John Dickson Carr: The Problem of the Green Capsule

Now THIS is a second-hand find! This is what I look for when I'm in charity shops, not any fecking Jeffery Deaver. The condition of this book is atrocious. It's an extremely cheap copy from 1956 (the book was first printed in -39) with rather magnificent cover art. And on the spur of the moment, since I happen to have time, I give you a picture.

Not a GOOD picture, mind. Don't get greedy. Isn't it superb? Anyway, all the pages start to come off the broken, torn spine whenever I turned the page, so we'll see how long it survives in my careless household.

The crime of the book is murder by poison. Very tragically the first murder is completely random -   poisoned chocolates are introduced into the local shop's countertop selection, eventually causing several children to be poisoned, with one fatality. Psychology plays a large part in the discussion and solution of this mystery - the psychology of witness perception and the mental setup of a poisoner, specifically men who poison. The analysis is remarkably modern, if I remember my popular psychology correctly:

"But the men are a more uneasy menace to society, since to the slyness of poisoning they add a kind of devilish generalship, an application of business principles, a will to make good by the use of aresnic or strychnine. [ ... ] First of all they are usually men of some imagination, education and even culture." [ ... ] "Now,", pursued Dr Fell, "what is the first most outstanding characteristic of the poisoner? It is this. Among his friends he usually has the reputation of being a thoroughly good fellow. He is a jovial soul. An open-handed companion. A real sport. Sometimes he may display slight Puritanical scruples, about strict religious observance or even good form socially; but his boon-companions can easily forgive him for this because he is such a decent sort."  [ ... ] "Whereas actually there is in their characters, as a reverse side to the same picture and perhaps an essential part of it, such a blind indifference to the pain of others - such a cool doling-out of death in its most horrible forms - that our ordinary imaginations cannot grasp it.  [ ... ] it really does express the attitude of the poisoner towards human life. Wainewright had to have money, so (obviously) someone had to die. Wiliam Palmer needed money to bet on horses, and so it became clear that his wife, his brother, and his friends must be given strychnine. It was a self-evident proposition. And it is also true in the case of those who blandly or even plaintively 'have to have something'.  [ ... ] and he gained only a few thousands by killing his wife's mother. But he wished to be free. He 'had to have it'. Which brings us to the poisoner's next characteristic; his inordinate vanity. All murderers have it. But the poisoner possesses it to a bloated degree. He is vain of his intelligence, vain of his looks, touched with the bruch of the actor, even the exhibitionist; and as a rule he is a very good actor indeed.  [ ... ]And nowhere does the male poisoner's vanity more clearly express itself than in his power - or what he thinks is his power - over women. "

 Dr Fell's lecture is much longer of course (you can see I've abbreviated it), and I think he's describing what we today would call a psychopath. The inability to feel empathy. The vanity - except we don't call it vanity these days when vanity is no sin. It's very good.

Another part that jolted me a little was a throwaway comment after the young woman suspected by the town of benig guilty has just had a stone thrown at her through a shop window. At the idea of her not being able to walk freely Detective-Inspector Elliot (who, sadly, has a Scottish volatile temper leading him to "growl" a lot - I ask you) says what! are they in Germany? are they a bunch of Non-Aryans cooped up in a citadel? - which is one of those little throw-away comments that shows that the rest of Europe knew oh perfectly well what was going on in Germany in the 30s. No-one can claim ignorance if you can reference persecution in a detective story.

God, now I'm back on the vintage horse, my dears. I need more. Perhaps perhaps I should commit to some internet shopping.

Soooo....

.... what have I been reading ...

I read a book about children and bilinguality, which was very interesting: Barn med flera språk by Gunilla Ladberg.  I've always been bilingual, and so have many of my friends, so for me it was an easy decision to try to keep it up with my kids. My mother was quite committed to making us kids bilingual. For the time it was a bit avant-garde in Sweden. Of course, the advantage of having English as a second language is that people can understand that it might be "useful", so they accept it and think it's okay. If you're speaking something unbelieeeevably foreign to your kids you just haven't accepted that you live in Sweden now, you know. Anyway, what I learnt about bilinguality growing up was that you had to be very strict about sticking to the one language with your child, so they wouldn't get confused and start mixing languages. Mixing languages was bad. In this book the author writes about newer research saying that it is so not a problem when we mix - to the immense relief of us bilinguals who have always mixed with merry abandon. She also stresses that Sweden is extremely monolingual, if you adopt a global perspective, and we have a tendency to automatically think that oh learning another language is sooo hard whereas in other places on the planet people just do it without working themselves up about it because sure how else are you going to talk to anyone? So very interesting subject, everyone should read up on it.

I read a Jeffrey Deaver novel called A Maiden's Grave. I have no patience with this writing anymore. God, I used to be entertained by it, but I have evolved. It is shallow and boring. This one is about sign language and hostage rescue. A decided meh. But ok for a train ride if you skim a little.

I just read a  Kathy Reichs too (I got it and the Deaver second-hand somewhere thinking they'd be good summer reads) and feel a bit the same about it as toward the Deaver. The woman's writing style annoys me now something awful. Building up to monumental cliff hanger phrasing at the end of every chapter (what's with the Dickens complex?) that turn out to be NOTHING at the beginning of the next. Yet still more entertaining than the Deaver. Oh, it was Flash and Bones and was about ricin poison and Nascar.

There was something else, but I'm forgetting at the moment... Finished reading Bilbo for my son. When we'd read three quarters of the book he looked at how much we had left and said: "Mammy! We're nearly done! Then we never have to read this ever again!"

So... not a fan then.

Ursula K Le Guin: Worlds of Exile and Illusion

Three novels in one, Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions. 

Rocannon's World just isn't very good, somewhere half-way through I just lose interest. You can tell that she hadn't found her voice and style yet, but was writing something much more generic. Planet of Exile was a lot more enjoyable, and I really liked having City of Illusions to read directly afterwards, since they're connected. As novels they are a little lacking, they lack tempo a bit and towards the end lose detail and sort of just peter out.

It's very interesting, and I think Le Guin has written about that herself somewhere, that she can be so comparatively daring (for that time) as to have the exiled Earthlings be all black, but it was hard to imagine a society without clear divisions between men and women - with women at the bottom (clearly this is based on some human patriarchal cultures). I mean, even though we don't want to be we are trapped into certain ways of thinking by our culture and upbringing. I think I wrote that this aged The Left Hand of Darkness too - it was very difficult for a writer in the sixties to imagine that a lot of the gender-specific ways of behaving and reacting would disappear.

Lee Child: Bad Luck and Trouble

Jack Reacher:

[...] a disheveled giant of a white man. Two metres tall, easily, a hundred and ten kilos, maybe a hundred and twenty, shaved head, wrists as wide and hard as two-by-fours, hands like shovels, dressed in dusty grey denims and work boots.

As if there is a casting director on the planet who wouldn't immediately think Tom Cruise, right?

Björn Larsson: Döda poeter skriver inte kriminalromaner

Den här boken är 382 sidor lång, och det dröjer till sidan 170 någonting innan den börjar bli intressant. Intressant, märk väl - inte spännande eller så, bara intressant. Lite så att man höjer ett ögonbryn. Hm, säger man, det var lite kul. Där tänkte han till den gode Björn. Inte så nytt kanske, men lite kul var det allt.  Men vet ni vad? Det räcker inte på långa vägar. För jag har läst vidare till sidan 284 och herregud vad det ögonblicket dog fort. På omslagets insida haglar det dock superlativer - okej, medges att de gäller den tidigare romanen, Filologens dröm, men man får ju vissa förväntningar i alla fall, och dessa infrias ICKE. Varför finns det sådana mängder skribenter i Sverige som skriver så vansinnigt tråkig och styltad dialog? var en av de första tankarna som slog mig när jag började läsa den här boken. Och så kom jag att tänka på ett återkommande samtalsämne jag har med min man, som just har haft en liten fas där han tittat en del på danska kriminalserier; även om storyn i serien är rätt blaha och deras överdrivna användning av teknik löjeväckande (Örnen, tack och hej) så funkar det mesta rätt bra på danska. Det låter trovärdigt bara de inte tar in några utlänningar de ska försöka vara pk med på det där taffliga medelklasssättet som vita misslyckas med så bra - de grötar på och svär och låter naturligt danska liksom. Nu KAN vi iofs inte danska. Det kanske låter otroligt onaturligt för danskar. Men för en svensk låter det fint, till skillnad från alla svenska kriminalserier där dialogen verkar skriven av någon som klippt sönder ett antal ark med femtiotalsdeckare och sedan lagt pussel med orden, och lagt in några moderna svordomar också. Va faaaaan till exempel får man säga nu, det fick man inte säga förr i tiden så tryckeriet hörde. I alla fall. Denna bok har uselt tråkig dialog, där alla karaktärer har precis samma röst och är precis lika oengagerande. Texten däremellan är inte så mycket bättre om jag ska vara ärlig, men det är möjligt att det är färgat av att den i stora delar är inre monolog vilket blir precis samma visa. Jag blir så förbannad. Varför trycka skiten? Det är ju TRÅKIGT. Dessutom har jag för länge sedan gissat mig till mördaren, något jag är ruskigt dålig på (och jag har läst de sista sidorna så jag vet att jag har rätt). Ha, jag har precis googlat och hittat SvD-recensionen som säger att det är en spirituell deckarpastisch. Får jag be herr Lönnroth att slå upp spirituell i ordboken för det finns inget spirituellt med detta. Och DN tyckte den hade en "lycksalig lätthet som gör den till genuint kul läsning". Jag tror jag får ett mindre anfall här. Varför är recensenterna så välvilligt inställda? Den här boken har samma lätthet som ett par gummistövlar efter en promenad över en nyplöjd åker efter ett regnoväder. Och den metaforen var så krystad att den skulle passa in där förresten (i boken alltså).

