Finished: White Teeth (Smith) I'd heard a lot about this book, but I have to say I was underwhelmed. It was a thought-provoking book tackling family, race, politics, religion and more. I just couldn't ever click with any of the characters, and frankly didn't find many of them likable. Maybe that's the way it is with many books, but at this busy time while I kept picking up this book and putting it down while we were in the last month of wedding planning, I just couldn't seem to connect. I did find myself more interested at the suspense at the very end, but it was too little too late. I'm not sure I have the desire to recap the whole thing in my own words, so I'm going to cheat and just include a blurb from Amazon about the book:

"...the book's home base is a scrubby North London borough, where we encounter Smith's unlikely heroes: prevaricating Archie Jones and intemperate Samad Iqbal, who served together in the so-called Buggered Battalion during World War II. In the ensuing decades, both have gone forth and multiplied: Archie marries beautiful, bucktoothed Clara--who's on the run from her Jehovah's Witness mother--and fathers a daughter. Samad marries stroppy Alsana, who gives birth to twin sons."

Archie's daughter, Irie, and Samad's sons, Magid and Millat, are the focus of most of the book as we watch them age into their late teens and grow in completely different directions...especially the boys, when Samad decides that at least one of his sons must grow up back in their home country instead of England. When they are only ten he separates them by sending his favorite, and the smartest and most selfless of his sons, Magid, back to be schooled in India. Meanwhile, the shallower Millat continues to be influenced by television and other "evil" western influences and becomes part of a bullying gang, before turning to become a member of an extremist Muslim group. Irie seems to be the only character who grows in any way by the end of the book. The indecisive Archie becomes an unwitting hero at the end of the book, and the fates of each character are wrapped up in a last single paragraph a bit too quickly after a very wordy, drawn out previous story. Eh, wish I'd liked it more!

Finished: The Reivers (Faulkner) Faulkner's second Pulitzer Prize winning novel, and the last novel he wrote. This was the least difficult Faulkner book I've read, and probably the most entertaining, though, my favorite Faulkner will always be the tragic The Sound and the Fury. The Reivers is set in the early 1900's and is about eleven year old Lucius Priest, a generally good and virtuous boy, who agrees to lie to his parents and grandfather one weekend when the grownups must attend a funeral out of town. Lucius agrees to go from his Mississippi town to Memphis with Boon Hogganbeck, a young man who is one of his grandfather's employees. To make things worse, Boon who is normally in charge of caring for the grandfather's car, convinces Lucius that they will take "Boss's" car, the only one in their county, and have it back home before either it or them are missed. Lucius knows it's wrong, but he struggles with letting "non-virtue" win, and he goes along! Boon's mission is to get to a prostitute in Memphis named Miss Corrie aka Everbe Corinthia, who he is in love with. Before they have gone too far, but far enough to not turn back, they realize that Ned McAslin, an incorrigible black man who also works for Boss, has hidden under a tarp in the back seat intent on going with them to Memphis. They have no choice but to let him go along. Thus ensues quite an adventure for the threesome, especially when Ned trades the Boss's car for a "racehorse" who is known not to be able to win races! Ned has a special feeling about the horse, though, and thinks he knows how to make him run and finally beat the other horse he's run against and lost against twice. He figures he'll bet the man with the car  and wind up taking both the car and the horse back home. All kinds of convolution occurs, all masterminded by Ned, as Lucius is enlisted to be the rider of the horse, Lightening, for the best of three race! Meanwhile, Miss Corrie is so impressed with Lucius' manners and general goodness that she pledges to give up prostituting and get a legitimate job, much to the chagrin of Boon! In the end, Ned does, in fact, know how to make the horse run...but not until after they all get into some legal trouble, some town trouble, some "real owner" of the horse trouble, and of course, some trouble from Boss, whose come looking for Lucius and Boon. Lucius does struggle with his conscience throughout, and almost looks forward to being punished by his father when he's finally home. However, grandfather intercedes and tells the father to let him handle it. Rather than whipping Lucius to let him release the guilt of lying, grandfather tells Lucius that sometimes you just have to learn to live with your bad decisions, and at the same time learn from those life experiences. Lucius has a good cry on his grandfather's lap. Months later, Lucius is called over to Miss Corrie's. It turns out, she and Boon got married after she gave up the business and now they have a new baby son. Corrie tells Lucius that they have named him Lucius Priest Hogganbeck. That's the last line of the book, and it's very satisfying given how close all the main characters got during their adventure. I'm sure there's no way I've done the recap justice, but Faulkner's writing is just spot on southern writing, which he was known for, of course. I could so easily see my southern, Louisiana born dad as a young boy getting caught up in such an adventure. :-) I'm definitely so glad I finally read this book, which I had been putting off!!

Finished: Tell The Wolves I'm Home (Brunt) "What does that even mean? 'Tell The Wolves I'm Home'?" Greta asked. No one said anything, because none of us had any idea. It was just one more mystery Finn had left with us. One more thing I couldn't call and ask. I can't explain how profoundly true that last line is. That's how I've felt every day for the past 20 years and 3 months, since my brother died far too early from a far too insidious disease on August 5, 1996. There's no picking up the phone to ask a quick question, or talk about a movie, or a book, or travel plans, or to get an answer to something I want to know from him. One more thing I couldn't call and ask. So, Tell The Wolves I'm Home is the story of a quirky teenage girl who is extremely close to her even quirkier uncle, her mother's brother, who dies of AIDS. I can't give too much more of a recap than that. I knew this book would cut close to my heart, but I really felt I should read it anyway. Tell The Wolves I'm Home is what Uncle Finn calls the last painting he ever paints, of his two nieces sitting together. Maybe I'll add more later. It's a good book, by the way.

Finished: The Longest Journey (Forster) I went on a mini Forster kick (two books) and though this one wasn't as good as A Room With A View, it was still very well written and deep in content....almost too deep for me. :-) In any event, I did enjoy it. It's one of those books that is just making me sit here in a contemplative mood. The book is about a young man named Rickie, who we first meet at Cambridge with all his friends, his best friend being Ansell. They are discussing Philosophy, which is Ansell's major and life passion. Rickie, who is of average intelligence, doesn't always follow the conversation, but he and Ansell are the best of friends. Rickie's parents both died when he was young, leaving him to be raised by relatives. His Cambridge buddies are now more of a family than he's really ever had before. Rickie can remember his mother, who he idolized. She raised him on her own once his father left them. Rickie is not terribly attractive, and is lame in one foot, which causes him to limp. He doesn't really have the confidence to think much of himself, but wants desperately to just be a writer...writing about nature and how deeply humans and nature interact. Rickie and Ansell grow apart as a girl enters Rickie's life. Agnes, an old family friend, loses her beloved, the man she's engaged to, and soon after sets her sights on Rickie. She doesn't necessarily love him like she did her fiance, but she does care for him and....he comes from a very rich aunt...his father's last living sister. Agnes is greatly motivated by the thought that perhaps someday the money and estate will be left to Rickie, so she snags Rickie and marries him. Ansell, who thinks of Rickie marrying Agnes as a near death catastrophe, pretty much writes Rickie off and won't return his letters or come to visit. Agnes insists that Rickie forge a relationship with his aunt, and when they quarrel and Rickie leaves his aunt's estate, Agnes maintains a correspondence and friendship with the aunt. The quarrel is all about Rickie being forced to spend time with his aunt's ward, Stephen, a young man a couple of years younger than Rickie. Stephen has been raised by the aunt since he was a young boy when both of HIS parents died. Though raised as a gentleman, he's really spent more time out on the land with the laborers of the estate and acts more like the farmers, i.e., he comes off as being a lower social level. He can be outspoken and a bit brutish, and he's also good-looking and athletic. When the aunt sets Rickie and Stephen up to spend the day together, they don't get along well at all and end up going their separate ways. When Rickie comes home alone, the aunt is mad at them both and ends up spilling to Rickie that Stephen is actually his half-brother!! She won't tell him the details and regrets even saying anything afterwards. Rickie is furious and humiliated that his father had another son while married to his mother. After regretting her words, the aunt, Rickie and Agnes all make a pledge not to ever tell another soul that Stephen is actually Rickie's half brother. Of course, Agnes' motivation is that she doesn't want Stephen to have a claim on the aunt's estate or money. The aunt's motivation is that she's just a spiteful, controlling old woman (who we find out later in the book is only 59!!). They write these "old" people as so crotchety and she's only a year older than me, acckk! Anyway, Rickie's motivation is the humiliation he feels for his mother...yet Rickie is the only one who has a guilty conscience about it. He goes on with his life, becoming an assistant school-master with Agnes' older brother, Herbert, and he, Agnes and Herbert live at the school with the boys who attend. Agnes becomes pregnant and gives birth to a baby girl who is more crippled than Rickie was, and she doesn't live for more than a few days. :-( This doesn't do much to help a pretty much already loveless marriage, and it sends Rickie into despair. He goes through the motions of his life, but isn't really living with happiness. Soon, both Ansell and Stephen come back into his life...but the two of them meet each other first! Ansell has come to town, but because they are both prideful, neither Rickie or Ansell will make the first move to see each other. Stephen comes bopping in at the house where Ansell is staying and tries to introduce himself to the stranger. Ansell, still being his aloof, philosophical self, doesn't respond to the "good morning", because he doesn't think it IS a good morning. Stephen gets into a tussle with Ansell for his rudeness and Ansell comes to like Stephen in those few minutes, because Stephen is just a real person exhibiting real human emotions with no misgivings. He finds out from Stephen that he's there to see his half-brother, Rickie!!! Stephen doesn't even know that Ansell knows Rickie, and Stephen is very excited to tell Rickie that he just found out he's his half-brother. He even shows Ansell the papers that prove the lineage. However, when Stephen goes over to see Rickie, he refuses to see him and instead Agnes confronts Stephen with her checkbook and asks how much money he has come to blackmail them for to keep quiet that he and Rickie are half-brothers. She tells Stephen that both she and Rickie have known for two years that they are half-brothers, as well as their aunt, and had promised never to tell. Stephen is completely taken aback and even those he's completely broke, refuses her money and quietly leaves the house. Ansell, who had finally decided to make the first move, was just coming into the house as Stephen was leaving. Rickie finally sees Ansell and goes to embrace him, but Ansell is more concerned about why that "young man" just left the house and whether or not he and Rickie talked. Ansell finally blurts out, don't you see?? That's your brother! When Rickie says he knows, Ansell can't believe that Stephen refused to see or even get to know his own brother. Rickie explains that he could never accept the son of the man who cheated on his beloved mother. That's when Ansell informs him that Stephen is Rickie's half-brother by his mother!!! Rickie has to be carried and put to bed at the realization that it was his mother and not his father who was the betrayer. (His father HAD been an ass who had all kinds of affairs first and his mother finally fell in love with Stephen's father and ran away with him, only to have Stephen's father drown after two weeks.) So, Rickie tries to find Stephen, but he has already gone. A few nights later, Stephen breaks into the house drunk and wants to confront Rickie. Rickie takes that as a sign that Stephen has come back to forgive him. It takes alot of convincing during the sober next morning, but he is just about to get Stephen to stay so they can get to know each other when Agnes interferes yet again and cries and screams that Stephen needs to go. Stephen heads out the door but he asks Rickie to leave these people behind and come with him...and he does!! Rickie and Stephen take refuge at Ansell's house! Rickie is estranged from his wife and starts his writing again, but as he used to do, fails when he submits his writings to be published. He's just not good enough. One day Rickie's aunt writes for him to come and visit her, so he does. Characteristic of Stephen, he hops on the train as well at the last minute and insists he'll stay out of the way since the aunt booted him out of her house for constantly being drunk and actually wanted to have him shipped to the colonies to work! Rickie only agrees to let Stephen come if he promises he won't drink, and he does. Rickie goes to see his aunt, who of course tries to convince him to go back to Agnes. When he explains to his aunt that he can't do that and he just wants to write, she actually doesn't argue with him. On his way to get Stephen at a neighbor's, Rickie is met by one of the laborers who tells Rickie that Stephen isn't at the neighbor's, but at the pub drinking! Rickie can't believe it, but then sees it for himself and can't believe that Stephen broke his promise to him not to drink. Rickie is standing on a bridge lamenting when the laborer comes by and asks him if he didn't see Stephen come by since he'd left the bar. At that moment, a slow moving train shows up on the train tracks and in it's shining light, they can see the drunk Stephen fallen and splayed over the train trackss. Rickie has time to get to Stephen and heave him aside, but no time to get himself off the track and he is killed. :-( The book ends with a sober and married Stephen putting finishing touches on some of Stephen's short stories to be published posthumously! He's got a wife and a very young little daughter. He's got the life that Stephen could never quite get for himself. He takes his little daughter out in a warm blanket to sleep under the stars like he used to do when he was a kid. He wants to teach her the good things in life. He kisses her head and we find out he's named his little daughter after his and Rickie's mother. And, that's the end. Such a sad, torturous life for Rickie, really, but I guess we're left with the hope of Stephen, his daughter and his future children. A very well written book, with lots of metaphors, particularly relating man and nature, that probably mostly went over my head...still a good book though. :-)

