Bleak House, by Charles Dickens

I picked this up for $5 from Audible.com during a sale they had, and I had NO idea how big this really was! I think it has turned out to be something like 31 hours of narration, which is practically a lifetime in comparison to most audio books. So I guess it was about the biggest bargain I have ever found in audio books, and that includes the ones from the library!

Where does one start with Bleak House? I have read three or four of Dickens' shorter novels, but never this one, which showed up on one of those questionable lists of 100 Books You Should Have Read But Probably Didn't. Add to that the fact that as a lawyer, I was ethically obligated to read Dickens' polemic against the English court system, and I felt I had to wade in.

First off, although Bleak House is famous for the unending lawsuit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the case itself plays very little part in the bulk of the novel. Instead, the suit serves as the thread which connects all the characters from all different classes of society, allowing Dickens to comment on everyone from country gentry all the way down to the starving street orphans, while showing how they are interconnected. Because make no mistake, Dickens' main topic is not about the injustice of a Chancery case as much as it is the injustice of poverty and the persistent failure of England to care for its own.

The central figure of this novel is Esther Summerson, who narrates most of the action of the book. Her narrative is interleaved with an omniscient third person narrator, whose voice is quite arch and satiric. Esther is the sort of naive narrator who stands in for the reader, watching as the plot unfolds without fully comprehending all the elements at work. Esther is also a model Victorian woman, cheerful, kind, uncomplaining, generous, and loving. While modern readers will doubtless find her unbelievable, I see her as Dickens' demonstration of the Ideal Woman: she constantly puts others' needs ahead of her own, she strictly forbids herself to be mournful over things like her disfigurement by smallpox, or her loss of her love. The other ingenue of the book, Ada Clare, is similarly idealized, to the point where her presence in the book is fairly negligible.

Dickens' has been disparaged for his apparent inability to write believable women--Lucy from "A Tale of Two Cities" is almost farcical in her passivity. Esther comes off better than that, because we see so much through her narrative, and she is given the opportunity to be honest even when it is not flattering. Ada is pure Lucy, a lovely young girl who marries improvidently but for the best of intentions, and while it is her husband who actually dies, Ada is possibly even more the victim than he is.

Ada and her cousin, Richard Carstone, begin the book as wards of Chancery, as they are apparently orphans who stand to inherit under the wills of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. As far as I know, there is no backstory to these two--they do not exist until they burst onto the scene nearly as adults. Their cousin John Jarndyce, has petitioned the court to have them live with him, and he simultaneously takes on Esther Summerson as his ward and companion for Ada. John Jarndyce has refused to take any interest in the Chancery case, and would withdraw from it if that were possible. He has claims which are reportedly contrary to the claims of Ada and Richard, but he takes them into his home in order to counteract the effects of the suit.

Dickens wrote Bleak House as a serial which ran for some 18 months, and the plot is rather a soap opera as a result. Held together by the mechanism of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the narrative wanders widely. The highest ranking characters are Sir Leicester and Lady Honoria Dedlock, landed gentry from Lincolnshire. Lady Dedlock is at the height of the fashionable world, and bored to death with it. Oddly, Sir Leicester's attorney, the malevolent Tulkinghorn, turns up with some documents for them to review in the Jarndyce case. Lady Dedlock notices a certain distinctive handwriting on one of the documents and asks who wrote it. (Oh yeah! This was before copy machines!)

Tulkinghorn notices this unusual behavior, and becomes alert to what it might mean. He spends his considerable intellect ferreting out her secret. It was an error on her part to even mention it, because Tulkinghorn is a collector of secrets, and she is not safe, especially if her secret is in conflict with her gusband.

The secret, of course, is that before she married Sir Leicester, Lady Dedlock had a lover and bore a child, who grew up to be Esther Summerson. The handwriting was of Captain Hawdon, Esther's father, who is found dead early in the book. At that point he was a poor opium addict who went by the name "Nemo," which is Latin for "nobody."

Nemo's milieu introduces a number of other characters: Mr. Krook, his landlord; Miss Flite, the other roomer and a suitor in Chancery (but apparently not in Jarndyce); Jo, the ragamuffin boy who sweeps; Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby, the legal stationer who hires Nemo and others to make copies of legal documents. So, by the device of a document in the Jarndyce case, we have moved from Lincolnshire to London, from the upper levels of fashionable society, through the mercantile middle class, to the opium addicted dregs.

The more I think about this novel, the more I take issue with the claim that this is a protest against the abuse of Chancery, or the legal system in general. The real issue, addressed over and over again, is the various forms of poverty and need, and how different people respond to it. There is, obviously, the utter indifference of the Chancery Court to the injury it causes to the people trapped in it--Mr. Gridley loses his farm to pay the costs of the adjudication of a will, ends up in prison several times, and ultimately dies as a result of his case. Poor Miss Flite has gone mad waiting for her judgment, and the weak Richard Carstone goes into debt, alientes his family members, and loses his health and life in pursuing Jarndyce and Jarndyce. But this is not the only instance of response to human want and need.

In introducing us to Tom All Alone's--a London street where rickety buildings have been colonized by squatters who then let out rooms to those who are even poorer--Dickens reports that Parliament has discussed its response to the horrible conditions there. However, since no one can agree on what to do, the street and its residents are only "to be saved by someone's theory, but by no one's doing." Even when the buildings start falling and killing the occupants, nothing is done.

In contrast, John Jarndyce learns of Esther Summerson and decides to be her protector, as well as taking in his two young cousins as well as all but supporting the feckless Horace Skimpole. Esther Summerson acts to attend to the needy children of Mrs. Jellyby on the one night she is in their household, and as a result has a life-long connection with Caddy. Esther takes in the ill Jo, and ends up nearly dying herself of smallpox. Her generosity is not rewarded--perhaps as a message that individual charity is not the solution. Her ultimate husband, Alan Woodcourt, attends the sick and dying even when it is clear they can never pay him.

Even the nearly penniless Nemo shared what little he had with Jo, who had even less. The brickmakers' wives, Jenny and Lizzie, also share their burdens with each other and help everyone from the gravely ill Jo to the distracted Lady Dedlock.

On the other hand, we also see the pointlessness of some efforts at charity. For instance, Mrs. Jellyby's obsession with her African mission blinds her to the very real needs of her own children. Mrs. Pardiggle forces her children to contribute to her charities, which they bitterly resent. Furthermore, Mrs. Pardiggle's form of charity is basically a pious bullying, and Dickens shows it to be utterly futile.

What Dickens shows us over and over in Bleak House is the necessity of making human connections, as individuals rather than as moral subjects or unbridgeable social constructs. It is this spectrum of relationship which is the real theme of the book. The various responses run from the cold and brutal inefficiency of the Chancery system (which takes no notice of whether waht it does is right, merely whether it is the system) to the generous and warm-hearted humanity of Esther Summerson.

One last comment: while the characters are often quite stock, I fully enjoyed Inspector Bucket, who was a new form of police officer that I had not previously encountered. He is not fixable as either "good" or "bad." He seems heartless as he forces Jo to "move on" without giving the poor boy any idea as to where he was to move to--but then he makes such a wonderful guest at the Bagnets birthday celebration, without letting on that he was only there to arrest Mr. George--far more humane and subtle than I had expected of him. Further, he is an excellent detective, exonerating Mr. George and finding the true culprit. He operates from extremely sympathetic motives, although his actions sometimes have more serious consequences than he could predict. He is truly an absorbing character.

Spilling Clarence, by Anne Ursu

This was a book club pick that I actually liked! I blame my reader's malaise on winter lasting too long, because it couldn't possibly be the case that I was grumpy and impossible to please, could it? Or maybe all those books I've been trying to read all winter really were that terrible.

What do you think?

Anyway--Spilling Clarence is Ursu's debut novel, and it certainly contains some snappy writing and an interesting and well-executed premise. Small town Clarence is home to a psycho-pharmaceutical company, as well as a well respected university. Due to faulty wiring and an antique microwave oven, a cloud of "deletrium" is released into the air. This mythical chemical is used to ferry the actual medication into the brain--when released alone, it stimulates the town to remember. Everything. Which overwhelms the oldest, who have the most to remember, but even affects the children, who presumably have fewer traumatic memories they are forced to relive.

The main characters are Todd, a graduate student in memory studies, and his fiance Susannah. Susannah's mother has periodic mental breakdowns, and has since Susannah was seven. Todd has brought Susannah to Clarence for the university program, and she is unhappy and at loose ends.

Susannah does volunteer work at the local senior living center, Sunny Shadows, where she meets Madeline Singer, a famous novelist. Madeline is in Clarence for her son, Benjamin -- who is a psychology professor at the college -- and seven (?) year old Sophie. Lizzie, Benjamin's wife and Sophie's mother, died in an auto accident while Ben was driving. This is the memory that lays him low when the deletrium is released--he is also among the last to recover, because he doesn't want to lose his newly vivid memories of his dead wife.

Among the victims is an elderly gentleman named Calvin, who has begun courting Madeline, until the deletrium forces him to remember what he saw in WWII, while liberating Dachau. He collapses into a near coma. At the end of the book, he recovers, but has lost his lighter self. He engages Madeline to record his memories of that time, stalling any possible romance while she works on his oral history.

