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424. Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Katy Fassett

Author:    Amaryllis Fox

Genre:   Nonfiction, Memoir, Foreign

240 pages, published October 15, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA is the memoir of Amaryllis Fox who writes about her life  as a young woman in the CIA.   Fox was an undergraduate at Oxford studying theology and international law when her writing mentor Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded.  Roused by this horrific event, Fox applied to a master’s program in conflict and terrorism at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, where she created an algorithm that predicted the likelihood of a terrorist cell arising in any village around the world.  At the tender age of 21, Fox was recruited by the CIA where she went from analyzing hundreds of classified cables a day to help prepare the daily briefing for the president. She then worked on the Iraq desk in the Counterterrorism center. At twenty-two, she was fast-tracked into advanced operations training and then deployed as a spy under non-official cover as an art dealer specializing in tribal and indigenous art and sent to infiltrate terrorist networks in remote areas of the Middle East and Asia.

Quotes 

 

My Take

Life Undercover is a quick read.  I learned a lot about the CIA training and covert operations.  Fox is a good writer and has some interesting tales to tell about her live undercover and how she got there.

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417. A Town Like Alice

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Noelle Mayne

Author:    Nevil Shute

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Foreign

372 pages, published 1950

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

A Town Like Alice follows the story of Jean Paget, a young British woman who spends World War II trying to survive in Malaya as she and a group of women and children are marched around the country by the Japanese.  Back in London after the war, Paget inherits a large sum of money from a distant relative.  She heads back to Malaya to build a well for the village that saved her and then to Australia to search for Joe Harmon, a soldier she met during the war that she mistakenly thought had been killed after stealing chickens for Jean and her fellow refugees.  She eventually finds Joe and helps him build Willstown, a small, desolute town in the Australian outback, into a town like Alice Springs.

Quotes 

“She looked at him in wonder. “Do people think of me like that? I only did what anybody could have done.”  “That’s as it may be,” he replied. “The fact is, that you did it.”

 

“It’s no good going on living in the ashes of a dead happiness.”

 

“it was so beautiful’, he said. ‘the Three Pagodas Pass must be one of the loveliest places in the world. you’ve got this broad valley with the river running down it, and the jungle forest, and the mountains….we used to sit by the river and watch the sun setting behind the mountains, sometimes, and say what a marvelous place it would be to come to for a holiday. However terrible a prison camp may be, it makes a difference if its beautiful.”

 

“You don’t feel any different as you get older. Only, you can’t do so much.”

 

“It was a gambler’s action, but his whole life had probably been made up of gambles; it could hardly be otherwise in the outback.”

 

“Most jobs are interesting when you are learning them,’ I said.”

  

My Take

I really liked this well written, classic book which was first published in 1950.  I appreciated the pluck, common sense and all around goodness of the two main characters, Jean and Joe.  I also really enjoyed seeing how Jean and Joe were able to transform their tiny settlement of Willstown into a burgeoning town by figuring out what the population needed and then methodically providing it.

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405. At the Water’s Edge

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Joni Renee

Author:    Sara Gruen

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Romance, Foreign, World War II

348 pages, published March 31, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

At the Water’s Edge tells the story of Maddie Hyde, a young ingénue who has entered into a disastrous marriage with Ellis Hyde (who may be gay), a high society Philadelphia playboy.  On New Year’s Eve of 1942, Ellis is cut off financially by his father, a former army Colonel who is already embarrassed by his son’s inability to serve in WWII due to colorblindness.  To redeem himself, Ellis embarks on a quest to find the Loch Ness monster, a venture his father had attempted but failed at in a very public manner.  While in Scotland during the war, the Hyde’s marriage begins to fall apart as Maddie discovers there is greater meaning in her life than being a socialite.

Quotes 

“I paused beneath the arched entrance, where the drawbridge had once been, imagining all the people who had passed in and out over the centuries, every one of them carrying a combination of desire, hope, jealousy, despair, grief, love, and every other human emotion; a combination that made each one as unique as a snowflake, yet linked all of them inextricably to every other human being from the dawn of time to the end of it.”

