Category Archives: Index of Authors

The Weekly Reader, Vol. 2026, Issue 4

I’ve developed a new practice, where I open this post right after the prior issue is published so I can add to it throughout the week. It makes it much easier to schedule posting.

I can’t remember a time when I haven’t been reading Michael Connelly. He’s been an autobuy author for me for years. I even buy the Lincoln Lawyer mysteries, which I don’t really like (so much so, that sometimes I don’t even read them). I frequently re-listen to the audiobooks, especially the Ballard & Bosch books that are the more recent vintage, and the older Bosch installments. The mid-career Bosch books are my least favorite of the bunch.

But, now, Bosch is just an old man, and is unlikely to be front any more books. Last year, Connelly introduced a new character, Detective Stilwell, who works for the LA County Sheriff’s Office, and who has been exiled to a very undesirable posting on Catalina Island. Ironwood is the second mystery featuring Stilwell, and it is already merging with the Ballard series, because (I was pleased to see) Renee Ballard plays a big role in this one. Even Harry Bosch makes a cameo.

I liked this one better than the first one, Nightshade, probably because of the Ballard connection. And there is definitely something rotten in the LASD, that is about to be revealed. Stay tuned for book 3.

Welp, this one was a bust. I probably should have DNF’d it, because I didn’t really like it, but I needed to see how it would end, which is why I gave it 2 stars on GR instead of 1.

I checked it out of the KU. The audiobook is also available from the KU, so I was able to do my favorite tandem read, where I pick up the audiobook from where I left off reading when I have to do chores. I was hoping for something like the Renee Ballard books by Michael Connelly, or the very fun and action packed Eve Ronin books by Lee Goldberg. That seemed to be what Greene was shooting for but, frankly, I felt that this book fell short by quite a bit.

On the pro side, it was readable, the writing was fine and I liked the main character, Cassidy. On the con side was basically everything else: the overstuffed plot; the simplistic, poorly developed and all together one-dimensional characterizations of everyone but Cassidy, and the lack of attention to detail. I’m not convinced that the author has ever spoken to an actual police officer in her entire life, and it showed.

The primary plot for which the book was named (i.e., the Hollywood Hit Men) was solved in about the first 50% of the book. This was a mistake. The two remaining major side plots: Cassidy’s decompensating, newly retired father and the investigation of an evil, corrupt police officer being protected by a politician were neither interesting nor particularly well done. There were a few more minor side plots that aren’t worth mentioning, because they got little attention and serve only to distract.

I think that the author has it in her to write a pretty good thriller, but since I really didn’t enjoy this book, I won’t be reading more books in this series.

Although Pym began this book in 1939, it was not published until after her death in 1985, which makes it a bit unique amongst Pyms. At this point, I’ve read several of Pym’s novels: Quartet in Autumn, Excellent Women, Jane and Prudence, Some Tame Gazelle and Less Than Angels. I’ve enjoyed them all, although not all quite as much as some. Excellent Women remains my favorite.

I really enjoyed this one! It is quite funny, and had some of my favorite characters. I loved Miss Morrow, who defies expectations, as many of Pym’s women do, actually, and has a delightful inner monologue. The necessary curate, Mr. Latimer, is one of the more personable of Pym’s men. And the May-December “romance” between student Barbara Bird and her professor Mr. Cleveland, in addition to being wildly inappropriate, is also almost unbearably awkward and I am embarassed on his behalf.

The first book from my summer theme! I actually started this a little bit early, but I don’t care. I’m counting it.

I’ve read the two earlier Oxford Time Travel books: To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book. I loved both of them, but Doomsday Book has a bit of an edge in my recollection.

This one took a bit for me to get into, but once I was in, I was in. There is a lot of detail about WWII and the London Blitz, and Willis does a great job making me feel the immediacy of the danger. Once I got past the first 30% or so, Oxford itself has disappeared from the narrative, the drops aren’t opening, and, like the characters stuck in the past, I have no idea what is going on in the present.

