Decisions decisions...

Which one to start with?

reservations

Update: this was written yonks ago, I just fixed the link and suddenly publication date changes? Don't understand why.

So I read this Buzzfeed list  and put a number of books on reservation because why the hell not, some YF always goes down. The first one to arrive was Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy, a book so lame (I assumed) that my teenagers showed zero interest in it (unlike that book Divergent which has a Hype). Well, it is quite lame. As nothing more than competent entertaining literature it's okay, just lacking in that certain something that can make even so-so books a bit more than average. It's always the characters that have to be so interesting that you want more of them. Somehow they have to be imbued with real traits and the at least hint of the complexity of actual people. Vampire Academy has none of that, sadly. Worse than that though is how sexist it is. Our main character, Rose, is a half human half vampire hybrid, who is gorgeous and curvy (unlike full-blood vampires) which makes her desirable to all men (no gay relationships in this book) at the vampire boarding school she attends together with the full-blood vampire Lissa that she has sworn to protect. However, exploring your sexuality and enjoying sex will brand you a slut and start some malicious gossip, as Rose soon discovers. After all, we can't have women uncrossing their legs all over the place, can we. She immediately accepts this and starts modifying her behaviour so people finally can respect her as an honourable woman. Oh I haven't the energy to even analyse this shit, but it's bad. Here's a picture instead.

Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas

After reading Ela's post on how much she likes Banks' books I borrowed the first one in the Culture series - but I am so bored. Half way through and I DO NOT CARE. Hang on, not half way, only about a quarter. I misremembered because it feels like I've been plodding through this forever. Should I persevere? Is it worth it? Boo. Re-reading the post I see that this is the (only) one she didn't care for much. Should I chuck it in and try a different one just? I thought it'd be good because it starts with an execution (not that I enjoy executions per se, but because I enjoy novelty of thought) done by slowly drowning the victim in sewage. But it didn't pick up. Also, it reminds me of a Douglas Adams universe, Vogons and all. I just can't take it seriously. Douglas Adams without the humour. What.

This is what I'm going to read soon

Susan Hill's The Woman in Black. After a tip from my husband who read the review in Svenska Dagbladet of the new Swedish translation. But I'm going to read it in English. First I have to read Divergent though, because YF come on, and then Matens Pris because books discussion club, come on. But then!

Bloglovin fish and overhaul

Sure why not, I'll give it a go.

Följ min blogg med Bloglovin

Also, the blog is due an overhaul. I don't want all the linksies, I use a feed reader and they were mostly there for me to find blogs I like, originally. Also, the masthead might need revamping. I was looking through it and JESUS I've changed my mind about a fair few books alright.

I'm not reading The Magician King by the way

Noticed this post in my drafts since months. There's nothing more to say really so why I didn't post I don't know: I borrowed it and my eldest daughter started to read it, and she just went meh I don't want to. So I started to but she's right - meh. I just don't care. I don't care about the characters enough. If it were my own book I might get around to it some day but I don't think it's going to happen... Returned. Funny that, a one-book phenomenon.

Catherynne Valente: The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

After the glowing recommendation below

I promptly checked what the library had to offer and borrowed this (n.b. that I'm not naive enough to jump out and BUY it on any aul recommendation, no sirree):

 

So, oddly they only had the sequel, not the first book. They do have the first one, but as an audio book, and not only that, it seems to be a DAISY edition, which means it's specially made for blind people. Apart from these, I can only see that there's a school library in the boondocks that has her collection of norty sheksy short stories, Palimpsest. So I settled for this. It's a children's book, but I just might rather read that than erotic short stories anyway.

The recommendations are glowing. There are prizes that have been won, there are ecstatic reviews. "The kind of book you don't want to end" and so on.

 Me, I don't get it. I think there are certainly some original and sweet ideas in Valente's version of Fairyland, but she seems a little too enamoured with her ideas because every character our heroine, September, meets holds a long quirky speech for her in a manner that quickly gets old. I don't really see that children would like this. Adults who fancy that they are in touch with their inner child will love this. It's like blogger pics of cupcakes and bunting, a bit pastelly and very artfully posed. "I love children, see how I've made them cupcakes!" Each scene wraps you up in so many words that you never get a sense of or feel for what the words are describing and what is actually happening in the flesh and blood story. Valente will write that something was terrifying but I never feel it. Everything is pretty. Unlike Gaiman's children's books with similar themes that have actual gore, this only glosses. Too clever. Jasper Fforde does this as well, loves his clever ideas so much he murders his book. No-one wants to read 200 pages of wordplay, bro. Anyway, book one might be better and this might just be filler, but I'm not going to go looking for book one.

