Charles Frazier and I Think Alike

Last week the New York Times Books section profiled Charles Frazier (who apparently has a new book coming out).   The format of these profiles is that the author responds to a series of questions.  Here was one question and answer:

    Q:  What moves you most in a work of literature?

    A:  Language and sense of place, always.

I agree.   As I've begun evaluating books I read based on the Four Doorways I've learned that not only do I look for language first in evaluating a book, I also really love books that have a strong sense of place.  I'll give books a pass on plots and characters that I don't think are wonderful if I love the language and the sense of place.  I won't love them, but I won't completely pan them. 

Mini Book Reviews - March 2023

 These are mini reviews of some books I read in March:

• The 7 1/2 Lives of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton.  I can't even begin to adequately explain the plot of this book.  Imagine the worst English country house party ever.  Then a murder that doesn't look like a murder.  Then a man whose consciousness jumps between seven different people as he tries to solve the murder.  If he doesn't solve it by 11:00 pm on the day of the murder, his memory is wiped and everything starts over again.  He must solve it to escape the loop. To say this is a complicated book is an understatement.  There is the murder to solve, there are the rivals who are also trying to solve the murder and escape the loop, and there is the whole mystery of why is there a loop in the first place.  I took this book with me on a short getaway weekend.  That was a mistake. It was too complicated to read in spurts.  I found myself frustrated with it as I read it and disappointed when I finished it.  The plotting is clever (perhaps overly clever) but I'm not sure it really worked .  At the end I found myself doubting that all the loose ends had been tied up and I didn't think that the ending really made sense.  Also, the cleverness of the plot masked the shallow development of the characters.  I found that I didn't really care about the main characters, and there were too many secondary characters to keep track of.  On the whole, not a success for me. 
• Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney.  I very much enjoyed Sally Rooney's Normal People.  I thought she captured the angst of teenagers and young twenty somethings perfectly. I was carried along by her writing style.  In this novel she tries to capture the angst of two thirtyish women and the men they are involved with.  This is not a novel with a lot of plot, it's all about character.  The two main women characters write long existential emails to each other about the world (and not too much about themselves).  Even though I generally like novels where characters bat around ideas, I found myself skimming those emails.   As far as the relationships went, I never really understood why the two women were friends and most of the time I just found myself wondering why the men didn't give up and leave the women.   If I had been in their places, I would have.  But at the same time I found the men super annoying because they seemed to have been crafted to belong at two ends of a spectrum of behaviour - one comes off as rude and selfish and the other comes off as annoyingly selfless.  All in all, this just wasn't the book for me.   
• The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout.   When reading a blog post about the Lucy Barton books I discovered that the character of Bob Burgess who appears in Lucy by the Sea came from an earlier book written by Elizabeth Strout called The Burgess Boys.  So I immediately found it.   It is the story of the three adult Burgess siblings:   Bob and his twin sister Susan and their older brother Jim.  We also meet Jim's "perfect" wife Helen and Bob's ex-wife Pam.  This is a different kind of book than the Lucy Barton books.  There is more plot ( a messy, chaotic plot that involves family issues as well as immigrant issues in a small community), although she still puts a great emphasis on building the characters.  I remember thinking that reading Lucy by the Sea would be triggering for me and it wasn't.  But I was surprised to find parts of this book triggering.  It was published in 2013 and parts of the plot dealt with white supremacists and hate crimes and I kept thinking about how much worse the world has gotten since then.  But I did really enjoy this book.  I stayed away from Elizabeth Strout for years after reading Olive Kittridge because I thought all of her books would be written in that same short story way.  I was wrong. 

• Standing Dead by Margaret Mitsushima.  This is the next installment of the Mattie Cobb series set in Colorado.  Mattie is a local police officer in a small town and her K-9 partner is Robo.   I love the way Robo is portrayed, you can tell Mitsushima is a dog lover.   This isn't a bad series from a writing point of view, she has good descriptions of the settings and at this point she's built the characters so we know them.  Her plots move along.  But ... one of my pet peeves is when writers (of books or TV) make the plot all about the cop having to save family or friends who are in mortal danger.  And Mitsushima continues to do that.  In this case I felt like she really reached to create a bad guy from Mattie's past who seemed created just to have a bad guy and never actually seemed real.  I hope, if this series continues, that she has Mattie and Robo solve some "regular" crimes. 

