Deep & wild: on mountains, opossums & finding your way in West Virginia, by Laura Jackson

 

I enjoyed this collection of personal essays about West Virginia. Author Laura Jackson is a West Virginia native and writes lovingly about her home state. She covers many topics, but primarily the flora, fauna, and geography of the state. Chapters address copperhead snakes, opossums, dogs, the red spruce, country roads, topography, and much more. With an easy prose, Jackson gives the reader a good understanding of what makes West Virginia special, but without denying or overstating its problems.

The enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim

I really enjoyed this 1922 novel about four women who travel to Italy, renting an old castle for a month. All of the women are unhappy for different reasons, but they find that their month away has given them the time and space to heal and face their respective concerns. The writing reminds me of E.M. Forster's classics Howards End, and A room with a view with their witty dialogue and comical situations, but also real-life sorrows and anxieties. This is a scholarly edition with a lengthy introduction, bibliography, chronology of von Arnim, and explanatory notes, which were very helpful.
 

Dear Evan Hansen, book by Steven Levenson; music and lyrics by Benj Pasek & Justin Paul

 

Dear Evan Hansen is a musical that will be coming to Eisenhower Auditorium in April, so I thought I'd read the play before going to see it. I really enjoyed this sad, but heartwarming, play about a boy who gets drawn into a long-term web of deception following the death of a school mate. It shows how one lie leads to another, until it's almost impossible to extricate oneself without blowing everything up. I won't give away any of the plot lines here, but will just say that this is a worthwhile read.

Devil is fine, by John Vercher

 

Devil is fine tells the story of a biracial man who has just lost his teenage son. He inherits a plot of land that was meant for his son upon reaching age 18, but since his son died before then, he inherits it instead. Intending to sell the land and arranging routine inspections prior to the sale, he finds that the land is a former plantation and has the skeletons of enslaved people as well as the plantation owners on it. These developments wreak havoc with the narrator's mental stability, and an element of magical realism enters the story. The narrator has regular conversations with his dead son, he is transported into the past where he inhabits the persona of the plantation owner as he abuses his slaves, and other times he experiences hallucinations that he is turning into a jellyfish. In the meantime, he has a high level of difficulty getting along with everyone else in his life, including his son's mother, his co-worker, and new people he meets along the way. I found his conversations with others to be so filled with hostility that it was difficult to imagine anyone behaving that way, even someone grieving the way he is. Eventually, after what seems like a series of psychotic breaks, he has an epiphany that allows him to move forward.

An unfinished love story: a personal history of the 1960s, by Doris Kearns Goodwin

 

This is a wonderful look at not only the relationship between Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin, but also an in-depth memoir about both of their experiences working in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960s. This was my Albany book club's December pick, but none of us finished in time, so it's carried over to January. I thought it would be mostly about their personal relationship, but there is a lot of substantive history here. It's fascinating to read about their experiences, bolstered by the artifacts and documents that they explore as they root through Dick Goodwin's hundreds of boxes of archives. It was also interesting to see how their opinions about John and Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson evolved as they reviewed the events of the 1960s from the vantage point of 50 years in the future. I loved the writing and couldn't put the book down.

The Brooklyn follies, by Paul Auster

I really enjoyed this novel by Paul Auster, one of my favorite authors. The Brooklyn follies tells the story of a recently retired, divorced man (Nathan) who relocates to Brooklyn from his former suburban home. His comfortable routine of writing, visiting a favority bookstore, eating in a local diner, is upended when he realizes that his nephew (Tom) is working in the bookstore that he regularly frequents. Both of their lives are further upended when Tom's niece (and Nathan's great-niece), Lucy, shows up on their doorstep. Adventures ensue as they try to find out what happened to Lucy's mother, get involved in a forgery scam, travel to Vermont for a getaway, and meet new friends that will change their lives forever. This is a well-written, heartwarming, and amusing story about making a new life with the people around us.
 

The Plantagenets: the kings that made Britain, by Derek Wilson

 

This is a good introduction to the Plantagenet dynasty in Britain. It devotes a chapter to almost all of the kings from Henry II through Henry V, one chapter on the War of the Roses, and then a final chapter on Edward IV, Edward V, and Richard III. It includes helpful family trees of the ancestors of Henry II, the Plantagenet kings, and the Houses of Lancaster and York. My one beef is that the family trees include the individuals' lifespan dates, but I would also like to see their dates of rule. Most kings' portraits are included in their respective chapters, and there is one map of England and its territorial possessions under Henry II. The book covers more than a dozen reigns and 300+ years of history in fewer than 300 pages, so it is a cursory look at this period.

The mysterious affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie

 

I read what I thought was a lot of Agatha Christie mysteries when I was a teenager, probably a few dozen, but that's only a fraction of her 66 novels and 14 short story collections published between 1921 and 1976, and I haven't read any of her non-fiction, poetry, or plays. I recently decided to delve back into her works, taking a chronological approach, so I began with this one, her first book and her first mystery featuring Poirot. My past reading of Christie was scattershot: basically as I came across her books in used or new book stores or the library. Reading them out of order didn't hamper me, but I thought it would be fun to read them as she created them this time. I thoroughly enjoyed this one as it introduced Poirot for the first time as a Belgian refugee from the Nazis in WWII and his friend Hastings, a wounded veteran from the same conflict. I like the way Poirot roots around for the solution to every puzzle, sometimes being led astray but always finding his way back to the truth, often inspired by a stray comment from Hastings. And Hastings always takes the wrong lesson from every clue, but his goodness of heart makes him unable to be suspicious of a friend. Very enjoyable!