ReadingBlog

End it already!

2012-01-25T14:04:00.000-06:00

I've read several of Charles Todd's mysteries featuring WWI nurse Beth Crawford. She's the one whose stories remind me of the Masie Dobbs stories, and they're as good as the lesser Masie Dobbs' stories.

I picked up another Charles Todd mystery at the library recently, and it made me wonder again about all this writing about the time between World War I and World War II. Todd has set "his" books in that time, as does Jacqueline Winspear. Laurie R. King sets some of her Mary Russell stories in that time frame as well. It doesn't seem -- Gatsby notwithstanding -- a very attractive period in Western history. Maybe it's attractive as a literary setting because it's far enough in the past so there are few people around with first hand experiences, but for which there is good and accessible documentation of the time. (I especially think of the descriptions of material culture in the Masie Dobbs stories.)

In any case, this book was not a Bess Crawford mystery, but an Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery. I read one of these before and liked it, with reservations. Looking back, I have some of the same reservations about Wings of Fire.

Inspector Ian Rutledge is a WWI veteran suffering what we'd now call a severe case of PTSD. It gets in his way, but -- stiff upper lip and all -- he tries to push through and do the investigations he has to do. Interestingly, but less so than the first time around, Rutledge carries a memory that is a constant voice in his head commenting on what's going on. It's sort of like a Greek chorus, but I thought it became tiresome.

I wrote about A Test of Wills (the Rutledge mystery that preceded this one), "Rutledge's investigation seems to reach the same conclusions as the local one did, but he can't tie up all the loose ends. The voice in his head taunts him. People tell him only what they think is relevant. He keeps probing to find out what they are keeping from him. Of course, he's relentless."

Well, I found slight differences in Wings of Fire, but hardly enough to note. It's just a variation on the earlier story.

There's a textbook I'm familiar with in which the first third of the book endeavors to explain theory and concepts before it tackles the subject matter those things apply to. I find it difficult to deal with because I best understand the methodology when it's applied. (I also know that other people want all the abstract stuff organized in their heads before they tackle real-world topics.)

Well, the last third of this book is an extended unwinding of the mystery that only Ian Rutledge (even in his damaged condition) has figured out. Well, one of the murdered people had figured it out, but her letter explaining things wasn't found until after Rutledge had unraveled the mystery. That last third of the book was not much fun for me. I'd figured out what Rutledge had long before he had the climactic meeting with the bad guy. When I read A Test of Wills, I wrote that I was dissatisfied with the resolution. Same here. If another Charles Todd novel falls into my hands, I'll probably begin reading it. I don't know if I'd slog through another resolution like this one.

So, have you read Wings of Fire or another of Charles Todd's novels? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world about your reactions.

Charles Todd's home page
An interview with Caroline and Charles Todd in January Magazine
Lee Gilmore's review at The Mystery Reader

Macro- and micro-novels

2012-01-17T21:23:00.000-06:00

Many years ago I worked my way through a macro-novel called Centennial by James Michener. It was the kind of marcro-novel that Michener became famous for. It was one of a number of macro-novels I plowed through long ago. [The last one was probably Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth. Or maybe Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (okay, it wasn't a novel, but it read like one).]

By macro-novel, I mean a novel (or history) that takes a wide view of "life, the universe, and everything." (See Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe and Everything. Michener begins his historical novel about Colorado with geology and lots of anthropology. Follett writes about the generations who built a cathedral. Tuchman writes about the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, religious politics, peasant uprisings, aristocratic politics, and the Little Ice Age. They are huge books that include enough ideas, characters, and stories to hold my interest for a long time.

I thought of Centennial twice recently. The first time was when I had a bad cold and cough. I went looking for tea and the local grocery store didn't carry lapsong souchong. I had fond memories of lapsong souchong from the time I read Centennial. Michener described how French fur traders in 18th century Colorado carried bricks of lapsong souchong. So I had to try it. I found it easily, but I was living in the big city then. Now, I'm shopping in a small town grocery store. Oh well, I found a soothing tea that worked to relieve my throat.

The second time I thought of Centennial was when I began reading Susan Vreeland's Luncheon of the Boating Party. The reason I thought of Michener's tome was that Vreeland's book is a micro-novel as opposed to Michener's macro-novel. Almost everything in the first half of the book took place in the head of Auguste Renoir. Vreeland paints some images of late 19th century Paris and illustrates some characteristics of Renoir, but there isn't much in the way of stories.

By the time I got to the middle of the book, I was tired of reading about Renoir's struggles to gather his models, get them to sit still, manage his love life, worry about the light... I would much rather have read a treatise about Renoir's painting or an analysis of Luncheon of the Boating Party. I would have much preferred to go to Washington, D.C. to see the painting and some of its contemporaries.

I quit reading the book and put it on the pile to be returned to the library.

Jeanette Hohman is a 92-year old acquanintance and reader of this blog (when I send her print outs). She asked not long ago why I read so few things besides mysteries. I replied that I was lazy and that mysteries are usually easy (Kate Atkinson, perhaps an exception). I should have added that I read a lot of serious stuff about government and politics -- including lots of news from six selected countries (you're probably fortunate that I write about that on a separate blog). And, I should have added that experiences like trying to read micro-novels like Vreeland's, Connie Willis' science fiction, Per Petterson's micro-novel, and even James Gleick's The Information, send me back to mysteries.

That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to pick up the Charles Todd mystery I got at the library. But, thinking about the macro-novels that I still have fond memories of, maybe I should devote a couple months to reading to something like Follett's World Without End (I've heard it's good). I've also heard good things about Edward Rutherford's London (a sequel to Sarum, another macro-novel which was based on an exhibit I saw at the City of London Museum).

Susan Vreeland's web site
Donna Bird's review at Greenman Review
Kathy Jones' review at Blog Critics
Kristin Merrihew's review at Mostly Fiction

Fast books, slow books

2012-01-14T13:19:00.000-06:00

Bird Loomis writes from a Democratic enclave (Lawrence) in a Republican utopia-to-be (Kansas). Luckily, the Kansans still allow the importation of books from the outside -- even those from outside the USA. And they allow e-mail out of Kansas as well. Thank you, Bird.

Over the past few months I’ve read five books by two authors, neither of whom I’d read before. Jo Nesbo is the better known, with his series of Norwegian novels (deftly translated) about detective Harry Hole. The other is Rebecca Pawel, a native New Yorker, who writes a fascinating series of mysteries about a Guardia lieutenant in Franco-era Spain of the 1940s.

I’ve come to enjoy both authors immensely, but my approach to the books has been quite different. Nesbo writes long, fast-paced, intricately plotted mysteries. I thought that I’d just about had it with alcoholic detectives, but Harry H. has won me over, in part because his drinking is not a constant, and it’s integral to his character and his up-and-down personal life. I haven’t read his work in any particular order, which is a little, but not too, problematic. I find that I read the long Nesbo books at a whirlwind pace. I start, and even if I’m not on vacation I find it hard to put the book down. (Not quite the 6-day Girl with the Dragon Tattoo marathon for all three books, but close.)

Pawel, on the other hand, is a “few pages a night before nodding off” kind of author for me. Like KC Constantine’s Western Pennsylvania novels about Rocksburg and its fictional police chief, Mario Balzic, Pawel’s books are less mysteries and more character studies. And what a set of characters – most notably Lieutenant Tejada, from an aristocratic, Fascist family, and his wife, who comes from a communist background and constantly makes life challenging for the family (as does Tejada). Still, they love each other and their son, and the series develops these relationships slowly and unpredictably. They genius of Pawel’s work is to make a sympathetic character (Tejada) out of someone whom most readers would ordinarily detest. But like Harry Hole, Wallander, John Rebus, and others, he is a good cop and, ultimately, a fair-minded individual.

I think I read the Pawel books slowly because I need time to keep following the various characters, placed back in history, but mostly because I want to ponder the relationships of Tejada with his wife, child, family, and social class. To be sure, there is a mystery to be solved, but the books’ resolutions are more about how personal ties evolve than the solving of a crime. In many ways, there is more to savor here than in the latest Connelly or Child or Nesbo.

In the end, I have no desire to read just “fast” books or only “slow” ones – but good ones. Nesbo hooked me almost immediately; Pawel took more time, but ultimately both made me go looking for more volumes, ever eager to read more.

Jo Nesbo's web site
My thoughts about The Snowman
Monica Hesse's profile of Jo Nesbo in the Washington Post
Kjetil Stensvik Østil's interview with Jo Nesbo in The Browser

Ilya Marritz' profile of Rebecca Pawel in The Sun (New York)
Steven Torres' interview with Rebecca Pawel on the blog named after him

The last of Louise Penny's books

2012-01-12T12:23:00.000-06:00

I was happy I got to read the first of Louise Penny's books, Still Life. It was charming and interesting.

So I picked up a second one, A Fatal Grace, when I was at the library. I evern renewed it because there were so many interruptions over the holidays (if grand daughters can be safely called interruptions.)

It took too long to read. It wasn't as charming or as interesting. The plot was far fetched. Most of the interesting characters from Still Life were in this book, but they weren't as interesting the second time around.

I did finish the book, so it wasn't awful. It just wasn't as wonderful as the first one of Penny's that I read.

Tiny, improbable village in southern Quebec where a second murder in as many years takes place. What are the odds? About the same as the odds of there being a second-hand book store there that supports its owner, as Penny contends. Now, I've read Carol Bly and Kathleen Norris and I'm willing to concede that there's probably more diversity in rural towns than I saw growing up in one. But the diversity in Three Pines stretches my sense of the possible. And like Cabot Cove, Maine, the violent crime rate is pretty high. I wouldn't want to live there and I doubt I'll visit again through Louise Penny's novels. (It's not the last of Louise Penny's books, but it's probably the last one I'll read.)

Have you read A Fatal Grace (published in Canada as Dead Cold and Sous la glace)? What did you think of it? Read other of Louise Penny's mysteries? What did you think of them? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

The author's web site
Carol Wallace's review at Book Group of One
Poet B. Morrison's review on her version of a reading blog

Started early, took a long time

2011-12-19T15:19:00.001-06:00

I wasn't totally discouraged by my attempts to make sense of Kate Atkinson's first novel. I still had good memories about Case Histories. Besides, I'd bought a paperback copy of the newest of Atkinson's books about the adventures of Jackson Brodie, Started Early, Took My Dog. Not only was it a paperback book, I bought it at the end of term sale at Carleton's book store.

As with Case Histories, the book starts out with a plethora of names and few other identifiers. I finally resorted to taking notes, like I did when I read Queen of the Night. Some of the people figured prominently in the stories. Some of the people just happened to be in the area. I was over two-thirds of the way into the book before I could stop checking my notes every couple paragraphs. Here are the notes I took at the back of the book. (I long for the days of the huge Russian novels I used to read that had the casts of characters listed at the front of the book.)

It was about two-thirds of the way into the book that Atkinson began to really tell her main story. That's probably why I didn't have to refer to my character notes as much. Atkinson has stories, lots of them: backstories, side stories, distracting stories, main stories. At the beginning there are few hints about which is which. And she writes little scenes from these stories and seemingly throws them into the book, often without warning. No chapters to speak of. Sometimes a date, sometimes not. Sometimes a horizontal line between scenes, sometimes not. And there are lots of people. Did I say that already?

I really don't want to work this much for a diverting mystery story (or two). I'm having second thoughts about going back and reading the two other Jackson Brodie books. In addition, the plots of the two main stories are, to my mind, overly complex. And the resolution was too quick and slick. It was almost as though Atkinson's word processor told her she had written 100,000 words and she felt she needed to end the book before she got to 105,000 words. [The endings of the television series Bones are like that. (It's one of the three or four TV series that gets watched at our house.) Big mystery, fantastical scientific investigation, a little detective work, and in the last 2 minutes the bad guy confesses or is said to have been arrested. Quick and slick.]

I liked wondering about the main mystery and one of the subsidiary ones. There was one good red herring. Some of the over-complexity was caused by a less than interesting back story. Jackson Brodie needs to get over himself before there's another story about him. Atkinson has to get over over-complicating her novels. Complexity and obscurity do not make for better story telling. (Although at times I think that's what critics imply.)

Have you read Started Early, Took My Dog? What did you think? Anyone besides Dan read other Kate Atkinson books? How did you react? Write and tell this little bit of the world about your response. Or you can just post a comment at the end of this blog entry.

the author's website
Jack Goodstein's review in the Seattle Post Intelligencer
Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times
Justine Jordan's review in The Guardian
Emily Dickinson's poem, "I Started Early -- Took my Dog"
Emily Dickinson's poem, "Hope is a Thing with Feathers"

Skipping

2011-12-05T15:30:00.000-06:00

I have read half a dozen of Thomas Perry's books. I have really liked them. (Search for Perry at the Delicious index for this blog.)

I picked up a recent Perry book at the library. It's one of a series he's written featuring Jane Whitefield: Runner. Jane Whitefield is a kind of magician who helps make people disappear because really bad guys are threatening their lives. She pulls out wads of cash, piles of previously established identities, formidable martial arts skills, and years of experience to create new people out of old ones.

Here are the Heart of Gold and Green Lantern awards for improbabilities and super heroism. The story is overwhelmed by those characteristics.

The other thing to note is that Perry's skills in creating and maintaining tension and suspense are as great as his sense of humor (that appears in his other books). Given the nature of the story: professionals searching across the country for a scared, pregnant, 20-year-old, tension and suspense cannot be relieved until the end of the story. Okay, but I'm not obligated to read 440 pages of gripping fear and anxiety. I read about half way through the book and then skipped to the last three chapters just to see how Perry tied up the loose ends.

Have you read Runner or another of Perry's "Jane Whitefield" novels? What did you think of it (them)? How did you deal with the tension? Is my imagination just too active? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

The author's web site
An unsigned review at Epinions.com
John O'Connell's review at The Guardian
Niki Masse Schoenfeldt's review at Curled Up With a Good Book

Help. What am I missing?

2011-12-02T15:52:00.000-06:00

Back at the end of September, I had the pleasure of reading Kate Atkinson's Case Histories. In October, I had the pleasure of seeing the three mystery novels about Jackson Brodie (the first of which was Case Histories) turned into BBC mysteries on the PBS series Masterpiece Mystery. I'm still looking forward to reading the other two Brodie mysteries. But not because of Atkinson's prize winning first book.

Because Case Histories was so good, I headed for the library with Atkinson's name on the top of my to-read list. I had several books to choose from and checked out Atkinson's first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum.

Back in '95, the book was named the Whitbread Book of the Year (now called the Costa Book of the Year). It's a respectable British prize. According to the prize's web site, "The Costa Book Awards is one of the UK's most prestigious and popular literary prizes and recognises some of the most enjoyable books of the year by writers based in the UK and Ireland."

According to the relevant Wikipedia page, the awards "are given both for high literary merit but also for works that are enjoyable reading and whose aim is to convey the enjoyment of reading to the widest possible audience. As such, they are a more populist literary prize than the Booker Prize."

Notice how I haven't said much about my reaction to the book yet?

I figure I need some instruction about this book.

I only got a bit past half way through it. And I only read that far because I recalled that at about the half-way point the elements of Case Histories began to come together and become a book and a story.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum didn't come together and gave no signs of coming together. It's a mish-mash of partial characterizations, incomplete anecdotes, and confusing descriptions of events.

And it took a long time for me to get half way through the book. I had the tendency to fall asleep after reading a few pages.

By half way through the book, I'd begun to distinguish between some of the characters, but not all of them. There was the narrator, who began telling the story at her conception. Some people in Mississippi might have appreciated the fetus' omniscience, but it was confusing, especially since after her birth, the narrator seemed not to know everything. There was the narrator's sister, Patricia, whose life would have made a more interesting story. The narrator's parents were intriguing, but not terribly interesting. And there were a bunch of other people, most of whom I could not distinguish from one another.

When I gave up on this book, I picked up Thomas Perry's Runner. By page 10, I was hooked on the story and caring about the characters. I really should have dropped the Atkinson book and picked up the Perry book long ago. I'll write something about Runner soon.

So, has anyone read this who can instruct me about why Behind the Scenes at the Museum was a prize-worthy novel? Or has anyone had an experience like my discouraging one? Write and tell me and the rest of this little bit of the world what you think.

The author's web site
John Mulan's review in The Guardian
Laura's review at Musings
A reading guide from Reading Group Guides (that wouldn't have helped me at all)

One good read deserves another

2011-11-05T20:02:00.000-05:00

I finished the C. J. Box book on a good note. The end of the book was its best section. So I was anxious to read some more. Nancy took the first draft manuscript I was working on to Chicago with her, so I couldn't keep revising that. To keep me off the streets and out of the bars, I read some more.

The other book Mary had left for us was a J. A. Jance book, Fatal Error. This Jance book features Ali Reynolds, former LA news reader and a wanna be cop now living in Arizona on a pile of money she inherited from her late husband. (There's a Jance theme: Reynolds and the star of the Jance book I finished not long ago, J. P. Beaumont, are both rich as Croesus because of what they were left by now-dead spouses.)

The Beaumont book, Betrayal of Trust was a great one for me.

This Ali Reynolds book was nearly as great. I did decide to award it one Heart of Gold for improbabilities and I almost gave it a Green Lantern for superheroics.

But, the stories that Jance tells in this book flow so well and are so integrated, that I enjoyed reading it. It even kept me up past my bedtime last night so I could finish it.

The story begins with a former LA rival of Ali's who was also "let go" by a television station becsause mature women don't attract the right audiences for newscasts. Ali's "friend" starts drinking too much, eating too much, and chasing the wrong men too much.

One of the men she "chases" is online, and when she discovers that the online boyfriend is stringing several women along, she decides to expose the guy and begins interviewing the women he's been virtually involved with. The problem is that one of the names on the list she finds is his employer in a scheme to build and sell drone bombers to really bad guys.

The employer is a no-nonsense, heartless crook who begins offing the people involved with the scheme when they're no longer needed. Ali's friend is down the list, but she is on the list.

The murders involve city and county cops all over east LA and central California, so lots of cops get involved. (I did have fun looking at Salton City in Google Earth since that was one of the settings in the book. Man, what a dump -- even from satellite photos!)

Ali, who has finished police academy training, but is not a cop, works with lots of real cops who are suspicious -- especially when she drops a few thou on a private jet to get an off duty homicide detective from one crime scene to another.

There are lots of complicaitons and lots of nooks and crannies in this story, but they fit together so well. (That is what earns the Heart of Gold award for too many coincidences.) Jance tells the stories well, both through dialogue and narration.

J. A. Jance talks about the origins of two of the stories in Fatal Error.

It's such pure entertainment, that I almost feel guilty enjoying the reading so much.

So, have you read Fatal Error by J. A. Jance? or another of Jance's 43 novels? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it (them).

The publisher's web site
A review from Kirkus Book Reviews
Andy Plonka's review from The Mystery Reader
Liz Nichols' review from The Mystery Maven Blog

Wilderness adventure

2011-11-02T10:47:00.000-05:00

Another book that family pusher Mary left with us was C. J. Box's new book, Back of Beyond.

I approached this book with a fair amount of caution. I've liked some of Box's books and disliked others. I was especially cautious after the enthusiastic pleasure of reading J. A. Jance's Betrayal of Trust. Some of Box's books were so violent and intense that I couldn't read the at bedtime. I do need my beauty sleep, you know. Besides, I was in the midst of a writing project of my own. (Be assured, you won't be interested in reading lesson plans for teaching comparative politics.)

So I began slowly and read a chapter at a time sporadically. I was trying to get a feeling for what was to come later. There was a lot of foreshadowing in the early chapters, and I wondered how far I would get into this story. I began anticipating a suspenseful, long, frightening drama of good guys hunting bad guys in the wilderness of Yellowstone.