Nu känner jag att jag måste lugna mig lite. Problemet är att det inte är ett dugg smart och sprituellt att skriva en bok i en för en själv främmande genre, som krim eller science fiction eller fantasy eller vad du nu vill, om du inte är ett skvatt intresserad av att respektera det hantverket och snickra ihop en bra historia, där dina intellektuella (eller, snark, pseudointellektuella) tankar och funderingar kan fungera som något som gör historien bättre, djupare, kvickare. Till en riktig roman. Som t.ex. Fröken Smillas känsla för snö nu när jag tänker efter. Och hej Danmark får vi väl lov att säga igen. Om du bara vill skriva ett manifest tycker jag att du ska göra det. Eller en insändare i Metro för all del. De tar in det mesta. Om boken ska vara läsvärd och inte aptråkig så måste ju ändå grundhistorien få ett grepp om läsaren tycker jag. Har jag fel?

Nä, det här orkar jag inte läsa ut. Urk. Och jag är ändå rätt tolerant mot dåliga böcker va. Det är nog de pretentiösa jag har svåra problem med.

Child and King

A trip to the library generated a Jack Reacher novel, The Hard Way, and The Pirate King by Laurie King. I had to get a Jack Reacher because we saw the film sort of and it was too ridiculous for words. Too too too. How on earth it got made is beyond me. I'm not saying the books are great literature or anything, far from it, but they do have a certain individuality that is appealing if you want a thriller novel and this individuality bears no resemblance whatsoever to Tom Cruise. This novel has a very simple plot line that I guessed in the first chapters and was right, so no points for originality there.

Sadly not many points for Laurie King either, because the book feels sort of rushed. I love the idea, and I love the idea of an ensemble stuck on a boat together, but can't help but long for Ngaio Marsh or Josephine Tey or even Dorothy Sayers to write the dialogue. This is the sort of setting that they'd excel in. Mix in a bit of modernity in Ms King's way (i.e. no fear of a censor) and it'd be great. Frankly, as it is now, it's seems a little as though - dare I say it? - it was written with a screenplay in mind. Never write for the movies folks! Still enjoyed it though, still devoured it.

Peter Høeg: Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

Every now and then, say every five years or perhaps even more seldom, this book is taken down and re-read. It seems like we've had it forever - our copy was printed in -95, so I think it's a budget print my husband around the time when we'd moved in together so we could see what the hype was about. I've always had a soft spot for it. It's been put in the charity pile every time we've had a bookshelf clearout but it's always been moved back to the "keep" pile by me, and now I'm happily resigned to the position of defender of Smilla; she's not leaving us anytime soon, that's my firm stance on the issue. The film was of course a huge disappointment. Let us not speak of it. This is a film that should have been made in Danish by Danes. In Danish nothing in Smilla's Feelings for Snow is sentimental or moony - in Danish Smilla is brutally self-sufficient and both whole and broken. There is beauty and dirt. This time reading it (which I am doing completely by coincidence based on the book being moved into my line of sight by my husband who was looking for something else I think) I am the same age as Smilla. We are both 37 and I know what she means when she calls herself old and at the same time can feel like a child. The darker parts of Smilla's personality are clearer to me this time and more understandable. When she wants to revel in her misery on her own I understand how she is thinking, and also how bittersweet it is that she isn't permitted that kind of solitude, now that she has made some connections to others.  And it's not just a crime novel, it's more. Which is why it's good.

I wonder if it's worth the trouble trying to read this in Danish. Granted, Swedish and Danish are not that far apart, but I think there is a certain something extra-terse and ass-kicking about the Danish language that is probably lost in translation. Reading in Danish and Norwegian is oh such a pain though. Could they not film this, the Danes, and do it properly, and let me hear Smilla's rude remarks the way they're supposed to be heard?  Do it well and it'll be a good story about their colonial past aswell, which may be needing to be told to the world.

I have to post something this time of year

I do believe I always post this time of year, my favourite time, and waffle on for a bit about nature being at its finest now before the greenery starts greening, the bare bones of it all so to speak yada yada yada. Which is all true. We've had a long, cold spring so here we are in May still without more than a few buds and very early spring flowers, so even though this spring post is late it really isn't.

I'm in the unfortunate position of not being able to keep the blog up, since I don't have computer time. It has led to me not reading. I want to blog about the books I read. If I can't blog, I don't read. I actually find this ridiculously upsetting. Haven't decided if I should just call it quits and live in the Now of the IRL  instead of getting too hung up on a digital journal that shouldn't be allowed to become the reason for enjoying literature.

I read all the Gregor the Overlander books, bar one, which I don't think I'll work to hard on getting hold of. I liked them, and like some reviewer I read find it a little surprising that they're not better known. Collins writes so well for kids, the stories don't shy away from darkness and difficult moral choices and are still easy to understand. I also read something somewhere about how this is one book that is NEVER going to be filmed - this may be a very accurate assessment. Giant rats and bats and other creepy-crawlies? Not really workable. I'd post links but this was ages ago and I'm not looking for them now (feel like I'm writing on borrowed time).

Other than that I've read nothing, bar a novel written by a fella I work with. Exciting, isn't it! It hasn't been published, so we'll keep it anonymous. Ever since he mentioned that he wrote a novel I've been pestering him to let me read it - especially after he showed me the rejection letter he got from a publisher. It was rather a good rejection letter as such ones go, pinpointing briefly but accurately what the problems were with the book. Anyway, my colleague is a tad miffed because he'll never get it printed now, because it's much too much like Kristian Lundberg's Yarden (which I've written about before and which was one reason why I was so keen to read this one). This is true. It's just bad luck. They wrote at the same time, and Lundberg got there first. And Yarden is a better book, I have to say. How much this is thanks to it being actually published and having the benefit of an editor (let's hear it for editors!) I don't know  (as I've also said I wasn't keen on book 2 so my confidence in Lundberg's writing went way down). My colleague's book could benefit from some sprucing up, some tightening up of certain passages and a clearer purpose in the storyline; all things he admits, but he says he just accepts that it's not going to be published now, so he'd rather keep it the way it is. It's sort of a document of himself, I suppose, since it's about a young man working a menial, soul-sucking job in a warehouse, despite being from a cultural middle-class background and "so promising" - which is what my colleague did a few years ago. In short sparse episodes he describes situations, emotions, people trapped in the warehouse, like a separate universe. I've become very curious about my colleague after reading this. How much is based on himself? If it's a lot, I'm immensely flattered and touched that he let me read it at all, because then it's very revealing and personal. But he's an intelligent man with plenty of empathy, so it's not at all impossible that it's only loosely based on himself and perhaps more inspired by someone else he worked with.

Because of this I've found that it's been a bit disconcerting to have read it, actually. Since I know the author it opens up for lots of questions - did you feel like this? Tell me more! What really happened? How much is true? - but the coffee room at work, with all the others around is not an appropriate place for the third degree. Probably, if I'm honest, nowhere is - we don't know each other well enough for me to be permitted to quiz him on personal matters. But he did let me read it, and I'm a very curious person and I want to know darn it. Ah well. So I passive-aggressively write about it here instead, in my own anonymity. I'm so terrible at this blogger lark, I should obviously have posted an interview with him instead, but there you go.

Lindsay Gordon or Wolf Hall?

Well, what do you think I chose? Came across Val McDermid's Hostage to Murder which I hadn't read, and I do have a soft spot for Lindsay Gordon I do, so easy contest. This is the one in which Lindsay doesn't want to become a parent, goes to Russia and takes on the IRA.

And it's not great, is it. The prose -  not marvellous. No. But I like it anyway.

Gregory the Overlander vs Wolf Hall

So far I'm not making stellar progress on my Christmas present, Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantle. I think I'm on chapter three maybe? don't frankly know because it's Monday morning and I cunningly forgot the book at work before leaving on Friday. To avoid the thing I've been immersing myself in blog reading and pod radio and haven't read for months. But I went to the library Saturday to borrow something for Minimus and his bedtime stories and saw book two of Suzanne Collins Gregory the Overlander series (The Prophecy of Bane) on the shelf, and since I've been so keen to see what they're like I picked that up too. It's just a kid's book, but it's good. Good story, good characters. Moral without being obvious and in-your-face-ish. I'm going to stalk them all. So far Gregory is winning over Thomas Cromwell and that contrived dialogue let me tell you. Give me a giant bat any day.

Well.

So.

In my defence, such as it is, I haven't actually been reading much, only blogs. For a while I listened to the radio on my commute instead of reading (mostly Spanarna and På minuten, but also some Tendens - yes, Swedish radio only), but now I'm having this huge blog-enthusiasm thing going and I've actually read several newly discovered blogs back-to-back. So I'm going to have to update my links I think to stuff I actually am reading. I added heaps of things to my Google reader too in a fit of go-get-'em but I don't actually want to follow more than say half of it, so I'm going to have to delete quite a few things and was most piqued when I discovered that it wasn't just hey, delete, it was Tricky. Google really are quite shite with lay-out, aren't they? A lot of my new blog favourites are clothes and/or sewing blogs, mostly retro, because I discovered Looks Good From The Back first and was so inspired to have more fun with clothes - and let's face it, retro is where the fashion fun is, isn't it. Because there is feck all in the shops, at least here. So now I've worked my way to Gertie's blog for better sewing, and am feeling that urge I sometimes get that maybe I'd like to sew my own clothes? I should take a sewing class. There's no way I can learn on my own, I'm too thick. Also, I felt ashamed and inspired to take more of an interest in my OWN blog, and maybe post stuff? With pictures, to make it more interesting! But it's not going to happen until I get my own computer somehow, one I feel I can use whenever. Until then the blog is not going really work, because the phone blog thing is a bit rubbish. I could of course just take a picture of the book I've just finished and post that but. how. dull. My unfulfilled wish to blog about what I'm only after reading has just led me to owe the library about a week's worth of late fees, because I read Backman's Saker min son behöver veta om världen and thought I'd post about it and didn't and didn't return the book because I wanted to remember to post first and there we are. And ironically, the only thing I really wanted to say was that this book is not very great. It's not even a proper book, just blog entries put together. I hate that. I also wanted to say that when I read En man som heter Ove I wrote that I just knew he was going to be offered a film deal, and then I meant to write that in a comment on his blog to say that even though it's going to be tempting for them to cast Kjell Bergqvist as Ove I think they should think carefully about that because it's a little too obvious. But then didn't he beat me to the revelation and then there were 600 comments. Bleurgh. 

