An Echo in the Bone, Diana Gabaldon

John Trumbull, The Surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga

(December 30) Love these books, this series. Love Claire and Jamie and the thousands of secondary characters, each one created in vivid detail, all of them interesting, right down to the dogs and cats. So much detail! In everything!

The author loves the eighteenth century, and she communicates her joy in it. Things go over the top sometimes, but I forgive her. I like her voice... something about her syntax, vocabulary, pacing, sense of humour, whatever else, is like a pleasant drug. I like her insights into human nature. There's an agreeable feeling that you're learning a lot about history, even though there is no scholarly annotation.

Never cared for the Bree/Roger thread when it first introduced, but I kind of liked them a lot in this take... perhaps because of the two time lines?? Or because Bree is less of a selfish diva now?? There are four threads in this book, I find out afterward from reading the jacket blurbs. I can't be sure what the fourth one is. Ian and Rachel? Rachel and Denzell? Percy Wainwright? Jennie and Ian Sr. and the rest of the folks in Scotland? Actually, it's probably William.

Liked the Lord John element as well... enough to make me go and purchase Lord John and the Private Matter. Well, this is partly because of newfound interest in Lord John and partly just to have more of Gabaldon's voice telling a story.

Woman is a storyteller -- no doubt about it.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, Stieg Larsson (translated by Reg Keeland)

Johannes Wessmark, Ostgotastreet, Stockholm

(December 28) Inhaled it (600 pages) in four days flat... loved the whole series and was so happy to get ahold of the newest and, alas, final one. After The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I was leery of Larsson -- he can get a bit graphic -- but that is, at the same time, part of the thrill of the books -- the fear that things will get worse than they already have.

Thankfully, this book is not as over the top that way as the first two were... although there is a freaky bit at the end there with a nail gun... heh.

It’s a good continuation of the series -- the plot gets so thick by this book that it sets a record for elemental density, I'm sure -- but basically it brings all the action and personalities to a fever pitch and delivers the necessary ending and ties up all the loose ends (except: what about Camilla?).

Mainly I love these books for the hero -- the anti-hero -- Lisbeth Salander -- except for her, these books are on the level of a decent television crime drama, or thriller novels like The Bourne Identity or The Little Drummer Girl, etc., -- but the creation of Lisbeth elevates them -- she is original -- dorky and punk and kind of soulless -- but your heart goes out to her the more for that -- and she is the equal of any classic female protagonist -- Lizzie Bennet, Miss Marple, Jo March, Anne Shirley, Nancy Drew, Clarice Starling... she inspires.

Love the food in these novels. People are always stopping for coffee and sandwiches that sound fabulous.

Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin, Kathy Griffin

Daniel Edwards, Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston

(November 30) So funny. Sample story:

We started class, and in the Groundlings curriculum, one of the first exercises you do is the clichéd "trust" game. I made everyone stand in a circle, with me in the center, and I said, "Being onstage, you have to trust your fellow actors, especially when you're an improviser. You're going to be there for each other, and they're going to be there for you. For example, I'm going to fall back, knowing that you'll catch me."

Then I let myself fall backward, and sure enough, I was caught. Everyone gets out some nervous laughter, and then they all took turns doing it. By the time it got around to Mariska Hargitay, we'd already done it with ten or eleven students, and they clearly had gotten the point. Then it was Mariska's turn. "Okay, Mariska, cross your arms in front of you and gently fall back," I said.

She fell back and nobody caught her. She fell flat on her ass.

I was horrified. This had never happened in one of my classes before. I don't know if there was a fly buzzing in front of our faces, or being typical actors, we were just dIstracted. People must have turned their heads at the wrong time, but as the teacher, I took full and complete responsibility. And this was a 5'10" girl, too. It's true, the bigger they are, the harder they fall, and BOOM, she went right down on her coccyx. Like a ton of bricks. No, not a ton of bricks. A few very beautiful bricks. She giggled and got right back up like a pro, but it looked like it just fucking killed her. I mean, everybody else got caught except Mariska Hargitay. Nobody else wanted to do the trust exercise after her. Nobody trusted anybody. It was a terrible way to start that class.

I've laughed at Kathy Griffin's performances and thought I'd be reading about how she exaggerates and embellishes her stories to make herself sound more pathetic than she actually is and therefore funnier. However, now, after reading this, I don't think she actually is exaggerating much and is probably more pathetic than even she realizes. I mean -- still funny, but less self-aware than I thought. So, in fact, funnier.

