Books I Read in August

While traveling and since I've returned,  I've read several books, but I've never taken the time to write any blog posts about them. The Kindle App makes it easy to have lots of reading material even while traveling light! So you can see above, my Kindle screen with books I've read. Before the month is over, I wanted to list and briefly describe them, but if I try to review them, I'll never catch up. 

• Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda. I would call this a romantic novel, in a very French style. The characters are quirky and mainly lovable, and they develop deep relationships and commitments to one another in the course of the story. One of them is a hard-working chef -- unlike many American novels about Paris restaurants, this shows the painful and abusive side of life in a restaurant kitchen in Paris.
• Death in Brittany by Jean-Luc Bannalec. This is a great police procedural, set in Pont-Aven, Brittany, where Gauguin and other artists lived in the 19th century. The memory of the artists is at the center of this suspenseful murder mystery. I especially enjoyed reading about the wonderful meals that the characters ate, for example:
• "They ordered straight away, without much discussion. Belon oysters harvested from the river a few hundred metres away, followed by grilled monkfish with fleur de sel, pepper and lemon, washed down with a chilled, very young red wine from the Rhône valley." (p. 250).
• The Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman. This is the second of the novels about policeman Joe Leaphorn, written around 40 years ago and still wonderful to read because it's so knowledgeable about the lives of the Navajo and Zuni people in the Southwest. And very skillfully constructed. Hillerman was a master! Over the years, I've read the whole series and I'm starting over.
• The Far Traveler: Voyage of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown. I reread this to connect with all I was learning about the Viking settlements of Greenland beginning in the 10th century. It was wonderful to learn about events that took place 1000 years ago in the exact locations that we visited.
• Quake: A Novel by Auður Jónsdóttir. I enjoyed this interesting psychological novel by an Icelandic writer. There are so many Icelandic writers -- considering the very small size of the country, and I'm planning to read more. The New York Times recently published a tempting list: "Read Your Way Through Reykjavík"
• The Daughter of Dr. Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This is a scary horror story based on the work of H.G.Wells. Moreno-Garcia is excellent at turning the standard horror genre into something different, where women are more powerful and less victimized, somehow.
• The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G.Wells, one of the inventors of Sci-Fi as we know it. I had to read the original as well as the knock-off. This was first published in 1896. There are at least two movie versions, which also influenced Moreno-Garcia, I think.
• Ant Farm by James M. Jackson. When our fellow passenger Jim on the Explorer told us that he had written a series of detective novels, of course I had to read one. This is the first Seamus McCree novel in his series. I liked the hard-boiled style of the mainly first-person narrative, and I enjoyed the references to many types of birds (Jim is an avid birder) and also the numerous meals that he mentioned. Here's one of Seamus's descriptions:
• "I drowned my pancakes in maple syrup—the real thing from Vermont. Years ago Paddy [Seamus's son] had insisted I ditch the supermarket plastic-bottle stuff. He claimed maple syrup was the one sweetener that didn’t impede mineral absorption, or some such. I admired his eating habits, but usually didn’t want to emulate them. He’d live longer than I, but I was unwilling to give up meat to gain a few years of life expectancy. In this case, I didn’t care what his reasons were; real tasted better." (p. 83).

Jim Jackson and his wife Jan in the lounge of the Explorer.

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