In between books sort of

Today I was rudely awakened to bring my son to daycare, despite trying to plug the idea that my husband could do it. I now have to go back to bed, because I'm working tonight and need to be fresh-ish, but since I got up and dressed I'm a bit too perky. So what to do? Sandwich and a cup of warm nutmeggy honeyed milk in front of the PC for a bit, of course, in the hope that it will help. I'm not quite awake enough for a proper blog entry, but I've been reading a bit so I really should. Perhaps tonight at work I can find the peace to tap them down. What I wanted to do today was go to the library to borrow something, but I don't think I'll have the time. Which leaves me with the book I'm reading, Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. Which I'm not sure I like. But given that I was actually getting to be quite a bit annoyed with how formulaic his novels is I should stop complaining and get on with it, since at least this one is not about someone remembering. Hm. You have until say six p.m. to convince me that it's not worth it/worth it a lot. I have also got Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss at home, which should be right up my alley but which I found extraordinarily hard to get into. Ditto for that one, regarding the convincing me that is. Chop-chop.

Seth Grahame-Smith (and Jane Austen): Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Jane Austen is one of the absolutely best writers ever. Really. I know this must be true, because even Harold Bloom has said so (lolz). Of all the reading experiences I've had, this has therefore got to be one of the most dire. It is with pain that I realise that this entry is actually my first Jane Austen entry. And I say this while directing a mental apology to my dear sister who lent me the book. She has actually payed money for it, thinking it to be quite a fun idea to add the scourge of the undead to the comedy of manners that is an Austen novel. I remember her saying that it wasn't completely consistent and that there are illogical bits in it that annoy her a little (such as the English housekeeper in Mr Darcy's Japanese-influenced household hobbling to meet the guests on bound feet), but that she found it quite humorous. My sister, clearly, is a more forgiving and generous soul than myself. I want to drag Grahame-Smith naked through thistles and then make him listen to a Glaswegian slowly read a combination of Little Nell and American Psycho. While I rub his scratches with salt. No, on second thoughts, I'll make him rub the salt into his wounds all by himself. That'll larn him.

The idea would have worked in a comedy sketch show on TV. It would have been quite funny. Every week a new scene from the zombie version of Pride and Prejudice - I can see that working. But as a novel it's awful. You end up skimming it to get to the bits that have been changed just to see how they've been changed. Possibly it might be feasible that someone who has only seen the film or TV series could stand to read it and appreciate the humour. Personally I think that the author would be better off spending time and energy on saving the whales or some similar laudable effort.

It is possible to use well-known characters that have passed out of the realm of copy-right with good results. Jasper Fforde is an example of a writer who does this. What he doesn't do is copy somebody elses novel and stick his own bits in it. He creates something new. There is only one instance in P&P&Z where there is a hint of "more", and that is when Lizzie Bennet refrains from killing a zombie mother and infant-in-arms, out of some sort of feeling of mercy, perhaps. It is entirely out of place with the rest of the book really, which in no way ever delves deeper into how it must really be to live in a zombie-invested Georgian England. Of course, the moment ends there. The only deeper emotions and feelings and true dilemmas in the novel, not to mention storyline, is Austen's. So read Austen, people. Please. Let this one die.

The book cover is fabulous though. Props for that. I'm not churlish.

I DN om deckare

http://www.dn.se/dnbok/deckare-seriemordare-1.893065

Jag måste bokmärka detta för de författare som nämns längst ner ska jag läsa tror jag.

P.G. Wodehouse: Very Good, Jeeves

Mr Bani mumbled something about wanting to read Wodehouse, so when I was in the library I picked up a book that seemed to be an early one albeit not the first, reasoning that surely one wants to start as close to the beginning as possible. Turned out that Mr Bani really wanted to start at the very very beginning (but he might have changed his mind now), so I read it instead. I've never read any Wodehouses, only watched a few episodes of the series with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. I do know that there are people who praise Wodehouse as among the finest of comedy, on a superior level altogether. I dunno myself - sure it's funny, but is it the best ever? I didn't laugh out loud - oh tell a lie, I did, once. I was wryly smiling a lot though.

Being fond of detective fiction from this era it's hard for me not to like this sort of stuff though. There's country house parties, dressing for dinner… familiar terrain all. It's all fresher than you'd think too. My favourite really is Bertie Wooster's inane slang. Such as being server breakfast by Jeeves, and "tucking into the eggs and b.", only to two sentences later be helping himself to "another portion of e. and bacon". That's really very funny.

