Another two Queens

So I finished the -68 novel, called House of Brass. It’s not terribly good, and after reading it I was all set for a blog entry on how I was bored with the whole Queen concept and wasn’t sure if it was worth the trouble of reading the last ones I had. However, it’s hard to resist them, when they’ve got such cute tables of contents and lists of characters (not always the latter though). For example, in the House of Brass the table of contents is 14 chapters long, and the chapters are named:

1. What?
2. Where?
3. Why?
4. What!
5. Which?
6. Who?
7. And Where Again?
8. And Why Again?
9. What and Where?
10. Wherefore?
11. Who’s Who?
12. When, Where, Who Why
13. Who and Why?
14. Who, How and Why Finally



This is quite glorious of course – sadly, as I mentioned, the book didn’t live up to it. Inspector Queen is here retired, newly married and just back from his honeymoon when his bride, Jessie, receives a mysterious letter, inviting her to said House of Brass and undersigned Hendrik Brass. She’s led a humdrum life as a nurse and wouldn’t mind a stab at adventure, so convinces Richard that they should go. Once arrived they discover a most eccentric house, host, ditto servant and, predictably, a motley group of guests, all having received the same type of invitation. The host claims to be fabulously wealthy and for various reasons wishes to make said guests his heirs. After drawing up the will, he’s murdered – but where’s the moolah? Search commences, for money and murderer.

My objections to the book are for starters that it’s very much un petit trop, with an overly crazy group of characters, not to mention location. At the same time, there probably were in the -60s (perhaps still are?) many such pockets of weirder than weird places. The author himself refers to it as a “Sleepy Hollow” sort of place, and the House and Host fit right in. Maybe I shouldn’t necessarily fault it. More important is my second major objection: that our Inspector, who in previous novels has seemed quite razor-sharp, only needing his son for perhaps the final imaginative push, here seems to be bumbling about rather, worrying about his impending senility or something.

So after finishing this disappointment I was really ready to just pack it in, but instead read The Finishing Strokes, and was immediately quite cheered. This novel is ten years younger than HoB, and ticklingly enough set mostly in 1929 – right after Ellery Queen, a young man, has published his first novel, The Roman Hat Mystery. Good thing I’d read that, because otherwise it wouldn’t be as funny. The book even quotes a review from Saturday Review of Literature as a prelude to Book Two:

“The Roman Hat Mystery, by Ellery Queen. This ‘Problem in Deduction’ introduces two new detectives, father and son. One is a genial snuff-addict, the other a philovancish bookworm. They are agreeable enough, if somewhat too coy and too chorus-like in their repartee . . . . In spite of minor defects . . . this is a competent piece of work for those who like their detective stories straight.”

Book Two then commences by telling us that although most reviews were favourable, this more acid one cut Ellery to the bone. I think this is a clever twist and it won me over – although I was already won over in Book One. This is surprisingly insightfully and at times movingly (such as it is) written, and describes how Claire Sebastian, in 1905, is injured in a car crash and gives birth prematurely. She dies, and her husband denounces the second twin, claiming the monster killed her. This is background for the rest. And to be honest I don’t know if I loved the rest, but it was fair. Ellery goes to a Christmas house party at young John Sebastian’s (the first twin!), a party that is spoiled by murder and mysterious gift boxes with ominous clues. I suppose, in retrospect, that I could have figured out the clues myself, especially since there were pictures, but I didn’t. I read it with the slight sense of huffiness that comes from feeling stupid. But on the whole I liked several aspects – the dialogue and descriptions of the interactions between the guests were at times very enjoyable for one thing. Apparently people were outrageously flirty in the -20s… Considering.

Janet Evanovich: Plum Lovin’

This is one of those between-series Plum novels that Evanovich occassionally turns out. It starts of dullish but picks up a little. Never rip-roaring funny I’d say. The slightly supernatural plotline is the most memorable thing about it. Some people apparently have “special” abilities, like our villain, who can give people an itch. Hives, that is. And the hero of sorts is called Diesel, who can sense where people are, or something. And so on. It’s the same theme as in the Christmas special novel I remember reading. So I’d not call it an out-of-series book so much as an another-series-book.


Ah I dunno, I suppose it’s cute.

Ellery Queen x 2

I got a whole big heap of them, and these are the first two to get randomly read. One of them is the first ever Ellery Queen novel, The Roman Hat Mystery. It’s very different from the other Queen’s I’ve sampled, both in how the characters act and behave and in general tone. It does have a lovely period feel to it, being from 1929 – and by the way, I’m just so tickled by how long this series kept going. It’s like bloody James Bond. The other book, The Player on the Other Side, is from 1963, and I’m currently reading another Queen, this one from -68.

Anyway, The Roman Hat Mystery is a classic mystery crime puzzle. A man is murdered in the theatre, and oddly enough his hat is missing. The hat must be the crucial jigsaw piece – since it’s gone, it must be incriminating, and therefore only the murderer will have taken it. So who could have removed the hat from the theatre right under the noses of the police? All the clues are there, and it is relatively easy to work out whodunnit, although you must read more of the novel to get the motive. As for the Queens, they are somewhat more Europeanly foppish here, especially Ellery. Also, they have some sort of boyish man-servant named Djuna, who reminds me of nothing so much as the witch’s familiar the way he’s talked about. It’s quite absurd and I’m glad he went in later books.

The Player on the Other Side is a bit weirder. According to the terms of an eccentric will, four cousins must inhabit a house each, surrounding a common square, for a certain period of time in order to inherit a vast sum of money each. They are all very different and odd in their own little ways, bar one who is really mad. Then they start receiving mysterious notes, and then they’re killed. The twist of it is that as the reader you know who the killer is all along, but you don’t know who is ordering him to commit the murders. This is revealed at the end, and is a little disappointing. Smacks of sensationalist pseudo-psychology a bit, in my view, and too fanciful. Overtly and in-your-face clever.

What I noticed most in these two novels was that somewhere in one of them a room or office is described as tasteful, with a Constable oil painting. Now, I swear, Constable paintings seem to be The Thing in crime fiction. I’m convinced I run into them all the time, as the epithomy of taste. I must start keeping note of this.

Again, I went overboard

Am working three nights starting tomorrow night, so went to the library to stock up. I had seen in the online catalogue that there were several Queen's in the open archive section in the cellar. So I brought home six books by that author. Also a Nick Hornby I hadn't read, a ditto Val McDermid (though I hesitated, since it's neither about Lindsey Gordon nor Kate Brannigan, and those are my faves, also it's a bulky hard-back), a Caroline Graham (had almost forgotten that I like her), a cultural alibi in the form of a short story collection by Annie Proulx (how do you pronounce that name?), and finally, what I'm most excited about, a previously unread novel by Ngaoi Marsh. Oh joy. That makes eleven books, and a heavy bag. I still haven't read the Evanovich I have at home, but I figure that won't take long. And I'm working my way through T is for Trespass.

I spent some time now updating my link list with a few more author blogs. I think I need to badger mr Bani more about helping me tweak the blog, I'm not happy with the way it is but I doubt I can do much about it on Blogger...

Carol O'Connell: Shark Music

This instalment in the Kathy Mallory saga is also known as Find Me, according to Fantastic Fiction, a website as ugly as it is informative. I'm not sure right now which ones I've read, but I can see I've blogged about none. Definitely the first one, Mallory's Oracle, and I'm also sure of no. 3, Killing Critics, 4, Flight of the Stone Angel, 5, Shell Game and 6, Crime School. In this trip down memory lane I am aided greatly by this page at Dancing Badger. Said Badger is very positive towards the novels in question, something I myself am not. Or no, that's not right. I like these novels, I think they're well written on the whole, the characterization is generally good, the mysteries are clever, and the heroine herself, Mallory, is compelling, ok, granted. But she is a bit too much. And at least in Shark Music her character is not made clear to us so much as by what she does as by the author telling us over and over again what she is. She is compulsively tidy - this we know not so much from descriptions of Mallory's person and surroundings (except briefly when her flat is described at the start, and towards the end when she starts to come undone and forgets proper maintenance). And this niggles at me when I'm reading, and confirms my impression of Mallory as a too-much character. She is so exceptional that the author has to rely on other people saying that "oh boy, she is something else" or just third-person telling us. I've never really understood, for example, why Riker (her partner) calls her a sociopath. Okay, so I'm a sloppy reader, but none of Mallory's actions really stood out for me as truly sociopathic. More like she was logical to the point of being somewhat autistic sometimes.

The Dancing Badger link I posted gives a much better review and summary than I can, so I'll spare myself the trouble. My opinions though are pretty much what I wrote above about the entire series. I found it a bit hard to get into the flow and grip of the book. It felt a little like the book was a box of building blocks that a child emptied out on the floor. A lot of separate little bits that didn't make a whole, and in themselves didn't have enough information to show the entire house that could be built. I'm not sure the metaphor entirely pans out, but it does descripe how I felt... slowly the blocks sorted themselves into piles of colours and shapes and I was able to discern a fuller picture and get the story straight in my head. These are not complicated novels, not by any stretch of the imagination, so it's just something to do with how they're written that makes it a bit cumbersome getting into them.