The main character (Why is it that I resist using the term "star?") is disgraced Denver detective Cody Hoyt. He got a second chance at his career in a county cop shop in rural Montana. Box has created a character so flawed, that he's almost a parody of the mystery/adventure novel "star." Hoyt goes off the deep end (again) when his AA sponsor is killed and his son heads off on a wilderness pack trip with a man who is to become his step-father. Of course, the killer might also be on that pack trip. And no one knows who that killer might be.

Fortunately, to my little mind, Box exercises his writing skills in complicating the plot rather than creating frightening suspense. Horses and bears and wilderness plus competing evil plots and a couple fathers trying to bond with adolescent children, accompanied by an old codger who knows how to handle horses, make a good mix.

Yes, it's violent and bloody, but I wasn't tempted to quit reading. I actually read the last 100 pages avidly.

I really liked Back of Beyond. The flawed main character actually had some redeeming qualities. I'm sure I wouldn't like the guy, but he was brave and smart (mostly). His efforts to find and protect his son were admirable (mostly). My immediate reaction would be that the ends didn't justify the means, but this story is is like one of those ethical dilemmas that appear regularly in philosophy texts. So, maybe the ends did justify the means in this case. (Philosophers can jump in at any time here and present arguments.)

Have you read Back of Beyond or another of Box's novels? Write and tell this little bit of the world how you reacted?

The author's web site
Maxine Clarke's review at Petrona
Bonnie Brody's review at Mostly Fiction

Losses and Recoveries

2011-10-16T19:41:00.000-05:00

After struggling through Laurie R. King's latest book, I grabbed a book from a small stack left at our house by Mary, the family book pusher. I wanted to read something entertaining and, if possible, interesting. The book I picked up was J. A. Jance's Betrayal of Trust. It was entertaining and some of the characters were interesting.

There's a story in this book; actually several stories. It's what I was missing in Pirate King. Of course, maybe it was just me and "where" I was when I read it. There are events in Betrayal of Trust. One after another. Some of them seem to causally related (even when they are not). There are a couple of tragedies, some betrayals (as I would expect from the title), there's a revelation, and the beginning of a story of hope warm the hearts of Horatio Alger fans everywhere.

It's a "J. P. Beaumont novel" according to the cover. That means the main actors are Beaumont and his wife and detective partner Mel Soames. They work for the state's attorney general on special investigations. Going back at least as far as Nick and Nora Charles, they are independently wealthy and doing cop jobs because they want to.

The story begins with a snuff film found on the cell phone of the governor's step-grandson. The story expands from there to a suicide, two murders, at least three betrayals, an arson, and another murder. Luckily J.P. and Mel aren't expected to do all the investigating themselves. The AG keeps pulling more people into the case to follow up on clues.

In the midst of this complicated investigation, Beaumont gets an e-mail from an aunt he didn't know he had. He'd grown up with his mother who had been rejected by her family and the family of her lover who died before Beaumont was born. J. P.'s mother never told him who is father was and named him Beaumont after his father's home town. Suddenly there was the prospect of filling in the second half of his family tree. But first there were bullying, murder, and sex abuse cases to resolve.

I enjoyed reading this one. The story swept me along and kept pulling me back to the book as I tried to do other things. Luckily, it was cold and windy at the little cabin on the lake and I didn't really have to work at cleaning and closing during the first 24 hours we were there. I finished in time to write this before I had to tackle spider webs, dirty floors, and cupboards and a refrigerator that needed emptying.

Have you read Betrayal of Trust? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it.

The publisher's web site
Christine Sedlacek's review in the Desert News
Erin Andersen's review in the Lincoln Nebraska Journal Star

King's Pirate

2011-10-16T19:22:00.000-05:00

Back in September, Nancy and I had the pleasure of meeting Laurie R. King. She is the author of the Mary Russell mysteries featuring Ms Russell and her mentor Sherlock Holmes. King was in town to sign and read from her latest (11th) Russell mystery, Pirate King.

Besides being novelties, Nancy and I thought that the first few Russell mysteries were terrific. We also discovered King's Kate Martinelli series, written about a San Francisco detective. To us, they are equal to the best of the Russell mysteries.

The gems of King's books, in my mind, are the dark, yet hopeful novels about the lengths to which good people will go to do good things. I still wish those books are somewhat based on reality.

But back to Pirate King. The book required lots of research and travel to distant lands. We enjoyed hearing from King about her experience of writing the book. It was a bit weird to have her lead her audience at the reading in an amateurish and off-key new version of a Gilbert and Sullivan classic. (The new words were relevant to the new book.)

It was a treat to hear King read the first chapter. I often imagine an author's voice when I read, and now I'm pretty sure I had King's voice right in my head.

We gladly bought a copy, had King sign it it, and went home looking forward to reading the book that had been so much fun for the author to write. I got to read it first because Nancy was busy finishing a couple big projects.

It took a long time for me to read this book. Things began slowly in this mystery. In fact, the first real "event" didn't take place until half way through the book when one of the main characters pushes the other overboard during a crossing of the Mediterranean. And things didn't pick up much fro that point on.

I came away from the book feeling like I'd read an essay on movie making in the 1920s. (Remember all that research King enjoyed?) Following that was a little travelogue about Portugal, a briefing on heteronyms, a short history of the pirates of Morocco, and a description of an old Moroccan palace where the women of the movie company were held prisoner. (Remember the exotic travel King enjoyed?)

In my mind, stories are made up of events — one following another, often causally related. Essays and travelogues sometimes include themes and even events, but they are not mystery novels. This novel includes a flimsy plot, a bit of intrigue, and a dash of adventure, but it's more essay and travelogue than mystery novel. Enough said (for me).

I know the Russell books sell and they're what the publisher wants, but I want another Kate Martinelli mystery or another Darker Place.

Have you read Pirate King? What did you think of it? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

The author's web site
168 reviews at GoodReads
Rick Keiffel's review at the Santa Cruz News

Old gem

2011-10-08T11:24:00.000-05:00

I'm working my way through Laurie R. King's latest book very slowly. So, I'm posting a 2002 entry from the old ReadingOnTheWeb site. It's about a book full of important ideas that's still one of my favorites.

To keep my sanity and to keep my brain cells functioning I must read something besides mysteries and depressing things like Michael Moore's commentary.

Chinua Achebe, like Stephen Jay Gould, is one of my heroes. A wise and perceptive man, he's written several beautiful novels about Nigeria. They may have been works of fiction, but they were true stories.

I picked up his most recent publication, Home and Exile at the Carleton bookstore. It's based on a series of lectures he gave at Harvard a few years ago.

Achebe gave me hope and made me doubt that hope in the span of these few pages (105 to be exact).

He makes the case for the power of story telling. His thesis reminds me of George Orwell's.

In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative.

Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything..."

He then cites an epiphanal experience he had in a university classroom as the central metaphor for a discussion of how the "civilized" world captured the African narrative for over 400 years. At first it was done out of wonder, then to justify slavery. Later, the civilized world wrote to rationalize colonialism and then to defend its reputation.

He and his generation of African students, scholars, and writers began recognizing their loss and began inventing their own narratives.

Even today, as "the empire writes back," Westerners fight a rear guard action to maintain possession of the Third World's narrative.

V.S. Naipaul wins plaudits and is discussed in suburban book groups for describing the depravity and deprivaton of the Third World and deploring the childish resistance of Third Worlders to assimilation into Western civilization. And conservative scholars react to multiculturalism as if recognizing validity in something other than Judeo-Christian civilization threatens the importance (not to mention the superiority) of Greek, Roman, and Anglo Saxon values.

Achebe offers hope that more peoples will reclaim their own narratives, but one bit of pessimism startled me. It's possible, he says, that the damage done by "civilization's" control of the description of Africa and Africans for so many centuries and the propaganda sown by those narratives has made it impossible for us and them to see each other as equally human.

My idealism was challenged directly in a humanistic way. The shock was a danger to my naivete. At my age I shouldn't be vulnerable to such shocks. It does mean I'm still learning, but has my idealism been that superficial? Perhaps so. When confronted by Achebe's words, I knew I shared his fear.

Dehumanization of Africans by Europeans began before slavery. It grew more powerful and even scientific later. In the USA, slavery and the accompanying racism has shaped our culture in powerful ways. Can we, the purveyors of the toxic myth, overcome it? I sure don't know. We've made some progress in our civic behavior during my lifetime, but internalizing common humanity may be beyond us. Furthermore, can the victims of such description overcome the lies, the insults and the dehumanizing treatment? I can only accept Achebe's doubts.

This is an important book. If we're going to survive as a world, as a civilization, as a culture, and as a nation, we need to learn the lesson taught by this wise man. Read the book. If your library doesn't have it, ask them to find it. If you can afford the $10 it costs, buy it. It's Home and Exile by Chinua Achebe, published by Anchor Books A Division of Random House, Inc. The ISBN is 0-385-72133-1.

Alastair Niven's review in The Independent (UK)
Kole Omotoso's review at Africa Resource
Amy Reads' review

Surprise! Surprise!

2011-09-26T16:54:00.000-05:00

My expectations for a good book are probably pretty low. I don't demand big truths like Barbara Kingsolver. I like a story well told. I want to read about characters who are more than marionettes or caricatures. I like realistic stories to remain realistic and for fantasy stories to make me wonder.

As I finished Case Histories while sitting in front of the little lake named Blake, I realized I'd gotten more than I expected from a good book. Kate Atkinson's book took me by surprise because I expected just another mystery novel. This one was more.

The story is well told, but it's told in little episodes from different points of view. Sometimes the episodes were only a paragraph long. Sometimes the voice telling the story switches from one character to another with little warning. As a reader I had to constantly be "on my toes" -- no groggy reading or skimming through this one.

The book begins with three tragic and horrific short stories set in 1970, 1979, and 1994. A child disappears, a young woman is murdered, and a girl runs away from neglectful grandparents after her father is killed by her mother. Gradually these disparate events begin to come together in the files and investigations of a private investigator in Cambridge (UK). Former police investigator Jackson Brodie is approached in the course of a few days by people involved in these three "cold cases" for help in resolving them.

There are two or three principals involved in each of the stories, and Brodie is an experienced investigator who asks good questions and has good instincts for evaluating the answers he gets. Most of the people he meets and talks to are interesting and complicated, and, as the story progresses, so is Brodie. Atkinson sends him off into very personal internal daydreams in the middle of interviews sometimes, and they are very revealing. As distracting as those were to me as a reader, they didn't seem to distract Brodie from his quest for more information. However, Brodie's past includes a couple horror stories as tragic as the ones he's investigating.

I thought that Atkinson's writing was so evocative of the characters' emotions that often I could only read short bits at a time. It's realism without improbabilities. Well, there's one big and one smaller improbability, but I can always let a remote coincidence or two slip by. Neither the story nor the characters depended upon the improbabilities.

Case Histories is the best book I read this summer. Since summer is officially over, that's a wrap.

So, who recommended Kate Atkinson? Come on, out with it. You deserve some credit somewhere in karma. Have you read Case Histories or another of Atkinson's novels? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it (them).

Kate Atkinson's web site
Nymeth's review at her blog, Things Mean a lot
Michael Allen's review at his blog, Grumpy Old Bookman (this one's better than mine even though he's likes the book less)

Jason Isaacs (actor who plays Jackson Brodie) interviews Kate Atkinson about the BBC adaptation of Case Histories

Trailer for the BBC series Case Histories

Teaser for the BBC series Case Histories

Little Canadian treasure

2011-09-18T16:31:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty sure I know how Still Life got on my "to read" list. It was one of those innocent-sounding questions that Dale Stahl asked at the end of one of his e-mails, "Have you ever read anything by Louise Penny?"

My answer was, "No," but based on his recommendation, I put her name on the list.

I'm really glad I did. Tana French probably puts extra efforts into the beginnings of her books and Louise Penny must put extra effort into dialogue that reveals characters. And she creates characters that are more than names and titles.

For example, her Inspector Gamache has to tell his wife that he can't attend his grand-niece's christening because there's been a murder.

The scene unfolds: "'Did you murder this person?' Reine-Marie asked her husband when [he] told her he wouldn't be at the two-hour service on hard benches in a strange church.

'If I did, I'll find out...'

'"I'll just tell them you're drunk, again,' she said when he asked whether her family would be disappointed he wasn't there.

'"Didn't you tell them I was in a treatment center last time I missed a family gathering?'

'Well, I guess it didn't work.'

'Very sad for you.'

'I'm a martyr to my husband,' said Reine-Marie, getting into the driver's seat. 'Be safe, dear heart,' she said..."

Penny doesn't have to say much more about that relationship later in the book. Similar exchanges illuminate other characters and relationships.

And there's a story -- a complicated plot. For a story set in a small Quebec town near the U.S. border, there are quite a few reasonable suspects for the murder of a beloved, retired school teacher. There's even that chance that the death was a hunting accident, which caused a frightened outsider to run away. If Penny's later books take place in the same little town, I'll begin to suspect the Cabot Cove ("Murder She Wrote") syndrome, and I'll be very disappointed.

Right now I'm very happy to have read Still Life. It seems obvious to me that Penny loves the place and characters she created. If she keeps Inspector Gamache and his assisstant Jean Guy Beauvior and sends them around Quebec, she can avoid creating a death trap village like the one Richard Levinson and William Link created for Angela Lansbury.

I highly recommend this one. Good characters, good story telling, no great gore, no sex (not even a kiss), few improbabilities, and no super heroism. Oh, and there are some literary references (Auden, Davidson, and Plessner) that are not out of place.

Have you read Still Life by Louise Penny or another of Penny's books? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of them.

More on "cozies"

2011-09-15T20:46:00.000-05:00

After disagreeing with Dan about Rhys Bowen and Molly Murphy mysteries, I discovered that the discussion group at Once Upon a Crime, a Minneapolis bookstore, was talking about Rhys Bowen last night.

I couldn't go because Nancy and I had made plans to go hear Laurie R. King at a Barnes and Noble near St. Paul. So I suggested to Dan that he might want to go.

Turns out he couldn't go either because he had tickets to hear Maria Muldaur. That turned into a digression about Muldaur (whose performances we both like) and about Pandora, which has become my primary music source.

This morning, after enjoying the presentation and reading by King, I found Laurie R. King's blog's hosting a guest blogger, Rhys Bowen!

Bowen and King, it turns out are good friends. And, as Bowen points out in the blog, they both write about women doing unusual things.

I pointed out the blog post to Dan, who wrote back,

Loved the blog--surprising connections.

What Rhys Bowen writes, about women doing things that people thought they couldn't or shouldn't, is exactly what the last two things I've written are really about: the Cokato [MN] girls playing basketball in the 1920s [the PDF version], and Amelia Earhart flying -- and consciously using her fame as a flyer to push for more opportunities for women and girls and to inspire them to grasp them.

On top of that, she makes reference to Amy Johnson (Britain's Amelia Earhart) whose biography I am currently reading. Almost weird. Thanks.

By the way, as I wrote earlier, if you didn't like Molly Murphy you would absolutely abhor Lady Georgiana. It is like going from Classic Comics to Archie and Jughead! But I love 'em. Unlucky you!

Here are my clarifications:

I have no problem with women doing unconventional things. I have a problem with people doing the improbable and unlikely in fictional venues where most things seem realistic. (I like Lewis Carroll and Jasper Fforde.) My example: Bowen's Molly Murphy flees Ireland and arrives penny-less in Liverpool, where the police are looking for her. As she flees down an alley, she's pulled into an unmarked door. What greets her there? Murderous attackers? Dangerous delinquents? No. She is greeted by a woman who gives her a ticket to America so Molly can deliver two children to their father in New York. And the scheme, right out of an I Love Lucy episode, works.
It's not just improbabilities. Laurie R. King, who, by the way, called her Mary Russell books "cozies" last night, writes well and creates pretty believable characters. Once you get beyond the conceit of a recent Oxford grad becoming an investigatory partner to Sherlock Holmes, the rest works pretty well. It works because King describes fairly realistic characters, tells good stories, and invents good dialogue. Bowen often relies on the old standby, "and then a miracle happens" to her handsome and daring cutouts of characters. I think an author ought to offer something besides, "It'll all turn out right in the end."
An author ought to do more than write grammatically correct sentences and put events in chronological order. Laurie R. King might write "cozies," but she's only able to write one a year. Bowen writes 10-15 books a year. And no, she's not that more talented.

In a few days I'll finish another book and write about it here. It probably fits into the "cozy" category, but the author has a way with words and manages to create more than cardboard cutouts of characters. Just wait.You can join this discussion. Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

Dan Conrad disagrees

2011-09-13T21:58:00.000-05:00

This deserves more than relegation to a comment on my Rhys Bowen review. Dan wrote,

Hey, c'mon! You just trashed my favorite "sleuth!"

I've read 'em all and can hardly wait for the next! And if you think Molly Murphy is light, just try Rhys Bowen's "Royal Pain," etc. series featuring the 37th in line to the English throne--in the 1930s. They make the Molly Murphy stories seem positively Bergmanesque!

Here in this vale of tears. I like, from time to time, to turn to something lighter where you KNOW everything will turn out just "peachy-keen" in the end. Maybe it reflects the fact that I first learned to love reading by devouring comic books.

And, seeing the others on your "don't read" list I think now that I better check out M.C. Beaton and Ngaio Marsh as well. If I want something dark and heavy and thought-provoking I can always reread Hardy, Eliot, Woolfe or Brookner -- or go back to something profound like Elegance of the Hedgehog (also among those you have trashed).

We've been agreeing on too much--so about time we could argue a little!

I'll have to gather my thoughts for arguing. And I'll have to go back and see what I said about Elegance of the Hedgehog. Did I really trash it?

And I can hardly wait for your reactions to Beaton and Marsh.

I didn't know you were a closet "cozy" fan. Never had a hint.

Lightweight

2011-09-12T14:30:00.000-05:00

I ventured back to the Northfield library, "to read" list in hand. Well, actually, it was in my pocket.

I began near the top of the list. The name Rhys Bowen was near the top and incredibly handy on the library shelf. There were a number of books there by Bowen, and I pulled the first Molly Murphy mystery, Murphy's Law, off the shelf.

It's a lightweight. There are just barely over 200 pages, it's not much more than a paperback in size and weight. Unfortunately, it's a literary lightweight too.

It's set in turn of the 20th century New York, and the book jacket advertises Molly Murphy as a female detective. I was hoping for something akin to the better Maisie Dobbs stories. The story is akin to a comic book plot -- not even a graphic novel. It gets a whole slew of Heart of Gold improbability "awards." I couldn't begin to describe the improbabilities here.

I get impatient with Margaret Coel for writing so much romance novel into her mysteries. Murphy's Law seems to include a minor mystery as a framework for a THE BIG KISS scene. Not a sex scene, a kiss scene!

Give me a break!

On reading the St. Paul Pioneer Press on Sunday, I learned what I'd found in Bowen's book: a "cozy." Mary Ann Grossmann was writing about a self-published book she thought was wonderful and hoped it would help the author find a publisher. The author didn't know it, but with Grossmann's help learned he'd written a cozy. I didn't know what a cozy was, but I read one.

Too late, I read the back cover. The selected press blurbs (carefully chosen and edited, as we know, to present the book and the author in some desired light) would have warned me if I'd read them while standing in the library. Kirkus Reviews compares Rhys Bowen to M. C. Beaton. A Denver Post reviewer compares her to Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. Beaton, Christie, and Marsh are all on my "don't read anymore" list. To top it off, someone at Publisher's Weekly says, "This mystery is sure to appeal to those who prefer old-fashioned , heartwarming stories to tawdry tales full of graphic sex and violence." That was written about a book published in 2001. Hey, I like my tawdry tales (to a degree).