The Lost Art of Gratitude, Alexander McCall Smith

William Holman Hunt, Mrs Wilson and Her Child

(November 5) More of wonderful same. As always, not much happens, but Isabel's every thought and deed is thoroughly analyzed. McCall Smith seems to be saying with this series that life is quietly bizarre.

Anything new or notable at all? Well, Jamie and Isabel have kind of morphed into a comedy team, which is nice, because it hasn't been absolutely clear before now what they see in each other. Second, Isabel is really duped by Minty (she's been misled before, but never so deliberately and evilly), and Minty is the first sociopath Isabel's had to deal with, which changes the rules of the game. Finally, Isabel gets really angry twice in this book -- something we haven't seen her do yet.

The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson

Louis Sullivan, Transportation Building

(November 2) I stuck with this book through to the end because I love architectural history and am OK with serial-killer biographies, and I kept hoping there would be a good reason the author was trying to entwine these two threads.

There wasn't! On the thin premise that large undertakings like the 1893 Chicago Exposition draw madmen, the author shamelessly holds out the carrot of lurid murder sprees while plodding through the story of building the fair. If there had been anything in common, no matter how minuscule, between Daniel Burnham and Henry Holmes, or if the Chicago fair had actually affected Holmes' activities in one little way, you could forgive Larson. But there are no parallels whatsoever.

So one has to assume that the author is not convinced the Exposition history is interesting on its own... or he didn't have enough material on either topic to make a book.

It's a drag when an author doesn't think his own narrative is interesting.

Other tell-tale signs: too much false suspense. Every section seems to end with "a decision that would affect the whole future of the exposition" and then you don't find out what that decision is for many pages. Also, the falsely energetic writing: people are not just "talented," they're "intensely talented"; they're not just "wealthy," they're "profoundly wealthy," etc.

All in all, a lesson in applying carny showmanship to writing.

The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold

Erik Nagels, You Girls

(September 29) I thought The Lovely Bones started out really strong -- Sebold seemed to have the same gift for combining cheerfulness and repulsiveness that Jeffrey Eugenides demonstrated in The Virgin Suicides, and I liked that book a lot, partly because of that weird combination.

But about halfway through, I thought The Lovely Bones got a little distracted from its original mission and wanted to be Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping or Ann Patchett's Patron Saint of Liars -- in other words, a book about a woman who takes road trips through America and can't quite focus, who's supposed to be charismatic and heroic but who's really a kind of a deadbeat.

So that was strange. And then all of a sudden that sidetrack wrapped up, and the original story was quickly dispatched, and it was like, "Oh, yeah, here's why I named it The Lovely Bones, a-a-a-and we're outta here in 3, 2, ...."

To me it seemed the author had never experienced losing a family member too soon, so I went and looked Sebold up to see if she actually had. There was nothing to suggest she'd had that misfortune, but I was shocked to discover that she had suffered a brutal rape and beating in real life... which ...should have given more edge and credibility to the murder scene in The Lovely Bones... but... didn't.

A puzzlement.

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout

Curious Expeditions, Oldest surviving figurehead from a Maine vessel, Maine Maritime Museum, Bath, Maine

(September 11) A collection of short stories about people who live in a small town in Maine, linked by the presence of Olive Kitteridge in each story. Sometimes the story is principally about Olive; other times she is a secondary character; other times she is mentioned only in passing. The stories are gentle and subtle, and, other than the setting and various degrees of Olive, have only the question "Why are people the way they are?" in common. The private trials and tribulations of all the characters in this town are themselves very different.

But even though they're short stories, the effect of the whole thing is of reading a novel. You feel like you've had a full meal, not just a series of appetizers. It's just that the book doesn't have a novel's usual building-to-a-crisis-that-is-eventually-resolved format. There's no real crisis, no real resolution to anything, no definitive answer to the question of why people are certain ways.

So the book is more like real life than a regular novel, and is such a subtle comment on real life itself, on how we are all secondary or tertiary characters in someone else's story and they are the same in ours.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, Stieg Larsson (translated by Reg Keeland)

Stina Persson, from the series Graphic Girls

(August 30, September 9) Nice little thriller in the John Grisham or Dan Brown tradition, but a little more thoughtful in some ways than those two examples (Larsson was very knowledgeable about economics and shared some of this) and interesting because of the setting (Sweden). Larsson is good about throwing slightly different twists into the conventional form -- the mystery's not absolutely predictable -- but there is after all a certain amount of convention about this form.

