“Mammoth” by John Varley

 This book was enjoyable as light reading. It did contain some interesting philosophical observations about the nature of time. Not all of it made sense.

“Excellent Women” by Barbara Pym

 I quite enjoyed this amusing book of manners about spinsters, clerics and anthropologists in 1950’s England. Mildred is quite the sharp observer of human foibles, and I also enjoyed her descriptions of mundane activities during that era. I think I borrowed it because a critic compared this book to Jane Austen’s writing style, which I like very much. I definitely saw the resemblance.

“Final Curtain” by Ngaio Marsh

 This is the first book I’ve read by Ngaio Marsh, and I was surprised to learn she’s a woman. She wrote during the golden age of detective fiction in the 1920’s and 30’s. When I bought this ebook for $1.99, I did not realize it was in the middle book of the Alleyn series. I much prefer to start at the beginning of a series to watch the characters evolve, so likely that was one of the factors making me less enthusiastic about this title.

The book spent many opening chapters on Troy, Alleyn’s wife, and her stay at the Ancred mansion, where she was working on a commissioned portrait. The lengthy absence of a murder and of the detective bored me to the extent that I read a plot summary online. The characters were all quite well drawn, but the book did not grab me. Also, I did not like that it is uncertain whether the murderer will be found guilty, and that there were a number of loose ends about the will. Would the granddaughter, Panty, get anything after all, since the practical jokes were unjustly attributed to her. Would Cedric benefit from his mother’s murderous actions? Etc etc.

“The Hallmarked Man” by Robert Galbraith

 This was absolutely the worst book in the Strike series. Half of it was a total waste of time, as it dealt with the high school level “will she or won’t she” thoughts of Strike and Robin. Robin’s alcoholic boyfriend was a bore, and because the plot was so convoluted, and I skimmed so much, I totally didn’t care about who did what by the end. I did like that Strike finally had a decent conversation with his biological father, Rokeby. And the last 100 pages were decently riveting,  compared with the boring drivel that preceded them.  So now, Robin knows that Strike is in love with her. What comes next?

“Rashomon and other Stories” by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

 It took me years to finish this book of short stories, translated from the Japanese. They were very literary for sure, but I did not properly understand many of the Japanese cultural references. This made for heavy, but interesting reading.

“House of Day, House of Night” by Olga Tokarczuk

 It took me awhile to read this book. It’s interesting but not riveting. It is made up of short chapters about the Polish people in a formerly German town. There’s a touch of magic realism, and I do like the way she presents the idea that all things are interconnected. The style reminded me of her more famous book, “Flights.”

“The Hidden Life of Trees” by Peter Wohlleben

It took me several years to finish this book, and I couldn’t quite figure out why it was apparently such a popular international bestseller. On the other hand, it did give me great respect for trees as living/feeling beings. As usual, I don’t remember most of the facts, but I do remember the feeling.

“The Alhambra” by Washington Irving

I read this book by Washington Irving after hearing it mentioned during my tour of the Alhambra and I quite liked it.  I took a photo of the plaque saying he had been there.

I found Irving to be quite modern in his sensibilities and writing, and I very much enjoyed his descriptions of life in the Alhambra. He enhanced my understanding of the culture by including tales of older times, when Muslims were still a presence in Spain. These tales included buried gold, wicked wizards, greedy wives, wicked politicians etc etc.

Irving made the Alhambra come alive in all its historical glory, and so it is not at all surprising that this book was a key factor in bringing about the restoration of that important structure. Just imagine. When Irving lived there, he could just casually stroll about the place, enjoying its fountains, relaxing in the gardens, taking in the views from various towers, and mingling with its various inhabitants, some of whom had been there for generations. Now the place is absolutely teeming with tourists.

“The Impossible Fortune” by Richard Osman

 I’m probably growing tired of the Thursday Murder Club books. Or perhaps, this title was a weak one in the series. Instead of focussing on the relationship strengths of the earlier books, it introduced new characters, including Joanna’s husband, and Tia, a young juvenile delinquent but with brains and a heart of gold, and Suzy and Kendrick who were Ron’s daughter and grandson etc etc. I enjoyed the earlier books partially because of the ever widening circle of interesting characters, but this particular book has gone too far, introducing new characters at the expense of the old.

“ Still Life” by Louise Penny

I reread this book because it was much too saccharine for me when I read it in 2017, and yet I wanted to get on the Louise Penny bandwagon. It’s nice to be emotionally invested in a good series. 

I enjoyed the book quite a bit more in 2026. It was quite riveting, even though the writing at this stage of her career was a bit unpolished. I can definitely now see the appeal of her books.

“Our Mutual Friend” by Charles Dickens

 This book was quite the slog, and I did not enjoy parts of it because it was filled with unkind people. But Dickens handled the material more gently than a modern writer would have, and for that, I was grateful. The book is dated, of course, in its treatment of women. I was impressed with Dickens’ creation,  Ria, the Jewish “fake usurer”, who turned out to be very kind and wise. And it was amusing to have 2 con artists marry each other, expecting that the other had money. Some of the language in this book was incomprehensible to me… I don’t remember having that problem with Dickens.