• Due Diligence by Michael Kahn.  This was a bookclub pick, chosen mostly because the author lives in St. Louis and the story is full of St. Louis landmarks.  I read this long ago and had mostly forgotten the plot.  It brought back memories of working in law firms in the days before the internet, when we still had secretaries who answered our phones.  And when sexist jokes were expected and laughed at if you were a "cool girl". 

• The Shadows of London by Andrew Taylor.  This was the latest in the Marwood and Lovett mystery series.   Set during the reign of Charles II, Lovett is Cat Lovett a woman architect and Marwood is James Marwood who works for Scotland Yard in the days before there was a Scotland Yard.  I've always been ambivalent about this series.  I like it because it takes place in a time period I know little about.  However, I don't think he writes women that well.  This time he decided to write parts of it from the point of view of a young woman destined to become the mistress of the King and ... I just never really believed in her as a character.  It is telling that I put it down one night after reading about 75% and then forgot about it for a couple of days. 

• Storm Watch by C.J. Box  This is the latest in the Joe Pickett series and, plotwise,  it's as over the  top as any in the series.  It's hard to describe but it involves a dead body that disappears, extremists, Joe's mother-in-law Missy, the Governor who hates Joe and the FBI.  And, as usual, if Joe were a real person, he'd be dead.   As with all the Joe Pickett stories I enjoyed the descriptions of Wyoming - this time in the snow.  I like the way Box writes but as usual I find his women characters underdeveloped and you have to be able to tolerate crazy eye-rolling plots. 

The Paperhound

 The Paperhound is an independent bookstore in Vancouver run by Kim Koch and Rod Clarke. It sells mostly used and rare books, but also some new and notable books.  A recent episode of the podcast The Book Club Review was an interview with Kim that was fascinating.  It is  all about the world of used and rare books, with many book recommendations.  Recommended.   Find it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Bookish News

 Some Bookish News from the last month:

• Turns out that America's most recession-proof business is .... bookstores.   Yep.  This is based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Google Trends.  This shouldn't be a surprise, they keep telling us that business at independent bookstores is booming. 

• Amy Tan, Ann Patchett and Colson Whitehead are National Humanities Award recipients.  “The National Humanities Medal recipients have enriched our world through writing that moves and inspires us; scholarship that enlarges our understanding of the past; and through their dedication to educating, informing, and giving voice to communities and histories often overlooked,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo).  Check out the other awardees, there are 12 total. 

• Oprah Winfrey selected her 100th pick for her book club:  Ann Napolitano’s “Hello Beautiful” which is apparently a modern day homage to "Little Women".  

• On a related note - The BookGang Podcast (Amy Ellen Clark) recently did a deep dive into celebrity book clubs that was interesting.  

• Attention: Fans of the Sebastien St. Cyr series by C.S. Harris - the next installment is released in the US on April 18.  Mark your calendars.

• The Backlisted Podcast (which is technically on hiatus) had an episode this week where Becky Brown and Norah Perkins, joint custodians of the Curtis Brown Heritage list of literary estates, selected seven backlisted books that they felt should be better known.  One of them was "Merry Hall" by Beverly Nichols.  I concur on this!  This is the first book in a trilogy of memoirs in which Nichols, after WWII, decided to buy a large country house (in England) with gardens in need of extensive renovation.  I am not a gardener but I loved this trilogy mainly because it is very dry, tongue in cheek, funny.  I gave the books to my best friend, who is a master gardener, and she ADORED them.  They ended up getting passed around our bookclub to the great joy of everyone. 

On Re-Reading

I want to point out this piece by Kerry Clare about re-reading Elizabeth Strout's Lucy Barton series and how re-reading can change your viewpoint. 

This is a post about a lot of things. It’s about being wrong, and dismissing certain ideas and ways of being, and the question of how one knows what’s good, all of which are actually themes of Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton books, which begins with My Name is Lucy Barton, and continues with the story collection Anything is Possible, Oh, William, and, finally, Lucy By the Sea.

