Part 3 of Quotes from and Commentary on The Mueller Report - The Washington Post edition

I'll try to let the quotes speak for themselves, today.

Comey's briefing included the Steele reporting's unverified allegation that the Russians had compromising tapes of the President involving conduct when he was a private citizen during a 2013 trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe Pageant. During the 2016 presidential campaign, a similar claim may have reached candidate Trump. On October 30, 2016, Michael Cohen received a text from Russian businessman Giorgi Rtskhiladze that said, "Stopped flow of tapes from Russia but not sure if there's anything else. Just so you know. . ." [...] Rtskhiladze said "tapes" referred to compromising tapes of Trump rumored to be held by persons associated with the Russian real estate conglomerate Crocus Group [...]

~from footnote on p. 289


Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations. The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the President sought to use his official power outside of usual channels. These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General's recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony. Viewing the acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance. For example, the President's direction to McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed was followed almost immediately by his direction to Lewandowski to tell the Attorney General to limit the scope of the Russia investigation to prospective election-interference only — a temporal connection that suggests that both acts were taken with a related purpose with respect to the investigation. 

~p. 419

Note: The above quote is particularly relevant because it shows that the president has been going outside normal government channels since at least a few months after his inauguration. Corey Lewandowski, like Rudy Giuliani, is not and never was a government employee.


The obstruction-of-justice statute most readily applicable to our investigation is 18 U. S. C. § 1512(c)(2). Section 1512(c) provides: 

          (c) Whoever corruptly —

                    (1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object's integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or

                    (2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. 

~p. 422


[...] a balancing test applies to assess separation of-powers issues. Applying that test here, we concluded that Congress can validly make obstruction-of-justice statues applicable to corruptly motivated official acts of the President without impermissibly undermining his Article II functions. 

~p. 433


A general ban on corrupt action does not unduly intrude on the President's responsibility to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." U.S. CONST. ART II §§ 3. To the contrary, the concept of "faithful execution" connotes the use of power in the interest of the public, not in the office holder's personal interests. [...] And immunizing the President from the generally applicable criminal prohibition against corrupt obstruction of official proceedings would seriously impair Congress's power to enact laws "to promote objectives within [its] constitutional authority," [...]

~p. 439


conspiracy to defraud the United States: A legal charge used against people thought to have worked together to commit fraud against the US government in some way, such as by impeding the functions of the Federal Election Commission or another government agency. The special counsel's office made use of this charge against former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, and against the Russian organization that engineered a social media campaign to influence the 2016 election. This is the technical charge that pundits likely mean when they colloquially refer to "collusion," which envisions a conspiracy between Russians and Americans to defraud the US election system. 

~from "Glossary of Legal Terms," p. 513


[...] defendant PAPADOPOULOS understood that a principal foreign policy focus of the Campaign was an improved U.S. relationship with Russia. 

~p. 525

Notably, 9 pages after this quote, the document quoted above goes on to say that George Papadopolous met with a "Female Russian National" because he believed she had connections to high-level Russian government officials and could help him arrange a foreign policy trip to Russia. He spoke with said Russian National via Skype and email on several occasions. When he figured out this was problematic, Papadopoulos deactivated his Facebook account and changed phones.

I'm going to stop, here, because the next section is the indictment against the Russians and there's a substantial chunk that I want to quote. Part 4 should be the final part and then I'll review the summary I've mentioned repeatedly and recently finished reading.

©2019 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Part 2, Mostly Commentary on The Mueller Report - The Washington Post edition

This is Part 2 with limited quotes from The Mueller Report (with added commentary by moi).  The first quote is the last one from Volume I, the part on Russian interference, then I jump to the obstruction part. I started out quoting and realized there was so much more to comment upon that I ended up hardly using any direct quotes, this time, but I plan to go back to further quoting the report, tomorrow.

I'm skipping most of the quotes I considered posting about the Trump Tower meeting with Junior, Kushner, et al. because it has been endlessly reported on, but I think a single point is worth quoting because it clarifies how what appeared (at least from the news reports I've seen) to be a fairly harmless meeting that went nowhere could potentially have legal implications:

This series of events could implicate the federal election-law ban on contributions and donations by foreign nationals, 52 U.S.C. § 30121(a)(1)(A). Specifically, Goldstone passed along an offer purportedly from a Russian government official to provide "official documents and information" to the Trump Campaign for the purposes of influencing the presidential election. Trump Jr. appears to have accepted that offer and to have arranged a meeting to receive those materials. Documentary evidence in the form of email chains supports the inference that Kushner and Manafort were aware of that purpose and attended the June 9 meeting anticipating the receipt of helpful information to the Campaign from Russian sources. [...]

