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There are a few hours left in February, but while I may finish the current book before bedtime, I'm going to want a little time to think about it, so it will go in March. If anyone is tracking 50-book challenge, this month makes 12 so far for 2009. I think I've avoided spoilers, but that can be pretty subjective, especially for mystery novels.
Sarah Caudwell, The Siren Sang of Murder. The tone here is odd. It has the shape of a mystery, and a plausible one, but a number of the characters don't seem to be taking themselves seriously. Not "aren't taking the mystery seriously," since it's reasonable for some of them not to, but we have here aspiring lawyers who are writing an aggressively bad romance (Caudwell supplies snippets) and seem completely unconcerned with the possible libel in how closely they model the villain on a real person, and barely change his name, or that of the heroine. I was talking to Adrian about it, before I'd finished it, and she said the reader needs to be in the right mood, and compared the trainee barristers to Bertie Wooster. I was amused (and this is a matter of being in the right mood) by the characters who were complaining that it just Wasn't Done to have a clue as blatant as a monogrammed pen in any respectable mystery written since the Second World War. Caudwell has written several other books with Hilary Tamar as the detective, I gather, and I may seek more at some point.
Looking at the above, and what I said about two other mystery novels when writing up my January books, I suspect that I am either looking for another mystery series to dive into and not finding it, or being pickier than usual for me about the genre.
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, The Laughing Policeman. This starts with grumpy police dealing with an anti-war demonstration, and almost immediately moves to lethargic police finding, to their dismay, a city bus containing several dead bodies. They are dismayed less by the corpses than by the likelihood that they will have to do something about the crime. More competent detectives start on the slow work of looking into the regular habits of everyone on the bus, in the hope of finding motives or witnesses. A good police procedural, set in Stockholm in the late 1960s, and the time is reflected in attitudes about sex and relationships.
Lloyd Alexander, Westmark. Read at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mrissa's suggestion, a fast read and a good one. Mris is planning a book discussion in her journal soon. A genuine corrupt minister (practically a vizier or Mayor of the Palace), a virtuous doctor who mostly prescribes rest and the avoidance of "treatments" like bleeding, and a grieving king and queen. It's YA, and centers on Theo, an orphan and ex-printer's devil, wandering through the land after his employer is killed and their press destroyed. I liked Dr. Absalom, the many-named con artist Theo falls into company with, and Mickle, who Theo and Dr. Absalom meet a bit later. There's some good scenery, too. Theo spends a lot of time feeling bad, not so much about what he's done, as about wanting to do it or being good at it: having attacked a soldier who was attacking the printer he was apprenticed to, and later, when Dr. Absalom adopts a scam of his and it works well. Dr. Absalom, left to himself, is an indifferent scammer, not half as good at judging people as he believes. (As a side note, I was delighted, on picking up the book, to find on the list of "books by," after the Chronicles of Prydain and Time Cat and numerous other novels, the heading "Translations," starting with Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea.)
Marjorie Allingham, Traitor's Purse. I grabbed this from a freebie table, and enjoyed it. It's both clearer and faster-paced than the Allingham I was grumbling about last month; for most of the story, Campion is suffering severe but gradually clearing amnesia after a concussion. I have no idea if concussions and amnesia ever work that way, but it seems consistent within the story. One interesting aspect is that, in between trying to figure out what the top-secret thing he's investigating is (because the only other person who he knows had the details is out of reach) without admitting to the amnesia, he's reacting to a number of things on emotional memory, and stating his affection for his fiancee rather more than he had in the past, to her surprise and confusion.
Ken Dryden, The Game. This was another book Mrissa was enthusiastic about, so much so that I gather I'm not the only non-hockey-fan who read it based on her praise. I enjoyed it, but am not sure I'd recommend it to people who aren't sports fans, though Dryden does make most of it clear to people who aren't hockey fans. He's not trying to teach the game, but neither is he doing the sort of play-by-play description where an understanding of the rules and details is key. I didn't have to know much about hockey to understand that his teammates had cut him slack on certain things because goalies were expected to be a bit weird, or to comprehend the difference between a child in a kids' hockey league, playing twice a week, spending six or eight hours a week at it, mostly on travel time and getting changed, with about 20 minutes of ice time, and a kid the same age playing pickup hockey in someone's back yard in Scarborough, or a frozen pond somewhere, and much more time actually playing hockey. Dryden's analysis is that the organized game had driven out the casual one, and that this is probably irreversible. This book was mostly written in the early 1980s, shortly after the author retired from playing, with one chapter of update written twenty years later, in which he talks about changes in the interim, and what he'd gotten wrong, and why. He hadn't expected money to keep flowing into hockey, and his predictions for the future of Canadian hockey, written around 1982, made the same assumption as many books on other subjects written at the same time: he expected the Soviet Union to continue.
