2012 Reading -- Part One

I have a plan for my reading in 2012.

The first part of the plan involves rereading. I’ll get to that topic in a future post.

The second part of the plan revolves around the need to reduce the pile of books to be read that are taking over my library like the tribbles took over the Enterprise.

Implementation of the second part of my 2012 reading plan is underway. I’ve decided that in January, and possibly February, I will focus almost exclusively on reading mysteries and thrillers. I enjoy the genre and books in that category generally prove to be a quick read.

The experiment is working. I’ve read eight books in 11 days, and, although the book pile is shrinking imperceptibly, I’m feeling better about all those books to be read.

Here’s one-half of a summary of my reading in 2012:

Book 1: North of Nowhere by Steve Hamilton

After reading The Lock Artist I resolved to become better acquainted with the work of Steve Hamilton. 

That resolve was strengthened after discovering that his Alex McKnight series was set in the U.P. I have vacationed in The Yoop two of the last three years. I’ve been to The Soo, Paradise and Whitefish Bay – all locations that regularly appear in Hamilton’s series.

Hamilton’s an entertaining writer. His plots move with the speed of a north wind out of Canada, McKnight is an appealing character and the location is unique.  North of Nowhere is the fourth book in the series. From my perspective, the books just get better and better.

Book 2: The Outlaw Album by Daniel Woodrell

Book 7: Crimes in Southern Indiana by Frank Bill

Two short story collections – from Daniel Woodrell and Frank Bill – that might be characterized as Hillbilly Noir.  

The Outlaw Album is the first short story collection from Woodrell, an accomplished novelist who is often compared to Cormac McCarthy. Crimes in Southern Indiana is not only Bill’s first story collection, it’s his first book.

Both are great; a disturbing serving of violence and depravity. Woodrell's collection is the strongest, but he’s been at it the longest. Crimes in Southern Indiana is an impressive debut. 

There are similarities in the subject matter. Both Woodrell and Bill explore a poor, marginalized segment of the American population that includes tweakers and drug dealers, the greedy and the victimized, hapless law enforcement officers and folks who simply see settling a disagreement with a gun as a logical and reasonable response.

I especially enjoyed The Echo of Neighborly Bones and Uncle by Woodrell; two stories as haunting and as disturbing as anything written by Stephen King.

Book 3: The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin

Initially, I didn’t warm up to Ian Rankin’s new series, featuring Malcom Fox and the Complaints, Britain’s version of America’s Internal Affairs.   

The Impossible Dead, Rankin's second book featuring the Complaints, was slow taking off. Other cops don’t like the Complaints, practice a lot of passive-aggressive behavior and call it cooperation, etc., etc., etc.

But a third of the way into the novel, Fox starts digging into a long-forgotten cold case that appears to be connected to the current case of cop corruption he’s investigating and The Impossible Dead starts reading like an Ian Rankin thriller – flat-out riveting.

Fox isn’t Rebus, but by the time The Impossible Dead steams to its conclusion, it’s evident that Rankin’s new series, and his new cast of characters, has the potential to be just as compelling as the Rebus novels.

Tomorrow: A summary of books four, five, six and eight.

Best Reads of 2011

A baseball diamond and the circus, two magic places, were at the heart of my best reads in 2011.

Those books, both by first-time novelists, were The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. 

The Art of Fielding is about the inability to find perfection on the baseball diamond or in human relationships. The Night Circus is the story of a mysterious magical challenge played out a circus that appears only between dusk and dawn. Both are love stories. Both were superbly written.

Other top reads in fiction:

The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson. Vikings. Hidden gold. Sailing ships. Swords and pillage. Do I need to say more? 

Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine -- don't be put off by the fact that this book is for young readers. It deals with very adult emotions. Erskine is a Virginia writer who drew her inspiration for this novel from the Virginia Tech shootings.

You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon. Tremendous short story collection.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. A modern take on Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. A surprise ending from a modern master. Winner of the 2011 Booker Prize.

