Short stories 31-35

“Eftir spennufallið,” by Þórarinn Eldjárn. From Ó fyrir framan. A nicely imagined and humorous modern retelling of the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall. Recommended if you read Icelandic.

“The Tapestried Chamber”, by Sir Walter Scott. From Classic Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Stories. A fine example of a 19th century ghost story that manages to come across as if it were a real story, so understated and realistic is the horror. Recommended.

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, by Ambrose Bierce. From A Treasury of American Horror Stories. A terrifyingly effective horror story. Highly recommended.

“The Gentle Boy”, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. From Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s Tales. A sentimental story about religious persecution. Not one of Hawthorne’s best.

“The Entertainer and the Entrepreneur”, by W.D. Valgardson. From The Divorced Kid’s Club. A moral tale about prejudice, for kids.

Reading report for January 2010

January has ended and in addition to the 22 books I have finished I have read enough short stories to fill a volume or two.

In the challenges, I reduced the TBR challenge stack by 11 books and read 2 Top Mystery Challenge books. What was unusual this month was that none of the challenges overlapped – the top mysteries were ones I acquired less than a year ago and so didn’t qualify for the TBR challenge.

I only managed to read 1 Icelandic book, but have plans to do better in February.

9 books were non-challenge (counting the Icelandic book, which didn't qualify for the TBR challenge), mostly books I knew I wouldn’t read at all if I didn’t finish them soon, books I took a peek at and got pulled in by, and one I started on the flight home from India and had been savouring for nearly 2 months.

I went on a Ngaio Marsh mini-glom and read 4 of her Roderick Alleyn books. I think I may very well finish the series before the end of the year. As to genres, I read my usual dose of mysteries, several romances and the usual smattering of various other genres.

I’d say this is a pretty good start to my reading year ;-)

I started working again at the beginning of last week after nearly 4 months of no work. The nature of the job is such that I will be attentively reading, proofing and translating all day long, so I may not have much energy left for fun reading when I get home, at least until I fall into a routine. We will have to see.

The annual reading report for 2009 is in post-production and should be finished soon.

The Books:
Lydia Adamson: Dr. Nightingale comes Home Mystery, murder
Alice Albinia: Empires of The Indus Travelogue, history
Belle de Jour : The Intimate Adventure of a London Call Girl Memoir, prostitution
Bjarni Thorarensen : Kvæði (Ísl. úrvalsrit) Poetry
Tom Clancy: The Hunt for Red October Thriller
Albert B. Feldstein: The Portable Mad Humour
Lori Foster: The Winston Brothers, Wildand Say No to Joe? Romance (modern)
Julie Garwood: Shadow Dance Romantic thriller (modern)
Georgette Heyer: False Colours Romance (historical); Why Shoot A Butler? Mystery, murder
Ngaio Marsh: Hand in Glove; Dead Water; Death at the Dolphin, and Clutch Of Constables. Mystery, murder, police
Sister Carol Anne O‘Marie: Death takes up a Collection Mystery, murder
Sharyn McCrumb: If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him Mystery (including murder), legal
Naomi Novik: Temeraire: The Throne of Jade Fantasy, alternative reality, historical
Jane Sullivan: The Matchmaker's Mistake Romance (modern)
Josephine Tey: The Franchise Affair Mystery
J.R.R Tolkien & various artists: Hugarlendur Tolkiens Fantasy art and illustration

Short stories 26-30

“Tarnhelm” by Hugh Walpole. From The Midnight Reader. An atmospheric chilling story.

“Þrándur” by Björnstene Björnsson. From Sögur frá Noregi. A story laden with metaphor about a boy who is a natural on the violin.

“Viðsnúnings hressandi hristingur”, by Þórarinn Eldjárn.

“Women are the scourge of the earth”, by Frances Molloy. From Wildish Things. A chilling account of an abusive relationship. Recommended.

"The case of the Middle-aged Wife" by Agatha Christie. A little piece of problem-solving by Mr. Parker Pyne.

And the 2010 Bibliophilic Books Challenge

This one is by Lesley of the A Life in Books blog. The 2010 Bibliophilic Books Challenge is simply to read a given number of bibliobooks during the year 2010. Since I generally read a number of bibliobooks each year anyway, I will be bold and join the Bibliomaniac part of the challenge, which is to read twelve books that have to do with books or reading, in the course of 2010.

As with the Global Reading Challenge (see previous post), I will try to read as many books as possible from my TBR stack and thus combine both these outside challenges with by own TBR challenge.

2010 Global Reading Challenge

I have joined the 2010 Global Reading Challenge. Dorte of DJs Krimiblog had an idea to expand her reading horizons and has invited other bloggers to join in.

For starters I will be going for the easy challenge, but who knows: I may upgrade to the medium or even the expert challenge.

First thing I will do is look through my TBR books to see if I have books that fulfil the stipulations of the challenge. I know I have books from Europe, North-America, Australasia and Asia, but I may have to look further afield for books from South-America and Africa. However, I would like to read authors that are new to me, so I will probably have to visit the library for a book from Australasia.

Short stories 21-25

“The Signalman”, by Charles Dickens. From The Penguin Book of English Short Stories. A typical Victorian creepy story. Well told but too predictable to give one goosebumps.

“Forbidden Things”, by Marcia Muller. From The Mysterious West. A mystery story about a family tragedy, well written but predictable.

“Harvest“, by Gay Longworth. From Big Night Out. A clever retelling of a well-known urban legend. Recommended.

“Lúlli og leiðarhnoðað”, by Þórarinn Eldjárn. From Ó fyrir framan. A fun little story based on a folk-tale phenomenon: a way-finding ball of string.

“Tarnhelm”, by Hugh Walpole. From The Midnight Reader. A very good supernatural tale with just the right amount of creepiness. Recommended.

Empires of the Indus: The Story of a river by Alice Albinia

Year published: 2008
Genre: Travel, history

In this book, the author begins her journey at the mouth of the Indus river, moving up river and backwards in time and exploring the history, archaeology and geology of this long and immensely important river that flows through three countries: from its source near Mount Kailash in Tibet, through the Indian state of Ladakh and down the length of Pakistan to the sea.

This is a perfect combination of travelogue and history that should be read by any woman who fears travelling alone, as well as anyone who is interested in the history of the region and in adventurous travel off the beaten track. It’s also a must for river fanatics.

It took me a long time to finish, nearly 2 months, but that was because I felt that each chapter needed to be properly digested and considered before I moved on to the next, and not because of anything else. It is well written, and while scholarly, it is neither dry nor boring. Recommended. 5 stars.

There is an official website for this book. Visit it for supplementary materials, such as photographs and audio recordings the author made of people performing traditional songs.

Short stories 16-20

“The Veiled Lady” from 13 For Luck by Agatha Christie. Hercule Poirot solves another case. Not one of the good ones.

“In and Out”, by Freya North. From Girl’s Night In. A funny little story about not letting a man interfere with women's friendships.

“The Genuine Tabard”, by E.C. Bentley. From Trent Intervenes. An interesting story about very bold criminals.

“Myndin”, by Þórarinn Eldjárn. From Ó fyrir framan. A funny story about a painting, by Iceland’s greatest short story writer. Recommended.

“Five Hundred Carats”, by George Griffith. From More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. A rather lame story about a highly risky way of committing a crime that didn’t work out completely as envisioned by the criminals.

Short stories 11-15

"Death in the Dawntime", by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre. From The Mammoth Book of Historical Detectives. A detective story set among Australian aborigines, about 35.000 years B.C.E. Interesting.

"The Return of the Crusader", by Anonymous. From The Penguin Book of French Short Stories. A very short 15th century story about infidelity. Originally an oral tale, the period's equivalent of an urban legend, told to amuse people at court.

"Parties Unknown by the Jury: Or, the Valour of my Tongue", by P.M. Carlson. From Women on the Case. A historical crime story, partly based on a real lynching case. Interesting voice and well written.

"The Ruff", by Michael and Mollie Hardwick. From 50 Great Horror Stories. A nasty, haughty girl gets a comeuppance. Historical, Poe-esque and pretty good.

"Beauty and the Beast". Fairy tale from Best-loved Folktales of the World. This is the longest and most detailed version I have read of this story. Recommended.

Top mysteries challenge review: The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

I must admit up front that I have a soft spot for Josephine Tey, so you may expect some prejudice in the review ;-)

Year of publication: 1949
Genre: Mystery
Type of mystery: Kidnapping
Type of investigator: Lawyer
Setting & time: England, contemporary

A teenage girl accuses two women of having kidnapped her and held her against her will for a month. The case seems to be solid, but solicitor Robert Blair, retained by the accused to speak for them, is convinced of the innocence of his clients and sets out to prove it.

This is the second Tey novel I read that effectively breaks one of S.S. Van Dine's detective story writing rules, and I admire her for making it so readable, because it is rule no. 7 that is broken: There shall be but one crime, and that crime is murder (my rephrasing).

It is difficult to sustain reader interest in a mystery without a corpse for nearly 300 pages, but Tey not only pulls it off, she does it so well that I could hardly put the book down. It is written with her customary light hand, humorous and full of interesting characters, twists and other unexpected developments, and it is realistic and condemning in its depiction of mob justice and the power of the press to influence public opinion and pass judgement on people before they have ever been brought to trial. As a matter of fact, I think it should be recommended reading for anyone studying the mass media, because of how realistically it depicts the modern version of a media-fuelled witch hunt. 4+ stars.

P.S. The novel is apparently inspired by the real-life case of Elizabeth Canning.

Books left in challenge: 86

Place on the list(s): CWA #11; MWA # 81.

Awards and nominations: None I know of.

Top mysteries challenge review: The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy

(The challenge really should be called the best crime a books challenge, since the American list also features thrillers, but it’s too late to change it now).

I loved thrillers when I was a teenager, and read everything I could get my hands on by the likes of Alistair MacLean, Desmond Bagley and Ken Follett. Since then, the thrillers I have read have mostly also been mysteries, caper stories or police procedurals, and it wouldn’t be stretching it too far to say that this one is a caper story – albeit a deadly serious one that deals with treason.

Year of publication: 1984
Series and no.: Jack Ryan, #1.
Genre: Thriller, military.
Type of hero: CIA man.
Setting & time: USA, the Soviet Union and the Atlantic ocean, contemporary.

A Soviet submarine captain and his officers steal the Red October, a nuclear submarine, and sail it towards the USA with the intention of defecting and handing the USSR's most advanced nuclear missile submarine to the Americans. CIA analyst Jack Ryan is brought in when the Soviet fleet suddenly starts sailing towards the USA at full speed and from that and some intelligence information he rightly deduces the captain’s intentions and gets sent to sea to monitor the submarine’s progress and help make it possible for the USA to keep the sub and any crew members who want to defect. A cat and mouse (or maybe shark and tuna?) game follows, with the Soviet fleet in hard pursuit of the Red October and the Americans and British keeping a close eye on them.

This is a fine thriller, long but never dull. The technical information that it is necessary to include so that someone with relatively little knowledge of such things can understand what is going on is parcelled out in small doses so that it never gets to be tedious. Most characters are only given a minimum of fleshing-out, but in most cases that is all that is needed, because the story is very much plot driven. I only wish that the exposition passages about some of the key characters, especially Ramius, had been kept short and the information parcelled out in small doses like the technical information. Not a book for the claustrophobic. 4 stars.

Books left in challenge: 87

Place on the list(s): MWA # 84.
Awards and nominations: None I know of.

The next 5 short stories

“Mademoiselle Fifi”, by Guy de Maupassant, from Mademoiselle Fifi and other stories. A story about a bad guy getting what's coming to him from an unlikely source. Too melodramatic for my taste.

“Problem at Pollensa Bay”, by Agatha Christie, from Problem at Pollensa Bay and other stories. An entertaining little story about young love, starring Mr. Parker Pyne. Okay, but not outstanding.

“The Nutcracker”, by Ben Travers. From A Century of Humour. A story about young love and naughty boys. Not particularly funny, but well told and would make a nice humorous short film.

“The Jigsaw”, by Leonard R. Gribble. From A Century of Detective Stories. A nice little detective story, a twist on the jigsaw puzzle urban legend.

„The Ring of Thoth“, by Arthur Conan Doyle. From Tales of Unease. A short creepy story from the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Recommended.

Review of the His Dark Materials trilogy

Originally published in June and July 2004, in 7 parts
Book 23 in my first 52 books challenge.


Entry 1:
Title: The Golden Compass
Alternative (British) title: Northern Lights
Author: Philip Pullman
Year published: 1995
Genre: Fantasy, children’s
Where got: Public library

I've wanted to read this book for a long time, but not enough to buy it (I may change my mind after reading it). Finally found a copy when I went exploring the suburban branches of the Reykjavik city library. I'm looking forward to start reading it.


Entry 2:
Reading progress:
I'm about halfway into The Golden Compass and it's great. A captivating story, and yet not so much that I feel I need to read it all in one sitting. Much better written and plotted than the last two Harry Potters, and although it is supposed to be a story for children/teenagers, it's still enjoyable for adults.

Entry 3:

Finished the book – what a great story. I was completely hooked once I got to part two.

The Story:
Lyra, a young girl, has grown up pretty much wild in Jordan College, Oxford. This Oxford is located in an alternate reality world that is in some ways like our own, and in some ways vastly different. Like people have dæmons, creatures that are like projections of their master’s soul, are inseperable from them and die with them. When “Gobblers” begin to steal children and take Lyra’s friend Roger, she desperately wants to do something about it. When a gang of “gyptians” (like gypsies in our world) decide they want to go and find the children and free them (having lost many of their own to the Gobblers), Lyra goes with them to the Arctic region to help out. After adventures involving Tartars, an armoured bear, witches and scientists, she ends up on another quest that will take her on to even greater adventures, for she has a Destiny she is unaware of.

Technique and plot:
I think I will wait to discuss this until I have read the whole story – two more books: The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass.



Rating:
This is quite a good book, wonderful storytelling, both for children and adults, but I will not give it any stars yet. I will rate all three books together as a whole.

Entry 4:

Title:The Subtle Knife
Author: Philip Pullman
Year published: 1997
Genre: Fantasy, children’s
Where got: Public library

Managed to get both parts two and three from the library. Have already finished this one, and I don’t think that once I start I’ll be able to stop reading part three until I’m finished.

The Story:
After tragically losing her best friend and walking from her world into another one that is full of children but no adults, Lyra has found another friend, Will, who comes from our world. He has a destiny of some sort waiting for him just as she has. The golden compass has told Lyra that she must help Will find his father. A man steals the compass and sends Lyra out to find the Subtle Knife, which he says he will exchange the compass for. The two children set out to search for it and find it in the world where they first met. The knife chooses Will as its bearer. It can cut through the fabric of reality and open windows into other world, and this the children put to good use when they realize that the man isn’t going to return the compass. After reacquiring the compass, they set out to find Will’s father, hunted by both friendly and unfriendly forces. It’s a matter of touch and go, which will catch up with them first. Lyra’s destiny is revealed to the readers and to the children’s enemies, but the children are unaware of it, although they know that it is something to do with Lyra’s father and the war he is planning to wage on The Authority (God). Will’s destiny is tied to the knife.

Ends with a cliffhanger…I’m looking forward to see what happens next.


Entry 5:
Title:The Amber Spyglass
Author: Philip Pullman
Year published: 2000
Genre: Fantasy, children’s
Subgenres: Alternate realities, parable
Where got: Public library


SPOILERS ahead. If you don’t want to know how the story ends, DON’T READ ANY FURTHER!

The story:
The conclusion to the trilogy. The story is really much too complex to summarize in a few sentences, but I’ll try anyway.

At the beginning of the story, Lyra is in the power of her mother who has suddenly been filled with a desperate need to keep her safe. This she does by hiding in cave in the Himalayas and keeping Lyra asleep so she can’t run away. It’s up to Will and some unexpected companions to save her. Meanwhile, everything is set for war between the forces of Lord Asriel (Lyra’s father) and those of the Regent – an angel who rules in the name of The Authority. Mary Malone, a scientist Lyra met briefly in Will’s world, has learned that she has a role to play and sets out to find Lyra. Lyra and Will set out to find the world of the dead and end up setting free the spirits of the dead. In the process they lose contact with their dæmons, and it takes a long time for them to find them again, but when they do, they are in a world where Mary Malone is waiting for them, ready to play the part of the snake to Lyra’s Eve and fulfill the witches’s prophesy…

Entry 6:

His Dark Materials trilogy – Review:
S-P-O-I-L-E-R-S
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Technique and plot: All three books.
Although published as a trilogy, His Dark Materials is one epic story, a brilliantly written extended religious metaphor, a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress from Innocence to Experience. It starts out innocuously, like a snowflake, with wild-child Lyra going off to the Arctic to rescue her best friend, and ends like an avalanche, with the the death of The Authority (the Church, or perhaps God as the Church sees him/her/it) and the fall of Eve as replayed by Lyra and Will. A lot of work and imagination has obviously gone into this book, and I’m sure it will be seen as Pullman’s greatest work for years and perhaps decades to come.

I loved the first two books, but found the third too long and uneven – the story could have been told in fewer words. It was melodramatic in places, and the continuity suffered because there were so many different viewpoints that were being explored. It never held my attention for more than a few chapters at a time, whereas I read books one and two through with only a few short breaks. The third book definitely didn’t live up to my expectations. All in all, I liked the story, but volume three could have done with some pruning.

Rating:
A sometimes delightful and gripping, sometimes melodramatic and overdone fantasy adventure. 4+ stars.

Entry 7:
His Dark Materials links:

Here’a bunch of links to websites about the His Dark Materials trilogy:
Pullman’s official website
Annotations for all three books (includes excerpts)

Reading report for December 2009

December was an unusually varied reading month for me.

Mysteries have dominated my reading for the last 10-15 years or so, but this month I only read two of them.

I have always enjoyed the Ripley’s Believe It or Not books, even when I find information in them I know or suspect to be wrong. I keep a couple of them in my bathroom for myself and guests to browse through when things get boring.

Two anthologies of poems and verse made it into my reading in December. Lately I have been reading a lot more poetry than I have done since I was in my teens, and I am becoming reacquainted with my favourite poets and versifiers in my native language and discovering new ones.

I mentioned the diary anthology in my last entry. Spending a year reading it took willpower, especially when the editor put in entries by the same person several days in a row when an interesting mini-story was to be told. I decided that it would be interesting to explore some of the excerpted diaries better. For example, I will definitely take a better look at Samuel Pepys.

I have always enjoyed short stories, and ended up reading two collections, one an anthology and the other by P.G. Wodehouse, an author I have for some reason always appreciated more for his short stories than for his novels. The last book on the list, Taxi might also be called a short story collection. It is a compilation of true stories told to the writer by 32 Icelandic taxi drivers, and the stories range from shocking to tragic to funny.

Then there were Pratchett and Wyndham, both books I have already reviewed, and one gorgeous photography book by one of Iceland’s best press photographers, Ragnar Axelsson. Look up Faces of the North if you want to check out the book.

The books:
Ripley's Believe It or Not (trivia)
Simon Brett (editor):The Faber Book of Diaries (anthology, diaries)
Grímur Thomsen:Ljóðmæli (verse)
Ngaio Marsh:False Scent (mystery)
Terry Pratchett:Unseen Academicals (fantasy)
Ragnar Axelsson:Andlit norðursins (photography)
Satyajit Ray:Incident on the Kalka Mail (mystery)
Various authors:Þrisvar þrjár sögur (short stories)
Various authors:Barnaljóð (verse; theme: children)
P.G. Wodehouse:A Few Quick Ones (short stories, humorous)
John Wyndham:Trouble with Lichen (science fiction, satire)
Ævar Örn Jósepsson (Skrásetjari):Taxi: 101 saga úr heimi íslenskra leigubílstjóra (true stories)

A look at the first 5 short stories

I know I said I wasn’t going to review them, but I couldn’t resist writing something about them, if only to say which ones I would recommend.

• "The Two Brothers" by unknown (Ancient Egypt, written down about 1400 B.C.), from Great Short Stories of the World. Did you think the short story was a recent phenomenon? Well, apparently, it’s not. This narrative has all the crucial elements of a short story, while also being a mythological text that tells a story of human destiny and heavenly justice. In fact, parts of the story remind me of the Biblical story of Potiphar's wife, and they probably have a common root. For me, it is mostly interesting because I am interested in Egyptian mythology – I wouldn’t recommend it as pleasure reading. I have a gripe with the translation - not that I read Ancient Egyptian, but the 19th century translator not only used 17th century Biblical language, but also appears to have attempted to use some of the original writing style, resulting in strange sentences, some of which even a native speaker of English would stumble over in casual reading. Henry James would have been proud.

• "Rumpole and the Man of God" by John Mortimer, from The Trials of Rumpole. I somehow managed to miss most of the Rumpole series when it was shown on TV, but I saw enough episodes to develop a fondness for the old guy and made an effort to get my hands on the books, of which I have three. I quickly discovered that Mortimer was a master of dry English humour and good at thinking up plausible comic situations and sketching, in a few sentences, characters that seem to jump off the page fully formed. In this one Rumpole has to do some convoluted thinking to get an otherworldly clergyman out of trouble. Recommended.

• "Parris Green" by Carole Nelson Douglas. Malice Domestic is a series of books of themed short crime stories that revolve around the home and family in some way. I have already read several of the stories and picked up the book after a long break to continue where I left off. The story features Irene Adler – the same one who outwitted Sherlock Holmes in "A Scandal in Bohemia" – as the sleuth, and the story is told by Miss Huxleigh, who appears to be her Watson. It is a darkly gothic tale of an obsessed artist, and features Oscar Wilde as a side character. It intrigued me enough to make me want to check out the Irene Adler novels, so it gets the "recommended" stamp.

