The Book Count 2026

[Greg]

Whidbey by T Kira Madden

Okay, I could have given this a higher rating for the writing but this book is bleak. The author even gives a subject matter warning to scare you off. And also I kept thinking this was reference to Dracula as in Whitby, but not. On multiple occasions I wanted to stop reading because this book was not my thing.

Birdie is a survivor of childhood sexual. Calvin is her abuser.  Mary Beth is Calvin's mother. Linzie King was also abused by Calvin and wrote a book about it. The book starts with everyone's story about Calvin and how the abuse affected them. Basically, Birdie runs away to Whidbey island when the book by Linzie King comes out about Linzie's experience with SA and it has a fictionalized version of Birdie in there. But this is a murder mystery so Calvin is murdered and then we have to see how that affects everyone. For most of the book, the narrators switch to give different view points of everyone's simply tragic lives. But then the author remembers about the mystery and starts talking directly to the reader about how the mystery is going and who the main suspects should be, tossing out red herrings and then saying why they are red herrings. Along the way we get more tragedy as more of Calvin's victims appear. And that there are more abusers out there. All bad.

Glad I'm done. Not sure I'm glad if I read that but it does show abuse in great detail, mostly mental.

[Greg]

Noir by Christopher Moore

Sammy and Stilton fall in love on the mean streets of post WW2 San Francisco while falling afoul of the government and find an alien.
Moore writes a love letter to the Noir films he loves, Chandler and Hammet and San Francisco. It's all particularly hard-boiled. There is a strong LGBTQ undercurrent. Sammy travels all over the town from Chinatown to Nob Hill to Hunter's Point meeting all sorts of interesting noirish characters. The mystery isn't that particularly enthralling and I don't think Moore really cares about that aspect of the book. It's all about the characters and their scenes together.

[Greg]

Alamein by Jon Latimer

Expect quite a few books about the early stages of the war in the Western Desert during World War 2. I'm trying to get a fuller picture of what happened there in the place my grandfather served.

To that end, Alamein. It's one of those battles I heard about but didn't know quite what it was about. Something Rommel. Something Montgomery. As far as the British go, the 2nd battle of El Alamein is where the war turned around for them. As Churchill said, "Before El Alamein, we hadn't won a battle. After El, Alamein, we never lost a battle" El Alamein war pretty much Commonwealth Affair, as England gathered in all her subjects and put them between the Italians and the Germans and the Suez Canal.

The book goes into great detail about every corp, division, brigade and battalion and their movements during the 11 days of the battle. I might hazard a guess there was too much detail. Latimer talks about places in the desert that I've never heard of and probably won't remember in a few weeks. The cast of characters is huge and a lot of them get a name check. Well, there were about 200,000 men duking it out in the sand. That calls for a lot of names. Latimer doesn't just talk about Big Boys, he gives snippets of what Captains, Lieutenants, and Sergeants were doing as well. It was mostly dying. That's pretty much what everybody was doing.

A lot of the book is just much in my head, but I do think I know a lot more of the battle when I started. I got some starts and finishes. A few of places might stick. And my Grandfather's 64th Fighter Group was mentioned twice. Still trying to answer the question of how they ended up there.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Noir by Christopher Moore

Sammy and Stilton fall in love on the mean streets of post WW2 San Francisco while falling afoul of the government and find an alien.
Moore writes a love letter to the Noir films he loves, Chandler and Hammet and San Francisco. It's all particularly hard-boiled. There is a strong LGBTQ undercurrent. Sammy travels all over the town from Chinatown to Nob Hill to Hunter's Point meeting all sorts of interesting noirish characters. The mystery isn't that particularly enthralling and I don't think Moore really cares about that aspect of the book. It's all about the characters and their scenes together.

“You dirty manchego!”