Book review: The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey

The fifty-fifth book I read in 2015 was The Man in the Queue, an Inspector Alan Grant novel by Josephine Tey.  The first Tey book I read was sent to me by my friend Leslie, probably her most famous book, Brat Farrar.  Having finished the Lord Peter Wimsey books, I decided to move on to more of Tey's genre.

The Man in the Queue is the first Inspector Alan Grant novel, but I don't think it really matters which order one reads them in.  This isn't his first case, and the narrative introduces him with the implication that he is already a well-known figure.  The murder in question was committed in a line for theater tickets.  Despite being surrounded by witnesses, no one noticed the death or the perpetrator, and no one comes forward to identify the victim.

Despite sharing a setting and milieu, Tey's mysteries and Sayers's are very distinct from one another.  It's difficult to imagine Lord Peter working with Inspector Grant in the way he does with Inspector Parker.  Sayers began writing six years before Tey did, and that has made all the difference: her London has a much more old-fashioned feel than Inspector Grant's city.  In addition, Sayers is writing from the point of view of an aristocratic dilettante, Tey from the perspective of a working (though still independently wealthy) common C.I.D. agent.  Tey allows Grant to be fallible -- to suspect the wrong man, even to make a false arrest -- where Lord Peter is more circumspect.  In the language of the game of Clue, Grant suggests and learns from his mistakes; Lord Peter accuses and wins the game.

Book review: The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff

The fifty-fourth book I read in 2015 was The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff.  Another serendipitous find on the clearance shelves of Half Price Books, it's an old-fashioned (1954) historical adventure novel of the kind that used to be in vogue for boys.  I'd heard of the book and didn't see a reason not to take a chance on it for a dollar, and now I'm quite glad I did.

Marcus Flavius Aquila is a Roman centurion in his first command on the British frontier.  He contemplates a long and successful military career and hopes, in the course of it, to uncover the mystery of his father's disappearance.  He led a legion into the north of Britain on a mission from which no one ever returned.

Marcus's chance to recover the lost eagle from the standard of his father's legion comes sooner than he expected and under circumstances he doesn't expect.  With a native gladiator he purchased from the ring, he goes undercover past Hadrian's wall into territory hostile to Rome to discover the fate of the lost Ninth Legion.

The characters of this book are very well-drawn, particularly Marcus's Uncle Aquila, and it's utterly fascinating to my American mind to keep reading the Romans as settlers and the native tribes as Indians and then get drawn up short by the realization that these "savages" are blond and red-headed British and Scots.  Marcus and Esca form an old-fashioned bromance to rival Frodo and Samwise.  This book is the first in a sequence about Old Britain, and I intend to seek out the rest of the series.

The book was recently (2011) made into a movie called "The Eagle," and I shudder to think what a mess it must be, with modern racial resentments read back into it.  It may well be more historically accurate, but it's no longer an adaptation of this book.  Make your own movie about how the Romans mistreated the British tribes, but don't twist someone else's narrative into something it's not and use a familiar title to gain an audience.

Book review: Have You Seen Dawn? by Steven Saylor

The fifty-third book I read in 2015 was Have You Seen Dawn? by Steven Saylor.  Saylor takes a break from Ancient Rome to set a mystery in small-town Texas.

Rue Dunwitty grew up in Amethyst, Texas but now lives and works in San Francisco.  Returning home to visit her aging grandmother, she sees a flyer in the supermarket window about a missing teenager.

There is no shortage of suspects, and it's to Saylor's credit that I never stopped suspecting any of them, so much so that when Rue ends up with one of them, it feels slightly creepy and disturbing rather than an earned happy ending.  The TV-preacher angle was lazy and overdone by the 1980s, and it's disappointing that Saylor couldn't come up with a more compelling motivation for horrific crime than Judeo-Christian Sexual Values.

While the book has a contemporary, Saylor is clearly influenced by the feel of the small-town Texas he knew as a boy.  It's very strange for an Austinite to think of the possession of an SUV or a cell phone as flaunting debaucherous luxury in 2003, and even more so for a San Franciscan to conclude that only a remarkably unfriendly or private person might have Caller ID; it may have been twelve years ago, but I'm pretty sure it came with most phone packages even then.

