Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

When I was in junior high or thereabouts I loved Agatha Christie mysteries. The local library had a pretty extensive collection, and I read half a dozen or more before my interest waned and I moved on to other novels. I preferred Miss Marple to Hercule Poirot, though that was mostly because I read two Miss Marple novels before I read a single Poirot novel, which bred familiarity. And because I didn't know how to pronounce Hercule (Her-cyool? Her-cyool-ee? or something more French-sounding?). My favorite, though, was And Then There were None, and I practically begged to stay home and babysit my sister while my family went to a Dodgers game (not a hard sell) just so I could rent and watch the 1945 movie.

I have lots of fond Agatha Christie memories, and I've often wondered if her novels would hold up for me now that I'm older. So I threw a novel I'd never gotten around to into the mix when I was guest book-chooser for my book club, and when another one of my selections won the vote, I decided to read it anyway.

Maybe I should have chosen another novel, because although I'd never read Murder on the Orient Express, I had seen the movie, and I'd forgotten enough of the plot to enjoy the story but not enough that I didn't predict/remember the solution to the mystery before we got there. (I actually like being able to guess the ending of a mystery before the actual end, as long as it's not too obvious, because it makes me feel smart, but I also like to guess it on my own, not with the help of subconscious memories.)

In spite of that, I thoroughly enjoyed the read. It was fast, it was fun, and it felt like watching an old Hollywood movie (again, my memory may have been intruding). I'm not a big mystery reader, but Agatha Christie tells a good story. Had I been traveling, it would have been a good travel book. I don't know that I'm dying to clean out the shelves of the library again, but maybe I'll pick up another next time I have a long flight ahead of me.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

It turns out I really had no idea what this book was about when I started seeing it everywhere and made the completely uninformed decision that I just wasn't interested. And as I started seeing it not just everywhere, but everywhere else as well, I started to think that maybe I should revise my decision. But I also heard a lot of mixed reviews - mostly that there were plot inconsistencies and some clunky writing, but it was still an awfully fun read. My book snobbery kicked in and I paid attention to the first part, but not the second, until my brother and sister-in-law gave me the book (and its sequel) for my birthday, and when someone gives me a book I can't not read it anymore.

So I did. And the reviewers were right. It's not perfect. I couldn't always tell if it was the writing that felt clunky, or if it was just the translation. Some important characters were more fleshed out than others. And when Larsson starts describing character interactions with technology, I felt like I had just stepped out of the story and into an Apple commercial.

But the story pulled me in. And like I said, the story was not at all what I thought it was. I think I was imagining sort of an action-hero movie in book form, but it's not. The main character (who is not actually the titular girl with the dragon tattoo, but a middle-aged journalist) spends most of his time in a small, sort of isolated Swedish town doing research. The story is really about about an aging tycoon who hires the journalist, Mikael Blomkvist to write a family history, and to secretly investigate the 50-year-old unsolved murder of his beloved...granddaughter? niece? grandniece? I can't quite remember, because the family tree is complicated and full of Swedish names, and while I had fun imagining that I was pronouncing all the names and places and phrases in perfect Swedish, it was also a challenge to keep everything straight in my head.

In fact, for that very reason, I had a hard time getting into the book. The action doesn't really pick up until about halfway through, and the first half of the book takes a slow pace and throws out a lot of complicated background information without giving the reader much help in sorting out what's going to be important to the story later in. But it works, and there's a payoff. This is definitely an airplane novel - it doesn't require too much deep thought or analysis or concentration. But it's a good airplane novel. Favorite novel ever? Probably not. But my interest is definitely piqued enough to read the next two books.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Speaking of things that were once new becoming commonplace, Wilkie Collins opens his novel The Woman in White by basically telling the reader, “I’m about to do something no one to my knowledge has done,” and then explaining that he will jump back and forth between different characters' perspectives as he tells the story. Wilkie Collins was conducting a literary experiment that he was pretty sure no one had ever tried. Now whether or not he was actually the first, I don’t know, but that particular literary device doesn’t seem so new and daring anymore. Everyone tells stories from multiple perspectives these days. I guess I'd never really thought about the fact that this must have started somewhere. And Collins didn’t just use the device haphazardly. He very carefully crafted a way to make the telling of the story from several different perspectives natural, necessary, and integral to the plot. The main character had important reasons to collect the accounts of other involved characters, and then intersperse his own account with theirs, in the forms of letters, journals, and even one long, delightfully annoying exposition in which a sinister character takes great delight in laying out the entirety of his dastardly plan.

