EJL2623

Unlikeable Characters

Revisado: 03-27-23

I both get why other people live this book and found it irritating. Just didn’t like the characters over the long haul. Very good narrator so if you want to read it via audible it’s a good choice.

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Amusing but doesn't touch the first book

Revisado: 10-03-22

In the quasi-sequel to The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, Alan and Julius end up catastrophically taking off in a hot air balloon and being picked up by a North Korean ship. We have no clue what happened to Alan's wife or their money, as they appear to have spent it all and to be in significant debt to the hotel where they live. Because Alan (partially accurately) spins a tale of his being an expert on development of nuclear weaponry, their lives are temporarily spared but soon it is clear they must get out of North Korea. How they do this would be a spoiler but, of course, Alan meets the new Swedish prime minister, the foreign secretary, President Trump and Angela Merkel in the course of their adventures and efforts to subvert Kim Jong-Un's nuclear ambitions.

This was not as robustly political and visionary as the first book and, like others, I liked the narrator for the first novel far better Steven Crossley, than Peter Kenney, who read this book. I did not like his voice for Alan and I found his Korean and Russian accents as well as Alan's raspy voice distorted words so that I did not understand pieces of the dialogue. There is a plot involving a white supremicist in Sweden and a woman who becomes a love interest for Julius. It had its moments but was not great. Another absurd novel, which is something I look for, some funny bits, but ultimately, just meh. Not horrible. Probably not worth my time.

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Quirky Story of a "Lovable?" Old Guy

Revisado: 09-24-22

OK. I can have a very sick sense of humor and like stupid stuff when it's quirky and bizarre and imaginative. So sue me. Maybe it's cause I listened to the audible version of this novel but the story starts out with the idea that Allen, who is just turning 100, is kind of viewed as mischievous because he drinks too much vodka and that he is a sweet old guy who needs to be returned to the old age home. This notion that Allen is ever in his life going to be an innocent victim is quickly dispelled in the Forest Gump is immoral and arguably evil and yet still lovable romp of a story. You have to suspend way too much disbelief to read this… and I did. So when Allen's past is rolled out in alternating time lines with an improbable present day adventure that begins with his taking a bus as far as fifty crowns will get him, you understand why he's capable of so much more. In his life, Allen has met and served many world leaders, without much regard for what side he is serving so much as "how he can be of help" with his extensive knowledge of explosives. His abilities make him useful in very unfortunate ways, but growing old is inevitable so the story does open with his through the window departure from an old age home, with only his "pee" slippers on his feet. recommend it and obviously it got reprinted a gazillion times, so I was surprised it has less than four stars and so many detractors on Goodreads. Definitely a matter of taste… or more accurately, of no taste.

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Lovely Fantasy about Korean Culture, Family, Time

Revisado: 08-28-22

My nine year old granddaughter and I were going on a short road trip and I selected this novel for its themes and for the fact we could "read" it from start to finish on our trip. What a wonderful choice!! Maya lives with her mother, who works constantly. They used to be closer, but about a year ago, her grandmother (her Hulmonee in Korean) moved in. Hulmonee requires care due to her early Alzheimers and much is left to Maya. Maya eventually agrees to cook Korean food with Hulmonee and finds herself being carried back in time to specific times and events in her family's past. You can watch what happened in the past, but you cannot be seen or heard or change the past. And yet it turns out that there are exceptions to the rules and they have significant impact on Maya, her mother and Hulmanee. Slowly, Hulmonee shares the information about Maya's family that her mother has held to herself, but Maya still cannot learn anything about her father. He is a hands-off subject. During the course of this short novel we learn about Korean dishes and cooking, holidays, family, friendship, love and memory. All in a fanciful wrap of fantasy and reality perfectly balanced for both the adult and the child in the car!

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Chicago 1893: Hull House " White City" Murder

Revisado: 08-14-22

Having been a mystery buff for over fifty years but a historical fiction buff for less time, I never read the Gilded Age Chicago Mysteries. I'm delighted that this was reissued and that I chose to listen to it recently. Evangeline (Engie), a wealthy single woman of marriageable age, teaches at Hull House and has become immersed in Jane Addams' and Helen Gates Starr's mission, when a very promising student is found dead in an upscale hotel. Elsa, a smart, curious and beautiful German immigrant is dead and her twin, Franz arrested for her murder. Engie ropes in her childhood friend Freddie, an aspiring journalist stuck in a law career he hates to investigate. She is fairly sure the police are more focused on Franz's political leanings, which are anarchistic, than what really happened. This is a well plotted, though given away too early, mystery about class, women's roles, Hull House, the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, full of temporary buildings that cost a fortune to build and human beings. Children still earn a living in factories instead of going to school. The murder of a poor young woman is solved quickly, her death unimportant. Engie moves between all of these worlds, enjoying her wealth and privilege but also committed to raising others up. This is a fun, engaging novel with great characters. As to the narrator of this audible book, she was GREAT, five stars EXCEPT for Freddy's voice. He's a major character and the voice she chose for him grated. So one star lost but overall not a deal breaker.

