Season of Mysteries, Witchery, and Magic

What a mild Fall we are having in Colorado. No snow yet, not even on Halloween. I've been slowly putting the garden to bed. Geraniums and begonias are now inside, but the pots of herbs are still on the deck and thriving.  

My Christmas cacti are doing their usual pre-Thanksgiving show, which I love, and I'm gearing up to start working on the Civil War quilt again, and toying with the idea of bringing out the puzzle table. The Winter lights are up on the outside of the house, but pumpkins and leaves are still the main decor inside. 

I do love the changing seasons. No, I didn't get to see the Northern Lights display last week. Did any of you?

Here's what I've been reading this season:

Run for the Hills, by Kevin Wilson - I finally got my turn for the audio from the library and was not disappointed. It didn't blow me away like Now is Not the Time to Panic, (the other Wilson book I've read and which I gave 5 stars), but it was still fresh and quirky and interesting and moving. Mid-way through, I started seeing it as a Wizard of Oz story, and lo, the narrator ended up spelling that out near the end--and here I thought I was being clever in making the connection. Anyway, I liked all of the weird characters, never understood the psychological misfires of the dad, but loved how the siblings ended up learning to become a family despite him.

Mysteries

Dance of Cranes, by Steve Burrows - #7 in the fabulous birder-murder series. Our UK police detective, Dominic Jejeune is back in his native Canada, implementing a plan to save his girlfriend from a heinous felon who is back on the loose and out for vengeance against those who incarcerated him. As always, I enjoyed the characters, setting, birding, and convoluted mystery immensely. At 392 pages, these are not short books, but such a pleasure to read. So much more than simple whodunits.

The Rising Tide, by Ann Cleeves - #10 in the Vera Stanhope series, and what a treat. Most of the action takes place on and around Lindisfarne, aka Holy Island, off the eastern edge of England, and the plot deals with old friends who reunite every five years to celebrate their decades-old friendship. Great plot, great setting, such fun to read.

Lindisfarne is in the top 10 places I hope to visit in the not-too-distant future, and I love reading about places I've been or plan to visit.

Mrs. Malory: Death of a Dean, by Hazel Holt - I am quickly becoming addicted to this series, and this is #7. I am not reading them in order, which is fine, but as I find them in used bookstores and my library. This time the story has definite Trollope overtones as the Dean of a cathedral is murdered, and Sheila Malory, as a friend of the family, is bent on finding the killer who just may be one of said family! Also, I good bit of it takes place in Stratford, so again, the setting was just marvelous, and again, is a place I've visited.

Bosch Books - I listened to two Harry Bosch detective novels, The Burning Room and The Crossing, #17 and #18 in the series -- both were excellent and read by Titus Welliver, the actor who plays Bosch in the TV series. Very meta but also very good, just cementing him in my brain as Harry.

Witchy Magic

Practical Magic, by Alice Hoffman - After reading and enjoying The Rules of Magic last year, I finally got around to reading Practical Magic. Halfway through I wasn't sure I was liking it, but I did end up enjoying it quite a bit. I know I should watch the movie, and I have read about how the book and movie differ, so fully prepared. And I have almost a year to watch the movie before the sequel, Practical Magic 2, comes out next September.

TV Stuff

We are rewatching the John Adams mini-series with Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney. Last episode is tonight, and then we move on to the new Ken Burns documentary on the American Revolution, which started on PBS last night.

We are also rewatching Never Have I Ever, which is a delightful three-season show with great dialogue and wonderful characters. It's a Mindy Kaling thing, and is funny, touching, and a good palate cleanser before going to bed.

Just finished the current season of The Great British Bakeoff last week and hoping they will have some holiday specials again this year. Every time I watch it, I am inspired to try some of the signature bakes, but then I have a cup of tea and wait for the urge to pass! Hope I am not spoiling this for anyone, but Jasmine is totally amazing!

Still watching the current season of The Amazing Race and making the Romanian mici that were featured in last week's episode for dinner tonight. I think risotto will go well with them.

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Happy Thanksgiving everyone, whether you celebrate or not! Thanksgiving is just such a perfect holiday. Giving thanks to the universe for the air we breathe just works.

Midsummer Roundup

It's that time again...snippets about books read that I haven't blogged about yet. Thank goodness I can refer to my GoodReads Read list!

