very simple

Here are the books that I’ve read since I’ve been in Italy…

Here’s something I haven’t done in years. I finished a book in one day. When I finally got my box o’ books, and decided to read this. I’m an avid fan of pamie’s website, and have been keeping up with her writing for a few years. Picked up this book in the morning and finished it at two minutes to midnight.

And lest you think that all I did was sit around and read, I went to the office that day and did about two hours of work, and then wandered around central Milan, window shopping at the few stores that were actually open on a Sunday. Oh, and I slept until almost noon.

This book gets a definite “thumbs up”. The way she captures so perfectly how you can love and hate your family at the same time. Oh, and it’s apparently going to be turned into a TV pilot.

I actually started this back in NY before I left, but it was too bulky to carry around on the bus, so I had put it down for a while. It seemed like just the right thing, however, to drag on the plane. Two separate people, who don’t know each other, both recommended this book to me based on what other stuff they knew I liked to read. It was quite interesting, although I think I figured out some of the “twists” pretty early on. But it’s a fascinating look through different time periods in Eastern Europe, seen through the eyes of some “accidental” Dracula hunters (I don’t want to give too much away). Told pretty seamlessly from the perspectives of several different narrators, through letters written to and stories told to one another. And just a bit of romance thrown in as well…

I picked this up in Italy, while I was waiting for the box o’books to get out of the black hole of customs. I always like Michael Chabon, so I figured, even with the somewhat…awkward title, that there would be more than met the eye. I was right. It’s 1944, and the “old man,” who use to be a “quite famous detective” (see if you can figure it out without reading the Chabon interview at the end) sets himself the singular task of finding a little boy’s parrot. That someone else has already been murdered in an attempt to steal the bird, who has an unceasing list of numbers to repeat, and that the young jewish boy has been rendered mute by the things he’s seen can break your heart. And then it all comes together when the bird gets his own chapter. I actually cried.

The Alienist was one of my favorite books back when I read it, probably in no small part because, at the time, I was actually living in one of the NYC buildings that the narrator would regularly stop into – it made it almost an adventure to go wandering around the neighborhood and see the remnants of the buildings that were essentially characters in the story. But this one’s a little different. Carr was requested to write this book by the representatives of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate in America, so he write a completely faithful Sherlock Holmes story, where Holmes, Watson and Holmes’ brother Mycroft (who, as it happens, is a trusted confidant of Queen Victoria), find themselves attempting to solve two murders at one of the royal residences in Scotland. Sure, I cringed at some of the extremely dated sexism in Watson’s descriptions of the women, but I suppose if you’re going to write something that’s true to the original, you can’t exactly reinvent the wheel there,and the mystery was certainly intriguing.

not to be confused with the Nicole Kidman/Sean Penn movie with the same name. The story of a Korean-American woman who works as a translator, has inappropriate relationships with married men, and who begins investigating the death of her parents (and the disintegration of her family) when one of the witnesses she is translating for inadvertently mentions that he knew them. I have to say that I’m usually pretty good at spotting ” twists,” but I really didn’t see the ending until I think I was supposed to. I really enjoyed this.

OK. This one was kind of dumb. Not dumb exactly, but I’m not sure why I decided to buy it. OK, I know why I bought it, because I love all things Pride and Prejudice, but frankly, I kind of wish that I had left this one on the shelf at the store. The “supposed” story of what happens after Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett get married, it’s basically just a romance novel that co-opts some of my favorite characters. Sure I read it the whole way through, but I kept waiting for it to get better. To live up, in some way, to the original, which it never did. But I read it, so it goes on the list.

Now this was an excellent book. Allende takes a well known and well-loved hero and gives us the story of how Diego de la Vega became that hero. The things that drove him, the destiny in his family history, that instilled the sense of justice that Zorro was famous for. Excellent. Plus, pirates!

I picked this up shortly after I finished reading Wicked. It’s told in the same vein, the classic fairy tale, grounded in reality, and told from the point of view of one of the “bad guys.” Here the stepmother is still pretty evil, but the stepsisters are merely plain. And “Cinderella” (or Clara) withdraws herself to the hearth rather than be forced there. Iris (the smart yet plain stepsister) and Ruth (the dumb one) are actually the ones that convince Clara to go to the ball. Of course there’s jealousy, and pettiness, and extreme beauty, but altogether it’s a much more human tale. Clearly I’m now going to have to add Son of a Witch to my “to read” list now.

I picked up trace first, in the english-language section of the Rizzoli bookstore in Milan. I had really liked the serialized version of At Risk that had appeared in the NY Times magazine, and I needed some less “serious” stuff to read because my box seemed to be filled with a bunch of books that required serious attention. Cornwell’s books are pretty much CSI in novel form, but they’re certainly enjoyable to read (if a bit gruesome), and I managed to find a few more at the other bookstore in town. Little hint though – it’s probably better to read them in order. by reading Trace first, it pretty much spoiled me for some secrets involved in the earlier novels. But I still enjoyed finding out how they got to those points.

Tags: books