evelyn_b

What I've Finished Reading

It's been another weakish week for finishing things, but I did finish X, which was kind of muddled and convoluted but perfectly fine. There's a boldly unsatisfying ending, if you like for your murderers to get caught in the end, and yet another attempt on poor Kinsey's life. If seven separate people had tried to kill you in the past six years, would you change anything about your job or routine? I might, but that just goes to show how ill-suited I am for the detective life - in spite of my appreciation for Kinsey's First Rule of Surveillance, "Never pass up a chance to pee." Kinsey, who prides herself on eating nothing but cereal, sandwiches, and cheap wine, also gets an opportunity in X to be judgmental about some grifters' frozen TV dinners. This makes a nice change from being judgmental about the estimated body mass indexes of random strangers, while remaining totally in character.

I also finished The Cactus League! It was fine! All the clarity and focus went into baseball and baseball-adjacent details rather than into characters I cared about, which made it admirable and interesting rather than emotionally compelling (except at the very end, where it hit me with feelings in an extremely predictable way - that is, I'm extremely predicatable in my reading responses. The book is a little predictable in this respect, but in the same way that music can be predicatable to good effect, not in a way I minded).

What I'm Reading Now

Scarce had Cardenio mention'd Knight-Errantry, when Don Quixote interrupted him: Sir, said he, had you but told me when you first mention'd the Lady Lucinda, that she was an Admirerer of Books of Knight-Errantry, there had been no need of using any Amplification to convince be more her being a Person of uncommon Sense [. . .] And I heartily could have wished that with Amadis de Gaul you had sent her the worthy Don Rugel of Greece; for I am certain the Lady Lucinda would have been extreamely delighted with Darayda and Garaya, as also with the discreet Shepherd Darinel, and shose admirable Verses of his Bucolicks, which he sung and repeated with so good a Grace: But a Time may bet be found to give her the Satisfaction of reading those Master-pieces, if you will do me the Honor to come to my House; for there I may supply you with above three hundred Volumes, which are my Soul's greatest Delight, and the darling Comfort of my Life; though now I remember my self, I have just Reason to fear there's not one of 'em left in my Study, Thanks to the malicious Envy of wicked Inchanters.

Don Quixote is a lot of book; sometimes I feel it's more book than I need or want, and then Don Q. interrupts another genre-stricken sufferer's earnest tale of woe to recommend a bunch of books and then suddenly remember that wicked enchanters stole his books for some reason. Something we can all relate to, in a sense? And in another sense, no.

Anyway, D.Q. has decided that in the name of love he has to do some naked flailing around in the manner of Orlando Furioso or one of those guys; Sancho manages to convince him to wait until he's left on his errand before stripping off the old garments.

I had to take my Motteux back to the library today, and am now finally starting on Smollett - I'm going to miss Motteux's probably-justifiably-maligned cheekiness and Noun Caps, I think.

What I Plan to Read Next

When I went to the library today, I picked up a book called Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet off one of the displays near the door. By the time I'd gotten Y is for Yesterday off the shelf, I'd decided I didn't want Broad Band overwhelmingly - but someone had already filled its spot on the display stand with another book - so I took it home anyway.

It's been quite a week for hardly reading anything (except WHO coronavirus updates, unfortunately), but I did have some enforced downtime, which led to

What I've Finished Reading

Unchecked Savagery, a wonderful tiny book of flash fiction by Glenn Shaheen. The stories are all about a medium-sized paragraph, so if one of them made me laugh I could just hand it over to the person next to me to read - one of the benefits of very short forms.

Julia Dixon Evans' novel How to Set Yourself on Fire is a pretty good novel with a not-terribly-convincing motor - that the fucked-up narrator finds her grandmother's shoebox of love letters from a neighbor and becomes obsessed with them is not hard to believe, but I found the letters themselves to be implausibly detailed and self-explanatory. Probably that doesn't matter. It also suffers from a difficult-to-avoid problem, that of the needlessly dramatic climax to a story that might otherwise trickle away quietly. Here, as in the much less successful Be Frank With Me, there's a fire. But I am being overly nitpicky about a book I completely enjoyed.

What I'm Reading Now

I heard Sam Lipsyte read from Hark before it came out, and though I didn't remember much about it, I remembered that it was funny. So when I saw it on the shelf at a bookstore, I thought "Now's my chance!" and bought it before I forgot about it again. So far, it's been a good decision. Hark is a guy's name and also a movement, called "mental archery," whose adherents use archery-based poses and metaphors to stay focused on staying focused. There are a lot of pleasantly hapless characters and it's a little mean, but not as mean as it looks.

X by Sue Grafton! The second-to-last book in the series, and full of twists and turns. Kinsey is hired to find a rich woman's long-lost son, a simple assignment that turns out not to be. There's a continuation of the previous book's story about an ex-detective who was killed when he turned to blackmail - Kinsey's found a coded list of names and is trying to get information from each one. I like the Alphabet's committment to its 1980s setting, even though the last books were written in the 2010s. This one has some heart-stopping answering-machine drama, turning on the fact that if someone sneaks into your house and listens to your messages, the little "new message" light stops blinking. The cameo from a newspaperman grumbling about the imminent death of newspapers is both too on the nose and completely chronojustifiable for any time between about 1930 and the present.

What I Plan to Read Next

I also got The Cactus League from the library (it was on the New Books shelf when I went in to get X and now have to read it before it comes due.

What I've Finished Reading

Nothing! I recently decided to approach my to-read shelf in physical order of which book was closest, with the result that all my books are giant and slow right now! Don Quixote is probably the second-beachiest of my current reads, which I guess isn't that surprising given that it was the triumphant bestseller of 1605.

Wait, no, not nothing. But What if We're Wrong: Thinking About The Present As if It Were the Past was a breezy treat by Chuck Klosterman. The entire book is in the title; we just sit down and have a chat with Klosterman about what he thinks the TV of today might look like in a couple hundred years and what people might remember about The Rock Era of music and so on. At the end of every paragraph, practically, he throws up his hands and goes, "But that's just a guess! I could be totally wrong about all of this!" It's a fun conversation that doesn't feel one-sided, even though it's technically a book and not a conversation. Unfortunately, it was too breezy to last and now it's over almost before it began.

AND I completely forgot to say anything about Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?, which was both slightly disappointing and mildly impressive because it turned out to be exactly the book described to me four years ago: a weird, stumpy, ambiguously pointless, ugly but compelling comedy of an alt history. The guy who recommended it to me told me I should read it in blank library binding if possible, so the back cover/cover illustration wouldn't immediately spoil the entire premise for me, then went on to spoil me anyway. Having now read it, I think he was right about the library binding. That plus my intrinsic laziness means I'll say no more.

What I'm Reading Now

Large books! Horizon by Barry Lopez is making me extrememly aware of how much time I spend indoors. Education of an Idealist is a memoir by Samantha Power, a journalist and diplomat. It was a Christmas present from my parents, so I feel obligated to read it all, and while the subject matter is interesting (especially the odd personal anecdote, like when she remembers hanging around her father's neighborhood pub as a child), it's just not doing much for me as a book. But it's early yet, so maybe things will pick up? I finally decided to make some progress on History of the Peloponnesian War, so there's Pericles being tediously patriotic and now a super depressing plague. Then there's W is for Wasted, which is taking a while because I've been saving it for bedtime, having nothing else suitable for drowsy reading. Kinsey meets two dead bodies in the first chapter. They appear to be unrelated, but we know better because we've read 22 of these already. But HOW are they related? That's another question I won't be answering.

Also, Don Quixote!

( I Put On My Cardboard Helmet and Sally Forth )

What I Plan to Read Next

Whatever Sue Grafton's X is for, obviously! Plus a bunch of work stuff for the next few days.

