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, and for an author’s first book it is very good, but it has a lead character who is amoral in certain respects and so is not for people who believe that detectives should be completely honest people.

Rating: An interesting and exotic mystery. 3+ stars.

Books left in challenge: 97

Awards and nominations: None that I know of.

Yet another use for books

Flowerpots

How to water the plants without soaking the book?
My guess is a really good, thick covering of that liquid plastic stuff that dries solid, but on the other hand this just might be a visual joke.

Reading report for June 2009

My reading has dropped back to about 2 books a week, and all the books I read this month were challenge reads. My reading was unusually heavy in mysteries, but I also got in a some travelogues, some history, poetry, fantasy and one brilliant modern classic.

In the Top Mysteries Challenge, I read 3 books. All were good.

• *Earle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Velvet Claws (murder mystery)
• *Ed McBain: Sadie When She Died (police procedural, murder mystery)
• *James McClure: The Steam Pig (police procedural, murder mystery)

In the Icelandic books Challenge, I finished 5 books, none of which have been translated into English, but 2 have been translated into one or more Scandinavian language and one into German as well. There exist English titles for both of them, so there may be translations in the works.

• Bjarni Þorsteinsson: Kvæði (poetry)
• Magnús Á. Árnason, Vífill M. Magnússon, Barbara Árnason (illustrations): Mexíkó (travelogue)
• Örlygur Sigurðsson: Rauðvín og reisan mín (travelogue)
• Sjón : Argóarflísin: Goðsaga um Jason og Keneif (fantasy)
• Viktor Arnar Ingólfsson: Afturelding (police procedural, murder mystery)

In the TBR Challenge I finished 7 books:

• Douglas Adams & Mark Carwardine: Last Chance to See (endangered wildlife travelogue)
• Mikhaíl Búlgakov: The Master and Margarita (novel - Icelandic translation)
• *Cyril Hare: An English Murder (murder mystery)
• Tony Hillerman: The Ghostway (murder mystery)
• Ngaio Marsh: Spinsters in Jeopardy (murder mystery)
• Stella Tillyard: Aristocrats (history/biography)
• *Eric Wright: The Night The Gods Smiled (murder mystery)

Wednesday reading experience #26

Choose a historical era and read one or more non-fiction accounts of it, either of the general history of the era, an event that took place within the era (e.g. a war, the discovery of new lands or a royal marriage), or the biography of a person who lived during that era. Then find a historical novel that features the same era, event, or person, or is directly about the same (i.e. a novelisation), and see how an author can use - or in some cases abuse or twist - historically known facts to tell a fictional story.

You may even want to compare the history book and historical novel with a novel about a similar subject that was written during that era.


Some suggestions for historical novels:
Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace
Georgette Heyer: An Infamous Army. Her other novels, which are mostly either pure romances or have a strong romantic element (Infamous Army does too) are more domestic in scope, but they are excellently researched and give one a good idea of the manners and language of the era they cover (mostly the English Regency, but some take place in the 18th century)
Paul Scott: The Raj Quartet
One or more of Steven Saylor’s mysteries about Gordianus the Finder (the rise of Julius Caesar and Roman politics of the time is in the background of the stories)
Ellis Peters: The Brother Cadfael books
Wilbur Smith: River God and its sequels
Patrick Süskind: Perfume - I highly recommend this one
Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers and its sequels, or The Count of Monte Cristo
Victor Hugo: Les Miserables or The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Sigrid Undset: Kristin Lavransdatter
Baroness Orczy: The Scarlet Pimpernel
Toni Morrison: Beloved or The Bluest Eye
James Clavell: Shogun
Sir Walter Scott: any of the Waverly novels, e.g. Rob Roy, Ivanhoe or The Talisman
Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities
George MacDonald Fraser: The Flashman Chronicles
Patrick O’Brien: The Aubrey-Maturin series
Bernard Cornwell: The Sharpe series
Margaret Mitchell: Gone With the Wind
John Jakes: North and South
Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose or Baudolino
Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Captain Alatriste novels
Fannie Flagg: Fried Green Tometoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
Alice Walker: The Color Purple

Top mysteries challenge review: The Steam Pig by James McClure

Year of publication: 1971
Series and no.: Kramer & Zondi, no. 1.
Genre: Police procedural
Type of mystery: Murder
Type of investigator: Police
Setting & time: A fictional city in South-Africa, 1970s.

Story:
The clever murder of a young woman is discovered by accident and Lieutenant Kramer and his assistant, D.S. Zondi, are handed the case. They discover a number of surprises about the young woman, who had lived a double life, and the people who might have wanted her dead.

Review and rating:
This is the first book in a series featuring the unlikely but efficient detective team of Kramer and Zondi. The story takes place in Apartheid-era South-Africa and Kramer is an Afrikaner and Zondi a Zulu, which makes for a complicated, layered relationship. Kramer is careful to maintain an outward appearance of being a proper white supremacist, but when more closely examined the relationship between the two men is really one between a senior officer and a loyal junior one and clearly based on mutual respect and recognition of each other's talents and shortcomings rather than on racial status.

The story not only reveals a good, solid working relationship between a black man and a white man in a racially divided country, but it is also a stinging criticism of the prejudices, contradictions and miseries of Apartheid.

The story combines the hard-boiled violence and gritty realism of the noir genre with the conventions of the police procedural, and gives us characters that come alive in the telling and an exciting narrative full of gallows humour, clever twists, red herrings and other surprises. 4+ stars.

Books left in challenge: 97. This is not another miscount – I got Grisham's A Time to Kill from the library and was no more than a few pages in when I realised that I had already read it. The story came back to me in enough detail that I don’t find it necessary to reread it.

Awards and nominations: The CWA Gold Dagger, 1971.

Quotation of the day no. 27

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other people have lent me.
Anatole France

TBR list cull

I’ve decided to cull The Book Club and take if off the TBR challenge list without finishing it. It passed the 2 chapters/50 page test, but by chapter six I realised it wasn’t keeping my attention as it should. None of the characters felt really sympathetic, their stories were falling into predictable grooves, and I only found one of the five storylines appealing. In short, it was becoming tedious to read and I found myself skipping paragraphs - a sure sign I'm not enjoying a book.

I’m replacing it with the next book I feel like reading that isn’t on the list but fits the challenge.

Mystery review: An English Murder by Cyril Hare

Genre/sub-genre: Country-house mystery
Year of publication: 1951
Type of investigator: Amateur
Setting & time: A country manor, England; mid-20th century.

Story:
A man is murdered in a snow-bound country house at Christmas, and it is up to a rather unusual sleuth to put together the pieces of the puzzle of a murder with a peciliarly English motive.

Review:
This is one of only a handful of books that have really surprised and delighted me this year. The story is well written, light, sparkling and excellently plotted and the characters, while all more or less based on certain stereotypes readers of Golden Age mysteries are familiar with, nevertheless are realistic enough to satisfy the literary critic’s demand for rounded characters. What delighted me most, however, was the playful combination of the familiar with the unexpected.

Hare showed with this novel that he really knew the mystery genre inside and out and could manipulate its conventions to produce a novel that is at once both thoroughly traditional and that breaks – or rather broke – with the tradition. The setting could hardly be more traditionally Golden Age English: a country manor house isolated by bad weather, a small number of suspects who all had reasons to want the victim (and in some cases each other) dead, high drama (or melodrama), hidden secrets, and a genteel, bloodless murder.

Then there are the untraditional, unexpected aspects. For one, the crime might actually have been committed by a servant (whether it was or not, I will not reveal). As I have mentioned before, I have never come across any evidence that the "butler did it" rule about the crime not being committed by a servant or other "socially inferior" person is based on a common plot element. I think it is merely based on what the rule-makers, generally middle class or higher placed socially, saw as common sense, so there right away is one unusual aspect. Another is the breakdown of the class order that becomes apparent as the story unwinds. Then there are the motive, the sleuth, and the manner in which he uncovers the motive. Depending on how you look at it, these points might be considered either quite unexpected or entirely predictable. Certainly the motive is, as far as I know, quite unique.

All these points come together to produce a delightful and entertaining mystery.

Rating: An excellent story that twists the traditional cosy country manor mystery into something rare and interesting. 5 stars.

P.S.: I have another Cyril Hare mystery lined up in the Top Mysteries challenge. It will be interesting to see how it compares with this one.

Holiday reading and mislaid book

I don't know what I was thinking when I packed for my recent holiday.

I have a rule - a very good one, in my opinion - of travelling with books: when going abroad, take as many as are needed to take you through the "getting there" stage, i.e. the whole trip from home to hotel. This usually means three books, although for a flight to the US I might take five, or load some audio books into my mp3 player. Then, once I get there, I go shopping for more books. When I travel, it's usually with someone else at the wheel, be it on an aeroplane, ship, train, bus or car, giving me ample time to read while being transported from place to place.

When packing for this camping holiday, in a fit of reader's optimism I took something like 15 books with me, forgetting that this time I was driving myself. The plan was to read for 30 minutes or so before bedtime, at mealtimes and whenever the weather was too bad to sight-see or hike. I ended up finishing one book, because at the end of the day I was usually just too tired to read, and my meals were mostly hurried affairs taken sitting behind the wheel of the car. It was a great holiday anyway, but next time I'll only pack 2 books.

--
BTW, I've mislaid Penny Black, so the promised review will be delayed until I can find and finish it. This is what can happen when one takes too many books on holiday. It's probably lurking somewhere in the car, or possibly at the bottom of the tent bag.

Quotation of the day no. 26

One sure window into a person's soul is his reading list.
Mary B. W. Tabor

Wednesday reading experience #25

Try a book by Halldór Laxness.

He was, and still is, the undisputed laureate of Icelandic literature and our only Nobel Prize winner. His best known novel, both at home and abroad, is Independent People, but to a first-time reader I recommend the shorter historical novel Iceland’s Bell or the coming-of-age story The Fish can Sing.

Quotation of the day no. 25

Read to me - Jane Yolen

Read to me riddles and read to me rhymes
Read to me stories of magical times
Read to me tales about castles and kings
Read to me stories of fabulous things
Read to me pirates and read to me knights
Read to me dragons and dragon-book fights
Read to me spaceships and cowboys and then
When you are finished- please read them again.

Quotation of the day no. 24

Steal not this book, my honest friend,
For fear that the gallows be thine end.
Bookplate

Mystery review: The Case of the Velvet Claws by Earle Stanley Gardner

This book is getting downgraded - seems the Top Mysteries List I started working with had some errors in it and this book had been put on the list by by a fan who felt it belonged there. No matter, it's a good mystery anyway.

Year of publication: 1933
Series and no.: Perry Mason, no. 1
Genre: Mystery
Type of mystery: Murder
Type of investigator: Lawyer
Setting & time: Los Angeles, USA; 1930s.

Story:
A woman comes to Perry Mason to get help in keeping certain facts from being printed in a sleasy tabloid, facts that can hurt not just her marriage but also the career of a local politician. But then her husband is murdered and things get complicated.

Review:
Before starting reading this book, my very first Perry Mason story, I had assumed that I would be reading a legal mystery-thriller, perhaps something that would take place at least partially in a courtroom. This belief comes from my mother, who was a fan of the Perry Mason TV show when she was younger and always talked of him as if he were a younger version of Ben Matlock. For the purpose of this particular story he could just as well have been a private detective - not an entirely scrupulous one. I confess my surprise at finding someone who it seems certain was modelled on Sam Spade, except with a greater sense of loyalty to his clients. (There are more parallels with The Maltese Falcon, but I'm not in the mood to write a comparative essay. If you're interested, you'll have to have a look for yourself).

The tone of the book is unmistakably hard-boiled, and there are hard-boiled story elements in it, such as the detective who can just as easily use brawn as he does brain, a femme fatale in the Brigid O’Shaughnessy mold (plus a familiar, loyal, nice girl secretary for contrast) and a sleasy journalist, on top of enough double-crossing to make one’s head spin. Of course, there isn’t really enough violence, sex, slease and cynicism to make it a real hard-boiled novel, but it has the veneer of one. As a matter of fact I find the style ever so slightly grating, but the plotting makes up for it.

Like so many other detective novels I have read, there is a definite "before and after the murder" element to the story. I don't just mean the regular lead-up and subsequent detective work, but two different but connected stories with a change of pace in between. The before part, the blackmail plot, is a tightly plotted but relatively straight-forward thriller and has Mason using his muscles and threatening people in true hard-boiled fashion, while in the "after" part the pace slows and the hard-boiled elements are toned down and Mason's brain gets a workout in a traditional puzzle plot mystery.

This story is very much plot-driven, and most of the characters are close to being cardboard cutouts or handy stereotypes, including Mason and Miss Street. I am looking forward to seeing how and if they develop into more distinct characters in subsequent books.

Rating: A thrilling, plot-driven mystery with a veneer of the hard-boiled. 4 stars.

Awards and nominations: None that I’m aware of.

Quotation of the day no. 23

The fact of knowing how to read is nothing, the whole point is knowing what to read.
Jacques Ellul

Review: The Night the Gods Smiled by Eric Wright

Genre: Mystery
Year of publication: 1983
No. in series: 1
Type of investigator: Police
Series detective: Inspector Charlie Salter
Setting & time: Toronto and Montreal, Canada; 1980's

Story:
When a college professor from Toronto is murdered in Montreal, the Montreal police request help from the Toronto police, as the man spent his last hours in the company of his Toronto colleagues, who have all returned home. The case is assigned to Inspector Salter, whose career has stalled because of office politics. He sees this as his chance to get back in the promotions game and starts work on what turns out to be a complicated case, not the least because many of the witnesses have something to hide.

Review and rating:
This is a nice little detective story, not quite a police procedural and not quite a cosy, but something in-between. In Charlie Salter, Wright has managed to create a very likeable character, and it’s refreshing that while there is some minor conflict within his marriage, it is of the kind that gets solved by the end of the book rather than lead to the separation/divorce one has come to expect when a police detective is having marriage troubles. (BTW, why on earth do authors have to bring the personal lives of their detectives into the story? Most of the time is serves little or no purpose). The mystery is intriguing, the author plays fair with the reader, and the humour is subtle and often ironic and lightens up the story. It's well worth looking for if you like gentle mysteries starring police detectives. 4 stars.

Awards: The New Blood Dagger Award, 1983; The Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for best novel, 1984; The City of Toronto Book Award, 1984.

Quotation of the day no. 22

When I am dead, I hope it may be said,
His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.
Hillaire Belloc (1870-1953)

Wednesday reading experience #24

Try some good horror novels or supernatural thrillers.

I have enjoyed:
Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House
Henry James: The Turn of the Screw
Edgar Allan Poe's short stories
Algernon Blackwood's short stories and novellas, e.g. "The Willows" and "The Wendigo"
H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories
Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”
Bram Stoker: Dracula
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
William Blatty: The Exorcist (the last horror novel I read that kept me up awake at night)
Stephen King’s short story collection Skeleton Crew and his novel The Shining
Clive Barker: Cabal
Peter Ackroyd: Hawksmoor
Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory
Anne Rice: Interview with the Vampire (I haven’t read any of her other books, but I am told that the Vampire Chronicles get increasingly more tedious as the series wears on)
Laurell G. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series up to The Killing Dance. From then on it degenerates into horror porn, which does not interest me.

I’m looking forwards to reading some of Poppy Z. Brite’s books, and I have at least one horror novel lined up in the Top Mysteries challenge, Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin. I am also planning to read some of M. R. James's ghost stories.

Other possible authors include Richard Matheson, Peter Straub, Dean Koontz, John Saul and Barbara Vine.

I also recommend Noël Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror, a great study of horror literature and movies and why we enjoy it.

Finally, here are some websites to guide you in choosing an appropriate books or books:
A Guide for Horror Lovers
A Guide to Supernatural Fiction
The Literary Gothic
Sweet Despise

Please post your own suggestions for enjoyable horror novels in the comments.


P.S. If you're Icelandic: Gleðilega þjóðhátíð!

Happy Bloomsday!

Today Dubliners and James Joyce fans celebrate Bloomsday, dedicated to Joyce and his creation Leonard Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses.

Quotation of the day no. 21

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.
Germaine Greer (b. 1939)

Quotation of the day no. 20

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
Richard Steele

Quotation of the day no. 19

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
Christopher Morley (1890 - 1957)

Top mysteries challenge review: Sadie When She Died by Ed McBain

Year of publication: 1972
Series and no.: 87th Precinct, #26.
Genre: Police procedural
Type of mystery: Murder
Type of investigator: Police officer
Setting & time: Isola, a borough in a fictional city in the USA (based on New York), 1960s or 70s.

Story: A woman is murdered and although the fingerprints of a junkie burglar are found on the murder weapon and he confesses to the killing, Detective Carella is still suspicious of her husband, who seems bent on implicating himself in the murder.

Review: This is a tense story, atmospheric, almost claustrophobic at times, with psychological undertones. McBain had a certain style and way with words that lifted his police procedurals above the average and brought him deserved fame, and he was in fine form in this book. The main plot is good, although a bit far-fetched, and the side-story about Detective Kling’s love life balances it nicely.

Rating: Another good offering from the master of the police procedural. 4,5 stars.

Books left in challenge: 100

Awards and nominations: None that I am aware of.

Quotation of the day no. 18

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.
-Oscar Wilde, in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

Wednesday reading experience #23

If you haven’t discovered Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, do give it a try.

Good starter books include the first books in each sub-series:

• Equal Rites, which starts the Witches subseries. Good if you like female protagonists. This particular book is full of magic, but there is less magic in the books that follow, but plenty of good witches vs. evil people, vampires, witches, elves and so on.
• Guards! Guards!, the starter book in the Guards subseries and a good place to start for a mystery fan. The books center on Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork city watch, and his trusty men, who have to solve various problems, ranging from a marauding dragon to civil war.
• Mort, the starter book in the Death sub-series - if you’re interested in the supernatural.
• The Colour of Magic starts the Rincewind subseries, and is the first Discworld novel, but I would only advice a purist to begin there, as it and its sequel, The Light Fantastic are not as good as some of the later novels. I do recommend starting with them if you want to follow the world-building in the series.

