Episode 906: A book set on a plane, train, or cruise ship

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Welcome to Reading With Libraries!

Thank you for joining us again on our book group and Reader’s advisory podcast! 

Our organization is the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we work with all types of libraries. Schools, public, academic, history centers, and more! We are here to support you and to bring you new knowledge to inform your library work. 

This season we continue to explore a wide variety of book genres and topics so you can expand your reading horizons, and share more information with your library community. We are looking at the prompt from the 2022 PopSugar reading challenge this season. You can read along with their challenge, linked in our show notes, or just enjoy some different books. 

This week we are looking at books set on plans, trains, or cruise ships. If you need to take time for a vacation, but can’t go anywhere right now; these books can be your ticket to a quick vacation at home! And if you are traveling, it can be fun to read about about other travels in other places.

Beverages:

This is, of course, a book group. And every book group needs to have beverages, so you really get the feel for your reading.

If you are traveling you should be sure to hydrate. And this is a time to enjoy some tasty things, to add a little more enjoyment to your adventure. This week’s beverages come from the article “27 Travel-Inspired Cocktails To Make At Home” from Forbes. Each beverage lets you celebrate a different location. 

Limoncello Mojito

“This enticing cocktail is the refreshing start to your holiday on the Amalfi Coast,” says Fabio Iacomino, head bartender of Casa Angelina. “A wonderful blend of the Amalfi Coast’s sweet-and-sour flavors with the one-of-a kind Sfusato Amalfitano lemon — indeed one of treasures of our divine coast.”

Cut-up lemon triangles with peels

1 spoon of white sugar

7 Mint leaves

1.4 ounces amber rum (Havana 7 is recommended)

1.4 ounces limoncello liqueur

Splash of soda water

Lemon slice or small sprig of mint for garnish

Put about four small lemon triangle wedges in a glass with the sugar and muddle. Add mint, crushed ice, rum and limoncello and stir. Fill the rest of the glass with more crushed ice and top off with soda water. Garnish with a lemon slice or mint sprig.

Barcelona

Bankers Martini

In Banker’s Bar, the original security boxes on the ceiling are remnants of Mandarin Oriental, Barcelona’s former life as a bank. Also showcasing its history is this martini, which has been on the menu since the bar’s opening and is its most popular order, the hotel says.

2 ounces housemade Ketel One vodka infused with cardamom

1 ounce housemade ginger syrup

5 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

2 teaspoons egg white

Dash angostura bitters on top

Dehydrated lemon slice or ginger candy garnish

Pour all of the liquid ingredients into a shaker and shake. Then add ice and shake again. Strain into a martini glass without ice. Garnish with the dehydrated lemon slice or a ginger candy.

Genre Discussion:

Books about travel, especially travel that might be a little fancier than just tossing a tent into the back of your car, can be like reading the best adventure stories. You can explore places you have never visited, worlds where you can’t really go, see things you might never get to see.  

And these stories are a little more exciting than traditional mystery, thriller or suspense stories. They are locked room stories – but turned up a notch. Everyone is stuck in the same enclosed area, so all your suspects are there. When no one can leave, when the means of travel is outside of your control, solving the mystery is important for everyone’s safety.

Any story is going to be heightened by being on a plane, ship, or train. So romances will be more fun, with lots of opportunities to interact. Mysteries will be scarier with the killer being trapped with you. Travel adventures have more opportunities to get places quickly, or to move around to find different locations as the story progresses.

So, let’s travel around and find some interesting new stories this week!

Suggested Reading Resources:

Our Book Discussion

We have our beverages, we are familiar with this week’s genre, let’s get to the book discussion! We will give you a list of all the books we share today. You can click on any of these links to go to Amazon.com for more information. If you buy anything while you are there, Amazon will give us a small percent of their profits from your purchase. Thanks in advance for helping to support the mission of CMLE – we appreciate it! 

Distress Signals, by Catherine Ryan Howard

he day Adam Dunne’s girlfriend, Sarah, fails to return from a Barcelona business trip, his perfect life begins to fall apart. Days later, the arrival of her passport and a note that reads “I’m sorry–S” sets off real alarm bells. He vows to do whatever it takes to find her.

Adam is puzzled when he connects Sarah to a cruise ship called the Celebrate –and to a woman, Estelle, who disappeared from the same ship in eerily similar circumstances almost exactly a year before.

To get answers, Adam must confront some difficult truths about his relationship with Sarah. He must do things of which he never thought himself capable. And he must try to outwit a predator who seems to have found the perfect hunting ground.

Shipped, by Angie Hockman

Between taking night classes for her MBA and her demanding day job at a cruise line, marketing manager Henley Evans barely has time for herself, let alone family, friends, or dating. But when she’s shortlisted for the promotion of her dreams, all her sacrifices finally seem worth it.

The only problem? Graeme Crawford-Collins, the remote social media manager and the bane of her existence, is also up for the position. Although they’ve never met in person, their epic email battles are the stuff of office legend.

Their boss tasks each of them with drafting a proposal on how to boost bookings in the Galápagos—best proposal wins the promotion. There’s just one catch: they have to go on a company cruise to the Galápagos Islands…together. But when the two meet on the ship, Henley is shocked to discover that the real Graeme is nothing like she imagined. As they explore the Islands together, she soon finds the line between loathing and liking thinner than a postcard.