In addition, the bias of a man who got out of small-town Texas when the getting was good and has never looked back is on emphatic display.  Everyone in Amethyst is fat, old, stupid, closed-minded, unhappily married, or some combination of the above.  As Rod Dreher learned, people can live full and meaningful lives in fly-over country even without escaping to one of the coasts -- or at least to Austin.

On the plus side, Saylor's descriptions of cold Texas days in December were so evocative that while I was reading, I was shocked to walk outside and find it warm, I had been so drawn into his narrative.  That  hasn't happened since I read The Long Winter on a hot summer day as a child.

Book review: The Song of the Quarkbeast by Jasper Fforde

The fifty-second book I read in 2015 was The Song of the Quarkbeast, the second book The Chronicles of Kazam, by Jasper Fforde.  In this sequel to The Last Dragonslayer, Jennifer Strange and the motley crew of wizards at Kazam must win a magical contest against rival group Industrial Magic to protect the separation of magic and state and prevent iMagic's unscrupulous boss, Conrad Blix, from being named Court Mystician.

Unfortunately, Blix is unscrupulous enough not only to claim unearned accolades -- promoting himself from the Amazing Blix to the All-Powerful Blix -- but also to cheat.  Along the way, Jennifer learns the secret of longevity, meets the formerly-Magnificent Boo, goes behind the Troll Wall to rendezvous with the mostly absent Great Zambini, and finally holds a conversation with the Transient Moose.

The book ends with what feels like a farewell to Kazam -- a list of "where are they now" of the main characters -- but the third book of the series just came out last month, so there's still more chronicling of Kazam to come.

Book review: Your God Is Too Small by J. B. Phillips

The fifty-first book in read in 2015 was Your God Is Too Small by J. B. Phillips.  A slim volume first published in 1952, the book purports to examine unsatisfactory conceptions of God commonly held and contrast them with the sufficient God which Phillips claims Christianity, when rightly understood, provides.  I picked up the book as a result of reading Christianity on Trial, the best parts of which were references to this older text.

In the first half of the book, Phillips tears down false images of God, often held, if unexamined, by "churchy" people.  These include God as policeman, parent, or other authority figure, "Jesus, meek and mild" or "the pale Galilean," a pie-in-the-sky God to whom his followers can retreat from the difficulties of the world, and many others.  I found this part of the book the most enjoyable, if not particularly ground-breaking.

Phillips devotes the second half of the book to constructing a representation of God able to meet the needs of modern man.  As he starts from first principles and builds rather predictably toward the Incarnation, this part of the book was less interesting to me.

What I took from this book was something that the author never intended.  In rejecting the conception of God as "Grand Old Man," an old-fashioned type who was greatly influential in His day but out of touch with modernity, Phillips writes, "So great and far-reaching have been the changes in modern life that the young man of today cannot see any but the slenderest connection between what appears to him the slow simple and secure life of a bygone generation and the highly-complex fast-moving life of the world today."

The irony!  Because one could quite readily find such a sentence in a contemporary text, with "the slow simple and secure life of a bygone generation" applying to 1952, the very era which Phillips judged "highly-complex and fast-moving!"  May it be a lesson to us today, that there is no notion so transgressive, no technology so bleeding-edge, that a future generation won't find it backward and provincial.

Book review: Just William by Richmal Crompton

The fiftieth book I read in 2015 was Just William by Richmal Crompton.  Published in 1922, it is the first in a series of William Brown books, about a Dennis-the-Menace-type boy and his adventures, most of which heap embarrassment on his hapless family.

These stories are very dated, so much so that one can't help but see them in black-and-white in one's head.  What they remind me of more than anything is the old "Little Rascals"/"Our Gang" serials.  Really: one story deals with William getting a crush on his teacher that could be Jackie Cooper mooning over Miss Crabtree.  Interestingly, the "Our Gang" shorts began filming in 1922 as well.

I read the book wondering if it might be something Eric might like, but the language and conventions are too old-fashioned for him to grasp.  Crompton apparently spent most of her life churning out new installments of the series, with the last published posthumously in 1970.  I wonder if William changed with the times as much as did Ramona Quimby.  Whatever the social problem du jour was, the poor Quimbys always seemed to suffer from it....

Book review: Come Rain or Come Shine by Jan Karon

I began reading Jan Karon's Mitford series more than fifteen years ago, and a new installment is always anticipated.  Come Rain or Come Shine, the thirteenth book in the series, was the forty-ninth book I read in 2015.