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Fun for all sometimes: Insightful throughout

Revisado: 06-12-22

This is a series of anecdotes all horrifying, in fact, but written by a comedian and gifted writer and performed by both sisters, mostly Amber Ruffin. Most of the stories expose isolated incidents of or long periods of racism experienced within neighborhoods, rural/suburban communities, public school classrooms and church youth groups experienced by one person, Lacey Lamar, in her native Omaha, Nebraska and surrounds.

The thing is, when you hear one of these stories after another and you've heard about or observed a few similar episodes of both casual or out there racism or racist microagression, this "funny" set of stories about what the writers admit are NOT unusual are not really that "crazy" as in "funny." It makes one feel kind of sick and angry (Well, as a white person with white tears). Most of the categories were not super new to me in content, though some were very unusual and the sheer volume is mind-blowing. (And I grew up in an area of PA that houses many, many people like those of Omaha with out there white supremacy biases and casual stereotyping comments and racial profiling that continue to give today and everyday).

Since this is portrayed as a fairly funny work, and my mood was off, I decided to imagine how one sees the humor in every single thing that these sisters put in their book. Apparently they could have made the book many times bigger and all the kids in their family, now adults, could add at least book's worth of stories. So I said to myself, "relax into this and get some insight into how people experience these things while you're at it, instead of just feeling pissed off fool." And what I got was an incredibly entertaining and educational look into as well as something of a memoir about a fascinating Black family in Omaha, a couple of really interesting women and their sisterly relationship, more laughs than expected and a desire to read every book they ever write again. AND. It pisses me off and makes me sick, but that takes me to what I started saying long ago when white acquaintances or coworkers expressed various racist views, "What is there about me that makes you think it was okay to say that about me? Do you think I'd approve of racist comments or ideas?" And despite her clearly not setting out to educate people like me, I did get so much from this book. I'm glad I listened. I'll probably buy a hard copy for the pictures they had to describe for us audible readers, albeit in a satisfying manner!

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Story of an Enslaved Woman

Revisado: 04-27-22

NOTE: This book is not called "The" Yellow Wife. It is called "Yellow Wife"
Yellow Wife tells a tale of Pheby Delores Brown, an enslaved woman whose life we follow from a fairly privileged position on a plantation to serving as the concubine of a cruel man who runs a jail/breaking house/auction service for enslaved people in Richmond, Virginia. The novel has been around for awhile now and the reviews already tell those who are interested that this book pulls no punches about slavery in the United States and this is a good thing. Every act of violence and depravity is central and necessary to the theme of this story and all of us need to face these truths. But read this when you can endure the complete lack of humanity and what it took to treat people as property. This is a totally engaging tale, inspired by some real characters and events but fictionalized so that the differences are not represented as what "really" happened, but as what could have happened. It is incredibly and richly imagined, down to the personalities of Pheby's eldest son, born of love of a man from her plantation and her daughters, born to the jailor. Every one of us knows that we have made choices in our lives we do not prefer but that are driven by context and circumstances. What Pheby does is sometimes horrifying, but she is a person with no agency and every time she exercises blatant free will, there are increasingly serious consequences that remind her she is under the full authority and will of her owner. As her mother says, she is not to ever be a slave in her mind, but the reality is, she is enslaved and must make every decision and carry out every order accordingly. I listened to that audio version of this book and very much enjoyed the narrator, whose understated manner of reading let us feel the horror from the words alone. Well done!

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El Salvador and understanding.

Revisado: 12-22-20

I read this because— years ago, years AFTER the vast majority of the events in this memoir— many of us awakened to the deaths of Catholic workers, to the disappeared, to our governments’ military aid to complicity on the wrong side of a civil war. I went to protests. I read and listened to and watched the news. But many of us, me included, have a surface understanding only. I often think about that era so the child we sponsor through Save the Children is from there. Near my daughters house is a large El Salvadoran refugee community. So I was drawn to this book but I had no idea that Forche was about to take me on an journey full of the detail s of the era — just before all out war — as she travelled through El Salvador with a man named Lionel. She spent months there, with people who had nothing, with US officials, with priests and nuns, with with the wealthy, with resistance fighters, with prisoners, with members of the government/military. She spent time in cities, remote villages, barren countryside. And years later, when it was safe, she bore witness in this book. To those she saw dead in the road or in coffins or in the photographs from high school, the last good picture taken before they disappeared. Her exposure to such an array of people and their circumstances and her poetic details make this a compelling and also a painful read.

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