Bookstore: "Bookstore" in Lenox, MA

Today we were in Lenox, MA with Dave & Avi for Fathers' Day weekend.  We spent a few minutes walking around Bookstore, a lovely little store that smells like old books and was just the right amount of disorganized.

While I had taken Sasha into Barnes and Noble in the past to get something for myself, it was the first time I was in a bookstore with her and thinking about how important it is for her to see books, be read books, and grow to love books.  They didn't have a lot of kids' books for her age group, although I did notice some Corduroy books. I couldn't find the original - I have to order that for her soon.

State of Fear by Michael Crichton

Web bought this book at our library's book sale before a trip he had a few weeks back.  He loved it, so I took it on my last business trip.  Sadly, I did not love it.  In fact, I barely liked it.

This book is about climate change.  It follows the unlikely adventures of a lawyer who is representing a philanthropist who is donating a large sum of money to an environmental charity.  However, soon they are thrust into a chase around the globe after eco-terrorists who are seeking to make an environmental point about global warming.

I didn't mind the far-fetched plot; the escapism of a Michael Crichton book is why I choose it.  However, Crichton used the book - excessively - to the detriment of the story - as a platform for poking holes in global warming.  In barely-disguised dialogue among characters, Crichton debated the science behind climate change.  It was distracting - suddenly I was reading Sophie's World rather than Jurassic Park.

Disappointing.

The Patron Saint of Lost Dogs by Nick Trout

I noticed this book at Barnes and Noble, then requested it from the library.  It's about a man named Cyrus who goes back to his small hometown in Vermont after his father's death to close down his veterinary clinic.  Except that would be a short book - instead, Cyrus ends up entangled with various people in town and finds that it is not easy to just "close down" the clinic.

There are some funny characters in this book, including certain animals.  The author is a doctor at Angell Memorial, so I'm sure he drew upon his experience to create some of the characters.  At times, Cyrus feels like a character from an Alexander McCall Smith book - very smart in a small-town way, figuring out clever connections and solving petty crime.

However, I didn't find this book quite as quaint as a McCall Smith book - in fact, I didn't think the book was as quaint as it thought it was.  While I enjoyed the stories about the animals and played along with some of the connections and mysteries, (AND respect the heck out of a vet who writes a novel) I didn't love the book and I didn't find Cyrus a compelling protagonist.

The Milk Memos by Cate Colburn-Smith and Andrea Serrette

This book was great - it's a semi-autobiographical account of several women who meet while pumping breastmilk at work at IBM.  It mixes information and tips about breastfeeding and pumping with excerpts from a journal they kept together while pumping.  I think some of the characters in the book were real, and others were composites of women the authors got to know.

A quick read, I enjoyed this book while I was feeding the baby.  While there weren't that many new tips in the book for me, I did like feeling like I was part of a larger community of pumping moms.  It was also a good inspiration for the business trip I recently took.

Probably not a book anyone would like unless they are in this situation, but I am so I did!

Inferno by Dan Brown

This showed up on my doorstep unexpectedly - thanks to Dad who sent it as a surprise!  Another book starring Robert Langdon from The Da Vinci Code, this one follows Langdon as he wakes in Florence suffering from amnesia.  

An adventure from the start, he embarks on a fast-paced chase around several pieces of art Dante's Inferno.  Interspersed with Langdon's travels across Europe around the Inferno are several chapters around an eccentric leader of a "transhuman" movement - one that believes that overpopulation is imminent and deadly, and that changes to our genetics can change human history for the better.

I liked this book more than Brown's last one, The Lost Symbol.  This seemed to be better written (as airport reads go) and though many hundreds of pages long, I didn't see many places that I would have cut.  I was kept entertained throughout the book and had trouble putting it down.

