RidgewayGirl Reads

Currently Reading

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Calling Mr. King by Ronald De Feo

Books Read in 2011
(Listed in reverse order)

December
Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu by Stephanie Rosenfeld
A Small Furry Prayer by Steven Kotler
Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay
A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel
Waiter Rant by Steve Dublanica

November
Hark A Vagrant by Kate Beaton
Tell Me Where It Hurts by Nick Trout
The Last Nude by Ellis Avery
Bent Road by Lori Roy
Murder on the Eiffel Tower by Claude Izner
The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall
Lost in the City of Light by Richard de Combray
The Waitress was New by Dominique Fabre
The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison
Danton: The Giant of the French Revolution by David Lawday

October
The Affair by Lee Child
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Blacklands by Belinda Bauer
Martha Peake by Patrick McGrath
Laura Rider's Masterpiece by Jane Hamilton
The Revisionists by Thomas Mullen
Voices by Arnaldur Indridason
The End of the Wasp Season by Denise Mina
The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock

September
The Vault by Ruth Rendell
Until Thy Wrath be Past by Asa Larsson
American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell
The Ballad of Tom Dooley by Sharon McCrumb
The Most Dangerous Thing by Laura Lippman
How to Become a Scandal by Laura Kipnis
So Cold the River by Michael Koryta
Borkmann's Point by Hakan Nesser
The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt
22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson
Tomato Red by Daniel Woodrell
The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

August
Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick
Dating Jesus by Susan Campbell
All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe
The House of a Million Pets by Ann Hodgman
Doc by Mary Doria Russell
Popular Crime by Bill James
Bullfighting by Roddy Doyle
What Is Mine by Anne Holt
Iron Lake by William Kent Krueger
Close to Shore by Michael Capuzzo
The End of Everything by Megan Abbott
Hemingway: The Paris Years by Michael S. Reynolds
Drawing Conclusions by Donna Leon

July
Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe by Jenny Hollowell
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
A Death in Summer by Benjamin Black
The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea
Three Seconds by Roslund and Halstrom
Becoming Madame Mao by Anchee Min
The Good Wife by Stewart O'Nan
A Moveable Feast by Lonely Planet
Down River by John Hart
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo

June
Trail of Blood by Lisa Black
Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott
Three Cups of Deceit by Jon Krakauer
Tigerlily's Orchid by Ruth Rendell
The Truth-Teller's Lie by Sophie Hannah
Forever on the Mountain by James M. Tabor
The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
The Missing by Chris Mooney
Broken Skin by Stuart MacBride
Sweet Ruin by Cathi Hanauer

May
Among the Missing by Morag Joss
The Unburied by Charles Palliser
Cold Earth by Sarah Moss
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
The Whispering Wall by Patricia Carlon
Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik
One Day by David Nicholls
Blood Men by Paul Cleave
Probable Cause by Theresa Schwegel
Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
Safelight by Shannon Burke

April
I'd Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman
Little White Lies by Gemma Townley
Little Face by Sophie Hannah
April in Paris by Michael Wallner
Black Robe by Brian Moore
The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen
Field Gray by Philip Kerr
Dear Enemy by Jean Webster
Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel
Vergebung by Stieg Larsson
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly
Persuading Annie by Melissa Nathan

March
Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
The Night Season by Chelsea Cain
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
The Chicago Way by Michael Harvey
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin
The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
By the Time You Read This by Giles Blunt
The Last Light of the Sun by Guy Gavriel Kay
So Many Ways to Begin by Jon MacGregor

February
Election by Tom Perrotta
A Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier
Forcing Amaryllis by Louise Ure
The Storyteller of Marrakesh by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya
Dying Light by Stuart MacBride
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers by Thomas Mullen
A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick
Mandy by Julie Andrews Edwards
Austenland by Shannon Hale
Indemnity Only by Sara Paretsky
Safer by Sean Doolittle

January
Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King
Shadow Man by Cody McFadyen
The Empty Family by Colm Toibin
The Black Tower by Louis Bayard
The Birth House by Ami McKay
Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O'Neill
The Gentle Axe by R.N. Morris
Seven Lies by James Lasdun
Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Annette Vallon by James Tipton
A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin
Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane
Angelology by Danielle Trussoni
The Song is You by Megan Abbott
Pereira Declares by Antonio Tabucchi

Looking forward to your thoughts on Angelology which I picked up and put down several times in the store before buying it.

Pereira Declares by Antonio Tabucci (translated by Patrick Creagh) is a slender novel set up as Pereira telling his story to a questioner, with the interrogator frequently adding "Pereira declares" to the end of paragraphs. Pereira is the corpulent and widowed editor of the culture page of a second-rate evening newspaper in Lisbon in 1938. He hires Rossi, a graduate student, to prepare obituaries of famous writers in advance, but Rossi doesn't quite manage the task, inserting comments into each article that renders the piece unpublishable in the pro-fascist atmosphere. The story builds slowly as Pereira attaches the same importance to what he's eaten or how he traveled to a place as he does to his changing views of the Portuguese political situation.

The Song is You is a classic Megan Abbott. Set in a glamorous post-war Hollywood, the book is based on the true story of the disappearance of the actress Jean Spangler. Abbott imagines a Hollywood full of the famous and powerful out for a good time and the many hopeful people drawn to the chance of fame or the good life. Gil "Hop" Hopkins is a reporter for a Tinseltown gossip rag and he spends his days writing fluff articles about Rita Hayworth's marriage tips or Kirk Douglas's newest movie. He spends his nights doing his level best to have a good time. He meets Jean with a friend of his and they go out one evening and somewhere in the haze of nightclubs and dance halls, he leaves them to go home with a Ms. Hotcha. Jean disappears that night and while Hop feels blameless, he is drawn back into the story some years later by that mutual friend. Things rapidly get messy for everyone involved. Hop is an interesting protagonist; he's out for what he can get and barely under control, but he also has the remnants of a conscience. The story Abbott weaves is complex and never goes in the expected direction.

The Song Is You will probably be one of those tempting "shiny and new"s...Btw, I started The Slap last night in bed and I had to make myself put it down to go to sleep!

And now I see you're reading Master and Margarita, also on The List....dang! Well, later this year...

I picked up Angelology by Danielle Trussoni based largely upon a laudatory review in the NYT Book Review that concluded that Sensual and intellectual, “Angelology” is a terrifically clever thriller — more Eco than Brown. I am now wondering what book reviewer Susann Cokal read exactly. I'll admit right here that I've never read anything by Dan Brown, but I have read Umberto Eco and Angelology has nothing in common with Eco's complex and highly intelligent novels. I'd be more comfortable comparing this book to thrillers written by Katherine Neville or Kate Mosse, although with reservations.

Is Angelology really so bad? Well, the concept is fantastic; based on three Bible verses (Genesis 6:2-4), Trussoni creates a world in which the fallen angels bore children with humans and that these offspring, the Nephilim, supernaturally good-looking, blond, tall and powerful, still exist today. They are, however, very, very evil and seek the utter enslavement of mankind. Also, the central segment of the book, taking place in occupied Paris, is well done, compelling (the Nephilim get along great with the Nazis) and action-packed. The characters here are reasonably fleshed out.

The flaws in the story are most apparent in the modern day story, set at the end of 1999. Here characterization is sacrificed on the altar of cram-packed action and even the action is sometimes quickly summarized so as not to waste time. The good guys are all instantly able to make startling leaps of logic (that are always correct) and to tell the good guys from the bad guys. They are never fooled, not even once. And the bad angels are amazingly incompetent and easy to kill. In one scene, a fierce and gigantic Nephilim is taken down by one unarmed geriatric nun. The characters are also paper-thin. There's the innocent, young and beautiful nun and her love interest, the New York hipster, who despite having to scramble to pay the rent, dresses only in vintage designer clothing and drives an antique car.

There are so many little inconsistencies and unexplained leaps of logic that derail the book. A book can be based on the unbelievable and work, but it must be internally consistent. Either the Nephilim are supernaturally strong and intelligent, allowing them to amass wealth and power or they are a group of easily distracted idiots. The originating idea was good; it's unfortunate that Trussoni didn't spend a little more time on the details. Also, the book doesn't so much end, as make way for book two, in which the hipster and the nun face new perils.

8 - Hmmm...that's disappointing. Guess I'll save it for a drunk on Nyquil sick day.

Too bad about Angelology. I bought it for the same reason you did.

I had also just finished A Time for Everything by Karl Knausgaard about the same time (pub. by Archipelago Press), which also involved the nephilim, and which I thought was an excellent book. It's not a mystery, or action thriller in any way at all, but a novel of angels through history. It's primary focus is in the 16th (?) century with an individual who decided to research the history of angels, and to determine whether or not they exist. It also includes a couple of novella length retellings of bible stories (Cain and Abel and Noah and the Flood), with a very modern take. I liked it very much.

I'm not an angel fan, though. It may be an enormous lack of imagination, but I'm severely disinterested in anything paranormal. But I'm a sucker for a literate thriller, which Angelology was not.

So, what with being snowed in, I've been indulging in crime novels, one old and classic and one new, both very good and noir.

Moonlight Mile is Dennis Lehane's newest and a sequel to Gone, Baby, Gone. In it, Patrick and Angie are older, married and parents, when the aunt of a the little girl they'd found and returned to her negligent mother tells Patrick that Amanda has disappeared again. Like in his other books, no one quite behaves the way you expect them to and Lehane even includes a little dig at the Kindle. Also, after reading this book, you will want to call somebody a 'hump'.

A Prayer Before Dying by Ira Levin is classic noir. A young man attending college on the GI Bill, meets an insecure and lonely student with a wealthy father. His fantasies of the easy life are cut short, however, when his girlfriend tells him that she's pregnant. He's sure her father will cut them off if he finds out, but she wants to get married. How he tries to fix things for himself lead him into an ever amplifying cycle of betrayal, deceit and murder.

>12 RidgewayGirl: Oooh, good, I was hoping Lehane's new one would be good. I've read all of them except the last one, I think.

I'm trying this year to read a little more from the books in my house. I did get them for a reason, urgent at the time, and then they were pushed to the side by newer and more urgent books, etc. I'm finding that LT, and the books it is introducing me to, is making me pickier in what I read, so the book that would have satisfied me five years ago is now seen more in the light of how good it is not, but more often I'm finding books that delight me.

Annette Vallon by James Tipton was one of the disappointing books. I'm a sucker for anything about the French Revolution, so I'm sure that's why I picked this one up. It just turned out to be devoid of nuance and, while written from the point of view of a woman, clearly written by a man. There are so many better books out there--I may have to pull out the new biography of Danton just to get the taste out of my mouth.

>14 RidgewayGirl:, An admirable goal. I know how you feel - I tend to buy books in huge batches. Somehow they become less desirable the longer they sit on my shelves. They get "stale," in a sense.

I look at many, if not most, of my unread books with intense longing. I haven't, however, figured out at way to read more than one book at a time.

If the new Danton bio you're thinking of is that by David Lawday, I'd recommend it. It's certainly a vast improvement on Annette Vallon. I think I picked it up v. cheaply via Kindle, but couldn't finish it. The Danton bio, by contrast, is very solid and lively. (I read a chunk of it sitting in the cafe Danton, on the carrefour de l'Odeon in Paris, facing the statue of Danton -- right in the middle of his old haunts! Pure serendipity...)

How lovely that it is the Lawday book. Except now I'm reading The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters and have no room in my life for anything else.

Last night, through various circumstances, I was home alone. After a week of snow days, this was heady stuff. Late last year I had reread The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, reading it on my laptop (via Google) because I couldn't find my copy and, astonishingly, the library system had no copies. It did have several copies of the DVD, however.

So last night I watched it. There were liberties taken with the text, including some large plot changes, but that was fine-I would have been bored by a scene by scene reenactment. What struck me was how unattractive Victorian women's clothing was, and especially how hideous the hairstyles were. There is no way for any woman to look anything other than repulsive with that hair! The men, on the other hand, didn't hold so tightly to historical accuracy. Instead of greased down side parts with muttonchops, they had flowing locks and sideburns. Also, why have waistcoats fallen from grace? That's my report from over here in the shallow end of the swimming pool.

Last year I read Fingersmith by Sarah Waters and was astonished by the way the plot twisted upon itself with ever increasing complexity, with fantastically interesting characters and settings, until the giant twist near the end that turned the book on it's head. So I picked up Waters' newest, The Little Stranger, with certain expectations, which the book both met and ignored.

The Little Stranger is set in post-WWII Warwickshire, in one of those stately homes that are now all owned by the National Trust. The Hundreds has fallen on hard times, with not enough money or servants to keep the decaying house up. Dr. Faraday, a struggling GP, is called out there one day and meets the last of Ayres family and gets drawn into their struggles to keep their legacy. He becomes a family friend and a witness to their downfall, as each family member becomes sure there is something malevolent working through the house...

Waters is an amazing writer, able to do pretty much anything. Here, she develops a world in which the old hierarchies are crumbling, but the old class resentments remain. She writes in the voice of a doctor whose parents had to struggle to get him his education, who is all too aware that he lacks the connections of the other doctors and has been set apart from his working class roots. The menace rises slowly, and Waters takes her time to allow it to bubble to the surface naturally. This is a quieter book than Fingersmith, but no less rewarding.

Warning: Bad language appears in the following review. Blame the author.

Anthony Bourdain made a splash with Kitchen Confidential, which has allowed him to become the very person he so eloquently criticized in that book. With Medium Raw he explains everything, exhibiting the same lack of filter that made the earlier book so much fun. Except that now he's defending some of the people he previously hated. Don't worry, though; he still has enough anger and vitriol to keep things interesting.

On the other hand, his life now is much less interesting. He's a media personality instead of a chef and drug addict, which gives him less to work with. Oh, he does his best to be shocking, opening the book with a lavish description of eating an endangered animal and dropping the f-bomb like a pro. It's just that if you aren't passionately interested in how chefs are innovating, if Momofuku and WD50 don't ring any bells or if you don't have an opinion on foie gras, then this book will be a little boring for long stretches. And even if you're a huge Top Chef fan, this book is a far lesser book than Kitchen Confidential, although I can only be happy that Bourdain has managed to do so well for himself. He's an asshole, but one you wouldn't mind sharing a meal with.

I was living in Munich when the old Stasi (East German secret police) files were opened. It was a wrenching experience for many, and fought against for many years. People went and looked at their files and discovered which of their friends and even family members had informed on them. Many others didn't want to know, still others watched their lives collapse as it was revealed that they'd been Stasi informers. The numbers were staggering and it seemed as if half of the DDR had been carefully watching the other half.

Seven Lies by James Lasdun takes place first in East Berlin in the seventies and then in New York in the early nineties. Stefan Vogel grew up in the family of man rising through the diplomatic service. There begin to be whispers that he and his family will be sent to New York. Stefan's mother is proud and ambitious and her husband's rise justifies her feeling that they are a cut above everybody else. Then, a small error derails everything and Stefan's family falls from the higher reaches of the political elite. The father grows passive, his mother becomes ambitious now for her sons and Stefan, now an outcast at school, will do what he needs to do to fall in with her vision of him as a poet.

Seven Lies begins with Stefan's attendance at a party in New York where a young woman approaches him and throws a glass of wine in his face. From that moment, Stefan is unmoored from his pleasant, quiet life in New York state with his wife, Inge, and forced to come to terms with his childhood and what happened that allowed him and his wife to leave East Germany so many years earlier.

That sound very intriguing. Good review without giving it away.

I saw (via Netflix) a wonderful movie about the Stasi and how it turned neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, "The Lives of others."

There was a funny movie about the nostalgia for the old DDR put out in Germany called Goodbye Lenin. Much less depressing.

"If I may make one further suggestion, your excellency. I fully accept the disciplinary action that you have initiated against me. However, I would propose that you postpone my suspension."
"That's out of the question. I do not go back on my decisions."
"Do you ever gamble, Yaroslav Nikolaevich?"
The prokuror regarded Porfiry with as much affront as if he had spat in his face.
"I propose a wager--that's all," pressed Profiry. "Delay my suspension for two days. If I have not solved the case, you may suspend me, indefinitely--without pay. If I have solved the case, I ask you to take no action against me. My success will rebound to your credit. My failure will give you a scapegoat."
Prokuror Liputin pinched his lower lip pensively. "I am Russian, Porfiry Petrovich. Of course I gamble."

