Books Read in August 2023

I read nine books in August and completed all of the books on my 20 Books of Summer list. I did not review them all, but did better than usual in that area. I read four nonfiction books, although three of them were shorter books. All of the books I read in August were very good.

Graphic Nonfiction 

Number One is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions (2022) 

by Steve Martin, Drawings by Harry Bliss

This is a short and entertaining graphic memoir, in which Steve Martin, star of many films and currently starring in the TV series Only Murders in the Building, tells selected stories about his career in the movies. That portion of the book is supplemented by cartoons drawn by Harry Bliss. This book was his second collaboration with Harry Bliss; the first was A Wealth of Pigeons: A Cartoon Collection.

A Fire Story (2019) by Brian Fies

Brian Flies tells the story of his and his wife's escape from the Tubbs fire that engulfed their home in Santa Rosa, and their experiences following the fire, with all their possessions gone. My review here.

Nonfiction / Letters 

84, Charing Cross Road (1970) by Helene Hanff

I loved reading this very brief book of letters between Helene Hanff in New York City and Frank Doel in London, starting in October 1949. My review here.

Nonfiction / History

Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (2010) 

by Ben Macintyre

This is an extremely well-written history telling the story of Operation Mincemeat, a plan to deceive the Germans related to the next target that the Allies planned to attack. Sicily was the most obvious target, but intelligence agents wanted to convince the enemy that the attack would be on Greece or Sardinia. My review here.

Science Fiction

The Last Colony (2007) by John Scalzi

This book is the third in the Old Man's War series; the first two books are military science fiction, which I did not think I would like, but I did. This entry in the series was an interesting combination of a story about the colonization of a planet and the resulting effort to protect the planet from a group that wants to annihilate it. I rated The Last Colony higher than the other two, but I read the first two books ten years ago. Maybe I am a more generous grader of books now (which I would just as soon not do anyway), or maybe I liked the emphasis on people and relationships in this one.

Crime Fiction

The Mulberry Bush (2015) by Charles McCarry

This is the last novel that Charles McCarry published before his death in 2019. It is a standalone spy story about a man whose main focus is getting revenge for his father, a spy for the CIA whose career ended in disgrace. Now the son has succeeded in getting a job with the CIA and is bent on avenging the wrong that Headquarters did to his father. My review here.

Sleep and His Brother (1971) by Peter Dickinson

This is the fourth in a series about Jimmy Pibble. In the first two books, he was a Scotland Yard detective; now he has been forced into retirement. His wife is a volunteer for a charitable institution and asks him to look into a problem they are having. There are vague supernatural elements, which is not surprising since Dickenson was a well-known author of fantasy books. The book is very short, around 200 pages, but very dense, not an easy read at all. I loved the story and the writing.

The Doomsday Carrier (1976) by Victor Canning

This was another short book, under 200 pages, and the fourth book in a loose series called the Birdcage books. They all revolve around a covert security group in the UK, a branch of the Ministry of Defense. A chimpanzee has escaped from the facility where it had been infected with plague bacillus, with the goal of creating an infectious carrier of the disease after a three week incubation period. The story follows the chimpanzee as it continues to elude capture, and two people who hope to catch it and return it to the facility before it becomes contagious. Concerns are addressed about the ethics of doing this kind of research and the dishonesty of government officials in trying to keep the truth from the public.

A Man's Head (1931) by Georges Simenon

There are 75 novels featuring Inspector Maigret, and each of those that I have read is different. Maigret often behaves strangely, at least for a policeman of his rank. In this case, Maigret arranges the escape of a condemned murderer from prison. The man, Joseph Heurtin, was convicted of having killed a rich American woman and her French maid. Maigret is sure that Huertin could not have done the crime, even though the proof of his guilt is strong. He plans to have the man followed once he escapes, and see if he will lead the police to the real culprit. Maigret gets very personally involved in this one. An alternate title for this book is A Battle of Nerves, which is definitely an accurate description. The Maigret novels are always good reads, brief, and usually with some humor.

Currently reading

For my Classics List, I am reading I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith; I have read about half the book. This book is the starting book for Six Degrees of Separation in October, and is on my Classics List. 