Finished: A Room With A View (Forster) Beautifully written classic that I truly enjoyed. The novels that I have read, written at the beginning of the 20th century, involving societal English characters rarely have happy endings, and rarely contain in their pages what you can see will most likely BE a happy ending, and this one did both. :-) In this book, young English woman, Lucy Honeychurch, goes abroad to Florence, Italy with her elder, matronly cousin, Charlotte, as a chaperone. From the first night as they stay at the pension (hotel), they meet an array of other British subjects who they become acquainted with, and involved with to varying degrees. Both Charlotte and Lucy befriend Mrs. Lavish, a free-spirited older woman who is out to explore Florence and write her great novel. Lucy befriends Mr. Emerson and his son, George. Mr. Emerson is also elderly, and very much a say-it-as-it-is person. He believes that feelings should be expressed with honesty, especially love. His son, who is in Lucy's age group, is much quieter and more serious. Charlotte rather shuns the duo because she finds the father too forward and vulgar...not proper enough...even though he magnanimously gives over their two rooms to Charlotte and Lucy because they were promised a room with a view, and he and his son were given those rooms. In any event, a few meet ups here and there and soon George is in love with Lucy, and though she has no idea what these feelings are, she is in love with him as well. When he dares to kiss her, her sensibilities are affronted. She's scared and confused and insists that she and Charlotte leave for Rome immediately. Though she has reservations about not telling George, they leave without telling him goodbye. Flash forward to the trip being over and Lucy is back in her small English town with her mother and brother. (Her father is deceased.) She is in the garden accepting a proposal of marriage from a sophisticated, snobbish young man named Cecil who she met in Rome. It's the third time he's proposed, as she's turned him down twice. She finally accepts, convincing herself she's in love with him. But, as an outsider looking in, we can see that he's really nothing more than a snob who will want to mold her into what he wants her to be. He can't wait to get her out of her provincial little town. (As my husband so aptly put it when I was explaining the character to him....think about Cal in the movie Titanic, the upper crust man who Rose was going to marry.) Anyway, it takes Lucy awhile to see Cecil's true persona. It certainly doesn't help that Mr. Emerson happens to let a nearby cottage, and that George spends many a day visiting him! As Lucy and George have a few meet ups like before, but this time with Cecil in tow, she's determined not to let George get to her, but he does. He finally kisses her again one day when Cecil isn't there and blurts out that he loves her and that Cecil is not capable of knowing her intimately, i.e., her heart and soul, and letting her be herself. Lucy sees that George is right, and she breaks off her engagement with Cecil, but refuses to let George be the cause. She books another trip to Greece and is about to go when she runs into Mr. Emerson the night before and he tells her how despondent George was, but how he told him he should never have confessed his feelings to an engaged woman. Anyway, Mr. Emerson ends up seeing in Lucy's face that she loves George as well, even though Lucy herself was just coming to realize it. She tells him that she's no longer engaged to marry Cecil. He talks a pretty talk to her and tells her to muster up the courage to face the scorn of her family and friends and go for love...so she does!! The story ends with Lucy and George, now married, a year from the time they met, staying in the same room with the view in their pension in Florence. :-) The book is so well written and lovely. I truly enjoyed it! I think I will probably read another Forster book next. Here's a snippet of dialogue from when Lucy's mother confronts her about being absolutely secretive about her breaking her engagement to Cecil until after she sails for Greece, i.e., she doesn't want George to find out and follow her!

Her mother, who had also come to see the snobbery of Cecil and wasn't that upset that the engagement was broken off, says:

"You've got rid of Cecil---well and good, and I'm thankful he's gone, though I did feel angry for a minute. But why not announce it? Why this hushing up and tip-toeing?"

"It's only for a few days."

"But why at all?"

Lucy was silent. She was drifting away from her mother. It was quite easy to say, "Because George Emerson has been bothering me, and if he hears I've given up Cecil may begin again"---quite easy, and it had the incidental advantage of being true. But she could not say it. She disliked confidences, for they might lead to self-knowledge and to that king of terrors---Light. Ever since that last evening at Florence she had deemed it unwise to reveal her soul.

Finished: Commonwealth (Patchett) This was a really good book! Their stories slowly unfold as we follow the lives of the six children who are irrevocably affected when the father of four of the children and the mother of two of the children have an affair and break up two young families when they decide to leave their first families and marry. At first I thought this was going to come off as rather soap-operaish, but instead it was a compelling story about how the step-brothers and sisters stuck together, in varying degrees, throughout their lives, even after their offending parents divorced years later. Much of the story centers on the tragic death of the oldest son of the four siblings. The actual cause of his death comes to light in small steps, but we do know that all the other children were there when it happened, and decided as a unit, never to tell their parents what exactly happened. It's really nothing out of the ordinary, but just the guilt and imaginations of children from 9 to 14 thinking they would somehow be held accountable for a death that was purely unavoidable. I felt like I knew each of the children personally by the end of the book, when they were grown, and most of them with children of their own. Franny, the baby girl of the two-child family, is a thoughtful, complex, eager to please young lady who ends up falling in love with the much older writer who she has idolized for years, and he for her. It's been years since he had a best-selling book and with Franny as his beloved and his muse, he writes his next best-seller, a book called Commonwealth. The only problem is...it's the story of Franny's life, and that of the two families, and the six children, and the tragic death of Cal, the oldest son/brother/step-brother. What comes to light is one of the things the children had promised never to mention...the fact that when the six of them used to be together during the summer, left unsupervised by their irresponsible parents (the two that had the affair), the older kids would feed Cal's benadryl tablets to 8 year old, annoying little brother, Albie, to make him fall asleep so the rest of them could run off and go to the lake or wherever they wanted, without his tag-along, non-stop talking, annoyance. Of course, Cal had those benadryl tablets for a reason...because he had a life-threatening allergy. And, so when it came time for Cal to actually need the pills, he had none in his pocket to use. Naturally, all the kids felt guilty for the rest of their lives for allowing Cal to use his pills on Albie just for their convenience. And Albie, who becomes a near-arsonist teenager, never realizes what the other kids used to do to him until he reads the new best-seller. Albie confronts Franny, and her writer boyfriend, Leo, and Franny immediately apologizes. She didn't realize while telling Leo her life story that their intensely difficult and personal childhoods would be displayed for all to see. Needless to say, Leo and Franny discontinue their relationship. All of the surviving children do end up in happy marriages with their own children, except for the oldest daughter of the four-sibling group, Holly, who has found peace in her life by living at a Buddhist Zen retreat in Switzerland! That is really just a fraction of a recap in what is another good, well-written Patchett book!