What I've Finished Reading

The Wolf and the Girl by Aster Glenn Gray is a historical fantasy novella that takes some cues from Little Red Riding Hood (mostly for the sake of one absolutely fantastic scene involving the protagonist's grandmother, which I won't spoil), and also involves an arty silent film version of Little Red Riding Hood. Basically, Masha's childhood friend Raisa went away to college in St. Petersburg and got mixed up with a group of Satanic anarchists whose head witch turned her into a wolf after she raised the perfectly reasonable question, "What if Satan is an unreliable political ally?" Masha and Raisa do about the only thing they can do under the circumstances, which is run away to Paris and start an animal act.

This is an excellent plot and I enjoyed it, but I came to the end feeling like it could have been half again as long. There's a lot of potential for a more leisurely story, from the lonely journey across a continent to the vaudeville life in Paris, to the unwritten rules for surviving being transformed into a wolf (if Raisa ever eats raw meat in her wolf body, she'll stay a wolf forever, so the poor thing goes hungry a lot). As a casual fan of historical anarchists, I'd also love to see some of the no-doubt epic bickering between the satanic group and their atheist and Tolstoyan counterparts, but that may be just me.

V for Vengeance by Sue Grafton, a re-read (because I knew I'd read it but couldn't remember a thing about it). A decent-enough entry in Grafton's Alphabet of Destruction series, with an overwhelming number of tangled plot threads and more than usually marred by Kinsey/Grafton's weird hangups about the specific number of pounds every single female character needs to lose or gain in order to meet Kinsey's exacting standards.

I read all of Wallace Stevens Collected Poems and still don't know what I think of Wallace Stevens. I also read a possibly genuinely obscure book called The Two Guides and Other Poems by T. M. Sample, privately published by Vesta Sample of Highland Park, Tenn. in 1908 and featuring several not-especially-professional illustrations by the same Vesta (plus one attractive photograph of a creek). The title poem is a long and didactic platter of heroic couplets about the unreliability of science and the importance of religion. There are also some panegyrics about William McKinley and Robert E. Lee, and lots of descriptions of the author's cozy chair by the fire.

What I'm Reading Now

As for the Giant Morgante, he always spoke very civil Things of him; for though he was one of that monstrous Brood, who ever were intolerably proud and brutish, he still behav'd himself like a civil and well-bred Person.

The copy of Don Quixote I ordered STILL hasn't arrived! so I got one from the public library along with my Kinseys, and the only one they had was this extremely seventeenth-century translation by P. A. Motteux with loads of italics and Capital Letters and quote marks that start again at the beginning of every line to remind you that the character is still talking. It's surprisingly likable! Eventually I'll get the other translation and then I can compare, but it hasn't happened yet. I'll probably post more about Don Quixote early next week.

(Wikipedia interrupts this entry to tell me this translation is widely criticized for being overly smug and jaunty, and is from the eighteenth century rather than the seventeenth).

W for Wasted has a homeless man turning up dead on a beach with Kinsey's name and number in his pocket, a perfect excuse for Kinsey to try to ingratiate herself with the local homeless population by buying three packs of cheap cigarettes at the convenience store. Will it work? This one has a washed-up PI in it (not Kinsey, of course, who always manages to pay the bills in spite of being nearly murdered every three months). It's also shaping up to be overrun with the adventures of Kinsey's sexy octegenarian landlord and his family of nonagenarian Midwestern eccentrics, which could be either good or bad. We'll see what the next three hundred pages bring.

What I Plan to Read Next

I don't know for sure! Maybe the "definitive" translation of Don Quixote, if it ever gets here!

What You Can Read Right Now For Free

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I love Ted Chiang and there's nothing to be done about it, but it's ok because I don't mind loving Ted Chiang. If you would like to join me in loving Ted Chiang, or alternatively if you'd like to see a fool-proof formula for making me cry a lot, here's a story you can read. It's called "Exhalation."

Though I think this story is a reasonably good example of why I love Ted Chiang, it is not my favorite Ted Chiang story. That small plastic trophy probably goes to "Seventy-Two Letters," the one about golem eugenics and the invention of sperm.

What I've Finished Reading

In The Phoenix Generation, Phillip "Two Ls, Zero Chill" Maddison seriously needs to cool it on having affairs to soothe the pain of his made-up idealized wife dying convenitragically in childbirth. He should probably also try to rake in his compulsion to explain The Money Power Behind the Government to everyone who passes within a yard and a half of him, but this is very obviously not going to happen anytime soon.

We spend about a billion pages on Phil sleeping with his secretary Felicity under Lucy's nose and Lucy being kind and understanding but a little sad about it. This is not nearly as interesting to us, the readers, as it is to them. Since he grew up - or, more genrously, since the war - Phil's never been as complete and believable a character as his all too human parents. Maybe that's simply because Henry Williamson has less sympathy for himself than he has for his own parents. Can you really blame him? I can and I can't.

There's a wonderful scene where Phil and his dad finally take a walk around the countryside together. It's all the walks Dickie imagined taking with his children before he had children and all the hoped-for happy memories he preempted with his brittle, wounded hostility. I cried like a baby who had grown up. Then I went back to being annoyed with Phil and H.W..

It's a little funny and a little sad how much time I wasted thinking, "Gosh, these fascist tendencies are way too subtle for me; I should have paid more attention in college; I sure do miss a lot of cues from not being British" only to have the whole thing suddenly take a screeching turn for the frankly Hitlerian. Not only does Hereward Birkin, the Oswald Mosley analogue, turn up and start making entire speeches on-page, but as promised Phil takes another trip to the continent and gazes starry-eyed at the well-run farms of the German countryside and the jolly apple-cheeked outdoorschaps of the Hitler Youth (Unlike Mosley, Hitler gets to keep his own name for this story). My heart sank when I opened a new chapter, the start of Phil's Germany trip, and the very first paragraph had Phil eating at a restauraunt full of "prosperous-looking Jews" and reflecting on the unreliability of anti-German propaganda. He saw plenty of hyped-up atrocity reports in the last war, and he's not going to be taken in again. Phil isn't necessarily a hundred percent on board with the Hitler program, but he thinks Hitler is a tragic Wagnerian figure tragically sacrificing himself to save the world from the tragedy of modernity, or something.

I also finished A Wild Sheep Chase, which was enjoyable all the way through. Murakami has great tonal control; the story floats easily from funny to spooky-sad and back with hardly a creak.

What I'm Reading Now

I had a rough day at work about 11 days in a row, and when I finally got a break, what I wanted most of all was to relax Kinsey Millhone Style: with a big glass of chardonnay, a pimento cheese sandwich, and the Alphabet of Destruction. A quick trip to the library and the grocery store and I was all set. It's nice to get what you want. V is for Vengeance has introduced about six different moving parts, none of which have come together yet - a hapless poker-playing college student, a shoplifter in trouble, a jealous trophy wife, a burglar's missing ring - but they will.

I started The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde, but I'm not sure yet if I'll finish it. It's another wacky adventure, but less engaging. This one takes place in an alternate 1980s, in which airships are the main method of long-distance travel, the Crimean War never ended (but there were also Nazis at some point), formerly extinct animals are cloned as pets (there are both pet and feral dodos waddling around) and everyone is really into English Lit. It's also possible to accidentally wander into the fictional world of books and (maybe?) change what happens. There's nothing obviously wrong with it; it just isn't holding my attention.

What I Plan to Read Next

I'll probably need a small break from the Chronicle and Phil "The Soil Purifier" Maddison before I dive into A Solitary War. I found A Bend in the River, a later 99 Novels listmate, on the free books shelf at the library, but I'm not sure if I'm going to read it now or later. Maybe now is a good time for cat mysteries?

