His advice can be summed up easily – stay active, physically and mentally; involve yourself in social activities; be open to new experiences.  Savor all opportunities for pleasure and adventure.  Old is when we accept substantial limitations on what we can do.  True, some of his suggestions are dated (seniors should spend time learning to use the internet), but the general concepts in the book resonate.

The mention of technology made me wonder how often in the past the old might have turned to the young for information. Was it some oldster who advocated trading in the horse for a car, or like today, did the young lead the way?  We’re usually told that it is the old who pass on their wisdom, and President Carter laments that the young no longer listen, but maybe having knowledge go both ways isn’t that unusual – and something else to keep us young.

I also liked his comment that education should prepare us for a whole life, not just the working years.  Hurray for the liberal arts and being introduced to art, music, and literature, all interests that can stay with us for a lifetime, plus philosophy and sociology to help with lifelong community/political choices.

Following President Carter’s advice to find things that make us happy, I’m suggesting three light mysteries – to be read for fun.  And in the first, there is someone who agrees with him on staying connected.

She is the publisher of the philosophical Review of Applied Ethics, and it is this subject which forms the backbone of Smith’s novel.  The thin plot – straightforward and solved with a few phone calls and lunches – is the thread that binds the main character’s stream of consciousness.  Isabel muses on general philosophical problems such as overpopulation, what it feels like to be a fox, the purpose of statues, how easy it is to misjudge a situation.   Her focus however is on what one must or can do to help others in trouble and it is this which causes her to become involved in mysteries.  Despite her philosophical bent, she is a practical woman with a husband and two small children who volunteers in her niece’s deli.  In the novel we watch Isabel attempt to apply her philosophical principles to everyday life.

This is not a book for someone who wants a compelling fast-moving plot.  It is meant for the philosophers among us who enjoy a slow moving, thoughtful ramble with a small amount of mystery.  The novel is number eleven in the Isabel Dalhousie collection, one of McCall Smith’s many popular series.

Several mystery writers who have used her help as a “murder consultant” are also found dead; all have received a mysterious postcard saying, “We are coming for you.”  Three improbable sleuths, a home health carer from the Ukraine, an ex-monk who would like a girlfriend, and a retiree in a rest home join forces to solve the crimes.

This is the second in the Brighton England series starring DS Harbinder Kaur, the gay Indian detective who tries to keep the three new friends safe while the police investigate in this charming literary mystery.

In her imaginative novels, starting with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, she gave Sherlock a young wife, the brilliant talented Mary Russell.  Twenty years later, in The Murder of Mary Russell, she changes her mind and kills her off – or does she? 

This cozy mystery is full of feints and misdirection, starting with the title.  It is not Mary who is the main character, but Mrs. Hudson, the reliable motherly housekeeper who has been with Sherlock since his story started.  But why would such a respectable woman have a visit from an unsavory character claiming to be her son, telling tales of shipwreck and hidden treasure?

Doubly fun, this “historical fiction” creates a lively back story for one of the popular supporting figures in the Sherlock saga.

Do all cultures have the ritual of a toast?  Prost! Salut! Or the most recent that I have learned, Okole Maluna!  (Bottoms to the Moon or Bottoms Up).   

I think the answer must be complicated and I’ll let you think about it – but not during the next Cheers worthy occasion.

In The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout, the thoughtless act of a friendless teenager brings the two groups together with an impact that upends their lives.

Alienation and loneliness are emotions not only the Somalis feel, but also the Burgesses when they move to New York, don’t like their work, get divorced, can’t stand one another, or disapprove of the other’s lifestyle.  Common problems are magnified by the long-lasting burden of the childhood loss. But family ties remain and when trouble comes, they draw together.

Juxtaposed with the Burgess family are the Somalis who also draw together in this land of confusion and strangeness where they have been forced to flee for their lives.  Americans tend to think immigrants should be grateful to be here, but the homesick immigrants often see things differently.  Americans are so individualistic (selfish). Children speak confidently (entitled and disrespectful). Strangers look you in the eye and smile (rude).  This section reminded me of Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar where the Muslim immigrants had similar observations.

Strout’s strong point is her ability to bring her characters to life.  When the novel was over, I felt that I knew the Burgess family very well.

