Books Completed Since October 1

  Distilled Genius: Quotations, Susan Branch
When Susan Branch fled California after her first marriage collapsed, she rented a little cottage on Martha's Vineyard in which she found her first book of Bartlett's Quotations. She pored over the book and marked out the quotations which inspired her.

This book is a "distilled" version of her favorites, done in her beautiful watercolors, on subjects ranging from "The Secrets of Life"  to "Friendship" to "Creativity" to "Writing and Writers"—and so much more! For Susan Branch fans or just fans of quotations done in beautiful style!

  The Diabolical Bones, Bella Ellis
I loved the first mystery in this series that I couldn't wait to pick up the next.

This one is not quite as good from my estimation, but I may not have gotten the full impact out of it because I've never read anything by the Brontё sisters, since it was obvious in the first book that the people they meet later form the basis for their book characters. In this outing, it's before Christmas, 1845. Clifton Bradshaw, the master of Top Withens, has gone mad since the death of his wife. During a storm it's discovered that there are a child's bones in the chimney breast. The neighborhood people aren't surprised, because they're convinced Bradshaw sold his soul to the devil.

The Brontё sisters, of course, don't believe this for a minute, and they're determined to find out who the child was and why he was entombed in the chimney.

I notice the sisters argue a lot more often in this outing, like actual sisters would do, and after knowing what happened to Branwell it's sad the way they keep trying to distract him from his destructive habits, but he keeps backsliding. The best part of this series is the way the author emulates the style in which the books were written and makes it sound like the story was written in 1845 without getting into the proselytizing and gargantuan prose of the time. Very evocative of the mid-19th century and the bleak winter Yorkshire setting is quite compelling.

  A Place for Everything, Judith Flanders
Since the beginnings of the Roman alphabet, alphabetical order has always been the natural and logical way to organize manuscripts!

Nope.

You would have thought this book would be a natural for me, but I was really distracted while reading it and perhaps I should go back some day and re-read it, as I didn't get out of it what I hoped I would, especially since I usually love Judith Flanders. Hierarchy was the original "order" of keeping books (originally scrolls): books about God would be first, then about religion in general, working down to more base items, and this system actually persisted well into the Renaissance. The book is also a history of records' keeping itself, from antiquity and through the long period where monks at churches kept the history and the learning from dying out.

Again, I guess I just wasn't in the mood for it; if you are anyone interested in the history of libraries, reading, and records-keeping, this is a well-researched text from Flanders with much history revealed. I'll get back to it someday, because I'm a Flanders fan.

  CSI: Body of Evidence, Max Allan Collins
This is the fourth in Collins' original novelizations from the television series; as in the other stories, two mysteries run concurrently: Catherine and Nick are called to an office where child pornography photos were found on one of the work printers, while Grissom, Warrick, and Sara are following clues after a witness sees a car stop, and a man pull out something from the trunk and leave it on the side of the road: a body wrapped in carpeting which turns out to be the mayor's missing secretary—and this is a touchy topic during an election year. The sheriff and his assistant will be drawn into the mystery before it ends.

The cybercrime is particularly twisty and Catherine having a child colors her feelings about the crime, so that it throws off the investigation. Again, these books are just like watching an episode of the series. The only thing that's a little off is that on the series they will visually show you a "re-enactment" of what the CSU people think might have happened. In the books it's shown as sort of a flashback type thing that Grissom or Sara envisions and it reads a little odd. Otherwise the characters' voices and the laboratory and police scenes are well captured. I wish someone had asked Collins to do Law & Order: Criminal Intent novels!

  Just My Type, Fallon Ballard
This was the better of the two rom-coms I read from NetGalley, but they're aggravating me so much I probably need to stop reading them (I've always had a problem with chick lit; then every once in a while I find a winner—I enjoyed Love Hypothesis so much that I thought these might please me). The protagonists are so young and incredibly...angsty. (But, yeah, I gotta admit I got angsty when I finally fell in love (and stupid, too).

