Regrettably, Nancy Pearl has announced that the October 2009 edition of Pearl's Picks would be the final one.
We will maintain this archive for fans of Pearl's Picks.
The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry’s The Manual of Detection is a prime example of one of those peculiar and intriguing novels that occasionally come across my desk. It’s the sort of fiction that is really impossible to characterize with any accuracy. Somehow, Berry’s novel is neither this nor that: the plot is not straightforward; the setting is surreal yet oddly familiar, the characters are types (detective, girl Friday, villain) but so individualized that they’re difficult to forget. When you’re talking about books like Berry’s, you find yourself mostly resorting to making comparisons with better-known titles and authors. It’s also true that with books that push against the boundaries of any particular genre (be it literary fiction, fantasy, or mysteries), readers tend to either love them or hate them. I certainly don’t love them all, but I sure enjoyed this one, enormously. Berry’s novel is an amalgam of all of the above--literary fiction, fantasy, and mystery; its pages echo with tributes to the writing of Borges, of Calvino, of Kafka, and of some of Paul Auster’s works. And yet, for all it may resemble, The Manual of Detection is entirely original. In an unknown, somewhat eerie city, in a building known only (and ominously) as The Agency, a finicky, committed-to-following-his-daily-routine clerk named Charles Unwin works for a famous detective named Sivart, writing up Sivart’s cases from the notes he’s been given. Then one day everything is thrown into disarray--Watcher Lamech, Sivart’s boss, is murdered, Sivart has disappeared, and Unwin is unwillingly promoted to detective from his lowly position as a clerk (a job he looks forward to every day). The only way he can get his beloved clerkship back is to find Sivart, and while trying to do so, Unwin uncovers the existence of a dastardly plot to take over the world by an organization bent on infiltrating people’s dreams. Can a simple clerk find his famous boss, prevent the worst from taking place, and retain his integrity and what sanity he has? Into a mix that includes a cast of truly evil thugs, an attractive assistant with more than assisting on her mind, a puzzling woman in a plaid coat, and a ventriloquist who’s up to no good (among other one-of-a-kind characters), there’s also a carnival that no longer travels and many thousands of stolen alarm clocks. Try The Manual of Detection. It’s thoroughly fun and a bit mind-blowing.
The Night Inspector by Frederick Busch’s novel The Night Inspector isn’t nearly as well known as it should be. (In fact, I fear that Busch himself is known to a relatively small group of readers.) The Night Inspector will please fans of historical fiction, those who simply love good writing, and anyone interested in the life and times of Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick and other works. The novel takes place mainly in Manhattan, just after the end of the War Between the States. The main character, Will Bartholomew, spent his army years as a Union sharpshooter, until the day a bullet from an enemy’s gun horribly disfigured him. Because most of his face was shot away, Bartholomew now wears a papier-mâché mask at all times. Along with Herman Melville, now working as a customs inspector with his writing career apparently at an end, and Jessie, a beautiful Creole prostitute, Bartholomew concocts a plan to rescue a group of black children who are still being held by their owners, despite the abolishment of slavery. Busch has captured in vivid, evocative prose New York of the late 1860s, with its chasms between social classes, its casual cruelties, and its myriad of pleasures and dangers. At the same time, the flashbacks describing Bartholomew’s experiences during the Civil War are graphic enough to give most readers nightmares. Sadly, Frederick Busch died when he was only 65; the literary world lost a great teacher and a productive, imaginative writer. If you’ve never read anything by him, drop everything and start now. Two of my favorite books of his are Girls and Harry and Catherine, but Don’t Tell Anyone is an amazing collection of short stories. In fact, except for Busch’s Closing Arguments, a novel which somewhat freaked me out, I can honestly recommend without reservation everything that Busch wrote.
The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World by It’s only a slight exaggeration for me to say that I am such a fan of Paul Collins’ books that if he happened to write one about--say--the history of the Los Angeles, California, Yellow Pages, I’d immediately request it from my neighborhood library and probably spend the next few days doing nothing but reading it. That is a somewhat roundabout way of saying that since I’ve thoroughly enjoyed everything that Collins has ever written, I’d follow him--literarily--everywhere. I am happy to report that his newest offering is another must read: perfect for history buffs, Shakespeare fans, and anyone who enjoys learning--painlessly--about a slightly abstruse topic. The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World explores the fate of the collection of the Bard of Avon’s plays that was assembled and edited after his death by his fellow actors and friends John Heminge and Henry Condell. In describing the peregrinations of this collection of plays over the next 400 years, Collins introduces us to a wide assemblage of folks whose lives and interests, as readers, writers, or publishers, had an impact on the world of Shakespeareana. These include fellow writer Ben Jonson, various editors and Shakespeare scholars, Samuel Johnson (who worked on an edition of the plays), poet Alexander Pope, and Henry Clay Folger, the one-time president of Standard Oil of New York and great amasser of everything Shakespeare, who, along with his wife, founded the Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. that bears his name. With wit and good will, not to mention an unabashed enthusiasm for his topic, Collins helps us understand the importance to the world of the First Folio, how publishing has changed (and not) since the 16th century, and what’s known about the fate of the approximately 1,000 copies that were originally printed of Heminge and Condell’s manuscript. This is history the way you wish it were always written.
