How Lucky: Hoping For More Than I Got

I rarely read a selection of the mystery readers group that I used to attend in person.  They have three selections every month and I'm usually not interested in any of them.  This time I decided to read one of the selections for the February Zoom meeting.  It's a contemporary mystery called How Lucky by Will Leitch that has been compared to the Alfred Hitchcock movie, Rear Window, because both have a protagonist who is in a wheelchair.  I have never seen Rear Window and wasn't aware of the similarity until I read the reviews.  This review will center on the observations that came to mind as I was reading this book.

                                  

This isn't a murder mystery, but it is a crime novel.  Daniel, the wheelchair bound protagonist, saw a woman get into a car.  Later he discovers that she's missing.  So he wants to find out what happened to her.   

Daniel has a terminal disease.  I'm not sure why the author made this decision.  Since Daniel's death isn't imminent, it isn't relevant to the plot.  I suppose Will Leitch wants readers to be sympathetic toward Daniel even if we don't find him a very likable character.    

Daniel's job is to deal with online complaints from customers of an airline. He likes to respond with emojis.  Daniel thinks that this short circuits hostility.  "How angry can you be at an emoji?"  he comments.  I may be atypical, but  I find the use of emojis as a response in a discussion, annoying.  It makes me feel as if my well reasoned remarks aren't being taken seriously.  If I received an emoji as a response in a business context, I would feel that the company employee was being unprofessional.  So right off the bat, I felt that Daniel had poor judgment.

There is a brief sequence in How Lucky dealing with a game called Azul.  When I looked it up, I discovered that it's played with illustrated tiles.  I enjoyed the illustrations I saw in my search. (See the Wikipedia article here.) Azul was designed by Michael Kiesling, illustrated by Phillipe Guérin  and Chris Quilliam, and released in 2017 by Plan B Games.  I was glad to discover Azul.  It almost justified the time I spent reading this book.

The characters and their interactions didn't impress me. Their lack of maturity was realistic given their age, but I would have preferred more interesting characters.  I was impatient with them.  There were also predictable plot elements.  I was hoping for more originality from this book.

Pelosi: A Biography of the U.S. Speaker of the House

I had already started reading Pelosi by Molly Ball when I heard on the news that Nancy Pelosi was retiring from her position as Speaker of the House after this term. She has been the only Speaker of the House since I became politically aware.

 

                                          

Since I'm a huge library fan, I was delighted to learn that Pelosi's first appointment was to the San Francisco Public Library Commission.  She was appointed by Mayor Alioto.

Pelosi was accused of getting elected through her father's political machine.  Her father was the  Mayor of Baltimore.  I can't see how her father could have had any influence in San Francisco.  So I thought that was ridiculous. She's also been in Congress for 34 years.  It seems to me that she must have been re-elected on her own merits.  

I was interested in learning that the Senate Judiciary Committee that didn't want to deal with Clarence Thomas' sexual harassment was chaired by Joe Biden. Pelosi and six other female house members went to the committee to demand they listen to Anita Hill. 

I was moved that Pelosi sat at Gabby Giffords bedside while she was lying unconscious after she was shot.  When Giffords woke Pelosi was there.  That shows that relationships and loyalty were important to Pelosi.  To Pelosi,  Congresswoman Gabby Giffords wasn't just part of the Democratic caucus.  She must have been family to Pelosi.

I loved that Congressman Mark Takano created a mock up of The Art of the Deal attributed to Pelosi with Pelosi on the cover.  You can find it here. Reading this biography definitely proved to me that Nancy Pelosi has been a great deal maker--perhaps the greatest Congressional deal maker of all time.

 

                           

                             

Eyes of the Queen: Tudor Monarch Queen Elizabeth I in Danger

 

I read the novel Eyes of the Queen by Oliver Clements because it was selected as the book of the month for the Tudor History Lovers group on Goodreads.   It deals with espionage and a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I of England.  This period became known as the English Renaissance because of the flowering of English literature and theater.  It's portrayed as peaceful and prosperous, but there was a great deal of conflict over whether England would remain Protestant.  So the imprisoned Catholic Mary Queen of Scots was a focus of those who sought to overthrow or murder England's reigning Protestant Queen.

 

                           

 

I was interested in the likelihood that Mary Queen of Scots had a condition called porphyria.  Relatives of the Stuart Queen also suffered from it.  I read an article about royals with porphyria  here and discovered that the current Prince William had been diagnosed with the disease.

