What a fascinating book! Summerscale relates the events leading up to and following a true crime, the murder of a child in Road Hill House in June of 1860. The Road Hill murder captured the public's imagination, as did Jon-Benet Ramsey's murder more recently. During the decade previous to the Road Hill murder, the number of newspapers had multiplied at an astonishing rate, going from 700 in 1855 to 1,100 in 1860. Domestic killings had become popular fodder—even then, apparently, “if it bleeds, it leads”—and the Road Hill murder, with its twists and turns, took over the headlines.

One of the best things about this book is the way it puts the details of the case into the cultural context of Victorian English society. For example, it was only in the 19th century that the home of the nuclear family became a “sacred space”, a secure refuge that should not be violated by public scrutiny or by government aggression. Every home a castle, in other words. One newspaper of the time even compared this tradition to a castle’s moat. I wonder if this cultural change could be related to the concurrent proliferation of newspapers with their daily fare of sex and violence.

Among others, Charles Dickens was fascinated by the case. He believed, as did the local police and a majority of the public, that Samuel Kent, the father, and Elizabeth Gough, the nursemaid, were responsible. The popular scenario held that three-year-old Saville must have woken in the night to see the two engaged in, er, inappropriate behavior, and was killed to keep him from telling anyone.

Summerscale enables us to follow the case along with the police and public. She gives us the clues, the interviews, the photographs of the major players, extracts of newspaper articles. She includes drawings of the layout of the house and yard, just as the papers of the day did, exposing that private space and the family’s private actions to public view. We learn about the history of the Kents, that the second Mrs. Kent, Saville’s mother, had been governess to her four stepchildren during Mr. Kent’s first marriage, to a woman said to be insane. Jane Eyre had been published 13 years earlier, in 1847.

The man named to investigate the murder was Jack Whicher, one of the eight men selected for the first detective unit to be set up in England. These men, making up their methods as they went along, thrilled the public with their exploits and became the models for Wilkie Collins's Sgt. Cuff in The Moonstone and Dickens’s Inspector Bucket in Bleak House. Whicher himself was well-known as a quiet, shrewd, and successful detective. He later played a significant role in the case of the Tichborne Claimant.

Assigned to the case over two weeks after the murder, Whicher found himself at odds with the local police. Not only did they refuse to cooperate with the London detective, but during the intervening weeks, they had lost important clues and allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by the Kent family. For example, on the night after the murder’s discovery, the policemen assigned to stay in Road Hill House and prevent the family from tampering with clues spent the night locked in the kitchen by Mr. Kent, a fact they later tried to cover up.

Whicher’s investigation was also hampered by public pressure when he arrested someone other than the nursemaid, Gough, for the crime. Knowing who has committed a crime and proving it are two different things, of course, and this crime, like so many in our day, was tried not only in the courtroom but in the press and the pubs and the breakfast rooms. Summerscale’s book gives us a resolution of sorts, but doubts remain as to what really happened on that June night.

The Road Hill murder inspired many early English detective stories: The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, as well as The Turn of the Screw and Charlotte Yonge's The Trial. Only a few years earlier, in 1849, the first English detective story had appeared, so the genre was still in its infancy. I highly recommend this true story of the origins of the English detective story.

Every year I collect the songs I’ve been listening to over and over in a playlist. Here is this year’s:

Working Class Hero, John Lennon
Working Poor, David Francey
Workhouse Boy, Sweet Felons All
Pretty Polly, Orange Line Special
Long Black Veil, The Band
Hard Steel Mill, David Francey
A Thousand Miles, David Francey
Long Way Home, David Francey
Hills/Mulqueen's, Nightingale
Regain/Psalm of Life/Plant un Chou, Nightingale
The Waiting Game/Raze, Nightingale
La Belle Rose, Nightingale
Three Pieces By O'Carolan, John Renbourn
The Lady and the Unicorn, John Renbourn
William Taylor, John Roberts & Tony Barrand
Brigg Fair, John Roberts & Tony Barrand
The Maid of the Mill, Jinky Wells
The Pleasant Month Of May, Sam Larner
John Barleycorn, Tim Radford
The Painful Plough, Finest Kind
The Orphan/Through the Grapevine, Elvie Miller & Naomi Morse
Honeysuckle Cottage, Band Of Friends
Whiskey Before Dinner, Band Of Friends
Farewell to Whiskey, Rhythm Rollers
Precious Staggering Blues, Precious Bryant
A Song For Sheryl/David's Air/Rorate Coeli/I Long For Thy Virginitie, Waverley Station
Waiting For Jim, Waverley Station
Calum Sgaire, Alasdair Fraser
A New Beginning, Bare Necessities
The Star Of The County Down, Walt Michael & Company
John Of Dreams, Walt Michael & Company
Fanny Power, Walt Michael & Company
Ashokan Farewell, Walt Michael & Company
Botany Bay, Kate Rusby
Urge for Going, Tom Rush
Moon On The Water, Aengus Finnan
The Black Isle, Becky Tracy

The standard take on creative nonfiction, as promulgated by Lee Gutkind, et al., is that it is a factual narrative (that's the nonfiction part) told using creative writing techniques, a narrative that provides information about a subject while telling a story. This book provides lots of information about Florida's history, Florida's quirky inhabitants, the history of orchid collecting, and some of orchid experts. Where it falls down is that there is no story at the core of the book.

