Friday, January 4, 2019

The Kingdom of the Blind: Louise Penny Does Not Disappoint

When Louise Penny publishes the next novel in her Three Pines series, I imagine I feel a little bit like young Harry Potter fans did when J.K. Rowling rolled out the next book. I might even risk hyperbole and draw comparisons to the new iPhone or Michael Jordan Nikes.

I got my hands on her latest, Kingdom of the Blind, the week it was released when she appeared at the Lipscomb campus as part of the Nashville Public Library's Salon@615 series. With the semester end, the holidays, and a family wedding pressing, I made myself wait to read.

I even considered waiting until the audiobook was available for checkout, since I have found all of her books ideal for listening. Even when the death of narrator Ralph Cosham, I was able to make the transition to Robert Bathurst (although admittedly with an unusual measure of grief for someone I only knew through his voice.)

In that lovely week between Christmas and New Year when I forget the day of the week, I found more time to read guiltlessly, so I picked up Kingdom of the Blind. Even reading words on the page, I heard the voices of the characters I have grown to love. One mark of a great writer, after all, is the ability to render voice with mere words on a page.

When I heard Penny speak in Nashville, I was struck by her clever wit. It should be no surprise, then, that her characters and their dialogue are so gripping.  In this novel, she picks up the thread from the previous narrative, when Gamache has won the war against a new insidious drug by losing some of the battles.

As this book begins, Armand has been summoned mysteriously to a vacant house as a snow storm builds. Also summoned by letter are Myrna Landers and a new character, a young builder, all selected as executors of the will of a woman they've never met. Of course, one can't have a murder mystery without a murder, and this book is no exception. As Gamache, his neighbors in Three Pines, and his family try to discover why they have been chosen for this odd responsibility, son-in-law Jean Guy has his loyalty tested as the department investigates Armand's role in the recent drug crisis.

While in theory each of these books could stand alone, the real charm is reading them in order, since some of the characters readers grow to love appear from one book the the next. (How can one explain Ruth and her duck to anyone who hasn't read these stories?) Loose threads from one storyline are picked up again. Meanwhile new characters--in this case, a female accountant--are introduced and developed. In secondary narrative lines, Penny leaves readers wonder sometimes just who the good guys and bad guys are.

Most surprisingly, as I read her books, I find myself wishing to revisit the whole series, even knowing how each will end. Her writing, I believe, is just that good.
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Wednesday, January 2, 2019

A Little Light Reading

Never one to shy away from a tough read or challenging subjects, I nevertheless enjoy simply a feel-good fun book. Light reading can be, should be well written. Even when the prose isn't Pulitzer worthy, authors can still develop engaging characters, ones we love and hate, and put them into interesting plots.

Jojo Moyes' Still Me, the third in her series, follows Louisa Clark across the pond, as she takes a job as a personal assistant after the death of paraplegic Will Traynor and after finding love again with the Sam the paramedic. Moyes gets Lou in and out of trouble, building suspense through misunderstandings and jumping to conclusions.

I also enjoyed Elizabeth Berg's The Story of Arthur Truluv. Since every book about an old person these days is compared to A Man Called Ove, I'd have to say this is the book you might have gotten if Ove hadn't been such a curmudgeon from the start. Arthur (real last name Moses) hasn't adjusted to life with Nola, so he visits here grave every day, carrying on conversation with her and her "neighbors" in nearby graves. He meets Maddy, a high school outcast who escapes the cafeteria to eat lunch in the cemetery, and develops an unusual connection. He also expands his circle to include nosy neighbor Lucille, recognizing her loneliness. The story is more life-affirming than life-changing, but who doesn't need that kind of read now and then.

I've already written about Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, another character-driven story that takes readers along with the title character (who is more like Ove than Arthur). She's awkward and hard to like; fortunately, her co-worker Raymond looks past her oddities and includes her as he rescues a stranger and expands his--and Eleanor's--circle of family and friends. The rollercoaster ride through Eleanor's lows can be painful for readers. Thank goodness for the Raymonds of the world.

