Readers and Reading discussion

Please share what you read in April with us. A bit about the book is always appreciated.

I read three traditional books:
1. Ashton, Jeff with Pulitzer, Lisa—Imperfect Justice—Prosecuting Casey Anthony; finished 4/2/12; non-fiction; rating 8. Ashton shared detailed background of the Florida case against Casey Anthony whose daughter Caylee went missing in June 2008 and was later found dead. Casey was tried for the murder and found not guilty on July 5, 2011. Ashton was one of the prosecuting attorneys and was frustrated with the jury decision.
2. George, Alex—A Good American; finished 4/5/12; fiction; rating 10. The narrator tells the story of his grandparents’ immigration from Hanover, Germany to Beatrice, Missouri including their courtship and the opening in Missouri of a tavern which stays in the family for generations and the lives of his parents including his life. The book takes an unexpected twist at the end when the narrator learns that his biological roots differ from what he thought they were and the impact this has on him: “We cannot exist without our histories; they are what define us. But my history was a lie. All of a sudden, I was rootless, cut adrift from everything that I thought I knew, an immigrant in a land where I did not belong.” The author’s notes also address the exploration of reasons for immigration to America.
3. Duggar, Michelle and Jim Bob—A Love That Multiplies; finished 4/13/12; non-fiction; rating 8. Loving story of parents of 19 children sharing their experience and pointers for living a Christian life with a large family. Although nice to know how perfect things have worked for them, it is also frustrating that they have been blessed with so many children while others are unable to have any.

I listened to four audio books:
1. Christie, Agatha—The Mysterious Affair at Styles—read by Judi Pennington; finished 4/9/12; audio (first book purchased through iTunes); fiction; rating 7. Methodical resolution by Inspector Poirot of murder by poison of wealthy Emily Inglethorp.
2. McBride, James—The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother—read by Andre Braugher and Laine Kazan; finished 4/17/12; audio (first book downloaded by OverDrive from library); non-fiction; rating 10. Journalist and musician McBride prodded until he finally learned more about his beloved mother, Ruth McBride Jordan. She was the white daughter of a Jewish rabbi and wife who had fled Poland pogroms in 1921 and settled in Suffolk, Virginia. Ruth abandoned her cruel father and the rest of the family, moved to New York City and married her beloved black husband Dennis McBride and as a widow remarried having 12 children in all and was widowed again. She told her children that God is the color of water and that life’s blessings and values are not based on race. In spite of the poverty and racism, she valued education and all of her children graduated from college and became successful professionally.
3. Lewis, C.S—Mere Christianity—read by Geoffrey Howard; finished 4/23/12; non-fiction; rating 10. Thorough explanation of the existence of God and the Christian religion and what it means to be a Christian. This was an author highly recommended by a close friend. I think that reading rather than listening to the book may help in the comprehension of it.
4. Connelly, Michael—The Drop—read by Len Cariou; finished 4/30/12; fiction; audio; rating 10. Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch is asked by the councilman to investigate his son’s death to determine if it was suicide or murder which results in discoveries of political scandal and the detective is also investigating a cold case murder in which the DNA results become suspicious because the results of the identity of blood found on the victim was only 8 years old at the time of the murder, but when pursued it becomes a major murder case.

While I did have one clunker I had a pretty good month overall. Here are my April reads:

Top Reads

Deception
Denise Mina
Usually I try to steer clear of any books with the words serial killer in the description but I am very glad I made an exception for this audio. Great psychological suspense with memorable characters this was extremely well written and the narration by Richard Matthews, with some help from Donada Peters, was top notch.

The Lions of al-Rassan
Guy Gavriel Kay
Sweeping fantasy with political intrigue, religious conflicts, romance, and larger than life characters that totally engrossed me from the first page.

Good Reads

The Last Great Game: Duke vs. Kentucky and the 2.1 Seconds That Changed Basketball
Gene Wojciechowski
The author, a veteran sportswriter who has covered just about every major sporting event, makes the case that the Duke vs. Kentucky regional final in 1992 was the greatest college basketball game ever and does a great job of showing the journey that led both teams to the historic match-up.

Certain Prey
John Sandford
This is fast becoming one of my favorite series on audio. I really liked that Lucas was a bit edgier in this entry and the villains were very well drawn. Listened to the audio version read by Richard Ferrone who did his usual stellar job.

Night Judgement at Sinos
Jack Higgins
A fast moving adventure featuring a former Irish commando in World War 2 turned salvage diver off the Egyptian coast.

OK Read

Murder In High Place
R.B. Dominic
Congressman Ben Safford gets caught up in an international incident that leads to murder when one of his constituents, a young woman who tends to act before she thinks, gets herself kicked out of a South American country. Not nearly as good as the first book in the series.

Not so Good

Free Agent: A Novel
Jeremy Duns
After a pretty interesting start this book just completely unraveled for me. One of those stories were the action is propelled by the characters making stupid choices. Not even the narration by Gerard Doyle could save it.

Shirley, your post reminded me of how much I enjoyed James McBride's THE COLOR OF WATER several years ago. A highly recommended book.

Carolyn

t I read in April 2012

4912. Voyagers of the Titanic Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From, by Richard Davenport-Hines (read 1 Apr 2012) This being the month of the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic I thought it appropriate that, even though on 9 Apr 1946 I read The Loss of the SS Titanic by Lawrence Beesley and on 16 Mar 1961 I read A Night to Remember by Walter Lord, I should read something about it again. So I read this book by a British historian and it is quite a book. The first section tells of the ship, its owners, builders, and crew. The second section tells of the people on the ship when it struck the iceberg on 15 April 1912, and the final section tells of the hugely exciting collision and its aftermath. The first two sections were not too attention-holding, but the third section made up for them, and I found it full of drama and tremendous reading. One feels as if one is on the ship as it is struck and its passengers come to realize that it will sink. It is of course tragic that so many more could have been saved if the lifeboats available had at least been filled. I found this book excellent reading and rate it highly.

