A Work in Progress

January 5: Reading Notes

I think for once the books on my sidebar actually reflect the books I am currently reading and which keep me company on my bedside night stand (savor this moment it probably won't last).  I tend to add books along the way that never get added to the list on the right, but it's a good way to keep me honest and maybe 'on task'.  Otherwise my reading gets totally out of hand.  Not that I am actually reading each book daily.  I have a little rotation going until one becomes so gripping (or has to be returned to the library) that I end up reading it alone until I finish.  I am a couple of books over than what I had planned to start out the year with...Ian Fleming was meant to be read over my break as was Helen MacInnes (but I was too busy trying to finish a few other end of the year books, so I didn't spend much time with new ones), but the idea is to finish them both before starting anything else.  You know how temptations go, though.

I was thinking that this year I need to read more 'literary' fiction--those books that cross some imaginary line from regular novels to some deeper more sophisticated realm.  These always seem like ambiguous sorts of books yet I know them when I see them (books that end up on the Booker or Orange longlists or that win the Pulitzer or National Book Award).  But I kept hemming and hawing and was unable to choose so in the end I picked up To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis (who is a Hugo and Nebula award winner in her own right) from my list, since so many people were enthusiastic about it.  Last year I started reading Blackout by Willis but it had to go back to the library unfinished, and I have never gotten back to it.  To Say Nothing of the Dog has a similar set up.  It opens with Ned Henry having gone back in time to the day after the Nazi air raid that destroyed Coventry Cathedral.  He's there to locate a Victorian statue.  The time slip business is normal where Ned comes from but one of his colleagues inadvertently brings something back she wasn't meant to, so he must help her return it and set things to rights.  It's been called a "comedic romp", and I do love a good romp, so this has turned out to be a good choice. 

Not sure which 'literary work' I'll pick when I finish this, but I'm sure I'll spend plenty of time thinking about it.

Otherwise I'm reading lots of other really good books.  I'm making steady progress in Jane Austen's Emma.  Austen is always a delight to read and she's always so witty and perceptive.  Emma is quite the meddler, isn't she.  Despite hearing how other readers have not always gotten on with Emma, I like her despite her shortcomings.  I've seen a few different film adaptations, so there won't be any surprises, but that's not really a bad thing.  I've already decided Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers will be up next.  Liz has offered to read along, and if anyone else is interested do feel free to join us.  We've decided it will make good a good February read.  It weighs in with over 600 pages, but my copy has fairly large print, and from what I've heard the story is a real page-turner.  I love Dumas and I love adventure stories (and I bet there is sword play), so I am very much looking forward to finally reading it.

I'll be starting Helen Dunmore's Zennor in Darkness soon for Caroline's Literature and War readalong.  A fresh year and a new list of books.  Although I did fairly well last year reading most of the the books on the previous list, I am hoping to get in all the books this time around.  The Slaves are reading Reif Larsen's The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet later this month, which I have borrowed from the library.   And I have my postal reading group book to think about as well.  And Cornflower has just announced her February book group book, Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows, a book I have heard is excellent and I've long wanted to read.  You see, this is exactly how I get into trouble with my own books.  I want to read them All. 

And true to my word I also brought home Elspeth Huxley's The Flame Trees of Thika from my library.  It's been totally hectic at work this week (which is why I have quickly fallen behind in blog reading again--too tired when I get home from work to do more than update things here...the weekend will be here soon!), so I've not had a good opportunity to peruse the other books we own by her, but I'll be looking forward to doing so eventually.  I did request a few other of her works though ILL.  Did you know she even wrote mysteries?  More about those books later.   

I do have one more question or rather a few related questions to ask.  You might already know I own a Nook.  While I do like using it, I was disappointed that the battery tends to expend itself pretty quickly.  My Nook is a first generation, and now there is a less expensive, smaller and supposedly with an excellent long life battery, Nook Touch.  I'm contemplating upgrading.  I can't decide whether to stick it out with what I already own or to give in to the newer version (and not have to constantly charge it).  So, has anyone bought the Nook Touch and what do you think of it?  I would most likely keep my original Nook, too, and am wondering if I can share my books between the two.  I need to investigate further but it's always good to hear about others' experiences. 

