Meredy's 2014 reading journal

Thank you for joining me on my reading journey in 2014. Here's a look back at last year:

Best reads of 2013
http://www.librarything.com/topic/162635#4442387

Clunkers of 2013
http://www.librarything.com/topic/162636#4443063

In 2013 I set myself the challenge of reviewing everything I read, even if only in six words. I'm proud that I managed to accomplish that goal with all 78 books I finished and a few that I abandoned. So I intend to do the same this year.

My reviews are also posted on the book pages, and I would be thrilled if you gave a nod to the ones you like. As a rule, I write my responses before reading anyone else's.

There are no spoilers in my reviews.

Solid star (★) = 1 star. Open star (☆) = ½ star. Post references are links. Reviews are posted on the works pages as well as in this thread.

To jump to the end of this post (which will grow long in time), click this link to message #2 and scroll up.

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January

• The Wheel of Darkness, by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, 1/3/14 (reread); 504 pages (★★★; genre: ★★★☆); review: post 3.
• An Excellent Mystery, by Ellis Peters, 1/12/14; 214 pages (★★★☆; genre: ★★★★); review: post 12.
• Dark Fire, by C.J. Sansom, 1/13/14; 503 pages (★★★); review: post 17.
• Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, by Agatha Christie, abandoned 1/20/14 after 170 of 532 pages (32%; not rated); comments: post 18.
• Tutānkhamen, Amenism, Atenism and Egyptian monotheism; with hieroglyphic texts of hymns to Ȧmen and Ȧten, translations, and illustrations, by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, 1/21/14 (reread); 152 pages plus backmatter (★★★★); review: post 24.
• Ordinary Thunderstorms, by William Boyd, 1/27/14; 403 pages (★★★★☆); review: post 27.
• David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, by Malcolm Gladwell, 1/27/14; 275 pages (★★★); review: post 29.

January totals: 6 books finished (2051 pages); 1 book abandoned (170 pages)

February

• Crocodile on the Sandbank (Amelia Peabody, Book 1), by Elizabeth Peters, 2/2/14; 262 pages (★★★☆); review: post 30.
• The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss, by Edmund de Waal, 2/8/14; 354 pages (★★★★★); review: post 172.
• The Lace Reader, by Brunonia Barry, abandoned 2/14/14 after 92 of 388 pages (24%; not rated); comments: post 42.
• Hild, by Nicola Griffith, 2/18/14; 548 pages (★★★★☆); review: post 44.
• The Raven in the Foregate, by Ellis Peters, 2/22/14; 252 pages (★★★☆); review: post 46.
• Waiting for Sunrise, by William Boyd, 2/24/14; 353 pages (★★★★); comments: post 50; review: post 73.
• A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle, 2/28/14 (reread); 92 pages plus notes (★★★★★); comments: post 51.

February totals: 6 books finished (1861 pages); 1 book abandoned (92 pages)

March

• The Sign of the Four, by Arthur Conan Doyle, 3/3/14 (reread); 80 pages plus notes (★★★★★); review: post 173.
• The Curse of the Pharaohs (Amelia Peabody, Book 2), by Elizabeth Peters, 3/4/14; 285 pages (★★); review: post 59.
• Someone, by Alice McDermott, 3/8/14; 232 pages (★★★★); review: post 61.
• The Scapegoat, by Daphne du Maurier, 3/13/14; 348 pages (★★★★☆); review: post 67.
• A Man Lay Dead, by Ngaio Marsh, 3/14/14; 214 pages (★★★☆); review: post 62.
• The Rose Rent, by Ellis Peters, 3/18/14; 190 pages (★★★☆; genre: ★★★★); review: post 75.
• Stoner, by John Williams, 3/19/14; 278 pages (★★★★★); review: post 99.
• Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths, by Nancy Marie Brown, 3/23/14; 206 pages plus backmatter (★★★★☆); review: post 83.
• Edda, by Snorri Sturluson, abandoned 3/24/14 after 129 of 258 pages (50%; ★★★★★); review: post 85.
• The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt, 3/31/14; 771 pages (★★★★☆); review: post 96.

March totals: 9 books finished (2604 pages); 1 book abandoned (129 pages)

April

• The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Lawrence Sterne, abandoned 4/1/14 after 23 of 444 pages (5%; not rated).
• On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, abandoned 4/2/14 after 45 of 293 pages (15%; not rated).
• Guilt, by Jonathan Kellerman, 4/4/14; 421 pages (★★★☆); review: post 95.
• The Hermit of Eyton Forest, by Ellis Peters, 4/9/14; 224 pages (★★★☆; genre: ★★★★); review: post 101.
• Wednesday Is Indigo Blue, by Richard E. Cytowic & David M. Eagleman, 4/9/14; 254 pages plus backmatter (★★★★); review: post 432.
• Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, 4/12/14; 415 pages (★★★★☆); review: post 171.
• The House on the Strand, by Daphne du Maurier, 4/19/14; 298 pages (★★★); review: post 107.
• Sum, by David Eagleman, 4/20/14; 110 pages (★★★☆); review: post 103.
• A Rare Benedictine, by Ellis Peters, 4/20/14; 150 pages (★★★☆); review: post 104.
• Thou Art That, by Joseph Campbell, 4/23/14; 114 pages plus backmatter (★★★☆); review: post 129.
• The Canvas, by Benjamin Stein, 4/27/14; 158 pages + 168 pages + backmatter (★★★★); review: post 137.
• Ragnarok, by A.S. Byatt, 4/20/14 (reread); 171 pages plus backmatter (★★★☆); review: post 134.
• Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn, 4/29/14; 252 pages (★★★★); review: post 166.
• Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman, 4/30/14; 181 pages plus backmatter (★★★); review: post 178.

April totals: 12 books finished (2916 pages); 2 books abandoned (68 pages)

May

• The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam, by Chris Ewan, 5/4/14; 238 pages (★★★); review: post 122.
• The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, 5/5/14 (reread); 254 pages (★★★★); review: post 435.
• The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker, 5/12/14; 486 pages (★★★★☆); review: post 123.
• A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind, by Robert A. Burton, M.D., abandoned 5/14/14 after 66 of 232 pages (28%; not rated); comments: post 169.
• Go with Me, by Castle Freeman, Jr., abandoned 5/14/14 after 5 of 160 pages (3%; not rated); comments: post 126.
• The Confession of Brother Haluin, by Ellis Peters, 5/17/14; 164 pages (★★★☆); review: post 135.
• The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, abandoned 5/21/14 after 16 of 239 pages (7%; not rated); comments: post 141.
• Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard, 5/25/14; 260 pages plus backmatter (★★★★☆); review: post 154.
• Dinner at Deviant’s Palace, by Tim Powers, 5/26/14; 294 pages (★★★★); review: post 143.
• Zen to Go, edited by Jon Winokur, 5/29/14 (reread); 155 pages (★★★★); review: post 149.

May totals: 7 books finished (1851 pages); 3 books abandoned (87 pages)

June

• The Spiral Staircase, by Karen Armstrong, 6/1/14; 306 pages (★★★☆); review: post 164.
• Thus Was Adonis Murdered, by Sarah Caudwell, 6/3/14; 314 pages (★★★☆); review: post 155.
• Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O'Nan, 6/4/14; 146 pages (★★★★); review: post 160.
• Imprimatur, by Rita Monaldi & Francesco Sorti, abandoned 6/4/14 after 84 of 649 pages (13%; not rated); comments: post 167.
• The Lumby Lines, by Gail R. Fraser, 6/10/14; 302 pages plus backmatter (★★★); review: post 168.
• The Jewel in the Crown (Raj Quartet 1), by Paul Scott, 6/23/14; 462 pages (★★★★☆); review: post 187.
• The Stress of Her Regard, by Tim Powers, abandoned 6/23/14 after 35 of 427 pages (8%; not rated); comments: post 182.
• Miss Buncle's Book, by DE Stevenson, 6/25/14; 332 pages (★★★☆); review: post 184.
• The Painter’s Chair: George Washington and the Making of American Art, by Hugh Howard, 6/29/14; 256 pages plus backmatter (★★★☆); review: post 189.

June totals: 7 books finished (2118 pages); 2 books abandoned (119 pages)

July

• Miss Buncle Married, by DE Stevenson (1936), 7/3/14; 330 pages (★★☆); review: post 192.
• Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, by Huston Smith (2009), 7/10/14; 298 pages plus backmatter (★★★★); review: post 227.
• A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, by Lawrence M. Krauss (2013), 7/15/14; 191 pages plus backmatter (★★★☆); review: post 259.
• A Far Better Rest, by Susanne Alleyn (2010), 7/18/14; 353 pages (★★★☆); review: review: post 391.
• The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells (1895), 7/21/14 (reread); 92 pages (★★★☆); review: post 219.
• Opium Fiend: A 21st Century Slave to a 19th Century Addiction, by Steven Martin (2012), 7/26/14; 396 pages plus backmatter (★★★★); review: post 230.
• The Day of the Scorpion (Raj Quartet 2), by Paul Scott (1968), 7/27/14; 484 pages (★★★★☆); review: post 255.
• Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, by Thomas De Quincey (1822), 7/29/14; 120 pages (★★★☆); review: post 234.

July totals: 8 books finished (2164 pages); 0 books abandoned (0 pages)

August

• Her: A Novel, by Harriet Lane (2015; ER), 8/2/14; 261 pages (★★★☆); review: post 252.
• The Gauguin Connection, by Estelle Ryan (2012), 8/2/14; 432 pages (★★★☆); review: review: post 264.
• 3 a.m., by Nick Pirog (2013), 8/3/14; 432 pages (★★★); review: post 225.
• Peony, by Pearl S. Buck (1948), 8/8/14; 352 pages (★★★★★); review: post 253.
• Nikola Tesla: Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century, by Sean Patrick (2013), 8/9/14; 46 pages (★★☆); review: post 226.
• The Heretic’s Apprentice, by Ellis Peters (1990), 8/10/14; 186 pages (★★★☆); review: post 231.
• Book of Shadows, by Alexandra Sokoloff (2011), 8/15/14; 308 pages (★★★); review: post 244.
• Dark Places, by Gillian Flynn (2009), 8/19/14; 345 pages (★★★★); review: post 265.
• Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne (1873), 8/19/14; 150 pages (★★★★); review: post 246.
• The Silkworm, by Robert Galbraith (2014), 8/26/14; 456 pages (★★★★); review: post 261.
• Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens (1838), 8/26/14; 362 pages (★★★★); review: post 263.

August totals: 11 books finished (2930 pages); 0 books abandoned (0 pages)

September

• The Shortest Way to Hades, by Sarah Caudwell (1984), 9/1/14; 314 pages (★★★); review: post 266.
• The Third Life of Grange Copeland, by Alice Walker (1970), 9/5/14; 328 pages (★★★★★); review: post 317.
• Silk Road, by Colin Falconer (2011), 9/10/14; 465 pages (★★★★); review: review: post 384.
• The Martian, by Andy Weir (2014), 9/10/14; 369 pages (★★★☆); review: post 310.
• All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr (2014), abandoned 9/11/14 after 11 of 530 pages (2%; not rated) for being written in the present tense; comments: post 270.
• The Silk Road: A New History, by Valerie Hansen (2012), 9/12/14; 242 pages plus backmatter (★★★☆); review: post 272.
• Farthing, by Jo Walton (2006), 9/16/14; 319 pages (★★★☆); review: post 279.
• Irene Dalis: Diva, Impresaria, Legend, by Linda K. Riebel (2014), 9/19/14; 268 pages (★★★); review: post 429.
• A Burnable Book, by Bruce Holsinger (2014), abandoned 9/20/14 after 70 of 444 pages (16%; not rated) for failing to hold my attention; comments: post 280.
• The Ten Thousand Things, by Maria Dermoût (1983), abandoned 9/20/14 after 78 of 314 pages (25%; not rated) for style; comments: post 280.
• The Potter’s Field (Cadfael 17), by Ellis Peters (1990), 9/26/14; 230 pages (★★★☆); review: post 308.
• The Art Spirit, by Robert Henri (1923/1958), 9/27/14; 271 pages (★★★★★); review: post 289.

September totals: 9 books finished (2806 pages); 3 books abandoned (159 pages)

October

• Opium, by Colin Falconer (2012), 10/3/14; 216 pages (★★☆); review: post 293.
• Ha’penny, by Jo Walton (2007), 10/5/14; 319 pages (★★★☆); review: post 294.
• The Lobster Kings, by Alexi Zentner (2014), abandoned 10/8/14 after 109 of 344 pages (32%; not rated) for not holding our attention; comments: post 306.
• The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg (2012), abandoned 10/8/14 after 24 of 290 pages plus backmatter (8%; not rated) for just failing to grab us; no review.
• Lock In, by John Scalzi (2014), 10/14/14; 336 pages (★★★☆); review: post 297.
• Saving Normal, by Allen Frances, M.D. (2013; ER), 10/14/14; 298 pages (★★★★); review: review: post 365.
• The Circular Staircase, by Mary Roberts Rinehart (1908), 10/18/14; 178 pages (★★★); review: post 321.
• Half a Crown, by Jo Walton (2008), 10/20/14; 316 pages (★★★★); review: post 304.
• The Sirens Sang of Murder, by Sarah Caudwell (1989), 10/21/14; 277 pages (★★★☆); review: post 316.
• Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson (2013), abandoned 10/24/14 after 150 of 529 pages (28%; not rated) for wearing me down; comments: post 320.
• A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, by Ben Macintyre (2014), 10/27/14; 308 pages plus backmatter (★★★★☆); review: post 324.

October totals: 8 books finished (2248 pages); 3 books abandoned (283 pages)

November

• Labyrinth, by Kate Mosse (2006), abandoned 11/1/14 after 265 of 515 pages (51%; not rated); comments: post 326.
• My Real Children, by Jo Walton (2014), abandoned 11/5/14 after 148 of 317 pages (48%; not rated), for boring me senseless; comments: post 341.
• Night Watch: A Long-Lost Adventure in Which Sherlock Holmes Meets Father Brown, by Stephen Kendrick (2003), 11/7/14; 259 pages (★★★); review: post 354.
• A Night to Remember, by Walter Lord (1955), 11/10/14; 208 pages (★★★); review: post 360.
• Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel (2014), 11/12/14; 259 pages (★★★★☆); review: post 379.
• He Wanted the Moon, by Mimi Baird (2014; ER), 11/15/14; 257 pages (★★★★); review: post 356.
• Cemetery Dance, by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child (2009), 11/19/14; 566 pages (★★★☆); review: post 357.
• My Cousin Rachel, by Daphne du Maurier (1951), 11/24/14; 288 pages (★★★★☆); review: post 367.
• Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, by Sam Savage (2006), 11/26/14; 162 pages (★★★☆); review: post 374.

November totals: 7 books finished (2079 pages); 2 books abandoned (413 pages)

December

• The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey (1951), 12/1/14; 206 pages (★★★☆); review: post 373.
• The Red Garden, by Alice Hoffman (2011), 12/2/14; 260 pages (★★★★☆); review: post 377.
• And Furthermore, by Judi Dench (2010), 12/8/14; 243 pages plus backmatter (★★★☆); review: post 388.
• The Enchanted, by Rene Denfeld (2014), 12/12/14; 237 pages (★★★★★); review: post 394.
• The Summer of the Danes (Cadfael 18), by Ellis Peters (1991), 12/20/14; 251 pages (★★★☆); review: post 406.
• Mystery in White, by J. Jefferson Farjeon (1937), 12/26/14; 256 pages (★★★☆); review: post 422.
• The Films of Akira Kurosawa: Expanded & Updated 3rd Edition, by Donald Richie (1965/1998), 12/27/14; 273 pages (★★★★); review: post 423.
• The White Dawn, by James Houston (1971), 12/27/14; 274 pages (★★★★☆); review: post 424.
• And Live Rejoicing, by Huston Smith (2012), 12/28/14; 194 pages plus backmatter (★★★); review: post 431.
• The Cry of the Sloth, by Sam Savage (2009), 12/29/14; 224 pages (★★★☆); review: post 425.

December totals: 10 books finished (2418 pages); 0 books abandoned (0 pages)

Year totals: 100 books finished (28,046 pages); 18 books abandoned (1520 pages)

 

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[Reviews: currently behind by 0 titles. All caught up! Hurray!]

Placeholder post.

The Wheel of Darkness, by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child (3 stars; genre, 3½)

Six-word review: Bizarre departure for investigator Pendergast fans.

Extended review:

This first book of the year was a reread for me, and now I remember why it took me so long to come around to reading the series from the beginning. This is noplace to start with Agent Pendergast. Almost any of the preceding seven books except perhaps The Book of the Dead, which is the third of a trilogy within the series, would make a better introduction.

First, the story takes place on an Atlantic crossing during the maiden voyage of an enormous luxury ocean liner. This common fictional device of isolating the crime-solving protagonist from outside resources while perpetrator and potential victims are all trapped together (on an airplane, on an island, in a haunted house, etc.) has the effect of separating Pendergast from all the interesting secondary characters that usually interact with him, so that we have no developing relationships to follow except the one with his ward, Constance.

Second, the book is really not a standalone. It relies heavily on contextual information supplied by its predecessors in the series, most notably Pendergast's and Constance's respective histories with the agent's brother Diogenes, who played a principal role in the trilogy. The number of allusions to the characters' recent personal experiences--and the inclusion of the voice of Diogenes himself--means that any reader who has not been following the series sequentially will miss the significance of or be confused by several key elements, and various other references will be meaningless.

Third, Pendergast himself spends a portion of this narrative behaving in a way that is deeply out of character for him. To appreciate how much, and to give that development its due weight, the reader must have some prior familiarity.

And fourth, there is a supernatural element to this story that, although explained in some fashion, takes it out of the realm of a world whose rules and conventions we know from our own experience. Once we leave the realistic setting behind, we can't be sure what kind of world we're in. There is no world-building of the sort that we expect in urban fantasies and magic realism. It's disorienting not to know what to accept as being what it appears to be and what to regard as hallucination or trickery that requires exposure.

Consequently I found this installment not only unsatisfying but in a number of ways annoying. For the sake of the longer arc that spans the plots of several of the novels, I'm glad I reread it, and I will certainly go on with the series, but with a little wariness now that I've come to doubt whether the authors--who have perhaps become a bit bored with their own creation--will play fair with the reader.

Yay! Six word reviews are back! :) Looking forward to the new year of shared reading threads, Meredy.

Thanks, MrsLee. I had thought that people liked my six-word reviews in themselves, so when I fell behind, that's all I wrote. But it turned out that they didn't care to see only six words. I guess there had to be something more there for the short takes to be shorter than. So I'll try to keep up with the brief-plus-extended combo for as long as I can.

In a few cases, though (Nightwood comes to mind), six was all I could muster.

For me, your six-word reviews are like teasers for the full review. I definitely enjoy reading both and am looking forward to more this year.

The six word review and full review go together to form a perfect whole!

I'll be following your thread.

I love reading your six word reviews. I was to scared of spoilers to read your full review before, but I see you have marked them as spoiler free o Iæll give it a go.

I'm following this. Six word reviews should be a lot of fun!

I am in awe of your six word reviews. They're so succinct, and as Sakerfalcon states, like a teaser for the full review to come. I play around with coming up with six word reviews, but I can never find the right few words.

I enjoy both types of your reviews. This is going to be a good year, I can feel it!

An Excellent Mystery, by Ellis Peters (3½ stars; genre: 4)

Six-word review: Secret passions, secret griefs, secret redemptions.

Extended review:

Brother Cadfael, perceptive and resourceful as ever, takes a secondary role in this story of loyalty, loss and pursuit, hidden sorrows, and deliverance, tightly interwoven with the political upheaval of twelfth-century England. Secrets, as ever, drive the drama, and the secrets in the present instance are more dramatic than most. Even though I guessed the answer halfway through, the answer, in this case, was not a solution, and its unfolding still left much of a tale to be told.

The author is admirably confident of her principal character's ability to sustain a series without having to be in the limelight every moment. This variant on the formulaic earlier novels refreshes the reader's interest and amplifies the development of Cadfael's character. The ongoing tension of civil conflict in the land brings history to life while showing how ordinary people are affected when giants take to the battlefield.

I continue to take pleasure in the author's lyrical and insightful prose style and authoritative command of English. I'm sorry to note that I've passed the halfway mark in the twenty-book Cadfael series and may have to resist the urge to gallop on through, in favor of making what remains last a little longer.

You are a tough cookie when handing out stars! What is your guide? Meaning, what do three and a half stars mean to you? To me, they mean an enjoyable book, not memorable or rereadable.

13: I suppose that's so, MrsLee, and it's kind of you to ask.

I don't claim objectivity in any absolute sense. In my mind there is an unevenly divided scale, with wider spacing in the middle than at either end, but I aim to apply it consistently. Three and a half stars is a good, solid rating, a mark of approval despite enumerable defects. (That's enumerable, not innumerable!)

I see a long gap between 3 and 3½. I'd equate it roughly to the gap between a grade of C and a grade of B. It's more than a matter of a few points; there's a pronounced qualitative difference that characterizes the whole.

I should stipulate that I recognize different standards for fiction and nonfiction. Nonfiction works seldom get more than four stars from me because they rarely have the literary quality that places them in my top ranks. To rate five stars, a novel has to blow me away. This does not that mean that I think it's flawless; in fact, it can have plain flaws and still earn a 5 or a 4½. But in addition to warranting superlatives in the basic elements of character, plot, setting, theme, and literary style, it has to show me an ineffable quality of artistry that sets it apart--an innate magnificence that can't be reduced to numbers or items on a checklist.

It's all but impossible for a work of nonfiction to do this, although there are always a few that seem remarkable enough to me to set and even exceed their own standards.

So you'll see many 3½s from me because that's what I consider "satisfactory"; I try not to read things that are going to rate lower than that. A 3 is a disappointment, and a book that gets a 2 or a 2½ is probably one I'll wish I hadn't bothered with. Most of those in that category are going to be abandoned before I finish them and will probably end up unrated.

I also take off heavily for grammatical incompetence. A few lapses are forgivable, if not forgettable, but repeated failures of grammar and diction--and especially the appearance of downright sloppiness--preclude a high mark.

A 4 is very, very good, a 4½ is excellent, and a rare 5 is a standard-bearer. A book can get a 5 from me even if I don't like it just because it's so good at being what it is.

My list of best reads for 2013 is here:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/162635#4442387
If I've done a decent job of writing my reviews, they should explain better than my generalities what it takes to wring a top rating from me.

I'm right with you on that boundary between a 3 and a 3½. A 3½ is a book that I enjoyed, although I'm not going to form a long term relationship with it. A 3 was readable, but I didn't particularly care for it. Anything below that, I actively disliked.

#14 - Thanks for the clarification. I have my rating system (which I pilfered from someone else on LT many moons ago and tweaked a bit) on my profile. I am not qualified to analyze books the way you do, so my judgments are more from the gut. Sometimes I have a very hard time putting into words why or what I liked about a book. That's why I like to read posts from you or jillmwo or others about books I've read, it helps me put my thoughts in some sort of order. :)

Dark Fire, by C. J. Sansom (3 stars)

Six-word review: Plodding double mystery never takes off.

Extended review:

This book isn't really a mystery, never mind two of them.

For investigator Shardlake it is, but not for the reader.

What I mean by that is that we are not invited to consider the cases along with the sleuth. We simply follow along as spectators to his efforts. We are given prolonged churn and frustration as substitutes for suspense. The possible culprits are never depicted in a lineup of suspects, as it were, with enough information for us to be able (theoretically, at least) to pick them out from the innocent parties, and so when the wrongdoers are finally revealed it is pretty much of a yawn.

And those weren't the only yawns for me in this 503-page tome. Situated in a fascinating time and place, England under Henry VIII during the rocky transition from Catholicism to Protestantism, it has tremendous dramatic potential in its setting alone. However, the author suffers from the apparent compulsion to dramatize everything in scenes when some of it would do well as summary. Conventional writing classes mislead with their mantra to show and not tell: you don't have to show everything--you have to show what needs to be shown; it's okay to tell some things. As a result, the story is laden with unnecessary and repetitive dialogue, a jumble of indistinct secondary characters produces confusion, and, as in the first book, a rushed ending leaves me wondering what actually happened. It's instantly forgettable. I'm afraid it doesn't help that Elizabeth's suicidally persistent silence and the book's McGuffin--the Dark Fire of the title--never really cross over into plausibility.

If I wanted to be mean, I could say that Sansom seems to have studied at the Willis school of historical fiction writing. This novel furnishes ample instances of the same maddening qualities that made me gnash my teeth through one and one-third of the Oxford Time Travel novels: repetitiveness, verbosity, repetitiveness, loose editing, and repetitiveness.

Here is but one example of Sansom's doing the same thing that the author of The Doomsday Book does (repeatedly). On page 444 we read: "Toky was frowning now, his ebullience gone." And then on the following page: "Toky grunted; his ebullience had evaporated."

Soon afterward, we have this (page 454): "He grabbed at his bicep, blood welling between his fingers." (And yes, he does say "bicep," which is not a singular form of "biceps"; "biceps" is the Latin name of that arm muscle, and it is singular.) On page 456 the same character is described thus: "He clasped his wounded arm and I saw a trickle of blood welling between his fingers."

This kind of carelessness and inattention suggests to me that as he approached the finale the author was writing in haste, a horse galloping toward the barn at the end of a long journey, forgetting what he just said, making random changes without checking surrounding text, not looking back or even using a word-frequency counter to catch overuse of unusual words, and that no editor was maintaining stern vigilance at sentence level to save the author from embarrassing himself in this ever-so-avoidable way.

There is also some egregiously pedestrian writing. Here's an example taken from what should be an exciting action-filled scene near the end of the book:

=====(Sansom excerpt 1 begins)

I nodded, my heart beating fast. We climbed the rickety wooden staircase carefully. I looked at the door, afraid that it might open and Toky might fly out at us. Barak held his drawn sword in front of him and I clutched the dagger at my belt. But we reached the platform safely. I saw that the door to the office was also secured by a padlock. It seemed darker now; glancing up at the high window, I saw the sky was dark as a winter dusk. I heard a faint rumble of thunder. (Dark Fire, page 441)

=====(Sansom excerpt 1 ends)

If a Freshman Comp. student can't think of at least two, and preferably more than six, ways to improve that paragraph through editing, I'll swallow my eraser.

As it happens, I finished my latest outing with Brother Cadfael only a day earlier. Coincidentally, both novels pose a climactic scene as a thunderstorm breaks after a prolonged spell of summer heat. Peters' novel is only 200-odd pages, as against Sansom's 500, and yet she is willing to spend several lines evoking the dark explosion of a rainstorm after a long buildup of meteorological tension:

=====(Peters excerpt begins)

They were well down the first reach between the water-meadows when the east suddenly darkened, almost instantly, to reflect back the purple-black frown of the west, and suddenly the light died into dimness, and the rumblings of thunder began, coming from the west at speed, like rolls of drums following them, or peals of deep-mouthed hounds on their trail in a hunt by demi-gods....Then the rain began, first great, heavy, single drops striking the stretched cloth loud as stones, then the heavens opened and let fall all the drowning accumulation of water of which the bleached earth was creditor, a downpour that set the Severn seething as if it boiled, and spat abrupt fountains of sand and soil from the banks....And steadily and viciously the torrent of rain fell, and the rolls and peals and slashes of thunder hounded them down towards Shrewsbury, and the lightnings, hot on the heels of the thunder, flashed and flamed and criss-crossed their path, the only light in a howling darkness. (An Excellent Mystery, pages 175-176)

=====(Peters excerpt ends)

In contrast:

=====(Sansom excerpt 2 begins)

There was silence for a minute. Then I heard a loud hissing sound from outside. I could not work out what it was at first, then drips began falling from the ceiling and I realized it was raining. Thunder sounded again, a mighty crack right overhead. (Dark Fire, page 445)
...
We walked slowly back along Cheapside then down to the river, through lanes that the rain had already turned into trails of filthy, clinging mud. There can be something pitiless about rain when it pounds, hard, on exhausted heads, as though cast from heaven by an angry hand. This was a real storm, no half-hour cloudburst as before. Everywhere drenched Londoners, their thin summer clothes clinging to them, ran to get out of the rain. (Dark Fire, page 456)

=====(Sansom excerpt 2 ends)

Which one has a pulse you can feel--special effects delivered through evocative language, setting mood and heightening drama? Which one is flat and undistinguished, somehow seeming more verbose in 37% fewer words? In fact, the latter passage would be briefer still if all the static, do-nothing words were removed; and while we were editing, I hope we'd also delete one of the two occurrences of "clinging" within the space of five lines of text.

Lest I imply, however, that faults of form and substance are confined to the closing pages of the book, when the author might understandably have been racing to meet a deadline, let me assure you that they are not. As before, I note odd misnomers and malapropisms--not many, perhaps, but enough to raise doubts about Sansom's or his editor's care with the language. For example, Sansom doesn't seem to realize that the popular use of the expression "just desserts" is a pun, a play on the phrase "just deserts," with "desert" in this case (de-ZERT, not DEZ-ert) meaning something that one deserves. A dessert (with the double s) is the sweet course at the end of a meal. Twice (page 33, page 294) he refers to "desserts" as if the word meant "comeuppance."

I also counted numerous misuses of "lest," which does not mean "in case" ("The workshop door was open. Barak banged it wide, lest anyone was hiding behind it." - page 330, and essentially the same sentence again on page 441). This particular error occurred throughout the first book, Dissolution, as well.

Flaws of execution are no novelty in fiction writing; even the best work may occasionally show regrettable lapses. But this author could have compensated for or eliminated many of those by practicing a reasonable economy. It's not in the original writing so much as in the rewriting and self-editing that a book succeeds or fails. This one, in my opinion, demanded far more of my time and patience than it rewarded. I liked the setting; I liked the dynamic between Shardlake and Barak; I liked the glimpses of the political milieu. But those features are not enough to sustain my interest. I've given the author two lengthy chances; I won't be back for a third.

Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, by Agatha Christie (abandoned; unrated)

Probably through no fault of its own, this meandering 532-page memoir is failing to hold my attention. I'm letting it go at page 170 out of 532 (32%) and taking it back to the library.

The questions I want answered when I read a book like this are, first, what caused or enabled the young x to become the adult y, and second, what inklings were there from childhood of the traits or abilities that would manifest themselves in the mature individual? Quite possibly the answers are here, but they are too long in coming. Instead Christie seems repeatedly to deny that such a remarkable career as hers might have been anticipated from anything in her history.

Certainly we see young Agatha as a supremely imaginative child with an absorbing inner life as well as a positive, embracing attitude toward the world around her. It wasn't all satin gowns and silver bowls; the privileged early years gave way to relatively hard times after her father's death. As I leave the book, the first World War is still to come, and Agatha has not yet begun her career as an author.

I'm not much of a reader of biography and autobiography. Usually some driving interest has led me to the ones I've enjoyed, and it may be that the interest can't be forced; or perhaps I'm just in more of a mood for the escape of fiction right now--escape of the sort that dozens of Christie's own novels have afforded me in the past. This may simply be the wrong time for me to tackle such a long and desultory memoir. So I think I'm going to put it aside for now and get on with something that will hold my attention better.

In passing, though, I must mention that the book is marred by quite a number of surprising typos, considering how many times and ways the manuscript must have passed through authorial and editorial hands over the years and the editions. To mention only two, spotlighted by their status as well-known titles: Dumas' novel The Count of Monte Christo (should be Cristo) and the Puccini aria "Te Gelida Manina" (should be "Che gelida manina"). I regard such lapses, especially when numerous, as affronts to the attentive reader, who should always be treated with respect.

Ah, another one of my favorites, shot down. :)

Oh, no! Which one?

The Agatha Christie one! I loved it, gave it five stars for the warm and fuzzy feeling I had when I finished. Here's my very short review.

"I love this book. It was like visiting with my grandma in a way. Warm, humorous and interesting. A delightful look at the turn of the century in England, up through the second World War. Then she gets less chatty about her later life, yet it is fun to read about her different inspirations for her books. A definite keeper and one I want to share with my friends."

