The Next Dark Age

Book 58

This has been on my shelf for awhile.  I think my book club read it back when I was in school and I interrupted the Holiday Reading challenges for it because I spotted an audio version at the library that I know had never been there before.

For a YA novel, this was intense.  And long, now that I’m thinking about it.  Illiterate German girl is sent by her mother to live with a foster family in 1939.  Younger brother dies on the journey.  Gravedigger drops his handbook or something on the ground and the girl picks it up and puts it in her pocket.  And so we have a Book Thief.

Oh, and the novel is narrated by Death.  How could this not be awesome?

Well, for one thing, it is Germany in 1939.  If the author can’t make us sympathize with our core family right away, the game is over.  So we discover that the girl was sent away because her parents were arrested by the Nazis for being Communists.  Then, we learn that in the last war, the foster-father’s life is saved by a Jewish friend who didn’t make it home.  Son of rescuer/friend needs a place to hide, so now our German family is hiding a Jew in the basement.

The friendship that develops between the young girl and the young Jewish man – two rather broken people –  illustrates the power of stories.  Books and music and the outside world and living in your own head.

As you can imagine, a whole lot of bad stuff happens.  Even with my prejudice against “you know this is going to end badly”, I loved every minute of it.

Book 57 of 50 Book Challenge and Book 2 of the Holiday Reading Challenges  

Greeley is a famous novelist/priest that I thought I might try to read someday.  Then I saw he had a Christmas book and it wasn’t too long and it fit nicely in my carry on..

And it was very good.  Three-tour Iraq war veteran has a near death experience in which God tells him to go home and fix things, particularly with the childhood sweetheart.  His first communion priest is also back in town, now the monsignor of the parish.  Redemption, forgiveness and the true meaning of Christmas.  Fa la la la la.

The cheese factor was tolerable, as was the politics.  The preaching was surprisingly low, considering it is the life’s work of the author.

I liked it.  I could read this guy again.

Book 56 of 50 Book Challenge; Book 1 of 2011 Holiday Challenges

I’ve never read Anne Perry before, but it looked like a perfectly reasonable holiday murder mystery to me.

New pastor and wife go to small town to sub for the local vicar over the holidays.  They settle in with your usual small town quirky characters when one day the wife goes to the cellar for some coal and finds the dead vicar. 

I am happy to say that I found the characters to be very pleasant on the whole.  This is important because there is not one single surprising detail in the whole of the novel.  Except, perhaps, how quickly our heroes solve the mystery. 

I did enjoy the pastor and wife telling each other, “We won’t trust anyone while we do our investigating” and they both go out and spill their guts to different people.  That was fun.

Also, there were a dog and cat that were very important to the discovery of the body that barely set foot on the canvas again for the rest of the story.  Even during the high tension of unveiling the killer, they are nowhere to be found.  That’s just not fair.

I have long said that I am not a big mystery reader.  So if I can guess the killer, something is wrong.  I totally guessed the killer.  And I guessed it early.  So I guess this was my warm-up book.

Book 55


Last year, Writers’ Theatre did a play based on Travels with My Aunt.  It was awesome, so I kept an eye out for the book.

Also awesome.  The premise is a retired bank manager – dullest man ever – meets his aunt for the first time and she pulls him into her crazy, crazy world.  It is one of those stories where the straight man is dragged into some goofy action and only realizes later that he had a really good time.

The play does a good job of keeping the action lively, but what the novel brings out is how quickly our hero, Henry, realizes that he hasn’t really lived.  It comes out subtly, a line or two at a time.  One example is when Aunt Augusta has gone abroad without him and he says:

“Perhaps it was to prove the reality of my existence that I began a letter to Miss Keane.“

The lady that he has tiptoed around for years.

Sometimes the plot gets a bit contrived, but it is a whole lot of fun.  I want to be Aunt Augusta when I grow up.

Book 54


I read about one Philip Roth novel a year.  Unfortunately, two years in a row I have picked the ones about men whose lives are entirely defined by sexual relationships.

That isn’t entirely fair.  But dude was married three times and cheated on each wife.  So the novel starts with his funeral, then tells the short story of his long life and the meditations that he did on death and dying and dying alone.

There were a couple of pretty poignant things:  one was that our Everyman (I don’t recall whether he had a name) had given up having a relationship with his two grown sons.  They never forgave him for leaving their mother when they were children.  He says something like: I am not able to apologize and explain myself any more.  There is truth in that.  When you have wronged someone, you apologize and attempt to make up for the wrong (assuming you want to continue the relationship).  If they won’t let it happen, if they just keep hammering at you, it isn’t healthy for anyone.

Because of a couple of childhood illnesses, our hero had a long-standing relationship with Death.  It isn’t exactly “another character”, but it is sort of the cloud that hangs over the novel.  I am glad it was a quick read, because however profound, this isn’t a place one wants to dwell.

Going to read some Christmas books now.