Duplicate Death by Geogette Heyer
Ah, one of my all-time favorite authors! It’s rare I can come across a new one of hers, since I’ve read so many, but I was fortunate today. For those poor souls who are unfamiliar with this author, her main genre is what is known as Regency Romance. I had never once considered reading anything of the sort, until people I trusted kept nudging her in my direction. Boy were they right. If you would like a taste, try The Grand Sophy – so funny! […]
Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp
This is a used book that I picked up at some library sale eons ago, because I recognized the title. It had been made into a 1940s “woman’s” flick that starred Jennifer Jones, and that was about all I remembered. I was curious as to how closely the movie might have followed the book, but decided to read it first. Judging that our introduction to Cluny is that she is an orphan in her late teens, taken in by a rather sour uncle who is […]
The Marrowbone Marble Company by Glenn Taylor
When I grew up, the surfaces of my childhood were sand, scraggly Bermuda grass, and gravelly asphalt for roads. My parents, who grew up back East, had skills that I never had an opportunity to learn as a child, such as roller skating. Even learning to ride a bike was a fairly dodgy proposition. And one of those old school skills, for my Dad, was shooting marbles. I understand he was pretty damned good at it. The “Marble”, in the title of this book, is […]
The Silentary by Antonio Di Benedetto
Written in 1964 by Argentinian writer Di Benedetto, The Silentary, or the “maker of silence”, is set in a nameless Latin American city in the early 1950s. The nameless narrator is a young man who aspires to be a novelist, and silence is the one thing he cannot control at all. For no matter where he goes, noise is always there. He shares an apartment with his mother, and has a friend from work (a nameless bureaucratic agency), and a girlfriend, Nina, who soon moves […]
Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
My mom’s family is solid Norwegian – I am only second generation American on that side. So much of this book struck home with me. Those people can work, and so nonchalantly, too. Many don’t realize that until fairly recently, Norway was a very poor country, with steep rocky soil and a very short growing season. Most of the men were out on the sea for most of the year as fishermen or merchant seaman, while the women stayed home to tend their […]
The Secret Lives of Numbers: A Hidden History of Math's Unsung Trailblazers by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell
I got this for a Christmas present – retired math teacher and all – and it turned out to be quite enlightening. These types of books tend to run more along the “Hey did you know that a lot of important math discoveries were made by – wait for it – women and non-European white males? That includes the lady with the best nickname ever, the Witch of Agnesi, based on a botched translation. My theory is that these ladies came up with these amazing […]
