I've hit the point of no return with Tana French's Faithful Place. You know that spot where the book grabs you and absolutely doesn't let you go? You almost miss your bus stop and ride to the end of the line. And you don't even notice that your time is up on the treadmill because you haven't been looking at the clock every five minutes to see if you are done yet. Yup, that's where I am. Actually this has pretty much been a page turner from the very first, and even though I think the murderer has been revealed the denouement is yet to come.
I'll write about Faithful Place properly later, but I think I'll mention a couple of books I finished recently in the interim, but I'll keep things brief as I am feeling very lazy and I want to get back to my book. I've read a good number of library books this year (due dates keeping me on my toes in order to finish the books I really want to read in a timely manner--including the one I am going to mention here), probably more than last year, and I've gotten back to my audio books as well. Actually I've finished two books and
will be finishing two more very soon so am thinking already about what to start in their place.
If you're looking for something light and undemanding, a book that's perfect beach or poolside reading, Isabel Wolff's A Vintage Affair might be just the ticket. However, this isn't an entirely breezy read either, as Wolff manages to add a bit of weight and depth to the story and tell it with just the right amount of humor as well. Phoebe Swift gives up a prize job at Sotheby's to open up her own vintage clothing shop after the tragic death of her dearest friend and the break up of a serious relationship with a man she was just about to marry. Phoebe's heart is in need of mending and she could do with a little life-altering change. It's amazing the therapy that can be had from finding just the right dress or accessory (for me it would be just the right book!), and the selection in Phoebe's store is impeccable. Much of Phoebe's stock is acquired from private collections, or clothes stashed away in closets long forgotten. When Phoebe comes across a child's blue coat, beautifully made and obviously well cared for despite the decades it has been in storage, she knows there is a story behind it. The owner is reluctant to sell the coat or share the story, but when she does it will begin a healing process for both of them. Okay, so that sounds a bit hokey, but it works. This is a story of friendships and forgiveness and second chances, and yes, there are a few romantic entanglements thrown in to add a little spice. Wolff
does a good job of balancing the various elements out nicely.
It took three tries for me to finally read Carol Goodman's The Sonnet Lover. In this case it was the audio book that did the trick. Goodman is usually a dependably good read for me, but for some reason every time I picked up the book I just as soon set it down. A Tuscan setting is generally a sure sell, but maybe it was the idea of reading about sonnets? Poetry is my achille's heel, and this is a book that was sure to have a generous smattering of them. Listening to a book is such a different experience than reading, however. Any little frustrations I might have with plot, characters or writing style are often forgotten as I simply become wrapped up in the telling of the story. And it helps to have a good reader, which in this case there was. The story has a fairly large cast of characters and she did a good job differentiating between them, but are Hollywood producers really so annoying? Goodman's plots tend to have similar elements and this was no different. Once again the protagonist is an academic--a poetry professor at a small, exclusive liberal arts college in New York. When one of her most promising students falls to his death Rose Asher will become tangled up in a mystery that involves stolen poems that might have been penned by a little known Renaissance woman poet, Ginevera de Laura. Was she perhaps Shakespeare's "Dark Lady", the subject of his sonnets? Rose returns to the Italian villa, La Civetta, where she had been a student twenty years earlier and the scene of her most intense love affair that ended in heartbreak. The most appealing aspect of the story for me was the unraveling of the story of Ginevera de Laura. While perhaps not her best work, Goodman's suspenseful stories always have an interesting literary or artistic slant to them.
At the moment I'm listening to something quite different, James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice. It's a dark tale of lust and murder set in 1930s California. I've read the book before, but I'd forgotten just how bleak the story is and how shocking it must have been to audiences back then. It's a classic American crime novel and one that paved the way for other novels of the hardboiled school. Now that I've read and am listening to it (it's a quickie--only 128 pages and about three hours on audio), I will have to finally see the movie as well. Next up I've got Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, which is a novel that I have contemplated reading for quite some time but never seem to get around to. Hopefully the audio will be a good experience. And it's about time to browse a bit for more audio books to load onto my player. I like to have one or two in the ready. I'm lucky as I can load them free from my library!