Book Log 2020 #62: Milk! by Mark Kurlansky

Just as he did for cod and salt, Kurlansky offers a global history of milk, tracing how we went from really only getting breast milk as babies to drinking, eating, and licking the variety of milk products throughout our lives.

I kind of found that this book was less than the sum of its parts. Plenty of interesting facts and stories, but I never really got caught into the general narrative. This is kind of how his books have gone for me after Cod, so be forewarned.

 Book Log 2020 #61: The Secret Place by Tana French

A boy is killed on the grounds of a girls boarding school, and the case goes unsolved. A year after the death, Stephen Moran reopens the investigation after one of the students presents a flier from an anonymous bulletin board called "The Secret Place" where the person who posted it claims to know who killed the boy. 

Moran, teamed up with the standoffish Antoinette Conway, find that there are competing cliques that may be involved (of course, it's a high school), and as they make progress they run into a complication in the form of Frank Mackey, a fellow member of the Dublin Murder Squad, whose daughter is in one of those cliques.

One of the things I liked about this book is that while the title refers to a bulletin board, there's no shortage of secret places that get examined. There are other physical spaces that are secret. The cliques have their own secrets, and each student has secrets that they don't share within the clique. The police all seem to have their own secrets as well. This shouldn't be surprising from a series where the psychological is as much a part of the plot as the police work. 

It's also not surprising that this book is of the same quality as the previous entries in the series. 

 Book Log 2020 #60: The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson

There's an old saying that "you can't go home again," and this book kind of proves the point. After several years living in the UK, Bryson returned to the US and road tripped across the country to get an idea of what life is like in the non-touristy, small town, "real" America.  

What he finds apparently doesn't meet his expectations, as much of the book is darker and, frankly, ruder than what you might expect if you've previously read A Walk in the Woods or In a Sunburned Country. I was going to chalk this up to it being an early book, written before he developed a more positive style of humor, but I had similar reservations with The Road to Little Dribbling, which is one of his more recent books.

I wouldn't rush out to read this, unless you're a completist and want to check off all of Bryson's books.

 Book Log 2020 #59: I Hear the Sirens in the Street by Adrian McKinty

Still processing the personal and professional fallout from his last case, Sean Duffy gets assigned to what amounts to a portable locked room mystery: identifying a torso that was found in a suitcase. This being the early 1980s there's no DNA testing available, but luckily the torso still bears a tattoo, which is enough for Duffy to start figuring out who the torso is and who packed the suitcase.

I hadn't planned on returning to this series so quickly, but am glad I did.  The story is as interesting and engaging as the first one, and adds in Duffy's examination of his personal and emotional state. This is quickly becoming one of my favorite series.

 Book Log 2020 #58: Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris

The author, midway through a Ph.D. program with an eye towards becoming an astronaut, decided to reclaim her youthful fascination with explorers like Marco Polo. This book is the chronicle of her adventure of cycling the Silk Road from Europe to Asia with a friend from previous cycling trips.

Along the way, the author mixes her own thoughts of what it means to be an explorer in the modern age with a variety of historical, scientific, and personal details. This gives a much broader scope to what could have been a straightforward travelogue. The day to day also provides a lot of color, between funny things that happen on the road and the challenges of being two women on a continent-spanning bike trip. 

It doesn't appear that she's written any books since this one, but I am hopeful we'll hear more about her travels in the future.