The World Played Chess by Robert Dugoni

First sentence:

"A purpose, I have learned, is rarely found, but revealed."

Description:

"In 1979, Vincent Bianco has just graduated high school. His only desire: collect a little beer money and enjoy his final summer before college. So he lands a job as a laborer on a construction crew. Working alongside two Vietnam vets, one suffering from PTSD, Vincent gets the education of a lifetime. Now forty years later, with his own son leaving for college, the lessons of that summer--Vincent's last taste of innocence and first taste of real life--dramatically unfold in a novel about breaking away, shaping a life, and seeking one's own destiny." -- from the inside flap

My thoughts:

I enjoyed this book about growing up from teen to an adult. William, a young man, discovering the stark reality of war as a marine/photographer in Vietnam, and later as a wiser adult coming to grips with PTSD. Vincent, a newly graduated high school student, learning about life and war from Vietnam vet William. Then, as an adult, Vincent passing some of his wisdom to his son, Beau.

Date read: 8/1/2024
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 3*/5 = good

ISBN-10: 1542029376
ISBN-13: 9781542029377
Publisher: Lake Union
Year: 2021
# of pages: 369
Binding: Hardcover
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Kingdom of the Blind by Louise Penny

First sentence:

"Armand Gamache slowed his car to a crawl, then stopped on the snow-covered secondary road."

Description:

"When a peculiar letter arrived inviting Armand Gamache to an abandoned farmhouse, the former head of the Surete du Quebec discovers that a complete stranger has named him one of the executors of her will. Still one expression, and frankly curious, Gamache accepts and soon learns that the other two executors are Myrna Landers, the bookseller from Three Pines, and a young builder.

None of them had ever met the elderly woman.

The will is so odd and includes bequests that are so wildly unlikely that Gamache and the others suspect the woman must have been delusional. But what if, Gamache begins to ask himself, she was perfectly sane?

When a body is found, the terms of the bizarre will suddenly seem less peculiar and far more menacing.

But it isn't the only menace Gamache is facing.

The investigation into what happened six months ago--the events that led to his suspension--has dragged on, into the dead of winter. And while most of the opiods he allowed to slip through his hands, in order to bring down the cartels, have been retrieved, there is one devastating exception.

Enough narcotic to kill thousands has disappeared into inner-city Montreal. With the deadly drug about to hit the streets, Gamache races for answers.

As he uses increasingly audacious, even desperate, measures to retrieve the drug, Armanad Gamache begins to see his own blind spots. And the terrible things hiding there." -- from the inside flap

My thoughts:

While it has been a while since I read this book, I remember I liked the twists and turns as Gamache and his friends try to figure out what's going on. Someday, I will re-read not only this book but the others in this intriguing series.

Series: Inspector Gamache, #14
Genre: Mystery
Rating: 3*/5 = good

ISBN-10: 1250066204 
ISBN-13: 9781250066206
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Year: 2018
# of pages:386
Binding: Hardcover
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Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales by Stephen King

 First sentence:

"It's so dark that for awhile--just how long I don't know--I think I'm still unconscious."

Description:

"The first collection of stories Stephen King has published since Nightmares & Dreamscapes nine years ago, Everything's Eventual includes one O. Henry Prize winner, two other award winners, four stories published by The New Yorker, and "Riding the Bullet," King's original e-book, which attracted over half a million online readers and became the most famous short story of the decade. "Riding the Bullet," published here on paper for the first time, is the story of Alan Parker, who's hitchhiking to see his dying mother but takes the wrong ride, farther than he ever intended. In "Lunch at the Gotham Cafe," a sparring couple's contentious lunch turns very, very bloody when the maitre d' gets out of sorts. "1408," the audio story in print for the first time, is about a successful writer whose specialty is "Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Graveyards" or "Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Houses," and though Room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel doesn't kill him, he won't be writing about ghosts anymore. And in "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French," terror is deja vu at 16,000 feet. Whether writing about encounters with the dead, the near dead, or about the mundane dreads of life, from quitting smoking to yard sales, Stephen King is at the top of his form in the fourteen dark tales assembled in Everything's Eventual. Intense, eerie, and instantly compelling, they announce the stunningly fertile imagination of perhaps the greatest storyteller of our time." -- from the inside flap

My thoughts:

I enjoyed this collection of short stories. My favorites were "That Feeling," "The Road Virus Heads North," and "1408."

Date read: 4/20/2024
Genre: Fiction/Horror
Rating: 3*/5 = good

ISBN-10 0743235150
ISBN-13: 9780743235150
Publisher: Scribner
Year: 2002
# of pages 459
Binding: Hardcover
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A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

 First sentences:

"Hi! My name is Naok and I am a time being."

