Best Read of the Month: May

This past month has been  more diverse than most in terms of reading.  I have managed to finish 12 books, of which only 7 were officially crime fiction, 4 were love stories (of a sort) and one was non-fiction but proved to be a more exciting and unbelievable read than any fiction.  Two of them were in French, which makes me want to do a little dance of joy.  My goal has been to read at least one book in French every month, preferably two, so as to improve my language skills, but I am sure there have been many, many times when I have failed in this mission.  Finally, three of them were translations: one from Danish and two from Hebrew.

1) Sophie Hannah: The Carrier.  Some of Sophie Hannah’s earlier books gripped me completely: it felt as though the author had been in my head and uncovered my most hidden thoughts.  She always seems to set the reader up with an impossible puzzle, yet solves them with flourish, keen psychological finesse and not a little poetic vision.  Although this was not my favourite of Hannah’s novels, it is still a good read, although perhaps not at an airport when your flight is delayed…  For my full review on Crime Fiction Lover, see here.

2) Joel Dicker: La Verite sur l’Affaire Harry Quebert.   Having seen and heard the author at the Lyon Crime Festival, and having seen how many awards and accolades have been heaped upon this book in the French-speaking world, I was naturally curious to read it. Well, it’s an easy-to-read, quite exciting story, with reasonable plot twists along the way, but I am puzzled as to why it has won all those awards, since it feels good but not outstanding to me. The setting is a small town in the United States, and there is nothing remotely French or Swiss about this book.  There are a few cliche situations and characters, but the simple, even pedestrian language appealed to me as a non-native speaker of French.

3) Amos Oz: To Know a Woman.   Perhaps not my favourite book by Oz, but he still is such a magnificent writer. He takes a widower’s story of loss and grieving, and turns it into a universal tale of love, reassessment of one’s life, trying to truly understand another person, moving on. He piles on detail after detail (about Yoel’s daily routines, his gardening, his cooking, his thoughts, his travels) and each adds a layer, but you feel that the depth really lies in what is unsaid.

4) Jonelle Patrick: Fallen Angel: An Only in Tokyo Mystery

Once again, the full review is here, but this is an intriguing insight into the world of Japanese nightlife and host clubs, written by someone who knows Tokyo rather well but still brings an external perspective to things.

5) Alan Glynn: Graveland.    Not quite as enthralling as his previous novel Bloodland, perhaps because this one takes place all in the US, rather than Ireland or the Congo. It certainly feels very topical, dealing with unemployment, young protesters and the shadowy world of finance and corporations. I found the excessive amounts of web searching a little tedious, and the investigative journalist Ellen never quite grabbed my attention.  However, the character of Frank, former architect now working as a sales assistant in an electronics store, and worried about his daughter in college, was quite moving.

6) Benjamin Tammuz: Minotaur.    The principle of the story is similar to Kurosawa’s ‘Rashomon’: you get to see an unusual love story from multiple points of view, until you are able to discern what really happened and how each player in the drama justifies matters. I read this in one breathless go, but it is actually a book to be savoured slowly. It has so many beautiful passages and philosophical meditations on love, passion in life, music and fear of the unknown. It is a thriller, a love story, a history of Palestine, a hymn to the Levantine spirit, a noir.

7) Katherine Boo: Behind the Beautiful Forevers.     This book deserves an entry of its own: it is the book I wish I could have written, as an anthropologist, yet it reads like a novel.  Except that all of the events described are real.  It is the heartbreaking story of everyday life, hopes, fears and disappointments of slum life in Mumbai.  One of the best books I’ve read in a long, long time.

Cover of The Concrete Blonde (Harry Bosch)

8) Michael Connelly: The Concrete Blonde.      A mix of courtroom drama, police procedural and serial killer novel, this is a solid entry in the Harry Bosch series, with an interesting backdrop of LA after the racial riots.

9) Meg Wolitzer: The Uncoupling.     I actually left this book behind me (once I finished it) in a hotel room.  I was that sure that I would never want to read it again. Although I found this story of disintegrating love and familiarity breeding contempt quite compelling.  I think all of us women have experienced some of those sentiments at one time or another.  However, the fable element of the story and the supposedly magic spells that descends upon all the women in the New Jersey suburbs was a little annoying and artificial, especially the ending. When it stuck to the mundane, there were many funny moments in the book. It is all at once a sharply observed, witty look at modern life in the suburbs, and a universal statement about the relationship between men and women, the way they misunderstand each other and mistreat each other, even unintentionally.

10) Massimo Carlotto: At the End of a Dull Day – to be reviewed next week

11) Louise Doughty: Apple Tree Yard – to be reviewed next week

Français : L’auteur danois Jens Christian Grøndahl au Salon du livre de Paris lors de la conférence La société, source d’inspiration. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

12) Jens Christian Grondahl: Piazza Bucarest

This was an impulse loan from the library, as I stumbled across it while searching for something else, and I couldn’t resist the blurb.  The narrator tries to find Elena, a young Romanian woman who married his stepfather to escape from Communism and then abandoned him.  Sadly, the book was a disappointment, and not just because the woman was unsympathetic (or because we Romanian women cannot take a bit of criticism).  I was never quite sure what the author was trying to say or what the point of the whole thing was.  Maybe the fact that I read a French translation of the original Danish didn’t help much either – it’s like trying to see a landscape through a doubly opaque window.