Lana Parker never got the love she expected from her academic mom (another neglectful academic mom? really?), so she was not only head over heels over her high school sweetheart, Seth Carson, she was in love with his supportive family. But Seth went off to college and left her, so now she's gone from one long-term relationship to the next with something always ending it abruptly. When her current long-term boyfriend breaks up with her instead of proposing, she's crushed (even though she really didn't love him). So Natalie, Lana's new editor out in Los Angeles, has this great idea: she'll pit Lana against the new employee to see who gets a coveted column—you guessed it, the new employee is Seth, who's never had a steady relationship. To win, Lana will write columns about being on the dating scene, and Seth will learn how to be a guy who a woman will want to set up a long-term relationship with.

Don't get me started. I was really upset that Lana makes one of the first things on her "challenge list" to "have a one-night stand." Really? Really? Do you know how dangerous that is in this day of roofies? I can't believe the author would do such a thing. At least there wasn't another flaky gay character in this one. Can't we please get a sensible gay character instead?

  The Plus One, Mazey Eddings
This is apparently part of a four part series about a group of friends who fall in love (Lizzie and Harper are the previous two). Indira Papadakis is a young psychologist who loves her job, and who loves her brother Collin and his intended, Jeremy. The person she doesn't love is Jude Bailey, Collin's best friend, who's been her "enemy" since childhood, in town for Collin and Jeremy's wedding. But Jude has a secret: in order to get through medical school without debt, he signed up to be a doctor in emergency zones once he graduated, most of them in war-torn areas. He is suffering terribly from PTSD, and Collin and Jeremy's bonkers pre-wedding festivities (please, can we have some sensible gay characters?) are torture to him. Indira doesn't want to fix him, but she does want to help him, and so they pretend to be lovers (and you know how that turns out in romance books).

I really admire Eddings for tackling the problem of PTSD—Jude's frayed nerves notch up the plot on this one, and Indira's efforts to help, not fix—but Collin and Jeremy really wrecked the story for me. Their pre-wedding antics are so childish and stupid. As an introvert, I felt so sorry for Jude, continually dragged into "make the wedding favors" and other jerky activities. Apparently this was supposed to be funny, but I was just appalled instead. And this is Jude's best friend. Yeah, in the end he apologizes, but really.

The subplot about Indira and Collin's deadbeat dad was dead depressing. So tired of rom-com parent bashing.

  Men Who Hate Women, Laura Bates
This is a genuinely scary book.

Bates, who has done research on "dark internet" sites has found chat groups and forums where men talk about raping and killing woman as if it's not only natural, but that it should be expected because women "deserve" to be raped and their only use is as sexual objects. I had been reading John Douglas' books about profiling and his observations about male rage piqued my interest, so I picked up this book. The chapters are "Men Who Hate Women," "...Prey on Women," "...Avoid Women," "...Blame Women," "...Hound Women," "...Hurt Women," "...Exploit Other Men," "...Are Afraid of Women," "...Don't Know They Hate Women," and "...Hate Men Who Hate Women," so there are many aspects of hate, all of them not only detrimental to women, but to other men.

Sadly, this is good reference if you're writing a crime against women book.

  The Seasons of America Past, Eric Sloane
This is one of Sloane's numerous nostalgic books about America's colonial past, complete with his gorgeous pen-and-ink illustrations of old-time tools, toys, buildings, and farming methods. This one covers a year on a colonial-era farm, from spring sowing to winter repairs, summer planting and autumn harvest, and there's even period recipes in the final few pages. If you like to read about historical eras, Sloane's books are some of the best about the "old times."

  Yours Cheerfully, A.J. Pearce
This is the sequel to Pearce's delightful Dear Mrs. Bird, finding Emmy Lake now firmly established at the magazine "Woman's Friend" under the supervision of Mr. Collins, the brother of her beloved boyfriend Charles. Emmy is now the editor of the new column "Yours Cheerfully," and the women's magazines have been pushed by the British government to step up and try to encourage more women to do war work because the war plants are understaffed. Emmy's glad to do so, until she meets some women war workers, including Anne Oliver and her precocious daughter Ruby and Baby Tony. Anne tells her how difficult it is for her to work with needing child care, and when another woman working in Anne's war plant is fired because she had to bring her daughters to work, Emmy is determined to Do Something.

