June was an odd reading month for me. I read six books by the same author, Peter Grainger, and two books about another single author, Daphne du Maurier. I didn’t read much else, partly because I went to Vancouver to see my family for a week. Sometimes I get in a good chunk of reading on the flights, but this time there was fairly constant turbulence in both directions, not enough to be truly frightening, but enough to keep this nervous flyer from concentrating. I spent a lot of time just listening to calming music (thanks for your help, Kasey Musgraves and Emmy Lou Harris!) and doing deep breathing exercises. What a miserable experience air travel has become, right? Overcrowding, seats that don’t recline, having to pay for every little thing as if it’s an “extra.”
I have read another two of Peter Grainger’s mysteries since I got back from Vancouver as well: I have now read all of the ones that are easily accessible from either my library or Kobo (for some reason, a whole bunch of them were very cheap at Kobo – the ones I haven’t read yet are the middle ones that remain full price there). I have been trying to put my finger on why they are so enjoyable. They were highly recommended to me by a couple of other readers, but that’s not always a guarantee, especially for mysteries, a genre I have been feeling a bit weary of in recent years. It’s especially notable to me that I started the series via audiobook: usually I find novels too slow on audiobook, compared to how fast I can read them to myself, so I prefer non-fiction, which also (for the books I choose, anyway) tends not to demand quite such minute attention, especially at the sentence level.
My enjoyment of the audiobooks is a clue to the general appeal of this series: Grainger (actually Robert Partridge) is a master of pacing. There are other strengths of the series, from the deft and engaging characterization (especially of DC Smith) and the wonderful evocations of the Norfolk setting to the equally deft way in which the cases often touch on broader social and political issues, without ever feeling gimmicky or heavy handed. But a lot of other mystery authors are good at these things too, including, just for example, Elizabeth George and Tana French. Both of these writers tend towards the prolix, however (IMHO etc.) whereas Grainger just gets on with it: there’s a crime, there’s an investigation, evidence and witnesses are pursued, the case is resolved. Even though the two most recent ones, The Late Lord Thorpe and Some Sort of Justice, are about the same case, they approach it differently enough that I still got none of that sense of bloat that I occasionally get from French and consistently now get from George, whose most recent was a DNF for me.
Bringing up French reminds me of Dorian’s recent post about her latest novel, The Keeper, which I haven’t read yet. I’m not quite as big a fan of French as he is, but I do agree with the widespread view that she is among the very best writers working in crime fiction today. In his post, Dorian says that The Keeper is “a terrific example of how crime fiction can chart its post-copaganda future.” Not least because I have so often taught a survey course on mystery & detective fiction, I have thought a lot about the “copaganda” charge, which is often levelled quite generally against crime fiction, and especially against the subgenre of police procedurals, as if to situate the story in a “cop shop” is enough to warrant the charge. (I am not saying that this is something Dorian does, to be clear, in this post or anywhere!) A more nuanced version would be that even if the novel exposes or critiques problems with the police as an institution or a manifestation of state power, the common trope of the heroic or anti-heroic officer counteracts or undermines that critique.
Both George’s Thomas Lynley and P. D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh are excellent examples of the ‘honourable man in a (sometimes, potentially) dishonourable system’ version of the procedural. Both are fine fictional creations (I am personally very fond of Dalgliesh, and was glad that when he finally fell in love, it was with an English professor!), and their novels often have plenty of moral complexity – but I would say that overall, their series, while not idealizing the police, tend to portray them as mostly serving the public good. (I haven’t reread George’s early books in a while, so I can’t back that up with examples off the top of my head. I wrote about James’s oeuvre here.) Ian Rankin’s Rebus series, I think, looks more skeptically at the police as an institution – and even more so (not unrelatedly) at the army, as is made particularly clear in the one I have frequently assigned, Knots and Crosses. I would actually really like to reread Rankin’s whole series and do a survey piece along the lines of the one I did on James for the TLS: rereading all of the Dalgliesh novels in a row really helped me see what James does and doesn’t do with them, and my sense of Rankin is that he is smarter about his choices in ways that keep his books from having the quality I described as “insular” for hers – or perhaps it is more simply that she is more conservative, politically, than he is, and that this shows up in how they think and write about the police.
