#59 - The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin
From Goodreads: In The Passage and The Twelve, Justin Cronin brilliantly imagined the fall of civilization and humanity's desperate fight to survive. Now all is quiet on the horizon, but does silence promise the nightmare's end or the second coming of unspeakable darkness?
It has been a long time since I read the first two books in The Passage trilogy, but I've been looking forward to this one for a while and was far too impatient to reread the earlier books to refresh my memory. And on whole I think it was a fitting conclusion to the story arc, though I found the main antagonist and his motivations a bit confounding. Still, his backstory was a fascinating look into how the apocalypse began as a series of decisions made by very smart men with very good intentions that went wrong and became corrupted along the way. I thought the early sections of the book got a bit bogged down in the politics and power struggles of the community that rose after the major battle at the end of The Twelve, with a lot of details that I didn't feel added much to the story. The best part, I thought, was the very ending where we get a glimpse of the rebuilding and growth of A.V. society as well as of the "monsters" longevity and mortality via the mutated-but-not-evil Amy at the end of her life.
#60 - The Secret Lives of Bats by Merlin Tuttle
From Goodreads: From menacing moonshiners and armed bandits to charging elephants and man-eating tigers, Merlin Tuttle has stopped at nothing to find and protect bats on every continent they inhabit. Enamored of bats ever since discovering a colony in a cave as a boy, Tuttle saw how effective photography could be in persuading people not to fear bats, and he has spent his career traveling the world to document them. Few people realize how sophisticated and intelligent bats are. Tuttle shares research showing that frog-eating bats can identify frogs by their calls, that vampire bats have a social order similar to that of primates, and that bats have remarkable memories. Bats also provide enormous benefits by eating crop pests, pollinating plants, and carrying seeds needed for reforestation. They save farmers billions of dollars annually and are essential to a healthy planet. Sharing highlights from a lifetime of adventure and discovery, Tuttle takes us to the frontiers of bat research and conservation and forever changes the way we see these poorly understood yet fascinating creatures.
I have no earthly idea what inspired me to pick this one up when I saw it on the library's new non-fiction shelf. I'm terrified of bats, a consequence of being a city girl transplanted to a rural town where if you don't keep unscreened windows or doors closed at dusk the winged monsters will fly right in and get themselves stuck. But it was a fascinating read nonetheless and maybe helped with that fear just a bit. The author is a lifelong bat lover and researcher, and each chapter is a different adventure he's had in decades of traveling the world researching and advocating for bat conservation. And he makes tropical fruit bats seem almost cute, both in description and in the photography included with the text.
#61 - Detroit Hustle: A Memoir of Life, Love, and Home by Amy Haimerl
From Goodreads: Journalist Amy Haimerl and her husband had been priced out of their Brooklyn neighborhood. Seeing this as a great opportunity to start over again, they decide to cash in their savings and buy an abandoned house for $35,000 in Detroit, the largest city in the United States to declare bankruptcy.
As she and her husband restore the 1914 Georgian Revival, a stately brick house with no plumbing, no heat, and no electricity, Amy finds a community of Detroiters who, like herself, aren’t afraid of a little hard work or things that are a little rough around the edges. Filled with amusing and touching anecdotes about navigating a real-estate market that is rife with scams, finding a contractor who is a lover of C.S. Lewis and willing to quote him liberally, and neighbors who either get teary-eyed at the sight of newcomers or urge Amy and her husband to get out while they can, Amy writes evocatively about the charms and challenges of finding her footing in a city whose future is in question. Detroit Hustle is a memoir that is both a meditation on what it takes to make a house a home, and a love letter to a much-derided city.
The author of this book is living my dream so I had to pick this one up. I even made it an exception to my New Year's Resolution about not buying books, even though I tend to have a love-hate relationship with books and articles about Detroit, especially when they're written by newcomers or visitors. But I did enjoy this. Haimerl has a light, funny, evocative writing style that captured the challenges both of moving to a city with as many problems as Detroit has and the inevitable "Money Pit" experiences of restoring a historic home (experiences I'm all too familiar with myself - we're fixing up our 1880 Victorian little by little, and should be done just about when we're ready to sell and move back to the city! LOL) without allowing those negatives to drag the story down into a litany of complaints.
#62 - Orphan Train by Christina Baker Cline
I got the recommendation for this one from this thread so I'm not going to repost the synopsis. I simply loved this book. The dual storylines, one in the present and one set during the Great Depression, wove together beautifully with parallels that spoke to constants not only in human nature but also in the way we as a society have served (or failed) the most vulnerable among us. A truly enjoyable work of fiction with something meaningful to say without feeling heavy-handed or preachy. I quite literally couldn't make myself put it down and stayed up WAY too late last night to finish it. I've passed it along to my daughter for her to read before I return it to the library.
