Best Reads of 2014: Part One

Here at Read Me Deadly, we're conflicted about doing a roundup of the year's best books. It isn't easy looking back and whittling it down, is it, Georgette? Deciding what is "best" is subjective and changeable from one hour to the next. Yesterday, I decided to make it a little easier for myself by focusing only on fiction published in 2014 and not ranking my picks. By evening, my erasures had created holes in the list. No NFL coach has agonized more over substitutions, but at least I didn't have a playoffs berth at stake!

After we've posted our favorites this week, we'll discuss them as a group next week. I have no doubt I'll be ready to amend my picks then. But for now, here's the 2014 fiction I enjoyed most this year.

"By the end of his second month at Hitode Station, Rob Freeman had already come up with 85 ways to murder Henri Kerlerec." How's that opening sentence for a hook? Game designer James L. Cambias's A Darkling Sea (Tor, January 2014) is fun sci-fi set on the frozen moon of Ilmatar. Far below the ice-covered surface live blind, lobster-like Ilmatarans. Hitode is manned by a group of human scientists who are bound by an agreement between Earthlings and their first extraterrestrial contacts, the Sholen. The six-legged Sholen, far more technologically advanced than humans, demand Hitode scientists in no way make contact or interfere with Ilmatarans.

The scientists' investigation of the Ilmatarans is stymied so Henri, a media-darling Hitode archaeologist, insists on starring in a clandestine research mission to be filmed by nature photographer Rob. The old TV series Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom never featured anything approaching Rob's filmed disaster. The Ilmatarans, who have their own scientific curiosity, naively capture and dissect Henri. This brings the Sholen to Ilmatar and three species' politics and cultures collide.

I read A Darkling Sea after spotting it on Publishers Weekly's list of best 2014 sci-fi. I love books in which humans interact with extraterrestrials and Cambias has created species with both striking differences and interesting similarities. The author is excellent in his use and description of technology, but his book is more than a geeky vision of future tech. It's a comic coming-of-age story and an examination of identity, culture, imperialism and colonialism. I'm glad it's the first book of a series because I look forward to returning to Cambias's strange world.

We don't have to leave Earth or even the United States to find the mysterious Area X. It's a pristine wilderness created by unknown forces, constrained by invisible borders and investigated by a shadowy governmental agency in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy. Annihilation (see the review here), Authority and Acceptance were all published by FSG Originals/Macmillan in 2014. (In November, FSG Originals published Area X, a hardcover edition that contains the complete trilogy.) These beautifully written books combine elements of sci fi, fantasy, dystopian fiction, and horror. Some spooky scenes and unsettling imagery appear. VanderMeer does a great job with themes of authority and identity (specifically, what makes us human). The books must be read in order.

Toby Clements' Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims is historical fiction that runs riot through the War of the Roses. Kingmaker, first in a new series, was published in February 2014 by Century, a Random House UK affiliate, and arrived at our house after its original purchase in London by a friend.

It begins with events in 1460 that lead Sister Katherine and Brother Thomas to be evicted from their religious orders. As they flee, they are caught up in the English civil war fought by the royal houses of Lancaster and York. Real-life figures such as the future Yorkist monarch, Edward, Earl of March, and his adviser, the Earl of Warwick, appear, but it's Clements' ordinary men and women like Katherine and Thomas who give this book a vivid authenticity. It's cinematic and very appealing.

Have you watched the HBO TV series True Detective? The 2014 season consists of an eight-part crime drama set in the coastal plains of southern Louisiana. I was repulsed by the serial killer's staged tableaux at the series' center, but riveted by the performances of Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. I felt much the same way when I read Lauren Beukes's Broken Monsters (Mulholland, September 2014), a thriller/horror genre-bender laced with comedy.

A serial killer's first "artistic" tableau, staged in an abandoned warehouse in the decaying city of Detroit, is half-boy, half-deer. And that's just for starters. The multi-threaded story is told from several points of view, including investigating detective, Gabriella Versado, her teenage daughter, an itinerant artist, a journalist and the killer. Blood and gore don't spill from the pages but the book is as twisting and weird as you'd expect from South African writer Beukes, who also wrote 2013's The Shining Girls, featuring a time-traveling serial killer. I read Broken Monsters on a night I was the only one awake and experienced what true dread feels like.

