The Padded Cell - Bookmarque’s Undisciplined Reading Room 2016 Q1

Welcome to another year of undisciplined reading!

I pledge to keep my reading fun and the pleasure that it has always been
I pledge to make no goals or restrictions
I pledge to read when I want to and not feel guilty when I don't
I pledge to abandon any book that I don’t enjoy
I pledge to review when I feel like it
I pledge to praise and laud or trash and insult any book as it deserves
I pledge to embrace any and all formats that I see fit

Because that’s how I roll.

And here's a picture of a kitty -

good pledges! And sweet kitty. This picture makes me miss our Russian Blue. He's been gone two years now.

I love the pledges - very sound ones they are too! Enjoy your reading in the year ahead. (I also love the kitty picture)

Sounds like an excellent plan!

I'm in complete agreement with your pledges and your kitty!

Gorgeous kitty! Hope you have a great year of reading.

Glad you're carrying on :)

Very worthy sentiments...and an awesome kitteh pic!

I'll be tracking you with a star.

Thanks everyone! That's my very spoiled Isabella. Alternately she will sit on a vent when the heat comes on. She loves to bake her bod.

Can't settle to reading today no matter what I pick up. Some days are like that. I'm even skimming The Twelve because the caricature of the fascist "homeland" is just so grating. So I'm doing chores and listening to an audiobook - The Weight of Blood which I should have gotten as an Early Review book last year, but never received. It's ok, but the cruelty to the women in the story is really upsetting. It never ceases to amaze me how realistic is the man who views a woman as a thing for his amusement.

But I won't let it get me down. My own personal man is here in the kitchen making Portuguese beef stew and so I can't fault them all. And I just got done watching a juvenile bald eagle in the backyard.

I managed to finish a few books. One of which Harvest: Field Notes from A Far-flung Pursuit of Real Food by Max Watman was an interesting look at a way different path to a whole food/anti-big-ag diet. It made me tired just reading about all the stuff he tried to do on his own. Confirmed that for me, the choice I made to leave it to the professionals was the right one. I have a freezer full of beef and pork and I hit the farmers' markets often enough to keep the veggies rolling in. Sure, we supplement with industrial farmed stuff when we have to, but we're off silage once and for all!

Anyway, I also finished The Passage and The Twelve which took me forever, comparatively and I can't really say I'm holding my breath for the third in the series which is due out next year. I'll get to it eventually, but the books are so disjointed and hyperbolic that I need a break.

A recent audiobook was The Weight of Blood by Laura McHugh. Decent although not groundbreaking. The bad guy is revealed early and there is no twist to change that or to add any other bad guys. It is effectively atmospheric (Ohio ozarks if memory serves) and while the narrators' accents seemed right, I wish audio casting agents would pick women who don't sound the same. If I let my attention wander, it was hard to know which character the section was about. Also I wish they'd stop casting women who sound like little girls. Oy vey.

Here's what I'm coming home with today!



It's pretty cold out so I haven't been taking pictures, but when it was in the teens I got out there!



Hardly anyone hikes in winter. It's really weird, but I appreciate the solitude.

Will catch up on book stuff later. Need to go to the dentist for my post-op check. Ugh. At least there will be no needles.

Ooh, The Rook! I love that book! Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Also, gorgeous photo of the creek.

I hope I like it, too. It's a bit of a gamble for me. The others should be slam dunks.

Love the photo. Hope the dental visit went well and enjoy those reads!

Oooh, The Sculptress. I found that one spooky, maybe the start of her dark books, but very good.

I liked The Rook. I listened to it on Audio with a somewhat problematic narrator and still enjoyed it. Hope you do, too.

The rook was well-loved by me too. Hope it will work its magic on you.

I love the photo; I can almost feel the chill air on my face as I look at it.

Love all the echos of shapes in your photo. The soft rounded ones of snowy rocks, frosty rounds in the water and then the straight up and down twigs and trees. Striking.

Thanks peeps! I love forest brooks and since I haven't found many here in northern Wisconsin, I kind of go a little nuts when I do.

Right now I'm reading the Patrick Flanery from that stack. Absolution was his first novel so I had to get it after raving about his second so much last year. And of course I have his third as an ER request (crosses fingers). The Rook is pretty well outside what I usually read so I might be pleasantly surprised although I rarely am by going off my reservation. We'll see.

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And now what you've all been waiting for - 2015 Year in Review!

Despite my 1300 mile move that I basically managed alone, I read an ass ton of books. 146 to be exact. More than any other year by a huge order of magnitude. You can easily tell where the move happened with this graph -



It was mostly fiction as per the norm -



Here's a more specific breakdown by genre. I think I went a little overboard with these, but what the heck.



Because of the marvelous library system up here in the Wisconsin River Valley, I read a lot more physical books than I have in years. At some point I'll do a year over year comparison so you can see what I mean.



Also because of the library I read a lot more front list or near front list than I usually do. Reading the very latest books has never been particularly important to me, except for the series I follow, but it was so easy this year that the number naturally went up. The Golden Oldies took a back seat!



This is the first year I read more books by women than men (although not by much). I know why though; trashy thrillers gifted to me by the Airplane Lady. Patricia Cornwell, Lisa Gardner and Lisa Unger mostly. And I mean trashy thriller in the most loving way.



Most of those writers were folks I've already read, but a substantial percentage weren't. Some are new favorites, too!



And last, here is my rating chart. I don't know why I bother with this since the curve comes out pretty much the same year after year. I'm pretty good at picking stuff I know I'll like and I'm stingy with doling out 4 star or higher ratings.



Phew! That's all I have for now. I'm working on my best and worst of lists as well. My hurdle is my usual way of creating a composite image of all the covers - I had to ditch that software after it basically killed my last PC. Bah. I'll get to it!

I love your graphs! It's cool to see everything laid out like that.

That's a fascinating breakdown - great to see the details - While I track some of those, I find the genre tracking most difficult because of books that seem to fit more than one. That's why I sort of gave up on tracking the genre, Looking at your stats though makes me curious about tracking the 'when it was published'. Sounds like it was a good year's worth of reading nonetheless. May 2016 but just as good if not even better!

>21 Bookmarque: Interesting presentation of your stats. You sure covered a lot of miles, both literally and figuratively.

Just wondering if you also note total pages or have an average-pages-per-book figure in mind. That's a meaningful figure to me because book does not always equal book. (Page doesn't necessarily equal page, either, but it's an indicator.)

>21 Bookmarque: Great review of your reading year.

Awesome graphs!!! Love it.

Wow, that is some serious analysis! Fascinating to have it all broken down like that.

>21 Bookmarque: Love it. My mom thought I was pretty obsessive about my stats. I think I will show her yours! Similar to mine, but so much prettier. I'm far too lazy to do the graph things. :)

Thanks peeps!

The charts thing is really not that hard. I keep a running list of all the criteria in a single spreadsheet for the year (google docs) and then I break it out by column to do the charts. The hardest part was making the three places where the data exists come out the same. I try to track year by a tag and finished date here on LT as well as a Read in ____ Year list, but sometimes I miss one or both of those, or the google spreadsheet itself. I went cross-eyed practically trying to figure out which book each list was missing. Ugh.

The genre thing is wicked hard, Peace2. The Fiction bucket is everything I can't really shoehorn into anything else. Just basic stories that aren't one thing or another. Maybe this year I'll stick Dystopia into the Apocalyptic bucket and be done with it. And why did I call Memoirs out separately? Ugh.

Here's a picture I shot on the last day of 2015 which is getting mental popular on flickr. I love it, but it's such a weird image that I didn't think anyone else would. Ferns fascinate me, what can I say?



I haven't shot in a week or so and I'm getting twitchy. I think it's going to warm up to the teens over the next few days so maybe I'll have to head out. Not so much snow as I'll need showshoes, so it should be easy going.

Am deep into Absolution by Patrick Flanery and it's pretty amazing. It's told is a very specific way that requires you to think about not just what part of the story you're getting, but what you're not and why Flanery decided to tell it that way. For example, Clare (mom) is telling you about some notebooks her daughter (Laura) has left her when she disappeared after committing terrorist acts. Why didn't the writer choose to present those documents as a whole instead of letting Clare interpret them? How much is Laura hiding or lying about and how much is Clare (a writer) inventing? And just how much does her biographer really know about her life and Laura's life v. how much she's telling him? It's great.

"Ferns fascinate me, what can I say"

Dunno, but the rest of us can doff our hats to a fern-tastic picture.

