Not New For Long

Type, a bookstore in motion

2012-02-13T18:09:00.000-08:00

Instead of me writing another review, how about another video? Canadian crime writer John McFetridge made me aware of this one.

Hmm. I could get used to this...

The Cold Cold Ground. Again.

2012-02-10T19:54:00.000-08:00

You didn't listen to me the last time, did you? Well, don't worry about it, hardly anyone ever does. I'm giving you a second option. You can listen to this guy instead...

Smoke, by Nigel Bird and The Point, by Gerard Brennan

2012-02-05T13:36:00.000-08:00

Bit of a problematic blogpost, this one, but I'm going to do it anyway. I happened to read these two novellas, both nominated for the Spinetingler Award, one right after the other, and found the parallels striking enough that I thought I'd do them together, rather than separately. Unfortunately, in the time that's elapsed between now and then, Smoke seems to have been withdrawn from circulation for the moment, due, I'm guessing, to some larger troubles at the press it was published by. That's a can of worms that I don't really want to get into here, but I'm going to assume that Smoke will be made available again soon by one means or another.

I read Smoke in ebook form, while The Point I read as a physical book. I think I enjoyed reading in the old school form marginally more, but with novellas, it isn't a terribly large issue either way, and I actually think novellas are highly suited to the ebook format.

Smoke begins with a simple enough school incident. Our hero, Jimmy, gets pantsed by the school bullies and as he of course decides to take his revenge, events soon spiral out of control. I was a little slow on the uptake here, but Smoke actually continues on from a fine short story I read in the Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 8 called "An Arm and a Leg", and I wish I'd reread that one before reading this story. If republished, I think including both in one volume might work rather well.

The community is Tranent, a working class British community where let's just say a lot of illicit activity is going on. I don't know that you'd call it tight knit, but it's the kind of place where everybody knows everybody else's business, including what's hidden under Nan's bed. There are a lot of skillfully interwoven story arcs to this brief tale, and everyone is pretty much after everyone else's loot, or even life.

Gerard Brennan's The Point focuses on another working class community, this one a rough Belfast neighborhood. When brothers Paul and Brian find themselves needing to lay low, though, they head for Warrenpoint, a seaside resort town that they remember as idyllic from their otherwise not so idyllic childhoods. There they meet Rachel, a girl with some troubles of her own. The encounter of the three of them, not to mention the various thugs that they inevitably get involved with, leads them to their own madcap festival of mayhem. I liked the brief titled chapters of this one, which helped keep things moving right along.

I still find myself a bit surprised to be reading crime fiction that centers on so much violence, boozing, drugs and sex. Not to mention dog fights. These are "guy books" in a big way, so I think it's fair to say straight off that they might not be for you, if I have any idea of who the typical readers of this blog are. Which, actually, I don't. If you're looking for fast paced gritty thrillers with more than a bit of edge, these are just up your alley. I admire the talent and craftsmanship of both writers and will continue to read more.

While you wait for Smoke to be reborn, why don't you check out Nigel's short pieces on Smashwords? Oh, and did I mention that he is in the probably all too often mentioned here Grimm Tales as well? In fact, he won first prize in the original story contest for "Sing a Song of Sixpence".

And once you've read The Point, which won the 2012 Spinetingler novella award, you can then go on to Mr. Brennan's Wee Rockets, which I have ahead of me as well.

Grimm News

2012-01-29T15:00:00.000-08:00

I'm falling a bit behind on the reviews here, but it's not that I haven't been reading, and there should be some book posts up shortly. In the meantime, I thought I'd update the news on Grimm Tales, because there are now several places to catch a bit of the action around it and to learn more about the various authors involved. Nigel Bird has interviewed Jack Bates over at Sea Minor , and earlier on Nigel's blog we have one of the trademark Dancing with Myself interviews, in which Loren Eaton interviews none other than, well, Loren Eaton .

Then we have Jack Bates doing a series of his own trademark Three Questions interviews. You'll find Nigel Bird, Absolutely Kate, B. Nagel, and Patti Abbott (although Patti's actuallywas done just before the anthology came out). Oh yeah, and I've got a spot over there as well.

Finally, I finagled my way on to my friend Rick Kleffel's radio show to talk about the book. If you didn't catch it already from another of my blogs, you can certainly catch it at KUSP now. It's about 45 minutes in, following a fine interview with mystery writer Sara Paretsky.

Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime in the 21st Century, edited by Declan Burke

2012-01-15T16:47:00.000-08:00

Any occasional reader of this blog must wonder at times how it is that a blogger who deliberately titles her blog Not New for Long as an excuse not to keep up with what's in, what's hot, what's happening in the world of literature can be so up to speed when it comes to Irish crime fiction. That's a long and complicated matter, my friends, and I'd go into it, but since I can sense the real question peeping out from underneath that one, I won't bother. Your question really is, how can you too be up to speed, or possibly a little ahead of it, when it comes to the cutting edge in what some people like to call Emerald Noir?

I'm here to give you part of the answer. For some time now, in addition to reading a bunch of blogs, I've also been dabbling in the anthology Down These Green Streets, in which a host of contemporary Irish crime writers responding to the requests of Dublin novelist and critic Declan Burke have turned in essays on various aspects of the crime story in Ireland present and past. The scope of the talent that's been squeezed in between these pages is pretty amazing. When you've got the likes of Ken Bruen, Adrian McKinty, John Connolly and Declan Hughes to contribute their thoughts on the matter, you are going to have a pretty substantive volume. And there's more! Much, much more.

I thought I would write this book up when I came to the end of it, but in fact, I've been dabbling in it for some time and it seems unlikely that I will even know when I do reach the end of it, so I thought I'd give it a mention before it goes out of print--which I hope won't be for some time yet.

In the meantime, some highlights, pretty much at random:

A fascinating piece by Ruth Dudley Edwards on the life of Liam O'Flaherty, author behind the movie The Informer.

Northern Irish author/editor and pretty much everything else, Gerard Brennan, who takes a look at crime writing from north of the border, with thoughts on such Norn Iron writers as Colin Bateman, Stuart Neville, and Adrian McKinty and with a special title nod to the often overlooked The Truth Commissioner by David Parks, which is a personal favorite of mine.

A terrific analysis of three earlier Irish crime novels by the currently on-a-roll Alan Glynn, including a great bit on The Third Policeman.

Declan Burke's own interview with John Banville on his alter ego Benjamin Black.

And the list could go on and on.

I know there are some of you who think you'd like to read some of these authors if only you could stop compulsively reading the Scandinavians. But some day that bubble will burst, my friends, and then where do you want to be? Swimming miserably in the icy cold water toward the Irish shore, or sitting comfortably in an Irish pub, with a great Irish crime novel already halfway read?

Yeah--I'll see you there.

The Cold Cold Ground, by Adrian McKinty

2012-01-05T21:18:00.000-08:00

Let's cut to the chase here--I love this book. "Love" isn't usually a word I use in describing my reaction to a crime novel, although even an occasional reader here on this blog may have deduced that I am a mad fan of Adrian McKinty's writing. I'd tend to say exciting, well-written, fast paced--things like this. But for reasons both idiosyncratic and more universal I do love this book.

Let's get the subjective part over first. The events of this novel largely take place in Belfast and neighboring towns in the spring of 1981. McKinty was still a child during this historic, tragic moment of Northern Ireland's recent history--and lived through them as a child--but I was a youngish adult, traveling through England and Europe for the first time. I didn't get to Northern Ireland, of course--probably wouldn't have even dared if I'd thought of it. But the Hunger Strikes which form a part of the background of this story were much on the mind of everyone in England that we met, that and the Royal Wedding, as well as the assassination attempt on the Pope and other things that mark this novel as accurate to its specific moment. So, for me, there is an odd nostalgia that goes along with this story, and it had an almost uncanny ability to restore the memories of a long forgotten time. It helped, I suppose, that we visited our old professor in Yorkshire, and he had some very definite opinions about Ian Paisley and Margaret Thatcher and everyone who was involved in Northern Ireland at that time, so that I was not completely ignorant of events, as normally I very well might have been.

But beyond all this, the real reason I'm crazy about this book is that it's actually the one I've wanted McKinty to write since I first began reading him. In Dead I Well May Be, we get a tantalizing look at life in Northern Ireland as the story opens, where we meet Michael Forsythe signing up for some illegal work in Belfast. No sooner do we start to settle into that life, though, than Michael finds himself fleeing the country entirely. Dead I Well May Be is a wonderful book, but there was a part of me that felt when we abruptly find him again in Harlem in a whole new life that I had been a bit cheated of something. The Northern Ireland that Michael Forsythe slips out of is not quite the Northern Ireland of 1981, but they are older brother and younger brother to each other. There is a bomb at the beginning of Dead I Well May Be, there are more than one in The Cold Cold Ground. One thing that most of us in the world are fortunate enough not to have experience of is what its like to try and live a normal life alongside of such violence with such random victims. This book, despite being a story about a crime, begins to tell us that.

The hero of our tale is Sean Duffy, a Detective Sergeant who has recently been transferred to Carrickfergus, a small coastal largely Protestant town within close reach of bellicose Belfast, but still separated enough to have its own culture and concerns. The police station is small and would be more likely to focus on insurance fraud and bicycle theft if it had its druthers, but the police force isn't exempt from getting out in full riot gear if Belfast or some other hot spot calls for support.

Duffy is a Catholic in a community that is self-protectively Protestant and could and sometimes does become hostile toward him. He's also a university trained man who was set for an academic career when one of Belfast's more violent moments touches him too deeply to ignore and sets him on the course that leads him to join the police. In other words, he's more than one kind of outsider. His stance, therefore is somewhat distanced as compared to others, and and he refuses to lead from a knee jerk partisanship in his reaction to events. (Although this doesn't make him a stranger to flareups of anger in other circumstances.)

The plot is a tight police procedural, with a couple of crimes floating around and investigating these takes Duffy and his team into many neighborhoods of Belfast and environs. Places like the Falls Road will sound familiar to anyone with even a nodding acquaintance of The Troubles, but McKinty knows both what they are and what they have been better than most. Here's how Duffy describes Rathcool to a colleague as they walk its "drab tenements and crumbling 1960s tower blocks.":

Rathcool comes from the Irish Rath Cuile meaning 'in the centre of the fort'. Once this was a royal palace for the kings of the Ulaidh. Now look at it. Concrete towers and row upon row of soulless terraces.

Most people could look it up on Wikipedia and then tell you of the recent history of Rathcool. Some might even give you that Gaelic meaning. But not everyone will give you the deep history of a place as they are describing the site of a run down tenement. Its the book's depth as well as its breadth, geographic and otherwise, that sets it apart.

Although Duffy is investigating a possible serial killer and things occasionally blow up in the background, don't be misled into thinking this is a grim tale. There's always humor running through McKinty's work, sometimes quietly, sometimes a groan-making pun. His ironic stance on situations that others have invested heavily in positions on always makes you look at things a bit differently.

Carrickfergus a little world. I'm glad McKinty came back to it, at least for awhile.

(If you'd like to get a sense of the opening paragraphs, here is a LINK.)

The Killing of the Tinkers, by Ken Bruen

2012-01-04T23:36:00.000-08:00

After the last post on this blog, readers could be forgiven for assuming that I ran out and picked up the first Ken Bruen novel I saw. But in fact, by sheer coincidence, I had actually been reading this, the second Jack Taylor novel that very day, a read which I had been looking forward to since reading The Guards back in April. These books are deceptively quick reads, and once you start you're likely to skip along too fast, at least if you're anything like me.

In this one, Jack has returned from what seems to have been a rather bungled time in London. It is not exactly a "hero returns in triumph" sort of scenario. In fact, he's actually added to his collection of addictions. And that's not the only thing he's acquired, either. But Taylor is almost immediately offered what seems like a pretty sweet deal involving free lodging in exchange for trying to figure out who has been killing the Irish tinkers, who, as Taylor is later told, should more accurately be referred to as "the clans".

Of course, the deal is not as sweet as it first looks. Associating with the clans is not the best way to make yourself popular, Taylor discovers, as he wanders around Galway trying to understand the situation, and of course giving us an insider's tour of the place in the bargain. He--and Bruen--also give us a literary tour of things both author and character have read. It's an education in itself, in crime fiction perhaps especially, but you'll get William Burroughs and Thomas Merton and Khalil Gibran too before you're done.

It's funny, because I was listening to an interview that Rick Kleffel did with Jonathan Lethem on the radio the other night on his new book The Ecstasy of Influence. This is Letham's twist on that old trope "the Agony of Influence" and his idea is that you should welcome and embrace all the previous works that have shaped you. He said that novels tend to hide their influences by the nature of the way they are written.

Maybe, but this is not the way Ken Bruen writes a novel, much to my pleasure and continuing edification.

Grimm Tales, edited by John Kenyon

2011-12-22T19:03:00.000-08:00

Apologies to the one or two people who may occasionally read more than one of my blogs, but I'm doing a bit of a blitz for Grimm Tales, a new ebook that I have a story in. More importantly, I've read the rest of the authors and believe me when I tell you that my contribution matters little either way to this fine and fun collection. Here is a bit of the blog post I put up on Confessions of Ignorance last night:

Normally I have a bit of reluctance to turn my blogging world into a platform for self-promotion or even other promotion, but this time, I have no scruples. Riding on the coattails of my betters, I've got a story in a really terrific new anthology. Grimm Tales, edited by John Kenyon and with an introduction by the Galway master of crime writing himself, Ken Bruen, features a whole host of up and coming crime writers, all working out their own variation on the premise of taking a well known fairy tale and ringing some changes on it in a piece of contemporary crime fiction.
John posted this challenge sometime toward the end of last year on his blog, Things I'd Rather Be Doing (I believe I actually learned about it through the crime community connecting blog of Sean Patrick Reardon, Mindjacker), and about seventeen of us took the challenge and came up with something that looked pretty much like a crime story. There was a contest, and there were first, second and third place winners, but basically everyone just did this in the spirit of fun. That would have seemed to be the end of it, but one way and another John thought maybe a book could be made of it, and Untreed Reads gave him the greenlight for an ebook. I believe we all quite enthusiastically agreed to be part of the project. I mean, how hard is it to say yes, when the story has already been written?)

John has been faithfully shepherding the project through to publication and keeping us all posted on the book's progress. I don't know why it came as such a surprise to me when a couple of nights ago, he emailed us all that Grimm Tales was live. But it was a pretty exciting one.

I like--really like--to read mysteries and crime fiction, but I'm not a crime fiction writer, so I have have a bit of a sheepish feeling about my own part in this. If you happen to read my story, you will quickly see that it is not really noir. It doesn't even totally qualify as crime fiction. So I was happy to get a little and quite unexpected nod from Ken Bruen in his introduction, making me feel that at least it was okay for my story to be included.

Anyway, enough about me. Rather than focussing on highlights, I'll just mention that a variety of familiar tales (and some not so familiar) and a smaller showing of nursery rhymes inspired the very various stories to be found here. For some reason, "Hansel and Gretel" had an outsize number of takers, but as you will see the outcomes are very, very different.

As you might suspect, Untreed Reads is all about ebooks, but if you don't have an ereader, don't despair. There is certain to be a format that you can download on to your computer if that's your option.

You can check the link out HERE

Who to read after Kim Jong-il--James Church

2011-12-19T21:46:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd just post this brief reminder about a series of excellent mystery novels by the psuedonymous James Church, who is said to be a former field agent in North Korea and other parts of Southeast Asia. I have reviewed the first one, A Corpse in the Koryo here, but there are four in all. I've read the second one, Hidden Moon, and have the next two to look forward to. It was actually this piece in Slate on The Man With the Baltic Stare that convinced me to give them a go, as I had mistakenly thought that they were about South Korea and more 'cozy'. Yeah, don't ask me how that happened.

Embers, by Sándor Márai

2011-12-13T20:12:00.000-08:00

I first got on to this by reading the blog postings of James Henderson over on Goodreads. He writes excellent lucid reviews on books which tend to interest me a lot, though often I haven't head of them before.

Sándor Márai, or Márai Sándor, as he would have been known in his birthplace, is now categorized as a Hungarian writer, though he was born in the time of the Austro-Hungarian empire in a town called Kassa, which is now part of Slovakia. The background story to the work is interesting if not absolutely necessary to know. The book was lost for many years, and was only translated into English from the German translation. Márai ended up in of all places, San Diego, and took his own life there in 1989.

You would never guess from the book that the author had travelled far beyond the time and space of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire. It takes place primarily in the home of an old General, who has shrunk his life into a tiny portion of the once grand house that he was born in. Here, he receives notice of a visitor, and prepares the house for his reception. The man is old, but it is his still older nurse who sees to this task. The visitor arrives--it is his boyhood friend, whom he has not seen for forty-one years. The night and the book are all about what has caused this breach in affection. It is an attempt to set the ledger straight.

This is a very beautiful book. It is quiet, solemn and grave. It is one of those few books I've read where I feel that the author really is a medium for another era, for a way of being in the world that is foreign and closed off to us now. If you happen to have read Penelope Fitzgerald's wonderful The Blue Flower, you will have some slight sense of what you are in for.

Perhaps it isn't even so much the historical aspect that is so intriguing in these works. It is the ability to convey connections between people that are not expressed in the more straightforward, let it all hang out mode of our time. Embers is really a novel about friendship, and it is a deft, if skewering analysis of that bond. What connects and what comes between.

The only exception I'll take to the book is provisional, which is Márai's conception of friendship such as he describes as purely male. Perhaps it is. This doesn't suggest however that women don't also have friendships of considerable depth and power, though Márai may have thought it does.

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, by John McFetridge

2011-12-04T15:55:00.000-08:00

Usually when I read a novel, I get a sense pretty quickly about how well it jibes with my own reading taste. Sometimes an author has to grow on me. And sometimes, more rarely, something mysterious happens where another look will have me completely on board.

I read the first book in the Toronto Series, Dirty Sweet, a couple of years ago now, I think. Although I liked the book, I was a bit taken aback by its milieu of schemers, cops and hookers, and though I could admire it technically, I wasn't completely on board with its intent. It seemed to me like more of a guy's book, and I didn't really feel like I was part of its target audience. Fair enough, I thought. Not everything works for everybody.

Somewhere around Christmas last year, though, I read a short story John reprinted as the wrap up for a Christmas challenge they did over at Do Some Damage, Santa in a Red Dress . I'm not quite sure if it has crossover characters from Dirty Sweet, but it is the same patch of territory he's working there, and there are definitely some of the same people in Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. In any case, I had the pleasant experience of recognizing the voice and realizing how much I appreciated it that time around.

Recently, then, I pulled a copy of Everybody Knows This is Nowhere off the shelf and dove right in. "Dove right in" is a pretty apt set up on this book, when I come to think of it, though that's probably all I should say about that. Let's just say that something unexpected happens to a hooker and a john in the course of their normal transactions. It's typical of McFetridge's stories, I think that once the cops arrive, the guy basically just wants to get out of there, but the girl is interested and realizes that this is the most exciting thing that's ever happened to her. However, they are but prologue to our entertainment here, which takes us on a vast tour of what can only be called Toronto on the make.

Americans like me, who live a long way from Toronto and from Canada in general, don't necessarily have a real conception of Toronto at all, but in some ways, the city as portrayed in these books could be likened to the Wild West. A lot of new money and a lot of new population--from everywhere, but, not least, from Quebec, where the radicalization and government takeover of the French speaking populace sent a wide swathe of the English speaking segment of the province to seek new climes in the late seventies.

You've got a lot of characters in Everybody Knows, but Toronto itself is the central unifying factor. A map of the city would be a great help in reading this book, because so much of it involves driving around through different neighborhoods, each with its own microclimate and history.

The police, as far as I can recall, are carryover coppers from Dirty Sweet, but you don't really need to know that. Each is coming from their own specific personal situation outside the crimes they are investigating and one excellent thing John has down is capturing the patter of their daily lives in between bouts of crime solving. In particular, the lore of the police force comes forward in the odd moment--tales handed down, which are wonderful nuggets kneaded into the whole.

This book doesn't really have the kind of plot that can be summarized in a paragraph or two. As with Dirty Sweet, I was impressed by how effectively the plates were all kept spinning. Mainly, the story revolves around pot, or more specifically, pot production and distribution in the Great Lakes region. There are quite a few ideas floating around in the book for those of a criminal persuasion, although beware, felons, there are a lot of disincentives for following this path. Not everybody ends up okay.

Although this does still seem like a guy's book, I have to say that the women in John's stories are always the more interesting to watch. The guys can be crafty and smart, but the women in adverse circumstances are really the ones who think outside the box.

One thing I've left out here is the humor. It is so dry, so deadpan that in a way I think you have to move into the novel's atmosphere before you get that much of the story is comic.

The obvious comparison is to Elmore Leonard, I think, but my hit in the moment on the difference is that Leonard's characters tend to be a bit dumber than McFetridge's. Some of McFetridge's characters are dumb, but mostly they're crafty and enterprising, and the fact that they are living on the lower end of the socio-economic scale is more random than blameworthy. They tend to be energetic and vital--it's maybe the cops who are a little depressed.

The next book in the series is Swap. I hear it's newly available on Kindle. As for me, I've got the hardback and I shouldn't think it would be awfully long before I get to this one, either.

The Cold Cold Ground--a teaser

2011-11-21T20:11:00.000-08:00

Adrian McKinty's The Cold Cold Ground is coming out in January. Even so, you're not going to be able to buy this in the U.S. just then. If you want it, you can preorder it from BookDepository.com or Serpent's Tail, or, if you must, Amazon.co.uk .

But as of today, you can read a sneak preview of the opening. Go take a look, then come back here. I sense diminishing returns here but never mind--it's fine if you stay over on that excellent blog instead. Feel free to comment. He won't bite. At least, he's in Australia, so if you're on another continent, you're pretty safe...

***

So did you check it out? I think this opening is trademark McKinty. It's a synecdoche of the book as a whole, and perhaps of McKinty's work in general. You have the compact poetry of the language, the violence of the scene observed, the casually thrown off cultural references from many levels, the diligent attention to factual detail, the dark humor, and the absolute refusal to bow down before anybody's sacred cows.

I have read the book in manuscript form and if you liked that sample, it only gets better from there. I'll review the book when I actually read it in published form.

Confessions of an Economic Hitman, by John Perkins

2011-11-06T12:03:00.000-08:00

Another one that I've wrapped up recently. I was actually reading this for a project I'm doing. I was expecting it to be a bit more cloak and dagger than it actually is. Basically, Perkins is trying to atone for a career in which by slanting economic data in certain directions, he and the people he worked with were able to convince the right people in various nations of the world that they should throw in there lot with U.S. and corporate interests. Then general effect of these projects seems to have been to build a lot of infrastructure in these countries which the countries in the end couldn't pay for, making them coercible and more amenable to our, and I use that word with a bit of hesitation, agenda.

Perkins met more than a few of the major players during his time in the game, and his talks with people who went against this agenda are valuable in and of themselves. He had a conversation with the popular General Torrijos before he died in a plane crash, as well as a chance encounter with Graham Greene, who was a friend of Torrijos.

I thought Perkins put his thesis together in a readable and accessible way, though I found myself wanting to read a critique of his book, as I'm a bit out of my depth judging it myself. Nevertheless, it does give you a lens to view the world, and some things that I didn't really understand before at least fit into place in this picture.

