May in Review

May was a bad month! Only three books, including one that I didn't really care for. (Also, apologies to my lovely fine-free library, because the spring publishing rush backed me up! No need to send bills - I'm returning them....)

Finally got around to Linda Fairstein's Lethal Legacy which has been lying around here since January. I always enjoy her books, aside from the ridiculously awkward attempts she makes at interjecting sex scenes, because she delves into the history of a different aspect of New York each time. And this time, it was the New York Public Library! And, as a bonus, map and print collectors. As always, I tend to wish I remembered as much about her plots as I remember about the institutions or locations she focuses on, but it's not a perfect world. Nice beach material at worst.

Laurie King's The Language of Bees was more enjoyable. Occasionally a little lighter on historic material than Fairstein, or at least less hard history in terms of dates and places, but much better for plot and atmosphere. I wish social clubs were still in vogue. (And I wish that people I'd actually find interesting would be members, if they were....) I did have the pleasure of dinner at the Queen City Club in Cincinnati while I was reading this, and the big paneled rooms filled with art and bookshelves, watching it rain while munching on macaroons (I would consider membership just for them alone), gave me a nice framework for the imagination during some of The Language of Bees. Also some great accounts of the challenges faced in the early days of flight. Flying over the crags of Scotland in bad weather in the 1920s - not for the faint of heart! I enjoy Mary Russell far more than Kate Martinelli for some reason; it may not be just me, as the two series feel so completely different that it seems they must have been written by two separate authors.

And after that, for reasons known only to Entertainment Weekly's best of 2008 list, I subjected myself to Disquiet by Julia Leigh, which was, at least, short. I hate it when I come away from a book thinking, "I just don't get it," but that's exactly what happened here. Not to fault her prose, which had lovely moments, but I'm not a fan of literature that feels obtuse just for the sake of being obtuse. I suppose at my heart, I believe that writing is about communicating, and I cannot for the life of me understand why someone would choose to communicate confusion or be praised for communicating vagueness. I think this comes back to Nancy's Pearl discussion about how readers enter books; people enter through four "doorways": language, plot, character or setting. All books, of course, have these doorways, but most books have much "larger" doorways in one area or another. And the great works of fiction - The Hobbit, Gone With the Wind, Huckleberry Finn - those books have large doorways across the board. I've found that of the four, language is least likely to induce me, at least without the accompaniment of one of the other three, and that was the case with Disquiet. Yet another example of good writing that does not necessarily make for good reading.

June is already much more promising with four titles polished off already, and two new gifts from the library!