Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf

A short collection of short stories. I think. Definitely a short collection and definitely short pieces - I am just unclear on whether or not they are stories. They seemed much more like paintings to me - with words for a medium rather than paint or pastels or watercolors.

They are beautiful, but I don't think I know enough, or think in the right way to comment on them.

The Day After Tomorrow (Sixth Column) by Robert A. Heinlein

I have always loved this book - and there are so many reasons that I shouldn't. It is totally misogynistic and racially bigoted. It is militaristic and elitist - and I could probably go on, but it is one of his best examples of pure "gee whiz" SF tech and that tech allows a initial corps of six men to recover the United States from a hostile take-over.

It was written shortly after the end of WWII and it was still probably acceptable to his readers to demonize orientals. He makes a mild case for American orientals - but he has the evil villains wipe them out - except for one fellow that manages to get to their hide-out. And after letting Mitsui ask the dumb questions so the white guys can explain the tech, he lets him die a hero. The premise is that at some point in the past the west cut off all contact with the far east, and in isolation this combined oriental race multiplied and suddenly attacked and devastated the US with a completely overwhelming force.

At one point, a couple of the good guys are discussing possibly recruiting women and decide against it. For one thing, they couldn't be allowed a public role in their game because the orientals despise women - but it is quite unclear that our heroes think much more of them than the evil yellow men. The orders go down, don't send any women, even to rescue them from forced prostitution.

But --- setting aside these few issues(?!) --- the solution they come up with is just a whole lot of fun. Although, and maybe this is one of its strengths, it really hardly qualifies as a novel - it is under 150 pages. Maybe his usual pontification got left on the cutting room floor.

Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein

You see, what happens when I am reading more than one book at the same time is that I tend to finish them in bunches. Actually, this was a replacement book. The second Heinlein novel on my shelf has gone back to the shelf still unread. I think I may have gotten a few more pages than the last time I tried it, but it is still garbage - as someone said, "Wasn't that one after he went crazy?" Yep.

This one, on the other hand, is another of the juvies - and a better one than the first one. The first one (first on my shelf, that is) Between Planets was a predictable little teenage boy adventure story. Our Hero saves the system and gets the girl. This one is a little more complex. Thorby is for most of the story a pawn of powers beyond his control. He first appears as a slave on the auction block. He is such an unappealing wretch that he is auctioned off to a ragged old beggar almost as a joke. The beggar, of course, is more than he appears to be and sets in motion a series of events which end with our slave child in a position of actual power.

The elements of a teenage boy adventure are still there, but Heinlein's causes are making a showing. Between Planets is the fourth of the dozen, this book is the eleventh - definitely a slicker product that the earlier one. Still, one of my favorites has always been Space Cadet, the second book, so I guess simple experience is not the answer. I actually remembered parts of this book - mostly the early stuff. But considering the years since I last reread it, that's not bad.

Why Don't Students like School by Daniel T Willingham

Interesting stuff. Doesn't have quite the free-read appeal of a good gory murder mystery, but very interesting in its own context. This is pop-sci (sort of), but Willingham is actually a cognitive psychologist - so he speaks with the voice of authority. Also, it runs along with much of what we covered in that course on Motivation and Learning. It was even more entertaining reading than the textbook for that course - although that was one of the most readable texts of my experience.

The bottom line seems to be a point that I tried arguing in my last education class, that if we want students to learn well and willingly then we, the teachers, must change. I'm afraid that teachers who want to be better teachers are becoming a minority. And I'm afraid that new teachers who want to become better teachers are going to find it difficult to find mentors who can and will help them. I am fully willing to grant that the lunacy which has taken over education at so many levels seems to be directed at making effective teaching and learning impossible - not least because those who seem to be in charge are not interested in learning - or teaching - only in test scores.

But, I didn't come here to rant about public education today. This is a well stated, if simplified, case for a rethinking the process.

The Shaman: The Star Stone Book One by Christopher Stasheff

It really isn't that I quit reading - that comes in August, but I have fallen back into my habit of having a book at my desk and one on my nightstand and another in the bathroom and my Kindle with another one in my handbag. Definitely has a negative effect on my completion rate.

