13 May 2013

Some thoughts from Down Under

Bird Loomis has been doing the visiting scholar bit in Australia, so his has been a year without a winter. Along with lecturing, writing, and observing, he's also been reading and visiting galleries down under. I don't know what he's been doing in the galleries, but here are some of the things he's been reading.

Long-running series:.  Just finished the last two C. J. Box books, with Joe Pickett as the central character. Force of Nature is #12 in the series, Breaking Point #13.  And I recently finished Ian Rankin’s latest John Rebus book, Standing in Another Man's Grave.

Rankin
The Rankin and Force of Nature were pretty good, but not great. Both represented late-series books that were more than a bit formulaic.  At some point Pickett’s domestic tensions and his buddy Nate Romanowski’s super-human exploits grow wearisome, as does Rebus’s drinking, smoking, and listening to a who’s who of jazz. Still, Box and especially Rankin are skilled authors, and even an average outing is not bad, especially when you can download it on a Nook in 30 seconds. 

This brings us to Box’s latest book, Breaking Point, which has been discussed a bit here previously.  Given its cartoonish treatment of the EPA specifically and governmental regulations in general, I was prepared not to like it at all. I checked out Amazon and found lots of very positive reviews, and a devastating critique of its treatment of bureaucracy.  Still, I’m sitting here in Australia, and my wife Michel has gone home. So I’ve got hours to fill in the evening. Well, there is a lot of excellent wine… In any event, I ordered Breaking Point yesterday and started reading.  And all the folks on Amazon were right. It was riveting and cartoonish in its depiction of bureaucrats.  But by the end of forty pages, the story has won out. I suspended my disbelief and let go.  Great read. Virtually no Nate and no domestic issues for the last half of the book, just a fast-paced set of story lines.  C. J. Box and Joe Pickett still have some juice. I’ll still be a bit suspicious, but will look toward #14 with more optimism. 

McKinty
I also recently finished Adrian McKinty’s The Cold, Cold Ground, introducing a Belfast Catholic detective during “the Troubles” of the early 1980s. McKinty is a young, but prolific, author, who I saw discussing his trade in a TV recording of his presentation at Adelaide’s Writer’s Week discussions (which took place in March). McKinty was a good talker, and he stated his suspicion of series, even one as consistently good as Mankel’s Wallander set.  McKinty's done a couple of short, three-book series, and was just starting with his new detective, Sean Duffy, in Belfast (a Protestant stronghold, of course). McKinty is good (based on my one-book reading). His Belfast was great, in that he’d grown up there. The tensions of being a Catholic cop in a Protestant city, during a violent time, are well-developed. I already have pre-ordered the next volume, due out in the next couple of days. 

McKinty argued that he had nothing more insightful to say about his characters after three books.  I’m still thinking about that. But it does make one think of whether a long-lasting  series offers much beyond predictable narratives.  I think that Breaking Point does it pretty well, but most later books in long-running series are likely to be written and read with formulaic expectations.  Maybe McKinty is right, but you need to be highly confident in your own abilities and willing to turn a deaf ear to the entreaties of your editor and publisher.

Have you read C. J. Box recently? Have you read the latest Rebus novel? How about McKinty's The Cold, Cold Ground? Do you agree with McKinty that authors have little new to tell us after three books about the same characters? Write. Tell this little bit of the world what you think.




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09 May 2013

Slipping into another mind

One of the books that Nancy added to my Nook before it became a Christmas present was The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon. What a great gift.

Elizabeth Moon
If you've read enough of these postings, you know I like stories. Usually that means a series of events. While there are events in this little book, it's really not a story. The book is about a person. Most of the book is an interior monologue or dialogue, if you'd rather.

The reason it's so fascinating is that the character isn't normal. He's autistic. He's several giant strides ahead of Raymond Babbitt, the charater played by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, but nonetheless, he's not normal. Using the language of his therapist and boss, he calls the non-autistics the normals and wonders constantly how they know the things they do and how they know how to do the things they do.

If anyone were really paying attention, they would ask the same questions about Lou Arrendale, the primary character in  The Speed of Dark. Only a couple people come close to asking, but they do so too timidly and too late.

Most of the people Lou interacts with are other people with autism at work. They work in a special division, hired as people with disabilities. But they are valued as people with very special analytical skills by the company.

Lou also interacts with some "normals" in a fencing club and at church. He's threatened and attacked by a rival from his fencing club. He feels attracted to a woman in the group, but has no idea how to act on those feelings. He almost gets close enough to the couple who run the fencing club to get advice on acting on those feelings and the "hinge" of the story.

A new division leader is hired at work. He resents the accomodations provided to the little group of autistic analysts and he's anxious to make a big name for himself. His ladder to fame and fortune and a route to eliminating the workplace accomodations is to get these "not normals" into an experiment to test a procedure for curing people of autism. His attempts amount to blackmail and they're foiled by a supervisor.

