Girl Detective

Faithful Place by Tana French is her third mystery novel in a series loosely linked by characters. You don’t need to read them in order, but that’s how I’d recommend them. Begun with In the Woods, continued in The Likeness, we get to know Frank Mackey, a detective in undercover from the latter book.

The book starts with his memory of a pivotal life event:

I was nineteen, old enough to take on the world and young enough to be a dozen kinds of stupid, and that night as soon as both my brothers were snoring I slid out of our bedroom with my rucksack on my back and my Docs hanging from one hand. A floorboard creaked and in the girls’ room one of my sisters murmured in her sleep, but I was magic that night, riding high on that surge tide, unstoppable; my parents didn’t even turn over on the pullout bed as I moved through the front room, close enough to touch. The fire had burned down to nothing but a muttering red glow. In the rucksack was everything important I owned: jeans, T-shirts, a secondhand wireless, a hundred quid and my birth cert. That was all you needed to go over to England, back then. Rose had the ferry tickets.

He’s divorced with child, and bitter about custody and his wife’s new boyfriend. But an urgent phone call drags him back to the neighborhood he grew up in, the Faithful Place of the title. As the novel unfolds, Frank’s world gets shaken again and again, and he butts heads with family and police as he tries to figure out who did what, and when.

This book is receiving great reviews (it’s an Amazon Book of the Month and got a starred review at Publisher’s Weekly), and many are claiming it’s better than the second, which most people thought was better than the first, which most people agreed was a thumping good read. My preference may lean toward The Likeness, which I plan to re-read soonish.

French writes a great thriller. Her psychological characterizations are complex, and the characters engaging. I was loath to put down the book, and resented (quietly, most of the time) things that made me do so: kids, husband, work, sleep, food, etc. And French is great at getting me attached to the characters and putting them through emotional wringers. These books make me feel twisty on the inside with some of the things the characters experience and do.

Yet I didn’t find it perfect. The whole divorced-cop thing brought nothing new to that tired character trope. And the mystery wasn’t hard for me to figure out. I suspected the killer early on, and even though I saw attempts at red herrings, they were never red enough to convince me. So I highly recommend it as an entertaining read, but it’s not for me one of the best books, ever.

That said, now that I’m just after finishing this book, I’ve got a hankering to call someone a fecking gobshite, or say “fair play to you” if they do a good job. And I have a strong suspicion that we’ll see more of Stephen Moran in the future from French.

If you’re free any time today, head to the Minnesota State Fair for Minnesota Cooks Day. Admission is discounted, and there are demonstrations by local chefs all day, with free food samples of what they cook! I’ll be at the Simple Good and Tasty booth this morning, and doing things my kids wouldn’t want to the rest of the time, like visiting Creative Activities, Fine Arts and such.

My piece on how to enjoy the fair with your family is up today at Simple Good and Tasty. Check out yesterday’s post on guilty fair-food pleasures. You know: Oh, no, I shouldn’t. OK, one bite. Chomp. Ummm. OK, well one more. Wait, where’d it go?

I don’t know about the rest of you, but my version of seasonal affective disorder happens four times a year, not just between fall and winter. Each shift in weather and schedule brings its own need for realignment and re-equilibration.

7yo Drake started 1st grade today, and I’ve got four (4!) different articles I’m working on. 4yo Guppy doesn’t start preschool till next week. I’m trying to calm things down myself. Today rather than having more coffee I made iced Evening in Missoula tea. The heat and humidity are certainly not helping. The switch from summer to fall is off to racing start; I hope things settle down soon.

After Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, I wanted to read Josh Neufeld’s graphic “novel” (narrative, I’d say), A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, which depicts New Orleans and some of its inhabitants before, during and long after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
Neufeld was a Red Cross volunteer in the aftermath of the hurricane, and began by chronicling his experiences online, which eventually led to this book.

The city itself is almost a character, since the book begins with the storm before it moves into the people. There are seven main characters in a rotation of five stories. They have different ages, ethnicities and religions. Some left; some stayed. Some returned; some did not.