So Bowen goes from my "to read" list to my "don't read anymore" list. Have you read any of Rhys Bowen's "mysteries?" How did you react to them? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

The author's web site
Some opinions at Epinions.com
Dawn Goldsmith's review at Crescent Blues
163 reviews at GoodReads

Betrayal of the reader

2011-09-08T20:54:00.000-05:00

Dan Conrad also wrote about another gripe he has about some writers.

While I'm at it, I wish to raise another gripe of mine -- besides series of novels going on longer than they merit. That is when authors break a kind of pact I think they (should) have with readers.

The pact is that as readers we will more or less suspend disbelief and go along with the story, even enjoy being led astray as we go, but NOT be suddenly tricked in a kind of "Ha, Ha, I sure made an ass out of you" revelation in the last two pages.

I don't mean a solution to the mystery that you never suspected, but being told at the end that the whole thing was actually someone's nightmare, or the ravings of an inmate in an asylum, or the last thoughts (before the killer returns) of a murder victim who you have been continually led to believe was going to escape, etc.

Two such that come to mind are Shutter Island by Dennis LeHane (& movie w/ Leaonard Decaprio) and the more recent Sister by first time author Rosamund Lupton. Both novels are exceptionally well written page turners which makes it doubly irritating to get to the ending which is a: "WHAM! Ha! Ha! Fooled Ya! -- Did you really believe that story? -- Well, maybe it happened as I told it--or maybe some of it, or maybe none. Now I can tell you that ya got all worked up over absolutely nothing. HA! HA! The jokes on you!"

Perhaps they think such an ending moves them out of the mystery genre (with its pact?) into something more Shakespearian in level of tragedy -- or something.

Does this bother you? I know lots of people loved the two mentioned novels, so maybe I shouldn't be upset.

[Well, I'm the one going around giving negative awards for improbabilities and refusing to read books where I expect to see too many of them.

[I agree that an author who betrays readers is a jerk. I don't want to read about angels, miracles, protective spirits, and sprites unless I'm reading something that's obviously fantasy.

[What do you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world.]

Dan Conrad on Jacqueline Winspear

2011-09-08T20:38:00.000-05:00

Dan wrote and I thought his comments deserved a couple posts rather than just a Comment on the blog entry.

My reaction to A Lesson In Secrets [Winspear's previous book] was that Jacqueline Winspear had finally run out of things for Maisie Dobbs to do that would last longer than a short story and filled in the rest with countless side stories that were neither very interesting nor in any way relevant to the main plot.

I wouldn't blame Sidetrack [the cabin] for making you doze off. You suggest the story lines are put in to be taken up in later novels. I hope not. When an author begins to write more about the personal lives of the characters -- main and otherwise -- than they do about the core story line I fear they are "running dry"on that series and should move on to something/someone else. Or quit trying to market the books as "mysteries."

Like The Help is, I think, a really great book to read with no mystery in there to move it along, just fascinating characters with interesting stories to tell.

ála Stephen King

2011-09-07T12:11:00.001-05:00

If Stephen King can make a classic car into an evil symbol, why not a snowman? Bill Watterson did just the opposite with snowmen in his comic strips. Jo Nesbø followed the Stephen King model in his 2010 book, The Snowman.

When I saw Nesbø's name on the shelf of new books, I recognized it. (That's the other reason I didn't need my "to read" list when I last went to the library.) Once again, I don't remember how Nesbø's fiction was recommended. Should I be keeping track of that too? Well, if you recommended this Norwegian writer, thank you.

The Snowman is a murder mystery focused on the search for "Norway's fist serial killer." According to a creepy Wikipedia article, there was one Norwegian serial killer, but nothing like the one in Nesbø's book.

The good guy in Nesbø's fiction is "antihero police investigator, Harry Hole," according to the book jacket. He gets a partner in this book who is a stunningly attractive young woman from across the Norwegian mountains (and cultural divide, evidently). There are several comments in the book about how the natives of Bergen are so different from the people of Oslo. Who knew that some Bergensians don't really think of Oslo as a capital city. Or that Oslo natives look down on people from Bergen. In spite of the prejudices in the Oslo cop shop, every male cop in the book except Hole drools over (and sometimes on) Katrine Bratt.

The killer the unlikely pair pursue seems to kill on the day of the first snowfall and builds a decidedly non-Watterson snowman at the site of the murder. As things progress, parts of the victims' bodies become parts of the nasty snowmen. (Maybe they were really snowwomen, since all but one victim was female. But Nesbø doesn't go there.)

The red herrings in the plot are good. At least twice I was tempted to think that Hole and Bratt had found the killer. But I could tell from the number of pages I hadn't read yet, that the story wasn't over. And the last line of the book suggests that the story isn't over yet. Look for a sequel.

I generally liked the book. Most of the story telling is good. The characters are interesting, although not as well-defined as I'd like them. But, there's too much story telling. I skimmed through the end of the book as Nesbø went on and on about the background of the killer. It was as though he'd gone to all the work of creating a back story and he couldn't leave it out of the book. I think he could have left it out.

Nesbø, who is described on the book jacket as "a musician, songwriter, economist, and author" has had three other books published in the USA. I think I'll keep his name on my "to read" list and look for another of his books someday. There's also a film based on his novel, Headhunters, that premiered in Norway and Germany this summer.

Have you read The Snowman or another of Nesbø's books? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world about your reactions.

BTW: Does anybody know what the Scandinavian "ø" does to pronunciation? Or what it's purpose is? It's a pain to type on an English keyboard. Rather like the little circle above some vowels (å). That's a mystery to me as well.

The author's web site
Wendy Lesser's reflections on Jo Nesbø in Slate
Barry Forshaw's review in The Indepdent (UK)

What's good?

2011-09-06T22:00:00.000-05:00

While at the cabin called Sidetrack, I read both of the library books that I'd brought with me. There's an interesting library there of books we've finished at the cabin and left behind as reminders, but I wasn't interested in starting a major reading project. So I picked up Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver. It was (and still is) on the bedside stack of potential reading.

I only read a couple of the essays, but one of them addressed a topic that I've wondered about here, why do I like some books more than others. I do know that my state of mind has a lot to do with my affection for a book. But there are other reasons. For instance, I really do like a well-told story.

Here are a couple of Kingsolver's comments that had me shaking my head in agreement. They are from "What is a good story?" that she wrote about her experience editing a collection of short stories.

Her first answer sounds like a textbook declaration: "What makes writing good? That's easy: the lyrical description, the arresting metaphor, the dialogue that falls so true on the ear it breaks the heart, the plot that winds up exactly where it should."

A couple pages she later, she is more personal: Good writing, she says, "should pull off the successful execution of large truths delivered in tight spaces... It will tell me something remarkable, it will be beautifully executed, and it will be nested in truth..."

I'm not sure I demand "large truths," but the rest of what Kingsolver says sounds to me like a good beginning definition of good writing.

By the way, her praise for short stories, tempts me to look up the volume she edited and read some short stories. She wonders in her essay why people don't read much short fiction. I usually avoid it. I wonder why?

Do you read or avoid short stories? Why? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

It's Maisie again

2011-09-06T21:51:00.000-05:00

I went back to the library, "to read" list in hand, but Ididn't really need it this time.

On the cart of recently returned books by the front desk was Jacqueline Winspear's A Lesson in Secrets. I don't know how Dan Conrad's request for this book from the Minneapolis Public Library is working its way up the waiting list, but Northfield's copy was just sitting on the cart waiting for me. I picked it up, checked it out, and never got 20 feet from the entrance. It was a satisfying and efficient trip to the library.

Sir Oswald Moseley, infamous for leading the British Union Of Fascists before
the second world war, figures indirectly in this story.

Reading A Lesson in Secrets was not as satisfying or as efficient. The book is once again full of fascinating details about fashion and technology of everyday life in London of 1932. There is a theme concerning the Crown's secret intelligence bureau and its focus on Bosheviks in Cambridge's colleges, while ignoring the growing influence of fascists and Nazis on campus. There's also a story about organized crime and a protection racket in London. In fact, there are many stories in this book. Too many by my lights.

Because there are so many stories here, none of them (not even the primary one) really get told well. There's the young widow that Maisie takes under her wing. There's Maisie's assistant Billy and his family. There's a story about Maisie's father, a widower for 20 years, and his new "girlfriend." There's Maisie's romance. And then there's Maisie's undercover job for Crown. Oh, and you might add that there's a story of Maisie's cover as a philosophy lecturer in a Cambridge college. (She's supposed to report on anything untoward she finds on campus.) There's also some of Maisie's reminiscences about her own student days in Cambridge. Well, you see the problem: how to tell all those stories in 321 pages. Winspear tries to do that and ends with, "Yes, time would give up her secrets. She just had to wait." Not great.

Those last lines affirm what I felt throughout the book. These are transitional stories. Most of them lead to future stories. The young widow, like Maisie, makes her way in the world. Billy and his family have a new baby and a brand new house with "an indoor lav." Maisie's father finds a boon companion for retirement. Maisie and her titled lover, in a romance novel, sort out how to merge their strong individual lives and compromise with the expectations of post-Victorian English high society. Maisie finds such satisfaction in teaching philosophy that she turns her detective agency over to Billy and the young widow while she commutes between her lover's London mansion, his family's estate in Kent, and her classrooms in Cambridge. And she probably takes on a few more undercover jobs for the crown while accompanying her lover (husband?) on his business trips around the world.

There are also some things missing. I just can't believe that Maisie's little MG roadster starts everytime she turns the key and it never breaks down or gets a flat tire. (MGs were not modern Toyotas.)

1930 MG like the one Maisie Dobbs drove.

How is it that Maisie and her friends never come in contact with the destitute and unemployed of 1932 England? I'm pretty certain that Winspear did the research, but were developers really building new, semi-detatched homes on the edge of London in '32? And then there's her lover's international business (and another character's global trading company). How was it that these companies were prosperous as the world's economies were falling apart?

So, I wasn't completely satisfied with the book. I wasn't efficient either. I kept falling asleep between chapters yesterday. There's something about being at the cabin called Sidetrack, looking at the lake, and doing bits and pieces of maintenance that are relaxing. And the relaxation led to several naps that interruupted my reading.

Check out A Lesson in Secrets for yourself. Then (or if you've already read it) write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it.

The author's web site
353 reviews at GoodReads
a review at Rundpinne

Families: can't live with 'em; can't live without 'em

2011-08-30T21:24:00.000-05:00

The other familiar name I found at the library was Tana French. Well, of course it was familiar, I just read In the Woods two weeks ago. This time I found Faithful Place and decided to see if French had written a book as good as the first one.

I have come to the conclusion that French must spend a lot of time on the beginning of her books. I wasn't lured in by the first paragraph this time, but by the first two pages. I once again felt drawn into her story and quickly became interested in the characters and what was going to come next. The opening scene, by the way, describes a film noir foggy night on the outskirts of Dublin and Frank Mackey, a young man waiting for the young woman he's about to elope with.

That's the beginning of the background story. The contemporary story takes place 22 years later and the young man from the first scene is the main character. All those years later, Frank's a cop who gets involved in the investigation of the disappearance of the girl who never showed up for the elopement.

He's also a guy surrounded by families. There's the family he grew up in and from whom he estranged himself. And there's the erstwhile family of his daughter and his ex-wife. Oh, and I suppose there's also the family at the cop shop that he's sort of part of.

This stories in this book are really frameworks for exploring what families can do to their own. Frank ran away from his family even though his intended never showed because he knew it was deadly and feared what it might do to him. His erstwhile intended's family isn't much better. The situation reminded me, in less dramatic and less drastic ways, of how my parents distanced themselves (and their children) from most of their families. They'd seen conflicts and nasty behavior and kept in close contact only with most of their parents. So Frank's absence from family for a couple decades is understandable to me. And after reading French's version of family life, I have trouble imagining why all of the people in the book's families didn't run away.

There's really not a lot mystery in this plot and only a bit of suspense. But the way French tells the story and gradually reveals more and more about the characters kept me reading once again. Unlike Coel's The Silent Spirit, I never resisted going back to read more when I had the opportunity.

The ending is a bit romantic (like Coel's), but I can live with that. If French pursues the story line suggested in the conclusion, I expect it will be less romantic, since most of her stories are grittily realisitc.

I liked the book. I didn't think it was as good as In the Woods, but I'll pick up French's second book (Faithful Place was the third) if I find it in the library.

Have you read Faithful Place? If you have, write and tell this little bit of the world how you reacted to it.

Tana French's web page for Faithful Place
Karen Ballum's review at BlogHer
Janet Maslin's review in The New York Times
Laura Miller's review at Salon (wish I'd written this one)

Frustrated romance; frustrating mystery

2011-08-30T14:57:00.002-05:00

One of the familiar authors I found on my last trip to the library was Margaret Coel. I didn't realize how familiar I was with Coel's books until I looked back at what I'd written about her books here. The earliest entry was in 2002 on the old pre-blogging blog ReadingOnTheWeb. I have averaged just over a book a year by Ms Coel. Some of them I've enjoyed a lot; others have been disappointing. Her story telling is not always top notch. She seems to slip into the romance genre when she spends much time writing about the relationship between a Jesuit missionary/recovering alcoholic on a Wyoming Indian Reservation and a middle-aged/native/divorcee/lawyer working in a nearby town.

In this new book, The Silent Spirit, Coel wanders dangerously close (in my mind) to romance while writing a mystery novel. Maybe she's writing more for a female audience or maybe she sees this as a balance to the superhero antics of Sue Grafton's and Sara Paretsky's characters.

The story is built around a young native man and his attempts not only to make something of himself, but to do something important for his grandfather. That important something is directly connected to his great-grandfather's involvement in the 1923 movie The Covered Wagon.

The two books I read just before this one (In the Woods and Junkyard Dogs) dragged me in and pushed me to keep on reading to the end. However, I read The Silent Spirit in spurts and often went back to it reluctantly. It seemed to me that some episodes were well-told and flowed right along. Then, reading the next episode was like slogging through a mucky swamp -- slow and difficult.

It turned out that the ending was one of the good parts. The widely-flung bits of plot, and a few irrelevancies, came together in Coel's romantic (in a philosophical snese) ending. The last 75 pages made me glad I'd mucked through some of the earlier bits.

Have you read The Silent Spirit? Write, and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it.

Other Margaret Coel books I've written about:

Nice doggy. Nice doggy.

2011-08-18T21:38:00.001-05:00

I had a busy morning yesterday. After my morning walk, I worked from about 8:00am to 1:30pm. (Working breakfast and working lunch) Things just piled up. I read the headlines and half a dozen articles in the 18 news sources I look at each morning. Found 3 articles that I prepared for the Teaching Comparative blog with bits of commentary and excerpts. I posted 4 excerpts and a comment to the blog that people had sent me. (I aim for one posting each week day, so this was quite unusual.) Then I got carried away trying to explain why the Texas governor is either ignorant or playing to the ignorance of his audience about money and banks. I posted a bit of my outrage at Google+. (If you look at it, you'll have to scroll down to the post with the graph showing the components of the money supply, since I don't know if there's a way to link directly to the posting.)

Finally, in the early afternoon, I showered and went off to run errands. One of them was to the Northfield Library. I returned the Tana French book I'd just finished and went off in search of new things to read. But, oops, I'd forgotten to bring my "to read" list.

That meant I was reduced to looking for new books by familiar authors. Good luck. I found a new book by Craig Johnson. I've written about Another Man's Moccasins and Death Without Company. I liked them, but I'd given both of them Heart of Gold awards for improbabilities.

Well, Junkyard Dogs gets a Heart of Gold and a Green Lantern (for super heroism).

This is another "Walt Longmire Mystery." One bit in the book has the sheriff getting a physical exam during which the doc catalogs his injuries and scars (including a broken bone in one foot and a partially detached retina). After that the super hero sheriff gets banged around some more, but still comes out able to see, walk, talk, and chew gum at the same time. More than any mere mortal. Give us a break, Johnson.

The book also gets awards for improbabilities. I only noticed a couple of them while reading the book, but some biggies popped into my head as I went to sleep.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I was was so entranced with the story and the pursuit of the villains, I finished the book about 11:15pm. Less than 12 hours after checking it out. And I sort of cooked dinner in there and talked to Nancy while eating it.

Craig Johnson relies of his super hero and on improbabilities, but he spins a mean yarn. The characters are pretty one-dimensional, but he spins a mean yarn. Winter on the high plains of northern Wyoming is brutal, but Johnson spins a mean (and complex) yarn. He kept me going for a long time. Oh, did I mention that there's some good humor in the book, too? Like the opening scene where grandpa ties himself to the bumper of the car in the yard while he cleans the chimney, but his granddaughter-in-law doesn't know it and drives off. (Grandpa survives that one, and it's funny because he does.)

Do you need more recommendation from me?

Have you read Junkyard Dogs? Or another of Craig Johnson's mysteries? Write and tell this little bit of the world how you reacted.

Craig Johnson's web site
Condorena's review at Murder by Type
An interview with Craig Johnson at Art and Literature, The Literary Blog of Raleign's Metro Magazine
Jen from Loraine, Ohio's review at Jen's Book Thoughts

Stories to read

2011-08-16T21:17:00.000-05:00

The other book I checked out during my last trip to the Northfield Library was Jana French's In the Woods. I wish I'd kept track of where I learned about this book. I'd like to thank someone for the recommendation. As it is I have no idea how this book ended up on my "to read" list.

After the last two books I tried to read and didn't finish, I really wanted a book to like.

French won me over on the first page. Her prose and the images she created with them were wonderful. Let me quote:

Picture a summer stolen whole from some coming-of-age film set in small-town 1950s. This is none of Ireland's subtle mixed for a connoisseur's palate, watercolor nuances within a pinch-sized range of cloud and soft rain; this is summer full-throated and extravagant in a hot pure silkscreen blue. This summer explodes on your tongue tasking of chewed blades of long grass, your own clean sweat, Marie biscuits with butter squirting through the holes and shaken bottles of red lemonade picnicked in tree houses. It tingles on your skin with BMX wind in your face, ladybug feet up your arm; it backs every breath full of mown grass and billowing wash lines; it chimes and fountains with birdcalls, bees, leaves and football-bounces and skipping-chants.

I know, I've said I'm a reader who likes stories. What French did was snare me with a gorgeous scene. On page 3, she begins telling one of the stories in the book. And she does tell stories well. One of the stories is an awful story of the disappearance of two 12-year-old children that happened a dozen years before the other stories. Oh, and when those three children went mising, a third child survived without memories of what happened. Another story is about a young policeman who has achieved his professional goal of becoming a homicide detective. There's also a story about the relationship between the detective and his partner, who is a smart, mouthy, and very competent woman. The primary story is about the murder investigated by these partners.

In the first third of the book, the detectives' partnership reminded me of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Gal Friday. The smart dialogue and the knowing cooperation is a joy to behold. It changes after that, and I didn't like as I was reading, but in the end, the changes made sense and offered a bit of realism to the fiction.

The story about the children who went missing is told partly in flashback and partly in the words of old police reports. The linkage is that the detective was the child who survived without memories.

The mystery is complicated and intriguing, if murder can be intriguing. It's a major case and a whole raft of characters are drawn into the situation. A third detective joins the main pair and is almost immediately a part of the screwball comedy dialogue.

The last half of the book tells the story of the dissolution of those amazing relationships and the investigation into the details of the murder. It's well done.

I liked the characters. I enjoyed the telling of the story. I came to accept the development of the characters, even though they changed from the very attractive people introduced early in the book.

Also, after struggling unsuccessfully to wade through two books, I not only read this one, but I read it eagerly.

Tana French remains on my 'to read" list. She's written two more books since this 2007 first novel. The other two are also in the Northfield Library. I look forward to checking one of them out.

Have you read In the Woods or another French's books? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

Tana French's web site
Maxine Clark's review at EuroCrime
Beth's review at Bookworm Meets Bookworm
Marilyn Stasio's review in The New York Times

Double failure

2011-08-10T21:22:00.000-05:00

I'll take these failures on myself, but I had lots of help.