He Who Fears the Wolf by One of the trends we’ve been seeing over the last few years is translations into English of mysteries by Scandinavian writers. One of the best, and--sadly--least well known, is Norwegian Karin Fossum. In He Who Fears the Wolf, Fossum brings back policeman Konrad Sejer, first introduced to American readers in Don’t Look Back. When an elderly woman is found murdered in her secluded house in the Norwegian countryside, the only suspect is a schizophrenic man who has escaped from the local asylum where he’s been incarcerated. And the only possible witness to the crime is a disturbed teenage boy, whose hobby is killing crows with his bow and arrow. As Sejer works his way through the meager clues that are available, his work is complicated by the attitudes of many of the inhabitants of the small town where the killing took place. Despite that, Sejer comes to believe that the perpetrator of another crime--this one a bank robbery and hostage taking--is also somehow involved in the murder. Fossum explores not only the psyches of these three wounded souls, but also delves into Sejer’s inner life, revealing a lonely, no-longer-young cop, who is still grieving over the death of his wife. Readers looking for a dark and moody psychological thriller, à la Henning Mankell, will definitely want to check this out. And if you enjoy this as much as I did, don’t miss Fossum’s newest, The Water’s Edge.
The Caveman's Valentine by Although he went on to write two nicely reviewed novels, including The Juror and the just published Ravens, I found the latter two to be a bit too scary for my taste. So if you want an exciting mystery and well-developed characters, but nothing absolutely too awful to bear to happen, take a look at George Dawes Green’s very first novel, The Caveman’s Valentine, published way back in 1994. Romulus Ledbetter, the caveman of the title, is a Juilliard-trained classical pianist. He’s also homeless and a paranoid schizophrenic. (He would say that he isn’t, technically, homeless, since he lives in a cave in Manhattan’s Linwood Park.) In the time that isn’t taken up with searching for food in dumpsters, Romulus spends waging war against the sinister Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant, whom Rom believes is beaming down ultra dangerous Y rays from the Chrysler Building. These rays are the direct cause of all the ills facing humankind, and Rom is convinced he must find Stuyvesant and stop him. He’s diverted from his quest because one Valentine’s Day morning, Romulus finds a dead body lying in front of his cave. Driven to find the murderer, he must reconnect with the world he’d long ago left behind, all the while coping (or not) with his schizophrenia, his hatred of Stuyvesant, and the “civilized” world.
The Skull Mantra by I’ve never stopped suggesting Eliot Pattison’s first thriller, The Skull Mantra, to mystery fans. It won a well-deserved Edgar award for Best First Novel when it was published in 1999. In his first novel, Pattison introduced Shan Tao Yun, who has been sent from his job as the Inspector General of the Ministry of Economy in Beijing to a forced labor camp in Tibet, where his fellow prisoners include Tibetan monks and other dissidents. Then a local Chinese official is discovered--headless--near the road construction project Shan has been assigned to. The Chinese colonel who assigns Shan the case bribes him by offering more food and better living conditions, but it’s also clear that he expects the murder to be blamed on a specific monk. As we follow Shan in his attempts to remain true to his conscience, appease the Colonel, survive inhumane conditions, and finally solve a complex mystery, we are introduced to a singular and singularly beautiful country, its people, and its customs. I’ve seldom read a novel that more effectively captures the soul of its setting, in all of its contradictions, difficulties, and beauty. The real hero of this novel is Tibet during its ongoing struggle for freedom from China.
The Unknown Soldier by Gerald Seymour’s exciting, indeed, almost irresistible The Unknown Soldier moves the spy novel ever more decisively in the direction it’s been going--no more bad Russians, good-bye le Carré’s Karla, and hello terrorists. In Seymour’s case, the search for a suspected terrorist, a detainee mistakenly released from prison on Guantanamo, takes place in the Empty Quarter of the Saudi Arabian desert, a place so alien, foreign, and inherently dangerous that only the Bedouin tribesmen can exist there. But American and British agents believe that a member of Al-Qaeda is crossing the sands with a load of Stinger missiles and the murder of Westerners on his mind. Can all that superior American technology locate him in the empty vastness of the Rub’ al Khālī, as the desert area is known? Like all good spy novels, this raises important ancillary issues: do two wrongs ever make a right? Is murder justified in the name of patriotism? Is it ever right to betray your country? Seymour’s characters are three-dimensional, the plot moves along smartly (great for an airplane trip), and the politics are enlightening. (Another novel with the Rub’ al Khālī as its setting is Josephine Tey’s The Singing Sands, one of my favorites of her Inspector Alan Grant mysteries--see below for another one of my favorite Tey novels.)
