Category Archives: Book

Everybody’s Favorite Read

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The Raven, MWA, Poe

Page by Ian Burt (photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Yesterday the Mystery Writers of America announced winners of the 2014 Edgar Allan Poe Awards for the “best in mystery fiction, non-fiction, and television published or produced in 2013.” Among the winners were:

Links are to the Amazon.com descriptions, but here’s a directory of independent mystery booksellers, organized by state. Maybe one is close to you!

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And on Your Bookshelf Are . . . ?

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booksTo write better, read more, advises blogger Mike Hanski, who provides an intriguing infographic showing the bookshelves of prominent people. Is your reading taste more like that of Marilyn Manson or Vladimir Putin? Margaret Thatcher or Bill Clinton? Now you can find out! (Apologies that I cannot show the infographic directly. It becomes too narrow on the page.)

Scanning the fictive shelves of these celebs, I see I’ve generally read 1-2 books on each, but have the most reading in common with Stephen King and Ernest Hemingway (5-6 books each). Two books that appear on multiple shelves are Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and the Bible. There’s food for thought.

Hanski includes this quote from King: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” And how to cobble together that reading time is explored here.

Hanski makes a strong case for why reading is so important to writers—for both building skills and inspiration.“Can you imagine a musician who does not listen to music?” he asks.

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***** An Officer and a Spy

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Emile Zola, DreyfusBy Robert Harris (read by David Rintoul) –This novelization of the infamous Dreyfus affair in turn-of-the-20th Century Paris starts slowly, then builds powerfully. French Army Officer Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was sentenced to life imprisonment on aptly named Devil’s Island on flimsy and trumped-up evidence that he was a spy. As the book’s narrator, Lt. Col. Georges Picquart, gradually discovers, a spy remains in the French military command and, if so, he begins to suspect and then believe that Dreyfus is innocent.

As in the present day, it isn’t so much the original crime—in this case, convicting an innocent man—that creates all the problems, it’s the cover-up. The book is full of real-life characters of the time with whom I was passingly familiar—Georges Clemenceau, Émile Zola (J’Accuse!), Picquart, who rose to be Minister of War after Dreyfus’s release, and of course, Dreyfus. Learning how they out-maneuvered the army’s top generals is riveting, even though you know they ultimately succeed. Alphonse Bertillon, the originator of concepts of scientific policing reappears, with some dubious handwriting analyses; his contributions were explored more fully in The Crimes of Paris, which I read last year.

Louis Begley’s New York Times review would have had the book provide more context about French society at the time, though some of his examples are to me pretty clear: the high position of the army in society and “the extraordinary wave of virulent anti-Semitism that had washed over France since the 1880s.”

The Dreyfus case still resonates today, not least because of the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe from both the left and right wings and the growing Muslim communities. Coincidentally last weekend, I attended a reading and discussion of a new play by McCarter Theatre’s Emily Mann, Hoodwinked, about the shootings at Ft. Hood and the friction between tolerance and intolerance within radical Islam and outside it. Looking back on Dreyfus, it’s easy to see where the players went wrong out of prejudice, self-interest, and absolutism. We see events in our own time through these same distorting lenses and, therefore, unclearly.

Backpack Books

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Dickens

Dickens’s writing retreat in Rochester, England (photo: vweisfeld)

Books written in exotic locales have a zing of extra appeal. What would Elizabeth Catton’s The Luminaries be without Hokitika, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American without steamy Saigon, or Dickens’s Oliver Twist without London? If we’ve read these books, we’ve been to these places, at least in our imaginations. And, sometimes, only in our imaginations. The late Gabriel Garcia Márquez created such a detailed portrait of the fictional town of Macondo, every one of us who read One Hundred Years of Solitude feels down in our bones that we’ve been there. And, none of us want to visit the bleak Mexican borderland of Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing or, God save us, Blood Meridian.

When sense of place is absent in a novel, we miss it. When place details are wrong, we notice. A few years ago, I read the thriller Gorky Park and enjoyed the first half a lot. It’s set in Moscow and created a vivid mental picture of the city. Then the action moved to New York, and the details were just . . . off, in ways I don’t remember now. Finally, the picture of New York became so discordant it threatened the credibility of the Moscow scenes.

Brooklyn-based publisher Akashik Books celebrates the importance of setting with its anthologies of place-based noir stories (Brooklyn Noir, Boston Noir, Trinidad Noir, Delhi Noir, Copenhangen Noir, and so on), new original writing set in distinct locales. A requirement for Akashik’s Mondays are Murder flash fiction series—“to get your week off to a dark start”—is that stories “be set in a distinct location of any neighborhood in any city, anywhere in the world, but it should be a story that could only be set in [that] neighborhood.” Such focus is essential for writers and brings their stories to life. Paradoxically, by being specific about places and people, writing becomes more universal, a point made by Donald Maass in his helpful Writing 21st Century Fiction. Generic places and stock, stereotypical characters don’t engage readers.

