Quite Elementary

You’ve seen the movies and shows. The haunting, but jaunty, violin music that follows Benedict Cumberbatch all over modern London. The signature intense cuts of Guy Ritchie. The unforgettable stained glass knight. Joan Watson.

If you’re feeling a bit sated by the sweet holiday movie/book offerings, here are a few Sherlock  spinoffs suitable for cold winter nights.

Julian Barnes sets the stage around Sherlock’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in Arthur and George as he sets off to solve a mystery in “real” life. 

Anthony Horowitz sends Sherlock and Watson on a new case in The House of Silk. He follows it up with Moriarty which explores what happened to Sherlock and Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. Although it’s more graphic (ummm much more graphic) than the original mysteries, the suspense is just as thrilling.

Laurie R. King focuses the plot around Holmes’ wife Mary Russell. King explains how they met with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. If you find yourself hooked, find the complete series list (in order) here. The star in these books is the exotic locale which varies in each book.

Nancy Springer puts the spotlight on Sherlock’s younger sister, Enola Holmes, in this series of nine books written for the YA set.

Books We Love Day

Every year around Thanksgiving, NPR publishes this list.

If you are shopping for the book lover on your list, or just in the mood for something new to read, the possibilities are endless. Here are five searches I tried (and my favorite result).

rather short/seriously great writing/funny stuff

Y/N by Esther Yi

book club ideas/historical fiction/realistic fiction

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon

eye-opening reads/identity and culture/it’s all geek to me

Hey, Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing

by Emily Lynn Paulson

biography and memoir/comics and graphic novels/family matters

My Picture Diary by Fujiwara Maki (translated by Ryan Holmberg)

staff picks/rather long/tales from around the world

Stolen by Ann-Helen Laestadius (translated by Rachel Wilson-Broyles

Murder She Baked

When I first started reading Joanne Fluke’s series a few years ago, I had no idea it was being adapted into mystery movies. Imagine my delight in discovering that our HULU live subscription (obtained to watch sports) includes offerings from the Hallmark Channel. You might say a little something for everyone, including my teenage son who is just as likely to watch a Hallmark Christmas movie as he is a football game. Until the Christmas romance watching commences, I’ve been biding my time with the Hannah Swenson mysteries, some of which can be found under the title Murder She Baked. While true to the characters, the movies do change the perpetrators from the books, so no spoil alerts needed if you are watching after reading.

If you do want to read before you watch, this is a post I wrote about the books in 2016.

In the murder mystery series by Fluke, Hannah Swenson owns a bakery in Lake Eden, Minnesota. However, in between baking the next day’s batch of cookies or catering her mother’s Regency Romance club, she has a nasty habit of stumbling upon dead bodies.

Comfort food for the serial reader, this series is predictable in plot (find a body, eat chocolate, go behind boyfriend detective’s back to interview suspects, make a cake, get trapped in a small space with the killer, eat more chocolate).  Swensen’s obsession with new recipes (helpfully printed at the end of each chapter) and the dilemma of which suitor to marry - detective or dentist - is quaintly old-fashioned, in our age of Instagram and Tinder. Also, comforting, once you’re hooked, is knowing that there are 17 or 18 more to read.

And recipes involving double or triple chocolate to try.

"I should have known better than to let myself get swept away"

When a movie comes out on a streaming service we don’t have, I look to see if it was based on a book. So when I saw this trailer, I was excited to find Loveboat, Taipei by Abigail Hing Wen. If you enjoy this one and the second, Loveboat Reunion, you’ll be thrilled to know  Loveboat Forever comes out next week.

In the first book, it’s the end of senior year for Ever Wong. She’s been accepted to a pre-med program at Northwestern. Her parents are ecstatic. Little do they know she’s been secretly applying to dance programs. And little does she know they’ve signed her up for an intensive language and culture program for the summer in Taiwan. In the program, she meets Xavier, the son of a mogul, who would rather be drawing than aspiring to run a company. Other key players (pun intended) are cousins Rick and Sophie. Rick becomes one of Ever’s love interests and Sophie discovers her prowess at social connections can be put to good, after she admittedly does some evil  

Fans of Crazy Rich Asians will find some familiar tropes - social media exchanges, extravagant parties, people who own private jets, and matchmaking schemes. Wen provides plenty of teen angst, over the top drama, and will they/won’t they moments to keep the plot moving.

Turns out they almost always will.

"What if pretending to enjoy life is the same as actually enjoying it?"

My reading interests lately have ranged from romance to historical fiction to social commentary. And of course sprinkled in are the lighthearted murder mysteries (if such a thing isn’t an oxymoron) as they become available on my holds list.  

