Books and Books, Some More

Mistress of the Monarchy: The Life of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster, by Alison Weir
Pardon me while I go all history-snob for a moment: Weir spends most of the introduction to this book explaining how there are barely any scraps of historical evidence about the life of Katherine Swynford. No letters, no objects, barely any mention by contemporary chroniclers. On the bright side--some places where she lived are still around (in varying states of decay)! That's a pretty good sign that there just isn't that much she can say about Katherine Swynford. (The parts about her various homes and places she might have visited were, by the way, parts I skipped.) I am therefore ambivalent about this book. Alison Weir is, no question, my favorite history author, and she does a good job with what she has, which is A) the broader context in which Katherine lived and B) . . . not much else. I liked learning more about John of Gaunt (Katherine's lover and later, husband) and what was going on in the later reign of Edward III and the reign of Richard II, but I just couldn't help but roll my eyes when Weir milked the teeny little compliment one chronicler paid to Katherine (in passing) for the third time. Weir's overarching argument isn't that great, either; it's basically "Katherine is really really important because a lot of really really important people were descended from her." Frankly, of all the contributions to history a person can make, "being an ancestor" is one of the least impressive. Props to Katherine, I suppose, for being swell enough for John of Gaunt to marry her and legitimize the children they'd already had (making it more possible for those children and their descendants to rise to high positions), but that still doesn't mean she did much of importance. To put my reading experience a nutshell: I made it through the whole book, but I'm still not convinced it needed to be written.

The Secret Life of Bees by someone, I'm sure
Well, ok, I'm not going to claim I "read" this. I got to, like, page five, where there's a flashback to when the little girl protagonist was four years old and (in unconvincing circumstances) shot her mother (I would have put a spoiler alert, but this was seriously by about page five) and that's when I was like, "Nah." If any of you have read it and it turns out I'm wrong and that it's actually great, you can let me know (but I'll be a little surprised if you do).

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer
I love this book. (The title made me think it was going to be one of those books about sassy middle-aged ladies who like to talk about sassy middle-aged things, but it is not.) I love the characters, I love the plot, I love that I got to learn more about how the Germans invaded and occupied English territory in World War II, which I only learned about like two months ago, because nobody ever talks about it. It's crazy. I liked this book so much that it didn't even bother me that it's an epistolary novel (even though I was dismayed when I first started the book--"Oh man, it's all letters?!). It's great; go read it.

Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
That's right, I finally read Freakonomics! It did not disappoint. Not all of its chapters are created equal--the stuff about crack dealers, for instance, is much better and more convincing than the stuff about baby names--but it's well worth the read.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon
This one is interesting because it's written from the perspective of an extremely autistic teenager; it's believable because Haddon (as the about-the-author informs us) spent years working with autistic teens. Even if I hadn't read that on the back cover flap, I'd still feel like this gave a pretty accurate picture of what it would be like inside an autistic mind--it just feels authentic. This isn't one of the all-time great books I've ever read, but it is unique, and I recommend it.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley
This is a quirky little book about a quirky little girl in a quirky little family in quirky little England. It starts out promisingly but unfortunately gets dumber and dumber as it goes along. It's a mystery, and it turns out that Alan Bradley is no good at writing mysteries. Either the clues are thuddingly obvious and you have to wait for a couple of chapters for the protagonist to put together what you already know, or the protagonist finds something out and applies really stupid logic to come up with some off-the-wall conclusion that turns out to be correct. Also, the protagonist, a precocious 11-year-old girl, is alternately preternaturally brilliant and crushingly stupid, depending on narrative convenience. (One more minor complaint: Bradley doesn't necessarily write convincing British people. When one minor character popped up with a stereotypically English bumpkin accent when nobody else around spoke at all similarly, it occurred to me to wonder if the author was even British. And it turns out he's Canadian. I'm not saying that a non-English person can't write about England, but if I asked the question in the first place, he probably wasn't doing a good job.) The second book in this series just came out, but I'd need to be paid a small to moderate sum to read it.

Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen
After I finished this book, I read a couple reviews on Goodreads complaining that the story was too melodramatic and hackneyed. I thought about this, realized it was kind of true--the main characters are practically perfect, the villains are super evil, and the events that happen to them are extremely dramatic. I also realized I didn't care. I didn't notice any of it myself, so none of it pulled me out of the story. The book is about an old man in the present day thinking back to the time about 1930 that he worked with a seedy little circus. It's about two-thirds circus flashbacks and one-third sad old man in a nursing home (but an interesting sad old man in a nursing home). I'm not going to give away the ending, because I recommend reading this one, but I have to tell you I got a kick out of it. It certainly isn't a perfect book (the way that the author wraps up the stories of the main character's circus friends leaves a lot to be desired), but I really enjoyed it.