I sampled and skimmed the 12 stories in Jay McInerney’s new collection titled, How It Ended. I guess I never found out how it ended, since I put the book aside without finishing it. I had read most of the stories when originally published, and found myself turning to the next one rather than re-rereading one I had read years earlier. They might have been worth spending the time reading the first time around, but for whatever reason, I had no interest in reading them again.
Shelf of Ennui.
Secrets. I didn’t realize how much I missed V.I. Warshawski until Sara Paretsky wrote the latest novel in the series titled, Hardball. After just a few pages, I remembered the reading pleasure from earlier books in the series. In many ways, both Paretsky and V.I. are continuing to improve. In Hardball, private detective V.I. Warshawski accepts a low-paid assignment from an elderly dying woman to find Lamont Gadsden, missing for forty years. V.I. tracks down leads and uncovers secrets that were long buried. Along the way, she wonders about her late father’s role in police corruption and illegal practices. The south side of Chicago, past and present, comes alive on these pages, as if it, too, is a character. V.I.’s twenty-three-year-old cousin, Petra, adds lots of energy to Hardball, and reprised characters from prior novels remain reliable, giving V.I. much-needed help in her perilous work to uncover secrets held closely for decades.
Rating: Four-star (Highly Recommended)
Depth. I am often frustrated by novels over 500 pages, coming away with the feeling that a hundred or more pages could have been edited out without much loss. That was not my experience when I read The Girl Who Played With Fire: I wanted the story to continue. Having been introduced to Lisbeth Salander in the first book of this trilogy, The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo, I was looking forward to her return along with Mikael Blomkvist in The Girl Who Played With Fire. We learn more about Lisbeth in this book, and see her use her prodigious skills to carry out justice. There are plenty of questions remaining, and some of those may be addressed in the next novel. In the meantime, reading The Girl Who Played With Fire satisfies a lot of curiosity, especially about Lisbeth’s past. I read this quickly, enjoyed it thoroughly, and look forward to reading the third book in this trilogy, which was the last book Larsson completed before he died in 2004.
Rating: Four-star (Highly Recommended)
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Darkness. E.L. Doctorow’s latest novel, Homer & Langley, brings readers into the strange world of the Collyer brothers, who lived eccentric lives in New York. While Doctorow based this novel on the real Collyer brothers and some of the facts of their lives, it is the inner life that Doctorow presents with great skill. Homer is blind, and while Langley has physical sight, his own darkness can often be more desolate than that of his brother. Doctorow’s writing led me to pause after finishing some sentences, and return to read them again to savor the experience. Here’s one example (p. 193), “There were mental shutters too and mine were closed tight and I turned back to what I could rely on, the filial bond.” Some shutters close gradually, and in many respects for both Homer and Langley, their descent into madness came slowly, adjusted each day by another step in a direction that became irreversible over time. Doctorow pulls this off with great skill and efficiency, allowing a reader to become absorbed page by page into Homer & Langley.
Rating: Four-star (Highly Recommended)
Rescue. Anita Diamant’s novel, Day After Night, presents four young women who come together in 1945 when they arrive at Atlit, a British internment camp in Palestine. As illegal immigrants who found passage away from the scars of their wartime lives in Europe, these four women display dimensions of ongoing shock, both from their recent experiences, and in arriving at a place of incarceration when they expected to start new lives. Each woman finds rescue, of one sort or another, as Diamant takes readers behind the barbed wire of Atlit, and into the personal stories of these women. Thanks to Diamant’s fine writing, I felt as if I were in Atlit with those women, and I came to understand their fears and hopes.
Rating: Three-star (Recommended)