The biggest impression the Mallory novels have made on me is an overall, dark and somewhat Gothic idea of a New York with crumbling gargoyles on old sky-scrapers, gargoyles that more often than you'd think fall down and hit someone on the head. Also I have a vivid memory of reading one of the Mallory novels just after or before reading a Jeffrey Deaver novel with a similar theme - magic, or rather illusionists. As the link shows, I didn't even remember which novel it was at the time. I've also read the none-Mallory novel Judas Child, which I remember much more clearly. A very disturbing, sad, original story. One of the themes of Shark Music is Mallory's search for her father, in other words a continuation of the book where she returns to her childhood Louisiana to settle the score on her dead mother's account. I thus can't help but think of the former book, and become profoundly annoyed by the fact that I can't remember the important details of it, like how Mallory's mother was killed. Very irritating! But it says something about the series - it's uneven, in my opinion.

Jaqueline Winspear: An Incomplete Revenge

Oh, I had to borrow it. It was new, I hadn't read it. And what does it matter then that I'm not keen on the Maisie Dobbs books really - it compulsive. In this one the mystical Maisie Dobbs heroine-worshipping super-woman image really goes into full swing, with Maisie sensing the aura of death all over the place, and in a retro play for explanation we find out that her grandmother was a gypsy, which apparently (not that it's spelled out) explains her psychic feelers.

She investigates a series of odd happenings in a village where her benefactor's son wishes to buy a brickworks. The incidents all take place during hop-picking season, which gives Maisie's assistant a good reason for going.

I can sort of see that Winspear wants to descripe a lost world and way of life, like the hopping. But I so feel like she's rubbing my nose in it. The book covers are lovely though.

By the way, my daughter is reading Lord of the Flies for school, and also watching the film (the new one). Only when she saw the film now did she become really disturped to be honest, the book did not grip her the same way. But anyway, she goes on and on about Roger and Simon and Maurice and Piggy - I simply have to re-read this, I remember nothing. Except Piggy. And a fire. And wild pigs and death.

Kathy Reichs: Bones to Ashes

There are a few moments left of Sunday, so I'm sitting here stuffing myself with chocolate (not even particularly good chocolate to be honest) before it's Monday again and my Lenten conscience starts nagging me. It often doesn't stop me from, shall we say indulging, sadly, but it smarts, it smarts. Anyway, the plan is to eat all the chocolate and write several blog posts. I've only just realised that's what a lot of smart bloggers do - they write the posts in advance and keep them saved, so that when they don't have time to write they can publish from the stash and maintain an active and updated blog. This is clearly the way to go. My blog is what I in Swedish would call a "sorgebarn", i.e. something that causes me a lot of grief and anxiety. I'd like it to be so much better, by which I mean that I'd like to do the books more justice. In the beginning I tried keeping notes while I read but I couldn't keep it up. I must devise some sort of method though, because it frustrates me to remember what I meant to write about a particular novel three days later, and then forgetting AGAIN. Also, letting posts pile up and then quickly writing something to get rid of the queue is a sure-fire way to short and meaningless posts. One of the reasons why I don't read other reader blogs is that I'd feel much to inferior. Ha.

Anyway, none of this has any bearing on Bones to Ashes. It did have bearing on something else, but I've forgotten my point long ago. It's not going to make me press delete though, I mean what the hell. If my few readers have waited so long for my update I'm sure they feel that the more words the better, right?

Back to the book. I do like Kathy Reichs, and the books are SO much better than the absolutely dreadful tv series based on her novels. I mean, it's good enough to watch as re-runs at 3 am when working nights (not that tv3 are airing such re-runs at the moment, but I'm just saying it'd work), but not entertaining enough for the 8 p.m. slot which it mysteriously occupies. The tv version of Temperance Brennan has none of the charm of the novel one. In the novel we have a middle-aged (well, past 40 anyway) woman with a lifetime of experience and a quick wit and real relationships. On tv we have a slip of a girl who seems to be mildly autistic or something. But what the hell, I don't begrudge Ms Reichs the extra income. And Boreanaz had to do something after Angel, after all.

This was a typical Temperance Brennan story, with lots of different plotlines that tie together at the end in a fashion I frankly don't find altogether satisfying. Here, it starts with a Canadian childhood friend of Tempe's who disappeared long ago, and whom she has always remembered fondly (yet never before tried to locate, despite having worked in Québec for so long? I don't buy it). Also there is a skull that a rural cop uses as a paperweight, and a string of teenage abductions and murders. All of these turn out to be sort of connected, and like I said, it's a little too convenient. But it doesn't matter much. Reichs is still very readable. The banter between Brennan and Ryan is still quick and fluid, and the shop talk bits are very educational. As usual with a Reichs novel there is a strong undercurrent of real pathos, since these books are written by a woman who has worked in the crime business and seen the actual horrors first-hand. This is a strength in her work. She's not selling gore, I feel like she wants to instill empathy. I'll remain loyal to the fan club.

Jeanette Winterson: Gut symmetries

I have to confess that at the moment I am not sufficiently awake, creative and imaginative to fully understand all of what Winterson is writing. There is always a slightly unreal and of-the-mind-solely quality to everything she writes, and you need to be sharp to completely follow. Worst case scenario is of course that you simply scoff and label it as pretentious. That would be a mistake, because all that poetic discourse is firmly rooted in real emotion, real experience, real class awareness and struggle. She may soar into what you might see as bohemian fantasy, but she remembers acutely the scrubbed threadbareness of working-class. This gives what Winterson writes soul. I like her work even though I skim bits because of my own short-comings as a reader. Sometimes you know with whom the fault lies…. Right now my mind focused on the narrative mostly. At the centre is Alluvia Fairfax, an English physicist who has an affair with a married colleague and then falls in love with his wife, but the book spans the life of their parents too. I was also pleased by the theme of the philosophical nature of modern physics. I wasn’t aware of this when I borrowed it. It’s funny though, since several of the Le Guin short stories I read had similar themes. It’s not really what my brain can currently grasp, but I still like it, seeing as how physics for me is still school physics: very tangible and Newtonian, push and shove, reaction and counterreaction. This relative and quantum stuff sends the mind reeling and makes everything possible.

Le Guin round-up plus Lessing

Okay, I have to return all these books to the library now, so it's time to summarize. Let's start with the odd one out, the 4th (because none of the first three were available) in Lessing's Canopus in Argos series, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. I had no idea that Lessing had written science fiction, which goes to show that I'm a) not very widely read, after all, and b) that I'm specifically not terribly interested in Lessing. I've read The Fifth Child and - I think - The Golden Notebook, but neither of them made an impression on me, apart from a vague memory of something tense and depressing. Admittedly, I was young and probably just not in the right place in life to appreciate them. Therefore it's doubly tragic that I tried to read the novel currently on the stand, because God in heaven was I bored with it. We have a happy planet with a constantly warm and pleasant climate, whose lithe and brown inhabitants frolic and dance together in the sun. When Canopus, the alien race who engineered their own, tells them to build a tall wall around the planet they do it, and gradually find out that this is because their planet will experience an unplanned ice age, and the wall is to hold off the ice until Canopus can save the population by moving them to a planet that is being made ready. That's the story. And then it's all a bunch of navel-gazing, with our narrator (a representative of the people) discussing and pondering the changes in temperament in the people now that they are frozen and meat-eaters and without hope. I skimmed it to be honest, after a while I just couldn't give an arse. The most interesting thing is the afterword by Lessing, which is about mostly Scott's Antarctic expedition but also about those changes in atmosphere in a culture that can make yesterday's taboo today's truth. I might try reading the first in the series sometime, but it's not at the top of my list. If one is to read novels that are meh they might as well be powerfully narrative-driven, in my opinion.

Then we have The Telling by Le Guin. Sutty is a Terran observer on the planet Aka. Before she came to Aka she briefed herself on what was known, that it had a unique system of beliefs that coloured every aspect of day-to-day life. When she arrives after all those light-years there has been some sort of revolution, and the old customs and beliefs have been outlawed. People are now primarily consumers in the Corporate State. Surprisingly Sutty receives permission to travel to a smaller town in the countryside, and even more surprisingly she discovers that the old ways are not dead and forgotten, and as she starts to reconcile with her past she starts to discover what it is the Ekumen are missing in their attempts to really communicate with the Akans. Although frankly that last bit is late in the coming, it's only the last few pages really that contain that pay-off.

It's a very philosophical book, less narrative than descriptions of the culture. It's not bad, but I can't call it my favourite. In my opinion it falls into the trap of wanting to invent a sort of utopian religion, which frankly makes it a little preachy to someone as cynical as myself. It's not at all as obvious as in the Dark Materials series, which completely degenerated into an anti-religious manifesto more religious in tone than an essay by the Pope. But it's fairly grating all the same.

So the next book, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, was older, a collection of short stories that was published in 1994. I liked this better. There were two obviously humorous stories which I found less funny than one of the Churten drive-themed ones (Dancing to Ganam). My absolute favourite is The Rock That Changed Things, because it is superbly alien, even though steeped in feminist vibes.

