A Work in Progress

October 24: Reading Notes, Mystery Edition

A round of applause, please (I say this tongue in cheek and only because this has been such a wonky disappointing reading month for me), but I finally finished a book over the weekend.  Why as readers (and maybe this is my own quirk and no one else's) is it so disconcerting to feel like I read and read and read yet never actually finish a book or feel as though I make any progress.  Well, diligence seems to have won out in the end.

I finished a RIP read, Kate Riordan's Fiercombe Manor (or in the UK, The Girl in the Photograph).  It turned out to be a somewhat uneven read for me.  Perhaps, since initially I was so enthusiastic about it, it didn't quite click in the end due to my bad reading month in general.  It was certainly atmospheric yet the story turned out to be less a ghost story than a story about postpartum depression and the Victorian's misunderstanding on how to deal with women's psychology.  This novel had two narrative threads that very much paralleled each other.  I found I was enjoying one thread less and less and the story seemed, therefore, to sag in places.  I'm not sure if I will write more about it or not.  I always feel bad when I get to a place in a book where I simply want to finish it and the enjoyment wanes somewhat.  That said, I read many very good reviews about it, so I think it was more me than the story and we simply got out of step along the way.

So, two RIP reads down, no short stories, but there is still one week left to squeeze one in.  I'm happy to have managed two RIP reads, but now the question is whether it is time once again to reshuffle my reading pile and move on to something new.   I started Shuichi Yoshida's Villain, which I am looking forward to getting back to now and have picked up Laurie King's The Game once again.  In part I am swinging back into a mystery/crime/thriller reading mood and I want to try and chip away at that pile of partial reads in order to clear those books away as the year nears the end.  I never start a new year with a totally clean reading plate, but it is nice to start with a "smaller" reading pile and not have so many hangers-on.   

A couple of other mysteries I want to get back to are Maurizio de Giovanni's second Commissario Ricciardi mystery Blood Curse.  Yesterday as I was finishing those last few pages of Fiercombe Manor all I could think of was how much I would love to be in Italy, if not in reality then in the pages of a book.  Also I love that quiet longing between the Commissario and his neighbor, Enrica.  Anthony Quinn's Curtain Call is not exactly a traditional mystery, but the story involves a character having an affair with a married man who on one of their illicit rendezvous sees an attempted murder.  Besides it is set in 1930s London and in the theatreworld both of which have a serious appeal to me right now. 

As for the "something new" to take the place of RIP, I am thinking now of Caroline and Lizzie's upcoming 6th Annual German Literature Month.  It takes place in November and I have a few books in mind for it (more on those later).  Caroline suggested reading Ursula Archer's Five, which Karin Slaughter calls ". . . a terrifying journey.  This is a superior psychological thriller with twists at every level."  Archer is Austrian and I believe this is her first novel to be translated into English.  I have it next to my bed already.   

Yesterday's errands ended in a stop by B&N to look at their new books tables and use the discount coupon they keep waving in front of my eyes.  I didn't let myself browse too much, but I found two promising mysteries.  One is one of those very appealing reissues of Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret novels.  I decided on The Saint-Fiacre Affair originally published in 1932.  "The last time Maigret went home to the village of his birth was for his father's funeral.  Now an anonymous note predicting a crime during All Souls' Day mass draws him there, where troubling memories resurface and hidden vices are revealed."  It was the mention of All Souls Day, which is coming in a mere week that made me bring the book home.  I like the idea of this book being a nice transition from October into November.  All Souls Day is like Mexico's Day of the Dead, which I have to say I rather look forward to since I love Pan de muerto (I have been thinking about it all month . . .).  So Simenon is going to find a place in my bookbag this week. 

My other bookstore find is M.C. Beaton's Introducing Agatha Raisin, which I see has been made into a TV series in the UK.  I have never read any of the Agatha Raisin books but I see them all over.  The book I found has the first two mysteries in one volume: The Quiche of Death and The Vicious Vet.  She sounds like fun.  One of the blurbs on the cover says: "Beaton has a winner in the irrepressible, romance-hungry Agatha."  So I shall give her a try.  I also indulged in the Winter issue of Mystery Scene, which I think will be my bedtime reading later.

