So, though crazy, I've still been reading. There's a list of recent books in the sidebar, a couple to mention in passing, a couple to talk about in more detail. Deep Pockets is the latest in Linda Barnes' mystery series featuring the six-foot tall, redheaded, cab-driving P.I., Carlotta Carlyle. I love reading stories set in locations I know and love, and this series takes place in Cambridge/Boston. G is from Boston, and we lived close to Cambridge for some years before moving to Cape Cod. Cambridge was a favorite haunt, for the bookstores and coffeehouses, the crazy press of student life, the street musicians, the sense of bohemian energy. This novel is not one of Barnes' best, but the ambiance is still there. The story involves a Harvard professor, pharaceutical research, a supposedly-murdered illicit lover of the professor's, the Charles River and kayaks. Sound like it should be riveting, but actually it wasn't.
The Book Borrower was a strangely disjointed tale of the friendship between two women over a considerable period of their lives. There's a story-within-the-story, contained in a book which one friend borrows from the other (hence the title) on their very first meeting. I found the rather impressionistic writing style annoying, and the two women never seemed fleshed-out as real characters to me. The most interesting character in the book is one who moves from the borrowed book (a non-fictional account of a young Jewish activist during the days of the trolley strikes, her family, the tragedy occasioned by the strike) into the main story as an aged sculptor waning into solitary senility. That itself was quite too coincidental. I wanted this book to be better than it was, and I should have been warned when the jacket compared it, as a story of women's friendships, to Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, one of my all-time least favorite books.
Ah, the new unrestrained character limit means I can babble on until hell freezes over, doesn't it? Therefore, on to the books I am loving. The Golden Compass is the first in Philip Pullman's young people's fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. These books have apparently caused some flap in England, as fantasy novels for young people often seem to do. I've read a lot about the series, bought it for my niece, but decided I wanted to read it first. And I'm certainly glad of that decision. Unlike many of these stories, this one features a young girl as protagonist; what a ferocious, brave, intuitive, and compassionate girl Lyra is too, yes indeedy. This first novel takes place in a world quite like our own, but with enormous differences, the most interesting of which is that each of the human characters possesses a dæmon in the form of an animal or bird. While the humans are young, pre- puberty, the dæmon can change shape at will, but as they grow into adulthood the creature "settles" into a permanent form. This dæmon is, I am quite sure, their soul, their spirit, their lifeforce. The plot centers around young people and their dæmons, and as Lyra scrambles through adventure after adventure to solve the dark and horrid mystery, we meet witches, armored bears, fierce Northern hunters (much of the book takes place in the frozen Arctic regions, under the northern lights), a lanky Texan balloon aeronaut, a river people called the Gyptians.
The first book was lengthy, but I raced through it, barely able to put it down for a moment. I have just started the second volume, The Subtle Knife, and am immediately hooked, gaffed, netted. I'll be back to report more as I follow Lyra, and her new friend, Will, through the adventures we see looming ahead, as she searches for her father, Lord Asriel, in the alternate world they have just entered.
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