Finally, the most epic fruit of Le Guin's imagination, Always Coming Home.

I'm not sure how to write about this novel. It wasn't to my taste, but I'm having trouble pin-pointing why. What it is is more a collection of tales about this people called the Kesh. The Kesh inhabit what's left of California sometime in the future, when the world has been altered by some devastating war, and the cultures as we know them are all gone. One tale is longer and more prominent, and that is the one about a woman called North Owl/Woman Coming Home/Stone Telling, who goes to her father's misogynist, monotheist and war-mongering people, where she stays seven years before she can make her way back home. It's an anthropologist's book, slightly disconcerting in it's dogged adherence to the secondary universe created within the covers. There are some short articles in which the author, naming herself Pandora, almost seems to be arguing with herself over how to write about the Kesh, or else describes herself talking to a member of the people. It's quite odd. I don't know what to make of it - is it genius or just a bit mad? Somehow I feel like I don't see the relevance. And, to be honest, I have huge problems with the Kesh being so obviously modelled on many Native American traits. Why are they? We never learn enough about HOW the world came to be where it is today, which to me is essential to understanding it and/or caring. I'm just reading about this culture, with practically no historical context, and then the fact that it seems so Native American really bothers me because I can't understand why that particular way of thinking survived.

Oh I don't know. Google it, smarter people than I discuss it.

Too much?

I went a bit overboard at the library on Tuesday. I borrowed (this is all cut and paste from the library's online record of my transactions, hence the lack of capitalization):

Lessing, Doris, The making of the representative for Planet 8

Brett, Simon, Death under the dryer

Brett, Simon, The witness at the wedding

Evanovich, Janet, Plum lovin'

Grafton, Sue, T is for trespass (and I'd just returned Q Is For Quarry)

O'Connell, Carol, Shark music

Queen, Ellery, A fine and private place

Winspear, Jacqueline, An incomplete revenge

And this was in addition to the books I already had at home:

Winterson, Jeanette, Gut symmetries

Le Guin, Ursula K., Always coming home

Le Guin, Ursula K., The telling

Le Guin, Ursula K., A fisherman of the inland sea

Le Guin, Ursula K., The birthday of the world and other stories

Reichs, Kathy, Bones to ashes

Of the ones I had at home I'd read all but Gut Symmetries, because I'd found it a bit hard to get into at first, but now the novel and I are getting along swimmingly as they say, whatever that really means. What if one doesn't swim very well? Most of it is a bit meh, if I'm too be honest (most of the list, not of Gut Symmetries. Winterson is never meh). But Winspear is not terribly good really, nor is Brett the most awesome of writers, but he's so light and entertaining I couldn't help myself. And Evanovich.... well, we all know. Doris Lessing did win a Nobel Prize, but I've read the book now and didn't care for it much, I have to say. More on that later. Nor is O'Connell that fabulous - a little OTT tbh, if I may chatspeak some - but it's entertaining.

Now, I'm off to bed again (today I overslept and missed the alarm (or else it didn't even ring), so my son was forgotten at pre-school. VERY embarrassing. I have to write an entry about all the Le Guins I've read - the pressure, the angst! So I need my sleep.

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Birthday of the World

I had almost finished this collection of short stories. I was on the last one - a novella, really - called Paradises Lost, which is about a generation-ship heading through space towards an earth-like planet. The 5th generation is reaching adulthood, and rather serene in the knowledge that they won't reach their destination until they themselves are grandparents. The ship is the world - safe, temperate, clean. I had just reached the part where the main character Hsing is about to find out that they may reach the Destination sooner than she'd ever thought, when I had to take Minima down town to an appointment. When I returned, my husband had returned the book to the library together with another one that I hadn't read yet. Because I'd put them in the wrong place, accidentally placing them on top a pile of books he was returning. I was - am - more upset than the situation warranted. I did spend some time on the Internet to see if I could just read the end online, but no luck. I hope no-one gets their hands on it before I have a chance to re-lend it. Feck all anyway.

It's a great novella, wonderfully describing the thoughts and culture of the isolated travellers. I might even get to finish it one day. Googling for it led me to the information that it has been adapted for the stage as an opera, which is exciting, and gives the Aniara parallell more zing. Also, I found this blog entry just choc full of marvellous reading tips! The other short stories are also all good. Le Guin is very good at imagining different cultures, and not afraid to make thought experiments that we might shy from normally. Several of these short stories centre on relationships and sex, with fucking being a much-used word. This crudeness, if you will, differs immensely from the by comparison almost ethereal tone in the Earthsea chronicles. So so far I'm very pleased with my Le Guin kick... feel free to recommend books in the comments section if you're a stalwart fan!

Ursula K. LeGuin: The Dispossessed

I’m on a bit of a Le Guin kick at the moment I think. She’s pushing all the right buttons for me: credible secondary universes, moral dilemmas, excellent characters, wonderfully evocative environments… I especially liked that this book takes place a long time before The Left Hand of Darkness, since the ansible which is used to communicate over the distance of many light years in that novel is only just in the starting blocks of invention in this one. The universe is in other words the same, with the same people, even though the Ekumen is not that advanced yet. I was very pleased with that, and it spurs me to read more, because I want to learn more about the different species in the Le Guin worlds.

Our main character is a physicist named Shevek, who lives on the barren planet Anarres in an anarchist society, where humans are bonded together to live without laws and instead work together for survival. The Anarresti left their home, the sister planet Urras seven generations ago. Urras is a a pathriarcial class society with strong state control and a history full of horrible acts of cruelty. (In one memorable scene Shevek sees the cloak once worn by an Urrasti queen - made from the skin of executed rebels, she wore it in public to humiliate, terrorize and shame the survivors.) Shevek now finds that his own world is developing unwritten laws of its own, despite having no structured government. When his own highly innovative research is thwarted by jealous and power-tripping colleagues he becomes the first to return to the home world, in an attempt to broaden and share his research.

There is a little too much theorizing in the book, with Shevek and others holding forth at length about the ideas behind a lawless world where personal responsibility is the only moral code – that, and the overall rule of sharing. Since I’m snatching reads between patrolling at work etc. I found it a little hard to concentrate. Nevertheless it’s thought-provoking and maybe a little provocative. I love stuff like this, heartily recommended!

Ellery Queen: Face to Face

God, I’ve hardly read any Ellery Queen. Nothing has appeared in the blog before, anyway. It’s always seemed a bit naff I suppose. The whole “Ellery Queen is author and main character” thing. I couldn't resist this at the library though, because the cover of this edition said "Ellery Queen's challenge to mystery buffs: Face to Face" which was so delightfully reader-oriented and newspaper-like that I fell like the proverbial stone down a well. And I quite enjoyed this. It was quite direct and outspoken in terms of sex and relationships – between the lines, obviously, but in that one can see where the true morality of the society of the times lay.

A famous retired singer is found murdered in her study. On the desk is a final scrawled clue: the word face. The singer was a mystery and puzzle buff as well as an artiste, you see. With the warped judicial method of this type of novel the father policeman allows the son detective to do whatever he wants to solve the puzzle. Hurrah. Not bad at all. I especially appreciate that it’s a proper whodunnit. I’m given everything I need to solve it, just like the detective. Nice. I failed (I guessed, but not thanks to the clues so it doesn't count), but nice.

Carter Dickson: She Died A Lady

Finally, some old-skool detective fiction! I took my youngest with me to the local library branch a while ago to stock up again, since my first supply was all but depleted. It’s a small branch so it doesn’t have much in the English fiction department, but on the other hand you can strike lucky and find something that might have been moved off the shelves long ago if it had been down town. I have read some Carter Dickson/John Dickson Carr before (see the labels), and although I think it’s nicely crafted in its style, I’m just not completely enamoured. Our detective hero, Sir Henry Merrivale, is just too much, for one thing. He’s fat and bald, and rides around on a motorized wheelchair in a toga for a while. He blusters and roars and bosses. Not altogether my thing. Also, it’s not a proper whodunnit either, since we the readers aren’t privy to all the clues from the beginning. Here, the narrator has information about caves that he springs on us towards the end, for example.

The narrator himself, a country doctor with plenty of empathy and a bit of a heart problem, belongs to the book’s assets. Also it’s a rather nice little micro-cosmic description of a village at the very onset of the war, before it had gotten painfully real. Herein lies the strength and charm of the novel, because while the riddle is hard to solve, it just made me grumpy when I didn't get all the information to solve it anyway.

Story: a scientist and his ten years younger wife life in a remote house. The wife has a lover, and one night they appear to have killed themselves by leaping off a cliff. Except when the bodies are found they have bullet holes, so suicide is out. Ta-daa. I loved the title by the way, very evocative (one of the reasons I borrowed it). Stems from the purported suicide note left by the wife after listening to Romeo and Juliet on the radio: “Juliet died a lady [..]”. I’d recommend this if you’re into this type of thing and all. a huge bonus is that although the writer was American, he didn't fall into the trap of having everyone constantly having tea and scones which a fair few Americans do when writing about England (including, but not limited to, Elizabeth George and Martha Grimes).

