Category Archives: Retired

Triple Play: Firestorm, Moscow Rules and Shadows Reel

I’m going to quickly blow through a few contemporary mysteries – this type of book is my catnip and I read a lot of them.

FirestormFirestorm
by Nevada Barr
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Anna Pigeon #4
Publication Date: January 1, 1996
Genre: crime, mystery
Pages: 310
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women

A raging forest fire in California's Lassen Volcanic National Park traps exhausted firefighters, including Ranger Anna Pigeon, in its midst. Afterward, Anna finds two from her group have been killed. One a victim of the flames. The other, stabbed through the heart. Now, as a rampaging winter storm descends, cutting the survivors off from civilization, Anna must uncover the murderer in their midst.

Firestorm is book 4 in the Anna Pigeon series. Anna works for the National Park Service as a law enforcement officer, and each book is set in a different National Park. This element is my favorite part of the series – one of my retirement goals is to visit every single National Park in the U.S., so getting the little vignettes is fun.

This one was set in the Lassen Volcanic National Park in California, and the book is set within and then in the immediate aftermath of a wildfire that has resulted in one of the firefighters being killed. Anna is trapped in a closed circle with a group of fellow survivors, one of whom is the killer. It kept me interested to the very last page.

Moscow RulesMoscow Rules
by Daniel Silva
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Gabriel Allon #8
Publication Date: July 22, 2008
Genre: suspense, thriller
Pages: 433
ReRead?: No

Now the death of a journalist leads Allon to Russia, where he finds that, in terms of spycraft, even he has something to learn. He’s playing by Moscow rules now.
It is not the grim, gray Moscow of Soviet times but a new Moscow, awash in oil wealth and choked with bulletproof Bentleys. A Moscow where power resides once more behind the walls of the Kremlin and where critics of the ruling class are ruthlessly silenced. A Moscow where a new generation of Stalinists is plotting to reclaim an empire lost and to challenge the global dominance of its old enemy, the United States.

One such man is Ivan Kharkov, a former KGB colonel who built a global investment empire on the rubble of the Soviet Union. Hidden within that empire, however, is a more lucrative and deadly business. Kharkov is an arms dealer—and he is about to deliver Russia’s most sophisticated weapons to al-Qaeda. Unless Allon can learn the time and place of the delivery, the world will see the deadliest terror attacks since 9/11—and the clock is ticking fast.

I cut my reading teeth on cold war spy fic – Len Deighton, Robert Ludlum, etc – so sometimes only a spy novel will do. This is book 8 in Silva’s series centering on Gabriel Allon, Israeli super-spy. In this one, Allon spends time in Moscow, but not the cold war Moscow of my memory (Gen X here – I grew up during the Cold War). It ended up being a particularly timely read since Russia has resumed their historical place as the West’s greatest enemy by invading the sovereign nation of Ukraine.

Shadows ReelShadows Reel
by C.J. Box
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Joe Pickett #22
Publication Date: March 8, 2022
Genre: crime, mystery
Pages: 384
ReRead?: No

Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett’s job has many times put his wife and daughters in harm’s way. Now the tables turn as his wife discovers something that puts the Pickett family in a killer’s crosshairs in this thrilling new novel in the bestselling series.

A day before the three Pickett girls come home for Thanksgiving, Marybeth Pickett finds an unmarked package at the front door of the library where she works. When she opens the package she finds a photo album that belonged to an infamous Nazi official. Who left it there? And why did they leave it with her?

She learns that during World War II several Wyoming soldiers were in the group that fought to Hitler’s Eagles Nest retreat in the Alps—and one of them took Hitler’s personal photo album. Did another take this one and keep it all these years? When she finds the name of a deceased local man who was likely in the unit, Joe visits the man’s son—only to find him brutally tortured and murdered. Someone is after the photo album—but why? And when a close neighbor is murdered, Joe and Marybeth face a new question: How will they figure out the book’s mystery before someone hurts them…or their girls?

Meanwhile, Nate Romanowski is on the hunt for a younger and more ruthless version of himself—the man who stole Nate’s falcons and attacked his wife. Using a network of fellow falconers, Nate tracks the man from one city to another, learning that his target is an agitator and a financier of anarchists. Even as he grasps the true threat his quarry presents, Nate swoops in for the kill—and a stunning final showdown.

The Joe Pickett books aren’t just catnip to me – they are really more like creamy, chocolate covered crack. This is book 22, and was released last Tuesday. I read it in one sitting on Saturday. Because we are 22 books into a series that is set in a location that contains approximately 22 residents – Twelve Sleep County, Wyoming – Box has increasingly imported his mysteries from outside of Saddlestring.

