Making Connections

(Apologies to those of you who have been reading my ghost story serial on Sundays. I'm not home and don't have that laptop with me, so the next installment won't be forthcoming until next Sunday.)

I have a friend who is a member of a book discussion group that has decided to read books in pairs, so they're choosing things that they think might be good companion reads. I'm jealous, as I absolutely love this idea. However, I'm not about to form another book group. I'm already a member of two book discussion groups, and a third one that requires reading two books at a time (as well as all my 2009 challenges) just might do me in.

But don't you just love it when you "accidentally" read two books that are great companions to each other? One of my favorite examples of this was when I finished reading Virginia Woolf's Orlando (fabulous, fabulous book, BTW) right around the same time that the copy of Jeanette Winterson's The Powerbook (also a fabulous book), which I'd put on reserve at the library, became available. Both books explore androgyny and gender roles and include characters who swap those roles. I didn't know The Powerbook was going to have some very similar themes and scenes until I started reading it.

Well, it's happened to me again recently. Last month, the detective book discussion group decided to read Ian Rankin's The Falls, which I enjoyed immensely from beginning to end. At the same time, I had also decided to read Mary Roach's Stiff, which is a collection of essays about cadavers (which, yes, is at times, as gross as it sounds. It's also fascinating in that macabre way such things are, and she is as hilarious as I remember her being when I read her book Spook, about ghosts, a few years back). Woolf and Winterson kind of make sense as companion reads. These two books most certainly didn't. Although mysteries do tend to feature a cadaver or two, I definitely didn't pick up Mary Roach's book thinking, "Ahh, this book might give me some insight into any dead bodies found in The Falls."

Well, life is full of little surprises, isn't it? (Most especially, I'm discovering, how much life our dead bodies provide for other organisms -- at least for a while. I guess I always thought that once we die, all those things that have been sponging off us for so long die right along with us, but not so.) One of the notes you can now find in the margins of my copy of Stiff is, "If it [his book] hadn't been published first, at this point, I'd be wondering if Ian Rankin read this book when he wrote The Falls."

You see, there is much more to connect these two books than mere cadavers. Roach has a whole chapter on body snatching and human dissection. She discusses two 19th-century Scots William Burke and William Hare who discovered they could make a bit of a fortune by selling dead bodies to those who needed and wanted bodies to dissect. They practiced their trade in Edinburgh, initially selling a dead body of a man who had died, unassisted, in a room at Hare's flophouse. However, they soon decided to create their own corpses, if you will. For some reason, not explained by Roach, Hare was granted immunity when the two were caught and put on trial, but Burke was found guilty, and his punishment (in a good old-fashioned "eye-for-an-eye-tooth-for-a-tooth" court of law) was dissection. Burke's bones were made into a skeleton, and some wallets were made from his skin.

Lo and behold! Burke and Hare show up in Ian Rankin's book, unique wallet (although it's referred to as a pocketbook by Rankin) and all. This little event, that probably doesn't show up in too many history textbooks, becomes a piece of the puzzle John Rebus and his colleagues are trying to solve in The Falls. The caratid artery, which also makes an appearance in Rankin's book, has a bit role in Roach's as well (although, in Roach's, it's all about embalming and in Rankin's it's about how to kill someone). I'd never even heard of the caratid artery, and here it shows up in two separate books I've decided to read at the same time. I haven't finished reading Stiff yet, but I'm wondering what other little accidental connections I might find.

I've decided there ought to be a term for this phenomenon. I'm thinking maybe librendipity? Tell me what you think it ought to be called.

Christine Falls by Benjamin Black

Black, Benjamin. Christine Falls. New York: Henry Holt, 2006.

(Warning: I've tried to keep it vague, but there are a few spoilers here. I've noted the one paragraph that might be most problematic.)

I was initially very interested to read this pick for the mystery book discussion group when I looked it up online and discovered that Benjamin Black was the nome de plume of John Banville. Not that I remembered who John Banville was (he won the Booker in 2005 for The Sea). I don't pay a whole lot of attention to these award-winners, unless their names come up over and over again, so it's not surprising that I didn't remember Banville. However, right after this book was chosen for the book group, I happened to be at the Lancaster Library book sale, where I found a copy of his The Ghosts and nabbed it (before disappointingly discovering that it's the second in a trilogy. I hate reading books out of order, but you must know how library book sales are. You take what you can get).

While being very interested in a contemporary literary author who decided to try his hand at writing genre fiction, as I read about him online, I sort of wondered why he had bothered with a nome de plume if he was just going to announce his identity anyway. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, thinking, maybe he tried to write pseudonymous-ly, and someone came along and "outed" him, and he'd had to come clean once the book was published. But no. I went to pick up the book at the library, which turned out to be a first edition and discovered right there in the cover copy that "Benjamin Black" is John Banville. That just seems odd to me. (Perhaps he remained pseudonymous in Ireland before the book was published in America? Does anyone know?)

Oh well. I put that little oddity aside and longed to attend the book group in person, because this book seemed like such a great choice to follow Ross Macdonald, who was someone (I know from having read that biography I constantly harp on about) who began his writing career with hopes of being a literary writer but all-too-soon found himself categorized as a writer of detective fiction, a label he was never able to escape. Here's a man who, instead, wrote his literary masterpiece (apparently) and then decided to try his hand at mystery writing. I had quite high hopes for such a book.

So, that was a very long way of telling you that my initial response to this book can be summed up in one word: disappointment. Part of the problem, I am sure, is that I'd just read stellar examples of "family drama cum mystery" writers (Macdonald and his wife Margaret Millar), and it was probably unfair of me to expect this first attempt by Black to hold a candle to two masters who'd honed their skills by the time they wrote the two books I'd read by them. In fairness to me, though, I will say that my first thought as I read the first few pages had nothing to do with those two authors. It was, "Ian Rankin does 1950s Dublin." Not that this thought did not bias me against Black, because, truth be told, that thought was actually preceded by a, "Oh no! Not..." Because, you see, for me (thanks to this book discussion group), just as there is no other Ross Macdonald, there is no other Ian Rankin. And yet, here we had an obviously alcoholic, once married, tough loner, and, well, I hope you can see why I might have made comparisons to Inspector Rebus.

But then I read on and realized that what was really bothering me was not that he was an Ian Rankin copycat (he really isn't. What he really is is a sort of bits and pieces copycat, someone who doesn't seem quite able to make up his mind exactly whom to emulate or what kind of mystery/thriller he is writing). No, what bothered me is what so often bothers me about contemporary literary writers. He wrote too hard. And I can sometimes understand why a writer who is trying to win awards might write too hard, but, come on, the mystery genre does not lend itself to writing too hard.