ETA: And I've been meaning to say for some time how much your kitty reminds me of our Solly, departed this life (aged 17) about this time last year. Same colouration, same corkscrew pose. Thank you.

Aw, that's sweet, Hugh. I'm glad it makes you smile, not sad. Kitties are so hard to say goodbye to.

That fern pic is great! How unique!

>29 Bookmarque: I hear you on the "trying to make the three lists come out the same" thing. I spent a weekend working on mine. My mom thinks I'm insane, but she loved reading the results, too. Some of my lists will not be the same because I count different things on them.

As for the genre, I only care that my fiction/nonfiction match my final tally, so happily will assign a book to more than one genre if it applies.

Thanks catzteach. I love ferns that overwinter and so rock cap is a natural. I've seen them curled up before, but never clutching snow.

Yeah, the genre thing is tricky, MrsL. I don't get too worked up about it, but I think I could do a better job.

And today I was reminded of another literary thing I hate.

Dreams.

Hate them when people tell me their dreams. Hate to read about dreams characters have in books.

Don't care. Authors, please stop. If you don't, I will skim them. Promise.

I don't keep a regular blog or anything so pardon me while I mourn David Bowie for a bit.

Never before has hearing a brand new David Bowie album been anything but pure pleasure. The tingle of anticipation, of exploration. Of genius and its many forms. Today though, as I listen to Blackstar, I am weepy. No this isn’t the first album made by a dying man (Warren Zevon I still miss you). He wasn’t the first or the last person to die of cancer (oh Lemmy). He wasn’t the first rock star to go by any stretch (Freddy, Stevie, Randy, Ronnie, Bon, Roy, oh too many…). And he won’t be the last. But damn this is hard. I’ve been buying new David Bowie CDs for over 30 years and knowing it’s the last one is really sad. That voice. Those lyrics. That unexpected arrangement. The range. The daring. What a void he leaves.

Throughout my childhood I must have heard Bowie. My mom played the local rock stations all the time in the car, but it wasn’t until high school that I realized he was a genius. Ashes to Ashes and Fashion were my watersheds. Early MTV fodder. The videos were so weird and the lyrics were head-scratchers. Great stuff. Then Let’s Dance blew up and things went to shit for a little while. But that back catalog. That will keep a girl busy. Diamond Dogs. The Man Who Sold The World. Aladdin Sane. Hunky Dory. Young Americans.

And so it has. It never gets old. Bowie has always been on the top of my list. In heavy rotation. I had a 12-disc CD changer in my car for 15 years and with every new batch of CDs I loaded up Bowie always got a spot. Every rock playlist on my iPod has at least one Bowie track. Even the weird stuff like Tin Machine, I love. Earthling freaked out the fans, but I thought it was great, what with being the Tool fan that I am. I saw him in concert in my hometown on the Reality tour. It was amazing. I turned to my friend and said that if he played Station to Station I thought I might faint. Then what to my wondering ears should I hear...the chuff chuff chuff of that train rolling in. I think I started crying and screaming at the same time. And that version of Sister Midnight. OMG. Little did any of us know it would be his last tour.

Oh David.

When you rock and roll with me
No one else I’d rather be
Nobody here can do it for me
I’m in tears again
When you rock and roll with me

>35 Bookmarque: It's been a really bad week. The very first single I bought was Life on Mars and just before Christmas I learned of a soundboard recording of the final Ziggy concert and bought that for myself as another present. It's been played a few times these last few days. A much more natural sound than the official live album that was released and also includes a few gems that weren't included on that such as a second song performed with Jeff Beck and a Mike Garson piano medley performed before the show started. Only got to see him live a couple of times myself, the Serious Moonlight tour in '83 & then the Glass Spider tour in '87.

Yep, he was pretty amazing. I downloaded a best of album last night and plan on getting Blackstar this weekend. I also loved him in the movie Labyrinth. He made a fabulous Goblin King. In fact, when I read a book a few years ago that had a goblin king in it, it was his King I pictured. The music world lost a true genius.

I can't say that I love every song he made, I certainly don't understand most of them. I don't have the knowledge or musical background for that. What I loved though, was his voice. Also, that it seemed he was not afraid to try anything. I admire him so much for that. Hard to express just what I mean there, it just is. I will always see him as the Patrician, Lord Vetinari, in the Pratchett stories, even though he never was.

AHS-Wolfy - Life on Mars just might be my favorite of his songs. If you put a gun to my head and made me choose, that is. I wish I had gone to see him on earlier tours. I could have. I was an adult and all, but for some reason I never did. Much to my regret. Is the soundboard recording generally available? I guess I'll have to google.

catzteach & MrsL, I have a copy of Labyrinth, but can't remember much about it and honestly I think I've only ever watched it once. I was a little old for it when it came out, like The Dark Crystal, but I have fonder memories of that one even though it doesn't have Bowie in it. I also have a copy of The Man Who Fell to Earth and talk about perfect casting. Woah. The whole weird vibe of the novel comes so effortlessly from him. And then there's his little role in The Prestige. Perfection. Oh and the cameo as himself in Zoolander. I just love that he wasn't so stuck up on himself, fab though he was.

And MrsL, I do know exactly what you mean about his fearlessness. Some say he never pioneered any particular trend or movement, but I think that in his embrasure of some of those he made them more acceptable for everyone to join in, not just the brave. He was never afraid to acknowledge anyone else's success, either. Like working with Trent Reznor (who I personally don't like).

Anyway, I'll shut up now. The man will be missed.

I just finished Absolution and wow, I can hardly form a coherent sentence about how great it was. Some reviews are overly critical of the style and the presentation; how much is obscured or left unexplained, but I think it's a more powerful novel as a result. You really have to think and ponder and connect the dots as a reader. I took a lot of notes so hopefully can write a review soon. So hard when the book blows my mind. I think I'm going to have to find hardcovers of it and the one I loved from last year, Fallen Land.

>39 Bookmarque: It's released by the tour's sound engineer, Robin Mayhew and is available directly from his website.

Thanks, I'll keep it in mind!

I've managed to put together a non-spoilery, semi-lucid review of Absolution - http://www.librarything.com/work/12231376/reviews/125083981

It will probably end up on my top five even though it's early yet.

I've also managed to put up a couple of Best Of 2015 posts on my blog. Here are the links - Best Non-fiction and Best Front List.

It's just too much to post here as well, so you'll have to trek on over. I'll put my overall best books up soon and then of course, the Worst and the DNF list, which is kinda long for last year.

ETA!!!

Best Books of 2015

An interesting article popped up on my twitter feed today about how much reference to pop culture is good/acceptable/literary in books - http://electricliterature.com/should-fiction-be-timeless-pop-culture-references-...

This made me think of the Steig Larson books about Lisbeth Salander and how overstuffed they are with all things Apple and Ikea and Billy's Pizza. While sometimes I do like a writer to be specific about things, I don't like it when they go too far. For example, I'm cool with a writer saying a woman got into her BMW as opposed to her car. Or a person using a laptop instead of a computer. It conveys a bit of extra information that is useful for imagining the scene or the character. For me it crosses the line when a writer says a person used a Lenovo Y70 touch laptop or a 2013 BMW 550xi. Unless those specific descriptors are somehow vital to the plot or character, I don't need that much specificity. Also with music, fine to say someone is cranking some Judas Priest, but we don't need to know it was Nightcrawler from Painkiller on vinyl unless it's a scene from a record store or something.

What about you guys? Like those tiny details or would rather a writer keep it more generic?

Oh and I'm well into now.

At first I was kind of put off at how simplistic the writing and the characterization is, but I readjusted my approach (having just come off two deeper, more complicated and emotional books) and I'm enjoying the thing for what it is, not what I thought it would be. It's sort of like a cozy fantasy. Yeah, there's violence and drama, but it's cartoonish and doesn't cut close to the bone. Kind of like a reading vacation.

>42 Bookmarque: I prefer to not have too many tiny specific details, as well as the reasons you've suggested but also because it very quickly dates a book and while I like books from different periods or representing different periods, sometimes that's a distraction from the point of the book, because I become too hung up on the 'well it wasn't like that here' or where I don't know a specific product, then I can't just substitute something from my experience. With your computer example - I know what a computer or a laptop looks like but if someone states a specific one, then I assume there's something I need to know about it that was different to the 'generic' or possibly specific to me image in my head and so I'm thrown out of the story.

That's another good point, Peace2, if I'm not familiar with something I puzzle over it sometimes, taking me out of the story, too. Sometimes I get stuck in a google rathole though trying to figure it out. Especially if it's some artwork or other that I have no clue about. Oh what did we do before the internet? Still, I like it when a writer nudges my imagination in the right direction and then leaves me to work it out.

