A Work in Progress

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

I seem to be reading a number of festive holiday books this year.  First it was not one but two versions of The Nutcracker, and then I've got Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal all lined up for this weekend.  To round things off I've just finished Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, which must be the ultimate Christmas story.  It's such an easy and entertaining read and a good reminder of how to show a little goodwill at this time of year (well, not just this time of year, but a good reminder when there are moments when I feel much more like saying Bah!  Humbug! when fighting crowds or am in fear of getting caught up in all the commercialism that comes with the holiday).

It was Caroline and Delia who inspired me to join in their Dickens in December readalong.  I wish I could have squeezed in a full length Dickens novel in honor of his anniversary, but the novella was really just perfect for the busy-ness of December.  And they have kindly come up with a list of questions to answer on this longest (and darkest) day of the year (and the first day of winter)!

Is this the first time you are reading the story?  I had to dig around in my archives, but I discovered that I read and wrote about it back in 2006.  My edition has a good introduction, which explains how Dickens came to write the story:

"Speaking at the first annual soiree of the Manchester Athenaeum, an institution which sought to bring culture and 'blameless rational enjoyment' to the working classes, Dickens dwelt on the terrible sights he had seen among the juvenile population in London's jails and doss-houses and stressed the desperate need for educating the poor.  This occasion seems to have put into his mind the idea for a story, building on, but also utterly transforming, the old Pickwick Christmas Eve tale of Gabriel Grub, which should help to open the the hearts of of the prosperous and powerful towards the poor and powerless but which should also bring centrally into play the theme of memory that, as we have seen, was always so strongly associated with Christmas for him."  

Did you like it?  Yes, this is such a classic story and never fails to put me in the holiday mood.

Which was your favorite scene?  The scene at the end where he sends the boy for the prize turkey to give the Cratchits.  If only everyone could show such generosity to those less fortunate.

Which was your least favorite scene?  I don't think I have a least favorite, though I do always feel bad when poor Scrooge isn't even cold in his grave and the neighbors are stealing the blanket and curtains from his bed. 

Which spirit and his stories did you find the most interesting?  The first one who shows Scrooge's past.  The scenes offer a little insight into how Scrooge became such a, well, Scrooge.

Was there a character you wish you knew more about?  Belle (is that her name?).  The young woman Scrooge was once betrothed to.  Hard to think of Scrooge with a love interest!

How did you like the end?  I can't imagine any other ending now of course. 

Did you think it was believable?  Well, it's a nice story.  The ghosts make for a nice touch even if they are only an imaginative concoction.   

Do you know anyone like Scrooge?  I know there are people like him out there.  Luckily I don't count anyone quite like him amongst my acquaintances.  People do sometimes and surprise and amaze me just when I have little hope that anyone would stop and be helpful to people in a moment of need. 

Did he deserve to be saved?  Sure.  I think just about everyone deserves a second chance. 

And now I am officially on my winter break until January 2!  Let the reading of many books, magazines, blogs and other holiday festivities begin!

A Wednesday Mishmash

Just a few random things today--starting with a few new books that are end of the year purchases.  Peter May's The Lewis Man has arrived in time for my upcoming break.  I loved The Blackhouse and wasted no time in ordering the second book in his projected trilogy of stories set on the Isle of Lewis.  I can't wait to crack this one open and from the blurbs inside the book this one sounds every bit as good as his first book.

I really need to get back to Charles Todd's Bess Crawford series of mysteries.  I read the first, A Duty to the Dead a few years ago, and already the fourth book was just published this year!  My how time flies and how far behind I have gotten in some of my favorite mystery series (maybe next year will be a catch up year?  Though I follow a number of different mystery authors . . . ).  The Walnut Tree is actually only peripherally related to the Bess Crawford series.  It is a novella, subtitled "A Holiday Tale".  It focuses on a different character and Bess only makes an appearance from what I understand.  I wonder if I can squeeze it into my break?  I've now got several novellas sitting on top of my reading pile.

In anticipation of next year's Literature and War Readalong I've already bought the first two books on the list.  The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers was just published this past year and is about the war in Iraq.  I don't always like reading books war books with a contemporary setting as it's all a little too fresh in mind.  Books dealing with difficult or tragic subjects are easier to take when the action is long past, but I've heard good things about this and am eager to give it a try.  Geling Yan's The Flowers of War is about the invasion of Nanking, China by the Japanese in 1937.  Another difficult subject but a book I am looking forward to reading as well.

When I read Rose Macaulay's Crewe Train last month I was reminded how much I like her work and that I really need to read more of it.  Non-Combatants and Others was an impulse buy.  It was so nicely discounted that I couldn't pass it up.  It is a "pacifist novel of the First World War".  I think I will pretty much read anything by her, so I'm happy to add this to my bookshelves to read a bit later.

