A Reason to Live

A Reason to Live by Matthew Iden
(Matthew Iden, 2012)
Format: audiobook via the author (narrated by Lloyd Sherr)

From Goodreads: "In the late nineties, a bad cop killed a good woman and DC Homicide detective Marty Singer watched the murderer walk out of the courtroom a free man. 

Twelve years later, the victim's daughter begs for help: the killer is stalking her now. But Marty has retired to battle cancer. A second shot at the killer--and a first chance at redemption--Marty has A Reason to Live."

Iden contacted me via twitter to see if I'd listen to his first Marty Singer mystery. I looked at the sample pages and was engaged enough to want to keep going, so I had him send me the audiobook. And I truly enjoyed the listen.

Singer is wry and fond of the sound of his own voice, but sharp and more compassionate than he would like to be. Like all the best retired detectives, he crosses lines but trades on his accumulated goodwill to keep out of trouble - and being the cop who retired due to cancer gives him more goodwill than some of his former compatriots would like to grant him. The mystery is well-constructed, twisty but not trickstery, and I liked the way Singer comes to rely on others not just physically but emotionally and mentally, too. He grows, even as the cancer depletes him. It's a satisfying journey.

Sherr is a new-to-me narrator. His voice has grit and gravity, very suitable for Singer, and he carries the listener very ably through the tense moments. I wish his female voices were more differentiated, but otherwise I found listening to him for 8 hours a pleasure.

A Tale for the Time Being

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
(Viking, 2013)
Format: paper via library

From Goodreads: " 'A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.'

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine.

Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.

Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home."

Nao! Wonderful, complicated, smart, bullied, depressed, buoyant, philosophical, super Nao. She's a treasure of a character, and her tale is the definition of engrossing. I wanted to devour it in one setting, but Ruth wouldn't let me. (Ruth the character, not Ruth the novelist.) Ruth makes it all about her, possessive of Nao even with her husband. And possession gradually gives way to obsession, which is a whole delightful journey of its own, no matter how often I wanted to shake Ruth (the character) and force her to let me get back to the next installment of Nao's journal. (Okay, maybe in those cases it was Ruth the author I wanted to shake. But then she would grant me some wonderful moment with Ruth the character, and I had to restrain myself.)

This is the first of the 2013 Booker Shortlist books I've read, and based on this, I'm excited to get to the rest of the list. 

How the Light Gets In

How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny
(Minotaur Books / Macmillian Audio, 2013)
Format: Audio CDs via Audiobook Jukebox (narrated by Ralph Cosham)

From Goodreads: "Christmas is approaching, and in Québec it's a time of dazzling snowfalls, bright lights, and gatherings with friends in front of blazing hearths. But shadows are falling on the usually festive season for Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. Most of his best agents have left the Homicide Department, his old friend and lieutenant Jean-Guy Beauvoir hasn't spoken to him in months, and hostile forces are lining up against him. 

When Gamache receives a message from Myrna Landers that a longtime friend has failed to arrive for Christmas in the village of Three Pines, he welcomes the chance to get away from the city. Mystified by Myrna's reluctance to reveal her friend's name, Gamache soon discovers the missing woman was once one of the most famous people not just in North America, but in the world, and now goes unrecognized by virtually everyone except the mad, brilliant poet Ruth Zardo. 

As events come to a head, Gamache is drawn ever deeper into the world of Three Pines. Increasingly, he is not only investigating the disappearance of Myrna's friend but also seeking a safe place for himself and his still-loyal colleagues. Is there peace to be found even in Three Pines? And at what cost to Gamache and the people he holds dear?"

Ah, sweet wonderful Inspector Gamache and the haven on fictional earth that is Three Pines! How I do love it! And I missed it, which is bonkers, but Penny's last Gamache book didn't take him to Three Pines, and, sure, the place can't support all that many murderers, but I was still eager for Penny to take him back there. And as Gamache is such a broken and fragile creature (you'd never know it; he is a pillar, but those of us who love him can see the cracks) when this book opens, it's crucial to his very soul that he is nestled in the town's bosom ASAP. Even if he's there because of yet another murder.

