It feels like I’ve had a lot of books in the fire this month (that was a strange half-metaphor that I should probably go back and delete and reword but I’m guessing you guys know what I mean) but my stats are disappointingly low when I go back to recap. Never mind. There were a couple of good ones that I can’t wait to tell you about!

The Chestnut Man by Søren Sveistrup was a Nordic thriller and I love a good Nordic thriller especially in the middle of winter. Sveistrup is the man behind the Danish show “The Killing” – I didn’t watch the Danish original, but I really enjoyed the American version starring Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman. Chestnut Man follows two seemingly mismatched detectives tracking a serial killer and although I didn’t like it quite as much as other thrillers I’ve read, I was hooked until the big reveal at the end (which I didn’t see coming). I would definitely read more by this author about these characters.

The Dark Angel by Elly Griffiths – yes, yes, another Ruth Galloway mystery but now I’m caught up in the series with no more to read or write about until there’s a new offering. In this most recent, Ruth takes a trip to Italy to help consult with a colleague about some Roman remains (and temporarily escape her complicated relationship with local police officer DCI Nelson who is her daughter Kate’s father). As always, the mix of history, archaeology, a charming protagonist in Dr Ruth Galloway, and a thorny love story makes this series a total winner in my book.

The Five by Hallie Rubenhold is my starred review this month. I confess to being a bit of a Ripperologist so when I bought this on my Kindle I thought I was in for another assessment of Jack and yet another opinion on his identity. However, Jack the Ripper is really a marginal character, as much as he can be – the book is an intensely researched, thorough, and sympathetic deep dive into the lives of his canonical five victims. These women are rarely considered, but reading about their tragic lives in Victorian England and how they have been viewed (and disparaged) made me realize they aren’t simply the victims of a deranged serial killer, they are truly victims of the society in which they were born women. Rubenhold reconstructs the terrible reality of misogyny, poverty, domestic abuse and addiction that these women experienced, in most cases trying to take care of an ever-growing number of children (see below) on paltry earnings. It can be no surprise that these demands resulted in alcoholism, divorce or death, and left them and their children at risk, in and out of slums and workhouses. Although the press coverage (both then and now) describes them as prostitutes, except for one, they were not in fact sex workers by trade. What they were was poor, abused, homeless, and addicted. History has done these women a grievous disservice and Rubenhold’s book is a long overdue revelation about our collective instinct to blame and forget the victim while turning the perpetrator into a celebrity.

“A woman’s entire function was to support men, and if the roles of their male family members were to support the roles and needs of men wealthier than them, then the women at the bottom were driven like piles deeper and harder into the ground in order to bear the weight of everyone else’s demands. A woman’s role was to produce children and to raise them, but because rudimentary contraception and published information about birth control was made virtually unavailable to the poor, they…had no real means of managing the size of their families or preventing an inevitable backslide into financial hardship. The inability to break this cycle – and to better their own prospects and those of their children – would have been soul crushing, but borne with resignation.” – Hallie Rubenhold, “The Five”

Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again by Rachel Held Evans may have been my starred review if I hadn’t read The Five. Brandon and I have divergent belief systems – he is a committed Christian and I am an agnostic – and we frequently discuss the nature of faith. I am perplexed by his ability to see the Bible as a sacred text and believe, unquestioningly, in it (at least, the New Testament); he is perplexed and somewhat sad that I can’t, although he is very non-judgmental. This book really brought me closer to understanding the upside of Christianity. Rachel Held Evans was born into a conservative Christian family but left the evangelical church after years of struggling with what she saw as its exclusionary and judgemental views. The very reasons that she left the church are the reasons why I am not a Christian. Sadly, Ms. Evans died at age 37 from illness but left behind several works questioning and researching Christianity. From the New York Times: “Her congregation was online, and her Twitter feed became her church, a gathering place for thousands to question, find safety in their doubts and learn to believe in new ways. Her work became the hub for a diaspora. She brought together once-disparate progressive, post-evangelical groups and hosted conferences to try to include nonwhite and sexual minorities, many of whom felt ostracized by the churches of their youth. She wrote four popular books, which wrestled with evangelicalism and the patriarchy of her conservative Christian upbringing, and documented her transition to a mainline Christian identity, which moved away from biblical literalism toward affirmation of L.G.B.T. people.”

And this month I have a bonus audiobook- The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. I read a lot of criticism about this book, with many reviewers disliking it as meandering and incomprehensible and at worst, pointless. While I don’t think I totally understood it all, and it could have benefited from some editing, I enjoyed listening to it. Her writing is so detailed and the worlds she builds so compelling that I could see myself in every scene even if it was a dollhouse full of bees the size of cats on a sea of confetti. I wish there could have been more from my favorite character Kat – knitter, secret-diary-writer – but all in all it made my dark wintry commutes fly by.

Whew!! Kind of a deep SUYB this month but all good stuff. Can’t wait to see what you’ve gotten into!