May’s bonus blog talks about three easy-to-read, relaxing books. Sometimes we want a break from instructive nonfiction, thoughtful tomes, or the news. While not the best things I’ve ever read, they are good enough. They fit the bill for sitting outside on a warm spring day or in the favorite chair inside if the pollen is too much.  There’s a feel-good happy ending, a romance/mystery, and an old-fashioned, classic mystery.

She inadvertently brings a tiny mouse into the house.  Her first instinct is to get rid of it, but how exactly should she do it?  If she decides on a live trap, she could put it safely outside – but it looks so vulnerable and it is cold and pouring rain. As she begins to feel responsible and care for it, she is drawn out of her solitary existence.

As her life enlarges, so does the reader’s view of her.  She is not the stereotypical “old lady” we have been imagining. She is an accomplished woman. She has a past! This charming story is a delightful pick-me-up. 

Stepping gingerly around each other, they look back on his life for clues. The three marriages, an old lover, and a hugely successful business with partners offer many people to look at, but none seems very plausible.  Not until a school literary journal and old photo appear does everything fall into place.

This book was fine, but I didn’t like it as much as her first mystery, The Last Thing He Told Me. It is too touchy-feely, too much emoting. Then there is the setting. The characters are architects who develop luxurious resorts all over the world. The constant descriptions of their upscale developments are intrusive and off-putting.   I mentioned in my last blog that this is a difficult time to read about catering to the world’s super rich.  We are at war, social programs are being decimated, the ultra-rich who appear in the news are extremely unlikeable.

The story did have some unanticipated twists, more mystery than romance-like, which helped it.  Also, someone especially interested in design and architecture might not find this aspect of the story overdone.  Neuroarchitecture anyone?

In A Shilling for Candles, Josephine Tey talks about the theater and its hangers on, the rural English countryside, the aristocracy, and a bit of politics. The actress, who has escaped poverty through hard work and talent, rents a house in the country in hopes of some quiet.  No one knows where she will be. But someone finds out, and when she goes for a swim in the morning, she is drowned. While suspicion falls on her house guest, there are two other possibilities.  Her husband, Lord Edward, has misled the detective on some basic facts.  Then there is the ne’er do well brother who has been disdainfully left a shilling in her will.  Had he expected more?

Three different plot lines make for an exciting story, but I thought it had a flaw.  The actress wants to help the young man get a start in life so leaves him a bequest in her will.  Really?  She is only 30.  Doesn’t she expect to live another fifty years? How will this help him get started? This fact is necessary for the plot but such a misstep spoils this otherwise pleasant cozy mystery.  

Will her energy and drive assure her of success?  Not in the early 1900s.  The only path open to her is a “successful” marriage.  She does her best.  She cajoles and browbeats her parents into taking her to New York City where she catches the eye of Ralph, son of an old money family. She has yet to discover that “respected-old-family” doesn’t equate with rich.  When he is unable to satisfy her extravagant desires, she divorces him for someone wealthier. Her next husband is from the French aristocracy, but alas, he thinks money is for conserving not spending.  Soon, there is an old flame on the horizon, someone from her hometown who shares her materialism and has become fabulously wealthy.  Will she finally achieve her goal?

The book is much more than a story of an ambitious, selfish woman.  It also directs our attention outward to the culture that shaped her.  Undine, like other women of her time and class, is oblivious to where money comes from and hasn’t a clue about business, thus putting all the pressure on her husband to support them as she wishes.  She can’t understand why he is so obstinate about her expenses.

The men’s expectations are also explored.  Ralph thinks that because she is young, he will be able to mold Undine to his quiet interests and family standards.  The French husband assumes that when she becomes a wife, she will give up her extravagant party ways and devote herself to his parents and rural estate. They are both mesmerized by her beauty, see what they want to, and don’t know her at all, for Undine is well named.  Like the myth of the undine, or mermaid, she is beautiful on the surface with a serpent’s tail underneath.

Wharton has plenty to say about the values of the wealthy classes of the time, both new and old money, American versus European.  Her critique was fresh when the book was written, but since then much has been written about the material values of our world.  It is also a painful time to be reading about the excesses of the super-rich.

