A Slowly Dying Cause

 

The Book:  Michael Lobb has been found dead, murdered in his Cornwall workshop. The suspects are many and DI Beatrice Hannaford is having trouble sorting things out until one of them confesses. But did that person actually do the crime? In the meantime, Detective Inspector  Thomas Lynley (also known as the Earl of Asherton, a title he seldom uses) has headed down to Cornwall to take care of some maintenance issues on his family estate and he brings along his partner, DS Havers, because she is on a week of forced bereavement leave (her mother has just died) and doesn't know what to do with herself. Also in the area is Daidre, who has recently told Lynley she doesn't want to see him anymore. Of course Lynley and Havers get caught up in solving the crime. This is a continuation of the DI Lynley series which now exceeds 20 novels. 

The Author: Elizabeth George

Genre: Mystery

Length: 640 pp (hardback)

One good thing:  It was fun to see Lynley's family home and see how they were struggling to pay for the upkeep of the Great House. It was especially fun to see Havers have to deal with being a guest in a Great House. It reminded me a lot of the YouTube channel "Mapperton Live" which is hosted by the Earl and Countess of Sandwich, who are very down to earth and up front about how expensive their house is to maintain. 

One not-so-great thing: About every third or fourth chapter there was a chapter written by the dead man. There was no explanation (at least until the end) as to why we are getting his point of view and how he was doing it beyond the grave. I found this annoying in the extreme and as the novel wore on I found myself gritting my teeth whenever I came to a "Michael" chapter. I also found him about as reliable as Humbert Humbert which was not a bad thing in Nabokov's novel but is not good in a mystery novel. 

Nancy Pearl's "Four Doorways":

    Story: This is a mystery novel so it is plot driven by its very nature. As I said above, I thought the "Michael" chapters were annoying and in my case they stopped the flow of the story. But others may not be bothered by them. On the whole I thought it was a well structured mystery and the perpetrator is not immediately guessable.

    Characters:  One of the main reasons to read a mystery series is because you are already invested in the characters and want to see more of them and find out how they are getting on. This story focused quite a bit on Daidre and her family but Lynley and Havers do have arcs for their characters.  

    Setting:  I love a novel set in Cornwall and as usual this made me want to go back. Having visited Cornwall, I thought that George captured it beautifully. 

    Writing:  I didn't care much for the structure of this book (especially the "Michael" chapters that were interspersed with no explanation). But George is more than a competent writer and she kept my interest by developing her characters well and keeping me guessing as to who the murderer was.  

Nonesuch

 

The Book:   It is 1939 and Iris Hawkins is a secretary at a financial firm in The City of London but she dreams of being a financial analyst, advising clients on their investments. This dream seems unlikely to be realized as there are no women in that position in London. A night out on the town brings her unexpectedly into what is supposed to be a one-night-stand  with Geoff, a young man who is working for the BBC in the new industry of television. Soon thereafter, WWII begins, Geoff enlists in the Army and Iris (with the rest of London) must deal with the terror of The Blitz. With all the young men away at war, the defense of the City is left in the hands of the elderly, the infirm and the women. This opens up new paths for women, including in the financial field. But Iris isn't only dealing with The Blitz, her night with Geoff unexpectedly draws her into a world of magic, other-worldly beings and bridges between past and present. The fascists in Britain want to take control of the bridges, go back in time and stop Britain from defying Hitler. Only Iris can stop them and save Britain. And while she is trying to save Britain she is also dealing with her feelings for Geoff and her avoidance of her mysterious past. 

The Author: Francis Spufford

Genre: Historical Fantasy

Length: 481pp (hardback)

One good thing:  In Iris, Spufford has created a character that is smart, mysterious, ambitious, driven, brave, not afraid of her own sexuality and completely human. Following her journey through the Blitz and at work and in her relationship with Geoff kept me turning the pages. 

