wednesday may 07
Maybe it’s something about radio. I really loved Penelope Fitzgerald’s Human Voices, a marvelous little novel about the BBC during World War II. Now here’s a Canadian novel about a radio station crew, Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air, and I’m charmed and impressed by it, too.
It’s 1975 in the little town of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. Here we meet Harry Boyd, an old-time radio man who is acting as temporary station manager. Harry was once a promising young broadcaster till he had a shameful failure in TV and got this second chance in this backwater radio station. He and Eleanor Dew, the cool, competent receptionist, hold the station together as they wait for corporate decisions on its fate. Two new staff members join them, rookie Gwen Symon and Dido Paris, a glamorous new announcer.
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wednesday april 09
Here’s one for readers who remember Mary Renault’s historical novels of the ancient world fondly. It’s Jo Graham’s reworking of the tale of Aeneas, the fall of Troy, and the founding of Rome, Black Ships.
Gull is a slave, a child of rape, whose mother is one of the conquered people of Wilusa (Troy). Lamed in an accident as a child, she faces a grim fate in her captors’ shore town of Pylos.
But her mother takes her to the Pythian priestess who serves the goddess of death. The visions Gull sees declare her the priestess’s successor as sibyl.
Growing up in her role as priestess, Gull continues to serve Pylos until a war party of Wilusans attacks to avenge further raids on their home and people.
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tuesday april 01
Back in medieval times, it was very important to keep the Royalty happy, lest all hell break loose. Therefore the King's fools, or court jesters, were no fools at all, since they played such an integral role in the well-being of the court. Members of the Fool's Guild in the mystery series by Alan Gordon are especially savvy. They use their inside knowledge and the anonymity of their masks to undermine all varieties of political trickery and deceit.
Author Alan Gordon is a marvelously clever writer, who has a 'day job' as a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society in Queens, New York. He has received praise for his series featuring the Fool's Guild, displaying a cunning group of unlikely heroes mixed in with history, suspense, and even a little Shakespeare before his time. All six of Gordon's Medieval Mysteries are available at the Library:
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wednesday march 26
I’ve read a whole string of great new books lately. Some I won’t blog, like Richard Price’s new novel, Lush Life, since you probably already have your place staked out in line for them (do if you don’t), but here’s one you may not have heard much about: Robert Hellenga’s The Italian Lover.
It’s a fairly direct sequel to his debut novel, The Sixteen Pleasures, but you don’t have to have read that novel (I haven’t yet), nor The Fall of a Sparrow (whose protagonist shows up in a major role here, too) to appreciate it.
Margot Harrington is an American book conservator living in Florence, where she came in 1966 to restore books damaged in the great flood of the Arno. In 1975 she wrote a book about her experiences as one of the foreign “mud angels,” her discovery of a book of Renaissance erotica in the convent where she was working, and the grand love affair she had then with an Italian art conservator. Now, some fifteen years later, there is going to be a film made of her memoir.
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wednesday march 19
Twelve-year-old Jamie Gabriel gets on his bike to run his morning paper route in the Indianapolis suburbs. He never comes home.
If you can keep reading past that gut-wrenching premise, keep reading. David Levien’s debut novel, City of the Sun, keeps tightening the suspense from there.
Jamie’s parents, Paul and Carol, spend a year anxiously following the police case on their son while their marriage falls to ashes and the case turns cold. Then a sympathetic patrolman passes them the name of a private investigator. Though they’ve already tried two, Paul finally makes the contact with p.i. Frank Behr. Behr is reluctant to take the case, as the odds of finding any information (much less the boy himself) are so remote. But Paul doesn’t know that the case has a hook that Behr can’t pull away from: Behr’s own son died at the age of seven.
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sunday march 16
Nicola Barker’s extraordinary novel, Darkmans, published in 2007 and short listed for the Man Booker Prize, didn’t reach my desk until January of this year. So it’s still “new fiction” to me. I’ve been thinking about Darkmans for a while now since finishing it. There's a lot to consider.
Barker sets her wildly strange book in Ashford in Kent, the western terminus of the Channel Tunnel. Ashford is a town whose medieval heart is circumscribed by modernity. In Barker’s novel, it’s a place where the past seeps into the present, with characters influenced by the malevolent spirit of one John Scrogin
, a jester at the court of Edward IV. Scrogin’s infamous act (can’t really call it a prank) was luring beggars to a barn then torching it.
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wednesday march 05
Of all the literary sisters of Bridget Jones, Hester Browne’s Melissa Romney-Jones (a.k.a. Honey Blennerhesket) is one of the most charming.
Not that Melissa would really find Bridget a kindred spirit. Melissa is a more old-fashioned girl who would never let her standards down far enough to drink and smoke and slack off at work as much as Bridget and her friends, and she wouldn’t be at home with their sarcastic humor. (Melissa never gets double entendres.) Though of course she would make perfectly cheerful conversation with any of them at a party—nice girls do, after all.
But her spunky optimism and determination to find true love make Melissa Bridget’s sister under the skin.
We first met Melissa in The Little Lady Agency, when Melissa decided to put her unusual talents to use by opening a business under that name. All of her old-fashioned domestic accomplishments (not to mention her busty figure that fits 1950s-era clothes better than modern fashions) and her firm belief in the social niceties made her the perfect advisor for London’s clueless bachelors.