This is the one with the story of when his friend is in love with a dog-crazy girl and joins in a violent football game to try to win her. (Obviously that's just one story of several, but should be enough for me to recall the book…)

Ngaio Marsh: A Man Lay Dead

This is the infamous paperback I paid 20 kr for in Stockholm. Apparently her first novel, which I didn't realise at the time - I just noticed that I didn't recognise the title so I bought it.
In the early days Alleyn has a journalist sidekick named Nigel Bathgate, who makes his appearance here. Bathgate gets an invitation to a week-end house party through an older cousin. The weekend is going to be spent playing a variation on a murder game - and you guessed it, there's a real murder.
While this has that lovely Marsh touch as far as language goes, and even some of the wry humour, it's still a bit rough. Alleyn is much too quick to feel certain that Bathgate's alibi is solid (based on three cigarette butts in an ashtray - I mean really), and even odder still he takes him completely into his confidence and allows him to join in a spy hunt. That's a bit absurd. But I still enjoyed it well enough.

Jeanette Winterson: Written on the Body

I'm taking a break from cleaning the bathroom to write an entry. Let's see if Minimus wakes up before I'm done, shall we?

Oh yes he did. So short version then.

Basic story: person who has always gone from relationship to relationship finds love, and mistakenly gives it up.

Good bits: gender of narrator never mentioned. Yay for Germanic languages where this kind of game can be played! Very clever, very subtle.

Bad bits: well, like I've mentioned earlier Winterson's poetry and depth can be a bit much for me. Possibly I was annoyed that narrator was an eejit. Read it and see.

Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach

It is, I suppose, really a rather moving little story (more novella than novel) of how desire, inexperience and fear of sex drive a wedge between two young people on their wedding night. In his customary manner McEwan tells the short tale in minute detail, handling and turning over every detail of what is being felt and thought and sensed and said, and afterwards finishes off with a sort of epilogue where we find out how it all ended for the two. Did they sort things out or was this it?

Of the McEwans I've read I actually think it's the best one. There is no discrepancy in it really, no bit that seems shoved in there leaving me wondering whether it belongs. I'm still debating inside whether he's overrated or not - right now leaning towards not. I'm kind of struck by a feeling that he has done historical research even for this little thing set in 1962 - there's a description at the start of how mediocre English cuisine of the time is, and how their wedding dinner's starter is a slice of melon with a glacé cherry on top. Somehow seems rather detailed, as though he'd read an old hotel menu.

I didn't hate it, nor was I that enamoured. I suppose he's not really my kind of writer. Something is lacking. Mostly I'm annoyed that I finished the book before 2 am and I didn't finish work until 8. What was I supposed to do - play Bubbleshooter all that time? Like, omgz.

Zoë Heller: Notes on a Scandal

This book is in many ways better than The Believers, the first Heller I read. It's tighter, tenser, more succinct. Very much a thriller, actually, not that anything particularly violent happens. It becomes a thriller thanks to the narrator, Barbara. Barbara is the friend and confidante of Sheba, the forty-something pottery teacher who has had an affair with a fifteen-year-old pupil. When we enter the story Barbara is living with and caring for a devastated Sheba. She talks about the hounding by journalists, how they write lies and how they exaggerate. She knows the truth, because Sheba has told her everything. So she tells the story of how Sheba started working at the school, how Barbara immediately sensed that here was a kindred spirit, and how Barbara gradually makes herself Sheba's closest friend. Subtly we become aware that Barbara isn't just a normal friend. To remember everything that has happened, she writes, she has made a timeline and marked important events with little gold star stickers. That's our first clue to Barbara's oddness. As the story continues there are more, but since it's Barbara's story the incidents aren't dwelt on, just matter-of-factedly reported. It's very well done. Slowly we learn just how sinister Barbara's desire to be a BFF, to be needed and wanted and loved, can be.

Ironically (or something), one of the reviews quoted on the first couple of pages states that this novel "shares many qualities with Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day." I seem to be swimming in a regular duck pond lately.

Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day

I saw the film of course - I've probably seen it a few times actually. Based on the film I was expecting something a little more passionate and tense, but my impression of the novel is softer, more humorous, although obviously melancholic. There are parallells to Never Let Me Go; as in that book we find out gradually, as our narrator in analytical detail remembers the past, that there was a dark shade to it, something that wasn't as safe and reassuring as you might think. Here the German sympathies of Lord Darlington provide the unpleasant backdrop, as he, easily led, becomes more or less a Nazi puppet while his butler shakes off any personal responsability, certain that Lord Darlington knows what is best and that serving such a great man is a reward in itself.

You read almost the entire book without fully realising why Miss Kenton, the housekeeper, reacts so passionately towards some of the things Mr Stevens does, why she takes things so personally. After all you're reading Stevens point of view, his reminiscing and justification over and of the past. Then at the very very end, there is the bit where Miss Kenton, who is now Mrs Benn, says to Stevens that the reason for her feeling unhappy at times is because she can't help thinking about what a life she might have led.

"And you get to thinking about a different life, a better life you might have had. For instance, I get to thinking about a life I might have had with you, Mr Stevens. And I suppose that's when I get angry over some trivial little thing and leave."

