First published in 1990, this book consists of short stories that build up a picture of a ground soldier's experience in Vietnam and after returning home. O'Brien, a Vietnam veteran himself, speaks from experience.

The first story is almost unbearably good. O'Brien uses descriptions of the tangible things carried by a soldier to illuminate the intangible things that weigh them down. The specific weight of each item—the 26-pound radio, the 5-pound helmets, the 6.7-pound jacket, the 23-pound M-60—hits the reader like a hammer. I felt my own shoulders bowing. And then there are the good-luck charms—a letter, a photograph, a pebble—that sustain them.

As a stand-alone story, this piece has deservedly won many awards. The remaining stories expand upon this one, focusing on a single story and exploring how his destiny plays out. Some of the stories are the narrator's own present-day musings.

At first I feared that these stories were mere padding, designed to create an additional product (a full-length book) out of a successful story. But the tales that seemed complete in their first telling actually do bear further examination. O'Brien comes back again and again to certain incidents and each time they yield something further, just as rereading certain books, I've found, always provides new insights no matter how often I go back to them.

I also appreciated when, late in the book, O'Brien turns to the marshy area between truth and fiction. Just as I began to wonder if this book shouldn't be classified as a memoir, the author steps back and parses what's true from what's invented in the previous story. Sometimes, he explains, only fiction can get to the emotional truth of an experience.

I agree. I wish everyone would read this book and pause before plunging us into a war to weigh the true consequences.

Geraldine Brooks comes up with great ideas for her books. Year of Wonders is set in a small village cut off from the world by the plague. March follows the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women as he joins the army during the Civil War. One of my book clubs read the first and found it disappointing in spite of its intriguing premise; they declined to read the second when it was suggested. Our disappointment may have been in part a result of the tremendous hype around Year of Wonders. Most of us expected something pretty spectacular, so what seemed pedestrian might have struck us as rather good if we hadn't known anything about the book.

I had thought I would not read another of Brooks's books, but then I heard her speak last year about the genesis of this, her newest book. It sounded marvelous: based on the true story of the Sarajevo Haggadah, perhaps the greatest treasure in that beleaguered city. A holy book used in the celebration of Passover, this particular Haggadah dates from the 15th century. Most unusual are its illustrations which depict the figures of people from the holy stories, such as Adam and Eve, this during a time when it is thought that Jewish artists, like Muslims, believed that creating images of people was forbidden.

What drew Brooks to the story was that during the 1996 bombardment of Sarajevo, the book was rescued—under fire—by a Muslim librarian. Nor was he the only person of another faith to save the book at risk of his own life. An inscription in the book shows that a Catholic priest during the Inquisition had approved the book as containing no blasphemy, though it clearly did, and by doing so saved it from burning. Thus the book symbolises the multi-ethnic harmony and cooperation that Sarajevo had been known for and which made the city's fate during the Serbo-Croatian war all the more heartbreaking.

The title is the Muslim term Ahl al-Kitab, which describes non-Muslims whose faith includes a book of prayer. The Qur'an specifically mentions Judaism and Christianity, though other faiths have been added to the list as well. Those designated as people of the book are, according to Islamic law, inferior to Muslims but superior to other non-Muslims, and thus candidates for tolerant treatment.

As Brooks further investigated the art of book conservation, she learned that breaking apart the folios in order to restore the cover often brought to light small bits of things caught in the folds, and that these could be used to discover more about the book's history. She uses fictional items from the Haggadah's binding to anchor her imagined stories about the book's past, while using an overarching narrative about Hanna Heath, a young Australian who is brought to Sarajevo to restore the book's cover in 1996, when the city is still so unstable that she must be escorted by armed guards.

A great premise, excellent plotting, marvelous settings ranging from Venice to Seville: I thought this was going to be one terrific book. And it is good. Brooks's prose is very readable, and the pages flew by for me. Her obviously extensive research is fairly well integrated into the story. The historical narratives are credible and engaging, more so than Hanna's story.