>44 Peace2:, >45 Bookmarque: I agree with Peace2's comment that going into too much detail risks dating a work very quickly. If I read a book written in the last year that names the newest gadget owned by a character, I know that I'm being shown how important the latest trend is to him or her. In a few years time, I'll be more likely to think "Wow, what an old phone/camera/car". I also find that if there are too many of these details inserted into a book, for instance being told which designer clothes are being worn in every scene, they actually overwhelm the plot and character development for me; they are a distraction, even if I don't feel the need to go and research them. A little goes a long way for me in this case.

>42 Bookmarque: That was a great article you point to! I am divided on the question. I have read novels by Dorothy Sayers not realizing that some of the references in a particular novel were actually taken from events in real life. It didn't detract from my enjoyment at all, but once I realized that something I had thought was a fictional fillip added by an author's imagination was instead real, it did expand my understanding of a time and place that I would otherwise not have connected with. If anything, those allusions gave me a greater respect for Sayers' novels.

As a counterpoint however, there was a mystery novel I read several years (and I can neither recall the title nor the author now) where every page had at least one reference to a current brand or designer name (Starbucks, Prada, etc.). It made me crazy because it seemed so oriented towards product placement. (And I never returned to that author's work.)

I suppose for me the key difference is that one set of references were based on real events and the other set of references were based on brand names. Both represent a means of factually orienting us in a time and place, but one (at least IMHO) enhances the reading experience because it had to do with historical events while the other detracted from the experience because it seemed to have more to do with advertising/marketing. On the other hand, I find reading experiences that make me look something up have more interest for me than reading experiences that don't require that effort. Now, should I be penalizing an author for not being aware of what I know or don't know? And yet, in essence, that's what I do...

So I really am divided on the question. But again, that's a fascinating thing to think about!

>47 jillmwo: Yep, I'm with you there. Now Ready Player One was full of cultural references, and yet was more like a trip down memory lane than a trip to the local strip mall. That may be one difference. Where do the references take you? With Sayers, they take you on a journey to another country in another time and fully immerse you there. I think it is a matter of how skillfully they are used by the author and whether they have a purpose to the story, or are simply product placement. Now I'm wondering if we read they same mystery book, because I recall having that experience as well.

jillmwo, do you really think the author was paid to put brand names in the book? I've heard rumors of that, but never that it's actually occurred.

One of the things in the article is the concept of high and low art and that current events/personages don't really fit in either, but can definitively put a novel into a specific time frame. Is that a way to better "age-proof" a novel? Ditto for historical events; they aren't "lowbrow" necessarily, but depending on what they are, can editorialize the text and get our minds thinking along certain lines. For example, highlighting a hostage situation v. a big gadget release. The gadget release probably affected more people, but could be viewed as trivial when the hostage crisis wouldn't be. I think that Yanigahara was going for exactly that when she wrote A Little Life (at least according to the article, I haven't read it). For me it speaks to author manipulation of the reader.

>42 Bookmarque: ff.: When I'd never heard the term "product placement," I found the mention of brand names very distinctive in the fiction of Stephen King. Back then, in the seventies, TV advertisers couldn't (or wouldn't) mention their competitors--not even generically ("butter"). When King said "Wonder Bread," it evoked all of "mainstream" Dick-and-Jane, Mickey Mouse Club childhood in the 1950s. This was before some of us knew there was anything but mainstream. (The next decade was to be very educational; but there was a time for many of us when we didn't know what we didn't know.)

To me this seems very different from the detective novels in which a perpetually impecunious protagonist can recognize at a glance the most costly designer suits, shoes, and accessories, name their labels and price them. It's not like he wears them himself. How much time does he spend reading upscale fashion magazines and studying display cases? or asking people what brand they're wearing? Unless I do likewise, the names aren't going to mean much to me; but I find his excessive knowledge offputting. And how many readers of detective fiction are in the designer-label income bracket, anyway? I like the way Jim Butcher does it: in the voice of Harry Dresden, he just says that a character's silk suit probably cost more than he paid for his car. That I can relate to.

Cultural particulars are fine, and indeed necessary, for flavor and atmosphere. When I read a book set in Edinburgh or Cornwall, I don't want it to sound just like London or New York (and I'm not talking about dialect). But an occasional nod to the uninitiated might not go amiss. There after, after all, readers of English across many diverse cultures.

Environmental particulars, attitudes, and speech patterns help give a feeling of place and time as much as or more than physical landmarks and contemporary technology. I want the author to use enough of them to put me there, without just compulsively showing off her research. One aspiring author I know opened her novel with a pilot flying a private plane. She isn't a pilot herself, but she wanted everyone to know that she'd learned all the technical details as well as the lingo. She crammed in so much of both that I had only the vaguest idea of what was going on. This isn't authenticity. It's self-defeating exhibitionism.

Selecting the right amount and kind of detail is a tremendously important authorial skill. I want to feel the atmosphere of a twelfth-century Benedictine abbey or a twenty-second-century urban wilderness. I don't want to know that someone is listening to a Beethoven symphony; I want to know which one. The Fifth is one thing, and the Sixth is another. If a reader doesn't recognize the difference, the inclusion of the number won't detract from his understanding; whereas if someone writes "2013 BMW 550xi" as if it mattered that much, all I'll know is that I missed something, and I'll feel as if the author were addressing someone other than me.

I recently abandoned a book that ladled out indiscriminate masses of detail without indicating which were important to the story. The result was that nothing was; it all felt flat and featureless and very wearying.

In general, I want to assume that a competent author chooses his detail, including brand names and item particulars, for some reason; they're not idle or random. I want to trust the author's judgment. If he overdoes it and there's no apparent reason, he's going to lose that trust, and I won't be back.

I seem to recall hearing something like that about King back in the 80s, but being so young I had no basis for comparison. Now I’ve got some years of reading under my brain, I do. Older novels rarely got so specific.

And I agree that the specificity has to lead to something. It has to mean something, not just for its own sake. That’s kind of what I meant by calling out the Steig Larson books; it didn’t mean anything.

Oh the research show-off is a thing I can’t stand either. Recently I reviewed Ghost Man and got into it a bit with that book. Please, save it for verisimilitude, not monologuing.

Another thing that occurs to me is the concept of a book being dated. In general I think people see it as a bad thing, rather than just an indicator of culture at a certain time. I really hate it when people attempt to update books to something newer. What’s the point? Unless you’re continually updating it will always remain “dated”. And like MrsL says about Ready Player One, sometimes it can be a great nostalgic experience. It’s also silly when a lot of your plot hinges on technology or the lack of it. A particularly bad example is The Tomb by F. Paul Wilson. I take the stuffing out of it in my review, but it really is bad.

And so Meredy, I think you’re spot on about cultural relevance and evoking time and place. That has value for me, and I think for most readers. The thing is, unless it’s very close to home, I probably won’t notice regional gaffes.

Finished The Rook. For something that's outside of what I normally read, I liked it well enough to finish it. I didn't love it though. It went on about 100 pages too long. It's weird and dangerous and shit isn't what it seems. Oh and it's weird. Yeah, we get it. If I'm in the right mood next year I will pick up the sequel. Non-spoilery review here - http://www.librarything.com/work/11459047/reviews/125582793

5 Worst books - these are the ones I actually finished. DNFs will go on another post, those were really wretched, but these five had something about them that made me continue.

The Angel of Terror by Edgar Wallace, 1922
Billed as a thriller and maybe 100 years ago it was, but now it’s just hilarious. When I was still actively reading the book, I rooted for the villain because the victim is just stupid beyond reason. The titular Angel of Terror was more interesting, but dumb as well. Plus there’s a supporting character who acts as a bodyguard and his real identity is obvious. In the end I skimmed like mad, got to the end and I doubt I’ll read another of Wallace’s books. The whole contrived, safe and dated plot reminded me of the Harold MacGrath book, The Million Dollar Mystery which was also terrible.

Bowie: The Biography by Wendy Leigh, 2014
I’ve never been so bored and unenlightened by a biography in my life. At almost 130 pages in and 4 albums produced, all I know is that Bowie will screw anyone who comes within arm’s length. Anytime, anyhow, anywhere. But nothing about the man as musician, composer or songwriter. Ziggy Stardust has been created and stormed the world, but we get 3 sentences about why and what Bowie thought about it then or now. It’s insane. Did the writer ever even talk to Bowie? Seems not. Choppy timeline and poor delivery of key events; some are completely ignored or given a single sentence. Oh and I think Bowie got the worst tattoo ever. I’m so disappointed, this book is going straight in the bin.