A threshold legal question is whether providing to a campaign "documents and information" of the type involved here would constitute a prohibited campaign contribution. The foreign contribution ban is not limited to contributions of money. 

~pp. 243-244


Volume II "addresses the President's actions towards the FBI's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election and related matters, and his actions towards the Special Counsel's investigation." It comprises the majority of the 700-something pages of the report. One of my friends recently said Mueller had "no right" to investigate the president. While I'm not going to hunt down the explanation, the report actually defines what Mueller was charged with investigating and occasionally describes why something was not investigated (because it was outside their purview and/or there was some other governmental agency or office charged with that particular investigation, for example). But, when the Special Counsel was hired, his job specifically included any kind of outcome caused by the investigation itself. That includes such things as lying to the Special Counsel's office or other methods of obstruction. So, even before any obstruction happened, he had "the right" to investigate it, if and when it did occur. That was part of the Special Counsel's job description.


The "key issues and events" examined in the obstruction-of-justice inquiry were, as follows (the following are all followed by descriptions of generally 2-3 paragraphs on pp. 265-269 of The Washington Post version of The Mueller Report:

• The Campaign's response to reports about Russian support for Trump. 
• Conduct involving FBI Director Comey and Michael Flynn. 
• The President's reaction to the continuing Russia investigation. 
• The President's termination of Comey. 
• The appointment of a Special Counsel and efforts to remove him. 
• Efforts to curtail the Special Counsel's Investigation. 
• Efforts to prevent public disclosure of evidence. 
• Further efforts to have the Attorney General take control of the investigation. 
• Efforts to have McGahn deny that the President had ordered him to have the Special Counsel removed. 
• Conduct towards Flynn, Manafort, [redacted].
• Conduct involving Michael Cohen. 
• Overarching factual issues. 

So, almost all of those are about what the president and his campaign did to stop people (the press; investigators) from finding out the truth. Much of it, of course, was done in full view of the public. This is the thing that I'm sure most people who don't support Trump find baffling. It's recorded! Remember when he went on NBC news and said he thought "this Russia thing with Trump and Russia" would go away if he fired Comey? Remember when Trump wrote nice tweets about Michael Cohen until Cohen decided to tell the truth about what happened and then wrote threatening tweets about Cohen's family and called him a rat? I have friends who have no idea those things happened. They simply believe everything Trump says, regardless of how insane it is and how publicly it's been displayed.

What you really get out of Volume II is a serious case of exhaustion. It's like reading about a toddler who stole a dozen cookies, got chocolate all over his face, panicked about it and lied (but didn't bother washing his face), got mad when he was caught, then blamed everyone around him and had a screaming, kicking tantrum (or, series of tantrums). Then he kept pushing people around him out of the house, one by one, because they refused to say, "It's true. Johnny never touched the cookies. I saw him innocently sitting on the couch while it happened."

Volume II describes Trump's lies and waffling and tells the story of his attempts to stop the Special Counsel's investigation, via evidence obtained through interviews with those around the president and his own tweets and interviews. It describes his screaming rages, refusal to listen to advice on laws and norms, and requests for others (in and out of the government) to do things that were either inappropriate, illegal, or outside their job description. I was shocked to find that so many people simply ignore the president's instructions or put him off repeatedly, knowing what they're being asked to do is wrong. Instead of telling the American people how dangerous he is, they ignore him.

I'll post more from Volume II, tomorrow, and try to focus on the quotes rather than the commentary.

©2019 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Part 1 of Quotes from The Mueller Report - The Washington Post edition

There is so much to The Mueller Report that I've decided to start out by simply quoting it (with commentary, where appropriate) and I'll divide the quotes and any other info I type up into parts. The following quotes are from Volume I, which I think of as the "Russian Interference" portion of the report. It describes the specific organizations (directly related to the Russian government, and therefore authorized by Putin) that interfered in our American elections. These were selected to show a little of what American intelligence agencies know about the Russian interference in our 2016 election, which Putin has publicly admitted to, although never in the presence of our current president, when he gleefully says he didn't interfere and seems to get a tremendous kick out of Trump's acceptance of his word.