As I understand, Blackout and All Clear are basically one long book broken into two installments. I already checked out book 2 and will start it after I finish my work day. I need to know what happens next!

Currently Reading:

American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. RobertOppenheimer by Kai Bird: I am definitely on the back stretch of this one, and I think (fingers crossed) I will finish it next week.
Anne’s House of Dreams by L.M. Montgomery: I should squeak under the line to finish in May.
All Clear by Connie Willis: apparently all of my book titles this week start with the letter “A”. Weird.

Reading Journal: 5.17.26

The weather has been hit and miss in the PNW for the last week, but I’ve been able to get outside and do some weed eradication with my trusty string trimmer. Our very mild winter made the weeds go absolutely bonkers.

I finished 5 books this week.

Murder in Married Life by Anne Morice: this is book 2 in the Tessa Crichton series, published in 1971. Dean Street Press has reprinted 23 entries in the series, through Fatal Charm, published in 1989. I’ve enjoyed both of the installments that I’ve read, and plan to – eventually – buy and read them all. Tessa, a moderately successful actress, meets the man who becomes her husband, Robin, in the first book. In this one, they are newly married.

Robin is a detective for Scotland Yard, and Tessa has a tendency to become embroiled in mysteries, so they are quite a match. This book reminds me a bit of the Mr. and Mrs. North mysteries because Tessa, like Pam North, is a firecracker. The next mystery in the series is called Death of a Gay Dog, and I will get to it. Sooner or later.

Hmmm, interesting. I guess my unwitting theme for this week was “newly married in London,” because that is the entire plot of Greenery Street. Ian and Felicity Foster are newly engaged at the beginning of the book, and are looking for a house in which to commence their married life. Greenery Street itself turns out to be a bit of a character in the book, with Mackail giving it a voice of its own at times, as the place where newly married London couples begin their marriages, only to be forced to move out once the babies start coming.

There is a naivete here that is really charming – Ian and Felicity seem quite a lot like children playing house because in many ways, they are children playing house. Ian has a job, and Felicity manages their finances, but neither of them are remotely jaded, world weary or cynical. They love each other, they love being married, and they are absolutely loyal to each other. They are innocent without being stupid, fun-loving without being reckless, and sweet without being saccharine. This one reminded me a lot of A Fortnight in September, a book about the smallest of things, but utterly riveting nonetheless.

I have been reading the Inspector Henry Tibbet’s series for many years now. I remember picking up the first one, Dead Men Don’t Ski, at the UBS at least two decades ago. I really liked it, and started picking up PB copies when I would find them. I have been vaguely trying to read in order, although at the end of the day, order doesn’t really matter here. Henry, and his wife Emmy (who plays a pretty substantial role in the books) don’t really seem to age. This is the 8th book in the series. Luckily, at this point, Amazon has entries 7 (except for book 9, weirdly) through 17 in the KU library, so I’m going to try to get them read before they disappear. Next up is Who Saw Her Die, which isn’t available through KU, but my library had a digital copy available so I grabbed it.

The plots are always clever, and they usually involve Henry and Emmy getting out of London, where they live, and going to different places. This one was no different – the first chunk of the book was set in London, where Henry is investigating a pretty garden variety murder of a low-grade con artist in the bathroom of a bar called the Pink Parrot. Eventually, though, that investigation merges with some international intrigue concerning a couple of fake African countries, and Henry and Emmy end up in Holland, where there is danger and they meet some murderous foes.

Along with some readerly friends, I am doing a read and reread of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s works for the next couple of years, and we started with the Anne Shirley books in January. We are meant to be doing one a month, but I got behind, so although May is the 5th month, Anne of Windy Poplars is the 4th book in the series, sitting between Anne of the Island and Anne’s House of Dreams. It was written well after those two books – Anne of the Island was published in 1915 and Anne’s House of Dreams was published in 1917, while Anne of Windy Poplars wasn’t published until 1936.