What kept the book from being a “wow” read for me was that, although the characters seemed real enough to me as I read, they did not touch me. The one exception was a scene when the librarian in Sarajevo lambastes the U.S. and other western nations for ignoring the city's plight. Strong emotions honestly expressed: finally I was moved.

As readers, I believe we can tell when a writer has plunged wholeheartedly into the emotional life of his or her characters. As a writer, I find this difficult to do. So I celebrate Brooks's achievement as a good read and a thought-provoking one.

These books were just what I wanted after a stressful week: familiar characters, a much-loved place, and a mildly challenging story. Some of the mysteries I love have a powerful emotional effect; others exercise my mind with their complicated puzzles. But sometimes I only want a comfortable read.

These mysteries feature J. W. Jackson, former Boston policeman turned fisherman. Marriage to Zee motivated him to convert the fishing shack where he lived into a real home for her and their children. So he is justifiably incensed when, in the first of these books, a real estate developer from the South threatens to take it away from him. After only a few pages, I realised I'd read A Vineyard Killing before, but went ahead and read it again anyway. Donald Fox is using predatory tactics to cheat long-time Martha's Vineyard residents out of their land. When someone fires on Donald and his brother, J.W. gets involved.

J.W. is a joy to hang around with. Easy-going but unafraid to stand up for what he thinks is right, he carves his own path. I love his sometimes acerbic observations of life on the island and the various layers of its inhabitants.

In the second book, J.W. looks into two murders among the wealthiest stratum of Vineyard society. In his casual way, J.W. distinguishes between the old rich who tend their farms in worn clothes and the new rich who throw up the most ostentatious mansions they can get away with. One of these partially-constructed mansions has been vandalised and then the security guard hired in response by the owner tumbles over a cliff. To solve these crimes, J.W. has to break open the secret lives the islands most privileged residents.

Craig's descriptions of Martha's Vineyard and the lives of its permanent residents make me feel as though I too live there, as though I know the island far better than I do. I love the descriptions of fishing trips, drives around the island pursuing clues and suspects, and all the small chores J.W. undertakes at home, such as fixing dinner for his family. Each book has a few recipes in the back. They are nothing fancy, but “All delicious”.

Zafón's first book The Shadow of the Wind entranced me from the very first page. I was mesmerized by his imaginative descriptions of post-World War II Barcelona and the story of the boy, Daniel, who sets out to find books by an author whose book, also titled The Shadow of the Wind, has taken possession of him. However, it seems that someone is systematically finding and destroying all copies of books by this author. Utterly charmed by the imaginary place described in the opening pages, I probably would have forgiven the author anything after that. Reading that first page was like falling in love.

Often editors and agents say they only need to read one page of a novel to know if it is worth continuing, a claim that aroused my skepticism until I attended a workshop at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto. The workshop was run by, if I remember correctly, a professor from the Humber School and one of the IFOA authors. All of us were given a packet containing the first page from each of our novels, and together we read each one and decided if we wanted to read on or not.

To my surprise, I found myself giving a thumbs-up or -down without any hesitation. One page was enough to decide. Mulling over this experience, I recalled the few, precious times when I have fallen in love with a book after the first page. Sometimes it is just the gorgeous writing that makes me stop and read more slowly to savor the prose. Cold Mountain and Deborah Crombie's Dreaming of the Bones come to mind. Sometimes it's the humor, as in Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum. And just as one may, instead of falling in love at first sight, find love developing unexpectedly over time, there are stories that have grown on me, such as Out Stealing Horses and Stoner.

