Books Completed in June 2025

 The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, David McCullough

I listen to the podcast "Travels With Rick Steves" and have bought too many books listening to it; one of them was David McCullough's The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris.

In reading it, I can hear McCullough's voice, just as he used to narrate The American Experience. It's a hell of a book, from James Fenimore Cooper and Samuel Morse (they were best friends) heading east on a sailing ship to the ends of the careers of John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt, with the development of the steamship, the Franco-Prussian War and the Siege of Paris (where they were reduced to eating rats and zoo animals), and the rise of the Eiffel Tower just a few of the historical milestones within. (Since it's now so iconic to Paris, it's amazing to think that when the Eiffel Tower was erected, famous people of the time hated it and a highly incensed letter was sent to the newspaper signed by notables of the time, including Alexandre Dumas and Guy de Maupassant, condemning it.)

  CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Snake Eyes, Max Allan Collins
This is the last of the original novels written by Collins and based on the CBS series.

In one of two small casinos in the town of Boot Hill, Nevada, two rival biker gangs come to a head and have a shootout. Innocent casino employees die, and the head of one of the gangs. If someone doesn't solve the latter's murder quickly, there will be a gang war that will tear apart the small town. To work the crime quickly, the LVCSU sends Gil Grissom, Catherine Willows, Sara Sidle, Nick Stokes, and their temporary tech Sofia Curtis there.

In the meantime, Warrick Brown and Greg Sanders are left to handle the rest of the Las Vegas deaths, and they keep coming hot and heavy.

This is the first time the two different case investigations don't merge into one in a Collins book. I think Collins got tired of writing these books, because this one isn't quite up to the others, even if the casino mystery is very twisty.

  The Word Hord: Daily Life in Old English, Hana Videen
Ah, there's nothing like a good linguistics book!

When people think of "Old English," usually what comes to mind is Shakespeare or, perhaps a little earlier, Chaucer, and funny word uses like "Ye Olde" somethingorother. Well, surprise, folks: Chaucer is Middle English, and Shakespeare is Early Modern English. "Old English" is the language of Beowulf, and untrained persons can't read it at all. The "wordhord" of the title is the language that poets and singers, and other wordsmiths, drew upon to tell stories.

This is the story of everyday life in Old English, starting with the basics, such as food and drink. Hlaf, for example, was the word for bread, and its descendant is still around: loaf. You might also have your æg with butere. Next come morning chores, then the work of the day, amusements after work and friends to share them with, all the way to the world outside and the animals and curiosities to find there. Much fun if you're into linguistics!

(By the way, "Ye" is pronounced "The." The "Y" in the "Ye" stuff is a stand-in for a letter that doesn't exist any longer, thorn (þ), pronounced as "th.")

  It's OK That You're Not OK, Megan Devine
This was the book about grief that I finally chose for myself; it was better than the religious-based text I was loaned (although I did get a few good things from it). It discusses the things they don't tell you about grief: the anger, the emptiness, the well-meaning people who want to make you feel better and can't, and the clueless people who wonder when "you're going to get over it."

I made notes in it, too. Don't judge me.

  Adventures of Mary Jane, Hope Jahren
I've been waiting for this book to come out in paperback, being a big fan of Huckleberry Finn. It's Jahren's story about Mary Jane Guild, who leaves her home near Lake Winnipeg and eventually travels to Fort Edwards in Illinois to care for her Aunt Evelyn and Uncle George and cousins Susan and Joanna; on the way, she meets an unconventional female steamboat captain and a Mormon family.

Things are tougher from there: Uncle George has suffered a grievous injury, and the family is starving. Mary Jane manages to save them all, until sickness overtakes the adults. Soon, Mary Jane, pretending she is Susan and Joanna's sister, accompanies them to their new legal guardian, Peter Wilks, in Greenville, Mississippi.

Yes, that Peter Wilks. For this is "Mary Jane, the red-headed one" from Huckleberry Finn. So, this is fanfiction, then—well-written fanfic, but fanfic. And Jahren does make it work as a book about a strong, resourceful young woman who tries to do her best. But boy, does she do a hack job on Peter Wilks. You know nothing about him from Finn, just that he died, and he had a bag of gold and a tattoo on his chest. Jahren makes him a reprehensible man even without his slave-owning: a penny-pincher from Yorkshire with really gross habits.

She also introduces a bunch of original characters, like Eddie the Jewish peddler, and a big dog named Cherry, and has Mary Jane fall in love with Huckleberry Finn in his guise of "Joe," the "valley" to "the King" and "the Duke" who are pretending to be Wilks' brothers.

Jahren's narrative style is first-rate; she keeps the story going and introduces side characters based on actual historical characters, but they all seemed to be jam-packed in as if she couldn't bear to leave any out. And once Huck gets the Duke and the King arrested, the ending is kinda Lord of the Rings (the films). I did enjoy it because of Mary Jane herself, but it has its flaws. (One of them is dates: Huck Finn takes place during the reign of William IV; Mary Jane talks about Queen Victoria being on the throne, and her favorite book, in 1846, is Dickens' A Child's History of England, which was written in the mid-1850s.)