The first time I read Windy Poplars, I was decidedly unimpressed. It’s still not my favorite – I think that Anne of the Island will always hold that honor in my heart. But in subsequent rereads, it has definitely grown on me. I enjoy Rebecca Dew and the Aunts, the Pringles crack me up, I wish that we could have had a book about Katherine Brooke and her life as secretary to a MP, and the Little Fellow makes me cry every damn time. Next up is Anne’s House of Dreams, which covers Anne and Gilbert as young marrieds. I’m hoping to finish that one next week, so I’ll be caught up with my fellow readers.

My last book this week was the third in Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s War series, Engaging the Enemy. I’ve previously read Trading in Danger and Marque and Reprisal and I’m really enjoying the series. There are two more in this cycle, and then two books in a different cycle, Vatta’s Peace, that were published much later.

These are really space opera, which is a genre that I don’t read a lot, but get into the mood for from time to time. There is something about it that I really enjoy, when it hits just right. This is a satisfying series and has all of the elements of good space opera: lots of space ship action, different planetary cultures, a tight knit crew, and much suspense and intrigue.

I had never read anything by Elizabeth Moon, and I’m impressed, actually. Her fantasy series that begisn with The Sheep Farmer’s Daughter, The Deed of Paksenarrion, has been on my radar for a while, so once I finish with Kylara Vatta, I’ll probably check that one out. Vatta’s War was published between 2003 and 2008, and the first book in the Paksenarrion series was published in 1988.

In fact, in addition to my “newly married in London” theme from early in the week, all of my books this week, strangely (I just noticed this when I was adding categories) were written by authors whose last name started with the letter M (I swear that this was a coincidence, albeit a really weird one), and all of them were backlist titles. The newest of them, Engaging the Enemy, was published the early 2000’s. One good thing about reading old books – absolute certainty that AI had no part in their creation. I prefer my art human powered, thank you very much. Not to put too fine a point on it, but fuck the tech bros.

Also, in spite of my use of the em-dash, I never use AI to write my posts. I have loved the em-dash since before Chat GPT was a gleam in it’s evil overlord’s eye, and I refuse to give it up.

Currently reading:

American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird – still. This one will sit on this list for a while, because it is 721 pages. I’m at 25%.
Information Received by E.R. Punshon – the first Bobby Owen mystery published in 1933;
Green Rider by Kristen Brittain – reread.

Reading Journal: 5/10/26

It’s been close to 6 months since I checked in here. I just haven’t had the energy to blog, at least in part because I completely lost interest in adding books to my book library. It doesn’t take a lot of time, but I just don’t feel like I get as much out of it as I hoped when I set the blog up to enable me to maintain my own reading library. I have found that I’m honestly not that interested in keeping bookish statistics at this point. The prospect of spending three or four minutes to add each book to my library is a deterrence to actually getting a post up.

So, I’ve decided to try something different and see if it works better for me. I’m going to quit entering books in the book library, and do the occasional reading journal where I post what I’ve finished reading since the last post (unless time gets away from me, as it tends to do, in which case, I’ll just start anew). The inspiration for this comes from Jo Walton’s monthly book posts on Tor.com which are lovely and chatty. She’s a delightfully eclectic reader and her thoughts are a joy to read. I’ve read two years worth in the last few days. (If you are interested, you can find the posts collected here.)

What I recently finished:

Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie: Reread. I am an Agatha superfan, and finished a full chronological reread of all 66 mystery novels with Sleeping Murder in March. I decided to do the round again, one a month, so I read Mysterious Affair at Styles in April, and just finished Murder on the Links. I know that technically Partners in Crime comes between Styles and Links, but I had a reason for the switcheroo that isn’t relevant here.

Anyway, Links is not my favorite Christie. It’s, in fact, not even in my top 10 of her Poirot mysteries. In my opinion, Hastings has never been more annoying or fatuous than he is in this one. I am always happy to send him off to Argentina in the company of his wife, a young woman who was probably already heartily sick of him within weeks of actually tying the knot.