What I've Finished Reading

Pale Fire was enjoyable but not memorable. Burgess calls it "a brilliant confection" and that's probably about right. It has all the Nabokovian elements of sarcastically bucolic college town, curmudgeonly opinions on literature, punny names, and wistfully ironic temporal meandering, that you can also find in Pnin, which for my money is funnier and more sustainably funny than Pale Fire (Prof. Pnin gets several name-checks here). This is a book with a great conceit, but once you figure out what's happening - that is, after about the second or third note - there is not much to do but watch it go on happening.

In The Innocent Moon (Book 9 in A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, for those of you keeping track) things are getting a bit thready. Phillip Maddison, now in his mid-twenties, spends a lot of time writing in a cottage or arguing with his drunk friends. One of the benefits of a really long novel is that you can get some sense in of the repetitiveness and tedium of real life - which I really do think is a benefit of Williamson's structure most of the time, and not just a sarcastic way of saying I was bored. Phil's career as a writer is not, sadly, as interesting as his career as an unhappy adolescent or a disenchanted soldier, and he is a flatter, shriller, less legible version of himself. Maybe that's just how growing up is sometimes. He has started to bring out a series of books that are obviously a fictionalized version of the earlier books in the Chronicle (and if we could read them, we would eventually find Phil's alter ego Donkin writing thinly fictionalized versions of his own childhood and youth, and so on). Phil spends the last third of the book courting two separate teenagers whose separate mothers are also in love with him, then climbs a mountain and has some failrly uninteresting revelations. In the meantime, there are conversations like this:

( Decay? In MY civilization? )

Anyway, eventually Phil marries one of his teenagers (after some pillow talk about the Viking and Celtic temperaments) and the book ends, so we have another unhappy marriage to look forward to, at least.

What I'm Reading Now

It's here: the last book in C.P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers series! Appropriately or on-the-nosely enough, it's called Last Things. Lewis Eliot, the narrator (dear writers of all generations, please don't give your characters two first names for a name unless you're going to make some kind of point about it OR you want your readers to spend eleven books forgetting if it is Lewis Eliot or Eliot Lewis) is the father of one grown son and the stepfather of another. He muses about his friends and the young people he knows, has a heart attack, and reflects on mortality and politics in the inimitable C. P. Snow style, i.e., "thoughtful lawyer writes his memoirs, only made up." I know I keep giving C.P. Snow guff for not being a genius, but I'm enjoying this one pretty well.

I meant to take a break from Sue Grafton, but as soon as I got within a hundred feet of a library, I picked up U is for Undertow and started reading. It's ok! I'm not quite as thrilled as Grafton is with her discovery of multiple timelines and POV switching, and I wish she would stop writing sentences like, "As a fat boy, he had no friends to speak of," but that probably won't happen at this point.

What I Plan to Read Next

FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER (or a long time, anyway), my local university library has the next Henry Williamson book in sequence! As a matter of fact, they have all the later books that Anthony Burgess expects me to skip! So probably that. I might start Synners first - a Cyberpunk Classic if the cover image is any indication.

What I've Finished Reading

In T is for Trespass, Our Kinsey accidentally rips a guy's arm off by accident, you guys, in self-defense. You can't blame a girl for defending herself! Later she accidentally allows her nemesis to fall out a window to said nemesis' death, solving several serious problems Kinsey has created for herself and any potential prosecution. In between, Kinsey's nemesis mails her a tarantula in a padded envelope, to throw her off her guard. The tarantula is gently rescued from Kinsey's apartment by a likable young tarantula breeder whose number Kinsey finds in the Yellow Pages.

As a Human Evil Spelunk, this was not an overwhelming success. The attempt to present the heartless murder nurse (not a spoiler; her POV is fairly forthcoming and present throughout) as Kinsey's dark mirror is extremely half-hearted, even if it isn't wrong. Kinsey probably has a higher body count than any of the desparados who pass through Kinsey's life. I don't mind Grafton cheating by killing off her culprits to avoid dealing with the legal system, but here the cheating is too apparent: she has to contrive a reason for the culprit, having fled the scene, to double back needlessly in order to threaten Kinsey in front of a convenient window. The contrivance puts serious strain on a minor character who was already getting the short end of the writing stick. It's not a failure, either. I'm acting all tough like I'm too cool to be riveted, but actually I read the whole thing in two evenings.

What I'm Reading Now

The Innocent Moon, book 9 of 15 in Henry Williamson's "single novel," A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Things are taking a turn - for what, I'm afraid to ask. The war is over and Phillip Maddison is keeping a diary full of bad romanticism and decent nature writing and a bunch of awkward intersections of the two. Part of the trouble with the Maddison men, father and son, seems to be that they would really like to commune with nature, but nature is just living its life and doesn't care about them. They try to blame it on the industrial revolution and other people not being sensitive enough, but maybe it's just that trees and birds and otters aren't all that into communion. Sometimes Phillip pretends he's made friends with an owl, but the owl doesn't really think of him as a friend. The owl is just an owl. This may be my reading more than Williamson's.

I've left both The Innocent Moon and Another Country (which just keeps getting better and more tortured and more hopelessly trapped in a spiral of drunken lectures) at home while I visit my family, since they're library books and I don't want to accidentally leave them at the airport. I brought some bite-sized paperbacks with me that I can take to one of the local used bookstores when I finish them. This afternoon I read part of Nobody Knows My Name by James Baldwin while watching a Hallmark Christmas movie about a Christmas-averse talk show host who gets sent to "The Biggest Little Christmas Town in the Country" to learn how to recover her Christmas spirit OR LOSE HER JOB. I felt even more American than usual.

What I Plan to Read Next

I feel like I should take a small break from the Alphabet of Destruction when I get home, finish reading my library books, and start the year off right by knocking out a shelf of already-owns. I also got, as a Christmas present, an enormous illustrated Earthsea omnibus, so there's that to look forward to. The illustrations (by Charles Vess) are extremely charming.

What I've Finished Reading

Most of the books I get from the library are closed up in blank library binding, so it's always a surprise - and a distinctively different reading experience - when I get one with the effusive publisher's description intact. I had no idea going into Riders in the Chariot what kind of book I was in for, but The Fox in the Attic announced right off the bat that it was going to be "a tale of enormous suspense and growing horror," that its hapless upper-class would-be twenty-three-year-old hermit is going to be suspected of murdering the child whose body he finds in the woods, and that Adolf Hitler will appear as a character. This is a great deal of information to have at the start of a book. I don't feel like I was "spoiled" or anything, but it's different from going in blind. I find myself mentally peering around the next corner for the thing the back cover told me about.

After the embarrassing spectacle of the Munich Putsch, all the local sophisticates are relived that at least now no one will have to waste another precious second talking about Hitler ever again. This heavy fish-slap of dramatic irony is intended to upset me and it succeeds. Hitler isn't embarassed by the same things you are, sophisticates!

The latest issue of the New York Review of Books has a review by Anne Diebel of Merve Enre's biography of the inventor/marketers of the Myers-Briggs test. Diebel notes in a throwaway parenthetical that Katherine Cook Briggs became obsessed with Carl Jung, "about whom she began writing gay erotica." Does the biography include any samples of Briggs' fanfiction? The review doesn't say.

Q is for Quarry is a heavily fictionalized (and fanciful) reimagining of a real cold case that Sue Grafton talked about with her pals at the Santa Monica PD, and it ends with an author's note asking for information on the real case, with some facial reconstruction images of the Jane Doe. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

S is for Silence marks the second time someone has tried to kill Kins with heavy equipment, and I've lost count of how many times our girl has killed someone in self-defense. Part of me wishes these last-minute chase scenes were a little less silly. In a way their silliness acts as an additional tone preservative for the series. No matter how grim the circumstances surrounding the muder, you can always count on the buried strains of Yakkity Sax to whisper through the bones of the dirge, reminding you that all of these tragedies are only gears in a music box, manufactured to please.

