A trip to London, and Justice Jones

 Our family took a trip to London in February, which included visiting the sister of one of Adam's high school friends and her family. While we were chatting, I (of course) brought up the topic of books. I asked what their teenage daughter is reading these days. They mentioned two series that she had read and enjoyed: Murder Most Unladylike (I had already read these and loved them), and Justice Jones (mystery lovers might recognize Elly Griffiths's name, as she also wrote the Ruth Galloway series, among other novels). 

Considering how much I enjoyed Murder Most Unladylike, I knew that I had to try to get my hands on the Justice Jones books. Unfortunately, they do not seem to be published in the US. I checked a couple of bookstores in London: a branch of Waterstones near the Tower of London, and the Holland Park branch of Daunt Books. We were only in London for four full days, not counting the day we spent with our friends, so I didn't have a lot of time to check other bookstores. Unfortunately, neither of those stores had Justice Jones in stock. Blackwell's to the rescue! I ended up ordering them from our hotel room on our last night in London.

This morning I finished the first Justice Jones book and ... it was fine. It was readable, but I didn't feel as compelled to read it as I did with the later entries in the Murder Most Unladylike series. However, I remember feeling similar about the first MMU book, so I'll keep going. There are only four books in the series so far and they're not terribly long. P also seems to have a penchant for mysteries/spooky books, so I hope in a couple more years she'll be interested in reading both series.

Another note about our London trip: I wasn't able to make it to the Marleybone location of Daunt Books, but I hope to be able to return to London soon so I can visit it. Doesn't it look amazing?

Book Review: Bad Intentions by Karin Fossum

Title: Bad Intentions
Author: Karin Fossum
ISBN: 978-0-547-48334-4
Pages: 213
Rating: 7/10

Summary: A young man named Jon who is recovering from a mental breakdown drowns in a lake in Norway while on a weekend trip with two friends. At first it seems to be a suicide, but Inspector Konrad Sejer has his doubts. When another young man's body is found and Sejer discovers a connection between the two, Sejer and his partner, Detective Jacob Skarre, must determine how involved Jon's friends were in both deaths.

Review: I discovered Karin Fossum in 2007 when the Washington Post featured her novel The Indian Bride in a story about international crime novels. Since then, I've read as many of her English translations as I could find, with the exception of Don't Look Back, which is currently sitting on my bookshelf.

Fossum's books aren't quite as raw as Steig Larsson's and Henning Mankell's. The setting can be bleak, especially when they take place during the winter months. But despite their sometimes harrowing plots, her books don't have quite the sense of cynicism that a lot of Scandinavian crime fiction does.

One difference between Bad Intentions and some of the previous Fossum books I've read is that there's not quite as much background about Sejer's personal life in this one. He occasionally mentions his wife, who's passed away, and his grandchild, but this book focuses more on the victims and their families than on the detectives. There are some moving domestic scenes that involve the mothers of the two dead young men.

Sejer's partner, Detective Jacob Skarre, doesn't play as large of a role in this book as in the previous ones, but I did enjoy the scenes he was in. His youth and energy provide a perfect counterpoint to Sejer's occasional jaded cynicism. I've enjoyed watching their relationship and rapport develop.

The Indian Bride is still my favorite Fossum novel; it's one of the saddest, most moving detective novels I've ever read. But Bad Intentions is also enjoyable. I don't think I've read a Karin Fossum novel yet that's disappointed me.

Book Review: Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition by Michael A. Stelzner

Title: Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition
Author: Michael A. Stelzner
ISBN:  978-1-118-0273-3
Pages: 255
Rating: 9/10 for business application; 7/10 for reading pleasure

Review: This book outlines a practical marketing methodology with realistic examples to show how these guidelines can be applied.

I've never felt comfortable with the idea of clobbering potential customers with marketing messages, which seems to be a standard operating procedure among many businesses today. Does anyone really like being the target of an aggressive marketing campaign? I know I don't. So Stelzner's philosophy of marketing by building strong connections and developing good content, rather than cold calling and cramming content full of marketing messages, made intuitive sense to me.

Stelzner goes into detail about how different categories of content can help build your business with specific examples of each and tips for how to create them. He also devotes a few chapters to the importance of engaging other people and building reciprocal marketing relationships.

Although I quickly tired of the extended rocket ship metaphor, the ideas and applications in this book make it well worth reading for anyone who wants to understand how to interact more effectively with current and potential customers.