One not-so-great thing:  Throughout the novel I kept wondering why Spufford felt it was necessary to include the fantasy elements (full disclosure, I'm a big reader of historical fiction and only occasionally read fantasy). The WWII plot and Iris's feelings for Geoff and her mysterious past and her ambition to rise at her firm, all of that seemed plenty for a great novel. The fantasy elements in some ways just seemed an unnecessary distraction. Until the very end, when it turns out that they are necessary to lead us into a sequel. I would have been fine with a stand-alone novel and no fantasy. BUT, the inclusion of the fantasy elements did not hinder my enjoyment of the novel or make me not recommend it. 

Nancy Pearl's "Four Doorways":

    Story: Spufford has created a page turning story for Iris where the reader keeps wondering how she will deal with the ever deepening crisis of the Blitz as well as her job and her relationship with Geoff, not to mention how she will save Britain from the Nazis. I felt  that the fantasy part of the story meandered a little bit. It would go away for a while and then come back. But because Iris' personal story was compelling the novel never flagged for me. And if you like to read fantasy your feelings about those parts of the story may differ from mine.

    Characters:  While this is a plot driven novel, Spufford has created a character in Iris with a lot of depth and a believable arc. The other characters are also well-drawn and have their own arcs. I particularly found the arc of Iris' boss very interesting and believable. In addition to the human characters there are the other-worldly characters, which are also very well created with just enough detail to make you imagine them but not too much detail (which would have destroyed, perhaps, their otherworldliness). Some of them are also (intentionally) humorous. If you are a character-driven reader (as I am) I think you would enjoy this novel.

    Setting:  There are two settings in this novel. The first, the real London immediately before and then during WWII, is created so well that I could often smell the smoke and dust, and feel the grit, from the aftermath of the bombings. The other setting is the fantasy setting of the land of the bridges which was VERY confusing to me (a reader who has trouble seeing things that are described in novels).  Possibly there was too much detail for me, but your mileage may vary on that. 

    Writing: As with all of his other novels that I have read, I found Spufford's writing to be excellent. He has a way with a perfectly ordinary phrase that doesn't seem at all special and yet completely sets the scene or describes the character.  My only objection in this novel is his descriptions of the fantasy bridges - but again that may be because I am a reader who has trouble picturing things that don't look like anything in the real world (one reason I will watch SciFi movies but don't read many SciFi books.)

The Care and Management of Lies

The Book: Kezia and Thea are old school friends who find they have less in common now that they are adults. Thea is a passionate suffragette. Kezia becomes engaged to marry Tom, Thea's brother, and seems bound for a traditional life on a farm. Then World War I intervenes and everyone is forced into a role they did not expect.  he world is in turmoil and the role of women in society is changing.   

The Author: Jacqueline Winspear 

Genre: Historical fiction

Length: 260 pp on e-reader (ipad mini)

One good thing:  The title of the novel comes from the fact that none of the characters are entirely truthful with each other about their lives, especially during the War. Each wants to shield the other from any unnecessary pain.  

One not-so-great thing:  The letters that Kezia sends to Tom during the War are filled with long detailed descriptions (lies) about the dinners she is making "for him" while he is gone so that he can pretend to be home with her, eating a good meal. This worked for a while but got old very soon. 

Nancy Pearl's "Four Doorways":

    Story:  This is not a page turner. I purchased this book at least three years ago and it sat in my Nook library for at least a year before I began it. It took me two years to finish because the story just dragged along. Winspear was constrained by real life events, I understood, but I was just not invested enough in the story or the characters and would put it down for months at a time. It ended up being the book that I would read when I was stuck somewhere with nothing to read. I think the only reason I kept reading was because I am a sucker for WWI novels and I like Winspear's Mazie Dobbs books. 

    Characters:  What happens to the characters seems very realistic and I did not dislike the characters. But they seemed more like sketches of characters than fully fleshed characters. 

    Setting:  I think Winspear does do a good job of evoking rural Britain just before and during the first years of the War.  And while she doesn't spend a lot of time in France with the troops, that part is evoked well. 

    Writing:  The writing is very accessible but there is nothing remarkable about it. 

