NEW BOOKS FOR MARCH

I hope  you will enjoy some of these newly added books!

The Fifth Gospel, Ian Caldwell, 2015

Murder and robbery in the Vatican, the Shroud of Turin, nefarious doings in high places and a priest set up to resolve it all.  This is Mystery! And these are the elements of The Fifth Gospel, written by the author of the (it seems) acclaimed and similarly religiohistoriopolitical novel/sensation The Rule of Four (which we have in the Deering Library). Most of those who posted reviews on Goodreads gave this book 4-5 stars and warned us not to compare it to anything from Dan Brown but not to expect anything as sublime as The Name of the Rose or other works by Umberto Eco. I’m reading it now so you’ll just have to wait your turn. It is beginning very well with a murder in the first few pages and the Shroud of Turin close behind.

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel, 2015

Sometime in the not-distant future a flu sweeps through humankind leaving only about 1% of that species alive. It all starts when a Shakespearean actor named Arthur dies at the end of Lear on a remote stage in Michigan or Minnesota – one of those ‘M’ states that get real cold in the winter and that receive a lot of snow (sound familiar?). In Station Eleven a child actress is on stage with Arthur when he dies. She survives and, after describing the devastation, the novel moves (sort of) fifteen or twenty years later when she, Kirsten, is maintaining Culture in a small travelling troupe. In an outpost Kirsten meets a bad prophet who tends to kill anybody who leaves. The book moves back and forth over time and memory of what was, what is, and what has been lost. There are a lot of Shakespearean allusions throughout the book and perhaps one could argue that Shakespeare himself, writing early in the 17^th Century as the Thirty Years War was heating up, had a sense of looming Apocalypse. Several  people reviewed this book for Goodreads, mostly women, and all but a very few gave it (4-)5 stars.

The Story Of A New Name, Elena Ferrante, 2013

Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante, 2014

These two books are, respectively, volumes two and three of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. They continue the lives of two women who grow up in a working class neighborhood of Naples after the end of WW II. Lila and Elena are best friends, very smart and close competitors in life. Lila, a bit rebellious, goes the route of early marriage and finds herself imprisoned (The Story Of A New Name). Elena continues her journey of self-discovery and becomes a writer imprisoned within the Salon Culture of her new world (Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay). All the novels are narrated by Elena. “The two young women share a complex and evolving bond that brings them close at times, and drives them apart at others. Each vacillates between hurtful disregard and profound love for the other. With this complicated and meticulously portrayed friendship at the center of their emotional lives, the two girls mature into women, paying the sometimes cruel price that this passage exacts.” (Goodreads summary). All the characters of these books, Lila and Elena, their families and friends are very interesting. Reading at least the first novel (My Brilliant Friend) gave a tactual sense of Naples and its inhabitants. Goodreads reviewers gave these books 4-5 stars. I look forward to reading these two.

Gray Mountain, John Grisham, 2014

Here is the summary from Goodreads: “The year is 2008 and Samantha Kofer’s career at a huge Wall Street law firm is on the fast track—until the recession hits and she gets downsized, furloughed, escorted out of the building. Samantha, though, is one of the “lucky” associates. She’s offered an opportunity to work at a legal aid clinic for one year without pay, after which there would be a slim chance that she’d get her old job back.
In a matter of days Samantha moves from Manhattan to Brady, Virginia, population 2,200, in the heart of Appalachia, a part of the world she has only read about. Mattie Wyatt, lifelong Brady resident and head of the town’s legal aid clinic, is there to teach her how to “help real people with real problems.” For the first time in her career, Samantha prepares a lawsuit, sees the inside of an actual courtroom, gets scolded by a judge, and receives threats from locals who aren’t so thrilled to have a big-city lawyer in town. And she learns that Brady, like most small towns, harbors some big secrets.

Her new job takes Samantha into the murky and dangerous world of coal mining, where laws are often broken, rules are ignored, regulations are flouted, communities are divided, and the land itself is under attack from Big Coal. Violence is always just around the corner, and within weeks Samantha finds herself engulfed in litigation that turns deadly.” Reviews in Goodreads were mixed. A lot of people didn’t think much of the book, included self-confessed Grisham lovers, while others gave it a 5-star rating. But…. Here it is. I hope you will enjoy it.

