Lisa Gray, The Final Act (2024)

Lisa Gray is a writer I discovered by chance on Netgalley in 2020, who writes a lot and hardly ever disappoints. This is the 4th book by her that I read, and a lot of fun. It’s not her best in my opinion but still takes you for a good ride.

A middle-aged actress has disappeared, and in a park near Hollywood her handbag is discovered. This does not augur well. But also, this is 2024, so her discovery gets immediately viral on Tiktok and wannabe true crime sleuths crowd the place. Detective Sarah Delaney has just transferred to the Missing Persons Unit in LAPD and she starts right away. The actress was only known for a few movies back 20 years ago but never made it to the stardom she aspired. She stopped by her waitressing job on her way to an audition, the first one in a very long time…

Compared to her previous books, the violence in this book is more psychological than gore. I’m not saying that Lisa Gray is mellowing, but I feel that she’s very much attune to the current vibe. There are references to actual scandals that the reader will pick up. I could guess a small part of the solution, but indeed not all the twists, and that was very satisfying! I feel this would make a great, quick summer read.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley. I received a free copy of this book for review consideration.

Alan Furst, The World at Night (1996)

I’ve searched high and low where I’ve heard of Alan Furst first, but I haven’t found anything else but the date I added this book to my Goodreads TBR list: October 21, 2018. I’m reading many more non-fiction about spies now, but I think that it wasn’t the main appeal of the book when I added. It was more about understanding how war can change the mindset of ordinary people and make them take extraordinary decisions.

In May 1940, as the book opens, Jean Casson is an ordinary French man in the upper middle class, living in the select 16th arrondissement of Paris. He is a filmmaker and not concerned by politics. He has a business to run, a new lover, friends to see, an ex-wife who is organizing a dinner tonight for everyone including her own lover, and for which Casson, always the dependable one, has to pick up the cake at the bakery. But the Germans are at the border, and the wife suddenly isn’t quite sure if the dinner should take place after all. I will leave it spoiler-free for you to discover what happens with the cake.

Fast forward a few months. The Germans are in Paris, but Casson’s life hasn’t changed much, at least at the beginning. He can still work with this Jewish screenwriter who has written a wonderful plot for him. But things are getting complicated, and Germans are pushy. Casson seems to drift through life without wanting to quite take sides, but this is a period where even not taking sides leads people to assume you have taken sides.

It is a slow book with a character that’s not immediately likeable. It has the advantage of putting you right into an atmosphere, and it is eminently believable. I wouldn’t have believed that Casson was jumping into the Resistance right away, ready to abandon his cushy life and charming lover to risk his life. Casson is patriotic, but not idealistic in any way. He’s a romantic at heart, a good guy but not a hero. There’s nothing glorious in the little spying he tries, and mostly fails. I can believe that. There are moments of tension and action, but in tiny ways, not the cinematic clichés of war movies. I can believe that too. The side characters are very vividly drawn too. Even weeks after I’ve finished the book I remember Casson’s aristocratic neighbor, a mature woman who has taken a German lover and who gets coal to heat the whole building. I also remember the boy who helps Casson cross the border.

I’m not entirely sure I would sign up for the entire Alan Furst series about World War 2 novels, but I would be happy to try another one. A nice discovery!

Pierre Bayard, Sherlock Holmes was wrong (French, Eng. 2008)

I became a Sherlock Holmes fan at the end of primary school with the passion that tween kids can develop at that age. I couldn’t get enough and it was the best ever.  But even then The Hound of the Baskervilles was not my favorite, because Sherlock Holmes wasn’t very present in the story and there was an element of fantastic that went against the logic and scientific demonstrations that fascinated me.

I have read several books by Pierre Bayard, and each of them elicits the same reaction from me: eye roll, exasperation at his know-it-all attitude, then he wins me over: once I’m game, it’s a lot of fun. You need to be in a special mindset to accept the possibility that characters have their own lives, separate from authors’ intentions, and that authors might have been wrong in solving a whodunit mystery. So far I’ve failed to convince Mr. Smithereens to give it a chance because for him to imagine an alternate version of a novel is way weirder than an alternate version of history (and a waste of time)

I started the book with a hefty dose of suspicion. Pierre Bayard had fooled me to find another culprit in And there were none,  but he could not do his magic trick on me with Sherlock Holmes, I knew the Canon too well, I would see it through. Verdict? He did it again. His solution makes a lot more sense than Conan Doyle’s and his reasoning why Conan Doyle gave a wrong solution is convincing enough, at least for people with Freudian interests.