I had fun reading David Shafer's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Mulholland, August 2014). It features an international media/industrial cabal called the Committee, natch, that wants to create a "New Alexandria" in which all information is privatized so they can take over the world. Playing David to the Committee's Goliath is the underground online group Dear Diary. Joining the fray is a trio in their 30s: Leo Crane, who uses his trust funds to abuse drugs and get paranoid in Portland, Oregon; his former school buddy, Mark Deveraux, a cynical self-help guru living lavishly in Brooklyn; and the good woman who brings the friends back together, Leila Majnoun, an increasingly fed-up worker for a global nonprofit agency.

Of course, Shafer isn't the only one to write about an unscrupulous Big Data conspiracy. Last year, there were Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge and Dave Eggers' The Circle, but this topic is important (NSA, anyone?) and this book is different. Shafer has an original voice that's darkly comic, paranoid and compassionate (if you can imagine that) and his characters are fully developed. I guess the best way to describe this is a cyber-techno thriller driven by its sympathetic characters rather than adrenalin.

I read Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad books for her stylish writing, characterization, meticulous plotting and Irish setting. The murder investigation in The Secret Place (Viking Adult, September 2014) begins when 16-year-old Holly, daughter of Det. Frank Mackey, gives a photo to Det. Stephen Moran, who's working cold cases. In the photo is Chris Harper, a rich and popular boy who was found dead a year ago on the grounds of Holly's school, St. Kilda's. Written across the photo is the sentence, "I know who killed him." The photo was posted on a St. Kilda's bulletin board called "the Secret Place." Stephen, who is ambitious to become a member of the Murder Squad, joins the Squad's tough Det. Antoinette Conway to investigate the now-hot case at the exclusive girls' school.

This fifth series book differs from the previous books, which are told from the lead detective's point of view. In The Secret Place, Tana French toys with the time frame and varies the point of view. One story line follows the course of the investigation by Stephen and Antoinette, while the other follows two competing groups of four St. Kilda's girls in the year leading up to Chris's murder and its aftermath. If you find teenage girls unbearable, you probably won't like this book. I enjoyed seeing French's police again and the book's focus on relationships.

What would the reading year be like without TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it)? My favorite 2014 dystopian novel is Station Eleven (Knopf, September 2014), by Emily St. John Mandel. The story centers around three characters: Hollywood star Arthur Leander, who dies onstage during King Lear in the book's opening pages; Jeevan Chaudhary, the good Samaritan who tries to save him; and a child actress, Kirsten Raymonde. Later that night, the Georgia flu begins wiping out most of the world's population. Years later, Kirsten is a member of a troupe of Shakespearean actors traveling through the Great Lakes area, which looks like something out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. They are on their way to a cultural center, and a group of stranded survivors, at a former airport.

Mandel travels back and forth in time, weaving together the stories of these three people and their associates and adding intrigue in the form of a sinister figure, the Prophet. The strength of Mandel's writing and the journey of her survivors brought to my mind the nameless narrator's walking tour of Suffolk in W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. Mandel's artists and musicians believe that simply surviving isn't enough. Station Eleven made me think about the world's beauty and its future.

Rabih Alameddine's An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press, February 2014) is a portrait of Aalyia Sohbi, a 72-year-old divorced and godless woman whose family considers her worse than an unnecessary appendage. She's an obstacle because they lust after her apartment. Aalyia loves her city, Beirut, and she loves her books. After her divorce, she began working at a bookstore, where she was paid so poorly she stole books from time to time to make up for it. For more than three decades, Aaliya has begun the New Year by translating one of these books into Arabic. When she's finished, she simply puts it away. The quiet Aaliya needs for these translations is threatened by the war and her family.

