Bodies in a Bookshop - R. T. Campbell

A little while ago, my friend Peggy reviewed another R. T. Campbell book, Unholy Dying.  She made it sound so good that I had to find a copy.  I did, and I added Bodies in a Bookshop to my order.  What reader can resist a mystery about a bookshop.

How can you not love a book that starts:  'I don't know what came over me.  It wasn't as if there were not enough books in the house to begin with.  There were books on the floor, books on all the tables, books on the beds  -  and in the beds if one wasn't careful.'  The narrator, Max Boyle, then goes out to find a book he wants to read  -  and ends up in several bookshops, with several bags of books.  Until he finds two bodies in a bookshop.  Even then, he's careful to package up the books he's found there and write his name on the package so whomever inherits the store will know to contact him about buying the books.

The mystery revolves around stolen books and prints of a certain degree of pornographic imagery.  At the same time, it's a humorous book.  'I had rarely heard a man say less at greater length.'  In addition to Max, there is his employer, Professor John Stubbs, a Scottish botanist, and Chief Inspector Reginald F. Bishop (The Bishop), of Scotland Yard.  All three collaborate to nab the killer.

I'm not one of those readers who tries to figure out who did it.  I'm happy to lazily wait for the killer to be revealed.  But I did figure this one out on page 148.  That didn't make the rest of the book uninteresting.

I liked the characters and I will go on to read Unholy Dying.

Fifty Days of Solitude - Doris Grumbach

I had heard of Doris Grumbach, but she wasn't really on my radar.  When a Kindle deal for Fifty Days of Solitude came up, I bought it.  I'm so glad I did.

This short book is Grumbach's observations and contemplations on solitude and loneliness.  Her partner, Sybil Pike, went off for several months to buy books for their bookstore in Sargentville, Maine.  Grumbach is determined to spend her fifty days alone, appreciating the silence.

I made so many notes while reading this that I can't put them all here.  She says that Edward Hopper, the painter, was a master at depicting loneliness.  I agree.  Even with no one else in the house, she finds there are so many distractions.  There's the distraction of paying her annual taxes, during which she wonders why it's called the Internal Revenue SERVICE.  Whom does it serve?  Certainly not the taxpayers.

She feels guilty because her friends think her solitude is a rejection of them.  No one wants to be alone, do they?  By herself, she can concentrate on seeing, listening.  She reads and listens to music and writes and thinks.  She realizes that sharing her experiences is exhausting.  She hates the concept of sharing feelings.

To isolate herself further, she doesn't read newspapers or watch the news.  In her self-imposed small world, the important things are the arrival of birds, the freezing of the cove.  What would the world be like if these were the things more important to people than war and violence and money?  She gets letters with the news of deaths of friends, though, and that shatters her solitude.  In particular, the death of Dr. Anna Perkins distressed her.  I wish I could find a doctor like her.

Grumbach wonders if contentment is more obtainable in places of physical beauty, like the coastal Maine village she lives in.  I think that's true.  

When she reads about Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, she goes to her bookstore to find out more about her.  Then she calls the library for an interlibrary loan of a biography of her.  She also sounds like an amazing woman.  Isolating herself doesn't mean diminishing her world in all ways.

The absence of another person intensifies cold.  'Silence seemed to lower the temperature of the room and to extend the size of it, death is the great cold, I thought, and turned on the radio.  Sound, I found, was somewhat warming, even the sound of a talkative host interrogating sleepless callers.'

Not everyone is fit to live in silence.  Small noises, a refrigerator running, the scraping of branches on a roof, a log falling in a fireplace, can be disturbing.  Velcro is noisy.

Silence made her value written and spoken words more. 

'In the silence I eagerly sought, I could hear myself think, and what I heard was, sadly, often not worth listening to.'

Until death, it is all life.

If you want to know more of her insights and thoughts, you'll have to read it yourself.  I don't think you'll be sorry.

Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd - Bradley / The City Baker's Guide to Country Living - Miller

I finished these two library books in the last few days.  I whipped through both of them, so you get a 'two-fer' today.

I've read all the Flavia de Luce books.  They're like a cross between Nancy Drew and the Addams family.  I like that sort of mix.

Flavia rides off on Gladys (her bicycle) to deliver a message to an old man who does wood carving.  Someone has damaged some of the carvings in the local church.  Flavia finds the man dead, hanging upside down from a contraption of some sort.  She, of course, investigates before calling the police.

I think the mystery in this one is a little thin.  I was a bit disappointed by the perpetrator and the solution.  But, on the way, there were some interesting characters and incidents.  The ending was abrupt and unexpected, though.

Danielle at A Work in Progress mentioned The City Baker's Guide to Country Living a while ago and just recently posted her review of it.  Danielle is a much better reviewer than I am.  I'm always in too much of a hurry to get on to the next book.

Olivia Rawlings is a baker who sets a prestigious private club in Boston on fire while serving Baked Alaska.  She was ready to leave anyway, to leave the club and her married, wealthy lover.  She goes to visit her friend Hannah in Vermont and ends up taking a job baking at the Sugar Maple Inn.

Livvy, as her friends call her, also plays the banjo.  She's invited to play with a group in town.  One of  the other musicians, a fiddler, is handsome and she falls in love with him.  His family treats her like a daughter.  But it all comes apart when his father dies.  It's the kind of small town where everyone has known each other for generations and where everyone knows everyone else's business, even though there are lots of secrets.

This was a light read, full of lots of baking and cooking.  It inspired me to bake a Lemon Drizzle Cake, which I've been intending to do for weeks.  Once it's baked, it has to be eaten, which is why I'm feeling a big porky at the moment.