If you haven’t read The Hound of the Baskervilles and Sherlock Holmes, this book is not for you. The target readership is a Sherlock Holmes fan who has taken some distance with the Canon, and is ok for a clever play. Who else is game?

Six Degrees of Separation, May 2024 edition

It’s rare that I catch this great game early enough in the month, but this time, I’m going to play along! Six Degrees of Separation is hosted by Kate at Books are my favourite and best: Start at the same place as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up.

This month’s book is The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop. I haven’t read it and don’t know the author, but Kate writes about a man falling from the ship during a cruise, a marriage between two creative people where the power dynamic has recently shifted. It made me think of Natalie Wood’s mysterious drowning in 1981, and it got me thinking about other drownings with some power dynamic.

So my first book is Black water by Joyce Carol Oates, a retelling of the mysterious Chappaquiddick incident, in which U.S. senator Ted Kennedy crashed a car and caused the death by drowning of passenger Mary Jo Kopechne in 1969. By the way, ugly book covers, but that were the 1990s. We didn’t have Bookstagram.

From that one I have to pick a novel with the Kennedy connexion, one of my favorite books, although one of the biggest as well: 11/22/63 by Stephen King, an alternate history version of the Dallas assassination. Weirdly enough, I didn’t post about it here, although I read it in 2016. It somehow fell through the cracks, which is very appropriate for a Stephen King book. There’s rarely a month in which I don’t think about this book.

For my third pick I could have gone all King, but I’m choosing a book whose title is only made of numbers: 1984 by George Orwell, a dystopia classic that was written in 1949. Like many, I read it at school, and I’ve not re-read it, although I can still remember it quite well.

I hesitated with other dictatorial nightmares and dystopian novels, but no, too obvious and too sad. So instead I’m picking Orwell’s Down and out in Paris and London, a book I have on my shelves somewhere and am curious about (maybe for the Summer challenge?) That’s George Orwell well before 1984, and also before he fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1937. I’m interested to see him as a young man (I understand this is mostly autobiographical, a sort of auto-fiction) and also what life was like in that era in the big cities.

When it comes to poverty memoirs, it seems to be a whole genre. The one that springs to mind first, although I didn’t like it, is Angela’s Ashes by Franck McCourt. I don’t remember when I read that one (it was pushed into my hands, and it was everywhere), but I remember hating the accumulation of misery, page after page. I remember finding the book whiny, and as a French person I know about Debbie Downers!

Of course I could not finish on something so depressing, and I hated that people view Ireland through this book only. So I’m choosing the most luminous, kind and beautiful Irish book I know: Foster by Claire Keegan. It’s not all fun and rosy but the writing is emotional and light.

From Australia to Ireland, from a famous film director and a successful writer to a small girl far from her family, this month’s literary travel has taken me quite far from the starting point! What about you?

Bookish Considerations and Tools of the Booklover

Content warning: If you’re not a book lover with an overly long TBR and are not interested in ways to tackle it methodically, skip that one and come back in a few days. I promise, normal program will resume shortly.

How many times I have complained here (and also IRL) that I don’t know where I’ve first heard about a book that I have finally read and loved? I was preparing a post about a novel by Alan Furst. Goodreads tells me that I added to my TBR in 2018, but what prompted this decision back on precisely October 21st, 2018? I have no *bleep* idea (sorry, I’m annoyed, you can probably tell).

Well, chances are that I was reading a book blog (yes, despite the opinion of many, I still love blogs. Indeed, I still write one), and I was reading a lot of them in 2018. I was reading them through an RSS aggregator, which was no longer Google Reader (RIP to this wonderful tool, retired in 2013), but I’d switched to Feedly, which I’m still using today, although less and less. So my strategy was to dutifully tagging interesting blog posts about books I was hoping to read. But, but… how does one search in this *bleep* tool? Apparently, one does not. Maybe I’ve been mistaken about the functionalities about an aggregator, or maybe you’re supposed to peruse articles there and save them elsewhere… I don’t know.

