The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

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by Ben McIntyre, Kindle Version, 2018, Broadway Books, Reprint edition

This is the story of Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB agent who began providing information to MI6.  The story is intriguing, especially since I had never heard of this individual and the extraordinary impact of the information he provided.  The author makes the case that his information may have prevented a nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and the USSR and also may have led to the trust that Reagan and Gorbachev seemed to instantly feel when they first met.

On the whole, the book was an interesting read, although it bogged down a bit, not because the the author’s treatment, but there were times when not much was happening.  Toward the end, however, it got pretty exciting due to events that I won’t relate here as it would spoil it for a reader. 3.5 stars

Commonwealth

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by Ann Patchett, 2016, Audiobook narrated by Hope Davis, HarperAudio

I was totally disappointed in this book!  Fortunately, we got this audiobook from the library so I didn’t pay anything for it other than wasted time.

The book is about two families where the spouses get divorced and marry each other.  It focuses on the children of the marriages and the effects of the disruption that this situation causes… or so I think.  After finishing the book, I now am unclear as to what it was about.

The one redeeming feature of this audiobook was the narrator, Hope Davis.  She did a really outstanding job capturing the voices of each of the characters.  One of the problems of the book, however, is that there are too many characters to keep track of and I gave up trying to figure out which one was which and which one I was supposed to focus on.

I actually didn’t mind listening to the book, at least until the end.  And what an ending!  It just ended; not in the middle of a sentence or paragraph, but almost.  I think the author finally realized that the book was totally pointless and she didn’t have any idea where it was going.  Better to just end it and that’s exactly what she did.  What a piece of work that was!

I just can’t imagine that an author of the apparent renown that Patchett enjoys would stoop to publishing such a novel.  I think it shows the current state of popular fiction that an author can get away with it.1.0 stars

Notre-Dame, A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals

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by Ken Follett, 2019, Viking

This book is, indeed, short – only 62 pages.  At the end of the book there is a note indicating that the book was written in seven days in April of 2019.

Follett wrote the book shortly after the fire in Notre-Dame.  It consists of his thoughts and emotions after witnessing the tragedy of the fire.  In addition to his musings on the fire, there are some thoughts regarding his publishing of his novel, Pillars of the Earth,  some information regarding the building of the cathedral, as well as a chapter about Victor Hugo and his writing of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

It is an interesting book given Follett’s writings about cathedral building, but it isn’t close to any history of the meaning of cathedrals.  It’s more just an author’s musings, which is fine, but I’m a bit disappointed in the claim its subtitle purports it to be. 3.5 stars

The Summer Before the War: a Novel

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by Helen Simonson, 2016,  Kindle version, Random House LLC

This is the story of a family in England before WWI and how it affects their lives.

I decided to read this because it was shared to me by my wife on her Kindle.  I wanted to like this book, but it was just too slow.  I did like the characters, even though many of them were stereotypes.  The story was okay but lacked any depth.  Just another book cranked out by an author hoping to sell some books but nothing noteworthy.

Note: I just discovered as I perused the list of books I have read that I had already read this book back in January of 2017.  I guess it’s a testament to how little of an impression the book made on me in that when I listened to it, I didn’t even remember that I had already read it! 2 1/2 stars

Machines Like Me: A Novel

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by Ian McEwan, 2019, Audiobook narrated by Steven Crossley, Recorded Books

This is an interesting book about a man who buys a robot to experiment what it would be like to have as a companion for him and his girlfriend.  The book is set in the 1980’s, during and after the Falklands War.  McEwan changes history significantly as the outcome of various historical events are the opposite of what actually occurred during that time.

The technology associated with this robot is far advanced of what was available at that time.  In fact, the book was published in 2019 and such capabilities as he depicts are still not available.  Despite the inconsistencies with historical facts and technological advances, the story is a compelling fantasy about what it could be like if such a robot were a reality.

Coupled with the technological and ethical issues that are associated with this invention, McEwan uses the altering of facts to satirize the political and social environment in England at the time.  It was fun to listen as the story progressed, as it was easy to be caught off guard not expecting the events that unfolded.

My only criticism of the book is that the ending is a disappointment.  There was so much that could have happened after the book ended and I was left wanting a more robust and fulfilling ending to an otherwise well-written and interesting story.

One very nice advantage of listening to this novel is that the reader captured the mindset and personality of the main character so well.  I would have missed this if I had read the book rather than listening to the audiobook.3.5 stars

Your Heart, My Hands

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by Arun K. Singh, M.D., with John Hanc, 2019, Center Street, Hachette Book Group, New York

This is the story of a person who started his life as a delinquent boy in India who immigrated to America and became one of the preeminent cardiac surgeons in the United States.

He spent most of his career at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence and was a professor at the Brown University Medical School.  He performed over 15,000 cardiac surgeries during his career.