I remember it gave me a great desire to find and read her books about the archaeological digs she went on with her second husband. Something I haven't done yet.

I haven't started it yet, so I'll go with MrsLee's review for now. ;)
I did read Come, Tell Me How You Live, and enjoyed it very much, so I'll hope for the best.

Oh, now, I don't think I shot it down, MrsLee. I gave it a really fair attempt--one-third of a long book--and then said I wasn't in the right mood for it.

If it says anything about the mood I am in, I took back Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend without reading it (at a glance, too cloying--a child's voice is very hard to do well--and spare me present-tense narratives), and I went two directions from there: on the one hand, Ordinary Thunderstorms, which has made a good start, and on the other, Tutānkhamen, Amenism, Atenism and Egyptian Monotheism, a 1923 publication by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge.

Tutānkhamen, Amenism, Atenism and Egyptian Monotheism; with hieroglyphic texts of hymns to Amen and Aten, translations, and illustrations, by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge (4 stars)

In 1923, six months after the opening of the virtually unmolested tomb of King Tut, Sir E. A. Wallis Budge published this small collection of scholarly monographs to counter the spate of misinformation that had sprung up in the wake of Howard Carter's spectacular discovery.

Both excited scholars and the popular press seem to have overstated and indeed romanticized the role of youthful King Tutankhamen among the pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty (1580-1350 BC). Budge's work places his reign in the historical and cultural context of his predecessor Amenhotep IV. That antitraditionalist king, also known as Aakhunaten, rejected Egypt's established religion and devoted himself and all his resources to the cult of the Sun-God (Aten) alone, neglecting both his subject people and his nation’s allies in his single-minded fanaticism. It was Tutankhamen, following the brief reign of an insignificant intervening ruler, who reinstated the older religion, with Amen-Ra as its supreme lord. He restored the forms and customs of worship to which the people had remained covertly loyal. This, and not the happenstance of having a well-concealed burial place, constitutes King Tut's historical importance.

As keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities in the British Museum, Budge had a lifelong commitment to faithful, detailed scholarship. He published numerous books and articles in his field, including primers in Egyptian hieroglyphics, one of which I studied assiduously back in the 1960s. His work is amply illustrated with careful, handsomely styled renderings of lengthy passages of hieroglyphics, translated word for word in accompanying text. They look a lot like this example, although this is taken from a different source:



This volume was a gift to me from my husband on our first ("paper") wedding anniversary in 1979. I reread it just now not only for sentimental reasons but as research for a plot element in a story I'm working on. A bonus was its interesting resonance with chapter 2 of Camille Paglia's luminous Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, "The Birth of the Western Eye," which I read just a couple of weeks ago. Paglia credits Egyptian art, and its apex the iconic painted sculpture of Akhenaten's sublimely beautiful queen, as the origin of the Western aesthetic sensibility. Budge's work of nearly a century ago locates it in history.

Of little likely appeal to the casual reader, Tutānkhamen, Amenism, Atenism and Egyptian Monotheism satisfies an interest that goes beyond glamour and fad. Budge's volume of Egyptological research and interpretation exhibits the intense dedication of a scholar to his subject that I admire as I admire the work of any whose life is exalted by a defining passion.

Ooo, research. Intriguing. I'm wishing you very good luck on the project.

Thank you, fundevogel.

Ordinary Thunderstorms, by William Boyd (4½ stars)

Six-word review: Inventive thriller explores questions of identity.

Extended review:

Getting by outside the system, living an undocumented life in the Information Age, is a theme that has interested me since long before the advent of the Internet. From time to time I've even considered the idea attractive and read with a tinge of envy about those who have done it, or nearly done it. So I was immediately intrigued by the premise of this novel: an innocent man, framed by circumstances, is believed to have committed a murder and goes underground to evade not only the police but the real killers.

Adam Kindred has come to London to begin a new life following a major setback in the personal and professional spheres. The new life he gets is not the one he sought. Instead, a chance encounter puts him in possession of a file containing information that will fatally compromise a hugely profitable pharmaceutical empire, putting his life in jeopardy with its hired thugs, while police pursue him as the suspect. How can he survive, alone, friendless, without resources, while powerful interests are determined to suppress what he knows?

You know a novel has me in its grip when I bring it out of the bedroom. An hour's bedtime reading per night wasn't enough for this thriller: I just had to see what happened next, so I spent several hours on the sofa with it two days running, preempting my current living room reading.

Now, I won't deny that this book has a number of apparent flaws, the main one being overindulgence in the development of an extensive network of secondary characters. In several cases their stories are more in the nature of digressions than they are essential to furthering plot or characterization; for example, I see no relevance in the dialogue between a prostitute and her customer about whether to take a vacation together, and not much in the details of how a young woman keeps her little boy drowsy and tractable or a business executive ruminates on his underwear. Yet I'm happy to overlook such arguably loose elements of structure because those asides are interesting. Likewise, Boyd's vision of how his protagonist adapts to his circumstances and builds relationships that affect his future course may have more than a little of the implausible about it, but as (presumably) speculative fiction it is highly entertaining. To the extent that his depiction of the forces of menace might be realistic, I'm duly chilled by the thought that anyone I care about might ever have to disappear deliberately.

In fact, I was somewhat surprised by my own inclination to be forgiving toward mistakes of the very sort that I tend to judge harshly in other works; for instance, failure to distinguish between "infer" and "imply"; some evident confusion about commas; a misrendering of "biceps" as "bicep" (coincidentally noted in Dark Fire, reviewed here just a few days ago, and not with any leniency); and a misuse of rebound where he plainly meant redound ("its success would rebound hugely in his and Calenture-Deutz's favour" - page 302). What this point suggests to me is that my degree of impatience with defects depends significantly on my overall pleasure or displeasure with the book and not the other way around.

One of the aspects of this novel that pleased me, and this may just be a matter of my peculiar taste, is the odd and even borderline bizarre names that he gives to his characters. Here's a sampling:

Ingram Fryzer
Mhouse and Ly-on
Jonjo Case
Yemi Thompson-Gbeho
Primo Belem

Extraordinary names such as these draw attention to themselves. Indeed, the name of the focal character caught my eye almost at once: Adam Kindred, Adam-father-of-us-all Kindred-related. This name tags him as a candidate for Everyman. Is there something allegorical about this novel? Certainly there is something fantastic about it, something that invites us to look beyond literal meanings and ask what the author is really doing.

In this connection we can't overlook the opening. The first two paragraphs address the reader directly, the first words being "Let us start with the river"--the river, a fertile metaphor as old as literature. After the establishment shot, the second paragraph zooms the lens: "There he is--look--" and a voice-over foreshadows the volcanic upheaval that is about to occur in the young man's life. And then the author abandons this cinematic conceit, but not before we've heard an echo of an ancient literary tradition, of Greek drama, of Shakespeare, of "Listen, my children, and you shall hear," and even of the familiar storyteller's voice in an older generation of modern fiction that predates MFA programs and writers' workshop cautions against "author intrusion."

Thus alerted by two prominent markers, I soon found a third signpost in the name of the drug at the root of the conflict into which Adam has been drawn: Zembla-4. This is an overt allusion to Nabokov's Pale Fire, a 1962 poem-cum-novel* whose focal character is, or believes he is, or appears to be, an exiled king living in disguise under the name Charles Kinbote. Zembla is the name of his troubled homeland. The resemblance of Kindred to Kinbote, both characters living under assumed identities and in fear for their lives, can hardly be coincidental.

Are these references intended simply as an homage to Nabokov, complete with a minor but pivotal character named Vladimir, or do they signify something more?

When Jonjo Case sits down to a newspaper puzzle involving anagrams, I suddenly remembered that anagramming was a favorite game of Nabokov's and that he often used such sly verbal devices to conceal clues to hidden meanings and connections in his novels. Immediately I set about anagramming all those weird character names, using the help of an online tool to make a thorough job of it. I didn't fail to include Rita Nashe, a normal enough name but with an unnecessary e that might be there to fill out another word with rearranged letters. I came up with nothing. Perhaps Boyd is just playing with his story and with us, dropping these tidbits because he can, but I suspect that I have missed other dimensions.

I'm unable to answer my own questions. Like the novel itself, I'm leaving some loose ends, threads that may tie up in the future--what will happen when Rita learns more? whom will the river bring back, and what will happen when it does? who, after all, is Adam Everyman? and what will surface as I reflect further on this uncommon narrative? Perhaps the questions are the point.

 
So--I brought the book out of the bedroom to read it faster. I looked kindly upon the flaws. I pondered its subtleties. And then I made haste to acquire the author's next title, Waiting for Sunrise. That's how you know it was a winner with me.

-----

*Review of Pale Fire:
http://www.librarything.com/work/7714/reviews/80056936

(Edited to upgrade my rating by ½ star.)

It's overcast today, and intermittently showery--not enough to help much here in rain-starved Northern California, but, as we've said in many a dry season before, "It didn't make the drought worse, did it?"

"Just a little bit of rain"...the phrase lodged in my mind and eventually led my memory back to this magnificent tune of Fred Neil's, delivered in his uniquely rich, magnetic voice: "A Little Bit of Rain."

I bought the 1965 album Bleecker and MacDougal back when it was new and must have played it hundreds of times over all the years until CDs replaced vinyl. Fred Neil was one of the most influential and elusive figures of the early folk revival in New York. I've just listened to the whole thing again--it's all there on YouTube. Hadn't heard it in decades, but it still gets to me, somewhere deep down, at the bottom of the well where pain resides.

At around the same time that he was playing in Greenwich Village, I was into the coffeehouse scene in Boston and knew a lot of the people. I remember hearing someone say back then that Fred Neil was a brilliant performer and composer but that he didn't care about commercial success. A heroin addict, he would disappear to Florida and stay there until he needed money, then come and do a few gigs or make a recording and take off again.

That recollection led me to Google "Fred Neil," whose name is best known for "Everybody's Talkin'," even though it was another artist who recorded it and a movie that made it famous. Wikipedia made no mention of the drug aspect of his story, so I searched on his name plus "addiction." That led me to the book Becoming Elektra, a 2010 release that narrates the history of the years during which the Elektra record label was home to some of the biggest performers on the folk scene--and indeed helped many of them become so.

And that, of course, led me to Amazon, where I inevitably added yet another title to the incoming list.

This has been a strange, moody trip under a gray sky.

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, by Malcolm Gladwell (3 stars)

Six-word review: Gaining, recognizing, and using personal power.

Extended review:

Malcolm Gladwell has a great thing going, and I can't fault him for making the most of what he's got. His current title, David and Goliath, is now at 16 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, following in the groove set by its four best-selling predecessors. His name is well known, and references to his take on the workings of the world crop up frequently in certain kinds of conversations and settings.

Maybe I'm just envious because I've never had anything on the best-seller list, but I think his formula is wearing a bit thin. Would this book have made it to the top if it had been his first? I'm inclined to doubt it. It just doesn't pack the intuitive punch of Blink or exert the logical appeal of The Tipping Point.

Gladwell's collection of biographical narratives interpreted in the light of a common theme is engaging, making the point again and again that adversity can confer advantage and that the actions of an individual can have incalculable consequences. Nevertheless, the "David and Goliath" conceit feels tacked on, as if a catchy title and a familiar motif counted for more in the Marketing Department than a well-integrated organizing concept. And it probably does.

What this book is actually about, it seems to me, is not the little guy against the big guy but the meaning and use of power, the authority of personal conviction, and the ways in which weakness and strength can be mistaken for each other and indeed can become reversed. But that would be a far less tidy notion to present, never mind being difficult to pin down in a popular phrase that sells copies.

The eye-opening character of Gladwell's observations commands attention, and the explanatory potency of his theories impresses, as it is designed to do. But I can't escape the feeling that the drive to churn out best-sellers takes precedence over the treatment of the content, which is veering toward the sensationalistic at the expense of coherency.

(Posted Feb 3, 3:57pm; edited long after the fact to correct a misguided touchstone.)

Crocodile on the Sandbank (Amelia Peabody, Book 1), by Elizabeth Peters (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Doughty heroine tackles evildoers in Egypt.

Extended review:

Charmingly fluffy cozy mystery-adventure set in one of the most fascinating places in the world and at an exciting time, at least for Westerners: Egypt in the decades of intense archeological exploration surrounding the turn of the twentieth century.

Having just reread Sir E. A. Wallis Budge's scholarly work on Akhenaten and Tutankhamen (review here), I was ripe for a lightweight yarn that sets a feisty Victorian lady at odds with youthful follies, unscrupulous miscreants, suitors false and true, and just about everybody else who crosses her path.

Despite a villainous presence that seems to come straight out of a black-and-white Boris Karloff movie, the story does have its moments of suspense, and the romantic aspect is well enough salted to offset the cloying sugar.

I have the second in the series on order. The novelty may pale soon enough, but it is always nice to have a quick, reliable escape read on hand.

I enjoyed Crocodile on the Sandbank, and found Amelia a refreshingly unusual heroine (that was about 25 years ago—maybe not so unusual now). But then I'm afraid I did find that the novelty faded very quickly in the following books.

I'm with Sylvia. I enjoyed the Amelia very much...but by the end of book 2, I was done. The fluffiness was overpowering, which is a pity.

Now, see? I loathed Amelia Peabody. :/ It's like we're counterpoints.

I'm absurdly pleased to hear that, MrsLee.

Nevertheless, I take due warning from Sylvia and Marissa, and so I don't expect to follow the series very far. Delightfully spunky little women and their big growly doting men do get on my nerves pretty fast. Truthfully, it's the setting and all the Egyptology that appeal to me the most.

But I do know that you and I hate at least some of the same things.

#34 I do know that you and I hate at least some of the same things.

That sounds like the foundation for many a political party.

I will vote for you.

No stuffing the ballot box there! I tried a few of the Amelia Peabody novels, but couldn't get past the obnoxious child, Ramses. On the other hand, I liked some of the stuff she wrote under other pseudonyms. Ammie, Come Home really got me as a teenager. (It's probably considered too tame by today's standards.)

I was into the coffeehouse scene in Boston and knew a lot of the people.

This is a period and place I know only from other people's telling (I mean, I've been to Boston, but in the 1990s-2000s) and yet it feels almost like a memory of my own, because of the deep impression left by the description of that "scene" you mention, in what probably isn't a very good book, James Michener's The drifters. Any chance you might know it?

I see those Malcolm Gladwell books everywhere, one of these days I must find out who is he and what does he do. I have a vague notion he's some all-purpose social critic and faintly hope he'll go out of fashion before I get to him.

Boris Karloff played the mummy in The mummy, 1932. Maybe that was an homage!

35: I think some entire countries have been founded on that principle.

36: Obnoxious child coming up? Oh, dear, that'll finish me for sure. Thanks for the warning.

37: I haven't read The Drifters, but I'll take a look. I'd never have thought to describe the music people I knew that way. Some of them were (and some still are) serious artists, and for some the folk scene was just a youthful phase at a time when it was hip, but I didn't sense a lot of drifting. I suppose there must have been some Llewyn Davises among them, though.

Yes, the 1932 Karloff movie is exactly what I was alluding to--one I've seen many times. I couldn't read those scenes in the novel without picturing it. It seemed to me less like an homage than like actual source material for the novel's descriptions.

When my kids were young, I liked having those very old spooky movies around--that's what we called them--because they were so innocent, safe to let them watch late on a Saturday night in summertime. There wouldn't be any gore, there wouldn't be any real horror, and the scary parts wouldn't last very long--just long enough to give you a good little shiver and stop your hand momentarily on the way to the popcorn bowl.

As I noted above (#14), nonfiction works seldom rate more than four stars from me. I kept my notes differently in 2012, so I'm not sure, but I don't think I gave any nonfiction work five stars that year. In 2013 there was one--The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell.

I also posted five stars for The Maniac: A Realistic Study of Madness from the Maniac's Point of View, by E. Thelmar, but I'm still not sure if that was really nonfiction.

Now I've just awarded five stars to Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes. I'm working on a review and hoping to do it some measure of justice. It's not a perfect book--is there such a thing?--but I'll say now that it does have that literary quality and, yes, that innate magnificence that to me lift it above even the usual best of conventional nonfiction.

I'm glad I left some room at the top.

Interesting, Meredy. I would not have rated it that highly, though I enjoyed it.

If you're at all interested in other WWII-related non-fiction, I would love to hear your opinion of Leo Marks' Between Silk and Cyanide--one my favorite non-fiction/memoirs ever. There is not a whiff of lyricism about it, but behind the slightly brash picture the author paints of himself is a great deal of depth and emotion--appropriate for someone in his early twenties who bore the burden of hundreds of secret agents' lives on his back.

#38

I think "the drifters" refers to the young characters in the book--loosely, the "hippie generation"--not necessarily the musicians. My memory's hazy, but I remember the plot travelling, besides Boston, to at least Marrakesh and Amsterdam (the drug route?)

The Boston coffeehouse with the folk singer scene, the one that led me to search obsessively for Child ballads, I later discovered was based on the early days of Joan Baez.

The Lace Reader, by Brunonia Barry (abandoned; unrated)

Abandoned just short of the one-quarter mark for the following reasons:

• Chapter 9, just finished, consists of a very long, exhaustively detailed, heavily dialogue-ridden scene that seems pointless. It should have taken a lot less, it seems to me, to convey whatever this protracted scene was intended to get across. Show, yes, good plan, but you don't have to show every damn thing. My confidence in the author's ability to be selective dropped too low.

• I put it down for two days, and when I picked it up again I couldn't remember who half of the characters were. They'd made little or no impression.

• It's in the present tense. I gave it much more of a chance than I do most present-tense fictional narratives--some get only one page--but it wore me down.

Too bad, because I liked the premise (even though I had to go to the Internet to find out what a lace pillow is because the author didn't tell me) and the setting and was mildly interested in the setup.

I've just succeeded in unearthing my two-volume The Annotated Sherlock Holmes for a group (re)read of the chronicles of the master sleuth, here:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/170096

Volume I looks practically pristine, and this is after some fifty years of apartment moves and bookcase shuffles. I'm doubting that I ever actually read it. My one-volume Complete Sherlock Holmes is obviously handled, although gently and with care.

Hild, by Nicola Griffith (4½ stars)

Six-word review: Violent medieval politics frame noblewoman's youth.

Extended review:

Beautifully realized fiction of life and war in Britain's early Middle Ages, as seen through the eyes of the child Hild as she matures into a powerful, far-seeing young woman in the court of her uncle King Edwin of Northumbria.

Nature, nurture, and self-discipline shape her subtle mind as observer and interpreter of both natural phenomena and human behavior, weaving them into patterns that reveal hidden connections and future directions. As the king's seer she must counsel and advise while protecting her own interests and those of her loved ones. Alone among the women of the court, she bears weapons of battle and serves the king in both armed and diplomatic conflict among petty rivals for control of all Britain.

This novel falls short of top marks for me largely because of the pacing, which made the scope and complexity difficult to follow. I came close to letting it go after a hundred pages, mainly because I was feeling impatient while waiting for it to grab me. It seemed to be setting the stage for a very long time, setting an enormous stage with so many characters and so much backdrop that I couldn't track it all. In time it was the character of Hild who held my interest; but I gave up on trying to remember who all those were who surrounded her and guess which ones I'd want to hold in mind for future reference. Sometimes the interval between mentions of a character who was going to turn out to be important were so long that I didn't realize I'd ever met him or her before, and the author didn't remind me. The ease of confusing similar-looking names added a level of challenge to this aspect.

The author's not to blame for the language patterns and naming customs manifested in historical seventh-century personal and place names, but I'd have found a reference list or index extremely helpful. I shouldn't have to leaf back through hundreds of pages to locate the first mention of a character's name and get a reminder of who the person is. From one day to the next I had difficulty remembering the roles and relationships of many of the characters.

I also wished that Griffith would remind us from time to time of Hild's age. I lost track sometime around the age of twelve and really had no idea of how old she was by the end. Fifteen? Thirty? I had no markers to go by.

The references that were provided were indispensable. I turned to the family tree, the map of old Britain, and the glossary many times in the course of each sitting. However, they were insufficient. Many more unfamiliar terms (for instance, "torc") appeared than were glossed in the back or explained in text. Place names (for example, "Less Britain," which does not appear on the map) occurred without prior mention, treated as significant but not explained. Epithets such as "Twister" cropped up suddenly, as if they'd been part of the author's character notes all along but she'd forgotten to mention them.

In fact, I had the feeling repeatedly that Griffith was in possession of such an overwhelming mass of material, some of it factual and very much of it invented, that it often threatened to swamp the story. At times I did feel swamped.

Yet when we came down to the last fifty pages, all of a sudden it seemed extremely rushed. Seasons and events were dispensed with in a line or two, and the dramatic unfoldings that we'd been building to--political outcomes, results of intrigues and machinations, fateful deaths--either remained in the future or swept past with barely a nod. At that point I also realized that one of the big questions I had hoped to see answered--namely, how did the main character bridge the gap between the old religion and the new Christianity so well as to become Saint Hilda?--was going to be left hanging.

I don't consider that a spoiler because the jacket blurb and promotional reviews tell us that this is the story of a saint-to-be. It seemed reasonable to expect that something in this narrative would point to how that transformation came about, especially since when Christianity invades the lives of these Woden-worshippers young Hild seems none too convinced. But to be fair, the book itself does not make that promise. Perhaps a sequel will unveil that mystery; in a note at the end, the author says she is working on the next part of Hild's story.

Meanwhile, one of the great virtues of the present narrative is the author's rendering of young Hild's sensitivity to the natural world. Griffith's lush and often tender descriptions of landscape and animal life employ evocative language in delicate brushstrokes that are as confident as they are fine. Two examples randomly chosen:

=====(Excerpts begin)

One evening she stood with Cian on the wooden walkway at the highest corner of the stockade and watched the sun setting over the white fields like a winter apple, small and shrunken, staining the snow with its tired juice. The air smelt of iron and brine. (page 317)

Slowly, carefully, like an orphaned foal folding itself down on the straw by a cat and her litter, Hild tucked herself alongside Begu and laid her head on her shoulder. (page 496)

=====(Excerpts end)

The same hand delivers brutal battle scenes and acts of violence without flinching, refusing to turn away just as young Hild refuses, yet without savoring them or forcing gratuitous grue upon us. She even brings freshness to scenes of lovemaking and affords us glimpses of a private mind that feel intimate rather than voyeuristic.

I'll willingly follow Hild's story into another volume. I hope that when it comes the author will supply sufficient cues to bring the dense context of this narrative to mind so that I miss no part of the patterns she so expertly weaves.

(Edited to upgrade my rating by ½ star.)

I'm so glad to see praise for Hild. I'm very keen to read it but I saw that some people in another group were not getting on with it at all. Now you and Janny have both enjoyed it I will have to make the effort to seek out a copy (it doesn't seem to be very easy to find here in the UK).

The Raven in the Foregate, by Ellis Peters (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Unlamented sudden death exposes many secrets.

Extended review:

Brother Cadfael's twelfth outing as a medieval sleuth in monastic robes combines familiar elements: mysterious death, misplaced suspicion, disguised aristocrats, young love, and natural justice played out against a vast political field and a very small Benedictine one. Plot predictability, almost inevitable within such a narrow setting featuring a distinctive, knowable character, is its virtue as well as its shortcoming; the writing is, as ever, deft and elegant.

I continue to enjoy this series, but I think it would also do to let a little more time elapse between episodes to offset a cloying sameness. Just what I needed at this juncture, however.

I think your six-word review would be valid for most of the series. I read the entire series over several years, some of it as the books were released, and enjoyed them very much. But when I look back, very few of the individual plots stand out at all.

47: You're right. It's been a real challenge to come up with new verbal sextets without just copying and pasting.

I've just taken a moment to collect all twelve to date, and what seems funny to me now is that they almost seem to vary more than the books themselves. Maybe that's a hidden virtue of brevity.

(1) Clever medieval monk investigates Welshman's murder.
(2) Politics in medieval England breed murder.
(3) Monastic sleuth investigates murder by poisoning.
(4) Crime and intrigue challenge medieval sleuth.
(5) Medieval monastery generates consistently satisfying mysteries.
(6) Comforting consistency characterizes Cadfael's culprit catching.
(7) Monastic sleuth sees what escapes others.
(8) Pleasing variant on successful mystery formula.
(9) Cadfael sponsors young romance, exposes murderer.
(10) Penance and vengeance provide narrative twists.
(11) Secret passions, secret griefs, secret redemptions.
(12) Unlamented sudden death exposes many secrets.

I'm very impressed that you've managed to find so many different ways to summarize the books! You are able to get to the crux of what makes each one differ from the others.

I've finished Waiting for Sunrise, but I'm holding off a little on writing a review. The ending left me bemused enough that I've had to ask for help:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/170809

Ordinarily I write my reviews and comments with confidence and before looking at what anyone else has written. This time I feel that I can't really make a fair judgment until I see whether I've missed something major.

One could argue (and I probably would) that it's up to the author to communicate clearly. However, the reader must bring something to the exchange, and the author must be able to make certain assumptions about the audience. It is possible and more than possible for a reader to fall short and miss key elements through no fault of the author. Because my attention is divided at present, I think this may be one of those times.

Meanwhile, I've done my reread of A Study in Scarlet, which I hadn't looked at since sometime before 1977. I'd certainly forgotten more than I remembered, but the essence was intact in my mind, as well as many details of Watson's backstory. The BBC series has indeed incorporated a lot of plums for readers of the canon to discover in its pudding.

Along with certain fairytales and folk tales, the Arthurian legend, and vampire lore, the Sherlock Holmes stories seem to be an inexhaustible well for interpreters, adapters, and imitators. It's refreshing to go back to the source.

I don't feel able to give this novella or any of its sequels a fair or objective rating. So I'll award them all a global, sentimental five stars without any pretense at impartiality.

That's the spirit! If I were inclined to rate or rate in any measure "objectively", I'd do exactly the same.

Still boycotting the new Sherlock. JEREMY BRETT FOREVER!

#51 There is nothing wrong with being biased when you are right.

51 - A second thing we agree on! I really can't rate the Holmes stories as the best mysteries or literature I've ever read, but I still love them, and so that gets a five in my book as well.

Thank goodness my library requests came in today. I have been white-knuckling it through the second awful Amelia Peabody mystery and dying to ditch it, but I had nothing to take its place.

Nothing, of course, aside from the several thousand books distributed in six or seven bookcases, uncounted boxes, and several outright vertical stacks leaning in corners around my house, none of which I felt like reading right now.

I'll finish this book, because I'm close enough to the end, but I won't, positively won't, have another one.

55> I think I tried reading the second Amelia Peabody at one point. I didn't make it to the end and haven't picked up another since.

>55 Meredy: I know that feeling. It's horrible. Condolences on Amelia Peabody #2--I had the same experience. It's a shame, because the concept of the series is such fun. The execution, however...

I liked many of the other books by Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels, so I was disappointed that from the mid 1990s on, the majority of her output was the Amelia Peabody series. I don't know whether she focussed on that because it was the biggest moneymaker, or if she was just tired of thinking of new characters. Or maybe she just really liked Amelia.

The Curse of the Pharaohs, by Elizabeth Peters (2 stars)

Six-word review: Revolting characters contaminate picturesque Egyptian setting.

Extended review:

When I was a little way into this regrettable second installment in what might have been a delightful series of cozy mysteries, I posted the following on MrsLee's reading journal:

=====
And by the way, MrsLee...since you posted this on my journal thread, I've started that second book. Ugh. I was choking before I'd gone half a dozen pages. I went on, but I don't think I'm going to make it to the midpoint. A decent, quirky character has become a repugnant self-parody, spiteful and contemptuous, smarmy, coy, a terrible mother (to a brute of a child) and such an unattractive partner that her husband's sanity and powers of perception are in doubt. Even an operatic-cliché misunderstanding on a large enough scale to disrupt and eventually heal the romance would have been better than this nasty brew of marshmallow fluff and hydrochloric acid. So--see? We do hate some of the same things.
=====

Having finished the book by dint of sheer determined perseverance, all I have to add is that I agree with myself.

The only reason for any stars is that the setting is nicely described and the use of archaeology as a backdrop is a favorable attribute. I think I must be awarding one whole point for incorporating sidelong glances at actual players in nineteenth-century archeological explorations. We catch a glimpse of the famed Egyptologist Sir E. A. Wallis Budge as something other than the venerated British Museum scholar and author, depicted here in unscrupulous competition with French Egyptologist Eugène Grébaut for possession and export of priceless antiquities:

"Budge is a scoundrel," Emerson said. "And Grebaut is an idiot." (page 45)

But these small light-shedding virtues are far from sufficient to redeem the irredeemable.

And that, for me, is the end of the series. Period.

And that, for me, is the end of the series. Period.

Yes, me too. It's a pity--it could have been a wonderful series. But it wasn't.

Someone, by Alice McDermott (4 stars)

Six-word review: Ordinary woman's ordinary life, worth telling.

Extended review:

Life and death: how can there be anything more to say about them? And yet how can there be anything else to write about? That's it, that's us, the human condition.

In this case we view those tightly interwoven threads, sheer and yet sturdy like the lace that serves as a recurring motif, both revealing and concealing, through the half-blind eyes of a woman who has lived her life in the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, growing up during the Depression, watching the modest triumphs and commonplace tragedies of others unfold around her as she copes with her own. The narrative skips around, more like the voiced reminiscences of an elderly speaker than a unidirectional memoir, complete with repetitions, interruptions, and unself-conscious insights.

It's hard to describe without resorting to cliches: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; the universal in the particular. Truisms are truisms because there is truth in them. This is a novel of truths, ordinary truths, everyday truths, of the same sort that I have in my own life: nothing spectacular, just real. In the end it reminds us that we all have our stories, that all are worth telling.

A Man Lay Dead, by Ngaio Marsh (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Cheerfully outlandish cozy delivers comfy quickie.

Extended review:

Ngaio Marsh's first Inspector Alleyn mystery, and my first Ngaio Marsh, is everything we look for in a British detective yarn of the golden 1930s. A house party at a country estate takes a ghastly turn when one of the guests is found with a knife in his back, and no one is above suspicion. Secret romances, jealous triangles, Russian conspirators, and watchful domestics keep the pages turning while a clever sleuth ferrets clues and sets traps. What more could we ask?

I don't know why, but I've never been able to finish a Ngaio Marsh book. I certainly tried enough, and they're the kind of book I should like.

>63 SylviaC: I know what you mean. I felt the same way about Michael Innes and, a bit later, Reginald Hill, wondering, "How could I like X and not love Y?" But despite the many similarities, something's enough different that one clicks for some and another for others. I'll probably come back to Marsh, but I'm through with Hill.

I read, and enjoy to some extent, Ngaio Marsh, but I never have clicked with Inspector Alleyn. I want to, but I don't. Still, the mysteries are good, and the stories are well written and fleshed out. And Sylvia, I always have that feeling you expressed, that I should love these, but I don't. Just like them.

On the basis of this first one, I see that Inspector Alleyn lacks the personality of a Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot. Of course, so does just about everyone else. But he's no Gervase Fen, no Gideon Fell, no Peter Wimsey, certainly no Sherlock Holmes...possibly he develops some distinction later on?

Since much of the fun of such stories is knowing the detective and anticipating how he's going to tackle the problem and the players, while at the same time expecting him to surprise us, I don't see much to look forward to with a character as colorless as Inspector Alleyn.

At the same time, we can hardly fault an author who, in the face of such formidable competition, had trouble defining a character who was neither a copycat nor a parody. Maybe the public appetite for detective fiction at the time was such that anything that filled the bill would find an audience. We've seen similar phenomena in other genres and media since.

The Scapegoat, by Daphne du Maurier (4½ stars)

Six-word review: Identity theft transforms lookalike's stale life.

