Reviews. How hard can they be? Quite difficult, actually, which is why I do my own version of the things, carefully avoiding a lot of intelligent musings on a variety of literary stuff. In short, I don’t know how, so I cheat. But I do know not to just list the plot, step by step, or to tell the end in detail.
I never did get round to reading the Striped Pyjamas, because I hated being told the ending in the Guardian review. Didn’t even see it coming. These days I squint carefully at a review if the book is still waiting to be read hereabouts. In fact, I was a little annoyed at being told too much about Running Wild a few weeks ago, too.
The Guardian review of Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals seemed to be only a list of what happens. Couldn’t work out if the reviewer even liked it. I wonder what people get paid for that kind of thing? I could easily summarise novels in 600 words for payment. I’ll even throw in 100 words of opinion if required.
The other question can be what to review. I was very pleased to see that the Halloween issue of the Guardian covered two of my selected Halloween books. Generally we don’t seem to attach importance to the same books.
What length? The Guardian does a crime column with about four crime novels very briefly reviewed. Barbara from Scandinavian Crime Fiction recently felt that that was just too brief. But better than not at all, I feel.
Crime and children’s books; always forgotten or ignored. Except here, naturally.
I’m beginning to feel I can’t stand the man. I can’t tell you who, really, because he has no name. He tried pretending to be Raymond Chandler in this new book by Bateman (I know I said I’d only ever call him Colin…), but he’s not. What he is, is an insufferable bookshop owner (there are a few of those around), with a girlfriend who is far too nice for him, and he has the mother he deserves. And he solves crimes.
He has a touch of Tourettes about him, and he’s a grade one coward (takes one to know one, possibly), and the rest of the time he’s quite obnoxious. But, he does solve crimes.
The Day of the Jack Russell is the second novel about this, well, we don’t know, do we? Private Eye, and ostensibly the owner of Belfast bookshop No Alibis, except he isn’t.
The Jack Russell is stuffed, but you can still be allergic to it. His girlfriend is pregnant. Not the Jack Russell’s lady friend. ‘Mr Chandler’s’ sidekick-cum-girlfriend. If it’s his, that is. She’ll get on well with the mother from hell.
So, stuffed doggie, decorators, Amnesty International, MI5, the Chief Constable and Starbucks combine to make another very, very funny crime novel. It’s the sort of book I could write. If I could write books, which I can’t. But I’d make my ‘hero’ a little nicer. After all, he has to deserve the lady.
The cover has , yet again, been designed with me in mind. I like. Very much.
There is a launch at No Alibis this evening, but Colin has banned all those who listen to jazz.
This week even the Guardian reported on the state of Stieg Larsson’s money. They didn’t have much to say that I haven’t already blogged about, except that Stieg’s father and brother have now offered his partner Eva some money. Of course, neither I nor the Guardian know all that much. We recycle facts and come up with clever guesses as to what’s what.
We’re all guessing, because Stieg can’t tell us a thing. So it makes a change reading this blog post, written by Annika Bryn, who is a Stockholm based crime writer, and who knew Stieg. I met Annika over on Sara Paretsky’s blog, and she has previously left a comment on Bookwitch saying it’s true that Lisbeth Salander has Asperger Syndrome because Stieg said so.
This week Annika wrote about her own feelings and ideas as to how all this mess over the Millennium money happened. She says that ethically it should have been Eva who inherited the money, and that it ought to be she who’s in the position to be able to offer the Larsson men 20 million kronor, out of the 130 million total so far, instead of the reverse. Annika says that Eva wasn’t just ‘a part of Stieg’s life’, as his father and brother put it, but he always referred to Eva as his wife, and he felt they had ‘grown together’ and he could never leave her.
Stieg’s brother has said to Annika that the fact there was no will must have meant Stieg didn’t want Eva to inherit him. (But most of us don’t consider our mortality soon enough, do we?) Another thing that is easily forgotten, is that when Stieg died, he had no more money than most people. He didn’t know there’d be millions to fight over. And Annika reckons he also thought the three people in his life would get on better than they do.
