Not Just Another Highland Fling

The closest I have been to Scotland, aside from the luscious bodice-rippers I secretly devoured as a teenager, was a "Tour of Scotland" sampling of seven scotch whiskeys one hazy and better forgotten evening, and an occasional outing to one of the various Highland Games events so popular throughout the Northeast, where big flaming-haired men in kilts hurl young trees and large rocks while bagpipes swirl and spectators and participants alike shout encouragement and insults. Lots of rippling muscles and rowdy fun!

But Scotland is not all crumbling castles, bleak moors, and picturesque warriors. It has produced some of the world's great financiers, inventors and scientists. I can't imagine life without the telephone, television, or ATM machines, all invented by Scotsmen. (Not Scotchmen; "scotch" is reserved for the whiskey and those dense cholesterol-rich eggs deep fried in sausage.)

With all those canny big brains on tap it should come as no surprise that Scotland has its very own serious rival to the brilliant Sherlock Holmes. R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke, trained in both medicine and law, uses both the science of the early 20th century and Holmesian deductive skills to solve his cases.

Author Raymond Chandler, no slouch himself, wrote of Freeman:

This man Austin Freeman is a wonderful performer. He has no equal in his genre... in spite of the immense leisure of his writing he accomplishes an even suspense which is quite unexpected.

Freeman also experimented with inverted or howdhecatchum stories, in which the crime is committed early on and the killer immediately known to the reader; as opposed to the more usual whodunnit format. Freeman was a prolific writer, and I am still discovering some of his stories and novels. While the good doctor is not as flamboyant and flawed a character as Holmes, the puzzles––and his methods of solution––are quite similar. Many of Freeman's novels and stories are available as free or low-cost downloads.

While Josephine Tey only wrote seven mysteries over her short life, she is rightly considered one of the doyennes of the Golden Age, and her Detective Inspector Alan Grant can hold his own among the best protagonists of the period. Tey applied a truly remarkable gift for characterization and settings to her unusual and elegant stories, which sometimes had rather weak plots. While her Brat Farrar and The Daughter of Time frequently appear on "best of" lists, my personal favorite is The Singing Sands, published the year of her death.

DI Grant, on sick leave for his nerves after a period of intense overwork, travels by night train to spend time with his cousin Laura and her family in the Scottish Highlands. Leaving the train, he spots a surly conductor roughly shaking a passenger to rouse him. The passenger––a young Frenchman by his passport––is dead, apparently of a drunken fall. Only later, in the hotel dining room, does Grant open his newspaper to find a curious and haunting incomplete poem in an English schoolboy hand and realize that he must have picked it up from the dead man's berth.

With time on his hands, Grant gradually becomes obsessed with the dichotomy between the young man's sensitive face and his sordid death, and the French identification with the British appearance and handwriting. Grant is the only one who believes that there is something very wrong about this apparently accidental death.

There is a lyrical and slightly haunting quality to this rather slow-moving mystery that invites periodic rereading. Some pundits have speculated that Tey, like Dorothy L. Sayers, fell in love with her detective. Every time I read this book I fall slightly in love with both the ardent young victim with the "reckless eyebrows" and the detective who found healing through ferreting out his story and murderer.

To go directly from the civilized and slightly rarefied world of Detective Inspector Grant in the beautiful postwar Highlands to the grimy underside of 1980s Glasgow requires quite a breathtaking dive. In The Dead Hour, author Denise Mina's Paddy Meehan is an overweight and insecure cub reporter working the graveyard shift for a Glasgow newspaper, following nighttime police calls to get stories. She hates her job and the unsavory stories and people it exposes, but needs the money. Her father has been unemployed for several years, and the family depends on her income.

One night she follows a call about an unusual domestic disturbance in a wealthy suburb. A man answers the door and addresses one of the investigating officers by name. A woman appears in a mirror, blood dripping from her face, but she shakes her head at Paddy's urgent gestures to flee. When Paddy attempts to interview the man who blocks the door, he hands her money, asks that the story not be published, and closes the door in her face. Next morning the woman who owns the house is found, tortured and murdered.