The annual Planned Parenthood Book Sale started on September 15th. We have been to the book sale several times since it started, and will go again on Sunday, the last day of the sale. I have bought way too many books, so maybe I won't find too many more to buy.

The photos at the top of this post are of the Silver-leafed Princess Flower plants in our front flower beds. Last month's photos showed the first purple blooms on the plants. The photos in this post show the plant in full bloom. 

The photo immediately above is a flower on our Butterfly bush. The plant has done very well and gotten taller than we expected.

Photos taken and processed by my husband. Click on the images for the best viewing quality.

A Fire Story: Brian Fies

From the dust jacket on my edition:

Early in the morning on Monday, October 9, 2017, wildfires burned through Northern California, resulting in 44 fatalities. In addition, 8,900 structures, including more than 6,200 homes, were destroyed. One of those homes belonged to author and illustrator Brian Fies’ and his family.  In the days that followed, Fies hastily pulled together a firsthand account of his experience in a twenty-page online comic entitled A Fire Story, that went viral.

The version of A Fire Story that was published online was a short webcomic (which is included at the end of the book). In 2019, Brian Fies published this expanded version of the story, adding more of his and his family's experiences following the fire, and a few sections on other people who lost homes due to the fire and their experiences.

Brian Fies' book does a very good job of conveying the stress that the victims of the fires had to deal with, and the unimaginable sadness of losing not just your home but everything in it. In some fires, the people in the paths of the fire have enough warning to gather some important possessions, but that was not the case here. 

I found it interesting that Brian Fies and his wife Karen went directly to her work place when they left their home and got safely out of the path of the fire. That made sense because she was the Director of Sonoma County Human Services and part of the County Emergency Response Team. And it had a backup generator, telephones, and internet. She ended up working there on coordinating emergency resources for the next 16 hours. 

My favorite parts were the wonderful, detailed sections telling the stories of other people who lost homes due to the fire and their varied experiences of finding a place to stay afterward and replacing their homes. There was Michael W. Harkins, a journalist and media consultant, who actually stayed and tried to save his house, unsuccessfully. And Dorothy Hughes, a senior who lived in a mobile home park. Her home was one of 44 in the park that survived the fire but she was never able to move back in. 

There is a very good review of the book at the Los Angeles Times. I am including a few paragraphs because I am not sure if the article can be read without a subscription.

Rooted in Fies’ webcomic, the book-length graphic account details life during and after the second-most destructive wildfire in California history. Now refined and enriched with more color and detail, opening pages depict their house’s silhouetted exterior and adjacent shrubbery, rimmed in carrot orange against an ash- and beige-streaked horizon. Karen smells smoke and from their bedroom window monitors a glowing sky that Brian attributes to “just the Calistoga fire.”

“I’m sure everything’s fine,” he assures his wife. “We haven’t gotten any phone alerts!”

Seventy mph winds that night ushered the fire that began near Tubbs Lane toward the Fieses’ front door, which was north of Santa Rosa. For the couple and thousands of other Californians, nothing would ever be the same again. Following a tense sequence that has the cartoonist and his wife springing from bed and frantically hauling belongings out to their driveway and the palpable heartbreak that materializes later when Fies scouts out their rubble-strewn streets, “A Fire Story” shares lesser-broadcast hardships as well as how quickly wildfire victims are expected to process a frenzied cycle of emotions.

Although my husband and I have been affected by wildfires in our area for many years, we have never been anywhere close to the type of devastation depicted in this book. In 1990, we had to evacuate due to the Painted Cave fire, which came down from the Santa Ynez mountains, jumped the freeway, and burned some homes close to where we lived. We were scared and for a short time I was separated from my husband and son when they had difficulty accessing any routes to our home. But we were only away from our home for one night after evacuating. We were very lucky. And that was before wildfires in Southern California became so prevalent and so damaging.

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Publisher:   Harry N. Abrams, 2019.
Length:       154 pages
Format:      Hardcover
Genre:       Graphic nonfiction
Source:      On my TBR for four years.