Extended review:

What is there that fascinates us about the idea of meeting up with our double? Whatever the reason, any number of authors seem to have found the theme irresistible: an unknown actual or virtual twin, a mirror image, a Doppelgänger, a shadow self that no one else can see--in its many variants, it's a commonplace subject in literature. These examples happen to be the first few that sprang to mind:

"William Wilson" (1839) - Poe
The Double (1846) - Dostoevsky
The Prince and the Pauper (1881) - Twain
The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) - Hope
The Secret Sharer (1909) - Conrad
Despair (1936) - Nabokov
The Likeness (2008) - French

I was expecting nothing new when I picked up Daphne du Maurier's entry in this crowded field. In a familiar enough beginning, circumstances bring the identical pair face to face and then cause one to take the place of the other, sustaining the charade through many tense moments while attempting to master the details and relationships of the absent one's life.

But The Scapegoat isn't a simple story of adventure and suspense hinging on mistaken identity, fortuitous maneuvering, and political intrigue. Nor is it, as in the Doppelgänger tales, an exposure of the dark and sometimes twisted secrets of the soul. Rather, I see this story as a fable of atonement and redemption. The title supplies the key: the Biblical scapegoat was literally a goat upon which were cast the sins of the community and which was then driven out into the wilderness as a sacrifice for all. Many mythic and religious traditions contain some version of this idea, the most obvious in Western culture being Jesus, called the Lamb of God.

In du Maurier's novel, John the Englishman is not forced to step into the life of the Frenchman Jean, who has absconded with all his personal effects and left him to fend for himself. He makes a conscious choice to attempt and then persist in the impersonation. In the process he discovers the many injuries done by his narcissistic counterpart to those around him, including some deep wrongs long past whose effects poison the present. The story of how John, in the role of Jean, deals with his double's culpability while clinging to his sense of himself as a separate being is a story of the growth of self-awareness, love, responsibility, and the search for meaning in life.

A recurring motif is that of windows: looking in, looking out, leaning out, curtains open, curtains drawn, shunning, revealing, enlightening, admitting, excluding. It would not strain interpretation to say that the author uses them symbolically, yet unobtrusively, to underscore how the focal character views, understands, and eventually opens the closed life that is given to him. We are a voyeur of him as voyeur, and when he becomes a participant, we follow and learn.

Right up until the suspenseful final pages, I had no idea how this story would end. And yet the conclusion has a satisfying rightness, a symmetry that echoes the symmetry of the beginning. If some questions are left unanswered, those are nothing other than our own answers to our own mystery: given what we know, what do we do now?

67 - Oh, Bravo! A wonderful review of one of my favorite books! Is this good, or bad, that we agree so emphatically on this book? As much as I love Rebecca, for its terrific Gothic suspense, I think that The Scapegoat is my favorite book of du Maurier's.

>68 MrsLee: Why, thank you, darlin'. I can't guess what it means for us to agree, but it must mean something! (Maybe it means that our tastes are not so different after all.)

I haven't read anything of du Maurier's since Rebecca and "The Birds" and a few other short stories, so long ago that the world's population has doubled since then. But I'm going to be looking up some others very soon. Any specific recommendations?

>68 MrsLee: & >69 Meredy:
The Scapegoat is on my tbr shelf for 2014 thanks to @MrsLee's recommendation of last year. It will be the next du Maurier I read and given the appearance of @Meredy's review, it will be my next read, immediately after London Falling.

@Meredy, as you may have gathered from previous posts I tend not to read a review until I have read the book concerned. I will be back to you on your review once The Scapegoat is under my belt.

>69 Meredy: Meredy: The only other du Maurier's I have on my shelves, besides Rebecca, The Scapegoat and The Birds, are two of her historical fictions, based on her ancestors, The Glassblowers and Mary Jane. The Glassblowers takes place in France, and seemed a very good read right after The Scapegoat, similar setting and all. Mary Jane is about a woman who becomes a consort for one of the kings of England, I've forgotten which. Both are historically interesting, although they are not suspense filled mysteries.

I know a lot of people like My Cousin Rachel and Frenchman's Creek, but it has been too long since I've read them to remember much about the read. I'm hoping to stumble across them again so I can refresh my memory. Books like that which under-whelmed me in my early twenties, sometimes have more depth or impact when I read them now.

> 70 - As always, I will be watching your reading thread to see what you think of it.

>70 pgmcc: Yes, as we've noted, I do the same thing. I just skim lightly for guidance when making a choice but leave all analysis and discussion aside until I've formed my own opinion. Now I'll watch for your comments.

>71 MrsLee: I've just ordered The House on the Strand. I have my eye on My Cousin Rachel as a possible next selection, remembering some recent comments about it in this neighborhood. Books and movies with "My" in the title invariably put me off, but I'll force my way past that little prejudice for the sake of an expected good read.

Waiting for Sunrise, by William Boyd (4 stars)

Six-word review: Impressive book left no lasting impression.

Extended review:

Oh, dear. This is a little bit embarrassing.

Well, maybe not so much for me, now that I think of it. Maybe for the book.

I finished Waiting for Sunrise on February 24th. As sometimes happens with a book that affects me strongly, or to which I have a complex reaction, I held off on writing my review. In this case, I wasn't too sure what to make of the ending and actually posted a request for comments that might help me to a better understanding of it.

There was no response.

And now, after just three weeks, I find that I can remember almost nothing of this book. I know that there was a lot of sex and sexual imagery at first, and that later it turned out that there was a point to all of it; and I know there was some sort of a complex scheme involving a persistent lover and concealed identities and secret messages. But somehow the rest has evaporated.

So--I gave it four stars, which is a very good rating for me, and now I find that it made almost no impression on me. I can remember more about books I listed in my journal two full years ago than I can recall of a novel I finished less than a month ago.

Hence this nonreview, which leaves me feeling a little foolish and also wondering what I think I'm doing when I rate a book anyway.

Well, I guess I enjoyed it.

Meredy, despite your not remembering much about the book I enjoyed reading your review. I think your honesty was the most impressive thing about it. Your admission to reading a book containing lots of sex, remembering very little about it but remembering you liked it is very honest.
;-)

The Rose Rent, by Ellis Peters (3½ stars; genre: 4 stars)

Six-word review: Slight departure refreshes Cadfael narrative formula.

Extended review: There's a young woman, but she isn't a blue-eyed seventeen-year-old virgin with golden tresses. There's a man, but he isn't a dashing lad of twenty who's wrongfully accused of something and being hidden by Cadfael until his innocence can be shown.

There's a killing, but it isn't of a middle-aged merchant with few enough redeeming qualities and some secret tie to the fate of kingdoms. There's a mystery, but its solution doesn't hang on some special knowledge that only Cadfael has or on a single thread or hair tellingly caught on a doorpost or a riverbank shrub.

So although the setting and the continuing cast of characters are familiar and the story moves rapidly through a well-traveled arc, there's a feeling of novelty about this installment in the series.

And very well timed for me, too, since I picked this one up prematurely, needing a break from much heavier fare.

May the god of reading bless all cozy mysteries.

The Rose Rent was one of the very few Cadfael books that I am able to recall individually when I look back over the entire series.

It seems to have become a pattern with me that the books I like the most are the hardest to review; or at least they take me the longest. I list them in message #1 as I complete them, but I may labor over review comments for weeks. I'm now in arrears by four titles:

• The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
• Stoner
• Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths
• Prose Edda (Everyman edition)

Not to mention the first two Sherlock Holmes novels and one anthology's worth of the short stories, all rereads, which I won't attempt to review in the usual fashion.

The problem seems to be a little bit of perfectionistic paralysis, an OCDish compulsion to do it right, to do them justice. Especially when I have a complex response to them, when they bring up new insights or cause some serious reflection, as Stoner has done, I feel bound to account for this and not just pass it off lightly with a "great book," "liked it."

(This compulsion is my own; I hope no one feels driven to try to relieve me of it.)

I'm currently reading The Goldfinch, which, at about the 1/3 mark, strikes me as being heavily burdened by the author's overzealous commitment to showing and not telling. Showing is good, but not everything needs to be shown and shown so exhaustively. I find myself wondering what it is that has made this book such a hit. At any rate, the duration of this read--well over 700 pages--ought to give me a little time to catch up with overdue reviews.

>77 Meredy: the books I like the most are the hardest to review;

I feel the same way. One of the best books I have read in years is Wilful Blindness and it generated a massive reaction in me but I could not start my review, there was just so much in it.

>77 Meredy: Yes, I agree- I feel like good books challenge me to write equally good reviews (to the best of my ability).

>78 pgmcc: It occurs to me that the cause and effect might go the other way: the books that are going to arouse the strongest responses and give me the most to think about will turn out to be the ones I like the best, perhaps because they affected me so much.

>79 sandstone78: And yet some readers seem to be able to deal out a few lines for a work they truly admire, without obsessing about it. That's what I attempted, in a way, with my six-word encapsulations, but I can't let some things go at that.

Those economical reviewers probably have neater houses than I do, too, and enviably tidy desks.

>81 Meredy: Some people are just blessed with that kind of carefree economy, I guess... me, I can overcomplicate anything. :)

(My desk personally is never untidy, it's just, um, creatively organized! I know where everything is... probably...)

Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths, by Nancy Marie Brown (4½ stars)

Six-word review: Icelandic sagas permeate contemporary Western culture.

Extended review:

Snorri Sturluson was a thirteenth-century Icelandic poet who assumed the task of writing down many of the myths and heroic tales of his people. He assembled a great number of those verses, enhancing them by his own invention, in a medieval masterwork known as the Prose Edda. He also codified the rules and elements of verse composition in old Icelandic, an art so highly prized in the Nordic lands of the Middle Ages that kings, warriors, and common folk alike revered its finest practitioners.

No warrior himself, Snorri was crafty, duplicitous, and relentless in pursuit of his supreme political ambitions. And he used his powers of the spoken and written word as much for self-aggrandizement as to glorify the valiant deeds of others--and to heap scorn on the losers.

In a society that crowned no kings of its own and guarded the independence of its barren volcanic island with the famous Viking ferocity, the mighty heroes of sword and shield depended on the poets and songcrafters in chieftains' halls to enshrine them in legend. For them, a record in memorable verse was the surest path to immortality--an immortality that the gods themselves did not share. For the destiny of the elder gods was to end with the cataclysm of Ragnarok and the bloody birth of a new world order.

Author Brown recounts Snorri's own story in lively, engaging prose, striking a sometimes difficult balance between readability and sound documentation. Like the ancient sagas of gods and heroes themselves, the world of medieval Iceland is alive with family rivalries, alliances and betrayals, politics and intrigue, and blood-drenched warfare. The line between fiction and fact is often unclear; indeed, the relative meanings of "fiction" and "fact" are unclear. Along the way Brown recounts numerous tales from Snorri's Edda and other Icelandic sagas, sometimes revealing their possible roots in history and more often showing how they themselves entered into history and shaped it.

The final chapter, "The Ring," brilliantly traces the descendants of the Edda right down to the present day, illuminating relationships among works that have framed and colored our perception of ourselves and our place in the world. As Brown writes in the opening pages:

=====(Excerpt begins)

(I)n the early 1600s Snorri was resurrected. Translations from Old Norse appeared throughout Europe. The craze led in one direction to the gothic novel and ultimately to modern heroic fantasy. Snorri influenced writers as various as Thomas Gray, William Blake, Sir Walter Scott, the Brothers Grimm, Thomas Carlyle, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Richard Wagner, Matthew Arnold, Henrik Ibsen, William Morris, Thomas Hardy, J. R. R. Tolkien, Hugh MacDiarmid, Jorge Luis Borges, W. H. Auden, Poul Anderson, Günther Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, Ursula K. LeGuin, A. S. Byatt, Seamus Heaney, Jane Smiley, Neil Gaiman, and Michael Chabon.

In another direction the rediscovery of Snorri's works led to Hitler's master race.

Snorri may be the most influential writer of the Middle Ages. His Edda, according to the 1909 translator, is "the deep and ancient wellspring of Western culture."

(Introduction, page 6)

=====(Excerpt ends)

Following the 206 pages of text are 38 pages of backmatter, including notes on sources, a list of further reading, and a detailed index in small print. Song of the Vikings is not just an entertaining and enlightening read, furnishing background and context for some of our most popular contemporary literature. It also shows us the depths of our own largely forgotten roots, flourishing even today in our classrooms, libraries, e-readers, and movie theaters.

To me, the hallmark of an exceptional work in any medium is that it alters my perceptions. It is no exaggeration to say that I am viewing the world and the words of its literary interpreters differently today, having read this book. This one will remain on my shelf as a resource and touchstone for future reading.

>83 Meredy:
another add to the wish list!

Edda, by Snorri Sturluson, translated by Anthony Faulkes (5 stars*)

Six-word review: Authentic medieval masterwork exhausts reader's attention.

Extended review:

The book called "the prose Edda," by Snorri Sturluson, is a (or some might say the) seminal work of Western culture. Its author's story is told in Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths, by Nancy Marie Brown (reviewed above and here). Brown recommends this 1987 Everyman edition, translated from Old Icelandic by Anthony Faulkes, as her preferred version, so that's the one I chose.

Following a prologue, the text is divided into three parts: "Gylfaginning" (the tricking of Gylfi), "Skalskaparmal" (the language of poetry), and "Hattatal" (list of verse-forms). The first of the three contains the bulk of the stories that we know as the Norse myths. The other two are encyclopedic discourses on the art and craft of versification, compiled and composed by a virtuoso of Icelandic poetry; as Brown herself says in her account, "('The Tally of Verse-Forms' is) a flamboyant display that frankly is no fun to read."

After completing the first part, the main narrative portion of the work, I read some way into the inventory of kennings (called periphrasis in literature courses), a blend of metaphor and riddle (for example, calling the sea "ship's road" or "island-fetter" and battle a "clashing metal-shower") as far as I could stand to, and eventually ground to a halt. I skimmed from there, turning all the pages and noting that a goodly portion of the third section is rendered in Old Icelandic verse with prose translation. As Brown says, there's not much point in trying to recreate the musical and rhetorical effects of the original; it can't be done.

This book is a work for students and scholars and not for the lay reader. In the end I settled for reading the helpful text summaries at the back and gave myself credit for reading the book halfway through.

The annotated index is not only extensive and detailed but in some respects unorthodox, in that it contains new information not found in the text. It was here that I found an etymological expansion of the term "Ragnarok," as well as numerous other names and expressions. The index alone makes this work a useful resource for anyone who is going to give the ancient texts and their derivatives more than a casual look, but I would recommend turning elsewhere if you just want to read the stories.

-----------

*This rating has no meaning. This work is in a class with the Bible and the Mahabharata; and how might I rate them? I am in no way qualified to judge it. Either five stars or an abstention is the only thing that makes any sense. Please note that in my ranking system, stars reflect an attempt to evaluate the goodness or worth of a work and don't necessarily signify whether I liked it.

>83 Meredy:, 85 Book bullets! Wish I could find these here!

Last night I began Tristram Shandy, not knowing what I was getting into, and set it aside after only a few pages. I'm not in the right state of mind for it at present, and might not be later on, either.

And now I've abandoned On the Road. Actually that was a joint decision: it was our current Wednesday-night read-aloud, and after one 90-minute session and a third of the second, we just decided not to continue. That happens sometimes. It was too aimless, trippy, and impressionistic for me, and somehow it didn't seem to grip my husband the way it did in his youth.

And maybe it was just too much of a comedown after its predecessor, which was Stoner--worth every one of the five stars I gave it.

We've switched to a so-so pop-nonfiction selection called Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, which I guess will keep us going while I engage in an invariably difficult search for our next title.

I read On the road while I was at uni (by choice, it wasn't on a reading list) and didn't get what all the fuss was about. From what you say, I doubt I'd like it any more if I tried it again now.

>85 Meredy: For what it's worth I read the Penguin edition of the Prose Edda a few years back where they omit that third section with the more academic goals. In that form it was pretty readable both as fist-pumpingly good mythology and in providing context for newer literature. It made me feel like I ought to read Tolkien again.

>87 Meredy: I also put Tristam Shandy down after a few pages. And I'm not planning on returning.

>90 fundevogel: Judging from this confident-sounding review, Tristram Shandy boils down to a protracted dick joke. I don't have and never have had an appetite for those, but I imagine that there's been an audience for juvenile humor for as long as there have been juveniles. Myself, I'd rather read Scott or Eliot when it comes to older literature. Right now, though, I'm taking a break from thought with a Kellerman page-turner.

I didn't turn right to rereading Tolkien, but I did watch the extended version of the three movies once again, and I ordered up Byatt's Ragnarok for a reread (even though I didn't see the appeal or the necessity of constant references to the thin child, since it never appeared to make any difference whether she was thin or thick).

>86 hfglen: There are a lot of versions of the Edda out there, and some of them are not at all recent. I hope you can find one in your neighborhood.

>82 sandstone78: Overcomplication...yes, alas, me too.

>91 Meredy:

Ack! A cruel and unusually punishing judgement of one of my favourite books!! I'd try to hype it, but the ominous reference to Scott and Eliot makes my crest fall (oops, probably can be construed as a dick joke... ;))

Sterne is unique (Tristram Shandy has been claimed as the first "postmodern" novel, for a reason), and sly, silly, sexy and seriously deep, but not in the manner of the dreary, up-its-backside 19th century. I find his voice enchanting and technique miraculous.

I wonder if you might not find the tone of his shorter works, A sentimental journey and Journal to Eliza more agreeable.

>92 LolaWalser: Wellll . . . I personally always want to hear opposing views (although I seldom find as much of a welcome for my own as I might wish). And yours does carry extra weight with me (as does @fundevogel's). So maybe this is just not the right time for me to tackle it.

I'll note that I did enjoy the first sentence, and add that my mention of Scott and Eliot is not to cite favorites but to indicate that I'm not uncomfortable with the literary styles of past centuries.

Maybe I'll come back to this one when I'm not feeling so short of patience or so much in need of an easy mental flight to Elsewhere.

The "elsewhere" in Tristram Shandy is really one man's remarkable spirit, so I can see where it could throw someone looking for an immersive trip to centuries past.

I like the mischief-makers, the laughers, the non-linear ones, so... clearly there's a recommendation and caution! :)

Guilt, by Jonathan Kellerman (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Strange trail leads to ruthless murderer.

Extended review:

Not quite as cozy as, say, the Brother Cadfael yarns, because Kellerman doesn't shrink from the gruesome and creepy parts, the Alex Delaware mysteries are still a comfortable fit: page-turners with a core cast of likeable regulars and an endless succession of bit players who could be our neighbors, a story arc that plays like a scavenger hunt, and a perpetrator with a twisted psyche who makes us hope we don't actually know anybody like that.

In this twenty-eighth installment in the series, Kellerman enlivens the mix of quirky cameos with several featured performers of a sort that we're very unlikely to meet outside of fiction. As ever, Delaware's intuitive powers, appetite for the challenge, and capacity to stare unblinking into the darkest shadows pair nicely with Detective Sturgis's solid police skills and ability to work the system, including defying it when necessary.

Much of the entertainment here is in chasing the witness- and suspect-surfing process from link to link as psychologist and detective concoct one hypothesis after another. If author Kellerman didn't pause to create detailed miniature portraits of the characters, environments, and artifacts that they encounter along the way (a worried teenager with hypervigilant parents, a service that does every little thing that celebrities don't feel like doing for themselves, a spectacular custom-edition 1938 Duesenberg), the puzzle and its solution would be too thin to sustain a novel. It's the glimpses of hidden lives, with all their peculiarities and small guilty secrets, that hold our attention. Some mysteries have a hub-and-spokes architecture or are constructed like building-blocks; Kellerman's are daisy chains.

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt (4½ stars)

Six-word review: Something like a slow mental tornado.

Extended review:

My posts from the What Are You Reading Now? group thread for the week of 29 March 2014:

Mar 28, 2:49pm
I'm about halfway through The Goldfinch and marveling at how many pages it takes for even small things to happen. It's due back at the library on April 1st, and I don't think I'll be allowed to renew it because there's a waiting list. I wonder how many of the 116 or so who were ahead of me managed to finish it.

Mar 28, 4:38pm
>mollygrace: I may have a dilemma to face, come Tuesday: purchase a copy of a book I've already read half of, or go back to the end of the waiting list and wait several months to finish it, or give it up. Thanks for confirming my sense that this is a case (all too common, I find lately) of overdoing the "show, don't tell" rule that every writing workshop and how-to manual wants to teach. You don't have to show everything, dammit.

Mar 30, 2:57pm
>Citizenjoyce: Thanks for the encouragement. Actually I'm not at all daunted by the length, or I wouldn't have tackled it. I love long novels. The issue for me is proportion: is the number of words appropriate to the content? There's no value in going on just for the sake of going on--or because it's too much work to cut it.

I've read 800-page novels that were over too soon and 8000-word stories that went yawningly on too long. In fact, I've read four-page stories that rambled and wasted words.

As an editor I find nothing harder than cutting; and yet I think I could have taken fifty to a hundred pages out of The Goldfinch without loss to the story, the texture, or the themes.

I'm closing in on 600 now and hoping to finish it before it's due.

Mar 31, 3:57pm
Finished it: The Goldfinch. Whew and wow.

------

I galloped through the last quarter, thoroughly caught up in both the plot and the inner world of the focal character. It was the latter that really gripped me. This is one of those books that not only make me feel that I've been through something--had an experience that feels more immediate than vicarious--but altered my perceptions. It wasn't just the author's descriptions of drug use and harrowing depictions of drug withdrawal, although those were part of it. More affectingly, it was her evocation of the power of great art to possess and shape the mind.

I don't apologize for remarking on its verbosity as I went along. Descriptions such as this are beautifully written, but there are simply too many of them, too many or too much; they feel like authorial self-indulgence to me:

=====(Excerpt begins)

It was all very different from the crowded, complicated, and overly formal atmosphere of the Barbours', where everything was rehearsed and scheduled like a Broadway production, an airless perfection from which Andy had been in constant retreat, scuttling to his bedroom like a frightened squid. By contrast Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea stains and tobacco, where every clock in the house said something different and time didn't actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock, obeying the pace of his antique-crowded backwater, far from the factory-built, epoxy-glued version of the world. Though he enjoyed going out to the movies, there was no television; he read old novels with marbled end papers; he didn't own a cell phone; his computer, a prehistoric IBM, was the size of a suitcase and useless. In blameless quiet, he buried himself in his work, steam-bending veneers or hand-threading table legs with a chisel, and his happy absorption floated up from the workshop and diffused through the house with the warmth of a wood-burning stove in winter. He was absent-minded and kind; he was neglectful and muddle-headed and self-deprecating and gentle; often he didn't hear the first time you spoke to him, or even the second time; he lost his glasses, mislaid his wallet, his keys, his dry-cleaning tickets, and was always calling me downstairs to get on my hands and knees with him to help him search for some minuscule fitting or piece of hardware he'd dropped on the floor. Occasionally he opened the store by appointment, for an hour or two at a time, but--as far as I could tell--this was little more than an excuse to bring out the bottle of sherry and visit with friends and acquaintances; and if he showed a piece of furniture, opening and shutting drawers to oohs and ahs, it seemed to be mostly in the spirit in which Andy and I, once upon a time, had dragged out our toys for show and tell. (pages 394-395)

=====(Excerpt ends)

Nevertheless, The Goldfinch took me vividly and breathlessly to places I'd never been before. "Whew and wow" pretty much sums up my response to this book. In the end I rated it four and a half stars and listed it among my best reads of the quarter.

>96 Meredy: I have been pondering over acquiring The Goldfinch for some months. Your 4.5 stars and your final paragraph have pushed me over the edge. It will be a definite item in my next purchase. I have not read the detail of your review but your enthusiasm is sufficient to convince me to invest.

>97 pgmcc: Thank you for that high compliment. My details don't include any spoilers, but I know you like to let your own views coalesce before you read others'. I did feel vexed and at times oppressed by the flaws in this novel, but I also felt that the payoffs were ample compensation. Naturally I'll watch for your remarks in due course.

Stoner, by John Williams (5 stars)

Six-word review: Powerful portrait in quiet, graceful prose.

Extended review: It's for a book like this that I try to leave room at the top. And the room at the top isn't quite enough for me; I'd have to downgrade a lot of my three-and-a-half-star ratings in order for a five to mean what this novel deserves.

When I started Stoner, I didn't expect too much. Yes, I'd seen strong recommendations on LT, which happens to be the only place I'd ever heard of it. But despite praise featuring expressions such as "brilliant" and "beautiful" and "little gem," it didn't sound like much.

And in fact it seemed not only to begin slowly but to suggest to the reader, in an almost diffident tone, that the story of William Stoner isn't worth our attention; that the subject of this fictional biography is unremarkable, forgettable, and possibly downright dull. The opening offers no hooks or enticements and asks no indulgence of us. Here is the man, it seems to say: here he is, as he is, take him or leave him.

And yet the author did take him onward, for 275 more pages. And I followed willingly because somehow the character of Stoner caught my interest and held it, and the language of its rendering, in fine brushstrokes rather than in grand sweeps of color and line, was all the more affecting for its restraint. The scope and outer dimensions are small, but the interior expands like the unseen world on a microscopic slide.

If I hadn't happened to read this one just when I did, in parallel with the text of old Norse myths and a history of the thirteenth-century Icelandic poet who wrote many of them down, I might not have been led to see the figure of Stoner and the arc of his life as if projected onto a larger screen. But because of that unintended juxtaposition, I found myself recasting it in heroic terms, as a mythic struggle as potent as the tales of gods and monsters, cursed rings and dire potions, mighty battles, doom and death. Here, then, in a sepia-toned miniature, without fanfare, crests, or ribbons, we see a modest warrior who

• came of humble origin,
• labored diligently to gain a place in a select company,
• met his mentor,
• found his destiny,
• persevered in the long quest,
• championed the right,
• rescued the maiden,
• stood his ground in battle,
• vanquished the foe,
• had his heart cut out by the witch,
• won it back through the power of his steadfast faith,
• proved his valor by being faithful and true despite adversity,
• earned the fair lady's token,
• met his ultimate enemy clear-eyed and without fear,
and
• succumbed with dignity on the field of honor.

The battlefield is academe, and the knight is an unassuming professor and scholar of medieval literature. As for the stakes, they are personal and private, and we recognize them as the stuff of our own insignificant dramas, looming large only because we are so close to them. It's the very improbability of William Stoner as the hero of a twentieth-century novel that invests his unheralded quest with significance--the same significance that brings shape and contour to the myths of our own lives.

Very interesting that you see him as a warrior. I'd think his abject passivity would disqualify him from such an image.

For me the book started promisingly, but I ended up disliking it AND thinking it a failure. However, my opinion is in such a minority I have no qualms making it known to a fan! :)

Dona Tartt is a fine writer. I liked The secret history but after the ultimately disappointing The Little friend, I'm not sure I have the energy for another brick.

The Hermit of Eyton Forest, by Ellis Peters (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Surprise! Someone's hiding out in disguise.

Extended review:

Reading a Brother Cadfael mystery reminds me a lot of having lunch at a bookstore cafe: you know what you're getting, it won't be amazing but it's perfectly fine, you won't leave hungry, and anyway you didn't go there for the food.

I wouldn't have said this when I'd read only the first two or three in the series, but this was my fourteenth. Among the things I'm happy to give the author credit for are building a main character with enough dimensions and conflicts to be interesting, recreating a fascinating historical setting, and knowing a good formula when she finds one.

Not that everything is obvious from the beginning: it isn't. There are puzzles, red herrings, subplots, mysterious travelers, false names and false pretenses. And, dependably, there are charming young people whose threatened fortunes are championed by the worldly-wise Benedictine brother.

In this case, we have an orphaned young heir with an overbearing grandmother, a runaway serf suspected of murder, and a revered hermit caught up in a scheme to gain control of valuable lands. Somehow this is all the business of the abbey, and Cadfael is actively engaged once again in the service of truth and justice. Dependable fun, written with style and old-fashioned grace. I didn't come here for astonishment.

>100 LolaWalser: I can understand why you say that. But it's that seeming passivity that I see as strength. Stoner reminds me of the Zen master in this famous koan: http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/3isthatso.html

We know from his adoption of Archer Sloane as his mentor and his ardor for medieval verse that Stoner perceives gems where many would see only dust. It's with the same inner eye that we have to view Stoner if we want to know him. The subtlety of this portrayal is, to me, the great beauty of the book.

With the stoicism that has been bred into him by parents, whom he never judges or disrespects, he persists and even prevails in the battles that surge unwanted and unsought into his life.

(Spoilers follow)

• He stands his ground against his colleagues in the matter of Charles Walker, the student who tries to bluff his way through his orals under the protection of Lomax. The jousting in this scene does have the feel of a deadly clash. Picturing myself in that situation, I am in awe of Stoner's toughness in the face of powerful pressure to capitulate.

• He refuses to be intimidated about his affair with Katherine, although he does acknowledge defeat when she is threatened. Despite losing her, he never loses what she means to him.

• He wins the duel with Lomax when his nemesis tries to exact revenge through class assignments and class schedules, using the means available to him through the same professional system that Lomax is wielding to punish him: a judo-like strategy that overthrows the opponent by using his own weight and momentum against him.

• He weathers all the storms of Edith's mad assaults, both indirect and overt, by holding steady and not fighting back. Instead of engaging in a contest he can't win, he waits her out, until she at last gives up and leaves him in peace.

Through all, he sustains the capacity for passion, the passion that drives him in the first place to find his true path, far outside the one prescribed for him, and that makes him the kind of teacher we remember all our lives.

Sum, by David Eagleman (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Life glimpsed as if from beyond.

Extended review:

In 110 small pages, author and neuroscientist Eagleman treats us to forty vignettes displaying perspectives on life as if seen in a rear-view mirror.

This is not a book about religion or spirituality, and it does not summon us to believe, but rather to be aware of our lives in present time. Each of these small gems is both fanciful and philosophical, some silly and some profound, all of them out of the ordinary by either a little or a lot.

What if the repetitive actions of our lives--showering, standing in line, signing our names--were performed not intermittently but each in one long, unbroken sequential turn? What if the molecules that make up our bodies missed being part of the old gang once it's broken up and redistributed? What if we were invented as computing machines to enable some lower form of intelligence to discover the answers to their big questions? These interesting speculations on the cosmic mysteries, from two to four pages apiece, are like sparklers on the Fourth of July: not starbursts that light up the sky and awe the multitude, perhaps, but entertaining by ones and twos, small enough that we can handle them and still feel that we've played a modest part in the greater show.

The originality of Eagleman's perceptions and their accessible presentation on this miniature scale make this book impossible to rank alongside 800-page novels and weighty works of scholarship. I'm giving it three and a half "I really liked it" stars without reflecting any regard or disregard toward comparable works, of which I can't think of any.

A Rare Benedictine, by Ellis Peters (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Cadfael's backstory, meant for series fans.

Extended review:

I sought out and read this small volume when I'd completed fourteen of the twenty novels in the Brother Cadfael series. Having come to know the crime-solving medieval monk fairly well by this time, I was interested in the story that explains how and why he made his unexpected transition in middle age from the life of a fighting man to a pledge of poverty, chastity, and obedience behind monastery walls.

Any time after the second or third chronicle, when I was already well entrenched as a series reader, I'd have welcomed this amplification of Cadfael's personal history.

However, I think the three short stories under this cover would have made for a poor introduction to the series; they were meant primarily to fill in background rather than to attract new readers. As such, they perform their function well. I don't think it's altogether fair to rate them independently. Rather, a newcomer to the series and the character would do best to start with the first or second of the novels, and come looking for Cadfael in his pre-Shrewsbury days only when moved by curiosity.

>103 Meredy: - One of those sounds like the premise to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the one about us being made as computers for another species.

>104 Meredy: - Agreed.

>104 Meredy: I also agree about A Rare Benedictine. I really liked it, but mainly because I was already attached to Brother Cadfael. I think you expressed it very well. And it is a beautiful book. (The hardcover, anyway.)

The House on the Strand, by Daphne du Maurier (3 stars)

Six-word review: Time traveler becomes addicted to past.

Extended review:

From the perspective of decades, du Maurier's 1969 novel about a secret drug that transports the user to a hypnotically attractive other world seems to be a cautionary comment on the tune-in-turn-on-drop-out culture of the 1960s.