That fragmentation may also (along with some non-book related circumstances) be affecting my attitude. I am not particularly enjoying either of the other two books (ok, so I exaggerated - my Kindle is tuned to the same book as my desktop) nor did I much care for this one. I'm not going to go into great detail about what I found lacking in this book, because Stasheff is a writer whose work I have always very much enjoyed - so for the time being I am going to assume that other things are fueling a bad attitude and that finding this book rather derivative and clumsy is probably more my issue than a flaw in the book.

I am going to add Stasheff to my "must reread" list and come back in a year or two or --- but I will come back. I enjoyed other series of his far too much to just write him off based on one book. And when I do I am going to actually reread Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague DeCamp's Incompleat Enchanter series as well.

Ehrengraf For the Defense by Lawrence Block

I don't usually care much for short stories, but this was fun. I've read a few of Block's Matthew Scudder books and a couple of other things (I think) which I can't remember particularly - but these stories are definitely out of a different pocket.

The protagonist (one hesitates to apply the term "hero") is a particular and extremely successful attorney. He is a small man and carefully and meticularly clothed, and he really does not care to actually appear in court. So, for an exorbitant fee, he guarantees that his clients will be discovered to be innocent and not be faced with the inconvenience and indignity of court appearance.

The reader is spared the narrative details of the actions which lead to this discovery, but the sequence of logic is fully outlined. All of this is done in gently dated language, just short of pedantic, which enhances the picture of Mr. Ehrengraf - even when he escorts the newly innocent grieving widow upstairs. The stories are well-polished little gems.

For me the mystery doesn't appear until the afterword, written by a fellow named Edward D. Hoch. To my memory, I had never heard of Edward D. Hoch and here is Block (whom I have heard of) writing an afterword to the afterword in which he implies that it is an enormous honor to have had Hoch comment on his work. So -- I went to the source of all information and looked up Edward Hoch.

The man published two or three mystery novels, two or three science fiction mysteries (bet Isaac A. had read them before writing his) and (drum roll, please) about nine hundred and fifty (950) short stories. He created somewhere in the vicinity of a dozen different series which were published in the myriad of mystery magazines which proliferated at the time - I am only familiar with the similar of body of works in the science fiction genre.

Most of Hoch's work was published (I gather - first Google page only - no serious research) in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. He was one of the writers who occasionally wrote as Ellery Queen and would have two stories in the same issue of the magazine. (Ellery Queen, BTW, is actually two guys.) Hoch has only been "collected" in print a couple of times - and those collections (according to the source of all print media) are not available.

Technically, I suppose they are available - but used paperbacks priced in the near vicinity of $100 are the same thing as unavailable to my way of thinking. This is annoying, one of those series is about a thousand year old coptic monk, and I am really curious. I suppose I could check the library ---

Between Planets by Robert A. Heinlein

It was a joke - well, sort of a joke. I told my advisor, also a Heinlein fan, that I needed to take the summer off because I had an entire shelf of Heinlein that needed rereading. Then I decided to try to make it to the end of the month without buying any more books. I have about a dozen "books on paper" and probably that many on my Kindle that I haven't read, but most of those are serious books - literature and non-fiction - that sort of thing. So, I decided the Heinlein might no be a bad idea.

First problem. What order to read them. The early stuff falls into roughly three categories: future history, Lazarus Long, and the Scribner's juveniles. All the websites that I looked at were more the "worshipful fan" type rather than any sort of logic based information - even the wiki. So, I decided to read them in the most logical order that I could manage without effort. I will read them in the order that they are on my shelf - actually, Heinlein takes up nearly two shelves - the order, once upon a time was alphabetical. That was a long time ago. I don't believe it has been completely disrupted since this was the first one - but who knows what I will find ten or fifteen books down the shelf.

It seems that this was the fifth of the juvies, and came out in 1951. It was never one of my favorites, therefore I haven't reread it as faithfully as most of the others and remember far less about it. I reread all of them when I took Jack Williamson's science fiction class (Jack was also a Heinlein fan - and enjoyed my paper). This one and Citizen of the Galaxy never really made it for me. The others I loved.