Haruki Murakami, in his short story “Samsa in Love,” writes a “sequel.”  The cockroach wakes up one morning and has been turned into a man. It’s one of the best things I’ve read lately.  It’s especially good if you can remember the original.

“Samsa in Love” is one of the short stories in Murakami’s collection Men Without Women. Each story centers around a man who has lost a woman he loved and has become one of the “men without women,” either really or figuratively.  The collection deals with their loneliness and isolation.

One of the men has a woman, a fiancé, but they have grown up together and he can think of her only as a sister, not as a lover whom he would like to marry. Another’s beloved wife dies and he will never know why she had affairs during their marriage. Someone gets a call in the middle of the night that brings back memories of a first love long gone.

The men have different ways of dealing with loss which revolve around becoming someone else, even if just for a while. The actor does it professionally; another immerses himself in stories; another quits his job. Murakami is a perceptive storyteller with an original point of view.

The dead man is a stranger, unknown to anyone in the tightly knit small town. What has brought him here?  What is his connection? In another story line, an Englishman, a newcomer, has turned up in town, renting with the intention of settling in.  The townspeople give the murder, and the newcomer, their casual interest, but when a second murder occurs, this time of a local boy, the mood changes. As often is the case, the root problem goes back many years, to a summer of parties at the home of a local bohemian artist.

This is a typical fast-paced, well plotted Ann Cleeves mystery full of the Shetland Islands atmosphere.  I liked it while reading it, but afterwards, when I thought about it, I didn’t think the identity of the murderer rang true.  An odd rather than satisfying resolution.

You can find the story in the February 2, 2026, copy of The New Yorker.  If you don’t have a subscription, try your online library.  Ours is Libby and has a large collection of magazines.

Shoalts, a professional explorer, expert canoeist, and skilled outdoorsman does just that.  He begins on Lake Erie, canoes across it and Lake Ontario, then north until the navigable rivers end in the Canadian wilderness.  There is a weeks long hike  – over rough trails when he is lucky – bushwhacking when he isn’t.  Lastly, he is back to the rivers and finishes his journey by canoe.

There are beautiful descriptions of the remote places he sees and observations about the interconnectedness of things.  Most striking are the parts about his interactions with the few people he meets.  Scruffy looking from remote living, he doesn’t expect much, but everyone he meets is kind and generous, offering hm food, water, a bed, a ride, and mostly encouragement. Why are people so helpful to a stranger? Someone he meets says it is because he is actually doing what others only dream about. This vivid adventure is perfect for the armchair explorer.

She pretends to be a lowly worker, not too bright, but in reality risks her life to observe and record the Nazi thefts at the museum in hopes the artwork can be recovered after the war. It is not only the art belonging to the museum that she tries to protect, but thousands of pieces stolen from individual Jewish families that passed through the museum on the way to Germany.

The number of things stolen is appalling.  The Nazi high command just helped itself to priceless paintings, tapestries, rugs, jewels and had them shipped by the train carload to Germany.  She details visits from Goring and his insatiable appetite for artistic treasures.

Suspicion falls on Rose many times but she talks herself out of danger.  She is particularly at risk since she is in a lesbian relationship which she carefully hides.

After the war, Rose worked with the Monuments Men traveling around Europe and into Germany.  Repatriating art stolen from French museums and individual Jewish collectors became her lifelong work until she died in 1980.  Lawsuits about reparations are still going on today, eighty years later. 

Someone in our book group pointed out that the Monument Men were predominantly American.  So interesting to think about our government paying to help France recover its looted treasures.  Would we do that today?

The story revolves around a dinner party for ten, the two servers, and a few extras who will come later.  All the guests have interesting back stories, but the book eventually focuses on the newly married couple, the groom with the wealthy mother and the beautiful red-headed bride who is a little odd.

