A Work in Progress

Teaser Tuesday: Magpie Lane

The circuitous route of how a book ends up on my reading pile.  Lucy Atkins's Magpie Lane.  I read (and loved) Mick Herron's Slow Horses (finally!) and came across an article about the adaptation of the first two books in his Slow Horses (Slough House?) series (cannot wait).  The article also mentioned some reading suggestions of Herron.  Well, I love his writing, his plotting and if he likes particular books and is willing to share, of course I am willing to listen.  

The story is indeed quite spooky (as described online).  Set in contemporary Oxford, a woman who has spent most of her career as a nanny takes up a position for the new Master of one of the colleges.  His second wife, a Danish woman who is a busy historian and expecting their first child, hires Dee to look after her eight-year-old stepdaughter.  The child has been selectively mute for most of her life.  Why?  Does it have something to do with the death of her mother?  

Dee narrates the story, and while she is obviously well-versed in childcare and articulate and by all appearances a caring woman who manages to break through the communication wall with the child, you do wonder.  The story opens with Dee being questioned by local detectives about the disappearance of Felicity.  The story moves around in time, quite smoothly.  You get (I have gotten) so wrapped up in the story that the pages are turning furiously.  The descriptions bring the place alive, not just the city of Oxford but in particular the Master's house, which Mariah is busy renovating.  

But, spooky, spooky, spooky!  Dee is ensconced in the household.  She is sleeping but hears something.  And just in case you wonder.  She is not afraid per se.  Which also makes you wonder.

"Behind me, I heard a floorboard out in the corridor creak and I turned, expecting to see someone standing at the door--Nick or Mariah.  Nobody was there.  The corridor light was on and I could see the stair bannister, the newly sanded floorboards, the bare white wall.  I reminded myself that in a four-hundred year-old house things creak all the time."

"Felicity's room seemed to be just as it was when I put her to bed.  Her colouring books were stacked on the desk, her pens tidied into their pot, treasures lined up in their spiral on the bedside table, wardrobe doors closed, toys arranged in the correct order on the foot of her bed.  I'f established that her tidiness had nothing to do with Mariah.  It was Felicity who kept it this way.  No doubt the bedtime ritual of lining up toys, organizing pens and putting clothes away gave her a sense of agency.  After all, her mother was dead: the world had proved itself to be an unpredictable place, capable or wreaking havoc.  She had to control whatever she could."

"I noticed then what was wrong: her chari was over by the bathroom door, upside down."

And then there is the door to the priest's hole.  Which is curiously open.  Yes, all the haunted house, creepy tropes are there.  But what can I say.  They feel fresh and are working magic (as haunted house tropes should, I guess).  I hope the author keeps it up.  I hope it ends on as good a note as it started.

By the way, thank you for the suggestions for a little romance.  I still need some and have not yet chosen a book, though I have requested a few books mentioned from the library.  My life seems to be set on slow motion.  Everything is happening at a reduced speed by me.  Although maybe not how I am reading this book (which is a good thing).  If this book continues as it started, I will be looking for her other books.  And other author mentioned by Mick Herron?  John Le Carre (of course), Jonathan Coe, Clare Chambers (yay), Babara Vine (also, of course), David Mitchell, Christopher Brookmyre and Michael Dibdin. It is good to have other authors to explore, isn't it?

Teaser Tuesday: The Water Cure

I am not generally keen on dystopian fiction, particularly after this past year we have (and continue) to endure, but I finally picked up Sophie Macintosh's The Water Cure and must say I am really engrossed in the story.  Maybe it is the mysterious aspect about it, not quite knowing what is going on and wondering what everything means that has drawn me in.  Maybe it is the feminist slant.  Or that this fictional world does not seem so very different than our world, at least not so far.  

I'm nearly a third of the way into the story.  Into this strange, isolated world of one small family, three daughters and their mother--King, their father having disappeared. arrives two men and a boy.  They have washed ashore on this island and promise more are to follow.  This is a strange world, stranger maybe than the world beyond their shores.  There are only hints of what has become of the wider world, and why these men have left it.

