ljbwell keeps it in check in 2016

A late start to 2016, but a start nonetheless. Let's hope for the best. As the year goes on, I'll include a list here, and then short summaries and thoughts below. Welcome, and may your own reading in 2016 be enjoyable.

1. This House is Haunted by John Boyne (291 p.)
2. A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley (406 p., Flavia de Luce mystery:3)
3. The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (164 p.)
4. The Blackhouse by Peter May (387 p.)
5. Where the Bodies Are Buried by Chris Brookmyre (293 p.)
6. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (845 p.)
7. Allt jag inte minns by Jonas Hassen Khemiri (332 p., Swedish)
8. The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker (646 p.)
9. Through the Woods by Emily Carroll (graphic/illustrated stories)
10. Ostland by David Thomas (438 p.)
11. The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross (418 p.)
12. The Bone Clocks (597 p.)

A slow start to the year, but trying to get back on track. My only plan is to get books from the library more often, as opposed to buying.

First up is John Boyne's This House is Haunted. I've had this on my list of books to look for at the library, and was happy to find it. It also introduced me to a library not far from home that I hadn't been to. Yes, I could have done an interlibrary loan, but I'm always happy to browse new shelves.

Now, for the book. Eliza Caine is 21, unmarried, and a teacher. She and her ailing father go to see Charles Dickens speak, which worsens his condition. When he passes, she decides she needs a change, and becomes governess to two children. All is not as it seems in the new household.

l really wanted a good ghost story. After reading it, I kind of feel like I still do. It was decent enough, but a few things didn't quite work for me. First, it was predictable. I met moments of revelation with a shrug and, 'Meh. Not much of surprise'. Second, I never felt submersed in the setting. Quite the opposite, in fact. Instead of smoothly integrating period details, they felt dropped in. Comments about working conditions, class differences, etc., felt filtered through a current-day lens. Finally, I really didn't like the ending.

I'm glad I read it, but happier not to have spent money or too much time on it. Now, back to trying to find a really good, unsettling (and not gory) ghost story/psychological thriller.

>3 ljbwell: I had a similar reaction to This House Is Haunted (especially the ending!), and was also left wanting a good ghost story. I followed it up with Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger, which fit the bill nicely.

>4 cabegley: I really liked The Little Stranger, too. Ditto to Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. I've had The Woman in Black or The Small Hand by Susan Hill on my wish list, so I'll be looking out for those more actively. I'm also happy for any recommendations.

If you haven't read it, I think The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is the best ghost story I've read to date, though I was disappointed by the other book I read by her.

Just stopping by to say hi and that it's nice to see you back this year.

>6 valkyrdeath: - Thanks! The Lottery is a favorite story of mine, so I was disappointed by a book of hers I read last year. The Haunting of Hill House sounds more like I'd like it.

>7 dchaikin: Many thanks, and good to be here again.

>8 ljbwell: I forgot about The Lottery, that is a great story. I need to try some of her other short stories. We Have Always Lived in the Castle was the one that disappointed me, as it was well written and atmospheric but didn't seem to go anywhere.

>9 valkyrdeath: On the other hand, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is my favorite Shirley Jackson. But I'm a Shirley Jackson fan.

>5 ljbwell: I'm currently just a little over halfway through The Woman in Black. What I can say about it at this point is that it's very atmospheric, and is succeeding for me at creating an overall feeling of unease. So far, so good! :)

I think you will like The Small Hand, which offers a lot of suspense. It is quite haunting.

>9 valkyrdeath:, >10 rebeccanyc: The Sundial is the one I read of Jackson's. Parts of it I liked. There's a lot of bitter, sardonic humor, especially related to class and tradition. But it left me cold.

>11 ursula:, >12 edwinbcn: Good to hear on both fronts. They sound like what I'd hoped, and have moved up the list. Well, at least they're more in the, 'be more proactive about taking advantage of interlibrary loan' as opposed to, 'cool if I run across it eventually' category.

I've never thought of reading The Woman in Black for some reason. I probably should. The play was one of the most atmospheric things I've seen on stage.

Next up, the third in the Flavia de Luce mystery series, A Red Herring Without Mustard.

