A Coffin for Demetrios by Eric Ambler; Delirium by Laura Restrepo

Excellent psychological thriller. Great detail, interesting characters, and an absorbing plot that builds to a fantastic climax.
Charles Latimer, a mystery writer, learns of the death of a shady man named Demetrios though his acquaintance with a member of the Turkish secret police. In an attempt to impress on the protagonist that real murders and their deeds are less neat and far more senseless than in books, the colonel shares Demetrios' dossier with him, even going so far as honoring a request to see the body down at the morgue.Taken by morbid curiosity, Charles starts off on his own journey to map out Demetrios' sordid dealings, moving from one country to the next, following the trail of crimes. He discovers the various schemes of this very nasty individual and meets the people he worked with along the way.

A very absorbing look at an episode of madness as manifested by Augustina, a rich Colombian woman living with her husband, Aguilar. Aguilar comes back from a business trip to find her in a hotel room experiencing a more protracted and intense delusional episode than she's ever had before. He sets out to find out what caused it.
The book has several viewpoints. One, the husband describes her mental state and the care he and her Aunt Sofi give her, how he goes about dealing with the situation, and a little bit of his history with her. Two, an old friend of Augustina recounts a story  about a bet gone very wrong and an offense against a drug lord that leads up to the event that causes the psychotic break. Three, descriptions of the madness of Augustina's grandfather. Four, Augustina herself telling the story of her family and her relationship with her little brother, Bichi.
Her writing style seems to be influenced by Jose Saramago only she's actually worked with it rather than used it to bludgeon her readers. It flows, lyrically along, sweeping up the reader and leading from one sentence to another.Saramago just puts one sentence after another, one piece of dialogue tacked onto the with no distinction apart from capitalization. Where his style makes his text artificially difficult to read (and incidentally makes trite subject matter and bad characters seem literary) hers plunges the readers into the stream of consciousness of life and delirium. She respects the need for the occasional dialogue tag or description to orient the audience.

Carn by Patrick McCabe; Thank all that is Holy for air-conditioning

Poor Norway! God watch over and comfort them. I just don't understand the mentality that allows people to feel as though they are justified in killing innocent, unsuspecting people. It's like a giant toddler-ish temper tantrum. "I'm upset so I'm going to hurt you." And what does it truly accomplish? Nothing good for anyone, not even the people who did it. It's just cruel lashing out.

The poor students and faculty where I work! Many of them seem to be from areas that don't get this sort of humidity. At least that's what they tell me. I'm basically stuck indoors for most of the day until 6:00 so I feel no need to complain. The air outside is smothering though; this is the only part I hate about summer. I love catching fireflies and the sound of cicadas and the green tunnel of the parkway near the river but the humidity...the humidity that fogs up my glasses as soon as I step outside and sucks the breath out of me when I get in my overheated car, that is something I could do without.

Work has mainly consisted of helping students with APA format and finding references and helping with computers and the copier/printer. Oh, and putting call numbers on books and cataloging. A lot of that. I got two orders of books in this week. I'm trying to build a slightly more diverse collection than just textbooks. The director said the acid-base, fluids, electrolytes book I asked for was too complicated for the students. I had thought that the reviews made it sounds like a good bet but even so that is why I sent the list to her and the Director of Education asking them for approval! They're the nurse and doctor! Anyway, I'll tell her to send it back and choose one of the alternatives on that subject from the list of possibilities I compiled. I also need to find good English and computer texts.

I finished City of Tiny Lights. Eh. Conspiracy theories aren't really my thing. Nor the cynical reasoning behind the "twist" at the ending of the book. Tommy was active and interesting for the first half of the book and then got pretty ineffectual and downright stupid for the second. Of course he had been hit in the head. The book was all right. I'd read another of his.

Now I'm reading Carn by Patrick McCabe and why haven't I ever heard of this author before? This book is so poetic. I bought two of his books at the library sale for fifty cents. The story is set in the small town of Carn in Ireland during the 1960s. A returning native has used the business know-how he acquired in New York to turn the place prosperous. The story is partly about the changing place as it opens up to the world and the new era of Elvis, "longhairs", bikers, and cinema. The priest who used to terrify villagers is no longer in charge and commerce reigns. The main characters are a young woman who dreams of leaving Carn for London for rockers and mod styles, a woman who escaped the stifling clutch of the nun at the orphanage at 16 and has come back home from London now that she can no longer find work, and a young man who is just discovering that the world holds more than his one small town can contain. It's beautifully written.