A couple of things that have struck me since because of this book. First, I was listening to something about Iraq as the U.S. 'wraps things up there' and they were saying something about access to Iraqi oil. Now of course I've long heard about this idea that we went into Iraq only for the oil, but after reading Perkins book, I suddenly saw something inexorable about this process, and that an eight or nine year war costing thousands of lives and incredible expense is really just a hiccup in this process of attaining access to that oil. I don't even attribute to a U.S. policy or any nation's agenda so much as to a kind of mindless machine, or as Perkins calls it, the "corporatocracy".

I also just happened to watch the beginning of Reilly: Ace of Spies last night and it turned out that Reilly's first mission in Baku, which was part of Russia at the time, but was before and since a major city of Azerbaijan, was really to collect information on oil.

That was 1901.

Perkins just happens to be coming to town at the end of this week, and I'm going to do my best to hear what he has to say about present developments.

Don't Look Now, by Daphne DuMaurier

2011-11-03T20:29:00.000-07:00

I finished this book a few days ago. It was another one I read for the Good Reads discussion group. We knew of the creepy nature of some of DuMaurier's stories, so thought it would it be a good pick for spooky October. I think we all pretty much enjoyed it. It was a bit longer than some of our other choices, and perhaps a tad more uneven. The first tale in the book, the title piece 'Don't Look Now', was made into a Nicholas Roeg movie that you may have seen--I'll definitely be renting it at some point, as others in the group seemed to have thought it was good and faithful to the story.

Another filmmaker seemed to have diverged a bit more, and not to DuMaurier's liking. Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Birds' was taken from DuMaurier's tale of the same name, but he shifted a few things, including the locale, and perhaps even the larger meaning. It's easy to understand why it might irritate her, but I thought that the deeper tale, which is about our individual helplessness before natural events we are powerless to control, seemed to me to be carried through faithfully. I had the same creepy feeling from both. And Hitchcock, as I learned from a friend, had his reasons for setting it in Northern California. He had read a newsclipping from my very own community, where the birds were mysteriously attacking people. There was a logical reason rather than a supernatural one in this case, though. The birds had conumed an element from a red tide in the bay, which was messing with their tiny little heads.

I found the stories had their strengths and weaknesses. They are definitely of a period and reminded me a lot of certain movies of the forties. There is nothing wrong with that, but some of the stories seem slighter because of that, and read in a row, it can be like watching too many B movies. But DuMaurier's strengths more than compensate. She is excellent on setting, and when she lavishes attention on a character, like the usherette in 'Kiss Me Again, Stranger' she usually nails them.

The introduction to this edition is provided by Patrick McGrath, who is known for writing fiction in the Gothic style himself. I think both McGrath and DuMaurier demonstrate that there is still plenty of room in fiction for this sensibility.

All Hallows Read--Carpathian Shadows

2011-10-31T20:24:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween, everyone. The night is young in California, but it's probably not so young where you are. Anyway, even though it's a little late, I thought I'd mention Neil Gaiman's new tradition of giving a book for Halloween. A younger, more savvy friend and coworker told me about it. It's called All Hallow's Read. She was getting a bunch of used horror books for all her pals, and I thought I'd reward her generosity by doing the same for her, but was a bit stumped on what she wouldn't know about already. Then it hit me. One I was certain she wouldn't have read was Carpathian Shadows, vol. 2. Why? Because most of the copies extant in Santa Cruz were sitting under my desk at work. There are frankly not that many moments where I think of this volume and conclude it is the perfect gift, but this is one of them.

About ten to twelve of us participated in the joint venture of writing a haunted (or is it?) castle anthology and my story appeared in this second volume. That's why I have a few copies on hand. I like my story pretty well, though it's more comic than scary, and there are definitely a few that are scarier.

If you're interested, you can get the ebook HERE, and although my status of working in an Indie bookstore prevents me from naming the place you can get it as an actual book, which is the only way you could really give it away, it's named after a great river and it's not the Mississippi either.

Award nominees and a miscellany of other news

2011-10-26T19:55:00.000-07:00

As I'm reading several things at the moment and getting to the end of none of them soon, I thought it might be fun to mention a few exciting things in the book world.

First, two authors I think are terrific, Declan Burke and Alan Glynn, are on the shortlist for the Irish Book Awards, which you can vote on HERE. I haven't gotten to Bloodland yet, but I've read two other books by Glynn and so I'm certain he is worthy of consideration. Burke's Absolute Zero Cool, which I have read, is super. And this says nothing at all about the other nominees. Why not check out the site and at least make a list for your TBR pile?

A flukey surprise of going to the site is that I discovered Anna Carey who was once a part of a reading forum I participate in, is up for another Irish Book Award in the children's category for The Real Rebecca. I have bought it since finding out, but haven't got a chance to read it, but knowing her through the virtual world as I did, I am sure this book deserves to be on the list.

Two more books from Irish or more specifically Northern Irish writers are not up for awards yet, but that's because they are barely or not even out yet. Gerard Brennan's The Point is getting heaps of praise before it's even hit the streets and I am super excited that it is probably being lofted my way even now. And you too can now order it from Book Depository now.

And the one I have read, although in not quite final form, is Adrian McKinty's The Cold, Cold Ground.
I loved this book, even unfinished. It's not going to be out till January, but you owe it to yourself to preorder it here and now. You know how January is. The holidays are over and the resolutions fade fast and you have nothing much to look forward till at least spring. Treat yourself to this now, and you will have a very pleasant surprise waiting for you just when you think there is nothing much left to live for.

All the Dead Voices, by Declan Hughes

2011-10-16T10:53:00.000-07:00

I finished this fourth book in the Ed Loy series a couple of days ago and as usual with Hughes' work, I enjoyed it a lot. I'm not going to say too much about the plot here, as really you should start at the beginning of Loy's story with The Wrong Kind of Blood. The series starts with Loy returning to Ireland after twenty years away, ostensibly to bury his mother. But his American Dream is in tatters too, and he's not going back right away--as I guess you can tell from the fact that this current work is set in Ireland too and he hasn't been back to the States in between.

I like the homage that Hughes pays the late Ross MacDonald's work in the Loy series. Ireland has a lot of family secrets to dig up and apparently no tradition of P.I.s with shovels until the advent of Loy. This fourth novel is a bit outside the usual pattern, although there's no need to panic--a ruined family or two lies at the heart of the tale. But All the Dead Voices takes on the consequences of the Troubles and there's more mention of paramilitary organizations than we're used to dealing with in Hughes' works. Actually, a good companion novel from north of the border would be Stuart Neville's recent Collusion.

Personally, I missed seeing more of Loy's old friend Tommy Owens in this book, as he always provides a bit of comic relief, albeit usually of a criminal kind. He's there, though, for a few crucial plot points. And that'll have to do.

The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 8, edited by Maxim Jakubowski

2011-10-11T11:39:00.000-07:00

After quite some time, I'm finally finished with this anthology. This is not because it was a drag--quite the contrary. It's just that they don't call it 'mammoth' for nothing. And I don't really like to race through a short story collection.

I haven't been much of a mystery anthology reader in the past, nor had I really gotten all that tuned into mystery short stories. I'm not sure why, they just seemed abrupt in relation to the novels I usually read. But several people I know to one degree or another through the blogosphere actually had stories in this one, and I was more than eager to grab a copy. I am awfully glad I did. In addition to the fine work of my virtual pals and acquaintances, Gerard Brennan, Paul D. Brazill, Declan Burke, Nigel Bird, and Jay Stringer, you've got bestseller types like Ian Rankin and Kate Atkinson, and many people who've work I know of but hadn't yet gotten a chance to read, like David Hewson and Stephen Booth and and Christopher Brookmyre. And then known favorites like Colin Bateman and Simon Brett.

The scope of the book is vast--from cozy to seriously twisted (I'm looking at you, Mr. Brennan) and ranges from the historical to the contemporarily topical. One of my favorites of the book is the strange and initially disorienting 'As God Made Us', by A. L. Kennedy. Seriously, though, there isn't a rotten apple in the barrel.

One thing I did miss in this collection was any sort of contributor notes. The book does cite where the story was originally published and of course there's always the internet, but after you read a story you like it's always nice to be able to look in back and find out a little bit more about who they are.

It's a quibble though. Pick up a copy of this fine volume and enjoy it at your leisure. You'll find great storytelling and a whole list of authors you want to read more of.

Deviant, by Adrian McKinty

2011-10-02T12:48:00.000-07:00

Although I did a review of this book already over on Goodreads, I thought I'd delay writing one here till closer to the true publication date, which is upon us. I had a pleasurable afternoon reading it before I was set to go on a trip this summer, but have been aware that there's been a bit of resistance to it, which I thought I might address here, even while knowing that this review is unlikely to be read by anyone from its true audience, which I think is probably the middle school age range. It is really perfectly suited to the type of kid who enjoys Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider series, which I somehow got involved in on the recommendation of my nephew, and which I've also enjoyed quite a lot. As with Horowitz, I enjoy the range and subtlety of McKinty's efforts for an adult audience more, but that's because, well, I'm an adult.

We have a prologue style opening in Deviant, which I'll get to in a minute, but once we get to the real protagonists story, Danny Lopez's path reminds me a bit of Jamie O'Neill's in McKinty's previous trilogy, The Lighthouse Books. Both boys leave a big but familiar city for a smaller more isolated place. Danny doesn't find an entry point to another planet, of course, but the world he encounters in the high Rockies of Colorado is a pretty weird one all the same. The school he'll be attending has a lot of very strange rules--though the kids, being kids, soon find ways of circumventing them.

Having been moved around a few times as a kid, I liked the depiction of how Danny has to figure out who his real friends are going to be. It looks easy at first, but isn't necessarily in the long run.

The stakes are a little higher for Danny than just fitting in, though. There's a cat killer on the loose in Cobalt, and along with his skateboard, Sunflower, Danny's cat Jeffrey is one of the few things Danny cares about. Uh oh.

The opening of this book starts in the mind of the cat killer, and I suspect that may be off-putting to some readers. Even I, who have enjoyed all of McKinty's books, wasn't sure I would be able to handle a book written completely in that voice. But have no fear, folks--that's just the set up. It's actually a pretty good little story within itself if you can get past your dread and read it.

A couple of questions did arise while I read the book, and while I'll do my best to make them non-spoilerish, I am going to put them in the comments section, so you have been forewarned.

Skylark, by Dezső Kosztolányi

2011-09-27T14:14:00.000-07:00

This is another book I've chanced upon because I've been part of the NYRB book club over on Good Reads. It's really a quiet gem of a book, short and in some ways simple. We've been having quite a good discussion of it over there if you want to take a look--although you might have to join the group to see it. I'm not really sure how that part works.

The story begins in a moment of nervous anticipation. Skylark, the daughter of two aging parents, is leaving for a week in the country with relatives. The threesome has never really been apart before. Skylark, despite the lighthearted quality of her name is the unmarriagable spinster daughter in a provincial outpost of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Though the novel was written many years later, after WWI had come and gone, the year is 1899 in the story--a year when it must have appeared that things would always be as they had been before. For me, part of the sadness of the book is that the characters do not know that in a few years time, extraordinary changes will have found there way even to sleepy Sárszeg. But the author certainly does, which made us wonder a bit why he had chosen this moment and represented it in some ways as eternal. More than one commenter in the discussion found there was a fairytale quality to the story.

Although this did not strike me as a purely satiric book, it is possible to read it as dark humor. In fact the author does signal this in some ways, because not only is Skylark one of the least aptly named people in the world--the parents apparently still call her that from a time when she would still sing--but she is not even the main character of the story. Most of the time she is offstage. This is not to say that she is an incidental character--she is in some ways the prime mover of the tale. Or maybe more accurately, the prime non-mover.

Once she is gone, the parents are left, very reluctantly, to their own devices. By stages, they rediscover and in turn show us this little town, which despite its provincial quality turns out to be quite a lively little place. I think this fits in with a realization that the journalist Miklós Ijas (who is surely a stand in for Kosztolányi himself, also a journalist) has at one point. He is one of those brilliant youths who is always longing to get away to the capital, as perhaps rightly, they should. He has a different destiny. But in becoming aware of the poignancy of the plight of this little family, whose members both love and are trapped by each other, he gains a deeper insight into the common bonds of humanity he shares with them. I had wondered how Kosztolányi, a famous and brilliant Hungarian literary figure, could write so penetratingly of people who shared none of these traits. A moment of similar empathy in his own life probably lies behind this beautiful little novel.

Death's Dark Abyss, by Massimo Carlotto

2011-09-12T20:41:00.000-07:00

We often think of noir in terms of the American literary scene, but I'm not sure if anyone hits the true depths quite like those who write around the Mediterranean. I was going to say the Italians, but in fact my last visit to European noir was the trilogy by Jean Claude Izzo, who was part of the Italian immigrant community in Marseilles, but was, by nationality, French. You might think that the Italians would be a little too sunny for noir, but you would be wrong.

Carlotto's novel is about as bleak as it can get. I'll try not to spoil the first few pages for you, but let's just say that a jewelry robbery goes very horribly wrong and ends in a terrible crime, which leads one of the robbers to end up in jail for this crime, while his accomplice gets away.

Flash forward fifteen years and a man who's life was ruined by this fiasco receives a letter from a lawyer requesting that he help the incarcerated robber be pardoned on compassionate grounds. Although at first the man refuses, gradually it occurs to him that the imprisoned man might be manipulated into leading him to the accomplice, who has never been caught.

I think the book is a great introduction to noir, because it runs counter to many of our more usual assumptions about what makes a good tale. Neither criminal or victim are exactly what you would call role models, but both have a lot of energy and the stakes are very high. One question that the book raises is whether there can be atonement for horrible crimes. I remember being a bit dissatisfied with Ian McEwan's take on this in his own book, which even takes atonement as its title. Basically, he says no. I think this book provides a slightly different answer. I think what Carlotto would say is that there is no easy atonement. You'll have to read the book to find out why I think the qualifier is important.

(This post also appears on the Europa Challenge blog, a site you should definitely check out!)

The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson

2011-09-04T20:41:00.000-07:00

I had a chance to read a very wonderful book last month, thanks to joining up with the New York Review of Books books discussion at Good Reads. The first book that was picked was this short novel by the Tove Jansson. Jannson is pretty famous for her Finn Family Moomintroll childrens' books, though somewhat oddly, not so much in the U.S. I guess Astrid Lindgren of Pippi Longstocking fame was our token Nordic writer for that era, but I do plan on reading them now.

The Summer Book is a series of related stories about summers spent on a small island off the coast of Finland that center around the lives of a grandmother and her granddaughter, Sophia. Sophia's father plays a somewhat peripheral role. Jansson's niece and her own mother were the models for this very wise book, and the whole family in fact spent much time out on these lonely but beautiful islands.

The discussion we had over on Good Reads was very thought provoking and we all found a lot of things to love about this book. I think for me what was most intriguing was the relation between the very old and the very young, which I think Jansson nailed. Life is a different thing when we are not in the midst of all the striving. I think these two states often have a lot to say to each other, though often in a subtle and indirect way.

Check out this beautiful book if you get a chance. I actually read it in the "Sort Of" edition, which has a fair number of photos. The NYRB edition has a lot of her drawings.

You are spoiled for choice, really.

The Cozy Knave: A Gershwin and Penrose Mystery, by Dorte Hummelshoj Jakobsen

2011-08-30T16:16:00.000-07:00

Occasional readers of this blog couldn't be blamed for assuming that when it comes to mysteries, my preferences lie towards the darker end of the spectrum, populated by tough guys and gals who'll stop at nothing to get to the bottom of a crime or, uh, commit one. But I actually got into reading mysteries through the likes of Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham, and later practitioners like Simon Brett and Dorothy Simpson. In fact one of the blogs I have on my blog roll is Miss Lemon's Mysteries, hosted in a behind the scenes kind of capacity by Elizabeth Frengel, but presided over, surely, by the spirit of Miss Felicity Lemon, Poirot's right hand gal.

All this to say that it's certainly no leap for me to read Dorte Hummelshoj Jakobsen's The Cozy Knave, which wears the mantle of the British village cozy proudly. The fact that the author is Danish will not cause bafflement to anyone who reads her djskrimiblog , as Jakobsen is a regular reader of British crime fiction, cozy and not so much so. Suffice to say, Ms. Jakobsen knows her stuff.

The story opens with the return of a prodigal son of sorts to the village of Knavesborough. He has set himself up in a newly acquired stately home, bringing his butler along in tow. The residents of Knavesborough, particularly those of the feminine variety, are of course quite curious about this turn of events, and when the village is invited to a housewarming party at Netherdale Manor, who are they to say no?

Needless to say, there will be a murder or two in the course of the tale, old history will be unearthed and newer secrets revealed. With a large cast of characters, many of them far from cleared of suspicion, it takes a good guide to lead us through the labyrinth. Constable Archibald Penrose, with little help from the powers that be, but a lot of help from his fiancee, Rhapsody Gershwin, is such a guide, and 'what we know so far' gets summarized in an unobtrusive way between he and Rhapsody at several points in the book. An old-fashioned 'cast of characters' list at the front of the book might be helpful in such a populated work, although to her credit, Ms. Jakobsen uses very memorable names to help sort that out a little. ( You'll see.)

It would be unfair of me to go further into the plot, as in this type of book, plot is everything in a way that it isn't in many other literary forms. If you like the Midsomer Murders television series, based on the mysteries of Caroline Graham (and which the The Cozy Knave actually mentions), you are a fair way toward enjoying this book already. You can buy it in a variety of formats from Smashwords--the link is in the title above.

Absolute Zero Cool, by Declan Burke

2011-08-21T15:02:00.000-07:00

This is a novel of so many excellent parts that I don't really know where to start. Why don't you take a look at this video of John Connelly helping to launch the book for Liberties Press? I mean, who would you rather listen to, really--him or me? I know which I'd choose.

If you watched the video, you will know that this is not your average crime novel, in either content or design. Having read two of his other books, I can attest that Mr. Burke is quite capable of writing a really good book in the more conventional forms, but that is not what he is setting out to do here. The conceit is that the character "Declan Burke" is visited, while on a writer's retreat, by a character who was thought up for a book that never made it to a final draft. Karlsson--or Billy, as he now apparently wants to be called-- asks to be let out of the limbo that is the fate of an unfinished character. He turns out to be a hard guy to say no to.

I believe I would have been a bit bewildered by this book, which I might have expected to be a caper, though of the darkly comic kind, if I had not been clued in by an early blurb of Adrian McKinty's, mentioning another Irishman who wrote sui generis fiction, Flann O'Brien. Having read O'Brien's The Third Policeman not that long ago myself, I was more prepared for the 'outside the crime fiction box' story than I might have been.

Although much of the book is about the hammering out of a novel between the fictional Karlsson and the, well, equally fictional Declan Burke, the book's dark energy is really Karlsson's, I think. He has a Mephistophelian charisma, if not what you could really call charm. When Karlsson, as Billy, meets Declan Burke at the writer's retreat, he is missing an eye, and sports an eyepatch. I was curious about that throughout the book, and may have missed a beat when it was explained, but an Irishman with an eyepatch always has some relation to Joyce, I suppose. For me, though, and this is just my own take on the thing, the one-eyed nature of Billy has everything to do with his monomania and, forgive the pun, lack of perspective. His relentlessly dark vision of our life on earth is persuasive, at times funny, and yet always bracing. He is the classic case of the guy who is too smart for his own good, by which I mean beyond the reach of help, because this is where he chooses to put himself.

The title of the book refers to the coldest possible temperature, which is more theoretical than actual, in which all energy is frozen. Nothing moves. This reminds me of Dante's version of hell, which is not heat, but ice. Karlsson, who want to bring everything down, is perhaps an agent of such a space, but Karlsson, much as he would like to go his own inexorable way, is, despite himself, still moved by love and loss, even as the book draws toward its close.

Karlsson is certainly an aspect of Declan Burke, for where else could he have come from? But Declan Burke, as either character or author, has learned a thing or two more about life, thanks to marriage and a child, than poor Karlsson ever dreamt of in his philosophies. Karlsson, I think, is aware of the lack.

Don't worry, Karlsson. You can always hope there will be a different sort of ending in the movie.

Red Lights (Feux Rouges), by Georges Simenon

2011-08-17T21:45:00.000-07:00

I'm on a bit of a New York Review of Books imprint kick lately. So much so that I recently joined the Good Reads NYRB Classics group in hopes that this would bump some of these great books up the list a bit for me. That idea has already paid off. But the idea of reading this roman dur from the great Simenon came through a slightly different channel, when I read fellow Good Reader James Henderson's brief review of the book. I was intrigued, because I had no idea that Simenon had written any novels that were not set in Paris or its environs, let alone in the U.S.

This novel came out here in 1953. It starts off on Labor Day weekend, when Steve and Nancy Hogan are preparing to leave New York and join the mad throngs heading to pick up their kids in parts north. For Steve and Nancy, the road leads to Maine.

As it's the nineteen fifties, they are of course going to have a drink first. For Steve, it's clear early on, that it's not going to be just one.

Simenon is pitch perfect on his mid last century American suburbanites. It's not a surprise in one sense--he lived for some years in Connecticut. We are in Mad Men territory, of course, but Simenon's vision is less of an exaggeration than the television show. But the feeling rising in the heart of our protagonist is very similar to that of Don Draper, without the mysterious past (which Simenon's book reveals to be an unnecessary dramatic twist). Despite the good life that they have, Steve feels somewhat strangled by it, which comes out when he drinks as a nasty sort of antagonism towards his wife, who has risen to a position of somewhat greater stature than Steve's and which he resents.

I was somewhat surprised that Simenon chose to characterize Steve's hostility to Nancy as a rare thing, brought on by the end of summer and an uncharacteristic overindulgence in alcohol. His manner, though truthfully rendered, would seem to me to be more realistic as a more common occurence. However, perhaps this is just a different kind of pattern. In any case, although Steve's longing for a more manly, freer, life comes across as selfish and immature, it also comes across as authentic. Faced with his part in the annual automotive migration north, which will restore all to domesticity come the end of the holiday weekend, anyone would resent that feeling of being a mere cog in the great wheel. And it is really only when he falsely turns Nancy into the prime denier of his wishes for freedom that he begins to go very badly wrong.

I happened to watch Goodfellas for the first time in its entirety the other night. I am not particularly interested in gangster flicks, so I was probably a bit overdue to appreciate this one. It was good, and I was struck by a similar longing in the main character to escape what he considered the pathetic life of the schnooks--the ordinary, law-abiding, slightly boring civilians who in the end he finds himself among despite all his intentions.

Steve's story takes him to a different place. But the question of how to escape the subjugation of self that is part of what civilized life asks of us is not really answered. I have a feeling Simenon didn't answer it for himself completely, either. Nor have we.

Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household: on the value of imprints

2011-08-08T13:14:00.000-07:00

At Bookshop Santa Cruz, where I work, we not only sell new books but used ones. Eventually, and inevitably, some books of both these categories end up discounted further, and are called Sidewalk Sale books. We haven't done an actual sidewalk sale for many a year, but occasionally we pull these

books away from their spot by the window and feature them a bit more prominently. You'd think that these would be the most sorry rejects in the store, but the truth is, many of the real gems are hidden there, and if I could only read books I found among these for the rest of my life, I would probably still die quite happy.

Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male is such a book. I'd heard of Household before, but never been tempted to pick up his work before. And with such a title, I certainly wouldn't have rescued this book from the bargain bin, even at a reduced price. Why did I? Because it was published under the imprint of the New York Review Books. Because I saw that it had one of their distinctive covers, I didn't reject it out of hand, but picked it up. And once I started reading--well, you know how it goes with good books. You end up getting hooked.

Not that the cover illustration itself is a sure seller. It pictures what looks to me like a very frazzled and probably dead animal. What an imprint says to someone like me is that a publishing house or a small wing of a publishing house that I respect has decided that this volume is worth backing. In the case of the NYRB books, these are often if not always reprints of work that has slid into some degree of obscurity. They may have had their heyday, they may not. Over on their webpage, they even have a slot where you can suggest an out-of-print title for them to think about republishing.

Rogue Male is a classic cat and mouse tale, with the also classic twist that the hunter soon becomes the hunted. The unnamed protagonist is a professional hunter who has decided on a kind of whim to see if he can break through the defenses of a dictator and get close enough to shoot. He is not actually going to shoot the man, of course, just see if he can do it. He comes within a hair's breadth of success, but a miss is as good as a mile in this case. Tortured and then left for dead, the hero of the tale manages to escape and begin a thrilling journey across all kinds of terrain. It turns out to be a bit more complicated than that, but that's enough to set you off with. I will just add that there was one point in the story in which I had to break off and go to work, and I actually felt quite uncomfortable leaving the narrator in the predictament he had found himself in.

Victoria wrote what I found to be a very helpful introduction to the book (which I read afterwards), giving me a bit more context for the yarn Household spun. In particular, she explains what Household meant by 'Class X' in the novel. It had a sort of snobbish possibility in it that I was wary of, but in fact, I did Household a disservice. In his own life, Household was quite a traveler and one night shared dinner in a restaurant in Toledo with a Spaniard of limited means. After he left, Household got up to pay his bill, and found that the man had paid it for him ahead of him. This kind of gesture went a long way with him, and embodied the qualities of the Class X type of person far more than any outward credentials.

There is a moment or two in this tale that are definitely not for the squeamish, but if you're willing to entrust yourself to a writer from Class X and if you're looking for a vivid and gripping read, this is the one for you.

You Too Can Be a Dickens Researcher

2011-08-04T19:22:00.000-07:00

I do actually have a couple of book reviews to put up, but I thought I'd let all you literate types know about this request from the Dickens Journals Online, posted on the Guardian blog. They are asking us ordinary Dickens fans to dig in and help them analyse Dickens' role as editor. You can read all the details HERE

I haven't signed on yet, because this is a busy time for me, but I do plan to take a look...

Absolutely Free: Absolute Zero Cool

2011-08-01T19:34:00.000-07:00

I can't take credit for the idea for this blog post. I saw it first over at Gerard Brennan's Crime Scene NI. Those who know Declan Burke's wonderful blog, Crime Always Pays, or have read any of his earlier novels, Eightball Boogie, The Big O, or Crime Always Pays, are really hoping to get the word out on his soon to be released Absolutely Zero Cool. I haven't read it yet, but I did pre-order it at Book Depository dot com, and I can't wait. Adrian McKinty, another fantastic crime writer and blogger says it follows in the tradition of The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien, and if it's even half that book it will be worth every penny and then some.

But if you're short on pennies, why not hop on over to the contest Mr. Burke is throwing on his blog to win a free copy? All you have to do is post your favorite 'story within a story' novel and leave your email address for a chance at a free one. (Don't worry--you'll figure out the contest when you get there.)

The Lake, by Banana Yoshimoto

2011-07-26T14:52:00.000-07:00

Despite her massive popularity in the West, I hadn't read Japanese novelist Banana Yoshimoto's books before. I didn't really have anything against them, but they looked too pop and light to really be my thing. I felt pretty sure they were meant for a younger demographic than mine. At the same time, I knew that as I started The Lake as my choice for the Japanese Literature Challenge, I really didn't know what to expect, or even if The Lake was representative of her work as a whole. As to the last, I still don't.

The Lake is very beautiful, a quiet revery of a book. I worry a bit that it might seem simplistic to some, but I thought it had a lot to say. The narrator of the story, Chihiro starts off the story with the fact that the first night her neighbor Nakajima stays over with her, she dreams about her dead mother. As her mother has died not so many months before and the Nakajima character is someone new in her life, I think we can say that this is a threshold moment, the point where new life is growing out of the ashes of the old.

If you read any of the blurbing on the book you will know rather more quickly than I did what Nakajima's story is, but I think I'll give you the option of letting that unfold as it did for me--slowly and over the course of the book. It doesn't give much away to say that Chihiro has only recently moved to Tokyo to try and begin her professional life--or some kind of life, anyway. As a graphic artist, she has accidentally fallen into a role as a muralist who is even beginning to be well known. Nakajima is a neighbor who lives across the way in another multi-leveled apartment building. they observe each other from this distance and very gradually become acquainted.

One thing that impressed me in this novel was the way that distance itself worked to foster a relationship between these two people. Chihiro is still grieving her mother's loss, and Nakajima is profoundly damaged. Neither would have been able to meet the other in a bar or any other shallow, superficial place. They meet, they don't force each other into any particular role--they grow closer in a more organic, unhurried way.

Despite her grief, despite being a somewhat adrift artist, despite having a mother who was ran a club and wasn't married to her father, Chihiro is a normal person. To be in relation to Nakajima she has to acknowledge that she is out of her depth--that she can't and never will be able to empathize her way into his story, because some stories are outside our normal human ken. Chihiro realizes that the call of death is strong in him, and that at some point it may become too strong and he may give in to it.

However much I loved him, and as beautiful as the world was, none of it was powerful enough to take the weight off his heart, that heaviness that dragged him down, into the beyond, making him yearn for peace. My body sensed it. And my soul.

It would be easy, in this circumstance, to make Chihiro, the female character, too self-sacrificial. But instead, she goes on with her life, taking up a new mural project and lets life unfold. It's not so much that she does anything in particular for Nakajima, as that she tries to understand what love in this circumstance could be. She opens herself up to the experience.

There are some friends at the lake of the title who Nakajima will eventually take her to meet. There's a slightly otherworldly and even ghostly aspect to this pair and I am wondering a bit if other readers will be put off by their somewhat supernatural abilities. For me, though, it felt like yet another new aspect of reality that Chihiro had to accept and surrender to, and that her reaction mirrors the reader's own.

I thought the portrait of mother loss was particularly sensitively done. Yoshimoto renders the subtle psychological state that new grief can be. When for example, she is offered an unexpected opportunity to take up a new life, she registers her mother's absence anew.

I wanted my mom to be alive, tying me down. To be showing her disapproval, telling me, I don't know, going abroad?--it's so far and we won't be able to see each other. I yearned to hear those words, to hear her saying them. But I never would again.

I know that others who are taking up the Japanese Literature Challenge are planning to read this book, and I'm very interesting to hear what they have to say about it, especially as it relates to the larger context of her work.

In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson

2011-07-12T21:15:00.000-07:00

This latest bestseller from Erik Larson, author of Devil in the White City, probably doesn't need much in the way of introduction here. It follows the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party through the early 1930s. It looks at the period and life in Berlin in particular from a unique angle--that of the family of the American ambassador William E. Dodd, who was posted there, drawing particularly from his writing and that of his daughter Martha, although his wife and son were there the whole time too, and are somewhat underrepresented in this book. Drawing on a variety of documents, including the letters and journals of the time, it paints a portrait of Berlin in the early 1930s, a period in which Hitler had come into power but had not yet taken absolute control.

Dodd did not come out of a diplomatic background, and was actually a professor at the time he was summoned to represent the U.S. under the Roosevelt administration. As the book reveals, there was the equivalent of a Good Old Boys club in the diplomatic services and Dodd definitely didn't fit the bill. He took the job in order to have more time to finish what he considered his own great project, a book on the old South.

In some ways, the book is a little harsh on Dodd in his greenhorn neophyte role. He had been in Germany as a student and did not at first grasp the historic moment he was actually in. Yeah, terrible, except that no one else really did either. I liked the bit at the beginning that explained that Americans did not really understand the nature of the beast they had encountered in the Nazi regime. It never was a question of rational pursuasion, for power was all the thugs understood.

I did connect pretty deeply to this book, because it is just a few years before my mother's own time as a young single woman and I think the family circumstances may have been similar. Her father raised himself by his own bootstraps in the same way as Dodd did, and lived a professional life in the law, though doubtless encountered some of the same sort of good ol' boys in that profession that Dodd did in the diplomatic one. And my mom, though I trust and hope wasn't quite such a party girl as Martha was, would, from her background, probably have entered into this true den of iniquity with the same brand of naivete that Martha sported.

It's incredible to hear how long the U.S. was fixated on the repayment of the war bonds owed by Germany from World War I. All sorts of other people looked the other way even when some fresh cruelty had been brought to their attention because they did not want to offend the Germans into defaulting. Even the Jewish communities in America were divided on how far open revolt against the Hitlerian regime should go.

One thing that stood out for me in the book was a short chapter on how well the Germans treated their animals, at the same time they were carting Jews off to be offed as if they were nothing more than so much Jewish lumber. This is a part of the pre-World War II psyche that I still don't understand, and Larson does not try to illuminate it, so much as just put it in the general picture. I find it interesting.

One of my great teachers, Page Smith, toward the end of his life lamented the end of narrative history for the non-historian, which seemed at the time to have given way to highly specialized monographs by professionals. I wish he had lived to see the likes of Larson, Krakauer, and Kurlansky, who write well-researched books about important historical subjects and bring the crowds in. I hadn't read any of these authors, so it was interesting to read this book. I found it easy to read, but I also noticed the brevity of the chapters, and I was a little put off by the ending, which seemed a bit hasty. But I think Larson does a public service by showing exactly what the mindset was in the days before Hitler's total control over Germany. It's a complex portrait. People were facing the unimaginable. But there were many signs that there were there for all to see, and the international community was clearly culpable in sittting by while dark forces took over a country that had not too long before understood what it meant to be a member of civilization.

Europa challenge

2011-07-08T22:38:00.000-07:00

II'

I discovered this challenge pretty much by chance. I've been intrigued by small publishing houses like Europa for the past few years, and I'd even hazard a guess that for readers who aren't totally driven by the media in their selections of what to read, imprints like this one may well be the way they'll shop in the future.

Many people will already know the house through their biggest success so far, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by psuedonymic writer Muriel Barbery. Still haven't gotten to this one yet, but I have read the likes of Gene Kerrigan, Jean-Claude Izzo, and Amara Lakhous through the auspices of this imprint. All were well worth the time.

I haven't quite signed on to the challenge yet, but don't wait for me. The entrance gate is HERE.

Happy Fourth

2011-07-03T18:59:00.001-07:00

Although I wrote this up for my story related blog I thought I'd put it up on a couple of my other blogs as well. Have a great holiday.

Happy Fourth of July weekend, everyone. In honor of the day (though largely by coincidence), I've made my self-published novella The Bird Watchers available again. The real reason this is all happening now is that Lulu.com has offered people the option of getting a proof copy of a new work, and while I've been working on that, which is actually a sequel to this one, I realized that I might as well make this one available again too. "For a limited time only" as they say, the book will be available at cost, or as a free download. At some point I'll probably boost the price a dollar or so but for now, I'd be interested in comments from anyone who wants to take the time. As a self-published book, it's got all the flaws that come with the territory, but more people than just my mother seemed to have liked it the first time around, so give it a go if you'd like.

The link at Lulu is HERE .

(I also don't know if the download works as a true ebook, but there's nothing to lose by trying it out.)

The Influencing Machine

2011-07-02T19:04:00.000-07:00

The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm not much of a radio listener, so the fact that Brooke Gladstone is a well regarded NPR managing editor did not bring this book to my radar. I happened to listen to her highly entertaining talk with our local radio host, Rick Kleffel, and resolved to read it at first opportunity. Brooke claims that she wanted to write a comic book about something even before she found her topic, and with the help of illustrator Josh Neufeld, who has previously done another comic or graphic novel about New Orleans, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, which I would also like to read.

I don't know about you, but I love what's been happening with the graphic novel/comic book format in recent years. I know that visually, I don't probably take in all the detail, as the longtime fans of the form would, but I do really like this medium for the way it handles material, giving you a visual and verbal way to take in all the information.

There's a lot of content to this engaging and deceptively easy to read book, but I'll paint what I take to be Gladstone's theme in broad strokes. She wants people to know, as they face the accelerated pace of new media in a new technology, that people have been through such mind-bending, anxiety producing exciting times before. Long, long before. She wants us to know that media bias is nothing new, and that objectivity is at all times problematic. She wants us to know that lies do seep into the news media and not always on the side of your enemies, either. That governments give the current media freedom with one hand and take it away with the other--because it's in their nature to do so.

There's a lot of history, a lot of interviews with our contemporaries who also happen to be commentators, and a lot of fun pictures of Brooke Gladstone sneaking around in a lot of scenes that you might have remembered just a wee bit differently. Never mind--that lapse is accounted for in this book too.

View all my reviews

The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Barry

2011-06-27T22:47:00.000-07:00

The good thing about blogs is that you don't really have to write an actual review of a book. So taking that liberty, I thought I'd write a little about what it was like to read Sebastian Barry's prizewinning novel, The Secret Scripture, in the context of reading it for a book group. Lately I've become a bit resistant to the whole book group angle. Well, actually, I was always pretty resistant. I'm not a fast reader, and I have a lot going on in my life most of the time, so reading things that someone else chose for me to read has never been all that appealing. But there is a lot to be gained, I've found, in reading something you never would have gotten to and then being able to get together with a group of people and discuss it. More than a literary discussion, though it can be that, it tends to bond you as a group over time, enough so that, though I would be quite happy never to read a book group pick, I can't really see not going to the group when I can. Hence my dilemma.

I missed the meeting where this book was chosen, and entered upon the project even more halfheartedly than usual. I had some other things to read ahead of it, so took my time and then found myself reading the book only in the brief moments of my breaks from work, or while waiting for the bus. As the fated Tuesday began to loom its ugly head, I realized that I hadn't really slotted enough time for it, so I had to choose whether to abandon the idea of completion or power on through. I had already reached about page 90 and hadn't really decided.

The Secret Scripture tells the tale of Roseanne McNulty, a hundred year old woman living in a mental institution somewhere not too far outside the Irish city of Roscommon. It is also the story of the psychiatrist Dr. Grene, who must oversee the evacuation of all the tenants of the asylum and decide who is fit to live in the outside world again. Somewhat improbably, he spends a lot of time trying to decide whether Roseanne would be up to that, when nothing about her age or circumstance would appear to indicate it. But Roseanne is a compassionate person, and Dr. Grene, going through some recent emotional hardship of his own, is in need of some connection. Both characters keep journals of their encounter, although for different reasons.

Now I have to say that the beginning of this book left me unmoved. But the question, always, with book group reading is, would I have felt that way if I had picked it up on my own and read it at my leisure? In the current circumstance, I found it captivating enough to keep going, but I also felt a certain distance from it, wondering why we had to have the trick of the two narratives, and why we had to have this improbable 100 year old narrator, who never for one moment seems mad enough to be in an asylum. Even the quiet moments of insight left me irritated. It all seemed too familiar, and what didn't seem familiar felt contrived.

As well it should have, as it turns out.

I think it was somewhere around page 90 that a couple of scenes of such startling beauty and yes, perhaps horror appeared and I suddenly thought, well, I want to know what happens. I looked at my watch and made a calculation. Yes, I could finish the whole thing before the book group if I set aside everything else. And so I did.

A lot of people go to book groups without worrying too much about finishing the book. Our group is about as anarchic in spirit as they come and no one would ever look down upon you for not finishing. No, the requirement comes solely from me and it's not because I want to be the 'good one' in the group, it's that I really can hardly bear to have the ending of a story given away. Even if it's a book I don't care about that much. So I have more than once had these eleventh hour ordeals to go through. I don't work on Tuesdays so I do have the option of doing an all out push at the end, and have taken that route more than once.

In this case, I did feel okay about making that decision. We ended up talking about the book more than we sometimes do, and I was able to side with a member who had loved the book and give evidence of waht we had liked about it. Some other members thought the story was a little too neat, but as I had been completely taken in, I didn't feel that way. And we all agreed that there were some absolutely breathtaking scenes.And one really scary one in a haunted house kind of way-- well, to me anyway.

But the curious result of reading the book in that way is that it has left not a trace in my emotional life. I loved it when I finished it, but I may have only loved my own sense of accomplishment. It turns out to be a bit like cramming for finals, which I also did in my day. You have mastery in the moment, but after the moment is over, much of it blows away.

Once again, this book fulfills the requirements for the Ireland Reading Challenge even though I should probably be getting on to other countries' literature...

Goosefoot, by Patrick McGinley

2011-06-18T20:44:00.000-07:00

What an odd little tale! I read this book because I'd once read McGinley's most well known novel, Bogmail, and had enjoyed it (though not quite as much as the person who had recommended it to me), and had at some point picked up this one. It was an impulse to pull it off the shelf the other day and read it instead of something else I was meant to be attending to.

The story opens with Patricia Teeling at a crossroads in her life. She has just finished off an agricultural degree, which her very simpatico Uncle Lar has done most of the funding for. Lar of course wants her to take over his very shipshape farm, but Patricia wants to try city life and sow some wild oats before she settles down, almost certainly for life. So she quickly finds a teaching job in Dublin, leaving the Irish midlands behind.

And there her troubles begin.

I have to say that I read this book almost completely wrong. I took it to be a rather convincing novel of a young woman's quest for her own authentic path, which includes finding a vocation and also a mate. The fact that all the men in her life are either very limited or very dicey--except for Uncle Lar, of course--and that having experienced the city she is no longer a country girl and still not yet an urban one--makes this path particularly difficult.

Actually, though, this is a crime novel. Though no one in the book seems particularly avid to solve the crime, this is still the case, and I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that McGinley never loses sight of the fact, even if we do. I see in the Wikipedia article that he is an admirer of Flann O'Brien, and this I think explains a lot about his approach. The same article links to a New York Times book review of the book when it came out, and although I think it's the kind of review that gives too much away, it's definitely worth reading afterwards.

And it also makes the book worth reading again after you come to the end.

Shaken: Stories for Japan--Editor, Tim Hallinan

2011-06-12T12:16:00.000-07:00

I think I'd better start off with a disclaimer. I am not absolutely thrilled by the whole Kindle model in general. I'm a bit uneasy about a future in which all our books are 'in the cloud', and where one corporation might be able to make that book disappear overnight, whether for good reasons or ill. I don't like the exclusivity of the Kindle model either.

That said, though, this is an example of a good use of a new technology. This anthology, a 'Kindle Exclusive', was put together by Tim Hallinan and all proceeds go to help the people of Japan. It's a terrific list of writers who have contributed to this effort, and it's only going to put you out $3.99. You can download a Kindle reader for free to your computer, which I've done for precisely such an occasion. Believe me, reading books on my computer is not going to cut into my desire for bound books any time soon, but this was a great idea, and I'm happy to support it. I haven't actually read my copy yet, but this is one of those times where I thought getting the word out was probably more important than any actual commentary I might make.

Here's a list of contributors, in case that might entice you further:

Basho, Brett Battles, Cara Black, Vicki Doudera, Dianne Emley, Dale Furutani, Timothy Hallinan, Stefan Hammond, Rosemary Harris, Naomi Hirahara, Wendy Hornsby, Ken Kuhlken, Debbi Mack, Adrian McKinty, I.J. Parker, Gary Phillips, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Jeffrey Siger, Kelli Stanley, C.J. West, and Jeri Westerson.

Japanese Literature Challenge 5

2011-06-02T21:20:00.000-07:00

As one more book, which I'm currently reading, will wrap up the Irish reading challenge (though not my interest in Irish writing), it seemed like the perfect time to sign up for theDolce Belleza fifth Japanese reading challenge.

It's a pretty simple challenge, folks. Read one book of Japanese literature between now and January 30, 2012. You can read and review more if you want, but really all you have to do to do is sign up here, maybe post a review at some point, but really, just read a book of Japanese fiction sometime in the next six months.

That's too hard?

Really?

How to Sell, by Clancy Martin

2011-05-30T21:22:00.000-07:00

This book is a perfect example of the kind of book I was thinking of when I started this blog. It hit the ground running with a cover story in the New York Times Book Review almost exactly two years ago, but when I decided to read it recently, I found that the paperback had been and gone in the bookstore I work in, and I had to order a copy in. This says nothing about the book, little about the store and less about the review, which I'll get to in a minute, but volumes about the state of the here today, gone tomorrow world of the publishing industry as it stands today.

How to Sell is a first novel and follows the life and actions of a latter day Holden Caulfield (today I suppose we would call him an 'at risk youth') who has both the good and bad fortune at the time of his Caulfieldesque crisis of getting kicked out of school to have an older brother in the jewelry business in Fort Worth, Texas. His father is either crazy or a spiritual adept, or both, depending on your point of view, and he advises his younger son not to make the journey, seeing some bad juju in his future.

Crazy he may be, but he is also right. Bobby may not have been doing so well in Canada, but when he gets into the high end jewelry sales business, it's only a matter of time before he's really going to crash and burn. Doing lines of cocaine with his brother and his girlfriend as they head directly from the airport to the store--because there's every indication in the novel that the job is just as highly addictive a thing as the drugs--it's clear that these high flyers are really going further and further down the circles of hell.

In this kind of book, everything depends on the winningness of the protagonist's voice, and Bobby is very winning. It is partly in the candor with which he tells of the seamy side of selling jewelry--and man, are there a lot of scams!--but it's also that in certain telling moments, he reveals himself to be a moral being. The book is a very enjoyable ride through a certain seamy underworld, one which I suspect many readers will like being able to peer into without having to get their own hands dirty. At least, this was the case for me.

Martin now teaches philosophy at the University of Missouri, and because I was curious about how this informed his story, I did a bit more research than I usually do before putting up my blather. For instance, I took a look at that book review mentioned above. It was written by Tom McCarthy, who made his own debut splash with Remainder a few years ago. I was more than a little surprised then, to find McCarthy, after giving the book a brief glance, becoming more exercised about the power of the blurbs than about the novel itself. While admitting to enjoying the book, he took umbrage at the idea that Benjamin Kunkel had said it had the "inevitability of the classic" and that Jonathan Franzen had called it "greatly original". But what does this have to do with reviewing the book at hand. Surely we must leave the classic status of any current work to the future? Besides, I'm not sure that Kunkel was saying that it would inevitably be a classic. He may have been saying that fate befalls our hero on rather classical lines.

Another thing that surprised me was to what extent Martin's novel was autobiographical. He did come to the U.S. to work in the jewel business with his brother, he does or did have a crazy father, and at least the corner of the world of jewelry that he moved in was pretty much as seamy as the novel portrays. He may be a high falutin' professor now, but by his own admission, in his former life, he was no better than he should have been, and sometimes a whole lot worse. I had been wondering why a professor of philosophy would write this book, but now I understand that he was drawing from experience.

The last thing to surprise me a bit was an interview I found with Martin, which again underscores the autobiographical aspect of the novel, and shows, I think that it was written out of a real sense of urgency and a desire to understand himself and the world, which is the opposite of the slick, opportunistic marketing that has become so much a part of the publishing industry today. In other words, it is not 'how to sell' at all.

Contrary to Kunkel's purported view, this little book does not seem at this moment destined to become a classic. All the more reason to go out and find a copy today, while you still can.