A.D. New Orleans shows, in pictures and text, an up-close reality very unlike the lawless chaos the media was so eager to emphasize. As with Zeitoun, the personal is political, and the specifics point to universalities. This book makes it all too easy, and decidedly uncomfortable, to imagine oneself in one (or several) of the characters’ shoes. Highly recommended.

The August selection for Twin Cities’ Books and Bars was Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, a meticulous recounting of one New Orleans family’s experience of Hurricane Katrina and its deadly aftermath. The eponymous man of the title (whose first name is Abdulrahman) remains in the city before during and after the hurricane. He chose not to leave, though his wife, Kathy, and children did. It’s also their story, about the struggles of one refugee family and the difficulty of remaining in contact with those left behind.

Epitomizing the phrase “the personal is political,” Zeitoun addresses issues of class, race, politics and, as trite as it may sound, humanity. As the book began, I was irritated by the writing. Eggers’ description of Zeitoun seemed to pedestalize the man, while reading more like a screenplay at times than a work of critical nonfiction.

Zeitoun pulled onto Earhart Boulevard, though a part of him was still in Jableh. Whenever he had these morning thoughts of his childhood, he wondered how they all were, his family in Syria, all of his brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews scattered up and down the coast, and those who had long ago left this world. His mother died a few years after his father passed on, and he’d lost a treasured brother, Mohammed, when he was very young. but the rest of his siblings, those still in Syria and Spain and Saudi Arabia, were all doing well, extraordinarily so. The Zeitouns were a high-achieving clan, full of doctors and school principals and generals and business owners, all of them with a passion for the sea. (12)

As I read on, though, I was completely and utterly won over to Zeitoun the man and to the plight of his family specifically, and New Orleans in general. This is often painful read, but tremendously moving and heartening. It’s an examination of the racism that persists, especially toward Arab-Americans and Muslims in the wake of 9/11. The current debate in New York City over what should be where in the aftermath of 9/11 shows how fresh these issues remain. The book is also an education, about the Muslim tradition and an unforgivable government and media debacle in our history.

The recent furor on whether Jonathan Franzen and his book are being overhyped because he’s a white male makes me wonder at the amount and content of the praise Zeitoun has received, e.g., Entertainment Weekly picked it as a book of the decade. I can’t and won’t say whether it merits the praise, but I do say it’s an emotional and provocative narrative, well worth reading, discussing and ruminating on how the future might change, given this oft-ugly chapter of the past.

New gap on TBR (To Be Read) shelf:

New residents of AR/IDCTR (Already Read/I Don’t Care To Read) shelf:

We did it! My husband and I finished reading Neal Stephenson’s System of the World well before the end of August for my self-assigned Baroque Summer reading project. We read Quicksilver in June, The Confusion in July, and the third volume in Stephenson’s sprawling, insane, erudite and entertaining Baroque Cycle trilogy this month.

SotW continues with main characters Jack Shaftoe, Daniel Waterhouse, and Eliza, duchess of Qwglhm (which Stephenson says is a joke and not meant to be pronounced, but I hear in my head as the Simpson’s Chief Wiggum saying his name, but with a K sound in front of it ending with a mushy r: Kwiggulm”). And there are a host of other characters (Isaac Newton, Princess Caroline, Louis the Sun King) who are almost as entertaining as the ones Stephenson invented.

“Men half your age and couble your weight have been slain on these wastes by Extremity of Cold,” said the Earl of Lostwithiel, Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and Rider of the Forest and Chase of Dartmoor, to one of his two fellow-travelers….

“I am astonished that you should call this an extremity of cold,” answered the old man. “In Boston, as you know, this would pass without remark. I am garbed for Boston.”

