A Century of Books: How Am I Doing? March Report

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

In January, I foolishly decided to join Simon Thomas’s Century of Book Challenge, even though I knew that reading 100 books, one for each year in a century, from 1925-2024, would be tough because last year I only read 169. So, how am I doing?

I decided this accounting would make more sense if I listed the holes, so here goes. If you want to see the details, see my Century of Books page.

  • 1925-1934: entries needed for 1926-31
  • 1935-1944: entries needed for all years except 1936, 1937, 1941, and 1943
  • 1945-1954: entries needed for all years except 1947, 1953, and 1954
  • 1955-1964: entries needed for all years except 1958 and 1959
  • 1965-1974: entries needed for all years except 1965, 1966, 1972, and 1974
  • 1975-1984: entries needed for all years except 1976
  • 1985-1994: entries needed for all years
  • 1995–2004: entries needed for all years except 2004
  • 2005-2014: entries needed for all years except 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2014
  • 2015-2024: complete!

Read since February 28th:

  • The Circular Stairway by Mary Roberts Rinehart (unfortunately, it doesn’t fit in this project because it’s from 1908)
  • Firebird by Zuzanna Ginczanka from 1936 and 2023
  • Beginning with a Bash by Alice Tilton from 1937
  • Mrs. Martell by Elizabeth Eliot from 1953
  • Impact of Evidence by Carol Carnac from 1954
  • Silence by Shūsaku Endō from 1966
  • My Death by Lisa Tuttle from 2004
  • An English Ghost Story by Kim Newman from 2014
  • The Green Road by Anne Enright from 2015
  • The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller from 2023
  • The Quiet Tenant by Clémence Michallon from 2023
  • The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters from 2023
  • The Hunter by Tara French from 2024
  • Murder Road by Simone St. James from 2024

Review 2334: Murder at the Residence

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

In my search for a Scandinavian mystery series that I want to keep following, I decided to try to read a novel by Stella Blómkvist, especially as it is set in Iceland. Much to my initial confusion, I found that the main character of the novel is also named Stella Blómkvist. I wondered whether I was reading true crime or another mystery series that features the author as a character only to find that Stella is the nom de plume of an anonymous author whose sex is even unknown.

On New Years Eve 2009, Stella has an unpleasant encounter with some thuggish young police academy students that leads to her meeting a Latvian prostitute named Dagnija. When Dagnija learns that Stella is a lawyer, she asks her to find her friend Ilona, who has been missing since she left a party the two were attending.

Stella also takes a case from an old man named Hákon Hákonarson, whose dying wish is that Stella find a woman he believes is his daughter.

Iceland is in chaos because of corruption in the government, banking system, and police. Demonstrators are practically living outside the legislature. But everyone is shocked when a fat cat financier is murdered in a church across from the president’s residence where a major reception is in progress. It is Stella herself, arriving to attend a christening, who finds the body of financier Benedikt Björgúlfsson beaten to death.

Within a few days, Stella is assigned to defend a drug addict named Sverrir Guðbjartsson. He has been charged with the murder of Benedikt on the basis of the police having found candlesticks used to beat him under Sverrir’s bed after a tip-off. Sverrir says he was at the church sleeping in the back seat of a friend’s car but did not go into the church. Oddly, the CTV footage that would show whether he left the car seems to be unavailable.

Finally, Stella is requested by a drug mule named Robertas who claims just to have been delivering a car. He says he had no idea it was stuffed with drugs.

The novel skips around among these cases, some of which are connected. Frankly, so many names are mentioned that I kept losing track of who was who, particularly as characterization doesn’t seem to be a strong suit of Blómkvist’s.

Stella is a salty, libidinous personality. I don’t mind sharp-tongued heroines, but I don’t think Stella is a convincing character. I have lots of reasons for believing there is no way the author is a woman or at very least is someone who has no knowledge of children. Stella has a daughter who is conveniently only mentioned as an afterthought and is apparently perfectly behaved and never wants any attention. It is hard to tell how old she is, but I actually thought she was an infant because of what Stella said about her until she suddenly spoke at the end of the novel.

