The good, the bad, and the best

If I don't watch the bad and mediocre movies or listen to the so-so music, how will I know good stuff when I see or hear it?

Same thing is true of books. Or as the princess said, "I've got to kiss a lot of frogs to find the magic prince." That is what she said, itsn't it?

I've read lots of good books and lots of so-so books. Most of the time that I tie into a bad one, I choose not to finish it.

Then I pick up a really good book, and it's suddenly obvious that it's good. Unless I want to sit back and enjoy it, I have to do the hard work of identifying what makes it good.

I picked up Walter Mosley's The Long Fall recently. It was obviously really good. After I read the first 2 pages, I stopped and interupted Nancy's reading to read her those 2 pages. That's how good it is. Nancy, who edits several semi-pro novels every year, listened intently. "It is so good to know that there are excellent writers out there." That's how good it is.

I've liked several of the books I've read recently. I liked a couple a great deal. The Long Fall stands out as excellent against the background of the books I've read during the past year.

Oh, and here's the opening:

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"I'm sorry, Mr. um?..." the skinny receptionist said. Her baby-blue-on-white nameplate merely read JULIET.

She had short blond hair that was longer in the front than in the back and wore a violet T-shirt that I was sure would expose a pierced navel if she were to stand up. Behind her was a mostly open-air-boutique-like office space with ten or twelve brightly colored plastic desks that were interspersed by big, leafy, green plants. The eastern wall, to my right, was a series of ceiling-to-floor segmented windowpanes that were not intended to open.

All the secretaries and gofers that worked for Berg, Lewis & Takayama were young and pretty, regardless of gender. All except one.

There was a chubby woman who sat in a far corner to the left, under an exit sign. She had bad skin and a utilitarian fashion sense. She was looking down, working hard. I immediately identified with her.

I imagined sitting in that corner, hating everyone else in the room.

"Mr. Brown isn't in?" I asked, ignoring Juliet's request for a name.

"He can't be disturbed."

"Couldn't you just give him a note from me?"

Juliet, who hadn't smiled once, not even when I first walked in, actually sneered, looking at me as if I were a city trash collector walking right in from my garbage truck into the White House and asking for an audience with the president.

I was wearing a suit and tie. Maybe my shoe leather was dull, but there weren't any scuffs. There were no spots on my navy lapels, but, like that woman in the corner, I was obviously out of my depth: a vacuum-cleaner salesman among high-paid lawyers, a hausfrau thrown in with a bevy of Playboy bunnies...

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It had been a long time since I read one of Mosley's books. He's stopped writing about Easy Rawlins and is writing about other characters. This book is about a guy named Leonid McGill, a shady character who says he's trying to go straight. That kind of ambiguity pervades the worlds that Mosley writes about, and the world most of us live in when we're really honest with ourselves. Our ambiguities might not be as dramatic as those that Mosley's characters face, but our stories aren't likely to make good novels.

Some of Mosley's books have been excellent. Others just good. This one is somewhere in between. But it was head and shoulders above most of what I've read recently.

Why?

Besides use of language? The story hangs together. The telling of the story took me along without provoking silly questions about why and how and who. The unwrapping of the complications and consequences are carefully done. The characters are humans I can comprehend even if they're not like people I know or would want to hang with.

There's a new Leonid McGill mystery out since this one was published, and a novel about Mosley's character Socrates Fortlow that I'm tempted to follow up on. It's like running into an old friend.

Anyone else have experience with Walter Mosley's books? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

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• Walter Mosley's web site

• Anna Mundow's review of The Long Fall in the Washington Post

• Another in a long series (about Bad Boy Brawly Brown)

• Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (an earlier really good book about Socrates Fortlow)

• Fearless Jones (from the old pre-blog site)

• The Walter Mosley page at African American Literature

• Walter Mosley talks about The Long Fall:

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Non-fiction as fiction

I was disappointed (or distracted) when I read Dan O'Brien's Brendan Prairie. But I did want to read about his buffalo ranching experiences, so I got Buffalo for the Broken Heart from the Northfield Library.

This book is pretty straight non-fiction. O'Brien tells the story of struggling to raise cattle on a South Dakota ranch (the Broken Heart) in the prairie between the Badlands and the Black Hills. He explains how he gradually became convinced that raising buffalo was the way the save the ranch and its environment. Then he describes how he (and his bankers) got buffalo for the ranch.



It's a good story, and it is told very well. And the story is told as if it were fiction. There's a beginning, middle, and an end. There are characters and drama. There is science and explanations. There are complete stories within the main story. And the the narrative concludes at the end of the book -- although there's another story implied by the ending. (I wish he'd done this with Brendan Prairie.)

I liked this book. I am looking forward to meeting O'Brien and seeing the Broken Heart next July.

Now, I may well go looking for another of O'Brien's novels next time I'm at the library.

Have you read Buffalo for the Broken Heart? How did you respond to it? Write, and tell this little bit of the world.

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• Becky Wiggins' short review
  
• Reviews at the Washington, DC Public Library site
  
• Information and a review from the Siouxland Library
  
• Dan O'Brien's Wild Idea Buffalo (where you can order organic buffalo meat)

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Black Hills mystery

Well, I got an overdue notice from the Northfield library. It doesn't happen often.

You'd think I'd be able to read and comment on a 250-page book in less than 3 weeks. At least I think I ought to be able to do that. What happened?

The book that's now overdue is Brendan Prairie by Dan O'Brien. It's a mystery and more. Or maybe less.

O'Brien is one of the leaders of a geology/ecology seminar I'm attending next July in the Black Hills. I thought I'd read something he's written before heading west.

I had trouble starting the book. There's so much back story to be told and it takes a long time -- practically the whole book -- to get it told. There's very little that isn't back story.

Then there are the paeans to the beauty of Brendan Prairie, a bit of Black Hills beauty that is about to be developed as vacation housing for rich people attracted to the gambling mecca in the Black Hills. The prairie sounds like an environmental gem. But I was never convinced that it was priceless or unique.

There's also incredible detail about capturing and training hawks and falcons. Yawn. And somehow that seems contradictory to the adoration of nature when O'Brien writes about Brendan Prairie. How is the main character's semi-domesticating of a falcon different from the semi-domestication of a bit of meadow?

At the end, all the main characters are tied up in a nasty ball of string that leaves the survivors bound by secrets and guilt that will never leave them.

I guess this book is a short story, an essay about preservation of nature, a feature article about falconry, and another short story about youthful love and lust.

It never hung together for me. And that's my excuse why it took so long for me to read it and almost as long to get around to writing about it.

Have you read Brendan Prairie by Dan O'Brien? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

Meanwhile I'm headed back to the library with the overdue book and I'll look for O'Brien's non-fiction about stocking his Black Hills ranch with bison. That's more appropriate to the summer seminar. I'll let you know how the book and the seminar go.

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Why do you read fiction?

Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know

Now English professors and graduate students… say they’re convinced science not only offers unexpected insights into individual texts, but that it may help to answer fundamental questions about literature’s very existence: Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read?…

Zealous enthusiasm for the politically charged and frequently arcane theories that energized departments in the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s — Marxism, structuralism, psychoanalysis — has faded. Since then a new generation of scholars have been casting about for The Next Big Thing.