• "The Last Crop" by Elizabeth Jolley, from Wayward Girls and Wicked Women. Another "recommend", this time for the wicked sense of humour in the story. A teenage girl tells the story of how her mother was able to have her cake and eat it too. I want to try to get my hands on the original collection it came from, Jolley's Woman in a Lampshade.

• "Dead man‘s Mirror" by Agatha Christie. From Masterpieces of Mystery. This is a Hercule Poirot story, and I must confess that I have never particularly liked him as a character, although it hasn‘t stopped me from reading most of the Poirot novels. The story was okay, but nothing I would recommend to non-fans.

First review of the year: Dr. Nightingale Comes Home by Lydia Adamson

Genre: Mystery, cosy
Year of publication: 1994
No. in series: 1
Series detective: Dr. Deirdre “Didi” Quinn Nightingale, veterinarian
Type of mystery: Murder
Type of investigator: Amateur
Setting & time: Rural New York state, contemporary

A good friend of Didi’s is found dead, apparently mauled to death by wild dogs. His mistress claims he was murdered, but disappears before Didi can persuade her to reveal why she thinks so. By examining the crime scene photos and coroner’s report through the perspective of a vet, Didi realises that he must have been murdered, but has a hard time convincing the police that she is right, so she ends up investigating the case on her own.

This is a pretty solid cosy murder mystery with a nicely thought out plot with some unexpected twists and red herrings. The writing is plain and straightforward and gets the story across without going into flourishes of language, and the main characters are interesting. A promising start to a series – I will definitely be on the lookout for more Dr. Nightingale books.

The 365 short stories challenge

As I mentioned in my New Year’s Day message (see previous post), I am starting a personal challenge to read one short story per day for the duration of the year 2010.
This challenge arose out of two things:

1. While surfing the net for literary blogs some time last year I came across a blog dedicated to a short story reading challenge and thought "this could be something for me!"
   
2. I was looking at my bookshelves recently and realised I have several big, thick short story anthologies that I have never even opened, and several more I have read a few stories from but no more.

Most of the books are themed and only a few contain stories by a single author. Since most are anthologies, and anthologies tend to be long and not really meant to be read straight through like single author short story collections sometimes are, I decided to have several books on the go so I could choose the theme that appeals to me most at any given time. I also decided to include fairy tales in the mix, to increase the number of choices.

Once I have read them I will list the stories in the sidebar, below a list of the books (below the blog archive links). I have put in abbreviations of the book titles in front of the titles in the list and will indicate which book a story comes from in the story list by those abbreviations. For example, Great Short Stories of the World will be shortened to GSSW, and The Trials of Rumpole will be shortened to TR, and so on. I am listing year published and publisher for those interested in finding these books. I have no plans right now to review any of the stories, but I will mention any that I especially like and if I come across a particularly good one I may review it.

Not listed are a number of Icelandic literary magazines that publish short stories.

In addition to those books I have listed, I seem to have misplaced one big fairy tale collection, one book by Alice Munro and one by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe (most of which I have read anyway), and a collection of Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories. There may be more, but I didn’t find them on my trawl through my bookshelves. I will add them and their abbreviations as I find them.

All of the books qualify for the TBR challenge and I will finish at least the short ones in the course of the year. The short stories I read for the challenge will always be new to me, although I expect I will take the opportunity to re-read some of my favourites as well.

New year, mostly the same old challenges

Happy New Reading Year!

May your year be filled with good friendship, good cheer and good reading!

I ended the year 2009 with four reading challenges on the go: the Top Mysteries challenge, the TBR challenge, the challenge to read more Icelandic books, and a fourth challenge I'm not sure I have ever mentioned here.

The Top Mysteries challenge is an ongoing project that is probably going to take me until 2012 to finish, so it will continue this year. I started with 120 books (counting one trilogy as a single book) and ended with 89, meaning I finished 26% of the listed books. This puts me right on plan, as I had hoped to reach that percentage by the end of the year.

The TBR challenge will continue as well. To recap the rules: it is a challenge to read more books than I buy, choosing books that have languished in my TBR stack for over a year.
I failed in that aim in 2009, ending up with more TBR books than ever, mostly due to BookMooch. But I am not giving up, and this year it looks like I may be able to succeed, simply because postal rates have gone up and my salary has gone down and I have stopped offering books for mooching which means that sooner or later I will run out of mooch-points with which to acquire books. Because of said salary decrease (due to a new job, and not to pay cuts) I will also have less money to spend on books, which will help me with the challenge as well.
The challenge will go on, but in modified form. Since August I have been using the arrangement of choosing 5 books that fit the rules from the TBR stack as set reading for each month, to be finished before any non-challenge books can be read and then adding more TBR books I might read to the tally as I go along, but I am changing this for the more flexible arrangement of simply choosing TBR books from the stack when I feel like reading them, trying to read at least 5 of them each month.

The read more Icelandic books challenge went pretty well until the end of September, when the sudden loss of my job derailed me from my reading plan. During October I read only what I felt like reading at any time, and since I have read most of my Icelandic books and I never went to the library, this only included one Icelandic book. In November I was in India and didn't read any. In December I was back on track, but no more than that. The final tally is 41, which is 36 more than in 2008. This is enough to make me happy even if I didn't complete the challenge, which was to finish 52 Icelandic books in 2009. I am not going to make reading Icelandic books a challenge for 2010, but I will make it my goal to read more of them than I have in recent years.

And the fourth challenge? Well, I finished it, but not without a little cheating. In 2008 I acquired a copy of The Faber Book of Diaries, an anthology of diary entries by different diary writers that spans several centuries. It happens to be arranged in the day-by-day manner of a diary, with 1-2 pages devoted to a day in the lives of anything from one to five writers. I decided to read it in the course of a year, reading each day's entries on the day of the year they describe. This I did, although I didn't take it with me on a few trips I made, and had to read several (and in one case many) day's entries to catch up (thus the cheating). I will be replacing it with the only new year-long challenge I am setting myself: To read one short story or fairy tale per day, for one year. I have a number of TBR short story collections (4 of them big, thick books) and three collections of fairy tales I would like to make headway with, so there is plenty of choice. If I really like the story of the day I will make a mention of it on this blog for others who like to read short stories, but I will (probably) not review any of them.

I will continues to participate in interesting short term and mini-challenges I might think of or come across. Here is one that I am thinking about joining.

Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett

Year published: 2009
Genre: Fantasy
Setting & time: Ankh-Morpork, can remember what year (it’s mentioned in the book)

For some reason I have not yet been able to bring myself to finish Terry Pratchett's last Discworld book, Making Money, possibly because it failed to grip me in the first chapter, and also because I do not find Moist von Lipwig that interesting a character. I had no such problem with Unseen Academicals. It is interesting from the first page, and while it didn’t turn into a must-finish all-nighter for me, I did enjoy it. The humour is less dark than it has been in several preceding books, and the book sparkles with good humour throughout, even when nasty things seem to be about to happen, are happening, or have just happened.

As with most of Pratchett’s other Discworld books, this one presents the reader with several interwoven story threads involving a number of characters that gradually come together into bigger strands and finally become one as the story nears its climax.

The plot revolves around an attempt by Lord Vetinari to tame the brutal street sport of foot-the-ball with the assistance of the wizards of Unseen University. Mix into that academic bickering and rivalry, opposing teams of rabid football supporters, young love, high fashion, the art of cooking, and the mysterious Mr. Nutt, whom lots of people want to kill on principle, and you have the usual heady mix readers have come to expect from Pratchett.

Unseen Academicals is not up in the top league of Pratchett's books, but I would need to re-read it with my literary analysis glasses on to put my finger on why. It is good, solid entertainment and gets a good solid 3+ stars from me.

P.S. I would like to read more about Dr. Hix and his department.

Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham

Year published: 1960
Genre: Science fiction, satire
Setting & time: England, mid-20th century

Two scientists discover an anti-ageing substance derived from lichen and put it to use in very different ways. When the public find out about the substance it is not, as one might expect, unanimously welcomed, and society is divided into different factions when people start to realise all the implications.

I don’t quite understand why this book is labelled as science-fiction even if a scientific discovery and its consequences are at the centre of the plot. The science is explained in simple layman terms and doesn’t dominate the plot even though it is of course the factor that sets the plot in motion. This is an interesting moral satire on British society in the mid-20th century and an intelligent examination of what might happen in such a society if the people discovered that it was possible to double their expected lifespan.

This is a fun read rather than a funny one, as the undertone is quite serious while the tone is kept light. Recommended.

Rating: 4+ stars.

Wednesday reading experience # 52

Read a biography or autobiography of someone you admire or are curious to know more about.

That concludes the Wednesday reading experiences/suggestions. I will not be continuing this feature in 2010.

Review of Sex and the City

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Originally published in June 2004, in 2 parts
Book 22 in my first 52 books challenge.

Author: Candace Bushnell
Year published: 1996
Genre: Social life and customs
Sub-genre(s): Sex, dating, relationships
Where got: Public library

Came across this while browsing in the library and decided to give it a go. It will be interesting to see what the book that spawned the hit TV series is like.

The Story:
There isn’t really a story as such, this being mostly a collection of articles about the mating habits of New Yorkers that appeared in Bushnell’s newspaper column, but some of the same people pop up repeatedly and you get to know something about them and their relationships with each other and others. Sex, dating, marriage and the attendant social rituals are the order of the day, and are sometimes investigated through conversations between people comparing notes on the subject and sometimes as little story vignettes that illustrate the subject. Faithful viewers of the TV series will recognise most of the subjects: “modelizers”, psycho moms, swinging, serial daters, toxic bachelors and perennially single women, and of course Carrie’s relationship with Mr. Big. They will also recognise many of the characters, but may be shocked to find that some of the people in the book have almost nothing in common with their namesakes from the series.

The first two-thirds or so of the book is a collection of articles about the above subjects and more, and the last chapters are mostly a chronicle of the relationship between Carrie and Mr. Big.

Technique and plot:
The book is written in a breezy, journalistic style, which is no surprise considering where the articles originally appeared. Bushnell has a good ear for dialogue and writes conversations that sound real (unlike some writers I might mention).

Although I read most of the book in one sitting, I would recommend reading it more slowly, maybe one or two chapters at a time.

Rating:
A fascinating record of New York social life in the 1990’s, and a must for everyone who loved the TV series. 3 stars.

Wednesday reading experience # 51

Read a sequel/prequel or rewrite of a famous novel that features some of the same characters but is written by a different author.

This could be, for example, a modernisation of a famous novel such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as retold in Kate Fenton’s Vanity and Vexation or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre retold as science fiction in Sharon Shinn’s Jenna Starborn.
Examples of sequels and prequels (and spin-offs) include all of Jane Austen’s books (authors include Emma Tennant and Joan Aiken) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books (authors include Laurie L. King and Nicholas Meyer).

Additionally, you can find thousands of (mostly unauthorised) short stories and some novels that have only been published on-line, written by fans (and not all of it is slash fiction). Most of it is not terribly good, but if you search hard you can find some gems among the rubble.

Some questions to consider:
How did you feel about reading about characters you knew and loved from the original, in a book written by another author?
Did the author do a good job of continuing or updating the story?
Did they try to imitate the original style and language and if so, did they succeed?
Would you read more sequels/prequels or modernisations of famous novels?

Review of The Haunting of Hill House

Originally published in June 2004, in 2 parts
Book 21 in my first 52 books challenge.

Author: Shirley Jackson
Year published: 1959
Where got: Public library
Genre: Horror
Sub-genre: Haunted house tale

I started reading this book a couple of days ago and have finished the first two chapters. Although nothing supernatural has happened yet, a subtle sense of suspense and creepiness has started to build. So far, I’m reminded of the beginning of both the TV series Rose Red and the movie The Legend of Hell House, but I guess there are limited ways in which you can start a haunted house tale.
--

Finished it this afternoon. This is a book that is best read in broad daylight – not that it kept me awake or gave me nightmares, but it took me quite a bit longer than usual to fall asleep after reading the first two chapters at bedtime.


The Story:
Two young women, Eleanor and Theodora arrive at Hill House, a fancy country mansion, to meet Dr. Montague, a researcher of psychic phenomena who has asked them to help him investigate the apparently haunted house. The fourth member of the team is Luke, the rakish future heir to the house. Right from the day of arrival, it is apparent that this is a strange and unusual place, and as the days pass on, we get to know some of the apparent reasons for the strangeness of the house described by Dr. Montague as “…disturbed…. Leprous. Sick. Any of the popular euphemisms for insanity…”
Strange things happen and hauntings occur, and the characters are affected in different ways as the house tries to scare and even possess them. Things come to a head when Mrs. Montague, the Doctor’s wife, arrives with an odious companion and tries to contact the spirits she believes are trapped in the house.

Technique and plot:
This is a marvellously spooky story, and Jackson has managed quite well to build up suspense and a sense of creepiness right from chapter one. The suspense and horror are largely psychological, and it helps that we get to follow one character’s internal thoughts and feelings and her… I don’t know if I should call it descent into madness or opening up to possession by evil, but you see her get more and more disturbed – by turns elated or upset - as the narrative moves closer to the climax.

A comic interlude lightens the atmosphere just before the climax, making the climax and denouement all the more effective. The ending is both completely predictable and a total surprise, which is no small feat for any author.


Rating:
A well crafted, suspenseful and spooky haunted house tale. 4 stars.

Information about Shirley Jackson, including a link to her brilliant short story, “The Lottery”:
Shirley Jackson

A possible inspiration for The Haunting of Hill House:
The Haunting of Borley Rectory

Books I acquired during my trip to India

Most of these books I bought or was given in India, but three I bought in London, two on the way to India and one on the way home. The first two were the guidebooks, and the third was Ulysses by James Joyce, because I couldn't find an edition in India that I liked.




Some of the books pictured had been on my wish list for varying lengths of time, others were bought on speculation because I liked the look of them. The books that it's hard to see titles or authors in the photo are, from the top:
1. Incident on the Kalka Mail by Satyajit Ray.
4. Le Morte D'Arthur, part II by Sir Thomas Mallory (I have had part I for ages but never could find part II until now).

Books number (from the top) 2, 8, 9 & 17 I was given by my friends.

Not pictured are the books that I bought, read and exchanged for other books: No Full Stops in India by Mark Tully, and The Age of Kali by William Dalrymple. Both were interesting reads and very informative about various aspects of Indian society, but neither was a book I wanted to re-read, so out they went.

Wednesday reading experience # 50

Celebrate the Christmas season with a holiday-themed read.

Any one of Charles Dickens’s Christmas novels will serve to get you in the mood. Start with A Christmas Carol, then move on to The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth. I leave it up to you whether you also read the less popular The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain.

Fannie Flagg’s A Redbird Christmas is funny and somewhat sentimental, but many of us like sentimentality around Chrismas.

Connie Willis has an excellent fantasy and science fiction themed collection titled Miracle and other Christmas Stories.

For younger readers J.R.R. Tolkien’s Father Christmas Letters is both heartwarming and funny and while Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! may have been written and drawn for children many adults find it enjoyable as well.

Christmas probably wouldn’t be complete for many Americans without "A Visit from St. Nicholas", better known as "The Night Before Christmas". This famous poem, originally anonymously published, has been attributed to Clement Clarke Moore and also to Henry Livingston, Jr. Whicever of them wrote it, it’s an entertaining little poem, lively and full of Christmas spirit.

Generally speaking, Christmas in crime stories is rather miserable due to most of them being about murder, but there is an exception: Mary Higgins Clark and her daughter Carol have written several Christmas crime stories starring Mary’s sleuth Alvirah Meehan and Carol’s sleuth Regan Reilly. These aren’t really mysteries, but rather caper stories focusing on how Alvirah and Regan foil some baddies, usually thieves or kidnappers, and tend to be frothy, fun and full of holiday cheer, and weak on mystery but usually with some suspense.
Mary started the series with Silent Night and All Through The Night, and Carol joined her for Deck the Halls, He Sees You When You're Sleeping, The Christmas Thief, Santa Cruise, and Dashing Through the Snow.

Wednesday reading experience # 49

This should of course have been published on the 9th, but I thought I had it on automatic posting and didn't even check. So here it is now, none the worse for being a little late:

Choose a major literary award, local or international, and read some books that have been given the award.

It can be any kind of award, not just literary fiction. It could, for example, be for crime writing, romance, travel writing or science, etc.

Did you agree that it should have won the award? For a fairer comparison, you could also read the books that were nominated alongside the winner and decide which one you like best and why.

Review of Closed at Dusk

Originally published in June 2004.
Book 20 in my first 52 books challenge.

Author: Monica Dickens
Year published: 1990
Where got: Bookstore (sale)
Genre: Thriller, mystery


I was going to read Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum as this week’s book, but I’m too busy right now to read such a long and dense text in only one week. Instead I have switched to another mystery that is shorter and less demanding.

I’ve read several of Monica Dickens’ children’s books and the autobiographical book One Pair of Feet, about her experiences as a nursing student during World War 2. It will be interesting to see how I like her adult fiction.


The story:
This is not a mystery as I first thought it was, but a thriller, or perhaps it might be called an insider mystery, as the reader knows who the villain is nearly the whole time. In this particular edition, the blurb cleverly gives a hint, but I at least didn’t catch on to it until I reached the chapter where the villain’s identity is revealed, and then I turned to the blurb and went “a-ha!”

Through the first chapters of the book we are gradually introduced to a family, some who live at a mansion called The Sanctuary, the rest coming there often to spend time with the family. The gardens are open to the public, because, as with many of Britain’s old landed families, they can’t afford to keep the gardens in shape without the entry fees from the public. When mysterious, apparently supernatural events start taking place, no one is sure what is happening and The Sanctuary seems posed to turn into a haunted house.


The technical points:
The story is quite well written, and the twists well worked out. It starts rather slowly, with a bit of underlying menace that is introduced through a nervous child who gets scared of the smallest things.

Unfortunately the character development is not quite as good as it should be. None of the victims in the story are really drawn as sympathetic characters. They are, in fact, rather colourless - not unsympathetic, just bland. They are so harmless and normal that you almost feel as if they deserve to be shaken up a bit, but only almost.

The villain, or should I say villainess, is the most strongly drawn character, and you do almost feel sorry for her, even if her revenge scheme is rather on the extreme side. But of course she is insane, so it no wonder. There were times when I wanted to reach out and stop her, help her to forget about her crazy scheme and get on with her life. She does become less sympathetic as the story draws nearer to the end and her scheming becomes more extreme.

This was not what I expected – I had been expecting a mystery in the vein of Agatha Christie, and this thriller element was quite unexpected, but not unpleasantly so. Dickens gives the villainess real reasons and motives and shows us her innermost feelings and thoughts, enabling us to feel sorry for her, instead of simply portraying her as an unsympathetic, rampaging madwoman like many writers would have.


Rating:
A good psycho thriller, where the villain is actually shown as a real person rather than the pure evil some authors might have been tempted to write. 3 stars.


P.S. There’s nothing like a case of the flu to keep you indoors and reading when the weather is sunny and warm. At least I’ve finished the book of the week a couple of days ahead of schedule.

Reading report for November

As might be expected I finished only a small (for me) number of books in November. They were mostly read in hotel rooms after dinner to delay sleep so I wouldn't wake up at 4 a.m. and on long train journeys when the company was less than convivial (or I had no company) and I was tired of looking at unchanging landscapes.

6 of these books are about India in one way or another. 2 are travelogues, 2 are collections of articles, and 2 are novels by Indian authors.

One of the friends I visited on my trip introduced me to R.K. Narayan – in fact she gave me the book, and I thoroughly enjoyed my first visit to Malgudi. Satyajit Ray I discovered on her bookshelves and subsequently bought another book by him that I have just finished reading. They are written for children but are thoroughly enjoyable for adult mystery lovers and beautifully translated.
My friend also recommended Bill Aitken to me and I bought one of his books that I still haven‘t read. Dalrymple and Shand are old acquaintances of mine. I have enjoyed other books by both of them and will continue to buy their books.
Tully I was new to. I found his analysis of Indian society and politics very convincing. As to the remaining 2 books, Eeyore is my favourite Milne character and Nora Roberts never fails to deliver a good dose of thrills and romance.

Bill Aitken: Divining the Deccan - A motorbike to the heart of India (travelogue)
William Dalrymple: The Age of Kali - Indian travels and encounters (collection of articles)
A.A. Milne (and others); Ernest H. Shepard (drawings): Eeyore´s Gloomy Little Instrustion Book (self-help, humour)
R.K. Narayan: Swami and Friends (novel)
Satyajit Ray: The Curse of the Goddess (mystery)
Nora Roberts: Birthright (romance)
Mark Shand: River Dog - A journey down the Brahmaputra (travelogue)
Mark Tully: No Full Stops in India (collection of articles)

Reading report for October

I´m back from a great holiday in India.

Here is the reading report for October. I will post the one for November soon, plus a photo of my book acquisitions from India and possibly some reviews.

I only read one Top Mystery in October, and only one Icelandic book, but I did quite well in the TBR challenge, with 7 books altogether.

