Book of many stories

Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I was standing in front of the "Best Sellers" rack of paperbacks while waiting for a prescription to be filled. I was next to a grocery store pharmacy.

Although the store now has some organic produce and a partial row of other organic products, it's still a middle/working class store that emphasizes thrift and large-sized cans of vegetables and Miracle Whip more than a wide selection of breads, cheeses, or sliced meats. Thirty years ago the store was called Erickson's. Then for a couple decades it was known as More 4. (The 4 was for four stores in one, but I could only ever count three. Maybe there was something out back I didn't know about.) Nowadays, it's called EconoFoods. Same corporate ownership all those years. Recently I noticed that a branch of the store in Hudson, Wisconsin, formerly called EconoFoods has a new name. I guess someone's still looking for corporate identity.

That's where I was when the eye-catching cover of Stieg Larsson's book caught my eye. It was in the #8 slot of best sellers, but the bar code sticker on the back said, "Best Seller #16 Expries July 30." However, the cash register receipt said I bought "Hanna Montana" in the "GM and Health Beauty" section. I guess someone's still looking for inventory and accounting identity.

In the back of my mind, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, rang a quiet bell. I'd read something about this book, but couldn't remember what I'd read or where I'd read it. The blurb on the back cover offered, "a murder mystery, family saga, love story, and a tale of financial ingtrigue wrapped into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel." I was headed for a quiet weekend at Sidetrack which everyone expected would be rainy, so I bought the book and some orange juice along with medication that promises to help me combat my hyper-lipidemia.

What an incredible luxury. Time to do nothing but read. Saturday was indeed a cool rainy day at the lake. Nancy and I were up early and headed to the neighborhood coffee shop (Cafe Wren in Luck), 15 miles up the road, for breakfast and an e-mail check-in.

When we got back to Little Blake, I opened up The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It's a 640-page book. By page 110, I told Nancy that I was hooked and wanted to finish the book. At the time, I didn't think I'd finish this weekend. There's usually a lot of competition for attention what with bald eagles, loons, kingfishers, garden flowers and weeds, and chores.

The rain persisted, off and on, most of Saturday. I was able to spend some time with neighbors during rainless interludes, but mostly I read. I watched the sun go down behind the clouds as I read. I got up to stretch after dark and discovered that it was 11:15PM.

I brushed my teeth, took my prescribed medication, and crawled into bed. Sometime later, I learned who one of the real bad guys was, I put the book down.

Sunday morning I paddled the canoe around the lake, poured myself a big glass of orange juice, made some coffee, and started reading again. I finished the book just after noon.

Recommendation enough?

How about that the author came from Sweden, but his attitude doesn't quite match the misanthropic perspective of that other Swede I've read recently, Henning Mankell. In fact, in spite of one of the main themes (in Sweden the book and the movie based on the book are titled, Men Who Hate Women), there's little in Larsson's book like the dyspeptic view of life that Mankell seems to live sourly with.

The translation by Reg Keeland is quite good and very much in American English. There are a few strange things in the translation and some things just don't translate well. ("After the meeting Blomkvist had coffee with Malm at Java on Horngatspuckeln.")

The mystery revolves around a teenager who disappeared 40 years before the story told in this book. The cast of characters includes a large Swedish clan descended from a very successful 19th century industrialist. The hired investigators are a discredited journalist and a self-taught, tattooed, pierced, punk polymath.

Larsson tells several side and back stories in this huge book, but the pace never lags. I didn't keep all the family names straight, but I never kept all the names in my own family straight either. I never got confused, but I also never felt I was being talked down to by the author or the characters.

If you have read other of my commentaries, you know I don't have a lot of patience with incredible things in realistic fiction. The last story Larsson tells in this book is incredible. I wish he'd left it out. Well, I wish his editor had dumped it. I'll buy a self-taught, neurotic polymath, but not one who does the things described in the last story. It's just too much.

In spite of that, I'm ready to read Larsson's next book (it's due out in hardcover now). I rather expected the discredited and rehabilitated journalist to be the main character of the second book. I'm not sure that's true. According to the chapter published in this volume, it's the punk polymath.

There won't be many books. Larsson died in 2004 after handing three manuscripts to his agent.

The paperback edition of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo came out in June 2009 in the U.S. The library might have a copy, but you'll probably have to hang out near the rack of paperback best sellers to find a copy. I think it will be worth it.

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See also:

• A Stieg Larsson web site
  
• Alex Berenson's review in the New York Times
  
• Kate's review at Kate's Book Blog
  
• Joan Smith's review at the Sunday Times

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Alaska frontier mystery

Sometimes I finish reading a book and write about it immediately. Other times, I put the book on the corner of my small desk with the intention of writing about it soon. I don't yet know what determines the course I choose. It might be the book or my reaction to it. It might be the press of other tasks. I was thinking it might have to do with whether or not a book is from a library, but I've gotten overdue notices before writing about a borrowed book.

So Dana Stabenow's Whisper to the Blood has been on the corner of my desk for several weeks now. Since I read it, I've written about several other books.

I really liked this mystery. It's one of Stabenow's Kate Shugak novels. I find the little wilderness community of Niniltna as interesting as Lake Wobegon. I think I like it better than Lake Wobegon because, in spite of the murder and mayhem, the events in Niniltna are less fantastic than most of the events old Garrison Keillor spills out on Saturday afternoons.



Okay, so I like the characters in Niniltna. I like the Aunties who spend their evenings in one corner of the local tavern piecing quilts together. I like the local native elder who spends his time there watching sports on the big screen TV. I like the main character, her teen-age foster son, her wolf-dog, and her lover, the local Alaska Trooper. I like most of the other frontier residents, who have escaped from one thing or another.

How does a tiny, mostly subsistence-based community react to the discovery of gold nearby? There won't be a gold rush, but the big company that has rounded up the mineral rights will be creating more jobs than there are people locally. How do the people react when first the company PR rep is murdered? And then when the most outspoken opponent of the mining is also murdered? And how does the local Trooper along with his unofficial partner in love and investigation find the murderer(s) and protect the community? Oh, and how do Kate and her lover resolve the relationship difficulties they have? (There is a bit of soap opera in this book, but it's better than the bits of romance novel that have been stuck into other novels by Stabenow.)

