Book review: A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

Tom Standage’s A History of the World in 6 Glasses is a pint-sized history of humanity and our beverages of choice. Starting with beer and moving through to the cola-based beverages that can be found in red and blue cans in just about any country in the world, Standage takes us on a cruise through the world’s most popular beverages.

The story begins with beer in the ancient world. Beer was first brewed around the time of man’s monumental lifestyle change from hunter-gatherer to farmer. Likely created entirely by accident in the Fertile Crescent, beer was man’s first mass-produced affordable alcohol.

The alcoholic fermentation of fruit was likely discovered much earlier than beer, however the expense of using fermented fruit to produce an alcohol was prohibitive. Beer, made on cereal grains and water was affordable to all people. Wine came to the forefront thanks to the Greek and Roman proclivity for ‘the water of life’.

Skipping much of the dark ages and medieval times, Standage moves to the golden age of exploration and the role Rum played in maritime history, as well as in the history of the slave trade as conducted by almost all European countries and the beginnings of revolutionary rumblings in North America.

Coffee is heralded by the Age of Reason in London, while tea discusses to the age of empire and revolutionary America (think the Boston Tea Party) and cola-based beverages are the era of globalisation.

This is a light historical read. Written in accessible language and broken down into short-story sections, Standage has an excellent knack for writing enjoyable non-fiction.

This is not a book bogged down in referencing and unnecessary detail. This is popular history that anyone could read if they have even a modicum of interest in history. If however, you are more of a buff, this is not a book for you. The over-simplification of complex webs of circumstances and situations make for digestible reading if not quite reassuring accuracy.

Book review: Unnatural Habits, a Phryne Fisher mystery by Kerry Greenwood

The Hon. Miss Phryne Fisher is an utterly delightful fictional character. She is an intoxicating combination of early female empowerment and a fantasy of the women you could be if you had beauty, brains, money and supreme self-confidence. In her pursuit of truth and justice, she is unfailingly gutsy and determined, venturing into dark and violent places and all the while staying collected and in control of the situation.

In Unnatural Habits, Phryne assists Detective Inspector Jack Robinson to investigate the kidnapping of young and foolhardy reporter Polly Kettle, who herself was after a scoop on the disappearance of three heavily pregnant young women from a lying-in house (read: a hostel where you can give birth without anyone knowing you’re there). The search takes Phyrne and her loyal band of helpers through the seedy underbelly of 1920s Melbourne as they investigate all the horrendous possibilities of where the girls might have been taken. Phryne visits brothels, bishops and poverty-stricken Collingwood to slowly uncover who might be interested in these girls when their families have rejected them for their ‘shame’.

Brothels can be dismissed. Even those that cater for ‘special tastes’ don’t have much use for girls in their third trimester. The Magdalen Convent and laundry is a distinct possibility, presided over by a tight-lipped and uncharitable Mother Superior, or perhaps the questionable ‘Jobs for All’ employment agency whose business is less secretarial than highly suspicious. And how does a fruit farm figure in all of this? As their investigations progress, it becomes clear that these are not the first girls to vanish suddenly. In fact young girls, blonde for preference and with no family, have been disappearing without a trace for months with no good or wholesome explanation. 

Unnatural Habits looks through the darker side of human foibles. At peoples strange or even illegal sexual preferences, at the way people are treated when they've 'sinned' against Church or society, and at the disgusting choices people make for a grubby dollar. If you want a detective story with a juicy murder and not much else, this is not the place to find it. Miss Fisher's investigations go to some dark and all too-real places as she uncovers child abuse, rape and white slavery. Greenwood deals with these realities with style and grace, as befits her heroine, and Unnatural Habits is a great read. As dark as the tale may seem, Phryne’s pro-active attitude and a stream of beguiling characters balance out the vile scroungers. In Phryne Fisher, Greenwood has created a character many of us might envy, with her intelligence and panache and immense capability to deal with any situation. Her mysteries are hugely enjoyable, not least for their historical depiction of Melbourne complete with slums, convents and comrades, and an age we’d all like to visit, if only for a while.