“I believe in destiny,” says her new mother-in-law.  The novel tells us, step by step, how chance, coincidence, casual error, and last-minute decisions, all play a stronger part in life than we might think.  It was intriguing to see the “murder mystery” used not as a puzzle but as a mechanism to comment on how, despite all of our hard work and planning, we don’t really have the control over our lives that we would like to think we do.  

This is a story of his Jewish family who were at home throughout Russia, Paris and Vienna. Wealthy and cultured, they were friends with Proust and Renoir.  Their magnificent, lavish homes contained precious paintings, furniture, jewels – and netsuke.

De Waal, who is a potter, has a feel for beautiful things – and he is very interested in exactly how the netsuke feel when picked up. This is a story that would appeal to the artist who loves the details of color and design.  It is a story that would appeal to the historian; De Waal’s ancestors who owned the netsuke, starting in the mid-1800s, are brought to life in the settings of the times – first Paris, then Vienna. 

While I appreciate the portrait of the cultural life of different eras, I’m just not interested in the details of so many “things.”  I prefer a book that talks about ideas, makes perceptive observations. This one finally came to life for me about three quarters of the way through, when the Nazis invaded Vienna, and went after the Jews.  De Waal describes the scene in present tense.  His family’s home is invaded by the Gestapo, their beautiful desk thrown out the window, their paintings inventoried and taken away, even the jewels and rings they are wearing are stolen.  They are forced to live in two dark rooms while the Nazis who revile them move into the rest of their family home.  We see the devastation of war that does not take place on the battlefield. 

The second generalization raised by this book is that not only the poor, but the super-rich, will always be with us. I couldn’t help but compare this fabulously wealthy family with those whose stories make the news today.  And this moral question: would I be as sympathetic if certain current homes were invaded and their things appropriated? 

So – a mixed review on this book.  Some interesting perceptions about life in general (if you look), but the main thrust is the luxurious lifestyle lived by this family of collectors for whom valuable netsuke were only a nominal part.

The freon, an environmentally destructive gas, was then destroyed.  Doing so gave them points to sell to large companies looking for environmental offsets. They earned enough to make a profit and do something for the environment.

Sam’s adventures are the story part of After Cooling by Eric Dean Wilson, the full title of which includes On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort. As often is the case, a story is needed to make scientific information palatable to us nonscientists in the general public.  This book starts with an explanation of how cooling occurs, moves on to what artificial cooling methods have been used in the past, and ends with the large-scale expectation of and availability of air-conditioning both in our homes and automobiles.

This easy accessibility of temperature control arose because of the invention of freon, thought to be a harmless refrigerant. Wilson takes us through the eventual recognition that it was causing changes in the atmosphere and leading to the destruction of ozone, a gas necessary to life on the planet. We learn of the eventual banning of its production although the use or sale of what had already been produced is still allowed.

From his discussion about air-conditioning, Wilson segues into the more serious topic of global warming. He moves from science into philosophy on the causes of the problem and the changes in mindset needed to solve it. He would like us to think about communal health in a world of finite resources.  Do we really want to bequeath rises in seas, burning forests, monstrous winds, and food scarcity to our grandchildren?

I liked this book because of the general discussion about the problems of global warming and some of the specific thoughts about what to do about this very important subject.  I understand that a scientist must provide facts to his peers, but I found them difficult to follow.  I also found the other end, his philosophy, obscure. So – another mixed review – an important work, well researched, thoughtful, but I was glad when I had finished this “good for me” book.

Harriet Vane has been invited to a gaudy, or celebration, at her old college. She re-establishes contact with old friends and a long-lost way of life. But there is trouble. The staff is receiving nasty letters and there has been malicious damage to the buildings. Harriet, a detective fiction writer and assistant to private investigator Peter Wimsey is asked to help. 

The backdrop for the story is a detailed portrait of academic life in an Oxford affiliated women’s college in the 30s.  The subject is whether women should receive an academic education rather than prepare themselves to be housewives.  It is discussed endlessly, from all possible angles.  Can a woman both marry and have a professional life?  If so, which should take precedence?  Is the academic obligated to stay single (and celibate)? This philosophical debate is personified in Harriet and Peter’s love affair.

