whee, book

[mrissa]

So: Reginald Hill! Why didn't any of you tell me? Did you think I already knew, or does he get weird (I mean bad-weird) early or late in the series? I'm halfway through Arms and the Women, which I selected more or less at random from the library's collection in this series, and it has a major character who is writing a novel, and it has bits of the novel in the book, and you know what? I don't even care. I hate novelist major characters, and even more than that I hate the books they write, hate them with the hatey hatefulness, and I am so loving the characters, and so wanting to pop up to my e-mail to send a quote to gaaldine or swan_tower or pameladean or anne_mommy every five minutes (but I am resisting because there is more book to read) that I don't even care about a) the novelist major character or b) the structure of this sentence.

And there are two dozen of them just in this series (which I will read first, and then try the others, as I did with Ruth Rendell, or am doing, rather, as I still have lots of not-Wexford to go), and the library has bunches and also doesn't have bunches, so I've gone and added a bunch of cheap mystery paperbacks to my Amazon list. I feel very virtuous about putting cheap paperbacks on my list before Christmas. "There," I think, "then if my dear little old auntie wants to buy me something from the list, she can have options. Mom can sort by cheapest on up to show her, and if she doesn't want to buy me Saffy's Angel--which she should because it's good--then she can buy me something with nice cheerful deathfulness in it." And the glow of virtue surrounds me like, lo, a nimbus, because of my virtuous potential receipt of presents. And then I putter off to stir spaghetti sauce while reading more of this book. The end. Good story, huh? I did not, at this juncture, find five bucks. But one never knows at an Aho premiere, really.

I was not in a good mood. But now I am. Moral of the story: Reginald Hill, you folks who are not wshaffer are falling down on your telling-me-good-books job, but I have the joy of having found him now , much rejoicing, and soon there will be brand new freakazoid Finnish symphonic music as written by a Finn who has apparently been listening to much North Indian drumming. Here is what about Kalevi Aho: not boring. Weird. But not boring.

So like the rest of my life then. So that's all right.

That was rather an incoherent moral, but a positive one. So again: like the rest of my life then.

Comments

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I am now full of squee and envy, in roughly equal parts. But you can envy me, too, because I have never even heard of Reginald Hill, so I get to read him for the first time!

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Oh, whoops. I'm sorry. I've known Reg for twenty years, and, y'know. Just kind of assume that anyone who reads mysteries knows all about him already, because he is Big Star Fella. And a gentleman from his silver hair to his polished shoes, but that's by the bye. Perhaps he's just not so well known in the US? (There is a popular TV series over here, "Dalziel and Pascoe", based obviously on his characters; dunno if that made it over there, but it certainly helped to raise his profile here.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't know if "Dalziel and Pascoe" has made it over here, either, because I am not at all good at spotting that sort of thing. DVDs are often available these days, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.

But anyway: I am someone who reads mysteries, but the problem is, I am not A Mystery Reader the way I am An SF Reader and A Fantasy Reader. So in sheer numbers, I probably read more mysteries per year than many people who are Mystery Readers. But what I can't do is walk into a mystery section and have a very solid idea of who is going to be worth my time and in which directions, vs. who is going to bore and annoy me. Obviously I am sometimes wrong about that in the speculative genres, but I'm even more often wrong about it in mystery. So I'm highly dependent on recommendations in mystery.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Okay, duly noted. John Harvey is good, if you haven't read him yet. Also try "Raven Black" by Ann Cleeves, the first of her Shetland quartet...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I had not heard of either of those, and the library has both. Thanks!

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

They get worse and then get better. My daughter loved Arms and the Women, but I didn't like it much. I strongly disliked Death's Jest-Book and Dialogues of the Dead, but I enjoyed the more recent Death Comes for the Fat Man and Cure for All Diseases (I don't know why in Canada we had the UK title for one of these and the US title for the other ...)

Editing: It gets weird late in the series - about where you started, or maybe the few before that are of uneven quality. The early ones are great classic British police fiction. Like Wexford.

