Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

He could feel his stomach churning. I'm repressing things, he thought. Along with everything else I don't have time for. I'm searching for the slayers of the dead and can't even manage to pay attention to the living. For a dizzying instant his entire consciousness was filled with only one urge. To take off. Flee. Disappear. Start a new life.

He stepped onto the little dais and welcomed his audience to the press conference.

-Faceless Killers

An elderly farmer wakes up in the middle of the night, struck by the sense that something is wrong. Gradually, he hears the faint cries from his neighbor's home. He walks into the horrific aftermath of violence - a man dead, his wife hanging on by a thread. She makes it to the hospital, where she utters her last word: "Foreign."

Inspector Kurt Wallander is lead on the case, in the absence of his superior officer, Björk, who is on holiday. It's a devil of a case, with virtually no leads besides the woman's last word, the meaning of which makes Wallander uneasy - there has already been local trouble with the refugee camps, and he hesitates to pursue a course of action that could stir up more unrest. Meanwhile, he struggles with a host of personal issues: his recent divorce, his terrible diet, his father's deteriorating mental state, and the distant relationship he has with his daughter.

Interestingly, despite these issues, Wallander is not quite as morose as I found him to be in the later stories I've read. Instead, he's angrier. The one time he gets teary, he notes that he can't remember the last time he's cried (which, boy howdy, simply cannot be the case in the later books unless he has a truly lousy memory). It made me feel a bit worse for him, honestly, to see that he has become so miserable - of course, I think he, like a lot of characters (paging Dr. House), would not be nearly so interesting were he content.

I'm now even more excited to read the intervening books, and see exactly how events shaped Wallander into the detective he has been in more recent years. I am going to have to start tracking down the original Swedish sequence of books (they weren't released in order here) and putting things on hold at the library.

Up next: I've started reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. While it's obviously not as engrossing as a mystery, I'm enjoying it so far. I also checked out a real grab-bag of books at the library, but I'll save those for another day.

If A Body Catch A Body Comin' Through The Rye

I've finished reading Faceless Killers, but I haven't pulled my thoughts together enough for a review. Instead, I thought I'd offer up some links of interest.

From The Onion: "Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger"

From The Times: "Walking in Holden's Footsteps" (an interactive map of Holden Caulfield's NYC)

And also from The Times: "National Book Critics Finalists Are Announced" (and I've read...one. Flannery by Brad Gooch)

From The New Yorker: "Neil Gaiman's Fantasies" (really interesting article on Gaiman)

And, nothing to do with books, but interesting to me - From Slate: "Why Did Life on Mars Work in the U.K. but Not in the U.S.?" (Spoilers for the U.S. series finale but not the U.K. one - and the U.S. one is so terrible that you shouldn't mind being spoiled.)

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby

Not one of us descended those stairs having come to the conclusion that life was a beautiful and precious thing; if anything, we were slightly more miserable on the way down than on the way up, because the only solution we had found for our various predicaments was not available to us, at least for the moment. And there had been a sort of weird nervous excitement up on the roof; for a couple of hours we had been living in a sort of independent state, where street-level laws no longer applied. Even though our problems had driven us up there, it was as if they had somehow, like Daleks, been unable to climb the stairs. And now we had to go back down and face them again.

-A Long Way Down

Four people on a rooftop, contemplating suicide. A a scandal-plagued television presenter, a foul-mouthed teenage girl, a never-was wannabe rock star, and a woman caring for her profoundly disabled adult son. Their problems vary, but they've all arrived at the same conclusion: they need to jump. They need to end their lives.

Hardly sounds like the premise for the most cheerful of novels, does it? The thing of it is, though: they don't jump. They don't leave the rooftop having come to an epiphany, nor do they necessarily feel even a tiny bit happier (as demonstrated in the passage* I excerpted). But they don't jump, and that's a start.

I can't say I was particularly enamored of any of the four main characters (the story alternates between all four parts of view). Jess, the teenager, was the most annoying - which is not to say she wasn't realistic. They all were, even if I found the American J.J.'s slang to be somewhat affected and silly-sounding (an over-reliance on "man" and "dude," which, I'll admit, is not impossible for an American). In general, Hornby portrays four pretty plausibly depressed people. Doesn't mean you necessarily want to spend any more time with them than you're given, though.

