19 Crows

I finished Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster, by Harold Schechter. A serial killer in the 20s who killed a lot of women, mostly landladies. It's beautifully researched but sadly not that interesting because he's no Ted Bundy; he's more in the retarded / head injury / bipolar mode. Why did he kill? Who the hell knows. His MO was to go to houses displaying a "room to let" sign, strangle the landlady as she showed him the room, then rape her, and shove the body into a closet or under the bed. He started in San Francisco and San Jose (which was interesting for me because the addresses of the houses are given and of course I had to look them up on Google street view), then he worked his way across the country and up into Canada. Finally he was caught in Winnipeg and hanged.

Schechter describes each murder as it occurs but after a while they're actually boring - the showing of the room, the murder, the discovery. He does a good job of describing what else is going on in the world, like Lucky Lindy's flight, which is kind of cool. It gets interesting once the Canadians realize they're got a killer in their midst and people start chasing him. Anyway, this one is going in the get rid of bag.

Now I'm reading Tana French's The Likeness. I was absolutely infuriated with the ending of In The Woods, which never solved the central mystery. That is just wrong, wrong, wrong. You can't show a rifle in the first act without using it in the third.

This one has a totally unbelieveable premise and plot and so it sat on the shelf for quite a while. Then it seemed like maybe a good book to bring on a trip to distract me on the plane, and I'm hooked. The characterizations are so interesting, the look inside the protagonist's thoughts is totally believable. There are lots of distractions but I'm finding excuses to read this every day. I just hope the ending can live up to the rest of it.

What I've read since the last time I posted:

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout. A group of related stories, some about Olive, some just touching on her. She's middle aged when we meet her and grows older. I liked her, the grounded way she relates to the world, even as I thought she was someone I wouldn't like in real life. She's critical and brusque, and as the stories went on, some of the things she did were hard to like, even as I felt sorry for her. The stories kept going in directions I didn't expect, which I liked - just like life - but I found it hard to keep track of characters and see parallels between some of them. (I only realized that because of reading the mostly annoying reader's club section in the back. Annoying because it was written as an interview with the author and Olive. Ugh.) I liked this book a lot but it took me a while to figure out what to say about it. I do want to re-read it.

The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker and The Rejection Collection Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap, edited by Matthew Diffee. What I liked best about this book was the questionnaire that each cartoonist filled out. There were a few funny ones but really, most of the cartoons just weren't that good. I won't be keeping either of these.

The Rare and the Beautiful: The Art, Loves, and Lives of the Garman Sisters, Cressida Connolly. Biography of (mostly) Kathleen, Mary, and Lorna Garman, who were born around the turn of the century and ran around with artists and writers in England and France. Mary married poet Roy Campbell (but had affairs with other people including Vita Sackville-West); Kathleen was the lover of sculptor Jacob Epstein for 30 years and they had three children before his wife died and they married; and Lorna married a wealthy publisher when she was 16, and also had many lovers including poet Laurie Lee and painter Lucian Freud. She modelled for several of his paintings. Freud and Lee each married one of her nieces, to whom she'd introduced them. Other Garman siblings are mentioned too. None of them are terribly important people in their own right, but it's a very entertaining book.

The Reconstructionist, Josephine Hart. I read a review of this when it first came out that instantly made me want to read it, to find out what happened, but somehow I didn't find it till recently. It's a psychological thriller: what happened that day when Jack and Kate were kids and their father told them to sit in their chairs in the hall, and then they went to London to live with an uncle and their father left their lives? It's revealed gradually, along with how they're doing in the present. Jack seems okay, a psychiatrist, but Kate is more fragile. They're unusually close... maybe some incest in the mix? Both of them have constructed their lives to avoid passion and emotions. Several other characters in the book comment on the destructiveness of passion. Several of Jack's patients show up for appointments and provide windows into other emotional lives. Then a chain of events begins that takes Jack back to his childhood, and reveals what happened.

A few scenes strain credulity, but I found it hard to put down, and very satisfying.

Now I'm reading Hubert's Freaks: The Rare-Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus, by Gregory Gibson, which is pretty much what the tin says. Also quite entertaining.

I gave up on Lenten Lands. Here's my review. One star.

Memoir of the author who happened to be the stepson of C.S. Lewis, so partly about Lewis and his wife Joy, and partly about Gresham's life. It's entertaining but he has kind of a florid writing style that I don't like, and there are flashes of cranky snobbery - how things have declined since socialism, railway strikes are "the small man's modern method of exerting power for power's sake", etc.

I gave up on this after Joy and C. S. Lewis both died and the griping about the sinister servants began. He cites the cook's remarks like "Wouldn't Mrs. Lewis 'ave loved those roses?" as cruel examples of her power to make Mr. Lewis cry, which is so strange I can't even believe it. Every grieving person I've known has been delighted to know that others remember their dear one, even if that memory brings tears. Anyway, I'm not interested in Gresham's life and I've come to dislike him. He didn't provide much insight into Lewis or his mother's relationship with him, either. What a prat.

What I'm reading now: Nothing. I just finished J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter. I enjoyed it: a straightforward biography without literary criticism. I'd been curious about Tolkien and how he came to write his books, and it was a good answer.

What I'm going to read next: Not sure yet. I'd thought it would be C. S. Lewis: A Biography by A. N. Wilson, which I bought a while ago, but just now reading reviews, it seems to be universally panned. And, I'm not really that interested in Lewis. I also have Lenten Lands: My Childhood with Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis which looks more like the kind of lightweight biography I feel like reading now.

Or, I might read Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster by Harold Schechter, about Earle Leonard Nelson who began a killing spree in 1926 across the U.S. and Canada. He killed at least 22 women and then raped their dead bodies. That's the other book I put in my bag when I went to the sauna today. Escapist reading, you know.

Here's what I've read so far this year. I just finished Streets of Laredo, which took a while, so I'll be adding a few more before the year is up.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/piemouth&tag=read%2Bin%2B2012

This morning I saw a robin! I was on the treadmill at the gym and it was walking around on the lawn outside. Spring is actually coming; it's been hard to believe.

Pat is asking me for Halloween costumes for work and I suggested he use these instructions to make a Ninja hood, and wear black cloths. He told me that he doesn't have any black clothes. How can this be?? Black is the new black!

Am I curious enough about the San Benito County Fair, south of Hollister, to drive an hour and 15 minutes to get there? Probably not.

Yesterday I went to the track at the local community center to run, for the first time. I liked it - all the different types running or walking, the soft track, and the snatches of conversation as I ran past:

"...not my place to say anything, but that boy really is obese...."
"...realize I should have thinned. I saw Jack out there thinning and I though, I should do that, but I didn't. Now my wild onions are all crowded..."
"...get it on the toasted bread, the thin bread - with peppercinis...."
"...says the level of lack of education in the doctorate program is really staggering..."

I need to figure out pacing, though. On the treadmill it's easy, but elsewhere I have a hard time figuring out how fast to go. Yesterday I started off too fast and soon was breathless and coughing. I slowed down, but my asthma really kicked up till I got in the car and used my inhaler. Also I ran a bit more than two miles and the time was way off (shorter) than I would have expected. I'm going to go back today, though.

Yesterday I had lunch in Berkeley with a friend at a restaurant on 4th Street and we sat outside next to the sidewalk. The couple next to us had with them their utterly adorable French Bulldog, Zorro, and I swear every other person stopped to exclaim over him and pet him. He ate up the attention, of course. We talked to his people and they said sometimes it's exhausting to take him for a walk because he gets so much attention.

Although I'm not a dog person it made me, once again, desperately want a French Bulldog of my own. Luckily cooler heads will prevail.