    

    

February 2026 Reading

What a strange month of reading this has been: lots of audiobooks (which is odd for me) and fewer "hard" books.  This was also the month of the Winter Olympics and I found myself engrossed by them. What a nice break from reality; but that left less time for reading. 

The reason for all the audiobooks was that I spent the first week of this month traveling, including a 12 hour car ride to the place I was going and a 12 hour car ride back. So, I downloaded  audiobooks for the drive. We listened to two of them during the drives and I finished the others once I got home. All the audiobooks I finished were memoirs read by their authors. I generally like memoirs read by their authors because is sounds as if the author is telling you, the reader, the story of their life directly. 

These are the books I finished in February. 

Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker

This is the audiobook I listened to on my way down to the Gulf Coast. It was not what I expected, which is on me and not on the book. A memoir by the actress Mary-Louise Parker told as a series of letters to men (some real, some fictional), it was, interestingly, not much about  her career as an actress. She might mention that she was in NY to do a play but that was about it. It was almost completely about her personal life including her kids, her health and her love life. She has a very dry sense of humor and we chuckled along with some of her stories. On the whole, not the best memoir I've ever read but entertaining enough.

What I Ate in One Year by Stanley Tucci

This was the audiobook I listened to on the way home. This is essentially a diary that Stanley Tucci kept over a year journaling the food he made for himself and/or his family and what he ate (whether made at home or in a restaurant). He includes recipes (you need to like pasta). Along the way he talks about certain projects he was working on beginning with the filming of Conclave. He also talks about the death of his first wife, which is sad. He also talks about the celebrities he had dinner with throughout the year. It took me a long while to figure out that his second wife, Felicity, is the sister of actress Emily Blunt (maybe he said that early on and I just missed it).  He can be very funny and I enjoyed listening although I did get a bit tired of hearing about pasta. And I don't recommend you listen to it if you are hungry. But I think listening to this book made me appreciate the little spots he did for NBC during the Olympics about Italian food in the Milan area. 

Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks

The third audiobook memoir that I checked out of the library for my trip turned out to be something I didn't want to listen to in the car. Read by the author, it was a very quiet book and I needed something that would keep me awake. But I did listen when I arrived home. Geraldine Brooks (the author of Horse, among other novels) was married for 35 years to Tony Horowitz, a Pulitzer prize-winning author. In 2019, while he was on a book tour, he dropped dead suddenly while he was walking down a street in Washington DC.  This memoir is the story of Brooks' grief journey.  A few years after his death she retreated to Flinders Island in Australia (she is Australian) to consider what happened and work through her grief. The memoir is partly a memoir of her time on the island and partly a memoir of the time immediately following his death. It is not a long book but I found myself very affected at points. (I'm glad I didn't listen to it while driving.) There were also parts where I found myself as angry as the author - for instance when she discovered that the family's health insurance had been canceled the day after Tony's death without any notice to her. Or when she had to apply for all new credit cards because she had never thought to establish credit under her own name prior to his death. And especially when she received the call from the hospital unexpectedly telling her that her husband had died but the doctor was finishing her shift and couldn't take the time to answer questions. I hope the administration at GW Hospital read this and made some changes. 

The Book of I by David Grieg

If you have ever wanted to read a comic novel about slaughter by Vikings then this is the book for you. The island of Iona was often a target of Vikings and the novel begins in the year 825 A.D. with the landing of a Viking hoard and the slaughter of all but two of the residents - a monk who hid in a latrine and the wife of the smith who made such good mead from local honey that she is spared. The Vikings also leave behind one of their own, believing him to be dead. This is the story of the following year in the life of the three on the island. Although this is a very short novel, each of the characters has an arc. It examines issues of faith, love, and loyalty, all the while in language that is humorous. I have no idea if the end of the novel is historically accurate but it was satisfying. 

