MarysLibrary

Fer-de-lance

I've discovered Rex Stout. Rediscovered him. Some years ago we used to watch the TV show with Timothy Hutton and Maury Chaykin. Santa gave Wilhelm a set of the DVDs from the 2001 TV show and the stories are just as good as/better than I remembered them.

And they serve a useful role for me by providing a face and a voice and a wardrobe for Mr Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. These men are so quirky in the books it's difficult for me to imagine them. The show is perfectly cast. It's worth watching for the neckties alone.

So I've gone back to read the books, which I made a stab at years ago. If Miss Marple is the quintessential English detective, Nero Wolfe and Archie are the American equivalent. And then there's the food. Mr Wolfe didn't get to weigh a seventh of a ton eating celery sticks. Fritz, the Swiss chef, is an artist of the palate. They were eating bacalhau in a recent episode. And the cars. All those whitewall tires make me swoon. 

Fer-de-lance is the first in the series of 34 novels set between 1934 and the 1970s. Give it a try. 

And by the way, Rex Stout was the author's real name, Rex Todhunter Stout. You do know what a fer-de-lance is?

Bella Figura

At her blog, Random Jottings, Elaine has declared this book, Bella Figura, by Kamin Mohammadi  to be her favorite of all she read in 2018. So how was I to resist? The library had it, I requested it, it came, I red it, and now I'm thinking of buying it. 

It seems strange to me that this book is cataloged as a cookbook. But Library of Congress cataloging is often strange. It does have a few recipes but it is really a book about changing your life, slowing down, looking around you, listening, smelling, hearing, enjoying. Drinking coffee.

It is not a classic self-help book. It's a memoir about a woman fortunate enough to get a new chance at directing where her life was going. And to start with it was going to Florence . . .

Her review is here.

Maryslibrary is 13 years old!

Back in January of 2006 I started my blog at the instigation of some friends back in the DC area who said they wanted to be able to keep up with what I had been reading. So I listed some books I was reading or wanted to read or had read and started off in a small way.

Eventually I began writing longer posts commenting on the books I liked best. Now I'm back to short "I liked it" / "I didn't like it." posts. In the intervening years what the blog has given me is an international clutch of bookish friends. I've followed their children's international travel, weddings, babies, grandchildren and their sporting achievements. And I get to see photos of the White Mountains in New Hampshire, a place I've always loved, and various places, especially in England that I'd love to visit.

And through it all I've learned of new-to-me authors and delightful books, and warnings not to read books and pleas that I really owed it to myself to read others. 

It's been an unusually rewarding experience. And new bloggers are moving into view all the time, new books or old books I didn't know existed are popping up, and the future looks rosy bookwise. Thirteen years!

A Spider in the Cup

We all have our favorite detectives. One of mine is Barbara Cleverly's Joe Sandilands, veteran of the Great War and pretty high up in Scotland Yard for his age. The first books are set immediately post-World War I with Joe being seconded to India for some project for the assistant viceroy. In The Last Kashmiri Rose he solves a series of seemingly unsolvable murders. I chose to read that first one because of the title. And now the series has gone on to the 1930s and is set in Europe and in the case of A Spider in the Cup in London.

These mysteries have been a solid 5 on a scale of 1-5, notable for clever (sic) plots, sometimes complex narrative style, skilled characterization, and the evocation of the 1920s and 30s in England, Europe, and India. And they aren't preachy. I hate to be preached to by mystery novels and TV shows.

And now comes A Spider in the Cup, which is not a mystery, really, but one of those international cabal stories that were popular for a time. The 39 Steps by John Buchan (1915) and The Grey Mask by Patricia Wentworth (published in 1928,) come to mind.

Adept as this author is at detective stories she does not have the touch for this kind of intrigue. The cabal is after world power and they are using an American senator to get it. Joe is assigned as his bodyguard for an economic conference. The man is in love with a Russian dancer and she is running him ragged. 

The title is a quote from The Winter's Tale.

There may be in the cup
A spider steep'd, and one may drink, depart,
And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge
Is not infected: but if one present
The abhorr'd ingredient to his eye, make known
How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides, 
With violent hefts. I have drunk,
and seen the spider.

