ONE GOOD TURN by Kate Atkinson

Two years after the windfall in Case Histories that left Jackson Brodie a wealthy man, he's in Scotland with his girlfriend, who's involved with Edinburgh's Fringe Festival.

A shady character who calls himself Paul Bradley--sometimes--is there too, driving through a crowded street, when suddenly a scruffy actor steps out in front of his rented Peugeot. Bradley brakes and swerves, a blue Honda Civic bumps him from behind, the driver gets out and comes after him with a baseball bat, and a laptop computer sails out from the onlookers and clips the Honda driver on the shoulder.

The Honda driver disappears. Nobody can remember what he looked like. Only one person took note of his car's license number: Jackson Brodie.

Enough said. Detective stories are meant to be read, not summarized. Kate Atkinson's plots are intricate and full of surprises. Her characters are nearly believable and usually hilarious. I'm not sure whom I liked better, Gloria the moralist ("If it had been up to her she would have summarily executed a great many people by now--people who dropped litter in the street, for example, they would certainly think twice about the discarded sweet wrapper if it resulted in being strung up from the nearest lamppost") or Martin the feckless crime writer (his current novel "felt even more trite and formulaic ... than his previous books, something to be read and immediately forgotten in beds and hospitals, on trains, planes, beaches").

Not to mention Tatiana the dominatrix, Archie and Hamish the teenaged thieves, Louise the frazzled detective, Richard the insufferable guest, Graham the mob-connected builder...

If it weren't for the fact that Atkinson tells a great story and keeps the pace brisk, I'd probably classify One Good Turn with literary fiction, not only for her witty style but also for the way she deftly probes her characters' motivations. I just wish she were bothered by comma splices. After all, as she herself pointed out, "Gloria liked rules, rules were Good Things."

But that's a forgivable flaw, even for this former English teacher and editor. Atkinson ranks right up there with P.D. James and Donna Leon as an author I love to spend my evenings with. James, who has written 16 mysteries, will turn 93 next week. Leon, who has written 22 Commissario Brunetti mysteries, is almost 71. Atkinson, with only 4 Jackson Brodie mysteries so far (© 2004, 2006, 2008 2011), is a mere 62. Ms. Atkinson, it's time for another one!
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The publisher figured One Good Turn would be a good title for book clubs, so there are a couple of pages of rather tedious questions at the end. I agree that book clubs could enjoy this book, and I in no way blame Ms. Akinson for the questions.

CASE HISTORIES by Kate Atkinson

Having run out of mysteries by Donna Leon and Michael Connelly and C.J. Sansom and P.D. James and Peter Lovesey, I am deeply grateful to whichever of my bibliophilic friends recommended Case Histories (2004). As Stephen King gushes in his front-cover blurb, "Not just the best novel I read this year, but the best mystery of the decade."

From the start, the story sounded eerily familiar: a child gone missing over 30 years before; three feuding sisters; a weird cat lady next door. About halfway through the book, I finally Googled Jackson Brodie, the private eye who was working this case along with several others.

Oh right - a year or two ago, my husband had recommended a Masterpiece Mystery episode because it starred Jason Isaacs, known to Harry Potter fans as Lucius Malfoy. David thought I would want to see how he looked with dark brown hair. (Stunning!)

It was a good show, and I plan to watch more episodes now that I've read the book. I also plan to read the next three Jackson Brodie books, and no doubt some of Kate Atkinson's other novels as well. The woman can write!

Jackson is a typically depressed private detective -  divorced, bitterly at odds with his ex, absent-mindedly devoted to their eight-year-old daughter, trying (but not too hard) to give up smoking, taking on jobs that are "either irksome or dull" because he needs the money. Originally from the north of England, he now works in Cambridge, where for 12 years he was on the police force. He's attractive (and attracted) to women, but there's no love in his life.

He was currently seeing more of his dentist than he had of his wife in the last year of their marriage. His dentist was called Sharon and was what his father used to refer to as "stacked." She was thirty-six and drove a BMW Z3, which was a bit of a hairdresser's car in Jackson's opinion, but nonetheless he found her very attractive. Unfortunately, there was no possibility of having a relationship with someone who had to put on a mask, protective glasses, and gloves to touch you.

He wishes he could throw it all over and escape to France.

Jackson doesn't show up until page 45, however. Up to that point we learn about three case histories - the missing child (1970), a murdered 18-year-old girl (1994), a young mother who goes berserk and - does what? (1979) - with which he will eventually be involved. We suspect the stories are somehow intertwined.

When it comes to detective stories, I have a couple of pet peeves. One is overcomplexity: I like to be able to follow a story without taking extensive notes (I eventually quit reading Elizabeth George, who is a fine novelist, for just that reason). My other pet peeve is shifting viewpoints. Very few novelists are able to switch from the mind of God to that of the detective to that of the criminal without sounding like poorly edited amateurs.

Kate Atkinson managed a complex plot and over half a dozen viewpoints without ever causing my pet-peeve alarm to buzz.

Because so many viewpoints are represented, Case Histories is not a procedural, though a certain amount of detective work is involved. Neither is it a thriller, though it includes a few fights and one big explosion. It would be misleading to call it a psychological novel: though it's literary, it's by no means a navel-gazer. There are many puzzles in the multiple stories, but the emphasis isn't on whodunit. I guess I'd just call it a brilliant detective story and resist adding subclassifications.

Atkinson's characters, like most people we know, are simultaneously tragic and comic. I suspect that she, like Jackson, believes that her job is "to help people be good rather than punishing them for being bad."

And maybe that's why - apart from the author's obvious skills in plotting, characterization, and literary style - I really liked this book. Despite all the human frailty and downright evil portrayed in it, the underlying tone is optimistic. Sometimes it's even laugh-out-loud funny.
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Warning: There's enough sex in this book - most of it pretty amusing - that you might not want to read it aloud to intergenerational family groups.

COOKED by Michael Pollan

Eat food.
Not too much.
Mostly plants.

--Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food

In The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), science journalist Michael Pollan looked at how food is produced. In his next two books, In Defense of Food (2008)and Food Rules (2009), he told us what we should eat (see above). In his most recent book, Cooked (April 2013), he investigates the methods, biology, and philosophy of food preparation.

I loved Omnivore: it's one of those rare books that can get a person fascinated by a topic that previously held no interest whatsoever. The two Food books were thin but full of wise advice, such as Pollan's now-famous seven-word guide to good eating.

Cooked, at 480 pages, should have been thinner.

I enjoyed Pollan's introduction, which is essentially the speech I heard him give at a nearby college a couple of months ago. Cooking, he says, is what separates humans from all other species--or at least so wrote the Scottish biographer Boswell in the 18th century, the French gastronome Brillat-Savarin in the 19th, and the French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss in the 20th. In fact, numerous writers suggest, cooking (rather than hunting and gathering) made civilization possible.

