Fiction, Reviews

‘Extraordinary People,’ by Peter May

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Extraordinary People

I’m becoming a fan of Scottish writer Peter May. Extraordinary People, which seems to be the first book of a new series, only added to my enthusiasm.

Enzo MacLeod (half Italian, half Scottish) is the father of two daughters. One, whose mother died, adores him and lives in France. The other, whose mother he divorced, will not speak to him. However, she too lives in France.

Enzo used to be a forensic scientist for the police, but now he teaches biology at the University of Toulouse. As a sort of a lark, he makes a bet with a friend, a journalist who’s writing a book on unsolved disappearances. Enzo bets him that he can solve the disappearance of a famous professor, public intellectual, and film critic about ten years before.

Quickly he is able to identify a skull discovered in a metal case in the catacombs of Paris as that of the missing man. Along with the skull various items were found, and Enzo believes they are clues to the motive and murderer. He begins to run the clues down, using the resources of the internet, which did not exist when the man was murdered. Along the way he gradually learns that someone is following his investigation, someone willing to kill him and those he cares about to keep old secrets.

The form of this mystery is one I don’t generally buy into – the serial puzzle mystery, where the detective has to solve a series of obscure riddles to solve the crime. Such things happen in real life, I think, never. In outline, this story resembles the National Treasure movies, which I found contrived and unconvincing.

But May plays the game at a much higher level, and while I recognized the implausibility of the plot, I still had a good time following it. Enzo is an ambivalent character who can sometimes repel the reader, but his growth in maturity and self-knowledge is part of the story.

Cautions for the usual stuff, plus a couple naive comments in the Dan Brown line. But overall I enjoyed Extraordinary People very much.

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Photographic evidence

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Our friend Roy Jacobsen, who used to run a fine writing blog called Writing, Clear and Simple, dropped in for a chat during the Viking festival on Saturday. He took the picture below.

Moorhead 2016

Past the canvas you can see, seated, my friend Kelsey, who sewed my tunic.

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Memoirs of a Viking amnesiac

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Well, that was dumb. I just erased all the photos I took at the Midwest Viking Festival this weekend. I’ve been having increasing trouble getting the reader for the smart card in my camera to communicate with my computers, and in the course of grappling with it I managed to erase the card.

There’s another picture I do have, of me sitting under my awning at the festival. But it was taken by a stranger who was kind enough to e-mail it to me, and I don’t feel right publishing her work in this space without her permission. I could e-mail her and ask, but I won’t be doing that tonight. I’m running behind in my chores. Maybe I’ll have it for you later.

Anyway, I made the four hour trip to Moorhead for the festival at the Hjemkomst Interpretive Center. It was not without challenges. Moorhead has invested heavily in road repairs this summer, and has blocked two of its I-94 overpasses, while also blocking off several of the main streets. The festival put us up in a motel south of the highway, and the venue is some blocks north of the highway. I don’t think I traveled between the two points a single time without getting lost.

Alzheimer’s seemed to be the theme word for the weekend, for me. I discovered that I’d forgotten my Viking belt and pouch at home. And the first day I left my belt knife and scramasax in the motel, and believe me I wasn’t about to drive back to get them. I muddled through, however, with a spare belt of my own, and a pouch I bought from a vendor. Continue reading Memoirs of a Viking amnesiac →

Fiction, Reviews

‘Death in Nostalgia City,’ by Mark S. Bacon

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Death in Nostalgia City

I almost feel guilty writing this review. To an extent, it’s a minor exercise in vindictiveness.

But I’m pretty sure I disliked the book before I figured out I didn’t care much for the author, either. So bear that in mind when evaluating my evaluation.

Death in Nostalgia City is the story of Lyle Deming, a burned-out former policeman who’s found a much more pleasant niche for himself. He drives a vintage taxi cab in Nostalgia City, a theme park in Arizona designed to recreate the Baby Boomers’ childhoods. So he’s reluctant to get involved when the park’s tycoon owner asks him to investigate a series of acts of sabotage in the park. The owner is in a precarious financial situation, and if these incidents impact the business, the evil insurance company that holds his notes may foreclose on it.

I fear that the main reason I actually read this book through to the end was so I could honestly tell you how much it annoyed me. I found the writing… slack. Not awful (though it does include infelicitous sentences like, “’Let’s see who our guests are,’ Lyle said, nodding toward the wallet he’d extracted from the wounded man.’” Extracted? With a surgical instrument, perhaps?), just not at all gripping. The dialogue has zero sparkle or wit. The characters are cardboard, and they all talk alike. The plot tension fails to ratchet up until the very end. And the villains are predictable (except for one surprise, which I’ll admit did fool me).

As icing on the cake, progressive political opinions find their way into the story in a couple places. Which will play well with some audiences, of course.