Árni Gunnarsson (text) and various photographers: Eldgos í Eyjum (documentary)
M.C. Beaton: The Skeleton in the Closet (mystery)
Suzanne Brockmann: Force of Nature (romantic thriller)
Edmund Crispin: Frequent Hearses (murder mystery)
Jasper Fforde: The Well of Lost Plots (futuristic fantasy)
Nicki Grihault: Culture Smart! India (cultural guide)
Thomas Hardy: Under the Greenwood Tree (romantic novel)
HRF Keating: The Murder of the Maharajah (murder mystery)
Sarah Macdonald: Holy Cow! (travelogue)
Ngaio Marsh: Singing in the Shrouds (murder mystery)
Stuart Mclean: Stories from the Vinyl Café (short stories)
Ellis Peters: Death to the Landlords (murder mystery)
Unknown: The Epic of Gilgamesh (classic literature)
Various: Ripley's Believe it or Not (trivia)

Additionally I read large parts of the Lonely Planet Guide to Rajastan, Delhi and Agra.

Review of The Stainless Steel Rat

Originally published in May and June 2004, in 3 parts.
Book 19 in my first 52 books challenge.

Entry 1:

Author: Harry Harrison
Published: 1966 (this edition: 1997)
Where got: Bookstore, sale
Genre: Science fiction, action

I’ve wanted to read this book since I read and enjoyed Harry Harrison’s short story “The Golden Years of the Stainless Steel Rat” in the comic fantasy collection The Flying Sorcerers.

This is classic science fiction, as can be seen from how long this book has been in print. First published in 1966, it is still being reprinted.

Harry Harrison’s official website.


Entry 2:

Progress report:
So far so good. This is not as funny as I had thought it would be after reading the short story, but maybe the stories get funnier in the later books (did I mention this is the first in a series?). The style is very straightforward and reminds me of classic macho tough guy detective stories. The story is plot driven and there has been action on nearly every page so far. The Stainless Steel Rat is not having a good time where I am reading right now – he’s got serious female trouble.

Entry 3:

Finished the book on my lunch break today. Am planning on starting to read next week’s book tonight, as it is a long one and will probably require me doing some research on the side.


The story:
At the beginning of the story, career criminal James Bolivar diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, is in the process of escaping from the scene of his latest crime. By chapter 4 he’s been recruited – reluctantly (his reluctance, not theirs) - by the Special Corps, an elite team of special police whose job it is to control and prevent intergalactic crime. When a mission goes wrong and a highly dangerous and attractive criminal escapes, Jim is determined to see the mission through to the end, even if it means abandoning his post and becoming a renegade from the Corps. The rest of the book describes how he tracks down his criminal and what happens afterwards.

The technical points:
As I have already mentioned, the story is plot driven and the narrative style is in the vein of the classic tough guy detective story. The narrative is in the first person. There isn’t much dialogue, but what there is serves to carry on the action. There are several twists, some more unexpected than others. The humour is in the sometimes ironic situations Jim finds himself in, and the author also had fun with names, some of which are puns and others which are only funny if you know a bit of German. The writing is hardly what I would call sparkling, but there’s never a dull moment, and Jim is the kind of character you can’t help but like.

I do have one gripe with the book, and that is that the story is not completely resolved (for me). Having read a short story about Jim in his golden years, I know something of what takes place after this book ends, and now it will nag me until I have read the rest. If you have been following this blog for any length of time, you will know that I hate stories that spill out into several books. Oh, well, at least they are all published and in print and the library has some of them. Off to the library I go…

Rating:
A sci-fi classic that should interest sci-fi, action and detective story fans. 3 stars.

Wednesday reading experience #48

If you have a favourite genre and a favourite sub-genre within that genre (say historical mysteries or paranormal romances), choose a different sub-genre you are less familiar with and try that (e.g. forensic mysteries or Amish romance).

I find I often stick to a comfort zone in my choice of reading materials, concentrating on one or two particular sub-genres and tending to ignore the others, but my original 52 books challenge had me reading out of my comfort zone and I have tried to continue that practice. It has introduced me to authors, genres and sub-genres I might otherwise never have discovered.

Review of The Godmother

Author: Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Year published: 1994
Where got: Public library
Genre: Fantasy (real world, alternate reality/possible future), fairy tale

As I mentioned yesterday, I went to the library to look for a suitable romance to review so I could keep my promise to choose reading material outside my comfort zone. Found no romance I liked the look of, but came home with The Godmother, Stormy Weather by Carl Hiaasen and Foucaults’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco.

I didn’t know what to expect when I started reading The Godmother, never having read anything by Scarborough before. What got my attention was the the title and the cover , which shows a middle-aged woman (who resembles Lauren Baccall) with a knowing smile and a pose of authority and confidence, surrounded by graphics that suggest magic and interposed on an image of the Seattle skyline (immediately recogniseable because of the Space Needle). Woohoo, I thought. Magic in the modern world. Nice!

I finished it in one sitting, around 2 in the morning and went to sleep with my head full of fairy godmothers and talking cats.

What follows might be considered by some to be SPOILERS, so if you want this book to totally surprise you, please stop reading here and skip to the rating at the bottom.

The story:
In an alternate reality or possible near future, Seattle social worker Rose Samson is toiling under an unfair official policy that is turning the place into a hopeless hell for the homeless and the abused. One day she cynically whishes for a fairy godmother for the city, and is surprised and incredulous when one turns up.

A lost teenager, two homeless young people, a street gang, dangerous pedophiles and two missing children are some of the things Rose has to deal with, aided by her police officer love-interest and the godmother, Felicity Fortune. Felicity doesn’t use much magic, only resorting to it when things get tough. Instead she relies on her psychic talent and a widespread net of connections among people she has previously helped.

A savvy reader will immediately recognise several fairy tales in their modern incarnations. Some of the ones I identified were Cinderella, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Hanzel and Gretel, Blubeard and Puss in Boots.
Scarborough isn’t afraid of describing violence – people get beaten up, poisoned and sexually molested, but in the end the good and the innocent get the good they deserve and the bad get their comeuppance. Oh, and there is a little romance as well.

The technical points:
The story is well written and well plotted with some minor flaws in the plot. The beginning is somewhat slow but it’s necessary in order to introduce all the different characters and narrative threads that come together later in the story. Although there is a fair amount of violence, it never becomes too graphic, and the author handles it sensitively.

Sometimes I thought she was being a little too simplistic or not clear enough. For example it is never really explained why the evil toad decided to help bring one of the godmother’s good causes to a happy ending (unless it was just from a desire to be kept safe until he could become human again), and the reasons the author gives as to why Rose’s accusations against the bad guys are unlikely to be believed seem unlikely to hold up in a court of law when there is so much physical evidence to support them.

Aside from these minor flaws, this was a good read and a gripping story, but not one I am likely to want to re-read.

Rating: A modern fairy tale with social conscience. Recommended for everyone who likes fairy tales. 3 stars.

Wednesday reading experience #47

Read some travel tales, real or fictional.

If you’re wondering where to start, you can start by browsing through my travel book reviews.
Then, you can check out the Wikipedia article on the subject.

Review of The Professor and the Madman

Originally published in 2 parts, in May 2004.
Book 17 in my first 52 books challenge.

Full title: The Professor and the Madman: A tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Author: Simon Winchester
Published: 1998
Genre: History, biography, lexicography
Where got: National library

This book is about two men who worked on the making of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) and their longstanding relationship. What got me interested in it was the title. We will have to see if the book lives up to it.

The story:
The book touches upon several subjects, but the core story is that of two men who were influential in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. One was Professor James Murray, the longest-serving editor of the OED, and the other was one of the most useful contributors of quotations to the book, Dr. William C. Minor, an inmate in a lunatic asylum (as they were called in those days). The life stories of both men are told in brief, showing how Prof. Murray rose from humble origins to become a philologist and a professor, and looking at Dr. Minor's career as an army surgeon in the American civil war and exploring the possible causes of his insanity. The history of British lexicography is touched upon, and also the conception and launching of the biggest lexicographical project ever undertaken: the Oxford English Dictionary.

The story-lines all come together in the second half of the book and we follow the relationship between Murray and Minor to the end, look at Minor's final years when he was finally released and sent home to the USA, and the OED's history is followed (in brief) up to modern times. It's really amazing how so much material made it into so short a book without becoming superficial: it is only 242 pages, including the preface, postscript and other end material. The only thing I missed was a bibliography.

The technical points:
This is another brilliantly written popular history book that reads like a novel (see my review of Seabiscuit). The narrative method takes some getting used to - at one point I became rather annoyed with the author for what I saw as over-usage of flashbacks, taking the reader back in time and to a different subject in every chapter and sometimes within chapters - but of course he had a good reason for telling the story in this way: There are so many narrative strands that have to be explored before they all come together that it would have been impossible to do it differently. I love the way each chapter is prefaced with one or more entries from the OED, explaining words that are pertinent to the subject of the chapter.

Rating: A fascinating snippet of history that is quite capable of gripping the reader until the end. 4 stars.

Wednesday reading experience #46

Get to know the roots of your favourite literary genre.

There exist histories of most of the popular genres, and a good librarian can recommend one to you.

Review of A Hat Full of Sky

Originally published in 2 parts, in May 2004.
Book 16 in my first 52 books challenge.

Author:Terry Pratchett
Published: 2004
Where got: Amazon.co.uk
Genre: Fantasy, children's

This book was delivered by the mailman on Friday afternoon, and I had to restrain myself not to start reading until after dinner. Finished reading it around midnight. I am going to read it again - more slowly - before I review it.

This is the sequel to The Wee Free Men and is the third Discworld book for children.

As usual, Pratchett has done an excellent job. The book is written for children, but is actually quite a good read for adults, who will read it at a deeper level. As this is a children's book, there are not as many allusions to other works as there are in the adult Discworld books, but there are still quite a few, some of which will be easily picked up by children and some which are better understood by adults.

Here be SPOILERS
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...

The story is slower than The Wee Free Men and not quite as laugh-aloud funny, but it is also deeper and more thought provoking and will (hopefully) teach children who read it a useful lesson about why it's bad to always act upon impulse. The previous story reminded me of Alice in Wonderland (except Tiffany is quite a lot brighter than Alice), but this one has elements of both Alien (the movie) and Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The story is not as dark as The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (the first Discworld children's book), but is still about quite a serious subject. The Nac Mac Feegle (see The Wee Free Men or Carpe Jugulum) play an important part and provide many of the funniest jokes. As in the previous book, Pratchett has not made the reading too easy - you sometimes have to read the Feegle's dialogue out loud (in a Scottish accent if you can manage it) in order to fully understand it.

Pratchett writes realistically about the feelings and thoughts of eleven year-old witch-in-training Tiffany Aching. I remember feeling some of the things Tiffany does when I was at her age. The inclusion of Granny Weatherwax is a good touch and I recommend for anyone who wants full enjoyment from reading this story to have read not only The Wee Free Men, but also the short story "The Sea and Little Fishes", which introduces the Witch Trials and the character of Letice Earwig and explains why Granny doesn't like her.

Rating: Excellent book, recommended to anyone who likes fantasy, fairy tales and/or is a fan of Granny Weatherwax. 5 stars.

Wednesday reading experience #45

Read some of Jules Verne's books.

I have a particular fondness for A Journey to the Center of the Earth, because it partly takes place in Iceland, and for Around the World in Eighty Days, which is partly responsible for my love of travelling.

Review of Icelandic Food and Cookery

Book 15 in my first 52 books challenge.
Originally published in 3 parts in May 2004.


Entry 1:

Author: Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir
Year published: 2002
Where got: public library
Genre: Food, recipes, social history

Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir is at the moment Iceland's most famous cookery book author who is not a chef. Her previous two cookery tomes, Matarást (Love of Food) and Matreiðslubók Nönnu (Nanna's Cookbook) are veritable food bibles. The first is an encyclopedia of food, ingredients, cookery methods, kitchen science, cookery terms, food history etc. etc., and the second is a collection of over 3000 recipes from all over the world. Both are unfortunately only available in Icelandic.

Icelandic Food and Cookery is Nanna's first cookery book written in English (to my knowledge). It focuses on food that may be called Icelandic, both traditional and modern. This book is of special interest to me because what Nanna is doing with this book is exactly what I have been doing with my cooking website, namely to introduce Icelandic cuisine to an international audience.
---

Here is one of the downsides to library books: you never know what condition they're going to be in. Every time I open this particular copy, the stink of stale cigarette smoke wafts up to meet me. Not the nicest thing when you're thinking about food.
Aaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrr gggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh!


Entry 2:

This is more than just a regular cookbook. The first section offers a short history of food and eating habits in Iceland, an introduction to Icelandic festive food and a listing of many of the festive occasions available to Icelanders and the traditional foods that go with them. A second section lists some of the ingredients in the recipes and in the case of ingredients largely unknown to Americans*, like skyr and hartshorn, there are suggestions as to where they can be got from and also what substitutes can be used.

The recipe section is divided into the usual categories. With each recipe there is a short text where the author explains why the recipe was chosen for the book and in the case of traditional recipes she often recounts some memories she has about the dish.


*The book is written for the American market and uses American measurements.


Entry 3:

This is by far the best and most representative Icelandic cookbook for foreigners I have seen. The recipes are a mixture of traditional and modern recipes, and the author never forgets that it is supposed to represent Icelandic home cooking. Too many Icelandic cookbooks for foreigners are full of fiddly "nouvelle" recipes that can only be called Icelandic - and not French, Italian or international - because they were invented by Icelandic chefs and use some supposedly unique Icelandic ingredient like rhubarb or fresh fish.

The recipes in this book are for the most part easy, although users in the USA may in some cases find it difficult to hunt down some of the more obscure ingredients. Hartshorn (ammonium carbonate) will certainly be hard to find, and even mundane (to Icelanders) ingredients like fresh haddock or a leg of lamb can be difficult to find. (I once searched supermarkets in eastern North Dakota from the Canadian border and all the way down to Fargo for both these ingredients and found neither. People who live in cities like New York will not have any trouble finding this stuff.)

The book was specifically written for the American market, and so the measures are American. The book is widely available from Internet bookstores, such as Powell's, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, and I have no doubt that many of the bigger bookstores in the USA will carry it.
(I didn't recheck to see if it's still in print, but I did buy a copy at the August the Deuce celebration in Mountain, ND, last year).

Some recipes include:
Icelandic halibut soup, langoustines (scampi) with garlic butter, cocktail sauce, grilled salmon, leg of reindeer with rosemary, flamed puffin breasts, glazed potatoes, velvet pudding, bilberry soup, crullers, vínarterta and leaf bread.

Rating: Great cookbook, full of easy and tasty recipes for homemade Icelandic-style food. 5+ stars.

Wednesday reading experience #44

Discover the literature of a foreign country you are not much familiar with.

I plan to see if I can find some English translations of Indian writers while I am in India, because my reading of Indian literature consists of a prose retelling of the stories told in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and a handful of books by Indian women writers who write in English*. When this posts (I am posting this ahead of time) I should have finished reading a translation of the Bhagavad Gita, which is part of the Mahabharata.

*Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Anita Desai.

Review of The Prime of Miss Jean Brody

Originally published in 2 parts, in April and May 2004.
Book 14 in my first 52 books challenge.

Author: Muriel Spark
Published: 1961
Where got: second hand shop
Genre: Literature, satire

I seem to have a knack for choosing books that have been made into movies. I wonder why?

This week's choice was made into a memorable, if rather stagy, movie, starring the wonderful Maggie Smith.

SPOILERS AHEAD!
...
..
.
..
...

Don't say I didn't warn you!

The book is about a teacher at a private girl's school in Edinburgh (Scotland) who has her own special ideas about education. She strives to turn out girls who are liberated and free thinking - or what she thinks is liberated and free thinking. Her behaviour and teaching methods are far from orthodox in the conservative environment of the school. She makes enemies among the other teachers and the headmistress is constantly trying to find an excuse to get rid of her. Her closest allies are a group of her students, six girls known as "the Brodie Set" among the other teachers and students of the school. The story is about her relationship with the girls and how the girls' perceptions of her change as they get older, and how in the end one of them betrays her fascist political ideas to the headmistress, causing her to be forced into early retirement.

This is in many ways a good story. Jean Brodie is a memorable character, somewhat unsympathetic and utterly real and understandable. She is the kind of teacher who can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how you look at it. A blessing because she readily diverges from the set curriculum to tell her students about foreign countries and other interesting subjects, and a curse because she does so much of it that learning is mostly done at home and can be reflected in bad grades. Her teaching seems to consist mostly of telling the girls about her life and travels and trying to mould each of them into the persons she believes they are destined to become. The girls seem to love her unquestioningly and form a protective shield between her and the headmistress whose attempts to get something on her become ever more desperate as the narrative continues. We are told almost from the start that she will be betrayed by one of her own girls, and when the betrayal happens, it is quite understandable why the girl did what she did, although you still feel sorry for Miss Brodie.

The narrative jumps backwards and forwards in time and is somewhat disjointed at times. It took me quite some time to figure out the age of Miss Brodie, and sometimes it wasn't clear how old the girls were either (not that it matters much).

Rating: A decent read, nothing earth-shattering, but worth taking the time. The movie is better (in my opinion) even though it is a bit stagy - Maggie Smith captures Miss Brodie perfectly. 3 stars.

Wednesday reading experience #43

Read an epistolatory novel.

These are novels written as a series of documents, e.g. letters or e-mails, blog entries, historical documents, reports, reviews, excerpts from books, newspaper clippings and diary entries. Basically anything that is traditionally written or typed, used without any connecting passages to form a narrative. It enables the author to let the characters (or a chosen number of characters) express themselves directly without having a narrator tell the story.

I have already recommended reading fictional diaries, which form part of the epistolatory genre, so a different epistolatory form is recommended.

Here are some that I have enjoyed:

• The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Written as a series of accounts of the theft of a precious stone, using different styles and voices.
  
• Letters to Alice, Upon first reading Jane Austen by Fay Weldon. What the title says, plus much more besides.
  
• Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos. A novel told entirely in letters between the characters.
  
• The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. A correspondence between a young demon and his "uncle" Screwtape, a senior demon.
  
• The Boy Next Door, Boy Meets Girl, and Every Boy's Got One, by Meg Cabot. These are frothy and fun romances, written as a series of e-mails between a number of people.
• Dracula by Bram Stoker. Written as a collection of letters, diary entries and other writings.
  
• Daddy Long-Legs and Dear Enemy, by Jean Webster. Two entertaining romances told entirely in letters.
  
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Letters between two sisters that tell a heartbreaking but also eventually heartwarming story.
  

I didn’t particularly like this next one – I thought it could have done with some serious editing – but many loved it, so I think it’s worth a mention:

• The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

On my reading list I have:

• The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
• Pamela by Samuel Richardson
• The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• The Griffin and Sabine Trilogy by Nick Bantock
• The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

And here is a list with even more:
Wikipedia list of epistolatory novels

Holiday notice

I am off to India for the next 5 weeks. During that time it is unlikely that I will post anything new, but there will be some automatic postings, including the Wednesday reading experiences for the whole time.

Top mysteries challenge review: The Murder of the Maharajah by H.R.F. Keating

In keeping with my India-oriented reading I chose a Top Mystery that takes place in that country, not long before the end of the Raj when Maharajahs still had some power (even if it was dependent on British support).

Year of publication: 1980
Genre: Mystery, cozy
Type of mystery: Murder
Type of investigator: Police officer
Setting & time: The fictitious state of Bhopore, India; 1930.

Story:
The immensely rich Maharajah of Bhopore is murdered and several people had the means, motive and opportunity (or at least two out of the three), to have done it. Due to an impending visit by the Viceroy of India, the Resident Adviser calls in District Superintendent of Police, Mr. Howard, and presses him to solve the case quickly, because if the murderer turns out later to be the heir to the throne, it isn’t good for the Viceroy to have met him. Howard sets out to methodically investigate the case, and in a reconstruction at the end makes some interesting and startling revelations.

Review:
Keating has taken the classic country house (or small village, desert island, cruise ship, etc.) mystery and set it in the exotic location of a maharajah’s palace in India, but it is in every detail still a classic “limited location - limited suspect group” whodunnit.

While the detective is a police officer, he does not have the backup of other policemen or forensics specialists, and does not interrogate people police fashion, rather using the methods of elimination and observation used by non-police detectives across the genre, so this can not be classed as a police procedural.

The writing is straightforward, with touches of humour here and there. The main characters are just barely brought out of the realm of stereotype by being given small personality quirks or distinguishing traits, but are still recognisable as reliable old types: the trusted retainer who may not be so trusty, the older woman with something to hide, the hothead, the male and female love interests, the dashing but not too bright young man, the quiet and dedicated detective, the spoilt young man suddenly forced into a position of responsibility, the mysterious woman who may have something to hide, the gold-digger, the reader stand-in, etc.

What makes this a bloody good mystery is then not the characters, but the plotting, the twists, turns, red herrings and an excellently imagined macguffin.

Now I think I will go and put the Inspector Ghote mysteries by Keating on my BookMooch wishlist. Maybe I'll be able to find some of them in India.

Rating: A very good mystery that will keep all but the most observant readers guessing until the very end. 4 stars.

Books left in challenge: 87.

Place on the list(s): CWA #97
Awards and nominations: 1980 Gold Dagger Award.

Review of The Gentle Tamers

Originally published in 2 parts, in April 2004.
Book 13 in my first 52 books challenge.

Entry 1:

Full title: The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old Wild West
Author: Dee Brown
Year published: 1958/1981
Where got: second hand bookshop
Genre: Social history, women, pioneers

This looks like a promising piece of women's history. If we were to go by the history books we read in school, it would seem that men single-handedly settled the western parts of the United States. This is of course not so - women did their share of the work and had a great deal of civilizing influence on the men. I'm looking forward to exploring the west with them, through this book.