Aalyia's thoughts about various books and writers are a treat to read. For example, here's Aalyia on Spanish writer Javier Marías, author of The Infatuations:

In one of his essays, (Javier) Marías suggest that his work deals as much with what didn't happen as with what happened. In other words, most of us believe we are who we are because of the decisions we've made, because of events that shaped us, because of the choices of those around us. We rarely consider that we're also formed by the decisions we didn't make, by events that could have happened but didn't, or by our lack of choices, for that matter.

How can a person read this book and not fall in love with Aalyia? I have Alameddine's The Hakawati, "an Arabian Nights for this century," on my 2015 reading list.

Earlier, I told you about the interspecies culture clash found in James L. Cambias's A Darkling Sea. In Okey Ndibe's Foreign Gods Inc. (Soho, January 2014), the culture clash is experienced by a Nigerian who immigrates to America. Ikechukwu "Ike" Uzondu drives a New York City cab despite his economics degree from Amherst. After his green-card marriage ends, Ike is overwhelmed by debt. His plan to deal with it involves stealing the statue of the god Ngene in his native Nigerian village and selling it to Foreign Gods, Inc., a New York gallery specializing in religious artifacts from Asia and Africa. Needless to say, his trip to Nigeria and the scheme don't go as planned.

Ike's life is fragmented as he straddles two countries. He doesn't feel completely at home in either of them. Foreign Gods Inc. has elements of a satire but it's a poignant portrait of a man who immigrated to America and got lost trying to find the American dream.

In Euphoria (Atlantic Monthly Press, June 2014), Lily King re-imagines the 1933 presence in New Guinea of a trio of young anthropologists: Margaret Mead, her then-second husband, Reo Fortune, and her future-third husband, Gregory Bateson. Her fictionalized anthropologists are Nell Stone, an American; Schuyler "Fen" Fenwick, an Australian; and Andrew Bankson, an Englishman.

We learn Bankson has been alone in New Guinea, studying the Kiona river tribe, for several years. He's lonely and depressed when his narration begins, "Three days earlier, I'd gone to the river to drown myself." He's saved from another attempt by his chance meeting with plucky Nell and her tightly-wound husband, Fen. Nell and Fen are ready to leave New Guinea unless they can come up with a suitable tribe to study. Bankson, already smitten with Nell, hastens to locate a tribe, the Tam, along the Sepik River, an hour boat's ride away. The trio's involvement with their work and the love triangle's growing passion are revealed through Bankson's narration and Nell's writing. (One smokin' scene involves the three poring over an unedited copy of Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture!)

King's prose manages to be taut and lush, restrained and sensual––all at the same time. She keeps her focus on the three anthropologists during this moving story but our glimpses of the New Guineans are fascinating. I'd particularly suggest this book to readers who liked Ann Patchett's State of Wonder, Hanya Yanigahara's The People in the Trees or Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork.

There you have it, my for-now favorite 2014 fiction. We'll have more favorites this week.

Fall Preview 2014: Part One

While kids contemplate going back to school––or have even returned already!––at Read Me Deadly, we're sifting through publishers' fall catalogs and prepublication reviews, trying to figure out what to read. Over the next two weeks, we'll be sharing our ideas about what looks good. Grab a pen and paper, because here we go.

Okay, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it fans, you've read Peter Heller's poetic The Dog Stars, in which a Cessna pilot, Hig, and his dog, Jasper, navigate Colorado nine years after a super flu has eliminated most of humankind. You've visited the world 2,000 years after a nuclear war in Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban and witnessed the deaths of 99.4% of Earth's population and the resulting fight of good versus evil in Stephen King's The Stand. You've traveled through the crushing bleakness of the post-apocalypse in Cormac McCarthy's The Road and puzzled over the mysterious Area X of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation; Authority; and Acceptance, to be released on September 2, 2014, by FSG Originals). Now, write this one down, because there's terrific buzz about Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (Knopf, September 9, 2014).

