Book #12: Birds of a Feather by Jacqueline Winspear

This is book 2 in the Maisie Dobbs series, and Maisie's dealing with a whole different murder mystery in this one. She gets hired to find a missing person, and ends up unraveling a related triple murder case that was mystifying the police--oh my! At the same time, she's trying to solve the simple mystery of her assistant's activities, and it turns out that he's sneaking drugs to help with the pain of his war wounds.

I do really like these books--they're SO quick and easy to get through, and really entertaining. I read this one in spurts while exercising (it's so easy to read on the exercise bike). I think it's kind of interesting/odd how Winspear intertwines Maisie's personal drama with the action in the story--there are men falling for her throughout the book and she's not interested, her and her father have been somewhat disconnected of late, and she realizes that she's really lonely in the place where she is in her life. This seems really odd to me, maybe because I'm just used to Sherlock Holmes as the detective, whose personal life is completely hidden and unattached from his work. But I do like it too, because it makes Maisie seem like a real person and not a machine, like Sherlock always seems. Winspear also tries to give hints and reasons for Maisie's deductions, like how she picks up on people's moods and such when they're interviewing, whereas Doyle NEVER gives you hints that might help you figure things out.

Oh yeah, and I thought Winspear deliberately chose the absolute most random person to be the villain in this case. Obviously mystery authors can't give you many hints so that you don't figure it out before them, but I mean, really? Somebody who you've heard NOTHING about the whole book is the villain? Way to go.

Book #11: A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute

I can't even say how much I've LOVED this book. Maybe it's just that I really love old books like this--it reminded me a lot of Song of Years, published in 1939, about people living in the Midwest in the pioneer days. This book is kind of like that in style (not at all similar in plot, of course). I really want to buy it sometime (of course, I checked it out from the library and have been listening to it on audiobook). I mean, just look at the cover! It looks amazing and old and perfect. I also want to check out more by Nevil Shute, whoever he is.

The book starts by describing Jean Piaget, the main female character, and her experience as a prisoner of war to the Japanese in Malaysia in WWII. This part of the book is based in fact--there really was a group of women who survived a march like Jean's. But maybe I was misled by the blurb on the back of the audiobook, because I thought that the WHOLE book was going to be about Malaysia. But that part of the book ended at chapter 4, and I kept thinking, "What on earth is the rest of this book going to be about?" Just so I don't give away the whole book, the second half of the book is set in Australia, which I was not really expecting (despite the hint from the title, which is a town in Australia which is mentioned earlier on in the book). Once they got to Australia, I pretty much knew what was going to happen, but I still felt so fulfilled by the whole story.

One somewhat unrelated note--I thought it was so cool how Jean was such an entrepreneur in the 1950s in Australia. She saw a need (and there were many in Willstown) and she created a business to fill it, despite not even having the right market (or so most people thought). Her experiences really showed me what entrepreneurs do, and made me want to start brainstorming and doing it too. I don't think I'll give up my day job, but it's kind of fun to daydream.

Book #10: The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko

I've seen this book on bookshelves forever, and always thought it looked really boring. I'd never had any idea what it was about, but kind of put it in the same class as Seven Habits of Highly Effective People--something that only business people read. (And yes, Seven Habits is actually on my bookshelf of things to read right now.) But someone recommended it while we were in Provo at the same time as Get a Financial Life, so I checked it out from the library. I secretly love reading non-fiction/advice books like this because I feel like they're such easy reads that I don't have to invest much emotion or time into, although I'm sure I don't get as much out of them as I could.

Anyways, I did really enjoy this book. Since I somewhat understand how surveys and research work after my brief introduction to scholarship, I found all the data they found very interesting. Obviously, they've got their thesis/theme they're trying to emphasize throughout the book, so I felt like they were sometimes unfairly emphasizing some of their data at the expense of other responses. But I have to say I wasn't SUPER surprised by all of their conclusions about how "real" millionaires make money and consume--because it seems like the most logical way to live anyways.

