Book Talk – June 8th, 2025

We had a nice group in June.   Seven people talked about the books they’ve been reading, including Linda, who returned from her European vacation.  Regulars joining in included Michael, Beth, Peggy and Christina.  Tim, who hasn’t been doing much reading, joined us as well, just to see what everyone has been up to.

Book-adjacent discussion included truck stops across the U.S., known as dhabas, that serve predominately curry dishes.  Michael informed us around 20% of long-haul truckers are east Indian, thus the demand for curry.   Mr. Google tells us that a ‘dhaba’ is a roadside restaurant in the Indian subcontinent. They are on highways, generally serving local cuisine, and serving as truck stops.  Fascinating.

Peggy had lunch with Barbara, who was back in town for a visit.  Barbara was a long-time member of the book club before she moved back to Virginia.  She told Peggy about an online book club that might be of interest to others, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Virtual Book Club.  Christina, who is already a member of at least 20 different book clubs, already knew about the Folger, and let us know that the book list for their 2025-26 season will be announced sometime in July.

https://www.folger.edu/whats-on/programs/book-club/

And for something completely different, Tim recommends listening to My Word! which was broadcast on BBC radio from 1956-1988.  You can find the archives here:

https://archive.org/details/bbcmyword

Join us in July for lots more interesting conversation, which you will only find when a group of Mensans get together.

In all, 69 books were read/discussed/reviewed.  The full list can be found here:

https://mamensa.org/category/book-lovers-sig-book-talks/

Book Lovers SIG always meets on the second Sunday of each month; in this case July 13.  We meet online using Zoom, so it is easy to join in.

Folks generally start checking in around 2 p.m. for a bit of socialization.  Book discussions begin around 2:30 p.m., more or less, or when Peggy says, “OK, Let’s talk about books!”

To join us on Zoom, simply click on the link shown below:

https://tinyurl.com/BookLoversSIG

You can also open your Zoom app and use these parameters:

Meeting ID: 946 0436 4344
Passcode: 844358

*****

Peggy

The Frozen River, by Ariel Lawton.  It’s just after the beginning of the American Republic in Maine when it’s still part of Massachusetts.  Martha Ballard, a midwife and mother to six children, also acts as a coroner, at least until a doctor who graduated from Harvard overrules her opinion in a drowning case.  Or was it hanging?  A local judge is accused of rape.  And unmarried mothers are fined for their immorality.

Based on the real life and diaries of a midwife who seeks justice for all the women in her care.

When We Had Wings, by Ariel Lawton, Kristina McMorris and Susan Meissner.  An Army nurse, a Navy nurse, and a Filipina nurse have a paradise assignment in the Philippines until the Japanese land.  Based on the true experiences of the “Angels of Bataan”, I read this because my brother-in-law is working on a book about his aunt and uncle who experienced the same.

The Book Club for Troublesome Women, by Marie Bostwick.  In 1963 Virginia, four suburban women start a book club — their first pick, Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique.  The book and the book club change their relationships with their husbands, their work lives, and each other.

Tell Me Everything, by Elizabeth Strout.  Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge and Bob Burgess, all characters from previous Strout novels, are together in post-Covid Maine.  They tell each other stories about their lives and those of others and are all genuinely nice people, even cranky Olive.

How to Lose Your Mother, a Daughter’s Memoir, by Molly Jong-Fast.  Molly is a political writer/podcaster and the only child of Erica Jong (Fear of Flying).  She was a drunk and a neglectful mother, but when she and her husband both have dementia, Molly steps in to manage their care.

Christina

The Last Heir to Blackwood Library, by Hester Fox.  I had quibbles but enjoyed this occult gothic mystery.  I’m a guest on Elizabeth Sagewood’s channel to discuss this book with the Haunted Victorian Book Club:

https://www.youtube.com/live/YMn1BqGzqxI?si=bitNWQKJoOADj06m

It gets spoilery pretty quickly, so you may want to pause it if you plan to read the book.

Horror MAYhem Readathon – Decades of Dread:

(1866) The Signalman, by Charles Dickens.  Not sure what was happening here, but it seemed vaguely spooky. I may re-read with my eyeballs.