I don't know enough about du Maurier and her social environment to know if she'd have been moved to deliver a warning about the seductive dangers of inhabiting an alternate life through the use of mind-altering substances. What is more likely, perhaps, is that the author was exploring once again the experience of a relatively innocent protagonist plunging into a life of someone else's creation and struggling to find his or her way in it. This is a theme I recall from both Rebecca and The Scapegoat, the only other two novels I've read by this author.

Unfortunately for me, I found the world of the novelist's creation even more disorienting than did her character, Richard Young. The fourteenth-century setting created by du Maurier and intermittently visited by the disembodied presence of her twentieth-century protagonist is fraught with unnecessary navigational difficulties. I'm always a little wary of a novel that includes a multigenerational family tree in its frontmatter. In the present case, I stuck a Post-it on the chart and referred to it many times, sometimes repeatedly in the course of reading a single page, and I still couldn't keep the characters straight. Not only are there two unusual three-syllable surnames beginning with C (Champernoune, Carminowe) and two important secondary characters beginning with O (Otto, Oliver), there are three Joannas and three Henrys. I'm afraid the amount of blurring caused by this much visual confusion detracted considerably from my enjoyment of the story.

It seems, indeed, that the author was a little confused herself at times. One clear entry in the genealogy, for instance, shows a family with a son named William and his two siblings. In the text we are told that the family consists of two boys and a girl; moreover, the younger two are referred to as William's brother and sister. And yet the chart shows the three as William, Elizabeth, and Katherine.

I also had some trouble tracking the geography and topology. In the immediate and historic vicinities we have Tywardreath, Treverran, Trenadlyn, Trevenna, Trelawn, Trefengy, Tregest, and Treesmill. So many of the comings and goings sounded just alike that I pretty much gave up trying to hold the locations and relationships in my head.

Further complicating the chronologic movements of Richard Young was the fact that different sensations accompanied his leaps in time--sometimes a smooth transition, sometimes a jarring and even sickening jolt--and I thought we were supposed to perceive or at least look for a pattern in these effects. If they had any significance, however, it was never explained, so I was paying attention to an element that was given emphasis without meaning.

And finally, the aspect that was probably the most unsettling to me was not spatial or temporal but emotional. Richard Young struck me as a pretty cold-blooded character. Despite his protestations of affection, he seemed to feel no particular warmth for his wife and not much for his two stepsons. He clearly disliked his wife's best friends. And he didn't even seem to have much of a reaction to the loss of an important relationship; his main concerns seemed to be pragmatic. Consequently I found it hard to believe that his supposed romantic attachment to one of the fourteenth-century women was anything more than a one-sided physical attraction to a woman whose chief allure was unattainability.

In sum, what promised to be a suspenseful yarn featuring a trippy Jekyll-and-Hyde magic potion and depicting the sinister side of addictive hallucinogens was instead a sort of narrative muddle that led me on to a disappointingly unresolved ending. I usually enjoy time-travel tales, no matter how implausible, but this one was simply unsatisfying.

>107 Meredy: It has been more than 30 years since I read that one, but I was never moved to revisit it. Du Maurier's works either blow me away or leave me cold. Not much in between. Maybe a couple of them are in between.

>108 MrsLee: That puts it succinctly: it left me cold. You know what? I'm just going to go ahead and assume that we felt the same way about this one.

So far all the Du Maurier's I have read have been very good. I am in dread of having started with the best with the result that I will some day be disappointed. This sounds like a candidate for disappointment.

(Those I have read are: Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, My Cousin Rachael, The Doll and The Scapegoat.

Having just finished Sharp Objects, I'm now behind by eight reviews:

The Hare with Amber Eyes
The Sign of the Four
Wednesday Is Indigo Blue
Gone Girl
Thou Art That
The Canvas
Ragnarok
Sharp Objects

I may have to cut some corners. Otherwise this self-imposed obligation is starting to feel a little too much like overdue homework.

>111 Meredy: @jillmwo is the one that checks our homework. She will expect a note if you haven't got it done.

Well, for what it's worth, @Meredy, I'd be most interested in your feedback on Gone Girl. I am just about to begin it myself in advance of next month's book discussion at my library. Your insights would be most welcome.

(As for you, dear @pgmcc, you are free to imagine that I've blown a raspberry in your general direction. To say more would be to risk indelicate turns of phrase.)

I hope Doyle continues to impress on reread. I caught up with the third season of BBC's Sherlock last week--what a disaster.

>114 LolaWalser: I think season three saw the show jump the shark.

>115 pgmcc:

It's very far up its own backside, isn't it. I'm just sad at the thought of the masses of youngsters who haven't read the original stories or seen other versions, who will forever have Cumberbumber's performance imprinted as THE Sherlock Holmes. That he'll forever be the "sexy" "sociopath" to them.

(I don't mind the actor, I think he's great--all the actors are excellent--but I just hate the whole "philosophy" of this interpretation of Conan Doyle.)

>114 LolaWalser:, >115 pgmcc:, >116 LolaWalser: Oh, dear, I'm disappointed--but grateful to be duly warned. And actually, I'm not surprised, just maybe surprised that it happened so fast.

I haven't seen season 3 yet (still stalled in my Netflix queue), but I have to acknowledge that I regarded the first two as mostly candy. I enjoyed them for their clever and often sly references to the canon, a sort of parody-pastiche, but I never thought for a moment that this rendering of the pair was meant to be taken seriously. The notion that some generation of viewers will think this is Sherlock Homes is as distressing as the idea that people who have never read Andersen and Grimm will take their view of fairy tales from Disney.

Jeremy Brett's portrayal was excellent. Alas, I internalized Basil Rathbone's at such a young age that his image permeated my original reading of all the stories as a youngster and lurks even now in rereads. And because of that, I can't shake the goofy (and elderly) Watson that accompanied him, even though the stories don't support Watson as a bumbling oaf. One thing that the BBC interpretation did right is to make them young.

My enthusiasm for the rereads is mostly sentimental now, I'll confess. Since the collection I'm reading is the annotated one by Baring-Gould, I'm seeing all the sober-sided attempts to reconcile awkward chronologies and explain careless authorial errors as if they were meaningful revelations. It might be best just to let them be fun and not study them too closely, but who am I to say that pretending to study things closely and take them seriously isn't fun?

>117 Meredy: >116 LolaWalser:
In the event that you are interested in my thoughts on Sherlock I have posted my comments on each episode of each series at the link below and also added some general comments. Each series is protected by separate spoiler masks and the general comments are masked separately also. I put these comments together shortly after having watched series three.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/163162#4668371

I share the feeling of regret that youngsters are likely to mistake modern representations of traditional or classical stories as the original, but I find myself thinking that about so many things these days. My teenaged son has never used a cassette tape, let alone a reel-to-reel tape recorder. He thinks an eight-track is some very sophisticated form of locomotive.

>113 jillmwo: To say more would be to risk indelicate turns of phrase.

@jillmwo, I am sure that any indelicate turns of phrase from you would be most eloquent and erudite.

As for raspberry blowing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtJrMtGmZFc

114, 115, 116, 117> In my opinion, the third season suffered mainly from the time gap between it and the second season. They had to catch the audience up with the characters and reestablish John and Sherlock's relationship. As a result, it was much more focused on character development than on the mysteries. Hopefully, the next season will be better.

>113 jillmwo: I'll try to do that one next, then. My six-word review says: Mystery-thriller navigates death-defying hairpin turns.

Maybe it's enough to add that I put Flynn's first novel on library request as soon as I finished that one, and I've just given it a solid four stars.

The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam, by Chris Ewan (3 stars)

Six-word review: Lightweight mystery falls short of promise.

Extended review:

The first of Chris Ewan's "Good Thief" series introduces a great premise--that of a novelist who writes about an accomplished thief and happens to be one himself. This setup creates numerous intriguing possibilities, and the rascal as hero is, in general, pretty hard to resist. Countless Hollywood action flicks have made capital on that concept.

I did find Charlie Howard appealing, and I enjoyed learning some of the tricks of a burglar's trade, assuming that the author has authentic knowledge from some source.

As soon as the plaster monkeys showed up, however, my doubts arose. Conan Doyle may or may not have been the first to use the device, but it has certainly been seen many times in film and fiction since "The Six Napoleons" appeared in 1904. I kept hoping their function wouldn't be the obvious one, but no such luck.

On the plus side, there is a jumbled but entertaining assortment of maybe-good-guys-maybe-bad-guys, and I didn't guess the ending. The truth about the culprit is surprising but plausible.

On the minus side, the ending took a lot, really a lot, truly an awful lot of explaining. The showdown scene where everything is revealed went on and on, and after a while I lost track. A day after finishing the book, I couldn't tell you how all the pieces fit together and how the protagonist-narrator worked it out.

I also expected, from the city name in the title and especially the "Guide to" in imitation of a traveler's handbook, that the setting would play a much bigger role. But not much of a feel for the locale comes through. Some narratives give you a real sense of place and some don't, and it's okay either way, but the emphasis in the title invites that expectation, and it isn't fulfilled.

Another minus goes to Charlie's emotional distance. I never felt that he had much of an investment in the solution to the puzzle. It wasn't his problem. Wanting to profit by someone else's crime may work as a motivation, but it doesn't really engage the emotions of the reader; and the allure of an attractive young woman is no substitute for real feeling. It just doesn't seem like Charlie cares very much about anything that's going on (except when it comes to threats to his life and limb), and for that reason it's hard for me to care.

As a light-duty page-turner, of course, it doesn't have to go very deep. For what it is, it was enjoyable enough.

If only. And here comes the big minus for me, the deal-breaker, the peculiarity so tiresome that I'm ready to drop the series after only one try.

It's not just that the book needs some editorial cleanup, although it does, especially in matters of punctuation. It's not even the author's sloppy misuse of words ("palette" for "palate," "grizzly" for "grisly," "teemed" for "teamed," and (shudder) "shammy" for "chamois"; or, if those don't get you, how about "right off" for "write-off"?) or laughably weird constructions like this, on page 231: "Then, just as I threw up my hands in disbelief and tossed my head back on my shoulders..." (where it had been, he doesn't say).

No, it's what I must charitably assume is a regionalism or colloquialism, albeit one I've never run across before in nearly sixty years of reading, including the work of at least as many British authors as American; or perhaps it's a local or family eccentricity; in any case, it's a nonstandard usage that no editor ought to have let pass.

The author uses "sit" and "stand" as transitive verbs when referring to a person's action--and hence uses them in the passive voice.

What this means is that he doesn't treat sitting and standing as if they were something a person or object does, but rather, as if they were something that's done to a person or object: not "he sat" or "he was sitting" or even "he was seated" but "he was sat."

• The monkey was sat on his haunches, knees up around his chest...
• ...I should have been proof reading the manuscript that was sat on my desk...
• One of them was sat on a wooden chair in a Lycra bikini...
• It was just sat there, no use to anyone until the Baileys returned...
• ...my hands were tied to the back of the plastic chair I was sat on...
• Stuart was sat just to my side...
• ...the thin man was sat with his hands clenched together between his legs...
• ...he stood up from the crate he was sat on...
• Outside of that doorway was a yard and in that yard was a taxi cab, with an anxious looking widow sat inside of it

• ...I was stood before a beer tap at a bar...
• ...I found myself stood opposite the window of Cafe de Brug...
• I mean, who was I kidding, stood outside the cafe, pretending I hade a decision to make?
• First off was a crumpled photograph of two men stood in front of a muddy river...
• A uniformed colleague was stood beside him and an unmarked police car was parked just behind.

(And many more instances besides.)

Yes, those words can be used that way with a particular intent: my mother sat me down (I was sat down) for a talking to; the coat was hung on a hook, and the umbrella was stood in the corner. But in standard speech and writing those verbs are active, not passive.

And that quirk of usage is enough of an irritant that, all virtues notwithstanding, I don't care to spend any more time with this author.

The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker (4.5 stars)

Six-word review: Complex and satisfying modern fairy tale.

Extended review:

What can you be when being what you were born to be becomes impossible?

That question is the core issue for two finely wrought characters, a golem (a woman made of clay and animated by Kabbalistic magic) and a jinni (genie) trapped in a copper flask for a millennium. Both emerge in 1899 New York and find themselves unlikely comrades in the struggle to pass as ordinary human beings when their true nature has been denied: hers by losing the master whom she was created to serve and his by being held captive under a spell he can't break.

In their alienness they are kindred spirits of a sort. And in their alienness they speak to those of us who have at some time--or at all times?--felt that we did not belong among our fellow creatures. Kept from self-realization by powers they can't escape, they can only choose between self-redefinition and self-extinction. A common adversary forces them to confront their own ultimate questions.

Imaginative, atmospheric, and searching, Wecker's novel draws upon the folktales of two traditions and the elements of several immigrant subcultures to create an original urban fantasy that resonates with the eternal human mystery: what am I, who am I, and what shall I do? Her insightful treatment of both principal and secondary characters and their environments confers the richness and depth that turn a story into an experience.

>122 Meredy: Interesting about the word usage. I wouldn't have noticed a lot of that, because I listened to the audio version, so it would not be apparent. I'm wondering as well, if when making the audio version, they cleaned it up a bit with the "was sat" business, because although I do remember a few times being jarred by phrasing, it was nothing that stuck in my mind. I can't really imagine Simon Vance reading such prose without cleaning it up, or telling the author to clean it up. Interesting. I will say, this was my least favorite of all the series precisely because of the monkeys and the other issues you listed at the beginning of your post.

>124 MrsLee: Hearing instead of seeing would definitely have made a difference. Most of those malapropisms would have passed unnoticed in spoken English. That makes me wonder if the book was dictated by the author and transcribed by someone with a faltering command of the language.

Still, someone should have done a careful proofreading.

As for "was sat" and "was stood," however: I checked three of the later books using Amazon's search feature. The Berlin book, oddly, showed me search results not for "sat" but for "ßat" (the German double s), and context suggested that those were meant to say "flat," as if the ß were an "fl" ligature.

The Las Vegas one linked to a completely different book by another author. And the Paris one still had "was sat" and "were sat" and "was stood."

So I'm not sorry I read the one, but it's not as if I were in danger of running out of books. I'll decline further attempts and move on.

Go with Me, by Castle Freeman, Jr. (abandoned on page 5; not rated)

Six-word review: First pages read like NaNoWriMo draft.

Extended review:

I suppose I could be judging this book too harshly on the basis of a very small sample. But by page 5 the author ought to have given me some reason to read on. Instead I bogged down almost immediately in the bloated dialogue and aimless action of what sounds like a first draft where word count is all that matters:

=====(Excerpt begins)

"Take it easy," said the sheriff.

The young woman swallowed, looked at the floor. She nodded.

"Have a cup of coffee," the sheriff said.

The young woman nodded again.

The sheriff got up from his chair and went to the coffee machine. He poured out a cup for the young woman.

"Milk and sugar?"

"Sugar."

The sheriff put a spoonful of sugar into her cup and stirred her coffee. He brought the cup to the desk and set it down in front of her. The young woman picked it up and held it in both her hands, as though her hands were cold. Long, slim hands.

The sheriff returned to his chair. He sat.

=====(Excerpt ends)

The prospect of even just 155 more pages of that seemed hopelessly dreary. The only thing the author forgot to tell us was when they blinked.

Since I actually bought and paid for the book, perhaps I'll take another look at this one sometime when I'm feeling less impatient. But now or later, I don't expect a novel's opening to fight me off with both hands. I'd rather slog through 800 pages of dense prose in which the author knows and measures the value of words than read a ten-page story whose author doesn't treat my time and attention with respect.

>126 Meredy: Given the extract you provided I think you are right to jump ship. You are only considering trying it again because you spent money on it. You have not hinted that you think it might get any better.

Good call in my opinion.

126> Just skip it. Don't bother coming back to it, sell it to a used bookstore and buy something that's actually readable.

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, by Joseph Campbell, edited by Eugene Kennedy (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Mythology and spiritual symbolism interpreted metaphorically.

Extended review:

This is the first volume in a series of compilations of material from the lectures and essays of Joseph Campbell, selected, integrated, and edited by various scholars on behalf of the Joseph Campbell Foundation. As such, it can't be viewed in quite the same light as the books authored by Campbell, although the content and the words are his. It's a little more casual, a bit disjointed, a bit repetitive, and possibly--although this is my own inexpert opinion and may be groundless--a bit muddied in places by the necessity of stitching together pieces of disparate material.

It could conceivably be the case that the editor has unwittingly introduced errors and interpretations that don't belong to Campbell. Editing someone else's work is a worthy enterprise, but inevitably fraught with risk. The perils become many times greater when the author is no longer around to answer questions and review his own work.

I would have expected, for instance, that Campbell himself would have spoken of the precession and not the procession of the equinoxes; but one way or another, the term appears erroneously on page 44. That is not the only such lapse I noticed in the book.

With that caveat in mind, I did enjoy reading this small volume, awed, as ever, by the breadth and depth of Campbell's knowledge, his ability to assimilate vast quantities of material, and his representation of it through the lens of a single clear vision. Any exposure to Campbell's thinking always makes me feel that I have glimpsed other dimensions of being. Even when I fail to retain the perspective gained at a higher elevation, I remember that I've been there.

>126 Meredy: Wow, that was painful. I can't imagine reading a further 155 pages of such banality. And the irritation factor means it wouldn't even be useful for sending one to sleep if needed.

>127 pgmcc:, >128 pwaites:, >130 Sakerfalcon: Thanks for the affirmation. Here are some quotes from the back cover blurbs: "A small masterpiece"..."a gem of a tale"..."razor wit and taut, impeccable plotting"..."vivid, page-turning tale"..."So quietly funny that every page brings a smile."

Why do people write things like that if they're not true? Or if they are true, what's suddenly wrong with me as a reader?

If I'd thought that passage I quoted were some sort of parody, that'd be one thing. But by this time we've already plodded through a similar dialogue about why the young woman is waiting in the parking lot and whether the man is really the sheriff ("I'm the sheriff." "You are?") and whether she'll come inside.

The curse of show-don't-tell lessons.

You're right, I don't like forfeiting my investment. But my time is an investment too.

>131 Meredy: I swear I've seen very similar passages in the "don't do this" section of writing advice books I've read...

>132 sandstone78: Me too.

In the NaNoWriMo handbook, No Plot? No Problem!, Chris Baty advocates turning off your inner editor so you can just get your 50,000-word draft written in thirty days. The thing is, you're supposed to turn your editor back on afterward. It's hard for me to believe that an editor of any sort was involved in this product.

Ragnarok, by A.S. Byatt (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Enhanced retelling of old Norse myths.

Extended review: One-eyed Odin and hammer-wielding Thor, regal Frigga and Baldur the Beautiful, marvelous eight-legged Sleipnir, amoral Loki and his monstrous offspring, the last battle and the Twilight of the Gods: here we have their stories retold, and not simply retold but reenvisioned, enriched by catalogues of lush detail and dramatized as an allegory of war in modern times.

The frame is that of a child in Britain during World War II, a young reader gripped by the ancient tales as she deals with the fear and uncertainty of a country under attack and a father serving abroad, in harm's way. The delivery is that of a mature author whose rich language and poetic style make the stories vivid and fresh, a new experience even when they are familiar.

There is, however, for me, one blemish on the complexion of this narrative, and that is the author's recurrent, or rather persistent, or shall I even say relentless reference to her frame character as "the thin child." I see no relevance whatsoever to the child's degree of thickness. It is simply an annoying epithet, and not at all Homeric. As I began my second reading of this book, after traversing the Prose Edda and a book about Snorri Sturluson, I withstood a frightful impulse to go through the entire text with a marker and blot out every instance of the word "thin." I'm not against writing in books, but I am opposed to making readers grit their teeth in vexation.

I still might do that just to relieve the urge.

The Confession of Brother Haluin, by Ellis Peters (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Improbable tale charms indulgent series fan.

Extended review: It's not hard to picture the author chuckling quietly to herself as she pieced together the fifteenth chronicle of a medieval monk whose monastic life seems to be as riddled with episodes of violent death as if he were a spiritual ancestor of Miss Marple or Jessica Fletcher. The first book of the series takes place in the spring of the year 1137, and this one begins in December of 1142. That's an average of nearly three dastardly crimes per year within the reach of the quiet, well-run abbey in Shrewsbury, all of which depend somehow on Brother Cadfael for their solution and the invocation of justice.

So it's no wonder that by now the author has ventured rather far into the realm of unlikelihood, albeit with the usual complement of concealed identities, long-hidden sins, thwarted romances, and complicated family relationships.

However, if we've stayed with the series this long, we love Brother Cadfael, and we're just happy to watch him going about his business, doing what he does best, which on most days is growing and tending his herb garden, preparing remedies, and offering wise counsel to those who seek it, and on surprisingly frequent occasions is investigating crimes and exposing culprits.

In this installment, it doesn't even matter that Cadfael has almost no detecting to do. His main function is to serve as a go-between and catalyst while the dramas of others play out. That's enough. I got what I came for.

>135 Meredy: While I have only read a couple of the Brother Cadfael books I have watched all the TV episodes and I can relate to your pleasure in the environment evoked in the stories. It reminds me of my reactions to two sets of books. One is Iain M Banks's Culture novels. I have enjoyed the earlier books so much and feel relaxed and comfortable in the world he created I am more forgiving of the weaker novels.

The other is the books of Monaldi and Sorti set in 17th/18th Century Rome, Imprimatur, Secretum and Veritas. I found on reading the second book I was just delighting in being back in the world created by these authors. I have yet to read the third book but I am anticipating a return to a wonderful world of opulence and grandeur in the devious world of Cardinals and monarchs.

I think you might find the Monaldi and Sorti books very interesting. They are who-done-its, but on a grand scale. @libraryhermit put me on to them.

The Canvas, by Benjamin Stein (4 stars)

Six-word review: Memory and identity, smoke and mirrors.

Extended review:

The twists and turns of this book include literally turning the book upside down to read the half that goes in the opposite direction, like a bilingual instruction manual with two fronts and no back. The ends of the two narratives meet in the middle. Deciding how far to read in one half before switching to the other is up to the reader, placing this book somewhere within the wider reaches of the category of ergodic literature.

Ordinarily I dislike gimmicks in books, and I'm not sure how necessary this one was to the realization of the author's intention, but it does enhance the sense that nothing in this story is straightforward and linear. Some books achieve that sort of circularity without special effects; one that I can think of is The God of Small Things. Nevertheless, I do see the physical configuration of the hard copy as a meaningful contributor to the experience of reading the novel.

I've given it four stars because it's a well-written and original treatment of an endlessly fascinating theme, that of memory and identity, with many layers and interesting story elements and complex characters. It also sent me off for a reread of The Picture of Dorian Gray (and that's not a spoiler, or if it is, I have yet to figure out how). I enjoyed letting the author lead me through this hall of mirrors. But as for what actually happened in there, I'd have to read it again before I could form a coherent hypothesis. For now, I'm content to entertain the questions.

>136 pgmcc: Those Monaldi and Sorti novels do sound like they might be for me. I don't have a great deal of knowledge of that period in Italy's political and ecclesiastical history, but a whodunit in that setting sounds enticing, especially if it comes with a recommendation from a good reader like you. I'll put the first one on my library list, with thanks.

I've been watching the Cadfael TV series too, though keeping ahead of it with the books. I must say some of the casting has bothered me a lot, most especially of the actor who replaced the original Hugh Beringar. Not only does he not look the part at all but his single mode seems to be angry sputtering, and there is no sign of the warm friendship that prevails between him and Cadfael.

I've also thought that pretty much all the charming young women whose romantic attachments have been so sympathetically furthered by Cadfael seem to have come from the same cookie-cutter mold; the casting director must have been indulging some single-minded commitment to an ideal of his or her own. If it turned out that the same few ingenues were recycled through several episodes, it would not surprise me.

But Derek Jacobi is always lovely, and I enjoy seeing the settings realized with what I trust is some degree of authenticity, so I watch them.

>138 Meredy:, I agree about Cadfael. I thought the actor who replaced Sean Pertwee was hopeless. However, Pertwee is a hard act to follow! The series did tend to become a re-vamp of the same plot every week. I did like them, classic comfort TV. I think Peters did manage to bring a bit more depth to the books - usually around the political and religious background of the time.

>138 Meredy: I don't have a great deal of knowledge of that period in Italy's political and ecclesiastical history

I had no great knowledge (= no knowledge) of the history and reading the book filled gaping holes in my store of facts historical. Now all those filled in holes are surrounded by other holes waiting to be filled in. :-)

One thing the books did for me was pull together events that I was aware of in different parts of Europe (including Ireland and Britain) and relate them to one another within the context of the wider European environment. (A long winded sentence to say the books are, "jolly good reads".)

The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang (abandoned on page 16; not rated)

This hasn't been a good month for read-alouds. My husband and I, following our long-standing Wednesday-night custom, have tackled four books so far during May, and three of them haven't made the cut. This is after the extensive screening that I perform before a book makes it to the coffee table for a shared weekly reading.

Most of the time we forge on and complete a book, even when we have mixed feelings. Sometimes we give a selection several sessions' trial before we give up, and sometimes (as when we started the novel Go with Me a few weeks ago, described in post 126 above), we know right away.

In the present case, the book was recommended to us by our grown son, who found it very relevant to his life and habits. He's definitely a member of the wired generation. My husband and I, however, don't find ourselves checking e-mail before getting out of bed, battling constant interruptions by RSS feeds and Twitter posts, or struggling with productivity-shattering distractions in the workplace. Yes, we spend a lot of time in front of our computers, but it's at a leisurely pace, one of the blessings of retirement after long working lives.

So by the time we'd completed the introduction, we recognized that we are simply not the audience to whom this book is addressed.

Moreover, it sounded to me as if the author were to a considerable extent capitalizing on a (presumed) knowledge of Zen principles and practice, repackaging and selling them as an antidote to the mental fragmentation that can be caused by the ceaseless, raucous electronic demands for attention that come with living online. As a sometime follower of Zen, I have a certain distaste for the commercialization of Buddhism, inevitable though it may be (and irrespective of its potential benefits).

The onslaught of stimuli in the Internet age and its impact on our ability to focus and process content is, by the way, the same terrain traversed by Nicholas Carr in his The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, another work that we failed to admire.

So we've set Pang's work aside and moved on, not so much as a result of some perceived fault in the material as because of a mismatch between reader and content.

Ok, I've just finished a book about the assassination of President Garfield in 1881. I've forgotten who recommended it and on which thread, but it was very good. And now I really need something soothing.

Dinner at Deviant's Palace, by Tim Powers (4 stars)

Six-word review: Severely weird postapocalyptic fantasy delivers shudders.

Extended review:

In the city of Ellay, where life in some mutated form goes on following a nuclear catacylsm, Gregorio Rivas is twice rare: he's a gifted musician and composer with some unique skills, and he's a redeemer, the best there is.

A charismatic cult leader by the name of Jaybush has been amassing followers, keeping them in thrall with drugs and mass hypnosis. Only the most cunning, resourceful, and daring can get in and bring someone out. Rivas is hired to redeem the daughter of a rich and powerful man--a woman who happens to have been his cherished first love. Everything is on the line for him as he struggles to penetrate the cult without falling under its spell and ultimately confronts the evil at its core.

In the wake of the 1978 tragedy in Guyana I read a number of books on destructive cults, the psychology of cult programming and deprogramming, and Jim Jones and Jonestown in particular. I continue to find the subject fascinating and deeply disturbing, in fictional treatments as well as personal memoirs. As a dystopian novel, this 1985 fantasy by Tim Powers seems dated in a number of ways, but the imaginative quality is nonetheless extraordinary and the writing compelling. The subject matter drew me in and held me. The particularly repugnant aberrations known as hemogoblins, which may owe a little something to Dante, are far more chilling than any conventional fictitious monster.

I haven't had equally high opinions of everything I've read by Tim Powers, but he is a writer I can trust, and that more than anything else made this a timely choice for me. It was a good time for something absorbing, however dark.

>143 Meredy:
Dinner at Deviant's Palace is a Tim Powers novel I was not aware of. I recently finished Three Days to Never and while it was ok, I was a bit disappointed. Having read and enjoyed Declare and The Anubis Gates I had hoped for more. I have several other of Powers' novels and I will read them, but I support your comment that his works are not all brilliant, but, as you put it, he is a writer I can trust.

Dinner at Deviant's Palace goes on the wish list, to be considered when I have finished the other Powers books I own.

>142 Meredy: Was it Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President? If so, I agree--excellent if appalling (chiefly, in how his doctors were probably more responsible for Garfield's death than his assassin.)

>144 pgmcc: This was one of his earlier novels, and I picked it up only because someone on here recommended it. Three Days to Never was a bit of a letdown for me, too, but I liked Last Call and The Anubis Gates, and The Drawing of the Dark was okay. I think I might have also read Earthquake Weather, but at the moment I'm not sure.

Let's compare notes on what we mean by saying we can trust an author.

In describing Tim Powers (just as the present example), I mean, first of all, that
• he's a competent writer (knows his craft),
• he delivers what he promises (the book sets expectations and then fulfills them), and
• he doesn't cheat (no rabbits out of hats, no weird left turns, no sentimental, manipulative goop, no major threads left hanging or questions whose answers are just wrong).

He is also reliable when it comes to grammar, usage, and style. His plots and characterization are sound. He presents ideas and themes without being didactic or moralistic or laying out naked messages. And he has an imaginative, even mythic, quality that makes me feel he's tapping into something a little bit deeper.

Hmm, I wonder if this topic is interesting enough to warrant a separate thread that invites discussion.

>145 Marissa_Doyle: Yes, it was. I gave it 4½ stars and am working on my review.

>146 Meredy: Hmm, I wonder if this topic is interesting enough to warrant a separate thread that invites discussion.

I think you may be onto something there. I think the thread would have to invite other feelings readers attribute to authors, i.e. not just trust.

In relation to Let's compare notes on what we mean by saying we can trust an author.

" he's a competent writer (knows his craft)", - Agreed

"he delivers what he promises (the book sets expectations and then fulfills them)", - I would give some trusted authors some leeway on this point. Three Days To Never would be an example. I do not think Powers delivered on the promise, but it was not a total disaster. I have enjoyed enough of his other work to know that an occasional glitch is not sufficient for me to give up on him totally.

"he doesn't cheat (no rabbits out of hats, no weird left turns, no sentimental, manipulative goop, no major threads left hanging or questions whose answers are just wrong)." - Agreed. As long as a story is internally consistent it is not cheating. While some of his stories are very "out there" in terms of supernatural happenings, his stories do not stray outside of the "world rules" he has built for his stories.

Another aspect of my trust is that the author will create an environment in which I will feel comfortable to spend many hours. Monaldi and Sorti do this for me.

By the way, I had forgotten that I have also read, and enjoyed, Last Call. I understand it is the first part of a trilogy with Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather being the second and third.

The implication of my trusting an author is that I will be happy to read any of his/her books while accepting there may be the odd dud amongst the gold.

Authors I trust would include:

Tim Powers (naturally)
Iain Banks (RIP - His first anniversary is the 9th of next month)
Daphne Du Maurier
Ursula K Le Guinn
Kevin Barry
Umberto Eco
Haruki Murakami
Arturo Perez Reverte
Dan Simmons
Nick Harkaway
David Mitchell
Ken MacLeod
Monaldi & Sorti

Of the authors above there are some whose work I would buy as soon as it is published. These would be:
Kevin Barry
Umberto Eco
Arturo Perez Reverte
Nick Harkaway
Ken MacLeod

I did buy Iain Banks' books as they were published.

Zen to Go, edited by Jon Winokur (reread; 4 stars)

Six-word review: Morsels of wisdom whet the appetite.

Extended review:

This was the book that led me to Zen. I picked it up on impulse 20 years ago, not knowing what I was getting, thinking it was just a piece of whimsy. This compilation of pithy little quotes doesn't look serious, and in a true sense it isn't, but it is genuine, by which I guess I mean that it really is a book about Zen and not just something meant to be amusing. Although it is, or could be. While still being about Zen. (The harder I try to say that right, the less sense I'm making, so I'll stop.)