Written by the author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee


Entry 2:

The Gentle Tamers is a collection of true stories about the women of the wild west. Some who are included are true pioneers, like Janette Riker, who survived a harsh Montana winter alone in a covered wagon, others are included because a history of women in the Wild West wouldn't be complete without them, like Calamity Jane. The stories are not told in a straight timeline, but are collected into themes which include chapters on the dangers of the pioneer trails (which included bad weather, food shortages, epidemics and attacks by natives), fashion and finery, gatherings and entertainment, to name a few. Some of the women in the book are heroes while others are victims. There are army wives, wild women, educators, settlers, entertainers, suffragettes, prostitutes and various other kinds of women. Some have a remarkable history of their own, others are included because their experiences are representative of the experiences of women of the time. All of them are treated with respect, although the author does make the occasional subtly sarcastic remark about some of them. Their stories are told in a simple, straightforward style with a number of quotations from the original sources that give the narrative colour and depth.

The text is well written and informative, and there is an extensive bibliography at the end for those who wish to do further research into the subject. No attempt is made to put forward any kind of thesis on the subject - this is simply a collection of stories about real women, a popular history that is first and foremost meant to entertain.

Rating: A fun and interesting read about the lives of women, ordinary and not so ordinary, in the Wild West. 5 stars.

----
I can't leave out one endearing thing about this particular copy: it has an inscription in it. I bought the book in a second-hand shop in Hamburg, Germany. On the inside front cover there is a sticker indicating that it was originally bought in the Boot Hill Museum in Dodge City, Kansas, USA.

The inscription reads:
My dearest woman of the new Wild West, Maybe you find the time in the Old World to read this book, to help remind yourself that the women of the New World had the same problems and struggle, like you may have. But of course they havenot had me.
Yours (The signature is unreadable)

I love books that have a history of their own.

Wednesday reading experience #42

Challenge your prejudices some more: Read a book that you have panned or derided without actually having read it.

Some frequently panned books that come to mind include novels by Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, Nicholas Sparks and Danielle Steel. Others include such famous and/or infamous works of the more distant past, like philosophical and religious writings of all ages and eras, Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, and anything by the Marquis de Sade. Of course you should choose one that you have prejudices about.

Whether your prejudices are rebuffed or confirmed, you will at least now be able to pan or praise the book in question without hypocrisy.

Books I have enjoyed, pt. 1

About 10 years ago, as I waited in a Canadian airport lounge for my flight to be announced, I found some unused Canadian currency in my pockets and went to browse in the airport stores to find something on which to spend the money. I chose a small bottle of Canadian maple syrup, and then decided to get a book to read on the plane. Among all the usual bestsellers and other typical airport books, I found a small shelf of Canadian literature and gave it a browse. One of the books I picked up had a whimsical image on the front, of a block of small shops. The title was Home from the Vinyl Café and the author was Stuart McLean. I opened the book and found myself engrossed in reading a story of a hapless husband charged with cooking the turkey for the family's Christmas meal and running into all sorts of difficulties, starting with forgetting to buy the turkey.

I promptly bought the book and read most of the short stories therein on the flight home, with frequent giggles and stifled laughter. The stories revolve around a record-store owner named Dave, his wife Morley and their two children, and their adventures and mishaps. They apparently feature frequently on McLean's radio show, which I would love to listen to. Ever since I bought the book I have pulled it off the shelf occasionally to read a story or two. I even translated the story of Dave and the turkey as a project in one of my translation classes. I give it a great big thumbs up.

From the information in the book I knew there was a previous book, Stories from the Vinyl Café, but I gave no further thought to it until I was building my wish list on BookMooch. I entered it into the list, and some months later it popped up. I promptly mooched it, but for some reason I didn't read it right away. Now I have and I enjoyed it just as much as the previous collection, although none of the stories stood out as much as the turkey story did. It was also fun to read about Dave and Morley's friends and neighbours, some of who got stories of their own in the book.

Review: Holy Cow!

Author: Sarah MacDonald

I am heading to India at the end of the month, and have been doing a lot of reading about various places I might visit. I had this one unread India travelogue in my TBR stack, and decided to read it to whet my appetite.

This is the story of how MacDonald returned to India after having left it over a decade earlier, wowing never to return. But fate plays funny tricks on people: her boyfriend, a broadcast journalist, was stationed there and she quit her job and moved to Delhi to be with him. She was not a religious or spiritual person when she arrived, but a fortuneteller's prophesy set her off on a search of spirituality among the many religions of India, and in the main the book is about this search. Each religion and spiritual experience is examined - often extremely superficially, I thought - and she takes away something good from each of them, but eventually rejects them all because none is perfect for her, finally finding the peace she is looking for within herself.

It's an interesting book and she had some experiences I can relate to, but the search for spirituality and religion is too much of an obvious gimmick for it to come across as entirely sincere. The book is entertaining - especially the passages about the spookily accurate fortune-tellers (even if they read like fiction) and about the living saints and their followers - but ultimately rather empty. You will find no new revelations about India in there, only a light read to while away a couple of hours.

Review of Seabiscuit

Originally published in 2 parts, in April 2004.
Book 12 in my first 52 books challenge.If you're wondering about no. 11, it was The Wordsworth Dictionary of Idioms. I did not feel it was worth republishing.

Entry 1:

Full title: Seabiscuit: An American Legend
Author: Laura Hillenbrand
Year published: 2002
Where got: book store
Genre: History, biography, sports

This book is about a famous American racehorse and the men whose belief in him took him from the lowest rungs of the racing world and right to the top.

I am not particularly interested in sports, and know next to nothing about horse racing, so this is not a book I would have picked up if it had not been for the fact that it has been made into a film.

As a teenager I enjoyed a film about another famous racehorse, Phar Lap, and so when Seabiscuit hit the cinemas I decided this was a film I wanted to see.

Well, somehow I managed to miss it. However, after watching a National Geographic documentary about Seabiscuit, I decided I would read the book to tide me over until the film comes out on video. So far I have not been disappointed.


Entry 2:

It's rare to find a history book that is as readable as Seabiscuit. One history book I have already reviewed, Cod: A biography of the fish that changed the world tries and fails, perhaps because the author simply isn't as accomplished a writer as Laura Hillenbrand, the author of Seabiscuit. Hillenbrand's writing seems effortless and she manages to hold the reader's attention throughout the book.

Of the two parts of the book, the second is the most gripping. In the first part Hillenbrand is introducing the people and animals involved in the story and laying out a description of American society in the first decades of the 20th century. This will at first seem somewhat longwinded, simply because of the wealth of information she has chosen to bring into the narrative.

In the second half of the book, which is mostly about the preparation for Seabiscuit's greatest race, it becomes clear that without all the information in the first half of the book, it would not have been as good a narrative. Her detailed descriptions of the racing practices of the era and the horrible situation of the jockeys (who had no union and hardly any human rights), of Seabiscuit's noble lineage and the character portraits and short biographies of Seabiscuit, owner Howard, trainer Smith and jockey Pollard before they came together, bring into the narrative a sense of continuity and a deeper understanding of what the race meant to these men and to the thousands of admirers of the "Cinderella horse".

There are some profoundly sad moments in the book (jockeys and horses being injured or dying), but also occasions for laughing out loud - especially in the description of Seabiscuit's appearance and habits and Smith's mischievous sense of humour and his war with the press.

Rating: Very well written biography of a horse and the men who believed in his abilities and made him a star among racehorses. Recommended for anyone with an interest in American history, sports or horses. 5 stars.

Wednesday reading experience #41

Read THAT book.

You know the one I mean: the one every one of your friends has read, or the one you promised someone you would read, or the one that you want to have read but don’t particularly want to read, or the one that you have desperately wanted to read just about for ever but haven’t because it daunts you because of its size or its reputation.

THAT book can be just about any book ranging from Twilight to War and Peace, so I would love to hear what you would choose and for which of the above reasons.

--

When I have finished my current reading challenges I am planning to tackle a tome that is the embodiment of THAT book for many people: James Joyce's Ulysses. I want to do this to challenge my prejudices about Joyce, whose short stories were apt to put me to sleep when I was studying him in modern literature at college. It is also one of those books that any literary snob worth her salt wants to have read, and I dearly want to be able, when said snobs start talking about Ulysses, to be able to tell if they have really read it or if they are pretending. Evil of me, maybe, but just think of the possibilities for pulling one over on a lit snob. The particular snobs I have in mind find my taste in detective novels and romances deplorable, and I would love to challenge their prejudices about romance and mystery readers.

--
It has occurred to me that I shouldn't be calling this feature reading experiences, but rather reading prompts, but I guess it's too late to change it now. If I decide to continue it next year I'll probably rename it.

Top mysteries challenge review: The Game, Set & Match trilogy by Len Deighton

I suddenly realised that I had not yet posted my review of Deighton’s trilogy, so here it is:

While I listed these books separately on my TBR list, the trilogy is listed as one book in the CWA list, so I will be reviewing them all together. Each book gets a brief synopsis and a very short review, and then I will review the common points together. I will try not to drop serious spoilers in the synopses, so they will necessarily be rather telegraphic, but if you have not yet read these books you probably should avoid this review anyway.


Published: 1983-5.
Genre: Espionage thriller.
Type of investigator: MI6 agent.


Title: Berlin Game:
Setting & time: London and Berlin, contemporary.

Story:
Agent Bernard Samson has been doing desk work for 5 years but his superiors in MI6 want him to go out back in the field to convince a frightened spy in East Germany to stay in place for a while longer. The man is convinced that Stasi or the KGB are about to discover his identity, and the only person he trusts to smuggle him out is Bernie. While he is considering whether to accept the mission or not, Bernie noses around and discovers that a high-ranking agent may be a mole, but finding out just which agent is going to be a tough job.

Review and rating:
A thrilling and twisted tale about intelligence and counter-intelligence, agents and double agents, trust and friendship, doubt and double-crossing. 4 stars.


Title: Mexico Set:
Setting & time: London, Berlin and Mexico City, contemporary.

Story:
A known KGB agent is spotted in Mexico City, and MI6, eager to recover its dignity after the defection of an important member of its staff over to the Soviets, send Bernard Samson to try to convince the man to defect. Samson isn’t too keen on the idea, but he needs to prove his loyalty, and so begins a complicated set of manoeuvres that can lead to either success or disaster.

Review and rating:
This excellent sequel to Berlin Game has narrator Bernard Samson trying to outmanoeuvre an enemy agent who knows him almost as well as he knows himself. 4+ stars.



Title: London Match:
Setting & time: London and Berlin; contemporary.

Story: Bernard Samson becomes filled with suspicion after an encounter with a Soviet agent, thinking that perhaps the double agent who fled to the East in book one wasn’t the only Soviet agent working inside MI6.

Review and rating: This final book in the trilogy follows Bernard Samson as he tries to discover if one of his superiors is a Soviet double agent, and re-build his private life at the same time. The weakest of the three books. 3 stars.


Review for the trilogy: All three books are well written and full of twists and turns, double (and triple) crossings, suspicion, fear, hatred and suspense. Deighton is clearly a master of suspense, and manages to make the secret services and the scheming that goes on within them believable and realistic, at least to someone like me who knows little about the subject. Unfortunately the very good second book in the trilogy is a hard act to follow, and the third book, which should be the strongest, doesn’t quite deliver, although it does complete the plot that began with the first book and suggest that the game is just beginning, thus paving the way for the second Bernard Samson trilogy.

All-over rating: A fine series of spy thrillers that deliver suspense and betrayal galore. 4- stars.

Books left in challenge: 88

Place on the list(s): CWA 58.

Review of The Book of Intriguing Words

Originally published in 3 parts, on March 28 to April 3, 2004.
Book 10 in my first 52 books challenge.

Entry 1:

Full title: The Wordsworth Book of Intriguing Words: The insomniac's dictionary of the outrageous, odd and unusual
Author: Paul Hellweg
Published: 1986 (as The Insomniac’s Dictionary)
Where got: University Student Bookstore
Genre: Dictionary, glossaries

I'm studying for exams and writing final essays for the next three weeks, so during that time I'm going to review some of the reference books I use in my field of study. To make it more fun, I'm going to pick some of the more unusual reference books in my library.

As a student of translation I am naturally interested in etymology, semantics and semiotics. This book is not only a nice way of finding unusual words, their meanings and origins, but it is also quite short for a dictionary and fun to read.

Entry 2:

Being a confirmed logolept, I like to collect words, and this dictionary was a windfall for me because it has plenty of unusual ones. Unlike regular dictionaries, it is not one long alphabetized list, but rather a series of chapters containing glossaries of words relating to a specific subject or theme. Naturally enough, the first chapter is all about word-words, all of them beginning, naturally enough, with the prefix logo.

It goes on from there, covering insomnia words, phobias and manias, killing words, types of divination, forms of government, eponyms, portmanteaus and acronyms, long and short words, interesting words no longer in use, consonant only words, word play, love, sex and marriage words, unusual words that don’t fall into any specific category, and three chapters on animal words: animal adjectives, names for baby animals and collective nouns for groups of animals.

It was in this last chapter that I found out that a group of ferrets is known as a business and a group of ravens as an unkindness. I don’t know when I’m going to be able to put this knowledge to use, but never mind, it’s still fun to know.

Seriously, the book HAS come in handy, especially the chapters on phobias and manias, and it is valuable for Scrabble players when all they have left is consonants.

Speaking of reference books: I recently discovered Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and am planning to dupe my parents into giving me the updated Millenium Edition for my birthday. This wonderful book is full of fascinating and often completely useless information.


Entry 3:

Rating:
A fun and fascinating collection of eclectic glossaries. Especially interesting for people who love unusual words, and handy for those who wish to increase their vocabulary. Too bad it's so short. 4 stars.

Wednesday reading experience #40

Now that you have become firmly familiar with the diary form, both in reality and fiction, why not try keeping one for a while?

This may look like a writing assignment at first sight, but I’m getting to the reading part:

Read your journal at the end of the journalling period, and again in 5, 10 or 20 years time. Annotate it if you feel like it.

Alternative suggestion: If you are a regular journal/diary writer, have you ever read your old ones? It can be like meeting a total stranger who is sort of familiar, but sort of not, and it’s interesting to read about how you saw or reacted to something back then versus the way you see or remember it in retrospective.

I have occasionally dipped into my travel journals from years past, and have often been surprised at what I have found in them. I have been amazed by the prejudices I held, the opinions I had, the way I handled a situation, how immature I was. I still cringe every now and then when I take one of these nostalgia trips, but even though they are "only" travel journals and therefore irregular, I can still see how I have grown and changed and matured by reading them.

Reading Larsson

I am about 90 pages into the English translation of the second volume in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, The Girl who played with Fire. It's a slow beginner, but the main storyline seems to be kicking off.

I take grave exception to all the [insert expletive of choice] product placements in the beginning chapters of part 2. Who cares whether Lisbet Salander bought Bonde or Billy bookcases? Or what was the brand name of her sofa or her coffee table? It isn't even necessary to list what she bought - surely it would have been enough to say she went shopping for new furniture at IKEA and brought back just about everything she needed for her new apartment? The whole thing reads like a combination of an IKEA advert and instructions for a movie set designer.

Earlier in the book there are several other such lists that, although not as heavy on the product placement, do make the book longer without mattering to the story.
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If anyone who has read the book in Swedish reads this, could you please post a comment and tell me if the characters, including Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, are almost always mentioned by their last names in the original? It's annoying as hell and makes them less sympathetic and I want to know which one to blame: the author or the translator.

Review of The Loved One

Originally published in 2 parts, on March 24-26, 2004.
Book 9 in my first 52 books challenge.

Author: Evelyn Waugh
Published: 1948
Where got: second-hand bookshop
Genre: Social satire

I first saw the movie as a child and again recently on TCM. I had no idea it was based on a book until I started reading about the film on IMDb, and when I found the book I immediately bought it in anticipation of a good read.

Here are a couple of links to information about the author and his books:

Evelyn Waugh: The best and the worst
Evelyn Waugh (includes a bibliography)


The novel tells the story of Dennis Barlow, a poet and ex-pat Englishman who has managed to make himself a nuisance to the stiff upper-lipped Englishmen of Hollywood by taking a job at a funeral home for pets - something that "just isn't done" by Englishmen Abroad. When arranging the funeral of a friend at Whispering Glades, a fancy and extremely kitsch funeral home, he meets a young cosmetician by the name of Aimée whose job it is to apply make-up to the faces of the dead in order to make them look presentable to the living.
Their budding romantic relationship is described with subtle humour. Aimée is quite beautiful and outwardly different from other American girls Dennis has met, but her lovely exterior belies her empty-headedness and ignorance. Aimée is very unsure of herself and writes regularly for advice from Guru Brahmin, a newspaper agony aunt whose real name is Mr. Slump. Not really aided by the Guru's advice, she has a hard time deciding between Dennis and her other suitor, Mr. Joyboy, the senior mortician at the funeral home. Things start to heat up once both suitors start playing dirty. Death and the rituals connected with it suffuse the novel from beginning to end.

The Loved One is a dark and often quite subtle satire, even becoming quite morbid at times. It deftly satirises the movie business, the funeral industry, American society and Americans in general. Mind you, Dennis Barlow is no paragon of virtue...

Sometimes the satire becomes quite obvious, like whenever Waugh starts describing Americans in general - his description of the uniformity of American women is sneeringly bitter and quite funny:

"Dennis at once forgot everything about her. He had seen her before everywhere. American mothers presumably knew their daughters apart but to the European eye the Mortuary hostess was one with all her sisters of the air-liners and the reception-desks. She was the standard product. A man could leave such a girl in a delicatessen shop in New York, fly three thousand miles and find her again in a cigar stall in San Francisco and she would croon the same words to him in moments of endearment and express the same views and preferences in moments of social discourse."

It's hard to tell if Waugh is being sarcastic here or if he really feels this way about American women. (Yes, I know this is a novel, but there are certain indications in Waugh's life story that in this book he was lashing out at American society in reaction to being frustrated by American film-makers who had optioned his book, Brideshead Revisited for a movie).

Rating: A dark, subtle and funny look at life, death and what comes after. 4 stars.

Reading report for September

I only finished 13 books this month, which would have been about average for most years except this one. Since I read 20+ books every month of the year up to now, this is actually quite far below average, but I‘m not worrying. After all, one needs to have a social life too.

In the challenges, I read:

3 Icelandic books:
Benedikt Gröndal: Sagan af Heljarslóðarorrustu - a literary parody that tells the story of the battle of Solferino as if it were an Icelandic Saga.
Páll Líndal: Reykjavík 200 ára - a short 200 year history of the city of Reykjavík, mostly told in photographs.
Þórarinn Eldjárn: Sérðu það sem ég sé - a collection of quirky short stories from one of Iceland‘s best short story writers.

TBR challenge:
John Berendt: The City of Falling Angels - a combination of travel book and the history of the fire that destroyed the Fenice opera house in Venice.
Dashiell Hammett: Red Harvest (also a Top Mystery read) – a brutal crime thriller.
Betty MacDonald: Onions in the Stew - funny memoir.
James/Jan Morris: Heaven's Command - history of the British Empire during Victoria‘s reign.
Lily Prior: La Cucina - romantic novel about a woman‘s love affair with food and a man.
JD Robb: Portrait in Death - futuristic police procedural.

Top Mysteries Challenge:
Len Deighton: Mexico Set and London Match - spy thrillers
Dashiell Hammett: Red Harvest (also on the TBR list)

And non-challenge:
Adam Jacot de Boinod : The Meaning of Tingo - a dictionary of interesting words expressing things English can not express in one word. I have been reading it in the bathroom for several weeks.
Lynn Viehl: Shadowlight - romantic urban fantasy.

I don‘t know how much reading I will be able to do in October, as there are big changes afoot in my life. Either I will do hardly any reading at all, or I will do nothing but read and cook and sleep. I have just lost my job, which sucks, but I am financially in a good place for 6 months at least, and I plan to take a holiday before I begin to search for a job.

I may – and this is still just a possibility – be going off travelling for a while. If anyone has a copy of the latest or next-latest issue of Lonely Planet India, I am willing to exchange it with the latest Lonely Planet Egypt.

Wednesday reading experience #39

Now that you have read a real diary, try a fictional one.

Last Wednesday I recommended a real diary because it helps to be familiar with the non-fiction diary form when reading fictional diaries. In fiction the diary form has been used to good effect in parody and for satire, but also for more innocent humour. It has also been used in dead earnest in fiction. It is one of the forms which epistolatory novels take, a sort of monologue where the reader takes on the role of the narrator's confessor.

Here are some that I can recommend:

• The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend. These are ostensibly written for teenagers, but can be enjoyed by adults as well. I have not read the sequels, but I do own them and plan to read them.
• Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding.
• Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison. Written for teenage girls, but quite enjoyable. Have not read any of the sequels, but expect them to be enjoyable as well.
• The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot. Another series written for teenage girls, but enjoyable for adults as well.
• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

Here are some more ideas (from Wikipedia).

I have posted a poll on the side bar

I am curious to know how book buyers feel about dust jackets on books. Please vote in my poll!

Review of Himself and Other Animals

Originally published in 2 parts, on March 17-23, 2004
Book 8 in my first 52 books challenge.

Entry 1:

Full title: Himself and Other Animals: Portrait of Gerald Durrell
Author: David Hughes
Published: 1997
Where got: public library
Genre: Biography, memoir

This week's book is about one of my favorite authors: Gerald Durrell. David Hughes, a longtime friend of Durrell's, wrote the book as a tribute to his friend back in the seventies, but it wasn't published until after Durrell's death. It's more a portrait of the man than a regular biography - I guess it should be called a memoir rather than a biography.

Entry 2:

Finished it last night. The book is well written and set up as a busy week in the life of Gerald Durrell, back in the 1970's when it was originally written. Interspersed with descriptions of Gerry's daily routine, character and moods are comments and reminiscences of himself, his friends and his family. He is shown in different environments and interacting with different kinds of people and what emerges is a portrait of a man who was contradictory in many ways.