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monday february 25
Joseph, protagonist of Bruce Jay Friedman's A Mother's Kisses was a good student in high school, but due to stiff competition from returning WWII soldiers, he finds himself in the summer after his senior year with nowhere to go next. (These were the days before community colleges and proprietary schools with flexible deadlines.) Fortunately for Joseph (or maybe not), he's got his mother fighting for him.
You'll either love or hate this book. I love it, but I'm not crazy about this particular cover, because I think the mother should be more glamorous.
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friday february 22
Turning the Page had the opportunity to conduct an interview with Robert Olmstead, author of Coal Black Horse, Cincinnati’s 2008 On the Same Page novel for adults. We asked Mr. Olmstead some general questions, because we wouldn’t want to include spoilers for those of you who haven’t yet read this gripping tale of a young boy seeking his father across the landscape of the Civil War.
But once you have read Coal Black Horse, be sure to bring your own questions to the book-signing with Mr. Olmstead at the Main Library on Sunday, February 24, or to one of the other events at which he’ll appear. Meanwhile, check out the official Web site for the book.
TTP: Where did you get the inspiration for Coal Black Horse?
RO: In the 1980’s I was living in Pennsylvania not far from Gettysburg. Visiting the battlefield for the first time was a powerful experience. I didn’t know that much about the Civil War, just the usual stuff. So living there, walking that ground, it is my way that I wanted to know as much as I could. And of course everything I learned simply made me all the more curious to learn even more.
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wednesday february 20
It has been more than ten years since the first "One Book/One City" community reading program was launched in Seattle. Since then, hundreds of similar events have been staged; some have lasted and some have not. We like to think that our program here in Cincinnati has "legs", i.e., that it is an event that people around town look forward to each year.
We started out in 2002, reading Ernest Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying, in an attempt to address the aftermath of the city's riots of 2001. Over time, the program has become more of a reading event than a city-wide healing event, although the idea of "encouraging community dialogue" continues as a strong undercurrent. For On The Same Page 2008, the challenge for readers is to experience the Civil War through the eyes of a 14-year-old boy from the mountains of Appalachia, in Robert Olmstead's spellbinding novel, Coal Black Horse.
Olmstead will be in town for several programs, begining with a Civil War History Day on Sunday February 24 from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. in the Main Library. Discussion groups and special events will be held during the next six weeks throughout Hamilton County, featuring local Civil War history and concluding with a guided Civil War Tour of Spring Grove Cemetery on April 6.
Each year, there are many ways in which schools, book clubs, and individual readers participate in On The Same Page, making it truly one of the most viable "One Book" programs in the country. Look for upcoming posts about author Robert Olmstead (and about this year's title for teen readers, Bronx Masquerade).
I keep seeing trailers for a new movie with Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson, but the Fool's Gold that pops into my mind every time I see them is a completely unrelated 1993 novel of that title by Albert DiBartolomeo. Only his second novel (and apparently his last), it was a crisp little mob thriller about a cache of gold coins.
As the book opens, Benny Bean, a violent young thug, steals those coins from a beach house. But before he has even got them out the door, someone in turn steals them from him. Furious, Benny tracks down the second thief and kidnaps his daughter, Claire, for ransom. But the second thief has already been robbed of the coins, too.
Those are just the opening twists in a spirallingly complicated plot. The coins (which belong to a mob boss) pass through several more pairs of hands while Benny keeps Claire a prisoner and Claire's boyfriend races to recover the coins that will buy her life.
Fans of the genre will appreciate DiBartolomeo's snappy plotting. I remember the book as being pretty violent, though with a comic edge, so keep that in mind. But let me know whether it stands up to my memory of it. And whether it would make a good movie itself.
thursday february 14
It was kind of nice to read two books in a row that I could get through in a single sitting. The first is Julia Cameron's 2005 book of cartoons, How to Avoid Making Art (or Anything Else You Enjoy). The suggestions are funny but sobering, since I've independently discovered them all on my own. Hang out with time-consuming people. Think about your novel instead of writing it. Write emails (or blogs) instead of your novel. Tell yourself your job makes it too hard to write. Tell yourself you've missed the boat and are too old anyway.
Sort of related is Charles Webb's Home School, a sequel to his 1963 The Graduate. It's 11 years later, and Richard Nixon is president. Benjamin and Elaine are happily married, living outside New York City. Benjamin works as a library shelver (yay!), but mostly, they devote their lives to homeschooling their 2 sons. Note that homeschooling once seemed stranger than it does now. They haven't seen Elaine's mother in 7 years. That, of course, is just about to change.
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wednesday february 06
A very popular genre in recent years has been the history-hopping novel where the author tells a story by tracing a work of art or literature through the centuries and illuminating each generation’s response to it. Girl in Hyacinth Blue, by Susan Vreeland, was one, The Dream of Scipio, by Iain Pears was another, and Lord Byron’s Novel, by John Crowley still another superb example.
Well, here’s a very readable and enjoyable novel based on the same premise, and this time the found object is both literature and art: a rare illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain that finally turns up in twentieth-century Sarajevo. The novel that tells that manuscript’s story is People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks.