Stephenson is a huge geek, and the book is about (among many, many things) the rise of finance, philosophy, natural sciences, and computers. If you’ve enjoyed other Stephenson, like Snow Crash or Diamond Age, it’s likely your thing. It also reminded me, in its sprawling, inventive craziness, of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. If you liked any of these, and aren’t opposed to doorstoppy books, give the trilogy a look. If not, or if you don’t identify as a geek, this probably isn’t a good fit.

I had a good time reading these as a summer project. They’re so dense it was sometimes hard to keep track of the details and personae, but reading them consecutively and reading along with my husband helped a great deal. I was involved with the characters, learned things from the historic details, was eager to return to the book when I was away from it, and sad to leave it when it was done.

Geeky stats: Trilogy begun 4 June, finished 21 August 2010. Other books read in that time: 12, out of which 8 were graphic novels. Total pages (not including intro and outro material and acks): 2,618.

How long before we succumb to a re-read of Cryptonomicon, which the trilogy is kind of a prequel to? Not long, I bet, though as usual my TBR list is long.

The Scott Pilgrim comic series by Bryan Lee O’Malley is about the 20-something slacker kid of the title and his efforts to woo and win the girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers. There are many obstacles along the way, like his chaste romance with high schooler Knives Chau, and Ramona’s seven evil exes, whom Scott must defeat in combat. Lucky for him he’s the best fighter in the province. (He’s Canadian.)

I think my favorite is volume 1, since it epitomizes the out-there, wacky visual humor of the entire series, and often made me laugh aloud. My least favorite was volume 3, since it wasn’t as funny. My favorite character was probably drummer Kim Pine (below, left).

The entire series of six is a fun-filled ride of manga-inspired goofiness that I highly recommend.

Oh, and the movie’s good, too.

Here is an excerpt from Neal Stephenson’s System of the World, volume 3 of the Baroque Cycle. One of the fictional main characters, the natural philosopher Daniel Waterhouse, is in a carriage with Isaac Newton. I found it particularly hilarious, and a good example of how Stephenson mixes humor and scientific history, with some characterization thrown in for good measure. Is it hilarious if you haven’t read the book?

In an apt demonstration of the principle of Relativity, as propounded by Galileo, the platter, and the steaming morsels thereon, remained in the same position vis-a-vis Daniel, and hence were in principle, just as edible, as if he had been seated before, and the pies had been resting upon, a table that was stationary with respect to the fixed stars. This was true despite the fact that the carriage containing Daniel, Isaac Newton, and the pies was banging around London…

Isaac, though better equipped than Daniel or any other man alive to understand Relativity, shewed no interest in his pie–as if being in a state of movement with respect to the planet Earth rendered it somehow Not a Pie. But as far as Daniel was concerned, a pie in a moving frame of reference was no less a pie than one that was sitting still: position and velocity, to him, might be perfectly interesting physical properties, but they had no bearing on, no relationship to those properties that were essential to pie-ness. All that mattered to Daniel were relationships between his, Daniel’s, physical state and that of the pie. If Daniel and Pie were close together both in position and velocity, then pie-eating became a practical, and tempting, possibility. If Pie were far asunder from Daniel or moving at a large relative velocity–e.g., being hurled at his face–then its pie-ness was somehow impaired, at least from the Daniel frame of reference. For the time being, however, these were purely Scholastic hypotheticals. Pie was on his lap and very much a pie, not matter what Isaac might think of it.

…Daniel, as he spoke, had tucked a napkin into his shirt-collar–a flag of surrender, and an unconditional capitulation to the attractions of Pie. Rather than laying down arms, he now picked them up–knife and fork….And he stabbed Pie. (p. 457)

At Kung Fu Monkey, Jane Austen’s Fight Club. (HT G. Grod.)

Some anniversaries have blown by this summer. My blog anniversary was in June; I can’t even find the archives anymore, though, so I can’t remember what day it was in 2002. And I moved to Minnesota in June of 1998 where I was immediately confronted with sights like this:

except the trees were at least 4 times the size of the one above, and advertisements for cars on sale due to hail damage.

