#spinepoetry

April is Poetry Month, and the Hennepin County Library system is running a hashtag program called #spinepoetry in conjunction with Instagram, of all things. (I have heard Instagram called Twitter for the illiterate, which makes for an odd association with a library. Maybe it's because of that that it's just about the only major social media platform I haven't joined.) Anyway, the idea is to create a poem by stacking books, so that the titles are the text of the poem. Then you post a picture of it on Instagram with the hashtag. Here is a good one my friend Lia did on Facebook (also the picture above), although she didn't use the hashtag nor (I think) Instagram. But who says you have to follow the rules? It's just fun for us booky/creative types to do stuff like this.

Things that make a difference to ones literary experience

I have been experimenting with CD audiobooks from the library. I had a good experience with a John LeCarre novel, Our Kind of Traitor, narrated by Robin Sachs. I have fading hearing, but I was able to hear everything just fine with a set of moderately-priced noise-cancelling headphones plugged into an old, cheap CD off-brand "walkman". I mostly listened to it on a brief out-of-town break I took to my friend Lulu's house in Chisago City, lying in one of her luxurious recliners, with Koby sleeping in my lap. Bliss, for the most part. My ears did hurt after a while, and it was darned cold that weekend and we were staying in the basement, which although also luxurious, is heated only by a roaring woodstove. So the temperature was rather uneven, and then I got interrupted from time to time to eat or be sociable or get in the hot tub (ho, hum) or take Koby out to relieve himself in the snow. Sometimes it's hard livin' the easy life. But no, it was a great, a much-needed break. I anjoyed the visit, and Lulu is a wonderful hostess.

Having enjoyed that audiobook a lot, the next time I was at the library, I got a few more. I just now tried to listen to my second audiobook, The Mystery Woman, by Amanda Quick, narrated by Justine Eyre. This was not such a good experience. Same piece of equipment, now lying on my bed, which is where I finished the LeCarre after I got back from my little trip. But first, there was a fault in disc 1, and I couldn't listen to it at all. Disc 2 played OK, but I only listened about two minutes before giving up in disgust. And this is the topic of my post. It makes a huge difference who the narrator is! And I do not like Justine Eyre, although I don't think, after Googling her, that I have seen her in anything. She is an extremely beautiful, if distinctly unfriendly-looking, young woman, but that could be because she has also been a model. (Or she could have been a model for the same reason she looks so distant and miserable, who knows?) Canadian by birth, raised in the Phillipines, educated in the UK, she is described as a classically trained actor. Her voice, how shall I say this? is horrible. Cut glass, but a little bit too much so, with backnotes of a suburban midwestern Canadian. A timbre somewhere between brittle and wheezy, like it's been overbaked on cigarettes and coke, and yet at the same time, flat in that very young way of very bored and snooty youngsters. I'm sorry, Justine, but I could not get past my appalled fascination with your ridiculous voice enough to even hear the content. Which I would probably like if I were reading it myself.

Friends of the Roosevelt Library Facebook page

I finally posted something on the Friends of the Roosevelt Library page. In fact, I got carried away and posted two things at once.  That second one is a share of an event sponsored by the parent group, Friends of the Hennepin County Library The links below are to three authors we read in the Adult Mystery Book Club.

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Roosevelt Library Book Club

I have been appointed to the board of the Friends of the Roosevelt Library. There has not been an election of board members because we are the first one. The group just got started this spring, in time to host the Grand Re-opening on June 1st. We just held our first Book Sale last Saturday and made $550 with a five hour sale, which is not too bad for just starting out. Our next project is to get some book clubs going. We may have Teen Book Clubs later on, but we're starting out with two Adult Book Clubs. Mine is just called Adult Book Club and it is being kicked off as a follow-up to the One Minneapolis, One Read event, which is October 3rd. Everyone in Minneapolis who wants to take part reads the same book - A Choice of Weapons, by Gordon Parks. Then your local library or your school if you're a student will be holding a discussion session. At Roosevelt we will announce that one month hence will be the first Adult Book Club meeting. The first book is The March by E. L. Doctorow (reviewed way down below) and the meeting will be November 7 at 6 pm. The second book will be Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and that one will meet the first Thursday in December, also at 6 pm.  The other book club starting out in November at Roosevelt will be the Mystery Book Club. It will meet the first Saturday of the month, and you can find out more details in the library.