I've got a nice variety--mysteries in translation, British 1930s crime, Mary Russell, a Commissario who sees dead people and even a cozy mystery.  I think I am only missing something along the lines of a thriller/suspense.  I always look at books by the likes of Tammi Hoag or Lisa Unger or Karin Slaughter or C.J. Box--a US writer, maybe a FBI story, but I always put them back, unsure about which to choose.  I am fairly predictable when it comes to my mysteries.  If anyone has a suggestion for something with a US setting, more thriller-ish I am always open to reading ideas. 

Even though I am reaching for books that have been in my reading pile for some time, I am excited about something "new".  I still have a current NYRB that I am chipping away at, my chunkster and a good library read (all books that were neglected over the weekend--perhaps absence does make the heart fonder since I can't wait to get back to the stories).  Curious how a meh sort of finish will make everything else look so very appealing.

Hmm.  How to pack my bookbag for work this week . . .

The Crying Child by Barbara Michaels

I'm sure I've said this before that Barbara Michaels is one of my dependably good go-to authors when I am in need of a reliable and entertaining comfort read.  Sadly she passed away a few years ago, but she kindly left behind a very prolific output of novels, mysteries, romantic suspense stories and even some nonfiction.  She wasn't actually on my list of potential RIP reads, but she fits in quite nicely.  I think we can file The Crying Child under the category of RIP-lite.  The story is nicely atmospheric with its fog-shrouded island setting and it turned out to be a suspenseful ghost story.  My first of the season.

"Look at the way the fog gathers, there beyond the stones.  You can see how ghost stories begin, when you watch fog; that patch over there is the right size and shape, and the way it moves with the breeze almost suggests--"

The Crying Child has lots of things I like.  It is set off the coast of Maine on a island.  Jo, short for Joanne, is the story's heroine and is very likeable showing just the right amount of independence and moxie (the story is set sometime in the  mid-1970s but no worries as there are no descriptions of bell-bottom jeans or hippies that might date the story) without being too overly perfect.  A pregnant sister who's under stress and hearing the sounds of a crying child where there are no children.  There's a cemetery with a gravestone (always toppling over no matter who sets it to rights or how many times) on the outer perimeter.  A spectral woman only Jo seems to see.  And an island doctor with whom Jo butts heads and maddeningly finds herself attracted to.  Even the cover of the book is inviting and creates a nice mental picture.

There's a reason Jo has moved to San Francisco where she works as an underpaid staffer at an ad agency.  Her sister Mary has married into a wealthy old New England family, and she and her husband Ran would like nothing better but to find some job close by for Jo.  As a matter of fact Ran has offered to create any job she would like, but Jo sees it only as a way for them to keep her safe and in their pocket.  Mary and Ran have settled in an old family home on a picturesque island where Mary can finish out her pregnancy in peace and quiet.  She has miscarried several times and is cautiously hoping this time it will be a success.  But when Ran calls asking Jo to come visit and reassure Mary, whose nerves are verging on frazzled over the sounds of a crying child, she takes the first flight she can.

It's not Ran, however, who meets her flight, but a weather-beaten, rather towering doctor with the most taciturn expression.  It belies his easy-going manner, however.  When an unexpected smile breaks out Jo suddenly finds herself reconsidering him.  Later, when she visits his rustic, very comfortable house (overrun with cats, particularly Maine Coon cats) she finds herself more and more smitten by him.  (But I digress).  Will is skeptical of the entire situation and doubts Mary's claims that she hears a child crying and later Jo's anxieties about a ghostly woman, who seems to "form her body out of the shadows themselves".

"I thought at first that her absolute stillness was her most terrifying attribute.  It was horrible because it violated the normal categories of experience.  No statue could counterfeit life so expertly; no living thing should be so still.  There is some movement, however slight, in any living creature--the lift of breast, the beat of pulse in the throat.  No pulse, no breathe moved the creature that stood before me."