But anyway, last post was a LIE, because I got books for Christmas! They were just late to arrive to The English Bookshop, but my husband gave them to me this week. And they are not just any books, he REMEMBERED that I told him I like Cyril Hare!!! That's worth three exclamation points!!! He got me An English Murder and a collection of short stories - I took a rubbish photo but can't upload it from my work phone because it's a bizarre Samsung I don't understand. I've linked you to them instead, they are so gorgeous and I'm so psyched. He asked me today if I was enjoying the book but in all honesty I'm hesitant to get into them because I want to savour them. I was so in the mood for some vintage crime!

Oh, and I read a rather meh teen dystopic novel called Pure by Julianna Baggott that my eldest brought home - it's not terribly good, but a quick and so-so entertaining read, if you happen to be on a flight or something. The author is much too enamoured with her idea of the survivors of the explosions being fused to whatever object they happened to have been near to remember that story, plot and characterization have to come first. Also, she gets praise for her prose I notice when googling briskly, but myself I felt like it was a bit of a copy of Burgess' Bloodsong to be honest. To be fair though Maxima didn't agree with me at all. That reminds me that Mortal Engines also reminded me of Bloodsong and I kind of felt that people need to be un-inspired, you know?

Anyway. CYRIL HARE!

c'mon ketchup

And look at me forgetting to mention Christmas in my last post. On Christmas Day. Shabby! This year I got no books for Christmas, possibly because my poor husband is too down about me not reading the Hilary Mantle he got me for my birthday (Wolf Hall). I've read about two chapters and Am Not Keen. Maybe it picks up. I'll get there.

Anyway, I've read some Charlaine Harrises: Dead Reckoning and Deadlocked from the Sookie series, and see that she's writing the FINAL  novel now, due next year. I think this is a good move, it's gone far enough. I also read an Aurora Teagarden (A Bone To Pick) I managed to get a hold of, have been interested in that series for a while and can now understand why it's not more popular. Also read her free-standing novel about a rape/a serial rapist, A Secret Rage - not brilliant but clearly based on true experiences, which is, as I've said, why Harris's books work despite everything; the darkness is real (sorry for the dwama phrase but it is). She could definitely do with more analysing, better editing and more depth as a writer, but she pays her bills and I think she's pleased and works hard. Good for her.

I read an Elaine Viets mystery shopper novel which was fucking terrible, Murder With All The Trimmings. Skimmed it more like. Bloody awful, disjointed stuff. I thought they were a little fun before? What was I thinking? It wasn't even light entertainment. No excuse for sending this off to the printers. None.

I also read a HEAP ( a HAPE) of Patricia Wentworths. The Case Is Closed, Danger Point, The Chinese Shawl, The Clock Strikes Twelve, The Case of William Smith, The Catherine Wheel, The Brading Collection, Anna, Where Are You?, The Benevent Treasure and The Alington Inheritance.They're oh so formulaic, with Miss Silver's annoying cough, the convoluted plots that are not ashamed to include hidden passages and treasures, the strong men who grab their beloved by the wrists and say "don't be a damned little fool, can't you see I want you to stop working and take care of you!". Vomit vomit vomit. Yet I wish I had more. I was so in the mood for vintage crime. I started noticing how she often spends a lot of time describing what the women are wearing, so thought that this was worthy of an email to one of my favourite blogs, A Dress A Day. I probably won't get around to sending her the tip, but I'm going to try, There were at least two books in which the heroine worked as a fashion model for a designer, wearing fabulous clothes and displaying them with great effect so middle-aged frumpy women with more money than sense would be fooled into thinking that they, too, could look equally ethereal. It's really very interesting and revealing of the times. Ha.

I re-read some more Laurie King, and I read some Jim Butcher, Dresden Files. Death Masks and Changes. Another series which has gone a little too far, but we'll see. I also read Sacrifice, the latest Charlie Higson "zombie" book. He's beginning to go soft now because quite a lot of children survived, but hey I'm not complaining. Quite like how he's pulling it together.

I'm really really hoping I can start blogging more next year.

En man som heter Ove

Fredrik Backmans bok lånades på biblioteket, vilket jag är rätt nöjd med, för i det långa loppet vill jag inte äga den. När den är som bäst är den fantastiskt rörande och empatisk, när den är som sämst är den skakig faktamässigt (har mycket svårt att se att brandmän står bredvid ett brinnande hus och utreder om det hör till deras kommun, samt har aldrig hört talas om att äldre tvångsintas på äldreboende - det brukar väl vara motsatsen som gäller) och lite för välbekant för den som läser Backmans blogg.

Men grattis till erbjudandet till filmmanus, som lär komma som ett brev på posten! Håll bara kontroll över projektet Fredrik, så de inte byter ut iranierna mot vilken utlänning som helst som råkar finnas i rullorna, och så vidare. First we take Trollhättan, then we just might take Hollywood om filmen blir bra och de vill göra en remake!

I övrigt har jag läst MYCKET, men jag ska se om jag hinner sammanfatta i ett blogginlägg innan året är slut.

Books you can't read in public

Noticed the paperback covers on the novels by Markus Heitz (the dwarf stories).

Well.

I'd feel really conspicuous. I mean really.

A whole great load

Ages ago I read a book called Min pappa är snäll och min mamma är utlänning by Emmy Abrahamson. It's handy to note that down, because I suspect I might want to be able to tip someone off about it sometime. It's a book for teens about a girl whose mother is Polish and how this makes her feel like the world's greatest outsider - pretty funny, not bad at all. Absolutely no point at all in writing this in English, but I don't like mixing in the same post.

I've read Laurie King's short story Beekeeping for Beginners - honestly, wasn't that sold on it, felt a bit unfinished? I have a reserve on Pirate King at the library, so should get my hands on it in about SIX MONTHS. Longest queue ever, like. Not as long as Jonas Gardell's Torka aldrig tårar utan handskar mind, which I gave up on getting my hands on before my book club, so I merrily joined in the discussions sans a clue. But I will read it. (Just didn't want to buy it.) I read the short story collection  An Apple for the Creature, edited by Charlaine Harris, which was trivial but fun. I have no patience with most fantasy after Tolkien, but I seem to have more tolerance for urban fantasy. Odd that. I'm not saying it should win awards, but I can leaf through them on trips. You know. I also found as an ebook a bizarre science fiction tale marked "erotica" by a Randall Garrett - Pagan Passions. It's about the Greek gods returning to Earth. Some decades after their return society is completely different, all centrered around the needs and whims of the Gods. That bit is quite amusing, the descriptions of New York with temples to Athena and an orgy to honour Pan in Central Park. The "hero" of the story gets to be a stand-in for Bacchus and have loads of sex. Awful, but amusing. In an awful way. But I'm not starting an "erotica" tag... Oh and I got Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris at the library, which is the third latest Sookie Stackhouse, and I read it just after reading three Ngaio Marsh novels back to back, Dead Water and Death in Ecstasy and a re-read of Artists in Crime,  and I was struck by a similarity oddly enough, namely the obsession with politeness. LOL to me I said. Oh, in Death in Ecstasy I was tickled to bits by several references to detective stories. I'd quote for you if I could copy and paste but I can't. At the moment I'm reading a disturbing R. Austin Freeman novel, The Uttermost Farthing: A Savant's Vendetta. About some lunatic who believes in "physical anthropology" and goes on a vendetta to kill criminals (examples of degenerate humans) after his wife is murdered. It's all goes remarkably and disgustingly unchallenged, almost as if the author has an axe to grind, but I'm not finished with it yet. Yuck.

"Det går inte att tänka sig fram till ett människovärde.

Det måste erövras genom handling.Du är och blir - eller inte."

Han kan han, Kristian Lundberg. Läser uppföljaren till Yarden, Och allt skall vara kärlek.

Men ändå. När jag är på sidan 140 av drygt 170 och han återigen lovar mig att han ska berätta: ja snälla, gör det. För all del. Jag väntar.

Yashim the eunuch

I know I've read about this series somewhere before, but for the life of me I can't remember where. Anyway - pretty colourful covers caught my eye and I borrowed a few in a heap - The Janissary Tree (no 1), The Bellini Card (no 3) and An Evil Eye (no 4). They've won loads of awards and they're ever so exciting, say the reviews.

Frankly, they're a bit rubbish. I can't speak for the plots, because they end up not interesting me. What I can say is that orientalism is still alive and kicking. Although ... that is perhaps a little unfair. Goodwin limits his orientalism to womankind I think. What could you call that? They're all beautiful and lithe and so on and so on. In more than one place he lets Yashim reflect on how Westerners imagine the Sultan's harem to be like an orgy (if such a collective noun there be) of gorgeous females just lounging about half-naked, whereas in reality it's more like some sort of English boarding school (Yashim doesn't say that, but it's written somewhere else). Well, frankly Goodwin's descriptions all lie on the houri side of the spectrum more than anything else. Good Lord. Follow Austen's example and don't describe what you don't know.

