Catching up - marching into spring

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. Song of Solomon

I've been traveling on business--last week took me to the following:
* Boston (high point was visiting the bar that inspired Cheers for a quick look and a quick chat with colleagues and low point was the Barking Crab--I really hated eating dinner on paper plates with plastic ware), with stops in Lexington (I didn't have time to swing by Concord and check out Orchard House as I had hoped), Framingham, and Norwood.
* Long Island (high point was watching my colleagues go off to see the Islanders play hockey while I got room service and prepared for the next day, low point was paying $12.95/day for wireless at a Marriott--it should be FREE!!!)
* Manhattan (high point was walking through Times Square to Rockefeller Center for dinner with a colleague who had not been to NYC before, low point was the mediocre dinner which was more for 2 than I paid for 7 for lunch the next day at a local Italian place in mid-town).
* Parsippany, NJ (high point was meeting in person someone I've worked with for years over the phone and internet, low point was lunch at a very, shiny chrome diner where I ordered a rueben and got a collosal open-faced monstrosity).
* Newark airport via Staten Island because when we tried to make a quick stop to check out the progress on One World Trade Center (it seems to be going up fast!) the cop directed me into a tunnel that spit me out in Brooklyn (high point was going across the Verrazano bridge, which I hadn't done before, low point was the little bird impaled on the barbed wire fence surrounding the Fed Ex center where we spent way too much time dropping off cases for overnight shipment to Florida).
* Tampa and points south: high point was the gorgeous weather--it had been nice in Boston and New York but it was absolutely perfect in Tampa (green, warm, not too humid, clear, lovely, ahhhh); low point was the Fed Ex shipment not arriving for a Friday morning meeting after all the hassle of shipping it from Newark the afternoon before...grrr).

And I finished two books! Even though I'm in the middle of Little Dorrit, I knew that this was not a good book to take on a hectic business trip, so I decided to catch up with Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne in Julia Spencer-Fleming's latest One Was a Soldier and then finally read Shopgirl, by Steve Martin, which has been sitting on my TBR shelf for awhile now.

I liked One Was a Soldier well enough while I was reading it, but then after I finished I realized that I was actually a bit disappointed with it. The mystery itself was satisfyingly interesting and I didn't figure out who-really-dunit-and-how, which is good, and I did smile at the end, which wrapped up the Clare/Russ story in a great way and then opened the door for another sequel. My issue is that Clare and Russ were never in danger in the way they were in the earlier books. Maybe the author decided to finally give them a break but the bad guy never really threatened them more than to just play pretty juvenile mind games with them, which doesn't get the heart racing the way it should.

In a previous review of this series, I confessed to being more interested in the Clare/Russ relationship than in the actual mystery, but now that I've read a book in which their relationship is front and center, I find I'm missing the excitement of the previous books. Just fickle, I guess. I ended up giving it 3 stars on Goodreads, but that doesn't mean I'll not be eager to read the next in the series, if and when it comes out.

Shopgirl was a different animal altogether. Overall, I found it somewhat oppressive, and just this morning realized that what I didn't like about it was the lack of dialogue. Steve Martin is a good writer--he is insightful, articulate, incisive, but not that great a storyteller, at least in this book, I haven't read any of his others.

His narrator is beyond omniscient. He delves so deeply into his characters' pysches that I feel like I cannot breathe, I'm in so deep. And yet, I don't really know them. Their voices aren't distinct or memorable or touching. They are more like mannequins or puppets play-acting a story rather than real people living it. This is ironic because the story is written in present tense, which should give the story an immediacy (ala Wolf Hall) but doesn't.

The whole time I read it, I felt like I was thinking in slow motion, which is a weird, oppressive feeling. Nevertheless, it's an interesting coming-of-age story. Not sure if I will watch the movie. It got wildly mixed reviews on IMDB, with reviewers either giving it >5 stars or just 1 star. You love it or you hate it, it sounds like.

In the interest of really catching up, just before my trip I read Flashback, by Nevada Barr, which is in her Anna Pigeon, park ranger, mystery series. I loved this book for a number of reasons. First, there's the setting. I really had never been aware of Dry Tortugas National Park, so I ended up Googling images of it whilst reading the book, and it's now on my top 10 list of place I really want to visit.

Set on a set of desert islands off Key West in Florida, the book provides two stories simultaneously. One is the mystery that modern-day Anna must solve as acting park supervisor, and the other is told via letters from an ancestor of Anna's, who was the wife of a Civil War officer in charge of the Union prison camp on the main island. The author did a great job of creating suspense and interest for two independent mysteries, and considering one was a historical fiction, I was pretty darned impressed with how well she managed this. I think this might be my favorite book so far in this wonderful mystery series.