I don't know whether to think Trump knows and is pretending not to believe our intelligence agencies or he truly doesn't believe the intelligence, but it is astounding what the intelligence community knows, down to the people who paid for the interference, the buildings and rooms trolls worked in, how they created rallies with props like "Hillary for Prison" floats from afar, and how crypto currency was used to pay for much of what was done. In truth, Americans should be livid about the extent to which many of us were fooled by a hostile foreign government. I, for one, thought the "Hillary for Prison" campaign was something that my fellow Americans came up with. It was not.


By February 2016, internal IRA documents referred to support for the Trump Campaign and opposition to candidate Clinton. For example [...] "Main idea: Use any opportunity to criticize Hillary [Clinton] and the rest (except Sanders and Trump - we support them).

~p. 81

Note from the Internet on the IRA, as referenced above:

The Internet Research Agency (IRA; Russian: Агентство интернет-исследований, also known as Glavset and known in Russian Internet slang as the Trolls from Olgino) is a Russian company, based in Saint Petersburg, engaged in online influence operations on behalf of Russian business and political interests.


The investigation identified two different forms of connections between the IRA and members of the Trump Campaign. (The investigation identified no similar connections between the IRA and the Clinton Campaign.) First, on multiple occasions, members and surrogates of the Trump Campaign promoted — typically by linking, retweeting, or similar methods of reposting — pro-Trump or anti-Clinton content published by the IRA through IRA-controlled social media accounts. Additionally, in a few instances, IRA employees represented themselves as U.S. persons to communicate with members of the Trump Campaign in an effort to seek assistance and coordination on IRA-organized political rallies inside the United States. 

~p. 91


Two military units of the GRU carried out the computer intrusions into the Clinton Campaign, DNC and DCCC: Military Units 26165 and 74455. Military Unit 26165 is a GRU cyber unit dedicated to targeting military, political, governmental, and non-governmental organizations outside of Russia, including in the United States. The unit was sub-divided into departments with different specialties. One department, for example, developed specialized malicious software ("malware), while another department conducted large-scale spearfishing campaigns. 

[...]

Officers from Unit 74455 separately hacked computers belonging to state boards of elections, secretaries of state, and U. S. companies that supplied software and other technology related to the administration of U. S. elections. 

~pp. 94 - 95


The GRU's operations extended beyond stealing materials, and included releasing documents stolen from the Clinton Campaign and its supporters. The GRU carried out the anonymous release through two fictitious online personas that it created — DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 — and later Wikileaks. 

~p. 99


On November 3, 2015, the day after the Trump Organization transmitted the LOI (Letter of Intent), Sater emailed Cohen suggesting that the Trump Moscow project could be used to increase candidate Trump's chances at being elected, writing:

Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins [sic] team to buy in on this, I will manage this process . . . 

~p. 129


[...] However, Cohen recalled conversations with Trump in which the candidate suggested that his campaign would be a significant "informercial" for Trump-branded properties. 

~p. 130


I include the following because the disinformation campaign by our current president and those surrounding him has successfully convinced many of his voters that there was no genuine basis for the investigation into coordination between the Trump Campaign and Russia or that it was based on entirely different sources or reasoning:

On May 6, 2016, 10 days after that meeting with Mifsud, Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton. 

***from a footnote to this sentence:

The foreign government conveyed this information to the U.S. government on July 26, 2016, a few days after WikiLeaks' release of Clinton-related emails. The FBI opened its investigation of potential coordination between Russia and the Trump Campaign a few days later based on the information. 

~p. 147


The following is a theme that is repeated throughout The Mueller Report. Each time the press managed to get wind of the connections between the Trump Campaign and Russia and reported on a particular interaction (as with George Papadopoulos), they immediately distanced themselves from the person receiving the negative press and removed him from the campaign. While I cannot possibly quote all of the information connecting the dots, it's substantial, often shocking, and the report indicates that direct coordination can't be proven partly because so much of what was requested by the Special Counsel's office (phone, text, and other documents) was destroyed:

In July 2016, after returning from Russia [Carter] Page traveled to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. While there, Page met Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak [...]. Page emailed Campaign officials with feedback he said he received from ambassadors he had met at the Convention, and he wrote that Ambassador Kislyak was very worried about candidate Clinton's world views. [redacted]

Following the Convention, Page's trip to Moscow and his advocacy for pro-Russia foreign policy drew the media's attention and began to generate substantial press coverage. The Campaign responded by distancing itself from Page, describing him as an "informal foreign policy advisor" who did "not speak for Mr. Trump or the campaign." 

