Save Me From a Life of TBR

You know your TBR situation is bad when you have to organize the books you haven't gotten around to reading yet. I now have three TBR areas––not counting the pile of five books on the end table next to my living room chair.

In the living room––conveniently next to the liquor cabinet––there is a three-foot-long collection of books that I really, really expect to read in the next few months. To be honest, some books do get demoted from that collection to the den, where there are two bookcases of TBRs. One bookcase is for non-mystery books, and the other for mysteries. Most of the books on the mystery bookcase are ones that I picked up at used-book sales or bookstore closings.

I have to pass by the bookcases on my way to the laundry room, and the other day I took a good look. I resolved that one of those lonely mysteries should graduate to the living room, and maybe even to my end table. But which one?  I was able to narrow it down, but now I need help.

Here are five candidates:

Ian Rankin: The Complaints

I was an avid reader of the Rebus series, starting way back in the late 1980s. Then Rankin supposedly ended the series in 2007, with Exit Music, and I believed him. So much so that when Rankin's first Malcolm Fox novel, The Complaints, came out in 2009, I just felt like I was done and never picked it up. Three years later, along came a surprise new Rankin novel, Standing in Another Man's Grave, which also featured Fox. I had to read that one.

I picked up a copy of The Complaints at a book sale a couple of years ago and it has been sitting there on the shelf ever since, despite being a nice, barely-used hardcover. Should I give Malcolm his chance? Frankly, even though Rebus would try anybody's patience, Fox comes across as a real pill in Standing in Another Man's Grave. But I could be persuaded that his introduction is worth reading.

Marisha Pessl: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Book descriptions have a bad habit of over-promising, but this debut is described as Nabokov meets Donna Tartt. Well, that makes me pay attention. On the other hand––pretension alert!––the protagonist is named Blue van Meer. On the third hand, it's about a high school murder, and what survivor of high school doesn't want to read about that? I'm so confused!

This is another nice hardcover that I picked up at a used book sale. I have another problem with this book that's kept it on the shelf. People keep saying that Pessl's Night Film (2014) is a very good story. I want to read it, but even though both of her books are stand-alones I feel like I should read Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2007) first. It's not that I have some kind of OCD problem (honestly!), it's just that the book is there on the shelf, just waiting, and since it's the older of the two books, it seems only fair that it should be first.

Robert Littell: The Stalin Epigram

Littell is a longtime and prolific espionage writer. His Young Philby fed my Kim Philby/Cambridge Spy Ring obsession, and The Company: A Novel of the CIA doorstop of a book managed to be both an espionage novel and multi-generational family history.

Littell's specialty is classic Cold War espionage, but he takes a little job with The Stalin Epigram (2009). As I'm sure you know, the Stalin era was no picnic. Anybody who didn't fall right into line with Stalin's harsh policies, like forced collectivization, could expect a show trial and banishment to Siberia––or worse. In the arts world, anybody who wanted his or her work published was expected to laud the big boss.

Renowned poet Osip Mandelstam refused to kowtow. He was horrified by Stalin and Stalinism, especially after he saw, from a train window, the results of collectivization. In 1933, he composed a 16-line poem and recited it to a circle of fellow artists. The results were just as you'd expect, and after he got the full treatment, including "internal exile," he died in 1939.

Littell takes this true-life history and holds it up to the light, allowing the story to be told by several different real and fictional characters, including his wife, his lover and the weightlifter/strongman who becomes his cellmate. I bought the book at a bookstore closing at least a couple of years ago, because I like Littell. I'm too much of a philistine for poetry, though, which I think is why the book has languished on that TBR bookcase ever since.

Can a philistine enjoy this one? What do you say?

David Thomas: Ostland

This one hasn't aged on the shelf too long; I've had the UK edition for only a little over a year. This one is so up my alley I can't figure out why I haven't read it yet. Georg Heuser makes a name for himself in the Berlin police as the man responsible for capturing the S-Bahn serial killer. But the war comes along and he's part of an SS contingent sent to the east, called Ostland by the Germans. In Minsk, instead of catching serial killers, he becomes a key actor in the Nazis' mass killing machine.

Years later, a young German lawyer named Paula Siebert is going through recently-opened Soviet archives and discovers the horrors of Heuser's past in Ostland. Now Heuser and his SS comrades will go on trial. The narrative shows us how a "decent German" went from an enforcer of law and order to an institutional killer. This is a novel, but Georg Heuser was a very real person who went on trial in 1962 for his activities in Ostland.

Cyril Hare: Tragedy At Law

This is embarrassing. I have no idea how long Tragedy At Law (1942) has been moldering on the TBR bookcase; just that it's been a long time. I don't even remember where or how I got it.

