What I'm Reading This Week (April 29, 2024)

 

Even though, or maybe because, I haven't been feeling particularly well for the last few days, I immersed myself into reading, movies, and music last week more than I have in a while. And the college baseball I was able to enjoy via ESPN+ was the absolute icing on the cake. So not a bad week, considering. I finished up two novels, The Man Who Smiled and Mercury, along with a non-fiction title, An American Dreamer. Of the three, Mercury is by far the one I enjoyed most, but I should have more to say about each of them in the next few days.

So where does that leave me? Well, I finally started reading my library copy of Absolution, and what can I say...it's Alice McDermott, after all, a favorite of mine who seems to be knocking it out of the park again with this one. The set-up, at near 100 pages in, has been brilliant. I've also read the second of fourteen short stories in Joan Leegant's Displaced Persons collection, almost half of Henning Mankell's first Kurt Wallander mystery, Faceless Killers, and have been pleasantly surprised to find that Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn can still make me laugh out loud despite its rather grim plot. Camus's The Plague, however, hasn't been touched in almost three weeks now.

Absolution is narrated by a rather naive young American newlywed who moved to Vietnam with her engineer husband (who had been seconded to the U.S. Navy) in the early sixties not too long before war started again in that unfortunate country. The narration is especially intriguing because the narrator is now about 80 years old and is addressing her memories of those days directly to the adult daughter of the woman who was her best friend in Vietnam in 1963. I have a long way to go, but this one promises to get a little messy before it's all done.

I'm still a little confused as to how the Kurt Wallander books have been published in this country. It seems like there are a lot of Wallander books out there, maybe even more than one series, including a series in which Wallander is a secondary character to his own daughter. Adding to my confusion, I do know that the books were not published here in the order in which they were first published in Sweden. Anyway, this is supposed to be Kurt Wallander No. 1 even though Kurt is already a rather gloomy old fart right from the first page. 

This is not the actual edition of Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn I'm reading, but I've always been partial to this cover, and since the LOA edition doesn't have a cover image, I decided on this one. This must be the fourth or fifth time I've read Finn but it's been a really long time since the last time. As I said up above, it's a pretty brutal story, but it is also so funny that I end up laughing a lot while reading it...especially in that bit where Huck dresses up as a little girl and pretends to be in need of help. The method used by a village woman to prove Huck is a boy in disguise vividly reminds me of a story I heard my grandfather telling when I was about seven or eight years old. (The story wasn't P.C. even in those days - probably why it stuck in my memory so vividly.)

If you read yesterday's post, you know that I'm on the verge of reassessing my reading plan - at least for a while - by purposely beginning to raid my own shelves for reading material while I still can. The way I figure it, I've let the books become more ornaments and reference material now than anything else, and that's not why I bought them, nor is it why I still treasure them. I dread having to downsize at some point, but I know it's probably inevitable for most of us. I don't mean to sound gloomy, because I'm not really feeling that way; it's more that I've always been a planner, and this feels like the time to come up with a new plan.

Here are the ones I'll be considering next. These are a mix of shelf books, library copies, and ARCs on hand:

Shelf Copy from 1971

Library Copy

ARC On-Hand

ARC On-Hand

Shelf Copy from 1982

I hope you all have great weeks in every sense of the word, and I'll look forward to seeing you on the blogs...

Magical Nostalgia Tour

 

While searching my shelves for an old book that I clearly remember having purchased, I started noticing others that I haven't given any thought to in years despite how "big" they were in their day. I never did find the book I was looking for (and probably never will since so many books have passed into and out of my hands over the years that I can't remember which of them should still be with me anymore), but I ended up with a desire to experience some of those touchstone books again.

James Dickey's Deliverance is a good example. Primarily known as a Southern poet prior to Deliverance, Dickey hit the jackpot with the novel after it became a major motion picture starring Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight, among others. Even today that movie is remembered for its "Dueling Banjos" song and an iconic line that I won't be mentioning here - but you probably know the scene I'm referring to if you've seen the movie. Dickey, himself, even had a small role in the movie as a sheriff. 

I've also spotted old hardback copies of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, James Leo Herlihy's Midnight Cowboy, and Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses that I want to re-read. I'm generally not a big fan of movies made from books I've enjoyed, but these four are some of the few novels whose movie versions have impressed me as being almost as good as the source material. 

Those are just the tip of the iceberg, but they've started me thinking that its time to do a seriously deep dive into my own shelves. I've put together a decent personal library over the last decades, and I can't help but wonder what will eventually happen to all of the books. Fewer people than ever seem to have the time or the inclination to do much book-reading these days, much less the space to house them, so I fear that most will end up being boxed up and donated to charity shops at some point - if not junked entirely. It's time for me to start enjoying the books more and reminding myself why they are there in the first place. 

I need to find a better balance, I think, between older books and those being published today. It's taken a lifetime for the ones still on my permanent shelves to find their way there - and to stubbornly hold on to their spots there - and the odds of matching their quality in new books feels like those of searching for that clichéd needle in the haystack. I've said this before, but even though the eye-candy books always get me in the end, maybe this time I'll be able to find a more achievable balance between the old and the new. 