King is known farther abroad and hence the arrival of these three.  His wife mourns him, but I am not so sure the daughters do.  There is something odd about these women, almost cult-like.  I share a few passages to help set the tone.  The story is narrated by the elder two daughter singly or by all three together (maybe the chorus of sorts?).

"There is barbed wire in the forest, deeper than I dare to go.  Should anyone arrive on the island, it serves the same purpose as the buoys out in the bay, marking our a clear message.  Do not enter.  Viewed from another angle, Do not leave."

***

"After years of them, I am used to sudden awakenings, to Mother's hand clamped against my mouth.  Always a drill for some unspecified event, the worst ever yet to come, always her dank breath and the white space of her eyes, blinking too fast."

***

"We have never been permitted to cry because it makes our energies suffocating.  Crying lays you low and vulnerable, racks your body.  If water is the cure for what ails us, the water that comes from our own faces and hearts is the wrong sort.  It has absorbed our pain and is dangerous to let loose.  Pathological despair was King's way of describing an emergency that needed cloth, confinement, our heads heal underwater."

There are other strange cures, or "methods" to keep the daughters "safe."  The peeks at this world is definitely unsettling, but I have more questions than answers so far.  I have to see what all this means and where these stories of these girls, is going.

I may have to look for more books with dystopian slant now that I have had a taste.  Finally, after a very long wait (I think I got in line when the book first came out!) I have heard that Macintosh's second novel, The Blue Ticket is on the hold shelf for me at the library.

Have you read a book similar that you can recommend?  I am curious now.  The only other recent dystopian novel I have read is Station Eleven by Emily Mandel St. John, which was a favorite book the year I read it!

Teaser Tuesday: Elisabeth's Lists

I stumbled across this book in one of my many bookish meanderings (I blame it, or maybe thank, those virtual cookies that follow me around). It is proving to be very interesting and I think it will be a really good read if the first chapter is anything to go by!  I love memoirs and as an inveterate listmaker myself, one about a woman written by her granddaughter (and created by way of a book of lists the grandmother kept) intrigues me.

Lulah Ellender learned about her grandmother's interesting life by way of a journal that her mother passed on to her.  She wrote Elisabeth's Lists: A Life Between the Lines to shed light on the life of this fascinating woman long after she was gone.  She notes that she had to read between the lines of this journal made up of ordinary lists.  The truth of her grandmother's life is filtered through her own memories and ideas.

"Until now, Elisabeth's absence has always been a presence, her story spun from the feathered filaments of my memories.  My mother spoke often of her parents, but there was always a sense of slippage; her memories are hazy and she really didn't know them (if any of us truly know our parents).  But I realise that Elisabeth's book of lists might allow me to discover who Elisabeth really was, and to draw out the stories hidden between scripted lines."

Elisabeth was the daughter of a diplomat and when she was 21 her family moved to China where her father became the ambassador.  This was 1936, such a different era and surely she was part of a lucky class of people to live in extraordinary circumstances.  I am not sure if this will be the tone of her life always, but being the daughter of a diplomat gave her certain privileges, and through letters Ellender gets a picture of what life was like fer her at the time. 

"Her time is spent riding, playing tennis,learning Chinese and socialising.  Elisabeth is much in demand and there are plenty of alcohol-fueled high jinks.  I find a note from Elisabeth and Alethea (her younger sister) asking that instead of the waffle-iron they requested, they should be sent some goldfish bowls, so they could drink brandy from them."

Isn't that crazy?  Was that a thing?  To drink brandy from goldfish bowls (maybe I will google that).  It feels like something out of a 1930s novel!  I think I am definitely going to enjoy this one!

