Non-fiction: 2022

 Oh, lord, I never did post the non-fiction books I read in 2022, and here it is 2024 already.   I promise I'll do a post with all my 2023 books in less than a year.   (joke)

London Under: the secret history beneath the streets, by Peter Ackroyd (I read fiction by him as well - see prior post - the only author with that distinction this year.)

Big Bosses: a working girl’s memoir of Jazz Age America, by Althea McDowell Altemus

A Diary without Dates, by Enid Bagnold

The Vanished Collection, by Pauline Baer di Perignon

Black Diamonds: the downfall of an aristocratic dynasty and the fifty years that changed England, by Catherine Bailey

At Home in Chicago: a living history of Chicago Architecture, by Patrick Cannon and James Caulfield

In Praise of Good Bookstores, by Jeff Deutsch

The Dead Duke, his Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse, by Piu Marie Eatwell

The Greatest Invention: a history of the world in nine mysterious scripts, by Silvia Ferrara

Dress Codes: how the laws of fashion made history, by Richard T. Ford

One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World, by Michael Frank

The Missing Ink: the lost art of handwriting (and why it still matters), by Philip Hensher

Truffle Hound: on the Trail of the World’s Most Seductive Scent, by Rowan Jacobsen

Judge This, by Chip Kidd

Come and Hear: What I saw in my seven-and-a-half year journey through the Talmud, by Adam Kirsch

Sabers & Suites: the story of Chicago’s Ambassador East, by Rick Kogan

The Woman and the Car: a chatty little handbook for the Edwardian motoriste [sic], by Dorothy Levitt

The House that Madigan Built: the record run of Illinois' Velvet Hammer, by Ray Lond

Chivalric Festivals at the Ferrarese Court of Alfonso II d’Este, by Alessandro Marcigliano

The Space Within: Interior Experience as the Origin of Architecture, by Robert McCarter

Kiss Myself Goodbye: the many lives of Aunt Munca, by Ferdinand Mount

Trade and Romance, by Michael Murrin

Back to Japan: the life and art of Master kimono painter Kunihiko Moriguchi, by Marc Petijean

Embroideries, by Marjane Satrapi

Final Report, by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol

I Will Judge You by your Bookshelf, by Grant Snyder

The English Gentleman, by Douglas Sutherland

Renaissance Woman: the life of Vittoria Colonna, by Ramie Targoff

Poetry and Photography: exhibition catalog, by the P2 collective

Three Girls from Bronzeville, by Dawn Turner

The Wordhord: daily life in Old English, by Hana Videen

The Unpunished Vice: a life of reading, by Edmund White

The Poet and the Murderer: a true story of literary crime and the art of forgery, by Simon Worrall

2022 books read

Herewith my reading in 2022.   It was more fiction than non- last year.  This list is basically alpha by author, with the occasional comment.  Works in translation listed separately.  (Non-fiction in a separate post.)

FICTION

The Clerkenwell Tales, by Peter Ackroyd
The Reading List, by Sarah Nisha Adams
Black Plumes, by Margery Allingham
The Black Cap, edited by Cynthia Asquith
The Red Hat, by John Bayler
The Simple Art of Murder and The High Window, by Raymond Chandler
Sherbourne Street, by John Cornish
So Big, by Edna Ferber
Innocence, by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Appeal, by Janet Hallett
The Pages, by  Hugo Hamilton
The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett
Clark and Division, by Naomi Hirahara
Search, by Michelle Huneven  Loved this book about a Unitarian-Universalist congregation looking for a new minister.
The Kindest Lie, by Nancy Johnson
The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, by Eva Jurczyk
Riviera Gold and Castle Shade, by Laurie King
When the Angels Left the Old Country, by Sacha Lamb - probably the best fiction read of the year, I am recommending it far and wide.  
For some reason, it was marketed as a "Young Adult" book, and I'm sure young adults would enjoy it, but that's too restrictive a description.
Give Unto Others, by Donna Leon
A Little Yellow Dog, by Walter Mosley
Overboard and Love and Other Crimes, by Sara Paretsky
At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, Love in the Time of Bertie, and The Perils of Morning Coffee. by Alexander McCall Smith
A Coat of Varnish, by C.P. Snow
A Far Cry from Kensington, by Muriel Spark
Barnett Frummer is an Unbloomed Flower, by Calvin Trillin
All Souls' Night, by Hugh Walpole
Tales from the Red Lion, edited by John Weagly and Andrea Dubnick

