Dorothy Dunnett Centennial

Today would have been the 100th birthday of one of my favorite authors, Dorothy Dunnett.  The author of fifteen wonderful historical novels as well as six more modern mystery novels, she died in 2001.   But her books are still in print and she has a world-wide readership. 

If you like the work of Guy Gavriel Kay, he is a huge fan.   As is Chelsea Clinton.   As are Natasha Lester and  Freya Marske. As is another of my favorite authors, C.S. Harris.  As is Diana Gabaldon. 

Here are links to some good articles about her:

All the Writers you love Probably love Dorothy Dunnett (NPR)

Writing Epic Fantasy the Historical Way: Lessons from Dorothy Dunnett's The Game of Kings (Tor)

Five Things I've Learned about Writing from Reading Dorothy Dunnett (Alys West)

7 Lessons for Writers from Dorothy Dunnett's The Game of Kings

The Game of Kings is the first in a six book series of novels set in the 16th century.   Niccolo Rising is the first in a series of eight novels set in the 15th century.   King Hereafter is a stand alone novel set in the 11th century. As we fans like to say, the first 100 pages of The Game of Kings can be hard going, but if you make it that far you will be hooked.    

Happy Birthday Dorothy.  And thanks for many hours of great reading.  

   

July Mini-Book Reviews

I'm very late in posting this because I was vacationing in Minnesota at the end of July where I was reading books and not writing about them.   July always is a month that is heavy on mystery stories because I often take those to the lake with me as light reading.   This year was no different. 

• The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff.    Everyone in the village believes that Geeta murdered her husband and disposed of his body.  In reality he was a deadbeat who left her high and dry.  But now women from the village are coming to Geeta for assistance in disposing of their own deadbeat husbands.  What is she to do?  Should she model herself on the "Real" Bandit Queen who took revenge on her male tormenters (according to lore)? This is a debut novel and in some ways that shows.  The author tries to do a little too much and sometimes I found myself skimming the inserted stories about the "Real" Bandit Queen.  But on the whole it is a very readable novel and, despite the subject matter, quite humorous.

• The Benevolent Society of Ill Mannered Ladies by Alison Goodman.   Very much in the style of Jane Austen but with two older "spinster" ladies as the leading characters (which is somewhat refreshing).  They solve crimes as a hobby, although also somewhat unintentionally.  Some of the resolutions to the crimes are ... fairly unbelievable, but it is fiction after all.  There are three crimes to solve in this novel and I had the impression that the author wrote them as three short stories (and I dislike short stories).  There is an overarching storyline too but that isn't resolved, setting us up for a sequel.  If you don't mind connected short stories posing as novels you may enjoy this.  Hopefully the sequel will read like one novel. 

• Blue Lightning, Dead Water, Thin Air and Cold Earth, all by Anne Cleeves.   These four books are part of my continuing read of the Shetland Islands mystery series which I am quite enjoying.   The mysteries are good and the continuing story has some shocking and unexpected developments.  I really enjoy Ann Cleeves and always recommend her mysteries.  These have a very developed sense of place and the plots are good.  I like the main character and we continue to meet and re-meet the other people on the island.  I'm on the waitlist for the latest Shetland novel and then I'll be caught up on all her books, and will have to wait for her to write a new one.

• The Word is Murder and The Sentence is Death, both by Anthony Horowitz.  After watching Magpie Murders on PBS last year I swore I was going to read at least one Anthony Horowitz novel.  Well, I read two.   These are mysteries but the hook is that Anthony Horowitz is a character in them, one of the detectives in fact.  So as part of the story he writes about himself working on Foyle's War and other things the real Anthony Horowitz does in addition to trying to solve the mystery.  Which is meta but also very amusing.  The mysteries are good.   I really enjoyed both of these books. 