(The real reason for all the last-chapter madness: the investigation has to end sometime and the Kinster isn't authorized to arrest anyone, so we might as well have an Exciting Shootout I guess).

What I'm Reading Now

T is for Trespass makes the bold claim to be Grafton's darkest mystery yet! Once again, I have a cover-flap and enthusiastic blurbs to fill me up with expectations - plus an author's note about the story we're about to experience, warning us not to be too alarmed by all the Depths of Human Evil within - so I know it's going to be about identity theft and elder abuse. Grafton tried her hand at a little Killer POV in S is for Silence (along with a bunch of other Flashback POVs), and made it reasonably non-annoying. There's some Identity Theif POV here. Meanwhile, Kinsey's inexplicably sexy octegenarian landlord has taken up with a weirdly predatory real estate agent. He's suspicious of her motives, but Kins keeps telling him to give her another chance, for no clear reason other than to push a subplot into motion. It's ok so far!

(I'd like to note that I do not approve of the Alphabet of Destruction's sudden swerve into product placement. Round about R is for Ricochet, Kins started waxing appreciative of "Big Macs and QPs with Cheese" and now there's a Mcdonald's ad practically every chapter. This isn't especially out of character for Kinsey, but it's noticeable - especially as she continues to use coy generic names for other fast-food products, such as "franchised fried chicken" - and I would like it to stop).

Another Country is a 99 Novels selection for 1962. James Baldwin's fiction is a very different reading experience from his nonfiction. His misogyny gets a more thorough airing, and his dialogue is unexpectedly clumsy. A hundred pages in, Another Country is gritty, confused, damp and complicated. It's one of those books where I keep compulsively sticking little post-its of distance and criticism all over the surface of my involvement and they keep falling off in a melancholy dead-leaf motion.

What I Plan to Read Next

Interlibrary loan came through with The Innocent Moon, so it's Henry Williamson time (again)! When I go to visit my family at Christmas, I'll probably bring a couple of my more disposable paperbacks, but I'm not sure which ones yet.

ETA I just counted up my remaining 99 Novels, and there are only 48 books left on the list! (Seven of which are volumes in the "single" Henry Williamson "novel" A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight). Do you know what that means? It means I'll be able to actually finish the list in 2019! Even if it takes me four months to read Ancient Evenings! That will make five full years of reading Anthony Burgess' idiosyncratic favorites. I wonder what I'll do when it's all over.

It's happened again! This time, I don't even have an excuse like "I was busy" or "family concerns" or "my eyes got burnt out from too much reading"; I just accidentally read a bunch of Kinsey Millhones and forgot to read anything else.

That's not completely accurate: I read a little bit of Poetry December 2018 and a little bit of the New York Review of Books. I'm not sure if I actually like the NYRB all that much, but they lured me in with the promise of a free notebook and it's not like I have enough notebooks. (I have enough notebooks).

Current Kinsey: Q is for Quarry - a dead body was found in a quarry, but Kins and her retired cop friends are also hunters on a cold trail - and probably there's a tertiary meaning not yet obvious, since Grafton likes to throw a wordplay curveball toward the end. We've spent a fair amount of time on a plot I'm not thrilled with - Kinsey's prickly reconciliation with her mother's estranged family - and Grafton seems to be losing her grip on the supporting cast a little. Rosie, the imperious Hungarian barkeep, talks in differently scrambled English in every book, and sometimes from chapter to chapter. Grafton tries to cover her tracks by making it a personality trait, but it looks too much like she's just been revising this whole time. Suddenly everyone's balking at eating Rosie's dinners and making damp comic hay out of her perfectly rational love of organ meats. "Screw you, Rosie's cooking is amazing," I said out loud at one point to the book in my hands. There's been a slow creep toward caricature in Kinsey's inner circle, but maybe it'll get better. First-person narration is a hard bag to drag when you're getting shot at all the time, and sometimes even when you're not. Maybe the Kinster just has a lot on her mind.

What I Haven't Quite Finished Yet Though It Really Seems Like I Ought To By Now

Titus Alone. Guys, it's kind of a mess. I don't hate it, but I don't love it, either – not the way I loved the first two books, anyway. It's noticeably all over the place now that there's a world outside of Gormenghast (that largely doesn't believe in Gormenghast, despite being exactly as weird as Gormenghast in its own ways), and that's probably on purpose, but I'm feeling as petulant as a detective fan who bought a brand-new book by their favorite cozy author only to find it was a Serious Personal College Novel with no murders whatsoever. Is it good? I don't know, maybe. Is it exactly what I wanted in every respect? No, it is not.

Suddenly there's sex! And motorcars, and fleets of fantastic aircraft, and robber barons – all of it still suspended in the same slow-motion Groan Zone of meticulously grotesque precision that made the first two books such a magical mildew infestation. But it's not the same because it can't be the same. It lost its center of gravity when it lost Gormenghast. To be fair, Titus feels the same way. It's not an accident. It's just – I don't know, it's just ok.

What I've Finished Reading

Three Sue Grafton books: L is for Lawless, M is for Malice, and N is for Noose. The last was a little more grisly than the first two, but they were all pretty good. Our girl Kinsey is beset by love interests (some of whom naturally end up murdered), bodily injury, and cases she should have known better than to take in the first place. I guessed the culprit in all three, well ahead of any solid evidence – on the principle that if there's a Shocking Revelation in a Grafton book more than ten pages from the end, it will turn out to be only half true at a maximum. Then I made myself a Kinsey Millhone-style peanut butter and pickle sandwich and ate it. It was pretty good – a pleasantly unexpected flavor balance complex enough to be satisfying.

When I say that I “don't love” Titus Alone, I mean that I'd like to love it and I'm willing to love it but it just isn't sticking, for whatever reason. But when I say that I “don't love” Riders in the Chariot, a 99 Novels novel by Patrick White, I mean that it's such a disconcerting oddball masterpiece that I both don't know how I do feel about it and am reluctant to use the same word that I use for Sue Grafton's Alphabet of Destruction. I really should try to get a better vocabulary one of these decades.

This is a novel that feels like a mystical experience, which is a silly thing to say because how would I know what a mystical experience feels like? I wouldn't and I don't. But I'm saying it anyway, because what's mysticism if not something you know when you see? Maybe a better metaphor would be one of the in-book paintings by Alf Dubbo, the secretive artist who keeps his work locked in a steel box. It's mysterious and oblique not because it's muddled (except in the very few scenes where it is muddled) but because every image and incident feels saturated with multiple and ambiguous meanings, some of which may be totally inaccessible without reading The Letters of Patrick White. Of course this wouldn't work at all if the painting – or the book – weren't something you wanted to keep looking at anyway.

It's curiously imperfect – in that it's spectacularly eerie and compelling and suspenseful in the long slow buildup to a climax that is, at least in my experience, so ineffective that I read it four times just to make sure I wasn't just in the wrong mood or something – and then eases right back into being eerie and compelling for the falling action, as if nothing went wrong. Burgess calls it Dostoevskyian, and it is a bit, but Dostoevsky is much gabbier and more colloquial – I'd say a lot more accessible and less abstract.

It's also got an incredibly vivid sense of place, and may be worth reading just on that basis. If you've never been to Australia and want to fake like you have, this book can help! (or at least create a powerful illusion that it can help; I've never been to Australia, either).

What I'm Reading Now

O is for Outlaw. Kinsey gets a call from a storage-unit scavenger trying to sell her a box of her own elementary school homework. It turns out her ex-husband's storage unit is being auctioned off for non-payment. Is she going to have to investigate her ex-husband's murder? Kinsey, you should probably just remind yourself that all relationships are tar pits for the unwary and turn this one over to the homicide department. I can't see this going well at all.