There are a few gruesome episodes throughout owing to the use of a very unsavoury sub-culture as a plot mechanism, but you've got to find a way to keep the "thrill" amped up if you're writing a "thriller" and this does... so...

I loved the heroine, Lisbeth Salander, and am reading the next one in the trilogy, The Girl Who Played With Fire, because of her... and also because of the exoticness of all the open-faced sandwiches and the shopping at IKEA and Konsum. Never thought too much about Sweden before and am now intrigued.

ETA: The Girl Who Played With Fire is also good -- in some ways I like the story better, actually. Am looking forward to The Girl Who Ran With Scissors The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest when it comes out at the end of October.

This second book reinforced the impression I got from the first that Larsson was doing product placements, like a movie. It's either that, or Swedes really like to know the brands of furniture, appliances and so on that characters are using in a book. Strange? Or clever?

Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, Alexander McCall Smith

Godfrey Ndaba, Ladies With Pots

(August 9) I love this series and am happy when there's a new one out, but I couldn't squash down the disloyal feeling that McCall Smith is just grinding them out a little bit at this point.

The quirkiness and the surprising little turns of events that make his otherwise hum-drum stories sparkle was kinda lacking from this installment.

Also, there was this off-putting comparison of men's and women's interests that was packaged to come off as "women are smarter than men" but really came off as "women are smarter than men, bless their little hearts." o_O

Cut: Movies in Fifteen Minutes, Cleolinda Jones

Johnny Cannon, Les Clark, Frenchy de Tremaudan, Joe D'Igalo, Norm Ferguson, Blue Rhythm

(July 28) My heh-ing muscles are worn out. Every page of this book made me heh-heh-heh aloud.

So these are capsule parodies of 10 blockbuster movies of the '90s and early 2000s, and they are brilliant. They are excellent summaries -- sometimes... often, actually... they impose more sense and logic than the movie in question ever had.

But they are also very funny, especially when you know the movie, and even when you don't, since Jones pokes affectionate fun at the generic clichés of movie-making as well as the ones specific to the franchises. From "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Sorcerer's Philosopher's Stone in Fifteen Minutes," for example:

Dinner in the Great Hall

DUMBLEDORE:I would like to announce that I am absentmindedly beneficent.

NEARLY HEADLESS NICK: I'm a ghost!

HERMINONE: I know everything, because I read it in Hogwart's: A History!

NEVILLE: I'm completely hapless -- OW! MY FORK IS IN MY EYE!

NEARLY HEADLESS NICK: I'm a headless ghost!

SEAMUS: I'm a half-blood! Has my water turned to rum yet?

RON: Dude, and possibly a burgeoning alcoholic.

SEAMUS: Yeah? Well, you're POOR.

RON: SHUT UP, I KNOW.

NEARLY HEADLESS NICK: I'm a disgruntled headless ghost!

PERCY: I'm overweeningly officious, which will be important four books from now.

THE FAT LADY: I'm a painting!

THE STAIRCASES: We're fickle bitches!

NEARLY HEADLESS NICK: PAY ATTENTION TO MEEEEEEEEE!

Even the scene titles are funny:
Gandalf's Cart of Exposition (from "The Fellowship of the Ring in Fifteen Minutes")
Hissyfit Chamber, Imperial Palace (from "Gladiator in Fifteen Minutes")
The Planet Seattle Kamino (from "Star Wars: Episode Two -- Attack of the Clones in Fifteen Minutes")

Ah, it's hard not to just quote the whole book.

Interview With the Vampire, Anne Rice

Richard Westall, Lord Byron

(July 22) Polar opposite of Dead Until Dark and about a beelyun times more profound than Twilight. Rich, complex, totally compelling on the poignancy of death. Dark, occasionally repulsively so; not as sexual as I expected from the hype, but extremely passionate. Louis is irresistible. True literature: all the characters are vivid and multi-layered; the settings are feasts for the senses; the passion is real and enthralling.

Amazon.com review by Patrick O'Kelley: "It is that rare work that blends a childlike fascination for the supernatural with a profound vision of the human condition." Iggziggly.

