January & February 2010 Book Report

One of my Christmas presents was a Kindle. I know so many people with Kindles (and now some who have Nooks) who love them, and so my lovely husband sprung for one. It is really fun and convenient, especially if you are a fast reader like me, and can't bear to be without a book you are in the middle of. I don't anticipate giving up print books, though; I like the idea of holding a real book, especially ones I'll want to re-read, too much to ever give up that pleasure. (I also love the way that books smell; they haven't figured out how to imitate that smell with e-books.) However, I have been having fun reading on the Kindle. I especially like the way that you can use it to mark quotes from books that you want to remember, and then the quotes are collated in a separate place for you.

So without further ado, here's what I read the first two months of 2010: some in E-book form, others in paper form.

The Monster in the Box by Ruth Rendell. Advertised as "the last Inspector Wexford novel" in a long and excellent series by Rendell, I found this a bit of a let-down. If you've ever read Curtain-- the last Hercule Poirot mystery (which I believe Agatha Christie held back so it could be published after her death), you may see some vague similarities: Wexford tries to prove that a nasty bit of goods named Eric Targo is an opportunistic serial killer who instigates other people into committing crimes, and who has avoided detection for years. This one was a bit slower than most Wexford books, with less action and a lot of reminiscing. Not bad, but not the series' best.

Woman with Birthmark by Hakan Nesser. A taut thriller/murder mystery involving the death of a series of men who don't seem to have anything in common -- until an astute detective figures out that they all did their compulsory military service together in the 1960s. Inspector Von Veeteren has to figure out which of the men in the unit will be targeted by the killer next, and who is holding a grudge against them. A quick read; spare, suspenseful and well done.

The Blood-Dimmed Tide by Rennie Airth. I read the first and third installments in this mystery series last year, and finally got the chance to read the middle one. Rennie Airth is a good writer but slo-o-w when it comes to putting out sequels; there was a gap of several years between each. His retired detective, turned gentleman farmer, is entangled in the investigation when a local girl is brutally murdered. Investigators determine that a sociopathic serial killer is on the loose...

Closing Time: A Memoir by Joe Queenan. I've liked Joe Queenan's writing for a while, although it's so acerbic that I tend to savor it in small amounts, like spicy food. But I really came to appreciate all that Queenan has accomplished, as a writer and as a man, as I read Closing Time. It's a memoir describing Queenan's childhood and coming-of-age in 1950s & 60s Philadelphia. As a resident of Philly for almost twenty years, I got a kick out of reading about a Philadelphia I never knew (and comparing his recollections with those of my father-in-law, who is a contemporary of Queenan). It just so happened that I read this book shortly after my father's death, and one of the central focuses of the book is Queenan's difficult relationship with his alcoholic father. It was oddly comforting to read about Queenan's experiences and to have that "a-ha!" moment when you realize that you aren't alone in some of the emotions you feel as the child of an alcoholic. If Queenan sounds harsh with regard to his father -- and at times he does -- he had good reason to feel that way; he unflinchingly describes the emotional and physical brutality that he and his sisters suffered at the hands of their father.

Inspired by the ubiquitous discussion of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, I decided to finally read this classic of 20th century literature. I wasn't sure what to expect, having been told by various folks that they loved it, that they hated it, that I was too old for it, that Holden was a "whiny bitch," and just about every other reaction you can imagine. It didn't take long to read it, but I felt ambivalent about the book right up until the end. I easily understood why it was considered groundbreaking, but it wasn't until I was about twenty or thirty pages from the end that something clicked and Holden became real to me. I'm glad I read it, even if it now seems a tinge dated, and I found myself laughing out loud at some parts, underlining lines that I thought were especially good, and occasionally wincing at Holden's painful experiences in the world.





