'Island of the Sequined Love Nun' by Christopher Moore

Island of the Sequined Love Nun, Christopher Moore (3.5)

After reading this book, I was confused about the name. There was an island, and there was a sequined priestess, but no love nun. Rather odd. I’m still not sure the relevance of the use of ‘Nun’. This priestess was definitely no nun! The protagonist of the story is a misfit young man who loses his job flying the private jet of a Mary Kay type CEO and gets an offer he can’t refuse – from a missionary Dr. on a almost deserted island in Micronesia. Little does he know, the Dr. and his wife are known to the natives as the Sorcerer and High Priestess, whom they follow in a made-up cult fashion…. and that’s not the crazy part!  In typical Christopher Moore fashion, there is magic (a ghost and talking bat), sex (men may not to read the part about how he loses his job as it involves sex and a painful experience with the flap actuator lever), craziness (cannibals and a talking bat!) and lots of irreverent humor. I laughed a lot and enjoyed this book, though it was not quite up to ‘Bite Me’ or ‘Lamb’, two of his classics.

'And the Mountains Echoed' by Khaled Hosseini

And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini (4)

I found this to be a sad, moving, if somewhat predictable novel. As with ‘Kite Runner’, Mr. Hosseini has a beautiful voice that brings normalcy to the drama of a war torn Afghanistan. The book starts with a poor family from a small village near Kabul who undergo a sad event that divides what is left of the family. The rest of the book describes the next 60-70 years from various characters’ points of view and from a variety of time frames. My biggest complaint in the book was that some of the characters seemed a bit too peripheral to the story to be meaningful, but after our book group discussed this, I was able to appreciate the ‘echoing’ nature of each character. This also allowed the author to highlight the duality of good and bad existing in most of the characters. After some good discussion, I was able to appreciate all that Mr. Hosseini had done.

'Ratting on Russo' by Alan Venable

Ratting on Russo, Alan Venable (3.5)

A friend of the author gave me this book, as she knew I would enjoy the writing and the genre (young adult angst growing up in the 50’s of middle America). I particularly enjoyed the culture and language given the location, the outskirts of Pittsburgh near where my husband grew up. I could hear some of his relatives in the ‘yinz’ and ‘aht’s.  The plot of a young lad making his way through his early teens – negotiating girls, friends and awkward school situations is not particularly new, but Mr. Venable adds many small nuances to make this book special. While not a barn burning plot – there is a sweetness and nostalgia throughout this story that made it a pleasant reading experience.

'Total Control' by David Baldacci

Total Control, David Baldacci (3.5)

I normally don’t read books in this genre (i.e. prolific author who spits out one book or more per year), but my dad left this for me after a visit and said it was a real page-turner. He also said the mystery of who was behind the dastardly shenanigans were not obvious until the very end. Since I really love to be stumped (due to a good plot and good writing, of course), I decided to devote some time to this ~700 page thriller. The story is set in the 90’s with doses of computer technology, so the tech details were pretty dated, though not irrelevant. It was only slightly distracting that the unimaginable technologies of that time are now commonplace or even out of date. The story centers around a husband and wife, who become embroiled in business intrigue so out of hand that it involves crashing a commercial plane, many murders and manipulating the federal reserve, whose power seems to be less understood in the 90’s as it is now due to recent events. Typical of this type of book, he has added a somewhat crusty FBI agent to help save the day and a smart, beautiful woman to make his motivation even easier to understand. Despite some of the flaws, the plot did twist and turn and true to my dad’s word, I stayed up late turning pages in order to find out if I was right about who dunnit.