Reading Notes - February 2020

This month's reading notes!  A mixed bag, as usual.

Finished

Finished

Finished

Three of Alan Bradley's Flavia De Luce mysteries this month.  I've heard several people now mention this series as their 'fluffy' or 'light' reading, and I'd just like to know why that is.  I mean, certainly, this isn't Moby Dick or something,  but gosh mysteries seem to get the short end of the stick, don't they?  Anyway, Flavia is 12ish, she's brilliant,  the stories are generally well thought out without a lot of gratuitous violence or anything, they are a little. ..atmospheric, perhaps.   And I like them.  Although I will say the second title up there is the first de Luce mystery where I totally knew what was happening from very early on, and the third in the list was a very lackluster mystery altogether.  I hope this isn't an indication that the author is slipping.

Finished 

I am probably the last person I know to read this.  For a while, The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society was everywhere.  And I can remember a friend rapsodizing about it.  But, well, it looked hokey to me so I just didn't read it.  I was wrong.   Imagine that.  It's like Helene Hanff became a British war correspondent!  A bit of romance,  a bit of humanity,  a 'brave European ladies against the Nazis' book that doesn't venture into alllll the tropes you know so well.  Very much one for the keep shelf.

In progress 

I like travel memoirs!  I like Agatha Christie!  I like trains!  And I like this!  So often these following -in-the-footsteps -of-the-greats kind of travelogues fall too far to either side - all about the initial traveler,  or all about the current traveler,  but this one balanced well between the two.  I never felt like this was a thinly veiled treatise on the history of the Orient Express under the guise of a Christie biography,  and I never thought 'I cannot read one more paragraph about Agatha's failed marriage'.  A good balance, is what I'm saying.  Also, I love it when books intersect in interesting ways with other books, which is part of my fascination with the novels of Barbara Pym.  But I especially love oddities of marginalia and on the inside back cover of this book a previous owner had scribbled:

Minaret of Samaria
P.325
P.100
P.117
Ziggurot
Nebuchanezzar
Babylon

I mean.  I love it.  So of course I stopped and looked it up and one of the page references mentions...Paul Theroux.   Everyone knows how I feel about Whiny Theroux.   I mean Paul.  Cough.  But honestly I was just thinking that this cover looked like Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar.  It just made me happy.  Worlds colliding!

Finished

Billed as a 'coming-of-age' memoir,  which I find annoying.  Because, ugh, coming of age implies the recognition of impending adulthood, a certain embracing of the future, a series of changes in maturity,  perhaps,  but not...not drinking in Australia,  really.  It was a fluffy travel memoir of a very privileged, twenty-one year old, middle class, debt-free college graduate who has always been a people pleaser and decides to strike out on her own and explore the world.  Which she does by waitressing jobs for a few months in a few countries,  and drinking with other young, aimless backpackers.  I mean, there was a very funny bit about a friend's incredibly strange Polish boyfriend.  And there wasn't a lot of pointless sex.  So it had that going for it.  By the end, though, she's just annoying - borrowing money from her mother because she doesn't have enough to keep travelling, and then spending it on yet more tours and wine and what have you.  Dismissing all the concerns of people who love her.  Literally dismissing her parents over and over again, while still needing them for even the most basic of adult tasks, like going to a doctor!  Gah, I'm too old for this crap.

Finished 

I picked this short little novel up on a whim at a second hand shop and it was a tiny, perfect gem of fiction.  I got so engrossed in the story of Lydia, the sister of American impressionist artist Mary Cassatt, that I finished it on the way home.  My edition was slightly different from the picture, and was so well bound it really added to the luxery of the story.  Every character, every scene, every sentence, was so expertly crafted it seemed like the story sprang fully formed from the mind of a poet.

In Progress  

I'm too sick to adequately discuss my thoughts about this Ferguson book.  So far, two things come to mind.

1) He is really unhappy about being called a gaijin.
2) I think that I've finally figured out the problem with this author.   He continues talking about every topic for just a few too many paragraphs.