And Stevens admits to himself and us that at that moment, his heart breaks. But he rallies and hides it, and says his cordial goodbyes. This is beautiful. It's wrenching in its simplicity and in its understated emotionality. The great thing about Ishiguro's novels is how you don't understand everything that's been going on until the end, and that unmasking of what it seems is quite important.

It's quite as lovely as Never Let Me Go. Now I wish I had another Ishiguro to read. I feel this wish to stay in that mood or spell that Ishiguro's writing conjures up. Unfortunately I didn't make it upstairs to the English section when I was at the library last, because I brought Minimus and the pram, so I settled for the paperback swivel shelf (with selected novels) they have at the foot of the stairs. I picked up quite a few books then, and the other one in my bag is a Zoë Heller, Notes on a Scandal. It's probably going to be good too, but it's a whole different mood. Hm.

Incidentally, flipping through the last pages of The Remains of the Day I was reading the blurbs about the other books that Faber & Faber Ltd have to offer - I was thinking about how those days must surely be over now, when people read a paperback and proceeded to order another one based on these summaries and reviews, using the order form on the very last page, and I wonder if anybody ever did that at all? Surely people have always gone to book shops? Maybe this was a service used by lonely readers on isolated islands or something? and I noticed how this book was printed in 1999 and the order page has an e-mail address and a web URL for reference, so this must be the dying gasp of an old paperback tradition - anyway, I was reading the suggestions and got quite interested in a much-endorsed novel by Peter Carey called Oscar and Lucinda, "also a major film starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett", and I was a bit amused by the fact that Cate Blanchett's face adorns Notes on a Scandal, since she was in that film too. Such little coincidences form the fabric of life, eh?

Michael Innes: Appleby at Allington and The New Sonia Wayward

I was very surprised at our local library branch to come across these two books, I thought I'd read everything the library had to offer during my last Innes phase. But not so. Goodie.

(After writing those sentences there was an eight-hour pause, during which Minimus and I watched trains on YouTube and splashed in puddles (PLASS IN DE PUDDEL!) and made dinner etc. FYI.)

Appleby at Allington is a bit of a classic whodunnit, featuring the retired Inspector Appleby solving crimes in his neighbourhood. He is invited to Allington Hall to dine with the owner, a former scientist. Towards the end of the evening they go out to admire the son et lumière show that has been set up in the ruins of the original hall, and come across a dead body. Then there is a village fête, and another dead body is found, fished out of the lake. I liked this one, it was funny and well-planned. I enjoy this kind of dry humorous old-school British bantering. The New Sonia Wayward is a stand-alone, more psychological thriller, about a man who finds his successful writer wife dead, and tries to pass her off as being alive but out of the country so he won't lose her money. The tangled web of lies grows ever more dense and complicated for him, and his staff start to blackmail him. It's not at all bad, but unfortunately we see where it's going the minute he spots his wife's doppelgänger on the train.

I'd love to have a Michael Innes collection though, perfect feeling-a-bit-down reading.

Jhumpa Lahiri: Interpreter of Maladies and Ellis Peters: Death to the Landlords!

Ha, forgot about this! Which sadly summarises my view on the author - absolutely lovely writer, empathic, moving and so on, but somehow not quite as memorable as I expected. Now that my memory was jogged I started thinking about the people in this short story collection again, an I do remember a lot about the characters, I can separate the different stories in my head and so on... yet it just wasn't the kind of book I thought about an awful lot when I'd finished it. That said, it's still quality writing. I'm absolutely going to read more of her. Just something not completely absorbing about it. It is her debut of course, I should read her more recent work.

It is refreshing to read about a "normal" India. By which I don't necessarily mean normal from a Western point of view "oh look they have indoor toilets and electricity in India too the darlings", but an India and Indians that are described matter-of-factly. Lahiri writes mostly about the middle-class, in other words the Indians we meet, the ones that travel and emigrate. I recognise myself and yet it's different. It's very good writing, I was just hoping for a little bit more. Maybe in the next one.

Incidentally (and what jogged my memory) I'm reading an Ellis Peters' novel set in India at the moment. She describes India in much the same way as she describes 12th century England - there is an air of aloofness and romanticism that removes the reader from the reality of what she is describing somewhat. This is part of her charm, oddly enough. In Death to the Landlords! the son of her hero Inspector George Felse, Dominic Felse, is travelling in India. The group of people he travels with cross paths with a terrorist bomber group, whose aim, simplified, is to kill land owners. Haven't finished it yet, so don't know if it will be one of his travelling companions who are guilty.

I think I've previously read Mourning Raga from the same series, also set in India. But now I can't find it in the library catalogue... maybe that just means they had to get rid of it. Pity.

