Admiring the scenery

I spent three hours yesterday as part of a team running, walking, clambering and sliding around lots of very steep muddy countryside looking for very specific portions of it (rogaining), which actually went better than I'd feared given that my co-navigator got us lost about eight times on the way to the actual event. Today, therefore, I am doing a lot of lying around, thus prompting me to find my usb stick and catch up with my booklog.

( Patrick Gale, Notes from an Exhibition. )

( Jodi Picoult, My sister’s keeper. )

( Georgette Heyer, The foundling. )

( Elizabeth Berg, The pull of the moon. )

( Louisa Alcott, Little Women (re-read). )

Irk. Irk. Irk.

The concept behind this grabbed me straight away - Josephine Tey, the writer, as a detective - and the Guardian review where I came across it was relatively approving, so I picked it up. And regretted it, as it annoyed me so rapidly that I started taking notes while still reading. This did mean that I had to take back an aggrieved note about "means of death described not remotely consistent with pattern of injury" when the Scotland Yard pathologist showed up and said exactly the same thing (he would have been my favourite character for this if, alas, he'd actually had a personality) but, on the other hand, it kept me going through the unlikely, grinding plot. I do not get the feeling that the author is at all comfortable with the sort of plotting required for successful detective stories, and I say this as someone who spent last week extracting a nonfunctioning crime plot from a friend's novella and attempting to put a slightly more coherent one back in - it's not an uncommon flaw, but it helps if there are other strengths to camouflage it (pace, character, setting, another plotline, humour, anything...) and there weren't here for me. And this is supposed to be the first in a series.

Snippy and fairly specific comments beyond the cut. No actual plot spoilers, largely because I don't think the plot makes sense.

( Nicola Upson, An expert in murder. )

Shaun Tan, Tales from Outer Suburbia

In contrast, this is a brilliant and touching book - I bought it when, reading the first few pages in the bookshop, I found myself getting tearful by page 18. Shaun Tan is a stunning good Australian artist who is also a genius at narrative; this collection of 15 stories - and the equally important illustrations - manages to do in only 96 pages what numerous other books fail to do with two or three times that many. The topics here are less immense, in some ways, than books like The Rabbits (about colonialism) or The Arrival (the immigrant experience), but no less well handled. The collection actually reminded me of Chris van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (which I love), and I was amused to see Shaun gives this as an influence on his work when I checked his website. He doesn't seem to have anything up on this book yet, so I can't include pictures, unfortunately (the clockwork birds surrounding the car of the couple on a scavenger hunt that must be completed before they can marry, the shreds of paper that make up the story of where unshared poems go, the woodcut style pictures of the loved and lost objects in The Nameless Holiday), but here are a couple of first lines. The bookshop I got this from shelved it in with all the children's picture books, which is both appropriate and not - they're certainly not stories that should be restricted to an upper age limit.

I know you think you saw him first, but I'm pretty sure it was me - he was over there by the underpass, feeling his way along the graffiti-covered wall and, I said, "Look, there's something you don't see every day." (Broken Toys)

On a cold night last winter there was a fire at the house of a man who only days before had beaten his dog to death. (Wake)

The night of the turtle rescue, I thought we were going to die. (Night of the Turtle Rescue)