Library Loot: Sept 21-27

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire (The Captive Reader) and Marg (The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader) that encourages bloggers to share the books they've checked out of the library. If you'd like to participate, just write up your post, feel free to steal button, and link up using the Mr. Linky at the hosting site each week. And, of course, check out what other participants are getting from their libraries.


I had no idea (until I was looking for my last post to cut & paste the intro) that I had been off the Library Loot bandwagon since the beginning of August. Don't know what happened there because I have been going to the library. Just too busy reading the books to post about picking them up I guess.

Here's what I've got this week:

Death of an Englishman by Magdalen Naab: The debut of Marshal Salvatore Guarnaccia of the Carabinieri, a Sicilian, stationed in Florence. It is just before Christmas and the marshal wants to go South to spend the holiday with his wife and family, but first he must recover from the flu (which has left the Florentine caribinieri short-handed) and also solve a murder. A seemingly respectable retired Englishman, living in a flat on the Via Maggio near the Santa Trinita bridge, was shot in the back during the night. He was well-connected and Scotland Yard has despatched two officers to "assist" the Italians in solving the crime. But it is the marshal, a quiet observer, not an intellectual, who manages to figure out what happened, and why.

Let's All Kill Constance by Ray Bradbury: The third volume in the author's noir series, set in 1950s California, follows a young screenwriter and his crafty partner, detective Elmo Crumley, as they protect an aging movie queen from a deadly enemy who is determined to put an end to both her career and her life.

Blood Atonement by Dan Waddell: Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster is called to a homicide at the home of a single mother in Queens Park, London. Her throat has been cut from ear to ear and her body dumped in the garden. Her daughter and only child, Naomi, who has just turned fourteen this day, is missing. As the hours tick by, the feeling grows among Foster's colleagues that this mis most likely becoming a double-murder inquiry. With nothing in the present to indicate a motive, Foster decides to delve into the woman's past, only to find out she doesn't have one. Not sure where else to turn for information, he calls on genealogist, Nigel Barnes for help.


Leftover Loot & Current Read (from my last trip): March Violets by Philip Kerr: Private eye Bernhard Gunther attempts to recover a diamond necklace in 1936 Berlin, a seemingly routine case that blossoms into a deadly plot involving Nazi politics and the Dachau death camp.

And...some Loot from the Friends of the Library Booksale:

Haunted Gound by Erin Hart: The Irish landscape holds secrets past and present as archaeologist Cormac O'Callaghan and pathologist Nora Gavin encounter a mystery when a decapitated woman is found in the bogs who may be related to a recent mother/child disappearance. [this will be the perfect final book for my RIP Challenge]

I could not resist this bit of whimsy:
Sherlock Homes Paper Dolls by Tom Tierney

Detection Unlimited: Review

In Georgette Heyer's Detection Unlimited we have more suspects and more detectives than we can shake a stick at. Sampson Warrenby is dead and just about everybody in Thornden has a motive and the opportunity to have done him in. He's found slumped on a seat under the oak tree in his garden....with a bullet through his head. Most of the suspects were at an afternoon tennis party and were wandering about the area on their way home when the the shot was heard. When the local police decide to bring in Scotland Yard, Chief Inspector Hemingway finds that he has more than the village policemen offering him assistance. The villagers each have their pet suspect and can't understand why Hemingway doesn't immediately arrest him...or her. Is the villain the dead man's niece--for an inheritance and to get rid of a controlling uncle? Or maybe it's the town's other solicitor--angry at losing clients and prestige? Then there's the new couple at the farm who seem to have a guilty secret. And what about the author who wants the starring role in a real live murder mystery? It doesn't help that Warrenby seemed to have had the nasty habit of finding out little tidbits about his neighbors and not quite blackmailing them with his knowledge.

This was the only Heyer mystery that I hadn't read previously (I'm currently rereading them all for a Georgette Heyer reading challenge). And it's another fine specimen of the vintage village cozy. All the usual suspects are on board--and we even have the suspicious foreigner to grab some of our attention. Plenty of humor. And Hemingway has his usual "flair" and a new sidekick. Inspector Grant has moved on to better things and we now have Inspector Harbottle--dour-faced but a definite Hemingway devotee. There were plenty of red herrings which managed to keep me guessing until the end, although I was torn between two suspects--the correct one and another. Four stars for a grand story by one of the grand ladies of vintage crime.

Booking Through Thursday: Got Books?

Do you carry books with you when you’re out and about in the world?

And, do you ever try to hide the covers?