Stabenow is a very good story teller. Even though she's written 15 other Kate Shugak novels, most of them are set away from Niniltna. So the little frontier village is not the hotbed of murder that some writers seem to create in bucolic settings. (It's hard to imagine, for instance, more than a couple murders a century in a place like Lake Wobegon.)

Stabenow is also very good at creating characters, and after 16 books she's got this crew down pretty well. That's why there has to be some soap opera in the central love story, a budding romance for Kate's foster son, and a new character or two who come to town and end up waiting tables in the tavern or catching on with the mining company's PR project.

Enough, already. I liked this book, Whisper to the Blood. If you've read it, let us know what you think. If you haven't read it, try it out and react here.

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See also:

• Dana Stabenow's web site, where you can read the first four chapters
  
• Mary Helen Becker's review at Mystery Scene

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For Kindle

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From the Monkey Cage

Lee Sigelman, a Carleton classmate, wrote about his most recent reading in the political science blog, The Monkey Cage. That blog is written by a number of professors, most of whom teach with Sigelman at George Washington University.

You can read what he says here.

He wrote about Windy City by NPR journalist Scott Simon and The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell.

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Stories quick and slow

Another weekend at Sidetrack, another stop at the Amery library, another book.

On Friday afternoon, I didn't want to spend much time nosing around the library, so I quickly picked up a John Dunning mystery, The Bookman's Promise. It was on one of the first shelves I looked at.

I was delayed by a greeting from the head librarian, who must have a phenomenal memory for faces, because she recognized me. I'm one of thousands of patrons. I only come in half a dozen times each summer. But we've always had pleasant exchanges as I've checked out or returned books. That woman, whose name I don't know, has to be one of the reasons that the little town of Amery has such a great library.

Back to Dunning's book.

I've read several of his books and enjoyed the stories and the mysteries. Dunning is a book seller like the main character, Cliff Janeway, in his mysteries. Janeway is a former Denver police detective. There's no hint in his bio that Dunning was ever a LEO.

This book is the best of Dunning's I can recall. That's true even though there was a big, ponderous story in the middle of the book about British explorer Richard Burton [right]. The imaginary story is relevant, but the details that Dunning offers aren't. Plod, plod, plod. Skim, skim, skim...

What makes The Bookman's Promise so good is the story told about a supposed notebook belonging to said Burton. Dunning tells that story well and populates it with great characters, some of whom are bad guys, a couple who are good guys, and many others who are suspicious. I was suspicious of nearly every character until the last few pages.

And how can you dislike a story in which Cliff Janeway gets to single-handedly defend Fort Sumter from attackers coming over the wall?

There are minor plausibility problems at a couple points in the story, but I can handle one or two. I don't think either was really necessary, but what do I know?

So I recommend this book highly if you like mysteries. It was published in '04, so there ought to be paperback or used copies around. Go see a bookseller like John Dunning, or check with Amazon using the link below.

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• John Dunning's biography
• Adam Woog's review in the Seattle Times
• Roz Shea's review at Book Reporter

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For Kindle

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An old Kellerman mystery

I hinted at this a few days ago, but I read another Jonathan Kellerman book awhile back. It was Private Eyes, An Alex Delaware Novel.

This was an old one. First published in 1992. It's even older than any of our cars. But, enjoying it was sort of a guilty pleasure. Then again, movies and books about the rich were popular during the Great Depression, so maybe a book about rich people is attractive now. Why that should be so I don't know.

Maybe when people are anxious about their economic futures, reading about people who have more money than god is reassuring. I know I've lived through recessions before, but never with the anxiety I've felt recently. Of course, I've never been retired before. In any case, a story about wealthy people who are different from the rest of us, was attractive, not repulsive.

Kellerman's Dr. Delaware is rich enough to work only when he wants to. And his client in this book is a lot richer than that.

In the first fourth of the book, Delaware recalls the little girl he treated and describes his analysis and the course of therapy. (That's what inspired me to pick up Oliver Sacks' book.) The rest of the book is about what happens after the nearly grown-up little girl calls Dr. Delaware because she's convinced her mother has been kidnapped.

As is common, I guess, in Kellerman's novels, Dr. Delaware recruits his LAPD detective buddy Milo Sturgis to help investigate the disappearance.

I told David, when I was about two-thirds of the way through the book, that the exchanges between Delaware and Sturgis were well-done. Kellerman really moved the story along through the dialogues. Instead of describing things from some distant third-person perspective, the story is told by the investigators as they share what they've learned along the way. I really liked it.

That all broke down at the end of the book. When the evil bad guy talks and talks and talks about what he's done and why. It's boring. The evil bad guy deserved to be shot on the spot just for blabbing on and on.

So the last 50 pages or so were a bust. The first 400 or so pages contained a good story.

Now, what did you think of it?

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• Jonathan Kellerman's web site


• cwriter's review at Wacky Web Writings


• Gene Lyons' review in Entertainment Weekly

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For Kindle

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Antarctic arts program of the NSF

A few years ago, I found the web cam from the Australian research station in Antarctica at Mawson [left]. I was fascinated by the summer day, the winter night, and the experiences of the few people who live and work there summers and the fewer people (about 16) who live and work there during the dark of winter. I still look at the Mawson web cam regularly and read the weekly newsletter about what people are up to down below the Antarctic Circle.

That's one of the reasons I was attracted to Sarah Andrews' book In Cold Pursuit when I saw it on the shelf at the new Amery library. It's set in Antarctica.

More than a few years ago, I read Andrews' first novel, Tensleep. It was very good. I've read several of her books since, but none of them lived up to that first one. A couple were discouraging to me.

The hope of reading another really good book by Sarah Andrews is another reason I checked this one out.

Andrews is a geologist who has written nearly a dozen mystery novels. Em Hanson, a geologist who solves mysteries is the main character in most of them.

In this book, Em Hanson appears only in a few e-mails to a glaciologist grad student who arrives to do research at McMurdo Station in Antarctica only to discover that her advison (and principal investigator) has been arrested for murder and shipped back to the US.

