Rocketjk's 2019 reading 'round the world

I've had fun charting my travels the last nine years. 2018 was a somewhat off year, travel-wise, as brought me to twelve countries, including the U.S., down from eighteen the year before. With luck, I'll be a somewhat more productive globe trotter this year.

As always, I don't select my reading to purposefully "travel" around. Rather, I just have fun seeing where my more random reading choices take me! I'll be writing at greater length about each book on my 2019 50-Book Challenge thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/301698

BOOKWORLD
One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde

AFRICA
Democratic Republic of the Congo
White by Deni Ellis Béchard

Egypt
Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively (also listed in England)

EUROPE
Non-Country Specific
Slingshot by Matthew Dunn
Mr Standfast by John Buchan
The Secret History of the War, Volume 1 by Waverly Root
The Liberation of Mankind: The Story of Man's Struggle for the Right to Think by Hendrik Willem Van Loon (history)

England
Miss Mapp by E. F. Benson
Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively (also listed in Egypt)
Gilbert and Sullivan: A Dual Biography by Michael Ainger (biography)
Arkady by Patrick Langley
The Three Hostages by John Buchan
The Woman Who Died a Lot by Jasper Fforde
The Masters by C.P. Snow
Death of a Mystery Writer by Robert Barnard

The Faroe Islands
The Island of Sheep by John Buchan (also listed in Scotland)

France
The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad
The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester

Germany
All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski

Ireland
Guerilla Days in Ireland: a First-Hand Account of the Black and Tan War (1919-1921) by Tom Barry (memoir)
A Soldier's Wife by Marion Reynolds
Amongst Women by John McGahern
Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion by Charles Townshend (history)

Italy
The Child of Pleasure by Gabriele D'Annunzio

Northern Ireland
Milkman by Anna Burns
The Land of Cain by Peter Lappin

Poland
In My Father's Court by Isaac Bashevis Singer (memoir)

Scotland
The Island of Sheep by John Buchan (also listed in The Faroe Islands)

Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation by Laura Silber and Allan Little (history)

MIDDLE EAST
Non-Country Specific
Scheherezade: Tales from the Thousand and One Nights translated by A. J. Arberry
The Apostle by Sholem Asch

NORTH AMERICA
Mexico
Dirty Laundry by Pete Hamill (also listed in U.S./New York)

The United States
Non-State Specific
The Life of Andrew Jackson by Marquis James (biography)
Canaries in the Mineshaft: Essays on Politics and Media by Renata Adler (essays)
The Wrecker by Clive Cussler and Justin Scott
Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country by Steve Almond (essays)
The Longest Debate: a Legislative History of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by Charles A. Whalen and Barbara Whalen (history)
Uncommon Type: Some Stories by Tom Hanks
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (memoir)
Blues Poems edited by Kevin Young (poetry)
Kate Remembered by A. Scott Berg (memoir/biography)

California
Shamrocks & Salsa by Gerald F. Cox (memoir)
For the Sake of Shadows by Max Miller (memoir)
Anybody's Gold: The Story of California's Mining Towns by Joseph Henry Jackson (history)
No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead by Peter Richardson (history)
The Recollections of Ernest Everett "Sharkey" Rawles by Ernest Rawles (oral history)

Georgia
Georgia and State Rights: A Study of the Political History of Georgia from the Revolution to the Civil War, with Particular Regard to Federal Relations by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (history)

Louisiana
Rampart Street by Everett and Olga Webber

Montana
In Shelly's Leg by Sara Vogan

Nebraska
The Jugger by Richard Stark

New York
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
Indefensible: One Lawyer's Journey into the Inferno of American Justice by David Feige (memoir)
Dirty Laundry by Pete Hamill (also listed in Mexico)
The Baby Bombers: The Inside Story of the Next Yankees Dynasty by Bryan Hoch (history)

Oklahoma
Saturday Matinee by Maxine Neely Davenport

Virginia
Action at Aquila by Hervey Allen
Gods and Generals by Jeff Shaara

SOUTH AMERICA
Argentina
The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof by César Aira

Peru
Death in the Andes by Mario Llosa Vargas

As always (at least for the past decade or so), my first book of the year is a Joseph Conrad novel, as I have been reading (or, in most cases, re-reading) his novels in chronological order. This year brought me to The Arrow of Gold, published in 1920. This is a love story set amidst Carlist intrigues in Marseilles, France, in the 1870s. Mostly the narrative takes place in drawing rooms, though there are just enough scenes set in restaurants and cafes to give the book the slight flavor of the time and place.