I always have a book with me. Always. One of my cardinal rules when purse-buying is that it must be big enough to hold a book--at least a small-sized hardback, not necessarily War & Peace. You never know when you might get stuck in traffic. Or held up at the doctor's office because she's running behind. I'd much rather read what I want to read than to be stuck with whatever magazine selection they have on offer.

No, I never try to hide my covers. If I'm reading it, then I'm ready to own up to it. If I'm ashamed of the cover (for whatever reason), then maybe I shouldn't be reading it.

Theme Thursday: Sound/Music

Hosted by Reading Between the Pages

Rules
*A theme will be posted each week on Thursday
*Select a conversation/snippet/sentence from your current book that features the theme
*Post it and don't forget to mention the author and title of the book
*Event is open for the whole week
*Link back to Reading Between the Pages

This week's theme is Feeling (Happiness, Sadness, Surprise, etc).

Here's mine from March Violets by Philip Kerr (p. 64):

"Do you like jazz?" she said, changing the subject. "Oh, it's all right, it's not negro jazz. I love it, don't you?" Only non-negro jazz is permitted in Germany now, but I often wonder how they can tell the difference.

"I like any kind of jazz," I said. She wound up the gramophone and put the needle into the groove. It was a nice relaxed sort of piece with a strong clarinet and a saxophonist who could have led a company of Italians across no man's land in a barrage.

Scariest Word

Scariest Word from readerbenji.blogspot.com. She is hosting a contest for one of Princess Bookie's Contest Crazes! Contest entry = chance at a Book Depository gift card. I found this through Blkosiner's Book Blog.

Grab a book you're currently reading (and hopefully loving)
Go to the 13th Chapter (if the book doesn't have 13 chapters, go to the closest to it)
Scan the chapter for the scariest word
Using Google/Yahoo images randomly pick on picture that comes up when you search the word
Write a blog post that has the book's cover, title, your word and your image

Here we go:

Wicked Nature

image credit

Found in

Detection Unlimited by Georgette Heyer

WWW: Wednesdays

WWW: Wednesdays is hosted by MizB over at Should Be Reading. This is a weekly meme that I have been participating in for over a year now.

To play along just answer the following three questions....

*What are you currently reading?

*What did you just recently finish reading?

*What do you think you'll read next?

Current:
Middlemarch by George Eliot: Dorothea Brooke can find no acceptable outlet for her talents or energy and few who share her ideals. As an upper middle-class woman in Victorian England she can't learn Greek or Latin simply for herself; she certainly can't become an architect or have a career; and thus, Dorothea finds herself "Saint Theresa of nothing." Believing she will be happy and fulfilled as "the lampholder" for his great scholarly work, she marries the self-centered intellectual Casaubon, twenty-seven years her senior. Dorothea is not the only character caught by the expectations of British society in this huge, sprawling book. Middlemarch stands above its large and varied fictional community, picking up and examining characters like a jeweler observing stones. There is Lydgate, a struggling young doctor in love with the beautiful but unsuitable Rosamond Vincy; Rosamond's gambling brother Fred and his love, the plain-speaking Mary Garth; Will Ladislaw, Casaubon's attractive cousin, and the ever-curious Mrs. Cadwallader. [Getting closer! only about 300 pages to go (of 848)]

Detection Unlimited by Georgette Heyer:

Slumped on a seat under an oak tree is old Sampson Warrenby, with a bullet through his head.

Everybody in the village is ready to tell Chief Inspector Hemingway who did it. Could the murderer have been the dead man's niece? Or perhaps it was the other town solicitor? The couple at the farm had a guilty secret-what was it? And why is it someone else actually wants to be the prime suspect? Add to this the fact that Warrenby was blackmailing someone, and Hemingway has his work cut out for him.

Read Since the Last WWW: Wednesday (click on titles for review):
Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers
Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L Sayers
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K LeGuin
The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

Up Next:
Hide and Seek by Wilkie Collins
Ghostly Tales and Sinister Stories of Old Edinburgh by Alan J Wilson, Des Brogan & Frank McGrail (eds)
The High Crusade by Poul Anderson
Lucky Jim by Kinglsey Amis
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford

Banned Books

Found this at Sherrie's place (Just Books)--who found it at Heather's place, Books and Quilts. She was looking at some of Heather's previous posts and ran across her post on Banned Books. She has a list of 110 books and we think it should be shared. Especially with Banned Book Week coming soon.