Finished: Home (Coben) Will Harlan Coben ever write a book that I can take days savoring instead of reading cover to cover in one day?? Sigh, I love my Harlan Coben books! In this book, he brings back Myron Bolitar and his trusty sidekick, Win! I've missed these characters!! In the story, Win has been gone for a year, tracking the people who kidnapped two six year old boys, one of them his cousin's son, Rhys, ten years before. He's finally got a lead, and thinks he has found one of the boys in London. It turns out to be Patrick, the boy who was with his cousin's son that day. Win calls on Myron, and all the usual gang, to help him figure out where Rhys is, and if he's even still alive. All kinds of twists happen as, at first, they don't even think sixteen year old who returned home is truly Patrick, but an imposter. When it turns out to actually be him, his parents refuse to let him speak to the parents of Rhys so he can try and help with what happened to Rhys. What ends up happening in the end, is a surprise, but not a happy one. Turns out Rhys has been dead all along and Patrick, tragically, but accidentally shot him as a six year old. The entire kidnapping was then fabricated by Patrick's parents so that their son wouldn't be scarred and they themselves wouldn't be jailed for having a gun. This is, of course, a very simplistic recap, but same old, good, good, good Harlan Coben! :-)

Finished: The Red Pony (John Steinbeck) Well, what did I really expect from a book by John Steinbeck about a red pony?? Did I think the pony was going to frolic and live happily ever after with his young boy owner? Or, did I think the pony was likely to go the way of many of the tortured, dust bowl characters of his bleak, The Grapes of Wrath? No matter what I expected, Steinbeck is still an amazing writer that just puts things good or bad, right there matter-of-factly in your face. The Red Pony is actually a book with four different parts. I think each of the parts may have been a separate short story, but they're all about a 9 year old farm boy named Jody, his parents, and their ranch hand, Buck. We just see the day to day workings of what was expected of a farm boy in the early 1900's, on a ranch in Salinas, California. His mother works her hands to the bone, and his father does the same. Both are no-nonsense, and the father is very strict. In the first chapter, Jody's father gets him a beautiful red pony. He tells Jody he must take care of him diligently, and at the same time do all his steady chores, and keep going to school. Since Buck is the horse expert, he will be there to guide Jody, but Jody will do the work. So, every day for almost a year Jody feeds, brushes, waters, lunges, etc., his red pony. Finally, about a month before Thanksgiving, Jody's proud father tells him that by Thanksgiving he'll be able to try riding the pony. Jody and Buck begin working on getting the pony used to a saddle. Jody, of course, grows to love the pony and the pony loves Jody. Naturally, a few days before Thanksgiving a storm is brewing. Jody is going to put the pony in the barn before he goes to school, but Buck tells him not to worry about it. He says he'll put him in if it starts storming, and besides, a little rain never hurt a horse. Sigh. Of course, it downpours and the pony is out in the rain all day. Buck is out working himself on some fence or something and never gets back to put the pony in. The next couple of weeks are spent trying to save the beautiful red pony who gets very, very sick. :-( Then, the red pony is near death and he breaks from the barn and goes to a field to die. Jody runs after the pony but when he gets there, a huge vulture is already sitting on his head eating his eye. The pony is dead. :-( So, that's where I almost stopped reading the book because why go on? Seriously, it was heartbreaking. The next three stories, though, were just more stories about Jody and his family. They didn't really go in order. The second one was about a visitor who came to the farm, an old man, who had lived near there in his childhood years and wanted to die near there. He steals one of their horses, who is also very, very old, and rides off into the mountains, presumably to die. The third story does take place after the red pony dies. It has been a few months and Jody's father tells him that if he takes responsibility for their mare, that he'll pay the $5 needed to breed her and then Jody can have and raise the colt! Jody is ecstatic, and again counts on Buck to help him out. It takes almost an entire year, but finally the mare is ready to give birth. But, of course, something is wrong. The colt is turned the wrong way and will kill both itself and the mare during the birth if Buck doesn't do something. Determined not to let this colt die, and more determined not to disappoint Jody again, Buck whacks the mare on the head with a shovel to kill her and cuts her open to get the colt out. Jody watches the whole thing in stunned silence until Buck puts the slimy baby colt in his arms. That's the end of that story, so we don't even get to see Jody raise the colt. The last story is about Jody's grandfather who comes to visit; his mother's father. His grandfather is famous for telling the same stories about how he and the other settlers went west to discover new territory and how they fought the Indians along the way. The grandfather overhears Jody's father complaining about how he always retells the same stories over and over and he ends up leaving sooner than he planned....but not before telling Jody that there wasn't anything else to discover anyway because the westward travelers got all the way to the ocean before they were forced to stop and make their lives there. So...that's it. Just a little bit of depressing Steinbeck, lol. The last story reminded me of my mom and how I would get impatient when she would tell the same stories over and over. Now I'd love for mom to be here to tell one of her stories. Hindsight is always such a cruel thing. ok, ready to read something more upbeat!!

Finished: Truly Madly Guilty (Moriarty) Another good page-turner, set in Australia, about the lives of three ordinary couples who get turned upside down by a near tragic event at a neighborhood barbecue, and how they are each affected and why they each feel their own level of guilt after the event. And, how three other people on the periphery arre affected in a major way without any of the rather self-absorbent couples even realizing it. Clementine and Erika have been best friends since elementary school, when Clementine's social worker mother forced Clementine to befriend the friendless Erika, who was growing up in a home with a mother who was a hoarder of massive proportions. Clementine resented Erika more than befriended her, but still as young, married adults, they have an unbreakable bond. Clementine is pretty, talented, married to a lovely man, Sam, and has two adorable little girls, 4 year old Holly and 2 year old Ruby. Clementine is a talented cellist who has an audition for the Sydney Opera House coming up, so she's rather preoccupied with herself and her own feelings. Sam is a great dad who has a new job, but also does more "stay at home dad" type parenting with the girls. Erika is an obsessive, compulsive neat freak with a very orderly life after her horrible, hoarding childhood. She's married to semi-hypochondriac, Oliver, who grew up as an only child with alcoholic parents. They love each other terribly, and have tried In-vitro Fertilization for the past two years to have their own child. Erika is the godmother to Holly and Ruby, and both she and Oliver love the two girls dearly. They often judge Clementine and Sam, though, thinking they are too lax in their parenting. Vid is a loud, friendly, huge man in his second marriage to his beautiful, younger, ex-stripper wife, Tiffany. They have a ten year old daughter, Dakota. Vid and Tiffany have lots of money and love to entertain in their ostentatious house, complete with twinkling lights and replica Trevi fountain in the backyard. Harry is the cranky octogenarian that lives next door to Vid and Tiffany and is constantly complaining about their music being too loud, their dog tearing up his yard, and anything else he can think to complain about. He's usually fairly rude, even when Vid always invites him over for the backyard get together's. He never comes, but just stays alone in his house next door. The only person he ever bothers to talk to and be friendly with is Oliver, because Oliver is just a super nice guy. So, one day Vid and Brittany have a barbecue and invite Erika, Oliver, Clementine, Sam and the girls. Vid, though he loves his wife dearly, is mesmerized by classical music and loves hearing about Clementine's playing. Tiffany is rather flirty with the other men, but nothing that bothers anyone. Of course, Erika feels inferior and proceeds to get tipsy, while Oliver constantly plays with the girls and points things out to them. At one point, Erika goes into the house to retrieve some dessert plates, while Oliver goes to the restroom in the backyard cabana. Dakota, who has also been watching the little girls, tells her mother she's going to her room to read. Tiffany tells Clementine that Dakota is no longer watching the girls, and Clementine says, that's fine...she'd done more than enough already. So, Clementine and Sam start watching their own daughters. They're good parents, but not the hovering always three feet away type. While Erika and Oliver are in the house and restroom, Clementine, Sam, Vid and Tiffany get caught up in a conversation and no one sees little Ruby toddle off with Holly's precious purse of collected rocks slung over her shoulder towards the huge fountain. Not until Erika comes out of the house and sees Ruby lying face down in the fountain and screams bloody murder does anyone jump into action. Oliver comes tearing around the cabana and he and Erika get to Ruby first, pulling her out and performing the CPR they have so carefully learned as they feel prospective parents should. It looks for awhile like little Ruby might not make it, but she finally gasps and throws up all the water and is helicoptered to the hospital. The near tragedy changes everything for everyone as different levels of guilt affect each one. Sam becomes despondent that "super dad" that he is let himself get enthralled in a story by ex-stripper Tiffany. Clementine feels the same way. They both blame themselves and each other and their marriage starts crumbling. Vid takes a sledge hammer to the fountain the next day and tears it apart. Erika can't remember any of the details leading up to the grabbing of  Ruby from the fountain, but something is niggling at her conscience. She does remember one thing very clearly though. Right before the party, she and Oliver had privately asked Clementine if she'd be an egg donor for them...the next step in having their own child after IVF had failed so many times. Clementine had been shocked and said she'd think about it before they all headed to the party. Privately, she told Sam that the thought disgusted her and why did Erika always, her entire life, have to have a piece of her to make her life right? Sadly, Erika overhears this conversation and she's devastated. She's still thinking about that when she goes out and sees Ruby in the fountain. Unbeknownst to her parents, Dakota, the ten year old of Vid and Tiffany's assumes a terrible guilt on her own shoulders. She thinks it's her fault that Ruby nearly drowned because she went inside to read. She starts have terrible spells of just sitting and staring and hating her once beloved books until Vid and Tiffany finally pry it out of her and convince her it wasn't her fault. They take her to see the recovered Ruby and Clementine reemphasizes to Dakota that it wasn't her fault, and she's much better. Sadly, one day Oliver and Tiffany realize that the old neighbor, Harry, hasn't put his trash out in weeks, so they go to the door to check on him. No one has seen him since he was cranky about the dog the day of the barbecue. They get into his house and discover to their horror that he's dead at the foot of the stairs and must have been like that for weeks! They are wracked with guilt that they weren't friendlier to him or checking on him earlier. We also come to find out a few weeks later that Erika has secretly taken things from Clementine all her life! She's got an old necklace, her grandmother's pearl-handled scissors, a missing family ice cream scoop, and even little Ruby's light up tennis shoe that they couldn't find earlier the day of the bbq. When Oliver discovers Erika's secret hoard, he doesn't worry about her becoming a hoarder, but does freak out that she has an obsession with things from Clementine. He ixnay's the egg donor process, which Clementine, out of guilt, has finally said that she'd do, and insists that Erika give back the missing things, a little at a time. In the meantime, when Sam almost implodes at a CPR life-saving course that he and Clementine start to take, he breaks down and cries and Clementine realizes that he might be suffering from PTSD about the near-drowning. Sure enough, he goes to a therapist and they begin to get back on track with their marriage. At the end of the book, we are hit with a couple of surprises, one which I assumed all along. Erika finally remembers everything that happened the day of the barbecue and what she remembers is walking outside with the dessert plates and hearing an incessant knocking! When she finally looks up she sees the old Harry banging on his window and pointing at the fountain. The tipsy Erika looks at the fountain and at first thinks that Harry is complaining about some trash floating in the fountain. It takes her a minute to realize that it's Ruby and she drops the plates, screams and runs! Harry, not understanding why Erika is just standing there, runs as fast as his 80-something arthritic legs will let him to go downstairs. He never makes it, though, because he trips on the top step and tumbles to his death. Yes, Harry the crank, died trying to save little Ruby. :-( Then, we also see the flashback of little Holly asking her grandmother that night if Ruby was going to die. She's very upset and confesses that she was mad at her for taking her rock purse so she pushed her! That's the one I kind of saw coming. Holly's grandmother tries to force the memory away from young Holly by telling her that Ruby slipped and fell. Anyway....everyone ends up pretty un-psychologically scarred by the end of the book. Erika and Oliver decide to try foster parenting first, Sam gets his head back into his new job, and Clementine does make the Sydney Opera House orchestra. I, myself, am so very glad that the author did not have two year old Ruby, who carried around a kitchen whisk like it was a teddy bear, die!! She was my favorite character. :-)

Finished: The Couple Next Door (Lapena) I just read this book in a few hours...couldn't put it down! It's about a couple who goes to a dinner party in the house next door, leaving their sleeping six month baby home alone, using the baby monitor to keep tabs on her, and going over every thirty minutes to check on her. Needless to say, when they get back home at 1:30 in the morning, the front door is open, and the baby is gone!!! What follows isn't exactly the best literary read, but it sure is a page-turner. Do we suspect one of the parents who took turns going over every thirty minutes? Who else knew the baby would be home alone after the babysitter canceled at the last minute?? No one is without their faults or suspicions! I'm not even going to do a recap. :-) Just a nice summer read! For anyone who may be reading this....I will spoil one thing about the ending...so stop reading now if you don't want to know. The baby is alive at the end!!

