Let's Talk About Those Year-End Lists: Part Two

Today, we'll wrap up our discussion of the year-end lists of our favorite reads in 2014.

Georgette Spelvin: I'm not the person Sister Mary Murderous should ask for help in kicking her book-buying habit. She lays waste to my own pocketbook with her emails that begin, "I just ran across a book with your name all over it, Georgette." I've been afraid to ask her exactly what this means, but she definitely has my number. In addition to directing me to Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings last year, she suggested several of my favorite reads from the year before: Philipp Meyer's The Son, an epic about the McCullough family of Texas, from the pre-Civil War days to post-9/11; and The Infatuations by Javier Marías, a novel that uses a supposedly random homicide to examine guilt, mortality, and truth. And we both loved Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker, and Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project in 2013 (see here).

All of the books on Sister Mary's 2014 list have migrated onto my library request list. The two that have me tapping an impatient foot in anticipation are her absolute favorite, Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (The Brits! Cambridge! Spies!) and Phil Hogan's A Pleasure and a Calling. Hogan's William Heming, a British real estate agent who takes advantage of home buyers who don't bother to change the locks after they purchase a house from him, brings to mind Canadian writer Russell Wangersky’s Walt (Spiderline, 2014), a grocery store janitor who collects shopping lists customers leave behind. Walt's wife has disappeared and so have some of the store's female customers. I think winter nights scream out for hair-raising psychological suspense and sinister protagonists. Don't you?

I agree with Della Streetwise that Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, a sci fi/fantasy/horror/dystopian genre-bender, is amazing. I also concur it's imperative to read the books in order, beginning with Annihilation. The movie rights have been sold to Paramount, and Alex Garland, who wrote the screenplay for 28 Days Later, is set to adapt and direct it. This isn't as exciting as the news that Matt Damon will star in the movie based on Andy Weir's The Martian, but I'll still look forward to seeing Annihilation.

Another of Della's picks, Station Eleven, by Emily St. John, is an original take on a post-apocalyptic America, and I enjoyed it. I haven't read James L. Cambias's A Darkling Sea, with Earthlings, lobster-like Ilmatarans, and six-legged Sholen at loggerheads on a planet far from Earth, but it sounds like a lot of fun.

I'm always anxious to meet fellow literature lovers, even if they're fictional characters like Aalyia Sohbi of Beirut in Rabih Alameddine's An Unnecessary Woman.

Sir Ian McKellen in Mr. Holmes

Seeing Michael Chabon's The Final Solution on the Maltese Condor's list makes me happy. I read it when it first came out and found it charming. Chabon's books contain witty phrases and metaphors that glitter like little gems scattered across the pages. The Yiddish Policemen's Union, alternative history set in the temporary Jewish settlement in the Federal District of Sitka after the 1948 collapse of Israel, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Chabon's ode to the comics, aren't as light as The Final Solution, but both are entertaining.

Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster and Stephen Fry as Jeeves

It's hard to beat a P. G. Wodehouse book when your head is tired from being at work, and you want something clever and silly for reading after dinner with snickerdoodle cookies and tea. Also good for those times are John Mortimer's Rumpole books, which aren't as frothy, and Henry Cecil's comic legal novels, which are. Cecil's characters include a drunken solicitor named Mr. Tewkesbury and an incomprehensible witness named Colonel Brain (see Sister Mary's post here). Why is it that the British do this sort of thing so well?

Okay, let's straighten up in our chairs and think about books that are more serious before we look at some satire. In Malcolm Lowry's masterpiece, Under the Volcano, Geoffrey Firmin's most important relationship isn't with his wife, Yvonne––it's with alcohol. On the Day of the Dead in 1938, he resigns his post as British Consul, sits at a bar, and resolves to drink himself to death. It's a powerful read about guilt and the struggle for redemption. I'd like to read Alice McDermott's Charming Billy, featuring another alcoholic.

I enjoyed Nigel Williams's satirical The Wimbledon Poisoner (see review here), in which a man likes the image of himself as a grieving widower so much he sets out to murder his wife. Unfortunately, his skill set doesn't include pinpoint killing, and his neighbors pay the price for his bumbling. After seeing this other Williams book, Unfaithfully Yours, on Lady Jane Digby's Ghost's list and reading Sister Mary's comments, I scurried to the Book Depository website to order it.

LJDG's comments about Lissa Evans's Crooked Heart are too much for me to resist: "A small part of the reader's heart will be left with the suffragette medal given new love in Noel's charitable hands. This is a wonderful, unforgettable read." (Regarding India Knight's blurb about the book: Sister Mary isn't the only one who loves Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love. You really should read that book and also Dodie Smith's witty and moving coming-of-age novel, I Capture the Castle. It has one of literature's best first lines: "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.")

Not only eggs are hardboiled

I read Richard Rosen's Harvey Blissberg series years ago because I'm a baseball fan and couldn't resist combining my love of that sport with crime fiction. After the first book, Harvey retires from baseball to devote himself full-time to work as a private eye. I'm glad to hear the books have been re-released and smiled at LJDG's comparison of Harvey to Lawrence Block's battered ex-cop, Matthew Scudder. Both these series feature decent, thinking men and are enjoyable reads.

If you haven't read any of Block's hardboiled Scudder books, I'll suggest a couple you could start with: Eight Million Ways to Die (a prostitute finds big trouble when she wants to quit her profession) or When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (Scudder looks back to the 1970s when he was drinking heavily and juggling several investigations for friends). Or, if you want to start at the beginning, that's The Sins of the Fathers, in which the father of a dead prostitute asks Scudder to investigate.