4913. The Great Silence Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age, by Juliet Nicolson (read 8 Apr 2012) This is a 2009 book by the granddaughter of Harold Nicolson (whose The Age of Reason I read 27 April 1966 and whose King George the Fifth I read 16 Dec 1976 and whose The Congress of Vienna I read 4 March 1990) and the daughter of Nigel Nicolson (whose Portrait of a Marriage I read 26 Apr 1974). This book is a social history or social portrait of Britain from 11 Nov 1918 till 11 Nov 1920. It is full of stunning exposition of so much of Britain's angst over the horrible losses of World War One, including the rise of the two minute silence at 11 AM each Nov 11 (on which I read The Silence of Memory by Adrian Gregory on 28 June 2004) and culminating in the placing of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey on Nov 11, 1920. I admit that, while reading the lucid account was always engaging, I sometimes wondered what was the point of the account, especially when some very trivial matter was recounted. But at the end one looks back on the book with real satisfaction--it is a stunning picture of the two years when Britain was trying to recover from the Great War. At the end of the book I felt much of the book as a tour de force of a time full of interest for anyone such as me, intensely interested as I have always been in the Great War which ended almost ten years before my birth.

4914. The Associate, by John Grisham (read 11 Apr 2012) This is Grisham's 2009 book and the 21st book of his I've read. It is unimaginative and often boring. Kyle, editor in chief of the Yale Law Review, is implicated in a college sex scandal, there is a video, and Kyle is blackmailed into going to work at the biggest law firm in the world where he is to steal information in regard to a big case. This scenario enables Grisham to deprecate big law firms and their billing practices and set out how associates lead such an awful life and law clients are cheated by the fees charged.
It is all typical Grisham, but this story is at lots of times really ploddingly boring as well as being totally unrealistic, I think. The ending has some excitement but is extremely weak. But at least Kyle has a future in law--not like some of Grisham's central characters. This book is the poorest Grisham book I've read.

4915. Royko A Life in Print, by F. Richard Ciccone (read 16 Apr 2012) This is a 2001 biography of Mike Royko (born 19 Sept 1932 in Chicago, died 29 Apr 1997 in Chicago) who I remember reading some columns of his without a great interest. But the book proved to be nearly always a good book and I could see why a newsman would think it worth reading. Royko was a dominating figure in Chicago and wrote a column first for the Chicago Daily News, then for the Chicago Sun-Times, and at the end for the Chicago Tribune. His views were often OK, but as a man he was a mean person often, who drank too much and could be cruel in his personal life. So I could not admire him but the book is nearly always good to read, though a bit too long. Some of Royko's interests--fishing, drinking, golf, etc.--were given more attention than their intrinsic interest deserved. Royko was a bit like Mencken (whose diary I read 11 Sept 2008) but Royko's politics were considerably better than Mencken's. But Royko was self-centered, often cruel, and egotistical. I don't think he would be fun to have known--but he would be interesting.

4916. Somewhere Towards the End, by Diana Athill (read 18 Apr 2012) (National Book Critics Circle Autobiography award for 2009) (Costa Biography award for 2008)
I admit I read this only because of the prizes it won. The author wrote it when she was 89--she had been an editor for a publisher in London till she was 75. In the first part of the book she tells of her promiscuous sexual life--she never married but lived with a succession of men, including some married to other women. This really turned me off, as did her atheism. Finally, about half way through the little book (only 183 pages) she talked about other things, rather felicitously, including things she did in her eighties. But I cannot say the book caught me up in any way.

4917. Chesty The Story of Lieutenant General Lewis B. Puller, USMC, by LtCol Jon T. Hoffman, USMCR (read 26 Apr 2012) I slogged my way through this 2001 biography of Puller (the father of the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning biography of 1992, and a famous Marine general). The book is written by a Marine reserve officer and so is pretty steeped in pro-Marine words, though the author does show some of his subject's flaws. But in general the book is full of favorable things said about Chesty, who was born 26 June 1898, joined the Marines in 1918, spent lime in Haiti and Nicaragua (the book has lots of boring detail on his time there) and was at Guadalcanal, New Britain (just before my brother Roman got there), Pelelui (the account of the fearsome fighting there is the best part of the book) and Korea. He fiercely objected to being retired for medical reasons in 1954, and the book gives this undue attention--it seemed to me he should have been more graceful about his physical condition. He was, I thought, not very concerned about casualties--he seemed to think lots of killed and wounded showed one was a good leader of men. He was popular, apparently, with his men but I did not think I would have wanted to be in his outfit. After he was retired he sounded like a right-wing Republican and made me glad he was not running our foreign policy. There was good stuff in the book but it was not always fun reading. But he and his men had tough times often.

Schmerguls, do you intend to read Grisham's (non legal) book, Calico Joe? I found it very disappointing - it could have been a short story.

He has another novel being published in October. The Racketeer.

Scmerguls: I like your review of the Titanic book. I am reading this currently(sometimes). I have just finished the part on the first class passengers. That was very interesting. I have read more on Philadelphian,Jack Thayer and his sad story in The Philadelphia Inquirer. I look forward to the last part of the book.

The Lifeboat

I read this is 2 sittings so I gave it a 5/5. Interesting story about how people survive in extreme circumstances...