Sunday Salon: Thriller, Fiction, Literary Fiction

I have finished several library books: The Other Einstein, The Orphan's Tale, and I See You. My new reading includes Cooking for Picasso, The Day I Died  and Big Breasts and Wide Hips, Previous posts will show the covers and details of the books.

I have started a novel on the history of blues in Chicago, Windy City Blues, and almost finished a quirky novel, The Wangs vs. the World, but misplaced my copy just when I'm so close to finishing!

Three paperback arrivals.

A Certain Age by Beatriz Williams, a book of romance and scandal in the Roaring Twenties of New York.

Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones, a coming-of-age story of an lunlusual boy, an outsider.

Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman, a modern day twist of To Kill a Mockingbird.

I am finally reading more e-books from the library, using Overdrive to order online. There are several queued for me so I'll get them when they become available. Suits me fine as I can hardly read too many at one time!

On a sunny but cold day in Ohio, Cooking for Picasso, a novel by Camille Aubray, is wonderful company and hits the spot. The book is set in Picasso's heyday in the sunny, blue Mediterranean, on the Cote d'Azur.

Cooking for Picasso

What are you reading this March?
Welcome to the Sunday Salon where bloggers share their reading each week. Visit The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer. Also visit It's Monday, What Are You Reading? hosted by Book Date

Review: The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict

The Other Einstein, an historical novel by Marie Benedict, October 18, 2016.

Einstein's first wife, Mileva “Mitza” Marić was a brilliant physicist in her own right and may have contributed to his theory on relativity.

Book beginning:
October 20, 1986
Zurich, Switzerland
I smoothed the wrinkles on my freshly pressed white blouse, flattened the bow encircling my collar, and tucked back a stray hair into my tightly wound chignon. The humid walk through the foggy Zurich streets to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic Campus played with my careful grooming. The stubborn refusal of my heavy, dark hair to stay fixed in place frustrated me. I wanted every detail of the day to be perfect.

Page 56:
On the evening of his first visit, Helene greeted him with a disgruntled, "Who simply appears on a classmate's doorstep uninvited?"

My comments: The novel is fiction and speculative when it comes to the amount of collaboration Einstein and his wife Mileva may have had in the first four paper he wrote in 1905, including the theory of relativity. Mileva was a physicist in her own right, and a mathematician. But now, there are historians and authors who are looking into how much Mileva did contribute to Einstein's work.

The author has done extensive research on the Einsteins, their meeting at university where Mileva was the only female in Einstein's physics class, his intense courtship of her, their marriage, their moving from one European university to the other during Einsteins rise to the top as a physicist and professor.

Readers might not want to believe that Einstein was at any time selfish with the praise for his research and dismissive of his wife, with whom he had close collaboration in their studies while there were university students, and who could have had serious input into his discoveries. Mileva is shown as gradually being marginalized by Einstein and relegated to simple housewife for him and their two children, this after she had lost her scientific career after an unplanned pregnancy while they were students forced her to give up school and her cherished dream of academics.

Historically, the marriage broke up close to the height of Einstein's career. Part of the divorce agreement was that Mileva would get the proceeds from any Nobel Prize coming from Einstein's work in the future. It's hard to believe he would agree to give that up unless his wife had very well contributed to his work, though unacknowledged and unrecognized.

Recommendation: A fascinating history of the facts of the Einsteins' lives, their marriage, his success, and an intriguing guess at what might have been different for her and for women scientists that came after, if his first wife Mileva had been recognized, even in a footnote, in any of the papers Einstein published in 1905.
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Memes: The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader. 
 

Another Great Library Find: Big Breasts and Wide Hips by Mo Yan

I found an intriguing library book: a novel and an historical one at that.
Big Breasts and Wide Hips, a novel by Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan, author of Red Sorghum, published 2014.

Book description: This is a book about women but it's also a book about China, from the fall of the Qing dynasty up through the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, the civil war, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao years. In sum, this stunning novel is Mo Yan's searing vision of 20th-century China.

In a country where men dominate, and as the title implies, the female body serves as the book's most important image and metaphor. The protagonist, Mother, is born in 1900. Married at 17 into the Shangguan family, she has nine children, only one of whom is a boy, the narrator of the book, a spoiled and ineffectual child who stands in stark contrast to his eight strong and forceful female siblings.

Mother, a survivor, is the quintessential strong woman, who risks her life to save the lives of several of her children and grandchildren. The writing is full of life-picturesque, bawdy, shocking, imaginative. (publisher)

The title and topics and history are inviting an exploration of Mo Yan's unique vision!

Mo Yan is a modern Chinese author, known for his novel Red Sorghum (which was turned into a movie by the same title). Often described as the Chinese Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller.

