September, 2025 Reading: "Time makes us grow old, but we do not change." (Paul Auster)

First book of the month and it's a doozy: Denis Johnson's RESUSCITATION OF A HANGED MAN.

Lenny English is down to his last card, accepting a position as part-time detective for a small agency in Provincetown (on Cape Cod).

There, the fabric of Lenny's life further unravels, as he drinks too much, uses poor judgement and loses his very tenuous hold on reality.

Johnson's version of a detective novel is wonderful, the "mystery" existing largely in Lenny's tortured mind.

Highly recommended--another one for my year end "Best of..." list.

The Bone Bed, Patricia Cornwell

The twentieth book in the Kay Scarpetta series. Only nine more to go - including the one due in October. The title refers to a palaeontological dig in Alberta, Canada. A female paleontologist disappeared and several months later Scarpetta is sent an anonymous email containing a short video of the missing woman and a photo of a severed ear. Despite Scarpetta having no connection to palaeontologist, the place in Canada, or even dinosaurs.

Then the body of a woman turns up in Boston Bay, tied to a buoy. Scarpetta manages to recover the body intact. Shortly afterwards she is in court being cross-examined by the lawyer of a billionaire industrialist who has been charged with hiring the murder of his missing wife. But the body in the bay is not her.

And when they do identify the body, it turns out she was someone Marino was flirting with on Twitter, so he comes under suspicion…

Initially, it all seems like yet another plot to destroy Scarpetta’s career and reputation, a feeling only reinforced by the grilling she gets in court and the FBI investigating Marino. But it actually isn’t. It’s just your common or garden psychopath serial killer, of which the US has plenty, and Scarpetta’s involvement is more by accident than by design, or at the very least a happy coincidence on the part of the killer.

It also starts to look like Scarpetta is going to dangle herself as a victim, only to turn the tables - as in many other books in the series. But again, the killer abducts her only because of, er, a happy coincidence, and for other reasons she’s rescued by the usual gang - Lucy, Marino, etc.

I’ve no idea if Cornwell was deliberately teasing the reader with hints of her more formulaic books, but I did like the fact The Bone Bed didn’t hew closely to the formula. The title came from an actual bone bed visited by Cornwell, and which inspired the novel - but it’s actually more or less peripheral to the story. She could have dropped the murder of the palaeontologist and it wouldn’t have substantially changed the plot.

A middling Scarpetta novel, I think. Slight above average, but not one of the more memorable ones. In its defence, it focuses more on crimes, and a killer, who has absolutely nothing to do with Scarpetta.

Last month's books:

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut- First read in English in 2022 and re-read in Spanish in 2025 as Un Verdor Terrible. Still love it.

The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne- Memoir of a Hollywood family. It includes many touching moments but it is occasionally exasperating. One gets the sense that there was a lot of sanitizing. Not enough Joan Didion.

Sculptor's Daughter by Tove Jansson- Childhood vignettes that have the feel of fairy tales. The most successful are gorgeous, tender, little jewels. Unforgettable. The collection as a whole is uneven. Saved by a beautiful audiobook narration, and because Jansson is always great company.

Notes from an Island by Tove Jansson- The more interesting part of this book is what left unsaid: that this was a house that Tove Jansson built with her life partner in the early 60's. Instead the book focuses on the building process, which was not that interesting, at least not for me. Context would have been useful.

Night on the Galactic Railroad and Other Stories from Ihatov by Kenji Miyazawa- I saw an animation adaptation in YouTube a while back and was curious about the book. The book is odd and intriguing, but like the adaptation, not entirely satisfying.

The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald- The audiobook version is not good at all. (Tone-deaf reader, no pdf with images, etc. etc.) I remain very interested in Sebald though. A rigorous, and original intelligence is evident.

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin- Loved it. It's kind of a rambling mess, yes, but it's so full of great ideas I didn't mind. Loved it.

Deep Six, Clive Cussler

The seventh book featuring Dirk Pitt, NUMA Special Projects Director and all-round man’s man and action hero, but actually the sixth book as Cussler managed to sell a trunk novel, set and written before his debut novel, having now become a best-selling author. Trunk novels should generally stay trunk novels, and Cussler’s is no exception. I should point out that Deep Six, published in 1984, may have been Cussler’s seventh actual novel, but in 2025 Cussler, who died in 2020, has 27 Dirk Pitt novels in print (the last two written by his son), 21 NUMA Files novels written by assorted hands from his atelier, 18 Oregon Files novels, 15 Isaac Bell Adventures novels, and 12 Fargo Adventures novels. I make that 93 novels. That’s a fucking large, or a fucking productive, hacktelier/atelier.

