George

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

How to describe this book? Magic for grown-ups? Harry Potter with an inferiority complex? Quentin Coldwater, a high school senior math whiz who’s obsessed with a fantasy land called Fillory, stumbles – or is he drawn? – into a magic college. Suddenly, he’s at home. Sort of. There, he makes friends and meets the woman who may be the love of his life. Oh, and he learns how to do magic. Quite nicely, too. Then, he graduates, and he and his friends are magicians with no purpose or goal, just ennui and disillusionment. Betrayals and bitterness soon follow, so when the chance to embark on an actual Quest – to Fillory! – arises, Quentin and friends leap at it. Magicians is occasionally very funny and frequently very horrifying. It’s always compelling. I had images of scenes from this running through my head for quite a few days after I finished it. Grossman is a very good writer.

The Bullpen Gospels by Dirk Hayhurst

You’ve probably never heard of Dirk Hayhurst. He’s pitched mostly in the minors, with a couple cups of coffee in the majors. He’s a bullpenner. He’s also written what might be the best baseball book I’ve read next to Ball Four. [Nothing's better than Ball Four. Thank you, Jim Bouton.] Gospels is the story of Hayhurst’s life in the minor leagues: the teammates, the travel, the travails. It’s hilarious. It’s heartbreaking. It’s baseball. I’d quote some excerpts here, but I really can’t…

The Tricking of Freya by Christina Sunley

This was one of our Iceland selections for the May Mystery Club reading and was really a wonderful surprise. Set in the Canadian town of Gimli [also known as New Iceland] and in Iceland itself, it’s the story of Freya Morris, her mother, and her unforgettable, magnetic, crazy Aunt Birdie. Freya, haunted by the the accident she feels she’s caused her mother to have and her aunt’s increasing unbalance and subsequent suicide [on Freya's birthday, no less], abandons the family for a solitary New York life. 15 years later, she’s called back to Gimli for her grandmother’s 100th birthday. While there, she overhears talk of a child her aunt had and gave up for adoption. Freya searches for the mysterious cousin. The book’s about family history, about Norse mythology, and about the wondrous beauty and history of Iceland. It’s lovely. Really. Read it.

Double Black by Wendy Clinch

So, True Confessions time:

I’ve been skiing once in my life. It was a lot of fun, and I discovered several important things.

1] A sweatshirt and blue jeans work perfectly well as ski attire, unless you have some weird insistence on staying dry.
2] If someone [say, your skiing partner], runs over your hand – with a ski – while trying to help you with your bindings, it hurts. A lot. And then it’s really hard to hold your ski poles.
3] You can actually make the chair lift shut down if you take a big enough gainer getting off.
4] Skiing: not so hard. Stopping: slightly more hard. But sitting down works.
5] If there’s a trivia contest at the place where you go afterwards to sit and drink and lie about how well you did, you can win a t-shirt. Which comes in handy if you’re soaking wet. See: 1].

All of which is to say that I’m probably not the target market for Double Black, Wendy Clinch’s terrifically entertaining new Ski Diva mystery. [Oh. Not a girl, too. Another good point.] But Black had me from the first sentence:
“When Stacey Curtis found the dead man on the bed, she knew it was time to get her own apartment.”
Stacey is a young [twenty-ish] ski bum who’s fled a bad relationship in Boston to ski, work, and live at Spruce Peak, a Vermont resort reminiscent of Killington. The body she finds is that of David Paxton, son of the resort’s owner. Before long, she’s met the local sheriff [from whom she ends up renting a room], much of the rest of Paxton’s family, and a young environmentalist/ski bum named Chip.

Complications, conversations, and winter chases ensue. While Stacie does very little actual detecting in the book [the resolving clues are very much in the "Hey, look what I found" style], the writing and characters are so good they carry the plot through. There are descriptions of various townspeople, local watering holes, and back roads that are clear, precise, and completely engaging, as is Stacey herself. There are descriptions of night skiing – not surprising since Clinch, a Vermonter, is founder of TheSkiDiva.com – that are so lovely they make me want to try it – you know, just as soon as my hand heals up.

Clinch is a wonderful writer [reminiscent of Julia Spencer- Fleming to my ear] and Double Black is completely enjoyable. Take it with you on your next trip up the hill; you never know when the chair lift will stop unexpectedly.

AGATHA CHRISTIE! or, Not Now, Please, I’m Reading – by George

March 4, 2010

Here’s why bookstores are wonderful and dangerous places: You can get an email about a book Tuesday afternoon, order the book Tuesday night, and pick it up Thursday morning while you’re at work. You can if you work at Bear Pond, anyway, and, even better, if the book’s so entirely enthralling you can’t stop looking at it ["Hey! Customer!" "What? Oh. Hi. Sorry."] you can try to pass it off as………research? Yeah, research. That’s it. Thank you, Jon Lovitz.  Really, though, if you’re a mystery fan at all and the book in question is Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, what else can you do?

Notebooks is the result of years of research by John Curran, a Christie scholar and – especially – fan. The introductory essays themselves are worth the price of admission: Curran became friends with Christie’s grandson when they met at a play in Toronto. Years later, he found Christie’s notebooks in a storage room of her daughter’s estate. He then, enraptured, sorted the notebook entries – there were 73 notebooks and Agatha apparently didn’t assign one to each novel, she just grabbed whatever was handy – and, even more impressive, translated her handwriting. [Notebooks also contains reproductions of actual notebook pages. They're indecipherable.]  You want to know how she worked out the concept for The ABC Murders? It’s here. Where she may have gotten the idea for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd? Notebooks has a letter from an Illustrious Personage suggesting just such a thing. Feel like reading a couple of previously unpublished Poirot short stories? Notebooks has ‘em. This book is a treasure trove; it’s a literary land mine of the very best sort; it’s an authorial pool of knowledge into which you may happily dive and never return. Just go read it already.