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson.  The sweep of one man's life is captured in 116 pages.

The Cut by George Pelecanos.  A return to form by this D.C. writer.  Riveting.

In non-fiction, here's what I liked:

Faulks on Fiction by Sebastian Faulks.  Reading about books is one of my guilty pleasures. Faulks is an entertaining enabler.

The Killing of Crazy Horse by Thomas Powers.  I'll never tire of reading about the Little Big Horn. 

Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton. I like reading about food almost as much as I like reading about books.  Just an awesome memoir. 

Yogi Berra Eternal Yankee by Allen Barra. The only baseball book worth passing on in 2011. Gotta love Yogi and Barra (no relationship) does right by him; clearly making the case that Mr. Berra is one of the greatest -- on and off the field. 

Just Kids by Patti Smith. Another awesome memoir.  Absolutely fascinating. Great insight in the development of an artist. 

The Greater Journey by David McCullough.  Read this. Watch Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and fall in love with the City of Lights.

Biblio Baggins's 2011 Reading List

“You always read too many books . . . That can’t lead to any good.”

 --Arturo Perez-Reverte

“I care about the reader . . . That one person, alone in a room, whose time I’m asking for. I want my books to be worth the reader’s time . . . The novels I love are novels I live for. They make me feel smarter, more alive, more tender toward the world.”

--Jeffrey Eugenides
in an interview in The Paris Review

I read 135 books in 2011, midway between the 114 in 2010 and the 161 in 2009.

A few highlights:

• I read Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind for the first time.
• I read my very first Stephen King novel, Under the Dome.
• I read, finally, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace.  Absolutely the longest book I've ever read.
• And after reading lots of non-fiction by Larry McMurtry, I finally read one of his novels, Lonesome Dove.

Because some of you will want to know, of those books, I liked Lonesome Dove the best. It is a great yarn and destined to be an American classic. 

Here's all the books for 2011. 

