Archive for May 2011
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Well, it looks like Blogger figured out what caused its “routine maintenance” to go so badly yesterday – things appear to be up and functioning correctly again after the crash that lasted for the better part of the last two days. While things are working again (I’m a little gun shy about the whole Blogger experience after this and other similar incidents), I’ll update my Top Ten lists.
Of the 32 fiction titles considered, Beach Music, Love at Absolute Zero, One Thousand White Women, and The Keeper of Lost Causes appear on the YTD Fiction Top Ten list for the first time.
1. The Glass Rainbow – James Lee Burke (Dave Robicheaux series)
2. Dead Man’s Walk – Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove series)
3. Nemesis – Philip Roth (novel)
4. Beach Music – Pat Conroy (novel)
5. Love at Absolute Zero – Christopher Meeks (novel)
6. Autumn of the Phantoms – Yasmina Khadra (Algerian detective fiction)
7. Standing at the Crossroads – Charles Davis (British novel)
8. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe (classic British novel)
9. One Thousand White Women – Jim Fergus (Western novel)
10.The Keeper of Lost Causes – Jussi Adler-Olsen (Norwegian crime fiction)
Of the 14 nonfiction titles considered, Tiny Terror, How Literature Works, and The Long Goodbye make their first appearance on the YTD Nonfiction Top Ten list:
1. Wolf: The Lives of Jack London – James L. Haley (biography)
2. Hitch 22: A Memoir – Christopher Hitchens (memoir)
3. Tiny Terror – William Todd Schultz (psychobiography of Truman Capote)
4. Chinaberry Sidewalks – Rodney Crowell (memoir)
5. We Were Not Orphans – Sherry Matthews (memoirs from a Texas home for neglected children)
6. Lincoln’s Men – William C. Davis (Civil War history)
7. The Siege of Washington – John and Charles Lockwood (Civil War history)
8. How Literature Works – John Sutherland (Instructional Text)
9. The Long Goodbye – Meghan O’Rourke (memoir)
10. A Widow’s Story – Joyce Carol Oates (memoir)
The year is not yet half over, so it will be interesting to see how many of the books on the list are still there at the end of December. I would guess about one-third of the titles will survive – at most.
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At least according to author Jo Nesbo, Norway has had no experience with the modern day serial killer. But since the star of his seven-book crime fiction series, Detective Harry Hole, is a U.S. trained expert on serial killers, when one does turn up in The Snowman, the ensuing investigation is in good hands. The Snowman is the Norwegian author’s U.S. debut, and its release in this country seems well timed to take advantage of the current huge popularity of Nordic crime fiction here.
On the morning of the first snow of winter, a young boy awakes to find himself alone in the house. His father is away on business, and the only sign of his mother is her favorite winter scarf – which someone has wrapped around the neck of the mysterious snowman that appeared in front of the house during the night. Detective Harry Hole, lead investigator, has a feeling that this will be no ordinary missing person investigation. Only weeks before, Harry received a strange letter, almost a challenge, that was signed “The Snowman.” Now he wonders if the letter and this missing woman are connected.
As Harry and his small investigative team search for clues into the young mother’s disappearance, they uncover past cases in which the only witness seems to have been the large snowman left behind at the scene. The oldest case goes back to 1980 but, up to now, no one has connected the cases via the icy calling card left behind by the killer in each instance. Harry, though, is certain they are connected based on what they have in common: each victim was the mother of young children, each crime coincided with the first snow of winter, and a large snowman was present at each crime scene.
As the bodies pile up, Harry begins to feel that it is all getting too personal, that the killer now known as The Snowman is playing with him and manipulating the investigation. In what turns out to be a desperate race to save those closest to him, Harry is led around the country and taunted by the killer’s false clues and finger-pointing right until the moment that it all finally makes sense to him- exactly as the Snowman planned it.
The plot of The Snowman will prove to be more than a bit farfetched for some readers, but the book’s well developed characters, even to the minor ones, make up for some of the stretch required by the plot. But Harry Hole, even as well developed a character as he is, is still predictable in the sense that he has so much in common with other popular fictional detectives from around the world. Harry is an alcoholic detective struggling to stay sober (not entirely successfully), a loner both in his personal life and on the job, a roots music lover who makes frequent reference to the song he is listening to at the moment, a man who has perhaps let the love of his life slip through his fingers forever. That description probably sounds familiar – but Nesbo pulls it off as well as anyone. The Snowman is, in fact, as intricately plotted as any crime novel I have experienced in recent months. I am, however, looking forward to the American release of earlier, and likely to be more realistic (that is, less spectacular), Harry Hole novels.
