Three daughters of Eve, by Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak, born in Istanbul and currently living in London, is a popular Turkish author who writes in both her native Turkish and English.  Lacking any mention of a translator, I assume this recent book has been written in English or translated from the Turkish by Shafak.  It is fluent and vernacular.  Three young Muslim women meet as students at Oxford.  The main character, Peri, is from an Istanbul family.  Her father, an incipient alcoholic, is secular while her mother has become an increasingly  devout believer over the years.  Mona, Egyptian-American, is observant and wears a headscarf, but does not think that this defines her as a person.  Shirin, a bit older than the others, has escaped from Iran and has no use for religion of any kind.  She does, however, urge both the new girls to try to get accepted into a seminar lead by the charismatic and controversial young don, A. Z. Azur.  The course title?  “God.”  As the novel opens, it is about fifteen years after the young women met.  Peri, on her way to an opulent dinner party at a mansion owned by a successful, and possibly corrupt, businessman, has her purse stolen out of the backseat while her car is stuck in the typical Istanbul traffic.  Pursuing the robber on foot, she is able to retrieve the stolen purse, but as she does, an old polaroid photo of the three women and Azur falls out, reminding her of their time together and the events that lead to their falling out.  The rest of the book alternates between the events in the early 2000s at Oxford and present-day Turkey, with all its internal contradictions between the former secular democracy and increasingly strong-man theocracy it is becoming.  In many ways, Peri’s childhood experiences torn between her parents beliefs and disbeliefs is an echo of the current political situation there.  Despite many pages of lengthy religious debates, the novel moves at break-neck speed to a surprising ending.  367 pp. 

The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance by Anders Rydell, 352 pages.
Rydell has written an illuminating and meticulously researched account of the concentrated and deliberate efforts by several groups of Nazi functionaries to acquire, steal, seize, and collect all the available literature by and about Jews, Freemasons, witches, socialists, and communists throughout the countries they controlled, invaded or occupied. Through these seizures the Nazis engaged in a systematic effort (or several competing systematic efforts) to rewrite history, deleting accounts of people they loathed and seeking to insert instead their own warped vision.
Groups like the RHSA (SS -Reichssicherheitshauptamt, a part of Heinrich Himmler's SS) and the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (the ERR, a free-standing Reich organization, controlled by Alfred Rosenberg) competed with each other to seize the biggest and most While tracing individual books and collections in the same manner  as The Monuments Men and other works that concentrated on the Nazi looting of art, Anders also delves deeply into the history of the actors within the Reich, the original owners of the collections and the men who secretly tried to save the histories of people, groups and cultures from the Nazis. A fascinating book, very well researched, and well written by Rydell, and capably translated from the Swedish by Henning Koch.

The Choice: Embrace the Possible

The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Dr. Edith Eva Eger, 288 pages.

A compelling story that is a hybrid of sorts. Partly an account, a memoir of a holocaust survivor, and partly a self-help book,, an account from a successful therapist who shows her patients that they always have a choice, even if that choice is sometimes how they choose to deal with tragedy. Eger grew up in Kocise, Czechoslovakia (formerly, when her parents were younger, Kassa, Hungary), an ethnically Hungarian and Slovakian part of the world. Her father was a tailor, and her mother, while a good and kind woman, was haunted by the early death of her own mother. Eger's older sister Klara is a violin prodigy, and their oldest sister, Magda an extrovert. Eger felt that she lived in the shadow of her sisters when they were all young, before the war. Eger tells of how, when the Germans came, she and her parents and her sister Magda were sent to Auschwitz. Edith and her mother were separated by Mengele at the first selection when the infamous doctor asked if this was her mother or her sister. Fifteen year-old Edith answered without thinking that this was her mommy. Her mother is sent to the left, and Edith to the right. Edith is haunted by her answer for the rest of her life.
After the war, Eger heals slowly. Eventually, after reading Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, Eger changes course in her life, studies and earns a PhD in clinical psychology. In the second half of the book she talks about her family, how she and they found paths towards healing, this interspersed with accounts from her clinical practice, how she helped others on a path towards healing. An arresting and effective book.

