Nemesis by Jo Nesbø

Harry rubbed the palm of his hand over his unshaven chin, reflecting on what Aune had said about drugs simply emphasising latent tendencies. He didn't know if he found that reassuring. Isolated details were beginning to emerge. A black dress. Anna had been wearing a black dress. And he was lying on the stairs. A woman helped him up. With half a face. Like one of Anna's portraits.

'I always have blackouts,' Harry said. 'This is no worse than any of the others.'

'And your eye?'

'Probably bumped into a kitchen cupboard when I came home or some such thing.'

'I don't want to worry you, Harry, but it looks like something more serious than a kitchen cupboard.'

'Well,' Harry said, taking the cup of coffee with both hands. 'Do I look bothered?'

-Nemesis

Inspector Harry Hole has had a lousy night, as you might have guessed from the passage above. The semi-recovering alcoholic made the questionable choice of having dinner with a former flame and woke up the next morning with a splitting headache and no memory of the previous evening. The day is not off to a promising start, and things get worse when a call comes in: a woman found dead in her flat, an apparent suicide. Harry isn't so sure. The woman is Anna, his date from the night before.

In Nemesis, poor Harry already had his hands pretty full before this most recent development. His girlfriend's in Moscow, locked in a bitter custody dispute with her ex-husband. He's working a tough case, that of a robber, nicknamed The Expeditor, who killed a bank teller in the course of a heist. And he's still doggedly pursuing any wisp of a lead he uncovers in the case of a fellow officer's murder. On top of all of this, he gets an e-mail.

Shall we play? Let's imagine you've been to dinner with a woman and the next day she's found dead. What do you do?

What does Harry do? He doesn't tell his girlfriend, for one. Nor does he inform the police of his ties to Anna. Instead he puts his head down and gets to work, using every connection he has in order to try to tease out answers in his cases, both of which are becoming increasingly complicated. His investigation takes him everywhere from gypsy caravans in Oslo to the criminal underground in Brazil. Did I mention it gets complicated?

Jo Nesbø excels in telling smart, twisty tales, and Nemesis is just as satisfying as The Redbreast, its predecessor in the Harry Hole series. Harry's a very compelling character and, in addition to his new travails, Nesbø has also set up an intriguing ongoing case with the investigation of the murdered officer. I hesitate to say too much about that aspect of the book, since it was a pivotal plot point in The Redbreast, and I think surprise is an important element in this series. As readers, we know more than Harry about the officer's death and the related corruption in the police department; I cannot wait to see what happens when he puts it all together. He'll either wreak vengeance or utterly collapse - and possibly both. You can see why it's going to be difficult to resist the siren call of The Devil's Star, the third book in the series, currently only available in hardcover (it was released in March). Let's hope that the library hold list is moving at a brisk pace, shall we?

Up next: Thanks to my pal Robin, I do have the next two books in another enjoyable (although entirely different) series, Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse books. I'm already digging in to All Together Dead.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

In Brooklyn reality had been empty and meaningless - whatever inferior stuff it was made of, meaning had refused to adhere to it. Brakebills was different. It mattered. Meaning - is that what magic was? - was everywhere here. The place was crawling with it. Out there he had been on the edge of serious depression, and worse, he had been in danger of learning to really dislike himself. He was on the verge of incurring the kind of inward damage you didn't heal from, ever. But now he felt like Pinocchio, a wooden boy who was made real. Or maybe it was the other way around, he'd been turned from a real boy into something else? Either way the change was for the better.

-The Magicians

I've not read every review of Lev Grossman's The Magicians, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find one that doesn't refer to Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia. The Magicians, a coming-of-age story featuring the moody Quentin Coldwater, draws heavily from both sources. Like Harry, Quentin is plucked from his ordinary life and sent to a school for magic - though Quentin, who was set to interview for Princeton, is significantly older. And what is our hero obsessed with? The fictional land of Fillory, as detailed in the series Fillory and Further, which chronicles the adventures of the Chatwin children. The oldest Chatwin, Martin, discovers a portal to Fillory in a grandfather clock. I think it's pretty clear that Grossman isn't trying hard to hide his influences.