Other novels appearing on the bestseller list this year didn't quite live up to their potential. Rebecca Serle's The Dinner List was built on such a lovely premise. One of my favorite parts of the Sunday New York Times "Book Review" section is "By the Book," in which current authors answer a number of standard questions--What's on your nightstand right now? What kind of reader were you as a child? The question What authors, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party? always sparks some interesting groupings with the potential for interesting conversation across the table. Sabrina, the novel's protagonist, lives out this fantasy on the evening of her thirtieth birthday. Her guests include her best friend, her estranged father, her long-time love Tobias, her favorite college professor, and Audrey Hepburn. It turns out Hepburn is not the only dinner guest no longer living.

Serve takes readers back and forth between the dinner party and flashbacks involving the characters in her life (Hepburn only on film). The book had a made-for-movie feel about it, but never quite lived up to my expectations. If I'd read it at another time, I might have felt differently, I admit.

If I only read light fare, I'd probably always be hungry for m ore. Reading over my year's list, I realize that some books barely touch me, while others never leave me. Sometimes I'm captivated by the language of a book; at other times, though, I fall in love with a character or a place. Either way, I'll keep reading.
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Tuesday, January 1, 2019

My 2018 Reading List

Once again, I'm tallying the books I read this year, recorded on my kitchen calendar before moving into my official Book-Woman  journal. While I have more to say about a lot of these books, for today, I'm simply sharing the list:

1. Walter Isaacson, Leonard da Vinci
2. Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop
3. Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
4. Ken Follett, Column of Fire
5. Barbara Martin Stephens, Don't Give Your Heart to a Rambler
6. Radney Foster, For You to See the Stars
7. Nathan Hill, The Nix
8. Gabrielle Zevin, Young Jane Young
9. Scott McClanahan, Crapalachia
10. Kristin Hannah, The Great Unknown
11. Ron Hall and Denver Moore, Same Kind of Different as e.
12. Rebecca Hornaki, Seven Days of Us
13. Ann Head, Morningstar
14. Thirty Omrigar, Everybody's Son
15. Alan Bradley, The Grave's a Fine and Private Place
16. Shani Lapina, The Couple Next Door
17. Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book
18. David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon
19. Lee Smith, The Last Girls
20. Jonathan Miles, Anatomy of a Miracle
21. Charles Frazier, Varina
22. Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists
23. Lisa Wingate, Before We Were Yours
24. Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey
25. Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars
26. ---. Wade in the Water
27. Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink
28. Jo Nesbo, Macbeth
29. Paula McLain, Love and Ruins
30. Monte Cox, Significant Others
31. Michael Bishop, Murder in Music City
32. Elizabeth Berg, The Story of Arthur Truluv
33. Jane Gardem, Old Filth
34. Edward Rutherford, Paris
35. Peggy O'Neal Peden, Your Killing Heart
36. Julie Schumacher Dear Committee Members
37. Sara Gruen, At the Water's Edge
38. Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side
39, Pam Munoz Ryan, Echo
40. Andrew Sean Greer, Less
41. Tara Westover, Educated
42. Mark Sullivan, Beneath the Scarlet Sky
43. Bren McLain, One Good Mama Bone
44. Tass Saada, Once an Arafat Man
45. Luis Alberta Urea, House of Broken Angels
46. Peter McDade, The Weight of Sound
47. Frances Mayes, Women in Sunlight
48, Min Jim Lee Pachinko
49. Barbara Kingsolver Unsheltered 
50. Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire
51. Anne Tyler, Clock Dance
52. Jonas Jonasson, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared
53. Kate Atkinson, Case Histories
54. Annie Chapman, The Mother-in-Law Dance
55. Sharon McCrumb, Prayers the Devil Answers
56. Rebecca Serle, The Dinner List
57. JoJo Moyes, Still Me
58. Terry Wait Klefstad, Crooked River City
59. Combs, Hogue, and Reish, John Hartford's Mammoth Collection of Fiddle Tunes
60. Frederick Backman, Elanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
61. Will Schwalbe, Books for Living

That's my list so far--and it doesn't include the one I finished early this morning, my first book of 2019. Now I can study book lists of my other reading friends to see what to add to the stack on my nightstand.
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