The Bookish Life of Nina Hill

The Bookish Life of Nina Hill
by Abbi Waxman
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9781472266217
Publication Date: July 9, 2019
Pages: 335
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Headline Review

Meet Nina Hill: A young woman supremely confident in her own... shell.
Nina has her life just as she wants it: a job in a bookstore, an excellent trivia team and a cat named Phil. If she sometimes suspects there might be more to life than reading, she just shrugs and picks up a new book.

So when the father she never knew existed dies, leaving behind innumerable sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews, Nina is horrified. They all live close by! She'll have to Speak. To. Strangers.
And if that wasn't enough, Tom, her trivia nemesis, has turned out to be cute, funny and interested in getting to know her...
It's time for Nina to turn her own fresh page, and find out if real life can ever live up to fiction...

Back when I read The Garden of Small Beginnings, I realised I’d read Abbi Waxman before, but I could find no record of my reading The Bookish Life of Nina Hill. This drove me more than a little cray-cray at the time because I remembered reading the book; I distinctly remembered many, many plot points. But nowhere on my too-many book sites was there any record of it. I did finally find the book on my bookshelves (the Read bookshelves), and accepted the fact that I must have read it during the Great Reading Slump of 2020, and it fell through the cracks of my book-life despondency, never to be acknowledged until now.

I’ve recently ordered Adult Assembly Required, and as it involves a few of the characters from Nina Hill, I thought now would be a good time to re-read tBLoNH.

I love this book. Waxman writes incredibly likeable characters, laugh-out-loud dialog that’s witty as hell, and buried at exactly the right depth in all this sunshine-y fun is the acknowledgment of Very Real Life in the form of crippling anxiety. Nothing is downplayed or made light of, but it’s not turned into a massive melodrama either. I don’t have crippling anxiety, but Nina Hill and I share a lot of other character traits (actually, I probably fall closer to Lydia, her niece, but never mind), and I’d like to think that if I did have crippling anxiety, I’d handle it with the same optimism and humor Nina Hill does, even if she sometimes visits self-denial-land more often that she should.

My loquaciousness is still sleeping off the 3 day weekend, so that’s really all I’ve got. It was a great book, even the second time around, and a lot of fun to read. I can’t wait for Adult Assembly Required to arrive, and in the meantime, I’ll likely re-read The Garden of Small Beginnings too.

The J.M. Barrie Ladies’ Swimming Society

The J.M. Barrie Ladies' Swimming Society
by Barbara J. Zitwer
Rating: ★★★½
Publication Date: April 5, 2012
Pages: 271
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Short Books

When Joey Rubin stumbles upon a group of elderly women swimming in a lake one freezing January morning, she thinks they must be mad. But then they dare her to come in...

Joey, an overworked New York architect, is in the Cotswolds to oversee the restoration of Stanway House - the stately home that inspired J.M. Barrie to write Peter Pan. It hasn't been easy. The local residents aren't exactly welcoming, and then there's the problem of the brooding caretaker, a man who seems to take every opportunity
to undermine her plans. She soon begins to feel that she can't do anything right.

Until, that is, she discovers the J.M. Barrie Ladies' Swimming Society and begins to take a daily dip with them in their own private Neverland. For Joey, meeting Aggie, Gala, Lilia and co. is a life-changing experience, the beginning of a friendship that will transform her in the most remarkable of ways...

What my daddy would have called a “fair to middlin'” story. It was good, evenly paced, well-written. Interesting without being exciting. A page turner without being suspenseful. It was extraordinarily realistic in its portrayal of adult friendships – pretty much all interpersonal relationships – without being dramatic.

A very ordinary story, well done.