If you haven't read any Phryne Fisher before, this might not be the best place to jump in. Greenwood assumes the reader has a certain familiarity with the characters and their history. Descriptions and explanations of the key reoccurring characters are almost non-existent, so if you haven't read any previous book or watched the ABC TV adaptation, you're likely to be a little lost. If this is the case, go back and pick yourself up a copy of Cocaine Blues and Murder on the Ballarat Train and get started, because these are great Australian detective stories. 

Read what I thought of the ABC adaptation of Greenwood's Phryne Fisher mysteries. A second series has been announced by ABC TV to be aired in 2013.


This review originally appeared on the Sassi Sam website. 

Book review: The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton

On one perfect summer day in the early 1960s, Laurel Nicolson is hiding in the family tree-house avoiding a birthday picnic. She watches as her mother comes through the woods towards the house to get the family’s special birthday cake knife. Also walking towards the farmhouse is an unknown man. He crosses the fields and approaches her mother, who freezes. He says hello as if he knows her and leans in to whisper something in her ear. In a moment, her mother plunges the birthday cake knife handle-deep in his chest. And so Laurel becomes the keeper of a dark secret, of the man who came one day but didn’t leave.

Now in 2011, Laurel’s mother Dorothy is dying and driven by the dark secret she has kept to herself for decades, Laurel begins to investigate what really happened on that summer day. Who was that man, unknown to everyone except her mother? And what did he say that caused her murder him without thought or question?

Kate Morton’s The Secret Keeper is an intriguing mystery novel about families, World War II and what people do in extreme situations. The novel moves back and forth between Laurel in the present day and Dorothy and her friend Vivien in London during the Blitz. As amateur sleuth Laurel uncovers information about the events of 60 years before, the reader is taken back to be told the truth behind each unfolding mystery.

This is a rich and textured novel from an internationally bets-selling author. The characters are engaging and the human dramas so real that the extremes of the emotions that rage in wartime are believable if not endearing. Morton expertly uncovers layer upon layer of story about each character and the dramas of the war, that ultimately lead to one man being killed in a field.

The Secret Keeper is an engrossing novel that will keep you guessing until the last page.I am every intention of going out and picking her Morton's other works. Public transport friendly they may not be but they are guaranteed to be a good read. 

Kate Morton's The Secret Keeper supplied for review by the Sassi Sam website.

Book review: The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things by Paula Byrne

The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things is a biography with a difference, in which author Paula Bryne investigates the life and personality of one of the world’s most popular authors through the ‘small things’ that make up every life; letters, portraits, scrawls and childhood notebooks. Starting with an everyday object that may or may not have belonged to the Austen family, Bryne expands on its relevance to Jane and her life, using historical evidence and Austen’s own novels to discuss what we know about Jane Austen and what we think we know. What emerges is a portrait of knowledgeable and free-thinking woman who was determined from a young age to be a published author and worked tirelessly to refine her art.

Bryne suffers as all Austen biographers do from a lack of evidence regarding Austen’s personal life. Of the thousands of letters she must have written in her lifetime, only a couple of hundred survive. We are fortunate that she was a published author in her lifetime otherwise even these and the few letters sent to her by family and friends might well have been consigned to the rubbish or fire.

Nevertheless, on the available evidence Bryne shows that the spinster daughter of a Georgian village clergyman knows more about the human condition than one might at first think. Rather than being sheltered and borderline reclusive as some imagine her, Austen had an extensive web of social contacts throughout the country and was very active socially, travelling around the country to visit family and friends and see the sights of cities such as London and Bath as well as small towns and villages. This network of individuals from country neighbours and landed gentry, was littered with delightful and extravagant personalities, some with life-stories stranger than fiction that must have provided grist for Austen’s literary mill. No one who writes social satire with the cutting wit and comedic flair of Austen could have lived all her life in amongst the same 30 people in quiet Southern England.

 Jane Austen. 

To take as an example chapter 12, in which Bryne’s discusses the hottest political topic of Austen’s day; the slave trade. The ‘small thing’ is a portrait of two beautiful young women; one white, one black. The portrait is entitled 'The Daughters of Mansfield' and the two girls are not the child of gentry and her maid as one might assume for the period, but adopted daughters of Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice who made monumental rulings on the rights of slaves. Austen was herself a staunch abolitionist. In her wide connections she knew several families who profited from the slave trade, owned or grew up in plantations in the Indies and her brothers in the Royal Navy held up slave ships as part of their national duty. She was knowledgeable and passionate on the topic, as we can see in Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price’s extensive reading and quoting of abolitionist writers Thomas Clarkson and Dr Johnson and of course in her vitriolic treatment of any of her characters bound up in the slave trade.