Stitches: A Memoir by To that shortish list of great memoirs using the format of the graphic novel (Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, and Craig Thompson’s Blankets), we can now add David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir. Readers with young children will likely recognize the name David Small as the illustrator of books such as The Gardener and The Library (both in collaboration with his wife, writer Sarah Stewart). But Stitches is a whole new ballgame for Small: it’s a wrenching tale of his 1950s childhood, raised by uncaring, unloving, and indeed, seemingly deliberately malicious parents who never had his best interests in mind. It begins when David was six, and follows him into adulthood, highlighting various events along the way, including an encounter with his mother’s mother (she’s like a wicked grandmother in a particularly grim Grimm fairy tale), his bout of cancer when he was eleven (terribly mishandled by his parents, despite the fact that his father was a physician), his hospital stay at fourteen, and much more. The pictures are all in shades of gray, which speak beautifully to the lack of color and happiness that marked Small’s childhood and adolescence. For me, the stitches of the title refer not to the physical representations of his surgery, but rather the emotional stitching--the mending, if you will--of all the damage he suffered in his early years, and the choice he made to become as unlike his parents and grandmother as possible. Heartbreaking and hopeful, all at the same time--this is a book that both teens and adults can read and appreciate.
When You Reach Me by Some extraordinary teen fiction has been published recently (E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, for one), and now we have an equally outstanding novel for middle grade readers: Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me. If this doesn’t win the Newbery Award, which is awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, “to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children,” and/or end up high on every critic’s best of the year list, I’ll be shocked. It’s that good. Stead’s book is one of those all-too-few-and-far-between novels that you want to reread as soon as you finish it, because you want to be able to see how the author so successfully accomplished all that she set out to do, which is write a fantasy that feels completely real. In 1979, 12-year-old Miranda and her best friend Sal are savvy New York kids. They know what’s safe to do, what places to avoid, and how to deal with the strange and bothersome homeless man on the corner of their street. But when Sal gets attacked--for no discernible reason--by one of their classmates, it’s only the first in a series of disturbing events: Miranda’s apartment key--carefully hidden--disappears, and she gets the first of a series of disturbing and mysterious notes, all of which have something to do with future events. This first one includes these lines: “I am coming to save your friend’s life, and my own.” Even as Miranda tries to figure out what’s going on, she has to deal with the realities of day-to-life--her crush on her classmate, Colin, her new friendship with Annemarie, and her dislike of Annemarie’s former best friend, Julie. Then there’s helping her mother, who is practicing to be a contestant on the television show The $20,000.00 Pyramid, fulfill her dream of winning. All these diverse plot lines come together in a most satisfactory way. Somehow I missed Stead’s glowingly reviewed first novel, First Light, but I intend to remedy that situation shortly. Best of all, in addition to its thought-provoking plot and its realistic depiction of pre-teen experiences, When You Reach Me is a wonderful homage to Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, which is Miranda’s favorite book.
Brat Farrar by If I had to choose a favorite mystery novel, I think I’d pick Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar. I have now read Brat Farrar so many times that I’ve had to replace several worn out copies. I’ve always heard that Tey--who published little more than a handful of novels between 1927 and 1952--had trouble coming up with plots, so she frequently borrowed stories she had read in newspapers and composed a novel based loosely around details of the plots. (This is certainly the case with The Franchise Affair, which happens to be possibly my second all time favorite mystery novel.) A brief outline of Brat Farrar certainly reveals a familiar plot: a young man masquerades as the heir to a fortune and nearly gets away with it. But Tey turns this summary on its head and the result is an emotionally satisfying novel that answers less who-done-it than how-and-why it was done. The title character, Brat Farrar, returns to England after spending many years in Canada working as a ranch hand. He is sitting peacefully in a restaurant one day when a total stranger comes up to him, addresses him as Simon, and asks him how come he’s able to lounge around London when his 21st birthday is rapidly approaching (which means that as eldest son he’ll come into a not-inconsiderable inheritance): shouldn’t he be home helping with the plans for the gala occasion? At first Brat is merely surprised at being mistaken for Simon Ashby, heir to Latchetts, an English country estate devoted to horse breeding, then he’s intrigued when the stranger comes up with an apparently perfect plan, one with a big financial payoff for both men. Brat will simply pretend that he’s Patrick, the first-born twin and therefore the rightful heir. But Patrick disappeared when he was about 13, and has long been presumed dead. Brat, as Patrick, will return to the family, collect his inheritance, split it with the stranger, who turns out to be a close family friend of the Ashby’s, and then disappear again. After some intensive coaching, Brat infiltrates himself into the life of the Ashby family, only to discover that things are seldom what they seem, and an easy con turns potentially deadly.
Awakening by S. J. Bolton’s Awakening is not a book I would have predicted I’d ever enjoy. I am not fond of snakes (and that’s an understatement for you) and in general I don’t like atmospheric psychological mysteries (plain old vanilla action is enough for me), but I was totally riveted by S. J. Bolton’s second thriller, Awakening. I hadn’t read her first one, so had no idea what to expect, and it was a pleasant shock to find myself turning the pages into--and through--the wee hours of the night. When reclusive Clara Benning, a veterinary surgeon in a small British town, gets a call from a panicky mother to please come quickly to remove a snake from her baby’s crib, it’s only the first in what turns out to be a series of venomous crimes. Who’s behind the appearance of one of the world’s most dangerous snakes--the Australian taipan--in placid Dorset, England? And, more importantly, how can the increasingly terrified villagers rid the town of these deadly intruders? Clara gets help finding answers from her handsome neighbor, a good-looking policeman, and a quirky reptile expert. Her investigations lead her to a deserted house, some long-buried and sinister secrets, and, in the process, a better understanding of her own fears. Perfect reading for a long plane trip--unless, of course, the film they’re showing during the flight is Samuel L. Jackson’s Snakes on a Plane. That would definitely be overkill.