Lindsey Davis: Saturnalia

A new (for me) Falco novel! Splendid. Like I've said before somewhere, I get quite annoyed with Davis' style of writing, but I keep coming back because I *heart* the characters. In this one it is the holiday of Saturnalia, and the Germanic tribe leader and priestess Veleda has been secretely taken to Rome for execution. When she escapes, and a man in the house she stayed at is found decapitated, Falco is called in to find her discreetly. Adding to the need for discretion is the fact that his (married) brother-in-law Justinus has Veleda as his first love, and now disappears. Into the mélange is also thrown a load of murdered vagrants, which leads Falco to discuss serial killers. I was rather miffed at this 20th century word being used in a novel set in ancient Rome. Amusingly Davis has a little afterword to excuse and defend and tip us a wink about her many neologisms, which I for a moment there thought would mean her use of modern language like that, but it meant her self-coined expressions and how they make the translators of her books tear their hair out.

Janet Evanovich: Motor Mouth

Second in the line of Evanovich's Barnaby series, I picked this up at random at the library. Not entirely my cup of tea - too much racing and cars, which I don't care for. But it has it's charm and I might read some others if I find them. Ponderation: Evanovich's female heroines get threatened with gruesome violence of a sexual nature from psychopathic/sociopathic villains. They become very frightened by all this, but prevail. Underlying theme of revenge on the patriarchal society? Not all that well executed then unfortunately.

Mil Millington: Instructions For Living Someone Else's Life

I've been following Millington's website Things My Girlfriend And I Argue About for a few years, which means I started following it late, when all the best was already written and the newsletter started coming very infrequently. Story of my life - I often come to things late. I only started watching Buffy when the last season was already over in the States I think. Missed all the hype, really. But my point here is that I was already familiar with Millington's style, which, to be frank, can get a little bit tiresome, even though he's very funny. Since I've posted the link to his sites there you can read for yourself. The book is written in a similar fashion, albeit with an editor holding the reins I assume, so it's been pulled up a bit. Nevertheless, in the long run it's a story that could have been over in about one chapter, but is dragged out to a whole novel due to Millington's weakness for over-emphasising the funny bits with long long masses of clever text. That said there are many laugh-out-loud moments. Storyline: Chris gets drunk one evening when he's 25 and wakes up the next day at the age of 43 (or something). He has no memory of the intervening years, and discovers that he apparently has become someone he hates. And what's the internet? And a mobile phone? Like I said, sometimes hilarious indeed - I even had planned to put some quotes in but haven't got the time now. Recommended - it's never going to make the classics list, but I think that in 50 years time someone will read it and get a kick from it being a document of our times.

Library visit

I'm back baby. For the first time in I don't know how long I went to the library today. Figured I should stock up for the two nights I'm working next week. Sadly I forgot to bring a list of "books I meant to read", so I ended up browsing rather randomly. And I couldn't even find the science-fiction, which is where Ursula K. LeGuin normally is to be found (I think there is a special shelf anyway. Am now beset with horrible suspicion that perhaps they were integrated with normal fiction), which I wanted because I re-read The Left Hand of Darkness and enjoyed it even more than the first time. Such a wonderful creation of a brand new world! It's only marred by the underlying theme of gender, which is too rooted in the time it was written and thus holds no credibility as being ideas of the future. It's to preachingly done, and should have been dropped. I got a random seletion of other books though, several of which I think I've read. But one (by Mil Millington) is definitely unread, so I'm just going to have to double-check the others and return them if they seem to familiar.

In an embarrassing echo of my previous LeGuin post I wasn't allowed to borrow the books at the self-service desk, because I owed 136 crowns and had been blocked. Remind me not to lend my husband my library card again.

Skuld by Karin Alvtegen

My mother-in-law gave me this crime story when we were visiting for Christmas. She had a pile of books she didn’t want, and I didn’t want most of them either but I did think this one might be okay. Karin Alvtegen is one of Sweden’s more well-known crime fiction writers, but I’d never read anything by her. Skuld is her debut, printed in 1998. As you may or may not have noticed I tend to favour crime fiction from the English-speaking world. Part of the reason is that reading in English is one way to keep the language going, part of it is more irrational – I had had a longish phase of reading certain Swedish writers (Mankell and Guillou) in one go so to speak, and since their books got progressively worse as the series lengthened my enthusiasm faded and rubbed off on all Swedish crime fiction. Also I was sorely disappointed by Liza Marklund's first novel Sprängaren – awful book I thought. And my attempt at diving into the olden goldies and reading some Maria Lang wasn’t terrible successful either – the woman was so productive that quality was varied, to say the least, and I only wanted to read the good ones.

The downside of this then is that I haven’t at all kept up with contemporary Swedish crime fiction, which is a booming business. The upside is that I haven’t at all kept up with contemporary Swedish crime fiction, and I have it all before me. Around Christmas I read in the newspaper that ALT’s latest issue was dedicated to crime fiction, expressed an interest to my husband, whereupon he promptly went out and got it for me. (ALT, Atlas Litterära Tillägg, is a Swedish periodical about literature, published by Atlas publishing house.) There were a whole bunch of good articles in it, but I was especially taken with a conversation between two writers about writing, the genre, fame and so on. I’ve made a mental note now to pick these two up at the library and give them a go.

So back to Karin Alvtegen! First, let's clarify that I'm writing in English because Alvtegen has been translated (although apparently Skuld has not). The cover promises this to be a thriller, and it was. Peter Brolin, a lonely, broken, bankrupt man is sitting in a café when a woman, endlessly yapping, sits down at his table and asks him if he, as part of his job as a private detective, will deliver a package to her husband. Brolin is no detective, and the whole encounter has a night-marish quality to him in his depressed state, but he does it. The “husband”, Lundgren, turns out to be an extremely wealthy businessman – unmarried. And the package contains a cut-off toe. The desperate Lundgren hires Brolin to help him catch the stalker before the situation escalates. There is a twist to the story which I didn’t see coming at all, so for that alone I applaud Alvtegen. Another thing she manages very well is muscling out Brolin’s character. She describes his reclusive and depressed nature and thoughts excellently and movingly. Perhaps I was more susceptible though, since I’m going through a bad patch and just feel like I can relate – but I really felt for poor Brolin. Sadly, Lundgren isn’t at all as full-blooded, and I was never really satisfied with how quickly he befriended Brolin. Despite a perfectly adequate explanation it just doesn’t seem a hundred per cent. Could have done with more time, more padding, to seem believable. Also, it’s a little too easy the way the identity of the stalker can remain undiscovered for so long. I feel we’re expected to skim over that bit too readily, because the author knows it’s a weakness in the plot. I’d recommend this though, and I’ll be reading more of Alvtegen. She shows a genuine interest in the inner workings of a human being that is very appealing. Her writing bears the marking of one who has known genuine pain, and she manages to convey this to the reader. Recommended.

Shakespeare by Bill Bryson

Another present from my husband. He was thinking of getting me this for Christmas but didn’t get around to it. He asked me if I’d like it, and I answered, confidently and cheerfully, that “I like anything by Bill Bryson my dear”. This is Bryson’s biography of Shakespeare, and he makes a point of telling us in the introduction that it’s a slim volume because he’s stuck to the facts, and there just aren’t that many of those. It’s an interesting and mildly humorous summary of what we really can claim to know about Shakespeare’s life, and towards the end a mildly sardonic debunking of the people who claim that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare, someone else did. Bryson’s stance, incidentally, is that there is not a shred of evidence to support that idea. I think that this book is an excellent introduction to the subject. It’s short and easy to read, and discards a lot of myths surrounding the bard. However I’m always a little wary when someone who is not a professional scholar writes a book like this one. Can I be sure that his or her research is sound? Oh the anguish the anguish. Apart from that huge, fundamental query I have a few minor quibbles: one is that Bryson early in the book mentions the first printed collection of Shakespeare’s plays, the First Folio, yet it’s not until somewhere towards the end, when we’ve reached that point in time when the collection is assembled, that there’s a footnote explaining what a folio is. In my opinion that could have been stuck in a little sooner. Also I found it a little hard to read about an author who is all but invisible in history except for his works without actually having more of the works in the text, if you see what I mean. Possibly this biography then is best read to supplement a study of Shakespeare’s works. Anyway, I’m glad to have it. It may well come in handy in a few years if my daughters read Shakespeare at school.

I've worked two nights now but it's hard to read actually if you have to hold conversations with your colleague. This must be resolved somehow.

Christmas special

Unlike other bloggers I can't seem to get my act together enough to post seasonally, but I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and I wish you all the best for the New Year too.

I've had a myriad ideas for blog entries but they slip between my tired fingers. Too much work and no internet working on my own little laptop, sadly. Was looking at my e-mail and saw that I'd sent myself a reminding e-mail from work (where I have no other internet access, the stingy feckers) about a new edition of Frankenstein that's out - one with notes on the differences between Mary's original writing and Percy's additions and changes. I read about it in Dagens Nyheter, but the book is here. I'd quite like to read that. Another e-mail to myself was a reminder about a book called Lubiewo by Michal Witkowski - not for myself so much as for mr Bani. But I couldn't find it in Polish, so it was struck off the Christmas list, which it had admittedly been added to at the very last moment. Most excitingly, Sara Paretsky (see link to her blog on your right) has a new novel out - I have my feelers out for that one! Oh, and that was just some ideas of many... I don't have time to read properly, so no wonder there's no time to blog. However, I'm going to start working nights soon, and hopefully that will mean reading time. Library, here I come! Soon.

