Recent Reads

So Many Steps to Death by Agatha Christie. A political thriller about a despondent woman who is recruited to help track down scientists who have been disappearing.  I normally am not a fan of Christie's political thrillers, but this one was enjoyable and had some clever bits.  It was quite like one of Dorothy Gilman's Mrs. Pollifax novels.

Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough.  Burrough's set out to explore the rise of the FBI from 1933 to 1935.  It seems like an informative book except for a few points:  Burrough spells Doc Barker's nickname as "Dock" and the people in the photo of the Hamer posse that tracked down Bonnie and Clyde are not identified properly.  A quick Google search shows nowhere else (including the FBI files that were supposedly primary sources for the book) was Barker's name spelled Dock.  If something as simple as the name of a major character is spelled wrong, how can I trust any of the information in the book?  .  So I'd call it a decent overview of the subject, but I wouldn't wholly believe the contents without further research.  It was a tad bit long, too.

Stover at Yale by Owen Johnson.  I downloaded this for free from Gutenberg after watching a film based on another Johnson book.  It's a book that hasn't aged well.  If you want to know about the social structure of Yale in the beginning of the 1900's, you might find it good, but as a story not much happens.

Have Spacesuit--Will Travel by Robert Heinlein.  As a teen I was disappointed with our library's selection of Heinlein novels, and now I wonder if I just hadn't looked in the right spot.  I only looked in adult fiction and never checked the card catalog, so it was only in the past few years that I found out Heinlein wrote juvenile fiction ( a surprising discovery considering Heinlein's obsessions with sex and breasts).  A teenager wins an old spacesuit in a soap wrapper contest and ends up involved with aliens.  Loads of fun with decent action, smart female characters, and insightful social commentary.  I love the boy's father who complains about the American educational system not really teaching students things they should know to succeed (this in 1958).  I love that the boy is smart enough to know he doesn't know anything.  One of Heinlein's best.

Washington Square by Henry James.  For a short novel, this was unbearably long.  We have a homely unloved daughter pursued by a gold digger.  Her father promises he will leave her nothing if she marries the guy (she already has a fortune inherited from her mother).  The girl also has a meddlesome aunt.  The girl is a blithering idiot who apparently expects the boy to wait forever.  The boy is not much of a gold digger since he barely seems to bother pursuing her.  I disliked everyone in the book and did not care in the least what happened to any of them.  Skip the book and watch the infinitely superior movie version, The Heiress.