What I read: January and February 2016

My reading goals for 2016 are: mysteries and histories. 

I love mysteries so much, stand alone and those in a series. I want to catch-up with my favorite detectives and if that means a year of not-so guilty pleasures then so be it! Thanks to Hamilton the Musical I’m interested in learning more about American history, so those are on the list too. I think biographies and histories will be a bit more hit and miss. 

I kicked off January with “The Impossible Dead” by Ian Rankin. I’ve fallen big time for Rebus again, and I can tolerate Malcolm Fox. Actually, Fox is growing on me and I love what Rankin has done with Rebus-Clarke-Fox dynamic. It’s all good. 

The rest of January was spend on Ron Chernow’s 800 page tome on Alexander Hamilton. Dear god I love Alexander Hamilton. This is such a good book. It’s a cliche but history is ALIVE on those pages and I learnt so much. I was sad when I finished it. Sad not to be reading about Hamilton at my 5am “me” time slot. (Fresh from reading Hamilton I went to the UK to ready to proselytize and you know what Brits aren’t as interested in our founding fathers as I am. What gives?)

On the audiobook front I finally finished Diana Gabaldon ‘Written in my Own Hearts Blood’. Roller coaster of emotion and tied in nicely with Hamilton, and I need another Jamie and Claire hit. I squeezed in a quickie mystery with Jacqueline Winspear ‘Leaving Everything Most Loved’ – Maise Dobbs I have missed you! This was a transitional story for Dobbs and I was glad that some of the characters/storylines were finally being wound up and new things are on the horizon. 

Come February I was in the UK with Zoey and Nomi, and I had high hopes to read all of  ‘Team of Rivals’ BUT as gripping as Doris Kearns Goodwin book is I needed something lighter to get me through 5 weeks of solo parenting. So I threw myself into Agatha Christie’s ‘They Do It With Mirrors’, ‘Saints of the Shadow Bible’ by Rankin and started another Maisie Dobbs mystery. I barely listened to my audiobook in February, when I had a chance to listen to something I blasted out Hamilton because Brits you need to embrace Alexander. When I’m back next year I expect EVERYONE to be word perfect. 

Hoping March will be the month I dig in to Lincoln, and perhaps go back to Washington and Jefferson. 

‘A Lesson in Secrets’ by Jacqueline Winspear

This post could also be called: ‘I Finally Read a Book!!!’

I think I was so fatigued from 6 years of reading for school that this summer I’ve barely been able to pick up a book over the summer. Reading a few chapters of ‘The Mayo’s Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy’ or ‘The New Basics: A to Z of baby and childcare for the modern parent’ is about all I can manage. But, when we went up to Lime Rock Park for the weekend (about 12 lbs ago – I now measure time in weight gain) I sat very happily on our balcony and read the latest Maisie Dobbs mystery (A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear) in a day. I now understand why one of my friends says that she can’t read in NYC she can only get through books on vacation.

I’m hoping that as the weather starts and as I gain my final 10 lbs (*sigh* these are going to be good sized twins) that I’ll feel more like reading. There is something about the crispness of fall and a latte that makes me want to curl up with my iPad (or Kindle). I just need to read something sticky that pulls me back in. I really need to read as much as possible before the cylon invasion.

Right, back to ‘A Lesson in Secrets’ which is the 8th Maisie Dobbs mystery, and whilst I enjoyed it I have a feeling the series is starting to wrap things up. Which is no bad thing – it’s better to go out strong than keep pumping up books with a thinner and thinner plot (ahem Alexander McCall Smith!).

For a quick Maisie Dobbs recap she is an investigator and psychologist in 1930s London who at the start of the series was a young girl working as a house maid for Lord and Lady Compton. She was discovered at 3am trying to teach herself Latin before a day of hard graft. Her employers realized her potential and were somewhat progressive (she was sent to work as a maid in the country and be tutored so that she could apply for university when old enough). Maisie’s education at the University of Cambridge is interupted by the First World War, and she takes a sabbatical to train as a nurse and join the Woman’s Army. Post-WW1 and after she completes her studies she ends being mentored by one of the top investigators, and eventually sets out on her own. Phew!

In ‘A Lesson in Secrets’ Maisie is working with the British Secret Service and goes undercover at a small Cambridge college to investigate one of the lecturers and then finds herself  sucked into solving a murder. It’s a solid case, and there is enough character development to keep the reader enthralled. It’s hard to write about the plot of a mystery novel without giving too much away so I’ll stop here.

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain (Kindle Edition)

I’m very slowly getting back into reading over the summer. It always takes me a while to unwind post exams, and this summer I’m pretty consumed with research for the upcoming cylon invasion.

