May 7th, 2012
Just the other day FD finished the most recent of the V.I. Warshawski mystery novels. It was an interesting project, to read all of the novels in order and without intervening other mystery novels, and made easy thanks to a dear friend who owned many of the novels in nice hard cover editions. For the ones FD’s friend couldn’t lend, there was the great local library which came through completely, including only a tiny wait for the newest book.
Now, this is not the way the books are usually read, probably. And while it was good to have the characters and recent events in that made-up world securely in short-term memory, there was a downside to reading the books at such a quick pace: especially since in doing so one sees how much of a template Paretsky uses for each novel. The most recent novel, which had a much-fun Glenn Beck-esque character (FD admits to being very shallow, it was hugely enjoyable to read Paretsky’s satire on that unpleasant persona!) was both enjoyable and had a totally unbelievable ending, so FD is ready for something different.
So, as a move toward the sublime from the (alas) basically ridiculous, FD is more determined than ever to plow through an annotated edition of Walden. FD is reading an old print version (from 1970); the Thoreau Society keeps an annotated set of all Thoreau’s writings on line here. This is a really nice site overall, and includes a link to an article about how to read large documents on line. However, as long as printed and bound books are available, FD will probably choose that format for large documents on line.
BUT, reading Walden feels more like eating dinner, not dessert. For “dessert” reading, FD is planning to ask the great local library for the new Hilary Mantel novel, Bring Up the Bodies. FD very much enjoyed the first of what is said to be a trilogy about Cromwell, Wolf Hall, and the reviews for the new novel have been very good, so FD is expecting to enjoy this one, too.
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March 21st, 2012
FD has never been able to keep a diary (too self -conscious). But FD has loved reading other people’s diaries, especially those of Virginia Woolf. Even when a poor graduate student, who wasn’t studying English modernists, FD bought the VW diaries in hard cover and moved them from apartment to house to house. Alas, trying to read Pepys’ diary didn’t work out as well. There is a great on-line source for Pepys’ diary, that began many years ago, (2003 or earlier, not sure of the exact date). FD tried to read along but gave up rather quickly. There didn’t seem to be enough time to start at the beginning, between the footnotes and the commentary and everything else that FD was reading and doing, Pepys was soon abandoned, with the same kind of regrets that accompanied FD’s attempt to read all of Montaigne’s essays.
Anyway, last night, FD finished Tim Jeal’s new book about British explorers in Africa (nice piece here on the Yale Press blog). It would not have been possible to write that book if the explorers themselves had not kept detailed diaries. Jeal was able to include a lot of information that the explorers did not disclose in what they wrote for publication or even in letters. It is mind-boggling to imagine those men (and women!) keeping diaries in the very difficult situations they describe. Sickness and injury, hunger and fear, none of it sounds at all pleasant, and yet they were also able to write about beauty and wonder and the goodness, as well as the evil, they encountered.
FD is not surprised to have seen nothing to match those diary entries on Facebook. Perhaps there are blogs that rise to the level of the best diaries, but perhaps not. It may not be possible that blog posts written for an immediate audience to have the same depth that is found in diaries. Diaries, even when the writer intends them to be read later, or to provide information for what they will write for publication later, are written with an understanding that (in most, if not 100% of cases) that they will not be read. Surely, this results in more “truth” — or perhaps more truth-revealing lies.
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March 8th, 2012
There are dozens of mystery series with female protagonists, some with millions of fans. FD likes female protagonists but hasn’t found most of these series to be compelling. There’s the numbered-title series by Janet Evanovich, and the alphabetical series by Sue Grafton, not to mention Marcia Muller’s mysteries featuring the private detective Sharon McCone, a very long series that started in 1977. And those are just some of the most prominent. The number of caterers, book store owners, dog walkers, cat owners, and other women who appear in mystery after mystery speaks to the power of women readers, who keep these series popular. FD has read a number of books in a developing series by Sophie Hannah that includes a complicated woman character who is in the British police, but that character is one of a group, not a primary focus of the novels.
Despite having some misgivings over series in general and despite having a dim memory of having not enjoyed reading one (now not even sure which one) book in the series that was read long ago, FD recently decided to read the entire V.I. Warshawski series by Sara Paretsky, FD has also seen the disaster of a movie made from the series, starring Kathleen Turner. A movie that should have worked, but didn’t. Nevertheless, after reading several good reviews of the latest Warshwski mystery, FD decided to give the whole series another chance.
FD has now read the first Warshawski novel and is mostly through the second. It is interesting to see a writer developing a character, and using the tropes of mystery writing. In the first novel, Paretsky writes an unpleasant scene in which Warshawski, like Sam Spade and other “hard boiled” detectives, is badly beaten by the bad guys. In the second novel, Warshawski is in a car accident and a blown-up grain delivery ship. None of these events has caused any lasting scars. There’s also a funny rant in the second novel, the protagonist finds pagers offensive and decries the idea of being constantly available to an employer. At this date, it’s almost cute.