It isn't bad - it just isn't as good as the others. There's also the "here a miracle occurs" aspect. The tide of war is turned by the application of an alien technology. At least Heinlein, even in his period, was not one of those who always make it clear that it doesn't come any better than humanity.

Some of the "problems" with Heinlein are quite evident even in this juvenile work. He is definitely male chauvinist - although he allows that in the huge laboratory there was a "sprinkling of women" among the fifty or so scientists. He puts young Donald in uniform at the first reasonable opportunity. And our boy takes to it like the proverbial duck, shortly he is referring to himself as a soldier first, even though he is not a citizen of any of the planets, having been born in space, between planets.

The war is clearly patterned on the American Revolution - with the Venus Colony taking the starring role. A good share of the chapter titles are Biblical, which is curious, since the only religion which earns any respect in the book is that of the Venerian dragons. It could be that at the time of writing, Heinlein could make the assumption that most of his readers would recognize and fold into the context of the story the background and setting of the quotations. I'm not sure that would be a reasonable assumption today. I expect that most people are familiar with the phrase: "the handwriting on the wall," but I doubt if many would recognize "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" as the actual text of the handwriting on the wall that is the root of the saying.

I was afraid that the technological glitches would be very distracting. They weren't as bad as I had feared. Bits of it --- for example, as our hero is boarding a rocket ship he has to go through a security screening (I wonder what Heinlein would have made of airport security post 911). That wasn't what made me laugh, though. The screener warns our boy that the machine will fog the film in his camera. In 1951, it would have been difficult to imagine digital imaging techniques. Even in 2003, when I went to Africa, I took film, not just digital.

Heinlein's "preachiness" was fairly low key, although there were episodes which made his opinions very clear. Definitely a more practiced hand than Stabenow's in Second Star, although Stabenow clearly shows that the roots of her SF is in Heinlein.

A Sea of Troubles by Donna Leon

Who was it just a couple of books ago that turned a cartoon character into a real one? Right - it was Dana Stabenow in Midnight Come Again, she took cartoon cop, Chopper Jim, and made him into a replacement for Jack Morgan. It surprises me how often I find similar things in books by different writers. In this book, Leon reinvents Signorina Elettra.

Signorina Elettra, the incredibly beautiful, impeccably clothed in Milan's latest, unfailingly capable, unapologetically manipulative of the idiot Vice Questore Patta, whose computer skills (and catalog of friends in the right places) far exceeds those of the boy hacker genius in Mankell's Firewall, and whose creativity with bookkeeping knows no bounds - yes, that Signorina Elettra becomes a real person rather than an office goddess.

Of course, when she actually fell for the guy, you could almost see his shirt turn red before your very eyes. But even with a novel's worth of remake, the final scene of a bedraggled and half-drowned Elettra with chunks of hair shorn off at the scalp searching the beach for her missing lover is truly stunning. It makes me want to read the next one to see what happens next - guess that's the point.

For some reason, perhaps because Leon rather batters the reader with it in Brunetti's musings, but I was really struck with the general acceptance of governmental corruption and incompetence, and the flip side - the assumption that cheating the government is not only reasonable, but appropriate. Here we deplore, without surprise, governmental waste, fraud, and abuse, but I really think that most of us are comparatively honest in our dealings with governmental authority. Maybe that is because perhaps our government is institutionally corrupt, but perhaps not so stupid as Leon portrays the Italian government. This may be the first of the Brunetti books in which Guido does not have to call on his father-in-law, the count, for help and inside information. And this is the first one in which there has been such a display of contempt for the Carabiniere. If I have my cops sorted out correctly, the force to which Brunetti belongs, housed at Venice's Questura, is the equivalent of the Venice Police, the Carabiniere are more or less like the State Police, but I do seem to remember that they have some national connection, as well.

Brunetti's character seems to have changed a little, too. Of course, Vice Questore Patta was on vacation for the entire duration of the book - I know it always changed my approach to the job when certain tin-pot dictators of my acquaintance were away from the scene of "trying to get it done."

