Monday, May 6, 2019

Brief--or not so brief--update on reading of books recently purchased

I'm two books into last week's #SEABookstoreDay purchases and, somewhat surprisingly, they were both so very good. Maybe some might think that a discerning shopper shouldn't be surprised when she likes two of her purchases but, for the most part, I was buying blind, taking a lot of books to the register on faith.

News of the World was the first book I read and, sort of, the first book I purchased last Saturday. It was recommended by a bookseller at Magnolia's Bookstore where I uncharacteristically asked for a recommendation. I asked because the same bookseller had endorsed or recommended, I don't remember which, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep last year which fully lived up to its charming title. (It's the sort of title I'd pick up on my own, obviously, but I'm pretty sure it was the bookseller insisting that it was good that made me keep it in my hand.) I learned from her this year that the Goats and Sheep author, Joanna Cannon, has a new book out but they were no longer stocking the hardback and the paperback isn't out until later this summer. So I asked her what else she had liked and she picked up News of the World, explaining that it was an entirely different book but it evoked the same reaction in her as Goats and Sheep.

And she was right. It was a very different book, but with lovely strange language that I had to read slowly to understand. It was funny and exciting and heartstopping and sad and just lovely. I remember stopping to consider a nicely turned phrase more than once, one of which had to do with how scalping is wrong: "It is considered very impolite." Mark Twain is often quoted saying something about the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. If I was brighter, I'd be able to say why that "very" is so crucial to the scalping sentence. I can't, however, I just know that it's the "very" that makes that sentence so damned good. It is, of course, also coming after a very tense scene so the humor is helpful. There was also this: Great limbs overhead were alive with birds on their spring migration to the north, lately come up from Mexico; the quick and nervous robins, the low song a yellow oriole, painted buntings in their outrageous clown colors.

I'm not entirely sold on "clown colors," but the rest of it is so fine that I overlook that slight misstep.

 The second book of the stacks that I picked up was The Travellling Cat Chronicles which has a cat narrator which is almost always going to work for me. (I hastily note that I Am A Cat was a disappointment to avoid jinxing things.) This was a quick and lovely and charming story of a man and his cat, traveling around in Japan visiting his old friends as he attempts to find a new home for the cat, Nana, which turns out to be Japanese for "seven," and also as a mechanism to tell the story of the man's life. I will say only that I started crying twenty pages from the end of the book. It is a very sweet little story. The Financial Times blurb on the back notes, "It has the warmth, painterly touch, and tenderness of a Studio Ghibli film--and it is a delight to read." I could not agree more.

 So it's with some trepidation that I pick my next book. I feel like Louise Penny's Still Life, a mass market mystery, isn't too much of an investment one way or another so if it's not as good as the first two, I won't be too distressed. Still. Fingers crossed.

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