ROBERT B. PARKER, R.I.P. by George

I was a freshman at UVM, and as clueless as only a freshman could be. I’d walked down to the Gaynes on some invented errand just to get out of the dorm. There, in the spacious Books section [two racks, all paperback] I found a tatty copy of a book called The Godwulf Manuscript – yellow cover, glaring typeface, some guy named Spenser. I picked it up and read the first line: “The office of the university president looked like the front parlor of a successful Victorian whorehouse.” Well. Forty-five minutes later I’d spent $1.25 of the $2.00 in my pocket. Two hours later I was back at the dorm finishing the book, studies abandoned [and not for the last time either]. Parker was witty, quick, sharp. Spenser was like no one I’d met before in books – a tough guy who cooked, a wisecracker who was reflective, a [self-contained] cynic who kind of enjoyed other people. And who was this guy Chandler Parker kept mentioning? Could I find him at the library? Yes I could.

Parker changed my reading forever. His writing never palled. The 37th Spenser novel - The Professional - was as good as the first. Better, probably: the Chandleresque style had long ago become one all his own. There’s never been anyone funnier or able to set a scene in fewer words. The Hawk/Spenser dialogue? Priceless. He wrote violence better than anyone else, too: short and terse and unemotional. Parker [and Spenser] created the hard-boiled private eye renaissance. Robert Crais, Dennis Lehane, Lee Child – they’re not Chandleresque, they’re Parkeresque.

So when I heard Tuesday that he’d died – at 77, at his desk – I felt really quite thoroughly bereft. It’s not so much the loss of a fine writer, although that’s true, it’s the loss of someone I felt I knew through his books. It’s the knowledge  that Spenser and Hawk and Susan [and Pearl - I'm really going to miss that dog] won’t be living in Boston. It’s the thought that Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch won’t be wandering the old West. It’s the not knowing whether Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall will actually make a go of it. For me, it’s a combination of how I felt when I heard Ted Williams had died and when I read the last chapter of the final Harry Potter book. Robert B. Parker’s dead, and I’m really going to miss him.

Thanks, Mr. Parker.

The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny

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buynow

What to say about The Brutal Telling, the new Louise Penny mystery? Well, that it’s laugh-out-loud funny? That it’s ingeniously plotted? That there’s an actual Coded Message? That it concerns another mysterious death in Three Pines, the small Quebec village that “didn’t even have crime. Except murder?” That the characters are nearly Dickensian in their scope and depth and breadth?* That it may very nearly break your heart? That this is the best novel yet by my favorite mystery writer? Yes, let’s try that. All of them.

Louise Penny will be here to sign and talk about The Brutal Telling on Tuesday October 27, at 7:00pm. I’ll see you there.

*We just read Dickens’s Bleak House for the September Bear Pond Mystery Group. I’m pretty serious about the comparison.

American Wife by Curtins Sittenfeld

american_wifeAmerican Wife
by Curtis Sittenfeld

George’s Review:
The first thing to remember about American Wife, the superb and slightly unnerving new novel by Curtis Sittenfeld, is that it’s fiction. “Wife” is the story of Alice Blackwell, a sweet, pretty, fairly intelligent young woman from a fairly liberal lower middle class Wisconsin family who becomes [to her surprise and almost, it seems, against her will] wife of the President of the United States. Blackwell narrates the book from her perch – comfortable, of course, but unsleeping – in the White House bedroom, as her husband snores contentedly beside her. Are you angry yet?
So…confession time. I mostly don’t like political books. I especially don’t like political novels. I really especially don’t like political novels about thinly disguised [or not] actual historical figures. [Lincoln, by Vidal? Bleah.] I loved this book*.
Blackwell is an interesting narrator. It’s through her that we see Charlie [her husband]’s development – his drug and alcohol issues, his acceptance of religion, his nearly accidental electoral ascendence. We see the the amused but loving[?] near contempt in which his family – especially his gorgon of a mother – holds him; at one point, the mother informs Alice that Charlie has married above his station. And this: ‘Charlie’ is actually a pretty good guy – not all that bright, perhaps, but thoroughly well-intentioned. It’s a remarkable, chilling portrait.
Because Sittenfeld is such a skillful novelist – her earlier books, Prep and Man of My Dreams, are both excellent – we also see how Alice changes, largely without being told. Her speech patterns, her interactions, even her thoughts subtly alter as she moves from a private to public person. There’s a casual discussion of facelifts and Botox late in the book that has stayed with me in the month since I’ve read this. Alice is a remarkably unsympathetic sympathetic heroine [if 'heroine' is the word], but because the writing’s so good you’ll stay with her to the end. And if the ending is notably anticlimactic, that’s only fitting. This is fiction after all; as a friend of mine once said, it’s truer than truth. I can’t recommend this novel too highly. *Claire says that’s because American Wife isn’t a novel of politics but rather a character study. Claire liked this book a lot, too – we kind of debated over who would get to review it. Pat L- S gave it it’s third thumb’s up.