What that means is that the mysteries have become more and more implausible. But, who cares. I am wildly entertained when I read a Joe Pickett. I know exactly what I am getting: Joe, will be uncorruptible, Marybeth, will be smart and supportive, Nate Romanowski will rip someone’s ear off, and, at some point, Joe’s state vehicle is going to get blown up. This one was true to the formula, and even though the story was, as always, bonkers, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Black History Month: A Rage In Harlem by Chester Himes

A Rage in HarlemA Rage in Harlem
by Chester Himes
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Harlem Cycle #1
Publication Date: January 1, 1957
Genre: crime, mystery
Pages: 160
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of crime

A Rage in Harlem is a ripping introduction to Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, patrolling New York City’s roughest streets in Chester Himes’s groundbreaking Harlem Detectives series.

For love of fine, wily Imabelle, hapless Jackson surrenders his life savings to a con man who knows the secret of turning ten-dollar bills into hundreds—and then he steals from his boss, only to lose the stolen money at a craps table. Luckily for him, he can turn to his savvy twin brother, Goldy, who earns a living—disguised as a Sister of Mercy—by selling tickets to Heaven in Harlem. With Goldy on his side, Jackson is ready for payback.

This is the last of my Black History Month reads, and was also the Appointment with Agatha side read for February. Chester Himes was an African American novelist whose novels included the Harlem Detectives series, featuring two black police officers, Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson.

This book has a definite noir flavor, and is also completely bonkers. It starts off with a bang, and continues to explode periodically throughout the entire experience. Non-stop action from start to finish, with a lot of twists and turns, and some extremely unexpected murders along the way. It’s an extremely violent book.

On my GR group, it has had a bit of a polarizing effect. There are several people who really liked it, but others who DNF’d early on because they couldn’t connect to the story or style. I’m in sort of middling position – I liked it, but it was really violent. Himes certainly did surprise me several times. I think it’s unlikely that I’ll continue with the series, even though I found it to be worth reading as an example of early crime fiction written by a Black author.

Books about Books – a pairing

Sometimes I have reading slumps – although frequently it’s actually impossible to externally identify when I am in a slump, because I am such a reader that I read whether I really want to read or not. I know I’m in a slump, though, because I find myself unable to choose a book, or reluctant to pick up a book I am reading, or just generally experiencing bookish malaise.

One of the things that helps get me out of a reading slump is rereading. Another is books about books – I am always looking for reading memoirs.

Tolstoy and the Purple ChairTolstoy and the Purple Chair
by Nina Sankovitch
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: June 7, 2011
Genre: essays, memoir
Pages: 241
ReRead?: Yes

After the death of her sister, Nina Sankovitch found herself caught up in grief, dashing from one activity to the next to keep her mind occupied. But on her forty-sixth birthday she decided to stop running and start reading.

Catalyzed by the loss of her sister, a mother of four spends one year savoring a great book every day, from Thomas Pynchon to Nora Ephron and beyond. In the tradition of Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project and Joan Dideon's A Year of Magical Thinking, Nina Sankovitch's soul-baring and literary-minded memoir is a chronicle of loss,hope, and redemption. Nina ultimately turns to reading as therapy and through her journey illuminates the power of books to help us reclaim our lives.


This was the first of a couple of bookish memoirs that I picked up at the end of February/beginning of March. I like these types of memoirs, and a lot of them seem to be set around the idea of a year of reading. This one is no exception. The gimmick here is that the author read a book a day for a year. Now, I read a lot, and still the idea of actually finishing a book a day for a year is crazy to me. I have friends who accomplish this year after year, and I bow to their proficiency.

I enjoyed my time hanging out with Nina enough that this is actually the second time I’ve read this particular reading memoir.

Jacob's Room is Full of BooksJacob's Room is Full of Books
by Susan Hill
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: October 5, 2017
Genre: essays, memoir
Pages: 273
ReRead?: No

When we spend so much of our time immersed in books, who's to say where reading ends and living begins? The two are impossibly and gloriously wedded, as Hill shows in Jacob's Room Is Full of Books.

Considering everything from Edith Wharton's novels through to Alan Bennett's diaries, Virginia Woolf and the writings of twelfth century monk Aelred of Rievaulx, Susan Hill charts a year of her life through the books she has read, reread or returned to the shelf. From beneath a shady tree in a hot French summer, or the warmth of a kitchen during an English winter, Hill reflects on what her reading throws up, from writing and writers to politics and religion, as well as the joy of dandies or the pleasure of watching a line of geese cross a meadow.