Death on the Holy Mountain by When you begin any series in the middle, there’s always a question about how the author is going to handle all the information you don’t know because you haven’t read the earlier books. That’s why many readers insist on starting every series with the very first title. But I find that as long as an author spends enough time--but not too many pages--filling me in on what I absolutely need to know to enjoy the newest book, I don’t really mind where I begin a series. I am happy to go forward or backward if I want to read the rest. Though I was only introduced to David Dickinson’s mysteries featuring Lord Francis Powerscourt with the 7th title in the series--Death on the Holy Mountain--I didn’t at all feel that I was out of my depth when it came to the back story. The time period and setting of the novel--1905, primarily Ireland--provides interesting insights into the ongoing conflicts between Protestants and Catholics in both England and Ireland. Powerscourt is originally asked to investigate a series of art thefts from large Irish country houses. It’s a strange sort of crime, really, because the thieves are pretty much ignoring the Protestant owners’ really valuable paintings, such as collections of Old Masters, and concentrating instead on stealing ancestral portraits. And then--weirdly--the portraits begin to be returned to their owners, but altered. When real people begin to die, however, the mystery deepens. What’s going on here? And who’s responsible? And is religion really the motive? Powerscourt--who, I suspect, will remind some readers of Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey--is both intelligent and witty. For readers who enjoy literate, unhurried historical novels with a puzzle at their heart, Dickinson’s novel perfectly fits the bill. I’m only surprised I’d never even heard of the author or his books before I picked this one up.
The Dark Horse by I am always happy to find a new entry in Craig Johnson’s mystery series featuring Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire. Walt was introduced in The Cold Dish, which was followed by Death Without Company, Kindness Goes Unpunished, Another Man’s Moccasins, and now, in what is perhaps his most compelling and humane novel yet, The Dark Horse. Walt, morally upright and an all-around good guy, takes a temporary leave from sheriffing when he leaves his home base in Absaroka County to investigate what appears to be an open-and-shut case in neighboring Campbell County. Mary Barsad has repeatedly confessed to anyone who will listen that she shot her husband Wade six times in the head after their house and barn burned down and Mary’s horses died a horrible death. But something about Mary’s story doesn’t ring true to Walt and he decides to pass himself off as an insurance agent in order to figure out what really went down that day, and to learn if she really is responsible for the murder. Fans of the series will be pleased to know that Walt’s two closest friends--Henry Standing Bear (aka, The Cheyenne Nation) and his fellow detective on the Absaroka police force, Victoria "Vic" Amoretti--feature in this story. Having Bear as a continuing character was a brilliant idea on Johnson’s part, since the close friendship between Bear and Longmire gives Walt greater credibility within the Indian community. And it continues to be a pleasure to watch Walt’s relationship with Vic develop from book to book. Dog lovers please take note: Dog, Walt’s companion (you can’t really call him a pet), is one of the best characters in this series.
The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by “Clever” novels frequently put me off. You know the sort I mean: those that make use of different fonts, footnotes, and other similar affectations. I often wonder if the purpose of all these bells and whistles is simply to disguise the fact that the author really has nothing much to say to the reader. And I find that so often novels about child geniuses all follow the same story arc: kid burns out and comes to no good end. So you can imagine my relief and delight when I discovered that Reif Larsen overcame both of my ingrained prejudices in his splendid and emotionally satisfying first novel, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet. Twelve-year-old cartography genius Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet lives at the Coppertop Ranch (just north of Divide, Montana) with his über-laconic rancher father, his scientist mother (who is obsessed with finding a certain type of beetle that nobody else believes exists), his older sister, Gracie, and the memory of his younger brother, Layton, whose death has left an unhealed scar on the family’s psyche. T.S. spends his days mapping the world around him. We’re shown examples of his maps: there’s one describing the behavior of the female Australian dung beetle during copulation, while another is a three-dimensional time-map of 26 of the Spivet family toasters, including “highlights of its career and the date and nature of its demise.” Two other notable maps are of the family’s dinner table conversation and the correlation between the time and distance of the self-inflicted gunshot that killed Layton. Then one day T.S. gets a call from the Smithsonian Institution, announcing that he has won the prestigious Baird award. He’s invited to come address a select audience and receive the recognition due him for his outstanding scientific contributions. (T.S. realizes that the man on the phone has no idea that he’s only 12, but he’s too shy to tell him.) Almost on a whim, T.S. decides to hop an eastbound train and hope that he makes it to Washington in time to accept the award. As T.S. travels toward the Smithsonian, we are along for the ride, experiencing the world through the eyes of this brilliant, funny, and emotionally wounded kid. It’s a trip well worth taking.