The novels have each had a male character who serves as a possible romantic interest and is also part of the mystery. FD will be watching to see if that model continues in subsequent books in the series.
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February 28th, 2012
The other night at dinner FD and Mr. FD were talking about novels about cooking/food. We really couldn’t come up with that many. Sure, there are plenty of great individual scenes of cooking or eating in novels, but few are the novels that are specifically about food and cooking, with chefs as protagonists, or great gourmands or gourmets as romantic hero or evil villain. And those book that did come to mind were mostly not by US authors. There’s Like Water for Chocolate, and The Debt to Pleasure, and Hunger. But in the US? Mr. FD reminded FD that Tony Bourdain has written novels with a lot of food and cooking — but also a lot of violence and crime, which end up as the main plot points. And there are a number of mystery series with caterers or restaurant reviewers as protagonists. Most of which are pretty bad, usually “cosy” in style and often interrupted by recipes that are really don’t move one toward the kitchen. Its a shame, really, since the Rex Stout Nero Wolfe novels provide a real model of how to write about food in a way that makes readers look forward to their next meal.
Similarly, FD couldn’t think of a novel in which Leap Year Day was a plot point. But a quick on-line search came up with a site that lists a few, including some from the nineteenth century (you may remember that the Pirates of Penzance turns on a Leap Year birthday). Many of these books are for children, who may find the concept of Leap Year Day more interesting than adults, who may not be able to remember when the ideas of time and dates were still capable of causing wonder.
There are probably many other plot foci that aren’t being used very often, even as there are also plot lines that are used over and over again.
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February 11th, 2012
FD has been feeling even more down than usual about politics in the US. There seems to be an increasing war against women and a more open (among certain segments of the right) bias against homosexuality. But FD, like a lot of people, spends more time with entertainment than with politics, and a LOT of time reading mysteries.
Perhaps, though, reading mysteries can be a way to think about politics. FD remembers an early exposure to gay culture that happened by accident — FD checked out one of Joseph Hansen’s Dave Brandstetter novels from the local public library. There’s a lot of information online about Hansen and his novels (the first Brandstetter was published in 1970) that gently invited heterosexual readers to expand their minds. See, for example, this tribute to Hansen by fellow mystery writers. Hansen was not the first, and certainly not the last, writer to choose a gay protagonist and today many mystery writers also include gay characters who are not the main protagonist, because, after all, if one is building a realistic world, gays are going to have to be a part of it. Lesbian protagonists came a little later, as described by Lori Lake in this 2006 essay. There are many gay and lesbian novels being written today, one can find hundreds in a simple Amazon search. The chance the average reader will find some at the local library is good, and so without even searching them out readers will get a more inclusive look at US culture. FD suspects that just as gay characters in television shows and movies have helped to change attitudes, so do the gay characters in mystery novels.
Lots of writers have used mystery novels to make direct or indirect protests against the gender inequality in US culture; FD is particularly impressed by Sara Paretsky, whose blog and website aren’t updated too often, but is worth a look, and whose novels will appeal to any reader of mysteries. Paretsky’s recent novel, Breakdown, includes an examination of right-wing media and its effects on US culture, within a novel that begins with teenage girls who are fanatic about a series of vampire novels. Paretsky’s ability to fold so much of current cultural activity into a mystery novel is one reason for her popularity. And unlike the uncertainties of real life, in a mystery novel the reader can usually hope that the good guys will win.
FD will keep worrying about the political situation, and keep reading mysteries, too.
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January 7th, 2012
Around here, we don’t expect New Year’s Resolutions to be ready on January 1, even though most of FD’s resolutions are the same, year after year. There is one new resolution, which will be active all spring — every day FD will be emailing a friend who is teaching this semester in the Department of Media and Communication at the City University of Hong Kong.
Other resolutions? As noted, they are the same as last year and the year before: 1) Always carry a shopping bag and try not to take bags in stores; and 2) try to discard, donate, or otherwise reduce the accumulated “stuff” of life by one thing every day. (Alas, FD often adds to said accumulation by more than one thing a day. Still, one can make the attempt!) FD hasn’t decided whether to try to resolve to write more blog posts or twitter tweets.
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October 22nd, 2011
Recently, FD started noticing repeated references to a novel by Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, usually in reviews of other novels when the review wanted to draw attention to an unreliable narrator. The number of references and the assumption that every reader of the novel in English is familiar with this work began to make FD nervous. There are many, many “classics” that FD has not read. Lists of “100 Best” often leave FD sighing, but usually do not move FD to actually reading such books. But as FD came across more and more such references, it began to feel as if it really was important for FD to read The Good Soldier. Fortunately, FD’s excellent local public library had a number of copies available; FD chose a Penguin British edition, with and introduction and notes. Serious reading was clearly ahead!