Jericho's Fall, by Stephen Carter, was one of the free selections I received from the Amazon Vine program. Carter is a well-regarded law professor at Yale, and, interestingly, writes fiction in his spare time. His earlier books had gotten pretty good reviews, and he's certainly a brilliant guy, so I figured I'd give this one a try. Alas, I hated it. The main character is a woman who travels across the country, to a remote Colorado town, to see her former lover, who has a terminal illness. It was hard for me to suspend my disbelief from the get-go, however. Rebecca's willingness to drop everything in her life (including her young daughter) to return to Colorado is hard to swallow, and she struck me as too much of a Lifetime TV Movie character: strong, beautiful, supposedly brilliant, but not so smart when it comes to jeopardizing her emotional and physical well-being by hanging out with a Svengali-like man from her past. Her lover, the "Jericho" of the title, is a former CIA director and adviser to presidents, and part of the tension in the book is whether he has, in fact, lost his mental faculties due to his terminal illness, whether he was/is insane all along, whether his daughters (who are taking care of him in his final days) are sane, whether operatives from the US or foreign countries are really after him to prevent him from revealing juicy state secrets, etc. etc. I bailed about 100 pages in when picking the book up seemed like a chore more than a pleasure.

Tears of Pearl by Tasha Alexander, another Amazon freebie, is a very lightweight historical mystery set in Victorian-era Constantinople. The lead character is Lady something-or-other (Emily?) who is on her honeymoon with her hunky husband; said hunky husband has a suitably mysterious career as a sort of spy-slash-detective working for the British government. A half-British, half-Turkish harem girl is murdered, and Lady Emily & her husband are asked to find out who did it. Good beach reading; glamorous locales, lots of silk skirts & horseback rides in the moonlight, a not-terribly-taxing-but-entertaining mystery.

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. Tom & I have a friend who is an English professor who has studied Willa Cather extensively, and she was aghast to realize I had never read any of her works. I started out with this book, and was charmed by it. The book is really more of a character study and a study of place, as it follows the career of two missionaries sent to establish a Catholic diocese in the southwest territories during the 1800s. Having lived in Arizona for a year and traveled around a bit in the southwest, I found the descriptions of place to be fascinating. The characters were beautifully drawn, and Cather writes with a direct but lyrical style. I'll definitely read more of Cather; in fact, My Antonia is already in the pile of unread books by my bed.

Still Waters by Nigel McCreary. I was lent this by a friend who also enjoys mysteries and I honestly didn't realize how gruesome some of the details were until I finished the first chapter. (I think I actually yelped aloud on the Stairmaster.) This was an engrossing, if very creepy, read, a decent mystery but not for the faint-hearted. The murderer is an older woman whose M.O.isto befriend lonely elderly women, insinuating herself into their lives, then poisoning them and keeping all their money and property. The main detective is a man suffering from a bizarre neural condition in which he experiences sounds as a kind of taste (synesthesia). He has been out on medical leave because even ambient noise causes him to experience a variety of strange, and sometimes very unpleasant, taste sensations; it sounds weird, but the author does a good job of describing how awful the condition is. The detective returns from medical leave to try to solve this case.

The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas (who's actually a she): We take a break from Scandanavian and British detectives just long enough to try out a French commissaire. Commissaire Adamsberg seems unconventional to his colleagues, but no one can argue with his success rate in solving crimes. In the first of the series (also lent to me by a pal), he is troubled by the strange actions of a mysterious person drawing chalk circles around random objects on Paris sidewalks. No one else in the police force seems very concerned, but Adamsberg is convinced that the circles are a precursor to murder -- and he turns out to be right. Very French, a little quirky, and very enjoyable.

All My Enemies by Barry Maitland. Another good lend from a friend; this is one in a British series featuring detectives Brock and Kolla. Brock and Kolla are called in to solve the murder of a young woman stabbed to death in her home. The detectives try to determine if the murder is part of a larger series of deaths, and connect it -- along with the deaths of at least one other woman -- to an amateur theater group.

That's the round-up for 2010; as always, I enjoy hearing from you, whether it's to give your opinions on any of the books I've read, or to suggest books for me to add to my "to-read" list.

Now I am preparing a very large update for BBF chock-full of CashSock yarn (even a few batches of sweater quantity!!) so I must get back to work.

October Book Report

Another month flies by; here's what I read. Don't forget to comment if you've read anything good lately that you think I might like -- I get lots of great recommendations that way... and I'm still looking for some of the ones you recommended last time.