Cyril Hare (real name Alfred Gordon Clark) was a barrister who became a county court judge, the kind who traveled a circuit in the old days. In this Golden Age classic, Hare took advantage of his experience to create the pompous Judge Barber, who is traveling his circuit with his clerk and his striving wife, Hilda.

Judge Barber's career is put in jeopardy when he accidentally knocks down a pedestrian. Shortly after that, he receives threatening messages, is nearly killed by a box of poisoned chocolates, and worse. Hare liked to have his plots turn on tricky points of law, and this one is described as following that practice.

Cyril Law's An English Murder is one of my all-time favorite Golden Age mysteries, so why haven't I read this one yet? Could it be as simple as the fact that it's a battered old paperback? Can you tell me I shouldn't overlook this book because of its cover?

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I'm ready for your advice. Which book should graduate? Let me know in comments or you can vote in the poll at the top right of the page.

The Sirens' Song: Our TBRs

Unread books on the shelf are sirens calling. What are some of the ones beckoning you? How did they make it into your to-be-read stacks in the first place? Are you waiting to read a particular book?

Maltese Condor: Before I began following some Amazon discussions a few years ago I didn't know what a TBR list was. Of course, I had a stash of books but once a great variety of wonderful recommendations came my way, my pile became a peak, so I now have a smaller, more immediate TBR. It usually includes something old (written before 1950), something new from more recent decade, something to make me laugh, something with a foreign vista and, last but not least, a book not dealing with murder.

While Peter Lovesey's The Detective Wore Silk Drawers was written in 1971, it is part of a very nicely written series about Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray, who are pounding the streets of Victorian London in search of criminals with unusual twisted minds. I first read these many years ago and have been looking forward to the repeat experience. Usually, my "old" pick is a classic mystery.

My "new" choice is Charlotte and Aaron Elkins's A Dangerous Talent, in which a young art consultant, Alix London, is introduced. Alix has had a reversal of fortune and is making a new life for herself in Seattle. I am really looking forward to this one.

I am expecting Michael Pearce to lift my spirits with A Dead Man in Tangier. Things are in turmoil in 1912, especially in Tangier. Sandor Seymour is a member of a flying squad before there were such things. He is an officer of England's Special Branch and he travels to hot spots in the British empire to unravel messy situations in a humorous fashion. I feel this author is one who can be relied on to entertain me.

Dance with Death, by Barbara Nadel, is my visit to a different culture for the coming week. Inspector Ikmen has to leave Istanbul and travel to Cappadocia to investigate the violent death of a woman who has lain undisturbed for two decades. I will have to do a little googling in this case.

Rounding off my mental stimulation will be The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach. This is a perfect time to read this, since our local high school baseball team just lost the state championship by one run as the result of a beautifully played game with a weenie two-run error. Aah. You remind yourself that somebody has to lose.

My rule of thumb is that my next book choice must always be fluid and flexible. One book tends to lead to another. Recently, reading a book about a blizzard may lead me to reading about Africa. And if I do read these as planned, I may need to read more home-grown talent next week. By the way, my time estimates are usually waaaay off. But if I could allot at least 10-12 hours a day for reading and the rest for work and all the other boring routine stuff, reality wouldn't be such a splash of cold water in my face.

Della Streetwise: Spies! I'm always in the mood for stealing secrets and double dealing. My John le Carré books are demanding a re-read, but before I begin all over with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, I'm going to read a le Carré I haven't read yet: Our Kind of Traitor. It's about international money launderers for Russian organized crime.

I do a lot of chauffeuring my kids around during the summer. Guess what I'll take in the car to read? It was written in 1951 and published in 1957. Mostly autobiographical and based on cross-country trips with friends. The original draft was on a roll of paper 120 feet long and there were no paragraph breaks. It speaks for the Beat Generation. Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood begins in this way. "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." It's the famous book with the novel-within-a-novel. Laura's science fiction novel and her sister Iris's memories wind around each other. Atwood won the Booker Prize for this, her tenth book.

An ex-spy! Gerard Macdonald's The Prisoner's Wife tells the story of ex-CIA agent Shawn Maguire's search to find Darius Osmani, an Iranian secretly held by the Americans for interrogation.

Sister Mary Murderous: Last week my TBRs were well-behaved, standing in orderly rows and waiting their turn. Now, all of a sudden, I'm besieged with newcomers. And they're almost all World War II and espionage. Not a quaint village mystery among them. Here are my impatient newcomers:

Joseph Kanon: Istanbul Passage. World War II is over, but when one last job goes awry, Leon Bauer is caught up in shifting loyalties, double-dealing and deadly maneuvers that rival anything that could happen during wartime.

Ben MacIntyre: Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies (Advance Review Copy). Speaking of wartime double-dealing, this nonfiction book tells the better-than-fiction story of a motley collection of double agents tasked by British intelligence to trick the Nazis about the location of the D-Day invasion.

