Review 2693: #ReadIndies! Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands

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I didn’t plan for Reading Independent Publishers Month, but it seems I have at least one book that fits the challenge, this one!

Update: It turns out that Particular Books is an imprint of Penguin/Random House, so this book doesn’t qualify for #ReadIndies after all!

I have to say that it’s seldom I get so much enjoyment from a nonfiction book. I found this one original and really interesting.

Born in East Germany, Judith Schalansky explains that she got interested in maps because she thought she would never be able to travel. For our enjoyment, she has put together this atlas of some of the most remote islands in the world.

Starting with end papers showing the world map and each island’s location, she arranges the sections by ocean. For each island, the first two pages show its data—name, ownership, size, and number of residents. Then its distance is shown from three other locations to give a sense of how isolated it is. Then there is a timeline of a few events related to the island. On the opposite page is a topographical map.

On the next two pages is a story about the island. This may be anything from a description of how desolate it is to a description of a native custom, an ecological disaster, or some other event.

The edition is lovely, with its orange cover, its edges turquoise, the color used on the maps for water.

It’s not often that I find a book interesting enough to read passages out loud to my husband, but the poor guy had to listen to several from this book.

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Review 2692: Death at the Sign of the Rook

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Jackson Brodie is in his 70s now but still working as a private detective. He has taken a case from Hazel and Ian Padgett, who claim their mother Dorothy’s caregiver, Melanie Hope, stole a painting from her after she died, a Renaissance painting that is probably valuable. But Jackson finds something shifty about the Padgetts, not to mention that the painting was hung behind Dorothy’s bedroom door.

Periodically, we depart this story to look in on the community at Barton Makepeace, an estate so encumbered that the new Lord Milton, Piers, is turning part of the house into a hotel and hosting murder mystery weekends. Piers’s son Como has stolen a valuable Renoir to pay his debts, and now Lady Milton’s valued housekeeper, Sophie, has disappeared with one of the remaining valuable paintings, a Turner. Jackson’s friend Sergeant Reggie Carter has been called in on the case, but Jackson starts to think that Sophie and Melanie may be the same woman.

As usual with a Jackson Brodie book, the story meanders around among several characters, especially inhabiting the surrounds of Barton Makepeace, including a one-legged wounded warrior who is having trouble finding his place and a vicar who has lost his faith and his voice.

We learn from the opening that this novel ends in a parody of a country house mystery with the characters trapped in the stately home during the murder mystery play in a snowstorm—oh, and an escaped murderer is on the loose.

My only caveat about this enjoyable novel is that I can no longer remember the plot of the previous book (from five years ago) to understand several references to it. Atkinson’s mysteries aren’t typical of the genre, but they are fun.

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Transcription

Review 2691: The Lighthearted Quest

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I started out Ann Bridge’s Julia Probyn series in the middle after reading two of her nonseries books, which I’ll say right now I preferred. The Lighthearted Quest is the first in the series, and if you can ignore some 1950s attitudes, is a fairly entertaining travel/adventure story.

Julia is a reporter who is able to pick her stories because she has her own income. She is a beautiful girl who has men following her around for most of the novel, but she is described several times as looking like a dumb blonde, which, as she is not at all dumb, does her some service in this adventure, but is also rather offensive.

Julia is summoned to her aunt’s house in Scotland because her uncle has died and so has the man who has been running the estate. Her cousin Edina has been doing the job in the meantime, but she is a highly paid advertising executive, and the family needs her salary in these hard post-war times. The family has lost track of Colin, the heir, who went abroad more than a year ago, reportedly sailing from port to port on the Mediterranean selling oranges. He hasn’t responded to any letters or advertisements asking him to return. So, a family friend, Mrs. Hathaway, has suggested they ask Julia to look for him, as, since she is a reporter, she’s allowed to take more money out of the country than the roughly $300 a year allowed to most Brits at the time.

Julia agrees, and the first thing she finds out is that nine months before, Colin had his bank account transferred to a bank in Casablanca. At this point, her bank informant, who had previously been very helpful, shuts up and advises her not to pursue it. Julia finds it interesting both that the transfer was allowed by the bank and that her source has dried up.

Finding that the best way to Morocco is to take a cargo boat, Julia departs. It’s not until she is telling her story to the first mate, Mr. Reeder, that she realizes her cousin is probably involved in smuggling (something I thought of right away and wondered why she didn’t).

Julia has booked to Tangier, which was listed as the ship’s first stop, but at the last minute it got a load for Casablanca, so she gets off there. She has left with the names of some contacts, but everywhere she goes, people either know nothing or get cagey.