How pertinent are these questions to a 21^st century reader?  Sadly, almost a hundred years later, they are still relevant, but not enough to make up the majority of the book, or to overtake the question of the destructive “poltergeist.”  Gaudy is interesting for its history of women’s rights in academia, but I will look for a more current writer for my mysteries.

Many popular science magazines are reporting on research published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Bird watching, a complex skill, contributes to neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to continue to restructure itself and adjust functions even in our senior years.  And like anything else, the more it is exercised, the better the brain can perform.  Learning a new language or playing a musical instrument does a similar thing, but the study on preserving mind function was done on bird watchers. 

But what about the others? Well, this isn’t a fairy tale. In Nathan Harris’s The Sweetness of Water, there is no “other side;” there are no knights in shining armor. There are just ordinary people, full of flaws, who stumble through life, usually doing what is easiest. But the opportunity to do something that matters comes to them. The ones who make the brave choice are not immediately showered with success and happiness.

The setting is the South at the end of the Civil War when slaves have just been emancipated, and Confederate soldiers are returning home.  Two young black men, freed slaves, are living in the woods, making their way to one of the tent cities that have sprung up.  Two white men, soldiers about the same age, best friends since school, have just come home.

One set of parents welcomes the social changes. They have often held views that were different from their small-town neighbors, and they do so now when they employ the two freed blacks to work on their farm and pay them fairly. The other set of parents insists that things will go back to how they rightfully were. Maybe the Negroes won’t be slaves, but they will be kept in their place.

The returning school mates share a secret that, when exposed, becomes the match to the tinder. Deep seated prejudices explode, damaging more lives than the war.

But House of Day, House of Night isn’t new.  It was written twenty years before Plow, and has just been republished to take advantage of the interest in her since she won the Nobel in 2018.

The term for it is “constellation” novel. There are fragments of stories, ideas, observations, which range from one page to a full chapter.  The main character, who is unnamed, lives in a small rural town in Poland with her husband/partner R.  She tells about her days walking in the woods and mushroom hunting. (I never heard of so many unusual kinds.)  There is an elderly neighbor, a wig maker, who emerges only in the spring. They tell each other folk tales such as the one about Saint Kummernis, written by a monk who very much wanted to be a woman. 

In the book, one subject sparks another and Tokarczuk doesn’t hesitate to move from one odd, creative idea to another.  Two or three characters return periodically to give the book some cohesion.  There is the recurrence of her online dream group, people who post their dreams from the previous night. We are taught the history of the area which had originally belonged to Germany but is now repopulated with Poles from the eastern part of Poland which had been ceded to Russia.

I love her use of metaphor, personification in particular, which is creative and edgy. I have to remember though that this is a translation.  How much is Tokarczuk and how much is her translator?  Here are some favorites:

…the clouds drew aside, revealing the moon, suspended like a bombshell, which began to rise over the allotments, got tangled in the fruit trees, and then shot straight into the sky, clearly on view as it took possession of the entire earth.

The sun was slowly disappearing…the shadow on the floorboards was creeping farther forward…finally it reached our backs…painlessly and imperceptibly, it swallowed us.

Of interest to the gardeners out there: R tells the story of the slug family.  He describes the master of the house.  At night he glides through the grass…he eats wet lettuce and tender young zucchini shoots.  He enjoys gnawing holes in them, but it’s not out of malice – it is his form of creativity.

If you’re interested in something quirky, with regular pop ups of perceptive ideas, this is a book to try. If you want a traditional story, I’d pass.

Nova has moved to a small Cornish town with her fiancé where, as part of her job in a community center, she starts a book club. One of the members, a Miss Marple wannabe with time on her hands, has many theories about murder.  Arthur, a caregiver for a wife unable to read any more, is looking for reading suggestions and company.  Ash, a gangly lovesick teen wants to impress a would-be boyfriend.

Trouble comes to the community center when money earmarked for a new roof is stolen.  When the mother of the prime suspect is murdered, the book group mobilizes to find the murderer and save the center and Nova’s job.