Two for the Dough by Janet Evanovich

Dang if Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum novels aren't great fun to read.  Admittedly they aren't high art, and there really is a lot of silliness that goes on, but after finishing my second book, Two for the Dough (how many are there now?  Eighteen?), I am finding them to be laugh out loud funny and an excellent stress reliever.  Even before I finished the second book I had the third one on order and it is now safely sitting on my reading pile just waiting for the right moment (which may well come sooner than I expect).  If I didn't already have some luscious new books waiting for me to start the new year with, I would immediately pick up Stephanie's next adventure.  Best to save it for an afternoon when it is gloomy outside or life seems particularly trying.

You may know that the first book, One for the Money was adapted to film and will be out later this month, and now I can't wait to see it.  Although I am not a Stephanie Plum aficionado (with only two books under my belt I have lots more to go), I was sort of disappointed by the actors who were cast in the roles of Stephanie and her nemesis/love interest Joe Morelli, but now that I've had a chance to consider them in those parts, I can't picture anyone else.  Stephanie is a former lingerie-buyer turned recovery agent (aka bounty hunter) living in Trenton, New Jersey, or as she affectionately calls it, The Burg.  She's kind of a haphazard gal.  Much to her mother's chagrin she wears jeans, flannel shirts and Doc Martens (her work clothes), caves in often to a sweet (and sometimes salty, too) tooth, and finds herself in the most awkward or unaccountable situations.  She must get it from her Grandma Mazur who's only too ready to get mixed up in Stephanie's escapades, and has been known to accidentally shoot roast chickens (you had to be there...).

This time out Stephanie is trying to bring in Kenny Mancuso who has skipped out on bail and failed to show at his hearing on a murder charge.  Kenny happens to be distantly related to vice cop Joe Morelli who has his own reasons for bringing Kenny in.  Stephanie and Joe decide to share information; well, as much as Stephanie can trust Morelli to share (which isn't all that much to be honest).  The two have a love hate relationship that goes back to elementary school, and while Morelli may smolder away with his bedroom eyes, Stephanie knows it's better to be wary of him.  Since she is always short of cash, she takes on a side job locating missing caskets from a local funeral parlor only to dig herself in deeper as she stumbles upon illegal activities that someone would prefer to be kept well hidden.  Are the two cases related?

It's all great fun.  These stories are totally light-weight, easy reads.  Of course the more Morelli and Stephanie clash the more the sparks ignite usually ending in humorous situations that elicit a good laugh or two.  I've decided the books are like bonbons--a tasty treat as long as you don't mind a few empty calories.  I probably wouldn't eat a whole box full in one sitting, but there's nothing wrong with indulging in a few now and again.

Love Among the Daughters: Memories of the Twenties in England and America

Sometimes a book comes along that is not only enjoyable and utterly delightful but leaves you perplexed as to why it ever went out of print.  Elspeth Huxley's Love Among the Daughters: Memories of the Twenties in England and America is just such a book.  This is a hidden gem of a memoir and is a book ripe for the picking by one of the many small presses out there who is working to bring back into print undeservedly forgotten books.  I can totally see this in a lovely dove grey wrapper with a suitable end paper and accompanying bookmark for example.  Happily for me it was in my library's stacks and there are still used copies floating around for those who don't mind searching around for a copy.

Elspeth Huxley is probably best known for her memoir of her childhood spent in Colonial Kenya, The Flame Trees of Thika, but she also wrote more than thirty other books, some of which are novels as well as a few nonfiction works and I do hope there might be a few more memoirs mixed in as well.  My library has a small selection of her books and I will most certainly be browsing the offerings and bringing home a few this week.  Love Among the Daughters was the last book I read in 2011 and had I finished it sooner would most certainly have added it to my favorites list.  Although it's been a while since I've read anything by the Mitford sisters, it reminded me a tad of Nancy Mitford's style or at least that same milieu. 

Although Huxley was born in England and considered it her home, she grew up in Kenya and only returned to England as a young woman after WWI.  Love Among the Daughters is about her time spent living with her mother's sister's family in the mid-1920s.  She went to Reading University and spent a year in New York where she attended Cornell, and it is with a acerbically witty eye she writes about her experiences as a 'foreigner'/Colonial in these places.  She's wise and funny and her writing style is sharp and humorous.  If you're curious about life at this time you could do worse than pick up this book as you certainly get a flavor for the period as told by someone who lived it. 