Strong willed and selfish, generous, charming, moody and used to having his own way, yet admired and loved by people who knew him, Durrell was no ordinary person. His upbringing was eccentric and his education sporadic and specialized: he basically read a lot of books, studied everything to do with animals and nature, and didn't bother much with the rest. Yet he emerged as a fine writer and an enthusiastic nature lover and conservationist who was capable of sweeping other people along with his writing. After all this, it's hard to believe that he was shy and retiring when it came to meeting the public or standing up to make speeches.

This books only gives snippets of biographical information, mostly concentrating on Durrell's personality. I really think I will have to read his biography now to get the whole picture.

Rating: A biographical appetizer that one might follow up with Durrell's own autobiographical books for the main course, followed by his official biography as a dessert to complete the meal. 3 stars.

Wednesday reading experience #38

Read a published diary/journal or a collection of excerpts from diaries/journals.

Diaries can be an excellent way of seeing into someone’s mind and also to find out little things about daily life in the past that can hardly be found anywhere else. For this reason historians find diaries to be an excellent source of research material. They also make good material for biographers.

While the diaries and journals of famous people may be most interesting to the general public in the authors’ life time or recently after their death, in the long run it is often the diaries of ordinary people like Anne Frank and Samuel Pepys that end up being much more fascinating. While parts of Frank’s diary were written with the view of later publication, Pepys probably never intended his diaries for publication and so he is more candid and outspoken than he might otherwise have been.

I am currently reading The Faber Book of Diaries, a collection of interesting diary entries chosen and edited by Simon Brett. The book is organised like a diary, i.e. by date, and within the date by year, so the oldest entries come first. I am reading it day by day, so that it will take me a year to finish.

Diarists whose writings you may find interesting:
20th century: Anne Frank; Virginia Woolf; Anais Nin; Sylvia Plath; Joe Orton; Victor Klemperer; Kenneth Williams; Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara
Earlier: Samuel Pepys; James Boswell; James Woodforde; John Evelyn

If you read an anthology like the one I mentioned above, you can find many more diarists you might want to give a try. Here are a few titles:

• Revelations: Diaries of Women, edited by Mary Jane Moffat & Charlotte Painter
• The Assassin's Cloak: An Anthology of the World's Greatest Diarists edited by Alan Taylor
• Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey edited by Lillian Schlissel
• A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries edited by Thomas Mallon

Top mysteries review: Red Harvest

Year of publication: 1929
Series and no.: The Continental Op, first novel, preceeded by and based on short stories
Genre: Noir thriller
Type of investigator: Private detective
Setting & time: Personville, a fictional town in the western USA, probably California or Nevada.

Story:
The nameless narrator, know to the reader only as the Continental Op, arrives in the small city of Personville where the crime situation has become so bad that people have started calling it Poisonville. His client is murdered before he can meet him, but the dead man’s father retains his services to find the killer. The Op starts investigating and uncovers all sorts of nastiness, and events finally lead to him becoming so annoyed with the place and it’s criminal elements that he decides to clean up the town.

Review and rating:
Like the previous two Hammett novels I have reviewed, this one is written in a spare and quick style and the narrative moves fast. The story is nasty and brutal and slightly tempered with the narrator’s sarcastic humour. Few if any of the characters are truly likeable, except perhaps for the femme fatale, whom one can not help liking on a certain level, even though she is scheming and greedy.

The narrative is in the first person, told by the Continental Op, Hammett’s nameless first hard-boiled detective about whom he wrote two novels and a series of short stories, some of which he elaborated on and connected together to make this novel. The Op is a true hard-boiled detective, a prototype for those who would follow: Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer and more of their ilk. He is cold, tough, calculating, hard-dinking, clever and manipulative and possessed of a great deal of shadenfreude. In fact I would describe him as a sociopathic bastard of the first order, capable of anything, including murder. He is rather too inhuman for my liking, but then I happen to dislike violence for the sake of the same and with this dislike comes a dislike of violent people, and since this novel is a collection of both, I didn’t like it much. 2+ stars.


Books left in challenge: 91.

Place on the list(s): CWA: #94; MWA: #39.

Some recently acquired books

Here are some books I have acquired recently:


About half are BookMooch acquisitions and the rest I got at a second hand shop that sells stuff for charity.
The one you can't see the title of is A Voyage by Dhow by Norman Lewis.
I have already read The Thirteenth Tale, but getting it in hard covers was a piece of good luck.

Review of Hawksmoor

Originally published in 2 parts, on March 9-12, 2004.
Book 7 in my first 52 books challenge.

Part 1:

Author: Peter Ackroyd
Published: 1985
Where got: public library
Genre: mystery, horror

I read this book years ago as part of a college course on modern English literature, but I remember nothing about it. Even now, when I'm almost finished with part one, I still remember nothing about the previous reading, which I guess shows how interested I was in it at the time.

Every other chapter happens in the 18th century and is written in the style of that time, which takes a while to get used to. The other chapters are written in modern English and happen in modern times. The narrative point of view shifts between chapters, from 1st person to 3rd person. These stylistic changes necessitate a shifting of mental gears at the beginning of each chapter and make the book challenging to read.

So far I'm finding it to be a dark and rather menacing narrative. Dyer, the 18th century narrator, appears to be stark raving mad and a satanist to boot. His narrative seems to tie in with the modern chapters, where it appears that people are being murdered in the neighbourhood of churches Dyer has built.

Part two should start giving some explanations - I hope. I hate it when mysteries continue to be mysterious after I've finished reading them.

Part 2:

Finished the book. Now for the review:

As I mentioned before, the narrative is in two totally different styles. The first chapter and every second chapter after that is written in the1st person, 18th century style English. The 1st person narrator is Nicholas Dyer, a character very loosely based on real life English architect Nicholas Hawksmoor. In the book, Ackroyd attributes to Dyer the six churches Hawksmoor is most famous for designing, and the narrative is as much based around the churches as it is around Dyer, inspector Hawksmoor and other characters in the book.

The second chapter and every other chapter following is written in the 3rd person, modern English. In part one of the book these chapters introduce, with great compassion, characters who end up being murdered at the sites of Dyer's churches, in an echo of sacrificial deaths, accidental, by murder or by suicide, that are connected with the building of the churches (in the story). In part two the modern chapters tell the story of inspector Hawksmoor who is investigating the murders, and his increasing frustration over getting nowhere with the cases.

I have to say that while this novel is a masterpiece in many ways, it is not a satisfying read. It has an ending, but no conclusion or resolution, leaving the reader to try to work out happened. The use of 1st person narrative for the insane and evil Dyer and the 3rd person for Hawksmoor, who's closest to being the good guy in the story, serves to make the reader feel compassion for Dyer and indifference towards Hawksmoor. Most of all it underlines how alike they are, their thought processes and frustrations are very similar, like two sides of the same coin.

Hawksmoor should really be read with a map of London at hand, as it will give the reader a better feel for the area in which the story happens. Make that TWO maps, one of the contemporary city and one of 18th century London, as some of the street names have changed. Knowing what the churches in the book look like will help as well - here's a link to a page with pictures of some them.

Another good reference to have at hand for historical detail is Ackroyd's own London: A Biography, but it's not absolutely necessary.

Rating: A dark and morbid narrative, in turns horrifying and puzzling, that should appeal to admirers of gothic literature and murder mysteries. 3 stars for quality, none for satisfaction.

Ackroyd links:
Peter Ackroyd bio and bibliography
Review of Hawksmoor

Wednesday reading experience #37

Read a graphic novel. If you are not already a fan of comic strips and/or comic books, you might be surprised to find just how sophisticated they can be.

Graphic novels tell a story in graphic form, using the images and minimal text style of comics to convey what a regular novel does in words alone. The term is used about stories too long to publish in one single edition of a comics magazine, and describes both works originally published in book form and works originally published in episodic form in comics magazines and later collected into book form.

There is some debate as to the exact definition of a graphic novel, but for the purpose of this blog post let’s define a graphic novel as a book containg a single long story or a collection of shorts stories with a common theme or setting, told in graphic form.

I can personally recommend:

By Neil Gaiman and various artists:

• The Sandman series
• The Books of Magic
• The Death series (spin-off from Sandman)
• Stardust (also a traditional novel and a movie)
• Coraline (children's book. Also a movie)
• The Daughter of Owls
• The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch
• Harlequin Valentine

By others:

• Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman
• When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs
• The Lucky Luke books by Morris & Goscinny
• The Astérix books by Goscinny and Uderzo
• Some of the Tintin books by Hergé. While some of the books are racist and offensive in other ways, others are just pure fun.

Reading journal on The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

Book 5 in my first 52 books challenge.
Originally published in several parts on February 22-22, 2004.

Entry 1:

Author: Alexander McCall Smith
Published: 1998
Where got: public library
Genre: Detective novel

Reason for choosing:
I first read about this book in a book review in one of the daily newspapers in Iceland. The title caught my attention and I decided that such an unusual and humorous name was very promising as to the contents of the book. So far I have not been disappointed (after reading chapter one).

Entry 2:

I'm quite enjoying the book so far.

Here are some links with information about the author and some of his other works:

About the series
Publisher's website, dedicated to the series

Entry 3:

"I love all the people whom God made, but I especially know how to love the people who live in this place. They are my people, my brothers and sisters. It is my duty to help them to solve the mysteries in their lives. That is what I am called to do."

There is something enchanting about the way Alexander McCall Smith puts these words into the mouth of his private detective heroine, Precious Ramotswe.

The book is more a collection of interconnected sketches than a continuous narrative. It moves backwards and forwards in time, telling the story of Precious and some of the people connected to her, in a simple and flowing style. Background information is dispersed throughout the book and you slowly get to know about Precious' past and the experiences that have brought her to the point where she decided to set up a detective agency.

Armed with her intuition, a manual for private detectives, and minimal assets that would make any American or European private eye hand in his licence on the spot, she starts the business with money inherited from her father. The book is about her first cases, which range from a cheating husband to a missing one, a variety of con men to expose and a missing boy who may have been murdered to make magic amulets. She solves (or in some cases doesn't solve) the cases to her customer's satisfaction (sometimes not), through intuition and knowledge of human nature, occasionally resorting to lying and sneaking about in search of clues.

The image you get of her is that of a woman who has learned to accept life as it is, whether it be happy or sad, and has not let the suffering she has lived through get her down. The descriptions of her and other character's reactions to misfortune are quite matter-of-fact, giving you an idea of a people who accept suffering with equanimity, much as they rejoice in good fortune.

The humour is sly and sneaks up on you, like the following:
"Now constipation was quite a different matter. It would be dreadful for the whole world to know about troubles of that nature. She felt terribly sorry for people who suffered from constipation, and she knew that there were many who did. There were probably enough of them to form a political party - with a chance of government perhaps - but what would such a party do if it was in power? Nothing, she imagined. It would try to pass legislation, but would fail."

I like it that the author has made his heroine a non-traditional one. Writing a story about a fat lady who runs a detective agency in Africa is an original idea and the author definitely took a risk with it. I'm sure he can have had no idea that it would become such a hit, or that people would be crying out for more of the same. There are now five book in the series and its popularity just keeps on growing.

Favourite quote:
"Nobody was missing, nobody was cheating on their wives, nobody was embezzling. At such times, a private detective may as well hang a closed sign on the office door and go off to plant melons."

Rating:
Great and unusual detective novel that convinces the reader that maybe she too can become a private eye. 4 stars.

Review of Shadowlight by Lynn Viehl

When the publishing date of this book was pushed forward, it left Lynn Viehl’s publisher unable to print and send out advance reading copies (known in the publishing industry simply as ARCs), Lynn decided to take matters into her own hands and offered the readers of her blog, Paperback Writer a chance to read the book by sending out e-ARCS, in exchange for reviews (the offer has now expired).

This book will be in bookshops on October 6th.

This is the first book in a spin-off series from the Darkyn books by Viehl, featuring some characters readers of that series will be familiar with.

Year published: 2009 (coming in October)
Genre: Urban fantasy
Series: The Kyndred (#1)
Setting & time: (mostly) Atlanta, Georgia; contemporary.

For those who want to be totally surprised by this book: potential SPOILERS coming up.
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The Story:
Jessa Bellamy has a psychic talent that has helped her build a business that screens job applicants for companies, but someone has discovered that she has this talent and wants to capture her and use her genes for nefarious purposes. However, before the bad guys can kidnap her she is captured instead by a mysterious man who claims he is saving her from being killed, but of course she doesn’t believe him and, ignoring the obvious attraction she feels for him, seeks ways to escape from him. Meanwhile, Lucan and Samantha (from the Darkyn books) are on the trail of a mutant maniac who is seeking Jessa with lust and murder on his mind…

Review and rating:
This is the first of Viehl’s books I have read, although I have been a fan of her blog for some time. I may therefore have missed some of the implications of the scenes including the Darkyn, but I will say that Viehl obviously doesn’t expect the reader to have read the Darkyn books because she shows the reader the things they need to know about them with very little actual explaining, which shows that she knows her craft.

She is also a great storyteller. The narrative never gets bogged down with unnecessary scenes (unless you don't like romance, in which case you shouldn't read this book in the first place), and it isn't overloaded with gratuitous sex, unlike some other examples of the genre I have read (Laurell K. Hamilton, anyone?). If the book has an obvious flaw, it's that Jessa and Gaven are a little too beautiful, a little too perfect. I much preferred Rowan, who has obvious flaws, and am looking forward to read her story, Dreamveil.

But all in all I am satisfied with the book. It is well written, well plotted and difficult to put down and both the action and romance angles are well done, something one can not always expect in a romantic thriller. 4 stars.

Wednesday reading experience #36

Read a bibliobook.

A bibliobook is a book that is about or prominently features books and/or book people, and can include both fiction and non fiction. Bibliobooks are perhaps the best proof of the enduring love people have for books and reading.

Some suggestions:
Non-fiction:

• 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. Memoir about her long-lasting intercontinental relationship with a book shop and its staff. There is a charming movie starring Anne Bancroft as Hanff.
• At Home with Books by Estelle Ellis & Caroline Seebohm, photographs by Christopher Simon Sykes. Here’s an excerpt from my review of it: “…a gorgeous, big book with oodles of pictures and chapters on various millionaires, aristocrats, collectors and designers and their libraries, interspersed with advice on how to care for and display books. The libraries range from small and cosy to huge and imposing, but all the owners are real bibliophiles who read their books and obviously love them. ... Cool coffee table book.”
• Living with Books by Alan Powers. Another gorgeous coffee-table book about libraries, public and private.
• Ex Libris: Confessions of a common reader by Anne Fadiman. A collection of essays about books and reading.
• Used and Rare: Travels in the book world by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone. About how they became book collectors. Warning: contains a proliferation of proofing errors.
• The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (American title: The professor and the Madman) by Simon Winchester.
• A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books by Nicholas A. Basbanes. A collection of anecdotes and essays about various aspects of books.
• Book Lust and More Book Lust by Nancy Pearl. Reading recommendations galore.
• A Passion for Books: A Book Lover's Treasury of Stories, Essays, Humor, Love and Lists on Collecting, Reading, Borrowing, Lending, Caring for, and Appreciating Books, edited by Rob Kaplan. What the title says.

• I am slowly working my way through The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom, but will only recommend it to very patient readers.
  

Fiction:

• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. A fantastic literary bibliomystery.
• The Eyre Affair and its sequels, by Jasper Fforde. Entertaining fantasy/alt-reality bibliothrillers.
• The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. A gothic thriller featuring a writer and her biographer.
• Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley. The first is a story about a woman who buys a travelling bookshop and the second is a spy mystery centered on a bookshop.
• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. The story is told in the first person by a young woman who is trying to write a book describing the place where she lives and its inhabitants.
• The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. Fantasy about a boy who reads himself into a book.
• The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. A historical mystery about murders copying scenes from Dante’s Inferno.
• Death on Demand by Carolyn G. Hart. A murder mystery centering on a bookshop. All of the books in the series that follows contain allusions to mysteries and authors and frequent mentions of both.
• Bimbos of the Death Sun and Zombies of the Gene Pool by Sharyn McCrumb. Both are about a writer. The first takes place at a fantasy/sci-fi convention, the second centers on a buried manuscript.
• The Club Dumas Arturo Pérez-Reverte. About an unscrupulous rare-book dealer on the trail of a book of magic.

On my TBR list I have:

• The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.
• The Book Thief Markus Zusak.
• So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading by Sara Nelson.
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer.
• The Yellow Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee.
• Inkheart by Cornelia Funke.
• People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks.
• The Booklover mysteries by Julie Kaewert. I have three of them lined up, but want to find the first before I start.

Review of Toujours Provence

Originally published in 2004.

Author: Peter Mayle
Year published: 1991
Genre: Memoir, living abroad
Sub-genre(s): People and places
Where got: Second-hand bookstore

The Story:
Unlike the first book in the series, there is no story this time, just chapters on various subjects, ranging from the truffle business, to singing toads, to being a celebrity, wine tasting, turning fifty, eating wonderful food, living in a tourist area and so on.

Technique:
Written in the same light and humourous style as the previous book, but in some ways a better book. There is no attempt at telling a story, this is just a collection of anecdotes. In A Year in Provence, Mayle connected the chapters together by telling the story of the renovations being made on his house, and it made the book ramble a bit. Here, he is writing for people who have read the first book and know who the people he’s talking about are, so there is no need to introduce any of them, and it makes for a more flowing narrative.

This book did for me what the other one couldn’t: It made me want to visit Provence.

Rating:
The charming second installation in Peter Mayle’s saga of life in Provence. 3+ stars.

Review of The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt

Year published: 2005
Genre: History, portrait of a city
Setting & time: Venice, 1996-2003, with historical background going back farther

John Berendt arrived in Venice a few days after La Fenice (The Phoenix), Venice’s opera house, went up in flames, and visited it repeatedly over the next 8 years, interviewing people and doing extensive research. The book is a portrait of the city’s artists, aristocrats and glamorous expatriates at that time, with the story of the Fenice fire and its aftermath up to the grand re-opening as the backbone of the narrative, even when discussing other matters, like the debacle over Ezra Pound’s papers.

The book begins with a gripping account of the night of the fire, looking at it through the eyes of some of the people whose portraits he draws later in the book, and continues with a tightly woven tapestry of words. Berendt, like a good journalist, always keeps back and is rarely in the forefront of the narrative, so the book can’t really be called a travelogue. It’s more like a current history and a portrait of certain strata of the city’s inhabitants, and while he doesn’t go into raptures over the city like so many others have done, his love for Venice shines through.

This book is hardly going to be of much use to people who plan on exploring Venice, but it may well provide insights for people who plan on living there. Most of all, it is well written and makes a cosy read. 4 stars.

Review of Kitchen Confidential

Book 4 in my first 52 books challenge.
Originally published in several parts on February 16-21, 2004.

Part 1:

Author: Anthony Bourdain
Published: 2000
Where got: Public library
Genre: Autobiography

I first got wind of this book shortly after it was published in 2000, when, browsing on Salon.com, I came across an excerpt from it. I liked the style which is refreshingly honest and has great descriptions of people, and I immediately decided I wanted to read it. Below is a link to that excerpt:

Kitchen god


Parts 2-3:

Kitchen Confidential extract

Interview with Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain’s top 10 books about food


Part 4:

Kitchen Confidential is for the most part a memoir, but one which is interspersed with anecdotes and advise and littered with profanity. This funny and entertaining account of Anthony Bourdain's progress from dishwasher to chef is written in a tough and macho tone and sprinkled with inventive vulgarisms that might offend some readers and make others laugh out loud. In between the autobiographical stuff and accounts of people he's met is useful information about kitchen tools, what foods to avoid in restaurants and even a chapter on kitchen jargon.

Bourdain freely admits to having been a drug addict for many years, but somehow you never feel sorry for him, maybe because he obviously doesn't feel sorry for himself. One of the things you catch onto quickly is that he obviously loves food. Right from his childhood experiences with raw oysters in France and all the way to his visit to the sushi place in Tokyo, you sense that here is a man who first and foremost does what he does because he loves food.

I'm not going to go into the "don't order fish on Mondays" thing, as it has already been discussed to extremes (it was the thing most media latched onto when the book became a hit), but I am going to mention one chapter that will be useful to anyone who thinks they need a kitchen full of gadgets to be able to cook like a professional. To condense it somewhat: You don't!

As if the excerpts weren't enough to give an idea of the writing style, here is a quote that made me laugh. Bourdain has reached the bottom, is recovering from heroin addiction and still doing other drugs, is thin as a rake, nervous and generally not in good shape, when he gets a call from Bigfoot, an old employer. To begin with, the guy lends him 200 $:

"Looking at me, and hearing the edited-for-television version of what I'd been up to in recent years, he must have had every reason to believe I'd disappear with the two bills, spend it on crack and never show up for my first shift. And if he'd given me the twenty-five instead two hundred, that might well have happened. But as so often happens with Bigfoot, his trust was rewarded. I was so shaken by his baseless trust in me - that such a cynical bastard as Bigfoot would make such a gesture - that I determined I'd sooner gnaw my own fingers off, gouge my eyes out with a shellfish fork and run naked down Seventh Avenue than ever betray that trust."

Rating: Recommended read for anyone who is interested in the restaurant business, and especially what happens on the other side of the kitchen doors. 4 stars.

Wednesday reading experience #35

Try some chick-lit or the male equivalent: lad-lit.

If you’re a woman who already reads chick-lit, give lad-lit a try, and vice versa.