I am also reading Chinese Letter by Svetislav Basara. It's a short novel where the protagonist, who is also ostensibly the author, comes across as incredibly emo and also quite insane. The "I wish I didn't exist" mantra would be eye-rollingly annoying if it wasn't balanced out by his paranoia.

City of Tiny Lights by Patrick Neate; Hidden Camera by Zoran Zivkovic

A Ugandan-Indian Englishman private eye investigating a case for a hooker. It's a decent enough book. Tommy Akhtar does nothing but drink, smoke, and ruminate about his past and the way of post-colonial Britain and in between that he looks into the case he was hired to solve. Then he gets involved in a case he wasn't hired to solve. That sort of thing happens a lot in these sort of books, along with the obligatory run-in with stereotypical obnoxious and stupid authority, and I have to wonder how these PIs finance their escapades. The plot is almost buried in reminiscences about Tommy's life and "how the world works" tangents and the British slang and cricket references leave me in the dark more often than not but it's not bad over all. There's more of a problem with the staccato nature of the prose and the "serious" tacked on to every fifth sentence. Also, for a book with a message running through it about how even "Paki's" (as he puts it) can be real people and something other than their stereotype and which makes fun of those people who judge others based on ethnicity/nationality, the fat-necked/overly tanned/macho "Yank" with bad fashion sense and an inability to "get" English humor comes over as hilarious. And kind of jarring actually.

Tommy has sent some dumb "thug-lite" kid with a chip on his shoulder to go undercover in an organization that brainwashes just that sort of idiot. I'm sure this will end well. Tommy is an interesting character but after he solves the case he was initially paid for he really does very little.

It's a good read, but I wonder how many of my recommendations would still be nice if I was buying books rather than getting them at the library.

This next book I did buy but cheap. Amazon Marketplace is my go-to for all books not in the library. That's where I got Hidden Camera by Zoran Zivkovic. A Czech author, this book is about a middle-aged undertaker who finds himself being led a merry chase in what he believes is a hidden camera show. He gets an invitation to a film, only when he arrives there is only one other person in the audience, a woman who's face stays hidden, and the film shows him eating his lunch. In the dark after the show ends he receives another invitation, this time to a bookstore. He decides to outwit his unseen antagonists by not being freaked out or making a fool of himself for their show. He fails if only because he's trying too hard and he's so caught up with being well-mannered that he's too rigid to easily adapt to new situations. The unnamed protagonist ends up moving from one strange situation to the next in the hopes of getting the better of the plot's organizers and of seeing the face of the mysterious woman. The ending was odd. I think I need to consider it a bit more because the whole thing seems to have something to do with life before birth/after death and nothing is ever explained. There's no dialogue either, basically. Only a short conversation with an obstetrician and a few lines exchanged with the extras in the "show".

And I'm back; First Drop by Zoe Sharp

Well, that was remiss of me. I should have written sooner.

Work has been interesting. The students and faculty are checking out books and asking for help with research so I guess things are headed in the right direction. I've created an access database to keep better records of the resources and Populi has upgraded their ILS feature which has made my life a little easier. I can delete resources and change cover pictures now! Very exciting stuff. My boss would be harder to deal with if we worked in the same building but fortunately we don't. She's a driven woman and I believe she's a nice enough person but her idea of management is to criticize every time she sees you. I think it's her way of letting you know she's watching. This would be very depressing if I wasn't getting a lot of positive feedback from everyone else.

My project of "put call numbers on book spines" is going nicely. The only thing I'm really having a little difficulty with is getting more support from the faculty. There are a few full-time staff that are really including me in the academics but without an order from above the rest of them have no incentive to incorporate what I can offer into their lesson plans. I've sent out emails and posted on the Populi news feed but I don't think a lot of people are paying attention. I'll work on it.