The Gentle Axe by R.N. Morris is set in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and features an investigator adept at working the arcane rules and hierarchy of the Russian justice system to see the proper culprits arrested. By working for justice, however, Porfiry Petrovich will never be able to work his way up the career ladder, stepping, as he does, on the toes of his betters. He's still a little haunted by a case he solved a few years ago, that of the student Raskolnikov, and it affects how he deals with some of the people he comes into contact with.

When a body is found hanged from a tree in Petrovsky Park, and a suitcase containing the corpse of a second man, it looks like an easy case to solve. Clearly, the hanged man murdered the other man and then hanged himself in a fit of remorse. But Porfiry demands all sorts of unreasonable things; autopsies for both of the murdered men, for example, the results of which cloud the easy solution. His investigation takes him everywhere from the rooms of a young prostitute to publishing house specializing in philosophic translations.

The Gentle Axe is both an intricately plotted detective novel and an homage to Dostoevsky. It was fun finding references throughout the book to Dostoevsky's novels, although I'm sure I missed most of them.

I can't tell if you liked Seven Lies, although your detailed description tells me that you weren't as bored with it as I was. I read it after reading and loving the same author's the Horned Man. I couldn't tell they came from the same author because they were so entirely different from each other.

I was the opposite of bored with Seven Lies, but I'm willing to think that a large part of my fascination was in having witnessed the furore over the opening of the Stasi files while living in Germany and having reached a level of fluency that finally allowed me to read the kinds of newspapers that didn't feature page three girls or enormous sports sections.

Just peeking in to see what you have been reading...

>20 RidgewayGirl: Medium Raw just came in for me at the library, so I'll be reading it in the next week or two. Even if the book isn't as good as Kitchen Confidential, I'm sure I'll still enjoy Bourdain's particular brand of snarkiness.

Also noteworthy is Bourdain's adeptness at using the f-bomb as a noun, adjective and verb.

Nickelini reminded me to read Lullabies for Little Criminals, which was very, very good. Usually, books with child narrators annoy me because they don't really sound like children at all, but O'Neill's Baby, at twelve, struck exactly the right balance between childishness and an awareness of the world around her; the run down streets of 1970s Montreal, where she lives with her heroin using father in a series of sleazy apartments.

Now, again, b/c of you, another book goes on the wishlist. That Little Criminals sounds fab. Almost done with The Little Stranger.

20 - Interesting. I have one Bourdain cookbook (Les Halles) and almost never use it because he is such an ass, even in the recipe instructions. You have to wade through all of his jokes to get to the instructions - not very useful. I've avoided Kitchen Confidential because of thatand the fact that I didn't care for the restaurant Les Halles that much either. I don't mind snark, but he's way overboard for me, but perhaps I should reconsider (particularly since I do know Momofuku and WD50 though I haven't been lucky enough to go).

I'll be looking forward to what you have to say as well Talbin.

I'm already a little behind here, in January no less!

Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O'Neill will probably rate among the best books I'll read this year. It won the Canada Reads competition in 2007 and fully deserved it. Nickelini reminded me that I had a copy of this book when she reviewed it on her thread here.

Lullabies for Little Criminals follows the story of Baby, who lives with her heroin-addicted father in a series of run-down apartments in Montreal. It's a grim tale, but not at all depressing because it's told in the voice of a curious twelve-year-old, who is not quite at an age to be aware of what she never had. It's her curiosity and her need to be cared for, that leads Baby into danger, over and over again.

The Birth House by Ami McKay is one of this year's nominations for Canada Reads and has high ratings here on LT. It's a really bad book; preachy and shallow. I think that its popularity lies with the subject matter -- a midwife fights for the right to deliver babies in rural Nova Scotia during the First World War and so the feminine and homeopathic is set against the masculine/controlling and modern medicine. This could be an interesting book, except that women died in incredible numbers when they gave birth in unsanitary conditions and without recourse to medical and surgical help. Forceps alone have saved millions. It is easy, now when giving birth at home with a midwife is a safe and comfortable option, to forget that the reason that we have that option is that should something go wrong, we'll be quickly moved to a hospital.

In The Birth House, Dora is an apprentice midwife whose mentor is an old woman who speaks only in aphorisms. She's fond of treating flu with a little spit and an old velvet quilt, and she can turn a breech baby by turning the mother upside down and singing into her hoo-ha. While entertaining, she's not someone you'd trust with a hangnail, but the residents of tiny, isolated Scots Bay, Nova Scotia, have little choice, until a doctor arrives who builds a maternity house in a nearby town and offers the women a safe, sanitary place to give birth.

The characterizations are either paper-thin or inconsistent. I was never sure what any of the "good guys" would think or do, because their actions were determined by the needs of the plot instead of arising from within them. As for the "bad guys" (and in this book, people are very much "bad" or "good"), they remain utterly true to stereo-type, so that Dora's aunt and cousin began to be confused in my mind with Nellie Olson and her mother and the book itself with a Very Special Episode of Little House on the Prairie.

The Black Tower is a historical novel by Louis Bayard, set in Paris just after the restoration of the monarchy after Napoleon's exit. The Revolution was just twenty years ago. Hector is a medical student who lost most of his late father's money to a mistress who turned out to have a husband and children and so he and his mother take in lodgers, mainly students, to make ends meet. One day, Vidocq, the feared detective on the Parisian police force arrives to tell him that his name and address have been found on a recently murdered man. Hector is drawn into a complex scheme concerning the son of Marie Antoinette, his father's actions during the revolution and this curious detective.

>31 janemarieprice: jane
I have a low tolerance for snark and ego but loved Kitchen Confidential.

>33 RidgewayGirl: "...Dora's aunt and cousin began to be confused in my mind with Nellie Olson and her mother and the book itself with a Very Special Episode of Little House on the Prairie."

This made me laugh. I think I'll be skipping The Birth House.

The Black Tower sounds delicious. I haven't read Bayard yet, but I have Mr. Timothy waiting. I have read excerpts of Bayard's writing and that is what got me to pick up that one.

You are a very, very bad influence.

33 - sounds yucky, nice review though.

Lullabies for Little Criminals sounds good; I'll add that to my wish list.

I've had a bug for the past few days, leaving me just far enough under the weather to set aside more challenging books for the comforting arms of crime novels. My mother has a thing for books about serial killers and her mother loved watching professional wrestling, so clearly it's in my blood.

I started with a book that's been around a few years, Shadow Man by Cody McFadyen. I thought the first half was better than the second, but I was running a fever through the first half. The author is a good enough writer, and the basic plot is interesting enough; an FBI agent, struggling to recover from an attack that left her scarred and her family dead, is sent messages from a serial killer preying on women with internet sex sites and claiming to be the direct descendant of Jack the Ripper. The killer is frighteningly clever and has targeted every member of the FBI team assigned to find him.

So I'm reading along, and things start to grate a little. Firstly, everyone (except the team's misfits) is described as being movie star handsome, or supermodel pretty, the women all freakishly short (would the FBI accept an applicant standing only 4'10"?) and the men all extra tall and well built. Secondly, the book is told from a woman's point of view, but the author couldn't pull it off. He did have her discuss her feeling a lot, but guys? I'm sorry to tell you that women, as a rule, do not notice the breast size of other women first thing. Probably not even horrifically murdered women. Also, women just don't gasp in awe when a man pulls out a penis. I'm just sayin'.

--I'm sorry to tell you that women, as a rule, do not notice the breast size of other women first thing. Probably not even horrifically murdered women. Also, women just don't gasp in awe when a man pulls out a penis. I'm just sayin'.

Right! So funny! That's a dead giveaway that it's a man writing. I remember a conversation I had once with my husband about one of my friends. He said something about her chest and I realized that I had never, ever thought about it before. And as for gasping, you'd only do that if you were being flashed in public!

Brava! Well said.

41: Yes, I agree, the gasping would only happen if you were being flashed in public - but I don't think it would be "in awe".

40: everyone (except the team's misfits) is described as being movie star handsome, or supermodel pretty, the women all freakishly short (would the FBI accept an applicant standing only 4'10"?) and the men all extra tall and well built

See that's why is supposed to be written from the woman's point of view - if it were a man's, only the women would be 'supermodel pretty'. Or maybe the writer has just been watching too much bones (how many pretty women that enjoy playing with dead things can there really be?).

Looking forward to your post on The Master and Margarita, it's on my TBR pile.

Not much noteworthy in the reading this past week. A selection of crime novels was read and, for the most part, enjoyed.

When I was ten or eleven, I really wanted to be an orphan. They have the best adventures, in books at least, and are able to join the circus or attach themselves to wealthy benefactors whenever they want. I had to be home in time to do my homework before dinner. I loved books about orphans; Anne Shirley, but also Jean Webster's books (especially Dear Enemy), along with countless others.

So last year I found a copy of Mandy by Julie Andrews (yes, that Julie Andrews), and brought it home with a real sense of recapturing a piece of my childhood. I'd loved this book about a plucky orphan who finds and rehabs an abandoned cottage. I loved it so much that I still feel vaguely tolerant of that Barry Manilow song and even of Barry Manilow, himself.

I've spent the past few weeks reading Mandy to my children in the evening. They have an amazing capacity to curl up and listen to gentle, old-fashioned books, although they would never pick one up to read on their own, my daughter preferring her novels to be tinged with fantasy and my son leaning toward the explosive or farty in his personal reading. They adored it, just as they had the surprisingly preachy Black Beauty. I, on the other hand, was a little bored. And the cottage seemed smaller and dingier than when I visited it as a child. I would advise caution on revisiting childhood favorites, but the kids loved it. We're beginning The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate tonight.

Laughing out loud at the "gasp in awe" comment. Nope. That's a man's view of what he'd like a woman to do -- and what some women may have done (great acting skills, if so!!)

So, you've caught my attention with the Stasi book and I'm wondering if your R.N. Morris book is the same as mine, only under a different title. I haven't read it yet -- it's A Razor Wrapped in Silk. It looked intriguing but is languishing on a TBR stack...

A Razor Wrapped in Silk is the third, but I don't get the impression that they need to be read in any sort of order.

Re: the 'gasp in awe' - very funny though sounds like a dreadful book. I think Seinfeld hit the nail on the head when they called a man's body to a Jeep.

Because everything's just all out there?

I had this impression of A Reliable Wife that it was a slow literary tale of repressed longing set somewhere in New England. I read it and discovered that it's set in Wisconsin and it's more along the lines of a scandalous melodrama.

He wondered, in the dark, in the latest hours, whether she thought of him in return, just down the hall, so clean, so rich, so polite. But she did not. He never crossed her mind.

She lay, Catherine, in a clean, simple nightdress, her eyes to the blinding moon and the drifting snow, and she dreamed of cigarettes and about the body of a worthless man who lay next to some other woman in some other bed, in tangled sheets in a rotten town, miles and miles and miles away.

Robert Goolrick says that he got the idea for this book from Wisconsin Death Trip and he makes frequent mentions of murders and suicides committed for no reason but that the winters are too long. Meanwhile, there's just too much going on to be able to enjoy the lugubrious atmosphere. No one is who they seem and there's not a lot of repression. Nobody is very nice, but they all have reasons.

A Reliable Wife was a fun, escapist read that I was always happy to pick up again to find out how these people could further destroy their own lives.

49 - No, because it's strictly utilitarian. :)

OK, scored the first R.N. Morris from PaperbackSwap; the second (relatively cheaply) from Amazon -- the hardcover is a bargain book; cheaper than the paperback or the Kindle version!

Oddly, I am less than interested in reading a book focused on the many ways people can destroy their own lives. There is so much of that in reality... Now, if it comes along with a GREAT plot or characters, fine. But it doesn't sound as if that's the case with Goolrick's book...

#45 I went back in time to read one of the Black Stallion novels by Walter Farley. I didn't exactly regret that, but I was amazed at how thin it was, and decided that, as a kid I must just have brought so much of my own imaginings to it (and I do think the first book was much better so it gave me a basis to build on). But I did regret watching the Mary Martin version of Peter Pan again. I was amazed that I accepted Mary Martin as a boy, she seemed blatantly female. And, it too, seemed a bit cartoony instead of the rich story I'd remembered.

I can't write a reasoned, objective review of The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers by Thomas Mullen because I loved it so, so much. If I were living in 1934, and the Firefly Brothers were, well, not fictional, I'd be filling scrapbooks with newspaper clippings of their exploits.

The book opens with Jason Fireson waking up in a morgue. He's pretty good at sleeping anywhere, but he's never woken up naked on a metal table before. He's also got a row of welt-like holes on his chest. It doesn't take him long to find his brother on an adjacent table, wake him up and make their escape from the police station, thanks to an all too frightened officer they find in a locker room, who seems to think that they should be dead.

The brothers can't remember anything of the last few days and so the book moves back and forth through time, telling the story of how they became infamous bank robbers and of what happened to them after they woke from the dead. There's a mystery here, too, of what happened to get them killed in the first place.

Mullen takes the unbelievable and weaves it with a realistic depiction of how unrelentingly difficult the depression was for millions of Americans, sending families to live in ramshackle Hoovervilles and causing men to fight for any job available.

Next, I gave up on the truly egregious The Doctor's Wife by Elizabeth Brundage, proof that no matter how prestigious the writer's program you attended, or how many authors have written laudatory blurbs, if you can't write, don't have anything to say and are missing an imagination, your book will stink. I gave up on page 146, so maybe it improved dramatically later.

I then turned to Stuart MacBride, that dependable author of dark crime novels set in cold and rainy Aberdeen, Scotland, and so enjoyed a well-written book with a plot and three dimensional characters. In Dying Light, an Edinburgh drug dealer is looking to expand his turf northward, and the local gangs are not pleased. Someone is killing the older and more desperate prostitutes found on street corners down near the docks and what's with the dog carcass found in a red suitcase in the woods? McRae is in disgrace over a bust gone badly awry and is reassigned to the fuck-up squad, working under a boss he doesn't respect.

My only complaint with this book is that Aberdeen's unpredictable weather had me putting on a sweater partway through.

In The Storyteller of Marrakesh by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya a storyteller begins his tale one evening in the central marketplace of Marrakesh. It's a story he tells once a year, about the disappearance years ago of a young foreign couple from the Jemaa. One by one, the listeners chime in with their own stories of their encounters with the couple, shedding a little more light on what happened, but also showing the unreliability of memory and how no two people will view the same person or event in the same way. Some saw the woman as unbelievably beautiful, one man going so far as to try to buy her off of her husband, others saw her a cheap or slutty. Some thought the man was dark, some thought he had a red beard. But the story progresses of two foreigners in danger and of a vibrant Moroccan marketplace, where the different ethnic groups come together and form a community.

I enjoyed the window onto another culture provided by this book. There are just not that many books available here about northern Africa that aren't written from an outsider's point of view. The book has it's own rhythm, where the story proceeds in circles, from many viewpoints, with frequent digressions.

Nice review of The Storyteller of Marrakesh; I'll add that to my wish list.

There's being dead and there's being alive and, in between, when you're dead, but still remembered by the living, there's a second life in the city of the dead, a sprawling metropolis where people arrive suddenly and leave just as abruptly. Luka's a journalist who writes a daily newsletter in the city and who reports as there's an influx of people and then as the city empties out until only a few thousand inhabitants remain.

Back in the world of the living, Laura works for Coca Cola and is on assignment in the Antarctic as a "wildlife specialist" as part of a publicity campaign. The world is a difficult place now, sometime in the future, with wars and terrorism and global warming no longer an abstract idea. She's there with two other co-workers when an antenna breaks off of their communications array and they are left unable to contact anyone.

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier is a dystopian tale set at the end of the world and it's a cleverly told story of the recently dead, living in the city for a long as they are remembered. Oh, and it's a story about survival in the Antarctic, all in a slim novel. There's not a word wasted, with each of the threads of Brockmeier's tale worth a book of its own. I couldn't put it down, and all too quickly it was over.

#57
This sounds good, another book to add to the wish list

David Carter grows up happily collecting artifacts that he digs up from the rubble of his post-war Coventry back garden and family mementos, which he carefully labels and displays in his bedroom. He eventually becomes a curator at the local museum, marrying a girl he meets in a museum tea shop on a research trip to Aberdeen. He continues to keep small souvenirs of his life, pictures of his family, rail tickets and the like throughout his life and these provide the framework for So Many Ways to Begin by Jon MacGregor.

As an adult, David is accidentally given some startling information about his place in his family and it leaves him with questions that he can't find answers to. His wife is estranged from her family, but she misses them and the rainy Aberdeen she was desperate to escape. Their marriage has its own missteps and missed connections, even as their lives grow closer and more entwined.

