Kate’s 2¢: “On Java road: a novel” by Lawrence Osborne

“On Java road: a novel” by Lawrence Osborne

Kate’s 2¢: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as,     describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ merely shares my thoughts about what I read.  I’m just saying…

Here are a few thoughts that stuck with me:

–I was an excellent non-entity

–“Their moment of vindicating the Motherland had come. When they achieved criticat mass, they acquired a belligerent confidence…”

–Their hatred operating through words as much as through beatings  and tear gas.

–What will people endure simply to obtain a bit of security and stability?  Almost anything.

–Crowds of black clad youths came surging along the street, countered by men and women in white…Each side considered themselves a patriots.

–Friendship was something like a light spider web, complex, but  easily broken by a  touch of jealousy.

   Michael Obiora  did a fabulous job of reading this story. Thank you.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lawrence Osborne (born 1958) is a British novelist and journalist who is currently residing in Bangkok. Osborne was educated at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge,[1] and at Harvard University, and has since led a nomadic life, residing for years in Poland,[2] France, Italy, Morocco, the United States, Mexico, Thailand, and Istanbul.

Osborne has been published widely as a long-form journalist in the United States, most notably in The New York Times Magazine,[3] The New Yorker,[4] Gourmet, Salon, Playboy, and Condé Nast Traveler. His writings about wine and spirits appeared in a regular column called Cellar in Men’s Vogue.[5] He has also been an occasional Op-Ed columnist at Forbes.com and is a frequent contributor to Newsweek International, The Daily Beast, and The Wall Street Journal Magazine. His feature for Playboy, “Getting a Drink in Islamabad”, won a 2011 Thomas Lowell Award for Travel Journalism.

He is the author of the novel Ania Malina;[6] a book about Paris, Paris Dreambook;[7] the essay collection The Poisoned Embrace;[8] a controversial book about autism called American Normal: The Hidden World of Asperger Syndrome;[9] and three subsequent travel books published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux between 2004 and 2009: a book about wine, The Accidental Connoisseur;[10] The Naked Tourist;[11] and an account of expatriate life in Bangkok called Bangkok Days.[12] His short stories have appeared in many American magazines. His story “Volcano”, originally published in Tin House, was selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 2012. His novel The Forgiven was published in 2012 to widespread acclaim. It was selected by The Economist as one of the Best Books of the Year for 2012.[13][14] Osborne’s next book, The Wet and the Dry, a travelogue about Islam and alcohol, was published in 2013. It was included in the Top 10 Books of 2013 by The New York Times Book Review critic, Dwight Garner.

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

On Java road: a novel DB109839

Osborne, Lawrence. Reading time: 7 hours, 16 minutes.

Read by Michael Obiora.

Suspense Fiction

Mystery and Detective Stories

“After two decades as a journalist in Hong Kong, ex-pat Englishman Adrian Gyle has very little to show for it. Evenings are whiled away with soup dumplings and tea at Fung Shing, the restaurant downstairs from his home on Java Road, watching the city—once overflowing with wine dinners and private members’ clubs—erupt in violence as pro-democracy demonstrations hit ever closer to home. Watching from the skyrises is Adrian’s old friend Jimmy Tang, the scion of one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest families. Just as Gyle prepares to turn his back on Hong Kong, he finds one last intrigue: the mysterious Rebecca, a student involved in the protests, and the latest of Jimmy’s reckless dalliances. But when Rebecca goes missing and Jimmy hides, Gyle feels that old familiar urge to investigate. Piecing together Rebecca’s final days and hours, Gyle must tread carefully through a volatile world of friendship and betrayal where personal loyalties vanish like the city he once knew so well. |On Java Road|

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Kate’s 2¢:  “A Woman Of Intelligence” by Karin Tanabe

“A Woman Of Intelligence” by Karin Tanabe

Kate’s 2¢: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as,     describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ merely shares my thoughts about what I read.  I’m just saying…

   Well, now. Who knew the United Nations translators were such swingers!  I thought the situations she experienced with her children, especially the older boy, were a bit exaerated and mostly because she had no training as a mother. However, her husband sure had a lot to learn about not only his wife, but his mother and how she handled stress.