A Darker Domain by Val McDermid. McDermid's Tony Hill books are among the most creepy ever (and I enjoyed the British teevee series based on McDermid's characters, available on Netflix) -- but this one seemed a bit anemic by comparison. Karen Pirie is a Scottish police inspector assigned to the Cold Case team. One day, a woman walks in to report her father missing -- the clincher is that he disappeared twenty years ago. Although not technically her kind of cold case, Pirie decides to look into the man's disappearance. At the same time, new evidence is discovered relating to a twenty-year-old unsolved kidnapping case. I saw where this one was headed pretty early on, and I found the constant shifts between time and point-of-view to be jarring. So I'd rate this one okay but not McDermid's best, not by a long shot.

My Soul to Take: A Novel of Iceland, by Yrsa Sigurdadottir, was the sequel to Last Rituals, which I read earlier this summer. I didn't like this quite as much, but it was overall a good mystery with the interesting backdrop of Icelandic culture. The main character is a lawyer (the same one as in Last Rituals) who is called out to help a new-age client who has just built a spa/hotel in a rural beach area; while the lawyer is there, the hotel's architect is brutally murdered.

Manic: A Memoir by Terry Cheney, was recommended by a blog-reader (Hyphenated Carol, maybe?) and I found it to be a quick and fascinating read. The author is a former entertainment lawyer who is bipolar, and she has written a memoir discussing her life and how being bipolar has affected it. What I found especially compelling were Cheney's vivid descriptions of what it is like to be manic (well, as she experiences it; apparently, different people experience different flavors of mania) and the crippling depressions that followed her manic episodes. She also describes the toll that her disease has taken on her personal life -- her job, relationships, friendships. If you're bipolar or know someone who is, you might want to take a look.

Sun and Shadow: An Erik Winter Novel by Ake Edwardson. This was another (all together now) brooding Scandinavian mystery -- although a new series for me. The protagonist is Erik Winter, Sweden's youngest chief inspector, mulling over the impending birth of his first child. He's called in to solve a creepy double murder in which an extremely violence-laden form of heavy metal music plays a role. The book seemed a bit slow and a bit long to me, although it wasn't a bad read by any means. This was one of those books that may have suffered simply because I read it stretched out over a longer-than-usual period of time (and I went to Rhinebeck in the middle of it, which totally discombobulated me).

From Doon with Death by Ruth Rendell. Rendell's debut novel isn't as complex or as polished as her later ones are, but it's still damn good. A classic English mystery, set in the countryside, in which a limited number of suspects are winnowed down until the climatic scene, in which the clever inspector (in this case, Reg Wexford) reveals how it was done, as the suspect confesses. I suspect the twist in the ending was a bit more unexpected and controversial when this book was first published (1964ish) but still a good read.

Casting Off by Nicole Dickson. I received a review copy of this book which falls into the category I think of as "knit lit" -- works of fiction intended to appeal to knitters, or at least female knitters of a certain age, in which knitting plays a role in plot or character development. I tend not to read these books, partly because I find myself irritated whenever the books get something wrong about knitting but mostly because I tend to look for books that take me out of my daily life rather than remind me of it.

I gave Casting Off a go, but my heart wasn't in it. I suspect that if you liked The Shop on Blossom Street (which I also haven't read), you might find this book enjoyable. The main character is Rebecca Moray (couldn't stop thinking of Rebecca DeMornay on Seinfeld -- "the homeless don't want your muffin stumps"), a textile scholar who goes to an island off the coast of Ireland to study fisherman's sweaters. Rebecca has a six-year-old daughter named Rowan (ha! now there's a knitting detail I like) and is still recovering from the death of Rowan's father shortly after Rowan's birth. It won't spoil the plot to tell you that Rebecca's relationship with the late Dennis was abusive and she still bears the emotional scars of her experiences. So she comes to the island seeking more than just to study sweaters; she's also looking for healing, closure, putting paid to the past.