It took me several tries to get into this book, with its opening chapters full of unrelenting and gratuitous meanness, but the effort was finally worthwhile. Paddy faces drug dealers and systemic police corruption as well as her own guilt for walking away from the original incident, even as she wrestles with the temptation to keep the attempted bribe. As frequently happens in real life, the closure is messy, incomplete, and somewhat unsatisfying. I admire Paddy's drive and courage and will likely read the next in this acclaimed noir series to see if some unresolved issues get settled, but The Dead Hour is pretty far outside my usual comfort zone.

From refined and mellow Edinburgh to the darkly beautiful peaty Highlands to the brash Glasgow blends; a criminous tour of tiny Scotland offers as wide a variety of innovative criminals as of its rightly famous scotches. Murderously speaking, enthusiasm trumps size, and the Scots have been passionate fighters and implacable enemies since long before Bonnie Prince Charlie led the doomed Jacobite Revolution in 1745.

(The following lovely picture of Glasgow is submitted with my apologies for dwelling only on her bleak underbelly. It can't be all grim gray misery!)

Leaping into the Unknown

I hope your 2012 is off to a good start. My own has been jogging along, although some of my New Year's resolutions will require more attention. Being prompt and improving my cooking for example. Other resolutions are proving easier to keep. One is to be more daring in my book choices by reading more books set in foreign places and trying new authors. Sometimes it pays to leap into the unknown.

This was true when I read Edna Mazya's Love Burns. When the narrator, 48-year-old Israeli astrophysicist Ilan Ben Nathan, arrives home unexpectedly early from work and wife Naomi isn't there, he is frantic. His mother isn't sympathetic. "A man who worries should live alone and not with a twenty-five-year-old lollipop," she snaps before hanging up the phone. But how can Ilan not worry when his life revolves around Naomi? Naomi's behavior when she gets home inflames his suspicions and over the next few days he abandons his work at the Technion [Israel's Institute of Technology] to follow her yellow Beetle around Haifa. It doesn't take long to discover that she is having an affair. Her lover is a recent immigrant from Russia who resembles Nick Nolte. Ilan resolves to let the affair burn itself out without letting on that he knows about it but, as some of us know, not all resolutions are easily kept.

I don't want to say more about the plot. This literary book, which begins with a neurotic man's obsessive fretting, turns into a thriller so farcical I had to repeatedly put it down to laugh.

First-time novelist Mazya is an award-winning playwright. I can visualize Love Burns on the screen and its plot reads like a group writing project undertaken by Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers. In fact, Tarantino's movie Pulp Fiction sparks an argument about reality in cinema at a party thrown by the Nathans. This book appeals to the intellect even during its moments of slapstick. It mocks everything in sight but it also offers keen observations about human character and relationships and Israeli society. Since the protagonist is an astrophysicist, it also contains some nice explanations about the nature of stars and constellations.

The description of the setting and the plot, which whizzes all over Haifa, give the reader a sense of the city. Mazya's characters are very eccentric but believable. One of Ilan's childhood friends, Anton, is now a detective in the Criminal Investigations Department. He is "short and sturdy, with the patience of a Bedouin" and his presence in Ilan's narrative keeps the tension rising. Ilan's mother, a unique fictional character, is the only one Ilan willingly allows to see behind his mask of competence and he instinctively turns to her when he is in trouble. She is insightful and very unsentimental. She is also weary and irritated by Ilan's neurotic behavior and his weakness.

Some readers will be put off Ilan as well. He is obsessional and self-absorbed and he doesn't so much experience reality as experience himself experiencing it. His narration has a tendency to drone on and he never stops to catch his breath or to begin a new paragraph, although his tale is broken into chapters.

Love Burns isn't for everyone. It isn't for a reader who wants a sparse narrative attached to a linear plot. It is for one who appreciates literary but lively writing and a sly plot with twists one doesn't expect. It has a protagonist who muses about reality while giving himself up to his fate. I not only laughed out loud, I cringed in pleasurable suspense. I highly recommend this unusual book to readers who enjoy sardonic humor and writers such as Robert Barnard, Lenny Kleinfeld, Kingsley Amis, Pete Dexter and Patrick McGinley. A reader doesn't come across a farcical literary thriller every day. I'm glad I kept one resolution because this is a gem.

Mack Baker: A Lost Prince of Crime Fiction?