Book Review: I See You by Clare Mackintosh

Thriller: I See You by Clare Mackintosh, February 27, 2017, Berkley
Genre: thriller
Setting: London

Publisher description: Every morning and evening, Zoe Walker takes the same route to the train station, waits at a certain place on the platform, finds her favorite spot in the car, never suspecting that someone is watching her...

First chapter, first paragraph:
The man behind me is standing close enough to moisten the skin on my neck with his breath. I move my feet forward an inch and press myself into a gray overcoat that smells of wet dog. It feels as if it hasn't stopped raining since the start of November, and a light steam rises from the hot bodies jammed against one another. A brief case jabs into my thigh. As the train judders around a corner I'm held upright by the weight of people surrounding me, one unwilling hand against the gray overcoat for temporary support. At Tower Hill the carriage spits out a dozen commuters and swallows two dozen more, all hell-bent on getting home for the weekend.

My comments:  The book seems to be a warning to women whose routine daily - to and from work - never or hardly varies. They can become targets for snoops or those intent on doing harm.  

Zoe Walker picks up the newspaper and sees her picture in the classified ads, with a listing for callers to visit FindTheOne.com. It seems to be a dating site that requires a specific password. Zoe is alarmed as she has not registered with such a site and doesn't know how the advertiser got her picture.

She becomes more alarmed when women in the ads become targets of crime and even murder. The one thing the women have in common: They take the train on their daily commute and are easy to track to and from their home.

Far from being a simple case of a stalker or stalkers, Zoe finds a complex plan to match FindTheOne.com members with unsuspecting women they can choose to follow. She manages to get onsite and sees her daily commute logged for members of the dating site to see. Things get worse from then on.
Working closely with police investigator Kelley Smith, Zoe finds out more than they bargained for.

Recommendation: A police procedural and a thriller, this was an engaging novel, with a most unusual plot. The ending was totally unpredictable and I wish there had been some clues given earlier in the book so that the culprits were not such a surprise. As it was, they were not completely plausible, believable. However I gave 5 stars for thriller writing and the interesting police procedural work.

MEME: Every Tuesday Bibliophile by the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph, Tuesday Intros sharing the first paragraph or two, from a book you are reading or will be reading soon.
 

Sunday Post: Books and Movies

Two new books for review/feature:

The Day I Died - William Morrow

A Bridge Across the Ocean - Berkley

And of course, a new library book:

 Cooking for Picasso

E-book bought and my current read - historical fiction set during WWII:

The Orphan's Tale

Movies:
We also got a bit of Oscar fever and went to see Lion last week and La La Land and Hidden Figures yesterday. Manchester by the Sea and Fences are on our list for later. How many of the films have you seen?

And what are you reading this week?
Welcome to the Sunday Salon where bloggers share their reading each week. Visit The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer. Also visit It's Monday, What Are You Reading? hosted by Book Date

Book Beginning: The Bridge Across the Ocean by Susan Meissner

Post WWII historical and contemporary fiction, A Bridge Across the Ocean by Susan Meissner, March 14, 2017, Berkley Books

Main characters and story line:
February, 1946. World War Two is over, but the recovery from the most intimate of its horrors has only just begun for Annaliese Lange, a German ballerina desperate to escape her past, and Simone Deveraux, the wronged daughter of a French Resistance spy.

Book beginning:
San Diego, California
Present day

A friend's baby shower was the last place Brette Caslake expected to encounter a ghost.

The gauzy apparition wafted into the stylish living room, as if blown in on a breeze, the moment the pregnant guest of honor began to open her presents. Or perhaps the ghost had been loitering there by the mahogany bookcase long before the attendees started arriving, and it was just the gentle gust from the open window that had stirred the form, giving its edges depth and shape.

Page 56:

You are the last of the women in our family who has the Sight. It skips around the generations with no regular pattern.

Memes: The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader.

Wondrous Words Wednesday: Two New Words

Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Bermuda Onion. You can share new words that you’ve encountered or spotlight words you love. 

This is my first time participating in this meme and I joined today as I came across two strange, to me, words found in The Wangs vs. the World, a humorous novel by Jade Chang.

* Praxis has the following meanings (Miriam Webster dictionary)

1. :  exercise or practice of an art, science, or skill
2. :  customary practice or conduct
3. :  practical application of a theory

 "...praxis in a democracy." (The Wangs vs. the World, ch. 4)

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Sartoriphilia comes from two words: (Reverso Dictionary)

 

sartorial - of or relating to tailor or tailoring

philia - a tendency towards or an abnormal liking for something

 

"Still on the ridge: Charles, saved by his sartoriphilia." (ch. 11)

 

Explanation: Charles was thrown from a helicopter before it crashed thus saving his life. He was not wearing his seatbelt, not wanting to wrinkle his newly pressed shirt.
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What new words did you find in your reading this week?