And believe me, whatever amount you may spend will be more than defrayed by the amount you'll be saving on jewelry.

Heresy by S.J. Parris

2011-05-24T12:33:00.000-07:00

I'm not really a big reader of historical mysteries, or historical fiction in general, the great Wolf Hall being a recent exception, and Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower being an older one. But in my ongoing Finnegans Wake group, we have, as I suppose anyone who's gone into the book very far does, become intrigued by the mysterious character of Giordano Bruno, 16th century Italian monk, who figures in the Wake countless times.

Guess who the crime solving protagonist of Heresy is?

I was quite astonished to discover the recent mystery series using Bruno of Nola as its voice, and so jumped on it.
I must say that this novel did not quite fulfill my original wish of it, as I thought at first it might, because its real preoccupation is the schismatic 16th century of Elizabeth I's England and not the fascinating life of Bruno himself. We get a few hints, but not all that much other than biographical details.

This will not be a strike against it for the vast majority of readers, though, and you can see why Parris, who is in her other life journalist Stephanie Merritt, a contributor to The Guardian and The Observer, chose him as her investigator. A foreigner who would have access to the Oxford scholarly society of the time, in which this story is set, he would also be above the schismatic mindset enough to read the situation without bias.

The story opens with a hint of Bruno's beginnings, and the reason for his long life in exile. It's a terrific beginning, by the way, and should give you a clue as to whether you want to read further. Before long, though, we find him accompanying his friend the poet Sir Philip Sidney while he takes a troublesome visiting prince to Oxford--mainly to get him out of the Queen's hair. Bruno is supposed to be doing a little spying for Sir Francis Walsingham, rooting out the members of the Oxford community who may still be practicing Catholics. But his own agenda is to see if he can track down the lost book of the ancient Egyptian sage, Hermes Trimegistus, which is rumored to contain a type of knowledge that would greatly appeal to Bruno in his own philosophy.

Soon, though, there is, of course, a murder--or at the very least a troubling death. Bruno is at the scene of the crime--how could he not get involved?

I found this book very good in its depiction of the Oxford of that era, and the mindset of people who had recently been divided by religious schism. If you want a good Oxford tale, this one is for you. The solving of the mystery was slightly over the top for my taste--the villain a bit too bad, when that kind of motive was hardly needed from the groundwork that had already been laid. But this is a minor criticism in a thoroughly competent writer, and to keep the book lively and interesting for 400 pages is an accomplishment in itself.

And I will certainly read the next one, for I'm prepared to follow Bruno of Nola wherever he appears, much as Bruno doggedly follows after Hermes Trimegistus.

Though I am fairly certain that my journey is going to be a lot more enjoyable than his was.

My Dinner With Arthur

2011-05-15T16:49:00.000-07:00

Okay, technically it wasn't my dinner, and it would have made a better title here if his name was Andrew, or even Andre. But Arthur Phillips was in town last week to read and talk about his new book, The Tragedy of King Arthur, and local publisher and patron of the arts, and, more importantly for me, old friend Steve Lawton decided to take a new approach to the fact. He invited a few friends of the bookish persuasion to join him at a dinner for Mr. Phillips. He also said in advance that he would offer to pay for half of the book for the first thirty people who took advantage of the offer. I'm not sure if anyone actually took him up on the book angle, but the bookish friends took him up on dinner, because that is what bookish friends do.

In the not so olden days, this would probably have been in the purview of the bookstore or the publisher or some combination of the two. With bookstores struggling to survive, that kind of thing is largely of the past, and I never knew it to be a major feature of the business anyway. Publishers probably do their wining and dining of authors somewhere other than small cities off the main book tour track. But in many ways, this evening was better. Steve took great care to welcome one of his favorite authors, and though the blown life up photos of Mr. Phillips head used as placemats was a risky touch, it seemed to have gone over well. Perhaps more important was the centerpiece of Arthur Phillips works, and Steve's close reading of all of them.

This was the basis of the placemat...

Arthur seemed up to pretty much everything the group could throw at him, and was gracious and appreciative of everything. I don't want to get too much into the details of dinner conversation without everyone's permission, but of course the conversation turned to the decline of books, as it inevitably does among any group of people who has a vested interest in their persistence. Arthur wondered after we had all gloomed it up for awhile about why what seems to be their passing seems so sad to us, since we at the table will probably always have books, and plenty to read until we ourselves are gone. If the next generation doesn't care about them, what of it? It's a good question, and was met by a musing silence. I think we want to pass them on, one of the guests said.

Anyway, at least some of us--the ones I've checked in with since--had a marvelous time. I'm not usually so namedroppy, but I really appreciated Steve's generosity and cleverness in putting the whole shebang together, and thought I'd mention it partly in thanks, but also because it might inspire a similar idea sometime in, well, YOU.

The reading itself, by the way, was highly entertaining. Some writers know how to do the traveling show aspect of this part of their gig and some don't, and no shame to them if its the latter. But Phillips has his act down, and I expect there is very little that could ruffle him in such a situation. Even a woman wandering into the room because she thought she'd heard him mentioning Brown College was taken into his schtick.

One man was noticeably laughing the whole time. Steve ran into the guy later in the parking lot and it turned out that he and his wife had seen Phillips on Jeopardy. They had come because they wanted to know if he was that funny in person.

Turns out he was.

And yes, I did buy a copy of the book that night. I'll be getting back to you on it before too awfully long.

Scene of the Blog

2011-05-04T20:39:00.000-07:00

Cathy Cole of the Kittling Books blog recently asked me if I would care to take part in her once a week Scene of the Blog post. Looking around my living space, all I could think was "The Horror!". But in a more general way, I do really like the idea, so check it out.

If I could just choose a place, this place might be worth a second look...

The Dark Fields (aka Limitless) by Alan Glynn

2011-04-28T15:35:00.000-07:00

After reading the excellent Winterland, a friend was kind of enough to give me her copy of Glynn's earlier work, which was originally called The Dark Fields. Thanks to the coincidence of The Ireland Reading Challenge 2011 , and renewed interest in this title under its new name, Limitless, The Dark Fields has finally been bumped up the queue.

I'll start by saying that The Dark Fields is quite a different kettle of fish from Winterland. Being set in New York, with no reference to Ireland, and with a main character with the name of Eddie Spinola, Glynn has very successfully masked his Irish-born identity. It is truly an American novel, and a New York City novel to boot. The title takes its reference from The Great Gatsby, and though F. Scott Fitzgerald obviously had some Irish blood in his veins, the story is essentially about American success and American failure.

But lest I get too serious about this before we even start, The Dark Fields is first and foremost a thriller. Eddie Spinola is a former coke addict and pretty much failure at everything he turns his hand to, including marriage. But that doesn't stop him from running headlong into his former brother-in-law, Vernon Gant, while he's out walking the streets near his apartment, trying to come up with some inspiration for some copy he's supposed to be writing. As the result of their conversation, Vernon offers him a 'free sample' of a new drug he's helping market. Eddie thought he was done with the drug life, and has the token reservations about popping a pill he knows nothing about. But come on--if he was totally sensible, there wouldn't be a story, would there?

What Eddie soon learns is that the drug is an amazing performance enhancer. It is a little hard to pin down what the drug actually does, but basically it all but forces Eddie to clean up his act, organize his life and his thoughts. It's the kind of drug that many of us would be tempted by, I suspect, especially those doing freelance work under deadline. When Eddie learns what the thing does, he has to have more. So he goes back to Vernon's apartment, and...well, that's where the adventure really begins.

I'll leave the various twists and turns of the plot for you to untangle, but I thought I'd comment on a few of the points Glynn makes in the course of the narrative. Not surprisingly, Eddie does rather well on the stock market, and this is one of the things he thinks about his success:

"Grappling for understanding, I soon realized that despite its susceptibility to predictable metaphor--it was an ocean, a celestial firmament, a numerical representation of the will of God--the stock market nevertheless was something more than just a market for stocks. In its complexity and ceaseless motion the twenty-four-hour global network of trading systems was nothing less than a template for human consciousness, with the electronic marketplace perhaps forming humanity's first tentative version of a collective nervous system, a global brain...It seemed to me that in that moment that I had tumbled upon it--I was jacked in and booted up...my mind was a living fractal, a mirrored part of the greater functioning whole."

(For another and earlier novel about the markets, check out David Paynes' very fine Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street.)

What's significant to me is that this whole train of thought, while interesting in its own way, would probably not be framed the same way now, even a mere decade later. It's funny that as I was sitting in a deli reading this book there were two guys sitting next to me, and they too were talking about making money, but it was now all about portals and social networking and your platform and free content versus paid content, etc. It did make me feel that this book, published in England in 2001, was in some ways an elegy for a vanished time in New York City. There's no mention of the Twin Towers, or terrorists, and Wall Street hasn't become quite the enemy of Main Street that it's percieved to be now. Email of course exists but the whole networking way of life hasn't become significant enough yet to be the basis of Glynn's metaphor for the global mind, as it would almost certainly be today.

Our hero, while not ill-intentioned is somewhat remote, ala American Psycho. Some of this is due to the state the performance drug induces in him, but some of it seems always to have been with him. We are interested in what happens to him, but don't necessarily feel for him as we do with Glynn's subsequent protagonist, Gina Rafferty. Eddie is in some ways incurious, despite his newfound ability to take on vast amounts of information. He also seems to have few thoughts about what to do with his new powers--a humanitarian he is not.

One thing that I found interesting was that buildings played such a prominent role in this book, because a building proves to be almost another character in Winterland. Although it might seem on the surface that the book is about gaining mastery and wealth, a lot of it is simply about the aspiration to move from cramped digs in an unfashionable part of town to a grandiose suite in a building called The Celestial. We see the city from the heights more than once in this book.

For the heck of it, I'll just link here to a post by PQ over at the always thought provoking A Building Roam, called Dream Architecture. It seems related.

The pacing in The Dark Fields suffers a bit in comparison to Winterland, though it's still an enjoyable read. I am quite interested in what the filmmakers did with the story, as they have inevitably tightened it up, and I assume made it more relevant to life in 2011. The tale itself is timeless, of course. Since Gatsby, Americans hustlers and dreamers never do end well.

At least not in fiction.

Ian McEwan and Solar, continued

2011-04-26T11:18:00.000-07:00

In the absence of a current review of my own, I thought I'd link to this What Five Books? interview with Ian McEwan that Alec Ash has just posted over at The Browser. It refers to Solar at points, but really is just evidence of McEwan's active, thoughtful mind. Really much more worth reading than anything I am ever going to post here.

Solar, by Ian McEwan

2011-04-19T18:33:00.000-07:00

I've had some resistance to McEwan in the past. I enjoyed the creepy movie that was made of The Cement Garden, but didn't go back and read it. I wasn't thrilled when Amsterdam won a Booker and Tim Parks in some ways similar but to my mind more enjoyable Europa didn't get a look in. I loved the beginning of Atonement, but never quite forgave the writer for breaking off the story and taking it up again in the middle of World War II. And felt the same way all over again when I saw the movie.

But I love Solar. I'm reading it for my book group, and as I've become more grumpy about required reading in general, I wasn't thrilled to learn that this was our next task. I thought I'd give it a try and if I didn't like it fairly quickish, I would not keep going. The resistance vanished right away. It probably actually vanished with the dedication quote from John Updike:

It gives him great pleasure, makes Rabbit feel rich, to contemplate the world's wasting, to know the earth is mortal too.
-Rabbit is Rich

Right there, we know we aren't going to have a sympathetic hero enacting our tale.

And sympathetic Michael Beard, the aging former Nobel Prize winner in physics, most definitely is not. Solipsistic, a womanizer, serial husband, glutton, and a good deal worse than that. If you have a low tolerance for anti-heroes, you really probably shouldn't bother with this one. But if you like a dose of Satanic energy to keep the tale going, by all means plunge right in:

"He belonged to that class of men--vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever--who were unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women. Or he believed it was, and thinking seemed to make it so. And it helped that some women seemed to think he was a genius in need of rescue."

And off we go. As the story opens, Michael is watching his fifth marriage fall apart, but with uncharacteristic feelings of despondency and obsession. He is a figurehead for a small environmental concern that has staked its future on wind turbines for rooftops, and he can already see that the whole thing is doomed. To escape all this, he allows himself to be invited on a trip to the Arctic, where in the company of a motley crew of artists, he is apparently supposed to make a statement about global warming. Let's just say that things do not go well for him there, and when he gets home, they go worse.

But Michael has a way of turning small setbacks to his own advantage.

Every once in awhile you come across a book that 'speaks to your condition'. The last time this happened for me was when reading Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. It's hard to explain the phenomenon if you haven't experienced it. In both cases I had more than one of the author's previous work with a certain degree of neutrality and a feeling that I didn't quite get what all the buzz was about. But with these two works, I experienced a kind of mind meld. It's a slightly uncanny experience. It would seem that I would have little in common with an aging Nobel physicist who happens to be a bit of a lad, but the inner life of this guy, despite the outer exploits, is some kind of mirror image of mine. It's not a flattering portrait of a mental life, either. Indeed there were some instances where even the outer world held a kind of echo, as when McEwan is describing Beard's dumpy 'temporary' basement London flat.

"Everywhere he looked, his apartment, made gloomier by unwashed windows, reflected some aspect of himself, his worst, fattest self incapable of translating a decent plan into a course of action. At any point in the present, there was always something he would far rather do--read, drink, eat, talk on the phone, drift through the Internet--than contact an electrician or a plumber or a house-cleaning agency, or sort through the three-foot-high paper piles or contact Tom Aldous's father."

And that's not the half of it.

Now, of course, it's one thing if the protagonist's mind in some flukey way mirrors my own, but it's quite a different and higher feat if McEwan has held a mirror the psyche of Western Man (and Woman) in the late stages of industrial civilization, as one of my teachers, Paul Lee, would term it. I'm hoping for the latter, and that other people wriggle a bit in seeing the likeness of their own interior lives to Michael Beard's. I think it's possible. By coincidence, there is a long section in the latest Utne on the culture of narcissism, with a nod and some salutary quotations from his famous book by the same title .

Well, tonight, I'll see if the group sees this book in the same way as I did. I shall report back.

Oh, did I mention that this book is deeply, darkly comic?

Sisters on the Fly: Caravans, Campers and Tales from the Road, by Irene Rawlings

2011-04-17T15:51:00.000-07:00

Taking a brief break from reading Irish crime fiction, I thought I'd put up a quick mention of this book, which I've been looking through (more than really reading) at our information desk. It's a book devoted to a group of women who restore old trailers, decorate them to their heart's delight, and meet up and drive around the country with them, stopping to camp, fish and just plain hang out together. It started with two real sisters and then just steadily grew. According to their website, they now have 1400 members.

Now I have to admit that I am unlikely to do any of this. The appeal of this kind of book, like that of one I wrote up here on Parkour awhile back, is more about knowing that people are doing something like this somewhere. I'm not all that big into home decor either, but it is a lot of fun to look through this book and see the ingenious and cheerful ways women have fixed up these tiny living spaces.

My mom often told me that she'd had the dream as a young woman of buying a trailer and travelling around in it. She didn't get around to it--had other adventures instead. And these aren't women who have dropped out--they all have busy lives waiting for them back home. But I bet Mom would have enjoyed hanging out with these gals, and though I'd eventually want to go off on my own, for awhile, I'm sure I would too.

If this sounds like something you would like to do, the book has a lot of practical tips for picking out a trailer, knowing what to bring along and so on. And you can always check out their website.

(Sorry, guys, the rules are: 1.)No husbands, 2.)No dogs 3.)Be nice. But for everything but the last one, they've been known to make exceptions.)

Eightball Boogie, by Declan Burke

2011-04-10T14:37:00.000-07:00

Although these days, I write posts about whatever books come to hand--new, old, or somewhere in between--this is exactly the kind of book I was thinking of when I first considered doing this blog. Eightball Boogie was published in 2003 by Sitric books, but despite it's many virtues, never made it's way over to my side of the pond. So the first book of Mr. Burke's that I was able to read was the madcap romp known as The Big O. At the time I read it, I hadn't yet decided to do a book post blog, but you can read a post to whet your appetite for that one at excellent crime blog Detectives Beyond Borders.

Recently, Eightball Boogie has become available on Kindle, and the author has also made the remaining print copies available for the mere cost of shipping and handling. As the true opposite of an early adopter, I of course sent off for a print copy. I knew it was an earlier work than The Big O, so expected it to be a more elementary type of the same thing. Much to my surprise and delight, I was largely wrong.

Rather than the multicharacter perspectives of The Big O, Eightball Boogie follows one Harry Rigby through a few wild days leading up to Christmas. ("The rest of the week is coming on hard, and its breaks are shot to hell.") Although he's managed a successful tryst with his not quite wife Denise ( and not incidentally, the mother of his son Ben), in reality he's been kicked out of the house and is sleeping at his office. If there were P.I.s in Ireland (and both Ken Bruen and Declan Hughes say there aren't) that is probably what Harry would be, child of Philip Marlowe that he so clearly is, but as it is, he's an "independent research consultant". Also, sometimes a freelance reporter, or at least that's why his pal Herbie, a photographer, is trying to lure him to follow up on some big news that's happened a few hours earlier: Imelda Sheridan, wife of an up and coming politician, has been savagely murdered on her own front porch at five o'clock that morning. We know this from the get go, but the police, or "the Dibble", as Harry is fond of calling them, seem to be in favor of calling this suicide. Herbie thinks he and Harry will be in the money if they can prove otherwise.

Oh, and one more thing to keep Harry on his toes. Denise informs him before she shoos him out the door that Gonzo's coming back. Who's Gonzo? Harry's, shall we say, 'no boundaries' brother, absent these four years.

To make matters a bit more complicated, a shady seeming car auctioneer named Dave Conway shows up at Harry's office, wanting him to find out the dirt on his wife, Helen. Why? So Conway can "break her fucking neck". (It's right about here that I should probably warn you that this isn't a cozy.)

So now Mr. Burke has all the plates spinning, and it's just as much a matter of suspense whether he can keep them all up in the air as to whether Harry can solve Imelda's murder, find out what's going on with Dave's tigress of a wife, and most importantly, deliver's Ben's present in time for Christmas. I'll give you a hint by saying that Declan Burke is an excellent plate spinner, and in fact there is only one character who I thought came into and disappeared from the story without a trace. (Yeah, read the book and see if you can spot it, or if you even agree with me.)

I've seen the quibble in various reviews that maybe Harry gets beaten up a few too many times, not to mention shot at, but I have to say that I didn't really care about that. It's an old trope in crime fiction, and Harry's not the nicest guy in the world, and probably deserves his licks. There was one scene in the book that I found a bit too excruciating, but it is very brief, so don't let that scare you off.

What I really want to talk about now that I've given you some idea of the premise is the inventiveness of the prose. Emulating a master like Chandler is a risky thing and you not only have to have guts, you've got to have a gift. And Burke's got it.Everyone's going to have their favorite line or ten by the time they get through with this one.

Here's a throwaway, bearing on the plot not at all, but terrific:

"It was Christmas week and the town belonged to the farmers. They lumbered up and down the streets, sailors on shore leave, grim and determined. Parcels stacked in elastic arms, necks craning around the piles. Tinny hymns drifted out of shop doorways. High above the streets the coloured lights danced a hangman's jib on the breeze."

99 cents, people. 99 cents. Or check out the print book offer (while supplies last) HERE.

Not convinced? Think you're somehow going to buy a cup of coffee with that instead? Well, take a look at one of his Digested Reads (which I wish he'd do more of) and think again.

(I'm editing this to add another interesting perspective on this book.)

The Guards, by Ken Bruen

2011-04-05T22:01:00.000-07:00

I've been headed toward a rendezvous with Mr. Bruen for a long time. Or at least his books. As with James Lee Burke, reliable sources have long plied him on me. I haven't been resistant, I've just been, as with so much else, behind times.

I don't know where the latest prompt came from, but I finally bit. One of the benefits of waiting so long is that you have the time to form an impression that will quickly be knocked down once you start turning the pages. So what did I think this book would be like?

Well, for someone who has read a lot of crime fiction over the years, I'm a little bit of a chicken about the genre. For some reason, I had the Jack Taylor books down as a bit brutal, probably dark and undoubtedly wet.

The Guards wasn't like that at all.

Jack Taylor is an ex-garda, which means he was once an Irish cop, and according to him, getting booted out of this venerable institution meant he really had to put his mind to it. But out of control drinking, among other less than highly desirable traits, has left him high and dry. Well, not exactly dry.

There isn't technically such a thing as a private investigator in Ireland ("the Irish wouldn't wear it") , so Taylor is instead something of a finder. Which really means he drinks his way around Galway, in the company of his mad and sometime friend Sutton, and in Sutton's company he gets himself into a situation that is deeper and darker than any person whose got his problems with sobriety should reasonably get.

Taylor is also a reader, which surprised me. One lesson we learn from his wide knowledge of books, detective novels, but much beyond these as well, is that reading is a lifeline for a certain kind of kid. What we also learn more painfully is that reading alone won't save you. But I enjoyed the literary asides and the way all of Galway seems to come to Taylor's aid at times, and the way his own low tide makes him compassionate to many others at a similar low ebb. Sometimes, of course, that's a mistake. As in life.

I'll definitely be reading more.

Falling Glass by Adrian McKinty

2011-03-30T22:51:00.000-07:00

In 2003, a new sort of crime fiction protagonist slipped into our midst, much as he had slipped illegally into the U.S. in the fictional realm. The book was Dead I Well May Be and the hero, or anti-hero, was Michael Forsythe, a young guy hailing from the environs of Belfast. A small, wiry guy, (at least the way I pictured him) you probably wouldn't have noticed him on the streets of New York, where he did the dirtywork for an Irish gang, but he turned out to be a figure to be reckoned with, as his enemies (and readers of the three Dead trilogy novels) would shortly come to know. Those who have been lucky enough to happen upon these books have been clamoring for more Michael Forsythe ever since. His tough, indeed ruthless way of achieving his ends was counterbalanced by his wit, his literary sensibilities, and his vulnerability, a kind of too open stance despite his bravado, which readers seem to have picked up on. When all's said and done, he's a thug, but readers do not love Michael Forsythe for this, but despite it. You may thrill to his acts of derring-do, but all the while understand that from the beginning his path is not so much a choice as a fate.

So, although McKinty has warned fans that his latest novel, Falling Glass, includes Forsythe, but without a starring role, he's still worth considering here as a background, a prime mover, or something more elemental, like the weather. This is Killian's book, not Michael's and I believe readers will be happy it is so. But it's still worth keeping Forsythe in mind, and possibly even read a Dead trilogy novel or two first if you haven't, because it's useful to have the Michael Forsythe frame of reference when you're considering Killian's alternatives. Let's just say that Forsythe is not incidental to the novel, but crucial to it.

Killian has traveled down much the same road as Forsythe. In fact, at a fateful meeting in an early novel, Killian failed to protect someone from Forsythe, which led to one man's death and allowed Forsythe to live to tell--or not tell--the tale. Killian has left his past in the Irish tinker culture to commit petty and not so petty crime for a number of years, but the advent of the Celtic tiger prosperity had allowed him to dream of the straight life, just as the departure of prosperity is now leaving him little option but to do 'one more job' in order to sort out his own financial nightmares.