Of the books that do not belong to a sub-series, I recommend starting with Small Gods if you’re into religion and philosophy; or Moving Pictures if you like slapstick humour and movie references.

Gentler and less interwoven with cultural, cinematic and literary references (but just as entertaining) books in the series include the young adult novels about trainee witch Tiffany Aching, starting with The Wee Free Men, and The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, which is a non-series story with a Discworld setting. Both can be read without previous knowledge of Discworld, but The Wee Free Men is better if you have read the books in the Witches sub-series.

I thoroughly recommend the website L-space Web, which contains more information than any neophyte can possibly want about Pratchett and his books, and not nearly enough for the hard-core fans. I suggest starting with the Books & Writings chapter and continuing on from there. There is also a newsletter, which will start making sense once you have read the books.

Readers who want to get to know Pratchett without reading Discworld, can either read the Johnny Maxwell trilogy or the Bromeliad trilogy, both of which take place in fantasy versions of our world. Both are written for teens but are enjoyable for adults.

His latest novel is Nation, a non-Discworld YA fantasy novel. I haven’t read it, but am looking forward to doing so.

Quotation of the day no. 17

To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time, is to meet an old one.
Chinese saying

I'm off on holiday

I am going away on holiday today and will not be posting much or at all for the next couple of weeks. Neither will I be able to approve or answer any comments, but don't let that stop you from commenting - I'll get to it when I come back. The Wednesday reading suggestions will post automatically while I am away, as will one or two reviews I have already written.

Quotation of the day

The best stories I have heard were pointless, the best books those whose plots I can never remember, the best individuals those whom I never get anywhere with.
Henry Miller (1891-1980), from The Colossus of Maroussi

Quotation of the day

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island.
Walt Disney (1901–1966)

Quotation of the day

That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.

Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888)

Wednesday reading experience #22

Read a book or two of poetry. I recommend reading one anthology from cover to cover, for example one of the Norton or Oxford anthologies (or something shorter) and following it up with a book of poems by an author who is included in the anthology, preferably not a “collected works” or “best of” kind of book but an original cohesive publication, like William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (or Experience depending on your mood), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portugese”, Langston Hughes’s The Dream Keeper and other poems, Silvia Plath’s Ariel, or Dorothy Parker’s Enough Rope, to name but a few.

If you find it hard to choose an anthology, think about what eras and authors you like in literature – e.g. if you like Shakespeare, you could try an anthology of Elizabethan poetry, if you like reading about the Jazz Age choose an anthology of that era, etc.

If your language is not English, choose similar works in your own language.

If you have never read poetry before, or have always found it boring, stick with it. You might be surprised at the variety of poetic forms, the colourful use of language and varied subjects – in spite what some seem to think, poetry is not all about larks and daffodils and romance.

How about this one, for example:

This Be the Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

This is verse one from a slightly longer poem by Philip Larkin. Not exactly love and roses, eh?

Quotation of the day

The more that you read,
the more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
the more places you'll go.

Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991)

Reading report for May 2009

I read 22 books in May. Five of them were travelogues, which is perhaps not surprising, as I am planning my summer holidays and being tickled by the travel bug. I also read four literary novels, or perhaps five, depending on how you categorise Emma Donoghue's book, which can be called either a novel or a collection of interconnected short stories.

The challenges are going well:

• Top Mysteries: 4
• Icelandic books: 4
• TBR for over a year: 9

The books:

• Birgitta H. Halldórsdóttir : Háski á Hveravöllum (romantic thriller)
• *Truman Capote: In Cold Blood (true crime)
• *Sarah Caudwell: The Shortest Way To Hades (murder mystery)
• Emma Donoghue: Kissing the Witch (fairy tales/fantasy)
• Einar Már Guðmundsson : Riddarar hringstigans (novel)
• Martha Gellhorn: Travels with myself and another (travelogue)
• Knut Hamsun: Pan (novel)
• *Michael Innes: Appleby on Ararat (murder mystery)
• Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer: The Phantom Tollbooth (children's fantasy)
• Norman Lewis: A Dragon Apparent (travelogue)
• Jeff Lindsay: Darkly Dreaming Dexter (murder mystery/thriller)
• *Peter Lovesey: The False Inspector Dew (murder mystery)
• Frances Mayes: Bella Tuscany (travelogue)
• Sharyn McCrumb: The Windsor Knot (murder mystery)
• *Nicholas Meyer: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (mystery-thriller)
• François Rabelais: Gargantua (novel)
• Colette Rossant: Apricots on the Nile (foodie memoir)
• Snjólaug Bragadóttir frá Skáldalæk : Holdið er torvelt að temja (romance)
• Patrick Süskind: Sagan af herra Sommer (novel)
• Svava Jakobsdóttir : 12 Konur (short stories)
• Colin Thubron: The Hills Of Adonis (travelogue)
• Honor Tracy: Winter in Castile (travelogue)

I am planning to go on a 2 week camping holiday during the second and third weeks of June. I expect my reading pace will slow down considerably during that time. I will be taking with me a number of books, all of them challenge reads except the Icelandic Roads Handbook and the Lonely Planet Guide to Iceland, which I plan to write a review of when I get back. I hope and pray that I will have good weather during this time, since it it unlikely that I will be able to find indoor accommodation at short notice, considering that most hotels and guesthouses are booked up throughout the summer. The economic problems Iceland is facing have made it very expensive to travel abroad, leading to many more Icelanders taking local holidays this year.

Quotation of the day

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Jorge Luis Borges 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986)

This is the motto of my favourite book discussion forum, Reader's Paradise.

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)

News: And the winner is...

Johan Theorin (Sweden) for Nattfåk (Night Blizzard).


Here are the authors, from left to right: Johan Theorin, Marko Kilpi, Lene Kaaberbøl, Agnete Friis, Vidar Sundstøl and Arnaldur Indriðason.

I was tempted to use a photo that includes a press photographer herding them into formation. Why on earth she wanted to photograph them out in the wind with the sun at their backs, I don't understand. She was also trying to get them to not smile and look menacing instead. Cliché!

Before the awards ceremony there was a short lecture on the Nordic crime novel, and afterwards the nominees participated in an interesting panel discussion about their books, their motivations, research and crime fiction in general. The majority of the audience were invited guests, with a few stragglers like myself in between. I wasn't doing any name-spotting, but I did notice Susan Moody among the audience, which is why I am going to read one of her books next: Penny Black, which happens to be on the top mysteries list.

Tomorrow there will be another panel discussion and a couple of lectures.

Time for a quotation from a book

Travelogues are my favourite non-fiction genre, and therefore you can expect to find a number of quotations from such books here once they start piling up for real. Not all are about travel, some are about the destination or the natives, expats or other travellers (I have yet to come across a travelogue written by a self-confessed tourist...).

I love this one:

"The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I shall have finished my travels."

Mark Twain (1835–1910), The Innocents Abroad (Ch. XXIII)

This paragraph is followed by examples, and although Innocents... was published 140 years ago, the observation is still quite valid.

Top mysteries challenge review: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer

Year of publication: 1974
Genre: Mystery thriller
Type of investigator: Professional
Series detective: Sherlock Holmes
No. in series: 1
Setting & time: London, UK and Vienna, Austria; 1891.

This is one of the numerous attempts to continue the saga of Sherlock Holmes from where Arthur Conan Doyle left off, although in this case the story actually happens right in the middle of the Holmes canon and is offered as an alternative account to what happened when Holmes disappeared in “The Final Problem” (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes). Two subsequent novels in the series fill in some more of what Holmes is supposed to have been up to during his absence, up to Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Empty House” (The Return of Sherlock Holmes).

Much like three of the four Holmes novels written by Doyle, the book is divided into two parts, but unlike them the story is told sequentially and has Holmes in both parts. In part 1, Watson, who is the narrator, finds his old friend in a state of paranoia induced by cocaine addiction and conspires with Mycroft Holmes to take Sherlock to Vienna where there is someone who may be able to rid him of the addiction. In part 2 Holmes solves a mystery in Vienna which helps him regain his old energy and zest for life.

While I do, on a certain level, find it strange that an author who is as capable a writer as Meyer is should choose to take characters invented by another author and put them into a story in which he could so easily have used characters of his own creation, I also understand the fascination Sherlock Holmes holds for many people and the desire to read more about him. In the afterword Meyer writes that in the book he took some of the theories and deductions made by Holmesian scholars and incorporated them into the book, so it appears that he really did his homework before starting, which is to be commended. The book was probable made more saleable by the inclusion of Holmes, and it would be an interesting exercise in writing for an author to pastiche another's work.

I am not going to do a comparison of the writing styles of Meyer and Doyle, so I can’t comment on how true the writing rings style-wise, but the events and the behaviour of the characters do feel true to the original stories. The writing is skillful and the plot draws one in easily, and the cocaine addiction part is interesting and written in such a way as to make one really care what happens to Holmes. The mystery part, however, is weak (although the thriller element is good), and content-wise could really have been presented better in short story or novella form. As a whole, however, this is an interesting “what if” story and not all a bad book, but its inclusion in a list of the best mysteries of all time is, in my opinion, not warranted.

Rating: An interesting look at what Sherlock Holmes could have bee doing whole he was supposed to be dead. 3 stars.

Books left in challenge: 101

Awards and nominations: None that I’m aware of.

P.S. There is a movie, with an Academy-award nominated script adapted from the book by the author.

Guerilla lending library

How cool is this?

Ok, so the school is probably within its rights to ban these books, but has banning a book ever stopped a determined teenager from reading it?

Minus point for the Twilight comment.

Wednesday reading experience #21

Choose a profession that you have read about in a novel and found interesting. Read some non-fiction about the same job or profession and compare the view the novels give with the view non-fiction books do.

It is quite likely that you will find that the novels either romanticise the profession or make it seem in some other way different from what is actually the case, depending on the kind of profession and the kind of novel.

This is, for example, common in crime novels. If crime novels are to be believed, private detectives frequently investigate murders, kidnappings, rapes, bank heists and other serious crimes, while in real life you are more likely to find them digging up dirt for divorce cases or running background checks on someone’s potential spouse or employee. And specialised forensic experts like pathologists and physical anthropologists, who in real life are confined in their work to the laboratory and the courtroom, in the books always seem to be questioning or chasing suspects or investigating aspects of crimes that have nothing to do with their training.

Quotation

"Librarians are wonderful people. They should be in the detective business."

Wilson Tucker: The Chinese Doll

Quotation

"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."

Tom Clancy

Quotation

What's a book?
Everything or nothing.
The eye that sees it all.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quotation

"Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving our quality of life. Libraries change lives for the better."

Sidney Sheldon

News: The Crime Writers of Scandinavia’s Glass Key will be awarded in Iceland this year – and I’m going!

The award will be delivered to the winner in the Nordic House in Reykjavík on Friday, May 29th, by the Icelandic Minister of Education, Katrín Jakobsdóttir.

The nominees are:

• Iceland: Arnaldur Indriðason for Harðskafi (Hypothermia)
• Sweden: Johan Theorin for Nattfåk (Night Blizzard)
• Denmark: Lene Kaaberbøl & Agnete Friis for Drengen i kufferten (The Boy in the Suitcase)
• Finland: Marko Kilpi for Jäätyneitä ruusuja (Frozen Roses)
• Norway: Vidar Sundstøl for Drømmenes land (The Land of Dreams)

There will be a panel discussion with the authors afterwards, and on Saturday there will be lectures, followed by a panel discussion with the participation of Jo Nesbø, Diane Wei Liang and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir.

Unfortunately, none of the Scandinavian books are available at a library I have access to, and none have so far been translated into Icelandic, so I have had no opportunity to read them.

Quotation

"Book lovers never go to bed alone."

Unknown

Mystery review: Appleby on Ararat by Michael Innes

Genre: Mystery thriller
Year of publication: 1941
No. in series: 7
Series detective: John Appleby
Type of investigator: Police
Setting & time: An unnamed island in the Pacific during World War 2

Story:
Appleby and six others are shipwrecked in the Pacific when their passenger ship is torpedoed. They end up on an island that at first seems deserted, but then one of them is murdered and it really seems impossible that one of them could have done it. Shortly afterwards, one of the group discovers a hotel at the other end of the island, and Appleby meets an archaeologist on the beach. At the hotel another murder is committed, and a group of natives attack the hotel. Appleby has by now figured out what is going on, but I will not go into it as it would be a spoiler.

Review:
This is my first Appleby book. I have read one other Innes book, The Journeying Boy which I enjoyed, but found a bit confusing because halfway through it shifted genres, from a mystery to a thriller. This book does the same, not once but twice times. It begins as a lightly comic Robinson Crusoe adventure that seems set to turn into a desert island mystery, then becomes a country house mystery, and finally turns into a war thriller.

I had been expecting a straight-forward mystery, but found my expectations challenged, fortunately in a good way. Innes breaks the rules repeatedly, peppers the narrative with obscure literary references, writes funny and interesting characters, hides clues in such a way that the reader is kept constantly on her toes, and drops Latin like he thinks everyone can understand it. Some of these I consider to be good points, others not so good. The plot involving the bad guys, while imaginative and apt for the time of writing, is unfortunately one of the points I didn’t like. But taken altogether I enjoyed the book more than I didn’t.

Rating: A confusing but enjoyable mystery thriller. 3 stars.

Wednesday reading experience #20

Have you ever found a description of a dish or a meal in a book that made you hungry? If you have, find the recipe or recipes and cook the dish or meal for yourself, or, if you don't cook, go to a restaurant and order it.

If you are the kind who reads while you eat, try reading the appropriate passage from the book while you eat.

Did the dish or meal stand up to expectations?

--
I have done this a number of times, with varying results. Some of the failures can be blamed on not having found the right version of the recipe, others on something going wrong with the cooking.

Top mysteries challenge review: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Sub-title: A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences.
Year of publication: 1965 (as 4 long newspaper articles; in 1966 in book form)
Genre: True crime
Setting & time: Kansas, USA (mostly Holcomb and Garden City), other places around the USA; Mexico; 1959-1960.

Story and review:
In November 1959, a respectable and prosperous Kansas farmer, his wife and two of their children were murdered by two ex-convicts. The men had come there to rob them of what they expected would be a fortune. They only scored a small amount of money but left behind them a carnage that horrified the peaceful small town of Holcomb. Truman Capote read a short piece of news about the murders and went there to investigate. What emerged was this book which is part fact and part fiction. The Wikipedia entry on the book calls it a non-fiction novel, i.e. a basically true story written using the techniques of fiction.

I must admit that I am squeamish when it comes to reading about real crimes, especially violent ones. Even so, I found this story keeping me spellbound, and I think this is mostly because Capote makes it seem like fiction, even while drawing up excellent images of the participants so realistic that one can almost see them, and describing in cinematic detail events one knows really took place. The novelization technique he adopted, including the use of an omniscient narrator who tells the story in an impersonal manner instead of telling the story as himself, is a very good way to make the story seem like a novel and thus remove any misgivings the reader might feel upon reading, for example, the descriptions of the murders.

As in most cases of true crime writing, there is always some speculation going on, and Capote has been accused not only of speculation, but of downright fiddling with the truth in unverifiable parts of the story. Additionally, long passages of the story are based solely on what the two men told Capote about themselves, and are probably not totally reliable. That doesn’t detract from the quality of the storytelling, which is excellent and in the best tradition not only of the police procedural, but also of the psychological thriller. With the police procedural it has in common the detailed descriptions of the police’s gathering of evidence, and with the psychological thriller the building up of tension that one can’t help but feel, even though one knows perfectly well what’s going to happen. The slow unfolding of events, jumping first between the victims and killers, and then between the police and the killers, and between the past and the (narrative) present, along with the piecemeal passing out of information, so that one doesn’t have the whole picture until the last sentence, is brilliant.

Rating: An excellent example of true crime writing that many writers of true crime stories could learn something from. 4+ stars.

Books left in challenge: 102

Awards and nominations: None that I know of.

Quotation

"Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers."

Steven Spielberg (b.1947)

Quotation

"Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them."

Samuel Butler (1835–1902

Quotation

"The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read."

Abraham Lincoln

Quotation

"They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library".

Terry Pratchett: Guards!Guards!

Book quotations

Back when I was blogging on my original 52 Books blog on Tblog I had, for a while, a feature called “quotation of the day”, where I would post daily quotations about books, reading or libraries. For some reason this feature didn’t follow me here, but now I’m resurrecting it. I’m not going to make it a daily or even a regular thing, but will try to post quotations on days when I don’t post anything else, if only to keep the feed readers busy.

I am widening the scope and including quotations from books that I have read that caught my attention for some reason, even if they are not about books, libraries or reading. I have, for some time, been collecting quotations from books into a commonplace book, and this is a perfect venue to unload some of the quotations.

Here is one I like:

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)

Wednesday reading experience #19

Consider a favourite book and find music that expresses how it makes you feel.

You may want to play this soundtrack in the background while you re-read favourite parts of the book.

You could also try making a playlist that expresses the book in some other way - like the relationships between the characters, or even one that retells the story in music.

My TBR challenge list

Lately I have been suffering from what we Icelanders call valkvíði when it comes to books. The word translates into English as “anxiety of choosing” and refers to the range of feelings from apprehension to terror suffered by one who has too many things to choose from. 809 TBR books are a very good reason for having valkvíði, and so I have gathered together 50 books that

• I have, at one time or another, started reading and then put back on the shelf with the bookmark inside, or
  
• I have been reading on and off for too long, or
• I feel it‘s time I read, either because they have been TBR for too long, or because they keep calling out to me to read them, or because I feel guilty that I haven‘t read them already.

I put the list in the side-bar, under the title TBR books I want to finish before the end of 2009. The aim is to try to finish all of them and/or cull any that are too dull or bad to finish. If any books are left over at the end of the year, they will form the core of a new list of 50 books I want to finish before the end of 2010.

While the list is meant as an aid in the “TBR-for-more-than-a-year” challenge, it is not entirely composed of books that fall under that label. Some of the books are newer than that, but most of them will have qualified for the challenge by the time I get around to reading them. They are “started reading but then stopped” and “I've wanted to read this for ages – better buy it” books that have subsequently ended up on the shelves, temporarily forgotten because something else was more interesting when the time came to read them.