Lamarr was born in Vienna and raised in a cultured middle-class family of Jewish descent who navigated the politics of Austria between the wars.  As a child, she loved to tinker with mechanical things and was stunningly gorgeous.  Which of those characteristics would dominate? It was interesting to see what in the culture, the times, her personal circumstances brought her beauty to the fore first, and then as opportunity shifted, her suppressed scientific interests reemerged.

Benedict struggles to hold the three distinct parts of the book together as the first section deals with the rise of the Nazis, the second, Hedy’s time in Hollywood, and the third her scientific achievements.  I found the book mediocre but was very interested in the questions it raised about historical fiction.  How much latitude is an author allowed in fleshing out facts to make a good story?  Is it disconcerting to have the made-up information woven so seamlessly we can’t tell fact from fiction?  I might prefer a Hamnet, where there is a starting fact (yes, there was a Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet) but the other personal information is obviously made up.  Maybe historical fiction works better if it is written about someone who lived centuries ago rather than decades.

Benedict is interested in women whose technological accomplishments have been marginalized. In Hedy Lamarr, she finds someone who is ignored not only because she is female, but also especially beautiful and a movie star besides. Three prejudices in one.

Susan Sarandon has produced a documentary, Bombshell, The Hedy Lamarr Story, covering similar material plus emphasizing that Hedy’s patented information underlays the development of cell phones and Bluetooth.

But a different tune is sung, and Joe discovers in the tiny town of Llanffugiol the discordant notes of arson, murder, drugs, and pedophilia. When he heroically rescues a young woman from a burning house, his involvement is guaranteed.

Joe thinks to himself in metaphor and cliché and rambles when he speaks to others. “You played the cards the dealer gave you… knocked back by what felt like a Pearl Harbor attack out of a clear blue sky… unsteadiness of a round-the-world sailor finally hitting home.”  But when he thinks about his case, he succinctly gets to the point and helps the local constabulary solve the mystery.

It takes an alert reader to follow him and to keep track of the many characters in this intricate mystery.  Easy-to-like Joe heads a large, varied cast.

When the speaker later refers to retirement, we realize that his “day” is symbolic. People look forward to completing their work life and anticipate satisfaction and comfort.  But what happens when a person looks back and finds the disquieting fear that all effort was for the wrong thing?  Such is the plight of the main character in Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Stevens is the quintessential English butler who served at the end of World War I, when the grand houses were still occupied by the nobility.  He gave up all thought of a personal life to completely inhabit his role.  Service to a great man at the center of power, to someone working for noble things, was the highest achievement.  Now, both the great man and his reputation are gone; the idealistic world they lived in is gone; the woman who loved him is gone; and he is left alone to consider his past.

This wonderful story is told in the quiet restrained manner Stevens would have approved of.  In addition to a perfect tone, Ishiguro uses nature to echo the scenes.  When Stevens meets for the last time the woman he has frozen out, it is raining.  As he contemplates his remaining days, it is sunset.  Although the setting is of a time long gone, the fear of having wasted your life is universal. 

A book like this is my favorite kind – easy to read on the surface but thoughtful and perceptive.  Exploring the large questions of life in literary fiction is one of the best reasons to read.

Can fast foods be as addictive as cigarettes and cocaine?  Moss explores our genetics and what we are programmed to desire in food by eons of evolution. Storing fat for times of famine. Getting the most calories possible from the least effort. Variety (think leaves, bulbs, fruit, and the occasional rodent) to ensure all needed nutrients.

Fast forward to the ubiquitous availability of cheap sweet fatty foods in unending variety (New! Improved!).  I counted approximately fifteen kinds of Coca Cola along with orange, ginger, and garlic (!) being tested in other countries. Big Food deploys an army of scientists to figure out how to exploit natural desires developed over millennia.  As with other addictions, science is unable to say why some people are happy with one Oreo and others must have the whole bag, but will-power is not the reason.

Reading non-fiction for information, whether to keep up with new things or learn about the past, is an excellent reason to tackle a meaty book, magazine, or news article.