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wednesday january 23
I read Peter Carey's Jack Maggs years ago. That great, fiendishly ebullient Dickensian riff is still my favorite of his many splendid novels, but here's another one that will grab you by the throat, slam you in your seat, and keep you there cover to cover.
Theft: A Love Story is the tale of Michael "Butcher" Bones, a brilliant painter who has sabotaged his own career by his drinking, his scorching impatience with the Australian art scene, and a short stint in jail for ignoring the divorce court orders that keep him from his son and turned his works into his ex-wife's property.
Now Butcher is living in a patron's backcountry house, reducing it to a shambles as he works, and looking after his big, thick brother, Hugh. Into their lives walks gorgeous Marlene, who is attempting to reach the house on the next farm, where there's a painting by her father-in-law, the late, great Jacques Liebovitz.
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wednesday january 09
“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation."
That’s the first line of Donna Tartt’s cult classic The Secret History, and the first time I read the sentence, I was hooked.
When narrator and native Californian Richard Papen transfers to Hampden College in Vermont, he joins an exclusive group of five other students studying ancient Greek taught by an eccentric professor. Gradually Richard earns their trust and becomes privy to the group’s secret history: they accidentally murdered a farmer during their recreation of an ancient Greek bacchanal.
One of the members, Bunny Corcorran, did not participate in the bacchanal and learns of the murder. As Bunny threatens to reveal their secret, Richard must decide whether to go along with their decision to silence him.
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tuesday january 08
Bestselling author Sara Paretsky will be in town next week, speaking at a program and book signing sponsored by the library on Thursday, January 17.
She’s most famous of course as one of the “founding mothers” of crime fiction. Her mystery series featuring Chicago private detective V. I. Warshawski was one of the first to feature a female p.i., showing that a woman detective could be as at home on the mean streets as at the tea table.
In her latest novel, Bleeding Kansas, she returns to her roots for an eerie story of neighbor turned against neighbor. Like her other non-series novel, the 1998 Ghost Country, the story is a showcase for her passionate social convictions.
Paretsky draws on the legacy of violence in her home state—both the bloody battle over slavery in Kansas in the 1850s and the Civil Rights struggle and generational divide of the 1960s and 1970s.
The novel’s contemporary story parallels those historic conflicts. Paretsky sees another generation bitterly divided, this time over religious convictions, sexual practices, and the war in Iraq.
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thursday january 03
I would begin this blog entry: "It's winter, and the perfect time to enjoy the warmth of a nice crackling fire." However, that's a bit in poor taste even for me, especially since I want to talk about a book called
An Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England. If you're looking for a book with a title that will get you some curious and frightened stares when you read it on the bus, this is the book. It's sparked a number of conversations during which I've had to explain that
no, I'm not planning on burning anything down and
yes, it is
a novel. However, aside from brief pauses during curious interruptions this book is one that's hard to put down.
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wednesday january 02
You don’t really need me to tell you about Anne Enright’s The Gathering, since it won this year’s Booker prize. But I just read it in one big gulp, and I can’t resist telling you how gorgeous it is. And I have another book to suggest while you wait for your copy to be available.
The Gathering is a story of family and memory. An Irishwoman mourns her brother’s suicide while calling up the intensely tangible memories of him and their childhood and youth together, memories that coalesce around the year they spent living with their grandmother and what happened to them there.
Enright writes so beautifully, so specifically, evoking the dense physicality of memory and family emotions, that readers will be seduced with every perfect word and scene.
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wednesday december 19
I love minor novels. Don’t get me wrong, I love major novels, too—big, muscular novels of ideas and literary bravura—but sometimes a small-scale work is just the right size. Lately, that seems to be what I’ve been in the mood for. (Did you like Moon Women and Uninvited Daughters?)
Englishwoman Marika Cobbold’s 1994 debut, Guppies for Tea, is another graceful, assured, and deliberately small-scale work.
Amelia Lindsey, by nature rather vague and irresolute, finds herself forced to take up the role of caretaker for her widowed grandmother, Selma. The family has put Selma into a nursing home—nice enough in its way, but depressingly cheerful—and Selma hates it.
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wednesday december 05
Okay, last week’s entry was about a cool and formal book for readers who like to see how a writer thinks.
This week’s is for readers who like to plunge right into a sympathetic story about likeable characters.
Moon Women, by Pamela Duncan, is the story of three generations of Southern women learning to find peace with each other and with their changing lives.
Middle-aged, divorced mill worker Ruth Ann Payne is going to pick up her daughter, nineteen-year-old Ashley, from a rehab center. Ashley, always trouble, is now pregnant, too. Meanwhile, Marvelle, Ruth Ann’s mother, who has begun to suffer from dementia, has wandered away from her other daughter’s house, determined to stay with Ruth Ann. So Ruth Ann’s house becomes home for all three of them, and the delicate process of accommodating each other begins.
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friday november 30
At a certain point in the days of my youth, Choose-your-own-Adventure books enjoyed a surge in popularity. I must admit I was one of the many in my generation who paged frantically back and forth exploring another planet or trying to find the lost treasure. I also have to admit that more often than not I was bitten by a poisonous creature or perished in a pit trap.