The brain may be it. Getting to the root of people’s fascination with fiction and fantasy, Mr. Jonathan Gottschall, who has written extensively about using evolutionary theory to explain fiction, said, is like “mapping wonderland.”

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Movie review

Dan Conrad wrote last night after seeing the movie version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

"Just returned from watching The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

"Maybe the best way to describe it is that coming out of the theater I had to check my watch three times as I simply could not believe I had been in there for over two and a half hours. All with virtually no chases, no gun battles, no mind boggling special effects, and no English; just a well told story and actors that looked and performed like they had just walked off the pages of the Larsson book.

"Did I mention that I liked it?"

Here's a link to a trailer for the movie (what I always thought was a preview).

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North country murder

The Economist, like many others, took note of the Scandinavian wave of mystery fiction this week (15-21 March). If you're not a subscriber, you might have to visit the library to read the whole thing.

Inspector Norse

THE neat streets of Oslo are not a natural setting for crime fiction. Nor, with its cows and country smells, is the flat farming land of Sweden’s southern tip. And Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, is now associated more with financial misjudgment than gruesome murder. Yet in the past decade Nordic crime writers have unleashed a wave of detective fiction that is right up there with the work of Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Elmore Leonard and the other crime greats. Nordic crime today is a publishing phenomenon. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy alone has sold 27m copies, its publishers’ latest figures show, in over 40 countries. The release this month in Britain and America of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the film of the first Larsson book, will only boost sales.

The transfer to the screen of his sprawling epic (the author died suddenly in 2004 just as the trilogy was being edited and translated) will cement the Nordics’ renown. The more unruly subplots have been eliminated, leaving the hero, a middle-aged financial journalist named Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), and an emotionally damaged computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace, pictured above), at the centre of every scene. The small screen too has had a recent visit from the Swedish police. Starting in 2008, British television viewers have been treated to expensive adaptations of the books of Henning Mankell, featuring Kenneth Branagh as Kurt Wallander. The BBC series has reawakened interest in Mr Mankell’s nine Wallander books, which make up a large slice of his worldwide sales of 30m in 40 languages.

Larsson and Mr Mankell are the best-known Nordic crime writers outside the region. But several others are also beginning to gain recognition abroad, including K.O. Dahl and Karin Fossum from Norway and Ake Edwardson and Hakan Nesser of Sweden. Iceland, a Nordic country that is not strictly part of Scandinavia, boasts an award winner too. Arnaldur Indridason’s Silence of the Grave won the British Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger award in 2005. The Devil’s Star by a Norwegian, Jo Nesbo, is published in America this month at the same time as a more recent novel, The Snowman, is coming out in Britain. A previous work, Nemesis, was nominated for the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe crime-writing award, a prize generally dominated by American authors.

Three factors underpin the success of Nordic crime fiction: language, heroes and setting. Niclas Salomonsson, a literary agent who represents almost all the up and coming Scandinavian crime writers, reckons it is the style of the books, “realistic, simple and precise…and stripped of unnecessary words”, that has a lot to do with it. The plain, direct writing, devoid of metaphor, suits the genre well...

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Clarification of recommendation

Dan Conrad wrote to clarify his recommendation of Charles Todd's mystery. It helps to make sense of why he had pointed out the similarity to the Maisie Dobbs books.

Sorry about that--but the book I read and enjoyed is called Duty to the Dead and is the first in what is planned to be a series of "Bess Crawford Mysteries."

The novel is set in the period around WWI and the Bess Crawford character is an Army nurse -- and thus the comparison to Maisie Dobbs. I've not read any of their books featuring Ian Rutledge so can't comment on the book you read--but it doesn't sound nearly as engaging as Duty to the Dead. I think I'll just wait for the next Bess Crawford installment.

Guess that will teach me to read recommendations more carefully AND not be quick to read an author's first book.

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Back to post-war Britain

I finished a professional project and gave myself leave to escape with a mystery by Charles Todd (actually a mother-son writing team), an author(s?) recommended by Dan Conrad.

The story is set in post-World War I Britain (like Jacqueline Winspear's "Maisie Dobbs" stories and most of Laurie R. King's "Mary Russell" stories).

A local patrician is killed while out riding one morning. No witnesses. Exact scene unknown. The body was found in a pasture some time after the murder. A local investigation seems to indicate that a famous, well-connected local war hero is the murderer. So, the locals send for help from Scotland Yard. Enter Inspector Ian Rutledge.

In the book, A Test of Wills, Ian Rutledge, like Maisie Dobbs, suffers from shell shock (PTSS). His condition is worse than Maisie Dobbs' but not as bad as Maisie's one-time fiance, who is confined to a hospital and unable to speak or care for himself. (The story is also set about a decade earlier than the Maisie Dobbs stories.) Rutledge is haunted by a soldier who mutineed at the front and whom Rutledge killed for his betrayal. The voice of the dead man is part of Rutledge's everyday life. Dark depression waits on the edges of his consciousness to take over.

The post-war period in Western Europe was traumatic for nearly everyone. For Rutledge it meant trying to return to a career that he was quite good at before 1914. A Test of Wills tells the story of his first investigation after the war and after treatment (therapy?) for his shell shock. The scene is rural Warwickshire (northwest of Buckingham -- Stratford upon Avon is in the south of the county). [Coincidence noted below.]

Rutledge's investigation seems to reach the same conclusions as the local one did, but he can't tie up all the loose ends. The voice in his head taunts him. People tell him only what they think is relevant. He keeps probing to find out what they are keeping from him. Of course, he's relentless. The voice in his head and the dark cloud at the edge of his being won't allow anything less. Eventually, he sorts out the details, finds the murderer, and returns to London with his pre-war reputation intact.

The book suffers a bit by comparison to Laurie R. King and Jacqueline Winspear. The story is not as crisply told as King's stories are. But, A Test of Wills is "Charles Todd's" first book. Dan Conrad read a later one and really liked it. I'll read another, but it's more opaque than King's stories. [Remember that teacher in high school or at the university who made it seem that there were secrets and priorities that he/she knew but that she/he wasn't going to explain? I remember several like that. I never could figure out what was most important and what would be on the exam. So I tried to learn everything. Well, this story is told like that. There are scores of details. And the crucial ones aren't revealed until the very end (the exam?). I was disappointed in the resolution as I often was with my grades on those less-than-transparent exams.]

Also, I got less of that feeling of verisimilitude that pervades the Maisie Dobbs stories. I think it has to do with a level of detail in Winspear's books. Ian Rutledge has a car that he uses to get around Upper Streetham, but unlike Maisie's little red MG, I never found out what kind of car it was, how he started it, or how he called the local blacksmith to tow it into town to fix a slashed tire.

I was disappointed in the resolution, but the story telling was satisfying and involving. It was a good book to read while relaxing after the completion of a big deal project. This is the first of an 11-book series, I learned from Wikipedia. From another source I learned that the authors, named as Caroline and Charles Todd, might be using pseudonyms and do not actually live in Delaware, where the publisher says they come from. Another source suggested that the son in this writing team might hold a sensitive position which would suffer from being identified as a mystery writer. Who knows?