I’ve seen the error on my ways a while back but only decided to tackle it this year. I no longer tag blog posts in Feedly, I try to go directly to Goodreads and add the book. Then I use an Excel spreadsheet that is the mirror of the Goodreads list, but with annotation on where does it come from and if my library has it or if I’m planning to buy it. (I don’t like the double step here, but my Excel sheet sits in my computer and not in the cloud). If Feedly can’t search, it means that I probably need to migrate those tagged information from a while back and do a sort of virtual culling operation. Culling yes, but probably also a massive addition to my TBR list.

Is there a better way? Should I just let go of all this? Tbh I’ve thought of closing my account in Feedly altogether as this lacking feature annoyed me a lot (can you tell?), but some blogs I’m following are not on WordPress and posting infrequently: I fear I’ll miss new posts (and I have enough emails as it is already). I’m bracing for the onslaught of books I wanted to read back around 2015-2018 and still find all of sudden very, very tempting. Tell me quick if I’m making a huge mistake.

David E. Hoffman, The Billion Dollar Spy (2015)

My 10yo son gifted me this book at Christmas and I’m very touched that at his age he was able to understand what I liked to read. Mr Smithereens told me that he was very systematic and logic in the bookshop to choose a book for me, not swayed by a pretty cover or a tempting promotion table or something that he might like. Apparently I’ve read enough books about spies that it was obvious I needed one more.

David Hoffman was not familiar to me. To sum things up, the book is still below my favorite spying book by Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor, but well above the big Macintyre disappointment that was Operation Mincemeat. It’s pretty good and full of details, but he doesn’t manage the pace and tension in the same riveting way.

In a strange way, the book doesn’t focus on the billion dollars spy that much, it gets side tracked on details about the US spiesbin Moscow, their processes, daily life and techniques. I can only understand this choice by the readily available info and memories from American agents, while probably not much was available on the Russian side.

Still, that was Tolkachev I was interested in, and the story the book tells is well worth the read. This highly intelligent and daring Soviet engineer worked for a military research institute, and decided to give away as much information as possible to Americans to inflict the most damage to his government. He didn’t do it out of greed or ambition, he simply hated the Soviet regime. It’s a shame that David Hoffman didn’t dig deeper into his motivations. For years, between the late 1970s and the mid-80s, he copied by hand and photographed thousands of pages of technical documents about weapons, radar technology and such.

He was finally betrayed by an American traitor back in the US, and this one story is interesting too. This guy had been selected and trained by the CIA to become an operative in Moscow, but at the last minute got the boot when some higher-ups decided he was not dependable enough. That harsh decision made him disgruntled and bitter, and was late enough that he had plenty of secret information to pass on to the Soviets. So in a way, the treason was the CIA’s fault for making a bad choice first and compounding this by getting rid of an agent in ways missing the most basic psychology.

History classes (my high school son’s e.g.) now tell that during the late 1970s and the 1980s the Cold War was over and that the Soviet regime was on its last leg, but a book like this says a lot about the dangers and restrictions on daily life beyond the Iron curtain back then. I wished it had a bit more oomph and focus but I didn’t regret the time spent reading it. Now, as his book selection was so successful, I’m curious what book my son might gift me next time around… we’ll see…

Linda Bailey, Julia Sarda, Mary who wrote Frankenstein (2018)

Today is a lazy day for me, happy international labor day to those who celebrate! (and sorry for those who read this post after a hard day’s work). So I’m going to write about a perfect book for such a lazy day, when you want to immerse into beautiful pictures and just read a few sentences. This children’s book is simply gorgeous! This is not 100% objective because I am a great fan of Barcelona illustrator Julia Sarda (IG, official site), but even if I hadn’t been I would have become an instant fan. In this kind of children’s book (probably age 4-6?), art is just as important as story if not more.