 

“One Crow for sorrow, Two Crows for mirth, Three Crows for a wedding, Four Crows for a birth, Five Crows for silver, Six Crows for gold, Seven for a secret, never to be told.”

 

“The monster—if there was one—never revealed itself to me again. But what I had learned over the past year was that monsters abound, usually in plain sight.”

 

“Life. There it was. In all its beautiful, tragic fragility, there was still life, and those of us who’d been lucky enough to survive opened our arms wide and embraced it.”

 

“It seems there’s nothing so good or pure it can’t be taken without a moment’s notice. And then in the end, it all gets taken anyway.”

 

“It was full of luxurious trappings and shiny baubles, and that had blinded me to the fact that nothing about it was real.”

 

“I did not take enough care with my hair, but a permanent wave would fix that. I was not thin enough, but for that, alas, there was no quick fix. I should never put more than the equivalent of three peas on my fork at a time, or one small disk of carrot. I should always leave two thirds of my meal on my plate, and was never to eat in public.”

 

My Take

I had previously read Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and really enjoyed it.  At the Water’s Edge is a lesser book with a bit too much romantic melodrama and characters who could use a bit more development.  Still, it was a decent read.

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403. The Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months Unearthing the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Heather Ringoen

Author:   Helen Russell

Genre:    Nonfiction, Travel, Memoir, Foreign

304 pages, published May 19, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Brit Helen Russell was living in London and facing burn out.  When her husband gets a job at Lego in Denmark, which is officially the happiest nation on Earth, they decide to take the leap and try out a year of living Danishly in rural Jutland.  In this book, Russell explores all the things that make the Danes so perennially happy.

Quotes 

“Psychologists at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, found that the better educated and wealthier a nation is, the less likely its population is to believe in a higher being. The Global Index of Religion and Atheism also assessed that poverty was a key indicator of a society’s tendency towards religion – so that poorer countries tend to be the most religious. The one exception to the rule? America.”

 

“He tells me about a word he’s been taught that encapsulates the Danish attitude to work: ‘arbejdsglæde’ – from ‘arbejde’ the Danish for ‘work’ and ‘glæde’ from the word for ‘happiness’. It literally means ‘happiness at work’; something that’s crucial to living the good life for Scandinavians. The word exists exclusively in Nordic languages, and hasn’t been found anywhere else in the world.”

 

“Continuing to learn throughout life helps improve mental well-being, boosts self-confidence, gives you a sense of purpose and makes you feel more connected to others, according to the Office for National Statistics.”

 

“Danes do have a good work-life balance on the whole. ‘And if we don’t, we usually do something about it. You ask yourself, “are you happy where you are?” If the answer’s “yes” then you stay. If it’s “no”, you leave. We recognise that how you choose to spend the majority of your time is important. For me, it’s the simple life – spending more time in nature and with family. If you work too hard, you get stressed, then you get sick, and then you can’t work at all.”

 

“Happiness is the things you possess divided by the things you expect.”

 

“the fact that I was dreaming of retirement at the age of 33 was probably an indicator that something had to change.”

 

“When he puts it like this, it sounds surprisingly sensible. Danes have a collective sense of responsibility – of belonging, even. They pay into the system because they believe it to be worthwhile. The insanely high taxation also has some happy side effects. It means that Denmark has the lowest income inequality among all the OECD countries, so the difference in take-home wages between, for instance, Lego’s CEO and its lowliest cleaner, isn’t as vast as it might be elsewhere. Studies show that people who live in neighbourhoods where most people earn about the same amount are happier, according to research from San Francisco State University and the University of California Berkeley. In Denmark, even people working in wildly different fields will probably have a similar amount left in the bank each month after tax. I’m interested in the idea that income equality makes for better neighbours and want to put it to the test. But since I live in what is essentially a retirement village, where no one apart from Friendly Neighbour works, there isn’t much of an opportunity in Sticksville. So I ask Helena C about hers. She tells me that the street she lives in is populated by shop assistants, supermarket workers, accountants, lawyers, marketers and a landscape gardener. ‘Everyone has a nice home and a good quality of life,’ she says, ‘it doesn’t matter so much what you do for work here.’ Regardless of their various careers and the earning potential that this might afford them in other countries with lower taxes, professionals and non-professionals live harmoniously side by side in Denmark. This also makes social mobility easier, according to studies from The Equality Trust on the impact of income equality. So you’re more likely to be able to get on in life, get educated and get a good job, regardless of who your parents are and what they do in Denmark than anywhere else. It turns out that it’s easier to live ‘The American Dream’ here than it’s ever likely to be in the US.”

