Bringing back the beaver

 

Bringing back the beaver: the story of one man's quest to rewild Britain's waterways / Derek Gow 197 pgs.

Another 197 pages that tell the tale of how important beavers are to the natural ecology around waterways.  How do you think we can improve on mother nature's solutions to managing floods, droughts and ecosystems?  Turns out the use of natures most impressive engineers saves money, time, and fixes many problems that we made ourselves.  This along with Ben Goldfarb's "Eager : the surprising, secret life of beavers and why they matter" will elevate the beaver in your list of natural miracle workers.  Just let them do their job.

A Red-Rose Chain

 A Red-Rose Chain by Seanan McGuire, 367 pages.

Here we have yet another series that I start blogging about well after the 1st book. A Red-Rose Chain is the 9th of the October Daye books, which follow the titular October Daye, changeling detective beholden to the fairy court in San Francisco. This book begins with Toby being asked to play diplomat by the queen in order to stop a war with the kingdom to the north. This is a very funny choice given the everything about her. Now Toby has to fight her "shake the problem until answers fall out" nature to be a successful diplomat in a kingdom who hates changelings if she wants to prevent a war and protect her friends.

This is far from the twistiest of the October Daye books, and ultimately had more to do with the characters than any mystery, which would be more common for the series. Overall I really enjoyed it. It was nice to have a book to really appreciate how far the characters have come in the previous eight, and I look forward to getting back into reading more in the series.

Backstab

 Backstab by Elaine Viets (1997) 309 pages

Francesa Vierling is a columnist for a St. Louis newspaper, The St. Louis City Gazette. Two of her friends, the owner of a popular bar and a rehabber who is gay, have recently died under what she thinks are suspicious circumstances, but her police department contact is doubtful. She delves into solving the murders, plus a third one, while hopping all around the St. Louis area, from South City to Florissant to Soulard. Fast read which catches the flavor of St. Louis well.

Fantasyland

 

Fantasyland : how America went haywire : a 500-year history / Kurt Andersen, read by the author, 475 pgs.

500 years in slightly fewer pages, much of this is a very interesting thread of how attitudes and beliefs have changed in this country.  Some where we picked up the idea that we are all so "individual" that we have the right to believe things...whatever things we want to believe.  Reason went out the window and conspiracy theory's and fantasy took over.  On the one hand, I found this fascinating, on the other hand, it was terrifying.  As a librarian, the idea that facts are optional isn't popular.  Surely we can do better, but will we?

The Borrower

 The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai, 324 pages.

In a fictional version of Hannibal (this one has no river) children's librarian Lucy Hull accidentally kidnaps (or is kidnapped by, depending on your perspective) her favorite patron, ten-year-old Ian Drake. Ian is a voracious reader, but his parents are very controlling about what he is allowed to read, forbidding any book that seems to mature or that might challenge their Christian beliefs (Lucy has helped him sneak books home). One morning Lucy finds I an in the library, running away from home and, she assumes, the anti-gay classes his parents enrolled him in several hours away. She is, only slightly hesitantly, convinced to take Ian on a cross-country road trip in an attempt to save him. 

This book was sort of fun to read, and I really enjoyed Makkai's writing style. It was almost enough to forget that the plot made absolutely no sense. However, by the time I was halfway through the book or so the fact that the plot made absolutely no sense started to become both distracting and frustrating. For example, at know point during the technically-a-kidnapping/helping Ian run away from home debacle does Lucy actually ask Ian why he is running away. She seems to do nothing but make nothing but bad, life-shattering decisions for no apparent reason. As fun as the style is, I find that this failure to ever once make a decision a rational human being would make made it sort of hard to get invested in the story.

The look of the book

The look of the book : jackets, covers & art at the edges of literature / Peter Mendelsund, David J. Alworth, 289 pgs.

An amazing book about book covers, a little history, a little theory, and some predictions about the future.  Plenty of examples and samples in this beautifully done coffee table book.  Recommended for literary nerds and graphic art types. And let's all finally admit that we DO judge a book by its cover, which is why publishers invest BIG BUCKS into designing them.

Red Widow

Red Widow by Alma Katsu, 340 pages

Freshly returned to the U.S., CIA agent Lyndsey Duncan is pulled away from her vacation time for a special mission: two Russian informants have recently disappeared, leading the head of CIA's Russia Division to believe there's a mole in his department, and it's Lyndsey's job to find out who it might be. As she begins her work, Lyndsey soon narrows down her list of suspects, though something just doesn't feel right. As she keeps digging, Lyndsey starts discovering much more than she, or her boss, ever intended.