Jane Hamilton: A Map of the World and Ariana Franklin: Mistress of the Art of Death

I borrowed the Hamilton novel on a whim, as I said. There was nothing on the cover indicating what it was about, just a lot of positive reviews, so I went for it. Started reading, very happy, good writing - then realised this was about children dying and suddenly was not so keen any more. Hamilton is a very good writer, so I was getting all worked up about it since it all seemed so realistic. I had to put it down. I can't take real horror right now. Which is why I declined to watch the film Grave of the Fireflies that Maxima got from a friend for her 14th birthday. I had a hunch that was going to be about babies dying too, and my suspicions were indeed confirmed when my red-eyed sobbing daughter met me in the hall after watching it the other afternoon. It was the saddest film ever she proclaimed and snivelled off to share her anguish with her friends on msn.

Anyway, I returned poor Jane Hamilton to the library (and of course immediately started to regret it, but done is done, I'm not reading it now so there). I wanted to write about it now though so I can remember to re-loan it sometime when I'm more relaxed (ha).

Which brings me to the second book of this post, an historical crime novel about a serial killer who, ironically, murders children, in a very gruesome way. Why can I take this and not Hamilton's? I think because Mistress of the Art of Death is, in the end, not real. It may be rooted in real history, it may be not flippant about human suffering and pain... yet there is something fundamentally escapist and distant about crime fiction that enables you to read the most horrible things without feeling too touched by them.

I wasn't expecting to like Franklin's novel as much as I did. I suspected that the female doctor Adelia, who comes to Cambridge to help find the murderer by reading the bodies of his victims, would be one of those larger-than-life characters that modern authors like to stick into the past to somehow avenge themselves on all that historical misery. However, Adelia is surprisingly likeable and imperfect, and the society is a rather nice blend of bad mediaeval and good mediaeval. People aren't just super-bigots and dirty xenophobes, but also just... well, people. I'll definitely be reading more of Franklin, it was fun.

Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go

How can I not have read this author before? I'm partly ashamed, partly happy that I have a number of probably most likely wonderful new reading experiences ahead of me. Never Let Me Go will always hold a special place in my heart I predict, because this my friends is science fiction at its best. The Wikipedia entry doesn't call it science fiction, but I've seen some other sites that recognize it as such. Like all good sci-fi it's not about the technology, it's about what it does to us.

The novel is set in a different Britain, in which sterile clones are grown from childhood to adulthood only to become "donors", to have their organs harvested. The story is told by Kathy, in her 30s, who is on her way to settling down to becoming a donor and subsequently "completing". She tells the story of how she grew up in a boarding school for clones, how she and her friends gradually learnt what they were, and she tells about her relationships with the people she loved best. It's very very good. It's slightly marred towards the end, when Kathy and her lover Tommy confront a former teacher from the school, and she "explains all". It feels a bit too summarizing and lecturing, but it's okay.

Recommended heartily. I'm off to borrow all his other works.

Sara Paretsky: Ghost Country

I have some issues with this novel. This is sort of the basic storyline: at a wall in Chicago, a homeless woman thinks that the rusty water leaking through a crack is the blood of the Mother of God. When the management of the hotel, who own the wall (but not the sidewalk) try to drive her away, she is joined by two more homeless women, an idealistic young doctor, an alcoholic former opera diva and a young woman who has run away from an oppressive grandfather. When suddenly a non-speaking, hugely buxom and higly erotic woman called Starr appears, everything really kicks off. Miracles happen around Starr. A local church and some of it's more strident members get more and more annoyed. Ok, so it paints a picture of Chicago that is different, more... fantastical?... than in the Warshawski novels. Fair enough. But the distinct impression I'm left with is that it's an experiment in the genre "what if Jesus came back as...". Starr in this case being Jesus - a non-speaking, extremely sexual creature who can tongue-kiss a woman back to life on an altar. And there is a little bit too much written about her huge bosom and how much she has sex singly and grouply for me to think it altogether flies - simply because I find it unnecessarily "provocative". Possibly I'm just being churlish and over-thinking things.

I really don't like the breast bits though. It's some sort of odd mix between Swedish "sommarbuskis" and US titty bar. I don't get it. I'm missing the love I felt in Bleeding Kansas.

Ursula K LeGuin: The Eye of the Heron

No no no.

I was not happy. Not that the idea is bad - in the future, two different kinds of cultures with their origins on Earth attempt to co-exist on an alien planet. One, the older, is descended from Portuguese-speaking criminals, who were deported when the planet was a prison colony. The younger, "The People of Peace", were also deported, but they are descended from members of a huge peace movement in the spirit of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, a movement so large that it threatened the rulers on Earth. Now the older culture, the Bosses, try to dominate and rule the younger, the Shantih, who want to try the theories of peaceful resistance in a revolt.

While I love the imagination present in the description of the alien world, the book gets overly political and preachy. Not subtle enough.

Annie Proulx: Postcards

I'm seven books behind now, so I'm going to have to hurry to make the blog match my reading (I'm on book eight, the Ngaio Marsh I mentioned).