Unfortunately, Americans in the 21st century seem to be devolving: we now spend less time than people of any other nation preparing our meals, though we watch an incredible amount of cooking-related TV. "The premise of this book," Pollan writes, "is that cooking--defined broadly enough to take in the whole spectrum of techniques people have devised for transforming the raw stuff of nature into nutritious and appealing things for us to eat and drink--is one of the most interesting and worthwhile things we human beings do."

Pollan explores four of these techniques in the book's four sections, "Fire" (grilling: barbecue), "Water" (braising: stews), "Air" (baking: bread), and "Earth" (fermenting: sauerkraut, cheese, wine, beer). In each section he observes and often works alongside masters of the particular craft, not only describing each process but also telling how to reproduce the ancient methods today, how they work biologically, what they offer nutritionally, and how the results taste.

Part of the fun of a book by Pollan is the way he interacts with his topic. My favorite story in Cooked is about the night he and his son, Isaac, decided to "cook" a meal using only convenience foods bought at Safeway. It's not exactly a spoiler to let you know the outcome: more time, more expense, and less family time at table than when they cooked meals from scratch. And besides, after the first three bites everything tasted alike.

Still, 480 pages turned out to be more than I wanted to know. I found myself skimming though many descriptive pages that needed to stop circling and come in for a landing. Pollan could have condensed his material into one fantastic magazine article, or maybe even four of them. His book-length treatment, however, seemed excessive.

Besides, I wondered, why was the guy who told us to eat "mostly plants" devoting maybe three-quarters of his book to meat and dairy?

If you haven't yet read a book by Pollan, don't start here: you are more likely to be entranced by The Omnivore's Dilemma. If you already love Pollan's writing (or his frequent commentaries on TV), go ahead and read Cooking. Skim if you need to: just as you're thinking, he does go on, doesn't he, you'll hit a trenchant observation that keeps you reading. Like this, for example, on the role of alcohol in religion:

Alcohol has served religion as a proof of gods' existence, a means of access to sacred realms, and a mode of observance, whether solemn (as in the Eucharist) or ecstatic (as in the worship of Dionysus or, in Judaism, the celebration of Purim). The decidedly peculiar belief that, behind or above or within the physical world available to our senses, there exists a second world of spirits, surely must owe at least a partial debt to the experience of intoxication. Even today, when we raise and clink glasses in a toast, what are we really doing if not invoking a supernatural power? That's why a glass of water or milk just doesn't do the trick.

I'll drink to that.

CATASTROPHIC CARE: HOW AMERICAN HEALTH CARE KILLED MY FATHER--AND HOW WE CAN FIX IT by David Goldhill

This week the company my husband works for unveiled the health-insurance plans available to us beginning July 1. If we chose the plan closest to our current plan, our premium would nearly double and our office visit co-pays would increase 25-50%.

I am so glad we are going on Medicare in August.

Medicare isn't perfect, by any means. It isn't even cheap. Just the insurance (Medicare medical, Medicare supplement, prescription) is going to cost us more than $500 a month, and that doesn't include the deductible or the prescription co-pays. And that's for this year. Who knows what it will cost 10 years from now?

I was so ready to read a book that would solve America's health-care crisis.

Besides, David Goldhill's title is irresistible: Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father - And How We Can Fix It.

First the bad news. Goldhill, who is president and CEO of the Game Show Network, got interested in health care when his physician father "died from a hospital-borne infection he acquired in the intensive care unit of a well-regarded New York hospital." In his early chapters, he piles up statistics about how truly dreadful our health-care system is. Wherever you are on the political spectrum, you need to read his "eleven strange things we all believe about health care." (Goldhill is a Democrat who thinks Obamacare will not work.)

After the bad news, Goldhill gives all kinds of wonky explanations about why our approach to health care doesn't work. This section will probably appeal most to free-market-loving Republicans. Despite being a lefty who distrusts the market, I found it very helpful.

Finally what we're all waiting for: Goldhill's solution. My daughter Molly should have written this book: she recommended an almost identical solution to me a couple of months ago when we had a long discussion about health care. (Molly and I do not agree about a lot of political issues, but we have respectful and helpful discussions. We don't see the point in today's political polarization: differing opinions can increase clarity and come up with better solutions than either side could do on its own.)

In a nutshell: Insurance should be reserved for catastrophes - unforeseen big-ticket expenses like major surgery or cancer treatment. Anticipated health-care expenses should come from health-care savings accounts. And there needs to be some kind of safety net.

What Republicans will like: Consumers need to have control of their own health-care dollars. There's no reason to siphon off 20% or more to insurance companies. Besides, when we pay for things ourselves, we tend to be a lot more careful about what we buy. We comparison shop. We avoid unnecessary expenses. And to get our money, providers compete with one another to provide good care at low prices.

What Democrats will like: Everyone must have a health-care savings account - no exceptions. Most people will build up a good-sized balance when they are young. As they age, they will start to draw from it. People whose emergencies cost more than their savings can borrow to cover the additional expenses. At a predetermined level, they need borrow no more: the government will make up the difference. Nobody will be left without health care: the government will provide the safety net (though not by running the program).

What everyone except certain industries and lobbyists will like: Prices must be completely transparent and equal for everybody. The market isn't free if people don't have the information they need to make smart decisions.

What nobody will like: There will be limits. Just because something sounds good in the TV ads doesn't mean everyone should have access to it. Some treatments (especially those that have little proven worth in lengthening lives) will not be available. Some will be too expensive and most people will choose to forgo them. Some will be available, but only to people who have lots of money to spend.

My favorite health-care book is still T.R Reid's The Healing of America. (See my review on this blog or in Christian Century, if you subscribe.) The fact is that a lot of other developed nations have much better health-care programs than America's. They get better results. People live longer. And they do this for about half our cost. Before we do anything else about health care, we need to lay aside our prejudices and study what these other countries are doing.

But if Reid should be required reading for legislators, Goldhill should be too. As Goldhill points out, America's politicians are unlikely to accept a lot of features that make perfect sense in other countries. We need a program that fits with our own weird beliefs and behaviors--one that combines vigorous free-market competition with a safety net for everybody.

Someday we may actually come up with such a program. But probably not until we understand, as Goldhill says, that "at some point, we will have to decide whether our attachment to the idea of helping people is more important than actually helping them--a decision that will require a rethinking of our assumptions."

THE MOONLIGHT SONATA AT THE MAYO CLINIC by Nora Gallagher

Ten years ago Nora Gallagher wrote Practicing Resurrection, a memoir involving her brother's death, her Episcopal parish's response to their recently uncloseted gay priest, and her own process of deciding whether or not to prepare for priesthood. Publishers Weekly's anonymous reviewer loved it: "With a poet's ear for language and a novelist's eye for essential detail," she wrote, "Gallagher offers a compelling story of her journey toward 'a wholeness bought at the cost of suffering.'"

OK, I confess: I wrote that review. And I also loved Gallagher's earlier memoir, Things Seen and Unseen (1998), about her brother's cancer and her own coming to faith, all taking place within the framework of the church calendar with its major feasts and fasts.

