Book Log 2020 #18: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Unknown to most people, Barcelona is the home to the Cemetary of Forgotten Books, a labyrinthine (and possibly magical?) library of obscure and abandoned books. A ten year-old Daniel Sempere is taken there by his father, and allowed to take out one book. He chooses The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax, and falls in love with the book after reading it.

Daniel looks for more works by Carax, but finds none. In fact, he learns that his copy of the book may be the only one left, as someone has been buying up copies and burning them. Daniel decides to learn more about Carax and why someone would want to destroy his work. This takes us back to 1919, where a story within the story tells us about Carax and how his life led to someone looking to erase his work forever.

This is the first book in a series, and if the rest of the books live up to this one it'll be well worth reading them all. It's not an easy book to define, as it's at points a mystery, a work of magical realism, and a Gothic novel. But it all works together, creating a higly engaging and atmospheric story. 

 Book Log 2020 #17: Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

When their parents have to go to Singapore for unexplained reasons at the end of World War II, a brother and sister wind up in the care of the family's lodger, who introduces the pair to his eccentric band of friends (and coworkers? fellow smugglers? criminals of some type?), all of whom seemed to have some ill-defined role in the war effort. The siblings are given a sort of practical education and helped to find work. The brother becomes convinced that their mother is still in Britain - perhaps even in London - and after more than a year of absence he sees her again, briefly, before being sent off to boarding school in the US.

Jump ahead a dozen years, and the brother is working for the Foreign Office in an intelligence capacity, and he uses that position to try to learn more about the work his mother (and the people who take care of him when she left) did during the war.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit, both as a mystery about what all of the adults were doing during the war and as an examination of how the past can shape your present. Very much recommended.

 Book Log 2020 #16: Black Diamond by Martin Walker

A wave of anti-Asian crime hits the French village of St. Denis, from an attack on Vietnamese shop vendors to the burning of a local restaurant. While this is going on, a local truffle expert (and former intelligence agent) is murdered. Does the influx of cheap Chinese truffles connect the crimes, or is it just a coincidence?

Once again, local police chief Bruno wades into the mysteries to find the guilty, dispense some local justice where appropriate, and, most importantly, keep the village running as close to normal as possible. We also get a healthy dose of Bruno's personal life as well, between a return of his former girlfriend (who is climbing the ranks of the national police) and interest in someone closer to home.

As with the previous entries in the series, this is a good mystery wrapped in a travelogue that make me wonder why I haven't moved to the Dordogne yet.

 Book Log 2020 #15: Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi

This isn't a completely new entry in the Old Man's War series, but a retelling of the previous entry, The Last Colony, from the viewpoint of Zoe Perry, the adopted daughter of John Perry and Jane Sagan. It does fill in a lot of gaps, and helps to explain Zoe's role in the events of that book. The book also marks the series transition away from the main characters and towards a broader story about the warring factions trying to claim parts (or all) of the universe.

I liked the book, and appreciate the transition to a different focus for the storytelling. If you like this series you should like this installment.

 Book Log 2020 #14: The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

The main thesis of this book is that the east-west exchange fostered by the Silk Road - the trading routes between Asia and Europe - played a much larger role in the development of Western civilization than normally credited, and should be thought of on par with the influence of Greece and Rome. Or to riff off of another book about global interconnectedness, the world was flat well before Thomas Friedman came along.

I gave this book three stars on Goodreads, so there was something I found a little off about this book, but I don't know what it was. The book comes in at over 600 pages, so maybe I found it a bit repetitive? Or maybe I just wasn't a fan of Frankopan's writing style. Or I found the idea that Europeans were influenced by Persia and peoples farther east to not be that surprising. Don't know. It's probably worth a read (a 2018 update adds coverage of China's Belt and Road initiative).

 Book Log 2020 #13: His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

I apparently had a thing going for fiction presenting as fact in 2020. In this example, we are presented with "found" documents relating to a 1869 triple murder in a Scottish village. There's no question that the killer is local teen Roderick Macrae. The real question is why he did it - did Roderick kill to take revenge against the constable that made his life a living hell, or did he have some sort of mental or moral defect that led him down the path to murder?