My top read of this month (and many other months) is undoubtedly ‘Beyond the Beautiful Forevers’, and my favourite crime fiction pick?  Hmmm, that’s a tricky choice, as there were quite a few good ones, although nothing exceptional.  I think it’s a tie between ‘The Concrete Blonde’ and ‘At the End of a Dull Day’.  Both rather macho reads, though, so I need something more feminine next month to compensate.

So I have covered quite a few of my reading challenge requirements.  Although, don’t you find that, as soon as you near the goalposts of a challenge you set for yourself, you start moving them about? Taking them just a little further? Demanding just a tad more of yourself? Fearful of missing out on something?  

Feverish Amounts of Reading

If there’s one upside to being ill (and having that illness drag out so long that you can no longer find anything amusing to tweet about!), it’s that you are forced to lie in bed and do nothing more strenuous than read.  So I am ahead of myself in all of my reading goals, although not quite up to date with the reviews.  Or with any other interesting blog post themes which I had planned.

Anyway, on to some simple arithmetic (my brain is still not able to cope with anything more strenuous).

I have read 10 books so far in February, all but two of them while I was ill:

1) Linda Gruchy: Death in Spiggs’s Wood - have reviewed it for Crime Fiction Lover

2, 3 and 4 I wrote about  in my review of four women writers  (I read the remaining one back in December)

5) Birgit Vanderbeke: The Mussel Feast – I will review in more depth for the Translation Challenge

6) Fred Vargas: The Ghost Riders of Ordebec – I have been a Fred Vargas fan for years and finally got to read and review one in translation (review will be up shortly on the Crime Fiction Lover website)

7) Boris Vian: Les morts ont tous la même peau – (The Dead All Have the Same Skin Colour)

This is one complicated, angsty, nihilistic and multitalented writer (and also jazz musician, songwriter, playwright, journalist, inventor) – the kind that France seemed to produce so many good exemplars of in the early to mid twentieth century.  Troubled by his lack of financial success or critical recognition as a writer, he wrote a series of potboilers under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan, in which his love of American crime fiction is evident.  In this book he is both celebrating and subverting the ‘hardboiled’ genre of writing.   It’s the story of Dan, a nightclub bouncer, who has kept his black roots well hidden and passes for white in a racist society. When his (black) brother Richard appears out of the blue to threaten his happy little status quo, the life he has built together with his blonde wife Sheila and their son, Dan goes on a rampage to protect himself and his lifestyle.  A disturbing and violent book, it nevertheless raises questions about identity, how we choose to define ourselves and how we respond to social pressures.

8) Franck Thilliez: Fractures

A psychological thriller by one of France’s most popular up-and-coming writers of  ’polar’ (crime fiction).  He specialises in thrillers with a medical slant to them (either mental health issues or deadly viruses or bio-experiments) and is set to become better known in English-speaking countries too, as one of his books ‘Syndrome E’ has just been translated and optioned for film rights in the US. ‘Fractures’ is perhaps not one of his best, but a riveting read nevertheless (despite quite a few gruesome scenes) and with an interesting subject: multiple personality disorder.

9) Steve Christie: Good Deed

This is a debut novel, a madcap chase through most of Scotland’s cityscapes.  It starts out with a simple enough mistake: Lucy Kennedy stops for a coffee at a service station just outside Dundee and leaves her car unlocked. Two opportunistic thieves steal something from her car. So far, so normal. Except that Lucy is a drug mule for a very unpleasant Scottish crime lord and his even less scrupulous fixer, Vince. And they will stop at nothing to get back their stolen goods: 2 kilos of pure cocaine. Detective Inspector Ronnie Buchanan of the Grampian police in Aberdeen is soon engaged in the man-hunt of his life, following the trail of Vince’s devastation and mind-games all over Scotland.

The plot twists and turns relentlessly, with lots of violent scenes, narrow escapes and tricks that the two main protagonists play on each other. Perhaps there is almost too much plot in here, a natural mistake for many first-time novelists, and this can be at the expense of the characters.  All in all, an amusing read (reminiscent of Colin Bateman’s ‘Divorcing Jack’), but could have done with some more judicious editing.

10) Arthur W. Upfield: Murder Down Under

My contribution to the Global Reading Challenge for Australia, this classic crime novel introduced me to the philosophical, patient and methodical half-caste Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte of the Queensland Police.  The inspector uses his holiday to help out one of his protegés from the Western Australia Police and investigate the disappearance of a farmer whose car is found abandoned near the rabbit fence of the large government wheat farm.  Bony goes undercover as a farm labourer, to encourage people to talk freely to him, and soon finds himself involved in a second mystery, that of the enigmatic Mr. Jelly and his lovely daughters. The claustrophobia of a small farming community is perfectly rendered, although I found the casual description of pervasive racism of the 1930s and of the death penalty a bit shocking.