Bubble Trouble by I count myself as someone crazy for the books of Margaret Mahy, especially her picture books. I love her flights of fancy and her scrumptious way with words. And her new book--Bubble Trouble--is great fun to read. Now, for several reasons it’s somewhat difficult for me when I come to review a picture book. First, so much depends on the marriage of the illustrations to the words. In the case of Bubble Trouble, it’s hard to imagine the text without the winsome watercolor and cut paper pictures by Polly Dunbar. They carry along the silliness of the story and make you smile as you look at them. Second, it always seems to me that it would be so much easier if I could just include the complete text in the review, rather than pulling out bits and pieces to quote. Third, the plots of picture books are frequently the least important part of the book--instead it’s the use of language, rhythm, and (often) rhyme that are what make a book a winner. Still, here I go, reviewing Bubble Trouble. When Mabel blows a bubble, her little brother is caught up in it, wafting out of the house and through the town. Mabel, her mother, and the rest of the townspeople--Chrysta Gribble, her brother Greville (in his nightshirt), Tybal and his mother Sybil (who are playing a game of Scrabble when they see the baby float by, encased in the bubble Mabel blew) and others--all chase after the baby. Even “crumpled Mr. Copple and his wife (a crabby couple)” and “feeble Mrs. Threeble, in a muddle with her needle (matching pink and purple patches for a pretty patchwork quilt)” try desperately to figure out how to bring the baby safely to earth. “’With the problem let us grapple,’ murmured kindly Canon Dapple,/ ‘and the problem we must grapple with is bringing Baby down.” Even when it seems as though things are hopeless (due to the dastardly deed of rascally Abel), someone figures out a way to save the day (and the baby). Reading this aloud (and it must be read aloud) will be the highpoint of any library story hour, or, indeed, is the perfect choice for that “just one more book” before bedtime plea from any three- to six-year-old.
How to Sell by Contrary to the implications of the title of Clancy Martin’s How to Sell, this is not a “how-to” book, but rather an unexpectedly poignant first novel, set in and around a large jewelry warehouse store in Texas. If I had to use only three words to describe Martin’s novel, they would be sex, drugs, and sadness. I know that some reviewers have found this novel to be hilarious, but I was too caught up in the desolation and meaningless of the characters’ lives to be greatly amused by anything that happened. When Bobby Clark drops out of high school, he travels from his Canadian home, leaving his girlfriend Wendy, to live with his older brother, Jim, in Fort Worth, Texas. Jim gets his baby brother a job at the jewelry emporium where he, along with the owner and most of the salespeople, are raking in dough hand-over-fist as they cheat the shoppers with numerous scams. These include printing bogus certificates of authenticity on the office printers and replacing real Rolexes (which the customers have brought in to be cleaned) with fake ones. The salespeople use the same con with rings brought in to be reset. The real jewels are replaced with fakes, and then the diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, et al. are resold at greatly inflated prices to prime suckers--oh, and I suppose that phrase should be “important buyers.” Most of the female staff is also turning tricks, and many are using cocaine, smoking crank, and liberally imbibing alcohol, both on and off the job, in order to get through their days and nights of immorality and deceit. Somehow, Clancy makes it all work: I cared, deeply, about the main characters, especially Bobby, a true lost soul, who learns too much too fast for someone so young, when he falls, hard, for his brother’s mistress, Lisa. And Lisa’s fate, while perhaps all too predictable, broke my heart. The author evidently knows whereof he speaks, because he had a (brief?) career selling jewelry before he became a philosophy professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Readers who don’t mind a little walk on the grungy side of literary fiction will probably love this novel. (I found Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children, which has some similar grunginess and themes of lost children out of their element in the world in which they’ve found themselves, much more distressing than Martin’s novel.) In fact, the only people who will definitely despise Martin’s tale are those in the jewelry profession. You’ll no doubt be a much smarter customer of fancy earrings, pendants, and watches after reading this--and how many novels can make that claim?
The City & the City by Here’s a scene I imagine might have gone through China Miéville’s mind as he was thinking about beginning his newest work of fiction, The City & the City. He’d just finished his wonderful novel for young people, Un Lun Dun, which posited a London that is quite like and unlike the one we know today. Where to take that idea next, Miéville may have wondered. Brilliant writer that he is, here’s what he came up with: a police procedural set in neighboring, nearly identical cities. The catch is, these cities--Beszel and Ul Qoma--co-exist in the same physical space, and their separation ultimately depends on how well each city’s citizens do in ignoring the existence of the other. Sound a little complicated? Leave it to Miéville to make it work superbly. Police Inspector Tyador Borlú is assigned to find the murderer of student Mahalia Geary. She was a member of an extremist group who believed that there is actually a third city—Orciny--that exists in the interstices of the first two. As more murders occur, Borlú is reluctantly forced to consider that the outlandish views Geary held might actually contain some truth. But with Miéville, weird as the plots of his novels might sound, it’s actually the setting that seems to matter most to him, and, ultimately, the reader. While I was engrossed in this quite compelling mystery, I found myself thinking of the many parallels that Miéville’s notion of separate cities (each with a different currency, economic level, religion, governmental structure, and ways of life) that are separated only by a longstanding habit of belief, have in the modern world. One could (and perhaps should) read this as a parable of segregation reduced to its most elemental form. But Miéville is also a splendid prose stylist--his characters talk the way people really do, with unfinished sentences, hesitations, and many stops and starts. This novel is the sort I happen to really enjoy, in which the author immerses you in an unfamiliar world but makes references to events and people as though you knew exactly what he was talking about (and eventually it all comes together, and you do). You might have to work a bit harder with a book like this--maybe read it more than once--but it’s totally worth it.