It is, in one sense, the spiritual successor to A Common Life, in that it aims to do nothing more than tell the story of a wedding, in this case, that of Dooley Kavanagh and Lace Harper; unlike the tale of Father Tim's and Cynthia's wedding, which was told "out of order" from the ongoing timeline, this story fits right onto the end of the series and thus is free to advance the narrative arc more than the previous book did.

It's a truism that, in a Mitford book, "Jack shall have Jill and nought shall go ill."  God knows one doesn't read them for action or drama.  Yes, Dooley and Lace get married, without any of the kidnappings, disasters, deaths, terminal illnesses, mad wives in attics, cases of cold feet, or bouts of amnesia that so often derail intended weddings in more volatile genres.

But Karon is comfortable leaving a few loose ends, particularly around Dooley's mother and her attempts to reconcile with the children she abused and abandoned.  Everything doesn't get wrapped up in a neat little bow, leaving storylines open for, God willing, a fourteenth Mitford book.  I'll preorder.

Book review: Roma by Steven Saylor

Picking up The Triumph of Caesar on clearance inspired me to begin seeking out the rest of Steven Saylor's Roma Sub Rosa series.  While looking for Gordianus books, I ran across Roma: The Novel of Ancient Rome.  Not part of the mystery series, Roma is historical fiction which looks in on the descendants of a particular family at certain crucial moments from before the founding of the city to the rise of Octavian through an heirloom passed down over the course of a thousand years.  It's also the forty-eighth book I read in 2015.

On the whole, this is an excellent book for an overview of Roman history.  As a novel, it has some weaknesses, however.  Most of the characters suffer as a result of the short amount of time the narrative focuses on them and, as such, fail to be fully developed.

Woman, in particular, are flat and passive, largely serving to explain the production of the next generation, and those who receive more attention aren't very well-written.  In part, I think this is due to Saylor's desire to combine a realistic narrative with the well-worn legends of Rome.  For example, the chapter which recounts the tale of Verginia also features an unmarried friend who has quickies in the alley of a crowded marketplace with her suitor.  Would a patrician maiden really engage in such casual sex in a society in which a father could perform an honor-killing after his daughter was raped and be lauded for it?  The desire to depict modern sexual relationships conflicts badly with the (probably mythical) purity of the Old Days Livy was harking back to some four hundred years later.

I most enjoyed a demythologizing chapter explaining what might be the origin of the myth of Hercules and Cacus.  The chapters describing the old Republic and how quickly political differences devolved into mass violence and bloodshed, particularly the fate of the Gracchi, make the rise of Julius Caesar and the birth of Imperial Rome seem a blessing.  Historical figures such as Sulla also feature in the Roma Sub Rosa series, and the separate genre allows Saylor to characterize them differently.  Sulla certainly appears less vile in Roman Blood than he shows himself in the chapter "Heads in the Forum."

Book review: 100 Cupboards by N. D. Wilson

The forty-seventh book I read in 2015 was 100 Cupboards by N. D. Wilson. Faith read this one before me; I'd heard good things about the trilogy and picked up a copy at Half Price Books.

Henry York is sent to live with an aunt and uncle in small-town Kansas when the overprotective parents he has never been comfortable with disappear in South America.  At first, his new living situation seems to be a welcome second chance at normalcy.  That's before the plaster in the wall of his attic bedroom begins to crack, to reveal the first of ninety-nine small cupboards, which don't open onto the Kansas prairie but into separate worlds.

There's a lot of Narnia in this book, particularly the Wood between the Worlds of The Magician's Nephew, a bit of A Wrinkle in Time, and several sly Easter eggs to The Wizard of Oz.

Book review: Mr. Monk and the New Lieutenant by Hy Conrad

The forty-sixth book I read in 2015 was Mr. Monk and the New Lieutenant by Hy Conrad.  This nineteenth installment of the Mr. Monk series serves as a sort of a reset on the Monk universe, realigning beloved old characters alongside the mainstays, so it's a disappointment that this is, barring an unforeseen revival, the last of the Monk novels.

