Book #30: Broken Harbor by Tana French

I started reading this book last night and I kept reading straight through until 3 am this morning. Not the brightest decision I've ever made, since we had to get up and clean the church this morning and I agreed to make cream puffs for a baby shower and we have a baby who doesn't sleep in, but I just really wanted to finish the book. It's a murder mystery set in Ireland, and the narrator is Mick Kennedy, a detective in Dublin. Kennedy has always followed the rules and has a great solve record on the Murder Squad, but when he gets put on a case set in Brianstown, erstwhile Broken Harbor, he gets challenged by a lot of his personal past while trying to solve the murder of a family of four.

I really liked this book. I liked Kennedy--he clearly had a lot of issues in his past (mother's suicide, crazy sister, etc.) but he says in the beginning that he worked through them and it shows. Although he clearly has a temper, he (almost) always keeps it and stays in control, even when presented with the most ridiculous situations (although he gets tested more and more throughout this case). He is clearly a pretty tough-guy cop who is very focused on doing the job right more than anything else, but he takes a lot of time taking care of his sister at the same time. I also Kennedy's partner and the interplay between the two of them--it was interesting reading about the interactions between police partners and how Kennedy's training them. And the mystery itself was pretty intriguing--I was actually pretty surprised by the ending (which is as mysteries should be, right?).

One thing that I didn't love about the book was that I thought that some of the conversations/discussion scenes in the book seemed to go a little long for my attention span, if that makes sense. Kennedy's interrogations of suspects or chats with his crazy sister could go on for pages and pages and PAGES, it felt like. The confession of the actual killer at the end seemed to go on forever, and it was mostly rehashing stuff that you already knew, just from the killer's own perspective. (But that might have been because it was almost 3 in the morning when I was reading it too.) All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this book--it was a great mystery and it was pretty well-written. Not much more I could ask for.

Book #29: Jane Austen Goes to Hollywood by Abby McDonald

I read about this book on someone's book blog and since it got a pretty good review, I thought I'd pick it up at the library. It's a modern retelling of Sense and Sensibility, except this time Elinor, the sensible one, is the younger sister and Marianne, the crazy dramatic one, is the older one. The book opens with their father's funeral, after which they get kicked out of their home and end up moving to Beverly Hills to live in a family member's home. Both girls have romantic relationships, things go crazy, and they both end up happy ever after. (If you know the story of Sense and Sensibility it really goes just like that one.) It was a really fun, cute read that only took a few hours today.

Book #28: The Distant Hours by Kate Morton

This is the third book I've read by Kate Morton (the others being The Forgotten Garden and The Secret Keeper), and I think this was my favorite. Morton has a similar style and theme to each of her books--mainly, someone in the present trying to unravel a mystery from her family's past, using whatever documents and memories she  (it's usually a woman) can find to help her figure it out. In this book, Edie's mother gets a 50-year-old letter delivered in the mail, which had been lost thanks to a mailman's laziness. Thanks to that letter, Edie finds out that her mother was evacuated from London during the Blitz in WWII and that she lived in Milderhurst castle at that time, something her mother had never told her about. Her mother was so secretive about it that Edie determined she had to find out whatever she could--and managed to make her way to Milderhurst castle to talk to the women living inside.

I love how Morton always manages to make the ending a surprise--how there are just layers upon layers of story, where at first you believe something at the beginning and then you later find out more and more information that makes you believe something else. My perception of the situation changed several times throughout the book, and I loved how it ended up. At first you think that the old ladies living in the castle are just nice old ladies, then you start to think there's other, more negative forces at play in their relationship, and then you find out that there's much more to the story. I loved that. Morton definitely is a very skilled writer with a gift for writing a fascinating and not-too-revealing plot.

I felt like The Distant Hours was possibly the most believable of the mysteries because of the methods in which Edie tried to figure out the mystery--it was mostly just through talking to the people who lived through it (because, conveniently, they were all mostly still alive--it just was a matter of getting them to want to talk about it). Whereas in The Forgotten Garden especially, I felt like it was kind of cheating in how so many things just "happened" to fall into place and so many random things turned up to help the main character with her research, this book didn't have that kind of feel. I did get a bit confused by the timeline sometimes--it was set in 1992, but then it was talking about events that happened during WWII in 1941. But the characters' actions didn't seem to match their ages at times. The women in the castle would have been nearly 90 but they didn't seem to act like it, and I could never figure out how old Edie's mother was at different times.