The Burning Grounds by Abir Mukherjee

The next installment of the Wyndham and Banerjee series set in Calcutta in the 1920's, this novel is set a few years after the end of the last novel. Banerjee has returned from a stint in Europe but does not want to go back into the police force, he is working for Indian independence. Wyndham is still clean from his drug addiction but he drinks too much.  And he has lost the faith of the police force so he hasn't been assigned any good murders to investigate in a long time. The two come together again when Banerjee's cousin disappears at the same time that a rich local man is murdered. I always enjoy this series and you could read this without reading the previous novels, but of course it would be better if you started at the beginning. 

Helm by Sarah Hall

This is an historical novel about the only wind in the British Isles that has a name: Held.  Held is a character in the novel. There are also many other characters who observe Held through the ages.  In my Quick Take I said that if you like short stories you may like this, as this novel is more like a collection of related short stories but not told linearly.  For me, that slowed down the narrative arc of the whole novel. Despite that, I did like this novel and was very impressed by what Hall accomplished in anthropomorphizing Held. 

The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

The last of the audiobook memoirs I got from the library. Levy is a staff writer for The New Yorker and she writes with The New Yorker style. You know.  Start the essay with something really personal that will grab the reader, then go into whatever it is you are intending to write about and at the end go back to the personal story. I don't have a problem with this form of essay - I am a subscriber to The New Yorker. But in my opinion this style works better for essays than for books.  And probably works better when read on the page rather than heard in audiobook form. This memoir starts with the description of a horrible moment in Levy's life without any explanation about how she got there and then goes back to the beginning of her life. This memoir did not grab me. It's not that Levy didn't have an interesting life; it was as interesting as any other woman who wants a career and a marital life and a baby.  Her's might even be slightly more interesting because she was in a same sex marriage that had issues with fidelity and heavy drinking. I usually like audiobook memoirs read by the author because it usually sounds as if the author is telling YOU the story personally. I think the problem with this audiobook is that Levy wasn't great at doing the reading and it often sounded like she was angry when I think it would have worked better if she had sounded ironic. Maybe I would have liked it more if I had read a hard copy of the book. 

The Hideaway by Nikki Allen

Full disclosure, Nikki Allen is married to a distant cousin of mine and I met her one time a number of years ago.

This thriller is part of the oevre of "country house murders" where a group of strangers are stranded together in a house where they can't escape and someone is a murderer. But in this novel, the "country house' is a house in Costa Rica and the group of five strangers end up lost in the rain forest. The action of the novel is related in third person omniscient, with the chapters alternating between the points of view of the different characters. (Regular readers will know this is not my favorite structure for a novel, but it didn't bother me too much here.)  Each character has come to the retreat in Costa Rica because they are dealing with personal issues (traumas?) and they want to get their life together and come back changed. In real life Nikki has worked as a therapist and she is very good at representing the various issues that each character is dealing with. In fact, the strength of this novel is the development of the characters. As far as plot, this is of course a thriller/mystery and it's pretty good but I thought it lost a little bit of momentum in the later chapters where there was a lot of narrative and less action (the opposite of what you would expect - although in the old murder mysteries the detective DID do a lot of narrative at the end explaining what happened). I thought it was an enjoyable book, the kind to  take on vacation. As a first novel it was promising and I do look forward to her future books. 

Helm

 

The Book: In the history of the world, certain winds get names. Think of the Santa Ana winds in North America. In Great Britain, only one wind has a name:  Held. This is the story of Held, as Held observes the formation of the world and the coming of peoples. This is also the story of the people who lived with Held including the neolithic people who considered Held a god, a medieval "wizard" who considered Held a demon, a Victorian scientist who wanted to study Held, a 20th century farmer's daughter who considered Held her friend, up to and  including a scientist studying plastic particles in the air. 

The Author: Sarah Hall

Genre: Historical Fiction

Length: 507 pp on ipad mini

One good thing:  Hall creates Held as an actual character. Held is curious, mischievous, egocentric, ferocious, and in some cases as close to loving as a wind can be. Hall uses third person omniscient with Held (as with all the characters) but the narrator, when talking about Held, has a real sense of humor. I sometimes thought that the narrator of the chapters about Held could actually be Held referring to Heldself in the third person. 