I am going to try to stick to this list and not read any of my other TBR books until it is empty, with the exception of books that belong in the other two challenges: Top Mysteries (listed below this list) and Icelandic books (which I do not have a list for, preferring to leave their choosing to chance and mood). I am also allowing myself the joy of library books on any subject – which is only fair considering that I have over a thousand books on my “Not Owned TBR”, many of which are available from one or more of the local libraries.

I am planning to finish the books I am currently reading to clear the slate before I delve into the list. To make it easier to stick to this regime, I am keeping all the books on the list in my bedroom.

Top mysteries challenge review: The False Inspector Dew by Peter Lovesey

I started reading this book a couple of months ago and finished a couple of chapters, but for some reason I then put it aside and forgot about it for several weeks. Since it is also a TBR challenge book, having lingered on my TBR shelf for over 2 years, I have managed to kill two birds with this one stone, challengewise, and also got an enjoyable read out of it.

Year of publication: 1982
Genre: Historical mystery
Type of mystery: Murder
Type of investigator: Amateur
Setting & time: London, England, and aboard the passenger ship Mauritania on the way to New York; 1921.

Story:
Dentist Walter Baranov is devastated when his actress wife decides to go to Hollywood to pursue a career in the movies. As his practice is in her name and he is penniless without her, he sees no alternative but to go with her, that is until a young woman he has met and become attracted to puts into his head the idea of killing Lydia. The plan is to do it on board the passenger ship to New York and throw the body in the sea, but things go quickly askew when another woman on board is murdered and Walter, who is travelling under the assumed name of Mr. Dew, is mistaken for the detective who arrested Dr. Crippen and asked to find the murderer.

Review:
This is the second enjoyable humorous mystery I read this week, but it is completely different from the other one in all other respects. For starters, this is a parody, and quite a good one. Lovesey’s humour is bone dry and he is very good at leading the reader astray.

The characters are interesting – even if they are somewhat exaggerated and larger than life. Walter, who at first seems so meek, blossoms once he has to pretend to be Inspector Dew, and the idealistic Alma, with all her knowledge of love straight out of romance novels, is very entertaining throughout the book. While as a romance reader myself I suppose I should find her offensive, I would like to think she was meant as a parody of a stereotypical silly romance reader, just as Walter and the ship’s detective are parodies of certain types of detectives, and the Cordells stereotypes (although more toned-down than Walter and Alma) of a certain type of nouveau riche Americans well-known from movies and books. Whatever the case may be, she keeps the reader nicely interested with her silliness until Walter comes into his own as Dew. The thing is, though, that while it is easy to recognise these stereotypes, Lovesey has still managed to make them interesting and rounded up to a point. Walter and Alma, for example, both develop and change in the course of the story, which is not something you often see stock characters do.

The thing about this story is that while it may be a parody, the mystery is still good, even if it isn’t exactly inspired. However, there are certain logical points that don’t hold up to scrutiny, but they have less to do with the actual mystery than with one important plot element, which a clever reader will have anticipated early on precisely because of these points, but for a story this entertaining in other respects this apparent weakness is almost excusable.

Rating: An excellent parody of the mystery genre that manages to be an entertaining and nice little mystery in itself. 4 stars.

Books left in challenge: 103.

Awards and nominations: The 1982 Gold Dagger.

A celebration of Bibliophilia

Books in the windows, books on the floor,
Books fill my shelves and block up the door.
Books in my bedroom, books in the hall,
Books on the tables and up against the wall.
Books in the attic, books on the stairs,
Books in the bathroom, books on the chairs.
Books in the kitchen, books in my head,
Books in the basement, books I haven't read.

I'm cozy and content in my quiet world of books,
I turn and read my pages in several little nooks.
I am relaxed and happy in my comfy little nest,
To read at least a book a day is what I love the best.
I feel alive and happy with my eyes fixed on a book,
I do my daily reading and sometimes forget to cook.
Some may think that all those books are keeping me in thrall,
It's true I will be old and gray before I've read them all.

Thank goodness!

Copyright by Bibliophile

Wednesday reading experience #18

Play a casting director: Take a familiar book and decide who should play which character in a movie. Read the book with the cast list in mind and see if your choices stick.

I recommend doing this with a book that has not been filmed before, as actors from the real film, whether you have seen it or not, tend to interfere with the fantasy.

If you have or know of any blog entries about casting a book, please post the link in comments.

News! Arnaldur Indriðason shortlisted for the Macavity award

Arnaldur Indriðason's book The Draining Lake (Kleifarvatn in Icelandic) has been shortlisted for the 2009 Macavity award, in the category for "Best Mystery Novel".

See my review of the book.

The Macavity Award is awarded annually in several categories, by Mystery Readers International, a large mystery fan organisation.

(Found through Petrona)

Top mysteries challenge review: The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell

Year of publication: 1985
Genre: Mystery
Type of mystery: Murder
Type of investigator: Amateur (a law historian)
Setting & time: London, England and Corfu, Greece; contemporary

Story:
Professor Hilary Tamar tells the story of how she (or is it he? – it is not clear from the text) became involved in solving a murder connected to a legal case being handled by her/his barrister friends and ex-students. The heirs to a considerable fortune wanted to change an entail arrangement so that the main heiress wouldn’t have to pay inheritance tax. The case was successful but when one of the heirs in the tail (i.e. she will only inherit if the main heiress dies) falls off a balcony and dies, the barrister representing her thinks it may be murder, but neither Hilary nor the police can see how it could have been done. Then two of Hilary’s young friends go to Corfu for a holiday and are invited to stay with the family, which includes the heiress and three others who are after her in the tail (line of inheritance). When one of Tamar's friends writes of mysterious "accidents" and her growing uneasiness about the situation, Hilary puts two and two together and sets off to Corfu to prevent further foul play.

Review and rating:
This is a very enjoyable story. Not only is it well written, full of funny and interesting characters and sparkling with humour, it is also a very complicated and twisted mystery. The solution involves the terms of a will and there are some points of law that one needs to understand in order to be able to compete with the sleuth in solving the case. But by making the narrator a legal historian and not a lawyer, Caudwell cleverly enables herself to have the lawyers explain the legal points to the reader through Tamar, in plain English, without it becoming contrived or overcomplicated. The narrative is full of funny dialogue which reminds me of Georgette Heyer’s mysteries. It also has a solid and complicated plot that should give any mystery lover several hours of reading pleasure.

All in all, I liked it very much and will be on the lookout for the rest of Caudwell’s books. 5 stars.

Books left in challenge: 104.

Awards and nominations: Finalist, 1987 Anthony Award.

2008 reading report mistake

I just discovered an error in my reading report for last year. I have been collecting all the statistically interesting information from my handwritten reading journal in an Excel file that allows me to make the statistical analysis I have published here at the end of each year. From the beginning of my journal-keeping I have written in the name of the publisher, but for some reason I never entered that information into the Excel file.

Having nothing better to do this afternoon, I decided to add the publisher information for this year and the last, so I got out the journal, opened last year’s spreadsheet, sorted the information by date and started entering the information. I soon discovered that I had somehow missed a couple of pages when entering the information for 2008, amounting to 4 books. The outcome is that instead of 153 books and 44691 pages I actually read 157 books and 45212 pages in 2008. It hardly affects any of the other stats, so I haven’t bothered recalculating them.

For those interested, this is how the publisher stats came out:

Jove: 14
Avon: 10
Dell: 7
Piatkus, Penguin, Harper (incl. H.Collins, H. Torch, H. Paperbacks, H. Business), Berkeley, Bantam: 5
St. Martin's Press, Pan, Mira, Headline, Doubleday: 4
Victor Gollancz, Pocket Books, Love Spell Books, Fontana, Fawcett Crest (incl. Fawcett Books), Arrow, Coronet: 3
11 others: 2 each
20 others: 1 each

This doesn’t quite tally with the book count because in some cases I didn’t write down the publisher for some reason.

Reading report for April 2009

I read 16 books in April, which is slightly fewer books than the average of the three preceding months. Of these, I had started five in an earlier month and one in the previous year, and 5 were under 150 pages, so in pages I read much less than in March. Asterisked books have been or will be reviewed on this blog.

The challenges:

• Top mysteries: 4. These were the only crime books I read in April.
• Icelandic books: 3. Should have been 4, but I was one book ahead so I am still on track.
• TBR for more than a year: 4, which is disappointing but not unexpected, as I found a lot of interesting library books that I wanted to read.

The books:
Michael Bell, ed.: Scouts in Bondage and other violations of literary propriety (collection of unintentionally humorous book titles)
André Bernard: Now all we need is a Title (famous books and their original planned titles)
T.J.Binyon: Murder Will Out (overview of the history of the detective in crime fiction)
*Nicholas Blake: The Beast Must Die (murder mystery)
*Christianna Brand: Green for Danger (murder mystery)
Bill Bryson (issue editor) & Jason Wilson (series editor) : The Best American Travel Writing 2000 (travel writing)
*Bill Buford: Heat (foodoir (see Note))
*Lionel Davidson: The Sun Chemist (thriller)
*Fjodor Dostojevski: Crime and Punishment (novel, psychological thriller)
Halldór Kiljan Laxness: Kristnihald undir Jökli (English title: Christianity at Glacier, Under the Glacier) (novel, magic realism)
Huldar Breiðfjörð: Múrinn í Kína (title meaning in English: The Wall in China) (travelogue)
*William Least Heat Moon: Blue Highways (travelogue)
Alan Moore (story) & Dave Gibbons (illustration): Watchmen (graphic novel)
Pratchett, Stewart & Cohen: The Science of Discworld II: The Globe (popular science combined with fantasy)
Snjólaug Bragadóttir frá Skáldalæk: Allir eru ógiftir í verinu (romance)
Jan Werner: Angels from Hell (humour)
--

Note: foodoir = portmanteau of food + memoir. Although I came up with it all by myself, I discovered I wasn’t, to my disappointment, the first to coin it. When applied to food photography, it is a portmanteau of food + boudoir and refers to images that can also be labelled as food porn.

Top mysteries challenge review: Green for Danger by Christianna Brand

Year of publication: 1945
Genre: Mystery
Type of investigator: Police
Setting & time: A military hospital in rural Kent, England; World War 2

Story:
An old man dies on the operating table during what should have been a routine operation to fix a broken bone, and Inspector Cockrill of the Kent police is called in to investigate what most people are sure will turn out to be an unfortunate accident or an unexplained but not malicious death. But then one of the nurses who attended the operation claims that she knows it was murder and that she has proof and knows who the killer is. She is subsequently murdered, and now everyone is convinced the first death was also a murder. Cockrill is sure he knows both the who and the why, but he still needs to find out how, and obtain solid evidence for the identity of the killer.

Review:
This story has a wonderfully evocative and atmospheric background: a rural military hospital during WW2, with bombs often falling nearby. The cast of suspects is quite small, only six people, but every one of them is made out to be likeable in their own way, and none seems to have a strong motive. Cockrill, the detective, is not doing much detecting. Instead, while he is presumably seeking evidence and connecting the dots of the case, the suspects speculate about the murder and discuss between themselves information about their alibis or non-alibis, some of which is unknown to Cockrill, who solves the case anyway, even though he has to use psychological warfare to squeeze a confession out of the quite unexpected killer, not having any physical evidence. Suspicion is cleverly deflected at every turn from the real killer, even at the climax which has an unexpected twist. The writing is deft, the characters (with the exception of Cockrill) memorable and interesting, and the story has many twists and turns and a number of red herrings. Unfortunately it also has the ending I don’t like and loses a half-point for that.

Rating: An atmospheric and thrilling puzzle plot murder mystery. 3 1/2 stars.

Books left in challenge: 105

I am definitely going to try to find more books by this author.

Wednesday reading experience #17

If you mostly read classics, try reading a modern novel published in the last 20 years or so.
Or, if you mostly read modern novels, try a classic, preferably one published more than 100 years ago.

Was it as good or bad as you expected? Was it perhaps worse? Or better?
After this, will you be reading more classics/modern novels, or will you stick to reading what you have always read?


In the last couple of years I have been reading mostly books published in the 20th and 21st centuries, but I have promised myself that I will read more classics this year.

Top mysteries challenge review: The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake

Two interesting facts about the author: Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Cecil Day Lewis who was Britain’s poet laureate from 1968 to 1972, and he was actor Daniel Day-Lewis’s father.

Neither fact has any bearing on the following review – I just happen to like trivia.

Year of publication: 1938
Genre: Mystery
Type of investigator: Amateur sleuth
Setting & time: Gloucestershire, UK; 1930s contemporary

Story:
Full of grief for his son, killed by a hit-and-run driver, mystery writer Frank Cairnes hatches a plan to track down the driver and murder him, writing his plan down in his diary. A coincidence gives him a clue to the identity of the driver and under the pseudonym he uses for his detective writing he manages to get an introduction to the man, but he can not be sure he is the driver. When the man is murdered, Cairnes seeks the help of amateur sleuth Nigel Strangeways to prove his innocence, the incriminating diary having fallen into the hands of the police.

Review:
This story is told by two narrators: the prime murder suspect himself, in a first-person diary leading up to the murder, and a third-person omniscient narrator who tells the remainder of the story, first briefly from the outside and then exclusively from the point of view of sleuth Nigel Strangeways. It is then up to the reader to decide/discover if the first-person narrative is a reliable or unreliable one. The reader is on an even footing with Nigel and the police the whole time, knows all they know and has the same opportunity to solve the case. Some may succeed ahead of them and some may not, for the plot is fiendishly clever and twisted, in the puzzle plot tradition.

Blake is a bit prone to using stereotypes, e.g. the downtrodden wife and the proud old matriarch, which is a bit annoying, but that can be forgiven when the plotting is as good as it is here. Only one thing, besides the stereotypes, marred my reading pleasure: it has the ending that I loathe, for which I withdraw 1/2 point from it.

Rating: A brilliant classic puzzle plot mystery. 4 1/2 stars.

Books left in challenge: 106.

Review: Blue Highways: A journey into America by William Least Heat Moon

Year published: 1982
Genre: Travelogue
Setting & time: USA, 1978

This book often makes it onto lists of best or favourite or recommended travelogues, and seems set to become a classic of the genre. Much like Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, to which it has been likened by some reviewers, it provides a snapshot of small-town USA as it was at one point in time.

In the wake of a divorce and the loss of his job, which precipitated an existential crisis, Moon set out to travel around America by the small roads - the ones traditionally marked with blue on old highway maps. The journey became one of discovery, not just of himself, but of small-town America. He especially sought out small towns with unusual names and asked around until he found people willing to tell him how they got their names, some of which makes for fascinating reading. He was always on the lookout for interesting people to talk to, and recorded the conversations which made it possible for him to quote them verbatim in the book (although some seem too apt to the purpose of the journey to be true).

While this book is in some ways similar to Travels with Charley, I also think it has certain things in common with Larry McMurtry's Roads which I
previously reviewed. While at first sight the two may seem like diametrical opposites, Roads being about fast travel along fast roads and Blue Highways about slow travel along slow roads, they actually have quite a lot in common, e.g. both being the results of a personal crises and both being fueled by a love of driving, of travelling, and of America. I see the two as companion pieces of sorts and recommend reading them back to back.

Rating: A modern classic of the travel genre and an interesting snapshot of small-town USA in the 1970s. 4+ stars.

Reading journal: Crime and Punishment by Fjodor Dostojevski. Entry 5: Conclusions and a few final words.

I got so caught up in the story that I decided not to stop to write notes about parts 5 and 6 and instead went on to finish the story. Therefore I don’t have any notes or thoughts on future developments, but here are my conclusions:

• While the main thread of the story is predictable – man commits crime, man tries to avoid suspicion, man breaks down and confesses – the parts that flesh out the narrative are not all so predictable. What really makes this such a brilliant story is not the main story itself but the characters and their interactions and dialogues. Each character is unique and separate and there is no danger of ever getting them confused with each other. Raskolnikov, for example, is brilliantly conceived, and one can easily see how someone with his pride, arrogance and tendency toward depression would be adversely affected by his circumstances and commit a crime. It is equally plausible how he can then be driven to confess by an older man like Petrovits, experienced in applying psychology to squeeze confessions out of hardened criminals, which Raskolnikov is definitely not.


• Although the incarceration of Raskolnikov at the end might be considered to be the punishment of the title, the real punishment is of course his realisation that he is not the great man he thought himself to be, which is why he gives himself up to the police in a quest for some peace of mind. He has no regrets for the death of the old woman, considers her a necessary part of his experiment to find out if he really is a great man or not. He does not find peace of mind in the punishment meted out to him, but rather in the realisation that he loves Sonja, who has loved him almost from the first.


• Lots of death in various forms: Murder, suicide, accident, illness, lack of will to live. Surprisingly, while some of the deaths are quite wrenching to read, the story is not depressing, perhaps because it ends on a note of hope, but also because one sees that the characters are expendable and their deaths are necessary for the plot.

The question now is: does this book really belong on a list of best crime novels?
On the surface it is certainly about a crime, but underneath it is an examination of human emotions, of character, of what drives people to extremes, and how people react to abnormal circumstances, so isn’t calling it a crime novel reducing it to a mere entertainment, a book to take to the beach?

Some of the best modern psychological thrillers and crime novels are exactly about those same themes, even when they don’t approach C&P in literary quality. It would be quite easy, I think, to pare C&P down to a sleek psychological thriller. It would certainly lose some of the literary quality, but the core story would still be about Raskolnikov and his crime, his mental anguish over it, and his eventual incarceration, so therefore I think the answer to the question is a definite “yes”. I am no expert on world literary history – all I have studied is Icelandic and English lit – but I think this may just be the prototype for the psychological criminal novel.

I even want to read it again some time in the future, which is not something I can say about many of the crime novels and mysteries I have read, however good they have been.


Rating: A masterpiece of literature and a great read. 5+ stars.

Books left in challenge: 107.