Written in 2020, it resurrects experiences from our own plague.  Woven into the story are the first intimations of a pandemic.  Next come experiences all too familiar.  Ruth is a professor and a single mother who must learn to teach online plus instruct and entertain her daughter who will miss graduation festivities as she leaves elementary school. Friends meet outside, two meters apart (this is England), bring their own wine glasses which they put on the ground to be filled.  Yikes! that is what we did as we worked to maintain social contacts.

This was a great story whose plot (even the title) echoes what we remember from that year – lockdowns, fear of illness, closing of public facilities, loneliness and suicide.  Is it too soon to read it?  The book did bring back the anxiety of that first year.

But I loved this series and binged this summer and fall and read all fifteen!  What makes a reader connect so strongly with one particular set of characters?  There is the occasional similarity – Ruth has only one child, a bright, lively daughter; she prefers ginger cats; she mentions some of the same authors I like; she even orders the same brand of ethically sourced toilet paper (maybe that is pushing it). I don’t think it is the similarities themselves but the attitudes and choices they represent. 

We term the mystery “cozy” because we are comfortable and at home in it.  We can relax–-a very valid reason to read a good book.

The structure is similar to a picaresque novel; the main character goes from experience to unrelated experience.  He has conversations with his father who has met and loves Donald Trump.  A new friend tutors him on the arcane knowledge of wealth producing hedge funds.  He discusses Salman Rushdie’s controversial works.  A favorite teacher instructs him on dream interpretation.

From this hodgepodge emerge some sad generalities. Thus “elegies.”  Americans present themselves as Christian, but they are really obsessed with making money and worship the dollar.  Too many Muslims take a literalist view of the Quran and use it to promote things such as child marriage.  Immigrants can’t adjust to a foreign culture they don’t respect.

To write his book, Akhtar experimented with form.  There is no plot, just a collection of events told out of sequence in first person.  Genre is mixed; fact and fiction are jumbled together. I don’t think it worked. The novel was too disjointed and unpleasant to read. To give credit where it is due however, his memoir format was totally convincing, and I was stunned when I realized that much of what I was reading was fiction.

For a twenty first century reader, it is a trite story.  Carrie moves in with her sister and her husband but finds them boring and obsessed with work. She meets a traveling salesman who pays attention to her.  He takes her to dinner, to the theater, buys her things.  Before long the inevitable (to us) happens and she moves in with him.  At his suggestion, she takes a small part in a local play, discovers her talent, and is on the way to fame and fortune.

Sister Carrie is an example of American Realism, popular at the time.  Dreiser has described how things are, not as they should be.  But his readers were scandalized, and the book had a rough reception.  Not only did Carrie succumb to temptation, but she wasn’t punished for it.

The most fun from reading this book was making comparisons with today. The men in the story think they will take advantage of Carrie, but she is the one who finds success and leaves them behind.  Such a view of strong womanhood was too much for the outraged 20^th century audience.  And the 21^st?

Although Carrie moves in with her lover, the word sex is never mentioned.  She is being pursued and the next thing we know they are sharing rooms.  Everything is left to the reader’s imagination. Compare this to Homeland Elegies (above) written two years ago.  The sex scenes are graphic and salacious. Way more information than I need to know.  Can we have something in-between?

Most interesting to me is that the two books written a hundred years apart, one by an atheist and one by a Muslim, share a main subject, the concern about materialism in our country.  Carrie only wants pretty clothes, a lovely apartment, nice things.  At the end when she has them, she is unhappy and lonely.  The drive to acquire and the self-indulgence of the average American are the main criticisms that also arise in Elegies.  Both it and Sister Carrie are concerned about the inequities of economic power. Dreiser, the railroad vs. laborers; Akhtar, Wall Street billionaires vs. laborers.

Decent Guido Brunetti, Commissario of the Venetian police, who both reads and dines well, is always a pleasure to visit. In this novel, he solves the murder of a building inspector, afraid of heights, who has apparently fallen from a scaffold.  At the same time, he struggles with the ethics of asking his wealthy well-connected father-in-law to interfere on his behalf to fix a personal problem with the city.

His other wives have not produced the two sons he demands.  Maybe someone younger, someone fourteen, would perform better.  Such is the opening of The Girl With The Louding Voice by Abi Daré. 

