Colorways by Vicki Welsh

August was all vacation reading for me. We had a book that we listened to in the car on the way to Maine and the rest was my sewing and relaxing time entertainment. I think we turned the TV on only twice all month. There isn’t one book on this list that I regret reading, except the one DNFed book.

What good books have you read this month?

DNF
North Woods by Daniel Mason. It’s really a collection of short stories set around one building.  It’s not a format that I enjoy.

TLDR: This classic is a fun and fast read. He skewers everyone.

When I first started listening to audiobooks in the 1990’s they were on cassette tapes. You ordered them from Books On Tape and were mailed boxes of tapes and I always had a box in my car. In the early days, there wasn’t a big selection and most were the classics. I read Voltaire and Somerset Maugham frequently. Candide came up in a book review I read recently and that prompted Chris and I to selected it to listen to on our ride to Maine. There’s a good reason that this classic is ageless. Voltaire was a brilliant writer.

Candide’s tutor, Dr. Pangloss, believe that they live “in the best of times”. It was a philosophical belief of the time and Voltaire set out to satirize it relentlessly by putting Candide through a fast series of progressively worse trials.

As I was listening to it I couldn’t help but compare it to Southpark in the bold way that he skewered all of the social norms of the time. Voltaire actually had to leave France for several years for this and other critical works.

TLDR: Funny and better than Crazy Rich Asians.

The Earl of Greshambury and the Gresham Trust are basically bankrupt. Lady Gresham is trying to solve the problems by marrying off her children to rich people. Her oldest daughter seems to have found a good wealth match and the outrageous wedding is happening on a Gresham hotel property in Hawaii. She’s using the event to try to get her son hooked up with an appropriately rich wife.

Like, Crazy Rich Asians, this book drops a lot of designer and luxure names.It was a fun, light read. Perfect for vacation.

TLDR: An Appalachian Trail hiker gets lost in the Maine woods. Two other women become an integral part of the search for her. An interesting read.

It was a nice coincidence that this book came off my hold list at the library during our first week of our Maine vacation. The location is the vast Maine woods.

43-year-old Valerie Gillis has hiked the Appalachian Trail and made it to Maine. She had a trail partner through Vermont but has been on her own in Maine. The Maine part of the AT is notoriously difficult. Valerie has gotten lost in the woods, She is keeping a journal in the format of letters to her mother in case she’s not found alive.

A Maine State Game Warden, Beverly, is responsible for finding her. Lena, is a 76-year-old resident of a retirement community and is an avid birdwatcher. She’s connected with a young man on Reddit who has similar interests. She realizes that she has information to help find Valerie but it may be too late.

The book explores how each of these women is “lost” in their own ways. I enjoyed it.

This is a hardback book that I picked up at a secondhand shop and I’ve been reading it in short sessions for a couple of months. It is exactly what the title says, important historical stories that we never hear about.

There’s the greater fire that happened at the same time as the Chicago fire. It was much bigger and more devastating but the press was preoccupied with the Chicago fire.

There’s the person who probably flew before the Wright Brothers, the first subway built in New York City, riders that outdid Paul Revere and Exercise Tiger, the disastrous practice for D-Day.

I really enjoyed this book and recommend it to anyone interested in quirky history stories. It’s a really easy read. The book was published in 2010 so you might have to look for it on resale sites, like Thriftbooks.

I’m a big Robert Dugoni fan and this one is probably one of my favorites. Most of his books are set in contemporary time but this one is set during the Depression. William (Shoe) Shumacher has moved from Kansas to Seattle in the hopes of finding a job at a newspaper that will help him support his family back home. Through family connections, he lands an entry level position at the city’s afternoon newspaper.

Just as Shoe starts his job, Frankie Ray is murdered at an illegal social club on Prospect Hill. His first assignment is quickly becoming the only news people want to hear. Shoe is quickly making a name for himself as he follows every clue and finds himself at risk.

It was a fun read.

Claire Roth is a struggling artist who makes her living trough commission reproduction artworks. One day a local art dealer commissions her to do a one-off reproduction of a Degas original. This particular artwork was actually stolen from the Gardner Museum on Boston in 1990. All of the stolen artworks remain missing.

She agrees to do the reproduction in exchange for a one-woman show at the Markel Art Gallery. As she begins to work on the piece she begins to suspect that the “original” is actually a forgery. As she’s working on the painting she also begins a search for the truth about the original.

This is based very loosely on the actual theft at the Gardner. It was a fun read.

While on vacation I ran across this at a thrift store when I was looking for a good non-fiction book. I know that Isaacson writes good biographies so I picked it up. Jobs died in 2011 and this book was published around the time of his death. Jobs asked Isaacson to write the book so that his children would have a place to learn the unvarnished truth about him and his life. Jobs never wanted to see the finished product but I think he would have approved.

It’s a long book but worth the time investment. He was a true genius and visionary and I think this book tells the whole truth about Jobs. I enjoyed it. It’s a beefy book so it required a serious commitment to read it.