Book #27: Anti Cancer: A New Way of Life by David Servan-Schreiber

I feel like my mom told me about reading this book, so when I saw it as an audiobook at the library, it seemed to ring a bell, so I picked it up. I was looking for something to listen to while I exercised, and this seemed like as good an option as any. Unfortunately, I don't think this was an ideal audiobook--it would have been much better to instead of to listen to. There were too many tables and discussions of which specific foods are healthier and blah blah blah that would have been much easier to read and skim as needed. I think I would have been much more interested (and I would have finished it in about 1/5 of the time!) if I had picked up a paper copy.

But anyway--Servan-Schreiber is a psychiatrist who has become interested in cancer after having it himself. He and his colleagues were using an scanning machine to do MRIs on people and study their brains, and he volunteered to let them do a scan of him, and they found out that he had a brain tumor. He had an operation, everything seemed to work, and then he relapsed, and he decided to do all the research he could to find out about how we can change our lifestyles to avoid cancer. There were many suggestions, and stories to back up their potential usefulness: eat anti-cancer foods (like green tea, dark chocolate--avoid a typical Western diet as much as possible), eat foods with Omega-3s to balance out the excess of Omega-6s, eat organic (avoid pesticides), clean up your home from environmental toxins, find calm and avoid stress, etc. I think these are really simple and useful suggestions that definitely could help someone motivated enough to follow them. If nothing else, even if they don't help prevent cancer in your body, these suggestions will most likely only make you feel better in general anyways. I'm not quite invested enough to sacrifice our decent-but-not-crazy eating habits and we can't afford organic right now anyways, so we're not going to be immediately adopting all of these suggestions, but I thought they were pretty interesting anyways. And now I think I'll feel good every time I make a smoothie with berries and flaxseed, because both of those are anti-cancer foods!

Book #26: Leaving Everything Most Loved by Jacqueline Winspear

The tenth Maisie Dobbs has finally arrived! It came out a few months ago, but I had to wait for this whole time for the hold at the library to come through because there was such a long waiting list. Definitely worth the wait. I read somewhere that each of the Maisie Dobbs novels has a theme to it, where Winspear is trying to make a statement or a point about it  (like mental illness or treatment of vets or drug addictions or something like that), and this book seemed kind of to be about racism (although it wasn't as didactic as some of the other books' themes might have been). Maisie is investigating the death of an Indian woman who was shot in London, and as usual several of Maisie's cases merge for her to solve this one. There's not much else to say about the case itself without giving too much away! Of course, Maisie is the most open-minded and charitable (and least racist) person of everyone in the book (as she always seems to be), which makes her seem much more twenty-first century than early twentieth.

As for Maisie's personal life, she is actually making plans to leave to go on a trip to India herself. I just want to smack her about her ambivalence about James and their relationship--although she's really NOT ambivalent; she loves him very much and just doesn't feel confident enough in herself to commit to marriage. So I DO understand that. I think Winspear actually does a good job of explaining her feelings in this book (or maybe it's that Maisie is finally understanding herself and her reluctance for the first time). She worries that she'll lose some part of herself (like her work, which has sustained her through her traumatic war injuries and loss of self) once she gets married, but I just want her to get married and keep working like she's always been doing. Come on, Maisie! What are you waiting for?! Gahhh. But oh well, I think there were some good signs in this book that she will finally commit while she's on her journey in India, which she embarked on at the end of the book (by herself!).

Book #25: Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

Louisa Clark is twenty-seven and has lived her whole life in the same tiny little English town, has worked at the same small cafe for six years, and has been dating her boyfriend for seven years, and is living with her parents. And she doesn't really have any plans to change anything up--she's happy with how things are. But she loses her job and finally finds a new one working as a caretaker for a quadripalegic, a young man who was injured in a motorcycle accident. She finds out that he has no desire to live and wants to kill himself, and she decides to try and show him what he has to live for and how he can still have a great life--and ends up being changed herself in the process.

