Monday, March 18, 2024

How to Build a Boat - Elaine Feeney (And a 2023 Booker Prize List Ranking Update)

 


Elaine Feeney's How to Build a Boat was a 2023 Booker Prize nominee, and in my estimation it is one of the better ones nominated last year. How to Build a Boat does share one of the more common themes of the 2023 Booker novels in that its main character is somewhere deep on the autism spectrum, but I found it to be more optimistic and hopeful than All the Little Bird-Hearts, Study for Obedience, or This Other Eden, other nominees featuring similar main characters. 

The novel is the coming-of-age story of Jamie, a young boy about to begin his secondary schooling, his single-parent father, and the grandmother who lives next door to the pair. Jamie was born to two young students totally unprepared to raise a child, and when his mother died less than an hour after Jamie's birth and her family walked away from the baby in their deep grief, he seemed doomed from the moment he took his first breath. But Eoin, the boy's young father, made sure that did not happen, and with the help of his own mother, Eoin gives Jamie precisely the home he needs.

But as it turns out, Jamie's brilliance is offset by an equally remarkable lack of social skills, and any kind of change to his routine, especially one that requires him to meet new people, is often more than Jamie can handle. Jamie has known only one school setting in his life, a small school in which teachers and students have finally accepted him for who he is, and he's been happy there. The transition to a much larger, louder Catholic school is going to be an immense challenge for someone like him.

Luckily for Jamie, within days of his arrival at the new school two empathetic teachers (Tess, the English teacher and Mr. Foley, the woodworking teacher) spot Jamie and try to help him adjust to his new daily environment. But unluckily for Jamie, Tess and Foley are not the only ones who quickly spot him, and within minutes of his arrival at the new school Jamie becomes an easy target for the school's cast of bullies. 

By this point, you are probably wondering why I call How to Build a Boat optimistic and hopeful. It's true that there are plenty of hard days ahead for Jamie, but as it turns out, the two teachers who have taken him under their wings are as troubled in their own ways as Jamie is. The near-perfect combination of these three people might just work in a magical sort of way to the benefit of all of them. So now, on any given day, it's a question of exactly who is helping whom?

Irish Author Elaine Feeney

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I find it kind of funny that the only one of the thirteen 2023 Booker Prize nominees that I've still not been able to get my hands on via my public library system is the eventual prize winner, Prophet Song. How to Build a Boat was definitely worth the wait, however, because I really enjoyed it and, I rank it high on the list of twelve Booker books I've now experienced for myself. 

As I continue to wait for Prophet Song (I'm number five on the wait-list but it only seems to be moving by one book a week on average), my updated list looks like this:

  1. The House of Doors
  2. The Bee Sting
  3. If I Survive You
  4. How to Build a Boat
  5. Western Lane
  6. All the Little Bird-Hearts
  7. Pearl
  8. Old God's Time
  9. This Other Eden
  10. Study for Obedience
  11. A Spell of Good Things
  12. The Ascension

Sunday, March 17, 2024

What I'm Reading This Week (March 18, 2024)

 


Despite continuing to succumb to so many distractions last week, I managed to finish three of the books I've been reading. One of them, The Case of the Empty Tin, is a book I'm very happy to finally have in my rear-view mirror; and another one, Day, did not work for me nearly as well as I'd hoped it would. Day turned out to be just OK for me, but I did really enjoy How to Solve Your Own Murder enough to at least even out my derision of the Perry Mason novel mentioned. So all in all, not a terrible week after all.

Things definitely got better for me near the end of the week when I started having fun with the novel about the man who claims he's 1100 years old (only 106 year years old in his current model, however), Again and Again. And I've been pleasantly surprised that Patric Gagne's memoir, Sociopath, has been both highly informative and easy to read. But the best part of the week might just turn out to be my discovery of two new titles, both of which are very promising in their early stages:

A Death in Denmark is Amulya Malladi's first book in her Gabriel Praest series. The publisher quotes a blurb saying "Philip Marlowe meets Nordic Noir" to describe this one, and my early reading of it does give me some classic noir vibe, so maybe they're not exaggerating about that. The story sees Gabriel reluctantly agreeing to investigate the murder conviction of an Iraqi refugee as a favor to someone once close to him. What he discovers about the case leads him to believe that the man has been framed. Now what does he do?