My first read was actually a re-read; something I’ve wanted to re-visit for a while – Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. An expose of sorts into the world of chefs and restaurants in New York. It’s over a decade old but still holds true, and very much worth a read. The chapters alternate between Bourdain’s journey as a chef (from summer jobs to the CIA to chefing his way through Manhattan – the good, the bad and the very ugly), and his thoughts on the restaurant industry and eating in general. Bourdain writes very well – snarky and no holds bars. It’s a fun read, and worth pairing with Medium Raw.

It’s funny but Kitchen Confidential is one of the few books I actually remember where I was when I first heard about it, and in many ways it’s Alex and I’s Eat Pray Love. It was 2000 and we were still living in London. We were having dinner with friends at Belgo (very 90s – early 00s dinner spot), and they were raving about the book. Little did we know that by the end of the year Alex would be off to work in New York, and then we’d be spending the next decade eating our way around Manhattan (including Les Halles which is a favorite steak and frites spot) and becoming obsessed with Top Chef.

The Guardian’s “Greatest” Non-Fiction List

There are only two purposes to most ‘Must Read’ book lists to make people either feel smug  or inadequate – dependent on how many you have read (or have pretended to read). At the weekend my twitter feed was full of re-tweets of the Guardian’s ‘The 100 Greatest Non-Fiction List’. I figured that I’d fair badly but this was a really mean list, and the comments seem to back it up. Samuel Pepys, Gertrude Stein, Herodotus, Samuel Johnson, Freud, Plato, Sun Tzu, and Stephen Hawking are not for the lay reader. Hell I’ve just finish a Classics degree and I’ve only read extracts of Herodotus (and as many of the commentators pointed out it was generous of the list builders to include him since he mixes a fair amount of fiction in his historiography) and Alex got through ‘A Brief History of Time’ because he majored in Physics. Out of 100 books only three books from the last decade. It’s not really an accessible or even a gateway list to promote reading more non-fiction which makes me sad. My thoughts on how to lift the list:

• Skip Samuel Pepys actual diary and just follow him on twitter instead  or read Claire Tomalin’s biography
• Military history is sort of scattered throughout the different sections but I’d include some Stephen Ambrose (particularly D-Day and Band of Brothers) and Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down
• Freakonomics is a glaring omission
• For memoirs I’d like to see Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories as they are laugh out loud funny, and philosophy could do with some pop philosophers like Alain de Botton
• Why struggle to read ‘The Art of War’ and ‘The Prince’ when you can watch four seasons of The Wire to see their lessons in action
• The science section needs some serious lightening. I’m a big fan of John Gribbin as his books were accessible enough to read in high school (though I was quite a nerdy), Brian Greene and Neil deGrasse Tyson are also good
• Where the heck is Bill Bryson his travel books are hilarious and Paul Theroux‘s ‘The Great Railway Bazaar’, and ‘The Happy Isles of Oceania’ are classics in the grumpy traveler field

And what about the recent trend of histories of cities or objects? I think the Guardian Book dept. could have done better.

Things on Tuesday (3/22)

The good

• Downloaded two new books (Complaints by Ian Rankin and the latest Maisie Dobbs mystery) just need to catch-up with school work so I can read them
• Baked a blood orange & olive oil cake
• Castle is really growing on me, and new The Good Wife tonight (when is this March Madness over?)

The bad

• Alex is helping someone move tonight so no tea and cake till he gets back. It’s almost 9pm – boo!
• Nasal congestion reaching the point where I need to get some of those Breathe Right strips
• Tomorrow night’s drinks with the girls just got rain checked and I am secretly pleased as I want to work on an essay plan instead
• EXAM! panic

Project: De-clutter

I find myself wanting to exist in two homes at once: one lined with books and the other spacious and minimal. It is possible to have both if you have a large enough home except the reality is that I live in a one bed flat and can’t see myself living in anything bigger than a two bed in the next five years. Earlier this year we moved from a fairly large one bed flat to a smaller one bed, and since I’ve been at home more I’ve really started to feel the walls closing in on me. I am such a pack rat that it’s all my own fault. How can you feel anything but cramped when surrounded by over six hundred books?

So last week I made the snap decision to de-clutter through a radical de-booking, and that brought me more inline with the way Alex has been thinking about his books for a while. Part of me had wanted to keep them for my future offspring but when I thought about it more I realized that by the time I have any offspring reading technological will have moved on (we are already living in the age of Kindles and iPads – what’s next?). They’ll look at a paper book as something archaic like a stone tablet chiseled with Linear B (which lets be honest was a fairly cumbersome and inefficient way to transport content rather like our own traditional books).