One of my fears is that, as a writer, I write like this,

A little black car, squat and rounded like a beetle, was approaching from the other side of the crossing, and at the sight of them surging forward it veered in fright and seemed for a moment as if it would scurry off the road altogether to hide among the marsh grass. (p. 266)

Okay, I don't fear that I write like that. I know that I do write like that. However, when I write like that, it's because I'm trying to be funny or trying to help people see life's absurdities the way I do. I would not stick such a sentence into a scene that involves a man we already know is impetuous and dangerous who might be in the process of driving one of the other characters to her death (especially when this scene is basically a foreshadowing of two similar and horrific scenes to come). It's out of place and over-dramatic to imply that even cars scurry out of this man's way. Even worse, a few lines down, the car bleats at him. Which is it? A bug or a sheep? Maybe it's a sheep-bug.

(Paragraph with spoilers right here.) And that's why I can't shake my, possibly unfair, comparisons to Macdonald and Millar. Those two give me beautiful quotes, marvelous simile and metaphor that's so effortless I almost feel as though I've been making the same connections all my life while being struck by their novelty and brilliance. They give me mystery and intrigue and screwy family dynamics that encourage me to fill in the blanks and create my own stories without seeming implausible. They do not, for instance, give me a woman who thinks she could possibly have fooled her dead sister's husband into thinking a child was hers that wasn't (wouldn't the man have any questions about how she'd suddenly had a baby? I know one couple was in Ireland and one in the States, but this was the 1950s, not the 1700s. Surely he would have known if his wife's sister was pregnant, especially when his wife was pregnant herself, even in 1950s Ireland, oh and given the fact that she, well, you know, happened to be married to an obstetrician). They would not give us an abusive, controlling husband who would agree to a very unusual adoption of a child that wasn't his without some truly compelling reason to do so (say, a wealthy, controlling brother-in-law who was the real baby's father. That would be classic Macdonald). I mean, most abusive husbands do not want to raise their own babies, let alone some stranger's. Granted, Black did give us some reasons, but those reasons were not compelling enough. As a matter of fact, that whole marriage made no sense to me. I came away from this book with all sorts of unanswered questions that didn't have plausible answers, and I didn't feel all that compelled to answer them anyway.

Black seems to have been trying to write a psychological mystery, but he doesn't seem to have had any real focus, and it doesn't even seem to be much of a mystery (the library from which I got it doesn't classify it as such). As with a lot of good psychological mysteries, the murder and whodunit are really inconsequential as the reader tries to understand the mysteries of this odd family. Who are the Bad Guys? What are these Bad Guys really doing? Again, the answers to these questions were ultimately unsatisfying to me (please tell me: nobody could possibly have been fooled by that one supposed "good guy." He was set up in a way that was almost farcical), and I didn't find anything very original here. (I know. I know. I'm looking for genre fiction to be original? But...well...yes.)

There was social commentary here, too, as Black highlighted the abuses that can so easily surface in a society in which young women are frowned on when they get pregnant out of wedlock (no matter who got them pregnant) and abortion is illegal. Yawn. And then there's that other old tired theme of organized religion's abuse of money and power. Yawn. Yawn.

Black was trying to do so much, and he fell short. I didn't have trouble getting through the book. He didn't lose my attention, but I can't be bothered to read more of his. As a matter of fact, John Banville has now been relegated to the bottom of the TBR pile, despite that eye-catching title.

Ian Rankin's The Falls

Rankin, Ian. The Falls. New York: St. Martin's Minotaur, 2000.

"'What's life without a bit of risk?'"
'A much pleasanter, less stressful experience.'" (p. 175)

How can one not love a book that contains such lines spoken between two of its characters? I haven't actually finished this book yet, as life (or maybe blog posting) seems to have gotten in the way of reading these days, but I wanted to post on it before the Connecticut mystery book group meets this evening, if for no other reason than to tell Michael I am cursing him up and down for choosing this book. I really did not need to be introduced to yet another great detective to love, which means yet another series of books (and this series contains loads of them) I must read.

I'm about 2/3rds of the way through the book, and I've discovered it's not an easy one to describe. I told Bob this afternoon that it's just so much fun, and he said, "Fun?" And I said, "Well, yeah. It's got all these different components: crossword-puzzle-like clues, a supernatural-sort-of-creepiness, a possible serial killer, and a little romance, as well." Bob's been reading a lot of John Sandford lately, so his next question, was, "Is it a nail-biting, John-Sandford-thriller-sort-of-fun or an Agatha-Christie-puzzle-it-out-sort-of-fun?" I wasn't quite sure how to answer that. In some marketing copy or review for it somewhere, I saw it described as a "police procedural," but I'd say it's more than that. There's more depth of character than I've seen in say, Ed McBain.

It definitely has elements of a Christie or Dickson Carr puzzle, but it's also got the thrilling, page-turner quality of what I think a John Sandford (having never read any Sandford) has. I found myself saying, "Well, yes, and well...yes." In fact, what I'd say it's most like is Ross Macdonald (one of my favorites, in case you haven't been able to figure that one out yet), evolved and updated. I mean, John Rebus is a detective who listens to The Rolling Stones to unwind. (In fact, his musical knowledge is wide-ranging and astounding). Case in point: Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer was very into the psychology of people -- what made them tick, family dyanmics, etc. At one point, a pathologist says to Rebus:

"'Endlessly fascinating, what this animal exterior can contain.'" (p. 116)
But:
"...Rebus didn't feel he had anything to add. To him, a body was a body, was a body. By the time it was dead, whatever it was that had made it interesting had disappeared." (p. 116)
I can hear Lew Archer thinking similar thoughts.

John Rebus is also a detective who lives in Edinburgh, my second favorite city in the world, and the city (as well as the weather) is vividly portrayed, which I like. He drinks too much (of course. I have a knack for enjoying the company of people who drink too much, as long as I don't have to live with them), but I don't blame him. I'd self medicate, too, if I had his job and lived all alone. He's a detective with a wry sense of humor, who does things his way and is not one to play by the rules when he thinks he's right. Thus, I am completely confident that he's going to figure this one out.

Right now, I haven't got a clue whodunnit. Rankin certainly keeps us guessing (he didn't even let us know whether a particular victim was alive or not until about halfway through the book), but I've been paying close attention and am beginning to narrow down the suspects. For me, that's the sign of a good mystery writer. I like being strung along, working alongside the detective, and I don't even mind if I get it wrong (as long as the final answer doesn't turn out to be completely absurd and unbelievable). And now, I think I will get back to it, so I can find out whether or not my detecting skills hold up in Edinburgh. When I'm done, I'll join you at the pub for some malt whisky and let you know what I thought of the ending.