Rated at: 3.5
(Review Copy provided by Publisher)
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Christopher Hitchens has written another poignant article (for Vanity Fair magazine) in which Hitchens updates his fans and admirers on his physical and mental condition after having enduring cancer treatments for the past several months.
Now that the cancer has taken direct aim at his vocal chords, Hitchens sees “writer’s voice” much differently than before:
Deprivation of the ability to speak is more like an attack of impotence, or the amputation of part of the personality. To a great degree, in public and private, I “was” my voice. All the rituals and etiquette of conversation, from clearing the throat in preparation for the telling of an extremely long and taxing joke to (in younger days) trying to make my proposals more persuasive as I sank the tone by a strategic octave of shame, were innate and essential to me. I have never been able to sing, but I could once recite poetry and quote prose and was sometimes even asked to do so.
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My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends. I can’t eat or drink for pleasure anymore, so when they offer to come it’s only for the blessed chance to talk. Some of these comrades can easily fill a hall with paying customers avid to hear them: they are talkers with whom it’s a privilege just to keep up. Now at least I can do the listening for free.
Please click over to the article at the Vanity Fair website. Christopher Hitchens has definitely not lost his writer’s voice – as you will see from the way he expresses himself in this two-page piece. But for a man who has been such an effective debater for his entire life, one can imagine the devastating impact the imminent loss of his voice must be having on him. Hitchens uses exactly the right words (impotence and amputation) to describe the impact of something like this on a man like him, proving how powerful his writer’s voice still is.
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The best writers of crime fiction, those whose work is translated into a dozen or so languages every time out, have a way of reminding the reader of just how much we all have in common. These authors do not settle for writing a series of formulaic whodunits. They, instead, develop complex, imperfect characters whose personal side-stories are often as interesting as the mystery within which they are intertwined – and they use setting as if it were another main character. In recent years, so many Scandinavian and Icelandic crime thriller writers have found success in the U.S. that they have carved out their own little subgenre. Now, it is time to welcome Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen, author of The Keeper of Lost Things, to the club.
Chief Detective Carl Morck was one of Copenhagen’s finest policemen for a long, long time. That all changed on the day that Morck and his two partners were ambushed at the scene of a murder they had just begun to investigate. When the shooting finally stopped, one cop was dead, one was paralyzed, and Morck blamed himself for letting it happen. Now finally back on the job, Morck is so grumpy, cynical, and uncooperative that no one, including his direct superiors, really wants to work with him. So, spying the opportunity to get rid of Morck by promoting him to a dead end job while, at the same time, locking in a larger departmental budget for themselves, the higher-ups jump all over it.
Thus does newly created Department Q, a one-man, cold-case shop located deep in the department’s basement, become Carl Morck’s baby. Only after tiring of reading magazines and working Sudoku puzzles (and learning about the extra money allocated to the department on his behalf), does Morck demand that someone be hired to make coffee and organize the departmental files. He gets more than he bargains for in Hafez al-Assad, a political refugee from somewhere in the Middle East who seems to think that he has been hired as an investigator, not as a broom-pusher.
When, as much to humor Assad as anything else, Morck agrees that they should study a five-year-old file involving the disappearance of a prominent Danish politician, he is surprised that the case actually captures his interest. Merete Lynggaard was a beautiful woman with unlimited political upside when she disappeared from her holiday ferryboat but, despite her high profile, no trace of her was ever found and it has been assumed that she either fell or jumped to her death. The more Morck learns from the file, the less he is impressed by the original investigation into the woman’s disappearance. Might she still be alive after all this time?
The Keeper of Lost Things is a definite thriller, a real race against the clock in every sense, but its particular strength is in the unusual relationship it portrays between Danish detective Carl Morck and mysterious Middle Eastern refugee Hafez al-Assad. Morck is a burned-out cop and Assad is a man who was hired for his coffee-making and janitorial skills – but together they add up to something much greater than the sum of their parts. They become one of the most effective, and one of the most entertaining, crime fighting teams in modern crime fiction. This one is fun.