She didn't much like My Name is Lucy Barton when she first read it. Or even when she read the sequels. But then she decided to re-read them because so many other people she respected loved them. 

And I’ve got to tell you that everything I thought was weird and slight about the Lucy Barton novels is still right there. The downright unfashionableness of the project too, the quiet, the earnestnes, so many exclamation marks!! (!!). Telling, not showing. She’s breaking all the rules I know of how to write a novel well, and it’s my immediate instinct to dismiss these books again. I’m only considering them again because other people are telling me that they’re good, instead of me knowing that in my bones. And isn’t that everything we’re advised against as readers, as critics, as humans? Of following the crowd, reading like sheep?

But she also said:

But still, to remain open. This is the object, I think. To stay curious. To look backwards and wonder if there is something you might have missed, some part of the puzzle you might have failed to understand.

And then she finally got it.  I recommend this post.  I used to re-read books all the time but I haven't in years - too little time.  But I need to make time for it.

 

Mini Book Reviews - February 2023

 Here are some mini-reviews of books I read in February: 

• The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith.   I remember, many years ago, reading a couple of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books before giving up and thinking that Mr. Smith's style wasn't for me.  But recently  I thought I'd try one of his series set in Edinburgh.  Alas, this one did not change my mind.   His main character, Isabel Dalhousie, is an older woman, living alone (except for her housekeeper who comes in every day - do people really still have housekeepers who come in every day?).  Isabel works from home - doing something for philosophy journals.  When she sees a man fall from the balcony of the concert hall to his death, she decides to investigate.  But not really. She sort of flits here and there and thinks.  She thinks a lot.  She thinks about philosophy a lot.  This book is written in the third person (thank goodness) but I still found her difficult to relate to as a character .  It had a good sense of place but the plot just sort of meandered.  But the clincher was that I found myself skimming large parts of the text because I have little to no interest in philosophy.

• The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson.  The premise of this novel was interesting - a multi-generational story of Dahkota women struggling to stay alive, preserve their families and their way of life.  With a bit of preaching about the evils of GMO crops.   The main character is Rosalie Iron Wing who is taken from her home after the death of both of her parents and raised by foster parents.   But there is also the story of her friend Gaby who is working to clean up the environment and Rosalie's ancestors who were pushed out of Minnesota in the 1860s.  And the story of seeds maintained each year to feed people.  I liked the story.  The style of storytelling wasn't one I love - told in the way that people tell the story of their lives to other people.    So a lot of telling, not showing.  Major events elided over.  It made for some thinly developed characters except for Rosalie.  And even the sense of place seemed generic.   I don't think the author is a natural novelist and when I looked her up I found this was a first novel but she had written non-fiction.  It showed.  But it did keep my attention until the end and, in general,  I recommend this book but be aware that she is no Louise Erdrich. 

• The Dry by Jane Harper. Set in a small town in Australia during a terrible drought, Federal Agent Aaron Falk returns to town for the funeral of his childhood best friend Luke.  Luke's farm is failing and he has apparently killed his wife and son before taking his own life.  But why did he spare baby Charlotte?  And there are other strange circumstances that lead Aaron to question whether Luke was in fact the killer or whether he was a victim.  Aaron is a well drawn character and the plot is a page turner.  The sense of place is excellent.  Harper has a nice readable style and doesn't do anything that made me roll my eyes.  Her style reminded me, a bit, of Tana French. This is a first in a series.  I will read the others. 

• The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett.  I really enjoyed this book.  Steve Smith, the main character, is out of jail on probation, determined never to go back to jail.   He's  also obsessed with finding out what happened to a teacher who mysteriously disappeared forty years previously and also with solving a code in a children's book that maybe the teacher solved.  Or maybe she didn't.  And along the way, he tells us what landed him in jail years ago.   This has a good plot that keeps you wondering what will happen.  The main character is interesting.  We see the other characters through his eyes so they are a little less developed.  It doesn't have a particularly strong sense of place but enough that you understand where things are happening.  I'm not completely convinced that it stuck the landing at the end - I might have preferred it to end more ambiguously than it does, but I'm not going be too picky about that.  What I loved was the writing concept.   The novel starts with a letter from a police inspector to a university professor enclosing transcripts of audio files found on an old iphone.  The transcripts were made by specialist transcription software (along with the mistakes that transcription software make).   The majority of the novel are these transcripts of dictation that Steve makes into the iphone.   Some people may not like that but I loved it. 