It was like a real home-cooked meal after the bland fast-food of Dead Until Dark.

Still, that's it for me with the vampire fiction. Too much gratuitous and lingered-over killing.

Dead Until Dark, Charlaine Harris

Alien Figure Running With Beer Mug, from the PSB Gallery of Thrift Store Art

(July 8) Yuck. This is one of those books that make you feel dumber for having read them; I finished it only to see if Harris ever lifted it out of the dime-store-romance bracket. She did not.

The concept is a wacky mishmash -- DUD mixes the romance novel with the murder mystery, hewing closely to all the conventions of both of those "gendres," then adds a thin veneer of sci-fi (vampirism and shapeshifterism) and a thin veneer of fantasy (telepathy).

Harris could have been so creative with this, but instead put in the barest of minimum efforts. The characters are one-dimensional and often incoherent, both the romance and the mystery are predictable, the telepathy device is vaguely sketched out and seems to come into play only when convenient, the vampirism is cursory as well.

Worse, Harris is careless with the "craft" of telling her story, which is kind of insulting to the reader in the end. DUD is supposed to be a first-person narrative, but other characters' points of view crop up randomly, even when the narrator isn't mind-reading; there are lots of lazy writing shortcuts, like "he said nostalgically" and "he guessed softly," and some downright ineptness, like "'Sure,' I said, after a notable pause"; there are lots of continuity errors -- for example, at one point, a vampire gives a talk at a historical society meeting, which turns out to be scheduled for 7:30 p.m., but the rest of the time during this one-month period this same vampire can't be out and about before 10 p.m. because it's summer and the days are long. There's an unmistakable atmosphere of cranking it out to get the book up to 300 pages and paycheque time.

I was totally shocked by this -- since it's the basis of the beloved TV show True Blood, I thought it would be at least as good, and probably better than, Twilight... but, believe it or not, Twilight somehow leaves it in the dust.

Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, Judith Flanders

George Elgar Hicks, "Companion to Manhood," from Woman's Mission

(June 30) I loved this because of the time-travel effect of learning how people actually coped from day to day without electricity, running water and sound medical knowledge, and Judith Flanders did an impressively massive research job.

She presents the meticulous portrait partly as a way of explaining some of the unfamiliar practices of Victorian novels, like call-paying and card-leaving, partly to expose how strangely the Victorians applied morality to everything, and partly to protest the institutions and beliefs that oppressed women.

But even without these more scholarly excuses for the research, the details of domestic life are absorbing. I was fascinated by how dirty life was living with coal (your hairbrush would be black every day, even though you wore a hat outdoors) -- and how clean the Victorians actually strove to be (laundry was boiled at least three times during an eight-stage process) -- and how long and drudging all this husbandry was with the tools they had.

On the other hand, I was surprised that the time-travel effect was ultimately delusional. Flanders, I think, wanted to stress how different the Victorians were from us, but, in the end, it's apparent the differences between us are infinitesimal. We still have bizarre notions about cleanliness, food and health; we still oppress women; we still think we're in charge of the world.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Britannia

(June 3) Andrea recommended this as a book she couldn't put down, but for the first third of it, and more, I thought I must have misunderstood her. The book was pleasant enough, but it was not "unputdownable" -- in fact, I thought it was a bit of an old chestnut -- one of those spirited romantic comedies about plucky post-war Brits who are all very well-bred and educated, even though they work for a newspaper or whatever, who have tasteful adventures righting wrongs and jolly-well throwing a teapot or two at a deserving target, and often citing lines from or telling anecdotes about Great Writers in a chummy, inner-circle-y way, all the time calling one another "darling."

There were a lot of old chestnuts in this bag, actually -- there's a lovely, gifted writer-heroine, a real Mary Sue, obviously about to fall for the wrong man when-the-man-she-should-marry-is-right-in-front-of-her, and there's her search for the topic of a new book (when of course, as always, the book you're reading is the book that was sought), and there's having the entire story told through letters (and a little bit of diary-writing, because there are things that have to be revealed that you're never going to find someone explaining to someone else in a letter) -- so, lots of irons in the fire, and overall kind of a lightweight read.