Do you know? Have you read A Test of Wills or another of "Charles Todd's" books? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

Oh, and coincidence. A couple days before reading this book, I was researching Warwickshire census records. My dad had searched diligently for ancestors named Wedding in England and never found any. There are many circumstantial clues from colonial Maryland, but no evidence of an English origin for the most senior John Wedding we know of, who died in 1772. Many records are now online in the UK, and I found several families named Wedding living in Warwickshire in the mid-19th century. Older records are not online. Maybe it's time for my research trip to England.

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• Charles Todd's web site
• The publisher's Charles Todd web page
• An interview with "Charles Todd" in January magazine
• Austrailian Kerrie's review of A Test of Wills

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Another voice on Fossum's "Black Seconds"

Dan Conrad wrote:

I roundly "second" this recommendation. Like you, I picked this up forgetting I had not at all liked the last two of hers I had read (Indian Bride and When the Devil Holds the Candle). Inspector Sejer is likable again, the other characters are interesting and real and Fossum's device of sort of letting you in on the solution ahead of time actually moves the story along and increases your interest. This is as good, I think, as He Who Fears the Wolf--if not even better.

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Powerful Norwegian tragedy

It had been a long time since I read one of Karin Fossum's books. She's one of the Norwegian crime writers who has made a name for herself outside of Norway.

[Norwegian Mystery (November 2006), Unexpected Norwegian Treat (December 2006), Who's evil? Who's a victim? (December 2006)]

I might not have pulled this one off the Northfield Public Library shelf if I'd remembered how bleak and dark those books were -- especially the last one. I'm glad I didn't remember.

Black Seconds was a difficult book to read (like a couple of the earlier ones). It revolved around the death of a nine-year-old girl. She disappeared while on a bike trip to a convenience story near home. She'd gone to buy a comic book. She never returned. Her new yellow bike disappeared too. If you have kids, you know why this was difficult to read. If you don't have kids, you can imagine, but you'd have to have a really visceral imagination to really know. Nancy noted, after David's birth, that she'd never felt so vulnerable.

Inspector Konrad Sejer and his assistant Jacob Skarre are on duty when the call about the missing girl comes in. Thus the story begins.

But this, like Fossum's earlier books, is more than story telling. Along with the events that make up the story, there are the ruminations of many people, and that's the most powerful part of the book. Fossum explores multiple perspectives: Sejer's, the missing girl's mother's, the missing girl's aunt's, the missing girl's cousins', and others. These internal dialogues have to carry the book forward, because there aren't many events.

Fossum tells us about intensive and futile searches. There is questioning by Sejer and Skarre. There is waiting. Sejer and Skarre fill in the waiting time investigating a fender bender involving one of the missing girl's cousins and his sketchy friend. They also try to interview the neighborhood character, a 50-something autistic man who can't speak. When that interview is a bust, they try talking to his widowed mother, who cleans his house, washes his clothers, and does his shopping. They even contact the missing girl's pen pal in Germany.

Practically nothing happens during most of the book. The searches and investigations go nowhere. After reading over half the book, the tension was intense. Fossum does an excellent job of sticking with events and the thoughts of the characters. That straightforward, factual story telling raised my anxiety level.

Sejer and Skarre begin re-interviewing everyone. Cracks begin to appear in people's stories. Somewhere in the second half of the book, I began to suspect what had really happened. But I wasn't sure until the very end.

A little girl died in a small Norwegian village. Some of the fears of everyone involved were borne out. But some of the mystery resulted from people trying to protect themselves and other parts resulted from the recognition of the vulnerabilities of parents.

I'm glad I stuck with this one, in spite of the ineffable sadness of the story.

Have you read Black Seconds? Write and tell us what you thought.

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See also:

• Maxine Clarke's review at EuroCrime
• The 50 Greatest Crime Writers, No27: Karin Fossum
• Fossum featured in Spotlight on World Mysteries at PBS

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Back to old favorites

I was browsing in the Northfield Library for new reading material.

Nancy and I are going to a geology/environmental seminar in the Black Hills and the South Dakota badlands in July and one of the leaders is a writer named O'Brien. I went looking for his books, thinking I knew who he was. So I was looking for his books. Well, it's not Tim O'Brien, whose The Things They Carried was about American soldiers in Vietnam. (I wondered what he was going to be doing at a Black Hills seminar.) The O'Brien I was looking for is Dan O'Brien, "a writer and buffalo rancher" according to his publisher's web site. His main book is Buffalo for the Broken Heart. The Broken Heart is his ranch and buffalo are what he raises there. The book's subtitle is "Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch," and I guess that's why he's one of the seminar leaders. I will read his book before we go, but it's checked out and I found other things to read.

What I found and brought home was Laurie R. King's The Language of Bees. This is the latest in her series of books about the genius ingenue who captured the heart and hand of Sherlock Holmes.

It's set in the early 20th century, just post-World War I and it's the 9th book about Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes. It's full of period language and technology. Mycroft Holmes is the equivalent of James Bond's Q. Sherlock Holmes and his nearly child-bride discover that Holmes has a son from a turn-of-the-20th-century dalliance in Paris, and that the son has a wife and daughter. This happens about the same time as the young man discovers who his father is.

Holmes' daughter-in-law has some unsavory bits in her past and they catch up with her about the time that the young family moves to London. And who does the young man turn to for help? Why the daddy who abandoned him before he was born, of course.

The plot is full of typical Holmesian deductions, surveillance, and research. Mary Russell hires a plane (in 1924) to fly from London to the Orkney Islands in bad weather. Holmes practically buys a fishing boat to take him to the same place. There is a serial murderer out there threatening Holmes' son and granddaughter. The evil villian always seems a step or two ahead of the pursuers.

Well, it's a lot of the same old, same old well-told story. Can you tell that even though I rather enjoyed reading this book, that I'm tired of the premise? Sara Paretsky and her private investigator V. I. Warshawski was a treat and a wonderful adventure for about six books. Then I tired of them too. I want Laurie R. King to go back and write a couple more books about San Francisco detective Kater Martinelli. I'm not tired of reading about her yet.

The trouble is that King has ended this book with the sort of cliff hanger that Conan Doyle used. She's created her own version of Professor Moriarty. At the end of this book it's clear that there will be a Language of Bees II in the near future. I won't be waiting for it.

And I've yet to figure out any meaning for the title or for the sections of the books about Mary Russell's investigations of the abandonment of one of Holmes' bee hives.

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

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See also:

• Laurie R. King's web site - it includes some amateur video of some of the key scenes from the book
• a review from the California Literary Review
• A review by ScotKris at It's a Crime! (Or a Mystery...)

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Chilly

Last December, at the Carleton Book Store sale I bought a copy of Arnaldur's mystery, Arctic Chill. I finally got to reading it recently.

But, before I go on about Arctic Chill, I'd like to reiterate something I mentioned when I wrote about Jar City and then forgot when I wrote about The Draining Lake and Voices.

In Iceland's insular world, people are known by their given names alone. They have patronyms or matronyms, but people don't use them. The population of the country (317,000) is about 80% of the population of Minneapolis. The country is smaller and snowier than Kentucky. Nearly everyone lives in a city or town. None of the towns or cities, save Reykjavik, has more than 30,000 residents. People are known by their first names. Ask Icelanders about Indriðason, and they might not know whom you are speaking about, even though Arnaldur is a best selling author.