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy: I’ve just started a book club with some friends, and we selected this one late and kind of on the fly because a few us already owned it. I bought it when it was recently on sale for $1.99. The bottom line here is that I have decidedly mixed emotions. I thought that the writing here was very good, and I really liked all three of the kids. I am much more ambivalent about all of the grown-ups involved here.

Who the hell sends a widower with three young children to a remote Antarctic island that is literally sinking into the sea and then leaves them there? Someone call CPS, please, because that’s the worst idea ever. And, as it turns out, it was, indeed, the worst idea ever.

A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny: I may be done with Chief Inspector Gamache and Louise Penny. I have loved this series for so long, but the last few books have not justified the hopes I have in them. This one is so complicated that I could hardly follow the threads of the plot. In addition, the plot relies entirely on the villain being able to mastermind and foresee every aspect of human behavior in a way that I just could not find believable. Yes, some people are extremely psychologically astute. However, human behavior is not so easily predicted as all that, and a plot that requires seven or eight (or even more) people taking highly specific actions and precisely calculated moments is just not going to work. I cannot suspend my disbelief that much.

This is the 18th book in the series. I already own books 19 & 20. This one annoyed me enough that it’s going to take me a bit of time to dive back in.

Somewhere in the House by Elizabeth Daly: This is a series of mysteries by an American author that my library, fortuitously, has available for digital checkout. I really don’t remember where I even found about the series – somewhere in my vintage mystery travels. The first of the Henry Gamadge mysteries was published in 1940; this one, the 10th, was published in 1946. The cover of this one, with the buttons, actually does relate to the plot, as hard as that may be to believe.

I like this series a lot and find myself returning to it at fairly random intervals. I’ll read one, not really think about it for awhile, remember that I like them and read a couple more in succession. Like most “Golden Age” era mysteries, they don’t really need to be read in order, although the character of Henry Gamadge does meet and marry his wife, and have his first child, through these first 10 books. Beyond that, though, there’s not a ton of character development and the mysteries stand entirely on their own, with just the occasional glancing reference to prior mysteries, like you see in Christie or other GA authors.

What I am currently reading:

American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird;
Murder in Married Life by Anne Morice;
Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories by Agatha Christie

18/365: A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

A Month in the Country
 by J.L. Carr
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: January 1, 1980
Genre: fiction
Pages: 160
Project: Project 365
In J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside of high summer, and laboring each day to uncover an anonymous painter's depiction of the apocalypse, Birkin finds that he himself has been restored to a new, and hopeful, attachment to life. But summer ends, and with the work done, Birkin must leave. Now, long after, as he reflects on the passage of time and the power of art, he finds in his memories some consolation for all that has been lost.

I have a shelf of NYRB Classics. They are reliably good and, as a pleasant side benefit, they look fantastic lined up next to one another. My library also has a good selection of them available for check out in both print and digital formats. They tend to be quite pleasingly designed, with very nice paper, so I strongly prefer to read them in print.

This is not one of the books that I own, however. I have checked it out of my library twice, reading it first in 2020, and again today (yesterday, when this goes live). It’s one of the best that I’ve read, and that is definitely high praise, because I have loved many of the books published by NYRB Classics.

This is a perfect gem of a novel. It is told from the first person perspective of Tom Birkin, who arrives in the village of Oxgodby to uncover and restore a suspected medieval mural in the local church. Oxgodby seems to be a stand-in for the real Osgodby, a village on the north Yorkshire coast, where the author attended school.

This is a perfect summer read, replete with gorgeous language. Tom Birkin is a veteran of the Great War who is suffering from shell shock. Over the course of the book, he slowly uncovers the mural, which turns out to be quite a bit more significant than he expected, and he slowly recovers from his wartime experience. The descriptions of the glories of an English village/countryside summer are lovely.