This one opens with a note from Sue Grafton to her readers, gently reminding us that Kins is stuck in 1986 and does not have access to the internet, so stop demanding to know why she doesn't just AskJeeves.com.

What I Plan to Read Next

More Kinsey, probably! Also The Fox in the Attic, which I'm sure is a good book and has been waiting under the Graftons for several days because nothing can compete with the Alphabet of Destruction.

What I've Finished Reading

Not a lot! Guilty Pleasures: Popular Novels and American Audiences in the Long Nineteenth Century was a lot of fun. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London was very poststructuralist, which reminded me that I want to try to actually understand poststructuralism before I reach the end of my life. I'm sure it's not actually very complicated! But poststructuralists have a particular writing style that is mostly fine for talking about Victorian sensation novels in, but whenever it turns toward explaining itself I get suddenly very tired. I tried looking for "Poststructuralism for Dummies" at the library yesterday while I was grabbing up Graftons, but they didn't have it.

What I'm Reading Now

Titus Alone! which I found conveniently in the used bookstore in a matching Ballantine paperback edition, so I didn't even have to check the library! (I know I should check the library, but that's a different question). Guys, it's weird. That's not to say Titus Groan and Gormenghast aren't weird, but the weirdness here is in a new and jarring key. It's weird in its own right but also weird within the set of weird books by noted weirdo Mervyn Peake. The chapters are so short that they're stressing me out a little, as if I were the one out of breath, and the world outside Gormenghast is so alien to the son of Gormenghast - with its new non-crumbling glass buildings and motor-cars and house parties - that the combination of new imagery with Peake prose and Peake-typical grotesque precision is both unnerving and a little flattening, at least here at the start.

Since I keep saying non-specific things about Peake's prose, here are the first four paragraphs of Titus Alone for your empirical observation.

( To north, south, east, west, turning at will, it was not long before his landmarks fled him )

In all honesty I don't know if I'm going to like it as much as the other two. But seriously, check out that echoing drumbeat-hoofbeat nonsense and the ridiculous slant-rhyme punning action on "marrow and bane" come ON PEAKE rein it in a little; I ALREADY LOVE YOU TOO MUCH.

Speaking of things I love too much, KINSEY MILLHONE IS BACK and better than ever. I finally got to the other library, and all of the Sue Graftons were there, or close enough, so I brought home menaces L through N. L is for Lawless opens with Kinsey grumbling that she'll never again take on a case as a favor to a friend, since this one left her with a nasty knock on the head and she didn't even get paid. Oh, Kins. Never change, never learn. The friend is Kinsey's inexplicably sexy octogenarian landlord, of course (whose entire family of cantankerous Midwestern eightysomethings is visiting, much to my delight), and the case is a dead neighbor's missing service records, which his son thinks are missing as part of a vast government conspiracy. Are they? Is it actually a much pettier conspiracy? I don't know, but in about a hundred pages, I will! Also there's a subplot where Kinsey's long-lost cousins keep trying to get to know her and can't understand why she thinks human ties are for chumps.

What I Plan to Read Next

This is the sixth or seventh time this year that I've run into that Henry James anecdote about going to see Uncle Tom's Cabin in order not to be beguiled. My conclusion is that I should go ahead and read Uncle Tom's Cabin - but I probably won't read it next. What I'll probably read next: M is for Malice by Sue Grafton.

It's been about a million days since I posted anything, for no really good reason. And the more I didn't post, the more I had to post about and the longer it would take to get caught up. So this is an attempt to catch up a little.

A Few of the Things I've Finished Reading

I picked up a bad cold back at the beginning of October and have spent most of the time since then pathetically stuffy and sick. Luckily, Thomas Mann has written the perfect book for reading in a haze of Ny-Quil and sadness. It's called THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN and it's about a very ordinary, very young man called Hans Castorp who goes to visit his cousin at a sanatorium for tuberculosis sufferers, high in the Alps. It's a weird place with a weird microclimate full of weird people where time seems to run and pool into its own bizarre eddies and swamps, but it's all very interesting and anyway he's going home in three weeks, so he might as well live like the natives do. Except SPOILER: he comes down with TUBERCULOSIS in the first hundred pages and now he has to stay INDEFINITELY. WHOOPS. Soon he's settling in for the winter, being cornered and lectured on his own nature by the local eccentrics, and lusting after a Russian woman who reminds him of a boy he had a crush on at school, whose most distinctive feature, apart from her "slanted" eyes, is distinctively sloppy posture. It's a wild ride. I can't tell for sure if the manic feverish quality is a Thomas Mann Original or the result of my own haziness, but ~~UNLIKE HANS~~ eventually I will recover and maybe then I'll be able to tell you.

There is also The Veiled One by Ruth Rendell, subtitle: Mike Burden Screws It All Up Again. I like Mike Burden because he can't catch a break. This time he catches even less of a break than usual, fixating bullheadedly on the wrong suspect until said suspect snaps, with predictably bad results. A little sillier in its seriousness than I expect Rendell to be, but this might be only because it's been a while since I read her.

I wasn't pleasantly surprised by The Sleep of Reason, exactly, because nothing about C. P. Snow's fiction is productive of surprise. I did enjoy it, though.

There's a Leopold and Loeb-esque murder trial involving George Passant's niece, and which is linked with Lewis' growing anxiety about the fruits of permissiveness in a way that isn't very convincing now, but may have seemed a little more so in 1968.

"It's curious how you talk about 'your generation,'" [Lewis says to his twenty-year-old son, during one of their serious chats]. "We never did."

This made me laugh because I've have the same thought about people ten or fifteen years younger than myself. I didn't know anyone my age who thought, as Lewis' son replies, that "Perhaps it's because we know that we have a difficult job to do." I don't remember ever knowing anyone my age who thought in terms of generational burdens or responsibilities at all, either now or when we were young. I certainly don't think that way, though plenty of people who are older and younger than me seem to. But I don't know if that's a real generation gap, or just a matter of who my friends were when I mostly had friends my own age.

I'm Reading A Few Books Now

. . . but the one I'm really excited about is Gormenghast, the sequel to Titus Groan and just as wonderfully weird: a gorgeously rancid dream-logical microcosmos. It was written, almost certainly painstakingly, by a human being, but it feels like Mervyn Peake put a couple of paragraphs of Arthuriana, a smudged half-page of college-paper satire, and some especially fetid cheese in a bottle and let it all compost together into a splendid mold. It's the best thing I've read in months.

I realized yesterday that my enjoyment is heightened by the fact that I know absolutely nothing about Mervyn Peake, except that he's the weirdo responsible for Gormenghast. There's no biography (but several pen-and-ink drawings by the author) in the mass-market paperback editions I've been reading, and I'd never heard of him before 99 Novels. I think I'd like to keep it this way until I finish the trilogy.

I Also Watch TV Sometimes

I gave up completely on the Westeros books and decided just to watch Game of Thrones instead, where I get more or less the same thing, but with actors of wildly varying talent and a delightful opening credit sequence that sings, "Here comes some TOP-SHELF NERD SHIT, from Sam Tarley's underappreciated brain to YOUR FACE, SUCKERS." Seriously, even when the episode is bad, I feel I've gotten my forty-five minute's worth just from watching the little fortresses whirligig up from the Risk map. We're on Season Three and the writing has started to decay a little; there's a terribly boring torture plot just gnawing up time for no clear reason, they've abandoned the Wall which was my favorite location and social organization, and a whole tier of characters I didn't hate just got stabbed to death - but the parts that are fun to watch are just as fun to watch as before, more or less. Good parts include: almost every scene with the Stark girls (even though the writers/GRRM are still way too committed to punishing Sansa for being a normal non-cynical fourteen-year-old) Jon "Bro" Snow and his two facial expressions, Daenerys "God Mode" Targaryen and her ridiculous harem of loyal retainers, and Joffery Baratheon, a gleefully evil child king who lives to be petty. Last season I would have included Theon Greyjoy, hapless dirtbag pirate prince, on my list of favorites, but he got trapped in the stupid torture plot and who knows if he'll ever get out again.