Damn, this makes a long stretch of boring books. Meh. 

Crap

See this? Don't ever read this. Don't buy it for a young female that you know thinking it'll be something, well, at least exciting and grrll power (the automatic spell check just changed grrll to grill, which is FUNNY). 

One of my daughters borrowed this from the school library to read for some assignment or other which requires them to read an English novel. It was lying around so I read it. The author, Alex McAulay, has one idea. The idea is girls, in tank tops, in a jungle. Based on this he scrapes together a story about young girls sent to wilderness camp when they misbehave, and once there a hike goes wrong and they end up lost and it all goes a bit Deliverance (which frankly has been DONE). Every single idea McAulay has which could have given the story some depth - just some, I'm not asking of r a lot -  he pisses away. It could have been about women's right to their sexuality, religious hypocrisy, society's fixation on women's bodies and how they look, what enduring and committing acts of violence does to your personality, the immorality of keeping children in what is virtually a prison camp - anything. But all leads to something interesting just fizz out. Not one character becomes anything but caricature. And a little over half way through the book he just gives up and just starts to write down what happens next with not even an attempt to tell a story. Like he had a maximum word allowance and was trying to keep inside it. What the hell? I've seldom read worse shite. I'm left with the distinct impression of an unhealthy interest in young girls as sexual objects, especially if they wear tank tops and cargo pants (for some reason one has to say cargo pants and not cargo trousers - why is that? discuss!) and self-publishing. Creepy and stupid. 

Neil Gaiman: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

So, as my sister pointed out in the comments of my last post I have completely forgotten to write about the book that shall henceforth be known as Ocean because TOATEOTL is a pain to type. Although oddly pleasant to say. Also, sounds like Cthulhus lesser known and less sinister younger cousin. Since I borrowed it from her (and nagged her for it) she naturally has wotsit Reasons to Ask, if only to ever know if she can demand it back wot wot wot. So yes, I have read it.

In the novel a middle-aged author returns to the place where he lived as a child, and as he's walking around the changed neighborhood he comes across the Hempstock's farm, and suddenly remembers The cover of Ocean is best from the back - I just ambitiously attempted to take a picture but since it's dark now there was flash and it didn't work; also, it was hard to also not get my ratty pajama trousers, messy living room and thumb in the photo so I abandoned the project and my oft-spoken-of promise to make the blog more interesting by adding pictures. The front is a girl in water, but the back is a photo of Neil himself, as a child, half-way up (or down) the outside wall of a house, balancing on the pipes. And it's just perfect for the book, which is clearly based to some extent on childhood memories (in the acknowledgments he phrases it as a thank you to his family for letting him plunder the landscape of his childhood). The beginning of the book even reads like a genuine autobiography, to the point where I almost decided to put it down since I'm not that interested in Gaiman's writing to read his genuine childhood memoirs. The back blurb doesn't give much away and I hadn't read up on the book in advance. But I stuck with it for those few extra pages and soon it all swerved into more familiar fantasy territory. And then the strength of the book became the little boy's story and relationship with his family, with the fantasy story just a vehicle to explore how vulnerable children are, exposed to their parents' whims. (The scenes that stick with me are the ones where his parents, influenced by the Creature, completely betray him. This is the work of the Creature, but that's just in the story. In real life we know that kids are betrayed all the time - in fantasy we can pretend that some outside magical influence causes it so that the parents are not to blame, but that's just in fantasy. The escapist solution for tormented kids.)

Anyway, so the end goes on a bit and doesn't feel really - true? necessary? believable? Ha. But I  liked it, and it wasn't long, so yay. I'd like to re-read it sometime.

