Voyager

Diana Gabaldon's third Outlander book, "Voyager", was pretty good (so glad the Jacobite rebellion stuff is over and done with--I don't know why it bored me so much). Roger Wakefield helps Claire track Jamie's whereabouts after Culloden. There's a possibility that Claire could go through the stones again and find him. It would mean leaving their daughter, Brianna, behind in 1968, but Claire has to take that chance. She does make the trip back in time to the 1760s successfully, and even finds Jamie with very little effort. But of course that's where the easy part ends. For many reasons, the Frasers are again forced to flee Scotland, this time bound for the West Indies. It was very exciting, and a lot of it takes place on the sea, and since I started sailing last year I actually understand what all the nautical terms mean, so that was nice.

Twisted Twenty-Six

Janet Evanovich's latest Stephanie Plum was actually pretty good. Grandma Mazur is recently widowed after her husband of 45 minutes, Jimmy, dropped dead. Jimmy's previous wives, sisters, and kids are all enraged at the thought of Grandma inheriting Jimmy's fortune. And because Jimmy was in the mob, his fellow mobsters think Jimmy gave Grandma the "keys". No one will say what the keys unlock or what they look like, but everyone assumes Grandma has them, so half of New Jersey is after her. Stephanie is burnt out on her job, but she actually seems to be improving, which is a relief, honestly. I sometimes feel like the series get a little ridiculous: I mean, after working for how long at this and she *still* can't get it right? Evanovich poked a little fun at how old Stephanie would be now if she had aged her along (the first book was published 25 years ago!). It looks like the next book is breaking away from the numbering naming convention, which is interesting.

Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers

I enjoyed this short but exciting book by Brian Kilmeade. We all know the ultimate outcome of the Alamo, but how the brave defenders were avenged was something I wasn't familiar with.
Mexican General Santa Anna brutally refused to give quarter and take prisoners, executing everyone at the Alamo and later, Goliad, despite them surrendering. The Texas Army rallied behind Sam Houston and his rousing battle cry of "Remember the Alamo!" and ended up crushing the much bigger Mexican Army at San Jacinto. Santa Anna was captured and the Republic of Texas was recognized as an independent country.

Janis

I was looking forward to this biography about Janis Joplin. The majority of the book was really good: Holly George-Warren meticulously researched and recounted Janis's early days in Port Arthur, Texas: her family life, her high school and friends, and then moved on to talk about San Francisco and the start of her time singing with Big Brother and the Holding Company. But the last bit of the book felt really thin: she got to the last two years of Janis's life and then basically sketched them out without much substance. I don't know if she thought that the stories of Janis's success and sudden early death had been told so many times already they weren't worth repeating, but it was a little disappointing, since the book had been so good up to that point. I still enjoyed it, I just wish the ending wouldn't have felt so rushed.

Dragonfly in Amber

Book two of the "Outlander" series starts 20 years after "Outlander" ended--it's 1968, and Claire is in Scotland with her daughter, Brianna, to finally tell her the truth: Frank Randall was not her biological father, Jamie Fraser was. After telling Brianna, the story flashes back to 1744, and Claire and Jamie are in France, trying to stop Bonnie Prince Charlie's planned 1745 rebellion that wipes out the Highland Clans. Their plans are thwarted, though, and they return to Scotland to see what they can do to help the Highlanders win the battle. In the end, Claire returns through the stones to her own time, two years after she disappeared, and pregnant. I enjoyed most of it, but I'm glad the Jacobite rebellion bit is (hopefully) over in the third book, that part didn't interest me very much (I know it should, but it didn't).

Case of the Careless Kitten

I'm quite sure I read this Perry Mason mystery at some point during the last 20+ years, I just didn't remember it, and it was reissued, so I took the opportunity to read it again. Helen gets a call from someone who says he is her Uncle Franklin, who disappeared 10 years earlier. He asks her to go to Perry Mason. No sooner does Helen get off the phone when her kitten, Amber Eyes, goes into convulsions. Helen rushes the kitten off to the vet, who determines the little guy was poisoned. That was just the beginning of this caper, which saw Della arrested and on trial for witness tampering. It was a bit confusing, but I think I probably wasn't paying as good attention as I should have been, due to everything that's going on in my life.

Chaos; Outlander

My father passed away suddenly at the end of October. He wasn't a big reader, but he would call me up and ask what I was doing, and I'd tell him: "Reading" (almost always) and he'd say: "What are you reading?". He was always interested in whatever book I was reading, even if he didn't know much about the subject he always had something to say. I'm really going to miss that. He wasn't just my father, but my best friend. I'll miss you, Dad.

Suffice it to say, I haven't been reading much over the past few weeks, but I did manage to finish "Chaos" by Tom O'Neill, which was super interesting. He's been working on this book for over 20 years now. He never bought the official motive in the Manson murders ("Helter Skelter", trying to start a race war) and went looking more deeply into the case. I admit, the motive always seemed a little weird to me, as much as I enjoyed Vincent Bugliosi's book. O'Neill found pretty compelling evidence that links Manson and his followers to a top secret CIA mind control experiment involving LSD and hypnosis. It's hard to know what to believe at this point, but brainwashing and LSD make as much sense as anything else, I guess.

I started watching the Outlander TV series, and I read the first book about 7 or 8 years ago, but didn't remember much. I know I didn't get any further than part of the second book before life got in the way, but I did want to read them, so I went back and reread the first one. There were parts that were a little boring, but overall not too bad. Claire is a nurse in the 1940s, and she and her husband, Frank, travel to Scotland for a second honeymoon after being apart during the war. She falls through a wormhole in time and ends up in the 1740s and ends up getting dangerously involved in the Jacobite rebellion that ultimately ended up destroying the clans forever. She marries a Highlander named Jamie Fraser to protect herself from the English soldiers who think she's a spy.