The novel begins with famous actor Arthur Leander's onstage heart attack during a performance of King Lear. Watching the doomed efforts of paparazzo Jeevan Chaudhary to save him is child actress Kirsten Raymonde. As Chaudhary later walks home, the Georgia Flu begins its swath of global destruction. The novel then weaves in and out, flashing back to the lives of Leander and his associates and examining the harsh existence of survivors years after his death. Kirsten is a member of a traveling troupe of Shakespearean actors on their way to an old airport housing the Museum of Civilization and a small settlement. Leander's gift to Kirsten, a graphic novel by his first wife titled Station Eleven, guides the troupe through the Great Lakes region, where a religious cult headed by the violent Prophet holds sway. In a decimated world, there are still plenty of ties that bind us.

For a while, it seemed there was no escaping books involving writers' quests. We had no sooner read about a year spent cooking a Julia Child dish daily before we were vicariously living a year spent Biblically. I enjoy quests at second-hand, but I prefer reading about a genuine obsession, such as a birder's attempt to see every bird species on earth, or one with personal meaning, such as an elderly man's effort to drive his lawn tractor 240 miles (top speed, about 6 miles/hour) across Iowa and Wisconsin to see his estranged, dying brother. These sorts of expeditions are of more psychological interest than one undertaken strictly for writing a book about it.

In Martha Baillie's The Search for Heinrich Schlögel (Tin House, distributed by PGW, September 9, 2014), an unnamed narrator uses letters, journal entries, newspaper clippings, and maps to understand a surreal hike across Canada's remote Baffin Island by a 20-year-old German named Heinrich Schlögel. Inspired by his sister Inge's interest in the Inuktitut language and the diary of his hero, Samuel Hearne, a real-life 18th-century British explorer of the Canadian Arctic, Schlögel returns from what he thinks is a two-week trip to find that 30 years have elapsed, although he himself has not aged. After reading reviews that praise the beauty of Baillie's writing, and learning of her interest in the works of German writer W. G. Sebald (I loved Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, which involves a nameless narrator's walk through Norfolk, England, and the fascinating meditations about people and places the walk inspires), I quickly added this book to my list. It may not be for you if you dislike magical realism or best like linear stories with a definitive ending.

Maybe you remember the controversy over the ending of Irish writer Tana French's widely read 2007 book, In the Woods. Readers seemed to love or hate it. Like Patricia Cornwell's Postmortem, In the Woods won four crime-fiction awards for best first novel. It introduces the Dublin Murder Squad series, although it isn't necessary for enjoyment to read the books––a combination of psychological thriller and police procedural––in order. The fifth, The Secret Place, will be released by Penguin on September 2, 2014, and it is already receiving raves for French's meticulous plotting and stylish writing.

Its narrator is Dublin detective Stephen Moran, who works cold cases and dreams of joining the Murder Squad. His entrée comes when Holly Mackey, the teenage daughter of colleague Det. Frank Mackey, gives him a photo from a bulletin board for anonymous postings called "The Secret Place" at St. Kilda's School. In the photo is Chris Harper, a rich boy from a neighboring school, whose murder a year earlier remains unsolved. It's captioned "I know who killed him." French uses alternating chapters––and changes in timeline and point of view––to leap between the investigation of Murder Squad Detectives Moran and Antoinette Conway and four St. Kilda's girls in the school year up to Chris's murder and its aftermath.

All right, let's take a big hop from Ireland to Greece, where we find Jeffrey Siger's Andreas Kaldis. When we first meet Kaldis, in 2009's Murder in Mykonos, he is an Athens homicide detective. He is now the incorruptible (but realistic) head of Greece's Special Crimes Division. In 2012's Target: Tinos, Kaldis marries the wealthy and socially connected Lila Vardi, who is neither harebrained nor stuffy. Siger's characters age and their relationships change over time; it's enjoyable, but not necessary, to read these police procedurals in order of publication. This excellent series has a very strong sense of place: each book is set in a different part of Greece, and geography, history, culture, and current social issues are woven into the plot.