Full of wry observations and warm humour, as well as strong opinions freely aired, this is a rare and wonderful insight into the rich world of reading from one of the nation's most accomplished authors.


This is a “sequel” to Susan Hill’s first bookish memoir, Howard’s End is on the Landing, which I read and really loved a few years ago. It also follows a reading year format, without the book-a-day gimmick. Hill talks books, but she talks about a lot of other things, too – the cycles of nature, and the joys of reading in summer and winter. In my mind, she lives in a rambling 18th century farmhouse bursting at the seams with books of all sorts, from the green Penguin mysteries of Josephine Tey to leather bound tomes hand-illustrated by monks. This is probably mostly just my head-canon, but it makes for a wonderful vision. There are reader complaints that she’s patronizing, or stuffy, or a bit of a know-it-all. But that’s not the experience I have, hanging out in her garden, in an admittedly one way conversation about books.

Friday Round-Up

I decided to expand my usual #FridayReads post a bit, into a full Friday Books post that dives into my reading plans for the weekend, my library situation, bookish haul, and any other reading organization that I am compelled to share.

Exiled in Paris by James Campbell: This is the last, slightly laggy, book in my James Baldwin author-in-residence project. I started it and was going along pretty well, and then I started feeling sort of slumpish so it’s just been sitting on my nightstand, looking at me accusingly, for over a week. I’m either going to finish it or DNF it this weekend.

Jacob’s Room is Full of Books by Susan Hill: Interestingly, it was Murder by Death’s mediocre review of Hill’s first bookish memoir, Howard’s End is on the Landing, that gave me the impulse to pick this one up. I liked HEiotL much more than she did (although I completely agree with her criticisms). In addition, when I am feeling slumpish, one of my go to solutions is books about books.

The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns: I am recently obsessed with the NYRB imprint. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that they have published and haven’t felt it was worth my while. I previously read Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns and thought it was grimly interesting. The Juniper Tree is a retelling of among the darkest and most shocking of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, The Juniper Tree, which is famous for the lines:

My mother, she killed me,
My father, he ate me,
My sister Marlene,
Gathered all my bones,
Tied them in a silken scarf,
Laid them beneath the juniper tree,
Tweet, tweet, what a beautiful bird am I.

This retelling is moving in a very dark direction. I’m strongly hoping that Comyns leaves out the cannibalism.

Library Loot:

I just realized that I have 27 books checked out from the library right now. It’s time to cull.

Print books:

  1. Red Knife by William Kent Krueger: this is due 3/8 and I’m not going to get to it by then. I am going to renew it once, and if I don’t get to it by the end of the renewal, I’ll return it.
  2. First things First by Stephen Covey: I checked this out because the organizational premise sounded interesting, but I’m not even remotely interested in it at this point. Return.
  3. The Sentence by Louise Erdrich: I have been really excited to read this, and it is next up, once I finish my current reads.
  4. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann: checked out for 1966 in my Century of Women project, but I read a different book already. Return.
  5. Thunder Bay by William Kent Krueger: this is the next book in the series; I’m going to hold onto it and may read it if I want a standard contemporary mystery in the next 3 weeks or so.
  6. Endangered Species by Nevada Barr: This is a catch and release special; I will read it eventually, but not right now. Return.
  7. In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes: One of the 5 NYRB titles I have checked out. I just bought an ebook omnibus with this in it, though, so I’ll likely return it.
  8. Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban: another NYRB title; keep & read.
  9. Stoner by John Williams: third NYRB title; this book was everywhere last year. Keep & read.
  10. Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe by Heather Webber: a little magical realism for a palate cleanser; keep & read.
  11. The Fortunes of War by Olivia Manning: fourth NYRB title; I have read the first book in this trilogy. I’d like to get to the second & third, but I also think that I will probably end up buying this book, so I am fine returning it if I don’t quite get there.
  12. The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner: fifth NYRB title; keep & read.
  13. The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns: currently reading; will be ready to return soon.
  14. Classics for Pleasure by Michael Dirda: this is part of my current obsession with books about books; I may or may not get to it.
  15. Browsings by Michael Dirda: I have actually started this one, & I’m reading a few essays at a time.
  16. A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders: this is a bit of a project read, but I definitely want to get to it.

