"Zero Day" by David Baldacci. ***

●  Audiobook
●  1st in John Puller Series
●  Mystery/Suspense
●  US author
●  Originally published in 2011
●  Review:  I enjoyed this thriller.  The pairing of amilitary expert and a small town cop worked well, as did the steadily increasing complexity of the case at hand.  Well done!

"Island BeneathThe Sea" by Isabel Allende. *

●  Audiobook
●  Chilean author
●  Originally published in 2010
●  Slavery in the Antilles
●  Review:   Very disappointed!  It was like sitting through a boring history lesson.  The lack of depth to the characters seemed so unlike what I expect in a novel by Allende, and overall it felt pedantic.

"Doctor Sleep" by Stephen King. *****

●  Audiobook
●  Sequel to "The Shining"
●  Originally published in 2013
●  Review:  A fabulous sequel to "The Shining", picking up with Danny Torrence wbo struggles with demons in his adult life.  The demons take multiple forms, both human and not human.  Stephen King is a master at grabbing the reader from the beginning and holding tightly as the tale unfolds.  Excellent tale!

"High Five" by Janet Evanovich. ***

●  Audiobook
●  US author
●  #5 in the Stephanie Plum series
●  Originally published in 2000
●  Review:  Another fun Stephanie Plum!

"Outer Dark" by Cormac McCarthy. *****

• Audiobook
• Originally published in 1993
• Satanic imagery....goat, figure in fire
• Journey of both characters
• Milk after 8 mo ths.....power of motherhood
• I seen the meanness of humans tili dont know why god aint put out the sun and gone away...the tinker
• Review:    Another darkly evocative novel from Cormac McCarthy! Frankly, a quote by the tinker sums up how one feels after reading about the tortured lives of these characters. I seen the meanness of people 'til I don't know why God don't turn out the sun and walk away." I don't feel that way in general, but McCarthy reminds me of the hardship people live through and keep putting one foot in front of another.US author

"The Devil's Star" by Jo Nesbo. ****

• Audiobook
• #5 in Harry Hole series
• Mystery/Suspense
• Originally published in 2006
• Norwegian author
• Review:  This installment of the Harry Hole detective series was excellent.  The plot was complex and engaging and the denouement was really well done.  As always, the reader reads a mystery and simultaneously a novel about relationships and being human.  Nice!

"Giovanni's Room" by James Baldwin. *****

• Audiobook
• US author
• Originally published in 1956
• Metaphor:  being in a foriegn country...exploring sexuality
• Review:   A powerful, moving story of self exploration.  Two young men discover a frightening truth about their sexuality, and proceed to struggle painfully with their passion and love for one another in the face of societal judgements.  An Italian and an American find themselves in a foriegn country and foriegn emotional territory.  Certainly, progress has occured since the publication of this novel, but really....when will hatred and fear stop reigning supreme?

"South of the Border, West of the Sun" by Haruki Murakami. *****

• Audiobook
• Originally published in 2000
• Japanese author
• Review:  In his classic style, Murakami once again lures the reader with his dreamlike, lyrical prose into a story of love and loves.  He weaves a fabric of past and present, duty and dream, yearning and honor.  Hajimoto loves three women during his life, for different reasons, at different depths, and with different outcomes.  How does one choose between fantasy and responsibility?  How do we reconcile ourselves with the reality of our lives with the dream of what might have been?  Murakami has a way of taking the reader into the very fabric of a character's being and wrapping us in that fabric so that we are warmed and reassured that being human is a confusing, yet survivable condition. Fantastic!

"Stoner" by John Williams *****

• Book Club Selection, January 2014
• US author, long time professor at University of Denver
• Originally published in 1965
• Setting:  Missouri, roughly 1891-1956
• Characters:  William Stoner (protagonist), Edith ( his wife), Grace (his daughter), Dave Masters & Gordon Finch (university friends), Hollis Lomax (his arch enemy), Archer Sloane (his mentor and role model)
• p.4..."At seventeen his shoulders were already beginning to stoop beneath the weight of his occupation
• p.16..."The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape."...the moment he discovered his love of literature
• Archer Sloane, the Department Chairperson 'knew' who Stoner was, recognized himself in him...a teacher
• p.31..."And so providence, or society, or fate, or whatever name you want to give it, has created this hovel for us, so that we can go in out of the storm.  It's for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear."...this from Dave Masters, who then went and died in WWI
• p.36..."The scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has aimed his life to build." ...this from Sloane when faculty are deciding whether to enlist
• p.36...."He had never got in the habit of introspection, and he found the task of searching his motives a difficult and slightly distasteful one; he felt that he had little to offer to himself and that there was little within him which he could find
• p.43..."He never went into that room that he did not glance at the seat he had once occupied, and he was always slightly surprised to discover that he was not there."..poignant
• p.100..."As  he sanded the old boards for his bookcases, and saw the surface roughnesses disappear, the gray weathering flake away to the essential wood and finally to a rich purity of grain and texture--as he repaired his furniture and arranged it in the room, it was himself that he was slowly shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible."...How I felt moving into and decorating my own home at 55
• p.113..."He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man.  It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence."...this is me
• p.194...."In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him:  that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another." how true!
• p.195...."Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart."...CENTRAL THEME OF THE NOVEL
• Don't understand concept of "given opinion"....p.199
• p.219..."Though he seldom though of his early years on the Booneville farm, there was always near his consciousness the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present to an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak."
• p.220..."As Archer Sloane had done, he realized the futility and wast of committing one's self wholly to the irrational and dark forces that impelled the world toward its unknown end..."
• p.243..."It was the force of a public tragedy he felt, a horror and a woe so all-pervasive that private tragedies and personal misfortunes were removed to another state of being, yet were intensified by the very vastness in which they took place, as the poignancy of a lone grave might be intensified by a great desert surrounding it."...his daughter's wedding
• p.250...entire paragraph about having given his love throughout his life in a manner saying, "Look!  I am alive.".......
• p.250..."H saw the sickness of the world and of his own country during the years after the great war, the hatred and suspicion become a kind of madness that swept across the land like a swift plague; he saw young men go again to war, marching eagerly to a senseless doom, as if in the echo of a nightmare.  And the pity and sadness he felt were so old, so much a part of his age that he seemed to himself nearly untouched.".....
• Review:  Reading this deceptively straightforward novel was an unexpected pleasure.  The plot is simple, telling the tale of one man's life.  A simple university professor's life.  To me the profound aspect of this novel stems from the brilliant tale of becoming.  Stoner "becomes" in the context of growing up on a farm, living through WWI, the Depression, and WWII.  He "becomes" because of his experiences of various forms of love, with wife, lover, and child. He "becomes" within the context of university politics.  Most of his life is spent in the inner world of his mind, while the outer world tends to both bewilder and horrify him.  My hunch is that this reading experience may bore some, while it may profoundly impact others.  For me, it is strongly reminiscent of the experience of reading Albert Camus' "The Stranger".  This one will stay with me for quite a while!
   