But the story of Quentin Coldwater is very different. For one, it's absolutely not a children's story. It's really not even a fantasy, primarily. Or it's the most realistic fantasy ever. Grossman's magic is very much grounded in the real world, and a lot of that probably has to do with Quentin himself. Upon arriving at the magical school of Brakebills, Quentin discovers learning spells is tedious work. He's surrounded by competitive overachievers like himself, and it takes him a long time to make friends. Unlike Harry Potter, Quentin never really delights in magic. There's none of that euphoric sense of wonder that in Rowling's universe can be found in everything from Chocolate Frogs to Quidditch. Despite the passage I quoted above, Quentin is often desperately unhappy.

Wasn't there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn't they teach it?

And then he graduates. Imagine the world of Harry Potter if there had been no Voldemort. Sounds idyllic, perhaps, but magic often requires epic, good-versus-evil confrontation. In Quentin's world there are too many magicians and not enough monsters. Quentin encountered one, known only as the Beast*, during a classroom spell gone awry. But after Brakebills, cushioned by a private fund set aside for young magicians, Quentin is aimless. He joins some other Brakebills alums in New York City, then spends his nights spiraling out of control and his days recovering. His unhappiness, never long absent, begins to engulf him.

The world shifts again. Quentin gets proof that, against all odds, Fillory is real. Surely, this will be it: the one thing that can really make him happy. But Fillory, it turns out, is nothing like Quentin imagined.

Quentin is a difficult character. I often found him unsympathetic, but I also found him to be quite realistic in his reactions to the world around him. And one afternoon, feeling grumpy after a long day at work, I pulled out The Magicians and sympathized with Quentin immensely. So perhaps it just depends on your mood. It's really not a happy novel, though. Well-realized? Yes. Clever? Absolutely. Happy? Not in the slightest. Bear that in mind.

I realize I haven't touched at all on the other characters in the novel. I thought Grossman assembled an interesting bunch, particularly brainy, quiet Alice and arch, oft-drunken Eliot. I sometimes wondered how the story might have played from their perspectives.

I am someone who, after disliking Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on first read, rediscovered it after loving the film adaptation; I then complained when the follow-up film wasn't dark enough to suit me**. In other words, after a rough transition to Rowling's darker world, I preferred it that way, and found the early gee-whiz aspect a bit childish. (No real complaint, though, they are children's books, and I love them.) I thought I would love a darker, more adult twist on Potter. Instead, though I did like The Magicians, I gained a new appreciation of Rowling's sense of whimsy. Interesting book, in the end, and certainly one that left me thinking afterward.

Up next: So excited to have Nemesis, Jo Nesbø's follow-up to The Redbreast!

*It's worth noting that The Beast is insanely terrifying and one of the best aspects of the book. Scary stuff.

**See, I'm a sucker for muddying the Potter world up a bit. Like this video, which is a montage of clips from the films set to "The Funeral" by Band of Horses. Oh so nerdy, and I love it - especially when the drums kick in and it all goes to hell.

Talking About Detective Fiction by P.D. James

Settings, particularly landscapes, are often most effectively described when the writer uses a place with which he is intimately familiar. If we want to know what it is like to be a detective in twenty-first-century Edinburgh we can learn more from Ian Rankin's Rebus novels than we can from any official guidebook, as we move with Rebus down the roads and alleyways of the city and into its pubs and its public and private buildings. Ruth Rendell has used East Anglia and London, both places with which she is familiar, for some of her most admired novels written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. East Anglia has a particular attraction for detective novelists: the remoteness of the east coast, the dangerous encroaching North Sea, the bird-loud marshes, the emptiness, the great skies, the magnificent churches and the sense of being in a place alien, mysterious and slightly sinister, where it is possible to stand under friable cliffs eaten away by the tides of centuries and imagine that we hear the bells of ancient churches buried under the sea.

-Talking About Detective Fiction

When I was a teenager I read a fair amount of Agatha Christie, starting with the twisty, clever And Then There Were None. At one point, I thought maybe I could write a detective story too. I looked over all of the books of Christie's that I owned in an attempt develop a sort of formula for writing mysteries. I remember being particularly concerned with how many suspects I would need. Nothing came of it, of course, except me dreaming up character names (always amusing), but it's certainly illustrative of why I would pick up a book like Talking About Detective Fiction.

