January Books: New Orleans, World War II and Military Sci Fi

I made a resolution to read a book a week in 2015. As long as you are making resolutions, you should make them fun, right?

In January I read a great nonfiction book about New Orleans’ neighborhoods and culture, a good historical fiction book that takes place during World War II and a bunch of easy reading military scifi.

Historical Fiction

The first book I finished this year was All the Light We Cannot See. My book group chose this book and it’s a good story. It takes place during World War II and is told from the view point of an orphan boy who ends up in the army on the Nazi side and a blind girl whose father is the master locksmith of the Louvre. The girls’ father is one of 4 people given a replica of a jewel or the real thing and told to hide it. The boy is part of a crew designed to find and take down radio transmissions. The story is well told; the characters are well developed and the book is true to history. I recommend it.

Nonfiction

I also said I’d read one nonfiction book and blog about it. For January, that book was Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans. This is the true story of nine people’s lives in New Orleans from Hurricane Betsy to Hurricane Katrina. I really enjoyed the book – partially because I have met one of the main characters, partially because I’ve been to most of those neighborhoods and mostly because it’s a good book. I blogged about it on Can You Cross the Street.

Science Fiction

Then I got my military science fiction fix:

• Against the Odds (The Serrano Legacy Book 7) by Elizabeth Moon. If you like Elizabeth Moon and you’ve read the rest of this series, then you should read this one. She does a good job of developing a universe of cultures and characters encountered with the issue of immortality. If you haven’t read any Elizabeth Moon books, you are probably better off starting with one of the first books in a series set in the same world (this one or this one) or my favorite Elizabeth Moon short story, Chameleons. You can find it in The New Space Opera 2.
• Rich Man’s War. This is the second book in a series and the opening premise is an interesting one. What if we outsourced all education to companies and young people started out with a debt that was inversely proportionate to how much they had learned? The book is good and the story and characters are consistent but the characters don’t have a lot of depth. I read it and will most likely read the next books in the series some day.
• Lines of Departure. This is the second in the series and after the first one I didn’t think I’d read any more of them. They were a bit too much about military life and way too many battle scenes, even for a military sci fi series. And not enough character development. However, I was intrigued enough – and missing the characters enough – that I read the second one. It was still good but still just too much fighting and military life. And I really hope this is not what happens to humanity. Infighting, squabbling and fighting aliens. Not much of a future.

Travel Books

I perused  the following books:

• Treme: Stories and Recipes from the Heart of New Orleans is a cookbook that tells brief stories about the chefs and the restaurants that the recipes come from. I decided it’s a good book to pick a list of New Orleans restaurants to try.
• A Walking Tour of New Orleans – The French Quarter (Look Up, America!) is a walking tour of New Orleans. It was very informational but I think it would need a tour guide to give it some dramatic flair.

Tried to read …

I also tried to listen to The End of Power, the first book that Mark Zuckerberg choose as part of his 2015 resolution. It was really hard to follow when listening to it in 10-15 minute chunks. I gave up on listening to it and I’m reading it now.

What did you read in January?