The Material Witnesses take great pleasure in offering you a guest post from our good friend, Jonas Oldacre, a genius in ferreting out little-known gems of crime fiction:


Do you remember Mack Baker?

Largely forgotten today, Mack Baker was the author of Dead Dames Don't Dance and Bad Broads Don't Make Bail. These were his only books published, but in his diary he describes completing two others: Kittens Don't Kill Twice and Diamond Dolls Don't Die Easy. The manuscripts of these have not yet been found. There may have been more. In a 1963 letter to Agatha Christie he wrote that he was working on a series of crime novels to be called "Don't." Mrs. Christie is not believed to have replied, as she had never heard of him.

Dead Dames and Bad Broads were first serialized in Crimewave Magazine. Encouraged by their reception and knowing nothing of the publishing business, he sent the manuscripts to Oxford University Press. Disheartened by their rejection, he went rapidly downhill and was last heard of slinging hash in Hoboken, New Jersey. Dark Deeds Press, a small publishing house that specializes in rediscovering forgotten classics of crime fiction, will publish both titles in February 2012.

Here is an extract from Bad Broads Don't Make Bail:

I needed a drink. It was hot in the city, hot enough to melt the heart of a Congressman. I'd just finished a case. I'd spent a week around people for whom too much was not enough. I needed the drink to wash the sour taste of corruption out of my throat. I was heading back to my office, a couple of rooms in a sad, tired building, full of men and women who were going nowhere and had just begun to realize it. There was a massage parlor on the first floor that was on the level and in the red. The place was three blocks away from Main Street. Or maybe a world away.

The client was a society dame. Paris couture and the best figure money could buy. She wanted me to discover where her husband went when he dropped out of her soirées because of "too much work." It didn't take me long to find out that he wasn't snuggling up with some floozie, but just playing cards in the basement with the hired help. She was mad as hell. A divorce would cost her big. No judge in this town would give her alimony because her husband preferred a game of poker and a few beers to a cocktail party for Friends of the Symphony.

She'd started getting edgy about my fee. I picked up my bill, wrote two words on it and pushed it across her desk. "Pool . . . Guy." She paid.

Another day, another stinking case. Another drink. In this part of town, there were places on every corner of every street where a man could find something to help him forget. And maybe someone. Plenty of places, but I was making for one. They knew me there. They had what I needed.

I pushed open the door. A lot of people. Groups from the offices downtown, laughing too loud at the boss's jokes. Lovers gulping their drinks, eager to get back to their apartment. A girl was sitting alone at a table opposite the door. Slim, pretty, serious. She glanced up. I caught her eye and smiled. She started to smile, then stopped and looked away. She always did. I turned towards the bar. He saw me. He remembered me.

"Your usual?"

"Yeah. A tall extra foamy latte." I paused. "Soy milk."

* * * * *

Baker revisits this dark urban scenario in Dead Dames Don't Dance. Here is an extract:

It was midnight when she came to my office. I was sitting behind my desk, trying to find the answers to a couple of questions that had been haunting me for a week. I caught her perfume first; jasmine, with a faint note of Jack Daniels. I looked up. She stood in the doorway, a curtain of blonde hair shadowing her face. The black satin dress spelled class. The diamond necklace spelled money. I had a weakness for wealthy wayward women, for foxy full-figured femmes fatale in faux fur. I also had a weakness for alliteration. I looked at her. I didn't offer her a seat. The view was better this way. Her voice was seductive, like maple syrup on a pancake.

"A friend of mine, Lola, said that I could trust you with something dirty."

I remembered Lola. I would never forget Lola.

"How dirty?"

As she turned her head, I saw a dark bruise high on her cheek. Her mouth was soft and kissable, but her eyes were like ice.

"I want you to take out someone. I want you to take out Jeffrey Morgan III."

Jeffrey Morgan III. A husband? A lover?

"I'm going to Paris next week. It has to be done when I'm not here."

I thought for a moment. Take out Jeffrey. Yes, it was dirty; dirtier than anything I'd done up to now. I looked around my office; the broken windows, the bare floor. I was an ex-cop with alimony to pay, living in an apartment where the rats were more comfortable than I was. I'd take the job, however dirty. I had left my conscience in the Third Precinct with my badge.

She knew. She reached into her purse and took out a photograph.