Teaser Tuesday: The Godwulf Manuscript

I don't think this is a spoiler to say--while the Godwulf Manuscript is the hook into the mystery, the reason for Spenser to become involved into what appears to be an innocuous case of a missing book, it is sort of just very incidental to what is going to eventually go down.  And it ends up being quite a ride. I thought Kinsey Millhone took a bit of a beating on a regular basis, but Spenser (and that is with an "S"-like the poet) endures more than just a little roughing up by local thugs.  After meeting him in this first foray into the Spenser mystery series, I think it is quite par for the course. 

A wiseacre.  That's what Spenser is.  Wile he might be just a little too "tough guy" for me, I like him and want to see where he goes next.  Granted Kinsey is very independent, quite savvy, an admitted liar, preferred singleton (now, though married twice before), but she has a decided moral code.  She knows her shortcomings and will bend the rules, but only to a point.  The jury is out on Spenser.

They do have some similarities.  They are working in pre-technology America--she in Santa Teresa, California and he in Boston.  She was a cop for a short while.  I am not sure what Spenser's backstory is, but he is a fine cook, drinks a lot of hard liquor (no matter the time of day).  They both pack weapons, both are sleuths of the hardboiled variety, both spend time at the gym.  He is a natty dresser, albeit ca. 1973, while she cuts her own hair with finger scissors and has one black dress for a variety of situations.  

I imagine some readers would pick up this first Spenser mystery and think--this feels a little dated.  Indeed it takes place in 1973 and I think at least one character sported sideburns.  But I prefer to think of the story being steeped in atmosphere.  It is America in the 70s and all the details are true to life, which I like.  I read historical fiction, and this is simply fiction portraying a specific time and place, and I call that authenticity.  And it is a few of those details, clothing-wise, that caught my eye and I want to share, because they are so descriptive.

The novel takes place in part on a college campus.

"The buildings around the university were old red brick.  Many of the windows were boarded, and few of the rest had curtains.  Along the avenue was some of the detritus that gathers at the exterior edge of a big university: used-book shops, cut-rate clothing stores featuring this year's freaky fashions, a porno shop, a school of astrology-reading in a store-front, a term-paper mill, three sub joints, hamburger, pizza, fried chicken joints, and a place selling soft ice cream.  The porno shop was bigger than the bookstore."

Terry Orchard is the student we are most interested in as she is perhaps the one with knowledge of and maybe ownership of the stolen manuscript.

"She looked like students I'd seen before, the real goods, faded Levi jacket and pants, faded and unironed denim shirt, hair pulled back tight in a pigtail like an eighteenth-century British sailor.  No make-up, no jewelry.  On her feet were yellow leather work shoes that laced up over the ankle.  She wasn't built soyou can tell from where I was, but I would have bet my retainer she wouldn't be wearing a bra."

And for the time, Spenser, you natty dresser, you.

"Gray, hard-finished slacks with a medium flare, blue paisley flowered shirt with short sleeves, blue wool socks, mahogany-colored buckle boots with a side zipper, broad mahogany belt with a brass buckle."

Oh, my.  Yes, no doubt the  height of fashion back then!  I want to keep reading the books for the descriptions alone.  I will have to describe Spenser's cooking sometime as well!  I do think, though, it is time for S is for Silence first.  Tag team detective work!

Reading Now: A Few Teasers

I am hoping to get back into the habit of picking up and reading classic literature.  For a while I was reading classics of all sorts including big hefty novels, but in the last few years I want to read them but seem to pass them by.  I know it is just a matter of perseverance and dedication.  I need to get into the habit of daily reading and spending time with classics as they are very much an investment and not usually something you can just idly dip into on occasion.  When I do that, it is pretty much a recipe for failure on my part.  (Think--A Suitable Boy, Undine Spragg's "follies" or my inability to even finish a short novel by Janet Frame.  There have been a few here and there that I have successfully managed--more modern classics or Japanese classics.

So rather than choosing something simply because it is a classic and I should really read "x", I have picked up a book I have for a very long time wanted to read.  Another Japanese classic, Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters.  Like so many other books, or genres, I have put off reading it for a couple of reasons--it is a heftier book with smaller print than others I have been reaching for in the last couple of years.  I was intimidated by the thought of a modern Japanese classic, which I thought might be hard to get into or understand.