Lou is recognizing some development in his mind as he processes the attack, works with a police detective, and tries to figure out why he's entranced with the bright reflections from the hair of one of his fencing opponents. He tries to decide whether to volunteer for the experimental treatment and wonders who he'd be if he became "normal."

Elizabeth Moon wrote this book when her low-functioning autistic son was a teen-ager. I have no idea how accurate her portrayal of a high-functioning autistic mind is, but it's fascinating. Her perceptions about his thought processes seem very insightful. The guy she describes is someone I'd like to get to know -- especially if he were as insightful as as Moon makes her character. Thinking back, I am sure I missed my chance to get to know people like that a couple times. (Metaphorically, I kick myself at this point.) Of course, I had enough trouble getting and keeping myself on a near-normal track. If I had spent the time and effort to get to know someone like Lou Arrendale, I ...  I would have been a different person. (Talk about a "hinge" event.)

I was entranced with Moon's character and the bits of story and dilemmas that surrounded the guy. I highly recommend this book.

Have you read The Speed of Dark? How did you react to it? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.


If you're curious, Elizabeth Moon is a proflific science fiction writer and The Speed of Dark is set in a near future, so there's some science fiction projections in it.



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23 April 2013

Justice

Alan Cheuse says at the beginning of his review of The Round House, "I've devoted many hours in my life to reading, and among these hours many of them belong to the creations of novelist Louise Erdrich." And I concur. I haven't understood everything she's written, but I've never felt I wasted any of those hours.

I think I must have been in some kind of magical trance when I read Love Medicine thirty years ago. I had been working with Ojibwa people on a Wisconsin reservation, and it seemed that Erdrich was writing about people I'd met there. I tried to follow those people in her later novels, but sometimes I lost track of what they were telling me. (Maybe it's time to go back and figure things out.) Often, Erdrich told me things about my world while she was writing about "worlds" that were exotic and foreign to me.

Something I read about The Round House made me anxious to read it. I'm very glad I did.

Maybe the fact that most of the story was told by a 13-year-old boy helped. There are many parts of my brain that are still those of a 13-year-old. Other parts of the story are told by the man that young teenager became. And I could recognize that too. Most thirteen-year-olds struggle with the concept of fairness and earned fate. I still do, too. So too does the lawyer Erdrich's boy becomes.

And what is justice? Is fairness an essential part of justice? What if the social systems we create to provide justice fail? Where does justice come from then? Is revenge part of justice? Does evil produce good, as the local priest asserts in Erdrich's reservation parish? Is the good produced automatically or do people have to create it? What if the good results from more evil?

This story is a mystery. But it's not the police procedural that I'm fond of reading. This book is full of ideas, not just events and people. It demands thought and response, but, unlike some books in which complexity imitates depth, this story facilitates analysis and questions. Not answers, but questions. Erdrich is not the priest offering answers. She's the philosopher asking questions.

A woman is brutally raped as part of an attempt to cover up secrets of an extended family. Did it happen on reservation land (one justice system), in a state park (another justice system) or on US government land (a third justice system)? Returning from the hospital, the victim retreats to the silence of her bedroom shutting out her husband, her son, and the rest of the world. Where is justice going to come from? A 13-year-old boy? A tribal judge? The community? The FBI? A county sheriff?

The pursuit of justice we learn about is that of the boy. Along with his buddies, he tries to enjoy the summer and adventures and find out what happened and where. It's not a story of precocious detecting. It's a story of growing up and asking questions. It's a story that kept me entranced. It's a book that reminded me that there's more to a novel than telling a story and describing characters.

I'll repeat what I said to Ms Erdrich in 1985 when I got her to sign my copy of Love Medicine. "Thank you so much for writing about people who are very much like people I've met." And thank you for writing about ideas I haven't paid enough attention to.

Have you read The Round House? What did you think of it? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.
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Boxing the feds

C. J. Box knows how to describe adventure. He's good. He's also good at corralling me into his stories with characters and story lines.

I picked up my Nook last night and began reading his latest, Breaking Point. I read longer than I intended to because I quickly got caught up in the morality play he was telling. This morning, I resumed reading when the power went out and I couldn't use my computer and we had no Internet connection. By the time the power was restored, I'd read enough to keep me from doing much of anything but read the rest of the day. Melodrama, action, danger, childish and nasty evil doers, and a great wild fire in the Wyoming mountains will do that to me.

Throughout the adventure, I was distracted by the unbelievable oversimplifications and the Wyoming politics that pervaded the book. I have some sympathy for honest libertarian politics, I'm firmly convinced of the need for the rule of law rather then the rule of individuals, and the need for the realistic right of appeal and review of institutional decision making.

