The Laws of Murder by Charles Finch

I read a lot of books that I never review because I want to recommend only the best. But I'm breaking my rule for this particular series because it's too good not to mention. Please note that I've read just one book (#8 of the Charles Lenox mysteries), so I can't speak for the other books.

Basic story: Charles Lenox has always loved solving mysteries. After a career in Parliament he decides to become part of a detective agency, but business is tediously slow. When a former colleague is murdered, Lenox plunges headfirst into crime-solving again.

Author Charles Finch was educated at Oxford and Yale, majoring in English and history, and it shows. He gives little sketches of Victorian practices throughout the novel that enrich the story. His writing is excellent in spite of the occasional use of profanity. This particular story includes some references to prostitution, but never crosses over into the tawdry. I appreciated Finch's restraint.

The mystery was good, but it was not what kept me reading. The reason I highly recommend the series is because Finch does a bang-up job of creating characters that you really care about. (90% of the fiction I read in 2016 had unappealing protagonists, which has left me slightly traumatized.)

Charles Lenox is happily married (imagine that!) and so is his friend Dr. McConnell. Other friendships and relationships include the young widow Polly, the former butler who is now in parliament, and amateur detective Lord Dallington.  I loved them all and look forward to meeting them again as I read the whole series. (Although I had not read the previous novels, Laws of Murder gives enough of a back story so that you know who's who.)

The kindle versions of Finch's books are pricey ($10 range) but some of the hardcovers are already available for one cent from Amazon and for free at PaperBackSwap. I got my copy as a free e-book download from my Michigan library. Where there's a will, there's a way!

Blessings,

Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt

Normally I avoid books about extremely unhappy families and whose protagonist’s main vocabulary words are “shut up” and “stupid.” But having been won over to the YA fiction of Gary Schmidt through The Wednesday Wars, I was willing to take a chance on his Okay for Now.

Doug Swieteck is a minor character in Wednesday Wars, a fellow seventh grader to Holling Hoodhood. In this book, it is now 1968 and he’s heading into 8th grade. His dad has a new job in a new city and Doug is dreading all the changes.  Because of his very broken family, he and his brothers are mouthy and rebellious. In Marysville Doug is quickly labeled a “thug in training.”

A lot of heartbreaking things happen in Doug’s life from the mean trick his father plays on him for his twelfth birthday to the return of his brother (minus his legs) from Vietnam.  I shed many a tear while reading about his life.  I shed happy tears, too, over the grace extended to Doug by several compassionate adults. In so much of today’s media the kids are smart and the adults are dumb.  I loved it that Okay for Now has many sympathetic and wise grownups (an eccentric playwright, an elderly librarian, a kindly science teacher) who help Doug to break out of his hoodlum mold.

The themes of brokenness and wholeness run throughout the story. My favorite part in the book is when Doug decides he is no longer going to contribute to the brokenness all around him. His first step in that direction is just to keep his mouth shut when he wants to say something mean. Interestingly, Schmidt uses a series of Audobon paintings to wake up Doug’s heart and imagination. There’s even a thread about Jane Eyre that I especially enjoyed.   

Doug’s philosophy has been that if everything is going right, then disaster is about to strike. As he matures through his experiences, he learns to let go of his fear of the future and enjoy the good things that come his way, which is the inspiration for the book’s title. Instead of, “Things are bound to get worse,” he comes to peace with life when it’s “okay for now.”

Although Doug’s sarcasm will appeal to the junior high crowd, I think many of the references to the 1960’s (filmstrips, space travel, ditto machines) will appeal to older readers. Being familiar with Jane Eyre and John James Audobon made this book quite a treat.

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Mockingjay is the third book in the adrenaline-pumping trilogy, The Hunger Games.  If you read my review of Catching Fire, you know I was miffed at a heroine who didn’t seem to know her heart; so I began this final installment with only mild enthusiasm.

The Capitol is the ruthless government that has established the hunger games. In this book Katniss is appointed as (symbolic) leader of the people’s rebellion against President Snow and his “peacekeepers.” Katniss plans to kill Snow but because of a series of surprising twists, things don’t turn out quite as she imagined.   

A few cliches made me wince: “If looks could kill,” “He had my back,” and a reference to someone going “ballistic.”  And this book was more gruesome in places.  But let’s face it, Collins is a compelling story teller.  