Now, back to Little Dorrit...must speed-read it because we are leaving on vacation on Thursday, and again, it's not a good travel book. Who knows what I'll be reporting on when I get back from that trip...reading and otherwise!

Catching Up

The holidays, as you know, have a way of disrupting the flow, but if you don't take the time to celebrate them, you blink and they're gone. This is to explain my recent absence from blogging, Tweeting, FaceBooking, and GoodReading.

This fall/winter has been a season of catching up on old favorite series, and I'm happy to report that before I disappeared into the land of Holly/Jolly I did read the last book in the marvelous Julia Spencer-Fleming series chronicling the relationship of Clare Ferguson and Russ Van Alstyne and the murder mysteries that plague their little town of Millers Kill, NY.

I Shall Not Want takes place after the death of Russ's wife, and the first part of the book deals with the grief, guilt, and other various conflicting emotions that Clare and Russ experience. I finished the book a little over a week ago, and it took me a minute to recollect exactly what the murder mystery was all about (for the record, it is about illegal aliens, gangs, drug dealing, and rednecks), and that is par for the course because I have never read this series for the mystery plot but for the romance between the local Episcopalian priest (once and future Army helicopter pilot Clare) and local chief of police (Russ).

New on the scene this time was Hadley Knox, granddaughter of Clare's janitor and who had recently relocated from LA, escaping a thuggish husband and dead-end career, a rookie cop and refreshing addition to the closed environment of a small, remote town. I thought Hadley had some of the best lines in the book, and has lots of promise to figure largely in future installments of the series.

It will be interesting to see where Spencer-Fleming goes next with the series--despite Clare being shipped off to Iraq at the end of this book, the main tension in the series (i.e., how will Clare and Russ ever overcome the huge barriers between them and actually get together) is resolved. Even if Clare comes home to Millers Kill with a boatload of post-tramautic issues to resolve, the hook for me was always the angst between them.

Next book in the series, One Was A Soldier, is due out in April 2011. Here's the promo about it. I'm hopeful that it will prove as compelling as the series has been up to now.

I'm now currently reading Diana Gabaldon's The Echo in the Bone, the latest in her Outlander series. Feels good to get caught up and not feel so behind the times when it comes to favorite series.

Potpourri

How did a week go by without a post? Oh, yeah, it was Thanksgiving week here in the U.S.

What have I been doing? Well, for starters, we invited my parents up for the holiday. They live about 100 miles south of us--just 1.5 hours or so if the traffic is light. They are 86 and 88 and since our house is full of stairs, we all decided that a Courtyard Marriott would be sleeping quarters for them. Between picking them up Wednesday, cooking a wonderful dinner Wednesday night, shuttling them back and forth between our house and the Marriott for much needed naps while they were visiting, cooking a fabulous Thanksgiving feast on Thursday, teaching my mom how to make coffee in the hotel room, teaching my mom how to deal with those new-fangled plastic key cards, watching several episodes of Animal Planet, catching up on all the family doings, taking them back home on Friday, I'm just glad we have leftovers to last for awhile!

On the reading front, I have started and given up on Bronteby Glyn Hughes. It was better than The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte, but on the whole rather flat really little more than dramatizing well-worn tales from Bronte lore. I'm not quite sure what I expected but I found myself growing impatient and rolling my eyes, so I figured this book wasn't a good way to spend my precious reading time.

I've also been plowing my way through the Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne mystery series by Julia Spencer-Fleming. I reached book five, All Mortal Flesh yesterday and was shocked to find that the series had jumped the shark! ****SPOILERS**** skip to the next paragraph if you don't want to learn that Spencer-Fleming did a cardinal no-no in my opinion. She killed off Russ's wife, Linda. Maybe some day I will read the novel and find out why, but I was so ticked off that Spencer-Fleming betrayed my trust as a reader that I returned the book to the library and will Clare and Russ a rest for awhile. Maybe I was irked because book four, To Darkness and to Death, was so terrific--the whole novel took place in one day and it was really well-written and interesting in that the mystery wasn't figuring out which dastardly arch villain was orchestrating the mayhem but instead was a study in how ordinary people can find themselves going down very dark psychological alleys when pushed hard enough. I was thinking how marvelous Spencer-Fleming was developing as an author, and then she pulled that cheap trick in book five.

So, I started Paul Collins's The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World. So far so good. Collins is an excellent writer--I've learned three new words and I've only read the first 50 pages--and the subject matter is compelling. Learning tons about the publishing industry in the early 1600s in London right now, and anticipating learning even more about Shakespeare, his colleagues, life in London, and how the First Folio conquered the world. BTW, I did finish A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare and need to find time to do my last blog on it...Hamlet. This was definitely my favorite book of 2009.