The Good Girl by Mary Kubica, 2014
Meh. The characterization is ham-fisted and the interactions between Mia and Colin are sketchy. It's supposed to be a study in how Stockholm Syndrome comes about, but it lacks depth. Dad is painted as such a villain that the ending is easy to spot. Of course he has to be culpable in some way. Sure it's sad that Mia's plan goes awry and she finds herself in the hands of a truly vicious person, but Mia never thinks of it while she's going through it. It made the sudden reveal stupid since it's just blatant manipulation of the reader. An honest inner monologue/Mia perspective would have included the fact that her plan went pear-shaped. And I didn't buy Colin at all. What is he, animal thug or lovable son? Neither came across as believable or even plausible. All his internal monologuing never revealed his real reason for foiling the kidnapping. What? So, so dumb; the worst kind of author thinks she's clever.

This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison, 2015
Spoilery - Glad I got this from the library since I didn’t like it, although the device used to tell the story is pretty good. It didn’t go anywhere much and where it did was quotidian and had no upshot, basically. So Bernard the Brute had an affair. With Harriet’s best friend. Who wasn’t her friend, best or otherwise, when the affair started. Harriet is a Doormat Extraordinaire and takes on board all the abuse and suffering life can throw at her and still forgives everyone for treating her like shit. Yawn.

The Partner by John Grisham, 1997
How does this guy continue to get published? A gullible public that doesn’t know better, I suspect, The writing is repetitive, not just info repeat, but the same words are used again and again. There are some sweet examples of stupidity as well, like when someone’s retinas are described as bloodshot. Basic anatomy fail. Grisham goes out of his way to say some item or other is being ignored only to have a character go for it with gusto. Then there’s the time the heroine is running for her life and she stops to make a list. Like you do when armed thugs are after you. OMG, never again.

Oh, I didn't like This is Your Life, either! I thought it was boring. I kept waiting for something to happen and nothing ever did.

I'm not a Grisham fan, either. I find him formulaic. All his books are the same.

Speaking of waiting for something to happen, I'm about 70 pages into The Remains of the Day and so far we've only had musings on why English countryside is more picturesque than the rest of the planet, sartorial advice for motoring in said countryside and who or what it might take to be a great butler.

zzzzzzzzz

I think I'm going to bail. I'm skimming like crazy already. My first DNF for 2016.

>55 Bookmarque: I've been waiting for that one from the library, but your description is making me think it's not worth worrying about and that even if it is in I don't need to bother bringing it home with me.

It's returned now. Disappointing since it won the Booker, was made into a movie and gets a lot of accolades. I also liked another of his books last year. But I'm not going to force myself to read things I don't enjoy...see post 1. : )

Here's what I have brought home instead -



I'm partway into the Minette Walters and am anxious to start the William Gay. He's been dead since about 2010 and I don't really know the story behind this novel, but there's a long forward so hopefully there's some info about how much of it he wrote and finalized before dying.

The Lauren Groff gets great reviews, but her first book didn't wow me and I didn't read the second so I have no idea how I'll like this one. I do like contrasting versions of the same story though and that's what this is - a husband, a wife and a complicated marriage.

The Lewis Man is a continuation from The Blackhouse where Fin returns to his hometown to restore his parents' long abandoned home and of course there's a murder.

>57 Bookmarque: I liked both Lauren Groff's previous novels, so I'll be interested to hear what you think of the new one. My library system doesn't have it at the moment.

I have high hopes for it.

So I promised that I'd show some year-over-year graphs about some of my reading - male v. female authors and format. Finally remembered to upload the images the last time I was at the library so here goes -





Physical books spiked that much because of the library, but also because my overall count went way up last year. Not sure I'll come close to that this year, but we'll see.

January Rewind!

14 books read
1 DNF
5 by women, 9 by men
6 by authors new to me, 8 were not
2 audio, 4 ebooks, 8 physical
2 non-fiction, 12 fiction



The best is Absolution by Patrick Flanery - There is such deliberation in the way this story is told that it’s easy to trust the author even though this is a first novel. Even when things were obscure, I felt confident that Flanery would get me satisfaction in the end. The writing is fabulous and the sense of place and of individual characters is solid.

The worst is hard to pick because nothing I read was truly bad, I guess in terms of disappointment I’d have to say Little Sister Death which is a posthumously published book and didn’t have a proper ending, which if you read William Gay, you know he delivers.

DNR = The Remains of the Day by Ishiguro. OMG this was so boring. I was 70 pages in and had my fill of sartorial advice, staff plans and how they contribute to the success or failure of Great Butlers so back to the library it went.

Did you enjoy Macbeth: A Novel? I loved the treatment, but have yet to listen to the Hamlet one.

I liked it, but didn't love it. It bogged down in the middle and was so overly dramatic that it was hard to take. But it's Macbeth so the story itself is pretty solid. I listened to it and sad as it is to admit, I tired of the Scottish accent after a while. So affected.

A sign that a book will probably be a DNF is when I take a break from it to read a trashy thriller. Case in point, I'm trying to read

But stopped to inhale

Sigh. I'll probably give it another go, but it's really trying my patience. The most momentous event so far is that someone fell down the stairs.

>62 Bookmarque: Hmm, I shan't hurry to look for a copy of Fates and furies. Hope the trashy thriller was good!

Well I finished it and overall it was good, but the first half (Fates) deals with man-child extraordinaire, Lotto (Lancelot) and was pretty torturous to get through because he's so damn pathetic. It ended with a lovely little Greek tragedy of a romance though and set up the second half (Furies) quite well. Matilda turns on its head just about everything Lotto assumed about her; past and present. I stayed glued to it pretty much the whole way once Matilda got to say her piece.

Am at another of my area libraries. It's a nice one and a nice stack coming home!



Yeah another "girl" book, but it was on my list before the moratorium!

What a great cover!

>66 Bookmarque: When was that one printed? At $3.95, it can't be very recent, but doesn't look terribly old, either.

Not sure about that edition, but $3.95 means it's not that recent. Cool cover though.

Bailed on Luckiest Girl Alive - the main character was so shallow, self-obsessed and a hot mess of low self-esteem that I gave up after about 25 pages. That and the name dropping. I get it Ms. Knoll, you're at the bleeding edge of fashion and pop culture. Yawn.

Started The Fate of Mercy Alban which is a much softer book than I usually read. Old family secrets/scandal, woman trying to figure out what to do with the next phase of her life, some romance and a soupcon of danger.

The weather hasn't been too cooperative, but I've been out shooting. Mostly ruins and abandoned buildings because we have a lot of it here in north central Wisconsin. A few landscapes, too though.



for more abandoned stuff you can check out my new gallery - https://wickeddark.smugmug.com/Abandoned/Abandoned-Wisconsin



for more winter landscapes you can check out this gallery - https://wickeddark.smugmug.com/Landscapes/Winter-Scenes

Love the picks! The one of the bus is my favorite.

>68 Bookmarque:, Wow, the one that you posted here with the tree is beautiful!

Thanks peeps!

The bus made me go back and shoot it. It just sat in my mind for a few hundred yards and I gave in. Happy to do it though.

I was surprised to find a landscape like that, zjakklelien, and a bit of lightroom magic made it pop.

Added a few short book reviews today -
The Shape of Snakes which is a fairly early Minette Walters and a nice complex psychological thriller.

The Lewis Man which is the second in the Lewis Trilogy by Peter May. It's a good follow up and I'll be getting the third soon.

The Fate of Mercy Alban by Wendy Webb, kind of a ghost story/family secrets story. Kind of light, but enjoyable.

and Christine Falls by Benjamin Black which is the start of a series that's a bit male-gaze-y and a lot wish-fulfillment-y.

and a DNF unfortunately - The Man Who Walked Away by Maud Casey. It just didn't engage me at all insofar as the characters went and the writing was too imprecise for me. Back to the library it goes!

Went to the library today and here's my haul!



Strange how most of them are pretty short books. Especially the James M. Cain - there's three books in there. I can't believe I've never read one of his before. I've seen Double Indemnity, but not any other movies either. I feel like a cultural recluse sometimes.

And I had to grab a Ross Thomas since he was so great and I'm such a fan. The others are brand new titles on 14-day loan. Both new writers to me. I think Ruth Ware was an editor for one of the larger publishers before writing her own book. The other is a "rich people behaving badly" book and should be amusing.