Book Review: The Language of Flowers - Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Title: The Language of Flowers
Authur: Vanessa Diffenbaugh
ISBN: 978-0-345-52554-3
Pages: 322
Rating: 8/10

Summary: Victoria Jones is a product of the foster-care system. Shuttled from home to home as a child, she trusts no one and won't let anyone get close to her. Her primary means of communication is through flowers, whose meanings she's become obsessed with.

Once she turns 18, she is emancipated and, with nowhere to go, creates a makeshift home for herself in a local park. Her gift for flowers eventually helps her land a job at a flower shop, where her services are soon in great demand by people who need help in their personal lives.

The only way Victoria knows how to communicate with people is through flowers, but the recipients of her messages don't always understand what she's saying. When she discovers that some flower dictionaries give flowers contradictory meanings, she becomes momentarily disoriented until she decides to create her own dictionary.

As Victoria's new life unfurls, we learn more about her experiences in foster care that have shaped her adulthood. When she meets a man who is a link to her past, she must decide whether she can forgive herself for a childhood misdeed that hurt the only person she's ever loved and give herself a chance at happiness.

Dahlia: Dignity

Review: The Language of Flowers is a beautifully written coming-of-age novel that will have readers rooting for its protagonist from page one. Victoria is a well-developed, complicated character who's had a past in which not many children would thrive, but she has the strength to do what she has to not only to survive, but to give herself a happy, fulfilling life--if she can stop sabotaging herself at every turn.

Lily: Majesty

I don't know a whole lot about the foster care system so I don't know if it's normal for foster kids to have the experiences Victoria does. Not only does she find it difficult to fit into any of the prospective families she's sent to, but even her social worker seems more interested in checking a box next to Victoria's name than in understanding or helping her.

Zinnia: I mourn your absence

As a flower-obsessed gardener, I enjoyed the flower meanings woven through the plot. While I was disappointed that two of my favorite flowers, hydrangea and peony, mean "dispassion" and "anger," respectively, I was happy to learn the meanings of other favorites: ranunculus means "You are radiant with charms," pink rose means "grace," and tulip means "declaration of love." I'm certainly not going to rip out my peony and hydrangea shrubs, but I might ensure that they're well-surrounded with ranunculus, pink roses, and tulips to balance them out!

Phlox: Our souls are united

The Fellowship of the Ring discussion, part I

I'm jumping into the Lord of the Rings readalong a little late. I read this LotR for the first time in junior high and liked it, but I think a lot of it went over my head. I listened to the unabridged audiobooks a few times and reread excerpts in college when I wrote a paper about JRR Tolkien for an Old English class, but this is the first time since junior high that I've reread the whole text rather listening to it.

1. Hobbits seem to have songs for everything!  I didn’t realize this was a musical. . . . how are you liking all the songs?

The first time I read this book, I skipped over all the songs. But listening to the audiobooks and writing a research paper about Tolkien's relationship to languages gave me a whole new appreciation for them. Tolkien understood the importance of the sounds of words. I think one of the most well-known anecdotes about Tolkien is his love for the phrase "cellar door":

Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent. [JRR Tolkien, from a 1955 lecture about English and Welsh]

This time, I've been taking my time reading the songs, paying attention to the sound of the words and the way it feels to say them out loud. One of my favorites is the elf song in Chapter 3:

Snow-white! Snow-white! O Lady clear!
    O Queen beyond the Western Seas!
O Light to us that wander here
    Amid the world of woven trees!

Gilthoniel! O Elbereth!
    Clear are thy eyes and bright thy breath,
Snow-white! Snow-white! We sing to thee
    In a far land beyond the Sea.

O stars that in the Sunless Year
    With shining hand by her were sown,
In windy fields now bright and clear
    We see your silver blossom blown!

O Elbereth! Gilthoniel!
    We still remember, we who dwell
In this far land beneath the trees
    Thy starlight on the Western Seas.

This song gives me goose bumps not just because of its tone of melancholic longing, but because of the sounds of the words and the way Tolkien constructed the stanzas. Beautiful.

Of course, "The Road goes ever on and on"--the whole song, but even that one line. If you think about all the different ways you can rephrase that line: "The road goes on forever," "The road keeps on going," etc.--the care Tolkien took in constructing individual phrases is clear.