At the moment I'm re-reading Lord of the Rings. It is, as I've said before, one of the most important books in my life. I've been wanting to do a series of posts on books that have meant a lot to me, but I need some time and space to do them justice. The list is varied and ranges from Taikon to Tolkien to Austen to Brontë to Auel to Lindgren... One day perhaps.

No-snow.

Well, the snow mentioned above (below) didn’t last long. One week later it was all gone, bar the odd drift by the side of the road. Welcome to Uppsala. One week later also happened to be the 1st of Advent, when my church holds its traditional Advent Fair. Fair might not be an appropriate word though. There are no games, I mean. We call it “the Bazaar” or “the Christmas Market”. Anyway, my point is that second-hand books are sold there by the lorry-load, and mr Bani and I usually succumb and bring home about twenty. Especially mr Bani. This year however he wasn’t in charge of the hot-dog sales (naturally nobody then took responsibility for it, due to part misunderstanding and part plain indifference from some people who should know better, I went up briefly and got it started and trust me when I say my husband has the patience of a saint – some people are so infuriating, I mean really), so he wasn’t there the whole weekend, hence he couldn’t browse the way he normally does. I was working in the food stall, but I didn’t wander off and look at the books. Just a little bit. And I didn’t see anything interesting. Until Sunday afternoon when they started weeding out the surplus (there’s too much to save for next year’s sale) – suddenly I spotted, from afar, a Kathy Reichs novel. I missed that one unfortunately, because I mistook the weeding process for a purchase in the making. Ah well. I think it was one I’d already read anyway. But later I nabbed the fourth Stephanie Plum novel, Four to Score, from the “throw away” pile, and also Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother. I’ve read the Evanovich, of course, but hey, it was free. And it’s a nice sort of book to have, easy to read. Also it’s one of the better ones, partly because it’s an early one. The characters are not as exaggerated yet. In this one Benito Ramirez is let out of prison and comes after Stephanie. Those are quite good scenes. Stephanie is very frightened, so it’s not all one-liners and jokes. Nice. As for Mark Haddon – I’ve read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and enjoyed it. I vaguely remembered A Spot of Bother as getting mixed reviews, but it surely couldn’t be terrible, I thought. And it wasn’t. It’s a nice little novel about a family going through a crisis, with an ending that borders on happy, definitely, but with enough of an edge to make it not uninteresting. Mark Haddon writes well, and most importantly he doesn’t, thanks be to Christ, write wannabe film scripts. Okay, there is at least one scene that could qualify as such – when the gay son stresses his homosexuality in front of the religious aunt – but it’s not too bad at all. The father’s descent into full mental breakdown is quite nicely written I think, but it’s a little marred by a too-quick recovery at the end. I do have a reflection on the subject of homosexuality – why does the gay man, no matter how loving the relationship, have to fuck, when the heterosexuals have sex, or perhaps even make love? I think I’ve come across that before this book. It annoys me. But perhaps it’s accurate, I must ask a gay man when I next get a chance – maybe they, being men, are perfectly comfortable using cruder language, and maybe the book reflects that. Cultural differences and what have you.

Apart from these books not much has been read. Oh, I know I read one or two of Minima’s books that she took home from the library, but I don’t remember which ones they were… I just skimmed through them because she was so excited and said they were GREAT. (They weren’t. One wasn’t too shabby, but generally the books these days are so inferior to the ones I read as an eleven-year-old. Obviously.) On the whole though I’ve mostly been reading about reading. I brought home DN’s culture supplement to blog about Clézio’s reading list in it (all I remember is that YES, I had read one name on it, Chinua Achebe – I’m pathetically thinly read, as Eddie Izzard would put it). Then I’ve noticed a few authors getting good reviews, so I always mean to blog about it as a sort of memo. But I forget. Oh the irony. Only today in DN I found another such article of interest – what was it now again? Since I’m writing this at work, where I read DN, I can go and check. Please hold while I check… oh now I remember. No, I can’t write that in the blog because that’s a potential present and you never know who’s reading. What fun! I may use the trusty technique of e-mailing myself.


So on the whole I’m happy about the books I’ve read, but unhappy about the number, my general cultural updatedness and frequency of blogging. Nothing new there then. I almost got something enw to read the other day: I was Christmas shopping, and on the sale shelf I found the first book from Evanovich’s new series, and another one that felt very desirable at the time – probably largely due to it costing only 39 kr – but I ended up replacing them and walking away. Best mind my money now that I haven’t got a job after January 18th (all tips welcome). And since I can't even remember what that second book was it can't have been that important.
Now I’m going to post this and not worry about finding links like a proper blogger would.

Astounding amounts of snow

We're snowed in here in Uppsala today! It's been snowing for pretty much two days straight, and is set to continue into tomorrow, apparently. I had to wait 20 minutes for the bus after work this evening, but since I have good new boots and it wasn't that cold I just stood there and surrendered to the beauty of the falling flakes. Because snow, when it isn't blowing straight and hard onto your face and down inside your collar, is so spectacular you can't help but be mesmerised by it. Everything is white and so pristine, and everything is quiet, because the traffic sounds are muffled. It's wonderful. Especially if you opt not to cycle. If I cycled in this weather I'd be writing an incoherent blog entry about whom to kill on the snow-clearing team, I'm afraid.

So snow snow snow - and how is this related to reading? Well, for one thing I did not read the paper at work today, because it never came. More to the point, as I stood waiting for the bus I pondered on all the books featuring snow that I have or have not read, and I realised that the category for not read contains some embarrasing lapses. I have not read Laura Ingalls Wilder. Mostly because I had a home-language teacher who made me read it when I was too young to care, so I went off it. I really must remedy that, because I read this interesting article (probably in The Believer...) about L.I.W. and how she actually wrote very critically of the white expansion into Native land. Nor have I read Vilhelm Moberg's Utvandrarna and Invandrarna, which I know contains a blizzard episode, in which the father kills an animal to save his child (he sticks the boy inside the animal's gut so he won't die while he gets help). And that is embarrassing, that I haven't read it, I mean. But I saw bits of the TV series as a child and it just seemed so depressing. On the read side is the quite recently enjoyed Ursula K. Leguin novel about the planet Winter, and also Jean M Auel's Ayla series. Sorry, Children of the Earth or something she calls it. Lot of snow during the Ice Age... Oh, and of course Peter Hoeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, which I have read in Swedish. A very memorable book (not a very good film). I regularly remember little snippets from it, like how Smilla the child stuffs biscuits into her mouth to defy her father, or how Smilla the adult wears soft leather trousers with a silk lining, even though the stitches of such a lining is too fragile, really.

And also, one is inevitably reminded of Mma Ramotswe. Because in Mma Ramotswe's Botswana at least one of the cars passing me at the bus stop would have pulled over to offer me a lift.

What I got from Ireland basically....

Our trip to Ireland generated me two books – one a gift from my cousin, the other a tip from same cousin that my husband, upon our return, went out and bought for me as a surprise. I am very pleased with this result and total number of two, albeit a little surprised, since I had assumed I was going to wander into a second-hand bookshop and find 13 Ngaio Marsh novels that I hadn’t read and the elusive E.C. Bentley I’m sort of actively looking for. Sadly such shops were thin on the ground – a quick peek into Wexford Oxfam revealed nothing but some John Le Carré and Danielle Steel and the like. Oh, and don’t remember if those were the precise authors, I just remember an impression of large-ish hardbacks with big bold (slightly raised) lettering. Anyway, it’s just as well, since our packing was FULL – the less said about the disaster that was our packing on the way home, the better. Just a little tip from me to you: even a small box of cereals is quite bulky. Why cereals, you ask…. but don’t. Just don’t. They do make much less sense than the three boxes of fig rolls.