It's post-War England. Flavia is a precocious 11-year-old living at Buckshaw with her widower father and two older sisters. A reading from a Gypsy leads to Flavia's offering the woman to stay on a part of the family estate's land. The Gypsy woman is attacked, which sets off a series of other events - all of which pique Flavia's inquisitive and investigative nature.

In this one, Flavia comes across as more meddlesome and an actual obstruction in the proceedings. I also don't know if it is intentional to have her turn everything into an overwrought simile or if that's down to the author's own style. It's been awhile since I read the first two, so I honestly don't remember if they were similar and it just didn't stand out at the time. My impression from the first books was that she was refreshingly spunky and clever. Here, I found her borderline annoying.

After being disappointed by This House is Haunted, I still had the hankering for a good ghost story. I took the recommendations above, visited a new (to me) library in my area, and picked up Susan Hill's The Woman in Black. Many thanks to everyone for the incentive. This was the perfect dark, dreary Swedish mid-winter read.

Arthur Kipps is a retired solicitor. His family are telling ghost stories, which leads Kipps to decide to write of his experiences years earlier, more towards the start of his career, settling the affairs of the recently deceased Mrs Alice Drablow. Kipps is sent on site to her home, Eel Marsh House, a home qickly isolated with each tide and often enveloped by thick, unpredictable fog, and trecherous salt marshes. Despite clear warnings, both implicit and explicit, Kipps insists on spending the nights not in the local hotel, but in the house. From the start, we know this won't go well.

Hill succeeds in meting out hints, small details, wee bits of foreshadowing to build apprehension. The descriptions of Eel Marsh House and its environs add beautifully to the eeriness. Every brave or naive comment met with uncomfortable silence, arched eyebrow, or alternate offer serves to add to the atmosphere. The ending is a foregone conclusion - Kipps as good as tells us in so many different ways where things are headed. But the storytelling is so taut and well-recounted that it is an increasingly tense journey there.

>16 ljbwell: Good review of The Woman in Black. I'm remembering the shivers it sent up my spine!

>16 ljbwell: it is an increasingly tense journey there. Exactly!

>17 cabegley:, >18 ursula: When you think about it, very little actually happens. But it's the way the setting is described, and the little comments dropped here and there, etc that hold the reader. I kept picturing Eel Marsh House as a solitary, isolated, and clearly far less tourist-friendly Mont St. Michel.

My dark, dreary, haunting winter trend continues with Peter May's crime novel, The Blackhouse. Fin Macleod grew up on the Isle of Lewis, but left to study at uni. Now a poice detective in Edinburgh, a murder case draws him back to the island, where his past and present begin to collide.

There are similarities in format between this and Christopher Brookmyre's A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil. The one that got out (of Glasgow to London; of Lewis to Glasgow/Edinburgh) returns to investigate a crime involving childhood connections, and the prestent day story is interspersed with flashbacks to the past. In these flashbacks lie the keys to the present. May's novel, though, strips away the humor for a more traditional crime procedural.

The settings, Lewis and then the annual guga hunt on An Sgeir, are as much a character in the book as the people. How characters respond to or survive in the remoteness of island life an important part of the story. The descriptions of the island, and especially of the guga hunt on the even more remote An Sgeir, are what set this book apart from the usual crime fiction.

Apparently I'm missing Scotland. I'm also continuing my darker fiction streak, this time with Christopher Brookmyre's Where the Bodies Are Buried.

The murder of a drug dealer and the disappearance of a private eye trigger two separate investigations. Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod is brought in to investigate drug dealer Jai McDiarmid's death. Meanwhile, aspiring actress Jasmine Sharp has been reluctantly training in the trade with her private eye uncle. When he goes missing, Jasmine decides to try chase up a couple cases in an attempt to find him. Unsurprisingly, the two investigations will intersect, and dredge up the past.

As much as I enjoy reading about places I've never been, or that don't exist, and being able to build images in my mind, I also get a kick out of being very familiar with a setting. It was fun for me when characters were running around Glasgow's West End, Central Station, etc. I also just enjoy Brookmyre's books.

>21 ljbwell: You've added Where the Bodies Are Buried to my wishlist.