So I was twice happy to learn from Gallagher's website that "Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic is part three of a quartet on modern faith as it is lived out"--once because this new memoir is about her journey into what she calls the Land of the Sick, or Oz (a land I know better than I'd like to), and twice because if this is part of a quartet, there's yet another book coming.

Let me say right up front that you should read Gallagher's other two memoirs first. They reach out to a broader audience. They are more finely crafted. They will allow you to befriend Nora before going with her on this darker journey where both physical and spiritual health are challenged.

The story begins in November 2009 when the vision in Gallagher's right eye goes blurry. She hasn't been feeling well anyway--headaches, queasiness, fatigue--so she schedules an appointment with her doctor. He doesn't like what he sees, and for the next two years Gallagher goes from specialist to specialist trying to find out, and hopefully to fix, whatever is wrong.

There's an element of medical mystery about her story, and I'm not going to spoil it by telling you the eventual diagnosis. Suffice it to say that it will not raise your opinion of American medicine in general: "Doctors were often baffled; the system of specialists who did not follow up on patients made it worse." The Mayo Clinic comes up smelling like roses, however. (Personal note: My experience at Cleveland Clinic, where I had open-heart surgery in 2011, was similar to Gallagher's at Mayo. Both have stellar reputations for the quality of their health care, and both have found ways to keep costs below the national average.)

Gallagher is a spiritual writer, and a person facing a major health crisis tends to have major spiritual concerns. I'm not going to spoil the account of her spiritual journey by telling you how her illness affected her faith, either. I'll only say that she and I--two women of about the same age, both of us having spent years in the Episcopal Church, both of us living with scary health conditions--look for peace in somewhat different places.

You may not identify with this memoir if you are young, or if you have never faced a life-threatening illness, or if you are a conservative evangelical. You'll probably want to read it if you prefer questions to answers, if you've faced serious illness or are caring for people who do, or if you work in health care and wonder how it feels to be the one on the examining table.

I'll finish by quoting a few paragraphs, one of Gallagher's many asides, that I particularly enjoyed:

I once interviewed Jews who had recently emigrated from Russia in one of the openings in the Cold War in the 1980s. Many of them had survived the siege of Leningrad. They were living in a retirement home in Denver. One of them took me aside after I had been there for a few days and said, "Tell me, Nora. Is everyone in America always fine? I ask someone how they were doing and they reply, always, 'Fine.'"
     I explained to her that this was a commonplace; a custom, it meant nothing. Relief showed all over her face.
     "Ah," she said. "That's good. Because I am rarely fine." (Later, whenever they saw me, they would chorus: "How are you? We are fine!" and then laugh uproariously.)
     I missed them, I thought. These were people who understood not fine.

THE GOLDEN EGG by Donna Leon

If you're already a Donna Leon fan, all I need to tell you is that the 22nd Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery was published March 26.

If you're not already addicted to the Brunetti books, you can check out a complete, chronological, annotated list of each book in the series here.

Or you can read a perceptive short review of The Golden Egg in the New York Times's April 5 crime column by Marilyn Stasio. In fact, even if you are a fan, I recommend this review. Stasio highlights the important theme running through this book:

“If the Brunettis had a religion,” Leon tells us, “it was language.” And so this thoughtful policeman is also led to brood over the debasement of language by the politicians and bureaucrats who cynically confuse, misdirect and misinform the public.

In The Golden Egg, language

• is the basis for hilarious dinner-table games at the Brunetti household.
• obfuscates the police bribes Brunetti is asked to investigate.
• is oddly absent from everything connected with the life of the slain dry-cleaner assistant. 
• becomes an important tool in Brunetti's investigations (should he speak Italian or Veneziano? Will his Neopolitan assistant be able to relate, since she doesn't speak the local dialect?).

Language is also the subject of Brunetti's extended meditation in the closing chapter. Here's a sample:

He drank a glass of wine, left the second one unfinished, drunk with the words that crossed the table, their different meanings, the fact that they indicated time: future and past; that they indicated whether something had been done or was still to do; that they expressed people's feelings: anger was not a blow, regret was not tears. At one point, Paola expressed a wish and used the subjunctive, and Brunetti felt himself close to tears at the beauty of the intellectual complexity of it: she could speak about what was not, could invent an alternative reality.

Language is probably why so many of my friends - many of whom are writers, editors, or publishers, and most of whom love words - are hooked on Leon's mysteries. Language, and food. Brunetti's wife, Paola Falier, seems to have few responsibilities at the university where she teaches English literature; she is nearly always home in time to prepare magnificent meals. Fritto misto. Baked finocchio with rosemary. A salad of carpaccio of red beet, ruccola, and parmigiano. Involtini of chicken breast. Cake with fresh black currants and whipped cream. I can't imagine why Brunetti's Cookbook, aka A Taste of Venice, is no longer in print. Maybe it should have been called, more accurately, Paola Falier's Cookbook.

To be sure, readers of detective fiction don't always appreciate the Guido Brunetti series. Some of the books are police procedurals, while others, like this one, focus almost entirely on Brunetti's deductions. There may be violence, but it is usually offstage. It may take awhile to get to the murder - if indeed a murder has occurred. It's often not too hard to figure out whodunnit. Brunetti's wife and children are as important as his coworkers at the questura. And Leon keeps tossing in Italian words, as I just did, without translating them.

Those are all reasons that I love the series, but I don't want to take you there on false pretenses. If the subjunctive, used correctly over a bowl of risotto, never brings you close to tears, perhaps you should read a different series instead.

P.S. If you hate spoilers, don't pay any attention to this book's title.

THE TOOTH TATTOO by Peter Lovesey

It seemed appropriate last week, when my dentist was replacing five fillings, to show him the book I was reading: The Tooth Tattoo by British writer Peter Lovesey (published April 30).

Like Lovesey's Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Diamond, I had never heard of tooth tattoos, but my dentist told me he had done some. He then hauled out a handful of photos to show me the possibilities. My favorite showed a Canada goose on the upper molar and a bullet on the corresponding lower molar.

In Lovesey's latest novel - the thirteenth in the Peter Diamond series - an almost unidentifiable corpse is discovered in a canal. The one distinguishing feature, so faint that it was missed by the first medical examiner, is a tattoo on one of the corpse's teeth. It appears to be a quaver, or an eighth note. Diamond and his team spring into action.

But all is not well at the Bath CID. Diamond's coworkers fear that, due to the economic crisis and government cutbacks, their jobs may be on the line. Diamond's churlish behavior, even more extreme than usual, seems to confirm their fears: they have no way of knowing that he is in the midst of a crisis of his own.

When I read the first 12 Peter Diamond books last year (for a review in Books and Culture magazine, "A Rough Diamond"), I grew increasingly enamored of the burly Bath detective's exploits. The Tooth Tattoo, I think, is one of Lovesey's best. Like the others, it's a procedural puzzle, but here Lovesey pays more than usual attention to Diamond's personal life. In addition, much of the novel focuses on the relationships among the members of a world famous string quartet. (If you like music-themed mysteries too, see my reviews of Morag Joss's Sara Selkirk series and Donna Leon's The Jewels of Paradise.)