Della Streetwise: Around Thanksgiving, I resolved to increase my reading speed in 2015. I have now made a startling discovery that will have me reading at warp speed by year's end. As my reading velocity has increased, so has my rate of new book acquisition. Because these two activities are positively correlated, my reading pace should therefore increase if I merely step up my purchases and library requests. I can utilize these Read Me Deadly year-end lists guilt-free because they're helping me keep my New Year's resolution!

What is this other than a bird's eye view?

The Maltese Condor rarely lays an egg with her book suggestions. (Surely you didn't expect me to resist saying this when all my self-discipline is directed toward accumulating outstanding books as fast as I can.) She is particularly good at finding unusual foreign mysteries and humorous crime fiction and I cannot wait to read Daniel Pennac's The Fairy Gunmother.

I haven't read a Camilleri mystery for quite some time and am glad to be reminded of his cynical Sicilian police inspector, Salvo Montalbano. Montalbano knows how to live by balancing work with pleasure. I'm going to bring some Italian warmth into my living room this winter with Camilleri's Treasure Hunt and MC's other Italian suggestion, Maurizio de Giovanni's I Will Have Vengeance.

I'm coming to rely on Lady Jane Digby's Ghost for recommendations of British authors (onto my list goes Unfaithfully Yours by Nigel Williams) and unforgettable characters (Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans). Like Sister MM, I rushed to get Ben Elton's Time and Time Again after hearing about it from LJDG. Hugh Stanton takes the responsibility for staving off the shot that signaled the first World War. It's a fascinating book and I'm still thinking about what it means. It reminded me of another book, Rebecca Makkai's The Hundred-Year House (Viking, 2014). In that book, actions and possessions of Laurelfield residents are repeatedly overlooked or misinterpreted during later decades. The unintended consequences of these mistakes stack up over a hundred years and remind us that we can't look into a crystal ball and see clearly when we can't even interpret history perfectly.

LJDG tells us the extremely careful Robert Purcell causes an accidental death and disrupts the perfection of his carefully planned life in Jon Canter's A Short Gentleman. Of course, I'm going to have to read this along with Georgette's recommendation for books about the consequences of choices, Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle.

Michel Faber's sci fi, The Book of Strange New Things, looks like a must read. I'm interested in how people balance pressures exerted by their own needs against their loved ones' and society's. I'd like to see what happens when Peter Leigh, a human minister on another planet, is caught between his employer, his congregation of extraterrestrials and his wife on a disintegrating Earth.

I still haven't gotten around to reading the book that mopped up all 2014 sci fi awards, Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice (Orbit, 2013). Its heroine was once one of a thousand mindless humans controlled by a spaceship's artificial intelligence but she is now her ship's only remaining consciousness. I've also ordered Dave Hutchinson’s Europe in Autumn (Solaris, 2014), "a thriller of espionage and the future which reads like the love child of John le Carré and Franz Kafka." This book is set in a Europe fractured into many little pieces by economic disaster and a flu pandemic. I still have room on my shelves for sci-fi Georgette liked: Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem, which sounds mind-blowing, and Andy Weir's The Martian, also given a thumbs up by Sister MM's husband and Becky LeJeune.

Of course, we're sorry to learn Sister MM is in any kind of distress. Notwithstanding the benefits we all receive from her books researching, reading and reporting, we're more than happy to respond to her request for help with a books addiction. Might I suggest she go to bed an hour later so she can squeeze in more reading and feel better about the number of unread books on her shelf? Perhaps her husband could read to her at breakfast. There's also lunch and dinner.

While she's contemplating these ideas, I'll thank her for several books on her list that I already read at her suggestion, Robert Harris's Ian Fleming Steel Dagger winner, An Officer and a Spy, and Terms & Conditions by Robert Glancy. I have Christopher Fowler's Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart in the pipeline. That weird William Heming, who keeps the keys to houses he sells, gives me the shivers so I must read A Pleasure and a Calling by Phil Hogan.

I'm pondering my next read (quickly) as I bid you goodbye. I hope everyone is off to a good start reading in 2015.

Let's Talk About Those Year-End Lists: Part One

Well, that does it, everybody. We've now finished talking about our favorite reads of 2014. The question now is, what do we think about each other's lists?

Sister Mary Murderous: My question is whether you all would be willing to pay for the therapy I need to kick this book-buying habit. Your lists have sent my addiction into overdrive.

I'll start with Lady Jane Digby's Ghost's list. She posted with us here about some of her favorites, so I'd already sent away to the Book Depository to buy Nigel Williams's Unfaithfully Yours. I read it a few months ago and it's a terrific book. These former friends are just so nasty to each other. It was a lot of fun to read, but I sure hope I never meet anybody like these people.

LJDG's recommendation here of Ben Elton's Time and Time Again had me downloading the audiobook almost instantly and I listened to it last month. It's now on my list of favorite time travel books and I keep thinking it would make a heck of a movie. I wonder if there's any chance of it?

LJDG was kind enough to send me her copy of Lissa Evans's Crooked Heart. It arrived just before I sat down to write this and I am having to exert every bit of willpower I have not to quit reading my current book in the middle and start reading it. First of all, the cover art is fantastic. Second, there is a blurb by India Knight (whoever she is) saying:

"I'm putting Crooked Heart on the shelf of my most treasured books, between I Capture the Castle and The Pursuit of Love. . . . I couldn't love it more."