Ebooks:

  1. Notes on a Native Son by James Baldwin: finished & ready to return;
  2. The Skull Beneath the Skin by P.D. James: I’m not going to get to this; return.
  3. Pony by R.J. Palacio: I’m also not going to get to this; return
  4. The Woman They Could Not Silence by Kate Moore: I have 9 days left on this borrow; keep & read
  5. The Day the World Came to Town by Jim DeFede: I have 11 days left on this borrow; keep & read
  6. Ex Libris by Michiko Kakutani: I am not going to get this book; return;
  7. How Reading Changed my Life by Anna Quindlen: I may get to this book; keep;
  8. Book Girl by Sarah Clarkson: I am not going to get to this book; return
  9. Liturgy of the Ordinary by Tish Harrison Warren: I am actually reading this book right now; keep & finish
  10. The Defector by Daniel Silva: this is book 9 in the Gabriel Allon series; keep & read;
  11. Hell’s Half Acre by Susan Jonusas; the subtitle of this book is “the untold story of the Benders, a serial killer family on the American frontier; hell yes; keep & read.

OK, that’s the library situation. Now: book haul for the week. I bought three books this week.

Title: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Author: Rebecca West

Published in 1941

Plot summary (Goodreads): Written on the brink of World War II, Rebecca West’s classic examination of the history, people, and politics of Yugoslavia illuminates a region that is still a focus of international concern. A magnificent blend of travel journal, cultural commentary, and historical insight, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon probes the troubled history of the Balkans, and the uneasy relationships amongst its ethnic groups. The landscape and the people of Yugoslavia are brilliantly observed as West untangles the tensions that rule the country’s history as well as its daily life.

This is a doorstopper of a book, and once it arrives, I’ll take a picture. It is 1181 pages. I am not sure exactly how I am going to approach it – probably with caution. It has great reviews on GR, but it is just a monumental undertaking. I’m not sure if I am going to plan to read 50 pages a week and set a pace of 20 weeks or so, or if there is a more natural way to break it up. I won’t really be able to tell until it arrives.

I bought the Penguin Classics Edition.

Title: Library of America Women Crime Writers of the 1940’s

Editor: Sarah Weinman

Pages: 848

This is an anthology that is currently on sale as an ebook (for U.S. readers) for a mere $2.99. I attribute my good fortune in realizing this to my friend Mike Finn, who linked to it in the Appointment with Agatha Goodreads group. Yay, Mike.

Further information from GR:

Women writers have always had a central place in American crime writing, although one wouldn’t know it for all the attention focused on the men of the hardboiled school. This collection, the first of a two-volume omnibus, presents four classics of the 1940s overdue for fresh attention. Anticipating the “domestic suspense” novels of recent years, these four gripping tales explore the terrors of the mind and of family life, of split personality and conflicted sexual identity.

Vera Caspary’s Laura (1943) begins with the investigation into a young woman’s murder and blossoms into a complex study, told from multiple viewpoints, of the pressures confronted by a career woman seeking to lead an independent life. Source of the celebrated film by Otto Preminger, Caspary’s novel has depths and surprises of its own. As much a novel of manners as of mystery, it remains a superb evocation of a vanished Manhattan.

Helen Eustis’s The Horizontal Man (1946) won an Edgar Award for best first novel and continues to fascinate as a singular mixture of detection, satire, and psychological portraiture. A poet on the faculty of an Ivy League school (modeled on Eustis’s alma mater, Smith College) is found murdered, setting off ripple effects of anxiety, suspicion, and panic in the hothouse atmosphere of an English department rife with talk of Freud and Kafka.

With In a Lonely Place (1947), Dorothy B. Hughes created one of the first full-scale literary portraits of a serial murderer. The streets of Los Angeles become a setting for random killings, and Hughes ventures, with unblinking exactness, into the mind of the killer. In the process she conjures up a potent mood of postwar dread and lingering trauma.

Raymond Chandler called Elisabeth Sanxay Holding “the top suspense writer of them all.” In The Blank Wall (1947) she constructs a ferociously taut drama around the plight of a wartime housewife forced beyond the limits of her sheltered domestic world in order to protect her family. The barely perceptible constraints of an ordinary suburban life become a course of obstacles that she must dodge with the determination of a spy or criminal.

Psychologically subtle, socially observant, and breathlessly suspenseful, these four spellbinding novels recapture a crucial strain of American crime writing.

Title: Mutual Admiration Society

Author: Mo Moulton

Published: November 5, 2019

This book has been on my radar for months. I actually checked it out, but it has to go back to the library unread, & I decided to just buy it since I think it’s the sort of book that will hold up to rereads. Not sure when I will start it. I’ll also mention that the Mutual Admiration Society (and Sayers) came up in Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain, which made me all that much more interested in this group biography!

