Lionel Shriver, We need to talk about Kevin

 In a series of letters addressed to her husband, mother tries to understand why her son, 15-year-old Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow classmates, a cafeteria worker and his English teacher in a Columbine-style school massacre.

Incredibly well written, drawing the reader into the mother’s reflections on the possible reasons for Kevin’s actions, moving seamlessly between time periods, and subtly instilling doubt into the reader’s mind as to the reliability of the narrator’s perspective.

CHristopher Brookmyre, By My Enemy

www.brookmyre.co.uk

A Jack Parlabane mystery, against the setting of an assignment on a corporate outward bound course.

Not a standard murder mystery but very witty, very funny and very readable:

See, that’s what I love about your generation. You know these things chapter and verse and can pluck them from your skull on cue. What can we quote? Song lyrics, sitcom gags and philosophical soliloquies that sould pseudo-Shakespearean until you remember they were spoken by Jean-Luc Picard.

…and reading this is now indelibly associated in my mind with a fabulous weekend at the seaside in Whitby. Bliss.

Martin Amis, London Fields

 

There is a murderer, there is a murderee, and there is a foil.

This is the story of a woman who is seeking to bring about her own murder…or is it the story of writing the story of a woman who is seeking…it’s Amis, you get the idea.

I can’t do better than the Guardian review here:

This book is a cheat. A con-trick. From start to finish, all 470 pages of it, it’s an elaborate tease. A whodunnit without a motive. A meditation on the way the world ends which turns out to be just another metaphor for the writing of fiction.

A con, but an intriguing and well-written con.

Christopher Brookmyre, One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night

http://www.brookmyre.co.uk/

As the publicity says:

The occasion: high school reunion.

The place: an oil rig converted into a tourist resort.

The outcome: carnage.

Dress Casual. Bring your own bullets.

Not a Jack Parlabane mystery which was a bit of disappointment, but very funny and riveting nonetheless. What I like about Brookmyre’s work is his ability to pick up on the detail of group dynamics – whether a school reunion or a ‘bonding exercise’. I also liked the ackowledgement of the cliches of the action movie genre with which this plot nominally accords. Great fun.

Ian McNeely & Lisa Wolverton, Reinventing knowledge from Alexandria to the internet

This book attempts a history of knowledge traced through its institutions, from the library to the monastery to the university and onwards.

It’s an ambitious attempt and an interesting read.

The authors acknowledge that their focus is upon formal knowledge in institutions rather than informal knowledge and they focus primarily upon the western tradition with occasional comparative reference elsewhere. It was in this definition that I had a problem – the later chapters go on to examine the republic of letters, the disciplines and the laboratory. While I would acknowledge these as constructs in the reinvention of knowledge, are they institutions? One key feature of the republic of letters is the extension beyond formal institutions – the informal intellectual community linked through social connection.

There is also a tension in dealing with the overlap between the role of the institution and the medium – between the library or university and the library or university.

Glenn Cooper, Library of the dead

This starts in what seems like fairly standard serial killer territory with a decent CFC (crime fiction cliche) score as the lead character is a jaded FBI agent described on the cover as ‘maverick’.

The action then switched to 1947. Okay, a hint of post-war conspiracy theory. Interesting.

Then we’re in an abbey in Wessex in the eighth century, named after the bus service on the Isle of Wight (okay I may have that the wrong way around, but it was definitely the eighth century).

It’s rather a good set-up, but impossible to carry through to a completely satisfying conclusion.

Think of this book like one of the later episodes of the X Files where the tension is ratcheted up with an intriguing case and a twist of the conspiracy theory, but then the entire construct deflates at the end as our heroes live to fight another day with a true solution still beyond their grasp.

Quentin Jardine, Aftershock

A mystery that begins with a body on a golf course outside Edinburgh that I chose to read during a weekend staying in a hotel on a golf course outside Edinburgh (Dalmahoy Marriott Edinburgh – just don’t, not quite murder but close).

Part of a series centred around a policeman, DCC Bob Skinner – although I’m not sure how successful it is as a serial entry. This book recaps back story in a way that doesn’t help a newcomer and would probably bore an established fan.