Over those years, I've read it, and read around in it, many times. This time I read it straight through, even though it doesn't appear to have been intended for that sort of approach, just to remind myself of what's there. As always, there were some parts that struck me as entirely new and fresh, because I was seeing them in a different way. And there were many familiar ponderables--and imponderables--to carry away with me.

The book came to mind because of an exchange starting here in @Jim53's reading journal. In the process of recommending it, I decided to revisit it myself, and once again I'm glad I did.

>148 pgmcc: As ever, I'm interested in your comments (and thank you for your lists). I agree with your qualifier on the question of promise and delivery--and of course that was exactly what was wrong with Three Days to Never. I stayed away from Powers for a while after that, but came back in the end.

"No cheating" means more to me than internal consistency. Introducing an improbable coincidence, leaving the inexplicable unexplained (suddenly the guy is out of the barricaded mine shaft wired with explosives--how did that happen?), using far-fetched contrivances (as, for example, in a certain popular Scandinavian mystery in which not one but two rare, incurable hereditary diseases figure prominently), slapping on an ill-fitting ending and abandoning the book because they can't solve the problems they created--these are all authorial cheats as far as I'm concerned.

I like your point about environment too. On your recommendation, I've just acquired the first Monaldi and Sorti, which I'll be starting when I finish Karen Armstrong's The Spiral Staircase.

And of course I agree on allowing for the odd dud. I'm as forgiving of an author I like as I am severe with one who for some reason has incurred my displeasure. In choice and disposition of reading matter, as nowhere else in my life, I'm an autocratic dictator, exercising absolute authority to raise up and strike down as I see fit, with no apology owing. Ah, power.

>150 Meredy: How are you finding The Spiral Staircase? I read that many many years ago now and went on to read Through the Narrow Gate. I currently have her A History of God sitting on the TBR pile, but it seems quite daunting and I keep shying away each time I have to pick my next non-fiction book.

>151 Peace2: I'm reading it with interest. I bring a little context to it, having read a couple of her other books (although not her previous memoir), having made my own--far less dramatic--escape from the bonds of religion, and having absorbed over time a fair amount of knowledge of monastic and convent life as well as of academe.

The book has been on my shelf for nine years, and I only just looked into it, so you couldn't say I was passionately driven toward it. But I'm not reading it to learn about Karen Armstrong. I'm reading it for the account of her experience in coming up out of depression, enlarging my own understanding of this very difficult condition.

>150 Meredy:

I've just acquired the first Monaldi and Sorti,

I hope you enjoy it and I look forward to reading your thoughts on the book. I'm planning to start their third novel, Veritas, as soon as I finish Tigerman.

"No cheating" means more to me than internal consistency. Introducing an improbable coincidence,
I hate "improbable coincidence". There are books I have read, a prime example being The Dragon's Tail, which are built on improbable coincidences. I accept that a degree of acceptance is necessary for the story of virtually every novel to exist, but please do not base the whole story on the same three people coming together at three different times across fifty years, in the vast expanse of China, by pure coincidence.

leaving the inexplicable unexplained (suddenly the guy is out of the barricaded mine shaft wired with explosives--how did that happen?),
I agree with you in the type of situation you describe, but I do find some stories are stronger by the author leaving some questions unanswered. An example is K-Pax. The book and the film are very close and both are excellent. (Kevin Spacey plays the lead character in the film and he, as usual, is excellent.) The author went on to write K-Pax II and K-Pax III in which he tries to explain the mysteries of the first book. The latter two books destroy the story. I would strongly recommend K-Pax, the book or the film, but avoid II and III.

I think full explanations and total loose-end tying up is essential in murder mystery/crime type stories.

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard (4½ stars)

Six-word review: How professional arrogance killed a president.

Extended review:

I don't read much in the way of history, memoir, biography, or other narrative nonfiction. Once in a while, though, I do step outside my customary paths and pick up something that holds my attention in much the same way as good fiction: with story, character, setting, theme, and capable craftsmanship. Destiny of the Republic is such a book. The element of documentable factuality adds significance, and the profound effect of this episode on the American nation as a whole confers a gravitas not to be found in any personal drama, no matter how compelling.

I had never read anything more about James A. Garfield than the few compulsory paragraphs I must have encountered in American history textbooks. His term was so brief, only six months including the two that he spent convalescing after the shooting in July of 1881, that no important changes or lasting achievements were credited to him, at least in my memory. What I never took in as a student was the impact of his assassination itself, much less the meaning of the election and then the loss of this honorable man who had never sought the presidency and had indeed tried to evade it.

As Millard so absorbingly tells it, the drama that unfolds with Garfield's nomination, election, violent injury, and tragic death reflects not only the shape of the nation a century after its founding but also the state of medical science, early advances in telephony, and so light a disregard for national security that it amounts to astounding laxity by today's standards. The intertwined threads of history weave what can almost be seen as inevitability in the way it plays out.

As told by the author, the true villain of the tale is not the deluded madman Charles Guiteau, who pulled the fateful trigger, but another deluded individual, Dr. D. Willard Bliss, the arrogant physician who interposed his own ego-driven agenda between the life of the president and the possibility of remedy by a hand other than his own.

This sad story grieves the heart for the fate of a good man who might have been a great president. It's impossible not to wonder how drastically the course of events in the United States and the world might have been altered by just one or two different choices by key individuals at crucial times. That question, I suppose, is one of the enduring fascinations of history.

Thus Was Adonis Murdered, by Sarah Caudwell (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Delightful series-starter introduces colorful characters.

Extended review:

Clever whodunit with an endearingly stuffy first-person narrator and a droll supporting cast in the best tradition of British cozy mysteries. I would be thrilled to discover a list of two dozen titles following this one in series, but alas, there are only three more. I expect to savor them.

Young barrister Julia Larwood, well versed in law but charmingly inept in practical matters, is off on a holiday in Venice. In quest of a romantic fling in a picturesque Italian setting, she instead finds herself under suspicion of murder. Her colleagues back in London, together with an Oxford don with talents as an armchair sleuth, set about the urgent business of rescuing her on the strength of what they are able to discover, deduce, and contrive from a distance.

>155 Meredy: I'm so glad you enjoyed it and share your sadness that there are only four of these wonderful stories. And I have to ask...do you think Hilary is male, or female?

>156 Marissa_Doyle: Oh, definitely male, I think. Apart from voice, there's the fact that he mentions quite early staying with a former Oxford mate, without any fuss such as there might be if the friend were of the other sex. Because I'd seen the question raised somewhere, I watched for signs throughout, and they all pointed to the likelihood that he's a man. Although the doors of possibility remain open, I didn't see a single thing that contradicted that in my mind.

Funny, I totally see Hilary as a woman. I think Caudwell was very careful to keep it wholly ambiguous and "as you please" throughout, though.

Love that series; great that you liked it.

My opinion changed from book to book, based on little cues. That's part of the fun of the series, I think.

Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O'Nan (4 stars)

Six-word review: The shining art of simple narrative.

Extended review:

Four stars for this tiny little book, 146 pages in which not very much happens, and what does happen is a miniature drama played out on a miniature stage by characters whose sheer ordinariness is almost a distinction in itself? Yes, because to give it anything less would seem false to the idea of perfection.

A chain restaurant is closing. On its last day and night, just before Christmas, a reduced staff--some of whom are facing unemployment--have to stay on task through the final cycles of the day's routine. Manny the manager takes responsibility for keeping up morale and seeing that the bases are covered, all the while dealing with an inner struggle of his own.

I read this through in just a few hours. And now I'm off to look for other work by this author.

>160 Meredy: That sounds really interesting to me, having worked during the last days of a store that was closing down. It's a difficult thing to go through and the emotions experienced are complex. This sounds like a great little book.

>161 Sakerfalcon: I thought so. It very much struck me that characters in a situation like this don't get much literary attention, or if they do, it's for laughs. This is poignant, not comical.

There was a continuity error in the early pages that threw me off: on page 5, the tile is spotless because Eddie and Leron mopped it last night before closing; on page 15, Leron didn't show up last night and didn't even bother to call. Ordinarily I would see this as more than a slip or an editorial miss--I'd think that the author lacked a clear picture of each of those named characters, so that he depicts the same one as both diligent and a slacker. Here, I don't readily see the reason--maybe he meant to use a different name on page 5 (that would make sense). It did take me right out of the story for a few minutes.

At any rate, I didn't detect any other false notes, and my confidence was quickly restored.

One of the LT reviewers said it sounded as if the author had found a place that was closing down and just sat there all day and wrote down everything that happened. That's kind of like saying that Dorothea Lange just saw a migrant mother sitting by a tent and took her picture.

>153 pgmcc: I'm really sorry, but I don't think I'm going to make it through Imprimatur, at least not on this attempt. I've given it three or four nights' bedtime hours, so nearly 100 pages, and I find it just too dense with information that I'm failing to retain. I have to keep looking back to see who's talking and what they're talking about, and it's not sticking. I really need something right now that feels less like a textbook.

Sorry to disappoint you, and please don't take this as any reflection on your tastes or recommendations. It's more about what's going on with me right now and what I need in the way of relaxation and escapism. My best bets at present seem to be the British cozies.

The Spiral Staircase, by Karen Armstrong (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Religious scholar wrestles with personal demons.

Extended review:

Whatever issues I may have had with religion don't seem to amount to much when compared with Karen Armstrong's sojourn in a convent and subsequent attempts to readjust to the secular world. The aftermath of spiritual crisis, thorny with guilt, resentment, confusion, self-doubt, and depression, plagued her for many years and seemed to mock her search for something resembling a normal life. Her repeatedly derailed journey through academe, her attempts to sustain various relationships, and her efforts to build a career on the considerable knowledge and skills she possessed constitute the substance of this exceptional narrative.

I have special appreciation for the account of how she dealt with her own agnosticism and atheism and ultimately arrived at a state of spiritual awareness that did not compromise her integrity.

As a distinguished scholar of the history and varieties of theology and religious practice, Karen Armstrong has written influential books and created presentations in other media. This personal history reveals the dark side of her struggle and the process by which she came to terms with her inner life.

>163 Meredy: There is a lot of information in the Monaldi books so I can well understand your not taking kindly to the books if you are in the need of relaxation. I am reading Veritas at the moment and I have had to check back a few times to remind of the speaker or the context of the conversation. Cozies are always a good option.

Have a great weekend.

Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn (4 stars)

Six-word review: Shuddery mystery-thriller, harrowing psychological portrait.

Extended review:

Immediately after finishing Gone Girl, I looked for another novel by Gillian Flynn and found this one. Sharp Objects was her debut novel, and a very impressive one. It's the kind of story that, if it were a movie, would make me want to cover my eyes in places, and then peek through them so I don't miss anything.

Camille Preaker is a haunted, damaged soul who, all against her wishes, must return to her home town and deal with her mother, nightmare incarnate. An old tragedy comes to the fore as two recent ones are under investigation. Before the end, I guessed the outcome, but it did nothing to spoil the suspense.

The author's insight into the psyche of her main character seems to come from some dark personal well of experience, giving it a flavor of authenticity that transcends craft, technique, and style. Flynn's handling of her material seems to me far more mature than I would normally expect of a first novel, especially one with such challenging subject matter.

"Like" and "enjoy" aren't the right words for what I felt on reading this book. I can recommend it, though, for readers who have a taste for dark fiction and appreciate the pairing of artistry and workmanship with strange revelations.

I've had to put aside Imprimatur, as anticipated in post #163. I'm not quite ready to say I've formally given up on it, but I don't have a maybe-not-quite-abandoned-but-certainly-postponed category of reading matter, so that's where it rests for now.

It's a matter of my present mood and state of mind, I think, more than any defect of the book.

For now I've taken up something completely different, The Lumby Lines, which may or may not do the trick.

The Lumby Lines, by Gail Fraser (3 stars)

Six-word review: Weak but pleasantly diverting light fiction.

Extended review:

It has bright, cheery paintings of the town and the surrounding countryside, done by the author's husband, paintings that enhance the sense of place and mood. It has recipes in the back, attributed to the fictitious inn, abbey, and restaurant that figure in the story. Maybe best of all, it has, after the conclusion of the story, a transcription of an informal conversation among the author and her characters, wherein they casually interview one another and compare notes like old friends.

How could anyone fail to be charmed by this book?

Maybe I simply expect too much.

The story itself has pleasing characters, a choice variety of them, and interesting dynamics among several. There's an authentic-feeling small-town flavor and plenty of local color. There are problems to be solved and mysteries to be revealed. There are also cliffhangers and unanswered questions that set the hook for a sequel.

What's missing, for me, is not just some actual drama and suspense, which I suppose we don't expect in this genre. It's craftsmanship, polish. It's what I look for in any genre and has nothing to do with style. It's not seeing lines like "the rest of the visit was quite enjoyable" or reading a protracted scene in which a series of characters are introduced to one another and exchanging commonplace small talk in greeting. It's not strained humor such as of a stoned cow with a couple of upset stomachs, resulting in crude sensory gags that really aren't very funny if you care about the characters, or very interesting if you don't. It's a clearer story arc that doesn't wobble quite so much and an ending that leaves a little less up in the air.

In short, The Lumby Lines feels very much like a beginner's novel, which it is. Pardon me for running this theme so often, but as a professional editor I can't help it: what it really needs is a good shaking and dusting and a little judicious scrubbing to bring out the best and let some of the rest go.

In time I may come round to the next in the series; I see there are five to date, the last published in 2010. I'm not in a hurry for another one, but it's sort of nice to know it's there.

A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind, by Robert A. Burton (abandoned on page 66; not rated)

This one wasn't worth my time. Here is a sample: an illustrative example posed on page 48 in the chapter entitled "Causation":

To flesh out the complex and overlapping relationships between agency, intention, and causation, consider how, as little kids, we learned to establish causation by witnessing the consequences of our own actions. Suppose that I am tempted to flip the shiny On-Off switch on Dad's stereo. I want to know what will happen. When I do, the music comes on far louder than I expected. Mom sticks her fingers in her ears and screams, "No dessert for you." In my room I review the unfortunate series of events. I flipped the switch (agency) with my hand (ownership of body part) because I was curious and wanted to see what would happen (intention). My intention caused Mom to cancel dessert. The general principle: The closer the fit between intention and outcome, the more likely we are to conclude that the outcome was caused by our intention.

This is a family of idiots. That's my inescapable conclusion. (And the inclusion of the word "shiny" tells us that Burton knows that.) I want nothing to do with any of them.

I wish I could tell you that that was the page on which I abandoned this inflated, pretentious conglomeration of old news and lame examples, but in truth I persevered for another 18 grueling pages before throwing in the towel. At that point I couldn't stand to read any more of his chronically stupid illustrations or see him thrash the same old arguments in language high in verbosity and low in insight and revelation.

I really liked the author's earlier work, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not. It altered my thinking in a number of respects and gave me a way of talking about the difference between feeling sure about something and knowing it for a fact. Because of that, I wanted to like this book and gave it a generous opportunity to win me over. Instead, this one feels like an attempt to rehash the same material and sell it again--something any number of popular nonfiction authors manage shamelessly and others just shouldn't try.

I admire your "intestinal fortitude" for lasting so long with that clunker.

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn (4½ stars)

Six-word review: Mystery-thriller navigates death-defying hairpin turns.

Extended review:

Two months have elapsed since I finished Gone Girl and gave it four and a half stars. What stands out to me the most from this distance is not the twisty plot or the chilling psychological portrait of the main character but the author's masterly control of her material.

Even though I guessed very early that things were not as they seemed, I couldn't have predicted how they would unfold. The device of alternating narrative voices is seldom more effectively used than it is here, as much to conceal as to reveal. The author keeps a firm hand on the tiller every instant; she does nothing inadvertently. And yet, far from feeling rigid or arbitrary, the movement of the story seems to flow naturally and, yes, inevitably from the characters. That is what's so admirable about this book.

Or one of the things.

The author plays fair. She doesn't spring illogical or inconsistent developments on us. The pacing is excellent. The characterizations are skillful and multilayered, not only of the two principals but of several important secondary characters--especially the parents and the Ozark duo. The various settings are vividly depicted without impeding the progress of the story or overshadowing the characters. Everything is in balance, while at the same time sustaining that dynamic imbalance that produces momentum, suspense, and stunning revelation.

When I finished this novel, I could hardly wait to read another by the same author; that turned out to be its predecessor, Sharp Objects, to which I gave four stars. Knowing that there is (so far) only one more, Dark Places, I'm just going to wait and anticipate it for a little while.

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss, by Edmund de Waal (5 stars)

Six-word review: Family saga mirrors recent European history.

Extended review:

I've given a rare five-star rating to The Hare with Amber Eyes, a rich, engaging, moving narrative that is at once a family chronicle and a cultural and political history of our times.

Nonfiction works seldom get more than four stars from me because they rarely have the literary quality that places them in my top ranks. To rate five stars, a novel has to blow me away. This does not mean that I think it's flawless; in fact, it can have plain flaws and still earn a 5 or a 4½. But in addition to warranting superlatives in the basic elements of character, plot, setting, theme, and literary style, it has to show me an ineffable quality of artistry that sets it apart--an innate magnificence that can't be reduced to numbers or items on a checklist.

It's all but impossible for a work of nonfiction to do this, although there are always a few that seem remarkable enough to me to set and even exceed their own standards.

The Hare with Amber Eyes possesses that literary quality. I found it affecting, touching, emotionally laden, fraught, understated, poignant. It exhibits both a broad scope and a fine focus. The author speaks in deft, evocative, and occasionally lyrical prose, reflecting an artist's eye for proportion, relationship, composition, context, juxtaposition, and the power of a silent statement. The language evinces not only the author's intellectual confidence but also his confidence in the reader, who is presumed to be both educated and cultivated. A shared body of knowledge, an understanding of terminology, and a familiarity with certain names are taken for granted; if we're not quite up to the author's use of French or mention of known figures in the arts, we can quietly Google them while taking de Waal's presumptions as a compliment.

The structure of the book follows from the author's initial intent to recount the history of a family-owned collection of netsuke, small, delicately carved Japanese ornaments acquired during the 19th-century rage in Europe for all things Japanese. He explains the 1870s craze in part by the fact that its foreignness put enthusiasts on an equal footing: "For with Japanese art there was an exhilarating lack of connoisseurship, none of the enmeshed knowledge of art historians to confound your immediate responses, your intuitions." (page 49)

Organizing a personal narrative around a concrete object entailed not only reconstructing a history from family documents, photographs, and lore but executing a skillful blend of objective historical facts and an artist's imagination. Late in the narrative (page 342), De Waal writes: "I no longer know if this book is about my family, or memory, or myself, or is still a book about small Japanese things."

Indeed, the scale of these exquisite miniatures, of which the hare with amber eyes is one, invites close examination. Their smallness creates a feeling of intimacy that permeates the book. Somehow the author conveys a sense of speaking privately about private things rather than of addressing a global audience.

Yet the netsuke are not the central image of the book. The central image is the vitrine.

A vitrine is a glass display case (vitre: pane of glass), a cabinet that consists of transparent windows and doors. Says de Waal (page 66):

But the vitrine--as opposed to the museum's case--is for opening. And that opening glass door and the moment of looking, then choosing, and then reaching in and then picking up is a moment of seduction, an encounter between a hand and an object that is electric.

The visual becomes tactile, and in that instant it also becomes personal.

The act of looking and actively seeing drives the book. In all forms, page after page, we have windows, glass, prospects, views, framing, panoramas, inventories, images, paintings, sculptures, art, photographs, perspectives. It is this sensory engagement of the reader that makes the reader not so much a consumer of words as a sharer of visions. Those visions, laden with the author's own memory and palpable ties to a lost way of life, seem almost to plant memories in the mind of the reader and draw out the same sense of pride and loss, rooted in whatever parallels have meaning to us.

In my estimation, the greatest shortcoming of this work is the lack of an index. I would have found it helpful at many points to be able to refer back to names, dates, and places to help me retain a sense of the manifold threads and connections that run through the narrative. I would also have welcomed many more photographs.

If you have read the book, you might also enjoy this talk given by the author at the Palace Ephrussi in Vienna where so much of the story takes place: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8wqJINrGj0

The Sign of the Four, by Arthur Conan Doyle (5 stars)

Like A Study in Scarlet (post 51 above), this second Sherlock Holmes novel received a sentimental rating of 5 stars from me upon rereading decades after first encounter. There's no way I can rate these stories objectively.

This convoluted tale offers plenty of material for armchair adventure: sudden disappearances, princely jewels, dark crimes, secret pacts, twisted characters, exotic poisons, menace, blackmail, death. Holmes solves the puzzle and Watson gets the girl.

The story didn't engage my imagination in the same way that it did when I was fourteen or fifteen and a relatively naive reader. But I could still feel something of the old thrill that has kept the Conan Doyle stories in a special place in my inner library all these years.

(Almost caught up now: just three to go, down from a high of twelve. Hare was four months late.)

>172 Meredy: You have summed up so much more eloquently than I possibly could just why this is such a great book. Thank you.

>175 Peace2: Oh, thank you. Most of my reviews don't get much response, either here or on the works pages, but one or two nice comments really make me feel like it's worth the effort.

You're very welcome! I have to say that I do enjoy reading other people's opinions of books, but unless I know a book or feel particularly inspired to go and track it down I rarely feel in a position to comment.

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman (3 stars)

Six-word review: Lightweight, forgettable exploration of illogical behavior.

Extended review:

This book was not worthless. It was not a total waste of time. It was not badly written. It didn't present a complete lack of interesting points and new things to think about. I gained a useful idea, for example, with the concept of procedural justice, illustrated by an experiment in which the subjects who were offered less than half of a certain sum by their assigned partners chose to walk away from free money (thus depriving both of them) rather than accept an unequal split.

However, as books on social psychology, analyses of decision-making processes, and compilations of anecdotes illustrating curious behavioral phenomena go, this particular work was undistinguished. I'm not sorry I read it, but I won't be passing out copies to all my friends and relations.

>178 Meredy: It sounds similar to one I read recently, You Are Not So Smart. They probably contain a lot of the same information. I won't be passing out copies of it, either. It wasn't bad...

>114 LolaWalser:, >115 pgmcc: Well warned by your posts, I forged ahead with BBC's Sherlock and then abruptly quit. I posted this over on the Sherlock Holmes thread:

I finally got my Netflix DVD of BBC's "Sherlock" Season 3 in. Egad, the first show was terrible. Sherlock has gone from being hip and campy to being a buffoon, a self-parody, an idiot savant, in much the same way that the TV character Monk went from being a socially inept genius to being a social and cultural ignoramus who needed to have the concept of refrigerated restaurant leftovers explained to him. I slogged through that first episode somehow and started the second, totally discredited the grotesquerie of the false alarm to Lestrade, and shut it off during the best-man-speech scene. Never to return. I canceled the rest.

Whatever fault we might find with the old original stories, they never sneer at Holmes or condescend to him. He is what he is, and that is never a figure of ridicule or disgust.

Shame on you, BBC.

Thank you for bracing me for the letdown.

>180 Meredy:

I saw all three stories but must admit I've already forgotten what they were about, as plots. I recall the mortifyingly self-conscious and self-absorbed wedding speech rigmarole (the mystery itself I thought was pretty cool), and Sherlock's clownish return and a few more "moments"... (I don't think it's a spoiler to mention we meet Sherlock's parents--and they are played by Cumberberry's actual parents!)... and there's more Gatiss, i.e. Mycroft... and nothing nearly as offensive (to me) as every single beat of Scandal in Belgravia...

but, overall, it's just not very good.

In retrospect, I'm amazed at how much I liked Study in Pink and how enthusiastic I was about the "updated" Sherlock--the difference between then and now.

>176 Meredy:

I hope you are adding your marvellous reviews to the books, where more people might encounter and profit from them. Most of the time they are so exhaustive I have all to learn and nothing to say.

>181 LolaWalser: Thank you so much, Lola, for that generous encouragement. I do post my reviews on the book pages, but either they're not seen or they're seen by people who aren't interested. I seldom get a thumbs-up on anything, and only a few have ever got more than two. But I'm not in it for the money or the glory, so I keep writing them. It's mental yoga, keeping my brain fit.

I'm abandoning another book today, though, my tenth of the year and a very high count for me. There's probably nothing wrong with The Stress of Her Regard, and I love the Romantic poets, but I'm just not in the mood. Instead I'm probably going to read the autobiography of Huston Smith.

I generally don't read reviews of books until I've read the book. Not only do I not want spoilers, but I also want to form my own opinion first, without the coloring of another. That being said, I don't read a lot of reviews here because either I haven't read the book, or I forget to do so. If I think of it, I will read reviews of a book after I post mine.

I always admire your reviews, Meredy, I don't write formal ones, or even very educated ones. Mostly I write mine so I can remember that I've read a book, and remember what I thought of it when I did! :)

ETA: I do put more effort into reviews of books which don't have very many yet.

Miss Buncle's Book, by DE Stevenson (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Perfectly delightful feelgood novel charms gracefully.

Extended review:

A novel about a woman who writes a novel about a woman writing a novel. With remarkable depth and insight, this gentle satire entertains while showing us the absurd and the admirable in a motley cast of village characters. I enjoyed every page of this down-to-earth narrative and look forward to meeting some, if not all, of the characters in one or more sequels.

Three and a half stars signify a thoroughly satisfactory read that does not aspire to venture into serious literary territory but does what it does very well indeed.

Exactly. It's not literary fiction, but it is a satisfying read! I characterize it as being charming, domestic fiction.

>184 Meredy: I'm reading that right now, for a group read on the D. E. Stevenson group on Yahoo. The last time I read it was so long ago that I barely remember, and I'm really enjoying rediscovering it.

The Jewel in the Crown, by Paul Scott (4½ stars)

Six-word review: Interwoven narratives personalize 1940s British India.

Extended review:

The first volume in the acclaimed Raj Quartet weaves a complex web of causal and peripheral connections among people and events during the final few years of British rule in India. The rape of a young Englishwoman by a gang of Indian toughs is posed as a precipitating incident, but not an isolated one. Imperialism, racism, presumption of privilege, social class, military versus civilian mindsets, and cultural identity are among many themes that this weighty novel explores while illuminating a tumultuous place and period in recent world history.

I watched the miniseries based on this four-part novel on PBS's Masterpiece Theatre when it was first shown in the 1980s, and parts of it remain vivid in my mind even after thirty years. The principal characters in the novel have the faces that the TV production gave them. From this distance, I think my memory of the series enhances my experience of the novel rather than diminishing it. Naturally the novel treats the subject to far greater depth and breadth than is possible in a television script, even a long one.

After a pause for some lighter fare, I'm looking forward to continuing with volume 2, The Day of the Scorpion.

I'm glad you thought so highly of it, Meredy. As I think I mentioned, I'm going to re-watch the series after having read it this spring, and will be interested to see how the two compare.

The Painter's Chair: George Washington and the Making of American Art, by Hugh Howard (3½ stars)

Six-word review: George Washington was a real person.

Extended review:

I read this book to learn how art, and portraiture in particular, found a footing in colonial America. What I got was something more than I was expecting.

It turns out that the history of art in America is all but inseparable from the history of artists' efforts to portray George Washington, first as Colonel Washington, of the Virginia Regiment of the British army, and then, during the War of Independence, the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, later to become the first president of the United States of America. Further, to chronicle the succession of painters who rendered Washington's likeness on canvas is, in Hugh Howard's hands, also to deliver a portrait of the man himself.

I took the prescribed courses in American history in school. I frequented the Boston Museum of Fine Arts as a young person and viewed the iconic, unfinished Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington many, many times. I've visited Mount Vernon and toured the Washington family's home. I've climbed all the steps of the Washington Monument, and I've spent countless one-dollar bills. At no time have I ever felt a sense of the presence and character of our first national leader as I did while reading this book. Simply put, it made George Washington real to me.

Here's a passage I particularly enjoyed, a down-to-earth glimpse that contrasts nicely with the larger-than-life heroic poses that history is apt to draw:

Lee knew of Washington's temper. He had heard tell of Washington's tirade when he discovered Continental troops retreating at the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse. An officer on the scene, General Charles Scott, remembered that Washington swore "till the leaves shook on the trees . . . Never have I enjoyed such swearing before, or since . . . he swore like an angel from heaven." Washington then had turned his ire on the enemy and personally rallied the troops. The man rarely lost control--since childhood he had disciplined himself to contain his anger when it rose--but Mr. Stuart was quite right that it sometimes simmered dangerously. (page 195)

(I also liked learning the answer to a question that has puzzled me ever since I first saw that incomplete portrait of Washington reproduced in a book: why didn't the artist ever finish it? The answer is that Gilbert Stuart, brilliant and gifted though he was, was also a temperamental slacker. The portrait is unfinished not because he thought it looked better that way but just because he never finished it. Oddly, it seems to me that the emergence of a startlingly realistic face from a flat, empty canvas is part of its power.)

Even more welcome than the lifelike portrayal of a man whose image is almost literally blindingly familiar is the fact that when viewed at close range Washington remains an honorable and admirable person: not flawless, by any means, but still (by this account, at least) a man of strength, resilience, integrity, self-restraint, decisiveness, and wisdom.

Following the artists tasked with painting a commander and leader who did not fancy himself as a celebrity--painters of renown such as Charles Willson Peale, John Trumbull, and Gilbert Stuart--the author depicts the subject within his natural element and outside of it, at home and in the halls of state, on battlefield and in drawing room, at ease on horseback and under duress in the chair of a painter's model. Why do portraits of Washington generally look so grim and forced, and what made the difference in those few images that have the authentic, vital feel of something that goes beyond representational realism? In answering these questions, Howard evokes the man, his time, his place, and the great calling that carved his place in history.

The narrative does drag from time to time, and I did not find all of the detailed research equally fascinating. I referred constantly to the color plates, and I would have been happy to see a good many more of them. My guess is that the limited number of illustrations here is much more a matter of publishing budget than of author's preference; but even some reproductions of black-and-white engravings might have served to amplify many portions of the text.

The writing is competent but seems to me somewhat self-consciously techniquey and not altogether polished. I'm thinking of lines such as this one: "Anatomical accuracy was less interesting to the artist than an appealing picture with overall grace and appeal" (page 43).

On the whole, then, I have to take off some points for delivery, but I still give the book a solidly favorable rating for fulfilling its promise and then some.

Oh, that sounds good! I may need to read that.

>190 Marissa_Doyle: I've found myself stalling about returning it to the library. I don't want to give it back yet and may just keep it until the due date.

It's staying with me in my mind in a way that usually only good fiction does. That's all because of the sense of Washington as a personality. As I said, this isn't great writing. But somehow, dare I say it, Howard got the brushstrokes right--not that I can attest to a likeness to the original, but that I can feel the presence of the General in the room.

Let's not forget what a benefit it is to be able to look up all the artists and images mentioned and see them on the Internet. It takes an effort sometimes to remember that until just 200 years ago, artists' renderings were the only way that most people ever got a look at their leaders and saw depictions of historical events. No wonder that people would stand in line and pay admission to view a painting of a contemporary personage.

Miss Buncle Married, by DE Stevenson (2½ stars)

Six-word review: Weak tea following predecessor's hearty brew.

Extended review:

My expectations were set low for this sequel to a first book that had the feel of a standalone. My six-word encapsulation of Miss Buncle's Book said, "Perfectly delightful feelgood novel charms gracefully." Not only did it have a clear, complete arc but the premise that had worked so well was canceled by the door-closing ending, stating clearly, "We can't go back." Moreover, I was warned that the second, though fun, wasn't as good.

Even so, I found the contrast striking.

Where book 1 had direction, momentum, and an apt conclusion, book 2 meanders.

Where book 1 seemed to flow naturally and of its own accord, book 2 feels forced and contrived.

Where book 1 was robust, book 2 is saccharine.

Where book 1 gave us character, book 2 gives us caricature.

In sum, as I knew I might be, I was left wishing I'd quit at one. But my pleasure in the main characters and their interactions with their community inevitably led me on. I'll stop now.