Every time there's been a new Doctor on Doctor Who, it's taken me four or five episodes to get used to him . . .but not this time. I think my brain pre-emptively primed itself to see continuity rather than discontinuity as a defense against anti-Thirteen whiners - whom I haven't actually encountered in real life, so I don't know why it would bother. The writing seems pretty wobbly at this point, but Jodie Whittaker is quintessentially and inescapably the Doctor (and the mess of a Rosa Parks episode gave me all the dubious American accents I could hope for), so I'm happy.

What I Plan to Read Next

My library didn't have L is for Lawless, but they had the audiobook version, so I thought, "What the hell, I'll try it," and brought it home. I keep forgetting to listen to it, but maybe tomorrow will be the day that I remember.

What I've Finished Reading

K is for Killer is not the best Sue Grafton. It's a little too convoluted for that, and Kinsey's supporting cast - her inexplicably sexy octogenarian landlord and the Hungarian barkeep who keeps bullying her into eating giant meals of stew meat - are sadly missing for this one - but it's a good detective story and it does what a good detective story ought to do. There's just enough emotional involvement to keep the pages turning, never so much that you forget the grisly murder is a fictional puzzle served up for your entertainment and start to get sad about all the broken lives and whatnot. It's a well-organized hayride through Human HeartLand, dark and creepy and bumpy in spots but certified safe for all ages.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm almost done with The Balkan Trilogy (now in one volume!) (Soon to be a major TV serial!) by Olivia Manning, my first 99 Novels book in a while. It's really three books (The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City, and Friends and Heroes), but they've been bundled together into one and they run together easily. It's sort of about war and sort of about hapless expats trying to convince themselves of their own importance - it takes place in British circles first in Bucharest, then in Athens, during World War II - but it's mostly about a young married couple, Guy and Harriet Pringle, who have moved to Bucharest from England without getting to know one another very well first and are now facing a long slow adulthood in a permanent state of mutual misunderstanding, not quite miserable but not quite happy either.

I'm not sure why I've become so invested in their hopeless relationship. Maybe it's not as hopeless as it seems?? Probably it's just that Olivia Manning is good at quiet humor and not-very-judgmental portrayals of ordinarily flawed people and their ordinary tragedies. I keep feeling I should be rooting for them to get a divorce, but I'm not. Why not? It might do them both some good. Every time Harriet almost has an affair, which by this point is practically once per chapter, I am on the edge of my seat, hoping she'll yield to inertia again and just not do it. In spite of an ongoing process of disillusionment, she is still convinced that Guy has tremendous potential that might, someday, make everything worth it in some ill-defined way. Meanwhile, it's been clear to the reader for several hundred pages that he's just another gifted child grown big. Neither of them are bad people or unusually good people - they're just a couple of very young adults who love idealized versions of each other that they can no longer access now that they have to live with their real selves every day. In the meantime, people just as ordinary as Guy and Harriet who don't happen to be British nationals are starving or worse. Guy sincerely believes that he's making a difference by teaching English, and who knows, maybe he is a little. He also sincerely believes he's helping by having idealistic conversations about politics with conspiracy theorists, and is mistaken. Harriet tries to protect a young Jewish boy, but fails, and after that she doesn't try to protect anyone else.

There is one larger-than-life character in this kaleidoscope of painful ordinariness: the permanently indigent British son of a White Russian prince who is always stuffing himself with other people's cheese cubes and getting loans he has no intention of paying back. He's a little too larger-than-life for the rest of the book - by about the middle, his appearances have started to grate - and while he thinks of himself as a lovable scamp, he casually betrays his friends to the Gestapo more frequently than I'm comfortable with. But he'll probably follow Our Non-Heroes all the way through the next three books as well (there's a whole other trilogy of Pringles Repenting At Leisure after this one, and I don't think I'm going to be able to stop myself from reading it), since Manning clearly enjoys writing him and making everyone cringe.

What I Plan to Read Next

Coming soon in 99 Novels: A Test to Destruction by Henry Williamson, The Mighty and Their Fall by Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller! I'm looking forward to all of them.

This will be short and perfunctory because I'm lazy this week and deep in the comfort-reading cottonwool. I tore right through all five volumes of Prydain and am excited to talk about them with my young relatives in a few days. They're undemanding fun, fast-paced to a degree that is sometimes hilarious (at one point, Eilonwy the ex-apprentice enchantress loses a magic item, resigns herself to a life without enchantment, and finds the item again, all in the space of two paragraphs), and managed to jerk a tear or two even if I didn't quite buy the ending and never warmed to one of the main characters (Gurgi) at all. The final book tries to be a little too heavy for its bones, I think. . . but I'm really just saying that because I didn't have the good sense to read it when I was still seven.

K is for Killer takes place among sex workers, so Kinsey Millhone's curious blend of toughness and mild prudery gets a thorough airing. I think the young hooker with a head for finance and a crossdresser who might identify as a woman if he weren't worried about keeping his day job are pretty good - i.e., sympathetic and human - for 1994 and within Sue Grafton's broad-strokes approach to characterization. The dust jacket calls the story "dark, complex, and deeply disturbing," and I suppose it would be if it were true crime, but as a Kinsey Millhone Special it's brisk and pleasant.

(In J is for Judgment, Kinsey decided against reporting the latest round of bullet holes in her car to the insurance company, because she didn't need to deal with her premiums going up. She also got a much-needed break from bullet holes in her body, and instead spent the climactic chapter frantically swimming after an apparent suicide. At least it's something different!)

The 24/7 SamCam is still rolling. Yesterday I reflected on how lucky we all are that James Boswell never acquired a time machine. If he had, either The Life of Samuel Johnson would never have been finished (because he's still following Sam around Lichfield Grammar School, a sporadically aging weirdo in an ugly future coat, scribbling every tic and stutter onto a slate) or it would have been three million pages long instead of a mere thousand, and the former British empire would still be recovering from the catastrophic deforestation necessary to print it.

Two good new books of poetry that are very different from each other: American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes and Bell Lap by Laura Winberry.

That's it for now!

What I've Finished Reading

My aunt really loved The Memory Keeper's Daughter, so when we met up at a used bookstore a couple of months ago, she bought me a copy to read. I didn't love it, but I was happy to have read it, as I wouldn't have thought to read it on my own. It's a situation novel, in which the most important thing is not the writing or the characters or even what they do, but the painful situation the author has contrived for them.

The situation: in 1964, a young doctor's wife gives birth to twins. One twin has Down's syndrome, the other doesn't. It just so happens that he had to deliver his own babies in a snowstorm with the help of a nurse who happens to worship him, so instead of dealing with a lot of other doctors and hospital protocol, he's able to shove the Down's baby into the nurse's arms and tell her to put it in a home. Then he tells his drowsy wife that yes, there were two babies but one of them died and no, she can't see it, they buried it right away. He does this because his own sister was sickly and died young, and he doesn't want his wife to suffer grief the way his mother did. The nurse decides she can't face putting the baby in an institution, so she moves to another city and tells everyone it's hers. This baby is the titular daughter. Then Mrs. Doctor spends 25 years grieving until eventually Doctor dies and The Truth Can Be Told. She and her son go to meet the missing twin and it's ok, actually, everything has turned out fine.

In the meantime there are a lot of domestic dramas, most of them low-key and predictable, one of them ludicrous. It's not an intolerably clumsy handling of the material or an innovative or an especially complex one. It's a careful, competent, stiff-jointed and predictable novel with book club aids in the back. Phoebe, the daughter with Down's syndrome, never really emerges from the fog of inspiration and cliche as a real or interesting character, but neither does anyone else, so I can't fault the author for it specially. I did find myself irritated by how doggedly heartwarming it insisted on being in the last chapters, after conveniently killing off the dad for easy forgiveness. My heart was unwarmed and if anything stonier than usual.