Launch of Always a New Leaf

On Sunday, the 7th of July, 2013, I launched this blog as a successor to my previous book blog Deborama's Book Reviews and Store.  I am moving most of the stuff from the old blog to here, with its original publication dates (mostly). But the reason I need a new blog is that the old one was an Amazon Affiliate, but it was a UK Amazon Affiliate. It hasn't earned any money in several years, and I no longer have access to the email address the Amazon Associates account was linked to.
Just a navigational point and a style point : below this launch post are my copied blogposts from Deborama's Book Reviews and Store, but without the graphics of the books or the monetized links. Just above this post will be one or more posts with loads of book links if you want to buy the books from whatever US store is my new affiliate. That's the navigational point. The style point has to do with English spelling. The posts I wrote in England have all British spellings. The ones I wrote after repatriating to America have all American spellings. That's just how it has to be; deal with it.
Another style point, but blogging style rather than writing style is that the relaunch blog will be more closely tied into Bookcrossing, Goodreads, Facebook and other social media. Also the Hennepin County Library system, my position on Friends of the Roosevelt Library, the Little Free Libraries that cover my neighborhood, and my condominium-based book club and writing club. Follow me if you love reading.

Two Women - A PI and A Vicar - Two Mysteries

Here are two more books that I bought at Once Upon A Crime in Minneapolis.
In the Bleak Midwinter, by Julia Spencer-Fleming, is a first crime novel, featuring one of those unlikely buddy pairs that can make detective stories either really entertaining or cringingly bad, depending mostly on the writer's skill with dialogue and narrative touch with relationships. (There is an obvious intention to start a "series" here, including a taster of the forthcoming second novel.) This writer is neither the best nor the worst I have encountered, but nearer the top than the bottom, so, so far so good. The pair is a newly appointed female Episcopalian priest and a married, male, non-religious local police chief. The scene is set to bring them together by a newborn baby being left in the church porch, and the attempts to find the mother, the father or the truth about what happened to them. Extra tension is added to the relationship by a small romantic attachment on both sides, and needs to be filled that are not being met by the wife on one hand or the vocation on the other. Not at all bad for a first timer.
The Big Dig, on the other hand, is one in a long-established and well-respected series by crime author Linda Barnes. The female PI, six-foot tall, red-headed, ex-cop Carlotta Carlyle of Boston, is very much in the V. I. Warshawski/Kinsey Mullhone vein. The Big Dig is a real project, the massive engineering feat of putting all the freeways in downtown Boston underground, the "central artery tunnel", which is the largest modern engineering project in the world. And a great setting for a mysterious death that may be a murder.

Two obscure British mysteries

For some reason I ended up reading two little-known British detective stories, both from the Nottingham Public Library, both set in the late Victorian period. [rant mode on] It annoys me no end that books like these are not available in ordinary bookstores, at least not if you don't already know about them and want them enough to order them. All the bookstores in the UK seem to be clones of one horrible bookstore, with five hundred copies of the latest Harry Potter, and lots of books about sports that I care nothing about, and loads of celebrity chef cookbooks. (And in fact I like celebrity chef cookbooks, but I don't like depressing bookstores with nothing of interest to browse.) In other words, I rarely go into even a large "good" bookstore in the UK (like Waterstones) and FIND SOMETHING, as in something that I haven't heard of before but that I am compelled to buy and read. In some ways that's good - I spend less money impulse buying, but, look, I am going to read the same amount anyway, I am just enjoying it less. [rant mode off]
The Detective Wore Silk Drawers (Peter Lovesey) refers to boxing shorts (I thought it was going to have some erotic element to it, but any that it has is only incidental to the plot.) It is quite interesting though, and you learn a lot about the sport of bare-knuckle fighting which was made illegal in the UK in the 1870s but persisted for a long time after. You also learn the origins of such expressions as "come up to scratch" and "throw in the sponge" and "throw his hat in the ring".
I didn't realise that An Orkney Murder, by Alanna Knight, was also set in late Victorian times until I started reading it. It features a way-ahead-of-her-time Scottish female private investigator. It also features an archaeological dig in the Orkneys and dark domestic secrets in a Scottish family. In the end, I got rather irritated at this book, for a reason that often applies when I am reading novels by contemporary writers set in the Victorian period. They just sound far too contemporary and therefore anachronistic. It is always a problem when writing a story set in the past to know how the people would sound, their diction, their colloquialisms, their social markers, all that. The bigger problem with a Victorian setting is that there are so many wonderful extant Victorian writers. I have read so much Conan Doyle, Dickens, Trollope and the like, not to mention my favourite childhood novels Little Women and Black Beauty, which I must have read 100 times each, that it is a very rare historical novel from that period that doesn't sound horribly false to me. But this one was egregiously so. But if you don't have my problem, you may be able to enjoy it, if only for the plot (which was only pretty good) and the main character.
The Lovesey book was, for me, a far better read, even though I have little interest in the Victorian London underworld and bare-knuckle fighting, and lots of interest in Victorian Orkney and archaeology and women private detectives. Just goes to show what a huge difference writing style, careful research and natural talent can make.
Update from 2013: I just finished another Peter Lovesey book featuring the same detectives. It's called Wobble To Death and centers around the sport of marathon walking. These bizarre sporting events featured men getting around a track as fast as they could for as many hours per day as they could in a period of six continuous days. They all start at the same time and finish at the same time, and whoever finishes and has the most total miles logged wins. 