I don’t know that I have anything much deeper to say about the book, but I definitely enjoyed it. Collins wove a good tale, but (okay, I guess I do have something deeper to say) I think the strength of the book was the characters, who had very distinct personalities, almost to the point of being exaggerated, but not to the point of being unbelievable. Some were likeable, some were unlikeable, some where a mix of both.

In fact, the only character, major or minor, who had no well developed personality was the main love interest. This was the only thing I can actually say I disliked about the book. She was beautiful and helpless and therefore the main character fell madly in love with her, while her cousin, who was plain, but intelligent, resourceful, loyal, pragmatic, and interesting, just accepted that her lot in life was spinsterhood. I kept rooting for the main character to suddenly wake up and realize that she was a much better match for him, but alas, the thought didn’t ever seem to cross either of their minds. I liked seeing a strong female character, but I disliked seeing that she got the short end of the stick in her society.

Still, it wasn’t enough to make me dislike the book. It was a good read. I have to thank my mom for this recommendation, and for giving me the book for Christmas so that I could actually get around to reading :).

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

I watched The Maltese Falcon (the movie) for the first time not that long ago, so when the book was picked for the March read of a book club I'm in, I was sort of intrigued...and sort of not. I'd actually seen the book in the downtown Ann Arbor Borders once and picked it up and flipped through it and decided that it was probably a dated, pulp-fictiony novel that was only still in print because it happened to be made into a movie that became famous.

And now that I've read it, I can say that that's kind of what it is. It reads like a dime store novel from the 1930s. The plot isn't terribly complex, the characters' motivations aren't well developed. There's mystery and snappy dialogue peppered with sex and violence and rough language (1930's style - it's pretty tame by today's standards), and while it was engaging enough that I didn't dislike reading it, it is a bit dated in style and tone. I found the movie easier to appreciate and enjoy.

I don't think it's that The Maltese Falcon is a poorly written book. I think there are a lot of interesting things in there (gender roles, the falcon as a MacGuffin, historical context, the importance of place) and our book club discussion, which covered some but not all of those, was long and interesting. But one of the things we talked about in our discussion was about how popular genres change over time, and how this book reflected that change. We talked about how themes and tropes and storytelling elements that seem trite or cliché originated somewhere, and weren't trite or cliché at the time. This book is a different read now than it was 80 years ago when it was written, and while it didn't really resonate with me, there was something historically and culturally interesting in reading it. I wouldn't go out and read more Dashiell Hammett detective novels, but it was kind of fun to read just one.

The Likeness by Tana French

I had just finished In the Woods when I went to the bookstore with my parents, which sometimes means I walk out of the bookstore with a free (to me) book (I love having parents who are just as tempted by bookstores as I am). The Likeness caught my eye this time because I had enjoyed Into the Woods enough (with some caveats that I already wrote about in my review) to be intrigued, but probably wouldn't have bought the book on my own for awhile.

I actually enjoyed The Likeness more than In the Woods, at least in some ways. I thought the plot was stronger, and Tana French didn't try to pull off that thing she did in her first novel that I won't say for fear of giving spoilers. That was a good thing. I thought the story was engaging, the mystery was intriguing, and the end was satisfying.

The story follows one of the characters from In the Woods, Cassie, some time after the first novel has ended. We already know that Cassie has a history as an undercover detective, and in The Likeness, she finds herself drawn back into that world when a young woman, almost identical to herself, and bearing ID with the name of her former undercover identity, is found murdered outside of a small town near Dublin. Before the death becomes public, Cassie takes on the young woman's (or the young woman's assumed identity) and integrates herself into her life in the hopes of both discovering her killer and discovering who she really is. It's an intriguing idea for a mystery, an idea that stretches credulity a little, but I think Tana French pulled it off fairly well.

Still, it didn't really make me want to continue to read the novels Tana French seems now to be churning out at the pace of a proper mystery novelist. The problem, for me, was the characters. One of the things that drew me into In the Woods was the depth of the characters and the emotional attachments between them. It felt very real to me, very humanly complex. But in The Likeness, that same depth of character and emotional attachment felt overdone. In the Woods, I realized, was an exploration of intense friendship, the likes of which I have never experienced myself, and when the same exploration of equally intense friendship permeated The Likeness, and involved one of the very same characters, it stretched my credulity even more than the story. People, I think, are not like that. Either that, or my own friendships are woefully shallow and inadequate. (They don't feel that way to me.)

So overall I did enjoy the read. I wouldn't not recommend it, especially if you like mysteries. But I just wasn't totally sold.