Anyway! If I were to fault Grainger’s DC Smith series, it would be on the grounds that his coppers are all pretty much the good guys. The main institutional enemy is incompetence and political timidity. Perhaps there are counter-examples in the handful of titles I haven’t read yet from around the middle of the series, but in the ones I have read, there’s no corruption, no abuse of power, no violation of rights, no skulduggery to “get their man.” Half the time even the criminals aren’t really so bad! The worst we’ve met so far is a kind of Epstein-like figure; even the man who actually kills somebody in that case is a lot more sympathetically portrayed than he is. So maybe there is a bit of “copaganda” going on here: DC Smith is wily and funny and a moral touchstone. It’s true he’s considered difficult to work with by his superior officers and has a tendency to work out his own sense of what is right to do, but (again, in the ones I’ve read) this never veers into vigilantism, and is more about that incompetence and timidity at the top than about Rebus-style willingness to outright skirt the rules or play dirty. This is part of the appeal of the genre, of course: it’s fiction, after all, and I think it’s OK to show us what we think things should be like, not always to hammer away at the way they really are – I say this as, among other things, an unrepentant fan of The West Wing. A citizen’s mental reach must exceed their grasp, or what’s the imagination for, right? We need some sense of the “ought” as well as the “is,” as well as a bit of respite from how awful the is generally is these days. But I do understand why portrayals of the police as benign, or as heroic guardians of justice and protectors of the innocent, are problematic. Dorothy Hughes’s The Expendable Man is just one of many examples of how else to tell the story.
Much more briefly, the other things I read in June. I’m working on a review of Rose Tremain’s The Housekeeper, so I reread Rebecca earlier this summer and have now read Tremain’s novel twice and also read Margaret Forster’s fascinating biography of du Maurier. I’ve flipped back through Restoration and Music and Silence, and poked around in a couple of Tremain’s other novels, including The Colour (about the gold rush in New Zealand). She is a strange writer, I find, one that’s hard to categorize: I had thought of her primarily as a historical novelist because the one I heard most about was Restoration, but she tries a lot of different things. I am not convinced about The Housekeeper – why? You’ll have to wait for my review!
I read one romance novel in June, Loretta Chase’s Not Quite A Lady – this is one of the Carsington series, which also includes Lord Perfect, Miss Wonderful, and my favourite, Mr. Impossible. I think I had read Not Quite A Lady before, but I’m not sure. It is not, I didn’t think, as delightful as the other three I’ve named, but it’s still pretty good.
Finally, I read Darcey Steinke’s Flash Count Diary. It wasn’t really my thing. I am shocked at how quickly specifics about it have already faded from my memory! This is the hazard of posting only monthly, instead of when the books are still fresh in my mind.
I’ve been meaning to catch up on my recent reading for weeks now: it has been a month since I wrote up 
—which is not a bad description of how I decided to read the book. I don’t think I want to read anything else by Modiano, though. For a better-informed commentary, read 
It seems unfair to characterize as a “reading slump” a period that includes both this and (in its very different register) the Modiano, and yet that is how the past few weeks have felt. Good thing that today in class we began what will be nearly a month of work on David Copperfield! 
I thought I had done very little reading in July, and I was prepared to defend myself: “
The unexpected highlight was a very last minute choice: an interesting conversation with my lovely mom about A. S. Byatt convinced me I should reread the ‘Frederica quartet,’ but I felt too lackadaisical that night to jump right in so I plucked Byatt’s The Matisse Stories off the shelf on July 30 and finished it July 31. I’ve owned it for ages (I think it was a book sale find) but hadn’t gotten around to it. It turns out to be a really fascinating trio of stories all related (surprise! 🙂 ) in some way to paintings by Matisse, though in unpredictable ways. In the first one, a middle-aged woman reaches a breaking point at the salon and ends up absolutely trashing the place: I would never do such a thing to my nice stylist or the pleasant salon she co-owns, but there was something profoundly understandable about this woman’s rage. In the second, a self-absorbed, pretentious artist endlessly catered to (if silently criticized) by his deferential wife gets an unexpected come-uppance when it turns out their cleaning lady is the one whose wild artistic creations get noticed. The third turns on an accusation against a professor by a student who is clearly unwell; there’s a lot of thought-provoking discussion in it about art and standards, but what will stay with me is a stark moment of acknowledgment between two people who, it becomes clear, have both considered ending their lives:
Nothing else I read made me think or feel as much as this little volume. I quite liked Ian Rankin’s Midnight and Blue; it has been especially fun watching Rankin push Rebus along through the years rather than preserving him in eternal crime-fighting youth. I also liked Kate Atkinson’s Death at the Sign of the Rook. I read Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow for my book club (I’m not considering this a re-read as it had been more than 30 years since my first go at it!). It starts out so strong! It goes so awry! It ends . . . with a parasitic worm? Really? Katerina Bivald’s The Murders in Great Diddling was mildly entertaining. Martha Wells’s All Systems Red—which I listened to as an audio book—was very entertaining and very short. Felix Francis’s The Syndicate was not very good: he took over his dad’s franchise and some of the results have been fine, but this one read like someone ticking off boxes.
The 0.5 is Ali Smith’s Gliff. I lost traction on it about half way through. Smith is a hit-or-miss author for me: I think she’s brilliant and absolutely love listening to her talk about her fiction, but the Seasonal Quartet are the only novels of hers that I have gotten along with well at all.
