I like Thomas Pynchon – which is to say, I like the idea of Thomas Pynchon, more than the actual execution. My first experience of reading Pynchon was at university, as a first year English lit student. I’d never heard of Pynchon before and The Crying of Lot 49 was required reading for a course on 20th century American literature. It seemed easy enough; it only has 149 pages. What a deception that was. Still, I returned to class the next week, exhilarated if only […]
Life is not a paragraph and death is no parenthesis
Now this is more like it. This thriller was indeed that and more. Just because I raced through this in one feverish afternoon and early evening does not mean that I skimmed the thing. Many times I had to go back and re-read a passage, not because it was unclear or convoluted, but because the writing was so damned dazzling. Rachel is a drunk. Her husband left her for another woman. Divorced, a friend has taken her in. She lost her job months ago when […]
If Serial Was Set in Victorian England
“The ordinary was made sinister.” Any Serial obsessed person can tell you that line pretty much sums up the whole podcast. It also accurately sums up the murder of three year old Saville Kent in England in 1860 at Road House. The residents and staff of Road House all had alibis that, if you believed them innocent, appeared innocuous. If you perceived them guilty, their testimony seems suspect. For example, when the governess awoke at 5am and noticed the three year old missing from bed, […]
“I know who killed him”
Tana French’s The Secret Place is based in a posh girl’s boarding school in Dublin, where a 16-year old boy from the neighbouring boys’ school was killed last year. The investigating detective (Conway) couldn’t solve the crime at the time – he was killed in the middle of the night, all swear he wasn’t dating anyone serious at the time, and there’s no evidence that the girls can get out of the building by night. No forensics, no confessions – Conway is stumped. A year […]
Strike seeks out the truth about the Cuckoo
JK Rowling has written a wonderful mystery story. Cormoran Strike, private detective, amputee, and ex military police (but not Jack Reacher, don’t worry) is broke, has a temporary assistant he injured on her first day and didn’t even want, and is sleeping in his office having been thrown out by his girlfriend. The brother of a model who died in a fall from her balcony arrives to beg Strike to investigate her death, driven by a conviction very few share. Strike’s meticulous investigations, aided by […]
A Delightfully Gloomy Norwegian Novel
…you don’t know what mothers do when they can’t stop crying…. This is a delightfully gloomy Norwegian novel about tragedy, death, and loss of one’s treasure. You know you’re off to a good start with a sentence like this: Jenny Brodal had not had a drink in nearly twenty years. She opened a bottle of Cabernet and poured herself a large glass. Jenny is 75 and her daughter Siri is throwing her a birthday party at their summer home, Mailund, on a winding, misty coast […]
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