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In the bad news department, my oral surgeon had to refer me to another one because she doesn't think my bone growth is fast enough for the type of implants she uses. The other doctor wants a cat scan before he'll even talk to me, which at $400 seems mercenary. And he can't get me in until April. I'm so frustrated and angry that I can't really think about it or I just want to cry. There's NOTHING I can do to grow bone faster. I'm in excellent health so it's not that.

Time to stop whining and open a book.

You have my sympathies with regard to the implant difficulties. I hope the situation improves quickly (and not too expensively!).

Enjoy your reading.

It is such a pain in my butt this tooth thing. The new dentist can't see me until early April.
APRIL!!
I could scream.

Instead I deadlift. Getting back up to some heavy weight finally. Am still wary of overtraining, but am pulling 225 for sets of 5 which is decent.

Put up a couple new reviews, too. The first one is for which is kind of an IT book right now, but was pretty ho-hum in reality. If you don't read a lot of thrillers it will probably work better for you than if you do.

The review for is a bit longer although I don't know why. I think the writer tried to put something of substance into this book, but it fell pretty flat.

Another great cover came up in the feed!

Here's a few more of my favorite shots from tooling around back roads -





This little house was especially sad. It's perfectly square and probably has no more than 4 rooms and maybe even a tiny bathroom. The windows are gone, but the blue paint clings. In spring I may go back and poke my head inside.

>77 Bookmarque: Beautiful photos. They remind me of Andrew Wyeth's paintings.

>50 Meredy: "Selecting the right amount and kind of detail is a tremendously important authorial skill. I want to feel the atmosphere of a twelfth-century Benedictine abbey or a twenty-second-century urban wilderness. I don't want to know that someone is listening to a Beethoven symphony; I want to know which one. The Fifth is one thing, and the Sixth is another. If a reader doesn't recognize the difference, the inclusion of the number won't detract from his understanding; whereas if someone writes "2013 BMW 550xi" as if it mattered that much, all I'll know is that I missed something, and I'll feel as if the author were addressing someone other than me."

Absolutely agree with this.. Very very hard for an author to get this right enough to appeal to a broad range of readers. And equally hard to be a reader for whom the broad range doesn't sit comfortably, but imagine the joy of finding an author who's got it just right for you.

I'm going to steal your quote for a Hobnob thread, and see what authors have to say... here

I love those pictures. It's always nice to see old, abandoned buildings getting some attention.

I had a photographer friend forever ago, he married a published author, together they were going to make a book about old barns and abandoned houses like the photos you have taken. I wonder if they ever got around to it. I love pics of old buildings, especially out in the country like these. Let us know what you find if you go back and peek inside.

Thanks peeps. I'm intrigued by abandoned places like most people and went out yesterday to look for more. I am getting tired of it now though and am starting to long for spring, even with its ravenous hordes of bugs. I really should have picked up a set of snow shoes this year, but didn't. Things are melting enough to make hiking in the woods enjoyable again though, so I might get out on Friday. Lots of trails right nearby so it shouldn't be hard to get out for a while.

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My brain is tired of vitriol, hate and cruelty I can tell you. Just DNF-ed The Tattooed Girl by Joyce Carol Oates even though I paid $2 for the ebook. I should have listened to my hesitation on buying it and gotten it from the library, but I'm not going to force myself to finish it even though it did cost me a couple bucks. I seriously dreaded returning to it so that's enough.

Instead started The Wild Inside which is a debut novel by Christine Carbo. Good so far although the writing isn't stellar; too many well-worn descriptors. It's set in Montana and involves grizzly bears v. humans in Glacier NP. I'm sure it will be gut-wrenching when a grizzly is slaughtered for being a bear, but hopefully there isn't too much of that. Since I have wolves for neighbors I can understand the stress the proximity has for both animals and humans, but sometimes the inequity seems so unfair. Oh but here I am getting worried for nothing.

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Finished and reviewed I am No One which is Patrick Flanery's third book and, while I think his intentions were good, is his weakest so far in my opinion. My review is a bit spoilery, but the first couple of paragraphs aren't so check it out if you have a mind. I do recommend it though just not as highly as his first two novels.

Also finished The Postman Always Rings Twice and really admired it. I can't believe it took me this long to read some James M. Cain. Crazy since I love noir and hardboiled stuff in general. I have his two other famous books on tap to read shortly, too.

Since I liked Trust No One by Paul Cleave, I decided to check out another in his books about crime in Christchurch and while I liked the plot, I didn't like Theo the main character so I probably won't read any more featuring him. He was so stupid and damaged that he couldn't do a single thing right and created more of his own problems than anything. Ugh. But, like Tana French does with her series, Cleave writes more about the area and the police department than any single set of characters so there is still more that I am going to read from him, just not about the uber-pathetic Theo Tate.

>82 Bookmarque: My brain is tired of vitriol, hate and cruelty I can tell you.

I'm with you. I don't take pleasure in vicarious suffering.

For some time I've been systematically avoiding books and movies whose overall pattern is that someone is taunted, bullied, or mistreated mercilessly, whether it's by a vicious parent or authority figure, a brutal thug, or mean peers. You know that somehow in the end the protagonist is going to right the balance; but I don't want to grit my teeth to withstand 300 pages or an hour and a half of viewing time just to feel some satisfaction when payback comes. As a reader I'd rather not have to figuratively bang my head bloody against the bricks in order to experience some future relief.

This is different from the ordinary ups and downs and miseries, difficulties, and obstacles that afflict your usual protagonist. Deliberate ongoing torment by a cruel aggressor is in a special category.

>82 Bookmarque: The wild inside sounds interesting, even though I don't really read thrillers. But I visited Glacier National Park last summer and loved it, so a book set there holds a lot of appeal to me.

Finished The Wild Inside and it was good. Typical of its time and place though. Read a mystery/thriller from 50 years ago and there's far less angst from the detective involved. In this one, our hero Ted is a messed up individual, but not extremely so, just enough to cause him to have a lot of "feels". In some ways it seems out of character that a man would have such hang-ups so long after his trauma, but I didn't mind it too much. Minimal eye rolling. There is going to be a sequel of sorts, but like Tana French does, it will feature another character from the first book and remain set in Glacier. I'll probably read it.

Sorry Meredy, I meant to post this the other day -

"You know that somehow in the end the protagonist is going to right the balance; but I don't want to grit my teeth to withstand 300 pages or an hour and a half of viewing time just to feel some satisfaction when payback comes."

Right! That’s how I feel. And these days there isn’t even a guarantee that there will be a righting of the balance, or if there is, what the collateral damage is going to be. More and more books seem to be aiming for torture porn these days. It’s not that I want everything soft and victimless, I just want the hate and cruelty dialed down. If an author gives me a taste and then backs off, I’m in. Even if the crime is horrible, which it usually is. Less time in the criminal’s head is what I’m after. More time in the protagonist's or just plain policing/detecting or getting on with how the rest of the story goes.

I haven't done a library stack in a while, so here's what's coming home with me today -



three are from my wishlist, but one is random. I've been meaning to just browse and find something new to me and so today I did. Can you guess which one it is?

I'll guess Lightkeepers.

Anyone else feel like guessing??

In the meantime...

February reading wrap up

16 books read - that extra day helped eke out one more
All were fiction
2 ebooks, 3 audio, 11 physical
8 by men, 8 by women
7 new authors, 9 I’ve read before
Oldest was from 1932, the newest 2016



The best is kind of a tie - I LOVE Ross Thomas so every book is a joy and a treat and Voodoo LTD was no exception. It’s a Wu and Durant story and I love those guys so 4 stars it is. And The Postman Always Rings Twice is stellar, but for different reasons. I was enthralled in the story just because Frank and Cora were so destructive and crazy.

The worst goes to Along Came a Spider because it was just so vicious. I did get through it because I had decent memories of it before and there’s a woman who rides a BMW, so there was that. I won’t be continuing the series even though I have them all courtesy of the airplane lady.

To be different to @Meredy I'll guess The Memorist.

>83 Meredy: I agree with you and Bookmarque. I can't stand cruelty either, and that makes it hard to find good books for me.

My guess is the Daylight Marriage.

To continue with my last post 91, from which I was unexpectedly carried away by a wonderful Lancaster Bomber documentary:

I am currently reading the ER book Spies, Sadists and Sorcerors by Dominic Selwood , which thus far reveals the sad truth about the behaviour of early kings of England and their followers. It's interesting, yet hard for me to read because of the unfettered cruelty. And I've a long way to go before I finish it. I wouldn't want to be reading about such things for fun and relaxation!