I have to admit that my decision making, at least in novels of this sort, has a certain exuberance that overrides my common sense. Offered the phrase You see a dark wood door; from behind it comes the sound of uncanny howling. Do you:
- Open the Door (turn to page 58)
- Go back down the passage (turn to page 84)
I'm going to almost always turn to page 58. I've also now verified that this trait has continued into adulthood with my recent thumbing through several of the hundreds of available plots in Heather McElhatton's Pretty Little Mistakes.
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wednesday november 28
Some people don’t like fiction that feels “cool,” where there’s a sense that the author has stepped back a pace from her characters. But it can be fascinating to watch a writer use the formalities of fiction to explore her subject. If you agree, try Andrea Barrett’s elegant new historical, The Air We Breathe.
The novel is set in a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Adirondacks in 1916. The inmates (who speak as a kind of Greek chorus in an unusual experiment in first person plural narration) are eagerly curious about the newest arrival amongst them.
How that new arrival changes their society results in personal tragedy for several. And it serves Barrett as a catalyst to explore the interactions of science and social attitudes—attitudes toward medicine, poverty, immigration, patriotism, and war.
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wednesday november 21
Odessa Levin lives in a Vermont saltbox cottage sparely furnished with Shaker pieces of the sort she always longed for during her Long Island-Jewish childhood, which was, let’s say, somewhat more baroque.
She’s single, and she has pared the complications of her life down almost to nothing. But now she’s beginning to wonder whether that was a good idea.
Into her life walks Megan Vasquez, a lonely and eccentric ten-year-old who’s suffering through the divorce of her Mexican-American father and her New-Age, WASP-rebel stepmother.
Of course, as every experienced fiction reader or moviegoer can guess, befriending Megan will bring lots of sticky complications to Odessa’s tidy, pseudo-Yankee life. But of course that’s the delight of Elinor Spielberg’s 1993 debut, Uninvited Daughters.
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friday november 16
I've had this eerie relationship with apocalyptic fiction ever since I found Nevil Shute's On the Beach as a 11 or 12 year old kid. I'm not entirely sure how to describe what this unbearably grim story did to my young mind. Needless to say I had trouble getting to sleep for a week or two and spent the next year or so worried that the Russians were going to drop the bomb on us before I even got my first kiss. Luckily, after that year the Berlin Wall fell, and soon after that the Soviet Union split up, and then I got my first kiss, so there were a few less worries to plague my young mind. However, my thirst for fiction that proposes the worst began at that point and has never quite left me.
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thursday november 15
Here are the rest of the titles I previewed last week.
The political love story is Letter to Lorenzo, by Amanda Prantera. Julia, the English wife of a wealthy young Roman, is devastated when she is told that he has been killed by a car bomb. Her agonizing grief for her husband is complicated by her bewilderment: why would Red Brigade terrorists kill her husband when the two of them were known for their own socialist convictions? It must be a neo-fascist plot to discredit him. But careful, relentless interrogation by the investigating magistrate reveals that the police think her husband was a terrorist transporting the bomb himself. Julia’s world is turned upside down again. Her grief is powerfully portrayed, and her painfully honest attempts to understand her marriage and her politics are utterly persuasive, as is the subtle characterization of the magistrate who forces her into this possible reconsideration of everything she believed.
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wednesday november 14
Last week I dug through my piles and files of books and reviews to post about some titles I thought you might have missed.
I got a little bit of response, including a few emails, from people who were curious about what the titles might be (no guesses, though!). No one commented about what kind of books they'd like to see more of in these posts, though, so I just want to repeat--don't be shy if there's something you're looking for. There's always more where these came from!
Anyway, read on if you were curious about any of the little blurbs and what the titles were. Did any of you recognize these titles?
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friday november 09
It's not really an opera, rather more of an often-told story from a grandmother to her grandchildren. And in the telling of the story, she manages to convey the ethos of cultures from long ago and far away, and to plant in the childrens' minds an unshakeable memory of herself. The Mapmaker's Opera is a charming story that winds from the crocus fields of La Mancha in rural Spain to the streets of Seville, and across the Atlantic to the Yucatan of Mexico. In the tradition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, where a single glimpse at one's true love can lead to a lifetime of sacrifice and suffering, this novel involves "forbidden love, unbearable grief, one country lost and another one found." Author Bea Gonzalez, a native of Spain who now lives in Toronto, writes with a true appreciation for the beauty, pathos, and subtle humor that can be found in the classic novels of her homeland. This is a delightful gem of a story, highly recommended.
thursday november 08
A suburban teen skater is haunted by the gruesome death of a security guard in Blake Nelson's tense little novel, Paranoid Park. Marketed to teen readers, the book has just as much appeal for adults, and has recently been made into a film by director Gus Van Sant. The film debuted at Cannes film festival in 2007, and is scheduled for limited release in the United States in March 2008.
The story takes place in a downtown skate park in Portland. The narrator hesitates to get involved with a street kid who tries to befriend him, and when a dare goes wrong, the narrator's life changes forever. You can't help but be drawn in by the guilt-ridden complexity of this teen's situation. Recommended for skaters and non-skaters alike.
wednesday november 07
I knew a regular library user who carried a tiny notebook in his jacket pocket. It was the latest in a long line of notebooks he had kept over the years, stretching back to when he lived in Shanghai in 1945, neatly recording all of the books he had read since then.