So, in spite of the publication of Arnaldur's patronym on the cover of the English version of his book, I'll refer to him as he's known back home. If I remember.

What about Arctic Chill? It's not up to the standard that Arnaldur set with Voices. Inspector Erlendur (who also gets a patronym for the American dust jacket) is haunted by the childhood death of his brother when the two of them were caught in a blizzard. His post-traumatic stress shapes nearly every aspect of his personality and most of his actions. I kept expecting Erlendur's past to play a major role in the investigation of the murder of a 10-year-old boy in this story. It didn't.

The death of Erlendur's mentor and the ambiguous relationship between them is more important in this book. I'm not sure why, even after re-reading the last chapter.

It was a difficult book to get into. The beginning is full of details, ideas, and actions of the three main cops investigating a schoolyard killing. There are so many details, I found it hard to keep track of people and events. The detectives seem incredibly thorough and Arnaldur tells us about nearly every detail. I even started the book over after reading the first third.

The dust jacket says the book's "a thriller." It's not a thriller. Unlike the backstories and parallel plots in Voices, there's little here besides the investigation.

Erlendur's children show up a couple times, but there's no real development of the relationships.

And here's part of the problem: the US edition of Arctic Chill wasn't published until 2009, but it was written in 2005. The Draining Lake was written in 2004. Voices was written in 2003, so I'm reading these out of sequence, which might make a difference. As I hinted before, I might decide to go back and read these in chronological order before I read Hypothermia, written in 2007.

In any case, Arctic Chill was a better book than I expected after reading the first third of it twice. It wasn't as good as Voices or The Draining Lake. I might well read them all again and someday, I'll read the newest one.

Have you read Arctic Chill or other of Arnaldur's books? What did you think? Write, and tell this little bit of the world about your reaction.

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• Maxine Clarke's review at EuroCrime
  
  
• Barry Forshaw's review in The Independent (UK)
  
  
• kimbofo's review at the web site Reading Matters
  

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More from "Michael Stanley"

On her Facebook page, Kit Naylor pointed out this blog post written by Michael Sears (half of the Michael Stanley writing duo).

The Quality Mystery

One evening last week when the new Kubu novel had been put to bed for the day, Stan and I talked about the issue of quality in mystery novels. We started off discussing what we thought quality meant, and ended up wondering if it meant anything at all beyond personal taste...

Stan and I came to the conclusion that it was all a mystery and went to bed. Can anyone help us with this mystery of quality?

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Questions, questions

Bird Loomis wrote after reading about my experience with Michael Connelly on CD:

"Never been a bad Harry Bosch book. It is interesting to read about aging detectives. Just read the most recent Ian Rankin book, in which Inspector Rebus finally retires. Does an author have his /her protagonist age or not? What I like about Bosch and Rebus is that they reflect back on the past, sometimes addressing issues from past cases. K.C Constantine had Mario Balzac retire, bu tit didn't quite work. I wonder if Rebus will find a way back?"

All I can add is that somewhere I read that Connelly has written a book about Harry Bosch's younger half-brother. Harry might get to retire and Connelly could write on.

A book I didn't read

I had a long drive last month. I've found that audio books (I still want to call them books on tape) make long drives a lot more tolerable than any other minimal distraction. Freeway driving is tedious, but paying attention -- even semi-consciously -- is important. Music is not enough of a distraction. A video is too much. Talk radio is too episodic. But, a decent book, read by a decent actor is just about right.

The day before I left, I went to the Northfield Library and looked through the collection of books on CD. I came home with a 9 CD version of Michael Connelly's Echo Park.

It was only a 4-CD drive, but I was hooked on Echo Park. I spent time quietly listening to the last 5 CDs after I got home. Connelly is a great story teller. And it helps that Len Cariou was the reader. Cariou played Shakespearean roles in Canada's Stratford Shakespeare Festival, a neo-classical role at Minneapolis' Guthrie (that I remember as intimidating), and musical and comedy roles on Broadway. Cariou never tried to impersonate the characters in Connelly's story, but he acted the parts and kept the voices distinct.

Echo Park is a story that features Connelly's dective Harry Bosch as a 60-something guy reflecting on his career and life while being reminded of an old murder he couldn't solve. The reminder was a confession to the murder by a guy caught with two dismembered corpses in his van. However, things are hardly ever what they seem in these books. And Harry Bosch is hardly ever the normal cop. That's why he deserves to be the featured character in so many of Connelly's novels.

The beginning of the book is a flashback to a key scene in the old murder. Here's a very good video version of that opening scene.

There are politics, romance, suspense, danger, and action in this book -- as in all the other Harry Bosch novels. Those are reasons the books are so popular.

The other reason for the popularity is Harry Bosch. Connelly has been creating this character for so long, that Harry is a pretty complete "person." He's dedicated to justice for victims more than he is to law and order, exacting police protocols and political correctness. He's haunted by demons from his past and separation from his daughter who is growing up far away from LA. It's the edginess and the vulnerability that makes him attractive.

Son Jim pointed me to the Harry Bosch novels long ago (thanks, Jim), and now I've read three and listened to one. I have another on my bedside stand that I think I'll get around to soon.

Have you read Echo Park or another of Connelly's mysteries? What did you think? Write and tell this little part of the world about your reaction.

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• Michael Connelly's web site
  
• The Review-a-Day from Powell's Books on Echo Park
  
• Janet Maslin's review of Echo Park in the New York Times (16 October 2006)

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Death in the desert

A couple weeks ago, Gary Sankary wrote about A Carrion Death, a book he'd just read. He said he "loved it."

He wrote just after he got his Sony Reader and a library card from the Amery, Wisconsin library. I don't know if he read the book on his Reader or "borrowed" the book from Amery. Those are just coincidental facts I know.

Gary's recommendation sent me to the Northfield Public Library where I found a copy of A Carrion Death by Michael Stanley. The book is a murder mystery set in the capital of Botswana [capital city, left]. (Go ahead and click on that link to the Wikipedia page about Botswana or this link to the CIA World Factbook page on the country. The CIA has a much better map. You know you want to find out where it is and what it's like.)

Michael Stanley is actually two guys, a Michael and a Stanley. Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip. Trollip lives part of the year (presumably the warmer part) in Minnesota and part of the year in South Africa where Sears lives.

The book is over 400 pages of darn good story telling. These guys work well together. I especially liked the numerous short little chapters that advanced the story and made it easy for me to read a few before sleep and pick up where I left off when I awoke.

The book revolves around Detective David "Kubu" Bengu of the Botswana Criminal Investigation Department. If you're expecting some kind of exotic Third World tale involving primitive sleuthing and technology, you'll be disappointed. Kubu, a huge man nicknamed "hippo" (in English), is a thorough, rational, thoughtful investigator. His forensic support team provides him with trace evidence identification, finger print comparisons, DNA analysis, and numerous other CSI-type services. He doesn't hike through the veld. He drives a department Land Rover. He doesn't ride a decrepit third class rail coach from HQ to the other end of the country, he flies. There is a peripheral character who shows up with mystical messages about what's going on, but he wouldn't be out of place in a seance in New Orleans or a fortune teller's front room in Queens.

