Book Round-Up: Bibliomysteries Edition

The Mysterious Bookshop in downtown Manhattan is publishing a Bibliomystery series, short stories or novellas by various mystery writers that center around a book, bookstore, or library. When I went for my birthday, I picked up a few.

The Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository by John Connolly: this was a fun little story about a bookish accountant who stumbles upon a special library housing not only first editions, but a number of characters from those books that have come to life -- shades of Eileen Favorite's The Heroines and Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair.

The Book of the Lion by Thomas Perry: A lost Chaucerian manuscript is being held hostage by a nefarious character, and a professor and his billionaire friend try to claim the manuscript before it is destroyed forever. It was entertaining, but I think I would have preferred a longer work, and more time spent on the lost manuscript (it apparently did exist at one point).

The Little Men by Megan Abbott: This story mostly takes place in the former apartment of a bookseller, but it ultimately was a psychological thriller that had little to do with books.

Reconciliation Day by Christopher Fowler: I liked this one a lot (no surprise, I like Fowler's Peculiar Crimes series, too).  It involves the original manuscript to Stoker's Dracula, and is appropriately creepy and weird.

Seven Years by Peter Robinson: of all the ones I read, this one was probably closest to a traditional mystery -- a cryptic inscription in an old book leads to an unsolved death and a missing person. It had a distinctly Christie-ish vibe.

Bibliotheca Classica by Simon Brett: The choice of a deeply unreliable narrator made this a lot of fun to read. Professor Rounsevell is curious to discover the origins of his bowdlerized copy of the Bibliotheca Classica, but being both a snob and a technophobe he leaves most of the work to his long-suffering wife. I was tickled to learn that the more common name for the text is Lempriere's Dictionary, which is the title of a (disappointing) Lawrence Norfolk book I read ages ago.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

The word "lyrical" is over-used in book reviews; every time there is an even slightly pretty sentence, it seems, the word is plastered all over reviews and and dust jackets and those "praise" quotations publishers love to pepper the book with. The result is that the word becomes meaningless.

Which is a shame, because every once in a while an author really does merit its use. Reading Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, I could not think of a better word to describe her writing.

And every evening would bring its familiar strangeness, and crickets would sing the whole night long, under her windows and in every part of the black wilderness that stretched away from Fingerbone on either side. And she would feel that sharp loneliness she had felt every long evening since she was a child. It was the kind of loneliness that made clocks seem slow and loud and made voices sound like voices across water. Old women she had known, first her grandmother and then her mother, rocked on their porches in the evenings and sang sad songs, and did not wish to be spoken to.

Her sentences are absolutely gorgeous. Reading them feels like cold liquid washing over me.

Loneliness is an absolute discovery. When one looks from inside at a lighted window, or looks from above at the lake, one sees the image of oneself in a lighted room, the image of oneself among trees and sky -- the deception is obvious, but flattering all the same. When one looks from the darkness into the light, however, ones sees all the difference between here and there, this and that. Perhaps all unsheltered people are angry in their hearts, and would like to break the rook, spine, and ribs, and smash the windows and flood the floor and spindle the curtains and bloat the couch.

What is thought, after all, what is dreaming, but swim and flow, and the images they seem to animate? The images are the worst of it. It would be terrible to stand outside in the dark and watch a woman in a lighted room studying her face in a window, and to throw a stone at her, shattering the glass, and then to watch the window knit itself up again and the bright bits of lip and throat and hair piece themselves seamlessly again into that unknown, indifferent woman. . . . And here we find our great affinity with water, for like reflections on water our thoughts will suffer no changing shock, no permanent displacement. . . . I think it must have been my mother's plan to rupture this bright surface, to sail beneath it into very blackness, but here she was, wherever my eyes fell, and behind my eyes, whole and in fragments, a thousand images of one gesture, never dispelled but rising always, inevitably, like a drowned woman.