• The Secret of the Villa Serena and One Summer in Tuscany, both by Domenica de Rosa.  I'm a great fan of the mysteries of Elly Griffiths, whose real name is Domenica de Rosa.  When I found that out last year, I bought all three of the books she wrote under her real name.  I didn't care much for the first one I read so the other two sat on my shelf until I hauled them up to the lake for vacation reading.  The Secret of the Villa Serena involves a woman who has moved her whole family to Italy because she always wanted to live there. But now her husband has left her and she is starting to fall for the mysterious archaeologist excavating her land.  One Summer in Tuscany involves a woman who runs writing workshops in a castle in Italy.   The business isn't very lucrative and she may have to sell the castle.   Both have very good senses of place but in both I found the characters a little annoying.   And I did not find the endings of either book very believable.  So I can't really recommend them, but I highly recommend the books she writes as Elly Griffiths.

• The Appeal by Janice Hallett.    I thought 2/3 of this book was really good.  I wish I could have excised the middle 1/3.   The first 1/3 is a series of emails, etc. that two people (paralegals?  Law Clerks? Junior Lawyers?) are reviewing to determine who committed a murder.  It includes the text messages between the document reviewers. The title of the book has a double meaning - the reason these persons are reviewing the files is for a legal appeal, but the file involves an appeal for donations to fund the medical costs of a sick child.  As the cover says:  One murder; 15 suspects.  The end of the book gives us the answers to all our questions.  All of that is fascinating.  But the middle of the novel is the analysis by the two reviewers of the evidence - and I found that incredibly boring.  Probably because I am a lawyer and I had already done all that analysis in my own head as I was reading.  I kept thinking:  "Trust the reader".

June Mini Reviews

I"m late to posting this because I was travelling during the end of June.  June was a big month for mysteries for me.  These are some of the books I read :

• The White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear.  I am a big fan of Winspear's Maisie Dobbs mystery series so I had high hopes for this stand-alone novel.  Unfortunately I did not think it rose to the level of the Dobbs' mysteries.  The novel follows the life and career of Elinor White through both the first World War and the second World War.  I found Elinor's life during both of the wars fascinating.  But Winspear decided to structure the novel starting in 1947 with a plot that involves organized crime and she tells Elinor's story in flashbacks.  I did not think this worked.  I kept wondering why she didn't just tell the story in a linear fashion and what the organized crime plot was adding to the story.  In the end the organized crime plot really just fizzled out with characters doing things seemingly because Winspear needed to wrap up the story rather than arising out of their own character.  The other problem I had was more personal to me.   When I read a novel, I don't see specific pictures in my mind (no "movie in my mind" for me).  I see general pictures.  But I HEAR each character's voice (including the narrator's) very clearly in my mind.   For me, Elinor's voice sounded exactly like Maisie's - the cadence and abruptness and bluntness.  They of course talked about different things but in terms of HOW they said things (even when the narrator was in their minds), there didn't seem to be much difference.  I couldn't get past that. 

• Red Bones by Ann Cleves.  This is the third novel in Cleves' Shetland Islands mystery series.  I read the first two at the beginning of last year but then put the series aside because I couldn't get the books digitally through my local library.  I can now get them so I picked it up again.  I really enjoy this series.  The principal detective, Jimmy Perez, is back.  This time the mystery directly involves the family of Sandy Wilson, the somewhat inept policeman who works for Perez.   It was nice to see some growth in Sandy in this novel.  I did think the ending of this novel seemed a little contrived but I always like Cleves' creation of characters and the sense of place.  I will continue to read this series.  

• Chita by Chita Rivera  with Patrick Pacheco.   I very much enjoyed reading Shy, the Mary Rogers memoir, last year so I thought I'd give Chita Rivera's new memoir, Chita, a try.  I did enjoy it.   She mostly takes things chronologically although sometimes she links things thematically (for instance, her cameo appearance in the film Chicago is included in the chapter about how she originated the role of Velma Kelly on Broadway).   I don't think anyone who isn't a theater nerd/fan would appreciate this book, in many cases you just have to "know" what she is talking about.  After finishing I surfed YouTube for video of young dancing Chita in performances she references (and, wow, I almost forgot what a fabulous dancer she was). She doesn't "dish the dirt" like Mary Rogers did, but she also doesn't sugarcoat things. But her main tactic is to talk mostly about the good and avoid the bad.  I think if you love Broadway and theater in general, this is a good book to read. 