   I enjoy this story. Jennifer Jill Araya did a good job of narrating it.

https://www.karintanabe.comActions for this site

KARINTANABE. KARIN. TANABE. Karin Tanabe is the author of six novels, including A Woman of Intelligence and The Gilded Years (soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon). A former Politico reporter, her writing has also appeared in The Washington Post.

   Karin Tanabe is a historical fiction novelist who is best known for her works The Gilded Years: A Novel, a novel about the first African-American graduate of Vassar College, and The Diplomat’s Daughter: A Novel, a love story set in a Japanese American internment camp.[1] National Public Radio has described her as a “master of historical fiction”.[2]

Biography[edit]

Tanabe is a first-generation American who grew up in Washington, D.C. with foreign parents.[2] Her father Kunio Francis Tanabe is from Yokohama[3] and is the former Book World art director and senior editor at the Washington Post.[4] Tanabe holds American and Belgian passports and speaks French and English.[5]

Tanabe graduated from Vassar College and currently lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, daughter, and son. Until 2017, she was a reporter at Politico.[6][7]

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

A woman of intelligence DB109828

Tanabe, Karin. Reading time: 13 hours, 18 minutes.

Read by Jennifer Jill Araya.

Suspense Fiction

Historical Fiction

Spy Stories

“A Fifth Avenue address, parties at the Plaza, two healthy sons, and the ideal husband: what looks like a perfect life for Katharina Edgeworth is anything but. It’s 1954, and the post-war American dream has become a nightmare. A born and bred New Yorker, Katharina is the daughter of immigrants, Ivy-League-educated, and speaks four languages. As a single girl in 1940s Manhattan, she is a translator at the newly formed United Nations, devoting her days to her work and the promise of world peace–and her nights to cocktails and the promise of a good time. Now the wife of a beloved pediatric surgeon and heir to a shipping fortune, Katharina is trapped in a gilded cage, desperate to escape the constraints of domesticity. So when she is approached by the FBI and asked to join their ranks as an informant, Katharina seizes the opportunity. A man from her past has become a high-level Soviet spy, but no one has been able to infiltrate his circle. Enter Katharina, the perfect woman for the job. N

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Kate’s 2¢: “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver

“Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver

Kate’s 2¢: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as,     describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ merely shares my thoughts about what I read.  I’m just saying…

   Charlie Thurston did a great job of reading this story. He added the right amount of thnic flavor to make the characters pop into existence for me.

   I down-loaded this story based on the Kingsolver name. I’d read “The Poisonwood Bible”, 1998, and enjoyed it very much. The fictional character relates his auto-biography in this story. It gives the reader a lot to ponder.

From the WEB:

Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1955 and grew up in Carlisle, Kentucky.[2][3] When Kingsolver was seven years old, her father, a physician, took the family to Léopoldville, Congo (now Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo). Her parents worked in a public health capacity, and the family lived without electricity or running water.[2][4]

After graduating from high school, Kingsolver attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, on a music scholarship, studying classical piano. Eventually, however, she changed her major to biology when she realized that “classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest of [them] get to play ‘Blue Moon’ in a hotel lobby”.[3] She was involved in activism on her campus, and took part in protests against the Vietnam war.[2] She graduated Phi Beta Kappa[5] with a Bachelor of Science in 1977, and moved to France for a year before settling in Tucson, Arizona, where she lived for much of the next two decades. In 1980, she enrolled in graduate school at the University of Arizona,[3] where she earned a master’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology.[6][7]

   Kingsolver began her full-time writing career in the mid-1980s as a science writer for the university, which eventually led to some freelance feature writing, including many cover stories for the local alternative weekly, the Tucson Weekly.[3][7] She began her career in fiction writing after winning a short story contest in a local Phoenix newspaper.[3] In 1985, she married Joseph Hoffmann; their daughter Camille was born in 1987.[8][9]

She moved with her daughter to Tenerife in the Canary Islands for a year during the first Gulf War, mostly due to frustration over America’s military involvement.[10] After returning to the US in 1992, she separated from her husband.[9]

In 1994 Kingsolver was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from her alma mater, DePauw University.[11] In the same year, she married Steven Hopp, an ornithologist, and their daughter, Lily, was born in 1996. In 2004, Kingsolver moved with her family to a farm in Washington County, Virginia.[2] In 2008, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Duke University, where she delivered a commencement address entitled “How to be Hopeful”.[12]