'Daughters of Mansfield'

Like all of her novels, Mansfield Park is full of nuances and references that would be lost on modern readers. The name of the house, built on the profits of slaving, is an ironic reference to the Lord Chief Justice Mansfield. Mrs Norris, the horrendous bullying aunt in the same novel and one of Austen’s most repulsive characters, could be named for Robert Norris, who promised to serve the abolitionist cause but spoke against it in parliament.

Frances O'Conner as Fanny Price in the 1999 film adaptation of Mansfield Park.

 
The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things also provides fascinating insights in to Georgian England. In chapter2 The Indian Shawl, Bryne examines Austen’s knowledge of and relations in Britain’s colonies, most importantly India. As well as merchants and seaman, Austen had a vivacious

Book review: Notorious Nineteen by Janet Evanovich

I’ve never read a Stephanie Plum novel before but they’re colourful and popular so I was looking forward to losing my Evanovich virginity. First few chapters; not so impressed. It read like the cheap and predictable detective stories that other books mocked wrapped up in exploding cars and needless dull detail. However, I did end up enjoying the story and the insane mix of gun fights, fried chicken, sex and questionable dialogue. I was properly engrossed by a third of the way through and keen to see how she’d clear up the hat-trick of mysteries in only two chapters.

Would I go back and read the others? Yes, I would. It’s hard to find light but entertaining books to fill in the gaps between my sometimes very heavy reading habits. Is it good detective fiction? It’s great cheap-blockbuster reading. But if I wanted to sit down and enjoy a murder mystery I’d go for a Phryne Fisher novel.

Proper review on Sassi Sam website.

Book review: Lifesaving for Beginners by Ciara Geraghty

Written initially for Sassi Sam and reproduced here. 

On a small road outside Dublin, a tired truck driver swerves to miss a deer, causing his truck to ram into one car and another to roll into a ditch. One driver dies and the other escapes miraculously with little more than scratches. This tragic accident sets in motion a chain of events that brings families together and uproots long-kept and damaging secrets. 

Lifesaving for Beginners is Ciara Geraghty’s fourth novel.  It is told through two perspectives; that of nearly-forty year old, successful author Kat Kerrigan and Milo, a young boy who loves his lifesaving classes, his mother and banoffi. As engaging as the story is, the real enjoyment for the reader comes from the select cast of realism of Geraghty has gift for creating characters with comparatively few words but who come alive and whom you can believe and invest in as a reader.

Principal protagonist, Kat Kerrigan, is not an instantly loveable character. She has spent her life concealing truths from the people who surround her, including herself. Only four people know that she is the anonymous author of internationally best-selling movie-making detective stories, and two of those people are her publishers. Kat is terrible at personal relationships, being secretive and selfish in the extreme. The only person in her life whom she loves unconditionally is her brother Ed, who has Downs Syndrome. Along with Milo, the second narrator, Ed is a delightful character who is portrayed with such sensitivity that you never feel sorry for him or his family but rather appreciate him as the person who brings out the best in Kat.

Back when she was 15, something happened to Kat that she has never dealt with and which she has kept secret even from her family. By covering over and burying the past, she has changed profoundly into the prickly, ultra-private person she is now. The car accident that doesn’t kill her still acts like a bomb thrown into her life, bringing up the events of 20 years ago and causing Kat to embark on an indulgence of self-destructive behaviour.  

Milo, in contrast, is loveable and caring. His mother died in the car crash and he is left in the care of his sister Faith. As much as she tries to keep everything together for him, he feels keenly the loss of his normal, ordered life and of course, his loving mother. His young voice has been perfectly captured by Geraghty, making it so easy to fall for this small boy who is dealing with personal tragedy and family fallout with great maturity. 

Lifesaving for Beginners deals with death, privacy, secrets and trust in the closest relationships people can form – with family, partners and life-long friends. Geraghty has written an engaging and personal story told from the perspectives of two very different people; the instantly likeable Milo and the contentious Kat, whom you warm up to as she allows herself to grow and become accepting.