Rated at: 4.0
Review Copy provided by Publisher
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The famous Book Chase Random Number Selector has chosen our three Laura Lippman book winners:
1. DarcyO – wins I’d Know You Anywhere
2. Shirley – wins Life Sentences
3. Marjorie – wins I’d Know You Anywhere
Ladies, please email me at: samhouston23atgmaildotcom with your mailing details.
I will forward the information to the publisher as soon as I have all three addresses – and you will receive your books directly from those kind folks.
Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everyone who participated in the drawing.
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Last call for entries in my Laura Lippman book giveaway.
I’ll be announcing the three lucky winners tomorrow evening, but there is still time to throw your name into the hat.
Just go here: Laura Lippman Book Giveaway and follow the instructions.
Good luck.
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Happy Mother’s Day, ladies.
Here’s hoping that you are enjoying a nice, restful day wherever you might be – maybe even snaring a little extra reading time.
For some reason (probably because it is so close to Easter this year), this one really sneaked up on me – I recovered my senses just in the nick of time!
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Susan Jacoby would have more appropriately titled Never Say Die, her look at aging in America, if she had called it The Worst Years of Our Lives – for that is what she predicts the ninth and tenth decades of life will be for those “fortunate” enough to live very far into them. (I do want to note that she clarifies the purpose of her book with its subtitle: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age.) She sees few exceptions (and she attributes most of those to class and money) to the rule: those who reach old old age invariably enter a world impacted more by Alzheimer’s, poverty, family neglect, suicide and assisted suicide, and painful disease than by everything that came before.
To Jacoby, this is a given, and there is no room for debate. She believes that those who are blind to this truth have been brainwashed by unscrupulous marketers having some dubious product to sell, some magic pill, cream, liquid, book, or surgery that promises to stop aging in its tracks. As millions of baby boomers reach or approach their 65th birthdays, it is more and more difficult to avoid these hucksters. They are everywhere. We are, after all, easy-sells; we want desperately to believe that the suffering associated with the aging process will be defeated just in time for us to enjoy life well into our nineties, if not beyond.
As Jacoby points out, it is not that older people become obsessed by death. Rather, it is that death “becomes a more conscious presence” in their lives as the decades pass. Losing grandparents is somewhat expected and acceptable; losing parents, less so; and losing siblings, old high school friends, and office mates at a steady clip is what finally hits home – we, too, are going to die soon. At sixty-five it is still easy for many of us to believe that the “best years of our lives” are still ahead of us but at eighty-five only “a fool or someone who has led an extraordinarily unhappy life can imagine the best years are still to come.”
Never Say Die is a wake-up call, a warning that old age is best handled by preparing oneself for it long before it happens. Jacoby warns of the generational warfare that is likely to erupt when younger workers can no longer afford to finance the medical costs required to keep their elders alive. The difficult choices that have been avoided by politicians for decades will finally have to be made. Those who can afford to save enough to pay their own way in old age need to do just that. Those who cannot, face a much less clear future because it will be up to politicians to figure a way out of the impending mess.
It is impossible, of course, to avoid politics in any discussion of health care and caring for a rapidly aging population in the future. Jacoby, however, takes the approach of blaming almost everything bad on conservatives and giving liberals credit for almost everything good. It is only in the book’s last few pages that she effectively dares to criticize the liberal point-of-view at all. Jacoby’s criticism of conservatism often can be justified – but the tone of that criticism, as seen below, often lessens its credibility:
“Since we do not euthanize the old when they become too expensive (teabagger fantasies notwithstanding), society winds up paying in the end if government does not require young adults to contribute to the maintenance of a strong public safety net.” (Surely Jacoby understands the sexual connotation of the term “teabagger,” but she chooses to use it anyway.)
“While I considered John Paul Stevens the wisest member of the Supreme Court before his retirement at age ninety, I shudder to think about the possibility of Antonin Scalia serving on the Court until his late eighties.” (Agreeing with Jacoby’s political point-of-view earns one a free pass that disagreeing with her politics does not earn.)
“Many of these people are former full-time retirees who were victimized by conservative-backed federal policies that enabled companies to break their pension and health care promises to retired workers.” (This issue is not as black and white as Jacoby portrays it.)