The novel becomes a sort of travelogue as Julia goes from city to city—Casablanca, Tangier, Fez, Marrakesh—following up scanty leads and shocking various people with how much she’s figured out. She also takes a job on a Phoenician archaeology site so she won’t run out of money, as the search takes much longer than she expected. Near the beginning, she even sees Colin from a distance standing on a rooftop with a red-haired man but is unable to get to him.

Because her explanation of her search is not taken at face value, Julia finds herself being followed, and there are hints of a Cold War theme that is much more prominent in the other books in the series.

If you can put up with Julia calling a group of gay men “pansies” more than once and some patronizing attitudes toward the locals along with a discussion of what great things the French have done for Morocco that would probably send shivers down the spine of any Moroccans, the book makes quite a good adventure. What Colin is up to is patently ridiculous, but that is really a MacGuffin. And there’s a romance for Cousin Edina as well as a hint of one for Julia, and a bit of peril. Quite entertaining.

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Review 2690: The Last Word

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The Last Word is technically the latest Harbinder Kauer novel, although judging by the list of previous books, Griffiths isn’t calling the series by her name, and she is only peripheral to the investigation. Instead, this novel returns to characters who appeared five years ago in The Postscript Murders. This put me off a bit, because I had no memory at all of these characters and had to look up which book they were in, yet Griffiths clearly expects us to remember them.

The characters are Edwin, a gay man in his 80s; Natalka, a young Ukrainian immigrant; and Benedict, Natalka’s boyfriend, who used to be a monk. Natalka runs a care-giving business, but since the events of the previous book, she has also opened a detective agency, and Edwin is her partner. Benedict runs a coffee shop.

Although the death of Melody Chambers has been found to be of natural causes, her daughters hire Natalka to investigate: Minnie and Harmony are convinced their stepfather, Alan Warner, killed Melody by replacing her blood pressure medicine, and they produce as proof a snippet that sounds like she was afraid for her life. The only problem is that Melody was a writer, so the snippet could be part of a novel.

Edwin is an obituary reader, so he has already noticed the death of Malcolm Collins, an obituary writer. As they look into things further, they begin to notice that several writers have died, and they all seem to be linked to a writers’ retreat at Battle. So, Edwin and Benedict sign up for the retreat. On the retreat, another participant, Sue, drowns in the pond. Her fiancé had died a few years before.

I think Griffiths depends a little too much on our memories of these characters to develop them further, and I didn’t have any, although of course things are going on in their private lives. I felt either that I didn’t know them very well or that I was relatively indifferent to them. Also, there are so many suspects in this case that I ended up not even trying to guess what was going on.

I’m beginning to think I’m over Griffiths. She ended the series I liked best, and I just haven’t been that interested in her other ones.

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Review 2689: Jane Austen in 41 Objects

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Oxford historian Kathryn Sutherland has provided an unusual glimpse of Jane Austen in Jane Austen in 41 Objects. It of course explores how little we know of Jane Austen, even to not having a proper portrait of her. In the book, Sutherland assembles 41 objects that have some connection to Austen and discusses each object and its relevance. These objects extend from things she actually touched or owned, like the table she wrote at, her pelisse, or a lock of her hair, to contemporary items such as the check stub of her publisher showing a payment, a silhouette of her mother made in honor of her birth, to more modern objects such as Colin Firth’s “wet” shirt or illustrations of costumes from the first stage production of Pride and Prejudice. Some of them are touching.

The Introduction to the book is scholarly and sometimes opaque. I was hoping as I read it that the body of the book wasn’t like that, and it was not. It was very readable except for a few sentences in the last chapter that get a little esoteric.

The format of each short chapter is to show the photo of the object, tell what is known about it, and in the last paragraph quickly describe its provenance and where it is located now.

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Classics Club Spin #43

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It’s time for another Classics Club Spin. To participate, post a numbered list of 20 books from your Classics Club list (here’s mine) before Sunday, February 8th. Classics Club will announce a number on that day, and that determines the book to read before the 29th of March.

I think I’ve participated in every spin since I became a Classic Club member. At this date, I have just eight books on my list, so I’ll be repeating to get 20:

  1. The Tavern Knight by Raphael Sabatini
  2. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  3. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  4. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de la Fayette
  5. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
  6. Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress by Frances Burney
  7. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  8. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  9. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  10. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  11. Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress by Frances Burney
  12. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
  13. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de la Fayette
  14. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  15. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  16. The Tavern Knight by Raphael Sabatini
  17. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Duma
  18. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  19. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de la Fayette
  20. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare

Review 2688: What Happened to Nina?