The successful dispatch of one job quickly leads to the offer of another even more lucrative task. And it's to be a good deed, isn't it? Rescue two wee bairns from their drug addicted mother, who has broken custody rights and fled with them. Although Killian half-heartedly asks a time or two why the police haven't been called in, the money is too good to really ask this question seriously.

The fact that Killian is a tinker is not incidental to the tale, nor just a bit of colorful lore, thrown in. To be a tinker is to take part in the nomadic life of the human race, which belongs to a different value system than the settled peoples of the world entirely. It is a last remnant of oral culture, and is tied, as McKinty does tie it, to Homeric times and Homeric values. I found this rumination on a non-capitalistic culture surviving within a capitalistic one very thought provoking, especially in the context of the bust that followed the Irish boom. Killian starts the novel with a bunch of useless apartments, a one time seemingly sound investment that, as for so many, has turned out to be at best a headache and at worst a nightmare. By the midpoint of the story, he has reconnected to his tinker past, and gradually finds his true identity among them. That identity includes songs, fairs, fests, but also true honor and true hospitality.

I found myself thinking a lot about Laurens Van der Post's work, both fiction and nonfiction, on the culture of the Bushmen. It was not only white settlers who were their enemies, he claimed, but settled black Africans as well. At the time, I thought that it was because these two culture's were antithetical, but something about McKinty's book made me understand that the tinkers and Bushmen and the Romany gypsies are not so much opposites of our culture, as simply a past that has been despised and repressed. It seems like it might be a good time for that repressed to return.

Lest I give you any impression that this is not a crime novel, it certainly is. It's a fast-paced tale featuring more than one foe for Killian and more than one decision to make about where he really stands. Killian is no pacifist, and he has occasion to take up a weapon or two before the course of the book has run. But the superb ending is a duel of another order, and one well worth waiting for.

(I'm editing this to add some links to other reviews I've held off on reading till I was done myself :)

Glenna's Inspirations;

Detectives Beyond Borders, where Peter Rozovsky gets further into the language aspect of the book;

David Park's review for the Irish Times;

Laura Wilson's Guardian piece;

And finally my own review for Goodreads and a few other places, which emphasizes the crime novel aspect a bit more.

Portis and Waugh: Compare and Contrast

2011-03-20T19:57:00.000-07:00

It's pure happenstance that I recently read Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis of True Grit fame and Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh back to back. Despite the many real differences between the novels, I was struck a few times by their similarities. I thought I'd see if I could pinpoint one or two of these, as I'm assuming it's a rather rare comparison.

Masters of Atlantis begins with the chance encounter by the young and feckless soldier Corporal Lamar Jimmerson with a mysterious mendicant who in gratitude for being swapped a couple of packs of American cigarettes, reveals to Jimmerson the Codex Pappus, containing the mysteries of Atlantis, and sacred document of the Society of Gnomons. Duped-- or is he in fact initiated?-- by this man of many names, Jimmerson realizes that it is his vocation to bring Gnomonism to America. Which he, in slightly haphazard fashion, does.

Decline and Fall begins more with a fall than a decline, as a young and feckless Paul Pennyfeather, happily living a quiet student's life at Oxford, runs into some members of the Bollingen Club, out on a tear after their annual dinner. The result of their assault finds him badly in the wrong (or just plain wronged), and he is sent down in disgrace. Without funds or family, Paul considers himself lucky to find a position at an eccentric boys' school in Wales. Llanabba Castle is in one sense, Pennyfeather's Codex Pappus. It is the catalyst for all that happens after.

Both books are comic novels, although the filters of American vernacular and English high culture of course make them distinctly books of their own countries. Waugh is quite a bit more savage than Portis, I think. (Watch what happens to schoolboy Tangent in several casual asides if you don't believe me.) Portis's geographical range is much wider, as is the time period in American history he covers as well.

As I was reading through some of the reviews on Masters of Atlantis over at Goodreads, which ranged widely in their assessment, I was struck by one favorable but reserved comment that said "At it's core, the novel is inert." I agreed with that assessment, but wondered whether that was any real indication of its merit. We tend to think of inertia in a story as a fault, but I don't think either Portis or Waugh would find it so.

For, as it turns out, neither Lamar Jimmerson or Paul Pennyfeather are heroes in any traditional sense. They are simply the excuse for setting in action the wide and ever evolving casts of characters they encounter. Paul does move through the world; Lamar does it increasing less as his story progresses. He is himself the inert center, around which a wide cast of scoundrels and others move. When he does act, it is at the urging of someone else, likely because they see a pretty penny for themselves in it.

Pennyfeather undergoes quite a bit more than Jimmerson ever does, but Waugh actually makes the same point about him roughly halfway through the book:

"...as the reader will probably have already, Paul Pennyfeather would never have made a hero, and the only interest about him arises from the unusual series of events of which his shadow was witness."

What we have instead in both books are the rogues and scoundrels who are magnetically attracted to the innocence of these central, inert and innocent characters. It's interesting that in both books they accumulate, drift out of the story and reappear again, not dead, not imprisoned, but simply with some new scam they're operating. Both books have women as elements, but neither, I think is particularly interested in women as characters. A case I suppose could be made for Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde in Decline and Fall, but not a really serious one. Women, in Waugh's book as perhaps Portis's are, simply put, trouble. Or if not trouble in their own right, certainly the inadvertent and largely careless agents of it.

Towards the end of Waugh's novel, an eccentric architect tells Paul his theory about static and dynamic types. He describes life as a large wheel, with a still hub where it is possible to simply rest or move in a normal way, and a rim where people are thrown off by centrifugal energy for the sheer fun of it. Many other people sit in the seats and merely watch.

"Now you're clearly a person who was meant to stay in the seats and sit still and if you get bored you can watch the others. Somehow you got on to the wheel and you got thrown off again at once with a hard bump. It's alright for Margot, who can cling on, and for me at the centre, but you're static."

Perhaps the real difference between Jimmerson and Pennyfeather is that Jimmerson accepts his true static nature a lot earlier on. Either that, or he really is an Adept of the Gnomons.

Burma Chronicles, by Guy Delisle

2011-03-02T21:41:00.000-08:00

There was a time not so long ago that I thought I didn't really like graphic novels. I can no longer remember exactly what I thought graphic novels were--a roommate I'd lived with for awhile was big on Love and Rockets and a very cursory glance made me think it was too cool or countercultural or something for me. I felt that I'd outgrown whatever interest I'd ever had in superheroes long before, ditto comics based on cartoon characters like Casper the Friendly Ghost, or Scrooge McDuck. I'd never really been crazy about Japanese cartooning style--frankly, the eyes kind of freak me out. In short, nothing really spoke to me.

Then, a couple of things happened. First, we had a really creative guy on staff who was very into them, and then I came across Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. McCloud's impassioned advocacy for the form and it's possibilities, not to mention the fact that he wrote the form in comic book form himself, won me over. I discovered Adrian Tomine's Sleepwalk and Other Stories, Dan Clowes' David Boring, Posy Simmonds Gemma Bovery, and R. Kikuo Johnson's Night Fisher. Turns out that I really like graphic novels. I forget about them sometimes, but when I come back to them, I am almost always gratified. Such is the case with Burma Chronicles.

I had heard of Delisle before, but it took Adrian McKinty's blog post on the book a couple of months ago to get me interested. I seem to have forgotten about it until he mentioned it again elsewhere. We had a couple of copies around at the bookstore, and I picked one up and read it while hanging out at the information desk. It was a nice way to do it, actually, as I didn't race through it, a problem sometimes with graphic novels, but read it over the course of a couple of days.

Delisle has written several travel style graphic novels by now. This is because he is married to a French, or at least French speaking woman who works for the heroic organization Doctors Without Borders (or in their case, Médecins Sans Frontières). His episodic story chronicles the year they and their young son Louis spent in Burma/Myanmar. As is the case with North Korea, sometimes we forget that there are real people just trying to live a life under a repressive regime. Delisle doesn't have a huge political ax to grind--he's just an observer. But his observations often gain an extra charge from his understated style. He portrays himself as just a guy, who often complains and often wonders why a certain thing must be so.

I like reading the printed word--a lot. But the graphic novel is a very compelling and absorbing form if you allow yourself to surrender to it. There is something about the marriage of image and word that takes you very far into a story, or at least it does me. I don't think that if Delisle had just decided to write a kind of diary of his time, it would have worked as well. He would have had to fill it out more, introduce some other elements. But as it stands the book is just right. Thanks to his illustrations, we can read between the lines.

Neon Rain, by James Lee Burke

2011-02-22T17:17:00.000-08:00

Over on her blog Inspirations, Glenna has credited Declan Burke of Crime Always Pays for introducing her to the current Swedish sensation, Three Seconds, by Roslund & Hellström. But that's nothing. Burke's powers of persuasion are apparently so great that he can get you to read a book he didn't even read. At least that's the way it worked for me.

I have a bit to do--well, more than a bit--with keeping the mystery section stocked at the bookstore I work for. So it's a pretty sad state of affairs that I have not read a James Lee Burke novel until now. He's obviously been recommended many times to me, and although it's sometimes the case with bestselling writers that I dismiss their work despite its commercial appeal, that wasn't the case here. In general, though, if a writer already has a huge fan base, I don't necessarily see my function as anything more than making sure their books are in. My endorsement adds virtually nothing.

I could give you the link to Crime Always Pays now, but then what would be your motivation to keep reading along here?  Let's just say that Declan's explanation that he had not read a Dave Robicheaux novel in part because he would not have time, as a professional reader and reviewer, to go all the way back to Neon Rain, which is some 18 books ago, perversely freed me to think, "Hey, but I could read Neon Rain." And so I did.

I have to say that the time may have been more ripe for me to read the book now than it would have been even six or seven years ago. That's first because I have now actually been to New Orleans, where much of this novel is set, and second because the New Orleans of today is not the same place post-Katrina that it was in 1987, when Neon Rain was published. Of course, much of its spirit and even most of its landmarks remain, but there is a ghostly quality that time and circumstance have given this book, which adds an extra patina to its appeal.

Much has already happened to Dave Robicheaux by the time this books opens, and one suspects the author as well. There's a Dantesque "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ..." feel to it, and in fact I wondered if I had missed some earlier books. But no. Just as Michael Connelly starts Harry Bosch's adventures well after his early career as a Vietnam tunnel rat and finds him (somewhat) solidly working for the L.A.P.D., we find Robicheaux after his failed marriage, and in recovery from more than one kind of addiction. The book opens with what will catalyze him out of whatever normality his job and stature give him. He finds out from a condemned man that he has stirred up trouble and if he doesn't get out of it, he is a condemned man himself. He soon learns that his troubles began when he pulled a dead black girl out of the Bayou. Everyone wants to dismiss this as an overdose. Everyone but Dave.

The quest to solve the mystery, or stay out of trouble, or both, let's Burke and his beloved New Orleans on full view. This is gritty crime fiction, and Robicheaux is a hothead, but side by side with the seamy crime world are some of the most lovely descriptions of city and surrounding bayou country you are ever going to want to meet. The descriptions of people, though my no means always lovely, are excellent too.

Here are some non-spoilerish selections:

"Cletus's face looked like it was made from boiled pigskin, except there were stitch scars across the bridge of his nose and through one eyebrow, where he'd been bashed by a pipe when he was a kid in the Irish Channel. He was a big man, with sandy hair and intelligent green eyes, and he fought to keep his weight down, unsuccessfully, by pumping iron four nights a week in his garage."

"I pretended to be a pragmatist, a cynic, a jaded war veteran, a vitriolic drunk, the last of the Louisiana badasses; but like most people I believed that justice would be done, things would work out, that somebody would show up with the Constitution in his hand."

"I took the streetcar down St. Charles Avenue to the Garden District. It was wonderful riding down the esplanade with the window open under the trees, the iron wheels clicking on the tracks, the sunlight and shadow flicking across my arms. At each stop, black and working-class white people and college students waited in the shade of the oaks and palm trees, and black teenagers sold ice-cream bars and snow cones out of bicycle carts, and the sidewalk cafes in front of the hotels had already started to fill with the early supper crowd. For some reason, every day in New Orleans seems like a holiday, even when you have to work, and there is no better way to enjoy it than rattling down the esplanade in a breezy streetcar that has been running on these same tracks since the turn of the century."

That's the 19th century folks. And though that final sentence comes from near the end of the book, it gives nothing away, and by the time you reach it, I can only assume that you will want to read it again.

Oh, yeah, Declan Burke's post? That would be here.

The 100 Thing Challenge, by Dave Bruno

2011-02-12T19:41:00.000-08:00

Every once in awhile, I succumb to what broadly speaking might be termed a self-help book. Frankly, I'm kind of past the point in life where I am going to change my personality or habits much, at least for the better, but sometimes such books have a fleeting, galvanizing influence. In particular, I seem to be a sucker for the organize/declutter/get your life in order type of books. To say that the books' influence doesn't last is not a criticism, just a statement about the monkey nature of my own mind.

Dave Bruno, a thoughtful family man living in San Diego, began wondering if he was really walking the walk that he was talking in terms of simplicity and anti-consumerism that he'd been writing about on his blog and probably talking with others about as well. He began to ponder the ways in which things were actually keeping him from living the sort of life he aspired to live. Accordingly, he set himself a challenge: to pare back and live with only one hundred things as his personal possessions for the timespan of one year. The book is a chronicle of his attempt to first identify, second unload, and finally live without the extraneous material things in his life. The results were, and are, illuminating.

One thing that the book brings out is the way that we invest things with a significance far beyond what is actually inherent in them. Bruno is open and candid about the way some of these objects operate in his life. As he has it, there are objects that we keep in the hope that they can somehow repair the past. There are those we keep because they keep some dream or illusion we have about ourselves alive. A particularly interesting part of his story is the way he dealt with his collection of woodworking tools. It wasn't that Bruno never did woodworking--it wasn't that kind of illusion. The illusion was that he would somehow gain mastery by possessing these very special tools. Mastery is a very interesting obsession. I remember my teacher of Ancient Greek arguing against the concept many years ago. He thought that the idea of mastery of a subject put us in an uneasy and unfruitful relationship to it. In some ways, the aim of study is to let a subject master us. To dream of mastery is more about the myth of our own power and so ultimately a dead end.

Personally, I'm not a huge stuff accumulator. The areas that I have problems in are the accumulation of books and the amassing of paper that I don't know how to get back under my control. I'm not a shopper in any of the usual sorts of feminine scenarios, and will do a good deal to avoid a trip to the mall. But it's always interesting to think of these things in relation to your own 'problem areas'. I was curious, then, how Bruno dealt with books in his one hundred thing challenge.

Very neatly, I would say. Books came collectively under the heading "One Library".

Ghosts of Belfast and Collusion by Stuart Neville

2011-01-31T19:48:00.000-08:00

I read Stuart Neville's Collusion last week, and find myself in a somewhat dissenting opinion from many reviews I've read. Although it is its own tale,with its own hero, I think that readers will be doing themselves a disservice if they don't read Neville's previous novel The Ghosts of Belfast, or, as it's known across the pond, The Twelve, first. It's not that you can't read Collusion on its own, it's that you're basically wrecking TGoB if you do. Collusion ties up too many of Ghosts loose ends to read in reverse order. But do what you will, I can but advise.

In Ghosts of Belfast, former IRA hitman Gerry Fegan must settle some scores--with himself, among other people. Not to be too flip about it, but he sees dead people. The people he sees are the ones he's helped make dead. He seeks revenge on their behalf against the very people who used him to achieve their ends. The story is basically the unfolding of this idea. It's effective, well written and in some ways tidy. Collusion comes along to remind us that things are never as tidy as all that.

This second novel does include characters from the first, including Fegan. Its central character, however, is new to us. Jack Lennon, a Northern Irish cop, bears a relation to Fegan that neither of them know about. His role is to get to the bottom of some mysterious killings that seem to come out of Northern Ireland's recent past. His interest is also more personal--he wants to be sure his ex-wife and daughter are kept safely out of the way.

The reason this novel is called Collusion is quite clear--it's even spelled out at a certain point in the novel. What's a bit hard for an outsider to Northern Ireland's politics and history to fathom is how much of the tale that unfolds is based on endemic collusion in the real world, and how much of it just makes for good storytelling. The relentless pace of the book, starting right from its slam dunk opening, guarantees a satisfying read for thriller readers, and it's obvious that it would do well on the big screen. Neville cites some of the sources for his central premise at the end. But an American reader is left wondering a bit. Was collusion between all parties really so pervasive in the North's recent history, or is Neville using a bit of poetic license to underscore his premise. In some ways, I think that only someone who had lived through these times or whose parents had would really be able to know the answer.

(This post is part of the Ireland Challenge 2011. Only one book counts towards my goal of 6, as I read Ghosts of Belfast awhile ago.)

Ireland Reading Challenge for 2011

2011-01-24T22:34:00.000-08:00

I really didn't think I was going to do any of these challenges this year. Frankly, they stress me out. But following the example of Bookwitch and Dorte, which I know can only be a good thing, I've decided to go for it--the Ireland Reading Challenge. I'm even going for the hardest level, the Kiss the Blarney Stone level, which is six books by Irish writers in 2011.

The way I see it, I'm already good for one, having just finished Stuart Neville's Collusion, and I know I'll be reading Adrian McKinty's Falling Glass as soon as it comes out this spring. Then I've got a whole host of others up my sleeve, like Ken Bruen, Brian McGilloway and Declan Burke. The thing just writes itself, basically.

Go ahead, sign up. You can take the Shamrock level and only do two...that is, if you're chicken...

My Questions about "The Finkler Question"

2011-01-20T20:44:00.000-08:00

Tonight [it was actually Tuesday] is the night we meet to discuss our past month's reading of The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson's Man-Booker prizewinning novel about three men who live in London, consider themselves friends, and are no longer young. Julian Treslove is the main protagonist in the book, though the concept of Treslove as a protagonist is a bit of a tall order to fill. Treslove is the kind of guy, now mid-forties, who has wandered through life without really inhabiting it, although he does seem to inhabit it long enough to have fathered a couple of sons who he doesn't really know very well or care very much about. NOr, for that matter, do they him.

Treslove is fixated on the idea of falling in love with a woman who will die in his arms. This doesn't make him a serial killer, as, despite the fact of wishing to be in on their death, he doesn't particularly wish them dead. His ideas of love lead him to a sequence of trysts with pale undernourished types. Unsurprisingly, none of them last very long.

Treslove seems to be the kind of guy who carries some very peculiar ideas in his head, which frankly, are no more interesting for being odd. He's pushing fifty, and seems still to be waiting for life to happen, despite having had the good fortune to have gone to a good school, be handsome enough to pass for Brad Pitt, or, any other famous celebrity seemingly (and quite improbably). He's even worked for the BBC, but despite having left it voluntarily, he feels resentment bordering on rage at having worked there for as long as he did.

As the story opens, he has fallen into the habit--nothing that Treslove does could actually be attributed to purposefulness--of dining with two old friends--one of whom is his peer and friend, though perhaps more rival than friend, and the other their former teacher, who is of much more advanced years. Both of these men are widowers, and though differing in their modes of grief, are in fact sincerly griefstricken. In their grief, Treslove finds them particularly congenial. Why they put up with him is another question.

His friends are both Jewish and Treslove develops a fascination with what this identity means. Much of the book is filled with his desire to try and fathom this, and it gives nothing away to say that the Finkler question is a kind of code in Treslove's own mind for 'the Jewish question'. If the book weren't written by a Jew himself, as my friends assure me Jacobson is, this whole premise would be offensive, and frankly, I am not sure it doesn't remain so in any case. Finkler is only the surname of his successful friend, and is not meant as a derogative, but to my ears it sounds like the kind of slang that has a negative slur built into it.

For me, the farcical elements of the novel are only mildly amusing at best, though it's obvious that Jacobson has put some thought into them. If the story stayed purely on the level of poking fun at a certain class of Londoner, it would be fairly enjoyable but forgetable. But it seems also to want to be truly about loss and grief, and also to tackle the enormous subject of anti-Semitism. In this last, I think it is probably the most successful. At least, it is the most uncomfortable aspect of the book, and the one that seems likely to remain with me.

The Jews of the book are highly successful people, much more successful than Treslove, I think, even at the business of living life. Yet behind the lives of these cultured and sophisticated Londoners, there still lurks the question of the Holocaust. In the aftermath of that history, what ease? Is 'one little anti-Semitic piece of graffiti something, or nothing? When does the defacement of a Jewish cultural center mean justg a bunch of louts and when does it mean something more?

Some of the way these questions are framed are odd to an American. Here, so often anti-Semitism and racism against many other races and cultures often get mixed up in one very foul pot. But the question of Israel, its policies and existence, are probably much the same. Jacobson has his characters discuss these things at length, and much to his credit, I am not really sure where he personally comes down on the issues. I think he might say that we can feel one way, and yet that events might lead us to a wholly different conclusion.

Frankly, I was not terribly engaged by any of it, but then the shootings in Tucson happened. In an oddly synchronous experience, I heard Sarah Palin use the phrase 'blood libel' and then found the term used on the very next page I read of The Finkler Question. Although, I have no idea what harm if any Palin meant in using the phrase, certain alarm bells went off in the context of the book. Then the fact that Congresswoman Giffords is Jewish struck me as an odd fact in the equation of tragedy here. I hadn't actually known that, but it turns out that what I know or feel doesn't actually make much difference. Was the targeting of her anti-Semitic or just crazy? Or both?

That is the kind of question that progressively grows in The Finkler Question. Is it something, or is it nothing? Wisely, Jacobsen only poses it--he doesn't attempt to give some definitive answer.

* * *
Well, the book group as a whole liked this book a lot more than I did. I think that the strength of the inquiry into anti-Semitism trumped the weakness of main character for almost everyone else. I put my points across, but at one point one member looked at me and asked if we had been reading the same book. It turns out that when reading novels like this one, we can gravitate towards different things in our evaluation of it. Jacobsen purposely made Treslove empty and infantile. I didn't mind that so much but I did mind having to suffer through countless pages of his introspection. If it served the greater purpose, maybe that can be excused. That, I think is where the group split on this.

It was a great book for discussion, though. I think we all agreed on that. One member actually related that she had discovered that she was Jewish, or half-Jewish or whatever at her father's funeral a few years ago. Her mother was Jewish, but kept it a secret. I don't know how it all came out and it's not my story anyway. But it just goes to show, as Jacobsen points out, that all of these issues are a long way from being over.

Not New for Long...But Not Long, Either

2011-01-17T20:03:00.000-08:00

I don't usually use any of my blogs to promote the place I work. It's not because it's not worthy of promotion, but I tend to like to keep Work and Not Work separate to some degree. Nevertheless, every once in awhile I realize that I should say something about the things I get from the place I spend a large portion of my life at, and one of these things is the number of nice, smart and interesting people I've worked with over the years at Bookshop Santa Cruz.

Recently, I've had a good example of this in the form of Matchbook Story. I've mentioned this literally tiny publishing venture in other places, but recently it has all come together in a particularly felicitous way for the greater Bookshop community, past and present.. A couple of months ago Michele Norris of NPR visited the bookstore while promoting her new book, The Grace of Silence. By all accounts it was an excellent and thought provoking event, and we are lucky that the man who interviewed her for the event, Rick Kleffel, recorded it, so that you can find it here under the November 21, 2010 listing. Anyway, somehow it came up that Ms. Norris had become interested in flash fiction, because in her hectic life she doesn't have much time for the longer version. One of the staff members who was helping to run the event that night, the quick thinking Kat Bailey, realized that she had an example of a form that puts even flash fiction to the test. She handed her Matchbook No. 3.