January

1.         A Rule Against Murder, Louise Penny

2.         The Brutal Telling, Louise Penny

3.         The Long Ships, Frans G. Bengtsson

4.         The Spot, David Means

5.         Guitar, An American Life, Tim Brookes

6.         The Anniversary Man, R.J. Ellory

7.         Four Fish, Paul Greenberg

8.         Zero History, William Gibson

9.         The Sherlockian, Graham Moore

10.       Andrew Johnson, Annette Gordon-Reed

11.       Star Island, Carl Hiaasen

12.       The Sentry, Robert Crais

13.       Al Jaffee’s Mad Life, Mary-Lou Weisman

14.       I’d Know You Anywhere, Laura Lippman

15.       Mockingbird, Kathryn Erskine

February

16.       Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

17.       Swamplandia!, Karen Russell

18.       Running the Books, Avi Steinberg

19.       Known to Evil, Walter Mosley

20.       The Darkness That Comes Before, R. Scott Bakker

21.       The Warrior Prophet, R. Scott Bakker

22.       The Thousandfold Thought, R. Scott Bakker

23.       Faulks on Fiction, Sebastian Faulks

March

24.       A Red Herring Without Mustard, Alan Bradley

25.       Bury Your Dead, Louise Penny

26.       Human Croquet, Kate Atkinson

27.       The Death of King Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory, retelling by Peter Ackroyd

28.       The Killing of Crazy Horse, Thomas Powers

29.       Sunset Park, Paul Auster

30.       Blood, Bones & Butter, Gabrielle Hamilton

31.       The Small Boat of Great Sorrows, Dan Fesperman

32.       Jerry Robinson, Ambassador of Comics, N.C. Christopher Couch

33.       Kraken, China Mieville

34.       The Bricklayer, Noah Boyd

35.       The Girl in the Green Raincoat, Laura Lippman

April

36.       Winter in the Blood, James Welch

37.       The Georges and the Jewels, Jane Smiley

38.       The Hangman, Louise Penny

39.       Tomato Red, Daniel Woodrell

40.       The Lost Gate, Orson Scott Card

41.       Yogi Berra Eternal Yankee, Allen Barra

42.       The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell   

43.       Townie, Andre Dubus III

44.       The Welsh Girl, Peter Ho Davies

45.       Run!, Dean Karnazes

46.       The Fifth Witness, Michael Connelly

47.       Bird Cloud, Annie Proulx

48.       The Death of Sweet Mister, Daniel Woodrell

49.       Wonder, Robert J. Sawyer

50.       When the Killing’s Done, T.C. Boyle

51.       Flyover People, Cheryl Unruh

May

52.       Twice A Spy, Keith Thomson

53.       Just Kids, Patti Smith

54.       The Waters Rising, Sheri S. Tepper

55.       The Uncoupling, Meg Wolitzer

56.       Agent X, Noah Boyd

57.       Moon Over Manifest, Clare Vanderpool

58.       Cleopatra, Stacy Schiff

59.       Lost Souls, Michael Collins

60.       Selected Stories, William Trevor

61.       Millard Fillmore, Paul Finkelman

62.       The City and The City, China Mieville

June

63.       The Widower’s Tale, Julia Glass

64.       You Know When the Men Are Gone, Siobhan Fallon

65.       Embassytown, China Mieville     

66.       A Well-Paid Slave, Brad Snyder

67.       The Tragedy of Arthur, Arthur Phillips

68.       Rizzo’s Fire, Lou Manfredo

69.       The Alchemist, Paolo Bacigalupi

70.       Bradbury An Illustrated Life, Jerry Weist

71.       The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Sherman Alexie

72.       The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman

73.       The Greater Journey, David McCullough

74.       State of Wonder, Ann Patchett

75.       It’s All About The Bike, Robert Penn

July

76.       The Snowman, Jo Nesbo

77.       Rodin’s Debutante, Ward Just

78.       A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

79.       Lockdown, Walter Dean Myers

80.       Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger, Lee Smith

81.       Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

August

82.       The Dewey Decimal System, Nathan Larson

83.       A Good Fall, Ha Jin

84.       A Cold Day in Paradise, Steve Hamilton

85.       Rule 34, Charles Stross

86.       Robopocalypse, Daniel H. Wilson

87.       The London Train, Tessa Hadley

88.       All the Time In The World, E.L. Doctorow

89.       Winter of the Wolf Moon, Steve Hamilton

90.       Disturbance, Jan Burke

91.       The Fort, Bernard Cornwell

92.       Washington, Ron Chernow

93.       Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K. Rowling

94.       Not the End of the World, Kate Atkinson

September

95.       Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J.K. Rowling

96.       The Cut, George Pelecanos

97.       Reservation Road, John Burnham Schwartz

98.       The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

99.       A Trick of the Light, Louise Penny

100.     Homicide Survivors Picnic, Lorraine M. Lopez

101.     Supergods, Grant Morrison

102.     Before the Poison, Peter Robinson

103      Just My Type, Simon Garfield

104.     Northwest Corner, John Burnham Schwartz

105.     The Hunting Wind, Steve Hamilton

October

106.     The Affair, Lee Child

107.     Stan Musial An American Life, George Vecsey

108.     The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach

109.     Luka and the Fire of Life, Salman Rushdie

110.     Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward

111.     Destiny of the Republic, Candice Millard