You don't need to have read the rest of the series to enjoy this book. After you've read it, though, you may want to go back and check out the others. Here's a list of all the titles.

FAT CHANCE by Robert H. Lustig and SALT SUGAR FAT by Michael Moss

If you eat food, here are two newish books you should know about.

You may already have met Robert H. Lustig, author of Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease (2012). Lustig is the UCSF professor whose surprisingly riveting 90-minute lecture, "Sugar: The Bitter Truth," has already had nearly 3.5 million hits on YouTube. The thesis of his lecture: it's not dietary fat that's making Americans gain weight, it's sugar. And sugar is doing much worse things than increasing our clothing size. It's setting us up for a whole range of lethal diseases that are almost entirely avoidable.

In Fat Chance Lustig writes about sugar, going into much greater detail about what it does in and to our bodies. He also writes about how various foods cause physical addiction, how the food industry keeps us full of junk, how the government helps the food industry ruin our health, why people gain weight, why diets fail, how people can lose weight--he's all over the map. But if you're not enslaved to linear thinking, you may well enjoy this fascinating collection of data and explanations as well as Lustig's sassy attitude.

Don't be put off by the title, by the way. I think it and the cover illustration are both insulting and misleading, and the subtitle makes the book sound like either an extended scold or a dreary set of rules for would-be ascetics. No, no, no. Lustig goes to great lengths to avoid blaming or shaming people who wish they weighed less. His concern is with keeping people--both convex and concave--in good health, and he'd like all of us to join his battle against the Evil Food Empire that is doing us in.

Once you've read Fat Chance you'll be loaded for bear. Michael Moss to the rescue--he'll tell you where to aim your rifle.

In Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (2013), Moss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, tells what the food industry has been up to during the last couple of decades. Food executives, Moss says, are nervous: people are figuring out that convenience foods aren't good for them.

Stripped of nature's nutrients and loaded with fat, sugar, and salt, most of today's grocery-store items are engineered to provide the maximum taste thrill for the minimum price so food companies can make maximum profits and give Wall Street maximum satisfaction.

As engineered foods have gained popularly, however, their consumers have gained weight. At the same time, obesity-related diseases have added billions of dollars to health-care costs.

"Obesity is literally an epidemic in this country, and some people's ideas for addressing this public health issue could directly or indirectly affect the entire agriculture industry, from farm to consumer," a Philip Morris vice president, Jay Poole, warned an agricultural economics group.

Yes, that Philip Morris. The cigarette manufacturer, who once fought any publicity indicating that smoking might be bad for you, owned General Foods and Kraft in 1999 when Poole issued that warning, and they acquired Nabisco the next year. The food giants--including not only Philip Morris affiliates but also Kellogg's, Coke, Oscar Mayer, Cargill, Frito-Lay, and Dr. Pepper--had no intention of letting customers slip away to the produce aisle.

They would fight back with whatever weapons they could muster: the science of addiction, misleading labeling, false claims, selling to less regulated countries, advertising to children, relentless lobbying of legislators and government agencies.

I especially enjoyed Moss's repeated observation, after lunching with one food company executive after another, that the executive looked trim and healthy--and would not eat his company's products. You might not want to either after you've read this book.

Oh, and never fear--Salt Sugar Fat is not a downer (unless you read it while drinking Coke and eating Fritos). It reveals, but it doesn't preach. You'll enjoy the stories Moss tells. He hopes you will find it a useful tool for defending yourself when you walk through the grocery store doors.

Books + food + friends = a delectable book group

I'm not normally a fan of online book clubs. I mean, what's the point? Book clubs should be events where friends get together to eat and chat, sometimes even about books. Move that online and you lose everything except the part about the books, and if I want to spend my alone-time reading (which I do) electronically (which I don't), why not just fire up the Kindle and read another book?

And then Cook the Books ("a bimonthly foodie book club marrying the pleasures of reading and cooking") emailed David and me to see if we'd judge one of their contests.

My first reaction: flee. I already have a stack of books in my office that I have to read for another contest, and the last thing I wanted was another accusatory stack. But I read on.

Cook the Books, it turns out, was asking us only to read blog posts about a book--The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri--and choose the post we liked best. We had already read the book, which I'd reviewed on this blog (here). That's why they came to us, though their first choice would have been Signor Camilleri himself. Maybe the fact that he's 87 years old and a heavy smoker made them think he wouldn't have time.

After we found out more about Cook the Books, we were happy to accept. It's different from most online groups. Participants don't just read and comment; they write whole blog posts. And they don't just write, they actually invent recipes and cook them. And even though the four hosts live in Hawaii, California, Indiana, and New York, two of the other participants got together in real time and spent an afternoon cooking up their entry. This was beginning to sound like a real book club, but tastier. How could we resist?

Here's how Cook the Books works (their complete guidelines are here).

Every couple of months, the website's hosts choose a book that has something to do with food. (For a not-quite-up-to-date list of previous selections, a main course of fiction with the occasional nonfiction contorno, click here.) They announce their selection on their website and encourage other people to join them.

After they and their readers have read the book, they use it as inspiration for cooking something--maybe a recipe that is actually in the book, maybe one they create based on a description from the book, or maybe one that just seems to go along with the book's spirit.

Then each participant--the hosts and anyone else who joins them--blogs about the book and the food.

The judge then reads the blogs and chooses one. "You can use any criteria you like," one of the hosts told us.

Now that sounded like our kind of assignment! If you'd like to know how it turned out, you can read our comments here. Or you can just look at this picture of the scrumptious soup we couldn't wait to make after we'd read the recipe, and try to imagine how we made it.

Bibliophilic foodies, take this idea and run with it. If you like to read and cook, I'm sure the Cook the Books club will be happy to have you join them. Better yet, start a local chapter, cook your own recipes (alone or together), meet in somebody's kitchen, and share the bounty! (If you live near me, get in touch...)

HOW AN ECONOMY GROWS AND WHY IT CRASHES by Peter D. Schiff and Andrew Schiff

One of my fiscally conservative friends told me I should read this book if I wanted to know why Keynesian economics are a politican's best friend. I interpreted that to mean "why Keynesian economics suck." Oh no, I thought. Booooring. But then she added that the book was funny, and my heart leapt up. I like funny books, even if they're about economics.

Yes, How an Economy Grows is funny. Peter D. Schiff and his brother, Andrew J. (known mostly for his lament about how hard it is for a family to live in Brooklyn on $350,000 a year), explain free-market economics by means of an extended fairy tale enhanced with hilarious cartoon illustrations by Brendan Leach.