Nancy brought Connie Willis' All Clear home from the library. I picked it up and took it to the cabin named Sidetrack because I'd read The Doomsday Book, Remake, and To Say Nothing of the Dog years ago and liked them. There was another Willis book, Promised Land, that I wasn't so fond of.

All Clear was advertised on the dust jacket as another of Willis' time travel novels. I'd found that to be an entertaining and clever device in earlier books. The plot device is that Oxford University historians about 50 years from now discover a method of time travel that lets them go into the past as researchers and return to their rooms in mid-21st century Oxford to write eye-witness accounts of historical events.

Willis' characters are most interested in what went on in London during World War II (as in To Say Nothing of the Dog).

I quickly found out that the 600+ page All Clear was the second of two volumes telling one story. Since I'd read earlier time travel books, I thought I could get by without reading the first volume, Blackout. It turns out I could get by without reading all of the second volume as well.

How many times do I have to read some internal dialogue about a character's fears that she's trapped in the past? Or that she's done something to trap another researcher in the past? Or that one of her colleagues has done something to change the course of history? Well, Willis seemed to think that one or another of her characters just had to say those things to herself every few pages. And how often was it necessary for me to read about the anxieties of getting to work on time or the exact details of what trains were necessary to travel from one part of London to another?

Willis is a successful author, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't need an editor.

[Short aside: Nancy's website features a quotation from T. S. Eliot: "Even a superb writer needs a good editor. A merely good writer needs a superb editor."]

To Say Nothing of the Dog was full of humor and joy. This book was full of anxiety and stress. Okay, the V-1 and V-2 rockets and the Blitz were no fun in London. But the earlier book was also set in London during World War II London. If Blackout, the first volume is a twin to this one, I'd suggest that someone abridge the two and make a (400-page?) science fiction novel out of them. I might have enjoyed reading that and even finished it.

Then I picked up Per Petterson's I Curse the River of Time at the Northfield library. It got on my "To Read" list because of a review in the New York Times. Stacey D'erasmo wrote that "Petterson’s narratives tend to unspool in the first person, in hushed, confidential tones. Tight-lipped with one another, his characters open their hearts to the reader, making us witnesses to their most private selves. He makes the reader lean in, out of the wind, to listen closely..."

I'd read Out Stealing Horses a few years ago and liked it. Maybe I wasn't in the mood for the moody, self-indulgent, un-selfconscious internal dialogues in I Curse the River of Time either. The main character wasn't interesting to me.

Another book I didn't finish.

Oh, well. My "To Read" list is still long. It was disappointing that one of the books on the list is only available from the libary as an e-book for an e-reader. I don't have one of those yet. But books? I can handle lots of them.

Have you read Connie Willis' All Clear? or Per Petterson's I Curse the River of Time? How did you react? Write and tell this little bit of the world about your experience.

Connie Willis' web site
An admiring review by Julie Phillips in The Village Voice
A less admiring review by Dorman T Schlinder in the Denver Post
Per Petterson's web site
An admiring review of Petterson's book by Kristin Ohlson at Cleveland. com
Rachel Cusk's positive review of I Curse the River of Time from The Guardian (UK)

Stieg Larsson, political reporter

2011-07-30T07:45:00.001-05:00

In the shadow of the terrorist attack in Oslo, Joan Acocella posted a bit in the New Yorker, "Stieg Larsson and the Scandinavian Right."

The killer in Oslo was exactly the kind of guy who Stieg Larsson spent his pre-novelist career trying to warn the Scandinavian people about. Maybe they should have listened before Larsson created Lisbeth Salander.

In the Times' heavy coverage of the killings in Norway... the name of Stieg Larsson has not come up. That is curious. The major subplot of the stories on the massacre is what many people are now describing as the indifference of the government and press corps in Norway... to native right-wing movements and their potential for violence... [H]omegrown fundamentalist movements have been gaining power in Scandinavia since, decades ago, the citizens of those countries began to lose faith in the benevolence of their vaunted welfare states...

Larsson had an unglamorous job as the Swedish correspondent for a magazine, Searchlight, that was English journalism’s watchdog against right-wing movements in Europe. In his articles for Searchlight he describes the car bombings, the rallies, the magazines of Sweden’s extreme right. He has only one message: fascism is on the rise. “For too long,” he writes, “Nazis, in the eyes of society, have been simplistically and credulously equated with a few dozen skinheads on a Saturday-night stampede.” That’s not the case any more, he writes. They are men in suits and ties, and they are getting elected to office...

Larsson’s main concern was the abuse of women, immigrants, and Jews... Eventually he turned his attention primarily to women...

The summer camp that Anders Breivik invaded last week, a hatchery for the children of the liberal ruling class, included young people whose parents and grandparents came from Africa and Asia.

Such inclusion—or, from another perspective, infiltration—is what the Scandinavian right wing opposes, and political parties ruled by that refusal are gaining power...

Hurry up and wait (for the paperback)

2011-07-27T08:07:00.000-05:00

Paperback Publishers Quicken Their Pace

It used to be like clockwork in the book business: first the hardcover edition was released, then, about one year later, the paperback.

But in an industry that has been upended by the growth of e-books, publishers are moving against convention by pushing paperbacks into publication earlier than usual, sometimes less than six months after they appeared in hardcover…

Publishers say they have a new sense of urgency with the paperback, since the big, simultaneous release of hardcover and electronic editions now garners a book the bulk of the attention it is likely to receive, leaving the paperback relatively far behind. They may also be taking their cues from Hollywood, where movie studios have trimmed marketing costs by steadily closing the gap between the theatrical release of films and their arrival on DVD…

The entire publishing life cycle has sped up in recent years. Hardcovers have less time to prove themselves in bookstores, since retailers tend to move them off the shelves more quickly than they used to. E-book sales are usually strong in the initial period after the publication date but do not spike again after the paperback comes out, said Terry Adams, the digital and paperback publisher for Little, Brown & Company…

As bookstore owners pointed out, readers love paperbacks.

“It’s definitely making the consumer happy to have the paperback available sooner,” said Peter Aaron, the owner of the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, an independent store. “If there’s one form of printed book that will survive, if there was only one, it would be the trade paperback.”

Frustration rewarded

2011-07-26T21:50:00.000-05:00

I picked up the last of my birthday cache from book pusher Mary. It was Queen of the Night by J. A. Jance. I'm glad I did, but for quite awhile I wasn't at all sure that I was fortunate to get this gift.

Queen of the Night flowering cactus

Jance's credits page lists 41 previous books. I've read several and been impressed with her characters. I guess she really knows how to structure a plot too. This one is like jigsaw puzzle that is difficult to put together. When I started the book, I had trouble following the story. The book consists of tiny snippets of story and action. Okay, but they aren't consecutive. Each one is carefully labeled with place, day, date, time, and temperature, but that didn't really help me unless I paged back and looked at the labels of earlier snippets. It was frustrating.

Even more frustrating was the huge cast of characters. I stumbled through the first 100 (of 350) pages. But there were interesting people and intriguing mysteries that made me want to continue reading. What I did was go back through the first 100 pages and make a chart of the characters and their relationships.

As you can see, even if you can't read all my scribblings, there are lots of people and lots of relationships. And new characters were introduced after the first 100 pages, too. Not all of them made the chart. This diagram became my reading companion right up to the end. Maybe my old brain isn't as capable as it once was. Maybe I just didn't concentrate enough, but this is supposed to be recreational reading, not academic study. Maybe Jance just created too many characters and too many complications.

I was reminded of the Russian novels that had lists of characters at the beginning. Jance could have helped by making such a list. I also remembered reading Michael Fredrickson's second book, Witness for the Dead, that I read back in 2003. It had a large cast of characters, but something about the way the book was written and how the characters were introduced made it easy for me to keep track of them. (If you look back at that review, done in a pre-blog presentation, you'll find that some of the links are no longer functional.)

Making the chart and referring to it everytime scenes in the book changed, made all the difference for me. I got so I could recognize names and checked the chart for relationships and statuses. From there on the book was great. Reading the last 100 pages kept me awake until nearly 1:00am (long past my usual bedtime).

I'm really glad I made the effort to finish the book. It's really too bad the beginning was so difficult. It's a story full of heroes and villains and family feuds and family loyalties. The story centers on actions -- good and bad, and you know from reading things here that I like good stories. I just wish the story telling had been easier for me to follow.

Have you read Queen of the Night? What was the experience like for you? Write and tell this little bit of the world about your reaction.

The publisher's web site for the book
Kirkus Review on Queen of the Night
Mary Ann Smyth's review at Book Loons
Terri B.'s review at Tip of the Iceberg

Nosey nurse

2011-07-20T11:16:00.000-05:00

Nineteen months ago, Dan Conrad passed on a recommendation of a Masie Dobbs-like mystery by Charles Todd, A Duty to the Dead. I finally read it.

It's good.

I found a copy at the used book sale run by the hospital auxillary last spring. I plucked it off the pile a week or so ago.

It's not a Masie Dobbs mystery. It is set during World War I, not in the war's aftermath. Hero Beth Crawford is an active duty British nurse from a well-to-do family, not a fortunate, talented former nurse who, with the right mentors, has made her own way in the world. Beth Crawford is home on recuperation leave after her hospital ship was sunk by a mine (she doesn't spend much time on R&R).

She's carrying a message from a dying patient to his family. She doesn't know want it means, but she has an overactive imagination and a really nosey attitude. She also has enough money, enough friends and family, and enough time and energy to poke around in the "private" world of a dead soldier's family.

Okay, I might make it sound bad, but if you read the book, you'll find Charles Todd putting an opposite spin on the whole situation.

The mother-son duo who is Charles Todd

In spite of that I liked reading the book. The story is complex and well unwound. The characters are pretty thin and the British countryside is mentioned, but not featured. There are some improbabilities, but I'm not inclined to award any Heart of Gold prizes for them. Well, except maybe the final one where Beth Crawford goes to a previously unmentioned aunt or cousin or something and finds a sympathetic and helpful advisor. It made me wonder why Crawford hadn't she gone to Aunt Melinda sooner.

I'll second Dan's recommendation of A Duty to the Dead, and look forward to reading another "Bess Crawford Mystery." However, I'll look forward with greater anticipation for the next "Masie Dobbs Mystery."

Have you read A Duty to the Dead or another of the Bess Crawford mysteries? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

The authors' web site (There's a video of the authors talking about and reading from the book. You might want to skip it. The book is much more lively and alive than the authors' presentation of themselves.)
Irma Heldman's review at Open Letter Monthly
Good Reads' 600+ ratings and 200+ reviews
Uncredited review at Women in World History

Why not dead?

2011-07-17T15:25:00.000-05:00

Well, I was reading through a welcome stack of books that I began accumulating in April, and dear Nancy brings home a book from the library. That means I should read it before it is returned unless I want to make the effort to find it later. Not that I minded much. The book was another in the Kate Shugak series by Dana Stabenow. I've liked most of Stabenow's books that I've read.

This one is Though Not Dead.

Right off the bat, I have to give this book two Green Lantern Superhero awards and a Heart of Gold Improbability award.

That bat, that I mentioned above, is about the only thing that wasn't used to hit Stabenow's superhero Kate Shugak in this book. I lost count whether it was 3, 4, or 5 times that Shugak was knocked silly and unconscious during the course of this story. I would suspect that Stabenow has a medical consultant she could consult about the short and long term effects of those injuries, but I really doubt that Shugak could wake up, blink, and carry on as nonchalantly as she does in this story. (Of course, as I recall, Shugak has survived worse in other stories, but in my memories her recoveries have been more realistic.)

Then there's the plot within which all this damage is done. As the book opens, Shugak's self-appointed foster father has died. He was a respected community elder. His gruff, outspoken manner was appreciated by most people. He left a mysterious message for Kate Shugak with his will, and that sets the story in motion.

It's a wonderfully complex story. Only slightly improbable. It's the actions of Kate Shugak and her "enemies" that are improbable. The bits and pieces of the story unwind and then join together in fine ways. Stabenow is a very good story teller. That is what holds this all together in the face of superheroism and incredibly unlikely events.

Like the other Kate Shugak stories, it takes place within the mostly native community on the edge of wilderness in southeast Alaska. The area is about 200 miles southeast of Wasilla in "the park," Stabenow's name for the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. Since the park is so new, there is still a lot of private land and some native communities within the park. (After all, there's still some private land within Glacier National Park, and it's 101 years old.)

Downtown Chitina, Alaska, near the site of Niniltna
(reminds me of Cicely from Northern Exposure
Of course, outside shots for that TV show were filmed in Roslyn, WA)

Niniltna and the native villages are familar communities, full of familiar people to readers of earlier Stabenow books. But, there's a big mining company doing an environmental impact study for a proposed gold mine nearby that brings in a lot of outsiders as well as providing jobs to many locals. Plus, Stabenow allows the community to change, as with the death of Shugak's "father." That kind of vitality is one of the things that makes these stories attractive to me.

Oh, and Kate Shugak's love interest? He's off in California because of the death of his father. And presumably he's coming back to the wilderness richer than Croesus. What will become of two rich adventurous do-gooders in "the park?"

The hard-headedness of superhero Shugak and too many improbabilities keep me from proclaiming this really great. But I liked reading most of it.

Have you read Though Not Dead or other Stabenow books? What did you think of them? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

Dana Stabenow's web page for Though Not Dead
Mary McManman's review at MLive
Nina Sankovitch's review at Read All Day
Over 300 ratings at Good Reads

Burned by Barr's Improbabilities

2011-07-11T21:32:00.000-05:00

Many years ago, long before I dreamt up the Heart of Gold awards, I stopped reading Sue Grafton's novels about the adventures of Kinsey Millhone. I think it was around G is for Gumshoe (1989) or H is for Homicide (1991). Grafton's private eye was improbably doing dumb things and improbably surviving attacks by bad guys. It was too much fantasy for me.

Before the little California girls flew home, I picked up another of the birthday books from our family book pusher. (Thanks, Mary.) This was a Nevada Barr book, Burn.

This book earns a couple Heart of Gold awards. Usually, improbablities leave me cold. I like stories and I like realism. I am not keen on superheroes in an otherwise realistic environment. Maybe I should give Burn some kind of superhero award too. A Green Lantern award for improbable superhero?

Well, the improbabilities in Burn could power The Heart of Gold across the universe and back several times (I know that's an oxymoron in Douglas Adams' universe). One of the biggest improbabilities is that Barr's hero, U. S. National Park ranger Anna Pigeon, is a superhero in an otherwise normal universe. At least in modern Superman's "world" there are super villains to contend with. (I don't recall super villains in the 1950's Superman of my youth, but that's another issue.) And then there are the scenes where straight-laced, uptight Ranger Pigeon goes undercover as a hooker in New Orleans' French Quarter. And she doesn't get tagged as a female impersonater. Nor does she get approached by any Johns.

And Barr resorts to a plot device often used by mystery writers: sending her main character off on an investigation she has no duty to follow and one that's far outside her purview. I see that most often in TV scripts, but it's here, right out in public. In fact, Ranger Pigeon is supposedly in New Orleans recovering emotionally and physically from her last adventure. Instead she decides to jump into situations she knows little about and without any consultation with people she loves and respects (like her husband and her sister).

I've really enjoyed most of Barr's mystery-thrillers. As escapist lit, she does a good job of story telling.

There are two stories in Burn which merge about half way through the book. I enjoyed the separate stories more than the single joined story. Once Anna Pigeon got involved with murder suspect on the lam from half-way across the country, things went downhill. I read the second half of the book wondering how Barr was going to pull all her irons out the fires. Her methods were improbable.

My unsolicited advice to Nevada Barr is to send her ranger back into the arms of her sheriff-preacher husband and find out how the two of them can more realistically work together. And don't neglect to have Ranger Pigeon's psychiatrist sister come for a visit. In my mind each of those people offers needed balance for the Anna Pigeon character (and stories about her).

Have you read Burn? Or another of Barr's novels? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

Nevada Barr's web page for Burn
Laura Taylor's review at Buried Under Books
Julie Hyzy's review at Reactions to Reading
Dorman Schlinder's review at The Denver Post

Reintroduction

2011-07-11T21:00:00.000-05:00

A couple years ago, I awarded some books I read "Heart of Gold Prizes."

The name for the prize came from Douglas Adams' space ship in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. [It had a black control panel (like my now obsolete audio amplifier). Black controls mean that no one can really tell what the controls control. But given the way the space ship worked, no one needed to use the control panel anyway.]

Heart of Gold

The reason I choose that space ship for the prizes was becasause of the power source used by the Heart of Gold. Kevin Kelly in his io9 blog, described the propulsion system this way, "The Heart of Gold ran on an infinite improbability drive that took it through 'every point in the universe at once' when it was switched on. Not too shabby. All it took was an electronic brain and a good Brownian motion generator, like a cup of tea, and you're off. Probably the cheapest form of travel ever invented."

I bring this up because of some of my recent reading. I'm ready to award some more HoG Prizes. Improbabilities drive me up a wall. Especially blatant ones. These are not awards of honor. A couple prize winners follow.

Doing my Doig

2011-07-11T14:50:00.000-05:00

Ivan Doig is one of those names I see tossed around in the world of Literature. Well-known authors review his books.

On the Ivan Doig Literature Map, there are no names really close to his. That, to me, indicates that Doig's work is ideosyncratic. But some people whose books I've liked are not far away: Dan O'Brien, Norman Maclean, Leif Enger, Alexander Mccall Smith, and Kathleen Norris. On the fringes of the map are names like Willa Cather, Rita Mae Brown, C. J. Box, and Louise Edrich, whose books I have mostly liked. But there are also names like Danielle Steel. Danielle Steele?

Yes. I liked the first couple of Doig's books I read. I should have stopped after the first couple. I'd have better memories.

I'm more convinced than ever that these books are script outlines for television soap operas (if there are any still around). The little scenes he describes as his way of telling stories could easily be 4-minute televison scenes. And the way in which the scenes follow characters instead of timelines fits with what I've seen of soap operas as I've surfed channels. And the extended timelines (e.g. slow progression of story telling) also fits with my image of those daytime sagas.

Well, I've now done my Doig. I picked up Bucking the Sun at the Hospital Auxiliary book sale. It'll be the last of his books that I'll pick up.

This one centers on the extended Duff family, immigrants to Montana from Scotland. They get displaced or recruited to help build the Fort Peck Dam in Montana.

Dredging to build the Fort Peck dam.

Most of the Duff family were hired hands on the project and lived in one of the boom towns around the dam. Doig romanticized those towns and the people who survived there. Not everyone shared those views.

Dr. C.C. Lull, a doctor in the boom town of Wheeler, described the place and its people this way:

The natural result of this desire for recreation and entertainment when not on shift of work was that these places became a fertile field for the professional gambler and those of questionable reputation, both male and female, who live off the 'sap' and his hard-earned money. Bootlegging became rampant and a 'red-light' district was established.

There were gamblers, bootleggers, women of questionable income, and the men who associate with them. Professional dancers, grafters, robbers and morphine addicts and not a few wanted by the law sought refuge in this area. As time passed, the better and more substantial citizens became acquainted with each other, casting the influences against these undesirables, and made it too hot for them to remain any longer to plunder on the strange public without detection.

Lull doesn't mention that the workers were also begin recruited by the IWW other union organizers. Proletarian politics at its best and worst.

Bucking the Sun is light on plot and big on characters. It's evidently big on symbolism, too, but most of that missed me. The reading group guide that was at the back of the edition I read was full of questions about the difference between fiction and nonfiction, the purpose of "back stories," and the causes of the betrayals in the story. Okay, not my kind of questions. Well, except for the one about fiction/nonfiction. I did go looking to find out if one of the big events late in the book actually happened. (It did.)