End of Story by Kylie Scott

Winterland by Rae Meadows

Summer Stage by Meg Mitchell Moore

The Trackers by Charles Frazier

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman (Thursday Murder Club series)

“it sliced right through me”

When poet Christian Wiman was diagnosed with cancer, he knew he believed in something, but “what,” he writes, “was considerably less clear.” His book My Bright Abyss is a collection of ruminations on faith, belief, love, death, and grief.

As a poet, he often includes excerpts from his own writing along with stanzas from both lesser and well known poets and theologians. As someone in my book club aptly observed, this “complicates” things. But reading this book wasn’t meant to be a simple matter of sitting down and opening it. His musings and interweaving of other writings makes you pause, think, reread, take notes, reread, and breathe.

As a recent episode of this show proposes, some things are meant to be savored. This book is one of them.

“Christ is God crying I am here, and here not only in what exalts and completes and uplifts you, but here in what appalls, offends, and degrades you, here in what activates and exacerbates all that you would call not-God.”

Amway

There’s a moment in her appearance at Seattle Arts and Lectures where Ann Patchett describes the Peter Dukes of her twenties (Peter Duke is a character from her new novel).  And she charms the audience by describing how one young man charmed her by pretending to sell Amway. Later in the conversation with Melinda French Gates, Gates makes reference to Amway and Patchett says, “That’s going to be your take away?!” 

My take-away is going to be the fabulous list of recommendations she peppers throughout her interview. And of course I’ll be anxiously awaiting my own copy of Tom Lake arriving from Elliott Bay Book Company, a bonus perk of supporting SAL.

 

Ann Patchett recommends….

Monsters by Claire Dederer

Do Tell by Lindsay Lynch

Swing Time and The Fraud by Zadie Smith

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

James by Percival Everett

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

Absolution by Alice McDermott

Fool for Love by Sam Shephard

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Checkhov

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy

The Orchid Thief and The Library Book and On Animals by Susan Orlean

The Magician’s Elephant and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and The Beatryce Prophecy and The Puppets of Spelhorst by Kate DiCamillo

WooHoo! You’re Doing Great! Sandra Boynton

The Moment of Lift by Melinda Gates

Earn Prizes!

Miss the pizza coupons and pencils from your childhood summer reading program? Many local libraries now have summer reading programs for adults! For example, here’s the Book Bingo card from the SPL and their list of reading suggestions.

Here are a few suggestions of my own that explore relationships on set, on the stage, and in the great outdoors:

Every Summer After by Carley Fortune

Happiness for Beginners by Katherine Center

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld

The Friendship List by Susan Mallery

They’re Going to Love You by Meg Howrey

Weather Girl by Rachel Lynn Solomon

And I’m looking forward to these new releases coming out later this summer:

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

What are you looking forward to reading this season?

Lily Brooks-Dalton

These may not be your typical beach reads, but these two novels by Lily Brooks-Dalton are thought-provoking imaginings that are haunting in their realism, and entirely plausible in their prophecy. 

The Light Pirate

“There is a necessary tension between knowing how nature works in theory and witnessing it.”

Wanda is born during a hurricane. Although her father and brother work tirelessly as linemen to keep the lights on, eventually the strength of the increasingly frequent storms is too much for Florida’s infrastructure to handle. Most people become climate refugees as the state shuts down for good, but Wanda stays behind in the only home she’s ever known. Under the tutelage of Phyllis, a naturalist and survivalist, Wanda becomes adept at adaptation, the new superpower in this unrelentingly hostile environment.

Good Morning, Midnight

“He had never been satisfied and never would be. It wasn't success he craved, or even fame, it was history: he wanted to crack the universe open like a ripe watermelon, to arrange the mess of pulpy seeds before his dumbfounded colleagues. He wanted to take the dripping red fruit in his hands and quantify the guts of infinity to look back into the dawn of time and glimpse the very beginning. He wanted to be remembered.”

Augustine opts to remain in the Arctic after the rest of the scientists leave upon news of an impending disaster affecting the rest of the planet. In the hasty departure, he finds that a little girl, Iris, has been left behind. Meanwhile, Sully and her crew have just been to Jupiter and must speculate why all communications with Earth have been disrupted. Even though Augustine has Iris for company, he diligently tries to connect with others on his ham-radio. In this way, he’s able to connect with Sully who has been likewise scanning the frequencies for proof of life. Faced with an unknown future, human connection offers the only hope.

"best day ever"

Does anyone else have July 21 marked on their calendar? In honor of the big event, I'm reposting something I wrote in 2017. 