Related Posts

My Soul To Take

The Mist

Last Rituals

Review 2333: The Halt During the Chase

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

Sophie is an intelligent, vivacious young woman who is in love with Philip, whom she considers perfect. It’s clear, however, that she is subduing her personality and dressing to please him. She, her mother, and friends have been waiting for a proposal of marriage, but none has been forthcoming. Then, during a romantic tryst in a hotel room, he says something that she finds unforgivable, and it becomes clear to her that, although he loves her, he wants a wife with money.

Sophie realizes she needs to be more independent of her mother, too. After attending some “spiritual” lectures that sound like they are about self-realization, she realizes that their relationship as it is, with her coddling and reassuring her mother, is bad for them both.

Sophie decides to split from Philip, although it is difficult to do so because she still loves him. But she wants to live her own life. Her elderly friend Pussy has told her that once she tries to leave, he will try to get her back, and he does.

This novel is intelligent and funny. It contains unusual turns of phrase and vividly conveys emotions. Sophie is a sparkling heroine. I just loved this novel.

Related Posts

Sing Me Who You Are

Sally on the Rocks

Beneath the Visiting Moon

Review 2332: The Circular Staircase

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

Rachel Innes, a 40-some-year-old spinster who has raised her niece Gertrude and nephew Halsey, is persuaded to leave the city and take a house in the country near where they have friends. She leases a large house from the Armstrongs, a banking family who are visiting California for their health.

Miss Innes arrives first with her servants and passes a comfortable night. However, the next night she and her servant see a face at the window and later on hear noises as if someone has broken in, although the windows and doors remain locked.

Gertrude and Halsey arrive with a friend, Jack Bailey, who is a clerk at the Trader’s Bank in town. That night, there is another disturbance. This time, an intruder is shot to death at the bottom of the circular staircase. He is Arnold Armstrong, the estranged son of the house owner, who should not have had a key. If that’s not bad enough, both Halsey and Jack have vanished. Right about this time it becomes known that the Trader’s Bank has failed because someone has stolen millions of dollars of securities. Suspicion has fallen on Paul Armstrong, the bank president, but maybe also on Jack, to whom Gertrude is engaged.

The house now becomes the target of a series of mysterious intrusions. Strangers appear on the grounds, noises are heard in the house, holes appear in the walls of an unfinished ballroom. Miss Innes runs up against someone on the staircase in the dark, and the events continue even with police guarding the house.

It’s not hard to guess why people are trying to break in, especially after Paul Armstrong dies in California, leaving an unexpectedly small estate. But Rinehart keeps the action going with lots of perplexing incidents.

The novel is engagingly written and moves along quickly. There isn’t much character development here, but that’s not to be expected from a thriller from 1908. However, we like Miss Innes and we also like Mr. Jamieson, the police detective who gradually lets Miss Innes in on the investigation.

Related Posts

The Uninhabited House

Seven Keys to Baldpate

The Iron Clew

What Is It with Cathedral of the Sea?

~ whatmeread ~ 9 Comments
Cover for Cathedral of the Sea

I occasionally look at my stats, and I find it interesting to note such things as which reviews are most read and when. I decided to look at them last week because I recently noticed that the novel Cathedral of the Sea had been popping up again as one of the reviews that was most read. I remembered it as a mediocre historical novel, so that piqued my curiosity.

Sure enough, the novel has the third highest number of views of any other on my site. (I’m not counting views of my home page, which has more than 83,000. That page, after all, is whichever review is up for that day.) The one in first place with 983 views is The Devil All the Time, which I don’t really count because it got linked to from Robert Pattinson’s official site after I mentioned the character he was playing and was only looked at for that year and the next. The second place review is for The Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu, but views of it peaked from 2017-2019 and fell off to almost nothing from there. Cathedral of the Sea only had a few views for the first few years after I reviewed it, but starting in 2020, it has had an average of 90 views a year, which is a lot for one of my several thousand reviews, and continues to pop up regularly as one of the most viewed posts of the week.