There are some interesting wrinkles: Ben finds out that one of his "memories" actually happened to someone else, thus demonstrating the unreliability of memory. Todd tries to create a game that demonstrates how memory works, only to conclude that while the game demonstrates one portion of how memory works, there are too many complicating factors that affect whether an incident becomes a memory, and fails to describe how memory fails.

It makes for an interesting thought experiment: how would you live if you literally could not forget anything? My book club meets to discuss this in three more weeks, and I have some high hopes for the conversation.

Snow, by Tracy Lynn

Yet another entry in the burgeoning category of retold fairy tales. This one is aimed at young adult readers, which in reality means about 12 years old: appropriate for the mother-daughter reading group I read it for.

Jessica (Jessica? Are we sure this isn't a book about the 1990s?) is the only child of a Welsh duke, whose mother died in child-birth. The duke's sorrow at losing his wife, only to get a daughter means that Jessica is all but raised by the servants and taught to cook and clean, free to run with the other children on the estate. This lasts until Jessica is about 11, when her father remarries, a coldly beautiful woman who conducts experiments that are part science, part magic. She takes Jessica under her wing, and teaches her the proper behavior of a lady.

On her 14th birthday, the new duchess arranges for a party--not quite a debut, but an introduction of the growing girl to Welsh society. Jessica slips away before the party to see the new puppies born in the barn, and on the way back is accosted and assaulted by a visiting count. Jessica knees the count, which causes the duchess so much embarrassment that Jessica is imprisoned in her room and forced to do chores. Kept indoors, her skin turns pale and her hair turns black, and she gains the nickname "Snow."

The duchess has a violinist, a young Scot named Alan, who is forced to hold the duchess's large mirror and answer all her questions truthfully. He is bound to keep her secrets by a gold chain around his neck, but manages to warn Snow to flee when the duchess's quest for a child leads her to try to regain her youth by eating Snow's heart. Snow flees to London, and Alan follows soon after.

Here is where there is any sort of time frame established for the story. In London the presence of gas lighting, trains, bustles, etc., make clear the time is Victorian. Snow is soon taken in by the Lonely Ones, a group of half-human, half-animals for whom she cooks and cleans. There is a perfunctory discussion of the morality of them stealing, and a brief trip to show Snow the extremes of wealth and poverty in the city.

After a year, the Duchess decides she needs to find Snow, and travels to London and puts about a story that she went mad, but has been successfully treated and is now working on behalf of the poor. Snow buys this story, falls into the Duchess's trap, and is used as a test subject for the Duchess's electric device which is supposed to stop the aging process. She falls into a paralysis as a result, though she is apparently not dead. The Lonely Ones take her home and put her in a china case while they try to find a way to reverse the process.

They find Alan, and with him seek out The Clock-Work Man, a half-machine man who lives in the sewers of London, and has a vague science/magical knowledge that he uses to build a machine to revive Snow. As they are about to leave, a duke and his servant Henry find the Clock-Work Man's home, and so Alan and Raven are "forced" to bring them back to Snow.

The new machine works, and the first thing Snow sees as she wakes is the handsome face of the duke. However, she remembers nothing about her life and is frightened by the Lonely Ones. The duke offers to take her home to Wales, and to protect her from the duchess.

Back in Wales, she still remembers nothing. Her parents throw a masquerade ball, and the Lonely Ones arrive with a potion to restore her memory. Before they give it to her, she remembers, due to the love she has for Raven which breaks the spell. The duchess realizes Snow remembers her treachery, but before she can do any more, the memory spell rebounds onto her, and she becomes old and confused.

In the end, Alan makes clear he loves Snow like a sister, the duke (who was expected to propose to Snow at the ball) accepts her rejection with relief, freeing him to go on more adventures. Snow takes the Lonely Ones and Alan off to explore Europe. The End.

Not a bad book, but rather weak. The book is not really best read as a retelling of Snow White, since the attempts to draw the necessary parallels are rather clumsy. The tale itself is less Victorian or fairy tale, and more steam-punk, especially the faux "experiments" of the duchess and the Clock-Work Man. The fairy tale elements seem more a marketing decision than a literary one.

Jessica/Snow is rather a boring character, the Lonely Ones only slightly interesting but under developed. The most interesting and powerful character is the duchess, but because this is a "fairy tale," the potential for her being a complicated and compelling creature is ignored, and she is flattened into a two-dimensional "evil stepmother."

Lots of potential in the setting, but mostly unrealized. There are some noticeable editing inconsistencies--the duchess's eyes go from dark blue to hazel within a couple of chapters. Snow's hair starts out black, but inexplicably is described as "chestnut hair was growing back black," without any indication it had been cut off either.

The contest between the Clock-Work Man and the pseudo-scientific duchess could have been of great interest--the developing role of science and the morals of experimentation. The duchess's desire for a child could have been developed--why did she want one? For her own sake, for the sake of her husband, because he was looking to find a younger woman to marry for the sake of an heir? (The duchess's name is Anne--Boleyn?) The duchess makes two separate speeches about the limits on women and their perceived worth only as pretty young girls or mothers, nothing else. I wish this had been developed more convincingly--it wasn't exactly untrue of the Victorian era, but put in the mouth of this mad woman was thus diminished.

It is a week book like this that makes me appreciate even more the achievement of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. There was much to hate in those books, but Mrs. Coulter was truly a scary woman, and the limits on what Lyra could aspire to was set forth compellingly.

Children of God Go Bowling, by Shannon Olson

Can I cut to the chase? Getting married is not the answer to an unsatisfactory and disorganized life. You cannot expect the Right Person to fall into your lap during therapy sessions. Stop whining, and go live your life.

I was willing to ride along with the semi-autobiographical "Shannon Olson" through the first quarter of the book, because she was funny and irreverent. She is also in her early 30s, works for a web-based company, keeps in close contact with her parents, and has a horrible tiny apartment that is full of crap she never deals with. Of course, her problem is that she is not married. Yeah, that's what she thinks.

The first three quarters of the book is devoted primarily to Shannon and her therapy--individual and group--as she whinges about not being married. Her younger sister is married, with a baby, and "Shannon" has to remind herself that her sister's baby "Is not about me." Although that's how she thinks of it--as proof that she herself is being judged and found wanting. This gets tiring fast. No matter what is going on around her, "Shannon" sees it solely as a judgment on her.

Really, you'd think that at 33 (more or less), she could have a little more perspective on her life. She is living with broken, crappy furniture that was left behind by an ex-boyfriend, who moved to Rome years before and got married. Her apartment is too small, but stuffed full of papers and files and dirty dishes and crap, but she just complains about it. Why do anything about it? Why take a friend's offer to help organize? Why look for a larger apartment? Why get rid of the crappy stuff? She does, EVENTUALLY, but only after she all but gets taken by the hand and given a bigger, nicer place.

Rather too much of the book is devoted to her absolute inability to make any decisions of any kind, and her irritated response to any suggestion that she might want to do so. Rather than looking at her own life, she has fixated on her lack of a husband. As she and her best friend from college, Adam, are the last of their friends to be unmarried, she starts to obsess over whether Adam is really The One. There is no reason for the reader to think he is The One, other than he is still unmarried and hanging around with "Shannon." Even she has to twist herself up to think of him romantically, and when she (finally!) broaches it with him, he declines. Because, guess what? He wasn't The One.

Just about the time she is able to realize she is disappointed and angry about this, Adam is diagnosed with cancer and given only a few months to live. She is still so angry that she can't see him or talk to him for a long time. Finally, after far too many therapy sessions, she starts visiting him, they talk briefly, and then he dies.

Which is sad, of course, but more importantly, he dies so that "Shannon" can learn something about living life and not just observing, criticizing and bitching about it. She joins a bowling league with a member of her therapy group, meets a nice looking rabbi's son and asks him out. The End.

In theory, this is a book about confronting adulthood, disappointment, religion, death, friendship, and how things change between people as years pass. In actuality, any of that sort of stuff is crammed into the last quarter of the book and given short shrift. Oh, despite obsessing over why Adam might be The One, it never occurred to me that he is Lutheran (a St. Olaf Lutheran who still goes to church, at that) and this might be a conflict for Catholic Shannon. Because why would she ever think about anything as obvious as that?

After Adam's death, she learns from their mutual friend Ellie that Adam had been in love with Ellie since freshman year in college, notwithstanding Ellie's marriage. Why hadn't I seen that, Shannon wails to herself. I can tell you why; because she never paid any attention to anyone else but herself. The book gets weighted down by the complete self-absorption of the protagonist, and her inability to DO anything about her own life.

While a bit of air enters the book with Adam's illness, the focus remains resolutely on "Shannon's" reaction to it, and what lessons she might learn from it. This got to be tedious, and in the end I cannot recommend this book to anybody. At least Bridget Jones was funnier.

The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie, by Jaclyn Moriarty

Somehow, when I went on vacation, I took only solemn and serious books with me. Unsurprisingly, I had no interest in them once I hit the lovely warmth and sunny skies of Palm Springs. Accordingly, I picked this up as a YA that Tonks might enjoy and that I could read as well.