Deep Six is set in 1989, five years after it was published. A tramp freighter disappears in the 1970s with a bank robber aboard. It is discovered ten years later because it was carrying a cargo of barrels of stolen US Army nerve gas, one of which has leaked and killed hundreds of people off the coast of Alaska. Pitt amazes everyone by quickly finding the ship. The barrels of nerve gas are taken away to be buried, but Pitt is intrigued by the ship itself, a Liberty ship from World War 2 from which all identification has been removed. He investigates further, and learns it was operated by a shady Korean shipping company, now based in New York.

Meanwhile, the president of the US, vice-president, speaker of the house, and a senator are off on a weekend trip on the presidential yacht, the USS Eagle (the last presidential yacht was actually the USS Sequoia, which was sold off by Carter in 1977). Overnight, a heavy fog drops, and when it lifts everyone aboard the yacht has vanished. The Administration desperately tries to cover up the fact the president is missing…

… and who has actually been kidnapped by the aforementioned Koreans, who have been paid by the Soviets, and a Soviet neuroscientist plans to brainwash the president and insert a controlling microchip into his head…

It’s action all the way as Pitt ends up involved in the hunt for the missing politicians. A Soviet liner in the Caribbean is blown up and sunk - and Pitt’s latest lover is aboard, so he’s involved in that too. But the Koreans have her, so he’s after them in a desperate race to find their secret laboratory before they kill everyone. The climax involves a battle on the Mississippi delta between the machine-gun-armed Koreans on a tug and a company of ACW re-enactors with muskets on a paddle-wheel steamer. Exciting stuff, even if not in the slightest bit credible. And the only reason Pitt found them is because the Korean shipping company named all their ships after towns on the Mississippi delta - er, what?

I’m beginning to wonder if Cussler had a time-machine and visited 2025. In Night Probe!, the US and Canada merged - which didn’t happen in the real world, obviously, although Trump clearly thought he could make it happen. In Deep Six, the president is controlled by the Soviets (although a microchip in Trump’s brain would be ineffective as his brain is clearly ineffective, but he’s still Putin’s puppet), he wants to pull the US out of Nato, there are troops on the streets of Washington, and the US is no longer a democracy. Hmmm. I don’t recall a tech billionaire who believes the laws of physics don’t apply to him in Raise the Titanic!, however. And while Iceland featured in Iceberg, Greenland wasn’t mentioned.

Still, another twenty Dirk Pitt novels to go…

THE FLANEUR: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris by Edmund White.

A reread but I still enjoyed it.

I'm drawn to the mystery and diversity of cities, how each has its own character, the face it presents to the rest of the world.

White's evocation of a Paris that likely no longer exists--he lived there in the 1980s--is historical, personal and, at times, sentimental.

A love song to another time and place.

SHERLOCK HOLMES: The Unauthorized Biography by Nick Rennison.

Great fun and dedicated Holmes fans will appreciate how much effort and research the author devoted to bringing our hero to life.

The mix of fact and fiction is deftly handled...and Rennison tosses in one or two biographical bombshells to make things doubly interesting.

Well worth a read.

On the Calculation of Volume I, Solvej Balle

It’s probably premature to review this first volume before having read the rest - although only two have so far have been published in English, the third is due in November, the fourth in April next year… and to date only six of the planned seven have been published in the original Danish. (I should point out it’s not On the Calculation of, volume 1, but On the Calculation of Volume, part one.)

The basic premise is: antiquarian book dealer Tara Selter, resident in France, visits Paris to purchase new books for the home-based business she runs with her husband. While there, she wakes up one morning and discovers she is reliving the previous day. In fact, every day from that point on is 18 November. Just like Groundhog Day.

She returns to her husband, and explains the situation to him. But the following morning… is 18 November again for her, and she has to explain all over again. And again. And again. While she is stuck in time, he continues travelling forward day by day.

Tara tries several different ways to live - spending the day over and over again with her husband, living in his shadow as he repeats his 18 November… She discovers that any changes she makes carry over to her next 18 November - so if she takes food from village shops, their stock diminishes on the one day she inhabits. She explores the limits imposed on her as he lives the same day over and over again - some items return back to the beginning of the day with her, some are lost to 19 November, and so on.

