September 4, 2008 at 2:39 pm · Filed under Books Etc
Last year, Picador published new, trade paperback editions of the first four books of the Mary Russell series. These are some of my all-time favourite books. My paperback editions of the early novels have seen better days–I’ve re-read The Beekeeper’s Apprentice so many times in the last few years that it’s dog-eared, its spine creased, its cover and pages worn (and I’m the kind of reader who, after reading a book two or three times, could probably still return it to the bookstore without raising any eyebrows.)
I have managed to acquire all but the first two books in hardcover, but those are the two that are most in need of replacement. Luckily, the Picador editions are absolutely gorgeous, inside and out, with vibrant covers and elegant, readable type on the inside. Even more luckily, these books, which retail for $16.25 in Canada, became available at BookCloseouts.com, an online bargain book site, for $4.99 apiece. Best deal ever, because I couldn’t justify to myself spending $65+tax on four books I already own in other editions. And believe me–I tried.
I wish Picador would release the later books in the series in the same edition, but I think I read somewhere that they don’t own the rights to publish them which, if true, is a pity. Anyway, enjoy the beautiful cover art and a couple of (slighly blurry) shots of the inside. I’ll be over here, cackling over my loot.
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Tags: Laurie R. King, Mary Russell
April 29, 2008 at 4:47 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Historical Fiction, Mystery and Suspense
66. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, or On the Segregation of the Queen by Laurie R. King (Historical mystery) 405 p.
I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him. In my defence I must say it was an engrossing book, and it was very rare to come across another person in that particular part of the world in that war year of 1915. (5)
And so begins one of the most magical books I’ve ever encountered. I was eleven or twelve when my mother first put a copy of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice into my hands. Although we both liked mystery novels, we didn’t really share the same taste, so I knew that anything she thought I’d like was sure to be something special.
At the time, I’d never read any Sherlock Holmes pastiches, so my immediate instinct, on encountering him in a story not written by Conan Doyle, was not to run screaming from the room. A lucky chance, because The Beekeeper’s Apprentice is not like any other Holmes story. For a start, it isn’t really about Holmes at all.
The narrator and protagonist is one Mary Russell, a young Jewish-American feminist who, after the death of her family, is placed in the guardianship of her aunt, and goes to live with her on the Sussex Downs. A chance meeting with Holmes leads to a kind of informal apprenticeship when the great detective realizes that here, at last, is someone with an intellect to match his own.
Although ostensibly retired, Holmes is far from abandoning cases altogether. When Mrs. Barker, a neighbour, brings Holmes a problem, Russell gets her first chance to see her mentor in action, and manages a few deductions of her own. The case is classic Holmes, with government secrets and mysterious poisonings.
Russell’s next case is far humbler; as she herself remarks, the theft of “thirty guineas and four hams, even in those days of chronic food shortages, were hardly the stuff of Times headlines” (103). Despite the affair’s relative unimportance, she acquits herself with credit, and it isn’t long before a genuinely noteworthy case comes along. The six-year-old daughter of an American senator is kidnapped for ransom, and although her parents are willing and able (barely) to meet the kidnappers’ demands, what guarantee do they have that she will be returned alive once the ransom is paid?
That case, although critical in itself, is also a turning point for Holmes and Russell’s partnership. It gives both Russell and Holmes and new confidence in Russell’s judgement and abilities—something they desperately need when it is revealed that Holmes has a new and deadly foe.
I’ve re-read this book a dozen times or more, and I’ve always found something new to enjoy about it. It’s one of those few, perfect books to which I would unhesitatingly award a rating of 10/10, or would automatically place at the top of my list of favourites in its genre. Mary Russell’s voice is unique, and Laurie R. King uses her pitch-perfect ear for dialect and vocabulary to make her sound like a WWI-era Oxbridge intellectual. And I know I’m not the only reader who has been completely charmed by the English settings of the book, particularly King’s descriptions of Oxford. She has a real gift for making a place come vividly to life with history and atmosphere.