Since this is a memoir spanning just a few years she picks and chooses the experiences she writes about.  She doesn't really write about her youth in Africa or her immediate family, but she does write about her extended family in Britain.  This was one of my lost in the stacks books and I shared a few excerpts about her cousins last fall.  They are a quirky family and she writes about them with fondness and lightness as well about the family home, Nathan's Orchard.  The family seems upper middle class, wealthy enough to have at least one servant and well connected to allow visits to country houses complete with parties and hunting. 

She went to study agriculture at Reading University and then later an uncle sold a horse so she could travel to America to continue her studies.  For Americans of this period France was all the rage, but for Europeans, apparently America was the popular destination.  It's interesting to read about the cultural differences between the two places, particularly so since Huxley was sort of twice-removed.  British, but raised outside Britain she is an astute observer of society and while she doesn't shy away from writing about cultural foibles she can also be generous and lavish in her praise.

I enjoy memoirs, maybe even a little more than straightforward fact-filled biographies (though I like those too) as there is always a slant towards the personal.  There is lots of history here--life for a woman in the 1920s at both home and university, the General Strike of 1926 in England, Prohibition and student life in America, as well as a look at a vanished way of life--wealth and opportunity when the world seemed at one's fingertips just before the Great Depression.  But everything about the period is filtered through this one woman's own perception.  It's filled with interesting information but it reads almost like a novel as she re-imagines situations and conversations, and as it was written, or at least published in 1968, it's a backwards-looking and more informed view she writes from.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable read, and now I think I will likely go back a bit further in time to read about her childhood in Kenya. 

Ice Cold by Andrea Maria Schenkel

 When I read Andrea Maria Schenkel's The Murder Farm, I was reminded of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.  It wasn't just that the stories were similar--both dealing with families murdered on isolated farms, but Schenkel's writing style also gave a firm nod in Capote's direction.  The story was slight and succinct drawing on various sources and viewpoints to create a portrait of a tragedy.  It had the same sort of documentary-style narrative that Capote used so successfully, though in Schenkel's case the story she tells is a purely fictionalized account of a murder based on an actual incident.  From what I understand this is also the case with Ice Cold (Kalteis), her second novel, which I was eager to read.  The Murder Farm was a dark and chilling story, so I was fully expecting Ice Cold to be equally so, but I'm afraid I was less impressed this time out than last.  As much as I like crime fiction, Ice Cold was too disturbing for my tastes.    

Schenkel chose well when she named her serial killer Josef Kalteis, as ice cold is just the sort of person he seems to be.  The story opens with the execution of Kalteis who supposedly has murdered a number of young women in Munich.  The murders take place in the 1930s, during the Weimar Republic, which the Reich considers to be a blight on German history.  Executing Kalteis is paramount to removing a cancerous sore, though whether such abhorrent crimes have come to an end under the new regime is questionable. 

Once again the story is told through several different viewpoints.  There is a straightforward third person narrative, but interweaved is the transcript of the interrogation of Kalteis as well as what appears to be eyewitness and family accounts of the various missing women.  Most of the story, however, focuses on one young woman named Katharina Hertl, Kathie, who has traveled from Wolnzach to Munich to look for work.  She finds living in a small town boring and doesn't get on well with her parents, but arrives in Munich without a job or even a place to live.  She falls in with a distant friend who seems to be involved in questionable activities, though it's never really clear just what they are.  The women seem to spend most of their time beer halls where Kathie meets a number of men, one of whom will turn out to be Josef Kalteis.

Kathie's story is the fullest and most complete but the murdered women are also given short vignettes.   These sections open with an eyewitness account but then switches to a narrative of the crime.  There's the suggestion throughout the story that Kalteis has been wrongly accused of the murders, though by story's end there doesn't seem to be much doubt that Kalteis is depraved and guilty of something.  In addition the reader gets the perspective of Kalteis's wife, which unsurprisingly doesn't quite match the answers he gives in his interrogation.  Friends from childhood the two meet as adults and have a brief romantic liaison which results in a child.  Eventually they marry, but he's not what he appears.  It's the usual story of a man who beats his wife and then claims to be deeply sorry for his actions, until it happens again, which of course throws everything he has to say about his behavior into question.