In the sixth book, Sons of Sparta (Poisoned Pen, October 7, 2014), Special Crimes Division Det. Yiannis Kouros is called out to the Mani from Athens by an uncle who once ran one of the region's crime syndicates. A land sale that will make the family rich is in the works until the uncle's death in a suspicious car accident calls the sale off. If Kouros successfully wraps up his investigation of the accident, it could avoid a family vendetta; however, his superior, Kaldis, working on a political corruption case in Athens, takes a sniff and smells fish. I'm looking forward to spending time with Siger's characters and inhaling a lesson about modern and ancient Greece.

I love satirical honeymoons set in fictional paradise. Of course, they turn into nothing like heaven, and we see how the newly married respond when fate deals their romantic expectations a below-the-belt hit. Writer Carl Hiaasen sends one Florida honeymooner fishing in the Keys, where he hooks a severed human arm (Bad Monkey). Another, Manhattan ad executive Max Lamb, seeking to inject some excitement into his Disney World honeymoon, grabs a camcorder and his new wife and drives into the path of an oncoming hurricane; this is by no means the end of the Lambs' perilous day (Stormy Weather).

Lydia Millet, whose 2009 short-story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys, creates eccentric pairings between animals and celebrities, has also written an upcoming satirical thriller, Mermaids in Paradise (W. W. Norton, November 3, 2014). It features successful young Americans Chip and Deborah, who travel from Los Angeles to honeymoon at a resort in the British Virgin Islands at Chip's suggestion. From the get-go, Deb, the narrator, is skeptical of this destination; however, when a marine researcher takes some snorkelers to a coral reef, and they discover live mermaids, Deb is transformed. The group's efforts to keep their discovery secret fail, and the resort hurries to profit from it. But the group has some ideas about how to protect these mythical creatures, which I hope are fully half-baked––and completely entertaining.

Few of us read crime fiction only because we're into the bludgeoning; stabbing; strangling; shooting; poisoning; electrocuting; rigging equipment (such as tampering with a car's brakes or wiring dynamite to the engine); pushing off a cliff, out a window, into an empty elevator shaft, in front of a vehicle or herd of stampeding elephants; crushing under a hydraulic press or in one of those diabolical rooms you've seen on TV where the maniac pushes a button and the walls close in on the victim, who already suffers from claustrophobia; drowning in the tub––if the murderer can figure out how to close the drain (I've been in hotel tubs in which I've had to ask my husband); feeding into a tree chipper or dismembering with a chainsaw or something not gas-powered, like a hacksaw or Swiss Army knife (I dream of receiving this one as a gift); leaving out in the elements to die of exposure, be eaten by wolves, or be beamed up to a passing flying saucer, experimented upon, and tidily vaporized by overly curious outer-space aliens, conscientious to a fault about not leaving evidence of their existence behind.... To cut to the chase, I read crime fiction because I like puzzles and the exploration of human nature and society in the framework afforded by the commission, investigation, and solution of a crime.

That said, I don't read much modern crime fiction that would qualify for the Mary Higgins Clark Award (see here). Sometimes, though, it's a pleasure to pick up a book and find little graphic violence and a smart, likable, and independent female protagonist. If there's a well-done romance, it's all gravy.

Hank Phillippi Ryan's Jane Ryland series begins with the Mary Higgins Clark Award-winning The Other Woman. Jane is a former TV investigative reporter, now employed by the Boston Register. In the upcoming third book, Truth Be Told (Forge, October 7, 2014), Jane is working on stories about foreclosures and banking financial services, when a murdered body drops onto her plate. Her investigation expands and becomes more dangerous. Readers will be pleased, because hunky Det. Jake Brogan of the Boston PD is handling a cold-case investigation that may tie in with Jane's stories, and he has eyes in his head to see Jane is no slacker in the beauty and brains departments. Author Ryan, a TV investigative reporter who has won more Emmys and journalism awards than you would believe, is a skillful writer, and she combines an examination of social issues and a sure touch with Jane and Jake's will-they-or-won't-they relationship. That sort of smoldering helped make early years of the TV series Moonlighting, with Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis, very popular. How often do you find that special longing sweetness in your crime fiction?