The writing here is quietly assured, so that while I often lingered over a paragraph or two, no segments stood out from the others. Dramatic events unfold, but are told as part of the greater tale of David's life, which is an ordinary life, told beautifully.

>59 RidgewayGirl: - Oh, that sounds lovely. I will have to look for it.

>40 RidgewayGirl:: Thanks for laughs! :-)
>45 RidgewayGirl:: I read so few classic children's book when I was a child--most of them I read with my sons as they were growing up. I envy the adults who have those favorites from when they were a child. I think your fond memories of the very best ones must insulate you a bit when you reread them as an adult; but others, I imagine, would suffer some as you grow older. I'm sure much of the pleasure of the book for your children is having the book read to them by you. I never had the experience of any adult reading a book to me, but I almost felt like I did when I read books to my children. Some of my absolute favorite times.

I've decided to just comment on the books I read when I feel like it. I know that that approach lacks rigor and exposes me as a dilettante rather than the serious reader that this forum is designed for. On the other hand, it keeps this thread from feeling like homework at the times when I'd rather read than comment.

Seriously, though? The rest of you need to keep commenting on everything you read. This forum can only afford one slacker and I call dibs.

By the Time You Read This is the fourth novel in Giles Blunt's detective series set in Algonquin Bay, Ontario. John Cardinal's wife is bipolar and has often been hospitalized, but she seems to be doing better, working and interacting with her family, when she suddenly commits suicide. Cardinal can't believe he didn't see it coming and begins to suspect she was murdered when he starts receiving nasty sympathy cards. Meanwhile, Delorme, his occasional partner, is given a stack of photographs by the Toronto police of a girl being abused. They think that the background indicates that the perpetrator operates in Algonquin Bay and she sets out to find him through those disturbing photos.

By the Time You Read This works well for the most part with the alternating storylines. Both are intense and trading off chapters allows a breather of a sort. My only criticism is that the ending was rushed and depended on a hearty dose of external help and coincidence. Still, Blunt does well operating within the constraints of the genre and I'll be looking forward to the next installment.

The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer is a straight-up historical novel of the kind I haven't read in a long time. There's no literary fanciness, or historical revisionism; the writing is clear and unembellished and the story is a straightforward account of a decade in the life of a young Hungarian architecture student and his family beginning in 1937.

Andras Levi leaves Budapest to study in Paris. Restrictions had been placed on the number of Jews allowed to work or study and he can't get a place in a local university. In Paris, he struggles financially and falls in love. His brother, Tibor, goes to study medicine in Italy and his youngest brother feels trapped in their small hometown taking care of their parents. The Paris years are filled with the usual hope and expectations of any young man who is excited by his studies and in love. The reader, of course, is aware of what must happen soon, of an urgency completely absent from the lives of the story's characters. Sure, things are difficult and prejudice wasn't left behind in Hungary, but the politics of the day are so much less important than Andras' day to day concerns.

I knew next to nothing about what happened in Hungary during the war. If I thought about it at all, I simply assumed that it suffered the same fate of all those trampled and destroyed eastern European countries, so the story told here did hold surprises for me and the sometimes intrusive historical segments were necessary for my understanding of events. While the book sped up as the decade passed, losing the lavish detail of the years spent in Paris for a pared down recounting of life in Budapest during the war, I think that that suited the flow of the novel.

>62 RidgewayGirl: I'm being a slacker these days also:-) I'm backed up a few books now and didn't have much to say about the mysteries I've read (when you read 4 in a row by the same author, what can you say?)

I do enjoy reading what you have to say when you do comment - even if it might take me a while to get back to your thread.

Thanks, avaland. There is a point at which I think, even when the book was good, and I think a few people here might really like it, that the reviews that exist do a perfectly adequate job of describing the book.

I closed Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter and held it for awhile. I read all the blurbs and the information about Tom Franklin. I even read through the tiresome list of names in the acknowledgments section at the back. I was not ready to let this book go.

Set in southeastern Mississippi, in a dying mill town, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter tells the story of 32 Jones, who is the constable of tiny Chabot, which means he runs a speed trap to fill the town's coffers and directs traffic during shift changes at the mill. Anything bigger than simple assault he passes on to his boss, the chief investigator in Fulsom, the town up the road, large enough to have a Wal-Mart. Larry Ott is an outcast. Suspected in the disappearance of a girl who lived nearby when he was a teenager, he's lived under the small town suspicion that he got away with something for decades. He was an outcast back in high school, too; a reader and a nerd. But, for a short time, when they were boys, they were friends of a sort, loneliness pulling them together despite the fact that 32 is black and Larry white, in a time and place where that matters a lot.

Now another girl's gone missing and the natural suspect is Larry Otts.

Dripping with atmosphere like a Spanish moss infested tree, Franklin makes rural Mississippi, both past and present, the central character of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. Every bit of this book was pitch perfect, both as a crime novel and as something more, a picture of life in the Old South and the lives of its inhabitants.

I want it! I want it! I want it!

ETA: Oh. It's already on my wishlist. So...I want it now! I want it now! I want it NOW!

Oh! Are you reading The Master and Margarita now? I've got about two chapters left to go. We should discuss.

The Master and the Margarita is going slowly for me. I'm about a third of the way through. I'll hustle.

No worries; it's taken me awhile, too. There is much to sort out and think about. I think I was 9 chapters in before I noticed the chapter notes at the end of the book.

67-69: I just started The Master and Margarita. I'm only about 70 pages in, but I'm loving it so far. Though there are no chapter notes at the end of my copy.

Oooh! I don't even like crime novels that much, but I'm with citygirl!

"Hello, Michael."

Gibbons had been retired from the force five years now. I hadn't seen him in four, but it didn't matter. We had some history. He shook off the rain and threw a chair toward my desk. He sat down as if he belonged there and always had. I put the Cubs away, pulled open the bottom drawer, and found a bottle of Powers Irish. John took it straight. Just to be sociable, I gave Sir Earl a jolt.

"What's up, John?"

He hesitated. For the first time I noticed his suit, uncomfortably cheap, and his tie, a clip-on. In his hands he twisted a soft felt hat.

"Got a case for you, Michael."

He always called me Michael, which was okay since that was my name.

So begins The Chicago Way by Michael Harvey, a classic hard-boiled set in present day Chicago. Despite PowerBooks and DNA testing, this detective novel does it old school. Dangerous dames who aren't who they say they are, deadly secrets and a detective who trades wisecracks with gun-toting thugs.

John always had a weakness for them. Women, that is. It's been my experience if you have that sort of weakness, the younger ones tend only to aggravate the situation.

Kelly's ex-partner shows up asking him to look into a long ago rape case, one that was never solved and now even the case files are missing along with much of the physical evidence. The victim wants answers, but somebody is determined to silence anyone involved.

The book loses a little of its intensity toward the end and I'm not quite convinced of Kelly's reasoning, but it was a fun ride.

70, TineOliver, the notes are not strictly necessary, they just help explain some of the religious and literary allusions and connections, and give context to some details of Moscow life at that time. I have the one with this cover:

Hey, I have that edition! There are chapter notes?

I did a little piece on 12 Nordic crime writers (women) in the current Belletrista issue and noticed when I was reading up on what some LTers thought of their books, I came across your name at least once, maybe more (was it Lackberg you read?). The piece is meant as mostly an overview. I'd be interested to know if you've read any of the others. I've read the Larsson, Sigurdadottir, and some Fossum (maybe 3 of hers, but I have not got attached to them). Oh, here's the link: http://www.belletrista.com/2011/Issue10/features_3.php
I did order the recent Anne Holt though while I was researching this:-)

Thank you for derailing my plans for Thursday evening, avaland! I need to check my email more often and then I would have already known the new Belletrista was up.

Thank you for giving me two new authors to check out. Leena Lehtolainen may not be available in English (yet), but she has been translated into German. And I'll also be looking for Camilla Cedar.

I adore Karin Alvtegen. She's similar to Barbara Vine/Ruth Rendell or Minette Walters. I also like Karin Fossum, but I have to say that I thought that Camilla Lackberg compares unfavorably to the very worst of our "bestselling" suspense novelists. I have books by a few of the others, but haven't read them yet. Blackwater by Kristen Ekman has some of the loveliest descriptions of loneliness that I have ever read.

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray is just not the kind of book I'd normally pick up. For one thing, it's set in a private boys' school and so is primarily concerned with the lives of fourteen-year-old boys. It also has lots of asides about string theory and Irish soldiers in the First World War. I'm still not sure why I decided to read it. And I could not put Skippy Dies down.

Skippy is Daniel Justers, a boarder at an elite Catholic school in Dublin. He dies in the opening paragraphs, so the title's not a spoiler. The book then goes back and shows the events building to his death, following various denizens of Seabrook College. Skippy has family problems, difficulties on the swim team and a bully out to get him. He also has a good, if geeky, band of friends and, most importantly, he's fallen in love. his roommate, Ruprecht, is an obese genius with a love of his own; the complicated cosmology posited by a Stanford University professor. Howard is a history teacher worried that this is as far as he'll ever go. He did something years ago that has earned him the nickname of 'Howard the Coward'.

Fourteen is a difficult age for boys. Some have almost finished puberty and are six feet tall and hairy, others have only just begun, lagging several feet behind their contemporaries. Their interests diverge just as dramatically with some dreaming of a first kiss and others watching hardcore porn on their laptops and doing whatever drugs they can get their hands on, and then there are always the boys who would prefer to spend their time on role playing games or scientific experiments.

What makes this book so hard to put down is the honesty and empathy with which Murray approaches his characters. Even the vilest of boys is a person and the author never lets us forget it. He is excited about the boys' interests and activities and, therefore, so is the reader. This is not a cheerful book, but there is a strong vein of humor running through even the most depressing of chapters. And there is one in the middle of the book, about the undertaking of Ruprecht's big experiment that is worthy of a John Hughes movie.

We look at the history of the world in terms of the grand, over-arching themes, but to people living their lives as best they can, things seem awfully chaotic.

>76 RidgewayGirl: Another Karin Alvtegen fan here! I've read her three translated titles and loved Shadow.

Enjoyed your review of Skippy dies I hope to read it later in the year

Skippy Dies sounds like a book that I would like too.

>76 RidgewayGirl: Thanks for your response. I should have mentioned that I have read Alvtegen also (Missing and Betrayal). I agree she is like Barbara Vine, but she most reminded me of 1960s Australian author Patricia Carlon, who was republished by Soho Press sometime in the last decade or so. I'm not a real fan of psychological suspense novels like those (the Hakan Nessars are akin to them), which is probably why I haven't chased down the other two Alvtegens. I'd like to get around to some Eckman also.

Great review of Skippy Dies; I'll probably read it in the next few months.

I would be tremendously interested in reading other people's reactions to Skippy Dies.

The Night Season is part of a gory series by Chelsea Cain set in Portland, Oregon. This one's a departure from the earlier books in that the serial killer who anchors the series is largely absent, and a secondary character, a journalist, has become the main character. It's a great improvement.

You're here because it's somewhere. Dogs pant in the streets. Beer won't stay cold. The last new song you liked came out a long, long time ago, and the radio never plays it anymore.

If you like your crime novels dark, you won't find many darker than Nic Pizzolatto's Galveston. Roy Cady is a mob enforcer in New Orleans. He'll rough guys up, or more, for his boss, Stan. The day a doctor shows him a picture of his lungs, filled with what look like snow flurries, is the day his girlfriend moves up and starts dating his boss. Then Stan sends him on an errand to scare a guy, with the odd instruction to not carry any weapons with him. It's enough to save his life when the job turns out to be a set-up, and then a bloodbath. With the exception of a teen-age hooker, he's the only one living by the time the bullets have stopped flying.

He takes the girl, Rocky, along as he leaves Louisiana, and she convinces him to stop by her old home in East Texas for a moment. Before long, he's holed up in a run-down motel in Galveston with Rocky and her three-year-old sister in the room next door.

"What's the matter with her, then? Having a little one like this. What's wrong with her?"
"I can't really say. You know how it is. Some people. Something happens to them. Usually when they're young. And they never get any better."
"But some do."
"I guess. You tend to meet more of the other kind, though."

This isn't one of those cheerful ending type books. Everybody's damaged and Roy, the closest thing to a good guy Pizzolatto provides, isn't very good at all. But the author reminds the reader that there's a reason that people are the way they are, that not everybody's as resilient as they need to be to survive. The tension in the story never lets up, even when we know who might have made it out. Pizzolatto's writing perfectly suits the mood and tempo of the story he's written. I'll be waiting for his next book.

You're born and forty years later you hobble out of a bar, startled by your own aches. Nobody knows you. You steer down lightless highways, and you invent a destination because movement is key. So you head toward the last thing you have left to lose, with no real idea what you're going to do with it.

Terrific review of Galveston. I'm catching up, so...very happy to see your review of Skippy Dies, which I hope to read this summer, and I'm intrigued by your review of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.

>85 RidgewayGirl: very interesting, it's written in second-person point of view? That's rare and worth a look on its own. The only other I've read is Bright Lights, Big City.

Fun review to read. You keep tempting me!

>85 RidgewayGirl:, >87 detailmuse: See also If On A Winter's Night A Traveller. I must say, it was rather discomforting about a quarter of the way through the book when I found out I was a man (in the story).

It's not written in the second person generally, but there are these second person passages that I read as being the main character's musings about a wasted life. You know, I never even noticed that and I usually feel annoyed when I run into too many novels written in the first person.

Jacqueline Kelly's first book, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate is something special. It reads like she took Anne of Green Gables, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Origin of Species and Little House on the Prairie and distilled from them an entirely original tale of a twelve year old girl, growing up in the small town of Fentress, Texas in 1899. She's the only daughter of a well-to-do cotton farmer with six sons, and she's possessed of a relentless curiosity about the natural world.

Things change for Callie when she scandalizes the local librarian by asking to check out Charles Darwin's controversial book. Callie is equally scandalized by the librarian's reaction and the event comes to the ears of her grandfather, a stand-offish old man who both loans her his copy of the book and takes her under his wing to teach her about natural history.

It's hard to explain why this book is so very good. Callie's exploding interest in the natural world and warm relationship with her grandfather (who tells her a wonderful story about a Civil War battle and a bat) is balanced by her mother's determination to teach Callie what she will need to know to be a housewife when the time comes and by the antics and adventures of her six brothers, who are allowed a great deal more freedom than Callie enjoys.

I read this book with my ten-year-old daughter, who strongly related to Calpurnia and her love of science and nature, and with my seven-year-old son, who pretended not to care, but who, alone of all of us, was able to keep track of the differences between Callie's many brothers. I hope that the next book we read together is half as good as this one.

>91 RidgewayGirl: science, history, feminism, mentoring, coming-of-age -- Sold! Your comments are wonderful.

I apologize in advance if I sound immensely braggy and full of myself. I have spent the past two weeks reading Vergebung, the German language translation of Stieg Larsson's third book. It was 848 pages long, German vocabulary and sentence structure being what it is. It kept me going, surprisingly, and I enjoyed the odd experience of living solely in the world of a single book for so long. Towards the end, I would wake up in the middle of the night and go read for an hour or so.

About the actual book; if you liked the first two books in the trilogy, you will have already read this one, or be planning to. I do recommend them although Larsson takes a bit of getting used to. He will never skip over anything, or fail to give you needed information, so there's a lot of information dumping, which may not be used in the story for several hundred pages. He is also not the most brilliant of stylists and his journalist character is pure male wish-fulfillment. But if you've read the first two, then you're used to Blomqvist, the unlikely lady magnet. His main character, Lisbeth Salander, is a masterpiece and I love how Larsson keeps his purpose, that of showing how even in a modern society, women are discriminated against and how thin the veneer of male tolerance is (and if you disagree, look at how Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton are discussed in contrast to how their male counterparts are seen). Larsson does have an axe to grind, but it's so subtly used, and there's so much action and intrigue going on around it, that you might miss it. The story may open with Salander being brought to the emergency room with a bullet in her head, but she is never a victim.

Yeah, Lisbeth rocks. And congrats on the German read-through. I'm always proud when I can do the same in French, which is too rare.

I found Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel on the "New Books" shelf at my local library and thought I'd give it a try. I have the worst luck with picking books randomly, so I was expecting it to be bad, but it wasn't. It was an odd little book, though.