However, this second book from Zafón, so eagerly anticipated, disappointed me. I found the story hard to follow. Rambling, surreal, and disconnected, this prequel to the first book tells the story of young David Martin who wants to be a writer. A retelling of Great Expectations, the author pounds the point home by having a friendly bookseller give young David a copy and then reminding us by bringing up the Dickens book again at intervals throughout the story. David is helped by his older, wealthier friend, Pedro, first to a newspaper job and then to a contract with a publisher of pulp novels. He moves into a long-abandoned tower, a Gothic monstrosity where he's wanted to live ever since he was a child, and buckles down to his writing, trying to meet the absurd deadlines demanded by his publisher. Then a mysterious French publisher with the Italian name of Corelli approaches him with an offer that seems too good to be true.

The descriptions of Barcelona's fantastic streets and graveyards are wonderful, but the twists and turns of the story struck me as contrived. They appeared to be deliberate complications padding the book instead of growing organically from the characters themselves. The first half of the book seemed more internally consistent and interesting, while the second half, with murders piling up and the supernatural elements taking over, became a jumble of increasingly violent and bizarre scenes. Also, David is not an attractive narrator, full of the passions of youth, but also youth's self-centered cruelty.

My discontent makes me wonder if I really liked that first book. Perhaps I simply fell in love with the title and that opening image. Second books are often disappointing, perhaps because they are pushed into print without the long gestation of that first book, lovingly revised over and over during the long years of seeking a publisher. But it is equally possible that I am the one who has changed, and this book is not so different from the first. Certainly coming into this book my expectations were much greater.

In 1865, a train carrying Charles Dickens, his young inamorata, and her mother suffered a serious accident near Staplehurst involving a broken viaduct. Many passengers were killed and many more injured. As he tries to help the survivors, Dickens becomes aware of a gaunt, black-clad man also ministering to the survivors.

From this first meeting, Dickens is obsessed with the mysterious Drood who seems to possess supernatural powers. Wilkie Collins, the narrator of this book who notes with regret that people always call him Wilkie and never Collins, begins to worry that the balance of his friend's mind has been affected. The two are not just friends, but also collaborators and rivals. No matter what kudos Wilkie receives, he can never seem to surpass Dickens, who calls himself the Inimitable. Dickens receives all the credit for their joint work and remains unperturbed by Wilkie's The Moonstone outselling Dickens's own books.

Admittedly, horror stories and tales of the supernatural are not my cup of tea, but I found the Drood storyline boring and unconvincing. Perhaps it is Drood's over-the-top facial disfigurement—so grotesque that Drood has to wear a veil over his face to walk among people—that caused my suspension of disbelief to collapse. The truly terrifying monsters are those who smile at you from a perfectly pleasant face, like the high school principal in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Another alternative might have been never to reveal the carved-up face that lies behind Drood's veil, as in the Hawthorne story. But to lay it all out immediately in monstrous detail and then add the revolting descriptions of Drood's underground realm, well, it was too much for me to swallow, even knowing Wilkie Collins's reputation for sensationalism.

Although the Drood storyline is meant to be central to the book, it is actually not necessary. A fine and far more interesting book could have simply focused on the relationship between the two writers: by far the best part of the book, in my opinion. I also very much liked the period details and atmosphere, and admired the author's research. However, too often I felt that incidents and descriptions peripheral to the story were jammed in because the author wanted to include everything he'd learned.

Quite simply, the book is too long. At nearly 800 pages, it is not only uncomfortable to hold but wearies the reader (this one, anyway) with much repetition. There are many descriptions of the normal dinners of the time, each easily five times as much food as we expect, even with today's inflated portions. There are many descriptions, too, of Wilkie's opium habit, his cravings, the quantities he ingests, the resulting tortured dreams. These are but two examples.

I came away feeling that the author was being self-indulgent. Yes, cutting is hard, but necessary. It's also true that books of the era in which this book is set were often quite long but they were published in installments (serialised in magazines) or in multiple volumes. This huge lump of text is hard to digest. Simmons does a masterful job of varying the pace, maintaining the momentum, and keeping the story interesting, but it would have been a much better book at half its length.