If that bothers you, feel free to say swoodles (sweet potato), coodles (cucumber), or broodles (broccoli). Just don’t let the terminology spiral out of control, or you might end up with an impasta on your plate.

A century ago, collecting the down left behind by the ducks was part of a self-sufficient lifestyle.  People on the small outer islands fished teeming waters, ate eggs from massive flocks of birds, and sold the eider down.  Now, the natural habitat is so changed that the ducks need assistance to survive.

Anna had lived the expected life; she married, had children, worked at a job in town that she enjoyed. But she had heard about the independent women who lived on the outer islands caring for the ducks and had been taken there to visit by her father who also loved that lifestyle. When she was fifty, she answered an advertisement for a duck woman on one of the islands.

Each spring, during nesting, she lived on the island, building safe nest boxes and protecting the birds from predators.  She became an expert; she saw her duck numbers increase, and eventually brought the eiders back to an island they had abandoned. Recognition came from UNESCO, making this area a World Heritage Site. Twenty years later when Rebanks joined her, it was Anna’s last season with the ducks.

The pace of this memoir echoes the pace of life on the islands. Both are slow, deliberate, observant.  Rebanks notes the small changes as spring progresses, the bite of the wind, the swelling of peony buds.  We learn about their meals of fish, potatoes, and pancakes and how the three duck people pass the time on a rainy day.  There is the art of making a nest acceptable to a picky duck mother and a tremendous amount of hard physical work.

Is it worth it?  If the ducks are unable to survive on their own, should humans devote a large amount of time and resources to helping them (and by extension other endangered animals)? After a whole season of work by three people, there was enough eider to make two duvets.

If the payoff isn’t monetary, or usefulness to humans, what then?  What is intimacy with something wild worth?

How could we give them up, these wild birds living the lives they’ve lived for millennia?  Isn’t there room for wildness in a 21^st century world?  Where do we envision wilderness 200 years from now? These are the looming questions behind this quiet beautiful story.

The top writers of the day, artists whose work we admire, who have won the big prizes, are as callow, jealous, and ambitious as can be.  They would do anything, anything, to be published, receive an award, be admitted to the “club.”  Such is the main character and many of the people he meets.

David is a gifted writer desperate to be published and acknowledged.  When he moves into a house and learns that the other tenant is a big-name successful writer whom he idolizes, he makes the mistake anyone would and assumes this is the break he has been waiting for. He is wrong and his idol is detestable. But David is no better. As he fights tooth and claw to get ahead, we see his career succeed, while his integrity disappears.

This is a wonderfully plotted story with an unnerving depiction of the need for success.  I understand that a person and his product are two different things. I drive a Tesla, after all. But getting to know the main character and watching his ascent/descent was just too painful.

Her previous novel, The Grey Wolf, which is actually the first half of a two-book whole, ends with the realization that the plot Chief Inspector Gamache and his staff had uncovered was only the first step.  There was still a problem.  But what else was going to happen?  They weren’t looking for the perpetrators of a crime – not yet – but trying to prevent something unknown. Whatever it was involved government officials, in both the US and Canada, at the highest level.

What develops is a sophisticated plot concerned with water supplies, mega forest fires, and global warming, all intertwined with power and greed.  Gamache matches wits with the black wolf to stop political chaos.

Three Pines, that mythical village of safety and home, plays a smaller part in this novel than others.  This might be all right.  There are only so many allusions to fresh hot brioche and seared Arctic char that a person can read.

Our three main characters meet on the beach.  Eddie, the dad, brings his daughter Anna to meet Dexter, soon to be his new boss. It is the Depression, and Eddie, with a quasi-union/underworld job on the docks, needs more money. Dexter, with his mob connections, think he can put him to use. Anna has been brought along as the family Dexter wants to look over. Years later, after Eddie has disappeared, Anna will meet Dexter who probably knows, or was responsible for, what happened to her dad.

As World War II begins, Anna is working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard as an inspector, substituting for the men at war.  She watches the deep-sea divers in their heavy equipment who do underwater repairs.  Fascinated by them, she applies for the job, but it is the 1940s, and such dangerous work is not for a woman.  She perseveres and because of the dire need is eventually accepted.