I was flabbergasted. I’d been prepared for a rough winter and distinctive accents. I had NOT known to expect tornado warnings and giant hail stones, like these that damaged our car recently in the ‘burbs.

Hard winters AND hard summers? I almost picked up and left. But didn’t. And here I am, with husband and two sons, twelve years later.

Another culture shock was Minnesotans wrote checks for everything: fast food, movies, small purchases, high end restaurants, and more. While I haven’t elongated my o’s, I have adopted this check-writing habit. Did you know it’s less expensive for businesses, especially small ones, to process checks than credit/debit cards?

Can we all just not apologize for how busy we’ve been and how lax we’ve been about blogging, etc.? Good.

My summer reading project has been Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle trilogy: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World. Not only am I on track to finish, but I’m actually a bit ahead! As with Infinite Jest, which I read last summer, this has been an entertaining, involving and educational read, and I’m so glad I’ve finally gotten around to these books.

Stephenson mixes fascinating historical characters like Isaac Newton and Leibniz with fictional ones like the Shaftoe clan and Eliza. The result is a wild ride that succeeds in making things like science, history, finance and philosophy not just understandable, but fun and funny, with some etymology thrown in for good measure, like the origins of the words mob and face.

I chose well when I picked this project and hope to give a better review near the end of this month.

What are you reading now, and what are you reading next? Next for me is Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun.

This month’s selection for one of my book groups, Chris Cleave’s Little Bee was recommended highly out there in the litosphere. And my expectations may have negatively influenced my reading experience. I wanted to love it, but I didn’t.

The cover information is curiously cryptic:

We don’t want to tell you WHAT HAPPENS in this book.

It is a truly SPECIAL STORY and we don’t want to spoil it.

NEVERTHELESS, you need to know enough to buy it, so we will just say this:

This is the story of two women. Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice, the kind of choice we hope you never have to face. Two years later, they meet again–the story starts there…

Once you have read it, you’ll want to tell your friends about it. When you do, please don’t tell them what happens. The magic is in how the story unfolds.

Puffery, is what they call this kind of hyperbole in advertising. Do I want to tell my friends about this book? Not really. I found it good, not great. I’m more likely to urge The Imperfectionists or The Magicians on them.

I’m not going to tell you what happens, as that’s not what I do in my book reviews anyway. My approach is to tell you just enough about the book and my reaction to it for you to get a sense of yes/no/maybe you want to read it.

The two women are Little Bee, a girl from Nigeria, and Sarah, an English working mother. There’s not one, but several moments of fateful decisions. Many of their scenes together were moving and strong. The book opens with Little Bee in a refugee concentration camp in England. As for how it unfolds, the author does do a good job of spinning out the tale out of sequence, which is, as Little Bee would say, a good trick.

The author’s intent to publicize the unjust camps is a good one, and is overall effective. Also good are many scenes between characters, and some of the psychological characterizations. But one of the characters does something near the end of the book so unbelievable it pushed me right out of the book. And at times the book has an after-school special feel to it, though much darker. For a similar subject and a better, IMO, execution, rent the little known and under-appreciated The Visitor.

I found Little Bee’s premise good, and some of the book very good, but there were many times the characters felt like thin blankets, and the plot felt herky-jerky. In this, it reminded me of The Help, which I also liked but didn’t love. It’s possible, though, that my skepticism of them was sharpened by the overwhelming hype they’ve received from fans and critics. For me, Little Bee was good, eye-opening, often moving, but not consistently excellent for me.

I finished The Confusion, volume two of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, so I’m on track to complete my summer reading project of all three behemoths! Volume 1, Quicksilver, was divided into 3 books, one each for Daniel Waterhouse the natural philosopher, Jack Shaftoe the vagabond, and Eliza the former Turkish concubine. The Confusion alternates between book 4, Bonanza, which is Jack’s story, and book 5, Juncto, which is Eliza’s. As in Quicksilver, and Cryptonomicon before it, I found the Shaftoe parts more enjoyable; they’re frequently humorous tales of adventure, in the spirit of the picaroon novels Stephenson mentions in the stories.