The story begins with three men, Able, Baker, and Charlie, who live alone on an island and stay alive on a diet of one fish per person per day. (If it occurs to you that the first man's name should be spelled "Abel," that could mean you're a proofreader, in which case this book will drive you nuts: it is littered with typos.) Many generations later, the island has a brisk fish-based economy, a strong manufacturing sector, and a booming trade with other islands. But then a monsoon hits, and the powers that be (especially Franky Deep) decide to issue Fish Reserve Notes to use in trade instead of actual fish, and Lindy B. funds the Great Society by issuing ever increasing numbers of Fish Reserve Notes (without keeping actual fish in reserve), and Slippery Dickson closes the bank's fish window to foreign depositors, and Roughy Redfin grossly outspends his revenues, and George W. Bass and Barry Ocuda bail out the banks--every one of these leaders egged on by villains such as Ally Greenfin and Ben Barnacle--until eventually the Sinopians, who by this time own most of Usonia, decide to cut bait and keep their fish for themselves.

On the positive side, the Schiffs managed to keep me awake while they explained their economic beliefs. I am impressed by the fact that Peter Schiff accurately predicted the recession of 2008 while many economists were still saying "Don't worry, be happy." As a parsimonious descendant of Puritans, I agree that savings are basic to economic health and that excess debt is perilous. Like the Schiffs, I think we're in trouble when the goods we consume are mostly produced elsewhere and our major export is dollars. I fear that the Schiffs may be right when they say (as David Stockman recently did in the New York Times) that we're in for a big crash in the near future.

But when I look at the kind of government the Schiffs would like to have, I see some really big theological problems. You don't have to be religious to see the problems, however: I suspect they are theological problems because they hurt people.

First, everything in this book's imagined universe is about money (well, fish), and how to get more of it. Oddly, the actual fish that sustain life in the early chapters become means of exchange and even storehouses of reserves in the later ones. Our daily bread (Matthew 6:9-13) transmutes into the rich fool's overstuffed granaries (Luke 12:13-21). People who are poor are barely mentioned in the Schiffs' tale: on their island, the poor do not exist. By contrast, in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the duty to care for the poor is one of the major themes. "Blessed are you who are poor," said Jesus, "for yours is the kingdom of God" (Luke 6:20). "You cannot serve both God and money" (Luke 16:13).

Obviously the poor are not well served by an economy that crashes, and perhaps the Schiffs would argue that their principles would be better for the poor than is our present precarious situation. Perhaps so, but that brings me to the second theological problem: the system the Schiffs describe might have worked very well before Adam and Eve developed a taste for apples, but in a world where everyone is infected with a touch of greed (see concupiscence), the Schiffs' system  is as dangerous as any other system we might invent. They do a fine job of showing how the government can screw things up--and indeed it can--but they are silent about how businesses can do the same. In their story, "Franky Deep" established disastrous policies in response to a monsoon--a natural disaster. In the real world, the Great Depression happened after decades of industrial monopolies, inhumane labor practices, and wild stock-market speculation--all unrestrained by the government.

I have no illusions about government. On the depravity scale, big government may be just as depraved as big business (though it's getting hard to distinguish between the two, since one buys the other and then uses it to accomplish its purposes). Ideally the two would form some sort of reciprocal deterrence system, checking each other's excesses, though that's not easy to accomplish in our multinational economy. But I think I know enough about greed to suggest that if businesses were left entirely to their own devices, the world's economy would soon consist of an interlocking network of immensely powerful monopolies that would "grind the faces of the poor" to an extent undreamed of by the prophet Isaiah (3:15). Heck, it's happening already.

So what's the answer to our economic woes? Well, if we--as individuals and as a nation--could somehow manage to understand that we need to pay (now, not during the next administration) for what we want, we could probably come up with something, especially if what we want includes concrete ways to lift people out of poverty. And yes, there are politicians (like Bill Clinton) and CEOs (like Bill Gates) who are devoting a lot of time and money to meeting human need.

But most businesses turn a goodly percentage of their profits into marketing whose aim is to persuade us that we always need more now; and most politicians spend vast sums trying to persuade us that if we elect them, we can have something for nothing; and most self-help books tells us that we really need to take care of ourselves better... and the beat goes on, and will go on, until one day it turns into the loudest crash yet, followed by ominous silence.

The Schiffs' ideas will not stave off the evil day, because the Schiffs do not take human nature into account. Politicians who follow their libertarian approach most likely have something other than ideas to sell. As do the Schiffs, for that matter, and they make no secret of it. Peter Schiff owns the brokerage firm Euro Pacific Capital, "an SEC registered investment advisor and full service broker/dealer that seeks to help American investors prepare for a global economy that may no longer be dominated by the U.S. dollar." His brother Andrew--the financially struggling one--is its director of communications and marketing. Peter is also CEO of Euro Pacific Precious Metals: that is, he sells gold.

Their father, Irwin Schiff, whose ideas they develop in this book, is serving a 13-year prison term for tax evasion. His lawyer's contention that he "had been diagnosed with a chronic, severe delusional disorder relating to his beliefs about the federal income tax system" did not sway the judge.

KNOTS & CROSSES by Ian Rankin

The test of a really good mystery: you can read it more than once and still get caught up in the story, even if you remember whodunnit.

To be honest, I didn't mean to reread Ian Rankin's first Inspector Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses, a second time. I knew I'd checked it out of the library some time back, but I thought I'd read the first chapter and quit. That must have been some other novel. As I read it this time, I kept realizing what was going to happen, and not because the plot was thin (it wasn't). Finally I googled my book lists and discovered that indeed I had read the entire book less than a year and a half ago.

I liked it even better the second time (and am likely to remember that I read it). Now I'm ready to follow in the footsteps of my husband, who, I believe, has read every one of the Rebus books and has seen some of the TV adaptations too.

Knots and Crosses, published in 1987 when Rankin was 27 years old, introduces Edinburgh Detective Sergeant John Rebus and immediately throws him into an investigation of a serial killer who targets young girls. Rebus has an 11-year-old daughter, and some secrets from his past that he can't bear to face, and ... well, the story turns into a thriller in which he's very personally involved.

Rankin's plotting is great: neither so complex as to require note-taking on the part of the reader, nor so simple as to be obvious (though the killer keeps taunting Rebus by sending him clues that, he says, should reveal his identity). He knows how to evoke emotions, from compassion to terror. Best of all, he makes Rebus fully human: on the one hand, a hard-drinking loner with a penchant for petty theft and fornication; on the other, a caring father and a praying, Bible-reading Christian who keeps wishing for better treatment from his vengeful personal god.

I've checked my library's holdings against Rankin's book list and am delighted that they stock most of them including the newest Rebus novel, Standing in Another Man's Grave (January 2013 in US). I've put in for an interlibrary loan on a couple of the early titles that they don't have. It's going to be a good spring.

Oh, by the way, if you're wondering about the title, "noughts and crosses" is the British term for what Americans call tic-tac-toe.

MY BELOVED WORLD by Sonia Sotomayor

I was barely awake, and my mother was already screaming. I knew Papi would start yelling in a second. That much was routine, but the substance of their argument was new ...

Sonia was seven years old, and this time her parents were fighting over who was going to give her her newly prescribed daily insulin shot. For a moment she panicked: if giving her the shot was so hard for her parents, surely her grandmother would not be up to the task either--and she'd have to give up her weekly sleepovers at her grandmother's house, her "only escape from the gloom at home." The solution was simple: Sonia would learn to inject herself.