Written in first person , primarily as a mix of letters, notes, and diary entries, Bindy Mackenzie is in Year 11 of her high school near Sydney, Australia. An unusually bright girl, Bindy has a long record of achievement, and now feels she must continue to perform at the highest of academic levels, placing first in every class, contest and competition. She has wound herself up really tightly and one fears for her ability to stay healthy.

This year, a new course has been introduced: Friendship and Discipline, immediately known as "FAD." Bindy is one of 8 students, none of whom are her usual crowd. This group also has a new teacher, Try Montaine, and a new student, Finnegan Blonde. Following her usual pattern, Bindy objects to this course as interfering with her studies, alienates her classmates, and evidences every symptom of being headed for a major mental breakdown.

Accordingly, I found myself reading this book actually leaning toward the pages, as if to physically see what was going on behind the text. Bindy is simply not a trustworthy narrator--I couldn't accept what she said was happening at face value, but I wasn't sure I could see what was going on. There were clearly major cracks in her parent's relationship, Bindi herself seemed a disaster about to happen, but I couldn't really suss out what this book was doing.

Obviously, it could be a "Breakfast Club" story, where the seemingly mismatched group of misfits bonds over their common humanity, and the Brain lightens up, the Party Girl stops drinking, etc. etc. And for a bit, it looked like that was beginning to happen -- sort of, and I started puzzling out what each kid needed and which other kid was the match. But Bindy continued resolutely to be Bindy--the socially inept whiz kid with a prickly and largely unlikeable exterior.

Okay, maybe it was "Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime." Unreliable narrator who has no idea that s/he is unreliable. Bindy doesn't have Asperger's Syndrome, but perhaps she is obsessive-compulsive, or simply too self-absorbed to see what is happening. However true that is, there was no obvious story going on that I could pick up, the way there is in "Curious Incident."

Maybe it was "Dead Poet's Society?" Not that I've seen that movie, but isn't that about the role of a special teacher in the students' life? Try could have been that teacher, and Bindy the student who learns to see the whole of life through her teaching.

Then, one weekend, Try invites her FAD group to spend the weekend up at a place she has in the mountains. And I had serious deja vu, since I had read this before, when it was ostensibly an adult novel called "Special Topics in Calamity Physics," by Marisha Pessl. Test this theory with me:

Academically over-performing girl? Check.
With an inflated opinion of her father? Check.
Living an uprooted life, moving nearly every year? Check.
Book smart, but ignorant of real life? Check.
Placed in a small group of unusual students? Check.
Lead by a charismatic teacher? Check.
Who brings the students to her house? Check.
Suspicious circumstances that the group has to solve? Check.
Teacher not who she appears to be? Check.

Still, this is a better balanced book than "Special Topics." The thing that is going on under the surface actually shows up in clues scattered across the book. The year before, Bindy overheard two substitute teachers talking about a Polish exchange student, and one teacher slapped the other. Bindy jumped up and offered her card, saying "I would be honored to be your witness" in what she assumed would be an upcoming assault suit.

Turns out that the conversation was about a new computer program being installed at the school, and the "Polish student" was actually the password. The problem is that the program was a scam, designed so that the installers could get back in at any time, implant fake teacher info and bilk the system through fake salaries, etc. If Bindy knew what was going on, she would have to be removed. So Try and some other people, were feeding Bindy small, regular doses of arsenic to disorient her. Try was supposed to find out if Bindy had figured out what that overheard conversation was about. Finnegan's cousin was one of the two women in that conversation, and he thought the car accident that killed her was no accident. He came to find out what had happened to her, and to protect anybody who might become endangered.

In the end, Try locks Bindy in an booby-trapped office, nearly killing her with arsine gas. Her FAD friends have figured out about half of the "real" story, and help her escape the fatal poisoning. So there is an element of "Breakfast Club" after all.

This is a fairly ambitious trick to pull of in a YA novel, but it seems to have worked. The scenes of normal high sschool life were believable, and Bindy's situation is sad, and she can't even see it.

In teh end, Bindy survives the murder attempt, although she was in a coma for several weeks. She is able to connect emotionally with her family, and now has different friends and a different approach to school. She is really no longer viewing school as an experiment she is observing, but as life she is living.

Riding Lessons, by Sara Gruen

Picked this up from a bargain table because "Water for Elephants" was so good. This one, not so much. The book starts out a lot like "The Horse Whisperer," in that a promising young woman and her amazing horse have a horrible accident, the horse has to be destroyed, and the girl breaks her neck requiring long months of hospitalization and rehab. Once out of the hospital, she never rides again.

That "back story" is dispatched in a few pages, then we get to the "real" story: now in her 30s, Our Heroine is let go from her job, her husband leaves her for his much younger intern, her daughter is all but expelled from school, and her mother calls to tell her that her father has ALS and only a few months to live.

Again, this is set forth in another few pages, and then we launch into the pity-party that is the rest of the book. Our Heroine (the book is written in first person, and I don't remember if she even has a name, much less what it is) takes her daughter and returns to her childhood home in New Hampshire at a horse ranch. Dad's disease is pretty advanced and she finds it hard to even look at him. She starts to take over running the ranch, and manages to get into serious financial trouble while simultaneously running afoul of the law. The horse that was destroyed 20+ years ago? Has a brother, who was supposedly burned to death in a barn fire. She recognizes him, buys him, tries to disguise him from insurance investigators, bounces all sorts of checks, avoids talking to her divorce lawyer, yadda yadda. . .

Frankly, I got tired of this book after the first few chapters, and skipped around to see if it was worth finishing. It wasn't. However, rest assured that Our Heroine finds true love, gets back on a horse, gets her daughter interested in horse training, and saves the farm. And the horse.

Yes, you say, but does she find old sheet music in the attic, and put on a show?

Life is too short to spend time on this book.

Exit Music, by Ian Rankin

This is the last book of the Inspector Rebus series, and I'm ready to be done with him too. Rebus is one week from retirement when the book opens, and finishes his last day at the end. Rankin has hinted that he may continue the series with the younger cops from the series, but that Rebus is done.

Will I follow the Further Adventures of Siobhan Clarke? Maybe. . . .

This mystery has a decided international flavor, when an expatriot Russian poet is found beaten to death in a dark alley, in the same week a large number of Russian "businessmen" are visiting Edinburgh and being lavishly wined and dined and flaunting their new wealth. Down in London, a Russian journalist has been poisoned (this really happened) by a rare radioactive isotope. Soon afterward, the sound man who recorded the poet's last reading is found dead when his home is torched.

Rebus and Clarke believe these to be connected--the fire was apparently set to destroy all the recordings that were made. Some of those recordings were of a series of Parliamentary committee hearings addressing urban development proposals backed by some of the Russians. Suspicions are further aroused at the repeated appearance of several banking big wigs. And Cafferty.

Cafferty is Rebus's bete noire, the Hyde to his Jekyll. Throughout the series, Rebus has tried repeated to get Cafferty put away for good. In an earlier book in the series, Cafferty gets out of prison by switching x-rays so it looks as if he is dying of cancer. Of course he isn't, and he gets away with it.

In this book, Cafferty is meeting with the Russians, clearly putting together some big (and undoubtedly shady) land deals. He also owns the building where Nancy lives--Nancy who was the one to discover the Poet's dead body. His continued criminal activity has become a personal insult to Rebus. Not to be heavy-handed with the metaphor, or anything, but numerous characters mention that the two of them are "very similar." Rebus is assumed to be too close to Cafferty and believed to be his friend. Simultaneously, he is also fixated on arresting Cafferty and has to be warned off so he doesn't interfere with a large scale financial crimes case being made against him by the Scottish DEA.

So, the good stuff in these books is still good--Rankin shows Edinburgh in its many contradictory facets--the rich and poor, the natives and the tourists, business and government, elegant hotels and seedy pubs. The criminal investigations are convincingly dreary and often the cops are casting about for any leads, unable to quickly resolve these complicated crimes.

But the bad starts to outweigh the good for me, at least after about 5 of these books. Rebus gets less and less pleasant to spend time with. He is ham fisted in his investigation, bullying witnesses, co-workers, and friends. The farther he is from the truth (as it turns out, later) the nastier he gets, often just for the sake of being nasty. And he's dangerously impulsive, as well as oppositional, hardly more than a toddler in his emotional development.

For example, at one point, he sends the DEA agents on a wild goose chase, just so he can talk to Cafferty without being observed. Why? What was so important that he had to go at just that minute? Nothing. When the DEA guys find out they were jerked around, not only are they angry, but it turns out that while they were gone, somebody went and coshed Cafferty--landing him in a coma for the duration of the book. Whose the obvious suspect? Rebus, of course. Only because he couldn't wait a damn minute once he decided he needed to talk to Cafferty.

Worse is what happens to Siobhan Clarke during the course of this book. Supposedly, once Rebus retires, there will be a promotion slot available, and Clarke is the logical person to get it. But like Scully to Mulder, Clarke can't seem to step away from the toxicity that is Rebus. He wants the DEA guys out of the way, so he tells Clarke to make the call. She does. Makes me want to smack her upside the head for being stupid. There is really no evidence that she is in any way ready to be promoted, since she is imcapable of taking a step without Rebus's approval.