Why You Hate Math (And Maybe Some Help)

The other day, a friend of mine who does not consider himself to be a “math person” and who is somewhat amused that I edit books about math, sent me this question, which supposedly came from a 5th-grade classroom:

This is not a trick question.

There are 7 DNR wildlife managers in the woods in Sawyer County:

Each manager has set up 7 elk traps.

In each trap, there are 7 elk.

For every elk, there are 7 deer.

How many legs are there?

Ten years ago, being someone who would have told you I was not a “math person,” I would have looked at this problem, started thinking about all those legs in traps, and lain down my pencil in defeat. Today, I look at a problem like this and can’t wait to get to work (although I would beg to differ that it isn’t a trick question. It doesn’t tell you how many whose legs you’re counting. Does it expect you to include the wildlife managers’ legs? Is it total legs or legs in each trap? It could have been worded better, but we’ll assume it means total human and nonhuman legs). Anyway, my guess is that the majority of you are having the same reaction I would have had ten years ago (if you're even still with me at this point), but I don’t believe you need be defeated. I am absolutely confident you can do this problem (unless you suffer from dyscalculia, which is highly unlikely if you can do things like tell time and read a train schedule).

What happened to you, then, to convince you that you can’t do it and that you are not a "math person?" Most likely, you were presented with horribly-worded questions such as this one when you were in 5^th grade. It probably showed up on a test or work sheet, and you were told to solve it in isolation. If you bothered to ask for help (which, if you were me, you most certainly didn’t), your teacher made you feel like an idiot when you didn’t even know where to begin to answer this question. Most likely, you couldn’t care less about wildlife managers and elk and deer (or, again, if you were me, you were distracted by the fact that the poor things were all caught in traps, and you hoped they weren’t going to be killed). If you managed to get away from those traumatic numbers (7 is a bad number, all around, as those who study numbers and cognition can tell you) long enough (me again. Anything to distract me from the actual equation I was magically meant to create), you were wondering what kinds of traps these were. How could you possibly fit so many large animals into one trap?

Then, having automatically marked this question wrong on your paper without even waiting for the answer, you heard the teacher ask if anyone had the answer. Some Smarty Pants you always despised raised a hand and before being called on, blurted out, “10,990 legs.” “Correct,” your teacher said. What? You were flabbergasted. Where was the potion that had been dumped on that huge number to bring it into sight? If you were lucky, maybe your teacher (or Smarty Pants) explained a little more:

“You’ve got 14 human legs

1,372 elk legs

9,604 deer legs

14 + 1,372 + 9,604 = 10,990.”

You were none the wiser and hadn’t learned a thing or understood the problem any better than when it had been handed to you. Nobody discussed the problem. Nobody was encouraged to show how it could be done another way. You just moved right onto more problems with invisible answers for which you were given no revealing potion.

Today, I’m going to put what I learn from the books I edit into practice. I’m going to see what I can do to help you understand this problem better. First of all, we’re going to take into consideration situated cognition, which is learning and problem solving in particular contexts. Even those who flunked math in school can develop powerful problem-solving skills when they are doing so in their own contexts, like when they're camping, if that's what they like to do, or cooking, or building a doll house. In fact, even when doing things we might not like to do, but need to do, such as attending staff meetings, we can be pretty good at it. If not, most of us wouldn't last too long in our jobs.

I’m pretty sure that you, my blogging audience, is likely to have the same reaction as my fifth-grade self would have to the elk and deer problem. Interest is half the battle, and most of you don’t find yourselves in situations in which you have to (or care to) count large animal legs. So, what interests you? Let’s take a wild guess here: books? And if you are interested in books, you’re familiar with walking into bookstores and skimming pages of books you might want to buy. Forget elk and deer then. Here’s my problem for you:

(First of all, before we get started, get out your calculators, because, even though I am going to make these numbers much easier to work with than Smarty Pants did, there is absolutely no reason for those of you who had that sort of teacher for fifth-grade math to try to add and multiply numbers greater than 100 without the use of a calculator.)

7 book addicts belong to a book swap group. Every so often, they get together, each bringing 2 books they’ve read to swap with others in the group (isn’t that a neat idea? I just made it up, but I’d like to belong to a group like that). Everyone gets to choose 2 books from the pile of fourteen. Today they’ve met for lunch at Good Enough to Eat in NYC. They all trust each other by now, confident no one is bringing a real dud to this meeting, so each one skims one page of each of the books he or she has chosen, and then they get down to the business of eating and catching up with each other. Near the end of the meal, one of them says, “Hey, why don’t we all go to The Strand today?” They all agree this is a great idea, and they make their way to the bookstore with “18 miles of books.” Once at The Strand, they go their separate ways, and:

Each addict visits 7 sections.

In each section, each addict looks at 7 hardcover books.

For each hardcover book, each addict looks at 7 paperback books.

Each addict skims four pages of each book to decide which ones to buy.

How many total pages do all of the addicts skim that day?

Now, let’s pretend I’m one of the addicts. I head first to the mystery section, because I’ve had so much fun reading mysteries for my mystery book discussion group. I check to see if there are any Ian Rankins. I’m in luck. I find one hardcover Rankin and seven paperbacks I haven’t read (not hard to do, since I’ve only read one Rankin so far, and he’s an extremely prolific writer). That’s 1 HC + 7 PB = 8 Ian Rankins. I skim 4 pages in each for a total of 32 pages from Rankin. Next, I cruise the shelves for Dorothy Sayers and again find one HC and seven PB I haven’t read. That makes 64 pages I’ve now skimmed. I do this with 5 more mystery writers for a total of 32 x 5, which is 160. Add the 64 Rankin and Sayers pages to that, and I’ve skimmed 224 pages before I leave the mystery section. In other words 7 (authors) * 8 (books) * 4 (pages) = 224 pages in one section.

Next, it was onto literature. Again, I skimmed 4 pages from 8 books from 7 different authors for a total of 224 pages. Then I visited the cookbook section where I found one hardcover book of vegetarian recipes and seven vegetarian paperbacks to skim, one hardcover and seven paperbacks on chocolate, one hardcover and seven paperbacks on soups, one hardcover and seven paperbacks on Chinese food, one hardcover and seven paperbacks on Indian food, one hardcover and seven paperbacks on bread, and one hardback and seven paperbacks on chili peppers. (I also found a whole shelf of Rachael Ray books, but I purposely ignored those.) By the time I left the cookbook section, I’d skimmed another 224 pages. I then moved onto the psychology, science, history, and religion sections, where I again skimmed 224 pages in each.