"This is Jeffrey."

His expression was sullen and suspicious. And he was ugly. As ugly as sin. His nose flat against his face, below dark, bulging eyes.

A Pekinese.

"He needs to be taken out every morning in Central Park. My housekeeper will give you the details."

She paused.

"One more thing. I'm a responsible dog owner. You will pick up everything he leaves."

A dirty job. But somebody has to do it.

She turned and left. I could still smell the jasmine, but now the Jack Daniels was stronger.

I opened the drawer of my desk and took out a paper. I knew the answers now. Taking my pen, I wrote the right words in the right place at last:

10 Down: WOMAN

6 Across: TROUBLE

* * * * *

Thanks to Dark Deeds Press, crime aficionados have an opportunity to read the two surviving works of an undeservedly neglected master of the hard-boiled genre, Mack Baker.

If Dark Deeds succeeds in finding any more Mack Baker novels, readers of Read Me Deadly will receive an exclusive preview.

An Exclusive Mack Baker Preview

Stay tuned.

Best Books of 2011

I read very few books hot off the presses, since I like to keep the best of what I read, so I wait for the trade paperback in most cases. With these, I can store more for future rereading. So my best reads for 2011 include only a rare 2011 publication. I have not separated books into mystery and nonmystery, because great books transcend genre. These are the books that hit the target:

The best I read: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.

I started 2011 out in a good way when I read this book a year ago. The medical background of the book interested me, but I really was drawn in by the history of Ethiopia and I was even compelled to add to my knowledge of the geography and history of the area. I picked up Evelyn Waugh's Waugh in Abyssinia. I also read Verghese's book The Tennis Partner and highly recommend it.

Every Bitter Thing, by Leighton Gage, was another of my favorites. Mario Silva is at his best in this mystery. The title of the book is taken from the Bible: "To the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet" (Proverbs 27:7). There are bitter and sweet throughout this book: in the descriptions of Brazil, in the solving of the crime, as well as in the feelings one has when the last phrase is reached.

The book that swept me off my feet: In All My Sad Dreaming by John Caulfield.

This is a mystery set in Cape Town, South Africa, during a violent modern era. Captain James Black is a member of the Police Service and part of the serious violence unit. He is just leaving the hospital after having been there for a considerable time suffering from two gunshot wounds. The story is filled with musical references that go back to the '70s. The prose itself is musical in many ways. There is a tone of foreboding overlying In All My Sad Dreaming that reminds me of Alan Paton.

The best new-to-me series that I began in 2011: Timothy Hallinan's Poke Rafferty series, which begins with A Nail Through the Heart.

This series takes place in Bangkok, Thailand, and introduces us to a fine cast of characters who are making a life that is intended to obliterate all the poverty and evils of their past lives. At the end of the story, I felt I had a nail through my heart.

And coming in second is The Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney. This book has some subtle, sly digs that perhaps take an adult to appreciate.

The book that best tickled my funny bone was Christopher Moore’s The Stupidest Angel. This book has some broad, sometimes crude, humor but it was laugh-out-loud time for most of the story. The Diary of a Wimpy Kid came in second and I found Simon Brett’s Blotto, Twinks and the Ex-King's Daughter hilarious.

My favorite character was Walt Longmire in the Craig Johnson series. I really looked forward to reading Junkyard Dogs and I was not disappointed.

The book I most looked forward to reading in 2011 and the only book I bought before the printing press cooled was Chris Grabenstein’s Rolling Thunder. You just can’t beat John Ceepak and his partner Danny Boyle for a solid mystery with a soupçon of humor.

The best book I read that I chose by its cover was The Definition of Wind by Ellen Block. It was a perfect summer read.

The best book I finally read years after publication: Beau Geste by P.C. Wren.

The book that took me the longest to read was Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

The book that stirred me the most was Bamboo and Blood by James Church. At a time when we are celebrating holidays characterized by plenty of food I think of this book and the people in this country, North Korea, who treat each other to a cup of hot water––which they serve cold, because they have no fuel.