I graduated from Brown and have lived in Rhode Island (seasonally) for over 17 years, but I had never heard of this individual.  His story is inspiring.  He is a living tribute to the argument for immigrants in this country.  He is also an advocate for providing quality health care to those who cannot afford it.

This is a really inspiring story. 4.0 stars

The History of Rome

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by Mike Duncan

There are 189 podcasts by Mike discussing the history of Rome from about the sixth century BC until 479 AD, when the western empire fell. These podcasts were recorded over a five year period from approximately 2007 to 2012.

Mike does a great job walking his listeners through this history. He not only told the story of each emperor, but he also devoted several episodes to discussing Roman culture, society, laws, etc., to provide the reader with a backdrop of the events that transpired. He had no formal training as an historian (or a podcaster) but managed to bring some fairly dull history to life. I greatly appreciated his sense of humor and down-to-earth manner of addressing the events that transpired made it very enjoyable to absorb the history of Rome from the earliest formation until its eventual demise. I never much liked ancient history as a subject in high school but I enjoyed this a lot.

The last episode was devoted to summarizing all that had been discussed and Mike did a very nice job of pulling it all together. This was a herculean effort and he executed it very well.

Justine

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by Lawrence Durrell, Kindle Version, originally published in 1957, this edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc., New York

I have always wanted to read this book as I recall my father thought very highly of it and the other three books in the Alexandria Quartet.  In addition, it appears we will be visiting Alexandria next spring on our cruise, so I thought it would be nice to get some history and flavor of the city before we go there.  Alas, I was disappointed and didn’t enjoy it very much at all.  The characters seemed to just pop up, one after the other, and I didn’t get much sense of who they were or what role they were playing in the novel.  After reading a while, I started to get some sense of what was going on, but, as soon as I did, the novel suddenly came to a halt.  It was over; the end.

Toward the end it started getting a bit interesting as some of the events that unfolded had some potential for suspense, but to no avail as the events didn’t lead to anything at all.  There was basically no plot at all in this book.

Durrell’s vocabulary must have been voluminous as there were words that I had never seen before.  Luckily, I was reading the novel on my Kindle so I could instantly look up the meaning.  I’m not sure that was very helpful, however, as once I looked it up I immediately forgot it as the word usually wasn’t used again in the book.  Also, there were several times when my Kindle dictionary didn’t even recognize the word so no definition was available.

I was glad I read the book as it gave me a sense of Durrell’s writing style which seems to have been popular at the time he wrote it.  I will not be continuing on to the other three books in the quartet, however.  I might give some of his brother, Gerry’s books a try as they seem pretty interesting.2.0 stars

The Innocents Abroad or the New Pilgrims’ Progress

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by Mark Twain, originally published by Mark Twain in 1869, Kindle Version,2011, Digireads.com Publishing

This book was on the reading list for our upcoming trip to Israel, Jordan, and Egypt so I decided to read it.  Most of the other books were travel guides, art history books, or dealt with some other cultural aspect of these countries.  I recall reading some pretty interesting books prior or during our trip to the Greek Isles and Turkey so I thought this would be interesting.

The book is a travelogue of Twain’s trip that he took in 1867 with a number of other individuals.  His voyage started in New York and they stopped in the Azores before landing in Gibraltar.  He then proceed to spend time off the ship in France and Italy before rejoining the ship and then travelling to Greece, Constantinople, Russia on the Black Sea, thence to Syria and Holy Land.

The book is pretty fascinating as it depicts how travel was done at that time but it bogs down and becomes a bit of a slog to read.  Also, Mark Twain did not mince words about the pitfall conditions and people he encountered, particularly in Palestine, but just about everywhere he traveled.  He also goes off on tirades sometimes as when he wrote about Lake Tahoe in comparison to a lake he encountered on his trip.  The books is 409 pages and, if he had had an editor, it probably would have been a lot shorter.

Twain’s humor and satire do come through, but it becomes a little tiresome at times.

Overall, I am glad I read it as it covered a lot of the areas that we will be visiting next spring.  I do wish I had referred to a map when he was traveling around the Holy Land as he constantly referred to the events in the Bible that occurred in these various places. 3 stars

Stolen Prey

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by John Sanford, 2012, Audiobook narrated by Richard Ferrone, Penguin Audio

This book caught my eye because it was about the murder of a family on Lake Minnetonka in Wayzata, Minnesota.  Wayzata is where my two children graduated high school, so I had an interest in the locale of the book.

The book is essentially about a drug gang from Mexico that was perpetrating murders in the Twin Cities.  The plot is somewhat interesting, but there is very little “Minnesota-like” color about the book.  It could essentially have been written with the backdrop of any city in the U.S.  The book is, in my opinion, a typical series crime novel that provides not very much that is unique or would serve to distinguish itself. 2.0 stars