Obviously, these characters very much get under my skin and take on a life of their own, as does the town. I've read plenty of small-town series in my day, but rarely have I been able to mentally navigate them as thoroughly as I can Three Pines. Sit me on the bench in front of the pond - if Ruth and her duck will make room for me - and I can point you to the B&B or Myrna's bookstore (Ruth, it's not a library!), and tell you the story of why there are three pines in Three Pines. And then we'll go to the bistro for lunch, and not leave for hours.

Penny creates it all with such a tender sensibility, and she does the same with Gamache and the troubling world of the Sûreté du Québec - and wow. Because there are some long, long narrative threads happening within Homicide, and my mind spins when I imagine Penny laying them out so many books and murders ago. She always keeps the overall arcs moving in relentless and compelling ways, but I was blown away by this one. I can only hope she keeps spinning out more.

And it's a pleasure to have Ralph Cosham talking me through those threads, over the course of 12 CDs. He continues to inhabit the story deeply; I think his heart broke as he narrated in the same places my heart broke. I loved his pacing, his intonations, his overall investment in the work as he read it. This is truly a magical author-narrator pairing, long may it continue!

Mirrors and Siblings and Science and Love

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
(Penguin Audio, 2013)
Format: audio CDs via library (narrated by Orlagh Cassidy)

From Goodreads: "Meet the Cooke family. Our narrator is Rosemary Cooke. As a child, she never stopped talking; as a young woman, she has wrapped herself in silence: the silence of intentional forgetting, of protective cover. Something happened, something so awful she has buried it in the recesses of her mind.

Now her adored older brother is a fugitive, wanted by the FBI for domestic terrorism. And her once lively mother is a shell of her former self, her clever and imperious father now a distant, brooding man.

And Fern, Rosemary’s beloved sister, her accomplice in all their childhood mischief? Fern’s is a fate the family, in all their innocence, could never have imagined."

I enjoy Fowler's other books, but this, I felt burrow its way into my heart. Things I grooved on: sibling relationships, especially the ways Rose is constantly jealous of hers while simultaneously longing to be a part of them while simultaneously bonding with one and excluding the other; parental action/inaction and the ways adult Rose learns to reinterpret what child Rose experienced; the constant reinterpretation Rose had to do of her childhood experiences, and how each was momentous in both interpretations, and each interpretation informed the other; mirrors and language and body language and invisible friends and speaking for the silent and letting the silent speak for you.

(And speaking of letting people speak for you, how's this for a segue?) Orlagh Cassidy is a truly lovely narrator for this novel. I could see Rose's expressions in Cassidy's intonations, and was wrapped tightly in Rose's emotions as she began to see her childhood through her adult lens. I love the voice she gave to Rose.

Knowing the Score

Knowing the Score by Kat Latham
(Carina, 2013)
Format: ebook via NetGalley

From Goodreads: "Rugby player Spencer Bailey is determined to win a spot on England's World Cup team. But with a month break before the selectors start watching him, he's eager to have fun with a woman who knows the score: the relationship will end when rugby season begins. The lovely American Caitlyn Sweeney seems perfect for the role of temporary lover, since her visa will run out soon anyway.

Caitlyn works for an international disaster relief organization and can handle the world's worst crises, but she flinches from her own. Her past has left her with a fear of intimacy so deep that she has trouble getting close to anyone—until she meets sexy Spencer. His hot body and easygoing nature are too much for even her to resist.

Neither Caitlyn nor Spencer expects to fall hard for each other. But with their relationship deadline approaching, the old rules of the game seem less important than before…until past secrets surface, challenging everything they thought they knew about each other."
So I had fun with this. I ran across this debut contemporary romance at another blog (there are other book blogs? Mel's readers gasp!) and loved the teaser bit that was posted, so I was pleased when my NetGalley request was approved. 

Enough of the history. Let's talk about Spencer, and how he's a bad boy who has already reformed by the time Caitlyn meets him, but no one in his high-profile world has gotten over his youthful indiscretions. Oh, and Caitlyn, who has no idea who he is, but knows that he's overwhelming to her and that if they're going to be together, however temporarily, she will have to confront at least a couple of her demons. They both think a short-term fling will serve their needs, but of course as they begin to think more of each other's needs than their own, everything changes.