This is a sweet followup to Bird, if with a less compelling storyline, although the problem of women war workers finding childcare was a very real one and many women did lose their jobs because they had to bring their kids to work. Emmy and Charles' romance is also very sweet, and the efforts Emmy and Bunty go through to help the war workers is both heartwarming and funny.

  'Til Death, Carol J. Perry
Alas, this seems to be the last of Perry's "Witch City" mysteries, which means I won't be reading Perry any longer since her new series takes place in—yuck!—Florida. Anyway, Lee Barrett is finally marrying her long-time boyfriend Pete Mondello of the Salem Police, and they're looking for a place to live near her Aunt Ibby's house so they can share Lee's beautiful—and slightly psychic—orange cat, O'Ryan. In the meantime, Aunt Ibby is fixing the upstairs apartment where Lee used to live to make two smaller units for use as Airbnbs, and one of the renters just may be a murderer who did his prison time and changed his name! (Shades of Anne Perry here...)

In the meantime, Lee and Pete decide to travel New England on their honeymoon, and one of the first places they will visit will be Pirate's Island, owned by Lee's late father's sister and her husband. Lee discovered this is the location of the plane crash which killed her parents, so she wants to visit, perhaps place a memorial where they died. But there's something odd going on at Pirate's Island; her aunt appears to have some type of medical problem and sometimes she appears to be afraid of her husband.

So in one fell swoop we get Lee's engagement party and then wedding, her suspicions of Aunt Ibby's new lodger, househunting, her boss' insistence that she "do a little work" on her honeymoon, and her hope to find closure on Pirate's Island. Lots of things going on in this final book, but things are all wrapped up as the story ends.

  Eloise and the Grump Next Door, Jenny Proctor and Emma St. Clair
Ho-hum. Part one of a three-book series about three sisters who inherit their grandmother's house on a small island off the coast of Georgia (I think; I've already forgotten). They are to turn it into a bed and breakfast and then either sell it, or one of them runs it and buys the other two out. Eloise is just out of college and didn't get into graduate school (this again), so she's the "free" one of the three sisters and gets the job of renovating. She's perky and cute and has her own Instagram following, so she's going to follow the process of the renovation on her Instagram page. Bad news: she has to deal with Jake, her grandmother's lawyer, a stuffed shirt in his early thirties who has to deal with his divorced sister and her bright son.

Well, of course they fall in love, but Eloise (call her "Lo" or she gets mad) keeps resisting it, and Jake thinks he's too old for her. He complains about this for the entirety of the book, and finally gets her the graduate position she wanted by talking to his mother (another neglectful academic—enough already). Everyone else in the book, including Jake's dad who runs the local bar, his supportive sister, etc. is cheering them on.

Complications arise when Merritt and Sadie, her pushy older sisters who treat her like a baby, arrive. People keep describing this as "swoony." I got through it only because my husband was in the hospital and it was something to pass the time.

I either have to quit reading rom-coms or find more intelligent ones

  My Name is America: The Journal of Jedediah Barstow, An Emigrant on the Oregon Trail, Ellen Levine
This is a good entry in the Scholastic "Dear America" series, written for boys instead of girls. Jedediah is a 13-year-old boy whose parents, along with his younger sister, are heading for the Oregon Country in 1845, but as the book opens, the rest of his family are drowned while crossing the Kaw River just as the journey begins. Jed originally stays with Mr. Fenster, a Jewish man, but feeling uncomfortable, switching to traveling with irascible Mr. Henshaw and his wife and young daughter. Jed continues chronicling the trip in the journal his mother originally began.

The descriptions are a bit thin, but good portrayal of the hardships the pioneers faced, especially river crossings, dust storms, rattlesnakes (a character gets his leg amputated due to a rattler bite), etc. Jed also learns lessons about tolerance and forbearance on his journey, and becomes more open-minded. The epilog is a bit odd, though, as it's written in Jed's voice, when the epilogs are usually a third-person summary of what happened to the characters (which are usually positive, unless it's a Barry Denenberg book).