David R. Gillham: City of Women (ARC). Non-mystery literary fiction about a group of women in World War II Berlin. To be released August 7.

Gerald Jay: The Paris Detective. A police procedural/thriller set in the Dordogne in the 1990s and featuring a Maigret-like Inspector Mazarelle.


Mark Mills: House of the Hunted. Espionage on the Cote d'Azur, 1935.



J. Robert Janes: Bellringer (ARC). Murder in a Vittel, France internment camp for British and American women during World War II. Number 13 in the Kohler/St. Cyr series. To be released on June 5.

Rebecca Cantrell: A City of Broken Glass (ARC). Fourth in the Hannah Vogel series, this one takes place in Berlin around the time of Kristallnacht. To be released July 17.

Georgette Spelvin: My TBRs are making like bunnies. I swear they reproduce as soon as my back is turned. Here are some of the books waiting, more or less patiently, for my attention:

I wish I could read Spanish, because I've seen some intriguing books written in that language. I couldn't resist Spaniard Victor del Àrbol's The Sadness of the Samurai when I learned it had been translated into English. It's a story of "rebellion, murder, and political ideology," as a dying woman in 1981 Barcelona looks back at pro-Nazi Spain in 1941.

Love Joe R. Lansdale. He's insightful, funny and raunchy, and he can write like nobody's business. The one on my shelf is his 2012 book of East Texas noir, Edge of Dark Water. I need to get to it soon because I like the synopsis: May Lynn dreams of going to Hollywood. When she dies, her friends want her dream to come true. So they plan to dig her up, burn her to ashes, and take her to Hollywood that way. They'll finance this plan by stealing some money.

I enjoyed David Mitchell's imaginative Cloud Atlas, and number9dream is another Mitchell book. From Kirkus Reviews: "A wildly inventive set of variations on an abandoned young Japanese man’s Sisyphean search for his father under the aegis of John Lennon and the mystical number nine." I hate Sisyphean tasks myself, but reading about them can be a recipe for bittersweet, and I appreciate bittersweet.

I've been discussing Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending with Sister Mary. That's been so much fun for me that I added Alex Grecian's The Yard to my TBRs after reading her comments about it. I want to see if I agree with her. I'm in the mood for Victorian London, so I'll read it soon.

I'm looking forward to Anne Korkeakivi's An Unexpected Guest. Clare Moorhouse is an American married to a high-ranking diplomat in Paris. She must host an unexpected––but very important––dinner party. Potential problems threatening Clare include a deeply buried secret (gotta love those dark secrets that come crawling out of the past).

Do you have a book you're saving for a certain time of the year? I do. Life and Fate, a 1959 novel by Vasily Grossman, is slated for this winter. I'm very fond of Russian and Balkan novels. I'm interested in sieges (hey, everybody has at least one odd interest), and this book begins with the German siege of Stalingrad and ends with the German surrender. Reading it on the beach just wouldn't be right.

Periphera: Travel in time and space! There are still a few of Robert van Gulik's mysteries about the celebrated 7th century Chinese Judge Dee Gong An that I haven't read. In Murder in Canton, he has achieved the highest rank of judges, with authority second only to that of the Emperor. In this story, he personally goes undercover to investigate the murder of an Imperial Censor in China's most important city, with the aid of a blind cricket-seller girl.

Also from the Orient, I have a copy of The Dragon Scroll by I.J. Parker, set in 11th century Japan. Sugawara Akitada is an impoverished young nobleman in the Emperor's service. He is sent out on an impossible mission to a remote province to determine why the convoys delivering tax revenues to the capital have been disappearing without a trace.

My brother's fondness for Guinness, and a picture on the wall of his favorite Irish pub, made me curious about Lady Caroline Blackwood, the beautiful restless heiress of the Guinness fortune.

She was the epitome of a jet setter before the term existed, having had four husbands and a writing career before her death in 1996. I have two of her books in my TBR pile: the semi-autobiographical Great Granny Webster, about a controlling martinet in the huge gothic mansions of the aristocracy, told through the eyes of an orphaned girl; and Corrigan, the story of lonely widow who befriends a crippled man who soon exerts a great deal of influence over her. If I enjoy these, I will move on to her biography, Dangerous Muse by Nancy Schoenberger.

Meanwhile, I am woefully behind in reading Joseph Wambaugh's Hollywood Station for a reading group. I don't know why I have avoided this author in the past; the book so far is a lively and well-written story about the insanity the police deal with in tinsel town, where almost everyone is an actor or a wannabe of one sort or another. There is some rough language and political incorrectness (one of the officers needs to stop frequently to use a breast pump, to the dismay and embarrassment of her grizzled senior partner), but nothing out of line with the setting or the collection of very strange characters.

We'd love to snoop through your TBRs. What books are calling to you?