List of the top 110 banned books (of all time). Bold the ones you’ve read. Italicize the ones you’ve read part of. Color the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of). Read more. Convince others to read some.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
"#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy"
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmu
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 The Color Purple by Alice Walker
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 The Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 The Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Teaser Tuesdays

MizB of Should Be Reading hosts Teaser Tuesdays. Anyone can play along. Just do the following:

*Grab your current read.*Open to a random page.
*Share two "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page.

*BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! You don't want to ruin the book for others.

*Share the title and author too, so other TT participants can add it to their TBR lists if they like your teaser.
Here's mine from Detection Unlimited by Georgette Heyer (p. 137):

Oh, you are a very poor hater, Charles! Or are you maliciously attempting to make the Chief Inspector lose interest in me? I believe you are. I shall have to tell him that I have already committed one murder, and I meant to let him find that out for himself.

Top Ten Tuesday: Everybody But Me

Hosted by The Broke and the Bookish

Top Ten Tuesday is an original bookish meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Each week a new top ten topic is posted for followers to write about. This week we are considering our Top Ten Books Everybody Has Read But Me. Of course, with me, it's a pretty good bet that if it's recent and spreading like wildfire over the book blogging universe then everybody else has probably read it. But not me. I'm not a current book kind of girl. But there are a few classics that I haven't gotten around to either. Here's my list:

Books that I will probably never read (meaning no offense to anyone who just LOVES these things):
1. The Hunger Games (and etc.)
2. the rest of the Harry Potter saga (Read the first one. I'm done now. Thanks.)
3. anything by Janet Evanovich
4. anything by Stephen King
5. anything with a vampire since 2000 (especially those that sparkle)
6. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Books that I'd like to get around to one of these days:
7. The Lord of the Rings cycle
8. A Tale of Two Cities
9. The Scarlet Letter
10. The Great Gatsby

Crime Fiction on a Europass: Switzerland

Next stop on our Crime Fiction Europass whirlwind tour is Switzerland. Home to Swiss chocolate and Swiss watches. Swiss bank accounts and the Swiss Alps. My Europass journey takes me along with Patricia Moyes's Inspector Henry Tibbet and his wife as they visit the Alpine village of Montarraz. The Tibbets are on holiday, but Henry is soon drawn into the investigation of the murder of a popular ski instructor. It appears that he was killed by his young wife--upset over his affair with the French film star, Giselle Arnay. But the high-class crowd surrounding Giselle seem overly anxious to see the distraught wife found guilty. Henry's curiosity is aroused and he begins to suspect that a motive other than adultery may be behind the murder.

I have to admit that when I read this I was under-whelmed (pre-blogging days--so I have no review). I am a fan of the Tibbet series by Moyes, but this one just didn't do it for me at the time. The locale is nice and the descriptions do it justice. But I found the murder and the motive difficult to swallow. But, don't take my word for it. Looking over reviews on both Amazon and Goodreads, it would seem that I am in the minority. The average rating between the sites is four and a half stars. And most reviewers say that it is "a cut above."

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is a bookish meme hosted by Book Journey. It's where we gather to share what we have read this past week and what we plan to read this week. It's a great way to network with other bloggers, see some wonderful blogs, and put new titles on your reading list. So hop on over via the link above and join in...and leave a comment here so I can check out what you are reading

Books Read (click on titles for review):
The Quality of Mercy by David Roberts
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers
Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L Sayers
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K LeGuin
The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

Currently Reading:
Middlemarch by George Eliot: Dorothea Brooke can find no acceptable outlet for her talents or energy and few who share her ideals. As an upper middle-class woman in Victorian England she can't learn Greek or Latin simply for herself; she certainly can't become an architect or have a career; and thus, Dorothea finds herself "Saint Theresa of nothing." Believing she will be happy and fulfilled as "the lampholder" for his great scholarly work, she marries the self-centered intellectual Casaubon, twenty-seven years her senior. Dorothea is not the only character caught by the expectations of British society in this huge, sprawling book. Middlemarch stands above its large and varied fictional community, picking up and examining characters like a jeweler observing stones. There is Lydgate, a struggling young doctor in love with the beautiful but unsuitable Rosamond Vincy; Rosamond's gambling brother Fred and his love, the plain-speaking Mary Garth; Will Ladislaw, Casaubon's attractive cousin, and the ever-curious Mrs. Cadwallader. [Getting closer! only about 300 pages to go (of 848)]

Detection Unlimited by Georgette Heyer:

Slumped on a seat under an oak tree is old Sampson Warrenby, with a bullet through his head.

