MarysLibrary

POTUS visits the bookstore

The president went shopping with his girls yesterday at Politics & Prose, an independent bookstore in his neighborhood in DC. 

Here's a list of the books he bought:

- Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End - Atul Gawande

- Junie B. Jones and a Little Monkey Business - Barbara Park

- A Barnyard Collection: Click, Clack, Moo and More - Doreen Cronin

- I Spy Sticker Book and Picture Riddles - Jean Marzollo

- Nuts to You - Lynn Rae Perkins

- Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus - Barbara Park

- Brown Girl Dreaming - Jacqueline Woodson

- Redwall - Brian Jacques

- Mossflower - Brian Jacques

- Mattimeo - Brian Jacques

- Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms - Katherine Rundell

- The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan

- The Laughing Monsters - Denis Johnson

- All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr

- Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

- Nora Webster - Colm Toibin

- Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China - Evan Osnos

Gemini by Carol Cassella

I couldn't put it down. People say that all the time about books they really liked, but in this case it was almost true. Although I did put it down on occasion, I never needed a bookmark.

Gemini is the third novel by Carol Cassella and it's the sort of novel one should read slowly. (Sorry, I just didn't have the self-discipline to saunter through it rather than dash.) Alternate chapters tell the stories of two women. First is Charlotte Reese, an ICU doctor who is struggling to save the life of a "Jane Doe" who was the victim of a hit and run accident in a rural area of Washington State. The second is Raney, a girl who grew up in a town on the Olympic Peninsula.

Slowly, as Dr Reese deals with Jane's various medical crises, the police, the hospital administration, and Charlotte's boyfriend, Eric Bryson, attempt to discover who she is and who might have injured her. And in the alternate chapters we watch Raney grow up and bond with Bo, a summer visitor to her small town.

This book isn't filled with suspense and gasps of shock, but there is one gasp on page 97 that caught me unawares. I should have seen it coming but I was so enjoying the slowly evolving friendship of the children and the quick thinking as Charlotte and her partner decide whether to treat Jane with dialysis or to take her off the machine that is breathing for her, or to do another test to determine if she was technically brain dead. The medical information that helps to explain what is happening to various characters is so interesting that it does not feel imposed on the story but rather seems to evolve from it.

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

The Rosie Project is a love story cleverly hinging on the problems of a man with mild Aspergers. He engages Rosie to help him find the perfect woman (he has a checklist) and she does, indeed, help him find what he needs if not what he thinks he wants.

I gave it 3.5 stars. It has charm and is easy to read.

He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope

Some say this is Trollope's greatest novel. The story is about a couple who struggle for control in what is obviously not a very strong marriage. When the innocent wife refused to say she had an affair with another man as her husband demanded, he broke up their home and slowly went mad because he knew he was right.

This is my fourth recorded reading of the novel, but I may have read it a fifth time back in the 1960s. A fine novel but not my favorite.

Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott

Rose Campbell is sad. Her parents have died and she has been handed over to an uncle. Uncle Alec is an MD and has been making his living as a ship's surgeon. As Louisa May Alcott's Eight Cousins begins, Rose is waiting at the old family house (somewhere on the south shore near Boston) with her great-aunts Plenty and Peace for her guardian to arrive.

She is of delicate constitution, as Aunt Myra points out, and doesn't know how to dress properly for a 15 1/2 year old, as Aunt Cora has noticed. She is a bother, says Aunt Jane. But Aunt Jessie loves her just as she is and looks forward to Rose's influence on the boys in the family. Rose is the only girl - the other seven cousins are boys.

Over the year she spends with her family her health improves greatly and she becomes a happy and charming young girl. She becomes a skilled housekeeper, does her share of nursing a sick cousin, and learns to enjoy herself.

When I read this book in my early teens I loved it. But all I remember of that early reading now is that Uncle Alec is big on clothing reform and won't let Rose wear stays and that the family creates a spectacular fireworks display to honor Rose.

This time it's a very different book. It's heavily didactic and the burden of the story is that good women have tremendous influence over men and are responsible for their behavior. Rose is able to talk two cousins into giving up cigars and another into staying away from bad companions and refraining from gambling. I do understand that women have influence, good and bad, over a lot of men. But putting the burden on women of keeping men on the straight path and reforming rakes verges on horrifying.

I have to wonder how much of this Louisa May Alcott really believed. Her father was a terrible man and his wife and daughters suffered terribly over the years of Alcott's youth. There was nothing she or her mother could have done to talk him out of his ridiculous and sometimes life-threatening decisions. Perhaps this book is his daughter's way of expressing her wish that she could have kept him from spending all the family money and could have somehow influenced him to take and keep a job.

The Monkey's Raincoat by Robert Crais

In The Monkey's Raincoat, Elvis Cole, private detective and wiseacre who collects Disney memorabilia, is engaged by a mousy woman to find her missing husband and son. When she calls Elvis to come to her house, which has been thoroughly ransacked, he recommends she call the police, but she and her bossy neighbor and friend don't want to cause a lot of talk. Elvis is on his own, though with the help of his taciturn sharpshooter partner, Joe Pike.

The twists and turns of the plot and diverse characters (a sullen teenager, a seriously bad Mafia don, an Eskimo thug) make this first in a series delightful By Robert Crais, published in 1987.

Armistice Day

When it was published 7 years ago, I gobbled up Bugle Boy, Len Chester's memoir of his years in the Royal Navy during World War II. I spotted it on the shelf the other day and took it down to re-read this Armistice Day and I'm so glad I did.

 That's the barely 14-year-old Len on the far left in December 1939. He had signed up at age 13 with the Royal Marines as a bugle boy, an age at which it was customary for those boys - soon men, whatever their age - to take the King's shilling.

Bugle Boy Chester spent the entire war at sea on one ship or another. And his memories of life aboard ship in Scapa Flow (it was often wet there), Russia (it was cold), and in the Mediterranean are amusing, informative, and sometimes, honestly, heart-stopping.