 

“inhabitants paid cripplingly high taxes. Which meant that we would, too. Oh brilliant! We’ll be even more skint by the end of the month than we are already… But for your Danish krone, I learned, you got a comprehensive welfare system, free healthcare, free education (including university tuition), subsidised childcare and unemployment insurance guaranteeing 80 per cent of your wages for two years.”

 

“I Google ‘new country, Denmark, culture shock’ on my phone and drink coffee furiously. I learn that Danes drink the most coffee in Europe, as well as consuming eleven litres of pure alcohol per person per year. Maybe we’ll fit in just fine after all.”

 

“You know you’re going to get taxed a lot anyway, so you may as well just focus on doing what you love, rather than what’s going to land you a massive salary.”

 

“I call up the happiness economist Christian Bjørnskov who I spoke to at the start of my adventure to ask for his perspective. He confirms that this level of trust is key to keeping Danes so damned happy. As he told me before I started my quest, ‘life is so much easier when you can trust people’, and this is regardless of whether you’re actually about to get your bank account wiped or have your house burgled. ‘So if I feel safe and trust the people around me, I’m less likely to feel stressed or anxious. I have the headspace to be happy?’ ‘Exactly,’ he tells me. ‘And countries with a major welfare state tend to be high-trust countries, though the high levels of trust in Denmark aren’t necessarily caused by the welfare state.”

 

“Research shows that great art and design can even induce the same brain activity as being in love – something Denmark cottoned on to 90-odd years ago.”

 

“After two weeks of paternity leave post-birth, (my husband) goes back to work before tying up loose ends to take ten weeks off to care for his baby. He has a big shiny job at one of the country’s most profitable companies, but a dad taking time out, fully paid, to look after his child is recognised as something that’s important and so is encouraged.”

 

“Danes actually work an average of just 34 hours a week. Employees are entitled to five weeks’ paid holiday a year, as well as thirteen days off for public holidays. This means that Danes actually only work an average of 18.5 days a month.”

 

“a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition confirming that home-cooked meals actually make people feel better than indulgent meals eaten at a restaurant.”

 

My Take

The Year of Living Danishly gave me a lot of insight in Denmark, reportedly the happiest nation on earth.  They have very high taxes that everyone pays, but also a very high level of social welfare benefits.  This makes for very low income inequality and a low-stress life.  However, the Danish system is not transferable to other countries.  The only way the Danes make it work is their homogeneous population and their exceptionally high levels of trust.

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400. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Valerie Flores

Author:   Patrick Radden Keefe

Genre:    Nonfiction, Crime, History, Foreign

pages, published

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders.  Her children never saw her again.  In her early 20’s, I.R.A. terrorist Dolours Price planted bombs in London, targeting informers for execution.   Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein which was the I.R.A.’s political arm, negotiated the peace that led to the Good Friday accords by denying his I.R.A. past.   The stories of McConville, Price and Adams are just part of the horrific events in the brutal conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles.  In Say Nothing, Patrick Keefe relates these and other stories from this black period in Irish history.

Quotes 

“if you could just get people to talk, he believed, the most bitter antagonists could discover common ground.”

 

“The body is a fantastic machine,’ Hughes told Mackers in one of his Boston College interviews, recounting the grueling sequence of a hunger strike. ‘It’ll eat off all the fat tissue first, then it starts eating away at the muscle, to keep your brain alive.’ Long after Hughes and Price called an end to their strikes and attempted to reintegrate into society, the nursed old grudges and endlessly replayed their worst wartime abominations. In a sense, they never stopped devouring themselves.”

