It's Sunday, So This Must Be Barnes & Noble - Part 2

 This week's Sunday morning visit to Barnes & Noble resulted in my TBR list growing by almost ten books - even though I brought only one of the books home with me today.  For about twenty minutes it seemed that no matter what direction I turned my head, there was something interesting in front of me.  When you get on a roll like that, you may as well just go with it.  So I did what I always do, put my phone's camera to good use by snapping pictures of things I want to know more about (I try, though, not to be particularly obvious when I take pictures inside a bookstore so some of these photos are a little wonky).

So let's begin with what I brought home, a new-to-me magazine title and Alex Berenson's 2017 The Prisoner:

World Literature Today is a high quality production that I've never before seen, and even though I paid full price for this November-December 2018 issue, I'm thrilled to get my hands on it.  As you can see, the cover features the wonderful writer Alice Walker and highlights several intriguing articles, especially the one titled "Illness & Literature." The magazine is chockfull of reviews, poems, stories, and interviews, so I expect to get a lot of use out of it.  Now I'm hoping that this wasn't somehow the last issue of a magazine that I only discovered on its deathbed - that would be just my luck.

I also bought a book from the bargain book display, The Prisoner.  I have found myself reading a whole lot of fiction and nonfiction set in various Muslim countries in the last few years, probably because I spent so many years living and working in North Africa and became pretty familiar with the culture.  A lot of those, of course, were thrillers and this one by Alex Berenson does sound like fun.  I take this from the dust jacket: "An Islamic State prisoner in a secret Bulgarian prison has been overheard hinting that a senior CIA officer may be passing information to the Islamic State.  The agency's top officials, and even the President, say the possibility is unthinkable."  And that means that recurring character John Wells is going to have to "resume his former identity as a hardened jihadi."

It seems as if I'm seeing more Holocaust-based fiction right now than I've seen in a long time.  Considering the horrifying rise in anti-Semitism around the world, that is probably a good thing (maybe everyone should be forced to watch movies like The Pianist so that this trend is stopped in its tracks).  This one is set in 1943 Amsterdam where a married couple is arrested and sent to separate camps.  Now the wife has to decide whether she prefers the certainty of a slow death over volunteering for the camp brothel.  

I absolutely fell in love with Swedish writer Fredric Backman's novel A Man Called Ove a while back but have read only one other by him since then, a novel called My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry.  That's why I was happy to spot the more recent Bear Town and Us Against You (not pictured) on separate tables this morning. Without even knowing much about the plot details (I do remember that one of the two is about a small town hockey team), I'm putting both of them in line to be read soon just because I enjoy Backman's quirky plots so much.  

And because I'm a sucker for longish family sagas, these two made the morning's cut: The Guest Book (not pictured) by Sarah Blake and A Secret History of Witches by Louisa Morgan.  I can't imagine any more different families, one wealthy and upperclass for generations and the other a family that has produced witches for generations.  Both novels appear upon first glance to be well written, so I'm looking forward to getting around to both of them eventually.  

I've been a Kate Atkinson fan for a few years now, and was pleased to see that her 2018 novel Transcription is now in paperback. This one is a spy novel set in England shortly after the conclusion of World War II. (I should mention that almost all of these books were found in displays of "new" paperbacks.)  The New Yorker raved about this one last year - and Atkinson is just so solid that I don't doubt that Transcription will be good.

Then there's this one called Supermarket by Bobby Hall (who appears to be a musician of note with whom I am completely unfamiliar).  It tells the tale of a young man named Flynn who has moved back in with his mother due to his anxiety and depression problems. Flynn gets a supermarket job that he believes will solve all of his problems - a steady job does tend to do that - but things don't go at all as planned after Flynn shows up at work only to find that he's walked into a crime scene.  This one is called a "psychological thriller" and a "study of madness and creativity." Sounds good.

And finally, there's the only nonfiction book in the lot, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, a book I've seen around for quite a while but somehow never taken a close look at.  Now I wish I hadn't waited so long because this one might finally answer some questions I've had for most of my life.  This will be my first Mary Roach book, but a quick glance at what else she's written tells me it's not likely to be my last.

In the past I would have purchased most of these nine books, if not all of them, eventually but those days are long gone due my lack of shelf space. I'm to the point where it has to be one book out for every new book I bring into the house, and that tends to make me a lot more careful with my book purchases than I used to be. So for now, most of these will be going on my "hold" list at the local library (best internet invention ever) - as soon as I can get that list back below the limit set by the library, that is.  Don't expect to see any of them reviewed on Book Chase anytime soon; but I can dream, right?

Random Sunday Morning Thoughts: Books, Blogs, and Bloggers

As I continue to clean up around Book Chase since my return to active blogging, a few things have jumped out at me:

• Like where did so many of my old book-blogging friends run off to?  I decided to clean up my "Blogger Reading List" yesterday afternoon by removing those blogs that have been dead for at least one year.  Now keep in mind that I haven't edited that list in about three years, so I did expect that several blogs might have disappeared by now.  What I didn't expect to find, however, was that 16 of the 38 blogs that I followed three years ago are no longer active.  Do the math along with me and you will see that's 42% of the bloggers I was following just three years ago.  Gone.  I had followed a few of them for close to ten years and lots of them for more than five - and saddest of all, some of them left just after reaching personal five-or-ten-year milestones.