Back to the books. My cousin gave me An Interpretation of Murder by Jeb Rubenfeld, a book she herself had read and thought I’d like – which is a bit wonderful in itself, since we’d lost touch a bit these past ohmygod fifteen years! yet she still managed to know me and get me something I would definitely have gone for myself, if not in the book shop at least in the library. An Interpretation of Murder attempts to solve the riddle of why Freud hated the US so much despite the fact that his visit in 1909 was so immensely successful. What could have caused such strong feelings of antipathy? The author has drawn upon real historical characters, invented a few fictional ones and stage-set the whole story in New York society. Does this remind us of the recently read The Blackest Bird? Why yes it does. Historical – check, criminal – check, New York – check and so on. As a matter of fact, the authors use the same trick of drawing upon actual quotes from their famous historical figures (Edgar Allan Poe and Freud, respectively) to make up their dialogue in the novels. However, Rubenfeld manages much better than Joel Rose in my opinion. In The Blackest Bird Poe’s lines felt disjointed from the rest of the book, while here it all flows rather well. That said, the novel has other problems. It shifts between different perspectives, the third-person spectator and the first-person diary-like account, but the result isn’t brilliant. The trouble is, in my view, that the writing is a little flat. This is no great problem in the first-person account, since I think it adds credibility to the diary-style. People don’t write florid and/or well-balanced prose in their diaries, generally. Not even authors. In the third-person narrative this becomes a bit slow and disappointing however. Another problem is that the author appears to have gotten carried away imagining how much money he could make from selling the film rights to his novel – or possibly he was watching too many historical action films (a genre to itself, and probably one that actually has a different name, but I trust you understand me) while writing it. Towards the end the main characters start cracking one-liners while facing imminent death. I found it distracting and annoying. And on the whole I suppose I just wasn’t taken with any of the characters in a deeper sense. None of them were sketched well enough for me to feel like they were real people, and so I didn’t care what happened to them. Which is a shame, because it’s quite a good story, with a fun premise, and Freud himself is not badly done. It just needed a better editor maybe, or a séjour inside a locked drawer for a few years, as Zadie Smith would recommend. Summary: alright, but not very memorable. Memorable enough for me to maybe read the author’s next one though.

The recommended novel then was The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by Gordon Dahlquist. I had, of course, not heard of this at all, despite there apparently being quite some hype over it and a not insubstantial bit of buzz. The reason for my ignorance is probably the limited time I can spend online these days – news of a book like this would normally have reached me via one of the forums I frequent. (Note to self: do a search on one and see if there is indeed a discussion in progress…) Always on the lookout for good, new, original fantasy I immediately got my hopes up when I saw the book – not only is the title wonderfully evocative, but so is the cover. Very promising! (Note to self II: start putting pictures in your blog. Really.) The story is set in a large city, sort of London but not quite. We are thrown right into the middle of the action when our heroine Miss Temple, an island colonial sent “home” to make a good match, follows the fiancé who jilted her. Much to her surprise she ends up in an enormous house in the country, where a huge fancy dress party appears to be taking place, and where none of the guests seem to know one another. She brazens herself in by pretending she belongs, and is assumed to be one of the women scheduled to undergo some odd and sinister procedure that is the centre of the whole arrangement. She narrowly escapes death, and in the next two parts we make the acquaintance of the two heroes, one after the other: Dr. Svenson, care-taker of a dim and lecherous German prince, and Cardinal Chang, an assassin. Both these men were also at the house when Miss Temple was there. The first part of the novel then is told from these three perspectives, all leading up to the moment when we know they must meet and work together. It’s packed with action right from the start, one of the blurbs on the cover says something about a rollicking ride, and it very much is. It’s also full of sex and silk, Victorian emotion and violence and an awful lot of villains and secondary characters.... for a good while I go for it and feel well entertained, until two things start to grate at me: one, the over-use of the verb “to scoff”. There are limits to how much people can scoff in one chapter, and Dahlquist ignores them. Grave mistake, possibly the editor's fault. Two, again we have the “I want this to be a film” problem. Or rather, after one third I started getting that same feeling I get when I read graphic novels. I don’t understand graphic novels, you see. I must just not be visual enough to “read” the pictures, and added to that is the annoying habit graphic novelists have of emphasising words by bolding them. “How I wish that Wolverine/Spiderman/Morpheus could find happiness… [new frame, sound effect swisch as character jumps over wall/building/tree] …. But I suppose a hero has to be alone… [new frame, close-up of eye of person thinking the lines] … so he won’t get hurt [final frame, character lands with a thunk].” It drives me around the bend. I read those bolded words with very heavy emphasis, as though someone was SHOUTING THEM and it completely breaks my reading flow. Anyway, Dahlquist slips into this habit of inverting certain words or phrases, and when you add to this the extremely detailed description of the surroundings and clothes and looks I suddenly realised I was reading a graphic novel in text, or... OR... one of those cartoon-like plans film directors make when planning a film. So I Wikipedia Dahlquist, and confirm my suspicions: he is indeed a playwright and filmmaker. Experimental filmmaker. Ha. Well, he needs to change his style a bit of he wants to write really good books, let me tell you. Towards the end I was tired and skimming the pages to reach the end, my eyes just glancing off the bloodbath unfolding on the paper in front of me.

Naturally, I'm going to read the next one. I'm hoping there's stricter editing, and that the plots will be less convoluted and confusing, but I'd definitely give The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters a ten for effort, not many writers have the imagination to create something that feels as new as this. Fingers crossed for improvement!

I have two books to write about.

And I will. Soon.

Remembering.

The week before Halloween we went to Ireland for a lovely but rather emotional visit. When I was little the drill was that summer holidays were spent in Ireland every other year, and with my paternal grandparents in Värmland the “other” years. This was so we’d have two years to save up for the holidays. After my mother died we went more often, even for Christmas. Since I was 17, however, I hadn’t been. Lack of money and time, basically (when there was time there was no money and vice versa). Now my sister and her family have moved there and we simply HAD to go somehow. The planned summer visit was spoiled by me working. However, it turned out that her kids were on holiday as well as mine, we found a cheap flight and so we took the chance. I’m delighted that we went. The visit was much too short for someone who has been away for more than 15 years, but better a short visit than none.

I wasn’t really able to allow myself to get emotional there (didn’t want to scare the kids) nor am I able to let it all out at home (yet), but it felt very sad suddenly to be living so far away from my sister and her family. Not that it’s far. Not like Australia or Namibia or Easter Island. But still. My nephew and niece are growing so big, and we’re not around. And they’ll never be as close to our youngest as they are to our elder daughters. It feels strange, even though I’m so pleased for them all, they seem to be doing so well. And there have been so many changes! My grandmother’s house looks the same from the outside, but inside it’s completely different. The rooms aren’t even in the same place. While part of me is unbothered by the differences (after all, change is inevitable), another part of me feels childishly upset.

Added to this is the death and funeral of a beloved aunt. She was my aunt by marriage, but you know how with some people it never feels like there’s a difference? Well, that’s what it was like with her. She was one of the warmest, kindest, most genuine people I have ever known. My heart breaks for her sons, my cousins, and for their children. She loved her grandchildren so much, and it feels so terribly terribly unfair that the youngest will never know her. As for myself, I am being eaten up by regrets that I never spent more time with her. It doesn’t help knowing that a lot of that is due to my own low self-esteem, that never allows me to think that other people really might enjoy my company – instead I keep away, so as not to disturb them. I’ve missed all those chances to talk to her. The last few years when I knew she was sick I found it especially difficult, because I was so afraid. It’s weakness, and I’m ashamed of it. I hope that she knew, or knows, that I loved her very much, that I am grateful for everything she did for me, and that I’m so so sorry. She loved literature too, and this spring she had sent me an invitation to join a sort of chain mail paperback swap that is all the rage here. You send a book to the person at the top of the list, and invite six friends to join, the idea being that you’ll end up with 36 books. I joined as a way to try to tell her I cared, but I should have rung and talked to her properly instead. I hope she received some books out of the swap, and I hope she enjoyed them. I feel so much guilt, and guilt is so useless unless you channel it. I hope I can channel this into learning to stay close to the people I love.

Michael Crichton is dead.

Something I find more sad than I would have thought. R.I.P. I've only blogged about one of his books, which surprises me. I'd also forgotten that the one I'd blogged about was Airframe - I thought it was Timeline, which is not very good at all compared to some others, so I was all set to write a blog entry now saying that I was sorry I'd only blogged about the bad novel. However, Airframe is one of the good ones, though not among the best-known (i.e. filmed, as far as I know anyway). I've also read (this list will serve sort of as an homage I suppose...): Sphere, Congo, Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, Eaters of the Dead and The Terminal Man. If you've only seen the films of any of his books - try reading one instead, because they're quite different in tone. It's entertainment, but often of the kind that would spark a discussion.

Bthdy!

This month was my 33rd birthday, and for once I wanted to have.. well, not a party, but let's say invite friends over for munchies. Added bonus of inviting people over is of course the presents that follow, and among other nice things I got two books that I promptly read. My friends are very clever people who understood what my brain is up for, so I got one definite chick-lit (Janet Evanovich: Lean Mean Thirteen) and one chick-lit-ish (Toni Jordan: Addition). Dilemma – which one to read first? I decided on Evanovich out of both loyalty and a sneaky suspicion that Addition might well turn out to be the better book on the whole. However, I ended up reading half of the Evanovich and then bringing Addition on the bus to read one morning because I didn’t want to go back into the bedroom to fetch the Evanovich. I tend to avoid parallel reading, probably for the same reason that I read short story and poetry collections from the front cover to the back cover with no skipping around (and possibly this is why I don’t much enjoy reading poetry). Um, I put “for the same reason” without really having a clear-cut idea of what the reason is – possibly my very own brand of OCD. A feeble attempt to bring order into my universe. Kitchen floor knobbly with pasted-down dirt? No matter, at least my short story books are carefully plodded through from beginning to end. This Bani-OCD also manifests itself in how I choose my week-day socks, by the way. I bought the socks because I needed black socks for my work uniform, and ridiculous as the Monday to Sunday writing at the top is (both as concept itself and as look), it at least functions well as a method to separate the socks from all the other black socks of the household, thus ensuring that I always can find my socks in the morning. And the OCD? Well, I can’t wear the correct day socks on the actual day obviously, since that would be dorky, but I also can’t bear to wear a different day on each foot (mostly because the days are written in different colours). So I wilfully mismatch days but match socks. Fantastic.