Fate intervenes and Adunni gets help from a trusted friend’s son to escape.  But the son is not the mother and once again Adunni is sold, this time as part of the slave trade still prevalent in the country. She becomes a maid to a rich family in Lagos where she suffers the abuse of the wife and predatory behavior of the husband. 

Mixed with the colorful sights and sounds of modern Lagos are the sometimes brutal superstitions of the past. Patriarchy is the rule. Although the setting is unfamiliar to a Western reader, the plot is the familiar quest whereby a young person overcomes many obstacles to achieve a goal.  Adunni’s goal is simple.  She wants to be a person with agency, one who has control over her own life, someone with a “louding” voice that will be heard.

The disadvantage of listening to the story was that the dialect and vocabulary were sometimes hard to understand.  The advantage of this beautiful reading by Adjoa Andoh was the lilt, emotions, little Nigerian songs which brought the character and setting to life.

The move to the US did not work out.  Her father, unable to deal with the racism of Alabama, abandoned the family and returned to Ghana.  Nana, the beloved brother and son was a sports hero until he was injured, became addicted to pain killers, and died of an overdose.  The guilty depressed mother who instigated the move is lost in grief.  Gifty, ten, is bereft.

She looks for solace in her Born Again, Evangelical religion and vividly remembers the feeling of being saved, when grace filled her body.  But where is God now?   Her quest becomes existential.  Is the transcendent kingdom to be found in faith or in the awe-inspiring abilities of the brains of the mice she studies and the brains and minds of humans.

Jane’s parents are quiet, cultivated, erudite people and she becomes like them.  Dolly’s mother lives by her wits always struggling for money, and Dolly, lively and vivacious, wanting the glamour of the good life, lives by hers.  These two women, a generation apart, opposite personalities, are forced together by family ties and responsibilities. 

The strongest point of the novel is the minute character studies of the two women. Plot is almost nonexistent; little happens beyond the normal progression of aging and what it entails.  The second strong point is the very appealing language – restrained, understated emotions, stereotypically British. The vocabulary is a stretch.

At the end, Brookner brings together her characters’ contrasting approaches to life with a slightly discordant discussion of Sleeping Beauty.  Jane has become an author of children’s books and gives lectures about women’s issues in fairy tales.  She sees that at heart she and Dolly are not so different in what they want, someone to care for and belong to. Maybe even an unsympathetic relative would do.

Filmed in the Piedmont of Italy, the movie follows some of the last of the rare Alba truffle hunters as they and their dogs sniff out the elusive underground morsels. 

This DVD is not for those who want blockbuster excitement.  It is a slow-paced thoughtful movie depicting a simple, independent lifestyle which spotlights the love between the hunters and their dogs.  Like The Mushroom Hunters I wrote about last time it contrasts the rural lifestyles of the pickers who spend their lives outdoors in the rolling hills with the luxury market of big city consumers.  There is a wonderful tasting scene where individual truffles in chardonnay glasses are being passed around by professionals who are sniffing and discussing their aromas.

At the end, we watched the credits roll so we could continue to listen to the hauntingly beautiful theme song.  No wonder we liked it!  We finally recognized Follow Me, the love theme from Mutiny on the Bounty, that movie with the gorgeous photography of the South Pacific.  And why was it appropriate here? beautiful countryside of a different kind?  the siren call of the elegant mushroom? the hunters calling their dogs for another adventure? 

When the music stops there is a pause, then gilding the lily are the night sounds of the truffle hunters’ woods and the lovely hooting of owls encouraging the hunters and their dogs to go out once again.

The book is fiction, but Frankel herself is raising a trans child. In her novel she uses several plot devices to explore the options available to such a family.  One, the truth can be told right from the start. This is a difficult road in our current society but avoids the weight of a serious secret and the fear of discovery.   Or, the physical identity can be hidden, and the child presented as a little girl, saving her the embarrassment of being very different in a culture that wants conformity in this area. 

But this is only a postponement, because dresses or not, at puberty the child will start to become a young man. Difficult decisions will have to be made about hormone therapy and eventual surgery when the child is just a teen and struggling with all the usual things as well.