Here's the thing. I love Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love beyond all reason. It is the book I reread whenever I need a combination of comfort and laughter. I have bought multiple copies of it over the years so that I can always have an extra on hand to give away. So to hear of somebody else who loves it and who puts this on the same level, well, that's just electrifying to me. Third, I sneaked a read of the first few pages and I can tell this is going to be at least very good, and maybe great.

A Short Gentleman sounds right up my alley, too. Something about LJDG's description made me think of Robert Glancy's Terms & Conditions, which was one of my favorite reads last year. So there it goes, onto my TBR list.

It's almost a relief to me that there was one book on LJDG's list that I didn't like nearly as much, and that's Audrey Magee's The Undertaking. I can definitely see why people liked the book, but the flat characterization didn't work for me. I think it could spur a very lively book group discussion, though.

Because of the Maltese Condor, I have almost every Andrea Camilleri book there is on my shelves. I haven't read them yet, but she gets me every time with her descriptions. So far, I've been able to resist her recommendations of Ann Cleeves's Vera Stanhope series, but my resistance crumbles a little bit every time she writes about them. Curse you, MC!

At least I have the satisfaction of having previously read her P.G. Wodehouse and Robertson Davies recommended books, so I get to just nod and agree. And not have to spend any more money.

Della Streetwise grabbed me right from the get-go, with her description of James L. Cambias's A Darkling Sea. I knew this was a book for my sci-fi reading husband. Luckily, I was able to get it from the library.

I was also able to keep the expenditure on Lily King's Euphoria reasonable, since I got the audiobook on a daily deal. I had met Lily King a couple of months ago, when she spoke at my local library. She was a charming, funny and warm speaker. She talked a lot about her writing process, which is always so interesting to a reader, but I think what I liked best was her story of how she came to write the book. A friend of hers told her that a favorite independent bookstore was closing and selling out its stock, and asked King to go with her to buy books. When they got there, though, nearly all the books had already been sold. King felt she should buy something, and picked a biography of Margaret Mead, the famous anthropologist. Reading that book inspired her to write a completely different type of story from her previous novels.

Margaret Mead and her second husband in New Guinea

Although I thought Lily King was delightful, a novel based on the real-life love triangle among Mead, her husband and another anthropologist while they were all doing field work among tribes in New Guinea just wasn't a subject that interested me. But then the book kept winning awards, people like Della put it on favorites lists, the audiobook went on sale––well, I had to read it. And I was mesmerized. This is another one that I think will be extremely popular among book clubs this year and will lead to some excellent discussion. I know I'm going to suggest it at my next book club meeting in a couple of weeks. My first question for a book group would be what they think of the choices Lily King made for her characters that differ from what happened in real life.

At least Georgette and I both really like pie

Between Georgette and me, our Venn diagram sets of reading interests don't overlap all that much, but we do share some of the same enthusiasms, a lot of the sci-fi books she recommends have gone over very big with my husband, and she can always make even a book I'd never consider sound like mandatory reading. And I really like it that I've come to know her tastes well enough that I can spot books that I know have her name all over them. I knew A Brief History of Seven Killings would be for her, so I'm feeling pretty good that here it is on her list.

As a kid, I could never stay in the room if Twilight Zone was on, so there is no way I will be reading a story like The Killer Next Door, in which "there's a grisly reason for the bed-sit's bad drains." Nuh-uh. Not gonna happen. But the instant Georgette told me about The Slaves of Solitude, I bought it. And now she mentions A Far Cry from Kensington in the same vicinity, well, woo hoo. By the way, if you've never read A Far Cry from Kensington, you should rectify that. And if you're an audiobook fan, I enthusiastically recommend the audio version, read by the marvelous Pamela Garelick.

Matt Damon on Mars. Oh yeah.

Georgette also recommended The Martian for my husband, and he thought it was not just terrific entertainment, but inventive––in a genre not always known for its originality. Did you know it's being made into a movie starring Matt Damon? Now that should be fun.

Speaking of movies, "cinematic" is what I thought of when I read Lenny Kleinfeld's Some Dead Genius. Among other things, there's a certain scene at the Art Institute of Chicago . . . But I'll let you find out for yourself.

Maltese Condor

Unfaithfully Yours doesn't look like my kind of thing on the surface of it, but I'll be reading it because I have fallen for the fabulous cover. I do that a lot, and over the years it has served me well.

Well, I am going to take it for granted that some of last year's best books of these discussions will likely be on my 2015 list of great reads. One of my favorite Christmas gifts are those lovely Amazon gift cards that I have already put to use as I read my compadres' lists of favorites.

I grabbed a copy of Tony Parsons's The Murder Man (the UK title; The Murder Bag is the US title) when Sister MM first discussed it and I think it will be a great way to keep me warm on one of these frigid January evenings. Robert Galbraith's second offering in the Cormoran Strike series is also a book I have been looking forward to. I am happy to hear that Sister found it an improvement over the first story.

Cardiff

Harry Bingham’s Talking to the Dead made me a fan of Fiona Griffiths as well, and I can’t wait to read Love Story with Murders. The Cardiff setting also intrigues me. I have read only a few books based in Wales and it is a part of the world with a distinct flavor all its own.

I don't choose my next read in any predictable way. It seems that I generally just get a feeling about what will suit my mood after I have digested the book I have just closed.

