Rural Routes, Blog Version

With thirty-six hours remaining in 2017, I have completed the list of books I have read since resuming my blog earlier this year. Not a great accomplishment, but a self-given task completed, and I take some pleasure in that.

“Round the Christmas Fire: Festive Stories”, Vintage Books, London, 2013. I purchased this from Hampstead House Books, a favourite source for discounted books. The book is a selection of seasonal writings featuring the talent of Truman Capote, Charles Dickens, O. Henry, Dylan Thomas, P.G. Wodehouse, Edith Wharton and others. Included are ghost stories, diary entries, excerpts from books and short stories. Some are well known, such as the “There never was such a goose” from Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” and “Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.” I especially enjoyed “A Christmas Memory” by Truman Capote which had all the sultry charm of New Orleans mixed with the fuzzy warmth of boyhood memory. I finished reading the book on Christmas Day night and considered it time appropriately and well spent.

“Redemption” by Leon Uris, Harper Collins, New York, 1995. I picked this up for $1 last summer at a used book sale. Years ago I had read “Trinity”, a family history set against the Irish struggle for freedom; “Redemption” is its sequel. The plot moves from Ireland to New Zealand, to Gallipoli and Cairo during World War 1 and back to Ireland, showcasing the intertwined stories of three families. All of Uris’ stories are sweeping sagas and this is no exception, although I found this one less captivating than others I have read.

“The Living and the Dead in Winsford”, by Hakan Nesser, translated from Swedish by Laurie Thompson, Mantle, London, 2015. I ordered three Nesser books from an online used book seller; he is an award-winning Swedish crime writer whose Van Veeteren books are published in more than 25 countries. This, however, is not a Van Veeteren book and was winner of the Rosenkrantz Award for Best Thriller of the Year when it was published. A Swedish couple leave Stockholm for Morocco, but the couple never reach their destination. Weeks later, the wife and their dog arrive in the village of Winsford on Exmoor and find a secluded cottage in which to live. Maria’s only intention at this point is to outlive her dog. A clue to the husband’s fate can be found in words she reads in an unfinished manuscript, “Women don’t realize they are more cold-blooded than men until after the menopause”.

“Beartown” by Fredrik Backman, translated by Neil Smith, Atrium Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, New York, 2017. After picking up a couple of Backman’s earlier books in a Barnes and Noble in Fargo earlier this year, I also purchased this one, his latest. Beartown is a hockey town in Sweden, not unlike hundreds of such small towns in Canada where NHL dreams are a powerful incentive for players and parents alike. So what happens to the town when its star player is accused of a sexual crime against the daughter of the team’s general manager? Backman’s characters are flawed; many of their actions are detestable; and yet I empathized with them. Perhaps that is one of Backman’s biggest talents, to dig down to people’s ugliest secrets and still make the reader care about them.

“Garden of Lamentations” by Deborah Crombie, Harper Collins, New York, 2017. I think I have read all of this series featuring Scotland Yard detectives Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James. The Washington Post said in a review that “Crombie has laid claim to the literary territory of moody psychological suspense owned by P.D. James and Barbara Vine.” I don’t agree. I don’t think Crombie comes close. But that isn’t to say that the Kincaid and James books aren’t a good read. They are. Dessert fare rather than the main course. Many sub-plots run through the books, which should probably be read in chronological order to fully understand and appreciate.

“Letter to Sydney”, by Ron Blicq, R-Group Publications, Winnipeg, 2016. I purchased this book from the author at a reading in Gimli, MB in November 2016. 80-something-year-old Jane has a secret and wonders if she should tell it. The origins of the secret go back to the days of the Second World War, when she was first a student and then a worker in a munitions factory. When the young soldier she has grown to love goes off to war and contact with him is lost, she loses her virginity to a smooth-talking Australian airman and becomes pregnant. The solution to Jane’s quandary years later is rather contrived, I felt, but I enjoyed the wartime story and the glimpses into life in the UK at that time.

