I read a lot in April. The situation kind of allowed me to indulge in sitting with my kindle for long periods of time. I expect similar results in May.

The Bully Pulpit

Doris Kearns Goodwin

I loved this book. It looks into a fascinating time and one of the most interesting stories in American history. The book follows three separate, but related threads. The first follows the life and career of Teddy Roosevelt. The second does the same for William Howard Taft. And the third follows the muckraking journalists, from the magazine McClure’s that were influential at the time, both influencing and being influenced by Roosevelt and other progressive politicians.

It does a good job of condensing the history into a readable story. I have read several Theodore Roosevelt biographies, and this does an excellent job of giving a quick, yet fairly thorough look at his life and his time as president. I know less about Taft, but it makes for a readable look at his life and the forces that shaped him. I knew next to nothing about McClure’s and this book does an excellent job of showing how the magazine came to be and why it was so important for a time.

The real meat of the book is the friendship between Roosevelt and Taft, and the completeness of its rupture during Taft’s presidency. It plays out almost like a Shakespearean tragedy. How they worked together so well while Roosevelt was President to the inevitability of everything coming apart once Taft ascended to that office. Roosevelt had this absolute need to be the center of attention, and he was never going to be comfortable stepping aside. Especially since he honestly could have won a second/third term had he run for it. While Roosevelt was brash and commanding, Taft was slower and more contemplative. He lacked the force of will to get things done that Roosevelt had, and Roosevelt treated his compromises as turning his back on the things they did together. So things fell apart.

The Bully Pulpit really changed my opinion of Taft. He comes across as the true tragic figure here. From his continually put aside desire to be a Supreme Court justice to his wife suffering a stroke early in his presidency to his demoralizing defeat in the 1912 Election. He comes across as a flawed but reasonable and conscientious man. The most crushing part is the anecdote from an interview, which never ran, from just before the 1912 election, where he was asked about what happened between him and Roosevelt and all he could say was that Roosevelt was his best friend.

This is a great look at a very interesting time in American history.

Dragon Weather

Lawrence Watt-Evans

This book is a take on the Count of Monte Cristo, but with dragons. The protagonist, Arlian, loses his family to a dragon attack when he is young. In fact, he is the only survivor from his town. Unfortunately, when he is found by the scavengers searching through the destruction, instead of saving him, they sell him into slavery. After growing to adulthood in some mines, Arlian manages to escape and sets out to get revenge on the men who sold him as a slave and the dragons who destroyed his town.

I really struggled staying interested in the first part of the book. After Arlian gets out of the mines and starts to plot his revenge I liked it a lot more. There are still things that give me pause. This book has a lot of mutilated women. It is a harsh book all around, but it is all seen through the eyes of the protagonist, and he seems to focus on women missing body parts. That said, it is mostly an enjoyable read. I don’t really have a lot to say about it.

Fairest

Gail Carson Levine

This is related to Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted; this time a retelling, of sorts, of Snow White. Aza feels ugly compared to the rest of her adopted family. She does have the power of magic ventriloquism. A useful skill in a land that greatly values one’s singing voice. This eventually leads to her getting entangled with the beautiful, but weak singing, new queen of her homeland. It deals a lot with how much Aza lets her perception of how people see her control how she acts. The queen, who isn’t really evil here, has similar problems, focusing mostly on her looks and being afraid to let people know her weaknesses. It was an enjoyable enough take on a fairy tale retelling.

The Mystery of Three Quarters

Sophie Hannah

Another of Hannah’s Poirot continuations. I enjoyed this quite a bit. I don’t think it really reads like Christie in the prose, but the mystery is suitably inventive and it does a good job of fleshing out a wide variety of characters to be potential suspects. The book starts with four separate people coming to Poirot, angry about a letter he had written to them, accusing them of murdering a man. Poirot is confused, both because he did not write any such letters and because the letters accused the four of them of murdering the same person. That person was an old man who died without any suspicion of foul play. Still, Poirot begins to investigate, as the letter writer likely intended.

The four people initially seem to be unconnected to each other, but as Poirot digs in, some connections start to turn up. Also, all four appear to be keeping some secrets from him. Somewhere in those secrets is the truth about who wrote the letter and who, if anyone, committed a murder. It seems to play fair, and the mystery keeps you guessing. I don’t know that I completely buy the big revelation near the end, but it did not lessen my enjoyment.

The Crime at Black Dudley

Margery Allingham

I’ve now read two of her books, and I do not think Allingham is for me. I have found both this, and its sequel Mystery Mile, which I accidentally read first, to be kind of muddled. Nothing about them comes across particularly clearly; not the characters, not the plots. This one clearly sets the eventual starring detective Albert Campion as a clear side character. It is about a group of guests invited to a house party at a remote manor, the titular Black Dudley. It is a mysterious old manor, with hidden rooms and secret passages. Things start to get strange when they play a party game based around a family heirloom jeweled dagger. The owner of the manor falls ill, with some of the guests convinced he is actually dead. It is soon pronounced, by a doctor present, that he is indeed dead. Things get weirder from there, with the victims’ associates, who are not part of the house party being thrown by the victims nephew, confining everyone to the manor and sabotaging their cars. One fly in the ointment is Albert Campion, a party crasher who seems to know more than he lets on.

The central figure to the mystery is one Dr. Abbershaw, who is trying to get to the bottom of everything and win the heart of Meggie, another guest at the party. It plays out as much like a spy adventure novel as it does a mystery. Really, there isn’t much mystery to it. Maybe knowing who Campion is going changes how I viewed things, but it seemed pretty clear who were the bad guys and who were the good guys. It was also pretty clear generally what people were up to, though not all the detail. I just can’t tell you much about Abbershaw or Meggie, let alone the bad guys. It’s just not for me.

Manners & Mutiny

Gail Carriger

This is the fourth of Carriger’s Finishing School series. They are kind of hard to define; steampunk historical supernatural adventure romances, I guess? It has been some time since I read the first three. I remember enjoying them, but I don’t really remember the details of what happened. I did retain a solid memory of who the characters are. Sophronia is now close to graduating from her finishing school. That school is set on an airship that flies around an alternate reality Great Britain. And this finishing school trains its students to be expert spies and assassins. Sophronia is just as much of a go getter as she ever was. She has taken her lessons to heart, and she is a very talented operative, if not an especially stealthy spy.

In this book, the school gets taken over by the nefarious Picklemen, and Sophronia, who knows more about what is going on than even her teachers, stays on the ship to try to stop them. That is the big climax, the first half is exactly how Sophronia came to have that knowledge. It also has her dealing with her love life. While she seems to have pretty definitely chosen between the two handsome young men who are interested, social issues seem destined to keep her and her love apart.

It doesn’t have the impact it likely would have had I read it closer to the rest of the series, but once I got into it, it was really enjoyable.