Alas, I found myself too obsessed with knitting to be able to take the book at face value. This is clearly my problem, being an obsessive compulsive anal-retentive control freak a passionate knitter. I should be able to overlook the lovely but inaccurate book cover (how you gonna finish the bottom edging on that otherwise-finished, apparently knit in the round sweater, with those two straight needles, Rebecca?). I shouldn't have been irritated by the invented book on gansey knitting, quotes from which preface each chapter (what? there weren't enough REAL books on knitting to quote from?). I should have been able to overlook the fact that the textile scholar accepts at face value the sweet but historically-questionable theory that gansey patterns were knit so that family members could identify the bodies of dead fisherman that washed up on shore, too battered by the rocks to be recognized (a textile knitter who wants to write a scholarly treatise on ganseys didn't bother to research this?). See how irritating my internal monologue was?

So while Casting Off seems like a sweet and likeable book in the chick-lit and knit-lit genre, it just wasn't for me. I'd be happy to pass the copy on to someone else -- just leave a comment and I'll give it to the first one who asks.

Hardly-Any-Bull Book Review: Knitting Socks With Handpainted Yarn, by moi

Journalistic objectivity be damned: I'm gonna review Knitting Socks with Handpainted Yarn, right here, right now, and none of yins are going to stop me.

And guess what?

I rather like it.

This week marks the official release of Knitting Socks with Handpainted Yarn (Interweave Press 2008), MSRP $19.97; available for $13.67 by following the link above.


The reason I wanted to write the book was simple. Handpainted yarns have become very popular: great colors and combinations of colors, often done on luscious base yarns by an ever-growing selection of artisans who do the dyeing. You can score a skein of sock yarn for under $25 in most cases, which makes it a relatively small investment. No matter what your sartorial style, nearly everyone wears socks and oftentimes you can be more whimsical and colorful with socks than other garments. And because the knitted fabric isn't worn next to your face, you can indulge in colors you might not normally wear. What's not to like?

Well, the pooling. And the splotching. And the way that sometimes colors which look wonderful in the skein don't look so great when you knit them up in a sock.

I wrote KSWHY in order to help people who love handpainted yarns learn how they work: why the colors look the way they do when knit up into a sock, why they sometimes make semi-stripes and splotches and pools of color in a way that's not always attractive, and what you can do if you don't like the way your sock is knitting up (instead of selling the yarn on Ebay...). I also wanted to compile a collection of patterns that were expressly designed for the way handpaints work. Instead of the designer selecting a handpaint that works like a solid, these projects were made for the multicolored hues of handpaints -- and designed to alleviate some of the less desirable color effects that one might get when knitting with handpaints. In this regard, I was extremely lucky to work with approximately 17 other designers who contributed some really innovative and good-looking and creative patterns.

The book is divided into roughly two parts: the beginning chapters cover technical info about handpaints and the second section contains the patterns.

The technical section, titled "The Road to Handpaint Happiness," begins by making clear that this book is meant for people who already know how to knit a basic sock (no "how to knit" instructions here!), and focuses primarily on fingering weight yarn (the most commonly used weight of yarn for socks). The knitter is also warned about the idiosyncratic nature of handpaints: they can vary greatly from skein to skein within the same dyelot, and even sometimes within the same skein. Next comes the heart of the discussion:

• a brief description of handpaints, discussing machine- (or space-) versus handdyes, fiber choices, different methods of dyeing, and distinguishing self-patterning and self-striping yarns.
• an approach that divides handpaints into three categories based on color: Nearly Solids, Wild Multis and Muted Multis. Photographs show some examples of each category of yarn, and I give you general tips on how to use each category of yarn to best effect.
• the section I think of as Color Theory Lite. I discuss the concepts of value and saturation, two other key components of traditional color theory, and apply them to handpainted sock yarn.
• a thorough discussion of pooling and splotching and striping: why it happens and what you can do to change it.
  

The most fun part of all is the pattern section. It contains 21 patterns designed with the unique qualities of handpaints in mind. What was especially fascinating to me was seeing the various ways that different designers approached the problem of pooling. For example, Kristi Schueler's Longbourn Socks use a semi-solid handdye and a wild multicolor handdye in a tessellated colorwork pattern to break up pooling. She also embellishes the sock with embroidery to help tack down long floats inside the sock. Clever and good-looking, no?