And M.J. McGrath's White Heat is the first in the Edie Kiglatuk mysteries.  It's set on Canada's Ellesmere Island in the Arctic and Edie is half Inuit (and "half outsider").  Reading Gabrielle Roy's Windflower is what actually put me in mind to read more about this part of the world.   

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I've decided that I am going to follow in Simon at Stuck in a Book's footsteps and try my hand at a Century of books next year.  It's not really a project I am going to work hard at doing, at least initially.  I'll just fill in the blanks as I read--trying to read books published in each year between 1900 and 1999.  I won't be able to accomplish this in a year, but it is something I can chip away at.  Just idly looking at this year's list of books I've read I could fill in at least 36 slots without even giving it a thought.  So look for a new tab at the top of the page very soon.  

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And now a question.  I'm such a mood reader and sometimes it's a particular time and place I want to read about.  At the moment (well, along with my current reads that is) I am looking for a book set in New York City in the 1920s.  Mystery, novel?  I'm open to just about anything.  I might be tempted by nonfiction (and I do have a couple of books on hand that might work), but fiction is what I think I really want at the moment.  I'm scanning my own shelves but nothing quite works.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.  

The Way the Crow Flies

Every once in a while a book will come along that is pretty much pitch perfect.  Everything comes together in just the right way--good writing, a well plotted story, fine characterizations, weighty subject matter dealt with with sensitivity but in such a manner that you can't help turning the pages even when it's almost unbearable knowing what is coming (and you can almost see it coming, but the author still manages to floor you in the end). 

Ann-Marie MacDonald's The Way the Crow Flies is just such a book for me.  I finished it in October, but the task of writing about it has felt so monumental that I keep putting it off.  And now the year is nearing the end and I want to make sure I give it the attention it deserves even if I feel like I won't be able to write about it adequately (hence my putting off writing about it for so long).  It's quite a chunky book weighing in at over 800 pages.  I could have went back to the beginning when I finished and started reading all over again.  It's a book that I will happily reread someday (maybe even sooner than later).  I even bought a new copy to give a coworker who I know will love it as much as I did, and I can't wait to thrust it into her hands and urge her to read it over the holiday break.

So now the problem (and what I've been trying to figure out since October) is how much to tell you to convince you to take a look at the book, too, without giving too much away.  I went into the book knowing very little about it, letting the story unfold before me and tugging me along, allowing all the details to settle in my mind, letting the light bulbs go off in just the right sequence so I could piece it all together.  There were moments during that process that were excruciating, but in a good way.  Having an idea of what was coming yet not being entirely sure--sometimes being proven right and other times wrong made for compelling reading.  That's the best way to experience this book. 

Steeped in the culture of the 1960s the story focuses primarily on one family living on an Air Force Base on the Canadian border.  Centralia has all the outward appearances of being a wholesome little community where neighbors are friends and people don't need to lock their doors at night.  There is an innocence to the time and the people and the place even coming out of the horrors of the Second World War, which is still close enough to be a memory yet distant enough for the future to look bright and rosy where all things are possible--even putting a man on the moon.

For eight-year-old Madeleine childhood is a happy place within her tight-knit family.  She idolizes her father Jack who to her young eyes can do no wrong.  Her Acadian mother, Mimi, is firm but loving.  And older brother Mike a typical boy who dreams of flying military jets like his father once trained to do, but was invalided out of the war early on.  But maybe the Sixties were never quite as innocent as they seemed.  Centralia is a fresh start for the McCarthys who were formerly living in West Germany.  They arrive full of hope and optimism, with no greater expectations really than leading a good and happy life.

In books as in life the worst things can happen to the best people and sometimes they happen purely by chance, by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  And good people can make bad decisions.  Or hard decisions.  Jack McCarthy is a good man, and an honorable man, and it is just that honor that he tries so hard to uphold that lands him in a difficult position that will have repercussions for his family and community that will resound for many years after they've left Centralia. 

It's through Madeleine's innocent eyes that this world is viewed and experienced.  But Madeleine's own world implodes while the adults around her are dealing with their own 'adult' problems.  Madeleine is a  marvelous character, full of humor and insight--the sort of insight that comes with innocence even if it isn't really understood.  And twenty years after her family has left Centralia she is still trying to make sense of what happened that year in 1962.

This is a story that reads like the best thriller, has elements of a mystery about it but is complex and sophisticated in what it sets out to accomplish.  It's a morality tale of sorts and an exploration of the memory of not only the individual but of the collective memory of a society.  I recently mentioned that books often make me feel all tingly.  Well, this particular book makes me feel all tingly because what Ann-Marie MacDonald managed is such an impressive feat.  If I've made you curious, do give the story a go.  And don't be intimidated by the length as it reads very fast.  