“The rationally-challenged but cleverly opportunistic fringe was represented by the shameless hustler Sarah Palin, who – blogging away viciously after walking away from her job as governor of Alaska – transformed entirely voluntary consultations into “death panels” that would decide whether old people and children like her son with Down syndrome would continue to receive medical care.” (Here, in her choice of adjectives, Jacoby shows her own irrational hatred of Sarah Palin and the “fringe” she represents.)
Never Say Die has some important things to say about medicine, aging, long term care of the elderly, and the hucksters trying to make a fast buck from a generation’s wishful thinking. It is, despite the author’s failure to resist taking a few cheap shots at those who happen to disagree with her, a good addition to the conversation.
Rated at: 3.5
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StoryCorps, an independent nonprofit, offers all of us the chance to record stories from our lives (in conversation with friends and relatives) before it is too late. Since 2003, more than 30,000 such conversations have been collected and preserved by StoryCorps at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. StoryCorps provides the participants with a free CD copy of the recording for sharing with others, and some of the recordings are featured each week on NPR’s Morning Edition.
This newly completed video is presented just in time for Mother’s Day and to bring some well deserved recognition to this amazing project. Anyone interested in recording the life stories of their own loved ones should go here for more information about how to get that done.
No More Questions! from
StoryCorps on
Vimeo.
Kay Wang, a feisty grandmother, was pretty much dragged against her will into a StoryCorps booth by her son and granddaughter. Though reluctant to be there, Kay still had stories to tell — from disobeying her mother and fending off her many boyfriends while growing up in China to adventures as a store detective for Bloomingdale’s. Kay’s sassy personality and sense of humor comes shining through!
StoryCorps also offers a special Mother’s Day Book of its own:
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=boocha01-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=1594202613&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
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For such a young man, Gunnar Gunderson has already accomplished a lot. The 32-year-old has his University of Wisconsin physics classes to teach, and his lab research has him solidly near the lead in a race against some of the best physicists in the world to be the first to create a new form of matter known as Bose-Einstein condensates. And now that the university has given him tenure, things are sure to get even better for Gunnar.
Well, not necessarily. Now all he can think about is finding the woman of his dreams, the soul mate who will plug that final hole in his life – and Gunnar is allowing himself three days to get the job done. After all, what good would the scientific method be if it could not be used to find a wife quickly and efficiently?
Love at Absolute Zero is about a brilliant man naïve to the ways of the world. He might be an inspired scientific researcher but, when it comes to women, Gunnar hasn’t a clue, so he begins with “Observe and Hypothesize,” confident that he will be in the arms of his true love in just 72 more hours. Along the way, Gunnar will have adventures, both large and small, that he never anticipated when he began his search, and he will learn the difference between scientific and creative thinking. For Gunnar, it is all about the destination; for the reader, it is about the hilarious journey that gets him there.
It is impossible not to like Gunnar Gunderson. As he progresses from one disaster or near miss to the next, one views him with a mixture of compassion and laughter, but he is such a good-hearted young man that it is impossible not to root for him (even while, on occasion, wanting to shake some sense into his head). Christopher Meeks has created a memorable character, a man with a uniquely interesting take on life, and he makes Gunnar real by allowing the reader to see him through the eyes of a wide cast of secondary characters: his students, his speed-dating partners, his mother and sister, his research partners, and a passel of very confused Danes, among them.
Love at Absolute Zero is likely to appeal to a variety of readers. The romance at its heart is leavened by references to what I can only assume is real science, and by humor ranging from near slapstick to the kind of inside jokes scientists tell each other at the water cooler.
As Gunnar puts it so well, “people were just elements looking to be a compound.”
Rated at: 5.0
(Review Copy provided by Author)
It might seem a little ironic after giving Love at Absolute Zero such a positive review, but I do think that you will find this article of Chris’s to be very interesting (especially considering its title);
How to Go Bankrupt Thanks to Really Great Reviews
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I mentioned back on April 19 that her publisher has been kind enough to offer me three of Laura Lippman’s books as giveaway material here on Book Chase. This is in celebration of the trade paperback release of Lippman’s I’d Know You Anywhere.