Bonus for great descriptions of cooking and I like the Polish ambassador, the ambassador without a country. Otherwise more than a little meh. Although I did maybe learn about the Janissaries. Okay then.

A bit of Harris

I've been mostly re-reading Ngaoi Marshes, including library ones, but I also found the missing books from the Sookie Stackhouse series last time I was at said book temple so I got them. Including the first one, much to my pleasure, because it always does seem a little off to not read the first one in a series doesn't it. So now I've read Dead In The Family, Dead and Gone, Dead Until Dark, Dead As A Doornail. In one of them, well, Sookie meets vampires 'coz Bill comes to town, in one there's the fairy wars and she's tortured (pretty gruesomely), then one is the follow-up to that and she's with Eric and... well, to be honest all I remember off-hand is that she first doesn't get a kick out of sex the way she used to because, hey, torture but then she does and all is well and there's a load of sex, but there was most likely some sort of plot too. In one of them her telepath five-year-old little relation comes to stay together with her fairy cousin, and in one her sister-in-law gets crucified, in one the were-wolves come out of the closet, in one Tara's vampire boyfriend gambles her off to a vampire psycho, and in one Eric's maker comes with the Tsvarevitch of Russia.

Oh, they all run together. I remember first one best, because it is the best. The longer the books run the more unbelievable the Sookieverse becomes. The supernatural beings are so unable to be discreet that no-one can credit that they were ever hidden. I appreciate the plot changes made in the tv show - they most often were for the better. Tara is an incredibly lame and uninteresting character in the books, whereas Tara on the tellybox is pretty fabulous.

Still get a kick out of them. But nonetheless I shall prolly be sticking to my re-reads for a while, mostly because I don't have the computer access to blog mostly. This post was brought to you by four interruptions. FOUR. (One was admittedly my own, I had to bitch about something.)

Pithy quotes

I'm re-reading all my Ngaio Marshes, and the library's too (except the earliest ones that are a little crap). And in A Surfeit of Lampfreys I read the following:

Maternal anxiety, he thought, was the emotion that human beings most consistently misrepresent, degrading its passion into tenderness, its agony with pathos.

I done gone reflected then that this is perhaps the point of Majgull Axelsson's Moderspassion, that we read for the book club. But I still don't think it came across very well in that book.

yada yada yada

I have been reading, but mostly re-reading. I felt like loads of Laurie King, so I've re-read everything I had bar Touchstone which I wasn't that keen on, and borrowed whatever was at the library - not much, sadly, people read crime fiction when on their holidays, right? So I didn't get to read The Moor or Justice Hall... I put in a reservation for at least one though. We moved this summer, so I wasn't in the mood for new stuff, I wanted oldies and goodies. I don't think I ever blogged about To Play The Fool - but there seem to be several I never wrote about when I go back to check. Odd that. I think I've read them all bar the two newest ones and the collaborations and e-pubs. I also re-read some Jasper Fforde, and found one I hadn't read, One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing, which is too clever for its own good. When I compare it to the The Eyre Affair, The Fourth Bear (re-read) and Shades of Grey, that all manage to touch on real pain and human problems in between all the puns and jokes ... too much BookWorld is not a good thing.

I've been re-reading Laurie King

but now all our books are packed for the move. I might have to stop by the library.

The anachronistic bits are more noticeable when re-reading, but she's still my friend.

I read my sister's books and returned them

And checked and I'd missed writing anything about the Wil Wheaton ones. Well, she lent me Memories of the Future and  .... Just A Geek it was I believe.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first, and look forward very much to the rest of his Star Trek NG reviews. Surely he must do them all? Just A Geek was a little slower in bits, but I appreciate the honesty. I'm really pleased that he's carved a proper new career for himself. And apropos honesty ... he could do with being even grittier. Just saying fuck doesn't cut it. A bit deeper, a bit more introspective? He tries to protect his family, which is laudable, but to be a great writer you have to be able to get really private I think.

Note

Not one copy of Wuthering Heights will survive this purge.

Janet Evanovich

Found Plum Lucky at the library, it's the one about the leprechaun. One of the supernatural ones, with Diesel. Ok. And I forgot I'd read Plum Spooky so got that too, and read it for lack of anything else to do while lounging next to the playground.

Sue Grafton: V is for Vengeance

This is the one I forgot about the other week! And this is really the one that sort of re-awakened my fondness for characters I thought I'd stopped loving. I liked Kinsey in this one. I was also sort of amused by how made-for-80s-tv the main story was - the gangster-gone-good who falls in love with the mother of a young man his henchmen killed a few years ago. With the descriptions of clothes and all you could almost picture the screenshots. Nuff said.

Stephen Fry: The Liar

What is the point of this book I asked myself after reading a quarter of it, and considered not bothering with the rest. But I kept going, largely because I was in bed sick Wednesday (food poisoning probably, woe me) and ended up reluctantly reading the whole thing. But what was the point remains the focal question. He's put in a caveat on the first empty leaf thingie before the actual book (I forget the word for those empty pages): "Nothing here is true" it says or something to that effect. Having read the second part of his autobiography though I can see that the book echoes his life, so it's sort of true. But of course the book is called The Liar, and in his autobiography he writes how he's been afraid all his life of being discovered to be a fraud and trickster so ... I dunno. It doesn't grab me. The bits that are supposed to be more sincere are not. In a way, perhaps, it perfectly illustrates what Fry tries to say in his autobiography - that he isn't really terribly intelligent, he just has a good memory and is sort of a wit. Being able to see that automatically makes you of more than average intelligence of course. Ta-daa.

On the whole though? Dull. I just didn't enjoy it. Fittingly, it felt insincere and fake. But what's the point of that.

Majgull Axelsson: Moderspassion

Kort inlägg följer: det här var bokcirkelns senaste. Sist jag läste Majgull Axelsson måste varit i högstadiet eller gymnasiet möjligen, och det var nog Rosario är död. Jag minns det som en av de hemskaste böckerna jag läst, och det var nästan första gången det gick upp för mig att det fanns vuxna människor som gjorde barn så illa.

För mig är hon en barn- och ungdomsförfattare alltså (eftersom jag läste boken när jag var ungdom - dålig logik, men sån är jag) - så jag var alltså, i enlighet med Poängen med Bokcirkel, fullt beredd att omvärdera detta. Inledde med avsikten att låna boken på biblioteket, men den är konstant utlånad, så jag skulle köpa den online, men jag glömde, så med typ tre dagar på mig köpte jag den på Akademibokhandeln (som jag normalt inte vill handla i längre - vi saknar alla RIKTIGA LundeQ) för åttifem spänn - hutlöst. Men nåväl. Jag hann! Tur man har semester.

Boken är skriven huvudsakligen från Minnas synvinkel. Minna är ensamstående och föräldralös med en dotter i gymnasieåldern, och man förstår ganska raskt att något hänt denna dotter. Romanen äger rum, med vissa återblickar, under stormen år 2000 som översvämmade Arvika, och en skara människor samlas på Minnas vägkrog den natten och bevittnar den olycka som kommer att avslöja lögnen hon burit för sig själv under det senaste året. Minnas synvinkel är dock som sagt inte den enda, utan varje kapitel byter berättare. Det är ju helt okej. Ett problem är dock att det inte alltid känns så självklart vilka som fått vara berättare. Varför den men inte den. Varför inte dottern? Varför inte läkaren som utnyttjar dottern? Osv. Det finns fler aber, men det mynnar ut i en känsla av att boken blivit klar för snabbt, och inte bearbetats klart. Låt den ligga i byrålådan i fem år till, och ta fram den och skriv lite mer. Utveckla, jobba om. Det kunde blivit så. himla. bra. Nu är det okej. Bitvis väldigt gripande, men mer för att det ÄR det när det handlar om att barn dör än för att BOKEN blivit så fantastisk.

Nåväl, kul att läsa men inte riktigt värd 85 kr helt enkelt. Men jag är nöjd med läsandet.

Catchupcatchup

Janet Evanovich: Twelve Sharp
Refound my love for this series a little.

Lindsey Davis: Alexandria
Ditto. I liked how the big war in the great library is between weeders and non-weeders.

There was a third, but I can't find my note of this at the moment ... I had to return them all to the library you see.

Ray Bradbury is dead.

His books meant a great deal to me when I was a teenager. I've re-read them sporadically, but only blogged the once. Neil Gaiman has something nice up on his blog though, worth looking at.

Nurse Ratched.

That's who the train conductor reminds me of! Beautiful but stiff like.

What? It's a literary comment!

What did I get for my sister then?

Since I had to write about it here? Well, Jenny Lawson's book of almost course, Let's Pretend This Never Happened. Don't come here and accuse me of not being au courant with the blogging world. (But I'm really not.) Bonus: I get to read it later too.

She's not very quick, is she?

My sister, that is. Who clearly doesn't have my blog on a feed because no comment as of yet on the parcel that has arrived. Lordy lord.

The last exclamation brings me to the Sookie Stackhouse novel Living Dead in Dallas, which was part of my last library haul. This is the one where Sookie infiltrates the church belonging to The Fellowship of the Sun, also the one that finds Lafayette dead. The tv series really does a better job of that (I like Lafayette). No. 2 in the series.

Happy birthday little sister!

The other day I wrote a post on my phone...

... but the phone sorta ate it. You have to get it just right when blogging via the Blogger app, I'll have you know. It breaks down and just keeps asking you to switch accounts. Useless thing. Anyway, the post is gone, but what I wanted to tell you was that I went to a second-hand book shop and saw these super-darling paperback editions:

But at 50 kr apiece I'm not buying them, since I'm not, after all, very keen on Agatha Christie. But they were sweet. The next day I went to the Red Cross and checked out their selection and they had NOTHING. I was utterly disappointed.