In the late 1990s she was a founding member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock and roll band made up of published writers. Other band members included Amy Tan, Matt Groening, Dave Barry and Stephen King, and they played for one week during the year. Kingsolver played the keyboard, but is no longer an active member of the band.[13]

In a 2010 interview with The Guardian, Kingsolver says, “I never wanted to be famous, and still don’t… the universe rewarded me with what I dreaded most”. She said she created her own website just to compete with a plethora of fake ones, “as a defence to protect my family from misinformation. Wikipedia abhors a vacuum. If you don’t define yourself, it will get done for you in colourful ways”.[14]

Kingsolver lives in the Appalachia area of the United States. She has said that friends in the urban literary community disparage rural areas such as Appalachia, but also that the COVID-19 pandemic might change these types of opinions as people move away from cities to practice social distancing longterm.[15]

  in 1993.[21] The Poisonwood Bible, published in 1998, is one of her best known works; it chronicles the lives of the wife and daughters of a Baptist missionary on a Christian mission in Africa.[22] Although the setting of the novel is somewhat similar to Kingsolver’s own childhood in DRC (then Zaire), the novel is not autobiographical.[2]

Her latest book, published in 2022, is Demon Copperhead, which is a modern retelling of David Copperfield.

   In 2000, Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize for Fiction. Named for the bellwether, the literary prize is intended to support writers whose unpublished works support positive social change.[2] The Bellwether Prize is awarded in even-numbered years, and includes guaranteed major publication and a cash prize of $25,000 USD, fully funded by Kingsolver.[29] She has stated that she wanted to create a literary prize to “encourage writers, publishers, and readers to consider how fiction engages visions of social change and human justice”.[30] In May 2011, the PEN American Center announced it would take over administration of the prize, to be known as the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.[31]

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

Demon Copperhead DB110786

Kingsolver, Barbara; Thurston, Charlie. Reading time: 21 hours, 6 minutes.

Read by Charlie Thurston.

General

“Demon Copperhead is set in the mountains of southern Appalachia. It’s the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities. Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contempor

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 Kate’s 2¢: “Birds of Prey” by Judith A. Jance

“Birds of Prey” by Judith A. Jance

Kate’s 2¢: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as,     describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ merely shares my thoughts about what I read.  I’m just saying…

As far as I can figure out, the birds of prey are several friends who go on cruises to find fun and men. The grandparents honemoon antics adds a wonderful tough of humor to the heavy theme of murder.  

Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia

Judith Ann (J. A.) Jance (born October 27, 1944) is an American author of mystery novels. She writes three series of novels, centering on retired Seattle Police Department Detective J. P. Beaumont, Arizona County Sheriff Joanna Brady, and former Los Angeles news anchor turned mystery solver Ali Reynolds. The Beaumont and Brady series intersect in the novel Partner in Crime, which is both the 16th Beaumount mystery and the 10th Brady mystery.[1] They intersect again in Fire and Ice.

Jance was born in Watertown, South Dakota,[2] and raised in Bisbee, Arizona (the setting for her Joanna Brady series of novels). Before becoming an author, she worked as a school librarian on a Native American reservation (Tohono O’Odham), and as a teacher and insurance agent.

Jance attended University of Arizona, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in education in 1966, then a master’s in library science in 1970. In 2000, University of Arizona awarded Jance an honorary doctorate.[3]

In July 2018, Strand Magazine gave Jance its Lifetime Achievement Award to recognize her contributions to the field of crime fiction.[4]

She lives part of the year in Arizona and part of the year in Seattle.[5] Jance uses her initials for her pen name because a publisher told her that disclosing her gender would be a liability for a book about a male detective. At signings, Jance asks bookstores to donate a percentage of their earnings from her appearances to various causes. Over the past 10 years, she has raised more than $250,000 for charity.

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

Birds of prey: a novel of suspense DB5175 7

Jance, Judith A. Reading time: 10 hours, 18 minutes.

Read by Jack Fox.

Mystery and Detective Stories

Retired Seattle homicide detective J.P. Beaumont accompanies his newly wed grandmother on her honeymoon on a cruise ship to Alaska. When one of the passengers disappears, Beaumont becomes part of an FBI operation involving a religious group that is targeting doctors–some of whom are aboard. Some strong language. Bestseller. 2001.