As expected, I loved this book. In the 1940s a young man commits a murder in a corner of his father's (one day to be his) farm. To conceal this he runs away, and spends the next 40 years moving about the West, taking odd and any jobs - mining, trapping, bone hunting for paleonthologists... for a while he has a farm, but loses it. He sends postcards home but never has a return address, so he never finds out what has happened to his family and their farm. Instead he keeps an image in his memory of how it was. We read what happens to him, and to his family, and to the US during these 40 years. It's tremendously moving and I devoured it. One of those books you can't put down.

My one quibble is that the postcards sent, that are reproduced at the start of every chapter, are illegible in the small print of the paperback. It ruins the story a little, to be honest.

The Wikipedia entry on Annie Proulx teaches me that she has written some science fiction stories early in her career. I'd love to read them.

Library visit today

I've been dipping into my small stash of (second-hand...) books I've bought so it was time for a library trip. Oh, I never wrote about my visit to a second-hand book shop in Stockholm not long ago - they wanted more than 100 :- for old Ellery Queens. The audacity. No wonder they had so many. I found a rather worn Ngaio Marsh novel the title of which I forget at the moment and they charged me 20:- for that.

But today I got:

Paretsky: Ghost Country - I was so pleased with Bleeding Kansas that I wanted to give another stand-alone a try

Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go - because why not, never read him

Proulx: Postcards - want more of her, more more

Hamilton, Jane: A Map of the World - on a whim, fell for the blurb

Le Guin: The Eye of the Heron - because I remain faithful and this might be good.

So I'll be alright for a while.

Sara Paretsky: Bleeding Kansas

I have been having a really bad day, for no other reason than a) I'm just feeling very down at the moment, and b) I'm trying to drill three holes in the living-room wall, with less than stellar results. Let's not go there. At one in the afternoon I broke down in tears and decided to take a break and write this blog entry instead to take my mind off wall craters. The instant I sat down my middle daughter rang and wanted me to pick her up from school because she wasn't feeling well. Now it's half-past ten at night, I sit down again, and at the first click of the keys my husband leans over to say that he took a facebook test to determine which ordinary thing he is (apparently he is sliced cheese, which is actually rather funny).

But I haven't lost my train of thought yet. I may if he speaks to me again.

Paretsky writes in the foreword that she grew up in Kansas, something I didn't know. It shows however that she's writing about ... how should I put it ... about people she understands and respects and loves, about a part of the world that she has deep feelings for. Unlike in a Warshawski novel, the main characters here aren't very savvy or politically aware, but "simple" farmers who take a "simple" pride in growing food that feeds people. They are patriotic and trust that the news is reported correctly and that the government knows its business. They are religious and church-going, and incorporate this into their daily lives. This doesn't make them idiots or despicable. There is no sarcasm here, no cynicism. I found this very endearing, very moving, and it gripped me all the way to the end.

The novel centres on three Kansas families that long ago settled together, worked together and fought slave-owners together, but now are estranged. The main families are the Grelliers, the "normal" family, and the Schapens, members of a deeply conservative church and run by a xenophobic and hate-filled matriarch. The main subplot is the birth of a red heifer at the Schapen farm, something with deep significance to a group of Orthodox Jews and to the conservative Christians (seriously, this is, what, the third novel I read featuring a red heifer. I should have kept track and added labels. Mental note.). There are a lot of other little plots and ideas - like how ludicrous it is to imagine that you can live in solitude in the country, where everyone talks about your affairs, how the Iraq conflict tears families apart, how grief can destroy a person, how religion can be twisted.... It's quite boxily written, yetI really liked it. There is something so true and respectful at the base of it. The boxiness is part of the whole aura. Oh, I can't explain myself, I can see that. Forget the literary criticism (attempts at). I actually cried reading this. I was touched at the pain the parents felt when their son died in Iraq. The simplicity of it, the way the world is changed for everyone and they don't know how to handle it - it's well described without in any way being too political and righteous. I would have expected Paretsky to be more cynical towards these Bush-following Republicans, but no. She understands, she respects, she grieves with them. When they sin, she doesn't judge. She tells the story. I had a great reading experience with this. Objectively, I can see that this is not the most astounding novel the world has seen - emotionally, it struck a deep chord. Funny how that happens. I'd recommend it now to anyone.