One of these was Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, which I got interested in because Bradley was a brilliant guest on Backlisted. She was talking about Monkey King: Journey to the West—this was 
Anders Lustgarten’s Three Burials is also quite violent and action-driven, but underlying it is a less cynical or discouraging vision than I felt was at the core of A Line in the Sand. Its Thelma and Louise-style plot (a connection made explicit in the novel itself) focuses on Cherry, a nurse who happens upon the body of a murdered refugee (we already know him as Omar) on a British beach. Cherry is carrying a lot of grief and trauma, including her wrenching memories of the worst of the COVID pandemic (people currently downplaying the severity of the crisis and restricting access to the vaccines that have helped us get to a better place would benefit from the terse but powerful treatment it gets here). She is also grieving her son’s death by suicide, and the resemblance of the dead man to her son adds to her determination to somehow get his body to the young woman whose photo he was clutching when he died.
My recent reading has not been particularly exhilarating, but most of it has been just fine: no duds, just no thrills.
novel to spend the amount of time on it that I’d need to coax the students through its 450+ pages (more than two weeks, most likely). This is the conundrum of 
I got Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing from the library as soon as I had agreed to review her forthcoming novel The Book of Records, on the theory that it was probably a good idea to know something about the earlier one in case there were connections. It turns out there is one possibly important one, though I’m still figuring out exactly what it means: throughout Do Not Say We Have Nothing the characters are reading and writing and revising a narrative called the Book of Records! I actually owned a copy of Do Not Say We Have Nothing for years and put it in the donate pile eventually because for whatever reason I still hadn’t read it. I assigned a story by Thien in my first-year class this year that I thought was really good, so this had already piqued my interest in looking it up again. I had mixed feelings about it. I found it a bit rough or stilted stylistically and never really fell into it with full absorption, but it is packed with memorable elements and also with ideas. It tells harrowing stories about the Cultural Revolution in China and focuses through its musician characters on how or whether it is possible to hold on to whatever it is exactly that music and art mean in the face of such an onslaught on individuality and creativity. It invites us to think about storytelling as a means of survival, literal but also (in the broadest sense) cultural—this is where its Book of Records comes in, as the notebooks are cherished and preserved, often at great risk. I’m not very far into Thien’s new novel yet but it seems even more a novel of ideas, perhaps (we’ll see) too much so.
Last week in my classes it was Reading Week, a.k.a. the February “study break.” Although overall this term has not been nearly as hectic as last term, I was still grateful for the chance to ease up. Work is tiring. Winter is tiring. Grieving is tiring (yes, still). It doesn’t help that I continue to wake up a lot at night with shoulder pain, something I have been trying to fix for years now. (I am getting closer, I think! I am working with an orthopedist who seems pretty confident about what needs doing, although we are waiting for an ultrasound to confirm that the issue is my rotator cuff.)
The one other book I got all the way through last week was actually an audiobook: my hold on Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain came in, and it proved truly gripping, surprisingly so given that I knew a fair amount about the whole story from various other sources (including the harrowing series Dopesick). I was so caught up in it that I spent longer hours than usual working on my current jigsaw puzzle—which I think contributed to my shoulder pain somehow, so that was a weird confluence as it had me thinking a lot about how tempting the promise of relief would be even for chronic pain as relatively mild as mine. Of course the whole story is also infuriating and outrageous and horrific, and perhaps it would have been more calming to stick to my usual, more benign, program of literary podcasts!
and that timing may well have been the real reason for my middling reaction to it. So far I am enjoying it just fine; we’ll see if when I get to the end this time I feel like reading on in the series.
November wasn’t a bad reading month, considering how busy things were at work—and considering that “work” also means reading a fair amount, this time around including most of both Lady Audley’s Secret and Tess of the d’Urbervilles for 19thC Fiction and an array of short fiction and poetry for my intro class. (I have not managed to get back into a routine of posting about my teaching, but I would like to, so we’ll see what happens next term.)
I felt the need for something cheering in the wake of The Election and landed on Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog: it was a great choice, genuinely comic and warm-hearted but also endlessly clever. I had a lot of LOL moments over its characterizations of the Victorian period, and it is chock full of literary allusions, many of which I’m sure I didn’t catch. A lot of them are to Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers: who know that Gaudy Night would be one of its main running references. I liked it enough that I’ve put The Doomsday Book on my Christmas wish list, even though I don’t ordinarily gravitate towards this genre.
That said, I did quite enjoy Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!!, which I picked up quite randomly at the library, mostly because it’s a Europa Edition but also because I vaguely recalled hearing good things about it online. It turned out to be a sharp and very funny send-up of the “great literature transformed my life” genre. Its narrator, whose life is in something of a shambles, reads Treasure Island and decides it offers her a template for turning things around. She adopts the novel’s “Core Values”—BOLDNESS, RESOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, HORN-BLOWING—and applies them to her job (which, improbably and hilariously, is at a “pet hotel,” where clients sign out cats, dogs, rabbits, even goldfish), her boyfriend, and her family, with hilarious if also sometimes weirdly poignant results. I have such a love-hate relationship with books that purport to turn literature into self-help manuals that I relished the premise, but Levine uses it as a launching point for something much zanier than I could possibly have expected or can possibly summarize.
Novel Readings 