I've read the new hit fantasy novel Cirkeln (it's being translated and will probably be called The Circle, right?) by Mats Strandberg and Sara Bergmark Elfgren - it's a breath of fresh air on the Swedish fantasy scene, but mostly for doing a great job on describing the kids that make up the coven of witches. The actual witchy bits are so-so really. But worth a read! Very exotic to foreigners I'm sure. Then for the book discussion club we read Sommarboken by Tove Jansson. It was okay. Didn't sing to me. Then I know I've read some other things that I've forgotten now. A shame that. Today I went to the library and I got a heap of paper-back crime fiction I hadn't read - I'll be back.

Bigamy

So I read Jane Eyre, and then The Nine Tailors because I felt like it, and I was reminded that I hadn't blogged about my new Victorian discovery - Wilkie Collins. I downloaded some ebooks because I kept reading that his novels were examples of early detective fiction; and not only that, he wrote about social injustices. Which I felt might be interesting. Oh, and bigamy: Jane Eyre - Mr Rochester wants to be a bigamist, in The Nine Tailors a woman is an unintentional bigamist and her presumed dead husband an intentional one, which is an important part of the plot (the woman is religious and doesn't want her daughters to be bastards for one), shich leads us to Collins's novel No Name from 1862, about a gentleman's daughters who discover, to their shock and surprise, that their parents were not married and that they have no right to their father's anything, including his name. Do you follow my train of thought? Bigamy?

So I'm re-reading Jane Eyre

And there is always something new to discover in good books isn't there? It hasn't been that long ago since I read Bryson's At Home,  and there he writes about how dark life was before electricity. Literally. Whole big rooms lit only by a fire,  a passage from someone's letter or journal describing a dining room dazzlingly illuminated by four candles. For some reason, now, I'm seeing this all through Jane Eyre. So many winter evenings spent in the dark indoors with only firelight. Getting dressed with only the last rays of moonlight to see the buttons by. It's so very specifically described: the school rooms at Lowood with long tables crammed full of girls of all ages, lit by a pair of candles per table. That scene where she meets Mr Rochester at the stile - it's almost dark then; my memory has been fooled by films I think into remembering it as daylight. When Jane returns to Thornfield she goes into Mrs Fairfax's room and sees Pilot by the light of only the fire. Everything so shadowy, always. She needs a candle, and rings for the servant. A candle. To walk upstairs with and change by.

The Farseer Trilogy

My colleague, who is totally into fantasy and science fiction (more Star Wars than Star Trek, sadly), said I should read Robin Hobb. So why not, I said, borrowed the first Farseer book (Assassin's Apprentice) and really liked it. Then I wanted to read the rest, and they were lost in the library. Sigh. My little sister had them though, so I made her bring them to me. Win! Exstatic review can be found here. Myself, I shall confess to becoming a little bored. It went on and on towards the end. Props for a sad, melancholy ending, but it took longer than it should have. I lost the magic. I made my sister bring me the other books set in that universe, and now I'm not feeling so inclined to read them, which makes me feel bad. I'm a selfish, bad person. I'll make it up to her with chocolate pie on Easter Monday.

When in doubt...

... re-read Jane Eyre.

Dr Thorndyke

This has been my Ebook reading project, y'all. I spent my winter commutes reading Thorndyke novels like crazy. Everything Aldiko had to give me, I believe. Let's make a list first.

Three books in three days. Or maybe it was closer to five. And other stuff.

I am, at a guess, thirty books or so behind. It's so much it isn't even funny. I should just write the title and the author in a post, and leave it at that, instead of saving it and thinking I'll catch up - how can I? I also have a few on the draft list actually, so maybe it's more like forty. I honestly find this very depressing. I have no internet persona at all these days, apart from a Facebook account. And let's face it (hardehar), no internet persona is more boring than the Facebook persona. It's not cool at all.

My husband told me once that I moaned too much on my blog about how bad it was and how I never had time to blog. Well let's face that too - he's right, yet the heart must say what the heart is full of to paraphrase a Swedish saying. Where the bloody hell else am I to give out about this? I've been really grumpy these past few days and snapped today with Maxima, telling her how I never got any computer time at home and she lost patience with me and said I should stop being such a martyr and just ask instead. But I don't want to have to ask. Feels like I have to ask to do everything, I can't just do stuff. Need to sort this out.

Right, Livejournal part over. Good Friday today. Mr Bani is watching the Scorsese film, The Last Temptation of  Christ. Minima is sitting in the armchair next to him with headphones in her ears. Watching but not listening, I suppose. I have not given up the internet for Good Friday. I can't find the post where I did.

The last three books I read where three paperbacks I picked up in Myrornas, where you can still on occasion find second-hand paperbacks at a decent price (which means no more than ten crowns, thankyouverymuch. Fecking Stadsmissionen think they can get away with thirty. I'm all for charity, but I'm not buying Lee Child for more than ten crowns.) So one of them was a Lee Child, one was a Charlaine Harris, and one - oh joy! was an Ellis Peters.

I want to read some of these alright

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/07/lloyd-shepherd-top-10-weird-histories

The Mortal Engines series

Let's save some time and assume I'll read all of these eventually, although now I've only read the first two. I got Maxima the first one for Christmas and she liked it so much she used her Christmas gift vouchers to buy the next two. I'd have read the third except she's plodding through them slowly herself. In an hilarious aside, we learnt yesterday that Minima has struggled through book one when she was in Tunisia last summer - you could've knocked us over with something quite light when she told us. She's normally so anti-fantasy and science-fiction. But she had nothing else to read when her friend had dropped off for the night, so she succumbed. And hated it.

I'm not completely sold either. It reminds me of a bunch of other stuff, ideas slightly cobbled together, and it lacks a little bit of that character depth you need in books of this sort, otherwise it's just cool imagery. Cool here means, like, steampunk. Which is so wow. Second book gets better though. Bonus points for author not being afraid to kill characters. And of course for concept, which is municipal darwinism in extremis and literally so.

It's being filmed, apparently - what isn't, these days? It'll probably end up loud and annoying. 

2 x Diana Wynne Jones

Borrowed two children's books to read during my Christmas holidays - The Magicians of Caprona and Eight Days of Luke. Alright. The former could make a great film in the right hands. It would have to be in Italian, and it would be so much fun with a good Italian fantasy film for kids wouldn't it? Make a change from the anglocentricity of the genre. The latter was amusing with its take on Norse mythology. I liked the open, slightly ambiguous ending.

End of the world

What better way to start 2012, after such a long hiatus, than with the myth of Cthulhu? Apparently (I read this somewhere) the alleged Armageddon of this year as "foretold" by the ancient Mayans has been linked by some to the entirely fictional Cthulhu monster. Who'd have thunk.

So, The Call of Cthulhu by Howard Phillips Lovecraft then. I'd never read this before, and I must say that I expected more given how influential the concept became in popular culture. The short story is written in that sort of documentary fashion of somebody piecing together notes and snippets of information. I think it workable in say Dracula, but it's not very scary here. Didn't grab me, didn't scare me. A little dull, in fact. Also, don't really see why the freed Cthulhu should so easily be re-imprisoned by a mere earthquake. Hrmpf.

Squeeee!

Very excited about new Hunger Games trailer! Although it looks a bit average really. Not like it's going to be Kubrick taking on The Shining or anything. But I'm so going to see it. Win win win.

Terry Pratchett: Pyramids

I'd written a post about this on my phone - pics and everything - but the Blogger app for Android is very unstable and completely melted down when I tried to publish. I had to forcibly restart and do all kinds of things to even erase the faulty post. Piece of rubbish.

So I'm just going to note that I read this and well it's a Pratchett and I enjoyed it. This is the one where the heir to the Faraonic throne is educated as an assassin before having to return to be king. Pyramids - cosmic energy - time - kaboom. There.

Patti Smith: Just Kids

I'm writing on my way from work to my book club, ergo am tapping away on the phone, ergo no deep thoughts today. Sadly not even a picture of the book in question on my lap; the rental has been returned to the library. ("Rental"  because it was overdue and I'll have to pay for my forgetfulness. Oops.)  Couldn't get hold of it in English, so read the translation - btw, it's a bit annoying when they don't translate the title, because if you're not up to speed on your library codes you can't tell which search result is the English one and which is the Swedish one. Translation ok, possibly brought out certain repetitions and mannerisms on Smith's writing for the worse. Hard to be sure without reading both obviously. 

The book is about Patti Smith's relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, how they met in the late 60s and how their careers got started in the following decade. Everyone seems to love this book, I've heard no-one gripe about it yet. Me - not sure. A lot of names in it I don't know, especially towards the end. The first half is the best and feels genuine, moving and heart-warming. I feel a great deal of sympathy for these kids and their dreams. I lose interest as the book progresses though. Despite professing to be The Story, honest and true, she seems to be writing more about surfaces. A lot of talk about how artists are special and not like other people - without really explaining the art to me. A lot of talk about how they're all about their inner lives, yet all the time telling me what they're wearing. It starts to feel - horror of horrors - pretentious. And I really don't think she is.

Be interesting to hear the others.

Charlie Higson: The Fear

Not read so much as skimmed. Can't quite stand all the dying, but I have to know how it all turns out. He ties up some loose ends in this one, bringing different characters together (and then killing them off). "St George's" zombie army is on the march now and becoming a real threat, just as megalomaniac David plants spies to destroy the nerds at the Museum of Natural History from within. It's still bloody terrifying, thank you very much Mr Higson. I think I even dreamt about it tonight.

Terry Pratchett: Nation

I felt like laughing a little, so I borrowed two Terry Pratchetts that I felt sure I hadn't read. This is one of them, a freestanding novel -  not Discworld that is. Just like the Discworld though it's set in a parallell universe.