If you are unfamiliar with either:
Chick-lit is a term used for a specific sub-genre of women's fiction (i.e. books written for and marketed to women). It separates itself from romance fiction in that the main focus is not on romantic relationships, although they may be (and usually are) included, but equally on the female protagonist’s relationships with family, friends and co-workers, and on their careers and other aspects of their lives. These novels are generally light-hearted and humorous and the females portrayed in them tend to be in their 20s or 30s, are generally single, building a career (often in some seemingly glamorous profession like fashion or publishing), and are often obsessed with career-building and fond of shopping.

Some well-known titles include Bridget’s Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger, and the Shopaholic books by Sophie Kinsella.

See here for further definitions and a list of sub-genres: ChickLitChicks

Lad-lit (sometimes called “dick-lit”) is basically chick-lit with a male protagonist and featuring the same themes as chick lit (love, sex, family, work), only from a male perspective. It is ostensibly written for men, but it is generally read by both sexes.

Some well-known titles include About a Boy and High Fidelity, both by Nick Hornby.

Reading report for August 2009, and changes to the TBR challenge

I finished 20 books in August:

1 perennial re-read:

• Gerald Durrell: Catch Me a Colobus - memoir, animal collecting

5 books in the Top Mysteries challenge, one of them part of a trilogy that’s listed as one book in the CWA list, so you could say I have read 4 1/3 TM titles. They are:

• E.C. Bentley: Trent's Last Case - Murder mystery
• Erskine Childers: The Riddle of the Sands - Espionage thriller
• Len Deighton: Berlin Game - Espionage thriller (to be reviewed with the rest of the trilogy)
• Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird - Novel
• Dorothy L. Sayers: Gaudy Night - Murder mystery

5 in the Icelandic books challenge: 2 so-so short story collections, 2 pretty good poetry books, and one travelogue that pretty much sucked due to being mostly a rewrite of the historical and descriptive chapters of some guide book, interspersed with only a handful of observations by the author herself. They are:

• Andrés G. Þormar : Hillingar - short stories
• Eggert Ólafsson : Kvæði (Íslensk úrvalsrit) -poetry
• Helgi Valtýsson : Þegar Kóngsbænadagurinn týndist og aðrar sögur - short stories
• Jón Þorláksson : Ljóðmæli (Íslensk úrvalsrit) - poetry and poetry translations
• Rannveig Tómasdóttir : Fjarlæg lönd og framandi þjóðir - travelogue

2 books from the TBR list:

• Anthony Bourdain: Gone Bamboo - Mafia thriller
• Sharyn Mccrumb: Ghost Riders - Historical novel

Unfortunately I must admit that I have failed to keep to the TBR challenge list. The sin registry numbers a whole 8 books that I read because I wanted to read them more than I wanted to read any book on the challenge list, although at least 4 of them actually fit the challenge criteria. The books were:

• Andrea Camilleri: The Terracotta Dog - Murder mystery
• Polly Evans: Kiwis Might Fly - Travelogue
• Ngaio Marsh: Off With His Head and Scales of Justice - Murder mysteries
• Nora Roberts: Midnight Bayou and Northern Lights - Romantic thrillers
• Dorothy L. Sayers: Have His Carcase - Murder mystery
• (No. 8 was the reread).

The TBR-for-over-a-year challenge:
I am beginning to feel that having such a long master list is becoming a chore. Since reading is supposed to be fun, I have decided to change the TBR challenge, make it more spontaneous and allow myself to read books I am in the mood for reading that don’t belong in the challenge. I am now going to run the challenge on a monthly basis, at least to the end of the year. At the beginning of each month, I will pre-choose 5 books that fit the original criteria (I have owned them for more than a year but not read them yet), to read during that month. When I have finished reading those 5 books, I will be free to read all the non-challenge books I want, to the end of the month when the cycle begins again. Any books I read that fit the criteria but aren't on the list count towards the final tally. I am beginning with the 4 books on the original list I am most interested in reading right now (indeed, I have started reading one of them already), and adding 1 new one I am in the mood for reading.

The Books:
Heaven’s Command by James Morris
La Cucina by Lily Prior
Onions in the Stew by Betty MacDonald
Portrait in Death by J.D. Robb
The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt

Review: A Year in Provence

Author: Peter Mayle
Year published: 1989
Genre: Biography, living abroad
Where got: Charity shop

Just finished reading this book (well, not really - this is a repost from 2004). It describes the first year Mayle and his wife spent in their Provence farmhouse, sometime in the 1980's.

The story is set up in 12 chapters, each of which covers one month of the year. The two main threads that hold the story together and prevent it from being just a rambling collection of anecdotes are on the one hand their relationship with their rascally old neighbour Massot and his fight to keep tourists away from what he considers to be his land (actually part of a national park), and on the other the alterations being made to the house to make it fit for the Mayles to live in (i.e. installing modern conveniences like central heating) and their relationship with the workmen.

Pesky summer visitors make their appearance and are so sarcastically described that one wonders if they were likely ever to come back again after recognising themselves in the book (not that it would be a loss to the Mayles), delightful restaurants are visited and delicious meals consumed, and in the background the seasons change, each bringing its share of problems and delights. Even the travails of having a noisy crew of workmen apparently dismantling and reassembling the house on an irregular basis is made out to be not too bad - the Mayles are either a very tolerant couple or else Mr. Mayle has an exceedingly bad memory.

Rating: A nice, light read that would be suitable for taking along to while away time during a long-distance flight. Interesting enough that I have now got hold of the sequel and will review it later. 3 stars.

Top mysteries review: The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers

Year of publication: 1903.
Genre: Thriller, espionage novel.
Type of mystery: Military secrets.
Type of investigator: Amateur.
Setting & time: (mostly) the Frisian Islands, Germany, around he turn of the 20th century.

Story:
The narrator, Carruthers, is invited by Davies, an old acquaintance, to join him on a yachting trip in the North Sea. When he arrives, Carruthers discovers that the “yacht” is in fact a small boat, with no crew, and that Davies is hiding something from him. As they make their way down to the Frisian islands, Davies eventually reveals that he has started an impromptu investigation of possible nefarious doings by a man he suspects of being a British defector working with the German military. To complicate matters, Davies has fallen in love with the man’s daughter.

The book is in the public domain, and here is a link to an online edition: The Riddle of the Sands.

Review:
The Riddle of the Sands was one of the earliest spy novels, and has had immense influence on the genre. It was also a clear warning to the British, pointing out how badly they were prepared for repelling an invasion by sea. Here is some interesting reading on the subject: Wikipedia article.

The story is well written, with a solid plot and an engaging narrator, and is one of those charming adventure novels about plucky heroism by ordinary people caught in unusual circumstances. The sailing descriptions are correct and realistic (I get this information from people who know about sailing) and even a card-carrying landlubber like myself can enjoy them, even if they may occasionally have to consult a dictionary.

This is one of those proper British “boy’s own” tales: thrilling, patriotic and non-violent fun that boys of all ages (and sexes) can enjoy and imagine themselves participating in. The pace is very slow at first, but the tension begins to build up almost immediately, which should be enough to keep most people reading.

Rating: A pretty good early thriller, recommended read for sailing enthusiasts and fans of spy fiction. 3+ stars.

Books left in challenge: 92.
Place on the list(s): CWA #92.
Awards and nominations: None I am aware of.

Review of Cod

Originally book 6 in my first 52 books challenge.
Published in 2 parts on February 29 and March 7, 2004.

Full title: Cod: A biography of the fish that changed the world
Author: Mark Kurlansky
Published: 1997
Where got: public library
Genre: History

I decided it was time to learn more about the fish that can, with some justification, be called the basis of Iceland's economy. I have always liked haddock better. Maybe this book will change that.

After all the rave reviews and accolades, I expected Cod to be something more than just an ordinary history book. It isn't. Like many other history books I've read, it's well researched, informative and well written, if somewhat journalistic at times, but by far the best thing about it is the quotes and recipes, for which Mr. Kurlansky is not responsible. The writing failed to get me interested in the subject and about the only thing I found interesting was chapter 2 which gives information about the biology and ecology of the cod, and chapter 10, which gave me a new angle on the cod wars between Iceland and Britain, which in retrospect seem funny but at the time were dead serious.

I can only surmise that the praise the book has received was for the idea itself, of writing the history of the commercial exploitation of a seemingly mundane natural food resource, and furthermore one that few people outside the fishing communities of the Atlantic ocean ever give thought to. Of course, it has been done before, but mostly about more exotic foods like chocolate.

Rating: 1 star for an unusual subject, 1 star for good research and good writing, 1 star for great choice of quotes and recipes. In other words: 3 out of 5.

Kurlansky links:

Eclectica Magazine review

There were more, but they are all broken.

Top mysteries challenge review: Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

Year of publication: 1936
Series and no.: Lord Peter Wimsey, no. 11.
Genre: Mystery
Type of mystery: Sabotage, poison pen letters, attempted murder
Type of investigator: Amateur, aided by a semi-professional
Setting & time: Oxford, England; 1930s

Story:
While visiting her old college in Oxford, Harriet Vane finds an anonymous poison-pen message seemingly directed at herself. She thinks no more of it until she is invited back and taken into the confidence of the Dean and asked, due to being a mystery writer and therefore a sort of expert on criminal behaviour, to help discreetly find out who has been sending these nasty little messages to students and various members of the teaching staff and committing acts of nasty but apparently senseless sabotage around campus. Harriet feels out of her depth, but agrees to the task and, over the period of almost 2 academic semesters, diligently gathers clues, but is unable to draw any significant conclusions from them. However, once she gives up trying to do it on her own and asks Peter Wimsey for help, he is able to use those clues to solve the mystery, and as they work together on the case, Harriet and Peter finally begin to understand each other better.

Review:
The synopsis above might indicate that this is a straightforward detective novel, but nothing could be further from the truth. It is also an ode to Oxford, a close look at academic society and academic thinking, an examination of the attitudes towards higher education for women prevalent at the time of writing, and a love story.

This is a long book, even by today’s standards, but unlike Have His Carcase which I read before it and which could have been pared down by about 100 pages or so with no damage to either plot or narrative, this one could not have been made better by making it shorter. It needs the slow pace and the discussions and thinking and the descriptions and small side-plots to build up tension, not only in the mystery part, but the romance part as well, and the examination of academia and women's education needs to be as extensive as it is because it has a direct bearing on the mystery.

The story breaks one of the primary rules of mystery writing, the one that states that nothing short of murder can be interesting in a mystery. Despite, or perhaps because of this, it is almost a perfect specimen of the genre. It has the requisite build up of tension, the gathering of clues, odd and interesting personalities, a psychological factor, a thumping good climax and a very satisfying denouement.

It also has that interesting mingling of post-war sadness and pre-war innocence that colours some novels written in the years between the World Wars, especially after Hitler’s accession, and in fact I was slightly shocked when some of the characters referred to him positively and others jokingly, until I realised that of course I knew things that neither they nor Sayers had any inkling of.

I could probably write a thesis about this book, but since I think brevity is best when it comes to online reviewing, I will stop here.

Rating: An excellent, fine, nearly perfect mystery. 5 stars.

Books left in challenge: 93.

Place on the list(s): CWA: 4; MWA: 18.

Awards and nominations: None I know of.

Wednesday reading experience #34

Read some short stories or novellas and compare the form with that of a novel.

The short story has been called the novel’s little sister, which could be taken to imply that it is an easier form than the novel, but in fact a good short story is actually just as hard to write as a novel, possibly harder. In a novel, you have plenty of text to say what you want to say, but in a short story you can only say so much if you want it to stay short and not turn into a novella or even a novel.

Here is a blog about just such a challenge.

Literary musings: Changing tastes

Originally published on 25 February, 2004.
I was thinking about my first 52 books reading reading challenge, which I had recently started.


It's funny how my taste in reading has developed in cycles.

The first books I really got hooked on were Enid Blyton's Adventure, Famous Five and Adventurous Four series, which means that my first love in literature was detective novels. Then I discovered Jón Árnason's collection of folk tales. Jón Árnason is to Iceland what the Grimm brothers are to Germany, and his collection of folk tales is great reading. My favourite section was the fairy tales, and I could spend hours reading them. This developed into an interest in legends and mythology, especially Nordic and Greek, and in all branches of religion.

Then came a period when I read just about everything I could get my hands on, including all kinds of stuff that isn't meant for kids. One memorable book I read during this period was Robert Bloch's Psycho, which gave me nightmares, and then there were the hardcore porn books I found somewhere and which gave me rather strange ideas about sex. I think I was 11 or 12 at the time.

Then I became interested in thrillers of all kinds: Alistair MacLean, Sven Hassel, Desmond Bagley and Ian Fleming were among my favourite authors, and I'm sure I didn't understand half of what was going on in some of these novels.

This was followed by a period when I became fascinated with love stories, but this quickly blew over and I got interested in Agatha Christie. (First full cycle completed). I read every one of her books I could get my hands on, both in Icelandic and English. After that I graduated towards more serious detective stuff (meaning explicit) and Thomas Harris and Patricia Cornwell became my favourite authors.

Then I discovered fantasy, which may well be called a rekindling of my interest in fairy tales. My favourites were the Pern series by Anne MacCaffrey and Piers Anthony's Xanth books. Just when I was beginning to get tired of both, I discovered Terry Pratchett, who has been my favourite author since. I read his Discworld books with the same fervour and interest as I did fairy tales 25 years ago.

With this reading challenge I have re-entered the omnivore part of the cycle, and am reading anything I can get my hands on. I have, however, just made an inventory of the 40-50 books I have on my "to be read" list, and there are more detective novels than any other genre on the list. I wonder if this is the beginning of a new cycle?

It was. The cycle is still going strong.

Mystery review: Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers

Genre: Mystery, murder
Year of publication: 1932
No. in series: 8
Series detective: Lord Peter Winsey
Type of investigator: Amateur
Setting & time: A fictional English resort town; 1930s.

Story:
Harriet Vane is on holiday and on a hike between two English coastal towns she comes across the body of a man, with his throat cut, on a rock on the shore. She is unable to drag the body off the rock, but is able to photograph the body and make some observations and remove the weapon that appears to have been used to kill him, before going for help. Once she is able to find help, the tide has dragged the body away and it isn’t found for several days, during which Lord Peter turns up and he and Harriet start investigating the case alongside and with the full co-operation of the local police. What emerges is a complicated and elaborate conspiracy plot about which I will say no more.

Review:
This is a well written and intricately plotted book with interesting and rounded characters, just like the other Sayers novels I have read (Whose Body?, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, The Five Red Herrings, Strong Poison), but just as in The Five Red Herrings there is a tendency to overcomplicate the plot. In both cases the whole thing depended on timing, and there were endless considerations going back and forth about it, ad nauseam. In addition, there was a cipher, which was given so much attention that I found myself skipping whole paragraphs when Harriet and Peter were discussing it and trying to break it. A cryptography enthusiast would probably have enjoyed it, but I didn’t. (The cipher is, in itself, quite interesting, but as a minor plot element it is given way too much space).

WARNING: Read no further if you are unfamiliar with the Harriet/Peter story arc and its conclusion.

Additionally, like is unfortunately the case in a number of mysteries from that era, the murder plot is too intricate for my taste, and yet, for a novel that has such an involved murder plot in it, it still reads like background to the development of the relationship between the sleuths, a bridge between the book where they first meet and she turns him down, and the book where they finally reach an understanding. I have no problem with relationship development, but I think both that and the murder plot could have been streamlined by judicious editing of what is essentially just padding, at little or no cost to the plotting and character development.

Rating: Not one of Sayers’ finest, but essential reading if you want to follow the developing relationship between Peter and Harriet. 2+ stars.

Review of Chocolat

Book 3 in my first 52 books challenge. Originally published February 8, 2004.

First, a guilty admittance: I read Chocolat around the middle of last week. In fact, I devoured it.

Author: Joanne Harris
Published: 1999
Where got: Public library
Genre: Chick lit

Chocolat is a light and fun read and although I have seen the movie (which broadly follows the story in the book), I was unable to put it down.

The story is that of chocolatier Vianne and her daughter Anouk, rootless itinerants who, one day at the beginning of Lent, drift into the small French village of Lansquenet and start up a chocolate shop. Vianne immediately provokes the dislike of the village priest, padre Francis Reynaud, who sees her as a threat to his authority over the villagers, who forget all about fasting and proper Lenten behaviour when they encounter the delights of Vianne's shop. What provokes the priest in the beginning is Vianne's self-professed atheism and the impropriety of opening a chocolate shop during Lent, a time when he expects his parishioners to follow his example and deny themselves meat and all luxuries in food and drink. His dislike turns to hatred when Vianne keeps her shop open on Sundays, something he sees as her wantonly tempting the parishioners away from his influence right after mass, a time when he believes they should be especially humble and obedient to the laws of the church. The outcome is a psychological war, with the participation of the villagers, some of whom back Vianne and some padre Reynaud.

Vianne acts as her conscience and insight tell her to and further enrages the priest and his posse by allowing gypsies into her shop who are not getting served anywhere else, rescuing the battered wife of a café owner in the village, and encouraging an old woman who has long waged a war with the priest over various subjects. The old lady immediately recognises Vianne as a fellow witch, but Vianne has the ability to see what kind of chocolate is the best for each person, and can to some extent read people's minds.

The priest is someone who should really have been born in the middle ages. He is ascetic to the point of nearly starving himself and suffers from a biting bad conscience over something that happened when he was a child and really was not his fault (and over something else that was). He denies himself more and more as Lent passes and at the same time becomes more and more suspicious of and hateful towards Vianne and the gypsies who have moored their boats at the riverside on the edge of the village.

The story itself has a timeless feel to it and could easily have happened at nearly any time during the 20th or even the 19th century. The only indication of it being modern is a passing mention of one of the villages possessing a satellite dish.

The book is well written and engrossing. You keep reading to find out what happens next - not that there is a lot of action and excitement, but the character development and the reader's curiosity about the character's fates are enough to keep the pages turning. Most of the characters are alive and believable. You come to care about what happens to Josefine, long to know what the priest's secret is, and wonder if anything will happen between Vianne and Roux. The descriptions of Vianne's chocolate creations are sensuous and tempting, and make you want to run to the nearest candy shop and buy a box of luxury chocolates to munch on while you read.

The story is told in turn by Vianne and pare Reynaud. My only complaint is that although Harris manages quite well to portray the differences in their characters through their narratives, their voices and style are too alike. It may be that she is trying to show the reader that they are actually more alike than they would admit themselves. I really can't tell.

Rating: A delightful and delicious box of chocolates ready to be devoured and savoured by romantics and lovers of magic realism. 4 out of 5 stars.

Review of Gone Bamboo by Anthony Bourdain

Year published: 1997
Genre: Crime, thriller, comic
Setting & time: (mostly) the Caribbean island of Saint Martin; 1990s.

The Story:
Between hits, laid-back professional assassin Henry lives an idyllic life on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin with his wife Frances, but things get complicated when an assignment goes wrong and one of the intended victims survives.
The injured capo agrees to bear witness against his former Mafia associates and is moved to Saint Martin by the authorities to keep him out of harm's way. However, their idyll is about to be disturbed because the mafioso who ordered the hit has sent out people to track down the capo and Henry and kill them both.

Technique and rating:
This is a better put-together book than the previous thriller I read by Bourdain (Bone in the Throat) in that it focuses on fewer characters and there are no extraneous storylines here that interfere with the main story, making it more focused and streamlined. It is loosely connected with Bone in the Throat in that it shares some of the same characters, but the blurb manages to make it look like Tommy Pagano, the protagonist of Bone... is one of the lead characters in this one. He isn't.

While I am on the subject of the blurb: this has to be the most blatant example I have ever come across of a blurb written by someone who hasn't read the book. Not only does it make Tommy look like one of the lead characters, it also gets the name of Charlie the capo wrong and makes it look like he's a cross-dresser. The name confusion may be because it does look like his name was changed in the British edition, but there is no excuse for the other mistakes.

SPOILERS coming up:

This is less a gangster thriller than Bone..., although it does of course have a gangster element. There is humour here, but not as much of it, which is a pity, and none of the main characters are really sympathetic. But the storytelling is undeniably better, which evens things out. I am giving it 4 stars for that, and for having the balls to do something not many authors would dare to do, namely to kill off the book's most sympathetic characters.

Wednesday reading experience #33

Subscribe to a magazine for one year and read every issue from cover to cover.

I did this for the several years when I subscribed to National Geographic, and then to Saveur, and found it very rewarding. I recommend something that has substantial and informative articles and contains more articles than advertisments.

Literary musings: Serial stories

Originally published in March 2004.

What is it with sci-fi and fantasy authors? Can't they write a story that's contained within one book? Is it greed, is it inability or unwillingness to finish the story, is it a continuation of the tradition of serializing novels in newspapers and magazines, or is it something else altogether? Is Tolkien (or rather his publisher) to blame?

You can probably guess by this that I don't particularly like reading an endless series of books that together make up one huge epic. I like it even less when there is no indication of this to be found on the cover and I buy a book thinking it's a stand-alone story and then discover I've bought volume 12 of a 25 volume epic. Gimme a break!

Trilogies are OK, unless they run to 1500 pages per volume, but more books than that - no way. If they are collected in one volume later on I may be tempted to invest in it, but I will not spend my money on a series that goes on and on with no end in sight. It doesn't matter how good it is. What if the author died or the publisher went bankrupt? I would never see the conclusion of the story and it would nag me endlessly.

I came to this resolution after I once started reading a gothic fantasy series that dealt with a large family of witches, starting in the 16th or 17th century and stretching onwards to modern times (I think the last book ended in what was then the future). The books were well written, the historical aspects were detailed and largely correct and there were some interesting sex scenes (hey, I was a teenager, full of hormones and curiosity).

