Asking the Wrong Questions

So the good news is that since the beginning of the year I've been reading up a storm, the last vestiges of the reading drought I'd suffered under for nearly two years blowing away.  The bad news is that I'm much more interested in reading books than writing about them, which is why this recent reading roundup only covers a selection of my reading this year, the others having passed too long ago for me to remember what I wanted to say about them.  (Also not discussed here: I've been rereading the Sherlock Holmes canon in publication order, and discussing my reactions on my twitter account .  The ephemeral format feels appropriate to books that I'm only returning to, albeit after fifteen years, not reading for the first time.  But I have storified my progress thus far: A Study in Scarlet , The Sign of the Four , The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes , Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes , The Hound of the Baskervilles , The Valley of Fear .) Saga : Volume 1 and 2 by Brian K. ...

Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers - the second Wimsey/Vane novel puts the two characters on a more or less equal footing, both in terms of their dominance over the narrative and in terms of their contribution to the investigation of the mystery--the murder of a professional dancer on a secluded beach. This is a more complicated story than Strong Poison , with a great many elements--eye-witness accounts, forensic evidence, common deduction--coming together to form a coherent picture of the murder like so many puzzle pieces (all the while, of course, Sayers is holding back the final, crucial piece). The result is clever, if at times too deliberately so--the timeline of events surrounding the murder is crucial right down to the minute, so Sayers makes all of the relevant characters compulsive about accurate time-keeping (three or four different characters take trouble to assure the detectives that they reset their watches every morning according to the radio clock, which, please)--to...

Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers - I don't imagine that I'm the first reader to pick up the next-to-last novel in Sayers's Peter Wimsey detective series, Gaudy Night , and then move backwards through her bibliography to the origin of Wimsey's relationship with Gaudy protagonist Harriet Vane. As was the case with Gaudy , I found Strong Poison compulsively readable and a great deal of fun. It was also, in spite of the rather grim plot, which sees Harriet accused of murdering her former fiancé and facing the gallows, surprisingly funny, although Sayers does on occasion stray too far into farce, and on other occasions (especially when delving under the surface of Wimsey's over-the-top persona) into melodrama. In her first appearance, Harriet is only very faintly sketched, and a little too perfect to be believed--I certainly see how Sayers fans might jokingly (and sometimes not so jokingly) accuse her of having written Vane as a self-insertion character. Her i...

I'm not ignoring you all--I've just been reading a lot. Here's a small selection: Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth - Unsworth's novel, about the English slave trade in the mid-18th century, is admirable but strangely unlovable. Unsworth has an excellent ear for period voice and a good eye for details, and Sacred Hunger is a fascinating primer on the economics of the triangle slave trade. Without drowning his readers in detail, as other authors of historical fiction are apt to do, Unsworth carefully instructs us in everything from the proper construction of slave ships to survival tricks in the wilds of Florida. Ultimately, however, Sacred Hunger is a meditation about good and evil, about the economic forces that still shape our lives, and about the nature of slavery. Without ignoring the awfulness of this practice, Unsworth treats slavery as a human invention, and its victims as human beings--who are capable, in their turn, of enslaving others. Where Sacred Hunger ...