When I travel I take along books set in the place, hoping to intensify and enrich the travel experience. A time or two, that has backfired. The biography of Vlad the Impaler I carried with me to Romania last fall was I must say too intense and specific in its gruesome details, so that I abandoned it, half-read. Traveling in New Mexico and binge-reading a suitcase full of Tony Hillermans revealed such a repetitive story arc that I never picked up another. This was not something I’d ever noticed reading one or two a year.

An entertaining guidebook for place-based reading, or for armchair travelers wanting to steep themselves in a locale or rekindle memories of past visit is Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust to Go: Recommended Reading for Travelers, Vagabonds, and Dreamers (2010). Pearl recommends both fiction and nonfiction books for territories as wide as Oceana and as focused as her home town, Detroit. Alphabetically, she roams the world from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. It will help me pick books for two trips to Canada this summer!

And, if you’re really into it—check out the Geoff Sawers’s literary maps of the U.S. and U.K., showing who writes where.

**** The Reversal

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Michael Connelly, Mickey Haller, Lincoln Lawyer

If you’ve read the Lincoln Lawyer series, you know Mickey Haller does most of his legal work from the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, which has the vanity plate NT GLTY

Got my Michael Connelly fix for the year—The Reversal—a 2010 crime thriller that alternates chapters between brash lawyer Mickey Haller and his half-brother (or did you miss that one?) cynical LAPD detective Harry Bosch. Both men have teen daughters so are especially anxiety-prone when a man convicted of abducting and murdering a young girl is released from San Quentin as a result of DNA evidence and must face trial again after 24 years.

It’s interesting how Haller—working for the prosecution this time—must introduce old evidence without revealing to the jury the prejudicial information that the accused has already been convicted once. Nor can he say why some witnesses are unable to appear (dead or demented) and interviews with them, actually their previous trial testimony, must be read aloud.

While this isn’t Connelly’s best, he never disappoints and received four Amazon stars from readers. If you like every plot angle tied up with a bow, in this one, that doesn’t happen, and the author leaves Harry still pursuing leads as to the convict’s possible involvement in other crimes. It’s as if Connelly was leaving the door open for a never-written sequel.

Matthew McConaughey, Lincoln Lawyer

Matthew McConaughey stars in the movie version – note vanity plate!

For a fun Netflix pick, Matthew McConaghey in The Lincoln Lawyer. Rotten Tomatoes Critics rating: 83%. I thought it was better than that, and I’d read the book! Also notice how the movie poster changed the license plate to “NT GUILTY,” thinking viewers were too dim to figure it out, I suppose.

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**** Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

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Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt, Savannah, Georgia

Savannah (photo: wikimedia.org)

As it seems I’m one of the last people in America to read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt’s 20-year-old best-seller, I’d heard enough sly references and snippets—especially when the movie (trailer) came out–to have a pretty good idea of what I’d encounter in its Historic District (free map!). I was not disappointed. While many people gravitated to the over-the-top drag queen, The Lady Chablis, my favorite character was Minerva, the purple-glasses wearing juju expert. Berendt allows that, although his book is nonfiction, he did mess with the time sequence a bit and disguise a few characters who needed a veil of privacy. Savannahians surely know when and who.

I hadn’t realized Savannah was so geographically and topographically isolated and that its residents used that isolation to their advantage, wanting “nothing so much as to be left alone,” Berendt says. “Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world.” It’s sadly ironic, then, that his book has inspired so many tourists and Midnight-themed tours.

And the perfect, related cocktail?

A Failed Censorship Attempt

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Afghanistan war, military, Mike Martin, Intimate War

(photo: Hurst Publishers)

The UK Ministry of Defence has been trying to stop publication of a book it requested on the British Army’s 13-year campaign in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. The MoD commissioned captain Mike Martin of the Territorial Army to write the book, entitled An Intimate War – An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict 1978-2012, but does not like its conclusions. It therefore held up publication for almost a year, under a policy governing books and articles by serving military personnel.

The ongoing dispute  prompted captain Martin to resign from the Army, and the book will be published soon. In the U.S., it’s available from Amazon for pre-order, coming Friday, April 18.

According to an account in The Guardian, “the book presents a bleak picture of British and American involvement, claiming that troops failed to grasp that it was primarily a tribal civil war.” As a result, Martin says, the troops “often made the conflict worse, rather than better. This was usually as a result of the Helmandis manipulating our ignorance.” Involvement in Afghanistan has cost the Britain 448 deaths, many of which occurred in Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold and one of the country’s major poppy-growing regions.

Martin’s book argues that the Taliban were not the “main drivers of violence,” but rather that the conflict was driven by the personal motivations of Helmandi individuals, including local politicians  and tribal chiefs. This made the conflict akin to a civil war  between clans, “rather than a clash between the ‘good’ government of Afghanistan and the ‘bad’ Taliban,” says The Daily Mail.