A new year

I don't read much these days, as I've said before, and the sad thing is that part of the reason is that I can't keep up the blog. I miss it very much. This is only a small part of a whole, I used to have an internet community I felt a part of and my blog (even though I've never had readers really) felt like an extension of that. I feel bereft. I said to mr Bani yesterday that I'd really like a laptop of my own (something we can't afford at the moment at all) - he felt so guilty he started looking at laptops on Ebay for me. And created my own login for me on his which I am currently using. It's difficult to have no space for oneself - the most private space I've got is my office at work, which is pathetic isn't it. In related news I have come to the conclusion that older teenagers are meant to be annoying so their parents will be glad when they finally move instead of panicking at the thought which they did only a few years prior. Because deargodhelpus. Anyway, going back to the first sentence - another reason is that I play Candy Crush (yes yes but I never beg for lives and never pay, I'm not that big of an eejit) and before that Angry Birds Star Wars (I know I know) and also I read other blogs and most importantly my commute now is only ten minutes so less time to read anyway.

There are a few things I've read that I've forgotten about, but let's write about the ones I remember ... I read World War Z by Max Brooks, a millennia after the party and only because we saw the film which was a bit shit (although I admit that I spent a fair amount of time NOT watching the film because scary zombies make me tense), and after that when I was picking Junior up from his friend I mentioned that we'd seen it at the friend's father said but oh! you must read the book here I've got it. So I did, and it was so much better and why the HELL do all those film directors and producers tamper so much with books when they claim to love them? (There is a Hobbit related rant to this, but I'm saving that for what will hopefully be a separate post.) World War Z is a book about collecting personal witness accounts about the disaster that almost destroyed human civilisation (that would be a terrible fast-spreading infection turning the dead into zombies, folks), about the impacts on countries and cultures, about political considerations, about coping and preserving humanity and human values. This makes it sound a lot deeper than it in fact is - it's not by any means Great Literature but I did enjoy it and found it thought-provoking. It struck me that in a lot of ways Earth seemed like a nicer place to live after being almost annihilated, expect in Russia. More just and fair, a bit post-Ark. The film was about Brad Pitt and his inane family, a very traditional classic storyline, purportedly a first-person view but not even managing to be consistent about that. Whatevs. (But yes, scary scary zombies.)

I re-read Justice Hall, by Laurie King. I'd like to collect  her books so I have them all, I find them soothing, and I'd also like to get a hold of the short story collections she's written for. And I read a Margaret Atwood novel, Cat's Eye, which was terrible and lovely.  I wrote a long post about it in my head but I've forgotten most of it. The main character and narrator, Elaine, is now a rather well-known painter and has returned to Toronto for a retrospective, which brings back all the memories of the torment she suffered in the city as a child. It is a brilliant story about a young girl who is almost destroyed by that kind of horrible, psychologically destructive bullying that girls can excel at, to the point where she chooses to forget those years altogether and only has them flood back years later when she is cleaning out the attic with her mother and finds the cat's eye marble she carried as a talisman. Atwood writes such sad characters. Even when they say they feel good and are happy there is a brittleness about it. Sorrow always lies hiding underneath, it never goes away. I feel like only someone who has experienced being an outsider could write like this about it. You always feel like you are acting a part, as though someone is going to find you out one day. Elaine the adult has never really left her childhood behind and is surprised constantly at how established she is, how young people look at her as a grown-up. And still she "hasn't suffered", she describes how she, in the feminist groups of the 70s, feels left-out because nothing really bad has happened to her  - she was never raped, she was never beaten. Always this quantifying of suffering, deciding which pain ranks the highest.

I read loads of Margaret Atwood in my teens, but I lost track of her. Maybe I should re-read everything in a chronological order. I feel like she is capturing a lost age, both in this one and in The Blind Assassin. 

There was something else, but I forget. Hopefully tomorrow!

Reading tips for me

I want all the books mentioned here.

I have read Brat Farrar and as usual love Josephine Tey, but I've never read anything by Mary Stewart so am very excited at the hint of a possible new favourite. Patricia Wentworth is good entertainment of course, but as Ela writes she's not the greatest author at all. Still, I'd like to read the trio together like Ela did and compare!

Josephine Tey - Brat Farrar

Mary Stewart - The Ivy Tree

Patricia Wentworth - The Traveller Returns

I miss this blog.

Lev Grossman: The Magicians

So I read about this in the paper, and decided that it sounded much to fun to miss. And it is fun, I really enjoyed it. It's so clearly and unashamedly influenced and inspired by boarding school books in general and Harry Potter especially, by Narnia, by every fantasy book like ever. It's pretty fantastic that Grossman holds it all together and really modernizes the genre without straying too far into urban fantasy (which he doesn't do, IMO).