There’s so much more I could say about this book, but I’ll confine myself to this: I have rarely enjoyed any book as much as this one, there is no mystery novel I like better, and if you haven’t read this yet, you’re missing something special.
I’m going to be re-reading all eight Mary Russell novels this year, in preparation for the release of the ninth, The Language of Bees, in 2009.
Pages read: 18,973
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, A ~ Z Reading Challenge, Decades Challenge 2008, Laurie R. King, Mary Russell
February 11, 2008 at 12:15 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Historical Fiction, Mystery and Suspense
6. Locked Rooms by Laurie R. King (Historical Mystery) 402 p.
This is my second time reading this, the latest book in the Mary Russell series. I first met Miss Russell more than a decade ago (half my life!) when my mother put The Beekeeper’s Apprentice into my hands. Although I don’t think any of the seven succeeding novels quite lived up to the first (although number five, O Jerusalem, comes close, in my opinion), I still enjoy the series very much.
I wasn’t 100% thrilled with Locked Rooms the first time I read it. It’s different from any of the other books, because alongside Mary Russell’s usual first-person narration, there’s a third-person perspective following her husband, Sherlock Holmes. The structure works for the plot, especially as Mary is an intensely unreliable narrator over the course of most of the book. Back in her hometown of San Francisco for the first time since the death of her family a decade earlier, in 1914, she is so distracted by recurring nightmares and the void where her childhood memories should be that she fails to appreciate the danger she may be in.
I loved seeing how Holmes felt about Mary, something that’s never been explored in the series before. I’m not exactly sure what it is about Locked Rooms that makes it inferior to its prequels in my eyes; somehow, the story just doesn’t come together early enough for me to really enjoy it. I did like it better on the second re-read, though.
My overall judgement? A good, but not brilliant, addition to one of the most remarkable (and enjoyable) mystery series in print.
Books read: 6
Pages read: 2,039
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Laurie R. King, Mary Russell
January 14, 2008 at 6:21 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Historical Fiction, Mystery and Suspense
5. Touchstone by Laurie R. King (Historical Suspense) 548 p.
I’ve been a fan of Laurie R. King’s writing since the day my mother first put The Beekeeper’s Apprentice into my hands. In late 2002, when it felt like my life was falling apart and I needed something to take my out of myself, it was her newly-released Justice Hall I turned to—making it the first book I ever bought at full price while it was still in hardcover.
No surprise, then, that I’ve been eagerly awaiting her newest book, Touchstone. Unlike all but two of her seventeen previously published works, it’s a standalone novel. Set in April of 1926, almost on the eve of the British General Strike, it makes the most of King’s familiarity with the language and social customs of the time (the eight novels in the Mary Russell series are set in the 1910’s and 20’s, mostly in Britain.) And no one writes historical fiction like Laurie R. King. So it’s understandable that I had very high expectations for this book.
I started Touchstone on Friday, and I have to admit that at first I wasn’t too impressed. King’s books usually suck me in right from the first page, but this time I had trouble getting into the story, which begins with a prologue. I don’t know why, but I have an irrational hatred of prologues. I don’t like reading them, and I almost always feel the story would have been better without them.
Touchstone’s prologue I found especially off-putting, because it’s very emotional, almost melodramatic. Rather than being drawn into the story, I was left standing outside it. I couldn’t engage with the character. The prologue also seems to reveal information about the plot that I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Even though it later becomes unclear whether that information means what it seems to mean, the passage raises questions, introduces ambiguities; without it, Touchstone would have been a very different experience.
The main narrative begins by introducing the protagonist, Harry Stuyvesant, an agent of the American Bureau of Investigation, who has come to London unofficially to gather evidence against a man he believes is responsible for three bombings in the United States. The city seems unable to think of anything but the upcoming Strike, hampering Stuyvesant’s investigation, but the chance mention of a name leads to a man who may be able to help him.
Major Aldous Carstairs takes Stuyvesant to Cornwall to have him enlist the help of Bennett Grey, who may be able to provide Stuyvesant with an entrée to his suspect’s world. Stuyvesant’s job is to convince Grey to help him—and to overlook the fact that working with Stuyvesant may bring Grey closer to the one man he hates more than any other: Carstairs. It helps that Stuyvesant himself dislikes everything he’s seen of the Major.