The Piano Teacher by Janice Y.K. Lee

Mom had given me a copy of this book a couple years ago and I never quite got to it.  Needing a new novel, I gave it a try.  It was really good - one part of the story took place during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during WWII and the other took place a few decades later.  The author captured the feel of Hong Kong in both eras very well; I wasn't really familiar with this culture before then.

In the more recent story, an Englishwoman named Claire comes to Hong Kong as a newlywed, only to find that her husband travels a lot and she is lonely.  She takes a job teaching piano for an affluent Chinese family, where she begins an affair with their chauffeur Will, an Englishman.  In the story taking place during WWII, Will falls in love with a half-Chinese woman.  During the Japanese occupation, he is interned in a camp but she isn't; both of them make difficult choices to survive the war.

This book was an amazing combination of excellent storytelling, strong character development, clear time-and-place setting, and obstacles for the characters to stumble over.  I really enjoyed it.

Live by Night by Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane is somewhat of a Boston institution.  Author of (among others) Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River, his last book The Given Day was a sweeping epic of the Policeman's Strike in Boston during the 1920's.  This book takes off when that one ends, following Joe Coughlin, the police chief's errant son.

Coughlin is a minor criminal when this book begins - bank robberies, that sort of thing.  When he falls for a mobster's girlfriend and then ends up in jail, his only choice is to become part of organized crime.  Moving to Florida during Prohibition to profit from importing rum, he begins to build his own crime syndicate there.  The story follows his rise as a mob boss there.

I really had a good time reading this book.  I was fascinated to read about the business deals he did, and loved reading about how he resolved personnel conflicts.  Like a young Corleone in The Godfather, he learns how to make deals, punish people, and manage a complex love life.  I don't know if Lehane has plans to continue this saga, but I hope so. 

Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg

I have been a fan of Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook) since her TED Talk on women in business.  In it, she talked about the importance of women "taking a seat at the table" (quite literally, don't sit in the back of the room) and advised women "don't leave before you leave" (i.e., don't turn down a business opportunity because you envision a life situation in the future where you couldn't have that opportunity)

In this book, she expands her ideas around women in business, through a mixture of personal anecdotes, research studies, and ideas about how to improve.  The book is pretty genre-less, not quite self-help, memoir, or business.  It's a quick read, alternating among funny, eye-opening and at times repetitive.

At first glance what is most striking is the name-dropping Sandberg does: Larry Summers, Arianna Huffington, Meg Whitman, Tip O'Neill - she is definitely part of an academic and social elite, which has been a large criticism of the book.  Another criticism of the book is that it is just part of the Facebook media engine.  Well, ok.  If it is, that's fine with me.  My objection to the book were the parts where she encouraged women to change how they negotiate to fit into the system, rather than change the system.

Quarrels aside, I am on the eve of returning to work after maternity leave, and there were several specific pieces of advice I will hold on to from the book.  Sandberg shared the advice she got from Eric Schmidt at Google - take a job for its growth potential, not its current state.  She also suggests that while mentors and sponsors are important, the best way to find them is to excel at your work and they will find you.  Finally, she shares the idea that if there is a work-life-balance accommodation you are looking for, ask: you never know, you might get it.  I am fortunate to work in an organization that has (so far) been very comfortable as a woman.  Now that I'm a mom, I hope that continues.

I don't think this was a perfect (or even that well-edited) book, but Sandberg is a great role model for me.  To have her book come out while I've been on leave (and Marissa Mayer announce her pregnancy two weeks before I announced mine) has made the past year much less stressful than it could have been.  With luck, the Lean In organization will effect change in my career, not just for future generations.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

I thought Meredith had recommended this book to me but she says she hasn't read it yet so I'm not sure how it ended up on my book list.  It was good, though - a creepy mystery story.

The story is about Nick and Amy, an unhappily-married couple who live in Manhattan.  Shortly after moving to Missouri to care for Nick's ill mother, Amy disappears and Nick is accused of murdering her.  Through Nick's narration and Amy's journal, the first half of the book tells the story of their relationship leading up to the current state of affairs.  The second half the book, Nick and Amy alternate chapters, with Amy's part being in the present.

