Introducing Book

This YouTube video is brilliant - and well executed - so don't let the English subtitles put you off. In fact the subtitles are part of the charm of this new product introduction.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Book:

 If Book were an Apple product, this is how the company might introduce it in Vegas at the next big high-tech conference.

The Sound of Broken Glass

I am a longtime fan of Elizabeth George, and I have often wished that she would produce more than one new novel per year. So, finally discovering Deborah Crombie’s Scotland Yard detective series (The Sound of Broken Glass being the fifteenth book in the series) last year was one of the highlights of my reading year.

The novels of George and Crombie have much in common. Each series is anchored by a group of Scotland Yard detectives who, over the course of the series, change and mature as they experience what ordinary life throws at them.  Major characters come and go, sometimes by choice, other times they are claimed by death. And, interestingly, despite the British settings of both series, George and Crombie are both American authors who rely on in-country and Internet research for the authenticity and detail that make their work so special.

Crombie’s two central characters are a married couple: detectives Duncan Kinkaid and Gemma James. As The Sound of Broken Glass begins, Duncan, currently on a parental leave of absence, is spending his days caring for the couple’s children, with most of his attention necessarily being devoted to their troubled three-year-old foster daughter. Gemma has now returned to work and is leading a Murder Investigation Team in South London.

Gemma’s first investigation as team leader begins early one Saturday morning with a phone call from Detective Sergeant Melody Talbot. Staff in a disreputable Crystal Palace hotel has discovered a dead man – in a rather embarrassing position.  The naked man, bound hand and foot, is on his back and appears to have been strangled. Whether he is the victim of murder, or of some sexual game gone bad, is not immediately clear, but he certainly could not have tied himself up the way he was found. The victim, as it turns out, is a London attorney who is neither particularly well liked or respected by his colleagues. What at first appears to be a rather straightforward investigation grows complicated when, a few days later, a second attorney is found dead under very similar circumstances.

Deborah Crombie

While the murder investigation is interesting enough, what makes The Sound of Broken Glass even more fun is the way that Crombie continues to develop her central cast of characters.  Duncan is itching to get back to work, but his new daughter needs him more than Scotland Yard does; Melody succumbs to a temptation that places her police career in jeopardy; Gemma feels guilty about how little time she has for her family; and Duncan’s old partner, Doug Cullen, is suddenly acting so needy that he is annoying everyone around him – probably including himself. 

Via a series of flashbacks and real-time developments, Crombie offers a series of clues and misdirection that will keep most mystery fans guessing.  I am not very good at solving these things before all is revealed near the end, and it was no different for me with The Sound of Broken Glass. Elizabeth George fans can double their pleasure by reading Deborah Crombie’s Scotland Yard series (and vice versa). Fans of mysteries and police procedurals will not want to miss either of these ladies.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

George Saunders Discusses Tenth of December on PBS News Hour

All of a sudden, George Saunders is everywhere.  Saunders is one of those "overnight successes" who has been working hard at his craft for a very long time, so it is good to see this happen for him.

Here's his recent appearance on PBS:



If you're at all curious about Saunders and his short stories, be sure to read the review I posted about Tenth of December, his latest collection - the one the New York Times called "the best book you will read this year."  Not bad for an former oil man (Saunders is a "geophysics engineer.")

Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces

I had never heard of John Kennedy Toole the day that the cover of A Confederacy of Dunces caught my eye on the Harvard Book Store bargain table. That cover was so different from everything else there that it was the first thing I picked up, and I had the feeling the book was going to be special.  And, it turns out that I was correct.  A Confederacy of Dunces is a brilliant novel, and it started my thirty-year fascination with its author, a man who committed suicide at age 31 in 1969, eleven years before his Pulitzer Prize winning novel was even published.

But, largely because of how Toole’s mother solely controlled the documents pertaining to her son, destroying those that did not support the image she preferred, knowing what to believe about the author’s life has not been easy. Butterfly in the Typewriter, the new John Kennedy Toole biography by Cory MacLauchlin, goes a long way in separating the myth created by Thelma, Toole’s mother, from the reality of the man’s brief life. 

The cover that caught my attention

 Toole is, of course, a New Orleans native, and the city was as important to him as anything else in his life ever would be. Despite working and studying in places as varied as New York City and rural Louisiana, the city was forever in his blood. Although it provided him with real-life representations of what would become the key characters of his literary masterpiece, living there with his parents into his thirties was also a constant reminder of his failures. And, finally, after a row with Thelma, John Kennedy Toole ended the last road trip of his life on a deserted road outside Biloxi, Mississippi by inhaling the exhaust fumes from his car until he was dead. 