Latham's style is light and frequently made me smile. I also cried a good bit, as is my wont, during the dark moments for these characters. The book was a page-turner (a page-swiper? a thumb-tapper?) and I stayed up half the night to finish it (as is also my wont, when I'm really into something.) All in all, I'm adding Latham to my insta-read list and looking forward to learning more about rugby as her series progresses. (Did you know they throw the ball backward in rugby? Isn't that odd?)

I am Agog! I am Aghast!

(Is Mel writing about Les Mis at last?)

Hello, fellow fans of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables - I'm back! But though it took me a really, really long narrative time to reach the point of something happening in Volume 3: Marius, it seems that pretty soon, it's probably going to turn out that there might be some actual action on the page. Let's get through:

A simple meal, a quiet life...
all a man needs.

Book Fifth - The Excellence of Misfortune

So, Marius is nobly indigent. His clothes are shoddy. He's earning an honest pittance at a publishing job. "He lived on it. How? Not so badly. We will explain." (p.453) I just bet we will. In short, he has a hovel overhead, not much in the way of clothing, eats a lot of bread, and is totally full of himself for living this life. He won't go into debt. "He even said to himself, that a creditor is worse than a master; for the master possesses only your person, a creditor possesses your dignity and can administer to it a box on the ear." (p.454)

Meanwhile, he's still crazy about his dear departed dad, and to a lesser but still freakish extent, old Thenardier who "rescued" him at Waterloo. (Remember Waterloo?) (Hi to my husband's cousin's daughter's roommate, BTW! You remember Waterloo, don't you?) Marius's grandfather is super-pouty about Marius's desertion of him in the no-good father's honor. "There are fathers who do not love their children; there exists no grandfather who does not adore his grandson." (p.455) And also, "Old men need affection as they need the sun." (p.455) So this estrangement isn't so good for Gillenormand.

Sigh. I'd love to tell you more about all this, but you see, there was that church warden who first told Marius about his father's banishment from his life. And Hugo says, "As we shall see M. Mabeuf again, later on, a few words will not be superfluous." (p.458) As if Hugo is any kind of judge about what is superfluous! Still, I give him props for these fun descriptive details:

• "He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often returned with two." (p.458)
• "He had... no teeth, either in his mouth or his mind...." (p.458)

Anyway, let's leave the bookish old man alone - at the moment, Marius only sees him a couple of times a month. What he loves to do almost daily is take long walks about Paris, thinking Deep Thoughts, socializing more often, observing the world, etc. (He would go out ut: broke. He can't afford a carriage, and walking gets his boots dirty, and "in a drawing-room you may be soiled everywhere except on your shoes. In order to insure a good reception there, only one irreproachable thing is asked of you; your conscious? No, your boots." (p.461))

Let's keep following Marius on his walks, shall we? You never know who he'll run across! Oh, wait. No. Hugo diverts again - back to Sad Grandpa Gillenormand. He's busy ranting about what he guesses Marius is doing with his free time. (Rabble-rousing.) "The nineteenth century is poison. The first scamp that happens along lets his beard grow like a goat's, thinks himself a real scoundrel, and abandons his old relatives. He's a Republican, he's a romantic." (p.463) (Kids these days!)

His daughter brings in the nephew she adores, Theodule, who just nods along with the rant. And even though he agrees that "Students deliberating on the National Guard,-such a thing could not be seen among the Ogibewas nor the Cadodaches! [sic] Savages who go naked, with their noodles dressed like a shuttlecock, with a club in their paws, are less of brutes than those bachelors of arts!" (p.464), Sad Grandpa doesn't decide to love him best of all. (Yes, I included that last part because: noodles dressed like a shuttlecock!)

Bailing on Summer

All you pumpkin spice latte / how cute is my new fall cardigan folk can just bite me, 'kay?

It's still in the 90s here. It'll be in the 90s here until, I guess, February? And fine, I grew up with it (it's the humidity and the heat, FYI), I don't own a lot of cardigans, and at least it's no longer in the 100s.

But the A/C at work is a bonkers anti-fun-house water torture mess.

And I’m tired of it. I’m enervated by it. I’m beginning to dread my office for the day-long, futile, vicious cycle of gently coaxing the damn thing just to have it attempt to lower the temp below 85.