I also just started Jenny Uglow's bio of George Eliot. I enjoyed her bio of Gaskell so much that I have decided to read about Eliot while reading her works.

I did read another Henry James story--The Romance of Certain Old Clothes--and was again disappointed in James and the story. Nothing particularly wonderful in the way it was written, and the subject matter has been done to death. Sisters who are jealous rivals, and one haunts the other. Grim, misogynistic, uninspired. I am going to have to read Daisy Miller so I can give James his due.

Finally, I did read the first installment of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. I am on the email list for the installments, following the same publication schedule as the serialization of the novel 150 years ago. This is a reread for me, but I read the original so fast for plot years ago that I don't remember a lot of it.




On the adaptation front, I am on episode 11 of the first season of The House of Elliot. Evie and Bea are friends again, Jack is courting Bea, and Lydia is desperate to get back into London society. So much has happened in the first 10 episodes that it almost seems like several seasons worth of plot. I wonder whether this season was actually cancelled or if the producers simply ran out of steam after running so hard so fast. I'm still loving it, thinking about bobbing my hair, and dressing exclusively in 1920's fashions, including the hats! V. chic.

Claire Ferguson and Russ Van Alstyne: my new obsession

A few weeks ago I was browsing the audio section of my library looking for something to listen to in the car since once again I am burned out on NPR and didn't yet have The List for musical diversion.

I remembered a mystery series that a fellow blogger had recommended (remind me who likes this series, because much as I've searched the blogs I frequent, I can't find out where I heard about it), and so got the first book in the Claire Ferguson/Russ Van Alstyne mysteries by Julia Spencer-Fleming, In the Bleak Midwinter (A Rev. Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne Mystery).

As a genre, I like mysteries from time to time, but do get burnt out on them as it's easy for them to get formulaic. The twist on this series is that Claire is an Anglican priest in a small town in upstate New York, and she is one tough, but attractive cookie, having been a helicopter pilot in the army during Desert Storm. She's single, driven, passionate, interesting, and compassionate. Russ is a good 15 years her senior, a VietNam vet turned chief of police. Married, driven, passionate, interesting, and compassionate. They hit it off. Sparks fly.

If I sound like I'm hooked, I am...but it took a little while to set the bait. First, the reader of the audio book was very irritating--I couldn't stand her Russ voice or her teen girl voice, and almost stopped listening because of that. Next, while I loved the premise of the story, I predicted almost each plot point at least a couple of pages before it was revealed, and I really hate feeling smug about being smarter than the author. Third, the characters had some verbal ticks that drove me up the wall (e.g., if Russ says "scuze my French" one more time after uttering the mildest of expletives, I think I may have to scream). Last, this book was published in 2003, when cell phones were not a novelty anymore but an appendage of everyone from kindergartners to grandmothers, and yet neither Russ nor Clare had one and relied on using landlines, when they could find them.

But, despite all this, their darned, doomed attraction for each other is so primal that I finished the audio book on the way to the library to pick up the second in the series, A Fountain Filled With Blood (A Rev. Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne Mystery), which I devoured this weekend. I'm heading up to the library tomorrow to pick up Out of the Deep I Cry (A Rev. Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne Mystery), third in the series. TBR list, you can wait, I need to find out if Russ leaves Linda for Claire, or if Claire starts to date in order to get over Russ, or if they can still be friends even though the whole town must be really talking about them by now.

I fully acknowledge that the series' angsty longing is driving my new obsession, I honestly think that the second novel is better than the first. The whodunit part was more masterly put together, and I loved the fact that the ending wasn't exactly tidy...a little like real life isn't exactly tidy with clean resolutions to thorny issues. And Russ is cutting down on the "Scuze my French"s and reading it is infinitely better than listening to a grating voice butcher a sensitive tough guy's voice. We're also seeing more of the town and its inhabitants, which increases overall credibility of the story and setting. And I know I'm going to like Russ's mom, Margy, who made a brief appearance in the second book, and who is another tough cookie with as much insight into the workings of the human heart as Claire.

The other thing I like about the series is that we aren't given the full backstory of the main characters right off the bat. I don't want to continue reading just to know whether Russ and Claire get together, but also to learn more about who they are and how they got to be who they are. I learned a little more about their histories in the second book, and I expect to be doled out a few more tantilizing tidbits in the third book.

I have to say, Julia Spencer-Fleming knows how to write a series, at least based on the first two books.