Finished Reading:
Currently Reading:
Two books finished this week! Now we’re rocking and rolling. I’ll begin with those two first then move on to the others. First, I finished the first book in Alexander McCall Smith’s second mystery series, The Sunday Philosophy Club. On the positive side of things, I am interested enough in the characters to pick up the next book in the series. However, the plot did leave something to be desired. It took me forty or so pages in before I was really interested in the book, and overall, I feel that Smith was still trying to figure out what to do with these new characters and new setting just as much as the reader. However, some of the images that he invokes of Edinburgh are wonderfully stimulating, and doing some online research, it seems like the subsequent books in the series get better reviews.
Coetzee’s Disgrace. I’ve mentioned it in the last two reviews as an upcoming book, and I managed to complete it in a week. While it is a quick read, it is not for the faint of heart. It is a brilliant work, but it is a very brutal and harsh tale of life in modern South Africa. Coetzee’s examinations into the human condition are fascinating, and one is left with a sense of a disordered, mixed up world far removed from the sterile order sought and unattained by so many.
Speaking of harsh truths, Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded continues to pile on evidence at a bleak future. Thus far, it’s much less optimistic than That Used to be Us, but I’m hoping that the discussion of how the situation can be improved is coming soon. As it is, I’m reading it very slowly as I’m trying to digest just how oppressively immense the challenges are as presented by Friedman.
Lefler/Newsome and Link are progressing as my North Carolina history course progresses. We’re on the eve of the Revolution now. It’s interesting — I’m finding that both books provide unique perspectives on the history of the state. They each have different aspects of the history that they focus on, and ultimately I feel that I’m getting a much richer experience by reading both than I would have reading either one or the other.
McFeely’s Grant is coming along nicely. Grant and his associates are beginning to think of his reelection. I think in the reading this week, two things struck me the most. First, the sadness at the lost of Grant’s close friend and good conscience from the war, John A Rawlins. I was nearing the point of tears at McFeely’s description of Grant’s desperate scramble to get back to DC before Rawlins died and arriving only to find that he was an hour too late. It makes one wonder if the Grant administration would have been so marked by scandal if Rawlins had been around. Second, Grant’s stubborn determination to annex Santo Domingo (now known as the Dominican Republic) captured my attention. I find myself asking the same question that contemporary observers asked: Why? Why was Grant obsessed with annexing that one rather small, comparatively speaking, bit of land when he had been against the annexation of Mexico following the Mexican War? Did Grant have some kind of personal financial interest in the deal, or was it just that he was blinded by his advisers and by Sen. Charles Sumner’s equally obsessive opposition to the scheme?
I haven’t read much in Uncle Tom’s Cabin this week. The characters in the plot are still settling in to St. Clare’s estate in New Orleans, and it seems like St. Clare’s obnoxious wife Marie has been droning on and on ad infinitum. I’m hoping she won’t make much of an appearance in the book because otherwise, I’d have to reach into the fictional 1850s and slap her for her ignorant pronouncements about African-Americans. I also began a new book which I received in a Goodreads giveaway — Tether Me Not by David Dachauer. It seems that it will be about the spiritual aspects of life, but since I just began it, I haven’t formed an opinion of it yet and will likely discuss it in greater detail next week.
Reardon has been neglected yet again this week. I’m thinking that, once I finish the McFeely, I’ll try to finish Reardon before moving on to Hoogenboom’s Hayes. Also, the next book coming up in the book club is Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor, which I’m looking forward to. It’s been on my to-read list since 2009, so it’s about time to pick it up.
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