I preordered on Amazon.  Still no estimated delivery date.  In the meantime,  I know y'all read other books aside from our monthly shared pleasure.  What are you reading? My bus-reading this week consisted of  by L. David Marquet, Captain of the USS Santa Fe.  It's a book about leadership.  He took command of the most dysfunctional nuclear submarine in the Navy and turned it around in to the best.  He changed the leadership style from 'leader-follower' to 'leader-leader'.  It's good.  I mean it's not page-turning and I'm always skeptical of the ..read more

Saturday Book Thread - First half of The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett ​Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 awardee, and her debut novel  was a New York Times bestseller. Her essays are featured in  Twin sisters Desiree and Stella Vignes are raised in a rural town in Louisiana called Mallard, a town too sm ..read more

Happy to put this blogging drought to an end!  Let’s talk about the first half of American Sherlock by Kate Winkler Dawson.   First, let’s hear it for the librarians and archivists out there.  While Oscar Heinrich is the star of the book, he receives help from his closest friend and pen-pal John Boynton Kaiser.  Kaiser sends Heinrich books that he comes across during his work stocking the Tacoma library.  I can’t imagine how awesome it would be if I had a friend who was reading papers in my field and shooting me the ones that were helpful to my work ..read more

All Wound Up  - The second half of The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi my previous blog about the first half of the book I made the prediction that it was Kanya, Jaidee’s lieutenant, that set him up.  And I was right!  Then again, it turned out that made the same prediction.  So, either I am not as clever as I thought, or everyone in Book Club is also very clever.  I’ll go with the latter. After Jaidee is sent into exile, he decides to seek justice on the members of the Trade Ministry who kidnapped his wife.  He is caught in the act a ..read more

Winding up  - The first half of The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi The novel is set in a future Thailand that has become a flourishing kingdom after a global travesty.  It is not explicitly stated but appears to be a climate change dystopia.  High sea levels surround the city, kept at bay by seawalls.  New York and other parts of the US are said to be underwater; the center of the US appears to be Des Moines, Iowa.  Carbon based fuel is nonexistent, with the exception of rare coal power and some methane.  But the real threat facing t ..read more

Chopping through The Chestnut Man by Søren Sveistrup ​The Chestnut Man is a murder-mystery thriller in the classic serial killer vein.  The killer leaves a calling card at the murder scene which are little chestnut men or chestnut dolls, which look like this: ​If that isn’t scary to you then you’re probably Danish.   The killer, who comes to be called The Chestnut Man by the press, has a certain gruesome signature in that he likes to amputate the limbs of his victims while they are still alive.  He contacts the police and other authorities, albeit in indirect ..read more

Opening The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel The novel begins with a librarian, Eva Abrams, who sees an article in an open newspaper about a German librarian making an effort to return books stolen by the Nazis back to their rightful owners, holding book up in the cover photo.  This sends Eva immediately off to Berlin to claim her book.  We then transcend time and space and meet Eva, a French-born Jewish young woman of Polish heritage living in Nazi occupied Paris in 1942. In the Author’s Note, Harmel describes how the idea for this novel began with interest in forgery piqued whi ..read more

Wrapped up in The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel The French police come knocking on Eva's apartment door, list in hand.  While her father is home and answers the door, Eva and her mother, Mamusia, are across the hall babysitting a neighbor's kids.  Eva watches through the peephole as the police take her father, and overhears how Mamusia and her were also on there list to be taken.  Within the short amount of time this spares, Eva forges false identity papers and gets her and Mamusia on a train from Paris to the south of France, Vichy France, the so-called free-zone, where ..read more

Our first ‘book of the month’ of the year is   by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, chosen by unanimous consent rather than the typical recommendations-then-vote process.  This is the second book in  The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series by Zafón , was a Book Club favorite of 2020, even though it never made it to official 'book of the month' status, proof that the recommendation process is worth it even if your book isn’t voted in as the winner.   In fact,  was my favorite book that I read in all of 2020.      Zafón is one hell of a ..read more

Snuggle up with  strong drink and get cozy with this warm hearth of this great book selection and fill out the The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis (Author of Moneyball and the Big Short) Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred, systematically, when forced to make judgments in uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced ..read more