I read MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees about six years ago.  While I found it a little harder to get into, once the story began to really roll, I couldn't put it down either.  I have every intention of revisiting it as well and plan on digging around my bookshelves over the break to find my copy.  Something to look forward to.    

The Stalin Front by Gert Ledig

Gert Ledig's The Stalin Front (Die Stalinorgel translated by Michael Hoffmann) is one of those books I can say I am happy to have read, but it's not one that I can say I 'enjoyed' exactly.  It is a wholly unsentimental and at times graphic view of World War II.  It's an interesting novel in that it feels both stripped down in the telling of the story, yet in no way slight.  In his introduction the translator notes how carefully plotted and controlled it is.  The events that take place occur over what feels like just a day or so.  The story takes place in 1942 not far from Leningrad as the Germans and Russians battle over a piece of land that both tenaciously try and hold at a high cost of man and machine.  In this story man is likened to and most probably was in reality treated as a machine. 

What the story lacks in personal detail, the characters being mostly unnamed, it makes up for in brutal descriptions of life in the trenches and on the battlefield.  I found this aspect of the novel surprising since I thought trench warfare came and went with WWI, which shows how little I really know about the Second World War.  And while I found the use of ranks in describing the characters a little disorienting (always forgetting just which side the captain was on and which the major) it did help not knowing too much about the men.  I think it would have been a little agonizing to become too attached to them knowing the horrific conditions under which these men fought.  It made for sobering reading realizing that this is in fact what it must have been like as Ledig himself fought on the Eastern Front.  He knew well of which he wrote.

The story opens with a German soldier, the Runner, taking messages back and forth between officers.  It's a dangerous and deadly job and one he wants to be well rid of, barely escaping with his life each time he arrives at his destination.  He's the reader's eyes.  Along the way he's shot at and narrowly misses bombs.  He sees the scarred landscape and bodies flung on wires and in the mud.  And they are at this point just bodies.  It's hard to imagine them as they once were.  Men.  As the battle for the land gears up and continues the scene shifts back and forth between Germans and Russians.  And slowly the characters come into focus with small teasers dropped into the story of the lives they once lead.  One officer has just lost his wife and child in a bombing raid.  Another thinks of his lover, she being a nurse and not so far away from the fighting.   

In the midst of the battle men are killed and captured, and soon each side has prisoners.  The Germans are trapped by the Russians, encircled but they refuse to give up and continue their bombardment.  Trapped they may be but their barrage of bombs inflicts just as many casualties and takes out the Russian tanks.  Little is lost or gained by way of land but most certainly in terms of lives.  And Ledig describes it all so matter of factly.

What strikes me most about reading this is how well he captures the senselessness and more so, the absurdity, that war is.  The Runner asks to be relieved of his duty and return to the trenches (no doubt having a better chance of surviving--imagine!), but the officer in charge can't bring himself to make the order.  It's all a catch-22.  One simple order that can't or won't be made.  The German high command won't issue orders for more troops or fire power, surely the men are fine and and can continue on, until they themselves are bombed.  And then the higher ranking officer leaves in his pajamas for safer ground.  And most distressing, an infantryman is charged with desertion because he fails to fight back (he being an only son who must take care of his elderly mother) and must face the ultimate punishment--death, when most of the men would and do willingly desert as well.  But orders are orders and they must be followed.  Whatever the cost.

The Stalin Front is an impressive story for what it accomplishes.  It was published in 1955 after having been rejected by fifty publishers and surprised many by becoming a success.  It was translated into a number of other languages, but eventually faded away into obscurity.  Apparently Ledig was aware that his books (he also wrote Payback about a 1944 bombing raid of an unnamed German city) were about to enjoy a revival but he died in 1999 before it happened.  I'd like to read his other book but think it best to save it for a sunnier time of year. 

You can read Caroline's thoughts on the book here, as well she has linked to a number of other reviews.  Next up is Michael Herr's Dispatches about the Vietnam War, and a "classic of war reportage".  I'm already looking forward to next year's list of books for the 2013 Literature and War Readalong and have started getting hold of copies to have on hand.

December 16: Reading Notes

A mere four work days stands between me and twelve (hopefully) blissful vacation days.  I love this time of year.  Despite the bustle of the holiday season and the stress that can come along with it (all those lists that are made and tasks that are checked off as each is accomplished . . . I'm getting to the end of those tasks by the way), I look forward to it every year.  I love that I'm fortunate enough to work somewhere that closes down between Christmas and New Years.  It's nice having guilt-free time off--guilt free because no one at the university library will be working.  We'll all be facing the same monumental pile of work when we return January 2, so no need to think about it until then. 

