An Embarrassment of Riches

What We're Reading Now

Wife murdered,
Complex spiderweb plot;
Husband speaks not.

Helen is reading Old City Hall, by Robert Rotenberg. Helen is a library assistant at the Central Library.

Double Pleasure - by Helen I seem to be at a crossroads in my life now and two books that I read recently have sparked me to do some deep examining. The first is a mystery by James Sallis called Salt River. His main character, John Turner is an ex-policeman, ex-con, war veteran and former therapist who wonders, "how much a man can lose and how much music he can make with what he has left."   

One of the characters talking about the troubles of a young man says that the boy had a hard life, "Not making apologies, and I know he brought a lot of it on himself. But there wasn't much that was easy for him, such that you had to wonder what kept him going." Turner then muses, "I had been wondering that, ever since I could remember, about all of us."

One thing that keeps me going is the pleasure I find in good writing, like this sentence spoken by Doc Oldham in Salt River, "Got more wrong with me than a hospital full of leftovers. Asthma, diabetes, heart trouble. Enough metal in me to sink a good-size fishing boat."

Part of the great pleasure of the second book, The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry, was listening to Wanda McCaddon read it on CD as I read it.  I sometimes read ahead of the recording; sometimes listened to fresh parts that I hadn't read, told in the narrator's rich Irish accent. What a nice way to enhance the reading!

The story reveals two very different versions of an Irish girl's life. Roseanne McNulty, once the most beautiful girl in all of Sligo, is incarcerated in the Roscommon Mental hospital. Now 100-years old, she is writing her life story and hides it beneath the floorboards in her bedroom. Meanwhile the hospital is preparing to close and her caregiver, Dr. Grene is evaluating the patients to decide which ones can be returned to society.  He begins to visit Roseanne and to listen to her story. He also discovers a document written by a local priest whose story of Roseanne is very different from her own tale. As they come to know each other, they uncover long buried secrets about themselves.

Roseanne says, "My father's curious happiness was most clearly evident in the retelling of this story. It was as if such an event were a reward to him for being alive, a little gift of narrative that pleased him so much it conferred on himself, in dreams and waking, a sense of privilege, as if such little scraps of stories and events composed for him a ragged gospel." 

I think that this is also true of Roseanne and the telling of her own story and how she coped with the events of her life. Along with her story, we are given glimpses of life in a small community in Ireland from the early part of the 20th century to the present time.

Roseanne and Dr. Grene come to respect each other. He says, "There has never been a person in an old people's home that hasn't looked around dubiously at the other inhabitants. They are the old ones, they are the club that no one wants to join. But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body."
   
Dr. Grene is also grieving the recent death of his wife."Too much thinking on death. Yet it is the music of our time. As the millennium passed fools like myself thought we were about to taste a century of peace." Roseanne observes him with compassionate eyes, "he was looking into that strange place, the middle distance, the most mysterious, human, and rich of all distances. And from his eyes came slowly tears, immaculate human tears, before the world touches them."

How can you go wrong with such lovely language!

What We're Reading Now

Karen is reading Fatal Remedies by Donna Leon, one of an incredible series of mysteries set in Venice, Italy.

Karen is a librarian at the Central library.

What We're Reading Now

Ross is reading The Road to Ruin by Donald Westlake. It's about hangdog, blue-collar, schlepper criminals, and he avoids reading it in public for fear of breaking out in maniacal laughter.

Ross works at the Central library. 

What We're Reading Now

One day, a normal day, three friends went into the woods to play...

...and only one came out.

Mary is reading In the Woods, by Tana French.

Mary is a librarian at both the Hollywood and Central libraries.

All In the Family - by Tama

I’ve been in a bit of a book funk lately. Just can’t seem to find a really good one--you know, the kind that makes you excited to get back to it when you’ve had to put it down. The kind where all you want to do it sit and read for a few gloriously uninterrupted hours. The kind that you’re bummed to finish because there’s no way the next one will live up to it and only disappointment lies ahead. I want a book like that.

I can’t recall how the Spellmans came into my life--probably a review in some library journal. It doesn’t matter because they’ve saved me. In The Spellman Files, by Lisa Lutz, we meet Izzy Spellman, age 28. Izzy has a much younger sister, Rae, and a chronically perfect, type-A older brother, David. The kids have been brought up in the family business of private investigation, to either their benefit or detriment, depending on the kid. David is an overachiever who ran far and fast from the family business as soon as he could to become a high-powered attorney. Rae, age 14, is chronically addicted to recreational surveillance and sugary food items. Izzy, the middle child, has attended multiple colleges and universities without completing a degree, can’t seem to hold down a “normal” job, has a past littered with romantic mistakes and slightly excessive drinking, and prefers to enter and exit the family home via windows rather than doors. Mom and Dad just try to maintain some sense of sanity and keep the business afloat as they squeeze in the occasional “disappearance” of their own, family code for a weekend away by themselves.
 
Curse of the Spellmans has been nominated both for an Edgar Award and a Macavity Award, and those of you who read mysteries know what a big deal that is. And honestly, I liked the other two in the series better, so that tells you how good they really are.

One reviewer called the series “Harriet the Spy for grownups” another says “part Columbo, part nightmarish Nancy Drew.” Whatever. It’s always a starred review no matter who's doing the reviewing, which in the book biz means you need to pay attention because people are gonna be asking for it. And for good reason.

There’s talk that a Spellman movie is in the works but we all know that the books are always better.

www.lisalutz.com
 

Good Goth! - by Ruth

I love a good gothic novel, but new ones have been scarce since the genre went out of fashion a couple of decades ago.  What's a girl to do when she's read all of Daphne Du Maurier, Mary Stewart and Barbara Michaels?  So I was incredibly pleased to find a brand spanking new AND excellent book that matched my idea of a gothic: The Séance by John Harwood.  It all begins with the death of a young girl, the mother's overwhelming grief and the elder, surviving daughter's need to alleviate that grief.  But, of course, there's a back story and, of course, it involves a sinister man, a decrepit mansion, a romance, a woman (possibly) in peril, and a supernatural element.  It's convoluted and told from multiple points of view and just oh so delicious!