Arnaldur Indriðason: Kvinna i grönt (Silence of the Grave)

Many many years ago (maybe a lifetime if you happen to be Minimus, maybe even a lifetime if you happen to be one of his big sisters - I don't recall exactly) I read a favourable review about Arnaldur Indriðason and then promptly forgot the name. I remember going to the library and asking the librarian if they had well, it's a detective story? Icelandic? There's an I in the name? She did know the name, told me, and I promptly forgot. (For some reason I couldn't borrow a book right then, maybe it was summer and they were all out. Summer tends to be crime fic time in Sweden.) Since then I have actually come across the name enough times to remember it myself; it's been mentioned somehow or other perhaps once a year and trickled itself into my consciousness. However, I still didn't read the books.

Some Harry Dresden

Well, I wanted something easy, and the library carries the books. And it's nice and distracting. However, by now I'm rather full and finished with Dresden I feel. I think I'm going to move on to some Terry Pratchett because I'm in dire need of fun. Don't want serious.

I've read the second book, Fool Moon (har har har - it's actually pretty funny, didn't notice the pun until now) and books 6, 7 and 10 - Blood Rites, Dead Beat and Small Favor. I didn't read them in order though, which was an experience in itself, a bit like that film with your man who has no long-term memory and the film shows what's happened to him backwards. You know which one I mean.

Slight Mary Sue warning on The Dresden Files. Not bad though. Really not - all characters are fleshed out and complex enough to avoid the serious Mary Sue-ing. A little too much martial arts, in the sense that you can tell that Butcher has been imagining the fights in his mind beforehand. Down to the last blow. But you can skim a lot of that stuff.

My favourite part of Butcher's writing is that he manages to add in a self-deprecating comment every time things get too cliché. I'd give an example, but I'm not keeping notes. Like, Harry cracks one-liners and then mentally comments on how on-type that was. It shows a nice sense of what we in Swedish call självdistans.

Correction

I do have something to read.

I'll alternate between this and Harry Dresden.

Tomas Sjöberg (Deanne Rauscher, Tove Meyer): Den motvillige monarken

Kolla, kungen! På väg till bokcirkeln, hann med tåget med ett nödrop. Detta är dagens bok, av mig lånad på bibliotek. Var ju synnerligen aktuell 2010 då den kom ut, märkligt nog aktuell även nu när kvällspressen skrev om någon intervju som Camilla Henemark gjort nyligen om skandalen. Hon är, för den som missat det, den enda av kvinnorna i denna cirkel runt kungen som namnges, och hon pekas också ut som kungens regelrätta älskarinna. Inte bara utpekas, hon säger det själv och i den ovan nämnda intervjun menar de att kungen erkänt det han också då han talade om att vända blad och sådär.

Boken inleds med en evighetslång beskrivning av kungens uppväxt och familjebakgrund (nazister). Här citeras barnjungfrun, systrar, rektorer, officerare från självbiografier och intervjuer. Bilden vi ska få är av en gosse som inte ville bli kung. Gott så - tråkigt men gott. Sen kommer vi till snasket. Kaffeflickor och allmän sexism, fester, festlokaler som ägs eller hur det nu var av kriminella. Sjöberg säger att han vill lyfta hur anmärkningsvärt och olämpligt det är att vår statschef umgås i sådana kretsar, hur han skulle kunna utpressas osv. Att det inte i första hand är moraliserande så. Men det är det. Jag tycker inte vi får någon analys av kungen, så bakgrunden känns lite jahapp, och den stora poängen är snasket. Klart som sjutton det är moraliserande, och varför inte säger jag. Med en mer fokuserad och ärlig bok hade kanske debatten kring den blivit bättre. Ni dog den i Anne Rambergs upprörda tal om elakt skvaller. Jag tycker att bokens historier är fullt trovärdiga, och hade det rört statsministern hade det tagit hus i helvete. Varför tillåts det glömmas när det rör statschefen? Konstigt konstigt. Men som sagt, egentligen inte jättebra som bok. Läsvärd dock!

I have nothing to reeeeeaaaaaaad!

So goodnight then.

Nicola Upson: An Expert in Murder

I actually bought and read this after a tip here on the blog the other day, after I'd written about Josephine Tey (thanks oh swine of madness!). I got so curious, the library didn't have it and I realised they probably wouldn't get it either, so I thought what the hell. Treat myself even though it's an unknown quantity so to speak. Excellent service as per usual at The English Bookshop (link to the right), I ordered online and chose pick-up as delivery option. When I popped in for it your man in the shop said that he'd heard lots of great things about it and that the second one was supposed to be even better, so I was very favourably disposed towards the novel before ever cracking the spine. Although, luckily, not MADLY excited, thanks to the moderate wording of my internet tipper-offer there (a person I've internet-known for years and whose opinion I can trust, I feel) - " I quite enjoyed it, worth looking up for a bit of light fluff" she wrote, and I didn't really expect more then. Good for that, because if I had been I'd've been disappointed.

Spoiled

Keep losing track of what's happening on stage, because I'm waiting for the murder mystery. This is the fault of Nicola Upson (more on that tomorrow). Also maybe I've read too much Ngaio Marsh in my life. Maybe. 

Charlaine Harris: An Ice Cold Grave

Am sitting on the train, same as every workday, but today is Saturday and I'm headed for the capital to go to the theatre with mah hubby. I'll say this for weekend travel - it's nice, nay fantastic, to have no trouble getting a seat. Amen. So why not avail myself of my seat (including the one next to me since the train is far from full) to write a blog entry? I'm sure you all agree, and with that you-all let's move to the South (well, North Carolina)  and re-visit Harper Connolly who sees dead people. Rather, feels them; rather, the presence of their bodies. In this one she discovers the hunting ground of a serial killer, whose anger at being thwarted might lead to her own death. Also, she has a fair bit of fairly explicit sex. Very difficult to read sex scenes on a crowded train I'll have you know. One glances through the page hoping none of the standing passengers will look down and see the phrase "his phallus was long, not as thick as some I'd encountered" (oh Charlaine. Phallus. Why?).
Quite a dark book. I like that side of her, it's genuine I feel. Like I've said a million times. Fluff, but not the worst kind. Reading this I was also struck by how well her books work to describe the minds and culture of the places she writes about. Small-town, semi-rural, bigoted yet capable of goodness America.

Charlaine Harris: Dead to the World

This is the one in which Eric is cursed by witches, remembers nothing about himself and has to hide out at Sookie's house. And Jason is kidnapped and we're introduced to the were-panthers of Hotshot. I've been wanting to read this in a not-very-active sort of way, because it's been a gap in the storyline for me - read the ones before and after, so knew what would happen but just hadn't read it.

Think I spotted several plot flaws, but I didn't keep notes (you don't when you're standing up reading on a moving fecking train) so don't remember specifics. Things like Sookie guessing something and two pages later treating it as fact. I do so wonder what Harris could turn out if she took her time instead of being so productive, but seeing as all her heroines (bar one) have low-paying jobs, struggling to get by, and Harris clearly writes from experience, I certainly don't blame her for wanting to keep a steady income coming in.

I'd've taken one of those fabulous book-in-my-lap photos, since this was a commuting read alright, but I forgot the book at home today and am tapping this out just before starting a new one. Hey ho.

The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher: Storm Front

My sister listens to these as audio books, mostly because James Marsters does the reading. She readily admits that her keenness for the Dresden Files may have more than a little to do with Marsters' delicious voice, but claims that they're fun even without this added spice. This is the first novel and introduces Harry Dresden to us in a classic noir private-dick-in-the-office scene. Except Dresden is a wizard. It's a fun idea, a kinda pastisch on noir with a supernatural twist.  I suspect that the subsequent books start suffering from that repetition of facts that is the bane of all serials, but so far so relatively snappy. A few lame one-liners. Not too many. Very filmable, but not written as if this is the author's main hope. The image of a tall, lanky guy stumbling around in trackie bottoms, cowboy boots and some sort of trenchcoat while shouting pseudo-latin spells is pretty original. Not all original (hello, Buffy) but ok. Good good. I might read more if I stumble across any.

This is the one in which people's hearts are magically ripped out of their chests by an evil wannabe wizard.

Oh, note to my sis: the love interest is TOTALLY OBVIOUS.

Incidentally

Parked my bike next to the window of a second-hand book shop ten minutes ago, and walked past their display on my way to the station. Among the children's books I noticed a book by Christianna Brand, about a little Matilda. Huh, don't think I knew that she'd written books for kids. That would be interesting to read ... but I'd want it in English obviously. Note to self, however.

Josephine Tey: The Daughter of Time

Reread this today. Well, started earlier, but finished today. Read it years ago, but this copy was a gift from my cousin. It's a nice one, because it has the portrait of Richard III on the cover, which is helpful considering that the story starts with that and they keep referring to it. I love this, even though I do lose track of some of the historical characters. Mr Bani started to read it in an attempt at solidarity with my hobbies but he wasn't too keen apparently. Philistene. I wonder if the Babes in the Tower are ever mentioned in the tv series, The Tudors I mean? I think not, right, it starts with Henry VIII doesn't it? And it's his father who is the true murderer, according to Tey. Great book anyway.

Lee Child: The Enemy

Bought myself this second-hand. Quite enjoyed reading it. It's a prequel, set before Reacher leaves the army, starting just as 1989 turns to 1990. The Berlin Wall is coming down and Reacher discovers that the various fractions in the military are panicking over what the new world order will mean for them. The best part for me was that Reacher and his brother Joe visit their mother in Paris, and she obviously lives right next to where I lived when I was an au-pair. Awesome! Brought back memories that did. Pretty nice complicated plot, but not too hard to follow, despite military jargon and all. Am writing this on phone on the train home, so will try to insert snapshot of book on my lap, on lovely Boden bag my sister gave me.