2. I love that we learn about Gollum and his past so early on. It gives a dark and foreboding (dare I say, perilous?) feeling to the whole thing. Were you surprised that the story took a dive towards the dark and scary so quickly?

This is something that struck me the first time I read these books. I remember starting out with the birthday party and thinking it the series was going to be an extended version of The Hobbit, which never really gets dark. But the Gollum chapter, and the early appearance of the Black Riders, makes clear right away that this series is much darker, more foreboding and more complicated than The Hobbit. I think this is why Lord of the Rings stands up much better to rereading than The Hobbit, in my opinion.

3. Tom Bombadil!  what and who is he???  If you met him in a forest, would you trust him?

I would definitely trust Tom Bombadil. I know a lot of readers dislike him, but the thing about Tolkien's world is that the division between good and evil is pretty clear. Sure, you have good characters who falter (e.g., Bilbo's behavior while Gandalf is convincing him to leave the ring behind) or bad characters for whom you might feel some pity (e.g., Gollum). But with most of Tolkien's characters, virtue or lack thereof is pretty obvious. So when a jolly little man comes bouncing into the scene singing happy songs and saving hobbits from hobbit-eating trees, I'd be inclined to trust him.

One thing that was interesting about reading the Tom Bombadil chapter after listening to the audio books is that I realized that even when Tom's speech isn't represented in stanzas in the text, he still speaks in song. For example, his speech to Old Man Willow when he's rescuing Pippin and Merry:

Old Man Willow?
Naught worse than that, eh?
That can soon be mended.
I know the tune for him.
Old grey Willow-man!
I'll freeze his marrow cold,
if he don't behave himself.
I'll sing his roots off.
I'll sing a wind up
and blow leaf and branch away.
Old Man Willow!

You let them out again,
Old Man Willow!
What be you a-thinking of?
You should not be waking.
Eat earth! Dig deep!
Drink water! Go to sleep!
Bombadil is talking!"

In the book this speech is presented as in-line with the rest of the text, not set off like the other songs, so when I read it as a teenager I didn't notice the unique rhythm of Bombadil's speech. This is another aspect that I think is enhanced by listening to the audiobooks--Rob Inglis, who narrates them, does an excellent job with Tom Bombadil's speech. 

As far as what or who Tom is, I suppose Goldberry's explanation that he is "Master of wood, water, and hill" is going to be the best explanation we get in this book. I'm most intrigued by the fact that he doesn't disappear when he wears the ring, and he can see Frodo when Frodo is wearing it, though no one else can.

4. What did you think when Pippin, Merry and Sam told Frodo about their “conspiracy”, and that they pretty much knew what he was planning from the beginning?

I was concerned about Frodo's ability to get the ring to Mordor without any of the baddies discovering him ;) But it's also reassuring to learn that Pippin, Merry, and Sam are so loyal and determined, and that they at least have an inkling of what they're getting themselves into but want to help Frodo anyway.

5. What’s your favorite part of the book so far?

I really love the language. I've said it before, but the care Tolkien takes in constructing even the smallest elements of the text makes this the perfect book to savor. Even some of the chapter names are lovely: "Fog on the Barrow Downs," "The Shadow of the Past," "A Conspiracy Unmasked." The wonderful story and characters, for me, are bonuses--but then I was an English major and am kind of a nerd about that sort of thing.

Amazon Book Rentals vs. Your Public Library

Apparently Amazon is looking into opening a lending library for digital books--for a fee. Sort of. It would be part of their Amazon Prime membership, which currently runs $79/year and also includes two-day shipping and video streaming. Today's Publishers Weekly news blog wonders whether this service might signal big problems for public libraries.

Amazon seems to be early in the planning stages so who knows if it will actually happen, but I'm not exactly sure what the point is or whether it's a viable idea. Don't most public libraries now offer digital collections to card holders for free?

I also think it's interesting that some publications are referring to this possible new Amazon service as "Netflix for Books." Hmmm ,where have I heard that before? BookSwim, another book rental service, has been touting itself as a Netflix-style book rental service for years. I tried BookSwim not once, but twice, while I lived in an area that did not have a good public library system, and my conclusion was that other than the fact that their product arrived (eventually) via mail, they were nothing like Netflix. Their selection wasn't great, their queuing system was screwed up, shipping took forever, and their pricing plans were significantly higher than Netflix plans.