Frankenstein as a clunky green monster is now familiar to young kids, but surely they won’t know anything about the young woman who created him. Even adults may know something about the stormy evening in Italy when Lord Byron and his friends decided to write horror stories. But even as I listened to several BBC history podcasts about Mary Shelley, I had forgotten (or perhaps it’s the first time I realize it), that Mary was only 18 when she imagined the famous Frankenstein.

The book is a praise to creativity and imagination. We follow Mary along her difficult childhood, and we get to see tiny links between what interested Mary as a child and the book (which is not really accessible to kids): the death of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft when she was a newborn, the weird stories that she heard told at her father’s (William Godwin was a nonconformist), her rebellious temper… So creativity and imagination are not striking out of the blue, even when Mary suddenly has the idea for her story.

Not so many books are dealing with Gothic and dark themes. Non-fiction for kids, especially biographies, sometimes shy away from difficult themes, but here they have their place, with appropriate vocabulary and the right momentum to not get bogged down by tragedies. All in black, brown and orange hues, the book probably targets Halloween, but even as a 1st of May I enjoyed it a lot!

April Pods Review

I think I was in a podcast slump as much as a book slump in March, but boy did I make up for it during the month of April! So be ready for a long post although I will try to be a short as possible for each of the shows. See, I don’t even wait for the very end of the month to post it, otherwise you might get overwhelmed with so many podcast news… (just kidding)

New(-to-me) podcasts

Serial 4th season is about Guantanamo. Whatever the topic of course I had to give it a listen! You may think that you already have heard enough or too much about Guantanamo but Sarah Koenig and Dana Chivvis still managed to surprise me. There’s a double story in episodes 3 and 4 that are well worth my time: Ahmad the Iguana feeder, an American Muslim translator that did a few stupid things and got embroiled into several years of suspicion and accusations. And the follow-up, The Honeymooners, is just weird.

The So What from BCG is a shortish business podcast (20 minutes approx). This is my attempt at this genre of podcasts. Well, it was interesting, I give you that. But fun? Not really. So I should probably not try to mix fun and business when it comes to podcast listening, and it’s just my personal preference.

If All Else Fails is a NPR North County Radio mini-series about far-right extremism among American sheriffs. Probably not one to try on a day you’re depressed. This is worrying, and not only for the US. Here also law enforcement is often leaning on these extremist tendencies, but at least my country is much too centralized that anyone could entertain the illusion that they can decide to apply the law as they want to.

Things Fell Apart season 2 with Jon Ronson is in the same vein, but by the BBC. Very interesting, but depressing too.

Scamfluencers was a podcast recommended by Nick Quah from Vulture, they’re at their 2nd year. I tried 2 episodes but was not really taken in. The story I enjoyed best was The Book Bandit. I got annoyed by the narration that was very linear and by the amount of advertisement from Wondery that seemed to come every few minutes (that’s not true, I know)

Best podcasts episodes

These are the episodes from my favorite podcasts that resonated the most with me, depending on the mood du jour. My criteria for listing them here is if I wouldn’t mind listening to them again.

Radio Atlantic: How to waste time (December 2023) – something about reclaiming time for oneself and not being obsessed with productivity, which I really struggle with

Radio Atlantic: Money can buy you everything except maybe a Birkin bag (April 2024). Well, I had no clue how much a Birkin bag cost, and no desire to get one, and it’s probably for the best.

Culture Study: We know sitting is bad for us. But what are we supposed to do instead? (April 2024 – what’s up with those awfully long episodes titles you guys?) I considered a standing desk, but apparently there are other more clever things to do. Do I do them now that I’ve listened? Mmh, don’t ask.

Search Engine: Do political yard signs actually do anything? (April 2024) Like P.J., (doesn’t it feel cool to write that? Oh yeah…), I had expected the scientists to just say “no”… but the answer is so shocking and fascinating and gives perspectives on democracy itself.

Search Engine: How do we survive the media Apocalypse? with Ezra Klein (March). I love those Ezra Klein / PJ Vogt conversations. Nothing better to help with taking responsibility and ownership of what we want as media, instead of just feeling powerless.