Do you know Robert Barnard?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Never met the guy, but I read Death on the High C's just recently. Does he get better than that? If so, which one(s)?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I think Death on the High C's is pretty much what you get with Bob Barnard; that's the kind of thing he does.

[pmrabble.livejournal.com]

Just leaving WBL for Ahoness now. Sans kayak! Mmmmm, freaky Finnish music.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Happy happy bassoons. Happy rumpled Finnish man. So happy.

He does so much better with letting the low instruments do something that isn't the orchestral equivalent of, "Oooooooh...bop bop bop," than such an overwhelming majority of composers. markgritter thought that the large horn section was excessive, but I did not.

[pmrabble.livejournal.com]

I talked to Aho for a minute or so at intermission - really nice guy. And that was a really good piece. I'm glad they flipped the Stravinsky and the clarinet concerto; made for a much better flow.

The problem with Der Rosenklavier Suite is that it always makes me wish Strauss had written some more tone poems, or, gasp, a symphony. Such pretty music, and it stops just when it could be getting interesting!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I did have kind of the "wait, we're done now?" reaction to the Strauss.

[anne-mommy.livejournal.com]

You can send me quotes anytime. ;-)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Will do, if I can peel myself away from a book long enough to do so.

[talimena.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry! I guess I thought you already knew of him, because I think of him as fairly mainstream and you'd mentioned other mysteries I hadn't heard of. There are a few I've had no interest in re-reading, but I don't think he gets bad-weird. Enjoy!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And see, "fairly mainstream mysteries" tells me nothing at all about whether I'd enjoy them--so if you think of other fairly mainstream mysteries that are also fairly good, do speak up at any time. Even when my response to book suggestions is, "Yes, I've read those," I always like them anyway.

[talimena.livejournal.com]

And, of course, I'm blanking now. All that's coming to mind are Deborah Crombie and Ellis Peters' Felse series. (And Cadfael, but the Felse ones are on my mind because they're harder to find.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And that was useful, because I've read the Cadfael books but not the Felse ones, and nothing by Crombie.

[talimena.livejournal.com]

Oh good. Another that came to mind is Teri Holbrook. There are only four in the series and they go back and forth between England and the southern U.S. It's been a while and I'm fuzzy on the details, but I enjoyed them enough to be excited to find out that there's a new one (2001!).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Our library has missed her; ah well, no library is perfect.

[talimena.livejournal.com]

I have at least one, though not the first, and would be happy to lend it to you once I get a new bookshelf and unpack the last of the books. Also, D.M. Greenwood, modern (ish, 90s I think) British mysteries whose main character is a deacon.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the offer, but I'm really too nervous about long-distance book loans to make them a good idea.

[pameladean]

I couldn't tell you because I didn't know. Now I have to read them. Oh, the horror.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If I get some of them, you can borrow them. Get some of the loan of mysteries flowing in the other direction briefly.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Me too.

Fortunately, the library seems to have lots.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If desperance had not spoken up, I would have started in with disclaimers here, because you quite possibly have met actual people from actual Yorkshire, whereas my main experience of Yorkshire is that I watched half a dozen episodes of All Creatures Great and Small when I was 11. So if Chaz hadn't said that these books were popular in Britain, I would feel the need to note that there might be glaring errors I was missing but you would not.

And there still may be, but it seems less likely to be a really aggressive problem.

[shark-hat.livejournal.com]

(Book recs from someone you don't know! Tempting!)
If you haven't read any of Dorothy Simpson's Inspector Thanet series, W. J. Burley's Wycliffe series, or Staynes and Storey's Inspector Bone books (published in the US as by Susannah Stacey, I believe), they're probably worth a try if the library has them. I prefer Thanet and Bone slightly to Wycliffe, but they're all decent people, and the crimes are interesting, and I find you get an interesting amount of the cops' personal life without getting overwhelmed.
Ian Rankin does good police procedurals but much grimmer, without being bloodporn.
And I love Sarah Caudwell's books but they're nothing like any of these- funnier, and first-person egotistical narrator.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Book recs are welcome from people I don't know, too, and when they suggest Sarah Caudwell, the entire rest of the recommendation set gets bumped up the plausibility scale. Thanks!