(As do I: at the end of the section, King succeeds brilliantly at making Carstairs repellent to me, by having him do something that disgusts me more than anything she could have written. Partly because I have a particular phobia about it, but I think most people would be suitably enraged at Carstairs.)
Stuyvesant may be interested in Grey for who he knows, but Carstairs wants the man for what he can do. Near the end of the war, Grey was blown up by an incendiary bomb that landed at his feet. He survived the experience physically intact, for the most part, but some essential muffling layer that protected him from the world was destroyed, leaving him unable to block out the smallest sounds, the lightest touches, the most subtle smells. And he knows things. He’s not a mind-reader, but he knows things about people he meets that no ordinary person could.
Touchstone is an interesting book for many reasons, one of them being the fact that it is not a story about Grey or his abilities. Harris Stuyvesant is the main character; the story is mainly told from his point of view. Grey is essential to the story, but on the periphery. As are a number of other complex, fully-fleshed characters. One of the things that puts King head and shoulders above so many mystery and suspense writers is the exquisite care she puts into characterization in what is, in the end, a plot-driven genre.
Once Stuyvesant’s investigation begins, the plot picks up for me, and I enjoyed the book immensely from that point on (not that I didn’t like it at all before that, but I wasn’t loving it, either.) The only shadow on my enjoyment came at the book’s climax; I’m still not sure what to do with the way the plot was resolved. Like the prologue, I just don’t know how to feel about it. That’s not a bad thing, though—Touchstone made me think, and I’ll be more than happy to re-read it sometime soon. Just to clarify my thoughts about it, you understand.
I have some other thoughts, about the way men, women, and sex are treated in the book, but I’m tired enough that I’ll leave those for tomorrow.
In the meantime, that’s one book down for the Chunkster Challenge!
Books read: 5
Pages read: 1,637
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Chunkster Challenge 2008, Laurie R. King
January 4, 2007 at 5:45 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Favourite Books, Fiction and Literature, Mystery and Suspense, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
So, I had a pretty good Christmas. I got to see many of my aunts, uncles, and cousins for New Year’s, and I got great gifts from my family (and gave some pretty good ones myself, I think.)
My aunts and I watched Million Dollar Baby on New Year’s Eve, and I absolutely loved it. I didn’t think I would, because boxing is ahead of only wrestling in the list of sports I find too awful to watch. Some of the scenes were too violent for me, but there weren’t many of them, and the rest of the movie more than made it worthwhile. Hilary Swank really deserved that Oscar, as did Morgan Freeman, who is one of my favourite actors. Clint Eastwood was also fabulous.
I’ve also read a surprising number of books lately, some of them very good. The past few years, I haven’t had as much time for personal reading as I used to, and when I have read purely for pleasure, it’s generally been very undemanding genre fiction, by authors I already know and enjoy. Not that those books have all been of low quality, but they haven’t been earth-shattering, for the most part.
So here’s what I’ve been reading (without spoilers, for the most part):
Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
Despite a few problems I had with the story, this novel had the most important thing I look for in my recreational reading: pure readability. I enjoyed every minute I spent reading it, and I was never bored or tempted to put it down. I have to admit that my choice of reading is generally escapist; I’m more interested in the quality of the journey than with the destination. It’s nice if a novel can teach me something, about the world or about myself, but first and foremost, it has to entertain me. Probably why I like fanfic so much.
I’ve come to realize that I love stories about other cultures. The descriptions of early 20th century Japan were probably the biggest reason I loved this book. I’ve heard that the movie isn’t very good, but I’d be interested to see it anyway. At least the costumes and sets are probably good enough to be worth paying $5 to rent it.
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Amir grows up in Kabul, Afghanistan, and for most of his childhood his friend and personal servant is a boy his own age, Hassan. Amir watched Hassan being raped and does nothing to stop it, and his guilt and shame over his cowardice and his failure to help his friend leads him to drive Hassan away. It isn’t until many years later that he gets the chance to atone for his actions.
