Book #105: The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emma Orczy

It's so sad to me that I haven't read this book in the whole time I've been keeping this blog! Same thing with To Kill a Mockingbird. These books are such classics and are some of my very favorites, but I have been reading so many new books the last few years and not as much re-reading, that I am missing out on some joy of these beloved books that I have read so, so many times before now. But, I pulled it out yesterday or the day before and got it started, and just thoroughly enjoyed this book. I don't think I love it mostly because of the nostalgic factor--we spent HOURS singing the songs to The Scarlet Pimpernel musical that we saw when I was maybe twelve--it's just a really excellent story. The romantic factor of a secret identity of a man saving people's lives with no benefit to himself--it's just awesome. And I love how you get to see most of it through Marguerite's eyes and get to see her transformation. Sure, maybe her newfound love for her husband comes on a little strong and out of nowhere, and I'm always slightly annoyed by how dainty and alluring and perfect and astoundingly beautiful women in fiction of this era are, but it fits along with the times and it's not terrible. Marguerite is actually the heroine of the story and shows how tough she is by trying to save her husband (although walking for a few miles is enough to render her incapacitated and bloody-footed... mm-hmm).

TOTALLY love this book. I just wish I could find a version on the stage of it these days so I can relive the amazingness of the musical. We LOVED it for a few years at my house.

Book #104: Can You Keep a Secret? by Sophie Kinsella

I read this book because when I was looking at the Goodreads page for My Not So Perfect Life I saw this book cover as another book Kinsella had written and it was like a deja vu bomb went off in my head. I used to have this book--when I was in high school--and I totally remembered reading it and enjoying it and vividly remembered the cover. But I had no memory of what was actually in the book. Our library had an e-copy so I checked it out and enjoyed this walk down memory lane.

In this book, Emma Corrigan is on her very first business trip and the plane ride home has terrible turbulence--so terrible she's convinced they're all going to die. So in her panic she begins spilling out all her secrets to the man sitting next to her on the plane, which ends up being a problem when he shows up at her work the next day as her boss, the owner of the company there for a visit. Ahh! There's the inevitable romance and all sorts of inexplicable awkward situations that I feel like are pretty common to Kinsella's novels, but it was definitely a fun read. It took only two hours, so I mean, what is there to complain about a book that you can read that quickly and check off the list with so little energy? Ha!

Fair warning: Kinsella loves the f-word and other swearing, and there's a little bit of sex, but part of me thinks it's because she's British and the whole cultural difference in what curse words are appropriate.

Book #103: My Not So Perfect Life by Sophie Kinsella

Could anything be easier to read and lighter than Sophie Kinsella? I am pretty sure the answer is no. I read a few of her Shopaholic books when I was in high school and then a few other ones through the years, but I'd heard this one was cute and thought it would be a great light audiobook to listen to, and it was. Kinsella is great at creating relatable, slightly hilarious main characters, and this book is no exception. This book is about Katie Brenner, who works in London at a branding agency, and her attempts to create a perfect life for herself through her Instagram photos. But when she gets fired from her job and moves home to the country to help her dad start up a glamping site, she begins to question a lot of things about her decisions.

I thought this book was super contemporary--as in, it definitely seems very 2017. The Instagram perfect life is a major theme in the story--and that's such an everyday issue. And there was a ton about glamping too. I wonder how much of this book may seem outdated in a few years--but obviously that's not an issue now. I liked this one, although after a while I was wishing I could have just been reading it instead of listening to it, because I could have powered through this book in two hours instead of having to listen for ten. I liked how Katie's relationship with her boss Demeter changes over the course of the book--although it seems surprising how close they were at the end--and of course the romance was cute too--although I was less interested in the romance in this book, since it definitely seemed secondary to the storyline of Katie's job and her wrestling with what she wants to do.

This was cute, fun, not too long--definitely a fun chick lit read. Obviously a little different from The Brothers Karamazov.

Book #102: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

I read this a long time ago, and I'd seen the movie adaptation at some point, but it had been so long that I didn't remember any specifics of the story and had forgotten who the murderer was. All I remembered was the basic premise: that someone is killing people on this island one by one, and nobody can figure out who it is. So this was a fun book to revisit. This is apparently one of Agatha Christie's best-known novels (if not THE best-known) and I can see why--it's creepy and suggestive enough to get your heart rate up a little bit, and totally throws you off because there's no way to really figure out who did it. This is apparently a faux pas in the mystery-writing world; apparently you are supposed to drop hints here and there that the reader can look back on and say, "Ah! That's what that meant!" when they find out the ending. But not so in this book--you have no idea who it was until the epilogue. But I didn't mind that about this one; the story is so shocking and out-of-the-ordinary that you don't expect it to work like any other ordinary murder mysteries.

Definitely worth a read for anyone. It's short, fun, and exciting.

Note: I have a hard copy of this book, but I forgot about it when I started reading it (for book club this week), so I downloaded an e-book copy from the library. I'm glad I read the e-book because it helped me to not skip ahead and try to get a hint of who did it! It made it more satisfying at the end. For this book that really mattered.

Book #101: The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny

I am really enjoying this Inspector Gamache series of books. It's awesome that our library has most of them as audiobooks, because I couldn't commit to a series of thirteen books to read, but I'm always searching for books to listen to since not everything is on audio and now I have a huge series to fill up my workout time.