Uh-oh, after all that, I realized I’d better get to the checkout, because it was time to meet all the other addicts (after all, we’d been here for nearly five hours). Lo and behold, when we all got back together, we discovered each and every one of us had skimmed the exact same number of pages from the exact same number of HC and PB books. I skimmed 224 pages in seven different sections, and so did each of the others. That makes 7 (addicts) * 7 (sections) * 224 (pages) = 10,796 pages. But don’t forget, before we even got to The Strand, we’d each skimmed one page from each of our two swapped books. In other words, we’d each already skimmed two pages before we'd even walked through the doors of The Strand. That’s 7 * 2 = 14. We needed to add that 14 to the 10,796 to get 10,990.

The formula for this is (7*7)(7 * 8 * 4) + (2 * 7) = (49)(224) + (2 * 7) = 10,976 + 14 = 10,990. If you were talking about elk and deer in that original problem, that 224 would be the number of elk and deer legs in each trap. The 49 would be 7 (traps) * 7 (wildlife managers). The 14 would be the number of wildlife managers' legs. As you can see by Smarty Pants’s answer, neither one of us did this problem the same way (and there are other ways to do it, too). However, aren’t my numbers a little more friendly? Wouldn’t you rather tap in 49 * 224 on your calculator than 1372 + 9604? And, even if you hate math, isn’t it easier to get that 49 and that 224 than to get that 1372 and that 9604? And that, my friends, is what a good teacher would have helped you see.

Oh, and for those of you who wonder how many books I actually bought, well, you know the answer to that: I bought all 56 books from each section and found myself bringing home 392 (Strand purchases) + 2 (swapped) books! And yes, of course, I know real life is rarely this un-messy. I’m sure all the Ian Rankins would have been gone, and I wouldn’t have been able to find a single hardcover Dorothy Sayers, and one of my fellow addicts would have found nine hardcover M.F.K. Fisher’s, while I found none, not to mention the fact that I can’t possibly carry 394 books around NYC by myself, but that’s where fantasy intersects with math.

Edgar Allan Poe

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, and The Purloined Letter from Poe: Poetry and Tales. New York: The Library of America, 1984.

(These stories were originally published from 1841-1844.)

I may have mentioned a time or two on this blog that I love Edgar Allan Poe. One of my favorite spots at The University of Virginia is the Edgar Allan Poe room (#13 on the West Range), which is supposedly the dorm room he occupied while a student there. It's glassed off for exhibit, and no one resides in it, except the stuffed raven I love.

I know there are many contemporary critics who love to knock Poe, but I choose to ignore them. I was hooked on him from the moment my sister Forsyth received some over-sized, illustrated "children's classic" version of The Gold-Bug as a gift. I'd received Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, and when I was done with that, despite having loved it, I read Forsyth's book and was horribly jealous (greedy child that I was) that it wasn't mine as well.

All that being said, I've not read everything Poe ever wrote, so I was very happy when the Connecticut mystery book club chose to read three of his stories, two of which I'd read and one of which I'd not. Why it is that of the three C. Auguste Dupin detective stories, I'd read the first,The Murders at the Rue Morgue and the third, The Purloined Letter, but not the second, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, is a mystery in and of itself. Perhaps Dupin would disdain me for chalking it up to bizarre high school and college curricula, coming up with some far more rational explanation, but if I chalk it up to English courses, I can then confidently say it's been about thirty years since I read the two.

That may explain why my brain was quite fuzzy on the details. What I remembered about The Murders in the Rue Morgue was that one of the victims was stuffed up a chimney. That's it, all I seem to have remembered. How I could possibly have forgotten the orangutan ("Ourang-Outang") is completely beyond me, but here's something weird about the way the brain works. I could have sworn that an orangutan features somewhere in a Sherlock Holmes story (I first read Arthur Conan Doyle about the same time I first read Poe). I've reread quite a bit of Sherlock Holmes in the past ten years or so and have yet to encounter an orangutan. Did I completely confuse the two? (Someone in the know, please let me know.)

Then again, the fact that I may have confused Dupin and Holmes leads me to the main point I want to make about these stories, which is that I find, now that I've been reading so many different mystery and detective stories, that the early ones, like those of Poe and Conan Doyle, credited with being the Founding Fathers of the genre, tend to be very matter-of-fact stories meant to highlight the genius of their detectives. Typically, these genius detectives are juxtaposed with earnest, but rather incompetent, policemen. Unlike contemporary authors of the genre who, yes, have genius detectives, but who also might have a setting that features as a character with a psychology almost as complicated as its human characters (Ian Rankin); or whose crime solver's story is so detailed and interesting that the mystery she's solving is almost unimportant (Jacqueline Winspear); or who may be using the genre as a means to express true literary talent (Tana French); here, what's important are the facts, the puzzle presented, and the amazing detective who's smart enough to see what most can't. He spots all the "clews" (when did a "clew" become a "clue"?) no one else has noticed. What the reader most wants to do is to outwit the detective, to pick up on all the clews, and to solve the puzzle just before he does. This reader rarely manages to do so.

I found this matter-of-fact writing style interesting coming from Poe, because I tend to think of his writing as flowery, especially since what I've read most recently of his is his collected poems. Not much poetry is in evidence here, which verifies my claims that Poe was a genius. He could write breath-taking poetry when he so desired, but when plot and puzzle-solving were the important components, he chose to be a little more pedestrian, which is not to say that he was dull or unimaginative, just, well ... prosaic. He may have left behind the flowery language, but he certainly didn't leave behind his own philosophizing, some of which left me with my own, ever-so-flowery response of "huh"? (For a prime example of this, see the beginning of The Murders in the Rue Morgue when Poe presents his theories about the analytical mind.) It's best to read these parts quickly, get through the plot, and then to reread them more slowly for real understanding. It's almost as though reading the story trains the brain to think the way Poe did.

All three of these tales are great fun in an "old-fashioned detective story" way, but of the three, although The Mystery of Marie Rogêt is very interesting in having been based on a true event that occurred in New York City and also includes my favorite quote from the three stories:

'And what are we to think,' I asked, 'of the article in Le Soleil?'