Here’s what it takes to get the A/C to run:

1.      First thing in the morning, turn it on.

2.      Forget that first thing, I should have bailed it out.

3.      Grab the take-out container and bail out the overflow tray. More on this below.

4.      Listen for the tell-tale ‘whrr-chnk’ that indicates the motor has consented to operate.

5.      Empty the trash can full of water that has just been bailed out of the overflow tray.

6.      Wash my hands thoroughly and still feel like there’s slimy particle-ridden A/C water all over me.

7.      Return the trash can for the next bailing session, turn out the closet lights, sit at desk.

8.      In 22 minutes when the overflow tray is full again, repeat steps 3 through 7.

Me, bailing the overflow tray. Note the handy red
sensor ensuring that the unit stops working!

The overflow tray! Oh, the overflow tray. So you may not know this, but A/Cs work in part by dehumidifying the icky hot, humid air. So you take a boat-load of humid air and the A/C has to, like, wring out the extra moisture before it can be cooled. And where does all that hot water go? Through the drain and into the overflow tray!

(It probably has a more technical name. Whatever. It’s my evil overlord, I’ll call it what I want to.)

For reasons unknown (alchemy was involved? and also a pyre made of operating manuals?), the overflow tray for my office A/C is not at the end of some pipe leading to the outdoors where water can just wander off to become more humidity in the future, but at the end of some pipe that is 1” from the unit itself, which is in the closet of my office.

(It’s actually in the closet’s closet. Well, one of the closet’s closets. My office has a closet/file storage area, and there are two closets off of it, with A/C units and breaker boxes and storage boxes and extra rolls of carpet and a rickety old ladder and exposed wires and bats, maybe? Plus the overflow tray.) 

(Worth noting: the office raccoon never goes in there. Make of that what you will.)

(Worth noting: we have an office raccoon. Don’t get me started. It’s not a pet.)

So, due to the aforementioned heat, swamp city, ritual sacrifice confluence, every 22 minutes the overflow tray fills with liquefied humidity. And a fun feature of the overflow tray is a little sensor that shuts off the A/C motor when the overflow tray is full. Because otherwise, the pipe would keep dumping liquefied humidity on the closet’s closet’s floor, which would drip through to the office below, and ruin the stacks of books that fill it. (Also notable: my company has an office that is full of nothing but stacks of books.) (The raccoon likes it in there.)

So every 22 minutes, the A/C stops blowing cool air. So every 22 minutes someone has to bail out the overflow tray, then spend the next 18 minutes feeling like there’s micro-humidity-demons on her skin, then spend the next 4 minutes hoping someone else will come in for the next bailing session. (To be fair, I’m not the only one who bails. But I’m the one closest to the closet and therefore am the soonest to notice when it’s needed.)

Now sometimes the overflow tray has no water in it for, like, an hour. Mind you, the fan runs the whole time, so unless you’re savvy like me and notice that instead of it blowing cool air, it’s just blowing air, you might not understand what this means.

What it means is that it’s so hot in my office, and the A/C is having such trouble trying to make air cold, that the coils have frozen over. And that means I have to turn the whole system off for half an hour so it can defrost. (This is also why I shut it off overnight. That, and because it’s super awesome to come into a 90-degree office in the morning.)

Probably you can guess what happens in my humid, metal-roofed office when it’s in the 90s outside and there’s no fan blowing air, much less cool air, to the denizens.

As a super-awesome-nature-loves-me bonus, when the fan isn’t blowing, I get an increase in the reek from the decomposing rodent in the ceiling of the office kitchen (the office kitchen is also off of my office. I have 4 doors: hallway, bathroom, kitchen, closet. The climate control strategy involved in their opening and closing is a complex art.)

For those of you paying attention, that means I come in to work in the mornings to a humid, hot, stomach-turning office and spend the next several hours attempting to mitigate as many of those factors as possible. So, yes, I’d love a cute new fall cardigan. A cute new fall cardigan would mean that it’s probably not hotter than 82 outside, which would mean that I can go to work and, on the best of days, not have to go near the overflow tray at all.

But for now, the raccoon and I co-exist with the heat.