The young magicians of the story have been taken from ordinary, mundane lives to go to Brakebills, a college of magic. It's old-fashioned, full of rigid rules, anglomanic. Classic boarding school stuff, complete with blazers and including a special made-up pseudo-British accent full of phrases like "hard cheese, old boy". However, being a magician doesn't not make you an adolescent/young adult. They drink, they have sex, they make stupid mistakes. And in the end, they go to another plane, another magical land, the one they've all read about as children and never imagined might be real, Fillory. It's a coming of age story, and a growing up story. It's honest and brutal and bloody, yet sweet. If it weren't for the fact that the final scenes has one of the women dressed in a leather bustier that she's spilling out of, while floating outside a skyscraper window, I'd be very impressed. Now I'm a little worried that Grossman is a shallow person writing for a dream screenplay. (If it is filmed, please God let it be good. Slow, a bit scruffy, with a lot of quiet. And take infinite care over the scene where the Beast comes from another plane and holds them all hostage, silently, in the classroom for hours. That is some good storytelling there.)

I've put in a reservation for the second book at the library.

Almost 3 for the price of 1

So I read my first mapback, Death In Five Boxes by Carter Dickson. It is really not very good, but then I'm no Carter Dickson/John Dickson Carr fan. The mystery is contrived, the detective hero is exaggerated which makes him a charicature and not a character, and come to think of it not one character in the book is fleshed out enough to be a real, believable person. I trudged through it, mentally comparing it to The Singing Sands that I read just before and thinking Jesus, THERE IS NO COMPARISON yet Dickson's/Carr's name is often mentioned among the classics while Tey is more forgotten. It's the locked room thing. Him and his fecking locked rooms. Haha, just saw that Wikipedia has a great quote from a critic in its article on the book:

"As usual, Carter Dickson's plot is extremely complicated and it depends on a variety of gimmicks, most of which are barely plausible. One good one is the method of poisoning the White Lady cocktails without anybody's going near the shaker or the glasses. For the rest, the dialogue is in the worst style of false excitement and byplay, particularly the part allotted to the egregious Sir Henry Merrivale, who calls everybody "son" and yells "shut up" whenever he is stumped. The early portion is dull, the middle chaotic, and the end interminable."

Snigger.

Directly after Death in Five Boxes I picked up the other mapback, Rinehart's The Window at the White Cat and wow, immediately drawn in by engaging writing and characters - NO COMPARISON. I was actually so offended by how much more enjoyable these two women writers were compared to the one man that I put the book away thinking I'd postpone reading it until I could write a detailed, exhaustive, comparative analysis of the three books in manner of highly intelligent well-read academic person. Since this obviously isn't going to happen, unfortunately, we'll settle for just writing about them, shall we. And I'll just finish the damn book this week.

While I read The Singing Sands I made mental notes of about twenty places I'd have liked to quote, and now sadly it's been a while and I've forgotten. But it's just gorgeous. There are so many period details which make it so interesting if you're the slightest bit into retro, and Alan Grant is just fantastic. The books starts with him being on sick leave for panic attacks connnected with claustrophobia. He heads up to Scotland to his cousin and her husband. Just as he's getting off the train after a sleepless, tortured night, the carriage attendant discovers a dead body in one of the sleeping compartments. Grant can't let this mystery go, and thinking about it distracts him enough to help cure his, well, mental illness we'd say now. The mental illness is treated with respect and delicacy, all things considered. I see on Wikipedia that this was found among her papers after she died and published posthumously. How I wish, selfishly, that she'd lived and written more. I don't know how much this was edited before publishing, but it's pretty perfect and doesn't feel unfinished.

The Katy books

Ah, what everyone loves - a crap photo post! I really am the worst at photographs, I know. This one was shot in my window at work this morning while waiting for the computer to warm up, and you can just barely make out the covers, can't you? Mad skills.

I thought I'd given these books away. When we were moving, I agreed to let go of my collection of what in Swedish is called flickböcker and in English... I don't know offhand... books for girls anyway. The genre encompasses Little Women and Anne of Green Gables and Nancy Drew etc. Girls' series books? Google isn't being very helpful. Anyway, when I was little I used to go to a book shop on the way to church every week and spend my pocket money on second hand books, and a lot of these were girls' fiction about plucky good heroines and their adventures. I've held on to these books for years and years (with some very sparse culling), and finally agreed to give the final ones up last year provided my husband passed them on to his colleague who more seriously collects them. I'm so sure I wrote a post about this but I can't find it (maybe the post was in my head, sure I never get a proper chance to write these days). But he forgot! So I found them all in a plastic bag only the other day. Ha! And that prompted me to read them online as ebooks in English, because as you can see my copies were in Swedish.

