Murder Before Evensong - Richard Coles

 

Well, I guess that if I must read a run-of-the-mill crime novel every now and again (and whether I like it or not, every now and again I do have to do that...), I might as well read something by an author that I find to be at least an interesting person.

Murder Before Evensong is a well-mannered novel by someone who comes across as a well-mannered clergyman and decades ago came across as a well-mannered pop musician. It's not going to rock anyone's world, but at the very least it did not upset me as much as John Banville's crime stories mixing rural life, religion and aristocracy. 

Also, obviously, being Richard Coles, his treatment of marginalized groups (being them queer or gypsies) is really rather delicate. And the novel has enough references to pop culture to be palatable for me. 

The Passenger - Cormac McCarthy

  

McCarthy is 4895 years old (actually 89) and it doesn't show from this book. Either he's still extremely sharp, or he has a heck of a ghost-writer...

The Passenger is a beautiful story that makes the American South fascinating (unlike, well, Faulkner, as per my previous post). Bobby Western is the kind of troubled anti-hero that should be played by McConaughey, just like in Mud. And its pages on nuclear research are rather interesting for a non-scientist (in particular as I had casually read this and Giordano's Tasmania back-to-back). 

Oddly enough, at the time of reading I had also just finished advising a student on an essay about Thalidomide, so seeing Western's sister being pursued by "Thalidomide Kid" was bizarelly alienating.

The Thursday Murder Club - Richard Osman

  

Yes, I occasionally read contemporary best-sellers. They have their positives in general, chief among them they are so very easy to read. And this one has a positive in particular: I find its authors really extremely funny. 

As for the book, it was entertaining enough and funny enough, but nothing more. I guess I've been around - or heard my mom tell stories of - enough old-people homes and communities to be largely inocluated against these "endearing elderly". Even if they were belieavable, I surely wouldn't find them likeable. 

The one character I honestly do find endearing is Bogdan. Who would have thought: hard-working European builder who moved to the country ages ago and still feels like an outsider, and I liked him eh...

The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler

In all honesty I was biased against this novel before even starting it: after reading quite a lot of Chandler, I had had enough of him and with how cool Marlowe finds himself, but I did like the movie (though many didn't!) and needed something reasonably long and reasonably light to carry with me to the hospital as my wife delivered baby numero dos. Yes, because that happened too...

Unsurprisingly, I didn't particularly like the book, but the setting remains one that I enjoy (though I'd pick an LA novel by Ellroy any day over this one!). The biggest surprises were in the differences with the movie, but I never really got into the plot, and that's partly due to the little time that I have for Marlowe and to the fact that I was quite on the sleep-deprived side of things those days!
 

All in all, though, it was oddly enough the perfect read for uncomfortable nights on uncomfortable hospital chairs!

In Cold Blood – Truman Capote

I actually had to wait for my wife and baby daughter to be quite literally on the other side of the planet (Brazil) before I could muster the strength and courage to read this book. And to think that when I was young I thought that Capote had just written Breakfast at Tiffany’s and nothing else…

The opening chapter was, for me, by far the hardest to read – not so much because of the brutality of the scenes (I was already quite familiar with the story), but because I was almost physically sick by the point Nancy’s friend found the first body and couldn’t stop thinking of Bobby Rupp (Nancy’s boyfriend) and what he must have experienced.

The rest of the book didn’t have many surprises, but it did end with the added (and for me really unexpected) drama of the stories of Lowell Lee Andrews, George York and James Latham – and all the people they killed before joining Perry and Dick on the death row – and that so nearly tipped me over the edge.