Okay, this is definitely the best book I’ve read lately. No wonder it’s a best-seller. The narrator, Amir, is entirely believable, and a convincingly flawed human being, while still be sympathetic and likable. Again, the portrait of Afghanistan is fascinating, although not as much as the relationship between Amir and Hassan. I was surprised at some of the turns in the plot, although once they happened it was easy to see that the evidence was there all along.
And boy, did those kites sound like tremendous fun.
Guy Gavriel Kay, The Fionavar Tapestry
GGK is pretty much my favourite fantasy writer, perhaps because he mostly writes historical fantasies which are more history than fantasy. I started The Summer Tree twice, and gave up both times within about 50 pages. The same thing happened with The Lord of the Rings; it took seeing The Fellowship of the Ring in the theatre, and being desperate to know what happened next, that made me finally read the trilogy. High fantasy just isn’t my thing, I guess, but it was very disappointing to find that GGK might have written books I didn’t like.
You can imagine how excited I was when I picked up The Summer Tree in late December and found myself caught up in it, so much so that I stayed up all night to read The Wandering Fire and The Darkest Road as well. I still don’t think they’re nearly as good as his other books. You can definitely see how his writing has improved over the years, as well as how he’s moved farther and farther away from fantasy. Tigana still has a very high-fantasy feel to it, in A Song for Arbonne the feeling is noticeably less but still present, and it is pretty much lost by the time you get to The Lions of Al-Rassan and Sailing to Sarantium/Lord of Emperors. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his later novels are my favourites (with the exception of The Last Light of the Sun, but that has more to do with its being more simplistic than his other novels, with almost a YA feel to it, which may stem from many of the main POV characters being teenagers.)
Slightly stupid side note, but it was nice to read a book (partly) set in Toronto, and right at U of T, too. It’s somewhat surprising how much of a difference it makes when some of the action takes place in places you actually know. Yay for GGK being a fellow Torontonian!
George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (abandoned unfinished)
I read this because I read so many raves of GRRM’s work that compared it to GRK’s; a lot of the latter’s fans seem to love GRRM’s A Song of Fire and Ice series. Having now read about half of A Game of Thrones, and abandoned it, almost certainly for good, I can see why people make the comparison, although I think their work is similar only on a very superficial level. Essentially, A Game of Thrones is an epic political drama. Like GRK’s books, it has a large ensemble cast, with a number of POV characters. Unlike Kay, Martin seems to make his characters subservient to his political intrigue, which takes away any interest I might have felt in the plot. I find Martin’s characters mostly either so unlikeable, stupid, or boring that I couldn’t care less what happens to them, or so likely to die that I don’t want to get attached to them. There are a few exceptions, Daenerys Targaryen in particular, but there’s not enough focus on them to make slogging through the rest worthwhile. I agreed with a lot of the things Russ Allbery says in his review, although my opinion of the book is much worse than his.
In fact, I found that I disliked A Game of Thrones for much the same reason I dislike soap operas: too many unpleasant people, and a neverending story that bores me to tears. It’s a shame, because Guy Gavriel Kay is one of the few authors I know who’s never had even a mediocre book, much less a bad one, and it would be nice to find an author to match him. Sadly, George R.R. Martin is obviously not going to be that author for me.
I am confirmed in my opinion that no one handles a large ensemble cast and shifting POV with the mastery that Guy Gavriel Kay so consistently displays.
Andrew Greeley, The Priestly Sins
Like pretty much all of Greeley’s books, I found this readable without being particularly memorable. The most significant thing about it is that Greeley himself is a priest, which makes the portrayal of Catholic church hierarchy interesting, to say the least. Although all it takes is five minutes listening to the Pope to realize that the Catholic church, in its higher echelons, can be wildly disconnected from the experiences of ordinary North Americans…
Laurie R. King, The Art of Detection
The new Kate Martinelli novel, and definitely my favourite so far in this series about a lesbian police detective in San Francisco. The parallels to Locked Rooms were many, the Sherlock Holmes theme was a delight, and I found the story-within-a-story just as compelling as the characters did, which made the whole novel just that much better. Pure entertainment for mystery fans, and despite my interest in the recent event in San Francisco, I really didn’t see the ending coming. My only complaint is that there could have been more about Kate and Lee’s relationship, and I definitely felt a lack of interaction between Kate and Al - it felt like Kate was practically flying solo on this one. The mentions of Jon and Sione’s relationship were a nice touch, one I was looking forward to and which I would have been disappointed to miss.