Review of Heat by Bill Buford

Subtitle: An amateur’s adventures as kitchen slave, line cook, pasta-maker, and apprentice to a Dante-quoting butcher in Tuscany.
Year published: 2006
Genre: Memoir, food writing
Setting & time: New York, USA, and Tuscany, Italy; starting in 2002

Bill Buford became obsessed with learning to cook like a pro and on the basis of his friendship with celebrity chef Mario Batali was accepted into the kitchen of one of Batali's restaurants, Babbo, as an assistant, working his way up to line cook in about a year. Then he became obsessed with learning to make perfect pasta, and went to Italy to learn. Then he became obsessed with meat, and again went to Italy and became an apprentice to a butcher in Tuscany. The story of this journey is interspersed with snippets of Batali’s biography, stories about Babbo kitchen antics and politics, discussions about food and excursions into Italian culinary history.

Here is a guy who is just as obsessed with food as Jeffrey Steingarten, but instead of writing articles about it, he has written a book. Buford is a skilful writer and is able to be self-deprecating without becoming clownish about it (which I absolutely hate). He also doesn’t spare anyone else when they deserve it.

Celebrity chef Mario Batali comes across as a larger than life figure in the hands of Buford, who obviously likes him very much, but without worshipping him. For a while I thought the book was shaping up to be a sort of biography of Batali, interspersed by recollections of Buford’s friendship with him, but then Buford changed directions and started writing about his experiences in Italy, first as a pasta-making apprentice and then as an apprentice in an old-fashioned butcher shop in Tuscany, which I found to be the most interesting part of the book.

However, the descriptions of working in the kitchen of one of New York’s best restaurants were by no means boring. The kitchen, which is organised in ranks almost like a military organisation, seems to have been staffed with a collection of big egos, some of whom seem to have enjoyed abusing the lower ranks. Some of the descriptions of the kitchen practices and treatment of food rival the ones in Antony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential in their ability to gross out the reader. These two books have convinced me that the less one thinks about what could be going on in a restaurant kitchen, the better one can enjoy one’s meal.

Ultimately, although Buford writes much about Batali and others, this is his story, and it makes for interesting reading. It seems clear to me that Buford was either going through an existential crisis of some kind, which made him quit his job to pursue unpaid apprenticeships in careers he clearly had no intention of entering, or that his intention right from the beginning was to have those experiences so he could write a book about them. Perhaps both notions are right. Whatever the truth is, the book is interesting and entertaining and full of information any foodie will enjoy.

Rating:3+ stars.

Reading journal: Crime and Punishment by Fjodor Dostojevski. Entry 4.

I’ve taken a long break from the book, but I hope not so long as to affect my memory of what I have already read. I have just a few notes on this part:

• Svidrigelof is definitely planning something. At first he tells R that he wants to court and marry Dunja, and then when R does not take kindly to that, he changes tack and says he wants to give her some money but will then leave her alone and marry another woman. Then he appears again, listening in on a conversation between Sonja and R. I think he may try to blackmail R, either for money or for help in winning Dunja's hand (he does seem to have honorable intentions towards her now that his wife is dead).


• As I had guessed (and hoped) Dunja has broken her engagement with Lusjin, and seems to be beginning to fall in love with Rasumikhin, who has proven himself to be a thoroughly decent person.


• Petrovits has started trying to confuse R into confessing or giving himself away somehow, using psychological methods, and has even described his method to him. R’s behaviour in Petrovits’s office is such that one would either take it as a direct evidence of his guilt, or of his madness. I am pretty certain that Petrovits knows that R is the murderer, but either can not arrest him for lack of solid evidence, or will not arrest him because he wants him to confess of his own free will.


• It seems I was right about Sonja – R visits her, finds out she knew Lisaveta, and promises to tell her who murdered her.


• Lusjin has been thoroughly confirmed as being pompous, arrogant, and silly. His attachment to Dunja arose because he desired to marry a woman who was educated and cultured but poor, so that he would always have someone to worship him for saving her from her situation. I wonder if he will try to win her back?

Wednesday reading experience #16

Find a book that has been adapted into a film. Read the book, watch the film (or vice versa) and compare the two.

What did you think was better in the book?
What did you think was better in the film?
Did the film change the storyline significantly?
Did it add anything?
Did you agree with the casting?


I plan to do this with one of the Top Mysteries challenge books and will blog about it when the time comes.

Top mysteries challenge review: The Sun Chemist by Lionel Davidson

Year of publication: 1976
Genre: Thriller
Type of investigator: Amateur
Setting & time: London, England, and Rehovot, Israel; 1970s.

(Note: links will open in new windows)

Story:
The narrator, historian Igor Druyanov, is in London, peacefully editing some of Chaim Weizmann’s personal papers when scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot discover that Weizmann may have discovered how to use the ABE process (which Weizmann helped discover) on potatoes to produce a cheap high-octane fuel that can replace gasoline. Immediately it becomes apparent that someone is trying to get hold of Weizmann’s formula. Igor goes to great lengths to
a) find the formula among Weizmann's papers, and
b) prevent it from falling into the wrong hands,
which, it is hinted at, are those of the big oil-producing countries or companies which would naturally not want the invention to become known to the world.

Review:
This interesting thriller is obviously inspired by the 1973 oil crises, and Davidson has skilfully woven together fact and fiction into story about what might have happened if such a biofuel had been discovered at the time. Biodiesel and several other biofuels had actually been invented by that time, but I guess either Davidson didn’t know about them, counted on his readers not knowing about them, or possibly those fuels were at that time so expensive to produce that they couldn’t rival fossil fuels. The blending of fact and fiction has produced a story that could be true – one that most readers, even today, 30 years after it was written, would wish were true.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get into the story. I read about half the book before Easter and then kept putting it aside in favour of other books, simply because I found it long-winded and even rather boring at times. Possibly a big part of it was the first-person narrative. I found Igor to be an uninteresting character, and therefore I found his first-person narrative boring. I even found myself skimming over the detailed final chase sequence, which, while admittedly atmospheric, was too wordy.

The plotting is very good and quite intricate, but without an interesting protagonist to cheer on, I just couldn’t get interested enough to find the story enjoyable as a whole.

Rating:
An interesting story that gets bogged down by wordiness and a boring protagonist. 2+ stars.

Books left in challenge:
According to my latest attempt at counting how many I have left, it’s 107.5 (I'm still reading C&P).

Wednesday reading experience #15

Read a book of myths, legends and/or folk-tales of your country or culture and see if you can find some familiar stories. Think about how these stories have influenced the literary heritage of your country or culture.

On a related note - it's fun to see how modern authors have spun their own versions of the old yarns. A fantasy novel that I read some years ago was, for example, a great modern version of the Sleeping Beauty* myth, and many romances are twists on one or another of the happily-ever-after myths (e.g. Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty). Another example is that all the names of the dwarves in JRR Tolkien's books and some of the names of other characters come straight out of Nordic mythology, and many of the stories he tells have a basis in myths or folk-tales. And of course one shouldn't forget all the novels based on the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.


*Enchantment by Orson Scott Card

Reading journal: Crime and Punishment by Fjodor Dostojevski. Entry 3.

• Things are now getting really interesting. The story is about halfway told and the plot thickens as several turning points are reached one after the other. R seems to be recovering from his fever, but his mind is still in turmoil. The main turning points I have recognised as such are:



• Sonja appearing on the scene and meeting R’s mother and sister – even though she has done little so far, she is presented in such a way as to suggest that she is an important character;


• Dunja seems to have decided to break off her engagement with Lusjin, possibly because she has seen that her brother does not condone the marriage, but also possibly because she has realised it would be a kind of prostitution if she did marry him;


• A second detective, Petrovits, has turned up and like Sametof he seems to be convinced that R is the murderer. It remains to be seen if he “solves” the case, i.e. finds proof and arrests R, or if R’s conscience drives him to confess. Petrovits is clearly a detective of the psychological school and has already started playing head games with R.


• Finally, there is the appearance of Svidrigelof, a man described in a letter from R’s mother in Part 1 as Dunja’s ardent admirer, a married man for whom she worked and who wanted to make her his mistress, causing both women to be socially ostracised until it was made clear that Dunja was innocent of any wrongdoing. In an earlier chapter in this part of the book R’s mother and sister had mentioned that his wife had died of a stroke caused by him beating her, and now he turns up out of the blue and visits R. I smell something fishy.



• Rasumikhin is clearly in love with Dunja, and she seems interested in him – this may lead to happiness or doom.



• The thinking behind the murder is becoming clearer – R had, some time before the narrative starts, published an article in a periodical about how some unusual men, great men with great ideas beneficial to humankind, could be excused for having killed others to set their plans in motion and introduce their great ideas to the world. While it is not said in so many words, it is clear from the portrait the narrator has already painted of R that he considers himself one of these great men. The plan or idea has only been hinted at, but clearly he needed money to set it in motion, and was able, through his idea of himself as a great man, to convince himself that the old woman deserved to die so that others would live. That he thinks to himself that he is more insignificant than his victim is interesting – the brutal reality of the murder clearly clashes with his ideal. Another interesting point is his thinking that he has hardly considered Lisaveta at all, which the reader knows is not true. That murder, unexpected and unplanned for, is, I think, the one that has caused much more turmoil in him than the death of the old woman.

Wednesday reading experience #14

Find a genre you have never read anything in and become acquainted with it.

I devoted part of my first 52 books challenge to discovering genres that were new to me, and I have not regretted it.

Reading journal: Crime and Punishment by Fjodor Dostojevski. Entry 2.

I will make this short, since I don’t have many comments on this part of the book.

• This part of the novel is an emotional roller-coaster. It starts with Raskolnikov’s wild attempts to destroy all evidence of the crime and his feverish panic when called in to the police station for an interview (over an unrelated matter), descends into pathos when his fever is described, although whether it is caused by real illness or is merely a psychosomatic effect of his shock and guilt after the murder is left up to the reader to decide (probably a mixture of both). Then there is a comic interlude when his prospective brother-in-law Lusjin arrives and both the reader and Raskolnikov discover him to be vain and pompous, both of which Raskolnikov mocks loudly but the man either does not understand or pretends not to. There follows another slip into almost mad despair with suicidal thoughts, followed by a very sad and pathetic scene which nevertheless lifts Raskolnikov’s spirits. Raskolnikov’s despair and guilt are never far away, however, so that one feels almost guilty for laughing at the funny parts. All of this is brilliantly done and never feels overdramatic.


• That another man’s death should make Raskolnikov decide not to give himself up to the police creates a great opportunity for a dramatic twist in the narrative. It seems to me that his apparent decision to do something for the dead man's family could either lead to his redemption or his doom.


• Marmeladof has resurfaced, if only briefly. His daughter Sonja has been introduced, and in a way that makes me think she will play some part in what is to come, either as Raskolnikov's love interest or his conscience made flesh.
  


• I also have a feeling about Dunja, Raskolnikov’s sister, and his friend Rasumikhin – that there might be a romance in the cards, or at least unrequited love.

Ankh-Morpork? No, just Wincanton, UK

Hehe. I really like this: Town names streets after Terry Pratchett's Discworld books.

There must be other examples of towns and cities taking up street names from fictional works. If you know of one or more, please drop me a comment.

Reading journal: Crime and Punishment by Fjodor Dostojevski. Entry 1.

Note that the spellings of the Russian names that I use here are the ones used in the Icelandic translation, and may be different from the way they are transliterated into English.
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Part 1 of the book is about the titular crime and what leads the protagonist, Raskolnikof, to commit it.

• The leading-up to the decision to commit the crime is the result of a state of mind that seems to be caused in equal measure by hunger, desperation and pride, and possibly also love for his family, that come together in Raskolnikof‘s mind to convince him that what he is planning is the right thing to do. The way Dostojevski describes the reaching of the decision, from the idea (conceived in a nightmare) to the planning to finally making his mind up to go ahead, is nothing short of brilliant. By describing it in a non-linear way, giving it out piecemeal so that the reader has to be on the alert the whole time if they want to fully understand what is going on, he creates tension that feeds into the stress and fear of Raskolnikof as he sets out to carry out his murderous plan. There is a sick kind of logic to the whole decision-making process that makes one understand why and how Raskolnikof reaches this decision, and even though I find his actions repulsive, I can’t help but sympathise with him on a certain level while finding him repugnant on another.


• Raskolnikof seems to be convinced that he can live with the murder on his conscience, having convinced himself that the old woman deserves to die and he deserves her money, but when he actually does do it there is a snag and he finds himself committing a second murder to cover up for the first and ends up killing an innocent and blameless woman. I have a feeling that this is going to be his downfall. He has not rationalised the killing of the second woman to himself, and I think his conscience will start bothering him before long.


• The beginning of the story has the hallmark of a moral tale. The crime being over already, I have the feeling that this is not going to be a story of punishment in the legal sense, but rather one of the punishment visited on the guilty either by fate or by their own conscience, or perhaps both.


• There is an interesting interlude early on with a drunkard named Marmeladof who tells Raskolnikof the story of his daughter who was forced by her stepmother to prostitute herself to keep the family fed and housed. This can be seen as an equally desperate but more honest sacrifice of the sort Raskolnikov’s mother and sister are preparing to make for him by the sister’s marriage to a rich man she does not love, and who, from the descriptions in the mother’s letter to her son, seems to be not altogether a nice person. It will be interesting to see what comes of this. I have a suspicion that Marmeladof will pop up again, and possibly his daughter as well.

Reading report for March 2009

I have amazed myself again by reading a total of 22 books in one month. By the 18th it looked like I would manage, without having planned it, to read a book a day in March. That’s when I decided to slow down for a few days to rest my eyes. I’m happy I did, because while reading is good, so is spending time with friends and family.

Besides that, I had my tax report to turn in. It was unusually complicated this year, as I had five sources of income to report besides my regular salary, including a grant, some per diem money and my freelance translation work. Some of this was tax-deductible while some wasn’t, and some was tax-free and some was not. Sometimes, especially come tax-time, I think this freelance business is really too complicated to bother with, but now all I have to do is look at my new car and think "I wouldn’t have this if it wasn’t for my freelance work", and it stops being a problem.

The challenges are rolling along on schedule or better. I finished:
5 Top Mysteries challenge books,
4 Icelandic books, and
6 books that had been in my TBR stack for over a year, plus 3 more that I have owned for less than a year.

I am still accumulating new books slightly faster than I can read and cull the old ones, mostly because books from my vast wishlist keep becoming available on BookMooch.

Books I read in March:
Annette Blair: The Kitchen Witch (romance)
Meg Cabot: All American Girl (young adult book)
G.K. Chesterton: The Man who was Thursday (novel)
Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent (psychological thriller)
Edmund Crispin: The Moving Toyshop (mystery)
Colin Dexter: The Dead of Jericho (mystery)
E.M. Forster: A Room with a View (classic romance)
Mark Hebden: Pel and the Faceless Corpse (mystery)
Patricia Highsmith: Strangers on a Train & The Talented Mr. Ripley (psychological thrillers)
Pico Iyer (issue editor) & Jason Wilson (series editor): The Best American Travel Writing 2004 (collection of travel articles)
Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (mystery thriller)
Cathie Linz: Between the Covers (romance)
Rory Maclean: Stalin's Nose (travelogue)
MasterCard Iceland: Umhverfis jörðina með MasterCard (travel guide, promotional)
Frances Mayes: Under the Tuscan Sun (fixer-upper memoir/travelogue)
Ruth Rendell: A Judgment in Stone (psychological thriller)
Stefán Jón Hafstein & Kristinn Jón Guðmundsson: New York! New York! (being there story/travelogue)
Fred Vargas: The Three Evangelists (mystery)
Pat & Dennis Welch (text); Mike Dowdall & Pat Welch(images): Humans (humour, comic book)
Yrsa Sigurðardóttir: Þriðja táknið (Last Rituals) & Sér grefur gröf (My Soul to Take) (mysteries)

Next month’s upcoming reads include 5 more Top Mysteries challenge books that I have on loan from the library and need to return before the end of the month. I plan to read fewer mysteries in April than I did in March and concentrate more on other types of novels and on non-fiction. I hope to take at least half of what I read in April from the TBR stack.

Reading journal: Crime and Punishment by Fjodor Dostojevski. Introduction.

Dostojevski’s Преступление и наказание (transliteration: Prestupleniye i Nakazaniye) or Crime and Punishment, was first published in 12 monthly instalments in a Russian literary magazine in 1866. It was almost immediately recognised for its literary value, and has become part of the literary canon, not only in Russia but in the whole of the Western world.

This is one of those classics that people who wish to be considered highly literate and well-read will proudly tick off their To Be Read list. I, on the other hand, am reading it because it's part of my mystery-reading challenge. Since it is often mentioned in the same instance as the epic War and Peace I expected it to be much longer than it tuned out to be: only 496 pages in the Icelandic translation, and not with particularly small lettering either. It is divided into six parts and a short epilogue, and I am going to read it in six sessions. I will try to write some thoughts and speculations and possibly analysis after each session.

Since this is a classic and not a newly published book like the book I journalled previously, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I am not going to try to hide what happens but will discuss the book as if I were writing to someone who has already read it and has asked me for my thoughts about it.



Source: Wikipedia. Retrieved April 1, 2009, 19:45 GMT.

Wednesday reading experience #13

Visit a place you have read about in a book and compare it with the book’s descriptions.

What place did you choose? What was the outcome? Was it more or less interesting than the book made it out to be? Was it different from what you expected?

More on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I came across this lengthy extract from the book and figured I would post a link here for those who are intrigued and want to know more.

To Be Read

I recently compiled an Excel spreadsheet containing information about my TBR books so I could keep better track of how I am doing in the informal “reduce the TBR stack” challenge. I excluded reference books, craft books, cookbooks, travel guides and books one rarely if ever reads from cover to cover, and according to this reckoning I have, as of today, 789 TBR books in my book collection.

I had not realised I owned so many books I had not read. Of the genres, about half are mysteries, thrillers or crime novels of one kind or another. The second biggest genre is novels of all sorts, including 81 historical non-mystery novels. This is followed by 55 romances and 49 travelogues and a smattering of other genres. Since I get rid of 9 out of every 10 books I own either through BookMooch or by donating them a local charity after I have read them, there is a lot of shelf space I can free just by reading more of my own books and fewer library books.

