Hi, Saloners!

This week I’ve been reading Dorothy L. Sayers‘s wonderful Gaudy Night. Sayers was a mystery writer, Christian thinker, translator, playwright, and general all-around scholar. Mostly I’ve read her mysteries, because they are delightful. They are also so very, very British.

Gaudy Night, I think, is the best out of all of them, and certainly out of the Lord Wimsey series. This novel takes Harriet Vane back to Oxford, her alma mater, to try and solve an ongoing mystery. Staff and students have been receiving anonymous and very ugly letters, which soon become coupled with outbreaks of vandalism. When Harriet calls Lord Peter in to assist, about halfway through the book, a further element of romance is also injected into the story.

It’s been interesting reading this book, because I have read it before. It’s been at least three or four years, but I do remember who the culprit is, and even why they did everything (although I don’t really remember the “how” of what they did). But I don’t remember how the mystery is solved, and the vast bulk of the story is new to me again. So it’s worth reading even if I know whodunit (which would otherwise be the point of reading a mystery novel, or at least a large part of it) because the way Sayers gets to the end is so wonderful. And a story is more than the plot, of course. How and why the narrative works as it does is also important.

Do you or can you re-read mystery novels? Does remembering whodunit ruin the rest for you? Do you read with only the mystery in mind, or is the rest equally (or more) enjoyable?

Post from: She Reads Books

Sunday Salon: Remembering Whodunits

I got home late last night, you see, having been out with friends to take in a play. And when I got home, I saw that my brother J was also come home (he having been on a school trip, you see). While in the States, J had bought yet another Terry Pratchett novel. I immediately demanded to read it first (since he hadn’t started, and because I read faster than he does, and because I’m like that) and gave him another one to read that I had already finished.

I know that it was his book. But we have a system, you see.

At any rate, I got his copy of Monstrous Regiment at around 11:30. And then I read it. All of it.

It only took four hours. (At an estimated speed of 1.6 pages/min).

So, at 3:30, I went to bed. Then I got up at 9, went to church, and now I think I’m going to eat food and then go to bed again.

Good times.

Post from: She Reads Books

Sunday Salon: Early Bird

Well, what better way to celebrate the end of winter than by . . . um . . . reading a book set in a snowy winter, with a whole town snowed in, and snow a constant recurring motif and . . . actually, there may be many better ways. But I’m still ploughing through Snow, by Orhan Pamuk.

This Nobel Prize-winning novel is set in the city of Kars in Turkey, to which the poet Ka returns after many years of political exile in Germany. He is there to write a newspaper article about a wave in suicides among Muslim girls forced by the state to remove their head scarves, but also to meet up with a beautiful ex-classmate, Ipek, who has recently become divorced.

It’s really good. I can’t tell you much more than that because I’m still not particularly far in. Actually, I’m about halfway done, but I still don’t think I could summarize the plot. It has one, surely, but it’s still kind of a weird book — good, but weird. A little too cutesy with the foreshadowing sometimes, maybe.

But good.

Post from: She Reads Books

Sunday Salon: Snow

Instead, I am cataloguing, over at LibraryThing.

I love cataloguing.

It just appeals to me all over. I like putting things in order. I like comparing my library with those of others. I like organizing and tagging books, and hunting down their correct covers and edition information. I like seeing the number of books I’ve done go up on my profile. I like finding the books I share with only one other person on LibraryThing, and keeping track of other library-ish statistics. I like handling all of the books, and using ISBN numbers, and being the only person in the house who knows more or less where every book lives. I like looking at my Author Gallery.

Ijust plain enjoy it all.

It’s my goal to catalogue every single book that we own. That’s a lot of books; I’ve already done just over 1,400 and there are at least that many left to do. Probably closer to 2,000 (my best guess). We’re book people, you see.

And this has been enough of a break — back I go!

(As of publication, the number of catalogued books stands at 1,430. We’ll see how much further I can get by the end of the day).

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Sunday Salon: Happily Cataloguing

Twenty dollars! It seems so little once you actually get into the bookstore. As usual, J. went straight to the Terry Pratchett books, while I wandered from section to section in an ecstasy of indecision. Fantasy? Mystery? Chick-lit? Classic? History? I have a mental list of dozens of books I would like to get at some point in time, but it is very hard to choose between them when the money is actually in hand.

Maybe someday somebody will give me $1,000 or so and tell me to spend it only on books. Can do!