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We pretty much know what happened to Nina Fraser from the first chapter. That’s not the purpose of this book, which is a fairly big departure from McTiernan’s previous ones. For one thing, it’s set in Vermont instead of Ireland. And it is darker.

Nina has been dating Simon since she was 16, but now that they’re going to different colleges, things aren’t going as well. When Simon comes home from Northwestern, he doesn’t understand that Nina needs to study and help out in her parents’ B&B. And he’s been getting rough with her.

Simon talks Nina into spending a few days at his parents’ vacation property. They are both athletic, and they can hike and climb even though it’s winter. But Nina takes a fall when they are climbing, and she believes Simon let go of his end of the rope when she was rappelling. So, when they get back to the house, she breaks up with him.

Leanne, Nina’s mother, begins to worry when Nina doesn’t return on schedule and she can’t contact her by phone or text. Andy, Leanne’s husband, thinks Nina may just have decided to stay longer, but then they learn that Simon returned a few days before. He has told his parents Nina was sleeping around, so they broke up and he left her at the house Saturday morning. But that doesn’t make sense to Leanne and Andy. So, they go to the police, and Matthew Wright gets the case.

Simon’s parents realize that Simon is going to be suspected if Nina doesn’t turn up. So, after Nina’s parents make a plea for help on TV, Simon’s father Rory gets his PR campaign to “muddy the waters” by doing a smear campaign against the Frasers, implying that Leanne doesn’t love her daughters and that Andy, Nina’s stepfather, is a pedophile.

And that’s just the beginning. A lot of the novel is about misuse of power by Simon’s wealthy parents, who will do anything to protect Simon. It’s also about how much worse such a situation can be with social media involved. The novel is billed as a thriller, which it is not, but it certainly makes compelling reading.

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WWW Wednesday!

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It’s the first Wednesday of the month, so it’s time for WWW Wednesday, an idea I borrowed from David Chazan, The Chocolate Lady, who borrowed it from someone else. For this feature, I report

  • What I am reading now
  • What I just finished reading
  • What I intend to read next

This is something you can participate in, too, if you want, by leaving comments about what you’ve been reading or plan to read.

What I Am Reading Now

I just started reading the biography Oscar Wilde by Sheridan Morley. This book was kindly sent to me for review by Dean Street Press. I find Wilde a fascinating personality, so I’m hoping to gain some insight from this novel.

What I Just Finished Reading

I read A Fortunate Man by Henrik Pontoppidan for the Pontoppidan Review-Along in March. By the last few days, I felt as if I had been reading it forever (it’s more than 800 pages long), and I’ll have a lot to say about it in my review. It is a vast novel that attempts to bring in most of the important philosophies and currents affecting Danish life in the mid-nineteenth century.

What I Will Read Next

If I don’t read If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery next, I’ll have to send it back to the library unread! It’s one of only two books I need to read to finish the Booker Prize shortlist for 2022. I’m reading it for my Booker Prize project; hence, I have no idea what it’s about.

Review 2687: The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

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In terms of the horror story it’s labeled as, The Empusium may end like one, but it spends more time building up to its climax than on the horrible part. Or maybe horror is the attitudes toward women expressed by the men.

Mieczyslaw Woznicz is a very young Polish engineering student who arrives in a remote mountainous town in Silesia for treatment for tuberculosis in the early 20th century. He is staying in the guesthouse for gentlemen until he gets a place in the sanatorium. The guesthouse is run by Willi Opitz and his wife, but his wife dies almost immediately on Woznicz’s arrival.

I don’t know if it’s helpful from the beginning to understand what empusa are or not. I had to look it up. but from the beginning we are occasionally reminded that someone is watching everything. Still, this is something I tended to forget.

A lot of the novel deals with Woznicz’s sense of unfitness and inferiority, which has been enforced by his father’s constant expression of disappointment in him. But we also get to read lots of philosophical discussions among the men, which always end in misogyny.

Occasionally, readers are told a lot of bizarre folklore or visit some unusual site in the forest, and these incidents are leading up an annual fall event. Woznicz feels he has a shameful secret, but he’s going to learn more about himself by the end of the novel.

Tokarczuk is a writer whose books are totally different from each other. This one isn’t my favorite, but it is atmospheric and full of irony. It is said to share some characteristics, including plot points, with The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, a book I haven’t read.

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