I'm as tired of the stories Doig has told as I am with the dry, high praries of eastern Montana. I know, those praries might be one of the reasons I enjoy the mountains just to the west, but I cannot think of what the romances of 20th century east slope Montana will help me enjoy more.

Agree? Disagree? Write and tell this little bit of the world why.

Ivan Doig on Bucking the Sun
Customer reveiws at Amazon.com
Gene Lyons' review at Entertainment Weekly
Readers' reviews at GoodReads

Readers, put this on your calendar

2011-07-11T13:29:00.000-05:00

The Library of Congress

July 18, 8:00pm EDT from CNN

"This program looks behind-the-scenes at the Library of Congress, allowing viewers to learn the history of the institution as they tour the Library’s iconic Jefferson Building and see some of the treasures found in its collections of rare books, photos, and maps. It will also feature a look at some of the presidential papers housed there, ranging from George Washington through Calvin Coolidge. Viewers will learn how the library uses technology to preserve its holdings and expand public access to them. It will also show how technology is helping to uncover new information about some of the items in its collections."

"The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world with nearly 150 million items. It was started in 1800. Its first books were bought from England with a $5,000 appropriation from Congress. Housed in the U.S. Capitol, the library was destroyed in 1814 when British soldiers burned the building. Hearing of the fire, Thomas Jefferson offered to sell Congress his book collection. After much debate, Congress agreed to buy the collection for just under $24,000. In 1851, another fire destroyed 2/3 of the library’s holdings. In 1870, Congress passed copyright legislation that required two copies of every book published be sent to the Library of Congress. Subsequently, the holdings of the library grew extensively. Congress debated whether to give the library its own building. That didn’t happen until much later. The library moved out of the Capitol building and into the Jefferson building in 1897. Today, the Library of Congress spans over a total of 8 buildings."

More about Montana before mid-century

2011-06-30T13:52:00.000-05:00

I was enchanted by a four-year-old recently. It probably helps that she's a granddaughter, but she's pretty wonderful without that status.

I was planning on spending a couple evenings with her, but for most of that time, she'd be asleep. So I grabbed a small paperback by Ivan Doig (another of those books I picked up at the used book sale). I figured it would be easy to hold on to while I read to stay awake.

The book was Heart Earth. It was written about a decade after Doig wrote the autobiographical This House of Sky. In This House... Doig told the story of growing up with his widowed father and his maternal grandmother. The time wasn't easy for any of them. Doig's mother died on his 6th birthday. His grandmother joined the household because there was no other way for his father to continue earning a living and maintaining a family. Father and mother-in-law never seemed to like each other, but they joined forces to create a family.

I haven't read This House of Sky, but I did read Heart Earth. Heart Earth is a recreation (or reimagining) by Doig of his mother. After his uncle died, he was handed a packet of letters from his mother to her brother. Doig's uncle served on a warship in the Pacific during World War II, and his mother had time and inclination to write to her brother and share a lot of her thoughts and feelings with him.

From these letters, Doig attempts to describe his mother and her married life. There are many holes in the description, as we'd expect. In spite of the apparent intimacy of the letters, he writes about events more than about the person who was his mother. Maybe that's to be expected, too. Doig was too young to have many memories or first hand impressions. This writing exercise seems primarily to be a personal project in which Doig tries to find out more about the mother he never knew.

I never really got engaged with the story or the people. And it wasn't because I read most of this during a couple nights of babysitting. Doig's prose is rich and smooth. It's also pretty passionless and non-judgemental. His other books have plot that this real life biography doesn't. The book ends with his mother's death. As the number of unread pages dwindled, I knew where the death was going to happen. No dramatic build up or climax here. Just sorrow, but even that was mostly implied.

Maybe you've read Heat Earth and found things there I didn't. If so, write and tell this little bit of the world about your experience with the book.

Ivan Doig's notes on Hearth Earth
Beth Fish's review of Heart Earth

More interesting books

2011-06-27T20:05:00.000-05:00

The Future Has A Past - J. California Cooper
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
Texas by James Michener
Rereading the book I wrote, Remnants, so I can write the sequel this summer!
Journal of a UFO Investigator by David Halperin (because when I was 7, I was a UFO investigator)
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susannah Clarke
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

An intriguing book list

2011-06-27T12:09:00.000-05:00

My college alumni Facebook page asked grads what they're reading this summer. Here are the results from the first two hours. It's lists like this that often lead me to books I'd never encounter otherwise.

I'll resist the temptation to comment and just post the list (without links too):

My Antonia by Willa Cather
The Portrait by Ian Pears
Uncertain Path: A Search For The Future Of National Parks by William C. Tweed
Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl [Okay, I'll comment. The author was once in a class I taught.]
Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson
Fire and Ice books by Neal Stephenson
In The Woods by Tara French, great mystery and great writing
The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization by Vishal Mangalwadi
Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors by James Hornfischer
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (listed twice)
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Bossypants by Tina Fey
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
Cinderella Ate My Daughter: dispatches from the front lines of the new girlie-girl culture by Peggy Orenstein
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Emma
Unbroken
Fall of Giants
In the garden of beasts
The Origins of Political Order, Vol. 1 by Francis Fukuyama
Game of Thrones series by George R.R. Martin
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
Waiting for Aphrodite (essays about amphibians) by the wonderful Sue Hubbell
Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne
Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
Embassytown by China Mieville
Philosophical Fragments and Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard

Great story again

2011-06-18T15:40:00.000-05:00

For at least the third time, our family book pusher provided us with a novel by C. J. Box. I think she likes carefully reading these before they become welcome gifts in our household.

I first read a C. J. Box mystery/adventure when Nancy bought one in West Yellowstone. The first one I wrote about here was Winterkill in 2006. However, I mentioned then that I'd read two earlier books by Box. (I read Open Season and Savage Run in the days before I began posting these notes on the blog. I have written about Free Fire, Blue Heaven, and Below Zero. Along the way, I passed on reading Three Weeks to Say Goodbye because it sounded too grim.

Box is such a good story teller, that I've read most of his books even though, as I've said before, I don't like nastily violent books like these.

As with at least two other Box novels, I didn't want to put this book down once I got into it. Paradoxilly, I kept taking breaks in my reading because I didn't want to be done with the book.

There are two stories in Cold Wind, and they pretty much run parallel to one another until the end of the book. In an earlier book, Wyoming ranger Joe Pickett and his outside-the-law doppleganger Nate Romanowski were seriously estranged from one another. As we might expect one of this book's stories is about Joe and the other is about Nate. At the end of the book, the two stories merge and Joe and Nate reach a kind of truce. And the ending sets up the next story which is likely to threaten Nate, Joe, and Joe's family.

Between the covers of this book, a fabulously rich rancher is murdered, his widow (Joe Pickett's mother-in-law) is accused of the crime, someone clumsily tries to kill Nate, Joe's oldest daughter heads off to college, and Joe spends time monitoring the fall hunting season in north central Wyoming between taking comp days to investigate the murder. The plot is satisfyingly complicated, but it's the story telling that stands out.

As usual, there's a fair amount of improbability in the details of the story, but I can overlook it when it's told this well.

Have you read Cold Wind? other C. J. Box books? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

C. J. Box's web site
Wyofile on the local star of fiction
An interview with Box at the blog Jungle Red
Tracy Grant's review of Cold Wind at The Washington Post
Chris Rubich's review in The Billings Gazette

From the Kindle store

Enough Scandinavian. How about a Canadian author?

2011-06-15T21:07:00.000-05:00

Dale Stahl wrote from his post-school year leisure with another suggestion for reading. He's another valuable friend who is regularly reading interesting things. This is what he recommended today. (And no, Dale, no one else has mentioned these before. Thank you.)

Here is another series I wonder if you have read or anyone has written about: The Inspector Gamache novels by Louise Penny?

They are all set in an idyllic little Canadian village outside of Montreal that seems to have an inordinate number of murders. [Sounds like Murder, She Wrote] The characters are wonderful -- Penny creates a social life of flawed but connected people that I would love to drop in on for dinner. And speaking of dinner, every meal enjoyed by the characters makes one’s mouth water. Not to mention the wine and cocktails before during and after!

The murders in these books are all a little convoluted, no straightforward bludgeoning or stabbing, and I had thought them a bit farfetched until I opened my Star Tribune and read about the MN man who is accused of crushing his wife with a giant totem pole.

PS also I am for sure going to pick up and read the rest of the works by the Norwegian author K.O. Dahl I mentioned to you earlier. Really enjoyed the Fourth Man.

Do you have a suggestion for us? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

Louise Penny's web site

Louise Penny introduces her hero Armand Gamache.

Multiple recommendations

2011-06-15T15:45:00.000-05:00

Dan Conrad dropped me an e-mail with an interesting list attached.

I thought you might find this of a tiny bit of interest.

What follows is my "request" list at Hennepin County Library.

The interest, I think, is not what I happen to have on order but as a check of the relative popularity of several books, which we might have a common interest in. Check, for instance, the long list for The Ice Princess. This will be my first Camilla Läckberg book. Have you read anything by her in your perusal of Scandinavian crime fiction? Also, note that Masie Dobbs beats out her "clone" Bess Crawford, 7+ to 1. That seems just.

Anyway, all in all a totally frivolous FYI. Any here you have on your "to read" radar?

Title	Author	Position (Place in Line)
Bad Intentions	Fossum, Karin	15 of 45 (on order)
A Bitter Truth: A Bess Crawford Mystery	Todd, Charles	15 of 32 (on order)
The Devotion of Suspect X	Higashino, Keigo	21 of 23
The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life	Hughes, Bettany	15 of 32
The Ice Princess	Läckberg, Camilla	463 of 485
A Lesson in Secrets: a Maisie Dobbs novel	Winspear, Jacqueline	17 of 228
Naughty in Nice: a Royal Spyness Mystery	Bowen, Rhys	35 of 112 (on order)
A Red Herring without Mustard: a Flavia de Luce Mystery	Bradley, C. Alan	87 of 92
A Singular Woman: the Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother	Scott, Janny	102 of 136
So Much Pretty: a Novel	Hoffman, Cara	27 of 67
Started Early, Took my Dog: a Novel	Atkinson, Kate	5 of 214

It's going to be awhile until Dan gets to read The Ice Princess. On my mental to-read list are the Maisie Dobbs mystery and Janny Scott's bio of Obama's mother. However, I'll have to investigate the others on this list as well. Except maybe the Soctates book. I might add Socrates to my fairly short list of things I'm unwilling to spend much time on anymore. Go ahead, call me a philistine.

Dan also wrote with a note that could only come from someone who identifies himself closely with his Swedish immigrant ancestors. But maybe you'll find some recommendations that will fit your reading mood even if you're not Swedish, Swedish-American, or Scandinavian. (I don't think there are any "important" books on this list.)

Two years ago, Dan sent me the same list. That time he'd found it in The Guardian. If you go to that blog entry, "Vem hade kunnat gissa?" you can see links to reviews of the books on the list besides Dan's. If he's read 6 of these books in the past two years, he's made great progress, especially if he's waited for library copies.

"I get a magazine called Swedish Press. In the current issue there is an interview with a current "hot thing" in Swedish crime fiction, Camilla Låckberg (Ice Princess, e.g.--not read it myself, but have it on my library request list, see above). Anyway, they asked her what she thought were the "Top Ten Swedish Crime Novels." Here is her list.

"I put an asterisk by ones I have read and also what I rated it on a scale of 1-5. [Note: I do have a "6" but that's for books I would like to read a second time]. Which have you read?"

Mind’s Eye, Håken Nesser (Read his Borkman’s Point and didn’t care for it)
* Blackwater, Kerstin Ekman (4.5)
* Missing, Karin Alvtegen (4)
* Sun Storm, Åsa Larsson (4)
* The Fifth Woman, Henning Mankell (3)
* Unseen, Mari Jungstedt (2)
Shame, Karin Alvtegen
Echoes from the Dead, Johan Theorin
* Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Steig Larsson (5)
Midvinterblod, Mons Kallentoft (Not translated yet)

If you look at the ReadingBlog entry, you'll find that my reaction to Nesser's Borkman's Point was much like Dan's. I read Mari Jungstedt's Unspoken and liked it. I've read all three of Stieg Larsson's books and I liked them all, although The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the best. Netflix delivered the third Swedish movie based on the books, The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, and we watched it last weekend. It was really good -- maybe as good as the first film. I have no interest in seeing the American versions which are currently in production.

Don't want to wait for the library copy?
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That's what I get

2011-06-13T21:25:00.000-05:00

Every once in awhile, my ego whispers in my ear that I ought to read something more "important" than merely entertaining fiction. Sometimes, I listen to that voice.

Prelude: Forty-some years ago, I trotted off to one of my first college classes. It was a math class titled Math 10. It was the most basic math class offered. The topic was something called calculus.

I had no idea what calculus was. It sounded like calculation. I'd taken all the available math classes in my small town high school. I'd done well, even in the most advanced class: solid geometry and trigonometry. I knew I had to take a few math/science classes to earn my degree even if I wanted to major in political science. What better time to fulfill one of those distribution requirements than a couple months after finishing the math curriculum in high school?

I was lost in the calculus class from shortly after attendance was taken. I don't think I knew how lost I was for a couple weeks, but I was in over my head. Indeed nearly everything that was said in the class went over my head. Unfortunately, the prof lectured. I have no idea what he said. He didn't ask us to do problems in class. He had no way of knowing how lost I was until the mid-term.

I asked a friend for help. She'd graduated from high school at 16 and had taken calculus in high school. She tried to explain things, but it was probably too late. I started hanging out at the prof's office during office hours. That's when he found out how lost I was. He helped me figure out how to solve some basic problems, but he never did succeed in teaching me what calculus was or why anyone would want to know how to use it. I think I passed the class because I hung out asking for help.

What is all this reminiscing about? I picked up an important book recently that I'd read about. The topic sounded interesting and the review I saw was enthusiastic. It turns out, the reviewer was enthusiastic about the anecdotes that dot the book's chapters. But most of the book is about abstract math and quantum physics and genetics, none of which I understand any better than I understand calculus.

The book? The Information by James Gleick. Some of the anecdotes are indeed interesting, but finding them is a chore. They should have been in a different typeface than the other stuff. And since I never really understood what the book was about, I never figured out why Gleick told the stories when he did. I know what a fibonacci series is, but why would anyone care enough to even identify it?

There were whole chapters where all I could do was scan the first sentence of paragraphs looking for an interesting story, because the textbookish stuff was opaque to me. Numbers, to me, are meant for counting and measuring. What do you do with a sentence like, "Turing proved that some numbers are uncomputable." I shrug and say, "So what?"

The book was big, 525 pages with footnotes. The cover was white. It reminded me of Twain's so-called autobiography. It was less interesting, but it was easier to ignore the boring (incomprehensible) parts. I would have been very satisfied with a New Yorker article.

I should have focused on this line from the review, "Gleick ranges over the scientific landscape in a looping itinerary that takes the reader from Maxwell’s demon to Godel’s theorem, from black holes to selfish genes. Some of the concepts are challenging..." Challenging, hell. For me most of the concepts were meaningless.

Anyone have a more basic introduction to information theory? You don't have to answer that question. I'm not sure I want to know anymore.

Have you read The Information? What did you think of it? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

Geoffrey Nunberg's review at The New York Times
Janet Maslin's review at The New York Times
Nicholas Carr's review at The Daily Beast

I get the impression that none of these people really understood much of what Gleick wrote either.

Freeman Dyson, I am sure understood what Gleick wrote about. His review in The New York Review of Books helped me make some sense out of The Information even though it didn't help me understand the math and science that Gleick chronicled. But, by the time I read it, I didn't much care anymore.

Reading what I write

2011-06-05T12:54:00.000-05:00

I guess I better read what I write as well as what comes to me from other hands.

A couple days ago, as I concluded my thoughts on a new book, I wrote, "I liked reading Fidelity. Now, I'll have to go looking for a Jane Whitefield mystery and see how Perry handles a series."

When I looked at the plot summary of the first Jane Whitefield novel I thought it looked familiar.

Then I searched this blog. I neglected Bird Loomis' advice and didn't read the first of Thomas Perry's Whitefield novels (Vanished), but I did read Dance for the Dead last fall.

I even wrote about it: First romance, now fantasy. I sort of liked it, but I wasn't terribly impressed. It must not have been very memorable. I'd forgotten about it. I guess writing about things I read isn't a way to remember forgettable things.

Murders most foul

2011-06-01T18:59:00.000-05:00

After reading about Montana at the beginning of the 20th century, I picked up a book about southern California at the beginning of the 21st century. That hundred years might have been the least of the differences between the two books.

First Bird Loomis and then Gary Sankary recommended Thomas Perry's books, and I've read a bunch of them. (Search for Perry in the search box at the top left.) No series of books centered on a few stock characters in Perry's bibliography; the books stand alone and the characters are unique (except for the "Jane Whitefield series" which I haven't come across yet).

Fidelity is one of the books I bought on my most recent Sunday afternoon expedition to a bookstore.

While Dancing at the Rascal Fair was an antique Western romance, Fidelity is a murder mystery thriller. Doig writes about people's lives over a 30 years span; Perry writes about events during a week (with some narrative flashbacks); the tensions in the story of last century Montana came from the ongoing nature of relationships while the tensions in the southern California story come from the murderous intent of a couple of the characters.

The only internal dialogues and reflections indulged in by Perry's characters are directly connected to the mysteries and the dangers. Doig's main narrator was often thinking about meaning and self as well as destiny. There is some progression in the emotions of the threatened widow of the first murder victim in Fidelity, but it seems to come without anguish. Would a woman still in shock at her husband's murder, who just found out about his long term affair, really approach her husband's mistress with an "I dont' care about that, I care about this..." attitude? Ah, well, even if it's unlikely, Perry tells a good story -- and remember, I'm a story guy.

The story begins with an ambush murder. It continues with sinister and horrific threats against the dead guy's widow, and the circle of horror expands from there. The characters and their back stories are lightly drawn, but it doesn't matter. It's an adventure story and well told.

I liked reading Fidelity. Now, I'll have to go looking for a Jane Whitefield mystery and see how Perry handles a series.

Have you read Fidelity? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

Thomas Perry's web site
Janet Maslin's review in The New York Times
Kirkus Review on Fidelity

Dancing in Big Sky Country

2011-05-26T20:52:00.000-05:00

Every year the Northfield Hospital Auxiliary holds a used book sale as a fundraiser. We look forward to it as a way to offload books we don't want to host any longer. This year I went to the book sale to purchase some children's books for a granddaughter who will be visiting in June.

I came home with more than just kid lit. I already had several books from my Sunday expedition to the book store, then I got some birthday books from my favorite family book pusher, and now I have more on the short shelf of books to read.

I did start reading another of the books from the pre-April 15 purchase, but I haven't finished it yet. It's one of those books that's taking a long time to read. When I headed off on a road trip to visit another granddaughter, I grabbed one of the book sale books as well as the tape of the French philosophical novel (see previous entry here).

So, while in the quiet times between play dates with the kid, I began reading Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig. The earlier Doig books I've read have been interesting and entertaining to one degree or another.

Dancing... was published in 1987, and was Doig's third novel. It's set in the northwestern Montana country where he grew up. His love of the country is as obvious as Hillerman's love of the desert southwest. Right away, I have more in common with Doig. However, while Doig likes the east slope prairies, I'd rather be in the mountains themselves. I'm not trying to make a living there though. Doig's people are.

The book is a western romance, starring a pair of young Scotsmen who came to America in the late 1880s. They would have been about the same age as my great-grandparents who came to Minnesota from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois. (Well, okay, some of my great grandparents weren't immigrants.) As a little kid, I knew two of those great grands, and as I read Dancing..., I kept trying to think of my ancient worthies. Didn't work. Doig's characters seemed entirely too human, normal, and modern.