Egan loves to intertwine her characters, jumping back and forth in time and space, showing us the growth, or at least change, in each one.  Anna was the most fully developed and tied the two men together.  Their stories weren’t so clear to me as I never understood exactly what motivated them or what they did wrong.  Hers was more typical, a sexual awakening, a woman wanting to work in a traditionally male job.

This is a historically accurate, well researched depiction of life at the time, the end of the depression, the beginning of the war at the Navy yard, nightclubs, prejudices.

It was not unusual for a god to want a beautiful woman or to stir up the sea to sink a ship.  Humans met nymphs in the woods; princes spoke with goddesses.  Prometheus gave the gift of fire.

Giving us entrance to this time is Circe by Marilyn Miller. Circe was the daughter of sun king Helios and a nymph who was the descendent of a Titan. When she discovers her magical powers, and confesses them, Helios, and still more powerful Zeus, confer.  They are afraid of this womanly magic and exile her to a deserted island.  With nothing else to do, Circe patrols the island, learning the secrets of its herbs and developing ever more powerful potions.

Although she may not leave, others may come to her, and they do.  Daedalus, famous crafter of wings, brings her a loom.  Odysseus, exhausted on his way home from Troy, stops for supplies and stays through the winter.  A son, Telegonous, is born.

Circe used her solitude to discover who she was. She observes the mortals – how hard they must work to perfect a craft, and compares this to the gods who flick a finger to get what they want. Her portrayal of unlimited wealth and power is a timely warning. These ancient gods are cruel and care for nothing but themselves; even they are corrupted by too much power.     

At first there is no reason to suspect anything other than natural causes.  But odd things start to happen.  She is mugged; she is run off the road while visiting her aunt on the Big Island; her boss’s briefcase is missing. 

Her visit to her aunt who is a traditional healer doesn’t give her the respite she wanted.  As she follows her to the mountains to look for medicinal plants, she hears noises in the bushes and sees a large pua’a, a pig-like shape.  Soon there is a strong floral smell, a Hawaiian warning.

As danger surrounds her, Storm makes use of her Hawaiian spiritual beliefs to ferret out fraud and murder in the law office.

Both my reading groups chose short story collections this month.  I thought they would be easy reading. Sit down, relax, read a story. Not so. Each was dense, often with an unexpected ending that required rereading to see what I missed.

The women rarely do well in their relationships with men.  Some stories appear to be set in the 50s and talk about subjugation. Others are more timeless.  A man dealing with his wife’s fatal diagnosis flirts with a young girl hired to help while the sick wife waits in the overheated car.  A man infuriated by his work situation dies still ranting, oblivious to his wife’s feelings of loss.  A woman meets a man she had a crush on when they were children and hopes for a reconnection.  But a child of his has died and the walls around his current life are insurmountable.

Each of Munro’s short stories creates a scene with detailed descriptions of character and place. Events from the past weigh heavily on the situation and help set the mood.  When the climax comes, it is a jolt: maybe it is an unexpected surprise; it might be the upwelling of a deep complex emotion; or rarely, the revelation is just plain satisfying.

The commodification and objectification of women in the stories is appalling to a twenty first century reader.  Without a bit of shame, men of a certain class abandon their wives and go out nightly to get drunk and evaluate the available prostitutes. No Christian moralizing here.  This behavior is expected.

Another theme is the devastation of war.  A woman muses on how her town has changed and realizes there are no dogs. The author leaves it to the reader to think about why not. In a different story, an eccentric old woman, unkempt and muttering, lives in a crumbling building (symbolizing traditional Japanese culture?) and remembers her prewar life when she was a published writer.

These stories were written as Japan was being changed by Western influence and the conflict between the two cultures was strongly felt. The first tale could not be more explicit.  A young man, travelling in Paris, is forced home to take on his family responsibilities and marry.  When he can endure the traditional life no longer, he leaves his wife for the debaucheries of the city.  After six months, he becomes ill and longs for the comfort his wife could provide. (He forgot she was pregnant when he left!) He returns home to the peacefulness of the country which he enjoys for about six months…

Written by many different authors over a period of one hundred years or so, this collection brings a perceptive slice of Japanese life.