Nomad’s Hotel: Travels in Time and Space by There are some armchair travel books I would put into a category simply labeled “Something Special,” and Cees Nooteboom’s Nomad’s Hotel: Travels in Time and Space is one of them. This collection ranges over a number of years, and includes essays originally written between the 1970s and the present decade. (The two earliest pieces are from 1975: one a prescient account called “An Evening in Isfahan,” and the other a charming tale of an unexpected trip Nooteboom took to The Gambia, in Africa--it was unexpected because he had actually intended to journey to the Spanish Sahara but ran into visa difficulties.) What sets Nooteboom’s travel articles apart from many others is that he is both a real reader and a real writer. By that I mean that he frequently refers to the experiences of other writers (but in a way that doesn’t make you feel inadequate because you haven’t read them) and is also able to capture the essence of a place in a paragraph or even a single sentence, which meant that I felt I had experienced the soul of, say, Venice, without ever having set foot on a vaporetto. Much has been written about Venice, but this is how Nooteboom does it:
In Venice anachronism lies at the very heart of things: in a thirteenth-century church you look at a fifteenth-century grave and an eighteenth-century altar; what your eyes see is what the no longer existent eyes of millions of others have seen. Here, on the contrary, that is not tragic, for while you are looking they go on talking, you are constantly accompanied by the living and the dead you are involved in an age-old conversation. Proust, Ruskin, Rilke, Byron, Pound, Goethe, McCarthy, Morand, Brodsky, Montaigne Casanova, Goldoni, Da Ponte, James Montale, their words flow around you like the water in the canals, and just as the sunlight causes the waves behind the gondolas to fragment into myriad tiny sparkles, so that one word, Venice, echoes and sparkles in all those conversations, letters, sketches, and poems, always the same, always different. Not without reason did Paul Morand call his book about this city Venices, and actually even that is not enough. There ought to be a superlative degree of the plural just for this island.
In the article on his trip to The Gambia that I mentioned earlier, Nooteboom describes a young woman who is headed off for a two-year Peace Corps stint as someone who ”resembles the beginning of a novel that is destined to have an unhappy ending.”
For me, the most moving chapter dealt with a trip Nooteboom made to Canberra, Australia, to the war memorial and museum dedicated to the men who fought and died in the Battle of Gallipoli in the First World War.
A Final Arc of Sky: A Memoir of Critical Care by Jennifer Culkin's affecting and effective A Final Arc of Sky: A Memoir of Critical Care is primarily an account of her experiences working as an emergency flight nurse on board a helicopter (an Agusta A109A for those whirlybird aficionados among you) in the state of Washington. But as we read about her attempts to keep heart attack and trauma victims alive while en route to the nearest hospital, we also gain insights into her personal life and her views on parenting, family relationships, and religion. As difficult as emergency medical care is under the best of circumstances (i.e., in a hospital setting), Culkin helps us see how the difficulty and danger are ratcheted up when you're 8,000 feet up in the air and several hundred miles from the nearest hospital, working in the cramped confines of a chopper's cabin. Some of the saddest parts of the book are where she describes the deaths of close friends and co-workers (in helicopter accidents) and her mother's difficult death. Constantly living with life and death tempers a person, I believe, and Culkin is not only the kind of nurse I think we all dream of encountering when we're in need of emergency care, but the sort of writer whose words and wisdom we can cherish.
First Chapter
The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders Emmanuel Guibert by The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders is the story of photojournalist Didier LeFèvre's first assignment: to accompany a team of Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) who were traveling through Pakistan to Afghanistan in 1986, during the long bloody conflict between the invading Soviet Union troops and the Taliban. The book is a collaboration between LeFèvre and artist Emmanuel Guibert, assembled by graphic designer Frédéric Lemercier. The pictures include both LeFèvre's original contact sheets (it's interesting to note that contact sheets of photos are not unlike strips of comics) and Guibert's drawings, while the text is reconstructed from discussions Guibert and LeFèvre had about the journey. (LeFèvre's journals--mentioned in the book--were lost years before.) The result is a powerful reading and viewing experience. It's a good example of how the graphic novel format can work elegantly for nonfiction; it's also a good example of how inadequate the term "graphic novel" is for a work that makes equal use of text and illustrations. And the decision to do this as a graphic novel, however inadequate the phrase is, was exactly right, because we need both the visuals and the text to fully grasp the experiences LeFèvre and the MSF team underwent. It began in Peshawar, and ended, three months later, in Afghanistan. Just getting to their destination involved plenty of danger; it required many pack animals and 40 armed guards. Straying off the path was not encouraged, as landmines were prevalent, and there was always the fear of snipers or of being attacked by roving soldiers of either side. Their destination was a small village in northern Afghanistan, where they set up a clinic to treat the men, women, and children who were the collateral damage in a brutal war. When the team was returning back to their home base in Pakistan, LeFèvre made an unwise choice to travel back to Pakistan by himself--a decision that nearly got him killed. Reading The Photographer is a stunning, unforgettable experience: you somehow emerge from your time spent in Pakistan and Afghanistan with LeFèvre and the members of MSF a better, more humane individual.