When I have finished reading the current crop of library books (most of them Top Mysteries Challenge books), I will concentrate on the TBR stack for a while and reduce the numbers even further. It will give me an excuse to buy some discounted books when the spring sales begin.

Reading journal: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, 3rd and final entry

Some final thoughts on the book:
I have rarely read a long mystery or thriller that didn't at least sag just a little bit in the middle, but this one does not. It does take a while for the central story to begin but once it does start rolling it never slows down until the almost disappointingly short climax is reached and the long denouement begins.

That he was able to keep the reader's attention through a slow background setting and introduction of characters the length of a short novel and a denouement that is an almost self-contained story the length of a novella, shows that Stieg Larsson was a master of the craft of writing. This is a first novel but it shows no signs of firstbookitis, which isn't really surprising because Larsson was a veteran journalist and therefore an experienced writer. That he was a reader is obvious. Apart from the references to Astrid Lindgren that suffuse the story in the characters of Mikael and Lisbeth (who are his speculations on what Kalle Blomkvist and Pippi Longstocking would be like as adults), his love of literature shows in nods and references to other writers, and several are mentioned by name.

The narrative is an interesting mixture of stark Scandinavian realism (e.g. the commentary on the Swedish social system) and a traditional mystery/thriller where realism takes second place to telling a good story, and the shifting between the two is seamless.

Several predictions I had made about the story turned out to be right, including The Big Twist, which I predicted as soon as the old man had told Mikael what he wanted him to do. I was likewise able to pinpoint the villain fairly quickly, but that doesn't mean this is a bad mystery – it just means the author plays fair with the reader. Kudos for that.

I‘m looking forward to reading the next book in the series, but I may have to read the English translation because I am not sure I want to wait for the Icelandic one to find out what happens next.

One thing I did wonder about is the title of the book. Not the original Swedish title or the Icelandic one which is a direct translation of the original, but the English one. The original title translates into English as Men Who Hate Women, but in English the title is changed into The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which shifts the focus of the title from the villains to one of the protagonists, who is herself a victim of just the kind of misogynist the original title focuses on.
Then I had a conversation with a woman I work with, and she mentioned the book, telling me that because of the title she thought it was a self-help book or a sociological study of misogyny when she first saw it. ”Aha! “ I thought, “so that‘s why!”
On further reflection I decided that the title change in English probably was made to make the book appeal to a bigger audience rather than to avoid it being thought to be something it is not. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is undeniably a more appealing title because it implies mystery with sensual undertones, contrary to Men Who Hate Women which just implies brute violence.
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I have decided not to write a regular review, as my journal notes include most of what I would have written in a review. To make it easier to follow, just click on the „girl with the dragon tattoo“ label below this post and you will be able so see all the entries in the journal on one page with no intervening posts in between.
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Book information:
Author: Stieg Larsson
Original Swedish title: Män som hatar kvinnor
English title: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Published: 2005 (Sweden); 2008 (English translation)
Genre: Mystery/thriller
Awards: The Glass Key (Scandinavian crime award), 2006; Exclusive Books Boeke Prize (S-Africa), 2008; ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards, International Author of the Year, 2008.

I will end with a warning: This is not a book for the squeamish. The violence is not of the stylised kind, but is extremely realistic. This includes a couple of rape scenes that are all the more harrowing because they are described from the victim‘s point of view. They are also liable to make women who read them very angry. After the second one I was seriously tempted to throw the book at the wall in anger and leave it unfinished, but I'm glad I didn't, because it turned out that the violence was a necessary factor in the personality development of the character it happened to.

Top mysteries challenge review: The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Genre: Psychological thriller
Year of publication: 1955
No. in series: 1
Series protagonist: Thomas Phelps Ripley
Setting & time: The USA (beginning chapters), Italy (remaining chapters); contemporary

Teaser:
How on earth do I synopsise the beginning of this story without giving away too much? I’ll try, but don’t blame me if you haven’t read the book and see something in here that you consider to be a spoiler.

A Mr. Greenleaf asks the protagonist, Tom Ripley, to go to Italy to persuade his errant son, Dickie, to come home to America. Once there, Ripley easily befriends Dickie, but when clouds start gathering on the friendship horizon Ripley decides that he deserves to be in the situation Dickie is in: financially independent and living in wonderful Italy; whereas Ripley is poor and unemployed and once his travelling money from Greenleaf senior runs out he must return to the USA to an uncertain future.

Review:
Herein you will definitely find SPOILERS.

The book is very well written, the characters are believable and the surroundings so innocuous that you find it hard to believe they are to be used as a backdrop for dark deeds. The narrative starts out innocently but almost immediately starts winding up like a spring until it is vibrating with pent up tension waiting to be released. When it finally is, the events that unfold have become not entirely unexpected, but then the tension starts mounting again and this time you have no idea where the narrative is taking you: if it is going down the inevitable road that psychological thrillers of the time of writing usually took, or if it will take you on an entirely new and (then) relatively untrodden path.

Highsmith has managed to do something in this story that is quite difficult: to create an utterly selfish, ruthless, amoral and unredeemable character who is nevertheless appealing, even sympathetic. That he is unredeemable and sociopathic is important, because there are plenty of selfish and ruthless and even apparently amoral but nevertheless likeable and even charming protagonists to be found within the crime-thriller genre (Sam Spade and James Bond come to mind), but ultimately they are sympathetic because one believes they possess a conscience (even if is underdeveloped) and might be reformed.

Highsmith creates this sympathy by the simple expedient of allowing us to see Ripley from the inside, to travel with him, even become him, and to feel with him all his insecurities and anxieties. At the same time she manages somehow to manipulate us to look past the fact that not for one moment does he ever regret having done what he did, except at moments when he thinks he might have been careless enough to get caught.

Rating:
An excellently written and executed psychological thriller with an unexpectedly sympathetic criminal protagonist. 5 stars.

Books left in the challenge: After careful counting I believe I have 110 books left to read in the challenge, but don’t take my word for it.

Reading journal: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, entry 2

I got so engrossed in the book last night that I didn’t stop until my eyes were stinging from all the reading and it was past one o’clock in the morning. I stopped around page 410, which leaves me the last section of the book, about 120 pages. I hated to stop, as I had got to a very exciting part in the plot, with one protagonist in mortal danger and the other about to head into it. That there should be so much left of the book when the climax appears to be starting tells me that either the climax is going to be drawn-out, there will be a second climax, or the denouement is going to be a long one.

Some thoughts about the plot: I really, really hope there is some real purpose to the horrifying abuse Lisbeth has had to suffer at the hands of her legal guardian. I would hate to think it was just a gratuitous addition to the book or a way to have her supply a small and not very important item to the profiling of the killer. It does emphasise that vulnerability that I mentioned earlier, that a pervert should pick her out as an easy victim (and then find out how wrong he was...). I think maybe something may happen in the chapters I have yet to read that will justify it, or it may even possibly have something to do with the other two books.

What seemed at first a baffling but clear-cut case of a girl’s disappearance has turned out be a lot more sinister, and the way Mikael discovered the clues was interesting. I don’t think I will be revealing to much by saying that at this point it has turned into an investigation of a grisly series of murders that the missing girl had found some clues about, so she may not have disappeared because of her strong position within her family, but rather because she knew that one (or more) of her relatives was a serial killer.

One of the killers – because there must be more than one – has been revealed, and was one of my two strongest candidates. At this point it seems obvious who the other will turn out to be, but I suspect there might be a twist involved. I rather suspect that there may be more dark deeds afoot than just the murders, or maybe more people are involved.

I am intrigued by the constant references to the reason why Mikael agreed to investigate the case of the disappearing girl: his conviction for slander against a rich and powerful business tycoon. Although the judgement and his prison term are discussed, it is also hinted at that he could have gotten himself out of it because of something he knew but didn’t reveal, possibly to protect a source, but I am inclined to think that there was more to it than that. Also, what does his employer have on the tycoon? His promise to help Mikael revenge himself indicates that he knows something important, but so far there has been no obvious clue at all as to what it could be.

I have already mentioned the parallel between Mikael and Astrid Lindgren’s Kalle Blomkvist, but what I didn’t mention was Lisbeth Salander’s connection with Pippi Longstocking, to whom her employer likens her (but only in his thoughts). Dorte has written an interesting analysis of Blomkvist and Salander as Pippi and Kalle, so I will not go into that (in any case, I am far more familiar with Pippi than Kalle, as the Kalle books weren’t translated into Icelandic until I was a teenager).

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Oh, and someone thinks Val McDermid is a man. I’m inclined to think it’s the Icelandic translator. I somehow doubt that a mystery fan like Mikael Blomkvist or a mystery writer like Larsson would make that mistake. Anyway, in the original Swedish the sentence about McDermid probably doesn’t indicate her gender at all.


The next entry will probably be the review, as I plan to finish the book as soon as I get home from work today (I'm writing this in my lunch hour).

Top mysteries challenge review: The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin

Genre: Comic mystery
Year of publication: 1946
No. in series: 3
Series detective: Gervase Fen
Type of investigator: University professor
Setting & time: Oxford, England; contemporary

Story:
Poet Richard Cadogan goes to Oxford for a holiday and due to bad planning he ends up missing the last train and hitch-hiking part of the way, arriving in Oxford in the middle of the night. While walking along a street he comes upon a toyshop with its door ajar. In he goes to let the owner know, but finds the shop empty and the body of a murdered woman in an abandoned apartment on the first floor. However, when he brings the police back to the crime scene in the morning the toyshop has been replaced by a grocery shop, the apartment looks different, and there is no body. Convinced he didn’t dream this, he turns to his old school pal, amateur sleuth Gervase Fen, who is now a don at one of the colleges, and together they embark on an attempt to explain the mystery.

Review:
This book was a surprise after the previous Gervase Fen book I read. That book was boring and the characters were mostly interchangeable and unmemorable, except for Gervase who was a conceited prick. In this third book in the series he happily seems to have undergone a personality make-over and has actually become rather likeable.

The book is written with a light touch. It begins as a typical Golden Era type puzzle mystery, briefly becomes a thriller with noir undertones (including a car chase, black-clad henchmen and a pretty damsel in distress) and from there it moves on into Keystone Cops territory, ending with two funny chase scenes with characters in various stages of inebriation chasing the villains on foot and bicycles. The eccentric plot revolves around the will of an old lady, some of whose heirs are too greedy for their own good and whose downfall is caused by Cadogan’s blundering into the middle of a crime which would otherwise have remained undetected.

The solution depends on a number of coincidences, which in my mind does not make it a good mystery, but one can see why this is such a favourite as to make both the CWA and the MWA lists because it is so highly entertaining that one is liable to forget or at least forgive the shortcomings.

Rating:
An entertaining mystery, but if you want good solid detection based on diligent searching for clues rather than stumbling into them, then look elsewhere. 3 stars.

Reading journal: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, entry 1

I did say I was going to start journalling about Crime and Punishment, but as it happens I had to read this one first, because I was on a waiting list for it at the library and got it on “new book loan” which means I only have it for 2 weeks, so must finish it before then, whereas I can keep the other one for 2 months, and then get another copy if that isn’t enough. This is a long book, over 500 pages, so it lands itself well to journalling. I am reading the Icelandic translation.
--

So, here are some thoughts about the book so far:

The intro chapter is a very good hook which suggests that an intriguing mystery is about to unfold.

It’s good that of the two leading characters Carl Mikael Blomkvist is introduced first, because he is the more conventional and less interesting of the two. Even the attempt to make him slightly less conventional by having him be involved in a ménage à trois does not quite work. If he alone had been the leading character, I would have expected this to unfold like a pretty conventional murder mystery. As a matter of fact, where I am at in the book, it looks like it’s going to be a “locked room” type story, although in this case the “room” is actually an island that was pretty much closed off when the crime happened, apparently limiting the number of possible suspects.
I say ‘apparently’ because although no-one seems to have left the island while it was closed-off, someone could have left it by sea and come back, or someone could have arrived by sea, done the deed and left, taking the body with them.

To anyone who is a fan of Astrid Lindgren, the Kalle Blomkvist reference is going to be an obvious one. It will be interesting to see if it turns into anything more than a joke.

Lisbeth Salander, who, while she has not been much present so far, is clearly the book’s other protagonist. With her counter-culture appearance and apparently asocial personality, obvious extreme intelligence, history of problems and suggestion of vulnerability, I think she is likely to be the wildcard in the story, and am looking forward to reading about how she and Blomkvist meet and start working together. Although this has not happened yet, I know it will, because I have been unable to avoid reading about the book. Besides, it is stated in the blurb, so I know it’s going to happen. Just how, I’m not sure.

It already seems that the book is going to be teeming with suspects, but appearances can be deceiving, and I think a twist may be coming up. It certainly looks like Lisbeth is about to run into some serious problems with her creepy guardian, or whatever he is called.
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One thing does annoy me about the book, and that is a technical problem. It seems as if it has not been proof-read by a human being. I have come across several errors that a spell-checking program would not catch but a good proof-reader would, such as correctly spelled but wrong words, and a couple of punctuation problems, including an annoying missing question mark.

Wednesday reading experience #12

Journal or blog about a book as you are reading it. This is is a good way to get thinking about things like writing style, formulas, points of view, themes, characterisations, etc.

I am about to start reading Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, and plan to make some journal entries about the book while I am reading it. I would have liked to do this with Ruth Rendell's A Judgement in Stone which I read recently because it really got me thinking, but it is so short that I read it in two sessions and taking a break to journal about it would have spoiled the mood. Crime and Punishment, however, is so long that I expect it will take several sessions to finish it, which lends itself perfectly to journalling.

I'm interested in seeing how others do this, so if you’re journal blogging about a book or planning to do so, please post a link in the comments to this post and I’ll check it out and leave a comment (or two).

Mystery review: My Soul to Take by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir

This book is due to be published in Britain and the USA in April.

Original Icelandic title: Sér grefur gröf
Genre: Murder mystery
Year of publication: 2006
No. in series: 2
Series detective: Þóra Guðmundsdóttir
Type of investigator: Lawyer
Setting & time: Snæfellsnes, Iceland; contemporary

Story:
Þóra’s client, a hotel owner in Snæfellsnes (south-western Iceland), wants to sue the people who sold him the land for the hotel on the basis of the place being haunted. This would not be a problem if the hotel were an ordinary one, but it is a new age health spa and some of the staff claim to be sensitive to that sort of thing, the owner included. Þóra goes up there to investigate and prepare the lawsuit (or rather to dissuade the client to go on with it), but arrives in the middle of a murder investigation. The architect who designed the hotel has been brutally murdered, and when a second person connected with the hotel is murdered as well, Þóra’s client is arrested on suspicion of being responsible. He asks her to investigate, and she starts looking for clues that lead her to start digging into the past.

Review:
Here is an interesting puzzle mystery that utilizes Icelandic folk tales and beliefs as part of the plot, as well as touching on a part of Icelandic history that most people would like to forget ever happened. The book is full of interesting characters and strong emotions, and there are a number of people who could have wanted to kill the victims, not all of them for obvious reasons. The story does get a bit long-winded at times, with periods of little action and much reflection or descriptions of nature, but the plotting is good and the puzzle is satisfyingly complicated.

Þóra has become a more likeable character than she was in the previous book, but her personal life, while providing some comic relief like in the previous book, has now become too prominent in the story, as has her relationship with Matthew, whom she met in the previous book. His presence in the story is, in my opinion, not really necessary from the viewpoint of an Icelandic reader, and he is certainly not needed for the point of view of the investigation, but he makes an excellent vehicle for the author to use to explain certain things to a foreign reader without the explanations looking too forced (i.e. Þóra is always telling him things).

Rating: Another good mystery from Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. 3+ stars.

Mystery review: The Three Evangelists by Fred Vargas

Original French title: Debout les morts
Translator: Siân Reynolds
Genre: Mystery
Year of publication: original: 1996; in English: 2006
No. in series: 1
Series detectives: Historians Marc, Lucien and Matthias, and former police commissaire (Armand) Vandoosler (Marc’s uncle)
Type of investigator: Amateurs and semi-pro
Setting & time: Paris (mostly), France; contemporary

Story:
Three down-on-their-luck historians move into an old run-down house along with the uncle of one of them, a former police commissaire. Because of their names the old man calls them “The Evangelists”: St. Lucas, St. Mark and St. Matthew. The four men quickly make the acquaintance of their neighbour Sophia, a retired Greek opera singer, and also that of Juliette who runs a restaurant nearby. Some weeks later Sophia disappears. Her husband seems unconcerned, but Juliette and Sophia’s niece Alexandra, who turns up shortly afterwards, are both convinced something has happened to her, as are the four men, who have already alerted the police. Not quite happy with where the police’s inquiries are taking the case, they set out to investigate it themselves, doing their research in traditional academic manner as well as using more unorthodox methods.

Review:
A full review would simply be a re-iteration of my previous reviews of Vargas’ books as regards style and so on, so I will let it suffice to say that I found the characters, especially of the three historians, very interesting and well-written, and the plot full of the twists and turns that typify the classic puzzle plot.

Rating: An excellent puzzle plot mystery that will keep the majority of readers guessing until the climax. 4+ stars.

Awards:
Prix Mystère de la critique, 1996.
The Duncan Lawrie International Dagger, 2006.

Top mysteries challenge review: A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell

Genre: Psychological thriller
Year of publication: 1977
Setting & time: England, contemporary

Story:
Eunice Parchman, illiterate and deeply ashamed of it, is hired as a housekeeper by the respectably upper-class Coverdale family, Mrs. Coverdale quickly becoming dependent on her for the housework and thus reluctant to let her go even when repelled by her. A seemingly innocuous event leads Eunice to become friends with Joan Smith, a religious fanatic living in the nearby village, and seals the fate of her employers which is revealed simply and starkly in the beginning paragraph: “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.”

The whole narrative is an elaboration and examination of all the little causal threads that come together and drive Eunice to murder the Coverdales.

If you like a book to surprise you, don’t read the following review, because I got a bit carried away and wrote a short analysis that will best benefit people who have already read the book and need discussion points for, e.g. a book club discussion or a class assignment.