Neither Nick nor Amy is entirely honest with the reader, which is part of what makes this book so good.  I love unreliable narrators.  Whether he killed Amy is the least of what becomes interesting in the story.

Definitely enjoyed this book and couldn't put it down at times.  I didn't love the ending but I did like the book in its entirety.

The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger

I saw this reviewed in the New York Times a few months ago so when it was on the shelf in the library, I grabbed it.  I hadn't loved her previous book, The Dissident, but this was well-reviewed.

The story is about a man who meets a Bangladeshi woman on a dating website and brings her to his home in Rochester NY to marry her.  The couple genuinely likes each other and seem to treat each other with respect.  Over time, however, secrets emerge from both sides that threaten their marriage.  The man's family life is more complicated than he lets on, and the woman has elderly parents in Bangladesh who are relying on her to help them immigrate as well as a former love interest.

While this book didn't have the drama of A Reliable Wife (it read more like something by Thrity Umrigar), it kept my attention, both as the story of an immigrant arriving in the U.S., as well as with the plot twists across the characters.  I also enjoyed reading this because of its being set in Rochester, where Webster is from.

What was she Thinking? Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller

I took Sasha to the library for the first time and picked out a few books to get back in the swing of reading.  This title looked familiar to me, and indeed it had been shortlisted for the Man Booker a few years ago.

The story is about a teacher named Sheba at a small school in England who has an affair with a student.  It is told by her friend Barbara, who is secretly writing an account of the affair.  Sheba is married with two kids, while Barbara is single.  By the end of the story (told in flashback, so this is revealed at the beginning), Sheba's secret is out and she is vilified in the press and separated from her family.

Barbara's telling of the story is eerie - her unemotional character reminded me of Kath in Never Let Me Go, and early in the book it is hard to tell if it's because she is acting like a reporter, jealous, or for some other reason.  It's also one of those books where the story is about Sheba but the protagonist is someone else - in this case Barbara. By the end of the book, Barb's actions are far more interesting than Sheba's.

I liked this book and read it quickly.  My only disappointment was not connecting more with one of the characters, although I believe that to be an intentional choice on Heller's part.

The Panther by Nelson DeMille

Jo was reading this when she visited after the baby was born and I figured its airport-read style would be good for my sleep-deprived ever-shortening attention span.  Little did I know that she left her copy with my parents for me, and they would schlep it from Florida up to Boston.  I bought my own copy - which was a hefty 800 or so pages.

This is the next book in the John Corey series that follows the irreverent retired NYPD detective and his FBI wife Kate through their work on an anti-terrorism task force.  While it is not necessary to have read The Lion, or any of the other previous books in the series, to appreciate this one, it does make it more fun.

In this book, John and Kate (yes, John and Kate, sans Eight) go to Yemen to hunt down "The Panther" - the operative believed to be behind the USS Cole bombing that killed 17 Americans.  Teamed up with some other Americans from the CIA, they embark on a dangerous plot to draw out The Panther in Yemen, a country where they find you can't trust anyone.

I had fun reading this book.  Corey's persona can be a little annoyingly flip at times, but that's part of his charm.  The story itself was great - with lots of intrigue, great new characters, and the element of surprise.  I will look forward to the next DeMille book, the plot of which was teased in the last scene of this book.

Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon

This is the fourth book in the Outlander series by Gabaldon.  The series follows the story of a woman named Claire who time travels from post-war Europe to 18th-century Europe and falls in love with Jamie, a man in the past.

SPOILERS BELOW IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE PREVIOUS BOOKS.

I liked this book progressively more as I read it. Weighing in at 800+ pages, it was not a quick read, and the first few hundred pages follow Claire and Jamie as they settle in to life in rural North Carolina.  I started to feel like the story was really contrived - they had gone from Scotland to France to the Carribean to the U.S. over the past few books, and I was starting to feel like it "jumped the shark."