There's so much written about Susan Coolidge's novels online I don't need to be elaborate. I've always been aware that they are classics even though I've never met anyone in the flesh I think who has actually read them, but for some reason I never actually bothered to look her or her bibliography up before. Therefore I was surprised to learn that the three I have are not the only ones about the Carr family. I didn't find a free copy of Nine Little Goslings online, but I found one of Clover, so I read that after re-reading What Katy Did, What Katy Did at School and What Katy Did Next. The photo shows my books in that order left to right. Note the cover art. The book in the middle, What Katy Did at School, has my favourite cover, and it was the only one that helped me somewhat place the books historically. The other two are much too modern and I remember as a child being mightily confused by these pictures when what was going on in the story was clearly happening a Long Time Ago (ca 1860s if you're asking). They are also fugly. I might get rid of these, nostalgia be damned, and look for copies in English instead. The middle one is pretty, and the colours and style do somewhat capture the books better.

I read these over and over. I wanted to be like Katy, loved and respected by her siblings and  everyone. I delighted in descriptions of Christmas boxes full of delicious treats for the boarding school, of pretty embroidered hankies and bouquets of flowers decorating every room. (As an adult I can see that Katy and her siblings are really much more interesting for the first half of the first book, before Katy is injured and reforms, but as a child I loved it all.) Any book with a description of a happy family was sure to seduce me of course (which meant that boarding school books were shoo-ins what with happy families at home AND happy family of friends at school - double win!).

Books like these have been derided for the message they allegedly send to young girls of docility, virginity and domesticity - but the problem isn't so much the message as the fact that only girls partook of it. The values (bar virginity perhaps, a value so taken for granted it's never even on the table for debate) are on the whole universal: be kind, be respectful, be neat, be considerate. The novels do in a way also stress what sort of values a woman should hold as ideal in a husband - and there is something refreshing about that in this shallow age where women are still taught to always keep looking for The One (man) but the brief on what he should be like focuses on his appearance or sexiness. Compared to what boys learned while reading Jack London (fuck him) this is grand. 

Speaking of Jack London - I obviously can't plead enlightenment on behalf of these books when it comes to questions of race. I think I counted two black people in all four - nothing disparaging said or anything but they clearly don't count at all. The worst bit is when they are talking about an old school friend who is now a teacher in the Indian Territories and they discuss how no Indian would take her scalp what with that smelly pomade she uses. Charming, I don't think. At the same time it is representative of how white people actually did think at the time, and sure I'm always complaining about modern books about the past in which the authors can't bear their main characters to be unenlightened but instead write them as pro-integration, pro-gay, pro-everything about a hundred years before this is at all likely. No, this is what the past was like. If we're charmed by the old-fashioned values of gentleness and politeness we'll just have to be more civilized here in 2013 and extend it to everyone, won't we.

Sometimes they can be surprisingly modern. I've often seen, on Facebook or forums, people (women) sharing quotes from old housekeeping books aimed at new wifes; the type with helpful hints like "help your husband put on his slippers when he comes home, he is tired after a hard day at work". Okay, I made that quote up, but it COULD BE TRUE. Here is a quote from Clover, as they read aloud from one such book that Katy receives as a wedding gift:

It proved to contain a small volume bound in white and gold, entitled, "Advice to Brides." On the fly-leaf appeared this inscription:—

To Katherine Carr, on the occasion of her approaching bridal, from her affectionate teacher,

Marianne Nipson.
1 Timothy, ii. 11.

Clover at once ran to fetch her Testament that she might verify the quotation, and announced with a shriek of laughter that it was: "Let the women learn in silence with all subjection;" while Katy, much diverted, read extracts casually selected from the work, such as: "A wife should receive her husband's decree without cavil or question, remembering that the husband is the head of the wife, and that in all matters of dispute his opinion naturally and scripturally outweighs her own." Or: "'A soft answer turneth away wrath.' If your husband comes home fretted and impatient, do not answer him sharply, but soothe him with gentle words and caresses. Strict attention to the minor details of domestic management will often avail to secure peace." And again: "Keep in mind the epitaph raised in honor of an exemplary wife of the last century,—'She never banged the door.' Qualify yourself for a similar testimonial."

