November 2023 in Books

November was a pretty good reading month.  A nice mix of books with some old and some new authors.  Here are the recaps:

The Door-to-Door Bookstore - Carsten Henn - fiction - five stars - Carl has worked for the bookstore for years, he delivers books to special clients, walking along a regular route.  The bookstore owner retires, his daughter inherits the store, but she has very different ideas for the business.  She's prefer to discontinue Carl's services, but he persists, and one day a nine-year-old girl named Sasha invites herself along on his delivery route.  They grow to be friends, and she also befriends those on his route and opens his mind to how to reach and help each of those individuals.  It's a really sweet story.  There were a couple things that bothered me about the plot line in terms of how things were resolved with Sasha's father and the bookstore, but overall this was a great book full of very likable characters.  Highly recommend.

The Prospectors - Ariel Djanikian - historical fiction - five stars - I really liked this one a lot.  It's the fictionalized story of the Bushes, one of the very few families to actually strike gold and make it in the Klondike Gold Rush.  They parlayed their earnings into an empire that later included oil.  The story focuses on the relationship of Alice Bush with her sister and brother-in-law, who were the ones who really found the gold.  Alice went along on their second expedition to help, ended up marrying her brother-in-law's brother, and the two families were linking in good and bad forever.  This one bucks the trend for me in that I really didn't like the main characters in the book, but the story itself was so compelling I could get past that.  It's one of those dual storyline books although the second, present-day, timeline is definitely not the focus of the book and I could definitely have done without it since it was more on the apologetic side.  

Sisters Under the Rising Sun - Heather Morris - historical fiction - five stars - Another great historical fiction novel based on a group of women fleeing the Japanese from Singapore during WWII.  Their ship is bombed and sunk and they make it to land only to be made prisoners of war.  The women survive years, moving from camp to camp.  They are blessed to have been shipwrecked with a group of Australian Nurses who help create more sanitary working conditions, care for them, and keep morale up.  It's a pretty amazing story.  I loved that the author provided details about what happened to each of the women following their release from captivity also.  

All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir - Beth Moore - autobiography - four stars - So I've heard about Beth Moore for years, but have never actually read any of her books or done any of her studies.  I picked his one up on a whim because I thought it might be interesting and in general I always find biographies kind of fascinating.  Anyway, I enjoyed reading about Moore's growing up life, and this covers how her ministry got started which was also pretty interesting.  What I really thought was lacking was her more recent adult life - parenthood, etc., particularly given the emphasis on her formative years.  I could have understood if the book was really focused on the ministry portion of her life, but it just seemed a little unbalanced in that regard.

From a Far and Lovely Country (No 1 Ladies Detective Agency #24) - Alexander McCall Smith - fiction - four stars - I can't believe there are already 24 Mwa Ramotswe books!  This one was focused on a couple of cases, one in which someone is trying to find the family of someone who was like a father/uncle to her in Canada, and the other trying to stop or put out of business a company advertising dances where eligible men and women can meet where the men solicited are often actually married.  This wasn't my favorite of the books.  This one was OK.  I thought that it was a little less compelling than some of the other more recent books particularly because I feel like Violet Sephotho can't always be the culprit when something bad is happening, but still quite enjoyable and I like that Charlie is getting more credit at the agency.

Enola Holmes and the Mark of the Mongoose (Enola Holmes, #9) - Nancy Springer - juvenile mystery - four stars - In this book, Enola gets involved in the disappearance of Wolcott Balestier, an American publisher visiting London.  Of course her brother Sherlock gets involved as well and they embark on a somewhat competitive, somewhat cooperative investigation.  I enjoyed that the characters in the book were actually real people which is different than the other books in the series.  I do like the relationship that is developing between Enola and Sherlock also.  I will say that I feel like more so than the other books there was way too much description of Enola's outfits.....made worse by the fact that she changes A LOT.  I found it distracting from the book, a minor nit, but it was noticeable.

Birnam Wood - Eleanor Catton - thriller - three stars - This was an interesting premise.  A kind of hippie collective of folks who plant crops on other peoples property or public land and then sell the crops to sustain the community/organization decides to try planting on the property of a wealthy couple whose house is somewhat inaccessible because of a landslide.  They are not the only folks interested in the land though, a wealthy entrepreneur is also interested for reasons he is not fully disclosing.  This could have been a really great book, but it was so preachy.  Long monologues about the purpose of the collective and what they do and don't stand for and why the entrepreneur is bad and on and on and on.  The story also took so long to set up.  It was 400+ pages and could easily have been 100 pages less and would have been much tighter and more effective.  There were several twists that I did not expect at all so from the plot line sense it was good, but just a slog in parts.

Favorite this month was probably The Prospectors, and least favorite was Birnam Wood.  I'm currently reading and really enjoying The Postcard and I have a whole bunch of library holds that just came in, so I really need to pick up the pace of things.  Would love to hear what you have been reading!