My sister will be in town and my family will celebrate at least part of the holiday together.  That will hopefully include a dinner or two out, some leisurely time spent in a coffee house or listening to holiday music and visiting museums but mostly just hanging out and in my case getting in as much uninterrupted reading time (and stitching time, too) as I can.  So I've been making book lists, too. 

Actually I'm going to try and keep my vacation time as stress free as I can and try not to worry about finishing everything (whatever gets done gets done, and if not, that's okay, too).  I've been chipping away at my 'clean-up' reading pile and have finished four books, am nearly finished with a fifth and will easily finish a sixth by week's end.  I've got four books I still want to write about, though at this point they may be half-hearted posts as I am getting lazier as the month drains away.  I'm making plans I want to share for next year, but those will come a little later and of course I want to share my favorites, though I will save those for after Christmas when I have a bit more time to think about them.    

At the moment, though, I've been spending lots of time with a few books and am making good progress towards getting caught up with my reading pile.  I've started re-reading Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.  I am rationing out the chapters since it is a very short novel, a novella really.  I'll be writing about it on the 21st and will follow up with the movie adaptation starring Patrick Stewart (has anyone watched it?), which I've not seen.

For something completely different I've been reading Peter Straub's Ghost Story.  Yes, I'm still working on it (a holdover from October's RIP reading).  It is a slightly longish book, but I must admit it is a little disturbing.  I want to keep reading, but I also want to be finished with it, because it is disturbing.  Disturbing might not be quite the right word.  Creepy.  It's a decidedly creepy book and the 'ghosts' in it freak me out a little.  I want to know what's going to happen, but I think the resolution is going to be unnerving and probably unhappy.  I'm going to try and finish this one before my break and Christmas.

And for a little relief from that I turn to Cashelmara by Susan Howatch, which I must say I am thoroughly enjoying.  Easy and light reading.  It's the sort of family drama that you get lost in and find when you look up from your lunch (it is my daily lunch break book) the time has flown by in an instant.  I usually also have Agatha Christie's The Moving Finger with me, too, which somehow seems an unlikely Christie novel.  It's really sort of playful, if that's the right way to describe a murder mystery.  It has a first person narrator who lives with his rather bohemian sister, and typical of a Miss Marple mystery she has yet to make an entrance.  I've been thinking I need to read a biography of Agatha Christie next year.  

I've also been dipping into some of the other books on the list and will keep working my way through them, though I am saving Guard Your Daughters and a couple of others for my break.  And speaking of reading during the my break (and beyond), I usually pick up a new book or two to read and carry over into the new year.  I couldn't wait, so I've started reading C.S. Forester's Hornblower and the "Hotspur".  You may or may not know I love Horatio Hornblower.  At least as much as you can love a fictional character!  I started reading the series of Hornblower books a few years ago, but I've not picked one up in a while.  I had a yearning for a 'seafaring' sort of book, so the Forester was an easy choice.  Maybe 2013 will be my year to work through the rest of the books (am only on #3), who knows.  I don't intend to try and cram it into this year's reading, so am taking it at a leisurely pace.  New Years/January seems, too, to be an espionage time of year for me, so I'm contemplating which spy novel to reach for.  Maybe an Alan Furst or another Ian Fleming.  Or maybe someone entirely different.  Maybe a female spy!     

So, four days of work to go.  And four books to write about.  It's going to be a busy week.  First up tomorrow is Gert Ledig's The Stalin Front. 

Windflower by Gabrielle Roy

My already long list of authors whose work I want to read all of has just grown by one more.  I've added French Canadian author Gabrielle Roy to the list.  Although not her best known or perhaps her most acclaimed work, Windflower (La Rivière sans repos translated by Joyce Marshall) was recommended to me by Buried in Print, and it was an excellent place to start reading.  It deals not just with a mixed race child but the entire community in which he grows up.  Jimmy Kumachuk is a much loved child, but he is a boy who lives between two disparate groups of people not entirely part of either.  I always find stories like this fascinating--reading about the sense of dislocation people feel when traveling (both literally and figuratively) between cultures--in this case the Inuit and white communities.

Elsa Kumachuk reminds me just the tiniest bit of Emma Bovary.  They don't really resemble each other and their stories are really quite different, but like Emma, Elsa is a dreamer.  She sees the world not as the harsh place it is or can be but has a more romanticized view of it.  The story opens with Elsa returning home from seeing a movie with her girlfriends (there were two shows a week--one for whites and one for Eskimos as the local pastor thought it best not to mix the groups) when she is pulled into a thicket of trees and raped.  But it's with a bland sort of acceptance that Elsa deals with her situation.  

"She herself seemed neither depressed nor pleased.  It was a thing that happened.  That it should happen before marriage caused no discredit here.  Rather the contrary.  Elsa's parents displayed no indignation.  They confined themselves to teasing her: so she'd been in a hurry to taste it, had she?"