Though Lifesaving for Beginners may be what I call ‘aeroplane reading’; the light yet absorbing books you pick up in airport news agencies for plane journeys; it is so much more emotional and rich than what is called for by the genre. Geraghty is a delightful writer who sweeps you up in her characters and tells stories with hope and enjoyment and the very necessary hint of darkness. If you were to pick this book up for a flight to Europe, you wouldn’t put it down for the full 24 hours.  

I had the good fortune to meet and interview Ciara Geraghty for Sassi Sam. Read the full interview. 

Interview with Ciara Geraghty, author of Lifesaving for Beginners

Thanks to Sassi Sam I had the good fortune to meet with an interview Ciara Geraghty, author of Lifesaving for Beginners. I would like to thank Ciara for her time and for being such a charming person to interview. I have edited out the rambling parts of our conversation, though they were pretty interesting.

What inspired the story of Lifesaving for Beginners?

Lifesaving for Beginners was inspired by a conversation I had with a friend of mine in County Kerry. The last time I was there I was chatting to my friend and she was telling me the story of her two elderly spinster aunts who lived together and died within months of each other. My friends' Dad was their only remaining sibling and he was going through their personal effects after their deaths and he found a birth certificate. One of them had had a baby in her teens and given the baby up for adoption. The baby, a baby girl, was sent to an American couple. But the aunts never spoke of it and one ever knew. We don't even know if the other sister might have known or not.

That absolutely fascinated me, the idea something so huge could happen to somebody and they just bury it and then continue to live their lives as if nothing ever happened. So that inspired the story of Kat who as a teenager had a baby and then lived her life as if nothing happened.

Forced or pressured adoption is a very controversial issue. Are you particularly interested it as a social issue?

I remember in Ireland when I was 14, and there was this young girl, she was 15 at the time and she was pregnant. She lived in a small town in the midlands in Ireland. No one knew she was pregnant and when she was due to give birth she went to the grotto in the town, which is a statue of Our Lady in the grounds of the church, and that’s where she gave birth to her baby. She brought scissors to cut the umbilical cord but it was a freezing cold night and they both died.

That sort of snagged in my net, I never really forgot that, it was so horrendous. Even to talk about it now, it's a horrible thing to happen to a young girl. In Ireland in the 80s it was still such a shameful thing for a young girl to have a baby and have sex. Those two stories (the young girl and the aunt) resonated with me and I suppose that's what interested me about the whole adoption situation, that's how I came to it. I'm more about the stories than about the topics. Definitely I'm about the characters, they would be very important to me.

So you started with this true story of the Aunt who had secretly given birth, from there how does your story evolve? Does it start with a character?

It definitely starts with a character, yes. So I had my character Kat Kerrigan and I had the idea; and I was interested in the technical aspect of telling the same story through two difference perspectives. I love the idea of perspective, that two people can experience exactly the same thing but tell it very differently because of their perspective. I wanted to tell the same story but through two different people to see how that would work. So I thought Faith and Kat.

But I couldn't make Faith work.  She a 24 year old woman I don't know if it was the age gap or if I wasn't that interested but I tried for the longest time to tell it. I have a big file on my computer labelled 'Faith' with about 25,000 words but I couldn't get it to ring true, I just couldn't make it work.

Then I was reading another book, Emma Donoghue’s Room.  She tells a very horrific story of a woman in captivity who is basically abducted and kept in a cell below ground on this horrible man's property and she gives birth to a baby. (In the novel) the baby is now five and Donoghue tells this horrendous story of captivity and abuse though the eyes of a five year old. Because it’s told through his eyes, there is such beautiful innocence to it. He’s seeing these dark and horrendous things happening but because it is told through his eyes there is such a lightness and innocence about it.

So I thought why don't I tell Faith's story through the eyes of her younger brother Milo, and the minute I started doing that it worked, it came.

Milo, the second voice in Lifesaving for Beginners, is at once such a mature young man and then he has just the perfect voice for a 10-year-old. How difficult was he to write?

I think you need access to a 10 year old boy before you can write it truly. Emma Donoghue, when she wrote Room, her son was 5. I do think you need that experience, or have an incredible good imagination. Even just the tone of their voice, you have to be familiar with it to write it. At the time my son was nine and I just thought I have access to this voice and this innocence and the way kids talk. He's one of my favourite characters. He just really worked for me and I was delighted to be able to do that.

