someone killed without even giving it a second thought. I don’t mean having the ability to do it. I mean having a conscience that would allow it.

The ending took me by surprise. At the beginning, I had theorized that Teresa had looked at the list that her boyfriend Guero Davila had told her to give to his godfather. But since it never really came up again (until the end), I sort of forgot about it. What I didn’t forget about, however, was my confusion about the telephone call that begins the entire book. I wondered all along who would have made that phone call. If that phone rang, it meant Guero was dead. But if his enemies killed him, then who would have called her? Voila! The answer became clear when it was revealed that Guero was an agent for the United States.

Keeping in mind that Teresa lived in an evil world, I must say nevertheless that I loved reading about her rich existence. I loved hearing about the clothes she wore and the house in which she lived, and the people with whom she surrounded herself. It’s hard to imagine having that much money.

I found Patty to be a very sad character. She loved Teresa so much that I think she really gave everything to her so that she could be happy. Then Patty herself, because she knew that Teresa would never love her back in the same way, tried to find happiness through cocaine and the fast life. I was very afraid that Teresa was going to have her killed, and I’m glad that didn’t happen, though her demise was sad enough.

Patty and Teresa. Aren’t those funny names for women in this particular world? They sound like 1950s cheerleaders.

I really liked the Russian mobster Yasikov. Again, funny to say that, since he also lived within this sordid world – killing people without a second thought. But he was so kind to Teresa.

When I started the book, I wasn’t sure I was going to like it. The author used a lot of words. But I found his writing caught me hook, line, and sinker into the world of the drug cartels. The first few sentences of the book created perhaps my favorite beginning of any book I have read. It didn’t take long before I was caught up in this book, despite its darkness.

I also thought that the transition back and forth from third person (the story of Teresa) and first person (the journalist’s gathering of facts) would be confusing. However, I found the transitions to be smooth, and provided a way for the journalist to tell the story of Teresa without having witnessed it himself. His interviewees told the story.

I will definitely read something else by Perez-Reverte. Perhaps the book The Club Dumas that I have had on my shelf for years..

February Book Choice

We will spend the next month or so in the drug world of Mexico, since we chose Queen of the South, by Arturo Perez-Reverte. I'm guessing this to be a rather long book, so lets give ourselves six weeks, beginning discussion March 5. 

Enjoy your February.

January/February book vote

I took a trip to Costco and found lots of interesting books to read, so I'm sorry, but we have six from which to choose:

Carry Yourself Back to Me, by Deborah Reed; I know nothing about this author, but it sounded interesting to me. What the heck. I like Florida and country music (or as my husband would say, I like both kinds of music -- country and western).

Queen of the South, by Arturo Perez-Reverte; I'm not sure I've ever read this author, though I have Club Dumas at home on my to-be-read shelf. Sounds like a big epic thriller, which always appeasl to me. Totally different from the above choice.

The Dispatcher, by Ryan David Jahn; How can you resist a "bullet-strewn cross country chase," especially when it's on I-10, which many of us have traveled. I can't help it. I love mysteries. And bullets. And cross country chases.

The Bungalow, by Sarah Jio; I seriously second-guessed this one because Kristin Hannah was one of the authors they quote as liking the book. Not a Kristin Hannah fan. Still, Bora-Bora and all.....

The Well and the Mine, by Gin Phillips; I have offered this book before and I will continue to offer it until you all give in! I am a sucker for books that take place in the south, though this sounds admittedly rather dark.

Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky; random, but perhaps interesting.

Let's have our votes into me (kzmclain@comcast.net) by Monday, January 23.

Holiday Treats

After seemingly months of rather depressing books, this month we were given the option to read a Christmas book of our choice out of the hundreds out there. My personal favorite was Poirot's Christmas, a mystery novel by Agatha Christie featuring my favorite detective of all time, Hercule Poirot. But, while it was a predictably wonderful mystery story, it wasn't much of a Christmas story (though there was a funny part where Poirot exchanged a Christmas gift with Chief Inspector Japp).

So for my choice, I selected 1225 Christmas Tree Lane, by Debbie Macomber. I had never read anything by this prolific author, so I enjoyed the book from many standpoints. I found her to be a good storyteller, though the plot was fairly predictable.

Apparently this book was the last in a series that took place in a small Washington state town. The main character, in an earlier book, had moved from California after divorcing her husband whom she still loved. She bought a Christmas tree farm, convenient for this Christmas novel. The gist of the story was the woman's two daughters using trickery to reunite their parents, knowing that they were still in love. Sigh. I wish life was that easy.

There were very many subplots that conveniently wrapped up stories that had taken place in earlier novels in the series. Needless to say, every story ended happily. Divorced people reconciled, barren women were able to conceive, widows and widowers found each other and were going to live happily ever after. The story even featured puppies, rescued by the main character and all given away to happy homes. Heck, some families even took two! Why not? It's Christmas.

I don't mean to sound cynical. It was exactly what I needed to read during the busy and joyful season of Christmas.

I'm not sure, however, that Macomber's writing appealed to me enough to pick up another book. Life is too short and there are too many other books to read. Next Christmas, however, I look forward to reading a light-hearted novel with a happy ending.