The child that arrives as a result is obviously the son of an American GI who will soon leave the beautiful but bleak coldness of northern Labrador for the sweltering jungles of Vietnam, but it matters not a whit to Elsa or her family.  She gives birth without a whimper, and then "everything changed for her".  Such a beautiful little boy.

"Elsa looked, and what she saw caught her by surprise, took her breath away so completely it seemed it would never be restored."

And she becomes subsumed by little Jimmy.  She herself is dark and small and Jimmy all lightness and pale features.  She spends hours caring for him, bathing him and dressing him.  She begins working in the home of the local policeman and his wife when she would prefer to spend all her time with Jimmy.  But when she sees what she can buy for the child with her wages, she cannot bear to give up her job.  And everything Madame Beaulieu says, all her advice, is taken to heart by Elsa.  She "took advice from no one but the white people".

The entire Eskimo community loves Jimmy, however.  Perhaps for his fairness and fine features?  Elsa now compares her life and that of her family to those of the white community and her own is found wanting.  No longer is her parent's hut or the lackadaisical way he's taken care of good enough.  She would take Jimmy to a special place on the beach away from everyone else to picnic and play, beyond the homes and reach of her family, but she's reproached by the local pastor for her extremes.  Before she was all carelessness and now all care and he fears she will only raise Jimmy to be ashamed of her Eskimo family and their ways.  

And so the pendulum swings the other way.  It's for her own sake as much as for Jimmy's that she takes him across the river to an older settlement where her uncle lives away from almost everyone to raise him more purely and simply and closer to her Eskimo heritage.  The fear is already a small seed planted in her mind of the possibility of losing Jimmy.

"If she were not careful, the white men would be quite capable of one day or another of taking him away from her--the more so as he was one of their own and she had never felt tht her own right to him was complete.  This is what she gathered finally from the pastor's warning.  And so it was that the resolution to flee everything that had once so attracted her took possession of Elsa's mind." 

For a while the two live blissfully with Elsa's uncle, but the outside world again encroaches when Jimmy is old enough to go to school.  And what Elsa fears comes to pass, but not in exactly the way she had thought.  The pendulum swings back again and they return to their Eskimo community but live half in and half out of the white world for Jimmy cannot be mistaken for an Inuit boy despite Elsa being his mother.  It's with great difficulty and little success that the two try to live in both worlds.  Elsa gives everything in order for Jimmy to have all the advantages due him.  She gives so much that nothing is left for herself and in the end she still loses her son.

"But all at once she sensed the uselessness of going on.  Several times already she had felt that she was being stared at by her own child with the same cool measuring quality she had seen in the eyes of the soldiers as they filed by on the icy road.  Today there was scarcely anymore doubt: Jimmy was looking at her with the eyes of a stranger." 

Windflower is an often sad and poignant story of motherhood, identity and of a society undergoing tremendous changes.  The editor describes the underlying theme as "how to live" and certainly Roy raises many thoughtful questions that are as pertinent today as when the book was published in 1970.  My copy now has lots of dog-eared pages and I can imagine this story being an excellent one to provoke some good discussions.  I've already acquired two more of her novels and a book of short stories and I'm looking forward to reading more by her soon. 

The Art of the Novella: Month One

They're here!  The first two books from my Art of the Novella subscription have arrived.  Remember when I stumbled upon the announcement from Melville House about subscribing to the series?  Each month they'll be sending me two different novellas, which I hope to read before the next installment arrives.  I was thrilled to see the package in my mailbox yesterday when I got home from work.  They're such cool little books and reading them will help improve my 'Classics' reading, too, which I've done so poorly at in the last couple of years.  The added bonus is a freebie t-shirt, which you can see here, but of course it's the books I'm really excited about.

First up are Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener and F. Scott Fitzgerald's May Day.  The former I read many years ago when I was in high school and the latter will be completely new to me.  It seems only right that I begin with the Melville, since he's the inspiration for the naming of the publisher.

"Academics hail it as the beginning of modernism, but to readers around the world--even those daunted by Moby-Dick--Bartleby the Scrivener is simply one of the most absorbing and moving novellas ever.  Set in the mid-19th century on New York City's Wall Street, it was also perhaps Herman Melville's most prescient story: what is a young man caught up in the rat race of commerce finally just said, 'I would prefer not to'?"

Seems quite timely, doesn't it?  As for the Fitzgerald . . .

"Set at the end of the first World War, in the heart of New York City, May Day is a tale of the brutalities of the American class system--depicted here as a confrontation between privileged college boys, impassioned, left-wing, intellectual journalists, and jaded soldiers returned from a bloody war, Fitzgerald's fine eye for detail is on special display and his relentless plot leads to one of his most shocking climaxes, in what is the first and only stand alone version of this rarity."