Our culture sees gender as binary, either-or, male or female, but Frankel suggests the recognition of a third, in-between possibility.  In the story, the mother volunteers to work in Thailand and becomes acquainted with the concept of kathoey, or ladyboy, which allows more flexibility in how sexuality is expressed.

The elements of a novel such as character, setting, or plot are not what count here as it is all about the subject matter.  As a senior, I grew up in the 50’s when gay children, never mind trans, didn’t exist.  Although my horizons have expanded a lot since then, transgender sexuality is a subject I am barely familiar with.  It was enlightening to read about the changing views and possibilities connected with this issue.

We meet Klara when she is newly made, living in a store, waiting to be chosen as a best friend.  She is learning about her environment, and we see as she does in pixels and shapes. Josie, the human who chooses her, is a metaphor for the benefits and risks of technology in our lives.  She is especially intelligent and privileged but has a mysterious illness which brings a note of disquiet to the story.

Josie’s father, when he comes to visit, nicknames her Animal, an unsubtle commentary about one of the main issues.  Exactly what is the difference between Klara and Josie who have indeed become best friends?  Does the human have a special spark that the machine does not or is it just chemicals and programming for them both?

On the surface, this is a story about love, friendship, family and the choices that define who a person is. Underneath is the provocative question of how much we want technology, computers, robots, and AI to intersect with our lives.

A picker himself, Cook brings to life the underground world of the wild food forager. Often people at the edges of society, the pickers are the type who are proud of strenuous physical labor and know the forests well, down to individual trees.  Like migrant agricultural workers, they follow the porcinis and truffles because mushrooms do have seasons.

The antithesis of the rural poor who do the harvesting is the wealthy big city resident who dines (mycophagist) on morels air shipped overnight from the NW forests.  Cook gives us a taste of the gourmet restaurant business that supplies such fare.

In between is the buyer.  The author follows one as he sets up shop near the harvests, cultivates pickers, deals with competitors, gets to the airport (hours away from the picking sites) on time to ship his matsutakes to waiting high end restaurants.

There’s lots of detailed information. Did you know that wild mushrooms come in fluorescent yellow (chanterelles), scarlet (lobsters), black (trumpets) and colors in between? that they have teeth (hedgehogs)?

There is also a very evocative sense of the place where they grow.  “The home of the elusive wild mushroom. shot through with warm shafts of light when the sun is out…sent from the heavens and filtered through a million leafy stained-glass windows, …explains why the Pacific Northwest’s ancient forests are referred to as nature’s cathedrals.”

———–

For the tech challenged among us, a joke from Facebook, Sue Fitzmaurice’s column:

Some self-recognition here.  It took me a few beats but then I laughed out loud.

The first group, Free America, libertarian, wants economic freedom without restraint. The second, Smart America, professional, socially liberal, wants a knowledge driven credentialed meritocracy. The third, Real America, working class, populist, wants respect for old fashioned values and reward for labor.  The fourth, Just America, wants equality for those who have been excluded from the American dream. This includes environmentalists seeking to protect the earth itself from the pressures of humanity. This perceptive description of 21^st century America was the strongest part of the book. 

The beginning, a recap of 2020, is strident and one sided – and who wants to live through 2020 again?  The conclusions Packer draws are vague although I am interested in his view that people are not upset about inequality of financial assets but are upset about being looked down upon. (Maybe so, but does he really think that people do not mind the obscene wealth of Bezos/Gates/Musk?  I have to draw a line there.)

Packer talks about how the pandemic exposed divisions so deep we could not rally as a united nation to overcome a common threat.  We have been here before – the Civil War and New Deal are examples. The last chapter tries to be optimistic; we lived through those things; we will live through this.  But his main prescription to bring us back to health was too obscure for me, and my sister readers, to find helpful.  Democracy requires the skill of “self-government” and we had better start learning and practicing it. (But what does that mean??)  Packer does point to the job ahead of us and has a neat phrase to sum it up: Make America Again.

Recently, this headline appeared in the local news. Maybe Packer is right.

His gamble at present is to join the pro-union startup newspaper, Thunder, whose purpose is to oppose giant Anaconda Mining which controls the town.  As Thunder’s editorial writer he battles with his well-known, well-paid equivalent at the Post, the company newspaper. Throughout the novel, the case for the union is well made and Doig gives a colorful portrait of the miners and bootleggers who inhabit Prohibition era Butte.

