The Best Book I Read This Month: The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson

The British cover of the book. The cover of the American edition features a sheep.

I love Bill Bryson. His books fill almost an entire shelf of my bookcase. Every single one has made me laugh out loud. When I was in Wales last year, he had just released a new book--The Road to Little Dribbling. At the time, it hadn't been released in the United States yet, so I bought a copy at the nearest Waterstone's (the British equivalent of Barnes and Noble). It took me until this month to get around to reading it.

About twenty years ago, Bryson published a book called (in the US) Notes from a Small Island. It was a travelogue of sorts. Bryson was--and still is--an American living in the United Kingdom. In Notes from a Small Island, he traveled around his adopted country and shared his impressions. It was hilarious. The Road to Little Dribbling was intended, I think, as a celebration of Small Island's anniversary. Once again, Bryson ventures around the British Isles and shares his remembrances and impressions. (That said, you don't have to have read Small Island to enjoy Little Dribbling. However, if you've never read Bryson before, please start with A Walk in the Woods, which recounts his misadventures hiking the Appalachian Trail.)

My favorite illustration in the book

Bryson's humor is dry, sarcastic, and self-deprecating. I laughed out loud through the first thirty pages. I giggled through the rest--often at something Bryson said, but sometimes at one of the illustrations that opened each chapter. The illustration that opened Chapter 16 was my favorite. At first glance, it's a dodo with a wicked case of body odor. Later in the chapter, though, I learned I was wrong. It's a dodo, all right, but body odor was not its problem. By the time I finished the book, I was overcome--not for the first time--with a desire to move to the UK.

The Best Book I Read This Month: A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee

The best book I read in September was A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee. I started it during my lunch break on a Monday. By the end of my lunch hour, I wanted to call in sick for the rest of the day so that I could keep reading.

Set in Calcutta in 1919, A Rising Man centers around policeman Sam Wyndham, a World War I veteran newly arrived from London, as he acclimates to his new home and attempts to solve the murder of a high-ranking colonial official. He faces the dual tasks of deciphering the culture of colonial India and navigating competing powers within the British government. His partner in crime, so to speak, is a local,  "Surrender Not" Banerjee.

What struck me first--what enthralled me from the get-go--was Mukherjee's descriptions of Calcutta. I could not only see it, I could hear and feel it too.

Then I was drawn in to the two main characters, each challenged in his own way. Wyndham, for example, is an opiate addict--the result of injuries from his war years. He struggles to manage his cravings while simultaneously wishing for the oblivion of a high. Banerjee is caught between cultures--not entirely trusted by the British police because he is Indian and disowned by his family for working in/with the colonial government.

The solution to the mystery could have used a few more seeds planted throughout the story, but I will definitely be reading the next book in this new series, if only so I can spend more time with Wyndham and Banerjee.

The Best Book I Read This Month: Darktown, by Thomas Mullen

It's early in the month to be posting this, but there is no way anything else I read this month will top Darktown by Thomas Mullen. It left me breathless.

Set in Atlanta in 1948, the story follows two of the Atlanta Police Department's first African American officers (Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith) and one white rookie (Denny Rakestraw) as they try to solve the murder of a young black woman, a murder that everyone else wants swept under the rug. All three main characters are compelling, and I look forward to following their story in Mullen's sequel, Lightning Men.

What really knocked me out about Darktown, though, was the atmosphere. This is not a light book. Even calling it noir would be a disservice. Every page captured the oppressive heat and humidity of that Atlanta summer. Every page captured the unrelenting, oppressive racism of 1948 Atlanta. Every word felt a hair's breadth away from violence. This is definitely fiction that brings history to life. There were spots so intense, I had to put the book down and take a few deep breaths. But then I picked it right up again because it was so compelling.

The Best Book I Read This Month: Surrender, New York by Caleb Carr

First, a disclaimer: my choice for this month is not the best book I read in terms of quality of writing. It is, however, the book that provoked the strongest reaction. In actuality, I still haven't decided whether I like the book. But  the fact that I finished all 592 pages despite my frustrations surely says something.

Surrender, New York is a mystery centered on the deaths of "throwaway," or abandoned, teenagers. It is set in upstate New York, in the fictional Burgoyne County (which is supposedly located in the environs of Albany, near Rensselaer County). The mystery, itself, was one of the better aspects of the book. It was intricate and well-plotted, with some nicely executed twists and turns. The characters--well, the supporting characters--were colorful and their loyalties not always clear. (I like stories and characters that live in the gray areas.) The main character, however, felt flat. More about him later.

I picked up the book based on the jacket copy. I adored Carr's The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness, which centered on a psychologist named Laszlo Kreizler and the development of what we now call forensic psychology in the dawn of the twentieth century. So when I read that Surrender, New York was a contemporary "sequel" to the Kreizler books, I grabbed it. Much to my disappointment, the connection to Kreizler was no more than a gimmick, not much better than name-dropping. It felt forced, and I feel duped. The story would have been just as good--maybe even better--without it. The Kreizler connection simply allowed the author to use his main character (Trajan Jones) to pontificate on everything he (Carr) thinks is wrong with modern law enforcement and forensic science. (He has particular venom for CSI and similar television programs.) This single-minded focus made Jones feel flat as a character, despite Carr's attempts to make him seem otherwise (amputee, cancer survivor, ill-advised love affair, pet cheetah).

Jones's pontifications often took the form of long passages of expository dialogue, another of my frustrations with the book. I found my eyes glazing over and my attention wandering during the especially long ones. Shortening, or even eliminating, many of these passages would have made for a much tighter story.

Carr also displayed a tendency for some rather amateur-level foreshadowing. More than once, I read something along the lines of "Much later, I realized the importance of so-and-so's words." My God, man, let me as the reader realize that importance for myself! Let me figure out the connections on my own! That's what makes a good mystery work.

So, while I recommend The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness wholeheartedly, I am not sure I can do the same for Surrender, New York.

The Best Book I Read This Month: The Haunting of Maddy Clare by Simone St. James

I went to the library on Saturday, looking for short books that would help me make up some ground on my Goodreads Challenge--where I was 10 books behind. I picked up a Stephen King novella, knowing it would be a quick read, and The Haunting of Maddy Clare. I chose The Haunting because it was a) relatively short and b) set in post-World War I England, one of my favorite settings. I read the King novella first and started The Haunting of Maddy Clare Sunday afternoon. It swept me away. I stayed up late Sunday night reading it and made sure I got up early enough Monday morning to finish it before I started work.

My library had the book classified as horror, but I didn't find it all that scary. (Perhaps a tolerance I've developed as a lifelong Stephen King reader?) Yes, there is a ghost--a rather violent one--but the story was more like a mystery, driven by the pursuit of answers to two questions: Who was Maddy Clare? What happened to her?

And Maddy doesn't do the only haunting in the story. World War I is just as vivid a specter, having left both physical and psychological scars on the two male leads, scars that inform their interactions with each other, with Maddy Clare, and with the main character: Sarah Piper.  And, as is fitting for an England where war has decimated the male population, the story is populated by female characters, with the men often playing supporting roles.

Ultimately, it was the interaction among the three "ghost hunters"--Sarah, Alistair, and Matthew--that drew me in, grabbed me, and held my attention. This is certainly not a story for the faint of heart, but Susanna Kearsley's cover blurb was accurate: it was spellbinding.