New month, fresh start. 

Going back to my Nixon Reading List and reading The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, which is their follow up to All the President's Men. Although I think this was a good reading project for me, the timing may be off considering....the state of the union so to speak.

NEA Big Reads for Wichita is Lab Girl by Hope Jahren; my real life book club is reading it as our leader/host is on the board that votes every year. There is a few events happening both on base library and my local branch that I hope to get to attend.

#IMOMSOHARD - man I love Kristin and Jen since I first saw their videos on FB. They are hilarious and real and I really want to see their show when they come to Tulsa next February....hint, hint Santa! Rather than doing non-stop toxic positivity, these ladies come straight out of the gate about the less than awesome things (deaths in family for example) or gross (adventures in toilet training), and motherhood with humor and grace. They are my inspirational mom friends.

I am still working through Connections in Death and I picked up Vendetta in Death since it was on the library's shelf, just calling my name. Seriously, brand new JD Robb title just sitting on the new release shelf with nary a waiting list - perplexed I was. I hope to be all caught up on the series by the time November comes around. I can't believe #50 will be published in February.

I need a palette cleanser in between the Eve Dallas books, so I picked up at the library Well, That Escalated Quickly by Franchesca Ramsey. I've listened to a number of podcast episodes with her and she seems funny and smart. 

I wanted something a little dark for this time of year and I am determined to get to Victoria Helen Stone's Jane Doe. I wanted something magical realism/cozy mystery, so Copycat Killing. And by the end of the month, the next novella in the Tourist Trap mystery series A Very Mummy Holiday will be on my NOOK and I can join the gang in South Cove for another round.

Finally, I picked up from the library Chris Hayes' A Colony in a Nation from my non-fiction wish-list. For those not in the US, Hayes is a tv host on MSNBC and former editor/writer for The Nation. Honestly, he is a little heavy on his love for a certain senator from a New England state, but he generally does do a good job of reporting and Ta-Nehisi Coates blurbed the book. I trust Coates enough to give the book a try.

There are many lists with writing tips on the internet. Some are good, others not so much. I once came across one that had some really good advise. It also had one point that said Make everything the could go wrong go wrong. My immediate reaction after reading that was a burning desire to take out my copy of Henning Mankell's The White Lioness and hit the creator of this list over the head with it. And then force them to read the book (which would be so much more painful) and then ask if they still think that everything should go wrong. Because The White Lioness is a book where everything that can go wrong does go wrong and it's horrible.

Of course it is annoying if your characters would be dead after 10 pages if it wasn't for countless incredibly lucky circumstances and a lot of authors don't seem to get that.
However it is equally annoying if the case would be wrapped up neatly after 10 pages if it wasn't for a number of riddiculously unlucky circumstances.

I did not tell all this because I like talking that much (well I do like it but that's not the point...) but because Those We Left Behind is another of those books where just about everything goes wrong. It doesn't reach quite the level of The White Lioness but there's too many instances of people deciding to do something at the moment where it's causing the most harm. There is actually a moment about three quarters into the book where one of the boys is about to tell everything but is stopped when the DI's boss turns up just at that moment.

Additionally I couldn't really warm up to Serena Flanagan, the main character. She made some horrible and stupid decisions that were just inexcusable and even when she wasn't I just couldn't warm up to her. She's just one of the many fictional cops who is always so busy with the job that partner and children suffer. Yes it's truth in fiction but you still could copy & paste the discussions between her and her husband into a dozen other books or films without having to change anything but the names. There is nothing that makes either of them stand out from the crowd.
This is mostly because apart from Serena we have three other POV-characters: Ciaran, the boy who was convicted of the murder, Paula, Ciaran's probation-officer and David, the son of the murder-victim. Especially Ciaran gets a lot of pages and they are just so frustrating because he is such a passive character. Don't get me wrong: it makes sense that he would be but that doesn't mean reading about a character who barely does anything unless told to is any less...boring.

I still read the book in a few hours so it was engaging enough and I did want to find out how exactly it would end but I don't feel the need to pick up any following books.

ARC provided by NetGalley.

I while ago I read Northanger Abbey and while I enjoyed it I also felt like missing out on half of the jokes because while was vaguely aware that Gothic novels meant scary old castles, fair maidens and old curses I had never read one of them. So I eventually decided to read one (after buying it, putting it on my tbr-pile and forgetting about it again till yesterday).

As it happens The Castle of Otranto is actually the first novel that (in its second edition) was published as "Gothic Novel" and wow! It certainly is one. Half a page in the only son and heir of Manfred, the highly unlikeable the lord of the castle has already kicked the bucket (only minutes before the wedding) after a piece of a statue (that apparently appeared out of nowhere) fell on him. Half a page later Manfred has already condemned an unsuspecting bystander to death who just remarked on the similarities between the piece and a statue in the castle and then tries to persuade Isabelle, his son's not-quite-widow to marry him (she refuses among other reasons because Manfred's wife is still alive). It continues in that speed and so the 100 pages are crammed with everything. Mistaken identities, birth-marks that reveal a person's true heritage, curses and enough murder, manipulation and bloodshed to keep up with many contemporary thrillers.

As a result it reads more like a parody that crams all kinds of Gothic tropes together than something that (at least to an extend) wanted to be taken seriously but it is definitely an enjoyable read and because of the shortness and the fact that it was the first Gothic novel not a bad place to start if you're also curious about Gothic fiction.

That was weird. And awesome.

There's not enough alcohol for this

I will finish this book but I'm really not sure if I'll continue with the series afterwards.