As a result of the events of the previous book, Amy Devlin, Leland Stottlemeyer's second-in-command, resigns her position to move back nearer her family, and the "new lieutenant" of the title is an old irritant to Monk.  The action of the story centers around a judge and Captain Stottlemeyer himself being targeted for murder.  While the captain recovers from the attempt on his life, Monk and Natalie have to work with Lieutenant Thurman, a situation to which Monk responds with authentically Monk denial:

"No, that's unacceptable.  What about Lieutenant Devlin?  She can come back, at least until the captain is safe."
"I already asked her.  She said no."
"What about Randy Disher?  He can come back."
Randy had been the captain's number two for years, until he'd found a better job on the other side of the country.  "Randy's a police chief in New Jersey.  He's not coming back."
"You don't know that.  Okay, what about Lieutenant Devlin?"
"I just told you."
"What about Randy Disher?  I'm giving you all these options."

When it appears that the attacks are related to an old case, Randy Disher does make an appearance and becomes thoroughly depressed that apparently he wasn't important enough for the killer to target him as well.

While it's disappointing that there won't be any more Monk mysteries, all good things must come to an end, and this is a satisfying conclusion to the story, one that leaves the characters refreshed, reunited, and primed for new adventures.

Book review: A Presumption of Death by Jill Paton Walsh and Dorothy L. Sayers

The forty-fifth book I read in 2015 was A Presumption of Death by Jill Paton Walsh and Dorothy L. Sayers.  My opinion of Paton Walsh's continuation of the Lord Peter Wimsey series has not improved since Thrones, Dominations.  Rather, in fact, the opposite.

Notice the reversal of the authors' names in comparison to the first book: Sayers's sole contribution to this volume, which earns her the byline, is a collection of wartime letters written to and by her characters.  I found them rather off-putting and was unsurprised to read that they were, in effect, war-effort propaganda published in 1939 and 1940, in some of the darkest moments of World War II for Great Britain.

Paton Walsh's mystery story centers around the effects of the war on the homefront in Paggleham, where Lady Peter is living with her children and nephew and nieces in the country while Lord Peter and Bunter are spying on the Continent.  The village is having a practice air raid, for which they prove remarkably ill-prepared.  The complaining of the village folk, whom Paton Walsh clearly wants to denigrate as selfish and provincial, stands in stark contrast to the flood in The Nine Tailors, where Sayers depicts the capable and self-effacing populace rising to the occasion with aplomb under more dangerous circumstances and with less advance notice.  During the practice air raid, a young woman is killed on the streets, a murder which Harriet is obliged to investigate on her own unless and until her husband returns.

I suppose it's not spoileriffic, considering Paton Walsh has already written two more "New Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane Mysteries," to reveal that he does, in fact, finally return, but I don't really need to know how many times he pleasures his wife before taking his boots off.  Paton Walsh includes a lot more sex (and gore) in her books than Sayers, which is unsurprising considering the age but still disappointing in light of the fact that these are meant to be a continuation of the same novel line and not a new series set in the same time period but with modern literary sensibilities.

What really annoyed me was this thought Paton Walsh placed in Harriet's head on page 331: "And there was a conundrum here: who had he killed?"  I hope that both Sayers and Harriet Vane, as writers, would know that the question should be 'whom had he killed!'

As stated above, there are two more books in the series at this point, both of which are attributed solely to Jill Paton Walsh.  I began reading The Attenbury Emeralds and did not finish.  The list of books I began reading and didn't finish is a short one, short enough that those books I set down in disgust, unable to finish or unwilling to subject myself to the misery of continued reading remain ready to hand in my mind, for the most part.  The Ambassadors by Henry James: just too mind-numbingly boring.  The Walrus and the Warwolf by Hugh Cook: I despised every character in it and couldn't stand to spend any more time with them.  The Pickwick Papers: God forgive me, I enjoy almost everything Charles Dickens ever wrote in spite of myself, even the blatant heart-tugging sob stories, and the March girls loved it so, but Pickwick and his friends are the Dumb and Dumber of their age.  Well, add to that short list The Attenbury Emeralds.

Where to begin with the sins of The Attenbury Emeralds?  Well, start with the fact that it opens with a list of characters, a crutch Dorothy Sayers never felt the need for as she respected the intelligence of her readers.  Go on to the fact that first several chapters are nothing but Peter, Harriet, and Bunter sitting in a room talking at each other, just clever dialogue atop too-clever dialogue.  And the reason for this logorrhea?  Because in all their years of courtship and marriage, Peter apparently never told Harriet about his first case, the one that got him started detecting.  Likely, no?