Now on to First Drop. Much like the movie Shutter Island seemed to last six hours, First Drop seemed to last about five years. This was not a good book. Now I don't say this because it was badly written or plotted. I say this because Sharp's characters are some of the most obnoxious, flat, and self-absorbed I've ever read. Charlie Fox has her first job as a bodyguard watching out for a fifteen year old Floridian boy named Trey. She got the job from her boyfriend/boss , Sean, the only character who isn't completely unlikable but this may be because he has no personality and is hardly in the book at all. Anyway, Charlie has come over from England for her first American job. The author obviously did some research or took a vacation in Florida or something so that aspect wasn't too terrible. The dialogue though wasn't particularly good and that was rather distracting. All the teenagers sounded like fake Californian valley girls and Ms. Sharp doesn't seem to realize that certain grammatical rules apply even to speech filled with "like" and "totally". The retired CIA agent Walt and his nephew were constantly calling Charlie "missy" and "little lady" which was just inappropriate under the circumstances and just in general most of the dialogue was filled with colloquial American English that would be right in certain cases but that she didn't know how to use properly. There were a few things that were obviously British in-jokes, like having a character named "Randy" and having the teenagers not understand sarcasm (or as she called it, "irony". Here's an interesting post on the difference between the way the two countries look at this topic http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2009/05/sarcasm-and-irony.html) Teenagers are generally the masters of this form of communication. The other thing that stuck out was the plot point wherein Charlie and Trey are on the beach and oh no! they are in trouble because the police are checking everybody's IDs (due to a murder committed nearly 200 miles away) and once the police get to them they'll be finished! They've got to get away! And I'm like, wait, what gives the police the right to randomly demand all beach-goers to present their IDs? Oh, and apparently Ms. Fox and Trey rode the 240 miles from Fort Lauderdale to Daytona on a motorcycle. And not on I-95 which would make sense but on a state road which would lengthen their journey to about 6 hours. They must've needed an alarm clock and smelling salts just to wake their backsides up enough to not fall flat on their faces as soon as they dismounted.

As for Charlie herself. She was utterly unprofessional: She expected the adolescent she was supposed to protect to do her job for her. He's her charge and she should expect nothing from him. She's utterly without the ability to empathize or put herself in another's shoes: When Trey gets upset and storms off during a conversation where it becomes clear that his father may have hired people to kill him she huffs and thinks to herself that she doesn't have time to deal with "a stroppy teenager". She's incompetent: When things started getting dangerous, instead of dragging a fifteen year old around with her while she tries to clear her name she should have driven to another state, dropped him off at a police station and then made her way to the British embassy. Trey would have been protected, fewer people would have died, and things would generally have been less of a mess. She's completely self-absorbed: When Trey, who has understandable trust issues, questions her commitment to protecting him after she uses him as a human meat shield, she gets angry that he would question her ability to do her job.

Charlie Fox is basically a horrible human being. When she gets upset at Trey's inability to deal with all the mayhem she tells him that people died because of him and that she herself killed a man for his sake. That is not cool. She argues the semantics of sex with him and angrily blurts out her gang-rape in the hopes that further traumatizing him might make him think twice before participating in one himself (I have no idea why she thought he might to begin with.) Her feelings are the only ones she allows to be valid. She's always in the right. She's a bad ass fighter who gains fanboys and can pass for a teenager. She's basically a really weird self-insert character.

Anyway, the majority of the characters were horrible people, the main character being the worst. I also have to remark on the female characters. There are only three other females in the book among the multitude of guys. One is a matronly female who makes pancakes. She's of no consequence. The other is a teenager who acts as support to Charlie; buying her supplies, smoothing the mood, and doing a little fangirling. The other is a hard nosed cowardly bitch who acts (badly) as a red herring and is summarily shot. Charlie is not allowed competition.

Okay, I just need to get that off my chest. I don't know why I bothered finishing the book. It was teeth grinding-ly bad. It was so bad I don't think I could make a semi-humorous post about it though I might like to try.

I'm re-charging with other books. I read Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, an alternative interpretation of the series. I don't quite like the way he portrayed Watson but for a Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper book (something that's been done to death by now) it's quite good.

In a shocking turn of events somebody wants to employ me

So I've been offered the librarian job. The terms will be sent to me next week for my approval and I'm totally terrified. I'm a beta person at heart and while perfectly capable of assuming an alpha role I'd rather not do it my first professional job. However, the project is exciting and much closer to home. I need to come up with a budget and talk to other librarians, find someone to mentor me.

I'm reading Body Count by P.D. Martin, an entirely forgettable detective story featuring an Australian woman working for the FBI in Washington, DC. She has psychic visions and she and her friend Sam and her new FBI boyfriend Josh are trying to find the DC Slasher. The writing is competent, the author did her research on criminal profiling and forensics, the plot generally moves forward, and the characters are at least somewhat engaging. She lays everything to do with the subject of profiling out as it comes up in informative paragraphs without being distracting. There is nothing very challenging or inventive (she does all right on the killer though). This is light reading at its best (as far as rape, torture, and killing go anyway). Also, I totally know who the killer is. The clues are not particularly subtle, unless they're a misdirect. If I'm wrong I'll be pleasantly surprised. If I'm right I'll be smug.