The Rose Code, by Kate Quinn - excellent fictional companion to The Code Girls. The Code Girls (non-fiction) is about American WWII codebreakers and The Rose Code is about English ones, but the work and issues are similar. I loved the characters of The Rose Code, from socialite Osla who dated the future Duke of Edinburgh and who was based on the real-life Osla Benning to working girl Mab from London's East End to mousey Beth, and how they grew and developed and matured. The Bletchley Park setting was fascinating (now on my must-visit list) as was the process of code breaking. I loved reading about how the various departments contributed to the whole, mostly without the cogs in the machinery having an understanding of what role their cog played. Final note--the best part of the book is last third. Reads like a thriller!

Enigma, by Robert Harris - it feels like I'm doing a short course on WWII codebreaking, but midway through The Rose Code I decided to reread Enigma, about...you guessed it, WWII codebreaking at Bletchley Park. I know I read Enigma once upon a time, but it must've been when the kids were babies because I remembered none of it. Again, interesting setting and work and interesting characters, although this time 99% of the characters were male, so it was a different kind of story than that of The Rose Code.

A Cast of Falcons, by Steve Burrows - book 3 in the author's Birder Murder series and a terrific mystery that takes our hero, Detective Chief Inspector Dominic Jejune, from his beloved Saltmarsh in Norfork to Scotland and back with plenty of birding along the way. Dom's mysterious brother is a central figure in this book and is a charming addition. Hope we see more of him in future stories.

Booked to Die, by John Dunning - another reread, but I did remember bits and pieces of this one! Set in Denver, Cliff Janeway is a police detective with an eye and love for rare books. In the course of the mystery, he takes the leap from disgruntled employee to entreprenuer, opening his own rare book store in Denver's Book Row neighborhood. It was great fun reading about Denver, Evergreen, and even Longmont in a book-centric book. This is the first in the Cliff Janeway series, and I'm planning on reading the rest in the series. Cliff Janeway is very, very similar to Lovejoy, the British antiques dealer who stumbles upon murder after murder.

Faithful, by Alice Hoffman - I read this with the GoodReads group, True Book Talk, and it was absolutely excellent. Hoffman is a prolific author, and I've only read one other by her, The Museum of Extraordinary Things, which was okay but Faithful is far the superior book. Early on, it reminded me of The Horse Whisperer in that a young girl survives an accident that leaves her friend dead and must dig her way out of the grief and guilt that nearly buries her alive. I absolutely loved the main character, Shelby, and the NYC setting for most of the book. As much as anything else, this is a coming of age story in which Shelby matures as she rebuilds her life and constructs a family out of the strays (canine and human) that she rescues and that rescue her. I'm still not altogether sure how the title fits the story, but it has been interesting thinking about the word faithful and all that it implies when analyzed.

And now it's on to the dog days of summer, headed up to the mountains for a little break, but packing a case full of books to read while I enjoy the flowers and fruits of the season.

Hope you all stay well and remember to read on!

The Museum of Extraordinary Things

In keeping with my desire to read more new releases this year, I just finished listening to Alice Hoffman's The Museum of Extraordinary Things.  As with so much of my reading these days, with The Taste of Sorrow being the glaring exception, I have mixed feelings about this book.

On the one hand, the setting of the book is superb--Brooklyn, Coney Island, Manhattan in the early 1900s combines one of my favorite places with one of my favorite time periods--as is the premise.  The story revolves around a "museum" on Coney Island that purports to display "extraordinary things," mostly people born with deformities that are exploited (e.g., the hairy Wolfman, the armless Butterfly Girl, and the star of the show and daughter of the evil Professor who owns the museum, the Mermaid, Coralie).

Hoffman builds a story around Coralie that involves the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, a rebellious Jewish photographer, Eddie (aka Ezekiel Cohen), a murder mystery, a hermit who lives in a hut on the Hudson, labor rights, and the fire that destroyed Dreamland, one of Coney Island's many amusement parks.  It's actually a very good story, well-plotted, with interesting characters who have interesting, believable stories.

My main problem with the book--and don't get me wrong, I liked it, but didn't love it--lay in the way it was told.  Hoffman really jumped around a lot time-wise.  The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire took place on March 25, 1911 and the Dreamland Fire on May 26, 1911--essentially the major plot takes place between these two events, two months apart, and while it is imperative that the reader get the backstory on the two main characters, Coralie and Eddie, I didn't care for the way Hoffman interspersed backstory into the main story. I found this made the book hard to follow and unnecesssarily disjointed.

There was a lot to like about this book--the yearning for freedom, the discovery of the past, the love and respect for life in all its forms and permutations.  I just don't think Hoffman quite did justice to the story she created and the real events she documented.

Final note--if they ever make a movie of this book, Mark Knopfler's fabulous song, Devil Baby, should really be the theme song.



This book counts in my Historical Fiction Reading Challenge for 2014.