Of the two voices in Lifesaving for Beginners, was there one that one easier to write?

Milo was the easiest to write. Kat is a prickly character anyway, so writing her was tricky but I really enjoyed it because she's nothing like me. I mean we're both writers but she's in a whole different league. She's the JK Rowling of thrillers. I had great fun writing her and getting to be difficult and prickly but certainly Milo came much easier.

I did worry about the readers – are the readers going to be rooting for Kat? Are they going to be in her corner because she is so difficult? But readers are giving me good feedback, saying they were won over by her. She is such a lovely person but she buries it all.

Why is Kat so prickly?

I think what's wrong with her is that she's never dealt with what happened to her when she was 15 and she's basically been dealing with post-traumatic stress ever since then. The car accident basically forces her to deal with it, like a grenade landing in her life and blowing the whole thing out of the water.

I think she would have been a different person if that (giving birth as a teenager) hadn't happened to her. It had a huge impact of her but she never dealt with her and then with the accident all her chicken s came home to roost at once and then she had to confront them.

Kat’s brother Ed, who has Down Syndrome, was he a difficult character to write?

I wanted to write Ed because I wanted there to be a relationship for Kat where she shines. I wanted that one relationship in the book where her goodness and her humanity shone through, and her relationship with Ed was that relationship.

My children go to lifesaving classes every week and while they're there, there are people with Down Syndrome in the pool as well, having a swim. That's possibly where I got the idea from. And then I know a couple of people with Down’s and I did a lot of research as well.

Hopefully I got it ok, because you don't want to mess around with the portrayal of the condition. It's difficult because you don't want to be patronising. You want to deal with that sympathetically but not be patronising; there is a balance. He's a nice character in his own right. You like Ed, you don’t feel sorry for him. That's the side that Kat sees in him.

Book review: The Unfinished Journals of Elizabeth D by Nichole Bernier

Read the full review on Sassi Sam.

The Unfinished Journals of Elizabeth D is a novel about the secrets we keep and the lies-by-omission that we tell the people closest to us. Elizabeth is a young dedicated mother who lives in a picture-perfect Connecticut world. When she dies in a plane crash, she leaves a lifetime of journals in the care of her closest friend Kate. Reading the journals, Kate realises she knew nothing at all about her seemingly close friend. Elizabeth did not trusted people with her secrets and no one in her life ever questioned her choices. 

The Unfinished Journals of Elizabeth D is light holiday read about the secrets we keep and the bonds of relationships. The thread of mystery running through the novel as Kate reads back through Elizabeth’s past is intriguing and makes this book readable. The subject matter is good if a little unoriginal. As a first novel, however, it is good.

Review: The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak

(Source.)

I finally read The Book Thief!

Almost two years ago, when B and I first began this blog, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak was on my list of books, the ones I owned but had never read. And it continued to sit there, unread, until, ironically, I bought a copy for my Kindle and read it on that. What can I say? The Kindle is handy for holidays.

But anyway, the book itself absolutely and completely lived up to all the good things I had heard about it. For those who don't already know - and honestly, I'd be surprised - The Book Thief is the story of Liesel Meminger, a young German girl living in the shadow of the Nazi Party and World War 2. She first comes to the narrator's attention in 1939, when her younger brother dies as they are travelling by train to Munich and has to be buried by the tracks. Liesel steals her first book - The Gravedigger's Handbook - even though she can't read yet, and so begins a pattern of biblio thievery that lasts the next five years of her life.

And the whole thing is narrated by Death.

I feel like this is a gambit that could easily have not worked, but in this case it does. The strange framing offered by Death's narration adds a new perspective and feels like a new way to tell a story about ordinary Germans dealing with the privations of the war, their instincts to help their Jewish friends and neighbours, and the need to avoid attracting the punitive attentions of the Nazi regime. It also draws constant, inescapable attention to the fact that, in Germany in this period, Death was everywhere. Literally. The soldiers, the Jews, the German civilians. The body count was immense, and with Death's narration this book is rightfully steeped in it.