I was always somewhat awestruck by this, but I couldn’t help but feel it was Too Late for me to follow his example, even if I weren’t Too Lazy to keep it up.
The wonderful LibraryThing, a website that lets you catalog your library and share it, is the modern equivalent (and much more!) of those notebooks, but even that strikes me as Too Exhausting when I look around at all of the books I’d love to add to it.
Still, looking around at all of those books does make me want to share them with you.
So here’s my question. What kind of books would you most like me to post about?
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wednesday october 31
Okay, I know it’s Halloween, but how about some romantic fantasy that’s a little less creature-of-the-night than the current crop of vampire romances?
The authors of these books would describe themselves as fantasy writers rather than romance writers, but I think their books have plenty of appeal for readers of both genres. Whether your heart lies with high fantasy or with grand romance, you’ll find yourself swept away.
I wrote last year about War for the Oaks, Emma Bull’s fantasy about a rocker chick who gets caught up in a faerie war. Here are just a few more suggestions of fantasies with strong romantic elements—lots more where they came from! Teen readers might enjoy these, too.
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monday october 29
During preparations for a Halloween party in the English village of Woodleigh Common, 13-year-old Joyce Reynolds boasts that she saw a murder years ago. Nobody believes her, until she is found drowned during the party in a tub for bobbing apples. Detective Hercule Poirot is on the scene to investigate in Halloween Party, another tale from master of suspense Agatha Christie.
Want to curl up with more Halloween-themed murder mysteries on October 31st? Try these spooky suggestions, also written by women:
Witches’ Bane by Susan Wittig Albert: When a Halloween prank ends in murder, herb shop owner and private eye China Bayles’ friend Ruby becomes a prime suspect after being accused of practicing witchcraft.
Hallowed Bones by Carolyn Haines: As Halloween approaches, Private Investigator Sarah Booth Delaney probes the controversial case of Doreen Mallory, accused of killing her handicapped infant daughter.
Trick or Treat Murder by Leslie Meier: While preparing for the annual Halloween festival in Tinker’s Cove, Maine, Lucy Stone investigates a series of arsons that are destroying the town’s historic homes, one of which claims the life of socialite Monica Mayes.
thursday october 18
I’ve read a couple of Jane Austen's novels and have seen many of them adapted on film, but author Laurie Viera Rigler is a self-proclaimed Jane Austen addict. She has read and reread all six of Austen’s books and is a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America. She has also just written her first novel, a charming romantic tale called Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict.
After Courtney Stone finds her boyfriend Frank having an affair with their wedding cake designer, she nurses her rejection with a copy of Pride and Prejudice and a bottle of Absolut. She wakes up to find herself in the body of Jane Mansfield, a 19th-century English woman.
Courtney is not prepared for the chamber pots, corsets, and endless embroidery that are a normal part of Jane’s life. But living in Jane’s body does have its perks: servants wait on her hand and foot, there’s plenty of delicious food to eat and balls to attend, and the dashing Mr. Edgeworth makes her weak in the knees. But can he be trusted? And how will she ever return to her life in 21st-century Los Angeles?
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wednesday october 17
I haven’t read Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia, about the voyage of self-discovery she undertook after her marriage fell apart. (I’m in line behind many of you!)
But seeing her name in reviews brings back fond memories of her 2000 debut novel, Stern Men, a memorable coming of age story set in the islands off the coast of Maine.
Its heroine is young Ruth Thomas, born and bred on Fort Niles, one of two neighboring islands that survive on the lobster industry. (The island’s other main industry is suspicion of outsiders, including those from the other island.) Ruth is the daughter of a lobsterman and an outsider.
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friday october 12
Just in time for Halloween--a scintillating, sizzling, sexy array of paranormal chick lit. Whether vampires are your thing, or demons turn you on, you're guaranteed to find something to read here:
wednesday october 10
The word “haunting” has shown up in virtually every review I’ve seen of The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney’s debut historical, which won the 2006 Costa first novel award (formerly the Whitbread).
Partly, that may be because of the book’s ending, which isn’t entirely resolved—fair warning if you like to close a book and have things wrapped up. But mostly it’s because the book is so eerily atmospheric. Fair warning number two: don’t read this book in February.
Dove River is a nineteenth-century settlement in Canada’s Northern Territory. Despite its tenderly peaceful name, it’s a harshly isolated place dominated by the majestic, menacing subarctic winter.
Mrs. Ross, one of the settlement wives, finds the murdered body of Laurent Jammet, a Hudson Bay voyageur turned hunter. She rouses the authorities, but then realizes she has a stake in the investigation—her seventeen-year-old son, Francis, Laurent’s friend, has disappeared and is soon a suspect in Laurent’s murder.
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wednesday october 03
Here’s an oddball little title that has stuck with me for years: Claudia Casper’s debut novel The Reconstruction. It begins as a well-done but fairly predictable story of a woman at a loss at the loss of her marriage. But midway through, things get considerably more quirky and charming.