Finished: The Sheltering Sky (Bowles) A very well written, and oddly hard to put down book, about three angst-ridden Americans who travel to North Africa post-World War II and face misadventure, mostly brought on by their own stupidity. I'm not really sure how to describe this book. I just read one description that said they were in "existential despair", and when I clicked on that it says "a moment at which an individual questions the very foundations of their life: whether this life has any meaning, purpose, or value." So...I can definitely see this in the three characters, but honestly cannot fathom how any of them thought that traveling to the small towns nestled in North Africa, on the edges of the Sahara, could possibly fix what was wrong? Port and Kit Morseby are a young, married couple who are apparently suffering marital difficulties, though we never hear why. We know only that they are both way too much in their own heads and about their own feelings to truly care about the other. Whine, whine, whine. Angst, angst, angst. Why me? Why me? Why me? On and on. When deciding to leave New York to embark on their possible marriage recovering trip, they invited along a male friend of theirs, Tunner. He hasn't been a friend for long, but eagerly agrees to go along with his new friends. Kit constantly feels as if Tunner would like to put the moves on her, and they do spend one night together. She does what she does best after that and completely avoids Tunner, not really wanting to be with Port either though. Port, who refused to be inoculated for any diseases before traveling, comes down with typhoid fever. He spends a miserable few sick days as he insists on moving to an even smaller town and insisting Tunner go ahead to their final destination to meet them. This leaves the incapable Kit alone to take care of Port, but to no avail. Port dies from the typhoid fever and Kit, rather than face the reality and going back to meet Tunner for help or comfort, takes off on her own out into the Sahara desert. She comes upon a caravan of two men and all their servants carrying supplies back to their home. She lifts her arms up to the youngest of the men and he takes her up onto his camel. Of course, he also begins to force her to have sex with him at night, but she quits struggling and decides she actually likes the comfort and the closeness and she becomes attached to him. She doesn't realize that he will also allow the other, older, man to also have his sex with her each night too. The man takes her back to his home, where he already has three wives, and keeps her locked in a room where he comes to visit her every day for several hours. She lives for her time with him. (This is truly weird. I mean, she's clearly not in her right mind.) Anyway, after he is away for several days, she comes to her senses and decides to escape. She does so, and is actually taken back to the American consulate at one of the larger cities by a French man she comes across. Luckily Tunner, who has stayed in Africa to look for Kit, has put the word out to all the consulates and has been contacted that Kit has been found! When Kit realizes that Tunner will be there and she'll have to face the real world again, she disappears outside the hotel they've taken her to for shelter and blends into the crowd. That's where the book ends! So very well written, as I said, but a very surreal, head-shaking book!

Finished: Edge of Eternity (Follett) Another great story, the third book in Follett's Centuries trilogy which follows the families of four different countries: The U.S., Germany, Russia and Great Britain. The main characters are the children of the main characters we got to know in the second book, and the grandchildren of the people we grew to love in the first book! The families: the Dewars, the Jakes, the Williams, the Murrays, the Francks, the Peshkovs and the Dvorkins. The book is far too long to recap in great detail, but it runs from 1961 to 1989. We follow the characters through major points in history, as each of them is involved in some way in these pieces of history, kind of the way Forrest Gump was inadvertently involved in so many pieces of history in the movie. We see the establishment of the Berlin Wall, the Civil Rights Movement in the deep south, the rise of Martin Luther King, the presidency of JFK, the terror and uncertainty of the Bay of Pigs, the assassination of JFK, then Bobby Kennedy, then Martin Luther King, Watergate, the Vietnam War, the rising up and subsequent crushing of the Solidarity movement by Lech Walesa in Poland, and the Russian leadership of Khrushchev, then Brezhnev, then Andropov, and finally Gorbachev, who helped to undermine the cold war and led to the breaking down of the Berlin Wall. George Jakes, the half-African American grandson of Russian immigrant to the U.S., Lev Peshkov, becomes a Harvard educated lawyer and resounding fighter for civil rights, and also one of Bobby Kennedy's top advisers. He has two major relationships with strong women and in the end, finds his own happiness. He's a good man! Cameron and Beep Dewar, the grandchildren of American Gus Dewar, go in totally different directions. Beep embraces the free love of the 60's, falling for both main members of an up and coming rock group. Cam becomes an avid Republican, working for Richard Nixon and continuing on with Reagan, eventually working for the CIA to carry out whatever questionable instructions his superiors want. The British Dave and Evie Williams are also a brother and sister duo, grandchildren of Eth Leckwith, the maid turned British parliament woman who we came to love in the first book. Dave becomes the first member of that up and coming rock group, Plum Nellie, despite his father's insistence that he'll never make it as a musician instead of finishing school. Dave falls in love with Beep Dewar, and she with him, until she cheats on fiance Dave with the other main member of the band, and Dave's best friend. Evie becomes a famous actress whose talent enchants the multitudes, until she protests the Vietnam War by posing with North Vietnamese soldiers on a tank in North Vietnam. Jane Fonda anyone? She is eventually forgiven and makes her comeback on Broadway. Jasper Murray, who was basically adopted by the Williams family growing up, turns into a reporter with few scruples who even uses stories about the people who took him in to make his way up the ladder and eventually be there to cover first hand such stories as the assassination of MLK and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. Walli and Lili Franck are the children of Carla Franck, the daughter of beloved character from the first book, Maud von Ulrich. They have an adopted sister, Rebecca, who Carla adopted as a teenager in the second book when her parents were killed in the war. The story for all three of these siblings centers around the erection of the Berlin wall, Rebecca's and Walli's escape to West Berlin, the decades long separation of their family, and their eventual reunion with the fall of the wall in 1989. Walli becomes that second member of Plum Nellie! He's a great songwriter and musician, and he and Dave become best friends. However, Walli leaves behind the love of his life, Karolin, when he escapes to West Germany. She refuses to cross over with him when she realizes she is pregnant with his child. She doesn't want to endanger the baby, so little Alice is born in East Germany and isn't reunited with her father for over 20 years. Meanwhile, Walli gets into drugs in the Haight-Ashbury music and free love scene. He sleeps with Beep, and ruins his relationship with both Dave and the band. The band breaks up and Dave sends Walli back to his sister, Rebecca, in West Germany to kick his drug habit. Eventually, Walli has that happy ending when he's reunited with Karolin and also meets his daughter for the first time. The Russian Tanya and Dimka Dvorkin are twin brother and sister who are the grandchildren of the great Grigori Peshkov (brother or Lev) who we got to know in the first book. Again, we have a brother sister duo who are at opposites in their beliefs, but never waver in their love and support of each other. Dimka is a true believer in communism and works for years in the government until he finally becomes disillusioned by the various leaders until Gorbechev comes along. He falls in love twice and ends up happy with his second wife and two children. Tanya works tirelessly behind the scenes in Russia as a TASS news reporter/secret revolutionary who covers such world events as the Bay of Pigs and the Polish solidarity movement for Russia, all the while sending intelligence back to the revolutionaries to try and abolish communism. She falls early on for a dissident named Vasili, who is sentenced to labor camp in Siberia for distributing a mere pamphlet about freedom. Tanya eventually finds Vasili while on assignment in Siberia, and she manages to smuggle his novel out of Russia and into the hands of British publisher Anna Murray, sister of Jasper. So, for years these writings come out of Russia to the frustration of the Russian government. Eventually Vasili is released from Siberia, with some influence by Dimka, but Tanya and Vasili are still stuck living in Russia, unable to leave, and with Vasili still unable to claim authorship of his books. The book ends with the breaking down of the Berlin Wall and with the Franck family finally reuniting after so many years of separation. Amazingly, none of the major characters die and most all of them end up happy with children! I'm kind of wondering if there will be another book (even those this was labeled a trilogy) to follow up what continues to happen in these fascinating families! :-) Now, for a shorter book.....

Finished: Palace Walk (Mahfouz) Finally!! Real life got in the way and it seems like it took me forever to read this very good book about an Egyptian patriarch who keeps his wife and children in line through tyranny and hypocrisy. This is the first book in a trilogy. I'll probably read all three, since this was a very moving story despite the early 1900's traditions that had Sayyid Ahmad treating his sons with coldness and harshness out of his misguided idea of tough love in making them men...and keeping his wife and daughters cloistered inside their home, never allowed to show their faces outside...not even to go to worship! However, when out working at his successful store, or spending time with his life-long friends and other women at night, Sayyid Ahmad is friendly, smiling, loving and very respected by his peers. It's truly sad to see the way he treats his devoted wife, Amina, and his children, Yasin, Khadija, Fahmy, Aisha and Kamal. Both daughters are married off to brothers of the same family, and by the end of the story are pregnant and/or giving birth. I imagine their stories and those of their children will expand in the next book. The oldest son, Yasin, follows in his father's footsteps as a philanderer after his marriage. Kamal is still just a ten year old school boy going to school, but very precocious. And Fahmy is a nineteen year old university law student who has honorable ideals that end in tragedy for him as the Egyptians in his city began a revolution against the English who are in control. When English troops make encampment right outside their own home, young and foolish Kamal actually befriends the soldiers with his singing. He thinks they are friends, but for them he is just like a little pet. After the Egyptians prevail and the leader they were protesting for is finally released, Fahmy participates in a peaceful, sanctioned demonstration of happiness, but is shot down and killed by disgruntled English soldiers who didn't like being beat. Sadly, Sayyid Ahmad had spent the last several weeks furious with and not speaking to his son because he knew Fahmy defied his father and refused to swear that he would not participate in any demonstrations. Just the very morning of his death, with peace seemingly on Egypt's horizon, Fahmy had gone to his father and apologized for his defiance and his father had very gruffly replied to him. Fahmy had just been happy that his father had even spoken to him. How sad that is how he went to his death. :-( We get alot of introspection about why Sayyid Ahmad is the way he is, and it's very nice writing, but hard to fathom that people actually lived this way. I know they did though. We also see Amina and her feelings and obedience in great detail, and though we don't understand it, we do respect her. What else can she do? Anyway, I'm thinking the next book will open with the aftermath of Fahmy's death! I think I'll read a few other books before diving back into this world though!