Lilia was abducted by her father from her mother's Quebec house in the middle of a winter night when she was seven. Since then, she and her father lived on the road, never staying long in any one place. Eventually, he settles down in a small town in New Mexico, but Lilia keeps traveling. Her longest stay was in Brooklyn, where she met Eli, moved in with him and then left one morning.

Michaela's father was a private detective hired by Lilia's mother to find her. He tracked her movements across the US, even as his daughter and wife disappeared from his life. Michaela contacts Eli, telling him that Lilia is in Montreal and that he should meet her there.

Eli has been working on his dissertation for so long that he suspects that he'll never finish. When Lilia walks out, he is unable to move on. When he receives the message from Michaela, he drops everything and goes to Montreal to find Lilia.

Last Night in Montreal is a book more concerned with style than realism. Neither of the female characters ever seem particularly real, coated as they are with the many layers of their colorful pasts. This doesn't make the story any less interesting, but it did mean that I had to adjust my expectations of what would happen. I'm left with more questions than answers, but the book was a pleasant read that evoked the odd geography of Montreal in winter.

Philip Kerr wrote an excellent trilogy published in an omnibus edition as Berlin Noir about a detective in the hardboiled tradition. Bernie Gunther had a talent for witty banter that got him punched more often than not, an independent spirit and an eye for the ladies. The twist? Bernie lived and worked in Berlin in the 1930s and 40s, where survival often depended on one's ability to toe the line and no one's hands were clean.

He smiled without smiling--the sort of expression a snake has when it opens its mouth to swallow something whole. He was smaller than me, but he had the ambitious look of a man who might eventually swallow something larger than himself.

Field Gray is the seventh installment in the Bernie Gunther series. It's different from the earlier books, which concentrated on single cases or discrete series of events, and can be read as a stand alone novel. Field Gray takes Bernie from Cuba in 1954, back to the days of World War II and beyond, as Bernie tries to survive the attentions of everyone from General Heydrich to the CIA, from Paris in 1940 to a Soviet prison camp.

While the scope of the story is larger than before, Kerr still writes with his characteristically noir style. The plot, however, has grown in scope and intricacy. It's a ride as fast and as twisty as a roller coaster.

91 – Ooh, sounds good.

Black Robe, by Brian Moore, follows a priest, called a blackrobe by the native peoples, Laforgue, as he travels into the wilderness to help the two priests living in a Huron settlement in 1645. Laforgue feels his vocation strongly, the hope of saving people from damnation is a calling for which he is prepared to endure much. He has secret dreams of martyrdom. And then his beliefs slam up against those of the Algonquins guiding him upriver.

At that moment a great shadow passed over him, and, looking up, his prayer stillborn on his lips, he saw, high above, a huge eagle of a sort he had never seen in France, its head white, its beak and talons yellow, its great blackish wings rigid as sails, catching the wind eddies as it glided back and forth over the trees. Suddenly, swift as clashing swords, the great wings shut. The eagle plummeted between the trees. And as Laforgue knelt there, his struggles, his deafness, the dangers of this journey were transformed miraculously into a great adventure, a chance to advance God's glory here in a distant land. God was not hidden: He had shown Himself in the eagle's flight. Laforgue saw the eagle rise from the trees, its great wings beating steadily as it carried off its prey. In the beauty of this wild place, his heart sang a Te Deum of happiness.

This is Canada, Quebec, before the Europeans had more than a slight impact on those natives living near the few settlements. Europeans, coureurs de bois, who traded for furs, hadn't yet changed the native way of life. The fur traders adapted to their hosts instead. The "blackrobes" on the other hand, with their goal of saving souls for Jesus and a willingness to die in the process, were the first Europeans who wanted to change things.

The strength of this book is how is presents two sides without glorifying either of them. The 'savages' here are neither noble nor ignorant. The priests neither holy nor intent on destroying a way of life. Despite the strength of his belief, Laforgue cannot help but be shaken when unbaptized, unsaved Algonquins risk torture and death to keep their word.

What mercy? If Our Lord tests me, if He tests Daniel, then he promises us something which repays us a thousandfold for any suffering, any danger, any death. But what does He offer to these others, what mercy does He show to these Savages who will never look on His face in paradise, these He has cast into outer darkness, in this land which is the donjon of the devil and all his kind?

This wasn't an easy read, this isn't a sweet tale with a feel-good ending, but a serious book intent on historical accuracy and an examination of one man's faith. Father Laforgue is very much a product of his place and time, yet he is a thinking man forced to examine his worldview.

April in Paris by Michael Wallner concerns a young Wehrmacht translator who becomes accidentally involved with the French Resistance. I wonder if the story is more plausible in the original German.

There is really something fascinating about the early Jesuit missionaries. Back in my undergraduate days when I was still thinking about a history degree I read The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America by James Axtell, which compared the success of mainly the Jesuit missionaries to convert the Native Americans against the Native American efforts to kidnap and convert western settlers to their culture. The Native Americans were trying to replace their dead. What was interesting was the number of kidnapped people who liked their new way of life with the Native Americans...(side note : just noticing the Axtell book was published only a year after Black Robe, in 1986...not that that means anything. )

Growing up in Alberta, I was enchanted with the romantic idea of the voyageurs, those men who traveled through Canada collecting furs. Black Robe disillusioned me a little. It hadn't occurred to me that they would be smelly and not good in social situations. Also, hairier than customary.

I've read a few books since I last posted. I've been busy.

Little Face was a psychological thriller that reminded me of Ruth Rendell's earlier novels. Sophie Hannah has a similar skill in creating odd characters and twisted situations.

Safelight by Shannon Burke is set in New York City in 1990, and a brutal, gritty place it is. Burke spends more time describing the filth and decay than he does on character development, but the story was interesting enough.

Anne is my favorite of the Bronte sisters. Her heroes are neither blind nor brutal, and with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall there is everything one could possibly want from a Victorian Melodrama; midnight escapes, brutality, unrequited longing, perseverance against all odds, unfortunate marriages and as unpleasant and prickly a heroine as one could ever want. I love it.

Despite my love for Wildfell Hall, or maybe because of it, I had never read Anne's other novel, Agnes Grey. The dreary synopsis - the wretched and put-upon life of a governess, with its unique social and economic realities - just didn't call to me in the same way as thwarted passion did. I've read it now, and I'm so glad I have. Agnes is a cranky girl, full of self-pity, pride and self-righteousness, but she's not the pill that Wildfell Hall's Helen is, not by a long shot. Agnes grew on me, so that while I was rolling my eyes at her at the beginning of the book, I was rooting for her by the end of it. And there's plenty of unrequited love and disastrous marriages and even a little dog saved, for those who like a bit of drama with their biting social commentary.

One small thing bothered me. My edition has footnotes, which could have been an invaluable asset to understanding the novel, however, they were only used to state the obvious.

#101 - " It hadn't occurred to me that they would be smelly and not good in social situations. Also, hairier than customary. "

:) ... In the American versions, the Mountain Men from the early-mid 1800's, I think smelly is part of the romantic notion.

102: Funny, I liked Agnes more than you did, at least right from the start, but Agnes Grey not as much. And hairy Mountain Men? Yuck! But your comments were great fun to read.

One small thing bothered me. My edition has footnotes, which could have been an invaluable asset to understanding the novel, however, they were only used to state the obvious.

Yes! How annoying. Especially when the notes are at the end of the book. I think "I interrupted my reading to look at this?"

I also enjoyed both your recent reviews and the comment about the hairy, smelly voyageurs.

102/105 - The copy of Jane Eyre I just read had that too. What the hell. Not even footnotes, endnotes which is even more annoying. At least I haven't had a rash this year (like I did last) with those dreadful 'reading questions' sections at the back.

There were also 'reading questions' at the end of my edition of Agnes Grey too. And they were clearly written by the newest intern on her lunch break. One of them asked that if you were offered a huge amount of money to rewrite the book as a comedy, would you do it? It was unclear whether that was meant as a moral question, or one about capability.

I encountered the endnotes that weren't that informative in my recent read of Pride & Prejudice (w/o Zombies), so I settled on a method. I would only look at them if I were truly perplexed, and at the same time go over the ones that I'd skipped in case there was a nugget. I think they're for readers less experienced than we.

RG, have you read The Hunger Games? If you haven't, i suggest you go out and buy this crack ASAP, seeing as we're reading twins and all, Little Children (I think it was) notwithstanding.

The Hunger Games are on my list of books I need to read, especially since much of my time is taken up with

http://booksforkeeps.org/

Which has also caused me to read Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Captain Underpants, among others.

citygirl, the discussion questions for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies were the best part of that book.

That's wonderful, RG, that you're helping literate the small.

Maybe next time in the bookstore, I'll skim the PPZ discussion questions. It intrigues me that they even exist.

I'm beginning to wonder about the NYT Book Review. First it had me read that stinker of Dan Brown proportions, Angelology, and then it gave a rave review to One Day by David Nicholls. Which is now being made into a movie starring Anne Hathaway, with a trailer that screams "CHICK FLICK, CHICK FLICK, NOTHING OF SUBSTANCE HERE, MOVE ALONG".

That said, I did really like One Day. It's the kind of book to get lost in; romantic and well-written, with an intriguing hook - each chapter takes place on July 15, so that we see the progression of the relationship between Dexter, a somewhat obnoxious, middle class poseur, and Emma, a bolshie, brilliant, working class girl from Leeds, as the years pass. They meet at university, but don't get together until after a graduation party, as they both stand on the brink of great things. Of course, adulthood doesn't work like that. Dexter isn't sure what he wants to do, except that it should be something glamorous and Emma stalls out, for awhile, at least.

Once more she shuddered, as if peaking beneath a bandage, and snapped the notebook shut. Good God, 'the elusive thing'. She had reached a turning point. She no longer believed that a situation could be made better by writing a poem about it.

One Day is enjoyable, but it's ultimately a 'beach read' type book. A cut above the usual, maybe, but more the kind of book that is dependably readable in an airplane or when something escapist is needed rather than a book that challenges or makes one think. I did spend much of Sunday grabbing moments to read another chapter, setting aside all other books quite happily.

I've stopped reading the NYTimes book review...I read it for about four years (2006-2010). I didn't think their fiction reviews, in general, did a good job of capturing the book or presenting it in a way that told me whether i want to read it. Too many misleading reviews.

And odd choices for reviews. Books that I think would be reviewed just aren't and books that are more "best-sellery" are given the front page treatment. I hope that the Book Review isn't dumbing itself down in the hopes of widening its readership. There are plenty of places that review the books with mass appeal. I'm almost expecting Sam Tannenhaus to start a monthly round-up of what's new in paranormal romance.

I get my reviews from People magazine.

I've stopped reading the NYTBR regularly because only 33% (roughly) of their reviews are books by women.

>113 RidgewayGirl: LOL! I'll have to pick one up and see if that's true about the "best-sellery." I just posted a link to a really interesting piece about the future of book reviewers (book critics vs Amazon.com reviewers). It was a panel at the PEN festival apparently - one I missed (oh, I missed so many!)

I agree with you guys; the quality of the NYT book reviews (and, IMO, the quality of the books that the NYT chooses to review) has declined greatly in the past few years, and it's uncommon that I'll buy a book based on a review there (although I did just buy The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son by Ian Brown after reading a review of it on the cover of last Sunday's NYT Book Review). The Guardian is my #1 source for reviews of new books, followed by LT, Belletrista, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and The New Yorker.

LOL about the Sam Tannenhaus comment; don't give him any ideas!

There are travel memoirs that become classics. While they take place at a particular time, they either manage to grasp what is eternal about a place or they perfectly capture a lost version of the place they're writing about. Down and Out in Paris and London captures the eternal of being poor in a great place, I think, and A Moveable Feast is a snapshot of a great time that is gone and still mourned.

Adam Gopnik's account of a American family living in Paris for five years, Paris to the Moon, falls into a second category; a book that is a snapshot of a time and a place, but one that is rapidly fading and which will be forgotten in a few more years. It's a very specific memoir, full of a young father's infatuation with his son, and it's the story of a specific family (well-to-do New Yorkers writing for The New Yorker) in a specific place (Paris, circa 1995).

Which is not to say that this is not a highly readable book. It is. But I suspect that my enjoyment of it is based on the similarities of our experiences. I lived in Paris for a year and we started our family in a European country and watched our children being not altogether American. So much of what I liked about Paris to the Moon were the parts where our experiences overlapped. Gopnik interviewed Bernard-Henri Levy; I had a crush on Levy when I lived in Paris (I was taken with the idea that a philosopher could be a sex-symbol). Gopnik's wife had their second child in Paris; I had my two children in Munich, and found Gopnik's experience to be similar to my own. My time in Paris occurred just a few years before Gopnik's, so that I recognized his version of Paris more readily than I do Paris of today.

There are pieces of this book that are very, very good. The chapter on the trial and surrounding media storm of a French public official charged with war crimes was excellent and a brief segment on the French interviewee's astonishment over being called by fact-checkers was funny and thought-provoking.

There is simply a lot of this book that is specific to Gopnik's own experiences and which doesn't expand to universality. His search for an American-style place to work out, for example, or the long story of his son's first crush at age five. And while the reader gets an painstaking account of the bedtime story Gopnik told his son, complete with his son's trenchant commentary, there is almost nothing about his wife or how the move affected their relationship.

I loved this book, but I think that I loved it because of the memories it brought back, more than for the writing itself.

Incidentally, Paris to the Moon got a rave review from the NYT Book Review in 2000.

Karen Russell's debut novel, Swamplandia!, is set in a Florida almost like the one we know. Thirteen-year-old Ava's mother, the famous alligator wrestler who swam dramatically through gator-infested waters as part of Swamplandia!'s evening show, has died of cancer, leaving her family bereft and the theme park without its star attraction. Ava's brother, Kiwi, is the first to desert the dying attraction, running away to the mainland and taking a job with at a rival theme park called the World of Darkness. Her father also leaves for the mainland, to line up investors for improvements. Ava is left alone on her island with 98 alligators and an older sister who is fascinated with the spirit world and who takes ghosts as boyfriends.

The weird Floridian setting of the Ten Thousand islands and the city of Loomis, with it's hell-based theme park is something you just have to go with. The journey Russell takes the reader on is enjoyable; odd and perilous and swampy.

We tried to talk about survival but we didn't get very far. I think postgraduate students may be an evolutionary dead end, though you'd think archaeologists would have more of a clue than mathematical logicians, say, or experts in late Latin poetry. Nina, who works on nineteenth-century travel writing, knows all about expeditions that didn't make it, but so far her suggestions are limited to wondering how the Franklin survivors cooked their colleagues, since the chopped up bones were found in cooking pots, and suggesting that there ought to be some way of catching fish using tights.

A small archaeological dig on the west coast of Greenland sets out to uncover what they can of a medival Norse farmstead during the brief weeks of summer. Back home, there are worrying indications that an epidemic might prove more dangerous than SARS or swine flu. Nina, the only non-archaeologist, soon begins to hear alarming noises at night and to suffer from vivid nightmares of what happened to the inhabitants of this small settlement. Tension grows as they lose both their internet and satellite phone connections to the outside world. With winter coming, the group begins to worry about whether they'll be picked up on schedule and whether there'll be a world to return to.

Cold Earth was one of those books that felt painful to put down. Sarah Moss builds such exquisitely suspenseful tension as the group bickers, comes apart, and wonders if the world outside still exists, that up through the final pages, I was prepared for pretty much anything to happen. With its near-Arctic setting, I can't think of a better book for these hot summer days, unless you want to be able to put the book down now and then.

Cold Earth sounds excellent - adding it to my wishlist...

Years ago I read a fabulous YA coming of age novel called Sloppy Firsts. The protagonist, Jessica Darling, was a self conscious braniac growing up in a Jersey Shores world. Her best friend had moved, she didn't really like her other friends and she was strangely fascinated with the oddly pretentious and oft-suspended Marcus Flutie.

Perfect Fifths is the latest installment in Jessica's story, taking place eight years after she graduated high school. With this book, I have gone from fangirl-style excitement to a weary, inert hatred. I skimmed much of it, hoping that it would suddenly show a spark of life. It didn't.

Here is my problem. Why did a girl who felt like a misfit and who dreamed about getting the hell out of Pinesville make no new friends in eight friggin' years in New York? And why hasn't anyone else? This book featured a scene in which Marcus Flutie mentions that he ran into her high school crush on a building project in New Orleans. They recognized each other even though they had never actually met. And every character has either managed to become a multi-millionaire entrepreneur or to go to an Ivy League school, presumably on full scholarship, since none of them seemed to work. That Marcus Flutie guy, otherwise known as the one who got away, even wandered around after high school, teaching himself meditation, until Princeton jumped at the chance to educate him. Does this actually happen? Can I spend my children's college education funds now because all they need to go to an Ivy League college is a wacky hobby or a year spent as a hobo?