Secondhand Souls

Secondhand Souls by Christopher Moore, 335 pages

Since saving San Francisco from the supernatural Morrigan a year earlier, the Death Merchants of the Bay Area have been taking it easy, recuperating and getting back to their non-death-related lives. Turns out that was a big mistake, since the Morrigan are creeping back into existence, aided by a mysterious man with a penchant for the color yellow. This book is a follow-up to Moore's 2006 novel, A Dirty Job, and it's pretty important to read that one before this one. I'd read A Dirty Job when it came out, but not since, and I'll admit that it took me quite a while to remember the whos and whats of the story. The plot of Secondhand Souls is a bit more scattered, and a few of the interactions between black characters came across as cringeworthy caricatures, so it's definitely not Moore's best work (in my mind, that will always be Lamb). But it's an OK urban fantasy sequel that fans of the Dresden Files might appreciate.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling, 309 pages

Orphan Harry Potter lives with his horrendous relatives until one day, he finds out that he's a wizard and.... Let's face it: if you don't know the basic premise of this book by now, you never will and you probably will never read this, no matter how many people tell you how freaking outstanding this series is. This was my gajillionth* time reading this, though the first time reading it out loud to my daughter. I loved sharing one of my favorite books with her, and seeing her reactions to Rowling's storytelling prowess. On to book 2!

Autumn, by Ali Smith

Billed as the first installment of her Seasonal Quartet, Smith’s novel is much like the lost collage, Pauline Body’s “Scandal 63,” that is at the center of the work.  For an American reader, it probably helps to have some knowledge of post-Brexit England and  British pop-art history – or to have watched the episode on PBS’s The Crown that dealt with the 1960s era scandal known as the Profumo Affair.  Daniel Gluck is 101 and on his deathbed as the book opens.  More than twenty years earlier, he and his very young next door neighbor, Elisabeth, then eight, develop a close and unlikely friendship.  Elisabeth, now 32, has not seen him in many years, but when her mother tells her that he has been taken to Maltings Care Providers, she rushes home for a last visit.  The book (although 260 pages long) is brief and episodic, with large type and a lot of white space.  It shifts back and forth between decades.  It lingers in the mind after the last page as only a really good book does.  I look forward to her newly released Winter.  260 pp. 

Fresh complaint, by Jeffrey Eugenides

Short stories by the author of Middlesex and The marriage plot.  An old woman, in the end, may lose herself in the snow; a young man, traveling in Southeast Asia and trying to starve the amoebas out of his gut, may drift out to sea. In other stories, the protagonists loses his clavichord, another his marriage, a third his cushy job.  There aren’t a lot of happy endings here but aside from the really bad “The oracular vulva,” there’s much to enjoy here.  285 pp.

Catapult, by Emily Fridlund

Fridlund’s novel, History of wolves, was critically well-received last year and I enjoyed it.  Her book of short stories, released this year, is more problematic, and frankly, pretty depressing reading in the dreary month of February.  The stories are well-written but the characters are so sad, damaged, and lonely in most cases, that it is a real slog to keep going one after one.  Best taken in very small doses – I renewed it multiple times and can’t believe it was only…..  199 pp.

Sherlock Holmes (Unabridged) Part 4 The Return of Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes (Unabridged) Part 4 audiobook read by Stephen Fry  381 pp.

This section of the set is the book The Return of Sherlock Holmes. After Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes in "The Final Problem" there was a public outcry in England for more Sherlock Holmes stories. People staged protests and wore black armbands to show their displeasure in the death of their beloved detective. The author finally relented and Holmes reappears to a mournful Watson with the tale of his escape from the "final" battle with Moriarity and his henchman. The rest of the stories in this book I was not as familiar with. Doyle's writing seems improved by the time he got to these installments.