I definitely enjoyed this book. I didn't really like the whole plot, I guess--it seems almost a little calculated to tug at your heartstrings, writing about someone unfairly consigned to a wheelchair after a full and vigorous life before his accident and the terrible emotions that he goes through. (But of course, that is real life too, so I guess it's fair.) But I really liked Louisa as a character, and her family. Louisa was so different a character from what you normally read in romances like this, I guess--she wasn't super ambitious, she hadn't gone to college, she dressed really weirdly, she lived a really boring life. And she didn't care or even notice, I guess, which made it awesome. That alone really kind of endeared her to me, that she wasn't this secretly person-just-like-me. I liked Will too, and how he was very human as well.

Although I didn't really like the plot necessarily, I think it does bring up important ethical and social questions about assisted suicide (not to mention how to treat disabled people), and it definitely humanized the whole thing. Considering it all, I really liked how the book ended.

Book #24: Not Much Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers by Linda Perlstein

This might seem like a random book for someone my age to be reading, because I think it's more aimed at parents with middle-school-aged children. But I was listening to a podcast (Stuff You Should Know) about middle schoolers and they mentioned this book and I thought it sounded interesting enough to take a look at. I was kind of disappointed when I first started reading it to see that it was published in 2003 (so it is definitely not up to date on the latest things middle schoolers are doing, like with social media and smartphones and all that), but that actually means that the kids she was interviewing and writing about are my own age--I was in middle school myself the same year she was writing this book. Perlstein does all of her research/writing in the school year of 2001-2002, the year of September 11, when I was in eighth grade (the same age as several of her subjects).

Perlstein follows five specific middle school students and closely watches their lives and interviews them and their parents, incorporating current research and information about this age of kids and the social, physical, and mental changes that are going on. It was fascinating to see these kids and their insecurities and the things they hooked onto and what were their interests, but it was also incredibly TERRIFYING. I honestly must have been so sheltered in middle school, because I had no idea that things like sex and drugs went on (or if I did, I must have blocked it out because I don't remember it at all). Not that all the kids do that kind of stuff, but it is definitely there, even on school grounds. It is totally terrifying to imagine having a kid this age. I liked how Perlstein included some of the parents' perspectives as well, how they are utterly bewildered by their children's changes and don't know how to relate to them or help them and how it's not that they are angry at them or anything.

Book #23: The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

This is our book club book for the month of May. It was kind of funny because someone in our group was saying how she just didn't want to read another YA dystopian apocolyptic novel, and that's exactly what we somehow ended up picking. I kind of felt the same way, but I still picked this up from the library and ended up reading it all last night in one evening while Tommy was working.

The basic premise of the book is that the world stops revolving at the same reliable rate--it starts slowing down, which everyone on earth then refers to as "the slowing." This means that the days end up getting longer and longer and longer--each day having several minutes added to it at a time. The narrator is an eleven-year-old girl named Julia, and the whole novel is basically her coming-of-age story in the middle of this catastrophe.

I didn't love this book. I liked the idea of the "slowing," and I thought it was an interesting twist on the whole world-ending thing that is so popular right now in fiction--but the author never goes on to explain WHY the slowing happens. She just has all her characters say over and over again that nobody knows why it happened. It seemed like she was too lazy to do any physics research to back up her whole plot. The book is basically how everyone reacted to the change (like, even though the days are longer than 24 hours now, everyone decides to stick to the 24-hour clock, etc.) and what things happen on earth as a result of the change (all the whales get beached and the birds start to die, also for semi-mysterious reasons that are kind of hinted at but mostly people still "didn't know").

I also didn't really feel like Julia was old enough for me to take her seriously as a narrator. I mean, eleven? I have a recently-turned-twelve-year-old brother who is incredibly smart but of course does NOT write/talk like Julia does. She also doesn't have any friends because her best friend has left her and she's lonely at school--but having been that age and being lonely, I don't think Julia seems that affected by having no friends. There's also a love story between her and another kid and again, really? He leaves at the end of the book and she says (as an adult looking back) that she still dreams about Seth coming back to her--this kid she had a crush on when she was eleven! I mean, come on. That really bothered me. I also couldn't tell whether the narrator was supposed to be eleven-year-old Julia or adult Julia looking back on that time period, because it definitely seemed to be both.

However, I did like the style of Walker's writing--there were some beautiful and poetic lines that I liked. It was definitely a decent book, but not my favorite.