Books I read in 2003 as part of Nottingham Public Library virtual book club

Editor's Note: This post is a collection of separate posts from the very beginning of my now defunct book blog, Deborama's Books. I wrote these posts in England, and while I resided in England, I spelled things in the English manner. I have decided to leave the spelling as it is. It's not pretentiousness, just consistency.

War Crimes for the Home, by Liz Jensen
Gloria is very old, and everyone assumes that it is senility that makes her so cantankerous, and possibly forgetful.
But during the war, Gloria was young and pretty and in love. After the war she has a beloved son, who is the spitting image of the handsome groom in her wartime wedding picture. So what happened to that dashing young American who left her with a child? And why can't she remember? Or does she remember and just refuse to face it?
Now her son is middle-aged, and he has found a slightly older, middle-aged woman who believes she is his sister. As the two of them visit Gloria in the old-age pensioners' home and try to ferret out the truth, a strange story keeps coming up: a story about Gloria and her American beau and a hypnotist and his pretty, but ruthless, assistant. . .
War Crimes for the Home is unique, engaging, and oddly uplifting, with its coarse humour, its unflinching story, its flawed but lovable heroine and its wonderfully twisting exposition. I recommend it heartily.



The Death of Vishnu, by Manil Suri
Vishnu is dying on the staircase of a crowded apartment building in Bombay. He has been living on the staircase, a coveted location, and paying for the privilege by running errands for the more favoured residents. As he lies in a fevered condition, two worlds swirl around him, the real world and the dream world of his memories and fantasies.
The real world is the tiny but populous world of the apartment block, where a man mourns his dead wife, two housewives fight over their shared kitchen, a Muslim householder dreams of founding a new religion to unite Hindus and Muslims, and his son schemes with the daughter of Hindu neighbours to elope in a style befitting the Bollywood movies she loves.
Vishnu's dream world is also full of wishes and longings, and memories of his love for the beautiful but (almost always) unavailable Padmini. Vishnu's mother comes back to him in memory, reminding him he is a god, and he begins to believe that he is. As the apartment residents step past Vishnu's semi-conscious body, only sure he is not dead because of his occasional stirrings or faint cries, he becomes a touchstone for their own compassion, beliefs and self-images. This is a strange and beautiful story, beautifully told.



The Rotters' Club, by Jonathan Coe
I imagine that anyone who grew up in Britain in the late 1970s would really identify with this book. There were parts that I really identified with myself, even though I grew up in the US, in the south, and about 10 years earlier. But then there are the cultural milestones, as opposed to personal ones, and in the milieu of this book, the five protagonists are beset by the demise of the industrial base in the Midlands and the IRA terror campaign, among other things. Whereas my high school years were stamped (upon!) by the virulent white opposition to racial desegregation and the Vietnam War. So, not so different, really.
The protagonists are a gang of four schoolmates and the older sister of one of them. (The Rotter's Club of the title is Ben Trotter and his beloved big sister, Lois, whose names are of course mutated by classmates into Bent Rotter and Lowest Rotter.) The other three boys are Anderton, the class-conscious one whose father is a shop steward, Harding, the edgy rebel, and Chase, the aspiring journalist.
The four boys are trying to form a band for most of the book, and it self-destructs as soon as it is formed. One boy goes to London and gets sexually initiated by a posh young woman several years his senior. The shop steward is in the throes of an affair that can only end badly, and he is trying hard to keep his family in the dark. Another boy's mother has an abortive affair with a teacher. Industrial tension simmers, somebody gets blown up in a pub, somebody else spends several years mute because of the loss of a loved one. There is a lot happening in the book and you get swept up in it, but it is sort of hard to keep track, the cast of characters is so large and lifelike.



Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters
This book is all about suspense . . . and lesbian sub-text, of course. Therefore, I must stop myself from saying too much, as I do not want to create even a hint of a spoiler.
The story concerns two girls. Sue Trinder is brought up as an orphan in Lant Street, London, amongst petty thieves and fences and con artists, sheltered somewhat by her unofficial guardian, Mrs. Sucksby. Maud Lilly's earliest memories are coming to consciousness in a madhouse, and then after the death of her inmate mother, being given to her creepy uncle who lives in a grand but isolated house. Maud's uncle uses her as a clerical assistant in his shadowy literary enterprise. Sue is persuaded by a con-man she knows as "Gentleman" to pose as a lady's maid to Maud in order to swindle her out of her inheritance. But nothing is as it seems . . .
If you love a good mystery, or a Victorian romance, or if you have lesbian tendencies and can take a really long tease if the culmination is worth it, then this is a book for you.



Buddha Da, by Anne Donovan
This is the first novel, but the second book, by Anne Donovan, and is something I read as part of a Nottingham Public Library programme called Book Chains. (Donovan's first book was a highly regarded short story collection.)
The most noticeable thing about this book, which presented quite a challenge to me as an American, is that it is written in a Glaswegian Scots dialect, except when the few non-Glaswegians are speaking. It is told from three points of view, Jim, his wife and his 12 year old daughter Anne Marie.
Jim, for reasons not clear even to him, decides to take up meditation with some Tibetan lamas in the Buddhist Centre in Glasgow. As he progresses on his baffling spiritual journey, he gives up meat, alcohol, and sex with his beloved wife, Liz. Liz is caring for her ailing mother, wishing she could have another child before she is too old, and just trying to get on with life, and understandably sees Jim's behaviour as self-centred in the extreme. Anne Marie has the most adult attitude of the three of them, and is carrying on with growing up, ditching old friends, picking up new ones, and producing an award winning CD combining Latin chant with Tibetan Buddhist chanting and Indian house music. In the end, it is the body rather than the spirit that resolves all these conundrums, leading the little family to a whole new spiritual plane. This is a lovely and engaging book, highly recommended.



Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
This book is one everyone is talking about, possibly because it won a prestigious award (the Man Booker). It is very absorbing, and the main character is one of the most likeable in all the fiction I have ever read (and that's a lot.) I don't know if the last two chapters are supposed to be a surprise, so I won't say anything specific about them, except to say that there was something of a let-down for me in the unresolvedness of the ending. It didn't seem right to me that a book so drenched with humanity and wisdom should have this little escape clause in it (if that's what it was.) Still, I strongly recommend this book.



River of Darkness, by Rennie Airth
Editor's Note: I did read The Blood-Dimmed Tide.
River of Darkness, published in 2000 to an enthusiastic critical reception, is noted for "blend[ing] the traditions of the golden age mystery with elements of the contemporary psychological suspense novel." The story is set in 1921 and concerns a psychopathic serial killer and a Scotland Yard detective inspector. Both are survivors of the Great War. The detective inspector went into the war as an idealist and came out the other end fighting against cynicism and deeply scarred, with no expectation of ever being happy again. The killer went into the war already a psychopath and found a hellish paradise in war and a vocation that, with a few grisly props and a reliance on his training, will last him for life. From this chilling premise, Aird builds an absorbing tale of a cat-and-mouse game with enough twists to keep anyone guessing. The story is lightened up with a young novice constable's awkward coming of age in the force, and his hero worship of the main character, DI Madden, as well as a redeeming love interest and a few brilliant comic touches. There is a sequel, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, set 11 years later, which I plan to read soon.