The Siege, Arturo Pérez Reverte, 2014

I enjoy historical novels in general and have particularly enjoyed reading those written by Pérez Reverte, so I eagerly picking this one off the shelf at Toadstool a month ago. The Siege won the Crime Writers’ Association’s International Dagger award.

In 1811 and 1812 Napoleon’s army has pretty much routed Spain. The Spanish government is holed up in Cádiz and the French have laid a siege to the city that has lasted a year or more. A former physics professor is in charge of French bombardment of the city, a pretty ineffectual campaign but one that inspires denizens of Cádiz to spy for the French (a local taxidermist/misanthrope) or to anticipate the next bomb and to leave the flayed remains of a young prostitutes at the site. At the heart of the story Cádiz detective, comisario Rogelio Tizón tries to figure out who’s committing the murders and how this psychopathic serial killer is anticipating where the bombs fall. Comisario Tizón is not a nice guy: he doesn’t like liberal reform, he tortures suspects, he extorts local citizens  he whacks bystanders with his cane. Going for him is his love of chess, a fair amount of introspection and – critically – his belief that flaying people is not a good idea. Along the way Pérez Reverte paints a vivid picture of 19^th Century commercial class, on one hand, and life of the lesser folk on the other. There’s a sort-of, soap operatic romance between a corsair who has a certain look in his eye and an attractive woman of the commercial class who is facing age (love does not conquer all here). There are descriptions of sailing ships and their battles and ponderings on ballistics by a frustrated French artillerist, and how to get the bombs to reach deeply into the city. There is a lot of description of people and places in this book, and I think every character is given an opportunity to air their introspection, which is interspersed with action and romance.

The reviewer for The Washington Post said that this is a big (around 600 pages) “social novel, aiming to do for 19th-century Spain what Victor Hugo did for post-revolutionary France. Pérez-Reverte surveys this world top to bottom, from the elegant salons of the bourgeoisie to the grimy quarters of the lowliest.”

Man v. Nature: Stories, Diane Cook, 2014

I like short stories. They can be like mixed bonbons in a  box: some you really like and others you offer to others. The big difference between a book of short stories and a box of good chocolates is that once you eat the chocolates, they’re gone.  I read one or two short stories, sometimes with a bourbon, in evenings between 8:00, when the TV is off and 9:00 when the cats get their final feed of kibble and I go to bed and read from whatever book is on the table. There are about 4 books of short stories going now. I just finished this one. I came to it because author Miranda July said that it was one of her  favs. The Goodreads reviews of Man v. Nature, the first book by Diane Cook, are all 4-5 stars. The stories are all a bit quirky and are set in some dystopian, or post-apocalyptic world. Just up my alley. Here is a review from Goodreads that says what I would like to express: “Cook's theme here is, of course, man versus nature, but within this theme the stories themselves run the gamut from man literally versus nature to man versus human nature and everything in between! The interesting and unexpected thing about this collection is that most of the stories are set in post apocalyptic and even somewhat dystopian worlds. Worlds in which spouses are assigned rather than chosen and children are determined to be necessary or not. Worlds overcome by natural and unnatural forces. Worlds in which the unbelievable are everyday occurrences.

Some of Cook's stories are amusing, some are shocking, and most fall somewhere in between. All of them are a bit weird, to be honest, but every one of the chosen pieces for the collection fit together to perfectly illustrate Cook's obvious talent as a storyteller.

A couple of my personal favorites in the collection are "Moving On," where a newly widowed woman faces a new life without her husband, all the while waiting for a new husband to bid for her hand and "Somebody's Baby," a tale that brings to mind legends of changelings.

Man v. Nature is quirky and dark, likely to hit the spot for a particular set of readers, but it's also an altogether fantastic collection.”

Essential New Hampshire books by Rebecca Rule:

Live Free And Eat Pie

Headin’ For The Rhubarb. A New Hampshire Dictionary (well kinda’)

Could Have Been Worse. True Stories, Embellishments And Outright Lies

For kids:

The Iciest, Diciest, Scariest Sled Ride Ever, Rebecca Rule