Finished: The Farm (Smith) Pretty good page turner by the same author who wrote the Child 44 trilogy that I really liked! The Farm wasn't quite as good, but still a book I enjoyed. It's about a twenty-something son, Daniel, in the UK whose parents have moved to retire on a farm in Sweden. Daniel, who is gay, has not been to visit his parents in the year since they've gone because he's promised his partner that he would tell his parents about them the next time he sees them. So, in the time that he hasn't seen them, apparently alot has happened to his parents! Daniel gets a call from his father in a panic one night telling him that his mother has gone a bit off the deep end, has had delusions, thinks there's a conspiracy of people out to get her, and that she was put in a mental hospital, but had convinced the doctors there she was lucid and had checked herself out. Daniel is in shock, but immediately books a ticket to head to Sweden! While he's at the airport, he gets an equally emphatic phone call from his mother saying, don't believe a word your father says if he calls you! He's in on a conspiracy to try and have me committed! I've just landed in London if you'll pick me up at the airport. Flummoxed, Daniel doesn't know who or what to believe! Neither of his parents has ever been an alarmist, and as a matter of fact, they've never even fought in front of him. Before he can call his father back, and because he's already at the airport, Daniel sees his mother almost immediately. She's thin, ragged and looking afraid. She insists that Daniel take her where she can start at the beginning and tell him the entire story. What ensues is a tale of possible sexual abuse and abduction and death of a teenage girl who has been adopted by their neighbors at the farm. The problem is, their neighbor farmer is also a town bigwig who happens to be best friends with the mayor, the police chief, and the psychiatric doctor! Daniel's mother has arrived with a satchel full of evidence such as newspaper clippings, written letters, etc. When Daniel's father keeps trying to call in the middle of their conversations, Daniel's mother tells him they must find another place to talk because he doesn't know his father anymore, he's changed. He's lying and will actually be on a plane to London to capture her. Daniel takes his mother to a hotel to hear the rest of her far-fetched story and promises her he will think only in her best interests. Sure enough, Daniel's father arrives in London very quickly, along with the psychiatrist who had committed his mother. Daniel doesn't know what to think, but he does take his mother to a local facility for her own safety as her behavior is getting more and more erratic. His mother considers this a huge betrayal, especially after her husband and former doctor arrive. She quickly falls into a state of non-communication and not eating. After a couple of months, Daniel is despondent at his mother's condition and feels terribly guilty. He decides to fly to the farm in Sweden and see if there is anything to his mother's story and all her evidence. He does meet the next door neighbor and sees how controlling a man he is. ****SPOILERS**** If you are reading this and don't want to know the ending, then quit reading now! So, even though the man is very unpleasant, as his mother described, Daniel finds out that he never harmed his adopted daughter, Mia. Instead, Mia got tired of being controlled, and one night when the mayor, her father's friend, comes on to her, she runs away with her boyfriend. She'd actually grown close to Daniel's mother, who had told her the story of running away from her own childhood home in Sweden when she was falsely suspected of drowning her best friend in a fit of jealousy! Daniel finally tracks down Mia, who is living with her boyfriend, and pleads for her to come back to the UK and see his mother so she can see she's alive. He's convinced it will help her out of her psychosis. While in Sweden, Daniel also visits his grandfather, who he has never met, since his mother ran away at 16. He sees a creepy shed that his mother described in the notes of her evidence as being a shed on the property of their neighboring farmer. Daniel goes to the shed, and seeing the inside, realizes that it was a secret room that his grandfather kept. He suddenly realizes that everything was in his mother's head, all her experiences after she moved back to Sweden, because her own father had sexually abused her when she turned 14!! The grandfather makes no apologies, in a very spine-chilling conversation with Daniel. Daniel wants to get the heck out of Dodge, and take Mia back with him to help his mother back to sanity. At the very end, after Mia spends hours talking with his mother, for the first time in months, his mother wants to see both him and his father to talk. Very eerie book at the end. So sad that it was all in her head, but then I guess a somewhat happy ending as she's able to realize it all came from what happened to her as a teenager. As it turns out...there never even WAS a best friend who was drowned. Even that girl was the figment of his mother's imagination who she made up to get through the abuse.

Finished: The Widow (Barton) Creepy page-turner about the widow of a man accused of kidnapping and killing a 3 year old girl. :-(  When I read the flap of the book, it just indicated mystery, etc. I didn't realize I'd be getting into the story of a man who started off with pornography and escalated to having to kidnap a youngster. Anyway, the book does keep you guessing and wondering if the guy was really guilty, since he gets off during his trial! Told from many different viewpoints, the widow, the detective, the reporter, the mother of the missing child and the husband himself, the book goes back and forth in time until finally, by the end of the story, you know for certain that he did it. Just when they're about to re-arrest him, though, his wife, pushes him in front of a bus and he dies. It turns out, he had confessed to her a few days before, after four years of insisting he was innocent, and even taken her to wear he had buried the little body. So, the story ends with the detective finally able to give the mother of the child some closure. However, the story material itself was just a bit too creepy and depressing for me!

Finished: Honey in the Horn (Davis) Another Pulitzer Prize winner, but oh my, it's never taken me two weeks to read a 380 page book before! (well, maybe in high school or something, but not since I started this project!) Anyway, it's really not a bad book, just very descriptive, long, prose. The book is about settlers in Oregon, and this is apparently the only book about Oregon that has won the Pulitzer. The story follows a teenage, orphan boy, Clay, who has worked for a man and his family as a ranch hand since he was a young boy. When the father asks Clay to sneak an empty gun into his miscreant son, Wade, in jail, in hopes that Wade will attempt to escape and be killed, thus putting an end to the father's embarrassed misery, Clay does as he's told. Of course, Wade Shively is so feared by the jailers, that all he has to do is wave the gun at them and they let him go!! So, the father's plan doesn't go as hoped and then Clay must go on the run, away from the law, who now knows he helped Wade escape, and away from Wade himself, who goes after Clay for taking his horse and rifle when he goes on the run. As Clay makes his way across the Oregon mountains and down onto the Coos Bay coast, he meets a host of characters, from farmers, to ranchers, to wheat-cutters, to down-on-their luck settlers, to Native Americans trying to make their own way, to a horse-trader and his lovely teenager daughter, Luce. Of course, Clay and Luce fall for each other, but each have secrets they keep from each other: Clay, his part in Wade Shively's escape, and Luce, the fact that SHE is actually the person who killed the man who Wade was finally in jail for killing, not Wade. The underlying story is actually pretty good, but it flows along about as fast as the slow-moving wagontrains ramble through the harsh land. There are really lovely descriptions of the landscape, flora and fauna, wild life, coast and mountains and valleys, especially if Oregon holds a dear place in your heart, which is does in mine! However, the book just dragged a bit! Clay and a few of the other settlers he's started traveling with do eventually have a confrontation with Wade which results in the hanging of Wade Shively for making another attempt on someone's life.  Ironically, they are wrong again and Wade only shot into the air, but Western justice is meted out. Poor Wade. Anyway, I'm glad I read the book, though I can't say it was my favorite. I think I'll slowly keep on my path of reading as many Pulitzer Prize winners as I can! Still slowly making my way through the bible too!

