Hello everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. In this post, I will be doing a wrap up of all the books I read in November. This month I read more nonfiction books than fiction, and it is perhaps the one month in the entire year thus far where the books I read do not fulfill most (if any) of the prompts in my reading challenge. However, they were all very interesting reads.
1. CLASSIC: The Lost Stradivarius by J. Meade Falkner
This is a short novel first published in 1895, and it has been deemed a “classic tale of the supernatural.” I read this book as part of my classics book club during the month of October (though I finished it in early November) as one of the season’s spooky reads of the month. And though I liked it, it wasn’t one of my favorite reads of the year either.
Set primarily in Victorian England, this is the story of John Maltravers and his growing obsession with the Gagliarda in the Aeropagita, written by Graziani, after he notices that a mysterious presence enters his rooms in Oxford whenever he plays this piece on the violin. This is the ghost of Andrew Temple, who also attended Oxford and the previous occupant of John’s rooms. He was also the owner of a rare Stradivarius violin, which John ultimately finds in his quarters. But after this invaluable discovery (Stradivarius violins are so rare it is practically impossible to steal one, and if you do it becomes utterly worthless), John changes from an affable and charismatic young man to a reclusive and distant person. How John changes both physically and mentally after he finds the lost Stradivarius is the premise of the story and it is narrated as a letter from Sophia Maltravers to her brother’s son Edward relating how his father changed to eventually become the violin’s latest (and last) victim and perish from its innate evil.
I don’t read much horror. I said this last month on my review for Dracula but whereas I loved Bram Stoker’s novel, which is also an epistolary novel, I did not feel the same way about The Lost Stradivarius. Several things were against it, I think. One, the writing. It was told. I never really felt like I was there. Yes, the events Sophia tries to relate to her nephew are already in the past and his father has been dead for some time but strangely the letter format of the story made me feel detached from what was going on, and I couldn’t help but feel that I was an outsider. The other thing that didn’t make me like this book as much was that we never actually get to meet John. We only get to know him through the eyes of others and yes, he’s already dead by then but this still gave the story a sense of detachment that I couldn’t shake. I gave this book an I Liked It But Will Probably Not Read It Again rating.
2. NONFICTION: The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream by Dean Jobb
I first read about Dr. Cream in A Taste for Poison: Eleven Deadly Molecules and the Killers Who Used Them by Neil Bradbury, Ph.D, a book I read back in September. So when I saw this book, I knew I had to read it. And it did not disappoint. Compared to his contemporary and fellow killer Jack The Ripper, we practically know nothing about Dr. Cream, unless you study poisons and the killers who used them like the author of A Taste for Poison. But don’t be fooled. Dr. Cream may have dressed like a gentlemen in Victorian England but he was a ruthless killer and a man on a mission: To rid the world of the scum of the Earth, which, in his estimation and Jack The Ripper’s, was prostitutes. Interestingly enough, the case for which he was arrested and sentenced to prison in the US was for the death of the only man he is suspected of killing. Years later, after he was released from prison in the US on good behavior, he moved back to London and started killing again. Eventually he was tried and sentenced to death for poisoning Matilda Clover, the one woman whose death was not associated at first to the Lambeth Poisoner (this was how he was nicknamed by the authorities because he chose his victims on Lambeth Street in London). Dr. Thomas Neill Cream was hanged on November 15th, 1892. His last words were “I am Jack…” uttered in what is believed to be a confession to the infamous unsolved murders of Jack The Ripper, but these rumors are still unsubstantiated. I Liked This Book And Will Probably Read It Again.
3. LIBRARY BOOK: Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff
Last year, I read Augustus by Anthony Everitt, which relates Octavius Caesar’s, Julius Caesar’s heir, also known as Octavian (as Cleopatra knew him), rise to power, which culminated when he defeated Marc Antony and Cleopatra in the Battle of Actium. After this battle, Egypt became a province of Rome. And Cleopatra committed suicide, preferring to die than to be paraded through the streets of Rome as a prisoner of war in Octavian’s triumph. In Augustus, the author relates the events of the Battle of Actium from the point of view of the victors. In Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff we see the events leading up to this battle from the point of view of the Egyptians and their maligned and misunderstood Queen.