Martin wrote the book as part of his PhD work for Oxford University and was one of a very few British soldiers who speaks Pashtu fluently. The book was the result of six years of research, involving 150 interviews conducted in Pashtu, and it begins with the problems the Soviets faced in Afghanistan in the 1970’s.

The Daily Mail story says “his criticism of intelligence blunders and the failure of commanders to understand the conflict is said to have embarrassed officials.” Although the Ministry opposes the book, Major General Andrew Kennett, who commanded Martin’s unit, said: “I think he has done the Army a great service by writing this,” and General Sir David Richards, the recently retired head of the Armed Forces, who commanded international forces in Afghanistan between 2006-07, said, “I sincerely wish it had been available to me when I was ISAF Commander in Afghanistan.”

Martin plans to donate proceeds from the book to military charities.

Three years ago, the Ministry of Defence bought up and destroyed all copies of a book by Sunday Times journalist Toby Harnden: Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Real Story of Britain’s War in Afghanistan. Harnden’s award-winning book also was about the British deployment to Helmand, and after deletion of 50 words, it was reprinted.

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Kids Review Books

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child reading, children's books

(photo: upload.wikimedia.org)

Fast-growing children’s reading and book discovery site BiblioNasium has launched a feature that lets kids under 13 review books (previously disallowed so kids didn’t inadvertently provide personally identifiable information). In part the impetus for the new service was evidence that kids read and respond to books recommended by their friends.

Says BiblioNasium Chief Education Advocate Adele Schwartz, “Our goal is to instill the habit of reading and to raise a generation of passionate readers.” The website, designed for children K-8, includes reading challenges, virtual rewards, online reading logs, and other features, as well as the reviews, “in a safe and private digital space.”

Currently, nearly 100,000 kids and 20,000 educators use the site and growing by about 1,000 users every week. When asked whether the future of reading and book recommendations is social, BiblioNasium founder Marjan Ghara said, “The present of reading is social.”

Among other awards, BiblioNasium is a recent winner of an EdTech Digest 2014 Cool Tools Award and a 2013 Best Website for Teaching & Learning award from the American Association of School Librarians.

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*****The Crossing

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Cormac McCarthy – Part II of McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy. This book is a force of nature, describing three lengthy horseback journeys from New Mexico to bleak and impoverished Old Mexico before and during World War II. The prose mostly moves forward at the pace and with the deliberation of a man on a horse, with occasional galloping, heart-stopping passages. The poor people 16-year-old Billy Parham encounters seem mostly willing to share what they have with him, including their stories and their hard-won philosophy, while the well-off, few in number though they be, seem intent on stealing or denying him what little he has. McCarthy never tells us how Billy feels about any of this, only shows us what he does about it, as he struggles to maturity and to maintain his integrity. The detailed sense of place makes the reader feel he has been on these melancholy and bitter treks, too. A thrilling read for the purity of the vision and the power of the words. Some favorite metaphors: “As if the darkness had a soul itself that was the sun’s assassin hurrying to the west as once men did believe, as they may believe again.” ” . . .the fence running out into the darkness under the mountains and the shadow of the fence crossing the land in the moonlight like a suture.”  And his matchless dialog, half of which is in Spanish but easy to follow.

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Girls Books, Boys Books?

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girls books, boys boooks, Let Books Be Books, gender stereotyping
(photo: farm5.staticflickr.com)

Is “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” a girls’ book or a boys’ book? Is “Chicka-Chicka-Boom-Boom”? These are books for any child. But as children grow past the board-book stage, it doesn’t take long for gender stereotyping to creep in, with princesses and cupcakes for girls and superheroes (OK, a few not-so-interesting super-heroines, too) and robots for boys. Last I knew, boys liked cupcakes, too. Too bad the ones in books are always pink.

The UK grassroots (moms and dads) gender-neutral toy campaign, Let Toys Be Toys, has launched a “Let Books Be Books” effort to encourage publishers, booksellers, (and bookbuyers) to be reexamine their marketing practices and better reflect the diversity of kids interests, rather than channeling them into girl-boy stereotypes. It’s gaining support. I loved Nancy Drew until I read my first Hardy Boys adventure, and I never looked back. The “boys books” were just more fun!

The covers of the books on the Let Books Be Books web page tell the story. The boys’ covers feature adventure! Skills! (Submarines, kites, soccer, vikings, rocket ships); the girls’ books? Cupcakes, butterflies, flowers, balloons, jewelry. You’re nothing if not slathered in cutesy stuff. The message is clear: Boys DO. Girls look pretty. In 2014? (You can sign a petition here, if you care to).

“Artificial boundaries turn children away from their true preferences,” the LBBB website says. They narrow kids’ perspective on the world. A recent birthday party for a four-year-old girl provided cloying evidence that “Princesses Rule” in the constricted world of gifts for diminutive females. This tiny effort may be a dragonfly wing in the hurricane of gender-based marketing, but still worth taking a stand.