My Beloved World covers some 30 years of Justice Sotomayor's life, from her diabetes diagnosis at age 7 to her appointment as a district court judge at age 37. It is not an account of her more than 20 years on the bench, but rather the backstory of what she had to overcome in order to get there: an alcoholic father who died when she was only 9, a hard-working mother who was rarely at home, a Bronx neighborhood full of junkies and gangs, her inability to speak English fluently until she had been in an English-speaking school for several years, and a serious disease that she expected would kill her before she reached middle age.

How did a penniless Puerto Rican girl from the projects get accepted by Princeton (from which she graduated summa cum laude) and Yale (where she became an editor of the Yale Law Journal), land a couple of good jobs (in which she advanced rapidly), and eventually get appointed to a U.S. District Court, a U.S. Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court? Much of her success is due to her own  hard work, competitiveness, and will to succeed. Much is also due to her supportive family and friends. And a significant factor in her career success is the era in which she was born.

A few months before Sonia's 7th birthday, John F. Kennedy signed the executive order that created affirmative action. When she was 11 years old, Lyndon B. Johnson reaffirmed and strengthened the policy. When she was 13, affirmative action was expanded to include women. When she was 17, she was accepted to Princeton.

I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run. I had been admitted to the Ivy League through a special door, and I had more ground than most to make up before I was competing with my classmates on an equal footing. But I worked relentlessly to reach that point, and distinctions such as the Pyne Prize, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, and a spot on The Yale Law Journal were not given out like so many pats on the back to encourage mediocre students. These were achievements as real as those of anyone around me.

My Beloved World is not a political book. It gives little insight into Sotomayor's legal or judicial philosophy. But with its emphasis not only on success but also on the importance of hard work, of the support of family and friends, and of wide-open doors of opportunity for all, it may give an idea of what kind of justice Sotomajor is likely to be. Fortunately, the treatment for type 1 diabetes has come a long way since Sonia was 7 years old. She's 58 now, still giving herself injections, and likely to wear that black robe for many years to come.

DOWNTON ABBEY, SEASON 4: What's next?

The long wait begins: Americans will not see Downton Abbey Season 4 until next January, though Britons will see it in September (however, they began waiting Christmas Eve). So what's going to happen?

I of course went on a Google search and learned that Lady Mary is going to be important in Season 4, and that she's going to get a new love interest, though possibly not a new husband. A nanny will be added: Julian Fellowes says there will be "a lovely nursery story." The Dowager Countess "logically must be about a hundred and something now," as Maggie Smith told 60 Minutes in a rare and delightful interview broadcast yesterday, but we can all breathe a sigh of relief--she's not leaving the show, and Fellowes has no intention of killing her off.

So what else might happen in Season 4?

Well, something interesting will surely happen with Tom Branson. With Matthew gone, he's the estate manager now: will Lord Grantham's gratitude to his first son-in-law for saving the farm extend to son-in-law number two? And Tom's a good looking man with a baby: surely another romance is in the offing (this is soap opera, after all). Trouble is, he can't really marry a chambermaid--Mrs Hughes gently made that clear last night. And he isn't invited to the best parties, so a titled wife seems unlikely. Unless she's rebellious, of course, like Lady Sybil. Which makes me think that Tom and Lady Rose MacClare are going to get along just fine. Lady Grantham and Rose's mother, after all, were commiserating about the difficulty of having headstrong daughters. And Rose is coming to live at Downton Abbey. And it is 1921, after all, when traditional matings seem so stuffy. I mean, look how Rose's parents turned out.

And dear Lady Edith. She's 27 now and still a spinster, poor dear. Will she go to live in sin with her married editor, Michael Gregson?  Matthew is no longer an obstacle, but Lord Grantham might have a heart attack--oh, right, Fellowes has said Season 4 won't be as lethal as Season 3. Or maybe Fellowes will remember Jane Eyre and have the asylum, with Mrs Gregson in it, burn to the ground, thus freeing Mr Gregson for Lady Edith. It would be a nice twist if she then refused him, bought the newspaper, and became a media mogul, wouldn't it. I doubt if that will happen, but at least she's going to glam up.

And that's just upstairs. What will happen downstairs? The cook, Mrs Patmore, narrowly escaped a bad marriage (cf Upstairs Downstairs: "The Sudden Storm," in which the cook, Mrs Bridges, has an almost identical misadventure). I'm guessing Patmore won't get another proposal, but will something develop between Mr Carson and Mrs Hughes? Will O'Brien wangle a job as lady's maid to Lady Rose's mother and get to travel to India? Has Thomas turned into a decent human being after all? Anna Bates is getting a new hairstyle--will she also have a baby?

What are your guesses?

WHAT'S A DOG FOR? by John Homans

When I saw this book's title in a New York Times review last month, I thought it might be similar to Jon Katz's engaging 2003 book, The New Work of Dogs. Katz wrote about how dogs have gone from being diligent farm workers who help us take care of our physical needs to being companions and even substitute children who help us take care of our emotional needs.

What's a Dog For?, it turns out, is wider ranging than Katz's book. It never quite answers its own question; it might have been more accurately if less attractively titled Lots of Stuff about Canines that Dog Lovers Will No Doubt Find Fascinating. For example, Homans, who is executive editor of and a frequent writer for New York magazine, looks at

• how dogs and wolves are similar and different
• the history of dogs from Newfoundland
• what kinds of emotions dogs (may) feel
• how humans have created dog breeds, mostly recently, and often by fast and reckless selective breeding
• how the animal rescue movement has both helped and hurt dogs
• how big dogs adapt to life in New York City
• how dogs think
• how Freud and Darwin related to dogs
• why it's dangerous to be a Pit Bull

--among other things.

I am a dog lover; I have lived at various times with Pepi the Toy Manchester Terrier, Willie the irrepressibly cheerful pound puppy, Baja Humbug the psychotic Chihuahua, Taco Bell the only mildly disturbed Chihuahua, Ladybug the sane but bossy Yorkie/Chihuahua, Maggie the docile but dumb Sheltie, Moose the TV-watching Maltese, and now Tiggy the perpetually distracted Mini Schnauzer mix and Muffin the Havanoodle princess. I enjoyed What's a Dog For?--a question that frequently crosses my mind--though the book may have more words than content. And I wish Homans hadn't focused quite so much on his dog Stella in particular, and on Labrador Retrievers and other big dogs in general.

Little dogs are people too, and mine would not be pleased to learn that Darwin considered them "sports of nature," i.e., spontaneous mutations. At least Homans showed some restraint: he did not descend to the level of a dear though Lab-owning friend who refers to our pups as "kick-its."

FUNERAL MUSIC by Morag Joss

Thanks to my friend Anne Buchanan, who recommended Morag Joss's Sara Selkirk mysteries.

Anne knows the kind of mysteries I like best. I'd rather the murder(s) happened offstage. I want the characters to be more than plot devices--I like to read about their friends and families, what annoys them at work, what brings them joy, what they like to eat. I love a writer who knows how to develop a sense of place. And it helps if the writer can make me laugh every now and then.