Living Witness: A Gregor Demarkian Novel by I have recently become addicted to the mystery novels of Jane Haddam. I read a few of them years ago--her first Gregor Demarkian mystery, Not a Creature Was Stirring, was published in 1990--but for some reason I don't think I ever fully appreciated her until I read her newest one, Living Witness--the 24th featuring ex-FBI agent Demarkian--at which point I went back and avidly read all the earlier ones that I had skipped. Haddam's books aren't for thriller readers looking for adrenaline-charged, page-turners; they're truly character-driven, British-style cerebral mysteries, deliciously slow-paced and intricately plotted. Living Witness is centered on the controversy over the biology curriculum in a small, very conservative town in Pennsylvania. Ninety-one-year-old Ann-Victoria Hadley, newly elected member of the school board, has initiated a lawsuit that would forbid the teaching of intelligent design (synonymous with creationism in her mind) in the local schools, thus requiring the teaching of evolution. When Ann-Victoria is found beaten nearly to death, and shortly thereafter two fellow plaintiffs to the lawsuit are found murdered, the local police chief, no fan of Darwin's theory himself, and thus a possible suspect in both the beating and the killings, calls on Gregor to take over the investigation. One of the things I especially like about Haddam as an author is the way she treats her characters. All of them--both major and minor, and on both sides of the controversy---are fully developed, as well as treated with respect. It's easy to imagine them having real lives both before and after we meet them in the pages of this book (except for the ones killed off, of course). Although events in Gregor's personal life change and develop over the course of the two dozen books, I don't think it's at all necessary to read them in order. Two others I'd recommend wholeheartedly are The Headmaster's Wife and Cheating at Solitaire.
First Chapter
Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival by All you armchair true-adventure fans--i.e., those who loved reading Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, Endurance by Ernest Shackelton, or Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air--should put Dean King's Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival high on your to-read list. In August of 1815, 12 crew members (including three officers) from the Connecticut merchant brig Commerce were shipwrecked off the western coast of Africa, enslaved by a Bedouin tribe, and forced to accompany their captors--by foot and by camel--on a seemingly endless, desperately grueling, and bone-dry trek through the sands of the western Sahara desert (now part of Morocco). Which of the crew, if any, will survive the unspeakable horrors, misery, and deprivation they face? And if they do survive, how will they ever make it back across the Atlantic to home and family? King based his book on two first-person accounts of the hellish experience the men underwent: The first was called, quite simply, Sufferings in Africa. It was written by James Riley, the captain of the Commerce, and was originally published in 1817. The second, written by Archibald Robbins, an "able seaman" aboard the Commerce, appeared in 1818. From these two works, King has constructed a gripping, page-turning narrative--a tale of survival and courage in the most dire of circumstances. The fact that this story was unfolding alongside a parallel story of survival and courage in the face of dire circumstances--the abduction and enslavement in the "New World" of African native men, women, and children--makes King's book especially ironic.
First Chapter Table of Contents
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks: A Novel by E. Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks is not only one of the most enjoyable teen novels that I've read in a long time, but it's also one of smartest. It's intelligently written, with a cast of well-drawn characters; it has an intelligent and witty narrative voice; and Lockhart has created an original and thought-provoking plot that carries a serious message along with its good humor. (This would be a terrific choice for mother-daughter book groups.) Twelve- to 15-year-old girls looking for a relationship novel that's neither sappy, angst-y, nor a fantasy need search no further: here it is. Frankie starts her sophomore year at Alabaster Prep a changed young woman from the geeky freshman she was just a few months ago. When she starts going out with handsome Matthew--the senior boy who's the catch of the campus--she's pretty sure she's left all remnants of the old nerdy Frankie behind. But when she learns that Matthew is the president of an all-male secret society of juniors and seniors at the school called "The Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds," her immense annoyance at being excluded simply because she's female leads her to come up with a brilliantly inventive (if perhaps slightly illegal) scheme to get back at the club members. But I think the caper-filled plot--entertaining as it is--is Lockhart's method to get us interested in knowing Frankie, who is pure and simply a delight. She's a fan of P.G. Wodehouse, she loves words (I can foresee a lot of engaged readers playing with the notion of "neglected positives" (if being disgruntled means you're not happy about something, why not use gruntled when you are?) and she's not afraid to either ask questions or challenge accepted norms. I wish I had been exactly like her when I was 15.
Border Songs by I am (in my reading life) always on the lookout for unforgettable characters who are both quirky and believable. That's how I would describe many of the men and women who populate Anne Tyler's novels, especially Justine in Searching for Caleb, Ezra in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and Elizabeth in The Clock Winder, as well as Christopher Boone, the hero of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incidence of the Dog in the Night-Time. Jim Lynch's greatly enjoyable second novel (after The Highest Tide),Border Songs, is filled with such characters. Set in Washington State, hard by the arbitrary and basically invisible (but very real) line separating the United States from Canada, the main character of the novel is inarticulate, dyslexic Brandon Vanderkool, a 6'8" somewhat-accidental American Border Patrol agent with a startling talent for ferreting out smugglers and illegals. He lives with his father Norm, who loves, but doesn't understand, his son, and his mother Jeanette, who loves and does understand her son, but is losing her mind to dementia, on a failing dairy farm. (There's a terrifically rendered scene of (the three of them?) trying to save some sick cows). But Brandon is much less interested in law enforcement than birding, painting, and building structures à la Andy Goldsworthy from the natural materials around him. Oh yes, and lusting after his former high school classmate Maddie, who lives on the Canadian side of the border near Wayne, her marijuana-growing, usually stoned, ex-college professor father. Through the lives of these characters, Lynch explores the notion of what borders signify, whether they're between countries (the difference in attitude towards drugs between the U.S. and Canada is pretty starkly presented), between people, between nature and the man-made world, between self and self-knowledge, or between sickness and health. There's not much of a plot here, but that didn't deter me--the pleasure of spending time with Lynch's unusually well-drawn characters was more than enough to keep me reading.