I am SO glad I didn't live in those times and it's sad to think that there are still people in the world who do apparently live under such leaders.

Ding ding! Winnah winnah lobstah dinnah - Peace2 gets it. The Memorist is the random pick. I may start it today, not sure. It's a combination of supernatural and harsh reality that sometimes works for me so maybe I'll like it. I found it on a lower shelf which don't get the same attention as the ones at eye level.

Put up a couple of reviews today, one is harsh in a technical way because of my photography background. I found so many outright stupid things about this so-called professional photographer that I wasn't enamored with the story or immersed in it. I kept looking for the next dumb thing for her to do. Plus I questioned all of the other "factual" information the writer supplied on other things, so it was a bummer. Oh it was for The Lightkeepers. No spoilers in it, so you're safe. Non-photographers will no doubt like it more than I did. Now I know how real forensic and crime scene techs must feel with just about every book, movie and TV show these days.

The other review is for The Castle of Wolfenbach which is a novel of 1793 in the high gothic tradition. It's in Austen's Northanger Abbey as one of the "horrid" novels that are at once deplored and devoured by the women in the book. It's absolutely dumb and absolutely great at the same time. Some spoilers, but you get a warning when they're coming.

Neither book features overt sadism or cruelty, so I didn't have to skim, which is what I usually do when an author gives me the bad guy's glee over hurting someone else. Oh, wait, I did skip the rape scene in The Lightkeepers. Well, I skimmed it.

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Yesterday I got out into the woods after photographing an abandoned log cabin that I've passed dozens of times without noticing. I should get the pics online next week, but here's one from my last outing. You just never know what you're going to find on the back roads up here.



Oh and we drove up to the big lake last weekend because it was 50 degrees and so why not. The ice is already out which is amazing for a lake that holds 10% of the freshwater on earth. I don't think the folks on the snow are agate hunters, but they abound on Superior's beaches right after ice out.

On a grey day in Pennsylvania when they're predicting snow in the next 24 hours, that blue ocean photo is very pleasant to see!

I hope you get a reprieve soon jillmwo. Oh and it's a lake, but it acts like it's an ocean. We're supposed to get some snow this evening and tonight, but nothing major. Just enough to make the woods pretty again I hope!

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Book covers fascinate me, both in the art itself and how they are employed by publishers. They are a tool that helps sell a book and sometimes big changes are made from hardcover to paperback and/or ebook/kindle release. The other day I pulled a random book off the shelf at my library. Now, when I say random I don’t mean blindly. The spine of the book caught my attention and made me pull it out, the cover made me open it and the description on the flap made me take it home. Here’s the book -

When I did some research into the series I found out this is #2 and that the books aren’t tied in such a tight linear way so that reading them out of order is ok (weirdly my library had all the books except the first one). Just for the heck of it I checked the Kindle store to see if the first one might be real cheap so I could read it first and conveniently. Color me shocked at the new cover -

If that’s what the hardcover looked like, I’d NEVER have pulled it off the shelf. The new cover has no appeal for me and doesn’t even seem to represent what it is - a suspense novel involving secret societies, repressed memories, a bit of historical fiction, conspiracy theories and international intrigue. The hardcover design conveys some of that to me, but the paperback or ebook cover, whatever it is, doesn’t at all. I think of a much softer book with a more definite romance angle. Interesting, huh?

>96 Bookmarque: I don't think it is sporting to throw book bullets around when you haven't even read the book yet! Fortunately, I am only winged, until I hear what you thought about it. Like you, I would have brought home the first book, almost regardless of what it was about. Intrigue, class, and beauty combined. The second, no. That is a scrambled image which portrays nothing.

All is fair in love and books. : )

So I finished it and it was good. Not great, not awful. Entertaining, swiftly plotted with a bit of character angst and some mysticism. Not a lot of violence or cruelty which was great and so I think I may read the rest of the series whenever I need a good yarn that won't stress my system if you know what I mean. And yeah, after reading it, I can see where the second image comes from, but it's too prissy for the tone of the book.

So last fall I talked a lot about the tundra swans that come through on their migrations to and from the arctic. I didn't have a lens near long enough to shoot them, but now I do. Still getting the hang of it so the image isn't as tack sharp as I'd like, but what the hell, I was in the yard.



Now we have almost full ice out, the birds are back! The usual eagles along with mergansers (hooded and common), swans (gone now) and Canada geese. It's all very busy and I hope I can get out there again when it's warmer tomorrow. It's tough to just sit and wait behind a tree when it's 40 degrees, lol.

Oh my goodness! So cool! You are very lucky to live where you do.

Otters, eagles, tundra swans ... you really have found a wonderful new home!

>99 Bookmarque: I really admire the composition of that shot: the one-third proportions, the angle, the depth of cool color in the foreground and warm color in the background, and the white-on-white with very distinct profiles. Just lovely.

Thanks everyone! I really like living where I do. And thanks for noticing my attempt at an artistic wildlife shot, Meredy. I was just crouched down on the bank and the sky reflected in the water was too much to pass up. I wish the swans were nearer, but alas, there is no dealing with them. They do what they want, when they want. lol

Here's another bit of abandoned Wisconsin. This is just north of me on county road E and I'd passed a zillion times without noticing it. Once I did, I went back on a gorgeous day before the snow melted. This is the first house I went inside of, too.





Isn't it great? Judging by the coffee and some of the other things I found inside (including a collapsed roof) I think it's been abandoned about 50 years. You can see the rest of the images here - https://wickeddark.smugmug.com/Abandoned/Cabin-on-E

>103 Bookmarque: I am amazed that there are so many abandoned houses that have not been torn down for years and years... Of course, in the Netherlands, we have a lot less space, so we have incentive to break down unused houses...

I was in Amsterdam in June and yeah, it's crowded there, but coming in on the train it seemed like there might be potential for abandonment, it was almost pastoral. But yeah, the American west and midwest are just so much more vast and because of that, buildings are allowed to just molder because why take the time to demo it when you can just build something somewhere else. Back east is a lot different; crowded and so not much just gets to sit.

Here's another favorite that I spotted just before the snow melted.



It's not that far from my house and I'm going to revisit it since I didn't see any signs telling me not to. There's a barn and silo behind it and possibly other buildings. Hard to tell for the overgrown trees.

Here's an article that's going up on the blog soon. I didn't write discrete reviews for each book, but instead played them off each other a bit. Not sure if it works. Still noodling.

Two and a half novels by James M. Cain

Weirdly though I’ve read plenty of other major noir writers - Hammett, Chandler and MacDonald - I’d never read any Cain until this year. He was prolific, but is most famous for three works - The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce - all of which were successful (and now classic) films. Conveniently, the three are packaged into a single volume and I tore through the first two, but alas, M.P. is a DNF. People often hold up the noir genre as the epitome of misogyny because of the way women are treated and portrayed, but they are a product of their times and while filtered through a writer’s imagination, a reflection of those times. Women weren’t taken very seriously and often didn’t have the ability to direct their own lives. In order to make the stories dramatic, the women often resort to the only power they have left; sex and the illusion of domination. Not so for Mildred, however, at least as far as I got with the book. By comparison with the women in Indemnity and Postman, Mildred plays by the rules, but her dichotomy of doormat and tycoon just kept me feeling distanced from her. The way she let her daughter treat her infuriated me the most. I read each of the other two books in a single day (they’re short so it’s no major feat).

In the basic elements, Postman and Indemnity are about the same things. Unhappy woman meets a single man who immediately covets her and they plot how to do away with the inconvenient husband. While not poverty stricken, the folks in Postman are a bit downmarket from the ones in Indemnity. I also found them to be more virulently desperate; their actions more ruthlessly base. The sex is also a lot more blatant and graphic, getting the book banned in many cities and towns. Also there is quite a bit of racism involved in Postman; Cora begins by insisting to Frank that she is just as white as he is despite marrying a Greek. At first she describes him as just another boorish man in her life, but later, when things escalate, he’s continually greasy.

It’s obvious that Frank and Cora are doomed, but it isn’t until the law becomes involved that they realize it, too. I was absolutely amazed at how much the authorities could get away with when it came to questioning a suspect. I actually had a “wait a minute, is this legal?” moment before remembering the story takes place well before the Miranda hearings. As a matter of fact, the whole of the legal proceedings were very strange; highly manipulative and shady. It’s an excellent precursor to how it wraps up and the fates of our two murderous lovers.