It’s all very cleverly worked-out, and written in an appealing flat lucid prose. This first volume (did you see what I did there?) is Tara exploring the “rules” which seem to govern her situation, both in her home village and in Paris. She inevitably grows distant - first from her husband, then from other people, then from her own life. The novel - it’s short, only 166 pages - is almost entirely set-up. But then there are seven books (each one also short) in the series. Nonetheless, On the Calculation of Volume I doesn’t feel abrupt or incomplete. It reads like the first step on a journey toward the solution of an impossible mystery (although the shadow of Groundhog Day does lie a little heavy across it).

Shards of Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold

Bujold was pretty much ubiquitous on the Hugo Award shortlist throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. True, the Hugo has its favourites, and they have their moments, and then the favourites change. At the time, I couldn’t see the appeal of Bujold’s Vorkosigan series - I read a couple of them, but they seemed somewhat bland and derivative, and not what I would have expected of award-winning science fiction novels. They’re not, of course - not what you’d expect of award-winning sf novels, that is, just instalments in a well-liked, comfortable sf series, and it was the series which kept on winning awards, not the novels.

And yet, reading Shards of Honor now - a reread as I’d read it once before back in the 1990s - the one thing that stands out is how… polished it all is. It was Bujold’s debut novel, but by internal chronology it's the second book in the Vorkosigan series. The main hero of the series, Miles Vorkosigan, isn’t even born when the novel takes place - it is, in fact, about his parents.

Cordelia Naismith is an officer of the Beta Colony Survey, when her team on an uninhabited Earth-like planet is attacked by Barrayaran soldiers. She is left behind when her team-mates escape, only to be captured by Aral Vorkosigan, the captain of the Vorkosigan ship in orbit, who has himself been marooned after a mutiny by his ship’s political officer. Barrayar is a militarist empire, with an old-style aristocracy and a Soviet-like “Political Education” apparatus. Vorkosigan is completely old school, a man of honour, a stiff-necked aristocrat, and known as the Butcher of Komarr.

Naismith and Vorkosigan have to trek some 200 kilometres to reach a Barrayaran supply cache, with a brain-damaged Beta Colony officer. Unfortunately, they’re met by the mutinous political officer and his cronies, who take them prisoner. But Vorkosigan turns the tables, only for the political officer to mutiny again. Which this time is foiled by Naismith, shortly before she escapes.

Oh, and the two fell in love during the trek and Vorkosigan proposed marriage to Naismith. Despite her feelings for him, she refused.
And that’s what the novel is about: Beta Colony Survey officer and Barrayaran military aristocrat, a romance. There’s an invasion, a space battle, a gratuitous rape/torture scene, a military defeat, lots of fatuous Betan politics (including a running joke about the Betan president, "I didn’t vote for him"), and brutal Barrayaran court intrigue.

Like Jack McDevitt’s novels, there’s not much here that’s actually science fiction. Set in the future, yes. Lots of different interstellar polities, yes. But it’s all very, well, American (even the aristocratic Barrayarans, who resemble Hollywood depictions of European royalty more than anything else). There’s a few sf bells and whistles - plasma mirrors, stunners, disruptors, plasma arcs (all weapons), plus spaceships and stargates and so on.

It’s all very entertaining and smooth, with a pair of likeable leads (important for romance, of course), and a background that seems both familiar to sf readers and yet also a tiny bit different - no doubt helped by the sympathetic treatment of what would normally be the bad guys. I can understand the appeal - well-defined universe, good buys to root for, bad guys to boo and hiss, and a fixity of worldview common to US sf.

Shards of Honor is one of the few Vorkosigan novels which didn’t get nominated for an award, although, to be fair, it was Bujold’s debut novel. I enjoyed it, and I’ll continue reading the series - but this is science fiction that doesn’t challenge, and I usually expect more of the sf I read.

Towers of Midnight, Brandon Sanderson

The thirteenth book of the Extruded Fantasy Product that is The Wheel of Time, and the second written by premier Extruded Fantasy Producer Sanderson after Jordan’s death. This is the end-game of the series - and has been for several books - and there's still one more humungous tome to go.