First Chapter
Into the Beautiful North by Following hard on the heels of two well-reviewed titles (the novel The Hummingbird's Daughter and the nonfiction work The Devil's Highway), Luis Alberto Urrea once again offers readers a glance into another culture. The protagonist of Into the Beautiful North is 19-year-old Nayeli, who works at a taco stand in a small coastal Mexican village called Tres Camarones. Years before her father had gone to America--to a place called Illinois--and never returned. She gradually realizes that, indeed, most of the town's male population has headed to the fabulous and fabled north, leaving their families behind. Nayeli isn't the only one to notice this phenomenon, however. A gang of drug dealers plans to move into the vacuum left by the absent men and take over the town. But Nayeli--influenced by the film The Magnificent Seven--decides that she, too, is going north to the U.S. There she'll recruit a group of Mexican men---her own personal "Siete Magnificos"--to return to Mexico and reclaim the village. As her plans unfold, Nayeli and her three accomplices encounter many difficulties, including finding enough money both to begin and carry out their plans, learning whom to trust and when to run away, getting over the border (illegally), and simply resisting the temptation to give up on their goal of recapturing the soul of their village. And for Nayeli, an added objective is to see her father again after so many years, and persuade him to come home and be one of the "siete magnificos." The characters in Urrea's novel are three-dimensional (especially Nayeli); the plot is fast paced and filled, somewhat unexpectedly, given the subject, with humor. Book clubs, especially those interested in reading multicultural novels, will want to add this to their list of books to be discussed.
Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey through Chile by Not to mince words here: I think that Sara Wheeler is one of the best contemporary travel writers around. Her writing is filled with the dry yet engaging humor of the classic British travelers, she does her homework before she visits a country, she's fearless (more about that later), and she has the particular kind of luck that serious travelers (or, at least, travel writers) seem to have. They're always giving accounts of meeting up with just the right people at just the right time, in order, for example, to hitch a ride (frequently planes and helicopters) to an otherwise inaccessible place. If they're in upscale hotels in locales like Montreal, Rio, or Sydney they're always getting upgraded to a better hotel room. Wheeler's masterpiece is, I think, Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, which is both an account of her own experiences as part of the American National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists' and Writers' Program, and a history of the exploration of the region, which is made up of both wise and foolish decisions, luck (both good and bad), heroism, and the inevitable fatalities. But Wheeler's Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey through Chile is definitely not to be missed. Chile is approximately 2600 miles long, and is never more than 250 miles wide (its average width is 110 miles); Wheeler makes her way from the arid north to the islanded south. Here's a brief example of her writing: "I woke up on my 31st birthday in a seedy hotel very close to Argentina, and John the Alaskan tried to wish me a Happy Birthday in Spanish, but by the time he had worked it out we had both lost interest." Before reading this, I never really considered visiting Chile; now it's on my list of must-see places. Interestingly, Travels in a Thin Country is one of the few books about the country that aren't centered on its terrible history under the dictator, Pinochet. Now for the fearlessness: I have one very adventurous daughter, who, like Wheeler, has an amazing gift for friendship and instant closeness with nearly everyone she meets. At one time in her life she would, like Wheeler, drop whatever plans she had in order to go off rock-climbing with a group of strangers, fax us updates on whatever was happening in her life on stationery from her new boyfriend's place of employment (one was a bodyguard for the president of a Spanish province that shall go unnamed by me), have her passport confiscated on a train between Florence and Budapest, sleep on the couches of strangers, be out of touch for weeks on end, and generally keep my anxiety level sky high. So, all the time I was reading Wheeler's wonderful books, I was feeling dreadfully sorry for her mother. Incidentally, Wheeler is also the author of two great biographies: Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton and Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard.
The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind--and Nearly Found Myself--on the Pacific Crest Trail by When Dan White and his girlfriend Melissa decided to give up their newspaper jobs in Connecticut and walk the 2,650 formidable miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, which stretches from Mexico to British Columbia, from the California desert to the rain forest of Washington, through mountain passes and over rivers, they had no idea what they'd let themselves in for. Nor did friends and family exactly cheer them on. As White describes in The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind--and Almost Found Myself--on the Pacific Coast Trail, none of their friends could understand why they were doing it, and their parents feared for their survival. After vicariously sharing the couple's experiences with--inter alia--exhaustion, sunstroke, giardia, bears, equipment malfunctions, blisters, hallucinations, and a particularly painful and unusual encounter with a cactus, readers will simultaneously applaud the couple's determination to keep going and at the same time probably question their sanity. There are many books available on walking the Pacific Crest Trail, but White's is the best I've found so far.