This isn't just a sports-focused book, it's a very Canadian book. Dryden explains aspects of being with the Canadiens that won't be obvious to people from English Canada, like the style of swearwords, but if something will make sense to the typical Ontario reader, it doesn't get glossed. (Though it may not have occurred to him or his editor that "cottage thriller" might be opaque: it took me a moment to make the connection to cottage country and realize that this is what people around here call a beach book.) The hockey Dryden grew up with was a thoroughly Canadian game. Yes, there were teams in the US, but the players were almost all Canadian, as was the culture. That was just beginning to change when Dryden was writing; it was very different by the time he sat down to look at it again for the 2003 edition, so some of the stuff about how Canada could compete with the USSR at hockey is less relevant. Dryden has also thought about the difference, in sports and elsewhere in life, between image and reputation. Image is one of the things professional athletes are selling, and as he notes, "want to be known as an antique collector? Collect an antique. A theatre-goer? Go. Once is enough." And then the athlete mentions it to a journalist or two, and it gets into the standard narrative, because the sports journalist wants a hook. Reputation, good or bad, takes longer.
If this is the kind of thing you like, you don't need me to tell you about it, because it was highly praised as a good sports book; if not, you might enjoy it anyhow.
Hazel Holt, Mrs. Mallory: Detective in Residence. A "cozy" mystery, with good scenery, but I felt cheated: too much of people being handed solutions, rather than actually solving things. (That's two by Holt, and I think I'll stop here. Also, I read about 30 pages of a random H.R.F. Keating mystery from the NESFA clubhouse cull and gave up.]
James White, Code Blue: Emergency. This is a Sector General novel, part of a loosely connected series (of which I've now read about three) set at a multi-species hospital in deep space. Cha Thrat is a "warrior-surgeon" of a species that was only recently contacted by the interspecies federation that (among many other things) runs Sector General. She winds up as a trainee there after saving the life of one of the first humans visiting her planet. She turns out to be intelligent, adaptable, and hopelessly insubordinate, all of which get her into a series of odd and interesting adventures. Fun. (I've had this sitting around for long enough that I don't remember where/why I picked it up, only that it's in a two-novel collection, and that the publisher annoyingly put an introduction, with spoilers, before the novels. So I put it down, and it's now been long enough that I've forgotten what was in the spoilers. The omnibus, General Practice, also contains The Genocidal Healer and the aforementioned Clute introduction. It's thus a fairly massive trade paperback, and not something I'm likely to carry around on the subway, but I was feeling utterly exhausted last night, and wanted something relatively straightforward to read. This filled the bill, while still being interesting enough that I happily picked it up this morning where I'd left off.
[12 so far for 2009]
Sarah Caudwell, The Siren Sang of Murder. The tone here is odd. It has the shape of a mystery, and a plausible one, but a number of the characters don't seem to be taking themselves seriously. Not "aren't taking the mystery seriously," since it's reasonable for some of them not to, but we have here aspiring lawyers who are writing an aggressively bad romance (Caudwell supplies snippets) and seem completely unconcerned with the possible libel in how closely they model the villain on a real person, and barely change his name, or that of the heroine. I was talking to Adrian about it, before I'd finished it, and she said the reader needs to be in the right mood, and compared the trainee barristers to Bertie Wooster. I was amused (and this is a matter of being in the right mood) by the characters who were complaining that it just Wasn't Done to have a clue as blatant as a monogrammed pen in any respectable mystery written since the Second World War. Caudwell has written several other books with Hilary Tamar as the detective, I gather, and I may seek more at some point.
Looking at the above, and what I said about two other mystery novels when writing up my January books, I suspect that I am either looking for another mystery series to dive into and not finding it, or being pickier than usual for me about the genre.
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, The Laughing Policeman. This starts with grumpy police dealing with an anti-war demonstration, and almost immediately moves to lethargic police finding, to their dismay, a city bus containing several dead bodies. They are dismayed less by the corpses than by the likelihood that they will have to do something about the crime. More competent detectives start on the slow work of looking into the regular habits of everyone on the bus, in the hope of finding motives or witnesses. A good police procedural, set in Stockholm in the late 1960s, and the time is reflected in attitudes about sex and relationships.
