 Icelandic cafe decor. These are color coordinated books that look cool, but the books have been cut away about 3 inches from the spine so that they can be displayed. The bookshelves don't need to be full sized this way, but the books are unreadable.
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1. Vivaldi's Virgins
2. The Venice Sketchbook 3. A Year At The Hotel Gondola *4. The City of Falling Angels 5. Dead Lagoon *6. Death at La Fenice *7. The Glassblower of Murano 8. Johnathan Strange and Mr. Novell 9. One Summer in Venice 1. The Good Left Undone
*2. The Highland Witch 3. Where The World Ends *4. Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox 5. Highland Fling 6. Daughter of the Forest 7. The Quaker 8. An Expert In Murder 9. The Woman Made of Snow *10. The Highland Witch 11. Keep Me 12. Under Loch and Key 13. The Last Witch in Edinburgh  I definitely was not aware of Vivaldi's history or life story. I did not know he was a priest, I did not know that there were orphans being cared for by the nuns who were trained to play in the orchestra that played Vivaldi's music. I tried to do a little research and it was unclear to me how accurate this book was, but it was an interesting backstory to build around the characters. The abuse and neglect of Italian orphans in the early 1700s in Venice and the outlying areas is on display here, consistent with the lives of children across place and time. In places, this book seems gratuitously salacious, but that is inconsistent and often feels out of place.
Not not recommended, but lean towards recommended if you are going to Venice. Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project. From My 50 Bookish Friends:
 This is a multigenerational story that centers around Leonora, whose marriage has dissolved, as she decides to move to her birthplace in Venice after growing up in England in an attempt to learn the masculine-dominated art of glassblowing on the island of Morano. As we move between generations, a complicated story of love, betrayal, business, and artistry intertwine as the story comes together to fill in Leonora's family history. Overall, a really good read about the art, history, and culture of the area.
Recommend. Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.  Niall Williams. 2024. Set in 1962 Ireland, this is a marginally interesting period piece that recounts the bleak existence of a small town second-generation doctor and his adult spinster daughter who "keeps house for him." Living under the rigidity of the Catholic Church and a cloud of grief since the death of the doctor's wife and the daughter's mother, the first three parts of the story drag on with detailed descriptions of mundane events that I suspect "real" lovers of literature find beautiful and enthralling. I got all the way to part four and realized that only about two or three weeks of time had passed in the storyline.
By Part Four, a few things happen. We meet another character, whose life is also dismal. A young teen, his father is an alcoholic and his mother the kind of run down and sad that comes from a lifetime of being dependent on alcoholics. The poverty and pain of the story continues on until the Time of The Child. At this point, well into the last part of the book, the plot seemed to begin. Now, I am not saying the book isn't well crafted or that it wasn't at times informative of an historical period in a place that is often ignored, but I am saying that it was boring and those things weren't enough to pull me along. Not recommended. Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.  Donna Leon. 2022. This is a classic murder mystery set in Venice after a fictious renowned conductor is killed in the famous Opera House before a show. The book is a solid read, with good plotting, character and scene developments, and writing. An ending that nicely tied up loose ends gets it bonus points, along with a little nod to the complexity and nuance of childhood traumas. I really enjoyed it and it is the perfect read for a trip to Venice.
Recommend. Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.  This is quite possibly the worst free audible book I have ever encountered--and I have suffered through some pretty terrible ones. This one, though, in addition to being a trite story without much character development or meaningful plot, had the added of what is being called a "Virtual Voice" reader. Now, I have used a voice to text function off and on since before the turn of the century and I have never had an issue with listening to a computerized voice reading to me, but this voice was irritating AF. It don't know if the programmer was trying to make it sound romantic or what, but it sounded like an uneducated community theatre audition read where she doesn't know when the script says "record" as in the thing you put on a turntable to play and "record" as to use a digit device to capture someone's voice. She also had no idea how to pronounce words like "testasterone." It was so distracting to have this weirdly breathy voice reading the dialogue in the same way the prose, substituting in the wrong words, and never coming up for air or emotion.
Do not recommend. Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.  This is a sequel to My Name is Lucy Burton, which I read as part of my 2017 reading challenge. That was a year when I had categories of books that I was reading from and I can't remember which category this fulfilled. I had trouble finding books to fill those lists the few years that I did that and started asking for recommendations, which is how I ended up ditching that list and just taking recommendations for my yearly booklist. In any event, I did not write reviews back then, so I decided to reread My Name Is Lucy Barton after reading the first chapter of this book in order to remember the backstory. In retrospect, this wasn't necessary to appreciate this story, but it did help connect many of the relationships in the book. And there are a lot of relationships in this book. There are a ton of characters and the history between them is complicated. I often felt like I do when I visit friends in a close-knit community or try to join a new group of people who have been tight for a long time. There are all these backstories that touch on each other and it is hard to keep up with how they all touch on each other. This makes the details of the book hard to keep track of and sometimes I would be well into a new storyline before I realized these were the same people from another storyline. In many ways, this is the magic of this series. It really makes you feel what Lucy Barton's small town life with judgy, hurtful people was like--and not just for her. Those who bullied her, those who were indifferent to her, and those who saw and helped her in big and small ways are all portrayed sometimes in sympathetic ways, sometimes not, and most often in both ways at the same time. There is so much depth here, so much hurt. Child sex abuse and sexual assault play prominent roles as they play out in families and relationships in ways that fill in the backstory for many characters. It is the story of kids who were bullied and kids who did the bullying and kids who were both bullied and did the bullying and how this plays out in their adult lives. The emotion of childhood trauma, indeed sometimes of torture, is on painful display here--told with a perspective that conveys deep empathy for the damage done and the damage done to the people caused the damage. It is heart-wrenching the whole way. Recommend. Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.  Herbie Hancock. 2014. Having known nothing about Herbie Hancock other than the heavily electronic version of Rock It from my childhood, I was surprised by a lot of this memoir and I can image that for someone interested in jazz, jazz fusion, and the evolution of electronic music and particularly synthesizers, that this book would be fascinating. I learned a lot about these topics, despite what might be surprised as a lack of general interest in them, which is one of the great things about reading in general. Hancock's background in engineering, touring with Miles Davis, and general likeability made for good storytelling, even if it sometimes fell into the name-dropping trap that I often find so irritating in these types of memoirs.
I will say that I found his lack of political engagement to be disappointing, especially considering the opportunities and relationships that he had connection to. The parts of the book where he wrote about his struggles with addition to crack cocaine were probably the most moving, but his repeated discussion of his Buddhist chanting practices reminded me of Tina Turner's memoirs (My Love Story and Happiness Becomes You) in terms of leaving me with a sense of superficiality. I am definitely see what others love about this book, but I think I expect more emotionality from a memoir like this unless I have an independent interest in the historical topic. Not recommended--unless you are a music or jazz lover, then I would recommend it for you. Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project. |
AuthorI'll read anything a friend recommends & I love telling people what I think about it. Every year, I read 50 books recommended by 50 different friends. Welcome to My 50 Bookish Friends Blog. SearchCategories
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