And then the heroine gets to Guernsey and many, many cool twists come into play -- all completely legitimate -- and the book does become unputdownable. It also becomes kind of completely harrowing, in terms of the whole strange concept of Guernsey having being occupied by Nazis as well as because of the individual stories of the losses, sufferings and heroics of Guernsey Islanders.

The fulsome acknowledgements the authors wrote for this smallish (260-page) book (which apparently took several decades and two people to write) suggest they were most proud of having brought to light some of the stories of the occupation of Guernsey... and perhaps they are to be congratulated for doing that... but I am baffled over why they'd decide to wrap such a story up in a light-hearted literary-snob epistolary romcom.

Did they feel they had to lighten up the occupation stories? Were there not enough Guernsey stories on their own to make a book? Or did it actually seem this was the best way to showcase an important but under-acknowledged historical event? It's like telling the story of the internment of Japanese North Americans through recipes or something.

Marley and Me, John Grogan

Lorena Pugh, Yellow Yearning

(May 28) I came to this really late -- I had heard so much about it that it became one of those books you feel like you've already read before you even open it, and from the reports everywhere I was a little afraid of its being soppy and sentimental, a kind of Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover's Soul.

But my mom had a copy and wanted to pass it on. She said, "Oh, read it, it's cute."

Well, it is cute, and I was pleasantly surprised that it was not too soppy and sentimental. In fact, I'm scratching my head about the reports of how people cried over it and also about how quickly it was made into a big Hollywood movie.

For I didn't feel that I got to know Marley as an individual at all -- he was just a collection of stories about things he destroyed, and they were pretty standard stories, I thought. My dog-nephew Buster was a way more creative thief and destructive force in his lifetime. So, I'm guessing that's what made the book so popular -- people thought of their own dogs, whom they did know and love, and they cried about losing them.

I was also a little creeped out by how often Marley was walloped and allowed to choke himself on a choke chain, and by how matter-of-factly Grogan described coming home time and again to find Marley bleeding from the mouth and paws from having tried to rip an escape hatch through a wall or a metal crate in a panic. I admit I've never owned a 100-pound dog, but... geez.

The Comfort of Saturdays, Alexander McCall Smith

Samuel John Peploe, Betty

(May 16) More of the wonderful same. It's amazing how addictive this series is, given that nothing really happens in the books.

In this installment, I was surprised that we entered into Jamie's consciousness a few times (we haven't before), and surprised that (1) Jamie is still thinking longingly of Cat and (2) Isabel is still attached to John Liamoor (if only unconsciously).

The Reader, Bernhard Schlink (translated by Carol Brown Janeway)

B.S. Wise, Oedipus and Jocasta

(May 10) It's challenging to review this book since I had such a bizarre experience with it.

There was a lot of hoopla surrounding the movie last year but I kind of avoided interest in the story because it sounded pretty dark. Then the movie won a few Academy Awards this spring and people on BookCel who hadn't read it back when it was a bestseller had taken up the book. Their very positive reviews, and those of people who'd read it years ago, persuaded me to gamely sign on as the eighty-third waiter-in-line at the library.

But when I finally got the book, I realized I had read it before. I just couldn't remember how each act in the play ended -- until I got there and went "oh yeah." I kept thinking that I must have put the book down unfinished at some point when I "first read" it. But I kept recognizing every scene and conversation, every philosophical passage, as I came to them, right till the end.

So that was either the longest sustained episode of déjà vu ever or I read the book many years ago and wasn't impressed enough to remember I'd read it when the movie came out. Is that a kind of review in itself? On the other hand, I was impressed with it this time through. It's really a very thoughtful allegory about guilt, and the love story is weirdly compelling.

I can only imagine that the first time I read it I must have thought it was about first-generation German guilt and must have thought it was being very second- or third-removed about it all. And I bet I didn't appreciate the abstract philosophizing and probably just rushed through those bits. Maybe I thought The Reader couldn't hold a candle to the most traumatizing book about the Holocaust I ever read -- Anya, by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.

But this time through I realized it was about second-generation guilt -- a whole different kind of psychological morass, and an absorbing one. I also appreciated the author's musings on his experience much more keenly than I must have originally. How awfully afloat one must feel to be the offspring of the most vilified generation in history. But then if that generation was collectively a Hanna, is it fair to vilify?

This whole interaction was further complicated by the fact that The Reader is a book about reading, and I'm a reader who normally doesn't like to re-read books. Also, it is a translation, which I always think of as the reading equivalent of washing your hands while wearing gloves. Strange bedfellows, The Reader and I.

