READING YEAR IN REVIEW, 2023

This is the time of year when people traditionally make lists of the 10 best books of the year in various categories, and in past years I’ve tried to decide on what my favorite fiction and nonfiction books of the year were, but this year it’s too difficult for me to choose just one or two books that I loved.  It has, on the whole, been a great year for reading (and I hope it’s been great for you, too).

How can I not love a year in which there was a new Harry Hole book by Jo Nesbo (Killing Moon) and a new Murderbot book by Martha Wells (System Collapse) and a new Wayward Children book by Seanan McGuire (Lost in the Moment and Found)?  Not to mention a great new book by John Scalzi (Starter Villain) and by Connie Willis (The Road to Roswell) and by Jesse Sutanto (Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers) and by Jane Harper (Exiles).  Many of my favorite authors came out with brilliant books this year which I devoured with delight (of course, one of my other favorite authors came out with a really disappointing book, but you can’t win them all).

This was a year with great book clubs, with mostly fun selections.  Even the ill-fated It’s Not Rom-Complicated Book Group (which I still hope to revive in the new year) read some great books while it was still running.  I’m so grateful to all the people who participate in the book groups and create such lively discussions with such great spirit and attitudes.  In connection with the book groups, I got to reread books I’d loved in the past (The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and Where’d You Go, Bernadette), which is always a pleasure.

There were books that cracked me up (The Road to Roswell, Starter Villain, The Unhoneymooners, and The Mostly True Story of Tanner and Louise, to name a few), and books that broke my heart (The Flatshare and Passage, to name two).  There were books that were totally warped (How Can I Help You, or Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone,  for instance) that delighted me though you might have to have a particularly strange attitude to really appreciate them. 

I can already see some new books coming out in the next year which I’m adding to my TBR list (a list which is always growing beyond my ability to ever catch up), and of course there are all the books I’ll be reading with the different book groups in the new year.  

Here’s to all the fun I had reading and writing about books this year, and here’s to having even more fun next year!  Happy new year, everyone.

MURDER AND HORROR ON THE HIGH SEAS: THE DEVIL AND THE DARK WATER

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to read Stuart Turton’s The Devil and the Dark Water, considering how much I love his The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, and considering that The Devil and the Dark Water came out three years ago.  Possibly it was the whole COVID thing that scrambled my brain a little, or possibly I was just afraid to try his second book because I would inevitably compare it to the brilliant and twisted 7 ½ Deaths and be unable to judge it on its own merits.  For whatever reason, I hadn’t gotten around to reading this wonderful,complicated mix of adventure and mystery, with enough twists and turns to satisfy the most demanding reader until now, and all I can say is that I heartily recommend it.

You’re not likely to confuse it with The 7 ½ Deaths, because it’s set in the 1640’s aboard a Dutch ship traveling from Batavia (present day Jakarta, in Indonesia) to Amsterdam.  The ship is part of a convoy of ships from the Dutch East India Company traveling to the company’s headquarters, a dangerous journey at the best of times, between horrible weather, pirates and all the evils to which wooden ships were subject, but this journey is especially hellish for a variety of reasons, the biggest of which is the possible presence and influence of Old Tom, a particularly evil demon who may or may not have already touched the lives of various passengers on the ship, and who may or may not be possessing one of them.  Before the ship even leaves Batavia, there’s a gruesome sign: a leper proclaims the ship doomed, and then bursts into flames.  When it turns out that the leper in question didn’t even have a tongue and so couldn’t have spoken his prophecy, everyone in this superstitious age is unnerved.  The supernatural events continue on board the ship, including the appearance of that leper despite his having died at the docks, the slaughter of the animals on board in a particularly gruesome way, and the appearance and disappearance of the lights of an eighth ship.

Turton is such a good writer that you follow along with the surface of the plot as he cleverly misdirects you from what’s really going on.  We’re fortunate to have some excellent characters as our point of view characters, including Arent, a former soldier turned bodyguard who also happens to be related to the Governor of Batavia, returning to Amsterdam to take his place among the most powerful men in the country who run the Dutch East India Company.  We also have Sara, the governor’s wife, who is smarter and more resourceful than most of the people around her.  Arent is there as the bodyguard for Samuel Pipps, a sort of Sherlock Holmes type investigator who is under arrest and imprisoned in the ship just at a time when his cleverness and insights into crime and criminals would be most useful.  Arent is no Watson to Pipps’ Holmes, though: he’s observant and smart in his own right, and a fighting man whose past contains mysteries of its own.  As he and Sara work together, with the help and hindrance of other people on the ship (all of whom are fascinating characters in their own right) to figure out what’s going on before the ship and all its inhabitants are destroyed, we’re pulled into a web of plots and subplots, in which half the characters have their own agendas, some characters are never seen except through doors, and the malevolence of Old Tom seeps through everything that happens.