The carrion death that opens the story of the complex mystery is the discovery of a murder victim's corpse, torn apart by hyenas at a wilderness water hole. Identifying features are missing, although the body is of a white man. Is it a wandering tourist? A European geologist? A gangster? No one knows. No one is reported missing at first. Detective Kubu goes to work even though his boss is a friend of one person who might be involved.

One thing I liked is that Kubu has a wife and parents and in-laws that he's involved with. He goes home after work (although not as soon as his wife would like). He and the Mrs. spend Sundays with his parents. He invites friends to dinner. He's not as overwhelmed and obsessed by the job as many of the stars of mystery novels.

Oh, yes, the mystery. As Kubu investigates, more people are found who are connected to the place and perhaps to the dead man. Then a couple more people are obviously murdered, and evidence connects them to the carrion death. And all this in a country whose geography is dominated by the Kalahari Desert and the Makgadikgadi salt flats (most of the people live near the rivers in the east and north of the country); a country that can't produce food, but has very profitable diamond mines. What begins to look like the cover up of a scheme to sell blood diamonds, becomes something insanely different.

And Michael and Stanley tell the story well. There's another Detective Kubu mystery in existence and a third on the way. I'll be keeping my eye out for them.

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See also:

• The Detective Kubu web site
  
  
• The publisher's web site for Michael Stanley
  
  
• A Carrion Death reviewed by Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times (it's the third book reviewed in this article.)

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The end of newspapers?

Marc Reigel wrote from Ohio about a book he enjoyed recently. It's not one many people are likely to have seen, but you can probably find it if you look at the bottom of this entry.

I recently read Late Edition, by Bob Greene, who hails from Columbus, Ohio. I enjoyed the book for a variety of reasons:

1. It's about the decline and almost sure demise of the printed newspaper as a part of American life, and therefore it's a commentary on the gains and losses of "progress";
   
   
2. my dad ran a small town newspaper from 1956 to 1974, and those times provided a "micro-scale" example of the things Greene identifies in his experience as a reporter for the long-defunct Columbus Citizen-Journal;
   
   
3. and finally, I really enjoyed Greene's journalistic style–perhaps because of my experiences as a newspaper man's son, but just as likely because of my twenty years as an English teacher, pleading with adolescents to "write in active voice!"

So, I wrote an email to Bob Greene, since, SURPRISE!, his email address appears on the book jacket! I'll include it here to illustrate how I felt about the book and why I'm recommending it to the readers of ReadingBlog:

Hi, Bob–Thanks for recommending that I read your latest book, Final Edition, a while back. I just finished it yesterday, on a plane flying back from frigid Tampa (where the golf vacation was frozen out but the computer worked just fine).

As I might have told you in previous correspondence, my dad was the publisher of a small-town newspaper in Minnesota from 1956 to 1974. I witnessed first-hand the Frankenstein-ian changes you describe in Final Edition, from the elimination of the linotype operators (my dad employed a blind man to do that job for the once-a-week Photo News in Owatonna, MN) to the "cold-type" process that preceded computerization–costing the blind man his job. Then on to the reduction in advertising revenue (I clearly recall eating at local restaurants on " due bills"). Then on to the nationalization of the news sources (the competitor, The Daily People's Press, soon carried national columnists--perhaps even your columns appeared there). Then on to oblivion: after he sold the paper in 1974, the new owner turned the Photo News into a weekly "flyer" devoted to advertising only, no photos, no news . . . . it lasted a year.

So, as I read the book, I felt like I was the cognizenti: smelling the hot lead of the linotype, seeing the paste-pots, feeling the smoothness of the high-quality newsprint (after all, my dad's paper WAS the Photo News), tasting the sandwiches brought back to the city desk by a copy boy . . . .

Somewhere around 1960-61, I worked episodically and not particularly dexterously as a paper-assembler on Wednesday nights. My job was to lay the first page on the conveyor belt so the rest of the "assemblers"–all girls, and all with much faster fingers than mine–could place successive pages on the soon-to-be-folded paper.

My "work" there was, I now realize, my dad's attempt to give me, literally "hands-on" experience in the production of the paper. I would have been better off if he would have let me write a few words, I think! After all, I ended up teaching high school English for twenty years before I made up my current job as a consultant to school districts, parts of which include writing grants, reports, and improvement plans.

I wanted to share a little of "my story" with you, since I so resonated to the anecdotes, personalities, and events you describe in Final Edition. They took place across the country, in thousands of newspapers, big and small, large circulations of 100,000 or a million, and the 5,000 papers my dad's little enterprise produced one-a-week in rural Minnesota.

Something has been lost in translation, I think, to introduce a movie metaphor, with the inevitable demise of the "real" newspaper–the one you could hold, feel, read, think about, shuffle, use to start a fire or wrap a fish.

Thank you, Bob, for writing an appropriate epitaph for the enterprise . . . .

Marc Reigel
Grandview, Ohio

And then, Mr. Greene wrote back to me:

In writing Late Edition, I tried to tell the story the way I did for this reason: I hoped that, by telling the story of that one mezzanine newsroom, I could come close to getting down on paper what it is we all may be losing as the inevitable changes in the newspaper world, and in America, take place. What you said in your letter-- especially those great stories you told about the Photo News, and your experiences there-- tells me that you understand all of this very well.

I'm honored. If you think any of your friends might like the story in the pages of Late Edition, I'd be very grateful if you would recommend it to them. I'd like for this book to reach the people who will appreciate it the most, and you may know who some of those people are. I hope the sound of all that laughter and good times in the long-ago city room will reach them.

Thank you again for your thoughtfulness, and your kind words. It means a lot to me.

Bob Greene

I thought this interchange illustrated something about writing, too.

Perhaps writing promotes making connections between writer and reader on a deeper, more personal level than, say, speaker and listener. Writing can be viewed on the reader's time; speaking needs to be heard on the speaker's time. You know, now that we are clearly, if not officially, well past "middle age"–oh, all right, I suppose 65 can be the new 45, at least for an evening–I find that reading trumps listening on issues I want to explore more fully.

So, I'm recommending Late Edition for readers who might resonate to that concept. A reader can read the book as though he or she might read a newspaper–if there were any newspapers left to read; and, yes, the style is journalistic: crisp sentences, sharp words, few adjectives, active voice.

Perhaps something has, indeed, been lost in translation with the loss of a bit of Americana: the daily, if not twice-a-day, newspaper.

Thanks for sponsoring this forum for sharing ideas about books, for so long and so well, Ken. As Bob Greene says, "It means a lot to me."

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Here at the ReadingBlog, we'll remain a venue for reading and asynchronous written discussion -- even on the Internets (as long as it doesn't get as expensive as mailing costs did for the actual newsletter. You're welcome and thanks for all the good words, Marc.

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RIP Robert B. Parker

Gary Sankary pointed out the blogger at Swanshadow who noted the passing of one prolific author.

The final bullet

Books live forever. Authors, sadly, do not.

Robert B. Parker has been my favorite novelist since 1977, when I checked out Mortal Stakes, the third novel in his now-legendary series of books featuring the one-named private detective Spenser, from the Novato High School library and immediately fell in love. (In a purely platonic and literary sort of way.) I quickly went back and read the two preceding novels in the skein, The Godwulf Manuscript and God Save the Child.

