The Charming Quirks of Others, An Isabel Dalhousie Novel, Book 7

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by Alexander McCall Smith, 2010, Audiobook narrated by Divina Porter, Recorded Books 2.0 stars

This book has some interesting characters but a weak plot. Isabel is asked to check out three applicants for a headmaster position at a local school. I estimate that less than 25% of the book is related to the plot. The rest of it wanders into the relationship between Isabel and her partner, conversations between Isabel and her housekeeper, the purchase of a painting, etc. It was somewhat entertaining, but there was really no plot. I wouldn’t characterize it as a mystery.

Divina Porter’s narration is very good.

I ordinarily enjoy Alexander McCall Smith’s books, but this one didn’t grab me at all. I won’t be reading or listening to any of the Isabel Dalhousie books after doing this one.

The Grey Wolf, A Chief Inspector Gamache Mystery Book 19

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by Louise Penny, 2024, Audiobook narrated by Jean Brassard, MacMillan Audio 3.0 stars

This book is about a plot to poison the water supply of Montreal. Inspector Gamache manages to come to the rescue at the last minute and prevents the disaster from happening.

I have enjoyed all of Louise Penny’s books and this one is okay, but not her best. I’m wondering if she is losing her touch a bit as the plot seemed to drag for a lot of the book. This is the first book narrated by Jean Brassard and he doesn’t seem to capture the characters as well as the previous narrators, but he did seem to improve the more he read.

I will no doubt do listen to The Black Wolf when I get it, but I hope it is better than this one.

No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson

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by Gardiner Harrris, 2025, Random House 3.5 stars

This is a revealing book describing the bad behavior of one of Amecia’s most trusted and respected companies. Harris goes into much detail about the risks and damaging results of many J & J products including baby powder, opioids, cancer treatment drugs, the Dalkon shield, hip replacement implants, mesh implants for prolapsed female organs, etc. He furthermore shows the unhealthy relationship between the manufacturers and the FDA because of the massive funding the manufacturers provide to the agency.

I would have rated the book higher, but I found reading it was boring. I had a hard time keeping from falling asleep while reading it. I don’t know why this is because I am usually interested in financial, medical, and scientific topics, especially when the books reveal information that I was not previously aware of. Also, the book is not very well organized in places. For example, the final chapter is titled “Covid” when it is really a summary final chapter. I kept waiting for information about Covid but was actually reading the end of the book.

Harris it to be commended for the vast amount of information he has uncovered in his research for this book. I assume that all or most of it is true, but I suspect that J & J will probably sue him anyway.

Olga

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by Bernhard Schlink, 2021, Audiobook narrated by Nathalie Buscombe, Harper Via 1.5 stars

I would classify this book as a swing and a miss. It’s about a woman in Pomerania before WWII who falls in love with an aristocrat. The parents of the boyfriend obviously don’t approve of their relationship and the boy’s sister interferes. The boyfriend has an obsession with achieving greatness and goes off on various adventures, the last of which is to the arctic from which he never returns. Olga thinks his vision is too grand and begins to despise anything she thinks is too grand, including Germany.

The problem I had with the book is that it just didn’t seem to be very interesting. Schlink writes beautifully, but the plot and the characters in this book are not very interesting. I kept waiting for something really exciting to happen but it never did. Olga had a secret and acted on it, but even that wasn’t very compelling.

This is the third book I’ve read or listened to this year that was written by highly respected authors that turned out to be much less than I expected. I’m not having a great year selecting books so far.

On Chesil Beach

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by Ian McEwan, 2007, Audiobook narrated by the author, Random House Audio 1.5 stars

This is another of a series of audiobooks by accomplished authors that have disappointed me. I have enjoyed McEwan’ books such as Atonement and Machines Like Me, but not this one. It’s about a man and a woman in 1962 who fall in love and get married, but due to their differing feelings about sex are not able to make it together. They break up on the night of their marriage and go their separate ways.

The problem I had with the book was that the man and the woman were essentially ordinary individuals and not very interesting. This was the same problem that McEwan’s book, Lessons, had. The characters didn’t seem to interest me very much and the stories became very tedious.

The audiobook came with an interview with Ian McEwan talking about what he was attempting to accomplish with the book. One aspect was the sexual mores of the England in the early 1960’s, a mix of repression and rebellion. He alluded to it somewhat in the book, but it didn’t seem to be a major theme.

The book shows up on Amazon as an “Amazon’s Choice” and it says it’s one of the best books of 2007. While it is well written, it is too irrelevant and boring for me.