Several of the villagers become prominent characters in the novella: Charles Moon, a fellow veteran who is in the village to locate a missing grave, the Reverend Keach, who is responsible for the restoration contract with Birkin, and his surprisingly beautiful wife, Alice, with whom Birkin falls in love. There is a second vicar, of the local low church, Ellerbeck and his wife, who play a sigificant role, and several other characters who play a small part in Birkin’s summer.

This one of those books which a review cannot do justice. My summers were entirely different from the one described in A Month in the Country, but, still, I found myself thinking about the indelible moments in my life in the same way that Carr was able to convince me that the summer Birkin spent in Oxgodby would represent that same sort indelible experience for him. The days that you cannot forget, not because they are particularly memorable, but because they somehow overflow with significance in their mundanity.

It’s a stunningly beautiful book that I will buy for my own shelves, so that I can return to it again and again.

17/365: The Fire Engine That Disappeared by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

The Fire Engine That Disappeared
 by Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö
Translated from: Swedish
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Martin Beck #5
Publication Date: January 1, 1969
Genre: mystery: silver age (1950-1979)
Pages: 213
ReRead?: No
Project: Project 365
The lightning-paced fifth novel in the Martin Beck mystery series by the internationally renowned crime writing duo, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, finds Beck investigating one of the strangest, most violent, and unforgettable crimes of his career.The incendiary device that blew the roof off a Stockholm apartment not only interrupted the small, peaceful orgy underway inside, it nearly took the lives of the building's eleven occupants. And if one of Martin Beck's colleagues hadn't been on the scene, the explosion would have led to a major catastrophe because somehow a regulation fire-truck has vanished. Was it terrorism, suicide, or simply a gas leak? And what if, anything, did the explosion have to do with the peculiar death earlier that day of a 46-year-old bachelor whose cryptic suicide note consisted of only two words: "Martin Beck"?

This is the 5th book in the Martin Beck series of Swedish police procedurals. I’ve read through book 6, but had skipped this one because it wasn’t available as a digital checkout through one of my library systems. Fortunately, I was able to double back and get it as a print book. There are a total of 10 books in the series, so I am now over the halfway point.

I preferred this entry to the next one, Murder at the Savoy (which I read first), because I felt like the plot was better. These are definitely police procedurals, and they are very old school. They don’t rely on flashy technology or CCTV footage because neither DNA nor ubiquitous surveillance cameras have been invented yet. These are the classic “put on your shoes and knock on doors” procedurals. The crime is solved through solid police work and nothing more.

I get the impression from reading these books that Sweden in the 1960’s was a fairly grim place, and a far cry from the sleek, modern cities (or the picturesque countryside) that I picture when I think of it today. The authors depict it as a rough and tumble working class society, with quite a lot of organized crime and vice.

The series is named for one of the characters, Martin Beck, but it is really an ensemble enterprise, similar to Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series. In this particular installment, Martin Beck does not play a starring role. All of the characters are important and distinct from one another. A solid entry into the series.

16/365: The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows by Rudyard Kipling

The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows
 by Rudyard Kipling
Rating: ★★★½
Series: Little Black Classics #24
Publication Date: October 11, 2014
Genre: short stories
Pages: 52
ReRead?: No
Project: Project 365
'Mind you, it was a pukka, respectable opium-house, and not one of those stifling, sweltering chandoo-khanas that you can find all over the City.'
Kipling first became famous for his pungent, harsh and shocking stories of northwest India, where he grew up. This is just a small selection from his inexhaustibly contentious and various early work.

Tuesdays are the longest work day for my employment contract, where I have the least reading time available, so I’ve unofficially decided that I will be reading one of the books from my Penguin box sets – either the black classics or the modern classics – on Tuesdays.

I’ve previously read Kim by Kipling, and I liked it pretty well. Kipling has fallen out of favor in these late, post-colonial and anti-imperial times, because he did write from a distinctly British view point about colonial India. I have never read his children’s stories – the Just So Stories and the Jungle Book – although I have, of course, seen the Disney adaptation of the latter.