However, Box didn't come close to convincing me to endorse his views about big government and bureaucracy by ignoring the ambiguities of a real life situation that he says his story is based upon. And he further distances his cause from me by inventing a villain who pursues childish revenge through the unrealistic use of bureaucratic power. His bad guy displays no outward signs or talents of leadership that would get him into a position of power, especially in hide bound federal bureaucracy. What Box describes could only happen in the crazed imaginations of Tea Party radicals.

Now a couple secondary villains in the story strike me as more plausible. Their power is not as extensive, but their threat is great. If Box wants to promote his political ideas beyond Wyoming, he needs to keep things real and believable.

A canyon from Breaking Point?
So, what story am I talking about? A couple armed EPA agents are killed while delivering some legal papers. A federal manhunt ensues and sweeps game warden Joe Pickett into its process. There is a private manhunt taking place at the same time and as things spin out of control, there are murders, drones, a huge forest fire, and an improvised rafting trip down a wilderness river. There are some family matter sidelines and a few misdirections, but mostly is simplified politics and action adventure.

The story telling is great and compelling. That kept me going.

Have you read Breaking Point? What did you think of it? Write and tell this little bit of the world.
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19 April 2013

Readin' Ritin' and pRocrastinatin'

Sorry to have been away.

I have been reading. I just haven't been writing about what I've been reading.

I blame it on the Nook.

I got a Nook for Christmas. And it came loaded with a bunch of stuff to read. But reading from the screen of little computer-like tablet threw me. Reading was very different. And when I finished, I didn't have a bound pile of pages between covers to hold and look at and remind me that I really did want to keep up the practice of writing. I've been doing this for 25 or more years.

Well, I finished a real book this evening. It's sitting here next to my keyboard and writing about it seems easier. More natural.

The book is Garment of Shadows by Laurie R. King. You remember, she's the woman who began writing about Mary Russell, the young woman who became the apprentice and then the wife of an old guy named Sherlock Holmes after he'd sort of retired. (See what I wrote about that first book, The Beekeeper's Apprentice if you're curious.)

By my count this is the thirteenth story about Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes. It's a follow up to Pirate King and is set in Morocco. Nancy checked it out for me from the Northfield Library along with a couple e-books for the Nook for my birthday.

Enough preface. Like Pirate King, this was not one of King's best. Garment of Shadows was pretty un-Holmesian. It was more Holmesian than the pirate book because Holmes played a bigger role. And there was some Holmesian sleuthing and logic. But the old guy and his wife were really out of their element in Morocco. They were probably not out of their element more than they were in a couple of the stories set in the Middle East. (Remember, Ken, it's fiction!)

Maybe I'm not remembering well the early Laurie R. King plots or the Doyle stories. Every time I try to think of examples from this book that seem un-Holmesian, I remember examples of situations, plot twists, and conundrums from Doyle stories. Maybe I'm not willing to admit that King really does a good job of writing in the Doyle genre.

This story begins where Pirate King left off. Russell and Holmes abandoned the movie company about they time the film is finished and separately end up in the Moroccan city of Fez. I had to get out a map of Morocco to follow the story. At the beginning of the book, Russell awakens without any memory. She's rescued by a mute little boy, who rescues lots of the good guys before the book ends.

While Russell searches for herself, Holmes is searching for her while visiting a diplomat in Morocco who happens to be a distant cousin.

In the meantime, there is growing tension between Britain, France, and Spain. Holmes' brother Mycroft is messing around in these tense international relationships like Dick Cheney selling a story about WMD in Iraq. Then there are the groups of Moroccan rebels fighting for independence and superiority.

Russell and Holmes are reunited. Russell gradually regains her memory. They facilitate a summit conference between a colonial diplomat and a rebel leader. They get shot at, drugged, imprisoned, and framed. They sneak back into the city of Fez through a "back door" and...

But that would be giving things away.

It's not as good as some of the earlier Russell-Holmes books. Laurie R. King has written some non-Russell-Holmes books, but the Russell-Holmes books have become so popular she's given up writing about Kate Martinelli, the San Francisco detective. And I doubt she'll be able to take time to write other books as good as A Darker Place, Folly, and Keeping Watch. Her publisher probably demands at least one Russell-Holmes book a year.

Too bad. I would really like another book about Detective Matinelli. Or an intriguing story about someone conquering inner demons.
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04 February 2013

Uncle!

View from Dr. Loomis' temporary home
Bird Loomis, who is now enjoying the coming end of summer in Adelaide as a Fullbright Visiting Scholar, asked me awhile back if I'd read Peter Temple's The Broken Shore. Indeed, I had. In September 2009, I wrote about my experience in "Southern (hemisphere) fiction." I rather liked the book.

Then I wondered why I hadn't followed up by reading more of Peter Temple's novels.

So I went to the library and found Truth, a 2010 novel by Temple.

I read about half way through the book.

I gave up.