The main notable feature of the structure was the short chapters leaping between the personal and professional lives of the various characters. The author must be a fan of the theory of six degrees of interconnection, or Edinburgh is a lot smaller than I thought, because each of the characters seemed to a have a personal connection to the next link in the mystery chain. Fans of CFC (crime fiction cliche) will be pleased to know that the case becomes personal for at least two of the characters.

The other weakness is the amount that is withheld from the reader. The wise all-knowing detective has worked it out a hundred pages before the end, but unfortunately the author isn’t as skilled at leading the reader along, but instead chooses the lazier route of ending chapters as follows in order to set up a denouement that the reader doesn’t have a chance of reaching from internal evidence,

I’ve just had a weird idea. It’s complicated, and you’ll need  to move very fast, but if you can put all the pieces together , this is what I’d like you to do.

Grrrrr….

Karen Karbo, How to Hepburn

A cross between a biography of Katharine Hepburn and a self-help book  and style manual for those who wish to live their lives according the gospel of Kate  – by having a credo, finding yourself fascinating (doesn’t everyone?), saying what you think…etc, etc…Mindless and harmless – fodder for the pile of trashy books in the guest room.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance-now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!

The strapline says it all – take one Jane Austen novel, add zombies.

It’s not quite as bad as it sounds. Taken on its own terms – as a parody – this is fun. There is some decent entertainment to be had from predicting precisely how the zombie sub-plot will be interwoven with the original text….even if 300 pages is stretching it a little.

I liked the pseudo-classic coverdesign and the reworking of familiar elements such as the opening:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains

 I also laughed out loud at the parody of a book club reading guide added in the appendix.

I was less convinced (inevitably) by the quality of the re-writing of some passages. This would probably work best as a comedy sketch or possibly a movie – in which media there would be less obvious unfavourable comparison of the quality of the prose. There was also some heavy handed innuendo – not prudery, I just thought it unnecessary.

I predict this could be the start of a trend. You don’t believe me? Well, who would have thought that turning the greatest hits of seventies and eighties bands into badly plotted musicals would have become a global phenomenon? I’m thinking Shakespeare and vampires, Shakespeare and zombies…actually, thought of in those terms, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet start to make a lot more sense!

Robin Wilson, Lewis Carroll in Numberland

http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780713997576,00.html

A biographical study of the Christ Church mathematician and logician, Charles Dodgson, looking, in particular, at the common themes between his academic work and his more popular writings as Lewis Carroll.

Hard not to like a book that manages to incorporate the chapter title ‘Here’s looking at Euclid’ – and then goes on to make Euclid moderately accessible to a non-mathematician.

The biographical and contextual elements of the book are pared to a minimum, making space for reproducing a number of the problems on which Dodgson worked and extensive quotations from correspondence and published works. My favourite extract was from a teasing letter from Dodgson regarding an algebraic paradox:

Ever since this painful fact has been forced upon me, I have not slept more than eight hours a night, and have not been able to eat more than 3 meals a day. 

The strength of the book lies in its explanation of Dodgson’s mathematical work and the commonality of themes with his more famous works as Lewis Carroll. In terms of historical context, I found it slightly more frustrating. There was some lovely anecdotal detail, such as Dodgson’s pseudo-mathematical argument for calculating the salary of the professor of Greek – a satirical take on a contemporary University debate about the salary of Benjamin Jowett. I did, of course, scour the later pages for reference to Dodgson’s later work on symbolic logic, given the ‘intersection’ (ahem…) with John Venn. Euler’s and Venn’s diagrams are used as a way in to introducing Dodgson’s own preference for square drawings, rather than intersecting circles, in order to represent more easily more than three terms, and also to ensure that the universe was ‘cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d’ in a way in which Venn’s was not. 

As a result of reading this book, I can feel marginally more educated the next time I go into Starbucks and ask, ‘May I have a large container of coffee?’, in the knowledge that I am simultaneously recalling the first few digits of π (by counting the number of letters in each word of the phrase 3.1415926). I always knew coffee was good for me!