I was delighted with Funeral Music.

Sara Selkirk is a concert cellist of international renown who has been suffering from "musician's block" for a year or so. Originally from Scotland but now a resident of Bath, England, Sara has agreed to play a short concert at the Pump Room in order to raise funds for the Bath Festival. Not long afterward she discovers a corpse.

Fortunately she is well connected. One of her cello students is a police inspector. A friend is a colleague of the murder victim. Another friend takes her to an alternative healing fair, where she happens to observe the eventual murder victim talking with a large man who, it turns out, badly wants a job they both are applying for. This friend's landlady, as it turns out, is the large man's girlfriend (Bath's population is only about 80,000). And then there is Paul, who is good with women and knives; and James, who has a rotten alibi; and George, the prejudiced museum guard, and ...

The puzzle is fun, with several healthy red herrings. Even more fun are Joss's descriptions--short ones, like "his face had the faraway, otherworldly look of a defecating Labrador," and dazzling longer ones, like her evocation of Bach's Trio Sonata in C Major, which

splashed out and down in a shower of weightless drops into the open lap of the abbey nave.... Only Bach could do this, make you feel you had been only half alive until this moment, pull you into the dance, lift you and take you as high as the roof, right up to where you could drink from the music's spring and be filled with a few bubbles of his crazy joy.... It flowed on, the little sounds dancing out across the transept like drops of light, darting through the melodic web that the organist's feet and fingers were spinning to and fro on which to catch them. Sara had the sensation that she had unknowingly been suffering from some sort of deafness and that with this glorious noise she had suddenly woken up to find that her ears were working properly.

Joss spices up the story with a number of complicated relationships: Paul and Sue (or Olivia?), Andrew and Valerie (or Sara?), Derek and Cecily (or Pauline?), James and Tom (or Graham?). One of the funniest scenes I've ever read in a mystery is between  Derek and his wife, Pauline, after she has learned about Cecily--but you'll have to read the book if you want to know more.

Publishers Weekly gave Funeral Music a starred review and P.D. James gave it a laudatory blurb. I'd call it a clever combination of Peter Lovesey and Jane Austen. I can't imagine why the Wheaton Public Library doesn't have the Sara Selkirk mysteries on its shelves, but they got it for me quickly through interlibrary loan. Or you can get a used copy for less than $4 from Amazon.

FLIGHT BEHAVIOR by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver's newest novel, Flight Behavior (November 2012), may be just the book you're looking for for your next book group meeting.

The main character, Dellarobia Turnbow, is a 27-year-old mother of two who for years has felt like flying from her nest. Just as she is about to do something definitive, she encounters about a million Monarch butterflies who, for reasons unknown, have flown from theirs. Complications ensue.

Here are some reasons Flight Behavior is so suitable for book groups:

• Dellarobia may be an Appalachian farm wife, but all kinds of readers will identify with her if they've ever married, raised children, or wondered what a completely different life would be like.
• You could spend hours talking about marriage as portrayed in this book: what makes it real, what constitutes infidelity, whether Dellarobia should stay in hers or leave.
• Or you might prefer to discuss climate change: what it's doing to the earth right now, whether the events in this book could actually happen, and how to  deal with it (deny? study? protest?).
• Even more interesting, to me anyway--you could look at the culture clash represented by Dellarobia's neighbors, on the one hand, and the various visitors to her neighborhood, on the other. Are Kingsolver's portrayals accurate? Do you know people like these? Are they doomed to misunderstand each other forever?
• Or you might try going beyond the story itself to predict what Dellarobia is going to do next, and to imagine how her actions are going to affect the other characters in the book. What should she do?

I enjoyed the story from start to finish. Kingsolver has a great sense of humor. She is gentle with all her characters: even the less lovable ones surprise us with good traits. She is a keen observer of people as well as of nature. It's not surprising to learn (from her website) that she lives in Southern Appalachia and raises sheep. As someone who identifies with conservationists more readily than with rednecks, I was especially delighted whenever she turned the tables on me and my prejudices and showed me just how wrong I can be.

The paperback isn't due until June, but the hardcover is inexpensive from Amazon right now. Or you could make this a summer selection.

THE JEWELS OF PARADISE by Donna Leon

After writing 21 detective novels featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, it's not surprising that author Donna Leon needed a break.

Still, having read all 21 of the Brunetti books, I was expecting Jewels of Paradise to be book 22 in the series. It is not, and I was disappointed.

Disappointed because by now the characters - the lovable detective from Venice; his wife, Paola, and their two young adult children; his sidekick, Sgt. Vianello; his insufferable boss, Vice-Questore Patti; and the indomitable Signorina Elettra - all seem as familiar as Facebook friends, and I wanted to stay involved in their lives.

But my nostalgia is no reason to keep Ms. Leon from expanding her horizons. I was more disappointed because Leon's new book simply didn't hold my interest.

A lot of the book has to do with biographical material concerning Agostino Steffani (1654-1728), churchman, diplomat, and nearly forgotten composer. (Hint: Leon's plot will be easier to follow if you read the Wikipedia article first. Want to hear some of his music? Cecilia Bartoli has a new album, Mission, devoted to his work [you can listen to the NPR program about it here].)

But don't come to this book thinking it's historical fiction. It's closer to historical research as done by a high-school student - and there's no afterword telling us which parts of the story are historical and which invented.

The main character, Caterina, does not seem to have much of a life outside the library. We learn even less about the other characters (though her sister, Cristina the Religious, might be worth a book of her own someday, or at least a bit part in a Brunetti novel).

The plot is thin. Somehow two 300-year-old trunks have been found, and two cousins each claim inheritance rights. Caterina, a musicologist, is charged with reading all the documents in the trunks and figuring out which, if either, has claim to the material.

There aren't many scary parts. At one point, you think scariness is developing, but (spoiler alert) it doesn't.

There isn't even much good food - but I suppose without Guido's ever-cooking scholar-wife, Paola, in the kitchen, there wouldn't be.

And when all is said and done, I know what was in those trunks, but I'm still wondering who the trunks belonged to, and how they came to Venice, and what Opus Dei had to do with the whole situation. Maybe my mind was wandering when all that was explained ...

Why I kept reading: (1) I'm loyal to Donna Leon. Up till now, she's been one of my favorite detective story authors. (2) I appreciate her wry observations about Italian culture and the Catholic Church. (3) I kept thinking the plot would heat up.

If you are a diehard Donna Leon fan like me, you should read it too - and please let me know what you think. I confess that I began skimming the historical parts; maybe I missed something important. If you have not yet become a Leon addict, however, don't start here.

2012: My year of series fiction

[Me, reading a nonfiction book
 approved by my mother]

In 1997, faced with a daunting commute, I decided to devote train time to reading for pleasure. At the same time, I began keeping a list of books I'd read. My mind goes blank whenever anyone asks, "Read any good books lately?" The list helps me access my hard drive. Sometimes I consult it before going to parties, just in case.