Artist Margaret has been plunged into a stagnating depression since her marriage fell apart. She’s not working or doing anything else too constructive until she is hired to make a museum diorama figure of a (presumed) female Australopithecus afarensis hominid. This recreation is to show the hominid pausing, half-turned, as recorded in the famous fossil footprints of Laetoli.
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wednesday september 26
I just read Stuart M. Kaminsky’s The Dead Don’t Lie, the latest Abe Lieberman mystery.
I’ve enjoyed the series since its 1991 debut with Lieberman’s Folly. That volume introduced the Chicago police detective—sixty-ish, feeling the first twinges of mortality in his arthritic knees, a world-weary basset hound of a man whose mild manner hid decades of street smarts. We also met Lieberman’s partner, Bill Hanrahan, a decent but troubled man who was drinking too much since his wife left.
Great minor characters rounded out the cast, from Lieberman’s energetic wife, Bess (leading light of their local temple); to Iris, the quiet Chinese waitress whom the Irish-Catholic Hanrahan found himself courting; to Lieberman’s brother, Maish, and the chorus of “alter cockers” who frequent Maish’s deli.
In The Dead Don’t Lie, our heroes have a few more years on them. And this time around, they’re working a pair of puzzling mysteries.
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wednesday september 19
I wrote last week about a tragedy in the classic American Western genre. Here’s another elegant short novel that’s both adventure story and tragic character study. A pretty different setting, though.
The book is The Fencing Master, by Arturo Perez-Reverte.
In a Spain racked by political upheaval and rumors of revolution (it’s 1868), fencing master Don Jaime Astarloa abstains from politics and devotes himself to his ancient and honorable art. Though modern weapons are making sword work obsolete, Don Jaime continues to teach it to a small group of noble pupils, and still hopes to bring it to perfection by formulating the legendary unstoppable thrust.
Despite his academic isolation and his old-fashioned ideas of honor, he bends his principles enough to take on a very unusual pupil, the beautiful and mysterious Adela de Otero, who comes to him already an accomplished swordswoman and asks to learn his most advanced technique.
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tuesday september 18
Yes, I know, it is on the verge of being overdone, this pirate thing. But, really, people do need to have fun, and dressing up like a Buccaneer or a Scurvy Wench only on Halloween is not enough for some. So, now is the time get ready for Talk Like A Pirate Day on September 19. Hide the treasure chests! Protect the women and children! Annoy your co-workers!
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wednesday september 12
I’m glad the new version of 3:10 to Yuma is getting good reviews. The Western is such a classic American genre, and it’s wonderful to see it rediscovered periodically both in film and on the page.
I’ve blogged previously about Elmer Kelton and how much I like his Western novels, elegantly simple frontier tales that are somehow as grand as the landscape in which they’re set.
Refugio, They Named You Wrong, by Susan Clark Schofield, is another favorite of mine.
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thursday september 06
Brock Clarke, a Cincinnati writer and all-around good guy, does not promote arson or any other sorts of criminal activity, really. It's just that the hero of his novel inadvertently started a fire at an important historical site, and things quickly went downhill from there. In An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, Sam Pulsifer is an 'accidental arsonist', a self-professed 'bumbler', and sort of an everyman who seems to be sleepwalking through life. He serves as a lightning rod for the trials and tribulations that commonly befall the modern American male.
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wednesday september 05
From Aesop to Animal Farm to the delightful mystery Mark blogged a few weeks ago, it’s a fine old literary tradition to dress up a sharp-toothed bit of satire in sheep’s clothing, so to speak, telling a telling tale by pretending you’re just talking about animals.
Or even insects. Yep, there’s precedent for that, too, of course.
So readers of Donald Harington’s The Cockroaches of Stay More shouldn’t be surprised to find a sly literary spoof and social satire between the covers of this cult classic, an immensely clever and entertaining novel that pokes fun at a whole range of human foibles—literature, sex, class, religion, and the atom bomb—all from the point of view of cockroaches.
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I like baseball, but not nearly as much as the protagonist of Robert Coover's novel The Univeral Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. The character's name is Henry Waugh, and he is not just a typical rabid Major League Baseball fan. He has taken baseball fanaticism to new heights. In fact, real life Major League Baseball isn't what he is concerned with, but a completely imagined league that is played as a game with dice. And if even this doesn't sound too out of the ordinary, Henry's game is fabricated to such a degree that a whole universe has been created around every possible aspect of the experience. For example, entire generations of players and seasons have already taken place and are established in his mind and all players past and present have fully realized personalities and histories that come to bear on the game itself.
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monday august 27
Paul Pennyfeather, an industrious third-year student at the College of Scone, Oxford, and the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, innocently crosses paths with members of the posh Bollinger Club. Naturally, the next thing that happens is that Oxford administrators unfairly "send him down" for "indecent behavior," and Paul is forced to take work as an instructor at a Welsh preparatory school. Since the novel is a dark comedy, Paul quiets his first class by offering a prize to the student who can write the longest essay, regardless of merit.
Interestingly, although Waugh certainly does not mean for us to respect Paul's teaching ability, this writing-instruction technique is quite popular among contemporary English composition instructors, including me.
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friday august 10
The weather's not the only thing that's hot and steamy these days. This summer's batch of new romances are just as sultry. If you're in the mood for a little romance (and perhaps one or two or ten scorching love scenes), check out these latest titles. They're guaranteed to raise your temperature a degree or two.