At any rate, I eventually decided. I bought two books: Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, and Atonement, by Ian McEwan. I read a borrowed copy of Tess last month and it is so beautiful that I know I will re-read it often. I’m glad to have it on my shelf now.

As to Atonement, this book has been flickering on and off my radar for a while. I think a film version just came out? I’m not sure. The book itself, though, comes highly recommended by a number of people I know, and so I thought I’d give it a go. I’m only about 40 pages in, and so I have no idea where it’s going, but I like it so far.

I don’t, however, have much time to read it this afternoon. With three exams this week, I’m trying to spend my time either reviewing what I’ve read this term, or reading what I haven’t read this term, but should have. Right now I’m reading Cymbeline, and then I’ll do a review of all of the plays we’ve read this term. Then, I think, a quick look over the list of all the Canadian Fiction from this term, and maybe to finish the last hundred pages or so of Middlemarch if there’s time. After that I should continue my essay on Wuthering Heights and Lady Audley’s Secret — but I somehow think that I’ll end up diving into Atonement instead.

I must get back to my reading. But here is a passage for yours:

The simplest way to have impressed Leon would have been to write him a story and put it into his hands herself, and watch as he read it. The title lettering, the illustrated cover, the pages bound–in that word alone she felt the attraction of the neat, limited and controllable form she had left behind when she decided to write a play. A story was direct and simple, allowing nothing to come between herself and her reader–no intermediaries with their private ambitions or incompetence, no pressures of time, no limits on resources. In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world; in a play you had to make do with what was available: no horses, no village streets, no seaside. No curtain. It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unravelled. You saw the word castle, and it was there, seen from some distance with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith’s forge, and a cobbled road twisting away into the green shade . . .
- Ian McEwan, Atonement, pp. 46-7.

Happy Sunday reading.

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Sunday Salon: Atonement, Tess, and Sundry

Not to say that I didn’t get any reading done. I’ve been reading through Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, and yesterday I finished off the last half of Sourcery. I believe it is the fifth in the series overall, and the third Rincewind book.

It was pretty good. It was funny, of course. And it wasn’t as unstoppable in its silliness as the first two Rincewind sagas. I’m glad of that. All of the Discworld books are silly to an extent, but I tend to prefer the more “serious” ones (such as those about Captain Vimes or Moist von Lipwig).

This book deals with the arrival of a “sourceror” in Ankh-Morpork — a “sourceror” being much more powerful as a wizard, as both a user and a source of magic. Needless to say, chaos ensures.

I’d give this one about a 3.75 of 5. It’s good, but Pratchett has written better. I don’t know if I would re-read this one, unlike most books in the series.

*As an aside, you must see Enchanted. It is side-splittingly funny.

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Sunday Salon: Sourcery

P. came to church with us this morning, and he brought me two books he’d bought for me last week. It was entirely a surprise; P. is not much of a reader (dyslexia) and finds me hard to buy for since he doesn’t know what I’ve read. But these two books were good choices — for more than the reason that I haven’t read them. The one is Green for Life, a new release by Gillian Deacon and is exactly that: a book full of tips, tricks, and ideas for everyday green living.

The other is also newly out this month, called Four Letter Word, edited by Joshua Knelman & Rosalind Porter. It’s a collection of “original love letters” — fiction by the likes of Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, M. G. Vassanji, and loads of others I’ve never read and now need to. I might have some trouble, though, tracking down the other writings of Anonymous.

This book is amazing. I began it this afternoon and finished it this evening, on the couch for the most of it, and then sitting sideways in the computer chair, hurrying through the last two or three because I was so excited to write about it.

This book is about love. It’s about love gone right, and love gone horribly wrong, and sometimes love just gone. There are letters to lovers, and to former lovers, and to perhaps future lovers. There are letters to parents, to children, to strangers. There’s at least one letter “to whom it may concern.” There’s a love letter to a mountain. There’s a letter from a chimpanzee to Miss Primatologist Lady in the Bushes Sometimes. There is a letter to Santa — from Bigfoot.

This book is 245 pages long, not counting the biographies at the end. I have read all of them, not counting the biographies at the end. I might get to that.

It’s a beautiful book to hold, too. The cover is made up to look like a packet of letters, tied with a satin ribbon — and the pages are uneven in that style I like. Underneath the dust jacket the cover is a nice sort of fawn colour, with copper writing. It’s just the right size.

I don’t know what more to say except that everyone should read it. And if you’ll excuse me, I need to write a letter.

5/5.

Post from: She Reads Books

Sunday Salon: Four Letter Word