I looked forward to this book, having read two Wilkie Collins masterpieces in recent years, as well as The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher about the detective who is in this book called Inspector Field. The writing is too good for me to be disappointed, but I was certainly ready for the book to be over long before the end. I'm not put off by long books—I even reread War and Peace earlier this year—but felt this one could have been tighter.

I like mysteries and I like short stories, yet I've been disappointed in the dozen or so mystery short stories I've read. Their fine plotting, characterization and setting draw me in, but their abrupt endings always take me by surprise, without the twists and false trails and doublings-back that I expect from a mystery. The fault was clearly with me and not with the stories themselves, so I decided to adjust my expectations by reading this collection of 26 mystery short stories.

I further handicapped myself by choosing historical mysteries, which I tend to be wary of. Writing stories set in the distant past requires considerable research and scholarship in order to include period-appropriate details and avoid anachronisms.

However, I'm pleased to report that the stories in this collection are very good and have persuaded me to become a fan of mystery short stories. All of the authors represented here are adept at sketching a character with very few words and drawing the reader into the story quickly, often through our sympathy with the main character. The cast of characters in each is necessarily limited, so sometimes the solution is not so much who did it, but how or why.

Another of my quirks is that I dislike stories that use real people as characters. It seems like a failure of imagination to me, a case of the author taking a shortcut by using some historical personage instead of dreaming up his or her own characters. It also seems to me unfair to the people themselves, making up tales about them when they are no longer around to defend themselves, as Milan Kundera argues so eloquenty in Immortality. Unfortunately, several of these stories fall into this trap, featuring Heroditus, Hildegarde of Bingen, Chaucer, and Ben Franklin.

However, reading a very good story featuring Leonardo Fibonacci, the great mathematician, made me reconsider. Perhaps including such relatively unknown figures may encourage readers to learn more about the real person and thus help keep their names alive, just as—I confess—reading Classics Illustrated comics as a child predisposed me to enjoy these books when I came to read the originals.

Perhaps this is as good a time as any to confront more of my entrenched likes and dislikes, before I harden completely into an old curmudgeon. I will certainly be looking for other books by the authors I've enjoyed here.

One of the exercises in The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron is to go for a week without reading. Impossible! I thought the first time I tried it. Yet I have found value in periodically emptying my mind of other people's words.

I listen to the frogs at night and the birds in the morning. I check out the trees that have fallen or died since last year. I see that new moss has grown over parts of the path, and the ladies' slippers are blooming. I count the goslings being taught the trail between the ponds by their proud parents. Because the ponds are very high this year, the logs that make a crude bulkhead are under water, accelerating their decay. I cannot put any weight on them.

Some things are unchanged: the ruddy sky reflected on the water, the rustle of pine needles in the wind, the tapping of rain on the roof. I sweep spiderwebs from the corners and mouse droppings from behind the books.

Shakespeare wrote of “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,/Sermons in stones, and good in everything.” There are stories enough here for me. This week, anyway.

I’ve read and enjoyed several of Taylor’s mysteries. I mostly enjoyed this one too, though I did encounter a problem for which I don’t have a solution.

Set in London in 1934, the book conjures up not so much the Jazz Age as the seedy miasma of Dickens’s stories. In the opening scene, Lydia Langstone abandons her upper-class life after a brutal encounter with her husband, taking little with her besides a copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of Her Own and some jewelry that she had inherited.

The plot centers around Bleeding Heart Square, off a dank and ill-lit alley, where Lydia has taken refuge with her the father she has never known, in a house run by the mysterious and sinister Mr. Serridge. The house had been owned by a middle-aged spinster, Miss Penhow, excerpts of whose diary preface each chapter. Also haunting the square are a plainclothes policeman who is on a mission, a seamstress who knows more than she’s saying, a beadle at the Catholic church who stands too close to Lydia, and Rory Wentwood who is engaged to Miss Penhow’s niece, Fenella.