While there are great novels being published daily, there are so many authors from the past who also call my name. So LGDG's recommendation of authors Daniel Friedman and Richard Rosen sent me on a search for the first in both of their series, and Friedman’s Don't Ever Get Old called back. After I read that one, Don't Ever Look Back will be next. Then I’ll probably read Rosen's Strike Three, You're Dead, which features a retired baseball player during those spring training days in the spring.

Della always recommends an eclectic selection of books ranging from wild times in other worlds to out-of-the-way corners in this world. I think Sister MM's idea of listening to Euphoria by Lily King is something I'll do as well. But Foreign Gods Inc., about a Nigerian cab driver in New York City, sounds fascinating.

When Georgette first mentioned Lila by Marilynne Robinson, which is last of the Gilead trilogy, I vowed to dust off my own copy of Gilead and finally crack the cover. It sounds like a memorable book. All I need are a few snow days to spend with some hot cocoa and a book.

When I was young, some of the most harrowing books I read were those true-life stories written about World War II. To this day, the words "Bataan Death March" give me chills. I don't know how The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about the work on the Thailand-Burma Death Railway, will affect me all these years later, but I would like to give it a try.

Celeste Ng's novel, Everything I Never Told You, is on hold for me at the library. The title intrigues me and family dynamics are always an interesting subject. I can't wait to get started.

******

Georgette and Della will be here in a couple of days to share their thoughts on our year-end lists. In the meantime, make a nice cup of hot chocolate and have your own snow day, whatever the weather.

Best Reads of 2014: Part Six

As my blog mates know, I dread making these yearly lists of favorite reads and think of them as a final exam in electricity and magnetism (my antiperspirant got a challenge during that physics class). Now that I've started listing, though, I'm having trouble finishing. I could go on and on, telling you about books I loved reading last year, and then I could tell you about some of the books I most regret not yet reading!

Some of my most enjoyable reads weren't the best written, but they made me think or were spot-on for my reading mood at the time. Okay, here are more books I liked in 2014.

In a post about giving books as gifts, I suggested Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead, 2014). It was inspired by the attempted assassination of Jamaican singer Bob Marley in 1976, and the (never named) singer's presence and influence permeate this novel. The primary setting is Jamaica over three decades; the primary themes are corruption and power. There's fighting between rival Kingston ghetto gangs and the two political parties that back them, the meddling we've come to expect from our government and the CIA, excruciating poverty, and the rise of the drug trade.

It takes some patience to become acclimated in A Brief History because you're thrown in and expected to immediately start swimming through multiple narrators; prose in various styles, including patois; and a huge cast of characters, although there's a helpful cast list several pages long at the beginning. If you're familiar with Jamaican history, it will enhance your reading, but it's not necessary. The book is as entertaining as other recent memorable books of historical fiction: Elizabeth Gilbert's Signature of All Things (Riverhead, 2013), James McBride's Good Lord Bird (Riverhead, 2013), and Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games (HarperCollins, 2007). If you're a fan of James Ellroy or George Pelecanos, I think you'll particularly enjoy these 675+ pages.

I'm keeping a tight rein on myself, because I love, love, love good books of 700 or more pages, and I don't want to get sidetracked into talking about them. Oh, I can't stand it. I'll just mention a couple: Underworld, by Don DeLillo, which begins with a 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers-New York Giants baseball game and morphs into an epic of the Cold War and its aftermath; and the beautiful, autobiographical A Book of Memories, by Péter Nádas. Then, too, there's Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, about Sugar, a teenage prostitute, who hankers after a better life in Victorian London.

Faber doesn't write the same book twice. His third novel, The Book of Strange New Things (Hogarth, 2014), is a 500-page book of science fiction set in the future. Faber's interest isn't really in technology and science; rather, it's a moving and thought-provoking contemplation about marriage, spirituality, faith, and redemption. Earthlings, whose planet is deteriorating due to climate and economic conditions, are establishing their first extraterrestrial colony on the planet Oasis. The settlement is supported by a shadowy global corporation, USIC, but the native Oasans (sensational characterization, by the way) refuse to cooperate with the settlement unless a new Christian pastor comes to replace the one they've lost. USIC selects a former drug addict-turned pastor, Peter Leigh, whose wife, Bea, remains in England while he goes on a planet-hopping mission to Oasis. Peter and Bea stay in touch through emails, but conditions on Earth deteriorate––and Bea's situation becomes desperate. Peter is caught between his work for God and his love for his ever-more-far-away wife.

Michel Faber's wife died shortly before The Book of Strange New Things was completed. Faber has stated it's his last book of fiction.

I guess 2014 was my year for reading novels that reflected on spiritual redemption; however, you don't need to possess any religious orthodoxy to appreciate Marilynne Robinson's beautifully spare writing about spirituality, relationships, and the human condition. Her Gilead trilogy is set in the tiny town of Gilead, Iowa, during the mid-20th century. These books are quiet, leisurely paced, and character driven. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, elderly Congregationalist minister John Ames writes a long, conversational journal entry about life for his young son to read––or not read––when he's a grown man. The second novel, Home, is set concurrently with Gilead, and features John Ames's best friend, Rev. Robert Boughton, as he struggles with his alcoholic prodigal son, Jack.

Lila (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), which completes the trilogy, focuses on the story of the homeless young woman who appeared out of nowhere in Gilead one rainy day, married Ames late in his life, and bore their son. By the time I finished Lila, I felt I knew a real person. It's possible to read these books in any order or as standalones, but I think they work best read in the order they were written.