Oh, the plot of the book? Jessica runs into Marcus (literally, of course) in the Newark airport as she misses her flight. Then they talk for hours, except when they decide to communicate by passing hand-written poems back and forth. It's pretty much a very, very bad rip-off of Before Sunset, except with over-written dialog and much less point to it.

I was on vacation and got very little reading done, and what was read was as escapist as possible.

Broken Skin was Stuart MacBride's lackluster third installment in a usually excellent series set in a rainy, dangerous version of Aberdeen, Scotland. I'll read the next book in the hope that this was a temporary blip and not a steady slide.

The Missing by Chris Mooney demonstrated all too clearly how some male writers should not be allowed to write from a woman's POV. In this case, his protagonist was really a man, albeit one with D-sized jugs. Mooney has also watched too much CSI.

The vacation was great, though.

Just wanted to de-lurk and say hi! I've added a lot of your reads to my wishlist and I'm most excited about the Evolution of Calpurnia Tate and Cold Earth. Thank you!

A Moveable Feast is my perfect book, the one I read over and over (twice last year). Hemingway captures Paris at a specific time, painting a picture of expat and artistic life at a time when great writers all hung out together in the cafes and nightclubs and racetracks of Paris. His descriptions of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Maddox Ford, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and many others are well worth the price of admission. A Moveable Feast is also the story of a writer learning his craft, and the story of a marriage that is strong until Hemingway brings it down. He's clear that the death of his marriage was his own fault and if he doesn't go into laborious detail, neither does he gloss over his own culpability. Hadley, his wife, is the only one who emerges unsullied.

So I wasn't sure she needed a fictionalized account of Hemingway's first marriage, told from Hadley's point of view. After all, she is presented in A Moveable Feast as a strong, cheerful, grounded woman; not a bad way to be remembered. And my own irrational love of the book Paula McLain based The Paris Wife on left me determined both to read her book and to sneer at it. And now, having read the damn thing, I can't. McLain has done a good job at untangling the chronology and relationships. She's kept the speculation to a minimum and has clearly read Hemingway's books and biographies until they were coming out of her ears. Her writing is even similar in tone, without descending into parody. I liked it.

Books about mountain climbing and polar exploration are endlessly fascinating, despite the uniformly bad writing. The type of person who would willingly give huge amounts of time and money to a hobby that involves relentless pain, drudgery and cold, not to mention an enormous risk of death, or of at least a few lost toes, is not the type of person who would enjoy crafting perfect sentences alone in a quiet room. This is why Into Thin Air was a bestseller; Jon Krakauer was a writer who was secondarily a climber and able to write lucidly about something so mysterious to the rest of us.

Forever on the Mountain was not written by Jon Krakauer. I've read a lot of books by climbers and they are usually really badly written, the force of the story they are telling overcomes the dense prose and inability to communicate intangibles. James M. Tabor's writing is much better than average, but that's faint praise--this is not a well-written book. It's much given to hyperbole, a lack of objectivity and, well, banal writing. Oh, but the story is compelling.

In 1967, a group of 12 climbers set off to climb Denali, the tallest mountain in North America. A month later, seven climbers are left dead on the mountain, victims of bureaucratic missteps, poor leadership and a storm that arose unexpectedly and raged for ten days. The most attention is given to the dynamics of the group of climbers and how their 24 year old leader, Joe Wilcox, was held to blame by many for the disaster. Tabor is convinced of Wilcox's innocence, driving the point home relentlessly over the course of the book.

Wilcox was the kind of guy who preferred to be in charge, was quick to take offense and who was a poor leader, but the men who chose to climb with him were all adults and responsible for their own safety. The National Park Service, still smarting from a media drubbing over the cost of a rescue effort just a few months before, refused to begin organizing a rescue at all, depending instead on other groups of climbers already on the mountain. And then there was that storm, which arose without warning and continued for ten full days.

The story transcends the writing while the men are on the mountain. I recommend sticking with this book through the slow and overlong opening, because when the climbers reach Denali, you won't be able to put the book down.

This sounds good. Thanks for the excellent review. I have still got the Krakauer book on my TBR pile.

>124 RidgewayGirl: - I just bought A Moveable Feast, because I saw Woody Allen's new movie, Midnight in Paris, which deals with Paris in the '20s. Your review makes me want to read it even more!

>122 RidgewayGirl: LOL, too funny about the Mooney POV. And so true sometimes.

Sarah Moss has a new book out or forthcoming...I saw it in a catalog somewhere....

I've already added the upcoming Sarah Moss novel to my wishlist. Isn't it a wonderful thing to read something amazing and discover that the author is just starting out? We have so much to look forward to.

Last year, I read detective novels by Ruth Rendell and PD James that left me worried. Rendell is 81 and James is 91 and it seemed that they'd both unhappily succumbed to crankiness. James's book was so full of class issues and the feeling that the world today was unbelievably horrific that I decided not to read anything more -- that book (The Private Patient) changed the way I now viewed her earlier, excellent novels. Rendell's last Wexford book had a similar flaw. Where earlier Inspector Wexford had viewed the dark world that he worked in with compassionate and understanding eyes, in The Monster in the Box he's descended into superiority and xenophobia. But while I was able to keep my pledge regarding James, Rendell has given me so many well spent hours reading her books that I just wasn't able to keep to my resolution.

Tigerlily's Orchids will not rank among her best, but it is still much better than the average psychological thriller. The novel is clearly written by an elderly author; many of the characters are older and the younger ones are unconvincing, she makes a big deal over things like cell phones and idioms that are no longer new (there is an explanation at the beginning of the book that the word "gay" no longer only means "happy and joyous"), and those oh-so-attractive threads of xenophobia and class divide are visible. But the book, which weaves together the lives of several people living in a small apartment building or in one of the houses nearby, fits together well enough and gets going in a relentless way a little over halfway through.

I've been looking for credible replacements for Ruth Rendell. She has been an excellent writer for decades, providing incredibly varied, well-plotted and well written books at an astonishing rate. I'll miss her when she stops writing and glad that The Monster in the Box was not the beginning of a trend.

Morag Joss has struck me as similar in tone to Rendell, especially when Rendell writes as Barbara Vine. And Sophie Hannah's series of mysteries featuring detectives Charlie Zailer and Simon Waterhouse are good replacements for her Inspector Wexford series (although the detectives are entirely different than Wexford and I think he would be appalled by them). I recently read the second in that series, The Truth-Teller's Lie, and while Rendell would have managed a more shocking ending that seemed a little more likely, if Hannah continues to develop as a writer, she's be amazing in a few years.

Interesting thoughts on Ruth Rendell and P D James. I have not read any of their more recent novels as I tend to pick up their books second hand. I shall be on the lookout for any crankiness.

Just popping in to say Hi! I quit BM and will spend more time reading. I enjoy reading your thread, especially your personal comments.

I think we read rather different things, but I like your angle on Germany etc.

I'm not sure I have any Rendell replacement suggestions for you (I haven't read her since the 80s, I think) , but as Barbara Vine... I thought Karin Alvtegen reminded me of Vine and 1960s Australian author Patricia Carlon. The books are stand alone psychological suspense novels with no common or continuing characters. She is interested about the "why" of the crimes and the psychology of the criminal. I'm not that big of a fan of psychological suspense, but I liked her Missing quite a lot. I think Akeela has read more of them than I.

The Private Patient is the only PD James I've yet to read. Have you read her book on detective fiction? It's just a small book, but an excellent tutorial of sorts on the genre, and she talks about her own writing some.

I have found Åke Edwardson and Mankell to be of the quality of James. And quite possibly Garry Disher.

Have you read any Reginald Hill? He's one of my very favourites, along with Ian Rankin and Michael Dibdin, and probably the closest of the three to the Rendell/James style. I enjoy the central dynamic between the two policemen, Dalziel, ranking senior and almost deliberately 'old-school' (but much sharper than he might initially appear) and Pascoe, who is quite an unexpected policeman - more 'sensitive' and married to a left-wing firebrand (who can obviously be quite ambivalent about his role as a policeman).

Its the humour in the Reginald Hill books that make them stand out. Almost every time that Dalziel appears it's a LOL moment. Good stories too.

Three Cups of Deceit would have been, not so very long ago, published as a series in a newspaper or magazine. Does such a thing exist anymore? Weighing in at a slim 75 pages, Three Cups of Deceit is Jon Krakauer's expose of the lies, inaccuracies, graft and plain dishonesty perpetuated by Greg Mortenson, both through his charity, the Central Asia Institute, and in his books, Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools. It's pretty shocking, less for the lies and exaggerations in the books (which make James Frey seem remarkably small-time), than for the way the children of Pakistan and Afghanistan were used by Mortenson for fame and money.

The article is well worth reading, both as a cautionary tale (Mortenson did start out with good intentions) and as an example of the kind of journalism we should be seeing more of, rather than less.

It depends why you want to read Dreaming in Chinese. As an introduction, I found it rather weak. It is much more a travelogue plus the author's musings on the language than to be of any use to anyone who might want to know more about the language. The only chapter that interested me was chapter 10, about dialects.

As a factual introduction, I would still suggest, for example, About Chinese by Richard Newnham, or a book I have recently read, which tells you all about the experience of learning Mandarin, Keeping my Mandarin alive. Lee Kuan Yew's language learning experience by Chua Chee Lay

So, in case I have not mentioned this enough; I really liked Midnight in Paris and I'm declaring it my favorite movie of the year. Mainly because it was my own personal fantasy of a movie. Ok, it was a little weird to be played by Owen Wilson - I'll have to ask Mr. Allen about that casting choice when I see him - but since his job was mainly to stand around with his mouth hanging open and his eyes bulging cartoon-style, he did a great job.

The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo is exactly what a crime novel should be. The main character, Harry Hole, is a wonderful creation; a large man with sticking out ears and badly fitting clothes (the paragraph describing his consternation at his high school graduation suit no longer fitting is worth reading more than once). His best friend is his partner, Ellen, who keeps him from returning to the bottle. At the beginning of The Redbreast, Harry is put in charge of securing the American president's route through a section of Oslo. Things go awry and the powers that be are eager to cover things over, causing them to promote Harry and stick him alone in an office at the end of a corridor.

The plot concerns everything from skinheads to arms smuggling to Norway's role in WWII. It's a wild ride that holds together to the very end. Harry's a great main character. He's a mess, but he's a sensitive and hopeful mess, with an appealing awkwardness. I'm looking forward to finding out what he does next.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy was a difficult read. Not because of the writing, but because of the content. But, oh, the writing is brilliant. McCarthy has pared down everything, from the language to the punctuation, to reflect the barren land the man and the boy are traveling through. The story is horrible, but beautifully told.

The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendered. Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their their crozzled hearts.

One of these days I'll get to that book...

Mongolians don't believe in wasting any of their beloved sheep. Everything was in the bowl, floating in a sort of primeval ooze: lungs, stomach, bladder, brain, intestines, eyeballs, teeth, genitals. It was a lucky sheep dip; you were never sure what you were going to pull out. I fished carefully, not too keen on finding myself with the testicles. My first go produced an object that resembled an old purse dredged up from the bottom of a stagnant canal. I think it might have been an ear. I had better luck with the intestines, which were delicious, and once brought to the surface, went on for quite a while.

That's why we read books like A Moveable Feast, which is sub-titled Life-changing Food Adventures Around the World, isn't it? For the startling meals we would never have thought of as edible, let alone the company-best casserole, written about by people with a willingness to do anything as well as a good sense of humor. This anthology put out by Lonely Planet is, as with every anthology, a mixed bag of the fantastic, the heart-warming, the pretentious and the slightly boring. The count is loaded towards the fantastic, with the best story of all by Tim Cahill, The Rooster's Head in the Soup, which manages to be instructional, touching and very, very funny. Other stand-outs included a story about Kansas City barbeque by Doug Mack and a short bit by Andrew McCarthy (yes, that Andrew McCarthy) set in Thailand, about how a meal among friendly strangers can ease loneliness.

Anchee Min is an author to watch. She grew up in China's Cultural Revolution and wrote an astonishing memoir. She followed that with a novel, Katherine, about an American teaching English in China. So I was quick to pick up a copy of Becoming Madame Mao, but slow to read it. Generally, I prefer my historical novels to concern ordinary people.

Becoming Madame Mao tells the story of Jiang Chiang, Mao's wife and leader of the infamous "Group of Four", but not in the form of a straightforward historical account. Min moves back and forth from the first person to a very close third person and restricts herself to following Madame Mao. She's an interesting, but difficult woman to follow, constantly concerned with positioning herself and with getting the attention she feels she deserves.

The writing style worked perfectly with Min's subject. Told from the first person only, the book would have been too claustrophobic to read, in the third person, I would have missed out on who she was. An actress, Madame Mao was adept at projecting the face she wanted to towards the world. Becoming Madame Mao is a fascinating picture of a time, place and person I knew very little about.

I don't read many travel books, but I've enjoyed a couple by Tim Cahill, including Pass the Butterworms.

I'm adding Becoming Madame Mao to my wishlist.

I'll definitely pick up anything by Tim Cahill I run into.

I'm on vacation, although it being a vacation with all of the in-laws, it feels less like a holiday and more like a crash course in dysfunctional family dynamics. Every extended family is probably dysfunctional, but one's own family's issues are always comfortable and, well, less startling than those of others. Still, there is a beach and good weather and lots of children and a stack of books.

The Devil's Highway was written by Luis Alberto Urrea seven years ago and should be required reading today. It describes how undocumented workers get to the farms, motels, fast food restaurants and factories of the United States and why they undertake that perilous journey through the story of a typical group of men who attempted to cross the Arizona desert on foot. It's brilliantly and humanely written, showing everyone from the Border Patrol to the coyotes who guide the group so disastrously wrong in a critical, but compassionate way.

As the political rhetoric heats up here and we have successfully renamed the people who pick our oranges and cook our Big Macs illegal aliens, as though they were non-human and essentially evil, this book is more important than ever. While Urrea does have a bias toward compassion and understanding, he doesn't flinch from addressing the costs to everyone of the issue of workers crossing illegally to work in the north. He also illuminates both the reasons people would be driven to undertake an expensive and potentially deadly journey and the ways American immigration policy has created unforeseen consequences.

If every article or book written on this topic were as well-researched and free of hyperbole, I think the national debate on immigration would be both more reasonable and more productive.

I agree; The Devil's Highway was an unforgettable and essential read, IMO.

I have another book by Urrea that I haven't read, but this one sounds more interesting.

He walked away, and then suddenly everything was dust and ashes in his mind again. What would be the use of all these books now? Why worry about one of them? Why worry about the millions of them? There was no one left, now, to carry on. Books themselves, mere wood pulp and lampblack, were nothing -- without a mind to use them.

George R. Stewart's Earth Abides was published in 1949, and it's interesting to compare it to modern post-apocalyptic novels. Ish is staying in a cabin for a few weeks outside of San Francisco. He doesn't have a radio and is busy enough that he doesn't notice when the usual scant flow of traffic dies out. When he does drive out, he finds an empty world. He eventually finds a newspaper and discovers that a pandemic has swept across the world. He may be the only survivor. Over time, he does find a few survivors as he watches nature retake the towns and cities.

There's a thoughtful pace to this book. Ish is an academic, more comfortable observing than doing and he is often passive. The author is less interested in the causes of the end of civilization or in the immediate aftermath than in what such an event would do to the survivors emotionally and in what would happen in the decades following. Stewart forms his characters very much in keeping with his time, which is different that those basic archetypes found in current novels. Here, men are less divided into good and dangerous as in stolid, capable but incapable of abstract thought and the intellectuals.

While very much rooted in the past, Earth Abides is a thoughtful book that approaches a now common theme in a different way.

Earth Abides sounds like a bit of a classic. Enjoyed your review of it and I will add it to my to buy list

I'm on the Outer Banks of North Carolina on vacation. On a recent outing to Ocracoke, I found a fantastic small bookstore called Books to be Red. In the interest of supporting independent bookstores, I walked out with a stack, three of which were for me.