Rebus gets himself suspended, yet again. He is not only taken off the case, but barred from the police station for the last three days before his retirement. Yet Clarke consults with him, arranges meetings so he can listen in (either in person, or over her cell phone), follows his orders in calling the DEA agents--when simple interest in her own continued employment should suggest that THIS IS STUPID. And she keeps doing it, over and over again. Sure, occasionally she says "you are suspended, you know." He says "I know," and so then she does whatever he wants her to.

Frankly, if she really was as talented as various characters say she is, they'd have broken up her partnership with Rebus and assigned her to someone who was less suicidal about his career. How can we take her seriously as a cop when she is so clearly a patsy?

Let's talk about that suspension a little bit. Rebus has gone and gotten into the face of the biggest of the bank big wigs, mostly for threatening his step-daughter and insulting his wife. Gratuitously, I might add, since it turns out that the Big Wig has nothing to do with the murders. But, once suspended, his boss DOESN'T TELL ANYBODY. None of the other cops ever learn about it (other than Clarke), so he's free to keep ordering people around and continuing the investigation. Even after he becomes Number One Suspect for Cafferty's coshing, the word of his suspension doesn't get around. It's like he's made out of Teflon.

Probably the most irritating thing for me about these books is that the mystery gets drawn out over hundreds of pages (or a dozen hours or so of audio), but the solution happens all of the sudden at the very end in a couple paragraphs in a rushed and unsatisfying way. The first few times, I thought it was my fault, for getting distracted at the end. Now, I'm convinced it's Rankin's fault.

The dead Poet? The guy who would drink too much and then hit on women (usually willing, due to his inherent Russian sexiness)? Turns out he was beaten to death by a jealous husband. Nothing to do with the other Russians, or the consulate, or Cafferty at all. What?

The torched sound guy? Apparently the Russian Businessman had his house burned to destroy a recording where he was caught saying "I wish he [the Poet] were dead." He didn't kill the Poet, but committed murder to avoid being charged with murder. What? Plus, the sound guy's murder is treated throughout the book only as confirmation that the Poet's death was not a random mugging gone bad, never as a crime in its own right.

Cafferty? Turns out that a young cop, a temporary addition to the CID, blamed Cafferty and Rebus for his family's bad fortune after his grandfather was jailed on a drugs charge. TWENTY YEARS AGO. Grandpa died in jail OF A HEART CONDITION which would have gotten him anyway, in jail or not. WHEN THE KID WAS FOUR. Like he had any experience of his family before. Sure, Grandpa was dealing drugs for Cafferty, got caught when Cafferty planted more serious drugs in his pub, and Rebus was the cop who testified at the trial, but is that really enough for a two decade vendetta?

Plus, the kid learns that Rebus's trunk doesn't close properly, steals a crime scene sanitary suit, and manages to cosh Cafferty and frame Rebus in the few minutes between Rebus leaving Cafferty alive and the DEA agents coming back from their wild goose chase. Sure. He happens to be away from all the other cops, with the stolen crime scene suit, which he is wearing, with whatever weapon he used (never revealed, by the way), attacks Cafferty, plants a boot to tie Rebus to the scene, burns the rest of the suit, and goes back to work without being noticed, and without any change in his demeanor? This quiet, churchy young guy?

Who also happens to have a girlfriend who is a Scene of Crime Officer, and so would herself have plenty of suits, so there is no reason to take one from Rebus? And, of course, since a boot was found at the scene, it had to belong to Rebus and nobody else? It just makes no sense.

At the end of the book, in the epilogue, Rebus and Clarke go to visit Cafferty in the hospital, and he conviniently flat-lines while they are there. Rebus--in a near cliche of not being able to let go--jumps onto the bed and administers CPR, unwilling to let Cafferty die without being convicted of his crimes. "Will he be all right?" Rebus demands. "Will he be all right?" THE END.

I guess my feeling is that Rebus has become too formulaic, to the point of sacrificing the characters in favor of clumsy plotting to keep him an outsider, a renegade, a stereotypical lone wolf cop figure. I guess I'm done with him too.

The Book of Air and Shadows, by Michael Gruber

Somehow, I have fallen into what seems like a series of books about William Shakespeare. This is one that creates a treasure hunt for an unknown play, written in Shakespeare's own hand -- which would be nearly priceless, as well as creating new opportunities for scholarship. Academics, book sellers, gangsters and thugs are all after the prize.

Gruber gives the reader three different narratives. The first is a first person account by intellectual property lawyer Jake Mishkin, who is asked to provide information about the copyright status of a 17th century document that may point to the unknown play, as well as a record of spying on him. Of course, there is almost nothing known about William Shakespeare outside of his plays, so even a sample of his handwriting would be incredibly valuable. A record of his actions reported by spies would open new areas of scholarship. A handwritten play--a previously unknown work--would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The second narrative is told in the third person, following Albert Crosetti, a young man saving to go to film school, who does computer inventory for a used/rare book seller. It is Crosetti who discovers the 17th century documents under the bindings of a set of books damaged by fire. He has fallen into the spell of Carolyn Rolly, the shopkeeper's assistant and amateur book binder.

The final narrative is the text of the ancient documents, written by one Richard Bracegirdle. Injured in battle and dying, he writes the story of his life to his wife to pass on to their young son. In this letter he mentioned having been sent to spy on "William Shaxpure" to reveal him as a papist. The second document is also by Bracegirdle, and is an encrypted message. The final document appears to be a draft of a letter, with corrections and edits marked in pencil.

Mishkin is holed up in a remote cabin, listening for sounds that the Russians are coming to kill him, passing the time writing his own life story. He first encounters the Bracegirdle documents when a Professor Bulstrode comes to consult him about the copyright on the letter from Bracegirdle to his wife. Bulstrode ends up leaving the manuscript with Mishkin, who puts it in a safe deposit box. Soon thereafter, Bulstrode turns up tortured to death, and his heir and niece turns up interested in the document. She manages to trick Mishkin out of the documents, disappearing with the letter in an apparent kidnapping--until the real niece turns up.

Crosetti's story starts with a fire in the basement of the bookshop where he works. He manages to save most of the most precious books, but a multi-volume work gets damaged, and the owner decides to break the books and sell the plates and prints inside. Crosetti and Carolyn Rolly take the books to carolyn's loft, where she plans to repair and resell the books. As she takes the leather binding off the first volume, Crosetti notices that it has been padded with old papers with writing on them. He coaxes Carolyn to take out the padding from all the books, and these turn out to be the Bracegirdle documents. Crosetti thinks he can read the old fashioned handwriting, and thinks it might have something to do with Shakespeare. Carolyn convinces him to take the papers to a Shakespeare expert she knows--who turns out to be Professor Bulstrode, who scoffs at the claim to Shakespeare, and offers to buy the letter for much less then it is worth--$3500. Carolyn manipulates Crosetti into taking the offer, but he has cleverly withheld the other two documents and Bulstrode doesn't know about them.

So the documents have been split up, and somebody is after them--whoever it was that killed Bulstrode. Carolyn Rolly also goes missing. These two story threads run more or less in parallel, until about midway through when Mishkin finally meets Crosetti, and the Russians burst in to kill them. At that point, although Crosetti is willing to give up the documents, being a smart guy--it is decided that the only way to get the bad guys off their backs is to solve the encryption and find the alleged play.

Gruber does a pretty good job in giving these amateurs the expert help they need; although at the expense of developing believable backstories for them. In fact, they start to read like stereotypical Quirky Characters than real individuals. There is the Olympic Weightlifting Giant Intellectual Property Lawyer; his Rich Best Friend & Shakespeare Expert; the Former Juvenile Delinquent Jesuit Priest; the International Supermodel; and the Jewish Bookie Ex-Patriot. We are also given the Computer Genius, whose family is even further beyond belief: mom is a Reference Librarian who knows all the other reference librarians in the world, and also keeps obscure cryptology reference books in the house, first sister is a cop, second sister a lawyer, mom's new boyfriend a former KGB spy from Poland.

What follows is a convoluted mess of schemes, double crosses, double crossing double crossers, and a confusing list of players and plots. Crosetti mentions The Maltese Falcon and Chinatown several times, which is the level of complexity Gruber provides. In the end, two different sets of ruthless mobsters are after the play, and Our Gang has to out spend, out speed, out resource, and out muscle these international professionals. Which, of course, they do--and find the manuscript.

Everybody shows up at the remote lodge where Mishkin is hiding out, and yet another round of double-crosses is introduced. The manuscript is forged, says Mishkin, so are the Bracegirdle documents, which were planted so an innocent guy would find them and create the appearance of veracity. Mishkin then fingers his Best Friend & Shakespeare Expert as the brains behind the scam, and the mobster is convinced. So he grabs the play and throws it into the fire. And Best Friend dives in after it.

After his flames are put out, everyone is convinced that the documents are real. The mob is going to put everybody else into a boat and blow it up. However, our amateurs once again out think and out shoot the professionals, and in the end the Cop Sister rescues everybody because her brother called ahead. In an epilogue, Mishkin grows up a bit and tries to reconcile with his estranged wife; Crosetti and Carolyn are seeing each other; everybody's kids are out of jeopardy; Crosetti sells a screenplay based on the whole thing; and there is lots of litigation over the ownership of the copyright, so there's lots of work for the lawyer.