Mary Renault, The Friendly Young Ladies
Extremely disappointing. I really like The Charioteer, despite the fact that I generally avoid reading any of the scenes with Andrew in them because I dislike him so much. This book definitely didn’t match up. I didn’t connect with any of the characters, and there was only one scene that even vaguely had the brilliant touch that makes the party scene in The Charioteer so amazing (I’m thinking of the conversation between the older sister and the doctor, which is pretty funny, but which certainly can’t carry the whole book.) Also, not having lived through the period Renault wrote about, or anything like it, I often find her ideas about homosexuality impenetrable, more so in this book than in The Charioteer.
Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
Not as good as the main Discworld novels, which isn’t surprising, since the Tiffany books are more oriented toward children. I also didn’t find it as good as its prequel, The Wee Free Men, but it wasn’t a disappointment. Worth reading if you like the Discworld series, and definitely not the place to start if you’ve never read them.
Terry Pratchett, Mort
Wasn’t very impressed. Mildly entertaining, but does nothing to change my opinion that the City Watch books (including The Truth and Going Postal, which sort of are but not really, and Small Gods, which isn’t at all) are Pratchett’s only truly brilliant Discworld novels. Oh, for more of Vimes, Vetinari, or Moist von Lipwig! Although I do admit that Granny Weatherax and Nanny Ogg have their charms, as well…
Edeet Ravel, Ten Thousand Lovers
A somewhat pointless story, entertainingly and informatively told. The background about Israel and Hebrew is fascinating; the main characters and the plot, not so much. Basically a girl-meets-boy story; the fact that the boy interrogates suspected Palestinian terrorists for a living (in a state where interrogation often equals torture) turns out not to be very important to the plot, which ends up being about nothing very much. Despite how that makes it sound, this isn’t at all a pro-Israel novel, nor is it anti-Palestinian. Like I said, interesting for its view of Israeli society, and for its linguistic analysis of Hebrew vocabulary, but deficient as a whole. Still, worth reading if you have a few spare hours.
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife vol. 1: Beguilement
The first volume of a duology, and so much inferior to her other books, even The Hallowed Hunt, which was itself a disappointment. The world-building didn’t interest me much, and the climax of the action came less than 60 pages into the 355-page novel. The rest is a fairly mediocre romance, and the couple dealing with objections from her family. The second volume promises to deal with…objections from his family. I’m curious enough (and enough of an LMB fan) to read the second book, but not enough to look forward to it. This story was apparently split in two by the publisher for economic, rather than literary, reasons, and I think it was highly unnecessary.
So, yeah. Not so much boring as unexciting, and pretty pointless.
Laurell K. Hamilton, Mistral’s Kiss
LKH, why do you keep writing this pointless, stupid crap? And more importantly, why do I keep reading it?
I really, really need to just never read any of her books again. But I know I will, because I can’t kill the faint hope that one day she’ll regain some remnant of the talent she once had.
On a less book-related note, my dad, who is a contractor and woodworker, just brought my roommate and I an elliptical machine that ones of his clients was getting rid of. It’s fairly small and light, and so much easier than going to the gym. It looks like I’m going to have to make some New Year’s Resolutions.
Currently reading: Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran; Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. Neither is doing much for me so far, unfortunately.
Tags: Andrew Greeley, Arthur Golden, Discworld, Edeet Ravel, George R.R. Martin, Guy Gavriel Kay, Kate Martinelli, Khaled Hosseini, Laurell K. Hamilton, Laurie R. King, Lois McMaster Bujold, Mary Renault, Merry Gentry, Terry Pratchett, Tiffany Aching, Wide Green World