Guess what?

Another geologist becomes an amateur slueth.

One of the strengths of this story is that grad student Valena Walker is not a lone wolf in solving the murders she learns about. An informal crew of academics and support personnel at McMurdo get involved in sorting out the clues and red herrings.

The story is a good one. There were too many characters to keep track of. The misleading clues were well done and believable. The main character was too anonymous. The story is well-told, but there are just a few too many geology lectures.

So this wasn't a disappointing book, but it doesn't live up to my memories of Tensleep.

If you read this one, tell us what you think.

Andrews wrote the novel after receiving a grant through the NSF Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. That suggests that she got to see the places she wrote about and meet people who worked in them. I trust her descriptions of McMurdo [right] and the research sites in the book. I also trust that her descriptions make it obvious that McMurdo (at least in summer) is much more like a small, well-connected city than the little family at Mawson Station.

Who knew there was an National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs that offered artists and writers grants? Is that a way to get more Congressional support? Or do the scientist-types think that artists and writers can help spread the results of scientific research?

I'm still intrigued and in awe of people who can work in a place where there's no escape for months from either the place or the people in the family.

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• Sarah Andrews' web site
• Andrews' publisher's web site
• Cherie Dargan's review for the Waterloo Public Library
  

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Sweden to Zambia

On the way to Sidetrack (the little refuge in the woods), I stopped at the new library in Amery. What a great new facility. No more are the window ledges full of books. No longer are there carts full of books in the middle of aisles.

There's plenty of new space. There are tables and comfy chairs and a fireplace. There are even empty shelves waiting for new books. Hooray for the Amery library.

As I was scanning the shelves, I saw, in the mystery section, a Henning Mankell book. Slightly curious and very skeptical, I picked it up. The description inside the front cover said, "Interweaving past and present, Sweden and Zambia, The Eye of the Leopard draws on bestselling author Henning Mankill's deep understanding of the two worlds he calls home: Sweden... and Africa..."

"Well," I said to myself, "it's not set in Sweden. Maybe the dispeptic Swede won't be so pessimistic if he's writing a story about a Swede in Africa."

Wrong!

I should have read the first couple sentences. "He wakes in the African night, convinced that his body has split in two. Cracked open, as if his guts had exploded, with the blood running down his face and chest."

His main character doesn't know what to do with his life. As a child, he'd had a realization that he was an individual and that his life was separate from everyone else's. He ends up in law school, but decides he doesn't want to be a lawyer.

He goes to Zambia because a woman who had befriended him as a motherless child wanted to go there. He stays in Zambia because he's asked and he doesn't know what else to do. He stays for 20 years even though he doesn't like what he's doing and he's scared most of the time and he doesn't understand Africa or Africans.

It's not a mystery in the conventional sense.

About half way through the book, I decided it's the Swedish/Zambian version of Camus' The Stranger. I skimmed most of the rest of the book. On page 246 (out of 315), Mankell writes (in the voice of his main character), "From my upbringing I received neither self-knowledge nor a sense of purpose... Now I try to move through hostile terrain without surrendering to confusion."

That's how I got through most of the book: without "a sense of purpose" and "without surrenduring to confusion." I still can't really answer the question of why I sort of read the whole thing. Maybe I kept hoping for some kind of redemption for the character or the author.

No such luck.

Why would Mankell choose to live in Zambia? Why would he choose to live in Sweden? Why does he choose to live? I guess he either gets by without "a sense of purpose" or he's not writing about himself at all.

So it goes.

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See also:

• Chris Petit's review in The Guardian, Out of Sweden
  
• Anna Patterson's review in The IndependentThe Eye of the Leopard
  
• Henning Mankell's web site

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Neurology text (almost)

While reading another of Jonathan Kellerman's books (about which I'll write soon), I was taken with the opening section. It was the fictionalized, and probably idealized narrative of a course of therapy for a fictionalized, and probably idealized patient.

I thought I'd like to read more things like that. So I picked up Oliver Sacks' [left] The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. From what I recalled having heard about the book, I thought it might be full of stories therapy and analysis.

I was wrong. There are some notable stories, a couple of which I remember reading in the New York Review of Books: the man who couldn't tell the difference between his wife and his hat and the man whose memory extended back only about 20 seconds.

But, most of the book is clinical diagnoses of patients and very little about therapy. There were the inseprable autistic twins who amused themselves by sharing prime numbers. There was the savant who knew the music, words, performances, and stage settings for nearly every prominent production of Bach's choral music.

Sacks offers intriguing literary allusions to help explain details of many of these case studies. But I'm not familiar with them. Sacks' references are meant for a more literary audience.

Much of the book includes references to seminal works in neurology. I've never heard of any of them, and Sacks' comments are directed to a more informed audience.

However, what I didn't expect and found fascinating were Sacks' philosophical questions.

• How is abstract reasoning different from simply knowing?
• Are there advantages to visualizing knowledge over knowing things by their verbal labels?
• What does it mean to know?
• What does it mean to be able to calculate?
• How do the talents of visual savants manifest themselves?
• Is it good therapy to direct autistic savants away from their natural talents and direct them to more socially useful (though not very valuable) activities?
• What makes it possible for someone to understand the narratives of stories but not the narrative of her own life?
• How can a person who cannot do simple calculations identify 12-digit prime numbers?
• Why are so many numerical savants preoccupied with prime numbers?
• Are numbers part of our brain's biology?

I would be interested in more about many of those questions, but they're beyond Sacks' professional expertise, so he's just asking.

The book wasn't what I expected, but it gave me a lot of ideas to think about.

While I was reading the book, Sacks appeared on The Daily Show, publicizing his latest book and a television production based on it. It's about music and the role music plays in human thinking and understanding. I missed the television production and I'll have to watch for a rerun, but I'm intrigued.

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Confusing the old guy in the room

David took at class this spring titled Artificial Intelligence and Science Fiction. It was a computer science course, but it could easily have been a philosophy course. The meaning of intelligence and the ethics of dealing with non-human intelligence were major topics.

