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Donna R, here is your new thread in 2015. Happy reading in the new year.

Our Required Format:

JANUARY

1. by Winston S. Churchill
Finish date: January 2015
Genre: (whatever genre the book happens to be)
Rating: A
Review: You can add text from a review you have written but no links to any review elsewhere even goodreads. And that is about it. Just make sure to number consecutively and just add the months.

JANUARY

1. by John Irving
Finish date: January 9
Genre: Fiction
Rating: A
Review: I finally got around to reading this coming-of-age novel about best friends growing up in a small New England town in the 50s and 60s. Aside from being a story about friendship, family, and faith, it has in Owen Meany one of the most unique and endearing main characters in literature. Irving is a great storyteller and I can now see why my daughter loved this book so much when she read it as a teenager.

That is a great book to start off the new year, Donna.

Jill wrote: "That is a great book to start off the new year, Donna."

Yes, Jill, and a good book to start over the holidays.

2. by Alan Bradley
Finish date: January 13
Genre: Fiction/Mystery
Rating: A
Review: I was taken in by the Flavia de Luce mysteries from the beginning and have enjoyed each one. This newest installment finds the now 12-year-old Flavia banished to a girls' finishing school in Canada. Homesick and confused by her role in a secretive British society, Flavia nevertheless manages to uncover the mysteries surrounding several suspicious deaths using her considerable pluck and chemistry genius.

While I think the plot was a bit thin in this one, Bradley has certainly hit his stride in writing Flavia's snarky, irreverent yet vulnerable voice. Unlike many series, this one is still holding up quite well at #7. I can't wait for the upcoming TV series.

You are off to a great start

Donna wrote: "2. by Alan Bradley"

I love the Flavia de Luce mysteries. I think you may have been the one who got me interested. Thanks a million!

What's the series like? I see Flavia is a kid, which sounds promising.

Bentley wrote: "You are off to a great start"


Thank you, Bentley, and thanks for setting up the link. It's such fun to contemplate a new year of reading.

Vicki wrote: "Donna wrote: "2. by Alan Bradley"

I love the Flavia de Luce mysteries. I think you may hav..."

You are welcome. And thank you, Vicki, for getting me started on the Master of Rome series.

by Colleen McCullough

It is Donna and you are welcome - thanks

Bentley wrote: "It is Donna and you are welcome - make sure to add the link to the Master of Rome series in message 10 however (smile)

by [authorimage:Colleen McCullough|2..."

Oh yes, thanks!

Peter wrote: "What's the series like? I see Flavia is a kid, which sounds promising."

Peter, Flavia is a precocious 11-year-old who is obsessed with chemistry and poison. She lives in a post WWII dilapidated mansion in the English countryside with her distant father and often hostile and nasty older sisters. There's a the requisite dead body and mystery to be solved in each installment but what I've found most enjoyable are Flavia's intrepid personality as well as the poignancy and humor in the writing.

Thanks Donna.

Peter wrote: "Thanks Donna."

And I should mention these are considered Young Adult books and most suitable for the younger reader.

3. by Paul Scott
Finish date: January 17
Genre: Fiction
Rating: A
Review: In the interest of full disclosure, I read much of this book in 2014, having decided recently to finish it after months of neglect. As the second book in the Raj Quartet, it continues the story line begun in The Jewel in the Crown, layering in depth and additional characters. Since these books are being discussed here at HBC, I won't go into plot in my review.

Scott's writing is very good throughout with flashes of brilliance. The Raj books are epic in scope and survive as monuments to a time when novels focused on the evocation of time, place, and the complexities of human life rather than the stylistic prose that characterizes much of the writing in post-modern novels.

by Paul Scott

4. by Karen Russell
Finish date: January 24
Genre: Fiction
Rating: A
Review: This is the story of three siblings who have lived their entire lives in a remote Florida island home and alligator-wrestling theme park called Swamplandia! After their mother becomes ill and dies an early and tragic death from cancer, the family and the family business begin to disintegrate. As the 13-year-old narrator, Ava Bigtree says, "The beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it...It was only after Swamplandia!'s fall that time folded into a story with a beginning, middle, and an ending. If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell."

While some reviewers describe the book as magical realism, dark comedy, or a coming of age story, for me it was a story of how the three Bigtree children move through grief and a loss that nearly destroys them. It's not a happy book but one in which the characters tugged at my heartstrings and I think will haunt me for a while (no pun intended). Oh, and the writing is very fresh and beautiful.

Good job Donna

Thank you, Bentley. You are very kind.