The highly eroticized portrayal of Mary Queen of Scots was criticized in a number of reviews.   I didn't really care that much.  It was just a plot cul de sac of very little relevance.  I suppose that the author wanted to draw an audience interested in such content in addition to those attracted to historical espionage thrillers.

I had more doubts about Clements' anxiety ridden Elizabeth.  It seemed to me that the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, both strong and determined individuals, would be unlikely to be continually apprehensive.   She would be much more sure of herself, and her ability to overcome any challenges to her authority.     

 Elizabeth's future spymaster, Francis Walsingham, is prominent in The Eyes of the Queen .  I read that he feared the Spanish would burn London.  Why would they?  In the alternate history Ruled Britannia by Harry Turtledove, the Spanish conquered England and made it a part of their empire. London was not burned.  In that fictional continuity,  Elizabeth was imprisoned in the Tower of London.

 Some people called this novel suspenseful.  I didn't think there was very much suspense at all.  I knew that Elizabeth wasn't assassinated or overthrown.  This novel isn't called an alternate history.  So it had to conform to established facts of actual history.  

Nevertheless, I did enjoy reading a novel in which the scientist/philosopher/occultist  John Dee is a major protagonist.  I would like to read more about John Dee in either fiction or non-fiction.

                                  

My 2021 Retrospective

                             WELCOME TO NEW YEAR

But first this is what 2021 looked like:

My 2021 statistics are a mixed bag.  The great news is that this blog's views more than doubled.  Yet I posted fewer reviews and read fewer books.  So I don't think that the trend of increasing views can possibly be sustained in 2022 unless I increase my reading and reviewing.  In blog land, you usually don't get an increasing audience unless your content is also increasing.  For the record, my total views in the entire history of this blog are now 56,041. 

My most viewed blog post in 2021 was a review of  A Door Into Earth on Flying High Reviews here .This is a book about a female Afghani-American going to Afghanistan.  I would speculate that there was great interest in Afghanistan while the U.S. was occupying that nation. I wonder if this review will continue to be read in such numbers since the U.S. has withdrawn from Afghanistan. We'll see.  My total number of views for the review of A Door Into Earth at the end of 2021 was 520 which wasn't a record number in earlier years, but certainly was in 2021. I'll be sure to check this post at the end of this year and then find out what happened with viewers of the post dealing with Afghanistan in 2022.

My most viewed post on Shomeret: Masked Reviewer in 2021 was a review of The Far Away Girl which was a blog tour post. Blog tours tend to generate many more views for a post than usual. The Far Away Girl review can be found here.

I rated ten books five stars on Goodreads in 2021.  This is fewer books than in 2020 when I had 18 five star rated books, but I also read less than half of my total number of reads for last year. This means that my percentage of five star reads was actually higher in 2021.

This completes the statistical section. The remainder of this post will be my favorite books in various categories which will be the 2021 recipients of :

                     

                        THE GOLDEN MASK AWARDS

Best Book of the Year

Do Better by Rachel Ricketts

It's also the best non-fiction and the best book published in 2021. This book caused me to reflect about how I might have unintentionally harmed African Americans.   My review of  Do Better on this blog can be found here.

 

Best Fiction

The Witch's Heart by Genevieve Gornichec

This book dealt with  my favorite female Norse mythic character Skadhi the Huntress and Loki's wife, Angrboda.  I disovered Angrboda more fully than I ever dreamed through reading The Witch's Heart.  I didn't blog about this book, but I did review it on Goodreads here.

Best Mystery

The Bombay Prince by Sujata Massey

This is also the best historical fiction of the year. It's the most recent mystery in the Perveen Mistry series.  So it's a Mistry Mystery.  It dealt with important real history taking place in India in the 1920's.  It also dealt with issues of enduring importance to Perveen which included how women can be mistreated by men. See my review of The Bombay Prince here .

Best Biography

 The First Emancipator  by Andrew Levy

This is about the life of Robert Carter, a virtually unknown American founding father who freed his slaves during his lifetime.  Robert Carter and Thomas Jefferson knew each other.  So Jefferson would have known that freeing his slaves during his lifetime could be done. See my review of The First Emancipator here.

 

I normally have more categories, but I didn't have five star books in them in 2021. I had multiple five star books in non-fiction and historical fiction, but there could only be one best book in each category. This could also be the result of having read only 54 books this past year.  Let's hope I do better in 2022.