However, part of the reason it works so well is that Zusak pays attention to Death as a compassionate force. The narration has a particular voice, one that mixes omniscience, bad jokes about its profession, and a huge amount of sympathy for the humans it encounters (by which I mean the dead ones). Death is unable to prevent the terrible things humans do to other humans, but it does its best to be there for all of us in the end.

The focus of the story, though, is Liesel. Her train trip in 1939 was actually a separation; her Communist parents seem to have been forced to give her up, and so she was travelling to Munich to be fostered out. Through her grief, she discovers and eventually embraces her new family, which consists of Rosa, her bad-tempered new mother who has a heart of gold below her angry red face, and Hans, her unbelievably kind, caring new father, who plays the accordion and bonds with Liesel over her nightmares. He's also the one who - crucially - finally teaches her how to read. Liesel also develops friendships with the neighbourhood kids, especially Rudy Steiner, the boy next door who insists that one day she will let him give her a kiss.

As The Book Thief explores Liesel's life, it maintains an excellent balance between the mundane day-to-day and the terrible events of World War 2. The complexity of the situation is fully explored, and starkly depicted. Liesel's family were hard-up before the war started, and as the German economy suffers, their circumstances grow worse and worse. Liesel and Rudy don't just steal books, they occasionally get hungry enough to steal food as well. Despite their poverty, though, the family doesn't hesitate to hide a Jewish man in their basement when the opportunity arises. Max, the Jew, becomes a friend to Liesel, and even manages to make a book for her. She keeps him secret, even as she and Rudy have to take part in the Hitler Youth Program and Hans has to join the Nazi Party. Then come the parades of Jews, marched through the town by Nazi soldiers. Dachau is, after all, just down the road.

Somehow, even with all this, The Book Thief still has a kind of youthfulness. Maybe it's the simple yet evocative language, maybe it's that Liesel, the focal point, is so young. A key aspect of her character is that she is honestly too young to understand why these terrible things keep happening to her. She grieves, she hates those responsible, yet she struggles to survive purely because she doesn't know how to do anything else. Janet Maslin at The New York Times mentioned 'Harry Potter and the Holocaust' in her review, and in a way, that's a strangely accurate parallel: The Book Thief - like Harry Potter - successfully marries loss on an extreme scale with an unsentimental kind of compassion. Human beings are capable of horrendous atrocity, but some of them resist, and at least Death is generous.

Reference:
The Age
The NY Times

Book review: Lola Bensky by Lily Brett

Read my full review on Sassi Sam.

Lola is almost a book about nothing nothing much but it is a brilliant portrait of an 'ordinary' women. Based on Lily Brett's life as a young journalist for an Australian rock magazine, the novel opens with Lola interviewing Jimi Hendrix minutes after an early gig. She travels in London and the US, interviewing some of the most incredible musicians of the 1960s. From there, the novel skips over the decades of Lola's life, drawing a slow portrait of a women who lives a life any of us could. What separates Lola from the mass of people is her parents, both of whom are Auschwitz survivors. This novel is a fascinating look at what it is like to be the child of holocaust survivors – a notion almost none of us would be able to comprehend without books such as this – and how being the child of a survivor affect you, in ways that can never be imagined. 

Lola Bensky is a novel with a difference and an excellent read that I would heartily recommend.

Book review: Lace by Shirley Conran

Read my full review on Sassi Sam.

Lace by Shirley Conran came out in the 1980s and became a feminist bonkbuster bestseller. It traces the lives of four very different women who share a teenage past. 

The novel starts out in a Swiss finishing school, all Dior gowns, handsome ski teams and what would now be viewed as rape. The first part of the book did not speak to me at all. Though an element of this luxurious improbability lingers, the novel grows to be an affirming story of four women who don't always have in easy, don't always have money but who do always have each other. At the final pages I must admit that I loved every minute of you.

Oh, and there's a lot of sex thrown in too, not all of it rape and a some quite titillating.

News from B

I have some news. I am now part of the team writing book reviews for the Sassi Sam website.

I'm excited, so you should be too.

I'll be reviewing books I wouldn't normally pick up myself on a trip to Avid Reader and that's kind of fun. My first book was Zoe's Muster by Barbara Hannay. It was the first totally light and fluffy book I've read in a long time and once I got over the slightly unbelievable starting premise (for me, not for everyone) I enjoyed it.