You know how sometimes you get all tingly in anticipation of reading a new book?  That's how I feel about these.  Can't explain why, but I'm excited about my novella subscription.  And now I have a little confession to make.  I've also succumbed to the NYRB Classics Book Club (I have Stefanie to blame thank for this one, since she so kindly pointed it out to me).  I know, I know.  I'm bad (actually I don't feel all that guilty).  I can't help myself, but this is books we're talking about, and it's so important to support independent publishers, so I'm just doing my part and and widening my bookish horizons in the process--I'll be reading more classics, more works in translation--all good stuff.  So I'm going to be doubly lucky each month--two novellas and a new NYRB classic to look forward to.  My NYRB subscription will start with one of their forthcoming titles plus a bonus copy of Adolfo Bioy Casares' The Invention of Morel.  It will be a surprise to see what they send me in January--one of these books perhaps? 

January is always such a long, cold, dreary month, but now I have some brightness (books) to look forward to.  And in the meantime I'll be spending time with Melville and Fitzgerald. 

The Blackhouse by Peter May

Even before I finished Peter May's The Blackhouse, the first in a trilogy of books set on the Isle of Lewis off the northern coast of Scotland, I knew I wouldn't be able to wait until the next book was published here in the US.  The Lewis Man is already jetting its way to me from across the Atlantic even as I type this post.  The Blackhouse is an exceptionally well done crime novel where setting and story come together in all the right ways.  Crime novels are often all about the plot, but in this case the plot and the personal, as in the personal lives of the characters, are tightly intermingled.  The dark, broody cover illustration captures perfectly the feel of the story--forbidding and atmospheric.  And while the pacing may not be edge of your seat in a traditional crime novel way, I found it to be almost unbearably suspenseful.  That must sound strange (how can a novel do something and not do something at the same time).  Let me explain.

The Isle of Lewis, and I had to stop and look it up to see if it was indeed a real place or fictional--it's part of the Hebrides and just Google the name and look at the amazing images, is almost a character in its own right.  It's where Edinburgh detective Fin Macleod grew up in the 1970s and where he couldn't wait to escape from.  As a matter of fact once he left he never returned until he's called in on a murder case that bears resemblance to a crime that he worked on and never solved in Edinburgh.  Fin is battling demons of his own after the death of his young son Robbie.  His marriage is in tatters, he's studying computers through the Open University in hopes he might make a career change (having become a policeman as he failed at his studies), and he's barely getting through the days.  The last thing he wants or needs is to return to the Isle of Lewis where he's haunted by bleak and unhappy memories of his childhood.

Fin Macleod was Fionnlagh Macleoid as a child.  Until he began school he spoke Gaelic exclusively at home, and was the object of much ridicule by his English speaking classmates.  It took a surly letter, the contents he never knew, written by the schoolmistress to his parents before he took to English.  And it's his Gaelic-speaking abilities that his superiors take note of in choosing him to liaise with the detectives on the island.  He's confronted with a wall of silence when he returns to the island.  The dead man was one of his own contemporaries, a schoolmate, who was a bully as a child and carried with him the same qualities as an adult.  There are few who mourn his death, but investigating it opens a pandora's box of memories for Fin.  

As Fin delves into the case he discovers that events of his childhood and youth are inextricably linked with the murder.  Petty jealousies and old animosities have been left to simmer for half a lifetime, and the more questions he asks the more his memories come to the fore.  Most burdensome is his memory of the summer before he left the island when he was one of a group of men who went on the annual guga hunt, an ancient tradition where two thousand birds are slaughtered, a delicacy found nowhere else in the world.  For nearly two weeks the men would live on the small island in the middle of the north Atlantic, under the most inhospitable of conditions.  It was a tradition Fin didn't want to take part in, but had no choice, and it was a year that ended in tragedy. 

May is telling two stories, but they are woven seamlessly together.  The murder investigation is written in third person, but when Fin's memories come in flashback, he is the teller of those memories and the narrative switches to first person.  I didn't even realize it was happening at first, so tightly controlled does it all feel.  The plot moves along at a nice clip, even the sections that move backwards in time.  What made it unbearably suspenseful were the bits set on the smaller island during the annual guga hunt.  Not only am I averse to hunting scenes, but the feeling of impending doom pressed down on me as I was reading.  I don't mean to imply this as a criticism, only the story was so taut at these sections I felt like something awful was sure to happen.  May's The Blackhouse is the best sort of crime novel--well written, carefully plotted with interesting and well developed characters.  And hard to put down.

I see Peter May has written two other mystery series as well as a number of standalone novels, which I may have to explore at some point.  I'm just hoping The Lewis Man arrives before my winter break when I will have lots of uninterrupted reading time to fill.  

