Chapter One Hundred Ninety-Six: Radium Girls

Kate Moore's non-fiction book Radium Girls makes for powerful listening--it was often difficult to bear because the subject matter was so affecting, even as I desperately wanted to find out the ultimate fate of the women at the center of this narrative.  The radium girls were teenagers and young women hired to paint watch dials with luminous, radium-based paint in the years following WWI.  They were taught to point their paintbrushes frequently using their lips, in order to paint the numbers as neatly and quickly as possible.  At first, it was the ideal job--it offered well-paid and well-regarded work in the company of dozens of other young women--but after a few years, several of the dial painters began to fall ill with strange, horrible, and--at first--unexplainable symptoms.  I don't want to give away much more, but this is basically an account of extreme corporate greed and baldfaced deceit, with a hefty dose of acute human suffering as the result.  At turns legal drama, medical thriller, and family saga, this book is not for the squeamish or faint of heart, but it tells a really important story of two groups of women in two different radium plants who persisted in their pursuit of justice for themselves and for future generations of industrial workers.

Chapter One Hundred Ninety-Five: The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

The Romance Reader's Guide to Life by Sharon Pywell is a novel that combines several genres: while historical fiction is dominant, aspects of suspense, mild romance, and the paranormal are present.  (For those of my readers also in the Boston area, this novel is set in Lynn, MA, adding some fun local flavor, too.)  But sisters Neave and Lilly are the main focus of the story, which follows them as, after losing their jobs to soldiers returning after WWII, they start their own very successful cosmetics business together, each complementing the other.  But Lilly, as you discover in the first chapter, is going to wind up dead, and Neave will be in danger as a result (hence the suspense aspect of the story).  Excerpts from Neave's favorite teenage romance novel, The Pirate Lover, are interspersed with the main narrative, connecting with Neave's life in interesting, if not always subtle, ways.  This was a darker novel than I'd expected based on its title and cover, but it certainly held my interest!  If you're looking for something a little different, you might consider The Romance Reader's Guide to Life.

Chapter One Hundred Ninety-Four: Boneshaker

I don't read a lot of steampunk, so I don't have much to judge it by, but I really enjoyed Cherie Priest's Boneshaker.  Set in an alternate-history Seattle circa 1880, the premise is that our heroine's late husband had been a mad scientist who had destroyed much of Seattle and unleashed a noxious gas that turns humans into zombies--perfectly and gruesomely referred to as "rotters."  Sixteen years later, Briar is left with a wayward son and a ruined reputation, and when her son ventures into the desolate Seattle to try to learn more about his shadowed past, Briar has to follow him to have any hope of rescuing him alive.  With air pirates, undead, a creative setting and a really kickass heroine, Boneshaker offers a gripping adventure story that, if you're at all like me, will keep you interested until the final page.

Chapter One Hundred Ninety-Three: Slade House

I didn't get what I was expecting (a story about a community of misfits) from David Mitchell's Slade House, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this twisted haunted house story.  Each chapter is from the perspective of a different "guest" at Slade House (hint: the so-called guests are never seen again), and we slowly get enough information to figure out what's been going on at the mysterious Slade House.  The end doesn't offer much resolution, so if that puts you off, this may not be the book for you, but if you're looking for a milder horror story, or  if you're already gearing up for Halloween, Slade House is a contemporary take on the creepy tale that is worth your time.

Chapter One Hundred Ninety-Two: The Wedding Bees

When The Wedding Bees: A Novel of Honey, Love, and Manners by Sarah-Kate Lynch came across the circulation desk at work, I figured it might make good light reading for an upcoming trip.  I didn't end up having time to read in while on vacation, but I really enjoyed it when I got around to it!  In addition to being well-written, it offers a fun (if implausible-seeming) New York City apartment building as its main setting, and the sort of loveably quirky and flawed cast of characters that I generally appreciate.  I think the subtitle sort of sums up the book, in which the well-mannered Sugar Wallace, an urban beekeeper with a knack for making friends and caring for neighbors, finally--with the help of her new friends and her bees--confronts her past romantic and social disasters.  It's not the most unpredictable plot, but I appreciated Sugar for her kindness to others and, as you've surely noticed by now, I'm a sucker for a happy story, so if you're looking for fun fiction with a heartwarming heroine, I'd definitely suggest The Wedding Bees.

Chapter One Hundred Ninety-One: Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002

Hello readers, and sorry for the long wait since my last post!  The summer was far busier than I expected, not that I haven't been reading and listening to a lot of excellent books!  But for now, I want to write about David Sedaris's newest, Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002.  I listened to this on audio--he reads his own work, which makes it so much more personal, as excerpts from someone's diary should be.  Really, give it a listen.  It took me a few discs to get really into Theft by Finding, but I felt my patience was rewarded and by the end, I was sorry to part ways with this book and found myself missing the sound of his voice in my car.  While some of the diary entries were familiar to me from Sedaris's other personal essays, many were not, and I always enjoy his wry observations on the absurdities of humankind.  And somehow, even describing some of the grimmer aspects of human behavior, Sedaris always leaves me with a sense of hope, if not for humankind on the whole, than at least for the possibility of finding the humor that's lurking in the people and situations around me.

Chapter One Hundred-Ninety: My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

Now that I'm nearly done with grad school, and therefore almost human again and possessed of time to do more leisure reading and write about it, I can get back to this blog!  Fittingly, I'm making my return writing a book that was both a graduation gift (thanks, Grandma!) and a memoir of another avid reader.  Pamela Paul, now editor of The New York Times Book Review, has kept a diary in which she lists what she's read (her Book of Books, a.k.a. Bob) since her late teens.  This book is the basis for this very readable* memoir, which focuses not so much on the books she's read but on how her reading habit has shaped her as a person and the course of her personal and professional life.  (Hint: you don't end up editor of the NYT Book Review by not reading.)  If you like memoirs, or if you like books about the power of reading, I'd definitely recommend My Life with Bob.  (See also Chapters Fifty-Five (2/14) and One Hundred One (11/14) for two other readers' memoirs that I particularly enjoyed.)


*Except for the chapter on children's literature--all I could hear were my many children's literature professors' voices (and, I'll admit, sometimes my own critical voice, too) asking all sorts of piercing questions about Paul's blithe assumptions about children's books.