However, Gabaldon had some great ideas in mind and the book got a lot better.  Introduced in a previous book, Brianna (Claire and Jamie's daughter) takes a more central role in the story, as she continues to research her parents' story in the past.  Her love interest, Roger, is also prominent in the story.  It was nice to have a new set of characters to root for along with my old favorites.

I had bought this book with plans to read it around the baby's birth - I ended up starting it before she was born and the picking it up when she was about two months old.  The next one in the series will probably be a summer vacation read for me.

Liars and Outliers by Bruce Schneier

Disclosure: I received a discounted and autographed copy of this book in exchange for writing this review.

Interestingly, that deal plays very well into the theme of this book - subtitled "enabling the trust that society needs to thrive", Liars and Outliers is about how trust is created, enforced, and betrayed.  Bruce Schneier (who I've been a fan of for a long time, scroll down in this post for a short review of his previous book, Beyond Fear) is a security expert, initially cyber-security, although his blog and books have now broadened to be about security in general.  He's written a lot about changes in security since 9/11, highlighting how many measures are "security theater" designed to make us feel more secure rather than actually increasing security.

So offering a free book in exchange for a review was a big experiment on his part.  And the model his book explains around why we trust people would indicate that some Societal, Moral, Reputational, or Institutional Pressure compelled me to follow through on my commitment to write this. (It was moral.)  In fact, a large section of the book explores each of those types of pressure with examples ranging from Worldcom to child labor.  He provides a model of what the interests and norms are in a society and then the things that challenge and enforce them.  This model is revisited many, many times throughout the text.

The remainder of the book discusses what security systems exist to enforce these norms, and how these models and ideas are implemented in organizations of different sizes, ranging from small groups to large institutions.  Schneier draws on a variety of current examples (Facebook privacy and the TSA) as well as classic game theory (Prisoners' Dilemma). 

There is a lot to like about this book: it provides a model that explains how society functions and why we trust certain people and entities.  In fact, the reason it took me so long to write this review (I received the book months ago) is that I recently had a baby.  As we've hired people to care for our daughter, I was acutely aware of what made me trust different caregivers.  Reputation in some cases, a personal recommendation in others, a recommendations from a group I trusted for another case.  In what I consider to be the most important decision I've made in years (who cares for my child) I naturally relied on many of the pressures Schneier highlights.

What I found hard about reading this book was the sheer number of examples he used in every chapter.  Rather than analyze a few familiar examples in great depth, he chose to pepper each chapter with what felt like dozens of small examples and name-drops.  I would have enjoyed a more in-depth analysis of just a few examples to better understand the systems he was explaining.  In some cases, he returned to the same ideas repeatedly - like Prisoners' Dilemma and the Hawk-Dove game (another game theory model) - and I found that valuable.  But in many chapters he jumps from one example to another each paragraph, which I found a less effective way to make his points.

Overall I'm glad I read this book but I didn't enjoy it as much as I do his daily blog posts.  Perhaps if I were not as close a follower of his, more of the ideas would have been new, and the examples more illustrative.

The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton

I usually don't like to read so many books by the same author so close together, but I was 9 months pregnant, perhaps a little grumpy, and the idea of another gothic-style mystery cheered me up.

Like the other two novels of hers that I read, this book takes place in a few time periods.  In one, a young girl witnesses her mother commit an act of violence.  Fifty years later, she is at her mother's deathbed and decides to investigate that incident from her childhood - which takes the reader back to London - WWII.  As she unravels the intrigue behind her mother's first love and famous neighbor, she uncovers family secrets and a dramatic story.

I liked this book a lot.  There were some good plot twists, interesting characters, and a great job of moving between the different stories.  There are ways in which Morton's books share similarities, but they never fail to keep me engaged, and I never guess the twists that she puts in the stories.