One of the books on the recommended reading list was Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. I picked it up after hearing David talking about it and the discussions in class.

It took awhile to finish. Stephenson uses a lot of words and writes complex stories. And he has the need to explain many things in great detail. Some of his books have been 800+ pages. This one was only 440.

Most commentators label this book one of the cyberpunk novels, most famously represented by William Gibson's Neuromancer. The stories are set in dark, violent, anarchic, dystopic societies of the near future and focus on the actions of various heros and anti-heroes ("please, don't be too conventional").

The books reflect and inspire video games, anime, movies like Blade Runner and The Matrix, and industrial music.

One of the amazing things about Snow Crash is that it predicted (or publicized) in 1992 things like Second Life, Wikipedia, Google Earth, airport security systems, and attempts to unify the languages that computers speak.

The story is interesting and, at times, moves along swiftly and entertainingly. However, it's often interrupted by long lectures from "the Librarian" about the linguistic legend and history of Mesopotamia. From that mixture of a native human language, the story of a confusion of tongues at the tower of Babel (in Babylon), glossolalia, religion as a virus, and Ayn Rand individualism gone amok, Stephenson tries to explain how the world is ending (or something).

There are some interesting bits and pieces in there. "Information as a controlled substance," for instance. There are lots of facts, but you'd have to be a scholar to know how many. There are some interesting ideas and assertions, but you'd have to be a scholar and hear some discussion to really evaluate them. If Stephenson wanted to write a treatise on language and mind control, I might be interested. I tried to follow the lectures at first, but in the final two-thirds of the book, I just skimmed them.

For me, that stuff got in the way of a good adventure story and a hero in the model of the hard-boiled detectives that Raymond Chandler wrote about.

Stephenson's story is about the adventure of Hiro Protagonist (how's that for symbolism?) in his efforts to prevent the Reverend L. Bob Rife from using the mental virus "Snow Crash" to gain control of the minds of all the preternaturally talented computer programmers and thus becoming the super power in a modern world of sovereign private enterprises like Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong and Uncle Enzo's CosaNostra Pizza, Incorporated.

It connects to the lectures about ancient language because the tool that our Hiro needs is a magic word from ancient Sumerian recorded on a clay tablet excavated from an ancient Mesopotamian city.

Complex enough for you? I feel a bit more culturally informed. In terms of importance, I probably could have gotten similarly informed by watching a week's worth of "Entertainment Tonight" or "TMZ." Except then I'd know about present-day people who are famous for being famous, instead of obscure cultural references of the cyberpunk world.

I'll end here as the book ends, "Seems about right."

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• Neal Stephenson's web site
  
• Snow Crash made Time's list of All Time 100 Novels
  
• Danny Yee's review of Snow Crash
  
• A review at SlashDot
  

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For Kindle

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Re-reading

Bird Loomis wrote to recommend an editorial about reading. Interesting ideas. Any of you have thoughts on re-reading?

If you are a veteran of the newsletter that preceded this blog, you'll know that I've been known to re-read books. In 1984, I re-read 1984. When a new translation of The Stranger was done, I read the new version of The Stranger. And I've re-read other books.

Every time I re-read a book, I find that even though the book has not changed, I have.

Time and again I found the same thing that Verlyn Klinkenborg found. He recently wrote, "Some Thoughts on the Pleasures of Being a Re-Reader" in the The New York Times.

I’ve always admired my friends who are wide readers. A few even pride themselves on never reading a book a second time. I’ve been a wide reader at times...

But at heart, I’m a re-reader. The point of reading outward, widely, has always been to find the books I want to re-read and then to re-read them. In part, that’s an admission of defeat... And in part, it’s a concession to the limits of my memory. I forget a lot, which makes the pleasure of re-reading all the greater...

The work I chose in adulthood — to study literature — required the childish pleasure of re-reading...

Part of the fun of re-reading is that you are no longer bothered by the business of finding out what happens. Re-reading “Middlemarch,” for instance, or even “The Great Gatsby,” I’m able to pay attention to what’s really happening in the language itself — a pleasure surely as great as discovering who marries whom, and who dies and who does not.

The real secret of re-reading is simply this: It is impossible. The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does. Pip is always there to be revisited, but you, the reader, are a little like the convict who surprises him in the graveyard — always a stranger...

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More mystery

Another Jonathan Kellerman book fell into my hands. It seems there are too many avid readers at Jo Ashmore's condo. They keep adding books to the common library. I was there on a day the library committee was deaccessioning books. I walked off with two Kellerman books to aid their effort to keep the shelves neat. Both of them are over 10 years old.

I took Billy Straight to the cabin called Sidetrack recently. I intended to get some yard work done. However, the rain, 30-mph winds, and cold (45°) kept me inside. Instead of cleaning full time, I read.

Billy Straight is an 11-year-old street kid in LA who witnesses a murder in Griffith Park. Kellerman tells a story about the kid's background. He tells stories about the principals in the murder and stories about the cops (lots of cops) who are investigating.

All this took place in the shadow of the OJ Simpson trial, and since one of the suspects is a minor-league celebrity, there are political pressures on the cops of the LAPD.

Kellerman does a great job of telling all those stories. Keeping them coordinated while writing and editing must have been a complex task.

It's not until the very end of the book that Kellerman pulls out his magic wand to save the good guys with narrative sleight of hand. Then he lays it on thinkly by rewarding Billy Straight with promises of happily ever after and one of the lead detectives with hints about better things to come.

It was really needless. Two squares a day and a clean lower bunk would have been luxuries for Billy Straight.

So, I enjoyed reading most of this Kellerman book while the May "blizzard" raged outside the cabin. It was certainly preferable to finding a parka and doing yard work. I could have done more cleaning, but what fun would that have been?

Do you want to tell a little bit of the world what you thought of Billy Straight? Comment here.

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• Kellerman's web site on Billy Straight
  
• Sofrina Hinton's review of Billy Straight in Book Reporter
  
• Leslie Dunlap's review at The Mystery Reader
  

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For Kindle

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Anecdotes, anecdotes

Carmilla Washburn is a wonderful 94-year-old neighbor of Jo Ashmore. One of the many reasons she's wonderful is her book recommendations. More than a month ago she said, "You've got to read the book I just finished, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell." She's waiting patiently for me to finish so we can discuss it.