"Fugitive Pieces" by Anne Michaels

 I absolutely detest Michaels' writing style. It is much too poetic and not enough story based. Eva told me it did not have much to do with holocaust misery. My reading of the book is that's all it was about. And then, of course, there was redemption from the psychological misery.

It was nice hearing about Biskupin, Poland, since I actually visited the place. I skimmed the last sections of the book because I hated it so much.

“Nosy Parker” by Lesley Crewe

 This is a story about a year in the life of a girl in NDG, during Expo 67. She did not know a thing about her mother, and her father was quite old. She made good friends, the neighbours were very kindly, and there was some darkness thrown in for good measure. The dialog was not very realistic, and an unusual number of characters were unusually nice. But the story was interesting enough that I read it rather quickly (for me).

“All Families are Psychotic” by Douglas Coupland

 A brilliant astronaut daughter with a missing hand because her mother took thalidomide. Two loser brothers and a loser father with new wife. People with aids. Pregnant people. An ultra wealthy Swiss pharmacist. The list goes on. Needless to say, the book was interesting, but I found the writing style to be quite cold and clinical. As a result, I never really got into the book, though I did enjoy the jaded, intelligent mother, who got aids via a bullet which passed through her son. She hooked up with the ultra wealthy and unscrupulous pharmacist, who was able to cure the family of aids, and in the case of the father, of terminal liver cancer.

'The Capital of Dreams" by Heather O'Neilll

 This seemed like an odd book at first. A girl wandering through a war, accompanied by a talking goose, and remembering her life with her intellectual mother. As is usual with O'Neill, the book becomes more complete and moving the closer you get to the end. The goose was a figment of the girl's imagination, to help her cope with having turned her mother in to save herself. The ending is beautiful.

The war theme was moving to me because my parents and relatives lived through a war.

“How to Read Buildings: a crash course in architectural styles” by Carol Davidson Cragoe

 It literally took me years to finish this book, which I bought in the National Art Gallery. It did contain some information which was interesting to me, but sadly, I don’t think I retained anything. 

It did not help that the book has the format of cobbled together lecture notes. As a result, some things are not well explained at all, and some illustrations, which would have worked well as slides, don’t really have much effect on a small page. That said, if this book is indeed based on a university course, I would have enjoyed taking that course.

“Valentine in Montreal” by Heather O’Neill

This was a pleasant, whimsical read, about a girl named Valentine, who had spent most of her life in the Montreal metro. She met a double, who turned out to be her second cousin, and the adventure commenced. The book began as a serialized story in the Montreal Gazette, much in the fashion of many of Charles Dickens’ writings. I loved O’Neill’s beautiful metaphors for what Valentine was seeing.

“Babel” by R. F. Kuang

It took me months and months to read this book, and I almost gave up several times. The closest was when I reached the section about Letty’s betrayal leading to the killing of key members of the Hermes Society. The book is very long and pedantic, and the subject matter, colonialism and exploitation, is described in all its horror. As I said, it took me forever to find the emotional strength and interest to finish Babel.

That said, I must also add that the book is very well written, though I did get tired of reading about match pairs of words, and their effects on silver. The characters are well developed and very realistic. The protagonist is Robin Swift, who was the result of a commercial sexual union between a Chinese woman and an English professor, who planned to put the resulting child to work as a translator at Babel, at the University of Oxford. Babel’s function was the manipulation of silver to augment all aspects of the infrastructure making up England. A vey few benefitted, while most suffered from lost jobs, overly fast machines causing injury and death etc etc.

“Pearly Everlasting” by Tammy Armstrong

 I bought this book because it took place in New Brunswick, and the word ‘gothic’ was used in its description. I guess I’m glad I read this story about a girl and her bear “brother” and their lives in a logging camp, but I did find it to be somewhat slow. I never did bother to look up some of the very technical logging vocabulary that the author used, and her descriptions, though evocative, were sometimes unclear to me. There were, of course, cruelty and sorrow in the book, but love as well. Logging was a very hard life indeed.

And I must say, there was less of the gothic than I had hoped for. I guess it resided in the tall tales/myths of creatures living in the forest. 

“The Bewitching” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

 I quite enjoyed this book. The 3 timelines were cleverly intertwined, with the common link being Minerva from 1998, the most recent timeline. She was a student researching a story about a 1934 disappearance at her college. Her witch heritage attracted Carolyn, a wealthy elderly donor to the college, and a powerful witch. Minerva survived the witch’s attack on her life/blood/heart thanks to knowledge passed on by her great grandmother, Alba, who was the 3rd timeline. 

Minerva also survived thanks to help from a ghost. In fact, I feel that the ghost was a step too far. I have read several books by the author, and I feel that she tends to go overboard into the fantastic, thus decreasing the quality of her writing.