It’s Monday, What Are You Reading? 4-17-23

We had a weekend houseguest who needed to catch a 9 PM flight home to Ireland on Sunday night, so I thought “Let’s have dinner in Boston first!” Forgetting it was Boston Marathon weekend.

Loretta’s Last Call is a country bar we’ve been wanting to check out for line dancing on Sunday night, and with today’s being a Monday holiday in Massachusetts, I thought, what better time to go when we have to go to the airport anyway? I had a bit of a wake-up call when the only dinner reservations available were 4:15, 4:30, or 6:30.

There must be a Red Sox game that afternoon. (Loretta’s is one block over from Fenway Park.) Yes, so there was. But that’s OK, we’ll make a 4:15 reservation and leave extra early to drive in to the city and get parked before the game lets out. We’ll probably have time to kill before we need to be at the restaurant, but that’s OK. (Ha!)

Neither my husband nor I follow sports or we might have remembered that Major League Baseball recently changed its rules to speed up the play, shortening the length of a game. We got stuck on a narrow bridge in the flood of pedestrian fans coming out of the stadium – all leaving just as we were trying to come in. It couldn’t have been much worse for timing!

I wish I had taken a picture of the crowd swarming all around the stopped cars on the bridge. It was wild! Our Irish guest was filming out the window from the back seat. At least, the Sox had won, so the crowd was in a good mood.

After about 20 minutes, when we had only crept forward a couple of car lengths and had been anxiously watching the GPS extend the time for our arrival at the parking lot (where we had a reserved 3:30 spot and then a 15-minute walk to the restaurant) to after the time of our dinner reservation, the two of us passengers hopped out of the car to walk to Loretta’s and order drinks and appetizers while we waited for my husband to finally park the car and get to the restaurant.

After such a busy weekend, I’m glad to have today off to recover. Patriots’ Day is only celebrated in two states; I’m lucky to be in one of them!

Currently Reading

A Good Cry by Nikki Giovanni

As energetic and relevant as ever, Nikki now offers us an intimate, affecting, and illuminating look at her personal history and the mysteries of her own heart. In A Good Cry, she takes us into her confidence, describing the joy and peril of aging and recalling the violence that permeated her parents’ marriage and her early life. She pays homage to the people who have given her life meaning and joy: her grandparents, who took her in and saved her life; the poets and thinkers who have influenced her; and the students who have surrounded her. Nikki also celebrates her good friend, Maya Angelou, and the many years of friendship, poetry, and kitchen-table laughter they shared before Angelou’s death in 2014. — From the publisher

Since this month is National Poetry Month, the MassBook Reading Challenge is to read a book of poetry, so I’ve borrowed from the library A Good Cry: What We Learn from Tears and Laughter, a poetry collection by Nikki Giovanni. Mainly chosen because I liked the title and the theme, but it’s also a good follow-up to my reading of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in February, since two poets were friends.

An Elegant Defense by Matt Richtel

The Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist “explicates for the lay reader the intricate biology of our immune system” – Jerome Groopman, MD, New York Review of Books

An Elegant Defense by Matt Richtel contains so much scientific information about the human body’s immune system(s), some of the sections (i.e. everything but the personal case studies) have been slow going for me, as I’m trying to absorb at least the basics into my unscientific brain. The author does very well at putting the complexities of immunology research into understandable language, but since there’s only so much simplification you can do before you get too far from the actual science, the book is taking me a while to read.

Recently Read

Come to This Court & Cry by Linda Kinstler

“In her gripping debut, Kinstler traces how the crimes of World War II have been prosecuted and justice attempted over generations — how memories have been formed and used, usurped and omitted.” – The Washington Post

Come to This Court & Cry: How the Holocaust Ends (Public Affairs, 2022) by Linda Kinstler grew out of the author’s investigation into family history – specifically her Latvian grandfather on her father’s side after seeing the name Boris Kinstler in the pages of a Latvian spy novel that was based on the real-life Herberts Cukurs known as the heroic “Latvian Lindbergh” or as the “Butcher of Riga” and Nazi fugitive, depending on what you believed. Cukurs was assassinated in Uruguay in 1965 by the Israeli Intelligence Agency Mossad rather than being brought to trial for war crimes.

In her book’s prologue, author/journalist Linda Kinstler writes:

“Growing up, I had been told that my paternal grandfather had disappeared after the Second World War, and until very recently that had seemed like explanation enough…He did not come up in family conversations and there were no photographs of him on display. It was only later that I learned there was good reason for the silence: Boris had indeed been a member of the same killing brigade that Cukurs had belonged to, the Arājs Kommando. He had become a KGB agent after the war, and then he had vanished.”

Come to This Court and Cry describes how the author’s research takes her deep into questions of historical guilt and innocence after a genocide such as the Holocaust, and who determines the answers. Can the truth be uncovered by bringing war criminals to trial years afterward, when survivors are few and their testimony can be discredited and dismissed in court, or even by historians?

Read more about how the book Come to This Court and Cry came to be written in this article by the author (a friend of my daughter and daughter-in-law) published in The Guardian: Nazi or KGB Agent? My Search for My Grandfather’s Hidden Past.

Verity by Colleen Hoover

Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller in Hardcover
USA Today Bestseller
The Globe and Mail Bestseller
Publishers Weekly Bestseller
Whose truth is the lie? Stay up all night reading the sensational psychological thriller that has readers obsessed, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of It Ends With Us.

I can see why Colleen Hoover’s books are so popular and are getting people hooked. They are fast-paced and easy to read. They might have twists, but there’s no subtlety or ambiguity; no reading between the lines or effort from the reader is required. No character development or layers of meaning to get in the way of the story, either.

Verity is the second and last book by Colleen Hoover that I’ll be reading, but she has legions of fans and certainly doesn’t need me!

Currently Listening To

An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good by Helene Tursten

Maud is an irascible eighty-eight-year-old Swedish woman with no family, no friends, and . . . no qualms about a little murder. This funny, irreverent story collection by Helene Tursten, author of the Irene Huss Investigation series, features two-never-before translated stories that will keep you laughing all the way to the retirement home. — From the publisher

Recently Listened To

Fairy Tale by Stephen King

Fairy Tale wasn’t my favorite Stephen King. An exciting enough story when you get to it through the extraneous details (24 hours long on audio!), but all the “as my uncle would say”‘s or “a favorite saying of my mother’s was” doesn’t cover the fact that the contemporary 17-year-old narrator, Charlie, thinks and talks more like someone who is a recovering alcoholic around the author’s age (75).

Calling the bathroom “the jakes” and using the expression “party hearty” are just two examples that stood out for me as not something someone Charlie’s age would say, and would possibly seem dated even for his father (an alcoholic) to say. And making his young character a fan of classic rock and the Turner Classic Movies channel isn’t enough to make the character’s voice sound like a teen of his generation rather than of the author’s.

The great audio narration by Seth Numrich is what kept me listening! Here’s the AudioFile review: https://www.audiofilemagazine.com/reviews/read/221248/fairy-tale-by-stephen-king-read-by-seth-numrich-stephen-king/

This post is linked to “It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?” hosted by Kathryn at The Book Date. Check out the link-up party there for more book lists!