I took a reading trip to the Middle East, and back about 500 years, via Scheherezade: Tales from the Thousand and One Nights translated by A. J. Arberry. According to this book's back cover, famed British orientalist A.J. Arberry's translation of these famous tales was "the first new rendering in over half a century." This relatively slim volume contains only four tales, actually, "Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp," "Judar and His Brothers," "Aboukir and Abousir" and "The Amorous Goldsmith." It was fun and interesting, in particular, to read Aladdin as translated directly from the Marmaluke-era Arabic (Arberry estimates the stories to date from around 1500 AD) into contemporary English, as opposed to the Disney version of the tale most American children have come to know. Not surprisingly, elements of the story are darker than the sanitized version we know. Arberry, in his interesting (though frustratingly plot-spoiler laden) introduction points out the degree to which, he believes, these tales were meant as satire on the society of the day. This volume was originally published by George Allen & Unwin in 1953. My copy is a beautiful Mentor Books paperback edition, and a first edition of such, dating from 1955. That makes my copy pretty much exactly as old as I am! Again according to Arberry, these tales seem to belong to the entire Arabic speaking world, so for my purposes here I'll just call this Middle East and non-country specific.

I took my first reading trip to England of the year, courtesy of Miss Mapp, the second (or third, depending on which list you believe) novel in E. F. Benson's wry comedy of manners series, "Mapp and Lucia." The foibles of life among the upper middle class in small village England, circa 1920s is the setting of the series and the source of the humor. Or, I should say, humour. Lots of fun. I will be reading the rest of the 6-part series by and by.

The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof is a slim volume containing two novellas by Argentinian author César Aira. The first The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof by César Aira. The first ostensibly takes place in Korea and the second on the streets of Buenos Aires, but really they both take place in the realm of the senses and the imagination. What they also have in common is that both begin in relatively commonplace settings with seemingly realistic characters, and then spin gradually but inexorably into the realm of the hallucinatory. They are meditations on the nature of reality, perception and cultural expectations. That's a fairly cliched phrase I just wrote, I know, but with Aira's deft way with phrasing and description and, not incidentally, his sense of humor, these swift rides are actually (or at least were to me) happily refreshing and even thought-provoking. At any rate, I'm listing this book as a reading trip to Argentina not so much for the subject matter but because Aira is such an important figure in contemporary Argentinian literature.

Anna Burns' Milkman is a simultaneously hallucinatory and acute novel about life in Northern Ireland during the troubles as seen through the eyes of an 18-year-old girl who has the added burden of being harassed by a powerful man more than twice her age.

I just finished and highly recommend All for Nothing by German author Walter Kempowski. This final novel by Kempowski tells in muted terms of the horrific last days of World War 2 in East Prussia, as hundreds of thousands of terrified Germans take to the road, fleeing the advancing Russians whose artillery they can already hear. Not as well known in America, I guess, it seems that Kemposwki is considered a classic writer in his native country. He himself, as a teenager, lived through the events this books tells of, only to be imprisoned by the Russians as a spy, serving eight years. Originally published in 2006, a new English publication came out in 2018 as part of the New York Review of Books' Classics series.

I have had two reading trips to France this year, but both, so far, via novels written by Englishmen. I recently finished The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester. It seems, as this somehow simultaneously dense and airy narrative takes off, that we are in the hands amazingly skilled stylist in Lanchester and an erudite, wry, if somewhat pompous, first-person protagonist. Our narrator, also an Englishman, is taking us on a tour of his own family history and of his beloved France, with attention especially paid to gastronomic experiences and history, with plenty of recipes thrown in. What fun! Slowly, however, we become aware that all is not well with our protagonist. We are inside the head of somewhat more than a little disturbed. It is in some ways an entirely exhilarating ride. The problem is that once we know where we are, we also know what's coming. Seeing how it will all work out is interesting, to be sure. But the book becomes an extremely creepy place to inhabit.