Book #22: Adulting: How to Become a Grown-Up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps by Kelly Williams Brown

I came across this book pretty randomly--a FB friend posted a link that had a list of "10 steps to becoming an adult," by Kelly Williams Brown, and mentioned that they came from her upcoming book Adulting. The list was funny and accurate enough that I decided to reserve it at the library.

This book is exactly what it sounds like it's going to be: tips on how to become an adult. It seems to be aimed right at the graduating-college crowd, so I am WAY advanced for it. Not. There are plenty of tips in here that I think I really could use. Some of them are practical ("Buy toilet paper in bulk") and some are more mental ("Remember that you're nothing special") and all of them have Brown's hilarious and witty commentary emphasizing and explaining how these steps contribute to you becoming an adult. I definitely laughed out loud many, many times at her metaphors and explanations. For example, this line still makes me laugh: in talking about not bringing anyone else to a job interview: "As far as the employer is concerned, you just emerged, Aphrodite-like, out of the sea foam and into the office park, the winds of your own competence wafting you safely to shore with five minutes to spare."

Although I AM pretty grown-up--hahahaha just kidding, let me re-phrase that. Although I have been living on my own for several years and am married and have a kid, and therefore have mastered many of the practical elements of "adulting," like cleaning up after myself and regularly checking to make sure our bills are being paid, I think this book was still worth reading, for fun and for some other good tips. I have already tried to do a few of the steps she names, like adding some important numbers into my phone (non-emergency police number, insurance, and poison control). I am seriously tempted to re-skim the book and write down a few other steps to remember them because they were good ideas. And, it was funny! Win win.

Book #21: The Roots of the Olive Tree by Courtney Miller Santo

I read about this book somewhere on someone's book blog and it got a very high rating from them and so I requested it. I read it right after Ella Minnow Pea and it had all of the qualities that I didn't find in that book--full characters and relationships that seemed and felt actually meaningful. The book is about five generations of women in an extraordinarily long-lived family and their complicated relationships after a lifetime (or several lifetimes) of living together and keeping secrets from each other. These women weren't perfect and didn't always love each other--they felt very real and human.

Anna, the matriarch, is 112 when the book opens, and is almost the oldest person in the world but is incredibly active and healthy still. Her daughter, Bets, is in her 90s, and her daughter Callie is in her 60s, and her daughter Deb is in her 40s, and her daughter Erin is in her 20s and pregnant at the beginning of the novel. They live in their family home in Kidron, California, in the central valley, on the olive groves that Anna's father planted when they moved here from Australia. As the book opens, a geneticist comes to study their blood and do research on how they're so long-lived and healthy, and his coming spurs a lot of nervousness and fear among the women about the secrets they've kept from each other for so long. I really liked how I started reading this book and you keep learning these pretty huge, explosive secrets about the women and their families as the book goes on, but you don't learn them with a big bang or a big reveal like many books do. They just come out naturally, when you're in the mind of one of the characters themselves, and many of the secrets never actually get resolved or come to light at all.

It was amazing to read about how long people can hold onto bitterness or sadness too--and that also seemed very real. It sounds dumb, but sometimes I think of older people as though they have to be perfect, or that they've worked through all their issues by the time they're that old. But nope, they're just people and they aren't perfect and they still get into fights and have century-old issues with their mother or daughter. But even with all those issues, they're still a family and they still love each other and want to pass on their legacies to the coming generations. But not everything gets resolved by the end and you don't really find out what happened to everyone. That's life.

Book #20: Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

Someone at book club mentioned this book, so I immediately went home and put it on hold at the library. The subtitle of the book is "A progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable," and if you know what those words mean, it's a pretty good explanation of what the book is. A lipogram is a type of writing game where you try to write a full document while avoiding the use of certain letters--there are whole books written without using the letter E! (I find that wikipedia page really interesting.) So a "progressive lipogram" means that you start by taking out one letter, then another, then another, all the way through the alphabet.

The story goes that there's this island nation that semi-worships letters and the alphabet--or at least they place a very high value on words and letters. The man who invented the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" was from there, so they built a statue with that sentence to honor him. One day, the Z falls off the statue, and the leaders of the island decree that it means that they are not allowed to use Z any more--all words that have Z in it are banned. Unfortunately, more and more letters continue to fall off the statue, so their language, which they've prized, becomes more and more constrained and lots of problems happen. The whole book is composed of letters between people on the island, so they have to follow the rules and write in lipograms.