• Murder Under a Red Moon by Harini Najendra.  This is the second book in The Bangalore Detective Club series which is set in Bangalore India in the early 1920s.  I remember that I liked the first book when I read it last year, but I thought the characters seemed a little too modern in their thought for the time period it was set in and the plot was somewhat convoluted.  I still thought that about the characters, even though I like the main character.  This time the mystery was less convoluted from a plot point of view but I found the author's sense of time confusing.  Something would happen (a character is injured, for example) and it seems that maybe only a day or two goes by before we meet that character again and most of their bruising is gone (which seems unlikely).   This happened multiple times and pulled me out of the story. Not enough to spoil it for me, but it did pull me out. This series has a great sense of place, which I enjoy.  I'm sure I'll read the next in the series but I don't count this as one of my favorite series.   

• The Burning by Jane Casey.  There is a serial killer in London and Detective Constable Maeve Kerrigan is on the investigating team, which is unpleasant enough without the constant sexism she must deal with from all the men on the team (other than the Big Boss who treats her with respect).   But is the latest victim the work of the serial killer or of a copycat murderer?  Maeve thinks it is the work of a copycat.   Can she prove it?  And will they catch the serial killer?  I normally dislike serial killer books but this one was so on the periphery of the main story that it didn't bother me.  This was a debut novel and it has a lot of debut novel problems including trying to do too much, dragging a bit at the end and wrapping everything up with a nice neat confession.  I also guessed the killer early on (which I can't decide if she INTENDED everyone to guess or not).   But even so, it showed some promise as a debut and was published back in 2011, so maybe someday I'll read another of hers and see if she improved. 

• A Disappearance in Fiji by Nilima Rao.  This mystery is set in Fiji in 1914.   World War I is raging back in Europe but not in the East. Akal Singh is a Sikh from India who works for the British Police Service, formerly stationed in Hong Kong.   Something happened in Hong Kong that caused him to be transferred to the backwater of Fiji where his new boss is not his biggest fan. The case he takes on involves a missing Indian woman who has come to Fiji with her family to labor on a plantation.   It is contractual servitude that is little better than slavery.  Did she run away?  Or did something happen to her?  The setting was interesting, the mystery only moderately interesting.  This is, I believe, a debut novel.  I'm not breathlessly anticipating a follow up although once it arrives I may read it.  

NYTimes Book Review

There was a time when I religiously read the New York Times Book Review.  I didn't subscribe to the paper but I bought the Book Review every week at the book store across the street from my office.   One day at lunch it turned out that everyone at the table had read the Book Review that week and someone, tongue in cheek (kinda), suggested that we start a Book Review Book Club where we never read the books, just the Book Review.   I remember having lists of books that I made after reviewing the Book Review of books that I wanted to read. 

These days I digitally subscribe to the NYTimes and occasionally read the "Books" tab.  Over the last 10 years or so, I only occasionaly found a book that I was interested in reading.  Was that a change in me?  Or a change in the Book Review?  Maybe both.  But I do know that I found most reviews boring - more like book reports than real reviews.   I can get that kind of writing from book blogs, I don't need the NYTimes for that. 

I have been reading more of the reviews in the last few months.  I actually didn't realize this until I read this Publishers Weekly article and learned that there is a new editor (and that my disinterest in the Book Review was pretty much the entire tenure of the last editor).  I started to think about it and realized I've been finding that the book reviews to hold more interest for me.  (Not much more, but some more.)

Is that a good sign for the future?   Maybe.  This gave me pause though:

Under Cruz, the Book Review is also streamlining its coverage. It no longer runs “double-reviews” (two reviews by different critics of a single book), which Cruz felt “sends a mixed message to the reader.” 