At the end of each year, I tally the books I've read. First, out of curiosity, I count how many are fiction and how many nonfiction. When I was a child, my mother, who was a serious and responsible woman, tried to keep me from reading fiction. She soon learned that she could not take me to libraries and expect me to refrain from reading stories, so she relented - but for every fiction book, I had to read a nonfiction book as well. Mothers are powerful: for maybe 10 years, even without trying, I read about an equal amount of fiction and nonfiction.

And then I fell in love with several mystery series.

In 2011, I read great stacks of M.C. Beaton (creator of Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth). They are very lightweight, predictable, funny, and excellent for people who are recovering from major surgery.

In 2012, nearly half the books I read were from one series or another:
Just one book each by Sue Grafton and Michael Connelly because they are two of my favorites and I had already read all 40-some of their previous books. Four books by Alexander McCall Smith and two by M.C. Beaton - I was caught up with them too, but that's how many they published last year. One each by Janet Evanovich (her Stephanie Plum series: I probably won't read the other 18) and the late Michael Dibdin (I may go back and pick up some I've missed), two out of five by Martin Walker, and three out of fifteen by Andrea Camilleri. If you want to see my reviews of some of these books, click here or click the Mysteries tab at the top of this page.

My discovery last year was British writer Peter Lovesey's series about Bath detective Peter Diamond. Books & Culture asked me to review his 12th book, Cop to Corpse, and I ended up compulsively reading the first 11, with increasing satisfaction.

The series I most enjoyed was the Venice-based Commissario Guido Brunetti series by Donna Leon, an American who has lived in Venice for 30 years and who, at least according to an American-Italian friend of mine who has lived in Florence for nearly 40 years, really gets Italy. I had read her first book, Death at la Fenice, in 2009 and was only moderately impressed. Friends urged me to keep going. Last year I read books 2 through 21, and I just put book 22, published last October, on hold at the library - along with the new Alexander McCall Smith and the new Sue Grafton.

Maybe I'll develop a more serious mind in 2013 and read more nonfiction. I'll let you know ...

-------------------------------------------------
For more series fiction recommendations, see "'Tis the season to read something relaxing."

LES MISÉRABLES

Les Misérables - the film - opened yesterday, and David and I were in back row center (my favorite seats) for the six o'clock showing. This was not because we are big fans of Les Miz. David had neither read it nor seen it, and though I saw the stage musical twice in London (the second time because my boss, with whom I was traveling, insisted), I wasn't crazy about it. But hey, it was Christmas Day, we needed to do something while digesting dinner, and it would have been too ironic to celebrate the birthday of the Prince of Peace by going to see Jack Reacher.

Our teenaged granddaughters wanted to know what we thought of Les Miz. Though we made a game attempt, a 2-hour-and-37-minute film is hard to review in text messages, so here are my extended observations.

The story. Quite faithful to Victor Hugo's sprawling novel (1779 pages in one French edition, and no, I haven't read it), this is a set-up, if not for the Oscars, at least for Christianity Today's annual list of most redeeming films. It won't be a spoiler for you to know that the hero, Jean Valjean, is a repentant thief who spends his life selflessly helping people. This is a story that reeks of moral uplift. And that's good: in an age that celebrates ruthless individualism, it is both shocking and inspiring to watch this reminder of the power of forgiveness and self-sacrifice.

The problem with the story. Despite his repeated willingness - if inability - to die for others, Valjean (like his creator, Hugo) supports an armed band of young insurrectionists who hope to overthrow the government. If you believe that peace is created by angry men who shoot the people with whom they disagree, you will find no inconsistency in this aspect of the story.

The historical background. Do read at least a couple of Wikipedia articles before going to see the movie. The one on the June Rebellion is a good place to start. Later you might want to read Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, if you haven't already, or watch Oliver, the musical that reportedly inspired the French librettist of Les Miz. Oliver Twist was published 24 years before Les Misérables (it takes awhile to write 1779 pages), but the two books deal with the same general time period, and the lives of the poor were just as miserable in England as in France. It helps to realize that there's not much exaggeration in Les Miz, except of course that the poor were unlikely to be as gorgeous as Anne Hathaway.

The opera. Be aware that Les Miz is not just a musical. It's grand opera: "a genre of 19th-century opera ... characterised by large-scale casts and orchestras, and (in their original productions) lavish and spectacular design and stage effects, normally with plots based on or around dramatic historic events." The characters are much more likely to sing than to speak. There are recitatives and arias, rousing choruses, and even a sextet where the conflicting characters lay out their differences in counterpoint and set the audience up for the dénouement.

So what did I think of Les Miz? I liked the lavish spectacle. I thoroughly enjoyed the rowdy song "Master of the House" featuring Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter. In fact, I enjoyed every scene featuring the evil duo. The sextet and chorus, "One Day More," is quite glorious. David, old romantic that he is, liked "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables."

The other 2 hours and 20 minutes, however, often left me thinking, in the oft repeated words of archvillain Javert, "Shoot me now."

At one point I whispered to David, "There are only two things I don't like about this opera: the words and the music." Apart from a few stellar numbers, the music ranges from insipid to tedious. One or two leitmotifs are endlessly repeated. Worse, a lot of the recitatives are simply drawn-out scales. If you can't come up with actual music, I wanted to scream, just let the characters talk, for Pete's sake.

The words are even worse. When I was a teenager, a particularly bad amateur poet came often to our church and read his supposedly inspirational poetry at us. I kept awake by playing a game: after he declaimed one line, I tried to guess the word he would use to make the next line rhyme. It was amazingly easy. I recommend, dear granddaughters, that you play this game while watching Les Miz. 

The librettist dips into his large sack of easy masculine rhymes (be/me, done/run, know/go, chill/kill) and scatters them prodigally about. He is particularly taken with the near-rhyme Jean Valjean with "on" and "gone." Never does he play with words like Alan Jay Lerner in, say,  Camelot ("You'll never find a virtue / Unstatussing my quo / Or making my Beelzebubble burst ...") or Stephen Sondheim in West Side Story ("I like the isle of Manhattan, / Smoke on your pipe and put that in!") Except for the bawdy tavern song, all the songs in Les Miz are so earnest, so sentimental, so predictable.

Still, as of this writing, 63% of the top critics (surveyed by Rotten Tomatoes) liked the movie, as did 72% of critics in general and 86% of the audience. That's not shabby. You may like it too, and I won't think less of you for it. Just don't put yourself through it three times. Nobody needs to be that misérable.

THE BLACK BOX by Michael Connelly

Harry Bosch fans, it's time to pour yourself a Fat Tire (one of Bosch's favorites), put Art Pepper's "Patricia" (Bosch's birthday gift from his 16-year-old daughter, Maddie) on your iPod, and settle down for an engrossing read. If you haven't yet read any of the Harry Bosch books, that's OK too. You can start with this one and pick up the others later.

--from my review of The Black Box, now up on the Books and Culture website.
Click here to read it.