The story is a litany of the troubles of a dysfunctional life – alcohol, sex, homelessness, PTSD. I felt she used writing this memoir as therapy and I found it tiresome to read.  Interspersed with her story were histories of some individual ancestors.  They could have been used to spark the book but were trite not perceptive. (They ate salmon and berries.) 

Does she feel that her ancestors’ mistreatment was the root cause of her problems? Her rage, now, still, at how Native Americans were treated was unexpected, but maybe this feeling is widespread. I thought about the problems on reservations with depression and alcohol and how psychologists are learning that trauma and injustice can be passed through generations.

LaPointe is a talented woman, a punk musician as well as writer who lives according to her native heritage and has learned to combine these apparently disparate interests. She talks about the meaning of red paint in her native culture and uses it in her performances.

We don’t hear many Native American voices from the Pacific Northwest and I was looking forward to reading this one.  She raises provocative questions about inherited trauma and identity, but there was so much anger. Mixed reviews!

An English professor wrote this sentence and asked the class to punctuate it properly:  A woman without her man is nothing.  The men in the class punctuated it as: A woman, without her man, is nothing.  The women in the class punctuated it as:  A woman: without her, man is nothing. 

Macfarlane is fascinated with things underground. First there is the concept of it – dark, hidden, burials – and the connection with our own subconscious. Most of the book, however, is not about ideas but about the places he has explored.  He writes about caving to find subterranean hideouts, old cities, and underground rivers. He climbs glaciers to understand the secrets they held deep in ice, but which are now surfacing. He travels to almost inaccessible coastal caves in Norway’s Arctic Circle to see the dancing red figures on their walls.

Macfarlane is a superb nature writer who can write pages about the colors and sounds of glaciers and make you want to continue reading. He is an artistic observer of what we think of as the non-animate world – rocks, water, dirt. He notices their shape, texture, sparkle, smell, color: “I will remember the days that followed mostly as metals. Silver of the pass.  Iron of the bay and its clouds.  Rare gold of the sky.  Zinc of the storm in its full fury.  Bronze and copper of the sea…” He is also a brave adventurer – or crazy person – depending on your view of dangerous travel and extreme sport.

Macfarlane explores the uses of caves in the past – as burial sites, or secret hideouts during wartime. In the present, underground facilities store nuclear waste – as deep and inaccessible as possible. There is a seed bank, back-up in case of global catastrophe.  Physicists study the universe’s dark matter. (Yes, underground.)

The book is very dense and best read with a break between chapters.  It is possible to pick and choose.  If getting stuck in passageways deep underground terrifies you, read about the network of fungi and how they connect the above ground trees.  There are provocative ideas, nail-biting adventure, an abundance of unknown (to me) facts.

The land is bleak and arid, alternately freezing and broiling, but the intrepid travelers see the best. They “travel through the stars” in the still hot desert night.  They navigate the washboard roads and bike up the passes in Tibet and Nepal.  Throughout the memoir, and again in the epilogue, Harris cites the kindness of strangers – people who fed them dinner and let them pitch their tent in the yard. One woman (a mother of four who was younger than they) washed their hair.

As Harris tells their story, she ruminates on many things.  What exactly is the use of a border?  How does wildlife conservation work in a poor country with a hungry population?  (This question after a police officer offered to share his lunch of lamb, made from the protected Marco Polo sheep he was hired to care for.) Why do we spend billions on space exploration when we don’t know what a rhino says when it snorts and sidles into the grass?  Harris’s far-flung philosophizing might be more interesting than the isolated places they visited.

Why do it?  Why go on a harrowing bicycle trip full of hardship and worry? A partial answer comes from Alfred Russell Wallace (co-discoverer of natural selection) who says that one of the essentials of life is “an adequate change of occupation.” Do something different! Or – some people just have adventure in their blood. 