Review:
If there is a book with a more chilling opening line or indeed an opening page, I haven’t read it. Here is the second paragraph:

“There was no real motive and no premeditation; no money was gained and no security. As a result of her crime, Eunice Parchman’s disability was made known not to a mere family or a handful of villagers but to the whole country. She accomplished nothing by it but disaster for herself, and all along, somewhere in her strange mind, she knew she would accomplish nothing. And yet, although her companion and partner was mad, Eunice was not. She had the awful practical sanity of the atavistic ape disguised as twentieth-century woman.”

Here the innocent reader is on the first page of a book and already the ending has been revealed. As a literary device it shouldn’t work: you, the reader, really should become offended and put away the book; but instead it draws you in, because of the same kind of curiosity that has people rubbernecking at the scene of an accident in an attempt to see the twisted metal and bloodied bodies, only here you then actually get to go back in time and watch the whole disaster unfolding in detailed slow motion, the tension mounting by degrees until it is almost unbearable and you begin to understand people who, upon seeing a stage villain sneaking up behind the hero, give a shout to warn the prospective victim of what is about to happen.

From the beginning line onwards the story only becomes more upsetting as the narrative progresses towards the climax: the inevitable murder of the Coverdales. Even Rendell has admitted that she became upset at the fate of the victims, so it’s no wonder that a reader would be.

The story is finely crafted, with seemingly innocuous events and innocent remarks taking on a sinister colour through the remarks of the omniscient narrator and the twisted paths of Eunice’s mind. Humour is injected to relieve the tension and make the story less dreary, and the characters are excellently drawn.

With Eunice, Rendell has managed the same thing Patrick Süskind did with Grenouille in Perfume - to create a protagonist who is utterly unsympathetic but at the same time the reader wants to feel sorry for her, if only for her illiteracy. But of course the illiteracy is a MacGuffin, a mere device to drive the narrative. Eunice would have been a sociopath even if she could read. She could just as easily have been a repressed lesbian (a device Rendell has used in at least one of her other books) or a phobic of some kind, to mention only a couple of possibilities. To lose sight of that would be a fallacy, and once the reader realises this Eunice ceases to be sympathetic.

As to the Coverdales as characters, such is Rendell’s skill that while she lets you know that they are indeed “nice” people she also makes them just as utterly unlikeable as Eunice. They are snobbish and self-centered, their attempts at doing good for Eunice range from patronising to downright contrived to make themselves – rather than her – feel good, and they are, each in their own way, responsible for their own deaths. Not that you ever feel they deserve it. The reason, I think, for us not wanting them to die even though we don’t like them, is that they are insignificant. They are snobs, yes, but to a normal person their snobbery is harmless and their self-centeredness is not consciously cruel to others. It is only a twisted person like Eunice, with her intense fear of being found lacking and being mocked, or Joan Smith with her religious righteousness crossed with psychosis, who can possibly decide they deserve to die. Therein lies the crux of the story: no sane person would do this kind of thing, even if they were illiterate.

Rating: An excellent psychological thriller and whydunnit. 5 stars.

P.S.
I have given up on the countdown because I keep getting confused and getting different tallies. I have somewhere around like 110-113 books left in the challenge.

Wednesday reading experience #11

Try reading in the bath or hot tub. I recommend something you will not cry over if you accidentally drop it in the water.

If you only have access to a shower, you have my sympathies. If, however, you have discovered a safe way to read in the shower, please share the secret.

Mystery review: Last Rituals by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir

Icelandic title: Þriðja táknið (literally: The Third Symbol)
Genre: Mystery
Year of publication: 2005
No. in series: 1
Series detective: Þóra Guðmundsdóttir
Type of investigator: Lawyer
Setting & time: Reykjavík (mostly), Iceland; contemporary

Story:
Icelandic Lawyer Þóra (Thora in English) is hired by the parents of a German history student who was found murdered in the offices of the history department of the University of Iceland. They want her to help Matthew, an investigator they have sent over from Germany, to find out why their son was murdered and why his body was mutilated. Since they are not convinced that the suspect the police have arrested is guilty, they also want Þóra and Matthew to find the real killer.

The victim had been researching and comparing the history of witch hunts in Germany and Iceland and was the leader of a clique that practiced magic rituals. The mutilation of his body is connected to a magic spell found in an old grimoire, so it would seem logical that he was killed in connection with the practice of black magic, but there may have been a more logical reason behind it.

Review and rating:
I must admit that I had made two aborted attempts to read this book before I finally did finish it. In both cases I didn’t get beyond chapter two because I didn’t like the writing style. Not that’s its bad or clumsy or anything like that – it is in fact quite smooth, but the tone irritated me. However, it seems that Yrsa’s writing style is a bit like that used by Elizabeth Peters in her Amelia Peabody books: grating at first (although for different reasons), but once the story pulls you in it stops being annoying.

The characters of Þóra and Matthew are well-developed. Less well-developed are the characters of the members of the clique they have to deal with to find important information about the lead-up to the young man’s death, and most of the minor characters (with the exception of Þóra’s teenage son) are either stereotypes (e.g. the secretary) or simply flat. Þóra starts out as not a very likeable person: uptight, insecure, defensive and often rude; but she slowly gets more likeable as one begins to understand her better. There is an interesting balancing of power between her and Matthew. He is a friend and employee of the victim’s family, knows more than Þóra does about the case and has experience with this kind of investigation (it is hinted that he is an ex-police detective), but Þóra holds her own because she speaks both languages, knows the culture and the local laws and is good at reading people. Unusually for a detective story, her personal problems (single mother of two kids, broke after a divorce, a struggling law practice, a bitchy secretary) are actually interesting, because while they have little or no bearing on the mystery, they lighten up the dark and rather creepy story, and Yrsa is careful never to let them overpower the main plot.

The best part of the story is the plotting. The narrative is fast-paced and the twists and turns of the investigation keep the reader guessing right until the final twist. All in all, this is quite a good mystery. 3+ stars.
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P.S.
I have a second book by Yrsa lined up and should have a review ready later this month.

Mystery review: Pel and the Faceless Corpse by Mark Hebden

Genre: Police procedural
Year of publication: 1979
No. in series: 2
Series detective: Chief inspector Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel of the French Police Judiciaire's Brigade Criminelle
Setting & time: Burgundy, France; contemporary

Story:
On a miserably cold and windy winter’s night Pel is called out to a farm where the body of a murdered man has been found in front of a memorial for resistance fighters killed by the Germans during World War II. The man has been shot in the face and head in such a way as to make his face unrecognisable, and because his fingerprints are not on file Pel and his men have a hard slog ahead of them to even find out who he is, let alone find his murderer. Complicating things is a second murder and an attempt on the life of a farmer who lives nearby. Then there are the fugitive bank robbers who may be hiding out in the area, and a pesky chicken thief the commissaire of police wants caught. All this weaves together to make an entertaining story.

Review:
Judging from this book, Mark Hebden was an expert in creating atmosphere. The cold, damp and windy winter weather he describes certainly gave me the shivers and made me wish I had waited until summer to read the book, because it heightened the winter chills I have been having lately. In that he rivals Arnaldur Indriðason.

The characters of the policemen were distinct and their detection methods different from each other, so there was never any danger of getting them mixed up like I have sometimes done when reading police procedurals. The story is interesting, for the plot, which is a typical police procedural plot with several investigations going on at the same time, for the characters, and for bringing up the German occupation of France in World War II, the crimes the Germans committed against the French and how the victims and/or their families have coped in different ways since. The red herrings are nicely done, and while I suspected that they could be red herrings, Hebden writes the story in such a way that at no time was I sure. I did see the final twist coming, but only a chapter or so ahead of Pel, so all in all I have to say “well done”. I will definitely be on the lookout for more of Hebden's books.

Rating: An intereting and chilly police procedural. 3+ stars.

Wednesday reading experience #10

Take a newspaper and read it all the way through. It’s amazing what we miss in the papers when we always just read one or two particular sections.

When I did this for the first time I was amazed at what I had been missing. Now I try to at least read the headlines to every article and piece of news, and the beginning paragraph as well, and I often find something I am glad I didn't skip.

Online advertising

I couldn’t help myself when I saw this sponsored ad on a website I visited:

“Learn How a Mom Combined 2 Products to Get Rid of Her Wrinkles Forever.”


To which my answer is: When is the funeral?

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

This is part of my Wednesday reading experiences, one where I challenged my readers to read a book by Joseph Conrad, and did the same myself.

Year published: 1907
Genre: Novel
Setting & time: London, England; 1886.

The story deals with Mr. Verloc, an anarchist who is also a secret agent for a foreign embassy. When the embassy requires him to prove his usefulness by committing an act of terrorism, he conceives an idea which will not put him at risk and that will, if successful, prove his usefulness to the embassy and prevent them from exposing him to the police. But the act of terrorism goes tragically wrong and Mr. Verloc has to pay for his failure in a way he never imagined.

This book was first published over 100 years ago, but it is very relevant in today’s society because of its themes of anarchism, terrorism and the examination of the driving forces behind them.

The story is excellently written and tightly plotted and a good solid read. Not that I would read it again, like I would, for example, Lord Jim, but the time I spent reading it was well spent. Highly recommended.
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Here is a link to the Project Gutenberg edition of the book. There are other online versions available, but Project Gutenberg is the only one that I have found that does not have annoying advertising.

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I am now reading a totally different book that also deals with anarchism: G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. It’s interesting to compare how the two authors handle the subject. One story is perfectly serious on the surface but there is subtle humour underneath, while the other is comical to the point of farce but with a serious undertone.

Free download: Temeraire/His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik

I loved this book when it was first published, and now it's being offered as a free download!

Here is my review.

And here is a link to the main site. They have more free downloads available, and will be adding even more.

These books are being offered by Random House to promote the sci-fi and fantasy series they publish under their Del Rey imprint, so this is perfectly legal.

Top Mysteries challenge review: Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

Year of publication: 1950
Genre: Psychological thriller
Setting & time: USA, contemporary

Story:
Guy Haines, a young architect, meets loafer Charles Bruno on a train. Guy wants to divorce his estranged wife so he can marry his new girlfriend, and Bruno wants his father dead. Bruno suggests an exchange of murders and Guy refuses. But soon afterwards Guy’s wife is murdered, and he gets sucked into a sick and terrifying relationship with Bruno, who wants him to honour the deal he thinks they made.

Review:
This is a good psychological thriller and an examination of what can make an honest and upright person commit a terrible crime. It is also an examination of the feelings that might arise in said person afterwards, and it might also be seen as an examination of the differences between the lazy, degenerate rich and the honest, hard-working middle-class.

The story is well plotted and the narrative moves slowly but surely towards an inevitable end, with some interesting twists along the way. The only problem I have with it is the characters, or rather the character of Guy. He and Bruno are clearly supposed to be opposites, their reactions to the same kinds of situations always being different – e.g. Bruno is calm in situations where Guy is a bundle of nerves, and vice versa, Guy is sane and Bruno is not, etc. But the problem is that while Bruno is capable of arousing feelings of extreme revulsion in the reader, Guy isn’t sympathetic enough to make one feel anything but slightly sorry for him. Mostly he just made me angry because he was so stupid, which I am sure is not the feeling Highsmith was trying to arouse.

Rating: A good psychological thriller with a murderous plot. 3 stars.

Books left in challenge: 114 (if this looks wrong – I got a bit confused when I started and counted Len Deighton’s Game, Set & Match trilogy as one book. I’m now counting the books separately).

Note: There is a Hitchcock movie based on the book (with a script written by Raymond Chandler), but apparently it changes the plot quite a lot. I’m going to watch it anyway – provided I can find it to rent.

Why lie about having read a book?

This article in today’s Guardian got me thinking about why anyone would lie about having read a specific book. I have always been able to understand people who pretend to not have read a book. After all, it’s easy to get the wrong idea about someone who admits they have read Mein Kampf or the works of the Marquis de Sade. But when I started thinking about it, I realised that of course some people would get the wrong idea if someone were to admit they haven’t read works which are required reading among students of English literature and culturally required reading in English-speaking countries. I am of course referring to books like Animal Farm, Hamlet or Jane Eyre.

But why pretend to have read books like Ulysses or War and Peace which are not required reading except in specialised university courses?

Is it perhaps a simple wish to seem well read, or an attempt to seem somehow “better” than those around one that have not read those books?
I would be interested to hear what you think. (And if you can give me a link to the full results of the survey mentioned in the article, I’d appreciate it).

Wednesday reading experience #9

Ask a stranger for a book recommendation and follow it. You never know what might happen. If you are too shy to approach a stranger, try someone you know but have never discussed books with, like a workmate or an in-law.


What happened? Did you read the recommended book, and how did you like it?

Interesting musings on book-to-film adaptations

As my regular readers know, I have a degree in translation studies. This is why, when I come across interesting articles or books about any aspect of the craft, I naturally want to tell the world about them.

Apart from Language X to Language Z renderings, "translation" can, among other things, refer to what is also called "adaptation", that is the rendering of one form of art into another, the most common being the adaptation of a book into a film.

Here is an interesting article on the subject by Salman Rushdie that I came across on the Guardian website.

Reading report for February 2009

I finished 21 books in February, which is quite a bit better than my monthly average for 2008 (not that I'm competing with myself or anything...). Out of those, I had started reading 5 before the beginning of the month – 2 of them last summer.

In the reading challenges the situation is as follows:

• I finished the last of the Mystery Reader Café challenge books: the book with the word "murder" in the title, so that challenge is finished.
• In the 52 Icelandic books challenge I read 4 books.
• In the Top Mysteries challenge I finished 2 books.
• In the TBR challenge I finished 7 books that had been on my shelves for more than a year.

Additionally, I culled 7 of the books I read this month and will be adding them to my BookMooch inventory, making room on my book shelves for the 7 mooched books I received in the mail. 5 of these I will be reading for the Top Mysteries challenge. I also found 2 TM challenge books in the book section of a local charity shop.

I listened to one audio book in February, or rather a filmed reading: Neil Gaiman was generous enough to offer live audiovisual recordings of his reading of The Graveyard Book through his blog. The recordings were made when he was on the promotional tour for the book. (If you follow the link, scroll to the bottom to start listening (and watching) in the correct order).

The books I read or listened to in February: (I have posted reviews of those marked with *)

*Arnaldur Indriðason : Myrká (police procedural)
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: The Physiology of Taste (kitchen science and philosophy)
Mary Higgins Clark: The Lottery Winner (detective stories)
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: The Mistress of Spices (novel, romance)
Neil Gaiman: The Graveyard Book and Coraline (children's fantasy/horror)
John Grogan: Marley and Me (memoir)
*Dashiell Hammett: The Maltese Falcon (noir detective story)
Tony Hillerman: The Dark Wind (police procedural, thriller)
Ingólfur Jónsson (collected by) : Þjóðlegar sagnir og ævintýri (folk and fairy tales)
Jón R Hjálmarsson : Þjóðsögur við þjóðveginn (folk tales)
H.R.F. Keating: Death of a Fat God (mystery)
India Knight, editor: The Dirty Bits - for Girls (anthology, erotica)
Sharyn McCrumb: Paying the Piper (mystery)
*Steven Saylor: A Murder on the Appian Way (mystery)
*Fred Vargas: Have Mercy on Us All (police procedural)
*Fred Vargas: Seeking Whom He May Devour (police procedural)
Viktor Arnar Ingólfsson : Flateyjargáta (mystery)
*Hillary Waugh: Last Seen Wearing (police procedural)
Jeanette Winterson: Boating for Beginners (fantasy, satire)

Reread:
Gerald Durrell: The Whispering Land (travel, animals)

Mystery review: Myrká by Arnaldur Indriðason

I wasn’t sure if I should post this review right away, considering that the book will probably not be published in English until 2010, but then I though “why not?” It just means the review will be there for those who want to know something about the book beforehand. Unfortunately I do not have an English title for it, but I will post it once I know what it will be.

Genre: Police procedural
Year of publication: 2008
No. in series: 9
Series detective: Detective Erlendur Sveinsson and colleagues, of the Reykjavík detective force
Type of investigator: Police
Setting & time: Reykjavík, Iceland; contemporary

Story:
Erlendur, the leading investigator in the previous books, is away on vacation, and the detective in this book is his colleague Elínborg. She is called in on a murder case involving a young man found with his throat cut and some Rohypnol tablets in his pocket. Was the man a drug rapist or were the pills planted on him? Did he rape someone the night he was killed and did she kill him in retaliation? Was there a third person involved? Elínborg needs to find answers to these and several other questions before she can solve what proves to be a complicated case.

Review:
As is usual in Arnaldur’s books, the mystery element in this story is excellent. There are twists and turns, meticulous gathering of evidence and questioning of a collection of interesting characters, most of whom have things to hide. However, one thing mars this story – something I have commented on about some of the earlier books in the series: too much background information.
In the previous stories, Arnaldur would sometimes summarise events in Erlendur’s family life from the previous books in overly long paragraphs. Here he is using Elínborg as the lead detective for the first time, and obviously he felt he needed to give her some back-story. The problem is that the back-story is too detailed and long-winded and does not have any bearing on the mystery or how she solves it, apart from her interest in Indian food, which helps her find an important witness. I got the feeling that Arnaldur was possibly building something up for the next book in the series, but even so it was clumsily done and boring to a degree.

Rating: A good mystery that gets bogged down in background detail. 3 stars.

Survival stories

I came across an interesting article at BraveNewTraveler: 8 Incredible Survival Stories. While I have only read one of the books (Endurance) and seen a documentary and the movie based on Alive, I am familiar with some of the other stories and think they are pretty amazing examples of survival. I already have Yossi Ghinsberg's book on my wishlist, and the movie based on Touching the Void is on my "To Watch" list. Now I want to check out the rest.

Be sure to also check out 8 of the Greatest Non-Fiction Adventure Stories Ever Told and 8 of the Greatest Fictional Adventure Stories Ever Told for some more great recommendations.

Review: On a Shoestring to Coorg (travel) by Dervla Murphy

Year published: 1976
Genre: Travelogue
Setting & time: India, 1973-4

This is the third of Dervla Murphy’s travelogues that I have read, and I think by now I could call myself a fan of hers. Her books project an image of a woman of strength, honesty, determination and individuality, and also one of bloody-mindedness and strong opinions that you sometimes don’t agree with, yet you can’t help admiring her for her strength of conviction. She isn’t afraid of matter-of-factly writing about things that might reflect badly on her, like getting drunk or angry or doing something embarrassing, but neither does she hesitate to tell the reader when she is overcome with admiration of something - often a beautiful sunset or a lovely nature spot. As a result, she comes across as more human than many travel writers who either turn everything that happens to them into a series of jokes, or seem not to be touched by anything that happens around them.

This book is Murphy’s slightly starry-eyed account of a four month journey down the west coast of India, accompanied by her five-year-old daughter, Rachel, who would also later accompany her on the journey recounted in Eight Feet in the Andes, which I have already reviewed here. Murphy, who had hated India on a previous visit there, returned home a confirmed indophile, which I can relate to.

Another thing I liked about this book was reading about how one can enjoy a long journey like this burdened with only minimal luggage. Being a master of the art of minimalist travel, Murphy brought one small rucksack for herself and a small bag for Rachel and yet never seems to have missed or lacked for anything. I’ve done this kind of minimalist travelling myself and it feels very liberating, but I suspect that I had as much luggage as the two of them put together.

I have not been to the part of India where most of their time was spent, so I felt as if I were travelling with them and discovering the area at the same time as they were, so vivid are Murphy’s descriptions of the people and places they encountered.

Rating: A good, solid travelogue that should especially interest indophiles and those considering travel in India. 3+ stars.

Wednesday reading experience #8

Read a book about a place you have visited, the area or city you live in, or a place you are visiting.


Being familiar with the place you are reading about can heighten the experience of the reading and make you look at a familiar place in a new way.

Reading about an area you are visiting can change your experience, for example by introducing you to new places, like sights, neighbourhoods, streets, museums, shops, pubs or markets that you would otherwise never have visited.


Have you made any interesting discoveries about a place through reading a book set there?

Mystery review: A Murder on the Appian Way by Steven Saylor

Genre: Historical mystery
Year of publication: 1996
No. in series: 5
Series detective: Gordianus the Finder
Type of investigator: Private detective
Setting & time: Rome, 52 B.C.

Story:
A rabble-rousing Roman politician is killed on the Via Appia highway, a day's journey from Rome, causing widespread rioting in the city. The dead man’s wife sends for Gordianus the Finder to hire him to discover what happened, but eventually he sets out along the Via Appia at the behest of another client. With a lot of digging and patient questioning he finds out what happened, but meanwhile trouble is brewing in his own household…

Review:
This is an interesting 1st century B.C. detective story and political thriller that reads in parts like a modern police procedural. Saylor’s writing is rich in detail and historical information, the plotting is layered and the narrative gripping, and the characters come alive on the page. Saylor is very good at drawing up an image of what Rome and the surrounding countryside could have been like in those times, and is able, without being overly wordy, to conjure up images of cityscape and landscapes that are almost cinematic.

While the story deals with deadly serious events, there is still place for humour, which Saylor has applied with a light and subtle hand.

Several famous historical characters take part in the story, among them Cicero, Pompey, Marc Anthony and Julius Caesar. All of them come across as plausible and their behaviour does not feel out of character, as sometimes happens when real characters are included in fictional narratives.

The story is all the more remarkable in that it is based on real events. The fictional Gordianus is inserted into the story as the investigator, and some twists are provided that make it more than just a novelisation of the events, but the historical basis is there and has made me interested in finding out more about Roman history.

I will definitely be reading more of this series.

Rating: Not just a good mystery, but also an interesting history lesson. 3+ stars.

BookMooch explosion

At the beginning of the year I changed my status on BookMooch from “ask me first” to “worldwide”. For the uninitiated this means that a step was eliminated from the process of mooching a book from me. Before, the person interested in the book would have to e-mail me and ask if I was willing to send the book to their country, and only after I had said “yes” could they mooch it. I did this because I was offering some books that were so heavy that even for 3 mooch points they were still not cost effective to send outside Europe. I always got a few mooches every month, but I also got a number of “will you send to my country” requests that came to nothing but took the book off the inventory list for a week, because if done right, asking automatically reserves the book for the asker. I think the number of “can I mooch” e-mails that never resulted in mooches was so high because many people don’t realise that the book is reserved for them when they use the “ask me” button. Once a book has been reserved, it disappears from the owner’s inventory and can only be found by
a) linking to it before asking,
b) searching for it, or
c) clicking on the link to it in the request e-mail.
Many people don’t seem to realise this and when they are unable to find the book again they think it must have been mooched while they waited for an answer from the owner.

I had grown tired of this, so I decided to go global and allow everyone to mooch directly from me, but first I removed all the heavy books from my inventory and donated them to a library. I had never had any complaints about the amount of books that were being mooched from me – there were always many enough to keep me supplied with points – but now there has been an explosion. If things continue as they have in January and February, my moochables shelf will be bare by the end of October, because it’s emptying a lot faster than I am adding books to it. In January alone, more books were mooched from me than in the previous six months. Obviously the “ask me first” status deters many people from mooching.

The mooch points I am accruing are something of a problem. I can easily find books to mooch for them all, but I don’t want to mooch too many books over a short period of time or the Icelandic customs authorities will think I’m opening a second-hand bookshop. If they do, I’ll be required to pay import tax (10%), VAT (24,5%) and a handling fee (450 kr.) for every book packet I receive, meaning I could just as well buy them from a second hand bookshop.

Crime reading for neophytes

Thanks to Maxine at Petrona, I discovereed Uriah Robinson’s “Snowed in on Dartmoor” challenge: to list 12 books you would recommend to a reader who has never read any crime books.

While I have read hundreds – perhaps over a thousand – crime books, my reading has been somewhat limited in that I don’t particularly like a certain sub-sub-genre of the hardboiled sub-genre and have read very few caper books, but I still managed to find books to recommend from all 12 sub-genres he mentions.

1] The Origins:
Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone. One of the earliest mystery novels and a very enjoyable read.

2] The Age of Sherlock Holmes :
G.K. Chesterton: The Innocence of Father Brown. I considered R. Austin Freeman and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but in the end I decided on Chesterton, because I love the Father Brown stories.

3] The Golden Age:
Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None. There are a number of writers I could have recommended here, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey or Ngaio Marsh.

4] Hardboiled:
Dashiell Hammett: The Maltese Falcon. My most recent hard-boiled read and one that I like very much.

5] The Police Procedural:
Hillary Waugh: Last seen wearing. It was either this, Ed McBain’s Cop Hater, or J.J. Marric's Gideon's Day, but I liked this one best.

6] Detectives [police, forensic and private]:
Sue Grafton: A is for Alibi. A very good introduction to the private eye genre.

7] Psychological suspense:
Thomas Harris: Red Dragon. There were several I could have recommended here, but I think this one is a good introduction to the genre.

8] Caper and comic crime fiction:
Carl Hiassen: Stormy Weather. Hiassen never fails to make me laugh. Had I chosen a caper story, it would have been Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery.

9] Historical crime fiction:
Ellis Peters: A Morbid Taste for Bones. An excellent histrical, but I did have a hard time here. I could have recommended Anne Perry, Elizabeth Peters, Lindsay Davis, Steven Saylor, Paul Doherty, or a number of others, but in my mind Ellis Peters is the queen of the historical detective story.

10] Thrillers:
Desmond Bagley: Running Blind. One of the earliest thrillers I ever read – and it takes place in Iceland.

11] Crime fiction in translation:
Arnaldur Indriðason: Silence of the Grave. He's Icelandic. So am I.

12] The Wild Card category:
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles. I felt Doyle rated a mention.


To this I would like to add:

13] Fantasy/sci-fi crime fiction:
Terry Pratchett: Feet of Clay. Quite a good police procedural, with the addition of a werewolf, dwarves, and golems.

14] Spy and espionage fiction:
Ken Follett: The Key to Rebecca. Based on a true story, this is one of the best spy thrillers I have read. Could also have gone in the thriller or historical categories.

Top mysteries challenge review: Last Seen Wearing by Hillary Waugh

Year of publication: 1952
Genre: Mystery, police procedural
Type of mystery: Murder
Type of investigator: Police
Setting & time: Massachusetts, USA; March-April 1950

Story:
18 year-old Marilyn Lowell Mitchell disappears without trace from her college dormitory and goes missing for 2 weeks before she is found dead. It is only because of some clever comparative forensic work by the town's police chief that her death is ruled a murder and not a suicide. It is then up to the police to dig for clues as to the who and why of her death.

Review:
This is a pure police procedural and a very realistic one. The entire investigation is based on solid and diligent searching for clues and evidence and the elimination of suspects. It has the requisite false leads and dead ends, but no real red herrings, because those false leads are quickly revealed as such, instead of dominating the plot for several chapters like they might in a less realistic story.
But this is far from being a mere dry recounting of an investigation, because Waugh knew how to create interesting characters. It is especially Chief Ford and Detective Cameron that come alive, but every character comes across as realistic without too much description. It is in the combination of these factors with humour, pathos and a matter-of-fact storytelling that makes this a great story.

Rating: An excellent and near-perfect police procedural. 4+ stars.

Books left in challenge: 114

For those who have read the book or those who haven't and don't mind spoilers, Wikipedia has a good summary of the plot.

Useful website of the week: Fantastic Fiction

Last week I discussed Stop, you’re killing me!, a useful website for readers of crime fiction. This time around the useful website is for all kinds of fiction, and if an author has also written non-fiction, that is included as well. The site has bibliographies for over 20 thousand authors with works in English.

Fantastic Fiction offers searches by author and book title, and if you go to the Preferences page, you can also search by short story title and ISBN. As with Stop, you’re killing me!, this website is only for books published in English, and doesn’t seem to include information on untranslated works (conclusion is based on a sample of Icelandic authors with both translated and untranslated books).

Putting in an author’s full name will take you directly to that author’s page, while searches by first or last name will bring up all authors in the database who share the name. A title search will bring up all the books that share the title word, or if the title is unique it will take you to a page with different editions of the same book.

Each author page contains a short bio, information about that author’s latest and upcoming books, and books classed by series, along with other information, such as prices from different online shops.

This is a commercial site, so you will see some (unintrusive) banner ads, but they mostly seem to derive their income from linking to online bookstores and collecting incentives from them.

Other features include:
An awards page with listings of the winners of numerous awards (hasn’t been updated for 2008)
A New Books page
A Coming Soon page
Most popular listings (seems to be a listing of most searched-for titles on the site)
Top authors (seems to be a listing of most searched-for authors on the site)
Series
Listings of authors who were born or died, by year
A preference page, so you can see, for example, the most popular titles or authors depending on what country you’re in

Wednesday reading experience #7

Read a cookbook from cover to cover.


Did it make you hungry, and would you cook something from it?

Mystery review: Seeking Whom he May Devour by Fred Vargas

Original French title: L’homme à l’envers
Genre: Mystery
Year of publication: 1999
No. in series: 2
Series detective: Commissaire Adamsberg
Type of investigator: Police
Setting & time: Rural France, contemporary

Story:
Camille, an old girlfriend of Commissaire Adamsberg’s, is living in the French Alps with a Canadian who is there to observe and make a documentary about the European wolf. In the area, dozens of sheep have been killed by what appears to be a rogue wolf, but when a woman in the neighbourhood is found dead with her throat torn out by the same creature, rumours about a werewolf start circulating.

Camille had been fond of the dead woman and joins her foster-son and her shepherd in a search for the killer, whom they believe to be a man from the neighbourhood who has trained a big dog or a wolf to kill on command. A map found in his house shows a route through rural France he has apparently planned to take, and this they follow, finding the killer always a step ahead of them and the body count, of both sheep and humans, rising.

Then Camille decides to call on Adamsberg for help. He has a good reason to stay away from Paris for a while and joins the trio in their hunt for the killer, conducting first an informal and then an official investigation into the murders.

Review:
In the previous Vargas book I reviewed (Have mercy on us all), historical facts about the Plague were woven into a story about a modern Plague scare. In this book, the inspiration is clearly the Beast of Gévaudan, which also inspired the movie Brotherhood of the Wolf. There is not so much history interwoven into this story as in Have mercy on us all, but a little knowledge about the Beast and its history and about wolves and werewolves is helpful.

The characters are well-drawn and interesting and there are some nice twists and turns and a couple of clever red herrings. The reader is on an even footing with Adamsberg and company, and may even have figured things out before Adamsberg apparently has.

It isn’t until Camille decides they need help and calls Adamsberg that the action really takes off. Until then the story unfolds at a leisurely pace that gives the reader time to get to know Camille and her companions and to form some opinions, that may or may not be confirmed when Adamsberg begins his detecting.

The landscape and small villages and hamlets of the French Alps provide a backdrop for the story that has made me want to visit the region.

Rating: A tasty road trip tale of death and mayhem, love and friendship. 3+ stars.

Awards: Prix Mystère de la critique; shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger.

Cool design

I follow the BoingBoing blog and yesterday it drew my attention to this piece of book-related furniture. It isn't real books, but carton paper printed to look like stacked books. It's sold to be used as a stool or a table. It reminds me of a sculpture made of books that's in the Reykjavík city library.

Others have given this idea a different spin by specially designing furniture, for example tables and chairs, to double as bookcases.

What I would like to do is to turn an existing piece of furniture into a bookcase, while still retaining the original function. If you have come across an example of this, please post a link in the comment section.

Mystery review: Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas

Fred Vargas’ books are only just beginning to be published in Icelandic. I read this one first as it is the first one published, but it turns out that the second book to be published in Icelandic (English title Seeking Whom He May Devour) is an earlier book in the Adamsberg series. I hope it doesn’t matter much.

I actually read the Icelandic translation, Kallarinn, but I’m giving the English title so my English-speaking readers know which book I am talking about.

Original French title: Pars vite et reviens tard
Genre: Murder mystery
Year of publication: 2001
No. in series: 4
Series detective: Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg
Type of investigator: Police
Setting & time: Paris (mostly, France), contemporary

Story:
A man who has revived the ancient profession of town crier has been getting messages that are copied passages from old books about the Plague. At the same time the police are baffled by a mysterious symbol that appears on doors across Paris and turns out to be a protective sign against the Plague. Soon, people who lived in the buildings with the marked doors but whose doors were not marked, start dying. It is really the Plague, or are Adamsberg and company dealing with a very clever killer with a specific motive?

Review:
This is an excellent book on several levels, not just as a mystery but as a novel. The quality of the writing is excellent, the characters and their interpersonal relationships are realistic, and the mystery is layered and complicated. Additionally, there is some interesting information about the Plague woven into the narrative, and you know that Vargas isn’t making these things up, because she is an expert on the Plague. The story is told from several points of view, mostly that of Joss Le Guerns, the town crier who receives and reads the Plague messages, and that of the police, mostly Adamsberg but also his sidekick, Danglard. This makes it possible for the reader to compete with the detective, something I always appreciate in a mystery.

The tension builds slowly – you get a sense of creeping menace at the beginning which near the end has become pulse-quickening excitement. And this is no cosy. There are heart-wrenching descriptions of brutality and people doing twisted things to each other. There is staggering unfairness, hatred, envy and lust, but also love and tenderness. All of this comes together to make one hell of a story.

Rating: An excellent read: thrilling, complicated and brutal. 5 stars.

Awards: Prix des libraires

Wednesday reading experience #6

Read Alfred Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage during a snowstorm.

Heightened the experience, didn’t it?

Recycled books

If you hate throwing away books, even old computer manuals and outdated textbooks, here is an idea for recycling them: make them into vases or furniture. All you need is a band saw and some imagination.

Top mysteries challenge review: The Poisoned Chocolate Case by Anthony Berkeley

Edited - I have added something to the review that might be of interest.

Year of publication: 1936
Genre: Mystery
Type of mystery: Murder, whodunnit
Type of investigator: Group of amateurs
Setting & time:
No. in series: 4

Story:
Amateur sleuth Roger Sheringham has formed the Crime Circle, a club of 6 clever people with an interest in theoretical criminology. A police inspector from Scotland Yard has decided to hand them a real unsolved case and see if they succeed where the police have failed. They have a week to prepare, and at the end of it each must put his or her case to the others, who will have a chance to accept or disprove the theory.

The case concerns a middle-aged rogue who, upon receiving in the mail a gift box of chocolates, gives it to another man. That man has lost a bet with his wife and gives her the chocolates to settle it, eats some himself and proceeds to fall violently ill. The wife eats even more chocolates and dies of nitrobenzene poisoning.

Who was the intended victim, and who did the dastardly deed? Was it the original recipient, or was it perhaps the other man or his wife, or someone else altogether? Each club member has a different idea, and so do the police.

Warning: here be SPOILERS

Review:
This is not only a murder mystery, but also an exercise in detection and a showcasing of different motives, types of twists and red herrings, detection methods and mistakes sleuths can make. As such, it should be read by all aspiring mystery writers, who will be able to learn much from it, not the least how to convince their readers that their sleuth’s solution is the only possible one. This is one of those stories where, while each sleuth discovers something new about the case in their search for the truth, all the facts necessary in order to solve the mystery are really set out right at the beginning, allowing the reader to compete with the sleuths as they draw their various conclusions, several of which would have made a quite credible final solution.

The characters are an interesting collection of people: a pompous, theatrical trial lawyer, two mystery writers, one cynical, the other arrogant, a cool and detached writer of literary fiction, a bumbling but very intelligent playwright, and a modest and mild little man of no particular appearance who had been even more surprised at being admitted to this company of personages than they had been at finding him amongst them, to use Berkeley’s words. Each character is well drawn, and each has his or her own method of arriving at a solution.

The only member of the club with practical crime-solving experience is Roger Sheringham, a somewhat unlikeable man whom Berkeley treats with a kind of loving disrespect. Sheringham is the only one of the sleuths we get to follow around while he is doing his detecting, which has the purpose of underlining that he is the series sleuth, and to show the reader some of the mistakes that can be made when cluegathering.