• Like how much easier it is to remember details from the books I've read when I write something about them than it is if I know I won't be doing that.  I think it's a combination of me unconsciously paying more attention up front during the reading process, and that writing something halfway intelligible forces me to organize and solidly lock in my impressions and conclusions when I'm done with a book. 

• Like how so many of my blogging friends have moved from Blogger to WordPress in recent years.  I made that same move a few years ago myself but learned the hard way that the free Blogger platform could do some things for me that the paid WordPress could not do nearly as easily, if at all.  So I moved back to Blogger.  I realize that was four years ago, and I suspect that both platforms have changed for the better since then, but I will be sticking with Blogger unless some huge WordPress advantage makes itself obvious. 

• And finally, like how several of my longtime favorite book blogs are now just over or just under 15 years old and still going as strongly as ever.  Honestly, I don't know how they do it, but I love them for doing it so well for so long.

Louise Penny and Inspector Gamache Would Be Proud of This Duck

Just when you think you've seen it all, along comes a duck calmly sitting on top of a car and quacking at anyone who pauses for a second look - or in my case, a couple of quick pictures.

I admit to eating an Egg McMuffin for breakfast at least three times a week, and that's why I spotted this car in the side parking lot I use on the mornings I stop by a local McDonalds.  Since the duck showed absolutely no fear of humans, I suspected he/she was someone's pet, so I mentioned it to a couple of folks inside McDonalds hoping that someone could tell me why the bird was out there sitting on, and messing on, someone's car.

That's when the story got even stranger...turns out that the duck belongs to a fellow who was having breakfast in McDonalds, and that the big white bird is his daily companion as he runs errands around town.  The man even claims to have left that cup of on the car especially for the duck but I didn't ask him what was in the cup. Yes, you read that correctly: the duck rides around Houston all day long with his friend, the owner of the car.  

Louise Penny, who has created a wonderful old lady poet character  who carries her pet duck around with her everywhere she goes in the Inspector Gamache series, would be proud of this pair.  Whoever said that truth is stranger than (or at least every bit as strange as) fiction was right.

A Dedicated Man - Peter Robinson

William Morrow Paperback from 2015

Continuing my recent discovery and exploration of Peter Robinson’s fiction, I have just completed his second Inspector Banks novel, A Dedicated Man.  As I mentioned earlier however, this is actually my third Banks novel since I only discovered Robinson with last year’s Careless Love.

 It seems that the good inspector has been enjoying something of a major-crime lull since the personal trauma he and wife Sandra suffered in Banks’s debut in Gallows View.  All of that though abruptly ends via the brutal murder of a “dedicated man,” a retired college professor who has permanently relocated to Banks’s rather isolated Yorkshire location.  Mainly because everyone seems to have loved and respected the victim to such a high degree, the case proves to be a particularly difficult one for Banks to get a handle on, but the inspector counts on his usual persistence, along with a well aimed hard push or two in the right direction, to get the job done. 

Author Peter Robinson

And it’s precisely that attitude that attracts me to Robinson’s Inspector Banks novels.  I have always enjoyed a good police procedural and found them to be more satisfying than detective novels by writers who rely on one thrilling scene after another to carry their books to some kind of (usually preposterous) conclusion. For me the best crime fiction writers are those who combine elements of both styles with an emphasis on process over thrill.  Thankfully, too, Inspector Banks is a “talker” and several times in A Dedicated Manhe explains his crime solving philosophy to one or another of the locals in great detail.

Robinson first tells the reader something that Banks learned the hard way:

“Banks knew from experience that once a murder investigation begins there is no stopping and little slowing down even for family life.  The crime invades mealtimes, ablutions, and sleep; it dominates conversation and puts up an invisible barrier between the investigator and his family.”

There’s also this from Robinson explaining the inspector’s mindset:

            

            “Banks also liked the feeling of being an outsider.  Not a stranger, as he had been among the anonymous, international crowds of London, but an outsider.  He knew he always would be no matter how deep he put his roots.”  (In Yorkshire)

In a revealing conversation with a crime novelist who also is a suspect in the murder investigation, Banks says this:

            “In writing, yes.  In fiction.  But in real life, I’m not so sure.  It’d be a damn sight easier if I knew who the criminal was without having to write the whole book and make all the mistakes along the way.”

Later on when another suspect asks if he is close to solving the murder, he says:

“I can’t see it if I am, but detection doesn’t work like that anyway.  It’s not a matter of getting closer like a zoom lens, but of getting enough bits and pieces to transform chaos into a recognizable pattern…But you can’t predict when that moment will come.  It could be in the next ten seconds or the next ten years. You don’t know what the pattern will look like when it’s there, so you might not even recognize it at first. But soon enough you’ll know you’ve got a design and not just a filing cabinet full of odds and sods.” 