Bitch in a Bonnet: Reclaiming Jane Austen from the Stiffs, the Snobs, the Simps and the Saps (Volume 2)

Bitch in a Bonnet
by Robert Rodi
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9781499133769
Publication Date: August 10, 2014
Pages: 514
Genre: Books and Reading
Publisher: Createspace

Novelist Rodi continues his broadside against the depiction of Jane Austen as a “a woman’s writer … quaint and darling, doe-eyed and demure, parochial if not pastoral, and dizzily, swooningly romantic — the inventor and mother goddess of ‘chick lit.’” Instead he sees her as “a sly subversive, a clear-eyed social Darwinist, and the most unsparing satirist of her century.”

In this volume, which collects and amplifies three years’ worth of blog entries, he combs through the final three novels in Austen’s canon — Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion — with the aim of charting her growth as both a novelist and a humorist, and of shattering the notion that she’s a romantic of any kind.

I’m probably ruined for any further literary criticism at this point. This book was so much fun, and Rodi’s analysis laced with so many quips and jokes and sass, I doubt I’ll ever have any patience for staid, thoughtful, academically minded critiques.

I say “Rodi’s analysis” but that’s probably building the lily a bit. Rodi is an author (whose work I’ve never read), and a man who loves Jane Austen’s work. Not because it’s romantic, but because it is absolutely everything but romantic. He’s a true fan of her writing, her satire, her wit, her ability to create characters that are deeply flawed and darkly funny. He maintains that the prevailing viewpoint that Austen is a writer of romances is the fault of Hollywood and the BBC, who don’t know who to treat her books as the dark comedies they are, and fall back, instead, on the relationships.

Volume 2 covers Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and he goes through each book in detail, using a lot of quotes and discussing, in detail, what’s going on in the stories, as if he’s sitting with friends in a version of a bitch and stitch gathering. Only without the swooning over Colin Firth’s wet t-shirt contest of one. There’s no academic speak here and quite a few moments where I laughed out loud.

The thing is, Rodi’s correct: when you really, deeply read Austen, she’s not even a little bit romantic. She has no patience for sentiment, or affection, or weddings. I knew there was a reason I adored her books. For Austen, the more romantic a character, the bigger fool she made of them, and even her heroines aren’t allowed to be great. Good, but not great; not flawless in the least, just the least flawed in a cast of fools, villains and cads.

I fully recognise that I enjoy Rodi’s take on things because it’s a form of confirmation bias, but I don’t care. I’ve ordered the first volume, covering S&S, P&P and Mansfield Park, and I look forward to delving into those with him.

Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey
by Jane Austen
Rating: ★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1975
Pages: 222
Genre: Fiction, Literature
Publisher: Folio Society

During an eventful season at Bath, young, naove Catherine Morland experiences fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who introduces Catherine to the joys of Gothic romances, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father's house, Northanger Abbey. There, influenced by novels of horror and intrigue, Catherine comes to imagine terrible crimes committed by General Tilney, risking the loss of Henry's affection, and must learn the difference between fiction and reality, false friends and true. With its broad comedy and irrepressible heroine, Northanger Abbey is the most youthful and optimistic of Jane Austen's work.

My thoughts about this book are about as uneven as the book’s narrative, but I’m … 90% sure I like this one even less than I like Emma.

This re-reading was done in parallel to Robert Rodi’s analysis of the same in his book Bitch in a Bonnet, in the hopes that he could show me this book from a more appealing direction. He didn’t, but that’s because he doesn’t think much of this book as a whole either.

As a story, there’s no there there in Northanger Abbey, and our ‘heroine’ Catherine is naive to the point of imbecility. The hero is an ass, charming and witty though he may be, and even Austen knew it:

…I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought. It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine’s dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will at least be all my own.

The narrative structure is meandering, at best.

But the satire is delicious and I lived for the moments, like in the above quote, that Austen breaks the fourth wall and talks to the reader as herself. Because this book was originally written and completed before all her other books (but published posthumously), her humor is much more in-line with her juvenile works. In other words, her wit is rawly scathing, and lacks the subtleties she developed in her adult works. When she has a go at someone, you know it. It’s a lot of fun.