'That it is a pity its inditer was not born a parrot -- in which case he would have been the most illustrious parrot of his race. He has merely repeated the individual items of the already published opinion...' (p. 533)

(have you ever read a better example of a wonderfully disdainful detective?), my favorite, which you can probably tell by the number of times I've mentioned it, is The Murders in the Rue Morgue. What I love about it is that it's so absolutely improbable, absurd really. And yet, while reading it, it all makes perfect, logical sense. (In that regard, it reminds me of one of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories.) That, in my book, is what good detective fiction is all about. Now, enough writing. I've got this whole collection of Poe stories to read and a hurricane supposedly on its way. What better weather for reading Poe than that?

50 Best Contemporary Novelists

I stole this one from Litlove. It was a bit harder than I'd thought it might be, mainly because I discovered when browsing our shelves, my "books read" list on Goodreads, and my book journals that most of the contemporary works I read are either nonfiction or genre fiction. Apparently, I just don't read many contemporary novels, which probably makes me a very poor judge.

I had a hard time defining some of these when it came to "genre." Much of what others would call genre fiction, I happen to think is quite literary or more "general fiction," so feel free to disagree with my categories. I think I sort of relied on Litlove's definition of literary, which is that these are authors whose novels I'd prefer to read when not tired or distracted.

Many of my choices are based on only having read one novel and/or some short stories by the author. When that's the case, I note which novel, or that I've only read short stories. The short stories are ones that have made me put the authors' novels in my TBR tome or that have led me to buy novels by the author that I have yet to read. I could be wrong about one-novel-only authors, because I know of authors (Audrey Niffennegger and Alice Sebold spring to mind) who would be here if I'd loved the second novels of theirs I read as much as I loved the first.

Litlove's criteria were that an author has to be alive and has to still be writing (I defined the latter very loosely. Basically, if the person has published something fictional in the past 30 years, he/she counts). That means no Harper Lee, sadly, since she doesn't fit that "still writing" category, and no David Markson, who would surely be here if he hadn't died last year.

Literary Fiction

1. Richard Adams

2. Margaret Atwood

3. Russell Banks

4. Kevin Baker (only read Dreamland)

5. Julian Barnes

6. Ray Bradbury

7. Anita Brookner (only read The Rules of Engagement)

8. Susanna Clarke (only read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell)

9. Michael Cunningham (only read The Hours)

10. E.L. Doctorow

11. Jennifer Egan (only read short stories)

12. Jane Hamilton

13. John Irving

14. Kazuo Ishiguro

15. Jeffrey Lent (only read In the Fall)

16. Yann Martel (only read Life of Pi)

17. Marilynne Robinson (only read Gilead)

18. Philip Roth (only read American Pastoral)

19. Jeanette Winterson

General Fiction

20. Sarah Blake

21. Pat Conroy

22. Kaye Gibbons

23. Alice Hoffman

24. Nick Hornby

25. Armistead Maupin

26. Richard Russo

27. Helen Simonson (only read Major Pettigrew's Last Stand)

28. Lee Smith

29. Kathryn Stockett (only read The Help)

30. Amy Tan

31. Anne Tyler

32. Connie Willis (hemmed and hawed about sticking her in "genre." What do others think?)

Genre

33. John Connolly (mystery/horror)

34. Jasper Fforde (mystery)

35. Tana French (mystery)

36. Neil Gaiman (sci fi/fantasy)

37. Jane Green (chick lit)

38. P.D. James (mystery)

39. Lisa Jewell (chick lit)

40. Marian Keyes (chick lit)

41. Stephen King (horror)

42. Ursula K. LeGuin (sci fi/fantasy. Some of her stuff is probably more literary fiction)

43. Philip Pullman (sci fi/fantasy)

44. Terry Pratchett (sci fi/fantasy, but as you may know, I argue he's much more than that)

45. Ian Rankin (mystery)

46. John Sandford (mystery/thriller)

Fiction in Translation

47. Gabriel García Márquez

48. Muriel Barbury (only read The Elegance of the Hedgehog)

49. Mario Vargas Llosa

50. Isabel Allende (only read House of the Spirits)

TBR Challenge (Book Four)

Mantel. Hilary. The Giant, O'Brien. New York: Henry Holt. 1998.

"Yes, you can judge a book by its cover. I have never read a book with a gorgeous cover that I didn't like." That was Emily, before she read this book, proving, yet again, that "Never say never" is not a mere cliche (sorry, don't know how to get Blogger to put an accent on the "e").

Look at that cover. Isn't it fantastic? And then, read the jacket copy, where it says, "In this eagerly awaited new novel, Hilary Mantel tells of the fated convergence of two worlds: Ireland and England, poetry and materialism." Can you think of a book that seems to scream "Emily" more loudly?

Nor could I. I had such high hopes for it. So many people love Hilary Mantel. I was sure this was the book that would explain why, that would help me understand that my not being able to get past page 30 in Beyond Black (another one, I realize, for which I had extremely high hopes) was merely a fluke. I was convinced I'd be racing out to get more by Mantel.

It didn't happen. Instead, this book clinched it for me: I don't like Hilary Mantel. It's comforting, really. Now that I've finally had this fact verified, I can move on. I need wonder no more whether or not I ought to give her another try.

At first, I thought I was merely suffering from expectations that couldn't be met. The premise of the book was fantastic: the giant (poet and grand story teller -- I will give the book this much. I loved reading O'Brien's stories) falls into the clutches of John Hunter, a doctor dying to get his hands on O'Brien's corpse for his own experimental purposes (which immediately negates that jacket copy. O'Brien, yes, is Irish, but Hunter is Scottish. They do all wind up in London together, but it's a Scot driving the materialistic forces, not an Englishman).

To top it all off, Bob and I had picked up our copy of this book at one of those many fabulous independent bookstores we used to frequent before Evil Empire Bookstore (this time, it was Barnes & Noble in Westport, CT) came to town. It was a dream bookstore: books on the first floor, stationery and pens on the second floor. One-stop shopping for all my shopping needs. This book had been a "staff pick," and well, that staff had never led us astray.

Critics say that Mantel is marvelous, that she reinvents herself with every book. I was convinced that this was the book that would make me fall in love with her. Maybe our first date had been disastrous , but she'd make it up to me.

So, you see, as I began to get that same queasy feeling I'd had on our first date, why I might have begun to think that maybe I'd set her up for a fall. Fall she did. Way down into the depths of Loch Ness, I'd say, and she's lost forever.

Why don't I like her? Two reasons:

1. She's vague. And she is vague in that pretentious way that so annoys me, when an author seems to be saying, "I know my history. You probably don't. Too bad. I'm not going to fill you in on my little secret, and I'm just going to write to satisfy my own whimsy. There will be a few in my club, those who get it. The rest of you be damned."