Firewall by Henning Mankell

The scope of this one is no less than the destruction of the world-wide banking and financial network, with the intent of bringing down the entire system and the economies of the entire industrialized world. The principal criminals and their intentions are not really hidden from the reader - the question is whether or not Wallander can put the pieces together in time.

There is a running focus on young people - as victims, as criminals, as pawns, as citizens of a drastically changed world - including one particularly loathesome little sociopath who nearly brings down Wallander's career.

The entire picture is muddied by crimes that seem to be related, but may be coincidental - or may have been used by the criminal masterminds specifically to confuse the issue. As the title implies the setting for the crime is primarily in cyberspace and is heavily protected. Wallander brings in a private consultant - in the person of a teenage boy who has just served a short jail term for successfully hacking the Pentagon's protected network.

We also find the perpetually depressed Wallander the victim of a sneak attack by one of his own troops who starts carrying slanted and completely false complaints to the lady chief of police. Wallander also, in a moment of weakness, takes daughter Linda's advice and registers with a dating bureau with disastrous results.

In the end, Wallander metaphorically attacks the psychological "firewall" that is keeping him from getting on with his life.

Still Alice by Lisa Genova

The book club was grumpy with me for selecting a book that was not exactly a pleasant read. This one was, for me, at least, much tougher than Never Let Me Go. Part of that is no doubt because I kept seeing Mother travel farther and farther away into her own little world. At least I didn't see my father in Alice's husband who had so much difficulty accepting and dealing. Granted, in the end he didn't dump her and run as it seemed he might.

Both Genova and Ishiguro brought me right inside the character and made me angry. Angry at Kathy because she stayed around after her childhood friends were cut up for spare parts to fulfill her own destiny as spare parts when she could have just disappeared into society. Angry at Alice because when the time came to take her prepared way out, she was too far gone to do it, so she fulfills her "destiny" as well by degenerating into a mindless creature incapable of tending to her own basic physical needs.

The difference is that the cloning for parts issue is in some fictional future. Alzheimer's is here and now and very real. I'm not sure Genova really intended to write a horror story, but Alice is a highly educated woman at the top of her field and from the beginning she is aware that she is losing bits and then whole chunks of herself. The abilities on which she based her identity slide away from her - and she is aware of them going. And eventually, she reaches the point where she is no longer aware of the degeneration - and that seems almost more horrifying. And perhaps the most horrifying thing is the knowledge that one of her daughters has the gene defect and will (not may) also develop the disease - and that daughter has children, each with a 50% chance of carrying the gene.

On the other hand, I rather think that everyone who must deal with Alheimers or any form of progressive dementia (what Mother had was not Alzheimer's although the effects were similar in many respects) should read this. And that could be any of us.

Deadly Decisions by Kathy Reichs

In the first book, Tempe's best friend forever is actually killed. In book two, her sister, Harry, is nearly a victim. This time it is her nephew, Kit, Harry's son, who is nearly killed.

Nineteen year old Kit has been dumped on Tempe by her oblivious sister and his father who may have been at the point of homicide himself. Nineteen year olds can have that effect on their elders. Of course, no one bothered to tell Tempe that his father is furious because the kid has picked up a drug conviction and refuses to see the light. He has also picked up a habit of hanging out with members of motorcycle gangs.

Motorcycle gangs are the main focus here. The opening scene is of a nine year old child lying on the autopsy table, the victim of a couple of stray bullets in an ongoing gang war.

This gang war stretches geographically from South Carolina to Canada and historically over a period of several decades. We get a broad view of its brutality both in individual actions and the group mentality. Gruesome stuff.

On the personal front, Tempe comes (again) to a tentative truce with Detective Inspector Claudel. And Ryan has gone undercover. Birdie, at least, manages to stay out of trouble after being ferried to Montreal from Charlotte by aforementioned nephew and his father because he hates to fly. Katy is on some sort of oceanographic expedition in the south Pacific and is well out of the way for this one.

Midnight Come Again by Dana Stabenow

First, Mutt is alive and well - and a good thing, because if she hadn't been I would probably have had to give this series up.