The language of the place and times, 1920, is fun and appropriate – “What’s on your mind besides your hat…popular as hotcakes…a ring-tailed wonder…hair peeked fetchingly under her ribboned bonnet…band struck up a tune – a schottische.”

When Morrie’s somewhat shady past catches up with him in the form of a lost trunk found and delivered, his independent minded wife Grace shows that she would fit in perfectly well with the activist protesting women of the 1920’s, and 2020’s.

Are they ancient relics or evidence of a current murder?  Often both are involved.  The stories contain just the right mix of down-to-earth scientific fact with the otherworldliness of Druid rituals, Iron Age beliefs and medieval curses.

Dr. Galloway personifies the modern woman.  She is a highly educated professional who loves her job and excels in her field.  She also worries about her weight, is somewhat estranged from her Born Again parents, and is a conflicted single mother who feels guilty about working.

Her first book, The Crossing Place, was excellent, but number five, Dying Fall, the most recent that I’ve read, was even better crafted.  Griffiths has learned to build tension and bring the story to a riveting climax.

In addition to great plot, characters, and setting, her books have some nice small touches. She refers to other authors I like – G.K. Chesterton who wrote Father Brown, the priest-detective mysteries, and Arthur Ransome who wrote the fairy tale that Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child is based on.  In A Room Full of Bones, the skeleton of the medieval bishop she is inspecting turns out to be female.  In Dying Fall, English King Arthur is found to have been black.  We are tutored in the history of Roman soldiers from Africa.  Griffiths likes language and tells us that an unkindness of ravens, like a murder of crows, is the specific word for a large group of them.

There are fourteen books in this series, and I look forward to reading them all.  Plus, there is an additional series.  This is one prolific writer.

He is forced by his family to leave the island and she, having nowhere to go, stays. He suffers the alienation of the immigrant and she, the devastation of war. How they find one another and reconcile with the past are the actions that drive this straightforward plot.

In between each chapter is a small exposition by a fig tree. Yes, a tree.  If you are surprised that the fig tree talks to us (and it has plenty to say) you would benefit from Shafak’s ideas about the oneness of life and the intelligence of non-human beings.  This charming device echoes, very appropriately, the chorus in a Greek play that comments on the issues raised by the action on stage.  It is also a symbol as its original happiness, then disease and death, and finally rebirth from a cutting reflect what is happening to the people.

Shafak is interested in several moral issues, many of which can be grouped around the long-term damage caused by war, long after the fighting is finished, both to people and the environment.  She wonders if genetic memory exists – in plants, animals and humans.  This was an easy-to-read story with provocative ideas, but I think the author brought up too many subjects and would have done better to focus on one or two.

We meet her when she is hustling some of her client’s super expensive no-lint napkins for her own cousin’s wedding, a skill recently learned from the Russian mafia.

Although Olga plans weddings, her own love life has stalled, and she is still single at 40 – until she meets Matteo at the local bar.  He is a bit seedy looking, but comes from her Puerto Rican neighborhood, and despite wearing socks with sandals, there is a certain something about him. 

Olga’s brother Prieto, a closeted gay politician, does his best for the old neighborhood until a pair of powerful developers discover his secret.  Because he tries to do the right thing, he is accused of having kindergarten ethics, a term that introduces one of the main subjects of the novel.

Brother and sister are especially close.  They lost their father to AIDS, and their mother, a revolutionary dedicated to Puerto Rican independence, left them with their abuelita while she went off rabble rousing.  Like Trees, this book has a chorus, in the form of the missing mother who reappears by writing untraceable letters to her adult children commenting on their choices. The contrast between their current posh lifestyles and their revolutionary, idealistic upbringing builds to a climax when Hurricane Maria barrels into Puerto Rico and their mother storms back into their lives. 

The novel’s title comes from the poem, “Puerto Rican Obituary” by Pedro Pietri.  “Juan, Miguel, Milagros, Olga, Manuel All Died yesterday…waiting for the garden of eden to open up again under a new management…Olga died waiting for a five dollar raise…dreaming of real jewelry…” Not too long, easy to understand, and very powerful, the whole poem is easily found online.