The 6 stories in this tiny book:

Thrown Away
False Dawn
In the House of Suddho
The Bisara of Pooree
The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows
The Story of Mohammad Din

are stories for adults, not children. I enjoyed them a lot – they are packed with imagery. Each story is told from a first person perspective, although I don’t think the narrator is identified in any of them. They are strange and morbid little tales, addressing death, opium addiction, magic and suicide. There isn’t much backstory – the reader is plunged directly into the story which barely get going before they are over. The best of them is also the title story, The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows.

Kipling was wildly popular during his lifetime, although he seems rather conspicuously old-fashioned (and racist) at this point. But he had style, and I think I’d be interested in some of his children’s stories.

13/365: The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Bookshop
 by Penelope Fitzgerald
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1978
Genre: fiction
Pages: 160
ReRead?: No
Project: Project 365
In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop - the only bookshop - in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbors' lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Florence's warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn't always a town that wants one.

It is easy to be fooled by the title and plot summary into thinking that this will be a charming and quirky story about a bookshop on the English coast, in the manner of an 84 Charing Cross Road by Helen Hanff.

The Bookshop is, at a minimum, poignant. It might even qualify as grim. I liked it a lot, even if the ending did break my heart a bit.

It is extremely well-written, with clear, economical prose. The main character, Florence Green, is a widow of reduced circumstances living in the hardscrabble seaside down of Hardborough – a name that could not be more apposite – on the coast in Suffolk County. Because I just finished A Fortnight in September, I had to check to see where Suffolk was, in relation to Bognor Regis, in Sussex. They are not too far apart, both on the Eastern coast of Southern England. Hardborough seems to possess nothing of the liveliness and prosperity of Bognor Regis, however. Our dear friends, the Stevens family, will not be visiting it anytime soon.

Florence decides that she will take her small inheritance and open a bookshop in Hardborough. Things go well for a bit, as she establishes herself in The Old House and begins to stock her shelves. There is a peak with the decision to purchase 250 copies of Lolita to sell in the bookshop. This seemed to me an astonishing number of copies of the same book for her small community, but controversy sold in 1959, apparently, as it sells in 2025, and she makes a packet. This causes her to become overly confident because, as it turns out, there is a storm brewing in the background of which Florence is blissfully unaware.

That’s where the book took a turn for me. I was invested in the success of the bookshop and of Florence. I wanted it to turn out well. Friends, it does not turn out well.

Florence is an unassuming woman of immense dignity, and I appreciated that, but in our year of the lord 2025, reading a book where the wealthy and powerful cavalierly squash someone so vulnerable for no good reason and without caring at all about the impact of their machinations on her, well, I’m not going to lie, it was rough. I closed the book with a feeling of desolation and fury at the injustice of it all.

I will definitely read more Penelope Fitzgerald. An author who can so deeply invest me in one of her characters has something worth exploring.

11/365: The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff

The Fortnight in September
 by R.C. Sherriff
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: September 1, 1931
Genre: fiction
Pages: 304
ReRead?: No
Project: 2024 read my hoard, Project 365
The Fortnight in September embodies the kind of mundane normality the men in the dug-out longed for – domestic life at 22 Corunna Road in Dulwich, the train journey via Clapham Junction to the south coast, the two weeks living in lodgings and going to the beach every day. The family’s only regret is leaving their garden where, we can imagine, because it is September the dahlias are at their fiery best: as they flash past in the train they get a glimpse of their back garden, where ‘a shaft of sunlight fell through the side passage and lit up the clump of white asters by the apple tree.’ This was what the First World War soldiers longed for; this, he imagined, was what he was fighting for and would return to (as in fact Sherriff did).
He had had the idea for his novel at Bognor Regis: watching the crowds go by, and wondering what their lives were like at home, he ‘began to feel the itch to take one of those families at random and build up an imaginary story of their annual holiday by the sea...I wanted to write about simple, uncomplicated people doing normal things.’