The documents provide various views of the motives for the crime, most notably the narrative penned by Roderick himself.  They also tell the story in a unique way, once that provides plenty of room for different interpretations of motive, as well as room for doubt as to the veracity of the narrators. It's also notable that the time the novel is set in is not that long after the development of the M'Naghten rule, a jury instruction developed in cases where an insantiy defense is given. This tension between crime as a moral failing or a sympton of illness adds to the conflict at the heart of the book.

This was short listed for the Booker Prize (it lost to Paul Beatty's The Sellout), and is apparently the best-selling book to be shortlisted (though I wonder if it was passed by The Testaments). It's easy to see why it became so popular, between the gripping murder story and the thorough depiction of grinding poverty in rural Scotland. Very much worth reading for fans of crime fiction or even true crime.

 Book Log 2020 #12: The Last Colony by John Scalzi

The third book in the Old Man's War series, we find former solider John Perry and his family settled down, at least until they're given an offer to lead a new colony, made up of residents from other previously colonized planets.

Only problem is that the Conclave, an alliance of races seeking to limit human expansion into the universe, discovered the location of the planned colony, forcing the Colonial Union to send the homesteaders to a new planet. Which they have to settle as damage to their ships prevents them from going home. And which they have to settle without the use of current technology, so the Conclave won't find them. 

And eventually, as you'd expect, the Concalve does find the colony, and it becomes embroiled in the politics between the Concclave and the CU, leading to an inspired - but possibly treasonous - solution.

As with most series, if you've liked previous books you'll like this one.

 Book Log 2020 #10: Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay

On Valentine's Day 1900, the students and some of the staff at an Australian girls' school go on the titual outing, which ends in tragendy. Several girls and one of the teachers have gone missing.  The search for the missing takes place on a backdrop of suspicion and mistrust, which as you might imagine wind up taking a toll on the school and those associated with it.

The book is written as if the events may actually be true, and most of the locations in the book actually exist. This, combined with the disappearances going unsolved, led to a bit of a national phenomenon with speculation over what happened to the missing women. This was answered by the eventual publication of the book's excised last chapter in 1987, which detailed what actually happened. That it was followed shortly by another book where other writers depicted their own alternate endings gives you a sense of how attached people in Australia were to this story.

I did not develop the same sort of attachment. The book is fine, I just never got that swept into the mystery. I also found the Victorian era manners and attitudes a bit irritating, but I suppose people of the age did as well.

 Book Log 2020 #9: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

This sequel to The Handmaid's Tale is set 15 years after the original book, and tells of the beginnings - and end - of that theocratic state through the stories of three women. Two are younger and have little to no functional knowledge of a time before Gilead. The third, Aunt Lydia, tells of the beginnings of the state and how she earned her role within it. Their stories interact with each other - and with the history of the first book - leading to a world-changing conclusion.

I did re-read the first book before the sequel, and I think it's a worthwhile move if you haven't read it in a while. The original book felt a lot more personal to me - which I guess makes sense as it's one woman's personal story rather than the wider-ranging narrative of the sequel - but both are told powerfully and are very much worth reading, even if you've been watching the TV show.

 Book Log 2020 #8: Broken Harbor by Tana French

Once again a member of the Dublin Murder Squad has to balance an active murder investigation with events from their past. Here it's "Scorcher" Kennedy, who is investigating the deaths of a man and his two children, while their wife/mother is in intensive care. It appears to be a case of the man snapping under financial strain - the family lives in a development that's half-finished, a casualty of the Great Recession - but as Kennedy and his rookie partner look into the case, they find that it's not so open and shut.

The past comes in the form of Kennedy's sister Dina, who is prompted by the new case to dredge up an incident from their past that Kennedy believed he had under wraps. 

If this feels familiar it's because most (if not all) of the books in the Dublin Murder Squad series have this sort of set-up, where the main character is investigating a case that dredges up part of their past and brings it into the present. In lesser hands this would get formulaic, but French brings enough difference (both in terms of the narrative and the main character's persona) that the recurring framework doesn't feel old.

I think I've pretty enthusiastically recommended the books in this series in the past, and do so again here.

Book Log 2020 #7: The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin

This fitting climax to the Broken Earth trilogy sees the mother and daughter orogenes (humans who can control earth processes like quakes) square off in their plans to save or destroy Earth.  I won't go into details (mostly because I'm writing this up a good 2+ years after reading the book), but will say that this book was incredibly satisfying both on a storytelling level and on wrapping up lingering questions about the world of the Stillness. 

If for some reason you've not read these books you should do so at your earliest convenience.