5. by Amanda Coplin
Finish date: January 26
Genre: Historical Fiction
Rating: B-
Review: This book began very slowly for me, picked up some speed in the middle, but crashed and burned at the end. Briefly, the main character, a kind and decent loner of a man, begins to care for two young pregnant girls who show up half-starved at his remote Washington state orchard. His decision to invest himself in the girls pulls him from his solitude and alters his life.

On one hand, there is some nice writing with interesting character and plot development going on. However, I became terrible frustrated by everyone's reluctance or total lack of ability to express themselves throughout the book, which led to the predictable misunderstandings and disconnections of a Victorian era cliche. And I would have liked the author to have provided more period detail for the early 20th century time period in which the book was set. But I could have easily forgiven all of this if the ending had been different.

6. by Bernard W. Sheehan(no photo)
Finish date: January 29
Genre: History
Rating: B
Review: A scholarly, detailed treatise describing Jeffersonian era public thought and ideas about the Indian and how these related to Indian policies.

Environmentalism, which was a cornerstone of Enlightenment and Jeffersonian era thought, contained an inevitability - and even a moral imperative - in the assimilation of the Indian with the white man. Sheehan argues that it was well-intended and mostly non ambivalent philanthropy that produced the social and governmental policies that had such disastrous results for the Indians.

Sheehan provides an extensive discussion of the incorporation process, carried out at first by missionaries with governmental support. When the civilizing plan failed, and "the philanthropist doubted that a straight presentation of the advantages of civilization would convince the Indian to commit cultural suicide, he accompanied his missionary activity with a plethora of strategems designed to accomplish his end without the Indian's conscious assent" (p. 180). Much of this was done with manipulation and intimidation.

Sheehan provides some graphic first hand accounts of the reciprocal violence that took place and that greatly called into doubt the philanthropists' view of a smooth transfer of civilization from white to Indian. He goes on to discuss the disintegration of Indian tribal integrity through an increasing dependence on the trappings of civilization, unscrupulous traders, alcoholism, diseases such as smallpox, and ultimately, the policy of removal west of the Mississippi. Ironically, the philanthropists argued for removal as a means of "saving" the Indian.

There's a lot in this small but dense volume to ponder. It seems incredulous that humanitarian motives could be ascribed to the systematic destruction of the Native Americans and the story is full of such ironies and paradoxes. However, the book does give merit to the notion that it's difficult to pass judgement from a 21st century perspective.

Recommended reading for those interested in the ideas and thought of the time, although I'm not totally convinced that the esoteric philosophies of the scholars translated well to those on the frontier.

7. by Franz Kafka
Finish date: January 31
Genre: Fiction/Classic
Rating: C
Review: A bizarre, nightmarish story about Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman who wakes up one morning after a night of disturbing dreams to find himself totally transformed into an insect. Gregor is just as "stuck" as an insect as he had been in a job he hated but that he felt obligated to keep in order to provide for his family. As his condition alienates him further and further from his human self, it also gradually alienates his family from thinking of him as their son/brother. Soon, they feel nothing but resentment towards the creature he has become while at the same time undergoing their own metamorphosis.

I've satisfied my curiosity about Kafka and expect that I won't read any of his other work.

Hahahahaha.....I feel the same way about Kafka. Good thing you haven't read The Trial then.

by Franz Kafka

I hate to say it, but as I haven't read any of his works yet, this just makes me more interested to read one of his books. (Since he seems to be or love or hate sort of author.) :)

I didn't hate it, Skeetor. It just wasn't my cup of tea. Reading a book by Kafka is, well, a very Kafkaesque experience.

Franz Kafka

"Kafkaesque experience"...nicely put :D

You all are making me laugh since I don't like Kafka at all. I guess I am not alone!!!!

No you are not! I think Kafka is a sort of author you have to approach willingly and then decide if you like him/her or not. When you are made to read him (for school) you usually hate him. :D

I found this... :)

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.�
- Franz Kafka

When put like that The Trial sort of did that to me. But I never wanted to read it again. :shudders:

Yep, I think that for the most part I like "the kind of books that make us happy". I do disagree that it would be the kind I could write myself, though. No writer's talent in these bones.

I have now realized that although I have not read any Kafka, I did watch the movie version of "The Trial".



Franz Kafka

Drat! I knew that! I was concentrating so hard on learning how to insert the image I forgot to add it.