However.  Stuff and nonsense as I am thoroughly enjoying it--even if I do take some time to work my way through it.  In its way it is not so very different than a novel by Jane Austen.  It was published in 1957 and the setting is 1930s Japan--in particular Osaka and Ashiya.  The story revolves around the four Makioka sisters, a once distinguished family now perhaps beginning to decline as the modern age (and the war) arrives. 

The two eldest are married and have children.  Tsuruko and her family live in Osaka and as the eldest in the family have the largest and most important home.  So far she seems to have been mostly off stage in the story.  Sachiko, her husband Teinosuke and their daughter Etsuko have some prominence in the story thus far.  They, as do the two younger sisters, live in Ashiya.  The youngest daughter Taeko (Koi-san as she is affectionately called) has a suitor she wants to marry, but as the youngest she cannot marry until Yukiko, the third daughter, does so first.  Alas, Yukiko is not inclined to marry and would happily stay and care for her niece Etsuko, for whom she has a great love and regard. 

Do you see where we're going here?  It is so interesting to read about the three sisters and the cultural aspects of Japanese family life in this particular time and place.  I have noticed this before in the Japanese novels I have read--the sadness of a way of life, of losing a particular Japanese-ness/or culture as the modern age brings so many vast changes.

So a few teasers from what I have been reading.  And this is a book to be read slowly and savored, too, I must point out.

"The best days for the Makiokas had lasted perhaps into the mid-twenties.  Their prosperity lived now only in the mind of the Osakan who knew the old days well.  Indeed even in the mid-twenties, extravagance and bad management were having their effect on the family business.  The first of a series of crises had overtaken them then.  Soon afterwards Sachiko's father died, the business was cut back, and the shop in Semba, the heart of old Osaka--a shop that boasted a history from the middle of the last century and the days of the Shogunate--had to be sold.  Sachiko and Yukiko found it hard to forget how it had been while their father lived.  Before the shop was torn down to make way for a more modern building, they could not pass the solid earthen front and look in through the shop windows at the dusky interior without a twinge of sorrow."

***

"The three were not monotonously alike, however.  Each had her special beauties, and they set one another off most effectively.  Still they had an unmistakable something in common--what fine sisters! one immediately thought.  Sachiko was the tallest, with Yukiko and Taeko shorter by equal steps, ad that fact alone was enough to give a certain charm and balance to the composition as they walked down the street together.  Yukiko was the most Japanese in appearance and dress, Taeko the most Western, and Sachiko stood midway between.  Taeko had a round face and a firm, plump body to go with it.  Yukiko by contrast, had a long, thin face and a very slender figure.  Sachiko again stood between, as if to combine their best features.  Taeko usually wore Western clothes in the summer and Japanese clothes the rest of the year.  There was something bright and lively about Sachiko and Taeko, both of whom resembled their father.  Yukiko was different.  Her face impressed one as sad, lonely, and yet she looked best in gay clothes.  The sombre kimonos so stylish in Tokyo were quite wrong for her."

***

"'What a nice smell,' said Sachiko.  They were walking down a hedge-lined street.  'The cloves are in bloom somewhere.'

'Only one month more to the cherry blossoms.  I can hardly wait.'"

This is such an interesting world to immerse myself in and Tanizaki had caught me from the first page.  I think my favorite filmmaker (or one of my favorite anyway) is Yasujiro Ozu and to read Tanizaki is to be in the literary equivalent of this particular Japan.  Are you surprised that I have already started collecting Tanizaki's other works?  And maybe it is time to revisit Ozu's films as well.  In any case a happy encounter with Classic Fiction once again for me.

Louisa Luna's Two Girls Down: A Teaser

Off already on my first unplanned reading path.  Sooner or later it always happens.  My reading is off to a very slow start this year, but all things considered, I am not surprised.  And I am not sure which reading list or newsletter that prompted me to pick up Luisa Luna's Two Girls Down, but the review or recommendation was so persuasive that I was immediately sold.  And to be honest I am very much in a mystery/suspense/thriller mood, too.  So it came in the mail and I started reading and was hooked.