>22 NanaCC: Enjoy, if you do read it. This one is a more straight-up crime procedural, but still with his dark humor take on Glasgow/Scottish crime, politics, and people. I think this is the 4th or so book of his I've read, and he's really grown on me.

Brookmyre is already on my tbr list but you have reminded me to pick it up soon! Same goes for Peter May.

>24 VivienneR: Both are good choices - in very different ways.

Switching gears, next is Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, the tale of Sugar, a 19-year old prostitute in Victorian London who is essentially sold to perfume captain of industry William Rackham as his kept mistress.

At 19, Sugar is already a seasoned prostitute, with a reputation for doing things others (even poorer, lower-rung ones) won't do. William Rackham is the dandy son and presumptive heir to his father's perfume industry (a role renounced by his deeply religious older brother), married to emotionally delicate Agnes. William, too, is initially wholly uninterested in taking the helm. But eventually he does, and fortunes change. I'll stop there so as not to give away what unfolds.

I was simultaneously curious and skeptical going into this one. I'd kept seeing it pop up on lists, mentioned here and there, reviews - glowing, praising it as the book Dickens could have written if unfettered by the societal proprieties Faber was able to delve into about 130 years later. To be frank, I was concerned that the sex in the book would be gratuitous and, clocking in at over 800 pages, that that could get to be a bit much. On the contrary, sex in the book is used to show the different power structures (or struggles), how sex can be a manipulator, a transaction, a suppressed desire.

Faber paints vivid images of the various strata of Victorian society. His use of the omniscient narrator who guides the reader's attention to different characters, occasionally dropping tidbits of what's to come or letting us know things the characters themselves don't - and in some cases likely never will - drew me in immediately. Where I think he gets repetitive is in the use of bodily excretions (urine, excrement, vomit, semen, etc.) and odors (Rackham's perfumed world vs the darker, dirtier, stench of Sugar's London) to underscore a situation or as a representation of, or contrast between, particular segments of society. While often very effective, at times it felt overused. But that is one small gripe about what I otherwise thought was an incredible journey through these characters' lives.

>26 ljbwell: Interesting. I've never heard of this, although it has a tv show and a slew of awards. I was entertained to see it won the bad sex in fiction award in 2002.

>27 dchaikin: I haven't seen the series, so don't know how faithful and/or good it was. The still I saw of the actress playing the lead wasn't all that promising (I pictured a young Tilda Swinton, or even young Cate Blanchett). I can see the bad sex bit, but at least it made sense to the plot.

I've been wanting to read Allt jag inte minns since it came out. Jonas Hassen Khemiri's Montecore is one of my favorite books, and I'd read strong reviews for this one. Note that it has been translated into English as Everything I Don't Remember.

Samuel dies in a car crash that may or may not have been a suicide. The author (a half-Swede, half-Tunisian author known for writing works that can be seen as less than straightforward - i.e., a fictional author striking a certain resemblance to Hassen Khemiri), for his own reasons, sets out to piece together who Samuel was by speaking to those around him. The two main voices are Vandad, Samuel's close friend and roommate, and Laide, Samuel's girlfriend. Amongst others, Samuel's family are briefly involved, and his childhood friend Panther comes and goes.

Once again, the reader sifts through a variety of unreliable narrators as the last year or so of Samuel's life is recounted. The novel itself is written as alternating snippets of the author's interviews. What unfolds is a story about relationships, finances, perspectives, even immigration and power structures. I realize this sounds disjointed, and it definitely requires the reader's attention. But the reward is a novel - one that has a fair amount of humor - that creates characters with depth that grows as they each recount their perspective on who Samuel was and what happened in the end.

Slowly but surely I'm continuing to accomplish two goals: to use the local libraries to scratch my reading itches, and to strike books of my wishlist. To that end, I got a hold of The Golem and the Djinni.

A golem is created to be the wife of a man preparing to journey to America. He is instructed not to awaken her until they arrive. She is crafted to have certain traits per the man's wishes.

After 1000 years, a djinni from the desert of Syria is semi-released from his long captivity. He finds himself in Little Syria in New York City.

