Reading post: October

In October I planned to read entirely fun books, spooky books, mysteries, etc. Nothing serious! And I was pretty successful in that attempt. I had hoped to finish one more by tonight, but it's not going to happen, so I'll have to fit it into much-more-serious November. Happy Halloween!

Spooky, fun books

The Family Vault by Charlotte MacLeod (1979). OK, not actually a spooky book, but rather a cozy mystery. MacLeod is a new author for me, and although I don't, in general, like cozy mysteries, I thought this one was fun and I would read more of her. The book introduces the two main characters in a 12-book series: Sarah Kelling, a Boston Brahmin with a huge weird inbred family, and Max Bittersohn, a Jewish art-fraud investigator. They were fun, and I was very worried for Sarah for most of the book, so it wasn't really all that cozy. But it all ended impossibly well, so yeah, cozy.

My Dark Places by James Ellroy (1996). I chose this as my second book of the month because I didn't think it would be too scary. Ha. The book is divided into four sections. Part 1 is a description of the initial investigation into Ellroy's mother's murder in 1958, and that was the most interesting. Part 2 is a memoir of Ellroy's childhood and young adulthood, truly harrowing. Part 3 concerns the detective he ended up working with, Bill Stoner, and his work on horrific murder cases, and it scared me so much I couldn't sleep. Part 4 is a description of Ellroy's and Stoner's re-investigation of Ellroy's mother's murder, and it's mostly frustrating. Overall, a fascinating book.

Eva Moves the Furniture by Margot Livesey (2001). Last October I read Livesey's novel about her great-grandmother, Lizzie; this one is about her mother, Eva, who died when Livesey was only two years old (both Lizzie and Eva were supposedly psychic). Like The Road from Belhaven, this book isn't spooky, even though there are two ghosts who show up quite often and mess with Eva's life (sometimes for good, sometimes perhaps for their own purposes). I suppose the book is about how she learns to live with them but also live her own life. Not your typical novel, nor your typical ghost story. It's slow-moving, thoughtful, very sad at the end. I liked it.

The Devil's Flute Murders by Seishi Yokomizo, translated from the Japanese by Jim Rion (serialized in Japan 1951-53/this translation 2023). Every time I read a Yokomizo mystery, I think that's my last, but then, hmm, I somehow find myself reading another. This is a "locked-room mystery," and I hate those, but the locked-room aspect is just a tiny part of it. Mostly it's a creepy, perverted mystery, which got more and more perverted as it went along. Plus it's set in 1947 Japan, so there's a lot of talk about how the trains don't run on time and there's no food and houses have been destroyed by bombs and fire. So it ended up being pretty interesting. I'm sure I'll go on reading Yokomizo.

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach (2005). Kind of an anti-spooky book, although she swears in the intro that it's not. 

"Skeptics and debunkers provide a needed service in this area, but their work more or less assumes an outcome. I'm trying hard not to make assumptions, not to have an agenda." 

And I would say she more or less succeeds, while being funny. Also, though she spends too much time on already debunked hoaxes, such as ectoplasm, she included some things I hadn't read about before, like nutty attempts to weigh the soul. By the end of the book, I was nervous, always the goal when reading spooky books.

The Searcher by Tana French (2020). I convinced my book group to read this as our October book. I love Tana French, but this isn't much like one of her Dublin Murder Squad books. The main character, Cal, is a retired Chicago cop who has moved to Ireland for peace and quiet, but then a 13-year-old named Trey shows up on his doorstep, wanting him to find someone who's gone missing. I'd say the first 2/3 of the book was pretty slow and then it finally sped up. But it was very easy to read, even during the slow parts. Also, it had a happy-ish ending, which surprised me. The book group liked it a lot, and Sally has already gone on and read the two sequels. I will have to read them too. Maybe next October!

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (2024). Everyone was reading this last year and I couldn't get it from the library. Now there are plenty of copies available, so I checked one out. The 13-year-old daughter of a wealthy family goes missing from a summer camp, 14 years after her brother went missing in the same area. It's not spooky, but it is creepy, and the writing got more and more propulsive, so that by the end I could barely put it down. The theme of people with too much money didn't interest me, but there were a lot of other good characters. I read on another blog that the book was over-hyped, but I don't think so. It's good! Recommended.

The Echo of Crows by Phil Rickman (2025). The last book in the Merrily Watkins series, because Phil Rickman died in October 2024, having submitted this manuscript to his publishers a few weeks earlier. His previous Merrily Watkins book, The Fever of the World, was really bad, mainly because Phil was sick and his wife Carol didn't have time to edit it because she was doing "absolutely everything else," as he said in the Acknowledgements. This one was edited by Carol, so it wasn't a mess, but just like Fever it felt more like an outline than a real book. Phil Rickman was so good at creating atmosphere, pacing a scene just right. This book has none of that. It's just -- this happens and then this happens and then this happens. No atmosphere, no spooky pacing. So strange. On the plus side, he managed to tie up several loose ends, so we know his characters will live happily ever after, and I appreciated that.

The Carrow Haunt by Darcy Coates (2018). I saved this for last because I thought it would be super scary. What a disappointment! I read another book by her, Gallows Hill, in 2023, and that was spooky, so I thought this one would be too. It wasn't. It was about a haunted house, but it was just so over the top that I started laughing at it. Like, oh, come on, give me a break. The Haunting of Hill House it was not. The pacing was off, I think. She crammed so much spookiness into one book that there was no time for a reader to get scared. And here I thought I had a great spooky author to read (she's written a gazillion books). Oh well. 

Books from the New Yorker's "Briefly Noted" reviews

Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child by Laura Cumming (2019). I've wanted to read this ever since I first heard about it, so this seemed like a good month to do it. Laura Cumming's mom was taken from a beach near her home in England when she was three years old and found five days later, safe and sound. The mystery behind this is complicated, and Cumming describes how she and her family gradually unraveled it, plus what her mother's life was like, growing up not knowing anything about her origins. Very unusual, interesting.

Other reading

Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels by Caroline Eden (2024). I think I heard about this book when I was reading Spilling the Beans by Sarah Moss last month. Either she mentions it in that book or I read about it when I was reading about that book, I DON'T KNOW, but anyway, I requested it from the library and it popped up in October, when I didn't really want to read it. I read it anyway and it is delightful. It was about eating interesting foods in unusual places, like Uzbekistan, Turkey, Latvia, Georgia, Ukraine. And now I want to go to Uzbekistan and eat winter melons. That's never going to happen. But I enjoyed the book, and I do plan to try a couple of her recipes.