I don't like to read and reread two pages and still find myself going, "huh?" I don't want to have to wonder exactly what it was that happened to that character with whom I was so empathizing. Mantel's the sort of author who leaves you wondering, "Is she pregnant, or does she have a tumor?" or maybe, "Did he get married, or did he just spend the night with a prostitute?" (I'm being facetious, but it really is almost that bad.) I consider myself to be somewhat bright, and I don't at all mind a good reading challenge. However, there are challenges, and then there are impossibilities.

Half the time I was reading this book, I found myself thinking, "Thank God I've read Ian Rankin's The Falls and Mary Roach's Stiff. Otherwise (having very little knowledge of scientific history), I would not at all have understood the need to beg, borrow, and steal corpses for science (both those books having explained very well to me that, back in the day when The Church was very against such experimentation, there was a real black market for dead bodies). I kept waiting for her to bring things into focus, to quit giving me faint lines and telling me to fill in the rest for her. Finally, I gave up. She wasn't even going to give me heavy lines. It was faint lines all the way, and I had to get used to it, because if I planned to wait for her to enlighten me, I was going to be waiting around until I was a prime candidate for being dug up by John Hunter and his students.

2. She's vulgar. Why should that bother me? Lots of writers are vulgar. I don't tend to hold that against them. It's because, unlike many another vulgar author I might tell you I love, her vulgarity seems somehow to be carefully planned. She isn't vulgar because, well, life is vulgar. Her characters don't just do the naturally vulgar things we all do from time to time. No, she seems purposely to be longing to shock. She's the kid on the playground who would get others to circle around her with the promise of something great and would then pull back a scab to reopen her wound and make it bleed, laughing at those who turned away.

The trouble is, she doesn't shock me. She isn't really presenting anything I don't already know, haven't, somewhere, already imagined through some other writer's offering (Patrick Suskind's far superior Perfume sprung to mind while I was reading this, not because the tales are similar, but because he does vulgarity right, knowing how to bring an old city in all its hideous glory to life). Not only is she the child who pulls back scabs, she is the teenager who thinks I'm not going to understand those ugly red slashes all over her arms and so purposely pushes up her sleeves while we are talking, showing them to me without saying anything about them. I just don't need that.

I will give her credit where credit is due: she writes well. And she gave me a very sympathetic character in O'Brien. I was extremely fond of that giant, doomed from the moment the book began. She doesn't write well enough for me to see if "three's a charm," though. I've given her her two chances, and I'm done.

50 Scariest Books I'VE Read

Thanks to Susan, I discovered this. The scariest thing about the latter is that, despite being a lifelong fan of horror and the supernatural, I've only read 17 books on the list of 50 (well, and part of 2, both of which spooked me so much, I had to put them down and never picked them back up again). Even scarier is that I'd never even heard of some of them. Maybe I haven't been reading that many scary books after all; maybe I can't really claim to be a fan; maybe I'm a mere piker when it comes to the spooky. No coward, I, I decided to face this fear head on, think of all the scary books I've ever read, and see if I could even come up with 50 to name as the scariest.

Happily, I discovered I'm no piker. I came up with tons of scary books and had to try to figure out how to narrow the list down to a mere 50. The first thing to do was to take a cue from the originator and include only one book by any given author. That made it a tad bit easier, but still, this was no easy task. I finally found myself boiling it down to books I remembered keeping me up at night; or those propelling me go downstairs to be with others, if the other members of the household were downstairs and I was upstairs alone (or vice versa); or encouraging me not to look out windows; or inspiring me to lock myself into rooms where I felt (sort of) safe. That meant including some titles that aren't necessarily horror classics, or that don't even fall into the horror genre, but just that, for whatever reason, scared the bejeezus out of me when I read them. I'm sure some of them wouldn't scare me in the least if I were to reread them. Others, however, I've read multiple times and can depend on to do the job when I'm in a masochistic sort of mood and actually want to feel the need to lock myself in the bedroom and dive under the covers.

I share with you my list (in alphabetical order by title), which does overlap with the "50 Scariest Ever" list. In compiling it, I've thought about how (like everything else about reading) subjective "scary" is. Vampires have terrified me all my life. Zombies? Not so much (except for the movie Carnival of Souls. Why, I don't know). I'd love to know which of these books others have read and found scary and which they haven't.

(I'm way too lazy to go find cover images for all 50 books, so, in keeping with a good supernatural tale, you'll just have to conjure up your own images.)

1. 1984 by George Orwell. Yes, the world he painted can only be described as horrific.

2. The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson. Okay, now we know that it may all have been a hoax, but I didn't know that when I read it in my early teens. To this day I don't take too well to gatherings of 3 or more flies on windowsills.

3. Best Ghost Stories of J. S. Le Fanu by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. A longtime fan of Uncle Silas, which didn't scare me at all, I made the mistake of reading this when Bob was away, and I was all alone. Lots of things went "bump in the night" in my house that night.

4. Best Stories of Algernon Blackwood by Algernon Blackwood. All the stories are good, but on really, really windy nights, or when I'm racing against time to get off a hiking trail at dusk, it's "The Wendigo" that always comes to my mind and sends shivers up my spine.

5. Blood Games by Jerry Bledsoe. Dungeons and Dragons game players and murder in my home state of North Carolina? Nothing scary about that, right?

6. The Bog by Michael Talbot. If books were classified the way movies are, this one would be a B movie. Completely predictable and stupid and about something that shouldn't have scared me at all, and yet, when a friend urged me to read it back when it came out, it spooked me to death.

7. Broken Harbor by Tana French. All of French's novels have had a spooky element to them, but this one was the one that got to me the most.

8. Burn, Witch, Burn! by A. Merritt. Ridiculous to think I'd be scared of doll-sized figures wielding sharp weapons, but I was. Maybe it's the psychology or the voodoo (which has scared me since I was a kid).

9. A Candle in Her Room by Ruth M. Arthur. Well, I guess dolls can be very scary, and the doll in this book was one of the scariest I'd ever encountered when I first read it as a child. She was still scary when I reread it as an adult.

10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Not scary so much as just so damn creepy and horrific that I didn't want to be alone while reading it.

11. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Forget that it's Christmas and has such a feel-good ending. Marley's ghost is damn scary. 

12. Coraline by Neil Gaiman. It's those blank, button eyes. 

13. Couching at the Door by D.K. Broster. Some ghost story collections are uneven. This one isn't. I may be wrong, but I recall being spooked by all of them. 

14. The Deep End by Joy Fielding. This is probably a really dumb book, but when it first came out, I read it, and it terrified me with that whole telephone-caller-is-even (really, really)-closer-than-you-think-thing.