The Hancock homestead, July 23, 1910, photo by Walter Lubken, a Bureau of Reclamation photographer (from Wikimedia Commons). Original source

My great grands were near and over 90 years old when I remember them. They were dependent upon my grandmother. They didn't get out. I'd have to work my imagination to the bone to see them as young, vital, and passionate. Even the old great grandfather who bragged about riding a horse to Yellowstone and back as a 21-year-old was probably only telling stories to his grand and great grandchildren.

The worthy ancients of Doig's imagination are human, normal, and modern. And they are young, vital, and passionate. And they're stars of a soap opera. The two heroes arrive in Montana with nothing but the name of an uncle. That part I get. One of my great grands arrived from Denmark with nothing but a name. (Unlike the Scotsmen, he didn't speak English.)

The Scotsmen homesteaded land in foothills of the Rockies. They became sheep farmers and members of a rural community of sheep farmers. They struggled to make a living; they fell in love, wisely and unwisely; they raised families; helped each other; and hurt each other. The ups and downs of life.

Doig adds some drama to the telling and his narrator adds some reflection and analysis. Sometimes that gets in the way of the story. (Remember, I'm a story guy.) Sometimes that reflection is thoughtful and descriptive. It makes me slow down in my reading. There are big sections of this book where I had to read slowly and carefully and pay attention to more than just the verbs.

I enjoyed the book. I'm glad I have a couple more books by Doig on my short shelf (I found three at the book sale). However, I think I'll read other things before I read another. I'll probably even go back to the book I didn't take on the road trip to visit my granddaughter.

Meanwhile, I think Dancing at the Rascal Fair is a good book. Have you read it? Did you like it?

Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

Ivan Doig's web site
Links to 175 reviews at Good Reads
Dan Webster's review at Spokesman Review

The return of the philosophical rodent

2011-05-18T20:52:00.000-05:00

About two and a half years ago, Dan Conrad wrote on Facebook, that The Elegance of the Hedgehog was the best book he'd read in 2008. He didn't write to tell us why, but I picked up his comment here and quoted a review from The Washington Post.

I don't recall that Dan ever explained his preference, but did mention the book by Muriel Barbery a time or two in conversations since.

So, I was heading off for a visit to a granddaughter. That meant 10-11 hours on the road. As usual when facing a road trip, I visited the Northfield library. When I saw the CD version of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, I checked it out. I listened to half of it on the way to Jim, Ange, and Jaime's. I listened to some of the rest on the way home.

I know why Dan liked this book. The author is a professor of philosophy. The book is full of philosophy. Ethics, epistemology, aesthetics, and metaphysics. There's very little plot. In fact, one English marketer noted that the book wouldn't do well in the UK because people there want plot more than anything else.

I'm a plot fan too. So I had trouble with the book. I don't think I could have read it. For me the philosophical processes of analyzing alternatives and meaning are tedious. I do understand why and how such cogitation can be appealing. It's just not appealing to me. While driving down the road, I could let the philosophical verbiage go in one ear and out the other. When I listened to the last two CDs at home, I kept falling asleep.

BUT, did you notice that I finished listening to the whole book? When I awoke and found that I'd slept through a track, I went back and listened to what I'd missed. Why? None of the tedious philosophizing was imperious or pompous. None of it was trivial. In fact, it was all tied to the "reality" Barbery created in the book. There were far too many big issues raised for me to keep track of. I think I could have spent a month with this book if I was of a mind to think through all the ideas she raised. But, I'm a plot fan.

AND, the three main characters are just amazing. There's a middle-aged Parisian concierge in an upscale condo building. She acts like the dumb country bumpkin the residents expect her to be. But in her back room she's reading Kant and Tolstoy, listening to Purcell and Mahler, and studying 17th century Dutch still life paintings. In her spare time, she's seen all the arty films of Yasujiro Ozu.

There's a friendless 11-year-old resident of the building, who is equally bright and forced to keep that quality under cover to satisfy her bourgeoise family. (She gets to narrate a third of the book through her journals.)

And then there's the new guy in the building. He's a rich Japanese businessman who, while being a successful importer, is also a secret intellectual, whose tastes in art and philosophy match those of his new concierge.

And then there's the ending. Eleven year old Paloma says, "I learned 'never.' It's awful!"

Have you read The Elegance of the Hedgehog? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it. Or, if you read it, don't forget to tell us about your experience.

Caryn James' review in The New York Times
Michael Dirda's review in The Washington Post
Why The Elegance of the Hedgehog Is For Grownups by Delia Lloyd in Huffpost Living
Viv Groskop's review in The Guardian

Your choices are the book, the recording, the Kindle version, or the French film on DVD.

Reading in Antarctica 80 years ago

2011-04-26T21:01:00.000-05:00

In 1928, Admiral Richard Byrd led a scientific expedition to Antarctica. His chief scientist and second in command was geologist Larry Gould. Gould did real science and confirmed that Antarctica was geologically similar to the other continents.

When the Byrd explorers returned to the US in 1932, they were famous heroes and many of them went on speaking tours around the country. Gould also wrote a book about the expedition titled Cold.

Gould went on to become a geology professor and president of my alma mater, Carleton College. The college has kept the book in print for decades. (Used copies are still available at Amazon.com and ebay.) Then last fall, Northfield's Cannon River flooded. The basement of the college's West Gym filled with water. The swimming pool's pumps and the building's HVAC system had to be replaced. And the remaining copies of Cold became sponges.

My talented wife now has the job of editing the text for the next edition of Cold. She reports that it's well-written and interesting. And, luckily, the 50+ photographs in the book are available for republishing in the national archives.

In the process of editing, she found these amazing discussions of reading in Antarctica over 80 years ago. (What was Jean Christophe, by the way?)

[Reading during the "winter night"]

I believe the most important single source of recreation that made the time pass easily was our library of some 3,000 volumes.

When we were looking forward toward the winter night all of us anticipated great times with the books, but few of us, I think, had such ambitious projects as did one man who came to me one day early in the winter and said: “Larry, do you know what I am going to do during this winter night?” Of course I hadn't the slightest idea.

“Well,” he said, “I am going to learn aerial surveying and navigation and read the Encyclopedia Britannica through.”

It seemed a fairly ambitious program to me, but I didn't want to discourage the man so I assured him that if he carried out the project he would certainly achieve the essentials of a liberal education. His literary aspirations were rather short lived. He did start with volume I, letter A of the encyclopedia and got as far as “ammonium tetrachloride.” I saw him throw the book down with a look of disgust and asked him what was the matter.

“The stuff in that d--- book is no good for an aviator,” he replied.

Commander Byrd had charged me with the responsibility of collecting the library as part of our preparations back in New York. I asked him what sort of books he especially liked to read. His reply indicated considerable catholicity of taste: “Dickens, detective stories, and philosophy.”

And of all the various classes of reading matter that were represented detective stories were the most widely read, with accounts of other polar expeditions making a close second. The most widely read single book of all was W. H. Hudson's Green Mansions. Donn Byrne and Joseph Lincoln were more exhaustively read than any other two authors -- Mark Twain came next. We had a complete set of Kipling's works which was scarcely touched. As for myself, had the winter night given me opportunity for no other reading than Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe and Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga in its entirety I should still have considered it well spent. To me these are two works of this day that will live if any do. Jean Christophe is the most satisfying work of art with which I have ever come face to face...

[Reading while returning from the Queen Maud Mountains, a three-month geology expedition by dog sled that encompassed a total of 1,525 miles .]

We were in such excellent physical condition from the hard work of the summer that we travelled along with great ease, especially as compared with the hard work that had accompanied our southward trek. But the dogs were showing the effects of the gruelling summer's work and we had to be careful for their sake, and, purely on their account, we decided to limit ourselves to 23 miles per day. Some days when the surface made sledging easy for them we made good this distance within six or seven hours, nevertheless we forced ourselves not to get impatient but stopped and made camp…

There is much more variety in a polar night than there is in a polar day, and besides, one can create light when he tires of the darkness. But there was no way for us to induce even semi-darkness...

I don't know just what I should have done with all my free time had it not been for the few books that we had brought along with us. Each man had been allowed one book and ordinarily I should have brought Browning with me, but I had been reading him off and on all winter and elected to bring a thin paper edition of Shakespeare, complete in one volume. I regaled myself with Hamlet and Macbeth and King Lear and Love's Labor Lost and The Passionate Pilgrim, trying to fall asleep. When the day's journey had been particularly easy we would have supper over and be finished with the work for the day, ofttimes as early as 6 o'clock. I would crawl into my bag and lie there and read until 12 o'clock or later before going to sleep.

But I ran out of Shakespeare. One doesn't realize how much reading he can cover when he has five to seven hours per day without any kind of interruption. It had never before occurred to me that one of the real advantages and benefits of an Antarctic Expedition would be the opportunity to read Shakespeare in his entirety. I have never appreciated all the tragedy of Lear quite so much as I did in this reading of it out in the midst of the Ross Shelf Ice.

Mike Thorne had brought along W. H. Hudson's Purple Land and though I had read it but a few weeks previously, I read it again with the delight I always find in Hudson's exquisite prose. Eddie Goodale had brought a volume of English poetry which I devoured and in which I was glad to find one of my great favorites by Browning, "The Bishop Orders His Tomb." O'Brien had a big thick volume containing H. G. Wells short stories. I read this too, and it would have afforded me no end of satisfaction to have dropped this volume down the deepest crevasse I could find, but O'Brien objected strongly. He had borrowed the book from Russell Owen who wanted it returned...

The Research Vessel Laurence M. Gould was commissioned in 1995 and is chartered by the National Science Foundation for use in the oceans between Chile and Antarctica.

The RV Gould at Ross Station, Antarctica.

Sunday, the library is closed

2011-04-18T22:17:00.000-05:00

Already we suffer from reduced public spending. The Northfield library used to be open on Sunday afternoons in the winter. No more.

So, when I came home on Saturday wtih a book I'd already read and didn't want to reread, I was stuck.

What it meant was a 35-mile ride to the nearest bookstore. It was a nice Sunday afternoon. Driving the Prius meant I used less than 2 gallons of gas for the round trip. Still, it was a luxury I would think more than twice about after writing checks today for income taxes. (Tom Paxton, at the time of the first auto industry bail out, wrote a song, "I'm Changing My Name to Chrysler." Later he updated the song to "I am Changing My Name to Fannie Mae.") Today, I want to change my name to GE. I don't want any of its billions in profits. I just want to avoid paying taxes on my income like it did.

Back in the halcyon days before I saw our tax returns, I made the drive to the bookstore and came home with several books. One of the was A Test of Wills, that I wrote about a couple weeks ago. Another was Last Rituals by Yrsa. Yrsa is another of the Icelanders who usually do without a family name. When publishers outside of Iceland demand a second name, she gets her revenge by saying, "I'm Yrsa Sigurðardóttir." (Go ahead try and write or type that one.) It's so difficult that her publisher transliterates her name into Yrsa Sigurdardóttir.

Enough about Icelandic names.

The cover of the book says that Last Rituals is "A Novel of Suspense." An unnamed USA Today reviewer was more accurate when describing the book as a "fascinating and deliciously creepy mystery." The closest to suspense I could identify was what was wrong with the main character's teen age son or how long would it take for the divorced Icelandic lawyer, Thóra Gudmundsdóttir (Þóra Guðmundsdóttir) to get into bed with the gorgeous German guy who was directing the investigation.

No suspense, but definitely creepy. And sort of fascinating. The story is strung out like a trail of breadcrumbs behind Hansel and Gretel. One thing leads to another and another. Sometimes the trail is a dead end, but if you haven't eaten the breadcrumbs, it's possible to get back to the main route.

Yrsa writes well and translator Bernard Scudder does a great job of putting things into casual and correct English. Thóra and the German factotum talk to each other and to the people involved in a grisly murder. The dialogue moves the plot along very well (I've noted that before; for me it's usually much better than straight story telling most of the time.)

The victim was the son of a wealthy German family researching Medieval witch burnings in Iceland. His death seems as symbolic and horrifying as the persecutions he was studying. Matthew, a representative of the German family, needs help understanding Iclandic and Iceland. Thóra is an attorney who could use the generous fee offered by the family. Besides, she's a quick study and smart. The local police are on the fringe of things, but pretty much quit investigating when they're satisfied that their suspect is guilty.

So, no suspense. If there was any suspense, it happened in the back story. Lots of creepyness. Not very delicious. But it's a well-told story. Several of the characters are interesting. Ysra has written a couple more novels about Thóra, and I'll be looking for them in the library. (Buying books is on hold for awhile.)

Have you read Last Rituals or another of Yrsa's novels? Did you like it? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

Yrsa's Facebook page
The publisher's web page
Maxine Clarke's review at EuroCrime
Karen Russel's review at How Mysterious!

Goodluck and bad luck

2011-04-17T22:13:00.000-05:00

The early returns from Nigeria point to the reelection of President Goodluck Jonathan. It seems a good time to write about Goodluck Tinubu.

Tinubu is the title character (and victim) in Michael Stanley's book The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu. After reading A Carrion Death at the beginning of last year, I was looking forward to reading another book by the writing team who go by the name of Michael Stanley. But in the blur of daily life, I forgot.

Then blogging friend Gary Sankary reminded me that there was another "Detective Kubu mystery." So, I looked for it on my next trip to the Northfield Library.

The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu is a big book. It has about twice as many pages (460+) as most of the mysteries I read. Then again, there are two authors. The main character is Botswanan detective David "Kubu" Bengu. (Kubu is the name for hippo. The detective resembles a hippo in girth as well as in determination.)

If you're not familiar with a bit African history, you'll have to learn about apartheid, Southern Rhodesia, Zimbabwe and its war for independence, and the proximity of Botswana to South African and Zimbabwe. It also helps to know a little about the terrors of present-day Zimbabwe.

You see, George Tinubu got his name Goodluck when he survived a murder during the hostilities between the white settler government of Southern Rhodesia and the independence fighters. However, the authorities listed him as dead because they found his identity papers with his fingerprints on them. Goodluck Tinubu went on to become a school teacher in Botswana. Many years later, he was killed in a tourist camp in northern Botswana near the border with Zimbabwe.

The local police don't seem able to make much headway in solving the murder because there are so many likely suspects and so many possible motives. So Detective Kubu Bengu is called in from the capital.

The story is set up well in the opening chapters, and it's well-told through conversations and bits of inner dialogue. I enjoyed reading the first half of the book and was thoroughly immersed in the story.

Then the book got better! The story telling never seemed to falter. Michael and Stanley write short snappy chapters and manage the information flow very well. There are partial escapes from the hunt for a murderer or murderers when Kubu gets home for weekends with his wife and his parents. But his wife gets more involved than expected when she's kidnapped -- seemingly by Tinubu's murderers who think Kubu has a briefcase full of cash that's gone missing.

Kubu ventures across the border into Zimbabwe to interview Goodluck Tinubu's mentor, the headmaster of a closed Zimbabwean school. He almost catches one of the bad guys by draining most of the gas from an outboard motor. He figures out that the past had caught up with several of the people at the tourist camp where Tinubu was killed.

But all that's told in a great story. And, if you need your stereotypes of Africa shattered, there's no better place for that to happen in a story set in Botswana.

I recommend it for many reasons.

Have you read The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it.

The publisher's web page
A reading by Michael and Stanley
A review by Bernadette Inoz at Reactions to Reading
Julie Kramer's review at the big Thrill Archives

Swedish crime novel

2011-04-05T10:48:00.000-05:00

And here's another view of Sweden to fracture your stereotypes (well, at least the stereotypes of the descendants of Swedish immigrants in Minnesota). Leif GW Persson’s novel also jostled the images of reviewer Katherine Powers, writing in The Boston Post. Persson's description of Sweden's police and intelligence organizations give credence to the cabals in Stieg Larsson's series of "The Girl Who..." stories. Powers also adds a reference to Arnaldur's Arctic Chill, something I read and wrote about just over a year ago.

From Nordic climes, come chilling thrillers

[H]ere before me is Leif GW Persson’s Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End: The Story of a Crime, unquestionably the best Swedish crime novel I’ve read so far.

In it, Persson takes up the 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, a crime that has never been solved. Aside from that event, the specific goings-on, as well as the characters, motives, involvements, and actions are fictional, but they are also completely believable. The novel consists of two chronologies and a fraught history. Sweden’s geo-political predicament is the backdrop, especially the years that spanned the end of World War II as it segued into the Cold War up to the mid-1950s. In Sweden this was the time during which “wherever you turned you only saw the Russian bear with his mighty paws, ready to deliver the final embrace.’’...

But be warned: This is a novel to read with your cerebral capacity at its highest setting and with, perhaps, a little notebook at your side. Most of the book’s characters are members of the Stockholm police force or of the country’s security organizations. They are numerous, and their names and official titles are nothing but trouble...

The Swedish security organization in place here is made up of a number of bodies: a central organization... a smaller “external group,’’ camouflaged as a management consulting firm established for the purpose of pursuing the most secret operations; a special “threat group,’’... and a further group, whose task is to spy on everyone else in the organization....

As I'll explain at a later date, my dance card for reading is pretty full right now, but I'm going to keep Persson's book on my waiting list.

Rereading again

2011-04-01T14:54:00.000-05:00

Awhile ago I had to look at my notes here to figure out whether I had already read the latest Arnaldur novel I'd started. (I hadn't.)

When I went to the library to return that book, I checked out a James Lee Burke novel (good recommendations and good memories). I'd only read two pages when I began to suspect I'd read it before. By page three I was sure. I read the back cover and was even more sure. It was Swan Peak. If I'd written about it, it was in the old newsletter. I couldn't find any record of my reactions online. I remembered it enough to decide not to re-read it.

It was Sunday. The library was closed. The closest open bookstore was 30+ miles away. Off I went.

I bought a couple birthday presents and four books for myself.

The first one I sat down to read when I got home was A Test of Wills by Charles Todd. Before long, I realized I'd read it before, too. I looked back on what I said about it a year ago. It was okay, except I felt cheated at the end.

I decided to read it again, in part because I remembered so little of the plot.

I read it. It was okay. I felt cheated at the end. (Red herrings are one thing, but magical resolutions are something totally different. And unwelcome to me.)

Did you read A Test of Wills? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

For me it's on to new and unread books.

The NYT reviewer speaketh

2011-03-27T10:36:00.000-05:00

Marilyn Stasio, writing in The New York Times really likes the final Wallander novel by Henning Mankell, but she's not so enthusiastic about Jacqueline Winspear's new Maisie Dobbs mystery.

She does recommend a second Michael Robertson mystery about the brothers Heath, who rent an office for their law firm on London's Baker Street in exchange for answering letters sent to Sherlock Holmes. The first book was The Baker Street Letters. The new one is The Brothers of Baker Street. Hmmm...

New Botswana mystery?

2011-03-26T07:27:00.000-05:00

Gary Sankary asks, "Any word on when the next Detective Kubu book might come out?"

Great question and good reminder. He and I read A Carrion Death and liked it.

There was a hint about a new mystery featuring Detective Kubu in Botswana.

At the Detective Kubu web site, there are three books listed: A Carrion Death, The Second Death of Goodluck Tunubu, and Death of the Mantis. I guess we missed the invitation to the publication party.

I am planning to go to the library today. Anything else I should look for?

More cold mystery from Iceland

2011-03-25T17:26:00.001-05:00

So, when I returned books to the library, I scanned the "new fiction" shelves as usual. Just in case.

What I found was an oversized paperback of Arnaldur's latest, "Reykjavík Murder Mystery," Hypothermia. (It's a British publication with all the extra vowels.) It was pretty good and the last half was better than the first half.

In fact, I read to about page 60 and then went online to search this blog. Things just seemed very familiar, and I wasn't sure I had hadn't read this book already. But, no, I hadn't read Hypothermia. The main character, the setting (Iceland), the prose, and the pacing all seemed very familiar. In fact, a couple of the "cold cases" in this book were mentioned in earlier books.