A few years ago, one of Gladwell's [left] earlier books, The Tipping Point, had been the common reading for new students at Beloit College, so David read it. Nancy and I were interested enough to read it too. Interesting perspectives on how change happens.

The subtitle for Outliers is The Story of Success. Gladwell's purpose is to explain some of the variables that go into making people extremely successful. The Beatles and Bill Gates are two of his primary examples.

Another of Gladwell's purposes is to poke holes in claims of the self-made man. I think he enjoyed quoting Jeb Bush who said (more than once) that he was a "self-made man" and that being the son of a president was a disadvantage to him as he pursued his political goals. Yeah, right! (Reminds of the joke about George II. He's the guy who was born on third base and always believed he'd hit a triple.)

Gladwell describes how timing, luck, good fortune, practice, and culture accounted as much as intellect, ambition, drive, and skill in creating "self-made people."

The Beatles were hired to play 8 hours a day in a Hamburg strip club for several years. That was a lot of practice time. Bill Gates had nearly unlimited access to an early computer terminal for a University of Washington computer at which to practice his programming.

Age is an important determiner of success in youthful competition. An incredible percentage of the all-stars in the Canadian Hockey League were born in the first three months of the year.

Gladwell's grandmother got to go to school in Jamaica because another student won two scholarships and gave one up.

The way numbers are named in East Asian languages might well give Chinese, Japanese, and Korean students an advantage in learning mathematics.

A girl who succeeds in a Bronx KIPP school has incredible determination and was lucky enough to get into the school.

Some children identified at very early ages as geniuses are incredibly successful. Others are not.

Some children from affluent, successful families are neither as adults. What makes the differences?

Gladwell catalogs bushels of reasons. Few of them offer solace to the Jeb Bushes of the world.

By the way, this is all anecdotal. Gladwell refers to some studies in his footnotes, but he's making his case by telling stories about outliers among the outliers. I'd like to see more integration of his stories and the studies. I read The Tipping Point four years ago, but I think there was more to think about in that book than this one.

Have you read any of Gladwell's books? What did you think?

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• Gladwell's web site
  
• Business Week review of Outliers
  
• Louis Bayard's review of Outliers in Salon
  

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Audio Book


For Kindle

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WaPo blog via Taiwan

Bird Loomis wrote from Taiwan where he's trying to explain American legislative politics to people there. He found Michael Dirda's contemplation of a book addiction in The Washington Post. As a recovering biblioholic, I understand. It was liberating to help David take two boxes of books to Half Price Books last week. He even came away wtih some cash.

Here's part of Dirda's comments and a couple of the comments.

Dealing With a Book Addiction

This past Thursday I went down to Georgetown to have lunch with an editor from Viking.... [O]nce I said goodbye, I immediately scuttled across the street to Bartleby’s Books... I ended up buying two novels by Flann O’Brien... [A]s it happens, I already owned both these books. But I lacked the jacket for The Third Policeman and I only had a paperback of The Hard Life. And so I bought them.

Since I don’t get to Georgetown very often, I naturally stopped off at its other used bookshop, The Lantern. There I ended up taking home a nice copy of The Princess and Curdie and an English edition from Hamish Hamilton of James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times... Here, too, I already owned these books...

I suppose this inability to resist these already owned volumes indicates addiction, and given that I have thousands of books in boxes, that seems the likeliest diagnosis...

Do others here, I wonder, feel that their book buying is an addiction or compulsion? Do others have this vision of civilized knowledge and art compacted into a single wonderful room?...

RandyM2 wrote:

I won't buy but just look, since I have more enough books to read through 2325, but, geez, look, it's the new Peter Beagle collection or spiffy reissue of a book I decided 10 years ago I'd never read and so rooted out of my collection with only 6 hours or so of agitation over whether I might someday change my mind and, dang, wouldn't you know, I did change my mind three hours after selling it but could never find it again ...

BooklandDC wrote:

I can see myself sitting in an overstuffed leather chair in front of the fireplace, a huge mirror above the mantle, surrounded by dark wood and bookshelves about to burst.

PatrickGarson wrote:

And books are, indeed, the one thing I find myself disturbingly and pathetically materialistic about...

Also, a bookshelf for me takes on some of the qualities of a photo album; a generous catalogue of where I've been, who I was, and what I was thinking. It holds a lot of treasured memories and truly, when I'm sprawled in the lounge, I do feel that I'm surrounded by old friends.

Anyone else have thoughts on book addiciton?

BTW, do you know about Bookcrossing? It's a place on the web to register books and leave them in public places. The people who pick up the books are expected to register their finds and record their reactions. And then to leave the book in a public place so someone else can take the book on further journeys.

I once left a Bookcrossing-registered book in a Northfield coffee shop. If anyone picked it up, she or he did not follow the Bookcrossing instructions, so I have no idea whether abandoning the book led to someone else's pleasure.

It's still worth a try. Check it out.

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Detail-filled pictures of an era

Dan Conrad mentioned Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs mysteries here and the next thing I know, Nancy has brought home two of them from the library. What was I to do but read them before they had to be returned (one of them all the way to La Crescent, Minnesota).

The first book was last year's An Incomplete Revenge. One of Maisie's patrons, James Compton, hires her to do some background investigation in preparation for a major corporate purchase. There's a factory he wants to buy, but it's part of a huge estate. He has lived in Canada for a number of years and is no longer very familiar with the estate.

Maisie, many Londoners, and some gypsies are in the area for hops picking season. And there are many local oddities that can't easily be understood by outsiders. But there's due diligence to be done. And hops to be picked. And, of course, mysteries to be solved. The mysteries and the plot revolve around recovery from the traumas (personal and public) of World War I. The characters and the stories add human details to one of my grad school topics. I probably would have been more interested 40 years ago if I'd had personal responses like these.

