who likes audiobooks?

An interesting article on the increase in people listening to audiobooks.  I always have an audiobook on in the car, when I'm folding laundry, when I'm playing mindless games on my phone...
https://bookriot.com/2019/04/18/audiobook-listenership-in-2019/

what to do for your 101st birthday

The Accidental Further Adventures of the 100-Year-Old Man by Jonas Jonasson
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Review: In The 100-Year-Old-Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, Jonas Jonasson, gave us Allan Karlsson, a man who seems, Forrest Gump-like, to be present at most major historical events.  Allan finds himself in a lot more sticky situations though, but continually gets out of them through sheer luck and his own lack of a filter when talking to world leaders.  He relates the story of his adventures as he bumbles through yet another misadventure as he turns 100 years old.  The humor in this first book is wry and subtle, and it was a real pleasure to read.

The next installment of Allan's life, as he turns 101, is a bit less enjoyable.  I can imagine that the humor from the first book would be hard to sustain, especially as we must largely confine ourselves to Allan's present circumstances, as Allan encounters Donald Trump, Kim Jong-Un, and Angela Merkel, among others officials.  Unfortunately, although Allan himself seems little changed, his companions now seem to find him more annoying than anything else, and that rubbed me the wrong way.  When did he suddenly become a troublesome old man?  Maybe it was just the little black tablet that he insists on consulting all the time...

Still, for all that this installment wasn't quite as good as the first one, it's very enjoyable, if for no other reason that Allan's continued lack of filter as he deals with current world leaders.

conversations in a hayloft

Women Talking by Miriam Toews
Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Review: A small group of women gather to decide what to do after it is revealed that they, along with most other women and girls in their community, have been repeatedly drugged and raped by the men of their small Mennonite colony.  Will they forgive the men, stay and fight, or leave the colony?  Their discussions range over what it means to have the freedom to choose, whether one can be a pacifist if one harbors a desire a kill, how best to protect one's children, and many more philosophical topics.

It was somewhat jarring that a book that seemed as though it was to be about female empowerment was told from a man's perspective, but it worked.  He is privy to the women talking as an amanuensis; none of the women can read or write, but want their deliberations preserved for posterity.  He's an outsider in the colony, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, but his outsider status allows the women to trust him for this task, and makes him appropriately sensitive to them, in a way that no other man of their acquaintance could, or would, be.

And perhaps this is a realistic notion of what could happen when such an insulated group of people is threatened in this way.  But I found it troubling to read about a group of women facing such a threat to themselves and their children and spending two days sitting in a hayloft debating the finer points of free will, rather than making actual plans.  The lack of action in the books gives it a claustrophobic feel, which seems appropriate under the circumstances, and that feeling of clautrophobia helps keep the pressure on throughout the narrative, having the effect of sucking the reader through the story, rather in the manner of a pneumatic tube.

So what will the women decide to do, and will they be able to follow through on that decision?  That is what they are talking about, and the question of whether they will be able to sieze their freedom, no matter what they decide, will leave the reader thinking long after the last page.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

more than just a sequel

Daughter of Moloka'i by Alan Brennert
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical fiction
Review: Alan Brennert doesn't pull his punches when it comes to some of the more shameful aspects of history.  In Moloka'i he explored the segregation of Hansen's Disease patients in Hawai'i, through the eyes of Rachel Kalama who was removed from her family and sent to the leper colony on Moloka'i at a young age.  Now, in Daughter of Moloka'i, Brennert tells the story of Ruth, the daughter Rachel was forced to give up for adoption.  And his unstinting gaze falls on the racism against Japanese immigrants and the Japanese internment camps of WWII.

