Reading post: Mick Herron in April

It's the last day of April, time for another reading post. In April I decided to take it easy and read books by Mick Herron, the British writer (born in 1963) who has become famous for his books about not very good spies. I loved the New Yorker profile of him, a year or so ago, and always wanted to read something by him. April seemed like a good time to give him a try.

• Slow Horses (2010). It took me a little while to get into this book, the first in the Slough House spy novel series. But once I did I loved it! There isn't much I can say that hasn't been said already by so many reviewers. I appreciated Mick Herron's command of the language. Before reading this, I tried to read a mystery that I was interested in (The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl), but the writing just set my teeth on edge. Pearl is very well-educated, but he doesn't (or didn't, in that book -- maybe he's gotten better) know how to write the kind of language you need for mystery fiction. Anyway, my point is that from the first sentence of Slow Horses, I knew I was in the hands of a master and could relax. What a fun book. I'd like to watch the TV show, but of course we don't have Apple TV. Maybe someday it'll be available on DVD from the library (I could buy an all-region Blu-ray version on eBay, but I think I'll wait).
  
  
• Dead Lions (2013). For about the first half of this book I couldn't seem to get settled with it. Herron likes to jump around among several different points of view -- each "slow horse" is doing something different and we get to watch them all, or most of them. This jumping back and forth can be distracting. But finally I calmed down enough to let it flow over me and I thought this book was pretty much as good as the first. I would definitely read the rest of the series -- and I probably will, eventually. The only thing I don't like about these books is that nice characters die, people you've gotten to know a little. You have to be able to rise above that, not let it bug you, and I wasn't in that sort of mood this month.
  
  
• Down Cemetery Road (2003). Instead of reading the third in the Slough House series, I decided to try one of Herron's "mystery" novels, which he wrote first. It's not really a mystery, though. It's sort of a cross between a mystery and a spy novel, and I didn't like it at all at first. I'd say the first half -- maybe two thirds -- of the book annoyed me. The detective(s) barely played a part -- it was all about a bored housewife and I didn't find her compelling. But then it started getting interesting, and the last third was really hard to put down. Now I think maybe I'd like to read the rest of the series (there are three others)...
   

So that was Mick Herron. Overall verdict: very good, lots of fun, but a little disturbing if you're not in the mood to read about nice people getting killed. Also, these books do tend to keep me looking over my shoulder a lot, in case someone is following me or planning to kill me.

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Since it was April, I was supposed to read one book from the shelves above my bed, but there's hardly anything left on those shelves that I haven't read. Finally I decided on Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems -- and got about one-sixth of the way through. Oh well. Another time.

What I did read was another book by Lily King, her latest novel -- Writers and Lovers (2020). I didn't mean to, but there it was on the shelf at the library, so... I was a little disappointed by it. There she was, at the height of her powers after the wonderful Euphoria, and she goes back into her own past to write another novel about a young woman with a dreadful father. If anything, the father in this book was worse than the father in Father of the Rain. And I wasn't excited about the romantic side of the book, either. But what I did like was her portrayal of a writer (herself). In the very first scene, her awful landlord makes a snotty comment about why on earth she bothers writing. Back in her tiny, moldy-smelling rented room, she tries again to write. And there's this great, honest quote:

I don't write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don't, everything feels even worse.

And then, near the end of the book, when she's giving a short speech to a bunch of high school students:

What I have had for the past six years, what has been constant and steady in my life is the novel I've been writing. This has been my home, the place I could always retreat to. The place I could sometimes even feel powerful, I tell them. The place where I am most myself.

The book has an unrealistic, fairytale ending, but that's OK. I read it for the parts about writing.

For May, who am I going to read? I've been alternating between male and female writers, so it's time for another woman. From my long list of possible writers, I chose Elizabeth Savage, an American author (from Montana originally) born in 1918. She's the author of one of my favorite books of all time, Happy Ending (1972), but I've never read anything else by her except her first novel, Summer of Pride (1960), which is sort of a less-good version of the same story. So anyway, that'll be my May. I'm also going to try to read a biography of Warren G. Harding, bleah, not looking forward to that. But I'm sure I'll get through it.