The Storm We Made is set in Malaya in 1935 prior to the Japanese invasion when that country was still a British colony. It is the story of one family's experience under British rule and then under Japanese occupation in 1945. The story is told in alternating chapters centered on four family members during each of those periods. Rather than presenting their story chronologically, the chapters often flash backward and forward to set up what happens next after decisions and choices made or not made. It is really well written by Malaysian author Vanessa Chan.

I'm still reading in and out of Kat Timpf's You Can't Joke About That, but I'm finding it less and less compelling as I get deeper into it. I'm starting, I'm afraid, to think that it's already made it's point and is now beginning to get repetitive. I'm still hoping that's not the case, however.

So now the scary point of the week. I mentioned last week that I was curious about the 2024 Women's Prize for fiction and that I had put several books from the longlist on hold at my library. Well, guess what? All nine  (of sixteen total on the list) of the books I put on hold are ready and waiting at my branch library for pickup, something that hasn't happened quite this way in a long time. Usually the books trickle in in twos and threes...but nine? Never. My plan is to bring them all home and take a close look at each of them in hopes of uncovering something special that I want to read immediately. I do need that kind of jump-start right now, but nine new books is too overwhelming to even consider tackling when there are others I already want to read soon. Because these are so readily available, it looks to me like no one else in Harris County is much interested in the 2024 Women's Prize.

Here are the ones ready waiting for me:

  1. Ordinary Human Failings - Megan Nolan
  2. Nightbloom - Peace Adzo Medie
  3. And Then She Fell - Alecia Elliott
  4. The Blue, Beautiful World - Karen Lord
  5. 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster - Mirinae Lee
  6. Enter Ghost - Isabella Hammad
  7. Soldier Sailor - Claire Kilroy
  8. River East, River West  Aube Rey Lescu
  9. Hangman - Maya Binyam
Does anyone know anything about these titles or authors? I'd appreciate any recommendations you may have.

So it's on to the new week...Happy Reading, All!

Thursday, March 14, 2024

The Case of the Empty Tin - Erle Stanley Gardner

 


The Case of the Empty Tin is Erle Stanley Gardner's nineteenth Perry Mason novel, so you would think that by this point, having now had so much experience writing Mason and all the other recurring series characters, that the books would be consistently satisfying ones. Well, think again. This novel is actually so bad that I may never see Perry Mason, the character, in a positive light again. So let me count the ways/reasons I so much dislike The Case of the Empty Tin:

  1. It is overly complicated, and almost as soon as one possible scenario or solution to the crime is presented, it is immediately shot down by the all-knowing Perry Mason.
  2. After a while, it seems like the theories will be added to forever, needlessly complicating an already farfetched plot.
  3. There are way too many peripheral characters too keep up with without following your own detailed character cheatsheet. 
  4. Perry Mason is most famous for having been one of the best defense attorneys of his day - and yet he does not enter a courtroom even once in this tedious tale.
  5. As a lawyer, Mason would be subject to an Ethics Code or Rules of Professional Conduct if he wanted to stay licensed - but here he takes great delight in creating false evidence, leads, and alibis. 
  6. Della Street seems to exist only so that Mason can ridicule her and explain to her (and to all the confused readers) what has just happened a few pages earlier - over and over again.
  7. If the numerous explanations to Della were not already bad enough, the novel ends with Della reading a multi-page, detailed confession from the killer - an excuse for a long recap to explain to frustrated and confused readers all the clues they have probably missed.
  8. The plot is a bore because not much ever seems to happen, and the characters are pretty much all so laughable that it's difficult to take any of them seriously.
  9. Mason is dumb enough to implicate himself and Della in murder by investigating murder scenes before the police know that anything has even happened.
  10. Perry Mason is so unethical that it's more fun to pull for his nemesis Lt. Tragg than it is for the "good guy" - and Della Street is an air-head willing to do anything and everything her "handsome" boss tells her to do.
And I won't even hold it against Gardner that The Case of the Empty Tin is as sexist and racist as any novel of the 1940s I've read in recent years. That's not a surprise, really, because Gardner is simply reflecting the thinking of the times. But what I do detest is being talked down to by an author who apparently didn't think his readers could figure this one out on their own without several pages of dry confessionary prose to explain what they had just spent several hours reading. It took me forever to read Perry Mason No. 19 because I could barely force myself to keep picking it up even when only 50 or so pages still remained to be read. I think it will be a while before I pick up another Perry Mason mystery - and that really irritates me. It also makes me sad.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

How to Solve Your Own Murder - Kristen Perrin

 


How to Solve Your Own Murder is a novel about an elderly woman who has been trying to prove since she was seventeen years old that someone is trying to kill her. A fortune teller told her so, and she believes it. And as it turns out, they were both right.