With her career dreams in her sights and a growing attraction to the competition, Henley begins questioning her life choices. Because what’s the point of working all the time if you never actually live?

The Last Train to London, by Meg Waite Clayton

In 1936, the Nazi are little more than loud, brutish bores to fifteen-year old Stephan Neuman, the son of a wealthy and influential Jewish family and budding playwright whose playground extends from Vienna’s streets to its intricate underground tunnels. Stephan’s best friend and companion is the brilliant Žofie-Helene, a Christian girl whose mother edits a progressive, anti-Nazi newspaper. But the two adolescents’ carefree innocence is shattered when the Nazis’ take control.

There is hope in the darkness, though. Truus Wijsmuller, a member of the Dutch resistance, risks her life smuggling Jewish children out of Nazi Germany to the nations that will take them. It is a mission that becomes even more dangerous after the Anschluss—Hitler’s annexation of Austria—as, across Europe, countries close their borders to the growing number of refugees desperate to escape.

Tante Truus, as she is known, is determined to save as many children as she can. After Britain passes a measure to take in at-risk child refugees from the German Reich, she dares to approach Adolf Eichmann, the man who would later help devise the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” in a race against time to bring children like Stephan, his young brother Walter, and Žofie-Helene on a perilous journey to an uncertain future abroad.

Strangers on a Train, by Patricia Highsmith

The world of Patricia Highsmith has always been filled with ordinary people, all of whom are capable of very ordinary crimes. This theme was present from the beginning, when her debut, Strangers on a Train, galvanized the reading public. Here we encounter Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno, passengers on the same train. But while Guy is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno turns out to be a sadistic psychopath who manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. “Some people are better off dead,” Bruno remarks, “like your wife and my father, for instance.” As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy is trapped in Highsmith’s perilous world, where, under the right circumstances, anybody is capable of murder.

In the Unlikely Event, by Judy Blume

In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life.

Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was fifteen, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events that Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and exciting and everyone dreamed of going somewhere, Judy Blume imagines and weaves together a haunting story of three generations of families, friends, and strangers, whose lives are profoundly changed by these disasters. She paints a vivid portrait of a particular time and place — Nat King Cole singing “Unforgettable,” Elizabeth Taylor haircuts, young (and not-so-young) love, explosive friendships, A-bomb hysteria, rumors of Communist threat. And a young journalist who makes his name reporting tragedy. Through it all, one generation reminds another that life goes on.

Night Fall (A John Corey Novel, 3), by Nelson DeMille

On a Long Island beach at dusk, Bob Mitchell and JanetWhitney conduct their illicit love affair in front of a video camera, set to record each steamy moment. Suddenly a terrible explosion lights up the sky. Grabbing the camera, the couple flees as approaching police cars speed toward the scene. Five years later, the crash of Flight 800 has been attributed to a mechanical mal-function.

But for John Corey and Kate Mayfield, both members of the Elite Anti-terrorist Task Force, the case is not closed. Suspecting a cover-up at the highest levels and disobeying orders, they set out to find the one piece of evidence that will prove the truth about what really happened to Flight 800-the videotape that shows a couple making love on the beach and the last moments of the doomed airliner.

The Spitfire Girls, by Soraya M. Lane 

At the height of World War II, the British Air Transport Auxiliary need help. A group of young women volunteer for action, but the perils of their new job don’t end on the tarmac. Things are tough in the air, but on the ground their abilities as pilots are constantly questioned.

There is friction from the start between the new recruits. Spirited American Lizzie turns heads with her audacity, but few can deny her flying skills. She couldn’t be more different from shy, petite Ruby, who is far from diminutive in the sky. It falls to pragmatic pilot May to bring the women together and create a formidable team capable of bringing the aircraft home.

As these very different women fight to prove themselves up to the task at hand, they are faced with challenges and tragedies at every turn. They must fight for equal pay and respect while handling aircraft that are dangerously ill-equipped; meanwhile, lives continue to be lost in the tumult of war.

Determined to assist the war effort doing what they love, can May, Lizzie and Ruby put aside their differences to overcome adversity, and will they find love in the skies?

The Woman on the Orient Express, by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

Hoping to make a clean break from a fractured marriage, Agatha Christie boards the Orient Express in disguise. But unlike her famous detective Hercule Poirot, she can’t neatly unravel the mysteries she encounters on this fateful journey.

Agatha isn’t the only passenger on board with secrets. Her cabinmate Katharine Keeling’s first marriage ended in tragedy, propelling her toward a second relationship mired in deceit. Nancy Nelson—newly married but carrying another man’s child—is desperate to conceal the pregnancy and teeters on the brink of utter despair. Each woman hides her past from the others, ferociously guarding her secrets. But as the train bound for the Middle East speeds down the track, the parallel courses of their lives shift to intersect—with lasting repercussions.

Conclusion:

Thank you so much for joining us on Reading With Libraries! 

Join us next Thursday with another topic or genre and many more books to share and discuss. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss a single episode! And if you want to hear more about the work we do in libraries or expand your library skills, check out our podcast Linking Our Libraries!  

Bring your book ideas, bring your beverages, and join us back here on Thursday!