I'm also reading I, Claudius by Robert Graves. I love history and he has created an engaging character to bring this story of Augustus, Livia and their pawns, family, pawns to life. Livia is a manipulative, cunning, mean-spirited, ambitious woman and Augustus is her perfect puppet. I've tried to create a crib sheet to keep track of the Claudian and Julian families but the lines are all over the place. Graves does a pretty good job of keeping everyone and their story lines separate though. Each chapter sets out sets out an intrigue or theme based around Claudius and his kin so that it occasionally jumps backward and forward in time a little so that other family members stories can catch up. I'm going to take my time with this one.

I watched Naked Lunch. Ohhh well. What to say. It is obviously not the book. That's not really possible; the characters would blend one into the other and half the screen time would be nothing but guys have sex. I mean, a lot of people would watch it of course but then it wouldn't have Ian Holm in it and I think we can mainly agree that that would be a shame.

It combines the Interzone country (a fictional place nowhere they've set in Northern Africa filled with drug cabals, agents, and bugs posing as typewriters (that last part wasn't in the book)) with parts of Burroughs' own life, such as the accidental shooting of his wife and the writing of Naked Lunch. His hallucinations seem to mesh well with reality anyway, allowing him to wander through his time in Interzone acting as an agent writing reports and his book. He also gives monologues consisting of passages from the novel. He gains a pretty boy lover named KiKi and there are even more bugs and parrots and the 'black meat'. Then it possibly starts all over again but I'm not sure.

Honestly I think this movie is for people who've read the book and know something about the author. Though if it makes even less sense maybe it's more intriguing? It was good. I'm rambling and tired.

I bought liquorice altoids today.

I have no idea who this man is but my grandmother must have known and liked him well enough to keep photos of him for sixty plus years.

Okay, now I want to talk about The Redbreast seriously because it consumed me for a week and I need to get it off my chest.

It's not a bad book. It's a perfectly decent thriller with lots of interconnecting parts and interesting history. I learned a side of WWII that I didn't know about. We didn't learn much about Norway's role in the war in school beyond the fact that it was occupied and the government and royal family fled to England. The whole background about the resistance movement and those who fought for the Germans and the trials and executions afterwards was fascinating. The book has this going for it. It should could have been a lot shorter but I acknowledge my lack of an attention span may play into that particular complaint, on this and other works of fiction. The characters are poorly developed and there isn't much in the way of setting description. That's probably my own preferences coming into play.

However.

The main character's leaps of logic and intuition are informed by authorial omniscience and the foreshadowing is as subtle as a brick. Characters who are supposed to be smart turn as dumb as a box of rocks so the author doesn't have to try very hard to bring certain events around. The Prince, a man who supplies guns to neo-nazis and is supposed to be competent and capable, uses the same phone for orders as he does for his girlfriends. And he leaves it turned on, sitting around. This is basic. If you're involved in illegal activities keep it separate from your personal life. The character that discovers what he's up to, after acknowledging that her life is in danger, leaves the safety of her home to walk to her boyfriend's apartment, picking up cigarettes along the way and then takes a deserted shortcut. This is dumb. To go for that extra cliche, she calls the main character before taking her leisurely stroll only to get his answering machine and instead of saying what she found, only leaves a cryptic message to the effect that she found something important.

While a lot made me roll my eyes there was one thing that greatly bothered me. Every woman in the book that had any impact on the story became a victim. Two were blackmailed into sex and the other two were murdered. This would be less disturbing if there was at least one female character that related to the plot in some way that was not reduced to victim status.

As I said, the book is interesting and I would read more of this author's work if his books weren't all around 500 pages long.

Now I'm reading Night Train by Martin Amis because...I'm not sure. He's supposed to be a good author and I wanted a quick read so I chose the shortest book by him on the shelf. Well, it's apparently his attempt at an American detective story with a modernist twist. I read the first paragraph (which reads like something aimed at 12 year olds) and decided to read the rest as though it's comedy. And it is funny. His American, female cop voice is horrible. The narrative is first person and it's so bad that it is hard to believe this wasn't written as a parody. His main character is the stereotypical American as imagined by a European who's only source of information is bad cop shows. There is moronic philosophical inner monologues on the nature of crime and gender roles, misuse of Yiddish words, weird grammatical constructions, misused speech patterns, and a heavy layer of the word 'fuck'. No matter what the relationship, job, or professional level of attainment, everyone curses a blue streak and uses the word 'ain't'. So this is going to be entertaining.