Recent Reads

I’ve been reading about 3-4 books a week for months, and I don’t keep a log. I seem to be jumping from author to author, and if I like the writing, I read several of their books: like Jojo Moyes. Because I loved the movie Me Before You, I read the series, then several of her other books. Where’d You Go, Bernadette? was a fun change that I recommended to my friends, but Lessons in Chemistry had me laughing so hard and loving the author’s writing, that I *bought* the book for a friend.

On the other hand, there have been quite a few that I’ve read the sample in (thank you Amazon and my Public Library!) and immediately closed the book. If the book began with the word ‘I’, I closed it. I dislike first person, but amazingly I read several, because the author wrote it well. I still prefer third omniscient and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

I read a couple by Jonathan Evison: This is Your Life, Harriet Chance!, and West of Here, both of which I enjoyed. I think I’d been hoping for more about the Pacific Northwest dam coming down when I picked up West of Here, but the saga was a fascinating history more about how the dam went up. Maybe he’ll write a sequel coving the damage done (this book barely touched on it) and the impact of the wild fish returning (the book only hinted at it).

That’s what Max Travis was aiming for by writing The Seiner Series. But maybe the seiner series needs a historical novel about why the weir went up in the first place, to help people understand just how much damage it’s done. I’ve been doing a lot of research on that topic because (yet again) I just spent months writing proposals and comments for the Alaska Board of Fish–all about hatchery destruction of Alaska’s wild salmon runs.