She is preaching in the park with her mother when suddenly Wes is standing in front of her. Mother thrusts a pamphlet into his hand. Wes glances at Birdie, not recognizing her at first. Then there is the moment when his eyes slowly narrow, like a gear turning inside him. He stares, comparing, she knows, this girl with the other one. She didn't tell him about this life, but doesn't everyone have two? There is the life you live for your parents and then the life for you.

Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe is Jenny Hollowell's debut novel. It concerns Birdie, a young woman who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household in Virginia, marrying at a young age the man chosen for her by her parents. She runs away to save herself, only to find that that escape wasn't an ending but a beginning. Despite leaving, she's still tethered to her past, even as she doubts her future. Los Angeles is wearing her down, not only with the endless auditions, but also with the need to pretend, to laugh at jokes that aren't funny, to smile at parties she'd rather not attend. It's changed her.

Now the phone is Lewis, wondering if she wants company. She is unsure of her answer, of what would be easiest. Lewis is better than most diversions because he doesn't seem bad for her, at least not in the way that drinking is bad for her or married directors are bad for her.

The writing in this book is gorgeous, both melancholy and comic. There were several passages, especially of dialogue, which I read more than once, Hollowell puts her sentences together so carefully that they appear as effortless as the life Birdie longs for.

Mother once told her never to pick up the phone on the first three rings. It makes you seem desperate, she said, like you're just sitting around waiting for someone to call you. Like you have nothing better to do. And so when the phone would ring Mother would stare at the jangling receiver, counting the rings until she was certain that whoever was at the other end of the line would not think she needed them.

Thank you for your excellent write-up of Earth Abides. I tried Alas, Babylon last year and found it a bit dated so I think that's what I was worried about with this one.

Hemingway: The Paris Years by Michael S. Reynolds is the perfect companion volume to A Moveable Feast. It takes Hemingway's memoir and puts it in chronological order, explains Hemingway's many jabs and offhand comments and corrects where Hemingway either embellished the story or made things up. What emerges is the story of a developing writer, a man desperate to both escape his upbringing and to impress the folks back home, a man quick to toss out an insult, but even quicker to take offense. Arriving in Paris, Hemingway was a mediocre writer of sentimental stories, but in just a few, intense years, he had made himself into one of the best writers of a very fertile time in American writing. Of course, he had help along the way, in the form of friendship and support from the likes of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and even Ford Madox Ford, who supported Hemingway despite of Hemingway's scorn and his own preference for traditional 19th century writing. Hemingway needed help, even as he wanted to be a self-made man, leading him to form intense friendships that never lasted long -- Hemingway was not given to gratitude and preferred to burn his bridges once he had walked over them.

Reynolds discusses Hemingway's writing during that time in detail. I was interested to find that my favorites of Hemingway's many short stories were written during his years in Paris. He worked tirelessly at his craft, and when he was doing well, he wrote quickly. He was also able to edit his stories down; removing everything that didn't need to be said, leaving no unnecessary scenes or even words. A disastrous trip to Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls was the inspiration for The Sun Also Rises.

Reynolds' also puts Hemingway within his time and place, explaining the events of the time as well as providing a vivid picture of Paris in the 1920s.

It was a thrill to read that when Hemingway went to New York to negotiate the publishing contract for The Sun Also Rises he hung out at the Algonquin, spending time with Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker, both of whom would accompany him on the ship back to Paris. I would have liked to have been on that boat.

Excellent review of Hemingway: The Paris Years. I have not read any Hemingway for ages, but this book about the author sounds fascinating.

My summer vacation was spent at the beach. There were two excellent independent bookstores in the area. If you ever find yourself on Ocracoke Island, NC, please visit Books to be Red. The bookstore portion of the old house is not large, but the selection is amazing. I've found half as many interesting books at my local B&N megastore. The other parts of the house were filled with local pottery, vintage aprons, quirky jewelry and art supplies. So, on both visits (I dragged several family members along for the second trip) books were purchased. The other independent was in Buxton, and was strictly a bookstore, albeit one with an eclectic greeting card selection. Buxton Books also had a friendly and knowledgeable owner and a few more books were obtained. Here, the books were shelved in a sort of organic way, with little attention paid to divisions like "fiction" or "cooking". Which was fun to browse and it was clear that the owner could tell you exactly where each title was shelved.

I picked up Close to Shore, Michael Capuzzo's account of the 1916 shark attacks in New Jersey, at Buxton Books as it seemed to be the perfect sort of end of vacation reading. Returning to the splendid joys of Discovery Channel's Shark Week, I enjoyed reading Close to Shore quite a bit, especially since I am now safely inland.

Close to Shore is much more about what life was like along the Jersey shore a hundred years ago than it really is about those famous shark attacks. No one is bitten until almost a hundred pages into the book. And Capuzzo has the annoying habit of breaking off just when the shark stuff gets really going to provide a chapter about something or someone only tangentially related to the subject matter at hand. As far as an interesting book about the social history of New York and New Jersey in 1916 goes, this book is interesting and informative. If it's shark attacks that grab you, better just spend an hour watching one of the excellent documentaries about historic shark scares on the Discovery Channel.

Anne Holt was mentioned in Belletrista in the article about Nordic crime writers. I picked up a copy of What Is Mine and promptly forgot it. I'll blame the cover, which was uninspired. The novel itself, once I got a round to it, was very well done. It's the first in a series that features an overweight, middle-aged detective who, going against type, is reasonably happy. He convinces a woman studying criminology to help him with a case in which children are being kidnapped, setting off a media frenzy and a great deal of public fear. The characters are well-developed, the story compelling and the ending made sense. I'll be reading more by this author.

Bullfighting is a book of short stories by Roddy Doyle all about men aging, in various ways, from a pensioner out walking on doctor's orders while wondering when he and his wife stopped speaking, to a man whose sons are still home, but who he can picture leaving in a few years. The stories are varied, despite the constancy of the subject matter, ranging from melancholic to quietly happy, from angry to resigned.

I'm not that interested in the whole wild west theme. Yes, I spent several years living in Phoenix, Arizona and so read a few books of local history, including And Die in the West, which is about the gunfight at the OK Corral, but it's not one of the historic times or places that grab my attention. But Doc, an historical novel about Doc Holliday, grabbed my attention when two LTers whose opinions about books I value raved about it.

Doc by Mary Doria Russell is, quite simply, one of the best books I have read this year. Following the life of Doc Holliday, the infamous dentist gunslinger, Doc concentrates on his year in Dodge, where he fell in with the Earp brothers. The historic detail is both impressive and fascinating, but what makes this book is Russell's skill at creating complex and conflicted characters.

Decisions--genuine, deliberate decisions--were never John Henry Holliday's strong suit. In youth, he'd sought the advice and consent of his large family. In manhood, poor health and a poor economy had dictated his plans, such as they were.

Things happened. He reacted. Sometimes he took a rebellious pride in the cold-blooded courage of certain unconsidered deeds; just as often, he repented of his rashness afterward. There is, for example, nothing quite like lying in a widening pool of your own blood to make you reconsider the wisdom of challenging bad-tempered men with easy access to firearms.

My son and I read The House of a Million Pets by Ann Hodgman together. It's a memoir of the author's large and varied collection of pets, from the run of the mill cats and dogs, to more exotic animals like sugar gliders and an unhappy bulbul.

The House of a Million Pets was enjoyable for both of us, with my middle school-aged daughter joining us for several chapters. Because each chapter was the self-contained story of a specific animal, it was perfect for summertime reading, when there are lots of interruptions. And the stories were honest, some amusing and some heart-breaking. Hodgman begins her adult life collecting all those exotic pets that parents automatically say no to, and she's honest about how fun it was to get to know about them first-hand, but also how much work it is to care for an animal that isn't really a housepet and how they would be happier in their natural environments. She has also adopted a fair number of animals rescued from unhappy situations and there's a heart-breaking chapter about putting a beloved cat to sleep that had both my son and I crying a bit (this chapter is difficult to read, but should be read by anyone who has a pet they love and it sparked a great discussion about the cat we have buried in the woods). Mostly, what comes through the pages is how much joy Hodgman gets from her menagerie and how each animal is an individual (well, except for the pygmy mice and the finches, who tend to be mistaken for one another).

I'm having trouble marshaling my thoughts in regards to Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl, Susan Campbell's account of growing up within a rigid brand of Christianity and how that shaped her adult life. When I was sixteen, my family moved and the new church we attended was unlike what I had been used to. For a while I fell in with this new brand of American Christianity until the cognitive dissonance did me in and I had to walk away. From there it's hard to turn around and find a place for faith in my own life. Campbell's experiences were similar -- her church differed in some ways from mine, and I'm sure we would have been equally certain that the other was probably not really saved, but on the larger themes, it could have been the same place.

When my Catholic friends who are lackadaisical or worse about their Bibles call their chuch the "one, true church," I sit silently. If they knew their Bible, they'd know that that title belongs to my church, not theirs. I know they are in for a big surprise come Judgment Day.

Dating Jesus is a humorous account of the odd things Campbell believed growing up and her dawning conviction that even though she was a girl, that she wasn't designed to be secondary; a submissive helper to the men allowed to hold the power and make the decisions. But the book is also a history of the evangelical church in America and how changed drastically over the years, and the story of how Campbell was able to come to a qualified truce with her upbringing.

I was impressed with how Campbell managed to present her story in a humorous way, without downplaying its effect on her or allowing the narrative to become bitter. I loved this book, but wonder if it would be comprehensible to someone who hadn't experienced something similar. On the other hand, with radio talk show hosts and politicians embracing the brittle, angry rhetoric of fundamentalist Christianity, it's more important than ever to understand where their ideas come from and to engage in a reasonable dialog on the subject.

love the title -- I too grew up in a fundamentalist church and I like what you said about the book being reasonable and fair and not too bitter. I'm seeing a lot of buzz about Vera Farmiga's new film also about a woman's religious experiences. can't wait to see it and to read this book-- thanks for the review!

Great review. Not sure if I want to read that book or not but I'll probably give it a try.

I've never read anything by Cynthia Ozick beyond a short story or two, so I thought to remedy this with Foreign Bodies. Set during the 1952, Foreign Bodies is the story of Bea, whose life has been on hold since her husband left her years earlier. She goes on a trip to Europe and her brother orders her to find his son and to bring him home. She fails, but is now enmeshed in the life of her brother's family. Her brother is a blow-hard who has estranged every member of his family and it's not hard to see why, but those family members aren't very nice themselves and it's hard to see why Bea is willing to involve herself in all that drama. Bea, through all the family drama, wakes up and begins to take an active role in the lives of those around her, finding that while it's difficult to change one's own life, it's relatively easy to have an impact in the lives of others.

Oddly, while I liked none of the characters and disliked several of them, and wasn't gripped by the plot, I could not stop reading this book. It's written in an old-fashioned style, which suits it's post-war setting and has a fearsome momentum that left me turning pages, uncertain of what lay around the bend.

#158 - engage in a reasonable dialog...I like to think that is possible, but I'm not so sure it is.

Hi! The pleasure of catching up on your thread after a longish hiatus!

The Church book sounds interesting, something like my own story, but I don't know if I'll read it, cuz I'm not having questions like that. Also, I'm trying a bit to bury my hand in the sand re politics and Christianity. I'd rather just read science fiction, so at least I'll know what's to come ;-)

You have made me interested in Hemingway for the first time since I encountered his overrated self. Maybe one day...The Feast.

Trust is the only Ozick book I've read, and it was her first one. I love it. It blew me away. There's something about the debut of that talent that just drew me in. It's too long and it's not huge on plot, but it doesn't have to be. All of the characters are despicable. But it is the way the narrator reacted to these horrible people that was mysterious and intriguing to me. Enigmatic.

And thanks for the Nesbo.

Trust sounds like Foreign Bodies, except that Foreign Bodies was pared down so that nothing was extraneous. I do plan to read more of her, just not immediately.

If you bury your hand in the sand, doesn't that leave you unable to get away when they all start shouting? And there will be shouting. I tend to listen to only BBC Radio4 for my news and, occasionally, the Daily Show during an election cycle. With an ocean in between and with more attention paid to harmless characters like Nick Clegg or Boris Johnson (who was much more fun before he had real responsibility, being a sort of middle-aged Bertie Wooster) it's less scream-inducing.

Glad you liked the Anne Holt AND the Mary Doria Russell. I've managed to find the 2nd in the Vik/Stubo series cheap via ABE, having read both the 1st What is Mine and the most recently translated Fear Not. I forget the title just now (it has a big 'eye' on the cover), but I think I will take it to the state park today where I plan to swim, relax and read.

I agree with what you say about "Doc".

>158 RidgewayGirl: How old is Campbell? Curious. I have a similar story, but it dates back to the 70s and not likely to be posted here in public:-) You, me and Nickelini ought to get together for tea & chat someday! :-)

Transfer my political interest across the pond? Why I never thought of doing that. Occasionally I listen to BBC radio and I love the contrast between politics here and politics there. Although, frankly, I've been thinking about relocating overseas. Husband works for the fed gov now and the outposts for his job are places I wouldn't want to go, i.e., war zones.

avaland, I've picked up a copy of What Never Happens, too.

Such a discussion would be fun -- who could come up with the wackiest belief, outrageous things told to children under the guise of keeping them safe from the devil, etc, but would best be facilitated with a stronger beverage.

citygirl, will you regret choosing the US during an election year over dodging bullets in a war zone? Only time will tell. Just remember to vote! I did enjoy missing most of the Bush presidency, though, by paying attention mainly to what was going on in Germany at the time. There was a Bavarian politician with named Sinner, which works there, but would reduce his chances in the Republican primaries, I think.

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff is a fascinating soup of a book. Taking place in a fictional version of Cooperstown, the book starts off with the illegitimate offspring of a descendant of the founder of Templeton, returned home pregnant after a disastrous affair with a professor and adds to that a monster, a ghost, a Greek chorus in the form of a group of joggers, a woman who can start fire Stephen King-style with her mind, a sexy tow-truck operator and a mother who was once a free love hippie and is now a hobnailed cross-wearing Christian. There are dashes of murderesses, pinches of wolf-boys and a Mohican or two as well.

There's just a few too many elements here to allow for coherence. Plot elements and characters are scattered all over the place, with some forgotten and others given a quick wrap up at the end. That said, The Monsters of Templeton kept me reading, and if I would have liked to have known more about one story-line, well, there was another interesting one a few pages away. Some elements of the book were so compelling that I'm interested to see what this author does next.

I'm not the type who can exclude people socially just because they operate under some bad habits.

Tomato Red is by Daniel Woodrell, who wrote the novel on which the movie Winter's Bone is based. It can be best described as hillbilly noir, with a protagonist who is sure to make the wrong choice and get caught doing it. Sammy Barlach has just moved from a tiny place in Arkansas to a small town in Missouri, where he gets a job at the dog food factory. On a lonely Friday night he finds a party of sorts going on in a near by trailer park and by Sunday morning, he's pretty much messed up his life once again.

What makes this book unique is Sammy, who narrates the story of his involvement with Jamalee and Justin Merridew. He knows the deck is stacked against him and how the world sees him as an uneducated redneck, but he has a bit of charm and enough optimism to keep going. He uses language in a way that reminds me of a Coen brothers movie.

The weather didn't help. The weather kept picking at us--nothing but heavy wet heat, sweat, heat, sweat, bugs, bugs, and bad whipped moods. The weather stayed in that attitude of weather where you can't help but wonder just who it is you've pissed off so.

22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson tells the story of the Nowaks, Silvana and Janusz, who were living in Warsaw with their baby, Aurek, when Poland was invaded. Janusz goes to join up with the Polish army and they end up separated for the duration of the war. Janusz eventually reaches England, after a long stay in a French farmhouse, while Silvana has a much more traumatic experience, ending up surviving in the forest. Janusz works hard to find his family and to build a new life in Ipswich, but both Janusz and Silvana hold secrets and sorrow and guilt, and are now different people from the young couple beginning married life in Warsaw so long ago.

This novel has interesting things to say about loss and survivor's guilt and how the joyous reunion is only the beginning of the story, rather than the end. There's a lot going on, between everyone's wartime experiences and their new life in Ipswich, so the characters remain opaque. Still, the story is hard to put down, even if the "big secret" is pretty clear, at least to the reader, from early on. Not a great book, but a good read that approaches a familiar theme from a slightly different angle.

>167 RidgewayGirl: I was probably not paying attention to what was being said to the young kids, I was college age:-)

btw, I just posted a few comments on What Never Happens over on my thread (and on the book's page). No spoilers. This one is set just after the birth of the younger daughter; Adam is still on paternity leave.