15. The Demonologist: The Extraordinary Career of Ed and Loraine Newman by Gerald Brittle. I'm still amazed that something so hokey had me so terrified. All I can say is don't read it at night if you have a dog who might suddenly start barking at nothing (or if you have a Raggedy Ann doll in your house. I was glad I didn't).

16. Dracula by Bram Stoker. No, it shouldn't have been scary. I knew the story when I finally got around to reading the original. Stoker was not the best writer of his time. Still, it got me (and did again when I listened to it while jogging through the woods one fall).

17. Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories. If you want to feed a fear of vampires with plenty of blood, read this one.

18. The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. Reread it last year to see if it's really as scary as I remember. Yes, it is.

19. The Falls by Ian Rankin. Just enough of a hint of the supernatural and things like grave robbers to send many shivers up my spine.

20. Famous Ghost Stories edited by Bennett Cerf. It's a short collection, but it has so many of the classics that can keep me awake if I read them too late at night (Oliver Onion's The Beckoning Fair One, The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs, The Phantom 'Rickshaw by Rudyard Kipling, to name a few). 

21. Ghost by Katherine Ramsland. Some of this was quite stupid (okay, a lot of it). Still, parts of it spooked me (a lot).

22. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M. R. James. James was the master. When I want to study the craft, I return to him. "The Mezotint" will always have me staying in one safe room and avoiding looking out windows at night.

23. Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton. Maybe it scared me so much because I never thought of Wharton as a writer of the supernatural, so I was surprised by her ability with the genre, or maybe it's because, like Henry James, she had such a good handle on "Is it a ghost or all in your mind?" Whatever the reason, it kept me awake at night. 

24. Ghost Story by Peter Straub. This was one that spooked me so much, reading it when I was on a business trip by myself, that I had to put it down. I've been meaning to try it again ever since.

25. Green Man by Kingsley Amis. The ending was over-the-top, but parts of it made me wary of trees (and, again, looking out the window at night, especially in areas heavy with trees) for a while.

 26. The Haunted by James Herbert. The surprise is, yes, surprising. The movie also scared the crap out of me.

27. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Every time I read it, I think, "It can't possibly scare me this time. I know it too well." I'm wrong about that. Every time.

28. Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi. This is the stuff that keeps a teenager up, reading until the wee hours of the morning and then, wide-awake, unable to sleep, hearing all kinds of strange noises in the house.

29. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. See Helter Skelter, only substitute teenager with forty-something who lives out in the American middle of nowhere.

30. The Killing Kind by John Connolly. Some very weird stuff that is very scary when you're reading it in Maine.

31. The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Sprezi. I listened to this one while out walking and remember constantly looking over my shoulder. It's terrifying on two levels: serial killer + being falsely accused of something while living in a foreign country.

32. The Omen by David Seltzer. It led me to believe that there isn't much that's scarier than a scary child. (Oh, and see Helter Skelter and that part about being a teenager up all night.)

33. The Overnight by Ramsey Campbell. Got so spooked by it (fog is scary) that I couldn't finish it.

34. The Owl Service by Alan Garner. I don't really remember why I found this one so scary. I just remember that I did.

35. People of the Lie by M. Scott Peck. A well-known psychiatrist writing about the psychology of evil and his belief in demon possession? You know how you study abnormal psych and begin diagnosing everyone you know? Imagine when the "disease" is evil and possibly demon possession, and you'll get an idea of where this one took me.

36. The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories edited by Michael Newton. Ghost story collections can be hit or miss, but this recent collection was pretty much hit, and the ones that scared me (that I hadn't read before, and even some I had, like the aforementioned "The Monkey's Paw") really scared me.

37. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. A study in evil, more terrifying in what it suggests than in anything that actually happens.

38. Psycho by Robert Bloch. You thought the movie was scary (which it most definitely was)? Read the book.

39. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. I found this one so much scarier than Silence of the Lambs. I think it mostly had to do with the way the killer chose his victims.

40. Rules of Prey by John Sandford. I don't really know why, but John Sandford scares me. Maybe it's his ambiguity when it comes to defining good and evil. But that ambiguity shows up in plenty of mysteries that don't scare me. Anyway, I won't read him when I'm alone (just like I won't watch Criminal Minds when I'm alone).

41. Salem's Lot by Stephen King. Word to the wise: don't read this one when you're fifteen-years-old and baby sitting, a sleeping toddler being the only other one in the house with you.

42. Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. Before there was Erin Morgenstern and The Night Circus (which had its moments), there was Ray Bradbury and Something Wicked this Way Comes (more than just mere moments), discovered in one's teens.

43. Strange but True: 22 Amazing Stories by Donald J. Sobel. This was a Scholastic book I got circa age 9. I blame it to this day for my addiction to horror. I reread it a few years ago, and yes, I can understand why.

44. Tales of Horror and the Supernatural by Arthur Machen. Includes plenty of good tales, but the one that scared me the most was "The Terror", a perfect study in mass hysteria.

45. This is the Zodiac Speaking by Michael D. Kelleher and David Van Nuys. I'm surprised I didn't buy a gun to protect myself while reading this one.

46. Threshold by Caitlin R. Kiernan. Nobody, but nobody writing in the 21st century does "here's a nightmare: is it real or not?" better than Kiernan (and I loved the Beowulf connection here).

47. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Still the ghost story to beat all ghost stories.

48. The Undead edited by James Dickie. Another one to feed the imagination of someone who's vampire-obsessed.

49. The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Marghanita Laski. One of those books that makes you glad you're not a Victorian woman surrounded by men defining how sane you are (or are not).

50. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe. Good old Edgar is another one to blame for my early addiction to the spooky unknown.

(And one to grow on). Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. I know, I know, call me a wimp, but that scratching at the window? I still don't like to hear branches scratching at a window.

Okay, I can see the pattern here. If you want to scare me include one or more of these elements (either real or imagined): ghosts, vampires, serial killers, demon possession, scary dolls, and maybe, if the conditions are right, a bog monster (especially if it's scratching at a window with long, bony, gnarly-nailed fingers).

For Those Who Have Not Lost Interest in Yet Another Remake of the Bloggers Take Manhattan

I’m pretty sure I spotted a few mad dogs and Burberry-coated Englishmen as I pulled out onto the Lincoln Highway early Saturday morning, heading east. But, of course. I’ve been to NYC three times this year, and the forecast all three times has been “100% chance of rain” (despite the fact that here in the Northeast we tend to teeter on the brink of drought most of the time). It’s a 2 ½ hour drive from my house to Manhattan. During that time, I went through monsoon-worthy downpours, fog to make the aforementioned Englishman proud, lightning (yes. In November!), and a brief period of clearing with patches of blue sky.

