Wrong Man Running by Alan Hruska

Another from the under $4 list. I think I would classify it as mystery/suspense.

New York City - and the Jack McCoy character, Chief ADA, is being framed for a series of brutal rapes - or is he?

One of Amazon's reviewers compared it to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo for general graphic gruesomeness, but I couldn't see any resemblance on that or any other score. Another was offended because the main character slept with so many women, but really there were only two - and he married one of them.

I enjoyed it, it certainly isn't one I would recommend to my book club - or particularly strongly to anyone. I don't believe it had as much bad language as the knitting book that I read last week. As I said, I did enjoy it - after all, I sat here and read it all evening instead of doing any of the great multitude of things that I should have been doing. It's one of those that was all right, but I'm glad I didn't spend much for it.

Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows

This was an impulse purchase from the January "100 books under $4" list. It isn't my usual thing at all, but I really like the title. No romance or mystery, except the eternal mystery of the Chinese language.

It is a description of an American's struggles to learn Chinese and the insights she gains into the nature of the society and its people along the way. Fallows is not your average American abroad; she is a scholar and a linguist with a PhD from Harvard. Although she describes many technical aspects of the language, the discussion never becomes pedantic, but remains lively and anecdotal.

The historical background of the language is fascinating. I had not known that the written language was completely redesigned during the Mao years. Also, I had always thought that "top to bottom, right to left" was how it was done. Although that is the traditional way, it seems that the Chinese are far more flexible than that.

There are only about 400 syllables which make up the language and most words are only one syllable. So, if you assume that Chinese may, like English, have a basic working vocabulary of around 2000 words, Chinese has a lot of homophones. That's where tone or inflection come in, and apparently most Americans can't even hear that.

Anyway, it was interesting and informative - and fun. Plus a little personal satisfaction. One of my classmates this semester claimed, in writing, that economically disadvantaged kindergarteners have five million fewer words in their vocabularies than five-year-olds from economically stable families. So I did a little research - it only took one google to learn that according to the OED people the English language is possessed of something like a quarter of a million words - those five-year-olds must have lost the remaining 4.75 million.

The Beach Street Knitting Society and Yarn Club by Gil McNeil

A friend recommended this as a new find and I found that I had already read it - of course, I didn't discover this until after I got the Kindle version. It is pleasant and a quick read, no mystery - just a nice feel-good story.

Jo Mackenzie is resettling with her two young sons in an incredibly British seaside village and taking over her grandmother's yarn shop. This drastic move is a result of the unexpected death of her husband - of course, nothing is quite that simple. He returned from an overseas assignment - he was a television news guy - and told Jo that he was leaving her to marry his mistress of several years. He is so outraged when she does not accept this announcement graciously that he storms out of the house and tears away in his car and promptly piles it into a post or a brick wall or something leaving Jo a widow with no particular reason to go into mourning except that she has always faithfully maintained for her sons the fiction that he was the perfect dad.

She meets people and starts a Stitch and Bitch - in the face of the intense disapproval of her grandmother's long-time employee who doesn't think that name is quite nice. The shop is a success, which it had not been for many years and Jo learns that life goes on.

A nice story. There is rather a lot of the f-bomb - unnecessary, to my way of thinking. Endless repetition does dull the impact, after all. Then there is one bit where a character is outraged because someone referred to a female dog as a "pointer bitch" in front of her daughters. The incident seemed funny to me in the context of the dialogue in the story in general because no character seemed to go more than a dozen words without f-ing something.

Oh well, I did enjoy it, but I think I will go back to the January under $3.99 list and pick a couple before time runs out rather than immediately run and pick up the second book in this series.

Guernica: A Novel by Dave Boling

The destruction of Guernica by Nazi bombers is immortalized in what is probably Pablo Picasso's best known painting: the mural titled Guernica. Now the painting is probably better known than the town, which lies at the heart of the Basque region of Spain.

Boling made me feel like part of the family of Guernica. The town is populated by wonderful and totally believeable characters. People that the reader knows and cares about so that we suffer through assaults on their way of life beginning with the Spanish Civil war and on through the devastating bombing raid with them. Their language is forbidden, their dance is forbidden, and finally their lives are taken from them.