I finished The Land of Cain by Peter Lappin, the second book I've read this month about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Whereas Milkman is about relatively contemporary times, The Land of Cain, first published in 1957, takes us back to the 1920s. The story tells of a Catholic family in Belfast, with three grown sons trying each in his own way to navigate the sectarian violence that breaks out between Catholic and Protestant. This was the author's first novel. There is much fine description of nature and countryside (the family starts out living on a farm). I learned a bit, as well, about the history of the Troubles of that era. The plot is a bit formulaic, and the characterizations could have used a much defter touch. Overall, though, I would say that I did enjoy the reading.

I'm listing Slingshot, the third novel in Matthew Dunn's "Spycatcher" series, as Europe: Non-Country Specific, as super-spy Will Cochrane and an assorted coterie of British, American, Russian, German and Israeli spies, henchmen, evildoers and goodpersons traipse hither and yon across the continent, leaving bodies in their wakes as they attempt to bring about and/or try to prevent global mayhem. Fun, escapist espionage fiction.

Penlope Lively's brilliant novel, Moon Tiger, takes place for the most part in England, but its most vivid scenes are set in WW2-era Egypt, so I'm listing this book in both countries. The book tells the story of Claudia Hampton, an adventurer and writer of histories, a woman who spent World War II as a war correspondent in Egypt, who lies dying in a hospital room in England. She thinks back over her life in snatches, only marginally in chronological order. The narrative wafts back and forth from first person to third and moves around, even, occassionally between characters. The descriptions of tank battles in the desert and their aftermath are particularly vivid. The descriptions of the many entanglements of family and romance and the street life of Cairo during the war are all, each in their different ways, compelling, as well. The core of the novel is Lively's flowing use of language and observation.

I finished Gilbert and Sullivan: A Dual Biography by Michael Ainger. While there is too much detail offered about individual quarrels over business and procedure, due to the author's over-reliance on the troves of correspondence he had access to, and not enough information for me about the inner lives of these two famous artists, all in all this was an interesting dual biography of one of the great music/libretto writing teams of the English stage.

I finished Guerilla Days in Ireland: a First-Hand Account of the Black and Tan War (1919-1921) by Tom Barry. Commandant General Tom Barry was the commander of the West Cork Flying Column of the I.R.A. during the days of the Irish guerilla war aimed at expelling the British from Ireland. Guerilla Days in Ireland is Barry's memoir of that campaign and his role in it, written and published 25 years after the events described. Barry chronicles in detail the ways that the decidedly outgunned (even when they had enough guns to go around, they rarely had enough bullets) and outmanned IRA forces carried on an effective enough campaign to eventually force the British government to offer truce terms in 1921.

I recently finished A Soldier's Wife, a first novel by Irish writer Marion Reynolds. Reynolds based her book on her grandmother's diaries. The story follows the life, trials and joys of Ellen, one of four sisters in a rural family in County Mayo, from the earliest years of the 20th century through the Irish Civil War of the early 1920s. Within a few pages of the book's start, Ellen has married James Devereux, an Irishman but a member of the British Army. While the prose style is far from sophisticated, it is clean. We see the story wholly through Ellen's eyes, as she deals with the tedium and frustrations of being an English sargeant's wife in the Raj during a seven-year tour of India, through holding her family together through semi-poverty in Dublin during James' years in the trenches of France in World War One, and then through the events of the Easter Rebellion, the Irish fight for home rule and the Irish Civil War, and finally navigating the pitfalls of having growing sons drawn ever more strongly to the fight for Irish freedom in the same house with a husband who has spent most of his prime serving the British as a member of the Connaught Rangers. The characterizations could certainly be deeper, but all in all (especially in the book's second half) an interesting view of the times, given a ring of authenticity by the reader's knowledge of the material's source.