And then came an offer for a review copy for her forthcoming novel, The Janes, featuring the same main characters, so I had to say yes, of course.  You know how all the planets will line up just right as a sign this is the book/author you need to read now?  For a while now I have been a little jaded when it comes to thrillers as they seem far too much in the same vein.  Or maybe I just needed a break and palate cleanser period, but I have to agree with the blurbs on the book--Nancy Pearl and Lee Child both gave the book thumbs up--"sensational", "spectacular" and "gripping" just to name a few words of praise the book has earned.

And then today in CrimeReads there was this list!  Hear hear--I am totally on board with that--in praise of difficult women!  The list is by Louisa Luna and now I want to pick up some of the books she recommends!  Onwards, I think.  But first maybe I should mention why Two Girls Down is resonating with me at the moment.  Maybe resonating is not exactly the right description, but I am finding myself engaged with the storytelling and the characters.

The mystery at the heart of the novel is the disappearance of two young girls from the parking lot of a Kmart in a small Pennsylvania town. Their mother ran in just for a few minutes to pick up a birthday gift, but when she returned to the car they were missing.  There is the sense that maybe the mother has some issues.  No husband/father in the picture.  Maybe not the very best family situation, but they are utterly devastated.  With little progress forthcoming from the local police the family hires a bounty hunter from California to help find the girls.  And this is where it really gets interesting.

Alice Vega.  I am still forming my impression of her.  She is called "Vega" in the story, which is sort of telling.  She is no-nonsense and fairly unemotional.  She can take care of herself it goes without saying.  I think to say she has moxie is even too tame to really.  Vega is a no-holds-barred sort of woman.  She is independent and confident and I would feel pretty safe in her company.  When she arrives, she knows she is going to need a little local help and she convinces Max Caplan, a disgraced former policeman, to help her obtain the witnesses interviews and aid her in her investigation.  I like Max--I like his teenage daughter Nell.  And I am very curious how they will all work together--especially as there is now a second book in the series and this disparate set of investigators live on opposite coasts!

So, a little teaser and peek into Alice Vega's character.

"In a room in a house in Central California, a girl stood on her hands.  She was too old to be called a girl anymore, thirty-three, but she still felt like one.  Not in a good way of having her whole life in front of her.  In the bad way of being able to see only the edges of things, to peek around the corners when what you wanted was a city planner's blueprints of the whole block seen from above." 

Vega is 33 and Cap is 41 with a teenage daughter and an ex-wife.  I am very curious about the characters and how they will interact and want to know more about their personalities and back stories.  All in all a good start to a new series with a few very fresh and interesting characters.

August NYRB: Heaven's Breath

Every year I say this is going to be the last year (for a while) and rather than renew my NYRB Classics subscription I will instead read some of those books I didn't get to in the previous years.  I have been a subscriber since 2013!  So that is a year's worth of classics for 7 (or nearly so) years.  A total of 84 books by the end of this year, which I am happy to have, but I won't even count how many I have actually managed to read.  It is always a dilemma as the books are so good, but as much as I hope and tell myself I will keep up with my reading, I never do.  Case in point--the last NYRB I even mentioned here was back in March and I gave up on Max Havelaar.  Wrong book at the wrong time.  And being such a mood reader I have to usually feel inspired to pick up a book and then really engaged to keep reading.  More so these days when it comes to classics, though I would love to get out of my classics reading rut.

So it is surprising that this month's selection, a book about natural history, on of all things--the wind--that I am finding quite compelling.  I took it to the gym yesterday thinking I would read a few pages before moving on to one of my current novels, but ended up spending nearly my entire work out reading about weather patterns.  Who knew it could be so very interesting.  Of course I am a firm believer that in the right hands, with the right author, almost any topic can be made not only wholly accessible, but downright entertaining. 

