Thursday Murder Club is a series of well-written books by Richard Osman, a British author, producer, and television presenter. We listened to the entire series, though not all, in the first quarter of 2024 and present from left to right in the series order. You cannot trust any of the senior residents living at Coopers Chase Retirement Village, where these four pensioners meet on Thursdays in the Jigsaw Room to investigate unsolved local murders that the local police have let grow cold. Despite the serious nature of the crimes, you will find yourself laughing as Club members find critical clues and make the police look incompetent.
Nathan Hill’s Wellness: A Novel is another NYT Bestseller and NPR Best Book of the Year. It is about a modern couple in urban America who struggle with misunderstanding each other and cannot leave their own dysfunctional childhoods. The husband is also challenged by a MAGA-like father, in his dotage, who has discovered the dark side of internet conspiracies and acts upon them. The wife is involved in the unregulated side of the wellness industry and is financially rewarded, but it eats at her soul. It was an enjoyable read on Audible.
You need to read or listen carefully to the first chapter of James McBride’s well-crafted novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store because it becomes essential late in the story. The setting is a grocery store in a black and Jewish neighborhood in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, called Chicken Hill. It is an award-winning, compelling story of community, family, love, and some violence worth reading.
Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning was written by Liz Cheney, a politician I disliked until the Congressional Select Committee investigation of the January 2021 insurrection. I disliked her father even more. I was wrong on both counts. The book and the story are compelling, and I stand in awe of the courage and integrity of Liz Cheney for her commitment to the U.S. Constitution and truth. She reinforces my pride in being a lawyer.
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens finally reached the top of my reading list in 2024. It is a classic, and I’ll not spend much time telling you it should be on your list. This book is not the reason Dickens is one of the great English language authors of novels that have stood the test of time, but it is also a classic Dickens that offers characters you cannot get anywhere else.
Disclosure: We knew the author when she was a child living in Skagit County with her family. Her first book, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, has been the subject of discussion locally, as anyone who has read it will understand. Her family attended our church in the early 1980s until they moved to Alaska. My wife, Debbie, is identified in the book as the RN who recalled Stephanie and was kind to her at a medical clinic. It was challenging to read her (unsigned hardback) book, knowing the family and not knowing the hardship Stephanie was experiencing in the years she lived in and around Skagit County. I believe her book is highly acclaimed because she conveys raw emotions about a difficult life where no good deed goes unpunished.
Amor Towles has become one of my favorite contemporary authors, so I was delighted when Table for Two was selected for the Skagit Valley Book Club. Towles has assembled a collection of short fiction stories and a novella. Table for Two is fine work but not comparable to A Gentleman in Moscow or Lincoln Highway. That being said, Evelyn Ross, in the novella, is a character not to be forgotten.
News of the World by Paulette Jiles is a book title that has almost no relationship to the theme or plot. That is not true of Chenneville: A Novel of Murder, Loss, and Vengeance by the same author. As you can see from the cover, News of the World was made into a movie because it is a compelling story of hardship, creating character and integrity. Chenneville is about a Union soldier, John Chenneville, coming home to the senseless slaughter of his sister and her family and the struggles he goes through to find their killer. You will find yourself rooting for John to get revenge and justice for his family.
Lessons in Chemistry is more about challenging the status quo than how to combine chemicals safely. This NYT Book of the Year by Bonnie Garmus is about stupid white men trying to control an intelligent woman, Elizabeth Zott, who refuses to accept the 1960s convention. The book was made into an Apple TV+ series I watched before reading. Subsequently, it became a Book Club selection, and I worried that it might not match the quality of the television series. It was worse than I could have imagined.
Men are retarded brutes who live on prejudices and lower base instincts, and women are primarily virtuous and put up with men to save the family. There is the lying bishop at the boy’s home who thinks only of money, the pastor who does not believe in God, the TV station manager who has to be the worst boss ever created in literature and would make Archie Bunker blush, the UCLA dean who raped Elizabeth and got her expelled from school, and her father who is in prison for being an evangelical fraud and murderer and drove his son to suicide. Don’t forget the executive at the lab who is clueless and plagiarizes Elizabeth’s work. The author feeds on stereotypes and prejudice. Still, it was entertaining.
In response to a question about understanding the conflict in Palestine, a friend recommended The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan. Certainly, there are many books on this topic, but Lemon Tree takes a refreshing approach by documenting the histories of two families in Palestine, one Arab and one Jew, centered on a home that belonged to the Arab family before the 1967 Six-Day War. Their story and struggles become a method of understanding the many decades of conflict in Israel. The dialogue between these families brings light to this challenging topic.
This book was written too early. Now that he is in the news more than ever, Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk should be updated by the author to fully capture the personality of this controversial character. I read the book mainly because of the author’s work in Steve Jobs, another bestselling biography, and I was not disappointed in Musk. I can say I’m disappointed in Mr. Musk (full disclosure: I drive a Tesla) since he purchased Twitter in 2022. Nevertheless, this book deserves your attention if you want to understand Mr. Musk, and there is every reason you should since he refuses to leave the world stage.
