The American Library - Janet Skeslien Charles

      

     In October, 2024, we spent a couple of days in a Dallas B&B that had its own version of a Little Free Library inside the rental. A sign on the container invited us to take a book or two with us when we left, and to leave something behind if we had anything to contribute. The Paris Library is one of two books I took home with me at the end of that weekend, but I’ve just now gotten around to reading it. I tend to read a steady diet of historical fiction, and was a little burned out on World War II fiction, so I ended up putting the book aside when we got home - and immediately forgot I even had it until stumbling upon it a couple of weeks ago. (I still haven’t read the second book.)

      The Paris Library was published in 2021 by Atria Books (a Simon & Schuster imprint) and runs 351 pages long, including the Author’s Note. My impressions are mostly positive ones for this well-researched account of how the American Library functioned in Paris during World War II:

• Will appeal to a broad audience of readers
• Centers on a handful of nicely developed characters who evolve and change during the course of the novel
• Uses flashbacks to the main story while occasionally visiting the main character some forty years in the future
• The American Library almost becomes a central character itself 
• Explores the difficult choices Parisians were forced to make during the Nazi occupation of the city - and the hypocrisy of those who sometimes benefited from the tough choices made by others
• Based on historical figures, letters, and memories of those who were there
• Intensively researched for accuracy

     I was a little slow to warm to the characters and plot of The Paris Library, largely I think, because I found the writing to be a little on the dry side. Once I got deeper into the story and became clearer on which characters were destined to play the main roles, that all changed. I got more used to the author’s writing tempo and lost myself in the story. If you read this one, don’t quit on it too soon because the ending is a memorably intense one. For me, this is pretty close to a four-star book.

Inside The American Library in Paris

Photo of The American Library featured in the novel

Top of the Desk: What I’m Reading This Week

 I don’t seem to be finishing many books so far this year, but that’s not because I’m not turning lots of pages. Seems like I’m falling back into one of my old habits of immediately beginning to read a book rather than simply adding it to my TBR for later. The stack of partially read books on my desk seems to be multiplying on its own these days, and even though I read from each of them several times a week, I am slow to reach the final page of any of them. 

The current desktop stack is only this short because I did finish two books in the last couple of days:

Chernow’s biographies, of which I’m a fan, are well researched, complete, and very, very long. Mark Twain (2025), coming in at 1,033 pages of text, plus another 125 pages of footnotes and index, is no exception. Thankfully, Mr. Chernow has a very readable style, but at just over 300 pages into this one, I have a long way to go. (This books is so physically heavy, that you could injure yourself trying to read it in bed.) Mark Twain really comes alive in this great biography.

Blasphemy (2012) is a book of Sherman Alexie short stories that I just started reading last night. Alexie is a Native American (he, I think, calls himself an Indian) author perhaps best known for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Another title of his that intrigues me, a short story collection I read in 2021, is The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. His stories brutally expose the problems so many Native Americans face to this day. He is a solid short story writer.

Gerald Seymour has been one of my favorite espionage thriller writers since I discovered a book of his in a London library in the mid-nineties. I loved his first book from the first page, and more than a dozen books later, he has yet to let me down. The Best Revenge (2024) is the fourth in Seymour’s Jonas Merrick series. Jonas is not your typical spy, he’s more of what his colleagues think of as just another MI-5 pencil pusher…but his pencil is a deadly weapon.

This is my first experience with anything by C.S. Lewis, and through the first three chapters I’m still not really into it. The book was produced from a series of radio talks Lewis did for the BBC during World War II. It’s not deep theology, more like sitting down with a neighbor across a cup of coffee every few days for a good conversation about how we should all try to live our lives. Lewis, at least in Mere Christianity, doesn’t talk down to his audience. I imagine that the British population really looked forward to these talks during the war. 