The book (or at least the first half) is written almost entirely as dialogue or monologue. Very little context. Very little (if any) introduction of characters. Just names thrown out.

I could, I suppose, have taken notes about scenes, characters, and events. But I wanted to be intrigued and entertained, not employed. It reminded me of the self-check out lanes at the grocery store. If I wanted to scan and bag groceries, I'd apply for a job at a grocery store. Besides none of the characters I could identify were interesting. I didn't get far enough into the book to be intrigued by any of the crimes being investigated. (Well, I assume they were being investigated, but I couldn't really tell.)

Example from page 1:
"Villani looked at the city towers, wobbling, unstable in the sulphurous haze. He shouldn't have come. There was no need. 'This air-conditioner's fucked,' he said. 'Second one this week.'

"'Never go over here without thinking,' said Birkerts.

"'What?'

"'My granddad. On it.'

"One spring morning in 1970, the bridge's half-built steel frame stood in the air, it crawled with men, unmarried men, men with wives, men with wives and children, men with children they did not know, men with nothing but the job and hard, hard hangover and then Span 10-11 failed..."
And it goes on. And on.

I didn't.

Have you read Truth by Peter Temple?

What did you make of it?

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

All these people really liked the book




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31 January 2013

Library favorites

The whole lists are 25 items long. I've only reprinted a few. If you want to see the complete lists, "check out" the Hennepin County Library site.

Psst... I haven't read any of them, not even the Fancy Nancy titles.

Top 25 Adult, Teen, and Children’s Books at Hennepin County Libraries In 2012 Show Consistent Author, Genre Favorites

Hennepin County Library has tabulated the top 25 adult, teen, children’s and very young children’s titles checked out in 2012, and the lists show that Hennepin County readers are remarkably consistent in their reading interests year to year.

In 2011 and 2012, 24 of the top 25 adult titles checked out were fiction. The one non-fiction title in the top 25 — both in 2011 and 2012 — was Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption...

Once again crime and mystery fiction by well-known writers such as John Sandford, Janet Evanovich, Sue Grafton, and James Paterson were clear favorites.

TOP 10 ADULT BOOKS AT HCL IN 2012
  1. Kill Shot: An American Assassin Thriller by Vince Flynn
  2. Stolen Prey by John Sandford
  3. Shock Wave by John Sandford
  4. Explosive Eighteen: a Stephanie Plum Novel by Janet Evanovich
  5. V Is for Vengeance by Sue Grafton
  6. The Litigators by John Grisham
  7. Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James
  8. Private: #1 Suspect by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
  9. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
  10. Lone Wolf by Jodi Picoult

TOP 5 TEEN BOOKS AT HCL IN 2012
  1. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
  2. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
  3. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
  4. Divergent by Veronica Roth
  5. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

TOP 5 CHILDREN’S BOOKS AT HCL IN 2012
  1. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days by Jeff Kinney
  2. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Greg Heffley’s Journal by Jeff Kinney
  3. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever by Jeff Kinney
  4. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth by Jeff Kinney
  5. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw by Jeff Kinney
TOP 5 EASY (VERY YOUNG CHILDREN’S) BOOKS AT HCL IN 2012
  1. Lego Star Wars: The Phantom Menace by Hannah Dolan
  2. Curious George Goes to the Zoo by Cynthia Platt
  3. Fancy Nancy and the Mean Girl by Jane O’Connor
  4. Fancy Nancy and the Delectable Cupcakes by Jane O’Connor
  5. I Can Be a Ballerina by Christy Webster
The first big library I remember (Minneapolis)
The fondly remembered library of my youth (Redwood Falls)






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21 January 2013

A company company

I checked out another non-fiction book from the Northfield Public Library a month ago. The fact that it took me a month to finish it ought to be an indicator. The book was Jon Gertner's The Idea Factory, Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.

This book had been on my "to read" list since I'd seen a laudatory review of it last year. In addition, I grew up in a Ma Bell family. My dad worked for one of the Baby Bells and was a true believer. So, I grew up seeing the company magazine and hearing stories about the great Bell System, including that wonder, Bell Labs. When I was in high school (in the early 1960s), I got a Bell Labs kit for making a solar cell and another for making a transistorized buzzer circuit that was powered by the solar cell. They both worked for me.

Gertner's book, like Sam Kean's book on genetics, was disappointing.

I decided that The Idea Factory... was a good set of notes which could be used to write a book, but it wasn't a real book. Like Kean's book, it had no voice. There were stories to tell, but the disjointed anecdotes were not a story. There were characters, but their appearances and disappearances in the pages of The Idea Factory... were hard to follow. I'm sure there are more dramatic stories about the development of the first kinds of transistors and the rivalry among the ambitious inventors, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956.

Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ

Gertner kept relating anecdotes and when he finished with one, he'd circle back to the decades between 1939 and 1959 to begin another (sort of like the circles around the Bell Labs HQ, above). As a reader, I felt like a tether ball winding round and round a pole until reaching the end of my rope and then being pushed back in the opposite direction until I hit the pole again.

There are other important stories to tell about the relationship of business, research, engineering, and product development hiding in this book, but they're not there. Gertner describes a bit about the lengths to which AT&T went to preserve their telephone monopoly, but that probably deserves its own book. (That book might exist in the business school library for all I know.) There are hints about things like business decisions to promote picture phones and initially discard fiber optics, but they're only mentioned.

There are hints about the revolving door between Bell Labs and the U.S. government (especially top secret R & D), but it's not told.

There are hints about patron-client relationships and keeping friends on the payroll even when they no longer worked for Bell Labs.

There's a brief description of the break up AT&T and the disappearance of Bell Labs into Lucent and then into Alcatel•Lucent. The merger of some parts of the old AT&T's engineering, manufacturing, and research organizations probably also deserves its own case study in business schools, and it might also exist (in the history section now). And what about the developments outside of Bell Labs that became competitors with AT&T? I really expected to read about how Bell Labs was involved with DARPA in some of the initial development of the Internet. There's nothing in the book, and Bell Labs isn't mentioned in the Wikipedia article on the development of the Internet. How'd all those smart guys working in communications miss that?

That last bit made me realize that, in spite of the propaganda I grew up with, Bell Labs was not unique. Every really large corporation does R&D. Bell Labs did come up with some remarkable inventions, like the transistor. But Texas Instruments came up with integrated circuits. Xerox PARC came up with laser printers and computer mice. Hewlett Packard developed scientific calculators and thermal printing. Microsoft, Apple, and Google invented themselves. And, to go back a bit, Thomas Edison, James Watt, Eli Whitney, and Henry Ford came up with some amazing things. So, to call Bell Labs' heyday "the Great Age of American Innovation" is a pretty big overstatement.

So, what I was looking for was a book, not a collection of notes and anecdotes. I guess I'll have to go back and read something more by Neil deGrasse Tyson or Tim Berners-Lee.

Have you read Jon Gertner's book, The Idea Factory?

What did you think about it? Write and tell this little bit of the world.
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19 January 2013

Reminder

Lest we forget.


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More non-fiction

Okay, it's not a book.

But this thinking and reading project took some time.

Maggie Koerth-Baker at BoingBoing pointed me at an old essay in Natural History Magazine by Neil deGrasse Tyson, "The Importance of Being Constant." Most of it was written for me. I learned things and I learned to think about things differently. I've been looking for someone to write like this since Stephen Jay Gould died.

What a way to begin a Saturday. I have plenty of things to think about as the temperature falls from the present 34° to an expected low of −5° tonight.

From Tyson's article:
"… the universe has its own constants, in the form of unvarying quantities that endlessly reappear in nature and in mathematics, and whose exact numerical values are of signal importance to the pursuit of science. Some of these constants are physical, grounded in actual measurements. Others, though they illuminate the workings of the universe, are purely numerical, arising from within mathematics itself…"

Okay, I had never thought of the fact that some constants are natural and others are artifacts of measurement ("purely numerical…"). Very interesting. Confusing, but very interesting.
 
He also wrote:
"Whenever a repeating pattern of cause and effect shows up in the universe, there's probably a constant at work. But to measure cause and effect, you must sift through what is and is not variable, and you must ensure that a simple correlation, however tempting it may be, is not mistaken for a cause… "

Oh, the time I've spent trying to teach those ideas.
 
Later in the essay, Tyson wrote:
"Kepler figured out that if you square the time it takes a planet to go around the Sun, then that quantity is always proportional to the cube of the planet's average distance from the Sun…"

I will never understand how someone could "realize" that squaring and cubing numbers that measure things create relevant relationships. If somebody wants to square time and cube distance measurements (which are not even measurements of the same things), my response would probably be, "So what?!" 
 
Even though I got lost somewhere in Tyson's description of Newtonian constants (never mind the quantum physics), he was quite clear about some things:
"No matter when or where you live, no matter your nationality or age or aesthetic proclivities, no matter whether you vote Democrat or Republican, if you calculate the value of pi you will get the same answer as everybody else in the universe. Thus constants such as pi enjoy a level of internationality that politics does not, never did, and never will—which is why, if people ever do communicate with aliens, they're likely to talk in mathematics, the lingua franca of the cosmos, and not English."

Another thing I've spent hours trying to teach. 

Although, I do wonder if the universality of these constants is a safe assumption. The Chinese spent millennia convinced that their culture was the center of the world (whatever shape it had). Where did that get them? And the author describes at the end of the essay how some physicists are looking for evidence that constants change over time. Why not look for evidence that they change over space as well?
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23 December 2012

Question about Rendell

Anyone have an opinion about Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh?