Lloyd Alexander, Westmark. Read at
mrissa's suggestion, a fast read and a good one. Mris is planning a book discussion in her journal soon. A genuine corrupt minister (practically a vizier or Mayor of the Palace), a virtuous doctor who mostly prescribes rest and the avoidance of "treatments" like bleeding, and a grieving king and queen. It's YA, and centers on Theo, an orphan and ex-printer's devil, wandering through the land after his employer is killed and their press destroyed. I liked Dr. Absalom, the many-named con artist Theo falls into company with, and Mickle, who Theo and Dr. Absalom meet a bit later. There's some good scenery, too. Theo spends a lot of time feeling bad, not so much about what he's done, as about wanting to do it or being good at it: having attacked a soldier who was attacking the printer he was apprenticed to, and later, when Dr. Absalom adopts a scam of his and it works well. Dr. Absalom, left to himself, is an indifferent scammer, not half as good at judging people as he believes. (As a side note, I was delighted, on picking up the book, to find on the list of "books by," after the Chronicles of Prydain and Time Cat and numerous other novels, the heading "Translations," starting with Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea.) Marjorie Allingham, Traitor's Purse. I grabbed this from a freebie table, and enjoyed it. It's both clearer and faster-paced than the Allingham I was grumbling about last month; for most of the story, Campion is suffering severe but gradually clearing amnesia after a concussion. I have no idea if concussions and amnesia ever work that way, but it seems consistent within the story. One interesting aspect is that, in between trying to figure out what the top-secret thing he's investigating is (because the only other person who he knows had the details is out of reach) without admitting to the amnesia, he's reacting to a number of things on emotional memory, and stating his affection for his fiancee rather more than he had in the past, to her surprise and confusion.
Ken Dryden, The Game. This was another book Mrissa was enthusiastic about, so much so that I gather I'm not the only non-hockey-fan who read it based on her praise. I enjoyed it, but am not sure I'd recommend it to people who aren't sports fans, though Dryden does make most of it clear to people who aren't hockey fans. He's not trying to teach the game, but neither is he doing the sort of play-by-play description where an understanding of the rules and details is key. I didn't have to know much about hockey to understand that his teammates had cut him slack on certain things because goalies were expected to be a bit weird, or to comprehend the difference between a child in a kids' hockey league, playing twice a week, spending six or eight hours a week at it, mostly on travel time and getting changed, with about 20 minutes of ice time, and a kid the same age playing pickup hockey in someone's back yard in Scarborough, or a frozen pond somewhere, and much more time actually playing hockey. Dryden's analysis is that the organized game had driven out the casual one, and that this is probably irreversible. This book was mostly written in the early 1980s, shortly after the author retired from playing, with one chapter of update written twenty years later, in which he talks about changes in the interim, and what he'd gotten wrong, and why. He hadn't expected money to keep flowing into hockey, and his predictions for the future of Canadian hockey, written around 1982, made the same assumption as many books on other subjects written at the same time: he expected the Soviet Union to continue.
This isn't just a sports-focused book, it's a very Canadian book. Dryden explains aspects of being with the Canadiens that won't be obvious to people from English Canada, like the style of swearwords, but if something will make sense to the typical Ontario reader, it doesn't get glossed. (Though it may not have occurred to him or his editor that "cottage thriller" might be opaque: it took me a moment to make the connection to cottage country and realize that this is what people around here call a beach book.) The hockey Dryden grew up with was a thoroughly Canadian game. Yes, there were teams in the US, but the players were almost all Canadian, as was the culture. That was just beginning to change when Dryden was writing; it was very different by the time he sat down to look at it again for the 2003 edition, so some of the stuff about how Canada could compete with the USSR at hockey is less relevant. Dryden has also thought about the difference, in sports and elsewhere in life, between image and reputation. Image is one of the things professional athletes are selling, and as he notes, "want to be known as an antique collector? Collect an antique. A theatre-goer? Go. Once is enough." And then the athlete mentions it to a journalist or two, and it gets into the standard narrative, because the sports journalist wants a hook. Reputation, good or bad, takes longer.
If this is the kind of thing you like, you don't need me to tell you about it, because it was highly praised as a good sports book; if not, you might enjoy it anyhow.
Hazel Holt, Mrs. Mallory: Detective in Residence. A "cozy" mystery, with good scenery, but I felt cheated: too much of people being handed solutions, rather than actually solving things. (That's two by Holt, and I think I'll stop here. Also, I read about 30 pages of a random H.R.F. Keating mystery from the NESFA clubhouse cull and gave up.]
James White, Code Blue: Emergency. This is a Sector General novel, part of a loosely connected series (of which I've now read about three) set at a multi-species hospital in deep space. Cha Thrat is a "warrior-surgeon" of a species that was only recently contacted by the interspecies federation that (among many other things) runs Sector General. She winds up as a trainee there after saving the life of one of the first humans visiting her planet. She turns out to be intelligent, adaptable, and hopelessly insubordinate, all of which get her into a series of odd and interesting adventures. Fun. (I've had this sitting around for long enough that I don't remember where/why I picked it up, only that it's in a two-novel collection, and that the publisher annoyingly put an introduction, with spoilers, before the novels. So I put it down, and it's now been long enough that I've forgotten what was in the spoilers. The omnibus, General Practice, also contains The Genocidal Healer and the aforementioned Clute introduction. It's thus a fairly massive trade paperback, and not something I'm likely to carry around on the subway, but I was feeling utterly exhausted last night, and wanted something relatively straightforward to read. This filled the bill, while still being interesting enough that I happily picked it up this morning where I'd left off.
[12 so far for 2009]