Works in translation 

L'Assassinio sull'Orient Express, by Agatha Christie.  Because I took the Orient Express from London to Venice this summer and what else would I read?
The Sect of Angels, by Andrea Camilleri
A Small-town Marriage, by the Marchesa Colombi
Bread for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone, by Maurizio de Giovanni
A Sister's Story, by Donatella Di Pietrantonio (also read in the original Italian)
Portrait of an Unknown Woman, by Maria Gainza
The Old Woman with the Knife, by Byeong-Mo Gu
Egyptian Short Stories, edited by Denys Johnson-Davies
People from my Neighborhood, by Hiromi Kawakami
Tales from the Café, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
And the Bride Closed the Door, by Ronit Matalon
Nives, by Sacha Naspini
Baltasar and Blimunda, by Jose Saramago

Non-Fiction reads of 2021

Vaguely broken down by category, but quite a few of these books could be in more than one.

 

Read for my "Chicago books" book club:

Chicago: City on the Make, by Nelson Algren

Campaign! the 1983 Election that Rocked Chicago, by Peter Nolan

American Warsaw: the rise, fall, and rebirth of Polish Chicago, by Dominick Pacyga

Other Chicago-related books

The Great Chicago Fire, edited by Paul M. Angle

Disposing of Modernity: the archaelogy of garbage and consumerism during Chicago's

    1893 World's Fair, by Rebecca S. Graff

The Jewel of the Gold Coast: Mrs. Potter Palmer's Chicago, by Sally Sexton Kalmbach

A Shopper's Paradise: how the ladies of Chicago claimed power and pleasure in the new

    downtown, by Emily Remus

Chicago's Great Fire: the destruction and resurrection of an iconic American city, by

    Carl Smith

 

Books on books:

 

Seven Kinds of People You find in Bookshops, by Shaun Bythell 

The Afterlife of "Little Women", by Beverly Lyon Clark

The Bookseller of Florence: the story of the manuscripts that illuminated the 

    Renaissance, by Ross King (way longer that it needed to be)

Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller, by Nadia Wassef

The Gilded Page: secret lives of medieval manuscripts, by Mary Wellesley

Britain:

These Ruins are Inhabited, by Muriel Beadle

The Very Best of British, by Nicholas Courtney

Terms & Conditions: Life in girls' boarding schools: 1939-1979, by Ysenda Maxtone

        Graham

Lions and Shadows: an education in the Twenties, by Christopher Isherwood

What Matters in Jane Austen: Twenty crucial puzzles solved, by John Mullan

C. F. A. Voysey: Architect, designer, individualist, by Anne Stewart O'Donnell

Behind Closed Doors: at home in Georgian England, by Amanda Vickery

Race:

Fire in the Hole: the Spirit Work of Fi-Yi-Yi and Mandingo Warriors, by Fi-Yi-Yi

The Color of Love: a story of a mixed-race Jewish girl, by Marra B. Gad

All that She Carried: the journey of Ashley's sack, a Black family keepsake, by Tiya Miles 

Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, by

    Monica L. Miller

Caste: the origins of our discontent, by Isabel Wilkerson

Asia:

The Sakura Obsession: the incredible story of the plant hunter who saved Japan's cherry

    blossoms, by Naoko Abe

Winter Pasture: one woman's journey with China's Kazakh herders, by Li Juan

African Samurai: the true story of Yasuke, a legendary black warrior in feudal Japan, 

       by Thomas Lockley & Geoffrey Girard

The Spirit of Japanese Poetry, by Yone Noguchi 

 

Art/architecture/design/fashion: 

 

Sisters in Art: the biography of Margaret, Esther, and Helen Bruton, by Wendy Van Wyck        Good 

Marion Mahony and Millikin Place, by Paul Kruty & Paul E. Sprague

Dandies, by James Laver

Brolliology: a history of the umbrella in life and literature, by Marion Rankine 

Patch Work: a life amongst clothes, by Claire Wilcox

The Unfinished Palazzo: Life, love and art in Venice, by Judith Mackrell

Portrait of Dr. Gachet: the story of a Van Gogh masterpiece, by Cynthia Saltzman 

Memoirs/biographies/diaries

Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence: the diaries of Buonaccorso Pitti & Gregorio Dati,         (edited by) Gene Brucker