Addition was indeed the better book. It's basically a boy-meets-girl-story (could be a Marian Keyes), but the twist is that our heroine Grace has a mental illness - she counts everything. To keep her universe in order she measures, weighs, counts and performs rituals every day. At first we're not told the reason, just that she's always done it, but gradually we discover why. When Grace meets Seamus she falls in love. With Seamus she can sometimes forget all about the numbers.

I was reminded of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. The similarities aren't huge or anything, but both novels tell a story from the perspective of the "ill" person, and in this way in an easy manner teach us about the affliction. This is not a bad novel. Grace becomes very real and quite complex, and Jordan doesn't shy away from being explicit about sex even though Grace is a nutter. Recommended - maybe not the greatest book ever written, but a refreshing addition (tee-hee) to the genre.

Lean Mean Thirteen is one I've been longing to read, obviously. It saddens me a little that the Stephanie Plum concept is getting so worn though. Over the books things have gotten more and more slapstick and cartoonish - a bit like that film, Last Action Hero, come to think of it. The first couple of books had that nice balance between funny, a bit cheeky, a bit OTT but also a bit of grittiness. In this the 13th novel I felt a little closer to the roots than I have in a while. Stephanie gets really scared here, which is good. More grit, less "what would this look like in the movie"-thinking. In this one Stephanie becomes a murder suspect, and the supposed victim is none other than her ex-husband. Oh, I'll definitely read Evanovich's 14th and 15th too...

Next week sees the Banis in Ireland, actually. With any luck I'll spot a second-hand book shop with lots of hard-to-get Ngaoi Marsh books (miraculously weighing next to nothing), or maybe the elusive E.C. Bentley I've been wanting. We'll see. May the chips be with me.

Ian McEwan: Atonement

Just as I finished my last blog entry approx. ten million years ago I also finished this book. Since then I have not read much at all - well, I reread all my Mma Ramotswe books, but that hardly counts. Not because I don't like them, but because they're so easy to read and all.

Atonement is also easy to read, albeit considerably wordier. It's a better novel than the last McEwan I read, definitely, and this could be why the cover blurb labels it McEwan's masterpiece. But it hasn't stuck with me. I wonder why this is - isn't it funny how some things you read cement themselves into your brain, but others do not? Even if they're objectively speaking better literature...? I think I'm just not a huge fan of the rather wordy, introspective style that McEwan is an example of. Briony, who is 12 or so when the story begins, has an incredibly profound lightbulb moment about her writing which goes on for a good few pages and baffles me a little because is she thinking this as a 12-year-old? Really? Is the author interpreting her confusion into this succinct form? I wonder I wonder. Then Briony commits her crime, her false accusation, and that bit is great, it was hard to turn the pages knowing that she was going to go down that route - please Briony don't! but she does. Then comes very good descriptions of being in the war, very blunt and without hero-worshiping - I liked those bits a lot too, and then a lot of bits about how tough it was to be a nurse in those days, and then it sort of ends. And I'm not sure if I really liked it as a package. I've spent more time thinking about what to write about this book than I've spent remembering the book itself.

Maybe I'm just thick though. Not impossible.

Bram Stoker: Dracula

As mentioned, I re-read this not long ago. I can't remember why though - I think it was because I started humming the Annie Lennox song from the film for no reason, and that put me in mind of the book. We have - we had -two copies of Dracula. One was my old worn paper-back (Wordsworth Classics I think) that was practically falling to bits, and the other is a rather swankier paperback (Penguin Classics) with a fuller introduction by Maurice Hindle. The latter was accquired by mr Bani (who else?). I threw the older one out in the Purge now. One copy will do (but we still have three copies of Jane Eyre. Y'see, one is a love-gift (aaaawww), one is a cool old Penguin paperback, and one is an interesting boxed little thing from the 19th century. So we can sacrifice none of them, and besides Jane Eyre rocks.). Where was I - oh yes, Dracula. Vlad the lad.

I remember reading Dracula years and years ago for the first time, and finding it rather dry. What stuck with me then was the religious fervour, the pure and clean vs. sullied and wanton, the way the men all put Mina Harker on a piedestal. So when I saw the film - marketed as "Bram Stoker's Dracula" as you may recall, no small claims there - I was very surprised. I didn't recognize this sex-obsessed creation at all. Surely there was no sex in Dracula? It was all about God and the evil vampire. And it was not until I re-read it now that I understood where Coppola got all the sex from - which is funny because I must have read it a good few times between then and now. Maybe I was paying better attention this time? Although I don't know how that could be, seeing as how I have had no time to read properly, I was just snatching time while nursing... In any case, I still think Coppola went too far to tout his film as being oh-so-close to the novel. Too much added, plain and simple. I wonder why he felt the need to insist that it was closely based on the novel, surely his own vision was just fine with his name on it. (Not that it turned out all that well.)

I digress again. Back to the book: I enjoy Dracula. It's not really great literature, to be honest. It could have been trimmed down, refined, made more succinct. This was brought home to me even more clearly when I read Hindle's introduction. The more you read about mr Stoker the more you can tick off his hang-ups when reading the book, and the more it starts to come across as some sort of therapy session. But no matter, it's a classic nevertheless. And back to the sex: before I digressed I was saying that the first time I read it I didn't see past the nattering about phonographs and typewriting and mesmerizing. This time I must have had my imagination hooked up properly, and I noticed this scene for the first time:

With his left hand he held both Mrs Harker's hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man's bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk [ ... ] Her face was ghastly, with a pallor which was accentuated by the blood which smeared her lips and cheeks and chin; from her throat trickled a thin stream of blood. Her eyes were mad with terror.

Oo-er. The sexual innuendo is strong with this one. I see what you mean, Francis.

Therefore, my advice to you is: read this. It's historical, it's classic, it's... well, in all honesty not terribly scary for a modern audience, but we can certainly appreciate the effort, and it's The Original. Go for it. (And if you get a copy with the Hindle introduction, read it AFTER you've read the book. But do read it, because it's very enlightening.)

Joel Rose:The Blackest Bird

As I was reading this book I very frequently thought of Nick Hornby's Believer column Stuff I've Been Reading, the collection of which I wrote about last time. Because this book - he would have thrown it away in disgust, and not been able to write about it then in the column, since they have that No-Snarkiness policy.

I got it from my editor friend E, who got it I think from someone at a bookfair, trying to pitch it to her I suppose. E handed it to me with a shrug, saying she hadn't liked it much but since I liked mysteries.... this was ages ago this, and I had forgotten about the book completely. (Well, not completely. I did have this vague feeling that there should be something readable in the house that I had brought in and not my husband, but I couldn't think what it was.) Now, when we were clearing and de-cluttering and bookburning I came across it. Of course, I was tremendously pleased. A murder mystery based on the tragedy of Mary Roger's death, which is immortilized in Edgar Allan Poe's Marie Rôget story! Set in New York in the 1840s! How fantastic! I read the most prominent blurb on the cover:

"Murder, mystery, historical novel, portal to another time, you'll lose yourself for days on end in the perfectly depicted characters, atmosphere and low life of nineteenth-century New York. The Blackest Bird is a masterpiece."

--Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential and Bone in the Throat

....

Hang on a minute. Anthony Bourdain, who's he? And then I remember - I've seen the man on BBC Food, haven't I. He's a chef. (And now, reading the blurb, I remember reading about Kitchen Confidential in the papers when it was published. I never connected that with the fella on the telly until now.) And he has a blog and all. Anyway, a chef. Why is his opinion all over the front cover? This is not promising. I mean, I don't expect Harold Bloom endorsements or anything, but come on.

But I get stuck in, and for a good while I'm impressed by the thoroughness shown in writing so consistently in an old-fashioned style, right down to segars instead of cigars. This amazon.com reviewer says it's newspaper jargon - I'll take his word for it. But. However. There is a reason why this style of writing went out of style. It's quite cumbersome to read. And I should point out that only recently I re-read Bram Stoker's Dracula (oh that reminds me, I forgot to blog about that. Dracula deserves its own blog entry! I'll do that soon then) so I was used to reading dialogue in which people don't hold normal conversations, they lecture at length using convoluted sentences. This is all bearable, providing you have a narrative drive and characters to get involved in. Here, we don't. The story doesn't seem to know who to focus on. Is it a story about High Constable Hays getting slightly obsessed with Mary Roger's murder? Is it a historical novel about New York in the 1840s? Is it a sort of biography of Edgar Allan Poe? Ideally, it should be all these things. Zadie Smith, for example, she can write a novel from many different characters' point of view and bring it off and together to a whole. This book just collapses into a layering of facts and ideas and endless name-dropping of Famous People from New York History, and the whole thing just screams out "I spent 18 years writing this! Look at all the research I did! Look how much I've read! Look at how I've taken snippets that Poe actually wrote and said and worked them into what he says in my novel!" As for the last bit - yes I noticed. Because it's very noticeable and this is a bad thing. To get back to Zadie Smith - in an article in The Believer (God, I know, I keep going on and on about this, but this time it's just coincidence, I've read a grand total of two articles from that magazine and this was one of them) she writes about how to write. Among other things she suggests leaving what you've written in a drawer unread for a few years, and then taking it out and reading it afresh. This novel was 18 years in the working and could have done with 18 years in a drawer, in my opinion. And then it might still have needed a great and ruthless editor.