Lyall Watson's Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind was originally published in 1984.  The back jacket blurb calls it encyclopedic and enchanting and if all nature and science books were like this one I would be an enthusiastic reader of all things science.  It brings to mind the books of Diane Ackerman (and now I kind of want to revisit my shelves and pull a book or two of hers off and add them to my reading pile).

Although this is only about 329 pages (not including 14 pages making up the Dictionary of Winds in the back of the book), it feels like a hefty tome, which is a little bit intimidating.  I admit that reading this is like having a cartload of information wash over me--it is a sensory overload almost.  Reading it is like being inundated with facts since he starts with the broader picture, the start of the world, and then works his way in.  I am enjoying what I am reading and penciling little bits that I would like to remember (and there are lots of pencil marks so far), but I know I am only absorbing a small portion of what I am reading.  It begins with the big bang and the arrival of the universe.  He describes the solar system and the planets and their natural satellites and what their atmospheres are like and then he begins to focus on Earth/Gaia.  It is so very fascinating.  At the moment I am reading about the physics of the wind--it is like building the framework and then he'll move on to specifics.  

This feels like a journey and in the introduction that is what this book is likened to.  Since I have no idea what to share from the text (though I might have to share bits and pieces as I go), let me give a teaser--the first couple of paragraphs of the introduction to give you a sense of what this is all about.

"Sailing back from the Trojan War, Odysseus and his men land on the island of Aeolia, the domain of Aeolus, the Keeper of the Winds.  Aeolus gives them an oxhide sack that contains the captive winds of the world--apart from a gentle westerly to waft them safely home--with strict instructions not to open it.  Believing there is treasure inside, the greedy crew do just that.  The opening of the sack unleashes a chaotic gale that hurls their ship upon the waves, out across the wine-dark sea, blowing Odysseus madly off course.  His adventures last ten years."

"[This book] is that oxxhide sack.  All the winds of the world are inside.  If you open it, you will be blown to places you never expected."

"Lyall Watson is a modern-day Keeper of the Winds.  His natural history of the great invisible forces that shape our planet--from the sand dunes of the Sahara to the serotonin inside our brains--twists and turns, uplifts and surprises like the subject it describes.  'Wind is defined as air in motion,' he tells us early on, then explodes this apparently simple statement in every conceivable way.  The reader is propelled back through recorded history into deep time, from the formation of the universe, through physics and mythology, biology and psychology, religion and sociology, in and out of an extraordinary diversity of cultures."

I was thought the most interesting parts (mythology and religion and psychology and . . .) were going to be the best bits, but he has me on an area that feels quite foreign--the physics.  It can only get better.  At this rate a book about wind might well be one of my best reads of the year.  See, it is books like this that make me waver.  Maybe I will renew my subscription after all.  What other gems might I miss otherwise?

Teaser Tuesday: From Doon with Death

I am sorely tempted to 'cheat' and google Chief Inspector Wexford to get a firm picture in my mind of the newest sleuth that I have just added to my repertoire.  I say new but I have been a very long-time admirer of Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine.  I have read nearly every Vine novel of psychological suspense and a fair number of Rendell standalones. 

She is by far my favorite novelist of this genre, but I am not sure why I never bothered with Wexford.  She is a superlative writer in my opinion--she just does what she does so well, but I just randomly collected a few of her series mysteries over the years and left them sitting on my shelves.  I guess there have just been so many other novels by her to explore, and I have a fair few favorites otherwise when it comes to detective fiction, so I left well enough alone.  

As I just recently started the conversation of favorite detectives, and Ruth Rendell had been in my mind anyway, though my intention was to pick up an unread standalone, the lightbulb went off in my head--why not Wexford?!  I handily had the first of the series, From Doon with Death on my shelves, so I am a third of the way through his first case.  It is a slim novel of just under 200 pages (for myself a good mystery falls somewhere around or under 350 or so pages normally), but I have a very thin idea, so far, of what Wexford is like or what he looks like.  I don't think I have even encountered his first name, though, I know his partner is called Mike Burden.  