GR summary: A group biography of renowned crime novelist Dorothy L. Sayers and the Oxford women who stood at the vanguard of equal rights.

Dorothy L. Sayers is now famous for her Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane detective series, but she was equally well known during her life for an essay asking “Are Women Human?” Women’s rights were expanding rapidly during Sayers’s lifetime; she and her friends were some of the first women to receive degrees from Oxford. Yet, as historian Mo Moulton reveals, it was clear from the many professional and personal obstacles they faced that society was not ready to concede that women were indeed fully human.

Dubbing themselves the Mutual Admiration Society, Sayers and her classmates remained lifelong friends and collaborators as they fought for a truly democratic culture that acknowledged their equal humanity.

So, that’s it! What are you reading?

Black History Month: Jubilee by Margaret Walker

JubileeJubilee
by Margaret Walker
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: January 1, 1966
Genre: fiction, historical fiction
Pages: 497
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women

Jubilee tells the true story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and one of his black slaves. Vyry bears witness to the South’s antebellum opulence and to its brutality, its wartime ruin, and the promises of Reconstruction. Weaving her own family’s oral history with thirty years of research, Margaret Walker’s novel brings the everyday experiences of slaves to light. Jubilee churns with the hunger, the hymns, the struggles, and the very breath of American history.


I stumbled on Jubilee when I was looking for a book for my birthday year of 1966 to finish up that decade for my Century of Women project. It fit well with my reading for Black History Month as well, and my public library had a copy available, so I grabbed it.

I’m really surprised that this book isn’t better known because it was an amazing read. Margaret Walker, the author, was a black woman born in Alabama in 1915, the daughter of a Methodist minister. Jubilee draws heavily on the oral history of Walker’s family, and is basically an unromanticized, unsanitized (and frankly much better) answer to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.

The character at the center of the book is Elvira, or Vyra. The reader meets Vyry at the very beginning, as a small child who is brought to see her mother, a slave, one last time before she dies, worn out from child bearing and physical labor. Vyry is the daughter of a slave and her white master, who rapes her on the regular (the book doesn’t frame the relationship as “rape” and the master would surely not have imagined himself a rapist. But a person who is property has no ability to decline consent, and therefore the entire concept of consent is meaningless when it comes to sexual contact between the man who owns the woman and the woman. All sexual contact is coercive and is also, therefore, abusive and assaultive). She is the despised half-sister of the legitimate daughter of house, who looks enough like her to pass as white and to constantly remind the mistress that her husband was forcing himself on a slave during their marriage.

The book begins in around 1850, fifteen years before the Civil War, through the Reconstruction. Vyry is a fantastic character – fully realized and complex. She rebuts many of the myths about slaves – that they were happy, that they weren’t mistreated, that they didn’t yearn for freedom, that they neither saw nor internalized the unjustness of their circumstances. She is absolutely indomitable, as are many of the black characters in this book.

Before the Civil War, she falls in love with a wealthy, well-educated and free Black man. They want to marry, but are denied the opportunity because the plantation owners recognize that the very existence of free Blacks will create unrest among their slaves. When she approaches her master – who is also her father – about her wish to marry, he is indulgent until he finds out that she has been keeping company with a free man, at which point he becomes abusive. The man she loves wants to purchase her freedom, and this request is denied. It is cruel.

I suppose that this is one of those books that the new breed of book banners would likely seek to ban. It shows the south for what it was – a brutal, white supremacists regime under which a good chunk of humanity lived in terror (and was denied their humanity). The Civil War destroys the south, leaving the plantations in ruin and economically broken. The North abandons the emancipated slaves, leaving them to fend for themselves in circumstances that are impossible and horrific.

No, they have begun a reign of terror to put the Negro back in slavery. They will never accept the fact that the South rose up in rebellion against the Union North and the North won the war. They mean to take out all their grudges on us.”

Vyry and her children struggle on, scraping by in poverty, fleeing from one racist town to the next, supported by a good and decent man that Vyry marries when she believes her first love has died in the Civil War. Vyry dies free, but there is no real happy ending for her, unless you consider the life of Margaret Walker to be her happy ending – a brilliant, successful young granddaughter who stood on the weary shoulders of a great-grandmother who never really had a moment’s rest.

Walker, born in 1915, was part of the African-American literary movement in Chicago known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. She was a poet and a novelist, and her poem, For My People, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 1942. It reminds me of Amanda Gorman’s poem read at Joe Biden’s inauguration, The Hills We Climb. It begins:

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
     repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
     and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
     unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
     unseen power;
1942 was 12 years before Brown v. Board of Education and 22 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. You can read the whole poem here.