While it is about depressed people, I wouldn't call A Long Way Down a depressing book at all. It has its entertaining moments, though I would say it has at least as many when I was just annoyed at Jess. Really bothersome character, that one - one of those who says and does whatever she wants, no matter how it might affect others. It shows a core of self-loathing, no doubt, which makes her intermittently sympathetic, but man**, would she be annoying in real life. It's certainly a realistic-seeming idea of how depression could manifest; I thought Hornby was particularly successful in drawing distinct depressions for each of his characters.

Hornby is a good writer, but I feel this is the least engaging of his books that I've read so far***. I think this is partially based on how I feel about the characters, but also because of the plot, which basically follows their improbable time together. Although I think Hornby does an admirable job of avoiding any quick fixes for the characters, the plot still seems rather awkward (particularly the angel bit, for anyone who's read it). I can't see myself revisiting this one, but it certainly hasn't put me off looking into his other books in the future.

Up next: I've started the first Wallander mystery (my third), Faceless Killers. I was so engrossed in it coming home from work that I missed my subway stop. Whoops! (Excellent sign for how good the book is so far, however.)

*I did pick this passage because of the Daleks, yes. It's just such a great image, using those terrifying little pepper pots to represent someone's problems.

**Yes, I realize I am using "man" in an entry where I speculated that Hornby had overused it when in the speech of his American character. Oh well.

***And I've read quite a few: High Fidelity, About a Boy, Fever Pitch, The Polysyllabic Spree, and his story "NippleJesus." (The Polysyllabic Spree is a month-by-month account of all the books he reads, so, naturally, I loved it.)

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

"I just wanted to say to him, 'Oh my god, Chris - you don't work here anymore. Give the fund-raiser ads up. Leave the building. Proofread your own frickin' resume!['] But my God," she said, "he wouldn't stop talking. He says to me, 'Can you believe I can't stop working in my head? I keep working and working and working - isn't that sick and twisted?' Well, yeah. Yeah it's sick and twisted. You don't work here anymore! But I didn't say that. I was trying to be nice. I do try to be nice sometimes. So even though he didn't know my name I went on proofreading his stupid resume, which had so many mistakes. How did we ever hire that guy to be a copywriter? I'm pointing them out to him, all these misspellings and typos and things, when he says, totally out of the blue - I mean, I have no idea where this comes from. I know something's wrong, though, because he's not talking talking talking, he's just looking at me, so I look up from his resume and I says [sic], 'What?' and he says, 'It'll happen to you, too, you know. Don't think that it won't.' And I says, 'What will happen to me?' 'Getting fired,' he says.

-Then We Came to the End

Then We Came to the End tells the story of a group of people working at a Chicago advertising agency whose glory days have come and gone. With only one pro bono campaign to work on, they have a lot of free time nowadays. Time to gossip and tell stories, as long as the boss is out of sight. And, more importantly, time to manufacture a sense of busyness and importance; an illusion of being a valuable member of the team instead of someone terrified that he'll be the next to "walk Spanish" - popular office parlance for getting fired.

There's no one main character in Then We Came to the End; rather, there's a company of players that the reader comes to know in the same shallow and yet sometimes oddly specific ways that one might know a coworker. You know what she has for lunch every day, maybe, but not what she's like for the 2/3 (hopefully) of her day that she's not at work. The entire story is told in the first person plural, creating the illusion that you're part of the team - this is our office, these are our coworkers, and these are our shared stories and aspirations and fears. They're not, of course, but they're close enough that anyone in the working world will recognize them.

I've heard Then We Came to the End described as a funny book - a literary version of The Office. I don't think funny is the right word (with apologies to Nick Hornby, who describes it as such in his blurb), but it's certainly entertaining. The style is breezy and conversational - with the exception of a rather different middle passage that will make sense by the book's end - and it's easy to get wrapped up in the minutiae of this world. I particularly admired Ferris's ability to transition from an event to a character's retelling of that event to a coworker (such as Marcia's story about Chris, part of which is included as the excerpt at the top of this post). Ferris juggles a lot in terms of characters, subplots, and chronology, but everything stays aloft and I thought things came to a fitting conclusion.

Next up: About halfway through Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down. I have mixed feelings about it so far, so it will be interesting to see how it progresses.

CBeebies Bedtime Story

I don't have children, and thus have no excuse for watching CBeebies bedtime stories - but I have, and they are just lovely. On the programs, which run about 4-8 minutes long, some of my very very favorite British actors read children's stories. It's that simple, but it's quite charming. Anyone who's seen BBCAmerica's Sci-Fi Saturday should be familiar with some of the actors: Doctor Who and Robin Hood are both well represented. A selection of links below (all go to YouTube). Recommended for when you need a bit of a cheerer-upper - there's really nothing more comforting than a bedtime story, is there? Probably best for children, but adults can watch, too. I promise.