However, once I arrived in Manhattan, the actual rain had stopped. Someone of our group must have favor with the gods. I’m guessing Charlotte, who was the first to arrive at The Hungarian Pastry Shop. I recognized her immediately from photos on her blog, glowing and happy, despite her horrible jet lag. You could tell she was being infected by the city (I know very few other places where it’s so easy to find so many people who are both radiant and exhausted).

We stood outside, chatting for a while, and then I spotted Becky and ZM, turning the corner the wrong way on Amsterdam, and called out to them. Miraculously, Becky heard me. We stood outside a while longer and then headed in to find a table. This was when I began to kick myself for not remembering, when I suggested we all meet here, that The Hungarian Pastry Shop isn’t the best place for a large-group meeting, being a typical NYC establishment (i.e. very small and narrow). But just as Dorr and Hobs arrived, the friendliness of the city made itself known, as people got up and told us we could have their tables, so we pushed tables together and waited for Cam.

Cam was also the only one I’d never met nor seen photos of, so I really had no idea what she looked like. She was easy enough to spot as she walked in, though, obviously looking for us (and I waved to her, hoping she didn’t turn out not to be Cam). One cherry cheese strudel, a cup of coffee, and lots of “getting to know you” conversation later, I decided this had been the perfect place to meet after all.

From there, it was down to The Strand (because, of course, we were determined to take poor jet-lagged Charlotte from one end of Broadway to the other. For those of you who don’t know, the pastry shop is at 111^th St., a block over from Broadway, and The Strand is 99 blocks down at 12^th St. Oh well, at least we didn’t take her cross-town as well). We decided to walk part of the way, since it had turned into a nice, warm day and then to catch 2 cabs. ZM, Charlotte, Cam, and I went in one cab. We got to The Strand well before the others, at which point Charlotte was beginning to look like she needed a bed much more than books. She gamely followed us all in but eventually had to seek out a café across the street to renew herself.

We all went our separate ways in the bookstore, occasionally crossing paths, as we browsed the “18 miles of books.” I was busy consulting with Bob by cell phone every other minute. I wanted to get him a treat (since he hadn’t been able to come along), and I can’t keep track of which thrillers he has and hasn’t got/read.

A word of warning: don’t go to The Strand with the likes of Hobs. While I was busy looking through Harlan Coben and John Sandford, I bumped into him to discover he had the likes of a huge James Fenimore Cooper biography, Victor Hugo, and The World without Us in his hands. I immediately began to feel I should stop filling up on candy floss and sit down to a good, long meal of duck a l’orange, roast potatoes, and spinach soufflé with a fancy side salad and chocolate mousse for dessert (in fairness to me, I did look for a copy of The Faerie Queene, but I couldn’t find the Penguin edition I want to read).

Eventually, we all met back on the street, signature bright-yellow bags in hands, sharing the contents of said bags like children on Halloween night. At this point, we all realized that all this book shopping had made us very hungry. Macaroni and cheese at Chat ‘n’ Chew sounded like an excellent idea. Make that macaroni and cheese and mimosas. Ahhh! New York! 4:00 p.m. on a Saturday, and they still have their brunch special: $5.00 mimosas. In Lancaster, 4:00 would be cocktail hour, for those who drink, what with dinner typically being served at 5:00.

After food and drink, Charlotte really did need a good nap. ZM was getting tired, too, and decided to head back to CT. That left only Cam, Becky, Dorr, Hobs, and me to head off in the direction of Ground Zero to explore The Mysterious Bookshop (which made perfect sense, since four out of five of us are members of the detective book discussion group). What a wonderful gem of a place this turned out to be.

We were greeted by a little skeleton as we walked in the door, who, apparently, stands patiently there all day, dressed in his oversized shop t-shirt (wonder what he does at night, when no one’s around). It’s a small shop, but it’s floor to ceiling books, all of a mysterious nature (although I’d quibble a bit with that, as my fellow browsers did. I don’t remember a Mr. Body in either Twilight or Harry Potter). One side houses new books, one old, and the back wall is dedicated to all things Sherlock Holmes. I had a great time browsing the shelves and, of course, feeding my candy floss book addiction some more.

After that, it was time to call it a day. Hobs and Dorr needed to get home to Muttboy. I still had a long drive ahead of me (for which the skies did a very nice job of opening up, yet again), and I’m sure Becky and Cam were eager to start reading their books. Next time, I think I’ll take the train, so I can have some uninterrupted reading time, too (that is, if bookstores are in the offering again). Cam was staying where we’d met and I’d parked, so we said “goodbye” to the other three at the Times Square subway stop and took the #1 train back up to Cathedral Station, which is a ride I’ve taken many, many times (only one stop short of the Columbia stop, where I used to disembark). It makes me kind of sad, so it was nice to have my new friend for company.

All-in-all, a wonderful day. Wish you’d been there, too. Oh, and for those of you dying to know, my booty for the day:

FROM THE STRAND

The Haunted Looking Glass: Ghost Stories Chosen by Edward Gorey. Do I really need to explain this one? Ghost stories by the likes of Algernon Blackwood, L.P. Hartley, and M.R. James? Illustrated by Edward Gorey? How could I go wrong?

Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichel, because I’ve been looking for some good food writing, wasn’t impressed with the one M.F.K. Fisher I found in the cookbook and food section, forgot that The Strand files her under literature as well (until we'd left and Becky informed me she’d found quite a few, but didn’t know which one to get), and I’ve been meaning to read this one for some time.

Secret Prey by John Sandford, for Bob, who discovered Sandford a couple of years ago and loves him (and probably for me one day, too, if I ever get around to discovering him myself).

FROM THE MYSTERIOUS BOOKSHOP

Hag’s Nook by John Dickson Carr, whom I haven’t read in a very long time, but who is a master with puzzles of the “door locked from the inside” sort. This is the first Gideon Fell novel, which I’ve never read.

The Fiend by Margaret Millar, who was Ross Macdonald’s wife. I’ve never read any of her stuff, and this musty old copy (written the year I was born) seemed like a good place to start.

A Question of Blood by Ian Rankin, because I’ve just met Rebus through the detective book discussion group, love him, and want to read more (also want Bob to read him, so I got this one “for him”). This is an author-signed copy in which he scribbled a dead man’s face, so I couldn’t resist.

And that puts me in something like 72-book deficit for 2008 (the year I was supposed to read 3 books I already owned for each one book I bought). Better start reading all those picture books up in the attic before the year ends.