My life has never been the same...

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Poetry on Capitol Hill, DC

Bird Loomis from Lawrence, KS, pointed out this article about an English prof working for a Senator. (I wonder if Garrison Keillor and POEM know about Huck Gutman?)

Huck Gutman brings a bit of poetry and verse to U.S. Senate colleagues

The old friends -- the senator, Bernie Sanders, and the chief of staff, Huck Gutman -- live a Washington paradigm: a fraction of a life here, a fraction elsewhere. For some, Washington can never be a whole place. "At times for us, it can be a lonely road," Gutman says one afternoon…

Gutman, a pleasantly rumpled 66-year-old with a thick, gray Vandyke beard and a puckish glint in his eyes, is searching for the right words to explain Washington in a windowless basement restaurant of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. He pauses, starts to say something, stops and looks around. A stray senator chats quietly with an aide a few tables over. To his left, a reporter tries to extract secrets; to his right, papers are being shuffled. Conversation hovers at low-hum.

"This is a very strange world we're eating in the middle of," he confides. "It's entirely absorbed with itself. It's all so inside the Beltway. I feel the occasional need to break out of this world."

And so it is that he began lobbing poems into the e-mail inboxes of every chief of staff in the Senate. Each note offers escape through verse. Meaty, challenging, thought-provoking lines, accompanied by pages and pages of Gutman's analysis. Poetry that has nothing to do with cloture votes or amendments or motions to recommit. Poetry intended to get his BlackBerry-addicted, tunnel-visioned, life-as-a-treadmill colleagues to think about the "huge dimensions of life that get shortchanged" in the grinder that is Capitol Hill.

Gutman, you see, is also an English professor, though he's on an extended leave of absence from the University of Vermont. Poetry is his way of connecting on a different plane…

Incongruently, one reader Gutman can't seem to reach is his buddy, Sanders. They have been friends for years… Even though they "talk for hours, talk about everything," Gutman still hasn't managed to turn Sanders into a poetry fan…

Still, Gutman always finds others to enlighten. Little by little, he becomes a kind of Capitol pied piper of poetry. His poetry e-mail list is approaching 1,500 recipients, including many former students and literary thinkers from around the world. ("You will publish the address, so people can sign up, won't you?" Gutman says one afternoon. Sure, Huck. It's LISTSERV@lit.uvm.edu.)...

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Icelandic treasure

Last August, I was mildly interested in Arnaldur Indriðason's Jar City. In September, I read Indriðason's The Draining Lake. I remember liking it, especially because there was more going on in the book besides describing a mysterious death and unraveling the clues leading to an explanation. I wanted to read more of what Indriðason had to say.

Another of the books I picked up at the pre-Christmas sale at the Carleton bookstore was Indriðason's Voices. It turns out that this book was written after Jar City and before The Draining Lake. Well, now I may have to go back and reread both of them.

Voices is a very good book. Maybe I missed things in the other two. I did comment when writing about Jar City as a "nice" book, that there was another story going on that involved the main character's daughter. After reading Voices, I want to read about that more carefully.

The complexity I mentioned when I wrote about The Draining Lake exists in Voices as well. I want to go back and see if there are things I missed in that complexity.

Why did I like Voices so much?

Well, first of all, I would have titled it Ghosts, even though Voices is a direct translation from the Icelandic title Röddin. Ghosts would have been misleading because it's very much not a ghost story. But nearly every character in the book is haunted by people and events from the past. And they're not haunted in subtle, Freudian ways. Their everyday behavior is directed and controlled by their memories.

At first the story appears to be about a random murder with no motive and no suspect. But as main character Inspector Erlendur asks questions, things get more and more complicated. And when people begin telling more truths, the murder case gets even more complex. Before long there are many possible motives and suspects.

The mystery story is a story that is well-told and unfolds as Inspector Elendur asks questions and thinks things through. I felt like I shared with Elendur the gradual revelation of what really happened in a dark hallway in the basement of one of Reykjavik's hotels.

But there are many other stories in this book. They're about abandoned and abused children. It turns out that the murder victim, some of the suspects, Erlendur, his daughter, one of Erlendur's colleagues, a boy featured in a sub-plot, and a couple other characters fall into the category of people handicapped by abuse and neglect.

Inspector Erlendur is disturbing to me as a character with no ability to reflect on his own behavior or break out of destructive patterns even though he knows he should want to. The backstory in this book helps explain that character and his incredible relationship with his children, especially his daughter. That father-daughter relationship develops in this book and that makes me want to go back to Jar City and be reminded what was said about it there.

As in The Draining Lake, there's an interplay between the mystery story and the back stories in Voices. Since the stories this time centered around parents and children, I am tempted to dig out Hamlet (last read on a rainy day in Copenhagen nearly 20 years ago) and reread that as well.

All this wondrous complexity suggests that there are more interesting stories in others of Indriðason's books. He's written 13, ten of which have been translated into English. I have Arctic Chill (2009) on my bedside table and some re-reading to do. Indriðason could become a project for 2010.

Carol Stoops recommended Jar City. Thank you, Carol. Jar City led me to The Draining Lake. Anybody read any other of Indriðason's books and have comments? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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See also:

• Ali Karim's review in January Magazine.
  
• Maxine Clark's review in EuroCrime or Petrona

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Details about Michael Stanley

Heads up for anyone (Gary Sankary?) interested in learning more about "Michael Stanley."

From Janet Rudolph's Mystery Fanfare blog, a guest posting by Stanley Trollip, who is half of the team that writes under the name of Michael Stanley (see A Carrion Death).

Partners in Crime: Michael Stanley.

Rudolph wrote, as an introduction, "Continuing the Partners in Crime series here on Mystery Fanfare, I asked Stan Trollip, one half of the writing team known as Michael Stanley to Guest Blog about writing collaboration."

Two bonuses are photographs of Trollip and his writing partner Michael Sears. Some people might be excited to know that a third Michael Stanley novel is nearly done.

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Early in the last century

Dan Conrad wrote with another enthusiastic recommendation.

After reading your latest blog, I may be adding to your reading load by suggesting something that could put you even further behind.

I just finished Duty to the Dead by Charles Todd and it is, in my opinion, a terrific book. Its the first in what they promise to be a series of Bess Crawford mysteries.

Actually, I think Jacqueline Winspear could have a copyright case against them as Bess Crawford is so like Masie Dobbs you could switch the names and never suspect the difference: she's a plucky WWI British nurse to start with.

Still it is, if anything, even better. The characters are so interesting I didn't even notice that 90 pages had gone by and there was no real mystery yet, just a highly engaging narrative. But once the mystery starts to unravel, well, don't plan on going to bed early.

I am also wondering if you have read other books by the mother-son team that goes by the name Charles Todd. I see they have a whole series of mysteries featuring Ian Rutledge and am wondering if you are aquainted with those. This is the first I have heard of Charles Todd, but I suspect that's not the case with you.

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First, this is the first I've heard of Charles Todd (whoever they may be).

Second, even if it's merely as good a Masie Dobbs story, it will probably be worth my time.

Third, I found A Carrion Death by Michael Stanley at the Northfield Library and began reading it today while David and I were at the laundromat (five loads for the family this week and doing them simultaneously rather than sequentially was worth a trip to the south edge of town). So far, Gary Sankary is on target: it's an engaging story about an exotic place.