No problem Skeetor - forgotten already (lol) -good job

FEBRUARY

8. by Anthony F.C. Wallace (no photo)
Finish date: February 5
Genre: Nonfiction/History
Rating: B
Review: After reading Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power with HBC a while ago, I became interested in Jefferson's policies regarding the Indians. How did this "apostle of liberty" square up with the systematic (and, ultimately, forced) removal of the Indians from their native lands and the virtual annihilation of their people and culture?

This book is a very detailed and focused look at Jefferson's attitudes, beliefs, and policies regarding the Indians. While Jefferson was sympathetic towards the Indians and an avid scholar of their language and origins, he was also self-serving in his policies, in which acquisition of land was the ultimate goal. He laid the foundation for the removal policy - the infamous Trail of Tears - something that I had not associated with Jefferson.

Wallace seems unable to leave out any known fact or detail, which makes the book a bit dense and cumbersome at times. But his anthropological approach included primary source documents and pictures that I found very interesting. The book leaves little doubt about the duality of Jefferson's rhetoric and actions, but, as Wallace states, he remains an "enigma with charisma" (p. 14).

by Jon Meacham

Donna, that seems to be an interesting book, but capitalize the month of February, please. Thank you for your contributions here.

All fixed. Thanks, Jose and Bentley.

Thanks, Donna, I have only flipped through sections of this book, but not read it all the way through. Much like this time of U.S. history, Indian policy was self-serving, no doubt.

by Anthony F.C. Wallace (no photo)

It certainly seems to have been, Bryan. And I think you recommended this book to me, so thank you!

9. by Ken Follett
Finish date: February 13
Genre: Historical Fiction/WWII
Rating: B
Review: Follett is a good storyteller. He does a nice job embedding his characters in the historical events of WWII and he has all the facts right. But I thought there was just too much improbable coincidence in the way the characters from five nationalities, in far flung places over the years, continually meet up with one another. As character Daisy stated, finding out her husband and lover were actually half brothers felt "creepy." I agree.

10. by Walter Isaacson
Finish date: February 16
Genre: Nonfiction/biography
Rating: B+
Review: This is a pretty straightforward, chronological biography of Franklin that is neither a hagiography nor unduly critical. It's rich in well- documented detail that filled in a lot of gaps for me about America's mostly beloved pragmatist and quintessential Enlightenment man. Isaacson's writing is not flashy but it is intelligent and clear and he doesn't resort to speculation when the historical records are thin or ambivalent. I enjoyed it and it was a surprisingly quick read at 500 pages. Recommended.

Great, Donna, I want to read it. I have his bio on Einstein, too.

by Walter Isaacson

Me too, Bryan. I collect way more than I can read!

11. by David Liss
Finish date: February 22
Genre: Historical Fiction
Rating: A
Review: This book was a happy surprise. Not having read anything by Liss before, I didn't know that his forte is historical fiction written as intricately plotted financial thrillers.

Despite the title, this novel is placed several years leading up to the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 and details the financial panic of 1792 as Alexander Hamilton was attempting to establish the Bank of the United States. But Liss devises an elaborate plot against the bank as the cause of the panic and he creates two unforgettable and opposing characters in Ethan Saunders, disgraced former Revolutionary War spy, and Joan Maycott, a Western frontier settler who holds Hamilton and his tax on whiskey responsible for her considerable personal losses.

There's good historical detail, adventure and intrigue, lots of plot twists, and some laugh out loud humor in the character and wit of Ethan Saunders. I couldn't ask for much more!

Donna wrote: "11. by Leland D Baldwin
Finish Date: February 22
Genre: Historical Fiction
Rating: A
Review: This book wa..."

You've got the wrong author.... you have Leland Baldwin

Good book though!

There we go.

JANUARY

1. by Winston S. Churchill
Finish date: January 2015
Genre: (whatever genre the book happens to be)
Rating: A
Review: You can add text from a review you have written but no links to any review elsewhere even goodreads. And that is about it. Just make sure to number consecutively and just add the months.

Hi Donna - this is the template above.

Thanks.

12. by Kenneth Roberts (no photo)
Finish date: February 24
Genre: Historical Fiction
Rating: A+
Review: Another tale of Arundel, Maine, this one featuring the young Captain Richard Nason. After being pressed and forced to serve aboard a British warship, Nason escapes and skippers the privateer, Lively Lady, as the War of 1812 breaks out. Much of the latter part of the book takes place in the infamous British prison of Dartmoor.

In my opinion, Roberts wrote just about perfect historical novels, this being no exception. With impeccable research and delightful storytelling, his books are real treasures.

Ah Maine - one of my favorite states

A favorite of mine as well, Bentley, although not in the winter!