Growing up, I had one Barbie doll. She wore roller skates and a neon yellow sports outfit. However, she was often relegated to the back of the closet since I much preferred playing with “My Friend” dolls.  

When my daughter was in kindergarten, she began asking for Barbies. Most were modeled after the Disney princess characters, but she also favored Barbies who were going to the beach. When we packed up to move last year, she gave the whole collection away. She has held on to her generation’s 18” doll.  

So I was curious, but not invested in, the story of Ruth Handler, the brains behind Barbie. Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World's Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her by Robin Gerber opens with Ruth Handler in court. Her company, Mattel, is being accused of shady financial practices.

This dramatic opening sets the stage for Handler’s life. Gerber rewinds from the 1970s to Handler’s early years in retail. We learn how her business acumen, along with the creativity of her husband Elliot, launches her into business.

After a few years in the toy business, Ruth decides to create a doll that allowed girls to “project their dreams of their own futures as adult women.” As Gerber says, “Boys and girls did not just play with different toys; they grew up to be men and women [like Handler] who created different toys.”

Just as fascinating as reading about Barbie’s birth, was learning the story of how toys grew from being a Christmas commodity to one that is sold year-round. Television played a big role in making this shift as it changed the timing of the sales and manufacturing of toys. Designers also had to take into consideration how a toy would look on television.

After leaving Mattel and struggling with breast cancer, Handler created her second business. She developed and sold a product called “Nearly Me” - a silicon breast prostheses.

Whatever your opinion on Barbie’s suitableness as a role-model, it’s hard to disagree with Handler’s. Despite her later legal troubles, she became a leader in a male-dominated field and created an iconic toy that has made it onto kids’ Christmas (and Birthday and Tooth Fairy and Last Day of School) lists for generations.  

Oof

Fans of Laurie Frankel and Miriam Toews rejoice. If you appreciate their dark  humor, you’ll revel in We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman.

Ash and Edi have been best friends practically from birth. Now they must face Edi’s impending death. Edi says her goodbyes to her young son and husband and moves into a hospice facility near Ash’s family. Over the next few weeks, a revolving cast of characters visit Edi, bringing lip balm, bagels, and approximations of “The Cake” - a lemon pound cake she tasted once and has never been able to replicate. When Ash isn’t keeping Edi company, she’s juggling her own cache of lovers, trying to persuade her daughter to go to class, and sharing meals with her ex, Honey.

How do you say goodbye? How do you reconcile loss with life? Whose idea was it to name a candy horehound? All these questions and more are broached with love and humor. Death is messy. Life is messy. And sometimes all you can do is embrace the corporeal to deal with it.

Oh, and near the end, there’s a bit about petrichor. Always a good sign of a good read.

“heaven could just be a fog machine in Orlando”

I rediscover the podcast On Being every few years. This time around, I stumbled onto a series within the series called The Future of Hope. The first interview was between journalist Wajahat Ali and theologian Kate Bowler.

This led me to Kate Bowler’s memoir Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved. At the center is how she responds to the news, as a young mother, that she has stage 4 cancer. As a professor of theology at Duke Divinity School (as well as a student of the prosperity gospel), she is surrounded by prayer, yes, but also plenty of empty platitudes.

If you’ve ever wondered what to say, or what not to say, to someone experiencing loss, that in itself is a good reason to open this book. But as you read, you’ll also find yourself reflecting on suffering, the perspective of time, and, with good humor, a little hope.  

"we will experience times of great inner emptiness"

Last fall, I was invited to join a book club with some Benedictine oblates. This month’s selection was The Forgotten Desert Mothers written by one of the Benedictine sisters, Laura Swan.

As Swan writes in the preface, “Women’s history has often been relegated to the shadow world: felt but not seen. Many of our church fathers became prominent because of women. Many of these fathers were educated and supported by strong women, and some are even credited with founding movements that were actually begun by the women in their lives.”

Swan begins by outlining the cultural context of these women as well as a description of what is meant by desert spirituality. She then shares and comments on the sayings of more well-known desert mothers such as Syncletica and Theodora, and catalogues the brief biographies of nearly 40 lesser known women who chose this ascetic life.

Especially as we experience the liturgical desert of Lent, these women have much wisdom to share on humility, grief, anger, overindulgence, and self-awareness.  

“When I encountered the ammas,” Swan writes, “they made sense of the desert in my life.”

Similar =

The Libby app has a new (to me) button labeled “similar approximately equal sign.” So far it’s been more approximate than equal. After staying up all night finishing Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, I, of course, wanted to find something similarly engrossing. Kudos, Libby, for pointing me to Laurie Frankel’s Goodbye for Now. However, I don’t think I’ll be picking up Hot Response by Ruby Scott anytime soon (though I’m sure it’s engrossing in another sense of the word).

