April 2020 in Books

A much shorter list this month, which is a little surprising to me.  I figured I would get a lot more reading in during quarantine, but I've actually been sidetracked by other projects, which is not a bad thing.  I'm catching up on that long list we all have of things I'll do someday when I have time.  We've been doing a lot of purging and organizing in the house (there is still LOTS to do), and I've been getting caught up on some scrapbooking.  I've also found that I am way more tired in the evenings which is also surprising to me since technically our schedule is must less packed than normal, but I think it's because I have to be 'on' more - more cooking/dishes, more helping with homework, more getting out with the kids to get fresh air/exercise, etc.  Anyway, this wasn't the best month for reading both in terms of numbers and content, but I there were some good ones in there. Here's the rundown: The Wild Robot (The Wild Robot, #1)  - Peter Brown - juvenile fiction - five stars - Carina and I read this one together.  It's a little science fictioney but not in a space/dystopian kind of way.  It takes place sometime in the future, when we're much more dependent on robots for help and they are far more autonomous and capable than they are now.  A shipment of robots is lost at sea, one of the boxes washes up on a deserted island.  The robot it accidentally activated by the wildlife, and she proceeds to become part of that community.  She observes, learns the language, and even makes friends with the animals.  This was such a good book.  Carina is my child who prefers graphic novels to regular books, so whenever she is this into a book, I'm happy.  In fact, we ended up putting the sequel to this book in her Easter basket, and we're reading it now.  Highly recommend. Cold Mountain  - Charles Frazier - historical fiction - three stars - I read his more recent book, Varina, last year and really enjoyed it, so I thought I would read this one as it's more well known, won an award, got made into a movie (which I didn't see).  I was disappointed.  It's about a man, Inman, who is injured during the Civil War, and after recuperating, decides not to return to the front, but instead deserts and heads for home.  Meanwhile, Ada, essentially his sweetheart back in North Carolina, is learning to survive on her own after the death of her father.  She is befriended by Ruby, who works with her to get her farm back on track.  The narrative skips between Inman and Ruby.  This is not a short book, and the pace of the writing is slow and detailed.  That's not a bad thing, but the crux of my issue is, there were a lot of words that I had to read in this book, and at the end of the day, I was irked by the unsatisfactory ending of it all.  If I had to do again, I would have skipped this one. Three Things About Elsie  - Joanna Cannon - fiction - four stars - I enjoyed this one.  It was a nice change from the dreariness and slow pace of Cold Mountain, totally different.  It's about Florence, and 84 year old who lives in a retirement community.  She's taken a fall in her room, and as she waits for someone to find her, she recounts a story of how a stranger, who wasn't really a stranger, but someone she thinks died years ago, came to their home.  As she works through how this could be and recounts the recent events, she also has to recount the events of the past.  This one was quite predictable, but also enjoyable.  You like the characters, you're rooting for them, and you feel badly for them as they deal with their infirmities and the difficulty of life as a senior.  Definitely worth the read. She Always Knew How: A Personal Biography of Mae West  - Charlotte Chandler - biography - two stars - I was o disappointed and frankly bored by this book.  It took me a long while to finish it, and a few times I almost gave up on it.  I love old Broadway musicals, and have seen a couple of 'retrospective' shows on them over the years, so I knew who Mae West was, but not a lot about her, and I've always been curious to know a bit more.  This did tell me more about her, but it was very prescribed.  It's based on a series of interviews between the author and West without a lot of additional resources or research.  As a result, you get a very one-sided view and it's the public persona/image that West put forth during her lifetime. The Long Flight Home  - Alan Hlad - historical fiction - five stars - Really enjoyed this one.  It's about Susan and her grandfather Bertie who raise homing pigeons and Source Columba, a secret mission during WWII in which homing pigeons were dropped into occupied France with the hope that the Resistance would use them to send back to England details about German movements/locations, etc.  I'd never heard of the use of homing pigeons during the war, and found that part of it pretty fascinating.  There's a love story involved as well, Ollie Evans is an American pilot who goes to England to join the RAF (this is before the US had entered the war).  He meets Susan and is accidentally marooned in France when one of the planes used to drop the pigeons crashes.  Informative and enjoyable. A Map of Betrayal  - Ha Jin - fiction - three stars - This was one of the books that I semi-randomly grabbed in my trip to the library just before it closed.  I had read Jin's book Nanjing Requiem a couple years ago and really liked it, so I thought I would try another from him.  It's about Lilian Shang, whose father was the most significant Chinese mole ever uncovered by the U.S.  After her mother's death, Lilian contacts her father's mistress Suzie to ask her some questions about him and learns that he had another family in China before he was recruited to work for the Americans.  Suzie also sends Lilian her father's journals.  The story then moves back and forth between the past and present, telling the story of Lilian's father, Gary, and of her search for and reunification with her relatives.  It is a bit predictable, but I enjoyed the way the history was told, and the dueling perspective between her and her father and their take on things. I'm currently reading Through the Bookstore Window, and after that I'll pick up another WWII book or Pachinko, haven't decided yet.  Please share what you're reading, I'm developing quite the list for when the library opens again!