wednesday july 02
Golly. That's all I've got to say.
I picked up Matthew Reilly's 1999 novel Ice Station because I had seen it listed on best lists for suspense and thriller novels over the years. So I had some time for a quick book, and I thought, why not?
Golly.
The novel is set in Antarctica. The scientists at an American research station are using a diving bell to explore a deep ice cavern.
They find something.
To tell you what would spoil the first of many plot surprises. Anyway, they send out a distress signal, which they hope will get through the solar flare interference that has them locked down. More than one set of ears is listening, and more than one country responds. But not all of the listeners have rescue on their minds.
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wednesday june 25
The siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg, Stalingrad) by the Germans in 1941 has inspired many books. From literary novels like Helen Dunmore’s achingly beautiful The Siege or Debra Dean’s poignant The Madonnas of Leningrad, to military thrillers like David L. Robbins’ War of the Rats or the movie Enemy at the Gates, and of course many histories, the books try to bring to life the terrible struggle for survival during that winter of starvation.
David Benioff’s new novel, City of Thieves, falls at the suspense end of the spectrum. The narrator, a writer, decides to interview his grandfather, Lev Beniov, about Lev’s experiences during World War II. Family legend has always said that Lev killed two Germans before he turned eighteen, but Lev’s grandson has never known the details. Now Lev tells him how life changed when he stole a knife from a dead German paratrooper.
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wednesday june 18
Amanda Ripley, a writer for Time magazine has written a fascinating exploration of The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—And Why.
This isn’t a Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook, although Ripley certainly advocates planning ahead to meet the disasters you’re most likely to face in your life, since in a catastrophic situation you may not be able to rely on emergency response teams.
It’s more about the reaction process people go through as they face sudden disaster and how each individual’s combination of instinct and experience and training can be lifesaving or fatal in the circumstances.
Through interviews with experts and with survivors of well-known disasters—9/11, the 2006 tsunami, Katrina, the Columbine shootings, and even the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire—Ripley tries to trace the common factors in people’s reactions to catastrophe.
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I picked up Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others thinking it was going to be about the phenomenon that TV documentaries sometimes cover, that people who interest each other subconsciously mimic each other’s gestures and even synchronize their breathing and heartbeats.
Well, neuroscientist Marco Ioacoboni’s fascinating book touches on that topic, but it turns out to be about much more.
He describes the discovery, led by a team of Italian scientists, of “mirror neurons,” motor nerves that appear to play a basic role in the ability of people (and other animals) to recognize each other’s intentions, anticipate each other’s actions, feel empathy for the emotions of someone other than themselves, develop language, and participate in the whole complex process of social cognition.
Pretty cool, huh?
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wednesday june 11
Some books just make me grateful that I learned to read. Being able to sit down, open a book, and be astonished by the master craftsmanship and the unimaginable imagination of a writer is such a glorious pleasure. Ian McEwan’s Atonement made me think about that not too long ago. (I finally read it, and if you’ve only seen the movie, you need to read it, too.) Now Margot Livesey’s The House on Fortune Street has made me grateful again.
This is a novel told from four viewpoints. Sean is living with Abigail, for whom he left his wife. Their relationship isn’t happy: Abigail may be cheating on him, and she is certainly leaving him far behind as he drudges through his dissertation while she’s off running her theatre company. Their downstairs neighbor, Dara, extends Sean some sympathy. But then Dara commits suicide.
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wednesday june 04
Okay, I’m recommending a fantasy novel here, and I know that will have many of you scrolling on past. Apart from the Harry Potter books or maybe Tolkien, fantasy is pretty hard to push. But if you enjoy a writer who can twist familiar storytelling elements into something just a bit different, try Lois McMaster Bujold.
Bujold is best known for her science fiction series, the energetically satiric Vorkosigan Saga (definitely something a bit different), but she has written a few volumes of fantasy, too. I recommended her historical fantasy The Spirit Ring last year, and she’s currently writing a more traditional light-romantic fantasy series, The Sharing Knife.