Julian Barnes, who knows a great deal about writing, provides a good overview of the novel in this piece published in the Guardian in 2008. Reading it after having finished The Good Soldier helped FD to realize the different ways in which a reader and a writer might experience the novel. A reader like FD might find the novel amusing, well-written, but ultimately slight: one of those books that are “realistic” without being “believable” — at least not without a huge “suspension of disbelief.” A writer, on the other hand, might be completely enthralled by the novel. As Jane Smiley noted (also in the Guardian), “There are those who believe that The Good Soldier is one of the few stylistically perfect novels in any language…”
The fervor of writers and critics about Ford Madox Ford has made FD curious, and the fact that The Good Soldier was a “good read” has made it possible that FD will read something else by Ford. Perhaps The Marsden Case — that’s a title with appeal for a mystery reader like FD.
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October 17th, 2011
FD recently read a mystery novel by Jo Nesbo, a highly acclaimed Norwegian writer. FD read number four in the series, The Devil’s Star (capsule summaries of all of Nesbo’s mystery novels are available here). Perhaps FD should have started with the first in the series. Read in order, perhaps one would develop more sympathy for the character. The mystery was, as serial killer mysteries go, well-done, and there’s an appealing subsidiary character, one Beate Lonn, who is another in the growing field of crime scene investigators and could probably carry a novel by herself.
However, FD was ultimately unsatisfied. The protagonist, Harry Hole, is presented as a seriously alcoholic person (yes, who makes a successful attempt to stop drinking during the span of the novel). And yet, he is seemingly un-touched by his drinking — every brain cell working better than the brain cells of those around him, great physical condition enables him to take on significant challenges and his appeal to women totally intact, etc, etc.
FD has always felt that most mystery novels are too “easy” on the reader and this seems another case in point. Perhaps that’s explains the greater appeal of Henning Mankell’s Wallender series. Wallendar is, in contrast to many other detectives, really affected by the bad choices he makes, by the difficult life situations in which he finds himself. FD isn’t really looking forward to reading the last in he Wallender series, but does feel that more mystery writers would do well to follow Mankell’s example of realism even in what is ultimately completely escapist fiction.
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May 3rd, 2011
FD is reading a new collection of short stories by Charles Baxter, Gryphon. Baxter is perhaps better known as a novelist than as a short story writer. In 2000, his novel The Feast of Love was nominated for a (US) National Book Award, but lost to Susan Sontag’s In America (the National Book Award folks have a nice website, here). FD has read The Feast of Love, and now a decade later remembered it fondly enough to pick up this collection of short stories from the public library. I am enjoying Baxter’s short stories more than I did the novel. In Baxter’s stories sometimes things happen, sometimes not too much happens, but all the characters, even the crazy and those who are not very nice, are treated with the same gentleness that we all crave from life. Bad things do happen in Baxter’s world, but there’s a sense of kindness and gentleness that seems larger than any particular person or event. The world Baxter creates is a wonderful place to visit, and makes one look around one’s own world hoping to find an equal amount of compassion, or at least to be able to extend that compassion toward others.
Like all(?) modern writers, Baxter has web site. Sigh. FD is also reading a book about our relationship to technology, Nicols Fox’s Against the Machine. FD is attracted to many of the strands of Neo-Luddite thought, and wants to think carefully about how much of life one gives up to technology. Of course there is a whole genre of books in this vein, all of which — like Fox’s own — probably have a web site! But somehow, it feels a little sad that writers have to participate so energetically in the wired world.
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March 28th, 2011
Geoff Dyer is a very interesting writer (as usual, a great place to start finding out about him is at the Complete Review’s author page). Like most of us, he knows a little about a lot of things and a lot about a few things. And like most of us, some of what he thinks he knows may not be as unusual as he thinks. I was surprised to see this in a recent essay from the Threepenny Review:
My mother had a particular way of doing jigsaws: we sorted out the side pieces and made a hollow, unstable frame, then filled in the middle. Our approach to jigsaws was, in other words, methodical, rigorous.
Doing the frame first — isn’t that the way everybody does jigsaw puzzles?? I remember reading in Margaret Drabble’s jigsaw-infused memoir, The Pattern in the Carpet: A Memoir with Jigsaws, a discussion of sorting pieces by color (and I’ve been tempted at times to sort by shape, but usually don’t) — now that seems methodical and rigorous, but doing the frame first, that just seems normal, not especially “particular.”
Posted in March, 2011 | Comments Off