It's hard to write about Wolf in White Van (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), musician/song writer John Darnielle's first novel, in a way that doesn't spoil it for a potential reader. It's one of those books in which the way the story is told is not only as important as what actually happens, it's integral to the meaning of what happens. It's about choices, despair, and a search for meaning in a landscape where time and space, and imagination and reality, are fluid. Writing it took a lot of skill.

The facts of the story are these: At age 17, Sean Philips suffers a devastatingly disfiguring facial injury leading to his isolation. He eventually turns the stories he tells himself about an imaginary world into a source of income: a text-based, role-playing game called Trace Italian. It's named after a medieval fortification that featured layers of defensive barricades branching far out from the central fort. Trace players navigate through a post-apocalyptic American landscape, with the goal of finding safety in this fortress. Sean's game was developed pre-internet, but Trace is similar to internet role-playing games in that the repercussions of players' choices determine their journeys. Players snail-mail their choices to Sean, who lives in southern California, and he mails them their corresponding instructions. The game could go on forever without a player reaching that illusory fortress. Then, something happens that takes Sean and the reader to both a beginning and an exit.

Needless to say, this book is not for those who like linear plots or for someone like Sister Mary's friend, who thought Moby-Dick is just a story about fishing. Wolf in White Van deals with alienation and tragedy, and it still haunts me.

Here's another haunting book, Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Knopf, 2014), winner of this year's Man Booker Prize. It's about an Australian surgeon named Dorrigo Evans, who at age 77 is a war hero and recipient of many honors; yet he never feels he measures up and suffers from chronic unhappiness. Is it because Dorrigo lost the one he loved, or is it due to trauma from the war?

Flanagan touches on Dorrigo's service in World War II as he tells us about Dorrigo's life, but then he zeroes in, and we find Dorrigo was one of a group of Australian POWs who worked on the Thailand-Burma Death Railway. (Flanagan's father survived his labor on that hellish Railway and died as Flanagan completed this manuscript.) As his senior officers die, Dorrigo is placed in charge of 700 sick and debilitated POWs. The supplies in the prisoners' medical tent consist of little more than rags and a saw, and some of the scenes in which Dorrigo doctors his fellow POWs were very difficult reading. Painful, too, was comprehending Dorrigo's moral dilemma when every morning he must pick which men will form the day's labor crews.

Flanagan occasionally shifts to the Japanese guards' points of view (during and long after the war), and we come to understand how these men saw dying in the service of the Emperor as the ultimate honor and were able to treat their prisoners so inhumanely. The heartbreak in this book is almost unbearable because Flanagan lets us get to know his characters as individuals, but this is what makes the book worth reading. This is a classic book of war fiction.

A love of apples might be in my genes because my family has lived in Washington state for generations. I'm not quite as obsessional as Leonard Dickinson, who ate an apple every night before retiring (in Cyril Hare's 1939 mystery, Suicide Excepted), but I'm in that ballpark. I collect books about apples, and that's why I  grabbed Rowan Jacobsen's Apples of Uncommon Character: Heirlooms, Modern Classics, and Little-Known Wonders (Bloomsbury USA, 2014). The 320-page book contains more than 150 beautiful photographs and information about 142 apple varieties, including the Knobbed Russet, which looks like "the love child of a toad and a potato." It is organized into six sections: summer apples, dessert apples (for eating rather than cooking or baking), bakers and saucers, keepers, cider fruit, and oddballs (those apples that don't fit neatly into the other categories). It ends with a variety of 20 recipes.

Jacobsen's writing is informative and entertaining. He includes resources for buying apples and growing them and an apple festivals guide. If you've been eating Red Delicious apples all these years because you don't know what else to eat, this book is for you. Of course, it's also for people who don't think of a computer company when they hear the word "apple."

Now you'll have to excuse me, because all this thinking about apples is killing me, and I must eat some apple pie.

Best Reads of 2014: Part Five

It's hard to believe we're a week into 2015. I've already been swept into a maelstrom of deadlines, so I sat down tonight and quickly composed my list of favorite 2014 reads. I'll tell you about half of them today and the other half tomorrow. A different day or more reflection might have generated a different list; no matter, you can be sure I enjoyed the following books.

I love novels set in boarding houses, such as Muriel Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington. In places where unrelated adults are forced to live close together, eccentricities and resentments bloom like mold on old wallpaper. Sometimes escaping a fellow boarder is nearly impossible, and if you're British, there's the stiff upper lip to maintain and the manners demanded by civilization to remember. Of course, it's one thing to be irritated beyond all reason or to be bored to death––and another to actually be done to death. For example, Mrs. Bunting lies awake at night straining to hear whether her secretive upstairs boarder will leave the house in Marie Belloc Lowndes's The Lodger, made into a silent movie by Alfred Hitchcock. The lodger is obviously a gentleman despite his shabbiness, but could he be the serial killer terrorizing Victorian London? He's so odd, but his rent comes in so handy!

There's an excess of dark secrets among the six tenants and the unsavory landlord of the seedy bed-sit at 23 Beulah Grove. In Alex Marwood's The Killer Next Door (Penguin, 2014), an incident one stifling London summer night unites the six tenants, who normally are extremely careful to mind their own business. What they don't know––but, we do––is there's a grisly reason for the bed-sit's bad drains. I stayed up much too late reading this weirdly chilling book, chock full of great characters and settings and laced with dark humor. It's perfect tension-filled suspense for a night you're looking to be creeped out.