But I wish she’d find time to do more in the splendid series that began with The Curse of Chalion in 2001. Its mix of old-fashioned fantasy and complicatedly original religious mythology was really intriguing.
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wednesday may 28
G. M. Ford’s Leo Waterman and Frank Corso mystery series are good stuff. Here he branches out on a stand-alone thriller.
As Nameless Night opens, we meet Paul Hardy, a brain-damaged John Doe who was discovered next to a railroad car and has been living in a Seattle group home for the past seven years. Now surgery for a second brain injury in a car accident has strangely resurrected parts of his memory. Not, unfortunately, knowledge of his own identity, though he remembers a name that was important to him for some reason.
Who is he? Why are government agents pounding on the door as soon as the group home's director googles the name Paul remembers?
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wednesday may 14
Smalltown Canadian girl meets cosmopolitan Dublin girl in Emma Donoghue's long-distance love story Landing.
Jude is flying to London to bring her dying mother home. Sile is the airline hostess on the flight. Despite the circumstances and the complicated relationships they both are already involved in, they're attracted to each other.
It’s impossible, of course. Jude has hardly ever been out of spitting distance of her tiny town, where she is a museum curator. Sile is in a settled relationship, is part of Dublin’s vibrant twenty-first-century urban scene, and knows from her own Anglo-Indian heritage how complicated long-distance, cross-cultural romance can be.
But they make tentative contact again a few weeks later. A romance of emails, phone calls, and all-too-infrequent visits ensues. Something will have to give, though, as both of them know, if they’re to have a real relationship.
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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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wednesday april 02
I'm passing this along to all of you who enjoy a nice, quirky memoir. Another librarian recommended Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone: Growing up at the Table to me. It's not a new book, but that just means there are two sequels, Comfort Me with Apples and Garlic and Sapphires to put on your list, too, if like me you didn't read them when they came out.
Reichl is a food writer, the editor of Gourmet magazine, a one-time chef, and most famously a former restaurant critic for the New York Times. Tender at the Bone is the story of her childhood and youth.
How she ever became a foodie is something of a mystery, given the stories she tells about her manic-depressive mother's odd ways of dealing with food, particularly her blithe habit of scraping the blue layer off of leftovers and declaring, "It's only mold."
But a long line of mentors and fellow enthusiasts helped Reichl to some memorable meals, and she lovingly remembers every friend and every bite. How a boarding school friend's French father introduced her to fois gras, how two courtly locals fed her couscous in Tunis on a college trip, the time she asked a lower Manhattan matron to teach her to make gefilte fish, to the days when she whipped up the daily specials at a Berkeley collective restaurant--Reichl fills her pages with warm and delicious stories.
And she includes recipes.
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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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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wednesday february 20
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.
wednesday february 13
Here’s one for all of you art history buffs, lovers of Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, and even readers of what are now popularly being called microhistories, those fascinating social histories that look at how a single insignificant object or place or event changed or reflected the course of world events.
In Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, Timothy Brook uses the objects glimpsed in Vermeer’s paintings to explore how economy and culture became globalized in the seventeenth century.
The broad-brimmed hat of the dashing officer in Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl becomes an emblem to explore the American fur trade and the search for the fabled Northwest Passage. A porcelain dish of fruit in the foreground of Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window leads to a discussion of the Chinese porcelain trade, and so on.
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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 30
I’m partly through this new book and I just noticed that it has two front covers, two editors, two tables of contents, two introductions, and two sub-subtitles. On one side, it’s called The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic: The Arctic, edited by Elizabeth Kolbert. On the other side it’s called The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic: The Antarctic, edited by Francis Spufford.
Okay, so the publishers will be disappointed that I missed the clever upside-down, half-and-half presentation, but they should be pleased how much I’m enjoying the first inside half.
I started with the Antarctic, since as you may remember I’m a big fan of Beryl Bainbridge’s The Birthday Boys.