"He was taller than Burden, thick-set without being fat, fifty-two years old, the very prototype of an actor playing a top-brass policeman.  Born u the road in Pomfret, living most of his life in this part of Sussex, he knew most people and he knew the district well enough for the map on the buttercup-yellow wall to be regarded merely as decoration."

A bit scanty on physical details so far, perhaps, but I get the sense that he is no-nonsense and does things by the book.  Experienced with a sharp eye for detail and a wry sense of humor.  I do know he is married, but nothing more about his personal life.  So far this feels like a Rendell yet it isn't quite.  The Rendell novels seem to be slighter, more concise, but Rendell can convey in fewer words more feeling that many other writers in twice the space.  This first book was published in 1964 and refers to an automobile from 1962, and I do get a sense of the period even if she is only painting in background in rather larger brushstrokes.  As the last Wexford novel was published in 2012 that is quite a lot of time she had to form her characters and I think she must have not let too much time pass between the stories.  I do think she often wrote about social issues and it seems the stories have expanded into more space as she published.  

This particular case involves a missing wife.  The husband has come home to find his house empty and his house-proud wife is not only not there to greet him, but she remains missing the next day even.  A body turns up in a local wood with the only clue a lipstick in a very particular and unusual shade of 'Arctic Sable'.  Whoever dropped it must be involved and now it is up to Wexford and Burden to suss things out.  I think I'll be speeding along to find the culprit in this one and have ordered a nice used copy of Wexford's next case to have on hand.  However I might be picking up a Simenon next before getting back to Kinsey Millhone.  Once again a good crime novel/detective story seems to appeal more to me at the moment than a thriller.  I am find thrillers, of late, to be very mixed bags.  It is good to have some reliable sleuths to return to again and again.

Before I go, the most recent CrimeReads newsletter has some really interesting articles that I will be reading tonight.  I have only read the first Aimee Leduc mystery set in Paris, but I see I really need to revisit her.  And this about crime writers writing non-crime books.  I am SO tempted to buy the newest Laura Lippman even thought it is in hardcover.  And while I do love Colm Toibin, I can only say about this article--whatever!  To each his own, but I don't understand the need for authors to diss on other genres like that.  I guess it offers a few inches of valuable column space and here we go talking about him and his opinions.  I have no problem whatsoever with mysteries--genre fiction.  There is space for everything I think and I do like variety, so it's not going to put me off.  As a matter of fact, you can see what is on my nightstand at the moment!

Oh, the fashion sense of Kinsey Millhone!

Now that I have gotten to know Kinsey Millhone, what would I do without her?  She tops my list of characters I wish were real and those I would love to sit next to a dinner party.  Oh, to be a fly on the wall in her world!  Rarely does a book elicit an actual, auditory, guffaw out of me, and in public no less.  But Kinsey does.  And the thing is, she is just so completely serious about it all.  I mean this is one very no-nonsense down to earth woman.  She has a great sense of humor and is often quite self-deprecatory with the things she says and does.  But you know she is someone you can totally count on.  I know I often go on about her and share her wisecracks, but they are so good, I wonder what I will do when I get from her to letter Y?

I am reading J is for Judgement at the moment.  She was sent down to Mexico on a claim--a life insurance policy was paid out upon the death of a California Fidelity (the company she occasionally does side jobs for) client, but as it turns out the man who was meant to be dead is sunning it up in Mexico and was spotted by one of CF's agents when he was on vacation.  Oops.  Now that is not supposed to happen, so Kinsey went down to try and confirm the dead man's (though still alive) identity.  

I could share the scene were she hops from her balcony to another to get to the balcony--and room, of the man in question.  And when he comes back she retraces her steps (or leaps) but surprise!  The man in the middle room is not only in his room but on his balcony.  The things she does to get out of a tight situation.  No, I think I need to share the outfit she came up with  back in California when she had to dress up for a party (for her investigation).  Now, if you know Kinsey, you know she has little real fashion sense.  She is a jeans, turtleneck, tennis shoes kind of woman.  "I" have not so much fashion sense to be honest, but even I was floored by this.  And it made me laugh aloud!  Going through a bag of a friend's cast-off (and given to Kinsey) clothes . . .