After that book, I was casting about, looking for another boarding house setting, when I came across the name of Patrick Hamilton, an English writer who lived a hard life and died too young. In Hamilton's Hangover Square, a deteriorating George Harvey Bone resolves to win or kill conniving small-bit actress Netta Longdon in World War II-era London. It's a wonderful, memorable read, so I was thrilled to find a book by Hamilton I hadn't read, The Slaves of Solitude (originally published 1947; NYRB Classics, 2007). It's late 1943, and we move from the larger setting of the World War against fascism to the smaller war set in a suburban London boarding house, where the genteel Miss Roach, and others, have taken refuge from the London Blitz. It's impossible not to identify with this decent woman as she suffers through dinners with the bullying and pompous Mr. Thwaits, a villain worthy of Dickens, and takes tea with a brash American lieutenant. It's a lovely read, especially when accompanied by endless cups of tea and cookies you can choke on when you laugh at the superb dialog.

A boarding house or city under siege setting; themes of identity, memory, justice or redemption; crime fiction set in foreign places; satire; dystopian fiction; experimental fiction.... I have so many reading joneses I can barely begin to list them. I picked up Jesse Ball's Silence Once Begun (Pantheon, 2014) because I wondered what narrator/character Jesse Ball would discover during his investigation of the Narito Disappearances case in 1970s Japan. Eight people disappeared from villages in Osaka Prefecture, with only a playing card posted on their door to provide a common clue. From the opening pages, the reader knows thread salesman Oda Sotatsu isn't guilty of the crime, yet he confesses and then stands mute thereafter. Ball is a poet, and his book, the majority of which is in interview form, is a lyrical, disturbing, and fascinating exercise in how one goes about learning the truth. I'm still mulling over Ball's observations about the nature of justice and obsession.

There are never enough quiet nights when you get to select what you feel like eating or drinking and pair it with a book you feel like reading. This winter, a good accompaniment to hot coffee and a thick slice of gingerbread is The Devil in the Marshalsea, historical fiction by Antonia Hodgson (Mariner, 2014). If you're working on your New Year's resolutions, even better. Trust me, you'll be motivated to improve yourself after watching Tom Hawkins go to pot in 1727. He lands in Marshalsea Gaol, an infamous London debtors' prison where prisoners are divided––according to their ability to pay for food, drink, and protection––into the horrible Master's side and the infinitely more horrible Common side. (I need to check my Dante's Inferno for the corresponding circles of hell.) Tom may earn a get-out-of-jail-free card if he discovers who murdered his recent cellmate, Captain Roberts. Of course, Tom's culprit will have to suit Sir Philip Meadows, Knight Marshal of the Marshalsea. Hodgson's first novel is atmospheric and features believable characters. I'm pleased it's the first in a proposed series.

I was on the train, trying so hard to be quiet reading Lenny Kleinfeld's Some Dead Genius (Niaux-Noir Books, 2014), laughs were coming out my nose. It's Kleinfeld's second comic hardboiled book about Chicago homicide detectives Mark Bergman and John Dunegan (see Read Me Deadly's review of the first, Shooters & Chasers, here). Mark and Doonie investigate a bizarre series of murders set in Chicago's art world (great observations on the valuation and marketing of art), and it can be read as a standalone. As the reader, you're clued in to the bad guys' scheme and watch the cops play catch up, but the twisting plot and fast pace keep you only a bit ahead of the cops. Kleinfeld's writing is original: hip, vivid, and playful. The closest I can come to describing its flavor is to say it's like reading a seriously amped-up Elmore Leonard with an "adults' eyes-only" rating for profanity and sex. Despite the X-rated language and all the characters' cynicism, the cops are very nice guys. I like that a lot.

Last March when I reviewed Andy Weir's The Martian (Crown, 2014) (see review here), I predicted it would be one of my favorite books in 2014. And it is. The book begins when American astronaut Mark Watney is erroneously presumed dead by his Ares 3 crewmates and abandoned alone on Mars without any ability to communicate––or leave. Mark, who has a great sense of black humor, is determined to survive until the next manned mission to Mars. Unfortunately, that's scheduled for four years from now, and the food, water, and air will run out long before that. Mark is a botanist/mechanical engineer/Mr. Fix-It, and we read journal entries in which he describes a goal (say, creating water), how he means to do it, what went wrong, and how he'll fix it. His scientific explanations are clear, and his jerry-rigging is fascinating. After a few months go by, satellite pictures convince NASA Mark is still alive. Then, the loneliest man in the universe gets a little less lonely, and his goals change. It's hard to beat this book for its combination of inspiring, entertaining, and interesting.

I don't speak Chinese, and I hadn't read any Chinese science fiction before Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem (translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu; Tor, 2014). Cixin Liu is an engineer, and his book is hugely popular in China. Ken Liu's smooth translation maintains the original's Chinese flavor and adds some helpful explanatory footnotes at the bottom of the appropriate page. It's a two-threaded story featuring two scientists: Ye Wenjie becomes an engineer on a 1970s covert military project that seeks to establish contact with extraterrestrials after she loses her physicist father during the Cultural Revolution; Wang Miao, a modern-day nanotechnologist, begins to play a mysterious video game set on another planet called "The Three-Body Problem" after he is asked to help a police investigation into a series of scientists' suicides. These threads eventually connect in a very satisfying way.