I read at least a dozen memoirs a year, but I usually know who the writer is before starting the book. Not the case with Isaac Fitzgerald’s Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional (2022). But no way could I resist a book with a first sentence like this one: “My parents were married when they had me, just to different people.” Turns out Fitzgerald is quite an interesting man who survived a chaotic childhood to do OK for himself. This one is very conversational and pages turn quickly. 

Just what I need, a book interviewing some twenty-two authors on “the books that changed their lives.” Nothing like that to add to my monstrous TBR list. Yep, just what I need. The Writer’s Library (2020) by Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager turns out to be even more interesting than I expected it would be. The authors use the interviews to explore their personal literary comings-of-age, and leave me with a whole lot that I want to read for myself, books and authors that had barely, if at all, cracked my radar before now.

There’s something here to fit just about every mood I might find myself in for the next couple of weeks, but I would not be at all surprised to find one or two new ones sitting atop my desk by this time next week. I can’t wait to find out.

What We Left Unsaid - Winnie M. Li

Sometimes I think I live for road trips, but not just any old road trips. I like to get out and wander aimlessly for two or three thousand miles before doing the same thing on my way back home. That kind of trip has led me to countless unexpected places, and to friends I would have otherwise never known over the last several decades, and it’s still one of my favorite things in all the world to do (although I had to skip doing a trip in 2025). 

And that is what led me to Winnie Li’s What We Left Unsaid, a novel about three middle-aged siblings on a drive from Chicago to California to visit their seriously ill mother. First, though, I fell in love with the cover because of the way that it so perfectly captures the serendipitous spirit of a four-wheel ramble across America. I wanted to experience someone else’s road trip, and I did that. But that’s not all there is here.

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My What We Left Unsaid impressions and takeaways:

• The basic plot (three rather estranged Asian American siblings forced to spend days together on a cross-country drive) is a solid one,
•  Flashbacks to their last road trip together, when the three were children, effectively explains their current family dynamic,
• Too much of the plot heavily depends on coincidence, and this many critical coincidences start to feel overly contrived and forced before very long,
• Li tries to hit every hot-button social/political issue on this roadtrip of about a week’s duration: overt racism, gun violence, gender issues, gay marriage, politics with a definite anti-Trump tone, it’s all there,
• the ending is predictable enough to be disappointing because most readers will see it coming long before the novel’s “big reveal,” is officially unveiled, and
• despite the book’s almost 400 pages, the last quarter of it seems rushed and overly (and very negatively) stereotypical.

Overall, I was disappointed in What We Left Unsaid despite enjoying its road trip aspects. It proved to be too one-sided for me to suspend my disbelief long enough to buy its message. All the “good" guys in the story are exceptionally “good,” and all the “bad" guys are exceptionally “bad.” Li’s failure to include any grey areas or characters in her tale leads to the book’s predictability. And that’s my main gripe about this one. Reluctantly, I’ll give it three stars because it did keep me engaged enough to finish it.

Is Book Lust a Sin?

    

     My bookshelves have long since reached the point where a book has to be somewhere removed from the shelves before I can add any recent acquisition. And even then, it’s still a matter of shifting books around until a spot opens up in the appropriate section of my shelving. I’ve even tried the periodic book-purge in which I’ve found new homes for ten or twenty books at a time, but that method almost always immediately sends me out book-shopping again until all that wonderful free space is filled. 

     So, in practical terms, the rule around here is “one book in, one book out.” And that’s gotten harder for me to do because the individual  choices are getting to be more and more difficult to make now. It's beginning to cut too close to the bone. Rather ridiculously, my answer - despite my aversion to buying e-books from Amazon - has been to buy e-books from those vendors that allow me to download backup copies to my computer, vendors like Kobo and a few publishers that sell directly to readers. (More on this later if anyone is interested.)

     Shelf space problem solved. Whole new problem created. 

