Reading Update

This post can double for my 'Books Read in September' post because it is, after all, September 30th today.  I'm currently about to finish a Carter Dickson book.  If I finish that today, I'll post about it, or not, separately.

I've been reading books I bought in Maine.  I read The Rubber Band by Rex Stout.  I love Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.  There's something comforting about knowing what to expect.  I expect Wolfe to be in the orchid rooms at certain times, I expect Archie to be a smart ass, I expect Wolfe to drink lots of beer and eat good food.  This book did not disappoint.

Then there was A Motor-Flight Through France by Edith Wharton.  The title misled me.  I thought she was going to be in an airplane.  But a 'motor-flight' turned out to be a trip, trips, really, through France in a 'motor':  a car.  I suppose that this was almost equally as adventurous at the time, cars being very new.  Wharton, it turns out, loved touring in an automobile.  Her husband was with her and so was Henry James at times.  Can you imagine those conversations?!  Wharton knew a lot about architecture, especially of the churches and cathedrals they hunted for.  She spends little time describing the people of the different regions they drove through and stayed in, though.  I would have liked more of that.  But she describes the buildings and landscapes in detail.

Then I read A Catherine Aird mystery called A Most Contagious Game.  I can't remember much about it now except that I enjoyed it.  Really, one day soon I'll be able to read a book, wait a week, and read it again, thinking it's a new book!

I also read McNally's Gamble by Lawrence Sanders.  I like Archie McNally and the trouble he gets into.  I found out something interesting when I read McNally's Chance a short while later.  Lawrence Sanders only wrote the first seven of the McNally series.  After he died in 1998, Vincent Lardo wrote another six of them.  The problem was / is that the books are published with Sanders' name in big letters, leading readers, myself included, to think that Sanders had written them.  Somewhere, I read that readers sued the publishers for deception of some sort and were reimbursed in some amount.  Before I read this, I was thinking that McNally's Chance lacked something.  Then I found out that it wasn't written by Sanders but by Lardo.

Several bloggers has posted good things about George Bellairs.  I agree with them after reading Death in High Provence.  I've been collecting his e-books, many of which are available at affordable prices.  I like the fact that Inspector Littlejohn took his wife with him when he went to investigate the auto crash deaths in France of the brother and sister-in-law of a friend of his.  There's a mysterious castle / estate that belongs to a man who has the village and everyone else nearby under his thumb.  He's clearly the bad guy, or is he?  Littlejohn finds out which.  I'm going to follow Inspector
Littlejohn through more of his investigations.

I found another Kate Shugak mystery in Maine.  They're usually exciting, the kind of book you can't put down.  This one was not up to par, in my opinion.  Enough said.  I'll still try to find and read the few in the series I haven't read.

AND, I just finished Glass Houses, Louise Penny's latest Inspector Gamache book.  This one is much grimmer than the others.  Gamache is now head of the Surete and it looks like he's botching it.  Crime is worse and the police don't seem to be able to do anything about it.  Are they completely inept?  The criminals are beginning to think so.  There's also a creepy robed, hooded, masked figure, a 'cobrador', that stands silently on the green, freaking people out.  Why is he there?  The thing I find most disturbing is that Three Pines is at the center of the story, which begins with Gamache on trial for several crimes.  It's a fascinating book with a spectacular ending.  I don't know how she keeps on doing it, but Louise Penny does not disappoint me.

That's it for now.  Books are my refuge, but sometime life gets in the way, bars the door to the other worlds I often prefer to inhabit.

A Great Reckoning - Louise Penny

I've read all of Louise Penny's books and she never disappoints.  

Armand Gamache is now the head of the Surete Academy (there should be some accents over 'Surete' but if my lap top has them, I don't know where they are), determined to reform the way police cadets are chosen and trained.  It's a difficult job because there's been so much corruption.  He fires many of the professors and replaces them with people he knows to have integrity.  But some of his choices are questioned because they are those very corrupt people.  Gamache has his reasons.

He is also personally checking the applications to the academy, accepting most of the previously reviewed acceptances and rejections.  But when he comes to Amelia Choquet's rejected application, he reverses the decision and admits her.  She seems unsuited for the position:  pierced, tattooed, a rude street girl, who reads ancient Greek and Latin, or so she says.  Why does he seem to have a special relationship with her?  He's questioned about admitting her, but he has his reasons.

An instructor at the academy is murdered.  Gamache, Amelia, and several others are suspected.  As the case is investigated, dark secrets are revealed.  Gamache asks that a high official in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police review the investigation as an outsider since the investigation is being conducted by Isabelle Lacoste, a former member of Gamache's homicide squad and now head of that squad. 