The Three-Body Problem is heavy on the science and tech; however, the scientist-characters drive the plot, and Liu is interested in big questions about the human experience. I don't think physics classes or previous knowledge about the Cultural Revolution are necessary to enjoy this book, but they definitely enhanced my enjoyment. Liu's slowly emerging story is mesmerizing. The second book in the Three Body trilogy, The Dark Forest, will be published by Tor on July 7, 2015, and I can't wait to read it.

There are few ways to describe Celeste Ng's exquisite first novel, Everything I Never Told You (Penguin, 2014), that don't include the word "sad." The first sentences are heartbreaking: "Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet...." And that's not the only thing "they" don't know about Lydia. Lydia is the middle and favorite child of  Marilyn and James Lee. The Lees moved to a small town in 1970s Ohio, where James, a Chinese-American whose parents immigrated to this country, teaches at the local college.

Both parents are bruised people who see Lydia as a vehicle to fulfill their dreams: Marilyn wants her to be the doctor she herself had hoped to become, instead of a housewife; James's desire is for Lydia to be popular at school. When Lydia's body is found in a local lake, James and Marilyn fall to pieces. Nathan, their oldest child and bound for Harvard, thinks Jack, a young James Dean type, might have something to do with it, while Hannah, barely registering in the family as the youngest, has another idea. This book takes a sensitive look at the hurts we suffer when we fail to fit in or measure up to expectations. It's also a terrific examination of magical thinking, family dynamics, and human resiliency and must be read to the unexpected end.

I'll be back tomorrow to tell you about my other 2014 favorites.

I'm fantasizing about reading in the snow. Our high temperature today was 81.

Best Reads of 2014: Part Four

Our regular guest blogger,
Lady Jane Digby's Ghost

Good grief! Is it really 2015 already? Where has the time gone––and what good books did I use to pass that time? Here's a list of some of my favorite reads of 2014. Let's start with the Brits.

I'm a fan of British writers. They tend to be snarkier and less politically correct than American authors. They're less afraid to shock or challenge their readers. Here are a couple of books I enjoyed reading this year. Unfaithfully Yours (Corsair, 2014), by Nigel Williams, is the story, told in epistolary form, of four couples who live in the tony London suburb of Putney. The couples used to be friends, but they've grown apart since their children left the nest, taking the couples' reasons for friendship with them.

Over the years, the wife of one couple has died suspiciously, the husband of another couple has changed his sexuality, and the other two couples have fallen out of love and into hate with their partners. Actually, they all hate each other and are not afraid to express their thoughts and opinions on the subject. The loathing and contempt they all feel for each other is hilariously expressed in some of the most deadpan prose I've ever read.

The novel is told in the somewhat unreliable voice of a private detective brought in to investigate philandering of one of the husbands and is both laugh-out-loud funny and very un-PC. Unfaithfully Yours is available in the US in audiobook form, but if you're interested, you should probably order the book from England.

Jon Canter's A Short Gentleman (Vintage, 2009) is the story of Robert Purcell, who is indeed short in stature, but long on accomplishment. He had his whole life planned out as a teenager and has become a Queen's Counsel (what British lawyers call "taking silk") right on schedule. He returns home every night to his carefully-chosen wife and his carefully-conceived children. His life is perfect––until it isn't. Robert Purcell's life falls apart because he commits a crime. The reader doesn't learn what the crime is until late in the book, but living the life of a criminal is not in Robert Purcell's comfort zone. This is a funny look at a man who shouldn't be a criminal but who, improbably, is. A Short Gentleman is available in ebook form in the US.

British comedian and author Ben Elton has written one of the most profound books of the year, Time and Time Again (Bantam, 2014). It is the story of Hugh Stanton, a brilliant History graduate from Trinity College, Cambridge. It is the year 2024, and Stanton is asked to return to Trinity by his former mentor, Dr Sally McCluskey. She tells him that Sir Isaac Newton made a sort of time machine four hundred years ago that could transport a person to 1914, the year Newton had prophesied would be a turning point in history. Of course, it was the beginning of The Great War and McCluskey tells Stanton that he must go back and prevent the assassination of Austria's Franz Ferdinand and then go to Berlin and shoot Kaiser Wilhelm. Those two events will prevent the beginning of The Great War and society will be the better for it.

Hugh Stanton carries out his tasks and The Great War never begins. But what does happen? Would you change history if you don't know what will happen because of what didn't happen? Ben Elton asks these questions and the reader is shocked at what does happen. Time and Time Again is not the best-written book I read all year, but it sure has me looking at history in a completely different way. I think the reader should have a good grasp of 19th- and 20th-century world history to really enjoy this book.

Let's now look at Irish writer Audrey Magee's debut novel, The Undertaking (Grove Press, 2014). Set in Berlin and Stalingrad during World War II, it is the story of German soldier Peter Faber and teacher Katharina Spinell, who marry for the most prosaic of reasons. He wants a honeymoon out of the war zone and she wants his death benefits if he dies. They marry in a telephone wedding, but fall in love and conceive a child when they meet.

Magee is unsparing in her descriptions of wartime Berlin, as the city is bombed into oblivion, and of the postwar period, when the Russian army occupies the city. The Russians are out for revenge for the German occupation horrors in their own territory. Meanwhile, Peter Faber is trapped in the frigid snow and vast wasteland of Stalingrad, as the German government leaves the 6th Army to surrender to the Russians. The Undertaking is not a mystery, but a stunning novel about the micro-effects of wartime both on the battlefield and on the home front. This is not an easy book to read, but is very good.