Spy thrillers aren't really my cup of tea, but this one is a great example of the genre. Which makes sense, as Katsu is a former CIA agent herself. There's a degree of realism in this book that doesn't appear in most spy thrillers, including some loose ends and unknown allegiances. While I appreciated the realism, fans of flashier spy novels might not like that bit as much. A good book though!

Dial “A” for Aunties, by Jesse Q. Sutanto

This is a pretty silly book which will probably be made into a pretty silly movie in the vein of Crazy rich Asians.  But it does provide an interesting look at Indonesian-Chinese culture in America.  Meddelin (Meddy) Chan lives with her mother and near her extended family of aunts – Big Aunt, Second Aunt, and Fourth Aunt (her mother is the third of the sisters).  The husbands and sons are either dead, divorced, or have escaped the centrifugal pull of the family and gone out into the wider world.  But Meddy, when she finishes college, decides to stay in the Los Angeles area and join her family’s new venture, weddings, rather than accompanying Nathan, her boyfriend of three years standing, when he gets a dream job in New York.  It is telling that no one in the family is aware of Nathan’s existence despite their being together most of Meddy's college years.  One aunt will bake elaborate cakes, another will be in charge of makeup and hair, and Fourth Aunt is the wedding singer.  Meddy, a photographer, will capture the wedding day on film and video.  Seven years later, the business (“Don’t leave your big day to chance, leave it to the Chans!) is successful enough that they are hired to do an over-the-top wedding of a billionaire on a private island.  However, the night before it is to take place, Meddy accidently kills her blind date when he attacks her on a deserted highway.  Wah!  What to do? As the aunties would say.  Then, surprise, surprise, Nathan turns up as the owner of the exclusive hotel where the festivities are about to commence.  Much toting about of a cooler full of the cooling blind date.  Diverting but still silly.  309 pp.

Anxious people, by Fredrik Backman

From the author of A man called Ove, a new, quirky book.  Nothing is quite as it seems in this novel.  When a desperate bank robber attempts to stick up a local, cashless, bank, he escapes empty-handed across the street to an apartment building and into an unanticipated and unwanted hostage situation.  The apartment the robber flees into is full of people attending a realtor’s open house there.  Each person, however, has his or her own unusual reasons for being there, on New Year’s Eve day of all the unlikely times to show an apartment, which are gradually revealed.  The local policemen in this small town, are called in to hold the fort while officers more skilled in hostage negotiations travel from Stockholm.  The locals are a father and son, but the relationships between the hostages are also somewhat connected.  And then there’s that bridge…  Although the situations are funny and the dialog snappy, there is a core of sadness at the heart of the story, however, the author manages to give us hope at the end.  341 pp.

The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War, by Catherine Grace Katz

An engaging look at the World War II conference at Yalta during the waning days of the war, from the viewpoints of three women, daughters of Roosevelt, Churchill and Averill Harriman.  FDR was a very sick man who would die only a couple of months later of congestive heart failure.  He thought he could work his special charm on Stalin, not knowing the full perfidy of the man.  Churchill, very realistic about Stalin, represented the waning power and influence of England, and was also not all that well (the famous quote attributed to him, “Most of the world’s work is done by people who don’t feel very well,” is probably apocryphal but seems apt here).  Averell Harriman, scion of one of the wealthiest American families, athlete, businessman, and dedicated public servant, was serving in Moscow as ambassador.  Anna Roosevelt, 38, married with three children, was thrilled to have time with her father who more frequently included his sons in his work.  She loved him deeply and saw her duty at Yalta to keep him rested and well-fed.  Sarah Churchill, an actress and RAF officer, also loved her father deeply and had a close bond with him, was often passed over in favor of his sons.  Kathleen Harriman, the youngest and only unmarried of the three, was a war correspondent and had spent the past 18 months in Moscow, already being a help to her father there – she even learned Russian.  And, yes, there were entangling romances.  Stalin, however, called the shots, insisting that the other dignitaries make the arduous wartime journey to remote Crimea in the middle of winter rather than meet at any more convenient locale.  There the three delegations were housed in three separate mansions/castles, most of which had been largely destroyed in the conflict and had been hastily renovated.  There were about three bathrooms per 100 guests – buckets were used which generals lined up for.  There were bedbugs.  It was, of course, cold.  And Stalin had taken the opportunity during the renovations to bug his guests’ quarters. Banquets featured tons of caviar and smoked meats, and vodka by the truckload, but little healthy food.  In the end, much of what the Americans and British had hoped to accomplish there, and briefly thought they might have done, was set aside by the march of the Russians and the coming onset of the post-war Cold War.  An interesting slice of history, well written. 352 pp.