I've been a Denis Johnson fan for a long time. If you're interested in influential American novelists whose subject is America, you may have read Jesus' Son, a collection of hallucinatory short stories revolving around some rural addicts; Tree of Smoke, an epic featuring Skip Sands, a CIA officer in the 1960s mess of Vietnam; or Train Dreams, a 116-page gem about Robert Grainier, a working man in the changing early-1900s American West.

On November 4th, Johnson's literary thriller, The Laughing Monsters (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), will appear. Kirkus Reviews terms it a "taut, Conrad-by-way-of-Chandler tale about a spy who gets too close to the man he’s shadowing in Africa." The spy is NATO agent Roland Nair, a Scandinavian with a US passport, who returns to Africa to meet his old friend Michael Adriko and Michael's fiancée, Davidia, a college girl from Colorado, in Sierra Leone. Roland and Michael, who has worked as a soldier of fortune and as Roland's colleague in anti-terrorism, made a lot of money during Sierra Leone's civil war. Davidia, Michael, and Roland set off to visit Michael's family on the Congo-Uganda border, but all three may have a hidden agenda. They soon attract the interest of various espionage and law enforcement agencies, and their personal and professional loyalties undergo testing. A re-read of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness may be in order, and then I'm going to sit down with this one.

I enjoy Japanese writer Keigo Higashino's Detective Galileo books, which feature Manabu Yukawa, a brilliant physics professor with a knack for solving crime, and Tokyo police detective Kusanagi. The Devotion of Suspect X and Salvation of a Saint aren't so much whodunits as howdunits or whydunits or willtheygetawaywithits. The detective-suspect games of cat-and-mouse contain surprising twists, and the books explore the nature of guilt, anguish, loyalty, and human relationships.

When Malice (translated from the Japanese by Alexander O. Smith, with Elye Alexander) is published by Minotaur Books on November 7th, we'll get a look at another Higashino series. This one features Kyochiro Kaga, a police detective in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department's First Investigative Division. It's the first English translation, and it sounds like fun. It seems that best-selling Japanese novelist Kunihiko Hidaka has been strangled in a locked room of his locked house. The two people who find him are his wife and his best friend, Osamu Nonoguchi; they both appear to have solid alibis. When Kaga investigates, he discovers Nonoguchi is an old colleague from his days of teaching school, and his investigation gains a personal element.

I used to hang out with a bunch of physicists, and at some point during dinner, we non-physicists inevitably started peppering the physicists with questions. What happens if I bore a straight tunnel all the way through the earth, and then drop a ball down the hole? Do I stay drier in the rain if I walk or run to the front door from my car? They'd debate the answers and scribble on paper napkins for illustrations. Of course, as the night went on, our questions would become more preposterous––and their answers more entertaining.

If you love science and like to consider hypotheticals, you'll be interested in Randall Munroe's 320-page What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, September 2, 2014). Munroe studied physics and then built robots at NASA before leaving to to draw comics on the internet full time. His xkcd.com is called "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language," and it's an enjoyable and informative place to visit. You can see some questions and answers by clicking on "What If?". (Anyone who has ever struggled to answer a child's tough question about how the world works will be amused by questions that begin, "My six-year-old asked me....") Some question examples are as follows: "What if everyone only had one soulmate? How dangerous is it, really, in a pool in a thunderstorm? If we hooked turbines to people exercising in gyms, how much power could we produce? What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool?" Munroe's answers are witty, well researched, and illustrated with cunningly drawn little stick figures, cartoons, diagrams, mathematical equations, etc. The book contains both new questions/answers and some of the most popular questions/answers from the xkcd website.  I definitely need to read this one.

That's it for today. I'll be back in a few days with more upcoming books. Tomorrow, Sister Mary will tell you about some great-looking fall books set during World War II and the Cold War.

Attack of the TBRs

Back a few years ago, I used to worry about finding mysteries to read. I would haunt the local bookstores and library and get recommendations from the few friends who were also mystery readers. I would read every mystery I got my hands on through those methods and I'd have a small handful of TBRs (to-be-read books) at most.