Reading this book makes me wonder if my parents are closet millionaires, because they fit all of the elements: they buy used cars, they live very frugally, we (their children) never knew how much money we had (and still don't), they don't give us any substantial economic support now that we're married. Since this was the way I was raised, I've always assumed I'll continue to live that way once Tommy and I have an income. Now that we are just living off of grad student stipends, we haven't stressed too much about budgeting (beyond not spending above our immediate means), saving, or investing, and we are obviously living very frugally. But this book just provided one more motivation to live this way once we have some money--because we'll eventually be MILLIONAIRES!

Book #9: The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

I'd heard about Tea Obreht for the first time when some of the MFAs in my program posted about how jealous they were of her success. She's only 26, she wrote this book while she was a student at Cornell, and she's had some wild success with it. The quotes on the back advertising it are all pretty much exactly the same: "A work of surpassing beauty," etc. But then, it IS such a beautiful book--that's really a great word to describe it--that you can't really blame her or her fans.

This book is set in some unnamed Balkan country, set right after some of the many wars there. It mainly traces the main protagonists relationship with her grandfather and tells his life story through these narratives of other people's lives. Although I KNOW I could have gone deeper and gotten more out of analyzing all the symbolism in here, I still feel like I enjoyed it enough to not have to worry about that too much. This book felt more like a Work of Literature more than some of the other books I've read lately, which have been more lighthearted and focused on just plot. This one was about heavier subjects (war, disease, death), it jumped around from story to story in different chapters, and the language just felt deeper and heavier (that's my really significant analytical skills for you). I'm really glad I read this and I definitely want to add this one to my "to buy" list now that I've finished the library copy.

Book #8: Get a Financial Life by Beth Kobliner

Okay, okay, this is not my usual reading fare. But I am MISERABLE at understanding our finances, and I really do want to know what we're going to be getting ourselves into in the next few years as we eventually graduate and start having real incomes and real financial responsibilities. While we were in Utah over Christmas break, Sarah said this was the textbook for her family finance class she was taking, so I found it at the library.

And it was really helpful! Like the subtitle says, it's meant specifically for young people with small/beginning incomes without a lot of understanding about the world of stocks and accounts and loans. I mostly felt reassured after reading it--although we're relatively poor, we're in pretty good shape according to Kobliner's criteria. We have no debt, we both have IRAs, we have at least three months of money readily accessible, we have health insurance, we have decent credit scores--not too bad. So even though we don't have any investments (and probably won't for a while) we're at least not in a BAD place to be when you're both in grad school. The chapter about the investing, with the differences between stocks and bonds and mutual funds (and whatever, I'm not going to say I'm an expert on the stuff now) was really helpful because no matter how many times Tommy explains it to me, I can't ever remember what the difference is between all of them. I probably should/will re-read the chapters on buying a home and getting the right types of insurance closer to when Tommy graduates and we're moving somewhere else, because right now we're pretty comfortable in our apartment and with our school insurance plans. A very useful book--and I'm also waiting for The Millionaire Next Door at the library, so hopefully that will supplement this information.

Book #7: Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear

Since I just said that I wanted to read some lighter books after The Grapes of Wrath, Maisie Dobbs was a good choice. Maisie is a kind of Sherlock Holmes character, who solves mysteries as people bring them to her, in the years after WWI. She was a nurse in France during WWI and the war has a huge impact on everything that happens in her life, and even the mystery she's investigating is somewhat caused by the war. She doesn't make any astonishing leaps like Sherlock, but that makes the mystery seem a lot more realistic, I think. This book is the first in a series (of 9 or 10, I think) and I plan to start reading the rest.

One of the major things I noticed about this book is how much WWI affected everything in Europe after the war (like I said above). WWI is the lost and forgotten war in my mind, which is awful, particularly when you read about how affected everyone was by how horrible the war was. Particularly since this book is set in England, every man is a veteran and everyone has lost family members to injury, illness, and combat. But I liked how Winspear intertwined the war into the storyline, and I like Maisie a lot as a character. She's smart and independent but not brash or harsh like Sherlock Holmes. So I do intend to continue reading the next ones--as soon as I get them from the library and work my way through the other stack of books I've got on my bedside stand.