I finished The Child of Pleasure. Published in 1889, The Child of Pleasure is the first novel of Italian writer Gabriele D'Annunzio, who gained fame in Italy and throughout Europe and the U.S. as a novelist, and went on to political fame (or infamy, perhaps) in post-WW I Europe as the founder of a nationalistic movement that inspired Mussolini. At any rate, in the late 19th century, D'Annunzio's topic was the power of beauty and sensuality. His protagonist here, Count Andrea Sperelli, is a young Roman nobleman who lives in and for luxury and for the seduction of beautiful women. The Child of Pleasure is the narrative of Sperelli's adventures in this arena, particularly as it pertains to two extremely beautiful and cultured women. Throughout the tale, D'Annunzio's eye lingers lovingly on the beauties of the natural countryside, Roman architecture, and the items of antiquity that Sperelli and his friends dote upon. Tellingly, these items are all at least 100 years old. There's little of contemporary (to the characters) vintage held up for admiration.

These descriptions of nature and art were interesting to read, but there was little of Count Sperelli's projects or problems that held any fascination for me. This is one of those books I read more out of an intellectual curiosity about the book's place in the history of literature than from a desire to know, or expectation to enjoy, the story. D'Annunzio himself throughout the tale speaks of Sperelli's gradual and eventually complete abdication of moral purpose or conscience, so at least we're not meant to admire the character, even if we are somehow to empathize with his delight in the purely physical/sensual world. Few modern readers will do so, I think.

I finished Amongst Women by Irish novelist John McGahern. The book is tersely written, with a particularly effective portrayal of the claustrophobia of rural family life. As such, it's not always comfortable to read, as the tension in the household transmits to the reader all too well. I did have my reservations, though.

I recently finished Death in the Andes by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, which I very much enjoyed, is an often hallucinatory story about a well intentioned Peruvian Army corporal trying to unravel the mystery of three disappearances in a remote Andean village. Quite likely, I missed some of the depth of what is reported to be an allegory about the state of Peru itself (circa 1993 when the book was first published). But I was easily able to settle into and appreciate the shifting narrative framework Llosa employed.

Another spy novel for the Europe: Non-Country Specific designation . . . I finished Mr Standfast, the entertaining third entry in John Buchan's classic "Richard Hannay" espionage series, written during and just after World War One. Buchan wrote the first two books while the war was still ongoing, so, obviously, he didn't know how things were going to turn out. Mr Standfast was written after the war's conclusion. But the war is still going fiercely in the novel, and Hannay is pulled from his command in the trenches in France to go after a master German spy who has set up a network through which vital British war information is being passed through to Germany. Hannay goes on a difficult chase, indeed, across Scotland, France and Switzerland. The "daring do" of this story has much more to do with endurance than with violence. There is a lot of fine natural description, as well. So the book is fun, although a modern reader must work around Buchan's persistent antisemitism and racism.

Back to a futuristic, darkly off-kilter England via Patrick Langley's excellent, dystopian novel, Arkady. What I like best about this book (and there is a lot to like) is that ultimately the development and the relationship between the two brothers who are the novel's main characters is the real heart of the story, even more than the world building of the fractured society Langley portrays.

Pete Hamill's 1980s mystery, Dirty Laundry takes place about half in New York City and half in Mexico City and includes enough description of the former to earn a split listing in U.S./New York and Mexico. It's a fun diversion. Murder, mayhem, suspense, etc. The ending is a let-down, though.

I finished The Secret History of the War, Volume 1 by Waverley Root. This is a fascinating, extremely detailed book about World War 2, written for the most part while the war was still going on. Root was an American journalist stationed in Paris right up until the German occupation of the city. The book was originally to be co-written with French journalist Pierre Lazareff, but Lazareff understandably became otherwise engaged "in government service." However, he allowed Root to use the material he'd already compiled. At any rate, this long book (I am reporting here on Volume 1 only, which in itself is 650 pages of fairly small print) contains endless interesting details of, particularly but not solely, the political conditions and many machinations of governments before and during the war. In particular, Root (and Lazareff) focus on France, both pre-war and during the Vichy era. Root maintains that a) many in French leadership were, essentially, facists who abhorred their own Republic; b) much of the Germans' meticulous prewar 5th column propaganda activity was done for them by French leaders (Philippe Pétain comes in for particular criticism) and c) the French Army's efforts to resisting the German invasion were sabataged by traitors within the government and the army. These people were either Nazi sympathizers or were so convinced of the Germans' eventual victory in the war that they thought resistance to be futile. I don't know the degree to which these opinions have been backed up or discredited in the intervening years, but Root makes a very, very strong case.