This book is a great read, and I highly recommend it. It can be difficult to be reminded how brutally the United States treated some of its citizens, but it is better to remember than to pretend. Our shared humanity demands that we be strong enough to face the truth about our history and ourselves.

2022: Book 17 – Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

Testament of YouthTestament of Youth
by Vera Brittain
Rating: ★★★★★
Publication Date: August 28, 1933
Genre: classic, memoir, non-fiction
Pages: 688
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women, back to the classics, Mt. TBR 2022

Much of what we know and feel about the First World War we owe to Vera Brittain's elegiac yet unsparing book, which set a standard for memoirists from Martha Gellhorn to Lillian Hellman. Abandoning her studies at Oxford in 1915 to enlist as a nurse in the armed services, Brittain served in London, in Malta, and on the Western Front. By war's end she had lost virtually everyone she loved. Testament of Youth is both a record of what she lived through and an elegy for a vanished generation. Hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as a book that helped “both form and define the mood of its time,” it speaks to any generation that has been irrevocably changed by war.

This book was a journey. Divided roughly into three parts, Brittain’s memoir covers the pre-WWI period, including her first year at Oxford University, the war itself and her work as a VAD, and then the post-WWI period, including finishing her degree and then her ultimate career and marriage.

There is so much to say about it. Brittain starts her memoir at the beginning, as a young woman who has decided that she wants to attend Oxford and needs to persuade her parents, who are very traditional middle class people, that she should be permitted to try for a spot in spite of her obvious deficiency: she’s a girl. Her father, in particular, isn’t wild about his daughter going to college. She ultimately gains admission to Somerville College, which is known for many of it’s women graduates, including Dorothy Sayers. She arrives at Somerville in 1914, and the war begins within weeks, completely derailing her plans.

For the time being I simmered wrathfully in anger and hopeless resentment. By means of what then appeared to have been a very long struggle, I had made for myself a way of escape from my hated provincial prison – and now the hardly-won road to freedom was to be closed for me by a Serbian bomb hurled from the other end of Europe at an Austrian archduke. It is not, perhaps, so very surprising that the War at first seemed to me an infuriating personal interruption rather than a world-wide catastrophe.

Youth just can’t help but be self-centered.

Vera has four men who are close to her: Edward, her brother, Roland, her brother’s friend and eventually her fiance, with whom she falls madly in love in the immediate pre-war weeks, and two close friends, Victor, or Tay, and Geoffrey. When all of the men she loves enlist to fight, she leaves Oxford and becomes a nurse with the Voluntary Aid Detachment. In this capacity she works in hospitals in England, eventually ending up in France and the Dardanelles.

This section of her memoir is deeply affecting. Her description of nursing war injuries is terrible, but most affecting is the fact that, one-by-one, the young men die. First Roland, then Edward, then Victor and then finally, and last, Geoffrey. I’m not a crier, but every single death felt like a body blow, and by the end of the war, I, too had wept more than once. It does seem that Providence could have left one of them, but I suppose it would have been a very different book under those circumstances.

But the War kills other things besides physical life, and I sometimes feel that little by little the Individuality of You is being as surely buried as the bodies are of those who lie beneath the trenches of Flanders and France. But I won’t write more on this subject. In any case it is no use, and I shall probably cry if I do, which must never be done, for there is so much both personal and impersonal to cry for here that one might weep for ever and yet not shed enough tears to wash away the pitiableness of it all.’

The memoir could have ended there, but it didn’t. How does a person come back from this kind of devastation?

The fact that, within ten years, I lost one world, and after a time rose again, as it were, from spiritual death to find another, seems to me one of the strongest arguments against suicide that life can provide. There may not be – I believe that there is not – resurrection after death, but nothing could prove more conclusively than my own brief but eventful history the fact that resurrection is possible within our limited span of earthly time.

Brittain was by no means alone in her experience, and like most women, she got on with it. She returned to Oxford, where life had proceeded without her, and where the young people who had been less affected by the war didn’t want to hear about it.

The rest of the book covers most of the rest of her life – her graduation from Oxford, receiving one of the first degrees granted to women, her work around women’s suffrage and feminism, her long, close friendship with Winifred Holtby (which was the subject of a second memoir, called Testament of Friendship), her conviction, like Virginia Woolf that

Marriage, for any woman who considered all its implications both for herself and her contemporaries, could never, I now knew, mean a ‘living happily ever after’; on the contrary it would involve another protracted struggle, a new fight against the tradition which identified wifehood with the imprisoning limitations of a kitchen and four walls, against the prejudices and regulations which still made success in any field more difficult for the married woman than for the spinster, and penalised motherhood by demanding from it the surrender of disinterested intelligence, the sacrifice of that vitalising experience only to be found in the pursuit of an independent profession.

