The One Big Advantage of Kindle Today

I worked in a bookstore for a good nine years. As far as things go, I am still a supporter of the traditional brick and mortar bookstore, and of the physical book. It took me a while to try reading a book off the iPad, then the Kindle . For travels, the Kindle does offer some advantages.

But today I have to admit there's something very convincing about having ebooks - the speed of getting your favourite books. The library and bookstores over here have not acquired the latest titles in the Mary Russell series - The Murder of Mary Russell. I decided not to wait anymore. The suspense is too much. So I went the kindle-way for a copy.

Will be spending my weekend with a good ebook this weekend. Cheers to technology.

Touchstone and Other Meanderings

Convalescence Update:

I know I should be convalescing, but I'm having trouble keeping still everyday. I need to sit up to read and that alone involves moving the stitches. It's still going to be a while before I can resume yoga. It has been about a week since my last practice and I already feel ill at ease.

I found out recently that two of my friends just signed up for the gym. It feels like the world changes the moment I go for surgery. I have half a mind to join them after I recover. Right: yoga and gym. Where will I find the time to do anything else? Let us leave that thought for another day and focus on getting better, shall we?

Starting on Laurie R. King's Touchstone & Writers That Challenge Themselves:

In my restlessness I have started many books, the latest being Laurie R King's Touchstone. I have been a fan of Laurie R. King since 1999 and I still look forward to each new title with excitement.

Laurie R. King is most famous for her Mary Russell series, a Sherlock Holmes pastische that features Mary Russell as the great detective's partner – professionally and as his wife. She also has her Kate Martinelli series, a contemporary police procedural series that I also enjoy.

Touchstone, however, is one of her four stand-alone novels – unrelated to all her other books. King herself has remarked on her blog that while she still loves writing the characters she is famous for, a writer can be bored just writing the same books all the time. Her stand-alone novels are her creative ventures outside the familiar. They can be frightening for an established author, as the audience may not always be accepting of differences.

Neil Gaiman himself faces the same problem. I read recently on his blog, his response to a fan who wrote in to tell Gaiman that he isn't spending enough time writing. The fan then asks Gaiman for the sequel to Neverwhere. Gaiman's reply (with much aplomb, I must say) is that what the fan is asking for is not more new books, but rather, more of the same type of books. He goes on to explain that he would much prefer to write something new than rehash old ideas, and any attempt at something new will take more time. Which is why he isn't writing as fast as a lot of his fans prefer.

If the writers are not the sort to constantly challenge themselves creatively, they probably wouldn't be the sort of writers worth reading anyway. This is one of my frustration with one of my favourite writer (who shall remain unnamed) and the new works she has been producing past few years. I have no doubt on her ability as a writer – she still writes beautifully. Yet there is the teeth-gnashing resentment within me each time I read her newest book. She seems to be circling the same ideas, working in the same style – so smug and self-satisfied with the brilliance of herself. There is nothing challenging about her writing anymore. In fact, she now reads like a lyrical parody of her earlier self. It breaks my heart to admit this, because I had loved those earlier works of hers which are refreshing with their audacity and wit. Now she just feels like a one-trick pony.

Now We Actually Talk About Touchstone:

Which brings me back to Touchstone, in case you think I forgot. I have read one of Laurie R. King's other stand-alone, A Darker Place, a contemporary thriller about a theology professor going undercover to investigate a cult that. It is definitely a departure from what I would expect of Laurie R. King – but to my surprise, it is one my favourite among Laurie R. King's novels. She certainly is not a One Trick Pony – or perhaps she just does that one trick very well – the ability to draw research and characters into good storytelling.

Touchstone qaulifies as a period novel, with its story set in the 1920s, where England the America are coming out of The Great War (World War I) with new enemies, in the form of unions, socialists and communists. There has been three bombing incidents in America, seemingly unrelated until Harris Stuyvesant, an agent from the U.S. Bureau of Investigation, finds a common link between all three in the form of a British Richard Bunsen – a man with connections to the English workers' union, a rising star in British politics and who is romantically linked to a lady from one of the oldest and most influential family of the British aristocracy. Stuyvesant travels to England, and in the process picks up a suspicious ally – a man known as Touchstone.

The touchstone of the story, is one Captain Bennett Grey, a war veteran who was injuried in the line of fire. His injuries led to a perculiar hypersensitivity in Captain Grey's perception of humans and things. Touchstone, as explained in the book:

"It's a soft stone used to prove the purity of gold or silver. But the alchemists used quicksilver, or mercury, because when one touches gold to mercury, the liquid is drawn up to cover the soild, making it look like lead. The inestimable value of touchstone is in the way it reveals the true nature of gold. In the same way, Captain Grey is drawn to the true nature of the person of thing he encounters: He cannot help himself, he reacts and reveals the nature of the person. True or false? Gold or pyrite?"

With a character like Captain Bennett Gray, with his special ability, Laurie R. King is asking for a good degree of suspension of disbelief. I find myself a little challenged in this areas as I could accept, conditionally, Captain Grey's ability to sense the dissonance among the people he interacts with – but the logic as explained by the author is unable to explain his sensitivity to the integrity of inanimate objects.

I also noticed one problem with King's stand-alone novels – as her strength is in characterisation over plot, she now has to spend more time building up several new characters. The process is gradual, but it slows the action of the book somewhat.

I'm about halfway through the book, and most of the principal characters have met. Yet there is a sense of things not yet falling into place – not a good sign since this is supposed to be a period political thriller – and it's not thrilling me yet.

But I'm going to give it more time. There is justifiable reason for me following Laurie R. King for 9 years.

And Now I Conclude With An Ironical Comment:

Oh cool. As I'm typing this, the mail just came in – with the hospital bill. The stitches are still on my body and they are already billing me for the procedure? They are efficient.