• Force of Nature by Jane Harper.  This was the follow-up novel to The Dry (reviewed above).   Australian federal agent Aaron Falk is back, this time with a partner named Carmen.  Aaron and Carmen are concerned when one of their sources on an important case goes missing in the bush during a corporate retreat/bonding experience.  The real story here is:  How well do you ever really know your colleagues?   I liked this book but not as much as The Dry.  I think that has to do mainly with my aversion these days to dual timeline books.  The main timeline takes place during the search for the missing woman but the other tells us what actually happened and how she went missing.  I didn't really want to see what really happened, I just liked the hunt.  But I didn't guess the ending (or the motive) which is good.  And I do like the way Jane Harper writes, in general.  Her characters don't say dumb things and she has a good sense of pacing.   I know I intended to avoid going down the rabbit hole of completing book series this year while not reading anything else in-betweenbut I had put myself on the wait list for the third and latest book, which started out with a wait of months.  But the library has purchased more copies and the list is down to weeks.  So I thought I should read book 2 while it was available.  And to be fair, I did read something in-between. (Why do I feel I have to explain myself?)

• Viviana Valentine Gets Her Man by Emily J. Edwards.  It is the 1950's in New York City and Viviana (Viv) is the secretary to private investigator Tommy Fortuna (the kind of guy who calls his secretary Dollface).  Viv likes her job and it brings in enough money to pay her rent at the boarding house run by Mrs. K., who watches over her "girls" like a mother hen.  All is well until Tommy takes a job from a well known millionaire then disappears and Viv shows up to work to find a mysterious man unconscious on the floor.  The cops think Tommy attacked him so its up to Viv to clear Tommy's name.  This is a very stylized mystery, written very much like a late 1940's/early 1950's film with a lot of banter.   Viv is engaging, smart and funny  (although at first I thought I might find her annoying, I didn't). It's a light read, perfect for a weekend afternoon or a plane trip.  Recommended by my friend AndiF. 

• The Echo of Twilight by Judith Kinghorn.  Back in 2012/2013 I really got into books set in the WWI era - both before, during and after.  I've never really gotten past it although I'm not as obsessive as I was.  But when I saw this at the library I couldn't resist.  It is the story of Pearl Gibson, ladies maid to Lady Ottoline Campbell and their "unlikely friendship."   It was disappointing partly because  there were a lot of "unlikely" things that happened in this novel.   The plot was ambitious.  But if you are looking for a page turner, this isn't it.   It starts a bit before the War and continues until 1925ish.   I honestly think the author was trying to do too much and the plotting overtook the character development.  One other reason I picked it was because it was partly set in the Scottish highlands, but it didn't really have enough of that sense of place to satisfy me.  And needless to say, the words didn't really grab me.  So, in general, it was just a "Meh" book for me.  It's not terrible but I really can't recommend it. 

• The Cliff's Edge by Charles Todd.  It was a relief for me that, after the last disappointing WWI novel, the next installment in the Bess Crawford mysteries was released this month.  Bess was a WWI frontline nurse, but the War is over and she's trying to figure out where she fits in the world.   Her friend Melinda Crawford convinces her to travel to Yorkshire to nurse Lady Beatrice after a gall bladder operation.  Melinda has previously placed an older woman named Lillian as Lady Beatrice's companion and Lillian is worried about Lady Beatrice.  But while staying there, Lady Beatrice hears that her godson has been hurt and sends Bess and Lilian to assist.  Turns out there was a murder.   Of course.   This was a good mystery.  I'm pretty sure the title refers to the cliff the victim fell off of but also the cliff that Bess finds herself personally wavering on as far as her personal life goes.  This book ends on even more of a cliff-hanger (pun intended) than usual, which is troubling.   Charles Todd is the pen name for a mother/son writing team and the mother, Caroline, passed away about a year ago.  So it isn't clear whether we should expect any more novels.  Which would be a real shame.  