So here’s a very brief similar to list of my own making:

If you were intrigued by The Bletchley Women, you might try books by Beatriz Williams. Start with Our Woman in Moscow and then dive into her books about the Schuyler sisters.

If you want to recapture the whimsy of One Day in December, try Jenny Bayliss. My hold on The Twelve Dates of Christmas came in sometime in mid January, but I’d be happy to read that one and Meet Me Under the Mistletoe even in August.

If you were inspired by Carrie Soto is Back, try Head Over Heels by Hannah Orenstein. And then go behind the scenes of a professional, albeit amateur, matchmaker in Playing with Matches. Oh! And then you have to read Meant to be Mine if you like a good fatalistic rom-com.

"All My Puny Sorrows"

With the release of the movie Women Talking, you may be curious about the book from which it's based. You could read the book or (about its author here or here), but I also recommend reading one of her earlier works, All My Puny Sorrows. This is a repost from 2015.  

“Our house was taken away on the back of a truck one afternoon let in the summer of 1979.” So begins the novel All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews. In it, Yoli’s family can’t seem to catch a break. In childhood, it’s because her family balks against the rules of their conservative Mennonite village in Canada. They harbor a forbidden piano to foster her sister Elfrieda’s musical talents. When not at the piano, Elf spray paints the letters AMPS (“all my puny sorrows”) around the village in further rebellion.

In Yoli and Elf's adult years, the family suffers from Elf’s unhappiness. Elf’s career as a concert pianist is overshadowed by her multiple suicide attempts.Yoli has been traveling back and forth from Toronto to support her mother and brother-in-law and sit at her sister’s bedside. When not at the hospital, Yoli can be found sitting on her friend Julie’s porch. It is here the novel provides cathartic humor to balance the sadness of the rest of Yoli’s day. 

Toews brightens the pages of this devastatingly sad novel with Czech violinists, Italian agents, huffy nurses, and eccentric aunts. The brightest character, however, is Yoli. Her struggles to see her sister’s point of view, her texts with her teenage children, her endless to-do-lists, her trysts with mechanics and violinists, and her sometimes flinching optimism all carry the reader onward - even when the Kleenex box is empty.

"the whole world opened up"

Now is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson

To be a teen in the 90s in small-town Tennessee means going to the community pool, watching daytime TV, or driving listlessly to all the usual haunts. For Frankie, whose triplet brothers don’t shy away from mayhem, it also means having access to a photocopier they somehow procured. She and her new friend Zeke, an artist, revive the copy machine and decide to use it to create something artistic. She writes the words, a manifesto of sorts. He illustrates. And they both splatter the page with a constellation of blood. 

After they begin papering the town with their flyer, all kinds of conspiracy theories emerge, causing unease, and then panic, as rumors spread farther afield. By the end of the summer, the havoc they’ve unleashed dismantles their friendship as well. 

Twenty years later, a journalist reaches out to Frances, a semi-successful YA writer, about her involvement. Frances must decide whether to tell her story, reckoning with her past, or keep silent.

Wilson never disappoints with his exploration of the phenomenon of combustible human relationships. If you haven’t yet read his work, The Family Fang and Nothing to See Here are must-reads too.

Blah Humbug

The weeks after Christmas always hit hard. I find myself sleeping more, eating more, and when I’m not doing those two things, reading more, of course.

Luckily, I found two books perfect for this in-between time. Although ostensibly not Christmas books, they help make that transition from holiday rom-com to New Year fitness videos more palatable.

Something from Tiffany’s by Melissa Hill

If you’ve seen the adaptation on Amazon, you know that the plot is somewhat convoluted. A taxi accident outside of Tiffany’s results in a mix-up of two shopping bags, resulting in a surprise engagement for one character and a disappointing Christmas morning for another. While the movie scores points for simplifying the resolution, the book takes delight in prolonging the inevitable with the added bonus of being set in Ireland.

A Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting by Sophie Irwin

Fans of Jane Austen and Daisy Goodwin take note. Kitty Talbot is left in charge of her four younger sisters, and mountains of debt, when her parents die. Her solution is to embark upon London during the “Season” to find a wealthy husband. Her plan almost succeeds until she’s foiled by the older brother, Lord Radcliffe, who discovers the scandal of her family’s past. Rather than admit defeat, Kitty agrees to leave the family alone in exchange for Lord Radcliffe’s insider knowledge to help land her next target. You’ll dive in for the period details and stay for the cute repartee between Kitty and her foe.