So this month I’m looking to read some inspirational and/or how-to fitness books. On the list:

The Courage to Start by John Bingham

The Principles of Running by Amby Burfoot

Ultramarathon Man by Dean Karnazes

Heft on Wheels by Mike Magnuson

Built for Show by Nate Green

In addition, I’m working on Hallie Ephron’s Never Tell a Lie, my latest (and overdue) Early Reviewer’s book, and I hope to tackle Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Links.

A tall order this month, but I think I can do it.

Stay tuned…

This is the sixth book in Fowlers Peculiar Crimes Unit mystery series, and, unfortunately, it’s the first one I’ve read. I say unfortunately because I prefer to read series in publication order so I can follow along with the lives of the characters as well as the mysteries. However, this was an advance reading copy I received through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program, and I just didn’t have time to catch up on the first five books before diving into this one. (In the future, I’ll remember to check whether a book is in a series I haven’t read before I request it!) For the first 50 pages or so, it became apparent that knowledge of the plot from previous books was necessary to understand some obscure references to the characters. At the same time, Fowler is skilled enough to make these references without spoiling the previous books – so I CAN go back and catch up.

The Peculiar Crimes Unit is a, well, peculiar offshoot of London’s Metropolitan Police (often colloquially referred to as “the Met” which, as an American, constantly had me thinking of what art museums and/or opera had to do with anything) consisting of nine “characters” in all senses of the word, led by senior detectives John May and Arthur Bryant. Well, it’s really led by Raymond Land, unit chief and liaison to the Met, but much to his consternation, Bryant informs him which cases they will be working on. The PCU (and particularly Bryant) are good at seeing connections and patterns between odd murders the Met would otherwise treat as separate cases; despite this (or perhaps because of it), the PCU is the red-haired stepchild of the Met, who would like nothing better than to dissolve the unit permanently.

Bryant and May themselves are beyond retirement age, and Bryant actually does submit a letter of retirement, but this case proves too much to resist. Women are dying in various pubs in London, and the circumstances seem too suspicious to be mere coincidence. While on his way home, Bryant himself sees a woman (who later turns up dead) stumble into a pub, but when he returns to the scene of the crime, no pub is there. In fact, the pub he saw had been demolished decades earlier. Was he too drunk? or hallucinating? Are supernatural forces at work? Are the deaths at all connected, and if so, how are the victims being chosen? The answer is astonishingly clever (if a bit unlikely), but the ending does leave you wondering if the series is at an end, as well.

Fowler’s characters are odd but very human, but one of the best things about this book is that 21st-century London becomes a character, too. You really get a feel for this odd, wonderful city and the people who struggle to keep alive the centuries-old traditions while mixing in their spit-and-polish new ones. London is perhaps my favorite city, and I love the way Fowler has mae me see it with fresh eyes.

If you’ve read the other Bryant and May mysteries, The Victoria Vanishes shouldn’t disappoint. If you haven’t, start with Full Dark Hour and read them in order. That’s what I’ll be doing.

I’d been thinking about it for a couple weeks, and the recent Booking Through Thursday post made me decide to take the plunge–I’m joining the challenge to read 100 books this year.

The details are here.

Happy New Year, everyone!
So … any Reading Resolutions? Say, specific books you plan to read? A plan to read more ____? Anything at all?
Name me at least ONE thing you’re looking forward to reading this year!

I tend to not make resolutions, per se, but I’m always trying to read more. Specifically, I’d like to dig into my pile of Tudor history and tackle a few classics.

I’m also looking forward to reading Inkheart…I’ve heard so many great things about it. Shades of Michael Ende’s Neverending Story, perhaps?

Also, this blog needs work (or, more accurately, “lots more stuff”), so I’ve signed up for the 2009 Blog Improvement Project. There’s also my own personal Christie Challenge that I let fall by the wayside last year and intend to make some headway on. Other reading challenges may follow.

Maybe a little semi-monthly work will keep me from going 6 months between posts, like I did when I first started!

All that being said, I don’t really know what to do with Mr. White’s Confession. One could easily be forgiven, from the blurb on the back, for thinking it is a mystery novel. It is not. The murders of a couple of beautiful young taxi dancers in 1939-era St. Paul provide the backdrop for this story, but it is no more than a backdrop. There is no real attempt on the part of anyone involved to discover who killed the young women and why. The primary suspect is Mr. White, a naïve, overweight, gimpy sad-sack of a man who additionally has memory problems. He cannot remember what he did yesterday, or the day before, or last week, and thus he keeps very detailed journals and scrapbooks to record his life. The flowery and ambiguous prose he writes eventually gets him into trouble.