Then it happened. I went online and met Georgette, the Maltese Condor, Della, Periphera and a lot of other mystery readers. Because of their stellar recommendations, my TBRs now number over 100 and are threatening to burst out of their bookcase. Sometimes I hear their authors reproaching me for leaving them on the shelf, and for my seeming to prefer new books fresh from the library or bookshop.

Some of the authors with books among the TBRs boldly accost me. Ian Rankin demands to know why I tore through each Rebus book as soon as it was published, but now, just because he's moved on to a new character in The Complaints, I'm not so eager. Fortunately for me, his Scots brogue is so strong that I don't understand a lot of what he says. I think he called me a "bampot," though.

Graham Hurley points to all the shelf real estate being taken up by the second through eleventh books in his Joe Faraday series and asks why I don't read them, considering that I have a 2012 series reading challenge going on. He's particularly peeved that I've chosen to read Josephine Tey's books for the second time for the challenge rather than his books for the first. I weakly respond that I did read the first book in his series and my husband has read all of the series, but he seems dissatisfied with my answer. "Hey pal," I want to say, "keep it up and you're getting moved to the already-read shelves."

Charles Cumming reminds me how excited I was to pick up The Trinity Six at the library's used bookstore six months ago, and how fascinated I've always been by the Cold War's Cambridge Spy Ring. It's been awhile since I've read a Cold War thriller, he points out. "And now that the remake of le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is coming out, it's the perfect time to read my book," Cumming reasons. He could be right, so I pull the book so that it stands out an inch from the others on the shelf. You know, like a little spy signal.

Andrea Camilleri seems to understand that I respond better to positive enticements than to criticism and pushiness. "Ciao, bella," he says, "there you are in your winter with your short days, and you deserve a visit to Salvo Montalbano's sunny Sicily. Ecco, you have three of his first four books right here! Put up your feet, pour a nice glass of limoncello and read."

Don Winslow appeals to nostalgia. "Hey, remember back when you found me at The Book Passage in Corte Madera? A Cool Breeze on the Underground and my other Neal Carey books, The Death and Life of Bobby Z, California Fire and Life. Those were the days, right? I know The Dawn Patrol didn't work for you, but we can get past that. You picked up Satori: A Novel Based on Trevanian's Shibumi at a book sale on a whim and it's been sitting here for the last couple of months. Give it a try; it's totally different from anything I've ever done." Maybe he's right. So I pull his book forward a little bit too.

Tana French is sulking over there on the far right of the second shelf. She knows I wasn't crazy about Faithful Place and she seems to guess that In the Woods isn't going to entice me anytime soon, no matter how many of my mystery-reading friends loved it.

Jedediah Berry is diffident, but he can't keep the injured tone out of his voice when he asks why I abandoned The Manual of Detection for something newly arrived from the library and then never picked up his book again, even though I was enjoying it. Unfortunately, I have no answer.

It's just as hard to explain to Thorne Smith why I haven't yet read Topper, even though Georgette and my husband loved it. I can't even look at Carlos Ruiz Zafón over there on the far right of the bottom shelf. The Shadow of the Wind is one of the longest tenants on my TBR shelves. How can I not have read it after years of my mystery friends telling me how great it is?

Then there are my old friends, the Michaels Gilbert and Innes. They sit there together, Gilbert's Close Quarters and The Danger Within, and Innes's Lament for a Maker and six Appleby books. The Michaels don't say much, because they know I'll get to them. After all, having read others of their books, I know I'll enjoy these books and I'm a lifelong fan of classic British crime fiction. And, of course, being British, the Michaels would never be pushy. The American in me wants to tell them that's not the way to get ahead, but I know they can't change their inbred characters. (I suppose their being dead is also a bit of an obstacle to a transformation in their personalities.)

The clamoring and censorious looks from the TBRs became so bad that I recently moved them from the living room to the next room. I can still hear them, but faintly, and they try to accost me when I go past them to the laundry room, but at least they're no longer such a constant reproach. Now I just have to do something about my history TBRs. Some of those guys have guns!

Which of my TBRs would you spring from the shelf and place next to my reading chair?