I read this book because I’d recently just finished reading When Women Ruled The World by Kara Cooney, an account of the reigns of six female pharaohs of Egypt. The last queen this book talks about is Cleopatra, and though she is the most famous one of them all there is very little that is actually known about her. It wasn’t until recently that I found out that her tomb has not been found yet. Though archaeologists are optimistic, and at the time of this writing a Dominican lawyer turned archeologist has found a tunnel under an Egyptian temple that she is hopeful might lead her to Cleopatra’s (and Marc Antony’s) final resting place. Last month, archeologists also uncovered the pyramid of a previously unknown queen of Egypt called Neith. I gave this book an I Liked It And Will Probably Read It Again rating.
4. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
I’d been meaning to read this book for a while, even before I read this author’s newest book The Body: A Guide for Occupants. The title of this book is ambitious, and even the author himself says that this is not a history of nearly everything…that’s impossible. It is, on the other hand, a history of Earth. Of how it came to be, how old it is, and how life evolved in it. This book has a lot of information in it, and the author wrote it in an attempt to know more about the planet we inhabit. To do so, he delves into astronomy, geology, archeology, paleoanthropology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and other disciplines and embarks on a journey to tell the story of men and his quest to answer some of the basic questions of the universe. I Liked This Book And Will Probably Read It Again sometime.
5. First Rider’s Call by Kristen Britain
In this second installment of the Green Rider series, Karigan Gl’adheon begins a new adventure when her link to the First Rider makes her witness events from The Long War. The Long War is a war that occurred a thousand years ago in Sacoridian history when Alessandros del Mornhavon, the prince of Arcosia (or the First Empire), arrives to the shores of Sacoridia and tries to conquer it. His purpose is to create a Second Empire. The King of Sacoridia and his people, however, fight back and Lil Ambroth, a magic user and leader of the king’s Green Riders, is one of Mornhavon’s strongest enemies. Hadriax el Fex is Alessandros del Mornhavon’s best friend and right hand man. However, he ends up betraying Alessandros and helps the Sacoridians confine Mornhaven The Black and his evil in Blackveil Forest.
The breach in the Wall, something that happened at the beginning of the first book, is still not fixed here and evil from Blackveil Forest is seeping through it into Sacoridia… Mornhaven is stirring.
I liked the link between Lil Ambroth and Karigan. It was a credible way to open the door to the past and tell us the story of The Long War and Mornhaven The Black. Hadriax El Fex’s journal entries also helped. But I admit that the storyline of the Wall (and the evil beyond it) reminds me a little too much of the Wall in Game of Thrones, and I am a little hesitant to see where this storyline is going. Let’s see, though I am in no way comparing these two or saying that one is better than the other. I am just wondering which author influenced the other though they are both already so different. I gave this book an I Liked It And Will Probably Read It Again rating. I will continue on with the series.
6. Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands by Dan Jones
The Wars for the Holy Lands are perhaps some of the most documented and studied wars in history. Works such as A History of the Crusades in three volumes by Steven Runciman and God’s War: A New History of the Crusades by Christopher Tyerman are classics on the topic. Dan Jones’s Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands focuses on the people who fought these wars, and I admit it was a refreshing take on a topic that I have been reading about for years. The Siege of Jerusalem, where the Christian captured the Holy City of Jerusalem in 1099, and the Battle of Hattin in 1187, where Saladin expelled the Christians and returned Muslim rule to Jerusalem, are probably some of the most famous battles of the Crusades and two of which should never be missed in a book about the crusades, but the events that led to the creation of Outremer, or the Crusader states in the East, began with the Muslim threat in Spain and the threat of the Turks invading the Byzantine Empire. The Sack of Constantinople, the culmination of the Fourth Crusade, however, was not brought upon by an invasion of Muslim forces to the city but of Crusader armies who captured, looted, and destroyed parts of Constantinople that left the Empire in a much poorer, smaller, and less able state to defend itself against the Seljuk and Ottoman conquests that followed.
Following the threat of the Turks and other groups of the Muslim faith, there rose another threat to the Crusader states: The Mongols, who warred with both Christian and Muslim armies and defeated them. These wars are also part of the crusading movement, which this author states ended in 1492, when a different kind of warring would take center stage; that of establishing colonies in the newly discovered land of America. I gave this book an I Liked It And Will Probably Read It Again rating.
This is everything for November. Thank you for reading. Next week, I will begin my End of the Year series, which starts with the books I DNF’d this year. These will be divided in two parts, and Part I will have 10 books and the series I do not plan to continue. See you then!