“Women of Red River”, The Women’s Canadian Club of Winnipeg, 1923. This one I found and paid one dollar for at the used book sale put on by Margaret Laurence Home in Neepawa last July. The book is in just fair condition and bears the name “Elizabeth Robertson” on the flyleaf along with the pencil drawings of a young child. A tribute to “the women of an earlier day”, the book covers the time from the earliest days of the Red River Settlement to 1873, the year that Winnipeg was incorporated as a city. It is interesting to read the stories of women whose names I only know as streets and buildings – McDermot, Logan, Norquay, Sutherland, Smith, Inkster, Bannatyne and the like. There are detailed descriptions of local events, line drawings of local dignitaries and sites, diary entries and letter excerpts. This one is a keeper.

“Raven Black” by Ann Cleeves, Pan McMillan, London, 2015 (originally printed in 2008). Ann Cleeves is the author of the Vera Stanhope novels which have been successfully adapted for the television series “Vera” starring Brenda Blethyn. It is one case where I believe that the TV show is better than the books. The reverse is true for her Shetland series, perhaps because the actor playing Jimmy Perez does not look anything like someone with Spanish lineage. I digress. “Raven Black’ is the first book in the Shetland series and was the winner of the 2006 Duncan Lawrie Dagger for Best Crime Novel. Very good.

“The Weeping Girl”, by Hakan Nesser, translated from the Swedish by Lawrie Thompson, Pan Books, 2013 (first published in 2000). This is another of the Hakan Nesser books I purchased from a used bookseller online. “An Inspector Van Veeteren Mystery” it says on the front cover, but that is misleading. The book actually features Ewa Moreno, Van Veeteren’s protégé. On her way to a vacation with her boyfriend, Morena meets a young girl who is going to meet her father, a convicted murderer, for the first time. When the girl disappears, Morena interrupts her vacation to investigate. There is one sub-plot that distracts from rather than enhancing the book’s flow, and then fizzles to an unsatisfactory conclusion. But other than that, the book is well written, the plot threads pull together in unexpected but believable ways and the ending proves that justice does not necessarily have to mean a jail sentence.

“The Crook Factory” by Dan Simmons, Mulholland Books/Little, Brown & Company, New York, 2013. Originally printed 1999. This was my husband’s recommendation and I thank him for it. “The Crook Factory” is a novel, but the story of Ernest Hemmingway’s “Cuban spy-catching, submarine chasing, World War II adventures is…. 95 per cent true.” Hemingway’s adventures are still classified in the dossier which the FBI has kept on him since the 1930s, according to an author’s note at the end of this book. Well worth the read. While reading the book’s 534 pages, I was immersed in a wartime Cuban landscape, a testament to its author’s talent.

“Putin’s Gambit”, by Lou Dobbs and James O. Born, Forge/Macmillan Publishing Group, New York, 2017. Another recommendation from my husband, but this one missed the mark. To be fair though, he only said “You MIGHT like this”. Lou Dobbs is the host of Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobb’s Tonight. Born is a former U.S. drug agent and special agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Coordinated terror attacks across the globe, cyber-attacks that secretly transfer funds to far-off places – the U.S. and its allies scramble to deal with the fall out. Meanwhile, Russia, with the help of radical Islamists, plans a major move in Europe. With some character development, it could have been so much more.

“The Painted Drum”, by Louise Erdrich, Harper Collins, New York, 2005. I found this in a used book store in Havre, Montana. This is the first book by Erdrich which I have read, but I have become aware that the Minnesota author is highly acclaimed. She has written novels, poetry volumes, children’s books and non-fiction. Estate appraiser Faye Travers is unaccountably drawn to a rare decorated drum she finds while going through the estate of a family in her New Hampshire town. Unknown to Faye, the drum had been created by a relative of hers on an Ojibwa reservation in North Dakota. The drum’s value in indigenous culture, as well as its significance to this particular family, becomes clearer as the book continues. It is a book that sometimes reads and flows like poetry and that is a compliment.