I’m definitely not sorry I re-read it; Austen’s worst is still miles better than almost everybody else’s best. But I can now confidently put Northanger Abbey and Emma at the end of the shelf, and save my indulgent re-reads for the other 4 novels.

The Library Book

The Library Book
by Susan Orlean
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9781782392262
Publication Date: November 1, 2018
Pages: 319
Genre: Non-fiction
Publisher: Atlantic Books

After moving to Los Angeles, Susan Orlean became fascinated by a mysterious local crime that has gone unsolved since it was carried out on the morning of 29 April 1986: who set fire to the Los Angeles Public Library, ultimately destroying more than 400,000 books, and perhaps even more perplexing, why?

With her characteristic humour, insight and compassion, Orlean uses this terrible event as a lens through which to tell the story of all libraries - their history, their meaning and their uncertain future as they adapt and redefine themselves in a digital world.

Filled with heart, passion and extraordinary characters, The Library Book discusses the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives.

When I reviewed The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, I said I dislike true crime, yet here I am again, talking about a true crime book. Sort of.

The publisher’s classification for this book is ‘true crime’ – and it does cover in detail the devastating fire at Central Library in Los Angeles in 1986, but the case remains unsolved, the suspect deceased, and some questions remain about whether or not it was actually arson – so was a crime even committed?

In the same way The Orchid Thief by the same author was nominally about the theft of protected orchid species from parkland, but was really more about the obsessive allure of orchids that drives some people to extremes, so The Library Book is nominally about the Central Library fire, but really a history of the LA Library system and an ode to the importance and joy of libraries in general.

For those that enjoy True Crime, this book is going to be frustrating; for those of us that aren’t fans of true crime, this book will fall somewhere in the range of ‘more palatable’ and ‘perfect’. For me, it was close to perfect. I was fascinated by the narrative of the fire itself, how bad it was, how challenging it was to put out, the whole walk-through of the day itself. The logistics of the aftermath and conserving as many of the books as they could. I was interested in the investigation; the manpower, the few slim leads, interviews with those involved. Mystery catnip! The few chapters devoted to the suspect, Harry Peak, were good, if disturbing. LA really has more than its share of people who live in their own reality.

Orlean interspersed all of this with a history of the Library system, from its modest start as a fee-based lending library at the edge of the wild west, to the massive city-wide system it is today, including concise bios of the many men and women who headed up, ran, and directed the library. A few of these chapters crawled a bit, but there were enough characters involved to keep things mostly lively.

I genuinely enjoy Orlean’s writing; she’s a journalist who knows how to do her research and engage the reader without trying to solicit a reaction in one direction or another. A most excellent read.

DNF: The Cursing Mommy’s Book of Days

The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days
by Ian Frazier
Rating: ★★
isbn: 9780374133184
Publication Date: January 1, 2012
Pages: 244
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Farrar Straus and Giroux

Based on his widely read columns for The New Yorker, Ian Frazier's uproarious first novel, The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days, centers on a profoundly memorable character, sprung from an impressively fertile imagination. Structured as a daybook of sorts, the book follows the Cursing Mommy―beleaguered wife of Larry and mother of two boys, twelve and eight―as she tries (more or less) valiantly to offer tips on how to do various tasks around the home, only to end up on the ground, cursing, surrounded by broken glass. Her voice is somewhere between Phyllis Diller's and Sylvia Plath's: a hilariously desperate housewife with a taste for swearing and large glasses of red wine, who speaks to the frustrations of everyday life.

This book has been on my TBR for years; the title appealed to me in the moment – I’m not a mommy but I can curse with the best of them. A few months ago, I had it in hand to purge, but I read the flap and the author is a New Yorker columnist so I held it back. After reading Are We Having Fun Yet by Lucy Mangan, I thought it would be the right time to read this one as a comparison of sorts: how would the American version of the concept compare to the UK version? How would a male author’s portrayal of a columnist-working-from-home mother of two stack up against the same dynamic in the UK?