I read all three Miss Buncle book so long age that I can't really remember them. I'm wondering now if the points you listed are the reason why I hadn't revisited the series in 25 years. The group read that I'm taking part in will get to the second two books in the fall, so I'll see then how they hold up for me.

Completely agree with your assessment--i kept waiting for something resembling a plot to appear, but one never did. I have the third book on my Nook but haven't tried it yet.

Postscript to #192: The author's style also seems more belabored and at the same time (perhaps, like Miss Buncle, rushing to capitalize on a ready market) less polished. There's a plethora of adverbs, especially in dialogue tags, and in dialogue itself a particularly heavy use of "frightful" and "frightfully" as intensifiers. I understand that the expression is or was in common conversational use in Britain more than in the U.S., but at a count of 27 and 43 times, respectively (thanks, Amazon search), sometimes several right in a row, it just got on my nerves as frightfully overdone.

Through your review of the Good Thief, I've found this thread and I LOVE your six word reviews. Brava!

My favorite is the George Washington.

Every biographer encounters this basic fact about the man.

=== This ===
marks the point at which I acquired my first e-reader (a birthday gift) and purchased my first e-book (A Far Better Rest). I've been a fierce holdout for so long that this is a major milestone for me.

Congratulations!! What kind did you receive?

I found there was a definite getting-used-to-it period and I still don't like to read non-fiction on it for research (versus entertainment) purposes because I've found I don't retain facts as well, but I love mine for the convenience and ability to wander around with several hundred books in my handbag. ;) Please let us know what you think of it.

Thanks, Marissa. Here's what I got:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/177185#4772603

And here's Richard's festive contribution:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/176560#4772593

I'm going to exercise some restraint in my comments because it's pretty old news (everyone who has a new baby seems to think it's a unique, unprecedented wonder), but I will post some reactions as I make the predictably bumpy transition to the 21st century from somewhere in the mid-20th (or in some respects the 19th).

I hope you enjoy it tremendously!

I like hearing people's reactions to their new e-readers because I find it fascinating on how the reading experience can differ, but maybe I'm weird. Actually, I know I'm weird, so no 'maybe.' :)

So I spent at least five minutes looking for some way to close the book I was reading (A Far Better Rest). 'End'? 'Exit'? Navigate to back of book? Find front cover in the TOC and shut it? Eventually it occurred to me that all I had to do was "go" someplace else.

Highlighting options keep coming up when I try to turn the page, but I haven't yet worked out how to make them come up on purpose. Also there seem to be highlights left by somebody else (WTH? is this a used e-book or what?), and I haven't figured out how to shut them off.

And yes, I do have a user's manual. I downloaded it and printed it out, naturally.

Once I figured out how to change the view to landscape, I was more comfortable reading. There's an optimal line length (or optimal range of lengths) for sustained reading; wall-to-wall text and web page width are much too long, and choppy little narrow pages are too short. The landscape view is better. Now I'm wondering if I'll regret buying a "portrait" mode cover and if there are any covers with the other orientation.

Can't answer your questions, Meredy, but I turned off the other people's highlighting in the share settings maybe? It was kind of an accident that I found it. However, Amazon has a great help forum and FAQ section for the Kindles. I've found a lot of my answers there.

One of my favorite functions of the Kindle is that I can return to Home and read in a different book and it will keep my place in the first book for when I return. :)

I had the same issue with the highlighting and was able to fix it by going into the settings.

I found the shutoff for the highlightings of other readers (an idea I do not like at all), but I'm still looking for a way to delete a highlight of my own.

I did see a URL for the help forum and FAQ, and I'll be going there for sure.

I think removing a highlight requires the slightly awkward maneuver of rehighlighting the highlighted text, and then when the popup appears you get additional options. If there's an easier way, do share :)

I've now completed my first e-book: A Far Better Rest. My findings are a bit mixed, but I am trying to keep my experience of using the device entirely separate from my response to the book itself. Here are some pluses and minuses noted at this point:

+  I was able to arrive at a combination of settings (font, size, brightness, landscape orientation) that allowed me to read quite comfortably.
+ Once I got into it, I was just reading, and the medium wasn't too intrusive--not at all, for instance, like reading on a computer screen, which I don't like to do for long. I was able to keep this up for hours.
+  The size and weight of the device are so slight that it is not cumbersome at all.
-  I did not like the feel of the plastic casing, and the edge pressed against my hand (between thumb and forefinger) in a way that became annoying.
+/-  Once the leather cover arrived yesterday, the feel of holding it became more pleasant. But it does add weight, and the orientation of the cover is portrait rather than landscape, so I can't hold it in normal book-reading position.
- The page-turning action feels unnatural, and I went the wrong way a lot of times.
- I don't like not seeing page numbers. The works page for the Kindle edition says this book is 353 pages, but I have no idea how that's arrived at. I don't know how many book-page-equivalents I really read, but it didn't feel like that many. It felt more like about 200 (about the length of a Cadfael mystery). Surely each little screen's worth doesn't count as a "page"--?
- I struggled with some of the functions, such as highlighting, which kept popping up when I didn't want them. My fingertips are small, but I have longish fingernails, and my gestures are not fine enough for good control.
+/- Once I got the stylus I ordered, manipulating the functions became much easier.
- I do not like seeing product promotions on the screensaver page or the bottoms of screens. My husband paid for top-of-the-line "no special offers" functionality, and yet these pages that are nothing other than promotional ads do appear. I think that's pretty, well, chickenshit (to use his term).
+ It's very easy to acquire additional titles.
- It's too easy to acquire additional titles. Almost like the chips in a Las Vegas casino, the one-click buy option and whoosh delivery to your little hand-held device is so slick that it doesn't feel like spending real money. I am not going to get sucked into excessive purchases. Not. I resolve to check out the library option.

More to come.

My biggest grievance with ebooks is that the library options are a real pain. I can get ebooks from my public library, but it requires downloading an extra program onto my computer and navigating several unwieldy websites.

>208 pwaites: Uh-oh. Damn.

I see that there's an Amazon "Kindle Unlimited" subscription service that lets you read any number of books for $9.99 per month--sort of like a Netflix for books, it seems. I'm assuming that not all books are eligible for that treatment.

I have a kneejerk resistance to the idea, even though I've had no problem with being a Netflix subscriber for the past twelve years. There seems to me to be an appreciable difference, although I haven't put my finger on it yet; something to do with feeling like a customer of Netflix but a captive of Amazon.

>209 Meredy: something to do with feeling like a customer of Netflix but a captive of Amazon.

That description is priceless. I can say right now that I will rob that from you at some point in the future.

By the way, I believe my son-in-law uses the "Kindle Unlimited" feature and finds it very convenient.

>210 pgmcc: Oh, let's not say "rob." Let's say "borrow," because it takes nothing away from me.

In fact, you can borrow an unlimited number of quotes from me for a mere $9.99 per month.

>211 Meredy: How kind. What a bargain.

>211 Meredy: how long have you been with Amazon? You seem to have captured the modus operandi extremely quickly! :0)

>211 Meredy:

How much for a Prime member?

But I only want to borrow 1 quote per month. Is there a basic membership for that?

>215 SylviaC: no, but for $9.99 you'll get a bunch of other stuff that you're not interested in, so it's a bargain really!

(This is a huge bone of contention in the uk where Amazon acquired LoveFilm and forced everyone on basic LoveFilm streaming plans to upgrade to Prime at a higher cost 'but so many extra benefits')

>216 imyril: you'll get a bunch of other stuff that you're not interested

Oh, a bit like digital TV. 200 channels and not a thing worth watching.

>207 Meredy: - I would be contacting Amazon and having a fit that they are still showing promotions and ads when you had to PAY not to have that. Glad you said something though, because I was actually thinking of paying for it to get the pretty pages like my mom has (her Kindle was purchased before they had the clever idea to advertise on them), but now I won't bother. Crooks.

The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Time traveling into my own past.

Extended review:

I've just reread The Time Machine, one of a little batch of free titles I picked up for my new Kindle.

Most of those public-domain freebies are things I've read before, long ago, as a teenager--in school (The Scarlet Letter), or in a 25-cent paperback (this one--The Time Machine), or in a faithfully adapted Classics Illustrated edition (The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man). Wells's ground-breaking story of time travel was one I read over and over as a youngster, transfixed and fascinated every time.

I must admit that the magic has faded a little bit by now. Not only have I read quantities of fiction published in the fifty years since then, much of it building on those nineteenth-century foundations (and making them seem very primitive), but I've been jaded by decades of spectacular special effects in movies--and, of course, by the real drama of unforeseen advances in technology.

Nonetheless, I was able to let myself slip into the right mood and go with it, dated style and conventions notwithstanding, and I found that some of the old wonder and thrill was still there.

Wells uses the common nineteenth-century device of telling a story second hand: a nameless narrator reports the fantastic tale told by someone else, together with his observations of and comments on the storyteller. This allows him to skirt questions of veracity, to speculate on missing details, and to supply an ending. At a time before radio, television, and video technology provided household entertainment, storytelling and reading aloud were popular diversions, and so this format lent familiarity and verisimilitude.

Wells's imagined world of nearly eight hundred thousand years into the future doesn't have to be believable in order to be vivid and affecting. The decay of civilization, the decline of humanity into a symbiotic pairing of opposites, and the poignant retrospective view on remnants of our time as obsolete museum pieces are depicted with intelligence and feeling. As he places hypothetical responsibility for those developments on the hubris and the very perceived strengths of his own time and culture, Wells delivers social commentary meant to give his own contemporaries pause for thought.

I enjoyed the story on its own merits, an adventure in an alien society and landscape, full of charm and menace, as well as one that deserves a monument in the history of modern fiction. I also enjoyed it for sentimental reasons. I hope there are still some young folk today who can read a novel like this and see it as a representative of the early youth of the genre, without disparaging it for its naivete and inexperience.

>219 Meredy: I love reading Wells and Verne stories. I willingly throw myself into the nineteenth century and enjoy them in the time of their setting.

>220 pgmcc: That's the way to do it. People who hold them to 21st-century literary customs and social conventions are not likely to enjoy them much. And that's really too bad. That much narrow-mindedness is more than an impediment. It's a shackle.

I think Wells is still eminently capable of making one think, in everything he wrote. And he's unsurpassed as a model--The time machine in particular (and War of the worlds) are the greatgrandparents of who knows how many dystopian and catastrophe narratives.

I need a swimming pool for the mind. I've just finished reading Opium Fiend: A 21st Century Slave to a 19th Century Addiction. which to me sounds as authentic as a story of addiction can possibly get. My brain is overheated now and I need to cool it off. The mental equivalent of a dip in cool water would do very nicely.

Perversely, I went from there to reading--at long last--Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which has been among my TBR shelves since college.

Now I'm enjoying the first Genevieve Lenard (despite some careless editing) and my first ER title, Her* (which exhibits some persistent typographical problems), as well as The Martian, our current weekly read-aloud.
-----
*No working touchstone.

3 a.m. (2013), by Nick Pirog (3 stars)

Six-word review: Offbeat, implausible but fun quickie whodunit.

Extended review:

The premise of this odd little novel or novella is that a guy named Henry Bins must live his life minute by minute, only one hour in a day. He has a disorder that causes him to sleep a predictable 23 hours out of every 24. One night he finds himself on the trail of a murderer during his scant sixty minutes. Soon law enforcement is after him as a suspect. While the clock ticks, what can he do to find the true culprit--and avoid waking up in jail?

This light, fast read scores a solid point for suspension of disbelief in the name of entertainment.

(Kindle version)

Nikola Tesla: Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century (2103), by Sean Patrick (2 stars)

Six-word review: Minor treatment of Tesla's extraordinary career.

Extended review:

Shallow, lightweight, thin, and not very well written, but not altogether worthless either.

This was a more or less idle pick from a list of free Kindle books. At 46 virtual pages, it's scarcely a book at all. Framed as an inspirational you-too-can-do-it piece, it sounds to me like a blend of self-pep-talk and bid for speaking engagements at corporate motivational luncheons.

However, I did know a lot less about Nikola Tesla than a reasonably well educated person ought to, and so I filled in some large blanks. Assuming that this account is factually based (and I haven't checked it independently), I was a little shocked to learn what an unprincipled SOB Thomas Edison was in conducting his feud with Tesla and also how wrongly others were given credit for Tesla's achievements: Marconi for radio, for instance, and Roentgen for Xrays.

The fact that the author couldn't spell 'Wilhelm' or 'Roentgen' (and various other names), misused words, and wrote lines such as this: "Stop and think for a second the frontiers that lie ahead for our species" (while no doubt believing that he didn't need editing) counts against him.

So whereas I can't possibly recommend this trivial essay to your attention, I took in some content that may lead me to further reading. If I could press a button and unread it, I probably wouldn't.

(Kindle version)

Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, by Huston Smith (4 stars)

Six-word review: Comparative religionist examines what shaped him.

Extended review:

For an autobiography of anyone, this personal history is short. For a man of (then) nearly ninety to tell his story in under two hundred printed pages seems remarkable. All the more so when the man is Huston Smith, a world-renowned scholar, traveler, author, and teacher in the field of comparative religion, and one who has a considerable appetite for being recognized and admired. So I must begin by awarding bonus points for keeping it brief, crisp, and relevant, with only a modest helping of self-indulgence and very little repetition.

Born into an evangelical Christian family as the son of American missionaries to China, young Huston was exposed to a variety of Eastern and Western religious practices from childhood onward. At sixteen he came to the U.S. to attend college and remained as a permanent resident. As a student he came under the influence of a mentor who encouraged and broadened his thinking in religious studies.

The hallmark of his career is first-hand experience: he didn't just learn about various spiritual traditions but joined them and followed their disciplines and teachings himself for significant periods of time. He was thus able to write about them in The World's Religions and other works from the inside rather than as an academic onlooker and impartial analyst.

The book is structured in two timelines: Smith's personal chronology and his spiritual journey, both depicted with rigorous selectivity through representative sketches rather than exhaustive detail. The two are intertwined but distinct. Together they deliver a moving account of how he came to be a celebrated expert on comparative religion as well as a fulfilled and self-realized individual. We detect some vanity here and a touch of false modesty, but we also see frank admission of error and an inextinguishable ardor for ever greater enlightenment. His narrative, if unapologetic, is also unsparing: he openly admits shortcomings of self-involvement and self-importance that for a time dangerously blinded him to the needs of those closest to him. Once seen, his personal failings are not defended but amended. One hardly thinks that any person could achieve the heights of accomplishment that he has reached without some personal cost.

I have met and spoken with Huston Smith on several occasions: decades ago when he taught a day-long class at Berkeley Extension; during the nineties, when he spoke at a zendo where I was a member; and, most recently, in 2004, when he appeared as a lecturer at East/West Books in Mountain View. In all cases and even (at the last of those times) when he had largely lost the power of speech, he radiated a contagious enthusiasm for his subject and a consuming excitement with the uplift of spiritual understanding. He has known real tragedy in his life, and now, at 95, he lives with considerable physical impairment, and yet his prevailing worldview appears to remain one of confident optimism in celebration of the infinitely faceted jewel of life.

When it comes to inspiration, I'm a hard sell, skeptical, resistant, not readily affected by anything calculated to move, lure, or seduce. I'm also a committed atheist with no place in my life for dogma and empty ritual. Yet I found myself drawn in by Smith's narrative, touched by the authenticity of his experience and, in spite of myself, uplifted by his joyous conviction.

On page 75 he says, "Now I am writing my memoirs, the book you have in your hands, and after it is finished I have still one more book up my sleeve. Stay tuned for what comes next." I'll stay tuned.

Ooh, I've just taken another bullet.

Cool! It's my turn to grin over some bull's eyes for a change.

Opium Fiend: A 21st Century Slave to a 19th Century Addiction (2012), by Steven Martin (4 stars)

Six-word review: Unsparing portrait of addict's compulsive behavior.

Extended review:

It began with collecting: simple collecting, a hobby, such as many kids have. Rocks. Shells. Coins. It ended with an all-consuming addiction to a long-banished drug whose power to enslave is multiplied by the unimaginable horrors of withdrawal. The journey led the author through a bizarre Southeast Asian underground of whose existence few are even aware and recorded the death of a renowned scholar whose secret drug dependency trapped her in the fatal ordeal of sudden deprivation.

Disturbing as it was, this cautionary tale of a man whose edgy hobby led to a life-threatening obsession was also fascinating and in fact difficult to put down. It was almost as if the vapors of heavenly poison were escaping the page, intoxicating and compelling, arousing a lust for vicarious experience even while sounding a warning in the strongest of terms.

Author Steven Martin documents the stages by which his hobby of collecting implements associated with opium use brought him to experiment with the fabled drug and ultimately become enslaved by it. His narrative includes a wealth of information about Asian collectibles and particularly about the sorts of rarities that became his focus. Some might consider the extensive descriptions of porcelain, carved pipes, lamps, and other devices excessive, but I found them all to be relevant. Likewise the stories of how he found his sources and what led him, step by step, to opium addiction all seem pertinent to me. I would not have edited out any of it.

Most moving of all is the account of what happened to Roxanna Brown, world-class expert on Asian ceramics. I found several online writeups of her death in a Seattle jail, but none of them told the story that Martin tells. For what it's worth, I believe him.

I read this book because I wanted to have an insider's view of the nightmare of compulsive using and the hell of withdrawal without ever placing myself in a position to experience it first hand. It's not for me to recommend this book, which will probably fall outside most people's range of interest in the subject matter; but for me it was deeply affecting, as someone who has loved more than one chemically dependent person and who never wants to go there herself.

Here is an article about the author as collector. It tells the story in brief.
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/journey-into-the-opium-underworld/

(Kindle version)

The Heretic’s Apprentice (1990), by Ellis Peters (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Priceless treasure kindles romance, precipitates murder.

Extended review:

In the sixteenth chronicle of Brother Cadfael, our favorite twelfth-century monastic gumshoe yields the foreground to the inevitable thwarted young couple. Perhaps shifting the focus away from her series character refreshed the author's enthusiasm for her task; I'd call this one of the better episodes, and definitely one of the best of the later ones, which had lately seemed to give off a faint whiff of staleness while becoming a bit too predictable.

In any event, Cadfael seems to yield the spotlight graciously, while the well-matched pair of lovers takes center stage. The clever deductions and the setting of the final trap fall to them, and they carry off their parts with spirit.

At the same time, the author gets in a full complement of asides on various religious, political, and social topics together with plenty of time-and-place atmosphere and well-researched detail. I thought the information about the making of parchment and fine books was interesting and well integrated into the story.

God bless cozy mysteries, an antidote to many an ill.

>230 Meredy: ooph, book bullet! That sounds fascinating and disturbing in equal measure. And rather more accessible than, say de Quincey.

>232 imyril: Very much so. I read De Quincey right on the heels of that, accomplishing a TBR of more than 40 years. I'd certainly say go for Martin.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), by Thomas De Quincey (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Opium dreams are heaven, addiction hell.

Extended review:

Somewhere on one of my bookcases, probably bearing 40-plus years' accumulation of dust and shelf wear, is a paper copy of De Quincey's autobiographical work, a remnant of one of my college courses in British literature of the Romantic Period. It remains unbroached; the copy I just read was a free download on my Kindle. But that's how long the intent has been in place.

What finally overcame the pull of inertia was reading Opium Fiend: A 21st Century Slave to a 19th Century Addiction (2012), by Steven Martin (reviewed above and here). De Quincey's work, although far from the only one on the subject, was a sort of spiritual ancestor of Martin's soul-baring memoir.

De Quincey's narrative, originally published in two installments in a London periodical, consists of two parts, each with an introduction: "The Pleasures of Opium" and "The Pains of Opium." De Quincey came to the use of laudanum (a preparation of opium mixed with alcohol) as a pain reliever when he was young and alone, estranged from his family. In it he found relief and release from emotional and spiritual as well as physical pain, and his ecstatic visions began to consume his life.

The old story, old even then in the early 19th century and a good deal older and more commonplace now, is simply that the drug of choice begins by seeming to solve a problem and ends by being itself a far, far greater problem. The user must overcome the addiction or die, and if he succeeds in withdrawal, his life is now encumbered not only by the problems he sought to escape in the first place but also by all the wreckage he has created since then as a result.

That is De Quincey's tale, recounted in 1822, different in language and particulars from addicts' stories told today but one with them in substance.

The age and style of this 200-year-old account pose no obstacle for me; but for readability, relevance, vividness, and comprehensiveness I recommend Martin's work to anyone who has no need to delve into the older literature.

Kindle update: follow-up to post #207

I've had the Kindle Paperwhite for a month now. Here's a further report:

+ I figured out airplane mode pretty quickly and keep it on most of the time to save battery power.
+ I can get through an average full-length novel (~300 book pages) with only a couple of recharges.
+ Being able to just grab the thing and take it along has been handy for waiting room sits and the like. I can choose what to read once I get there.
+ If I forget my reading glasses, I can enlarge the print.
- Sometimes the touch functions don't respond.
- Having been baffled by the incomplete instructions in the user manual, I had to go on an online quest to find out how to manage books in "collections," which is a clumsy, counterintuitive function that's only marginally better than nothing.
+ By checking the Kindle store on Amazon, I've been able to acquire quite a few decent selections--and not all of them more than a century old--for little or nothing.
+ So far I've only once paid as much as $5.99 for a book, and most of the time it's $0.00 to $1.99. I'm pretty determined not to pay more than $6.00.
- I have to wade through a lot of trash to find the choice items.
+/- My reading of regular paper books isn't much affected. The Kindle really doesn't work well for reading in bed, at least not in landscape view.
- Seeing a percentage complete is not the equivalent of feeling how many pages or how much bulk is left. I've been fooled twice now by seeing '93%' and thinking there was a lot more to come (tying up of loose ends, explanations of puzzles), only to have a book end seemingly abruptly--followed by teasers and promotional material that counted in the percentage.
- Moving forward and backward and looking around is never going to be as easy as it is in a real book.
+/- The highlighting function, once I got the hang of it, is easier than taking a lot of notes; but it is still cumbersome and takes numerous retries, especially across pages.

What are the (good) books you've found so far for less than $2? When I look at ebooks on my TBR list, most of them seem to be $6 or more. Pretty much all of them have used copies that are cheaper than the ebooks.

>236 pwaites: These. They may not all be available at the same price now (I think some were temporary specials), but they were. These range from "okay" (3 a.m.) to "excellent" (Peony). All are listed and rated in my post #1, and some have been reviewed.

• A Far Better Rest, by Susanne Alleyn (2010)
• The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells (1895)
• Opium Fiend: A 21st Century Slave to a 19th Century Addiction, by Steven Martin (2012)
• Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, by Thomas De Quincey (1822)
• The Gauguin Connection, by Estelle Ryan (2012)
• 3 a.m., by Nick Pirog (2013)
• Peony, by Pearl S. Buck (1948)
• Book of Shadows, by Alexandra Sokoloff (2011)

237> Thanks!

Finished during July and August and not yet reviewed:

• A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, by Lawrence M. Krauss
• A Far Better Rest, by Susanne Alleyn
• The Day of the Scorpion (Raj Quartet 2), by Paul Scott
• Her: A Novel, by Harriet Lane
• The Gauguin Connection, by Estelle Ryan
• Peony, by Pearl S. Buck
• Book of Shadows, by Alexandra Sokoloff
• Dark Places, by Gillian Flynn
• Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne

Working on it. Really.

I'll look forward to hearing your thoughts on The Day of the Scorpion. :)

>239 Meredy: Was Dark Places as dark as Gone Girl?

>241 pgmcc: Yes. More so, in my opinion, and by quite a bit. Don't venture into Dark Places unless you're ready for that.

She does do it well, though.

>242 Meredy: I thought she did well what she did in Gone Girl but her totally dismal view of humanity left me dubious about reading more of her work. I must agree with you that she is good at what she does.

Book of Shadows (2011), by Alexandra Sokoloff (3 stars)

Six-word review: Macabre joyride is fast, forgettable entertainment.

Extended review:

This book really isn't a mystery, although it's structured like one. We don't get a lineup of suspects and try to figure out whodunit. And everything isn't logically explained in the end.

What it is is a suspense thriller. And it is pretty creepy, a pulse-thumper, by no means highbrow literature but not bottom of the barrel either; rather, a B-movie equivalent that's worth the popcorn on a Saturday night.

If you're in the mood to consider as entertainment a gruesome murder, some demonic possession, satanism, ritual magic, seduction, sex, madness, suspicion, misdirection, and a race against time in the company of a likeable enough detective, fluff your sofa cushions and sit back. Don't worry about the unanswered questions and loose threads; think of it as a theme park attraction that isn't really going to resemble the experience of an Alpine climb or a mining tunnel but is going to give you a pretty rambunctious ride anyway.

And it's free.

(Kindle edition)

A lot of Sokoloff's books are like this, it would appear--I've read one, but replace a few nouns in your review and we might have read the same book. Your comparison to a B movie is apt--I heard the author speak a couple of years ago at a writing conference about her plotting tools, which are based on screenwriting techniques.

Around the World in 80 Days (1873), by Jules Verne (4 stars)

Six-word review: Global romp charms even without Niven.

Extended review:

E-book editions of old works in the public domain, free on Amazon, may have less than universal appeal; but their availability is just the prompt I needed to remedy some omissions in my reading history.

Around the World in 80 Days is one of many classics that I'd encountered in other media, and most memorably in the 1956 blockbuster film, but never actually read in the (translated) original. Now I have. And I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite the dated narrative style, despite the misconceptions and stereotypes that strike such a harsh note to 21st-century ears, despite the contrived coincidences and the deus ex machinas.

Phileas Fogg is a preternaturally unflappable Englishman who takes on a wager to circumnavigate the globe in eighty days or lose his fortune. Accompanied by his highly flappable valet Passepartout, he encounters numerous obstacles en route and calmly undertakes to overcome them all. Not least among them is Detective Fix: certain that Fogg is a fleeing bank robber, he dogs his steps and attempts to halt his progress. A race against days, hours, and ultimately minutes creates an entertaining chase. Part travelogue, part Victorian-era adventure, the novel rates four stars on sentimental grounds.

(Kindle edition)

Hooray! One we agree on. :)

Double hurray! How do you feel about Oliver Twist?--my current Kindle oldie.

I loved 80 Days when I read it.

I haven't read Oliver Twist yet. :) It is on my TBR shelf.

I am looking forward to hearing your opinion of A Far Better Rest. The author's name rings a vague bell with me, but when I looked it up and found that it's a retelling of A Tale of Two Cities, the interest levels definitely rose.

Her (2015), by Harriet Lane (3½ stars)

(my first Early Reviewer review)

Six-word review: Vindictive passion drives woman's calculated revenge.

Extended review:

It's not just that two people experience and remember the same event differently. That wouldn't be so bad. But when the event is life-altering for one of them while for the other it's too trivial to recall or even notice, that imbalance can create a festering wound.

The story of Her is told in the voices of the focal characters, Nina and Emma, in alternating chapters following a structure that has become very familiar in recent decades. It works better in some cases than others; here I'd say it's quite effective. Using lines of dialogue as anchor points to keep the reader oriented to the timeline, the shifting viewpoint calls into constant question the validity of both characters' perceptions. Emma's is deeply colored by her exasperatingly unfulfilled life as a young wife and mother, Nina's by her harbored resentment of a youth disrupted by events outside her control. The author exhibits considerable skill in sustaining our sympathetic identification with both characters even as we regard their actions with doubt, disapproval, or revulsion.

In a style at once lyrical and incisive, Lane exposes the complex inner lives of Nina and Emma, at odds in both cases with superficial appearance. Here's Emma reflecting on the tyranny of her toddler son's inflexible demands:

Christopher's margins are ribbon-narrow; if I allow him to get hungry or tired, he'll punish me. And those punishments are hard to bear. I'm already someone else, but the person I turn into at these low points is someone I never imagined I could be a few years ago: someone with a hot knot of fury where her heart used to be. (page 15)

More alike than either can possibly guess, each of them is plagued by intractable demons. In Nina's case, however, scheming and manipulating afford her the sense of mastery and control that Emma has long since lost. Nina seizes a chance to step in as a last-minute babysitter, insinuating herself ever more deeply into the life of the preoccupied, unwitting Emma:

   For a while, I'm undecided. I think of Emma looking forward to her evening, excited but a little intimidated by all the effort involved in doing this differently, just this once: dressing up, leaving the kids, making conversation. Getting out into the world, seeing that it has all been ticking over happily, not missing her at all.
   The thought of pulling the plug, robbing her of all this, is quite appealing.
   And yet, and yet. There's an opportunity here for me. I feel the rightness of it. Why not? Two birds, one stone. (page 138)

Despite the homely content of these excerpts, the novel is not primarily a drama of perverted domesticity. It's a story of obsession and revenge. Says Nina's internal monologue: "I wonder if Emma ever stalks her younger self as I stalk mine, full of rage and pity" (page 149).

The gradual revelation of one character's increasingly invasive machinations paired with the other's willful obliviousness fosters a building sense of menace, a haunting, nameless peril of the sort that one senses in a Tana French novel. I don't think we need to understand why a certain long-ago event had the impact it did on Nina's life; we only have to see that it did, and in some respect we can comprehend--if not justify--what she does. We've seen a similar buildup in Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, if not a parallel situation: on some level, the scheme makes sense, even though we know it's bizarre, obsessive, and insane. It's the author's gift to make us feel the character's hunger for justice toward her history even as we must condemn the means.

The author's power of apt description enriches every page. Briefly, almost offhandedly, she evokes the way our existence is erased the moment we leave the restaurant, creating the illusion for the next patron that no one has ever occupied the table before:

I glance in the window, into the room which is full of a buttery low light pricked out with candles and silverware, and see the waiter clearing our table, whisking away the wine glasses and the coffee cups, the plate of petits fours, and lowering on a new white cloth with easy dramatic precision. (page 43)

In a few words she captures how different kinds of silence possess different qualities:

The house fills with the particular atmosphere that accompanies peacefully sleeping children: a rich narcotic silence that creeps down the stairs and twines itself around the table legs. (page 91)

The sorry intimacy of our personal laundry, so seemingly innocuous, exposes us mercilessly to the predatory voyeur:

Socks and pants and vests, the demoralized-looking bras in dishwater shades dangling there like pale bats. (page 143)

Not that the book is without flaws, but most of them are mechanical and probably not the fault of the author. There's a problem with quotation marks that runs throughout the book from start to finish--something I hope can be corrected before the bluelines are signed off and the presses run. There are editorial lapses, too (such as the all-too-common "bicep," missing the final s, which is not a plural).

There is also a vexing habit that does belong to the author, that of mentioning names for the first time without offering any relationship tags: needlessly disorienting. Leaving us to figure out who's the daughter, who's the ex, who's the father, and who's the cat really serves no purpose. Like so many other authors of contemporary literature, Harriet Lane needs to muster a little more defiance of the writer's-workshop tyranny of "show, don't tell." Some telling is okay; ordinary background information shouldn't require diligent sleuthing on the part of the reader.

In sum, I'll award this novel good marks for its characterization, plot development, style, and tone. Moreover, I thought the ominous but open-ended conclusion was just, fitting, and oddly satisfying in its way. Leaving me to recognize and examine my own thoughts about it is, I think, exactly the point: a final disturbing mirroring of the reader that in my mind calls up an echo of Baudelaire's famous line--"Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!"

Let it stand as a testament to the virtues of this novel for me that I was able to get through all 261 pages of a narrative in the present tense. That was enough to knock me off Hilary Mantel on page 1. If I hadn't been committed to an Early Reviewer read, my first, I'd have abandoned this one at the start for the same reason; but, without yielding one particle of my prejudice, I'm glad I didn't. I promise I will be watching for another work by this author.

Peony (1948), by Pearl S. Buck (5 stars)

Six-word review: Love and duty bind Chinese slave.

Extended review:

In a large city in mid-nineteenth-century China, a woman named Peony is bound in service to an old, established Jewish family. Her pivotal role in the life of the family bridges two ancient traditions, each with its observances and taboos. Peony's devoted service to the old master, Ezra, and his controlling wife masks a consuming but forbidden love for their son David, once her childhood companion, now destined for a place in the religious community.