One not-so-great thing: There are many characters and their stories are strung out throughout the novel forcing the reader, with each chapter, to try to remember who the character was and where we were in their story. Although there is narrative flow I found my attention wandering at about the 75% point in the novel and didn't come back to it for a few days. 

Nancy Pearl's "Four Doorways":

    Story:  There is a narrative arc for each of the characters (except possibly Held) but I would not call this a narrative driven novel. 

    Characters:  There are many characters and they are well drawn.  Each has a story arc. In fact the story arc of each character could be a single short story. If you like short stories you may like this. (I don't and found myself wanting more definitive endings for each character.)

    Setting: Hall does a great job in setting the scene in Cumbria and specifically the Eden Valley. If a novel with a great setting makes you want to see the location, you will be booking plane tickets immediately after finishing the novel. 

    Writing:  Hall's characterization of Held is the glue that holds this novel together. There were laugh out loud moments for me in reading about Held. The novel is structured as one of those novels that goes back and forth between characters but here the characters don't really have anything to do with each other. Most characters are unaware of the characters that came in time before them. It is their fascination with Held that ties them together.  In some ways this is really a book of interconnected short stories but Hall split up the stories into chapters so that no story is told linearly. If you like short stories this may not bother you. I don't particularly like short stories so I kept expecting something else that would hold the characters together or at least more definitive ends of their stories. 

Walter Scott Prize Longlist 2026

The longlist for the 2026 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction has been released.  Here is the list:

VENETIAN VESPERS John Banville (Faber & Faber)

THE TWO ROBERTS Damian Barr (Canongate)

EDEN’S SHORE Oisín Fagan (John Murray Press)

HELM Sarah Hall (Faber & Faber)

THE PRETENDER Jo Harkin (Bloomsbury)

BOUNDARY WATERS Tristan Hughes (Parthian Books)

THE MATCHBOX GIRL Alice Jolly (Bloomsbury)

EDENGLASSIE Melissa Lucashenko (Oneworld Publications)

BENBECULA Graeme Macrae Burnet (Polygon)

ONCE THE DEED IS DONE Rachel Seiffert (Virago)

THE ARTIST Lucy Steeds (John Murray Press)

SEASCRAPER Benjamin Wood (Viking)

I have already read Seascraper (which I liked very much) and Venetian Vespers (which I disliked).  I have Helm and The Pretender and intend to read them soon. The one that I'm most excited to read is Boundary Waters because it about the fur trade in the early 1800's. 

January 2026 Reading

It is always good to start the year with books you enjoy and so in December I decided to save for January a number of books that I wanted to read. It worked. I started the year off on a good reading foot.  

I finished my read of the 2025 Booker Prize short listed novels. I read a book of poetry that I enjoyed (which was a relief after not finding enjoyable poetry last year). Surprisingly I also read three nonfiction books this month, all memoirs. That puts me half way to my goal of reading 6 nonfiction books this year. 

I also carried through on my resolution to write more, individually, about books I read. I didn't do a "Short Take" for each of the books I read but I have provided a link for where I did.  

These are the books I finished in January. 

The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovitz

The last of the 2025 Booker short listed books that I read, I enjoyed this one.  After learning of his wife's affair Tom Layward makes a decision. He will leave her but only after their youngest child leaves for college. Years later the time has come. Tom considers his options as he drives his daughter to college in Pittsburgh. Once in Pittsburgh he decides to continue the drive cross country to Los Angeles to see his son, stopping along the way to visit old friends. He is in ill health, suffering from what his doctor has said was "long COVID". Told in the first person, we are in Tom's head the entire novel. This is a character driven novel that focuses mostly on the one character.  My Short Take is here. Recommended.

My Beloved: A Mitford Novel by Jan Karon

Yes, yes, yes. Jan Karon's Mitford series is kind of hokey but that's ok. Sometimes in dark times you need to read the heartwarming hokey books. How great that she published her 15th Mitford book now. This one takes place at Christmas time and I read it during the 12 days of Christmas. My Short Take is here. Recommended only if you have read and are a fan of the other Mitford novels. 