One of the themes that interested me in all three books was Katniss’ self-loathing for having caused the deaths of so many people.  She was also unable to accept acts of love and grace because they caused her to feel unhappily beholden to those who gave sacrificially to her.  I was disappointed that these ideas were not dealt with more clearly in the resolution.  

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Carolyn McCormick who did an outstanding job.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

We all know that Carol at Magistramater has impeccable taste, so when she mentions a book more than once, it behooves you to run right out and get it.  (Thank heavens for kindle library books so that I could download it even here in Brazil.)

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is an absorbing murder mystery that takes place in England in the 1950’s. Its 11 year old protagonist has an obsession for chemistry, particularly poisonous concoctions.  Flavia de Luce finds a body in the garden and for the whole novel is always one step ahead of the police in discovering “whodunit.”

The book is chock-full of intriguing characters from the gardener with memory lapses, the stamp collecting father, the deceased mother, to the two obnoxious sisters.  Normally I eschew meanness, but Flavia’s vicious jibes at her two siblings are laugh out loud funny.

Although this is Alan Bradley’s first novel, he’s been writing short stories for many years and it shows.  He is a master of description and understated wit:  

 She gasped.  Her face went red, then gray, as if it had caught fire before my eyes and collapsed in an avalanche of ashes.  She pulled a lace handkerchief from her sleeve, knotted it, and jammed it into her mouth, and for a few moments, she sat there, rocking in her chair, gripping the lace between her teeth like an eighteenth-century seaman having his leg amputated below the knee. (p. 68)

A long hallway, hung profusely with dark, water-stained sporting prints, served as a lobby, in which centuries of sacrificed kippers had left the smell of their smoky souls clinging to the wallpaper. (p. 98)

Blessings on you, Carol, and on you, Mr. Bradley.  I look forward to reading the rest of the series.

Inferno by Max Hastings - Part One

For those who want a month-by-month detailed overview of World War II, Hasting's Inferno is amazingly comprehensive.  Since he’s written other tomes on various events in the war, he dreaded being redundant here; thus, some sections are frustratingly brief.  The information he gives, however, is more than enough to overload your brain cells.  Because there is so much material, I want to cover a couple of key subjects in this review and finish up with further thoughts in next week’s post.

STATISTICS - The number of lives that were lost is staggering.  Hastings writes, Many people met death far from any battlefield.  The Jews of Europe suffered the most dramatic fate, but millions of other civilians – Russians, Poles, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Chinese, Malays, Vietnamese, Indians – were extinguished by willful murder, chance explosion, disease or starvation. (p. 485) Around three quarters of all those who perished were unarmed victims rather than active participants in the struggle. (646)

An average of 27,000 people perished each day between September 1939 and August 1945.  Thirteen million died under bombardment or in German-occupied regions. (329)  There is no commonly agreed total of war-related deaths around the world, but a minimum figure of 60 million is accepted… Russia lost 27 million and China at least 15. (645)

 

FIGHTING METHODS - Since I had recently finished James Bradley’s Flyboys, I was particularly interested in Hastings’ comparison between the Axis and the Allied fighting methods. (Bradley saw them as equally brutal.)  Hastings builds a strong case for the different viewpoints of the enemies.   

The Japanese army in its new conquests sustained the tradition of savagery it had established in China, a perversion of virility and warrior spirit which was the more shocking for being institutionalized.  Soldiers of all nations, in all wars, are sometimes guilty of atrocities.  An important distinction can be made, however, between armies in which acts of barbarism represent a break with regulations and the norm, and those in which they are indulged or even incited by commanders.  The Japanese were prominent among the latter. (212)

To the Japanese and Russians, the lives of their soldiers and civilians were completely expendable.  Hitler assumed he could easily take over Russia, but it did not occur to Hitler, after his victories in the west, that it might be more difficult to overcome a brutalized society, inured to suffering, than democracies such as France and Britain, in which moderation and respect for human life were deemed virtues. (139)

With the exception of a few such enthusiasts as Patton, Allied commanders understood that they were mandated to win the war at the lowest possible human cost, and thus caution was a virtue, even in victory. (643)

Japanese willingness to fight to the death rather than surrender, even in tactically and indeed strategically hopeless circumstances, disgusted Allied troops.  American and British soldiers were imbued with the European historical tradition, whereby the honorable and civilized response to impending defeat was to abandon the struggle, averting gratuitous bloodshed.  Americans in the Pacific, like British soldiers in Burma, felt rage towards an enemy who rejected such civilized logic. (424)

Hastings is scholarly, eloquent, and clear-eyed. This fascinating and hefty book is one of the most articulate and even-handed overviews of the war that you’ll ever read.  