~p. 160


The last sentence of this portion gave me chills:

Soon after midnight on election night, [Kirill] Dmitriev messaged [redacted] who was traveling to New York to attend the 2016 World Chess championship. Dmitry Peskov, the Russian Federation's press secretary [...] was also attending the World Chess Championship. 

At approximately 2:40 a.m. on November 9, 2016, news reports stated that candidate Clinton had called President-Elect Trump to concede. At [redacted] wrote to Dmitriev, "Putin has won."

~p. 207


I have to stop here because the storms have arrived and today is predicted to be dangerously floody. There are 500 more pages, so I'm going to have to limit myself as to how much I quote but there is a tremendous amount of detail about the interference by Russia — and the Trump Campaign's willingness to accept it — known and published in The Mueller Report. Unfortunately, we're expecting storms all day, so I'm going to unplug the desktop to prevent potential damage from lightning. If I'm unable to get a post written in time to publish tomorrow, I should have one up by Thursday.


©2019 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Monday Malarkey

Recent arrivals:

• September Moon by John Moore
• Birds of a Feather: Joseph Cornell's Homage to Juan Gris by M. C. McKinley
• The Hadley Academy for the Improbably Gifted by Conor Grennan

All of these were purchases. September Moon is a book that an Instagrammer I follow reads annually and the excerpt she posted was so beautiful that I would have joined along if I had a copy. Unfortunately, I had to order one from England, via Abe Books, so it didn't arrive till September was over. I may not save it till next September, it sounded so good. Isn't it gorgeous? Birds of a Feather is the book I was thinking about breaking my Amazon book-buying ban for and clearly I decided to go for it. It's about a series of box constructions by Joseph Cornell, all of which were done as an homage to Juan Gris, an artist Cornell admired. The book accompanied an exhibit of Cornell's boxes and the paintings and collages that inspired them. The Hadley Academy for the Improbably Gifted is a book I pre-ordered months ago, so it was a surprise to open the box with Birds of a Feather and find a second book inside.


Books finished since last Malarkey:

• The End of Something Wonderful by Stephanie Lucianovic and George Ermos
• The Many Colors of Harpreet Singh by Supriya Kelkar and Alea Marley with Simran Jeet Singh
• Moldilocks and the Three Scares: A Zombie Tale by Lynne Marie and David Rodriguez Lorenzo
• Summary of the Mueller Report, for those too busy to read it all by Thomas E. Patterson
• The Cats of Tanglewood Forest by Charles de Lint and Charles Vess

I actually read the first three books (all children's books from Sterling) the moment they walked in the door but forgot to add them to last week's list. I hope to get those reviewed this week. The Summary of the Mueller Report was great, although reading about our president's terrible temper and the laws and norms he routinely breaks, all over again, was painful. Hope to get to that, this week, also. I may move Fiona Friday to Saturday to make sure I can fit everything in, although the three children's books will probably be reviewed in a single day, as usual. I like doing a Children's Day. The Cats of Tanglewood Forest is a book I picked up when nothing else was holding me. I just needed a change of pace. It worked; I was afraid I was about to fall into a reading slump but The Cats of Tanglewood Forest saved me. 

Currently reading:

• Where the Angels Lived by Margaret McMullan
• Birds of a Feather by M. C. McKinley
• The Contender: The story of Marlon Brando by William J. Mann

Where the Angels Lived is nonfiction, about the author's search for information about a family member who died in Mauthausen concentration camp but whom her family had never mentioned. She moved to Hungary for 5 months to research his life and teach. It's this month's F2F discussion book and I hope I make it to discussion but it seems unlikely because we're getting close to Kiddo's wedding and we're helping with the planning. It's getting down to crunch time and there's still a lot to be done.


