Priest

Little did I realize when I picked up my first Ken Bruen book, The Guards, back in the middle of April that I was going to have read three others of his by the middle of July. But that's exactly what has happened. Initially I was fascinated by the way that Bruen paid homage to many of my favorite American Noir writers of the past by using a writing style so similar to theirs and by including quotes from many of them in his books. But after reading another Jack Taylor story in Bruen's Calibre I started to wonder if too much of a good thing was going to grow a bit old. As I was soon to learn, there was no need to worry about that because Bruen lightened up on all the direct references to those writers of the forties and fifties and really hit his stride with the next Taylor novel, The Dramatist. Now, with Priest, Bruen has placed himself solidly on the watch list I keep to make sure that I don't miss any new work of certain writers.

Fans of Bruen's Jack Taylor novels will probably notice that I didn't mention The Magdalen Martyrs, an earlier book in the series. I almost always read "series fiction" in the order in which it is written but I somehow missed that one when its turn came. But it is on my shelves waiting for me now.

The beginning of Priest finds Jack Taylor confined to the mental hospital he ended up in as a result of the shocking tragedy that ended The Dramatist. Having lost all will to live, and preferring to drink himself to death, Jack still somehow managed to stay away from the booze before being locked up for his own good. Now he is being released just in time to find that his old friends have not fared well during his five months in the institution and that he barely recognizes the Ireland in which he lives. Taylor realizes that things in Galway have taken a particularly nasty turn when he hears that a priest has been beheaded inside his confessional booth.

Desperately needing something to keep his mind off of the events that placed him in the mental institution, Taylor reluctantly agrees to look into this murder at the request of Father Malachy, an old friend of his mother's. What he finds out about the dead priest's history of sexual abuse going back to the sixties, and how it was covered up, does not surprise him in the least as he tries to identify the killer. But Jack's life is never that simple. Along the way, he takes on a young, eager partner who needs a father figure as badly as Jack needs someone to take care of, a match not exactly made in heaven but one which Jack comes to accept. Their new relationship is severely tested when Jack is asked by an old friend to find and stop the stalker who is threatening her.

As is always the case in his Jack Taylor novels, Ken Bruen surrounds his basic story with the devastating portrait of what it must be like to walk in the shoes of an alcoholic who is always one drink away from losing control of his life. Jack is well aware of his problem and is forced to avoid his old friends and neighborhoods because everyone he meets seems to be heading to a pub and would be happy to have Jack join them in an exchange of rounds. His struggle to remain sober takes on an almost heroic nature and is painful to watch. Despite his self-control problems and his tendency to solve problems with the use of violence, be it verbal or physical, Jack Taylor is a hard man not to like. He loves the music of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan and is a dedicated reader of relatively obscure American authors who are little appreciated even in their own country. Despite all of his troubles, his personal library somehow seems to survive and he is such a book collector that bookstore owners give him first crack at books they know he will appreciate. What's not to like about a man like that?

Readers will find that a Jack Bruen novel does not wind down in the manner of most detective or crime fiction. Bruen doesn't rely on a recap of previous events to provide him with an easy ending for his books and, in fact, some of his hardest punches to the reader's gut come just when it appears that all the story has been told. Ken Bruen has carved out a worthy spot for himself among all those authors he so admires.

Rated at: 4.0

Dear Heloise

This is just something I found interesting in today's newspaper. It might be something to think about although I can't imagine that something like this happens very often. Since I don't write in my books or put labels inside them, it's not a problem for me, but the ladies amongst us might want to consider this little warning.

When I lent out books, I put my address label on the inside cover so I could get my book back. I lent out a cookbook to a dear friend. A couple of months later, she passed away. I had forgotten about the book, and her family donated all her books to charity — my book landed in a men's prison library, and I was contacted by an inmate. I had no clue as to who this man was or how he "knew" me. He said we had something in common — books. He seemed so friendly — yet he was in prison.

I did not respond, but I wonder how many books I have "out there" with my address in them. I'm not so sure it is a good idea to put your address label in books. I currently do not put my address labels in my books — just my name — and I record on my calendar who borrowed what book.

What do you think? Problem or not?