     Since the Year of the Plague (2020), I’ve bought more e-books every year than I can possibly ever read. As of this moment, there are 1,659 e-books on my Kobo reader, with a paltry 335 of those actually having been read. A handful of others have been abandoned after failed efforts on my part to find them readable, but that still leaves something over 1,300 unread books on the reader. 

     And I keep on buying them, and buying them, and buying them. 

     They are not all new books; in fact, well over half of them are back catalog choices that I’ve gotten at really good prices. (Is this starting to sound more like an addiction now and not just a harmless hobby?) I see that I purchased over 30 books in January, and already this month, another 10. The best that I can say about them, is that they are a fairly diverse bunch of books - and that I’ll never, ever, run out of things to read. 2026 purchases include:

• Eight books from Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series
• The new Michael J. Fox memoir, Future Boy
• Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, historical fiction about the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son
• The Impossible Fortune, Richard Osman’s fifth book in his Thursday Murder Club series
• Michael Connelly’s eighth Lincoln Lawyer book, The Proving Ground
• Elizabeth George’s latest Inspector Lynley book, A Slowly Dying Cause
• The Land of Sweet Forever, a collection of Harper Lee short stories and magazine pieces
• Nobody’s Girl, Virginia Roberts Giuffre memoir of being sexually exploited by Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Prince Andrew, among others
• Clown Town, Mick Herron’s latest Slow Horses book, along with six earlier pre-Slow Horses books from his back catalog
• Eleven books from Martin Cruz Smith’s back catalog

     And of the thirty-three purchased so far this year, a whopping five of them have been read.

     That’s pretty typical of what I’ve been buying now that I’m tending to binge-read certain authors that catch my eye. If I particularly enjoy a book and rate it a rare five-stars, I find myself wanting to know instantly what else that author has published. And then I want to read them all. But 1,659 e-book purchases in a little over five years is crazy. 

     Book lust has to be a sin…right?

     

     

Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan

 

What you need to know about this one:

• Published in 2006
• One of Tan’s lesser known novels
• Less detail about Chinese history and culture than in author’s more popular books
• Focuses on 11 American tourists who disappear into the Myanmar jungle on Christmas morning
• A satirical look at American tourists (these are all from San Francisco) who naively place themselves in grave danger while expecting their good intentions and American citizenship to keep them safe from harm
• Comic at times, deadly serious at others, even when one sixteen-year-old boy reluctantly becomes a god for the tribe that kidnaps the group
• Not what most expected from Amy Tam after The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife or The Bonesetter’s Daughter

I imagine that this was quite a change-of-pace novel for Tan when she published it. I like it (not love it) because of the interesting characters she develops so well over the course of this 472-page story. If you like literary fiction, you are probably going to enjoy Saving Fish from Drowning.

Slow Reading, Re-Reading Old Favorities, and Just Turning Pages

 I must be feeling better. 

I’ve only noticed that in the last few days. Some of my old energy has returned and - even though my health situation is still a precarious one - I opened up my own blog today for the first time in months. Just reading some of the old posts and comments brought back so many great memories, that I wanted to say hello to anyone out there who might still be reading book blogs.

I’m sad to see that so many of my old favorites seem to have disappeared or drastically cut back on blogging for their own reasons. That makes me realize just how long some of us have been doing this and how many good friends have come (and sadly) gone over the last twenty years or so.

So this is just a HELLO! to the book community, or what’s left of it. I’m not sure how long I will continue to feel so much better than I have in months, but I just wanted to let everyone know that I’m still here and reading. 

My reading has changed over the last year or so in that I’m doing very little reviewing and have decided to read strictly for my own personal pleasure. I’m doing more re-reading than ever, more slow reading, more nonfiction, and just generally enjoying my reading more than I have in a very long time.

I’ll stop here because I have a feeling this post is akin to putting a note in a bottle and tossing it into the sea. It may just sink to the bottom of the ocean - or with a little bit of luck, it will find it's way into the hands of a few readers and old friends.

So here goes...