Clearly, this is not a exercise in profound pholosophical meditation, although it is not without redeeming value. A world in which people are passionate about Shakespeare isn't all bad, after all. Mishkin gets a complicated family background, and doesn't end up totally happy ever after. However, as Crosetti comments several times--the whole story is more like a movie than real life, complete with a last big twist. Several loose threads are never acknowledged, much less tied up: how did the Bracegirdle documents end up bound in books about a hundred years later? Where had they been? Why would anybody be named Bracegirdle?

There are some charming scenes in which Bracegirdle reports to his masters what Shakespeare does during his days, and what sort of man he is. Also, the report of the unknown Shakespeare play is clever: it is The Tragedy of Mary Queen of Scots, in which the lives of Mary and Elizabeth are mirrored as each woman recognizes that what she lacks the other has. Yet they must be enemies due to politics--even though each is the only person in the world who would understand the other.

There is yet another layer of double dealing and treachery in the Bracegirdledocuments. He is impressed into the job of spying because Shakespeare is suspected of being a secret Catholic. James I is looking to marry his older son to a Spanish princess, who would also be Catholic, thus endangering Protestant England, in addition to being Wrong about religion generally. The plan is to trick Shakespeare into writing a play about Mary, Queen of Scots (James' mother) that will show her as sympathetic and Queen Elizabeth as foul and evil. Shakespeare will be revealed as a Catholic, the theaters will have to be shut down, and James will have to abandon the Spanish Match. However, the plotters are found out, and Bracegirdle is left hanging, so he tells Shakespeare all about it, and together they conclude that the play is too dangerous to exist, so they work together to bury it, because they cannot bring themselves to burn it.

Of course, even had the plot not been discovered, the play was not at all what the conspirators were looking for: after all, it was written by Shakespeare. Both Mary and Elizabeth were shown as fully rounded women, each with virtues and faults, each of them made sympathetic and thus the play would have been useless as a piece of political blackmail. Shakespeare wasn't really known for writing agit-prop, after all. That's not why we still read him 400 years later.

This was a better than average thriller--less violence, more interesting subject of the hunt, and at least an attempt at giving Mishkin and Crosetti characters and backgrounds to explain their actions to the reader. Would I go out to buy another book by this author? Not especially. Would I pick one up from the library? Sure. Would I read it on an airplane? Just about perfect for that.

Fool, by Christopher Moore

All right, I really enjoyed this one. Moore is funny, but not consistently so, and some of his books stretch so far that they lose their traction. His recent works, however, are pretty good. A Dirty Job, in which a nebbish finds out he has become Death, and You Suck, his take on vampirism, mine a single vein of humor and contain some wonderful characters.

Fool is Moore's retelling of the story of King Lear, from the perspective of -- yes, you guessed it, Lear's Fool. The Fool is the only character who cares for Lear throughout the play, joining him as he rages on the heath in a thunderstorm and trying to keep him dry and sheltered. Moore's version of the Fool has his own agenda, and actually does a great deal to aggravate the deteriorating relations between Lear and his daughters.

Fool is set in a assemblage of vaguely 13th century England--there are still a lot of pagan practices, but also a definite Christianity, as well as English landmarks from the time. The historical Lear dates back to Roman England, but Moore doesn't want to go that far back, and so he ends up placing the characters in a kind of quasi-RenFair environment, but without the beer wenches.

Moore also deviates from both the Lear myth and the Shakespeare play in his ending. In the myth, Cordelia brings an army from France against her sisters, and restores Lear to the throne, where he rules for another 5 years. In Shakespeare, everybody dies. Mostly. Moore kind of splits the difference, while giving his Fool a happy ending.

The real strength of the book is the language. Sure, Moore can get away with quoting from the play whenever the action of the book coincides--but it takes real cojones to try to play Insult Smack Down with the Bard. And Moore doesn't fully succeed--I don't think Shakespeare ever repeated an insult, while Moore relies rather too heavily on a few words. You can probably guess most of them.

Yet there is something reckless and rushing about this book, and I believe that Moore now knows more about King Lear than anyone else alive today. I listened to this book, and enjoyed hearing the insults played out loud to my ear. I may get the book from the library, to better savor the language.

Locked Rooms, by Laurie R. King

Found this on the discount table for $5, or I'd have just gotten it from the library. This is another in the Mary Russell series, in which this Jewish American/English young (!) woman has married Sherlock Holmes, and they solve mysteries together, often for Holmes brother Mycroft.

In this installment, they leave India and head for the United States. Mary's family died in a car crash when she was 14, and she left for England to live with an aunt. This is her first time back since then. She has estate business to settle, but as the boat approaches California, she has three recurring nightmares that only get worse. A little armchair psychoanalysis by Holmes, and she is forced to realize that she and her family were living in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake, and that something happened to affect her family, but that she has shut away the memory in the "locked room" of her mind.

Poor Russell not only has to deal with the estate matters, and the trauma of remembering the big earthquake and fire, but she believes she caused the auto accident that killed the rest of her family. She was squabbling with her brother in the back seat, which caused her father to pull his attention away from the road when the accident happened. She was thrown clear, and the rest of her family died.

Much of the book is taken up with Russell's returning memories, and her emotions when she returns to many of her childhood sites. Meanwhile, Holmes is scurrying around watching over her, hiring Dashiell Hammett as a temporary sidekick, and generally investigating Russell's past. He becomes convinced that her parents were killed deliberately, and that it was not Russell's fault at all. She refuses to see it, and insists there is no mystery for over 300 pages of a 400 page novel.

It turns out that something happened during the 1906 earthquake--a former black sheep friend of Charles Russell, Russell's father, showed up with a tin of cash and jewels that he had looted during the fires, and asked Russell to keep it hidden in his garden. Charles was disgusted, but felt his former friend had some claim to him, so Charles wrote out a check for the value of the loot and told his friend to never come back.

This lead to some strife between Russell's parents, and her mother took the children to live in England for the next six years, apparently to keep them safe from this "friend." The family reunited in San Francisco, and Charles was scheduled to enter the army for WWI. So he wrote a letter explaining what his friend had done, as well as his part in it, on the theory that then it could not be the basis of blackmail.

The false friend found out something about this letter, and sabotaged the brakes to silence the family. Turns out he also killed Russell's psychiatrist and the two servants from the house. When Mary Russell returned, he tried to find and destroy the letter, or kill her as well.

The most interesting part of this novel is the reverse feng shui Holmes uses to locate the hidden loot. This is (potentially) like those fun old Golden Age detective novels, where the criminal leaves clever clues, or Your Rich Uncle converted his fortune into rare stamps, then put the hiding place into a secret crossword puzzle inlaid in the tile at the bottom of the swimming pool. Sadly, King simply brings in a Chinese Master, who stares at a map, then points to spot. Gone is the chance to intrigue us with the cleverness of the plot, or give us some information on this odd practice, and what Holmes thinks about it. Instead, it basically happens off stage, and we don't get to go on a treasure hunt. Bummer.

Of course, Laurie R. King is a very good writer, and it's certainly an enjoyable story. But I would have liked more mystery and less psychoanalysis.

Queen Betsy series, by MaryJanice Davidson

Vampire chick lit. This continues the descent of vampire novels into the most disposable of writing: this has all the complexity and moral probing of the shoe department at Nordstrom. Our heroine, Betsey (nee Elizabeth, ha ha) Taylor is hit by a car after a spectacularly awful day, and wakes up three days later in the mortuary. Turns out she had been attacked by something carrying the vampirism virus, and she's not dead. She's undead. And so the series starts, each book in the series titled "Undead and . . . ." beginning with "Undead and Unwed."

Betsy Taylor is a vapid and cartoonish figure, who inexplicably has vampire powers previously unheard of. She does not need to feed daily, but can go three or four days between taking blood; she lets her family and friends know about her new undead status, she can actually enjoy sunshine, althrough for quite a while it's like narcolepsy--once the sun rises, she is completley unconscious. But, due to her unusual powers, the vampires slowly come to believe she is the Queen foretold by their Book of the Dead.

As a result we have mysteries, solved by Betsy and her posse of human friends and vampire associates; Vampire 101, as Betsy learns about her new powers and obligations; as well as a great deal of angst and chatter, as Betsy out Bridget Joneses Bridget Jones. Really, the series is the lowest form of chick lit, in which Betsy cares more about designer shoes than almost anything else.

Why do I keep reading them? Primarily because they are set in the Twin Cities, where Betsy and her gang live in a mansion on Summit Avenue, shop at the Mall of America, and generally live their undead lives in places I know very very well.

Will I anxiously await the next in the series, or follow the career of the author? No.
Worth a purchase? No, unless you are in an airport or otherwise desperate for reading material. Worth a library pick up? That's how I'm reading them, and also library audio. They are fun, not at all taxing, and the novelty of reading a series set Right Here makes them a beach type read.


Edited to add: While Googling this series, I stumbled across the Bookclub Bitches, who podcast reviewed Undead and Unwed in 2007, dubbing it "the worst book ever." While there is an awful lot of giggling, they are pretty articulate about the flaws of this book. My favorite comment is as they detail Betsy's unusual powers, including immunity to holy objects. Thus, she is able to say, for example, "For the love of God." As the Bitches report, "And that is something I found myself saying multiple times while reading this book."

Well said, although I didn't hate it as much as they did. Perhaps that is the advantage of listening on audio--a decent narrator can make something better than it deserves to be.

