Book Review; Library of Souls

Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Though it had about four different denouments at the end, I'm glad the real ending is the one that sticks. We have time

And though I was, at best, a lukewarm fan of the series, the whole thing was made worth my while with this beautiful little snippet of writing;

"She had a heart the size of France, and the lucky few whom she loved with it were loved with every square inch--but its size made it dangerous, too. If she let it feel everything, she'd be wrecked. So she had to tame it, shush it, shut it up. Float the worst pains off to an island that was quickly filling with them, where she would go and live one day."


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Book Review: A Caribbean Mystery

A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Miss Marple is IN this one! Like an actual character! Not an afterthought!

AND she is confused! Not sure of herself! Not the magical all-seeing crone she usually is!

AND I figured it out! I feel smart!


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Book Review; Hollow City

Hollow City by Ransom Riggs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I really don't like creepy vintage photos. They give me an unexplainable whiff of anxiety and disquiet.

So I shouldn't like these books.

But I do. Kind of.

The first one I read without knowing that it was partly inspired by the photos contained therein. Though Riggs has said that, this time, he wrote the plot and then chose the photos, the book still felt mechanized, as if forced to rally around the collection of pictorial oddities.

Or maybe it was that it was just a publisher-forced sequel (why do publishers make everything trilogies now?) that made it feel a little forced and mechanical.

Regardless, I enjoyed it enough to want to read the third one. So off I go.



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Book Review: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As I was reading, I thought to myself, "If these creepy pictures weren't in here, I would be enjoying this book so much more!"

Then I read the interview with the author that is in the back of the edition I read and discovered that the creepy pictures were actually the inspiration for the whole story. So I guess I'm ok with the creepy pictures, since it inspired a story I enjoyed reading (but, really, I'm not ok with them). But, also, the story isn't nearly as creepy as the pictures make you think it's going to be which, for me, was a good thing.

What I enjoyed most about this book was the whole-book nod to legacy and how tragedy can indeed taint, or inspire, the generations that come after you.

"I thought about how my great-grandparents had starved to death. I thought about their wasted bodies being fed to incinerators because people they didn't know hated them. I thought about how the children who lived in this house had been burned up and blown apart because a pilot who didn't care pushed a button. I thought about how my grandfather's family had been taken from him, and how because of that my dad grew up feeling like he didn't have a dad, and now I had acute stress nightmares and was sitting alone in a falling-down house and crying hot, stupid tears all over my shirt. All because of a seventy-year-old hurt that had somehow been passed down to me like a poisonous heirloom, and monsters I couldn't fight because they were all dead, beyond punishing or any kind of reckoning."


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Book Review: The Moving Finger

The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Miss Marple doesn't even show up until page 175! How can you call this a Miss Marple Mystery, I ask you?

But the narrator, Jerry Burton and his sister Joanna are charming lead characters in a mystery that didn't really intrigue me or entice me much at all.

Jerry has been in a horrible flying accident and is sent to the country to slow down and recover. When he first arrives, he gets a letter. He turns it over "in the idle way one does when time goes slowly and every event must be spun out to its full extent."

Yes, life was slower in 1943, when this book was originally published. Consider this; "The human mind prefers to be spoon-fed with the thoughts of others, but deprived of such nourishment it will, reluctantly, begin to think for itself--and such thinking, remember, is original thinking and may have valuable results." One imagines if staying away from being spoon-fed was difficult in a small village in 1943, it is nearly impossible now with talking heads and social media screaming at us all the time.

At one point, a character says, "God doesn't really need to punish us, Miss Barton. We're so very busy punishing ourselves," which was about the only allusion to the fact that this was written during WWII.

And, finally, describing a character as speaking "with that maddeningly complacent confidence in herself which was her chief characteristic," Christie finally gave me the vocabulary to describe a type of person who I find extraordinarily tedious and annoying. I could never quite give that feeling that certain people give me, that annoyance and eye-roll-inducing tedium, accurate description. Until now.


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Book Review: Murder at the Vicarage

Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the first full-length Marple mystery, but she's almost a secondary character. The narrator is the local Vicar, who initially judges Miss Marple to be just like the other old biddies in the village, who would fit very nicely into the "Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little" scene in The Music Man. The Vicar thinks about one of them, "It is difficult with Miss Hartnell to know where narrative ends and vituperation begins."

But Miss Marple, while an inveterate gossip, also is the "type to notice things." So wisdom and truth come because she putters in her garden not only because she loves flowers but also loves watching the comings and goings in the neighborhood. Because she watches birds through binoculars and, if she also sees the activities of her friends and neighbors, so be it. What makes her charming, though, is that she is aware of her predilection for over-reaching inquisitiveness. It's her hobby. And she makes no apologies.

And thank goodness. Because these bumbling inspectors and constables would never have figured it out without her help.

"I wish you'd solve the case, Miss Marple, like you did the way Miss Wetherby's gill of pickled shrimps disappeared. And all because it reminded you of something quite different about a sack of coals."

"You're laughing, my dear," said Miss Marple. "But, after all, that is a very sound way of arriving at the truth. It's really what people call intuition and make such a fuss about. Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can't do that, because it has had so little experience. But a grown-up person knows the word because he's seen it often before."

Later, Miss Marple says, "I remember a saying of my Great Aunt Fanny's. I was sixteen at the time and thought it particularly foolish. She used to say, 'The young people think the old people are fools--but the old people know the young people are fools!"


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Book Review: The Basque History of the World

The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Ugh.

Couldn't get through this one, even though I have a hearty desire to know more about Basques and Spanish/French history.

Tedious.

Before I quit reading, right in the middle of a convoluted section that started several pages earlier declaring it would explain the Basque beret but getting bogged down in so much poorly-told history that I threw the book down in disgust, I did learn a couple of things.

Basques have the highest percentage of Rh negative blood in the world. Other places originally occupied by Cro-Magnon man, like the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and the Canary Islands, also have high percentages of Rh negative.

The Basque language, Euskera, is not related to any other language. It has no Indo-European roots. At all. Which is remarkable because once those Indo-Europeans started spreading, they left virtually no European language untouched.

The only defeat Charlemagne ever suffered was at the hands of the Basques in 778. The story is told in the Song of Roland.

I wish I could hang in and keep learning. But I just can't read this darn book any more.



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