This richly atmospheric novel delivers fascinating details of life in the China of about 1850 and especially in a Jewish household within that setting. The synagogue in the city was by then already some 800 or 900 years old. As depicted, Jews who had migrated to China by way of the Silk Road centuries earlier remained aloof in the wider community but were cheerfully tolerated by their liberal-minded Chinese hosts, who knew nothing of European antisemitism. A comfortable symbiosis prevailed between the merchant classes of both cultures, and intermarriage among their offspring increasingly blurred the differences.

For Peony, however, the barrier is insurmountable: it is not because she's Chinese but because she is a bondswoman, inescapably restrained by her inferior social status and her utter dependence on her owners, that there is no hope of a union between her and David. So her love must find other expressions. To serve him, she becomes a schemer and manipulator of events and circumstances. In Peony we see a complex characterization fraught with secrets, conflicts, and hidden motivations, at once rigid and yielding, resourceful, clever, loyal, and yet hopelessly yearning. Among all the principals we see above all else a depiction of love in its many forms, bringer of pain and grief as much as of joy.

From the Pulitzer- and Nobel-winning author of The Good Earth, Peony the novel, deep, moving, satisfying, poignant, wise, and culturally rich, is certain to be one of my highest-rated reading experiences of the year.

(Kindle edition)

Pearl S. Buck is one of those authors I save for when I need a good read I can depend on to be good.

The Day of the Scorpion (1968), by Paul Scott (4½ stars)

Six-word review: Cascading effects of precipitating causes continue.

Extended review:

Dense, complex, compelling: those are the three descriptors that I noted down immediately on finishing this second volume of the Raj Quartet.

In an evolving procession of viewpoint characters, the focus shifts here from Daphne Manners and Hari Kumar to the upper-class Layton family and specifically to Sarah Layton, who describes herself thus: "I was the kind of child who automatically asked why when I was told the cat sat on the mat. My teachers said I ought to curb a tendency to squander curiosity on the self-evident." (p. 176) Sarah's interest in the lives of those around her and even of those only peripherally connected with her moves the story forward with the unfolding drama begun in volume one. Against the backdrop of India in turmoil during the final years of British rule, the consequences of a brutal rape and a gross injustice rooted in racism continue to play out. Sarah's perceptive and often unconventional reactions to people and events make the story immediate and personal.

Rather than recapitulating and analyzing this portion of a much longer work, I'll just cite three excerpts that for me convey something of the flavor of this quarter part.

Sarah witnesses her sister Susan's wedding to Teddie Bingham:

Glancing from Teddie to Uncle Arthur and back again Sarah thought: Why, what a curious thing a human being is; and was not surprised to hear Aunt Fenny sniff and to see that Susan was trembling as she put out her hand for Teddie to fit the ring on her finger. It is all over in such a short time, Sarah told herself, but in that short time everything about our lives changes for ever. We become something else, without necessarily having understood what we were before. (p. 164)

The best man at the wedding is Captain Ronald Merrick, formerly the policeman who had arrested and imprisoned Hari Kumar. He is speaking here of a military conflict in which both sides made poor showings, revealing the arrogant pragmatism of his own approach to situations:

"They were both amateurs because they were both hot-headed. They were trying to make a lyric out of a situation that was merely prosaic. It only seemed problematical because we lacked information. But because it seemed problematical all this free emotional rein was given to the business of its solution. Well, there you are. If there are things you don't know, you call the gap in your knowledge a mystery and fill it with a wholly emotional answer." (pp. 378-379)

A regime that has allowed generations of British military and civilian residents to call India home while sustaining their aloof supremacy over the native population has become destabilized not only through the effects of World War II but through internal events exacerbated by the Daphne Manners case. Sarah Layton reflects privately on the maneuvers of the failing British occupancy to hold its position against the tide of Indian independence:

...a further sign that Aunt Fenny had entered the new age, in which old Flagstaff House values were shrewdly to be readjusted as an insurance against the extinction of those who held them. Gimlet and cigarette in hand and for a moment alone, Sarah was conscious of belonging to a class engaged in small, continual acts whose purpose was survival... (p. 404)

That survival is seriously in question as the story proceeds.

>254 MrsLee: I haven't read anything else by her, but I will. Do you have a list of favorites?

The Good Earth was my first exposure, and I loved it. More recently, I read The Living Reed, which takes place in Korea, and I loved that, too. I've read others, but those are the most vivid in my mind.

WRT getting good prices for kindle ebooks, check out http://eReaderIQ.com. It lets you track books and lets you know when prices fall. I seldom pay more than 2.99 for kindle books, and this site lets you input the sorts of books you want and alerts you when the prices drop. You can also input books you want or authors you want to track.

A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (2013), by Lawrence M. Krauss (3.5 stars)

Six-word review: Depends on how you define "nothing."

Extended review:

Sometimes when it takes me weeks to write a review, I find that by the time I come to comment, I've forgotten most of what I read. That's not the case with this book: I was actively forgetting it even as I was reading it; or rather, hearing it.

I wouldn't call that the fault of the author. I just don't have a lot of built-in receptors for physics and cosmic stuff. Moreover, this book was a read-aloud for my husband and me, and I retain less when I'm listening to something I can't see, even when I'm interested in it.

So here's what I've got now that six weeks have elapsed:

• Space is awfully big.
• Because of when we are, we have the capability to measure and calculate things left over from the Big Bang that will no longer be possible to observe at some future time when science has advanced a whole lot more.
• Stuff winks into and out of existence all the time, so that "nothing" isn't really nothing.
• The author convinced me that he knew what he was talking about.
• The author needed a more attentive editor.

Reading books of this type now and then is good for my brain. That reminds me, I should probably eat more liver and try a few situps.

Hee hee. Equating a book with liver and situps tells me all I need to know.

The Silkworm (2014), by Robert Galbraith (4 stars)

Six-word review: Bloody good read despite rough spots.

Extended review:

By the time we got to the fourth or fifth Harry Potter volume, I had the sense that either the books were being rushed into print too fast for much editorial care or, as seemed even more likely, the author's words had suddenly become golden and hence exempt from correction.

Observed lapses included odd repetitions, occasional wrong word choices, a continuity break or two, and some jarringly weird grammatical constructions.

Is the same thing happening with the Cormoran Strike series now that author Galbraith has been outed as Rowling?

Here's the opening sentence of one chapter (page 101):

They marched against the war in which Strike had lost his leg the next day, thousands snaking their way...

And here's the opening of another (page 147):

Late that evening Strike sat alone at his desk while the traffic rumbled through the rain outside, eating Singapore noodles...

It would be so nice to be able to relax and read a big book without stumbling over comical gaffes like these, which not only break the tone but make me as a reader feel as if the publisher were putting revenues pretty far ahead of quality control.

There were several moments while reading The Cuckoo's Calling when I wondered if Rowling as Galbraith were deliberately using an amateurish device to throw suspicious readers off the scent of an accomplished author. Here, with no more need of cloaking, the author again employs a surprisingly nineteenth-century contrivance to create suspense: on page 281, the narrative tells us (I'm paraphrasing) that Strike did not look out his window, but if he had, he might have seen a shadowy figure...really, Robert.

Nevertheless, The Silkworm was a four-star read for me, an engaging if gruesome mystery with likeable main characters (despite the wear and tear of their respective love lives) and the intrigue of the infinitely barbaric world of book publishing. Among all the quirky-to-bizarre characters, I didn't guess the culprit; not that I tried too hard--it was a good enough ride that I didn't want to spoil it. I must say there were clues here of a sort that definitely scored points for novelty.

I'll continue to follow the series with enthusiastic anticipation, but I won't expect to see it polished with the finest grit, even though it deserves to be.

I've been coming across A Universe from Nothing frequently. So far I've convinced myself not to buy it, because I have a tendency to accumulate far more science and history books than I will ever be able to read. Your review will make it easier for me to resist. It sounds like there is nothing to really make it stand out from other books on the subject.

Oliver Twist (1838), by Charles Dickens (4 stars)

Six-word review: Deservedly classic tale of orphan's survival.

Extended review:

Despite its verbosity, sentimentality, and exaggerated characterizations, how can you not love this book? Like a dog at your feet, it's there to be loved. What else are you going to do with it?

It also turns out to be much more satirical than I ever realized. Social commentary, yes, expected; but satire? I didn't know. For example:

Mr. Bumble...had a decided propensity for bullying: derived no inconsiderable pleasure from the exercise of petty cruelty; and, consequently, was (it is needless to say) a coward. This is by no means a disparagement to his character; for many official personages, who are held in high respect and admiration, are the victims of similar infirmities. The remark is made, indeed, rather in his favour than otherwise, and with a view of impressing the reader with a just sense of his qualifications for office.

Dickens misses no opportunity to underscore the social ills of his time and place and to distribute ample helpings of blame freely up and down the social scale. He also holds us captive with a story that keeps us reading and soaking up his message.

So here they all are, the characters we know so well in so many incarnations, embedded as they are in the cultures of the English-speaking world and probably well beyond: the ever-so-good good guys: tender, mistreated Oliver; kindly, open-hearted Mr. Brownlow; sweet, sweet Rose, so impossibly angelic that it's a wonder she doesn't suffocate of her own virtue; and poor brave, doomed Nancy, without whom nothing could have turned out right; and the bad guys, not one of whom is without at least some small spark of sympathetic humanity to argue for redemption: sadistic Mr. Bumble; cocky Artful Dodger; unregenerate, duplicitous Fagin; mysterious, menacing Monks; and cruel, brutal Bill Sikes, a monster who comes to a fitting end that yet inspires horror.

Of the rambling story with its odd, protracted word-count-stretching digressions and amazing coincidences I have no comment to add to the immense body of commentary on the literature of Dickens: but to say that the story is brightest in single scenes and episodes, with the long arc serving mainly to string those together. It's in those vignettes that the brilliance of Dickens' characterization is displayed, and that, indeed, is why we fall in love.

The Gauguin Connection, by Estelle Ryan (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Autism heightens investigator's unusual sleuthing skills.

Extended review:

Here are the notes I jotted down right after finishing the book, a month ago now. I'm afraid I no longer remember what I had in mind when I wrote "magnetism." I enjoyed the story well enough, and I'll probably read the next in the series, but this is as far as I feel like exerting myself right now for the sake of this review.

entertaining chase
complex plot--lost track a few times
interesting characters
magnetism
enticing ambiguity of relationships

maddeningly repetitive like Connie Willis--we get it
--her traits, such as taking things literally
--themes like male territoriality
Monk on overdrive
contradiction
can learn 3 languages but can't master a glossary of English slang and idioms
on one page she doesn't understand a remark and on another she uses it herself (what?)

I did give it three and a half stars at the time, which is a solid "okay" in my book.

(Kindle version)

Dark Places (2009), by Gillian Flynn (4 stars)

Six-word review: Aftermath of horrific crime never ends.

Extended review:

Be warned by the title: this novel is very dark indeed.

After reading all three of her novels published to date (this being the second and by far the darkest), I have to say that Gillian Flynn either knows, or imagines, or is some very, very strange women.

In this case the woman is the survivor of a murderous rampage that took the lives of her mother and two sisters. Only seven at the time, Libby Day escaped and later supplied court testimony that sent her older brother Ben to prison for the deed. Her life has been understandably overshadowed by the experience, but even at that Libby seems to be a profoundly warped individual. It is a tribute to the genius of the author that we can identify with her at all sympathetically.

Now in her thirties, Libby is forced to revisit the circumstances surrounding a soul-destroying event that has shaped her life and reexamine the validity of her own testimony.

Libby is also surrounded by characters who are in their own way as messed up as she, conferring on her an appearance of relative normality that is creepy in itself.

Even though the narrative stays within the realm of the real, meaning that there's no magic, no fantasy, no supernatural agents, nothing that would be impossible in the course of real-world cause and effect, Flynn's stories push the boundaries of the probable and the plausible pretty hard. It's the treading just barely within the constraints of consensual reality that gives them an eerie, shuddery quality that prickles the skin: that and a gripping style that reaches for the edges of words and grasps them by their sharp sides.

For a single example, here's the sort of line I love in Gillian Flynn's writing: "The frenetic, zigzag music started scribbling on Ben's brain" (page 272).

There's also a description of tripping, starting on page 274, that is so vivid that it makes me feel as if I were on something myself. I can't attest to the authenticity of it, but it sounds genuine to me.

On the other hand, Gillian, just to let you know: I wish I didn't keep running into lines like this: "Her lips were plump as labias" (page 305). Restated, Gillian, that would be "Her lips were as plump as lipses." We know what you mean, and we get the intended effect, but it still counts as a black mark. Labia is a plural already, the Latin plural of labium, and it means "lips." Authors can't do everything; but your editor, whose job it is to spare you embarrassment, should have caught this.

I awarded four stars to this work, not recommended for overly sensitive souls, but surely one of the most extraordinary explorations of family bonds and of coming to terms with personal history that I have seen in a while.

The Shortest Way to Hades (1984), by Sarah Caudwell (3 stars)

Six-word review: Law professor investigates heiress's suspicious death.

Extended review:

A quintet of young London barristers and a cheerfully freeloading professor of law constitute a formidable investigative team when a suspicion of foul play enters an otherwise arid legal proceeding. That the victim's loss is unlamented is irrelevant; someone still stands to gain when the prescribed order of inheritance is disrupted. The denizens of Lincoln's Inn and their academic colleague don't intend to let the matter lie unquestioned--especially not when one of their number appears to be threatened.

The delightfulness of Caudwell's second Hilary Tamar mystery, successor to Thus Was Adonis Murdered, falls a little short of the mark set by the first. This is due in part to a very drawn-out explanation of the legal matters at issue in the plot and in part to a parallel prolonged play-by-play description of a cricket game, the crucial difference being that the game does not seem to figure in the storyline except as a pretext for drawing certain characters together. There is no apparent reason for the progress of the game to be so exhaustively recounted. When we add a similarly detailed account of an obscure controversy surrounding aspects of transcription and translation of ancient Homeric texts--which, however, are used cleverly in the unfolding of the plot--we have a lot of weight dragging down the movement of the story.

So although I continue to enjoy the interplay of the characters and their irrepressible British quirkiness, the mystery story was to me very slow and a bit elusive to follow.

In due course I'm sure I will read the remaining two installments; but I can't give this one more than three of the expected three and a half stars.

I think the drawn-out legal explanations were where I ground to a halt in the series. Someday I should revisit the first one, and try to get back into it. Someday.

I think this was the weakest of the four. Numbers three and four are better. Especially three, where Julia and Michael decide to co-author a steamy romance novel.

>268 Marissa_Doyle: Oh, well, now, that does sound like something to look forward to.

Come on, Sylvia, let's give it a try.

I began and promptly abandoned (on page 11 of 530) the highly touted All the Light We Cannot See. I don't care how good it is or what it's about, I simply can't stand a present-tense narrative for that long. I can barely push through a short story that's written in the present tense. There's plenty more reading matter awaiting my attention. Back to the library it goes.

I finished Colin Falconer's Silk Road the same day that my husband and I galloped to the conclusion of The Martian, which lasted eight weeks as a read-aloud. I'm kind of working up to reviewing them in tandem; there are certain parallels. We'll see if I can still write a half-decent compare-and-contrast essay.

The Silk Road: A New History (2012), by Valerie Hansen (3½ stars)

Six-word review: First-millennium travel shaped world history.

Extended review:

Like so many others, including, it seems, many scholars, I'd fallen for the popular conception of the fabled Silk Road as a well-beaten thoroughfare traversing Central Asia from coastal China to the Mediterranean, with long trains of pack camels hauling goods for trade across endless reaches of mountain and desert.

In fact, according to Yale professor and researcher Valerie Hansen, caravans tended to be small, wholesale trade light, travel limited and local, and the routes inconspicuous but for the natural formations that marked them. If it weren't for the cultural cross-pollination that resulted from migrations of refugees from war and political conflict and the exchanges of gift-bearing envoys from kingdom to kingdom, there would be little of significance to say about the Silk Road.

But those cultural effects were world-changing. From about 200 CE to 1000 CE, the vast land mass extending across the whole breadth of Asia was traversed on foot and on camelback by hundreds of thousands of travelers, carrying knowledge from east to west and from west to east. Language, writing systems, technology, art, and especially religion spread along those pathways. Rulers converted, temples arose or were torn down, new customs supplanted old. Alliances formed and reformed; boundaries were drawn and redrawn. Monks and scholars traveled to study under other masters and examine original sacred documents. The resulting blends of peoples and cultures transformed some of the world's oldest civilizations.

The author cites primary sources, such as records of taxation, travel passes, correspondence, and legal documents, to establish a picture of traffic along the routes of the Silk Road and life in seven oases dotting the way, locations that became urban centers and even capitals of rulers. The well-documented view that emerges may have lost something in romance but seems to have gained in authenticity.

One fact of note: the term "Silk Road" was coined by Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877 when he developed maps of the ancient routes as a basis for building a railway line; until then the expression had never been used.

I read this book because Pearl S. Buck's 1948 novel Peony made me curious about how Jews came to establish large communities in China. A search for books about the Silk Road led me to Colin Falconer's (definitely romanticized) 2011 novel Silk Road, which I read in tandem with this evidence-based account of verifiable fact. All three broadened the horizons in my mind across time and space and left me with an appetite for more.

>272 Meredy: Argh! Book bullet!

>272 Meredy: *stagger* yep, winged me too.

Sigh. She's very good at that, isn't she? ;)

Yes, she sure is...

>253 Meredy: The Pearl S. Buck novel sounds fascinating. Having recently read Anchee Min's Pearl of China I've wanted to read something by Pearl S. Buck. I shall keep my eyes open in the hope of finding something lurking around somewhere.

Got me too...

I do have something more to add about The Silk Road. But first:

Farthing (2007), by Jo Walton (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Murder and politics in 1949 Britain.

Extended review:

Well along in this book, I was still wondering why the alternate history, one in which England has made a war-ending peace with Germany and Hitler still rules in much of Europe. I didn't see how it served the story, why it was necessary to invent this highly charged political climate instead of using one that already existed.

By the end I knew: this isn't really a murder mystery. It's a cautionary tale disguised as a murder mystery. Here the Ghost of Horrors Yet to Come points a bony finger at the gravestones of freedom, justice, decency, and the rule of law. The author might have dealt with her more serious themes directly instead of couching them in this way, as so many others have done, and yet there is something particularly effective about having them come at us sidelong.

And so we're wrong to expect the conventions of a traditional murder mystery to be honored in the end. For that reason, I feel a bit dissatisfied. Things didn't turn out the way I wanted them to. I could argue that I've been misled.

At the same time, I see that the author is serving a larger purpose, and she does it well, at least in this first of three. The two principal characters, Lucy Kahn and Inspector Carmichael, are nicely drawn, appealing and very human in their ideals and virtues, their conflicts and contradictions. I'm inclined to follow Walton forward and see where she was going with this trilogy.

I parted ways with two books on the same day. Both were book bullets, highly spoken of around here, but they just didn't connect with me.

After 70 pages, I couldn't get into A Burnable Book, even though I wanted to like it and loved the idea of Geoffrey Chaucer as a character (loved him in the Heath Ledger movie too). It sounded forced and inauthentic to me, as if the author were trying really hard to pull off something that sounded classically British but just couldn't quite shed the 21st-century American accent. The premise of a prophetic book that people will kill to possess seemed very strained to me, although I'll admit it's no more so than plenty of other concepts I've met in this and other genres. Maybe it just seemed a little too gee-whiz for me to buy into it. I also found the characters difficult to follow, mainly because I forgot them between sittings from one day to the next. It just seemed as though it were going to take too much energy to get through it.

The Ten Thousand Things was a different story. I don't mind a slow pace and a contemplative manner, and I make allowances for translations. But 78 pages in, representing a quarter of the book, I had to put it aside. I just didn't have enough patience for the dithery style, the excess of dashes and unfinished sentences and vague conversational asides. It effectively conveyed the feeling of listening to an old woman ramble, but I'm not up for listening to an old woman ramble right now, even though when my time comes I hope someone will listen to me. So--I'm sorry if this is uncharitable, but I had to move on.

>272 Meredy: Isn't it a bit out of bounds to deliver three book bullets in a single entry? Pearl S. Buck, Colin Falconer and Valerie Hansen all neatly packaged into a single educational reading list. Not sure that's quite cricket, Meredy, but you do make it an attractive option.

Hmm. The Silk Road; I know virtually nothing about it and we start a brand new reading year in just about 3 months.

>281 jillmwo: Oh, dear, three is the wrong number? Should I try for four?

The brave little tailor managed Seven at One Blow. Now, there's a standard-setter.

Actually, I am living more in fear of the day that you embark on the creation of an extended reading list dedicated to a single topic, something on the order of a full-scale bibliographic essay. You will do it and I will be standing by, awe-struck, thinking to myself, "No one has ever done that on LT before!!!"

So to answer your question, on the one hand, three is just fine, thank you very much. On the other hand, if anyone could develop a bibliographic essay on LT, you would be well qualified to do it!

 
 
 
 
 
{suddenly boggled by the implicit challenge}

uh...thanks...(now what? yikes)

Sorry. Not buying it. ;>)

Someone pass the popcorn, please...

(There's a little more on the subject of bibliographic essays over on Jill's thread, here and following:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/176956#4859224
I'm not abandoning it, quite, but letting it cook while I do other things.)

Do I smell something burning?

The Art Spirit (1923; 1958 edition, reprinted 1984), by Robert Henri, compiled and edited by Margery A. Ryerson (5 stars)

Six-word review: The seeing and doing of art.

Extended review:

You won't see many unqualified raves from me, but here is one. This book is wonderful and amazing. If you have any interest in art, whether it be Art or simply the art of doing something--anything--well, this book is rich with treasures for you. It grants insight as summer rain grants refreshment, as surrender grants grace.

The Art Spirit is not a conventional book in the sense of a sustained and integrated argument conceived as a unified whole. Rather, it's a compilation of articles, talks, correspondence, critiques, class notes, and other words of an inspiring teacher who was first of all a renowned and distinguished painter in his time, about a century ago. The whole expresses the understanding of art and the act of creation as he practiced them and as he taught them to a generation of students, among whom many were fanatically devoted to their teacher.

It's the sort of book one can open to any page and find something worth reading and worth thinking about. Epigrammatic in style, it makes memorable impressions, whether discussing the meaning of art and the place of art in the world or the importance of the shadow beneath the upper eyelid. At once abstract and concrete, it discusses with equal passion the role of attitude in the life and work of the artist and the technique of creating background space by applying pigment to canvas.

Although I ought to have heard of Robert Henri before, his name* was new to me when I began the fall series of adult-education drawing classes on September 8th. The instructor read an excerpt from the book at the first session, and I promptly ordered it from Amazon. I was halfway through reading it--and it's a fun read, calling for lots of underscores and penciled marginalia from an interactive reader like me--when, utterly coincidentally, I received an event notice from the nearby San Jose Museum of Art, where I'm a member: a three-hour portrait-drawing workshop on September 28th in conjunction with a special exhibit of portrait paintings of Robert Henri.

I made haste and finished the book by the night before the workshop.

On Sunday I went two hours early and saw the exhibit, searching in every painting for the very things he'd talked about in the book. Already my way of seeing was much affected. By the time I sat down in the classroom with a live model before me, my entire approach to drawing had changed. Following Henri's advice, I spent the first five minutes quietly looking at the model without a pencil in my hand, seeking awareness of what was beautiful about him and what excited my interest, and also looking for themes and dominant lines. I thought about the idea that I wanted to capture and convey.

While I drew, I sustained conscious attention to such things as that the space behind the model is mostly air; that the chair supports the body and the neck supports the head, solidly, in a weight-bearing way, with bulk and gravity; that the nose is relatively dark except for the highlight at the tip, which reveals the contour; and that I should make the folds of garments and draperies look like a landscape I want to visit. Every stroke of the graphite was informed by what I had read and seen.

One of the things I noticed right away was that the model, a grey-bearded man in his sixties with faraway eyes, was very aware of me drawing him. At break time he came over to see what I'd done. Henri's book made me think about an important way in which drawing from life creates a reciprocal relationship between artist and model, something you can't have when you work from a photograph: namely, the model's showing a sense of being seen in some deeper way than just superficial appearance.

When I'd finished my first two renderings, the instructor came by and called them "beautiful." I was astonished. Truly, I've always seen what's wrong with my drawings and never once thought they were "good" in any way that a loyal friend or relative wouldn't see. A group of students clustered around and looked, and one of them said, "You must have been doing this for a long time, to draw like that." In fact, until I started that very lightweight adult ed class during the summer, the last formal art instruction I'd had outside of public school--and the last time I'd worked from a live model--was a 10-week museum class when I was 14. I've done a lot of sketching in the past, on my own, though I hadn't drawn anything but random doodles for years; but I never had real help in finding the goodness in my faulty sketches, not until I read the Henri book. Suddenly it all just seems to work differently.

That's a powerful lesson.

As a retired person, I'm not about to embark on a full-scale art program or even undertake a modest second career. But I find my interest renewed in an activity I enjoyed as a teenager, and for $8.95 plus tax and shipping I've received an education delivered by a master. Whether you're a museum-goer or not, I think you can learn something exciting about whatever you do like to do from the teachings of a man who thoroughly grasped the marriage of knowing and doing.

----

*A note on the artist's name: despite its French appearance, it's not ahn-REE. It's HEN-rye. Really. Robert Henry Cozad (24 June 1865 – 12 July 1929) was born in Cincinnati. After his father became involved in a fatal shooting in a Nebraska town, he and other family members relocated and changed their names to escape the scandal. Robert chose the spelling and pronunciation of his new name.

Meredy, I always enjoy your reviews but this one is beautiful - thanks for taking us along on your creative journey. I love that art is as much a way of seeing as drawing or painting.

>290 Athabasca: Thank you. You're very kind. I hope it encourages someone to read it who might not have otherwise.

"Save yourself, buddy, I've taken a bullet."

Opium (2012), by Colin Falconer (2½ stars)

Six-word review in five: Slight novel tantalizes but underperforms.

Extended review:

Phooey.

I chose this book because (a) I'd recently read two factual accounts of opium addiction, so I was interested in a fictional treatment of the subject (which it turned out not to be); (b) I enjoyed Falconer's Silk Road; and (c) it was free on Kindle.

Yes, I knew it was the first of a series, so it probably wouldn't feel like a complete story, and I also knew that it wasn't very highly rated.

But still.

Willful, unsympathetic characters on collision courses in wartime Southeast Asia. Crime lords. Daredevil pilots. Interfering Americans. Focal character Noelle who is oh, so instantly lovable because she is extravagantly, incredibly, heart-stoppingly, and irresistibly beautiful, and she keeps on being annoyingly beautiful page after page, no matter what she does. As if that's all it takes to be madly loved (is it?), as if no one else is worth looking at. Men destroy their lives for her. Personal relationships have a cascade effect on international dealings. All this ought to have been better than it was.

Falconer does have a gift for description and for interwoven plotting. But there's a sense that he's churning his stories out in a huge rush, swamping well-turned phrases in a flood of obligatory connective fill that's as thoughtless as it is raw.

A big minus for me is that the text is riddled with errors: missing words, repeated words, wrong words, as if a spellchecker had been the sole stand-in for an editor--and its suggestions had been taken with eyes closed. I have no way of knowing if that's the fault of the Kindle edition or if the print book is the same, but the sloppiness index is so high that it dwarfs my complaints of carelessness in most other books. If an author wants my attention, he should pay a little more himself.

I'll say this for the novel: it's very atmospheric, with lots of place knowledge (or good faking) of Laos and Vietnam in the fifties and sixties, from mansion to unspeakable slum, as well as detailed depictions of opium smuggling, criminal organizations, and moneyed privilege. Even if specifics are unreliable (and I wouldn't know), the narrative evokes a strong sensory presence of parts of the world that dominated news headlines in my youth but were never real to me.

Despite the abrupt and unsatisfying ending, however, there is not enough of a lure in finding out what happens next to draw me on to the second book. I'm cutting my losses and stopping right here.

(Kindle edition)

Ha'penny (2007), by Jo Walton (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Conspiracy and coercion in 1949 Britain.

Extended review:

The sequel to Farthing follows the same model of alternating chapters with different focal characters, one in first person and the other in third. The third-person character, Inspector Carmichael, continues from Farthing; the first-person narrator, Viola Lark, is new. It's a somewhat odd device, but it works well enough, although I think it calls attention to the formal structure of the novel instead of letting it disappear behind the story. To that extent it interferes with my ability to immerse myself in the world of the novel.

Again we have an alternate history set in a 1949 that never happened. The action of the story takes place only a few weeks after the political events in Farthing effect a change of leadership in Britain, and now the new prime minister is hosting a chummy visit from Adolf Hitler, whose Reich dominates Europe. The visit sets the stage for a group of left-wing revolutionaries to plot a double assassination--a conspiracy in which Viola is perforce caught up. Her handling of the role, or roles, she must play form the main plot line, in parallel with Carmichael's investigation of a related bombing.

The troubled inspector is an interesting character whose personal conflicts color his professional life. His inner struggle is not a simple one, and it is far from easy to see what we might do in his place. The questions he faces constitute the moral core of the series so far and give it greater weight than we might expect for a suspense-thriller. The device of an alternate history allows the author to play out a number of disturbing themes in the manner of a cautionary tale rather than outright social criticism. I would be guessing if I speculated on her reason for doing this, so I'll just say it strikes me as possibly disarming to defensive reflexes.

Here's a line I liked, an example of the author's deft treatment of dialogue that sounds natural but is more likely to have been very carefully composed: "Who would tell anything important to someone with more hair than wits?" (page 217).

The novel didn't leave me thrilled to breathlessness or awe-struck with wonder and admiration, but I found it adequately competent, solid, and entertaining, and that's what three and a half stars mean to me. I will complete this trilogy sometime in the next month or two.

>294 Meredy:
Your description of 3.5 stars matches my views of that rating.

I have not yet tried a Jo Walton novel but your review moves me closer to doing so. (Begrudging admission to having been grazed by your bullet.)

Iain Banks used the technique of a different person for different characters in his thriller, Complicity. He used 1st, 2nd and 3rd person. The murderer was "you". I found it very effective in that book. It wasn't until well into the second half of the book before there was a reveal letting the reader know whether I or him was the serial killer.

>295 pgmcc: Seems fair enough. I took the bullet for the first installment here on LT.

I read a murder mystery once--years ago, probably more than 40--written in second person, in which the murderer turned out to be "you." It was a novelty at the time, but I think I'd hate it now. I don't feel like going along with things that authors do to show off, try to be "different," or just overcome staleness. Write your book surpassingly well, I say. That's remarkable, different, and fresh enough for me.

Lock In (2014), by John Scalzi (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Fast-food novel leaves me hungry.

Extended review:

I must not be the right audience for this author's work.

This is the first novel I've read by John Scalzi, who's pretty popular among some of the groups I frequent on LT. And I can see why: it's imaginative, action-oriented, and edgy. Aside from a few annoying stylistic habits, including a thing with commas and dialogue tags, I wouldn't fault his craftsmanship. The fast-moving plot explores an interesting constellation of what-ifs. For example:

WHAT IF a terrible disability were so bad and so widespread that enormous resources went into creating therapies and compensations, which turned out to confer amazing advantages that normies couldn't enjoy?

WHAT IF a human/software interface had been perfected?

WHAT IF one human being could take total control of another? (This is an old idea, from the gods pulling the strings of human puppets to zombies and hypnotism and all the way to Being John Malkovitch, but it doesn't seem to be worn out yet.)

WHAT IF someone in this day and age (or a little while from now) managed to evade all the standard ID traps that typically have everyone nailed before they can walk--so they were completely outside the record system?

I give Scalzi full marks for handling these and a number of other ideas very capably. Still, the result seems kind of phony to me. This is no one's story; it's a plot hatched by what-ifs, without an emotional core--more like a futuristic action movie on paper than a substantial work of well-wrought fiction.

And maybe all I'm saying is that it's not quite lit'ry enough for me.