David Leavitt: The Page Turner

A present from my cousin in Dublin, who always gives me books. I'd never heard of this and after glancing at the cover asked her sceptically if this wasn't terribly sentimental, but she said no no. I think after reading it I'd say yes, yes. It gets great reviews according to the back, not just from The Gay Times but from more, shall we say, independent press too. But me, I don't really get it.

Colin Cotterill x 3 (2? No, let's say 3)

As previously stated I read Anarchy and Old Dogs before going to Ireland. That's the one in which Dr Siri discovers a plot to overthrow the Communist government and thwarts it. He's not having the Royalists back even if his hopes of an equal and free Lao society are turning to Cold War Communist red tape dust. I liked it so much that I got my cousin the first one in the series - no, the second I think it was.  I've yet to read it myself though ironically, and the library doesn't have the first three at all. So I might buy them. However, I'm sort of reading them in order, as I read Curse of the Pogo Stick next and after that The Merry Misogynist. I liked the latter the least; not because it isn't well crafted or whatever, but because it introduces the by now rather cliché serial killer theme. I kept imagining this being filmed. There's already so much on-screen these days portraying  violence towards women - rape scenes, naked mutilated bodies, CSI and so on. As Wennstam notes in Alfahannen somewhere, this too serves to objectify, however much the creators may think it's to inform or whatever. Bla bla. Anyway, felt a bit meh, same old same old. Curse of the Pogo Stick was quite obviously written in order to introduce the plight of the Hmong people more than anything else, but that's okay. I liked it better. One con is that there is a fair bit of repetition "Dr Siri remembered how he only a few months ago had ..." and then a quick recap of the last book. You know. But fairly inevitable in this type of literature. Take the good bits and enjoy them, I say! I like these a lot. I think I'll buy myself the first three - I can always donate them to the library after I've read them.

Läsvärt

En väldigt bra artikel, ett utskrivet tal närmare bestämt, i dagens SVD. Selma är ju ruskigt bra.

Whoohooo let's BURN this candle!

If you know what cartoon I'm referring to with that line, you win a wink.

Anyway, so we've had a busy summer, during which I have largely not been at the computer. I have been reading however, so shall now try to catch myself up with some posts over the next few days. My husband said something a while ago about how my blog posts were mostly me moaning about how bad the post is and how I have no time to blog - but hey, there you are. It's true and I feel sad about it. All the smart thoughts I have in my head while reading, all the associations and connections I make; even if I make notes I can't get it down. Ah well.

Luckily I've been reading nothing too strenous. I had two weeks holiday before we went to Ireland for another two weeks (where we had an absolutely glorious time) and I'd started two new obsessions then: Eric Ambler and Colin Cotterill. Of the two, Ambler is the easiest to spell, so I'll start with him.

Ursula Le Guin: The Other Wind

I'd missed reading this, the last part of the Earthsea books. Series. Saga. It does tie up some loose ends that had bothered me previously, but I didn't realise it until I read this. The dragons are explained, the oddness of the depressing afterlife ... Much better way to finish things up that in Tehanu, which I thought was the last one (clearly I never pay attention nor do I do research - The Other Wind is from 2001! Talk about out of it!).I still don't think she should necessarily have resurrected the series after the 1970s classic trilogy, but there you go.

Wheeeeeeeee!

Going to Ireland tomorrow, the whole lot of us! I'm bringing library books to read on the trip - very daring, but it's two new (to me) authors that I found and now want to read all of. If that makes sense.

Xiaolu Guo: UFO in Her Eyes

In my youth a long time ago I read a collection of short stories about Chinese peasants and their lives. Give me a year and I might remember the title and author, but it's not likely - anyway, the point is that this was the first time I came across "Miserable China". My image of China was heavily influenced by what one must bluntly call positive racism - people of learning and dignity, with an innate wisdom that they hold on to despite the suffering imposed on them even during Cultural Revolution etc etc. Invented paper and gunpowder, much more advanced really than Europeans etc etc. However, that book and this one talks of life as a peasant in China as dusty, crude, coarse and hopeless. Not only, obviously - but the contrasts between the glittering surface of modern Shanghai and these hamlets that by Chinese standards are tiny (only 300 or so inhabitants) where people still can't read and have no way of independently connecting to the outside world are immense. (I remember when I read the short story collection I was shocked at the language, the swearing. I thought Chinese was automatically more refined. In UFO in Her Eyes the favourite expressions are Bitch Bastard and Cow's Cunt - colourful.)

Charlie Higson: Double or Die

Why not? I said to myself, and read the third book in the Young Bond series, since the first wasn't in. In this one Bond and his group of friends discover that Eton's teacher of mathematics has been kidnapped, since he sends them a coded letter that only the student crossword buffs can decode. Pretty much same as last time. I pondered a little on how it seems as though Higson is gradually breaking Bond down into a sociopath, but I'll have to read more of the books to tell. I also think boarding schools seem so shite. And that's it from the Efficient Blogging Machine.

Jasper Fforde: The Last Dragonslayer

His kiddie book, borrowed 'coz I saw it. Funny, but Fforde can be a bit tiresome when there is too much Clever floating about and there is a bit here. Nonetheless I enjoyed it and wouldn't mind more of this universe. I like the idea of the Ununited Kingdom etc. Read about it more somewhere else, we're on an efficiency roll here!

Kathy Reichs: Spider Bones

Borrowed this in the large print edition, which feels a bit like reading a shout. Anyway, I've gone of Reichs quite a bit, her writing isn't great even if I like THE REAL BONES thankyouverymuch as a heroine and find the actual facts interesting. This is the one where they find a dead man who turns up as reported dead and buried during the Vietnam war, and then find more bones that might be him and go to Hawaii. It's a bit slow and choppy. But still - a fairly good travel book.

Charlaine Harris x 2

One I own, Club Dead, one I recently borrowed, All Together Dead (had a fabulous library haul!). I haven't been following True Blood lately and I don't read the books in any order, only one now and then as they happen to cross my path, so the storyline in Sookieverse is jumping all over the place for me. In Club Dead she turns down a nice romp with the were Alcide because she's faithful to her man Bill who is captured by his maker Lorena in cahoots with the king of Mississippi (seen that bit in the True Blood version), whereas in All Together Dead she's not with Bill at all 'coz he LIED to her and now she's with this were-something or shifter or whatever named Quinn instead and they go to this convention thing and there's a bomb. I remember turning over a book in the series (where? where was I? where did I see this book?) and reading that she gets together with Erik the vamp later on, so my timeline is totally unsequenced here.

(Basically I only want to note down the titles so I can keep track of which ones I've read.)

I done gone did a good deed

A colleague and I got to talking today about how she'd seen all the Twilight films recently and ended up reading the final book to see what would happen. She was surprised at herself because the book was so thick (cue me "one should never judge a novel in advance based on the number of paaaaaaages it's all about the stoooooooryyyyy...") and because it was fantasy. So she was rather pleased with this venture into a new genre, and I immediately tipped her off about the Sookie Stackhouse series. And I wasn't snarky about Twilight.
And now I'm off on my holidays. Good times.

Jack London: A Daughter of the Snows

If I ever ventured to surmise based on my positive recollections of one book that Jack London maybe was worth reading, could write or anything else of a positive nature - consider it revoked. I take it all back. The man was, and his writing still is, obnoxious, chauvinist, monotonous and most of all despicably through-and-through racist, in the vilest pseudo-scientific manner. This book made me gag many many times. All my former prejudices were proven true. Before Adam must be an anomaly; I'm guessing since it's all imagination there's no room for ranting about how Native Americans must be inferior to Europeans (especially the Nordic "races") because otherwise why would the Europeans have won? 

Utter utter shite. Avoid avoid avoid. I took notes but it was ages ago and frankly I don't feel it's worth the effort now (three months later).

Bill Bryson: Made in America and The Lost Continent

Oops, I had started a blog post on Made in America. Silly me. On March 30th as a matter of fact - well, I have no trouble repeating myself, so here goes again. (My husband has pointed out that most of my blog is me complaining about how I never get to blog, how crap I am at blogging, how I never have time for it and so on in aeternum. He isn't wrong. But I got defensive. You had to be there.) I remember now that I had planned to write about these two together since they're both about America. A thematic blog entry, like. Possibly I even had very smart things figured out. I distinctly remember thinking as I read the one that aha! he write about that in the other too! but I'm drawing a blank now and didn't keep notes.

Anyway, so you all should read both. The Lost Continent is about Bryson driving across America to rediscover the country he has left and the road trips of his childhood. It's also I think a form of grieving process since his father's death; this is never the main point, but now and then Bryson's memories are very touching and poignant. Since the book is by now a little older (first published in 1989) it's also by way of being an historical document, almost. Made In America is about linguistics, about how that special kind of English called American evolved. It's tremendously interesting for those of us who like that sort of thing. I especially enjoyed the bits about the oldest records, Pilgrims and all.

Very much recommended, always.

George Sylvester Viereck: The House of the Vampire

This entry was started May 3d this year, FYI. I downloaded this novel to the Aldiko because the author is written up as the man who introduced gay pulp fiction. I was curious alright? No harm in that.

Lasse Berg: Skymning över Kalahari

This book is not translated, but you never know: it might be. Or at the very least someone may write a very similar book in English, and then one can, you know, draw parallells, should one so wish. The title means "dusk over the Kalahari". Lasse Berg is a Swedish journalist who has reported from many war zones over the years, and says that until quite recently he believed in the old idea that humans were intrinsically dark creatures, prone to aggression and violence when thwarted. "The veneer of civilization" you know. Survival of the fittest and throw the weak ones overboard, that sort of thing. Then he started reading about recent research into our earliest development, and changed his mind.