When things seem that familiar and the pace of the story telling is a slow march, I have trouble getting enthusiastic about reading. I'd read a chapter and put the book down. The next day, I'd read another chapter. However, things picked up in the last half of the book.

Arnaldur's main character, Erlendur, is off on his own in this story. Things are slow at the Rekjavík cop shop. Erlendur is doing paperwork on a suicide and taking a last look at a couple 30-year old cold cases left over from early in his career. He's motivated, in part, because the father of a young man who went missing without a trace back then is dying.

Of course things get complicated. Details of the suicide don't add up. A guy retires from a career in Denmark and comes home to Iceland. Guess who he used to know. Erlendur is still haunted by the death of his little brother in a blizzard that almost killed both of them. His adult daughter is pushing him and his ex-wife to sit down and talk to each other (something they haven't done for 20 years). There are hints of ghosts and words of mediums.

Nearly all of that is in the second half of the book. And that's worth reading. I don't know how well the second half would stand up without introduction, but I'd guess you could skim the first 120 pages.

Now, there's the issue of counterparts. Dan Conrad noted that Charles Todd's Bess Crawford character (first created in 2009) is strikingly similar to Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs. The first Maisie Dobbs novel was published in 2003. Both women were nurses during World War I and both are independent women who get involved in solving mysteries in London after the war. I haven't gotten around to reading a Bess Crawford story yet, but here's another pair to draw to.

In 1991, Henning Mankell wrote the first Kurt Wallander novel. The Swedish detective has become incredibly well-known. The eleventh (and last) novel is about to come out. There have been television series produced in Sweden and Britain featuring Wallander. And there's a Swedish movie.

Wallander is a morose and phlegmatic man, whose wife left him and whose daughter worries him (in several senses of that verb). He's a passionate detective whose life is centered on finding the facts and explanations behind awful events. He lives in a neglected apartment and doesn't take care of himself.

Arnaldur's Erlandur first showed up in 1997. He's a morose detective, haunted by his past and anxious to explain tragedies and atrocities he confronts as an Icelandic detective. He abandonded his wife and two children long ago and has no clue about finding closure with those people. He lives in a neglected apartment and doesn't take very good care of himself. Books about Erlandur have been published in 26 countries, but none have been made in to television shows or movies. And Erlandur's putative apartment building is not a tourist destination like Kurt Wallander's.

Oh, and Arnaldur is Icelandic and doesn't use a family name. In the UK and the US, his books list him as Arnaldur Indriðason. I guess you can't be an author in the English-speaking world with only one name unless you were a 19th century short story writer or you've established yourself as a performer.

Northern exposure, an interview with Arnaldur by The Guardian's Nicholas Wroe.
Jane Jakeman's review at The Independent
Maxine Clarke's review at Euro Crime
A review at Mysteries in Paradise

Wait for it

2011-03-23T08:21:00.000-05:00

Henning Mankell: the last Wallander

Forget the 40 plays, the Gaza flotilla arrest and the good work in Africa, what Henning Mankell is really famous for is the anguished detective he created 22 years ago. Now, with the final Wallander novel published this week, he tells Jon Henley why he is happy to say farewell

That's it then; the end. Twenty-two years after his first appearance and more than a decade since the one everybody - even his creator - had assumed would be his last, Inspector Kurt Wallander is working his last case.

The lugubrious, all too human but ultimately decent Swedish cop with the never-ending health problems and the terrible family life has sold 30m books in 45 different languages. This will be a sad day for a lot of people.

But not, on balance, for Henning Mankell. "Hand on heart," he says, "I thought I'd written his last adventure a long time ago. I don't even particularly like the man. We have certain things in common: we enjoy the same kind of music, we have a similarly conscientious approach to work. We wouldn't be enemies if we knew each other, but he wouldn't be a close friend. He's not someone I'd invite to dinner."...

"When you reach your 60s, you realise certain things," he says. "First, that you've lived well over half your life. Second, that you've pretty much made all your really big decisions; people very rarely change direction after that. And that leads you to look back. It's quite a . . . scary moment. So I asked: am I afraid of anything? I'm not afraid of dying. Nor of pain; we can control most pain these days. But there is one thing I'm scared of."

The thing Mankell is scared of is the reason this is Wallander's last case, so obviously I'm not going to tell you what it is. But thinking about that, and about the whole business of looking back on a life, and the idea of Wallander realising how all along he had been so resolutely non-political, then wondering what might happen if you confronted him with perhaps the biggest political scandal in Sweden's postwar history – thinking about all those things, Mankell says, "I began to think I really might have a story for Wallander. One last one."...

Crime writing, he came to realise, was not – as everyone had always told him – a literary genre that was invented by Poe or Hammett or even by Shakespeare. "It was around in classical drama," he says. "Even then, we were holding up a mirror to crime to observe society. Look at Medea: a woman murders her kids because she's jealous of her husband. If that's not a crime story, I don't know what is. And if the ancient Greeks had had a police force, you can be damn sure a detective inspector would have had a part in Medea. Society and its contradictions become clear when you write about crime."

Wallander took off almost instantly in Scandinavia, and nearly as fast in continental Europe. Britain, after a slower start, is catching up, carried on a wave of Scandi-crime enthusiasm that also features the likes of Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbø and Detective Sarah Lund. Wallander, though, retains a special appeal. What is it?

Partly, Mankell reckons, that he has never instrumentalised the detective. "Everything has always started from a big question, not from within Wallander," he says. "I did sometimes use him, of course. But I never held him between my fingers and looked at him and said: So, what can I find out with you today? I'd written three novels with him before I realised this was . . . like a cello, that I could play."

It's also important that Wallander is real. "No one could imagine James Bond stopping to inject himself with insulin," Mankell says. "That's because James Bond isn't real. So it's important that Wallander has diabetes, he's ill, his ideas progress, he has relationship problems. He changes, like we all do." It helps, too, that he thinks: "It's challenging to have him enter a room and think for 10 pages. But that's what I'm interested in – how he reads facts, traces, situations. Running around and shooting people is easy. And it isn't normal. Normally you solve problems by thinking."...

But now Wallander has reached the end of his road. Would Mankell, prolific and hugely successful for over 40 years, be happy for the rumpled detective to be his greatest legacy? He thinks. "I believe," he says, "the most important thing you do in your life, you may not even know what it is. It may be that one day you sat down on a bench to comfort someone who is crying. That could be the most important thing you ever do. So no, I would like to be thought of as a good, and quite generous man, who tried to make life a little better for others through what he did. And the things he wrote."...

Whew!

2011-03-18T21:27:00.000-05:00

After slogging through the muck of the rough draft of Mark Twain's autobiography and then working, soporifically, through David Brin's universe of multiple sentients, I was worried I'd never get back to really enthusiastic reading. During the fortnights with Twain's book, I avoided reading. I did crossword puzzles. I played solitaire. I watched TV. I mindlessly surfed the web. I didn't want to go back to that book. During the fortnight with Brin, I kept falling asleep. I was on airplanes and I did come down with a blue ribbon of a head cold, but nonetheless, I kept falling asleep with the book in my hands.

Before I left for California, I not only checked out a book from the library, I also bought one from the best seller rack. Usually, reading a couple books in a week would be no big deal -- even when around little granddaughters. But I never got J. A. Jance's Trial by Fire out of the backpack during the trip.

Yesterday, after writing about my reading experiences with Twain and Brin, I got the book out and began reading.

Yipee! I can still read enthusiastically.

I know, it's mindless eye candy. Jance is an entertainer. She creates identifiable characters. She writes realistic dialogue so the characters talk to each other. Her characters aren't terribly deep, but the main ones were parts of earlier books, so there's background. They react in understandable ways within the realm of what's expected of people. She tells stories that are paced well. All these things are distinct contrasts to the books I most recently read.

I was half way through the book before I put it down last night. This afternoon I finished it. The good guys won again, with some suffering. The bad guys got their due. The scene was set for another story about some of the same characters. I enjoyed the experience. Just like I've enjoyed most of the other Jance books I've read. (She's written 40 so far -- a regular Mickey Spilllane. I don't know how many I've read.)

Trial by Fire considers the ways in which people react to fortune, good and bad. It's not profound, but it's got half a dozen telling anecdotes to relate. If I really wanted to think about it, I could ponder human nature, personality, and fate. But I only got as far as agreeing with the protagonist that I'm damn lucky and very grateful for it. Not everybody is as lucky and some who are aren't grateful. "So it goes," to quote another of my favorite authors.

Trial by Fire is an "Ali Reynolds Mystery." It's good entertainment. Try it out. Or try out something else by Jance. All the ones I've read have been worth the time I spent with them.

Or write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

Not just in Botswana

2011-03-17T09:55:00.000-05:00

If you search for Bess Crawford or Maisie Dobbs on this blog, you'll find recommendations for books about post-World War I women who were private detectives. You won't find a review of Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency because I only listened to an audio version of the series' first book. But women as private detectives does seem to be a theme (or a meme).

Be aware that this theme is not made up of whole cloth. Here's a 1911 ad from Chicago (posted at BoingBoing by Scott Edelman):

Pioneers? Us?

2011-03-16T21:47:00.000-05:00

My blogger friend Sank made of list of his 10 best for 2010. He recommended Death Benefits by Thomas Perry. It was a book I liked. Sank also like the Nick Adams stories by Hemingway and Ken Follett's World Without End. I like things those authors have written, too.

He recommended Sundiver by David Brin. He liked the themes of rebellion and adaptability and acceptance.

When I recently flew to California, I took along the Northfield Library's copy of Sundiver.

I tried reading it on the flight to Denver, during my layover there, and on the flight to Oakland. So many characters, such confusion, so few events. I got some good naps on those flights.

While not playing with granddaughters in California, I tried reading the book before sleep. It did put me to sleep.

After I got home, I struggled to read the rest of the book. Somewhere around page 150 of a 340-page book some things began happening. By then I'd skimmed enough to be confused and unable to distinguish one character from another, except for a couple. I had trouble making sense of descriptions of settings and events. Besides, I no longer cared about any of the characters -- even the protagonist.

Interesting ideas, yes. Well written, no. Interesting technologies, yes. Enthralling plot, no.

Of course, that's just one guy's opinions. A guy who got suckered by a century-old dead guy.

Tomorrow Happens, David Brin's website
Eoghann Irving's review of Sundiver in Solar Flare
Reviews at BookLore
Aristeidis' review at Fantasy Report Universe

Sucker!

2011-03-16T21:33:00.000-05:00

It was more than 50 years ago when I first read the story about Tom Sawyer and the fence Aunt Polly tried to make him paint. My reaction then, and when I read Tom Sawyer to young David a few years ago, was that Hannibal, Missouri must have been full of dumb, gullible, backwoods boobs.

Then Mark Twain, 100 years dead, proved me to be a dumb, gullible, backwoods boob, too. He sold me a copy of his so-called autobiography.

I was excited to read Twain's autobiography, and he sold it well. I bought a copy during the week of its release. "Don't publish this until I've been dead for 100 years," he said. The purpose was to allow him to say what he really thought without earning the enmity of the people he wrote about.

Well, old guy, nobody cares about or even knows most of the people you wrote about. Even your good buddy General/President Grant is pretty much forgotten, except as a notorious drunk.

Twain might have begun doing an autobiography. Some of the opening chapters are about his family and the childhood he heard about, but was too young to remember. He quickly became bored with that. A few years later, he started again. The second time, he decided to write about what he was interested in and change topics whenever his interests change. Sometimes his interests waned in the middle of a story. Okay, most of the stories weren't interesting to start with.

Every once in awhile, Twain told a good one. In that way he resembled my blogger friend Sank. Twain would tell an amusing anecdote with some insightful commentary. Sank does it more often than Twain did. Those moments were why I kept reading (actually skimming). I kept at that skimming for over a month. Toward the end of the book, Twain goes on quite awhile about his daughter Susy, who died at age 24. It was touching and the man's pain was palpable. The book is 736 pages. Well, there are 276 pages of notes and index, but the few gems don't make the other 460 pages worth the effort. Twain needed an editor.

Oh, but there was a whole team of editors. Editors from the University of California. Instead of editing, they collected every little word Twain wrote with the note "autobiography" appended to it and put them all in this book. Well not all. They promise more volumes. Oh, goody.

I find myself in agreement with Garrison Keillor. He reviewed this book for the New York Times. If you want a more complete or informed consideration, read it. Skip the book.

Wikipedia on the autobiography
The Autobiography of Mark Twain – a review by Tim Adams in The Guardian.
Mark Twain's Amazing Embargo, a review by Craig Fehrman at Slate.com

Usually, I put a link here so you can easily buy a copy of the book. No link this time. Go the library, check out a collection of Twain's short stories and read those.

A Charles Tood novel and a Maisie Dobbs alert

2011-02-01T13:08:00.000-06:00

Dan Conrad wrote from Minneapolis:

I get these "Author Alerts" from the Hennepin County Library when they order books from authors I've specified. This morning I got one announcing the purchase of Lesson in Secrets : A Maisie Dobbs Novel, by Jacqueline Winspear -- so I can pass it on to you and to get the Northfield Libray cracking--if they haven't already ordered it.

On that note, I just finished An Impartial Witness, the second Bess Crawford novel by Charles Todd. It is very nearly as interesting as the first in the series, Duty to the Dead. Of course Bess Crawford is a shameless rip-off of Maisie Dobbs -- but the novels have, I think, their own merits nonetheless: less psychological depth and angst and a bit more sleuthing and more of a "how the hell is she gonna get out of this one" climax.

Thanks for writing, Dan. I'm still hung up on Mark Twain's autobiography and trying (like the despot in Egypt) to find a graceful way out. I skim pages of pitiful prose and then, every once in awhile, run into a remarkable bit (like Twain's elegy to his daughter Susy, who died unexpectedly at age 24 while Twain was in England).

An alternate list of the best of 2010

2010-12-29T14:55:00.000-06:00

I'm mired in Mark Twain's sort of autobiography. I'm only about half way through and the wonderfulnesses are random and few and far between. If you want a preview of my thoughts (that I'll put together when I've finished the book or quit trying to read it) look at Garrison Keillor's review in the New York Times. In the meantime, here's a great list of the best of 2010. (I recommended one of the books on his list, and one of the 2010 books I liked was one he wrote about -- Gary writes about a lot more than what he reads, and his blog, Old and in the Way is worth reading on a regular basis.)

Okay, we're recommending each other, but Gary Sankary's list of his best reading of 2010 is worth looking at.

Best of 2010- Written Word

That time of year for Sank to start thinking about the best of 2010. Why? Why not. Oh, and as you’ll figure out pretty damned fast, it’s not books that came out in 2010, it’s books I read in 2010, and that matters. In this space anyway.

As many of you know, I’m a serious media hound. I consume a boatload of music, video and books. Well, I think it’s a boatload. When it comes to music it certainly is. When it comes to books, Mrs S kicks my butt, but I’m trying to get better and spend more time reading.

It’s the right thing to do.

I even stopped driving into the office this year so I could ride the bus and, yes, enjoy even more time for reading.

So dear readers, here it is. Sank’s BEST OF 2010. First edition- the written word...

Lots of reviews

2010-12-02T21:42:00.000-06:00

The New York Times is going to publish its list of 100 notable books for 2010. You can get a head start on the list here. Each book on the list includes a link to a review from the NYT Book Review. One of them I've already recommended. The list is alphabetical.

100 Notable Books of 2010

FICTION & POETRY

AMERICAN SUBVERSIVE. By David Goodwillie...
ANGELOLOGY. By Danielle Trussoni...

and on and on...
Now, go out there and READ!

Singing not whistling

2010-11-08T15:12:00.000-06:00

When I saw the name Ivan Doig among the new books at the Northfield library, I had good memories of a couple of his books. When I looked them up, it turns out I've read four of his books in the last 3 years. When I checked out Work Song, I had no idea exactly what I was getting into, because while Doig's books tend to be historical fiction, they range widely in that pasture.

It turns out that Work Song is a sequel to the best of the books I read, The Whistling Season.

And, like The Whistling Season, this book is just a story about a few people. It's set in Butte, Montana just after World War I. It turns out that Butte in 1919 was a multi-ethnic city of 100,000. Copper mining was just beginning to wind down. The post-war red scare was in full swing as was union activity. The Golden Age of paternalistic mega-corporations was just past its prime.

Into this scene, the University of Chicago scholar, gambling huckster, wood splitter, and school master from the earlier book, Morris Morgan, appears. He says without offering any details that he spent the decade between the two stories in Tasmania. He's unclear about what drew him back to Montana. The Chicago gamblers, who chased him to the frontier, remember him, and he's promised not to go near the woman with whom he ran from Chicago.

Whatever plans he had are thwarted when the railroad loses his trunk and he arrives in Butte with a stachel of clothes and necessaries. He ends up, luckily for a classically educated big city guy, with a job in the Butte Public Library (he was found reading Caeser in Latin by the classically inclined head librarian). The story revolves around Morris, the landlady of his boarding house, two of his fellow boarders, one of his former students (who is teaching in Butte) and her fiance (a miners' union leader) and the suspicious corporate enforcers trying to identify Wobblies (see IWW).

Like The Whistling Season, this book is about the characters. Unfortunately, the characters in Work Song aren't as well-drawn as the ones I remember from The Whistling Season. But, it has been a bit over two years since I read it. There's a bit of suspense and adventure, but no big events. The times in which the book is set deserved a couple big events. But they're not in the story. The time and place are not evoked as vibrantly as Davis and Winspear drew ancient Rome and 1930s London. But it was a pleasure to read about fairly normal life. No murders. No huge improbabilities. Just some colorful characters bumbling through life like most of us do.

I recommend reading The Whistling Season and Work Song as a pair. Then, I recommend choosing some others of Doig's books and trying them out. Have you read Work Song? Have you read other books by Ivan Doig? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world how you reacted to them.

Ivan Doig's web site
Jonathan Yardley's review in The Washington Post
Tim Rutten's review in The Los Angeles Times
Joanna Hershon's review in The New York Times

I've gotta stop reading like this

2010-11-04T20:56:00.000-05:00

The last time I was at the Northfield library, I picked up a Lindsey Davis [right] mystery, Scandal Takes a Holiday. Over the past few years, I've read several of Davis' mysteries set in the ancient Roman empire and starring Marcus Didius Falco, "private investigator." I've enjoyed them.

Like Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs mysteries, Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael mysteries, Tony Hillerman's mysteries, and... Well, like lots of mysteries, the setting in Davis' stories is an important as the characters and the plot. The settings are often one of my motives for reading a book.

Unlike the Maisie Dobbs mystery I read recently, I wasn't drawn into ancient Rome the way I was drawn into 1930's London. Davis does an incredible job of describing the place -- even down to its aromas. Maybe I was tired of reading about the buildings, meals, and smells of ancient Rome. This book seemed to be filled with too many of them.

There were lots of interactions among a large cast of characters, but they didn't hold my attention either. Not even the gangs of evil doers kept me interested. I was curious enough to read nearly every paragraph, but it wasn't easy to do.

When I read The Mapping of Love and Death a month or so ago, I could hardly wait to find time to read more. While reading Scandal Takes a Holiday, I kept looking for excuses to do something other than read. I even watched Castle.

I really liked some of the other Marcus Didius Falco stories. The one set in Londinium and another set on the German frontier were memorable. This one, not so much. I've often discovered that my reactions have more to do with me than with the book. Your results may vary.

So, if you've read Scandal Takes a Holiday or another of Lindsey Davis' books, tell us how you reacted.

Write and tell this little bit of the world.