David Tennant reads Emily Brown and the Elephant Emergency

John Simm reads Bones and the Pigeon Race

Richard Armitage reads I'm Not Going Out There

John Barrowman reads Blot and Og's Monster Party

The Way Through the Woods by Colin Dexter

"Good of you to spare a few minutes."

"If I can help in any way..." said Lewis warily.

"You know Morse better than most."

"Nobody knows him all that well."

"You've got a reasonable idea how his mind works though."

"He's got a strange sort of mind - "

"Not many'd disagree with you."

"He's good at some things."

"Such as?"

"He's not bad at catching murderers for a start."

-The Way Through the Woods

Oh, I just can't get enough of British mysteries. I recently started watching Prime Suspect, which is satisfyingly complex and gives Helen Mirren lots of opportunities to be awesome (at which she excels, naturally). And now my first Inspector Morse mystery - Morse is a television series as well, and if the show's as well done as The Way Through the Woods, I'll undoubtedly check it out at some point.

As this is the 10th Inspector Morse book, I had some catching up to do in terms of characters. Morse himself, I quickly discovered, is as well known among his fellows in the CID for his hard drinking and prowess with the ladies as he is for his masterful detective work. He's not necessarily well liked - he sets himself too much apart for that - but he is grudgingly admired. At the start of The Way Through the Woods, Morse has surprised his colleagues by actually taking a vacation. Naturally, though, this doesn't stop him from following an intriguing story in the local paper: a poem sent to the police that seems to suggest a lead in the case of a missing (and presumed dead) young Swedish woman.

Morse is on the case as soon as he returns to work, and the clues start piling up. It seems that he is well on his way to finding the murderer, but then things start to get a bit twisty. With the aid of his trusty right-hand man, Inspector Lewis, Morse sorts through the players and the many, many lies they've told.

The lying, of course, is a great deal of what can keep a mystery reader on her toes. Everyone is lying to protect himself, but it takes a while to figure out who is trying to keep a lid on his dirty little secret and who has actually committed a crime. The Way Through the Woods certainly kept me guessing through its entirety - Dexter is fond of giving the reader just enough information to figure out that a character isn't on the up and up, without revealing why that might be. It certainly gives one a lot to puzzle over, and leaves the clever Morse looking exactly as smart as he is meant to*.

I liked Morse, but not as much as I like Kurt Wallander, for example, or Jackson Brodie. It might just take more books to get to know him better. I'd like to read the first book in the series next, in order to get a better introduction. I liked Lewis, who seemed far more relatable, and I'm interested in exploring Lewis's own television series, which I remember running on Masterpiece Mystery! last year (though I didn't get the opportunity to watch).

Up next: Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, which I recall being on a lot of year-end top 10 lists a couple of years back.

*Unlike, for example, in The Da Vinci Code, in which Robert Langdon is meant to be brilliant, but doesn't immediately recognize backwards writing (which da Vinci is famous for using in his notebooks). Sigh. Yes, I'm still bitter about that confoundedly popular book.

The End of Overeating by David A. Kessler

The International House of Pancakes recently put a stuffed French toast combo on its menu. Cinnamon raisin French toast (made with eggs and milk) is stuffed with sweet cream cheese; smothered with powdered sugar, fruit topping, and whipped topping; and served with two eggs, hash brown potatoes, and a choice of two strips of bacon or two sausage links. Breaking it down, the French toast is a load of fat on fat on fat and sugar that's then layered with fat on sugar on sugar and served with fat, salt, and fat.

-The End of Overeating

Sounds really lovely when you put it like that, right? It does seem that it's much easier to make choices about food if one turns a blind eye to its origins, its processing, and its nutritional value (or lack thereof). As David A. Kessler notes in The End of Overeating, the foods that we generally consider the most palatable (that is to say, those that "stimulate the appetite and encourage us to eat more," per Kessler), are those with a happy mix of fat, salt and sugar - none of which we need too much of. One of the big problems that has mired our country in an ongoing weight loss struggle, of course, is that we are constantly given opportunity to eat mind-boggling portions of all of those things.