I had never heard of Bony before, but he completely charmed and captivated me. The author does tend to raise him to almost mythical status and give him all the virtues of both races: the wisdom, patience and close observation of nature (tracking skills) of the Aborigines, as well as the analytical abilities and eloquence of a highly-educated white man. Yet the story still feels fresh today, proving that you don’t have to use ‘heart in your mouth’ moments on every page, but can instead take time to build well-rounded characters.

One final thought to conclude this rather rambling post: does the way we feel (physically and mentally) have an impact on how we read books? I found, for instance, that I had enough fever and wild imaginings in my head, and so had no desire to encounter any more hectic pacing and convoluted plot lines. Instead, I was drawn to humour, well-drawn characters and a more cosy atmosphere. Comfort read, perhaps?

My Blogging Anniversary

WordPress wished me Happy Birthday today.  Yes, it’s been exactly one year since I created this blog, although (ironically, given its title) I did not find time to post anything until the 7th of February, 2012.

I was not new to blogging.  I had been writing a blog on my professional website for 2-3 years.  But it was professional, neutral, business-like… bar an occasional foray into the vicissitudes of expat life.  It was a blog I was very keen to promote and market, as it was a way to let prospective clients know what I was doing.

This writing blog was something I was very reluctant to share with anybody else.  I started it mainly as a personal challenge.  A means of holding myself accountable for giving pride of place to the thing that means so much to me in my life. Namely, writing.  That thing which I have, nevertheless, always placed last in my list of priorities.  Perhaps because I love it so much (even when it is painful and difficult), that it feels like sheer self-indulgence to be dedicating so much time to it.  How could I possibly be selfish enough to write, when there are so many other claims on my time: money-making, laundry, children, husband, parents, friends, acquaintances, schools, society, the wider world?

So this blog was my little stake of selfishness that I drove into the permafrost of obligation and strict scheduling that my life had become.  And I have been selfish in the way I present this blog: whatever comes into my mind, with no rhyme or reason, posting whenever I can and feel like it, following no rules.

Anything else – being read, receiving comments, making friends – has been a surprising and wonderful bonus.

For those who like facts and figures, here are some of the stats which delighted or dismayed me this past year:

• I have had 10,500 views over the past year.  Many, many more than I ever expected.
• I have received 1,477 comments (well, OK, probably most of them are mine, replying to your comments) – but it is humbling to find that people take the time not only to read and ‘like’ something, but also to provide such insightful andor supportive comments.
• I have had visitors from 106 countries – so exciting for a global nomad such as myself! – with the most visitors from the US, then UK, France, Canada, Greece and Germany.
• My most popular post was certainly not what I expected – the rather snarky, opinionated post entitled Most Overrated Books.  Meanwhile, my poor little anti-Valentine’s Day poem only got one view.  So, should I understand that my readers are hard-nosed realists and critics, with a hidden romantic tremor?

But what these statistics do not show is my gratitude to all of you, who have given me such a wonderful sense of community, who have put up with far too frequent postings followed by long periods of silence, who have stayed with me despite a lack of consistent theme.  It’s been a wonderful first year of blogging, and thank you for making it just that!

 

 

Pick of the Month – November Reading

It may not look like it, but November has been another slow month for reading. By November 18th or so, I had only read two books – and both of them had been started in October. But then matters improved.  It occured to me that I have been all over the world this month.   Here are the books I read: with some brief thoughts and/or links to reviews.  The first three have been reviewed (or are about to be reviewed) by me on Crime Fiction Lover.

Bogdan Hrib: Kill the General – a Romanian conspiracy thriller

Sergios Gakas: Ashes - set in Athens just before the Olympic Games 2004

Alan Glynn: Bloodland – set partly in Congo, Ireland and US

Mari Hannah: The Murder Wall – set in party capital of the UK, Newcastle – the first in what promises to be a gripping police procedural series

Lemony Snicket: The Austere Academy – set in the world’s grimmest boarding-school

W. Szymborska: View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems – set in Poland and the world; deceptively simple, yet always profound and troubling

Henning Mankell: The Shadow Girls -  set in Sweden and illegal immigrant camps; not a crime novel, an odd combination of tongue-in-cheek description of a writer’s life, and a much more serious description of immigrant life in Sweden

Gillian Flynn: Gone Girl – set in Missouri.

Finally I got to read Gillian Flynn’s much praised book and (unlike last month) I felt the hype was justified.  I will write more about it in a later post, but this was most assuredly my Crime Fiction Pick of the Month (see lovely Kerrie from Mysteries in Paradise about this meme). Not sure about the ending, rather nasty characters, but so cleverly written – I stayed up all night to finish it.

Related articles

• The Shadow Girls – Henning Mankell (gcbooks.wordpress.com)
• The Best of 2012 (meandmybigmouth.typepad.com)
• Lose Yourself in Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn: A Book Review (paulineprobynblog.wordpress.com)