Add the unbearably anachronistic classism (reverse classism?) where all the aristocracy are unbearable snobs who have nothing but contempt for the lower classes except for Peter, noble, shell-shocked Peter, who prefers the company of servants to that of his own social milieu because they're so salt of the earth.  And the absolute nadir is Paton Walsh dropping The Honorable Freddy's "The Honorable" and actually allowing a character to refer to Lord Peter as Lord Wimsey, with no one raising an eyebrow or correcting his appalling faux pas.

We get it, sweetie: You're democratic, progressive, anti-establishment, probably socialist.  Go fight the system in your own darn books instead of using Dorothy Sayers's name and reputation to ride your hobby-horse.

Book review: Mr. Monk Is Open for Business by Hy Conrad

The forty-fourth book I read in 2015 was Mr. Monk Is Open for Business by Hy Conrad, the eighteenth in a series of novels based on the successful USA network detective series.  We were big fans of the show during its run, and I've enjoyed the book series.  (Tommy felt the idiosyncrasies of the main character diverged too much from the baseline established in the TV series.)

To be fair, he's not wrong.  The Mr. Monk of the novels is even more crippled by his phobias than his depiction on the show, largely because the author has more time and space to demonstrate, say, that Monk is afraid of elevators due to claustrophobia and acrophobia by having him go to great lengths to avoid riding in one whereas, in an hour-long show, the writers are more concerned with covering all the necessary bases of the murder investigation and are happy to put Monk in an elevator just to get to the money scene.  The most egregious discrepancy that comes to mind is that novel-Monk has a positively crippling case of coulrophobia while TV-Monk has interacted with clowns at carnivals and circuses while demonstrating only minor annoyance.

(And, to be fair to the novels, it's not like the TV writers were unswervingly consistent with his quirks from week to week, either.)

Despite the fact, the great thing about the novel line is that it was written by two men -- first Lee Goldberg, then Hy Conrad -- who were both writers on the show.  As a result, all of the dialogue is just right for the characters: you can actually hear the actors from the show saying the lines as you read.  Since the novel line began during the show's original run but continued after it ended, the books not only gave the characters further development but introduced new ones that (mostly) feel organic.

One of the new characters that didn't work, from my perspective, was a new love interest for Adrian Monk.  This novel opens having gotten rid of her, which is always a good thing.  The premise is that Natalie has gotten her P.I. license and is opening their own business rather then depending on consults with the Police Department.  The show flirted with the idea in the 5th-season episode "Mr. Monk, Private Eye," and it's somewhat surprising that the book doesn't acknowledge the fact, though less surprising that Natalie doesn't bring it up, since neither of them considered the endeavor a great success.  The cases in the book are brought to them by two recurring characters new to the novels, Natalie's AA sponsor and Randy Disher's replacement as Stottlemeyer's lieutenant.

Book review: Thrones, Dominations by Dorothy L. Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh

When I read The Nine Tailors and the last stories in Lord Peter, in one sense, I had read all there was to read about Lord Peter Wimsey.  However, I already knew that a contemporary novelist, Jill Paton Walsh, had been given permission by the Sayers estate to write more.  'Authorized sequels' can be a dubious proposition (Scarlett, anyone?), but I thought I'd give them a chance.

As a result, the forty-third book I read in 2015 was Thrones, Dominations, with the double by-line of Sayers and Walsh.  According to Wikipedia, Sayers began work on Thrones, Dominations with a view to comparing Lord Peter's and Harriet's new marriage with that of two other couples but abandoned it in the face of political events in Europe in the latter half of the 1930s after completing approximately the first six chapters.

That's where Jill Paton Walsh comes in.  I'd like to say the transition is seamless, but....  Her command of the language is admirable: Lord Peter and Harriet, in the main, sound like themselves.  I suspect Paton Walsh of being the hand behind the excerpts from the Dowager Duchess's diary, which are distractingly of-the-moment, mentioning then-current events and personalities with a specificity Sayers avoided.  I hope she is the originator of some glaring new characters, including Harriet's lady's maid and Bunter's sudden and distracting love interest, who seem to be introduced with a passion for making things fair: If Lord Peter gets a romance, so must his lower-class right-hand man, and if Lord Peter has a live-in assistant, so must Harriet.

