What I’m Reading

 Odd that it’s taken so long to write about a book in my primary reading genre, mystery and more specifically police procedurals.  My British authors, Ruth Rendell in her 70s, and P.D. James in her 80s, can’t keep up with my demand, so I have to mix it up with some of the Americans who write in the genre.  Deborah Crombie is one of the more competent and I really enjoyed her most recent book, Water Like a Stone.  Crombie’s sleuthing couple Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James deal with a complex set of problems related to policing, being a couple and being a couple in the same profession.  Though the books always deal with murder and secrets, they are less dark than Elizabeth George’s or Rendell’s.  Water Like a Stone is about the world of narrowboats, houseboats that move along England’s out of use industrial canals and the often nomadic people who live on the boats.  All the Crombie books include wonderful maps by Laura Hartman Maestro and in Water Like a Stone the maps are particularly useful.  As my friend Paul Dowd says, “No book with a map in it can ever be truly bad.”

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We gave my mother The Thirteenth Tale for Christmas because there was so much buzz around it.  I was able to read it when I visited on vacation last month, and I have to say, the buzz was accurate.

The Thirteenth Tale tells the story of elderly author Vida Winter, a sort of Barbara Cartland/PD James combo, and her naive and bookish biographer, Margaret Lea.  The book succeeds as a true gothic and successfully evoked the novels of my adolescence (and there are plenty of references to the Bronte sisters and there ilk, in case you don’t, like get it.) Like those stories, The Thirteenth Tale gets you to stay up way too late, turning the pages, dying to know what happens next and how it all turns out.

My Mom liked it, too, as did my seventeen year-old niece, creating the opportunity for multi-generational (if not multi-gender) family fun.  The Thirteen Tale would make a great beach book for this summer, though unfortunately, the paperback version won’t until October. 

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I was excited to get Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock because her last collection of short stories, Runaway was breath-taking.  (Here is the NYT Book Review of Runaway by Jonathan Franzen.)  There are stories in Runaway that are, quite simply, perfect.  Runaway brought me back to reading short stories, and ultimately to writing short stories, after a long absence.

Munro says in her Foreward to The View from Castle Rock that this collection is different from her previous ones.  Some of the stories come out of genealogical research, as she imagines the lives of her ancestors.  Other stories in the collection she sees as more frankly autobiographical than her previous work.

The ancestor stories are good.  Her family comes from the Scottish lowlands and after reading the stories I did have to wonder–perhaps us Scots are genetically bred for herding sheep and that’s why we are so content to be by ourselves.

It is in the stories about her own life that Munro once again hits her stride.  It fascinates me that despite the fact that, as Franzen says, Munro has been telling the same story over and over all her life, these stories are palpably different.  I think it may be that Munro’s usual wise and distant narrative voice is stripped away and the emotions in these stories are somehow rawer.

I do recommend The View from Castle Rock, but only after you read Runaway, if you haven’t already.

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 I jumped eagerly into Julia Glass’ The Whole World Over, because I so loved The Three Junes, which won the National Book Award in 2002. In the early going, I was a bit disappointed, not because the book isn’t good–it is beautifully written and full of characters you want to know better–but because I thought it was not going to measure up. Then, in the final chapters, it all came together and by the time I closed the book I found it every bit as satisfying as its predecessor. Like The Three Junes, The Whole World Over has many locations but is essentially a love letter to New York City, or more specifically to the West Village in the seven months preceding and the weeks following September 11. I didn’t think I was ready for a September 11, book, and I approached the end of the book with some trepidation, but it is told so well and not about the day, but about the time and the people. One of the National Book Award judges said, “Three Junes is an anti-hip book, an anti-cool book. It was like choosing a 25-year-old single-malt whiskey.” The Whole World Over offers the same genuine, unfussy pleasure.