Charlie Higson: Blood Fever

The Young Bond series, so - y'see I'm experiencing withdrawal waiting for the next zombie books. Which, by the way, is set to be an everlasting series now, and I can't say I'm very pleased. Chances are it'll just go on and on and on like fecking Tribe. Anyway, so I took a chance at the library with this. From whence, by the way, it is probably overdue by now. I believe this is the second book, but don't let that stop you, you don't seem to need to read them in order.  I am actually very impressed by the level of action, by how closely Higson follows the Bond template (exotic location, eccentric megalomaniac crook, girl interest - Young Bond isn't that into it though - , explosions, fast boats and cars and so on). Bond is just not a psycopath/sociopath. Yet? Shall we follow him as he gets older and his mind more perverted? (Recently watched a bit of that Bond film with Roger Moore and Jane Seymour, the Haiti voodoo one - Live and Let Die, that's it - what a bunch of psycho racist shite. And Bond's the psycho - the voodoo seems reasonable by contrast.) I think I might borrow a few more this summer for light entertainment. I like his style. I like how he's set things in the 30s or so too. Clever!

Summary: this is the one where young Jimmy-oh is on/in (which is it? surely on?) Sardinia and meets a lunatic art-collecting local "prince" who has kidnapped the sister of one of his schoolmates. All coincidental of course - if real life was like James Bond storylines the police would solve all crimes. They'd go into shops to get a fresh pack of cigarettes and overhear the crooks making plans behind the deodorant shelves.

Bill Bryson: At Home (maybe also Made In America)

My husband gave me this for our wedding anniversary on the 15th of June,  and I didn't read it at first because I thought I'd save it, and reward myself with it after finishing all the blog posts that are waiting - but what the hell. Just a quickie then.

A seriously collaborated mystery

Will this be readable? Clicky. I am intrigued.

Summertime

Summertime means changes in the train schedule, so the 7.13 departs directly from Uppsala instead of coming in from the North (i.e. Tierp), which means that those of us who are always there early have the pleasant luxury of being able to step aboard a waiting train and choosing our seats, instead of jostling like it's the last lifeboat off the Titanic. This is off topic, but it needed to be crowed over. 

Diana Wynne Jones: The Dalemark Quartet

I had a sudden urge to read some Wynne Jones, after Minimus having a phase of watching our dvd of Howl's Moving Castle again. So when we were at the library at one point during a gloriously extended weekend (thank you Christ for ascending and thank you government for 6 of June being a holiday - that was five days of work that was and a half day the day before - oh yeah, thank the union for that) I borrowed all four books of the Dalemark story.

I get a bit vexed with myself for wasting my fantasy-mad childhood reading Alexander Lloyd, who frankly is monotonous when you devour all his books at pretty much once, when I could have been reading Wynne Jones instead. Nothing and no-one is perfect, but Wynne Jones has a lovely wry sense of humour that isn't limited to goofy side-kicks. I like that. At the same time she introduces very difficult subjects in her books.

Happy Anniversary Day + 1!

Our wedding anniversary was yesterday, we've been married fifteen years. To celebrate, my journey home after work was marred by a late bus and a cancelled train. But no matter! Mr Bani got me a lovely surprise present: Bill Bryson's At Home. Just perfect! -  I was looking at that myself on Amazon, wondering whether to hit the buy button. He's a genius for getting good gifts. (I bought him an orchid, which - well, at least it was something.)

Artikel om Dorothy Sayers i SvD

http://www.svd.se/kultur/gatfull-deckardam_6218343.svd

Kommentera gärna om du är positiv, så dränker vi den märkliga person som tycker att Läckberg (!?!?!?!) är bättre. 

Re-reading Harry Potter

I'm on the train at the moment with HP and The Order of the Phoenix in my bag. Sadly, in oh so many ways, that book is as thick as ... oh I dunno - maybe six Gutenberg bibles? not to mention the fact that it's the hardback kiddie edition. I.e. it's conspicuous as hell and I'm too embarrassed to take it out on a packed train.  With the ease built into this Blogger phone app I could take a photo of its massiveness, but due to the above I won't.

I went on this Harry P kick after we watched the last film again not long ago. Of all the films it's my favourite. They manage to convey a feeling of bleakness and realism that lifts the story to a better level. All good science-fiction and fantasy should, ironically, be realistic. I'll get back to that when I write my Tolkien post someday THIS YEAR - see how I've committed myself now? I read that part two of The Deathly Hallows is going to me more spectacular though, all effects and 3-bloody-D I suspect. How utterly boring, predictable and disappointing.

Scarlett Thomas: The End of Mr Y

So this is the one the conductor (ticket inspector?) in my previous post liked so much she had to lean over and tell me. That sounded snarky, but I'm not taking the piss, honestly. I like the community of readers. I posted the picture on Facebook too and my editor friend said it'd be interesting to hear what I thought, because they'd turned it down themselves. So the pressure is on, people.

Laurie R King: The Language of Bees and God of the Hive

Disclaimer: this post was started on May 6th. Adjust all references to times and dates accordingly and make allowances for sketchy memories.

Two days before reading these books (well, one of them, I can't remember which one I was thinking of when I started the draft)  my husband and I walked about the Wordsworth poem We Are Seven (yes yes, initiation of discussion was all his. I'd never read it before, I admit it). And lo and behold the quote from that very poem on page 82 (in one of the books, see above), which would have been meaningless to me only three days earlier. Yesterday I read an article about a recent trend in Japan for divorce ceremonies. A key element was smashing a symbolic wedding ring with a mallet. The broken pieces are placed in the mouth of a netsuke, a frog (not real one obviously), which in Japanese belief symbolizes new beginnings. Page 210 Mary Russell breaks into a house, and her foot brushes against a netsuke on the floor.

Lucky I'm not that crazy, or I'd start thinking I was receiving messages from Above. Of what though? - that would lead to new levels of madness.

Community

And later that afternoon the ticket inspector (conductor?) checked my commuter card, then leaned over and said "that's one of my favourite books".

Not dead!

I'm still here. Just not that much on-leasure-line.

Thursday I stopped by Väsby Centrum and went into the big charity shop there (a very good one!) to panic-shop something to wear to a dissertation party we were going to the next evening (a very smart lady deserves her guests to be at least moderately smartly attired, no?). Naturally I browsed the book section, which was surprisingly good, even for English books. I could have picked up several, including two Lee Childs because whythehellnot, but I settled for The End of mr Y which I've been wanting to read for ages and lo, lo, lo and behold - The Language of Bees.

I've finished the latter and reading it was like meeting old friends. I'll get back to you on that one.

Ken Bruen (ed): Dublin Noir: The Celtic Tiger vs. the Ugly American

My husband got me this book for - oh God, it was either my birthday, which would make this late blogging of it REALLY embarrassing, or else Christmas, which is only a little bit embarrassing. It's a collection of short stories by mostly NA authors, written as you can tell in the noir genre and with Ireland as the subject theme.

My poor husband was on to me for the first few weeks to find out if I liked it, but I didn't read it straight away (this is unusual for me) because I wanted to save it as a back-up book for times of drought. By the time he'd given up I did start reading it, and frankly wasn't too enamoured with it so it got pushed to the side for a while. I finished it this month anyway (by this month I mean March, the time of writing), and have been left with a resounding impression of Meh.

Christine de Pizan: The City of Ladies and Thorstein Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class

I'm putting these in the same post because I happened to read them back-to-back and found a similar theme. I started with The City of Ladies on 8th of March - International Women's Day - and finished with Veblen's two days later. Both books have been hailed as feminist literature, and reading them so close together sparked lots of comparisons in my mind. All brilliant, all very intellectual. Sadly, I can't remember any of them now, I don't think.

Charles Dickens: Hunted Down

Hunted Down was in the Aldiko's mystery section, so I had to read it. It's one of Dickens's typical magazine stories, I suppose, very Victorian damsel-in-distress, sudden ending, swift punishment of the villain, self-sacrificing death and so on. Actually it's quite gripping up to the ending, which is pretty lame. The worst side of Dickens is his Deus ex Machina-trait, and this was full of it. Suddenly people turn out to be the unfairly impoverished good child's rich relations and so on. (This is my first Dickens post, but I have read more of his, I promise, so I know it's a pattern.) Anyway, still enjoyable and dramatic. Also, like all Dickens, in one way or other historically interesting. I liked the descriptions, however brief, of the office work/life insurance business.

A.A. Milne: The Red House

I read this on my phone as an eBook, and here's the link to Project Gutenberg's versions of it. Yay eBooks! It's a bit stupid writing eBooks though. I have to start rebelling against the minuscule as initial trend. Ebooks. Ebooks. Now that wasn't so hard, was it.

Dorothy Sayers: In the Teeth of the Evidence

I'm home sick today, so it's BLOGGING DAY my friends, bloggetty-bloggetty blog! I have six (6) empty posts in my draft lists that are waiting to be filled with content. All I have to do is type like a madwoman for a few hours (with intervals for the Book of Face, random surfing, making extensive watch lists on Ebay and Tradera), then set the posts to be published at regular intervals - and hey presto, it once again looks like I'm a Real Blogger™.  This draft is the oldest, so I'm starting here. Also it's the easiest post to write I think, I probably don't even have to locate the book (a near-impossible task since that ill-fated attempt to organize the shelves alphabetically), since I've read it several times and should remember it anyway.

RIP Diana Wynne Jones

I'm just after reading on Neil Gaiman's blog that Diana Wynne Jones has died. And this is terribly terribly sad. She'll be missed, even by those of us who never had the pleasure of knowing her in person.