Lucia, Lucia, Adriana Trigiani

Vogue, 1953

(April 30)This book is the poster-child for the concept of a "light" read -- it's pleasant and engaging, it's a bit of a chick-lit book but not in the formulaic, insulting sense, it's a good story. Angela recommended it to me as light and fun, and after two books about horrible people, it seemed it might be a good palate cleanser.

And so it was! Trigiani very skillfully brings to life the experience of living in New York in the early 1950s as a first-generation Italian. She lovingly recreates the clothes, the home decor, the food, the ambiance of New York, the trends and preoccupations of post-war America, and not in a cataloguey way, but as the natural backdrop and props appropriate to a young woman's story of making her way in the world. A lot of the drama and suspense of the book relates to Lucia's love life, although the story isn't a romance per se, and Lucia is a bit of a feminist, though not in a way that makes it an anachronism. All very satisfying.

The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker

Edvard Munch, The Scream

(April 24) I was leery of this title because I'm against fear-mongering, but on Occupation: Girl people were talking about how the book discusses intuition, which sounded interesting (and I wondered if The Gift of Fear would support or contradict Blink).

It turns out that Gavin de Becker is also against fear-mongering and sensationalism in the media, because he thinks they dull our natural intuition about looming danger. (So I have to once again envision an Evil Publisher, who this time saw the value of a title with the word "fear" in it.)

On the other hand, de Becker is able to show he knows how to sort out threats because of a long career of protecting celebrities and political figures, and evaluating the activities of hundreds of stalkers... so all these stories make the book a sensational read. Huh.

But, on the third hand, because de Becker can produce example after example to prove his points, he does convince you not to engage with certain types of people, not to worry when a stalker verbally threatens to kill you, not to underestimate your own abilities, and so on. So ultimately a reassuring book. Huh.

The Dust of 100 Dogs, A.S. King

Carol Hegarty, Girl Running With Dog

(April 14, 2009) Again, a synopsis that sounded fabulous:

In the late 17th century, famed pirate Emer Morrisey was on the cusp of escaping pirate life with her one true love and unfathomable riches when she was slain and cursed with the dust of 100 dogs, dooming her to one hundred lives as a dog before returning to a human body—with her memories intact. Now she's a contemporary American teenager, and all she needs is a shovel and a ride to Jamaica.

Does that not sound great? So I was expecting something like The Pirates of the Caribbean writ modern, or maybe The Golden Compass with a nautical twist, or even possibly a kind of historical saga like the Outlander books.

But it’s not that at all -- it's more like Angela's Ashes minus the humour mixed with a Raymond Chandler-style hard-boiled detective novel minus the noir stylishness. It’s just sad and depressing from beginning to end. People are cruel to each other now, and were cruel to each other 400 years ago, and are also cruel to dogs.

There is nothing redeeming at all. Nobody is likable, nothing is presented in contrast to the bleakness of human life, there’s nothing to invest in whatsoever.

It’s hard to believe this book falls into the Young Adult category. If this is the literature young adults want and / or the literature publishers think they should have, then... yikes.

Actually, it seemed at times that I was reading extracts from a much longer novel, perhaps a 700-pager. The plot set-up gives the impression of a way longer trajectory than it eventually takes, and there are many scenes and characters that are amplified and expanded upon in such a way that you think they’re going to be important eventually... but they never are. There’s all kinds of gratuitous gore, the result of either violence or the indignities of the human body or both, which probably was the tipping point for the YA categorization, because it’s totally adolescent. But I could see it all working in a long historical novel full of richly imagined passages through which we come to know and like the heroine, or learn fascinating details about the differences between life in the 1660s and now, or gain crucial contextual knowledge that puts a little clothing on some narrative themes.

I could totally see that novel existing, and being decent, and the author being told, “We’ll only publish this if you cut it back to 300 pages.... and you must retain all the gory bits intact.” That would explain Dust. The only other explanation I can imagine is some kind of authorial ADHD.

I’m giving it a star only because the concept was so great, and because there are lots of descriptions of jewellery.