As always, Brennert's gaze falls beyond the immediate drama to give us the full and rich sweep of a life.  Ruth's life is fully imagined, from her time in an orphanage and her dreams of finding a family to her happiness with her adopted parents and brothers to the hardships they faced as farmers in rural California to their internment and beyond.  Once Rachel is re-introduced into the narrative, it is fascinating to watch Brennert tell the same story, even many of the exact same scenes, but told from Ruth's perspective.  Reading the books back-to-back turns them into a wonderfully faceted multi-generational story that is a pleasure to read.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

all the synonyms for debauchery

Cape May by Chip Cheek
Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical fiction
Review: In most books, one expects there to be some character growth.  In this book, the characters just get more and more debauched.  Our main characters, Henry and Effie, are newlyweds from Georgia on their honeymoon in Cape May, NJ.  It's September, so the summer resort community is largely empty, but soon Henry and Effie find another young couple in a house down the street.  But their new friends are neither as young nor as innocent Henry and Effie, and soon they find themselves going inexorably down the path to dissipation and lasciviousness until they both doubt whether their marriage will outlast the honeymoon.  Cheek saves most of his answers for the last chapter of the book, where the reader can trace the effects of their licentiousness.

Ultimately, this book is very readable (if you're in the mood for reading about a lot of sex) and the action (pun intended) is fairly continuous, making it feel as though things are moving along at a good pace.  The descriptions of the town and the ocean are evocative (as are the descriptions of the sex) and the characters are believable, if not very likable.  But there's not much movement in this book, either geographical or metaphysical, giving the book a somewhat stagnant feel.

Cheek shows his prowess (I just can't help myself) much more in the last chapter than in all the preceding ones, when he focuses on the emotions of a relationship more than the sex.  He shows definite promise as a novelist (certainly anyone who can write a good sex scene is a promising novelist) but hopefully his future books will focus more on the growth of his characters than on their sex lives.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

looking back

The Red Address Book by Sofia Lundberg
Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical fiction
Review: Doris Alm has lived a long and eventful life, from a poor childhood in Sweden, to modeling in Paris, to being a maid and companion to a frustrated artist.  Doris has loved, and lost, and would probably agree with Tennyson that that's better than the alternative.  But now she is concerned that when she dies, everything that has made up her life will die with her.  So she determines to write about the people she knew and the things she did.  She uses the red address book that her father gave her as a young girl as a prompt, as she looks through the pages and sees that nearly all of the names are crossed out and have the notation, "dead" written beside them.  The story alternates between these reflections and her current life, home-bound, with her only connection to the outside world being the aides who come in to help her each day and her weekly Skype sessions with her only family, her great-niece Jenny who lives in San Francisco.

This story is lovely, heartbreaking, tragic, and hopeful, all at the same time.  The writing is evocative, both the past and present sections, and beautifully translated by Alice Menzies.  Although it's slow to get into, Doris's story will sweep the reader along after the first few (short) sections.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

just keep telling the story

The Quintland Sisters by Shelley Wood
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical fiction
Review: The first 80% of this book is really quite good.  It details the better part of the first five years of the real-life Dionne Quintuplets, through the eyes of their fictional nurse, Emma Trimpany.  Emma is 17 in 1934 when she assists the midwife at the quints' birth, and has led a fairly sheltered life until then.  As the Depression deepens and the situation is Germany gets worse and worse, Emma's focus remains resolutely on her charges, staying with them even as many other caretakers come and go.  Even naive Emma is shaken by the conflicts between the quints' medical caretakers and their parents, and she can't entirely ignore hints that some people who claim to care for the quints are really there to exploit them, a list that starts with their parents and primary doctor and goes all the way up to the Canadian government.  Told through Emma's journals, and letters she receives, as well as newspaper articles that, we are told in the author's interview, are almost entirely unedited contemporaneous sources (and Wood carefully delineates where any edits have occurred), we get a good feel for the situation.

Throughout the book we read letters sent to Emma from her would-be beau, Lewis, and at the end of the book, Wood makes the unfortunate decision to give us all of Emma's letters in return, as a way of answering a lot of the questions that have come up in the narrative.  It amounts to an info-dump, at the end of  a well-told story.  I think Emma's letters were supposed to be the "big reveal," answering some questions about what was really going on, but I wish Wood had told her story more organically, giving us Emma's and Lewis's letters together and letting the tale unfold as it happened.  The ending is satisfying, in its way, but seems very ragged compared to the rest of the book.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.