The story follows two families, the Ansoteguis and the Navarros through generations of love, loss, and hard work. And it follows those who survive the bombing as they grieve and rebuilt life from the fragments that are left to them.

Shakespeare's Counselor by Charlaine Harris

I was definitely ready for some of my usual sort of reading - something that didn't require too much thinking. Good likable characters that I know from earlier books in the series, a logical plot, - and set in Arkansas with mentions of many places I know, even if Shakespeare itself is totally fictional.

Let's see, Lily doesn't get beaten up as badly as usual: just a stun gun and a broken nose, but she is recovering from a miscarriage, so maybe Harris thought she ought to take it easy on her. And the big shocker - she and Jack, the Little Rock private investigator, have gotten married. Unless I missed something, that happened between this book and the previous one.

Harris is considerate. She finds it necessary to have a bad guy butcher an innocent squirrel early on, but she does find a suitable home for the two dachshunds orphaned by one of the murders.

I really didn't intend to read this all today, but I it really isn't all that long, and I was enjoying it much too much to just quit and do my homework or anything radical like that. Surely tomorrow I can find some time to comment on the state of curriculum as America enters the twentieth century.

The Distant Hours by Kate Morton

Now that was fun - in a dark, brooding sort of way. It was nice to read a story with a plot - I guess I am still annoyed by the time I wasted on the book I read before this one.

The Distant Hours has all the elements of a classic gothic romance, but never quite succumbs to the cliche. There is the ancient castle with almost the suggestion that, like a fairytale castle, it can only be discovered by accident. Like the House of Usher, its very existence is tied to the family of the house named, in contradiction to their nature, Blythe. The ghosts of past generations inhabit the stones of the castle in a narrative area somewhere between reality and fantasy and theirs are the distant hours of the title. There is murder and madness and genius -- and a will (both in the sense of character and paper) that destroys the hope of happiness for the last generation. There is the young girl who arrives to stir the waters - in this instance by the vehicle of the World War II evacuations of children from London, rather than as a nurse or governess.

Morton has a trick of revealing consequences before causes, which sets up a myriad of possible explanations all wound up in long-kept secrets. Instances of clear foreshadowing (remember the pet cemetary?) serve to draw attention away from the actual events of the past yet to be revealed but are still significant in the eventual revelation.

The story of the story The Mud Man is the greater loop of the novel, but there are lesser circles which must be closed as well. Why does Seraphina hate cousin Emily? Why does Persephone dislike Mrs. Bird? Why did Juniper have blood on her shirt? Morton faithfully fills the reader in on the "facts" of all her red herrings. An excellent quality in a novelist.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

I strongly suspected from the very beginning that the ending was going to be unsatisfying. If I had checked it out of the library or borrowed it instead of buying it for my Kindle, I would not have finished it. We trail around behind two fundamentally likeable characters while they make stupid decisions and throw away any number of opportunities to be happy. And that's how it ends: they have one last perfect chance to come together and they choose to part company and follow amorphous futures which have little expectation of much of anything. Essentially, I had the feeling that the writer was setting up the reader. He led us on down two narrative lines - and on and on and on - knowing all the while that he had no intention whatsoever of pulling it together at the end.

It seemed primarily to be a pseudo-literary vehicle for an awful lot of sex. Nobody loved anybody - not even themselves. There is an extensive and painful exploration of bipolar disorder, possibly the most interesting part of the story.

Sorry I bothered, but at least I can self-righteously tell other members of the book club that I did read it. I may bail on this group. The books that we have read that I liked were ones that I suggested - and no one else liked them much. And I have not liked many of their suggestions either.

Let Us Build Us a City: Eleven Lost Towns by Donald Harington

This was definitely an interesting read - worth the $1.99 from the Kindle cheap books of the month list. Probably worth it to the author as well, because at some point I am going to find and read some of his novels.

City rather defies conventional categories. On one level it is simply a story a woman's search for the history and characters of some of the "lost" cities of Arkansas. Lost cities in this context are places named City which never achieved that status and are now near or actual ghost towns. It is by this nature episodic and the center becomes Kim, the eighth grade civics teacher making the quest. There is also her fascination with "the writer" that she has corresponded with and is an absent partner in the venture.