112.     White Noise, Don DeLillo

113.     The Baseball Codes, Jason Turbow w/Michael Duca

114.     Dangerous Laughter, Steven Millhauser

115.     Under the Dome, Stephen King

116.     Train Dreams, Denis Johnson

November

117.     Death of Kings, Bernard Cornwell

118.     The Sisters Brothers, Patrick DeWitt

119.     The Apothecary, Maile Meloy

120.     Death in the City of Light, David King

121.     The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides

122.     Half Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan

123.     The Buddha in the Attic, Julie Otsuka

124.     King of the Badgers, Philip Hensher

125.     The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern

126.     Emotionally Weird, Kate Atkinson

127.     I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, Alan Bradley

December

128.     The Sojourn, Andrew Krivak

129.     Lost Memory of Skin, Russell Banks

130.     The Stranger’s Child, Alan Hollinghurst

131.     Pigeon English, Stephen Kelman

132.     War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

133.     Tales of Burning Love, Louise Erdrich

134.     Alpha Better Juice, Roy Blount Jr.

135.     The Drop, Michael Connelly            

Second 2011 Challenge: The To-Be-Read Pile

The second Internet reading challenge of 2011 was put forth by Adam at the Roof Beam Reader. The idea behind the 2011 To Be Read Pile Challenge was to take 12 books and two alternates that have been on your bookshelf or "to be read" list for more than a year and actually read those books in 2011.

So that's what I did.  I read all 12 books and the two alternates. Here's the list:

1. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
2. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
3. War and Peace by Mr. Tolstoy
4. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
5. The Darkness That Comes Before by R. Scott Bakker
6. Under the Dome by Stephen King
7. White Noise by Don Delillo
8. Yogi Berra Eternal Yankee by Allen Barra
9. The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies
10. Winter in the Blood by James Welch
11. Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson
12. Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson

Alternates:
Reservation Road by John Burnham Schwartz
Tales of Burning Love by Louise Erdrich

I enjoyed this contest and the motivation it provided. I would have read some of the books in any event, but the challenge provided me with the extra incentive to read them all.

Thanks Adam.

2011 Chunkster Challenge

I accepted two Internet reading challenges in 2011. The first was the Chunkster Reading Challenge.

In this challenge, size matters. A "chunkster" is defined as a book, fiction or non-fiction, that's 450 pages long or longer.

The challenge has different levels. I accepted the Mor-book-ly Obese challenge, which calls for reading eight chunksters, three of 750+ pages. Here's how I did:

Books 750+
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, 945 pages
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, 1148 pages
Washington by Ron Chernow, 817 pages
Under the Dome by Stephen King, 1074 pages
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, 1386 pages

Books 450+
The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson, 503 pages
The Darkness That Comes Before by R. Scott Bakker, 577 pages
The Warrior Prophet by R. Scott Bakker, 600 pages
The Killing of Crazy Horse by Thomas Powers, 467 pages
Kraken by China Mieville, 509 pages
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, 469 pages
The Waters Rising by Sheri S. Tepper, 498 pages
The Greater Journey by David McCullough, 456 pages
The Fort by Bernard Cornwell, 464 pages
The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst, 564 pages
Tales of Burning Love by Louise Erdrich, 452 pages

Five books in excess of 750 pages. I needed three.  Eleven books in excess of 450 pages. I needed five.

Challenge met!

Finishing 2011 with The Drop and Alpha Better Juice

Here are the final two books of 2011.

Tomorrow we'll post the full 2011 reading list, the results of two Internet reading "challenges" and my thoughts on the best reads of 2011.

Book 135: The Drop by Michael Connelly

Detective Harry Bosch returns in Michael Connelly's The Drop. Fans of Connelly's novels, and I count myself among them, know what to expect -- a tightly written, riveting thriller that keeps the accelerator to the floor from the first page to the last.

Yeah, Connelly's that good. And although I'm also a fan of defense attorney Mickey Haller, another Connelly character, I think Bosch is his finest creation.

Bosch is hard-nosed and uncompromising, yet clings to a romantic view of his job as a detective.  "Everybody counts or nobody counts" is the maxim that motivates Bosch in his crusade to bring justice to the forgotten victims of brutal crimes. 

That motto ensnares Bosch in a political tug-of-war between the L.A. city council and the police commissioner.  Councilman Irvin Irving's son is found dead. Did he leap from the seventh floor of his posh hotel room or was he dropped? 

Irving, "scourge of the LAPD in general and one Detective Harry Bosch in particular," asks that Bosch be assigned the case because he believes Harry will tell him the truth about what happened to his son "no matter how it falls."