Root goes into some detail about the conditions in France and the other conquered countries during the years of occupation, during which, eventually, near starvation conditions applied as the Germans extracted more and more of the local produce and manufactured goods to feed their armies. When you see movies about the French occupation, you never see the people as gaunt and malnourished as Root describes them.

Also included are chapters on Finland, the history of the German-Soviet Pact and the eventual, disastrous, German invasion of Russia, and events in the Balkans, Africa and the Low Countries. Also fascinating is the chapter about Hitler's continual attempts to make a separate peace with the Western allies in order to be able to concentrate solely on fighting Russia. Again, this is Volume 1 of a three-volume set. I'll be starting on Volume 2 very soon.

For the purposes of this thread, the emphasis on France notwithstanding, I'm counting this book as Europe: Non-country specific.

Lots of interesting insights! I wish I had noticed this thread earlier...

>23 Dilara86: Thanks! Although I list most of the books I read in the first post, I generally only post further comments here about the books that are appropriate or at least semi-appropriate to the group in general. "Appropriate" are novels written in/about countries other than the U.S. and not originally written in English. "Semi-appropriate" are novels or histories written in/about other countries but by authors who do write in English.

If by some chance you're interested in seeing comments about all the books I read, you can find that on my 50-Book Challenge thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/301698

I finished The Apostle by Sholem Asch. Asch was a Yiddish writer, a Polish Jew who wrote about shtetl life in Europe and became very well known, with his work being translated into many languages. He moved to America in his 30s and began writing about the Jewish immigrant experience here. Late in his career, however, he wrote three books in what became known as his "Founders of Christianity" series: The Nazarene, The Apostle, and Mary. This did not go over well in the Jewish community of the time (The Apostle was published in 1942), and he lost readership and his job. This despite that fact that Asch maintained that the novels were meant to bridge the gap between Jews and Christians by demonstrating in fiction that Christianity was in fact a deeply Jewish phenomenon at its core. As my old man would have said, however, "Lotsa luck." And so I was curious about The Apostle. It is the fictional story of early Christianity as seen through the eyes of Saul, who become the Apostle Paul.

Once he is converted and begins preaching about the Messiah, Paul schlepps back and forth across the Middle East and the Adriatic, founding congregations and converting Jew and Gentile alike to the new faith. Being Jewish myself, I never knew the details of Paul's life nor much about the turning point where Paul stopped preaching only to Jews that their Messiah had arrived and instead insisted on preaching to everyone, thus taking the new religion out of the realm of Judaism. (And that is, of course, to whatever extent this book is faithful to what is know of those events.) So that was interesting. Unfortunately about 95% of the storytelling is done in flat, expository prose. There's almost nothing to draw us into the narrative for its own sake. So I plodded through, chapter by chapter, one chapter at a time over several years, and now I've finished! I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone other than the historically curious about Asch and his career. That's probably a fairly small subset of my LibraryThing friends! I do look forward to going back and reading some of Asch's earlier works, which were much praised when he wrote them and are still highly regarded.

Although the story does take Paul from Jerusalem to Greece to Rome and back a couple of times, it is centered in Biblical era Israel and surrounding areas, so I'm going to call this Middle East: Non-country specific.

>25 rocketjk: Sounds interesting! I've never got around to any Yiddish writers except Singer - taking note.

>26 thorold: Singer is great, as you know. If you read Asch, please don't start with The Apostle. I, too, want to explore his work more. Also, I highly recommend the short story collection Tevye's Daughters by Sholom Aleichem. The collection alternates between stories about Tevye the Milkman and his daughters that formed the basis of Fiddler on the Roof and other stories about life in the Pale of Settlement. All are excellent, with the stories about Tevye and his world much grittier (no surprise) than the musical.