The combination of these factors meant that I could more cost effectively buy the books I wanted to read. In the case of BookSwim, some of these shortcomings are necessary: it's a lot more expensive to ship books than DVDs, for example. This would be a nonissue with electronic books. But the selection is a sticking point for me, and that could be just as much of a problem with renting ebooks from Amazon is with renting paper books from BookSwim.  So my reaction to Amazon being described as "Netflix for books" is, "I'll believe it when I see it."

I read a lot of books that are not available electronically, or that are way too expensive to buy in an electronic format. The subscription fee would negate the price-per-book issue, but would publishers who insist on putting price points of $18+ on ebooks agree to giving customers unlimited access to their content for a mere $79/year? Which ALSO includes shipping and streaming video? Just how much would readers be willing to pay for an electronic book subscription service if they have access to a decent public library?

Here are a couple selections from the blog post:

Though Amazon’s digital library is still in its very early stages, and though it’s yet to be seen if the idea hits roadblock getting publishers to cooperate, it’s time to speculate about the future of libraries. In 10 years, what will be the closest thing to a library? Will the image the word evokes change from the one we all once had–a person sitting quietly rapt at a table, poring over a book (either for research or pleasure) while surrounded by shelves and shelves of more books–to an image of a person, never leaving his or her house, pressing a series of buttons on a high-res Amazon tablet screen to check out a lent book, scanning the lines using the device’s backlight instead of the low ceiling lights of a library?

NOOOOOO! The specter of trading my beautiful public library in for a tablet screen will encourage me to keep donating whatever I can to my public library. But there's a big caveat in this paragraph: Amazon is just in talks with publishers and as far as I've seen, none have signed on yet. That's a huge obstacle in the way before this idea can become in any way viable.

But can local branches, many already running dry, survive if Amazon gives Prime, which is becoming more and more of a deal at $79 as it decorates its price tag with feature after feature, and its users the capability to access any book a library could provide, without having to leave one’s home? Publishers, reportedly worried that Amazon’s digital library will devalue books in the eyes of consumers, obviously have the rights to the books and can put the brakes on the plan. But once one publisher signs, and assuming it finds success, expect a flood of others to follow. And really, it’s hard to imagine a feature that puts books right in front of your nose and charges you no additional cost not taking off.

Yes, Prime is a good deal now and would be an even better deal with digital book rentals thrown in--IF that price point sticks. I think it's unlikely that the Big 6 publishing companies would sign off without a huge payout, and Amazon would have to come up with that cash somehow. Probably by raising the Prime subscription price.

Maybe I'm in denial because the idea of libraries failing makes me shudder. The amount of weight Amazon decides to throw around to get this done, combined with the level of desperation within the major publishing companies could make this project viable. I just think it's unlikely that this service would be the end of public libraries or paper books.

RIP VI: Death of a Gossip by MC Beaton

As I mentioned yesterday, I became hooked on MC Beaton's Agatha Raisin series a couple years ago. I almost got caught up on that series, which currently spans 21 novels, earlier this year; but then I had to take a break.

Now that fall is rolling around, I decided to pick up the most recent Agatha Raisin book--the only one I hadn't read--from my library, and I also decided to get started on Beaton's other popular series about the Scottish police constable Hamish Macbeth.

For some reason Death of a Gossip is no longer in print in the US, but my library still has the first edition hardcover from 1985. I started it last night and finished it tonight.

The premise of this book is that a malicious busybody is murdered at a week-long fishing camp in Scotland. Everyone else attending the camp has a motive for murdering the obnoxious woman, but it's up to Macbeth to determine which one of them did the deed.

Although the sleepy, easygoing Hamish Macbeth has practically nothing in common with Agatha Raisin, this book has several of the hallmarks of a Beaton book. I think it would be easy to play a drinking game while reading one of these books. It would involve taking a shot ever time a character "jeers," "sneers," screams at another character, calls another character sexy, or behaves inconsistently in order to advance the plot or a subplot.

Despite these minor annoyances, which I think can be alleviated by simply not reading Beaton books in quick succession, I'm planning to keep reading this series. Macbeth's character intrigued me: I want to know more about the six younger siblings he's helping his parents support and whether he ever becomes romantically involved with the beautiful and rebellious Priscilla Halburton-Smythe. Beaton's books are also very short, very easy reads, which makes them good palate cleansers.

This was my first full-length novel for the RIP VI challenge.