Book report, part 1

Herewith, a report on reading books, on the occasion of several things converging:

• Tomorrow classes start at Owls Head Central School (what characterizes primary school better than the book report?)
• This August marks six years for me on Goodreads (what an interesting tool for reviewing one's life)
• We are back in Maine after a couple of difficult months (what makes one want to escape into the world of books more than overseeing the decline and death of a 16-year-old dog, and the move of an 89-year-old mother-in-law and belongings from an apartment to a care facility?)

My six-year Goodreads total is 640 titles. You might say books are my life.

Here are some stats and trends.

Novels

There are only a handful of nonfiction titles on the list, some required by membership in a book group, the others usually related to research or obeisance for my own writing. I can't write fiction so I must read it.

Mysteries (and the occasional thriller)

Is it a touch embarrassing that almost a third of my reads are mysteries? I was an English lit major after all.

At this time, mystery authors are nearly equally divided between male and female. But lately I've been reading women writers almost exclusively. The males of the species seem to trying to compete with television, with improbable plots, increasing violence, and huge cast of characters, most of whom die in gruesome ways. Here's a sentence from Michael Koryta's The Silent Hour that illustrates the problem. “According to Darius, Salvatore Bertoli had sought Cash out to warn him of Joshua Cantrell’s attempts to get information about the murder of Johnny DiPietro.” Five characters shallowly exhaled in one breath, near the end of the book. I can't remember how many of them die - probably all of them.

I do like (early) Martin Cruz-Smith, David Downing, Philip Kerr, John LeCarre, and Peter Lovesey. Authors that rise a little higher are Ian Rankin, Alan Furst, and Henning Mankell - they have strong characters and interesting settings and even some "literary" themes.

Speaking of the Scandinavians, I too had my fling - lasted a couple of years. No more - now even the women are writing like the men.

Favorite women writers, all or almost all of whose books I've read, include Ann Cleeves, Elizabeth George, P.D. James, Donna Leon, Laura Lippman, Louise Penney, Ruth Rendell, and Jacqueline Winspear. Just good characters and reasonable stories, please.

None of these are literary in the graduate school sense. In fact, I can't think of a "mystery" writer since Graham Greene who confronts the great themes of religion and politics and death and joy and angst.

Next 

More serious books....