Finished: The Forgetting Time (Guskin) The exploration of souls reincarnating themselves into young children is the crux of this book about a four year old boy, Noah, who is plagued with nightmares of the water, and is always asking his single mom when he can go be with his other mother. The mom, Janie, a successful architect, but at her wits end, finally resorts to consulting a psychiatrist when Noah is kicked out of preschool for talking about things he shouldn't...like how guns smell when they are fired, and how spells are cast in Harry Potter, etc. None of these things have ever been discussed with Noah by his mom or anyone else she knows, and the fear of water and nightmares just keep getting worse and worse. When a psychiatrist wants to medicate her young son for schizophrenia, Janie takes the desperate measure of consulting another psychiatrist, Dr. Anderson...one who has dedicated his entire neuro-science career to traveling the world and meeting young children who would appear to have the souls of other dead people in them. In many of the countries, like India, the people actually accept this idea and the family of the child will get to know the family of the deceased, once they figure out who it is. Most of the children, though, outgrow "being" the other person by the time they are six or seven, and go on with their current life. Dr. Anderson knows that in America he'll have a much tougher time convincing parents, especially the ones of the soul who has inhabited Noah's body that such a thing is possible. And, sadly, Dr. Anderson, who is sixty-six, has been diagnosed with a kind of aphasia which has already started robbing words from him. The brilliant man has trouble coming up with the correct words for things, and he's only going to get worse over the next year until he becomes completely dependent on someone else to live. In the meantime, though, he's determined to help Janie and Noah. Dr. Anderson is able to get out of Noah that his name is Tommy and what area of the country he lived in. He begins searching obituaries for any child named Thomas who may have drowned or died in the years since Harry Potter came out! They find a family whose nine year old son has been missing and presumed dead for seven years. The mother, Denise, has never fully recovered and just goes through the motions of life. The father no longer lives in the house. And, the younger brother, Charlie, now fifteen, is a teenager basically raising himself and lonely for his parents' attention. When Janie and Dr. Anderson take Noah to the house, he immediately recognizes it, and when he sees Denise, he throws his arms around her legs crying, "mama, mama". It's all very emotional for Denise and Charlie, but Noah says too many things and knows too many things for them not to believe. As they sit around, pretty much in shock, talking about how this could be possible, Noah slips out the back and makes his way over to the house of the person who killed him!!! Acckk!! As it turns out, Tommy was on his bike heading to a friend's house seven years before when the fourteen year old brother of another friend stopped him and said, hey, want to come fire my gun? The fourteen year old, who was verbally abused by his father, just wanted someone to show off to. He promised Tommy he could have a turn shooting the rifle. As Tommy was setting up the third can for Pauly on the side of an old well, Pauly decided to switch his perfect aim from the can to the well bucket. He fired the gun and the bullet ricocheted off the metal bucket and hit Tommy in the back, felling him at once. Panicked, thinking he'd killed Tommy, and knowing his own father would probably kill him, Pauly threw Tommy's body into the well. As he was leaving, he heard Tommy yelling for help! He's wasn't dead! Pauly looked around for a rope, but found nothing to help. Figuring that by the time he came back with help that Tommy would be dead, he just left him to drown. :-( So, little four year old Noah goes over, knocks on the door and confronts now twenty-one year old Pauly, really freaking him out by asking him why he shot him and threw him in the well! Pauly runs out of the house and into the fields, and Noah returns back to Tommy's old backyard and climbs up into his and Charlie's old tree house. By now Janie has called the police to find the missing Noah, and instead, they find Pauly who confesses to what he did years before. Charlie gets an idea of where Noah might be and sure enough, finds him in the tree house. They reminisce a bit, and Denise hears them. This makes her open to embracing Noah more readily and Denise is the only person Noah wants when he then has an asthma attack and is rushed to the hospital. Janie is reeling by all the developments, but Noah throws her a crumb when he asks her not to leave the room either. After they stay for the funeral and burial of Tommy's remains, which were found in the well, Dr. Anderson and Janie tell Noah that it's time to go home now, and he consents, but first he wants Denise to give him a bath...the first bath he's had in over a year due to his fear of the water!! She gives him the bath and then sends him on his way. The families promise to stay in touch. They do stay in touch by phone a couple of times, but by the time Noah is six, when Denise comes to visit, he doesn't recognize her at all. Janie just has to tell him that this is an old friend he met a while before. Denise is upset, but realizes it's what's best for Noah and she is finally able to say goodbye to Tommy. She and Charlie are in a much better and open place now than before as well. It was a pretty good page-turning book...especially when Noah went to confront Pauly and we didn't know the truth yet of how Tommy had died. It was all a horrible accident, though, and at the end of the book, Denise goes to the prison to visit Pauly and hear what happened. She asks him to write to her. Interspersed before every couple of chapters were real-life accounts taken from a book written by a doctor who actually did travel the world studying reincarnation in young children. All in all, a pretty good book!

Finished: Find Her (Gardner) The latest book by one of my favorite suspense authors! This time she revisited Detective D.D. Warner as she tried to break the case of a newly kidnapped young woman who had been kidnapped five years before as well and kept captive for over 400 days. The young woman, Flora, survived the first kidnapping physically, but emotionally she has turned into somewhat of a vigilante trying to make amends for some of the things she was forced to do while kidnapped. Five years before, her kidnapper, Jacob Hess, had been captured by another of Gardner's mainstay characters, FBI agent Kimberly Quincy. I'd love another Kimberly Quincy story, by the way. And, Kimberly was introduced in a book after we first go to know her father, FBI profiler Pierce Quincy, who became another recurring character in Gardner's books, along with the detective he aided, Rainie.  Anyway, that was a tangent, but I just love Gardner's books, and all these characters that she keeps bringing back over and over. :-) So, D.D. calls up Kimberly Quincy to get some insight on what happened when she rescued Flora five years before and that helps D.D. figure out what's going on. Flora has been abducted while out in a bar trying to hunt down the person who had kidnapped college student Stacey Summers only three months before. In the process, Flora is taken again herself, but it can't be by Jacob Hess because Flora actually blew his brains out when Kimberly rushed in to save her. So....turns out there was another person who Jacob Hess had been attached to when he was driving Flora around the country in the back of his 18-wheeler, much of the time confined in a pine coffin. Jacob had a daughter whose sociopathic tendencies may have actually outweighed her father's. These five years later, she's out for revenge on Flora for killing her father. So, it all comes to a head with Flora helping to rescue Stacey and Flora and D.D. together bringing down the psycho daughter. At the end, Flora finally realizes that she can try living her life for the future instead of in the past.

Finished: The Year of Magical Thinking (Didion) Joan Didion's memoir of the year after her husband, writer John Dunne's, sudden death. For some reason I was thinking this book would be more uplifting, but it was really a study in the depth of grief, many of the experiences so similar to what I experienced after my brother's death. Things like this "One day when I was talking on the telephone in his office I mindlessly turned the pages of the dictionary that he had always left open on the table by the desk. When I realized what I had done I was stricken: what word had he last looked up, what had he been thinking?" I can't tell you how real a moment something like that is. Well, I mean, you understand if you have lost someone close to you. Anyway, in writing what her first year without her husband of forty years was like, Didion also writes "Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention." I thought that was very profound as well and wonder if I've been grieving for almost twenty years, but not yet dealing with the grief? Hmm... In Didion's book, the other horrifying event was that her newly married daughter happened to be in the ICU battling pneumonia which had morphed into life-threatening sepsis. I'm sure the stress of that added to her husband's heart attack. How completely shocking and awful for Joan Didion. :-( I'm honestly surprised she was able to write about her experiences, but I'm glad she did. When she writes about bounding into the house, eager to talk to John about something from her day, only to realize that he wasn't there to talk to, I know that exact feeling. I remember so completely intuitively wanting to call my brother after seeing Titanic to compare notes, only to realize, yet again, that he wasn't there to talk to. Anyway....a very deep and moving book, but certainly one that takes me back to all these thoughts rather than propelling me forward!

Finished: The Fixer (Malamud) Pulitzer Prize winning novel about, Yakov Bok, a Jewish man in 1911 Russia who is falsely accused of killing a young Christian boy, and imprisoned in detestable conditions before finally being brought to trial! The book ends as Yakov is finally being carried by carriage to his trial, so book readers never know his fate (though it is assumed that he will be found guilty, even though there is no evidence against him). In fact, The Fixer is based on the infamous real life story, imprisonment, trial and release of Russian Jewish man, Menahem Beilis. In real life, enough people, both Jewish and non-Jewish, apparently cried out for justice when it was obvious that Beilis had been falsely accused of a "blood ritual" killing of a young boy. In the book, very few people cry out, and some who do are actually imprisoned themselves, but there is a lawyer who believes in Yakov Bok, so we are led to believe there might be hope for the right verdict, but most likely not. Throughout his horrific prison trials, the prosecutor tries to get Yakov to confess many times, telling him it will go easier on him. In reality, the prosecutor actually suspects the child's mother of being involved in the murder, but since he's got a Jew in prison and Tsarist Russia was getting uncomfortable with giving Jewish people their rights, the prosecutor intends to make an example of Yakov Bok. Meanwhile, Yakov deeply examines both is life and the bigger world that he has been living in. The book is really a wider statement on how people who are feared are terribly mistreated. I guess it was a good Pulitzer choice, but again, it was one of those very depressing books that makes you question where the goodness in the world is or was.

If on a winter's night a traveler (Calvino) Well, a very interesting book, with a neat hook, that started with promise, but ended up dragging to the end. At the beginning of the book, the author talks to the reader and tells them to sit back and enjoy the book. In the first chapter we start reading about a train traveler on a winter's night who disembarks at a tiny train station where some suspense ensues, and just as the chapter is getting to a climax, it ends. The first line of the book is "If on a winter's night a traveler". The next chapter is told from the viewpoint of "the reader". The reader has been reading this book about the traveler and suddenly when he gets to the climax, there's an error in the book and the pages begin repeating themselves! Over and over they repeat, the only pages being the pages he's already read. Anxious to finish the story and to get a book that is not defective, the reader takes it back to the bookstore where he bought it. The bookseller is so very sorry and says they have had a few books like this of Calvino's latest and tells him the correct book that finishes the story is actually by a Polish author. The reader runs into a pretty woman there for the same reason....to return her defective Calvino book. Her name is Ludmilla and she becomes known as the second reader. So, the reader and Ludmilla exchange a bit of talk, and he asks for her phone number so they can compare the end of the story when they get to it. The next chapter begins in what each of them think is a continuation of the Calvino book, but in actuality, it is an entirely different book with the first line "outside the town of Malbork". At first the reader is dismayed that this is a totally different book than the first one, but he again gets caught up in the story, which is a completely different story, which again ends abruptly right at a climatic point! In this case, the remainder of the book's pages are blank! The reader and Ludmilla get together to try and get to the bottom of things, and then the book gets rather perverse. Every other chapter, the author basically talks to the true reader about reading and writing...or we hear the story of a crazy man whose life mission is to go around creating these false books...or we read the diary of an author who has HAD some of his books hijacked and mistranslated into completely different stories in other languages. So, after each one of those chapters, we get another intriguing chapter of another new book, with a different first line. This goes on until we have read ten different stories that all end right at a crucial point. We never find out the ending of any of the stories or the fates of those characters. It was a clever idea, and people have called Calvino a genius in writing this book, but I felt it got too bogged down with his droning on and on about the expectations of both readers and authors in his "in between" chapters. And, of course, I figured out early on that the first sentence of each book made one long paragraph that kind of made sense, but didn't tie anything together. The reader and Ludmilla have a bit of a love story and are married by the end. For me, I was left really just wanting to know the ending of about eight of the stories. :-) I'm glad I read the book, because it was on a list of "must reads" that I'd been putting off. Done and done and I'm none the worse for it, but really none the wiser either. :-)

Finished: Housekeeping (Robinson) I'm having to let this book sink in. Very beautiful prose, at times bordering on stream of conscious that gets a bit tedious, but very moving piece on how profoundly the loss of loved ones affects a family, specifically, two young girls left behind when their mother commits suicide. This remembering of her mother by the narrator, Ruthie, as a teenager, resonated very strongly in me:

There is so little to remember of anyone--an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.

