39/100 - Everything We Left Behind by Kerry Lonsdale
40/100 - All the Breaking Waves by Kerry Lonsdale
Books 2 & 3 in the trilogy that began with Everything We Keep, these are more romance and less mystery than the first title. The second still has that element of suspense, while the third gets frankly weird with the main character and her daughter both having psychic abilities and a bit character in the first two stories revealed to be a long-dead relative. I enjoyed the second book as much as the first, but the third wasn't my cup of tea at all. It felt like a big departure from the first two in content, though the tone and writing style remained the same, and much of the story was really, really obvious to the point I was getting impatient waiting for the story to come around to points that every reader surely saw coming.
41/100 - Abandon by Blake Crouch
I really enjoyed the Wayward Pines books, so when this one came up as a recommendation on Kindle Unlimited I had to give it a try. A winding mystery that takes place in the same remote mountain town in two different time periods - 19th century and present day - a heinous crime in a mining town in its boom years is the basis for the action in the present-day, when a tour of the ghost town uncovers what happened in the past. I really enjoyed this one, more than Pines even, because without the post-apocalyptic elements of that series the book revolved entirely around the characters and their interactions with the mystery and legend that they are chasing.
42/100 - The Party's Over by Mike Lofgren
A political expose and analysis of the general trends in Washington over the last two decades, written by a former Republican party insider and Congressional staffer, this was both enlightening and dismaying to read. The sub-title - How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class got Shafted - kind of says it all. Lofgren chronicles, though examples from his own service under high-ranking Republicans in Congress, the decline of bipartisanship, the rise of dark money in politics, and the growing dominance of what were once fringe ideologies within the party. The chapters on how to fix the problems as he sees them were among the most disheartening pages I've ever read, since literally every one of his suggestions was a long shot 5 years ago and probably entirely impossible today. It was an excellent read in terms of understanding the current state of American politics.
43/100 - Green Metropolis by David Owen
A rather different take on writing about sustainability, this book was well researched but at times dense and not particularly enjoyable reading. The basic premise - that dense cities, not decentralized communities full of "green" features, are the sustainable model for human societies, and that higher fuel economy, hybrids, and other transportation advances are counterproductive because they further encourage sprawl - was really interesting because it runs contrary to everything we're conditioned to think of as environmentally conscious. And the author makes a persuasive case that is only slightly undermined by his open acknowledgement that while he knows academically that cities are more sustainable, he moved his own family from a low-footprint car-free life in NYC to a small upstate town.