I really like the idea for the story--it's cute and whatnot--but I feel like it kind of stretched my boundaries for belief a little bit. It went way too far--people being banished and killed for slipping up and using the banned letters twice? But besides that, I did not feel like the characters or the action was very well-developed at all. I've read epistolary novels before and really enjoyed them and felt like I connected with the characters, but not at all with this book. I understand that the point of the novel was to focus on the lipograms and not necessarily on the action, but there were way too many storylines and way too many people included in this book that I didn't believe or understand why they were there. For example, Ella, the main character, writes one time that she met a boy named Tom. A few pages later she gets a letter from Tom saying that he thinks she's pretty. Then he disappears and you don't hear anything more about him for the rest of the book when everything's resolved and she's apparently in love with him. What?! That was the dumbest love story ever! I think the whole lipogram idea would have been better served with a different and much less complex narrative around it.

Also, I didn't love how the whole novel basically seemed like a not-very-well-concealed analogy to religion and people blindly following edicts from leaders. It was wayyy to explicit for it to be useful and actually seemed kind of hostile to me. In short, this book sounded really neat, but it fell far short of my expectations and I don't think it was executed as well as it could have been.

Book #19: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

I know this may sound weird to say about a 750-page biography, but I could NOT put this book down. I totally neglected everything around here for the last three days while I was trying to power through the rest of this book because I was just so interested in everything happening with Lincoln. And it's not like I didn't know what was going to happen--it's just pretty regular Civil War stuff, which I remember SOME of from high school--but I absolutely loved the insights that Goodwin provides to Lincoln's character and the men that he worked with in his cabinet. I felt like I really got to know him, similar to how I felt after watching Lincoln (which was in part based on the research from this book, and which I definitely want to watch again after reading this).

Goodwin takes the really interesting tack of studying other people in addition to Lincoln in order to give greater insights into Lincoln's personality and achievements, including the men who were his rivals for the Republican nomination for President and who later were members of his cabinet--Seward, Chase, and Bates. The first half of the book talks about each of these men and their histories and their ambitions to become President, all the way up to the election in 1860. I really enjoyed reading about the different men and their different personalities, and seeing how Goodwin compared them at different points. The second half of the book follows (very closely, in much detail) Lincoln's presidency and how he brought together all of these men, and many other people with differing skills and opinions in order to succeed through the Civil War.

Goodwin views Lincoln as a "political genius" (as the subtitle says) and after reading all of her commentary and the evidence she quotes to back it up, it definitely seems like it. Lincoln was incredibly skilled at reading public opinion and waiting until the exact opportune moment to present his opinions or make a move when it was most likely to succeed (like with how he decided to present the Emancipation Proclamation when and how he did). He knew how to use the members of his cabinet to the best of their ability and to ignore their petty faults to focus on the good they were doing in their positions, and he could universally ignore the personal attacks made on him by anyone in order to utilize their skills to save the Union and support him. That was the most amazing thing about Lincoln that came through this book--what an amazing, charitable, "magnanimous" (Goodwin used this word to describe him or his actions about twenty times; she used the word "indefatigable" to describe Seward about thirty-five times) human being Lincoln was. He was incredibly forgiving towards everyone--people that he knew personally who hurt or offended him, soldiers who deserted the Union who he pardoned, and the South as a whole during the plans for Reconstruction. He was welcoming and kind to everyone who came to him as President and he was patient to a ridiculous point with everyone around him. Everyone (at least, everyone who wasn't crazy) who got to know him and worked with him on a close basis became his lasting and loyal friend because of his generosity.

I loved the emphasis Goodwin placed on his storytelling habits and abilities, and on his literary/writing skills. He told stories almost constantly in his conversation to defuse situations, amuse his listeners, and make a point--it was funny because it seemed like no matter where he went, and no matter what age he was, he was always surrounded by a crowd of people listening to his stories. He started telling stories to his friends when he was a kid, entertained young men around the fire in his friend's shop before he was even a lawyer in Springfield, and would lighten the mood while waiting for telegrams with his aides during the War. Also, Goodwin called him "our only poet-president"--can you believe if our leaders wrote their own speeches today? Everyone wrote their own speeches then; men had to be accomplished orators to be successful as politicians.