Rand al’Thor has finally grown up (it's only taken him twelve books), and proves that when he puts his mind to it he has, well, super-powers. But he doesn't use them to defeat the bad guys because that would end the story real quick. Meanwhile, Egwene is trying to get the Aes Sedai behind her, but someone is murdering sisters in the White Tower, so Egwene arranges an ambush in Tel'aran'rhiod, the dream world. Perrin Aybara finally accepts what people have been telling him for around seven or eight books, that he's not just a blacksmith out of his depth but the actual leader of an actual army - oh, and he turns out he's even more powerful in Tel'aran'rhiod than Egwene because of all the wolf dream stuff. Mat Cauthon still eyes up every woman he meets and tries to work out which of his friends he should introduce them to, but he also rescues Moiraine (remember her?) from the Aelfinn/Eelfinn (one of the genuinely dramatic bits of the novel, to be fair). Oh, and he invents cannons, as well. And there's some weirdness going on at the Black Tower, with an increase in toxic masculine behaviour (!), and something preventing those there from Travelling out (gosh, not an obvious piece of foreshadowing at all).

There's a few other bits and pieces going on, and a handful of sections from the POVs of supporting characters - but it still feels like there's a lot of verbiage for very little actual progress. By the end of Towers of Midnight, the good guys have a gigantic army gathered at the Field of Merrilor, which I think puts them in place for the Last Battle... Incidentally, I don't recall any actual towers of actual midnight being mentioned in the novel, other than in the glossary (which places them on the Seanchen continent - er, what?).

On the plus side, Nynaeve loses her braid, so there’s no more pulling of it (although it doesn’t stop Sanderson from repeatedly mentioning she wants to pull it). Sanderson clearly doesn’t have Jordan’s fascination with spanking, but every female character is introduced with a description of her breasts. There are also lots of descriptions of clothes, mostly female. The prose reads like it was dictated (which is how I believe Sanderson “writes”), the sort of narrative scramble created by someone who puts things down as they think of them. There must have been some planning, of course, given the vast cast (ugh) of the series and the even vaster wordage, but was that Sanderson or Jordan?

Sanderson doesn’t appear to know what a chapter is. There are 57 in this novel. Each one contains sections from the POVs of the different lead - and supporting - characters. The chronology is more or less linear, but there's no structure or logic to which narrative thread follows which - sometimes, several sections follow one POV, other times it flips between several in a single chapter. It's not as if the chapters were all the same length, either. I couldn't work out what in story terms signalled the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next.

There’s only one more book to go: A Memory of Light. There's a lot of heavy lifting needed to finish off the story - which no doubt explains its 350,000+ words.

We shall see how that goes.

Memory of Water, Emmi Itäranta

Shortlisted for the Clarke Award in 2015 - and it’s not often a translated work makes it onto the award shortlist. In fact, the only one prior to Memory of Water was Stanisław Lem’s Fiasco, in 1988, although there have been four since Itäranta (Frankenstein in Baghdad, The Electric State, Vagabonds and The Anomaly).

Memory of Water was originally published in Finnish in 2012. There’s no mention of a translator, and Itäranta lives in the UK according to the bio, so I’m guessing she translated the novel herself. That might explain a couple of word misuses, such as “the hidden core of the profession pertains that tea masters were once…”, and “woolgathering” when context suggests it should be “digressing”. Less understandable is the use of Scandinavian Union as the name of the setting of the novel, when it seems to be set in Finland, which is not a Scandinavian country, and both Sweden and Norway are described as polluted and uninhabitable.

Several centuries from now, climate crash, and war, has drastically changed the face of the Earth. Many former nations are now underwater, and the Chinese rule pretty much everywhere. Water is so scarce it is controlled by the military. Noria is the daughter of a tea master, and his apprentice. He shows her the family secret - a hidden spring.

After Noria’s father dies, she becomes tea master, and her mother moves to the capital, Xinjing. In a nearby garbage dump, Noria and her friend find a series of CD-ROMs which contain the log of an expedition to the Lost Lands (ie, Sweden and Norway) several centuries previously. The expedition was presumed lost and the Lost Lands uninhabitable. The novel never actually reveals what’s in the logs, only that it contradicts what everyone has been told. Noria, and her best friend, to whom Noria revealed the secret of the spring, decide to retrace the route of the lost expedition. Before they can set off, the military arrest Noria.