In the Woods by Tana French

It's hard to write about this one for people who haven't read it, because the thing that left me most dissatisfied at the end is something I can't reveal up front. I mean, it's a mystery novel. I can't give away the end of a mystery novel.

First, the good. Several people have actually asked me what I thought of this book, and I never know how to answer, but what I will say is that I did enjoy it. I wouldn't not recommend it to someone who already had their eye on the book. I thought it was well-written, and felt realistic, and had me engaged from beginning to end. The story is about Rob Ryan who, as a child, disappeared with two of his friends, and was later found in the woods under mysterious and slightly gruesome circumstances, with no trace of his friends and no memory of what had happened. The book picks up years later. He has managed to disconnect himself from his childhood and is now working as a detective, when the body of a girl is found in the same woods. His own history and the current case intermingle as he and his partner, Cassie Maddox, work to solve the new murder and seek a possible connection to his childhood. It was a good summer take-my-mind-off-my-dissertation book, and a good airport read.*

That said, I also think the novel had unfulfilled potential. I understand the author's intent now that I've finished, but I just don't think she was capable (yet?) of effectively pulling it off. There are some scathing reader reviews on Amazon, among lots of glowing reviews (don't read these if you plan on reading this book), but while I wasn't as enamored with the book as many readers, my dissatisfaction also didn't turn me away completely as it did some. I enjoyed the ride and have actually picked up the next book. This was Tana French's first published novel, and after reading it I think I can expect better from her, so I'm willing to try.

* Which is where I picked it up in the first place, greatly discounted at a Powell's shop in the Portland airport - I couldn't pass it up because of the discount, and because it was at Powell's, the one place I was most disappointed not to have visited during my short stay.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Lest you get the wrong idea, I want to start out by saying that I liked this book. It just took some time before it grew on me.

Like a lot of people, I love books. But there are different kinds of book lovers. I like brightly-lit and well-organized Borders bookstores, trade paperbacks, authors who write well but without frills or pretensions, copyright dates within a few years of the present. Other people like classics, searching for gems in small and cluttered floor-to-ceiling used bookshops, solidly-bound hardbacks, first-editions. These are far from the only categories—every reader has his or her own preferences. But the reason this book was difficult for me to get into was that it seemed to speak to that second category of reader, a category that I definitely am not. I have read my fair share of the classics, to be sure. It’s usually for the sake of being well-read, but I also usually really enjoy what I read (Les Miserables is what I claim for my favorite book of all time). But that’s not what I naturally gravitate towards.

The whole book had a feeling of oldness to it, literary oldness. The primary setting was in the present day, but the narrator lived in a world of old dusty volumes and handwritten letters and dampness and deep sorrow, and it was just difficult to relate to that. It evokes the English gothic novel (think Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre), and this is a genre/period that I’m particularly unfamiliar with. I’ve tried to read Wuthering Heights three times now and just can’t get past the first 50 pages. Older English literature in general has never really appealed to me for some reason (though I’m a huge fan of British humorists like Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams or Jasper Fforde).

All this is why when I first began reading the book, I wasn’t sure I’d like it. In fact, if I hadn’t read so many great reviews beforehand, and if I hadn’t bought it specifically for the purpose of reading on the airplane, I might have given up altogether after the first several chapters. Several months ago I picked it up in the bookstore and almost gave up after the first chapter.

But because I had all the time in the world on my flight from Detroit to Los Angeles to become engrossed in the story, I did become engrossed in the story, and while I never quite shook my discomfort with the style and general feel of the book, the story was too compelling to put it down. I still had a hundred or so pages left after two cross-country flights, but when I got home I finished in just a couple sittings.

Vida Winter is a famous novelist, made even more famous by the fact that she has kept her past a secret for decades, telling a new (but inevitably fictional) tale to every potential biographer. Now she is dying, and is at last ready to tell her story, to Margaret Lea, a young woman and book lover who Vida Winter has specifically sought out for the task. But the telling does not come easily, and even as Ms. Winter narrates a gothic account of her troubled childhood home at Angelfield Hall, complete with ghosts, tragedy, dark secrets, and twisted family relationships, there are pieces missing that Margaret (and the reader) are left to puzzle out. Although the full story only becomes clear at the very end, I never felt like the author was deliberately hiding it from me—I was free to puzzle it out myself, and when I figured things out a step before the narrative, I never felt cheated, nor did I feel like I had cheated. The clues were all there and half the fun was trying to put the pieces together.

So in the end, although I had my doubts initially, I enjoyed the book, and I think I would recommend it.