• Back of Beyond by CJ Box.   I very much enjoyed reading CJ Box's Joe Picket series last year.  The writing is good for this type of page turning novel and the sense of place is excellent.  The plots are a little over the top (sometimes eye-rollingly over the top) but they do draw you along and the women characters are somewhat thinly drawn but not really offensive.  The main character, Joe, is very well drawn.  When I realized Box had another series I thought I'd give it a try.   Like the other books it is a real page turner but I didn't really enjoy it.  I thought the plot was even more far-fetched than some of the Joe Picket plots (which is saying a lot).  This time he told some of the story from the point of view of a young girl named Gracie and did a pretty good job with her, although I thought she didn't really think like a young person.  But all of that didn't really matter to me since I despised the main character:  Cody Hoyt, a chain smoking, alcoholic, asshole cop (he would describe himself that way and it is accurate).   If the writing hadn't kept me reading I would have stopped in disgust with him very early in (and he isn't really redeemed at the end).   I'm not inclined to want to read more about him.   I am intrigued however by the fact that this series is called the CJHoyt/Cassie Dewell series.  There was no Cassie Dewell that I remember in this book so she must come in another volume.   If he ditched Hoyt or made him a minor character I might read more.  

• Exiles by Jane Harper.   This is the third and latest book in the Aaron Falk series.  This is what started me on the readathon - I read a review somewhere of this book and thought it sounded good but thought I should start with the first book in the series:  The Dry (see above).   I put my name on the reserve at the library for this and it was supposed to take months so I thought I would be reading The Dry this month, the second book Force of Nature maybe next month and this one when it finally arrived.  Then the library bought many more copies and, oops, I had to read book two faster since it was available. (When my name comes up for a book I like to take it and not delay it).  Why am I explaining this?  Anyway I really, really liked this book.  Jane Harper is a very good writer - her dialog works perfectly, all the characters sound like real people.  She gives a very good sense of place (this time vineyard country in Australia) and her characters are interesting.   And once again, I did not actually guess the two mysteries in this book until right before the reveals. 

Those are my thoughts.  Remember, of the four doorways into a novel (plot, character, sense of place and language), I'm looking for the language doorway to be big in order for me to love a book.  (See my post about the Four Doorways).  Probably why I loved The Twyford Code and just liked the others. 

A Mystery is Solved

I'm always looking for new books to read but I don't usually ask for recommendations because I know my taste differs from other people's taste (remember, of the Four Doorways into books, I'm looking for the "words" doorway.  It can have a rip-roaring plot but if the writing isn't great it's just an OK book to me.).  So to find leads to books I might like to read I read reviews and some book blogs and I keep of list of books that sound interesting.  

One of the blogs I regularly read, Eiger, Monch & Jungfrau:  A Mountain of Books is written by someone who teaches in the English department of Hendrix College (and is also a host of the One Bright Book Podcast).  Their reading is far more erudite than mine and is more oriented to books in translation than my reading is, but I've also gotten some leads on books I've really enjoyed from them.   

One of the things I like about that blog is that every January/February they turn the blog over to guests who post about what they read the preceding year. Most of those people also like to read a lot of books in translation but, again, I've also gotten some good leads from them.  Every once in a while someone posts about a year of reading that could have been mine.  This year Anne Cohen was a guest blogger and many of the books she blogged about I've read and enjoyed.  And, like me, she said she is "always taken aback by how many mysteries I've read in a given year."  She wrote this about mysteries:

As I was finishing this, Dorian and his One Bright Book podcast colleagues were talking about how hard it sometimes can be to settle into a new novel; to become used to the rhythm of that specific universe. For me, a pleasure of mysteries, and mystery series in particular, is the absence of some of that acclimatization. [Ed. – Nicely put! Helps me see why genre fiction can be so comforting.] Mysteries are like sonnets—the typicality or transparency of their framework makes it fun to see how well a writer sets up character and plot; the bad or lazy writing can be howlingly obvious and the clever more enjoyable. [Ed. – Absolutely!]

That resonated with me.  It also explained to me why I like mystery series even though the words doorway is the most important doorway for me.  I've always found that hard to reconcile (even though I'm the first to say that genre writing doesn't mean "bad" writing.) 

Anyway, check out that blog and go back through the posts of the last month to see what a variety of people read last year.