All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley

A memoir of loss, grief, joy and finding calmness through surrounding yourself with beauty. In his twenties Patrick Bringley quit his job at the New Yorker after his brother died and took a job as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he worked for ten years. This memoir is a love letter to the Met but also a story of how he dealt with his grief by surrounding himself with beauty and stillness.  Another book to read during hard times. My Short Take is here. Highly recommended.

The Snow Lies Deep by Paula Munier

The latest in Paula Munier's Mercy Carr mystery series, this one takes place at Christmas time and where better to celebrate Christmas than in Vermont's Green Mountains? But someone is killing Santas, which puts a crimp in the local holiday festival. Former Army MP Mercy and her husband, game warden Troy Warner, just want to celebrate their daughter Felicity's first Christmas in peace. Instead they are called on to help solve the mystery with their dogs Elvis, a retired bomb sniffing Malinois, and Susie Bear, a search and rescue Newfoundland. In addition, they have to deal with both sets of grandparents who have their own ideas about how to celebrate the holidays. I really like this series because the author clearly understands dogs and the dogs are integral to solving the mysteries. But the mysteries are also usually good and Munier does a good job developing her characters. And you can't beat the beautiful location. This one had a fairly convoluted plot but it all came together at the end. You can read this as a stand alone mystery but as always I recommend you start at the beginning of the series.

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

I know that some people dislike when an Ian McEwan novel has a twist that reminds the reader that s/he is reading fiction. But I don't mind it. This novel is set in a dystopian future in the year 2119, and the humanities are still under siege at the university level. Thomas Metcalfe specializes in the literature of the early years of the 21st century, specifically  the poetry of the poet Francis Bundy (a sort of lesser Seamus Heaney). Bundy is reputed to have written a long poem for his wife Vivien and given the only copy to her. Thomas is determined to find it even though the geography of the world has changed immensely. Through the archive of emails, text messages and social media posts, he traces Vivien's days, especially the date of her birthday when the poem was given to her, and draws what conclusions he can. Through this research he creates a narrative that seems to fit the facts. But does it?  There are always things about people that remain unknown because neither the person nor anyone in the person's life ever refers to it in any kind of writing. The novel is divided into two parts:  the search and Vivien's actual story. Truthfully, I thought the second part, the shorter of the two, dragged a bit. Too much narrative, not enough action. But on the whole I enjoyed this novel.  My Short Take is here.  Recommended with reservations.

Doggerel by Reginald Dwayne Betts

After a disappointing year with poetry in 2025 I was glad to start off 2026 with a collection I enjoyed. I admit I would have understood it better if I had read a bit of the poet's biography before finishing the collection. When he was 16, Betts, otherwise an honors student, committed armed carjacking and was sentenced to 9 years in prison as an adult. While in prison he began to write poetry and after his release and receiving his GED he went to graduate school and received a number of degrees. It would have been very helpful to have known that in prison he received the name Shahid because through the collection he refers to Shahid. This collection examines his life both in prison and after prison using primarily (but not exclusively) his relationship with dogs. Sometimes as a person puts their lives together only their dog is a witness. Sometimes their dog reminds them to live in the here and now. Sometimes other people's dogs allow connection with other humans. This is not necessarily a light hearted collection and, as with most modern poetry, it is very personal and therefore not always understandable to a third person (my major complaint about modern poetry). It is a tribute to man's best friend although in the acknowledgements he thanks "Fiesty, the cat, a rescue, that circles my legs whenever I sit near her, & purrs that doggerel is kind of incomplete without a cat." Recommended.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

This memoir has been on my TBR list since it was released more than 10 years ago. Since there is a feature film of the book being released this month it seemed to be the right time to pick it up. Helen Macdonald tries to deal with her grief over the sudden death of her father by retreating from the world and raising and training a goshawk she names Mabel. Helen was an experienced falconer but goshawks are supposed to be difficult to train. Over the first year with Mabel she learns as much about herself as she learns about Mabel. The memoir is interspersed with memories of her father (who seemed to have been a lovely man). She also becomes somewhat obsessed with a memoir by T.H. White in which he describes how he (badly) tried to train a goshawk. Although filled with information about birds of prey and the woods around Cambridge, this actually reads more like a novel than the usual memoir. Macdonald seamlessly integrates facts into her narrative so that it doesn't feel like a digression but an essential part of the narrative. My Short Take is here. Highly recommended.