And Michael Stanley, like Charles Todd, is a pseudonym for a pair of writers. One of the pair who make up Michael Stanley has Minnesota connections.

Fourth, I still have Echo Park by Michael Connolly and Voices by Arnaldur Indriðason to write about (and Voices is very good).

Fifth, reading good books at leisure is not a burden ("adding to your reading load"). And, as an old retired guy, I have more leisure than most people and more than I used to have, so recommendations are always welcome. Even if the list grows longer. (I have another Arnaldur Indriðason book on my bedside table already.)

What to do first? What to do first?

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African mysteries

I am falling behind. I have two books to write about. I did just finish the next to last chapter on a textbook project, so maybe I'll have time.

Meanwhile, Gary Sankary wrote from Apple Valley, MN, "BTW, just finished the first Detective Kubu book, have you read that one?

"I read Carrion Death by Michael Stanley and loved it."

That's enough to send me off to the library tomorrow. Has anyone else read that or The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu?

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Needed: suggestons for a potential teacher

Dan Conrad's son, now in his mid-20s, dumped his post-college corporate job last summer and headed for Japan to teach English.

He really likes what he's doing and suspects he might want to teach when he returns to the states.

He asked his dad for books, "You asked what I wanted for my b'day and I was thinking that one idea would be a book about teaching elementary or middle school. Either a story from a teacher or even a book on education theory."

So, Dan is looking for recommendations.

Do you have any? Add them as comments or send the to me and I'll pass them on to the birthday gift-buying dad.

Oh, darn

Nevada Barr has written many good mysteries set in U.S. National Parks. Several have been suspenseful and violent. One, set in Carlsbad Caverns, was too intense, dark, and deep in the earth for me. Most have been very good, partly based on Barr's work as a park ranger in several of the parks she wrote about.

(See Winter with Wolves and Worse, Along the Rio Grande, Endangered Species, Firestorm, What a Deal!, High Country, and Hunting Season.)

Our book supplier, banker Mary, dropped a new Nevada Barr book at our house at Christmas time. Its setting is not a National Park and its main character is not Park Ranger Anna Pigeon. It's much more a suspense and terror story than a mystery. It's set in New Orleans. The title is 13½.

One of the main characters is a serial killer. Even the survivors at the end are victims. The plot resembles a masquerade ball in which it's difficult to know who is who.

Barr tells the story in disjointed chapters that aren't quite short stories in themselves. There's little insight into the minds of the main characters until the very end of the book, and by then the insights seem abnormal. And by that point, I had figured out who was who in the masquerade, but I didn't really care. I finished it only to see how Barr pulled the strings together at the end, not because I was really interested in the story any more.

Maybe this was practice for writing outside a genre and a framework. I wish Barr well in another, better endeavor.

Then again, maybe 13½ was too intense, dark, and deep for me and I should go back to reading depressing Swedish mysteries that are so much the rage that there are bookstores in Germany that specialize in them.

If anyone else reads 13½, write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it. I really would like to know about someone else's reaction.

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• Nevada Barr's web site


• Nevada Barr biography at an Ole Miss web site

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Tell this little bit of the world...

I keep inviting you to offer your opinions on books here.

If you write about a book, like Bird Loomis did recently, your words get published as a regular blog entry.

However, if you offer a comment on something already written here, I have been adding those as "Comments" on the original.

Turns out that I didn't realize how thoroughly those "Comments" were buried in the blog.

Oops! Sorry.

For instance, Dan Conrad responded to my negative reaction to Kjell Eriksson's book. A couple weeks later, he asked if I'd missed his comments.

I hadn't missed the comments, I'd thoughtlessly buried them in the "Comments" section.

From now on, your comments will become new blog entries with a link to the original entry.

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Here's how Dan reacted to my thoughts about The Cruel Stars of the Night.

I agree. I read Cruel Stars of Night a couple years ago and quit about 1/3 of the way through (which I almost never do) as by that time I didn't care one iota what happened to any of the characters. It was so bad I have sworn off Swedish mysteries since -- except for Stieg Larsson. I see I was wise not to finish it.

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I really do want to encourage you to add your 2 (or 3) cents' worth to this forum. From now on, your comments will get as much emphasis as whatever I find worth saying.

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Flashbacks as bad as the present

When I was shopping a few weeks ago at the Carleton bookstore discount day, I picked up another mystery by Craig Johnson. Back in November, when I read Death without Company, I was intrigued, but not sold on Johnson's writing. But I thought it was worth reading another.

So, I bought Another Man's Moccasins, "the fourth book in Craig Johnson's award-winning Walt Longmire series..."

This one was better. It's a complex story that begins in Vietnam in 1968, involves some post-traumatic stress, and concludes in northern Wyoming's Absaroka County in the early 21st century. Johnson tells the story well. The flashbacks to '68 are vivid and detailed. The investigation of the death of Vietnamese woman in northern Wyoming, who had a 40-year-old photo of Sheriff Longmire in her pocket, lurches along, as I imagine things do in real life (not like the smooth, budget-free sailing in 48-minute TV episodes).

I came to like and care about the main characters in this story. Maybe they're more realistic by this fourth novel. (Death without Company was the second.)

This book gets at least one Heart of Gold for improbabilities, but they are in the set up of the plot, not the events. That makes them more forgivable to me.

So, I recommend this one. If you read it, let us know what you think. Write and tell this little bit of the world how you responded to it.

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• Craig Johnson's blog at his publisher's site


• Kevin Tipple's review of Another Man's Moccasins


• A reading guide from the publisher

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Politics and Fiction: the Possibility of Learning?

Bird Loomis, prof at the University of Kansas, wrote again about his serious, professional reading. Not that serious, professional reading can't be enjoyable. (See how easy it is to add your ideas here.)

"For the second time I'm teaching my course on Literature and Politics, of which I asked for suggested readings a couple of years ago. (Suggestions still welcome!) But my focus today is to write a bit about one book - A Dangerous Friend -- by one of my favorite authors, Ward Just [left]. Just writes intimately about politics in various venues, most notably D.C. and around Chicago. But he was a war correspondent in Vietnam (a good one, a contemporary of David Halberstam) for several years, and has lived a lot in Europe.

"In A Dangerous Friend he writes about Vietnam in 1965, near the start of the major troop build up. Americans were still hopeful, albeit naively, in their approach to the 'effort' to do some good in this nation we could scarcely locate on a map.

"As usual, Just brings broad political, policy, and moral issues down to the personal level Moreover, writing a decade ago about an older conflict, Just offers a news lens through which to examine our 2009 (and ongoing) involvement in Afghanistan. This seems one marker for effective fiction - a plot line and a set of characters that transcend time and place. (Think Shakespeare)

"What makes A Dangerous Friend such a compelling read in 2009 is that it's a 1999 book that looks back to 1965 in Vietnam, when there were still many American optimists (naifs?) who had concluded that we could build a Western-style democracy in a small, rural Asian nation. What was most thought-provoking for me here, beyond Just's narrative, is that I've read this book three times - in 1999, in 2007, and now in 2009. The contexts of U.S. military involvement have been quite distinctive in those three periods; strangely enough, I think ADF packs more of a punch in this third reading, as we commit more troops to Afghanistan, than it did in my two previous ones.