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 Kate’s 2¢: “Birds In My Backyard” by Mike Atnip Kate’s 2¢: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as,     describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ merely shares my thoughts about what I read.  I’m just saying…

This story is read and then, a brief description is added  for this short children’s first book of birds. A good start, but since it is a recording, why not add the bird’s song or whistle, too?  

Here are some of the books Mike Atnit wrote, but I don’t know why the obit doesn’t mention them, if this is the correct obit.

Backyard Safari By Mike Atnip

Life In The Woods

God Made The Marsh

The Midnight Library

A Day At The Zoo

MICHAEL ATNIP OBITUARY

Amemorial service is scheduled for Sunday, January 5, 2020, at 2 PM in the Chapel at the First Baptist Church (400 S. Travis St.) Sherman, TX for Michael L. Atnip, 73, a life long Sherman resident, who passed away at his home December 1, 2019, in the loving care of family and a caregiver. Michael was a courageous survivor overcoming polio as a child, a kidney transplant from his brother Joe (1975), a liver transplant (2005), a divorce, quadruple bypass heart surgery (2012), diabetes, and numerous surgeries and hospitalizations which left him bedridden for the past 3 years, but still with his sharp mind, wit, and sense of humor. Never a complainer, Michael truly served as our family role model and hero.

Born on July 12, 1946, Michael was the son of Redellium and Zerma Lea Atnip. As a child, he was actively involved in the Boy Scouts of America where he regularly attended the National Boy Scout Jamborees and Philmont Scout Ranch rising to the rank of Eagle and participating as a member of the Order of the Arrow.  At Sherman High School he was proud to be member of the Band program.

After graduating in the Class of ’64, he attended Cooke County Jr. College.

Later he earned his real estate and brokers’ licenses and started Atnip and Associates Realtors, a family business along with his parents and brother. Michael was active in the real estate community where he served as President of the Grayson County Board of Realtors, Inc. and received recognitions for his ‘distinguished leadership’ and ‘devoted service’ from the Greater Texoma Assoc. of Realtors and Grayson County Board.

Michael married Julie Snyder when he was 40 years old and for 21 years they enjoyed working together in the family business and traveling. Faith was important to them, so they were active members of their church where Michael served as a deacon. Having no children of their own they served as guardians of 2 young sisters for many years. In addition, because of their love of children, they hosted high school international students from Italy, Norway, Germany, Japan, Thailand, and Switzerland.

Michael enjoyed showing our beautiful country to his ‘kids’ and continued to communicate on Facebook, by phone,

and their return visits. Michael never missed the televised church services every Sunday from First Baptist Church and felt God’s presence to the end. He enjoyed special gifts from the ministry of encouragement. He loved his family, his ‘kids’, his life long friends, and former real estate associates. 

Michael was predeceased by his parents, his brother Joe, and his ex-wife. He is survived: by his sister, Kay Carnes (Tom)of Stuart, FL; his nephews Jim Carnes (Donna) Sherman, Chris Carnes (Jennifer) Palm City, FL, Conner Atnip Austin, TX; his niece Laura Creeden (Kris) Clermont, FL; sister-in-law, Shanna Atnip McKinney, TX as well as 6 great-nephews and nieces (Brandon, Katelyn, Courtney, Collin, Christopher, and Kayla) and cousins in TX and Okla.

The family wishes to thank: Dr. Mackey Watkins, his personal physician and staff for so many years of dedicated care; his home health nurse Jodi of Sher-Den; his many caregivers from TLC Professional Care, especially Jessica; the First Baptist Church ministry of encouragement; his best friend since college, Carroll, and his sister-in-law, Shanna, who were steadfast in visiting him; and finally his nephew and wife, Jim and Donna

Carnes who lived in his home and managed his day to day care and managed his farm and animals.

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

Birds in my backyard DBC17480

Atnip, Mike. Reading time: 21 minutes.

Read by Lisa Donovan.

Nature and the Environment

Look! Listen! There’s a show going on in your backyard! Birds in My Backyard is a whimsical introduction to the chattering, swooping, squawking creatures that children see every day. Each page presents a new bird in colorful collage with a playful rhyme: Robins go fishing for worms. Blue jays boss other birds. Hawks play with breezes. Birds in My Backyard starts at dawn and ends at dusk, so that little ones might “soar with the birds” in their dreams. 2019. Adult.

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