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

This darkly comic western is a stylish foray into an old genre. From the eye-catching cover art to the strong interior graphic design, this book shouts for attention. Cleverly written, deWitt tells the story of Eli and Charlie, the infamous Sisters Brothers, as they travel from Oregon territory to San Francisco during the Gold Rush. They are killers-for-hire, although one of the brothers is decidedly less blood-thirsty than the other. Eli is worried about his weight and he discovers the joys of dental hygiene along the way. He longs to settle into a quiet life, with a wife and a store to tend, and to leave his current life far behind him.

My attitude about this decision was that it would be the last bit of bloodshed for my foreseeable future, if not the rest of my life; I told Charlie this and he told me that if the thought brought me comfort I should embrace it. "But," he said, "you're forgetting about the Commodore."
"Oh, yes. Well, after him then."
Charlie paused. "And there will likely be some killing related to the Commodore's death. Accusations leveled, debts owed, that sort of thing. Could be quite bloody, in fact."
I thought, Then this will be the final era of killing in my lifetime.

The Sisters Brothers is full to the brim with colorful characters and situations. There's certainly never a dull moment as the brothers make their bloody way south. My only quibble with this book is that it lacked depth and substance, but the shiny outer layer was sure pretty.

LOL! Hurrah for shiny covers and cleverly written mind candy! Oh, I can't wait to get to this one...

A little catching up--

Borkmann's Point was a solid Swedish crime novel by Hakan Nesser. The crime is solved - that of someone killing men walking home at night with an axe - using police procedure and dogged determination rather than flash and intuition. It was good, but would have been better had not the author been so clearly uncomfortable writing from the point of view of a woman. There are shifting viewpoints, and when the internal narrative is in the voice of the female detective, the thoughts expressed go all unnaturally trite. The men think about how to catch the killer or how worthwhile it was to buy the expensive sound system. She admires her breasts and wonders if she should get pregnant soon. It's a discordant note in an otherwise solid, if not exciting, police procedural.

I don't generally read horror, but So Cold the River by Michael Koryta was well reviewed somewhere or other. It wasn't bad and I kept turning the pages, but the element of menace wasn't quite menacing enough to frighten and so came off to me as a little silly. What did make me shudder, though, was the presence of a reader's guide at the end of this novel. Seriously? I'll have to check to see if Harlequin romances and airport thrillers have them now too. Who reads something as insubstantial and escapist as a horror novel with the intention of answering essay questions when they finish? And the questions are as trite and meaningless as one would expect. The first time Eric Shaw sees the dome of the West Baden Hotel, he is filled with wonder. Have you ever had a similar reaction to a building or a place? or What is your take on Eric's relationship with Claire? What do you think will happen to them in the future?

I've also read The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta, which was excellent, but lacked the sense of intimacy he created in earlier novels like Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher. The premise is fabulous, though. Imagine the world after the rapture has occurred, only the people who disappeared where not the people who were expecting it. Set two years after The Sudden Departure, The Leftovers is really a novel about grief. Mean spirited person that I am, I wanted more about the fundamentalists' writhing about justifying being left behind, but Perrotta is too compassionate to poke fun.

#174 It seems that many modern novels have these readers guides tacked on at the end. I wonder who writes them? Is it the author trying to drum up some interest in the book or is it the publisher trying to suggest that the book has literary merit. The questions are uncredited and so we do not know who writes them. The examples you quote are laughable.

I suppose that book clubs and discussion groups are some of the intended targets, and perhaps they also suggest to a book reviewer there is hidden depths to the novel. Unfortunately it all sounds like yet another way to promote a book.

My theory is that the reader's guides are all written by the newest intern, while she eats her lunch. Some are ridiculously abstract: What do trees symbolize in the third chapter? Is Mr Badger a Christ-figure? to the amazingly shallow as shown in the examples I took directly from the So Cold the River reader's guide (comment 174). Has anyone ever come across a reader's guide that genuinely enhanced their understanding of the book?

>176 RidgewayGirl: "My theory is that the reader's guides are all written by the newest intern, while she eats her lunch." Oh RG, you are so right! And no, I've never come across a helpful guide.

They all seem pretty idiotic to me too. I don't necessarily blame the poor interns though; they have to do what the publishers want. I think they originally put them in books that they thought reading groups would read, but I can't imagine why they thought these kinds of questions would be useful.

>174 RidgewayGirl: I read through a couple of Nesser novels earlier in the year and won't be picking up any more. I thought they were light on characterization, although they had a decent puzzle to them (I found I made no connections with the characters at all). Also, one was a straightforward psychological thriller (you know who the killer is and it is a race to find the killer before he/she kills again), which is not my favorite type of book. You read the only one I haven't read! Your comments are interesting though. I had some similar feelings about the latest Kjell Ericksson novel, in which his female detective, Ann Lindell, is still mooning over the same guy five years later. I suspect the author has been trying to make her a more inward and moody character a la Wallander, but I didn't find it credible this time (and I wanted to seriously kick her arse).

Do men, in their heart of hearts, still believe that women spend their internal lives agonizing over not having a baby/husband and admiring their own breasts? It was clear that Nesser was trying to make the female detective an intelligent and interesting character, but he couldn't imagine himself in female form without fixating on the boobies.

>180 RidgewayGirl: Your observations are just too funny.

Re the reading guides, I just figured that there were some dumb people running book clubs, and why shouldn't they? Dumb people gotta read too. Well, no, actually, they don't. But I still think that's why. Weirdly, many people in book clubs don't read like we do: quantity, quality, etc.

>180 RidgewayGirl: - that's so unrealistic. Everybody knows she would be fixating on whether her bum looked big in her uniform.

Once again, catching up.

How to Become a Scandal by Laura Kipnis is a fascinating look at the ways prominent people self-destruct in the most public ways possible and why we can't help following the media bloodbath. Kipnis uses examples like astronaut Lisa Nowack to explain how sometimes the need for revenge can blow up in our faces and how actions taken in a blur of misery and anger are often the wrong things to do. She references Linda Tripp in her explanation of the motivations for whistle-blowing as well as Sol Wachtman and James Frey. She also explores why certain people grab the imagination of the public and why we feel the way we do (fascinated, angry, full of schadenfreude, etc) about these kinds of public falls from grace.

Since this kind of media fascination with the downfall of the rich and successful shows no sign of abating, it was interesting to get a glimpse of why these public figures do such stupid things and why we can't get enough of their public combustion.

I really enjoy Laura Lippman's novels about Baltimore. She knows and loves her city and doesn't flinch from difficult subject matter. The Most Dangerous Thing is a somewhat middle of the road effort from Lippman and concerns a small group of children who become friends one unsupervised summer. It didn't need to end badly, but it did. As adults, they try to piece together what happened after the sudden death of the youngest of them. If you like Lippman, you'll enjoy this, but she's put more effort into some of her other books.

The Ballad of Tom Dooley is Sharon McCrumb's attempt to tell the story of a famous murder that later had a song written about it. She's come to her own conclusions in a book that takes place in the mountains near Asheville, NC (and, incidentally, not all that far from where I now live). There's not a sympathetic character to be found in this story about what life was like in the Appalachian mountains just after the Civil War. Life was always difficult in the hills and hollers, but the war and its aftermath made everyone into a survivor of one sort or another. I did find myself rooting for the amoral, vengeful Pauline, who engineers much of the ensuing disaster.

Until Thy Wrath Be Past by Asa Larsson is a crime novel set in the far north of Sweden, where Finnish is the second language and there's still plenty of snow on the ground in late April. Rebecca Martinsson has come to live in the house her Grandmother owned and to work as a police prosecutor. She loves the wild, remote area, where many places can't be reached by car and doesn't regret her move from Stockholm.

The story begins with a hair-raising account from the point of view of a murdered girl. She and her boyfriend were out scuba diving on a remote lake when things go terribly wrong. She's a presence in the rest of the book, pulling our attention toward different characters. Since the reader knows who the victims were before the police do, and the perpetrators are identified fairly early on, the suspense rests on the motivations for the crime. The book looks at Sweden's role in WWII, a less neutral position than one would think, and how, even decades later, there are secrets to be kept.

I really enjoyed this novel. The investigators were all fully developed, with relationships and conflicts already underway. The location was beautifully described, from the remote lake houses, accessible only by snowmobile to the dying northern villages, with their populations aged and dwindling. There's more here than a crime story.

>185 RidgewayGirl: I guess we differ on this one. I thought it not as good as her previous and I was also turned off by the recently dead-as-character technique. And that's now 4 traumas that Martinsson has had to survive and recover from (or will have to). We differ on Nesser also. I suppose I am picky when it comes to my crime reads. I do enjoy reading your takes on them, though.

Listened to a few Lippmans on audio in my commute days, but I generally don't read American crime novels. Having worked in the law enforcement field for years, I have more trouble suspending disbelief with those.

I don't read many American crime novels, mainly because they either strain even my credulity or they follow such a well worn path of plot points that they're uninteresting. Usually both. Every so often, however, a description catches my eye and I'm sucked into reading something mediocre once again.

As for the Lippman, I caught an interview with her a few years ago and she was so well spoken, funny and she had such interesting things to say about writing and Baltimore, that I'll be reading her for some years. I don't follow her mystery series, but I like her stand alone novels.

Are there any good American crime novelists writing today? I have found a few I like, but they tend toward the noir end of the spectrum and aren't police procedurals. I'm not sure that I do read anyone outside of Laura Lippman. I'm sure I can come up with someone else, especially when I like the genre so much when written by non-Americans.

>187 RidgewayGirl: I think there are probably some wonderful writers of American crime novels (are you in the Mystery & Crime group here on LT?). I have listened to a fair variety on audio (picked up at library sales) and have actually read some, like Julia Spencer-Fleming's In a Bleak Midwinter and also Linda Fairstein's The Bone Vault which has some nice bits about the Met. Museum of Art and the Natural History Museum. I think you would like both of these. I've read all of Dennis Lehane's novels, except his 6 crime novels (oh, might be 7 now), but people like them (I suppose Boston is just TOO close to home). The list is endless, I suppose.

I first discovered Ruth Rendell sometime in the late eighties with The Bridesmaid. What a treat it was to discover this master of psychological suspense had dozens upon dozens of books already written. I devoured her earlier books and settled in for a long friendship, secure that she'd provide me with at least two excellent books a year (she also writes under the name Barbara Vine)A.

And then, in the past few years, something happened. She lost her subtlety and the compassion that she gave even the least likable of her characters. Rendell has lost nothing of her writing ability or her agility in crafting interesting stories, but the sensitivity to nuance is largely gone. I keep telling myself, at the end of each frustrating novel, that that was the last time I would read her, and with each new release, I find myself unable to leave it well enough alone.

The Vault takes place after Inspector Wexford has retired and now spends most of his time in London. He is asked to consult in a case in which four bodies were found in an old coal hole that had been covered by a manhole. He is uncomfortable with his new non-status in the police force, but so pleased to be detecting again.

The story is, as usual, interesting, with threads going every which way, to take in a famous painting, prostitution, illegal immigrants, wife battering and gay bashing, among other things. There were so many fascinating characters. But it's with her characters that Rendell had lost her footing. There's just too much of she was the kind of woman who and they were the sort of people that, followed by sweeping value judgments of the sort she would have never voiced before she lost her filter. I was left with the uncomfortable feeling that Rendell does not approve of very many people and her book is full of instant disapproval of clothing and make-up choices, interior decorating decisions, body shapes, accents and nationalities.

I'm pretty sure that I'll pick up this author's next novel, however reluctantly. I wish she'd stop writing, actually, as her newfound cynicism is beginning to color how I view her earlier books.

Lol. I used to feel guilty about ignoring those reader's guides at the back of the book, but there's something about those questions that just makes me want to throw up. I'll think of you next time I'm tempted to try to answer them again.

The Devil All the Time is Donald Ray Pollock's second novel set partially in the rural Ohio town of Knockemstiff. Set in the years after the Second World War, this profane novel is peopled with serial killers, corrupt cops, prostitutes and preachers, both obsessed and amoral, all looking for victims in the hardscrabble Appalachian hills. Pollock does a fantastic job of creating outrageous characters that are sympathetic and believable even as they engage in the most horrific activities.

Alvin's mother is brought home to die of cancer in a rented farmhouse while his father prays for her recovery and sacrifices animals at a small clearing in the woods. Two revivalist preachers discover that faith is not enough, although the one in a wheelchair already knew that. A young waitress meets an unusual photographer who leads her from a life of prostitution into something unspeakably worse. There's nothing boring about this book, but you may not want to think too deeply about certain parts of it.

The End of the Wasp Season is Denise Mina's second book featuring Glasgow detective Alex Morrow. Here she's in charge of investigating the brutal death of a young woman in her own home. Morrow's previous partner and rival, Bannerman, is now her boss and he's managed to alienate all the officers he now oversees, so that they are intent on doing as little as possible. Morrow has a difficult case on her hands and she's having trouble getting the men to care about the death of a rich prostitute with no relatives. She's also pregnant with twins, which is making it harder for her to be as badass as she usually is.

Morrow also discovers an old school friend, Kay Murray, worked for the murdered woman. They were once close, but Morrow left the council flats and joined the police and Kay is a single mother to four teenagers, scraping by as a house cleaner. It's with Kay that Mina shows how very good a writer she is. Kay looks older than her age, working menial jobs while raising children alone. She's tough and honest and tired and determined and very, very likable. And Morrow's in a better place than she was in Still Midnight. She's still hard as nails, but she's determined to understand the victim and to navigate the shoals of poisonous office politics.

She took a bite of her apple and tried to imagine allowing herself to be fucked by an unattractive stranger in an unfamiliar room. She found it hard to imagine allowing someone to even touch her without seeing herself punching a nose.

I didn't entirely warm to Alex Morrow when she appeared as the protagonist in Still Midnight. She was prickly and defensive and lacked the spark that animated her previous heroines. But she's come into her own with this book and I'm eager to see what she does next.

Arnaldur Indridason writes crime novels set in Reykjavik about a detective named Erlendur who is repressed even for an Icelander. In Voices, the doorman of a large hotel is found murdered in his basement room. He's wearing a Santa costume and a condom and he was stabbed. Erlender is sent to lead the investigation but it's hard for him to even get out of bed. He takes a room at the hotel, one with a broken radiator, chosing to stay there rather than in his own apartment through the holiday season. His estranged daughter visits him regularly as she fights her own demons and asks him over and over, why he never contacted her or her brother after his divorce from their mother.

Erlendur's a fascinating character. He doesn't engage in small talk and he avoids all emotional entanglement. There are good reasons for this, which are explained, and you can't help feeling for the guy. In this book, he attempts to form a relationship with a woman, but it's not so easy for a guy who can't make conversation and who doesn't want to divulge anything personal.

The mystery of who killed the doorman is interesting in the way it paints a bleak picture of a friendless world, but the linchpin of the case is just not that believable for a book written in this century, but never mind that; the atmosphere and the intriguing detective more than make up for the lack.

The Revisionists is the newest book by Thomas Mullen, who wrote my favorite book of the year (so far), The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. This was completely different, being a dystopian thriller in which Zed is a revisionist; his job is to travel back in time to stop hags (historical agitators), who travel back to disrupt key events and so to change history and jeopardize The Perfect Present, a world where there is no war or ethnic conflict, but where there is also no history.

Zed's been sent to a somewhat contemporary Washington, DC, where he works to not prevent or delay The Great Conflagration, which was an admittedly bad stretch of time for people, but it led to The Perfect Present, and so must happen.

Leo used to work for the CIA; back when he was finishing graduate school, 9/11 happened and he joined in a fit of patriotism. He worked to infiltrate terrorist groups in Indonesia and he hasn't been back in Washington long. He's now working in the private sector, doing essentially similar work, but targeting American dissidents and agitators. He meets by happenstance an Indonesian maid to a family of South Korean diplomats. She's been abused, and is being treated as a slave. Sari's lonely and happy to hear her own language spoken by this seemingly trust-worthy man.

Tasha lost her brother. He was serving in the military and she's not satisfied with the sketchy details she's been given about his death. She meets Zed at a candlelight vigil and they connect. She's also connected to Leo, who's tailing her because of her friendship with an activist who runs a wikileaks-type of website that is embarrassing some of the corporations doing security work for the government.

The plot of The Revisionists is complex and always changing direction. It's never simple, just as the characters are never entirely pure. Their motives are usually good, although this leads them to often act at cross purposes. How can you find out what the right thing to do is, when everybody lies, especially the good guys? And is it worth sacrificing the past to make a better future? It reads like a thriller but, at heart, The Revisionists is a novel of ideas about race, identity, nationality and history.

