How to Read a Book

I have a backlog of books to read. I’ve had them ever since Murder by the Book closed. I took with me books I had always wanted to read but never got around to. Now they are tumbling and rampaging around my house. I’ve read a few of them over the last six years, but my New Year’s resolution was to make a bigger dent in the piles.

Just begin, just read.

I decided to choose several books — new, old, forgotten, classics — and rotate them, a chapter of this here, a chapter of that there. I currently have seven on rotation. What are they?

“A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking. This book serves as the illustration in the dictionary of “a book a lot of people own but few finish.” I’m determined to finish it. It is the ultimate mystery book. Curved space, waves that are particles and particles that are waves. Quirky. Or do I mean "quarky"?

“Americanah” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I had always wanted to read this book, even before I read her stunning essay in “The New Yorker.” After I read the essay, I moved the book closer to the top of the pile, but over the last year it remained there, just below the top of the pile. New Year’s resolution: Read it!

“Sirens” by Joseph Knox. Recently read about this in some review. I needed to read a new book (c2017) by a new author. The main character is a Mancunian detective. Yes, I finally get to use the word “Mancunian” in a sentence!

“Dark Money” by Jane Mayer.

A mark, a yen, a buck, or a pound,

A buck or a pound,

A buck or a pound

Is all that makes the world go around.

That clinking clanking sound

Can make the world go around.*

*“Cabaret”

This is a horror story (so far) about the dark uses of money by the dark, secretive billionaires who want to make more money. I’m left asking, how much money does one person need?

“What You Don’t Know About Charlie Outlaw” by Leah Stewart. Funny, touching, out-of-the-box book about a television star being too honest in an interview. As his reward, his girlfriend dumps him and his series people probably hate him. Charlie has taken off for a hike in a jungle, where he is kidnapped by unorganized individuals. Actually, they are organized under only one principle: kidnap an American.

“The Death and Life of the Great Lakes” by Dan Egan. This is the latest pick by the PBS Newshour/New York Times Facebook book group. Ecological disaster. Solution. Another ecological disaster. Another solution. That’s where I am right now.

+++++

I’ve been doing this rotational reading for a few weeks now, and it is invigorating … as long as I can keep the books straight. That’s one reason for keeping them fairly diverse. A couple have already rotated out, i.e., I finished reading them. A couple rotated out because I wasn’t engaged by page fifty and saw no reason to continue. Book drop.

My review of the seventh book on my list, the latest to drop out of rotation — because I finished it — follows in my next post.

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

Subtitled: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

Vintage, 400 pages, $16.95 (c2017)

This book is nominated for the 2018 Edgar Award for Best Non-Fiction.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” won’t be read for its breakthrough style or literary edginess, although it is thoroughly readable and author David Grann paces the presentation of the murders in a commendably dramatic way. It is the content that drives this non-fiction work. As location is to real estate, so content is to most writing. Grann has that covered.

What is also satisfying is that Grann introduces his own sleuthing into the picture. It is not just about reporting the atrocities of the Osage killings, a tragedy that stunned America when it happened (1920s through the 30s), but of doing research in primary sources and talking to people who were close to the victims. Reporters, the judicial system, and politicians made a big deal of the killings at the time, but the story was overwhelmed by other issues: e.g., the Depression, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. It is Grann’s honor to have uncovered the story again and to have breathed new direction into it.

Tom White was a Texas Ranger who became one of the first FBI agents, although it was a few years from being officially named the FBI. He was an honorable, intelligent man – luckily. There was so much corruption and racism at all levels of the Oklahoma community in and around the Osage Indian nation. Many members of the tribe were murdered, some clumsily and some with more subtlety. Although many clues and witnesses existed to the events, by the time White became involved, a lot had been covered up.

J. Edgar Hoover was ambitiously trying to set up a nationally-established investigative department. He was not the rough-and-ready type himself and was a germaphobe, but his agents were canny and tough. Ex-Rangers made good agents to send into the fray in Oklahoma. Hoover hired White and let him recruit his team. Hoover was hoping a success by the team would lead to government approval for a new department.

Central to Grann’s story is the inhumanity evinced by the “good citizens” of Oklahoma towards Native Americans. In their lights, the Osage were not fully human, intelligent, or capable of handling their own lives. They encouraged federal legislation to that effect. Why was it so important that the Osage be relegated to non-person status? Money.

The “underground reservation” on the Osage land contained oil. Buckets and barrels and monstrous fountains of it. The Osage were among the richest people in America because of that. And that prosperity brought tragedy.

Grann’s clear exposition of what happened to the Osage is stellar. The tragedy is riveting. And so disturbing. I’m glad this book was chosen by many critics as a best book and nominated for a bunch of awards, because this is a story that will probably be forgotten again. At least, with such a prominent book, the story may be resurrected again and again. Lest we forget.