Annie Proulx: The Shipping News and Close Range

I’ve been reading all this Proulx at that time of year just before the new greenery has started growing, when it’s as though only the skeleton of nature is there. The bare bones of it all, ready for sculpting as it were. Even though the forest is full of trees you can see so far. No leaves obscure your line of vision. The ground is flat, covered in dead grass, and it feels as though I could walk anywhere, just fix my gaze on a spot far away and start hiking. I can’t see any obstacles – or rather, they are all in plain view; they haven’t been hidden yet. Even though I can tell that it’s all ready for new growth, bursting with life, it also seems so vulnerable. It’s such a contrast to the almost perversely opulent wealth of foliage brought by July. Walking into the forest then you are surrounded by different shades of green, it all closes in on you and I for one get these ideas of building a secret house deep in among the trees (an idea that has stuck with me for many years, ever since I read The Prince of Central Park by Evan Rhodes as a child). In these months of spring such an idea seems ludicrous, there is no secrecy no matter how much you’d want it. You can’t even thrown an apple core under a bush and expect it to be hidden – all rubbish comes out in the open.

This may sound like a post about Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest, but no, I do have a Proulx-y point: I wonder if part of how much I’ve enjoyed her books is the fact that I’m experiencing a similarly bare landscape as the ones she writes about. Or, at least it feels like bareness is a huge part of it – a wide open sky, endless plains or endless sea … sparsity and rough weather (the last bit perhaps doesn’t apply to my situation. It’s been a bit cold and windy, sure, but that’s it.). I suppose in a way I’ve only had to look out the window to relate, to get my own illustrated version of what I’m reading. Nature suiting the tone of the novel.

I’ve seen the film made of The Shipping News, some years ago. I can’t remember that it made a great impression on me. I think I was kind of interested in how it had an edge of grit and pain, even though it was mostly lost in Julianne Moore’s lovely face. This edge was an echo of the book, I see now, of all that Annie Proulx writes. Like I said before, she writes about people. And bad things happen to people, and yet they go on living, and perhaps they even turn out wonderfully well, considering. Possibly Lasse Hallström was a good choice of director, since when he’s at his best he does a fine job of showing real people. But the novel is much more complex, shows a lot more nuances and delves more into the many more or less quirky characters that populate the pages. A scene in the book that’s a little bit funny would in the film become slightly cheesy I think, “local odd-balls dropping one-liners in pub” typ of thing. But it all works on paper. It’s very very good.

Close Range is the collection of short stories that includes Brokeback Mountain, of cinematic fame. I still haven’t seen the film, but the short story is great. All of them are, but some I like more than others. There are more marvellous names, by the way and of course: Scrope, Freeze, Muddyman, Wrench. Some of the stories are realistic, others, like A Pair A Spurs have a fantastic edge.

I've been thinking about all the things I would like to say about Proulx for more than a week now, but they slip my mind. I'd like my words to be a punch in the face, a command to read this author, but I fall short of that. So just take my word for it. I seldom read authors that really touch me, that make me remember so much of what they've written, but this is one of them. One of those that make you genuinely glad that you haven't read all the author has written yet. You still have some to look forward to.

Gibberish

Half an hour ago I woke from a dream in which I was wandering in Israel/Palestine and found skeletons of gibbon apes along the road. It was very real. I just caught myself thinking "what I pity I didn't take a photo".

I am seriously wondering if my recent reading of Annie Proulx inspired this fanciful flight of my subconscious. It's almost as though I can hear the dreamy background music.

I'll be back with Proulx posts, count on it.

Ursula K Le Guin: The Word for World is Forest

I wanted to re-read this because it had been a long time. I'm beginning to find the fore-words more interesting than the books themselves, actually. Here Le Guin calls the novel a little preachy - "overly moralising". She wrote it during frustration at the Vietnamn war. Now that she told me I noticed, but the story does stand up well anyway I think. It's just a classic in the genre. And that's all I have time for, but no matter (dunna mattuh) because you can google it for wiser words.

Nick Hornby: A Long Way Down

On a rooftoop on New Year's Eve four people meet and queue up to jump to their deaths. Obviously, queuing for suicide is socially awkward, so they end up not jumping, and then they end up becoming an unlikely group of not-friends-at-all-really.

It's not the best and most gripping tale of depression I've read, although Maureen's story comes closer than the others. It's just too funny and light-hearted. Then, Hornby would be the first to admit his failure in the Serious Literature department, so it doesn't matter (dunna mattuh as my son says). I liked it. I like Hornby. But his name is hell to type, it keeps coming out as Horby or Hienby.

Annie Proulx: Bad Dirt - Wyoming Stories 2

I haven't even seen Brokeback Mountain, folks.

Curiosity prompted me to get this, and also, short stories are good to read when interruptions are frequent (darn those nightly rounds when I'm working). I'm glad I did, because I found it quite marvellous. Not that every story was a masterpiece, but it was on the whole very good. In Proulx nobody is a hero I think, instead people are just people. This sounds simple, but most authors can't really write that simply, just about people. It's odd.

Some of the stories are about a little three-bar town called Elk Tooth. These are a little more humourous and feature the same sets of characters. A bit more crazy, like the one with the game warden who discovers an opening straight to hell in the forest, to which he commences to bring the poachers he catches.

I'm also enamoured with the names. Does everyone in Wyoming have fantastic names? Wolfscale, Conkle, Cokendall, DeBock.