Cathedral of the Sea was published in 2006, but I didn’t review it until 2013. It was a popular book for a while—you can see that it says “#1 International Bestseller” on the cover—but I found it an uninspired and rather poorly told story. I looked back at my review to remind myself what I thought of it, and I observed that the characters were poorly defined and Falcones had a habit of bringing people and things into the story when he needed them and then forgetting them. His women have no personality at all and have horrible fates. The oddest thing about it was that he has a plot where the main character is trying to discard his mistress for years so that he can have good marriage with his long-suffering wife. He finally does, and then there is an immediate jump of five years and within a page or so from that jump, Falcones kills off the wife. The wife is a cipher the entire time, and it’s like he doesn’t know what to do with her once the mistress is gone.

So, I notice that in 2018 Netflix posted a production of it. Could this be the reason people keep looking it up? It’s true that in 2018 the views of my post jumped from almost none to 33 that year and then almost doubled the next year and again the next year. But it has continued to be viewed at about the same rate every year since then. It’s a mystery.

Maybe the Netflix program is better than the book. I guess I have my answer. (I was looking all this stuff up as I was writing this, so I didn’t even know I had an answer until the end of the post. In fact, my plan was to ask my readers if they had a clue about it.) I was unaware of the Netflix series before now. It’s little research expeditions like this that make looking at the stats interesting.

Have you read Cathedral of the Sea or seen the Netflix show? What did you think of it?

Review 2331: Skeletons in the Closet

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

A quote by Frederick Méziès on the cover of my edition of Skeletons in the Closet says, “Writing so dark it gives a new meaning to the word noir.” The novel was written in 1976, a bit after the height of French film noir, and it is certainly violent, although probably not as shocking to modern readers.

Eugene Tarpon is a private detective whose office is next to his bedroom. He only has one client when one of his contacts in the police department sends him an old lady, Mrs. Pigot. Her daughter, Philippine Pigot, has disappeared. She left for work one day and never arrived. Further, she is blind.

Tarpon’s contact, Coccioli, has strongly hinted that he shouldn’t actually look for Philippine, but he does. The next day, Mrs. Pigot arranges to meet him in a public square, and she is shot to death before his eyes. Soon, people are trying to kill him.

This novel is dark; nevertheless, there is a certain lightness and humor about it. Manchette is credited with redefining the noir genre for social criticism, but although there is certainly corruption going on, that theme is not so stressed in this novel.

I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

Related Posts

The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau

The Blank Wall

The Blunderer

Review 2330: Somebody’s Fool

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

Somebody’s Fool is the third of Richard Russo’s North Bath novels. The first two (Nobody’s Fool and Everybody’s Fool) centered around the character of Donald “Sully” Sullivan. Sully is now dead, but he is certainly not forgotten, and in a way, you could say that this novel also centers around him.

These books of Russo’s are equivalent to ensemble cast programs. There are lots of characters, and the novel moves among them.

Peter Sullivan, Sully’s son, is one of the main characters. He is a college professor who spends his weekends fixing up, first, the house his grandmother left him and now, the one Sully left him. He enjoys this work, but his plan is to leave North Bath as soon as he finishes and sells the second house. On the other hand, he’s always planned to leave but doesn’t seem to do it.

Peter is surprised to receive a visit from his son, Thomas, whom he hasn’t seen since he and his wife split up when Thomas was a boy. Thomas doesn’t seem to mean well, even though he is friendly, and we learn later that he has a plan but not right away what it is. Thomas, we learn from letters to his brother, is eaten up with resentment against Peter for deserting them (even though his mother didn’t want to have anything to do with Peter) and with jealousy against Will, the oldest brother, for getting to go with Peter.

(Just as a side note, I can’t be sure, but I think this is the first time we ever hear that Peter has two other sons besides Will. They are certainly convenient for this plot but make Peter’s lingering resentment against Sully for deserting him and his mother even harder to understand.)