The penny dropping for Walter in Indemnity happens more organically as he realizes the standoff he’s gotten himself into. He goes into the plot thinking he’s in control and that it was at his instigation, but it dawns on him that she can make just as much trouble for him and that she was remarkably easy to ‘persuade’. No wonder when she has so much experience. Funny it’s that that gives Walter pause. Not that she’ll do it with him, that it’s not the first. When he first proposes the idea to Phyllis I wondered why this just popped into his head, but later Cain gives us some insight that Walter has been toying with an idea like this for a long time; just to see if he could do it. No thought to the consequences for anyone.

The ending well, if you’ve only seen the movie the book will surprise you. I didn’t find it satisfying in the sense of justice, but in terms of keeping with the bleak turn of events (and the moral turpitude despite not letting the youngsters take the fall) it fits.

Both novels feature elaborate murder plots that are a treat to watch unfold. Each is complex, relies on timing and a lot of manipulation - especially of witnesses. Except for some accidents and unintended blunders, each could have worked too, (well, one did). They are more linear than plots devised by Hammett, Chandler or MacDonald and shows how different the noir novel can be when it doesn’t involve a detective.

Yay! Library book haul!



Sorry for the bad phone pic. It's wet out or I'd go where there's better light. Anyway...gotta finish the one on the very bottom before I start on anything else.

Horrorstor was quite fun :)

I'm almost 1/2 way thru and it's entertaining if uneventful.

Horrorstor was fun. It got way more gruesome and gross than I thought it would so that was fun. I thought it might be touchy-feely like the Orsk employee handbook. Clearly there are a lot of inside jokes for Ikea employees here, or any big box store, really, but Ikea especially. I wish I'd had the opportunity to go in one of the stores before reading the book though.

Just put up a bunch of quickie reviews today.

For Assumption by Percival Everett. Review.It's an ambitious novel that maybe goes a little too far. It has a great cover though -


And one for The Daylight Marriage by Heidi Pitlor. I had way less sympathy for the plight of our victim than I have with other books. Also the relationship at the heart of the story itself seemed too unlikely. Review here.

Another slim volume was The Bird Artist and it was ok. I liked What is Left the Daughter better though. Review here.

>110 Bookmarque: Clearly there are a lot of inside jokes for Ikea employees here, or any big box store, really, but Ikea especially. I wish I'd had the opportunity to go in one of the stores before reading the book though.

Do you mean to say you've never been inside an Ikea?

Nope. Never been one near where I lived in NH. And up here it's 45 minutes to the nearest Walmart. Shudder. Luckily we have Menards and Fleet Farm. But those are also 45 minutes away.

I've never been in an Ikea either. Somehow I don't feel deprived. :)

Phew. I'm not the only one. Part of living in the sticks, I guess. I wouldn't have it any other way though, even if I never set foot in an Ikea.

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My latest win from the ER program arrived and I read it immediately as I usually do. It’s a 25th anniversary edition of Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence which was a groundbreaking fantasy book back in the early 90s. A good friend of mine turned me on to it when it first came out and I remember being delightfully entranced by it and its sequels. I bought each of them immediately and so kind of envy those who have the nifty boxed sets. Nothing like a slipcase to make a bibliophile turn green.


Now I’m older and not quite the wide-eyed youngster I was, these still hold a great amount of charm for me. The tactile quality is so much a part of these books that I feel bad for the blind that they cannot experience the same thing. The immersive element to opening someone else’s mail is pretty wonderful. A tinge of excitement at each new missive; what will it contain? I wonder that other novelists didn’t take Bantock’s lead and publish epistolary stories with the same lovely goodies inside. Maybe they did, but I missed them. Yeah the first trilogy is better than the second, but if you can ignore how silly the underlying premise is, you can enjoy the high-flown, held-breath quality they evoke not only with words, but with the artwork which really requires its own scrutiny. It’s hard to say which you should absorb first. Generally I look at the envelope or postcard front before I read. Then I sometimes go back and look again at the illustration; examining for details or echoes that expand the text. Don’t forget to turn those cards and letters over though, there’s wonderful little artifacts to be found. All in all it was an enjoyable day when the Anniversary edition arrived to set me back down in the Sicmons again.

You're not alone. IKEA has no appeal for me either. The spare, linear style is just not for me. The world already has too many rectangles in it.

The Griffin & Sabine books sound intriguing. Not sure how I missed ever hearing of them before. Oh, wait--early nineties? That was within a ten-year span when I was actively raising two young boys and scarcely read a thing.

oOOh! Get this one! And take pictures so we can live through you vicariously!



There is one more book that came out last week that I hope I win in this month's ER program. Since I don't have a box for them all, it doesn't matter. I wonder if Chronicle will do something like that with all of them, like Scholastic did with the Potter stuff when it was done.

>114 Bookmarque: Oh dear. I don't have Alexandria or The Morning Star. I loved these for pretty much the same reasons you did, although I needed you to explain the reasons for me to know it.

>115 Meredy: You are not the only one who missed these, and I think we missed them for the same reasons! I find that I am missing the popular culture of the late 80s and 90s. Spent two hours the other night reading up on the Spice Girls, who I never knew existed, and they are supposed to have been the next generation of Beatles invasion to America! Who knew?

>117 MrsLee: I'd heard of the Spice Girls, but I vaguely thought they were some kind of advertising mascots (like those dancing raisins) for a company such as McCormick's or Schilling. I've still never heard them or seen them perform, just a still photo or two in pop mags at the dentist's office. They mean nothing to me.

My sons were born in the mid-eighties, and I don't think I really surfaced until the end of the millennium, between them and a heavy-duty job in Silicon Valley high tech.

>112 Bookmarque: >113 MrsLee: >114 Bookmarque: >115 Meredy: I'm not surprised that there are people who do not like Ikea, but around here (the Netherlands) I think there are few households that don't own at least one item bought there. It is one of the few places where one can buy reasonably priced furniture. And in the Netherlands, you can drive across the whole country in about 3 hours (and then I'm not taking the shortest cross-section), so you can imagine that there are not many chain shops that take 45 min to get to!

>112 Bookmarque: What is NH by the way?

Actually, I quite like a lot of what ikea produces; clean lines, spare detail, it's great, but I've never lived in a high-density population zone where a store like that works. I live in the sticks now (WI = Wisconsin in the upper midwest part of the US), but even in southern NH - that's New Hampshire zjakkelien - a state in New England which is in the far north eastern part of the US. It's one of those little states that people outside of New England get mixed up and can barely find on a map.

Yeah, the sheer size of the US can be hard to envision if you haven't seen a lot of it. My dad hasn't traveled very much at all (never been west of the Mississippi or east of the beaches in Maine) and he has a hard time when I tell him just how few people live around here. Or how it only takes me an hour to go almost 100 miles. I'm tempted to take my parents up to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan so they can see real nothing and a really big lake.

>120 Bookmarque: Yeah, the size is difficult to imagine! And maybe the lack of population even more. Around here, everything is close compared to that.
Thanks for the explanation, sometimes people use geographical terms here (LT in general) that probably only make sense if you live near the region. I figured the abbreviation would be one of the states, but I wasn't sure.

This region is definitely pretty sparse of people compared to the southern part of the state which includes Milwaukee which is like the 5th or 9th largest city in the US. A little further south of that is Chicago which is bigger still. And then Milwaukee/St. Paul is 3 hours west, so there's no shortage of big populations semi-close, but it's pretty rural here. Lots of farms. No Ikeas.

Minneapolis/St. Paul

Duh. yeah. That's what I meant. funny. thanks suitable1. The twin cities, of which Milwaukee is not a sibling.

>120 Bookmarque: Back in the days when Namibia was still called South-West Africa, it was not unknown for residents of the far north to travel to Windhoek (in the centre) for a lunch meeting and back the same day -- about 500 miles each way. @Bookmarque, you remind me of that!

ETA: and probably not see a living soul for half that distance!

It's not that remote - you'd have to hit the UP for that! lol But traffic is very minimal. There's more wildlife and tractors. Lots of unincorporated towns. Lots of abandoned houses etc. And I drove an hour to buy a mattress for the futon downstairs because that's just what you have to do here sometimes. Only sometimes though. We can get a fair amount of what we need in the city just north of here even though it's only 3000 people.

>21 Bookmarque: Love the bar graphs and pie charts. I'm jealous of how much you got to read last year. I don't think I've ever put away that many books in one year, except maybe back in 8th grade. :o)

As usual your photos are spectacular. Hope you enjoy your first Spring in Wisconsin and find many new places to photograph for us.