I finished The Three Hostages by John Buchan. This is the fourth of John Buchan's 5-book "Richard Hannay" series of thrillers, written during and just after World War One. Uber-Englishman Richard Hannay is home from the war in France, and from his dangerous and desperate espionage assignments which had repeatedly pulled him away from his men in the trenches. Now he has retired to his country estate . . . well, no such luck. It seems there is another dastardly plot afoot to gain control of the Western World and in particular to destroy all is strong about English society. Worse, this cabal has taken three innocent hostages. Scotland Yard and their European allies are just about to sweep up the conspirators, but first, someone has to find and free these hostages. Guess who? As usual, there is lots of great natural description, this time in particular of the mountain passes of Scotland. And here, the antisemitism gets dialed down from its crescendo in the third book. Being Jewish myself, I'm never surprised to find such elements in English writing of the time, particularly from the upper classes, to which Buchan belonged. I'm able to work around it and still have fun with these books. While the story moves takes our hero to Norway and Scotland, enough of the action centers in England this time for me to consider this a reading trip there.

I finished The Woman Who Died a Lot by Jasper Fforde. This is the seventh entry in Jasper Fforde's absolutely delightful "Thursday Next" series. It would have been hard to imagine a Thursday Next novel in which our heroine never enters Bookworld being so satisfying, but Fforde pulled it off. So since we're not in Bookworld, we are in England, alternate universe, through the looking glass England though it is. If you love, literature, wordplay, puns, made up science, and astoundingly inventive, good-hearted falderal, this series is for you.

>29 rocketjk: I have the first two of Fforde's series and they're among my oldest unread. I've seen a resurgence in mentions here (on LT) and that's pushing me to give them precedence once I've finished up with my latest round of required reading.

>30 lisapeet: Go for it! If my descriptions make the books look like they might be your cup of tea, don't delay! :)

In another reading trip to England, I finished The Masters, the fifth book in C.P. Snow's "Strangers and Brothers" series. I'd enjoyed the first four books of the series, though I was not expecting to find this one particularly compelling. The book is about the politics and personalities involved in the election of a new Master for an unnamed college within Cambridge University in the 1930s. Doesn't seem like an electrifying premise in this day and age. However, in Snow's hands, the individuals involved come alive, and I found the book to be much more enjoyable than I expected it to be. Although you might miss a reference or two, I think you could read this novel as a standalone.

I finished The Liberation of Mankind: The Story of Man's Struggle for the Right to Think by Hendrik Willem Van Loon. This is an interesting and very well written history, originally published in 1926. As Van Loon tells us very early on, "This is not a handbook of anthropology. It is a volume dedicated to the subject of 'tolerance.' But 'tolerance' is a very broad theme. The temptation to wander will be great. And once we leave the beaten track Heaven along knows where we shall land." It should be noted that, as it turns out, by "mankind," Van Loon means, essentially, Europeans. Hence, I am listing this book here as Europe: Non-country specific. Also, as per the book's publication date, we are not surprised to find that, according to this narrative, basically every single person of influence or note was male.

Van Loon starts with the Greeks and then moves through the Roman era and then through European history up through the French Revolution, describing the movements, institutions and individuals who have the most to do with, in turn, enhancing or curtailing the cause of tolerance in society. The book's second half is composed of short biographies of influential individuals, either via politics or philosophical writing, over the ebb and flow of the idea of tolerance in Western society. Erasmus, Spinoza and Montaigne get particularly interesting treatments, as do the figures of the French Revolution. Van Loon describes the repression in the Puritan settlements, but, disappointingly, misses the admirable Roger Williams. The final chapter, "The Last Hundred Years," is only a few pages long, and Van Loon concludes with a hopeful passages that beg for patience and perseverance in the struggle for overall societal tolerance. He writes with an uneasy eye backwards toward recent history (World War One and the Russian Revolution). But as he was writing in 1926, he could not be expected to be able to see what was coming. I don't know how historically accurate all of his descriptions and observations are. Nevertheless, I think he's well worth reading even given, or possibly because of, the book's vintage of close to 100 years old. Van Loon's sense of humor, as already noted, is enjoyable and quite dark. For example, while the book's dust jacket, as pictured above, is certainly benign, the cover of the book itself, a book, remember, about tolerance and liberation, depicts a guiilotine!