Well, today’s the day. I am ready to take entries for two free copies of the new trade paperback and one copy of Life Sentences. All you have to do to enter is to leave a comment to this post expressing your desire to win one of the books and choosing a number between one and twenty (please take care not to duplicate previously chosen numbers). I will use my handy, dandy random number selector to choose three winners from the entrants. The first and third winners chosen will receive copies of I’d Know You Anywhere and Life Sentences will go to the second randomly selected winner.
I do suspect that many of you are already familiar with Laura Lippman and her well written psychological crime novels, but those of you who are not might want to take a look here to get a feel for what her work is like:
HarperCollins Laura Lippman website
Book Description of I’d Know You Anywhere
There was your photo, in a magazine. Of course, you are older now. Still, I’d know you anywhere.
Suburban wife and mother Eliza Benedict’s peaceful world falls off its axis when a letter arrives from Walter Bowman. In the summer of 1985, when Eliza was fifteen, she was kidnapped by this man and held hostage for almost six weeks. Now he’s on death row in Virginia for the rape and murder of his final victim, and Eliza wants nothing to do with him. Walter, however, is unpredictable when ignored—as Eliza knows only too well—and to shelter her children from the nightmare of her past, she’ll see him one last time.
But Walter is after something more than forgiveness: He wants Eliza to save his life . . . and he wants her to remember the truth about that long-ago summer and release the terrible secret she’s keeping buried inside.
Laura Lippman Biography
Browse Inside I’d Know You Anywhere
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Alternate history, that literary genre in which an historical event is tweaked, removed, or reversed, can be interesting. It is always great fun to play the “what if game” with the actual events of our shared past: “what if the South had won the Civil War,” “what if the Normandy invasion had failed,” or “what if John Kennedy had not been assassinated?” Much fascinating fiction has originated from those and similar questions. Jim Fergus plays a more subtle version of the game in One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd.” He wonders what might have happened if, in 1875, President Grant and Little Wolf, chief of the Cheyenne nation, had agreed to exchange one thousand white women for an equal number of Indian horses.
Grant is at first shocked and disgusted by Little Wolf’s proposition, but he has to admit that the idea makes sense. Since, in the Cheyenne culture, children belong to the tribes of their mothers, Little Wolf sees the “Brides for Indians” program as the best chance to assimilate his people peacefully into the white culture that seems destined to overwhelm his own. Grant, on his part, hopes that the women can influence their husbands into accepting, or at least tolerating, white ways and religions to the point that open warfare with the tribe can be avoided. Thus is born the secret “Brides for Indians” program, a program that will require Grant’s people to scour mental institutions, debtors’ prisons, and other jails and prisons in search of the one thousand women needed for Grant to meet his part of the bargain.
May Dodd, resident of a Chicago mental institution, is one of the first women recruited to go west to meet her new Indian husband. May has been institutionalized by her father for the unpardonable sin of bearing two children out of wedlock to a man beneath her social status. To her father’s way of thinking, no woman in her right mind could do such a thing – his daughter has to be insane. Rather than spend the rest of her life locked up, May, ever the adventurer, leaps at the chance to regain her freedom by becoming an Indian bride for the required two-year commitment.
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| Author Jim Fergus |
One Thousand White Women is told largely in the words of a series of journals May begins to record almost the moment she decides to make her break for a new life. Through these journals, we meet May’s colorful traveling companions and learn of their adventures and hardships as they begin their new lives as wives of men with whom they have so little in common. The women, although they will suffer the hardships of winter encampment, inter-tribal warfare, kidnappings, and one horrible night when their men succumb to the evils of alcohol, find that they are learning as much about what is good and proper in society as they are teaching. But is it all too late to save the Cheyenne from what the army has planned for them?
The audio version of One Thousand White Women is read by Laura Hicks who does a remarkable job with the various accents and languages she has to deal with: two of the characters are Irish, one is Swiss, one is from the Deep South, one is an ex-slave, and some are French. Hicks handles all of these accents well, in addition to voicing a believable version of the Cheyenne language. This one should appeal to a variety of readers, among them: alternate history fans, western fans, and those who enjoy feminist novels with especially strong female characters.
Rated at: 5.0
Well, it looks like Blogger figured out what caused its “routine maintenance” to go so badly yesterday – things appear to be up and functioning correctly again after the crash that lasted for the better part of the last two days. While things are working again (I’m a little gun shy about the whole Blogger experience after this and other similar incidents), I’ll update my Top Ten lists.
