Review: The Battle of Belmont: Grant Strikes South

The Battle of Belmont: Grant Strikes South by Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



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Orbital by Samantha Harvey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Philosophizing while on a spaceship looking out the window. May work better as an entry a day kind of book that you can read throughout the year.

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Review: Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoy listening to Strout's novels. The voice of the author is calming, and so far always matched with a good narrator. Olive is a blustery force of nature, one that I recognize in parts from some of the women I've known over the years -- someone who comes off as they know all the answers, but then you realize they are often making it up as they go, albeit with good intentions. You see that here, but also the unsure side of Olive as she deals with aging and changes.

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Review: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Eric Jorgenson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Interesting talk, self-help-ish. My favorite part was his list of books to read (big surprise), which includes his reasons for suggesting the books. A wide variety. I listened on audio, only to find out that the book is available for free online, so I was able to look at his book suggestions there. I believe shorter takes on Naval are better, so I'll find some more podcasts featuring him instead of looking for a book.

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Review: The Berry Pickers

The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Good story, well told, but I didn't find much unexpected throughout. Not my normal kind of read, and not an author I would go out of my way to read again, but not a bad book. Read as part of a college alumni book club.

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Review: Doin' The Cruise: Memories From a Lifetime in Radio and Rock & Roll

Doin' The Cruise: Memories From a Lifetime in Radio and Rock & Roll by Ken Churilla
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Autobiography of the radio career of long-time Chicago DJ Mitch Michaels. As many DJs do, Michaels bounced around a lot of radio stations in his career, starting in Ohio, then moving in his 20s to Chicago for the rest of his career. He talks about the personal stuff, the marriages and divorces, the kids, the relatives. He talks about his being in the right place at the right time, like WLUP the Loop when it promoted the Disco Demolition at Comiskey Park, and when that station started. The Chicago stations Michaels worked included WXRT, WDAI, WKQX, WLUP and WCKG. He more recently worked stations in the Western Suburbs.

This was interesting to me on many levels. Growing up far from Chicago's FM reach, I didn't know these stations, but I'd heard a lot about them from Chicagoans at the University of Illinois. It was difficult to pass a day without seeing at least one Chicago station t-shirt. I ended up moving to Chicago and experiencing the tail end of the FM rock boom. Michaels described it well, and since I've always been interested in radio, this was very interesting.

Also interesting was that when Michaels wasn't living downtown or on the Michigan shore, he lived pretty close to where I lived in the Western suburbs, a couple miles away. I never knew that. He describes the area and the times well.

Michaels does come across as a bit pushy and a bit arrogant. He seems to fall back on threatening people a lot. Given his radio DJ career, I kinda expected this, so was not surprised, but he doesn't come across necessarily as a guy you want to be friends with. Funny thing is that it seems he doesn't realize he comes across negatively - he's kind of oblivious. He also is that way in some of the business stories he tells, like starting a clothing store in Michigan and quickly expanding, that watching it fall apart in months. I'm not sure how much of that is Michaels directly or how much came from his co-writer.

Overall I liked the book, a better than average DJ life story, with the added benefit for me that it covers local stations and the Chicago area.

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Review: The awakened eye: A companion volume to The Zen of seeing, seeing/drawing as meditation

The awakened eye: A companion volume to The Zen of seeing, seeing/drawing as meditation by Frederick Franck
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Frank goes beyond his "The Seeing Eye", which describes his method to look at scenes and draw them quickly. Here, he describes how he teaches others, or attempts to teach others, how to do the same thing in a workshop format. He doesn't have a great success rate at this, but it is interesting in how he choses to present the material to the class and how he makes them practice.

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Review: Broken Glass: Mies Van Der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece

Broken Glass: Mies Van Der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece by Alex Beam
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I visited the Farnsworth House a few years ago. I took the tour with a number of European and South American visitors, and, I believe, no other Americans. This was an interesting experience, to see an architectural icon (close to my home!) with only visitors from far away to appreciate it. To learn more about the drama involved in the building and the managing of the house (love affairs, lawsuits, money problems, flooding, headstrong architect vs headstrong doctor,...), this is the book.