Another important character is Doug Raymer, the ex-Chief of Police of North Bath. North Bath has recently been dissolved as a political entity and absorbed by nearby Schuyler. Raymer was offered the job of Chief of Police there but decided to retire. He is mostly missing Clarice, his girlfriend and ex-officer, who wanted to take a break and has accepted the Chief of Police job. When he meets up with Clarice, he finds she is dealing with a breakdown on the part of her twin brother, Jerome, and the misogyny and bigotry (she is Black) of her new staff, led by Lieutenant Delgado.

Raymer gets involved with a case of identifying a badly decomposed suicide at an abandoned estate when his old officer, Miller, calls him for help. Clarice hires him as a consultant and asks him to take Jerome as a housemate.

Another main character is Janey, a woman with a history of poor choices in men. Although a lot of her space is occupied with her relationships with her mother (whom she resented for years for carrying on with Sully outside her marriage) and her daughter, she ends up being key because of her relationship with Delgado.

Russo’s characters tend to be self-doubting and over-think things. Usually I enjoy him, but in this novel some of these tropes became a little repetitive. And at times they slowed the action to a halt. For example, Peter hears someone moving around in his supposedly vacant house. He grabs a baseball bat but then Russo takes two pages to have him wonder who it is (including Sully’s ghost) before going up to see. Eventually, the plot gets going but before that, there were times that I got impatient.

Russo is a really good writer, though, who creates complicated and mostly likable characters. It seems like he wanted to use this novel to wind up the fates of his sometimes comic North Bath characters. If that was his intent, he succeeded.

Related Posts

Everybody’s Fool

Empire Falls

Mohawk

Review 2329: The Warrielaw Jewel

~ whatmeread ~ 1 Comment

I have read a few novels by Winifred Peck, so I was intrigued to learn she had also written some mysteries.

Betty Morrison is the newly married wife of an Edinburgh lawyer, John. She accompanies her husband on a call to the Warrielaws, an old family whose members are constantly feuding. The most recent dispute concerns the fairy jewel, a chunk of amber said to be given to an ancestor by a fairy and subsequently encrusted in jewels. Jessica Warrielaw, the old lady who was left the estate, hadn’t spent a penny on its upkeep but instead has been selling off treasures and giving the money to her nephew Noel. Shis is planning on selling the fairy jewel.

Jessica’s sister Mary as well as the other potential legatees are horrified by this. Mary, who lives with Jessica in shabby rooms divided in half by physical markers, wants the jewel to stay in the family as does niece Cora. Niece Rhoda, on the other hand, would like money to start over in America. She is horribly managing and makes the life of weaker Aunt Mary miserable. Other potential heirs are Neil, of course, and Rhoda’s much younger sister Alison.

First, there is an odd incident at the house that seems like a break-in except nothing is missing. Then Jessica leaves for London, presumably to sell the jewel—and isn’t heard from again. John, as trustee of the estate, finally hires Bob Stuart, an ex-police detective and friend, to find Jessica.

Weeks later Jessica is found dead, not in London but in the estate’s dilapidated stables. The jewel is nowhere to be found. Was Jessica murdered? How did she get back home when Betty herself saw her on the train to London?

As is often the case with mystery novels of the period (1933), this novel is more concerned with the puzzle than characterization. However, several characters do have strong personalities. The plot is rather slow moving, and once or twice just when things were getting exciting, Peck drove me crazy by inserting a several-page description. However, I liked Betty and though the novel was entertaining.

Related Posts

Bewildering Cares

House-Bound

4:50 from Paddington

A New Blog Feature

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

It seems that more attention is going to translators lately. I’ve noticed a few imprints putting translators’ names on the covers of books and other bloggers saying they plan to list translator names. I was wondering what I could do about this. I thought that adding them to my Authors page would be too complicated, as often a series of books changes translators. Finally, I decided to create a Translators page and link to it from my Authors page. The page contains two lists, one sorted by book title and the other by translator name. You can check it out today.