More unforgiveably, both Lord Peter and Harriet are much less intelligent and able in this novel than in the previous Sayers-penned ones.  Harriet convinces a neglected wife to take a weekend in the country; when something unpleasant occurs and everyone is trying to figure out why she was there, it's a whole chapter before Harriet suddenly recalls the fact; later on, Harriet notices a clue as Lord Peter and Inspector Parker discuss the case and begins to raise a question ... but Inspector Parker talks over her, Lord Peter allows him to (out of character), and Harriet doesn't bother bringing the point up again (even more out of character) until the men handle it chapters later and she says oh, yes, I thought that was strange but didn't say anything.

Paton Walsh has produced a serviceable detective novel set in the 1930s, but it is, in the final analysis, not a Lord Peter Wimsey novel.

The Sexy Dinosaur

On the subject of the depiction of women in fantasy art, in one of these pictures Wonder Woman is wearing, well, as many clothes as she ever does, and in the other she's entirely naked, save for a strategically-placed sheet; and yet, the "fully-clothed" Wonder Woman is far less offensive (also, far less top-heavy).

Blogger David Brothers compares art of the same character as drawn by different artists -- Wonder Woman, here, and Psylocke (who, frankly, I've never heard of, but whatever), here -- and demonstrates that it's not about how heavily-clothed a female character is (contra those who shout that those who object to women being sexualized in popular culture want to put them in burqas) but about depicting women as competent independent agents rather than pin-up dolls that exist to be super-sexy.  It's like Halloween costumes for women: Sexy Pirate, Sexy Minion, Sexy Dinosaur, whereas men can just be Pirate, Minion, Dinosaur.

And, just for fun, here's what one of the most reviled comic-cover poses really looks like when modeled in 3D.

Book review: The Triumph of Caesar by Steven Saylor

I was browsing the clearance section of the local Half Price Books when I spotted a familiar name on a spine: Steven Saylor.  In my first year of college, spring semester of 1992, I took a Roman Civ & Culture class that had, as one of its requirements, to read a work of fiction set in Ancient Rome.  The book I selected was a detective story starring Gordianus the Finder, Roman Blood, by a first-time novelist named Steven Saylor.

I knew Saylor had written some sequels, as I kept up with them for a book or two, borrowing them from the library in my hometown during vacations, but after moving away for grad school, I completely forgot about them until I saw this hardcover on the shelf.  Could he possibly still be writing Gordianus books? I wondered.

The answer, as it turns out, was yes.  The forty-second book I read in 2015 was The Triumph of Caesar, the twelfth in the series.  Despite not having given the series any thought in twenty-odd years, I remembered Gordianus, and even a few of the supporting characters seemed familiar from the first three books.  Set more than thirty years after the first installment, The Triumph of Caesar finds Gordianus nearing the end of his career.  His career as Finder has proved relatively lucrative and has won him powerful friends; the story opens with Julius Caesar's wife seeking Gordianus's help in uncovering what she believes to be a threat on Caesar's life during the week of his Triumph, a series of parades celebrating his victories in Egypt and elsewhere.

A bit too much of the didact comes through at times -- dialogue in which the characters over-explain everyday habits to each other, "As you, of course, know, it has long been our custom to...."  Still, to reacquaint myself with Gordianus after such a long time in such a serendipitous way was a delight, and it motivated me to seek out the rest of the series, both the ones I read twenty years ago and have largely forgotten, and the ones I missed.

Book review: Death by Living by N. D. Wilson

The truth is that a life well lived is always lived on a rising scale of difficulty.
As a little kid, I had a job: Obey my mother. Don't lie. Play hard. Be nice to my sisters.
At the time, that job was actually difficult. My mom kept saying things like, "Come here." And, "No jumping on the couch." Or, "Don't stand on the doorknob and swing on the door." And, "No hitting."
But my sisters were there, and so were my fists. The couch was bouncy. Doors are cool to swing on.
Man, I was bad at my job.

The forty-first book I read in 2015 was Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent by N. D. Wilson.   Wilson is best known, I would imagine, as the author of young adult fantasy, including the 100 Cupboards series, but this is a devotional book.  Or possibly "Christian living."  I've never been entirely clear on the distinction between the two.