Looking at the WW2 home front––Britain this time––is British author Lissa Evans in her absolutely charming novel, Crooked Heart (to be published in the US by Harper, July 28, 2015). Noel Bostock is a 10-year-old orphan who has been raised by his aging great-aunt, suffragette Mattie. Mattie is suffering from dementia, but has given Noel a wonderful upbringing despite her increasingly wandering mind.

Noel is a brilliant, precocious boy, given to silence and a seeming abhorrence of other children. Noel is not someone who suffers fools gladly, and he has met his match when he meets Vera ("Vee") Sedge, a local St. Albans woman into whose care he's literally dumped by the evacuation department. Vee has never met a money-making scheme she didn't like, even if it was morally questionable and somewhat illegal. Vee and Noel come up with some novel money-earning schemes.

In this book, Lissa Evans has created some of the most remarkable characters I've ever met. None are caricatures; all are people you might know and love yourself, just transposed to WW2 London. Not only are Evans's characters adeptly drawn, she also gives her readers a look at London in wartime. But the best part of Crooked Heart is the relationships Noel Bostock has with the people in his life, both past and current. A small part of the reader's heart will be left with the suffragette medal given new love in Noel's charitable hands. This is a wonderful, unforgettable read.

Do people retain their moral beliefs as they age? Do they see the outside world in the same way as that world changes and expands around them, while their own world shrinks and they lose their mental and physical faculties? Daniel Friedman, in his new book, Don't Ever Look Back (Minotaur Books, 2014), tries to answer those questions. This book is the second novel about long-retired Memphis policeman Baruch "Buck" Schatz. Friedman's first novel, Don't Ever Get Old, introduced 85-year-old Buck Schatz in a bit more rollicking plot.

In Don't Ever Get Old, Buck and his young grandson chase an old Nazi, hiding in the US, from Memphis to St Louis in an attempt to find some hidden gold. This second book, with a much more serious look at aging and how the now 88-year-old Buck, living in an assisted-living facility with his wife, has not learned to give up the ghosts of the past.

Buck Schatz has been contacted by a long-ago criminal, "Elijah," whom he remembers with no fondness after Elijah master-minded a bank heist in Memphis in 1965. Elijah would like to surrender to police in 2009 for his part in that long-ago heist. The book goes back and forth between 1965 and 2009, as Buck Schatz looks at his own moral beliefs about crime and punishment.

Don't Ever Look Back is a serious book that has some funny parts. I'd say Daniel Friedman's first book was just the opposite. Both make for good reading, but this second book might make you think about morality, aging, and what memories last as a person nears the end of his life.

The Strangler's Waltz (Monsoon Books, 2013), by Richard Lord, is set in 1913 and features two Viennese policemen who are called in to investigate the murder of a wealthy woman found strangled in the red light district. Her murder is followed by four others and the city is in a panic. Will the strangler in Vienna surpass the numbers run up in London by Jack the Ripper 20 years earlier?

Police inspectors Karl-Heinz Dorfner and Julian Stebbel are tasked with finding the strangler. They are helped in their job by Dr. Sigmund Freud, who was the psychiatrist to the first victim, and a young artist called . . . Adolf Hitler, who witnessed the first murder and draws a picture of the strangler, which helps the police identify the murderer. Okay, here's the possible problem with the book. The "ick" factor is fairly strong in a work of fiction featuring Adolf Hitler as a character anything short of mass murderer. But is it really a problem or is it a sign of daring on the part of the author? I can't quite decide, but I'm leaning towards "interesting plot point."

Richard Lord also does an excellent job of establishing place and time; the city of Vienna in 1913. The final years of both Emperor Franz Joseph's reign and the Austro-Hungarian Empire––neither survived the Great War––were a time of inquietude in the city of music and arts. The mystery of the five murders––and the attendant political ramifications of the deaths––is beautifully drawn by the author. I certainly hope that he does produce his promised three more books. This is an excellent beginning of the quartet.

Finally, I'd like to tell you about the reissuance of a series of five books by American author Richard Rosen. The books were originally published in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They feature Harvey Blissberg, a retired professional baseball player who starts a second life as a private detective. The books have been out of print for a while, but have been reissued in ebook form.

I started my re-reading of the Harvey Blissberg series with World of Hurt (Walker & Co., 1994; ebook reissue from MysteriousPress.com/Open Road, 2013), the fourth book in the series. I had read all of them when they were first issued, and I'm pleased to see they've been reissued. I think Rosen's writing has held up as time has passed.

Another mystery writer whose work reminds me of Richard Rosen's is Lawrence Block. Block is a more prolific writer than Rosen, but one of Block's characters, Matthew Scudder, seems a lot like Harvey Blissberg. Both are cerebral detectives, and the books' plots are often overshadowed by the characters. Block and Rosen both use dialog to move their plots, which I don't think is easily done. Both writers do it well, though.

It's also amusing to see a world without cellphones or personal computers. Written in the early 1990s, car phones (remember those?) are in use and the police have computers to access information but, otherwise, modern-day communications are not used. (It's a bit like reading a Sue Grafton mystery and realizing in 2014 that her books take place in the 1980s!)

So those are a few of the books that kept me entertained in 2014. I'm looking forward to continued good reading in 2015!