So, we have a historical research driven narrative which suddenly goes totally off the rails with what is an apparently completely fictional narrative of a paroled Union soldier headed home after the civil war. This is embedded in the true story of an overloaded steamboat, the Sultana, carrying, in addition to the paying passengers, a couple thousand soldiers from two of the most notorious Confederate prisoner camps, Andersonville and Catawba. The boilers explode and and an indefinite number of people are killed; most estimates place the number of dead higher than the number that died in the sinking of the Titanic. I kept waiting for Kim to locate descendants of the man - but the story was just dropped.

The wrap is the actual romance of Kim and the writer, none other than (surprise, surprise) Donald Harington himself. Actually, it isn't a surprise at all - if you read prologues - because he telegraphs it pretty clearly there.

They finish up with a list of lost cities of the United States - state by state. So naturally I had to check out what they had listed for New Mexico. I had only heard of one of them, and that caused me some concern about their list as a whole. They listed Silver City - if Silver City is a ghost town, there are any number of well-populated places in this state which qualify.

The House at Riverton by Kate Morton

Was this similar to The Forgotten Garden or not? I can't decide. They both move back and forth over many years. In both there is a secret which is only exposed on the last page (approximately), but this one doesn't really give the sense of a mystery to be solved: Grace knows the truth all along. Of course, there are secrets and secrets within secrets all through the story: the secret of Grace's identity and the unacknowledged fact that Ursula's grandmother is Hannah's daughter for starters, although neither of those has much bearing on the story.

The secret that brings about the disastrous conclusion seems very trivial - Grace, as a young housemaid, allows Hannah, the teenaged daughter of the house, to believe that they shared a secret ambition for office work and both knew shorthand. Personally, I think that was a rather weak device to precipitate the tragic conclusion. Why, ten years later, would Hannah write a note to Grace in shorthand? Just a little lame. Logically, she would have taken Grace into her confidence earlier. In fact, she would have needed Grace to facilitate her plans.

It also seemed very improbable that a young woman whose education ended before she was fourteen would leave her destined career in "service" and go get a PhD in archaeology. Unnecessary as well as improbable because it does not have any impact on the plot.

Frankly, the events - as they are supposed to have occurred or as Grace knows they actually did - seem rather ordinary to be such a legendary tragedy that they bring an American filmmaker to try to recreate them.

I do like very much the ghosts that Grace has discussions with when she returns to Riverton. They are handled very matter-of-factly. It reminded me of conversations that I had with my own grandmother in the months before she died. She often told me about talks that she had with her sister - who had been dead for a number of years. I believe that Katherine did come and visit with her, partly because Katherine is not the person that I would have expected Grandmother to summon. If Grandmother was going to imagine a visit from someone already dead, it would have been either my grandfather or her other sister.

Aside from that, my first impression was that this was very slow moving compared to The Forgotten Garden, but I'm not sure that impression is completely valid. It read very quickly, and I was never tempted to put it aside and get back to my other book.

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

Every month Amazon sends out a list of a hundred books for Kindle for under four dollars. This list is almost irresistable. Every month I go through it again and again and usually end up buying an old favorite or another in a series that I am following. This time I made of list of things that looked intriguing, and bought the first one on the list.

It wasn't exactly what I expected. I thought it would probably be a Russian police procedural - even after reading the reviews - sort of Gorky Parkish. Not exactly.

It is set after World War II, at the end of the Stalin era. In fact, the death of Stalin figures into the story. It is fairly convoluted, but, if improbably so, not incomprehensibly. Our hero, Leo, is an agent of some predecessor of the KGB, but is condemned ostensibly for refusing to denounce his wife, actually for having made an enemy of the wrong man. They do get away with their lives, but that is only the beginning of their troubles. There is a serial killer murdering children, but institutionalized paranoia prevents the many local jurisdictions from connecting the dots. In all cases, the murders have been "solved" and the supposed perpetrators summarily executed.

This is a society where paranoia is an essential survival skill. Everyone, no matter who they are, lives in constant fear. That alone made it very tense reading and quite outweighs the tension of the long string of murders and Leo's unsanctioned search for the killer.