There is a thread of humour that runs through the whole narrative from beginning to end, sometimes gently mocking both reader and characters by drawing out the ridiculous in a situation, and at other times satirising the mystery genre. Without the humour this would have been a rather dull story, in spite of all the juicy detecting.

The last of the possible solutions will be a surprise to many, but I disagree with the reviewer who said it was the least likely suspect who did the deed – I think this person was supposed to be the obvious murderer right from the start, so obvious that few readers would even notice right away. I don’t think I will say any more on the subject, as I want other readers to discover this humorous and delightful twist for themselves and draw their own conclusions as to whether it is the correct one.

Edit: For those who are interested in this kind of exercise, there is a similar exercise in Ellery Queen's The Siamese Twin Mystery, where, before coming up with the right solution, the Queens propose several different solutions to a murder mystery, only to either immediately prove it couldn't have been so or to have other characters reveal evidence that proves them wrong.

Rating: A classic mystery that should satisfy anyone who has ever disagreed with an author about the most obvious solution to the crime. 5 stars.

Books left in challenge: 116

Useful Website of the Week: Stop, you’re killing me!

I keep a close eye on the traffic that comes to this blog, and especially which search engine keywords bring people here. Quite often people are looking for an author whose book or books I have reviewed. Another common search is for e-books and a third is for the series, reading or publication order of an author’s books. It occurred to me that perhaps I would be doing these people a favour by redirecting them to the right website, so I decided to start a new feature. I’m calling it Useful Website of the Week. Despite the name, it’s not going to be a regular weekly occurrence – the name merely indicates that I will not be doing more than one such post a week.

The plan is to review one or more useful website(s) each time, sticking to ones that are useful to readers, e.g. sites that distribute free e-books, detailed author sites, author and reader blogs that I enjoy, and sites that list useful information about an author’s books, such as series and reading order.
--

The first Useful Website of the Week is Stop, you’re killing me!
The site was started in 1998 by Bonny Brown, who is an avid mystery fan. Like so many other readers she likes to read series in order of publication to be able to follow the development of the characters and writing. She was frustrated by how difficult it could be to find out about publication order and even what books an author had written, so she started scouring various websites and reference books and put together the website for herself and other readers who felt the same way. In 2006 Lucinda Surber and Stan Ulrich took over the maintenance of the website, and have continued adding to it and making it even better. In 2008 it won the Anthony Award for Best Mystery Website/Blog, so I am clearly not the only one who recognises its excellence.

The website covers mystery, crime, thriller, spy, and suspense books. If an author has written books that belong to other genres, you will not find them there, so if you want to find a listing of an author’s complete works, you will have to look elsewhere (I’ll post a useful site for this next week).

I have been using the site since at least 2004, and have found it very useful. Occasionally I do come across a mystery author who is not featured there, but it’s rare. In those cases I have another website to fall back on, one that I will discuss next week.

Stop, you’re killing me! doesn’t just feature authors of crime fiction and their books by series and publication order, but also a number of other useful features. One is the ability to search by series character – so for example if you want to find books about Sister Mary Helen but can’t quite remember the author’s name, you just have to look up that character and you will be taken to the author’s page.

Other features include:

• Listings of newly published books
• Award listings – you can, for example, find the CWA Dagger awards going back to 1955
• Books by location, historical era and genre
• Sleuths/detectives by occupation and ethnicity
• Recommendations based on which authors or what kind of crime story you like
• Short reviews of the crime books the webmasters have been reading

The site is only about books published in English, both original English-language books and translated ones, but in some instances when a non-English language author has had some works translated and not others, you can find information about the untranslated works as well.

Mystery review: Tími Nornarinnar (Season of the Witch) by Árni Þórarinsson (Arni Thorarinsson)

This is one of the Icelandic challenge books. It has been translated already into German, French and Danish, and I read somewhere that it is being translated into English, which is why I am reviewing it here. What the English title will be remains to be seen, but the Icelandic title translates as Season of the Witch, taking its name from the song by Donovan, which has a bearing on the plot.

Genre: Mystery
Year of publication: 2005
No. in series: 4
Series detective: Einar the journalist (I didn't see a last name - perhaps it's revealed in the earlier books)
Type of investigator: Investigative reporter
Setting & time: Northern Iceland, mostly Akureyri, contemporary.

Story:
A woman falls overboard during a rafting trip in Skagafjörður, hits her head on a rock and later dies without having gained consciousness. Her mother contacts Einar and tells him she was murdered. Einar finds this hard to believe but starts investigating anyway, more as as sop to the old lady, whom he likes, than on suspicion of finding anything suspicious. Shortly afterwards a charismatic young man disappears and Einar gets orders to write up a story about the investigation, while also covering a problem with politics and hooliganism in a village a few hour’s drive from Akureyri. His investigation leads to interesting facts about the young man, who was not all he seemed to be, and also about the dead woman’s husband. At the same time Einar finds himself embroiled in two separate family dramas with quite different outcomes.

Review: This was my first book by this author, but will not be the last. The story is told in the first person by Einar the journalist, a recovering alcoholic, warm-hearted man and hard-nosed journalist with strong ethics and an ironic sense of humour. The twists were by turns unexpected and predictable, with enough surprises and interesting events to keep me happily reading the book in one session. There is humour, tragedy, love and hatred, and in short, it’s a very satisfying read.

It was fun seeing all the different characters and for once knowing that they are, if not exactly based on, then at least meant to remind one of real people, and the same goes for places. I have lived in two of the three places where the story unfolds (the third is fictional) and know them intimately, and in fact I used to sell and participate in rafting trips like the one in which the woman dies and go to the same school as the missing boy, so that made the story very real for me.

Rating: A thrilling and funny murder mystery. Do read it when and if it comes out in English. 5 stars.

This the second Icelandic book in the Icelandic reading challenge.

Top mysteries challenge review: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

This is the second Hammett novel I read for the top mysteries challenge, which leaves two.

Besides reading the book I watched the movie, which is the most faithful book to film adaptation I have seen.

Year of publication: 1930
Genre: Hardboiled detective story
Type of mystery: Theft, murder
Type of investigator: Private detective
Setting & time: San Francisco, USA, contemporary to writing

Story:
A woman approaches private detective Sam Spade and his partner, Archer, with an apparently simple request: to tail someone. But Archer is killed on the job and Spade is approached by two more people and asked to find a valuable statuette, the Maltese Falcon. The woman turns out to be after the same thing. What follows is a merry-go-round of ruthless lies, intrigue and murder.

Discussion and review:
Sam Spade is one of the most famous detectives in the history of detective fiction, because he was a perfect prototype of the tough guy detective who used brawn as much as brain to solve his cases, took no shit from anyone and lived by a threadbare code of honour that didn’t stop him from lying and double-crossing to get what he was after. His predecessors, such as Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey and Hercule Poirot, had been gentlemen who played fair and used their minds. While Spade was not the first tough guy detective, he was the one in which everything came together to make a really memorable character. Of course, his portrayal by Humphrey Bogart in the 1941 film adaptation helped to anchor his fame as well, even though Bogart actually portrayed him as rather more sensitive and likeable than Hammett meant him to be. In the book, he is described in terms of being devilish, not just in appearance but in demeanor as well, and while you can't help rooting for him, it's more because he's the most honest of the characters rather than being in any way endearing.

If Spade is a prototype, then Bridget O'Shaughnessy is an archetype – a perfect femme fatale: beautiful, sexy, self-assured, charming and utterly ruthless. The rest of the main characters are all realistic and clearly drawn.

The narrative is spare and streamlined and quick-paced. The dialogue is realistic, and the story is character driven but still full of action. The falcon statuette is a perfect MacGuffin and one gets the feeling that the story is not so much a story as a chapter in the statuette’s long history, and that it will go on causing death and mayhem for a long time to come.

Rating: A perfectly balanced hard-boiled detective story with memorable characters and great twists. 5 stars.

Books left in challenge: 114

Wednesday reading experience #5

Read a whole series in the order of publication (or the recommended reading order), without reading other books in between. It’s up to you whether you choose a trilogy or something longer.


I did this with the Anne of Green Gables books – unfortunately I read them in chronological order rather than order of publication, and found a nasty spoiler in the one book that was published out of chronology. I have also done this with sub-series from the Discworld series.

The Harry Potter books might be a not too strenuous series to read like this.

What series would you choose, and why?
or
What series did you choose and what was the outcome?

Review: King Solomon’s Carpet by Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell)

Genre: Thriller, psychological
Year of publication: 1991
Setting & time: London, contemporary

Story:
A group of society’s outsiders rent cheap rooms in an old, mouldering school building. The owner is obsessed with underground railways and is writing a complete history of the London tube. His cousin and her children lead a fairly care-free existence, a young musician falls hard for a young woman who has left her family in order to pursue her dream to become a solo violinist, and another young man worries over his pet hawk, which seems to be dying. When a mysterious stranger arrives in their midst, he sets in motion a chain of events that will change all their lives in one way or another.

Review:
This is one of the best psychological thrillers I have read in a long while. The story moves slowly, occasionally making sudden spurts of action, but even the action is described slowly, almost languidly, so that the tension is magnified with each sentence one moves closer to each narrative climax. The characters weave in and out of each other's lives, each interaction possibly meaningless, possibly not, but often loaded with a sense of foreboding or even menace. The characters come alive on the page, but each is described with indifference by the author, so that the reader can never be certain which characters matter, which ones are merely decorative, and which ones are expendable. The story moves with a sort of inevitability, much like an out-of-control subway train destined for a collision, which is apt because the London tube is very much a character in the book, a magic carpet that takes the characters where they want to go, indifferent as to their fates or whether they ever get to where they are going.
This can't really be called a mystery in the sense that the key events have become foreseeable long before they happen, but the nature of the narrative is such that you are never quite certain that what you have predicted will happen, or if some diabolical twist is waiting just around the corner, which is of course one of the things that make this such a good thriller.

Rating: A very good slow-moving psychological thriller. 4+ stars.

Award:
CWA Gold Dagger, 1991.

This is the second book I finished in the Mystery reader Café challenge: the "on the shelf for at least a year" one.

Mystery review: Harðskafi by Arnaldur Indriðason

The English title of this book will be Hypothermia. According to Amazon UK it will be published in Britain in September.

The Icelandic title is the name of a mountain in the area where Erlendur is supposed to have grown up, meaning something like “a bare and sharp-edged mountain”. It has a bearing on events from Erlendur’s past that have been mentioned in previous books. Interestingly (at least from a linguistic viewpoint) another meaning of harðskafi is close to the meaning of the English word hardscrabble, and I am sure it is no coincidence that the two words sound similar.

Genre: Mystery, police procedural
Year of publication: 2007
No. in series: 8
Series detective: Detective Erlendur Sveinsson
Setting & time: Reykjavík and Þingvellir, Iceland; contemporary

Story:
A woman discovers her friend’s body hanging from a beam in a summer house by lake Þingvallavatn. She seems to have killed herself, but the friend is convinced she would never have done that. This is enough for Erlendur, who has little to do at work, to begin an informal investigation under the pretense of a research project on the causes of suicide. At the same time he is preoccupied by two old missing persons cases: that of a young man in his last year of sixth form college, and a slightly older female university student, both of whom disappeared around the same time, 30 years earlier. Meanwhile, his private life is complicated by his daughter’s insistence that he meet with his ex-wife and make peace with her, and his colleagues (who are otherwise not involved in the story) think his preoccupation with what they see as three suicides, is morbid and unprofessional.

Review:
As in some of the previous books, this story takes place in winter, and the atmosphere is correspondingly gloomy. Erlendur himself, on the other hand, is a bit less glum than usual, and I would describe his mood in the story as pensive rather than depressed. While the season is not as important a presence as in Voices and Arctic Chill (where it is like one of the characters), there is nevertheless a definite feeling of coldness that underlines Erlendur’s memories of an event in his youth that changed his whole life (I’m not saying anything more, in case this is read by someone who has not read any of the books before) and explains why he is so interested in the missing persons.

As in some of the previous books, we get to see the past in flashbacks, in this instance events in the dead woman’s life leading up to her death, seen from her point of view, but she never becomes as engaging a character as some of the others have. She is pitiful and a victim by nature, but I still found her hard to sympathise with.

The story at first seems to move very slowly as Erlendur painstakingly goes over details and questions people, but the slowness is deceptive. Every chapter holds one or more pieces of the puzzles and nothing is held back from the reader, who is given a level playing field against Erlendur, with full access to his discoveries and thought processes. All the time the tension is mounting, almost unnoticed, until before you know it the story is racing ahead at speed.

As with some of the other Erlendur stories, there is no such thing here as perfect justice, and the ending may be disappointing to some, in more than one way.

Rating: Another excellent mystery one from Iceland’s King of Crime. 4+ stars.

This is the third book I finish in the Mystery reader Café challenge: the story taking place in my area.

Reading report for January 2009

January was a bigger than average reading month for me: 21 books finished. This is no surprise as I had a week off from work in which I finished a total of 6 books. I expect I will be back to my average of 12,75 BPM in February.

In the reading challenges the situation is as follows:

• I finished 3 out of the 4 Mystery Reader Café challenge books, and only have the book with the word „murder“ in the title left. I plan to try to finish that in February.
• In the 52 Icelandic books challenge I read 5 books, which puts me a little ahead of plan.
• In the Top Mysteries challenge I finished 4 books. That challenge is not on a deadline, but I would like to finish at least 25% of the books on the list by the end of the year.
• The challenge I am proudest of is the TBR one. In addition to the Mystery Reader Café „on the shelf for a year book“, I managed to read 10 other TBR books that had been on the shelf for a year or more. I decided to keep 5 and put the other 6 in my BookMooch inventory. The only books I have bought this month were ones I have been specifically looking for, which is quite a change, as I usually buy about 75% of my books on speculation.

The books:
Arnaldur Indriðason: Harðskafi (murder mystery)
Árni Þórarinsson: Tími Nornarinnar (murder mystery)
Anthony Berkeley: The Poisoned Chocolate Case (murder mystery)
Suzanne Brockmann: The Admiral's Bride (romantic thriller)
Jennifer Crusie: The Cinderella Deal (romance)
Joseph Delaney: The Spook's Apprentice (YA fantasy)
Karen Joy Fowler: The Jane Austen Book Club (novel)
Hallgrímur Helgason: 10 ráð til að hætta að drepa fólk og byrja að vaska upp (thriller)
Dashiell Hammett: The Thin Man (murder mystery)
Michael Innes: The Journeying Boy (mystery)
Ed McBain: Cop Hater (police procedural)
Harry Pearson: A Tall Man in a Low Land (travelogue, Belgium)
Rakel Pálsdóttir: Kötturinn í örbylgjuofninum (urban myths collection)
J.D. Robb: Reunion in Death (police procedural)
C.F. Roe: A Nasty Bit of Murder (murder mystery)
Dorothy L. Sayers: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (murder mystery)
Daphne Sheldrick: The Orphans Of Tsavo (memoir, animals, Africa)
Sigurður A. Magnússon: Grískir reisudagar (travelogue, Greece)
Barbara (Ruth Rendell) Vine: King Solomon's Carpet (psychological thriller)
Patricia Wentworth: The Gazebo (murder mystery)
Wilson, Jason & Frances Mayes, editors: The Best American Travel Writing 2002 (travel articles)

Top mysteries challenge review: The Journeying Boy by Michael Innes

Michael Innes is best known for his Appleby series, but this is a non-series book, albeit one that takes place in the same world. Appleby is even mentioned once in the book, and it is stated that he is no longer with the police. The detective in the story is one of his successors at the Yard.

Year of publication: 1949
Genre: Mystery, thriller
Type of mystery: Kidnapping plot, murder
Type of investigator: Police, special agent and amateur
Setting & time: England and Ireland, contemporary (to publication)

Story:
Respectable, elderly private tutor Richard Thewless is hired to accompany the 15 year old son of Britain’s most respected nuclear physicist on a summer visit to relatives in Ireland, when the first choice for a tutor cancels his appointment unexpectedly. Only he didn’t really cancel, he was murdered (unknowingly to the boy and his father), and Detective-Inspector Thomas Cadover wants to know why. The boy, Humphrey Paxton, seems to be both nervous and given to telling stories, so it is not surprising that Mr. Thewless doesn’t at first believe his broad hints that someone is out to get him. Things finally come to a head at the end of the journey, when boy and tutor meet the villains head on.

Review:
The three characters mentioned in the overview above represent the points of view in the story, which always shift between chapters and never within them, making it very clear whose POW is being shown. The reader has the advantage of the characters in being the only one who has total overview of all three viewpoints, and can, if she is clever enough, fit together the pieces of this intricate puzzle plot into a picture that makes sense to her before it does so to the characters - provided she doesn’t get lost in a labyrinth of words.

The story is very wordy, and most of it is narrative, making the text very dense. Sometimes it makes for good effect, like in a detailed and very tense scene late in the book when Humphrey is being chased by his enemies and in a somewhat surrealistic ghostly midnight chase through a dilapidated old mansion, but at other times it holds back the action, like when Mr. Thewless’ is searching desperately for Humphrey on a train. That particular scene, which is meant to be at once comic, tense and full of panic, does not come well enough across exactly because of this wordiness. I actually found myself skipping whole paragraphs of this scene, and had to force myself to go back and read them.

Some good points are the humour, which is sometimes subtle and sometimes veers into full blown farce, and the tension, which keeps mounting, with minor climaxes which only serve to heighten the tension instead of relieving it.

Another strong point is the characters. All are expertly drawn and realistic, even the minor ones and there are no stereotypes. Even the funny-speaking servant who at first might seem a very crude caricature of an Irish peasant turns out to be merely humouring his master who expects that sort of thing. Seemingly sinister characters turn out to be totally innocent of any wrongdoing, while others who appear to be innocent turn out to have something to hide, although not necessarily in a bad way.

The ending is a bit over the top (in the classic tradition of Boy’s Own adventures), but satisfying all the same, with a nod to Edgar Allan Poe and all ends tied off into a neat bow.

Rating: A good thriller which could have been made very good with some judicious editing. 3 stars.

Books left in challenge: 117.