The Lincoln Highway

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The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles, 2021, Audiobook narrated by Edoardo Ballerini, Marin Ireland, and Dion Graham, Penguin Audio 2.5 stars

This book was apparently about a young man who was released from a reform school in Nebraska and his younger brother who were planning to take the Lincoln Highway to San Franciso to see if they could find their mother who had abandoned them. The Lincoln Highway was the first road built in American that went coast to coast. They encountered numerous delays and the book actually doesn’t describe that trip at all but rather the experiences they encounter before they actually hit the road west.

I read Gentleman in Moscow by Towles and liked it a lot, but I was generally disappointed with this book as it didn’t seem to provide any meaning. The characters were somewhat interesting, but there were encounters with other characters that didn’t seem to go anywhere. The plot didn’t seem to be very interesting and was unfinished.

The book received very high reviews, but I just didn’t get it.

Summer Crossing

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by Truman Capote, published posthumously in 2005 from a manuscript discovered years after the author’s death in 1984, Modern Library, an Imprint of Random House1.0 stars

I was visiting Mt. Dora, Florida, a month or so ago and we went into my favorite little bookstore, Barrel of Books and Games. I wasn’t in there long, but I spotted this book. It is a novella that Capote wrote early in his career, probably before he had published his first book. I thought it would be a quick read, but I was disappointed.

The book is about a wealthy young girl of seventeen living in New York. The author portrays her thoughts and feelings which are definitely flighty. I haven’t read Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but I suspect this character had some of the same traits as Holly Golightly in that novel.

The book is hard to read because of the sentence structure and the odd punctuation. It seems that Capota must have had a bowl of colons and semi-colons on his desk and, every time he approached the end of a sentence, he took one out of the bowl, pasted it on the paper, and continued on.

The plot is somewhat interesting, but disjointed and hard to follow. I think Capote’s In Cold Blood was one of the best books I ever read. This one needed a lot of work before it should have seen the light of day. Capote never went back to finish it and it never was professionally edited. It’s too bad as it could have been a much better book.

Small Things Like These

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by Claire Keegan, 2021, Grove Press, New York3.5 stars

This is a nice little book which I would classify as a novella as it has only 114 pages. It’s about a man in Ireland who delivers coal to his customers. He has a family of six girls and is somewhat dissatisfied with his life. One day, when he is delivering coal to a nearby convent, he discovers a young girl locked in the coal-house. She is pleading with him to take her with him, but he declines to do so.

It’s a good book and highlights the sad history of the treatment of young “wayward” girls in Ireland who, for a long time, were sent to convents to have their baby and avoid the shame that might have otherwise been endured by the family.

The Keeper of Lost Causes

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by Jussi Adler-Olsen, 2007, translation 2011, Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 3.5 stars

The book is about an old detective in Copenhagen who is charged with creating a department to solve old unsolved crimes. He is given an office in the basement and is assigned an assistant who is a mysterious Muslim immigrant. The detective was recently shot while investigating another and he is slowly recovering. The intent of this assignment was basically to get him out of the way.

The detective and the assistant get involved in investigating the disappearance of a woman politician five years previous. She was presumed to have gone overboard on a ferry, but it turns out that she was kidnapped and is still alive.

The main character of the book reminded me somewhat of Jackson Lamb, the head of the fictional Slough House MI5 group. After watching the Slough House TV series, however, it is hard to equal Lamb’s character. While I enjoyed reading this book, there were some uneven sections that detracted from its being a really good book.

The Satanic Verses

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by Salman Rushdie, 2008, Audiobook released 2011, narrated by Sam Dastor, Recorded Books 1.5 stars

I don’t get it. The book started out with a tale of two men who were in an airplane that blew up in mid-air, but they somehow safely floated down into the ocean and survived. The book is narrated superbly by Sam Dastor who captures the Indian accents suffused with English and American idioms. The narration is particularly crisp in the case of the female characters who are portrayed as strong women in charge of their male counterparts.

The reason I wanted to read this book is because I wanted to understand why it was so controversial and caused so many threats against the author. I sense that the point of the book was that it is difficult to determine whether religious events are real or just hallucinations. The author never clearly states it, but cast enough doubt about the reality of the events that it raised the anger of the Muslim and Hindu communities.

Rushdie is greatly praised as an author, so why did I really not like this book? While the narration was good, it wore on me after listening to it for over twenty-three hours. It was cute in the beginning, but not in its later stages. The stories seemed to wander all over and there were new characters introduced frequently who didn’t seem to fit with the narrative. And then, when I was expecting some kind of enlightenment toward the end, there was over an hour of detailed description of one of the character’s father’s dying, a huge disappointment!

I can now take this one off my list of must-read books, but it was definitely a chore to get through it.