Search Engine: Who’s behind those scammy text messages we’ve all been getting? (March) Seriously the weirdest story I’ve heard for quite a while. Starting all fun and light, and then… wow… Brutal and so awful. Be ready for a roller-coaster of ethics, this is a (serious) PSA.

So these were the high points of my podcast month, what about yours? Any interesting stories or shows you listened to?

Alex Michaelides, The Maidens (2021)

I added this book on my TBR list soon after its publication, because it was associated with Donna Tartt’s Secret History and with dark academia. I don’t think I realized at the time that it was a recent release, nor did I know before turning the last page that it had been written during the 2020 lockdown. I had never heard about Alex Michaelides and have not read his bestselling Silent Patient (which I mistakenly associated with the English Patient… now that makes me laugh so much harder)

I like to think I didn’t have high expectations for this book but in retrospect that’s not entirely true. Cambridge University, Greek drama professor, dark secrets… this sounded so perfect to me… Comparing it to The Secret History is not doing it any favor.

The story is told by Mariana, a group therapist in London, who studied at Cambridge and who is grieving the loss of her beloved husband the year before. Her niece Zoe, Mariana’s only relative left, is studying in Cambridge and in Professor Fosca’s Greek drama study group and she’s in shock after the murder of a classmate. In this moment of crisis Zoe has confided to Mariana, and now Mariana is convinced that Professor Fosca is a murderer.

The main problem I have with the novel is that very few characters and events are believable, starting with Mariana. What a weird therapist who reads situations wrong time and time again, who over-analyzes people around her, using concepts that read like basic pop science magazine sentences (but only when it’s convenient), who has no boundaries and no method. I can understand that she is troubled, but… She drops her patients and launches into a murder investigation based on… what? A fellow therapist and police scientific advisor finds it fully normal to let her onto a crime scene… and that’s just the beginning.

I wanted very much to know the secret and so I kept reading till the end (to its credit this is a very easy read). But the revelations at the end made hardly any sense! So disappointing…

The one thing that made me laugh is that in my opinion you can tell it was written during lockdown: all the characters are desperate to meet in cafés, restaurants, do things in groups… At almost no moment does Mariana wish to reflect on her own, although there would be plenty of reasons to.

One good thing with The Maidens is that it made me really want to discover Cambridge, and it seems that we really might go there this summer after all! So not everything was lost with this book.

This book featured on a post on Dark Academia in Modern Mrs. Darcy. Although this one was not a success I’m still eagerly looking at the other titles in this subgenre! Any novel you might want to recommend? Bonus points if the book is set in Cambridge!

Janet Singer Applefield, Becoming Janet (2024)

I rarely read biographies, and I’m usually hesitant about Holocaust stories, but this one attracted me on the Netgalley pages because of the cover, and also because it was in the Teens and YA category. Janet Singer Applefield is an Holocaust survivor who made it her mission to tell her childhood story to kids in Massachussetts schools, in order to let them understand the realities behind what is taught to them in history textbooks. She arrived in the US in 1947 at age 12, but her story is nothing short of a miracle.

She was born Gustawa Singer in a well-to-do Jewish family in a small town of Poland. The invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany destroyed the happiness of her childhood. The life of the family became more and more difficult until her parents took in 1942 the most heart-wrenching decision: they decided to split ways to get more chances at survival and to give their daughter away to strangers so that she would hide under a new identity. A pretty blond girl, she took the Christian name of Krystyna and was passed from stranger to stranger. She suffered loss after loss, and nearly lost herself in the years of hardships. Janet Applefield does not conceal how her experience showed the best and worst in people she met in those years. Relatives were not the ones who were the most humane, and at times random strangers saved her life.

I devoured the book in two days. Janet’s memories are told in a very straightforward way. The most shocking parts were perhaps the renewed hatred and antisemitism and attacks she faced after the end of the war from the hands of Polish people. Even if the Holocaust was over, her hardships were not. No wonder that she emigrated as soon as she could. Even as she has very clear messages to give to the newer generations in terms of choosing courage and tolerance and human decency, I felt that it was not heavy-handed because she shows in concrete terms what those values meant in a terrible context. I hope that the book will find its way into the hands of many teens and young adults.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley. I received a free copy of this book for review consideration.