It’s a book where a near mutiny and a shipwreck aren’t even the most exciting and nerve wracking things going on.  There are mysteries galore: why is Pipps imprisoned?   What is the Folly that the Governor took on board the ship and has guarded as if it were more precious than gold?  What’s the other thing the Governor brought that’s so obviously valuable but that nobody has even seen?  Is there really a devil involved here or is Old Tom just a manifestation of the evil that lurks inside all the characters?  When murders take place (there are at least two in the course of the book, not counting the leper), how were they done, who was responsible and, most important of all, why were these people killed in these ways?  One of the murders is a classic locked room situation where it seems nobody could have gotten in to commit the murder or could have left without being noticed. 

I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the fun of this plot and these characters.  It’s a great book to read if you like historical fiction, or horror (there’s plenty of that), or mysteries, or just a great read.  If you pick it up, make sure you block out a lot of time, because you are not going to want to stop in the middle of this one.  If, like me, you didn’t grab this book when it first came out, take it now and settle in for a great roller coaster of a novel.

LOVE OF BOOKS TAKEN TO AN EXTREME FOR FIELD NOTES IN JANUARY: THE EYRE AFFAIR

At the final meeting of the Field Notes Book Group for 2023, we had a rousing and fun discussion of Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, made all the more interesting because not all the people discussing the book liked it (though at least one person said that our discussion raised their rating of the book from a 3.5 to a 5, which I consider a high compliment to the group), and we made an attempt to choose our favorite and least favorite books of the year.  This was much more difficult than a similar exercise had been in the Field of Mystery Book Group, as there wasn’t just one book that stood out as the very best or the very worst.  In a group so varied and opinionated (I say this with the greatest affection), it’s unlikely we would all agree on anything, especially when we had such a variety of books, fiction and nonfiction, to choose from. I’ll certainly try to give us as good a collection of books to choose from in the upcoming year.

Our choice for January was very easy, though, because we’d made the decision back in November, choosing this book for January at the same time we chose our December book.  The book, The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde, is difficult to describe but a delightful read nonetheless (I have in fact read it before; when I presented the options for our upcoming books in November, I made a point of proposing books I had read before and had enjoyed, because our experience with Age of Vice was so depressing).  It’s set in an alternative timeline in England, where the Crimean War is still ongoing, where cloning is ordinary enough that people have pet dodos, time travel is taken for granted, and people are so interested and invested in literature that you have battles between people who believe Francis Bacon wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare and those who believe Shakespeare wrote his own plays.  Our protagonist, Thursday Next, is a Special Operative in Literary Detection (and if you’re the kind of person who has fallen in love with the whole concept just from that title – which I did – you’re going to love this book), and she is faced with a very serious problem when the third most wanted criminal in the world goes into books and kills off characters, changing the endings, and graduates to kidnapping Jane Eyre from the book that bears her name. Thursday, with the help of her time traveling father and Edward Rochester himself from the book, has to rescue Jane before the villain kills her, which isn’t as easy as it seems in a world as topsy turvy as this one.

Copies of the book are already available at the circulation desk, so if you’re interested, come and pick one up and then join us for what should be a fun discussion in January.

HAPPY EVER AFTER ON SKIS: FOUR WEDDINGS AND A PUPPY

You’ve got to love a book that opens with a scene in which an out of control (but goodhearted) golden retriever is running head on toward an elaborate wedding cake with destruction on his mind, and the main character rushes to stop the dog from destroying the cake and the whole wedding.  Not only dramatic, but funny, and a great introduction to the main characters, Kendall (a wedding planner, not necessarily by choice) and Brody, the hunk who intercepts the dog moments before he destroys the cake and any chances Kendall has of establishing her family’s resort as a wedding destination.  Four Weddings and a Puppy, by Lizzie Shane, gets points from me for a great opening scene.  And, unlike some rom coms which start with great funny characters misbehaving and then forget about the funny characters for most of the book, in this one the dog, Banner (whom Kendall is “fostering”, though you know from the outset that she’s going to end up keeping him), repeatedly appears and causes havoc of one kind or another.