 

“There is a concept in psychology called ‘moral injury,’ notion, distinct from the idea of trauma, that relates to the ways in which ex-soldiers make sense of the socially transgressive things they have done during wartime. Price felt a sharp sense of moral injury: she believed that she had been robbed of any ethical justification for her own conduct.”

 

“Outrage is conditioned not by the nature of the atrocity but by the affiliation of the victim and the perpetrator. Should the state be accorded more leniency because, legally speaking, it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force? Or, conversely, should we hold soldiers and cops to a higher standard than paramilitaries?”

 

“the violence intensified, grandiose funerals became routine, with rousing graveside orations and caskets draped in tricolor flags. People took to joking that there was no social life in Belfast anymore, apart from wakes.”

 

“Dating back to the Iliad, ancient Egypt and beyond, burial rites have formed a critical function in most human societies. Whether we cremate a loved one or inter her bones, humans possess a deep-set instinct to mark death in some deliberate, ceremonial fashion. Perhaps the cruelest feature of forced disappearance as an instrument of war is that it denies the bereaved any such closure, relegating them to a permanent limbo of uncertainty.”

 

“But even if your parents were ardent supporters of the IRA, there were reasons not to tell them that you had joined. If the police or the army broke down the door to interrogate them, the less they knew, the better.”

 

“We beat them with stones at first, and they had guns. Our people had to go and get guns. Wouldn’t they have been right stupid people to stand there? Our people got shotguns at first and then got better weapons. And then the British, who were supposed to protect us, came in and raided our homes. What way could you fight? So you went down and you blew them up.”

 

My Take

Say Nothing is a compelling book which takes an in depth look inside The Troubles in Northern Ireland.  Prior to reading it, I only vaguely knew about this period in Irish History.  I came away with a much better understanding of the who, what, where and why of that conflict and the importance of forgiveness before there can be peace.

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398. The Secret Place

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:    Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Suspense, Foreign

480 pages, published August 28, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

A year after the discovery of a teenaged boy’s murder at a girlsʼ boarding school, Detective Stephen Moran is brought in with Detective Antoinette Conway to reopen the case.   Moran had been waiting for his chance to join Dublin’s Murder Squad when sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey arrives in his office with a photo of the boy with the caption: “I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM.”  Under the watchful eye of Holly’s father, fellow detective Frank Mackey. Moran and Conway investigate the murder which leads them to Holly’s close-knit group of friends, a rival clique, and to the snarl of relationships that bound all of them to the murdered boy.

Quotes 

“You forget what it was like. You’d swear on your life you never will, but year by year it falls away. How your temperature ran off the mercury, your heart galloped flat-out and never needed to rest, everything was pitched on the edge of shattering glass. How wanting something was like dying of thirst.  How your skin was too fine to keep out any of the million things flooding by; every color boiled bright enough to scald you, any second of any day could send you soaring or rip you to bloody shreds.”

 

“I love beautiful; always have. I never saw why I should hate what I wish I had. Love it harder. Work your way closer. Clasp your hands around it tighter. Till you find a way to make it yours.”

 

“She hears all the voices from when she was little, soothing, strengthening: Don’t be scared, not of monsters, not of witches, not of big dogs. And now, snapping loud from every direction: Be scared, you have to be scared, ordering like this is your one absolute duty. Be scared you’re fat, be scared your boobs are too big and be scared they’re too small. Be scared to walk on your own, specially anywhere quiet enough that you can hear yourself think. Be scared of wearing the wrong stuff, saying the wrong thing, having a stupid laugh, being uncool. Be scared of guys not fancying you; be scared of guys, they’re animals, rabid, can’t stop themselves. Be scared of girls, they’re all vicious, they’ll cut you down before you can cut them. Be scared of strangers. Be scared you won’t do well enough in your exams, be scared of getting in trouble. Be scared terrified petrified that everything you are is every kind of wrong. Good girl.”