  The Little Book of Life Skills, Erin Zammett Ruddy
It was $3 at Half-Price Books. Kind of an edited version of a Bottom Line Personal book.

  The Book of Murder, Matt Murphy
Murphy spent 20 years in the Orange County district attorney's office, and, as they say on Law & Order, these are his stories.

Most of them are grim, although there are anecdotes about stupid criminals as well. One of the most fascinating—and repulsive—chapters was about a sexual predator named Rodney Alcala, who actually appeared as a contestant on The Dating Game! But all the chapters are fascinating, whether about a married couple selling their boat who were never seen again, to the ill-fated partnership of Chris Smith and Ed Shin that boded not well for Chris, who suddenly sold his half of a business and went on walkabout.

There's a lot of behind-the-scenes of an investigation into a crime, the long hours of work that go into a case (to the point that Murphy gave up on personal relationships altogether), and how the different parts of the investigative team work together to close a case. Murphy sometimes gets a little heavy on "how I gave up my life to prosecute bad guys," but the narrative about the criminals and cases themselves is first-rate.

Books Completed in May 2025

  Novel-in-the-Making, Mary O'Hara
Wyoming Summer is one of my comfort reads, but I didn't realize O'Hara had two more nonfiction books! This one is the story of writing her novel The Son of Adam Wyngate. It begins with her driving east with her collie after her divorce from Helge Sture-Vasa to re-establish herself in Connecticut, and thinking on what she wants to write next, a family drama based on her own father. I was heartened by reading about how many false starts she had! At one point, she envisioned it as a trilogy and began writing the second book first. It was quite encouraging to know that even as an experienced writer, she had so many false starts.

The book also makes me glad I live in the computer age: her talking about having to edit her drafts by cutting and taping multiple pages of typewritten manuscript together made me exhausted.

  Any Trope But You, Victoria Lavine
Margot Bradley's once-flourishing romance writer career has gone down the tubes: someone found her private file, the one the now-cynical author kept to herself because she wrote unhappy endings to all her famous rom-com epics after an epic breakup with her fiancé, and broadcast it to the world. Her sister Savannah, who has chronic autoimmune disease, proposes that she go away for six weeks to a lodge in Alaska and write in a new genre: mystery. But no sooner does Margot arrive in Alaska than she runs afoul of Forrest Wakefield, a former researcher who is now taking care of his invalid father and is guilty because he wasn't there to care for his mother.

Two cynics, in this genre, equal romance, although neither of them will admit it at first. Great fish-out-of-water protagonist who discovers the "cozy lodge" comes with physical challenges, and a hero with heart.

  The Rhine, Ben Coates
The Dutch are different, but then so are the Germans. And the Swiss, and all the other countries along the length of the Rhine River. Starting in Amsterdam, Ben Coates follows the path of the Rhine all the way to its source at Lake Toma, covering the history, sociology, and current political and social customs of the countries he travels through, comparing and contrasting the people, the food, and the treatment of the river.

Sometimes Coates has his tongue more firmly planted in his cheek than perhaps he should have, but I enjoyed his journey up...down?...along one of the most notable rivers in Europe. I bought this book because I was tired of all the good travel narratives being about France!

  Juneau, the Sleigh Dog, West Lathrop
Grosset & Dunlap's "Famous Dog Stories" series. I ate these up as a kid. Nope, didn't want to read about girls dating and gushing over boys, or, when I was younger, little girls simpering over their dollies and having tea parties. Adventures. I wanted adventures! These, along with Albert Payson Terhune's wonderful collie stories, captured my imagination.

Got this from a friend who knew I liked old dog books. It's a corker: an engineer and his son are on vacation in Alaska. Dad is called away unexpectedly for a few daysand wants to take son Pierre with him, but Pierre persuades him to leave him at the cabin with Juneau the husky, knowing a neighbor, Andy, will help him if there's a problem; besides, he's in the care of their Native-American guide Ka-uk, a member of the Tlingit tribe.

Alas, these books were not exactly enlightened: Ka-uk deserts the boy and proves to be treacherous, and Pierre and Juneau are obliged to fend for themselves. Considering when this was written, I was impressed that Ka-uk's problem didn't stem from being "naturally bad" due to his heritage, but because he was an outcast from both his own people and from white people. Pierre gains maturity and experience during his unfortunately long ordeal, and the dog is magnificent.

  Fake Heroes, Otto English
Nobody's perfect.