Dante and the Early Astronomer: Science, adventure, and a Victorian woman who opened 

    the heavens, by Tracy Daugherty

'Dangerous Work': Diary of an Arctic Adventure, by Arthur Conan Doyle

Fillets of Plaice, by Gerald Durrell

Still Alive: a Holocaust girlhood remembered, by Ruth Kluger

Lear's Italy: in the footsteps of Edward Lear, by Michael Montgomery

Fred in Love, by Felice Picano

Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler, by Joe Queenan

Memories: from Moscow to the Black Sea, by Teffi

 

Jews/Judaism:

 

Plunder: a memoir of family property and Nazi treasure, by Menachem Kaiser 

Letters to Camondo, by Edmund de Waal  

Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean, by Edward Kritzler

Jews and Shoes, (edited by) Edna Nahshon

Other:

Elderhood: redefining aging, transforming medicine, reimagining life, by Louise Aronson

An Atlas of Extinct Countries, by Gideon Defoe

The Writing of the Gods: the race to decode the Rosetta Stone, by Edward Dolnick

The Ring of Truth and other myths of sex and jewelry, by Wendy Doniger 

Dante and the Early Astronomers, by M. A. Orr

Books read in 2021 - Fiction

Read for my Italian book club:

 

Il Treno Dei Bambini, by Viola Ardone 

La Misura del Tempo, by Gianrico Carofiglio 

Cara Pace, by Lisa Ginzburg 

Vita, by Melania Mazzucco 

I Colibri, by Sandro Veronesi 

 

For my "Chicago books" book club:

 

Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, by Hamlin Garland 

Death on the Homefront, by Frances McNamara 

Into the Beautiful North, by Luis Urrea 

 

Mysteries, ghosts, and the like:

 

The Poisoned Chocolates Case, by Anthony Berkeley

Buffet for Unwelcome Guests, by Christianna Brand 

The Charing Cross Mystery, by J. S. Fletcher 

Woman in the Dark, by Dashiell Hammett 

The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes, by Patricia Highsmith 

The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance, by M. R. James 

Transient Desires, by Donna Leon

Pretty Monsters, by Kelly Link 

Sisters of Sorcery, edited by Seon Manley and Gogo Lewis 

Widdershins: first book of ghost stories, by Oliver Onions 

The Day of the Owl, by Leonard Sciascia 

Tears of the Giraffe, by Alexander McCall Smith 

Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing, by Marla Szymiczkowa 

No Happy Ending, by Paco Ignaicio Taibo II 

The HIdden Palace, by Helene Wecker

The City of Mist, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon 

Body and Soul Food, by Abby Collette 

Tales of the South Carolina Low Country, by Nancy Rhyne 

 

Some British humour:

 

A Breath of French Air, by H. E. Bates 

Holy Deadlock, by A. P. Herbert 

The Eliza Stories, by Barry Main 

Portuguese Irregular Verbs, by Alexander McCall Smith 

Leave it to Psmith, by P. G. Wodehouse 

 

New (for me) books from favorite authors:

 

A Single Rose, by Muriel Barbery (not up to her usual standard, I'm afraid) 

French Rhapsody and The Portrait, by Antoine Laurain 

The Magician, by Colm Tóibín 

The Vicar of Bullhampton, Ralph the Heir, Castle Richmond, and The Three Clerks, by Anthony Trollope

 

 and a variety of others:

 

The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, by Alina Bronsky

God's Mountain, by Erri De Luca

The Vietri Project, by Nicola DeRobertis-Theye

Lady into Fox, by David Garnett

In a Dark Wood Wandering, by Hella S. Haasse

The Fall of a Sparrow, by Robert Hellenga

The Slaughterman's Daughter, by Yaniv Iczkovits

The Europeans, by Henry James

Einstein's Dreams, by Alan Lightman 

The Cat who saved Books, by Sosuke Natsukawa

Yours Cheerfully, by A. J. Pearce 

Bride of the Sea, by Eman Quotah

Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto, by Gianni Rodari 

The Liar's Dictionary, by Eley Williams

The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams 

NON-Fiction read in 2020

It was a year of "one thing leads to another", one book to another.