In this book, another murder happens in Three Pines. (Sidenote: isn't this unlikely, that the murders keep happening in this tiny, so-called peaceful village? The murders per capita rate must be extremely high compared to the rest of Canada! But this is where the suspension of disbelief is important. That doesn't bother me enough to detract from my enjoyment of the series.) This one happens during a seance the villagers hold at the old, haunted Hadley house--one of the group falls dead from a heart attack caused by fright during the seance. It comes out later that the heart attack was caused by a drug slipped to the murdered woman--and who did it? Inspector Gamache figures it out again, with his trademark intuitive, emotion-sensitive style. But this book is also focused on the betrayals headed towards the unsuspecting Gamache by his best friend. The reader knows what is happening, but Gamache has no idea who is leaking terrible stories about him and his family to the press, and it's torturous to watch as it unfolds. I'm curious to know what will happen for him in the next book, since the climax of the story involves this coming to light.

Definitely a fun book to listen to, and Penny has a huge talent of telling a story and creating these characters I love, who seem real and have personalities of their own. I'm looking forward to the next one soon too.

Book #100: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

First, a quick summary of this classic: there are three brothers and sons of Fyodor Karamazov, Dmitri, Ivan, and Alexei. Fyodor is the world's worst parent and a pretty horrible person, and everyone knows it. The three (motherless) brothers have grown up thanks to servants taking care of them and other people basically raising them to adulthood. However, they're all grown now, and have all returned to their home town where their father is for short stays, and are becoming reacquainted with him and with each other. There's a lot of deep discussions about right and wrong, about their Karamazovian natures, etc. Then Fyodor is murdered and Dmitri is the immediate suspect, and the second half of the novel is describing the arrest and the trial and the aftermath of the accused patricide.

This book took me a LONG time to read. This is one of those books that is the equivalent of five other books--because of its length, but also because of the difficulty of reading it. It was about 775 pages long, so much shorter than War and Peace or Anna Karenina (the two books I keep comparing it to, since they're both long Russian classics I've read as well), but it felt longer than those because it was heavy. All the summaries and reviews I read of this book talk about how it is a "philosophical treatise on morality" and "a passionate philosophical novel set in 19th century Russia, that enters deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality." This basically translates to whole chapters being long, LONG monologues from different characters without there being even normal paragraph breaks. Ten whole pages will go by with no dialogue and hardly any new paragraphs--which makes for slow, slow reading. I was determined not to skim and skip things (which happens automatically for me sometimes, when faced with entire pages with no distinguishing breaks), so I moved much slower than I usually do. Add in the fact that it's heavy stuff, talking about our agency and what is right and wrong and debating the existence of God and Christianity--and that makes it even slower. Additionally, the plot was difficult to stay engaged with, and many of the characters (other than Alyosha) were not sympathetic. However, it was easier to follow which character was which and not get confused about who was who, which was nice.

I don't say all of that to say that I didn't like the book. I did, but not as much as War and Peace or AK. I wish I had read this with a class where I could have discussed it and gotten some insight into why things were significant. I read the Sparknotes for each section of the book as I was going, and that helped a lot to give me insight into things that I missed the importance of as I was slogging along through the book. The philosophical elements that I enjoyed thinking about was how much of an effect our natures have on our actions (everyone was always talking about their "Karamazovian natures") and Ivan and Alyosha's disagreements about right and wrong. Ivan believed that if there's no God, there's no afterlife, and everything is permitted and nothing is wrong. This belief, which he talked about a lot and discussed with many people, blows up in his face and ends up driving him insane when the repercussions of it strike him finally. Alyosha was my favorite character, and obviously Dostoevsky's as well--he was angelic and beloved by all and always trying to do good for everyone. I didn't quite understand the need for the character of Father Zosima, the elder at the monastery who was Alyosha's mentor in his attempt to become a monk, and I thought it was super weird how an entire section, out of nowhere, was dedicated to his life story and his beliefs about everyone being responsible for everyone else's actions (I get that it was supposed to be in response to Ivan's atheism, but it seemed super weird). I kept thinking, "This would NEVER be allowed in a book being published today."

All in all, I am glad I read this. I have had this book on my shelf for YEARS and YEARS--I bought a secondhand copy while I was at NCSU, so at least six years ago--and I've always felt lame that I've never gotten around to reading it. I'm trying to work through the books on my shelves that I haven't read yet, and this was a major one. I don't honestly know if I'll want to read it again, though. It really dragged for me, and I don't know if the interesting insights were worth all the pages of blabber it took to get them.

But hey--book 100!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! CHECK ME OUT!

Book #99: Where I Was From by Joan Didion

I read this book in 2011, before I started keeping this blog. And I got the idea for a "family book club" (from a friend who does it with her sisters), and this ended up being the first one we picked for our family discussion. Although only a few of us ended up reading it, I'm glad to have revisited it again--it reminded me of what a great writer Joan Didion is, and how I feel like her ideas are so much deeper and more thought-provoking than my thoughts usually tend to run. This book is basically different essays dissecting Didion's relationship to and understanding of California, her home of her childhood. She writes about the many contradictions of California as a whole, as the supposedly picture-perfect place but with many issues hidden beneath the surface that I think surprised her as she grew up and became aware of them. She writes a lot about different ways the federal government has supported and then pulled out of California, such as the railroad and the aerospace industry, and about the growth of the prison system, and the Lakewood Spur Posse gang issues of the 1990s. I really enjoyed her discussions of the pioneers who first came to California in the 1800s, and thinking about the difference between her pioneer ancestors/heritage vs. our Mormon understanding of ours.

All in all, it wasn't probably the best book club choice for our first book. But it was still fun to try and discuss with my mom and Camille, and I'm excited about the next one we chose. I think this is a fun experiment. We'll see how it continues.