This is the third in the Inspector O series, but it is a prequel beginning in the winter of 1997. North Korea is in the midst of a famine that is devastating the country. The very young and the very old are dying and only people of strong will are likely to survive until the spring. The country is hiding its desperation from the rest of the world, so it is a great surprise to Inspector O when he is asked to play host to an Israeli agent who is able to come and go seemingly at will into society. Beautifully written by an author using a pen name, James Church is the pseudonym of a former member of a western intelligence organization.

The book that awakened my righteous spirit the most was Desert Wives by Betty Webb. The book begins: "What do you call a dead, sixty-eight-year-old polygamist? In the case of my thirteen-year-old client, you call him your fiancée."

The book that surprised me the most was one that seemed to land on my door by itself, and I loved it: The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras by J. Michael Orenduff. I immediately put all of his books on my wish list. The main character makes a living in the Southwest by finding native American pots that are salable. Hubert is a likeable protagonist who lives on huevos rancheros and margaritas and is studying Pythagoras in order to figure out how the ancient potters could manage to space 17 design elements evenly around a pot. This pot thief studies Ptolemy and other great scientists, so you can always brush up a bit on your science when reading Orenduff.

Since 2012 promises to be an excellent reading year, I am always on the look out for the special books. I would rather hear your opinions than look at any best-seller list. The date of publication is of no interest to me, because my feeling is that just because something is new that doesn't make it better!

Let's Not Put Off Reading Something Extraordinary

It's January 2nd, time for us procrastinators to begin working on a list of resolutions. No, no, not for 2009. Let's not waste any more time fretting about THAT list. Let's grip our pencils and work on 2012. Sister Mary Murderous, with her series challenge, has given us a timely shove in a good direction. Fellow dilly dalliers, this is a situation almost unique in our chronically late lives. Right now, we're not too late. Let's pick something extraordinary to read.

What will it be? A series we've always wanted to try but somehow never got around to starting? (Ahem. Let's not start down the road of self-recrimination. We're working on our long-standing tardiness now.) A series we read long ago that is now half shrouded by the fog of time? Will we explore a mystery genre we've never or rarely tried before? An author highly recommended by someone whose opinion we trust? Books set in a country we're curious about but have never visited? A book set in our hometown to see if a writer's insights agree with our own? Something that appears on a list of "the year's best" that sounds too good to miss?

I'll start with that last question first and work backwards. (There's something fitting about that for a procrastinator.) Here are some books appearing on "best of 2011" lists that I plan to read (and WILL read because they're on my list of resolutions):

The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht. "At 24, Obreht became the youngest writer on The New Yorker’s coveted '20 Under 40' list. Her debut novel examines what happens when a young doctor in a Balkan country investigates her grandfather’s mysterious death" (Miami Herald).

Plugged by Eoin Colfer. "From the author of the 'Artemis Fowl' series, a bang-up crime novel for adults starring an Irish bouncer at a seedy casino in New Jersey" (Washington Post).

Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante. "This spooky thriller about a retired orthopedic surgeon suffering from dementia is both a poetic portrait and a page-turner" (Chicago Tribune).

See, that wasn't so hard! I'm sure you can find plenty of books that sound good to you on "best-of" lists. Try major newspapers. Ask your friendly independent bookseller. Or look at Sister Mary Murderous's list in the older posts of Read Me Deadly. In the next few weeks the rest of us will be posting more.

On to books set in my home state of Colorado. I've read John Dunning's Cliff Janeway series about a cop-turned-bookseller who pursues crime and first editions in Denver (Janeway investigates the death of a book scout in Booked to Die, first in the series). Learning about rare books while reading Dunning's books is as much fun as solving his mysteries. I've also read some of Stephen White's thrillers with psychologist Alan Gregory and attorney Lauren Crowder in Boulder. I liked Manner of Death, in which people connected with Gregory's clinical residency are killed. I'm now tempted to go white-water rafting on the Arkansas River near Salida with Beth Groundwater's guide Mandy Tanner in Deadly Currents.

I'll turn now to places I'd love to visit. South America? My books have taken me to several South American countries: Brazil with Leighton Gage's Mario Silva and Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza's Inspector Espinosa. Argentina with Ernesto Mallo's Superintendent "Perro" Lascano, a police detective in Buenos Aires during Argentina's military rule in the late 1970s. In the first book, Needle in a Haystack, Lascano investigates how three bodies ended up on a river bank. Juan de Recacoechea took me to Bolivia in American Visa, a book I talked about in a previous post. What else could I read set in South America? I'd love any suggestions.