Marilyn Stasio, who reviews mysteries for the New York Times, made Rendell's new book, The Child's Child, sound intriguing.
“Subtle” is an inadequate word for Ruth Rendell. So are “crafty,” “cunning,” “clever” and “sly.” Although these are accurate descriptions of her confounding technique, a better word would be “surprising.” Whatever it is you might think Rendell is up to, especially when she’s writing as Barbara Vine — that’s not it...

Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think about Rendell/Vine's books.

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21 December 2012

It's not nice to fool an old man

A month ago I picked up Christopher Fowler's Ten Second Staricase at the Northfield Library. It's subtitled "A Bryant & May Mystery." Reading it was a confusing and slow project.

I suppose I shouldn't have begun with the fourth "Bryant & May Mystery." There were lots of ways that I was adrift from the first page. I should have guessed since the two characters of the subtitle were the heads of London's Peculiar Crimes Unit.

My other problem was that I kept trying to read it in the late afternoons and evenings. The times of day, the confusion, and the writing kept abetting my fatigue. I seemed unable to read for more than a quarter hour without falling asleep. No wonder it took me a month to finish the book.

Throw in a lot of London mythology, a bit of vampire lore, and some cultural history about the "Highwayman," and I was getting less entertained. And that, after all, is a main reason for reading a book like this.

The investigative process used by these agents of the Peculiar Crimes Unit are anything but normal. But that didn't help me since much of it was based on following clues based on arcane London history. The plot is ridiculous. The cops are too weird to admire. The other characters are enigmas and even less interesting than the detectives.

Merry Christmas from Bryant & May
I finished because I hoped the ending would make sense out of some of the rest. It didn't really help.

Have you read any Christopher Fowler or Ten Second Staircase? What did you think?  

Write and tell this little bit of the world.



Dan Conrad wrote: "I don't know if it was Ten Second Staircase, but I once began a Fowler book thinking stories related to something called "The Peculiar Crimes Unit" -- and in London -- would just have be interesting.

"Wrong. I think I got about a quarter of the way through and gave it up."
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02 December 2012

Short and sort of non-fiction

While at the Northfield Library, I picked up another book by Karin Fossum. This one is The Water's Edge. The primary characters are, once again, Inspector Konrad Sejer and his partner, Jacob Skarre. They're smart and careful cops.

 Christian Skolmen as Jacob Skarre
and Bjørn Sundquist as Konrad Sejer on Norwegian TV		 

I've thought that a couple of Fossum's books were very good and a couple others weren't. This one borders on good from the not so good side. Luckily, it's short -- about half the size of most of the mystery novels I read.

Also, I want partial credit for reading non-fiction (see previous entry). The primary crime in this story involves paedophilia. I'm glad the crime is neither graphically described nor discussed at length. However, Fossum obviously did a lot of research on paedophilia in order to write the book and she passes on what she learned through the voice of Jacob Skarre. Skarre "does" his research in the course of investigating this case, and he passes on what he learns about profiling paedophiles, about paedophilia in the USA, and about the liklihood of serial killings. All that telling does offer some education to Inspector Sejer and the reader, but it's not fiction. Nor does it move the story along.

As in other of Fossum's books, much of the investigation takes place off stage (off the page?). It reminds me of the handy partners that Detective Kate Beckett has on the TV series, Castle. Beckett says, "You guys and the uniforms go canvas the neighborhood and find out if anyone saw anything." And magically in the next scene, the partners show up with the results of the canvas. Well, Sejer and Skarre have a good crew at their police station who carry out much of the investigation off the page. That creates some complications for the main investigators in this story, but it does mean that little happens during the course of the story telling -- and that's been true in others of Fossum's books.

That inaction works pretty well because Fossum tells the main story and two or three side stories in first person narratives. She's done that in other books too. One of those side stories is intriguing -- especially at the end. Intriguing enough that I wish it had been more fully told.  

The Water's Edge was pretty good. Not great. Certainly not as good as Fossum's best (He Who Fears the Wolf or Black Seconds ).

Have you read The Water's Edge?  

Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it.
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28 November 2012

Tales mostly lost on me

The world lost a number of wonderful people that I knew in the past year. In 2008, I shepherded one of them, at the age of 88, into the local Democratic caucus, and the excitement of a thousand or two people milling about the Northfield Middle School so she could cast her vote for Obama. Another, at age 90, asked a friend to take her to an exquisite dinner, and announced afterward that she was ready. A few days later she died. A third asked me, through her daughter, why I seemed to read nothing by mysteries. (I never got to answer the question.)

But the question stuck with me for months. It's true that all of the books I've read in the past couple years have been mysteries.

Now, in another part of my life, I read political science and scan the headlines of a dozen online news sources every morning looking for things that might help teachers of high school courses in comparative politics. I post the things to a blog that attracts a couple hundred people a day. (That's about 50 times as many people as look in at this blog.)