"I went back to one of the long skirts, a black washable silk.  I think she intended for me to hem the length, but I simply rolled it up at the waist, a little doughnut effect.  She's also given me a tunic top in a color she called taupe (a blend of gray and old cigar butts), with a long white vest that went over both.  She'd told me I could dress up the outfit with accessories.  Big duh.  Life I really had some kind of clue how to make that work.  I searched  my drawers for jewelry to no avail and finally decided to wear the long crocheted runner my aunt had made for the dresser top.  I gave it a little flap to get all the woofies out and then looped it around my neck with the ends hanging down the front.  Looked good to me, kind of devil-may-care, like Isadora Duncan or Amelia Earhart."

Even just typing this again makes me smile.  She seriously cracks me up!  My attention has been stretched in too many places this last month or so, but I need to get back to Kinsey and finish this so I can get to "K".  I want to finish the alphabet this year.  But then again, maybe I don't.  When I get to "Y", what will I do?  Go back to "A"?  Surely there can't be another female PI quite like Kinsey, right?

Teaser Tuesday: Normal People

I know I am not the last person to read Sally Rooney's Normal People (it has not even been published here in the US yet--due out in mid-April), but it feels like it.  I have heard really wonderful things about Sally Rooney--her books have won awards and acclaim and now this newest (though published in the UK last year) is longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction.  I shamelessly have had it checked out from the library for longer than I care to admit, so I shall start here with the longlist.  By the way, if I manage to read even a small handful of the books listed (and that over the course of the year!) I will be pleased--particularly those books I have owned for a while now.

I suspect Normal People will have a very good chance of making it to the shortlist, and it feels like it will read quickly (and then I will be in on the conversation finally . . .).  It has been, or rather Rooney, has been hailed as the first great Millennial novelist.  Maybe that is where my hesitation has come from?  The gulf between me (I guess I am a Gen-X'er) and the Millennial generation seems wide indeed.  I don't think there is such a thing (not really anyway) of being too old or too young for a book, but my experiences and viewpoint will likely be vastly different.  However, maybe it is a way of bridging the gap and understanding?  

I like the premise of the book--Marianne and Connell are high schoolers when the story opens, but they come from very different backgrounds.  His mother is Marianne's family's cleaning lady.  Despite that he is quite popular in school and she is an outsider--happy in her intelligence and solitude.  Things may flip by the time they begin college and I am curious to see where their lives take them and if they tackle growing up together or apart.

I do like her writing very much and I love the descriptions she gives, particularly of Marianne, which is what I want to share here.  This is Connell's perspective by the way.

"Marianne is grinning now.  She exercises an open contempt for people in school.  A lot of people really hate her.  Her father died when she was thirteen and Connell has heard she has a mental illness now or something.  It's true she is the smartest person in school.  He dreads being left alone with her like this, but he also finds himself fantasizing about things he could say to impress her."

***

"She wears ugly thick-soled flat shoes and doesn't put make-up on her face.  People have said she doesn't shave her legs or anything.  Connell once heard that she spilled chocolate ice cream on herself and took her blouse off to wash it in the sink.  That's a popular story about her, everyone has heard it.  If she wanted, she could make a big show of saying hello to Connell in school.  See you this afternoon, she could say, in front of everyone.  Undoubtedly it would put him in an awkward position, which is the kind of thing she usually seems to enjoy.  But she has never done it."

Did I mention that I my weekend reading was almost nil and that I didn't finish books or make progress in others when I had hoped to?  It has been making me a little antsy, so starting a new book is definitely just what I need.  And an Irish author in March, so it works out doubly well.  And while I am still reading my February prompt book, it is time to think about March now as well!