This is a book about ten heroes--historic and celebrity-- whose lives were not what the public believed. I admit, I bought this book because the first chapter was about Douglas Bader, a World War II pilot whose positive press covered up the fact that he wasn't who he seemed; my husband, the consummate fan of aviation heroes, had read about him and scorned his fame. My mother, the ultimate JFK fan, knew all about his peccadillos and, later in life, knew about his illnesses. Almost everyone knew he didn't write Profiles in Courage; Ted Sorenson did. And once Mother Teresa died, the word about her forcing people to suffer without painkillers because "suffering was good for them" became known. And how many people didn't know Coco Chanel was a Nazi collaborator?

English offers up as well, in each of ten chapters, people he believes more worthy of the honors.

  The Curse of Penryth Hall, Jess Armstrong
Ruby Vaughn had one chance at a good marriage, but was "ruined" by an in flagrante reveal. After serving in the first World War, she now lives in England working—and sharing a house with—an elderly bookseller, who unexpectedly asks her to travel to Cornwall to deliver some esoteric books to a folk healer. Ruby is reluctant to go because her old friend Tamsyn lives there after marrying an English aristocrat. Mr. Owens' client turns out to be the town Peller, a cross between a healer and, from what Ruby can gather, some type of witch.

When Tamsyn's husband turns up dead, everyone is under suspicion, including Tamsyn.

An atmospheric thriller set in the 1920s with lots of twists (although the characters seem to spend most of the book soaking wet).

  Re-read: The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by William Anderson
There is some meat to this collection of Wilder letters, including some of the letters she and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane shared about the editing of the "Little House" books. Sadly, Rose burned most of the letters, especially those from the 1940s, so we will never know the full editorial partnership she shared with her mother. There is an impassioned letter of Laura's insisting that The Long Winter be confined to the Ingalls and Wilders with a few supporting characters rather than a full pallet of townspeople as Rose wanted to give full import of the isolation families faced during that hard winter of 1880-1881, which showed she did have the flair for storytelling that some literary scholars have denied her. But most of the letters are banal little responses to schoolchildren, with a few lovely gems.

The trouble is, I've read so many books about Wilder, including the recently published Pioneer Girl, that I've already seen many of these "surprise bits" (like the fact that a young couple and their baby lived with the family during the long winter), so the revelations aren't. It's also sad to read Wilder's last letters with her longing for her late husband clear even in the few paragraphs, and it's also obvious that the sisters did not remain very close after Ma and Pa and Mary died.

I've been a Laura "junkie" since I first saw the television series and wanted to know "the real story," so I'm glad I picked this up, but if you have less of an attachment to her, I would invest in one of the biographies instead.

  The Pocket, Barbara Burman & Ariane Fennetaux
What's the one thing women always complain about in modern clothing? Of course, not enough pockets. From 1660 through 1900, however, most women did have pockets, often capacious ones, which tied around the waist and went under their skirts (the skirts usually had a slit/slits to access the pocket(s).

This is a history of those pockets, most made of cotton, some of wool or leather or linen, some embroidered and many plain, and what women kept in them, from valuable things like coins and keys, to items for beauty (powder compacts, rouge), to things like snacks, books, visiting books, and sentimental objects. Often the pocket(s) were the only private places women had for their cherished items and they were often stolen by cutpurses who cut the tie strings or brazen thieves who reached under a sleeping women's pillow for her stash. Other women used their pockets as shoplifters hide things under their coats, to steal.

This is a scholarly study, but an interesting one.

  Modern Loss, Rebecca Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner
These are selections from a website called "Modern Loss," where stories of grief are shared. One of the stories from the co-authors sounds like it came out of a Law & Order episode: her father and stepmother were killed by a handyman who, a few weeks earlier, had done repair work at their home. He intended to just rob the house, but when he found them at home, he beat them both to death.

This book made me more depressed, so, obviously not what I needed to be reading at this time.

  A Musical in the Making, Mary O'Hara
This book was interesting to me not only about how she developed, then wrote and re-wrote, her musical play The Catch Colt, but how much work some of the process was. Since she was composing the music and writing the book, she had quite a load on her shoulders, but I never realized how laborious the orchestrations were! Fully half the book is about how she had to work and work on these orchestrations, and then she had to finally sell the play. I've seen behind-the-scenes of play production, but not ones that include the writing and the music. Pretty much just for O'Hara or play fans, though.

  Anything from Nothing, edited by Mercedes Lackey
The 2023 collection of Valdemar short stories. Much better than Shenanigans, which I really didn't like at all. The quality in this volume is pretty solid, from the opening story about a blacksmith's son who feels stifled in his small town and requests that a Herald take him away to Lackey's own tale of a small town under siege. Several of the stories are serial in nature, so we continue the stories of Healer Erenal and Nwah the kyree being held captive. One of my favorites was the story of a traveling carnival, "What a Chosen Family Chooses," and how they help a captive in a stifling village. "Needs Must When Evil Bides" is another good one, about a herbalist who helps a servant rescue a wealthy family taken hostage by bandits.

All the stories are worth reading.