What really sets Winspear's books apart are the images she creates of England in the 1930s. She describes in detail what people wear, what buildings look like, how rooms are decorated, and the colors of the landscape. All that description could get tedious (and when I tried to listen to a recorded book while driving, it did get tedious).

But I appreciate the detail when I'm reading. The pictures in my mind are much more detailed than they are when I read most other books. As I've said before, Winspear and her "cannot be named 'Cheef Resurcher'" must do incredible background research into fashion, decorating, architecture, automobiles, roads, agriculture, demography, and urban landscapes. (My only complaint is that Maisie's MG is so reliable that the car must be fictional.)

The second book is Among the Mad. Maisie gets "seconded" to a Scotland Yard investigation of threats to London and His Majesty's government. Military intelligence also is involved. While Scotland Yard is chasing after political radicals of many stripes and the military spooks are looking for alien agents, Maisie is focused on war veterans who have been misused and forgotten by society.

What we'd call post-traumatic stress is part of all Winspear's stories. Maisie is a recovering victim (she was a front line nurse in France during the war and was wounded). But the effects of PTSD and the morality of weapons development are central to this story and to an important sub-plot. And Winspear seems to be setting the stage for explaining how PTSD helped create the enviornent for World War II.

Thanks to Dan and Nancy for reminding me about Jacqueline Winspear and her Maisie Dobbs stories and for putting them in my hands. I enjoyed reading them.

See Winspear in the blog index for other reactions to her books.

So, if you've read any of them, tell us what you think. There's a comment link below and you can send me your thoughts and, with your permission, I'll add them here.

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• Jacqueline Winspear's web site
  
  
• Biography and interview of Jacqueline Winspear at Book Reporter
  
  
• Debra Hamel's review of An Incomplete Revenge
  
  
• Joe Meyer's review of Among the Mad

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Long time gone

I buried another book in the pile on the left-hand corner of my desk after reading it. Honest, I put books there with the intent to write about them the next time I sit down at my desk. Then I cover them with something more urgent. Then I have book orders to ship, and I put more things on top of the "urgent" thing. Pretty soon a month has passed. Then a fortnight more.

Book shipping season is over. That excuse won't reappear until next fall. Urgent? What's urgent for an old retired guy? Getting up to the lake? Reading another book? Cooking supper?

So, I'm catching up. The book I buried this time was Gone by Jonathan Kellerman. I've been on another Kellerman kick this winter and spring. But Jonathan and Faye [at right] have written so many books. Even one of their kids has written a novel.

This book is the 20th "Alex Delaware Novel" by Jonathan Kellerman. Alex Delaware, like J. A. Jance's character J.P. Beaumont, has come into a lot of money. He drives an expensive car and lives in a luxurious home. In both Kellerman and Jance's minds that puts these characters in a situation where they have more freedom than the working stiffs with whom they cooperate. Maybe it makes them more interesting for some people.

Delaware seems to be a part-time clinical psychologist and a part-time, experienced amateur criminal investigator (like his creator who is a part-time clinical psychologist and a part-time mystery writer). Delaware often hangs out and works with his old buddy, L.A. detective Milo Sturgis.

[Latigo Canyon, at left in a realtor's photo, is the site of important events in Gone.]

The story of Gone is complex. A murder here and another there (or I should say one then and another now). A strange family living off the wealth of a previous generation. Wannabe starlets in LA. Kellerman is a good story teller. The complexity might have been overwhelming, but it wasn't -- even though it took me a couple weeks to find time to read the whole book.

I liked reading this book, probably more than I liked the story. One of the online reviewers said that one of the best parts of the book was the relationship and dialogue between Delaware and his buddy Sturgis. I agree. I think it's probably the best part of the book. It's one of the treats that kept me reading all the way through the 360 pages.

Have any of you read this or other Kellerman novels? What did you think of them?

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• Jonathan Kellerman's web site
  
  
• Joe Hartlaub's review of Gone at Book Reporter
  
  
• A less-enthusiastic, unsigned review from The Mystery Site

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For Kindle

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Along the Rio Grande

Our family book pusher, dropped another book on our pile a couple weeks ago. Thank you, Mary. It was a good one.

The book is Nevada Barr's newest, Borderline.

Building on her own career as a law enforcement ranger with the National Park Service (NPS), Barr has now written 15 mystery and adventure books set in National Parks. She's been all those places (although she hasn't worked in all of them). It's pretty obvious she's more comfortable in the big outdoors than in the big city.

The main character in these books is Ranger Anna Pigeon, a powerful and assertive woman who has battled alligators, wolves, forest fires, and all manner of bad people. She has incredible recuperative powers because she bounces back from physical and psychological traumas that would send most of us into retirement from rangering.

However, after the horrors of the adventures described in Barr's previous book, Winter Study, the NPS puts Ranger Pigeon on medical leave and tells her to take some time off and really get over it. They don't want a PTSD survivor patrollling the campgrounds in any National Park.

That sets up the Rio Grande rafting trip along Big Bend National Park [That's Barr's hat and life vest on the Rio Grande at right.] that Pigeon and her husband take for the next adventure. High water, a drowned woman and her nearly drowned baby, a sniper at the top of the canyon, and a smarmy Texas politician, turn the recuperation vacation into another deadly adventure. Anna Pigeon is going to need another leave after this one.

Barr tells good stories. They're always a little beyond the pale of credulity, but the narrative is so good, I don't let that get in the way (much).

This book continues Barr's tradition. I liked the story and enjoyed reading the book. The deadly tension and adventure in several places led me to interrupt my reading and put the book down. But, I always wanted to go back, and I did. The fact that I fell asleep one evening while reading was caused by fatigue, not the writing.

If you read Borderline, tell us what you think.

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• Nevada Barr's web site
  
  
• Nevada Barr's Facebook page has great photos of the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park
  
  
• Roz Shea's review of Borderline at Book Reporter
  
  
• Nevada Barr web page at The Mississippi Writers Page
  
  
• Winter with wolves and worse, my comments on Winter Study

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E-Book for Kindle

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From Minneapolis

Bird Loomis isn't the only person to send in recommendations recently.

Dan Conrad, whose words have appeared here to great effect in the past wrote again.