Eliza is embroiled in intrigue and finance, plus has a vendetta against one man (or is it several?) who done her wrong. Her story was more frequently affecting, and much more complex and challenging.

These books are challenging and great fun. I’m learning about history, though it’s a fictionalized version. And I’m enjoying myself with a vast cast of characters I like spending time with. Which is good, because these books are so long. Overlong? Perhaps. But it’s hard to resist Stephenson’s zeal for the historical subjects and his characters.

I’ll have a little incidental reading in between, but then I’ll be off into volume three, The System of the World.

Every day at 4pm, Mary Lucia of the Current plays a “No Apologies” track. One day, it was Meatloaf’s “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” which I sang to my bewildered kids at the top of my lungs. I hadn’t even known I knew all the lyrics.

I was reminded of this idea of no apologies when I read a piece on failure by Elizabeth (Eat Pray Love) Gilbert in the 10th anniversary edition of O magazine, which I borrowed from the library. Yes, I sometimes read O. Turns out I’m their demographic. Guess what? Not gonna apologize for it.

Anyway, the piece isn’t groundbreaking or revelatory.

Can we lighten up a little?

As we head into this next decade, can we draft a joint resolution to drop the crazy-making expectation that we must all be perfect[?]

But I liked what I was left with when I finished, which was the sense that not only should be expect to fail and forgive ourselves for it, but we should laugh at our ridiculous expectations of universal success, and maybe even actively embrace failure. In that spirit, then here is a short list of things I’m currently failing at:

1. cutting back on caffeine and sugar
2. keeping my house minimally clean (e.g., ungross bathrooms)
3. blogging regularly
4. managing money
5. weeding the yard (not only did our thistles spread, then flower, but they went to SEED)
6. being even tempered with my kids and not calling them idiots on occasion (deserving occasions, IMO, but still)
7. keeping up with my online feed reading
8. managing my inbox (1300 in my home box, dunno how many in the blog box)

I’m sure there’s more. I’m far from perfect. I don’t get it all done, or done well. And I’m not going to apologize. So there.

Me, instructing 4yo Guppy and his nearly 4yo friend Bitsy on the basics of Quiet Time so that I could get a little lie down:

1. Be safe.
2. Be kind.
3. BE QUIET.

Guppy turned to Bitsy and said, “My mom loves quiet time. Because she gets PEACE and QUIET!”

The more detailed instructions on quiet time, which both my boys can tell you if you ask:

1. No going outside
2. No talking to strangers
3. No answering the phone or door.
4. BE QUIET

Things you can get Mom for:

1. Someone we know is at the door.
2. Blood
3. Burglar

A farming friend once shared a theory with me that humans get busy and perhaps a bit anxious at the height of summer, as we’re in tune with the earth, which is telling us to tend, weed and harvest our gardens while the sun shines.

I like that idea, and certainly find summer to be full rather than lazy. My gardens are metaphorical (except for the ones of bellflower and thistles in my back yard, but I don’t think weeds count) but there’s still a lot of tending, wedding and harvesting to be done even though not literal.

For all my punctuation-geek friends, (of which I know there are many) “Colonoscopy: It’s Time to Check Your Colons” from the Millions (linked from The Morning News):

The jumper colon is a paragraphical Red Bull, a rocket-launch of a punctuator, the Usain Bolt of literature. It’s punchy as hell. To believers of short first sentences–Hemingway?–it couldn’t get any better. To believers of long-winded sentences that leave you gasping and slightly confused–Faulkner?–it also couldn’t get any better. By itself this colon is neither a period nor a non-period… or rather it is a period and it is also a non-period. You choose.

Yes, yes, I know I’m supposed to be reading The Confusion, volume 2 of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. But finishing Volume 1, not to mention schlepping it everywhere for a month, made me want to take a wee break, which I did over the long weekend with Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists.