On a lighter note...

I just read an article about poisonous book covers from the mid-1800s that used arsenic or lead to produce certain shades of green cloth that were so popular back then. Apparently the covers are still so dangerous that "experts" only handle them while wearing protective gloves. The covers are more common on books with gilded lettering on them - and now I'm wondering about the Dickens books from the mid-1860s that are on my shelves. Some of them were signed by their original owner in 1867, and now I hope they didn't kill the poor woman.

Mine are considerably nicer than these, but this will give you an idea of the type of cover I'm talking about. There is supposed to be a long list of poisonous covers somewhere on the web, but I haven't found it yet. It's a bad day when even your books are trying to kill you.

A Heart Full of Headstones - Ian Rankin

 

Hard as it is for me to believe, A Heart Full of Headstones is Ian Rankin's twenty-fourth John Rebus novel. I haven't read all of them, but I have read most, and by now I think I have a pretty good feel for the kind of man John Rebus is. Maybe that's why the last couple of Rebus novels have left me feeling so sad for him - this one most of all. As A Heart Full of Headstones opens, Rebus sits in a courtroom accused of a crime as serious as many of the ones he investigated in his prime as an Edinburgh cop. But just when Rebus's past seems about to be catching up with him, he throws fuel on his own funeral pyre, and jumps on top the pile all by himself. 

The bulk of A Heart Full of Headstones is spread over the immediate eight days prior to the crime Rebus is accused of having committed, and as John Rebus novels usually do, it includes multiple, simultaneous subplots. One sees Rebus's loyal friend Siobhan Clarke working on the domestic abuse case of a fellow policeman that is about to blow up in the face of the whole department. A second involves DCI Malcolm Fox's push to build a case against a cop he believes to be among the dirtiest of all those he investigated when he was working in Internal Affairs. And the third storyline finds Rebus agreeing to do a personal favor for an elderly crime boss he's battled so closely for so long that the two seem to know more about each other now than their friends and families know about them.

What none of them realize at first is that one Edinburgh cop, a man threatening to rat out his fellow cops, is at the center of all three investigations. And when they do finally realize it, it just might be too late to minimize the damage.

What I find disheartening about A Heart Full of Headstones is exactly what makes the novel so realistic. John Rebus has always considered himself to be a good cop, a man who would do just about anything to protect the innocent and ensure that the bad guys get what is coming to them. Younger policemen still see Rebus as a kind of role model for the most effective kind of policing. If a little embarrassed by that sentiment, Rebus is also maybe a little proud of that status whether he would admit it or not. But now, a man Rebus worked with for years is about to name names and tell stories to save his own hide, and John is forced to admit something to himself he doesn't really want to face...he was a bad cop, one not above lying and falsifying evidence if that's what it took to get a predatory criminal off the streets for a while. His intentions may have been the best, but now Rebus wonders if his willingness to turn a blind eye to the real corruption in the ranks made sure that he was just spinning his wheels the whole time.

Now Rebus is an old man who can barely breathe anymore, and it may just be too late for any kind of personal redemption.

Ian Rankin is one of my favorite crime writers, and John Rebus is one of my very favorite fictional crime fighters, so a new Rebus novel is always something I look forward to reading. Still, I'm sad that Rebus has ended up here after thirty-five years (24 novels from 1987-2022). The next novel in the series will be published in the U.K. in October, and I can't wait to see what's in store for Rebus. Who is he going to end up being?

Falling - T.J. Newman

 

Now don't get me wrong. T.J. Newman's Falling is a very well written thriller that kept me turning pages all the way to the end. The thing is, though, I was probably turning those pages for the wrong reason. I'll try to explain why.

Anyone who reads thrillers on a regular basis, and I've read dozens and dozens of them over the years, learns eventually that the hero is never going to die in a thriller like this one. (And that has to be the farthest thing from a spoiler alert I can imagine.) It just doesn't happen - even in standalone thrillers. It is so rare, in fact, that I often find myself hoping that an author somewhere has written a disaster-style thriller in which the hero actually does die and the bad guys win because I would very much admire the courage of a writer who managed to pull that off. So if any of you know of such a book, please let me know.

The beauty of Falling is Newman's creativity, the way that she sets up one seemingly impossible-to-survive scenario after the next and manages to find a way for the hero (in this case, it's airline pilot Bill Hoffman) to not only survive, but to turn the situation to his advantage. I can't even exaggerate how clever a plotter T.J. Newman is, or how fascinating it is to watch her come up with solution after solution for Bill Hoffman and everyone on board the airplane he's piloting.

I'll quote the back of the paperback edition of Falling to give you the basics:

"You just boarded a flight to New York. There are one hundred and forty-three other passengers onboard. What you don't know is that thirty minutes before the flight your pilot's family was kidnapped. For his family to live, everyone on your plane must die. The only way the family will survive is if the pilot follows his orders and crashes the plane. Enjoy the flight."