"[Katy] never does bang doors," remarked Amy, who had come in as this last "elegant extract" was being read. "No, that's true; she doesn't," said Clover. "Her prevailing vice is to leave them open. I like that truth about a good dinner 'availing' to secure peace, and the advice to 'caress' your bear when he is at his crossest. Ned never does issue 'decrees,' though, I fancy; and on the whole, Katy, I don't believe Mrs. Nipson's present is going to be any particular comfort in your future trials. Do read something else to take the taste out of our mouths. We will listen in 'all subjection.'"

There, you see - nobody appreciated those books. And young girls reading the Katy books could be told that they are full of nonsense even then.

When reading old novels like these it's so much fun to see how the people who lived then clearly thought that civilization had reached it's absolute apex. Miss Nightingale had reformed nursing with her modern ideas on hygiene and order, there were telegraphs and even telephones! steamers! trains that raced along at 30 miles per hour! Things could hardly improve after all this!

So I ended up bringing these to my book club, which has been dormant for a while. To reinvigorate it we decided to each talk about something we'd read since last time and then set a new date and pick a new book (it ended up being one by Denise Mina, could be interesting). I don't know if I converted/reinspired anyone to read vintage girls' fiction, but I did try... It was so good to see everyone again, all together. I'm looking forward to next meeting in October!

yessssss

The library texted me that my reservation is in, Lev Grossman's The Magicians. I read about it in the paper and decided that it needed to be checked out. A quick google gives me lots of blog write-ups so I'd have heard of it before if I read other book blogs which I don't because it's too depressing since mine is a bit shite and also so many books so little time etc. I mean, I'm currently upset about not having had a proper chance of writing about The Singing Sands and Death in Five Boxes and also The Window at the White Cat (which I actually stopped reading so I'd feel pressured to write about the other two first). Bla bla bla, no fun at all.   

Must maybe read this

Nora Ephron: Crazy Salad - Some Things About Women

Also this? 

So, I did it...

... after all, they're collectibles. I may never have another chance to get them. Googling finds me much dearer copies (if I include postage).

The fronts: 

They are so PRETTY.  The backs:

Closeup of the back of Death in Five Boxes by Carter Dickson:

No closeup of The Window at the White Cat by Mary Roberts Rinehart because I neglected to get a good one, but how about the insides?

I love them so much. Am reading Death in Five Boxes now. 

Bonus picture: they had paperbacks of some Agatha Christies in an edition that my mother owned at least one of, Evil Under the Sun, the one on the left. Also great cover art. That brings back memories. 

Pardon the reflections, I can't take pictures worth a damn.

The one I didn't read

Like I said, cool cover art but I wasn't gripped at all. Gave it up. By cool I mean genuinely retro, you understand, not perhaps artistically pioneering. Anywhoo, despite glowing front blurb (sorry, hard to see) I found it dull. A bit too pastischy?

Note to self:

Remember to check out  Fred Vargas.

A Dell Mystery paperbacks

Remember this post? I never got those paperbacks, even though they were lovely. As I wrote in the post, I'm not paying 50 kr for them. That was thinking they were Agatha Christies though. As you can see, the one on the far left is a John Dickson Carr called Death in Five Boxes. Now that one I saw as a possible it turned out, when I went in yesterday just to browse and saw that they still had two books left. They must have had loads in that I just didn't see at the time, but now there were too, this one and a Mary Roberts Rhinehart. Anyway, I decided that ok, I'll splurge on them. Go to the counter and your man says 175 kr please. What? Oh no, that pencilled "50 kr" on the inside isn't from us. Our price is here (pointing) and our price is 80 for the Dickson Carr and 95 for the Rhinehart (I think it was). Good grief. So I said sorry, I'll have to think about it. In my shock I walked out and realised I should have taken new photos of them, because I missed the backs last time - and the backs, my they're so adorable. They have little drawings of the layout of the murder scene and so on. It's all like a lovely vintage Cluedo game. I image-googled quickly and though you can see a lot of examples of the cover art you can't see any back covers, mores the shame. I'm going to see if I can get a photo today. If it's not the same fella behind the counter.

... Hang on now. While I'm writing I'm googling. They're called "mapbacks" apparently. LMGTFY again ... Oh, now I feel foolish. On Wikipedia no less. They are so pretty ... I'll have to think and google and see of they're worth it.