Memory of Water is not the first sf novel to feature a Chinese-controlled future. Two examples which spring to mind are Gwyneth Jones’s Bold as Love quintet and David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series. Nor is it the first sf novel set in a Europe mostly underwater. Despite that, Memory of Water’s setting never quite convinces. The writing is lovely, and the surroundings are described in poetic and leisurely detail (sometimes somewhat over-leisurely). But the scarcity of water doesn’t - I’m tempted to say “hold water”, but that would be cruel. Anyway, it doesn’t seem entirely credible, and if it were the case then I doubt the tea ceremony would still exist centuries later. The fact Sanja can fix “past-technology”, including a CD-player, is not really feasible either, but it breaks suspension of disbelief less than the water thing.

Which is a shame, as the "water thing” is what the novel is actually about.

THE BOOK OF MY LIVES, a memoir by Aleksander Hemon.

Hemon was fortunate enough to escape the former Yugoslavia just as the terrible siege of Sarajevo was beginning. His story of his time in America, starting in Chicago, getting married, getting divorced, remarrying, all very interesting and quite funny in places. But it is the final portion of the book, where Hemon and his wife must endure the loss of their infant daughter to an aggressive brain tumor, that is absolutely heart-wrenching, almost unbearable to read.

Remarkable story, well told.

AURORA, a novel by veteran screenwriter David Koeff.

Mr. Koepp should stick to writing movies.

The "pitch" for AURORA sounds very compelling: a massive coronal discharge from the sun has cooked our atmosphere to the extent that power grids are down for at least a year, people forced to forget their cushy past and figure out how to survive.

But in execution the book is clunky and clumsy, cinematic, rather than literary, an entertainment rather than anything the slightest bit edgy or off the wall.

A beach read, a book you can leave on the sand and not regret its absence.

The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons, Karin Smirnoff

The start of the third trilogy featuring Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, and a new author. As indicated by the title, I read it in English - and… a new translator too. This time it’s a professional translator from Swedish to English. The English version keeps up The Girl… book titles, which are not of course direct translations of the original Swedish titles. In this case, it’s Havsörnens skrik, The Sea Eagle’s Cry - but weirdly, it’s a boy who finds himself in the titular, er, appendages.

Blomkvist is in the invented town of Gasskas in Norrbotten, a county in the most northerly part of Sweden. He’s there for his daughter’s wedding. To the head of the Gasskas kommune (district council/municipality). Who Blomkvist doesn’t like from the moment he meets him as he seems to be a bit of a chancer. Honest - but not the most transparent of politicians. Especially when it comes to a deal to build Europe’s biggest windfarm on land in the district. There are three companies in line to take a third each of the contract, but one wants 100% of it, a shadowy Swedish company run by a disabled psychopath who lives in a refurbished military bunker near Gasskas.

Lisbet Salander is in Gasskas because her half-brother’s daughter - previously unmentioned in the series, unsurprisingly - is about to go into care, and Salander is the only surviving relative. The daughter, Svala, is a genius like Salander, and also has the same genetic condition as her father which means she doesn’t feel pain.

The two narratives are connected. Svala’s mother is missing because she’s been kidnapped by the psycho millionaire. Blomkvist’s soon-to-be son-in-law is being threatened by the same psycho to give him the entire contract. The two stories intersect when Blomkvist’s grandson is kidnapped at the wedding.

There’s little that’s new here, except perhaps the setting: the Swedish north. Blomkvist is a bit more of a fogey than in earlier novels, and Svala fills more of Salander’s typical role than Salander does. The villains are almost caricatures - they even have a secret underground lair!

The writing is better than the Lagercrantz trilogy, although that’s hardly a high bar to clear. Everything is in present tense, which gives it much more urgency, and often drops into choppy sentence fragments. It works, to an extent - although I don’t think the material is really strong enough for it, given everything is so clichéd.

This is the English prose, of course, so it seems the translator is much better. There were a couple of questionable choices: Systembolaget is referred to throughout as “the off-licence”, which may well be a UK term for a shop that sells booze, but Systemet is the state liquor monopoly chain, which is not quite the same thing. The word "Lapp" is used interchangeably with "Sámi", even though it's considered offensive, and it's not always in dialogue or in the POV of characters who are prejudiced. And someone orders “a pizza salad”, but “pizza salad” is the name of a side-dish in pizza restaurants here (the indefinite article looks odd - like, you order a pizza and say "and garlic bread", not "and a garlic bread").

So, slightly better than the preceding three books, and makes good use of the series mythology. They are at least better than Dan Brown’s “weapons-grade bollocks” - and English is his first language! - but even for a commercial thriller this is near the bottom of the barrel.

And yes, I really should try reading the books in Swedish.