Currently reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. It’s been a while since I’ve read something where the language has been so exquisite I find myself re-reading paragraphs and making notes of particular sentences and passages. Like this one:
I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it.
p.57.
This is a book I’d heard a bit about but always resisted reading because, from its blurb, it seemed to be something I would be unlikely to enjoy. Misperceptions, hmph.
Just seen at Bibliobibuli, a long list of reading suggestions for lovers of the crime genre (from the Sunday Telegraph’s list of top fifty crime writers).
I’ve bolded the ones I’ve read.
GK Chesterton - The Complete Father Brown (1986)
Arthur Conan Doyle - The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
Edgar Allan Poe - The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)
Ed McBain - King’s Ransom (2003)
Kyril Bonfiglioli - The Mortdecai Trilogy (1991)
James Ellroy - The Black Dahlia (1987)
Janwillem van der Wetering - Outsider in Amsterdam (1975)
Carl Hiaasen - Double Whammy (1987)
Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon (1930)
Dan Kavanagh - The Duffy Omnibus (1991)
Margery Allingham - The Tiger in the Smoke (1952)
Charles Dickens - Bleak House (1852-3)
Georges Simenon - The Yellow Dog (1931)
Agatha Christie - Peril at End House (1932)
Wilkie Collins - The Moonstone (1868)
Jonathan Latimer - The Fifth Grave (1941)
Ruth Rendell - The Water’s Lovely (2006) [Don’t agree with this one, found it anti-climactic and plodding.]
Ngaio Marsh - Vintage Murder (1937)
Benjamin Black (a.k.a. John Banville!) - Christine Falls (2006)
John Dickson Carr - The Hollow Man (1935)
Michael Innes - The Weight of the Evidence (1943)
Raymond Chandler - Farewell, My Lovely (1940)
Friedrich Dürrenmatt - The Pledge (1958)
Michael Gilbert - Even Murderers Take Holidays and other Mysteries (2007)
Donald Westlake - What’s So Funny? (2007)
Colin Bateman - Wild About Harry (2001)
Frances Fyfield - The Art of Drowning (2006)
Reginald Hill - Good Morning Midnight (2004)
Andrea Camilleri - The Patience of the Spider (2007)
Henning Mankell - Sidetracked (1999)
Patricia Highsmith - The Talented Mr Ripley (1955)
James Lee Burke - Black Cherry Blues (1989)
Jim Thompson - The Getaway (1959)
Walter Mosley - Devil in a Blue Dress (1991)
Denise Mina - Garnethill (1999)
Steig Larsson - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008)
Ronald Knox - The Viaduct Murder (1925)
EC Bentley - Trent’s Last Case (1913)
Lawrence Block - All the Flowers Are Dying (2005)
Edmund Crispin - Holy Disorders (1945)
William McIlvanney - Laidlaw (1977)
George V Higgins - The Rat on Fire (1981)
Dorothy L Sayers - Five Red Herrings (1931)
Anthony Boucher - The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars (1940)
Mickey Spillane - I, the Jury (1947)
James Grady - Six Days of the Condor (1974)
George Pelecanos - The Big Blowdown (1996)
Robert Crais - The Watchman (2007)
John Lawton - Black Out (1995)
Elmore Leonard - Maximum Bob (1991)
Along with science fiction, I think crime is one of my favourite genres, so this eight out of fifty is pretty sad. Although I have read more than eight of these authors, just not the books listed: Ed McBain, Janwillem van de Wetering, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Reginald Hill, Lawrence Block, and a few of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories.
Nothing’s more frustrating than picking up a book that looks good, finding it’s not that good after all, perservering with it just in case it gets better - and of course it doesn’t - and then finding you’re a third of the way or halfway through a book you don’t like and are not enjoying.
I’ve just done this with three books in a row.
The first book, The Savage Altar by Asa Larsson, I actually finished, because I kept hoping it would get better. The blurb said the book’s sold a quarter of a million copies in Sweden, and I kept thinking “250,000 Swedes can’t be wrong…” Maybe it’s better in the original, I dunno, but it just didn’t ever grab me. I even guessed whodunnit very early on. Bah!
The second book was A Faint Cold Fear by Karin Slaughter. This was the first one of her books I’d picked up; maybe I should have started with the first one in the series to properly get the background on the characters.
The third book was the most disappointing: Small Changes by Marge Piercy. Disappointing because I like Marge Piercy’s work, usually. I found the start of this book promising (I enjoyed the story of Beth), but after that it just got more and more rambly and I found myself wondering what the point was.
Am now wondering what to read next. I don’t want to be disappointed again!