(1881) The Shadow Builder, by Bram Stoker.  Interesting but hard to follow.  Another I may have to re-read.

(1907) In the Valley of the Shadow, by Bram Stoker.  No plot to speak of.  Just a dangerously ill man sharing his fevered delusions.

(1995) The Howling Ghost, by Christopher Pike.  The second book in the Spooksville Middle Grade Horror Series.  Pretty solid ghost story, though I’m not fond of the narration.

(2019) Walking to Aldebaran, by Adrian Tchaikovsky.  Very creepy.  Very violent.  Very gross.  But also, a very interesting cosmic horror adventure with lots of allusions to classic SF.

(2020) Finna, by Nino Cipri.  Similar setting to Horrorstor, but more of a multiverse horror story with more nuanced character development.

Zombie Awareness Month – Zombiethon:

Dead City, by James Ponti.  Fun YA secret history of Manhattan.  With zombies.

The Legend of the Zombie, by Thomas Kingsley Troupe.  Audio only of what was obviously a children’s picture book, so this was more like a recitation of PowerPoint slides.

Zombie Makeout Club Vol. 1: Deathwish, by Peter Richardson. Did not like. Had I not read the description, I would have had absolutely no idea what was going on. Oddly enough, though, I appreciated the artwork even though it’s not really my style.

Mystery Novels:

The Scent of Rain and Lightning, by Nancy Pickard.  Read for a local mystery book club.  Cold case mystery that totally nails the rural Kansas setting and ranching community dynamics.

Murder (and Baklava), by Blake Pierce.  Okay murder mystery set on a European river cruise.  Amateur sleuth was kind of annoying, but I might continue the series to see if it gels.  I’m not entirely certain Blake Pierce is a real person, but this didn’t feel like AI slop, either.

The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers, by Samuel Burr.  Read for the Cozy Puzzlers book club.  No murders, but an interesting coming-of-age tale about a young man who was abandoned as an infant on the doorstep of a group home/atelier of puzzle creators of various types.  Kind of predictable in a cozy, comforting way.  I enjoyed the audiobook, but I am told that the puzzles in the print version are disappointing.

Birds in Flight, by Anni Taylor.  Read for the Historical Fiction Readathon.  Dual-timeline story of estranged sisters who have to team up to find out what happened to their mother, who disappeared in Australia when they were children.

Shady Hollow, by Juneau Black.  Read for the Cozy Readers book club.  Murdery mystery in a community composed entirely of anthropomorphized animals.  Super gimmicky but it worked for me.  Cozy, yes, but a bit noir around the edges.

Science Fiction Stories:

Model Minority, by Cory Doctorow.  This finished off my reading of the Radicalized quartet of novellas.  Interesting ideas, but probably my least favorite of the four.

Keeping Cadence, by Piper J. Drake.  Read for Temporal Textual Talks.  Steampunk heist adventure romance novella.  Fun but a little spicier than I like.

Nonfiction:

Poirot and Me, by David Suchet.  David Suchet will forever be the One True Poirot.  This heartfelt memoir detailed how he accomplished this and provided lots of behind-the-scenes info.

On the Curry Trail, by Raghavan Iyer.  Read to kick off the 52 Book Club’s Connections Challenge.  A cookbook with yummy-sounding recipes and a good number of notes on history and culture.  I would recommend this to anybody who loves good curry, even if they don’t want to actually prepare it.

Linda

Straight Man, by Richard Russo ***  An English professor contends with political issues in his department plus numerous interpersonal semi-dramas.  Typical Russo – nothing much happens but his writing makes it fairly entertaining.

