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!

It feels like a long time since we’ve had a Show Us Your Books! It seems like I would have had some extra time for by-the-fireplace reading and under-the-Christmas-tree reading but the holiday flurry of activity actually made it harder for me to carve out good reading time. Still, I had a couple of good ‘uns.

Without further ado:
The Revolution of Marina M. by Janet Fitch was a whomper in terms of sheer length and you know, anytime you get into the Russian revolution it’s going to be weighty subject matter. A blurb described it as a female Dr. Zhivago and I can see that (we actually re-watched “Dr. Zhivago” while I was reading this book and it was immensely satisfying). Marina is the daughter of a wealthy Russian family before the 1917 revolution and as the events unfold, she makes several choices that put her at odds with her family and friends, and set her on a dangerous yet liberating path through the political upheaval. I actually picked this up because the sequel is on the New Book shelf at the library and it interested me, but I thought I should read the first one first. I liked the characters and found this very engaging and well-written and led to many discussions about Russian history with Brandon, who went there in the 1980’s.

The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life Is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy In A Store by Cait Flanders wins the award for book with a title longer than the book itself. The subject matter is pretty self-explanatory – I thought this was okay. It wasn’t what I expected, and was maybe more self-indulgent than it could have been, but it’s nice to read about people coming to the same conclusions about consumption and excess that I am. It’s impressive that Ms. Flanders did so at such a young age and I wish that I’d been as self-aware as she is when I was her age.

obligatory cat picture featuring pot roast!

The Chalk Pit by Elly Griffiths (Ruth Galloway #9) yep, still on the Ruth Galloway kick although I have just one more in the series to read. This one wasn’t as absorbing for me as her previous contributions but I still love Ruth and her friends, colleagues, neighbors and nemeses and have #10 sitting on my desk at home waiting to start.

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert was also not what I expected. It took me awhile to get caught up in this one, although the time period is interesting, and the characters and the writing in general were well done. I didn’t start to really connect with the story and feel involved until about halfway through, and I’m glad I hung in there, because the main character as a grown woman was more intriguing than her young self. I wished there had been more detail in the second half of the story rather than the first. Set before, during, and after WWII in New York, in a rattletrap theater full of fascinating female characters and few raffish men, this story is somewhat thematically similar to Revolution of Marina M. as it also traces a young woman’s liberation and independence through a charged social & political time, and we share her coming of age as major cultural shifts take place around her.

Big Sky by Kate Atkinson caused me to drop everything else while I was reading it because I LOVE Kate Atkinson and I LOVE Jackson Brodie (and his estranged soulmate Julia). This contribution to Jackson’s arc didn’t appeal to me as much as his past endeavors but I still couldn’t put it down, despite the distasteful plot (spoiler: there is human trafficking). As always, there are several seemingly unrelated threads and characters that wander in and out and then are brought together expertly by Atkinson in the climax. I will always love Jackson and I will always love Kate Atkinson, and it’s a toss up as to which of her book styles I like better – her mysteries or her more experimental themes such as she explored in “God In Ruins” and “Life After Life”. Either way, she is an absolute winner in my book and this one is no different. I look forward to seeing where Jackson goes next.

No audiobooks this month since I was listening mostly to Josh and Chuck on the “Stuff You Should Know” podcast and also our Local 4 WDIV podcast “Shattered” Season 4 about Jimmy Hoffa.

Look forward to checking out everyone else’s reads this month!