Edited: Thanks to Cornflower for the heads up on some posts appearing on her blogs--she has traveled to the Isle of Lewis, so you can see the beauty of the island: Blackhouses, Isle of Lewis souvenirs from her travels, the Loch.  It looks like such an amazing place!  You can read Cornflower's thoughts on The Blackhouse here, too.

December's Thirteen Books

I mentioned the pile of books that I want to finish this month, but don't be too impressed that there are thirteen of them.  With the exception of a very few that are books I'm just starting to read this month, the majority of them are either very short (novella length in some cases) or I am already midway through or even nearly finished reading.  This is mostly a clean-up sort of month for me when it comes to reading.  I had wanted to finish most of the books I had started earlier in the year, but I'm probably not going to manage to get to a number of them.  

So what to do about the rest?  Some will get carried over into next year and some might end up back in my TBR piles.  I read very much by whim, but sometimes (no, most of the time) I get carried away by books and the possibility of reading lots of them (usually at once).  If I set any goals for myself for next year (and I really try and avoid 'goals'--better to stick to a few loose plans), it is going to be to be more discerning in my reading selections and try and stick with books from start to finish and not get overly distracted by each new book that crosses my path that I feel like starting right away.  Perhaps then I can avoid just this sort of end up the year clean up.  So, in no particular order here are my last reads for 2012 (though don't be surprised if some other book happens to pop up in my posts during the last few weeks of December--I might feel inclined to finish some other book from the 'in progress' pile).

1. Ghost Story by Peter Straub -- This is a holdover from October's RIP reading.  I'm nearly finished--less than two hundred pages to go.  With shorter days and walks to and from the bus stop in the dark, I admit that its creepiness makes me only want to read it in the comfort of my own home.
2. Windflower by Gabrielle Roy -- I read this for the Canadian Reading Challenge and just need to find a moment to write about it. I liked it so much that I've gone and bought most of Roy's other works and can't wait to start another book by her.
3. The Nutcracker and Mouse King by E.T.A. Hoffmann and The Tale of the Nutcracker by Alexandre Dumas -- I really enjoyed these stories and may have to give a quick rundown of the Dumas at some point as well (though as the basic story goes it's quite similar to the Hoffmann).  These are stories I'll be revisiting in the future.
4. The Stalin Front by Gert Ledig --WWII story for the Literature and War Readalong.  I had hoped to read all the books from the list this year, but I didn't finish June's reading selection (Bomber by Len Deighton) and have a feeling I won't do so before the year is out.  Maybe I can finish it retrospectively.
5. Guard Your Daughters by Diana Tutton -- Have just started this short novel and think it will be a light and entertaining book.
6. Cashelmara by Susan Howatch -- I'm going to try and mostly concentrate on just one or two books at a time, but this will be my one constant that I take with me.  It's a good family drama and quite easy to slip into and get involved with.
7. The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie -- I had to try and sneak just one more mystery in this year and thought it was time to catch up with Miss Marple.  I'm trying to read the books in the order they were written and am slowly working my way through the Miss Marple mysteries.
8. The Progress of Love by Alice Munro -- Although I've not yet gotten around to writing about the last two stories I read (still hope to do so--will cover the last few stories in one post I think), I'm nearly finished with the book--may even finish the last story tonight.  I'll definitely be reading more of Alice Munro's stories (and have her first collection Dance of the Happy Shades partially started and sitting on my bedside pile).
9. The Well-Kept Kitchen by Gervase Markham -- This is the first volume (according to my list anyway) of the Penguin Great Food Series that I'll be reading over the course of the next year.  All the books are very short in length--no more than about 150 pages each.
10. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodges Burnett -- I started this last month.  It's another charming story that I am looking forward to getting back to.  I read about a third of it before a few other books came along and distracted me.
11. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens -- I'll wait until  just a bit closer to Christmas to start reading this one.  From what I recall it's fairly short and should be a manageable read for the end of the year.
12. Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter -- Another very short book, more novella-length, that I'll be reading just before the upcoming holiday.
13. Dispatches by Michael Herr -- This is the last of this years Literature and War books.  I'm hoping I can squeeze it in easily just after the holiday on my week off from work.

I've got quite a combination of books, don't I?  Everything from traditional Christmas tales (I don't usually do so much seasonal sort of reading like this--I just seem to be inspired by Christmas tales this year) to war stories and family dramas.  Something to suit my every mood I hope.  I won't have quite a clean slate to start 2013, but hopefully I'll come close.