Four novels by William Kent Krueger (found some I missed!)  ****

Sulphur Springs
Desolation Mountain
Tamarack County
Windigo Island

Love you More, by Lisa Gardner.  One of a series, crime novels featuring Detective D. D. Warren.  A man has been murdered, and his wife is accused.  Plus, their child is murdered and may be dead.  Lots of plot twists – kind of reminded me of Harlan Coben.  ****

Here One Moment, by Liane Moriarty.  A woman who may or may not be a psychic predicts the dates and causes of random strangers on a plane.  What ensues afterward is hard to understand.  Terrible and wonderful things happen, and I loved this book.  *****

Solito, by Javier Zamora.  A young boy journeys from El Salvador to the U.S. to reunite with his parents.  His only guides are the paid coyotes and the other immigrants.  I didn’t realize till the end that this was a true story.  ****

The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore.  A young girl disappears from her summer camp.  The ensuing search involves much about the history of her family and the camp.  Very well-written and suspenseful.  *****

Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village, by Maureen Johnson.  A fun half-hour read about the dangers of “cozy” mystery settings.  ***

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, by Lisa See.  The main character lives in a remote Chinese village where tea-farming is the means of income.  The story goes through her life and takes her to many places and through major life events.  I learned a lot about tea.  ****

The Year of the Locust, by Terry Hayes.  A book of foreign intrigue with spies turns into science fiction.  And yet it’s done well!  Very suspenseful.  *****

Beth

Wizard of Most Wicked Ways, Charlie Holmberg.  Souls, bodies, and magic.  And evil.  And how people hold on to life, and who deserves to live.   This is the fourth book in the series about a man with chaos magic, a woman with seer magic, and a boy whose soul inhabited a house rather than die.

Cut and Thirst, Margaret Atwood.  Older women fantasize about settling scores at others’ expense.  Things go sideways immediately, but karma wins out.

Murderbot Series: All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, The Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry, System Collapse by Martha Wells.  A human/bot construct is involved in a catastrophic event, with lots of dead people and units.  It deactivates its governor and tries to find what it wants.  Like Data with his emotion chip.  Addictive Space Opera.

The Bookstore Family, Alice Hoffman.  The end of the saga of family, loss, and love on a small island in Maine.

The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead.  A fictionalized story of the underground railroad, with an actual railroad.  The point is how fraught the whole process was and how everyone could end up on the wrong end of the slavery issue.  This actually took me several attempts to get through.  I got attached to the characters and there was only so much I could take in one sitting.

The Shadowspell Academy, by K.F. Breene.  Fantasy at another school for magic people.  A highly competitive school with no guarantee of survival.  There is a back story that finally unfolds in book three.  It looks at the situation where there are people with outsized amounts of power, and the effort to control/stifle them.  It asks the questions of how much power is too much, and how to control it without succumbing to it.

Give her Credit, Grace L. Williams.  The story of the people and the process that went into opening a bank for and by women in 1970’s Denver.  The banking landscape was a good old boys club, inside and outside the bank: i.e., male cosigners.  The process was fraught with all the things that go into any group trying to get something done.

The Golden Age of Magic, Luanne G. Smith.  Fairy Godmothers are real, but there’s a catch.  Looking at the balance of good and evil, and egos, and humility.

The Knight and the Butcherbird, Alix E. Harrow.  A short story about evolution in real time.  Reminds me of Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio.

Michael

Keeper of Enchanted Rooms, by Charlie Holmeberg.  A lightweight fantasy about a house that is haunted and can transform itself by making rooms and floors disappear, etc.  Predictable love story.  Underlying Christian beliefs:  Thank the Lord!  Presence of a ruby cross.  Limited magical world.  Reminded me of myself watching the roof of my house in Bangkok seem to blow off while I was under the influence of LSD.

Anansi Boys, by Neil Garman.  Good brother vs. bad brother with folk stories actually stolen or paraphrased from Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone chapter from The Once and Future King and Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines.  References to Shiva, Kalpa Vigraha.

The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides.  A very good story of a sexually betrayed psychological patient who refuses to talk until the big reveal at the end of the book.  A friend of mine, who is a psychotherapist, is currently reading this book and says it’s realistic.  References to Alcestis in Greek mythology who refused to speak after returning from Hell.  Related readings: I Hear Voices by Paul Ableman and The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat.

Beautiful Ugly, by Alice Feeny.  Feminist empowerment on a mysterious island inhabited only by a village of women and one male writer, who will not be allowed to leave.  Well-written and organized but with a contrived secret message and illogical last chapter.  Recommended viewing: The Vanishing, a 2006 Dutch film by George Sluizer.

Do not watch the crappy American happy-ending version with Sandra Bullock.