Posts since last Malarkey:

• Cilka's Journey by Heather Morris (book review)
• I Guess I'll Write it Down by Beth Evans, a journal (book review)
• Fiona Friday - A cat story in 6 images (cat photos)

In other news:

Last week was just a forgetful week, I guess. I'm still watching the same programs: Glitch, NCIS, Chicago Fire, Poldark, The Durrells in Corfu. But, I forgot to mention that it's also Hallmark Channel movie season, at least for me. Husband and I watched two Hallmark movies, last week, and one this week.

Pumpkin Pie Wars surprised us both. While the male lead was a little stiff, the storyline was not so trite as the usual Hallmark script. It was cute, the story of the children of two women who have competing bakeries taking their places in the annual pumpkin pie baking competition. Both parents of both of the main characters were still alive! We're so accustomed to a "sad because of dead parent" line running through most of the Hallmark movies that my husband actually said, "This isn't a real Hallmark movie! Nobody's dead!" Haha, it's true. It was a very different story and we both loved it. There really wasn't a dark moment, either, although there was one brief moment that something went wrong for such a short time that it didn't even count. It went "dark throwaway line; all resolved".

I like it when the Hallmark movies don't fit into the normal pattern and the story was charming, so Pumpkin Pie Wars is definitely a new favorite.

Over the Moon in Love is a more typical Hallmark story and parts of it stressed me out but I still loved it. The heroine, Brooklyn, has had a natural talent for matchmaking all her life and turned it into a successful business. Now, she's trying to get a spot in a magazine that will help her take it to the next level. Meanwhile, a man she used to hang out with from childhood, Devin, has returned to town and there's still a spark between them but Brooklyn's never known quite how to use her matchmaking skill on herself.

The daughter of the man who will decide which business to feature in the national magazine has come to check out Over the Moon in Love (the name of the business), one of several businesses competing for the coveted article slot. But, then she sees Devin, who is really still in love with Brooklyn, and asks Brooklyn to set her up with him. It goes badly till she talks Brooklyn into helping her figure out how to attract Devin and then it goes too well. Will Devin end up with the wrong woman?

Loved this one, too. And, then I watched another Hallmark movie (which I apparently saw part of, last year, but it wasn't memorable), last night. It was terrible but I watched the whole thing, anyway. It had all of the usual hooks, two giggly female leads who were frankly annoying, the usual dead people on each side. The dark moment wasn't all that dark and lasted a hot second. I just didn't think the actors had any particular chemistry. But, I love the happily-ever-after, so I stuck it out.

©2019 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Fiona Friday - A cat story in 6 images

©2019 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

I Guess I'll Write it Down by Beth Evans, a journal

I keep forgetting to post about these adorable journals and I finally realized why, last night. I'm accustomed to reading a book, recording the number of pages read daily, finishing it, and then adding it to my master list (a draft saved for publication on the blog at the end of the year). I refer back to my master list regularly to see what I need to review and to add links to my reviews. But, you don't read an empty journal, apart from the pages like that one shown above, so these two did not get added to either the calendar or the master list.

At any rate, I finally photographed the two journals, both sent by HarperCollins. There are some pages with text like the open journal, above, but most have the ghostly-looking creature peeking out of a single corner or doing something in a small space and the rest of the spread is empty lines to fill. It's super cute, but of course a journal is for writing in, not reading, so I'm glad the author kept the reading material to a minimum but made it interesting or funny when she did insert a page of text.

I'm not a journal-keeper in the traditional diary/anecdote way. Notebooks and journals are, to me, a place to write down observations like the features of everyone at a particular table in a restaurant, lines they say that I think are interesting, or brief conversations I find worth keeping. I've done that since I was young and never fully stopped, in spite of the fact that I haven't written fiction regularly in years. I Guess I'll Write It Down by Beth Evans encourages me to get back in the game.

Highly recommended - The I Guess I'll Write It Down journals make me want to go to a coffee shop to eavesdrop. I particularly like the fact that these little journals are hardback, so they're not likely to end up ruined if you stick them in your purse or other bag (I'll add a rubber band when I carry one around, just to make sure something doesn't get stuck between the pages). But, they're compact enough to carry around conveniently. The two would easily fit in the purse I'm currently carrying. Particularly great for people who carry a journal in a bag or who are intimidated by a larger empty journal because they don't write large entries.

My thanks to HarperCollins for sending me the journals. They will be well used!