Sookie Stackhouse series, by Charlaine Harris

What is it about vampires, and why do I keep reading about them?

I picked up a copy of Dead Until Dark, the first of this series about Louisiana vampires and the basis for the HBO series True Blood. To tell the truth, my curiosity was piqued by Anna Paquin's win for her role at the Golden Globes. And since I can't seem actually bring myself to watch TV, I decided to read the book. Books. All of them. And in about a week.

Clearly, these go fast, and they are nowhere as complex as Laurell K. Hamilton's vampire books. In fact, they are kind of "Hamilton lite." Vampires are public, legally recognized as citizens, but with certain limitations on their rights--they cannot marry, for example. They are viewed as exciting and romantic, making vampire nightclubs a profitable enterprise, where all night dry cleaners just weren't. They have their own rituals and hierarchy of obedience, with a King or Queen in each state, and elaborate and subtle rules of etiquette. The first person narrator, Sookie, has her own magic power--in this case the unwanted ability to read minds. She finds vampires restful, since she can't read their minds, and so they give her some quiet inside her own head.

There are the uneasy relationships with werewolves, witches, and fairies, who all turn out to be real as well, who have their own rules of etiquiette, etc., and Sookie finds herself in conflicts caused by their differing cultures. There are also bad guys, murders, attacks, failed relationships, etc., etc. In a slight twist, although the vampires themselves are quite well off, Sookie isn't, earning her living as a bar maid, and the milieu is thoroughly lower class. Harris never makes fun of her characters for their socio-economic status, and Sookie herself is quite likeable in a way that Hamilton's brittle and hostile Anita Blake really isn't.

That said, Harris's books really benefit from the extensive groundwork Hamilton has mapped--the internal politics of the various species, their conflict when they are forced into contact are deeply probed in the Anita Blake books. The werewolves have a complicated pack hierarchy, with different jobs within the pack that are completely different from their human relationships. Blake's world is more violent and sexy than Sookie's: sure, Harris has physical relationships, but they are rather prim and bloodless. As a whole, the series lacks the energy that gives the Blake series such life.

There is an arc to this series, however, and reading them in order, while not strictly necessary, is recommended. Sookie's first vampire is named Bill, and fro him she meets an increasingly wide circle of others. Their relationship falters, and in later books he is refered to only glancingly as her "ex." It helps to understand the evolving relationships when reading the books. Again, not strictly necessary, but it makes the experience a better one.





















Lastly, a comment on the covers. I don't know who designed them, but they are really spectacularly poor. Badly drawn charactatures of the main characters, awkwardly scattered around a vague background actually creates an impression of amateurish work that unfairly harms the writing. These are not great novels of deathless prose, but they are better than one would be lead to believe by the cover art. The newest edition, using a visual from the TV series gives the book a better first impression.

Worth a read? Sure. Worth buying in hardcover? No. In paperback? Possibly, even probably. Worth checking out from the library? Absolutely, but do read them in order. The near impossibility of doing that in a reasonable amount of time lead me to buy nearly the whole damn series in paperback, because I couldn't wait as long as I'd have to to get the copies returned from other borrowers.

For fun, the HBO website has a related merchandise from the series, including logo "branded" tees and bar ware from Merlotte's and Fangtasia, etc. Fun if you are a fan.

Guess I'm going to have to check out the TV series now.

The Falls, and Resurrection Men, by Ian Rankin

It's called "Tartan Noir;" dark, modern cop novels set in Scotland. Perhaps a bit (okay, more than a bit) precious as a "genre." Fortunately, there is nothing twee about Ian Rankin's Inspector John Rebus.

I picked these up from Audible.com, and in audio form they each took about 14 hours to listen all the way through. They might be better read than listened to, as the plots get pretty convoluted with numerous characters, victims, witnesses, suspects, police officers, and by-standers, and it would be nice to be able to quickly flick back to jog the memory about who some of these people are.

These two books come fairly late in the Inspector Rebus series, and by this time, Rebus is a bit of a cliche--divorced, living alone, one grown daughter who doesn't maintain contact, drinking problem, bad reputation for being a loner and slightly rogue in the department. Jasper Fforde nicely skewers this stereotype in The Well of Lost Plots, and properly so. He's a bit unconventional, plays odd wild hunches which work out against all odds, has a prickly relationship with his superiors, and a young DI who is learning to see through his gruff exterior to the wounded heart inside.

However, cliches become that because they do work, and Rebus is not a nice man, not a man with much insight into his own behavior, but still he is a decent guide to the grubby world of Edinburgh criminal investigation. These are books written by a Scot for Scots, and there are references and slang that I know I don't understand, but the books managed to keep me engaged in spite of the sheer drudgery of a police investigation.

The Falls seems the most gimmicky, in that a missing heiress is found to have been playing a sinister scavenger hunt game online, and the young DI Siobhan Clark gets caught up in following the clues which seem to be leading her to the missing girl's body. Eerily, a small doll figure in a tiny coffin also turns up, and might be related to several other instances of women who were murdered as long as 30 years before, each of which had a coffin memorial.

It's hard to write realistic modern police novels with a prankster murderer--the world as we know it is not an Agatha Christie book, with murderers determined to call attention to their crimes through clever clues--what real murderer would court discovery like that? But Rankin's invention of a computer game that may have turned deadly allows us to engage in a bit of Da Vinci Code clue solving that is unlikely but not completely unbelievable.

Interestingly, The Falls assumes that the reader is familiar with the "Arthur's Seat Coffins," a set of tiny handmade coffins containing small doll figures that were discovered on the high hill outside Edinburgh in 1836. Do they have a relationship to the more recent coffins?

Resurrection Men puts Rebus into a remedial course for unreliable older police officers. Rebus picks a fight with his superior and throws a mug of tea at her, and ends up in a 3 week course designed to resurrect his career. There are five other cops also in the class, from all over Scotland, doing the course in order to finish their careers and collect their pensions. They are given a cold case to review, in between classes, and they are required to work together to find anything that was overlooked the first time to see if they can reach some resolution now.

Before long, we find out that Rebus was asked by a superior to "go undercover" into the class and find if three of the other cops had turned crooked and stolen several million pounds from a criminal who was framed for another crime. To his consternation, the cold case they are investigating was one he was involved in, and there is some secret about his involvement that he does not want to reveal. Now he wonders if his "assignment" was itself a blind, and that he is the one being investigated.

Meanwhile, the department is investigating the murder of an art gallery owner who was killed on his front step after a gala reception. Newly promoted DS Siobhan Clark doesn't believe that the angry artist in the cells is the real killer, and she finds herself bending the rules the was Rebus does to find out the truth.

Amid the actual investigations, we see inter-city rivalries, the "right" way to investigate a case, obnoxious reporters, grieving families, random domestic violence, the different worlds inhabited by the various classes of Edinburgh society, as well as landmarks of modern Scotland. The solutions to these various cases are never very tidy, which feels true to life. There is no single criminal mastermind, but sometimes there are very deep ties between seemingly unrelated events. Sometimes bad men prosper, innocent people get hurt or die, sometimes justice can only be gotten if the police stoop to dirty tactics.

I'm intrigued, and will keep reading this series--plus, it makes me want to go see Edinburgh for myself now.

Several Books by Jennifer Crusie

Can we talk about chick lit? What about chick lit lite?

I stumbled on Jennifer Crusie because Audible.com was having a sale, and one of her books was available on audio for super cheap. "Welcome to Temptation" which sounds rife with possibilities. Her two heroines are a pair of video making sisters, hired by a B list (or C list, or lower) actress to make a promotional video of her return to her home town of Temptation (North Carolina, I think--generic Southern state may be substituted at no extra charge). There is a hunky town mayor, an equally hunky sheriff, missing/embezzled money, and a body or two. There is a lovely but deteriorating house the heroines are trying to renovate, a reluctantly ex husband, and an inappropriately pornographic version of the video played on cable access which was actually required viewing by the town's students--until somebody realized just how pornographic the video was.

It was fun, there was some snappy dialogue, at least three happily ever afters, and no filmy residue on skin or tongue. So, I picked up another one. "Agnes and the Hitman" had a lovely but deteriorating home that the heroine was determined to renovate, a slimy fiance, quite a few bodies, a bad boy turned good, and a mystery. Subsequently, I read "Crazy for You," which involves a woman with a slimy boyfriend, a bad boy turned good, a lovely but deteriorating house which the heroine is determined to renovate, and a dog. No mystery and no dead bodies, but a cute conceit in which the heroine decides to do one selfish thing and have a dog--which sets off a chain of other changes in her life and everyone around her as well.

"Getting Rid of Bradley" involves a creepy ex-husband, a bad boy turned good, a lovely but deteriorating house, embezzled money, scary threats to the heroine's life which were not meant to be fatal until the end, and (here's where this one breaks the pattern--okay, not really) THREE dogs, with a fourth one added at the end for good measure.

"The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes" is a collaborative book, written by Crusie and two other romance authors, starring three sisters with psychic powers they can't control, living in an obscure Southern town in a lovely but deteriorating house, at least one bad boy gone good, two dead bodies, an evil aunt, a 29-ish virgin, and three happily ever afters.