Adobe Offers New E-Book Reader

As Roy Tennant, over at Library Journal.com, points out this morning, Adobe has its new e-book reader, Adobe Digital Editions 1.0, up and running along with some free books to get you started.

Download and install the reader and you may be pleasantly surprised. Or, better yet, simply browse the sample library and download a book that looks good. If you don't already have the reader, it will download and install then and there. One of the interface behaviors that I found impressive with an OPS-encoded book is that when you scroll it always jumps a complete page. That is, no matter how you resize the window, even when in the middle of reading a book, when you click on the scroll button it does it a page at a time based on exactly how the window is currently sized. Therefore, there are no "hard" pages, but only "soft" ones, and once you get used to this behavior you never worry about scrolling past where you wanted to be.

The software looks good and I particularly like the "complete page" feature that Tennant mentioned. Not being able to scroll down in complete pages was always my biggest complaint about the Adobe Reader software that we all use to read PDF files.

If you decide to test drive the new software, you have a nice selection of e-books to choose from (follow some of the links from the main page because they will lead you to even more choices). Although I don't really expect that e-books will ever replace "real" books, this is definitely another step in the right direction for those of us who find ourselves on occasion wanting, or needing, to read an electronic version of a book. Check it out.

Say It Ain't So, JK

Jean Hannah Eddelstein, in her Guardian Unlimited blog today, points out an interesting campaign being run by the Waterstone's book chain in an attempt to get JK Rowling to continue her Harry Potter series. Eddelstein rightfully questions the motives of the Waterstone's effort to gather one million signatures by July 21 on a petition begging Rowling to reconsider ending the Potter books.

"There has never been a place like Hogwarts. There has never been a writer like JK Rowling. And there has never, ever been a character like Harry Potter. Millions, perhaps billions of us love reading his adventures, and we never want them to end."

This would be a rather sweet plea if it was drafted by the 8-11 year-olds who were originally the target demographic for the Harry Potter series. But that tell-tale "W" at the bottom of the website that touts itself as the epicentre of "the international campaign to SAVE HARRY!" betrays the truth: this crusade is brought to you by your friendly neighbourhood bookselling behemoth, Waterstone's.

Are they really trying to save Harry, or are they trying to save themselves?

...

...for Waterstone's, the end of Harry means the end of the guaranteed massive volumes of sales that they've made every time a new book in the series has been released. With no clear successor to the series on the horizon, I imagine that the company's strategy meetings are less than jolly these days as they scramble desperately to identify the next pot of mass market publishing gold.

Independent booksellers, on the other hand, will not be signing the petition. Although making the statement in polite bookish society that you're not keen on the Potter is tantamount to saying that you enjoy kicking adorable puppies, independent booksellers can't compete with the deep discounts that large retailers can sell the books at. Indeed, 25% of them won't be stocking book seven because they cannot afford it. The prospect of a publishing market that is not dominated by a single author and title each year or two must be extraordinarily appetising for them.

The Harry Potter phenomenon is really interesting to me when I consider the business aspects associated with moving that many millions of books in such a short period of time. It's been fun to watch all the bookstores and theaters position themselves for what they perceive to be one last shot at making a buck off of Harry and friends. But what's been most intriguing about all of this is the fact that so many booksellers lose money on a new Potter book and are probably hoping that Rowling really does kill the guy off in Book Seven.

Too much of a good thing often turns into a bad thing, and at this point, I've come to wonder if Rowling is not pulling the plug on Harry Potter at exactly the right moment. She is obviously ready to move on, and I have to hope that booksellers are as prepared for what comes next as she is.

Hooked

Matt Richtel lives in San Francisco, from where he has covered high-tech news and issues for the New York Times for several years while also writing a successful comic strip, Rudy Park, which is set in an internet cafe. Hooked, Richtel's first novel, is a thriller set in a version of that high-tech world where everything is not necessarily what it appears to be.

Despite four years of medical school, Nat Idle has chosen to eke out a living as a freelance medical journalist, a decision that his friends and family find hard to understand. But making a living is not what is most on Nat's mind since the sudden death of the girl with whom he was desperately and completely in love. These days he is struggling to accept the idea that he will never see Annie again and to move on with the rest of his life. Little did he know that the rest of his life was about to change in a way that he never expected.

Seated in a San Francisco internet cafe, and engrossed in the book he was reading, Nat barely noticed the woman before she placed a folded note on his table and hurried away. He decided that she might be flirting with him and followed her out the door to see what would happen next. It was only when he realized that he would not be able to catch up with her before she left in her car that Nat opened the note and read: "Get out of the cafe - NOW!" A split second later the cafe exploded and he was thrown through the air.

When his head finally cleared and he was sure that he was still in one piece Nat realized that he recognized the handwriting on the note to be that of his long-dead girlfriend, Annie. Thus begins Nat's quest to solve the mystery of the note and how the cafe explosion could possibly have anything to do with Annie's tragic death. Along the way, Nat has to deal with being a suspect in the explosion and with the realization that everything that he has assumed about his relationship with the love of his life might have been nothing but a distorted illusion on his part. He meets good cops and bad cops - but can he tell which is which. He needs help if he is going to survive life on the run while still trying to solve the mystery of that note, but whom can he trust?

Hooked has a lot going for it. It's written in a style that allows for it to be read at the quick pace that works best for thrillers and its opening chapters do, indeed, hook the reader by introducing the question of whether or not Nat's girlfriend might still be alive. But about two-thirds of the way through the book, when some of the answers started to come, the plot took a twist that was less compelling and which completely changed the nature of the book into one that began to bore me. I looked forward to the end of the book for all the wrong reasons. But as he shows in the first part of Hooked, Matt Richtel is a talented writer and I'm curious to see what is next for him.

To be fair, based on the physical appearance of this book, I'm probably not really the target audience for Hooked. First impressions are important when it comes to convincing a customer to lift a particular book from the shelf, and if I had seen Hooked in a bookstore rather than having received a copy from the publisher, I doubt that I would have chosen it for a second look. It has a psychedelic dust jacket that seems to be aiming for some sort of optical illusion and I find the colors of the book itself to be rather strange, yellow boards with baby blue trim and bright red lettering. Now that I've read the book I can see how its appearance relates to its plot but I think that its look probably will scare off as many potential readers as it attracts. (My copy of the book does not appear exactly as the pictured one that accompanies this post, so it may be that I'm describing a review copy that is different from the retail version of the book.)

Rated at: 2.5

More Time to Read in a Fractured World

I'm not sure what some of the statistics in this article really mean but I do find it interesting that people in Europe seem to be reading more today than they did in the 1970s. That conclusion is pretty much the exact opposite of most of the doom and gloom news that I read about reading trends around the world.

Contrary to expectations it is books that are more popular, according to a team at the University of Manchester.

They analysed thousands of time-use diaries compiled for official census agencies in five countries in 1975 and again at the turn of the millennium.

One theory is books are ideal to fill gaps in people's schedules - and with busier lives there are more gaps.

Women increasingly are reading more than men. The number of people in the UK reading newspapers and magazines has declined, though those who do read them do so for longer.

...

There was a similar increase in Norway but the French far outstripped them - going from 10 minutes a day up to 18.

In the Netherlands there was a slight decline but from a higher base, from 13 minutes to 12 (1995 data). In the US the increase was two minutes, from five to seven.

One of the researchers, at Manchester's school of social sciences, Dale Southerton, said there was a popular perception that people were reading less but all reading had gone up, reading books had gone up the most - and there were 17% more people reading them.

Dr Southerton agreed that an explanation might be simply that books had become cheaper.

...

But a study in Holland had suggested that the more people's days were fragmented, the more they read, regardless of their educational background.

"Which is completely counter-intuitive but I don't see anything to contradict it."

Another study he had conducted had indicated that people felt they did not have enough time in their days.

All of that makes perfect sense if you think about it a little. As we find ourselves spending more and more time waiting in lines and sitting in waiting rooms, people have figured out that taking a book with them to help pass all that otherwise wasted time is one of the best ways to maintain sanity in the stop-and-go world that is ours today. I am a bit surprised that the minutes-per-day statistics are as low as they are, to be honest, but maybe they are a per capita rate that doesn't truly reflect the reading time of those who are actually doing the reading.

That aside, this study offers some encouraging news to booksellers and book fans alike. Books are holding their own in this electronic age, and that's a nice thing to see.