Kendall and Brody have known each other their whole lives.  They practically grew up together on this mountain in Vermont where Kendall’s family has been running a ski resort for generations.  Kendall was always the daredevil of the two, constantly challenging Brody to ski faster and better, and even though he was her brother’s best friend, Kendall always had a crush on Brody, which she never acted on.

The two of them both became Olympic-hopeful skiers, until a tragic accident ended Kendall’s career.  Brody, by contrast, has continued his quest for gold, winning all kinds of medals in the meantime and becoming something of a minor god in the world of ski aficionados. Kendall has watched his exploits from afar, while she struggles to keep her family’s resort going after her father (her first coach) spent a ridiculous amount of money on her medical bills and physical therapy after the accident.  She feels she owes her father a debt she can’t repay, which is why she’s working so hard even though running a resort and especially doing wedding planning for people at the resort, is not her forte at all.

Brody appears at the first of the four weddings in the book (and no, in case you’re wondering, the fourth is NOT Brody and Kendall’s), that of his cousin, where he is fortuitously placed to intercept Banner and save the day.  What he hasn’t told anyone is that he’s dropped out of the world of Olympic skiing with a dumb excuse about his knee, and he has no idea what he’s going to do with his life, beyond wanting to prove to his family and friends that he isn’t married to skiing and he can be relied upon.

One of the things I like about this book is the way the two main characters are struggling with something other than their attraction to each other (though of course they are attracted to each other however much they may try to pretend otherwise).  Kendall has issues of grief and guilt and loss to deal with, facing the death of her dreams of what her life would be like, which is especially difficult when she sees Brody, who, as far as she knows, is living her dream.  Brody is dealing with an early mid-life crisis – maybe it’s a mid-career crisis – where he looks at everything he’s been doing and realizes that none of it matters that much to him anymore, and now he has to come up with a self-image that’s not built on his success as a skier.  They both have family expectations to confront, and it takes each of them a while to do that (Kendall’s comes practically at the end of the book, in fact), and because they have some of the same issues, they’re able to help each other ask the right questions and face the people and expectations they’ve been avoiding.  Don’t get me wrong, I love a little sexual and romantic tension between the main characters (isn’t that half of what romantic comedies are all about?), but it’s refreshing to see the characters connecting on another level as well.

The supporting characters, at least on Kendall’s side, are her best friends, who are there for her and for each other.  They’re distinctive and sweet, and Charlotte, one of the people getting married over the course of the book, is responsible for a funny disaster of a bachelorette party (orchestrated by Kendall) that leads to Kendall and Brody getting closer to each other in the aftermath.  Brody has a sister who’s sort of a character (another of the people getting married in the course of the book), but she doesn’t spend much time with him and is more of a walk-on. That’s a shame because Steph comes across, when we do see her, as a character who could probably carry a book all by herself.  I do wish female writers of rom coms would give the male leads as strong a friend group as they give the female leads, or at least give them interesting and rounded supporting characters.  This isn’t the first rom com I’ve read this year where the heroine has friends and family who have lives of their own and the hero has at most a couple of people who could be switched for each other without any readers noticing. 

Of course there’s a happy ever after, which resolves the characters’ life choice issues (and thankfully their problems with identity and self-worth are not resolved by their romance but by their working on those issues with the help of their romance) and feels satisfying and earned.  Even Banner ends up where he belongs, which of course we expected from the outset, no matter how many times Kendall said she was just fostering him. 

For a fun read that will make you want to learn how to ski (or almost make you want to; I have long ago resolved that nothing in the world will get me to attempt to ski down any kind of sloping surface, and even the most charming book in the world isn’t going to change my mind) and will give you some smiles and giggles, check out Four Weddings and a Puppy.

THE BEST AND THE WORST OF FIELD OF MYSTERY FOR 2023

One of the things I really enjoy about the end of the calendar year is the retrospective my book groups do about the books we’ve read over the course of the year, deciding which ones we liked best and which ones we disliked most.  Of course, time being what it is, most of us couldn’t have told you the names of all the books we read, let alone provided anything like a plot for most of them (that includes me, by the way; I had to go through my notes to see what we read and what each book was about, especially for the ones earlier in the year), so I provide a listing with a brief description of the books so we can discuss them intelligently.