Here is Ms. Norris's blog post about this experience.

So the cool part for me is that the author of the story that struck Ms. Norris is my friend Susan McCloskey, our current events coordinator; the editor of Matchbook Story is my friend and sometime coworker, Kyle Peterson and the sponsor of this particular Matchbook was the Delmarette Cafe, which is co-owned by my other friend and former co-worker, Jennifer Toner. It might sound like cronyism, but trust me, none of us are rich enough to be cronies in that particular way.

Check out Michelle's blog. Submit to Matchbook Story. (It's fun!) and if you ever get to Santa Cruz, you have got to check out Jen's cupcakes.

Requiems for the Departed, edited by Gerard Brennan and Mike Stone

2011-01-03T21:37:00.000-08:00

I don't really want to look at how long ago I mentioned this book on another blog, hoping to give the project a friendly plug. But it took me to December to finally settle in and read it, and right into the new year to finish it. That's not because it's boring. But especially with story anthologies, I really don't like reading too many at one time. It can be a bit jarring to move from voice to voice to voice.

I really think this is a terrific compendium of many of the people writing Irish crime fiction today. A few of the authors, like Stuart Neville and Adrian McKinty I had read before, and others, like Ken Bruen were names well known to me just by virtue of shelving the mystery section at the bookstore on a fairly consistent basis. And then there were the writers I already had a sense of from interviews they'd done over at Brennan's CSNI site, or Declan Burke's Crime Always Pays blog.

The premise of asking writers for crime fiction that had some connection to the world of Irish mythology was a brilliant one. Readers from other lands such as myself get a kind of double or triple introduction to the myths, the culture and the crime scene all in one. It gives the authors enough scope to do pretty much whatever they want, and it was interesting to see what tales drew which writers. The writing level was consistently high, and I was impressed that although the stories drew on the Troubles at times, there was a decidedly unsectarian cast to the collection.

I'm not sure I really want to do the 'stand out' stuff, as I think the collection actually reads best as a whole, not picking out individual parts. I know that I'll be checking out the Brian McGilloway Inspector Devlin series now, as well as some long overdue Bruen. But I'll be checking out any of these writers whose books happen to cross my path in the future.

Great job, Mike and gb!

Hidden Moon, an Inspector O mystery by James Church

2010-12-30T23:07:00.000-08:00

The second in Church's Inspector O series. Although it's not a plot spoiler, very far along in this book I've found a key passage that I think explains Inspector O and Church's own stance on the fate of the people of North Korea. You can wait and read it in the book or read it here. It's not something it will hurt to read twice:

"This isn't about you, Inspector, it's about something bigger. The future of your country. Your people's future."

"You have no idea what you're talking about, do you? You're just reciting some crap they told you at a briefing. My country's future? Forgive me... I don't know anything that flourishes when it's watered with blood. Let's not float away on visions of the future. Your man, whoever he is and whatever he's done, is not my problem. Am I clear? If you have a bone to pick with him, take care of it yourself, on your own turf. What happens here is not yours to worry about. It's for us, it's our business, our future, our fate."

"Surely you don't believe that."

"Don't tell me what I believe. I live here, you don't."

Things Found in Books

2010-12-14T18:36:00.000-08:00

Not quite done enough with anything to write it up, but in the meantime, how about this cool site about things found in library books?

Freedom--the limerick reprise (Spoilerish)

2010-12-09T19:03:00.000-08:00

There once was a nice guy named Walter

Who got a sweet girl to the altar.

When she fell for his friend

He went right round the bend,

In the end, though, Walt's love did not falter.

Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem

2010-12-05T22:53:00.000-08:00

I've been told to read Motherless Brooklyn for awhile now. I'd read a couple of Lethem's books before--first Girl in Landscape, which is a literary scifi novel about a girl who's family moves to another planet and finds itself living alongside an alien life form, and Fortress of Solitude, an almost mainstream novel about growing up very near the color line in Brooklyn, with the added benefit of superhero powers.
Both were enjoyable, but this is my favorite Lethem so far. Lionel Essrog (and by the end of this book, you'll have a hard time forgetting this name too) is an orphan who grows up under the somewhat indifferent auspices of the St. Vincent Home for Boys. He's got a bigger problem than being an orphan, though. He's got Tourette's Syndrome and not a mild case.

As the story opens, he and another St. Vincent "graduate" are involved in a stakeout, in which they have their boss, Frank Minna wired. Minna has been the father they and the two other "Minna Men" never had, and if he isn't the ideal father figure, it's not like any of them have ever had any better options. Frank is a small time gangster and things do not go so well for him. This leads Lionel on a quest to find out what happened to him, which involves him with a Zendo and a fabulous Park Avenue apartment building, of whom someone tells Lionel, "These people are so rich, their other home is an island."

Lionel, despite or maybe because of his Tourettic mind, does eventually piece it all together. He does, after all, work in a detective agency/taxi company, even if the standard answer to the request for cabs is "No cars."

Lethem, as is his wont, is paying homage to a genre convention here, in this case the classic detective novel, with, if the text is any evidence, particular honors paid to Ross MacDonald. If my book group is any indication, the detective aspect maybe is wrapped up a trace abruptly. As a reader of the genre, though, I have often found that the wrapping up doesn't live up to the build up and you kind of have to live with that.

What's fascinating about the book, of course, is the character of Lionel. His first person account of what it's like to live with a Tourettic brain wins us over completely. It's a brilliant stroke to talk about his situation constantly, but always in the shadow of having to solve a "normal", if not perhaps everyday problem. We empathize into this situation rather than sympathizing from a condescending distance. He's just a guy who's trying to figure out the hand he's been dealt, which happens to include a few, uh, tics.

I don't know if Lethem has succeeded in mimicking Tourettic speech or not. I assume that it was at least his attempt. The book is filled with a nonsensical-yet intriguing "word salad". I really don't know how he wrote it, but it's good. In fact, it reminds me a bit of Joyce. As maybe one or two readers here know, I am involved in a Finnegans Wake group, and at times, I saw a strong resemblance between Joyce's wordplay and Lethem's. Was Joyce Tourettic? I doubt it. Would he feel a strong sense of recognition if he came across someone with the syndrome? I don't know, but I'd like to think he would.

Luka and the Fire of Life, by Salman Rushdie

2010-11-23T20:48:00.000-08:00

Salman Rushdie's Luka and the Fire of Life - Book Trailer from Syrie Moskowitz on Vimeo.

Our Random House sales rep mentioned this trailer, so of course I had to seek it out...

Nine Dragons, by Michael Connelly

2010-11-16T19:49:00.000-08:00

I hadn't read Connelly for awhile. Not that I had anything to complain about--I've always liked him. But as with any successful and fairly prolific writer you can tend to fall behind. Reviewing a book like this one has its challenges. Despite the fact that I know you can pick up plot descriptions practically anywhere, I really think this book works best when you pick it up without preconception and enter into its journey. So can I just say pick it up and start reading?

Well, its my blog. I guess I can.

What I will say here is that Connelly is a master of this form. He's got Harry Bosch picking up what seems to be a pretty standard hold up murder. He then takes this story at an absolutely relentless pace to places that follow logically but are very far afield from this South L.A. beginning. More incredibly, he weaves it all back.

Even that is probably saying too much. I'll stop.

Book Blog Holiday Swap

2010-11-11T19:21:00.000-08:00

I just learned of this gift exchange program through the blog Page 247.
I may be fudging it a bit, because I don't think I've had eight posts here in the last two months, but it is an ongoing concern, and all the reviews and shelf talkers I write for the bookstore I work at should count for something. Anyway, this seems like a fun challenge to find something someone will really like.

Wanna try it too? Go here by November 14th. (In other words, don't dilly dally). And happy book swapping.

A Corpse in the Koryo, by James Church

2010-10-28T19:29:00.000-07:00

(Updated to say that I am happy to report that despite my own problems obtaining a copy a few weeks ago, A Corpse in the Koryo now seems to be readily available. Grab one while it's easy to get. These days, you never know.)

I don't know how it is for other people who work in bookstores. Sometimes it seems to me that they always read everything they plan to read in a timely way, and can recommend new titles in their chosen areas of interest with ease. I imagine that they get off work, grab a quick snack and then go home and plow through a couple hundred pages before the evening is over.

For me, it's more hit and miss. I know about a lot more books that I'd like to read than I am ever going to get around to, and although that's not necessarily a wholly bad thing, being a bookseller adds an extra pang to it. Here's an example of why.

I noticed James Church's first novel, A Corpse in the Koryo, as soon as it came in in paperback. It had a distinctive cover, and I saw that it was set in Korea. I don't think I noticed that it was about North Korea. Somehow, I got it into my head that this was one of those travelogue mysteries that can be quite fun to read from time to time, but really are in a way a form of cozy. So it fell down the "so many books, so little time" list. It wasn't until I saw an article on Slate about the series that I realized that these books were likely to be one of the more penetrating looks into North Korea that we are likely to have in the fictional world for awhile. After looking at the article, I thought, great, I'll read the first one and if I like it, I'll get some in for the store and start selling it.

Unfortunately, this was not to be. The book had become unavailable through the usual channels and I had to get it from a used book dealer. What's upsetting about this is that as the fourth Inspector O novel, The Man With the Baltic Stare, comes out, the first in the series is not readily available to people. As any mystery reader knows, this matters in a series. (A commenter has since posted in to say that they found it on Minotaur's website, so please try that, if you are interested in the book)

In case you think this is a fault of the first book, it isn't. Church (which is a psuedonym used by a former western intelligence officer) comes out of the gate strong. He's got a great character in Inspector O, and he conveys his setting beautifully. The mystery is well-plotted, and the pieces all come together. All that was missing was the publicity team that might have gotten it out there in a substantial way.

What was personally most important to me, though, was the shattering of my own images. We've all seen the perfectly choreographed mass displays and the stories of detentions of outsiders. Naively, I've assumed that the people have simply been brainwashed and know no other way. What Church is asserting is that this is far from the case, and that the North Koreans live under a totalitarian regime in much the same way you and I would live under that regime if we were so unfortunate as to have to do so. We would avoid what we could, endure what we couldn't and live an inner life that was, pardon the stereotype, inscrutable. If you want to know something of that inner life, read one of the beautiful poem fragments that Church starts his sections with. Here's one:

At dawn, the hills wake from the mist,
One row, then another,
Beyond is loneliness
Endless as the distant peaks.

-O Sung Hui (1327-1358)

Freedom Redux

2010-10-27T20:01:00.000-07:00

Nice interview clip from Franzen.

And while we're on it, here's a review of the book I really liked.

The Sea, by John Banville

2010-10-19T09:13:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since I've done one of these pre-bookgroup, post-bookgroup reviews. That's because, for various reasons I haven't been to the group in awhile. But this month I read the book and am going to the meeting.

I've read a couple of other Banville novels, as well as an interview with him. He is talked about on one or two of the blogs I read, though most often in his alterego persona of Benjamin Black, the name under which he writes his crime novels. Although it's simplifying things a bit, crime novelists seem to be a bit put out by his condescension about their genre. On the other hand, he does seem to continue to enjoy writing these books, so possibly for him it's just a matter of putting on different writerly hats.

I'm very curious what the other members of my book group will have to say about this one. As in the last one I read, Eclipse, I find his prose style to be excellent but his storytelling a bit too removed and rarified for the likes of me. "Exquisite" is the word that comes to mind, with the full range of its connotations.

The Sea is a story about grief and loss, and having recently experienced the death of my mother, obviously such subjects would be interesting to me. The main grief, or the most obvious one that Max Morden character is experiencing is the recent loss of his wife to cancer. The narrator is obviously grieving deeply, but his detachment in telling of it never really let me in to the experience. He does give some hint of who his wife was, but there is oddly little about the experience of being married before the onset of illness, though this final stage is described acutely.

The real subject of the book, and where all the narrative interest lies, is a family Max became involved with as a child on a seaside holiday. They belong to a different, higher social stratum than his family, and he is early fascinated by them. They are, in fact, odd and fascinating, though not what you would call likeable. The father is a kind of satyr, the mother an earth goddess, the twins oddly alienlike, and then there is the enigmatic Rose, who appears to be some kind of governess.

Unfortunately for me, this all felt a bit too much like an indie movie that I had seen one or two times before. I don't know that this is really fair to the book, and obviously it didn't mar the experience of the judges for the Man Booker prize, as they awarded Banville it in 2005.

I have to say that his early book Kepler, which was a biographical novel about the early German astronomer, was much more interesting to me when I read it some years ago. It seems to me that Banville's aesthetic impulse is to grow quieter and quieter and more detached. It will be interesting to see tonight if this is more congenial to others than it was to me.

Mindjacker, by Sean Patrick Reardon

2010-10-05T20:42:00.000-07:00

One thing should probably be stated from the get go. Mr. Reardon is a 'virtual' friend of mine, and I won this particular book by winning a contest on his blog. Furthermore, my particular demographic is not the target audience for this book, as the author states himself in a recent interview:

"The audience I had in mind when I wrote it would be adults around ages of thirty to fifty, who enjoy pop culture and may not be avid readers. I think it is a known fact that men are not reading much overall. I wanted to write a story that a guy could read in a few sessions, be entertained, and maybe decide to start reading some of the great crime fiction that is out there today."

So let's start from the point that I think this is an absolutely terrific goal, and one that this book meets. If Mindjacker can be seen as a gateway drug to the world of fiction, then I think it's entirely successful.

But this begs the question a bit. What does Mindjacker have for me, not a man, and who am an avid reader? A lot of fun, that's what, though I may not have read the book exactly as the author had in mind.

I'd describe Mindjacker as "Swingers meets Michael Crichton" (in his sci fi thriller mode). There's a diabolical mastermind--a guy who the story says should have cut off his ponytail a long time ago (a sentiment I could relate to, particularly in the town I live in)--a device that messes with people's mind (literally), but more than that there are a bunch of guys wandering around trying to get ahead of this situation, but mostly meeting up, making friends, comparing their take on music and having a pretty damn good time fighting evil, flying around the country, and saving the day. Even though women are a bit in short supply in this story, the women who are there come across pretty well, though one or two may come to, uh, tragic ends.

Music is important to the author and it plays an important role in the book. If you are more playlist oriented than I am you will probably have fun checking out this post. I mean, I had fun checking it out, but I am not adept enough to have it playing while I was reading.

Sean Patrick Reardon says the book he is working on is provisionally called "Sissy Murphy". Good title, and I'm looking forward to the results.

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel

2010-09-26T13:40:00.000-07:00

This is simply a gorgeous book. I'm not actually a huge fan of the historical novel in general, as I find it something of a strain separating fact from fiction in them, but occasionally I read one that, as a friend recently said of this one, seems to be channeled.

I'm also not a huge devotee of the Tudor historical industry that others find endlessly fascinating. I watched "The Six Wives of Henry the Eighth" and then Glenda Jackson's "Elizabeth R." way back in my youth, and thought that was enough to be getting on with.

However, it turns out I was wrong. Turns out that I really did want to wade through five hundred plus pages on Thomas Cromwell, which is not even the whole life. Who knew? I mean, before I started this book, I thought Thomas Cromwell and Oliver Cromwell were the same person. (I guess I wasn't watching the TV series all that closely...)

The reason I wanted to read this book, the reason it won the Booker Prize last year, the reason more than one person has told me they want to live in its world (and this is the England of deathly fever and death of heretics by burning, remember, so that's saying something), is because of the beauty of the language and i's extraordinary, luminous style, and perhaps, above all because of Mantel's empathy toward her subjects, and her greathearted compassion.

It does not give much away to say that this book begins with Cromwell's boyhood as a blacksmith's son and charts his rise to being the confidante of Henry Tudor himself, precisely when he is embroiled in the affair of trying to oust his first queen and replace her with Anne Boleyn. Cromwell always saw what needed to be done, and did it. In Mantel's view, this did not make him ruthless, it made reasonable--and one of the few such around.

I expect few will love Thomas Cromwell as they start this book. I expect few will fail to at the other end.

Arctic Chill, by Arnaldur Indriðason

2010-09-18T08:02:00.000-07:00

Looking back through my blog posts here, I'm surprised to see that I haven't written up anything on Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indriðason yet. This is the fourth book of his I've read, although fifth in the Detective Erlendur series as far as the ones that have reached America go. Oddly, the first two books in the series have not been published in the U.S. (I'm kind of baffled by how frequently books in translation reach us in the wrong sequence--it's okay with 'regular' novels, but it doesn't make much sense with series.)

Arctic Chill is the story of a murder investigation into the death of a young boy of Thai descent who is found frozen in the snow outside an apartment block. Arnuldur (last names aren't really used in Iceland, which is lucky for me, because his patronymic Indriðason is one I must resort to cut and paste to print) uses this situation to examine many different kinds of attitudes toward the steadily growing foreign population that has come to what previously has been a very insular, one race culture. I expect that in the time since this book was written many of the guest workers have gone home. But as this book makes clear, even when things don't work out, there are wives left stranded in the wrong hemisphere, children of one culture born in the homeland of another, and people caught between two worlds, who can't negotiate the gap. And I do have to say that all the way through the book, I felt a kind of shivering pity for all these Southeast Asian people having to endure a world of winter and snow.

I liked this outing, though it wasn't my favorite. Part of this was probably due to a fairly clumsy and confusing translation, which I have since heard was due to the death of original translator Bernard Scudder midprocess and the attempt to finish the project by someone else. But I think some of it was just due to the fact that we have less of Erlendur and his doleful family drama than in the others. Erlendur left his wife with two young children early on, and due to the bitterness of that separation he lost contact with his children. They in turn have not fared so well without him. One of the continuing strengths of the series is the strained and in some cases terrible relation between Erlendur and his drug using daughter Eva Lind. The kind of hopeless yet somehow hopeful connection between them seems very real, and one of the uses of series books is that situations like this can go on without being resolved neatly at the end.

As a child Erlendur lost his little brother in a terrible snow storm. He was not at fault, but still feels perpetually guilty. How a tragic event can shape the life of a survivor, and how that in turn affects the lives of all who try to connect with him is also one the continuing themes Arnuldur explores in an aching, understated way.

Freedom

2010-09-05T11:38:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is probably the big book of the fall, for more than one reason. For one thing it's a Very Big Deal in the publishing world, which has its own mysterious laws. For another, it's just a big book physically, at well over five hundred pages. And it's also big in its ambitions and ideas.

I've read it, but I'm not going to review it here. Partly it's because I don't feel quite up to the task, and partly because this book really doesn't need any further help from me. Of the several things I've read about it so far, I think this New York Times Book Review piece by Sam Tanenhaus was the most helpful, though I'd recommend reading it after you read the book rather than before.

Personally, I would and will read anything Jonathan Franzen cares to write, just to make my own position clear.

I thought instead of a book review, I'd mention something funny that happened a couple of nights after I finished the book. I was watching a performance on PBS and one of the characters gleefully said "Freedom for everyone!"

What's not to like, right?

Well... that character was Don Giovanni, surely one of the archetypal villains and libertines of Western Civilization. And as a matter of fact, there is a Don Giovanni type in Franzen's book, in the character of Richard Katz, punk rock star and seducer, though by no means as black and white or one dimensional a character as the Don. In any case, this particular vision of freedom is one of the many types that Freedom is written to illustrate and explore, so I watched the rest of the opera looking for parallels.

During an intermission, there was a brief interview with the conductor, Donald Runnicles. He said that at the end of the opera when Don Giovanni has met his just fate, it's interesting to see that the other characters are left with a kind of blank space or vacuum in their lives. And it's certainly true that Freedom would have been the poorer without Giovanni's latter day avatar. What this says about demonic energy, I really don't know.

Read the book.

(The cartoon, by the way, is from a site called Head Injury Theater.com)

It's a...trailer

2010-08-22T11:20:00.000-07:00

I'm frankly not sure if this is the way to promote this or not. Yesterday our terrific children's book buyer at Bookshop Santa Cruz pressed this new book by Lane Smith upon me and I immediately pressed it upon a couple more of my coworkers. So I thought I'd go on and recommend it here too, thinking I wouldn't have much more to show than the cover image. However, Macmillan has made this cartoon of it available which gives some sense of the substance. Perhaps it undermines the central point, though, which is that a book is a book and not something else. I have to admit that I heard different voices in my head when I read it to myself, and you might want to go that route too. However, I offer you the choice...

Theroux on luxury

2010-08-13T23:14:00.000-07:00

Although I have actually finished a very enjoyable book since my last post (Moonlight Mile, by Dennis Lehane) the fact that it's not only a galley but an uncorrected proof leads me to decide not to quote from it just yet (it's good, though!). Instead, I will revert to my brief posts from other books I'm wending my way through more slowly. Today, it is Paul Theroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, in which he revisits a trip he made some 33 years earlier in The Great Railway Bazaar. I always like Theroux, though he is probably the most curmudgeonly author I've read that still manages to retain my affection. What's great about this book is not only that it's done in the inimitable Theroux style, but it allows him to reflect on half a lifetime of such escapades and their meanings. Here's a brief bit on finding himself riding the Orient-Express--not the famous Orient-Express we'd expect, but another of the same name on a neighboring track. Of the first he says:

"It was not my train because, one, it was too expensive: it would cost me around $9,000, one way, from Paris to Istanbul. Reason two: Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and the great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seems as though they are from another planet. It was also my experience that one of the worst aspects of traveling with wealthy people, apart from the fact that the rich never listen, is that they constantly groused about the high cost of living--indeed, the rich usually complained of being poor."

Henry Miller on Water

2010-08-08T14:11:00.000-07:00

Due both to some assigned reading and my own highly distractable nature, I am in the middle of quite a few books and not at the end of any of them. In the meantime, I thought I'd post an impression or two. Today's comes from Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi.

Perhaps I came to Miller from the wrong angle in the past--namely some passages about him in the diary of Anais Nin--but I have never had a keen desire to read him. So it's somewhat inexplicable that I suddenly decided to pick up this book about his visit to Greece just as the Second World War is about to break everything to pieces. I don't know what I was expecting exactly, but certainly not this piece about his late night stroll in the park during a heat wave on his first night in Athens:

I sauntered slowly through the park towards the Temple of Jupiter. There were little tables along the dusty paths set out in an absent-minded way: couples were sitting there quietly in the dark, talking in low voices, over glasses of water. The glass of water... everywhere I saw the glass of water. It became obsessional. I began to think of water as a new thing, a new vital element of life. Earth, air, fire, water. Right now water had become the cardinal element. Seeing lovers sitting there in the dark drinking water, sitting there in peace and quiet and talking in low tones, gave me a wonderful feeling about the Greek character. The dust, the heat, the poverty, the bareness, the containedness of the people, and the water everywhere in little tumblers standing between the quiet, peaceful couples, gave me the feeling that there was something holy about this place, something nourishing and sustaining.

Zora's films

2010-07-27T22:55:00.000-07:00

Although even to me it seems as though I'm bouncing back and forth between Irish crime authors, To Kill a Mockingbird and Zora Neale Hurston, I'm not going to break the trend just yet. Thanks to the new blog from the Library of America, I've learned about this very nice release of some of her field work films. It's implied rather than stated that this is her voice, but having heard her sing a few other songs, I'm pretty sure it is. I love this.