Wilson's thesis is that we ought all to live in consciousness of the inevitability of death.  Not only does it orient us to live less self-centered lives ("If you were suddenly given more than you could count, and you couldn't keep any of it for yourself, what would you do?  This is, after all, our current situation."), it is a positive mercy to mankind struggling to overcome his sinful nature: "In the ancient myths, Tartarus is where the revel Titans were tortured forever, where they struggled to complete tasks without any end, without any completion.  Without death, without mortal time, this earth would be Tartarus."

A life well-lived is always lived on a rising scale of difficulty.  The last enemy to be conquered is death.

Book review: Lord Peter by Dorothy L. Sayers

When I read my last Lord Peter novel, it wasn't my last Lord Peter mystery.  Dorothy Sayers also wrote several short stories starring the noble sleuth which are collected in Lord Peter: The Complete Lord Peter Wimsey Stories.  The collection isn't the fortieth book I read in 2015, as I read the stories folded in with the novels in the order of their publication, but it was the fortieth book I finished.

A Lord Peter short story is a very different experience than a Lord Peter novel.  There just isn't room enough or time for the multitude of clues and characters that accrue in a longer work, and there's less of a deductive unraveling of the case and more of a flash of inspiration that solves it.  As such, the Lord Peter of the short stories comes across significantly more superhuman than he does in the novels.  The plots are rather more sensational, as well, perhaps to quickly seize the attention of a reader flipping through the pages of a magazine.  On the whole, I much prefer the novels.

The collection is chiefly notable for the last two stories, which take place after the last Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane novel and give us a glimpse of life after their honeymoon: "The Haunted Policeman" takes place the night their first child is born, and "Talboys" is set some years later when they have three young sons.  "Talboys" in particular sets the mind at rest about whether letting the romantic leads get married means the end of the line creatively; had Sayers chosen to continue writing books about Lord Peter, the quality of the story is reassuring that she could have done so with no drop-off in quality -- even if the mystery in question is only who stole the local farmer's peaches rather than a murder.

Book review: The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson

The thirty-ninth book I read in 2015 was The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson. Set in Denver in the early 1960s, it tells the story of a woman living two lives: in one, a successful single career woman running a bookstore with her best friend, in the other, a happily-married mother of small children.  When she falls asleep in one life, she wakes up in the other.

For a while, she merely enjoys what she considers to be a vivid recurring dream, exploring the road not taken, but eventually she must decide which of the two worlds she is experiencing is the real one -- and which she wants to be.

Apart from the implied supernatural element, I was also drawn to this book because my mother was a single woman in Colorado for a while in the 1960s, albeit in Boulder rather than Denver.  I very much enjoyed it.  Each of the realities the protagonist (Kitty in one life, Katharyn in the other) experiences is rich and believable, and I went back and forth in my own mind over the course of the narrative over which one was "real."  Even more impressive, the final resolution felt earned, rather than a cheap or trite cop-out ending.  This was Cynthia Swanson's first novel, and I'll certainly be interesting in taking a look at her second.

Book review: City Beyond Time by John C. Wright

The thirty-eighth book I read in 2015 was City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis by John C. Wright.  I read it on my Kindle, drawn in by a free preview of a non-linear story which jumped forward and backward in time in the telling.  "Murder in Metachronopolis" begins

16.

Third beginning:
I woke up when my gun jumped into my hand.

If you can resist trying to unravel a noir detective story told out of order, you're a better man than I.

"Murder in Metachronopolis" is by far the best story of the six, but it was worth the price of the e-book, particularly since I paid most of the $4.99 with promotional credits I'd accumulated from various other Amazon purchases.  The protagonist of "Murder," Jacob Frontino, returns in the last story, "The Plural of Helen of Troy," which is the second best of the collection.  The stories that don't feature him are standard "Twilight Zone"/"The Outer Limits" fare.

At the time I read the book, I was unaware of the Hugo Award kerfuffle.  I can verify that Wright's female characters are underwritten and antithetical to the Bechdel test, as they're defined entirely by their relationships with men.  The Jacob Frontino stories suffer least, as -- hello!  they're in the noir detective genre, where women are femme fatales, hookers with hearts of gold, girls-next-door, or gals Friday.  