A good example:  I took an online course about Ashkenazi cooking, which led to cookbooks and memoirs, and why let it be all about Ashkenzim, so books on Sephardic cooking and Sephardic history, etc., etc.

 

Matzoh Ball Gumbo: culinary tales of the Jewish south, by Marcie Cohen Ferris

A Drizzle of Honey: the lives and recipes of Spain's secret Jews, by David M. Gitlitz and Linda     Kay Davidson 

Heretics or Daughters of Israel? the Crypto-Jewish women of Castile, by Renée Levine                Melamed 

Family Papers: a Sephardic journey through the Twentieth-century, by Sarah Abrevaya Stein

The Cooking Gene: a journey through African-American culinary history in the old South, by     Michael Twitty 

The Cooking of the Jews of Greece, by Nicholas Stavroulakis 

 

Donna Rifkind's biography of Salka Viertel, The Sun and her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood, led me to Viertel's own memoir, The Kindness of Strangers.

 

A lot of books on race in America, several for my "Chicago books" book club:

 

Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side, by Eve L.            Ewing

A Few Red Drops: the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, by Claire Hartfield

Another Way Home: the tangled roots of race in one Chicago family, by Ronne Hartfield 

    neighborhood, by Carlo Rotella

A Most Beautiful Thing: the true story of America's first all-Black high school rowing team,       by Arshay Cooper

Say I'm Dead: a family memoir of Races, secrets, and love, by E. Dolores Johnson

Fire Shut up in my Bones, by Charles M. Blow (and I am SO SO SO looking forward to the opera at Lyric in the spring!)

Italy, of course:

Dark Water: Art, Disaster, and Redemption in Florence, by Robert Clark

The Politics of Washing: real life in Venice, by Polly Coles

Rawdon Brown and the Anglo-Venetian relationship, edited by Ralph A. Griffiths and John E.     Law

Two Cities, by Cynthia Zarin

and the two works by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa mentioned in my previous post.

Some memoirs:

Confessions of a Bookseller, by Shaun Bythell

The White Road: Journey into an obsession, by Edmund De Waal

Moab is my Washpot, by Stephen Fry

Making the Mummies Dance: inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, by Thomas Hoving

Crossing: a transgender memoir, by Derdre N. McCloskey

Talking to Myself, by Studs Terkel

Night, by Elie Wiesel

St. Trinian's Story, by Kaye Webb

Literary women in interwar England:

The Mutual Admiration Society: how Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford circle remade the         world for women, by Mo Moulton (a good book, but a ridiculously over-the-top subtitle)

Square Haunting: five writers in London between the wars, by Francesca Wade 

Frauds:

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou (though the jury is     literally, still out as I write this)

The Baker who Pretended to be King of Portugal, by Ruth MacKay

And some odds and ends:

Renaissance Invention: Stradanus' Nova Reperta, by Lia Markey (exhibition catalog)

The Ghost: a cultural history, by Susan Owens

Daemon Voices: on stories and storytelling, by Philip Pullman

Gilgamesh: the life of a poem, by Michael Schmidt

A Unified Theory of Cats on the Internet, by E. J. White

Books read in 2020

Better late than never.

FICTION

Havelok the Dane and Gawain and the Green Knight were both read for a class on food in literature.

 

My book club , which focuses on books about Chicago and by Chicago authors, read Carol Anshaw's Right After the Weather, Willa Cather's Song of the Lark, and Sara Paretsky's Deadlock.

 

For my Italian class:  L'Arminuta, by Donatella Di PIetrantonio; La Vita bugiarda degli adulti, by Elena Ferrante; La mennulara, by Simonetta Agnello Hornby; Isola di Neve, by Valentina d'Urbano

 

I took a class about Giuseppe di Lampedusa. In class we read Steven Price's fictional biography, Lampedusa, and, of course, The Leopard (a re-read for me), but I also re-read The Professor and the Siren, as well as (for the first time) two non-fiction works by Lampedusa: Places of my Infancy: a memory, and Letters from London and Europe (1925-30) 

 

Due to the pandemic, theatre stopped in March.   But Court Theatre did a lot of online "deep dives" into plays they had intended to produce.  So I read Wole Soyinka's The Bacchae of Euripides: a communion rite and Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt.