On to India. What else could I read set there? Perhaps further visits with Paul Mann's George Sansi (first book is Season of the Moonsoon, which finds Sansi investigating a Bollywood corpse) or Tarquin Hall's Vish Puri, who began a detective agency in Delhi called Most Private Investigators Ltd. We meet Puri for the first time in The Case of the Missing Servant, as he works for a client suspected of killing a maid who had disappeared.

I've never been to Hong Kong and Georgette recommends William Marshall's highly imaginative (read "bizarre") Yellowthread Street Station series by William Marshall, starting with Yellowthread Street. I've traveled across Asia with John P. Marquand's Mr. Moto. In Southeast Asia, I recommend the Poke Rafferty books set in Thailand by Timothy Hallinan (first is A Nail Through the Heart) and books involving Sonchai Jitpleecheep, John Burdett's Bangkok police detective. I've enjoyed books by Laura Joh Rowland set in Japan. I'd like to try other books set in Japan and perhaps Read Me Deadly readers could suggest some.

Let's head from Asia toward Europe.  I'd love to read the Erast Fandorin series set in 19th-century St. Petersburg, Russia by Boris Akunin or complete the Arkady Renko series by Martin Cruz Smith. I'd like to try a book by Czech writer Josef Škvorecký or read a Jana Matinova book set in Bratislava, Slovakia by Michael Genelin. Has anyone read Zygmunt Miloszewski's book Entanglement, set in Warsaw, Poland?

I'd like to read all of the Quirke books by Benjamin Black (John Banville), Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor books and the latest Stuart Neville book set in Belfast and featuring Jack Lennon.

I don't have to travel far from home if I read David Carkeet's darkly comic From Away or Louise Penny's Three Pines police procedural series set in Quebec, recommended by Sister Mary Murderous. What other books are suggested by people whose book opinions I like? I know that Maltese Condor likes the Walt Longmire books about a sheriff in Absaroka, Wyoming, and Periphera likes George Dawes Green, author of The Caveman's Valentine. I'm eying his book Ravens, about a couple of two-bit crooks who set up a hostage situation. I'm also intrigued by writer Jonathan Lethem. Both Periphera and Georgette liked his Motherless Brooklyn, involving a protagonist with Tourette's syndrome who investigates the death of his boss. Georgette likes George P. Pelecanos, whose hardboiled books are set in Washington D.C. I've only read a couple of them but that was enough to make me want to read more.

I could try more forensics books. Other than Postmortem, the first Kate Scarpetta book by Patricia Cornwell, I haven't read many of those. Perhaps a book by Kathy Reichs? Who else? I haven't read many books of gothic suspense other than Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and The Moonstone, the famous Victorian novel involving the disappearance of a priceless gem; and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, in which Maxim de Winter's new wife tries to decipher the puzzles of Manderley and the death of Rebecca, wife No. 1. These are some genres that deserve more reading. I highly recommend the above books to people who haven't yet read them.

It's been years since I read Raymond Chandler's classics. His Philip Marlowe books, set in Los Angeles, are too good to be forgotten. Dashiell Hammett's books and short stories are fading from my memory. Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey and Margery Allingham's Albert Campion. The Nigel Strangeway series by Nicholas Blake. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Martin Beck series. Arthur Upfield's Inspector “Bony” Bonaparte books, set in Australia. Agatha Christie's Jane Marple. All of these series could use my re-reading.

Series I've meant to try but haven't yet include Cornelia Read's Madeline Dare books (the first is A Field of Darkness), the Charlotte “Charlie” McNally series about an investigative reporter by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Prime Time is first), the Erlendur Sveinsson books by Arnaldur Indriðason and the books featuring Omar Yussef Sirhan by Matt Beynon Rees. I'd love to hear your opinions on these or any other suggestions you might have.

These are some ideas for books to read in 2012. Of course, I could see if some of them are already on my shelves here at home. But searching through my books already waiting to be read will have to wait for another day. I'll procrastinate about that. Right now I'm not going to wait to write my list of books I resolve to read in 2012. And you shouldn't either. See you on the Challenges page of Read Me Deadly!