In the previous nine Kate Shugak books, Jim Chopin was drawn in as essentially a cartoon character. He is bigger, and more handsome than most men. His uniform and heliocopter sparkle with "more than oriental splendor." He is known as "the father of the park" for the number of dark-haired, dark-eyed girls who have fair-haired, blue-eyed babies. He is the classic laconic western lawman whose very presence causes fully adult grizzly bears to cower and slink away. He is called by all and sundry Chopper Jim, in clever play on his name and his usual mode of travel.

Now having done away with Jack, a more or less rounded character, who except for his mindless obsession with Kate, has a life and problems and a vague touch of reality, Stabenow, rather than creating a new brooding, perverse character to interact with Kate, has decided to promote Chopper Jim to personhood. I think actually she has created a new character, but she is hanging the new character in the general framework of Chopper Jim. We see things from his point of view; we actually spend more time with him than with Kate in this story. He has become obsessed with Kate now that Jack is out of the way - to the extent that he is no longer interested in casual sex. Now that is enough to make it clear that he is a different character.

The main action takes place outside the park, in Bering. The mystery plot is Russian Mafia. The background story plot is Kate's recovery. And for the second time, Stabenow leaves us with a hook into the next book. Last time she dropped us with Kate holding Jack's body and Mutt at the point of death at their side. This time she returns to the park to find Jack's son, Johnny, at her homestead.

It's okay, I guess. But that sort of trick always seems to me to speak of insecurity. The author isn't sure that the reader will return unless she leaves him with an unanswered question. Perhaps she caught a lot of flack for killing Jack - that could account for it.

In the last book, Hunter's Moon, the chapters were headed by quotations out of the chapter itself. I think this was the first time that she has done chapter headings. In one case, the purpose was clearly to mislead the reader. The quote was "I thought you were dead." The reader then hangs on to that when Jack is killed thinking that somehow he is saved after all, but it is actually one of the bads speaking to Kate herself. In this book she uses quotes from a native American poet, including the one that Jack quoted to Kate about "Light bright shining." It was an interesting transition. I'll be watching for them in the future.

Hunter's Moon by Dana Stabenow

I should have known that drastic change was in store when Kate agreed to allow Jack and his son, Johnny, move in with her. I just didn't expect it to quite so drastic. I have already gotten the next one because I need to know if Mutt made it.

Stabenow polished off several running characters in this one. And again evil with greed as its core has brought about a truly hideous sequence of events. The body count in this book was the highest yet. The best was when Kate leads her pursuer into the waiting arms of a six-hundred pound grizzly. The worst - I don't even want to think about it.

The plot itself is fairly simple. A corporate retreat with an agenda of take-over by murder with the Alaskan Bush framed for the crimes. The result is a bit excessive. Really, not enough story and too much shooting and killing in general.

A writer of series fiction has to be aware of the fact that readers get involved with the background story which continues from novel to novel. This makes it risky to make the changes to radical. Having taken unthinkable steps, she must then be prepared to take action to re-engage the reader. At least I can read the next book immediately, unlike those who discovered this series as it was coming out and had to wait a full year to see what happens next.

Double by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini

I've often wondered how two people write a book. I remember reading how a pair of fantasy writers, each well-known, although I can't remember either of their names at the moment, sent drafts back and forth and revised and rewrote independently on the same text. There were the banking mysteries by Emma Lathen, who was actually two women, but the stories were seamless. I tried it one summer a number of years ago with a classmate, and it was a nightmare.

This is something I had never quite imagined. Muller and Pronzini actually wrote this story in parallel. Muller writes in first person as Sharon McCone and Pronzini writes in first person as Wolf. They take turns religiously, and actually start out investigating quite different crimes. They are both off their home turf of San Francisco in San Diego for a PI convention. The first two "chapters" actually cover exactly the same time frame - Sharon's and Wolf's arrival at the convention and their initial foray into the convention mix - including their encounter and conversation with each other, repeated verbatim in both segments.

To my amazement, it actually works. I'm not sure it is a format that I would enjoy reading for an entire series, but it was entertaining for this one.