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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 16
I have to confess that I have become completely addicted to our new New Arrivals service. If you don't know, it's a part of our website that lists every new title we receive. You can look at it whenever you're in the mood for something new, or you can subscribe to all or parts of it as an RSS feed so that you can make sure you never miss a thing in the categories you're interested in. Still better, you can put holds on anything that tempts your fancy. Some of the entries include reviews, and some of them include cover images.
That's of course why I put a hold on this book, Ellen Highsmith Silver's Floorquilts! Fabric Decoupaged Floorcloths--No-Sew Fun. The cover is gorgeous, showing a floor covering that looks like a quilt. Silver describes the process with which she treats artist's canvas and decoupages fabric onto it, using traditional quilt fabrics and design principles, for colorful and durable floorcloths. It seems like a very do-able project, though time-consuming.
Now, will I ever actually make one of these? Maybe not. (Well, to be more accurate, very, very probably not.) But I love the fact that I know this book is in our collection and that if I ever get inspired to get out the fabric scraps, I know exactly where to find my inspiration.
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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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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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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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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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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wednesday october 24
One of the more interesting aspects of getting a bit older is watching the fashions and pop culture of your youth come back into style again—what decade are we updating now, the 1980s? (Another of the interesting aspects of getting older is that it’s okay to admit you don’t know exactly where the cutting edge finds itself these days.)
Anyway, once you’ve been around once, you recognize how cyclical pop culture is. Read Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz, and you’ll be amused at how familiar it all seems in our Paris Hilton–jaded, media-dominated age.
Zeitz’s book is a social history of that cultural icon whom Zeitz calls “part reality, part invention,” the post–World War I modern girl whose racy lifestyle dismayed her parents and fueled a national craze.
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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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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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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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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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wednesday august 08
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 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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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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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
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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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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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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wednesday june 13
You wouldn’t guess it from the title, but Leaving Disneyland, the debut suspense novel by Alexander Parsons, is one I recommended to a fan of Walter Mosley and George P. Pelecanos.
The book’s main character, Doc, has served sixteen years of a twenty-year sentence in the grim and crumbling Tyburn Federal Penitentiary. He is almost due to face the parole board again when is assigned to a new cell. And it can’t be a coincidence that his new cellmate is a young druglord from a rival gang, whom honor requires Doc and his friends to kill.
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wednesday june 06
Big Red Tequila is a great title for a Texas mystery, isn’t it? This novel gets it right right on the title page.
Rick Riordan is probably more famous nowadays as the author of a teen fantasy series based on Greek mythology—his bestselling The Lightning Thief was our teen book choice for On the Same Page.
But back in 1997 he debuted an adult mystery series set in San Antonio. He got more than the title just right. All of you readers who enjoy a nice semi-hard-boiled mystery with an appealingly thoughtful but smart-talking hero and a well-realized regional setting should try the Tres Navarre series.
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wednesday may 30
How about a little suspense?
I’m looking back at a whole stash of good, nailbiting suspense novels and nice, twisty mysteries that I’ve read in the past few years, and I think my next several posts are going to be about those genres.
Maybe it’s the hot sunshine we’ve been having lately that has put me in a noir mood—I once read a definition that said a true noir movie had to have a shot somewhere in it of broken light slanting in through venetian blinds.
I don’t think my first title quite fits that definition, since it takes place in Glasgow. But it sure fills the bill for gripping suspense.
It’s Denise Mina’s award-winning 1999 debut, Garnethill.
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wednesday may 23
News of the death of children’s writer Lloyd Alexander last week sent me to the bookshelves to reread his Chronicles of Prydain. It's one of my all-time favorite works of fantasy, whether for children or for adults, a splendid work of high fantasy based on Welsh legend. Have all of you Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fans discovered it? The first volume is The Book of Three.
In quiet Caer Dahlben, the sheltered farm of the great enchanter Dahlben, orphaned Taran tends the oracular pig, Hen Wen, and helps out in the fields and the smithy.
But what he really longs for is to be a hero. Glory and grandeur fill his dreams—he’s sure he could do noble deeds, given the chance.