©2019 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Cilka's Journey by Heather Morris

Cilka's Journey was my most-antipicated fall release and it did not disappoint. A little background: my book group read The Tattooist of Auschwitz and discussed it, a couple months ago. During the discussion, someone brought up Cilka and one of the women in the group called her "the prostitute". I argued that she was not a prostitute but a rape victim. Had she said "no" to sleeping with a Nazi who cornered her at the concentration camp, she likely would have been either beaten mercilessly (and raped, anyway) or put to death. She chose to stay alive and didn't fight but it was still rape because it certainly wasn't something Cilka wanted. The response amongst the group was mixed. I left the meeting feeling frustrated.

So, I was thrilled when I found out there was a new release coming soon that revealed what happened to Cilka. At the end of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, you find out Cilka was accused of being a collaborator and a spy because she slept with Nazis in the concentration camp and spoke several different languages.

Cilka's Journey begins with her release from a death camp (I think she was in Birkenau, at that point), after which she was immediately sent to another prison and then onward to Gulag Vorkuta, above the Arctic Circle. There, she was to be imprisoned for 15 years. Cilka's Journey is a novelized account of her time in the gulag, the friendships and dangers, the work she managed to acquire, and how she fell in love and was eventually released. There are flashbacks to Cilka's time in the concentration camps that help fill in the story of what happened to her while she was there, beyond what you learn of her in The Tattooist of Auschwitz.

There's also some additional material to fill out the facts of what life was like for women in gulags, at the end of the book. I appreciated that. While Cilka was a real character and much of what is in the book happened to her, Cilka's Journey is a fictional work based on facts (the author goes out of her way to make that clear) and things like the friends Cilka made in the gulag are creations by the author. But, she made it clear that Cilka was not a prostitute, as she was accused of being, but a prisoner whose life was always, always in danger and submitting to rape was one of many things she had to do to survive.

Highly recommended - A difficult but very satisfying read, especially if you were already curious about Cilka and what became of her. If you haven't read The Tattooist of Auschwitz, that's OK. Cilka's Journey stands alone fine, although I also recommend The Tattooist and I suspect the reading of Cilka's Journey is much more fulfilling if you have gotten to know her, already.

Many thanks to St. Martin's Press for the Advance Reader Copy!! 


©2019 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Monday Malarkey

Recent arrivals (left to right):

• Nature's Best Hope by Doublas W. Tallamy - from Timber Press for review 
• The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando by William J. Mann - from HarperCollins for review
• The Christmas Spirits on Tradd Street by Karen White - from Berkley for review
• The End of Something Wonderful by Lucianovic and Ermos,
• Moldilocks and the Three Scares by Marie and Lorenzo, and
• The Many Colors of Harpreet Singh by Kelkar and Marley - all from Sterling Children's Books for review

The Contender and The Christmas Spirits on Tradd Street are hardcovers (both unexpected) of books I already received in ARC form, so I'll read the finished copies in case I decide to quote from them, for accuracy. I believe I signed up for Nature's Best Hope via Shelf Awareness before I stopped opening SA newsletters due to my forthcoming break. I'm excited about it. I always love books from Timber Press. Nature hates me but I am a big fan of it, anyway. I think I mentioned that I changed my updated review policy to continue accepting children's books. I won't accept any that will need to be reviewed while I'm gone but I decided I can't bear to give up the children's books. 

Books finished since last Malarkey:

• Cilka's Journey by Heather Morris

Currently reading:

• Summary of the Mueller Report by Thomas E. Patterson 
• Help the Witch by Tom Cox (short stories)

I hope to finish Summary of the Mueller Report, tonight. It's hard rereading it and having all the horror reinforced, but I'm realizing that there are some things I missed on the reading of the complete Mueller Report, probably partly because you lose a little bit of continuity by going back and forth between text and footnotes (there are a lot of footnotes in the complete report) but also because I occasionally was sleepy when I read it. I love the ease of reading the Summary. And, to be honest, it's more relevant than ever. 

I started Help the Witch, last night, and the first story is so long that I stopped before finishing. It was already late when I got going on the Summary of the Mueller Report, later still when I opened Help the Witch. So far, I'm having a little trouble following Cox's description of the house and surrounding track in the title story, "Help the Witch," but I've learned two new words. Here's one of them: 

ar·chi·trave

/ˈärkəˌtrāv/

Learn to pronounce

noun

1. 1.