What mystery there is in the book, then, is whether Mr. White did in fact commit the crimes of which he is suspected (and cannot remember), or whether there is another guilty character only too happy to let White take the fall. The answer is made obvious to the reader barely halfway through the book and not at all to any character in the book, not even Mr. White. So I’m calling this Not A Mystery. But it’s Not Really a Crime Story either; we never learn the why or how, and it’s very unfulfilling that no one seems to care why or how. There is a surprise at the end of the book concerning the fate of a supporting character, but ultimately, this novel exists as neither a mystery nor crime story, but as a study of two very different men.

We get to know Mr. White primarily through his journal entries and letters, which occupy a great deal of the book. They are often long and rambling, full of minutiae, thoughts on religion, and overly intellectual dissection of the latest movie featuring his favorite B-grade starlet, a Veronica Lake type to whom White writes clumsily familiar letters and is too naïve to realize her responses are not only not at all familiar but are in fact form letters. The other main character is Wesley Horner, a police lieutenant initially assigned to the first murder. His story is written like a Dashiell Hammett novel, in faux-noir style, and is your typical moody loner detective for whom work will always be the most important thing. Wesley is the closest we come to getting an actual likeable character in this novel, but when he goes looking for love in a very wrong place, I lose sympathy for him.

I can’t say I enjoyed Mr. White’s Confession, or that it’s a great novel, because I didn’t, and it isn’t. It is a good novel, however, and while I won’t pick it up a second time, I don’t regret the time I spent reading it.

(I’ve just discovered the “Booking Through Thursday” meme blog. Good stuff!)

Never, but grad school makes it worse. Right now it takes me nearly a month to finish a book, reading a chapter at a time during lunch, etc. I have high hopes of amping up the book consumption over the holiday break, but there are lots of other things to do that may suck up my time as well. At the very least I’ll catch up on my Early Reviewer books and read a book for school.

Classics and history. I have piles and piles of various Tudor books just waiting to be cracked, and my personal-edification-reading-list includes such things as rereading The Great Gatsby and Wuthering Heights and tackling Tolstoy, Thackeray, and Dickens. Throw in some classic detective fiction in there too, as I’d probably knock back a few Christies and maybe some Doyle and Hammett.

Somehow, when perusing this book’s entry in the Early Reviewer program, I got the wrong impression about Any Given Doomsday, Lori Handeland’s first offering in her new series, The Phoenix Chronicles. It sounded like an interesting urban adventure story, perhaps with a bit of noir mystery thrown in.  I don’t know what gave me that impression.

Because it’s actually vampire porn. 

Or something like that. I suppose it could be accurately described as “paranormal romance” or something of the sort. I get that this is all the rage right now — Twilight, Laurell K. Hamilton, that True Blood series on HBO — and I don’t have a problem with that.  It’s not really fair of me to say more…this book is geared to a different type of reader entirely. I, a 30-something guy, am not the target audience. I felt compelled to finish it and post a review because I received the free book, but it’s difficult to review a genre you’re not really versed in.

Whatever. This novel is ludicrous, and I say that as someone who is perfectly willing to suspend disbelief for a good story. It’s too bad, because if you subtract the ridiculous sex scenes and the thoroughly annoying heroine, the Doomsday scenario this book posits is an interesting one. The target audience may appreciate both these things, but they’re not for me. I actually found a plot point related to a few of the sex scenes not only tacky, but genuinely offensive. Not to mention the writing style, which is just plain bad.  The heroine goes for noir-speak narration but comes off as grotesque parody.

Two stars for the promising story underneath all the nonsense.

I’m probably biased because I’ve never found political intrigue to be all that interesting, and the UN setting does nothing for me here. In fact, I stopped reading once the UN made its first apearance and didn’t pick the book back up again for several months. A rereading may be in order to make some more sense of the events, but ultimately, it just wasn’t all that compelling. 

This book comes off a bit more silly than its predecessor. Realism, in a world where a dog is capable of reading (and critically thinking about) Proust and ordering books online, is probably a bit too much ask for, but the villians are unnecessarily cartoony, Boris-and-Natasha types. Englert’s style, through Randolph’s narration, is dry and witty (I love the chapter titles!), but there was ultimately too much diversion, too many weird characters, and too little of Harry, Randolph’s owner, for my taste. 

Readers should be warned that this book gives away the ending of the previous one, and a knowledge of the backstory of Harry’s lost love Imogen, as provided in the first book, may be necessary to appreciate the story here. The Imogen storyline is not resolved in A Dog Among Diplomats so expect at least one more book in this series. 

In short, this sophomore effort doesn’t quite live up to its predecessor, but it’s still a worthwhile read. Though I’m already a bit tired of the chase for Imogen, I’ll definitely read a third.