"In the past, I've talked a bit about rereading books, but often just for pleasure. But here there is some instrumental value to revisiting a book. Might it even be worthwhile to give a copy of ADF to some policy makers. One never knows."

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Character driven story

While I was reading the McNeill's father-son world history book (see below), the Carleton College book store had its annual sale day: 20% discount on everything. Students were on break; the campus is pretty deserted. The discounts are advertised in Northfield as a sale for the community. Gee, 20% off -- that's almost as good as the discounts at Barnes and Noble. Of course I went.

Outside the bookstore were half a dozen tables of remainders. How could I resist looking? One short stack on a table contained The Cruel Stars of the Night by Kjell Eriksson [right]. Yes, another Swedish murder mystery.

This novel stands out from other Swedish mysteries and most non-Swedish mysteries. I'm not sure I liked the way it stands out. It's a story told through character development rather than through actions. Even the firemen who show up at one point to put out a house fire get names and hints at the relationships among them.

There are many inner monologues -- many more than the number of dialogues or conversations. And, until the last 30 pages, there are more dialogues than events.

The primary characters have flashbacks, meditations, and day dreams. It's through these mental rummagings that I learned about the characters and the events that constituted the plot. (A plot, by the way, that involves a serial killer.) It's like everything is in past tense.

It's a laborious way to tell a story. This was especially true for me because I never got attached to any of the characters (except for one of the murder victims and a hapless crime lab tech who wasn't even a big player in the book).

And then there was the patchy nature of the characters that were developed in depth. The thoughts of a few characters were exposed in great detail. In spite of that, I was startled several times by actions that were not hinted at in a character's thoughts.

The main investigator, a single mother, professes great love for her toddler son, but there are no actions that express that love. Only words. Okay, it's a murder mystery, not a domestic tale, but a mother-son relationship asserted by the mother to be central to her existence ought to be reflected in more than her words. Well, Mr. Eriksson?

And how is it that a repressed, middle-aged recluse of a woman suddenly becomes an aggressive seductress, Mr. Eriksson?

It seemed that Eriksson painted detailed pictures of large parts of characters, but left other parts completely blank. Even at the end of the book, the main investigator is hauled off in an ambulance, not reunited with her son. The primary villain -- okay a pretty insane villain, an urbanite who even dislikes gardens -- wanders off into the Swedish wilderness.

Some of this book was interesting and some of it was a pleasure to read. Much of it was tedious. I kept waiting for something to happen. When big things finally did happen (in the last 30 pages), they had less impact than if they'd been more carefully described.

Have you read The Cruel Stars of the Night or another of Eriksson's other mysteries? What did you think? Write, and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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New York recommendation from Ohio

Marc Reigel used his Facebook page to recommend Ian McEwan's story, The Use of Poetry in The New Yorker.

It surprised no one to learn that Michael Beard had been an only child, and he would have been the first to concede that he’d never quite got the hang of brotherly feeling. His mother, Angela, was an angular beauty who doted on him, and the medium of her love was food. She bottle-fed him with passion, surplus to demand. Some four decades before he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, he came top in the Cold Norton and District Baby Competition, birth-to-six-months class. In those harsh postwar years, ideals of infant beauty resided chiefly in fat, in Churchillian multiple chins, in dreams of an end to rationing and of the reign of plenty to come. Babies were exhibited and judged like prize marrows, and, in 1947, the five-month-old Michael, bloated and jolly, swept all before him...

It's late, but I've bookmarked it for reading tomorrow since Marc thought the story "had the power to move me into that fabulous 'next-layer atmosphere' where one thinks that these words provide the key to life!" Naturally, he assumed he "might as well tell the hoi polloi!"

We've been told by the former English teacher, cover band rocker, and all-round guy.

Other opinions welcome here too. Tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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Years in the reading

After finishing the Craig Johnson book, I reached for a book on my nightstand. That's the depository for books I think I'd like to read and books I think I should read and books I've started reading. What I grabbed was J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill's The Human Web, A Bird's-eye View of World History.

William H. McNeill was a professor at the University of Chicago and, for a long time, a lonely crusader for the cause of teaching world history. J. R. is his son and a professor at Georgetown University.

I became familiar with the elder McNeill's work when I was teaching a course called World Studies. It was difficult to teach because the secondary textbooks which purported to be about world history were really just European history with a bit of Asian history and even smaller bits of African and Latin American history appended to them (mostly as topics for discussing European colonialism).

Even academic historians (except for McNeill [right] and a few others) argued that world history was just too huge and too diverse to be a legitimate subject of study. McNeill and his allies began writing history that was really world history and demonstrated to all but the most chauvinistic that there were generalizations and comparisons to be made and lessons to be learned in a field that supposedly "diluted" real history. I had the pleasure of meeting the senior McNeill at a conference in Washington, DC a long time ago. He was as impressive in person as he is in his books.

One of McNeill's cohort, Ross Dunn of San Diego State University, wrote a secondary textbook and it was actually published. Links Across Time and Place was pretty radical. I remember that chapter 8 was about the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty. (You can see right there how "real" history was being "diluted" -- Lynn Cheney's word.) It was also a pretty good textbook and helped get students thinking.

Things have changed some in the past 30+ years. World history is considered a legitimate, if rare academic subject. The Advanced Placement program has a World History course that is rapidly catching up with European History in popularity. And we're back in a war in Asia when even Jon Stewart is pointing out that no one has ever been able to run Afghanistan: not the Mesopotamians, not Alexander the Great, not Ghenghis Khan, not the Turks, not the British, not the Russians, and not even the Afghanis. (That's a real world history lesson and the kind of lesson a lot of us learned in the 1960s.)

So, most of what's in The Human Web... was familiar to me. I haven't taught World Studies in this century. So the book has been partially read for a long time.

What I enjoy from this book is seeing new connections, and this is the book for that because it's about webs among people. Webs that were created by things like creation of speech, sharing of technology, and competiton for resources.

I liked things like:

• "Bureaucratic administration, alphabetic writing, and portable, congregational religions have never been surpassed as instruments for sustaining civilized societies, and stand as the most important innovations generated among ancient Southwest Asian peoples between 2350 B.C.E. and 331 B.C.E."
  
• "Cheap transportation allowed goods of common consumption to circulate widely. In favorable locations, a peasant family could concentrate on raising silk worms, or some other commercial crop, and rely on the market for food and other necessities."
  
• "The linking up of the world's ecosystems altered Australia and the Pacific islands more drastically than any other parts of the world."
  
• "Urbanization and population growth stands as the cardinal social change of the last century."
  
• "Ironically, therefore, to preserve what we have, we and our successors must change our ways by learning to live simultaneously in a cosmopolitan web and in various and diverse primary communities. how to reconcile such opposites is the capital question for our time and probably for a long time to come."

If you're a fan of history, especially if you're familiar with traditional and localized histories, you might find this entertaining and worth your time. I liked it, but I've been a fan of McNeill and his work for a long time. Check it out and tell us what you think of it.

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See also:

• Articles and books by William H. McNeill
  
• Why Study History, and essay by William H. McNeill
  
• Books by J. R. McNeill

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