Review 526: Dracula

Dracula by Bram Stoker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Finished reading this on Halloween, in time to close out October with a spooky read. Generally, I do not like horror books and Halloween is not one of my favorite holidays. But if one was to read a frightful book that is a good season if a reason was needed.

I’ve been exposed to many tales of vampires, mostly on television or movies. I don’t find them horrifying, at least what I’ve seen so far. Since this book is the original I couldn’t be certain this would be frightening, but honestly it wasn’t. It had all the familiar aspects already known to me. I do suspect this might have been somewhat horrifying to the people of the late 1800s, as they didn’t have so much horror media back in those days. One does tend to get desensitized to some extent.

The story itself I found well done, better than I expected for the age of the book. It was told mainly by diary entries from the main characters, along with some letters. There were hints of things that a modern reader one knows the meaning ahead of time. Had the feeling a bit of knowing an inside joke.

I felt the tension was adeptly written and overall, a book well worth the time to read.

Review 525: Rise & Shine

Rise & Shine by Patrick Allington
My rating: 2.75 of 5 stars

A dystopian world thirty years after the catastrophe. A few people found a new way to live and started a new community, two cities one named Rise and the other Shine. They are perpetually at war and this footage feeds their people. Growing plants is now a crime. It's an odd book for sure. Not sure I really liked it, but it was short.

Review 524: Young Men and Fire

Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is the story of what happened at the Mann Gulch Fire on August 5, 1949. Smokejumpers were a relatively new way to fight forest fires, and were the elite of the firefighters. On that day, the fire turned into a blow-up and killed nearly all of the smokejumpers.

Norman Maclean, a firefighter in his youth and grew up in the area was a bit haunted by that day and all those deaths. He wrote and investigated this tragedy for decades, but the book wasn’t finished, he had a hard time finding his way into the story. Instead it was published after his death.

It story repeats, the actions and what happened are gone over multiple times. There are different versions of what happened, what was in court cases, and what the two remaining survivors told Maclean. The language used was at times poetic, a literary language.

I’d wanted to read this book for a long while. Earlier this year I attended a webinar for the 75th anniversary of Mann Gulch Fire, my desire to read this book, and reminded me I still haven’t read Maclean’s book. Then I saw the unabridged version of the audiobook available but only for another week in the Audible Plus catalog that I was finally propelled to get to this one. I may even have rushed through the ending in order to finish before I lost access to the book.

Review 523: The Prague Sonata

The Prague Sonata by Bradford Morrow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My favorite of the year! At least for fiction.

Update: July 2025:

This book was one of my favorites of 2024. At the time, and often, I seem to have a hard time writing some notes about my favorite reads. So here goes another attempt. 

The book has a bit of a mystery about an old sonata. Meta was given just a part of a sonata. Since she can no longer perform as a profession, she went on a search for the other two pieces. Well, she did get a little obsessed by this piece of music, knowing there was more and wanting to hear it, understand it.

 A large part of the book takes place in Prague, and Morrow did an excellent job of writing the feeling of that old city. I could see the place.  No other fiction book I’ve read (so far) has done such a good job of placing the setting. 

The writing was clear. There is a bit of relationships with Meta, one that had a falling out and another that began. Then there was also the music. One of those books I wished I could hear what was being talked about. 

I don’t know much about classical music, but apparently it was a long piece of music with three sections, or parts. They were split apart in Prague during WWII, the owner of the piece, Odylie, had married a Jewish man, Jakub.  When the war broke out he immediately became part of the resistance. Odylie wanted the music to survive, to save it from plundering, so she split it apart, kept the  first part.  She gave the second part to her best friend, and the last went to her husband. However, since he was in the resistance she could not see him directly, it was given to an intermediary and she hoped it found it’s way. Then Odylie left Prague for England.

In the modern time, it was a mystery for Meta trying to find the three pieces of music: where were they, what happened? The book gave us the past, so we knew more than Meta on what had happened, but the past was also revealed slowly so there was still some unknown aspects. Another mystery was who actually wrote this masterpiece of music?  Was it Beethoven, was is someone unknown genius in music, or was it more modern than it appeared?

I put off reading this one for a while (about six years) because of its length, while it took some time to get through it, I did not mind as I savored the book. One of the better fictional books I’ve read in a while.

Review 522: BOOM

BOOM: Oil, Money, Cowboys, Strippers, and the Energy Rush That Could Change America Forever by Tony Horwitz
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

This is a short book. Horwitz traces where the XL Pipeline was proposed to carry the oil from the tar sands in Canada. Starting out in Canada he talks to people who are working on mines in the oil tar sands. Two tons of these sands will produce one barrel of oil, and daily they produce about 3 million barrels a day. That is an enormous amount of sand processed. The size is unfathomable, but Hortwitz does try to describe what the giant mine looks like.

After talking to mainly workers and others, he starts to follow the pipeline location, although it hadn’t been started yet. Most of the people he tries to talk to are land owner who’s land it will be sitting on, and we get their opinion. For the most part people seem to be for this venture, for the jobs and the money it will bring in.

There are some that are completely against it, and Horwitz talks to some of those people too, but there is not a balance. It felt to me that the majority included in this book are for the pipeline for what it will bring. Maybe I didn’t keep close enough track.

This is a journalist travel narrative, with the expected notes on things such as the border crossing and his rental car, along with some other local flavor and experiences.