Recent reading
Jan. 5th, 2022 07:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxLast book I read in 2021 was Christianna Brand's Green for Danger, a murder mystery set in a military hospital in WWII. Everyone who recommended this book was right! This is definitely her best one! The atmosphere is great, and the ending was probably the best in all of the many mysteries I've read this year, in terms of whodunnit, why, and how it was revealed.
I love murder mysteries where everyone is, to some extent, in on it - think Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express or The Hollow - and I found that aspect of the ending, when everyone distracts Cockrill so he doesn't notice the murderer has taken poison, devastatingly well-done.
Three books in to the Inspector Cockrill series, I'm still not sure how I feel about the detective. He has a talent for lurking on the sidelines and saying just the right thing to get a suspect talking, whether it's by being sarcastic and provoking or by playing dumb. It's an approach I suspect I would be able to appreciate more in a movie or TV adaption, because I find it kind of hard to get a read on who he is, when his chameleon-ness is filtered through the narrative's POV. Personally, I think Brand's strength is in the dynamics between the characters under suspicion— especially in this one, where after the fourth attempted murder (two successful), the suspects are essentially quarantined away from the rest of the hospital staff and kept together, under close watch, until someone cracks. (It was a very pandemic mood, actually.)
First book I read in 2022 was Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa. Sentaru, an aspiring writer burdened by his criminal past, has been phoning it in at his job making dorayaki until he hires Tokue, an elderly woman with her own secret, to make the shop's sweet bean paste, turning around the shop's fortunes; they also befriend Wakana, a teenage girl from a broken home. Bit of a Lifetime/Hallmark movie vibe, especially once it turned out that Sukegawa had framed the story around a specific, and unexpected, social issue, but it was a sweet little book. (Pun intended.)
I initially suspected Tokue's secret was that she had also been in prison, but it turned out to be that she had been diagnosed with Hansen's disease, or leprosy, as a child and spent most of her life in a sanatorium, not allowed to leave its grounds even after she was cured, under Japan's harsh Leprosy Prevention Act, which was only repealed in 1996. Continued stigma against people with Hansen's disease results in a loss of customers after the rumor spreads, and the shop's absentee owner fires Tokue, but Sentaru continues to work with her to develop a new recipe to save the shop.
Read The Woman Who Borrowed Memories, a collection of short stories by Tove Jansson. Knowing Jansson for the Moomin books and her at least semi-autobiographical Fair Play, I was surprised by how unsettling many of these stories were— not creepy, exactly, but with an undercurrent of tension, or menace, or the sense of something being ever so slightly off. Artists, especially illustrators, were a reoccurring theme. My favorites were "The Squirrel," about a woman on an isolated island who becomes obsessed with a squirrel that washed ashore on a piece of driftwood, and "The Doll's House," in which a retired man's passion for building an elaborate miniature mansion nearly wrecks his relationship.
Not reading, but book-adjacent enough to include here— I listened to BBC 4's radio play of Howl's Moving Castle (available until Jan. 10th)! It's only an hour long, so it cuts out a lot (including Sophie's family, and most of her backstory, although it kept Howl's) and condenses what is left, but it's still fun. I enjoyed the voice-acting, and that it has an actually Welsh Howl!!
I love murder mysteries where everyone is, to some extent, in on it - think Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express or The Hollow - and I found that aspect of the ending, when everyone distracts Cockrill so he doesn't notice the murderer has taken poison, devastatingly well-done.
Three books in to the Inspector Cockrill series, I'm still not sure how I feel about the detective. He has a talent for lurking on the sidelines and saying just the right thing to get a suspect talking, whether it's by being sarcastic and provoking or by playing dumb. It's an approach I suspect I would be able to appreciate more in a movie or TV adaption, because I find it kind of hard to get a read on who he is, when his chameleon-ness is filtered through the narrative's POV. Personally, I think Brand's strength is in the dynamics between the characters under suspicion— especially in this one, where after the fourth attempted murder (two successful), the suspects are essentially quarantined away from the rest of the hospital staff and kept together, under close watch, until someone cracks. (It was a very pandemic mood, actually.)
First book I read in 2022 was Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa. Sentaru, an aspiring writer burdened by his criminal past, has been phoning it in at his job making dorayaki until he hires Tokue, an elderly woman with her own secret, to make the shop's sweet bean paste, turning around the shop's fortunes; they also befriend Wakana, a teenage girl from a broken home. Bit of a Lifetime/Hallmark movie vibe, especially once it turned out that Sukegawa had framed the story around a specific, and unexpected, social issue, but it was a sweet little book. (Pun intended.)
I initially suspected Tokue's secret was that she had also been in prison, but it turned out to be that she had been diagnosed with Hansen's disease, or leprosy, as a child and spent most of her life in a sanatorium, not allowed to leave its grounds even after she was cured, under Japan's harsh Leprosy Prevention Act, which was only repealed in 1996. Continued stigma against people with Hansen's disease results in a loss of customers after the rumor spreads, and the shop's absentee owner fires Tokue, but Sentaru continues to work with her to develop a new recipe to save the shop.
Read The Woman Who Borrowed Memories, a collection of short stories by Tove Jansson. Knowing Jansson for the Moomin books and her at least semi-autobiographical Fair Play, I was surprised by how unsettling many of these stories were— not creepy, exactly, but with an undercurrent of tension, or menace, or the sense of something being ever so slightly off. Artists, especially illustrators, were a reoccurring theme. My favorites were "The Squirrel," about a woman on an isolated island who becomes obsessed with a squirrel that washed ashore on a piece of driftwood, and "The Doll's House," in which a retired man's passion for building an elaborate miniature mansion nearly wrecks his relationship.
Not reading, but book-adjacent enough to include here— I listened to BBC 4's radio play of Howl's Moving Castle (available until Jan. 10th)! It's only an hour long, so it cuts out a lot (including Sophie's family, and most of her backstory, although it kept Howl's) and condenses what is left, but it's still fun. I enjoyed the voice-acting, and that it has an actually Welsh Howl!!