Everybody in the village is ready to tell Chief Inspector Hemingway who did it. Could the murderer have been the dead man's niece? Or perhaps it was the other town solicitor? The couple at the farm had a guilty secret-what was it? And why is it someone else actually wants to be the prime suspect? Add to this the fact that Warrenby was blackmailing someone, and Hemingway has his work cut out for him.

Books that spark my interest:
Ghostly Tales and Sinister Stories of Old Edinburgh by Alan J Wilson, Des Brogan & Frank McGrail (eds)
The High Crusade by Poul Anderson
Hide and Seek by Wilkie Collins
Lucky Jim by Kinglsey Amis
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford

Challenge Complete: Follow That Blurb

Sponsored by Jennifer over at Reading with Tequila, this challenge was meant to see exactly where the blurbs on and in the books we read would take us. What we were meant to do was choose a starting book. Read that one. Then look at the blurbs and read a book by one of the authors who have been quoted. And so on. Do this for ten books and then see where your journey has taken you. If you start with a mystery, will you end in the mystery field or will you wind up in some far off country like non-fiction? The journey will be half the fun.

Here's my blurb journey:

1. The Last Matryoshka by Joyce Yarrow (7/2/11) [starter book which leads to...]
2. Hot & Bothered by Jane Isenberg (7/9/11) [and that takes me to...]
3. The Case of the Deceiving Don by Carl Brookins (7/13/11) [Onward I go...]
4. The Mystery of the Third Lucretia by Susan Runholt (7/16/11) [which will take me to....]**
5. Bone Harvest by Mary Logue (7/17/11) [blurbed by Nancy Pickard]
6. No Body by Nancy Pickard (7/24/11) [and that leads me to....]
7. Random Walk by Lawrence Block (7/26/11) [blurbed by Harlan Ellison...]
8. Shatterday by Harlan Ellison (8/23/11) [blurbed by Ursula K LeGuin, Ray Bradbury, Dan Simmons, Roger Coman, Michael Moorcock, Steve Allen, William Kotzwinkle]
9. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K LeGuin (9/18/11) [blurbed by Michael Chabon]
10. The Final Solution: A Story of Detection by Michael Chabon (9/18/11)

**Could also have led to The Prop by Pete Hautman (which I read anyway because it looked interesting).

And....I started with a mystery and ended with a mystery. Took a little mystical, new-agey detour with Random Walk that led me into science fiction, but then right back to mysteries. Sort of like my real life reading journey--started out a mystery girl (way back when my mom handed over her Nancy Drew set), wandered into science fiction through high school and college, and now I'm back on my mystery-lover's kick. Not that I don't read other things--but that's my primary love.

The Final Solution: Review

Billed as a "suspenseful tale of compassion and wit that reimagines the classic nineteenth-century detective story" and set with "subtle revelations [that] lead the reader to a wrenching resolution." The Final Solution is about an elderly man who is in retirement deep in the English countryside. Villagers vaguely recall that he was once a famous detective up in London. Now his door is pretty well closed to the outside world and all that interests him is his beekeeping. But then he meets up with Linus Steinman, a nine-year-old boy who has escaped from Nazi Germany--alone and apparently mute with only an African gray parrot as his companion. The bird is known for the strings of German numbers which it recites. What is their meaning? Is it a top secret Nazi code? Combinations to Swiss bank accounts? Or maybe something far more dangerous. Soon there is murder done and the bird disappears. Will the elderly sleuth get to the bottom of it?

This is actually a reread for me. But other than remembering that The Final Solution was about an unnamed elderly beekeeper (who we all assume is Holmes) and a boy with a parrot, I remembered nothing else about it. So, when my Follow That Blurb Challenge journey brought me to Michael Chabon I decided to refresh my memory--and also provide a real-live review of the book since it had been read in my pre-reviewing days.

I was mildly disappointed. Oh, Michael Chabon can write. He even manages to bring off the mannered writing that goes along with Holmesian fare. But if it's a tribute (or "brilliant homage" as the synopsis claims) to the master then it falls a bit flat. I don't want to spoil anything....so let me just say that the final mystery isn't much. One expects a build up to possible Nazi codes and intrigue to actually lead somewhere. I mean, after all, this is Holmes we're talking about. Sure, he may be 89 years old but give the man a puzzle worthy of him. The clue (yes, indeed, that is clue singular) is clumsily presented and the denouement isn't all that exciting--and certainly not wrenching. I do see the overtones. I do "get" what the title of the story is referring to. But, honestly, it's quite heavy-handed in all the wrong places. I liked the interactions between the boy and the Holmes character. That was extraordinarily well done. More of that and I would be handing out a much higher rating. Three stars--just.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K LeGuin: Review

George Orr is afraid to dream. He has discovered that he has what he calls effective dreams. His dreams can change things. That pesky Aunt Julia who came to stay when he was seventeen? Suddenly she was gone and had never stayed with them at all. Not just vanished from their home--but dead in a car crash. That wasn't precisely what he wanted when he decided in his waking hours that he wanted her out of the house, but his subconscious seemed to think it an adequate solution and so he dreamed it. And it happened. And he was the only person who knew that it had ever been any different.