Thanks for stopping by, Clam! Nice to see you back. I have a list of nature preserves to visit this year so there will be no shortage of photos. Of course, I can make use of almost any piece of land and got a few nice shots in the lot across the street (all the lots on the non-water side of the road have gone unsold since subdivided over a decade ago so it's like a surrogate backyard for me). Pics coming soon. Gotta get to the library where there's bandwidth.

I love some of the covers that come up in the cover module on the homepage. This one is great!



My copy is a reprint of the original hardcover, but I wouldn't mind having that one.

>128 Bookmarque: That is most suitably creepy!

How different are you finding the surrounding area and weather from New England?

Differences huh? So far weather-wise, not too much although the locals say last summer was unusually gorgeous and the winter mild. I guess in 2014 they started ice fishing around Thanksgiving; it was that cold. This year the earliest you could get out on the ice was mid-to-late January so people were bummed. It’s less humid here and so the snow is lighter and fluffier and last summer it didn’t get above 90 here even for one day. Way less humid, too, but way more bugs than in southern NH. Way more.

The highest “mountain” here is just under 2000 feet so it’s pretty flat. There are tons more lakes and ponds though and we even have some prairie left (and some being restored). I’m anxious to see that since I never have. Way more wildlife, too because there are so few people relatively speaking. The resident wolfpack has its homebase just a few miles from here, for example. Fewer moose than NH though. It’s just different enough to be interesting and the same enough to be something we’re prepared for. Nice balance and I’m looking forward to wildflower season, although I am going to need a mesh bug suit to keep them off me, especially the ticks. Ugh.

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Here's a shot of the lot across the street from me on March 17 -



and here's a shot from yesterday in the same lot - hepatica buds!!



Amazing what 10 days will do for you.

>130 Bookmarque: I kind of enjoyed the way you talked about getting some shots of the lot across the street, then posted the Salem's Lot cover. It made me think for a moment, ”Oooh, she lives in that kind of neighbourhood." Then I realized that they didn't actually go together. But it was a nice little exercise for my imagination.

And I do like the pictures of the real lot across the street.

I didn't even catch that. heh. I really hope there are no vampires in the neighborhood. I'll check out the bedroom window later tonight!

>131 SylviaC: I noticed the same thing! I thought the posts would be related as well.

I've never read Salem's Lot. Is it as creepy as it looks?

I think I prefer the real lot to the book cover one!

I like the real one, too, but Salem's Lot is a pretty terrific book. A slow-burner that riffs on Dracula more than anything. It's been a while since I read it, but I think my review for it is spoiler free.

Wow! I read 18 books in March. If that isn’t a sign of uncooperative weather I don’t know what is. Here’s how things went -

18 books
2 audio, 2 ebooks, 14 physical
2 non-fiction, 16 fiction
7 by women, 11 by men
9 new authors, 9 authors I’ve read before
Oldest book was from 1793, the newest from this year



You may notice there are more book covers than books and that’s because I counted the original Griffin & Sabine trilogy as one book and the 2nd trilogy as one book also. They’re short comparatively speaking, but lovely experiences.

The best book was Passionate Minds which delivered exactly what its title promises - the story of Emilie du Chatelet’s and Voltaire’s love affair that helped birth the Enlightenment movement. Without getting into the weeds of detail, it showcased their relationship against the backdrop of French government oppression and the suppression of knowledge by the Catholic church (what else is new?). It made me angry and wondrous at the same time.

The worst book was Thick as Thieves by Peter Spiegelman. I mistook it for one of a series by him, but it’s a stand-alone and it’s pretty dreadful if you read a lot of this kind of thing which I do. It was predictable. It had one-dimensional characters that were sexist and kind of racist in the way they were portrayed. And to top it all off the protagonist was a dope.

There was one DNF - Mildred Pierce which surprised me because I devoured both the other James M. Cain novels I read. This one dragged and I really hated the hub on which the story turned; Mildred’s daughter is horrid, but poor old mom just can’t stop devoting her every waking moment to the little brat. Ugh, kids. Who needs ‘em?

>116 Bookmarque: I have The Morningstar Trilogy by Nick Bantock. I love it, it's so beautiful and imaginative. And, quite a coincidence, here

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/art-and-architecture/griffin-and-sabine-crea...

is an article from this past weekend in my favourite newspaper that you guys might like.

As for distances on our continent: I have a friend who has relatives coming here (Southern Ontario) from Ireland. They also want to go on a "short trip" to a town in north-west Ontario and can't believe that it is around 1000 miles from here!

And finally, as usual, Bookmarque, your photographs are wonderful.

(edited to fix some things)

aw thanks nhlsecord, and thanks for the article. I've always liked what Bantock does.

Here's a shot from a couple weeks ago. I just love what you can find between seasons.



And woo hoo! I just saw a loon on the river! I hope it stays. We had a non-breeding adult that hung around all last summer. No way to know if this is the same one, but we have a loon!

Would it be loony to go and introduce yourself?

I think it would look at me like I was nuts. But hey, to paraphrase Warren Zevon, maybe even a loon can shake hands.

>138 Bookmarque: Lucky you. They are beautiful birds.

After hearing the call of loons for the first time over a lake in southeastern Canada when I was a youngster, I've been a lifelong loon lover. Once I bought a carved wooden loon-call whistle. It was great. I don't know where it is now, but I still have a little carved and painted loon on my bedroom bookcase. And I have a recording of music blended with loon calls. The first piece is--guess what.

Would that be Clair de Loon?

It would indeed. Irresistible.

And I love that you have a loon carving. I have one, too -



I was in Friday Harbor on San Juan island and wandered into an art gallery featuring native American art from the Northwest. Most of the items were beyond my budget, like an enormous bear that had to weigh several hundred pounds. But this loon wasn't too expensive and I loved the streamlined interpretation of the bird. It's made several moves and is still intact, pointy bill and all. It's made of soapstone, I think, 12 inches long. Post yours if you feel like it. :)

I found this image online. Mine is very similar.

Very realistic. I bet it's nice to have around. I think I heard the one on the water whistle a little while ago. It was faint, so I can't be sure. This part of the river isn't a good breeding location for them, so if it's looking for a mate it will probably move on to safer waters. If it's a non-breeding adult it might stay because it's good fishing!

I guess we Canadians have the right idea, putting a loon on our dollar coins. We even call the coins "loonies".

>147 SylviaC: Yup. I carry one in my pocket.

The call of a loon, the flicker of a firefly, the taste of a fresh truffle. These are some experiences I am lacking.

>149 MrsLee: Come to "Durbs-by-the-sea" in the right season and the fireflies are easy. A bit of research will tell us when to go off to Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park in search of Kalahari Truffles (said to be as good as their French cousins). Can't help with the loon, though.

>150 hfglen: I did not know there were truffles there! I suppose, like wine, truffles are in many places other than France. I know for a fact they grow in Oregon, a trip which is in my budget, but sadly lacking in South African friends.

>151 MrsLee: Come to think of it, there was a news item that someone in the Midlands was growing oak trees infected with truffle fungus some years ago. What success he's had I know not. But that would exclude you from the desert widlife.

147 SylviaC - aren't the two-dollar coins called toonies? I always thought that was cute.

I've never had a fresh truffle either. I did have some marvelous hen-of-the-woods on one of my last outings in NH. Such perfection I haven't tasted in a long time. Just a little crispy from the sauteeing, slightly nutty flavor. So good. There is an enormous glade of what I suspect are chanterelles not far from here. I need to do a bit more research on identifiers for the food and how the look-alikes differ and what the symptoms are (if any) when eaten. That way I can harvest a huge amount of them if they are indeed the gourmet item.

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Put up a couple of new reviews. The first for Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III, more famous for his novel The House of Sand and Fog. It's my first book by him and, while good, I'm not in a hurry for more, but only because the premises don't spark my brain. Review here.

The other is Passionate Minds: the great love affair of the Enlightenment, featuring the scientist Emilie Du Chatelet, the poet Voltaire, sword fights, book burnings, assorting kings, seditious verse and the birth of the modern world.

Phew. If that doesn't tempt you I don't know what will. It was pretty darn excellent if frustrating from a feminist perspective. slightly angry review here.

Wow, those pictures are lovely, Bookmarque (didn't make much sense to post this in the new thread).

Never knew a loon was a bird. Is it related somehow to loony? Like, is it a crazy bird?

>154 zjakkelien: Loony is a short form of lunatic (a crazy person), which has to do with the moon (luna). I think the bird's name has a different and unrelated etymology.