As the news in the real world continues to be little but gloom and doom... I've turned (in fiction writing) to a series of heroes and heroines who face problems that would make Hercules wince but never fail to come out victorious--and then some.

Ken suggested Laurie R. King, and I started with Art of Detection featuring Kate Martinelli--a lesbian cop in San Francisco. [For reasons I don't understand, this book's title shows up as The Art of Detection on illustrations.] Now I'm going back to the start of the series and then take up with the heroine introduced in Beekeeper's Apprentice - I think.

My favorite right now is one Molly Murphy who is introduced by Rhys Bowen in Murphy's Law.

Molly is wanted for murder in Ireland (ca1900) but has immigrated (illegally) to New York and is bent on being a private investigator--against all odds.

Then there is Maisie Dobbs who enters in a novel by the same name by Jacqueline Winspear. It doesn't hurt that her experiences as a British nurse in W.W.I and her being part gypsy give her uncommon insight.

Then there is that disgraced son of a British nobleman who solves murders in high places (with help from his sometime actress, prostitute, spy girlfriend) in 4 novels by C. S. Harris. I'm about 80th on the waiting list for the 4th in the series.

Oh, then there's my favorite so far this year, and not just because of the name. Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News. It takes a while to get going but when it does, hold on to your hat. You'll love that teenage girl and older heroine even more than the featured detectives.

That's it for now. Got a bunch of books on Christianity as it was before Constantine (to say nothing of the Apostle Paul) twisted things around to create a religion unrecognizable by the early followers of Jesus. Enough for now.

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See also:

• Rhys Bowen's Molly Murphy web site
  
• Rhys Bowen interviewed by Barbara Peters of Poisoned Pen Press and Bookstore, Arizona
  
• C. S. Harris' web site
• Kate Atkinson's web site
  
• Patrick Ness' review of When Will There be Good News from The Guardian (UK)
  
• Improbable upstart, my thoughts on Beekeeper's Apprentice
  
• Maisie Dobbs mysteries
  
• Recorded Maisie Dobbs mystery

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From the prairie

Nancy and I just enjoyed our latest Netflix video, Scotland, PA (second viewing). It's a film we found unexpectedly when it was new in 2001. It's a contemporary rendition of Macbeth done, as the director said, for those kids in high school who read the Cliff Notes version while getting high. Most ot it works pretty well for those of us who read the real thing while straight. It's worth checking out.

But, it's over and I'm still awake on Saturday night.

Bird Loomis, just in from Baghdad and soon to be off for Jarkarta, wrote from Lawrence, KS. (Bird might have grown up near Scotland, PA.)

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One of my great pleasures is to read mysteries (and all fiction) with a strong sense of place. K.C. Constantine's Western Pennsylvania, where I grew up, is outstanding, as is Steve Hamilton's Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where I've never set foot. Likewise, C.J. Box's Wyoming, and so forth.

This becomes relevant, in that Dennis Lehane's recent The Given Day offers up his usual wonderful depictions of Boston with a twist - it's the city of 1919 that provides the setting for a novel based on the police strike of that year.

As a reader, I'm a sucker for first-rate historical fiction; it's a “two-fer” that delivers both lots of easily digested information as well as a compelling story line. My personal favorite here is Gore Vidal's Burr, which offers a highly persuasive analysis of the tangled Burr-Hamilton relationship, wrapped in a truly entertaining fictional package. Lehane's tale may not rise quite to the significance, literary achievement, or the pleasure of Vidal's work, but it's close.

Over the years, Lehane has moved from writing a series of highly competent crime novels to producing a superb stand-alone crime novel (Mystic River) and a mediocre thriller (Shutter Island). With the exception of this last effort, his work uses blue-collar Boston as a richly detailed venue.

More than most crime writers, Lehane brings his characters to light through their links to place. Indeed, they're often prisoners of their personal geography, albeit willingly so on occasion. Lehane possesses a cinematographer's eye, so it's little wonder that Mystic River won an Academy Award and that both the book and the film transcended the crime genre. In many ways, the under-rated Gone, Baby, Gone may be the equal of Mystic River as a film, and it served as a transition for Lehane between his crime writing and his more recent fiction.

For all his development as a novelist, however, Dennis Lehane had given little indication, at least with his long-form fiction, that he was ready to produce a major historical novel. But that's just what he's done. Lehane begins his story with a wonderful set piece - of Babe Ruth and the Boston Red Sox traveling east during the 1918 World Series. Their train requires repairs, and first Ruth, then a number of other players, happen upon a pick-up baseball game among a group of talented black amateurs. This thirty-page short story, while complete in itself, is tied into one story line that is reminiscent of Ragtime in addressing the racism of the day.

Just as Ruth is headed for Boston, so is the story, with a rich mix of first and second generation Irish grappling with issues of duty, unionization, and various pecking orders, both social and economic. Dennis Coughlin, a young, talented police officer and son of a much-admired captain, finds himself torn between his loyalty to the force (along with his ambitions) and an increasing recognition of the plight of most police officers, who suffer on low wages and insulting working conditions.

The 700-page book also includes a racial subplot, some romance, and the appearance of a young J. Edgar Hoover, a stiff and officious Calvin Coolidge, the revolutionary John Reed, and of course, the Bambino, who ends the book, riding with Coughlin to New York, where they will both begin new lives in 1919.

Dennis Lehane knows how to write dialogue that keeps the narrative moving, as well as edging up to the line of improbability without crossing it. I have no clue whether he'll go back to crime novels, or head to ward even more unfamiliar ground. But he's demonstrated both his adventuresome nature and his substantial talent, and one would hope that his ambition continues to move him in new directions.

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Brief extension.
Ian Rankin and Lee Child are among my favorite crime writers. Rankin's John Rebus, an Edinburgh police detective [played by John Stott at left], and Child's Jack Reacher, an ex-military loner, are predictable characters in their own ways, and one doesn't look to either for great surprises. Rather, one hopes that Rankin and Child will deliver the goods.