The fields were honeyed with light as the sun set, and they gave off the warm smell of hay… another night on the Silk Road, with silence settling over the fields and the crickets resuming their own strange incantations, spells that conjured beads of dew from blades of grass and lulled us to sleep under a smoke of stars.

Qwill has taken a few days’ vacation, staying in a cabin on the river.  Koko, always mysteriously prescient, is suspicious of some of the neighbors.  What is really going on in the adjacent woods? are they taking photographs? panning for gold? or something more nefarious?  The plot moves at a leisurely pace with many diversions into the history of life “400 miles north of everywhere” and the quirky characters who live there.

In Jim Qwilleran, Braun has drawn a character that allows readers to indulge an almost universal fantasy.  What would it be like to suddenly inherit a fortune? (Billions in his case.) We can allow ourselves to identify with Qwill who has the energy, brains, and generosity to use it well, all while solving the latest murder.

It was occasionally the companion to amphifa, Portland’s now famous frog.  Then there is auntifa, seen next to photos of protesting old ladies.  And two favorites– Make America Read Again and MAGA: Make America Gracious Again. 

In this autobiography, Rivera tells some stories about his childhood: between two and four years of age he was allowed to roam the woods with only a goat to watch over him; he had his first sexual experience at 9 with a voluptuous 18-year-old; at 10, he was a military genius who astounded the generals.  Hmmm.

The bulk of the book emphasizes his dedication to painting.  He describes individual murals and what he hoped to accomplish in them; we hear his side of the many controversies he was embroiled in.  There are opinions about his contemporaries, his travels, and studies. 

Viewpoints on the Mexican political scene, his belief in communism and dislike of capitalism appear throughout.  He proclaims a love for the peasants, but the stories he tells are all about the wealthy heads of government and business who sought his company and bought his paintings.

Women, his four wives and numerous sexual exploits, make up the third major part of his story.  He looks at them with an artist’s eye: “Lupe was a beautiful, spirited animal…the curves and shadows of that wonderful creation…” The end of the book has a short essay from each wife.

Usually when we hear about Rivera, it is about his accomplishments, his painting genius. In this book, we hear his opinions in his own voice. He doesn’t do himself any favors.  He had a large ego that craved attention, a disdain for conventions, and a love of chaos and excitement. (Sound familiar?) He saw the world from a different perspective. Maybe it is too hard for someone to be a revolutionary artist and conventional at the same time.              

In The Book Club for Troublesome Women, Marie Bostwick tells about life in the 60s and how Friedan’s book was one of the sparks that started the women’s movement. For Margaret and her three friends, it was life changing.  We follow these traditional housewives and mothers into their first forays with careers, business, and higher education.

At first, I wasn’t impressed with Bostwick’s book.  The fact that there could be more to a woman’s life than housekeeping is no longer news. But for the younger generations who didn’t live through the 60s, the potential tradwives, it might be an eye opener.

One of the best parts of the book is the message of the importance of support and help that friends can give to each other.  This is a fine piece of social history told through the voices of four thoughtful gutsy women.

Google’s AI reminded me that Harper Lee’s mockingbird symbolizes innocence. In Walker’s story, a young French troubadour has written a song about Catalan independence (the province of Spain that Walker expounds on).  His lovely folk song has become embroiled in a political firestorm.  Spain wants to ban it; France is incensed that one of their own is being censored.  But is the problem really between these two closely related countries or is there a third-party lurking in the background manipulating the situation?

Walker is very interested in the minute details of French Perigord history (his second home). This book reflects that interest as well as international espionage, military history and weapons.  It also gives a nod to devotees of the more personal, cozy mystery genre with a second story line about a woman whose abusive ex-husband has been released from prison.

One of the best parts of Walker’s books are the endearing details about life in the small village of St Denis, especially the delicious food and wine.  His main character, Bruno, casually whips up simple feasts featuring gazpacho from his garden vegetables or capon from the local butcher. I’m always so impressed with his hospitality. Bruno routinely invites old friends, people he has just met, or casual business acquaintances to dinner at his house. Out-of-town visitors are offered his guest room.  His generosity creates a feeling of community and is an example to us all.