I really like Chief Inspector Alan Banks.  He may be a bit of a plodder, but he’s not going to quit before he gets the job done.  So if police procedurals are for you, I think that author Peter Robinson just may be your guy.  And knowing that I have something like 22 more Inspector Banks novels to enjoy makes me happy (hopefully there are many more to come yet).

Book Number 3,394

Future Home of the Living God - Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich is best known for the depth in which she portrays contemporary Native American life in her fiction.  Her work has won and been considered for major literary awards for more than a decade, including Plague of Doves (a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist) and The Round House (2012 winner of the National Book Award for Fiction).  Future Home of the Living God, while it issomething very different for Erdrich, is similar to her previous work in that many of the story’s main characters are members of the Ojibwa tribe of the northern Midwest.  What makes this one so unusual is that it is a dystopian novel in which plants and animals in the United States, including human beings, appear to have suddenly entered some kind of reverse-evolutionary process in which new births result in more primitive versions of their parents.  

Cedar Hawk Songmaker, the book’s narrator, is four months pregnant when Future Home of the Living God begins, and her narration takes the form of a written diary in which she directly addresses her future child just in case she does not survive the baby’s birth.  When pregnant women start to be arrested on the streets and whisked away to secret facilities, there is good reason to believe that this is precisely what will happen to Cedar and that her child may only ever know her from that diary.  Then when authorities begin actively searching for pregnant women – and when society begins to crumble all around her – Cedar knows that she has to do more than stay out of sight.  People around her know that she is pregnant and they know where she lives.

Author Louise Erdrich

Cedar, however, has something that most people do not have: two supportive families, an adoptive one and a tribal one - and both of those families are willing to risk their lives in order to protect Cedar and her unborn baby.  As a deadly game of cat and mouse ensues, everyone involved wonders how it will all end.  Is it only a matter of time before the conspirators will be discovered and themselves arrested or will they all be able to blend back into the general population in just a few months?  When Cedar is captured and taken to a special hospital, it appears that she and her baby are not destined for a happy ending.

Future Home of the Living God, published in 2017, is a reflection of the times in which we live, a period during which women feel that their reproductive choices are being threatened in ways that may or may not be exaggerated, and that of course makes the novel even more terrifying than it otherwise would have been.  For good reason, this one will remind readers of both Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and PD James’s The Children of Men.  In my estimation it is every bit as powerful a novel as either of those, and it should not be missed.

(I recommend the audio version of the book read by the author.  She is the perfect reader for this one.)


Book Number 3,393

Pet Peeves: Barnes & Noble and Libraries Make It too Hard to Find Short Story Collections

I noticed something this week that my local library and Barnes & Noble store have in common that really irritates me - and it irritates me so much that I'm wondering why it took me so long to notice it.

My library used to have a separate section of several hundred books that were divided into general short story anthologies and science fiction anthologies.  On any given visit, I generally spent as much time browsing those books as I did browsing the shelves in the rest of the library put together - and now they are gone.  When the library finally reopened in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey (months and months after the horrible flooding it suffered) that section was nowhere to be found.  Barnes & Noble used to do something similar by grouping anthologies either at the end or the beginning of the appropriate genre sections of the store.  This morning I noticed that either B&N doesn't stock many anthologies anymore or they "hide" them in the shelves somewhere among all the rest of the fiction and sci-fi titles.

I still haven't gotten completely used to my library's new floor plan because for some unfathomable reason someone decide to flip the locations of the fiction and nonfiction books.  Fiction moved from the south side of the floor to the north side and nonfiction books made the opposite move - and right in the center of the floor, just where it's always been, is a large space dedicated to room for four or five librarians at a time to call home.  That was disorienting enough, but I finally got used to turning right for fiction as I approached the librarians rather than left as I have been doing for more than a decade.

But when neither of the two librarians I asked to point me in the direction of the newly located anthology section had even an inkling of what I was talking about, I was dumbfounded.  They didn't even try to answer the question; it was like they had never heard of a collection of stories from different authors in one volume.  I was on my own, and since I had a few minutes to spare, I started to browse the shelves in search of the vanished books.  Sure enough, I finally spotted one of them in the general fiction section filed alphabetically by last name of the volume's editor, but in almost ten minutes of searching that was the only one I spotted that was not a collection of stories from a single author.  

It looks like the books are still there somewhere in the library and the bookstore, but that doesn't make me feel a whole lot better because if I don't already know about a collection, including the name of its editor, it is unlikely that I'm ever going to become aware of its existence.  And because I find short story collections to be one of the best way to expose myself to new authors and genres, this really bothers me. I have two takeaways from all of this: bookstores don't try very hard anymore to sell new writers to customers, and libraries don't design floor plans with the best interest of their patrons in mind.

So there you have it; I'm done for now.