The death of Irving's son isn't Harry's only case.  A hit on a 20-year-old cold case -- a spot of blood on the victim's neck -- belongs to a convicted sex offender. Results of DNA testing are overwhelming, yet that sex offender couldn't have committed the brutal rape and murder because he was only eight years old when the crime was committed.

How'd his blood end up on the neck of a murder victim?  The answer to that question leads Harry and his partner to a horrific discovery.

Two crimes to investigate and along the way Connelly continues to explore Harry's relationship with his 15-year-old daughter, conflict with his partner and a new girlfriend.

The Drop? Connelly's editors at Little, Brown could have called it The Bomb.

Book 134: Alpha Better Juice by Roy Blount Jr.

Alpha Better Juice is Roy Blount Jr.'s second collection on words with an emphasis on the way words sound.

Blount has coined a word -- sonicky -- to describe both the way many words sound and their meaning.

"I needed a word that combined sonic and kinesthetic," he writes. "I needed . . . to describe an intrinsic significant value that . . . does evoke meaning by a combination of its sound and its movement."

Blount takes exception to theoretical linguistics, which contends that the relations between words and their meanings is arbitrary.

"Any huckster, any animal caller, any lover, any poet, anybody knows better than that," says Blount. "The sounds of letters and the words they constitute, and the kinetics involved in their oral utterance, and the rhythms of their combinations, have inherent signficiant value."

Sonicky words, to name only a few, include bubble, fuzz, knickknack, skimpy, gobble, smooch and ooze.

Blount is best known for his humorous writing.  In Alpha Better Juice, he strikes a perfect balance; he's serious about words and how words sound, but he's entertaining to the point of evoking an occassional guffaw -- another of those sonicky words.

On War and Peace and Tales of Burning Love

Book 132: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

What is there for me to say about a book many consider the greatest novel ever written?

I could say that 21st Century tastes don't agree with 19th Century writing, but that's far too broad an observation.  Besides, I'm a Dickens fan boy, which eliminates that argument.

It's not the length of War and Peace that troubles me.  Novels that I read this past year by Stephen King, Margaret Mitchell and Larry McMurtry all weighed in at more than 1,000 pages. And all those novels demonstrated that a 1,000-plus pages can read like 220 pages, which is also true -- at times -- of Tolstoy.

When he tells the story of Count Bezuhov, Rostov or Prince Bolkonsky -- their misfortunes in love, financial woes or valor in war -- he weaves a compelling story. But when he doesn't do that -- and he doesn't do it a lot -- Tolstoy loses me.

By today's standards, War and Peace isn't a pure novel.  It's as much a philosophical treatise on the vagaries of war, the existence of free will in man and a dozen other musings as well as a loose history of the Napoleonic Wars.  

I prefer a narrative uncluttered by philosophical observation.

Finally, War and Peace is often portrayed as a celebration of the Russian spirit. I struggle with that. All of the people portrayed here, in any depth, are Russian gentry -- counts, princes and princesses.  Thousands of servants and serfs are only shadowy background figures. It is difficult, if not impossible, to truly capture the spirit of the Russian people without telling their story. 

More than anything, I just want to say I've read it -- all 1,386 pages of this Modern Library paperback edition. That's enough for now.  It's quite a lot actually.

Book 133: Tales of Burning Love by Louise Erdrich

Tales of Burning Love, Louise Erdrich's most erotic novel, is the story of Jack Mauser, a North Dakota building contractor, and his five wives. 

Jack's first marriage lasted only a few hours. That wife walked off into a North Dakota blizzard. Between that marriage and his current one, Jack was married three more times.  He still sees all three ex-wives and is still in love with one of them.

It's the second marriage for his current wife. She's still married to husband number one who is in prison for life.

There's a lot of moving parts of Tales of Burning Love.    Jack fakes his own death after his house burns to the ground. Someone kidnaps his infant son in the middle of a blizzard. The first husband of wife number five escapes from prison. And all that is secondary to the stories the wives tell.