In other words, what you don't know won't hurt you. It's a great quote from one of my favorite plays, and it makes a terrific title for a book about pre-Hitler espionage. But alas, this book is not up to Cleverly's standard. I can't even figure out what the spider represents in this murky story.

Read this series. It is extremely rewarding. But start at the beginning and when you come to this, the 11th novel starring Joe Sandilands, skip it.

Kardemumma Skorpor

In mid-November I ordered some Swedish kardemumma skopor, cardamom cookies, and I've been waiting for them more or less patiently. 

They didn't arrive until this week, well after our New Year's Eve in Stockholm celebration. I've been eating them for breakfast. They taste a bit strange but like all baked goods from Scandinavia, they're delicious.

Cardamom has an unusual taste and is the third most expensive spice per weight in the world (after vanilla and of course saffron.) I used to put it in sugar cookies and people loved them but couldn't figure out what I'd done. 

Skopor is translated as crisps, which I'm told is what the Swedish call biscuits and cookies. And snaps. What we call ginger snaps, which are nothing like the real thing as eaten in Scandinavia, are ginger crisps in Stockholm.

Two Tales of Romance and Redemption

I recently re-read A Tale of Two Cities, the first time since high school, I think. Not a bad book as it turns out. It is filled with men who "come back from the dead" so to speak. It begins with Dr Manette being saved from a death in life after 18 years locked up in the Bastille. Sydney Carton is saved from his pointless life, Charles Darnay is saved from death by guillotine (three times.)

Even the servant, Jerry Crutcher, a Resurrection man (one who digs up dead bodies for medical students to use for their studies,) vows to give up his evil avocation and to tolerate his wife's prayers. And of course, France is saved from the horrors of the Old Regime. It is now in the throes of the horrors of the Revolution, but the author hopes this will soon be over and there will be improvement in the lives of France's poor.

Another book addressing the same subject is an old favorite, The Scarlet Pimpernel. Sir Percy Blakeney, a London fop, a wit with no convictions, has lost the love and respect of his wife. She adores the mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel who is risking his all to save aristocrats from the Revolutionaries and their guillotine. They experience a kind of resurrection, going from sure death at the hands of the rabble in France to safety in England. the Pimpernel experiences a kind of resurrection when his identity is revealed too Lady Blakeney.

The books have very different levels of seriousness and the subject is handled differently, but they are both romantic tales with many threats and danger and last-minute reprieves. Both are historical fiction, published in respectively, 1861 and 1938. The Scarlet Pimpernel is the first of a series of adventures starring the same hero and his friends. There are also books by the Baroness about the Pimpernel's ancestors and one about a descendant.

As for A Tale of Two Cities, there is nothing remotely like it in Dickens.

World War I at Home in England

Cynthia Harrod-Eagles is well known for her Morland Dynasty, a series of historical novels that begins during the Wars of the Roses with The Founding, published in 1980, and finishes up 35 books later in the 1930s with The Phoenix, published in 2013.  

Now she is writing another series called War at Home, which is about the Hunter family in England during the first World War. Beginning in 1914 with Goodbye, Piccadilly (2014), she follows the sons and daughters and cousins and other relatives and friends of this upper middle class family as their son enlists, a cousin is called back to duty, the horses their daughter loves to ride and care for are confiscated by the army, and they all come to the realization that the war will NOT be over by Christmas.

The series will end with the sixth volume, Pack Up Your Troubles, which will be published in the US in hardcover in August 2019 with the paperback to follow in about six months.

I'm nearly finished with the splendid first volume. The next four will arrive tomorrow. I intend to read through them without stopping for bookmarks . . .

Happy New Year!

Another reading year begins today and another set of New Year's Resolutions begin the countdown to failure. I read that the typical New Year's resolution is broken by 12 January. I usually make it to about June.

This is the year I succeed, if only because of their number (few) and ambitiousness (not very.)

My first biblioresolution:

Re-read The Iliad, using the modern Fagels translation this time.