Historical Romance:
Romantic Suspense:
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wednesday august 08
Twenty-six years ago, Gorky Park transported American readers to a frozen crime scene in Moscow and introduced Senior Inspector Arkady Renko, a homicide specialist in a country "that had little organized crime and no talent for finesse." A murderer is frequently a drunk nearby.
But evidence of a triple murder has emerged in the thawing ice and snow of April. A KGB major is already on the scene when Renko arrives. Renko's relationship with the KGB is testy and antagonistic. The victims—two men, and a woman wearing ice skates—will be difficult to identify. Each has a gunshot wound in the head and in the heart. The hands have been removed to prevent fingerprinting.
Renko lights a cigarette. His job is to find killers, but he can’t stand the sight of a dead body.
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I suppose there’s a downside to being a literary wonder boy. Each of Michael Chabon’s novels has been so extraordinary (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Summerland, and more--not to mention Wonder Boys) that I’m sure he’s kept awake nights thinking how to top them.
His newest, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, is probably not my favorite, though for sheer whiz-bang originality it’s tough to beat—it’s a playfully sophisticated, Yiddish-drenched, noir, alternate-world satire. Sitka, Alaska, was designated a protectorate for Jews displaced during World War II , but sixty years later it’s about to be reassimilated into America, along with its melancholy protagonist, policeman Meyer Landsman—a process hardly likely to go smoothly.
I admired it more than I liked it. But the author of the 2004 The Final Solution: A Story of Detection can rest on his laurels for the rest of his literary career, as far as I’m concerned (though I’m glad he doesn’t). It’s another highly literary and original takeoff on a familiar genre, though it, too, got mixed reviews. I think it’s breathtaking.
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wednesday august 01
The Discovery Channel is in the midst of their annual Shark Week celebration. From July 29th-August 4th, Discovery is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Shark Week. Tonight's episode, "Perfect Predators", airs at 9 pm. The Newport Aquarium is also getting in on the fun with Shark Fest. Receive free giveaways, pet sharks, and see sharks fed daily. For those of you obsessed with shark attacks (and I know you're out there), check out the International Shark Attack File. It might surprise some of you to learn that Florida, not Australia, leads the world in shark attacks. Since 1990, Florida has seen 365 attacks, compared to Australia's 94.
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The lives of three generations of women are the fodder for British writer Penelope Lively’s latest rich and subtle work of fiction, Consequences.
Lorna, the diffidently rebellious daughter of well-to-do parents, sits weeping on a London park bench in 1935 after yet another pointless argument with her socially ambitious and conventional mother.
Matt Faraday is sketching nearby for a series of woodcuts he is working on. (Art college was his path out of a working-class life in a Welsh village.)
Their meeting leads to an unconventional marriage, launching a family quiet unlike the one either was born into. World War II, which cuts short their life together, brings changes to British society that make their descendants’ lives in turn unimaginably different from their own. But the bonds of love and family transcend the generations.
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friday july 27
In the category of winsome, anthropomorphic nature fiction, Timothy, or, Notes of an Abject Reptile by Verlyn Klinkenborg was last year's unexpected and delightful prize. This little study, translated from the German, is narrated by a tortoise named Timothy, who lived, in fact, in a garden belonging Gilbert White, an 18th century British curate and naturalist. White wrote The Natural History of Selborne, an enduringly popular work of scholarship, and recorded his observations of Timothy in his journals.
Verlyn Klinkenborg slyly turns Timothy, the object of scientific inquiry, into a watchful chronicler of the Selborne environs and a commentator on the strange ways of its human population. The action, if a turtle’s meander can be so characterized, occurs during a week of freedom that Timothy spends beyond the garden gate. I recommended Timothy, or, Notes of an Abject Reptile as an irresistible little gem in 2006.
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wednesday july 25
Mark Merlis’s 2003 novel,
Man about Town,
is a low-key but wonderfully resonant story of midlife crisis.
Joe Lingeman is a mid-level advisor on legislative matters to Congress. It’s an interesting job, but not exactly earth-shaking.
He has been in a relationship with his lover, Sam, for fifteen years. Again, comfortable, but the earth doesn’t really move.
Then Sam leaves him. And on the job, he’s suddenly in bed (legislatively speaking) with a homophobic senator who wants to ban Medicare payments to gay AIDS patients. Joe is forced to face the fact that he doesn’t have any of the things he wanted to have by midlife.
And what were those things? He remembers the glimpse of infinite possibilities he got at fourteen, when he came across the photo of a beautiful youth in a swimsuit ad at the back of a suave men’s magazine. It seemed like a window into another world to the naïve, repressed boy he was.
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sunday july 22
There is one corpse in the body count and the novel isn't open yet. Richard Bachman, pseudonym for Stephen King, died of cancer of the pseudonym back in 1985. This novel, Blaze, was unearthed by Stephen King and published just this year. It's about a dead guy and written by a different dead guy yet the codex exists right here in my hot little hands in all it's jacketed black and orange glory.
Clayton Blaisdell Jr. is one of the most unfortunate characters of the lot of Stephen King's books. His mother dies and Clayton is left with his alcoholic and abusive father who throws him down the apartment stairs one time too many.