"Fast Women" stars a woman whose husband walked out on her, leaving her a ghost in her own life, until she gets a job with a bad boy who is actually good, her slimy ex, an apartment in a duplex that is lovely but not deteriorating, hush money paid in diamonds and a Porsche, and quite a few bodies, mostly inside basement freezers.

Are you seeing some repeating elements? Me too. This is what makes this "genre fiction." There is a little bit of character arc for one, sometimes two characters, lots of plot, very little description or any sort of trauma caused by traumatic events, and a couple of sex scenes. While ostensibly contemporaneous stories, there is quite a lot that is very retro. The women, for example, are nearly virginal, if not actually so. Several have only had just the one man--either Mr. Wrong, or Mr. Right, or have been celibate for years before the story opens. They tend to fall for "bad boys" who aren't really as bad as they look. Despite insisting on living their own lives as independent women, they mostly just move from one (wrong) man to another (right) one, with very little indication that they really are independent. You could hardly be any more gender stereotypical if you were Barbara Cartland.

And yet, I've clearly been devouring these as if they were potato chips. What is it that is so appealing about them? The experience is not unlike reading Agatha Christie novels--sure, the books are littered with corpses, but nobody really is too bothered by them. And they mostly deserved it. There is some chaos, but it all is comfortably reordered and resolved by the end and we (the readers) can feel that the social order is always going to win out over disorder. The good guys win, and get the girl, and the lovely but deteriorating house, and a happily ever after, while the bad guys go to bad ends.

Can I recommend them? Not really--would you actually recommend Twinkies? Same thing. Junk food literature, to be consumed quickly and forgotten, but enjoyable while they last.

Dead Man's Folly, by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie novels are kind of like potato chips--it's nearly impossible to stop at one.












This was also an audiobook, narrated by David Suchet, who has played Poirot in a number of BBC series. A truly great audio narrator is able to the opposite sex without falling into camp or parody, and Suchet does AMAZING women's voices. Truly a joy to listen to, and now I'm hungry for more.


















Christie's novels seem to exist in a mythical, unchanging England. There are references to "the War" and the "difficulty of finding good servants," --the only thing that guarantees it is more recent that 1850 is that there are trains and buses. Otherwise, Christie seems to write about an Eternal England like Jane Austen and P.G. Wodehouse. Dead Man's Folly makes glancing references to WWII, and there is a youth hostel with numerous visiting foreigners, but otherwise, there is nothing to distinguish this as 1956 rather than 1923.

So, imagine how odd it is to Google this novel and find comtemporary reviews! I've never thought about the 1956 Michiko Kakutani actually reviewing Agatha Christie--if I'd thought about this at all, I kind of thought of these books as just spontaneously appearing on bookshelves and in libraries. I never thought of them as being released, and then reviewed, as if a review of an Agatha Christie book would ever change your mind about whether to read it or not.

Sure, a reviewer probably needs to point out that Christie's characters are rather two-dimentional, but is character development the point? People are moved around like puzzle pieces? Of course they are! This is an Agatha Christie novel! If we wanted realism, we'd read John Updike or something.

So, what happens in this book? The Old Country Manor had to be sold to pay the exhorbitant death duties, and was purchased by New Money rich man from The City, and his exotically beautiful and mentally limited wife. The new gentry are holding a Garden Fete, and have hired Ariadne Oliver (Christie's self-parody of a mystery writer) to stage a "murder hunt"--she constructed a mystery, and created clues for participants to try to solve to find the "body," played by a local 14 year old. Mrs. Oliver is unsettled, however, feeling that she has been pushed into making some decisions that weren't really her ideas, and she fears something horrible is going to happen. So she calls her old friend Hercule Poirot to come out and figure out what is going to happen and prevent it if possible.

Poirot arrives, meets all the participants, and surprise! The "body" turns up actually dead, and the Beautiful and Mentally Limited Wife disappears. The police can't understand why this nobody of a girl has been killed, and the mysterious disappearance of the Wife seems to be linked somehow. Of course, it takes Poirot to figure out the solution. Of course, for the practiced reader of mysteries, some of the elements are clear. The Wife disappears after putting in an appearance in a vivid pink dress, dripping with diamonds, in 4 inch heels, heavy makeup and a huge black coolie hat. Hard to miss, right? That's the point--take off all the obvious furnishings, and who knows what she looks like?

There is a scene where Mr. New Money is yelling at someone out the window, then turns back in saying "what did you say, dear?" Do you think his wife is really inside at that moment? I don't! So I know I've read this book before--sometime in the last 30 years--but who can remember exactly what happens in a Christie novel, am I right? But who wants to remember? It's like potato chips--sure, you've had them before, but that doesn't mean you won't eat them again at the first opportunity.

(See what I did there? Returned to the theme from the first paragraph! That's literary merit, that is!)

So, in a departure from my usual reviews here, I'm not going to say what the solution is--because I'm going to want to listen to this book again. Definitely an audio book worth owning, since it's re-usable.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Steig Larsson

This book has been on a ton of Top 2008 Books lists, and has garnered a bunch of enthusiastic reviews. It was even one of the top recommendations from Audible.com, so it looked like a book I was going to have to read. I ended up getting it on audio for my iPod.

I make the point that I listened to rather than read the book, because I firmly believe that the experience is different. For one obvious thing, the time I invest in the book is very different. With an audiobook, I can't skip ahead, so skim through parts, or look ahead or back to check things. I am bound to the pace of the reader, which is much slower than I can read.

The quality of the time is different too. With an audiobook, I can read while doing chores: walking the dog, cleaning the kitchen, doing laundry, driving. With a book, I pretty much have to sit down and focus: the opposite of listening.

So, I can accept that my experience of this book is different than it would have been had I read it, and I'd welcome hearing from people what their experience is in the different formats. My experience, however, was mediocre. This is an interesting book, but surely there are better books than this published this year.

Quick plot summary: Mikael Blomkvist is an investigative journalist forced to take a leave of absence from his job due to losing a libel case. He is hired by a retired industrialist to investigate the disappearance of his 16 year old grand-niece nearly forty years before. He works with the eponymous girl of the dragon tattoo, Lisabeth Salander, who has incredible research and hacking skills and they solve the mystery. They then prove the truth behind the libel case and take down a rouge financier. They don't end up happily ever after, but there are two more books in this series, in which they will likely do so.

So, let's start at the beginning. The title. "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" puts the focus on Salander (everyone is addressed by surname, except when a very large family makes that confusing). With a title like that, I'd expect that the tattoo itself had some meaning, or was a clue, or something. (Work with me on this one.) For example, maybe all the girls who were drug runners, or prostitutes, or grifters identified themselves with this tattoo. Maybe the dragon was a clue to the specifice mastermind behind the plan: "I should have seen it--translated into Mandarin, 'dragon' is pronounced exactly like his name!" Imagine the book Raymond Chandler would have written with a title like this!

But no. Salander has a dragon tattoo on her shoulder, a loop on her bicep and ankle, a rose on her calf, a Chinese character on her hip, a ring in her lip and one in her eyebrow. The tattoos are remarked upon, mostly in passing. There is a little more discussion of the piercings--are they okay? Would I let my daughter get one? What does that mean about her professional abilities? But ultimately the tattoos etc. are no more important than that. The book could as easily have been called "The 90 Pound Investigator," or "The Girl on the Kowasaki Motorbike." The tattoo isn't particularly significant in any way.

The original Swedish title apparently translates to "Men Who Hate Women" which admittedly sounds like a self-help book, like "Women Who Love Too Much" or something. However, the original title actually focusses on the mystery and its effects, rather than one character. Sure, Salander is the most interesting character in the book, but she is really only one of two main characters, and Blomkvist gets entirely shorted by the US title.

Okay, so we move inside the book and address the plot itself. Large and wealthy family owned business. CEO is childless, and determines his (then 16 year old) grandniece Harriet is the best person to be the next head of the company. Everybody is on the family island for a meeting when a terrible truck crash cuts off the only bridge for 12 or 24 hours--a significant amount of time. Only the next day does anybody notice that Harriet is missing. So, when Blomkvist his briefed on the mystery, much evidence is given to prove that there was no way she could have left the island, making it the epitome of a "locked room" mystery. The island was searched, and her body never found.

Well, I don't know about you, but all this emphasis on how she couldn't have left the island left me looking for how she could have. So much strenuous misdirection makes me suspicious, and so while everybody is nodding and accepting how she must have still been on the island, I am busy thinking up ways she could have left it, willingly or not. Which, it turns out, is only the first of several plot solutions I guessed well before any of the characters.

This is one of the first books I have read that attempts to be fully realistic about the pervasive technology in our lives. Everyone has mobile phones; when Blomkvist moves to the island to start his investigation, he calls the phone company to get DSL. The main characters do their writing and note-taking and evidence storage on their MacBooks. Most of the investigations start with Google.

So, when a question arises of how Salander gets such good information, is it really any surprise to learn that she is a hacker? She gets details about her subjects that are substantially more private than any of her co-workers get--how do you think she came up with the information that a job applicant was a closet pederast? Of course she hacked into his computer--and everybPody else's she investigates. Score now stands: Me-2, Blomkvist-0.