When George's fears reach the point that he is abusing his pharmacy privileges to try and prevent a dreaming state, he is referred to a psychiatrist for standard treatment. Dr. Haber begins by thinking he simply has to cure George of this irrational fear of dreaming. It isn't long before he realizes that George is right...his dreams can change the waking world. Haber decides to use George's unique power to make changes. He claims that it is for the greater good: to stop war, to prevent overpopulation, to wipe out hunger. But George becomes more and more uneasy with every change. Who has the power to decide what is best for all mankind? Who should have that power?

This should have been a very powerful book. The ideas behind it--just what is reality and who, if anyone, should have the power to shape it--represent very powerful and intriguing questions. However, I found the ideas getting lost in the psycho- and techno-babble that Dr. Haber spouts whenever he and George have a session. Talk of dream and sleep states and all the wondrous gadgetry of his Augementor (the machine that records and enhances George's dreaming powers), just weighed the story down. LeGuin can be an awesome writer (I love her Left Hand of Darkness and Always Coming Home), but I think she is at her best when she sticks with people--with the speculative stories of the human condition. Too much tech talk is definitely not her style. I would have appreciated more focus on George's struggle. And more straightforward discussion of the dream-power. And then to bring in the aliens and their alien terms for the power (which never get fully explained) didn't help matters at all. More explanation of how the aliens know about the dreaming power and how they helped George would have gone a long way. Two and a half stars.

Five Red Herrings: Review

Five Red Herrings (aka Suspicious Characters when first released in the States) is Dorothy L Sayers' flirtation with a railroad tables crime. The first time I read it I spent a great deal of brain power trying to keep up with all the times and trains and didn't get it at all. In all subsequent readings (including this one), I take the times and trains and tickets as read and just sit back and enjoy the ride.

What we have is an apparently very simple death in Kirkcudbright, Scotland. After a night that well represents his life--quarreling with just about everyone he meets--Sandy Campbell, a local hot-headed artist, sets out for a little morning painting at one of his favorite spots. Later that afternoon his body is found lying on the pointed rocks along the stream just below his painting gear. It looks as though Sandy stepped a little too close to the cliff's edge while scrutinizing his morning's work and took a fatal tumble onto the rocks below.

But our favorite aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, is on the spot enjoying a bit of holiday himself. One that turns into a busman's holiday when he can't stay away from the scene of the crime. It's Wimsey who first suggests that it might not be the simple accident that it appears. He first senses that something is wrong when an item very vital to the scene that has been set cannot be found--not among the dead man's gear nor anywhere in the area surrounding the "accident." There is also the fact that rigor would seem to indicated that the man has been dead long before the morning's painting. When all is said and done, there are six suspects--all fellow painters with reason to wish Campbell dead--it is up to Lord Peter to separate the five red herrings from the fish that must be netted for the crime.

Pairing a reading of this book with the filmed version starring Ian Carmichael is an absolute must at some point. In fact, this is one of the rare times that I would say that the filmed version outshines the book. In the novel Sayers goes through a very long and labored process at the end--taking the reader through every shred of evidence and showing how it might (or might not) apply to every single suspect. The film version condenses things down very nicely without losing any of the mystery. And it's worth the price of admission to see Wimsey recreate the murder using Bunter as the corpse (although the part of the corpse is played by Sir Maxwell in the book). "'Hi!' said the corpse. 'You shut up,' said Wimsey, 'you're dead.'

Another slightly tiresome bit is the dialect. After reading this one several times, I'm better able to sail through the broad Scots dialect...but, if that weren't enough, Sayers also provides us with a traveling salesman with a lisp. A bit too much, DLS, a bit too much. (Fortunately, the filmed version ditches the lisp as well).

Despite these two draw-backs, I still enjoy the story. It's nice to see Wimsey out of his British element (and to see Bunter wrestling with the local terms for various cooking supplies). I have a good time with the various artistic lessons we get--and it's much more entertaining than the education in campanology that we get in The Nine Tailors (not that I don't enjoy learning about bell-ringing, but it does go on a bit). And I love the reenactment of the crime. Four stars.