I like mixed messages.  It tells me that this is a book that can be DISCUSSED.  And argued about. 

So, we'll see how things go under the new guy.   But I still miss the old Book Review. 

May Mini Book Reviews

 May was a good month for reading.   I liked all but one of the books I read.  

• The Perfumist of Paris by Alka Joshi.  This is the third book in Joshi's trio of books that began with The Henna Artist and continued with The Secret Keeper of Jaipur.   Although technically a sequel to the stories of Lakshmi, Malik and Radha, this novel doesn't follow immediately after the last book; time has moved on to the 1970's.  Where The Henna Artist focused mainly on Lakshmi and The Secret Keeper of Jaipur focused mainly on Malik, this novel focuses on Radha who is living in Paris with her husband and two children and working as a perfumist.  Lakshmi and Malik are in the novel but this is Radha's story.  I found Radha's career fascinating.  I'm not a great wearer of perfumes myself but I really enjoyed reading about how they are mixed (and it made me want to take a trip to the Guerlain or Channel counter and sniff perfumes).  Radha also has to deal with the issues that working mothers always have to deal with, including trying to get her husband to value her career and worrying about her relationship with her French mother-in-law.  Plus she had some unfinished business from the first book to deal with.   I thought Joshi handled all of this well although I did think there were a few too many false endings.  But all in all, recommended.  There is a decent plot but I think Joshi's books rely more on characterization and, to a certain extent, sense of place. It isn't really necessary to read the other two books to enjoy this one but I do recommend you start at the beginning with The Henna Artist.

• The Last Remains by Elly Griffiths.   This is the last installment of one of my favorite series and changes are coming to Ruth Galloway's life.  Although a tenured professor, her own department of archaeology is on the University's cutting block and she has decisions to make.  Then there is Nelson, the father of her child, who is now separated from his wife Michelle and is pushing Ruth to move in together.  But does she want that?   And of course there is a skeleton discovered that needs to be investigated. One thing I really liked about this installment is that Griffiths does not pretend that COVID is over.  This takes place in 2021 so people are still wearing masks (except the ones who refuse), people exposed to COVID still have to quarantine and her good friend Cathbad (who almost died of COVID in the last book) is still recovering and is not himself.   While I'm sad that the series is ending because I always enjoyed the archaeology in the books, I was (I admit) getting tired of the on-again, off-again relationship with Nelson.  I think she ended the series on a good note and even managed to bring the story around to the very first mystery in the series in a very satisfying way.  Recommended but especially if you read the whole series.  This has a decent stand alone plot but much of it depends on the characters she has built up over the years.  

• Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club by J. Ryan Stradal.  An intergenerational story about five women (Betty, Florence, Mariel and Julia), and a couple of men, who all own/work at the Lakeside Supper Club in northern Minnesota at different times beginning in the Depression.  The main storyline follows the story of Mariel and her husband Ned (who also comes from a restaurant owning family) and their desire to have Ned figure out what he wants to do in life and also their desire to have a baby.  But there is a secondary storyline about Mariel's mother Florence who has arrived back in town, causing emotional turmoil for Mariel.  The underlying story (or moral) is that not all family members in a family-owned business want to carry on the business and you should never assume that one of your children (usually a son) is better suited to carrying on a business than another (usually a daughter).  A complicated inter-generational story is a lot for an author to strive for in a novel that is only 350 pages long (on e-reader) and I didn't think this author really succeeded.  This is one of those novels that switches back and forth in time, telling Florence, Mariel and Ned's story (and Betty and Julia's) with each chapter being in a different time and, often, place.  The result, for me, was that I was never truly invested in any of the stories because I kept being jerked out of one story and plopped into another story.  I'm not sure that the author intended this to be a sad book (it is marketed more like a beach read)  but I thought it was sad.  Of the six people who are affiliated with the supper club - three of them would leave it in a heartbeat, one of them is only a caretaker and the other two are literally killed by the place.  I thought this would be a nice book for me to read at the start of summer since I vacation in northern Minnesota each year but it didn't have as much of a sense of place as I expected and could equally have been set in northern Wisconsin.  The author bio says that he was born and raised in Minnesota but now lives in California with his family and, to me, the book reads like it was written by someone who is grateful to have escaped Minnesota. 

