William Bennett Seitz/Harry Moses, Pickups: Classic American Trucks - I'm a big fan of old cars, and particularly old trucks, so Lou got me this awesome coffee table book of restored trucks around the country. The pictures are great, the people's stories are interesting - I really enjoyed it.
Rhys Bowen, Death of Riley - I liked the first book in this series, so I had high hopes for this second one, but I admit to being disappointed. Molly seems to fall in easily with all sorts of unusual people just when she most needs it, it's all very convenient. In addition, where historical fiction is concerned there's a fine line between grounding your character in the time period and straining disbelief, and to have Molly all of a sudden show up and come within moments of preventing the assassination of the president was an event so poorly led up to and so completely coincidental that I didn't buy it. The intrusion of the real world meant that I was no longer living in Molly's world.
Edmund Burke, The Evils of Revolution - I was disappointed in this. I had read about Burke's book many times. It's quoted frequently and figures prominently in the thinking of 19th-century Americans. But the book itself did not impress me - I found it too blustery and not as powerful as I had expected.
Jack Todd, Sun Going Down - This is a western epic, based on the memoirs of the author's own family, and I thought it was overall quite successful. The characters were rich and interesting and they were fully enmeshed in their time period, which came to life on the page. It definitely follows a pattern of misery - as soon as a character expresses happiness, or love for another person, you can be sure one of them is about to die - but that's fairly typical of other books I've read set in the early 20th century west. The first half of the book the characters are more fully realized than in the last half, but the book as a whole was gripping and held my interest.
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