Follett makes the building of a twelfth century cathedral into a fast-paced thriller.  The prior of an insignificant church in England wants to build something magnificent for the glory of God.  A master builder, desperate to feed his starving family, is looking for work.  Jealous church officials connive for power.  Civil war wages when the heir to the crown dies and greedy local officials force control with knights and swords. There are heroes and heroines and the devil incarnate.

The architectural design and structure of the church are often illustrated as the story progresses. The details of everyday life for peasants, monks, lords and bishops are vivid and well researched.  We learn what they wear, how their houses are built, and what they eat.  “They ate vegetable pottage, baked fish with pepper and ginger, a variety of ducks…posset to drink, made of ale, eggs, milk, and nutmeg.”

But this is a book that is obsessed with blood, sex and violence.  It both starts and ends with a hanging, told in colorful gruesome detail.  The heroine’s large breasts are described repeatedly.  Her rape is lingered over.  The book wallows in swords, slaughter and spurting blood.  The mood is often ominous and fearful.  

If this is typical of the thriller genre, I am not a fan.  Give me a nice cozy murder mystery where violence is a one-time thing often off stage, and the emphasis is on the puzzle of solving the crime.  In Pillars, lively action, sympathetic characters, and the details of medieval life are outweighed and spoiled by the repeated scenes of violence.

Shakespeare is never mentioned by name as this novel features the mother, Anne, or Agnes, as she is called.  There is little in the historical record and past critics have looked on her unfavorably – a woman pregnant at marriage whose husband left her for long periods.  O’Farrell updates the portrait and imagines a warm, strong woman secure enough not to demand her husband stay in the stifling environment of a small town and his father’s domination.  The love between her and her husband endures despite the hardships of separation and the death of a child.

The story is told in present tense giving immediacy to the death and grief but leavened with beautifully detailed flashbacks of happy times. There is Agnes’s courtship at her father’s farm by the previously bored young Latin tutor which culminates in the rhythmic movement of apples in the storage shed as they are jostled back and forth, back and forth.  There is the lovely church wedding, performed by her old friend the falconer priest where her impatient groom smiles happily; her mother, dead for some time but present for this event, gives her a sign of rowan berries; and Agnes, in her yellow gown, wears a crown of daisies, larch and fern made for her by her sister-in-law to be.

Side by side with these scenes full of life is the inexorable advent of catastrophe.  The fleas arrive, finishing their long sea journey packed in something beautiful; the son sickens, and his healer mother cannot help him; his father, home for the funeral, cannot bear to stay and returns to the London theater.

Four years later, there is a play about a father and son who communicate across realms, but it is the father who is dead and his son who is still alive. It is the first performance of Hamlet and Agnes is there to see her husband’s portrayal.

Monkey by Agnes Bushell is a grand, sweeping, Russian style novel that travels throughout that country in the mid nineteenth century. On an old estate with an overgrown garden there is a poet who has not received a letter from her son Nikolai for a year and is so worried she has taken to her room where she will see no one except a favorite granddaughter and is so frozen she can no longer write.

Family and friends devise plans to search for the missing son.  The bowels of Russia, its hovels, brothels, and gypsy encampments are searched, all with an eye towards the secret police who also want him because he too is a writer, and a subversive one at that.

An inkling that this is no ordinary search, and no ordinary young man, creeps into the story.  Elena Petrovna Blavatskaya, based on a famous Russian medium and mystic, appears.  She and her companion Fyodor Fyodorovich Fyodorov are swept into a carriage that magically materializes.  There is a seance where spirits cause mischief, and a fire is summoned.  A young woman who possibly married Nikolai (but where? when?) is rescued.  And so the search expands – into broader possibilities, time portals, astral planes, and parallel times.

Questions about the nature of being, the flexibility of time, the need for freedom are woven into the journey.  The friends have hope that Nikolai will be found, even if it is in another world and another time, and the search continues.   But the poet mother accepts that he is gone and at the end of the book writes her last poems.  Powerful and beautiful, they convey the deep emotions of loss and grief.  This is a novel that defies genre.  Is it historical fiction? fantasy? poetry? philosophy? history? 