John Kennedy Toole

Butterfly in the Typewriter follows Toole’s brief journey from birth; through the school years that culminated in degrees from Tulane and Columbia University; to his jobs as an English teacher; and, completing the cycle, back to living with – and financially supporting - his parents in their New Orleans home. Along the way, we meet his friends and colleagues, and learn much about his family, including its history of mental illness.

Toole’s story is complicated by his mother’s unfortunate habit of editing it for her own purposes (and glory), but it would have been complicated enough even without her meddling. To Thelma’s everlasting credit, there is no doubt that, without her efforts, the world would never have heard of A Confederacy of Dunces. She even, with $100,000 of royalty money from the book, established the John Kennedy Toole scholarship at Tulane, a fund that, according to MacLauchlin, is worth more than $1 million today.

Cory MacLauchlin

Butterfly in the Typewriter is an evenhanded biography, one that tries to tell all sides of the story while minimizing speculation and rumor (or at least pointing them out as such). Sadly, though, it appears that we will never know the whole truth of John Kennedy Toole because all we have left is Thelma Toole’s edited version of who he was.  We know that she destroyed his suicide note and other documents that would have certainly offered insights into her son’s mind. And, now that all existing documents have been studied, and most of those to whom Toole was closest have taken their secrets to the grave, Butterfly in the Typewriter may just be as good as it ever gets.  

Group of 125 Authors Chooses Its Favorite Mysteries

Well, it's Super Bowl Sunday, so before everyone leaves the Internet to park themselves in front of a big screen TV, here's one more tidbit from my all-time favorite book of lists, J. Peder Zane's The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books.  You really need to grab this book - it's that fascinating, if you keep in mind that it's sample is limited to 125 authors.

Top Ten Mysteries and Thrillers

1. The Long Goodbye - by Raymond Chandler
2. The Killer Inside - by Jim Thompson
3. Red Dragon - by Thomas Harris
4. The Big Sleep - by Raymond Chandler
5. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - John LeCarre
6. The Postman Always Rings Twice - by James M. Cain
7. The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
8. Mildred Pierce - by James M. Cain
9. The Silence of the Lambs - by Thomas Harris
10. Everybody Pays - by Andrew Vachss

I have read eight of these and am also very familiar with Jim Thompson and Andrew Vachss, authors of the two books I've yet to experience.  Two or three of these would probably end up on my own Mystery Top Ten list, but I am surprised at the double-appearance of Thomas Harris. Too, I suppose it is because I find John LeCarre's writing style to be so boring that I find his showing at number five to be the biggest surprise of all.

Man in the Empty Suit

Time travel novels, despite the well-known paradoxes associated with the theory of time travel, generally make for fun reading. For example, how could a person go back in time and accidentally kill his own grandfather when that means that he would have never existed to be able to time travel in the first place? But that kind of mind-twister is all part of the fun.

Sean Ferrell's Man in the Empty Suit puts a complicated, mind-bending twist on that old paradox. But Ferrell's story, while it is certainly an intriguing one, generally left me more confused than satisfied because I found it difficult to follow the author's logic. Picture this: every year on his birthday, a man travels to an abandoned hotel in 2071 New York City to celebrate the event at a special party. The event marks the 100th anniversary of his 1971 birth, and in attendance are all the "versions" of the time traveler that have ever existed, or will ever exist.  It is a crowded party - but he is the only one there.

As parties go, this one is actually pretty dull and, of course, very predictable.  But the party jumps off the track the year our hero turns thirty-nine, because on his way to the hotel ballroom, he finds a dead body.  The shocking thing about the discovery is that this body is his own at age forty, and now, as older versions of himself are quick to point out, he has exactly one year to figure out how to stop the murder from happening or they are all doomed.

Because no outsiders (with one beautiful exception) ever attend the party, the killer almost certainly has to be an older version of the victim.  But would not that be some kind of strange suicide?  As the search for clues evolved (and the clues were often ones left in the future/past by our boy himself), I became confused.  Unfortunately, I pretty much stayed that way for the rest of the ride.

Sean Ferrell

What saved Man in the Empty Suit for me is the love story that anchors it.  The first outsider ever to attend one of the birthday parties is an attractive young woman who calls herself Lily.  Our hero falls hopelessly in love but soon learns that he has a second mission almost as important as solving his own murder - he must stop Lily from attending the birthday party at which he meets her.  So, hoping to fix things, the time traveler jumps backward six months.

Despite my confusion, I did enjoy Ferrell's depiction of a future in which people still manage to work for the common good and take care of each other despite living in a city that is largely in ruins. What avid reader, after all, could fail to appreciate a society in which so many people, despite the struggle they face just to stay alive, are so physically involved in finding and distributing library books to readers in other cities?

Bottom Line: This one requires a little extra patience from the reader, but is an interesting, if sometimes confusing and frustrating, time travel novel whose side-plots and setting make it a memorable read.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)