   (in classical architecture) a main beam resting across the tops of columns, specifically the lower third entablature.

   

   

   

   

   

   
2. 2.

   the molded frame around a doorway or window.

I forgot the other but I'll try to remember to share it in my review. 

Posts since last Malarkey:

• The House on Tradd Street by Karen White - #3 for RIPXIV (book review)
• The Size of the Truth by A. Smith, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters by J. D. Salinger, and Collage and Construction by H. Weiss (mini reviews)
• Fiona Friday (cat photo)

In other news:

I was wrong about the DVD cases, last week. Season 1 of Glitch is the image of the officer, James, with a woman in a towel — his dead wife, resurrected. Season 2 is the one with the woman in the background, new wife Sarah and their baby. I'm on Season 2, now. It's getting more sinister but I haven't been frightened away, yet. Also watching Chicago Fire, Poldark, and The Durrells in Corfu. Kind of bummed that this is the last season of both of the latter two. 

Our first cool front of the season has arrived! It's only supposed to get to 76°, today. Woot! Sure, it'll be back in the upper 80s in two days, but we have to take our joy when it comes. 

©2019 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Fiona Friday

©2019 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

The Size of the Truth by A. Smith, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters by Salinger, Collage and Construction by H. Weiss

Well. This is a hodgepodge. I looked back over the list of books I've read and found that there are 4 I haven't reviewed. One is The Mueller Report, which I think I'll start quoting, next week (you should see the number of flags in that book). The rest are random and none are ARCs; all were purchased at some point, so there's no need to say much.

The Size of the Truth by Andrew Smith is a middle grade story about Sam, a boy who fell down a well when he was 4 years old and was so traumatized that he didn't speak for years. While he was in the well, he encountered a talking armadillo.

Now 11, Sam has been moved 2 grades ahead and is feeling traumatized all over again. Everyone is bigger, especially James, the boy Sam blames for his fall into the well. Sam's father wants him to go to the science and math magnet school and MIT but Sam wants to be a chef. Gym sucks and the teacher seems to hate him. Everyone is making him feel like he has no control over his life.

As the present-day story is told, the tale of Sam's time in the well with Bartleby, the talking armadillo, unfolds. Of course, the armadillo was all in his mind (or was it?) The Size of the Truth is a fun read and all the way through the book I was so convinced that the armadillo was real that I kept stopping myself to question how on earth it was that someone had managed to convince me a clearly-not-real character was, in fact, real and not a figment of the child's imagination.

I do recall having a bit of trouble with the fact that the 4-year-old knew so much, including how to swim. But, obviously Sam is a pretty sharp kid or he wouldn't have been bumped up 2 grades. I still had trouble swallowing his level of knowledge, although I shouldn't because I knew a little girl who was that far ahead of her age range at 5.

Recommended - Smart and entertaining with some terrific lessons. I particularly liked what Sam learned about James and how memories can be distorted.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction by J. D. Salinger is a book of two novellas (I think), which I read during a weekend readathon. I posted a couple photos of the book to Instagram but chose not to do any updating at the blog because I figured it would be too time-consuming and the whole idea was to read as much as possible, after all. There's something very real about Salinger's writing and the moment I read that opening paragraph, I was hooked. I loved "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters". I love the Glass family and it was nice to revisit them.

"Seymour, an Introduction" was a bit more philosophical, much like Franny and Zooey but without the nice stretches of description in which the family is just being human, so I didn't care for the second story as much. The great thing about Salinger was his straightforward descriptive ability and characterization. The awful thing was that he was too smart for his own good. I find his philosophical meanderings exhausting. But, it was great to go back in time and learn a bit about Seymour, his love of poetry, and how he and his friend kept getting in trouble for going off to talk poetry when they were in the military. In general, I kind of adore Salinger.

I definitely recommend Salinger, in general, and particularly loved "Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters", of the two stories.

Collage and Construction by Harvey Weiss is an ugly old book that I bought in the library sale so long ago that I didn't even recall owning it. I came across the battered copy while I was going through books, trying to find some to donate. It's a children's book that describes the difference between collages and constructions, gives examples by the author and other artists (often with photos of museum pieces), and describes how to come up with a theme, the items needed to create them, and the actual process of creating or building.