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, Corinne May Botz

Frances Glessner Lee, Three Room Dwelling (detail)

(February 11) Miniaturization and unsolved deaths -- what an irresistible combination. The synopsis had me at hello, as it did everyone I told it to:

“The Nutshell Studies were a series of intricately designed dollhouse-style dioramas created by Frances Glessner Lee, a millionaire heiress with an interest in forensic science.

“She designed detailed -- almost obsessive -- scenarios, based on composites of real criminal acts, and presented them physically in miniature. Students were instructed to study the scene and draw conclusions from the evidence presented. Lee used her inheritance to set up Harvard's department of legal medicine, and donated the Nutshell dioramas in 1945 for use in her lectures on the subject of crime scene investigation. In 1966 the department was dissolved, and the dioramas went to the Maryland Medical Examiner's Office; there, Harvard Magazine reports that they are still used for forensic seminars.” (Wikipedia)

Some images of the dioramas are here and here.

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death’s really a book of photographs, since Corinne May Botz thinks of herself mainly as a photographer, but she does provide a biography of Lee, as well as analytical hints and anecdotes about each of the dioramas.

A major letdown to me right off the bat when I got the book was to learn that the “official solutions” for the unexplained deaths depicted are not available (because the dioramas are still being used as learning tools) -- so, after poring over the photographs and weighing the various forensic opinions offered, you don’t get the thrill of finding out if you drew the right conclusions. Unsporting, I say.

Other than that, the studies are an amazing wonderland to explore.

Lee apparently lavished loads of money and time on these creations, hiring a carpenter full-time to make scale furniture, rooms, moldings, working doors with keys, and so on, and keeping many commercial suppliers busy fabricating custom pieces, while she herself made and dressed the doll corpses. She knit miniature stockings using straight pins as needles, steamed felt into tiny hats, cobbled little shoes. She was supposed to have been very exacting about the 1:12 (inch=foot) scale she used; there are collections of correspondence between her and the suppliers, complaining that dimensions in their catalogues did not sound accurate and warning that she would return her orders if the scale was incorrect.

She never called the studies “dollhouses” nor allowed them to be called that, and wanted them taken very seriously.

Despite all this seriousness and attention to detail, and although they are wonderful, the models to my eyes do look like dollhouses, because of inconsistencies in scale. If her 1:12 scale is uniformly accurate, then apparently we have baseball-sized knobs on our dresser drawers, smoke cigarettes the size of paper-towel rolls, and drink from cups and glasses with inch-and-a-half-thick walls. When the things the “people” are supposed to handle look way too big or way too fine, you’ve got to think “dollhouse.”

Also, Lee used prefabricated bisque heads and limbs to make the corpses, and there is just no way, even if the faces are individually hand-painted, that that sort of creature is ever going to look other than doll-like. You wonder why Lee didn’t sculpt her own figures out of wax or cast her own bisque or something.

On the other hand, looking through all the little death scenes, I felt more vulnerable and mortal than I ever have looking at photos of real death scenes, or watching violent movies. God, if these terrible things could happen to sweet little dolls, what chance is there for us human beings?

Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gordon Bryant, F. Scott Fitzgerald

(February March 25) OK, so Scott was a beeeelyun times the writer Zelda ever was.

This is a beautifully told story, and I was particularly struck by the contrast between how modern Fitzgerald sounds and how long ago 1925 was... Dick Diver sounds like someone you'd meet at a contemporary party, whereas the world of Tender Is the Night is a strange alternate universe where you become an outcast if you're ever caught drunk in public.

I say Fitzgerald sounds modern, as though to imply that his contemporaries didn't; but of course Hemingway, Eliot, Faulkner, Woolf, etc., sound modern, too -- although I'd say they sound self-consciously modern, which Fitzgerald doesn't to me. He doesn't seem to be worried about creating new forms for the novel; he seems to be wanting to give you the novel version of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," with his own life as the lab specimen.

In conclusion: Fitzgerald was a beautiful writer. His descriptions are breathtaking. There is also something almost Shakespearean about him in his ability to sketch a whole scene and its mood in only a few words: "Amiens was an echoing purple town, still sad with the war"... "A white sun, chivied of outline by a white sky, boomed over a windless day" ...and to capture those odd perceptions we all have but don't have names for: "Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure but turn out to have been the pleasure itself."

Also, if I'm comparing the treatment of the dissolution of the Fitzgeralds' marriage here and in Save Me the Waltz, then I have to say that Scott's version is far nobler, kinder... and sadder.