Both are heavily restricted, and unnatural for their kind. Both are forced to hide their true selves as they try to adjust to life in the burgeoning melting pot.

Of course the two paths intersect. Of course there are flashbacks, other characters, hidden and more obvious dangers.

I'm torn on this one. On the one hand, I enjoyed reading it. The two characters have to come to terms with who they are and what their true natures are. The historical fantasy elements surrounding golems and the djinn are interesting. But it boils down to harnessing man's true wandering nature and letting women be daring and test new boundaries-territory, and that felt incredibly trite.

Through the Woods by Emily Carroll is a graphic novel containing five stories. The illustrations are fantastic: richly coloured; conveying vastness, fear, tension; hinting at something amiss; creating discomfort. The stories themselves, however, did not live up to the standard of the graphics, nor to the hype. Instead of resembling the comparisons to Grimm Brothers, Stephen King, and Edward Gorey, I felt like the stories were more like campfire tales, often falling flat after a decent buildup.

Ostland by David Thomas had been staring at me from the bookshelf, and I was finally in the mood to read it. It is a fictionalized account of how Georg Heuser went from being an ambitious detective out to help catch an elusive brutal serial killer to being one of WWII's more heinous war criminals. The book moves back and forth between a first person memoir-like recounting of events between 1941-1944 by Heuser himself, and the third person focus on two (fictional) lawyers in 1959 West Germany as they investigate Heuser's (and others') war crimes from the Russian front and prepare for trial.

Thomas explores how ambition, coupled with a deep-rooted belief in unquestioningly doing what you're told, can lead to a frightening willingness to carry out despicable orders. Heuser is depicted as having blind faith that Hitler, Heydrich, et al had a logical long-term plan - that there must be a strategic reason for the firing squads (in which Heuser himself took part) to be shooting Jews at point blank range and dumping them in mass graves.

What is unclear to me in the blending of fact and fiction is just how much Heuser hated or doubted what he was doing. On the other hand, we see the effects his time in Minsk have on him over time, along with the coping mechanisms he and others engage in.

The book is hindered by a thoroughly unnecessary romance between the two lawyers. But otherwise, a good read.

To end on a lighter note - 'ost' is the Swedish word for cheese, so I kept calling the book 'cheeseland'. I needed some levity to offset what I was reading.

There are two things about Charles Stross's sci fi spy thriller The Jennifer Morgue I didn't realise, or better put, that I didn't confirm, until today (i.e., after having finished the book):

1. The Jennifer Morgue actually contains a novel and a related short story (and also a related essay).
2. This was not his first work on the topic of The Laundry, a British black ops organisation dealing with occult intelligence.

The Jennifer Morgue can absolutely be read as a stand alone, but it might also explain why I sometimes felt myself wondering, "Wait, is there something I missed somewhere? Should I know more about this?"

The novel is a twist on both Lovecraft and James Bond, and has all the requisite chases, heroes and villains, gadgets, crosses and double crosses of a Bond book/film - together with a dose of Lovecraftian characters. My criticism here would be that I'd have liked more of the creatures (and the actual Jennifer Morgue), and less of the chase scene action.

The short story threw me. I thought it was another section of the novel and wondered why it came after the epilogue. Moreover, why it seemed to be a tacked on non sequitor. Now I understand, but can't undo my befuddlement as I was reading it.

The essay ties into the Bond aspects of The Jennifer Morgue, but then goes off in a quirky, less essay, direction.

If I were to come across it, I might try the earlier stories about The Laundry, but wouldn't put a lot of energy into hunting them down.

Unfortunately, I finished The Bone Clocks a few weeks ago on vacation and only realised now that I'd forgotten to update here. This means details and immediate impressions are out the window.

As always, I was left impressed by Mitchell's ability to create an engrossing, sweeping tale spanning time, place, and realities. The focus of the story shifts in each section, as a centuries-long battle between opposing groups and their members and believers builds to a climax.

Mitchell, also as typical for his novels, weaves in characters from previous novels. I'd want to ask him, when he creates a character in a book, does he immediately/already know he plans to use that character in a future work? Does he have an even bigger plan for tying all his works or these characters together? Regardless, now I can read Slade House when I get my hands on it.