I guess this is really pretty much a depressing tale. The girls, Ruthie and Lucille, one year apart in age, are left on the porch of their grandmother's house in a tiny town in the "west" near a huge lake by their mother who proceeds to go and drive her car off a cliff into the lake. This is the same lake that her own father had died in years before when the train he was riding in (on the railroad he worked for) plunged off the bridge traveling over the lake and perished in the depths of the water. I suppose that would set the tone for the mother's life. In any event, she doesn't even let her own mother know that she's leaving the girls there, and they spend hours on the porch alone, thinking their mother is coming back before their grandmother gets home and finds them. The girls are then raised by their grandmother for a few years until she passes away. Then, their mother's sister, who has become a homeless drifter, comes back to town when she hears of her mother's death and she attempts to continue raising the girls who are now in their teens. It's really a recipe for disaster since the aunt, Sylvie, isn't really "all there" herself. Ruthie grows close to her, however, and starts to become just like her, while Lucille determines to break away and lead a more normal life. In the end, Lucille removes herself and goes to live with one of her teachers. When the sheriff informs Sylvie that there will be a hearing to see about the removal of Ruthie from her care, Sylvie and Ruthie burn down the house and run away in the night across the huge expanse of the railroad bridge!! They barely make it across by daylight, where they hop on the morning train just as it begins to cross. Sylvie is going to take Ruthie and teach her to become a drifter. The rest of the town, including Lucille, is left thinking that Sylvie and Ruthie perished off the bridge into the lake which had already claimed the lives of Sylvie's father and Ruthie's mother. They don't ever let Lucille know any differently since they don't want to be caught. I totally did not understand the ending, and had to reread it three times. sigh. Ruthie was just kind of rambling on about what Lucille must be doing and how maybe she was waiting in a cafe in Boston for her to show up or her mother, but they never would? Other than the kind of weird ending, there were so many beautiful passages in the book. I'll put a few more of them down. I think I definitely need to read a book that isn't so depressing the next time around, though!

I always love descriptions involving wind. Here, a description of how the spirit passes on:

....just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves, then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on. 

Ruthie describing her family: Then, too, for whatever reasons, our whole family was standoffish. This was the fairest description of our best qualities, and the kindest description of our worst faults. 

And this last one I just visualized instantly because I have some of these exact old pictures that belonged to my parents with the same black paper on the back having been torn from their old photo albums to give to us:

There was a shoe box full of old photos, each with four patches of black, felty paper on the back. These had clearly been taken from a photograph album, because they were especially significant or because they were not especially significant. 

Finished:  Fool Me Once (Coben) Another great page-turner by one of my favorite current authors, with one of his twistiest endings yet! Maya is a former helicopter pilot who fought in Afghanistan, but was discharged from the military after accidentally ordering the shooting of a vehicle with civilians in it while trying to rescue some of her comrades. Now home in the states, she suffers from PTSD nightmares while trying to raise her two year old daughter, Lily. And, that's not the worst of it. Maya's husband has been murdered. :-( As if that wasn't tragic enough, Maya's sister had been murdered while she was in Afghanistan. Needless to say, her world is reeling. When Maya finds out that the same gun was used to kill her sister and her husband, she is determined to figure out what is going on, all on her own. Matters only become more complicated when Maya views her secret nanny cam and the impossible happens....a man sits down on the couch and plays with Lily...and Lily knows him. When he turns towards the camera, Maya sees Joe's face!!! Could he possibly be alive? As the mystery deepens, Maya speeds around figuring things out. The ending is quite a shocker as we find out first who killed Joe, and then why...and then what actually happens to Maya in the end. I'm always so disappointed when my Harlan Coben books are done!!!

Finished: Arrowsmith (Lewis) Pulitzer Prize winning book about a scientist named Martin Arrowsmith that took me forever to read because it was truly so boring. I believe Sinclair Lewis is more acclaimed for his Babbitt and Main Street, but since he didn't win the Pulitzer for either of those he was maybe awarded it for Arrowsmith as a consolation? Anyway, none of the characters, including Martin, are very compelling or likeable, so that always makes it hard for me to be interested in them or care about them. Martin goes through medical school with a bunch of guys, most who are only concerned about how much money they can make in the future. Martin, on the other hand, just wants to work on experiments in the lab. His mentor is Dr. Gottlieb, who is the one professor who understands him because he is also interested more in making the scientific discoveries than getting rich being a doctor. Anyway, Martin does meet someone, Leora, fall in love, move to her podunk hometown, and become the town doctor for awhile, but his heart isn't into it. He does eventually end up back in a major lab and discovers a potential cure for the bubonic plague. He travels to a tropical island that is being ravaged by the plague and become relatively famous when his cure works. Leora, however, who had insisted on going with him, becomes sick and dies. Martin makes his way back to the states and marries a rich woman who wants to change him from the all-hours-of-the-night lab worker to a socializing socialite. He eventually chucks that life (and their young son) for a cabin in the woods to go back to his first love, working on experiments hoping to cure another disease. I've obviously left out alot of detail, but it simply wasn't that interesting to me. So glad it's over! I think I'll read a page-turner next. :-)

Finished: The Lake House (Morton) Another pretty good Kate Morton page-turner, though this one didn't keep me quite as engaged. Once again the story centers around the secret mystery in a great manor house in England. The Edevane family, Eleanor, Anthony and their three daughters, Deborah, Alice and Clemmie, are living what seems to be a carefree life at their lake house in the country when finally a son is born, Theo. Theo is twelve years younger than the youngest daughter and the light of every one's life! Unfortunately, though, Anthony is plagued by flashbacks from World War I, where he went through the horrors of the trenches. He is particularly disturbed by the horrific memories of his dearest friend, Howard, like a brother to him, who decided to desert the army to be with the young French woman and her child who he has fallen in love with. Though Howard is an officer, he decides to help them escape, but the plan is foiled by the crying baby. Howard is then shot as a deserter. :-( Anthony forever blames himself, and after young Theo comes along, his bursts of "shell shock" violence get worse as he insists on making the baby quit crying. Meanwhile, Eleanor has stuck by her husband and kept his secret since neither of them want their girls to know of his illness. One night, during the annual festival at the lake house, complete with dancing, drinking and fireworks, Eleanor sets a plan in motion that affects the family for the rest of their lives. When they all wake up in the morning, baby Theo is gone. Kidnapped? Murdered? Wandered off? The mystery is never solved. Well, not solved while Eleanor and Anthony are still alive. Seventy years later, a young female detective, Sadie, has been given a month's leave for getting too emotionally involved in her own case of a young mother who left her child alone in an apartment and disappeared. The young mother's own mother suspects foul play, but the police write it off as a runaway mother. Detective Sadie Sparrow feels otherwise, but her insistence on pursuing the case gets her a suspension. When she goes to spend that time off with her grandfather, she gets caught up in the old cold case of the missing Theo Edevane. Her grandfather lives close to the estate where the tragedy occurred so many years before, Loeanneth. Sadie delves into the old library clippings about the kidnapping/possibly murder and discovers that the middle daughter, Alice, is still alive at 86 and the prolific detective novelist, A. Edevane. When Sadie finally gets in touch with Alice, and her thirtyish assistant, Peter, the pieces all start to fall together. Alice has spent years thinking she was the cause of Theo's disappearance because she'd written a wild story about the kidnapping of a toddler from his rich parents as a teenager and shared it with an estate gardener who she realized was in terrible need of money. All these years she has thought herself responsible, but Sadie and Clive,  a retired police officer who was the youngest member of the force during the Edevane case, figure everything out when Alice gives them permission to enter Loeanneth and go through her father's notebooks and her mother's letters. They all go from believing that perhaps Anthony Evedane accidentally killed Theo in a fit of shell shock, with Eleanor helping him to cover it up, to finding out the real truth...which for once, I might add, is a happy ending. :-) It took me much longer to finish this book because I just couldn't get quite as engaged, but all in all, though a little bit predictable, it was still a good Kate Morton book....and I will probably read more of hers! :-)

Finished: The Able McLaughlins (Wilson) The 1924 Pulitzer Prize winner about a community of Scottish immigrants who have settled in Iowa during the Civil War years...and specifically about the McLaughlin family. We find out quickly enough that the McLaughlin's have thirteen children, but the story focuses on their beloved son, Wully, who has been to fight in the Civil War. He arrives home one day after being held as a prisoner of war in the south. He has escaped and takes refuge at home! His mother, father and siblings are beyond delighted, but after nursing Wully back to health, realize that he's got to go back to the army. Before he goes, though, he runs an errand for his mother and meets neighboring farm girl, Chirstie. He is immediately smitten, as is she. They share an emotional kiss, and then he is off back to the war. He's kept under lock and key by his own army, as are all the soldiers who escaped, but didn't come right back so were considered deserters. Finally, a northern general pooh poohs that idea and frees the young men, but Wully is once again sick and after a few months, honorably discharged and sent home to recover. When he's back on his feet, he rushes over to see Chirstie, only to have her violently rebuff him. It takes some time, but he finally learns from her that in recent months, her cousin, Peter, had forced himself upon her and now she was expecting a baby. Furious, Wully goes to find Peter and makes him leave and never come back. Wully then marries Chirstie and suffers the disdain of his own parents and the community when they all realize that Chirstie's baby is coming so soon that Wully must have had his was with her before their wedding. Wully lets himself be shamed and plans to raise the baby as his own, and makes Chirstie promise not to tell anyone the truth. Eventually, Chirstie does tell Wully's own mother, and she restores her worshipful opinion of her son...but doesn't let him know that she knows. Wully and Chirstie build their home on McLaughlin land that his father had set aside, and happily raise baby Johnnie. Johnnie is the light of the family, and all are happy...until one day Peter comes back and approaches Chirstie when she's alone in the house with the baby! He rips her sleeve and she runs screaming from the door to get Wully. Wully hunts and hunts for Peter, determined to kill him but he's nowhere to be found. Many worrisome months go by, and Wully decides that they can't spend all their days looking over their shoulders, especially with Chirstie having to be way out on the farm alone while he's working the fields, so he decides that they'll give up the farming, which has been quite successful, and move to town. While visiting town, Wully is notified that Peter is actually lying in a nearby stable dying. The townsfolk ask Wully if he'll take Peter back in his wagon to his family to die, and he refuses. When Chirstie finds out, she begs Wully to stop the wagon and take Peter to his family. She hates Peter as much as he does, but it isn't right to let him die alone. They eventually go back to get him, and the ride back is terribly stressful, without a word or smile. Then suddenly, baby Johnnie blurts out his very first complete sentence, and Chirstie turns to Wully with the most beautiful, loving smile. They are both so happy! Peter has lifted his head and witnessed how much in love they are. Wully notices that Peter sees that and is instantly full of forgiveness rather than vengeance. He sees that it must hurt Peter more than anything else possibly could to see that Chirstie loves Wully. With that, the story ends as they continue to drive Peter to his folks. The story is pretty good, but a little, hmmm, what's the word...just a little matter-of-fact like many of the earlier novels have seemed to me. It did keep me interested though! More characters were delved into and a good sense of the upbringing of the Scottish immigrants was represented, and of the community pulling together in what was assuredly a hard life on the cold plains. And, I'm glad that Wully and Chirstie got to end up having a happy ending. :-)