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Review: Skeleton Man

Skeleton Man by Tony Hillerman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I actually quite enjoyed this one in Hillerman's series. I didn't give it 4 stars because there were some logical and character inconsistencies that puzzled me throughout the book, taking my mind off of the action, as well as dropped lines of action. Leaphorn plays a minor role here (well, he IS retired at this point) but he pulls his girlfriend in and you think the characters would reappear, but they just disappear from the story. This one was more to move forward on the Bernie and Chee romance, with some action thrown in. But it worked for me.

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Review: Washington Square

Washington Square by Henry James
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I've found Henry James to be a bit overwhelming for my reading tastes, too many flowery phrases. Yet I find I remember parts of this book more than the other flowery books that I've read. I think it was because the story was tied to a particular house, and I related to having a house know my history, so to speak. I'll be trying another James, wish me luck...

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Review: Summerland

Summerland by Michael Chabon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I had wanted to read this book for a long time. Chabon, Summer, Baseball, Fantasy -- what could go wrong? I found that I just wasn't into it, though. Perhaps it was because I read it in the fall, at the end of baseball season. The book felt too constructed to me, written to a specification. I did find myself very interested in some scenes, but the whole story - the connectedness of the scenes - just didn't grab me.

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Review: Poem a Day, Vol. 1

Poem a Day, Vol. 1 by Nicholas Albery
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It only took me about two and a half years to read this poem-a-day book. I'm not good at doing what people tell me, I guess. Instead of a daily read, I tended to read this in short chunks of a few days at a time. I appreciated the variety, although I enjoyed the more modern poets much more than the ones from centuries ago -- there were way too many of those classics in there. I enjoyed reading these, slowly. I was impressed to read in the foreword that many people would memorize a poem a day. That would be quite an accomplishment with this collection, with so many rare and/or dated words. But the poems are mostly one pagers, so memorizing might be more readily accomplished than longer poems. Overall, I enjoyed this but would have liked more modern and fewer classic poems...and maybe even more American poets -- this is the American version of a British poetry book, and some British poems were traded out for American poems, but not nearly enough for my liking...

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Review: Clete

Clete by James Lee Burke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The most amazing part of this audiobook was that the narrator does Clete's voice with a gravelly texture. It has got to hurt his throat doing that voice. And here, he does it through almost the entire book. Kudos to Will Patton.

Strange thing is, now that we get into the mind of Clete, he's almost identical to Robicheaux in how he thinks and imagines. Clete spends a lot of time talking to Joan of Arc in between "investigating", which was very much like Dave seeing the Confederates every few chapters. I'm not sure it's a good thing that two friends seem to share the same mental issues, but that does explain why they are friends.

Typical Burke story, at least typical of the last several Robicheaux books. Burke still describes the oppressive atmosphere in the bayous and parishes of Louisiana and the supernatural visions that atmosphere can release, but it doesn't seem as steamy as it used to be.

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Review: Western Edge: The Roots and Reverberations of Los Angeles Country-Rock

Western Edge: The Roots and Reverberations of Los Angeles Country-Rock by Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The story here is interesting, from the start of California country rock, courtesy Linda Ronstadt and others. Focuses on a few key people and venues, and concludes with post-punk country. Lots on the Byrds, Eagles, and some other less known bands. The pictures are all large in this large book, but I thought there was a surprising preponderance of Nudie suit pictures. I would guess from the quantity of these pictures that the Country Music Hall of Fame, the source of this book, devotes a lot of space to these suits. This is probably more interesting to a clothing designer. The book made me a bit less interested in visiting the museum, which I'm positive wasn't the intent. A short read with nice pictures, and will give you some new bands or musicians to listen to if you didn't grow up in the California country rock music scene.

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Review: Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut

Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut by Mike Mullane
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I found it odd that Mullane, in the middle of the book, talks about how the shuttle designers changed a system and that change caused problems and flight delays. He used the common quote "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Then, at the end of the book, bemoaning NASA's loss of quality in the build of their shuttles, repeats a story about how an aspect of the ship's design was below tolerances, but it flew safely despite those functions being outside the specifications. When Mullane discussed this issue earlier in the story, he says that the spec writers saw what was needed for their part or process to be safe and added some contingent safety requirements, then the designer took those specs and added his own additional safety tolerances so that things tended to be oversafe. Yet by the end of the book he is saying the opposite. You can't have it both ways - "if it ain't broke don't fix it" is the opposite of "sooner or later it'll get you". I'm hoping Mullane at least understands the dichotomy here, but the way this is written, I'm not sure.