Laura Nelkin's Whirlpool Socks (top in the montage following this paragraph) also use an eyecatcher to pull attention away from any color effects, but she chose to use small beads instead of embroidery as accents. The swirling textured pattern on the cuff also helps move the color around and draw the eye away from any splotching. Deb Barnhill's ingenious Potpourri Sock (bottom) employs a whole bag of tricks to keep from pooling. Changing stitch counts from round to round, yarn overs, wrapped figure-eight stitches -- these socks move the color around so much it just doesn't have a chance to pool.



Several designers opted for ingenious methods of construction to combat pooling: Jody Pirrello's Chevvy socks (featured on the cover; top in the montage below), use a chevron pattern but also short rows to make some huge vees of color so that the colors won't mass in splotches; Kristi Schueler's Spread Spectrum Socks (bottom left) use intarsia to break up pooling and create visually arresting ministripes; and Chrissy Gardiner's Color Collision Socks alternate garter-stitch stripes (knit flat) with ribbing knit in the round.




All of the above designs are aimed at those sock yarns with lovely colors that are incorrigible poolers. For the muted multicolors in your stash, the ones that aren't quite as prone to color splotching but have too much going on for more traditional patterns, look to the designs that use eyelets (like my own Switcheroo Socks, bottom right in the montage below), travelling stitches (like Lorna Miser's Escher Socks, top) or ribbing (like Barb Brown's Rib Fantastic socks, bottom left).



Another thing that I particularly like about the book is the mix of designers I got to work with. Some of my knitting idols are represented (Nancy Bush, Ann Budd, Priscilla Gibson-Roberts, Ve-Ve) but also some newer people and some GKIYH pals who submitted kick-ass designs (like Barb Brown, Puff the Magic Rabbit,



Courtney Kelley). To add an extra thrill, Ms. Ann Budd herself used Black Bunny Fibers sock yarn to knit these lovely Punctuated Rib socks.



The patterns are labeled not by difficulty level, but by the type of yarn they will work best with. Some of the more complex patterns appear in one-size-only format; others contain two or more sizes. Unusual or advanced techniques are illustrated in the back section. A bibliography lists some of my favorite sock books, and there are miniprofiles of the contributing designers in the back.

So there you have it: Knitting Socks With Handpainted Yarns. It's the sock book I wished I had when I first started delving into the world of handpaints. And it's full of patterns that I want to try myself. I am certain that I will find much joy pairing patterns from the book with the many, many skeins of handpainted sock yarn in my own personal stash. I hope you do, too.

Stay tuned this week for more KSWHY features, including links to the blogs of the designers as they discuss their individual designs and a special surprise!

Rest of the summer book report

Okay, here's another semi-annual book report. It seems I haven't done one of these since, let's see, early August? Hmmm. Brace yourselves: that's a lot of reading in these parts.

Walking Through Walls: A Memoir by Philip Smith. This one is hard to describe: the memoir of a guy whose father was an interior decorator to the Miami rich during the 1950s (yep, his dad has a lot of interesting stories to tell). What makes the memoir even weirder, and yet more compelling, is that Smith's father also was regarded as an extremely talented "psychic," for lack of a better word. Through a mystical regime of fasting, yoga and all sorts of New Age exercises, his father transformed himself into a psychic healer. It's really difficult for me to accept at face value all the anecdotes that Smith tells of his father -- an ability to heal people through mental energy? stopping ants from invading your Florida house by "talking" to them psychically? -- but the author seems sincere in his belief that these things actually occurred. Whether or not you accept it as literal truth, it certainly is an entertaining and offbeat read.

The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff. Mixes the current-day fictional story of a young man who grew up in a polygamous sect with the based-on-history story of Ann Eliza Webb, who was one of Brigham Young's wife (possibly the 19th wife). Fascinating stuff.

Exit Music by Ian Rankin, is the latest in the gritty John Rebus detective series set in Edinborough, Scotland. When this book opens, Rebus is about to retire from the force -- and he, and his partner Siobhan have all sorts of mixed feelings about his imminent departure. You can always rely on Rankin for a solid, entertaining mystery with lots of local color.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson. This book, published in the US posthumously, got a lot of press; I found it to be quite a bit overhyped. The beginning is especially slow to get moving, although the pace picked up about a third of the way through. The book begins with a magazine publisher being found guilty of libeling a prominent industrialist, although the reader is told that he was set up. The publisher then gets a strange invitation from another wealthy industrialist to move to his remote village and write a family history -- including solving the long-ago murder of a cousin. Not a bad read, but I had to persevere through the first few chapters. This one needed a good edit.