Lindsey Davis web site
Lindsey Davis' ten favorite books about ancient Rome
A review of Scandal Takes a Holiday at Shots
A review at Who Dunnit

Another book I didn't really read

2010-10-29T12:27:00.000-05:00

Masterpiece Mystery recently featured three stories featuring Kurt Wallander, the repressed and obsessive Swedish detective created by Henning Mankell. The Wallander mysteries are intriguing and Wallander as a character is too. I keep expecting him to break out and become a real person. Maybe I shouldn't.

I picked up Depths by Mankell at the Northfield library. I'd forgotten that Mankell has written things besides the Wallander mysteries. I didn't look too closely at the book. I should have.

The back of the book jacket might have given me a hint. There's a quote from a Swedish newspaper review: "Mankell's most ambitious literary work so far." For me, that kind of response is a warning.

Depths is not a mystery and Wallander is not a character.

It's the tale of a troubled and obsessive Swedish naval officer set in 1914 as a world war is about to begin. I can't critique much about this book, because I only read about a third of it. It's constructed with little chapters of one to a dozen paragraphs each. The book jacket biography says Mankell has written many plays. The tiny chapters are like tiny scenes from a movie. Or maybe they're like individual frames in one of those antique things called films. Each of those frames is a still picture. When you run them through a projector, you get the simulation of movement.

Practically nothing happens in most of the scenes in Depths. I kept reading expecting the scenes to add up to something. I don't understand the arithmetic of the book. Even when it seemed that something had happened, I couldn't understand what was going on. (Reminded me of calculus in fact.)

I got tired of the main character rowing off into the fog to stalk a woman who lived a solitary life on an island off the Swedish coast. She was as as helpless and hopeless as he was, and nothing made much sense. Maybe if I was Swedish and not American I'd understand more. (Depths was a best seller in Sweden.) Maybe if I could better recognize my own helplessnesses. It's really not worth the effort for me. I think it should have been a short story (or as Paul Binding suggested in his review - link below - a tragic folk ballad).

After struggling through about a third of the book (maybe only a quarter), I skipped to the end and read the last couple scenes. Evidently things had happened and there was an ending with cosmic justice (I guess). But if it took 400 pages to get there, I'm glad I didn't read all those pages to find out. Next time I'll make sure I'm checking out one of the Wallander books.

Have you read any of Mankell's books? Have you read Depths? How have you responded? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

Lucy Ellmann's overly-long and spot on review of Depths in the New York Times
Ian Thompson's review in the Guardian (UK)
Paul Binding's review in The Independent (UK)
Myra Junyk's review from Curled Up

First romance, now fantasy

2010-10-14T11:44:00.000-05:00

Taking Bird Loomis' advice, I picked up a book by Thomas Perry. And then another and another. I liked them. One of the things I liked was that the characters were new to me in each book. There are times when it's a treat to follow characters through several novels. (See Tony Hillerman, Dana Stabenow, and Jacqueline Winspear.) But the novelty in Perry's books was refreshing.

I did notice in the dust jacket bios, that Perry was identified as the author of the Jane Whitefield novels. I was curious enough to look for one the last time I was in the Northfield library (celebrating the centennial of its Carnegie building). I picked out the oldest Jane Whitefield novel I could find and checked out Dance for the Dead, published in '96.

The book starts out like gangbusters. The first two chapters are great short stories. I was ready to read a series of short stories with little ligaments holding them together into a "novel." Turns out that the rest of the book is woven around those stories to create the novel. There are other short stories, but by the time I got involved in the book, I wasn't looking for them anymore.

This novel, like most of the other Perry novels, is a fantasy. Jane Whitefield is a magician, a superwoman, and smarter than any of the other bears. She's a Seneca woman from western New York who helps people disappear when they need to hide from bad people. It's a dangerous occupation, but she's the expert. Like Sherlock Holmes, she has people who help her in small, but essential ways. She always has enough money and another identity with documentation (even ones she can share with her clients). She always knows people she can go to. They're always home. She always wins the fights. She always is the survivor. No villain that Perry can invent can outwit her for long. She's heartless with the bad guys and motherly with victims. She probably does everything except shepherd people into heaven. The ones she sees out of this world are obviously going elsewhere.

I had to put on hold my desires for believability. There's practically nothing believable in the book. The action scenes are well done and suspenseful, as long as you forget that Jane Whitefield is coming out on top a the end. The plot is simple, but the telling is complex. That may be why I liked reading it.

Have you rad Dance for the Dead? Have you read any of the other Jane Whitefield novels? What did you think of them? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

Publisher's web site for Thomas Perry's books
An Australian bookworm's thoughts on the Jane Whitefield series of novels
Robert Birnbaum's interview with Thomas Perry at identitytheory.com

Romance

2010-10-07T20:46:00.000-05:00

I've read several of Jacqueline Winspear's novels and really liked the atmosphere she creates. The novels are set in London during the early 1930s with World War I and the depression important for context. Well, not the depression so much, but the post-war experience of Winspear's main character, Maisie Dobbs, is vital. There are regular references to the depression, but Dobbs and her assistant are mostly observers. Dobbs is a private investigator and people wealthy enough to hire her haven't been hurt by the economic disaster very much. So, Maisy Dobbs and Billy Beale are gainfully employed.

It's Winspear's use of language and attention to detail that create the atmosphere of the 1930s. I can't swear that it's the 1930s atmosphere she creates, but it's definitely not a late 20th or early 21st century atmosphere. Words, phrases, and bits of material culture all contribute to a sense of another time. A romantic re-imagining of a time long past. (Maisie would have been about the same age as my grandparents.)

One of the reasons I have kept coming back to read more of Winspear's books is that they haven't strayed into romance novel territory. The stories focus on a mystery and the steps Maisie and Billy take to uncover the hidden facts. Maisie is a young, single woman and you might expect romance to be in the cards. But Winspear has created a woman who was a front-line nurse in France during World War I. She returned with traumatic stresses. The young doctor she loved and served with also came back from the war, but he was damaged much more severely. A head injury left him an invalid in a hospital for a dozen years after the war. Romance was on hold for Maisie.

But, a book or so ago, the injured doctor died. Maisie had a date or two and a serious suitor whom she turned down. In this book, The Mapping of Love and Death, romance blossoms.

But the romance is not just about Maisie and a new suitor or idealized memories of another time. Maisie is trying to find out what happened to a young American, a volunteer in the British forces during the war who went missing. In 1932, his body was found in France and, with it, a packet of love letters from an unnamed British nurse. The American parents want to identify the woman and learn more about their son's last days. (Of course it's more complicated than that because the post-mortem on the soldier's skeleton suggests he was murdered.) But there's the soldier's romance from 1915. There's a romantic image of a beautiful valley in California that the soldier visited before the war. There's an obvious romance still going on between the grieving American parents. There's are filial relationships between Maisie and her father and between Maisie and her dying mentor. And more. There is romance of one kind or another throughout the book. So, when Maisie is approached by a new suitor and she accepts his suit, it's not out of place. It does make me wonder how Maisie will continue her career if she marries into a proper upper-class family in London of the mid-1930s. Charity work, maybe. But investigative work for paying clients? I think not. The post-war, depression years were ones of great opportunity for women in Britain, but there were some things that proper women just didn't do.

In any case, in spite of all the romance and romance novel-like attributes in this book, I enjoyed it. It was a little day dream away from the fall of 2010 to an idealized time in early 20th century London. The characters are attractive. The story telling is well done and sometimes compelling. The most unbelievable thing is that Maisie's 1930 MG doesn't break down -- ever. The reputation those cars had doesn't support such reliability. Ah, escapism. Sometimes it's just the thing.

Have you escaped into a romantic past? How'd it go for you? Have you escaped into Jacqueline Winspear's London of 75+ years ago? What did you think of it? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

Jacqueline Winspear's web site
Jacqueline Winspear talks about the book

Perry's Death Benefits

2010-10-07T20:44:00.000-05:00

Gary Sankary, wrote about Death Benefits by Thomas Perry. It's one I'd written about previously: More from a fox of an author.

Biological science fiction

2010-09-28T17:53:00.000-05:00

Some time ago, Gary Sankary mentioned, in his blog Old and In the Way, that he'd enjoyed reading Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear. That was a recommendation to explore, even though he said very little else.

In the back of my head I knew that Greg Bear was a science fiction writer. So, the next time I was in the Northfield library, I browsed through the science fiction section looking for his name. A number of his books were on the shelf, but not Darwin's Radio. Okay, I thought, I'll look again later.

After several unsuccessful forays to the science fiction shelves, I resorted to using the catalog (it's still a card catalog to me, even if it's now online). And there I found the book. It had probably been on a shelf all along, but someone had decided to shelve it in the "fiction" section instead of the "science fiction" section.

This has happened before and I don't get it. Sure, there are no space aliens, intergalactic travel, or imaginary technology in Bear's book, but it's the best kind of science fiction. It is (or was when written in '99) a projection of ideas based on contemporary science. So shelve it with the rest of science fiction.

The science it's based on is biology -- molecular biology involving DNA. Now, I still don't understand very much about this science. I have read enough Stephen J. Gould essays to grasp the concept of punctuated equilibrium, but beyond that I'm clueless. Bear could have been telling me that up is down in genetics and I wouldn't have known the difference. But he seemed to understand the basics and some of the scientific speculation. And then Bear struck out from there to science fiction.

WordiQ.com says, "The scientific details in his work are such that he is usually classified as a hard science fiction author...

"Darwin's Radio... stick[s] closely to the known facts of molecular biology of viruses and evolution. While some fairly speculative ideas are entertained (it is after all, fiction) they are introduced in such a rigorous and disciplined way within the context of the cutting edge of those disciplines, that Darwin's Radio gained praise in the science journal Nature."

The mix that informs the plot includes mass murders in Eastern Europe, some possibly Neanderthal mummies in an ice cave in the Alps (Bear was referencing Ötzi the Iceman), a flu-like illness that seemed to be connected to huge numbers of spontaneous miscarriages and new ideas about human genetics. Nearly all the main characters are scientists, although some of them have fled the ivory towers of academe for commercial ventures and public health administration.

The scientific conflict arises when some scientists see rapid evolutionary change as a disease. The public health authorities have to take action to safeguard populations. Other scientists think they recognize evolution at work and do their best to evade the public health officials who threaten a natural process.

The central characters are a molecular biologist and a discredited archaeologist. Bear makes them an attractive couple and makes them fugitives by the end of the book -- sympathetic fugitives, but on the run nonetheless. That transition from science fiction to hide and seek was difficult for me.

There's too much scientific detail in the book for me. Bear spreads his explanation of genetic details quite thickly on the story. In other places, the story telling is somewhat ponderous. I found myself skimming and skipping a lot. But it's an engaging story and I, too, enjoyed reading it. I might even go looking for the sequel, Darwin's Children.

Have you read Darwin's Radio? What did you think of it? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

Greg Bear's web page for Darwin's Radio
Nicholas White's review on his web site
Reviews at GoodReads.com
Donna McMahon's review at SF Site

Literature Maps

2010-09-22T10:06:00.000-05:00

I was playing with Literature Maps this morning before really getting underway. (One delight of retirement is that I can get up, post something on a professional blog, go for a sunrise walk, read headlines in more than a dozen newspapers, have breakfast and my first coffee, and then consider "getting underway" at 9:30am.)

The Literature Maps are part of Gnod, described on its web site as "a self-adapting system, living on this server and 'talking' to everyone who comes along. Gnods intention is to learn about the outer world and to learn 'understanding' its visitors." I'm not sure what that means, and there's no explanation of how the "system" works. However, if you click on the "Gnod Books" link, you get to a page titled, "gnooks." There you'll find links to the Literature Maps and a discussion about Literature Forms. You'll also find a link to "Gnod's Suggestions," which is where the site gathers data for constructing the Literature Maps. (It collects this data so literally, that typos and misspellings are also collected and republished on the Literature Maps.) At that page, you'll be asked to identify three of your favorite writers. Based on the names you submit, you'll be presented with the name of an author you might like and a link to a Literature Map for that author.

I'd looked at these Literature Maps before, but I hadn't spent much time looking carefully at them. The idea is that if you plug in an author's name, the program will create a "map" of names, and that the closer the names of "two writers are, the more likely [it will be that] someone will like both of them."

I've been tempted before to look at the names that are closest together, but this morning I discovered that the outliers are equally interesting.

So, here are links to Literature Maps for authors I've recently written about and some of my favorites. Using Carol O'Connell as an example, the names closest to hers on the "map" are Gerri Hill, Charles Todd, Maan Meyer, Elizabeth Amber, and Jo Clayton. None of these ring bells with me. However, if I look at the outer edges of this "map," I find the names Walter Mosely, Jonathan Kellerman, John LeCarre, Nevada Barr, Dana Stabenow, Marcia Muller, and Dick Francis, all of whom have written books I've liked. Does that fit with my ambivalent response to the Mallory mysteries?

So, look at some of these Literature Maps or create your own. How well do they reflect your experiences? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

An American Salander?

2010-09-21T13:46:00.000-05:00

A couple weeks ago, NetFlix delivered the DVD of the movie The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to our mailbox. After reading the books and hearing Dan Conrad's raving about the movie, I was really looking forward to seeing the movie and reading the subtitles. I was not disappointed. I only wished I'd seen the movie on a big screen in a theater. The small screen seemed to limit the impact of the movie.

Nancy has not read the Larsson books, but she was entranced by the stories in the movie and taken by the Salander character. She was reminded of a central character in a series of mysteries by Carol O'Connell [left]: NY cop Kathy Mallory. The two young women characters are blazingly smart, extraordinary hackers, and physical fighters without equal. They both are the products of very traumatic childhoods. They're both loners. The differences are physical. If Salander is a tattooed, gothic waif, Mallory is a lucious beauty who can't do surveillance because everybody notices her.

Nancy pulled Mallory's Oracle and The Man Who Cast Two Shadows off her shelf and handed them to me. I read them both. There are big differences between the Stieg Larsson books and the Carol O'Connell books. I'm not quite sure what they are. All the characters are intriguing, but the Mallory character is somehow drawn less intensely than the Salander character.

Well, there is my reading. I think I read these books in snatches too small to get into the flow of the story telling. O'Connell uses quick cuts between "scenes" with little in the way of transistion. Sometimes there's an extra space between paragraphs; other times not. But I would be reading about a discussion of magic and illusion set in an old magician's storage spot. In the next sentence I would be reading about a poker game in which a character without a poker face keeps losing his spare change. And then there were so many characters. If I didn't remember who was who, I'd get totally lost in the transition. And if I read only a few pages at time, I had trouble remembering who was who.

So, the reading experience was, for me, disjointed.

The stories in these novels were intriguing and convoluted. The action scenes, were not interrupted by abrupt transistions and were well scripted. The setting is Manhattan. What's not to like? But, they were not as compelling as Larsson's stories. I could not have read his books in the small snatches I used to read O'Connell's.

Have you read Mallory's Oracle and/or The Man Who Cast Two Shadows? Have you read another of O'Connell's books? What did you think? Is Mallory an upper class version of Salander? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

A review of Mallory's Oracle at Jandy's Reading Room
A review of O'Connell's career and several Mallory novels

You're reading my memory

2010-09-20T08:00:00.000-05:00

Novelist James Collins wrote about reading, memory, and thinking about reading in yesterday's New York Times. It reminded me of several of the reasons I began writing little bits about the the things I read. One of the reasons was to reflect on what I read. The other reason for writing an actual newsletter for 20 years and this blog for the last four is that this is my memory cache.

Collins' essay is well worth the 3 minutes it takes to read it.

PS: I've completely forgotten the plot of one of the last two books I read. My blog entry about it is in rough draft and will show up here soon — without a plot summary. In the meantime, I have to check the TV schedule to see if there's a golf match broadcast today.

The Plot Escapes Me

I have just realized something terrible about myself: I don’t remember the books I read… These are books I loved, but... all I associate with them is an atmosphere and a stray image or two, like memories of trips I took as a child.

Nor do I think I am the only one with this problem. Certainly, there are those who can read a book once and retain everything that was in it, but anecdotal evidence suggests that is not the case with most people. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most people cannot recall the title or author or even the existence of a book they read a month ago, much less its contents.

So we in the forgetful majority must, I think, confront the following question: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?…

Now, with a terrible sense of foreboding, I slowly turn to look again at my bookshelf… And I have to ask myself, Would it have made no difference if I had never read any of them? Could I just as well have spent my time watching golf?…

Alaskan summer

2010-09-06T09:09:00.002-05:00

The other book I picked up at the Northfield library was A Night Too Dark by Dana Stabenow. I think I've been reading Stabenow's books for a couple decades. She's written more than 30. I keep reading them because most of them are set in Alaska. Kate Shugak or Liam Campbell show up in many of the books, and they are interesting characters. Besides creating interesting characters, Stabenow weaves good plots, tells good stories, writes good action scenes, and tells good jokes once in awhile.

I don't remember any jokes in A Night Too Dark, but the characters and plot are good. I never did figure out the title. I sort of expected that it might have something to do with short days and long nights of the Alaskan winter. Nope. The story takes place in the summer. Maybe it refers to the tragedy at the end. Or maybe things in Kate Shugak's future.

Oh well, the action centers on exploratory work on a potential gold mine just beyond the boundaries of a national park and native territory. Lots of new people flooding a once isolated community that welcomes the inflow of money more than the influx of people. A depressed mine worker walks off into the wilderness to return his body "to nature." A body is found. A month later, the missing guy stumbles out of the woods much the worse for wear, but very much alive.

And there are people and events as unusual and unexpected as anything in a script for Northern Exposure. It's Alaska, after all. Alaska state trooper Jim Chopin hires former PI Shugak (who is also his parmour) to help investigate. Old Sam goes fishing for salmon and hunting moose out of season. Kate's foster son Johnny gets a girlfriend and a paying job. Jim and Kate are as randy as usual.

It was fun to read. It's more chewing gum for the mind and a great summer book. Luckily, I finished it before summer was over.

Did you read A Night Too Dark? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

Dana Stabenow's web site
Patrick Anderson's review in The Washington Post

Hapless

2010-09-06T08:57:00.004-05:00

When I had read the available books from West Yellowstone, I was back in Northfield heading for the public (socialist) library. The librarians have a rolling cart positioned just in front of the main desk where recently-returned books are placed before they are reshelved. I always look at the contents of that cart.

The look paid off the last time I was there, and I went no further. I plucked a new Dana Stabenow mystery and Thomas Perry's Strip from the cart, went to the automatic check out machine with my library card, and left the library. I doubt I was there more than four minutes and walked away with several hours of good reading. I'll write about the Stabenow book later, but here's to Thomas Perry.

If many mystery writers are producing episodes of TV series featuring a few main characters and a few settings, Perry is producing movies set in a variety of places and populated with characters unseen elsewhere in the world of fiction. The dust jacket informations says that Perry "is the author of the Jane Whitefield series..." Well, I might have to go look for one of those. But for now, there is a long list of non-series Thomas Perry books that I look forward to.

Strip, like Metzger's Dog and Death Benefits, is a well-told entertaining tale.

A hapless mook lucked out when robbing a strip club owner who was trying to deposit the nightly receipts from his three gentlemen's clubs. A hapless LA newcomer, who has been spening his retirmement savings trying to impress girls, gets fingered for the robbery. A hapless police lieutenant, who has simultaneous twenty-year marriages and a kid from each who is about to enroll in an expensive university, is assigned to investigate the robbery. The mook gets a girl friend/accomplice for the next late night robbery, and she excitedly shoots someone. The newcomer proves that he's not hapless. The lieutenant stumbles along trying to figure out who is doing what to whom and where will the tuition money come from. Then, a Mexican drug boss and his bodyguards are murdered.

Details? You'll have to read Strip. It's a great and complicated tale with an ending befitting O. Henry.

Have you, too, read Strip? What did you think? Write and tell this bit of the world what you think.

Thomas Perry's web site
Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times
Carol Wallace's review at Book Group of One