Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr.

Empty Mansions is the kind of journalistic-style nonfiction book that started in the best way: a writer starts with a simple question, and it leads them down a rabbit hole of sordid family history, scandal, and decades of buried secrets. In this case, the writer is Bill Dedman, and the question is this: what was the story behind a California mansion, never occupied, that was put up for sale in 2009. Who built the house, why did they never live there, and why was it being sold now?

The English Girl (Gabriel Allon #13) by Daniel Silva

Despite not really loving the previous Daniel Silva thriller I’d read (The Heist), I decided to give him another chance for two reasons: first, The English Girl seems to be one of Silva’s most acclaimed thrillers, so it had the best chance of being good; and because when I was browsing audiobooks on my phone, this one popped up.

The Empty Grave (Lockwood & Co #5) by Jonathan Stroud

*WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS*

When I sat down to write this review, I initially wanted to give the book four stars, but ended up settling on three instead. I stand by that rating, but be aware going into this that I was leaning really, really close to four stars. This is, overall, a perfectly serviceable and satisfying conclusion to the Lockwood & Co series – plot lines are resolved, questions are answered, characters are given suitable endings, and everything is wrapped up in a nice little bow. But there were plenty of things that irritated me – just irritated, nothing worse than that – so I can’t give this the full four stars.

The Creeping Shadow (Lockwood & Co #4) by Jonathan Stroud

The fourth installment in the five-book Lockwood & Co series picks up a few months after the last one left off – Lucy Carlyle, having left the Lockwood agency after realizing that her experiments with her psychic abilities were putting the rest of the team in danger, has been working as a kind independent contractor, teaming up with other agencies for one-time jobs. It’s only a matter of time, of course, before Anthony Lockwood shows up and asks Lucy to help her former agency with a job.

The Girl With The Lower Back Tattoo by Amy Schumer

I went into this book with very low expectations, and I was neither disappointed, or pleasantly surprised.

I like Amy Schumer’s comedy, generally. Her show had some very, very funny sketches, and while she’s certainly not my favorite female comedian, I don’t have any strong feelings about her either way. Her memoir gave me a similarly lukewarm reaction – it’s no Yes Please by Amy Poehler or Bossypants by Tina Fey, and I wouldn’t even rank it alongside Why Not Me by Mindy Kaling. It’s…fine. Not good, not bad. Fine.

Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

*WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS*

(I tried to write a spoiler-free review, I really did. But I can’t talk about all the stuff I want to cover without giving away the ending, so if you clicked this review thinking that “well, maybe the spoilers won’t be too extensive,” be warned that I am going to spoil basically everything about the ending. So unless you’ve already read the book or have no intention of ever reading it, continue at your own risk)

The Swans of Fifth Avenue by Melanie Benjamin

“But defiantly, they had agreed to meet at the scene of the crime – the restaurant that had spawned the literary scandal of the century, as it was already being called. Slim Hawks Hayward Keith, Marella Agnelli, Gloria Guiness, and Pamela Churchill Hayward Harriman – not a shrinking violet in the bunch – had descended upon La Cote Basque, always the place to see and be seen, especially today.
…Today, they’d opened the pages of Esquire magazine and seen themselves – not merely themselves, but their kind, their tribe, their exclusive, privileged, envied set – eviscerated, skin flayed open, souls laid bare, ugliness acknowledged. Secrets betrayed and lives destroyed. By the viper in their nest; the storyteller in their midst.”

Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food And the People Who Cook by Anthony Bourdain

“Order the fucking fish on Monday.”

Although Medium Raw isn’t, technically speaking, a sequel to Anthony Bourdain’s first collection of restaurant industry-related essays, it’s definitely a companion volume – to the point where if you read Medium Raw without first having read Kitchen Confidential, you’re not really getting the full experience. Kitchen Confidential was a brash, cranky, profanity-filled collection of essays detailing the ugly ins and outs of the restaurant industry and the people who make a living from it, and even the positive essays were still brimming with piss and vinegar. One of the most quoted essays from the book explains why you should never order fish on a Monday, so it’s a good indication of how much Bourdain’s worldview has changed since Kitchen Confidential. The crankiness is now tempered with weariness, and a resigned irritation (mostly directed at himself) that so many people have held him up as some kind of all-knowing expert on the restaurant industry.

The Aeneid by Virgil

“I sing of warfare and a man at war.
From the sea-coast of Troy in early days
He came to Italy by destiny,
To our Lavinian western shore,
A fugitive, this captain, buffeted
Cruelly on land as on the sea
By blows from powers of the air – behind them
Baleful Juno in her sleepless rage.
And cruel losses were his lot in war,
Till he could found a city and bring home
His gods to Latium, land of the Latin race,
The Alban lords, and the high walls of Rome.
Tell me the cause now, O Muse, how galled
In her divine pride, and how sore at heart
From her old wound, the queen of gods compelled him-
A man apart, devoted to his mission-
To undergo so many perilous days
And enter on so many trials.”

Post Captain (Aubrey & Maturin #2) by Patrick O’Brian

I’ve been reading the Aubrey/Maturin series for a few years now, and even though I’m not as loyal to these books as I am to other series, it’s always nice to dip back into Patrick O’Brian’s well-researched, well-written, and consistently delightful historical adventures.

Post Captain, the second in the series, is almost split evenly between scenes on land and scenes on various ships, and even though a lot of people prefer the ratio to skew more towards sea-based scenes, I liked the frequent changes of scenery. And it’s always fun to see how Captain Aubrey functions on land opposed to how he functions at sea.