Book Board Chat

Rained a bit this morning and now overcast. Tomorrow will be high in mid-20's and very windy and snow and/or snowshowers for the weekend. We have had a few days of mid-40's, sunny weather and reasonable snow melt.

Joanne- I read Riven Rock a few months ago as T.C. Boyle is a favorite author of mine. I loved Riven Rock - you forgot to mention his wife, Katharine Dexter McCormick who was wealthy on her own. Since she couldn't live with Stanley McCormick she became a women's activist on her own including suffragette movement and she used her own fortune to fund the doctor who created the birth control pill. Stanley was the son of Cyrus McCormick the inventor of the reaper and the company became International Harvester. Other books I enjoyed by T.C. Boyle were about the caretakers of the Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara - San Miguel and a book about when these islands were taken over by the National Park Service - When The Killings Done.
San Miguel is a wonderful book about isolation, dramatic weather, hard work and hopefulness.

Currently reading Swedish author Henning Mankell's series of books about Kurt Wallender, homicide detective. Mankell has written other books not about the detective and I want to try those. The detective books were written in the 1990's but the descriptions and comments about increased crime, more violent crime and lack of adequate funding for police sounds contemporary - USA. The detective identifies the changes in Swedish society as related to when people stopped darning socks. The throwaway society that became attitudes towards people too. Interesting.

Happy St. Patrick's Day. I am only 1/4 Irish but with a grandfather named Thomas Francis Kelly.......