In 1965 Frances Adams and her two best friends stopped by a carnival fortune teller's table on a lark, expecting that they would hear one of those boilerplate, one-size-fits-all fortunes that are so easily laughed off. Instead, Frances was warned that her life would almost certainly end at the hands of a murderer. From that moment on, Frances began to watch everyone around her through new eyes - always trying to identify her potential killer before it was too late. In later years, Frances would even take to creating her own murder board, the kind you find in homicide investigations. Her photo was in the center, surrounded by all those she thought might wish her dead.

Annie Adams, Frances's great-niece, who lives alone with her mother in a house owned by the old woman has never actually met her great-aunt. Then one day, to her great surprise, Annie is asked to come to tiny Castle Knoll to attend a meeting with her aunt and several other people where an announcement of some sort is to be made. But on the very morning of that meeting, Frances finally meets her fate and a very different kind of meeting is in order. 

Frances is dead. Is it because she finally solved her own murder, but failed to prevent it?

The more Annie learns about her great-aunt, the more determined she becomes to identify the killer and to complete the task Frances spent a lifetime working on. But will Annie suffer the same fate her aunt suffered before justice can be served?

Kristen Perrin has written a mystery here that is a whole lot of fun, one that reminds me very much of the kind of classic cozy mystery written in the 1920s and 1930s. The characters are all eccentric, and there are plenty of them for the reader, and for Annie as the big city outsider trying to identify a killer, to keep track of. Chapters of Annie's first person narration are alternated with chapters featuring excerpts from Frances's teenaged diary to tie together what happened in the '60s and her death all these decades later. And I'm happy to say that Perrin plays fair with her readers in How to Solve Your Own Murder. If you don't figure out this one for yourself, rest assured that it will all make perfect sense to you at the end. No irritating bolts of lightning out of a pure blue sky from this one to irritate you.

Kristen Perrin publicity photo

Look for the United States edition of How to Solve Your on Murder on March 26.

Monday, March 11, 2024

What I'm Reading This Week (March 11, 2024)

 


I had another of those hard-to-concentrate weeks last week that seem to be plaguing me more and more often these days. Seems like my mind was all over the place, with quick, but short, bursts of energy that pulled me in multiple directions all week long. As a result, my week didn't go at all as planned. I did finish a couple of books (Hitchcock's Blondes and How to Build a Boat) but never did get around to reviewing How to Build a Boat. And from there, my reading time was allocated all over the place: a couple of short stories from the current edition of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, an hour-long listen to an audio book whose reader almost put me to sleep with his sing-song cadence before I abandoned the audiobook for good, several literary movies, and lots of bookish YouTube stuff that is always dangerous to my reading (more on this later).

I think what messed me up last week was my disappointment in the Perry Mason novel I've been reading, The Case of the Empty Tin. I'm finding it to be very repetitive and just can't suspend my disbelief to the degree that this plot is asking me to. And what's with this one anyway? It's the nineteenth book in the Perry Mason series, and with only about 25 pages left to read, Mason hasn't sniffed the inside of a courtroom yet. If this were the first Perry Mason novel I'd read, I would really not like the Mason character very much. I'll save "the why" for the review, and just say that I'm having a hard time with a defense lawyer who delights in tampering with evidence...or even creating it in order to throw the cops off. So I ended up tossing this one aside for most of the week - and my mind started looking everywhere else for something more fun to read.

And that's about the time How to Build a Boat really began to impress me, and I started having so much fun with How to Solve Your Own Murder (sound like two instruction manuals, don't they). I pretty much alternated my reading between those two for the rest of the week, along with finally getting much deeper into Michael Cunningham's Day. But not even those could hold my attention for as long as they normally would have. 

Anyway, after all of that, in addition to finishing Day and How to Solve Your Own Murder, this is what I have planned for this week:

I am really happy about being able to read James Lee Burke's latest addition to his Dave Robicheaux series early, and I hope to get started on it in the next week or two. I purposely slow my reading pace on Burke's Robicheaux novels because they come so far apart these days. The title refers to Dave's longtime partner in crimefighting Cletus Purcell. Clete and Dave have had a lifetime's experience saving each other from themselves, and there is nothing that one doesn't know about the other. Now, they are old men...very violent old men when they they have to be. In this one, Clete takes it personally when his grandniece dies of a fentanyl overdose. This is book number 24 in the series that started in 1987 with The Neon Rain.