That's all to say that I read more than mysteries. But non-fiction books? Not so much.

In any case, I scanned the new non-fiction shelves at the library recently and picked up The Violinist's Thumb by Sam Kean. It's subtitled Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius as Written by our Genetic Code.

I feel particularly ignorant about our genetic code, so I thought this might be a good introduction.

Not so much.

Now, I've heard about this thing in Literature that's called "voice." I think Sam Kean could use some study about the voice in which he writes. I had to get to the second half of the book before I caught on to the fact that Kean was telling stories. I wasn't always sure there was a connection between the topic he started out with and the examples ("stories") that accompanied his explanations.
The structure of the DNA double helix. The atoms in the structure are colour coded by element and the detailed structure of two base pairs are shown in the bottom right. -From Wikipedia
Describe this in words. I dare you.
It seemed mostly like an inadequate textbook. I had to go online to make sense out of his description of chromosomes, genes, and all the other bits of DNA. Then, every once in awhile, Kean would throw in a sentence or two that sounded like a smart alec remark a high school student might make. Other times he'd try to describe an incredibly complex process like making DNA sculptures without a diagram.

There were some interesting stories and lots of facts about our genetic code. I've forgotten most of them.

I do think I'll go looking for another bit of non-fiction to read and hope it's more Literary.

Have you read Kean's The Violinist's Thumb? What did you think of it? Do you think non-fiction can be Literature?

Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.
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Non-fiction can be "lethal?"

In another part of my life, I post excerpts from bits of journalism to a blog. The bits are related the countries and the curriculum of the AP course in Comparative Government and Politics.

I don't usually post excerpts here, but this appeared in an op-ed section of the New York Times and it's a good introduction the book I just finished.

You can tell I haven't studied Literature because I don't know what that means. As a teacher and a social scientist and historian I always assumed that non-fiction could be Literature.

Gould
Now any of us who have been subjected to textbooks knows that some non-fiction will NEVER be Literature. I don't know why most textbooks are so poorly written that they induce sleep more than admiration. That's an argument for the study of more non-fiction.

Why anyone would find more study of non-fiction a "lethal dose," is beyond my ken. Unless, of course, the objection was to the lack of good examples. How about beginning with the essays of Stephen Jay Gould? There's a guy who wrote Literature. Literature about ancient things and evolution.

Well, the book I finished is not Literature. That's coming up next. Meanwhile, what do you think of Sara Mosle's ideas about non-fiction?

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

What Should Children Read?

By Sara Mosle

[T]he Common Core State Standards [are] a set of national benchmarks, adopted by nearly every state, for the skills public school students should master in language arts and mathematics in grades K-12...

Depending on your point of view, the now contentious guidelines prescribe a healthy — or lethal — dose of nonfiction.

For example, the Common Core dictates that by fourth grade, public school students devote half of their reading time in class to historical documents, scientific tracts, maps and other “informational texts” ... Alarmed English teachers worry we’re about to toss Shakespeare so students can study, in the words of one former educator, “memos, technical manuals and menus.”

David Coleman, president of the College Board, who helped design and promote the Common Core, says English classes today focus too much on self-expression. “It is rare in a working environment,” he’s argued, “that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.’ ”...

One education columnist sums up the debate as a fiction versus nonfiction “smackdown.”

A striking assumption animates arguments on both sides, namely that nonfiction is seldom literary and certainly not literature...

As an English teacher and writer who traffics in factual prose, I’m with Mr. Coleman. In my experience, students need more exposure to nonfiction, less to help with reading skills, but as a model for their own essays and expository writing...

I love fiction and poetry as much as the next former English major and often despair over the quality of what passes for “informational texts,” few of which amount to narrative much less literary narrative.

What schools really need isn’t more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing. Most students could use greater familiarity with what newspaper, magazine and book editors call “narrative nonfiction”: writing that tells a factual story, sometimes even a personal one, but also makes an argument and conveys information in vivid, effective ways...

Narrative nonfiction also provides a bridge between the personal narratives students typically write in elementary school and the essays on external subjects that are more appropriate assignments in high school and beyond...

There are anthologies of great literature and primary documents, but why not “30 for Under 20: Great Nonfiction Narratives?” Until such editions appear, teachers can find complex, literary works in collections like “The Best American Science and Nature Writing,”...

If students read 100 such articles over the course of a year, they may not become best-selling authors, but like Mr. Gladwell, they’ll get the sound and feel of good writing in their heads. With luck, when they graduate, there will still be ranks of literary nonfiction authors left for them to join.
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05 November 2012

Volcanic ash covers a crime scene

I found Yrsa Sigurðardóttir's book, Ashes to Dust, A Thriller, on the "new books" shelf at the Northfield Library. I had vague memories of reading Last Rituals a couple years ago and checked out this newer book.