And most of all she manages to make us fall a little bit in love with Wyoming. Without glorifying anything, least of all the people, remember, she tells us that it's worth loving. It inspires devotion and love. Maybe this love destroys it too. But I'd like to go there and see the clear sky...

Zoë Heller: The Believers

I picked this up on a whim because Heller's previous novel, Notes on a Scandal, is endorsed by Zadie Smith on the cover. This one was apparently filmed - I'd never heard of it. I'm so out of it. (Like that story of the sport's journalist who gets roped into reviewing Macbeth when the theatre critic is sick, and writes an unbiased enthusiastic review, having no preconceptions about Shakespeare - indeed no idea of who he was. This is me sometimes in questions of culture. Except I have Google to ruin me.)

Anyway, Zadie is right, and this is a great book. I thought it would be funnier (black humour, but nevertheless), but it mostly isn't. Quite moving and tragic. I might gripe about that the mother of the family, Audrey, becomes a little too much of a charicature, but I think this resolves itself a little towards the end. I'd recommend it!

Oh, and my motto for this Friday is, as you can see, "write something , no matter how short"...

Peter Dickinson: The Ropemaker

I had such a hankering to read something by Peter Dickinson, and thought myself very clever when I remembered that there was nothing stopping me from borrowing his children's books, since I'd read all the adult ones the library seems to have. After all, a long time ago I'd read The Blue Hawk (in translation, admittedly), and it was good. So when I saw this I picked it up. Unfortunately I was disappointed. It starts off well, throwing us into a setting and events that we don't completely understand the reasons for, without any explaining. This is classic Dickinson, to me, and I like it. Makes the reader feel a bit intelligent, right? But then the explanations start coming and to be honest I just felt like the whole book was a series of scenes piled upon one another, with long tedious dialogue and over-explained like anything. The first chapter I started thinking that this would make an excellent film perhaps, and had jsut started crowing to myself that Dickinson wasn't one of those writers that write as if they're expecting that to happen though, ha ha ha, and was I ever going to put that in the blog post!

I changed my mind. I am very unsure of this book.

It redeems itself a little in the epilogue, where we learn that despite our heroes and heroines tremendous efforts to save their home, there will come a future day in which they are a mere myth, and their country will have been overrun by violence and death. With that little glimmer of hope, when one descendant starts to believe the stories. Oh, and the world Dickinson has created is really capable of being a fantastic secondary universe. It's a tremendously cruel and violent Empire, riddled with magic and with a lot of internal logic and myth. Sadly, it doesn't reach all the way, I feel.

Caroline Graham: Written in Blood

The Midsomer Murder books are MILES better than the tv series, as I believe I've said. This one is about a writer's circle in Midsomer Worthy that invites a famous author to one of their gatherings. By the end of the evening one of their members is dead. Like I said I'm in a rush, so I'll just but down that I liked it. It's fairly predictable, but I still like it. The predictability is miles better in writing than on the telly.

Val McDermid: A Darker Domain

The only McDermid's the library stocks are the newer ones. I want my beloved Lindsay Gordon, pretty please...

This one is a free-standing story, about a cold case detective (who by the way, is a fabulous character) who is asked to investigate the disappearance of a miner whom everyone assumed had gone off scabbing during the strike in -84. His daughter wants to find him to help save her son's life. At the same time new evidence emerges in a kidnapping case from that same era, and our detective with her male sidekick solves them both.

I liked this, but I wasn't mad about it. I loved our radar couple though, more of them.

Am being a bit short, because I want to return the books today.

Ursula K Le Guin: Threshold

How fortunate that I happened to find Rocannon's World at the second-hand shop recently. Because this book just about did it for my relationship with Le Guin. First that enormous brick of questionmark that was Always Coming Home and now this. Premise is OK - a spot in the woods that's the threshold into another world, where it's always twilight. Discovered by accident by a young man with problems, and one day there he meets a girl who has been coming regularly since childhood. The inhabitants of the world are in trouble and gladly send these two off to meet their deaths. Okay, but what is the point of the story? It got awfully long and tedious for such a short book. It feels like an experiment.

Bit of a bargain

Went to the Red Cross shop yesterday and found Rocannon's World by Le Guin - a VERY battered copy, but for five crowns it'll do me nicely - and an Ellery Queen collection, containing mystery stories by Hemingway, Huxley and Steinbeck, among others. Should be good!