Cue eerie music, dark skies, a rustling of leaves on the tress from a faint breeze.  So, Mary is hearing a crying child and then Jo begins hearing it too.  Just the breeze catching the trees in the right way?  Maybe so until Jo sees this spectral woman who does not seem to breathe.  Ran doesn't quite know what to do to help.  Will isn't entirely convinced and Mary won't leave the island or see a psychiatrist.  So Ran plots, with the help of Will, to bring help to Mary in the form of a female doctor who pretends to be Will's sister.   

Best intentions and all that.  You know how it turns out when you bring in an outsider to meddle in family affairs.  Things sometimes go disastrously wrong. 

You could easily pick up The Crying Child and read it over a nice crisp autumn weekend.  Maybe a glass of cider in hand.  Within reach of my computer, as I sit typing, there are two books by Mary Stewart and another by Barbara Michaels.  So tempting.  I am, however, feeling the call of Agatha Christie, so I might add her to the RIP mix.  Otherwise I will be spending time with Kate Riordan's (also ghostly) The Girl in the Photograph and Shuichi Yoshida's Villain.  It is going to be a RIP-reading kind of week

Teaser Tuesday: Villain

Part of the reason I am so drawn to books translated into English is the desire to really feel transported to another place, another culture.  For some reason Japan has always felt particularly foreign to me.  Maybe this is due to the fact I have read so few books written by Japanese authors or with a Japanese setting.  The Japanese language holds no familiarity for me either.  I can understand a tiny bit of most romance languages.  I've traveled to Europe and have read lots of books set there.  I am more familiar with European culture and history, but Japan is an almost unknown quantity.  So Shuichi Yoshida's debut crime novel, Villain, is proving to be a very tantalizing look into a place that is utterly exotic.  I think if I traveled there I would feel very much at swim and maybe a little disoriented by it.

Pardon me, please, if I am staring.  That's a little how I feel as I immerse myself into this unsettling world.  The nice thing about a book is I can literally be like a fly on the wall.  I can look into this story and even gawk a little but not worry about how or if my reaction is registering in a curious way. 

So, the set up . . . I know there is going to be a murder.  And I am, at the moment, being introduced to the victim.  Normally a reader is sympathetic to the person who is murdered even if their presence is only after the fact.  Sometimes they are already gone before the story even begins.  So what happens if the victim is being introduced and they are not terribly likable?  I might even already have met the murderer, too, but we're still building up to that moment.

She, the victim, is a young woman.  She's an only child.  An impatient daughter with not so much time for her parents.  She lives in housing provided by her work, though her parents would have wished she would have stayed home and simply commuted to her job.  She's not cruel, or not much, anyway. But she lies to her friends.  Two other young women who also live in the same building and work the same job make up her small group of friends.  She pretends Keigo, a young man she met, is her sometimes boyfriend and has come up with an elaborate story about their relationship.  She takes a perverse pleasure in pitting one friend against the other in a way that makes life easiest for herself.  And sheds the best light on herself.  Her name is Yoshino.  And while she tells her friends she is meeting her 'boyfriend', she is actually going off with another young man she met through an online dating service.  Her dates, the few she has had, consist of meeting at a love hotel.   You get the idea, right?

So here we are, setting the stage for the story, creating a picture of Yoshino and throwing in a person or two who might potentially turn out to be our murderer. 

"Yoshino was proud that she was the only one Keigo had asked for her e-mail address when they'd met in the bar.  And that pride had led her, when Sari had first asked  if he'd sent her a message, to suddenly lie: 'Yeah, he did.  I'm going to see him this weekend.'  When the weekend came, she had her two friends check her hair and makeup, and they gave her a cheery send-off as she left the apartment.  The white lie she'd told ballooned into something out of her control, and she wound up taking the Nishitetsu line back to her parents' home to kill the day there."