The Lost Apothecary, by Sarah Penner.  Excellent mystery told from three points of view: a medieval apothecary and her assistant, who poison richly deserving men, and an American researching them in contemporary London.  Very well-written and suspenseful.

Deadly Doses: A writer’s guide to poisons, by Serita D. Stevens & Anne Klarner.  Excellent guidebook to almost all the known natural and synthetic poisons, including name, toxicity, form, effects and symptoms, reaction time, antidotes and treatment, and case studies. For authors writing murder mysteries who wish to be accurate, like Agatha Christie, who learned all about poisons working in a military pharmacy during WWI.

Buddhist Ethics, by Damien Keown.  Excellent study of Buddhist ethics with chapters on contemporary Buddhist attitudes towards the treatment of animals, sexuality, war and terrorism, abortion, suicide and euthanasia and cloning.  From the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series.

Buddha, by Michael Carrithers.   A detailed study of what is known and what is only assumed about the life of the Buddha with a deep study of how his philosophy evolved from the then contemporary Indian social and cultural norms and the caste system. From the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series.

Buddhism, by Damien Keown.  Not Read Yet. From the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series.

Brad (27/10,284)

Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, by Adam Higginbotham.  My first job out of undergrad school was with Morton Thiokol, the makers of the solid rocket boosters that blew up Challenger.  I thought I knew this story but learned a lot more due to the extensive interviews and Higginbotham’s FOIA requests, information that documents how NASA and Thiokol management tried to cover up their decisions that led to this tragedy.  I’d like to emphasize that 14 engineers on the Thiokol SRB team unanimously recommended that the shuttle not be launched that morning, but were overruled by three Thiokol managers, who were under intense pressure from NASA managers to maintain an unrealistic launch schedule.

This was an accident that never should have happened.  *****

Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Readers’ Favorite History & Biography (2024).

To the Temple of Tranquility … And Step on It! A Memoir, by Ed Begley, Jr. Begley is an actor and character I really like.  (He appeared in The In-Laws, one of my all-time favorite movies).  He grew up in Hollywood, the son of Ed Begley, a pretty big name at the time.  So many of the kids he went to school with, young actors just getting started, Begley met and became friends with.  This is a book chock full of great stories. ****

The Reluctant Tuscan: How I Discovered My Inner Italian, by Phil Doran.  Doran was a writer in Hollywood, a hot commodity at one time, but he was getting older and no longer in demand the way he once was.  His wife, a sculptor, bought a dump of a villa in Italy while she was working there on a project and convinced him to move there to get away from the rat-race and rehab the building into something livable.  For a writer he doesn’t tell a very interesting story, and there really isn’t an ending … it just stops.  Not recommended.  ***

Out of the Dark (Orphan X #4), by Gregg Hurwitz.  I won’t share the plot, as someone in the group might start reading the series, but as usual the pace is frenetic and the action violent.  *****

Heaven’s Keep (Cork O’Connor #9), by William Kent Krueger.  Another plot I won’t share, but I will say that Krueger does a great job of character development, while also telling a great story.  *****

Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang.  I’d like some whine with that.  Basically, a rip-off of The Plot, followed by hundreds of pages of the protagonist complaining about people accusing her of stealing the plot of her bestseller from her dead friend.  Which she did.  People are mean to me on social media.  Wah, Wah, Wah.  So repetitious.  Not a single likeable or relatable character in this book.  I hated it.  **

Goodreads Choice Award Winner for Readers’ Favorite Fiction (2023).

Into the Fire (Orphan X #5), by Gregg Hurwitz.  *****

The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth.  I’ve never forgotten the original movie, so I finally got around to reading the book upon which it was based.  Forsyth is a terrific storyteller.  Does a great job of building up the suspense, but in a slow, deliberate manner.  Every bit of it is believable, so it really draws you into the story.  Recommended.  *****

Death Valley: A Thriller, by J.F. Penn.  I was given an advanced copy of the book, with the request that I provide a review on Goodreads and Amazon.  I won’t be doing that, for two reasons: the plot and the writing.  There are so many literally unbelievable parts of the story that I just wanted to throw up my hands.  And the writing.  Every little thing is over-described.  Why use one word when ten will do?  But don’t tell Penn I said that. **