A near perfect novel, The Fortnight in September is the charming, and deceptively simple, story of the Stevens family and their yearly holiday taken at the seaside in Bognor Regis, Sussex. Mr. Stevens, his wife (Flossie) and their children have been taking their holiday at the Seaview, a boarding house run by Mrs. Huggett, for the previous 20 years. The two older children, Dick and Mary, are actually young adults at this point. They have both left school and started working, Mary at a dressmakers and Dick at a stationer. The youngest child, Ernie, is ten and remains a bit of a cipher through the entire book.

Everyone else gets their moment of focus during the fortnight that they are at the Seaside. The book opens with everyone packing and checking off their leaving chores, and takes us – in detail – through the railway journey (change trains in Clapham, with only 14 minutes to spare), and then to Bognor Regis and the Seaview.

This year, the year described, is particularly bittersweet. The Stevens are a close family, but it is clear that both Dick and Mary are realizing that these family holidays are coming to an end. The Seaview itself has become a bit rundown and Mrs. Huggett herself isn’t doing so well as before. They are fiercely loyal, but even so, if this isn’t the final family holiday at the Seaview, it’s undeniable, even if a bit painful, that this time of their life is grinding slowly to a halt.

As an empty nester, there’s something very universal in The Fortnight in September. My family vacations – in the U.S., we rarely use the word “holiday” for anything other than a specific day like Christmas or Labor Day – were quite different from the one described in the novel, but, nonetheless, the feeling is so similar. The way that a family creates traditions for itself, that are worth repeating simply because that’s what your family has always done. The way that a vacation seems like a whole separate world. When my daughter went away to college, and then my son graduated from high school, one of the most painful things was knowing that the family vacation would never be the same.

Kazuo Ishiguro provides the blurb on the cover of my edition: “Uplifting, life-affirming . . . the beautiful dignity to be found in everyday living has rarely been captured so delicately.”

And, yes, I agree with this to my bones. There is something about a simple family and a simple life that is deeply moving. Mr. and Mrs. Stevens are a very ordinary husband and wife, and they do have yearnings, but, at the same time, they are content with the life that they have built. Proud, even, of what they have accomplished. They have done well.

Mr. Stevens has not achieved everything he would have hoped to achieve as a young man, but he has bought a house (that will be his, outright, in twelve more payments), and he has a wife and he is proud of his children. And Mrs. Stevens, well, she doesn’t even like the seaside, it frightens her, but for two decades she has put her family first and made carefully sure that they never know how she really feels. She has given them this as a gift.

The book ends when the holiday ends, when the Stevens are packed and ready to go back to the station for the journey home. I was so sorry to see it end – I would love to have read more about their lives. What happened to Mary? Did Dick find a better job for himself, as he wanted? How did Mr. Stevens’s return to work go? Had he forgotten the invoice that gave him anxiety during the holiday? Did they ever return to the Seaview?

This book may be the perfect antidote to our current culture of individualism and the obsession with chasing wealth. I’m so glad I read it. I will read it again.

10/365: The Way Some People Die by Ross MacDonald

The Way Some People Die
 by Ross MacDonald
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Lew Archer #3
Publication Date: June 1, 1951
Genre: noir
Pages: 245
ReRead?: No
Project: Project 365
In a rundown house in Santa Monica, Mrs. Samuel Lawrence presses fifty crumpled bills into Lew Archer's hand and asks him to find her wandering daughter, Galatea. Described as ‘crazy for men’ and without discrimination, she was last seen driving off with small-time gangster Joe Tarantine, a hophead hood with a rep for violence. Archer traces the hidden trail from San Francisco slum alleys to the luxury of Palm Springs, traveling through an urban wilderness of drugs and viciousness. As the bodies begin to pile up, he finds that even angel faces can mask the blackest of hearts.Filled with dope, delinquents and murder, this is classic Macdonald and one of his very best in the Lew Archer series.