Meanwhile, in Three Pines (where we all want to live), an old map has been found in the walls of the bistro.  It's of Three Pines, which has never shown up on any map before.  Not even now.  Gamache asks four cadets to investigate the map and find out all they can about it.  A couple of the cadets think it's busy work, a waste of time for a police officer in training.  Gamache has his reasons.

It all comes together in the end, the stories, the people, the crimes and their solutions.

And we find ourselves back in the warm circle of friends in Three Pines.

Louise Penny has written a touching Acknowledgements at the end of the book, allowing us into her personal life.  My heart goes out to her.

P.S.  As I post this, I see that there is an update to her Acknowledgements.

The Nature of the Beast - Louise Penny

I love Louise Penny because she's introduced me to wonderful, odd people and to the mythical place called Three Pines.  I wish she'd write a mystery a month.  I don't even care if there's a mystery involved.  I just want to sit in the bistro drinking with Reine-Marie, Armand, Ruth (especially Ruth!), Rosa, Clara, Myrna, and the others, basking in the warmth of the fire and in their intelligent and sometimes silly conversation, eating delicious food.

Little Laurent Lepage cries wolf.  A lot.  His imagination runs away with him.  So when he races into the village, raving about a gun he found in the woods, a gun bigger than a house, and a monster riding on the gun, no one believes him.  However, when he's found dead, apparently from a bicycle accident, retired Chief Inspector Armand Gamache feels that something isn't right.  He suggests to his protege and successor, Chief Inspector Isabelle Lacoste, that they investigate further.  Yes, Laurent was murdered.

What they find in the woods is a huge missile launcher built in the 1990s.  Called Project Babylon and decorated with the Whore of Babylon, no one was sure it had been built, although some people had been searching for it and for its plans for years.  Pointed at the east coast of the US, rumor had it that the builder was planning to sell the launcher to Saddam Hussein, but the builder was murdered.  As word gets out, Canadian intelligence agents show up.  They clash with Lacoste's group and Lacoste's group clashes with some of the local police.  Tensions and subterfuges abound.

There's another murder.  Everyone is looking for the plans for the gun and Laurent's murder is overshadowed by the search.  The intelligence people from the government, an elderly scientist who'd been involved in the project, even some of the older villagers who lived there when the gun was built are suspected.  How could they not have known what was being built in the woods?  Not everyone is who they seem to be.  Someone is hiding something.

The Nature of the Beast is the eleventh in a string of engaging and satisfying mysteries involving Gamache and the residents of Three Pines.  I've now acquired them all and hope to start at the beginning and read through to the end.  This is how the books should be read.  If you read them out of order, as I did, you'll miss the reasons for the character development.  Things happen, people change.  But I'd love to live in Three Pines.

Some Books I've Read Recently

Instead of boring you with an end of the month synopsis of all the books I read during the month, I've decided to do short posts as I finish each book.  That's less trouble for both of us.  This will be the last multiple book post, unless I finish two books on the same day.  So, here we go!

The Spell of Holland  -  Burton E. Stevenson     My friend Katrina just got back from a trip to Holland to visit family.  I was there in 1988, but only in Amsterdam, so I decided I'd go along  -  but not with her  -  and about 100 years before she went.  Stevenson and his wife went to Holland in the early 1900s.  This book, published in 1911, is his record of the trip.  They didn't want to go on a 'tour' and were determined to stay at inns and hotels that catered to the Dutch, not the ones the English and American tourists stayed in.  The author is chatty and fun and opinionated but open-minded.  They go off the beaten path, once going to a place even the Dutch couldn't understand why he wanted to go to.  I could hardly put it down.  I feel a bit guilty talking about his book because it's from my collection of old narrative travel books and it's hard to find.  It even has a lovely fold-out map.  There seems to be a modern reprint, but it's almost $40.00.  Here's a photo of my book:

The Shape of a Year  -  Jean Hersey    This book sounded so good when it was reviewed by Belle earlier this year that I jumped on the Internet and bought a used copy (I don't think it's currently in print).  I like books about the quiet country lives of people.  Gladys Taber is one of my favorites in this genre.  The author goes through the year, month by month, describing her home, the things she and her husband do for fun (play duets on their recorders! fly kites! she hooks rugs while he reads out loud to her), their flower and vegetable gardens, the walks they take with friends, the birds that visit their feeder, their grandsons.  It's a calming book, but it also makes me miss the country home we sold to come live in the city.  There were a few things that I thought made it feel a bit dated (it was published in 1967, I believe), but it's always fun to remember how much life has changed in even that fairly short period of time.