Yrsa signing books
As I noted before, Icelanders are part of a country small enough to dispense with family names most of the time. In her books, most of Yrsa's characters are identified by first names only. As her books get translated, globalization proceeds, and Yrsa publicizes herself on Facebook, she adds her family name. And she adds family names to some of her characters. (However, her lover from Last Rituals is still only the German lawyer Matthew.)

I noted that the title on this dust jacket seems to include a PR person's sales pitch that Ashes to Dust is "A Thriller." Last Rituals was labeled "A Novel of Suspense, but lacked much suspense. Ashes to Dust is not thrilling. In fact, it's anything but exciting. It's interesting. The story is well told. It's about the investigation of a forty-year-old multiple murder and a contemporary murder that might be connected. What kept me reading was not the pursuit of thrills, but curiosity about what chain of events was going to explain the discovery of three bodies and a severed head in the basement of a house covered by volcanic ash in 1973, and whether or how a 2010 murder is related to the earlier crimes. In the back of my mind I kept wondering when something thrilling might happen. But the thrills never came.

There were opportunities. The bodies had been discovered by archaeologists excavating some of the houses buried by the volcanic eruption. Thóra and her assistant prowl around the basement in the dark. They meet with tough-looking sailors on a dock in the dark. They take an aimless tourist cruise as the only two passengers in order to talk to a shady sailor. There are opportunities for thrills, but none are taken.

Nor did I feel any emotional attachment to the characters. Some of them were interesting. Most were just there. The motivations of several of the key players didn't make much sense or weren't explained very well. Students of Stanislavsky and Strasberg would have a terrible time portraying these characters without a lot of imaginative work. Too bad that Yrsa didn't do more of that work.

So no thrills. No emotions. An intellectual puzzle well told, but only partly explained (sounds terribly Scandinavian). Attorney Thóra once again does nearly all the detective work. It seems the Icelandic cops, especially the small town guys, are too overworked to pursue clues — even in a murder investigation. Thóra's love interest is offstage and considering a job offer in Reykjavik, but she isn't sure how to encourage him without seeming too needy. (Even that bit of emotion gets stuffed.)

I enjoyed the puzzle and the way that Yrsa revealed the pieces of it. It wasn't riveting.

Have you read Ashes to Dust? How did you react? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

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01 November 2012

More Scandinavian mystery fiction

Dale Stahl wrote as promised because he finished the Jussi Adler-Olsen Department Q novel he'd begun.

Here's what he had to say:
I enjoy Jussi Adler-Olsen's Dept. Q novels. However, I notice a persistent theme among some of these Scandinavian/Northern European-type authors: a tendency toward apocalyptic views of human nature and overcoming obstacles to solve a crime.
[My note to Dale: go watch a couple Ingmar Bergman films.]
Adler-Olsen's main character is Carl Mørck, who is a classic, irascible, irritable guy who is more thoughtful and smarter than everyone else on the detective force. But, he's likable for his human desires, foibles, heart pounding self doubt and limitations. Still, the crime in the first Dept. Q novel, The Keeper of Lost Causes, is so outrageous because of the horrific treatment and torture of the victim, that it is almost beyond believability. If it weren't for the real life treatment of someone like Jaycee Dugard (held captive for 18 years), I might have just thrown the book away. Still, there is something compelling about Mørck and his assistant Assad. In addition, I always find a a novel in which the plot revolves around a cold case or a past event compelling. I liked it and was glad I read it.

Then I got the follow-up book, The Absent One, and was even more irritated by the ridiculous, over-the-top crimes and bad behavior of the gang of suspects: wealthy boarding school kids who delight in sexual promiscuity, violence, and the torture of animals and innocent people. It irritated the hell out of me, yet I am Scandinavian and have just enough pessimism about human nature to believe that there are people out there who are that base and brutal. So, I read the book doggedly to the end, and I will be damned if I don't read the next one.

The finish was absurd, the denouement implausible, but I want to find out if Mørck ever gets to have a relationship with his crush and therapist, Mona. And I want to find out if he ever solves the crime which involved an ambush that killed one of his two best friends and paralyzed the other. That story was begun in the first book.

[Dale seems repelled by the savagery; attracted by the romance and the mystery. Those of us who read murder mysteries (even if they're cozies) have strange motives, don't we]

[Questions: Is it a coincidence that Mørck's assistant has the same name as the former dictator of Syria? And, is it a coincidence that Mankell's detective Wallander has a black lab named Jussi?]

[One answer from a publication "In the Footsteps of Wallander," a tourist brochure from the Ystad (Sweden) Tourist Office: Wallander named "the dog Jussi after the famous mid-20th century Swedish tenor Jussi Björling."]

Have you read anything by Jussi Adler-Olsen? What did you think of it? Write and tell this little bit of the world how you reacted.
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