Not that I'd want to disparage the mechanical, plot-driven novel--I wouldn't apologize for it if it were mine; but it leaves a big part of my inner reader unsatisfied.

I read the first few chapters of Lock In, but it didn't grab my interest enough to keep going. Mainly because I'm just not into police detective stories. I did think there were some interesting ethical issues being raised. First I read Scalzi's free novella, Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome, which provides the background to Lock In. I liked that a lot, because I'm very interested in diseases/epidemics, and also disability issues.

I think I prefer Scalzi's blog "Whatever" to his fiction. I very much enjoyed Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded and The Mallet of Loving Correction.

>297 Meredy: I have trouble being interested in his fiction. I have set a couple of his novels aside through lack of interest.

He has done a lot for promoting Science Fiction and making it available to a wider audience, but that is in parallel to writing his own fiction.

Oh dear, I'm further in arrears than ever. Currently I'm behind in my reviews by 13 titles:

Wednesday Is Indigo Blue (Cytowic & Eagleman)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde)
A Far Better Rest (Alleyn)
The Third Life of Grange Copeland (Walker)
Silk Road (Falconer)
The Martian (Weir)
Irene Dalis: Diva, Impresaria, Legend (Riebel)
The Potter’s Field (Peters)
The Lobster Kings (Zentner) - abandoned
Saving Normal (Frances)
The Circular Staircase (Rinehart)
Half a Crown (Walton)
The Sirens Sang of Murder (Caudwell)

Anyone want to push me toward one or another? I suppose I ought to review the ER book first (Saving Normal), but I'm less likely to forget particulars of that one than some others.

The Walton or the Caudwell?

Well, some seven years ago, I reviewed The Picture of Dorian Gray on my blog here: http://individualtake.blogspot.com/2007/01/wildes-picture-of-dorian-gray.html. You are welcome to show me where I'm wrong (or at the very least, where we disagree...)

Sometimes it's easier to write when you have something to push against.

Ok, Marissa, here's one:

Half a Crown (2008), by Jo Walton (4 stars)

Six-word review: Pulse-thumper roundly wraps thriller trilogy.

Extended review:

Jo Walton's "Small Change" trilogy (nice title, that) comes to a rousing, seat-edging conclusion with Half a Crown. This alternate history, in which a brokered peace with Hitler has led to a fascist government in Britain, jumps ahead to 1960 and follows the former Inspector Carmichael through to a seemingly inevitable conclusion that nonetheless grips and surprises.

Now commander of the Gestapo-like Watch, Carmichael has been covertly using his position to rescue victims of political injustice. As the stakes rise, he finds himself in an impossible conflict of personal priorities engineered by his highly placed adversaries.

Meanwhile, his ward Elvira, about to make her society debut by presentation to the young Queen Elizabeth, becomes unwittingly entangled in a political web that threatens the entire nation.

Once again I found the alternation between first-person and third-person narratives somewhat distracting, even though I could see sound reasons for it from a writer's point of view. But I was expecting it and it didn't really throw me off. Much more disconcerting is the author's habitual misconstruction of subjunctive verbs with the past perfect:

"I'd have loved to have talked to her about it (page 160);
"Normanby would have preferred to have had everyone loathe and fear him" (page 208);
"I'd almost stopped being hungry and would have liked to have gone straight to bed" (page 259);
"I would have liked to have washed it" (page 275).

I'll spare you the rest of my examples. They're all the same, and they do run through all three novels.

Nonetheless, I was very much caught up in the story, thanks to the author's sound plotting, appealing focal characters, and imaginative treatment of historical possibility. The pervasive theme--using whatever advantages you have to make a positive difference--plays out marvelously with the intervention of an unlikely and unexpected heroine. I spent the second half of the book pretty much parked on the sofa reading and not doing much of anything else.

The exciting finish garnered the series-ender an extra half star. I was also pleased that she answered some questions left hanging in earlier installments. I'll be back for more Jo Walton.

I just wish that she or her editor would read up on verb tenses with subjunctive.

>303 jillmwo: That's my second-oldest overdue review. I've made lots of notes but haven't pulled it together yet. I do, however, try to write my comments before reading anyone else's. So I'll take that as a spur.

(You're right about having something to push against. Also, contrarily, I tend to want to do the opposite of what's suggested.)

The Lobster Kings (2014), by Alexi Zentner (abandoned; unrated)

I'll concede up front that I don't care for stories that are adaptations of or based on (including "loosely based on") plays of Shakespeare. I don't even like Shakespeare plays themselves done in modern dress or in some alternate setting. I just want Shakespeare to be Shakespeare. Allowing an exception for West Side Story, the film version of which came out when I was just the right age to fall in love with it, I wish authors would quit trying to milk the work of the all-time best-known playwright and just make up their own damn stories. Given that there is (or may be) a finite number of plots, still, it's one thing to concoct a tale of murder and revenge, and it's another to name two of your principal characters, let's say, Trudy and Claude and have a reluctant son spurred to action by a ghost.

So the minute I saw that a character named Cordelia was one of three daughters of Kings, I was already expecting to be irritated. (How I made it all the way through The Story of Edgar Sawtelle I can barely explain, and the ending was so bad that it trumped all the other defects of the book.)

When Jane Smiley tackled Lear in her A Thousand Acres, she drew me in in spite of myself, and I ended up giving her novel four stars. Unfortunately Alexi Zentner did nothing to win me over.

We gave the novel a good try: 109 pages, or one-third, which represent three weekly read-aloud sessions for my husband and me. At the point where we quit, we'd seen Cordelia and her family undergo several flavors of family trauma, including the death of a child and the execution of a pet, with more anticipated, and we just didn't care. Even the potentially colorful background somehow failed to engage, and the theme of local territorial battles veering off into drug-trafficking issues seemed irrelevant to whatever the story had been leading up to, which seemed to be about sibling rivalry, old prophecies, and a foggy element that either was or wasn't supernatural.

We found the first third pretentious, digressive, and unclear in its focus, seeming almost amateurish in an apparent push to tell everything about everything and thus failing to give proportionate emphasis to what's most important. After putting it aside once and coming back, we found nothing to lure us on.

I would like to know what you thought of The Martian, and I always enjoy seeing you rise to the challenge of creating a new six-word review for yet another Brother Cadfael book.

All right, Sylvia, you got me with that. (Thanks, guys, for the timely prodding.)

The Potter’s Field (1990), by Ellis Peters (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Peters gets a belated second wind.

Extended review:

There's a freshness about Ellis Peters's seventeenth chronicle of Brother Cadfael that hasn't been seen in a while. Perhaps it's that the principal characters (other than the continuing characters of the series) depart a little bit from the mold that's become customary; or maybe it's that the setup, although no less bizarre than some of the others, feels a little more as if it had proceeded from some plausible series of events and a little less as if Peters had been consorting with plot ninjas.

At any rate, I enjoyed this one a degree or two more than expected--and of course I expected to, having found the author completely reliable for a comfort read when I need one. I'm heartily sorry to be so close to the end. It's tempting to go ahead and laud The Potter’s Field with four stars; but I can't, quite, in view of how tough I've been on so many other things. Let's call this a 3.7.

I consider a synopsis to be completely irrelevant. It's a Brother Cadfael mystery. I knew what I was getting. Like a Pepperidge Farm cookie right out of the package, it was just what I wanted at the time.

Nice!

Glad we could provide some motivation.

The Martian (2014), by Andy Weir (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Not literature, but a terrific page-turner.

Extended review:

In a writing class I took once, the instructor said, "Ninety percent of plots amount to this: 'Someone takes a trip.' And most of the rest boil down to 'A stranger comes to town.'" (Or maybe it was the other way around.) This turns out to be a paraphrase of a principle set down by Tolstoy: "All great literature is one of two stories: a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town."

In a way, The Martian is both.

Stranded on Mars when the rest of his expedition crew thinks he's been killed, Mark Watney is the stranger, the fish out of water, utterly and completely on his own until someone on earth happens to notice signs that he has survived. He also has taken and still must take a major trip, by whatever means possible, if there's to be any chance that he'll ever get home again.

"There's no place like home," says Dorothy in Oz, and like Dorothy, all Watney wants is to get back to the place he came from. The homebound quest itself is a theme of countless stories, from The Little Lost Kitten to The Lord of the Rings, but it's never been done quite like this.

The Martian has been justly popular, garnering rave reviews and plenty of media attention. It's thoroughly entertaining: suspenseful, textured, and inventive. Pairing plausible-sounding science with an appealing narrative voice, Weir takes us on an unsought adventure in which our hero meets a seemingly unstoppable series of mishaps and challenges with indefatigable resourcefulness and persistence. This is the stuff of which our national myth is made, and the less we see of it in our real-world surroundings, the greater our appetite for it in our escapist reading.

As long as we don't look for much more than that, this is a terrific read.

What we don't see is much in the way of character development. From the first lines, we're given Watney as a glib, wisecracking realist, a bit of a rogue, an out-of-the-box thinker in the best tradition of Westerns, war stories, detective yarns, space operas, and just about every other genre that features a solitary protagonist up against overwhelming odds. Watney starts out with such a sizeable endowment of confidence and self-reliance that there's not much for him to gain along the way; but neither, as in the customary alternative setup, are we going to see him learn humility as an antidote to arrogance, despite a few dangerous miscalculations. It's a given that he needs help outside himself; there's no supernatural force at work here, and he can't fly home under his own power. But we don't see him learn. We don't see him change. The character arc is flat.

Not that it needs to be otherwise. That's just where the depth marker is set.

Apart from several jarring shifts in point of view that seem to occur with cinematography conspicuously in mind--the business about the faulty sheet of Hab canvas, for instance--the craftsmanship is perfectly adequate to the task, not calling attention to itself. For a book of this sort, we don't need more than that.

In sum, this novel meets my test of delivering what it promises. It doesn't promise to be more than it is. It was a fun ride, with an exciting gallop to the finish line, and when it was done I'd got exactly what I came for.

I'd say that is a pretty accurate review of The Martian. I gave it a higher rating, because I mainly rate on enjoyment. If a book makes me happy, it gets a 4 or 5. I didn't mind the lack of character development, because I wasn't looking for any. The Hab canvas thing was a bit jarring, because it didn't fit with the rest of the narrative. I also found the justification for bringing potatoes to be kind of weak. But they had to get there somehow, and having them there for research would have been too easy.

All right, you've convinced me that I have to move beyond the first book of Walton's Small Change trilogy.

Interestingly, The Martian didn't grab me the way I thought/hoped it would (I got to...I don't know--page fifty or sixty?--and put it down.) Your thoughts on the lack of character development/change definitely resonated and that may have been what kept me from engaging fully. Also, the journal format for the story-telling didn't work for me: I couldn't help thinking that a man in his situation would probably save his journal for...I don't know, his internal life, rather than minutely recording the details of what he did each day (or, as a scientist engineer, would have kept a very different kind of technical log.)

>311 SylviaC: Fair enough. For my part, I try to give relatively little weight to whether I like a book. The main thing, to me, is to strive for consistency across my own ratings so they mean something. I've greatly enjoyed books and movies that weren't worth four or five stars. Sometimes you just want a burger and fries.

This one happened to be an especially great read-aloud, once I got my husband to stop voicing the ellipses and delivering literal character-by-character reads of the message transmissions: LNCHhexiditONRVRCMP,OPENFILE types of thing. (He doesn't want me to miss anything, bless him.)

>312 Marissa_Doyle: In both of those books, the willing suspension of disbelief goes a long way. If I'm having fun with a book, I'll grant the author a lot of leeway. (And I have to say the endings of both of those called for giving realism the night off.) Likewise, if the author has ticked me off, I'll pounce on every little thing. I accepted the journal thing as the author's device of choice and stopped judging it on other grounds pretty early.

One of the things I like about reading other people's reviews of books that I've read is discovering the different things that they look for or notice, and varying interpretations and assessments. I already know what I think, so I want another perspective.

>313 Meredy: Yes--so I guess I wasn't sufficiently sucked into The Martian to be able to grant that suspension of disbelief, while in other stories I am.

>314 SylviaC: Yes!

The Sirens Sang of Murder (1989), by Sarah Caudwell (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Stylish blend of mystery and humor.

Extended review:

The third novel in an all-too-brief series finds one of the junior barristers of Lincoln's Inn on the small island of Sark in the Channel Islands. Unlikely as it might seem, Cantrip has been called in to consult on a case involving tax law and inheritance.

The strange mix of obscure law, misplaced records, and lost heirs is soon complicated by two murders. With Cantrip himself at risk, Professor Hilary Tamar engages his deductive powers to discover the true motive behind the crimes and rescue his young colleague.

Once again, much of the forward motion of the story occurs through correspondence. But Hilary doesn't miss the chance for a nice getaway at someone else's expense, and his arrival on the scene foils the perpetrator's plans.

Caudwell is as good as anyone at blending light-hearted entertainment with the solving of violent crimes. Like all good cozy mysteries, the Tamar series doesn't get too messy; the investigation is just the pretext for her main character's exhibition of problem-solving prowess while enjoying the collegiality of a charming crew. For us as well as for Hilary, they make delightful company.

The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), by Alice Walker (5 stars)

Six-word review: Adjectives won't do this novel justice.

Extended review:

Powerful, gripping, vivid, heartbreaking, intense, unsparing, moving, dark, pulsing with humanity: these are some of the descriptors that spring to mind when I try to give an account of Alice Walker's first novel.

I know they don't do it justice. Doing it justice is not within my scope. So let me content myself with doing it honor.

I tried to think of any reason why this novel should rate less than five full stars, and I couldn't. Instead, the more I thought about it, the more I felt that awed silence was the best response.

However, since silence doesn't work well in a written medium, I'm opting for the second-best response and trying to talk about it.

The story of Grange Copeland, a poor black sharecropper in rural Georgia, and his son Brownfield is a story of passion and pain, redemption and hope. Through the lives of its principal characters it depicts unbearable loss and what is perhaps still more unbearable, something dreamed of but never possessed. The limits set on a man's life are as seemingly insurmountable as electrified barbed wire; and yet something resists extinction--something that in the end is undeniably beautiful.

What makes this work so remarkable is the author's use of plain, everyday language to reveal multilayered characterizations and expose conflicting motivations.

The art of expressing complex emotions and states of mind in simple, direct language is a gift. It's one I can only admire in others; if it can be learned, I haven't learned it. Alice Walker seems to have been born with it. Heightened language is dazzling, to be sure, but so is the art of the pure, clean stroke.

Not incidentally, one of the other notable features of this novel is the way it exercises the power of telling. A recurring theme in my reviews is the all-too-common excessive application of the writers' pet maxim "Show, don't tell." And showing is good. But there is a place in storytelling for telling. One of the traits of very traditional stories such as fairy tales and folktales is that there is much telling of the sort that would typically be frowned on in writers' workshops and critique groups today; and yet, appropriately used, it confers on a story a timeless and even mythical quality--the opposite of the much-prized "immediacy" that makes us feel it's unfolding before us as we read. The telling of Grange's history achieves a kind of transcendent luminosity through the very fact that it isn't all scenes and dialogue stitched together with a little narration.

It does, however, evoke a real and present emotional response. One of the signs that I have just read a work of exceptional mastery is the feeling that I haven't merely been a spectator of someone else's experience. I've just had an experience myself. I've been through something. And it leaves a lasting impression. The Third Life of Grange Copeland is such a work.

(Kindle edition)

"I haven't merely been a spectator of someone else's experience. I've just had an experience myself. I've been through something. And it leaves a lasting impression."

The Color Purple affected me that way too.

So pleased to read this glowing review. I recently finished listening to The Color Purple. It was an extraordinary experience and I've been wondering how Walker's other works measure up.

Life After Life (2013), by Kate Atkinson (abandoned; unrated)

I'm giving up on Kate Atkinson's Life After Life.

Yes, your life can change in a second. I've experienced those life-altering moments; probably everyone has. And yes, anyone can die at any time. But this isn't a novel. It's philosophy. And Atkinson, for all her craft and art, is no Camus (who also had the wisdom to keep it short).

Philosophically, this 529-page composition is closer to one of Nietzsche's zaniest ideas (Eternal Recurrence) than Camus, as she implicitly acknowledges with an epigraph. Fictionally, it makes a very odd pairing with a Jo Walton novel that I happen to be reading, My Real Children, which also treats the theme of life paths diverging from decision points. For now, I'll stick with the Walton.

What it lacks is the sustained plot and character depth that engage the reader emotionally. How many times does one experience the same sense of loss before it gives way to detachment? Mechanical devices evoke mechanical responses.

As I remarked on another thread, I keep feeling as if I were riding a carousel: we go around and around, but we don't get anywhere. After 150 pages, I'd call it a virtuoso performance, but cold.

(It also oddly echoes themes in Walton's "Small Change" trilogy having to do with Hitler's Reich, which are coming up simultaneously in A Spy Among Friends about World War II master spy Kim Philby. This conjunction of reading matter is purely coincidental.)

I loved Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novels, and I'll probably go with her again somewhere else, but I guess I simply lack the endurance for this one.

The Circular Staircase (1908), by Mary Roberts Rinehart (3 stars)

Six-word review: Adequate but unexceptional country house mystery.

Extended review:

Here's an author whose work I'd never read before and was very unlikely ever to read. Her name was associated in my mind with frothy, shallow popular fiction of the sort that would be no challenge to semiliterate middle schoolers looking for an easy read for a mandatory book report. (No, I don't know where such prejudices come from. But who doesn't have them, in one flavor or another?)

As it happened, I found myself waiting in my car while someone did an errand, and I needed something to read. I'd had the foresight to grab my Kindle on the way out the door. From a recently downloaded bargain collection of mysteries, I picked this one at random without even noticing the author's name.

My verdict: better than expected. It read like a low-grade case of Hill House as visited by a middle-aged spinster channeling Holmes while on Victorian holiday in (I think) upstate New York. (It sounded so British that I had trouble remembering it was set in the U.S.) Wikipedia tells me that this crime melodrama is credited with being the first of the "had I but known" genre of mystery novels.

It was duly creepy, with ghostly nocturnal activity, unexplained disappearances, a shocking corpse, false identities, and much, much more, not to mention a spunky heroine who forgets to tell anyone when she goes off in search of things that go bump in the night. I was sufficiently entertained to return to it over the next couple of weeks, in short bursts, and finish it up.

I'm not in any hurry for more Rinehart, but in case I feel the need, there seems to be an ample assortment in the anthology. At least I know there's something mildly diverting on tap for some other waiting room stay.

(Kindle edition)

I shan't be reading Life after life now, but I am looking forward to your review of My real children!

"...a low grade case of Hill House..."

Thank you for the chuckle!

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, by Ben Macintyre (4½ stars)

Six-word review: Supreme deceiver never known by anyone.

Extended review:

A thumping good read, I'd call it, even more so than expected: suspenseful, surprising, and engrossing. The mystery and intrigue surrounding Cold War master spy Kim Philby, some of which will never be unraveled, possess depths of complexity that would probably be scoffed at in fiction as simply too implausible. While appearing to be a talented, dedicated, and indeed brilliant officer in British intelligence, he covertly and very effectively served the cause of communism for thirty years. One of the paradoxes of his story is that he had to be good enough to keep his position in counterintelligence while systematically foiling the operations mounted against the communists.

What I was not expecting was a moving and ultimately tragic story of a man who was addicted to secrecy and deception as much as to the prodigious consumption of alcohol. It seems that Philby was constitutionally incapable of having an honest relationship with anyone. In the midst of a nonstop social whirl, he was profoundly isolated by his hidden life. Ironically, the only people he never betrayed--the Soviets--were the only ones who never fully trusted him. Key members of British and American intelligence organizations, including his closest lifelong friend Nick Elliott, trusted him absolutely. Neither side believed that a gentleman of his character, class, and background could do what he had done.

I remember hearing Kim Philby's name in the news when I was a youngster. His final unmasking came in 1963, followed by his defection to Moscow. At the time I was too unaware of world events to grasp a fraction of the significance of those revelations, but even if I had, it would have been minor compared with the true extent of the consequences of his crimes, some of which have only lately come to light. It is no exaggeration to say that this one man dramatically altered the course of modern Western history.

Even now Philby remains a figure of unending controversy. As Macintyre says in his preface:

Presented with conflicting accounts, different viewpoints, and divergent recollections, I have had to make judgments about the credibility of different sources and choose which of the many strands of evidence seem to run closest to reality . . . This book does not purport to be the last word on Kim Philby. Instead, it seeks to tell his story in a different way, through the prism of personal friendships, and perhaps arrive at a new understanding of the most remarkable spy of modern times.

I've never been a reader of espionage novels, but I am interested in the themes of truth and identity that inevitably come up in fact-based spy literature. This compelling account will probably send me off after other work by Ben Macintyre.

The only fault I have to find with this book that is essentially historical in nature is how frequently the author mentions events by day and date without the year. With so many narrative threads to follow, and especially with some movement forward and backward in time, I lost track numerous times. It would have been worth some risk of redundancy to make sure the reader could remain oriented to sequences and temporal relationships.

One final note: I think there is an error in the transcription of Philby's famous 1955 press conference (and it looks like an error that might have proceeded from a common typo--namely "not" for "now"). The author reports (page 195) an interview comment by Edwin Newman: "That implies that you have spoken to communists unknowingly and not known about it." I listened to that portion of the interview myself several times--it was easily found on YouTube--and believe it says, more sensibly: "That implies that you have spoken to communists unknowingly and now know about it." Perhaps this line will appear differently in a future printing.

>322 Sakerfalcon: Interim update: At about halfway through, I have to say that I like Jo Walton's writing, I like the premise and the storylines, and I like the main characters; and I'm a woman who has given birth to two children and had a miscarriage; and yet, for all that, there is simply TMI for me here about sex, childbirth, and unsuccessful pregnancies. Someone would have to be a very, very dear friend for me to listen to all this in such detail. I'm sort of amazed that my husband is still hanging in with it.

Labyrinth, by Kate Mosse (abandoned; unrated)

I've committed a lot of book abandonment so far this year--sixteen titles through October--and here, alas, is yet one more: Labyrinth (Kate Mosse) is going down at just past the midpoint.

When I take a day or two off from my main read, my bedtime read, and don't miss it, it's doomed.

In the present case, it's definitely a matter of the author's handling of her material. She must have got the idea somewhere that it's a good plan to dispense with exposition and get right to the action, plunging the reader headlong into the story instead of weighing it down with description and explanation.

This is all very well in a certain kind of novel, but here is one with two main characters, very many secondary and minor characters (several of whose names are similar), two timelines separated by eight centuries, unfamiliar settings, historical situations, and fantasy elements that only the author can tell us about. This is too much to get by inference or retain in memory and then keep track of without enough reminders at each shift of time and place. The author seems to think that keeping a reader disoriented (not disorientated, Kate) arouses curiosity and suspense, whereas I simply find it annoying. In medias res is one thing; a constant state of "What's going on? And who are these people? Are they new, or am I supposed to know them already?" is wearing.

As it happens, I've done a fair bit of research into that period and place myself, having read some eight or ten books on medieval France and the Cathars in particular, so I'm receptive to its power to fascinate. And I do appreciate the way the author evokes the sensory experience of the setting. But what's bogging me down is trying to hold in mind a large assortment of characters without enough clues to which ones are going to be important or enough reminders as to their interrelationships.

This becomes even harder when the author's own slips occur. For instance, on page 148 Amiel is a blacksmith in a stable. On page 180 another Amiel, Amiel de Coursan, performs a rescue. On page 247 people are praising the bravery of Amaury, not Amiel, de Coursan. An Amazon search tells me that there are two other Amaurys mentioned in the book.

In fact, there are altogether too many names beginning with A throughout, including the two principals, whose similarity of names is obviously deliberate and who ought to have been enough for the A's.

I'm also bothered by a certain self-conscious preciousness of style, having already been put off by the presence of four exclamation points in two pages of acknowledgments up front (two in the same paragraph). At numerous points I get the feeling that the author is preening a little, showing off technique and research instead of keeping her craftsmanship smooth and invisible. The result, to me, is lack of polish. A rigorous and fearless edit might have done wonders with what ought to have been a marvelous story.

As it happens, I like a little more restraint in my sex scenes too. A matter of taste, yes, I realize that; but still.

I can't let this pass without a mention: by page 117, the author has handled the physical descriptions of not one, not two, but three female characters using the amateurish device of having them study their reflections in a mirror.

Probably I should have stopped at the first one.

I'm sorry you've had to abandon so many books this year, but I wonder, if you feel as I do, a sense of release in not having to sludge through the whole thing? When I was younger, I was much more reluctant to quit reading a book, fearing that it was some fault in myself that I couldn't enjoy the author's work. Now, even if it is on my part, and everyone else around me loves the book, I feel no guilt in quitting it. At this time of my life, I only want to read books I enjoy for one reason or another.

>327 MrsLee: At this time of my life, I only want to read books I enjoy for one reason or another.

I'm wholly in sympathy with that sentiment.

I've always felt free, though, to abandon books that were not adequately rewarding my attention. My catalog of things to feel guilty about is as long, varied, and detailed as the DSM, but that isn't one of them.

However, I used to give most books to the halfway mark before I'd quit. Now it's rare that I last that long with one I'm going to end up ditching; I have to really want to give it a good try to get that far. There are books I never even ended up listing here because I knew on page 1 that for me they were duds.

If I'd completed all the books I started this year, I'd be at 100 by now. Those 1100 pages of unfinished reading would have meant about three more full-length reads.

Oh, well, it's not a competition.

I know I can't possibly live long enough to read everything I want to read, so I'm not going to waste my time on books I don't enjoy.

I do have some trouble deciding what to record on my reading thread, though. Does it count if I only read two pages? Two chapters? Half the book? What if I just skimmed through the book to see what happened, but didn't care enough to read the whole thing?

>329 SylviaC: I list everything I've tried to read, but if I can't finish, I will say why. I know I like to read how these books affect my friends, good, bad, ugly or indecisive.

I list them at the top (post 1) and say if they're abandoned, and if so, at what point. Then if I have comments I post them in the thread. But I don't mark a rating for a book I haven't finished, even if I'm sorely tempted to give it one star. It doesn't seem fair if I haven't read it all.

>331 Meredy: I like the idea of listing how many pages read in the abandoned books. I may have to start doing that in my book journal. I already note how many pages in the book, but I never thought to list them on the books I quit reading.

>332 MrsLee: I didn't used to track that, but at some point I started noting how much I read per week (right now I happen to be averaging 567 pages), and unfinished books count in that total. Also how far I got, percentage-wise, is a reflection of my dissatisfaction with a book: if I ditched it after 2%, it turned me off a lot worse than one I stuck with to the 50% mark.

>326 Meredy: I did read to the end of Labyrinth and can report that you didn't miss anything. A very over-hyped, underwhelming book altogether, IMO.

>334 Sakerfalcon: Ah--thank you for saving my time on this one.

Meredy, Ben Macintyre has become an auto-read for me--I've yet to dislike anything of his I've read.

I also finished Labyrinth. I didn't like the ending much but was relatively happy with the earlier parts. "Relatively", is an important word in this context as I had recently read a much more over-hyped book, The da Vinci Code. I described Labyrinth as a thinking person's Da Vinci Code.

I think that description puts the book in context.

I have encountered a number of authors over the past ten years who weren't careful about the naming of their characters -- names too similar for the reader to be able to differentiate. Characters whose names all start with P and all with a similar number of syllables. If they aren't sufficiently distinguishable in their mode of speech or physical description, how's the reader to cope? My sympathies are with you over Labyrinth.

>331 Meredy: I like what you've done with the links up in your top post.

I generally don't rate any books that I haven't finished, either. I also don't usually rate a book if I disliked it, but can recognize that it is well written.

>338 SylviaC: This is the downfall of the rating system as a means of determining the quality of a book. The rating system has no general guidelines, it is personal to each user. For instance, I use 1 star to indicate that I loathed something and feel it isn't worth anyone's time, 2 stars mean I didn't like it but can see where someone else might, 3 mean that I liked it OK, or am glad or at least not resentful that I have read it (this is a wide range), 4 means I'll probably keep it to loan out or recommend it to others and 5 means I'll cherish it, it moved me in some way special and it will remain with me forever. But there is no group standard there, only my own.

>338 SylviaC: Thanks. You could be the first person to have looked at them.

>339 MrsLee: I agree that it can be a little difficult to interpret ratings when they follow different standards.

However, any system is still going to come down to subjective judgment.

I happen to have done a fair amount of judging in literary contests--short stories, poetry, and personal essays--over many years. Some judges have asked for rubrics; they wanted scales on which to mark so many points for composition, style, content, etc., thinking that this would somehow make it all more "objective." What they fail to see is that although a point system makes rankings quantitative, the actual awarding of points remains a subjective call on the part of the judge. When one judge gives a story a 10 and another rates it a 1, what is that but a difference of personal opinion? You can't get away from that unless you're judging something that is in itself objectively measurable, such as which jar contains more beans.

So I think the next best thing is to do as you have done and define your own criteria. Then when I want to predict my interest in a book that you have rated, I have a guide to go by.

My Real Children, by Jo Walton (abandoned; unrated)

Alas, another casualty. This one has fallen to the axe at 48%. It should have fared better.

Unfortunately, and despite the promise advanced by the author's "Small Change" trilogy, this one never gets off the ground at all. It starts out with an interesting idea--that one life diverges into two threads as a consequence of a fateful choice, and that somehow they ultimately merge--but leaves the concept hanging at the end of the first chapter.

By halfway through, the idea has never been revisited. Instead we are subjected to a suffocating quantity of intimate detail along both threads. It's just stuff and stuff and more stuff, but we don't seem to be going anywhere. As noted above in post 325, the amount of information supplied about one woman's two alternate lives greatly exceeds my appetite for knowing. By tonight I could only say, "I can't stand any more of this cloying domesticity." It's aimless and boring. I'm done.

>341 Meredy: Sorry to hear that this is a disappointment, but at the same time I'm relieved not to be adding another book to Mount Tbr. The excessive ob/gyn detail that you mentioned earlier would have been hard for me to get through even had the plot been better.

>342 Sakerfalcon: And in the end it wasn't even the procreation that pushed me past the tipping point. It was the babies, the babies, the babies. Gahhh. Real babies are wonderful, but I don't want to read about them. I do not care whose ears she has.

Now having glanced at several of the review comments posted on the book page, I'm wondering if this book could possibly have suffered from what I've seen as a beginner's mistake--namely, that the author expects some big twist or revelation later on to justify what amounts to a protracted (and sometimes purposely obscured) setup. I've tried patiently to explain to a number of writers whose work I was editing: "But the reader doesn't know that. The reader doesn't know it's going to take off suddenly in chapter 6. You have to give the reader a reason to keep reading from the beginning, or you'll lose them."

Some writers seem to think it's enough that they want the reader to read on: "But they have to know that before they get to this part so it packs a punch." Yes, but why does the reader want to know it? Even a four-page story can fail if the words don't draw the reader along from the first page.

I would expect a successful author of Walton's experience to be far past problems of that sort, but the fact remains that she didn't give me a reason to keep reading, so she lost me.

Looks like I may be AFK for a little while. We made it to our getaway cottage, miraculously enough, and without a detour to the ER either, and that's when I found out that my traveling laptop can no longer connect to the Internet.

It's an XP machine, and it's probably been compromised with Internet diseases, says a local computer guru who wouldn't even attempt a laying on of hands.

Yes, I know it's EOL, but I hate acquiring new devices and learning new technology and interfaces, so I hung onto hope. Now I'm in for computer shopping while on vacation. And no doubt a new desktop when I get home. Argh. I'd rather have a colonoscopy.

My son says: "Why complicate the process? Decide how much you want to spend and buy a computer that costs that much." My pre-Sputnik brain still boggles at remarks like that.

Meanwhile, I'm borrowing my husband's laptop, but that won't do for long.

I did bring a good selection of books: finished A Night to Remember on the Kindle last night and began Station Eleven, and am also reading the next in the Pendergast series (after leaving off in January), and have been dipping into Under the Dome. Who needs computers anyway?