In conclusion: this was a book. I read it; it was fine.

What I'm Reading Now

He again advised me to keep a journal fully and minutely, but not to mention such trifles as, that meat was too much or too little done, or that the weather was fair or rainy. He had, till very near his death, a contempt for the notion that the weather affects the human frame.

I'm about halfway through The Life of Samuel Johnson, and even though it seems to me like I'm moving through it at a pretty fast clip, there's a lot of it to move through. SamJam and the Boz are still the most lovable intergenerational bros in the world's most meandering biography. Of course I'm going to have to check Boswell's journals now to see if he heeded his friend's advice or if they're all cluttered up with The Meat Report.

I'm on the cozy train a little earlier than planned, because I went to the library to get some Lloyd Alexander (my niece and nephew are really into the Prydain Chronicles; last time I went for a visit they tried to get me to play Roll the Death Cauldron Through the Woods and I had no idea what was going on, but this time I'll be ready) and realized that I missed Sue Grafton and what the hell, they don't take long to read. So I'm also reading J is for Judgment. Kinsey is reflecting on her natural love of snooping and how she'd definitely be in jail by now if she hadn't gone into law enforcement. She was also almost caught ransacking a hotel room and had to pretend to be some random dude's birthday hooker, a subterfuge that made me anxious and unhappy, even if she didn't pursue it as long as I feared she might. Look out for yourself, Kinsey!

The Book of Three, the first in the Chronicles, is a totally charming children's book, except for the ubiquitous comic-relief Gollum Lite character, Gurgi, who . . . would be hilarious if I were seven, I admit. But some things are lost and can never be regained. All the characters are a little one-note, but that's probably normal for middle-grade fantasy, and mostly the notes are very likable. Eilonwy, the bossy girl who has the bad luck to be apprenticed to an evil sorceress, is my favorite by a mile.

What I Plan to Read Next

K is for Killer! by Sue Grafton, among others. What else could K be for?

What I've Finished Reading
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It's been another mass-market paperback week for the most part. I finished I is for Innocent and am out of Sue Graftons again. It's become a sad existential certainty that poor Kinsey can't get through a book without putting herself in mortal danger, even when the case is four years old and she's only looking into it for a friend. If this keeps up she'll have more bullet holes than skin by the time we get to Y. And then she'll probably say something tough about how it suits her lifestyle to be an impervious mass of metal and scar tissue (as long as it doesn't keep her from eating cereal for dinner) because That's Our Kinsey. Sue Grafton has gotten a lot better at writing suspense since the Yakety Sax days of A is for Alibi, so can I really complain? I can a little, but I mostly don't.

What I'm Reading Now

My father-in-law, whose taste in detectives only occasionally intersects with mine (I introduced him to The Most Comfortable Man in London; he gave me the gift of Sue Grafton) has put Elizabeth George into my hands, so I've started A Great Deliverance, the first book in a series.

There are a lot of characters all at once, mostly CID higher-ups with personal problems. The ostensible hero of the piece is a repellent Balliol bro who is perversely maintaining a valet in 1988. I thought, "This bro is itching to drop a Shakespeare quote into this already tense meeting," and lo, he did. I don't know what a person like that is supposed to do with himself except join the police and hope someone eventually throws a murder his way. His partner on the investigation, for maximum conflict, is a working-class detective with a chip on her shoulder. As the POV drifts around, one character after another reflects on how badly dressed she is, which ensures that she's my favorite but also makes me worry that at some point the narrative is going to foist a makeover on her.

I'm not sure what I think of it so far. The case is grisly and there's another grisly case in the background. All signs point to a Thorny Exploration of Human Evil, which is not really my favorite kind of murder story, and half the front-matter blurbs compare George to both Ruth Rendell and P.D. James. I've loved every Rendell book I've read, thorny as they are, but I haven't had the same luck with James - so we'll see.

ETA I cant' be sure, but it looks as though Elizabeth George may also have written. . . A RICHARD III NOVEL? I'll have to investigate further.

What I Plan to Read Next

It's travel time! I've got a stack of books to help me pass a very long string of airplane and airport hours: Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett, A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin, and The Dollmaker by Hariette Arnow. The latter was famous in my house growing up because my sister had to read it for high school and hated it very volubly and at great length, but I've never read it myself. There is an afterword by Joyce Carol Oates! My sister hates things with afterwords by Joyce Carol Oates, but I don't necessarily. I might swap it out at the last minute for Sylvester by Georgette Heyer, which will probably be more lighthearted fun but isn't nearly as thick. Sadly, Ulysses and Sam Johnson are too large and too non-disposable, and will have to stay at home.

After a sumptuous supper of cold cereal, I had to restrain an urge to snatch at the food like a snarling mongrel. I tried a sip of the wine, a silky blend of apple and oak. Kick-ass private detectives hardly ever live like this. We're the Gallo aficionados of the jug-wine set.

I don't have much new to report.

My reading time has been severely curtailed and when I get a minute to myself, almost the only thing I want to read is my best girl Kinsey Millhone. She's a not-like-other-girls narrator done beautifully right, even if I'm never going to love her (typical of narrators in the 1980s? Or just of Sue Grafton?) habit of describing people by exactly how many pounds overweight they are. I love her prickliness and her deliberate, defensive self-isolation, and I love that it's impossible to offer her food in any context without her casually but compulsively reminding the reader of her own lazy self-catering. She's the perfect guide to her own endless string of ridiculously over-the-top misadventures (she's about to get marked for death AGAIN after getting chased around the desert by a hitman and losing both her car and her apartment to fire, and as if that weren't enough her landlord's hypochondriac brother is visiting and driving everyone crazy) and also the perfect guide to the petty insurance-fraud cases that pay her bills. She's not always the perfect guide to whatever supporting cast she's investigating, because her prejudices get in the way, but you won't get far in the private-eye game if you keep your good-faith goggles on all the time, will you?

In I is for Innocent, Kinsey has what she thinks is a clear case against some asshole who obviously murdered his wife, and she's sure she can sew it right up if she can just talk to enough people about what an asshole he was. But can it really be that simple? Of course it can't; we're only a third of the way in. Things are just starting to unravel. My expectations are high.

I did finish The Martian and it was just as delightful all the way through. In addition to the endless problem-solving, I also really enjoyed how transparently Mark was the star of Andy Weir's daydreams, right down to his fellow astronauts reminiscing about how great his stupid jokes were.

No promises for next week, either - but at least I made it to Wednesday this time?

What I've Finished Reading

Nero Wolfe occupies a weird place in my personal detective pantheon. I love the idea of Nero Wolfe; I like the character most of the time, and I enjoy Rex Stout's ability to make me instantly crave and then purchase a six-pack of beer, but I've hardly ever managed to finish one (a Wolfe book, that is; I have finished many a six-pack), and I've never not gotten bored in the middle. I don't know why! There's some intractable mismatch between my attention span and Rex Stout's plotting. I don't think it can be his fault. And I'm probably never going to be thrilled with Archie's narration, though I can see the appeal from a distance.

Too Many Cooks might represent the maximum of enjoyment it's possible for me to get out of a Nero Wolfe book, or close to it. Nero Wolfe is the guest of honor at a sort of culinary mini-Olympics in West Virginia, so he forces himself to leave his brownstone and get on a train For The Love of Cuisine. Naturally, wherever Wolfe goes, murder is sure to follow. If you like tracking depictions of race relations in formula fiction, you'll definitely want to give this a read; the investigation turns on the question of who, if anyone, would mistake a blacked-up white person for a black one, and on Wolfe's willingness to talk to the black resort staff on a more or less equal footing. Not so equal that he stops being a pompous curmudgeon, of course, because that would let all the Nero Wolfe fans down.

(Actually, now that I'm reading the Life of Samuel Johnson, I wonder how much of the Wolfe concept was based on read, remembered, or osmosed Life of Johnson anecdotes).

There are recipes in the back, all but one of which involve copious quantities of meat, which I don't normally eat. The one that's not meat is a sauce for the meat. Oh, well!

What I'm Reading Now

The Martian by Andy Weir is pure delight from the opening sentence on. If you've ever seen Apollo 13 and thought, "I'd like five hundred times more where that came from, only I'd like you to replace the charismatic actors with a curiously flat first-person narrator so there's less to distract from all the hot duct tape action," this is a book just for you! Mark Watney is trapped on Mars. His fellow astronauts think he's dead. Luckily, they dumped a bunch of supplies when they abandoned the mission, so he can make a ton of water out of fuel, mix human waste with Martian soil to grow potatoes, and who knows what all. Fifty pages in, I feel I have a pretty good map for the next 300: Mark discovers a problem relevant to his survival, Mark solves it with aplomb and duct tape, a new problem emerges from the solution, rinse twice and repeat. It combines the comfort of knowing exactly how the rest of the book is going to go with suspense about what will go wrong next and what ingenious solution Mark will describe for us in his log. I find this kind of thing incredibly charming and childishly soothing.

If your good opinion of humanity needs tempering but you don't feel ready to start reading the news, Suetonius' Twelve Caesars is a good compromise. The sources are dubious in the extreme (at one point he presents as "evidence" of a poisoning the allegation that the victim's heart failed to burn, and everyone knows that a heart won't burn if you soak it in poison) but the Caesars as recorded are a heartbreakingly vain and desperate bunch.

Also reading: Sue Grafton. I'm up to I is for Innocent; a fellow detective has died and left one of his cases to Kinsey, a stroke of professional luck since Kinsey got kicked out of her office last book by an efficiency expert. It's been a rough couple of months for Kinsey; she's been targeted by a cheap hitman and gotten her apartment blown up, in addition to almost losing her all-purpose dress in a car crash. I am very happy to report that Time calls I is for Innocent "Her best-crafted alphabetical mystery yet."

When am I Getting Back to Wednesday Posting?

I can't say for sure it'll be this Wednesday, but maybe it will! I've got lots of new books in spite of my reduced free time. One of them is an issue of Ms Magazine from 1974! Another is Ulysses. I love them both already.

What I've Finished Reading

Stardoc was exactly the book I wanted it to be, except when it really, really wasn't. Dr. Cherijo Grey Veil proves herself as a space doctor, does her best to ignore her creepy mad scientist dad, finds love, and learns to believe in herself. There's a pretty cool medical mystery for Cherijo to solve (unfortunately it's a deadly epidemic, but that's how medical mysteries are sometimes) and it ends with exciting plot twists and a flight into the unknown. The exobiology is inventive, the narrative voice is brisk and bright, the characters are on the flat side but not in a bad way. It's like watching a fun, light TV show set in space.

Except for the rape plot, which was like watching an incredibly stupid TV show set in space.

I'm putting this under a cut AND breaking out the whitetext because it's spoiling time!

( One thing leads to another )

Other than that, it's fun. On balance, I liked it a lot; if it weren't for Captain Convolution and his sorry telepath excuses I would have loved it. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to actively seek out the next book, or just wait and see if it falls into my path.

What I'm Reading Now

I wasted all my time complaining about Stardoc and now it's after noon and I have to get back to work. What I'm reading now is Love and the Loveless (subtitled A Soldier's Tale and the third Book of the War), which is knees-deep in mud, and A for Alibi, which is just as good as C for Corpse. Also Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome by Donald G. Kyle, which has a beautiful origin story: this guy was whipping up murderous tales of arena gore for his Gen Ed students, when one of them suddenly said, "What did they do with all the bodies?" He realized he had no idea what they did with all the bodies, and a book was born.

What I Plan to Read Next

Words, words, words.

What I've Finished Reading

Tarka the Otter is a remarkable book. It might actually be a little too resolutely non-anthropomorphic to be entertaining in the way you expect a novel written for humans to be entertaining, but it was also completely riveting, in a strange way, in that I was riveted even when I was bored.

Williamson set out to write a book about otters, and he didn't mean fantasy otters with language and a mythology, making plans and having conversations all day like a bunch of weirdly-shaped human dudes, he meant otters. Tarka and his kind spend their days eating, playing on the ground, learning to swim, playing in the water, learning to hunt, catching and eating fish, sleeping, running and hiding, raising cubs and forgetting them. The otters communicate in yips, hisses, licks and nips, but they don't converse. They don't analyze or wonder. They're otters. They occupy a disorientingly specific physical landscape, and they have a hell of a lot of fish to eat.

Did you know that there was an otter-hunting season? That people used to hunt otters with a pack of dogs? I didn't, but it's true. According to Wikipedia, the practice ended in the 1970s when otters got too scarce. I don't get the impression that Williamson is a fan, though he doesn't vilify the hunt, either. The dogs and the hunters are characters in this book, as much as any one of the animals is a character, and are treated exactly the same as the trees, fish, owls, badgers, roads, grasses, and so on, as features of the environment. A few of the more memorable otter-hounds, like the more memorable birds, get names; the humans don't, though they speak from time to time.

I was delighted to learn both that there is an audiobook narrated by David Attenborough, and that Gerry Durrell wrote the screenplay for a movie version.

C is for Corpse is an almost completely satisfying detective story right up through the brilliant reveal when all the pieces (including the title) come crashing into place. Unfortunately, this moment is immediately followed by Kinsey Millhone getting chased around a morgue by a syringe-wielding villain, who reveals his ax-craziness by, well, showing up with a syringe and chasing Kinsey around the morgue. It's all a little too Yakity Sax for me. The rest of the book is great, though, and Kinsey is great. I finished feeling glad that there are 24 more in the series.

If you like frequent reminders that a book was written in the 1980s, you'll find a yogurt-and-quiche-laden smorgasbord here: there are health food jokes, tracksuits as formal wear, microfilm-machine-induced nausea, "Chinese food syndrome," and my all-time favorite, the Obscene Phone Call.

What I'm Reading Now

Stardoc by S. L. Viehl. This is such a silly, exuberant space opera that I initially thought it was about thirty years older than it is (first published in 2000). That's not a criticism, it's exactly what I wanted out of a book called Stardoc. Cherijo Grey Veil is a young human physician who runs away from her overbearing mad-scientist father and a disappointingly space-racist future Earth to work in a SPACE HOSPITAL. The concept of a multi-species SPACE HOSPITAL was explored in some depth by James White's Sector General series, and the appeal of Stardoc is similar, though with less loving attention to alternative evolution and its discontents. Here there's a lot of focus on medical drama staples: red tape, interpersonal drama, and bizarre medical emergencies- but the asshole colleagues, gossipy nurses, administrative tools, and love interests are an assortment of non-humans, ranging in size from colossus to snail, all of whom have low expectations of Cherijo's ability to cope with diversity because she comes from the DNA-purity-obsessed space backwoods. In this world, Terrans are primarily known outside Terra for spitting on the ground when non-Terrans walk by. Cherijo is not a spitter, but her co-workers are wary just the same.

What I Plan to Read Next

Love and the Loveless is here! I also celebrated a minor book-reducing victory (all books off the floor, only two books lying flat on top of a row of shelved books) by immediately going out and buying three more books. One of them is A for Alibi by Sue Grafton.

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Entries tagged with sue grafton

The Darling Comfort of My Wednesday

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To Dream the Impossible Wednesday

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No Rest for the Wednesday

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