Bookin' It Thru Life

"This is the fictionalized account of the real-life, cutthroat rivalry between two of America's earliest, preeminent paleontologists, Edward Drinker Cope of Philadelphia and Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale. "  So describes the USA Today's Dan Oldenburg in his May 2017 review of this delightful book.  Historical fiction with some reality tossed it?  Adventures with dinosaur bones?  The wild west?  A coming of age book?  I'm in! I've read many of Crichton's books over the year with varying degrees of enjoyment...I think as a general rule I like his stuff well enough but I generally find the stories more compelling than the writing.  This book, published posthumously, was more polished than some of his other works.  I found it delightfully entertaining and it made me want to revisit his collection to see if in my advanced age I would like them more than I recalled.  Alas, I haven't gotten around to doing this yet. If you like this sort of thing, I rec

Picked up off the deep discount shelf at Barnes and Noble- could have left it there and been no worse off.  But, I was heading to the beach, I needed a book to read on the plane and the kids were getting antsy...so I bought it.  A mixture between a pyschological thriller and a mystery, it was not a bad "beach read" if you have low expectations for such.  I left it on the bookcase at the beach house for some other desperate beach goer to read...there was no way I was dragging it back to Minnesota. I should not be so hard on it, I did finish it and it did keep me guessing for most of the book.  But there were a couple of overriding issues for me.  I could not really relate to the characters...the premise of the book was that these young women were invited to live in a dream house but the invitation came with strict rules regarding how one was supposed to live in such house-I just could not relate to being willing to live in a place where there could never be any dirty dishes,

My 14 year old daughter read this book and said she liked it so I picked it up.   It was ok…but my overriding sense was that it could not decide if it was supposed to be a supernatural tale (was it?  ) or not.  There ended up being a reasonable, rational explanation for everything, if you could buy into the fact that the mother was suffering from some sort of mental health issue.  I didn't particularly like the book and I did not think it was especially well written but I think it was aimed at the "young adult" crowd so my expectations should have been lower to start off. Bearable, Just Barely #6

I found this book in a used book store ‘round about 1993.   It intrigued me then-a Richard Adams book that I had not heard of (Watership Down, anyone?) and which upon reading defied all expectations.   It’s the story of a young girl who was sold into slavery by her mother, became the concubine of a wealthy spymaster and was positioned to (and did!) become a hero for her country.  What's not to like? On the reread, the book has traits of soft porn (I know, I know, but I gotta tell it like it is) but it doesn’t feel as risqué as it actually is because all of the “naughty” words are replaced with words in the language of the book which makes everything just a bit remote and disconnected.  The book seemed really long this time around-I don’t recall it taking so long to get through and I can’t really account for that.  I mean, I think I probably read as fast now as I ever have…  In terms of the book, Mia is a tremendous adventure story, a coming of age novel, a story of fri

I read about this book a while ago and thought maybe I’d read it but sort of moved on without picking it up at the time.   When I found it on the sale rack (you know, $4 for recent hardbacks, gotta get me some, I can’t resist a book on deep discount) I thought ah, sure, I’ll give it a try.  I was pleased that I did. The book centers around two families living on either side of the border of a modern day Indian reservation.   Each family has a five year old son.   One of the men kills the other family’s child in a tragic hunting accident and as recompense, he offers his own son to the family of the slain child.   Devastating, right?  And that does not even take into account how his wife felt about the "trade". Its ultimately a book about these two families, the town they live in and the school and parish they attend.   It’s about taking in strays and making sacrifices for others.   The characters felt real and fresh.  The author has mastered the trick of conveying sh

Billed as a psychological thriller this book documents the aftermath of a couple’s honeymoon where they find “something in the water”.   It was surely that-they did indeed find something in the water.   And it had all the trappings of a thriller but I just was not quite “thrilled”.   First, I had some issues with the way the author told the story.   The book was told in the first person and there were no signs that she was a unreliable narrator, yet she kept second guessing herself and having other characters react in ways that were inconsistent with the story that she was telling.   And the disintegration of her relationship with her husband…odd.   My kids asked what I was reading about and I said it was a book about a person who made one tiny misjudgement and then another and then another and suddenly had gone so far wrong they could not recover without ever having realized it was going south.   But really, even the initial missteps seemed obviously wrong.   I don’t know, I am