Helmet for my Pillow by Robert Leckie

Helmet for My Pillow was originally published in 1957 and was probably reprinted on the heels of the success of another WWII memoir, Unbroken. It’s a title well worthy of being re-published.

Marine Robert Leckie tells of his experiences in the Pacific beginning with Guadalcanal (Aug 1942) and ending with the first battle on Peleliu (Sept 1944).  I’m used to a fair amount of profanity in books about the war, but even though Leckie does not sanitize his experiences, he describes the drinking, womanizing, and swearing with such discretion that I was able to read his narrative with nary a blush. 

What sets this book above many other WWII bios is the amazing prose.  He describes the joys of comradeship, the horrors of battle, and the drudgery of daily life in the jungle with poignancy and consummate skill.  But rather than rave on and on about the book I’ll give you a few samples:

Huts, oil, beer.  Around these three, as around a sacramental triad, revolved our early life at New River.  Huts to keep us dry; oil to keep us warm; beer to keep us happy.  It is no unholy jest to call them sacramental; they had about them the sanctity of the earth. (p. 26)

[The island of] New Britain was evil, darkly and secretly evil, a malefactor and enemy of humankind, an adversary, really, dissolving, corroding, poisoning, chilling, sucking, drenching – coming at a man with its rolling mists and green mold and ceaseless downpour, tripping him with its numberless roots and vines, poisoning him with green insects and malodorous bugs and treacherous tree bark, turning the sun from his bones and the cheer from his heart, dissolving him – the rain, the mold, the damp steadily plucking each cell apart like tiny hands tearing at the petals of a flower – dissolving him, I say, into a mindless, formless fluid like the sop of mud into which his feet forever fall in a monotonous slop-suck, slop-suck that is the sound of nothingness, the song of the jungle wherein everything falls apart in hollow harmony with the rain.

Nothing could stand against it; a letter from home had to be read and reread and memorized, for it fell apart in your pocket in less than a week; a pair of socks lasted no longer; a pack of cigarettes became sodden and worthless unless smoked that day; pocketknife blades rusted together; watches recorded the period of their own decay; rain made garbage of the food; pencils swelled and burst apart; fountain pens clogged and their points separated…everything lay damp and sodden and squashy to the touch, exuding that steady musty reek that is the jungle’s own, that individual odor of decay rising from vegetable life so luxuriant, growing so swiftly, that it seems to hasten to decomposition from the moment of birth. (p. 241)

Read this if you are a fan of World War II history, especially if you have a penchant for fine writing.  One of my favorite books of 2012.

The Kindle and Your Public Library

Although I love the convenience of Kindle for travel and enjoy all the free public domain books, I still read more physical books than Kindle titles.  I have discovered, however, another reason to really like my e-reader.  Just before leaving the U.S., I heard that I could check out Kindle books from my library.  I don’t read many modern books because I deplore the immorality and bad writing, but I took a look at the selection and was pleased to see that Max Hasting’s newest book, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945, was available.

Within minutes I was able to begin reading this extensive overview of WWII.  The dictionary that is built into the reading device became invaluable as Hasting uses many military and British terms (boffin, wiseacre, shambolic, chivvy, etc.) with which I am unfamiliar.  Also (and this may not be an advantage to some), library books vanish automatically from my Kindle after three weeks so I was motivated to keep reading this 650 page book within that time frame.

The biggest drawback was that maps were unreadable on my early model (5 X 3 ½  screen), but I consider that to be a minor bugaboo in a program that allows me to read new books for no cost.  Now I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll be able to check out e-library books from here in Brazil.

P.S. I read this post six months later and had to laugh.  Now I read 20 Kindle books for every physical book because I haven't found a good source for books in English in our new location.  And, yes, I can still get audiobooks and e-books through my wonderful Michigan library.