Brittain had a career as an author and journalist, but Testament of Youth is nearly the only thing that survives.

I doubt that I will be able to revisit this book in the future. The experience of reading it was intense, especially the middle section, that memorializes her experiences in the war. If I were to go back to it, it would likely be for the post-war section focusing on women’s rights and her relationship with Winifred Holtby. I read South Riding, by Holtby, a few years ago and loved it. I will likely seek out Testament of Friendship at some point, but it’s more difficult to source than this one.

It took me three tries to get past the first 30 pages, but I’m so glad that I persevered this time. This was a worthy way to close out the 1930’s in my Century of Women project.

February Reading Plans: James Baldwin

It’s black history month in the U.S., and James Baldwin is the second author-in-residence in my Goodreads group for the first quarter of 2022, so my plans for February and March involve reading a few of his books. I have a stack of books from the library as well as from my own shelves.

If Beale Street Could Talk and Notes of a Native Son from the Library of America edition are first up. I’m also planning to rent the movie I Am Not Your Negro from Amazon at some point during the month. The large book on the bottom is Exiled In Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett and Others on the Left Bank by James Campbell, which isn’t exclusively about James Baldwin, but covers a number of America writers, especially Black writers, who left the United States for the more welcoming climate of Paris. Fortuitously, it also includes Chester Himes, whose Rage in Harlem also happens to be on my February reading list.

January, 2022 Wrap-Up

I had an outstanding reading month, finishing a total of 16 books.

With respect to my various reading projects, I read 3 books from my TBR cart: Over Sea, Under Stone and The Dark Is Rising, both by Susan Cooper, and My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather. I read 7 books which fit the Century of Women project, which had an average rating of 3.93 stars, and 4 books from my Classics Club 2.0 list, with an average rating of 4 stars.

I DNF’d one book – I finally pulled the plug on The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan around the middle of the month. I haven’t concluded that I’m never going to give the series a try again, but I lost interest and found myself avoiding reading it. This is always a clue to me that it’s time to DNF.

Using the book database, I am able to pull a lot of interesting analytics. I won’t go through all of them every month, but a few of the more interesting pieces of information from January are as follows:

My longest book, The Priory, was 536 pages, and my shortest book, My Mortal Enemy, was a mere 112 pages.

I spanned 100 years with my reading this month, breaking down as follows (I would note that this only adds up to 15 books – I obviously forgot to complete this term for one of my entries):

In addition, 12 out of 16 books were new to me, and 4 were re-reads. This is the first time in many months, I would suspect, when I actually read more print books than kindle books – 7 books were read on kindle, 9 in print. 10 books were from the public library and 6 came off of my shelves.

Finally, with respect to ratings, I ran the gamut, but spent the most time between 3.5 stars (29%) and 4 stars (29%); I had 2 5 star reads: The Dark is Rising and This House of Brede, and 2 4.5 star reads: The Priory and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. The book I liked the least this month was My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather.

I think that I have gotten my book database terms organized the way that I want it to be able to track the information I want to track. I’ve decided to enter my reading from 2021 into the database because I’m curious about what a comparison of this year against last year will look like. I really wish that I had all of this information going back the full 10 years that I have been tracking my reading on the internet, but the idea of creating the database is pretty intimidating.

Back to the Classics 2022

I know that I said that I wasn’t going to participate in any challenges this year, but I can’t resist joining this one again. I’ve done it several times, with varying levels of success, and I can fill it with books that will double up for my on-going Century of Women and Classics Club 2.0 projects. Usually I easily fill the categories, but I struggle with getting posts up, but I’ve already read and posted to fill 2 of the categories this month alone.

This challenge is hosted by Karen @ Books and Chocolate! You can find the sign up post here.