Finished: Agent 6 (Smith) The third book in Smith's trilogy about Russian secret police agent Leo Demidov. In this book, it is ten years after Leo and his wife, Raisa, saved their rebellious, adopted daughter, Zoya, from her own destructive path of revolting against their Russian lifestyle. Now, their 17 year old younger daughter, Elena, has been seduced and recruited by a wily Russian agent to help get American communist, Jesse Austin, out of retirement to speak in America, rousing the people to revolt against the U.S. Raisa, Elena and Zoya travel to the U.S. without Leo, much to his dismay, to perform in a joint Russian/American chorale concert to show the world that the two Cold War rivals can perform together and be "friends". Raisa has no idea that Elena will use this opportunity to get in touch with Austin. Years before Austin had visited Russia and then traveled back to America, extolling the virtues of Communism and Russia through his soulful, jazz music, and through many a rousing public speech. Inspired by the innocence and exuberance of Elena, Jesse agrees to meet her on the street corner near the United Nations building, where the choirs are singing, after the concert to give his speech. Meanwhile, the FBI is constantly tailing all the Russian students and especially Raisa and her daughters. One agent in particular, Jim Yates, intimidates Elena and Raisa. As Jesse Austin begins to speak, he is gunned down and the gun is planted on Elena! Raisa arrives during the chaos to shield her daughter and puts the gun in her own pocket. Raisa is then accused of killing Jesse Austin, and Austin's widow goes to the police station and shoots her! Rather than save her life, Jim Yates lets her die a slow death on the police station floor so they can concoct a story that there was a sordid love triangle and Raisa killed Jesse out of jealousy. In reality, at first you think the FBI wanted Jesse Austin killed, but in reality, it is the Russians who decided that if they had Jesse Austin assassinated and made it look like America's FBI had him killed, then maybe the country would rise up and revolt and become communist. OK, that's a far stretch to me, but that was their motive. Anyway, Leo is obviously devastated by the death of his beloved wife Raisa, and sixteen years later, he's still devastated. He's also out of touch with both his daughters who are now married and living in Russia. He's an opium addict and he's been assigned to the worst position a former Russian secret police agent can be assigned to...he's now a Russian advisor in Afghanistan during the occupation  of Afghanistan by Russia! He dreams of making his way to America so he can figure out who killed Raisa and exact his revenge. Long story short, Leo does finally find out that even though Agent 6, aka Jim Yates, didn't kill Raisa, he did let her die a slow, painful death. After realizing that this doesn't bring Raisa back, Leo goes back to Russia a traitor to await his certain death sentence. He finally gets to see his two daughters after several years while he's in prison, and that's where the story ends. Leo is a traitor because to bargain his way to America, he offers the FBI a deal to give them intel about what Russia is doing in Afghanistan so the U.S. can decide whether of not to enter the war. I've left out lots of details but that's the gist of the story. The book was a good wrap up to Leo's story, but out of all the books, I think I liked the first one, Child 44, the best! I just might read more of Tom Rob Smith's work though! :-)

Finished: The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh (Milne) "Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred."  Pooh thought for a little.  "How old shall I be then?"  "Ninety-nine."  Pooh nodded.  "I promise," he said.  Still with his eyes on the world Christopher Robin put out a hand and felt for Pooh's paw.

Sigh, I just love Winnie the Pooh, always have. I know I've read all of these stories at different times over the years...mostly to my own kids, and I'm sure when I was younger too...but I've never sat and read the entire illustrated tales. Oh how I love every character! Not much more to say than that. I'm just going to bask in the innocence and love of Poohness right now. :-)

The Namesake (Lahiri) A very good, but very sad book. Not sad in the way of death and destruction or sick children, anything like that...just that the main character's life is not at all happy no matter what decisions he makes. The story is about a man, Ashoke, and a woman, Ashima, from India and Bengali who both marry in the traditional Indian way...set up by their parents. Ashima moves across the world from her family in Calcutta to live with her new husband who teaches in Boston. They are steadfast in their marriage, but not in love. They have two children, the first being a son, in 1968. We get a little back story about Ashoke and find that when he was in his early twenties, he loved the Russian author Gogol, and in particular, his famous short story, The Overcoat. On an overnight train trip one evening, he was the only person in his sleeping cabin who didn't climb in his berth and go to sleep. Instead he stayed up to read Gogol. When the train derailed, buckled and crashed, killing many of the people aboard, all of Ashoke's cabin mates were killed, except for Ashoke. Ashoke saw this as a further sign for him to be enamored of Gogol. Flash forward to 1968 when his son is born. Ashima and Ashoke decide to again go with Indian tradition and wait for her grandmother to name their son. A letter is in the mail from India. However, the hospital will not release the mother and child until there is a name on the birth certificate. Not really understanding that this will be his permanent name, Ashoke gives him the name Gogol, planning to change it to the name the grandmother picks as soon as it arrives. Of course, fate steps in the way and the grandmother has a stroke and Ashima's father dies, so they must travel quickly to India. Gogol is the official name written on the baby's passport, and the name he is stuck with for the rest of his life. Gogol and his sister grow up in American schools, with American friends and customs. They never quite appreciate it when their parents force them to leave school for weeks at a time to travel to India to see relatives...India, where they don't have any of the things they're used to. Yet, at school, despite having some friends, they are still considered just enough "different" to be on the outer fringe of being included as well. Caught between spending weekends with his parents' friends, who are all people of Indian and Bengali descent who they have met in America, and between trying to keep up with his American friends, life is not the happiest for Gogol. On his twelfth birthday, Gogol's father gifts him with a copy of Gogol's short stories, including The Overcoat. He does not tell Gogol how he almost died and had to relearn how to walk and how much the name Gogol means to him. Gogol is pretty much a brat, hates his name, and doesn't do much but stick the book on a shelf, never even seeing the inscription his father has written. As he grows into a typical teenager and then goes to college, he exhibits the fairly typical behavior of ignoring his parents, even lying that he needs to be at school for a project when he really wants to spend time doing the things he enjoys instead of going home every weekend. He's a good student at an Ivy league school. He shows a talent for drawing at an early age and has decided to become an architect. One of the first things he does when he's of age is officially change his name! He picks the name Nikhil, which is what his parents had finally decided to call him when he entered kindergarten, but ironically, five year old Gogol had thrown a fit, so his teachers stuck to his official name and kept calling him Gogol. So, in college, everyone gets to know Gogol and Nikhil....but as we read the book, he's always referred to as Gogol. Anyway, Gogol meets an American girl, Maxine, that he falls for, and she for him, and his parents are devastated that he won't be picking an Indian girl to have a traditional marriage with. He doesn't give too much thought to their feelings and ends up spending more and more time with her and her family, who he comes to love. Suddenly, Ashoke drops dead of a heart attack at the age of 46 and Gogol's life does a complete change. He goes back home to help handle things and even though Maxine is very understanding at first, she doesn't understand why many months later he is still mourning, regretful and wanting to spend so much time with his mother and sister. Maxine and Gogol break up and Gogol goes to work at an architecture firm in New York. He deeply regrets that he didn't speak to his father more and spend more time with him. In one of their last conversations, Ashoke had finally told Gogol about the train wreck, and why Gogol the author meant so much to him...but it was long after Gogol had changed his name to Nikhil. Finally, when Gogol is nearing 30, his mother asks him to call up the daughter of an old friend from India...actually, a girl who he used to hang out with as a youngster on all those Indian/Bengali get togethers. Just to appease his mother, Gogol calls up Moushumi and they meet for drinks. Moushumi is every bit as independent and "Americanized" as Gogol Actually, she has also spent quite a bit of time in France, growing up there first before moving to the U.S., so she's even a bit more worldly. However, despite  their insisting they won't, they actually fall for each other and have a traditional Indian wedding which makes Gogol's mother and Moushumi's parents all very happy! The happiness doesn't last long, however. As a matter of fact, they are not even married for two years when Moushumi starts having an affair with an older man who she met and fell for as a teenager, who is now back in New York and in her life! It's so sad. :-( Gogol doesn't do anything wrong....but also, it's not like they are madly in love with each other...they are more just comfortable. But, they do care for each other and Gogol is blindsided by the affair. He ends up divorced from Moushumi by the time he is 32 and he travels back to his mother's house in Boston for one more Christmas before she moves from his childhood home, which she has just sold, to travel to India. When Gogol makes his way upstairs to grab a camera, he sees that most of his old things have been packed away. His mother wants him to go through them before she leaves. His eyes fall on the old copy of Gogol's short stories, which Gogol had never read! Gogol opens the book to see a very sweet inscription from his father, and realizes with even more regret that his father must have known all those years that Gogol never even gave the book a second glance. Gogol sits down and starts reading the book and the story ends. See? Not an earth shattering sad story, but just very sad in terms of Gogol never really finding happiness. He seems to fight all his life trying to fit in between his Indian/Bengali roots and his American upbringing. Lahiri writes very straightforwardly and nicely and really pulls you into the story and the feelings of each of the characters! This is my second Lahiri book and I just might have to read more. Here's a passage near the end that I really liked:

     In so many ways, his family's life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another. It had started with his father's train wreck, paralyzing him at first, later inspiring him to move as far as possible, to make a new life on the other side of the world. There was the disappearance of the name Gogol's great-grandmother had chosen for him, lost in the mail somewhere between Calcutta and Cambridge. This had led, in turn, to the accident of his being named Gogol, defining and distressing him for so many years. He had tried to correct that randomness, that error. And yet it had not been possible to reinvent himself fully, to break from that mismatched name. His marriage had been something of a misstep as well. And the way his father had slipped away from them, that had been the worst accident of all, as if the preparatory work of death had been done long ago, the night he was nearly killed, and all that was left for him was one day, quietly, to go. And yet these events have formed Gogol, shaped him, determined who he is. They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.