• The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish.  This is a long (very long) novel about two modern academics who discover a trove of old documents that reveal a story that wasn't previously known.  If that sounds a lot like the plot of Possession by A.S. Byatt, it is. In this case the academics are Helen Watt, a British historian of Jewish history (although she herself is not Jewish) on the brink of retirement struggling with Parkinson's, and Aaron Levy, a young American Ph.D. student who is loaned to Helen to assist in translating and studying the documents, which consist of household records and letters from a Jewish household in 1600's London.  Helen and Aaron are very different from each other and part of the story is about their relationship which is impacted by each of their pasts. They very early determine that the documents belonged to a household of a blind rabbi and that the rabbi's scribe is, very unusually, a woman.  Eventually, the story leaves the modern period and we enter the world of Ester Velasquez, newly arrived in London in the mid-1600's from Amsterdam where many Jews fled from Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition.  The double plots are, to say the least, complex.  The history of Hasidic Jews in London in the 1600's is not something I knew anything about before reading this. I also knew nothing about the philosophy of Spinoza (I'm not sure I know much more after reading the book because I admit I skimmed a lot of the philosophical discussions.)  I know that in the last year I have complained many times about novels that jump between two different time periods, but this is a novel that does it correctly and to great effect. After reading the first chapter I hoped that I would end up loving this book the way that I love Possession.  But although I liked it quite a bit, I thought it could have done with a bit of editing.  There are big info dumps in the various letters that the academics translate (in addition to the long disquisitions on philosophy) that drag the plot a bit.   With that warning, I do recommend it.   It has very interesting characters and (if you ignore the philosophical letters) a plot that kept me wanting to know more.  It has a good sense of place - Restoration London with the plague and the great fire as well as the tightknit Jewish community.  And I think you can skim the info-dump sections like I did if you aren't that interested in the philosophy discussions (they really aren't necessary for the plot, but are there mostly for character development).  

• Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris.  I didn't intend to read two long novels this month that were both set during the Restoration , but that's what happened.  After Charles II was restored to the English throne, the "Act of Oblivion" was enacted which caused all the men who signed the death warrant for his father to be hunted down, tried and put to death.  A great number of them were immediately arrested and put to death.   But some escaped by leaving the country, leading to a worldwide manhunt.  In this novel, two of them (Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe) escape to America, first to the Massachusetts Bay colony, then to Connecticut and finally to New Haven (which at the time was not part of Connecticut and wanted to be recognized as its own colony.)  Whalley and Goffe are relentlessly pursued by Richard Naylor who leads the manhunt on behalf of the King and as part of his own personal vendetta.  I believe Naylor is a fictional character but Whalley and Goffe were actual Regicides.  In some ways this is a story about fanatics - on both the Puritan side and the Royalist side - but Harris does a good job showing the fanaticism without necessarily making the characters completely dislikeable.  Although primarily a plot-driven novel, this novel has everything:   a good plot,  fully fleshed characters who are not perfect, a true sense of place (Puritan America) and really fine writing.  My only complaint is that the story drags on a bit towards the end - but I think that is because it is based on a true story and he couldn't (or didn't want to) fudge the dates.  

• Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead. Benji (who thinks he is old enough now to go by Ben) spends his summer on Long Island hanging with friends, working at the ice cream shop and wishing he was much cooler than he is.  Colson Whitehead sets this book in a part of Sag Harbor that, in the 1940's, began to attract a Black middle class population.  Like all summer homes, it has emotional resonance for the children and grandchildren of those first owners, all of whom have memories of the long summer days they spent there before they became adults.  With every Colson Whitehead book I read, I become more firmly convinced he is one of our best writers. Be warned, if you are looking for a page turner, this is not it.  There is no real plot.  This is a picture of a place and also of a time (the early 1980's) that, if you lived through it, you will remember even if you are not Black and never set foot in Sag Harbor.  It's the kind of book you can take on vacation, to the beach or pool, and read in spurts.  His rendering of location is vivid and Benji and his friends come to life on the page. It was the perfect book to start the summer. 

100 Greatest Children's Books of All Time

The BBC  polled "book experts" to find the greatest children's books. They say "the list is not designed as a fait accompli, but rather as an inspiration for further discovery and debate".   Let the debate begin. 

#1 on their list is Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.

Here are the top ten:

1          Where the Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak, 1963)
2          Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll, 1865)
3          Pippi Longstocking (Astrid Lindgren, 1945)
4          The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943)
5          The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien, 1937)
6          Northern Lights (Philip Pullman, 1995)
7          The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (CS Lewis, 1950)
8          Winnie-the-Pooh (AA Milne and EH Shepard, 1926)
9          Charlotte's Web (EB White and Garth Williams, 1952)

I would put Charolotte's Web and Winnie-the-Pooh in my top ten.  And probably Alice and Pippi too.  I don't actually have a problem with the others but I might not put them up at the top of my personal top ten. 

Here are others that I would put in my top 10 and where they fell on the BBC list:

11        Anne of Green Gables (LM Montgomery, 1908)
17        Little Women (Louisa May Alcott, 1868)
25        The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911)
28        Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (JK Rowling, 1999)
71        From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler (EL Konigsburg, 1967)
87        Little House in the Big Woods (Laura Ingalls Wilder, 1932)

What is missing?  I'm not sure what they actually mean by "children's" books.   But since they included The Hobbit on the list (which surely could not be read by a child alone until at least middle school) I'll add two of my favorite books from childhood.

The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare - a Newberry Medal winning novel in which a girl faces accusations of witchcraft in colonial Connecticut. (Google tells me this is grade level 5).

The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder - (reading ages 8-11).   A Newberry Honor winner.   The story of a group of friends who create an ongoing imagination game based on ancient Egypt.  

Martin Amis

There was news today that Martin Amis has died.  I read a number of his novels as well as his books of collected literary criticism.  As a literary critic, I found his work interesting.  I wasn't as enamored of his novels and I honestly don't remember much about most of them.  But his 1995 novel, The Information, has really stuck with me. 

 It was one of those novels where I reached the end and immediately re-read it to figure out how Amis manipulated my emotions.  It is the story of two writers (the successful writer Gwyn Barry and the less successful writer Richard Tull) and their friendship/enmity.  It is a mid-life crisis novel. 

Tull and Barry have been friends since university and Tull is very (VERY) jealous of Barry's success and manufactures increasingly convoluted plots to cause Barry inconvenience without Barry knowing it was Tull who is doing it.  But Barry eludes them all causing Tull to become increasingly deranged and his plots to become more and more dangerous. 

By the final third of the novel, Tull's state of mind is so far gone that I began to find the novel almost unreadable, so ridiculous were his thoughts and the plots he was concocting.  Key to the novel is that the reader starts to, if not sympathize with Barry, at least think that Tull is completely mad to think Barry is as bad as Tull thinks he is.  Then, as the novel wound toward the end, one plotline began to take precedence and I assumed the author was going to go in a direction that was so predictable that I found myself talking aloud to him, saying "Oh, please.  Don't do that!  How predictable!"   But he surprised me and went in a different direction at the very end  that found me switching places with Tull in terms of state of mind.  Tull ends the novel relatively complacently while I was left furious with Barry and wishing Tull could really have "got him". 

It isn't by any means a pleasant book and I've never felt like going back to it.  But I did think it was structured in a beautiful way and I've always remembered it.