What I've been reading

The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene

narrated by Andrew Sachs

"In a poor, steamy and barren Mexican state, the Red Shirts have gained control, outlawed God, and murdered priests. But one still lives, the whisky priest, who is on the move, trying to escape his executioners."

From all the books by Graham Greene that I've read I think this one is the best so far, perhaps alongside 'Travels with my Aunt' (which I read a very long time ago as one of my first audiobooks and remember thinking that this is a great medium for fiction). First of all, I understood nearly all the plot, also most of the references to Catholicism, and why the priest is under threat and how he responds. In his other books I haven't really got it.

The Other Bennet Sister
by Janice Hadlow

"In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mary is the middle of the five Bennet girls and the plainest of them all, so what hope does she have? Prim and pious, with no redeeming features, she is unloved and seemingly unlovable."

This wasn't bad and I quite enjoyed it, but it was about twice as long as it needed to be, unlike this review.

Death Comes for the Archbishop
by Willa Cather

"In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief."

It took a while to get into the style of the book, which is a series of vignettes about the lives of these two priests in the incredible and wholly unfamiliar setting of 19th century New Mexico. I enjoyed it very much.

A Taste for Death
by P. D. James

narrated by Daniel Weyman

"When the quiet Little Vestry of St. Matthew's Church becomes the blood-soaked scene of a double murder, Scotland Yard Commander Adam Dalgliesh faces an intriguing conundrum: How did an upper-crust Minister come to lie dead next to a neighborhood derelict of the lowest order?"

Many say that P. D. James is fine writer, and it's true that the writing is good, but somehow I don't find her characters plausible. I'm definitely able to distinguish all the players and their places in the scene (helped by the expert narration), but there's something not quite right. She tries to draw the human relationships between the police characters but they don't feel real, and the suspects seem even more like caricatures. But at least I could follow the plot and reach the end and understand who did it and why, even if the finale was unnecessarily melodramatic.

The Martian
by Andy Weir

"Mark Watney is stranded on Mars. If the Oxygenator breaks down, he’ll suffocate. If the Water Reclaimer breaks down, he’ll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, he’ll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, he’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death."

It kept me gripped to the extent that I had to carry on reading past my bedtime, even though I'd seen the film and knew the ending. It would have been a full success except for the amount of technical detail. I suppose it could be described as the author's style, and in a way I'm glad he included all the calculations he made about litres of liquid oxygen required to support life and how much power a solar panel could provide and therefore how many he would need for 3200 km travelling at a rate of 80 km per day powering his oxygenator and water reclaimer and so on. But I admit that while a small part of me would have liked to go over the calculations to understand them, I skipped all of those paragraphs. This isn't often true, but I think in this case the film is better than the book.

The Human Stain
by Philip Roth

narrated by Dennis Boutsikaris

"It is 1998, and in a small New England town an aging Classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser."

I've tried a few authors now but I don't much enjoy 20th century American writing. I imagine it's because many of the cultural references pass me by - this book is set during the scandal of Bill Clinton's impeachment, which I was certainly aware of at the time but didn't really feel the societal shift that this author refers to. The secret at the heart of the book doesn't touch me as much as I think it would to someone immersed in US politics and living in that society.