This is the third or fourth in Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer series that I’ve read. I don’t think that MacDonald was quite so accomplished a prose stylist as Chandler, but his plots are better and his characters are just as good.

There is just something about Hollywood in the 1950’s that feels so perfect for crime fiction. It’s in the blood of mid-century California; I can’t think of the golden age of Hollywood without also thinking of the squalor and grit of noir.

Earlier this year I went on a book buying binge and snagged a number of the Library of America crime collections. The Ross MacDonald collection was the last one I bought, and this is the first entry of the first book in the set. Whoever edited the collection didn’t start at the beginning and go through to the end – there are just too many Lew Archer’s for the standard LOA two to three book set. Mine has 11 novels. The first book selects 4 from the 1950’s, the second has 3 from the early 1960’s, and the third collects 4 “later” novels, whatever that means. There are a total of 18 Lew Archers, so my collection is missing 7 of them.

The Way Some People Die is a pretty standard hard boiled private eye novel, with all of the accoutrements of noir: femme fatales, crime bosses, heroin addicts, double-crossers and inept police officers. The plot is complicated but ultimately makes sense and is easy to follow – something that is often not true of Chandler, who is more interested in the way he tells the story than in the story itself (this is not a criticism. I love the way that Chandler writes). Lew Archer is a quintessential noir hero: life has not been kind to him; he’s cynical, and more than a bit frayed and rumpled, but his moral compass, while a bit askew, points true, if not true north.

Noir is so stylish. This one has the style, but also the plot to go with it.

8/365: My House in Umbria by William Trevor

My House in Umbria
 by William Trevor
Rating: ★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1991
Genre: fiction
Pages: 155
ReRead?: No
Mrs. Emily Delahunty-a mysterious and not entirely trustworthy former madam-quietly runs a pensione in the Italian countryside and writes romance novels while she muses on her checkered past. Then one day her world is changed forever as the train she is riding in is blown up by terrorists. Taken to a local hospital to recuperate, she befriends the other survivors-an elderly English general, an American child, and a German boy-and takes them all to convalesce at her villa, with unforeseen results.

I have a truly huge omnibus of William Trevor’s short stories that I have barely cracked. I’ve read just enough to know that he reminds me a bit of a male, Irish analogue to Alice Munro’s Canadian female writer. If I were just rating the quality of writing, this would be rated higher than 3 stars, but the story was so strange and unsettling that I didn’t particularly enjoy it. This is an odd little novella.

The cover and the title lulled me into a false sense that it would be something like Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April – a bit of found family, a healing interlude in the Italian countryside.

Ummmm, nope. Not at all. It starts out fairly straightforwardly, with an introduction to Emily Delahunty as she boards an Italian train. Emily is an observer of human nature – she has written and published several romance novels and we see her taking note, and filling in backstories, for the other people in her train car. However, once the train car blows up and she awakens in a hospital bed, things, like the train, derail a bit.

Ultimately, Emily invites the only three other survivors of the attack to convalesce in her house – an older Colonel, a young German amputee and an American child named Aimee, who is about ten years old. Aimee is left an orphan, with her sole surviving relative an uncle from America named Mr. Riversmith.

All three of the adults become very attached to Aimee, who is going to be returning to America with Riversmith once he arrives and she is cleared for travel. Once Riversmith arrives, things really get weird and Emily’s grip on reality grows increasingly tenuous. It’s more and more difficult to distinguish between the stories she tells herself and the reality, and her behavior with Riversmith is extremely unsettling, culminating in a disturbing interaction in the middle of the night which no doubt left Riversmith thinking that he was staying in the house of a crazy person.

The writing here is beautiful – clean and clear and evocative, and the character studies are well-drawn. I wavered between reading this one and The Story of Lucy Gault, and I’m sort of wishing I had read it instead. I’ll get to eventually, though, along with the rest of those short stories.