A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee

Pegasus Books, 400 pages, $15.95 (c2017)

Can I admit that the only reason I continued to read “A Rising Man” was because of the author’s name? I would probably have given up reading after the first fourth (which I did) and not gone back (which I did — go back, that is) if the author had been, say, Albert Michaelson (not intentionally a real person). I read the part introducing Captain Samuel Wyndham, a Brit displaced, misplaced, re-placed to Calcutta in 1919, as a homicide detective. After closing the book at about seventy pages because of a case of the “meh,” I ignored it for a few months. Finally, I reopened the book and began reading again, and it was as though I held a new book in my hands. The story had changed (or I was in a better head space?). I found the rest of the book quite interesting.

Recruited to Calcutta in the last days of the Raj, Sam is befuddled. Such a strange land. Such strange voices, clothes, food. And such strange fellow Brits. Some British people have never known another home, but they still identify as British, with British-style country homes, fashions, manners, appalling food. The people who would have been middle class with modest abode and habillement in England are owners of grand homes, with servants and rich trappings in Calcutta. Most of them have the arrogance and sense of entitlement that inevitably doomed them and their lifestyle in the end.

Sam has brought baggage with him, too — the emotional kind. His wife died young and before they could establish a life together. And that led him to pick up a wicked opium habit. He is probably on the last of his nine lives. Then, within a few days of his arrival in Calcutta, Sam picks up a murder. The victim, Alexander MacAuley, is an aide to the Lieutenant-Governor of the Bengal government. His body was found in a seedy part of town, a stone’s throw from a bordello.

Abir Mukherjee, who grew up in Scotland, obviously takes glee in his portraits of the transplanted Scottish community. He writes about the subjugated Indian communities with compassion. He lets us see the importance of the non-violence movement. His Indian character, Sgt. Surendranath Banerjee, is Sam’s assistant. Banerjee is known as “Surrender-not” because no one can pronounce his name. He has a law degree from England and speaks English better than some of his “superiors.” Why can’t the British pronounce his name? Why do we call Deutschland Germany? Why do we call Nippon Japan? Why can’t we learn to call a person or place by its name? Anyway …

Banerjee is the real main character, in my opinion, although he has fewer scenes and we don’t follow him around. He has the more interesting life, split as it is between the British sensibility, his tribal one, and his larger Indian community. He is the one who makes sacrifices. He is the one who understands why larger numbers of Indians are rising up against the British government. The conflict of his loyalties is the most roiling storyline.

I went back to reading this book because it is nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. (See a partial list of nominees and links to my reviews: here.) And because the author’s name is Mukherjee, which to my thinking, erroneous assumption or not, promised a more complex view of the days of the Raj. It followed through with that, but I hope the next book stars Banerjee.

In Farleigh Field by Rhys Bowen

Lake Union Publishing, 396 pages, $14.95

"In Farleigh Field" has been nominated for an 2018 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original.

Rhys Bowen is a very good storyteller. She has proven with her other historical mysteries (Molly Murphy, Lady Georgiana) that she can bring to life a kinder, gentler version of a different time. That’s what she has done as well with “In Farleigh Field,” a novel set during World War II in England.

Bowen works with the cliché of the British upper class and its sense of superiority, and produces a charming and strangely relevant story set during the horrors of Hitler’s march to dominate. Perhaps modeled on the real-life Mitfords, Bowen’s aristocratic family has five daughters. The oldest is prematurely matronly (Olivia). The next is having a wrenching affair with a Frenchman (Margot) Then comes our heroine (Pamela). Then we have poor Dido who had the misfortune of coming of age during the war, thus obviating the need for a debutante presentation at court. Sob. And finally — you knew there had to be at least one — the plucky youngest daughter (Phoebe), who is too smart for her own good, steals the show.

This is also the story of aristocracy depleted. Household staff have gone to war, leaving the “U”s to haul some of their own water, so to speak. Pamela (“Pamma”) has left home to join the war effort, primarily as a glorified clerk. Then she is tapped on the shoulder to do more when she becomes involved in reading German messages at Bletchley Park.

Margot becomes trapped in Paris when she refuses to leave when the going is good. When the going becomes rough, she is captured by the Gestapo and given untenable choices. Her narrative breaks the rhythm of the British story, and it could very well have been left out, but Margot has a part to play at the end.

Phoebe, of course, is the precocious child who sees too much. But is she capable of accurately understanding what she sees?

Toss in Pamma’s old flame, an RAF pilot (and fellow aristocrat) who was shot down over Germany and recently escaped from a detention camp. And also Pamma’s childhood friend Ben, son of the local vicar, is necessarily the lovelorn victim of Pamma’s charms. Of course, there are a bunch of other village characters, most of whom seems suspicious, most of whom could be German spies. Deadly deeds in a demure district.

It’s not that Bowen has created a unique mystery situation, it’s that she does it so competently and entertainingly.