I enjoyed the book, despite Mullane's fraternity-level personality. He grows on you.

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Review: Life of Python

Life of Python by George C. Perry
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The book provided chapters on each of the Pythons' history before the show began, with some stories about how the group worked together for the television show, subsequent movies, and ancillary projects like the records and books and live shows. Interesting as a book about entertainers, it's also interesting in how the creative group came to be and how it created, which changed over time and project. Enjoyable, with plenty of black and white pictures that didn't add much to the text, unfortunately. Somewhat short, but that was a good thing here.

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Review: ABC for Book Collectors

ABC for Book Collectors by John Carter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have a hobby now of flipping modern classic books found at estate sales. I always check the prices from various amateur and professional booksellers online, and I kept finding that the professionals have their own patois. Wanting to know more, and to make my own ads with some knowing verbiage, I took a chance on this classic glossary of book related terms. So this is a British book, written with that low-key British wit throughout. I actually enjoyed reading this, and I went through it alphabetically. However, the focus here was more on books over 150 years old than on those more modern. I ended up skimming about half of the entries because they were about books I doubt I will ever see, or bindings, or research sources. What I read was interesting and entertaining, and I know more than I did, so the book did its job well.

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Review: Front Runner

Front Runner by Felix Francis
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Consider me confused. The book starts with a thrown race, and our hero investigates and spies on a man making bets. He figures out the man is making money through nefarious methods, which are explained in some level of detail. And then, the book goes off in a different direction, as if this first big mystery, which is left unsolved, was just to introduce some characters. The Francis method involves mixing plots involving horse racing with other well-researched topics. In the past that included glass blowing, computer hackers, the veterinarian business, and more. This one had that horse racing bit at the beginning, but pretty much left it behind for some focus on, where I to take a guess, international tax theft, the use of Google to search the internet, and, in general, the Cayman Islands, where, it is explained in the book, there is no horse racing. The horse racing content was sadly lacking beyond the first third of the book, and really made no sense anyway.

Another of what I'd call the Francis formula is to put your protagonist through torturous pain, repeatedly, and with descriptions that cause even the most ardent crime fiction readers to wince in solidarity. I don't think Felix quite has the skill here that his Dad had. Close, and will likely match it soon, but a smidge too clinical here.

So although I found the plot disconcerting, I find promise in the hero-torture. Boy, that doesn't sound right!

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Review: Arlington Park Racetrack

Arlington Park Racetrack by Kimberly A. Rinker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It is difficult to tell a good story in these Images of America books, and sometimes the topic makes it doubly hard. That was the case here. About half of the pictures were of horses in stride, and given space limitations, you rarely saw the same horse twice. The writeups on the horses showed the expected material - owners, trainers, jockeys, record, family history... There wasn't much excitement in reading the material in this book. The only excitement was in the photos and they got repetitive, although I am sure those race fans who spent a lot of time at the facility and knew their horses would rank these pictures higher. Casual fans, not so much. There were a few pictures of the aftermath of the fire that burned down the grandstand and offices, and I actually found those pictures compelling - there should have been more about the effort to rebuild (enough) for the Arlington Million that year. That was a story. What was really sad, though, was that the book ended on a hopeful note, talking about all the great racing to come at the most beautiful racetrack in the country. Which was closed, sold off, and torn down a few short years after the book was published. I suspect that the book would have included more about the facilities themselves had they known - I don't recall the book having any pictures of the betting windows and the lines there, or the Million Room, or the crowds in the stands, the train stop from downtown, the beautiful and well-kept infield, the special events, or even the office workers. I suspect there is another book that could be written now that the jewel of Illinois horse racing has been demolished.

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Review: Peaks and Valleys: Making Good And Bad Times Work For You--At Work And In Life

Peaks and Valleys: Making Good And Bad Times Work For You--At Work And In Life by Spencer Johnson
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I can't say I got much out of this. I kept hearing that sometimes you are in a valley and sometimes you are on a peak, and peaks are better places to be. You want to get to peaks more often, but understand you might end up in a valley sometimes. Seemed kind of inane, or at least over simple. This was a very short audiobook, but it was stretched by adding some questions and answers by the author. And it was still short.

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