 

Probably also due to the pandemic, I did a slew of very light reading - humor, mysteries, etc. 

So:

This Undesirable Residence, by Miles Burton 

Give up the Ghost, by Margaret Erskine

Unpunished: a mystery, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Leavenworth Case: a lawyer's story, by Anna Katharine Green

The Second Man, by Edward Grierson 

Israel Rank: the Autobiography of  a Criminal, by Roy Horniman (this is the book on which "Kind Hearts and Coronets" was based)

The Plain Man, by Julian Symons

Whose Body?, by Dorothy L. Sayers (a re-read) 

Rear Window and four short novels, by Cornell Woolrich

Hunting Season and The Safety Net, by Andrea Camilleri 

Puppies, by Maurizio de Giovanni (one of the Bastards of Pizzofalcone series) 

Raffles, by E.W. Hornung 

Venice Noir, an anthology edited by Maxim Jakubowski 

The Thief of Venice, by Jane Langton 

Trace Elements, by Donna Leon 

Black Betty, by Walter Mosley 

Murder at the Frankfurt Book Fair, by Hubert Monteilhet 

The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes,by Jamyang Norbu 

Revenge: Short Stories by Women Writers, edited by Kate Saunders

The Lacquer Screen, by Robert van Gulik 

The Womansleuth Anthology, edited by Irene Zahava 

 

P.G. Wodehouse amused me with Ring for Jeeves, Ukridge, Tales of St. Austin's, The Small Bachelor, and Meet Mr. Mulliner.

Other humor included Craig Brown's The Marsh Marlowe Letters, and Alexander McCall Smith's  The Geometry of Holding Hands and The Promise of Ankles.

 

I found some excellent new (to me) authors this year. I binged a bit on French author Antoine Laurain, reading first The President's Hat, followed by The Red Notebook and The Reader's Room. 

Two excellent collections of short stories were Lost in the City, by Edward P. Jones, and  The Bus Driver who wanted to be God, by Etgar Keret. 

 

I also returned to old friends, such as Anthony Trollope (He Knew he was Right, The Belton Estate, Lady Anna), Wilkie Collins (No Name), Sharyn McCrumb (a re-read of Ghost Riders), and Edith Wharton (The World Over).

 

Other fiction reading included:

Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light, ending the story of Thomas Cromwell

Emily Danforth's Plain Bad Heroines (longer than it should have been!)

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Babylon Revisited 

Arthur Phillips' The Egyptologist

Nancy Springer's Fair Peril

Paul Theroux's The Greenest Island

Lisa Wingate's The Book of Lost Friends

E.H. Young's Miss Mole

 

I think I'll do a separate post for the non-fiction, and then get to 2021!

2019 Reading: Fiction Part 3

Okay, this should be the last of the fiction.

41.  An Elderly Lady is up to No Good, by Helene Tursten.  "No good" doesn't begin to describe it!   Maud is 88, living in a fabulous, rent-free apartment, which some no-goodniks would like to get their hands on.  Maud takes care of them, all right.  Great fun.

42.  Fiori sopra l'inferno, by Ilaria Tuti.   A thriller set in a small town in Italy, close to the Austrian border.   Teresa Battaglia is sent to Travenì to investigate a series of gruesome murders and mutilations.  She has to work with a rather arrogant, much younger cop, and contend with a village that would rather not know and would rather not have the outside world know it.   The narrative goes back and forth between the present, and events in an orphanage years earlier.   The end is heart-rending.

43.  Fox, by Dubravka Ugresic.  The fox is a trickster, a shapeshifter, and so is this book.  Hard to describe its mix of fiction and history, invented characters and real people, its story told in several section jumping to different parts of the world.  What's true and what's false?  It's not an easy book, but it's worth the effort.