She feels that although the offered 20 million is a lot of money, it’s not enough, and that a fifty-fifty share would be the fair way to do it. They should also cooperate over the intellectual property Stieg left behind. She mentions a dispute over the English translation, too. So it seems nothing is easy in this sorry saga. As for anyone finishing the fourth book, Annika reckons this would be wrong, unless it’s practically all finished anyway.
There was a very early will, in which Stieg left his money to a communist organisation. So it doesn’t seem as if he’d intended his father and brother to enjoy whatever he had to leave.
Annika’s blog usually has many, and friendly, comments left by her visitors. This time feelings have run high, and people have left some much more strongly worded comments than usual. Not all are on Eva’s side, and some don’t manage to comment politely, whatever their opinions.
I walked past the empty shop again. Well, since it’s in amongst our nearby row of shops, I go past it often, so it’s hardly worth mentioning. The shop front is rather pink and purple, which might be because it was a florist’s before. In these hard times it’s not surprising they went out of business, and neither is it strange that the premises still stand empty.
When I pass the shop, or even when I think about it, it turns into our local specialist crime bookshop. My bookshop, to be precise. Well, a person can dream. As someone who had a house covered in vividly pink carpets for a few years in the mid 1980s, I can assure you it is much cheaper to imagine, than actually to do. I never did have pink carpets, really, but in my – inexplicable – pink period I wanted them. Lack of money meant they remained in my mind, although I tried to get visitors to see them too.
So, I have the loveliest little bookshop, a mere three minutes walk from our house. Couldn’t be more convenient. We considered making it a children’s bookshop, but since one opened a few miles away very recently, we felt it’d make more financial sense to pick another speciality. I have already – in my mind – invited lots of authors to come to events. I’ll use the upstairs for my cosy author events.
It’s a far better shop than the one we imagined 25 years ago. I suppose it just goes to show that we don’t change much, just mature a little and improve on the dreams. And they had better remain dreams. I am not a good shopkeeper. I read. I dream. I don’t sell.
But I’ll repaint the shop premises. This time I don’t want pink. In my mind the shop looks like an amalgamation of everything I love in my house magazines. Except it’s a shop, not a house.
This business of admitting to not having read certain works of Shakespeare’s is getting embarrassing. The more I consider the matter, the more it seems as if I have read, or seen, hardly any. Needless to say, Othello is one of them. So I was reading in the dark when I came to Mal Peet’s Exposure.
It’s quite clear that this book is Othello in some way. I just didn’t know quite how far it would go. I had/have this idea that an awful lot of people die in Othello, and wasn’t sure that a YA novel may kill as many as that. I don’t believe Mal did, now that I have Wikied myself on Othello.
The other stumbling block was its football topic. Why would I want to read about football? Probably because it’s only about football in ways that are OK. It’s not tedious, and you barely need to understand offside and other intricate terms. But it’s quite obvious that Mal knows his football, which makes it a good read.
Exposure pulled me in immediately, so after the first chapter there was no danger of giving up. There is a lovely young man portrayed early on, and I hoped with all my heart that he wasn’t going to die. Someone dies, and it’s not nice, but I can see it was necessary.
Otello and Desmerelda are very much Posh and Becks with a Latin American flavour. Paul Faustino as the sympathetic sports journalist does a great job in making the reader feel that there is some decency in this world, when far too many of the other characters are very dubious. The children from the slums are believable; you can both love them and be afraid of them. And the old ‘leftie’ bar owner Fidel proves there are good people everywhere.
In the end it wouldn’t have helped me to know Othello, because I would have worried even more. You can tell that the baddie is bad and that he will do what he needs to do to succeed in ruining Otello. In a way you have to admire him, since he is intelligent and can work out precisely how to achieve things. And when he fails, he thinks up something else.
How super is it? I’ve been considering having a good long moan about this for a while. About today, and all the books that are published on this one day. I suppose it’s rather like moaning about your family; you love them, but something is driving you demented.
Even while being ruthless about what I want to read – and let’s face it, that’s hard to be – Super Thursday has got me on my knees, and they weren’t very good knees to begin with. For weeks I’ve been muttering a prayer that ’surely after early October there will be only a very small number of books being published for at least three months’. Please?