I looked up Harvey Weiss, after I finished reading the book. He was an interesting man. He wrote quite a few how-to books and I wouldn't mind finding more of them to read but they were mostly published a long time ago, like this one (1970 is the copyright date). I also looked up some of the artists whose works were included and I'd like to read more and see more of one of those artists' works. I'm still not buying from Amazon but it's a book of one of the featured artists' work that I might break my boycott for . . . eventually.

At any rate, the book was fascinating and informative enough that I'd probably keep it if I didn't need to get rid of books and it didn't happen to be so grubby. Recommended, if you can find a copy.

©2019 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

The House on Tradd Street by Karen White - #3 for RIPXIV

I read The House on Tradd Street by Karen White both for the RIP Challenge (ghosts!) and because there's a new Tradd Street book coming out (it's on my October TBR stack). The House on Tradd Street was published in 2008 and has been sitting on a pile of books in my library for a couple years, and the series has chugged on, since then. I'm pretty sure I got my battered copy from Paperback Swap, a few years after it came out. It was one that I packed up and moved from the old house.

The House on Tradd Street is about a real estate agent named Melanie Middleton, in Charleston, South Carolina, who sees ghosts. When she goes to a house in the historic district to talk to the owner, Nevin Vanderhorst, thinking he's about to offer her the listing as he prepares to go into a residential facility, she sees a woman in old-fashioned clothing standing behind a swing. Reluctantly, she admits that she saw the ghost of his mother, after Nevin asks. That night, he dies and leaves the house to her in his will. But, there are conditions. She must stay in the house while it's being restored, try to unravel the mystery of his mother's disappearance when he was a child, and after a year the house will become hers.

Melanie is approached by a writer named Jack Trenholm, who wants to dig around in the house to find out what happened to Mrs. Vanderhorst for his next novel. Did the late Mrs. Vanderhorst run away with Joseph Longo, the man she dated before she married and gave birth to Nevin, as the rumor states? If so, where did the two go and what happened to them?

There are many ghosts in the Tradd Street house. One is a dark presence that has a tendency to shove people. The rest are harmless. But, they're trying to tell Melanie something. As she enlists the help of her friend Sophie, is aided by Jack, and must report her expenses to her father, there is quite an interesting cast of characters. When a relative of Longo's shows up looking to buy the house and he starts taking Melanie out, is a love triangle forming when Jack appears to be jealous? Who are the ghosts and what are they trying to say? Will Melanie figure everything out and help lay the spirits to rest or will the sinister spirit do too much damage and put an end to the restoration?

Recommended but not a favorite - The one thing I really, truly loved about The House on Tradd Street was the ghosts. I thought Karen White did a fabulous job of keeping the spirits close to available literature and other ghost stories so that it felt believable. In fact, I was really quite surprised to find that, after finding Heart-Shaped Box far-fetched enough that it didn't frighten me at all, Tradd Street seriously made my skin crawl and had the hairs on my neck standing, at times. It just felt real to me. I also liked the secondary romance. But, I found the heroine too prickly and didn't understand a few things about her. Why was she so rude to Jack? Why did she think of business dinners as dates? Why did she trust the man that everyone said was fishy and the dog even hated?

Fortunately, I do love a good ghost story and that kept me going. I occasionally felt lost amongst the clues, but I also enjoyed the mystery and the fact that the mystery deepened as the story progressed, keeping the pages turning. So, not being overly fond of the heroine certainly didn't ruin the book for me. And, in fact, she seemed to have laid her own ghosts to rest ("ghosts," in this case, meaning her childhood traumas) by the end of the story, which bodes well for her attitude in future stories. I'm looking forward to reading the new book, particularly for more creepy ghostly fun.

Since this is the first Tradd Street book I've read, I have no idea what's happened in the series as it's progressed but I don't have any problem with reading stories out of order if they're written to stand alone. Hopefully, the new one will stand alone well.

Silly book story: When I moved The House on Tradd Street to my bedside TBR, it became vulnerable to Cats Trying to Get Mom's Attention in the Morning. I don't know who is the guilty party (probably Fiona – she's terrible about chewing on paper) but one of the cats ripped a corner off the cover. I was able to salvage the corner and put it back on with carefully-placed clear packing tape. Whew! Grateful that clear packing tape is a thing!


©2019 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.