Too much?

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

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

Brett, Simon, Death under the dryer

Brett, Simon, The witness at the wedding

Evanovich, Janet, Plum lovin'

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

O'Connell, Carol, Shark music

Queen, Ellery, A fine and private place

Winspear, Jacqueline, An incomplete revenge

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

Winterson, Jeanette, Gut symmetries

Le Guin, Ursula K., Always coming home

Le Guin, Ursula K., The telling

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

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

Reichs, Kathy, Bones to ashes

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

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

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Birthday of the World

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

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

Ursula K. LeGuin: The Dispossessed

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

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

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

Ellery Queen: Face to Face

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

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

Carter Dickson: She Died A Lady

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

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

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

Lindsey Davis: Saturnalia

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

Janet Evanovich: Motor Mouth

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

Mil Millington: Instructions For Living Someone Else's Life

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

Library visit

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

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

Skuld by Karin Alvtegen

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

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

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

Shakespeare by Bill Bryson

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

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

Christmas special

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

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

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

No-snow.

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

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


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

Astounding amounts of snow

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

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

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

What I got from Ireland basically....

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

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

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

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

I have two books to write about.

And I will. Soon.

Remembering.

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

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

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

Michael Crichton is dead.

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

Bthdy!

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

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

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

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

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

Ian McEwan: Atonement

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

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

Maybe I'm just thick though. Not impossible.