They started arriving in early summer with Jacqueline Wilson in the lead, and at that point I felt there was plenty of time. Just a few August and September books to read. Not too bad. Months turned to weeks and then there were days and then there was nothing.
Anyway, if I don’t end up reading a particular book, that doesn’t mean it’s bad or that I wasn’t interested. A large number of books lie waiting; either for a little love and attention a month or two late, or maybe hoping to become the surprise read next summer, or at the very least that I will love it in my retirement in the far off future.
As I didn’t start this blog just to review books, or to write exclusively about new books, I feel the time has come to have rules about how I read. On the basis that many books will have to wait for me to read while baby-sitting the great grandchildren one day, I will allow myself to read old books, and books for purely personal pleasure on a more regular basis. I just can’t decide whether to have a monthly plan, or whether to go for four of one category followed by two from another?
This way I could soon be reading I Capture the Castle and Harriet the Spy and Nesser and Theorin and all the Adrian McKintys. I have three interesting looking story collections by Chris Priestley sitting looking hopeful. Plus all the rest. Oh yes, I understand I must read The Secret Garden. Black Beauty. And one or two more.
Shorter and less frequently published books will always be appreciated.
Not being a Kindle owner, nor intending to become one, I have absolutely no idea how one buys Kindle books and gets them into that little contraption gadget thing. It’s probably quite easy.
Last year I blogged about Declan Burke’s The Blue Orange, well before it was going to be published. Now two things have happened. Declan has gone and changed the title to Crime Always Pays (coincidentally the same as his crime blog, so he is not very imaginative, really). And to disprove the title, the publisher decided there’s no money in publishing really good crime novels, so ran away and left him in the lurch. Cowards!
Being a crafty type, Declan has looked into every other way of getting CAP to the world of crime readers, and has settled on Kindle. If you’re an up-to-date kind of reader who has indeed got a Kindle, now is the time to grab hold of Crime Always Pays. It’s simply a very amusing and mad crime novel, which any crime fan should enjoy.
Apart from the slight Kindle technical hitch, like if you haven’t got one, you may need to get hold of Declan’s novel The Big O first, seeing as CAP is the sequel. A select few of you can do that here.
This great t-shirt has been specially thought up by Sara Paretsky to mark the return of V I Warshawski. V I has been away for a while, and rumour has it she went to Italy. Today sees the publication of Hardball, although only in America. UK readers have to wait until February, I think.
As a special treat for particularly bothersome bloggers, Sara sent out a few t-shirts a couple of weeks ago, which was really kind of her. You’d think that having books to write, book tours to go on and video recorders to set to record NCIS as it starts this evening, would be more than enough.
There is something worse than finding that the book you’ve just finished reading has a sequel which you need to wait for. It could be that the author is dead, so is unable to write that sequel. Stieg Larsson is no longer alive, and I kept worrying as I raced through Luftslottet som sprängdes, that it would be too much in need of a sequel for me to be happy. Strictly speaking it doesn’t have to be continued, but you are left feeling that there is a continuation, which there is, as we know. Part of one, at least, and the question is how much of it exists.
Not that I’m sure it would satisfy to have half a book, or a short Stieg Larsson. And considering the mess his estate’s in, I doubt it can happen anytime soon. The more I read of book three, the more I was reminded of Stieg’s family. I’ll leave it to you to work out which characters reminded me of them.
The titles have had me thinking, too. Before reading Luftslottet som sprängdes I thought I knew what it meant. The same goes for the concept of kicking a hornets’ nest, but in both cases I’d say the meaning is almost the opposite of what I’d had in mind.
Where book two set Lisbeth Salander up with a worse mess than she’d been in before, the ‘concluding’ book sorts things out more than you are made to expect at first. It looks very, very grim to begin with. For me it was difficult to keep fact from fiction, as there is so much that belongs in real life, and I couldn’t quite draw a line anywhere. The prime minister is in there, and so is a named predecessor of his. Real life scandals and names are mixed with fiction.
If this had been a film and if Daughter had watched it, I know exactly how she would have screamed in delight through most of it. The last two thirds, anyway. It’s fun and it’s exciting. I did spend a little time wondering how much could be allowed to go wrong, and one of my suppositions only half happened. I just feel that a stage had been set, so maybe it’s for a later book.