It didn’t, obviously. I wasn’t able to make it through February. But I’m not sure this is a condemnation; it’s just a very different delivery and one that ultimately didn’t suit me at all because – hilariously – of the swearing.

Do you remember the comedian Sam Kennison? For those that don’t, he was an American stand-up comedian and actor. A former Pentecostal preacher, he performed stand-up routines that were characterized by intense sudden tirades, punctuated with his distinctive scream, similar to charismatic preachers. The Screaming Mommy is the Sam Kennison of mommy diarists, and I think you have to have a certain sense of humor to appreciate it. Entire paragraphs of all-caps profanity, using f*ck as every part of speech, usually in the same sentence.

Apart from that, it’s not bad, but still didn’t work as a book; if I skipped those tirades, the narrative still failed to connect with me and frankly, I found some of it disturbingly hypocritical – like when she’s wondering why her 12-year-old son needs to be medicated to control his angry, emotional outbursts in school, as she’s smashing an entire sink full of dishes with a hammer because she tried to rinse her hands off, and the splash back from a dirty cereal bowl stained her silk blouse.

In the author’s defence, this book was based on a series of columns written for The New Yorker, and as columns, I think they’d have worked much better; outbursts like this are probably easier to chuckle over when they’re fed to the audience once a month. All together like this in book form, it’s just way too much. Lucy Mangan manages to convey the same frustration and angst in a way the reader can laugh with, rather than feeling as though they’re laughing at the crazy person who escaped the asylum, and she manages to do it with a semblance of continuing plot, or at least character, development.

Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms

Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms
by Richard Fortey
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780307275530
Publication Date: December 11, 2012
Pages: 332
Genre: Natural Science, Non-fiction, Science
Publisher: Vintage Books

Evolution, it seems, has not completely obliterated its tracks as more advanced organisms have evolved; the history of life on earth is far older—and odder—than many of us realize.

Scattered across the globe, these remarkable plants and animals continue to mark seminal events in geological time. From a moonlit beach in Delaware, where the hardy horseshoe crab shuffles its way to a frenzy of mass mating just as it did 450 million years ago, to the dense rainforests of New Zealand, where the elusive, unprepossessing velvet worm has burrowed deep into rotting timber since before the breakup of the ancient supercontinent, to a stretch of Australian coastline with stromatolite formations that bear witness to the Precambrian dawn, the existence of these survivors offers us a tantalizing glimpse of pivotal points in evolutionary history. These are not “living fossils” but rather a handful of tenacious creatures of days long gone.

Written in buoyant, sparkling prose, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms is a marvelously captivating exploration of the world’s old-timers combining the very best of science writing with an explorer’s sense of adventure and wonder.

This ended up with 4 stars because I struggle with timelines that stretch over billions of years. I find the science riveting, but when the text starts throwing around Ages and Periods like Cretaceous and Mesozoic and Mesoproterozoic like we’d talk about events that happened to us last week, my eyes glaze over and my comprehension rate plummets through the floor.

Still Fortey deserves better; he’s an excellent writer, one who mixes personal anecdotes with hard science very well. He only slipped up once and made evolution sound like a sentient decision making process on the part of the specimen in question, but perhaps he was only making a point.

In this book he visits a list of life (flora, fauna, and microscopic) whose branch on the tree of life has survived the ages, evolving through catastrophic events only to wind up in the here and now, where humans will likely figure out a way to kill them off. Except, sadly, for the cockroaches, and, happily, the sea monkeys. He ties these fascinating species of today to their ancestors of the past and discusses where current thinking places them on the tree of life: are they closer to the trunk (truly amongst the first) or are they closer to the tips of the branches (the newcomers, or – in our case – the party crashers).

This is one of those books that, because of their built-in uniqueness in flora and fauna, the antipodean part of the world becomes the star. There are a lot of critters featured here that are found in New Zealand and Australia. Not taking anything away from my home country, these were my favourites. I need to be on the lookout for the velvet worm, and I have a new appreciation for the extreme mothering practices of the Echidna. I think seeing a lungfish might be kinda cool.