P.D. James, grande dame of modern mysteries, is (unsurprisingly) a big fan of detective novels. In Talking About Detective Fiction, she traces the history of the genre (hello, Wilkie Collins!), delves into some points of to consider while writing (such as setting, above), then takes a moment to consider detective fiction today. It's a quick read, and a great overview of what is possibly my favorite genre of fiction.

I especially enjoyed reading James's thoughts on mystery authors over the years, many of whom I was familar with (Arthur Conan Doyle, Christie; also Rendell and Rankin, to a lesser extent). I am eager to try out some of the authors I've never read before, like Dorothy L. Sayers and some of the other Golden Age novelists. She also mentions Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe series, which I've wanted to try for some time now solely because I think the name Dalziel is so wonderful.

One other point that James makes that I thought was interesting is on the modern convention of the flawed detective. Although Sherlock Holmes would fit in well with some of the more psychologically complex detectives today — indeed, James notes that his seeming modernity is probably part of why that series has remained so popular — many detectives from years gone by had much more stable lives.

But are we in danger of reducing the fictional police officer to a stereotype - solitary, divorced, hard-drinking, psychologically flawed and disillusioned? Real-life senior detectives are not stereotypes. Would anyone, I wonder, create a fictional detective who enjoys his work, gets on well with his colleagues, is happily married, has a couple of attractive, well-behaved children who cause him no trouble, reads the lesson in his parish church and spends his few free hours playing the cello in his amateur string quartet? I doubt whether readers would find him wholly credible, but he would certainly be an original.*

I have to confess that I wonder how interesting this detective would be. Perhaps that's unfair. I'd probably give it a try if the premise seemed engaging, but I do enjoy those damaged detectives.

Up next: Surprisingly, not a mystery, although that would have been a nice segue. I've started The Magicians by Lev Grossman, and I'm really enjoying it so far. Fingers crossed.

*Yes, this excerpt is from the same page on which she discusses Kurt Wallander, who ticks all of the boxes pretty nicely, although he's not particularly hard-drinking — compared with a Harry Hole or a McNulty, at least — and generally seems to go for junk food more than alcohol.

PS - My 100th post, just one day shy of the one-year anniversary of this blog. Neat.

Moab Is My Washpot by Stephen Fry

Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry play chess - Cambridge, 1980

The story of a sensitive young weed struggling to grow up in the robust thicket of an English public school is not likely to arouse sympathy in the breasts of every reader. It was a subject done to death in the earlier part of this century in novels, memoirs, and autobiographies. I am a cliché and I know it. I was not kidnapped by slave traders, forced to shine shoes at the age of three in Rio or sent up chimneys by a sadistic sweep. I grew up neither in circumstances of abject poverty, nor in surroundings of fantastic wealth. I was not abused, neglected or exploited. Middle-class at a middle-class school in middle England, well nourished, well taught and well cared for, I have nothing of which to complain and my story, such as it is, is as much one of good fortune as of anything else. But it is my story and worth no more and no less than yours or anyone else's. It is, in my reading at least, a kind of pathetic love story. I would prefer to call it pathétique or even appassionata, but pathetic will do, in all its senses.

-Moab Is My Washpot

When I wrote about Jude Law's Hamlet, I mentioned that I had first come to notice him when I rented Wilde as a teenager. Wilde was also where I first came across Stephen Fry. I find it funny in retrospect that I have known of him for so long, whereas I only discovered his comedy partner Hugh Laurie, now much more famous here in America, about five years ago. * I assume, after House, it's much more common now to discover them the other way round.

Anyway, I've long liked Fry. If he'd done nothing but Jeeves and Wooster, he'd be in my good books, but that's only one of his many accomplishments. He's immensely, almost unbelievably clever, in a way that makes one despair about one's own education. To read Moab Is My Washpot, Fry's account of his youth and coming of age, is to delight in the company of someone who loves language and plays ever so nicely with it. The man can wield a word. It's actually quite difficult to carry on about well he writes without noticing that my own writing looks so lumpish and ungainly put next to his. Oh, difficulties.