I read just enough last week of Again and Again to learn that Jonathan Evison is a really good storyteller. At this point, narrator Eugene Miles is still introducing himself and explaining why his 106-year-old self refuses to just give up and die. It seems that Eugene has had only one true love in his life, and that despite having lived for about 1,100 years all told, he's only run into her in two of his lifetimes. He feels that dying will just put him one more lifetime farther away from her. So for now, he's content to spend his days telling his story to Geno, his latest caretaker in the home.

I need to get going (nothing like a pending review deadline to get you jumpstarted) on Sociopath this week because of its short fuse. Patric Gagne says that she started making people feel uncomfortable around her by the time she was six years old. She believes this was probably because she felt none of the emotions common to other people, and people sensed this about her. She tried to pretend but found that she could not cope with that pressure, so she turned to a life of crime, and only learned that she was something called a "sociopath" when she started college.

I mentioned earlier that watching YouTube book-videos is often dangerous to my reading plans, and it's happened again. After watching several videos on the 2024 Women's Prize for fiction, I was intrigued enough by the list to see which of the sixteen books long-listed were available at my library. I found that nine of them are in the library system, and I immediately put holds on those hoping that maybe one or two would be immediately available. As it turns out, three of the books are now on their way to my branch where they will be held for my pick up. Whether this turns out to be a project similar to what I did with the 2023 Booker Prize list remains to be seen, but I wouldn't be surprised if that were about to happen. At least this time, I would be starting relatively early (and have already read one of the sixteen) because the shortlist is not to be announced until April 13, and the winner on June 13. 

I was negligent in visiting other blogs much last week, but I hope to make up for that this week, so I'm hoping you've all had a great last few reading-days. Can't wait to see what you've been reading.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Hitchcock's Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director's Dark Obsession - Laurence Leamer

 


Even casual viewers of Alfred Hitchcock movies have to be struck by how closely most of the lead actresses in those films resemble each other. Hitchcock's version of the ideal woman appeared over and over in his best movies, and he prided himself on being able to turn unknowns who met his physical standards into A-List movie stars. The problem was that Hitchcock wanted to control the women's personal lives as he worked with them, and he saw any unwillingness on their part to toe the line as personal betrayal. The worst possible thing any of them could ever do was to get married, and that would mark the beginning of the end for the several who dared do so.

Laurence Leamer approaches the Hitchcock legend by focusing on the women most closely associated with the best of the famous director's movies, beginning with June Howard-Tripp in 1927's The Lodger and ending with Tippi Hedron, star of The Birds  and Marnie in1963 and 1964, respectively. All told, Leamer offers short biographies of the eight actresses who worked closest with the director over his decades long career - a before-and-after-Hitchcock approach to their lives - plus a frank look at the often difficult relationship each had with Hitchcock during filming. 

These key actress are:

  • June Howard-Tripp - 1927 - The Lodger
  • Madeleine Carroll - 1935 - The 39 Steps
  • Ingrid Bergman - 1946 - Notorious
  • Grace Kelly - 1954 - Dial M for Murder
  • Eve Marie Saint - 1959 - North by Northwest
  • Tippi Hedron - 1963 and 1964 - The Birds and Marnie
  • Kim Novak - 1958 - Vertigo
  • Janet Leigh - 1960 - Psycho
I've listed the key movies, but altogether these eight actresses starred in fourteen Alfred Hitchcock movies.

Hitchcock's life is also studied in some detail in Hitchcock's Blondes, including his rather sexless marriage of many years to Alma Reville, the mother of his daughter. Alma was a valuable contributor to Hitchcock's success, even to writing important screenplays, editing others, and managing the director's entire career. As reflected in his own marriage, however, Hitchcock saw women as "lesser beings" and he purposely treated them as such. This was a particular problem with the way he treated his lead actresses, and even though it is highly unlikely that any of the women had anything approaching a sexual relationship with Hitchcock, his sexual harassment of each of them was appalling even to his many leading men of the day. Hitchcock's psychological manipulation and disregard for the physical and mental health of his actresses makes for cringeworthy reading. Unfortunately, that kind of behavior was not uncommon in the Hollywood of that era, and well beyond. 

Hitchcock's Blondes will be much appreciated by film buffs, particularly those who admire Alfred Hitchcock's body of work, but it is also an eye-opening look at a world that (hopefully) no longer exists in Hollywood. Warning: I have found myself spending hours and hours re-watching the movies highlighted in Hitchcock's Blondes, and I'm not done yet.
Laurence Leamer jacket photo