September 2005 Archives
I abandoned my Herefordshire haul in favour of the next letter of Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone series ... borrowed from the Barbican Library in lieu of the Lonely Planet Guide to the Ukraine (still out on loan, despite my having put in a request for it over three weeks ago - bah!). Actually, I'd had to call this one back from the mysterious 'stack'. Quite why some of the series get to stay out on the shelves and others don't is another mystery.
But Barbican mysteries aside; K is for Killer is another quick and easy read, this time putting Kinsey on the trail of the murderer of a high class call girl come proto-porn star whose decomposing body had drawn a blank for the Santa Theresa police. With no reference to Kinsey's long-lost family, Killer felt a bit of a filler, but then again you can understand wariness in a character who's spent most of her childhood an orphan, and most of her adult life living alone suddenly finding out she's got aunts, uncles and cousins, and a weathy grandmother who disowned Kinsey's mother.
A suitable read for the Astraeus flight from Gatwick to Simferolpol, and H and my first day in Yalta.
Buy it: Amazon link
A stroke of luck in my pre-Yalta holiday foray into the Barbican library, finding Angels and Demons in the Adventure carousel made up for my fruitless search for a travel guide and/or map for the Ukraine.
As with The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown provides a compelling page turner with plenty of twists and turns. Less of the historical in the sleuthing for Robert Langdon this time, and a lot more of the gore, but no less readable for that. The only aspect I didn't like was the fact that the baddie in this white western world was neither white nor western - but perhaps that is me being too PC.
Buy it (and join the millions who have!!): Amazon link
The first of my post-holiday reading (so watch the rate of consumption drop off!), and I decided to continue the travel theme. I've long been interested in the life, times and travels of Ibn Battutah, but I was put off by the rather dry academic texts which were all I could find....... until I discovered Tim Mackintosh-Smith's tales his own 20th century travels in the footsteps of this travel-bug from Tangiers.
Starting from IB's Moroccan homeland, in the far west of the arabian, muslim lands, Tim follows his trail to Mecca, with a short excursion to the Crimea. This sidetrip within the then muslim world made for interesting reading as H and I head off to Yalta at the end of September. In particular it highlighted the fact that the Crimea spent a substantial chunk of time as a Khanate, having been settled by a segment of the Mongol Hordes that converted to Islam. Not what you expect of part of the Ukraine....
Fascinating stuff, told with human insight by Yemen-based Tim Mackintosh-Smith. I'm very glad I've got Norton Rose's leaving gift, Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah , ready and waiting on the bookshelf to provide coverage of further voyages, ever eastwards.
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I thought that I might find this heavy going, but after the froth and insubstantial fare of The Colour of Heaven I felt in need of something a bit meatier.
And Christian Tyler provided that in his (her?) history and analysis of Xinjiang, the region of steppe, desert and mountain that sits as the buffer between China and the Central Asian republics, and which now is becoming increasingly dominated by Han Chinese at the expense of the Uighur people - whose language is Turkic and religion is Islam.
A really stimulating and easy to digest read, on a topic which has made me all the more determined to make that trip from Beijing to Kashgar, and if possible onwards along the Silk Route to the West. In fact, this journey, perhaps?
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I fear that historical novels are never 'as good' once you've read Dorothy Dunnett....
The plot of this relatively slim volume sounded promising enough - young orphan adopted by glass-making family is sent on a quest for Lapis Lazuli, the pigment that produces 'the colour of heaven' - but the telling is just too thin. Runcie skates over the thirteenth century's scientific discoveries and their dissemination (spectacles) and the pre-Marco Polo travel and trade (travelling from Italy to present-day Afghanistan) with the concomitant meeting of cultures. And as for the love story, wholly unnecessary (unless Runcie is looking to sell the movie rights to Ridley Scott).
Dorothy, do it justice!!
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Easy-reading account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the contribution made by the mysterious Dr William Chester Minor to this Herculean task. It is all the more fascinating, and sad, given that Dr Minor carried out all his work from his cell in Broadmoor (another Victorian innovation, then, as now, Broadmoor was an "Asylum for the Criminally Insane") where he was paying a life sentence for murder.
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I'd been on the look out for another Maggie O'Farrell novel after loving After You'd Gone, and My Lover's Lover didn't disappoint. The novel plots the relationship between naive Lily and self-centred Marcus, with occasional insights from Marcus' friend and flatmate Adam, and Marcus' former girlfriend Sinead.
The early parts in particular provide an eerie read, which the later parts unpick and normalise. Throughout, the novel dissects relationships of all shapes and sizes, and people's commitment to them. The only disappointment was the end.... it was just a little too neat for my liking.
Buy it: Amazon link