I may have to read some of Pronzini's stuff. He uses an odd little gimmick - the nameless detective. We readers do not get to know Wolf's name. He discusses the nickname "Wolf"; it annoys him, but he accepts it from McCone and shares it with a small boy that he encounters. His name isn't a secret. He tells it to people when asked. It is on his convention badge, which he puts in his pocket. But the reader is never made privy to this bit of information. In fact, he does it so casually that I might not have noticed that if I hadn't read the write-up on Amazon before I bought it.

Sharon also runs into Kinsey Milhone at the convention. There may be others that I simply didn't recognize. Reminds me of Asimov's murder mystery about a convention which included writers and booksellers. He dropped the names of any number of actual writers, including himself, but I'm not sure he included any characters from other writers' work.

One Step Behind by Henning Mankell

Every time I think Mankell has created as perverse and bizarre a serial killer as possible, and every time he comes up with something equally or even more strange. And this time he throws in the almost unthinkable, one of Wallander's team is killed - not in a shoot-out with an armed suspect - in his apartment as part of the killer's work.

Also, here we have Wallander forced to face his own mortality in several ways. He has been battling unexplained fatigue, then he realizes that he is constantly thirsty and is making many visits to the mens room. Got it yet? One of his younger officers observes that her father had similar symptoms and was diagnosed as a diabetic. When he is finally forced to seek medical help, his blood sugar level is something like 300 (rough approximation from the European standard measuring scale) and his blood pressure is also quite high - 180/105, I think. I wonder if Mankell himself has been there, because Wallander's response is very typical. He begins with denial and marches through the stages.

The ending is so very uncharacteristic that I would expect the series to be ending - except that according to his wiki it seems that there are several more books in the series - not to mention at least two television series: a Swedish one and a British one starring Kenneth Branagh. At the end of this book, Wallander is happy.

With the last one, I had concluded that depression is Wallander's normal state - perhaps the normal state of Swedes in general, since it is also a noticeable factor in the Stieg Larsson books. Then there is the Swedish singer, Anna Ternheim, one of whose albums is in the CD player in the car - beautiful voice, depressing lyrics. But I suppose I shouldn't generalize from such a small collection of observations. After all, he was happy at the end of this book - I'll have to read the next one to find out how long that lasts.

Life after Forty by Dora Heldt

This was pleasant. Not a must read - but a really good "read on the plane" sort of story. The translation ran smoothly; I didn't notice any particular oddities of phrase or word choice. Of course, I believe most European children start actually learning a second language (usually English) very early and continue the study through school.

I'm not quite sure how to classify the story - maybe that implies some depth that I have not perceived. It would be a "coming of age" story - but with a main character who celebrates her fortieth birthday during the course of the story - that sounds a little silly. It reads rather like a romance, but it isn't one. I guess it was just the story of a divorce - and, appropriately, treats it as a process rather than an event.

It opens on the day that Christine's husband drops the divorce bomb (by phone - what a jerk), and ends with a celebration, as her friends put it, not of her divorce but of the new life she has begun a year after she thought her life had ended.

There is no great revenge, no scene of vindication - although we do gather more and more about what a colossal jerk her (ex)husband is. We see a lot of women coping in various ways and Christine working her way through all of their individual approaches to similar situations to find her own way.

I still don't see why she couldn't take her cat to Hamburg, though.

The Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell

Someone reminded me that our Swedish cop, a couple of books back, went on indefinite leave from his job suffering from depression after killing a man in the line of duty - as cop drama would have it - a righteous shoot. He was on leave for eighteen months apparently without treatment or supervision. Definitely not the way things are handled in American police forces. In this one I am finally realizing that depression is part of Wallander's personality - and it seems to apply pretty generally to many of his colleagues as well. His father has died, within days of their trip to Rome - and he is not merely grieving, but feeling guilty because they had not repaired their relationship years earlier. One of his officers is shot and nearly dies and he obsesses because he didn't know that the suspect was armed.

Hamlet is frequently referred to as the "melancholy Dane" - are Swedes also given to melancholia? I've heard that Finns are, it probably has something to do with the lack of sunlight in the far north.