On Friday I packed up the books, and then forced poor Alex to spend the weekend dropping them off at various non-profits. Now I have two bookcases to get rid of and will make my first foray on to Craig’s List. But ‘Project: De-clutter’ is not over I have started working on my closet and the rest of the flat.

The Summer So Far

I came up with a few goals for the summer because what is three months off studying without a some structure. I like organized fun people – I’m a capricorn.

– Jog for 20 minutes
I am not a huge fan of cardio. I walk a lot and take pilates classes but the treadmill is an undiscovered country. But, I know that cardio is good and I feel that I should at least be able to run for 20 minutes without my legs turning to jelly. I started out by doing walk-run-walk-run for a few minutes of each and today I managed 15 mins of a continous jog. (Of course afterwards I collapsed and I will feel it tomorrow.)
– Read 12 books
So far I’ve read 8 books: The Slap, The Millennium Trilogy by Stig Larsson, An Education by Lynn Barber, The Mapping of Love & Death by Jacqueline Winspear, The Importance of Being Seven by Alexander McCall Smith and Exit Music by Ian Rankin.
– Gut my wardrobe
When we moved flats I lost the walk-in wardrobe and about 50% of storage space. I really need the cull my clothes because there just isn’t the space to hold on to those items that I might one day wear again. So far I haven’t tackled this project. I have a feeling it might be done at the end of the season when I am switching over to my fall-winter clothes (which I also have to cull).
-Get through my Netflix queue
I upped my membership to two discs at a time but I am still fairly slow to watch stuff but at least I am getting more use out of Netflix Instant thanks to Leverage.
– Learn how to make macaroons
When I was in London I discovered macaroons from Paul’s bakery chain and oh my word they are delish. I haven’t started on this challenge yet because the summer heat makes it unbearable to have the oven on.

The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson

Over the course of the weekend I read the entire Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest. This was a mean feat as these books are over 500 pages long a piece. I was up until 2am this morning finishing off TGWKTHN.

I’ve had TGWTDT in my To Be Read pile for well over a year. It was so thick and Swedish I thought it would take forever to finish. WRONG! About 200 pages in I could not put it down. There is a series of reveals that suck you in and won’t let you out. From Saturday night onwards I ignored Alex and read. When I finished the first book on Sunday morning I immediately downloaded the second to my iPad, and there I stayed in bed reading and drinking coffee (they drink a lot of coffee in these books so it was kind of meta). By 4pm on Sunday book number two was done and such a cliff hanger I greedily downloaded book number three. But, because I was feeling light headed and couldn’t focus took a break and went for an early dinner.  Sunday night I returned to the scene of the crime with a super strong latte and I just had to know how it ended before I closed my eyes. I can never stay up late but it was such a complex and compelling story it kept me awake.

I don’t want to give anything away about the plot as I came to them cold, and it was all the better without spoilers but what I will say is that they are focused around the relationship between journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, and a heavily tattooed research assistant, Lisbeth Salander. Salander is one of the best anti-heroes that I’ve read in a long while. She is up there with Nora storming out of the Doll House, and not only could she wipe the floor with Bella she could kick the vampire and the werewolf’s arses.

And now after a full day on only 4 hours sleep I am tired, disorientated (keep forgetting I am not in Sweden and all our IKEA furniture doesn’t help) and sad that there are no more stories about Blomkvist and Salander.

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

This is an amazing book – raw and unnerving. The story centers on the consequences of a non-family member slapping a misbehaving child at a barbecue in suburban Melbourne. How the reverberations can be felt not only by those directly involved but by everyone in their social sphere. Sides are taken. New alliances against old. Cultural differences come to the forefront, and not everything is as straightforward as it would first appear. Each chapter is from a different characters point of view, and moves the plot on. This is no Vantage Point, you don’t have to relive the slap umpteen times.

My enjoyment was probaly heightened by reading it on a long train journey to a potentially fraught (because aren’t they all?) large family gathering and that it was the first non-school book I’d read since January (and that is a long time to go without escapist fiction). I also had just over 24hrs to read it before I flew home and needed to finish it so that my mum so she could take it on holiday. All in all that made it an intense read and I wish more of Christos Tsiolkas books were available outside of Australia because he weaves a cracking tale.

Things on Tuesday

FTW

• James Franco + Body Pillow + 30 Rock = BLISS!
• Silver nail polish
• Swedish detective novels
• Yoga tomorrow morning
• Taco trucks
• Weather is warming up

Meh

• Too much to do
• Puffy eyes put the kibosh on weekend plans
• Dollhouse descends into madness. So glad there are only 2 episodes left