E.T.A. Hoffmann's Nutcracker & Mouse King

E.T. A. Hoffmann's The Nutcracker and Mouse King (Nussnacker und Mauskönig translated by Joachim Neugroschel) is a really charming story, perhaps a smidgeon dark, but a perfect holiday read.  I thought I knew the story but was surprised by how much it varied from my recollection of having seen the ballet years ago.  I think this is one of those stories that has made its way into popular imagination and has taken on a life of its own quite apart from the original tale.  There's much more to the story and a certain poetic license was taken with the ballet.  Hoffmann published it in 1816, but it is Alexandre Dumas' 1845 retelling of it that Tchaikovsky's ballet is based on.

Hoffmann's Nutcracker is a story within a story, or perhaps better described as a story that is many-layered with fantastical elements.  It's quite magical and comes alive through the imagination of one young girl, Marie Stahlbaum, who along with her family is celebrating Christmas Eve.  The children, Marie and her brother Fritz and sister Luise, are anticipating the arrival of their godfather, Herr Drosselmeier.  Known for his extravagant gifts, Drosselmeier is an artistic man and a clockmaker who can fix anything mechanical.  His gifts, however, are so exquisite that they get locked away on the top shelf of a glass cabinet for fear of breaking them.  Drosselmeier presents them with a beautiful and intricate castle with tiny people taking up residence in its rooms.  The children soon tire of it, however, not being very practical as a child's toy.

Marie's attention is caught by an "excellent little man, who stood there, quiet and modest, as if calmly awaiting his turn".  The Nutcracker.  The children soon begin dropping nuts into his mouth to crack them open, but Fritz mishandles him and the nutcracker's teeth begin breaking.  Tenderhearted Marie takes him in her arms and wraps the poor Nutcracker in her handkerchief.  When their parents announce bedtime, Marie begs to be allowed to stay up just a little longer with the Nutcracker, and this is where the adventure begins.   

As the clock chimes midnight there is a scurrying behind the walls and a whispering.

"Soon the room reverberated with trot, trot, and hop, hop, brighter and denser squads of mice were galloping to and fro and they finally lined up in rank and file, the way Fritz stationed his soldiers before a battle."

So the Mouse King with his fearful seven heads and troops of mice marches straight for Marie who staggers back and breaks the glass door of the cabinet cutting her arm.  The Nutcracker raises his sword and comes to her rescue, the other dolls and toy soldiers in the cabinet are not far behind.  But after a fierce and valient battle they're overwhelmed and just before the Mouse King strikes the Nutcracker, Marie flings her shoe at him and then faints, saving the Nutcracker.

When she awakes Marie is safe in her bed with her arm bandaged and her parents convinced that the fantastical story Marie tells is simply a dream.  Godfather Drosselmeier comes bringing with him a restored Nutcracker.  He has fixed his teeth and made him good as new, and then goes on to tell the story of Princess Pirlipat and how Nutcrackers have come to look the way they do.   

Princess Pirlipat, the victim of a spell cast on her by Frau Mouserink (the mouse queen) after an argument over royal bacon (the mice having eaten too much of it that was intended for the King and his guests), was once a beautiful child but now has a deformed head and twisted body--looking much like a Nutcracker.  The only way to cure her is for her to eat a rare Krakatuk nut.  The catch is the nut must be given to her by a man who had never been shaved nor had ever worn boots.  The King sends two of his courtiers off to find the nut, which takes them many years to unearth.  When the nut is presented to the princess and her beauty once again restored, the King offers her hand in marriage to the young man.  Unfortunately  he trips over Frau Mouserink who casts a spell on him (still seeking revenge)--the same as she cast on the princess.  But faced with such ugliness the princess refuses to marry the young man.

Godfather Drosselmeier tells this story of Princess Pirlipat over the course of several nights as Marie is resting and recuperating.  Marie, not being as shallow as Princess Pirlipat, is much more loyal to the poor Nutcracker.  In the night the Mouse King comes to her, threatening Nutcracker and each successive night she gives something up to him--her marzipan, her sweets, her dolls--in return for the Mouse King not hurting Nutcracker.  Soon there will be nothing left to give, so despairs Marie.  Finally Marie goes to Fritz, who offers Nutcracker a sword from his toy Hussars to battle Mouse King one final time.

I won't reveal the ending, though you may already be familiar with the story of the Nutcracker and Mouse King.  It's much happier than my previous forays into German fairy tales.  My only disappointment with this book is that I have the movie tie-in edition, which does not have the introduction.  I know there is more to this story than excitement and adventure, of which there is plenty!  I'm now reading Dumas's version, The Tale of the Nutcracker, which is included in my Penguin copy.  I'm curious to see how the two compare, and then later today I'll get to see the story performed live.  I've added E.T.A. Hoffmann to my list of authors whose work I want to explore.  The book is a keeper, the story quite entertaining (how fun it would be to read aloud to children) and I look forward to revisiting the story again.