Zora's films

To Kill a Mockingbird, community style

2010-07-21T23:13:00.000-07:00

These days, it takes a bit to drag me back to Bookshop Santa Cruz on my day off (it's kind of a busman's holiday for me), but the fiftieth anniversary of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird tilted the balance. We have a monthly community book group facilitated by Julie Minnis, and though these groups have grown in size and popularity since inception, last night's draw of over 150 people was definitely a record. Judge Ariadne Symons and public defender Larry Biggams graciously agreed to not only come and be part of the discussion but to read from the closing arguments of the trial scene. Symons said that she'd realized in the course of a reread that there was actually no place for her as a lawyer and a woman judge in the book. I suppose she could have played Scout, but she elected to come in the persona of Gregory Peck playing Atticus Finch. She encouraged Biggam to do the same, but he advised her that he 'didn't do rumpled'. If you study the picture here, I think you'll agree.

It's very easy these days when you work in a bricks and mortar bookstore to lament the decline of the book and of bookstores as public spaces. So it was heartening to see a huge crowd turn out to talk about this novel, to hear heartfelt and intelligent comments, to see the public interact with their legal representatives in a way that must be rare enough for all parties. Such events, which celebrate the life of literature in a profound but not at all pretentious way, are the real reason to keep storefronts alive. At one point, Mr. Biggam said that in facing a recent confrontation with his teenager, he paused at the threshold and thought "What would Atticus do?"

The internet can do a lot of things well in terms of connecting people, but I still haven't heard 150 people laugh at the same moment on it.

It is, however, a pretty good place to say: Thank you, Harper Lee.

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

2010-07-10T19:00:00.000-07:00

I thought it might be fun to do a kind of running blog commentary on To Kill a Mockingbird, as we have come to the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. Theoretically, I am rereading this for a big community book group we're going to have in about a week and a half, and I thought there would probably be plenty of grist for the mill here. For instance, I was surprised at the way the book starts, which I'll get to at the end of this post, just to give you time to test yourself on what you think it was.

I was still a child myself when I read TKaM, which probably explains why many of my impressions seem so sharp, when much that I've read since then seems vague. Of course, I saw the movie too, a few years later. It remains one of the few movies I can think of in which there seems no gap between the original text and the movie. The characters were exactly as I imagined them, or at least didn't violate any conception I had had of them. Scout, Jem, Dill, Atticus and even Boo Radley were just as I had read them. Even the light seemed right.

Here are a few things I've found odd in the intervening years:

For the longest time, and in fact till the recent movie, Capote, I had the idea that Harper Lee had written this book and then more or less vanished from the face of the earth. I was shocked to learn that she was not a recluse shut up in some southern mansion, but had had a more or less constant presence in the New York literary scene. I was equally shocked to realize that Dill grew up to become Truman Capote. I'm still shocked when I think about that. When you read fiction, you don't really expect that the model of the childhood next door neighbor will grow up to become one of the era's leading literary lights. What are the odds? I remember hearing some rumor that Capote actually wrote TKaM, and though I haven't heard much about that since, in some ways it seems a great deal more plausible than the reality of two writers this quality growing up next door to each other.

When I read To Kill a Mockingbird in fifth or sixth grade, even though I read it on my own, I remember feeling as though I was reading a 'classic'. It already had a kind of canonical status, although of course at that time I wouldn't have known what a canon was if it shot me. It is surprising to me that it had probably only been out for ten years or so. Ten years later is usually a very wavering period in a novel's life. Most bestsellers have died off by then and most classics have not yet been born--or I suppose I should say, reborn. But TKaM seems to have just chugged merrily along. Needless to say, these are just my impressions, not well-researched facts.

I still wonder why Lee didn't try her hand at another. Perhaps during this anniverary, I'll find that out.

Okay--how does To Kill a Mockingbird begin? I had always remembered it as beginning with the arrival of Dill into the lives of Scout and Jem. And that's almost right. But before that happens we are treated to the ancestry of the Finches and how they came to be in the place they are. And before that happens, we have the opening line:

"When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow."

The story is then ostensibly about how Jem came to break his elbow. Less ostensibly, it is also about how the lineage of the Finches, which has partaken in the primal sin of slavery in the past, comes to fulfill its destiny in the present.

Wonder how it's all going to work out?

*I'm editing this to add a link to Kathleen Kirk's current post, since, as seems to be often the case, we are once again on the same page.

The girl without a dragon tattoo--Fifty Grand, by Adrian McKinty

2010-06-22T16:41:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd take a moment to mention that today is the street date for the American paperback edition of Fifty Grand, Adrian McKinty's action packed thriller about a Cuban detective who sneaks up into El Norte to track down her father's killer.

In the book biz, 'the street date' is the date a book is officially available for sale, which is an attempt to level the playing field for all sellers. For some reason lately Tuesday seems to have been designated as the day for new books to come out, so today for example we have the latest Diana Gabaldon for sale in paper and a new Janet Evanovich in hardback. (I'm not providing links--you're not getting away that easily.) But other books are also released that may not have gotten such promotion as either of these fine women have, and that's a little bit of what I wanted to talk about here today.

If you're reading this blog, you have almost certainly at least heard of Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and quite possibly already devoured the whole trilogy. I have nothing against the books or there subsequent success, though it is a bit sad that Larsson isn't around to reap the benefits of it. I read the first one, and liked it pretty well, though was bothered that the mystery didn't really hold up, and found the graphic violence against women pretty tough going at times. And, although I didn't mind these so much myself, I heard others complain that it suffers from too much information syndrome and even that both prose and plot were terrible.

The reason people seem to be willing to overlook so much of this, though, is that Larsson created a tough, smart, resilient and utterly determined heroine. Also, she had a pretty nifty tattoo.

So is it really all about the tattoo, then? Because Fifty Grand has a tough, smart, resilient and utterly determined heroine as well. Mercado is just as independent as Salander is, and actually a lot more out there on her own than even she knows. They both come from what you might call 'bad home lives', though Mercado's is more cultural than domestic. Both suffer the attempt of some appalling sexual violence and the threat of it pretty much all the time.

True, Detective Mercado doesn't have a photographic memory. She isn't a genius hacker, with a hidden underground friend who can provide her with the latest equipment. And she doesn't have a tattoo of a dragon on her body--at least I don't recall one.

But the story she dwells in is a better story. It's more tightly written and plotted. The author has lyric gifts that Larsson did not have, at least in translation. Larsson's first tale, anyway, is obsessed with Sweden's hidden Nazi past, while McKinty's is interested in the power structures and abuses of the present. I haven't come across anyone who brings more sociological awareness than he does to his fiction, though I'm aware that this is a title Larsson himself might have relished.

Now, I may not be playing fair with Larsson's books, as I've only read the first. I'm really just saying that there is obviously a market for good books with kickass heroines and Fifty Grand fits the bill. So where was the marketing campaign for this one?

I wrote a somewhat less serious piece on Fifty Grand when it came out in hardback, but that's a year ago, and though I doubt this blog has more readers now than it did then, it might at least have a few different ones.

By the way, for the few people in the world who are less aware of sporting events than I am (and yes, I'm aware that not a lot of toddlers will be reading this blog), the featured picture is not of the author or in any other way related to the book. It's just a nod to McKinty's Northern Irish origins, which he shares with Graeme McDowell, winner of the 2010 U.S. Open. The guy with him is his dad.

On the other hand, his strategy for achieving his underdog win might well mirror Mercado's on her own high stakes quest:

"I controlled my emotions; I felt calm all week. Probably the worst I'd been was Thursday when I got a little frustrated out there. I hit a few bad shots and got frustrated... I promised myself I was going to be calm, and I was going to hang tough."

And they do.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Part 2

2010-06-18T19:19:00.000-07:00

Thought it might be nice to once again follow up my own thoughts on Mohsin Hamid's novella with the impressions of various members of my book group. We were fortunate to have a couple of new people in attendance, one of whom had been wanting to talk to a group about the book and one whom had only read it the night before.

The main thing that was fascinating to me was that there were two opposing views of what had happened between the narrator and his silent antagonist. Both groups had been so certain that they had the right interpretation that it had occurred to neither that there might be a different interpretation until they heard one at the meeting. Apparently the ambiguity was Hamid's intention, but I wonder how well this strategy works if you don't discuss it with others, as the story itself does not reveal to you that you might not have gotten its point.

I'm not sure that as a group we really got into the trajectory of the Changez's story. In retrospect, I think the group view that Changez was just a guy who never quite fit in, making it a personal problem or personality quirk failed to follow the real dilemmas of a character like Changez, which have to do more with a cultural situation than with his idiosyncracies. I believe I said in my first post that people became reintrigued with this book after the attempted Times Square bombing by Faisal Shahzad, as Changez seemed in some way to prefigure Shahzad. Changez does not explain Shahzad, but an American who reads this book will come away with at least a little more understanding of how America looks through Pakistani eyes. And that certainly is all to the good and a service that Hamid has provided us.

In my search for a photo for this post--the author, by the way, lest that remains unclear--I came across a nice review, which probably makes clear some points that I have unintentionally left vague.

The Lighthouse Land by Adrian McKinty

2010-06-08T12:55:00.000-07:00

As the school year ends and summer pleasure reading begins, it seems a fine time to suggest an action packed adventure story, especially one that is the first of a trilogy. This book has two likely but very different audiences. The first is composed of middle grade readers, looking forward to somewhat bigger adventures in the years ahead. The second comprises McKinty's adult fan base, who are either waiting for this summer's release of his latest crime fiction, Fifty Grand, to hit the shops in paperback, or simply have run through all the rest of his oeuvre.

For this last group, who may be thinking about gifts for the younger readers in their circle as well, fear not--there are no Belfast sixpacks to be seen in this book, although there is battle and there is also death. But like other able crime writers who moonlight in the realm of children's literature, McKinty is quite capable of writing a tale of derring do and adventure that is suited to younger readers. Personally, I think this trilogy is a perfect recommendation for middle graders who have run through the Percy Jackson and Alex Rider books. What stood out for me in this first book on the sheer excitement level was a certain kind of sea going vessel that McKinty has dreamt up along with a wholly plausible way to fight it. The story in fact, cries out to be animated. It could really be quite stunning in the right hands.

Another strong point of the story from my perspective is that though two of the main characters are boys, there is also a female lead who is independent, capable and not always in agreement with the others on the best course of action. In other words, it's not all just battles and there should be plenty of elements that girls will relate to too.

But enough about child readers and the child reader in all of us. What's in it for adults? Some things that stood out to me were the fact that it's a story that really begins three times, and in three very different settings. We start in Harlem, and then we start again in Northern Ireland. The third start I'll leave for you to discover.

The main character, Jamie O'Neill has recently had to come to terms with losing a large part of his arm to cancer. But he has not only lost an arm, he's lost a father to the process, and at least for the time being has lost his ability to speak. I found the connection between these things fascinating to contemplate, the more so as the author does not give any facile explanation as to why this should be so. Jamie's muteness simply is. It is not sullenness, as Jamie does manage to communicate by other means. But there is some implication that speech comes out of wholeness and as the novel starts, Jamie has by no means been made whole again after his various losses, despite the fact that he has suddenly come into a pretty grand inheritance.

Another thing that is a true pleasure for the American reader is to get a new view of Northern Ireland, as we have all been filled with certain kinds of image of the place, even when the time for that image is long since past. Thanks to fellow blogger Philip Robinson, who shares a background and fondness for this part of the world with McKinty, we have a couple of old photos of the Northern Irish setting of one part of the story.
According to Philip, the following photo is captioned:

Port Muck and Muck Island.
There are puzzling remnants of a castle keep, above McClelland's farm, overlooking the harbour. The jetty was built 1827 when almost 100 herring boats fished these waters. Horse's cave on the island kept smuggled animals hidden while awaiting shipment.

And of the following, Philip says: "The second photo is of Blackhead lighthouse which is just a few miles down the coast - at the bottom end of Islandmagee, where Adrian's sister lives. He cleverly puts the lighthouse on the island in the story. And there is a shingle causeway out to the island which is only visible at very low tides.

By the way, Islandmagee is not an island but a peninsula about 5 miles east of Carrickfergus."

Thank you, Philip.

As for the rest, I think I'll leave the book some of its secrets. The truth is, I've already finished the sequel, which is also terrific and am pacing myself on the third as, well, that's the end, isn't it?

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid

2010-06-01T19:56:00.000-07:00

Another book group pick. I don't know for sure why the person who requested it chose it because she wasn't present at the last meeting, but I do know why this novel, or really, novella, has come to the forefront again. The Times Square attempted bomber, Faisal Shahzad, bears more than skin deep resemblance to the narrator of this book, and I imagine that people looking for clues have gravitated toward this one. I'm glad this Booker-Man Prize shortlisted work of fiction has had a second wave of interest, though I suspect people looking for conclusive answers will be disappointed. I think what they will find, though, is a penetrating look at American society about a character both outside it and inside it, and his progressive disenchantment is well worth considering. It is, in fact, open to interpretation.

The narrator, Changez, is a Pakistani, and the entire novel is narrated by him in one sitting in a cafe in Lahore. His willing, captive or hostile listener is an American stranger and he is only one of those whom Changez tries to find some sort of mirror or connection in. In a sense, the failed attempt in Times Square, which happened long after the novel went to print, raises the stakes and perhaps even changes the reading by a reader now. I don't think Hamid would mind that, as the book is all about our ambivalent interpretations of each other. I had originally thought to write that I don't get the ending, but having read an interview with him, I realize that's partly his intent.

This book is full of acute observations about the foreigner's position, and particularly the Muslim foreigner's position in America today. It's interesting to watch how far a liberal American is willing to go with him and where and if there is a point where the viewpoint diverges. We must of course always remember that Changez is not Hamid and though I'm sure their viewpoints overlap at many points, but they are not identical.

I had a funny feeling of a haunting in this book, although it is not about ghosts. Briefly, I can feel the ghosts of the books that Hamid has read before writing this. It is by no means derivative, but this story of an Asian man who falls for and is emotionally captured by a damaged Western woman feels like a story I've heard before.

Actually, it's a very Western story, come to think of it.

Olive Kitteridge, redux

2010-05-20T22:18:00.000-07:00

First of all, yes, I had to look up 'redux' to see if it actually meant what I thought it did...
Basically, I'm just reporting back as promised on my reading group's reactions to this book. Unfortunately, we were a bit thin on the ground due to some other commitments, so the person who loved it and the person who hated it and even the person who suggested it weren't actually there. Still, it was interesting, and perhaps more so to discuss between a few people who didn't have any huge axes to grind.

One thing that stood out for me about this group discussion was that there turned out to be quite a few "talking points". One thing that everyone seemed to agree on was that it was a bit misleading to call this a novel, and I believe the consensus was that it could have been edited without too much trouble into a more seamless whole. One member got very tired of the way that Olive seemed to be referred to in every story as a large woman, and wondered if that was really necessary. She was somewhat mollified by the idea that in the original stories, it might not have come across so much as being hammered with this information.

Beyond that, though, different stories seemed to have different resonances for different people. One member who had undergone her own hospital experiences was very struck by one in which Olive has to struggle for her own dignity in such a situation magnifed to a whole new level. Another member found echoes of some friends' experiences with being told off by adult children, who had felt stunned and silenced into merely listening to these complaints, as it can be argued Olive had to do on one occasion. And yet another member enjoyed some of the small, unexpected moments, such as one in which Olive figures out what to do in response to a new daughter-in-law who turns out not to like her very much.

Sometimes I get frustrated with the whole notion of book groups. How did this become our preferred method of reading and why is it primarily a women's kind of thing, as it is primarily with ours? But this last evening was a prime example of the beauty of book groups when they're working right, which is that many facets of a book are reflected back to you in which you both remember and learn something new that you wouldn't have come to on your own.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

2010-05-16T13:12:00.000-07:00

Our May reading group pick. Winner of last year's Pulitizer prize, this has been selected for discussion by a lot of reading groups since, making me think of it as a kind of quintessential reading group book, the qualities of which I've been mulling over quite a bit as I've been reading.

As is a fairly common device these days, this novel is actually a series of linked stories, much like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg,Ohio. In fact, it could as aptly have been titled "Crosby, Maine", as in all but one instance, the town and its environs are as much a character as Olive is, if not more so. In a few stories her actual presence is so slight that she merely makes an appearance at some sort of gathering the protagonist is attending. It cannot be said that these cameos actually add anything to the story they appear in or further our understanding of Olive herself, although they do often reinforce the sense of her formidability as a teacher. What they do serve to do is make Olive serve as a kind of glue for the book as a whole, though personally, I think it might have been a bit more intriguing to just leave her out of several stories all together. If, as seems likely, Olive and the town of Crosby are emanations of the same spirit, it is not really all that necessary to dot all your "i"s and cross all your "t"s in quite this manner.

If you look over on a site like Good Reads, you will find that a great number of people have found this book to be worth a five star rating, and I've read a few commenters that call it life-changing or confess having been deeply moved by it. These kinds of testimonies have their own authority, I think. You can't just say, "you are wrong" to readers who have had this kind of experience. There are, however, a few reviews mixed in of what I would call the "Bleh!" variety. I find myself somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, and somewhat at odds with myself in my own response to the novel.

The truth is, I had no trouble reading this book. I enjoyed the stories, found them seamless in the telling, although as they are actually stories collected from over a long span of time, it's not surprising that there is some repetitiveness in the detail. I have heard a few people say that they do not care for Olive herself, and apart from the fact that the likeableness of a main character is not something I think an author is required to give, I did actually like her in all her ornariness.

Nor do I think the stories forgettable. I think some of them will stay with me for a long time, in fact. So what really is my bone to pick with this book? Why do I insist on having any bone to pick with it at all? I think it's because the stories of quiet, ordinary, lonely, sometimes desperate lives has about run it's course with me. Perhaps my resistance is so great because they remind me too much of a certain type of story I have written myself. (I'm not comparing the success of our different attempts at this, merely our subject matter.) But whatever the reason, more than once while reading this collection, I have thought, Where the hell is Charles Dickens when we need him? Where is the larger than life, outrageous character? And where is the writer who is going to tell me that life is about something more than I've figured out already?

Of course, it's unfair to make this demand of a book that never had any intention of being, say, Great Expectations. What I do think, though, is that when you award a Pulitzer to a book like this, you are setting a standard for what contemporary fiction should strive to be. And I'm finding more and more that I beg to differ to with that idea of success. As I believe I said in my own quick take in my Good Reads review, "wry" and "quietly absorbing" no longer seem to be quite enough for me.

I am not sure just what is.

Charlotte, Emily and Anne

2010-05-07T22:38:00.000-07:00

While we all wait around for me to get my act together and post a new review of something, we could do worse than to check out this cool comic by Kate Beaton, entitled Dude Watchin' With the Brontes.

This came to me by way of a great website called Chicklit forums, which is not really about Chicklit at all, nor is it just for chicks. Yeah, it's a long story.

Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, by Valerie Boyd

2010-04-18T20:22:00.000-07:00

I've lately been reading quite a bit by and about the writer Zora Neale Hurston for a rather mad project I've embarked on, and reading this book was probably my deepest venture yet into the story of her life. I have also read Hurston's own account, Dust Tracks on the Road, which has its strengths, but this only takes us so far, as there are certain things Hurston would like to pass over--and have us pass over as well. Also, as with all autobiography, it ends before the story is over, and in this case, quite a bit before it is over, as Hurston was pressured by her publisher to attempt her memoir before she herself felt ready to do it. And still, we are lucky to have it.

I thought it might help me, if no one else, to gather some of my thoughts about Boyd's longer account. Although Hurston's trajectory through life is too unique and in some ways extraordinary to be much of a model for anyone else, from her birth and early life in an all black community in late 19th century and early 20th Florida, to her initiations into hoodoo and then voodoo, her life as a writer bears some common themes with the life of many other writers, and in that sense, though fraught with crisis and complexity, might make a person feel not so alone on that particular path.

One thing that seems very common to me is the struggle with vocation, with its companion theme of the struggle to discover one's material. I suppose there are people who have a kind of certitude about their gifts, but Hurston's relation to her own writerly gifts seems much more common. Her first desire was simply for education and to see some of the world. Few people who might happen upon this post will have faced anything like the kind of obstacles that lay before her. And with a gap of years in her life which she never spoke about, and which, to my knowledge, we have no remaining record of, we will probably never know all that she lived through before she became a writer and personality to be reckoned with.

As someone who lived at the center of the Harlem Renaissance, while at the same time attending the elite Barnard college, the first black woman to do so, it's understandable that she might have a little trouble fitting herself into typical roles. She tried to make the sensible decision of becoming an anthropologist and succeeded in this, though in an unconventional way. In this process, she added a lot to to what we know, both about African-American life in the American South of her era, and about that of the Bahamas, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. But though her books are an addition to our knowledge, a close reading of them reveals the stance of an artist and not a scientist. She doesn't always achieve the scientist's detached viewpoint, although I think her own 'semi-detached' viewpoint is instructive just in itself. I will hazard a guess that her anthropological works like Tell My Horse, and Of Men and Mules are really books by a novelist looking for her material. It's instructive, for instance, that it was while she ostensibly went on a trip to Haiti to understand the culture of voodoo, which, by the way, she treats with immense respect and becomes an initiate in, she also wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God--to my mind, one of the great American novels of the last century--in seven short weeks, apparently in her spare time.

The other aspect of her life that seems relevant to today's writers, and perhaps to writers at all times everywhere, is the utter contingency of her situation. Put more plainly, she was always scraping around for money--not because she lived an extravagant lifestyle, though she was generous with money, but because that is a writer's life, when not cushioned by a reliable job, a trust fund or something else more steady and predictable. She did try to find something like this--it's just that she never really managed it. There are some writers who can find or at least luck into one of these things, but I think the thing that struck me about Valerie Boyd's account is the idea that at root, Hurston's life is any artist's life. For the great majority of writers, and that doesn't by any means exclude the geniuses, there are plottings and negotiations, and maybe even a bit of kissing up, doing hack work and so on. People let you down. People have expectations that don't actually match up with what you are called to do. Even success doesn't provide future security. Hurston died in poverty. She was buried in an unmarked grave. (Which Alice Walker famously tracked down and bought a headstone for, so don't toss and turn at night about that part.)

When you are keyed into a life, for whatever reason, the biographer of that life holds a special place in your heart. So I would like to take this opportunity to thank Valerie Boyd for her steady, calm, exhaustive and highly readable research into the life of a singular American author. I am sure that with such an extraodinary energy at the center of her field of enquiry, it wasn't always easy.

Tell My Horse, by Zora Neale Hurston

2010-04-08T22:31:00.000-07:00

I'm very absorbed in the life of Zora Neale Hurston these days. Coincidentally, this book on Hurston's travels to Jamaica and Haiti was a book group choice, based on a group desire to learn a little more about Haiti in the aftermath of this year's devastating Haitian earthquake. Although for me, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God remains the benchmark, this book proves how engaging a writer Hurston is in more ordinary circumstances. (Though how I can use "ordinary" in a description of a book that includes wild boar hunts and zombies, I don't know.)

Hurston is known most famously as a novelist, but she also studied anthropology under Franz Boas, and spent countless hours collecting African-American folklore throughout the south. Her journey to the Caribbean was of an anthropological nature as well. What remains interesting are her intent to keep her findings accessible to the general public and her viewpoint, which was detached without being remote, and treated the cultures she studied with an uncondescending respect.