I don't take a side in the actual controversy.  I liked this book a lot, but I also loved Redshirts by John Scalzi, who is on the opposite side of the argument; and both the dinosaur stories are execrable, but the Sad Puppy one at least has the distinction of actually being science fiction.  

Book review: The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers

The thirty-seventh book I read in 2015 was The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers.  It's not the last of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels, but it's the last one for me, as I read the Harriet Vane books first before going back to fill in the rest of the Wimsey oeuvre.  It actually has nothing to do with people who make or mend clothes for a living, although the misunderstanding does arise in the course of the story.

Lord Peter, traveling to Duke's Denver with the faithful Bunter, runs off the road after dark in the village of Fenchurch St. Paul and manages to get involved in a series of events surrounding a missing necklace which bankrupted an aristocratic family and an unidentified body interred in someone else's grave.  I'm not altogether convinced by the medical science which finally explains the death, but the circumstances are convincingly horrific and the fellow who suffered them suitably dastardly almost to deserve them.

Sayers's picture of parish life, and the care the parish priest provides to the souls in his neighborhood, is touching enough that even this devoted nonconformist got a little nostalgic.  One of the highlights of the book is a flood, to prepare for the arrival of which the whole village cranks into highly-efficient gear, under the direction of the rector, to turn the church into an emergency shelter.  The portrayal of pre-WWII stiff-upper-lipping and keeping-calm-and-carrying-on indicates all that was admirable about British character in the early twentieth-century.  The fact that Sayers apparently felt it morally necessary to punish the innocent victims of the villain's perfidy, in connection with the do-the-right-thing-and-kill-yourself-to-avoid-shame trope that appears in a couple of her books demonstrates the less-lamented aspects of the same period.

Reviewing a book review: In the Beginning Was the Word by Mark Noll

I quibble with Peter Thuesen's review of Mark Noll's book, In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783, in the November/December 2015 issue of Books & Culture.

Thuesen reports

...during the American Revolution, ... clergy of many stripes, along with secular pamphleteer Tom Paine, appealed to Scripture to justify the Patriot cause.  Ironically, the same Bible had been used earlier in the colonial era not to attack the British monarchy but to defend it as a bulwark against Catholic (especially French) tyranny.

Is it really ironic, though?  If a text is in favor of liberty (and any reading of the Pauline epistles can hardly help but come away with the impression that the New Testament is), can it not be profitably employed against a more authoritative regime in favor of a less, as well as against the less authoritative in favor of the democratic?  One can plausibly use medical research to argue that steak and mashed potatoes make a more healthy meal than a fast-food hamburger and fries, even if grilled fish and rice with steamed vegetables are more healthy than the steak and potatoes.

Later, Thuesen (and presumably Noll) bemoans that the freed slave and abolition activist Olaudah Equiano wrote an autobiography which, while rich with biblical allusions and quotation of Scripture, was "overwhelmingly a story of personal redemption.  As such, it typified the mostly apolitical uses of the Bible by other 18th-century evangelicals."  This is one of the rare instances I've seen of scholars criticizing people for failing to exploit Christianity for a political end.

Thuesen concludes that the book under review is "the most profound treatment ever written of the Bible in public life" [my bold].  While this may well be true -- I certainly haven't done the research to contradict it -- the extravagance of the claim gives one pause, particularly when the reviewer follows up by strawmanning, "All too often, histories of the Bible in America have uncritically glorified the American project, stopping just short of assuming that Moses and Jesus were Americans whose teachings were everywhere in harmony with the nation's imperial ambitions."  Such hyperbole demands citations to back it up, or it didn't happen.

From today's Parade Magazine, where journalism goes to die

From this puff piece on Daniel Craig, promoting the new Bond film:

...film biographer David Thomson claims that Craig is the "least handsome" of the actors who've played the spy....  Thomson also says Craig is the most taciturn, "almost as if he had always wanted to be an actor instead of a star."
And yet from his very first outing in Casino Royale (2006), Craig has been a very believable Bond....

[My bolding]

Thomson's kiss-up to Craig (and snide implied put-down of the other Bonds) aside, it's "nice" to see the same bland incredulousness that was applied to Colleen McCullough in her obituary can smack men upside the head as well.  "Gosh, Daniel Craig's no George Clooney, and yet he's a good actor! It's almost as if a person's physical attractiveness has no relation to their value in other elements of life at all!"