After attending Jack's funeral, his four living wives are stranded in a car in the midst of a North Dakota blizzard. To stay alert, and alive, the wives agree to each tell a true story, a story "you've never told another soul, a story that would scorch paper, heat up the air!" 

The stories (Erdrich has always had a penchant for slipping whole stories, stories that can stand alone, into her novels) do heat up the air even as they serve to tell us more about Jack Mauser and the lives of his wives.

Erdrich is skillful at drawing all the separate strands of a convoluted plot into a coherent whole.  She demonstrates that skill here as she brings Tales of Burning Love to a satisfying, and steamy, conclusion. 

A fresh, original voice debuts in Pigeon English

Book 131:  Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman

Pigeon English, short-listed for the 2011 Booker Prize, introduces a lively and original voice in author Stephen Kelman.

The novel is narrated by 11-year-old Harri Opoku, who, along with his mother and sister, recent emigrated from Ghana to England. They live in a flat on the ninth floor of an inner city housing estate.

Harri's voice is unique and captivating. Kelman captures his 11-year-old bravado; Harri is alternately timid and bold, boastful and modest.  (He assures us that he's among the fastest runner in Year 7).  

A particularly fine touch is the way Kelman reflects Harri's understanding of the English language. The meaning of some phrases and slang completely elude him, while he quickly embraces the complexities of other street lingo.

Kelman captures, too, the push and pull of societal pressures that places temptation in Harri's path. His desire to be a good boy and to please his hard-working mother is balanced against his desire for acceptance by the local ring of adolescent thugs.  

Harri is at once naive, yet wise.  Like most 11-year-olds he does not yet know what he doesn't know, a condition that makes him vulnerable to dangers he does not even suspect exist.

The novel draws its dramatic intensity from the discovery of a student's body early in the story. Harri and a classmate are determined to solve the murder.  Initially, their efforts are comic as they mimic the language and methods of television's CSI. But Harri's investigation has not gone unnoticed and the comic aspect soon takes a serious turn.

Kelman makes only one misstep in Pigeon English.  There are a few isolated passages when he breaks away from Harri's narration to tell the story through the voice of a pigeon.  It is an unfortunate decision on Kelman's part. Clumsy and ineffective, those brief passages only distract from the power of Harri's voice.

It's easy to forgive such a misstep -- Pigeon English is Kelman's first novel. All things considered, it is a strong debut by a fresh and original voice. 

The Stranger's Child lacks passion, purpose

Book 130: The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst is a simulacrum of a great novel -- exquistely written, yet curiously absent any passion or purpose.

Perhaps the novel fails because its central character, Cecil Valance, is on stage all too briefly. We meet Cecil in the opening section of the book, by section two he is already off stage, killed by a sniper in World War I.

In that opening section, Cecil, a promising young poet, arrives at Two Acres, the home of the Sawle family. Cecil and George, the second of three Sawle children, are students at Cambridge. They are lovers.

During the course of Cecil's visit, Daphne, the youngest of the Sawle children, asks him to sign her autograph book. After he has departed, it is discovered that Cecil has scrawled a poem across several of the books' pages. Daphne is convinced it was written for her. George knows he is its inspiration.

The poem, Two Acres, becomes Cecil Valance's best known work. It will be memorized by a couple of generations of British schoolchildren and then forgotten as Cecil is destined to be regarded as a "first-rate second-rate poet."

Section two jumps forward a decade or more. Cecil is dead as is Hubert, the oldest of the Sawle children. George has married a humorless woman. Daphne is married to Cecil's brother. They have two children.

The novel continues to leap forward in time, finally arriving in the present day. As the story advances, the Sawle family recedes into the background as does Cecil's reputation.  New characters are introduced, including one grows up to write a controversial biography of Cecil Valance.

Comparisons to Julian Barnes' Booker-prize winning Sense of An Ending are inevitable. Barnes gives his narrator, and the reader, an emotional jolt with a surprise revelation that casts a magnetic influence over his entire novella and that commands a reader's musings weeks after the books has been completed and set aside.