My second book was Unnatural Habits, a Phryne Fisher Mystery by Kerry Greenwood, which I was bound to enjoy, being a bit of a Miss Fisher fan.

The reviews are slightly less opinionated than the ones I write here, but still when one is posted I'll put the link in here, just in case you're interested.

Right now I'm reading the 30 year anniversary re-release of Lace by Shirley Conran; an international best seller that is a 700 page brick of a book stuffed with sex, glamour and empowering female friendship. It's going to take me a while, this one.

Book review: The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume

On a chilly July evening in Melbourne, someone is murdered in the back of a cab. No one knows who he is or why he was murdered. The only suspect is the man who was in the cab with him for part of the journey home. But this man also has no name, no description, nothing to distinguish him from the throngs of well-to-do gents who are out every night in late nineteenth century Melbourne. So begins The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, best-selling work of Fergus Hume, and a positively ripping yarn it is too.

This baffling case is handed to Detective Samuel Gorby. He and a host of characters traverse the length of Melbourne society as their investigations into who this man was and why he was murdered take them from the drawing rooms of cattle kings to slums presided over by foul-mouthed drudges killing themselves with drink. Even as suspects are thrown into prison to await the gallows, secrets from the past come back to reveal new twists that might save or condemn innocent men.

Before there was Agatha Christie, before there was even Arthur Conan Doyle, there was Fergus Hume. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was Hume’s first novel. Rejected by publishers, he self-published in 1886 and the risk paid off. Within months of publishing, the book had been read by 20,000 people in Melbourne. Impressive at a time when they cities’ population was less than half a million and literacy levels were significantly lower than they are today. The rights were subsequently bought by an international publishing firm and The Mystery in a Hansom Cab went on to be an international best-seller. It was in fact the best-selling detective story of the 19thCentury, beating out Conan Doyle’s early Sherlock novels such as A Study in Scarlet (1887).

Book review: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Every so often when my boss and I discuss literature, she tells me that Anna Karenina is her favourite novel and is shocked and horrified that I have not read it. 'Magnificent', I believe, is her favourite word to describe the work.

Last month, spurred on partly by her recommendation and partly by the impending release of a movie adaptation, I borrowed the novel from my sister-in-law and knuckled down to read.

This is what I expected from Anna Karenina;

• Reading exhaustion. That feeling you get when you’re a third of the way through a book and you suddenly run out of steam or lose all interest but you have to keep going. For hundreds more pages.
• Confusion from the Russian names, which I cannot pronounce let alone remember.
• That it would take me months to read and I would most likely read 2 other books in between just to give myself a break.

None of that happened.

All that happened was I fell for this story utterly and completely. It is tremendous. It is at every turn of the page the epic Russian novel you think it will be. A host of characters flow in and out of the story, as Tolstoy deftly switched between storylines and points of view, bringing the reader in to see every angle and become acquainted with the thoughts and emotions of each unhappy individual.

For those who want the three sentence overview of the novel; Anna Karenina is set in the lives of the nobility in the last decades of grand imperial Russia. The titular protagonist is the social ideal of a perfect wife and mother until she meets and falls passionately in love with Count Vronsky. In abandoning her respectable life to be with him, she leaves behind her hated husband, her beloved son and her place in the world to be an outcast. Anna's story is interwoven with those of a host of family and friends whose stories run the breadth of the human experience.
 

Keira Knightly as Anna and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Vronsky.

The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters

In September, I was given a Kindle for my birthday. In October, I finally got it out of its box and started to use it (it always takes me a while, I'm not one of those people ripping it open and booting it up on the day). I went through the set-up, then started looking through the catalog to find a book to read while travelling to Melbourne. I searched on a few authors whose writing I knew I liked, and came across The Chemickal Marriage, by Gordon Dahlquist. At that point, I'm pretty sure I made a noise only dogs could have heard. It was the third in a series of books I had been dying to finish.

Because, you see, way, way back, in the beginning of time (in 2006), I worked with a woman and we talked about books a lot. We'd read promos for this book called The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters, and thought it sounded like a good time. Then we discovered that the publisher was releasing the book as a serial; once you subscribed, they would mail you an installment, one week at a time - similar to the way Victorian folks used to get Charles Dickens books, for example. These special installments were only available in the UK, but my friend had an aunt there, so after a few months, I received a lovely package of slender blue volumes in the mail.