In his book, Kessler describes some of the elements that have led to the current obesity crisis. He is particularly interested in the idea of conditioned hypereating (just what it sounds like), and how people are cued to engage in it. Much of the book is spent on this (bring on the rat studies), in addition to a look at the workings of some restaurants and food corporations. He also presents a plan to end overeating.

In a way, I found this book to be common sense - for example, if you like the way something tastes, you eat more of it. If you walk by the restaurant that serves a favorite meal, you will be more inclined to crave that meal. Kessler offers behavioral reasoning for why we do these things, but it still can sound less than revolutionary (although he does overturn some widely held ideas, such as people having a set point for weight). He lays out all of the science in a very clear, easily understandable way.

I found the plan to end overeating itself to be the most interesting part of the book. His plan, which involves retraining your responses to stimuli, is a natural progression from his ideas on hypereating. It's definitely not a quick fix - Kessler describes the battle against conditioned hypereating as a lifelong one. His plan involves structure - the same structure people go for when they choose "shake for breakfast, shake for lunch." The difference is, a shake-based diet is not a sustainable long-term plan. Kessler's could be.

I'm not sure how what I've learned from this book will affect my eating - I imagine it will help to sustain the awareness I'm trying to maintain about what foods I buy, if nothing else. I am not a huge overeater myself, although I certainly have many, many food weaknesses* - plantain chips, baguettes, ice cream, etc. I was actually hoping that this book would have more personal anecdotes about how people respond to food and information about the evolution of eating in this country rather than the self-help information (although that ended up being interesting). I guess I will have to look for another book to get into those other things - perhaps one of Michael Pollan's books, which are still on my to-read list.

Up next: I'm about halfway through my first Inspector Morse book, The Way Through the Woods - the 10th book in Colin Dexter's series. Ideally I would have started at the beginning, but since the opportunity presented itself, I thought I'd give Morse a try.

*Not French toast, incidentally. I think that IHOP selection above sounds disgusting - to each his own.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

"There are churches all across the States, though," said Shadow.

"In every town. Sometimes on every block. And about as significant, in this context, as dentists' offices. No, in the USA, people still get the call, or some of them, and they feel themselves being called from the transcendent void, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they've never visited, or by erecting a giant bat house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. Roadside attractions: people feel themselves being pulled to places where, in other parts of the world, they would recognize that part of themselves that is truly transcendent, and buy a hot dog and walk around, feeling satisfied on a level they cannot truly describe, and profoundly dissatisfied on a level beneath that."

"You have some pretty whacked-out theories," said Shadow.

-American Gods

When we meet Shadow, the hero of American Gods, he's finishing up a three-year stint in prison. Although he was guilty, we sense that he's a good guy who got mixed up in some bad business. In the last week of his sentence, he's blindsided by news of his wife's death. He's released early in order to attend the funeral, and on his way home he meets a character who calls himself Wednesday. Wednesday seems to be familiar with Shadow's life and has an uncanny ability to show up wherever Shadow is. Numb with grief and bereft of the life he thought had been waiting for him, Shadow is a man without a plan. When the mysterious Wednesday offers him a job, he takes it.

Wednesday wants Shadow to work as a bodyguard as he prepares for the coming war. What war, you might ask? A war among the gods. America, it quickly becomes apparent, is home to many - those brought over in the minds of immigrants from all over the world, as well as the new gods of commerce and technology. The old gods have been fading from the national consciousness and are ready to take a stand against the powerful new gods - except, of course, it's really much more complicated than that.

Although it took me a little while to get into the story, by the end of American Gods I was pretty absorbed. Gaiman (perhaps unsurprisingly for any reader familiar with his work*) has a few good tricks up his sleeve. I hesitate to say too much, but the evolution of the character of Laura (Shadow's wife) was particularly interesting. Gaiman also shows a really impressive ease in writing a story steeped in so much mythology. I think I would have appreciated the book even more had I been more knowledgeable about the various gods who pop up** - other than sketchy memories of Norse mythology and Anansi stories, I was pretty much out of my depth. It certainly makes one appreciate the vast amount of research that must have gone into this book, though.

I once read (on the internets, naturally) someone propose that American Gods would make an excellent HBO miniseries. I think it would be a huge challenge to adapt but, wow, that would be wild.

Up next: The End of Overeating by David A. Kessler. I'm actually about halfway through - nothing revelatory so far, but it's been pretty interesting nonetheless.

*Have I mentioned lately how much I loved The Graveyard Book?

**This is a super great resource for figuring out which gods are depicted in the novel: only the gods are real