Kestrel, James: Five Decembers (Hard Case Crime, 150)
This is an exceptional novel. It's published by Hard Case Crime, but that needn't put anyone off. It's a fantastic character study of the protagonist, who, yes, happens to be a detective, and that detective moves through some fascinating milieux: pre-Pearl Harbor Honolulu, Hong Kong just before and during the Japanese occupation, and Tokyo during the war. We come to care enough about this character and his quest, and the prose is sufficiently tight that we forget the few less than believable plot-turns. I was very happy to stumble on this one.
Shakespeare, William: Troilus and Cressida (Folger Shakespeare Library)
Two intertwining plotlines, one to do with love, one to do with war, and when the plotlines become intertwined things can't end well. Shakespearean language and wit are the icing on the cake, or maybe they are the cake. Because I was reading this with a student, I spent two many weeks turning the not very many pages which lessens the effect. I look forward to reading it again.
Russell, R. B.: Fifty Forgotten Books
This is a superb memoir by the bibliophile, publisher, collector, author, musician, and full-time dabbler (his word), B.R Russell. It's an artful weaving together of the books he has read and collected with the life he has lived—of course they are not separable. (For the record, I knew [had not forgotten] eleven of the books he writes about and had read three of them).
Allingham, Margery: Mystery Mile (Albert Campion)
In this, his second outing, Albert Campion has come to the fore, and it is, for that, a better novel than the first. I look forward to watching the character develop, and as the first book in the series came out in 1929, the last in 1970, he has a lot of years in which to grow and change. I'm eager to see how Campion with all his oddities deals with the swinging London he will encounter, but I'm several volumes away from that.
Ngugi, Mukoma Wa: Black Star Nairobi (Melville International Crime)
I picked this book up for the setting. Detective novels are a great way to get to know a city. I wish the detectives had spent all their time in Kenya's capital, but to my surprise, events took them to both Californias, Baja and Del Norte. The novel didn't suffer for that, but did leave me wanting more Nairobi, so perhaps I'll go on to what I've only just figured out is the first novel in the series. An oddity of the book is that the bad guys are part of an organization that is in every way like an extreme Communist cell in their belief that their ideal makes a few, a few hundred, or a few thousand deaths justifiable. I wonder why Ngugi decided not to make the baddies communists.
Kobek, Jarett: I Hate the Internet
"Literary fiction was a term used by the upper classes," Jarrett Kobek writes, "to suggest books which paired pointless sex with ruminations on the nature of mortgages were of greater merit than books which paired pointless sex with guns and violence." Kobek's I Hate the Internet is neither literary fiction nor, by his own admission, a good novel. For that, we must be grateful. It is a screed filled with astute and pointed observations of the society in which we've ended up, and bitter good humor (think late George Carlin). Read it and weep. And laugh.
Austen, Jane: Persuasion: (Peacock Edition)
After having considered sense, sensibility, pride, and prejudice, Jane Austen gives us, in her final completed novel, persuasion. One is struck, once again, about how for all that her novels end with marriages, most of the marriages shown and anticipated are not blissfully happy. There are exceptions like the Admiral and his lady in this novel, and, we assume, Anne and Captain Wentworth, but on the whole we see couples who do not seem well-matched stumbling into matrimony together. Likewise, in this, perhaps the darkest of Austen's novels, we see a great deal of hypocrisy and unearned arrogance, frivolity, and thoughtlessness. Austen was a satirist and looked at her society with a gimlet eye. I'll miss her penetrating gaze, so I suppose next it's on the juvenalia and false starts for me since life without Austen is unappealing, and it's a bit too soon to start a reread.
Celestin, Ray: Sunset Swing (4) (City Blues Quartet)
Some time ago I read a review of Ray Celestin's Sunset Swing. The review convinced me that, as I'm a connoisseur of LA noir, it was definitely a novel I wanted to read. I also learned from the review that it was the fourth novel in what I guess is called the "City Blues Quartet," so I figured I'd better read the initial three volumes first. I did, and now having completed the fourth, I am convinced that the novels, which move from New Orleans to New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, are together a fantastic achievement, and also that Sunset Swing is a suitable crown, the strongest of four very good books, made strong partially by the patient work Celestin has done setting things up as the series moves along. The characters who populate the books (including a trumpeter named Louis Armstrong), which cover more than thirty years, are mostly either old or dead at the end of Sunset Swing, but Celestin has left a thread he could pull—a young protégé of a seventy-year-old detective—if he decides he wants to keep the ball rolling. If he does, I'm there for it.
Austen, Jane: The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen: Volume V: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion
This volume contains Jane Austen's last two completed novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. I'll write here about Northanger Abbey. I had always thought of it as being my least favorite Austen novel. Now I wonder if it might be my favorite in a very strong field. I enjoyed the fun Austen has with novel-reading and its consequences, the pastiche of the gothic she provides, the mockery she makes of the mansplaining Thorne, and of course the elegant prose and brilliant construction. I've even come to enjoy the manner in which she picks up the pace in the last few pages to get her heroine happily married. Austen, it seems, understands that the happy marriage––a foregone conclusion from the beginning––is far from being the most important part of her creation. Looking forward to Persuasion.
Haynes, Natalie: A Thousand Ships: A Novel
One cannot tell the story of a war, Calliope notes in Natalie Haynes's A Thousand Ships, while ignoring half of those who live through it—or die because of it. A Thousand Ships is an account of the Trojan War, but told entirely from the perspective of the women who, with a couple of exceptions, are barely there in Homer. These voices were missing, and Haynes's skill in bringing them to life gives us an absolute tour de force. A Thousand Ships is an exceptional addition to the canon.
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