With our attention focused on the fate of the missing Miss Penhow, Taylor slips in a number of subplots, including one about the competing claims of the early Communist Party and the British Union of Fascists. The book is beautifully structured, moving between different characters and their stories, but always coming back to the square and Miss Penhow’s diary. Knowing that the plot is based on a real murder that the author heard about as a child adds an extra frisson of appeal.

My problem came with some of the characters, who did not behave as I expected them to. Of course, multi-dimensional characters are a good thing; nothing can kill a story faster than a character who is just a cliche. However, the behavior of some of the characters just didn’t seem to fit, making my suspension of disbelief begin to slip. For example, Lydia’s husband—rich, powerful, possessive, jealous, self-centered—does not try to force her back to his home, or have her committed as insane, or any of the other ways men controlled their wives in that time. He just leaves her in her father’s squalid flat. To mention other examples would be to give away too much of the plot, but these characters took me out of the story as I wondered why they felt so wrong. Of course, I could just be missing some obvious pointers that would have explained their behavior.

Dealing with a reader’s expectations about a character is a problem I’ve encountered in my own writing and one for which I don’t have a solution. It seems as though one ought to be able to lay enough clues for the reader to forestall those expectations, but I’m not quite sure how to do that. I’ll have to go back over what I’ve read and find a good example to study. Perhaps Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. He manages to make stock characters both unusual and utterly believable.

Overall, the book is still a good read and has given me a some things to ponder.

“March violets” is a derogatory term for those Germans who, after Hitler’s ascension to power, suddenly became ardent supporters of National Socialism. This detective novel, the first in Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy, takes place in 1936 as the city prepares to host the Olympics by hiding the more egregious evidence of policies attacking Jews and others considered undesirable.

Ex-policeman Bernie Gunther has set up as a private investigator. In the best noir tradition, he works alone from a small office and regards the moral poverty of his clients and the government with cynical amusement. Many of his cases involve searching for missing persons, usually Jews, whose families are desperate for news of them. Bernie is not a Nazi but is careful of what he says and does, observing the necessary forms: the salutes, the chants of “Heil, Hitler”.

Hired by a wealthy industrialist whose daughter and son-in-law have been murdered, Bernie’s assignment is to recover a valuable diamond necklace that was stolen from a safe in the couple’s bedroom. His investigation leads him into cabarets, police interrogation rooms, the clutches of a couple of femmes fatale, and a seat at the Olympics to watch Jesse Owens compete. He finds a conspiracy that seems to involve low-level criminals, officials like Goering and Himmler, and possibly even his own client.

I’m grateful to my friend Steve for recommending this author. Admittedly, I was skeptical of how the historical context would play out and, as Steve warned, it is a little odd to have these monsters of history wandering in and out of the story. The description of the atmosphere of pre-war Berlin and the political nuances of the insidious spread of Nazism are among the best things in the book.

My only quibble comes towards the end. In one too many plot twists, Bernie is briefly sent to Dachau. As a privileged prisoner, he observes the suffering of others and, when he can, tries to alleviate it. The scenes in the concentration camp are passed over quickly—descriptive and moving, yes, but not given the attention such a significant situation demands.

The concept of emotional weight was brought home to me a few years ago. I’d written a number of short stories about single mothers, skipping quickly over the reason for the absent husband/father. Yet every critique group honed in on that brief dismissal as a flaw, wanting to know more about the divorce or death or desertion. I was dismayed because this backstory was not relevant to the story I wanted to tell. I began to suspect that the only stories we were allowed to tell about women were love stories.

However, I finally understood that it was the emotional weight of these events that was pulling my stories askew. Death and divorce are huge life changes and not something to be dismissed in a sentence. By mentioning them, I was inviting the reader to participate in them emotionally. As one workshop leader said, “Do not set up a door for the reader unless you are going to open it.”

In Kerr’s book, the emotional weight of the concentration camp distorts the rest of the story. As a reader, I could not be satisfied with a few brief scenes of camp life before being returned to the streets of Berlin and the “larger” puzzle. It felt wrong to me. Kerr might have done better not to go there at all. Still, March Violets is the first of the series, so much can be forgiven. The noir aspects work surprisingly well; the characters are strong; and the plot (other than my one quibble) excitingly torturous. I will certainly try some of his other books. 

My father used to say that when he died, we should just cram his body into a garbage bag and put it out with the trash. As a doctor, he knew about all the goopy things that our pretty skins hide. He was accustomed to the idea that after death our bodies retain nothing of the animating spirit that once looked out of our eyes, and believed that dead bodies should be discarded without sentimental references to the person they once held.

We don’t like to think about death. Hard as it is to believe in our own death, it is even harder to envision what is happening to our deceased loved ones’ bodies, the way they are putrefying and disintegrating in the ground, just like the burst-open deer by the roadside or the blackened potatoes in the bin. If you don’t believe in heaven and hell, or paradise, or reincarnation, then all you have is this life. This brief, unrehearsed life.

In this short novel Crace makes us look at death. Coolly and unsentimentally, he opens with the bodies of two middle-aged zoologists, murdered in the dunes of a remote beach, and describes the effects of sun and rain, beetles and flies. Braided into this dispassionate report are several other stories. One starts from the murder and retraces the couple’s steps backwards through the hours of that fatal day. Another tells the story of how Joseph and Celice first met, at that same beach, and how they first came together, cradled by those same dunes. Yet another story goes forward in time, as their estranged daughter is alerted that they are missing and begins to search for them.

I should have hated this. I am usually irritated by stories that jump around in time or person, much less both together. It is a tribute to Crace’s writing that these shifts never disturb the flow of his story; each seems like the most natural progression in the world. With each shift, he quickly locates us in the appropriate story, sometimes with a person’s name, sometimes by actually providing a heading with the date and time. In the description of the book on Crace’s website, it’s mentioned that these stories moving forwards and backwards in time mimic the movement of tides, which I think may contribute to their easy transitions. Also, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, the shifts came just as I was ready to move on. The descriptions of the bodies, while scientific, are beautiful in their own way; they are almost poetic, not just by the close attention to detail but by the quality of the language. Yet there’s only so long that I want to read about ants and maggots. Also, as quirky and interesting as the two zoologists and their daughter are, I found it hard to care about them. Moving between storylines kept me from getting impatient with the characters.

The writing is brilliant, as I’ve said. Even without caring about Joseph and Celice, I found their story powerful, especially what they found to love in each other and the adjustments they made to accommodate each other during their long marriage. At the moment of his death, Joseph reaches out and takes hold of Celice’s ankle. That tenuous and tender connection, which remains throughout the book, reminded me of something I saw in a private chapel at Lullingstone Castle in Kent: statues of a man and a woman, lying on their separate tombs, yet in the space between, their hands joined. Later, reading Philip Larkin’s poem “An Arundel Tomb”, I wondered if this was perhaps a more common funerary motif than I’d thought. Looking at Crace’s website, I see that John Banville, in his review of the book, also was reminded of Larkin’s poem. It’s absurd that such a small gesture should be so moving, yet I was moved.

I was reminded too of Kevin Brockmeier’s novel A Brief History of the Dead which I blogged about a few years ago. The story takes place in the land of the dead, a kind of purgatory, where people remain until the last person who knew them or remembered them dies, suggesting that our immortality consists of the memories we leave behind. Crace’s book does not offer the idea of purgatory or any kind of afterlife to take the sting out of death, but by recounting the story of Joseph and Celice’s life together, he gives their going a kind of grace.

When my father went, we did not put him out with the trash. We held a memorial service where my brother recounted family stories while wearing a cap emblazoned with “See Rock City”. Then we buried my father next to his parents. Such rituals may be a sham—and a waste of good compost—but they were a comfort to my mother. Then again, we grown children disrupted the interment with a snowball fight, so all was not lost.