Monkey, like Hamnet, addresses the concept of tragedy as the inspiration for art.  It also takes a philosophical approach, reminding the reader of how little we know about life and death, and how grand and encompassing life and the afterlife may be. Agnes Bushell writes from Portland, Maine, and Monkey can be ordered from Littoral Books.

Wanting to learn about their social behavior, scientists put tiny trackers on these clever mischievous birds, but the birds did not approve.  Within minutes, the group of five had figured out how to remove the first device that had taken the scientists six months to devise.  True, the birds couldn’t do it alone which was what the scientists had guarded against in their design.  But they cooperated.  Each magpie took the tracker off another – helping each other in a way almost unheard of in the bird world.  Just another example of how little we know about the complexities of life.

His older brother and guardian, Emmett, hopes the open road will lead him to a new beginning and second chance. The third, Duchess, views it as a chance for escape, possibly from his violent nature, and definitely from its results.  And Wooly, the fourth character, wants a road to take him home.

Alongside the physical road the boys travel is the philosophical road or direction taken in life.  Sometimes it is a choice and sometimes an accident.  Sometimes staying home is best; sometimes home is stifling.  The human desire for fairness, and the need for charity versus retribution are themes that emerge throughout the story, but any moralizing is lightly done. 

The main character, Emmett, is similar to Towles’ first famous character, The Gentleman from Moscow.  Although Emmett is working class, he shares a moral nobility with aristocratic Count Rostov as they are both honest, responsible, and resourceful.  Emmett willingly assumes the care of his young brother when their father dies just like the Count raises five-year-old Sophia when her parents are gone.

Many small seemingly unimportant details converge at the end of this ten-day travel saga.  The story is like a well-planned road trip when the unexpected happens.

The Lincoln Highway, built in 1913, was the first transcontinental highway in the United States.  It stretched from Times Square in New York City to the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.  Eventually, it was replaced by numbered highways and finally superseded by modern interstates. In the 1990’s, the Lincoln Highway Association was formed to preserve and improve the remaining portions.

Evolution has started to go backwards.  Animals – and human babies – show characteristics of earlier times.  Government reacts to this by locking up pregnant women and treating them as scientific experiments.  Women are hunted by the government and betrayed by their neighbors. They are not allowed to have their children as they see fit.  Although written in 2017, this book about reproductive freedom could not have been timelier.

Adopted by idealistic white liberals, the main character has just received a letter from her Ojibwe birth mother inviting her to visit. She is four months pregnant, uneasy and uncertain, but decides to go. Meanwhile people are frightened and panicking about a bizarre evolutionary change that is not part of their world view. Religious institutions, as well as government, seek to assert control, and they focus on the women who are producing, or might produce, children who are different.

Federal Agent Falk returns to his boyhood home near Melbourne for the funeral of his best friend from school and his family, all found dead in an apparent murder/suicide.  As Falk returns to his old haunts, the town has not forgotten that, as a teenager, he was connected with the unsolved drowning of a girlfriend.  Is there a connection between the two events?  Falk finds a friend in the new sheriff and together they resolve these tragic episodes. 

This well plotted page turner touches on old loves, reputation in a small town, isolation in the Australian bush, domestic abuse, fraud and gambling, all of which come together to tell a rich and compelling story.

The dry, or the drought, is a character itself.  While Harper’s book is not about a “cause,” global warming is ever present.  It strikes Falk especially when he is walking near the river he swam in as a teenager.  Although he is close, he can’t hear the water and the silence disturbs him.  When he finally finds it, the river that used to be over his head is a trickle through hardpan, and the plight of the farming town comes sharply into focus.

This is not a series for someone who likes fast action.  The show starts slowly, moves slowly, and depends on the perfect timing and subtle British humor of its quirky stars. When one of the company finds something special, his joy in this simple success and the pleasure his friends take in his success is heartwarming.  In the final season, there is a nest of Roman gold coins, but the true treasure is the friendship, love, and support the group finds among friends and family. A just-right theme song adds to the charm.  

I watched all three seasons on Netflix disks, but some of our local libraries have the series as well.