Fry, in addition to being a clever-clogs - he wrote an epic poem in his teenage years in which he rhymed "Hitleresquely bad" with "picturesquely had" - is also disarmingly frank. His life story doesn't play entirely as one might expect. Oh, some of it does, yes - the public school**, the house in the countryside he takes care to describe as not too "Bridesheady." And even his schoolboy penchant for nicking pence from the pockets of his classmates might not seem too out of the ordinary. It starts to become evident, though, as time goes on, that things are starting to go awry - and this is long before he tries swiping credit cards, though it does come to that.

Clearly I have no idea how honest Fry is being in his account, but it certainly feels quite heartfelt. The shame he recalls at some points just radiates off the page - as does the love he feels for one of his classmates, the beautiful Matthew Osborne. Fry's love for Osborne (a pseudonym) was the all-consuming passion of his teenage years - and, in his recollection, possibly fuel for his increasingly reckless behavior.*** In any case, it's hard for a reader to stay indifferent in the face of any of it - even if you were otherwise totally unfamiliar with Fry, I don't see how you could come away unsympathetic.

I met Fry once, at a book signing last year - a little different from meeting him at a cocktail party, of course, but still exciting for me. As with every author signing I've been to, I found it a rather intimidating experience. He was very kind, though, and all the fans I saw walked away from meeting him with their signed books clutched tightly to their chests and smiles on their faces. Just another reminder of how lucky we are to have him around.

Up next: P.D. James's Talking About Detective Fiction, which I suspect I will breeze through quite quickly.


*Heck, I even knew about their fellow Cambridge Footlights member Tony Slattery, little known here, before I'd ever heard the name Hugh Laurie; I was a huge devotee of Whose Line Is It Anyway? (UK) during my senior year of high school. Tony Slattery in any Party Quirks sketch was always the best - especially the one where Rory Bremner plays Tony Slattery.

**It's amazing to me how much of Harry Potter is really true, minus the magic - just swap in double Maths for double Potions and rugby for Quidditch.

***Although his late-in-book spending spree, for instance, is classic manic behavior, and Fry has been diagnosed with manic depression. (He actually made a documentary about manic depression that I should seek out, as it sounded interesting. Quite interesting, even.)

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea - destructive not just of the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. Indeed, no people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than we Americans do - and no people suffer from as many diet-related health problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obesession with healthy eating.

The scientists haven't tested the hypothesis yet, but I'm willing to bet that when they do they'll find an inverse correlation between the amount of time people spend worrying about nutrition and their overall health and happiness. This is, after all, the implicit lesson of the French paradox, so-called not by the French (Quel paradoxe?) but by American nutritionists, who can't fathom how a people who enjoy their food as much as the French do, and blithely eat so many nutrients deemed toxic by nutritionists, could have substantially lower rates of heart disease than we do on our elaborately engineered low-fat diets. Maybe it's time we confronted the American paradox: a notably unhealthy population preoccupied with nutrition and diet and the idea of eating healthily.

-In Defense of Food

It's possible that, in lieu of a review, I could just post seven words: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

That's Michael Pollan's oft-quoted mantra, the heart of his argument in In Defense of Food. Anyone who's been paying attention to food news in the last few years may also be familiar with some other pieces of Pollan's work: the idea that you shouldn't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize, for example, or anything with more than five ingredients in it. Still, even if they're not new to you, these are easy-to-remember points that could really stick in people's minds and affect how they eat. Pollan elaborates quite a bit, and provides a lot of useful information about how our relationship with food has changed over time, how it's hurting us now, and what we need to change. It's a matter of spreading awareness and education, and helping people believe that they are capable of achieving better health.

It's not quite so easy, of course. Pollan admits that good food - actual food, that is, as opposed to processed food products - is likely to be more expensive and, in some areas, less available than the junk. Still, it's a matter of people who do have the luxury of making these choices doing so. Individual choices add up, and can gradually change the culture.

