August Post

Wow, it's been a long time. I have a bunch of books to report.

30, 31, 32, 33. Maisie Dobbs books by Jacqueline Winspear
An Incomplete Revenge: Maisie heads to the countryside to catch an arsonist and meet some Gypsies.
Among the Mad: Maisie tries to find a would-be mass murderer who she suspects has been institutionalized.
The Mapping of Love and Death: Maisie traces an old war-time romance (and tries to face letting go of her own).
A Lesson in Secrets: Maisie works with Scotland Yard.

These are all really good books. I don't think I was at all disappointed in any of them. The whole series is definitely worth reading!

34. Cold Vengeance by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. Special Agent Pendergast is back, and so are his ward, Constance, and his teenaged Kansas assistant, Corrie. He works on unraveling the mystery of his wife's death. It's just as fun and exciting as usual for this series.

35. The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball. A city girl falls in love with a farmer and moves to the country. Pretty good. I liked Kimball's voice. I also like the idea that she and her partner had: grow everything that their customers need. Not just zucchini and onions, but meat, dairy, eggs, syrup, grains, flours, beans, herbs, and fruits. Pretty amazing idea. I like to daydream about being a farmer, though I know that I do not want to HAVE to work that hard every day. I like to work hard on my garden and then sometimes say to hell with it and let the weeds grow while I take a break. I guess that's what keeps it fun for me -- it's optional.

36. Still Life with Chickens by Catherine Goldhammer. In this memoir, a woman gets divorced and has to move with her daughter. Illogically, she buys baby chickens just when they're having open houses to sell their old house and looking for a new place to live. But the chickens are a great distraction and bring the mother and daughter together. I liked this one, too.

37. The $64 Tomato by William Alexander. In this memoir, Alexander tells us about creating an enormous, ridiculous garden in his yard. It's so fun. He and his wife waste so much time, effort, money, and water, and have such a wonderful, disappointing, frustrating, infuriating time of it. And he learns lots of lessons. And he adds up the cost of his garden one year and does the math to see how much he spent per tomato. You already know the answer from the title, and it would be scary to do the math in most people's gardens. I liked this one, also.

But gardens aren't really about saving money, right? They're about having a project and doing some sort of tangible work with a delicious reward. And having everything ruined by hail or bugs or disease, and keeping a certain perspective on life -- great for Buddhists to remember to let go and stop trying to grasp on to anything. Nothing is permanent.

38. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs.
Wow, this one has a really cool premise and you should definitely check it out from the library. Riggs collected a bunch of cool old photos and wrote a young adult novel around them. COOL! And the plot is that there are kids with special powers who live together in a house in Wales -- or is it just a story that the narrator's grandpa told him? Was grandpa a liar, or was he psychologically damaged in the war?

It's pretty dang good for the first half and then it's only okay. But it's worth at least flipping through at a store or library and seeing the pictures and imagining what story YOU could write with those photos. I just read something that said that we find our novel when we read someone else's and it's disappointing. We start thinking about how we could have done it right. I think this one is inspiring tons of would-be novelists right now.

___

My 8-month old CRAWLER! is crying so I have to go. Today she stood up all by herself for a few seconds, not holding on to anything! She might be walking before too long.