The End.

BOOKS | Forthcoming New Titles

We interrupt our recent series of yoga posts for a report on forthcoming books that has caught our attention.

Laurie R. King, (author of those utterly winsome Mary Russell novels) was blogging over at The Rap Sheet last week. She wrote a little on The Language of Bees -- the new Mary Russell in progress (scheduled for Spring 2009). It is set back in England in the summer of 1924, after Mary and Holmes have returned from India (The Game) and San Francisco (Locked Rooms and Holmes’ tale in The Art of Detection):

So, currently I’m writing a story about a hive of bees that has gone berserk, and why. I am also researching the subculture of Bohemia, and not the sort of Bohemia that had a scandal solved (more or less) by Holmes. I will also deal with several pieces of unfinished business from some of the other novels, and bring in a major plot and at least two subplots, one about love.

I feel as if I’m holding the reins of a four-horse team that is in a fractious mood.

It's always reassuring to know your favourite author is hard at work. ;p

Also getting some blog coverage, is the forthcoming English translation of Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It's a memoir of a sort, about his running experience, his writing, his passion for music -- another contribution to the mystique of Haruki Murakami, I guess. The US edition will only be available in July 2008, while the UK edition is scheduled for May 2008.

On a sidenote: A couple of colleagues and I were looking at the original Japanese version of the book yesterday, trying to acertain the content of the book. As I observed the conversation about the book, it occurred to me that no one else caught the Raymond Carver reference on the title.

Somehow that saddens me a little.

BOOKS | The Art of Detection

The Art of Detection
By Laurie R. King
[04/01/2007 ~ 20/01/2007]
[Mystery, Detective Fiction]

This post is long-overdue. I finished reading the book some time back, but just never got around to writing about it - as usual.

The latest in Laurie R. King's Kate Martinelli series, The Art of Detection features the usual set of characters that fans are familiar with: San Francisco homicide detective Kate Martinelli and her detective-partner Al Hawkins, as well as her life-partner, Lee Cooper. In this book we finally meet little 5 year old Nora - Lee and Kate's precocious daughter.

Since last we left Kate, she has settled into domestic life and juggling her police work with her duty to home. The character is at peace, which unfortunately seems to throw her and most of the characters into a blandness. Laurie R. King has the ability to write believable three dimensional characters with rich emotional lives - that is one of the reason she has such a strong following for her Kate Martinelli and Mary Russell series. In Art of Detection unfortunately, the characters are more pushed into motion than active protagonists.

Present time, San Francisco, the story opens with Detective Kate Martinelli going into the home of a murder victim, Philip Gilbert. What is disturbing is that the victim had set up his entire apartment like the interior of 221 Baker Street, with violin, fireplace, and bullet holes in the wall spelling the initial of Queen Victoria. It turns out the late Mr Gilbert was a collector-dealer in Sherlock Holmes memorabilia and he has recently acquired a typrwritten manuscript that is supposedly written by Sherlock Holmes himself.

The best part of Art of Detection is this mysterious manuscript, a short mystery story told in the first person by a male narrator of extraordinary deduction skills. Here is where fans of the Mary Russell series, especially those who have read Locked Rooms, will be excited.

I visit the Laurie R. King's blog from time to time, and my impression is that she is an intelligent, self-aware lady with a wry sense of humour. Here is the author playing on the consciousness of her own literary creations. Sometimes the characters you create seem to possess a life if their own and all you really are doing is acting as biographer for someone else's life. The crossover between the Mary Russell and Kate Martinelli in Art of Detection is playful, wry and very well-done. It is fun, and shows us how sometimes authors need to take a step back and not that themselves too seriously.

But one complaint: The Art of Detection pales in comparison to other Kate Martinelli novels, especially the wonderful first Martinelli novel, A Grave Talent (which won King the Edgar Award), and To Play the Fool, where we meet the most intriguing character King has ever created: Brother Erasmus - a living embodiment of the archetypal Fool, who buried within himself some tragic secret too terrible to speak of, that he could only communication in quotations.

A fan of Laurie R. King would find enough to enjoy the book, but I would not recommend it to newcomers. The plot is too conveniently tied up at the end, and there is none of the emotional engagement with the characters found in previously books. Even the victim, Philip Gilbert, is hardly a sympathetic character. I would suggest a newcomer to King try the abovementioned titles: A Grave Talent and To Play the Fool if you're interested in the Kate Martinelli series.

Or try the Mary Russell series, if you're more inclined towards Sherlock Holmes pastiche. In The Beekeeper's Apprentice (first in the series), in the year 1914, young, feisty Mary Russell meets a beekeeper and becomes his assistant in the world of mystery and intrigue. The Mary Russell series by the way, has always been more successful for King.

A little background: King has a BA degree in comparative religion and an MA in Old Testament Theology - all of which she puts in good use when she writes. Odd theological knowledge comes up when you least suspects it, and Mary Russell, protagonist of her Sherlock Holmes pastiche series, translates Sanskrit for leisure.

Another good King to start will be A Dark Place. It's a stand-alone, which features Anne Waverly, an esteemed university professor, who also works with the FBI on cult activities. (Here, King again puts her theological education to very good use) She goes undercover to unravel the truth behind a new fangled cult, the People of Change. A complicated and haunted character, Anne Waverly was previously a member of a cult herself, where she lost her family. Tragic, self-destructive, you feel for Anne Waverly as she gradually loses herself in her new assignment. The character of Anne Waverly was so compelling that I wish there was a sequel for her. But just as well. Sometimes a good thing is knowing when to stop.

Meanwhile, if you are already a fan of the Mary Russell mystery, check this out.