The fabulous binding was only a preview: The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters is a classic adventure-mystery, with bits of steampunk science fiction/fantasy and erotica thrown in. Set in a psuedo-Victorian-era city, the story follows three main characters - Cardinal Chang*, an assassin with bad eyesight and a fondness for poetry; Miss Celeste Temple, a stubborn, independent plantation heiress; and Doctor Abelard Svenson, a chain-smoking army surgeon attached to the prince of his country as he travels. Separately, the three come into contact with a sinister cabal intent on enslaving the upper eschelons of society and taking control of Europe, and when our heroes' paths' inevitably cross, they team up, intent on thwarting the plot. The glass of the title refers to the cabal's main weapon; a blue alchemical glass that can be used to steal memories and record them for others to experience. Using the glass also produces a feeling of erotic euphoria, ensnaring the hapless user in an addictive hallucination. As the story progresses, so does use of the glass, until a shocking and astounding alchemical transformation takes place!

And so, this began my interest in these books. The sequel, The Dark Volume, came out in 2008, and was an intriguing continuation of the story. It had an infuriating Empire Strikes Back-style ending, though, hence my excitement about the 2012 release of The Chemickal Marriage. And now I've finally read them all, and honestly, I found the conclusion totally satisfying. I thought the style and quality of the story and writing was consistent all the way through (it's always so disappointing when the end of a series is crap compared to the beginning, but that's not the case here) and overall, I find these books such an entertaining read!

They won't be what everyone wants in a novel, I suppose. The story is packed with a million characters, and driven by a crazy series of events - death-defying escapes, betrayals, encounters with members of the cabal, plus the detective-style work the three heroes are doing, trying to uncover the cabal's plot. Each chapter throughout the whole series is also told from the perspective of a different main character, rolling through them in a cycle, which has the advantage of uncovering a wider view of the overall conspiracy than a single perspective could portray, and also exploring how the main characters appear to other people, which is always intriguing. Of course, Dahlquist ends just about every chapter right on a cliffhanger, which is completely infuriating (and excellent). The books are also written in a slightly Victorian style, very much after Dickens, or maybe HG Wells or Jules Verne, and the language sometimes contributes a certain convolutedness for the modern reader.

However, if you can get used to the mannered writing, free-wheeling story and the perspective switches, there's plenty to reward you. Conspiracy, steampunk science, dissolute aristocrats, masked balls and murders. The villains, dastardly though they are, are a lot of fun - there's the Comte d'Orkanz, aristocrat-slash-artist-slash-mad-scientist and the creator of the science behind the blue glass. There's Francis Xonck, younger brother of a wealthy arms maker, who plays at being another dissolute aristo but has a greater ambition within the cabal than he pretends. Then there's the Contessa di Laquer-Sforza, a beautiful, enigmatic con-woman, orchestrating and manipulating even within the cabal. There are others, each convinced they are in control of their conspiracy, and the whole thing is naturally a house of cards, just waiting for the co-conspirators to betray each other.

I also really liked all the main characters. Miss Temple isn't a cookie-cutter heroine, and she refuses to be anyone's damsel in distress. She does start out searching for the fiance who threw her over, but continues to fight the cabal long after her interest in him has dissolved. Doctor Svenson is more reserved, even when the story is from his perspective, but his dry wit and ongoing loyalty, even to those who may not deserve it, becomes a welcome relief in such a mad-cap story. His chain-smoking and fear of heights also humanize him in appealing ways. And then there's Cardinal Chang, the consummate antihero; a talented assassin with a well-hidden reserve of courage and self-sacrifice.

So, if you feel in the mood for a thrilling, action-packed story, of sinister villains and a conspiracy that accelerates like a runaway train until it threatens to unseat an entire country, escalating to a horrifying, epic yet deeply personal climax at the end of The Chemickal Marriage, maybe these are the books for you...

(The Guardian has naturally written a better review than mine, if you need further convincing.)

Note: I hope they don't try to make a Hollywood movie out of these books. They'd have to tear them apart, and that would be such a shame. A really well-produced miniseries, on the other hand, akin to Game of Thrones or something, could be amazing.

*Not a real cardinal.