 

“Trust your instincts, Dad always says. If something feels dodgy to you, if someone feels dodgy, you go with dodgy. Don’t give the benefit of the doubt because you want to be a nice person, don’t wait and see in case you look stupid. Safe comes first. Second could be too late.”

 

“She wants to leap up and do a handstand, or get someone to race her fast and far to wreck them both: anything that will turn her body back into something that’s about what it can do, not all about how it looks.”

 

“They always act like they’re having an amazing time, they’re louder and high-pitched, shoving each other and screaming with laughter at nothing. But Becca knows what they’re like when they’re happy, and that’s not it. Their faces on the way home afterwards look older and strained, smeared with the scraps of leftover expressions that were pressed on too hard and won’t lift away.”

 

My Take

The Secret Place is the sixth book was the fifth book that I have read by Tana French (and the fifth in her Dublin Murder Squad series).  While I loved her other books (The Witch Elm, In the Woods, The Likeness and Faithful Place, and Broken Harbor) I liked, but did not love, The Secret Place.  I found the characters and the central mystery a bit less interesting than previous French reads.  It is still a good book, just not quite up the standard French sets in many of her other books.

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396. Broken Harbor

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:    Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Foreign

450 pages, published April 30, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In one of the half-abandoned luxury developments that populate Ireland, Patrick Spain and his two young children have been murdered.  Mick “Scorcherˮ Kennedy of the Dublin Murder Squad investigates the case and finds that all is not as it seems.

Quotes 

“Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they’ve cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.”

 

“Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who’ve been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you’re not looking, without you adding to the drama.”

 

“People you knew when you were teenagers, the ones who saw your stupidest haircut and the most embarrassing things you’ve done in your life, and they still cared about you after all that: they’re not replaceable, you know?”

 

“But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk of the edge of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone’s mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else’s hands, so it won’t weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.”

 

“I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.”

 

“If you think you’re a success, you will be a success; if you think you deserve nothing but crap, you’ll get nothing but crap. Your inner reality shapes your outer one, every day of your life.”

 

“One of the reasons I love Murder is that victims are, as a general rule, dead… I don’t make a habit of sharing this, in case people take me fore a sicko or- worse-a wimp, but give me a dead child, any day, over a child sobbing his heart out while you make him tell you what the bad man did next. Dead victims don’t show up outside HQ to beg for answers, you never have to nudge them into reliving every hideous moment, and you never have to worry, and you never have to worry about what it’ll do to their lives if you fuck up. They stay put in the morgue, light-years beyond anything I can do right or wrong, and leave me free to focus on the people who sent them there.”

 

My Take

Broken Harbor was the fifth book that I have read by Tana French (and the fourth in her Dublin Murder Squad series) since starting my thousand book quest.  Like The Witch Elm, In the Woods, The Likeness and Faithful Place, Broken Harbor did not disappoint.  French is a gifted storyteller and her mysteries are much more about the human nature involved than whodunit.  A great read.

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392. Faithful Place

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:    Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Foreign

416 pages, published July 13, 2010

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In 1985, 19 year old Frank Mackey was from a dysfunctional family living in a poor part of Dublin in small flat named Faithful Place.  He and his girl, Rosie Daly, were all set to run away to London together, get married, get good jobs, and break away from the despair of their lives in Ireland.  However, on the winter night when they were supposed to leave, Rosie didn’t show.  Frank assumed that she’d given him the brush-off and gone to London on her own.  Frank left Faithful Place and never went home again.  22 years later, Rosie’s suitcase shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place.  Frank, now a Detective on Dublin’s Murder Squad is going home again where he must figure out what happened to Rosie and deal with his family demons.

Quotes 

“My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.”

 

“I’ve always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you’re over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he’s not into strong women is fooling himself mindless; he’s into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in her makeup bags.”

 

“Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.”

 

“I listen to the things people want out of love these days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform on which date and what she should always or never do or say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafes while they reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout, Are you people out of your tiny minds?”

 

“We had no one else to learn this from- none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success- so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming.”

 

“You can be a rich scumbag just as easily as a poor scumbag, or you can be a decent human being either way. Money’s got nothing to do with it. It’s nice to have, but it’s not what makes you who you are.”