I finished White by Deni Ellis Béchard. In this extremely readable and thought-provoking novel, an American journalist and veteran traveler and war reporter, travels to the Congo in hopes of searching out and writing about a corrupt and ruthless European "fixer," Richmond Hew, who helps environmental agencies trying to set up preservation parkland in the African jungle. The goal seems noble but the agencies' presumptive ways and Hew's methodology are not. Plus there are well documented complaints of Hew's sexual abuse of young girls. But the main issues at hand are those of white privilege and white foreigners' paternalistic presumptions of supremacy over the Congolese in their own country, in terms of expertise and motivation and wisdom, to offer a short list. White is, for me, a novel about humanity and quicksand.

The Island of Sheep, the fifth and final entry in John Buchan's "Richard Hannay" series of adventure thrillers, takes place in England, Scotland and the Faroe Islands, but for my purposes here I've only listed the book in my opening list in the latter two. For one thing, I already have enough England listings. For another, the descriptions of the natural setting and shepherd life of 1930s Borderlands Scotland are particularly good. And for a third thing: The Faroe Islands! (Although Buchan chose instead to call the place The Norlands for some reason). At any rate, this is a fun adventure book and a fitting conclusion to the series, though I'm not sure whether Buchan actually meant it as a final book or just never returned to the characters.

I finished Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion by Charles Townshend. This is a fascinating, detailed (to the extent possible) and well written history. Townshend does an admirable job of assembling the history of the rise of the fractured Irish separatist movement at the beginning of the 20th century. There was a strong party urging Home Rule for Ireland as a first step toward independence, and several groups urging for a more immediate and total independence from Great Britain, obtained through arms if need be. The history moves through the decision for a country-wide armed rising, the damaging confusion caused when a countermanding order was sent across the counties that caused a day-long delay and sent many potential insurrectionists home, never to re-engage. In the end, the fighting took place mostly, and certainly most famously, in Dublin itself, with the most important and memorable (and horrific) action centered around the Dublin General Post Office. He also discusses quite cogently the effects of the event on Irish history, both in the years immediately following and then in later decades. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in the subject matter.

One more reading trip to England via Death of a Mystery Writer by Robert Barnard. This is a fun oldish (1978) English murder mystery, published as Unruly Son in England. Well known whodunit author Oliver Fairleigh-Stubbs is a tyrant and a bully to his wife, his three grown children and everyone else he has dealings with and runs into. Given the title of the book, we are not surprised when he gets bumped off. The only problem for inspector Idwal Meredith is that the most likely suspect couldn't have done it. Or could he? This book is a load of fun for fans of the genre, well paced and plotted with mostly believable characters and a good dash of humor thrown in. Barnard wrote one additional mystery with Meredith on the case, At Death's Door, which I think I'll read sooner rather than later.

I finished In My Father's Court Isaac Bashevis Singer's memoir about his childhood in Poland in the years leading up to, and during, World War One. Singer’s father was a Hasidic rabbi and the court of the title was the Beth Din, the traditional court in the Singers' home to which community members came to have their divorces, lawsuits and other disputes arbitrated and their questions about Jewish holy books and law answered and illuminated.

The book is presented as a series of short vignettes, each from five to seven pages in length, told more or less in chronological order, with Singer’s narrative evolving as the small boy begins to grow and to question his surroundings. In the early remembrances, the perspective is kept very tightly on his father’s fierce devotion to God and to Jewish biblical and rabbinical law, custom and mysticism. The tales told are about the people who arrive in the Singers' home, what their problems are, and how his father deals with them.

Soon enough, however, the outside world begins gradually to intrude. The family moves from a small town to the crowded streets of a Jewish Warsaw slum. Next come rumors and then the realities of World War One, with its uncertainties and sharp deprivations. Singer’s older brother becomes more worldly, and young Isaac begins asking questions himself and longing for information about the outside world. Zionism and socialism begin to be discussed among the young, further eroding the hold of the old ways over the community as a whole.

And that's a wrap for 2019. Not all that much globe trotting, at least in terms of individual countries "read to." Looks like I got to 16 countries, including the U.S. and eight states within the U.S. Plus several "non-country specific" books in Europe and "non-state specific" books in the U.S. Oh, yes, and one read to Jasper Fforde's "Bookworld." I'll be back with a 2020 thread within a few days. Cheers, all!