So when the war bands of the terrible dark lord Arawn threaten Caer Dahlben, causing Hen Wen to run off in a panic, Taran doesn’t think twice. He dashes off after her, plunging himself into perilous adventure.
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wednesday may 02
Michael Dibdin died on March 30. He was best known for his mystery series featuring Venetian Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen. The final novel in the series, End Games, will be published in the fall.
As much as the character of Zen defines the novels—morose, psychologically complex, and world-weary—so does the character of Italy, where Dibdin lived for several years.
Each of the novels is set in a different part of the country, and the style of each novel seems to reflect the cultural differences among Italy’s regions. But all are richly cynical, darkly funny, intricate in plot, and acute in their understanding of modern Italian politics, religion, and everyday life.
My personal favorite among Dibdin’s novels is set in England, though. It’s one of his stand-alone works, the 1991 suspense/satire of Thatcher’s England, Dirty Tricks.
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thursday april 26
You're not imagining things if you've been seeing Imperial Stormtroopers at the library.
In conjunction with the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, we're launching GalaxyCon, an out-of-this-world celebration of all things science fiction.
It hasn't even started yet, and already it's a blast. I've had some great conversations with fans of all ages and families who plan to join us for the stellar events we have planned.
Science fiction is such a part of our culture, in fiction, film, and TV. Were you one of the wide-eyed kids who watched Flash Gordon serials on Saturday mornings, or did you stand in line for Spiderman and its sequels? Did you get your kicks from superhero comics or have your consciousness raised by the sociological sf of Sheri S. Tepper or Margaret Atwood? Are you hooked on Heroes or daffy for Dr. Who?
Even if you're not a techie, a Trekker, or a towel-carrying hitchhiker through the galaxy, how can you resist? (Resistance is futile, you know!)
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wednesday april 18
I think most people would be able to answer this question easily: Are you a re-reader?
I think we're pretty firmly divded, those of us who are from those of us who aren't. If you're not a re-reader, you wonder why people bother spending precious time reading things they've already read when there's so much else out there to read. If you are a re-reader, you wonder how people get along never revisiting beloved authors and characters and settings. (And we don't even need Maria's desert island as an excuse to re-read.)
I'm a re-reader, and there are certain authors I binge on over and over again. Currently, I'm re-reading every single Regency novel by Georgette Heyer. I love their sparkle and wit, their charming characters, and their sweetly humorous variations on the conventions of the old-fashioned historical romance.
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wednesday april 11
Now that we have a new category, Children’s Books, on our blog, I want to post about an enchantingly different book that adults as well as kids will enjoy. It’s already getting plenty of praise, and you may have to wait in line for a copy, but I promise you it is worth the wait. This thick block of a book looks like something you’d use for a doorstop, but open it up and suddenly you’re transported beyond the clouds.
It's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, a story told alternately in words and page upon page of black and white sketches. With the magical, herky-jerky stutter of early film scenes, these stop-motion, cinematic pictures tell a dreamlike story of an orphaned boy, a famous filmmaker, and the fantastic machines and still more fantastic visions that draw them together.
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wednesday march 14
I think Robert B. Parker started it--correct me if I'm wrong. I'm talking about the mystery genre tradition of the smart-talking p.i. with the silent and supremely lethal sidekick. Spenser has Hawk. Harlan Coben's Myron Bolitar has Win. (Well, Win's not quite so monosyllabic, but he's even scarier.) And Robert Crais's Elvis Cole has Pike.
It's a useful mystery convention. Hero and super sidekick together can plausibly handle a lot more trouble than the hero could alone. Just as important, the author can go to any lengths to take care of the bad guys by the last page, but no matter how violent things get, he never has to let his hero go too far over the edge or permanently drop that oh-so-enjoyably sarcastic tone that helps makes these winning series crackle.
Messing with a great formula can be risky. But in Robert Crais's latest, The Watchman, we get the story from Pike's point of view.
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wednesday february 28