There was no question about which book was the one we disliked most: The Resemblance was everybody’s choice.  Part of it was the discussion we had: some people who had been merely neutral or blandly generally okay with the book became more and more annoyed at it as we discussed the various problems with the plot.  This was the book that had the group questioning the entire publishing industry, and also had us creating our alternative versions of the story, any one of which was better and more interesting than the book itself.

We also were in general agreement about the other dishonorable mentions, the books which just didn’t work for us, though there was some spirited discussion about which ones ranked lower than others. 

When it came to talking about the book we liked best in the year, we didn’t have a lot of difficulty with that, either.  Though there was one strong vote for Exiles, by Jane Harper, the general consensus was that the best of the bunch was The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle.  It was so intricately plotted, so unlike any other mystery novel of the year, and so well-written that nobody could guess what was really going on before the final reveal (and there were plenty of well-written and well-prepared twists all along the line; this is one of those books I recommend vehemently to people who say they’re bored with the ordinary mystery novel).

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers was also a very popular book this year. We all enjoyed Vera’s take-charge personality, and, as one member of the group said, just reading it made you hungry (those mouth-watering descriptions of the food Vera prepared!).

I personally enjoy seeing what people like and don’t like, if only to make it easier for me to choose what to present to people to read in the following year.  Of course, some books are sui generis (The 7 ½ Deaths, for instance), and you can’t always tell which highly praised and well-reviewed book is going to turn out to be a stinker (which has happened in my other book groups as well), but knowing what kind of books we really liked this year points me in the right direction for next year.  

The best part, though, is that even if we don’t particularly like the book (even if we hate the book, as sometimes happens), or even when the group is bitterly divided over the quality of the book, this is such a great group of readers, knowledgeable and ready to read critically and discuss the details of books with verve, that I can be confident we’ll have a great discussion no matter what the book.

FIELD OF MYSTERY PUTS THE FUN IN DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES: EVERYONE IN MY FAMILY HAS KILLED SOMEONE

It’s the mark of a good book group that you can have a lively discussion about a book that several people vehemently disliked and some people didn’t even finish (I have noticed that in this group, often people who really dislike a book don’t come to the meeting, which I think is a mistake on their part, but I can’t make people come to the group even if I wanted to), and everybody remains in good spirits and polite to each other, even while we’re tearing into the book. It’s even cooler when one person who’s in more than one group makes a connection between something we read in the other group and what we just read in this one.

And what’s coolest of all, as far as I’m concerned, is when the book I offer the group because it’s just out there enough to be different and quirky turns out to be the book we select, which is what happened this month.  One of the group members said it was because I described the book so well, and I’ll take that compliment, but I’ve put in as much enthusiasm on other books I wanted us to read and the group went for something else, but this time it was a success, and I’m delighted.

The January selection is Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, by Benjamin Stevenson.  Just look at that title (just look at that cover!) and you can see why it attracted me. And, just to make it clearer that this is exactly the kind of book I love, before you even start the book itself, there’s a list of the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” attributed to Ronald Knox in 1929, and the page on which that list appears has a helpful little diagonal line near the corner, with instructions, “Fold here.”  Not that I would fold corners of pages in a library book, but the thought is a good one.

The narrator of the book, Ern, is a member of a somewhat criminal family.  He was responsible for turning his brother in to the cops after he witnessed his brother committing a murder (which would seem like a sensible thing to do in most circumstances, but this family is an exceptional one).  The family is now having a celebration of the brother’s getting out of jail, an Ern is, inexplicably, invited.  And the celebration is being held in a remote cabin in the mountains, which should make anyone who’s read a mystery pause and consider the odds that people are going to be stuck there. Almost as soon as they arrive, the family finds a dead body, interestingly with ash in its throat but no signs of burning and no fires anywhere around. The police are way over their heads, and Ern, as a mystery aficionado and someone who’s well aware of his family’s proclivities, feels he has no choice but to investigate the murder himself.

It looks like a lot of fun, and I, for one, am looking forward to discovering exactly how the other members of Ern’s family have killed people (and Ern himself, of course: he did say everyone, after all) and if they got away with their evil deeds. Copies of the book will be available at the circulation desk, and we’ll get together to discuss this one on January 6 at the usual time and place.  Join us for a discussion of a macabre, but probably funny, book.