Great review, Alison. I won The Revisionists as an ER book and am really looking forward to reading it.

Yes excellent review of The Revisionists which sounds very topical. One to look out for.

>193 RidgewayGirl: Glad you enjoyed the Indridason. It might comfort you to know that you will eventually discover the roots of his demeanor and that he does manage to move a wee bit past it (though I suspect it's like moving large rocks with a teaspoon).

The Woman in White isn't a ghost story, but rather a tangled soap opera of greed and mistaken identity. The heroine of the novel isn't the mysterious woman in white, or even the hero's love interest, Laura Fairlie, but rather an independent and entirely appealing woman named Marian Halcombe. She's resourceful and intrepid and I can't think of anyone I'd rather rely on in a time of trouble.

The story itself concerns Walter Hartright, a young drawing master who takes a job at Limmeridge House and there meets Miss Halcombe and Miss Fairlie. He falls in love with Miss Fairlie and, because of his lower social status, he leaves and joins a dangerous trip to South America in an attempt to forget her. Laura is married to the nefarious Sir Percival, who is, naturally, only after her money. Included in this tale is a desperate woman Walter meets one night as she escapes from a mental asylum and whose fate is tied to Laura's. There's also a colorful Italian Count, who is the most interesting and villainous of men. And present every step of the story is Miss Halcombe, who protects Miss Fairlie, solves the mystery, fascinates the Italian Count, thwarts the bad guys and keeps Walter Hartright pointed in the right direction.

There's something to be said for those wordy, Victorian authors. The Woman in White is the most suspenseful novel I have read in a long time. Wilkie Collins takes his time setting the scene, and then he slowly increases the tension, never allowing the reader the easy satisfaction of a quick resolution. Rather, the reader endures what the characters must; long moments of uncertainty, hours trapped without knowing if all was yet lost. It is a credit to Collins' writing that this strategy stands the test of time. Even in our era of instant gratification, I was more than willing to allow this book to hijack my days.

Great review of The Woman in White. I have not read any Wilkie Collins yet but I am looking forward to this one. Next year perhaps.

I wholeheartedly agree with your glowing review of The Woman in White. If I hadn't read (and enjoyed) this book already, I would certainly put it on my wish-list.

The Giant of the French Revolution: Danton by David Lawday is the best book I have read about the French Revolution. It's not the most detailed or complete, ending as it does with Danton's death, but it combines a relentless forward momentum with a clear description of the factions, policies and events of the time. Not only could I only put the book down reluctantly, but I now can also tell you the names and activities of the various factions, from Les Cordeliers and Les Feuillants to who pushed for the establishment of the fearsome Committee for Public Safety and which generals were secret royalists. That's an accomplishment. It was confused time, with internal strife competing for attention with the foreign powers who immediately invaded France.

France was ready for revolution long before it began. With a system that gave all of the power to a small percentage of the population, the Church and the Nobility, and then exempted them from all taxation, and an empty treasury, it took only a bad harvest or two to send the people into the streets, ready to die fighting instead of waiting to starve. The small middle class were the children of the enlightenment and proved willing to call for reform.

As things simmered, a young man named Danton came to Paris to become a lawyer. The book focuses tightly on Danton, which simplifies the story enormously, for all that he was one of the two towering figures of the Revolution. Danton was gigantic in everything he did. Larger and uglier than everyone else, he had a voice that carried and a talent for public speaking. He also was free of the blind ideology that sent so many of his contemporaries into dead ends. What did him in, in the end, was his out-sized personality which both threatened and annoyed his rivals, as well as his realization that the Terror had to be limited.

Enjoyed your enthusiastic review of The Giant of the French Revolution: Danton. I am fascinated by all things concerning the French revolution and so this one has gone on my to buy list

I share the fascination, baswood. I've got to find an equally good biography of Robespierre.

Nice review of The Woman in White!

I've read two books since my intense relationship with Danton, one terrific and one just really not good.

The lackluster offering was The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. It was a first novel and that showed in the two dimensional characters and awkward pacing, but what really irked me about this book was that whenever the women had sex outside of marriage, they died. Three of 'em, which is quite a few. The one who didn't die had her entire life thwarted by seeing other people's extramarital escapades. Mind you, this was shortlisted for a prize celebrating female authors.

The Waitress was New by Dominique Fabre was something entirely different. Pitch perfect and lovely. Many of you have already read this and pointed me in its direction. Thank you. Also, aren't the Archipelago Books lovely?

It's growing increasingly difficult to find books that I can read to my two children. With one eight-year-old and a daughter in middle school, finding a book that appeals to all three of us is increasingly difficult. So finding a book all three of us look forward to is something to celebrate. This year, the clear favorite is The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall.

The Penderwicks tells the story of a family who goes to spend a few weeks one summer in a cottage on the grounds of a mansion. Their mother died a few years ago and their father is loving but involved in his botany, the four Penderwick daughters are independent and protective of each other. Rosalind is the oldest at twelve and serves as a surrogate mother to Batty, the youngest Penderwick. Jane is a dreamer and a writer, Skye sporty and mathematical. They meet the son of the big house, Jeffrey, and become involved in his life.

The Penderwicks has the feel of a classic British children's book, while being set in a modern United States. Birdsall manages to make the plot adventurous and action-packed while retaining that old-fashioned feel and keeping the events all tremendously realistic. My children were enthralled, and so was I.

Sounds like your kids are about the same spread as mine--I'd given up on read out louds for all of us by that point. Good for you for persevering! I think we have The Penderwicks in our TBR pile--will let the girls know that's a good one (they're older now, but a quality kid's book always appeals). Have you read Anne of Green Gables? I read that with my daughter when she was 8, and the older one said she wasn't interested, but I often found her close by listening in.

I was thinking that might be a good one. My youngest is a boy, but he's fine with a female protagonist if she's interesting.

We just like the routine. We've been reading together at bedtime since the first one was born and it's become a habit. My son's not a reader, but he loves being read to.

That's really fabulous. It was a routine with us too, from when they were babies. But as they caught on to reading themselves, the family reading faded away. We all read together, still, but silently. Once in a while we share. But I'm sad we no longer share the read out loud, so as long as you can do it, wonderful for you!

Have you tried The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke? I listened to it on audio ages ago, and then played it for my niece and nephew when they were with me. I know she has written many others since then. You might try Un Lun Dun by China Mieville, but you'd have to read it with an English accent :-) The two leads are teen girls but the other characters include, for example, a man with a pincushion for a head and wears clothes made out of books, trash bins that do security (binjas), extreme librarians who rappel down the steep book shelves to find the books you want....need I say more?

>206 RidgewayGirl: so, today I was in the bookstore where I used to work and asked my former co-worker for read-a-loud recommendations for an 8 yo and a middleschoolers. The first book she recommended, after asking me how old the middle-schooler is (naturally I did not know), was The Penderwicks, which you already know about. Here are her other recommendations:

A Nest for Celeste by Henri Cole
Masterpiece by Elise Broach
Crunch by Leslie Connor
Season of Gifts by Richard Peck

(She is an amazing bookseller...)

Thanks for the recommendations! I'll look into those. There's always a few unsettled days before we settle down to something new.

In Bent Road by Lori Roy, Arthur Scott moves his family out of Detroit and back to the Kansas farm country he left as a young man. 1967 may have been a time of change in Detroit, but in the rural community the Scotts move to social mores have not yet begun to change. Arthur had left the farm soon after his older sister was murdered, something his mother and remaining sister do not discuss. While the Scott's oldest daughter and Arthur himself soon adjust to their new life, the two younger children struggle to make friends and Arthur's wife, Celia, who was determined to make this change work, is stifled by the smaller world of the Kansas community and life with her in-laws. There is also the unspoken mystery surrounding Arthur's sister's unsolved murder and his younger sister, Ruth, is being abused by her husband and in this world, women do not leave their husbands.

Roy does a fantastic job of creating the world of a rural community in Kansas, a place where the coming political and social changes haven't even registered as anything but something happening somewhere else. It's a place with a lot of space, but with a stifling need to keep things as they always have been, even if that means returning a woman to the husband who knocks her around, even if that means never looking beyond the rumors that surround the Scott girl's death. And when a young girl disappears soon after the Scott family's arrival, the community is sure that the man they suspect in the first girl's death must have a hand in the other girl's disappearance.

This book was both a difficult book to read and a difficult book to put down. The crime story was interesting, but the real focus of the book was how difficult it was for a woman to leave a husband who wanted her to stay.

And as an aside, the cover art for this book has nothing to do with the book itself. It features the legs of two young girls. In Bent Road there is one school-age girl, but no very young children. With a book so rich in imagery, this cover is just lazy and does the book inside a disservice.

The Last Nude by Ellis Avery tells the story of Rafaela, a seventeen-year-old American who ran away to Paris and who is surviving doing whatever she needs to get by when she meets the painter Tamara de Lempicka in the Bois de Boulogne. Rafaela soon becomes her model and lover. As she learns to navigate the ambiguous waters of the Parisian art world in the 1920s, she grows up a bit and finds uncertain love.

Avery has created a vivid picture of a specific place at a specific time. I've read a fair amount about the literary scene in Paris at that time and was eager to expand into the art world. And it was interesting; Tamara de Lempicka was a fascinating and controversial woman in her time, a serious and bi-sexual artist at a time when most women were restricted to the role of supportive wife and mother. The fictitious character of Rafaela is well developed; she combines the insecurity of a teen-ager with the strength of will to run away and dream of something better. She's fascinated with fashion and so the book also provides a look at how women dressed then.

On the negative side, the historical characters were muddied by the characters who were fictional but obviously based on historical figures. For example, Sylvia Beach is herself in the book, but there is a fictional character who plays an important role in the book who is obviously based on Ernest Hemingway and some of the characters from his books. Rafaela was partially based on Suzy Solidor, an entertainer who had a liaison with de Lempicka, but Suzy Solidor also appeared as herself in the book. So, while much of the book was based on historical figures and adhered closely to what is known about their lives, it also diverged in unnecessary ways. Still, The Last Nude provides an atmospheric look at a unique place and time and as long as the reader does not rely on this novel for their facts, it is an enjoyable and worthwhile read.

Excellent reviews of Bent Road and The last Nude. I could be tempted to read the last nude because of its time and place.

December's a busy month, until everything just stops for the holidays, and that's busy with other things, so not much reading is getting done. Actually, I am reading quite a bit, but it's all A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. It's longer than average, but also so good (it makes Wolf Hall look like something off of this year's Booker shortlist!) that I'm reading slowly. I'll be back when I'm finished.

it makes Wolf Hall look like something off of this year's Booker shortlist!

Ooh...I can't wait to read your review of A Place of Greater Safety. I suspect that it will be one of my earlier reads of 2012.

I too loved A Place of Greater Safety more than I loved Wolf Hall.

Catching up, and missed the whole conversation on reading out loud to children. I'll follow up on the books on Lois's list for my severn year old.

Great reviews, not sure I could read The Last Nude.

217 - yeah, no pressure! You'll love A Place of Greater Safety, I promise.

218 - I so loved Wolf Hall that I put off reading A Place of Greater Safety, worried that it couldn't possibly live up to my expectations. I suspect that I'll be hunting down each and every book by Hilary Mantel next year.

219 - I'm reading Anne of Green Gables to them now and I'm surprised at how very much my eight-year-old boy is enjoying it. And the word that got him on board the idea of reading it was orphan. Is there a great children's book without one?

And when evening came the civil servants hurried home; the jewelers of the Place Dauphine came clank, clank with their keys to lock away their diamonds for the night. No homeward cattle, no dusk over the fields; shrug away the sentimentality. In the rue Saint-Jacques a confraternity of shoemakers settled in for a night's hard drinking. In a third-floor apartment in the rue de la Tixanderie, a young woman let in her new lover and removed her clothes. On the Ile Saint-Louis, in a empty office, Maitre Desmoulins's son faced, dry-mouthed, the heavy charm of his new employer. Milliners who worked fifteen hours a day in a bad light rubbed their red-rimmed eyes and prayed for their families in the country. Bolts were drawn, lamps were lit. Actors painted their faces for the performance.

Robespierre and Danton are the two towering figures of the French Revolution. They were almost comically different; Danton living large, with enormous appetites, voice and zest for the challenges of leading a revolution, and Robespierre, tidy, precise and constrained in his personal and public life. They're great fodder for a many a book. In A Place of Greater Safety, however, Hilary Mantel does something different. She puts the spotlight on Camille Desmoulins, the stuttering lawyer whose speech in the gardens of the Palais Royale was the spark that set the revolution alight. Oh, Mantel spends plenty of time in Danton's head and narrates from the POV of everyone from Robespierre to both of Danton's wives, but the central focus remains on the volatile and scandal-prone Desmoulins. This does make excellent sense; Camille is the connection between Danton and Robespierre, close to both men, but Mantel is interested in Desmoulins for his own sake. This gives a new angle to a familiar story, although Mantel's writing is so fine that she hardly needs the boost.

Usually, it's clear who an author prefers, either Danton or Robespierre. Mantel treads a delicate path of showing both men sympathetic and abundant in faults. She also fleshes out the secondary actors in the Revolution, from Marat (a surprisingly positive portrayal) to Danton's teenage second wife.

Robespierre smiled his thin smile. he was conscious of the thinness of it. If he were remembered into the next generation, people would speak of his thin, cold smile, as they would speak of Danton's girth, vitality, scarred face. He wanted, always, to be different--and especially with Danton. Perhaps the smile looked sarcastic, or patronizing or disapproving. But it was the only one available to his face.

Excellent review of A Place of Greater Safety. This is turning into a must read for me, especially as one of my neighbours claims that Camille Desmoulins was one of her ancestors.

I will try and get to it next year.

Your enticing review makes me want to drop everything and start reading A Place of Greater Safety now. I'll probably get to it in February.

French Revolution...I keep thinking to myself that I don't know anything about it and really should read something, then I move to another place. Echoing above, terrific review.

ETA a missing word

Great review!

#220 I suspect that I'll be hunting down each and every book by Hilary Mantel next year. That's more or less what I did after reading A Place of Greater Safety. One of the things I really like about Mantel is that she is not afraid not only to tackle wildly varying topics but also to try very different approaches. Some of them work better than others.

224 French Revolution...I keep thinking to myself that I don't anything about it and really should read something, That's how I felt after reading A Place of Greater Safety, and a bought Citizens by Simon Schama. It is quite a tome and has been sitting on my TBR for several years, but I'm going to try to tackle it at the end of January when I go on vacation (unless something more tempting intervenes).

I've been reading this love-in for A Place for Greater Safety and feel that I should now break my silence to put the case against it. This was chosen as the first book of the year for my book group - only two people finished it and one them because she had studied the French Revolution. My personal take on it was that it was the literary equivalent on a 1-to-1 scale map. It didn't surprise me that it was Mantel's first attempt at a novel because it was obvious the author didn't understand what needed to be left in and what could be left out, the novel just drowned under the weight of detail. I think for that reason it is a love-it-or-leave-it novel.
And I say this as someone who has liked other Mantel novels.

I can see that, Jargoneer. I mean, I disagree, but you do have a point. I've heard similar comments about Wolf Hall. I loved all that detail and would really have liked her to have continued until Robespierre's death and to have humanized Saint-Just (if that's possible).

If an author can write, I mean really write, then I'm willing to read pretty much anything they care to put out there. Elizabeth Hay can write. It's an odd writing style, one which features both worn-out phrases and metaphors so startling that you have to read them a few times, both for comprehension and for the sheer enjoyment of the pictures she paints.

For a while I was able to carry it all inside me, like a big bouquet of peonies, and then I couldn't anymore. The moist, plump peony heads got to be too heavy. They were like pounds of raw hamburger hanging upside down.

Alone in the Classroom concerns Connie, a brand new and very young teacher sent to a small Saskatchewan school in a farming community at the brink of the Great Depression. There, she tutors an older boy who can't read and is menaced in vague and uncomfortable ways by the school's principal. Her story is told by her niece, a woman who worships the strong, independent woman Connie later became and who has an unsatisfactory relationship with her own mother.

The first part of the book is perfect; an interesting story beautifully told and with a strong sense of the isolated prairie community. The book loses momentum as it continues on, so that the final chapters seem to be just treading water. However, Hay is such an accomplished writer that I found it pleasant enough to float around with her through those final chapters.