After reading about 10 books I realised three things:
1) that I would have to read every single book in the order of publication to be able to understand goings-on in later books,
2) it would go on for years, and
3) I didn't have the patience.

So I stopped reading them.

As it turned out, I was right on all accounts. The author created a complicated family tree and it was vitally important to know what had happened to who and who was descended from whom; in the end there were more than 40 books of about 150-200 pages each; and when the series came to an end the author began another one about what happened afterwards. According to a friend who read them all, the quality kept on declining the closer the books got to the 20th century. By that time I had long lost interest in this kind of literature and was reading books in which realism reigned supreme (I have since come back to fantasy).

However, I have nothing against books from series that happen in the same fantasy world and even feature the same characters, as long as each book is a separate and complete story and you don't need a "companion" or guide to figure out plot elements or the reasons why major characters are like they are. I used to quite like Piers Anthony's Xanth (before it got silly and repetitious) and I still love Terry Pratchett's Discworld. In both series, having read the other books helps you understand the characters and the worlds better, but a reader unfamiliar with the series can still safely pick up any book in the series and enjoy it on its own.

Mystery review: The Terracotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri

Original Italian title: Il cane di terracotta
Translator: Stephen Sartarelli (2002)
Genre: Mystery
Year of publication: 1996
No. in series: 2
Series detective: Inspector Salvo Montalbano
Type of investigator: Police
Setting & time: Sicily, Italy; 1993

Story:
When working on a case, Inspector Montalbano discovers a sealed-off cave and inside it the dessicated bodies of two young people, murdered 50 years before. The bodies have been ritualistically surrounded by a life-size terracotta dog, a water jug and a bowl of money. While on sick-leave, Montalbano has time to investigate the case and makes some interesting discoveries.

Review and rating:
As with the previous books I read by Camilleri, I found this one to be a good mixture of skilful writing and plotting and great storytelling. Combined with the humour, some quite poignant but never sappy scenes and some of the most mouthwatering descriptions of food I have read in any mystery, it makes for great reading.
And of course there is Montalbano. He is far from being perfect, but it is exactly his flaws that make him more human and endearing than many other detectives. He is, I think, a good example of how a character’s flaws can be used to make him come alive on the page.

The mystery itself is a bit lame, but the way that Montalbano finally solves the final part of the riddle is ingenious, and somehow I can easily imagine his gambit working in Italy, simply because the Italians seem to have such a highly developed appreciation for melodrama.

Stephen Sartarelli’s translation is excellent, by which I mean that it reads like the text was written in English but still retains an Italian flavour. The list in the back of the book, of terms and other stuff that needs explaining, is useful but at the same time unobtrusive so that one doesn’t feel like one has to read it.

Highly recommended. 4 stars.

Review of Jonathan Livingston Seagull

This was the second book of my first 52 books challenge. I would probably be less charitable if I reviewed it today...

Originally posted in two parts on February 1-2, 2004:

Entry 1:

Author: Richard Bach
Photographs: Russell Munson
Published: 1970
Where got: charity shop

This week's book is short and should make for a quick, easy read - a good thing considering that I'm swamped with school work. I've read it before, when I was a teenager, in an Icelandic translation and can remember nearly nothing about it except it took me less than an hour to read (I expect it will take a bit longer this time). I also saw the film some years ago and all I remember of that is music, pictures of soaring seagulls and a voice telling the story. This books seems to be a great favourite among New Agers and other sorts of spiritually inclined people, like religious groups, none of whom seem to interpret it in the same way. It will be interesting to see what my own impressions will be.


Entry 2:

Joyce it isn't. The language of the story is simple, so simple that young children and semi-advanced learners of English as a second language can understand nearly every word. Some of the flying terms might cause a bit of confusion to some, but they are not that important to the story. It's a quick read - I estimate that it took me less than 30 minutes to read it, sitting on the bus on the way to and from school.

The story is, narratively speaking, a very straightforward parable about a person who happens to be a seagull and who is cast out of his social group/flock for daring to be different and thinking more about flying than food. So far I can relate, having myself experienced very nearly the same thing. Then part 1 ends and the story gets spiritual, even religious. Jonathan transcends his mortal existence, enters another plane of existence where he meets others even more advanced in flight than himself, and perfects his art. He becomes some kind of heavenly gull who returns to the flock to teach others what he has learned about the pursuit of perfection through flight.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull could almost be taken as a model for how to write uplifting and spiritual texts. The language is ethereal, soothing and gentle and the story is very simple and yet vague enough that it can be taken to be an allegory for a hundred different things, which is probably a contributing factor in its popularity.
Personally, I think it's harmless enough, but I really can't understand what all the fuss is about.

Rating: A misunderstood children's book that you will either love or detest. 2 stars (out of 5)

Wednesday reading experience #32

Find out about a religion that’s foreign to you. You might want to read, in part or entirely, the primary religious text of that religion, and a book that explains and discusses it.

I suggest keeping a reading journal of the experience and considering how religions clash and how sometimes their messages are fundamentally the same.

Review of Kiwis Might Fly by Polly Evans

Sub-title: Around New Zealand on two big wheels
Year published: 2004
Genre: Non-fiction, travelogue
Setting & time: New Zealand, 2003 (?)

This is Evans’ second published travelogue, and a sort of sequel to It’s Not About the Tapas. This time around Evans stepped up the pace and got herself a motorcycle permit before embarking on a journey around New Zealand in search of the stereotypical Kiwi male: the hard-living, hard-drinking, ingenious bloke of pioneer days. This is, of course, a gimmick (such as most travel writers use in order to justify their journey) and it works well, even if it seems a bit affected. It lends humour to the narrative, as does her initial struggle to master the powerful motorcycle and the relationship she develops with the bike in the course of the journey. Then there is the destination. New Zealand comes across as the kind of place an Icelander would feel right at home, with its small-town culture, individualism and friendliness, and the varied landscapes and even more variable weather.

Evan has, in this book, managed to find the right balance between personal and historical narrative. There are no overly long historical passages and when she has chosen to include some history, the short and well-chosen passages are relevant to her mission and the places she visits. Most of all, she manages to make New Zealand interesting, in a way that she fails to do for Argentina in On a Hoof and a Prayer.

Rating: An interesting and well-written travelogue. 4 stars.

Musing about some of the ways readers mistreat books

Originally published in March 2004.

Some people have no respect for books.

There are readers who don't hesitate to mark their place by folding down a corner or laying the book down open and face down, risking serious damage to the pages and spine.

Some like to break the spine before starting to read, which weakens the cover and loosens glued pages. Of course, sometimes you have to, especially when the book is as thick as a brick and fights back when you try to open it.

Many, many readers slobber food stains or spill crumbs on the pages, which lowers resell value, hastens decomposition of the paper and encourages insects and bacteria to take up residence. Not to mention it's kind of icky for the next reader to find a collection of stains in the book. Jam, peanut butter, paté and ketchup stains are especially disgusting.
(OK, I confess, I am guilty of eating while I read, but I have at least learned to keep the book away from the food by using a book-stand, and I never read when I'm eating finger food or soup*).

I have heard of a reader who likes to read paperbacks and tear out each page after he's done and throw it away (shudder).

And don't talk to me about people who smoke while they read: I have checked a book out of the library that turned out to be so poisonous from cigarette fumes that only a gas mask would have enabled me read it.

All of this spells disrespect to me and I don't understand how people can treat books like that.

I also don't understand people who highlight words or write in library books or other books they don't own. I don't generally write in books myself, except sometimes in school books I don't intend to resell, and I would never write in a book that doesn't belong to me, and I always use a pencil when scribbling in my own books.
---------------------

*There's nothing that teaches that lesson more effectively than having your pet bird land in the soup dish and shower both you and the book with soup. After the soup incident he is not allowed out at mealtimes.

Review of Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb

Year published: 2003
Genre: Historical novel
Setting & time: (mostly) North Carolina; mid-19th century and modern times.

The book tells two converging stories. One is about the American Civil War as it played out in North Carolina (and Tennessee), seen from the viewpoints of two historical characters: Zebulon Vance, and Malinda Blalock, while the other is about modern-time psychic mountain dwellers and Civil War reenactors in the Appalachians who are on a collision course with some restless ghosts of the war.

The book examines how the Civil War tore apart families and made neighbours turn on each other, and how modern people in the area (not just reenactors ) all seem to think that their people were on the Confederate side during the war, when in fact they might have had ancestors on both sides. To add some spice to an already interesting story, McCrumb brings in a theme she has used in several of her other books: ghosts that can or will not rest. An additional dimension brings in NC governor Zebulon Vance to tell about the political side of the war, and Sheriff Spencer Arrowood as a balancing factor on the modern side, in his search for an ancestor who fought in the war.

The technique used to tell the story is one that is potentially confusing: two timelines, three major first-person narrators and an omniscient narrator, and a point of view that shifts between 5 important characters and a few minor ones. McCrumb pulls this off quite well and manages to keep the narrative voices distinct and separate and tell a cohesive story.

Most of all, this is a good story well told, as are all of her books. I am pleased that she seems to be moving away from the mystery genre, because her mysteries have always been more about people and their relationships than about detection, and I can truthfully say that only one of her books that I have read was a really good mystery (If ever I return, pretty Peggy-O).

Rating: Very good, as might be expected from this master storyteller. 4 stars.

Awards: Wilma Dykeman Award for Regional Historical Literature (by the East Tennessee Historical Society); 2004 Audie Award for Best Multi-voiced Narration (audio book award).

Top mysteries review: Trent's Last Case by Edmund Clerihew Bentley

Warning: If you want to be surprised by this mystery, don't read the Wikipedia entry on it.

American title: The Woman in Black
Year of publication: 1913
Genre: Mystery
Type of mystery: Murder
Type of investigator: Amateur (artist)
Setting & time: England, just before World War I.

Story:
An American business tycoon is found dead in the grounds of his English country house and it could be either murder or a bizarre suicide. A newspaper publisher calls in Philip Trent, an artist who has a knack for solving mysteries. He methodically sets about solving the case, using scientific methods and eliminating the suspects and theories one after the other.

Review:
This is a thoroughly old-fashioned mystery, and yet surprisingly fresh. According to some sources I have found on the web, Bentley wrote it in answer to Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, in order to contrast a detective who was human and fallible with the methodical and never-wrong Holmes, and perhaps to show the how some of Holmes' deductions could very well have been interpreted differently.

This novel is notable for breaking some of unwritten rules of a genre that was still in its formative years. For one thing, it offers not one, but three solutions to the case, and not in the form of speculations either. For another, it allows the detective to fall in love with a suspect, possibly one of the first detective stories to do so. It also shows just how wrong the deductions drawn from an available set of clues can be, even if they look thoroughly bullet-proof.

Modern readers may find the pacing slow, but this book is well worth taking the time to read. And the best part is that you can do it for free. I chose to link to the American version because the format of the British one is not suitable for reading online.

Rating: A good early mystery that has a few surprises up its sleeve. 4 stars.

Books left in challenge: 94

Place on the list(s): CWA #34; MWA #33.

Here is a recent entry on another blog that explains, better than I have the patience to write down, why you should read it.

Top mysteries challenge review: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Year of publication: 1960
Genre: Novel
Type of mystery: Rape
Type of investigator: Lawyer
Setting & time: Alabama, USA, mid-1930s

Story:
A presumably grown “Scout” Finch looks back on three years of her childhood, from the ages of six to nine, and tells the story as seen through her childish eyes, but with adult understanding. Part one is concerned with her, her brother and their friend and their lives, introducing the the town were they live and the people who live there, and the children's fascination with a mysterious neighbour who has not been see out of doors for many years. Part two features a criminal trial where the children's father defends a black man accused of raping a white girl, a trial that has unexpected consequences for the family.

Review:
Although this book is on the CWA's list of the Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time, I can’t really review it as a crime story or a mystery, because it’s not really either. The crime is never much of a mystery, and although it has far-reaching consequences, it isn’t really the main theme of the story, but rather the means to an end. The core of the story, as I see it, is justice and injustice and the various forms they take, and not just in the judicial meaning. But it’s also about coming-of-age, about race and racial prejudice, about poverty, community, family, friendship and childhood. In fact it has so many interwoven themes that it would make a good subject for an analytical thesis. Do not read it as a straightforward crime story, as you will only be disappointed.

This novel is a masterpiece of good storytelling and one of its main strengths is the charming way in which the story is told. While we are aware that Scout is teling the story with an older person’s hindsight, the narrative voice is still endearingly naïve at times, and mixes together adult humour and irony with childish wonder and innocent outrage in a narrative that would not have been nearly as charming if it had been told by an anonymous third person narrator.

I could write a long essay about this book because of all the different thoughts it provokes and its various themes, but in the interest of brevity, I think I will stop here and leave the expounding and interpreting to the thousands of students who read it every year in schools across the globe.

Rating: A wonderful coming-of-age novel and strong portrait of a community in the southern USA at a point in time. 4+ stars.

Books left in challenge: 95

Place on the list(s): CWA #60

Awards and nominations: The Pulitzer Prize, 1961

News: The Árni Magnússon manuscript collection is added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register

Árni Magnússon spent much of his adult life collecting old Scandinavian manuscripts, including many Icelandic ones. Some of the manuscripts are on display in Iceland's Culture House, which is located in the center of Reykjavík, next to the National theatre. For only 300 kr. (free on Wednesdays) you can see some of the manuscripts and view an exhibition that covers their creation and historical importance.

Wednesday reading experience #31

This is actually a challenge in two parts and requires the participation of at least two people.

a) If you consider yourself an expert on a particular genre, consider how you can teach a neophyte to like that genre by finding which books you would recommend they start with so they will get a positive image of the genre. For example, if you want to turn a mystery fan into a romance reader, choose the very best romance you know which has a strong mystery element, and a couple more books that will move gradually away from mystery and into purer romance.

b) Get some of your friends to do the same, then find someone among them to exchange these reading suggestions with – someone who prefers a different genre or sub-genre than you.

The same can be done with authors. See, for example, my suggestions for starter books in the Discworld series.

The fans are out in force and arguing about who is the best wizard

I wonder if the author of this blog entry knew what he has starting when he wrote it? (I'm sure he did, and is now sitting back and enjoying the show)

Some of the comments are hilariously fannish.

Second hand bookshops

I love second-hand bookshops and (by extension) second-hand books.

The number of second-hand bookshops in Reykjaví­k has dropped severely since I was a teenager. Most of the shops I remember from my forays into the city in those years were situated on the fringes of the city centre, away from the main shopping streets, sometimes skulking inside residential areas. The windows were usually dirty enough to allow only a dim view of the inside, and once you opened the door, the shops were tiny and stuffed with books from floor to ceiling, with hoards of more books in boxes, piles and stacks on creaky wooden floors. They all seemed to be run by old men who sat in ancient office chairs (that leaked stuffing) and looked benignly on as you rifled through the collections of dusty books. If you were lucky, you could find treasures for next to nothing, books that don't seem to be available anywhere anymore.

This was before the flea market opened.

The only good thing about buying books at the flea market is the low prices. Unlike the shops, the flea market is large, noisy and crowded, and, like most true bibliophiles, I love bookshops that remind me of an old-fashioned library, complete with high bookshelves and an atmosphere of church-like quietness combined with a smell of paper, dust and leather covers.

After the flea market opened and a bunch of booksellers set up permanent booths there, selling new and used books at low prices, the old-time second-hand shops disappeared one by one, killed off by competition, bad locations and the retirement or passing away of the owners. Now there are only two worthwhile second-hand bookshops left in the city.

I remember being very upset when my favourite second-hand bookshop closed and an Irish theme pub opened in its place. The shop had been housed on two floors, the first being given over to Icelandic books and antiques, and the second floor to foreign books. I could spend hours in there browsing until I was driven out by sneezing fits brought on by the clouds of dust that would billow up when some of the older books were pulled out for inspection.

As it turned out, the store had not closed, but had just moved to a cheaper location, a mere 10 minute walk from the old one, in a residential area where the Salvation Army also has a shop, giving me a double reason for visiting the area.

The new location has by now become too small for its contents. As you enter, you come into a dimly lit room dominated by a couple of desks placed at an angle to one another to form an L-shaped fortress around the bookseller - a friendly, elderly man - when he isn't pottering about the shop and arranging books on shelves. A large table in the middle of the room is stacked high with books, and to the side there is a huge pile of even more books. Continuing inwards from the front of the room are rambling, dusty bookcases that reach towards the ceiling and drifts of books creep over the floor and periodically threaten to form dams across the narrow aisles. The air is hot and dusty and has a musty, papery smell and I can never stay for long because it is always stiflingly hot in there, possibly to ward off dampness. There may well be doorways into other dimensions hidden among the shelves, and I wouldn't be surprised if one day I were to find myself wandering into L-space. It's that kind of bookshop.

The other good second hand bookshop in Reykjaví­k is very nearly in the centre of the city, not too far away from where I work. The street it's located in is the next one down from Laugarvegurinn, the main shopping street.

This shop is more like a regular bookshop: it's clean and neat, there is little dust, and there are no free-standing bookcases. The smell of books is still there, but it doesn't have that church-like atmosphere of the other one. The attraction there (for me) is the paperback section. A bunch of shelves and a table piled high with foreign (mostly English) language paperbacks beckons as soon as you enter. The books there are more expensive than in the other shop, costing about the same as they would new in a bookstore in the USA (did I mention that books are VERY expensive in Iceland?). The great thing about this second-hand bookshop is that it accepts trade-ins. The trade-in price for one paperback is two paperbacks - an excellent way to reduce a large library. This is where I acquired most of my fantasy paperbacks, and where I get mystery novels and thrillers for my mother.

Before going in there to trade books, a savvy bibliophile will first visit the Red Cross second-hand shop and buy a couple of books for 200 kr. and trade them in for a single book that costs four times that...

First published in March 2004, in three parts.

Update:

The first bookshop has since moved again. It is now situated in the city center, on the same street as the other one. The lighting is now good because the location was designed as a shop with large windows, but the books still drift about the floor and many are stacked in tottering piles and boxes. It's still dusty, but the musty smell is no longer there and neither is it uncomfortably hot any more. Big improvement.

The second bookshop has changed owners, and now stinks so horribly of smoking that I wouldn't dream of buying books there any more.

And the price of second hand books at the charity shops is now 100 kr.

Reading report for July 2009

I read fewer books in July than in the preceeding months, which is actually a good thing because the time taken from my reading schedule was used for some freelance translation work that will eventually enable me to buy a bigger apartment with a special room to house my book collection ;-)

I finished 8 challenge books:
3 top mysteries,
2 TBR, and
3 Icelandic (still on course, as I read 5 last month).

There were also 2 rereads and 3 first-time non-challenge reads. Two of the first-time reads were, in a roundabout way, parts of the top mysteries challenge: I am trying to read the Brother Cadfael series in order of publication, and one of the books is in the Top Mysteries challenge, so I am reading my way towards it.

The books:
Caroline Alexander: The Way To Xanadu (travelogue)
Linda Barnes: Bitter Finish (murder mystery)
Vera Caspary: Laura (murder mystery)
Jennifer Crusie: Anyone But You (romance)
Stella Gibbons: Cold Comfort Farm (novel)
Magnús Rafnsson: Angurgapi (Angurgapi is a magic symbol), (history)
Susan Moody: Penny Black (murder mystery)
Ellis Peters: One Corpse Too Many and Monk's Hood (historical murder mysteries)
Rakel Pálsdóttir og Jón Jónsson: Ástargaldrar (Love Magic), (books of spells)
JD Robb: Purity In Death (mystery-thriller)
Dorothy L. Sayers: Strong Poison (murder mystery)
Stefán Sigurkarlsson: Hólmanespistlar (stories from Hólmanes), (short story collection)

Top mysteries challenge review: Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers

This is the first volume in the four book story arc within the Lord Peter Wimsey series that describes his developing relationship with Harriet Vane, from first meeting to honeymoon. Two of the books are on the top mysteries list, but I will be reading them in order of publication to get the story as it should be read.

Year of publication: 1930
Series and no.: Lord Peter Wimsey, no. 6
Genre: Mystery
Type of mystery: Murder
Type of investigator: Semi-pro
Setting & time: (mostly) London, England, 1930

Story:
Mystery author Harriet Vane stands accused of murder, but Lord Peter, who has fallen in love with her at first sight, does not believe she is guilty. When a hung jury results in a mistrial (meaning the case will have to be tried again), he sees a chance to investigate the case more thoroughly, and does so, revealing a fiendishly clever and well-planned murder plot.

Review:

SPOILERS

One of the drawbacks of doing research before you read a book is that it can take away some of the thrill of reading it. In this case I started reading with the knowledge that Harriet Vane was innocent, which is pretty obvious as she ends up marrying Wimsey in a later book. But it couldn’t be helped – these books are just too well known for the fact to slip by any mystery fan who doesn’t wear blinkers. I can only imagine what it must have been like to read the book when it was first published, because back then no-one but the author would have known for certain that she was innocent. But enough about that, on to the review.

This whodunit has the narrowest list of suspects I have come across in a mystery, so narrow that the whodunit element can’t be sustained all the way through and around the halfway mark it turns into a whydunit, and then into a howdunit. The mystery is very cleverly done, and this is a beautifully done puzzle plot. Lord Peter is slightly less foppishly annoying in this book than in some of the previous ones, which is good, and there is a wonderfully comic interlude with his employee and sometime spy, the resourceful Miss Climpson, pretending to be a medium in order to acquire some important papers. The writing, as usual, is very readable, and fortunately less peppered with French and Latin words and phrases than some of the previous books.