I'm not much of a fan of the kind of book blurbs you find on the first couple of pages and covers of a lot of paperbacks, but the blurbs for Falling really jumped out at me because of who they are attributed to: Lee Child, Gillian Flynn, James Patterson, Janet Evanovich, Don Winslow, Diana Gabaldon, Ian Rankin, and others. There are even numerous quotes from newspapers and journals like the Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and The Guardian. And I agree with most of them. This is an excellent thriller.

 But as those airline passengers in Falling might tell you, the real surprises all come from the ride, not from the landing.

What I'm Reading This Week (April 22, 2024)

 

I did a lot of reading this past week but much of it involved "test reading" of books to see if I really wanted to read them or not. I didn't decide to keep reading all of the books I read from, but all of the "sampling," in addition to firming up my "TBR-soon" list exposed me to a handful of books and authors I would have never otherwise have experienced, so it was all time well spent in the long run. And I did finish both Ian Rankin's Rebus novel A Heart Full of Headstones and Alba De Céspedes's Forbidden Notebook (more on those to come later this week, I hope). I added another not mentioned before, An American Dreamer, and decided to permanently table the Elmer Kelton western I was reading because it's a little too YA oriented for me to take it all that seriously right now. In addition to An American Dreamer, I come into the new week reading four others: The Plague, The Man Who Smiled, Displaced Persons, and Mercury.

Mercury is one of those novels my library system underestimated demand for, so it has a much shorter time-fuse on it than I realized when I first picked it up. That means I'll be spending a lot of time with it this week so that I don't add to the wait for those behind me in line. It's taken me longer than I thought it would to get into the novel's rhythm, but at 100 pages in, it's finally starting to happen for me. It's a coming-of-age story for multiple characters, and reminds me a little bit of the kind of story that Anne Tyler writes so well. The Joseph family doesn't know what hits them when seventeen-year-old Marley comes to town and catches the eye of one of their boys...and then another of their boys.

When it comes to politics, I like to think that I'm a middle-of-the-roader, but lately I find myself drifting toward the more conservative side of the line. Even my reading has started to reflect that drift, so I wanted to read a current book that I think is written from a more liberal perspective than my own. An American Dreamer by David Finkel focuses on an Iraq war veteran trying to reconnect his vision of what America should be with what he sees happening all around him every day. What first caught my eye was not the book's title, but its subtitle: "Life in a Divided Country" because of how sad I find that phrase to be.

I hadn't planned to begin Joan Leegant's Displaced Persons quite so soon, but I was in the mood for a short story one day last week and decided to read "The Baghdadi," the first story in this fourteen-story collection, to see what I should expect from the book. And I was wowed by it, to say the least. I know that most authors lead off a compilation with a story they feel is one of the strongest in the book, but this story of an American academic's experience with a Iraqi Jew who moved to Israel fifty years earlier is so exceptional that now I can't wait to read the other thirteen.

I'm in danger of not getting to three books that I just realized are not eligible for additional check-out periods, but I'm still hoping to get to one of them this week (probably by tabling The Plague again):

So that's the plan on this Monday morning. And now I'll see what really happens. Happy Reading, y'all...

The Storm We Made - Venessa Chan

 

Kuala Lumpar - February 1945

"Teenage boys had begun to disappear."

 At first, the Japanese invaders were welcomed as Malayans hoped for "a better colonizer" than the British had turned out to be. But after the Japanese ended up killing more people in only three years of occupation than the British killed in more than fifty, they saw their past - and their future - much differently.

Vanessa Chan's The Storm We Made is the story of one fictional family caught squarely in the middle of what happened in Malaya between 1935 and 1945. The novel's central character, an ambitious and resentful Eurasian woman who realizes that she will remain a second class citizen in her own country as long as the British are there, dreams of a better life. And when a smooth-talking Japanese business man offers her a chance to help Malaya end its British rule - even if it means spying on her own husband - she is all in. 

The Storm We Made begins in early1945 when Cecily's family, like all of those around her, is struggling just to survive from one day to the next. Her husband's daily obsession is simply to find something for the family to eat, Cecily's to protect her children, especially her two daughters, from the Japanese soldiers who roam the city all day long "recruiting" girls as young as eight or nine years old for military brothels. But ironically, it is her son, not one of her daughters, who disappears on his fifteenth birthday.

"...as with the pieces she had set in motion ten years before, there was no fixing to be done. There was no coming back from this."

Vanessa Chan alternates flashback chapters to 1935 with the present to show exactly how and why Cecily planted the seeds of her own family's destruction, beginning on the night she first met Mr. Fujiwara, a prominent Japanese businessman favored by the British. Cecily, who carried the blood of the country's original Portuguese invaders in her veins, was a soft target for the persuasive Fujiwara. She already felt slighted and looked down upon by the British wives whose husbands her own husband worked with every day, and Fujiwara offered her the chance to get even with them all. Fujiwara convinced Cecily that the British would ultimately lose to Germany's aggression and would have to abandon its interests in Asia. With her help, Japan could be prepared to fill that void, and Asians would finally be given the chance to govern themselves.

"Yet perhaps this was what a woman's idealism is: not the reach for a utopia - everyone had lived long enough to know perfection was beyond reach - but the need to transform one thing into something better."

Best be careful what you wish for, Cecily. 

Vanessa Chan author photo