"Tell My Horse" or parlay cheval ou in Creole, refers to the time when a person is 'mounted' by the spirit or loa, Guede. Possession or assumed possession by the loa gives the person a kind of permission to speak in the voice of the god, often saying things that he or she would not dare to say in real life. It reminds me a bit of the tradition of the Holy Fool in Russian Orthodox Christianity. I hadn't thought till now that Hurston's choice of this title may be telling.

Although the book is not the tightest she ever wrote, it is full of fascination. The fact that fascinates me the most, though, is one that doesn't appear in it. While Hurston was in Haiti--"after hours" so to speak--she sat down and wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in six short weeks. Personally, I consider the novel one of the great books of the twentieth century. Hurston wrote it so quickly and mentioned so little about the travails of doing so, it makes me wonder if she had any idea of what a gift she bestowed upon us.

I hope so.

J is For Judgment--or one good reason to read mystery novels.

2010-03-13T21:27:00.000-08:00

This blog has lagged a bit of late. The main reason is that with multiple projects going, I don't seem to be getting done with any of them. For example, I'm a fair way into this tenth outing of Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone series but that's not the same as done. Luckily for me, with mysteries, you shouldn't give too much away anyway. So, though I have at least gotten a bit further than this, here is a little quotation from pages 8 and 9 in the mass market edition:

"Wendell Jaffe and his partner, Carl Eckert, put together limited partnerships for real estate deals to develop raw land, build condominiums, office buildings, shopping centers, that kind of thing. They were promising investors a fifteen percent return, plus a return of their original investment within four years before the two partners would take a profit. Of course, they got in way over their heads, taking off big fees, paying huge 'overhead' expenses, rewarding themselves handsomely.

Alarm bells, anyone? No? Very well then, I'll continue:

When profits failed to materialize, they ended up paying old investors with the new investor's money, shifting cash from one shell company to the next, constantly soliciting new money to keep the game afloat."

"In other words, a Ponzi scheme," I inserted.

"Right. I think they started with good intentions, but that's how it ended up..."

And yes, this absolutely reeks of the whole Madoff scandal. There's just one slight problem. This was first published in 1993.

Sometimes people put down reading mysteries and crime fiction as a waste of time. But if a few more people had read these lines back in the nineties, they might have a bit more retirement money in the bank than they do now. Sadly.

This Night's Foul Work by Fred Vargas

2010-02-08T19:47:00.000-08:00

This book will be the first reviewed for the 2010 Global Reading Challenge, set by Dorte Jakobsen. (Thanks, Dorte!)

I have to admit that the cover did not inspire me to read this one and in fact I would not have opened it if I hadn't heard good things about it over time, and if I hadn't set myself a small goal of tackling some of my shelf-sitters. The title is actually a tribute to the French poet Racine, who figures prominently in the book, due to one character's intimate familiarity with his style. The French title is actually quite different--Dans les bois éternels , which translates to something more along the lines of "In the eternal woods". I don't know if that would have drawn me in any faster, but at least it would be unlikely to have the picture of a dead stag on the cover.

Anyway, neither the author's name, nor the title, nor yet the cover image clued me in to the fact that this novel is in fact a Parisian police procedural, and a very delightful one at that. Vargas' detective squad is the closest I have come to the classic Amsterdam based Grijpstra and de Gier series of Janwillem van de Wetering. Led by the Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, a right-brained dreamer if ever there was one, the Paris Crime Squad holds as many idiosyncratic characters as anyone could ask for. This book comes fairly late in the series, but Vargas does a good job at delineating the characters again for new readers like me.

I fear that certain kinds of readers will throw up their hands at many of the more absurd situations and improbable plot twists in this one. But for readers who are willing to surrender and enjoy the ride there are many rewards. It's extremely well plotted and woven together, and the twists and turns of the central mystery, as well as a secondary one involving Adamsberg's past kept me guessing.

One of the great pleasures of Vargas' work is the way she describes all the detectives--with the exception perhaps of the formidable Retancourt, a woman of many talents--as flawed and somewhat hapless in their own lives, but how in collaboration their strengths come to the fore.

I do have a small problem with the translation, which is that whenever the story ventures into the realm of dialect, the translator's efforts to find some substitute in English slang fall flat. It's a shame, because her rendering of the speech of Adamsberg and the detective squad is subtlety itself.

I found that at the end of reading this one, and despite many other goals, I wanted to nothing so much as begin reading another. And so I have...

Winterland by Alan Glynn

2010-02-01T21:10:00.000-08:00

I was tempted to throw in an imaginary subtitle: The Lost Language of Cranes, but that was already taken. Anyone who visited Ireland four or five years ago, as I did, could not have failed to get the reference. There were cranes everywhere--new schemes, new money, even all new people (another stolen literary reference). Attractive young Irish people flocked the streets in expensive new clothes--never have I felt so old and past the moment--and the small hotels and bars and pretty much everywhere were staffed by Asians and Eastern Europeans, most of whom did not seem at all happy.

That moment, for better or worse, is done--at least for the time being. Capital, and labor, has come and fled again, as it has so many other places. This is the setting of Alan Glynn's excellent new novel Winterland.

The initial setup is this: a young thug, Noel Rafferty, is murdered at a local pub. As he is revealed from the outset to be a very unpleasant character, we do not mourn him much. But his tightly knit Dublin family does, of course, and their grief is more than doubled when his uncle, his namesake, dies in a car accident that very night. Tragic coincidence, yes, but their common relative Gina Rafferty begins to doubt that all is exactly as it seems. Gina's company, a start-up, is having troubles in the new economic climate. And it's not the only thing that's suffering in the fallout of global recession.

I love the way the local and the global overlap and affect each other in this novel. I also love the acute depiction of the way government and business and law enforcement are all in each other's pockets. Gina Rafferty is a great and fearless character in this setting. Here's hoping we hear a bit more from her in the future.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell--first impressions

2010-01-19T16:46:00.000-08:00

There's just about the right amount of time to get in a quick initial post on David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Hailed as one of the best books of the last decade on a variety of lists, and popular with the more literary minded of our staff when it first came out, it's one of those books that I long planned to read but never quite got around to. But last month I did manage to convince my book group to read it, which is my way of bumping a book right to the top of my To Be Read pile.

As we got a bit of a late start this time, one of our members asked if we might do this one as a two parter and everyone agreed. Don't read on if you don't like even the structure of a book to be revealed ahead of time, but in fact this is actually a perfect book to read in halves. The novel is actually six separate stories, which nest inside each other, so that the first half of the book is the first half of all stories and the second completes each of them. Concentric rings is one way of looking at it.

Having just finished the central story--central in a physical sense but not, I think in any sense of importance, I feel as baffled as ever about what the intent of the novel as a whole is. I trust that there is a whole, and I trust that Mitchell's structure is intentional, but I am not quite so convinced that I will figure out what those intentions are myself. Whether this is particularly important, I don't know.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I am not all that fond of linked or not so linked stories as a way of putting together a novel. I particularly have a hard time with stories or even series where you get invested in a set of characters and then find yourself jumping into the future where you suddenly are dealing with a whole new cast of characters. An example of the type would be Zoe Heller's The Believers, which begins with a scene in London where two characters meet and fall in love and jumps in very short order to a time near the end of their marriage, with the husband in a coma and life unraveling or at least changing for his wife and children. It's actually a very good novel, but I missed the development of those early days all through the book. This isn't a flaw in the writing, though. This is a shortcoming or at least a preference in me. Still, I might not be the only one.

The Cloud Atlas has been an interesting test for me in this regard. These are six very different strands of life and even genre and yet Mitchell was able to recapture my attention in all of them. He is obviously an extremely gifted writer, not just capable of mimicking any style he sets his mind to, but of at least seeming to have the expertise and breadth of knowledge to put across the backgrounds of these worlds without flaw. And even my problem will be addressed by bringing all these abruptly cut off stories to closure in the second half. But there is a risk that all this cleverness actually works against the reader's experience to some degree.

Because once you know that the writer is going to break the story off, isn't there just a little less engagement with it as a result? Isn't there some sense that the guy's just messing with your head? It's one thing when you have the rug pulled out from under you the first time. But when you can look ahead and see that it's going to happen at least four more times, doesn't that do something to the degree to which you immerse yourself?

Put another way, isn't it hard enough for any reader to sustain disbelief long enough to enter a story without having the author whispering in your ear all the way that it isn't real, I'm making it all up, don't get too comfortable? I know that some readers do like that experience--they want to share in the writer's experience of constructing fiction, they want to be in on the trick. Well, for better or worse, I am not really that reader.

I will add that Mitchell does not actually, in his heart of hearts, appear to be that kind of writer either. I don't know if he personally gets invested in his characters, but he certainly makes it possible for you to invest in them. The distancing does not come from the stories, it comes from the structure.

It will be interesting to see if anyone else in the group tonight has this problem with the book. Initial reports have been favorable.

I shall report back.

Crime Fiction Curriculum Challenge from The View at the Blue House

2010-01-11T19:29:00.000-08:00

Thanks to DJs krimiblog, I learned of Rob Kitchen's Classic Crime Fiction Curriculum Challenge. He's asking anyone interested to make a list of ten significant pre-1970 crime novel still worthy of our interest. You can post a list over on his blog, or, if you're like me and are always needing to add content to your own blog, you can post it there and then email him the link.

Anyway, I welcome the opportunity to list some of my favorites. Here they are, in no particular order:

1.) The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart. Somewhat out of fashion just now, but Rinehart's mysteries are the real deal. There's always a big house and a nostalgic glow.

2.) Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy B. Hughes
Hughes wrote noir when women when women weren't expected to. This one takes the main characters down into Mexico.

3.)Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham
Her early Albert Campions were a bit like inferior Peter Wimseys, but she wrote much more complex stuff as her writing matured. Tiger in the Smoke is one of the best. London is almost another character in this one.

4.)Hamlet, Revenge by Michael Innes
I love novels with allusions to Hamlet, and Innes, the psuedonym of an Oxford don, is one of the best and funnest of the type.

5.)The Moving Toy Shop by Edmund Crispin. Another don writing mysteries under a psuedonym, his books are especially clever and comic.

6.)Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey. People often cite Tey's Daughter of Time for it's wonderful historical research, but the rest of her books set in her own day are pretty wonderful too. This one centers on a young man pretending to be the missing heir to a fortune.

7.)Tragedy at Law by Cyril Hare, yet another psuedonymous British mystery writer, but this time a British judge, not a don. His mysteries turn, naturally, around points of law, but the writing is very engaging.

8.)The West Pier by Patrick Hamilton. Hamilton's Gorse books are reminiscent of Highsmith's Ripley books, but with their own flavor.

9.) The Underground Man by Ross MacDonald. Finally, an American who bothers with a psuedonym! MacDonald's Lew Archer novels are in the same tradition as Chandler's and Hammett's. One thing I like about them is the metaphoric and mythic structure that shows through them. It's an interesting mix with the at the time very contemporary Southern California settings.

10.)The James Joyce Murders by Amanda Cross. Just realized that Cross's early Kate Fansler mysteries slip in under the wire of that pre-1970 stipulation. Cross, aka scholar Carolyn Heilbrun, used her mystery series to explore issues literary, academic and feminist. She was didactic in the best sense of the word.

That's it! Got a list? Put it together and let Rob know about it before January 31st. Now's your chance to get some of your favorites out there.

My plans for the 2010 global reading challenge

2010-01-06T20:26:00.000-08:00

I have realized belatedly, that, having linked to the 2010 Global Reading Challenge, I ought to make a brief list of my intentions to fulfill it.

Doing the easy challenge as I am, it's going to be a pretty short list, and very subject to change:

South America:
I think this has got to be Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.

North America:
I think this will have to be Canadian rather than from the U.S., for the sake of expansion. Luckily, I think I've suddenly thought of just the one--Michel Basilières and his novel, Black Bird, recommended by Canadian crimewriter John McFetridge.

Europe:
I decided to avoid England, Ireland and Scandinavia for this challenge, as I seem to do quite well finding books without prompting in these countries. It looks like the book is going to be French writer Fred Vargas' This Night's Foul Work, for the simple reason that I have already started to read it.

Australasia:
Not sure on this one. I'm leaning toward finally reading Peter Temple's Broken Shore.

Asia:
I'm thinking of breaking outside of the crime box and reading Vikram Seth's Suitable Boy for this one.

Africa:
I'm pretty sure I'll go for Deon Meyer's Dead Before Dying.

One book at a time, though. One book at a time.

Dorte's 2010 Global Reading Challenge

2010-01-01T09:32:00.000-08:00

I just realized that this is as good a place as any to make mention of Dorte Jakobsen's 2010 Global Reading Challenge, which is basically a challenge to broaden your reading a bit in the new year.Take the easy, medium or expert challenge, and then plunge right in and read books from all over the world. The idea is to review them on your blog or website or whatever as you go, but if that sounds intimidating, just remember that a review can be as simple as "I liked it".

A lot of the folks doing the challenge will be reading crime fiction, but don't feel limited to that if it's not your thing. I probably won't be sticking to that myself.

At first I thought it was just the challenge itself that was intriguing, but what will really be intriguing is the accumulation of reviews and recommendations.

What are you waiting for? Hop on over and have a look.

The Wrong Mother, by Sophie Hannah

2009-12-27T17:50:00.000-08:00

I've been hearing about Sophie Hannah from a couple of different directions lately--first, hot ticket novelist Tana French has mentioned recently that she is on French's own shortlist, and secondly, Martin Edwards has written a good piece on her over on his blog, Do You Write Under Your Own Name?. Then Penguin was kind enough to send me an unsolicited copy of The Wrong Mother and I was off and running.

I am not going to delve into the twists and turns of this complex and very absorbing crime novel, other than to say that it starts off in the voice of a mother of young children who has an upsetting encounter with her child minder, and not too long after, finds herself pushed into the path of a bus, apparently deliberately. What I will say is that it is no accident that the novel starts off with a dilemma about childcare, career and the mothering of young children. There is not just one mother facing this situation of trying to be a good mother and still holding on to an interesting career despite the demands, there are several.

In fact, you might say that The Wrong Mother is an exercise in refracting the same basic situation through several different lenses. The care of self versus the love of one's children plays out in various ways. One question that I was left with was more general, though. When we complain about the people and situations in our lives, how seriously do we mean this and how seriously do we expect others to take us?

Although ultimately I found some of the resolution of this story a little unsatisfying, it does fit within the conventions of crime fiction, and I have to say that I was reading compulsively all the way through and the main puzzle of the story was not one I saw through till quite close to the end. I'm eager to read more of Hannah's work, and though I think mothers with small children would find much to relate to here, I am not sure they could read this book with equanimity.

Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd

2009-12-11T14:03:00.000-08:00

I must admit a weakness for novels that use London as a strong and evocative setting. Vikram Seth's An Equal Music springs to mind as do several of the mysteries of P.D. James, maybe particularly Original Sin with it's venerable London publishing house set right on the Thames. I recall reading her early novel, Innocent Blood, before I ever visited the city, and I do know that a young woman being able to find a flat in London seemed one of the most glamorous things in the world--and this before I had the faintest idea of London prices.

William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms joins the ranks of those crime novels that use both London and the Thames to great effect. Here's the opening:

Let us start with the river--all things begin with the river, and we shall probably end there, no doubt--but let's wait and see how we go. Soon, in a minute or two, a young man will come and stand by the river's edge, here at Chelsea Bridge, in London.

And of course that was enough to hook me right in. I will not give away whether things do or do not end at the river, but the river is very much a part of the landscape through much of the book. It reveals itself in different aspects to different people, reflecting their inner lives as well as outer weather.

A chance encounter leads our hero, Adam Kindred, to become deeply implicated in a crime. His own decisions in response to this lead him further afield, until he finds himself looking at London from the lower strata, a view of the city that few tourists get to see. Meanwhile, there are some pretty major corporate shenanigans going on, and of course someone who's been sent to clean up untidy loose ends like, say, witnesses. Although at times this seems fairly standard stuff, the pacing keeps it lively.

What I find more interesting, and what I think most readers will, is not just the way Adam hides out in a vast and in many ways impersonal city, but the way in which he comes to accept that riding the river of chance, and being able to let go of the old life as necessary, is really all we have. There's a clever, ironic twist when another character has to make the same decision, but I'll leave that to you to find.

As it turns out, there are more than a few people in this book hiding from what they once were. But, as is pointed out in the novel, 600 people are reported missing in Britain every week. That a few of their fictional counterparts find their way between these pages does not in the end seem too improbable.

The Parkour and Freerunning Handbook, by Dan Edwardes

2009-12-04T21:26:00.000-08:00

Every once in awhile, this blog must be forgiven if it takes a break from writing up books of a high literary character and indulges in its author's odd private obsessions. This post is one of them.

What are parkour and freerunning? Well, fans of the recent film Casino Royale are probably already familiar with the opening sequence that made this gymnastic way of moving through the urban landscape famous. For those who haven't seen the film, you can think of this as a whole new way of getting around and relating to your city or town.

Okay--I am not really the ideal candidate to practice this discipline. I don't think I'll be doing backflips off three story buildings any time soon, for instance. But of course the primal place for all of us is always our imagination, and whether we can practice this in the urban landscape itself, or only in the far frontiers of our imaginations, this stuff is really cool. It's a shift in our thinking about city streets, city railings and city buildings to imagine owning these impersonal public structures with our personal stunts and feats. If you're young and athletic, you may be able to duplicate some of the moves demonstrated in this book. But even if you're not, and I believe this is actually the important part, you too can imagine the streets you live on in an entirely new way. Take a look at this book, or the movie Casino Royale for that matter, and try to picture yourself doing such stunts on the streets where you live. You will inhabit your own space on earth in an entirely new way if you do.

The Dead Yard, by Adrian McKinty

2009-11-10T20:43:00.000-08:00

I have just recently finished reading the Dead trilogy, with Belfast's Michael Forsythe as hero or anti-hero or something. I wouldn't recommend reading the series in the order I have, but as the first is out of print in the U.S. right now, do what you must.

The Dead Yard is the second book in the series, although chronologically, this story actually fits in somewhere before the coda at the end of the first novel, Dead I Well May Be. Starting off on the island Spanish island of Tenerife, somewhere off the east coast of Africa, the action swiftly moves back to the east coast of America, which is a different clime entirely.

It doesn't give too much away, I think, to reveal that Michael becomes embedded in a disaffected Irish group who are hoping to make a big splash to gain favor back in the home country.

I've heard that some find this middle novel darker than the others, but frankly I'm surprised at that. Our introduction to Michael Forsythe in Dead I Well May Be very quickly throws us into the dark and violent world he lives in, and shows him to be if not a willing participant, at least a compliant and resigned one.

As a person who is not particularly drawn to violence as a selling point, I have had to think a bit about why this series works for me. True, the writing is tight and at times gorgeous, and the darkness of the series is relieved by the author's periodic wit. Still, we are left with the conundrum of the appeal of the central character. I must admit that I was a bit baffled by it, especially in reading this second, but for me, third of this very compelling series.

And then I thought of Odysseus.

Now let me say right out front that at its heart,this is an action series. If you liked Matt Damon in the Jason Bourne movies, then you should be saying your prayers that someone in Hollywood will see the commercial potential of this series. But it remains true that these books are more literary at their roots and so the Odysseus reference seems fair.

Michael Forsythe starts in Belfast, and though this may be a spoiler, ends in Belfast. He does, in effect, live out his own odyssey, and spends his time in various lands with various snares, just as Odysseus does. Although the third book, The Bloomsday Dead, actually models itself on the plan of Joyce's Ulysses, which in turn is also based on The Odyssey, I don't mean to imply that this is a deliberate pattern of the books. But I will say that thinking about the character of Odysseus may prove helpful in thinking about the character of Michael Forsythe. Because the chief word that springs to mind for both characters is "cunning". Not kind, not compassionate, although both characters do at times exhibit these traits, but cunning. Like Odysseus, Michael Forsythe makes survival his highest value. Odysseus does this because he intends to return home, no matter the pain, and no matter the cost. Forsythe never makes this goal plain, even to himself, but in fact, there is a Penelope, though not as Penelope ever imagined herself, and there is even a Telemachus of sorts, though the less I say about that the better.

I believe that Odysseus is a type of human consciousness and Michael Forsythe is a reflection of that type. Although we see Odysseus in a heroic light, Forsythe casts a different sort of light. In a way, he shows the limits of the heroic mold. Odysseus survives by embodying the heroic values of courage, resourcefulness, foresight, and yes, cunning. So does Michael. But in these, our latter times, the ending is not so neat. Michael Forsythe, at the end of the day, is not a Hero, but a human being. And human beings carry within them the history of all their actions--an anti-heroic tale indeed.

All the Little Live Things, by Wallace Stegner

2009-10-25T13:30:00.000-07:00

I have only a few minutes to revive a practice I kind of like which is to put in a word about the book that will shortly be under discussion at tonight's book group. Still let's give it a go.

Wallace Stegner published this book in 1967, and the story of Joe and Ruth Allston, in supposed retreat in what is presumably the Santa Cruz Mountains is a perfect picture of that historical moment, and of that geographical locality. Reminiscent of Andre Dubus II's The House of Sand and Fog, though strictly speaking, chronologically the reverse is true, as a portrait of a small cast of characters engaged in a conflict of types in a very individuated setting, it left me very nostalgic for an era close to me in time but which I was too late to participate in. As in Dubus' book, the conflict between different types of people escalates to logical if possibly greater than life conclusions.

Stegner taught a prestigious writing program at Stanford until shortly before he died, and his son Page taught at my own UC Santa Cruz; and his wife has had some success as a novelist in her own right. It is tempting to search for autobiographical elements, but the book is none the worse if you don't have any of these more personal connections.

To be continued...

...I'd hoped to post the group's responses a little earlier than this, while they were still fresh in my memory, but time has gotten away from me. I'm happy to report that this was the rare book that all our members seemed to enjoy, and probably for roughly the same reasons. The craftsmanship of the novel is very evident without calling attention to itself, and this appealed particularly for whom technical skill is one of the primary considerations. Stegner's gift for rendering setting and making it part of the plot itself was probably the thing we most appreciated as a group, and that is largely because we live in the area just south of where Stegner places it, and its natural elements are second nature to us. In other words, it made us savor our place in time and geography.

We are all old enough to have lived during the sixties, and some to have actually participated in that turbulent era. The fact is that the sixties are very much still alive in Santa Cruz, where we live, and the conflict between the hardened older man and the naive but somewhat arrogant younger one who worms his way into the narrator's life is something we face as a community as much as individually. Many Jim Pecks of our own day have made the downtown streets of Santa Cruz their home, and pose a similar problem for the upstanding citizenry as Jim Peck did for Joe Allston. Collectively, we find them an affront and yet no one quite has the heart or the good enough excuse to kick them off the land, which was Allston's dilemma as well. If I sometimes sense that one 'incident' would be all it would take to send them all packing, this also parallels the novel.

I tried out the point that none of us would probably like the saintly Marian much if we actually had to live with her, but the group didn't really buy that. I'm not sure I buy it myself. In some ways she is a model of what we should be. But it's interesting to note that she was certainly as naive as Jim Peck was, though all her faults are excused and all of his are excoriated. To me she remains to some extent a person whose philosophy not only won out over her own common sense but bent other people to her will as well, against their own best and probably better judgement.

No, I must stand by my own view of things.I probably wouldn't have liked her.