I took a book hiatus to catch up on old magazines that had piled up. A book or two slid into the mix of all that but I didn’t bother to keep up with them.
However, I took 5 books on vacation in June and if I can remember what they were (I actually left them along the trip as I finished them), I’ll list them here:
After reading 3 books on my trip that involved murders and pathologists, I wanted something without all that so I picked up Sandra Brown’s “Ricochet”, only to find one more book with a murder and some sleazy cops. It was a bit suspenseful but predictable at best for me. I had already started to feel like a pro after the other 3 books I had read:
Tess Gerritsen, “The Mephisto Club” was based in Boston (where we happened to be at the time) and was an interesting twist and turn into how people who study criminals can actually make them create gruesome crimes to get their attention. It was a bit different read than the others, but still involved murder and mayhem and autopsies. Ugh.
James Patterson and Andrew Gross’ “Judge & Jury” was also about murder and mayhem and kept you interested to the very end. It involved a single mother as a jurist and brings to light how unsafe you can be if picked for the wrong jury. Very believable.
Frankly, the other book was so memorable that I cannot even remember what it was about, but the same theme as the 2 above.
A book I started back in May and recently finished was Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. This book was started by Irene before she was taken to a concentration camp, never to return. It appears to be 2 parts to what was a “never-finished” novel. Because of the timing of the events in the book, which were June, 1940 to July, 1941, it appears that she was writing the book simultaneously to events that were happening at the very moment. Although the book doesn’t really seem to end, it still gives you a very different perspective of living in France during WWII and the writings describing the various classes of society and their reactions to the war around them are fascinating. It gets a bit boring at the beginning of the 2nd section but if you stick with you will get wound up in the story.
Probably the best book I have read since “The Historian” is one I had on my bookshelf for quite some time, “The Life of Pi” by Yann Martel. This book was nothing like what I thought from the title (can’t judge a book by its cover for certain on this one!). It was so fantastical that I gave it to my 13-year-old daughter to read and we are still commenting about parts of the book. It is not a long book but it is based on interviews of Pi (the person) that were recorded in the late 1970’s and recollections of a short period of time back then. I don’t want to tell anymore as to spoil the book for anyone else wanting to read it.