He definitely wasn't perfect, but it definitely seems like he was the ONLY person who could have helped the nation weather the storms it went through at that time period, and he was the only person who could have gathered the people around him who helped to solve the problems. He definitely seems like probably the only person who could have responded to so many unfair and ill-willed situations with such graciousness and, yes, magnanimity. It's interesting because one reason he is such a huge public figure is because of his assassination, making him a martyr and instantly preserving him as this larger-than-life person, but he really was an incredibly capable and charitable person beyond just his presidency during the Civil War and his assassination.

I tend to have a very cynical opinion about politics and politicians, but this book helped me to see a little bit about what politicians do (or at least what they DID, but I am sure that some of it transfers still, in generalities) and why it is valuable and why it takes skill. I guess if all politicians were like Lincoln, things wouldn't be so bad in this country.


A few other random notes about this book: I was really touched by Goodwin's description of Seward and Lincoln's friendship and Seward's reaction to finding out that Lincoln had been killed. I loved Stanton and hated Chase--he drove me crazy with his lack of responsibility and obnoxiousness. I feel so sorry for Mary Lincoln, even with all of her craziness--I could never go through all of those trials that she went through without partially losing my mind either.

Book #18: Someday My Prince Will Come by Jerramy Fine

In my ward book club we had a White Elephant Book Exchange back in December. I opened up this book and then my friend Libby stole it from me. She read it and gave it to me to read after we finished Tess. It only took me about two days, after Tess took me two months (because of all the procrastinating because of how depressing it was). It was the lightest version of a chick-flick book--a super quick read and nothing very substantial about it, so therefore it was fun and easy (exactly what you need after reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles).

Honestly, I almost felt embarrassed while reading this book. Mostly because the author was so unashamedly silly, if that makes sense. The book is a memoir (it's all TRUE) and it's about how she always wanted to be a princess while growing up, was a full-fledged Anglophile and desperately wanted to move to England and marry a prince. And that's what she tries to do throughout the book. And that's all the book is about.

Libby said her favorite part of the book was reading about how English society works and how people get to know each other there (for example, Fine talks about how nobody just introduces themselves to anyone else--you have to be introduced by a mutual friend in order to meet anyone). And I felt the same way; that was really interesting to hear about from a first-person (American) perspective. I also really liked her description of her parents and the crazy things they did (they were hippies--in every true sense of the word). My least favorite part of the book was how she included a bunch of just random stories about her life as she went along on her quest, when they didn't really have anything to do with the overarching narrative of wanting to be a princess. Just silly stories about something her roommates did or something her mom said, like they were meaningful or important enough to include in this book. I feel like it would have been stronger if she would have cut out about 1/4 of the book.

Book #17: Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

I only read a few books in April, and this book is the reason why. I started it back in March because we were reading it for our ward book club, and I was stuck about halfway through it for weeks, and I kept putting off reading other books because I wanted to finish this one, so I never ended up reading anything! (The other reason I didn't read very much was because I watched every episode of The Office from all the seasons in the last few months.) The reason why I never wanted to keep going with Tess is because of how totally depressing it is. I read a quote (maybe on the Wikipedia page for the book) that this book is "the most depressing book in the English language," and honestly, I would have to agree. Long story short: Tess gets raped, and the rest of her life is ruined from that moment after. She's a "pure woman," as the subtitle of the book says, and she truly wants to be good, but she's scorned and ruined after she's raped when she's 16. It's a terrible story, and probably all too true in far too many societies and centuries. I also hated the description of the story on the back of my book (which I am borrowing from the library): it says that she was "seduced" in a wood and that later she is "torn" between two men (the man who raped her and her eventual husband), but those are ridiculous words to use in this situation. It makes it sound like she had any choice in the matter, but the whole point of the novel is that she didn't.

So in one sense, I hated this book, because it was so freaking sad. I did enjoy reading it, but I hated the story, if that makes any sense. I'm interested to talk about it at our book club meeting tomorrow. And I really am especially glad to have read it now, after the fact--it's another one of those books I always mean to have read, and now I can finally check it off my list.