Needless to say I am quite curious to see where exactly this story is going.  Am I going to feel sympathy for Yoshino?  Does it matter ultimately?  One of the things I like in particular about this story is how descriptive Yoshida is in his storytelling.  Even though I know nothing about the place, I still feel like I can create an image in mind when he talks about places and streets and all the things special to Japan that we do not have here.  It is a different kind of education--one that is both new and interesting and it is all wrapped up in a mystery.  This is a crime novel with a psychological slant to it.  I'm wondering why so much attention is being paid to the cost of things in this society.  We seem to be told quite often how much something costs.  Now I must look up what a Yen is worth.  And then there is the food.  Gyoza are dumplings and Yoshino and her friends have just gorged themselves on them.  I'm glad she enjoyed her meal as it might well be her last one. 

RIP-ping Right Along: Reading Notes

It was another blogger who said "I can't stop starting new books" and boy, am I doing the very same thing at the moment.  It's the fault of it being R.I.P. time.  It's like having an open invitation to start books in honor of fall and appropriately suspenseful and ghostly tales, which are a favorite of mine at any time of the year but especially now.  I love Autumn even if it has still been toasty warm and stormy of late.  (Summer started early and seems to be going on and on and on).  Since I seem to be reaching mostly for my most atmospheric stories at the moment, here's a little run down of the books I have been escaping into. 

Fiercombe Manor.  Don't you love it when publishers change titles depending on where they are published.  In the UK Kate Riordan's novel was published under the title The Girl in the Photograph.  I suppose that now that I am slowly getting into the story either could work.  I happen to have the UK edition of the book (I wanted it in paperback back when I ordered it--it has since been released in paper in the US, too).  I have to have at least one proper ghost story for the season and this fits the bill quite nicely.  Her writing reminds me of Simone St. James, who I have read and very much enjoyed (and who knows, maybe tomorrow or later in the week I might pick up one of her unread books that graces my shelves at the moment).

This story oozes atmosphere.  It is one of those parallel-stories novels set in 1933 and 1898 with an emphasis more on the more 'contemporary' story.  Fiercombe Manor, I suspect, is going to be just as important character-wise as either of the two women who are destined to have a connection.  Alice Eveleigh comes to Fiercombe to hide her pregnancy.  She tells the little fib that her husband was killed in a motor accident and so is too fragile emotionally to stay in London.  Her mother was friends with Fiercombe's housekeeper so it seems like the perfect solution.  Fiercombe is one of those massive old manor houses that is dark and foreboding situated in a grounds that is not particularly sunny and bright and hard to get to.  And things are just not quite right with the house.  Among other things Alice's watch seems to have stopped (and no amount of winding will make it work).  And there is a painting of a former owner whose eyes seem to watch Alice no matter how she tries to ignore him.  Alice has yet to find that photograph of the girl, but as she has been snooping around a bit (what else is there to do in such a great house where she is meant to be resting?), but I think it will be soon!

My other main RIP read is Elizabeth Peters's (actually she is writing as Barbara Michaels here) The Crying Child.  The book was published in 1971.  It doesn't feel dated, but it has that aura about it somehow.  So, I am going to say this, but I don't mean it as a criticism in any way . . .  There is something a little formulaic about her novels of romantic suspense.  They have a similar set up and I expect this will follow the same trajectory as other books by her I have read.  These are escapist reads for me--pure, unadulterated enjoyments and the reason I often turn to her is simply because I know what to expect and I almost always want what I know will be a fun, uncomplicated but comforting read.  She can pretty much always deliver.

So, Joanne McMullen is living in California making her own way in the world of advertising, scraping by is more like it despite her family's wish she would remain closer to home and take up a job in the family business.  Not her family exactly, but her sister happens to be married to one of the wealthiest young men on the east coast.  They live in a family home on the coast of Maine.  Actually on one of the remote islands off the coast.  Yes, more atmosphere here.   Her brother-in-law, Ran, is worried for the sanity of Joanne's sister, Mary.  She has gone through several pregnancies ending in miscarriages, but her latest pregnancy seems to be stable.  Now, however, Mary is hearing the wailing of a child and disappears at night in search of this missing baby.  Ran fears she has perhaps gone over the edge in her grief so he sends for her sister to come and give her support.  Enter taciturn young doctor, Will, who is attractive but maddening.  And you know Joanne is going to fall for him.