Rating: A complicated mystery that has a good reason for being reckoned a classic of the genre. 4 stars.

Books left in challenge: 96.

Place on the list(s): 67/36

Awards and nominations: None I know of.

Mystery review: Monk’s Hood by Ellis Peters

Genre: Historical mystery
Type of mystery: Murder
Type of investigator: Amateur
Year of publication: 1980
No. in series: 3
Series detective: Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk
Setting & time: Shrewsbury, England, 1138

Story:
A man who has pledged his estate to the monastery is murdered by slipping some massage oil made with monkshood (aconite, a deadly poison) into his food. Brother Cadfael, who made the oil to be used as a topical relief for rheumatism, is deeply offeneded. On top of that, the dead man’s wife turns out to be someone he loved very much as young man and had planned to marry. When suspicion falls on her teenage son who had been his stepfather’s intended heir before they had a falling out, she begs Cadfael to help the boy. He begins an investigation that is somewhat hampered by the Prior who is in charge of the monastery while the abbot is away and doesn’t approve of what he sees as Cadfael’s worldly ways, and also by the absence of deputy sheriff Hugh Beringar, who, unlike his superior, is unlikely to arrest someone just because they seem to be the likeliest suspect.

Review and rating:
This is the third outing in the Cadfael series, and like One Copse Too Many, which I reviewed yesterday, it is a mixture of thriller, mystery and romance, has an eventful and twisting plot, and is well written. While the previous book is pretty much a straightforward whodunnit and procedural that turns on finding out who the murdered man was, why he was murdered and who, out of a large group of possible suspects, did it, this one is more of a puzzle plot. The group of suspects is small, and the solution is arrived at by a very careful piecing together of clues and facts from various sources. Like so often with mysteries with a small cast of suspects, the solution lies in finding out who had the strongest motive for the killing, and then finding out how they did it. And while I did figure out both before the omniscient narrator gives on that Cadfael has done so, I still consider this a better mystery than One Corpse….

In addition, it has some really wonderful descriptions of the landscape on the Welsh-English border, and a funny side-story about monastery politics. I therefore give it a solid 3 stars.

Mystery review: One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters

I used to faithfully watch the television adaptations of the brother Cadfael books (starring Derek Jacobi as Cadfael) but I remember very little of them, except that I loved the medieval setting of the series. I have been patiently assembling the book series for reading ever since I joined BookMooch, as I want to read them all and would prefer to read them in order of publication. Now I have nearly the whole set and am ready to start. I read the first book, A Morbid Taste for Bones several years ago, and didn’t review it, but I may revisit it and post a review.

Genre: Historical mystery
Type of mystery: Murder
Type of investigator: Amateur
Year of publication: 1979
No. in series: 2
Series detective: Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk
Setting & time: Shrewsbury, England, 1138

Story:
At the end of the siege of Shrewsbury (a real historical event) by King Stephen (a real person), pretender to the English throne, the whole of the defending garrison, 94 men in all, are executed as an example to Stephen’s other enemies. However, Brother Cadfael, who has been given the task of redying the bodies for Christian burial, discovers an extra corpse. The young man had been murdered and his body hidden among the executed. King Stephen gives orders for the killer to be found and brought to justice and the task falls to Cadfael, who is, at the same time, involved in a potentially dangerous game of cat and mouse with an ambitious young man who has just pledged his allegiance to Stephen and is searching for the young woman betrothed to him. She is in in hiding, being the daughter of one of the men opposing Stephen and a valuable hostage if caught. With shrewdness born of wide-ranging experiences before he became a monk, Cadfael plans and plots and investigates, and succeeds, with the help of an unexpected ally, in carrying out his plans and finding the killer.

Review and rating:
Ellis Peters had a style that was flowing and readable, and in the Brother Cadfael books she has added historical detail that suggests research at least as exhaustive as that of Georgette Heyer in her historical novels. Combining this easy writing style with an interesting lead character, thriller elements, an eventful plot and a double romance, this makes for a nice mixture that I breezed through in less than 2 hours. Unfortunately, I couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for the mystery itself, which, in spite of all the investigating, pondering and theorising, turned out to be rather flat. 2+ stars.

Wednesday reading experience #30

Read one of the great foodie books. I recommend Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of Taste.


Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) was a famous French gastronome and his book on the subject, Physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste), is still in print. Here he is discussing the effects of digestion on men of literature (translation by Anne Drayton, from the Penguin edition):

"I believe that men of letters, for the most part, owe their choice of genre to their stomach.
According to my theory, comic poets will be found among the regular, tragic poets among the constipated, and pastoral and elegaic poets among the lax; whence it follows that the most lachrymose of poets is only removed from the most comic of poets by a degree of digestionary concoction."

The book covers all kinds of subjects and their relation to food, eating and digestion, and is a must-read for true foodies.


Other good food reads I can recommend are:

• The Book of Tea by Anthony Burgess and Alain Stella – a brilliant coverage of the history of tea, tea-drinking traditions, tea natural history and tea varieties, full of gorgeous photos and illustrations.
• The True History of Chocolate by Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe. Although some of the history chapters are a little dry, this is a great read for those who wish to know where that heavenly substance comes from, how it came to be known to the world and how it’s made.
• Unfortunately I have not come across a really good book about coffee, so I can’t recommend one.
• Tender at the Bone and Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl. The first is a wonderful memoir that describes the making of a foodie, and the second is a memoir and collection of her food articles and restaurant reviews from the New York Times.
• A Cook’s Tour in search of the perfect meal by Anthony Bourdain. Combines two of my favourite hobbies: travel and food. If you're wondering why I am not recommending Kitchen Confidential, it’s because while it’s an interesting read, it is uneven and sometimes just plain gross.
• The Man Who Ate Everything and It Must Have Been Something I Ate by Jeffrey Steingarten. Two great collections of food essays and articles by an obsessive gastronome.
• Salt: A world history and Cod: A biography of the fish that changed the world by Mark Kurlansky.
• For a food porn fix: any of the Culinaria books. Gorgeous and heavy coffee-table books about food culture in different countries, rich in recipes and photographs.

I have avoided cookbooks, but many of these books have recipes in them as well.


And, just for fun, some of the foodie books on my TBR list:

• The Art of Eating and The Gastronomical Me by M.F.K. Fisher
• Comfort Me With Apples by Ruth Reichl

Blast from the past: Review of Holes

Originally published February 11, 2004.


Author: Louis Sachar
Published: 1998
Where got: Public library


Picked up Holes at the library along with next week's scheduled book and read it in about three hours.

It's written as a story for older kids and teenagers but has appeal for adults as well - at least this adult. It's well written and funny in places, but also contains some nasty scenes of cruelty and injustice that should appeal nicely to kids and teens who love reading stuff like Grimm's Fairy tales (unedited) and Harry Potter. Those same scenes may gross out delicate souls and younger children.

The story tells of Stanley Yelnats, a boy wrongfully convicted of a crime and sent to Camp Green Lake, a miserable juvenile work camp in the Texas wilderness. There, his and the other inmates' days are spent digging holes at random in the dry lake bed. He quickly realizes that they must be looking for something but the reader figures out much sooner than he does what it is, through flashbacks to the past history of the lake and to Stanley's family history.

Favorite quote: "If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, it will turn him into a good boy."

Rating: Great read, skilfully written and well told.

First blast from the past: Reading journal entries and review for Catch 22

This was the very first book review I posted on my very first blog (52 Books: A bibliophile's miscellany), back in 2004. It was the first book I read as part of a book-a-week reading challenge that aimed at discovering as many new authors and genres as possible. I might not review it in the same way or give it the same rating now, but I am letting the entries stand as they were when I wrote it. All that has changed is that I left out some outside links, left out the cover image and fixed a spelling error or two as well (I hate those).

Originally posted in several parts on January 24-31, 2004:

Entry 1:

I've had this book in my "to be read" pile since sometime last autumn, and have wanted to read it for even longer, which makes it a good choice for the first in my 52 books challenge. Below are a couple of links related to the book.

Author: Joseph Heller
Published: 1961
Where got: charity shop
Genre: Satire, war

Entry 2:

I've finished several chapters and am beginning to be reminded of a TV series that I used to like watching as a teenager. The framework in both stories is war with all its attendant madness. Not that the book and the TV series take place in the same war or even the same continent, but some of the characters in Catch 22are displaying idiosyncrasies and attitudes that remind me decidedly of some of the characters from MASH.
So far the book has not tempted me to sit down and read it from cover to cover in one go. I'm on chapter seven and characters are still being introduced. A main storyline has not yet presented itself, although there have been hints...

Entry 3:

Catch 22 was first published in 1961. Critics who reviewed it either loved or hated it (there seem to have been no middling reviews), and at first it became a popular underground book, only surfacing to take its place on the bestseller lists when it came out in paperback. It came as something of a shock to readers who were used to serious anti-war novels full of pathos, with its dark and sarcastic humour, absurd dialogues and lack of a continuous storyline. It is by many considered to be among the best American novels of the 20th century, and readers still either think it's one of the best or one of the worst books they've read.

Catch 22 is one of those books that get classified under "general fiction" because people find it hard to put it anywhere else. I would say it belongs to the satire genre, with war as its main sub-genre.

The setting is semi-fictional, but the story could have happened almost anywhere in the world where American bomber planes were based, within the time frame of World War 2.

Heller based the book on his own experiences in WW2, which is perhaps the reason why some of the things that happen are so realistic and the conversations often believable in their absurdity.

The book's title has entered the English language as a term for things that are at once paradoxical, impossible and absurd.

Entry 4:

I'm at the halfway point in the book and it's becoming engrossing enough to keep me wanting to be reading when I'm at work. Have laughed out loud several times at the abusurdities and ironies of it and am looking forward to going back to reading.

Entry 5:

Note to anyone who hasn't read it yet: don't skip round to the ending at any time during your reading as it will ruin the rest of the book for you.

A friend asked me if If I'd seen the movie, but I haven't. I will check to see if it's available at the nearest video rental store, and will watch and review it if I do. In the meantime, here's one viewer's review
And more, at the Internet Movie Database

Finally, here is a quote which explains the basics of Catch 22:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he would have to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. “That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed. “It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.

New (old) reviews

Yahoo has announced that it's closing down Geocities, its free website-hosting service, so the archive for the old 52 books blog will be going offline in the autumn. I have therefore decided to move some of the old reviews and other material over here, to make them easier to find. I am also going to see about taking the old blog down, since many of the links are broken and it has turned into a big mess. I am going to be posting this material under the label "blast from the past" and will try to post no more than one review, book list or essay a week.

Wednesday reading experience #29

Read Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media and/or Neil Postman’s Amuzing Ourselves to Death. Although they’re oldish books, they offer some still-valid insights into today’s mass media.

Mass communication studies are a fascinating discipline, and can really help us understand how the media are affecting and often manipulating us without our knowledge.

I came across the following on the Guardian book website this morning, and felt I had to comment.

Alphabetisation is the most banal approach to bookshelving going: who wants their living room to look like a lending library?

Sarah, I don't really see what is banal about alphabetising your books. Everyone should use whatever system suits them best and not have to worry about being publicly criticised for it. The only problem I can see with straight alphabetising is that if you own a mixture of paperbacks, hardcovers and books in various larger formats and shapes (like I do), it's not an economical use of shelf space. But banal? No, just practical.

I'd rather be reading

... but duty calls. I am taking a short sanity break from translating a legal contract on a short deadline, which is very exacting work, and I can't use a translation memory because it's in badly scanned pdf form and the reader can't convert it to text. I'm of a mind to change my price list to charge more when I can't use translation memory, because not only does it mean more typing for me, but I also have to figure out the lay-out of the document and hand-count the words. Unfortunately it also means a higher risk of error, so maybe that evens it out. It's some consolation that the contract happens to be fascinating...

Top mysteries challenge review: Laura by Vera Caspary

Year of publication: 1943
Genre: Mystery
Type of mystery: Murder
Type of investigator: Police
Setting & time: New York, USA; 1930’s
Place on the list(s): MWA #44

Story:
A young woman is found with her face blown away by a shotgun blast and is identified as the owner of the apartment where she was found. However, shortly afterwards the murder investigation takes a new turn when the real owner of the apartment turns up very much alive.

Review:
This is an interesting novel mostly for the way it is set up. The points of view shift to show how the main characters saw things, making it an interesting example of the use of one or more unreliable narrators. Other than that, it is a mediocre mystery, and more a study of how a strong, independent woman can arouse strong feelings and reactions in men.

The story is well put together, but the killer’s identity is glaringly obvious from early on and this does not, in my opinion make Laura a good mystery, only a study of stereotypes strung together with some fairly good writing and regrettably predictable plot elements.

The worst part is the big cliché, which can not be excused by saying that it was not a cliché when the book was written, because it was well-established by that time. It's one that annoys me no end, twinned with another cliché that also annoys me, which is why, although I think the stock plot elements and stock characters are well utilised, I can't give the book more than 2 stars. Just to be clear: I am not referring to the much-mentioned cliché ending that I detest, which we have been mercifully spared here, but something else I don't remember mentioning before.

I have a sneaky suspicion that the reason this book made it onto the MWA’s list is that it was the movie that the voters remembered and not the novel. I have this suspicion because Christie's Witness for the Prosecution is known to have made it onto the same list for a similar reason. It isn't really eligible because there never was a Christie novel of that title – the original is a short story and there has been a play and a movie (both of which end differently from the short story), but all three are fondly remembered and appreciated enough to make it onto the list. If the voters made one such mistake, why not two? The film version of Laura is a classic of its kind and from all my research seems to be considered superior to the book. I haven't been able to judge for myself yet, but if I get my hands on the movie, I will certainly watch it and possibly post an update.

Rating: 2 stars.

Books left in challenge: 97.
Awards and nominations: None that I know of.

Top mysteries: changes and ranking

I’ve found a more reliable source for both the lists I am using and have discovered that the lists I was using weren't entirely correct, so I am changing the combination list accordingly. Out go 10 books and in go 9.
Interestingly, a book I read and reviewed as a Wednesday Reading Experience earlier in the year gets added to the list: The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad.

The lists I am now working from give the ranking of the books, and I think it would be useful to include this information with the reviews. However, I don’t want to repost the reviews I have already posted because it plays hell with the feed readers and annoys real readers, so here is an list of rankings for the books I have already reviewed, alphabetised by author. CWA stands for the British Crime Writer’s Association and MWA stands for the Mystery Writers of America.


Anthony Berkeley: The Poisoned Chocolate Case; CWA # 41
Christianna Brand: Green for Danger; CWA #84
Truman Capote: In Cold Blood; MWA # 54
Vera Caspary: Laura; MWA #44
Sarah Caudwell: The Shortest Way to Hades; CWA # 76
Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent; MWA #86
Edmund Crispin: The Moving Toyshop; CWA # 25, MWA #72
Lionel Davidson: The Sun Chemist; CWA # 88
Colin Dexter: The Dead of Jericho; CWA # 37
Fyodor Dostoevski: Crime and Punishment; MWA # 24
Caroline Graham: The Killings at Badger's Drift; CWA # 80
Dashiell Hammett: The Maltese Falcon; CWA # 10; MWA # 2
Dashiell Hammett: The Thin Man; MWA # 31
Thomas Harris: Red Dragon; MWA # 27
Patricia Highsmith: Strangers on a Train; CWA # 38
Patricia Highsmith: The Talented Mr. Ripley; CWA # 45, MWA # 71
Michael Innes: The Journeying Boy; CWA # 52
Peter Lovesey: The False Inspector Dew; CWA # 27
Ed McBain: Cop Hater); CWA # 36
Ed McBain: Sadie When She Died; CWA # 96
James McClure: The Steam Pig; MWA # 98
Nicholas Meyer: The Seven Per-Cent Solution; MWA # 65
Susan Moody: Penny Black; CWA # 57
Ruth Rendell: Judgement in Stone; CWA # 39, MWA # 89
Hillary Waugh: Last Seen Wearing; CWA # 12, MWA # 74


And just for fun, the listed books I had read before I started the challenge:
Desmond Bagley: Running Blind; CWA # 77
James M Cain: Double Indemnity; MWA # 34
James M Cain: The Postman Always Rings Twice; CWA # 30
John Dickson Carr: The Hollow Man/The Three Coffins; CWA # 40, MWA # 44
G.K. Chesterton: The Innocence of Father Brown; MWA # 57
Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None; CWA # 19, MWA # 10
Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express; MWA # 41
Agatha Christie: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; CWA # 5, MWA # 12
Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone; CWA # 8, MWA # 7
Arthur Conan Doyle: The Collected Sherlock Holmes Short Stories; CWA # 21
Arthur Conan Doyle: The Complete Sherlock Holmes; MWA # 11
Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles; CWA # 32
Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose; CWA # 13, MWA # 23
Ian Fleming: From Russia with Love; CWA # 35, MWA # 78
Ken Follett: Eye of the Needle; MWA # 25
Ken Follett: The Key to Rebecca; CWA # 95
Sue Grafton: "A" is for Alibi; MWA # 51
John Grisham: A Time to Kill; MWA # 73
Thomas Harris: The Silence of the Lambs; MWA # 16
Jack Higgins: The Eagle Has Landed; CWA # 54
Tony Hillerman: A Thief of Time; CWA #69, MWA # 53
Tony Hillerman: Dance Hall of the Dead; MWA # 37
P.D. James: Shroud for a Nightingale; MWA # 83
Alistair MacLean: The Guns of Navarone; CWA #89
J.J. Marric: Gideon's Day; CWA # 87
John Mortimer: Rumpole of the Bailey; MWA # 26
Elizabeth Peters: Crocodile on the Sandbank; MWA # 82
Ellis Peters: A Morbid Taste for Bones; CWA # 42, MWA # 100 (tie w. Rosemary’s Baby)
Edgar Allan Poe: Tales of Mystery and Imagination; CWA # 23, MWA # 32
Mario Puzo: The Godfather; MWA # 15
Mary Roberts Rinehart: The Circular Staircase; MWA # 40
Maj & Per Wahlöö Sjöwall: The Laughing Policeman; MWA # 46
Mary Stewart: My Brother Michael; CWA # 55
Mary Stewart: Nine Coaches Waiting; CWA # 62
Bram Stoker: Dracula; MWA # 70
Josephine Tey: The Daughter of Time; CWA # 1, MWA # 4

I had posted reviews of some of these books online before I started the challenge and will be working on reposting them under the appropriate label.

Wednesday reading experience #28

Try one or more of the great dystopian novels.
For some reason I have always found them more interesting than the utopian ones.

I recommend:
Aldous Huxley : Brave New World
George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-four and Animal Farm
H.G. Wells: The Time Machine
Franz Kafka: The Trial (I need to reread this one, it’s been ages since I read it)
Several of the short stories in Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House, e.g. “Harrison Bergeron” and the titular story.

Currently on my reading list are:
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Check out this Wikipedia list for more suggestions

Wednesday reading experience #27

I forgot to post the Wednesday reading challenge on Wednesday, so here it is now:

If you come from a Western or Christian culture, read the Bible and consider how it has affected the literary heritage of your culture or country. If you belong to a non-Christian religion or culture, do the same with the primary book of your religion.

It is not necessary to be religious or even to be a believer to enjoy doing this, just to enjoy reading and thinking about literature and literary connections.

There are many, many different stories in the Bible, and most, if not all, have been reworked, twisted, inverted, used as inspiration, referred or alluded to in some form of literature.

Here is a list of some literature to check out that use biblical material or biblical themes:

Connie Willis: “Inn” and “Epiphany”, both in Miracle and other Christmas Stories
Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman: Good Omens
David Seltzer: The Omen
John Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress
Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy
C.S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia and The Screwtape Latters
John Milton “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained”
Mark Twain: Letters from the Earth
O. Henry: “The Gift of the Magi”

I had a longer list, but now I can't find it. I'll post more when I do.

Top mysteries challenge review: Penny Black by Susan Moody

I finally found the book (under the driver's seat of my car), so here is the review.

Year of publication: 1984
Series and no.: Penny Wanawake, no. 1.
Genre: Mystery
Type of mystery: Murder
Type of investigator: Amateur (photographer)
Setting & time: Washington D.C., USA; 1980s.

Story:
Photographer Penny Wanawake is shocked to discover that a friend of hers has been stabbed to death in a restroom at Los Angeles airport. Her search for the killer takes her to Washington D.C., into the company of the city’s diplomatic and political elite, made easy by her connections: her father is a diplomat and her mother an English Lady. Once in Washington, she delves into the world of orchid breeders where a fierce competition is taking place to be the first to breed a "black" orchid. She also uncovers some seedy secrets that someone may just be willing to kill to keep under cover.

Review:
Penny Wanawake was, when the first book was published, quite an unusual and exotic detective: a six-foot tall photographer of African and English descent with connections among the world’s diplomatic set and aristocracy, educated at the best private schools and keeping company with thieves. She is polished, erudite, funny and sexy, but unfortunately, with her frequent sarcastic quips, Penny also comes across as somewhat bitter at times. While it may sound like a cliché, I kept seeing her as resembling Grace Jones in my mind’s eye while reading the book, only not quite as fierce (although I don’t remember if Jones ever wore her hair in beaded cornrows).

One thing I really liked about the story was that as a first-time Penny is believable. She is genuinely shocked and saddened by the murders, she makes mistakes and advances theories without having anything to go on other than dislike for the suspects. But she also shows a keen talent for reasoning and eliminating suspects once she is able to look past personal likes and dislikes. In that way she is more realistic than many of the first-time amateur sleuths I’ve read about.

The story is sleek and chic and full enough of twists to delight any mystery lover