44.  The Willow Pattern, by Robert van Gulik.  A Judge Dee story, with plague and murders.  
45.  Sperando che il mondo mi chiami, by Mariafrancesca Venturo.   The title is a bit of a pun.  Carolina comes from a family of teachers, and is herself what we call in the States a substitute teacher.   It's really hard to get a full-time position, and to get a temporary one, you have to be constantly on call and nearby.  (You'll learn a lot about the Italian educational system and what it's like to be a teacher there from this book.)  Carolina loves her work, and she has an amazing ability to establish rapport and understanding with her young charges, even when she's there a very short time.  Her desire to figure out what's best for them and what's best for her is what drives the plot.  Secondary characters are drawn really well.  We understand her close connection with her grandmother, for instance, and her need to help a student in distress.  The book does not appear to have translated into English (yet), which is a shame.

46.  Little Novels of Sicily, by Giovanni Verga, translated by D.H. Lawrence.  More short stories than novellas, this volume includes the story on which the opera, Cavalleria Rusticana, was based, though there's a whole lot more to it.   The stories reveal the lives of rural Sicilian peasants, corrupt clergy, and greedy landowners.   

47.  The Sole Survivor, and the Kynsard Affair, by Roy Vickers.  Two, two, two mints in one!  Okay, two stories in the same volume.   In the first, a group of men are stranded on an island following a shipwreck.  One survives.  What happened to the rest?   Some were clearly murdered, but the last might have been a suicide.  A judicial inquiry may or may not reveal the truth.  In the second, the question is, who has been killed?  A naked corpse is discovered, and there are two possible victims.  Or are the women one and the same?

48.  Cakes for Your Birthday: a criminal extravagance, by C. E. Vulliamy.  The Liquidation Committee decides to perform a public service, and rid their town of a nasty, malicious, slander-slinging biddy. The chair, a retired headmaster, and his younger accomplices, take advice from a dahlia-loving professional hit man. Things go wrong. 

49.  The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner, by Giles Waterfield.  Oh, funny!  A a satire on what goes on behind the scenes in museums, covering twenty-four hours in the run-up to the gala opening of an exhibition at "BRIT: the Museum of British History".  If you've worked in a museum, if you go to museums, if you know anything about them, you'll enjoy the romp.

50 and 51.  False Dawn and The World Over, by Edith Wharton.   

In False Dawn, Lewis Raycie's father sends him to Europe to buy "great art", which will be the nucleus of a collection that will make Raycie's name echo down the ages.   But in Italy Lewis falls under the influence of John Ruskin, and the art with which he returns is not what was expected.  His father basically disowns him, and it is not until years later, when it is too late for him or his widow financially, that the paintings are truly appreciated.   Read for a class and it engendered quite a good discussion about "what is art".   

The World Over is a collection of short stories, set in Wharton's usual worlds of Gilded Age New York and the Europe of wealthy American travelers.

52 - 56.   The Code of the Woosters; Right Ho, Jeeves; Heavy Weather; Galahad at Blandings; Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (a/k/a The Catnappers), by P. G. Wodehouse, of course.  What else needs to be said?  If you like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you'll like.  I do and I did.

57.  Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Golden Samovar, by Olga Wojtas.  I picked this up because I thought the concept was interesting, but it goes horribly wrong.

The protagonist, Shona McMonagle, is a librarian and a graduate of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, snitched from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  But this connection goes nowhere, so what was the point?  She finds herself on a time traveling mission to tsarist Russia, but has not been told where she's going, what year it will be (she never finds out), or what her mission is, which is a strange way to go about things. And this, naturally, contributes to her idiotic behavior, behavior that one would not expect from a theoretically intelligent woman, one who comments that being wrong was a new experience for her. She is ridiculously dense, missing things that anyone with an ounce of common sense would realize immediately.

A note at the end of the book suggests that there will be more books featuring this woman. I will not be reading them.

58.  Sorcery and Cecelia: the Enchanted Coffee Pot, by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer.  An epistolary novel set in Regency England featuring Cecelia and her friend and cousin Kate.  Wrede and Stevermer alternate the writing, so Cecilia and Kate each has her own distinctive voice.  It's got fantasy, magic, wizardry, as well as a couple of feisty teen-aged girls.  I enjoyed it.

59.  A Coin in Nine Hands, by Marguerite Yourcenar.  This is a collection of short stories, culminating with an assassination plot against Mussolini, linked by the "coin" of the title. Everyday lives, isolated, lonely, are connected as the ten-lira piece changes hands.

To be continued  .  .  .  with non-fiction.