Fortey does get one thing wrong: he says no mammal is venomous. I don’t know if this is because the book was written before the slow loris was found to have venom glands, or if that discovery just stayed under his radar. It’s a small thing in the overall body of knowledge in the book and has no consequence in the context of the subject matter under discussion.

Not an easy reading book, but one that’s worth the time and effort.

NB: Some quick research into the venomous mammal bit, and the slow loris is the only venomous primate; of course there are a handful of other venomous mammals, including my beloved (male) platypus. I tried to find the reference in the text again, but I can’t remember which chapter it was in, and the index yields nothing for venom, so now I’m thinking he might have been referring to primates, not mammals, and the slow loris discovery was post-publication.

The Last Curtain Call (Haunted Home Renovation Mystery, #8)

The Last Curtain Call
by Juliet Blackwell
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 9780593097939
Series: Haunted Home Renovation Mystery #8
Publication Date: June 30, 2020
Pages: 318
Genre: Fiction, Mystery, Paranormal
Publisher: Berkley

Mel Turner can’t resist the chance to bring the Crockett Theatre, a decrepit San Francisco Art Deco movie palace, back to life. But there’s a catch for Turner Construction: Several artists are currently squatting in the building, and they aren’t the only ones haunting the once-grand halls of the historic theater.…

When one of the squatters is found dead, the police department has a long list of suspects to investigate. Meanwhile, Mel and her fiancé, Landon, are remodeling an old house for themselves, and Mel finds being on the other side of a home renovation project more challenging than she expected.

When Mel discovers that the former owner of the Crockett Theatre died under mysterious circumstances, and that there just might be a connection to the ghost haunting her own attic, the case takes a new turn—one that could bring down the curtain for the last time.

One of the few remaining cozy writers and series I still find dependable. Juliet Blackwell is a good writer; I enjoy her characters, her imagination for the paranormal, and her plots … well I can’t think of any of her plots that failed to amuse, and I can’t think of one of her books where the mystery was transparent. Her diversity of characters feels natural (the San Francisco setting probably helps) and I’ve been reading her long enough to know that they existed to greater or lesser extent long before it was ‘on trend’ to do so.

This one made me ache to explore an old, abandoned theatre, although I’d prefer mine to be ghost free, thanks; especially the kind of ghosts who fill the theatre seats and follow you around with their blank, unseeing stares. The connection between the theatre Mel is renovating and the house she’s renovating for herself felt a bit too coincidental, but it bothered me so very little that it amounts to nit-picking.

A fun book, and a fun series that would be perfect for several Halloween Bingo squares.

The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World

The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World
by Abigail Tucker
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 9781476738239
Publication Date: December 1, 2016
Pages: 241
Genre: Non-fiction, Science
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

House cats rule back alleys, deserted Antarctic islands, and our bedrooms. Clearly, they own the Internet, where a viral cat video can easily be viewed upwards of ten million times. But how did cats accomplish global domination? Unlike dogs, they offer humans no practical benefit. The truth is they are sadly incompetent rat-catchers and pose a threat to many ecosystems. Yet, we love them still.

To better understand these furry strangers in our midst, Abby Tucker travels to meet the breeders, activists, and scientists who’ve dedicated their lives to cats. She visits the labs where people sort through feline bones unearthed from the first human settlements, treks through the Floridian wilderness in search of house cats on the loose, and hangs out with Lil Bub, one of the world’s biggest feline celebrities.

Witty, intelligent, and always curious, Tucker shows how these tiny creatures have used their relationship with humans to become one of the most powerful animals on the planet. The appropriate reaction to a cuddly kitten, it seems, might not be aww but awe.

This should have been a better book; Tucker is a self professed, life long lover of cats, and I understand her need to be objective about the subject matter – I applaud it, even. But just about all of this book felt like an apology, or an over-correction of bias. Or both.

