January 2018 started with a newly published book reviewed in the New York Times and followed that with the first in a highly successful series. 2018 looks to be a good year for reading!
The Written World by Martin Puchner Smoothly written summary of how reading (not writing) has changed human civilization. While the effect of writing on human culture is a given. reading has perhaps not been studied as much, and reading, just like writing, can be subversive, clandestine, and rebellious. While the New York Times made this sound like an academic treatise, I found that while much historical research had been done by the author, it doesn't fall within my definition of academic. There are chapter notes, but without footnotes, it was painstaking to check interesting facts or anecdotes. Nicely illustrated, with good examples from around the world and through time.
Tombstone Courage by J. A. Jance It's pretty much impossible to live in Arizona, be a mystery lover, and not have read J. A. Jance. And while I have read several, I hd never read the first Joanna Brady mystery. My library recently acquired audiobooks of the series, so I went completely against my natural inclination to jump willy-nilly into a series, and listened to the first. It's easy to see why the series has been a hit from the beginning, but I must protest the narrator. She used a riff on a faux Southern accent for the Arizonans, and I can assure after having lived here 30 years, native Arizonans do not sound southern. And she mispronounced Chiricahua, but I guess I can't hold that against 'foreigners."
The Cat of the Baskervilles by Vicki Delaney Cute idea for a series--an expatriate Londoner operates a Cape Cod bookstore dedicated to all things Sherlock Holmes (clearly riding the wave of the popularity of the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock). So many things that I would love--the location on Cape Cod, the setting in a mystery bookstore, and I wouldn't call myself an Anglophile but I've been to England and I love old English mystery series. But yet again, the author has the amateur detective snatch a piece of evidence from the crime scene and not tell the police about it--argh! I absolutely hate it when authors do this, give the main character the snobbish presumption that they know better than the professionals. Our Heroine, Gemma, makes several comments throughout the story that were a tad arrogant and put me off the character. In fact, Our Heroine actually muses, with regard to the detective investigating the murder, "She didn't like me and she didn't trust me, and I didn't fully understand why." Hello? You stole evidence from a crime scene, and I'll bet it's not the first time you have done that, Gemma; why would she like you? And when the police detective Gemma is romantically attracted to tell her that Det. Estrada is a a good police officer, Gemma muses that "I had yet to be convinced of that." Hmm, second-guessing the love interest? Not a good start for a romance. The dog trainer in my cringed when reading about her friend's "rambunctious six-week-old cocker spaniel;" puppies are generally only just getting weaned completely by 7-8 weeks, so a 6-week-old pup shouldn't be in its new home. Slipshod facts like that, so easy to check on the Internet, bother me. I found myself only tolerating Gemma for the sake of the bookstore on the Cape, and frankly that's not enough for me to pursue the series. I'd give this one a C--the setting on Cape Cod and in the bookstore is promising, the mystery and the whodunnit were solid enough (although the reason for the murder was a little unrealistic in my opinion, but that's not too much of an issue for me), but the main character grew more and more grating.
