Book Catsup (or Book Catch-up) if you prefer...

The Testing of Luther Albright by MacKenzie Bezos (book #62) is one of those books that keeps coming back to you throughout the days afterwards. (ok, I just finished it a couple of days ago, but...) Luther Albright is an obsessive person who seems easy enough to figure out at first...but he really isn't that easy to understand after all.

This book has many absolutely first class scenes that make it totally worthwhile, but there is such an underlying sadness in Luther that it might be a little hard to read for some.

By the way, she IS married to Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com fame. The Lady and the Panda by Vicki Croke (book #61) was one of the books I took with me to Mexico. It kept me entertained enough, but if I hadn't been on vacation without a lot of other reading options, I might have given up on it. And of course the fact that the book was a gift from my best friend, and I had to understand why she felt compelled to mail it to me!

The book starts out in the thirties following the death of Ruth Harkness's explorer husband. Ruth decides to take up his pursuit of the giant panda in China even though she knows nothing of exploring, and is a hard core smoker and drinker.

Various other explorers do sneaky and mean things to her...she hooks up with Quentin Young, a young Chinese explorer, and together they are able to get a baby panda to bring home. With the exception of the relationship between Quentin and Ruth, I found the book a mostly scary account of why so many species have been driven to near-extinction.

The Seduction of Water by Carol Goodman (book #60) was interesting enough to keep me reading but also infuriating to my critical ear. She would say someone "descended the staircase" when it would have been so much better to say "went downstairs" or something similar. The flowery writing and over-dramatization of the Selki legend was overdone, and I can't believe her mother's two novels were so well read that everyone she knew or ran into had read them! The transparency of her parents' fear of hotel fire was ridiculous, also.

If you are trapped somewhere with no other books available to read, go ahead and read it, but if you have any other choice, don't bother, if you want my opinion! The Secret River by Kate Grenville (book #59) is a wonderful but also horrifying look at the invasion of Australia by the English. The first part of the book takes place in nineteenth century London, where William Thornhill works incredibly hard as a kind of river taxi driver, but ends up imprisoned for petty crime and is ultimately sent to Australia, along with his wife and child.

While his wife longs to return to London when their banishment is over, William stakes a claim to a piece of land along the river, and convinces his wife to settle it with him.

The people they meet during their time on the river - both Aboriginal and English, are case studies of people in any age. William's internal conversations tell of his struggle with the displacement of the Aboriginal people and his contempt for the racist English...but his desire for a piece of land of his own made him compromise his beliefs.

This book made me all the more interested in, and respectful of, the Aboriginal people of Australia.