The Introduction professes the text to be an overview of the history of cats as domesticated animals and their intersection with culture and pop culture. It mostly succeeds, but really, just barely. I think her motivation underneath it all is to point out that cats are cats and cats do what cats do, but humans are, at the end of the day, at the heart of the destruction that cats get blamed for. After all, without human interference and transportation, house cats would still be a wild animal confined to the region around Turkey. Unfortunately, if that’s the message she intended, she was a little too subtle about it.

There were highlights; I loved that she pointed out that cats are the only domesticated animal that chooses to be domesticated and the only domesticated animal that can successfully return to the wild. When people say cats are independent, I don’t perhaps think they realise just how independent they truly are. I admire them for that.

Otherwise, I mostly just argued with the text as I read it, and all in all I found The Inner Life of Cats: The Science and Secrets of Our Mysterious Feline Companions by Thomas McNamee to be a superior text all the way around. I learned a lot from that book, and it left me with a lot to think about. This one, I was just mostly happy to have finished.

A Perilous Perspective (Lady Darby Mystery, #10)

A Perilous Perspective
by Anna Lee Huber
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 9780593198469
Series: A Lady Darby Mystery #10
Publication Date: April 19, 2022
Pages: 389
Genre: Fiction, Historical, Mystery
Publisher: Berkley

Argyll, Scotland. July 1832. After a trying few months in Edinburgh, Kiera and her husband and investigative partner, Sebastian Gage, are eager to escape to the Highlands with their three-month-old child. Kiera is overjoyed for her cousin Rye and her detractor-turned-friend Charlotte who are being wed in a private ceremony at the estate of Rye’s great-uncle, the Marquess of Barbreck, in what seems to be the perfect wedding party.

But when Kiera is invited to peruse Barbreck’s extensive art collection, she is disturbed to discover that one of his most priceless paintings seems to be a forgery. The marquess’s furious reaction when she dares to mention it leaves her shaken and the entire house shocked. For it turns out that this is not the first time the word forgery has been uttered in connection with the Barbreck household.

Matters turn more ominous when a maid from a neighboring estate is found murdered where the forged painting hangs. Is her death connected to the forgeries, perhaps a grisly warning of what awaits those who dare to probe deeper? With unknown entities aligned against them, Kiera and Gage are forced to confront the fact that they may have underestimated their opponent. For they are swiftly made to realize that Charlotte’s and Rye’s future happiness is not the only issue at stake, and this stealthy game of cat and mouse could prove to have deadly consequences.

Well, that was, frankly, disappointing. Even taking out of account the babbling about the baby, this just wasn’t anywhere near as good as her first 8 books were. The potential was there – I really enjoyed the art forgery backdrop; that was genuinely interesting and really well done. But the character development just wasn’t.

Huber seems to be stuck on a need to constantly give Kiera (and Gage, to a lesser extent) some kind of melodrama anxiety. For the first 8 books it was the fallout from her late husband’s scandalous behaviour – and that worked well while it lasted. Book 9 was a fantastically over the top drama about Kiera’s impending motherhood and how it would mix with their inquiry business. This book, it was all about her mom, who died when she was 8, and someone’s attempt to gaslight her about it. It was completely unnecessary to the plot, it was silly and it detracted from the story.

The plot of the murder was so tissue-thin transparent I can’t believe it got through a beta read. I never once, for a second, doubted who the murderer was. And the climax … oh the problems I had with the climax. Huber broke the first rule every American is taught about handguns – you don’t carry one unless you’re prepared to use it. She also tried to belie the adage “Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight”. It was preposterous, and the whole thing was unbelievable. Which is a shame; written better, it would have been diabolical, as I’m certain she intended it to be.

I went with three stars, because I’d say I enjoyed about 50% of the story; the other half would have been better had it not been so over-written. I think I’m still going to want to read the next one, but I am definitely not feeling the excited I previously felt for the newest release.