I read about this book first at Entertainment Weekly, then again online somewhere. It lodged on my radar, then was recommended to me by the Biblioracle at The Morning News (Great fun for book geeks like me.) So when I found it on the shelf at Half Price Books, well, who was I to pass it by when the universe was so obviously putting it in my path? (Moi, good at rationalization?)

Rachman’s first novel is about a struggling international newspaper and the people involved with it.

The paper is hardly at the cutting edge of technology–it doesn’t even have a website. And circulation isn’t increasing. The balance sheet is a catastrophe, losses mount annually, the readership is aging and dying off.

There are eleven chapters, each focusing on one character, which are also linked short stories. Most are employees of the paper, but a few are peripheral: a reader, an applicant, and a girlfriend. In between are brief pieces of the paper’s history. Over the book, all of these overlap and interweave.

This book tells a lot with very little; Rachman’s background in journalism shows itself in his eye for detail and in the sharp jabs of humor. But it’s the characters that drew me in and held me. I kept hoping for them to be happy, and ached for them when tragedy occurred. And occurred, it did. This book has moments of terrible, terrible sadness, if only because I cared so deeply for the characters who experienced them. Near the end of the book, I was exulting as one character’s chapter seemed to be ending without tragedy. Then in a very few lines, the knife twist occurs. I read the end of that chapter several times, marveling at the swiftness of its punch, even as I continued to wish it had gone differently.

In its workplace dynamics and relationships, the small joys and the big tragedies, this book often reminded me of Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End. Those who have worked at a newspaper or in a copy department will likely recognize many of the characters. This was a short, intense read, far more sad than I’d expected because I cared so much about the paper and its people.

I was on the fence about seeing the Swedish adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s book, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But I’m glad I did. In short, it replicates some of the big problems with the book, such as dwelling far too much on particulars of crimes against women. There MUST be better ways to shed light on and criticize something without potentially fetishizing it, right? I wonder what a woman director might make of this.

But it also was a mostly faithful adaptation of the book parts of the book, such as Lisbeth. The character looks and feels true to the book, and it’s much of why I enjoyed these books in spite of their problems, and thus enjoyed the adaptation, too. I was surprised and pleased at the casting of the actor who played Blomkvist–not only is he not conventionally good looking, but he’s often kind of funny looking, and it’s a pleasant contrast to what will be done in Hollywood, I’m sure. But it helped with one of the film’s other departures from the book–Blomkvist doesn’t have women falling into bed with him as much, though it is, unfortunately, still there. I see the point Larsson was probably trying to make: Blomkvist loves women in all their shapes, sizes, abilities, etc. and is in contrast to the many men in this book/film who pathologically hate women. Yet he’s still such a Mary Sue character that his bedroom escapades feel ridiculous. And why is it that only the deviant sex is described/shown, not the healthy stuff?

In any case, as with the book, a qualified recommendation. Not for the squeamish, but definitely for those who love Lisbeth.

Remember when I reviewed Dragonflight a little while back, and we had a great discussion in the comments about better books for tween and teen girls where the main character has a relationship with another girl and is not defined by the boys around her? Foiled, a graphic novel by the prolific writer Jane Yolen, is one of those better books.

Aliera attends the smallest high school in New York City. She fences, hence the pun of the title. She doesn’t always get along with her parents, but she has a good relationship with her cousin. They play a D & D like game every weekend and talk about what’s going on with Aliera, like fencing tournaments and cute boys at school. Not much goes on with the cousin, as she’s confined to a wheelchair with rheumatoid arthritis.

When Aliera gets asked out on a date by the ridiculously named cute boy Avery Castle, things begin to get weird in that “hey, magic is real!” way. And they do not unfold in a predictable or saccharine manner. Aliera is funny, charming, and easy to relate to. Her fencing skills are cool. The art, by Mike Cavallaro, is manga influenced, and easy to read and engage with. This book sets the stage for further books, so it’s a beginning rather than a complete story. I will definitely read the next book in this series, and would recommend this one unreservedly for tween and young teen girls who like fantasy.