My Weekly Book

This is an excellent example of a very specific genre, and one I’m rather fond of – historical true crime. Typically a writer will take a crime or similar incident and then review all the evidence and available historical material, writing it into a narrative and reaching a conclusion accordingly – or not, depending what has survived and what modern sensibilities make of the evidence.

Dashiell Hammett, for anyone unfortunate enough to be unacquainted with his work, is (along with Raymond Chandler) the progenitor of some of the most definitive hard-boiled crime detectives around, including Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (who, incidentally, looks nothing like Humphrey Bogart on paper. But that’s another story.)

This is the third in a series of novels by the prolific Scots author Alexander McCall Smith featuring that philosopher, seeker after a good life and tireless student of human nature Isabel Dalhousie. It was picked up in impulse off a library shelf without my having read the second in the series, entitled Friends, Lovers, Chocolate, and with a certain amount of amused tolerance. This was because I like the work of Alexander McCall Smith a lot, but sometimes feel it would be better if he wrote a bit less. And this series is the one I could most easily see go by the wayside.

Here’s just one among many reasons why I love my local library – because I can walk in and pull books like this one off the shelf. I’ve long had an interest in such works – the writings of Victorian antiquarians such as William Crossing who sought to document the life, landscape and ecology of Dartmoor.

This is a literary curiosity – a book about an improbable imaginary footrace that draws its inspiration from improbable but actual footraces of the past. It’s a book about running, and also about a range of other sports. It’s a historical saga that encompasses a surprisingly varied cast of characters and there’s about as much off-track action as there is racing detail.

The pitch of this book is very simple – if you want to complete a half-marathon (13.1-miles) or marathon (26.2 miles) but aren’t perhaps what most observers would regard as a classic long-distance runner, it will provide you with the tools to do it.

I’d signed up with the understanding that this text was no easy undertaking and felt that receiving it in bite-sized chunks might actually make it a bit more of an achievable project. And the book itself is difficult.

The dominant theme running through the entire length of this fine sequel to CJ Sansom’s first historical whodunnit Dissolution can be summed up in a single word: desperation. In fact, the whole thing reeks of it as we rejoin our lawyerly protagonist Matthew Shardlake some three years after the encounter with Thomas Cromwell that led to the events of the previous book.

I’m one of that annoying breed: a specialist in a particular period of history who tends to get really worked up about how it is portrayed in popular culture. Thus, when the nearest and dearest suggested that the oeuvre of one CJ Sansom would be right up my alley, I was at pains to point out that it would have to be an authentic Tudor alley, identifiable to the correct area of London, with an absolutely unimpeachable historical provenance and no incorrectly-butchered bones visible in the ordure, never mind neologisms in the graffiti.

Everybody knows that Alan Moore has long been staking his claim as both the coolest and the most sensible individual in Britain – and here’s another item of proof.

I have recently (defined here as during the last few months of 2010) been seized with a passion for reading The Brontës. It’s hard to remember what kicked it off – I think an urge to revisit Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in the wake of reading one of those books that takes a classic as its theme and then riffs on it. The book may, in fact, have been Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair. But, whatever it was, it has faded in importance compared with the project it started.

This isn’t a review of Forster’s seminal text on the structure of the novel – this is my notes, written to summarise what is argued in each chapter.

What I’m hoping to read in July.

This is at least my fourth encounter with the Journey to the West story – and the chances are that you’ve encountered it too, although not necessarily going by that title.

We seem to have been reading Julian May for ever. This is partly because her Saga of the Exiles and Galactic Milieu series run to quite a number of books and partly because each of those books is long in its own right. Also, the world she has created in their pages is on an operatic scale and mightily absorbing.

What is this book? A business textbook? A self-help guide? A social manifesto? In fact it is all three, in that order, and arguably decreasing in effectiveness as it moves for one to the other.

The premise of this book is both simple and seductive. What would be the fate of the planet if humanity simply ceased to exist?

It’s the halfway point in the year and time to pick up the reins. The plan: half of 52 books in the second half of 2010. A book a week for the second half of the year.

A year or so ago, I read and greatly enjoyed The Saga of the Exiles, on the recommendation of someone who had first come across them in childhood. Much more recently I became interested in Jungian psychology as one of the very few areas where science meets mysticism on terms that are not complete and utter nonsense. And there are striking parallels between the two.

In the spirit of looking forwards not backwards, and in ensuring this blog is ready and raring to go for 2009′s weekly book challenge, here are six-word reviews of the entire 2008 reading list.