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I've actually done a fair amount of reading in the past couple of months, not even counting the Italian guidebooks that occupied so much of my time.

In preparation for visiting Venice, I read The City of Falling Angels. The author used the 1996 fire at La Fenice and its subsequent investigation as a starting point for many nonfiction stories about the city and its inhabitants. Although somewhat disjointed in the telling and more anecdotal than corroborated, these stories did provide a good background for the first-time visitor, and I'm glad I read it.

Book Group's October selection was the biography Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. I also found this book to be disjointed and anecdotal but interesting in its details about the mercurial entrepreneur. I don't want to speak ill of the dead, so the most I can say is that Mr. Jobs was a very interesting person, and I'm glad I read it.

The Orchardist by new author Amanda Coplin was a well-written and very original story set in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1900s, but it was dark and sad. My first thought at the end was that truly no good deed goes unpunished. It's maybe too dark for my current taste in literature, but I would definitely read something else by this author.

After reading several very positive reviews for this story about a man and his loyal dog trying to survive in the wilderness, I added The Dog Stars to my reserve list at the library. By the time I picked it up a couple of months later, I had forgotten what the story was about--when I read the inside flap of the book jacket, I wondered why I had ever wanted it.

"Our Hero, Hig, lives at a little country airstrip which he shares with his beloved blue heeler Jasper, and a mean gun nut named Bangley. It's nine years after a super-flu has killed 99.7% of the people on the planet." Dark--yes. Original--no. Predictable--yes. Uplifting--no. After the first couple of chapters, I have to admit I pretty much skimmed rather than read the rest of the pages. If you want a great book about post-catastrophe living, try either Jose Saramago's Blindness or Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

Of today's entries, this book was my favorite! The Light Between Oceans was a very original story about a lighthouse keeper and his wife on remote Janus Rock in western Australia in the years following WWI. "A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby...and they claim her as their own." The moral principles compromised by this decision and the consequences of their action have far-reaching effects. I actually wish this book had been longer and gone into more detail about the couple's lives in their later years. This was an enjoyable yet thought-provoking read.