Books like An Easy Death

I’ve read this book multiple times over various stages of my life, and I find it funnier and funnier (and more and more impressive) the older I get.

This novel has so much going on: yes, technically it’s a Western, but it’s also a crime novel about the corrosive power of revenge, a buddy comedy about a fourteen-year-old girl and an over-the-hill U.S. Marshal, an oddball historical novel, and a meditation on youth and morality.

And more things, probably, that I’ll spot next time I inevitably pick it up again.

When novelist Paul Sheldon suffers a terrible car accident, he finds himself in the care of Annie Wilkes, a woman who claims to be his biggest fan and wants to nurse him back to health. But Annie isn’t pleased with the way Paul has brought his beloved series featuring Misery Chastain to a close. 

I love that we get a front-row seat to this unhinged author-fan encounter. Despite the horror that’s inflicted, readers—especially ones who are also writers—may take a perverse pleasure in seeing a fan have such strong feelings about a fictional character. 

Another component I adore is the way an author’s ego often causes them to overlook warning signs that would set off alarm bells in others who have a clearer picture of what’s really going on.

This book is probably the closest title to my own. Doc is centered around everyone’s favorite dandy gunslinger, Doc Holliday. It is a truly entertaining and informative tale of the real Doc’s life before his legendary stand at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone. While Wyatt and Morgan Earp play important roles in the story, Doc Holliday is definitely your Huckleberry. 

If you love it like I do, the author wrote a continuation called Epitaph: An O.K. Corral Story. You won’t be sorry.

I should preface this with some bit of transparency. One reason I love Tinsmith is because I personally know the author. Not only is she a great writer, but she’s one of the only female tinsmiths working in the United States. She makes her own cookware, and it is amazing.

The main character, Marie Kotlarczyk, moves to the Dakota territories with her tinsmith family. When the family encounters disaster, Marie has to learn the family trade in order to survive. It’s not an easy task when women were not meant to do such things. 

Sarah puts so much of herself in this book, it’s enchanting. Since she’s a professional tinsmith, every scene is tangible. I can’t recommend it enough.

I’ve always been fascinated by American Indian culture. Girls wore intricately beaded dresses and headbands with feathers. Moms carried elaborately decorated baby backpacks. Also, I didn’t understand why the cowboys couldn’t get along with the Indians. In this novel, based on a historical event, the government strikes a deal with the Cheyenne, trading 1000 white women for 1000 horses. 

The women are culled from poorhouses, prisons, and asylums, like May whose father committed her for living in sin. May jumps at the opportunity to escape the asylum. Once on the reservation, the newcomers bond and slowly adapt to their new lives and families. Readers too get an intimate portrait of Indian life, and compared to actions of the US Army, it begs the question, who should be labeled savages?

Fforde takes literary characters and brings them to life in a mystery format. Inside jokes about them and well-constructed absurd situations kept me amused. I admire the creativity and imagination a book like this requires. The plot is also ingenious, with unexpected twists and turns.

I’d say I never read a book like it, but I’ve read others by him, and he continues to create fun novels with literary and fairy tale characters. I recommend all of them.

They say you should never judge a book by its cover, but when I saw this one, it was love at first sight: the blue waters, the orange octopus, and the little pink fish swimming along the yellow-sprayed page edges.

However, the story matches the promise of the cover. The friendship between a widow working the night shift at the aquarium and an incredibly smart octopus reminded me that connection can be found in the most unlikely places.

Van Pelt’s genius is how she uses the scientifically proven fact that octopuses are bright. In the story, Marcellus, the octopus, sees patterns, secrets, and emotional undercurrents the humans overlook. The octopus chapters work like a lens that reveals what people hide from themselves. It’s just brilliant.

Agatha Christie's perfectly plotted stories, including the twenty short ones in this collection, remain crisply relevant even now, a century after their origination, which is the reason for her selling over two billion books.

I always believe I’ve caught her carefully dropped clues, only to realize I missed one…or three…that pointed toward the culprit. While Hercule Poirot remains my favorite Christie detective, I enjoyed meeting a slew of new characters in these fascinating tales of the “super-psychological” as noted in The Fourth Man. Plus, this collection is perfect for a quick evening read, though a few made falling asleep challenging!

A lot of people have heard about a crazy monk called Grigorii Rasputin, who, by the way, was neither crazy nor a monk. We read many volumes about him when researching our book on the myths of the Russian Revolution. We thought we had seen it all. Yet Douglas Smith’s book about Rasputin was still an eye-opener.

This scholarly book, based on years of archival work, reads like a work of fiction. Page after page lifts the veil of mystery surrounding Rasputin! We also deeply appreciated how Smith placed the powerful courtier in the social context of his time—the peasants, the priests, the aristocrats, the imperial court—many of which perished in the Revolution. 

I love contemplating what happens to the characters of a book or a film AFTER it ends, and this book took me right past the usual culmination in the story of the Romanovs: the Russian Revolution and the murder of the Tsar and his family by the Bolsheviks.

I found the story of the Romanovs surviving in immigration very poignant: as an immigrant myself, I could relate to their nostalgia for the motherland that no longer existed, their troubles and the dynamics in their immigrant families.

The story of the Tsar’s mother, Minnie, leaving Crimea on board a British gunship, surrounded by the remains of her family, and the last loyal officers on another ship singing to her just made me bawl!