Farewell, My Lovely (Raymond Chandler, 1940)

Book club selection (via Lon).

I wasn't at all familiar with author Raymond Chandler or what I think was his favorite character - private detective Philip Marlowe.  In this novel,  Marlowe is witness to a murder at the story's outset; he then interacts with various police and other characters; eventually sorts out the story.

Plot line was pretty disjointed, but Chandler's writing is quite good.  He often comes up with unexpected phrase twists that are simultaneously communicative and funny.

As I understand it, Chandler was a pioneer in this genre.  Lots of things seemed cliched reading this in 2014 but I guess that label doesn't fairly apply to the pioneer of the style.

I didn't really care about any of the characters.  The book didn't really make me feel anything, or teach me anything.  I'm the wrong audience for what I'll call a well-written, entertaining page-turner - there simply are too many other books I want to read, and too little time to get to them.

The Daughters of Mars (Thomas Keneally, 2012)

Had seen favorable reviews when this was published in 2012.  And I liked it.  Two sisters are raised in Australian back country; older one goes to Sydney to work; they aren't terribly close.  But both volunteer for service during WWI recruitment drive.

So essentially this provides a very different take on WWI - perspective of Australian nurses who train in Egypt, serve on a hospital ship off Gallipoli (and then on the nearby island of Lemnos), and then make their way up to France.  The older sister (Naomi) ends up working in an Australian-run hospital in northern France, while the younger sister (Sally) works closer to the front (including stints at clearing stations).  They are in service all the way up to the end (including "Spanish" flu outbreak (which was quite interestingly discussed here)).

Not too much detail about medical stuff, but it does help give an idea about the challenges of 1915-era medical efforts running up against industrial killing.  Amazing to think of the doctors and nurses that faced this stuff endlessly, year in and year out.

The two sisters are pretty strong characters, but I didn't think the author romanticized what this was all about.

Medical personnel were critical players here, but quite naturally they tend to be overlooked by the historians and novelists in favor of other aspects of the war (though Hemingway did address the topic quite famously here).

Making this book all the more worthwhile.