Ellery Queen's Double Dozen

This is a collection of short stories by various authors, edited by Ellery Queen and part of his (can you say "his" when there is no real Ellery Queen but instead it's a pseudonym for two people?) series of Mystery Annuals. I'd love to get hold of more of these, sadly I don't think the library has many. Most, if not nearly all, of these stories are forgotten now, but so many of them paint a lovely little picture of what was in at the time. I even kept little notes while reading this so I wouldn't forget my favourite bits, because I'm thinking I need another few labels on the blog to help me find the reading tips I leave for myself. However, I've lost the scrap of paper I was writing on. (Whereupon she takes a break to look for it.) (And doesn't find it.) I'll just ad lib then. Well, there's an L.E. Behney who has three stories set in rural or lower-middle-to-working-class America. They are quite moving and good. I especially liked the first one, about a woman in an abusive relationship who has had enough. There's an interesting one by George Summer Albee about a US agent in Algeria, trying to find a Communist spy. It sorts of precedes the whole current Iraq situation in a way. Disturbing in how it assumes the right for foreign powers to meddle in certain foreign affairs, I thought, but it wasn't my favourite in terms of pure enjoyability. A really clever one was A Paper for Mr. Wurley, by William Farrell, about a young boy who gets caught up in a murder on his way to school and writes about it for his school assignment. Keeps you kind of guessing to the end. There were, in short, many good ones, even though a few were only so-so.

Just my luck

I'm going shopping at Gottsunda Centrum today, with the two-year-old (apparently I don't value my sanity much). Minima needs supplies for her birthday party tomorrow. A good opportunity to pop into the library there and borrow some Peter Dickinsons I've already scouted out that they have.

But since it's Friday they don't open until 12, at which time I plan to be home and napping with Junior. It's so typical.

Sue Grafton: T is for Trespass

The blurbs on the cover have this as being one of her absolute best, a gripping thriller that’s so exciting you’ll wet yourself. Now, it certainly isn’t one of her worst, so I'm not complaining. Grafton steps away from the format of only writing from Kinsey’s point of view, and in my opinion that alone can make for a more interesting novel. Here we hear the story from Kinsey (first person narrative)and her antagonist Solana (third person narrative) – a calculating con artist who steals other people’s identities and insinuates herself into the homes of old or sick people, only to bleed them dry and (optional) kill them. One of Kinsey’s next-door neighbours falls prey to the woman when he ends up needing a nurse after an accident. So it is a good story, although I feel that the addition of Solana’s sub-intelligent, over-grown and abusive goon of a son was a bit unnecessary. To me the book is about the race against time – is the neighbour doomed? – and the pitting of wits. However, adding the son did make for a joyously violent and bizarre finale fight. I dare a director to film it, I bet you they’d feel compelled to tone down the dirty, desperate scrappiness of it out of fear of seeming ridiculous.

Absolutely one of her best. But I didn't wet myself.

Ngaio Marsh: A Surfeit of Lampreys

I was so pleased to spot this! Such a treat with an unread Marsh novel. This one is about a young New Zeeland orphan who comes to England to live with an aunt (who, by the way and most amusingly writes letters EXACTLY like Lord Peter Wimsey’s miss Climpson. For several pages I was unsure of who’s fiction I was inhabiting…), and first stays with her friends the Lampreys. The Lampreys are a large, eccentric and charming upper-class family who are permanently short of funds and hiding from creditors. Now they are once again in the red, and throw themselves at the mercy of Uncle Gabriel once again, hoping that he’ll help his heirs rather than see the family name shamed. But Uncle Gabriel is not so amenable, and is gruesomely killed. Who did it? The suspects are limited, and our orphan is torn between loyalty and horrible suspicion. I must say that I did not at all see who the killer was, I was fooled completely. Silly really, all the information was there. It’s quite good, and a nice period piece about Britain at the onset of war.

I am copying his draft and posting it anew to circumvent my last post problem. V. annoying.

Ellery Queen: Inspector Queen's Own Case

Ha, I should have read this one before House of Brass, since this is the novel in which our Inspector meets his Jessie. I don't think or suppose I'm spoiling things too much though through inadvertently revealing that they do indeed get married. I like this one a whole big bunch better. This isn't a clever whodunnit, but a more human crime story. It's a lot about emotion - wanting love, feeling inadequate, desperation, hate, guilt. The most interesting part isn't the crime, but Jessie's and Queen's budding relationship. It's a bit to it's lack that the crime, a terrible murder of a tiny baby, gets nudged aside, but it's never really forgotten so I'm not too upset.

I'm still interested by how different in tone it is to those Ellery-themed novels. Those are so clever and whimsical, whereas this is more say, The Bridges of Madison County. I can't think of a film to compare the former with right now, it might come to me. Forgive the halting analogy for now.

The only Queen left now is a collection of short stories. I'll be back.

Well this didn't work out at all.

Remember I had this plan to write a bunch of entries and post them when I had nothing new to post? I thought this would be possible by saving them as drafts and just posting, whereupon they would appear at the top of the page. Turns out they don't, they appear on the date when they were last edited, in that order. So I just posted a new Janet Evanovich post that popped into being on March 21st.

My point is, if you wish to read it you must scroll. But you're not missing much in this case. Stupid Blogger anyway.

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.