So, the categories & possible books to fill them:

  1. A 19th century classic: I have several books planned that could fill this spot, but I think I’ll either read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte (1848) or Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell (1853)
  2. A 20th century classic: The only limitation for this category is that the book must be at least 50 years old. I’m going to check this category off with The Priory by Dorothy Whipple, which was published in 1939. See, already one classic down!
  3. A classic by a woman author: I’m going to check this one off, too – I finished my second-to-final Willa Cather novel, My Mortal Enemy, over the weekend, so I just have Shadows on the Rock left.
  4. A classic in translation: This category is often a problem for me, but I want to read more translated work this year anyway. I’ve been meaning to read The Wreath, by Sigrig Undset, for a number of years.
  5. A classic by BIPOC author: I’m planning on reading books by both James Baldwin & Zora Neale Hurston this year, so possibly If Beale Street Could Talk by Baldwin or Moses, Man of the Mountain by Hurston for this one.
  6. Mystery/Detective/Crime Classic: I read so much classic crime that I could already fill this category three or four times over this month. I’ll grab something later in the year that really stands out for this one.
  7. Classic Short Story Collection: On the other hand, I rarely read short stories. I have a copy of NYRB’s The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, so maybe I’ll read that one?
  8. Pre-1800 Classic: I rarely read anything this old because I find pre-19th century lit to be heavy going indeed. I have been considering reading The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis (1796) for a number of years; alternatively, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding (1749) is somewhat appealing, but it’s 975 pages long! A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstoncraft was published in 1792, and it’s only 269 pages.
  9. Non-fiction: I’m strongly considering Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, but it’s 1100 pages long, so I may look elsewhere, maybe at Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals or Come Tell Me How You Live by Agatha Christie.
  10. Longest on Your TBR: I can’t even begin to imagine which book has been on my TBR the longest, but I do know that I bought Lark Rise to Candleford  by Flora Thompson in October, 1997, and I have never read it, so that’s got to be close!
  11. Set in a Place You’d Like to visit: For now, I’m going with The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien, set in Ireland.
  12. Wild Card: I have a whole stack of D.E. Stevenson books that were just released by Dean Street Press, and she’s always delightful. So, one of those – maybe Green Money or The English Air.

So, there we have it! My Back to the Classics project, which is well underway, with categories 2 & 3 already completed!

2022: Book 15 – Wintering by Katherine May

WinteringWintering
by Katherine May
Rating: ★★★½
Publication Date: November 10, 2020
Genre: memoir, non-fiction
Pages: 241
ReRead?: No

Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a break up, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time, but embraced the singular opportunities it offered.

A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May’s story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath, swimming in icy waters and sailing arctic seas.

Ultimately Wintering invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times. May models an active acceptance of sadness and finds nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the hushed beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear. A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season.


I’m going to be honest – I thought I would like this book more than I did. I definitely didn’t hate it, but I also expected something more, or maybe just different. There were parts of the book that I liked, but I think I was looking for something that approached the subject from a more universal perspective. Less memoir-like. I’m not a huge fan of memoir, so that might have been the barrier for me.

What did I like? I really liked the concept of “wintering” and how she introduced it. I liked the way that she differentiated between approaching your life in a linear way, rather than acknowledging that there is a cycle:

To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical.

I also liked her description of the “eightfold Wheel of the Year.” As I’ve gotten older, it has seemed apparent to me that modern society has lost touch with the yearly cycle of nature. I suspect that severing of our lives from the forests and the water and the desert and mountains may explain some of why so many people spend so much time attempting to deal with their psychic pain through drugs, alcohol and other activities that numb them to what their life is missing, and to the stress of modern striving.

Four solar festivals, linked to solstices and equinoxes, and four pastoral ones in between, celebrating key moments in the lived experience of the year. “In mainstream culture, the only major festival is now Christmas,” says Philip, “and perhaps also a summer holiday. The gap is far too long. When you’re following a Way like Druidism, the pattern of festivals gives a rhythm to the year, offering a way through even the darkest periods.”

I really liked her discussion of “grasshopper years” versus “ant years,” as well.

I will give you an alternative if only. If only life were so stable, happy, and predictable as to produce ants instead of grasshoppers, year in, year out. The truth is that we all have ant years and grasshopper years—years in which we are able to prepare and save and years where we need a little extra help. Our true flaw lies not in failing to store up enough resources to cope with the grasshopper years, but in believing that each grasshopper year is an anomaly, visited only on us, due to our unique human failings.

I just had a conversation with a co-worker and we were talking about this very subject. It’s easy to forget that lives – and careers – are a marathon and not a sprint, and that the person who expects to be able to run flat out to the finish line without ever stopping to catch her breath is doomed to collapse. I’ve been a lawyer for 30 years, and there have been grasshopper years and there have been ant years as it comes to my work; the same is true when it comes to my long marriage (27 years) and having raised two children to adulthood. There were easy years, and there were hard years. It has taken me a while to accept that this is not just okay, but should be embraced, even if deciding not to fight through sometimes feels like giving in or giving up.

This wasn’t quite what I was looking for, but worth reading nonetheless.