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wednesday july 18
Thirty-something high school Latin teacher April Epner has never had any desire to find the woman who gave her up for adoption. Her adoptive parents were perfectly loving, if rather restrained, and she is contented with her single state and quiet career.
But into her tidy life bursts Bernice Graverman, a flamboyantly self-dramatizing woman who wears “toad sized clip-on earrings” and “wet-look white eyeshadow.” Bernice, who is a local talk show host, confessed to her TV audience that she once gave up a child for adoption, and the ratings were so good (“You didn’t happen to see the show, did you?”) that tracking down April was the inevitable next step.
That’s how Elinor Lipman’s 1990 debut novel Then She Found Me begins. The rest of it is just as wryly funny and perfectly pitched.
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wednesday july 11
Shortly before the outbreak of Word War II, 16-year-old Paul Christopher resides in Berlin with his American father, Hubbard, and his beautiful German mother, Lori, a baroness. It’s a time of great tension for Jews and non-Germans in Berlin, especially for the Hubbards. They have helped Jewish families escape the Reich to Denmark on their small sailboat. The secret police, directed by an SS officer named Stutzer, are watching them.
The danger for the family increases after Paul meets Rima, a Jewish girl, and he falls in love. Their relationship possesses a fatalistic gravity far beyond their adolescent years. As the threat of arrest increases, Paul’s parents send him home to New York City for safety. But Paul can think only of Rima's safety, and he returns to Germany.
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I recently joined a book club where the members are all (we would admit this) women of a certain age. While we were making our list of must-reads, scribbling down titles of great books we always wished we had read, we discovered that not everyone in the group had read Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman.
Well, that was that. Half the room leaned forward and said in chorus, “Oh, you’ve got to read it!”
There’s something about living through an era of social change that makes you want to tell people about it and gives you an enormous camaraderie with other people who went through it, too. (Any social change—this summer, ask someone older what life was like before air conditioning, for example.)
If someone can do that telling as vividly and hilariously as Atwood does in this 1969 classic of the early women’s movement, you’ve just got to pay attention.
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sunday july 08
Schaffert’s
Devils in the Sugar Shop is sophisticated chick lit set in present day Omaha, Nebraska. The story is centered around a group of women who, try as they might, just can’t seem to get it right. DeeDee is the proprietress of a very tasteful adult oriented store called the Sugar Shop. Ashley is a failed writer of erotic fiction. Artist and bookstore owners are also among the occupations of the group. Add stalker to the list, but just whom that happens to be is a delicious mystery deeply embedded in the novel.
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friday july 06
I love a good mystery novel. Likewise, a piece of science fiction, especially one with an anthropological bent, really makes me want to curl up and read all night. Books that straddle the gap between these two genres: pure bliss.
I recently found Paloma, a new book in the Retrieval Artist series by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. I was so happy to see a new one is out, because I tore through the other four in the series last summer, reveling in the mystery plots centered around humanity's interaction with various species of aliens and the ensuing political and legal conflicts.
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wednesday july 04
I’ve been blogging mystery and suspense novels for the past few weeks. This one’s a mystery, too, but a delightfully charming period mystery quite unlike those other titles.
Kate Ross’s series debut, Cut to the Quick¸ introduced Julian Kestrel, a London dandy of the 1820s. Invited to a country house to be the best man at a wedding, he finds that the groom’s aristocratic family is being blackmailed into accepting a former stable hand’s daughter as the bride.
More startling still, Julian finds the body of an unidentified young woman in the bed of his guest room. When his own manservant (a former cutpurse) is accused of her murder, Julian steps in to find the real culprit, and of course discovers that the murder and the blackmail are linked.
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wednesday june 27
Virgin Lies is the second suspense novel by Roderick Anscombe to feature forensic psychiatrist Dr. Paul Lucas. You don’t have to have read the first one, The Interview Room, to catch up, though—you’ll be caught up in the suspense from the very first scene, when Lucas fields a frantic phonecall from his wife, Abby, who wants him to use his professional skills to find a missing child—a child who may die while the adults who care for her stand helplessly by, just as their own child did.
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sunday june 24
Justin Evans’ psychological thriller debut, A Good and Happy Child doesn’t open, it launches. Once began, the story grimly informs the reader that the protagonist, George Davies is neither good nor happy.
George Davies is a married New Yorker with a newborn son. George and his wife aren't getting along because he cannot hold his infant son. His wife orders him to seek help, so he begins to see a psychiatrist and record his past in notebooks. Each chapter is representative of a notebook and they reveal that George was admitted to a mental institution in his adolescent years for violent behavior and possible demonic possession.
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wednesday june 20
I just read Jo Bannister’s sixth Brodie Farrell mystery, Requiem for a Dealer. I’ve always liked her work—her Castlemere books are great police procedurals set in northern England—but I think I like these best.
Brodie is a brisk, resourceful woman who runs a finding service in a little coastal English town. She tracks down missing pets, locates china patterns in online auctions, whatever needs finding.
In the series debut, Echoes of Lies, she was given a photograph and asked to find the man in it. She quickly and cleverly identified him as a local teacher, Daniel Hood. What she didn’t know was that she was finding him for people who then tortured him for information they believed he had, and left him for dead.
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