Top Secret Twenty-One  -  Janet Evanovich    My oldest niece and I have an arrangement:  she buys me the latest Stephanie Plum mystery, gives it to me for my birthday or Christmas, I read it in a few days, and then I send it back to her.  Works for us.  We both like Stephanie and her goofy pals, so why not share?  If you read these books, you should know that I'm in the Ranger camp.  If you don't read these books, you won't know what I'm talking about.  I know Ranger isn't forever;  those guys don't settle down well and, well, would you really want him to?  He wouldn't be Ranger anymore.  These mysteries are silly.  This one involves a pack of Chihuahuas, a homeless man, a hugely fat naked man, several murders, exploding apartments and cars, and a very dangerous Russian.  I didn't think this one was as exciting as most of the others, except for the ending.  Maybe they're too formulaic.  At least Rex made it through again.  That hamster must be about 10 by now, the oldest hamster in history  -  but I want to keep living that fantasy.

The Long Way Home  -  Louise Penny    From one sort of mystery to another.  I turned my cousin Anne onto the Inspector Gamache mysteries and she repaid me by sending this one, the latest, to me for my birthday.  They are consistently the most intelligent, well-written mysteries.  I love all the characters, especially Ruth, the cranky old poet, and her duck Rosa.  Gamache and Reine-Marie have retired to the village of Three Pines.  Clara Morrow has a problem:  she kicked her husband out to give them a year's separation to see how they feel about each other, the year's up, and Peter hasn't returned.  She doesn't want to bother Gamache, who's trying to recover from physical and emotional wounds sustained on his job.  But she finally asks him to help find Peter.  Myrna, Ruth, Reine-Maire, and Jean-Guy all volunteer.  It makes for one crazy road trip.  I'm not going to say more.  These are great books.  I highly recommend reading them in order.  The characters have such depth and they change over the course of the books.  Oh, how I want to live in Three Pines!

The last three are library books, so no photos of the ragged copies I borrowed.

Nine Lives to Die  -  Rita Mae Brown    I've read all of the Sneaky Pie Brown mysteries (I also read all The Cat Who ... mysteries) and I think this will be my last.  Maybe it's partly because I just finished the Louise Penny book, but the characters in this series seem flat to me and the situations contrived.  I like the cats and the Corgi, but maybe I've had enough of talking animals, even if they just talk to each other.  (My neighbor has Corgis and just got a puppy  -  he's the cutest little guy and so friendly.  The older ones can be a bit grouchy.)  Anyway, two men involved in a program to help boys are found murdered, both with their index and middle fingers cut off.  A coyote finds a very old skeleton buried in the woods and Harry's pets lead her to it.  Odd though, the skeleton keeps disappearing and reappearing.  Harry and her friend and neighbor Deputy Cooper have to solve both mysteries.

Game for Five  -  Marco Malvaldi    I don't remember which blogger mentioned this author, but I know one of you did.  I was hoping it would grab me like the Inspector Montalbano mysteries have, but it didn't.  Four old men hang out at a bar in a Northern Italian coastal town.  They play cards.  The bartender, the grandson of one of the geezers, gets involved in a murder when a drunk young man comes to the bar to use the phone to report finding a dead girl stuffed in a trash can.  The police think it's a prank because he's drunk, so the bartender goes to the trash can, sees the dead girl, and calls the police.  The police are bumblers and are on the wrong track.  The bartender watches and listens and  finds the clues that point to the murderer.  Thank goodness it was a short book!

The Architecture of Happiness  -  Alain de Botton    I know this will disappoint Belle (see above), but I had a hard time with this book.  I loved, loved, loved this author's book The Art of Travel, but I didn't love this one.  I finished it just an hour ago, so maybe I need to think about it more.  I felt that there were too many contradictions, that de Botton argued both sides, so it was confusing to me.  I get the point that the places that surround us, that we live or work in, or that we look at when we leave our homes, have a great effect on the way we feel.  Personally, I can't stand modern architecture or skyscrapers taller than or built after the Empire State Building's era.  Try as I might, like abstract painting, modern architecture makes me feel anxious and jittery.  I've only lived in one new house in my life.  The house I live in now was built in the early 1800s, and the one I moved from was over 300 years old.  Old houses comfort me, reminding me that people lived in this house before me, were born, were happy, suffered in many ways.  I guess I like living with ghosts.

It looks like my reading hasn't been that satisfying since the Louise Penny book.  She's hard to top.

Katrina, Peggy (I think), and I are planning to read Rebecca during the month of October.  We're not reading together in any sense except that we're all reading the same book and planning to finish it by the end of the month.  Then we'll discuss it.  If you'd like to read along, please join us!