Anyway, I don’t recommend this book, but it doesn’t cost much, if you want to double-check my prejudiced verdict.

Non-fiction, Reading

Read the Bible in Whole Books

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When we change the Bible into a chapter and verse Bible, plus added all these other modern additives — cross references, section headings, footnotes, all the other stuff that we put in Bibles — we have really made it hard for people to just flat out read the Bible. And one of the things I contend in my book is we should be reading first and studying second and actually doing our study in the context of having read whole books, because that is really what authors intended. Their central unit is not a verse, is not a chapter, it is a book.

Tony Reinke of Desiring God talks to Glenn Paauw, the Executive Director of the Biblica Institute for Bible Reading, on how the Bible came to be designed the way it is today. Paauw says practical considerations simply built on each other so that while we’ve done much to help people reference the Bible, we’ve also hindered them from simply reading it.

Authors, Fiction, Non-fiction

Who Once Destroyed Harold Bloom

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Cynthia Ozick, who is now 88 (“piano keys,” as she sprightfully said when I [Giles Harvey] congratulated her on her recent birthday), has not ceased from the mental fight in the intervening years. She remains a crusader, a missionary or, as she recently put it to me, “a fanatic” in the cause of literature. With one hand she has written some of the strangest, most intellectually daring and morally intelligent fiction of recent times, including “The Shawl” (1989) and “The Puttermesser Papers” (1997); with the other she has produced a prose brick of lit crit, essay after essay on subjects ranging from the Book of Job and Gershom Scholem to Helen Keller and Susan Sontag. You could furnish a room with the prizes she has won, and yet the embrace of a wide readership and extraliterary fame has proved elusive; and no wonder. Public demand for the exacting insights of practitioner-critics, never high, has been in steady decline for a good while now.

Harvey begins his profile of Ozick with a remarkable story of how she punked critic Harold Bloom in a public discussion 30 years ago.  “She beat the crap out of him,” one editor said afterward. (via Prufrock News)

Authors, Fiction, Writing

Kirkus Interview with Ken Liu of ‘The Grace of Kings’

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Kirkus Reviews did an interview with author Ken Liu earlier this year, in which he shares good thoughts about writing and his novel The Grace of Kings.

I wouldn’t consider myself a very fast writer. Almost every other writer I know can draft and revise faster. I have found, however, that the solution to almost any kind of temporary setback in a writing career is to write more, and keeping that in mind has allowed me to keep on writing even when I was not feeling “on.”

The Grace of Kings is your first novel. What are the main differences between writing short fiction vs. long fiction, either in how you envision the story or its construction? 

I think on the practical side, there’s a lot more bookkeeping that must be done with novels: dates, plot points, character traits, worldbuilding details, etc. And decisions you make early on can have consequences hundreds of pages and months or years later. Since I’m not a natural planner when it comes to writing, I’ve had to learn to use various technologies like wikis and timelines to keep all this stuff straight. I suppose in a sense, writing a novel is a lot more like architecture while short fiction feels more like sculpting.

He goes on to describe his use of “silkpunk,” which is “a blend of fantasy and technology inspired by prototypes from East Asian antiquity.”

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Sunday too

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I forgot to mention I’ll be at Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis on Sunday, too, for the annual Scandinavian Summer Fest.

I’d link to the web site, but there doesn’t seem to be one.

It will be an active weekend.

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Gone a-Viking, again

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Midwest Viking Festival

I refuse to say I’ll be “out of pocket” for the rest of the week. I dislike that turn of speech; it makes no sense to me. “Out of pocket” is a term having to do with spending money.

Anyway, I’ll be away for the next few days. I’ll be participating in the Midwest Viking Festival at the Hjemkomst Center in Moorhead, Minnesota. The Hjemkomst Center is a museum devoted to preserving a replica Viking ship which was built beginning in the 1970s and sailed to Norway in the early ‘80s. Its chief builder was a regular guy named Bob Asp, who sadly died before the launch. There’s also a lovely replica stave church.

I’ve been to the Hjemkomst Center before, but this will be my first time at this particular event. It will probably be the largest Viking event I’ve ever attended. There’ll be a few friends and acquaintances there, so I won’t be wholly on my own in a sea of strangers, though. I’ll have some books to sell. Drop in if you’re in the neighborhood.

I just finished loading my car, and was amazed at how easy it was without hip pain. It’s like growing ten years younger all of a sudden. It occurs to me that I must be kind of tough. I’ve been playing hurt for more than two years.

Reading, Writing

Developing a Writing Mindset

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Here are two posts with some good thoughts on developing a writing mind.

Shannon Stewart explores the wisdom behind her friend’s recommendation, “If you want to write fantasy, you’re going to have to stop reading only fantasy.”

Anne Janzer describes a couple binary mindsets, fixed vs. growth and abundance vs. scarcity, and how they restrict or encourage a would-be writer.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture