Choices
As I have mentioned before, I am an enthusiastic reader of mysteries of all kinds. I enjoy series featuring one lead detective or partners, with private eyes or amateur sleuths; and I enjoy police procedurals, legal mysteries, stuff that might be considered thrillers rather than straight-out mysteries, and even the occasional cozy. In short, my mystery tastes are pretty eclectic. And in general I am not one to shy away from stuff that can be graphic, although I don’t specifically seek it out. But everybody has their limits, and mine seems to be that I don’t want to read things that are unrelentingly dour and depressing.
After discovering the Will Trent series on TV and thoroughly enjoying it, I decided to check out Karin Slaughter’s original creation of this character and his world, and although I found the writing and story-telling to be good, I struggled with all the differences between the written and televised versions, ultimately deciding that I vastly prefer the TV show to the books and choosing not to read any more of them. This is almost sacrilegious for me, but…there it is.
I did, however, decide that I would explore some of Slaughter’s pre-Will books, so I picked up Blindsighted, the first in the Grant County series featuring pediatrician and part-time small-town coroner Sara Linton. The description sounded intriguing, and I always enjoy a female protagonist. The fact that she’s a doctor rather than a detective is a nice twist, and the connection to the law via her ex-husband, police chief Jeff Tolliver, keeps everything legitimate in terms of solving cases. In short, it sounded like something I might like. But there were a few words in the Goodreads description to which I should have paid more attention: brutal, twisted, macabre, sadistic, malevolent.
I didn’t, unfortunately, and once I got started I felt obligated to give the book a shot. In the absence of any other book waiting in the wings, I kept reading and finished it, but I have decided that the books of Karin Slaughter aren’t for me; the subject matter is just too much. This being the first in the series, I can only wonder where she goes next, after a story this grueling. I used to like Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta books—likewise headed by a medical examiner—but had to stop reading them when they got too dark. This one was too dark out of the gate.
I think there also has to be a balance in books like this: If there are going to be horrifying murders committed by deranged serial killers, you need a certain amount of balance provided by a stable and focused protagonist. That was what ultimately made me turn aside from Cornwell and, now, Slaughter: Not only were the murders gruesome and strange, but the protagonists and all those surrounding them were angry, sad, depressed, and distressed. I can take one or the other, but the entire experience can’t be an unrelenting downer.
While I have always believed that people should read outside their comfort zones in order to discover things they never knew they loved, I also believe that it’s good to be able to narrow your choices by deciding what’s okay with you and what’s not. I just found one author who is unfortunately not, even though she seems talented and writes prolifically. Too bad, but sometimes despite doing everything right, a writer isn’t for you. I’ll move on and keep looking.
Sweetness and lies
The description of Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame gives off major cozy vibes: Jenny, a woman of 77, happily part of a couple for 59 years with her beloved Bernard, 83, feels a little restless settling further and further into the undeviating routine of their retirement. She takes an unexpected opportunity to apply to be a contestant on the television show “Britain Bakes” (yes, think The Great British Bake-off), to see if life still offers the potential for meaning and adventure. She enjoys the new-found independence of her choice, but it brings up some old memories that begin to affect both her and her relationship…
It sounded ideal: I like baking and recipes, and I like seeing older people charging towards life rather than sinking into it. But…I’m going to quote another Goodreads reviewer here:
“I feel tricked. I wanted ‘elderly woman finds herself through entering a baking contest.’ Instead, I got ‘elderly woman reminisces about the most traumatic thing that ever happened to her (which she’s kept a secret for 60 years) while participating in a baking contest.'”
The trouble started for me when Jenny decides to keep her application a secret from her husband until she knows for sure that she got in, or at least has a good chance. I didn’t have such a problem with that—you don’t want to get people’s hopes up, or deal with their expectations, for that matter—but the way she went about it was inconsiderate and rather thoughtless (not to mention incredibly inept), and leads her husband to believe that she’s hiding something serious, like a life-threatening illness. And when she realizes that is the conclusion he has drawn, she doesn’t come clean and put his mind at ease! I began to like and respect Jenny a little less.
Then we discover that there’s a much bigger secret she’s been keeping from Bernard (and everyone else) for the entire 59 years of her marriage, as the baking of some of her old family recipes brings up memories of her life at 17. She claims that she has kept the secret all this time in order to protect him, but we figure out pretty quickly that it’s to protect herself from being looked at differently by him and by her other close family members. Which didn’t track at first for me, because the secret would explain so much—but once I realized in what way the trauma has shaped their subsequent lives, I liked Jenny even less.
I would really, really like to go into the specifics of why I was kind of horrified by the ramifications of her secret, but I don’t want to give away a central plot point. I will say that I felt like she robbed her beloved (and charmingly portrayed) husband of his agency in a particularly cruel way by never taking him into her confidence.
But…I did thoroughly enjoy the baking narrative, with its descriptions of such delectables as Battenburg Cake and Treacle Tarts; the interactions with her extended family and with the people she met and in some cases befriended on the show; and the descriptions of the filming of the show’s production. Reading those parts immersed me in the bake-off experience, and if the book had been exclusively about that I think I might have liked it better. Many people gave this book five stars, with few being as curmudgeonly as I have been here. Perhaps I am overreacting…but I didn’t like the lies, the implications of Jenny’s emotions about the traumatic event, or the way it finally resolves, which seemed a little too pat.
You will have to decide for yourself whether you want to allow yourself to be whisked away into this story, pun intended.
An addendum: This is my 500th post on The Book Adept Blog!
National Book Lovers’ Day
Here are some of the books I love. You are welcome to respond to this by listing some of the books you love, in the comments. These are not in any particular order, and it is by no means a complete list, just a random assortment—a combination of books that occur to me when “books you love” comes at me in a Facebook post, and a scan of my Goodreads files for five stars.)
The Terrorists of Irustan, by Louise Marley
Green Dolphin Street, by Elizabeth Goudge
The Wee Free Men (and sequels), by Terry Pratchett
To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis
The Beka Cooper trilogy (Terrier, Bloodhound, Mastiff), by Tamora Pierce
The Queen’s Thief series, by Megan Whalen Turner
Found in a Bookshop, by Stephanie Butland
The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett
The Obernewtyn Chronicles, by Isobelle Carmody
The Farseer books, by Robin Hobb
Strange the Dreamer, by Laini Taylor
Vicious, by V. E. Schwab
The Last Dragonslayer series, by Jasper Fforde
The Scorpio Races, by Maggie Stiefvater
Memory and Dream, by Charles de Lint
The Earthsea books, by Ursula K. LeGuin
Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Blue Sword, by Robin McKinley
Mary Stewart’s Arthurian saga
The Snow Queen, by Joan D. Vinge
The Convenient Marriage, by Georgette Heyer
Tai-Pan, by James Clavell
The Persian Boy, by Mary Renault
The Rich Are Different, by Susan Howatch
In This House of Brede, by Rumer Godden
Random Harvest, by James Hilton
Holding Smoke, by Elle Cosimano
Lacey Flint mysteries, by Sharon Bolton
We Begin at the End, by Chris Whitaker
Harper Connelly mysteries, by Charlaine Harris
What Came Before He Shot Her, by Elizabeth George
Dublin Murder Squad books, by Tana French
The Fifth Sacred Thing, by Starhawk
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig
The Lock Artist, by Steve Hamilton
The Language of Flowers, by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Demolition Angel, by Robert Crais
Kill the Messenger, by Tami Hoag
Hold Me Closer, Necromancer, by Lish McBride
Scarlet Feather, by Maeve Binchy
Coming Home, by Rosamunde Pilcher
The Far Pavilions, by M. M. Kaye
The Feast of All Saints, by Anne Rice
The Just City, by Jo Walton
The Family Tree, by Sheri S. Tepper
Dune, by Frank Herbert
Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis
Just to put these in a little further context: These are books with longevity (for me). That is to say, I didn’t just recognize their merit and give them five stars in the moment, I returned to them at least once and, in some cases, again and again to reread and re-experience the story-telling that is always the foremost in importance to me; and they are also books I tend to think of when someone else asks for a recommendation. So while some of them may be “significant” books while others may seem like trivial choices, for me they resonated somehow, enough that I wanted to revisit them myself and share them with others. And again, partial list! I’m sure there are some absolute gems I left out and will later think, Oops! how could I forget THAT one?
Navola
That was…an experience.
When I was 20 percent in, I actually wrote on Paolo Bacigalupi’s Facebook page that I was enjoying his world-building and the use of language and nuance in his new novel, Navola. (As has been previously commented upon, I am a stickler for authentic world-building.) He responded that he had enjoyed creating them, and I can believe that, because there is a lot of loving detail in this book. As it turns out, maybe too much? At first it reminded me of my best-beloved fantasy series, The Queen’s Thief, by Megan Whelan Turner, and also gave me the feel of Ursula LeGuin’s masterpiece of pseudo-historical fiction, Malafrena. But as it went on, I felt so overwhelmed by the discussion of every niggling detail (and the need to figure out what was meant by all the semi-Italian, sometimes Latin-based lingo) that it almost felt like being back in English class, being forced to read a classic work about which I felt reluctant, since it wasn’t my choice. I couldn’t help but contrast this with Bacigalupi’s excellent Shipbreaker series, in which he masterfully paints the scene using just what he needs, and then jumps full-force into the story.
The world of Navola seems to be based on a loosely historical evocation of city-states from the Italian Renaissance. There is all the intrigue of the Borgias, with both front-facing and behind-the-scenes manipulation of absolutely everyone by everyone else, except by our protagonist, Davico, son and heir to the wealthy and successful merchant banker, Devonaci di Regula da Navola, who is the power behind the titular heads of state of Navola. Di Regulai rules by maintaining a calculated balance between greed and politics, alternately controlling and rewarding his many clients within Navola and in all the surrounding states. But despite Davico’s training in all the arts both physical (knife- and sword-fighting, equestrian, etc.) and mental/political (negotiation, the reading of faces and body language, the subtle acquisition of background information), he remains largely ignorant (or innocent) of the real breadth of knowledge necessary to step up to the challenge presented by his father—to rule Navola as Devonaci has done. Davico is a tragic hero: His honesty and authenticity is a liability in the world to which he has been born, and although he toys with rejecting his heritage, he is not strong enough to stand up to the culture within which he is embedded, nor to the expectations of his father.
Although I have always been a proponent of thorough world-building, I found myself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the information Bacigalupi attempts to convey throughout this nearly 600-page tome. There are multiple information dumps—my least favorite parts of the book—and even in the course of the sometimes exciting and action-packed scenes, the “behind-the-hand” translations of the language, the explanations about the involved parties, and the setting of context weigh down the actual events to the point where I felt I was constantly digging for the meat of the story.
There is a fantasy element (introduced on the cover by the depiction of a dragon’s eye, an actual artifact Devonaci keeps on his desk in his library), but while its presence is strong in the parts of the story in which it is included, those are few and far between. Its significance to Davico is toyed with early on, and then mostly recedes until near the end of the book, almost past the point where anyone would care.
There is also a grimness to this story that may be disturbing to some; in addition to the mental manipulation, there is no escape from murder, rape, or graphic revenge amidst the noble families’ bloody pursuit of power. It’s not quite as overwhelming as, say, Jay Kristoff’s Nevernight Chronicles, but it has its moments of queasy-making horror.
The real fault I have to find with this book, however, is the complete lack of foreshadowing by anyone—the author, the publisher, Goodreads—that this is merely the opener for a continuing story! I began to realize, at about the 80 percent mark, that this would have to be the case, because the events took such a back seat to the development of the venue itself that there would be no time, unless it was criminally truncated, to resolve the hero’s situation and provide a satisfactory ending, and indeed I was right; it’s one of those cliffhangers where the hero lives to fight another day. It’s not abrupt, but the story is by no means at an end and, if it is, then I would have to say, What was the point of all that? Navola is too well written to give it a bad rating, but if, when perusing the teaser for the book on Goodreads, it had said “volume one,” I would have approached it with a completely different attitude that wouldn’t have left me feeling duped.
Maybe the lack of this was the author’s way of leaving himself an out; if the first book doesn’t go over so well, do you really want to invest the time in writing a sequel? But I am here to say, Paolo Bacigalupi, you owe us all the rest of the story, having made us endure through the laborious stick-upon-stone of the world you built to house it!
Funny story
I was headed towards a long, intense perusal of Paolo Bacigalupi’s latest, Navola, but just as I was about to open it, the library popped up in my email to tell me this Emily Henry book was now available for checkout, and I decided to prioritize a shorter, lighter read in the midst of ranting about the Republican convention and scolding Democrats trying to ditch Biden in a last-minute bid for the nonexistent “perfect” candidate. And I’m glad I did.
I was surprised by this one, because I have read four other Emily Henry books and enjoyed them all, but so far Funny Story is my favorite. It’s surprising because a bunch of die-hard Emily fans gave it a low rating and found many things to pick at about the protagonists, the set-up, the story, the writing…not a bestie for many.
I may have been prejudiced by a few things: Daphne, the protagonist, is a somewhat buttoned-up children’s librarian. Miles, the other MC, is scruffy, mischievous, but also deep and troubled, and dead sexy. I also liked the opening premise: Daphne is engaged to Peter, and the wedding is imminent. Peter has a lifelong best friend named Petra, who is dating/living with Miles. Everything is on track when Peter and Petra decide, at his bachelor’s party no less (to which she was, of course, invited), that they are in love with each other, and dump Daphne and Miles. Peter then gives Daphne a week to move out of “their” house, to which he holds exclusive title and, given her limited options as a poorly paid librarian (trust me, there is no other kind), she moves into the second bedroom of Miles’s apartment. So yeah, she’s now living with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex…
The next inevitable step is that Daphne, motivated by panic (and by revenge fantasies), intimates to Peter that she and Miles are a couple, and then she has to confess this to Miles. He is surprisingly sanguine about this lie, and promptly starts taking couples selfies to post on Daphne’s social media. And…you can probably guess the rest, although it’s nicely written and plotted, with a fair number of roadblocks in various directions, and also features some wonderful side characters, such as Miles’s sister Julia and Daphne’s new friend Ashleigh, and explores familial issues that illustrate why the MCs are the way they are.
The title may have been misleading for some, hence the disappointment when the book didn’t turn out to be particularly humorous (although it has its moments). It alludes to the story that all couples have and, if it’s a good one, like to tell, about the moment they met. Peter was fond of recounting his with Daphne, but it turns out not to hold a candle to how Daphne and Miles start their relationship. I really liked this book, beginning to end; some of Henry’s others have lagged for me at key points, but this one kept me going, start to finish. Don’t listen to the naysayers on Goodreads—check it out!
Book pharmacy
The pandemic did something to our libraries from which I’m not sure they will ever recover completely: It made the in-person experience first precarious, then impossible, and then precarious again, as libraries first changed policies to prevent close contact, then completely closed their doors, and finally opened again only to discover that their patrons were either still being cautious or had completely changed their methods of book access and weren’t readily returning to their former habits.
My experience has been particularly acute, since, in the year after the formal lockdown when we were all mostly still staying away from any public place with more than half a dozen people in it, my disability began to ramp up to the point where making my weekly rounds to the market, the post office, the feed store, and the library became at first painful and then fairly impossible. The only time I go to the library nowadays is if I am booked to teach an art workshop at one of the local branches, and it takes me two hours to get ready and a double dose of Tylenol to weather climbing in and out of the car four times (leave-arrive, leave-arrive) and walking from the parking lot to the meeting room to set up for contour drawing or watercolor or T-shirt stenciling.
My previous library habits were filled with serendipity for my reading life; I had a particular routine that varied but usually included most of the same checkpoints. I would return my books and then look at the return shelves to see what “everyone else” had been reading and whether any of it looked intriguing to me. I would check the new books shelves and grab at least one or two unknown and untried authors. I would look to see if the latest volume in half a dozen mystery series I read had arrived, or if there was new science fiction, and I would visit the YA section for fantasy, because some of the best fantasy writers live there. And if all that failed to garner me at least half a dozen books to take home, I would stroll languidly up and down the aisles, looking for beloved authors, and would consider re-reading one of their books; but then I would also look around them on the shelves to see who I might discover because they were shelved close by. That’s how, while looking to see if there were any Rumer Goddens I hadn’t read, I noticed and borrowed the books of Robert Goddard. That’s how, while standing by the shelf containing Betty Smith and Dodie Smith, I found A Simple Plan, by Scott Smith. The books of Robert Heinlein led me to the Dune saga by Frank Herbert “next door.” In short, I can’t say enough about the expansion of one’s reading life through the luxury of browsing.
In my readers’ advisory class at UCLA, I used the book Reading Still Matters, by Catherine Sheldrick Ross, as one of the texts; Ross and her colleagues did multiple in-depth surveys and studies of thousands of readers to discover how they select, but I never realized, until I just now took the time to describe my own exact experience, that I almost perfectly characterize the habits of the successful readers she catalogues. Part of that book is also dedicated to the purpose of discovering what happens when a person’s own habits and methods fail them and they are flailing about trying to find a book. And now, I can relate to that, too….
These days, being so nearly housebound as I am, my choices suffer from a certain paucity. Although I belong to a couple of Facebook groups of avid readers, most of the time they all seem to be reading the same two dozen or so books, many of which are not to my taste. I have never been a peruser of the bestseller or award-winner lists in the newspaper or online, mostly because long experience has shown me that the former are not as good as their publisher’s blurbs declare, while the latter have won awards simply because some esoteric bunch of people decided they should, and we apparently have little in common! So without my library routine, I struggle to find what I want, just as much as any more naive reader with fewer developed resources. I wasn’t conscious of this until my annual Goodreads challenge (how many books you read in a year) began to number fewer and fewer books, mostly because I am not finding the ones that would hold my attention and keep me reading on a continuous basis. One year, while working full-time (at the library) with a long commute, I nonetheless managed to clock more than 150 books; but last year I struggled to complete 80, despite being retired and mostly at loose ends. Part of it, of course, is a certain lack of concentration that comes with my physical challenges, but I blame most of it on the functional lack of choice.
Being a readers’ advisor carries a certain amount of responsibility with it to keep up with current literary output while having a deep base of older choices on which to fall back, and I confess that I’m not as good at it as I have been in the past. But I still manage, in the Facebook reading groups (and sometimes on Goodreads) to find the books people want, if they give the slightest bit of personal information that would lead me to their preferences. And that brings me to the book I am currently reading (at last! you may be exclaiming with relief), which is called Found in a Bookshop, by Stephanie Butland, and which is resonating so closely with certain parts of my own personal experience that I am finding it positively cathartic.
I didn’t know, until I had already reached chapter 11, that it is actually a sequel to Butland’s book The Lost for Words Bookshop. But several Goodreads reviewers said you could read the second as a stand-alone, and I somehow couldn’t bring myself to stop, once started, so I’ll get to the first one when I am done with the second. (EDITED TO ADD: I apparently did read the first book, back in 2018, and gave it five stars. I didn’t review it here, since I hadn’t yet started this blog, and I don’t remember a thing about it! That’s kinda scary….)
A couple of Goodreads reviewers groused about the book being set during the Covid lockdown (“outdated” said one, while the other elaborated: “Boring. Too many characters. Hate Covid books. Could do without the author’s opinions. Glad I only spent 99 cents.”) but that was precisely what I loved most about it. Butland so perfectly captures the feeling of being isolated from everyone, from standing on one side of a door but not allowed to open it, the nervous retreat from other people when encountering them in public places, the quiet of the streets with nothing but essential traffic…it brought the whole thing back with complete clarity. I suppose some people wouldn’t want to experience that again, and while I didn’t precisely crave it, I found it comforting, in a way, to recognize that this author’s experience (and that of her characters) so perfectly echoed my own.
The description of the pervasive quiet of the bookshop without any of its customers and the nervousness of its proprietor and her employees as the lockdown went from weeks to months with no sign of abatement was evocative and painful. The vignettes of the various people who were tenuously connected through their previous status as customers of the bookshop were likewise poignant and familiar. But the thing that really got me, in the end, was that this was a story not just about Covid but about readers’ advisory. At some point, after one long-time patron mails a check and requests that the bookshop send her books each week—leaving the selection up to the staff—the owner, Loveday Carew, decides that she will enlist her employee, Kelly, to craft more of a presence on social media and then to advertise their services as a “book pharmacy.” Basically, they tell the town of York that they will be happy to select books for people who aren’t sure what it is they want or need, a sort of reading prescription, and either deliver them to their porch via bicycle, make them available for pickup, or send them in the post. And then the emails and letters start to arrive, some requesting specific genres or types of reading but others simply describing the feeling the reader wishes to experience and hoping the bookshop staff can figure out what book will produce that. The books couldn’t cure Covid, but they could do something about fear, boredom, loneliness, and the desire for escape. It was like this author took my favorite area of study—and my life’s preferred work—and laid it all out on the pages of her book.
In addition to all of this synchronicity with my own life’s experience, I love that in the “prescriptions” the bookshop staff write out for their customers I discovered at least a dozen intriguing titles with which I was unfamiliar, and which I promptly noted and added to my Goodreads “want to read” list. After doubling back to peruse the first book in this duology, I can scarcely wait to explore that extra list of smart suggestions from an author who has obviously done her homework. Great work, Ms. Butland!
Retrograde
The blurb for this book describes it as “funny and heartfelt.” It’s also supposed to be a romance about a woman who writes romances for a living and wants to open a romance-only bookstore with her two best friends, also authors. So you would think I would love it, or at least find it charming and/or germane to my interests. I’m beginning to think all the books I want to read have banded together to evade me on purpose, leaving me with a bunch of hopeful choices that don’t quite pan out.
Penelope in Retrograde, by Brooke Abrams, isn’t a bad book, and I didn’t hate it; but it’s too slight to make much of an impression. It’s also annoying in some specific ways. I feel like the author is trying too hard to include all the romance memes, from the meet-cute to the friends-to-enemies-to-friends, and throwing in a conflicted familial situation to spice it all up—none of which turns out to be satisfying.
The main character, Penelope (Penny) has been, not exactly estranged from her family, but out of regular contact for about a decade. Her father is a workaholic businessman in finance; her twin, Phoebe, graduated with honors from college and works in his firm; and Penny has always been the odd one out. Phoebe is successful, Phoebe has a relationship, Phoebe lives close to her parents and sees them on a regular basis, while Penny lives more than half the state of California away from them, and writes romance novels. She is so insecure about her lack of acceptance from her family (her mother wants her to dress better and get a husband and maybe have some kids) that she hasn’t even told them the pen name she uses to write her books.
Once upon a time, Penny was briefly married to Smith, with whom she grew up. She had a better relationship with his family than she does with hers, and mourns the loss of them more than the marriage. The present-day setting of the book is the Thanksgiving holiday, for which Penny is finally returning home after 10 years of avoiding every family gathering. And why is she gracing them with her presence? She needs money to open her bookstore. This immediately made me think poorly of her, since the only reason she’s willing to connect again is to get the funding.
Karma trips her up when she phones for a rideshare from the airport and ends up sharing the Úber with her ex, Smith, who is also returning home to spend the holiday with his sister. Penny then discovers two things: Her parents have invited a young and handsome colleague from her father’s company to dinner, because they never give up matchmaking (even after 10 years of no contact?), and Smith is dating someone new. So Penny immediately decides it’s a good idea for Martin, the set-up guy, to pretend to be her boyfriend. The problem is, her whole family knows he’s not, so he has to convince Smith without revealing what he’s doing in front of her family. The whole thing is cloyingly cute. (Sorry, that was all a little spoiler-y.)
Basically, I agreed with one Goodreads reviewer who said that the story tries way too hard to be funny. Penny’s compulsive avoidance of any genuine conversational moment by turning everything into a joke is grating, while the ride-share scene stretches out forever and is patently silly. Penny’s narrative paints her as the victim of her family’s rigid expectations, but her own behavior shows her up as kind of selfish, and definitely as tone-deaf to their needs as she feels they are to hers. And everybody fights nonstop, which is likewise wearing.
The other thing about this story is that it’s so, so easy. Martin immediately falls in with her plans; Smith turns out not to be plotting what she thinks he is; her father has changed drastically in completely implausible ways while her mother has remained distressingly static; and Nana Rosie as the comic relief is too, too coy. And even though her sister is justifiably irate at how Penny is constantly stealing her thunder, forgiveness also comes easily. Despite Penny raging about how they are all hostile to her, everybody cooperates with hardly a whimper, and then when a stressful life event occurs, Penny transforms into someone else and we have a qualified HEA like all good romance novels. I was surprised when I discovered I had already turned the last page, because I kept expecting things to become, well, more. The desire for more seems to be the one bell I keep ringing lately.
Can anybody recommend something to me that will generate some genuine feelings of joy when I read it?
Giving up Cheetos
If you read only my last couple of posts, you would conclude that I am an overly critical nonreader rather than a lover of books who wants to share my experiences! I assure you that’s not the case, but…hmm.
Last year I read The Housemaid and The Housemaid’s Secret, by Freida McFadden, and likened them to Cheetos: Addictive and entertaining but not in any way subtle or nutritionally redemptive. At the conclusion of my review of the two books, I commented that I was looking forward to book #3 in the junk food franchise. The Housemaid is Watching released a couple of weeks ago, on June 11th, and somehow there was an E-book copy available from my library’s catalog (maybe that should have seemed more revelatory), so I checked it out and got ready to pick up Millie’s story the minute I was done with Veridian’s and with Walt’s (see last two blog posts).
I went to Goodreads and read the synopsis, which places us 11 years after the activities of book #2; Millie has married Enzo and they have a couple of kids, and after scraping and saving for years they have managed to buy a house in a somewhat snooty suburban neighborhood. Millie is thrilled to have finally achieved this pinnacle, but soon, inevitably, things begin to go wrong, starting with weird neighbors, children acting out, shady/skeezy behavior from her husband…in other words, typical Millie World.
I was all set to start indulging in a feast of salty orange puffery when I paused to read some reviews. The first one was a five, but the rest…well…some adjectives included “underwhelming,” “unbelievable,” “messy,” “predictable”…. As a result, what this turns out to be is not a review but a renunciation of a certain level of junk food. Some of the complaints served to remind me of the frankly unbelievable plot points from the previous book and my reaction to them, and I decided to follow my instincts with reading the way I have learned to with actual food: Seek out something that has both substance and the flavor factor—in other words, get the yummy potato chips that are kettle-cooked in the good oil and are doused in half the salt, and forego the fake cheesy stuff that will tantalize but not satisfy.
I guess I now have a new category: Instead of “DNF” for “Did Not Finish,” it’s “DNS” for “Did Not Start.” It won’t count for my Goodreads total for the year, unfortunately. Now to scope out my next book with high hopes for a good report….
Colonel Custard…
On the plains of Montana, with a Remington…
I couldn’t resist! One of the reviewers on Goodreads called it “Custard’s Last Stand” (without irony), and the vision of a Clue board swam through my mind….
I am, of course, talking about Craig Johnson’s 16th book in his Walt Longmire series, in which Walt is called in to explore a possible art heist of the famous painting Custer’s Last Fight, by Casilly Adams, which was supposedly lost in a fire in 1946, although a lithograph copy of that painting was the most reproduced print of the 19th and 20th centuries.
I was actually pleased by the prospect of a somewhat less fraught plot for a Longmire novel, given the bad reaction I had to #14 (Depth of Winter) and my so-so response to #15 (Land of Wolves). I felt like Johnson betrayed all the essential ideals of the character in #14, and that the following book was a confusing mess because of the fallout in Walt’s life from his previous experiences, so I was hoping this one would bring us back to “normal” Longmire life. I also, of course, love reading any book that’s about painting. I hadn’t realized, until a friend mentioned reading the latest in this series, that I am actually four books behind, Walt’s story having progressed to #20, which just came out last month, so I have some catching up to do. And whether I chose to do so hinged on this book, Next to Last Stand.
At this moment the book is looking like my last stand with this series. I opened it up and started reading, and the initial scene in which we meet the inhabitants of the Wyoming Home for Soldiers & Sailors was such a disaster that I closed the book again and put it in my “abandoned for now” category on Goodreads. I was astonished by this, because one thing Craig Johnson has always been good at is carefully crafting the voices of his characters so that they are distinctive and memorable. The extended exchange between the group of veterans sitting in their wheelchairs out by the highway was not only stilted and hard to believe as an actual conversation, but each person’s dialogue jumped back and forth between formal and informal English within the same sentence, with the effect of jerking the reader out of the flow of the story with every jarring transition. I know that to some, grammar issues will sound like a ridiculous reason for not reading a book, but I honestly couldn’t get past this scene into the story.
Has Johnson changed editors? Has he quit vetting his own books as extensively? Has he gotten bored and lost his motivation? I can’t say, but this is the third book of his I have found problematic. In writing circles, the Rule of Three is a storytelling principle that suggests people better understand concepts, situations, and ideas in groups of three. But for me, it works equally to say that if you are disappointed by a storyteller three times in a row, it’s time to move on. I’m sad to do so, but I’ll have to find out about the fate of this painting some other way.
(To my friends who also read this series, am I missing out? Should I change my mind? Speak up if you have a different perspective!)
Heists and capers
I am a big fan of heist plots, particularly if they are art-related. When I was a teen librarian I enjoyed the Ally Carter Heist Society books, and really liked the crew and their capers portrayed by Leigh Bardugo in the Six of Crows duology. One of my favorite fantasies is the Queen’s Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner, and I also thoroughly enjoy more mainstream heist books like The Great Train Robbery, by Michael Crichton, or The Lock Artist, by Steve Hamilton, which includes the ideal combination of safe-cracking and the creation of graphic novels. I also enjoy all the movies in this sub-genre, such as The Italian Job, The Thomas Crown Affair, Tower Heist, Baby Driver, and the Ocean franchise. And I just finished binge-watching the TV series White Collar, which follows a thief and forger who works with the FBI in order to achieve a limited amount of freedom (he’s not in jail, but wears an anklet that limits his radius to two square miles of New York City). So when I saw that one of last week’s Amazon Kindle First Reads was an art forgery mystery, I enthusiastically grabbed Veridian Sterling Fakes It, by Jennifer Gooch Hummer.
I won’t say that I was disappointed; it was sufficiently populated with interesting characters and situations and art-related historical facts that I read it with a certain amount of pleasure. But ultimately the book never really figured out what it wanted to be, and this lack of definitive direction made it a somewhat meandering and diffuse story with a lot of implausible elements and some clichés I could have done without. There are multiple different directions in which the author takes a few steps and then draws back instead of fully committing, which proves to be a frustrating narrative to read.
Veridian Sterling is a recent grad from the Rhode Island School of Design, with the typical hopes of everyone who excels in their art school classes and hopes that will translate into finding a gallery to display their work, interest (and sales) from the world of art aficionados, making a name for themselves…. And, like most art school grads, she quickly discovers that none of that is going to be forthcoming and that if she wants a place to live and food on her plate, she’d better find a “day job” to sustain her while she works on the rest of the dream. Veri has a job in the beginning at a laundromat/dry cleaners, but when she loses that she takes a position as an assistant at an art gallery that has rejected her paintings. The owner happens to be a former friend and roommate of Veri’s mother’s, when her mother was herself at RISD, and she is all too obviously modeled on Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada but without the icy demeanor and impeccable taste or, in fact, any redeeming qualities whatsoever. I found this character to be unnecessarily shrill and unlikeable and wished the author had chosen a different option.
We get a lot of stuff about working in the gallery and living her life, meeting an intriguing guy (the driver for a wealthy art dealer who visits the gallery regularly), discovering things she didn’t know about her mother, and various interactions with her best friend, all of which are overlaid with a level of stress that should be building up to something but takes an awfully long time to do so. By the time we finally get to the crux of the story (the mystery, the art crimes, the revelations), we’re just a teensy bit exhausted by the angst and the minutiae. Said plot point doesn’t even arrive until well past halfway through the book, and turns out not to be much of a mystery. While there was a build-up to what should have been the high drama, it felt like the stress level remained almost constant throughout, which did a big disservice to the revelatory bits.
In fact, while reading this book I was constantly reminded of one with a somewhat similar plot that I read and thoroughly enjoyed a few years back (in fact, I liked it enough to read it three times in six years!), so I’ll put in a plug for that one here. It’s The Art Forger, by Barbara A. Shapiro (see my review by clicking the title link), and that author achieved what I think this one was hoping to accomplish, by smoothly combining the multiple levels of mystery, art, and moral dilemma. One of the mistakes I think Hummer made was in attempting to include the slightly goofy humor and irony of such books as Finlay Donovan Is Killing It, by Elle Cosimano, but in trying to be all things to all readers, she couldn’t successfully pull together all the elements to make it work. So if you want a fairly lightweight version of the art forgery world, read this book; if you’d prefer an in-depth exploration of the same theme, go for Shapiro’s instead.
Finally, Christopher Booker famously made the case in 2004 for there being only seven basic narrative plots in all of storytelling and, having just finished watching White Collar, I do wonder whether part of this plot was a result of that coincidental symmetry or else this author did some binge-watching of her own….
The Book Adept 