Wednesday Book

After the weirdness of Merrily Watkins in cider-coated Herefordshire, I went back to Scandinavia and read K. O. Dahl's The Fourth Man. It is a very good read. I almost suspected I had read it before when someone's hytta (Norwegian "chalet" they say in the book) burned down, but I think that happens often in these Norwegian/Swedish/Icelandic mysteries. (Anybody know a Danish one?) It is a nice complex plot, clearly nicely written and good in translation.

I moved on from there to my next Andrea Camilleri Inspector Montalbano book, Rounding the Mark. This one is laugh-out-loud funny. I love these books! They are so real and such good stories, full of all the joys, sorrows - and, being Sicily, crime - of human life. Salvo Montalbano is a terrific character. In this book his very favorite restaurant closes when the owner retires, but he quickly finds another as good. The descriptions of him eating and savoring his food are worth the books. I want to go to Sicily for pasta in squid ink! Please, read these books! Here they are in order, and in order they should be read:

The Shape of Water (La forma dell’acqua, 1994)
The Terracotta Dog (Il cane di terracotta, 1996)
The Snack Thief (Il ladro di merendine, 1996)
The Voice of the Violin (La voce del violino, 1997)
Excursion to Tindari (La gita a Tindari, 2000)
The Scent of the Night (L’odore della notte, 2001)
Rounding the Mark (Il giro di boa, 2003)
The Patience of the Spider - 2007 (La pazienza del ragno - 2004)
The Paper Moon - 2008 (La Luna di Carta - 2005)
August Heat - 2009 (La Vampa d'Agosto - 2006)
The Sphinx's Wings - 2009 (Le Ali della Sfinge - 2006)
The Sand Path - 2010 (La pista di Sabbia - 2007)
The Potter's Field - 2010 (Il campo del vasaio - 2008)
The Age of Doubt - 2010 (L'età del dubbio) - 2008

There are two more, but they aren't translated yet. There's TV, too, and two episodes were aired in England in 2008. They don't seem to be appearing here yet.

Now I finally gave in and started Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize winning novel about Thomas Cromwell. What a book. It is amazing writing and story/history telling. It is a reading feast. We have a stop day here tomorrow, and it's a good thing or there might not be a sermon on Sunday! I will have to take a break though as we have the annual Women's Retreat this weekend and I have to do Bible Study. (The Bible - I recommend that one, too!) But we also have Doug Thorpe, who teaches English at SPU, coming up over Valentine's weekend to do sessions on The Brothers Karamozov, and I'm going to take a shot at getting through a lot of the newer translation that came out in 1999 - supposedly way better than the one I read in college! So Wolf Hall will have to wait until the week after next. That's ok. It's the kind of book you don't want to finish in a hurry because it will be over.

Happy reading!