"The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin *****

• US author
• Originally published 1963
• Epigraph:  "God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!"
• Review:   I am not the first, nor will I be the last to exhort the writing of James Baldwin.  His prose is profound and passionate at the same time. As a white woman, I, of course, felt uncomfortable and unsettled as well I should, as I read this.  There is a solid thread of hope in the letter and the essay in this collection, which is what kept me reading.  I can only hope that if he were writing to his nephew today, Baldwin would be able to see some change.

"The Communist Manifesto" by Karl Marx ****

• German author
• Non-Fiction
• Originally published 1848
• Review:   I found this book among a stack my daughter no longer wanted and since I had never read it, I decided to see what all the fuss has been about.  I was surprised that it was written in 1848.  I thought it was a 1900s document.  I found it to be fascinating.  The fact that Marx really saw the discovery of America and the Industrial Revolution as the beginning of the problem was something I had not known.  I was also impressed at Marx's foresight in terms of the process of capitalism.  Frankly, I agree with much of his interpretation of the problems of capitalism and rampant materialism, which has continued to progress as he predicted.  The problem for me is that his solution does not seem viable to me.  I am no great philosopher or economist, but my sense is that there will always be leaders, and as the world population grows there will just be more of them.  I may just be cynical, but I think that putting any group in power, even the righteous proletariat, will eventually lead to greed and power struggle.  Glad to have read this.

"The October List" by Jeffrey Deaver **

• Audiobook
• Mystery/Suspense
• US author
• Originally published 2013
• Epigraph:  "Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards.".....soren Kierkegard
• Terrible narrator made it difficult to stick with
• Review:  DID NOT FINISH..... I did not engage with this story.  The experimental structure, starting in the middle and then moving backwards left me constantly calculating and I found that quite distracting. 

"The Fish Can Sing" by Halldor Laxness *****

• Nobel Winner
• Icelandic author
• Originally published in Icelandic in 1957
• Opening line:   "A wise man once said that next to losing its mother, there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose its father."......WOW
• "Parents have even more need of children than children have of parents."
• p.5..."It was odd that I should discover eternity in this way, long before I knew what eternity was, and even before I had learned the proposition that all men are mortal-yes, while I was actually living in eternity myself."
• p.7..."His constant silent presence was in every cranny and corner of Brekkukot - it was like lying snugly at anchor; one;s soul could find in him whatever security it sought."...Alfgrimur about his grandfather, Bjorn...lovely
• p.14 His grandfather held the conviction "that the money which people consider theirs by right was unlawfully accumulated, or counterfeit, if it exceeded the average income of a working man; and therefore that all great wealth was inconsistent with common sense."
• Really chuckled at the jibes about Norwegians and Danes...I have seen these consistently in Icelandic literature
• p.32..."...in Iceland barbed wire became the most desirable luxury commodity in the land for a while, next only to alcohol and cement."...LOLOLOL
• p.42..."...in the darkness the Saviour had bestowed on him,, which neither candlelight, nor oil-lamp, nor the sunrise itself, nor any illumination other than the light of a dauntless heart, could conquer."...lovely
• p.79..."...the  man who makes a pilgrimage on his knees all the way up the mountain, and the man who lives in the gilded palace on the mountain-top are one and the same person."...interesting
• p.82..."The only disgusting work ther is, is badly done work."
• p.104..."Where fish leaves off in Iceland, Latin takes over".
• p.120..."The wave of fame associated with his name was never less likely to burst through our turnstile-gate than when it was beating most strongly against it from outside."
• p.204..."An Iceland paradox:  The fish can sing just like a bird, And grazes on the moorland scree, While cattle in a lowing herd, Roam the rolling sea."
• p.210..."What a man is himself is the one thing he is not.  A man is what other people think he is. Do you imagine that the Emperor of Japan is an emperor, really? No, he's just like every other poor wretch."
• p.246..."And may things go well for you.  May things go for you according to the deserts of all those who have a purpose in life; be it great or small, it doesn't matter, just so long as they are determined not to harm others."....Parting words from Grandfather
• Review:  A brilliantly written coming of age tale set in Iceland, as only Halldor Laxness can tell it.  This is the story of a boy raised by adoptive grandparents who are, frankly, the parents I wish I'd been.  The story isn't a new one.  A boy loses his innocence and his idealism, and then must determine his own way in the world.  There is just something quite precious and profound in the manner this age old process is presented to the reader.  Highly recommend this read!