It's really easy to be snookered by food. I spent years eating veggie burgers, thinking that they were both tasty and healthy. In retrospect: the soy. The hexane (recently in the news). The ingredient list that runs way longer than five. More and more, I'm reevaluating everything. And continuing to read books like In Defense of Food only reinforces the aversion that I'm developing toward processed foods.*

I'm biased, for sure. I think everyone should read In Defense of Food and Fast Food Nation, and watch Food, Inc. and Super Size Me. Or just pick one - In Defense of Food would be an excellent place to start.

As for me, I'm going to be leafing through back issues of Gourmet, looking for something I could cook this weekend. One of the great side effects of avoiding processed food is that I'm becoming a more adventurous cook. More work? Sure. But it's awfully nice to really know what went into you're eating - and that there was no soy lecithin or high fructose corn syrup required to turn it into "food."

Up next: Stephen Fry's autobiography, Moab is My Washpot.

*Replacing my aversion to blueberries, which I am in the process of dismantling, hooray.

The Likeness by Tana French

He froze the frame on Lexie, head turned over her shoulder to say something, eyes bright and mouth half open in a smile. I looked at her, soft-edged and flickering like she might fly off the screen at any second, and I thought: I used to be like that. Sure-footed and invulnerable , up for anything that came along. Just a few months ago, I used to be like that.

"Cassie," Frank said softly. "Your call."

For what seemed like a long time, I thought about saying no. Back to DV: the standard Monday crop of the weekend's aftermath, too many bruises and high-necked sweaters and sunglasses indoors, the regulars filing charges on their boyfriends and withdrawing them by Tuesday night, Maher sitting beside me like a big pink ham in a sweater and sniggering predictably every time we pulled a case with foreign names.

If I went back there the next morning I would never leave. I knew it as solid as a fist in my stomach. This girl was like a dare, flung hard and deadly accurate straight at me: a once-off chance, and catch it if you can [...]

"Tell me this woman smoked," I said.

-The Likeness

The Likeness picks up six months after the events of In The Woods (see the previous post), and I'm going to do my best to tell you about the former without revealing too much about the latter. A bit tricky for a sequel, but here goes.

The Likeness, by Tana French, is not a particularly conventional sequel, anyway. In The Woods covered a Murder investigation led by detectives Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox, told from Rob's point of view. Cassie tells the story of The Likeness, leaving Rob mostly out of the picture. Still recovering from the outcome of her last case in Murder, Cassie has arranged for a transfer to Domestic Violence. One day she gets called to a crime scene by Murder detective Sam O'Neill. There's a body she needs to see.

The dead girl bears an uncanny resemblance to Cassie, and they share more than that. Her college ID shows that she went by the name of Lexie Madison - the same name Cassie used when she was working undercover years earlier. Cassie's boss from undercover, Frank Mackey, is at the scene as well, and he has a crazy idea: What if the detectives pretended that Lexie had pulled through, and stuck Cassie back into her life to suss out the killer? "We've got the chance to investigate a murder from the inside," Frank says with a grin.

Cassie's resistant at first, but Frank gradually wears her down, and after feverishly studying everything from local geography to subtle body language (luckily Lexie left a cache of videos on her phone), Cassie's walking up to Whitethorn House, her new home - and possibly the home of Lexie's killer.

Lexie lived with a tightly knit group of doctoral students - Daniel, serious and aloof; skittish Justin; beautiful Rafe, with the quick temper; and warm, motherly Abby. They were each other's family. Cassie's job is to live with them for a few weeks and pick up as much as she can about who Lexie Madison really was and who might have had it in for her.

It's an unusual premise for a mystery, and though I missed Rob a bit*, I quickly became just as absorbed in The Likeness as I was with In The Woods. Like Cassie, the reader is drawn in to Lexie's weirdly close group of friends (a little Googling reveals I am not the first to see a comparison to The Secret History) and wants to know what secrets they are keeping. The undercover angle ratchets up the suspense, and the more we learn, the more dangerous the situation seems. It ends more neatly than In the Woods did, but certainly leaves the door open for further adventures with the Dublin crew. Maybe Sam will get a story? That just occurred to me, and I love the idea. Fingers crossed.

Up next: At long last, In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. Very much looking forward to it.

*Okay, a lot - I'm very curious about what he's up to.