Hollinghurst's novels lacks such resonance and reverberation. The novel, like the fictional Cecil's poetry, is quickly forgotten. 

The Stranger's Child is like an elaborately painted eggshell. Beautiful on the exterior, but its interior entirely lacking in substance.

Unlikely protagonists undercut The Sojourn and Lost Memory of Skin

An Austro-Hungarian sniper in World War I and a convicted sex offender are the unlikely protagonists in two novels that promise more than they deliver.

Book 128: The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak

Shortlisted for the 2011 National Book Award, The Sojourn is the sort of novel that contest judges love -- filled with weighty themes from the despoliation of innocence to the meaning of life and the horrors of war.

Jozef Vinich is an America who finds himself at war through a series of unfortunate events and misjudgments.  While an infant, in Colorado, Jozef's mother is killed after taking a stroll along a train trestle. 

Unsuccessful in America and mourning the loss of his wife, Jozef's father packs up his son and his trusty rifle and returns to his native Austria-Hungary. A cruel step-mother, two bullying step-brothers and an impoverished life as a shepherd await Jozef.

When war breaks out, Jozef lies about his age and enlists.  His skill with a rifle -- honed while hunting for food when not tending sheep -- leads to his assignment as a sniper.  

We follow Jozef through the war, his capture and subsequent imprisonment and his return home. During that return, Jozef befriends a pregnant woman. She dies giving birth and Jozef assumes responsibility for returning the infant to the woman's family. Clearly, it is opportunity for redemption for the death's bestowed at a remove during the war. 

The Sojourn breaks no new ground. Many of the scenes in the novel feel stale and predictable. Other war novels have told this story before, and told it better.

Book 129: Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks

A far more promising and original novel is Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks.

It's the story of the Kid, a 22-year-old, sex offender living, with other sex offenders, beneath a highway overpass. The irony is that the Kid is a virgin who has yet to kiss a woman.

An egregious misstep in judgment led to his arrest and conviction.  The punishment imposed on the Kid is excessive and seems likely to follow him throughout his life. That's one of the points Banks seeks to make. The Kid isn't so bad, just unfortunate. He never knew his father and his mother abetted her son's addiction to pornography.

Had the novel remained focused on the Kid, it might have worked. Maybe.  The Kid is still a most unlikely protagonist. The trouble is that Banks introduces a second character, a college professor seeking to interview the Kid in support of his theory that sex offenders can reintegrated into society.

But in the course of the novel, the professor turns up dead. Either he killed himself, disconsolate that his wife has left him or because he was also a sex offender and the police were closing in or -- and this is where the novel really goes off the rails -- he was a spy who was killed because he knew to much. 

Really. A spy? Where'd that come from.

Banks never resolves the question of the professor's suicide/murder. And, after introducing the possibility of a shadowy espionage ring, I'm not sure he could.

Banks' dalliance with the professor also distracts and diminishes from the Kid's story, turning the entire novel into farce. What begins as a provocative and thoughtful novel, ends disappointingly.

Flavia stars once more in Bradley's enertaining I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

Book 127:  I Am Half-Sick of Shadows by Alan Bradley

Setting out to prove that Saint Nick exists, Flavia de Luce, Alan Bradley's delightfully implausible 11-year-old sleuth, captures a murderer instead.

I Am Half-Sick of Shadows is the fourth entry in Bradley's mystery series featuring Flavia, her father and sisters and the inhabitants of the village of Bishop's Lacey. It's as charming as the previous novels, which is to say very charming; very charming, indeed.

Christmas has come to Buckshaw, the de Luce estate, and with it a London film crew. Before filming can commence, a key member of the cast is murdered. Once again, Flavia must circumvent the local constabulary and her own distraction due to the imminent arrival of Saint Nick, to bring the murderer to justice.

With her flair for investigation, her love of poisons and her general knowledge of chemistry, as well as her skill as making her two older sisters' lives miserable, Flavia has quickly earned a place of prominence in English literature and in the hearts of Bradley's readers.