After reading ten or so Rankin novels and six or seven Child books, I find that I'm not at all tired of Rebus, the phlegmatic Scot, who can be downright unpleasant, but never uninteresting. Reacher, on the other hand, is pretty much a one-trick pony, although his trick - winning against all odds, then walking away, is often a compelling one. Still, in two recent books, Rankin's A Question of Blood entertains at a high level. Indeed, Rankin is as good a crime writer as any writing today.

Lee Child surely does continue to entertain, but in Nothing to Lose Jack Reacher seems, to me, to be going through the motions as he seeks to understand the strange politics of the twin Colorado towns of Hope and Despair. It's not quite as corny as this set up would suggest, but the humor in the names eventually peters out. [Lee Child portrays Jack Reacher in a New York Public Library mock trial at right.]

For those who have read neither Rankin nor Child, they're both first-rate, but for the long haul Ian Rankin's John Rebus is by far the more compelling character. With Child, the sequence of the books is not too important, but the Rankin volumes are best read in order. That way you have to wait a bit, and become familiar with Rebus, before reading the best of the series - Redemption Men. It's well worth the wait.

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• Dennis Lehane's web site
  
• Adam Woog's review of The Given Day in The Seattle Times
  
• Janet Maslin's review of The Given Day in The New York Times
  
• Ian Rankin's web site
  
• Lee Child's web site

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Human story

David and I had some spare time because Little Tel Aviv was closed on Wednesday for Passover prepartion. Instead of lunching there, we ate at Subway.

Where do we often end up in our spare time? A bookstore. I really wasn't going to buy anything because I had three books on the pile at home -- one of them a library book.

But, the title, artwork, adn the plot teaser tempted me and I gave in.

It turns out that William Kent Krueger lives in Minnesota, and the story in Thunder Bay takes place in northern Minnesota and Ontario.

It's a story that spans more than 70 years and involves a lot of secrets that people believe they are keeping from one another. You know, like those secrets within families that really aren't secrets. In this story, as in so many of those family "secrets," many people know part of the secret, but no one knows all of the secret.

One bit of the story involves a 90-year-old Ojibwe shaman. Another bit centers on an eccentric and very successful mining company executive. Other bits involve domestic life of an all-America murder mystery/adventure feature family and the mourning of a retired and recently-widowed cop. There are Hallmark moments involving a young boy and dogs. There are frightening moments involving people killing each other. There are a couple of sad love stories. There is intrigue and mystery.

And Krueger is a good story teller. Characters are well-drawn. He doesn't venture too far into the implausible. I never lost interest or felt rushed by the story-telling. He's written seven other books like this one (according to his publisher), and he's won 8 minor-league prizes for them. I may go looking for another someday, but since I bought this one, I've read 3 books and there are still 3 more on the bedside table.

If you've read Thunder Bay or another of Krueger's books, let us know what you think.

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• William Kent Krueger's web site
  
• Jen's review at Jen's Book Thoughts
  
• John Holt's review at California Literary Review

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Narrow focus. Too bad.

I was getting anxious about reporting on another bit of light reading I'd done. Shouldn't I be reading more substantial books? I even started a non-fiction book (more about that when I've finished).

Then it occurred to me that my serious, substantial, non-fiction reading does not come in books. In fact, most of it isn't even on paper.

Every day, I read headlines in at least 16 online news sources (they really aren't newspapers). And that doesn't take into account the fact that one of those sources provides links to half a dozen Nigerian newspapers' web sites.

I also read entries in at least half a dozen blogs.

And I write about how to teach with one or two of the articles I read in my teaching comparative blog for teachers (and some students) of comparative politics. When necessary, I also write updates to my book, a study guide for students of AP Comparative Government and Politics. I also labor through textbooks when new editions come out.

So, I guess I can read chewing gum "literature" in my spare time. And I shouldn't feel embarrassed.

Therefore, let me introduce Skeleton Lake, A Nik Kane Alaska Mystery by Mike Doogan that I picked up at the Northfield Public Library. [A Skeleton Lake at right]

When I saw "Alaska" on the cover, I probably was thinking of Dana Stabenow, who has done a fine job of writing adventures and mysteries set in Alaska. The bits of sea ice floating in the cover illustration probably made me think of the season just passed. And I really did want to read a new author's work.

Mike Doogan is a newspaper columnist and an Alaskan state legislator. He writes in complete sentences and spells all his words correctly (or at least his editors insist that he does). He tells this Nik Kane story in a complicated way.

Nik Kane, nearly washed-up old detective is coming in and out of consciousness during the first half of the book. He was badly wounded and in his pain-killer facilitated dreams, he sometimes recalls his childhood and other times a vexing 20-year-old murder he never solved. It's an intriguing plot device, and over time, I felt like I got to know Kane a little bit. Not much, mind you, but a little. But I never cared about him. If he'd died on page 50, I wouldn't have missed him and the story could have continued somehow. But he didn't die.

His childhood traumas matter a great deal to the 60-year-old Kane, but I never got to the point of empathizing with his pain and longing. His ruminations on the old homicide never really got me interested.

Then, on page 234 of a 300-page book, I read what Doogan's story should have been about. Describing Kane's family, Doogan writes, "A nun, a volcano about to erupt, a gay guy, a beauty queen, and a lifestyle-a-minute drifter, Kane thought. Does that make me the normal one? God help us all."

This should have been a book about the Kane family. Add Kane, the cop who spent 7 years in prison, his sister who died of breast cancer, and a brother who disappeared into the maw of Vietnam to the crew described above. I almost drool thinking of the stories surrounding those 8 people. Why did Doogan choose to write about Nik Kane? Why not write about the nun? Or the volcano of a brother who, "looked like hell; overweight, unshaven, and in need of a haircut. He was the one who had the most conventional life; a wife, five kids, a big house in the Seattle suburbs, an important job, a deacon in the church... There was something in there fighting to get out and it didn't look like it would be pretty when it emerged."? Or Barry, who was a hotel manager in Bangkok, who "lived with somebody named Kongsangchai who everyone was careful not to ask about."? etc. etc.

Harriet Klausner liked it better than I did. If you read it, let us know what you think. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood.

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• Mike Doogan's web site.
  
• Harriet Klausner's review of Skeleton Lake

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