July Audiobooks

This wasn't the best month for reading. I spent way too much time on YouTube and I some of my books were just slow to get going. But as I look through my list of 5 books that I finished this month, I can say that I really enjoyed 4 of them.

What good books have you read  this month? I'm looking forward to some good ready for August while we are on vacation. 

DNF - Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo - This is a very interesting story told in an uninteresting way. I know this is one of THE hot books right now but I found my mind wandering throughout the whole thing. I finally gave up.
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Just For The Summer
By Abby Jimenez, Read by a cast

I picked this up to listen to at the beach knowing it was chick lit. I didn't get to it at the beach so I  listened to it while quilting instead. I was pleasantly surprised by this one! I expected something like Emily Henry but it was much better. It's a cute love story but isn't silly and it deals with some serious issues for the characters.

Emma is a travel nurse. After a life in foster care between short stints with her mother, she find her comfort in living out of 2 suitcases. Her dating life is also transient.

Justin has just posted to a AITA Reddit thread about his most recent breakup. It seems that every girl he dates finds her true love after she breaks up with him. Most recently his latest girlfriend found her true love with his best friend. As revenge he adopted the ugliest dog he could find and named it after his best friend, Brad.

Emma and Justin start chatting through the Reddit thread and eventually agree to date for 6 weeks to break the curse. Of course you know how it ends but there are some really surprising twists along the way. I find Emily Herny books to be kind of silly. This one was much better.

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The Wager
By David Grann, Read By Dion Graham

In 1741, a battered English ship washed up on a barren island near Patagonia. The Wager had left England in 1740 on a secret mission related to The War For Jenkin's Ear with Spain. In January of 1742 a ramshackle raft arrived on the coast of Brazil. These were some of the survivors of The Wager. Everyone else was presumed dead. But 6 months after that another pile of floating sticks arrived in Chile with 3 more survivors. The stories of their adventures are wild. How anyone survived is a miracle. 

This book isn't going to appeal to everyone. It's history. It's Naval history. That's a niche. But this is an amazing story that reads like a novel. How anyone survived is a miracle. This book had gotten a lot of press and awards and it's all deserved. I also recommend the audio version because the narrator's voice is perfect.

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The Authenticity Project
By Clare Pooley, Read By Anna Cordell

Clare pooley writes charming stories about finding community wherever you are. She creates interesting and sympathetic characters and you root for each one.

Julian is 79 and a mostly retired artist. He believes that people aren't honest with themselves so he starts The Authenticity Project. He writes his own story in a green notebook and leaves it on a local cafe. There it's picked up by the cafe owner, Monica, who adds her own story. Over time the book finds it's way into many hands and the people who share their stories find their way to Monica's Cafe and into each other's lives.

​Very enjoyable.

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The Friar and the Cipher
By Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone

This was one of my sit-outside-and-read books, meaning that I read this one in paper. It's an older book and isn't available in audio. I picked it up from Thriftbooks for a few dollars and I'm glad I did.

The book is supposedly about a particular medieval manuscript, today knows as the Voynich manuscript. It's named for the man who rediscovered it in 1912 after hundreds of years hidden in a library. The manuscript is over 200 pages long and it full of drawings of plants, astrological diagrams and naked women doing tasks. It's completely indecipherable  and has been the focus of cryptologists ever since it's discovery. It is generally attributed to Roger Bacon, an astronomer and friar of the 13th Century. Roger Bacon is not related to Sir Francis Bacon, although the book explores parallels in their writings.

Roger Bacon was a contemporary of Thomas Aquinas and much of the book focuses on their contradicting philosophies of scientific enquiry. Amazon reviewer Clay Garner has a much better summary than I can writer:
"most of the writing is covering the contrast between two versions of scientific enquiry. One, drawn from Robert Grosseteste, (who believed the Bible is inspired from God and should be treated with more respect than even Aristotle) the bishop of Lincoln, through Roger Bacon is explained as a mathematical, inductive, empirical, experimental method. The second, drawn from Aristotle through Albert Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, is a deductive, verbal, logical, mental construct."

If you read The Woman Who Smashed Codes about Elizabeth Friedman and her husband, you be interested to know that they made a cameo in this book. They are among the countless people who have worked for decades unsuccessfully to try to decode the manuscript.

​It was an interesting book on a number of levels. For me, it was the explanation of the foundational philosophies and actions that created our modern educational and research systems.

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The Book of Lost Names
By Kristin Harmel, Read By Madeline Maby

Eva Adams is an 85-year-old librarian in Florida and sees a photo of a book in a news article that brings back memories of her experiences in WWII. The photo is of The Book of Lost Names.

The book is a ancient religious text that was confiscated by the Nazis during the occupation of France. The book is particularly interesting because it seems to contain a code that no one has been able to break.

Eva has never told her family about her involvement in the resistance during the war and the actions she took to make identity documents to protect Jewish children. This all happened after her father was taken to Auschwitz. She and her mother avoided being picked up and escaped to Southern France where her artistic talents were put to great use.

After seeing the book, she feels she must go to Germany to see the book and explain what it is.

This book is compared to The Nightingale by Kristen Hannah. They are both about women in WWII and, as far as I'm concerned, that's where the similarity ends. This story is a love story told during WWII and out heroine is really crappy at keeping secrets. Also her mother is supremely annoying. Her behavior is unfathomable.  I finished the book but I didn't love it.

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