And then the murderer, whether it is Kalteis or not, gets to share his thoughts, too.  And this is where I began having problems with the story.  Often enough an author will allow the reader into the mind of a killer, and it's almost always a terribly uncomfortable place to be.  In the case of this story, it's not just uncomfortable but downright disturbing made more so by the fact that the killer also happens to be a serial rapist.  Reading his reprehensible thoughts felt gratuitous to me, and had they come earlier in the book I might not have been able to finish reading.

I suspect Schenkel is trying to push the limits in this genre, and the spare prose style and multiple viewpoints is somewhat unusual and maybe even a little innovative, but this time around the story felt too thin.  I like the set up of the story, the narrative style, but (for me anyway) there just wasn't enough explanation/fleshing out of the story to support the behavior of Kalteis, Kathie and the other women.  Part of the reason I like crime novels is the psychological insight into the characters and what motivates them, and how it all reflects on society.  I think there was a missed opportunity here to expand more on the period and place, which would have been fascinating to read about.

Unfortunately this story didn't work for me.  It mostly left me feeling slimy and in need of a hot shower after being in the mind of a murderer and rapist.  I will note, however, that Ice Cold is superbly translated by Anthea Bell, whose work is really exceptional.

Ten Books for 2012

Considering my failed attempts at making a list of books to read for the coming year I shouldn't do this (and I even told myself I wasn't going to this year), but the temptation is too strong, so here's a stack of books I'm (optimistically) planning on reading this year.  And to get the ball rolling I've even been reading Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love this weekend (and finding it quite enjoyable).  To keep things simple I've only picked ten--books I've long been thinking about reading, or books that others have enthused about and an impulse choice or two.  Of course the actual list was (relatively) easy to compile.  The hard part will be to read all of them over the course of the year (the hard part not being the reading but avoiding distractions that keep me from picking them up).  Of course if at this time next year I haven't read them all, that's okay, too, but they all sound wonderful to me at the moment.  And with all of 2012 stretched out before me and an endless selection of books at my fingertips, anything seems possible!

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler -- I don't know why I've never read Anne Tyler.  I think I'll enjoy her very much and even started this book at one time and liked what I read.  I'm quite looking forward to it.

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis -- I read Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat in expectation of reading this, so there's nothing holding me back now.  It sounds like a fun adventure story, and at the moment I'm all for adventure.

From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming -- I'm going to have another go at my spy novels.  I've never read any Ian Fleming, though I have seen a few of the Bond movies.  I've been reading this one and it is different than I expected--not that I had any idea what to actually expect, but different in a good way.

A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor -- It was Darlene who reminded me (well, I didn't realize it at all, so told me) that 2012 is the 100 year anniversary of Elizabeth Taylor's birth, so I have to read something by her in celebration.  I'm not sure which of her novels I'll choose but at the moment I am leaning towards this one.

To the North by Elizabeth Bowen -- I've lost track of how many people read this book last year (for sure Rachel), and as I heard only good things about it, I think I must read it, too.  I've read a couple of Bowen's novels and was suitably impressed by her writing, so I am happy to get back to her work.

To Bed with Grand Music by Marghanita Laski -- This is another book that ended up on Rachel's best of list.  I'm looking forward to getting back to my pile of Persephone books.

The Warden by Anthony Trollope -- I have it on good authority that Trollope is wonderful and this seems to be a good place to start--the first of his Barsetshire books.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson -- I want to read more 'literary" (contemporary) fiction.  I read her book Housekeeping years ago and loved it, though this particular novel appealed to me less, hence my hesitation to pick it up.  Once again it was a favorite of Rachel's as well as of Simon.

The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki -- Impulse choice.  I've owned this book for ages and it sounds good--a family portrait.  It's supposed to be a classic of Japanese literature.

Résistance: A Woman's Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France by Agnes Humbert -- This just fits in with my war literature reading.  Another book I've heard many good things about.

Looking at my list it sort of follows how my reading usually works out during the year--more women authors than men, more fiction than nonfiction, a few international authors and one or two classics, and even a spy story.  I'm just missing a mystery.  Other than this list I don't have any other plans for the year other than to just read some very good books!

So, will this year be the year I read all the books on my list?  Check back next December!