Description:

"On a remote island in the Pacific Northwest, a Hello Kitty lunchbox washes up on the beach. Tucked inside is a collection of various items: an antique wristwatch, a pack of undecipherable letters, and the diary of a sixteen-year-old Japanese girl named Nao Yasutani. Ruth, who finds the lunchbox suspects that it is debris from Japan's devastating 2011 tsunami. Once Ruth starts to read the diary she quickly finds herself drawn into the mystery of the young girl's fate.

In a manga care in Tokyo's Electric Town, Nao has decided there's only one escape from te loneliness and pain of her life, as she's uprooted from her U.S. ome, bullied at school, and watching her parents spiral deeper into disaster. But before she ends it all, she wants to accomplish one thing: to recount the story of her great-grandmother, a 104-year-old Buddhist nun, in the pages of her secret diary. The diary, Nao's only solace, is her cry for elp to a reader whom she can only imagine." -- from the inside flap

My thoughts:

I found this to be a mesmerizing book about time, connections, family and self awareness. I liked how the characters interacted and how they learn more about themselves through their interactions with others.

Date read: 1/20/2024
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 3*/5 = good

ISBN-13: 978067026630
Publisher: Viking
Year: 2013
# of pages: 403
Binding: Hardcover
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The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer

 First sentence:

"He shifted nervously in the front passenger seat of the four-wheel-drive as it approached the southern exit of the city."

Description:

In the 1980s, a young archivist, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niver River, tracking down tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that were crumbling in the trunks of pastoralists and farmers. His goal: to preserve this crucial part of the world's patrimony. But then Al Qaeda showed up at the door.

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the remarkable true tale of how mild-mannered Haidara became one of the world's most prolific smugglers, organizing a heroic heist to sneak all 350,000 manuscripts to the safety of southern Mali. 'At once a history, caper and thriller' (The Economist), it is the extraordinary story of a man who, through extreme circumstances, discovered his higher calling--and a reminder that ordinary citizens often do the most to protect the beauty of their culture from the threats of the modern world." -- from the back cover

My thoughts:

I liked this book about a courageous archivist and his colleagues and how they saved literary treasures that otherwise would have been destroyed. I work in the library and archives world, but I am nowhere near as brave as Haidara. I recommend this book to anyone who's curious about both the history of Western Africa and its current fate.

Date read: 2022?
Genre: Nonfiction
Rating: 3*/5 = good

ISBN-10: 1476777411
ISBN-13: 9781476777412
Publisher: Simon & Shuster
Year: 2016
# of pages: 278
Binding: Trade Paperback
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Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

 First sentence:

"A boy is coming down a flight of stairs."

Description:

"England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old and the young alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on.

A young Latin tutor--penniless and bullied by a violent father--falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family's land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is just taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.

A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a tender and unforgettable reimagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, and whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down--a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists." -- from the inside flap

My thoughts:

This is a moving and bitterswet book. I enjoyed learning about Shakespeare's family and their lives during the Black Plague. 

Date read: 2/18/2022
Genre: Historical Fiction
Rating: 4*/5 = great

ISBN-13: 9780525657613
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Year: 2020
# of pages: 305
Binding: Hardcover
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The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

First sentence:

From high up, fifteen thousand feet above, where the aerial photographs are taken, 4121 Wilson Avenue, the address I know best, is a minuscule point, a scab of green.

Description:

"Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House is a stunning debut memoir about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a neglected New Orleans neighbor hood.

In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother, Ivory Mae, a fiercely determined and recently widowed nineteen-year-old, invested her life savings in a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East. It was the height of the Space Race and the area was home to a major NASA plant. The optimism of post-war America seemed endless. In the Yellow House, Ivory Mae and her second husband, Simon Broom, who would be Sarah's father, built domestic tranquility one wobbly renovation at a time, their dreams perpetually under construction. The family would eventually number twelve children. When Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the Yellow House became Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child.

A brilliant interweaving of reporting, archival research, and gorgeously rendered family lore, The Yellow House tells the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy and that of a daughter who left home only to be continually pulled back, even after the house was wiped off the map by Hurricane Katrina." -- from the inside flap

My thoughts:

This is a very moving book about a family doing their best in New Orleans East - a place of promise that was sadly neglected and destroyed by bureaucracy and Hurricane Katrina. Sarah's journey both geographically and emotionally was moving and though provoking. It gave me a new appreciation of  that one can't simply look at a place and truly understand the breadth and depth of people's lives there.

Date read: 8/9/2021
Genre: Memoir
Rating: 3*/5

ISBN-13: 9780802125088
Publisher: Grove Press
Year: 2019
# of pages: 372
Binding: Hardcover
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