 

“Privately, I consider religion to be a load of bollocks, but when you have a sobbing five year old wanting to know what happened to her hamster, you develop an instant belief in anything that dissolves some of the heartbreak off her face.”

 

My Take

Having previously read and thoroughly enjoyed The Witch Elm, In the Woods, and The Likeness by the brilliant Irish writer Tana French, I was highly anticipating Faithful Place (the third book in Dublin Murder Squad series).  It did not disappoint.  French brings you into the time, place and motivations of her characters so completely that I felt like I was right there with them.  Additionally, her insight into the human condition adds a depth and richness that keep her books in your psyche long after you are finished reading them.

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315. Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Clare Telleen

Author:   Kate Atkinson

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, Foreign

332 pages, published November 1, 1999

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Behind the Scenes at the Museum is Kate Atkinson’s debut novel, a story of family heartbreak and happiness. Ruby Lennox begins narrating her life at the moment of conception, and from there takes us on a whirlwind tour of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of an English girl determined to learn about her family and its secrets.

Quotes 

“In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.”

 

“Patricia embraces me on the station platform. ‘The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,’ she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. ‘Nonsense, Patricia,’ I tell her as I climb on board my train. ‘The past’s what you take with you.”

 

“Sometimes I would like to cry. I close my eyes. Why weren’t we designed so that we can close our ears as well? (Perhaps because we would never open them.) Is there some way that I could accelerate my evolution and develop earlids?”

 

“But I know nothing; my future is a wide-open vista, leading to an unknown country – The Rest Of My Life.”

 

 

 

“Slattern! What a wonderful new word. ‘Slattern,’ I murmur appreciatively to Patricia.

‘Yes, slattern,’ Bunty says firmly. ‘That’s what she is.’  ‘Not a slut like you then?’ Patricia says very quietly. Loud enough to be heard, but too quiet to be believed.”

 

 “shop-bought cakes are a sign of sluttish housewifery.” 

My Take

I picked up Behind the Scenes at the Museum after enjoying Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and A God in Ruins.  It wasn’t as good as those efforts, but still offered interesting insights into the human condition.

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305. The Dogs of Riga

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Henning Mankell

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller, Suspense, Foreign

326 pages, published April 13, 2004

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Dogs of Riga is the second book in the Kurt Wallander Detective series and takes place in Sweden during 1991.  A few days after Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team receive an anonymous tip-off, a life raft washes up on a beach containing two dead men, dressed in expensive suits.  In his pursuit of a solution to this case, Wallander finds himself in Riga, Latvia where he is plunged into a world of corruption and intrigue.

Quotes 

“He was so excessively polite that Wallendar suspected he had endured many humiliations in his life.”

 

“The experience he’d gained during his years in the police force had given him this unambiguous answer: there are no murderers. Only ordinary people who commit murder.”

 

“I’m a religious man,” he said. “I don’t believe in a particular God, but even so one can have a faith, something beyond the limits of rationality. Marxism has a large element of built-in faith, although it claims to be a science and not merely an ideology. This is my first visit to the West: until now I have only been able to go to the Soviet Union or Poland or the Baltic states. In your country I see an abundance of material things. It seems to be unlimited. But there’s a difference between our countries that is also a similarity. Both are poor. You see, poverty has different

faces. We lack the abundance that you have, and we don’t have the freedom of choice. In your country I detect a kind of poverty, which is that you do not need to fight for your survival. For me the struggle has a religious dimension, and I would not want to exchange that for your abundance.” “I know paradise has many gates, just as hell does. One has to learn to distinguish between them, or one is lost.”

 

“We live in an age when the mice are hunting the cats…nobody knows who are the mice and who the cats.” 

My Take

Having just read the short Wallander book An Event in Autumn and enjoyed it, I was looking forward to another installment featuring the cynical Swedish inspector.  I liked The Dogs of Riga and appreciated the strong writing by Henning Mankell as well as the interesting locale of Latvia (I place I knew little about).  However, I wasn’t captivated by it.  I’ll try another Wallander and see if I like the next one better.

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