It takes most of the book for Blomkvist and Salander to come around to beginning to suspect Harriet's older brother Martin. Excuse me! I am supposed to believe that an investigative journalist who specializes in reporting on financial crimes never once considered looking critically at the current CEO of the company? Isn't it about the first rule of investigation to "Follow the Money?" Who benefits from the crime? Everybody knew that Harriet was being groomed to be the next CEO; after she disappeared, her older brother got the job. There is Number One Suspect right there! But no, it takes some laborious nonsense about reading old newspaper negatives and blowing up blurry pictures using Photoshop before Our Heroes even think to look at him. This is just sloppy, isn't it?

The family is full of repulsive old folks; abusive drunks, anti-Semites, Nazi sympathizers. Everybody hates everybody else for the most part, and so when one foul old drunk lives in a cabin on the complete other side of the island, away from everybody else, and falls off a cliff and drowns while drunk, nobody even whispered that he might have been pushed? Of course he was pushed! You suspected that too, I know you did. Almost nobody just falls off a cliff and drowns by accident in a novel--not if they are broadly disliked and live isolated from potential witnesses! Me-3. Blomkvist-0.

If this were an Agatha Christie novel, I'd just be patting myself on the back for spotting the plot so successfully. However, this novel is much darker than Christie ever dreamed of being, and the sheer horror of what Larsson puts in his book made me deeply uncomfortable. This is where the original title would have warned people off--as Blomkvist and Salander investigate Harriet's disappearance, they find evidence that the family is connected to a number of grisly murders of women. Horrible murders; serious sexual assault, women bound and tortured to death. I don't even want to think about the horrible things that Larsson has chosen to put into his book, and I suspect anybody who writes so much about so many unthinkable things. Women's bodies are abused in so many ways in this book it's revolting.

Sure, most of the horrible things are from reports of old murders--they are not shown in the "real time" of the novel, and they are further distanced by their remoteness in time. Still, Larsson puts in enough detail to be truly troublesome, and I can't expiate that sin by granting that book claims that men who do that to women are maniacs. Sure they are, but what are the people who write about such acts in a novel?

Which brings me to another flaw in this plot of this book. The old murders are tied together as being perversions of the laws listed in Leviticus, and the mutilations of the victims' bodies are in some fashion related to ritual offerings, and the conclusion is that the murderer is a religious nut who hates women. We also see that the ritualistic behavior continues to the present day, with the mutilation of a cat having been done in the family crypt rather than in a basement/garage or out in the woods.

So why, when we finally meet Martin in his torturing mode, is there not a whiff of religious mania about him? He gets quite a melodramatic monologue about the god-like feeling of having a life in his hands--but not a thing about women being bad, or his need to extirpate his sin, or anything even remotely religious at all. Why did Martin--who possesses a well equipped soundproof torture chamber in his own basement--feel the need to dismember the cat in the family crypt? Finally, we are told that for Martin, the real thrill was in stalking and capturing a woman who wouldn't be missed--no relgious psychosis there.

So, as we skid into the final chapters of this book, we are faced with the solution to the mystery--16 year old is abused by her drunk father, she pushes him into the water in self-defense, only to find her brother intends to continue the same treatment. So, she runs away with some help so she isn't found and brought back to the intolerable situation. It's creepy that we had to get to that solution through the serial killings of dozens of women to figure out what is pretty obvious to start with. I felt dirty and corrupted for having been dragged through such muck.

Oh, and by the way, that libel case? Salander hacks into the victor's computer system, and gets all the incriminating information necessary to lead to an arrest, the guy flees, and is found dead not long after. Probably a mob execution, we figure, several paragraphs before we are told so. Was this necessary? Does it tell us anything more than we already know about plot, character, motivation? No. What we do get is Larsson's fantasy about what should happen when a journalist breaks a story about shady financial dealings--it becomes a huge media story, all the sloppy journalists get shamed for their failing to ask the tough questions, the government moves to create oversight and regulation to prevent such shenannigans, and Blomkvist is vindicated and lionized, plus he gets to publish a book that sells out its first run and has to be re-printed, and he rides off into the sunset to get laid. The End.

So, let's talk about Blomkvist. He's a weirdly passive guy for an investigative journalist, and seems to have been created to be Larsson's idea of what a Man Who Doesn't Hate Women would be like. Larsson has crafted a wonderfully spiky character in Salander, and then waters her down by having her fall in love with Blomkvist. Why does she love him? Well, the sex is good, and he doesn't ask her personal questions, and he doesn't get mad when she does outrageous things to him, and he doesn't push her to do things she doesn't want to do. So does a dog, except for the sex.

Blomkvist has a brief affair with one of the women of The Family, and when she decides to break it off, he just shrugs and basically says "whatever." Which, come to think of it, was his response to her initiating the affair. Now, I totally value a decent guy over a "bad boy" as dating material, but this guy has as much personality as a piece of soggy toast. He's just not really there, in any meaningful way--his appeal is that he is so self-effacing that he doesn't create any obstacle to the women around him. If that were a character I could actually believe in, and find understandably attractive, then I might have had a better reaction to this book.

Finally, a word about the writing. I'm going to ease off a bit here and blame it on translation, but a great deal of the "description" in the novel is merely a list of nouns: we get a list of every item of furniture in Blomkvist's office, his apartment, the guest cottage where he stays for most of the novel. We get all the ingredients of the sandwiches he makes for himself. We get a list of how many pairs of socks and long underwear he puts on for the winter. We get the model numbers of the MacBooks the characters use. We even (I am not making this up) get the square footage of every living space anyone enters. I can hope that in the original Swedish this was more graceful or elegant; in English it reads like a lot of inventories.

So, ultimately, I'd give this book a B+ if I were grading it. It's uneven at best, and rather creepier than I think the author intended.

The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien

Or: How I Read This Book And Learned To Love Post-Modernism.
















How does one even start with this book. It is a book about the Vietnam War, it is a book about the impossibility of conveying what it was like to be in the Vietnam War. It is a book about a young man named "Tim O'Brien" who was drafted after college, contemplated running to Canada, but ended up going to war.

This is a book that plays with literary convention, but does so for solid and understandable reasons. It's not a McSweeney's type of lark, O'Brien doesn't play with the form just because he can, but because it is deeply rooted in what he is trying to say. Before the first page, on the same page with the Library of Congress information, there is a caveat:

This is a work of fiction. Except for a few details regarding the author's own life, all the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary.

On the facing page is the dedication:

This book is lovingly dedicated to the men of Alpha Company, and in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa

These are the names of the main characters of the book. In other hands, this could very well be a bit of PoMo manipulation, an attempt to mess with the reader's head. For O'Brien, these imagined men are as real to him as the actual physical men during his surreal experience of Vietnam. The blending of fact and fiction laid out in these two small prefaces is part of the very meaning of the book.

The book itself is either a collection of short stories, or an episodic novel in which the stories themselves are arranged deliberately, although not chronologically. The book is hard to read, as O'Brien describes the catastrophic boredom of war--vast amounts of time of boring, gritty field routine, punctuated by brief, unannounced horror. The first story, "The Things They Carried" details the specific items--and their weight--carred by each of the men. There are the basic supplies each man must have for himself, plus the additional weight of equipment necessary to their jobs. But each man carries other things, that are far heavier and cannot be thrown off: fear, guilt, shame, which are heavier than the military issue.

We see the men failing to connect with each other--Cross spends his time dreaming of a girl who probably doesn't love him. Rat Kiley tells stories that he has to exaggerate in order to properly convey the emotional weight of what happened. Norman Bowker returns home after the war to find that there is no one he can talk to about the experience. One of the men writes a letter to the sister of a man who was killed, trying to tell her what a great man her brother was--and she never writes back. Each man is isolated, unable to communicate what is happening.

The inability of communication is both implicit and explicit in the novel. O'Brien writes of the impossibility of mere words being able to pass the experience on to another person. There is the (now expected) unreality of war in this country, where there is no clear enemy, where boys are expected to act as men, where there is nothing familiar about the experience. And yet, O'Brien refuses to accept that Vietnam is "unknowable." It's not that Vietnam was surreal, but that all experience is limited to those who experience it.

One example: In "Speaking of Courage," Norman Bowker imagines telling someone "I almost won the Silver Star." As the chapter progresses, Norman slowly reveals that while bivouaced in a swampy field, they were hit with mortar fire, and Kiowa got sucked under the mud. Bowker tried to grab Kiowa's leg, but gave up, overwhelmed by the cumulative circumstances of the situation. Bowker blames himself for Kiowa's death, but frames the story for the people back home as "almost winning the Silver Star." The chapter returns again and again to Bowker's attempts to talk about the experience, and to the infinite distance between him and the people in his hometown. O'Brien weaves a delicte story about a man wrestling with his own sense of guilt, the rut he is stuck in, and his inability to integrate back into town life. The writing is spare, yet laden with metaphor.

In the following chapter, "Notes," the author's persona admits that it was "Tim O'Brien" who was responsible for Kiowa's death. After this emotional wallop, we then read "In the Field," where we see the event from Jimmy Cross's perspective, and learn that he blames himself as well, although more vaguely than "O'Brien" did in the previous chapter.

This is not a fun or pleasant read; the suffering of war is hard to work through voluntarily. As hard as it was, I am glad I read it. It engaged both the emotions and the intellect, saying things about war, and the impossibility of saying anything about war. Definitely a great book