We have again the satisfaction of deserving victims in this book. The octogenarian bird watcher and the florist/orchid fancier have dark pasts which have caused the killer to select them for fairly gruesome deaths.

There are two layers to the title of the book. We know one from the very beginning that Wallander does not discover until the very end. The killer's mother was killed along with a group of nuns somewhere in Africa and the letter that she finally receives from a police officer there sets things in motion. It seems that the international press were given the story of the four nuns, but the powers-that-be elected to suppress the fact that a Swedish tourist was also murdered. They essentially wrote her out of existence. The young officer while going through the dead woman's possessions finds several unfinished letters to her daughter and is persuaded that she must notify the daughter of what has happened in spite of the possible repercussions affecting her own career. The second "fifth woman" is the killer herself. As Wallander follows chains of conjecture he senses that there is a "fifth woman" just out of reach.

The next one of these I have on paper. My sequential reading has finally caught up with the stack of books that a friend loaned me back about spring break. Still, these are so grim that I need to read something in a warmer climate before going on to the next one.

The Main Corpse by Diane Mott Davidson

I know I was apologizing for reading a book every day for a while here - not that I didn't finish this one until some idiotic hour this morning, and went to bed without writing the post. I didn't finish it earlier because I went down to school yesterday morning and that stretched into afternoon - and I'm afraid that my summer to read a book every day is shot to hell and gone. After doing six graduate hours in four weeks last summer, I swore never to do it again - but it looks like it is going to be nine this summer - and six during the regular semesters. They had better be easier than the ones I took last summer. It reminds me of a cheezburger caption - mostly pretty dumb, but every now and then --- Anyway, "What?" he says, "You knew I was a cat when you brought me in the house." Here it's - "What? You knew I didn't have a master's when you hired me in the first place."

Back to the book.

Maybe it is my personal aversion to white stuff falling from the sky and covering roads and that sort of thing, but I sometimes wonder if Davidson actually likes living in Colorado. She does talk about the glorious blue skies and the resin-scented air and says things like "These days are the reason why we live in Colorado." But there always seems to be a bank of black clouds on the horizon or "the promise of the day faded ... ."It seems to me that implies that there are many days which are not days which would persuade one to live in Colorado. And it seems to be those days which constitute an overwhelming majority of days - at least in Aspen Meadow and environs. I think I prefer a climate where - this wasn't actually about here exactly, but about my hometown - the golf course boasted that you could play golf three hundred sixty days a year. It might be chilly or windy on some of those three hundred and sixty days, but if you wanted to play, you could. Only five or six really bad days in a year - now that's a liveable climate (as long as you don't mind heat and the occasional breeze).

All of that to get to the beginning of the story. We open with snow and ice and an outdoor function - in June. And into a convoluted story of greed (on so many levels) and faithlessness and murder and general mayhem. On the other hand we have a new family beginning to gel as a unit - in spite of the fact that Goldy, this time deliberately, gets involved in a murder and actually becomes a felon before all is said and done - but she HAD to break Marla out of jail!!

At the heart of the story of the family Schulz is a bloodhound named Jake who has been given a dishonorable discharge from the police force for matters beyond his control. Tom rescues him from the animal shelter and takes him home to Arch who has wanted a pet for most of his life and is presently mourning the loss of Julian who is off at Cornell. Arch and Tom are determined to repair Jake's damaged training and Goldy is determined that if she must have a dog in her house, couldn't it be more like a cat --- at any rate, not an 80 pound drooling, howling monster.

Needless to say, Jake earns his creds by saving Goldy and Arch and by finding any number of bodies - both dead and alive. And almost everyone important gets out alive.

Just a side note - maybe not so much a side note given that the recipes are the gimmick in these. Davidson has seen the light and a good share of her recipes are now low fat/low cholesterol. If they are not, she generally issues a gentle warning - in this one she tells us that someone refers to one of the recipes as "a heart attack on a plate." Remember a couple of books back when Marla had the heart attack? I wonder if someone in Davidson's real world got the same wake-up call.