If you have yet to read a Flavia de Luce novel, any of the books will do. They are uniformly wonderful.

Book 126: Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson

Here's something original I've yet to say about a Kate Atkinson novel -- this book is awful.

It's Atkinson's third book and, as such, a dividing line between her first two books --  Behind the Scenes at the Museum, her splendid debut novel, and Human Croquet, which was good but not great -- and her recent novels featuring private investigator Jackson Brodie.

Those recent novels are truly fine books, well written and entertaining; everything, I'm afraid, that Emotionally Weird is not. I could say more, but there doesn't seem to be any reason for that. Pick up her first book, definitely pick up the Jackson Brodie novels, but give Emotionally Weird a wide, wide pass.

The Night Circus wholly original, absolutely entrancing

Book 125: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern 

Love and magic, so inextricably linked in popular culture, are antagonists in The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern’s alluring first novel.

The Night Circus is the story of a man and woman locked in a decades-long magic competition. They do not know the rules of the competition or its consequences. For many years, they remain a mystery to one another, competing in a shadowy vacuum, wondering if each person they meet might be their opponent.

What they do know is that the venue for the competition is a mysterious circus. Its tents and performers dressed only in black and white or shades of gray, the circus appears without warning in locations throughout the world. It is open only between sundown and sunrise. Its performers and everyone affiliated with it never seem to age.

The competition is the creation of two aging magicians striving to settle a philosophical disagreement about the nature of magic. In creating the competition they have ensnared, and disrupted, hundreds of lives, including the daughter of one of the magicians.

And in bringing together that daughter and an orphan boy, raised and trained by the second magician, they have unintentionally woven a spell -- not of magic, but love. 

Morgenstern’s two protagonist must ultimately settle the question of which is greater – magic or love.

In doing so, Morgenstern weaves her own magical spell. 

The Night Circus is wholly original and absolutely entrancing, a formidable first novel. It leaves me with two great wishes: that I had written this book and that on some future occasion, after the sun has set, I may visit this magical circus.

King of the Badgers a disappointing effort

Book 124: King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher

I still have not the slightest idea what Philip Hensher was trying to accomplish in the disappointing King of the Badgers.

The novel begins in one direction -- the faked kidnapping of a little girl -- switches directions rather abruptly -- gay lovers who run a cheese shop -- only to switch directions once more --an unhappy and overweight gay man who, to quote Mick Jagger, can't get no satisfaction.

Ostensibly, Hensher is trying to peel back the layers of Hanmouth, a small English town near the Bristol Channel.  Lots of authors have used the disconnected-yet-connected narrative format to much greater effect.  

King of Badgers never takes flight. The "connectedness" that Hensher seeks to develop never emerges and none of the individual stories prove interesting enough to elevate the novel. 

This is a disappointing effort by a writer vastly more talented than the material presented here.

Otsuka weaves a haunting, powerful tale in The Buddha in the Attic

Book 123: The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

Lyrical, yet muscular, Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic is an unconventional novel that relies on hundreds of voices to tell a single story

In less than 130 pages, Otsuka tells the compelling story of a generation of  Japanese women who travel to an unknown land to begin a new life with men who are strangers to them. The novel was short-listed for the 2011 National Book Award.

The unknown land is America. The strangers are Japanese bachelors, most years older than the young women, who labor at the bottom rung of American society -- itinerant laborers living in barns, shanties and tents. 

The women are a source of sex, an extra set of hands picking strawberries or plowing a field and, finally, the foundation of Japanese-American families. Families that are uprooted and relocated to remote desert or mountainous internment camps following Pearl Harbor and America's entry into World War II.

Typically, this story -- a sad chapter in American history -- would be told through the voice of a single narrator. The Buddha in the Attic draw its power -- and its haunting lyricism -- from Otsuka's decision to tell the story using hundreds of voices rather than one.

By doing so, she is is able to tap a wider range of experiences and to elevate the story from that of an individual to a people. This is an extraordinary novel whose story lingers long after the book has been put away.