This is a lovely multigenerational memoir. The author is the daughter and granddaughter of Latvian refugees who fled their home country at the end of WWII, and she returns to Latvia after her the death of the grandmother who raised her to learn more about the country and her family’s stories. Much of the book traces the lives of her grandmother – raised on a farm she would forever idealize, before going to school, moving to the city, and ultimately fleeing across war-torn Europe with her two young children, not knowing whether her conscripted husband was dead or alive – and her grandmother’s younger sister, who was trapped on the farm by the war, then deported to Siberia with her family, to finally return and pick up the pieces all over again. Separated for fifty years, the sisters both seemed to envy the other: Ausma envies the glamorous older sister who got away, while Livija, who finally lands in Tacoma, lives in the past, clinging to the Latvian community in exile and raising her granddaughter in its traditions.

It’s a lovely, thoughtful, atmospheric and emotionally rich memoir, and quite comprehensive for its length, with diversions into Latvian history recent and remote and even geological, but always centered on the family and the countryside they both love intensely and often want or need to escape. The artsiness of the writing style was a bit of a stumbling block for me in the beginning – this is definitely an MFA memoir – but by the end I felt the literary style helps distinguish the book. And I appreciated the author’s reckoning with complex topics, such as how those men, including her own grandfather, who were conscripted into the Latvian Legion – meaning they were fighting for the Nazis, but against the Soviets – should be judged. I felt throughout that the author was searching for truth and comfortable with nuance. And of course, I was especially thrilled to find a high-quality book about Latvia, a country rarely featured in literature. I recommend it.

Having finished The Singing Sands, today is a new roll day for me.

 

You rolled 2 dice:

 

Timestamp: 2019-06-01 17:20:49 UTC

 

...which takes me to:

 

15. My husband, Mr. MR, is a big fan of the mountain vacation.

Read a book with a tree (or trees) on the cover, or that is set in a mountain community.

 

Uh, ok. Right. Well, ... Erm, ... I have a few options there, but since Lillelara and I are planning on a buddy read on The Climb, and perhaps some others, I think I'll go for Maurice Herzog's Annapurna. 

I have very low expectations for this one. Based on some comments I have read about Herzog and this particular expedition, I have a feeling that we won't get on, in which case I at least get to whittle down Mt. TBR by another book. However, Annapurna can still prove me wrong, and it would not be the first time that a book has that impact. 

 

Also, I may change my book choice if it turns out that Sourcery is set in a mountain community. ;D

 

 

And because, I rolled doubles, I get another roll:

 

You rolled 2 dice:

 

Timestamp: 2019-06-01 17:30:12 UTC

 

...which takes me to:

 

23. The Cape-to-Cairo Railway

Read a book set on the continent of Africa, or by an author from any African country.

 

One of the benefits of BL-Opoly is that I get to scour my bookshelves for unread titles and get to work (unofficially, since this is "the year of free-range reading") on Mt. TBR. 

 

There are actually three books I have on my shelves that fit this particular prompt:

 

My Traitor's Heart by Rian Malan,

Woza Shakespeare by Antony Sher, and 

King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild

 

I will make a decision once I finish Annapurna and Sourcery. At the moment, I am leaning towards Malan's book. Not only has this been on my shelf the longest, but it might actually be the least challenging (even if have I no expectations to this one being a fluffy read either). 

 

Date	Bank	Square	Title		Pages	DNF	DNF @ Page #	Rating	Notes
May 20	$20								(Starting Bank Balance)
May 20	$3	5	Death on the Nile		320			5
May 22	$0	Jail	Ladies' Bane		237			3.5
May 24	$3	15	Savage Summit		303			4
May 24	$1	25	Bel Canto		319	1	50	1	Memorial Day Bonus Roll # 1
May 24	$3	35	The Division Bell Mystery		254			4	Memorial Day Bonus Roll # 2
May 27	$5	Go	-		-			-
May 27	$3	4	Ways of Escape		309			3.5
May 30	$3	11	The Singing Sands		246			4
June 1		15	Annapurna						Doubles roll; in progress
June 1		23	tbc
Total	$41

 

Cards in Pocket:

The Cat

My brother-in-law, Richard, apparently knows that I'm one cheap bastard, and don't much like paying for books. So, he recommended this one, which was available for free on Amazon. He'd met the author recently at a conference and he'd rather liked him. So, I figured, what the hell, why not give it a go?

So, it seems that Frank Cole had run a reasonably successful software company for a while. Then things went sour and he went bankrupt. One of the things that came out from his bankruptcy trial was that he would have to begin paying back the money he owed if he were to earn more than a certain amount, essentially more than the bare minimum for survival. So Frank's lawyer told him to go live in a poor part of Florida, the panhandle area, and take only a few short-term gigs, as the need arose. Thus, Frank works piecemeal as a "fact checker". He has good computer-based investigative skills and will check out facts for insurance companies and the like. Mostly, he searches on-line computer data bases to do background checks on various people. Much of the checking is done on computers at the local library, and Frank has become BFFs with the reference librarian, who like most librarians (imho), is awesome. Frank claims that he most certainly won't do private investigation, where he might have to be dealing with people.

A young man, Eddie Gonzalez is a hit-and-run victim while out on an evening jog. The police figured he'd been hit by a teenager who was out joyriding in a stolen car. But, it seems that Gonzalez had only a few weeks previously taken out a life insurance policy that made his fiancée the beneficiary. So, the insurance company figures it was an intentional suicide, and hires Frank to do some fact checking so as to establish that Gonzalez was sufficiently sketchy as to do such a thing. [To me this doesn't make any sense at all, but what do I know? I suppose if one is living in despair and plans suicide anyway, doing so in such a way as to benefit someone else makes sense. I should remember that the next time I think about committing suicide. How can I contrive my suicide so as to benefit my spouse and children?]

Anyway, Frank does some investigating. It seems that Eddie was a pretty good guy. Also, it seems that a jogger who dresses similarly to Eddie and who takes a similar course is a very rich guy, and there might be benefits to bumping off the rich guy. He was about to sell off the family shipping business to people outside the country.

So, perhaps Eddie's death was a case of mistaken identity. Then too, the type of vehicle used in the accident/murder seems to have been meticulously chosen, as was the location where the hit-and-run occurred, and the disposition of the vehicle after the hit-ant-run. So, "just an accident" makes no sense.

Well, anyway, Frank gets drawn in and does more investigating than he'd like. Eventually, the perp is fingered and so forth.

This book is written in a style similar to hard-boiled detective fiction such as works of Raymond Chandler, or Ross Macdonald. It's not quite so hard-boiled, perhaps just soft-boiled. But it's very engaging and overall a GoodRead. It seems my brother-in-law knows a thing or two after all.

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