It also ticked several of my boxes, as they say.  Olivia lived and worked in Boston, where I used to live and work, she has an Irish Wolfhound mix, and I've had the pleasure of sharing my life with three Irish Wolfhounds, and she uses Nancy Drew books to level the legs of a table, and I love Nancy Drew.  Although I'd never use them to level a table.

October Books

I only read a measly eight books in October.  I don't know what my problem was.  It seemed like I never had time to sit down, but don't ask me what I was doing because I can't remember.  I keep a journal, if you really want to know, but I don't think you want to waste your time.

The Man Without a Face  -  Armstrong

Vermilion Drift  -  Krueger

Northwest Angle  -  Krueger

Trickster's Point  -  Krueger

(I was trying reading straight through all the books by an author I like, but I don't think that's for me.  I like more variety.)

Death is a Word  -  Holt

Tenting To-night  -  Rinehart

Marking Time  -  Howard

Hungry Heart  -  Weiner

I hope you had a good reading month.  Here's to more time to read in November!

Marking Time - Elizabeth Jane Howard

This is the second of the five books in The Cazalet Chronicles.  I read the first one a little while ago.  I enjoyed that one so much that I started right in on volume two.  I feel more comfortable with the Cazalets now.  I was overwhelmed by meeting the three Cazalet sons and their wives and children and Villy's sister Jessica and her family.  I had trouble keeping everyone straight:  who was married to whom, which children belonged to which families.  There's a family tree at the beginning of each book and I made a copy to have at hand while I was reading.  I'm starting to know them better.

In Marking Time, several of the characters get their own chapters.  Clary has her own chapter, as do Louise and Polly.  Thinking back, the book is mostly about these girls growing up under difficult conditions, both personal and historical.  It's hard enough growing up under normal conditions.  Growing up with bombs falling around and shortages of all kinds must have been horrid.

Clary's father goes off to war and disappears.  She refuses to believe that he's dead, although the rest of the family believes that he must be.  She and Zoe, her stepmother, become closer.  Zoe has a baby and between that and her husband being MIA, she matures and becomes more compassionate.

Polly is faced with her mother, Sybil's illness.  She's outraged that her father and mother don't talk about it to her or to each other.

Louise is pursuing her acting career.  She meets an older artist who falls in love with her.

The book is full of the sorts of things that happen in all families.  People get older, people get sick, people fall in and out of love.  I'm still enjoying the series and plan to get on to the next one  -  as soon as I finish several library books that I have or have on hold.  You could do much worse than to befriend the Cazalets.

Katrina has just read this, too, so you might want to check her blog to see what she has to say about it.  I think she'll be posting her thoughts soon.

Hungry Heart - Jennifer Weiner

I don't know Jennifer Weiner, but she's one of my neighbors.  I used to see her writing at the coffee shop across the street from my house.  I haven't read any of her novels, for no reason other than that I almost never read contemporary fiction except for mysteries.  I did watch the movie In Her Shoes, which was from her book of the same name.  But now that I've read Hungry Heart, I feel like I know her intimately.

This is a collection of her essays  -  about everything.  And EVERYTHING about everything.  If you know anything about her, you know that she's a feminist, opinionated, and that she's struggled with her weight and body image all her life.  When I used to see her at the currently defunct coffee shop, I didn't think she was noticeably large.  Maybe that was after her gastric bypass surgery.  Yes, in detail.

It was strange to recognize so many places she writes about.  We took our pets to the same animal hospital.  I know the park on Front Street where her dog was attacked by another dog and I know the dog park her dog hated.  I know which hotel her family stayed in when she got married the second time and the bookstore she took her little girl to to buy a birthday present for a friend.  It was a little unreal and it makes me feel a little creepy that I know so much about her.

I admire people who can be so self-revealing.  I'm usually honest, but I'm reserved, and I reserve my deepest secrets because I've been burned by people I trusted with them.  She puts it all out there:  her two marriages, her ex-boyfriends, the father who abandoned his family and ended up dead of a heroin overdose, her miscarriage (again, in detail), childbirth, her beloved dogs  -  it's all there. 

Maybe oddly, I found it refreshing.  The only way we know about people, about our own selves, is to know what other people experience, how they live, how they feel.  But it's a weird feeling to know so much about someone you don't know but who you see every now and then.  I walk past her house several times a week.  The next time I see her, will she know that I know her now?

It's Chilly - Time for Chili!

I was chatting with my friend Katrina over the Internet yesterday and mentioned that I was making chili for dinner.  She suggested that I share the recipe with my blog followers, or at least with her.  So here's our favorite chili recipe.  I usually have all the ingredients in the pantry except the peppers.

                                                    Bean Chili with Peppers and Corn

1 large onion, chopped (1 cup)                            1 Tbsp. olive / vegetable oil
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped                            1 red or yellow bell pepper, cored, seeded & chopped
1 green bell pepper, cored, seeded & chopped    2 Tbsp. chili powder
1 Tsp. ground cumin                                            2 C. frozen corn kernels
1 can of diced tomatoes (14.5 oz. can)                1 C. water
12 oz. spicy vegetable juice (I use Spicy Hot V8)
1 15-oz. can black beans, drained & rinsed         1 15-oz. can kidney beans, drained & rinsed
1 15-oz. can pinto beans, drained & rinsed          2 Tsp. white vinegar
Salt & pepper to taste

Saute onion in oil in large pot for 3 minutes.  Add garlic and saute 1 minute.  Add peppers, saute for 5 minutes.  Add chili powder & cumin and saute 1 minute.  Stir in corn, tomatoes, water, juice, and beans.  Simmer for 30 minutes (it gets better the longer you simmer it).  Add vinegar, salt, and pepper before serving.