Honey, Baby, Mine by Laura Dern and Diane Ladd

I listened to this joint memoir on audiobook and I'm really glad I did. The book arose out of a series of walks that Laura Dern forced her mother to do when her mother was diagnosed with a life threatening illness. The doctor said that increasing her lung capacity by walking would be good for Diane. To distract her mom during the walks Laura asked her questions. That led to Diane asking Laura questions. The book is a transcript of the conversations (clearly also edited) but in the audiobook each of Laura and Diane read their own "parts" and, being actresses, that makes the whole book sound like it is taking place in real time. There is a lot of interesting information about working in Hollywood but the personal parts (especially when they disagree over their memories) are equally entertaining.  My Short Take is here. Recommended.

The Last Children of Mill Creek by Vivian Gibson

Six months after she retired, Vivian Gibson joined a creative writing class and began writing about her childhood. That turned into this memoir of her life growing up as a Black child in the 1950's in segregated St. Louis. Vivian lived in a segregated area called the Mill Creek Valley, a section of the city containing over 5,000 buildings and inhabited by 20,000 citizens, 95% of them black. My book group picked it for next month's discussion and the Missouri History Museum currently has an exhibit called Mill Creek: Black Metropolis which runs until July 12.  The Mill Creek Valley neighborhood was demolished in 1959 for "urban renewal". Almost no trace of it remains today.  Vivian remembers the community that lived there and the details of her life. This book was not only informative but nostalgic for me. Even though Vivian is black and I am white and I did not grow up in Mill Creek I remember many of the things she remembers including the Charlotte Peters show on television that my mom watched at noon every day, going to Soulard Market for fresh fruit and vegetables, making cornbread (with my grandma) and being allowed to play in other kids' backyards but being told not to go in their houses. I did not, however, grow up in a house infested with rats. I enjoyed this book. I'm not sure it would have the same effect on someone who wasn't from St. Louis. 

Moby Dick or The Whale by Herman Melville

This was a month long read-along with my usual BlueSky reading group. I think most of the people in the group (at least the ones that were posting the most often) had read it before but I hadn't. You might expect more "action" in a book about a whaling ship searching for and trying to kill the Great White Whale but most of the book is more like a treatise on whales, whaling ships and whalers. Fortunately Melville writes with humor, and his descriptions are vivid and every time I would think that I was bored out of my mind he would pop in with some quip that made me laugh. Also, the sections on whales and whaling included most of the "deep thoughts" that Melville had (or seemed to have). While I'm glad I read this book (finally) and I appreciated the writing, it was my least favorite book that I read this month. I don't need a novel to be plot-heavy (this isn't) but I do like my novels to be character-driven and through most of this novel (really, until the last part) it isn't. Even though the plot (such as it is) is driven by Ahab's obsessive search for the White Whale, Ahab himself isn't really much in the novel until toward the end. I will say that Melville created a good sense of place - being on a whaleship hunting for and processing whales - which is usually a plus for me but I found that I really wasn't that interested in whaling ships and whales.  My Short Take is here.

In some ways it is a shame I chose to read "Moby Dick" and "H is for Hawk" in the same month. "H is for Hawk" could be read as a treatise on hawks and hawking but Macdonald's digressions into hawks and hawking were integrated into the greater narrative and were necessary for her character arc (even though it was a memoir and not a novel). On the other hand Melville, who was ostensibly writing a novel, did not integrate his information about whales and whaling into his narrative but put them into (many) separate chapters. This was, I think, partly because of the age in which the novel was written but also the digressions may have been his way of showing how time slowly passed on a whaling ship where you might have nothing to do but reflect on life. Either way, I have to say that in my opinion those sections went on much too long.