I should be able to make quick work of the Michaels novel and so have already added something a little different to  my pile.  I was all set to start the first Lew Archer novel by Ross MacDonald that I just mentioned here a few days ago, but as I was digging through my bins of mystery novels, I came across a crime novel by a Japanese author, Shuichi Yoshida, Villain, which I had heard many good things about when it came out in paper (and so had to have it and has been waiting patiently for me).  I've been wanting to read some Japanese Literature and thinking about starting something, so it just seems the right book for the right moment.  One of the blurb describes it as "a ripping good story of murder and secrets".  It has a ghostly mountain pass and is set in part by a desolate seaside town.  "A chilling and seductive story of loneliness, desperation and murder."  This is Yoshida's English language debut novel and it looks quite promising.

I've still got novels by Ottessa Moshfegh and Anthony Quinn which are peripherally related to my RIP reading as well as two novels by Daphne du Maurier set aside and a library book out by Alex Marwood, all of which I am at least thinking about.  My only disappointment at the moment is a lack of short stories of a ghostly variety.  As a matter of fact not posting about short stories on Sundays regularly means I have gotten lax in my short story reading, so I need to do something about that. 

I can recommend a very good podcast to you, however.  It is somewhat disturbing even while it catches your interest and holds you glued to your earphones.  It comes via Sarah Weinman whose newsletter I subscribe to (she also recommended Ross Macdonald somewhere along the line).  APM Reports offers excellent investigative journalism in the form of podcasts.  I am three episodes into listening to In the Dark, which is about a child abduction case in Minnesota that went unsolved until just recently.  Jacob Wetterling, an eleven-year-old lived with his family in rural Minnesota until he was abducted in October 1989.  The killer was living very close by and had gone undetected for almost thirty years.  Madeleine Baran has been investigating just what went wrong in this police investigation.  Why the perpetrator was allowed to live freely for so many years.  It is fascinating to hear her piece together all the steps and what was done wrong when the crime was first committed.  True crime stories are always more than just a little disturbing.  I've listened to the first three podcasts and am waiting for the next installment.

R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril XI

Wow, is it really possible this is year eleven?  And I have read along each and every time from the very beginning.  Granted some years have been more loosely RIP-ing than others, but as I am a great fan of ghost stories I have read at least a novel or two and some short stories.  At first I thought I would just read "a" book and call it good, but when I started looking at my shelves all of a sudden all these potential reads just leapt out at me from their piles and shelves.  Really, leapt.  Okay, maybe just figuratively.  And being such an enthusiastic "starter of books" (ahem) I have now got a whole list of reading possibilities!

So, here we go, thanks very much to Carl at Stainless Steel Droppings for organizing another wonderful opportunity for some seasonal (Autumn being my very favorite season by the way) readings.  So, here we go . . . R.I.P. XI!  (and thanks too Hugo Award winning artist Abigail Larson for the use of her art).

My pile of books to choose from in September and Octorber, so far, consists of:

The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

The Girl in the Photograph by Kate Riordan -- I have actually jumped right in and have started reading this one!

Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson (or one of her other books as yet unread on my shelves--there are two or three)

The Darkest Secret by Alex Marwood -- I am waiting for a library copy of this!

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham -- I am forever telling myself it is time to start a new classic . . . this would, of course, be perfect

Daphne by Justine Picardie

The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier (or another of her books) -- This could be read in conjunction with Justine Picardie's novel.  I do love reading pairs.

The Blunderer by Patricia Highsmith (or another of her books)

The Crime Writer by Jill Dawson -- Another book to pair up with a novel by Highsmith

The Widow by Georges Simenon

For short stories I have A.C. Moyer's All Sleep, which consists of four novella-length stories

I'm reading Anthony Quinn's Curtain Call and Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen at the moment, too, both of which would fit in nicely with suspenseful type stories. 

Will you be reading along, too?  Any book choices made yet?  I am hoping to (finally) start making the blog rounds again--I know I have been absent from the book blogosphere lately.  I also owe a number of people emails, and postcards.  And I have read your comments and will be replying to those as well.  Thank goodness for the upcoming long weekend!

Happy (spooky or otherwise) reading everyone!