The Calling by Inger Ash Wolf. Wolf is the pseudonym of "a well-known and well-regarded North American writer." If you Google the pseudonym, you find a lot of articles speculating as to the real identity of the author, but, well, who cares? This is a decent mystery about a Canadian detective who is not the typical protagonist of a mystery novel: in her sixties, with serious back problems, living with her mother. She's tracking a scary serial killer with a religious fetish.

A Field of Darkness by Cornelia Read. I got a kick out of this one; another mystery, but the main character is a former debutante, daughter of a WASP family with old money. Her ambivalent attitude toward her family and its social prominence, and the insider's look at what it's like to grow up in a family whose prominence and wealth has faded in recent times, was interesting, and it was a keep-you-guessing-til-the-end kind of mystery.

Between Here and April by Deborah Kopaken Cagen. The protagonist in the book is a mom of two, juggling a freelance career with her struggling marriage and the chaos of young children. When she begins having fainting episodes, she consults a psychiatrist, and discovers disturbing memories of a childhood friend who went missing. Some of Lizzie's turmoil has to do with problems in her marriage, her own mother's failings, and her repression of a brutal incident while on a photojournalist's shoot. But some of what Lizzie investigates is the unpleasant side of being a mom -- i.e. how exhausting giving one's all to a child can be; how childrearing can sap the energy & vitality out of even a good marriage; how even the most loving and doting mother sometimes wants to beat the crap out of her kids because no one else knows how to push her buttons as well as they do. Yep, it's heavy stuff, and a bit melodramatic at times, but thought-provoking.

Raven Black by Ann Cleeves (not to be confused with Anne of Cleves). How could I refuse to read a mystery set on the Shetland Isles? I enjoyed the story of a lonely detective oddly named Jimmy Perez, who grew up on the Isles and now investigates crimes there. When a teenager is killed, Perez has to investigate her death, and figure out if recluse Magnus Tait did it -- or if he's been blamed for someone else's crime.

Christine Falls is another brooding mystery set in 1950s Ireland, written by a Booker Prize winner under a pseudonym. The main character is a pathologist who discovers his stepbrother altering a file at the city morgue.

Slip of the Knife by Denise Mina, is part of a series of mysteries set in 1980s Glasgow. Another fast-paced read with newspaper reporter Paddy Meehan investigating the death of her former lover, who was also a journalist.

Goodnight, Irene by Jan Burke. Breathlessly billed on the cover as a favorite of Bill Clinton, this is another fast-paced mystery with a newspaper reporter as the main character. Irene Kelly is a reporter at a small newspaper in southern California investigating the abrupt death of her friend and mentor.

The Sonnet Lover by Carol Goodman tells the story of a college professor who returns to Italy to serve as advisor for a film about Shakespeare. The professor also is trying to figure out why one of her star students fell (or was pushed) off the balcony of a high building just before he was scheduled to spend the summer in Italy working on the same film.

And yes, Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, the teen novel about a high school girl who falls in love with a modern-day vampire.

Too many distractions

First, the other moms at Little Miss's ballet class insisted that I read Twilight. I was highly skeptical -- and then couldn't put it down.

In the meantime, I was cajoled to join Facebook and have been spending way too much time playing with it.

And then we woke up to see snow:



Meanwhile, the "to-do" list grows ever longer...

Catch-up Book Report

I spent the last week reviewing page proofs for Knitting Socks with Handpainted Yarn and it's very exciting to see it so close to final form! However, as you can see, my blogging has dropped off a little, so today I'm starting to play catch-up. I noticed that I hadn't done a book report since March or April or something, so here goes. (Remember, I'm a freakishly fast reader, and this report covers over three months. . .)