The plot doesn’t do much to recommend the Swedish police or government or anything much. But when things look bleak, there are individuals with integrity dotted about here and there. Mikael Blomkvist is as capable and devious as before, and Lisbeth Salander, well, she is very much herself. There is a doctor who was based on one of Stieg’s friends, and he was written into the plot under his own name. Unfortunately he upset the Larsson family sufficiently to have his name written out again. Oh well, his acts speak louder than any name.
Stieg didn’t write in any great literary style, but it’s not necessary. The plot and the general excitement means that it’d be hard to come up with anything quite like it. It’s not just Lisbeth Salander who is on the autistic spectrum, I’d say. The neat and precise way the good characters plot the path to safety, suggests a fair amount of Aspie reasoning, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. I suspect that’s why it satisfies so much.
I was going to begin by saying that you mustn’t all start writing romances after this blog, but then I thought that if you did, I’d most likely find myself reading some very good romances some time soon. (Well, not soon soon, publishing takes time. But soon.) It’s not the genre that is bad, it’s the quality of the writing. Just as I have a fondness for opera singers singing popular songs, really. It’s supposed to be really dreadful that they do, but I like popular songs, and I love them being sung by someone who really knows how to sing. Take Pavarotti singing Ti Adoro. Wonderful!
Anneli Rogeman who is editor of my favourite Swedish magazine Vi usually writes good editorials, commenting sensibly on whatever topic she has a go at. I tend to agree most of the time. I was just a little disappointed with her latest editorial, where she attacks light reading.
At least, I think she is. In the summer I blogged about what Swedes were reading, and mentioned the latest publishing phenomenon, Lars Kepler. He’s a pseudonym. Now he has been outed, and Anneli Rogeman is disappointed. Lars is in actual fact two very ‘proper’ authors, married couple Alexandra and Alexander Ahndoril (yes, really!), about whom I know virtually nothing, living in exile as I do. But they are good, I understand that much. Good as in serious, and promising to reach greater greatness in future.
Or they would, had they not stooped so low as to write for the man in the street who has little interest in literature. She moans that now we will lose years of real books from them, as they’ve been contracted to write eight books. But surely, they have the right to write anything they like? This way they will provide reading material for many more people than their ‘proper’ writing would. That’s not a bad thing, I feel. I don’t know what this Lars Kepler book is like, but assume it’s a well written novel; that they have written lighter, not badly.
AA and AA stand to make a lot more money doing this. I can see that this would be attractive. But it seems this is to be sneered at. You have proper literature for the few and possible financial hardship, versus ‘rubbish’ and authors who are well off. Hm. Tricky.
Apparently there are five reasons for writing under a pseudonym, according to Anneli Rogeman. To get read at all, if you’re a woman, say. To attract curiosity and attention. To joke with the establishment. To avoid ruining your ‘proper’ writing. To simplify your own name.
The reason I got a little incensed with the editorial was that an old favourite of mine was listed under the second reason, and was rubbished by Anneli Rogeman. I now feel that my earlier fondness of and appreciation for Bo Balderson* has been ruined in my mind. His crime novels from forty years ago are only mediocre, it seems. It was just the fact that none of us knew who BB was that made people buy the books. Really? I read them because they were funny, and I enjoyed them. The mystery was fun too, but even now that BB has been found to have been a mere primary school teacher (and I expect my Vi to be less scathing on the subject of being a ‘mere’ anything), I still like him. I wished he’d turn out to be King Gustaf VI Adolf, but this is OK.
OK, so let’ move back from mere school teachers to potential Nobel prize winners; they are still allowed to write what they want. And if they do a light genre well, then that is good and will give pleasure to many. Maybe one day they will sink so low as to write for children. No, surely not…
(*Footnote – Bo Balderson wrote crime novels about a sleuth who just happened to be a government minister. He was really only an affable, wealthy man with about 14 children, but he accidentally became a minister because his galoshes were too large. He is assisted in his sleuthing by his long suffering school teacher brother-in-law; a man with bad nerves. At the time almost every public person in Sweden was suspected of being Bo Balderson. I really favoured the theory that it was the King.)
