wahistorian's reviews
488 reviews

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's little detective story combines a locked room murder with a science fiction twist. Jeff Vandermeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy, povides an enlightening foreword that sketches in the Stalin-era context for this odd story. I appreciated the weird collection of guests and staff at the remote inn and the Strugatsky brothers' spin on the classic detective novel, but I wasn't entirely sure that scifi provided a satisfying ending. If you don't expect *too* much from the climax and if you enjoyed Vandermeer's three novels, you'll probably appreciate this one.

'Names for the Sea' recounts Sarah Moss's experiences teaching literature and writing at the university level for a year in Reykjavik. Relocating from England, she had no idea what to expect from Iceland, and much of the book relates her mystification at Icelandic ways: their daredevil driving, their disdain for walking and public transit (which becomes a bit more clear in winter's freezing temperatures), their chilly reception of outsiders, and their horror at the notion of secondhand anything. She acknowledges arriving at a particular time in Icelandic history, just when speculation-fueled high spending and growth had collapsed under the weight of a worldwide depression in 2009. She spends time with Icelanders who are accustomed to outsiders, like the country's gnome and elf expert, but since she has difficulty getting to know the "real" Icelander, her other line of inquiry has is the weather in all its soul- and body-testing extremes. Oddly enough, her prose really soars in the last section of the book, when she and her family have moved to Cornwall, and they return for a brief vacation. They visit all the sights they'd missed as working people, and marvel at the geology and the the wildlife, the sky and the sea especially.

I enjoyed this book about a topic I know virtually nothing about: the North Sea in the Middle Ages. I didn't necessarily completely buy Michael Pye's thesis--that Renaissance innovations had their roots in the North Sea fishing trade and its traveling people--but I learned more about the Hansa people and the Frisians than I'd ever know before. The book is replete with fascinating characters and their scrambling attempts to shape the world to their needs.

Didion's wide-ranging and anecdotal style takes a little getting used to, but "The White Album" essay makes it worth wading through some of the less enjoyable parts of the rest of the book. These essays--all written about her experiences and observations between 1966 and 1972--really evoke that particular time when the 1960s began to get uglier and even more narcissistic than they started. "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Didion writes, and there was certainly a lot of story-telling going on in the late 1960s: on Didion's part, as she tries to make some sense of what she's seeing, and on everyone else's part, as they either tried to understand the collapse of the Flower Children's good intentions or rationalize their own bad behavior. Ask Charlie Manson or the Hell's Angels at Altamont (or the Rolling Stones who hired them).

I slogged through Jackie Kennedy and Susan Sontag, and stopped at Angela Davis. Kaplan is an excellent writer and the organizing concept for this multiple biography was intriguing. But the privilege and the wide-eyed admiration for the city itself just wasn't for me.

Robert Traver's 'Anatomy of a Murder' was one of the early courtroom thrillers that John Grisham would make so popular thirty plus years later. Like his fictional character Paul Biegler, John D. Voekler--Traver's real name--had been both a prosecutor and a defense attorney, and was intimately familiar with the twists and turns of criminal cases in small-town courts. The book was based on a case that Biegler actually defended and his delight in the law (and fishing) comes through. Traver set a difficult task for himself, in that the the story of the crime at the center of the book has been told in the first 100 pages; the next 400+ are all about making the case that will save his client's life, yet the writing is still compelling. The supporting characters--investigator Parnell McCarthy, secretary Maida, and prosecutor Claude Dancer--are vivid, and Michigan's Upper Peninsula is almost like another character. Spoiler alert: the book is quite different than the movie, but Jimmy Stewart will always be "Polly" Biegler to me.

Fredrik Sjoberg is a Swedish entomologist who specializes in studying the hoverfly on his small island off the Swedish coast. He in entranced by its diversity and the ways in which its patterns of birth, life, and death help explain the world. But Sjoberg has the remarkable capacity to be entranced by many, many things: the habits of other entomologists; bug collecting and collecting in general; the history of his profession; and particularly the life of the inventor of the fly trap he uses daily to study his target. Sjoberg's writing glows with his interest in the natural and human worlds, and his tangents are fascinating. I would have never believed a book about entomology could be so fascinating.