We had a beautiful evening yesterday – it was our annual concert in the park put on by the symphony. Great weather, good food, nice friends, wonderful music – a combination that cannot be beat. We are getting adjusted to having youngest gone except for the cat who refuses to believe it. He hangs around downstairs waiting for youngest to join him and then complains bitterly when it doesn’t happen. We also interviewed two dogs and had to come to the reluctant decision they were not our dog. Hopefully we can find a dog that Himself, I and Elly can agree on. I was a little under the weather this week so not much reading or writing got done.
However, here is what caught my interest this week:
I have seen several bloggers mention Louise Penny, the Canadian author of the Inspector Armand Gamache series of mysteries. The latest in the series, A Trick of Light is the one I have most recently seen highlighted, for example, by Devourer of Books. I used Jen’s link to FitFact and found the first book in the series is Still Life – The Inspector and his team travel to a small village on the border of the United States to investigate what at first appears to be a simple hunting accident. Of course, things are more than they seem; there are secrets in the village, and off we go. I have been searching for a new mystery series to fill those odd spots when I don’t want to think as much when I read and this may fit the bill. There are seven books in the series so I am set for a while. If you like to read series, I would suggest checking out FitFact. I spent way too much time there looking up different authors and had a blast.
I recently finished Shadow Without a Name by Ignacio Padilla which comes highly recommended by Matt of A Guy’s Moleskin Notebook. This week he mentions the book again in a discussion of underrated books. He also mentions Learning to Lose by Daniel Trueba (translated from Spanish). Since I enjoyed the one so much, I feel I need to follow the second recommendation as well. Learning to Lose is a long novel, an inter-generational family saga, which is about what makes up your identity as a person, and what happens if you lose that very thing. Set in Madrid, the novel follows four characters as their lives change direction. Matt, in his original review of the novel, includes this quote, “Desire forces you to see what desire reveals. ” [Part 2, Ch. 5]. Now I want to see what lies behind those words.
The Boston Bibliophile reviews The Vices by Lawrence Douglas. The book opens with the docking of the Queen Mary 2 in New York missing one passenger, “Oliver Vice, 41, a professor of philosophy at Harkness College in Western Massachusetts.” The book is narrated by a colleague who describes Vice as “…my closest friend, and remained so, even after he ruined my marriage.” Vice is a member of a rich family of eccentrics of may are may not be what they seem to be. There is Oliver’s mother, a person who seems to lie at lot, his fraternal twin who is obsessed with European tyrants, and others. The narrator, in trying to understand what happened, launches an obsessive investigation into the disappearance and supposed suicide of his friend. I read the first chapter at Amazon and this one will go on the list.
Finally one book of interest was published this week: The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta is a novel about the post-rapture and how individuals cope with the aftermath of the sudden departure of people. This isn’t a religious rapture – a wide variety and eclectic group of people are taken and there is no tumultuous aftermath in terms of a religious war between good and evil. Life just continues on without millions of people. The novel starts three years after the event and focuses on the inhabitants of the town of Mapleton, particularly the Garvey family as each member takes a different path to coping this new world. Reviews can be found at The Seattle Times and The New York Times review written by Stephen King who ends his review saying:
Yet the novel isn’t completely bleak. If it were, we would care no more about these characters than about the ones who populate the post-apocalyptic “Mad Max” films. In fact, we come to care about them deeply, and Perrotta is wise enough to know that even in this bedroom-community version of Dover Beach, where ignorant suburbanites clash by night, the better angels sometimes prevail.
There is Perrotta’s beautifully modulated narration to admire, too. His lines have a calm and unshowy clarity that makes the occasional breakout even more striking, as when Laurie smells a freshly unboxed takeout pizza, the aroma “as full of memories as an old song on the car radio.” Or when a suburban housewife recalls her husband’s job-related BlackBerry obsession, his mind “so absorbed in his work that he was rarely more than half there, a hologram of himself.” Lines like that offer their own form of rapture.
Happy Reading.
Reflections from the Hinterland 
Like the sound of The Vices. Thanks for bringing these to our attention.