I think what upsets me most is that it could have been riveting and fantastic. I forced my way through the whole thing, because after the twist at the very end of Special Topics of Calamity Physics I no longer take anything for granted - but I was ready to give up not even half-way through. I have no doubt that Rose has talent, and has done a spectacular amount of research. The problem is it's just not very good the way it is now. What a waste. That said, in the right hands it might make a great film. This is of course another pet peeve of mine: when books appear written solely for the film rights. Ah well.

Nick Hornby: The Polysyllabic Spree

This past year or so mr Bani has been reading The Believer quite often (well, at least copies of the magazine have been turning up here and there in the flat). So it only follows that he would want The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, which is a collection of the columns Nick Hornby wrote for The Believer over a period of two years. So, since I'm a bit of a sucker for Hornby and was in the mood for something easy to read but not stupid, I nabbed it off the shelf, where it was resting atop the other books that had a space in the original row (now that we have de-cluttered it has its own space, three cheers for us!). I've read all Hornby's novels I think (barring maybe one? or two?). I was very pleased with How To Be Good, even though critics seemed to think it was weaker than his previous work - I thought he did a good job of writing from a woman's point of view, and the story was interesting. Well done.

So this compilation turned out to be completely my thing. Hornby's task was to simply write about what he had bought and/or read every month, and in theory, he speculated, this might show if there was a pattern to what he reads. Since the magazine has forbidden snarkiness there are a few instances of "unnamed literary novels" being abandoned half-way through because they're too terrible to finish - which amuses me. Hornby creates a fictitious fight with the Polysyllabic Spree, which is what he calls the people who run The Believer. He describes them as a sort of cult, and it's very funny.

[...] the fifty-five disturbingly rapturous and rapturously disturbing young men and women who edit the Believer [...]

[...]the eighty horribly brainwashed young men and women who control this magazine [...]

[... ]the seventy-eight repellently evangelical young men and women who run the magazine [...]

[...] those teenage white-robed prudes.

Anyway, that's really not very important. What's important is that I want to be like Nick Hornby. This blog was supposed to be more like that book - effortlessly fluently written, witty and clever without really trying. Although we don't always seem to have the same taste in books - Nicky breaks down in tears when attempting science-fiction, for example. I like science-fiction. Nick, I can tell you why you fail at sci-fi: it's because you think you have to understand everything. You don't. It's just there for the period effect, as it where. Hornby complains that he must be dim for the whole column

[...] I haven't felt so stupid since I stopped attending physics lessons aged fourteen.

Although I have a sneaking suspicion that he really thinks that sci-fi is stupid literature, but masks his dislike by putting himself down, so as to con the Polysyllabic Spree. But once or twice I could nod happily, seeing that we enjoyed the same things - admittedly not very often, given my obse... huge interest in crime fiction these past years, a genre Hornby doesn't revel in. I was extra happy then to read him praise Citizen Vince by Jess Walter. Yes Nick, you and me! We could actually, like, hold a conversation!

Why can't I write the way I want to? It's heart-breaking, so it is. This book left me itching to read more, and I'm definitely holding on to it for a good while so I can glean it for tips. Inspiring is the word I'm looking for.

Bookburning

Mr Bani and I are in an organizing frenzy here at casa Bani. As you may or may not know, we live in a two-bedroom apartment with one bathroom, with a total square metrage of just under 70. And there are five of us. So thank God we always resisted the children's desire for a pet, I say. There is a certain amount of compact living going on here, and by that I mean that we have a lot of stuff and it is everywhere. If that's compact, we're it. And 1½-year-olds? They believe in entropy. One spends a frighteningly large amount of time picking up stuff that he has emptied out. And then, finally, not bothering to. I had forgotten (as in repressed) that part about having small kids. Give me teenagers any say. You just say "Hey you, what the hell?" and they pick it up themselves.

So, we decided that we needed to change the furniture around in the livingroom and put the bookshelves on the other wall and in the corner, aso we could put those two cabinets from the Ivar range that have been "temporarily" arranged these past three years on top of one another on top of a semi-antique chest of drawers in our miniscule bedroom alongside that wall and so on. You get the picture - it isn't a tidy one. And where are the wheels we once had screwed on under that second cabinet? We unscrewed them to stack the cabinets and now I only found one set. Arse.

In order to manage this we had to scrap one whole bookshelf. This meant that we first had to have a big clear-out in the cellar so we could move discarded-but-not-unwanted-really books down to the cellar (and said shelf, of course). And since we can never be really structured about these things we end up just throwing things away and not even attempting to sell them - although to be fair, most of it was sort of rubbish anyway. Anyway, so all the course books, representing thousands of dineros (yet with no actual degree to show for it...) are being moved into the cellar, finally, and lots of books are finally being deemed as Not Necessary to Own so we're giving them away to the Christmas flea market at church. BUT, and here comes the explanation for the title of this entry - we've thrown away lots too. Books that were breaking (fair enough), but also just books that we didn't think were worth the trouble of carting off to some other destination than the rubbish room (my English translation of the word soprum...). And since they end up in the burnable bin in the rubbish room - WE ARE BOOKBURNERS, as mr Bani said, with a wince. We ended up becoming less and less ruthless, so the pile that is going to charity is now larger than it would have been if we'd carried on with the sacrilege. See, I'd planned to bookcross a lot of this stuff. I'm a CRAP bookcrosser. I should delete my membership. I haven't had a chance to search for ANY books, and I haven't released any, or even gotten to the point of starting to register one for release. And now I won't be doing any releasing for a long time, since I'm not prepared to let go of the ones I have left. (Yet.)

Among the books I finally got rid of is an old copy of Fanny Herself by Edna Ferber. I've held on to this book for ages because it made an impact on me. Little bits of it often drift to the surface of my thoughts - for example, for a while there Fanny dates a man who keeps volunteering snippets of Useful Information, so she dubs him "Fascinating Facts". So far I'm the only one who gets it when I say "fascinating facts" with irony in reference to people like that. It doesn't seem to be a widely read novel, but I really like it. Fanny grows up in a small town with her mother and brother. Her mother works very hard in her little shop to support them, but ends up being outmanouvered by a new, larger store. When her mother dies Fanny swears to never become like her, working her life away for nothing. She's going places, she is. Connecting her mother's failure to Judaism too, she rejects her entire background and goes off to the big city to make a career for herself. In the end she mellows and reconnects with her past, and the whole thing is quite sentimental (in the best possible way) and lovely. Also, it paints a great picture of a professional woman - actually, of two professional women, if we count Fanny's mother - in the 1910s and before. The Amazon link above states "that Edna Ferber has been called the greatest American woman novelist of her day" and I think that this book is well worth reading, as well worth it as, say, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, which I think is much more widely known. Well, I don't have it anymore. Nor do I have Flickan som inte sa nej by Elsa Nyblom. I've insisted on holding on to this for years, but I'm ready to let go now. This book is so little known I can find no good link to it, only online second-hand book sellers telling me they have it, and one Bookcrossing entry that turned out to be a dud. It's not about much this book, but I quite liked it. I liked how it felt so set in that particular time (1930s, 1940s), and its sort of dreamy quality, even though it deals with real matters. I can hardly remember exactly what it's about any longer, to be honest. The main character is a young girl who is easily influenced (she doesn't say no is the title), so she agrees to be married to a much older man. It's not a depressing story about abuse or anything, but it's about having a sense of self and being able to say what you want for yourself. Her life doesn't turn out badly, but she has to learn to say no. That's it.

It's a bit of a wrench to get rid of these old novels, because I might never be able to get hold of them ever again. I've found them in second-hand stalls and bought them on impulse. My one, sole ambition in life really has been to have a Library. To have bookshelves covering the walls, and to be able to go in there and see my life through the books I've read. It makes me sad that I can't realise this dream. I've wanted to save all those 1940s "young women" novels I'd collected, but I haven't. How will I ever get hold of Flickförbundet Silverkorset by Bertha Clément again - a 1927 story about some young girls who meet at a boarding house during their holidays and form a sort of charity club together. A moralistic little book, to be sure, but it paints an interesting picture of pre-Nazi Germany. I have to hope that Bokmamsell and others like her will remember all those books, because I can't be their custodian right now, and maybe never.

Anyway, St. Lars Catholic Church in Uppsala, during the 1st of Advent weekend - that's the place to be if you want to buy the Bani cast-offs. See you there - I'll be rescuing novels from other broken libraries.