When You Are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris. I love David Sedaris, and there were many moments in his latest book where I laughed uproariously. I took this on vacation with me, and Tom kept asking me what was so funny, and I ended up reading passages of the book out loud to him, causing us both to crack up. My only quibble is that the last quarter of the book is written as a kind of impressionistic journal chronicling Sedaris' battle to quit smoking. While I appreciate how difficult that is, this portion of the book didn't seem to fit with the rest of it, and, quite honestly, wasn't as funny. But I still wouldn't miss a David Sedaris book for anything in the world.

You know how I love my murder mysteries, so there were quite a few of those, including Not in the Flesh, Ruth Rendell's latest Inspector Wexford mystery. This wasn't her best novel, or even her best Wexford novel, but even an okay Ruth Rendell is better than most of the crap out there.

I discovered Tana French when I found In the Woods in the library's new books section. Set in Dublin, this is a story within a story, told by a police detective investigating the death of a young girl. However, the detective has his own personal agenda, as he, along with two friends, were kidnapped at the age of twelve in the same woods in which the young girl's body was found. He's got to fight his own demons as well as try to solve the present-day mystery. This one doesn't have an ending that neatly ties everything up in a bow, but I found that to suit the book's theme of the frailty and mutability of memory. I followed it up with French's follow-up, The Likeness, which features the In The Woods detective's former partner, as she gets involved in a murder case. It seems the murder victim looks exactly like her, and so the police pretend the victim lived, and send the lookalike detective "undercover" to impersonate the victim to try to figure out who the murderer might be. Once you get past how ridiculously improbable this kind of identity-switching is, the book is filled with tension and emotional intrigue, and I enjoyed it very much.

Also on the new books shelf (we've got a good library! and I swear they read the NY Times Magazine Book Review section when they add new books) were I Shall Not Want, by Julia Spencer-Fleming, and Where Memories Lie, by Deborah Crombie, the latest mysteries in two series that I have been reading. The Spencer-Fleming was much more vivid and suspenseful than the Crombie, which disappointed me a bit. Also in the new mystery section was Black Seconds, another dark, spare Scandinavian mystery by Karin Fossum. I liked this one and it was a fairly quick, suspenseful read.

In the political realm, I read The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him and Why Independents Shouldn't and I urge anyone who thinks they might vote for McCain, or who still believes that he is a "maverick" who thinks for himself and is full of refreshing candor (i.e., "straight talk") to read this book -- it's short -- or if you prefer, to take a good hard look at McCain's political positions over the years. McCain has flipflopped a staggering number of times on a spectrum of issues that are important to me: military intervention in other countries, abortion, ethics legislation, gay rights, campaign reform, and on and on. The Real McCain is written by someone who once donated to McCain's 2000 presidential campaign but became disillusioned by seeing his political opportunism. If you feel this book is too partisan, then do some objective research yourself. You just might be surprised at what you find.

I balked for a long time before trying the Outlander novels by Diana Gabaldon. After numerous people recommended them, I tried Outlander and the first sequel (which are huge!) and enjoyed them way more than I ever thought I would. I don't read much science fiction, and I mistakenly thought this series was more science fiction-y than it is (it really isn't at all, except for the time travel thing); instead, it is a weird blend of time travel and historical fiction, with a bit of romance novel thrown in. Since I'd been reading a lot of historical fiction, I gave these books a go and found them oddly compelling.

Let's see, what else did I read?

I'm about to finish My Cousin Rachel by Daphne DuMaurier, which is quite an excellent Gothic-style mystery. DuMaurier is best known for Rebecca which is a great book if you've never read it. My Cousin Rachel is about a man whose beloved uncle meets and marries a distant cousin while abroad. The uncle dies abruptly in Italy, and his widow comes to visit the nephew. The story is told from the point of view of the nephew, who is attracted to the widow in a kind of Mrs. Robinson way, yet he grapples with his ongoing suspicions about her motives -- is she a fortune-hunter? did she cheat on his uncle? did she murder his uncle? Very well done and if it hasn't been made into a movie already, it should be.

So there you have it: my summer reading list. And with another couple of weeks left in August, I'm sure I'll add a few more to it. If you've read anything good lately, leave a comment -- I'm always looking for new authors to try.