It starts out as a sketch of John Larouche, an odd character who goes from one obsession to another, a narcissist who in his orchid period persuaded two Seminole Native Americans to help him steal wild orchids from Fakahatchee Swamp. They were caught and, despite Larouche's argument that the Seminoles (and their employee) were exempt from laws protecting endangered species and public land, prosecuted.

The only other discernable narrative is the author's desire to see a particular species, a ghost orchid. She wades through swamps and talks to collectors and merchants alike, but always seems to arrive just before or just after her elusive prey has bloomed.

Neither story line is enough to sustain the book. There are too many tangents, chapters full of well-researched information that do not move either story forward. I admit that none of these subjects particularly interests me, but good writers are always able to jump start my curiosity. I just read—fascinated—a ten-page article about the recent history of Cyprus in the London Review of Books simply because Perry Anderson's prose sucked me in and wouldn't let me go.

That didn't happen here.

The book's flap promised that it would help me understand the passion that motivates people to collect things: orchids, whatever. I'd hoped this was true. I don't get collecting. I just don't get it. Sure, I'm as materialistic as the next person and there are sometimes things that I just have to have, whether it's a particular blue and green scarf or a book about Arts and Crafts gardens. But I don't have to have every kind of scarf in the world or every garden book. Not that there's anything wrong with that; it's just not something that I can imagine wanting.

My mother left me an assortment of her tchotchkes. I confess I don't know what to do with them. I can't just give them to the Salvation Army because they are “family” pieces: a teacup made from clay from the family farm, crystal salt dishes handed down from my great-grandmother. I don't want to dust them for the rest of my life, and certainly my kids aren't interested in them. But I can't bring myself to toss them. Someone, generations from now perhaps, may want to touch and hold something of their history. At the same time, they're just stuff. And stuff has always weighed me down. I like emptiness, empty space around me. I'd hoped this book would take me briefly into the mind and heart of someone who wants one of every kind of something, a collector, someone obsessive about things.

That didn't happen either.

The book seems to me like a character study, an essay (the author alludes to an earlier article she wrote on the subject) that someone thought could be expanded into a book. It's well-written. Orlean does a good job of presenting information in a palatable form, and her transitions between sections are very well done. But without a story, the book is hollow at the center. I found it boring.

On Friday night, tired and a little discouraged by the results of the week's work, I went to see this production by the Reisterstown Theatre Project. Inspecting Carol is a comedy about a small, cash-strapped theater company rehearsing for their annual production of A Christmas Carol. With only four days for rehearsal, some of the characters repeatedly admonish everyone to get down to business, while others run rogue by trying to rewrite the story or create distractions by arguing about costumes or leading vocal exercises.

I don't know when I last laughed so hard. Within the first couple of minutes, a sardonic look from the actor playing M.J. McMann, the stage manager, had me chuckling. As the ridiculosity escalated, any residual self-consciousness vanished and my guffaws turned to helpless shouts of laughter, leaving me bent weakly over my knees wiping away tears.

I'm generally not a big fan of comedy, as it seems to be practiced today. Disparaging, hurtful jokes make me sad, and most physical comedy just seems painful. Stories where you can see from a mile away that a character is setting himself/herself up for an embarrassing if not distressing situation bore me.

However, this production found my sweet spot. The actors' facial expressions were priceless. Pratfalls and other physical comedy bits were used sparingly and always as part of the story. There was a bit with one of the ghosts—I don't want to give anything away—that had me laughing so hard I could barely hear the lines. There was plenty of wordplay and just the right amount of repetition, enough for the line to become like a family's in-joke without edging over into a boring anecdote you've heard too many times. And best of all, there were long cons, humor set up throughout the play that culminated in a surprising payoff at the end.

Afterwards, I talked with Paul, who plays Kevin Trent Emery, the long-suffering business manager. Paul mentioned that when he first read the play, he didn't think it was funny. It was supposed to be a comedy, but nothing in the script seemed humorous. It wasn't until he heard the other actors speak their lines that he began to realise how hilarious the production could be. His comment made sense to me; the humor was less in the words themselves than in what the actors and director did with them.

As a writer, I'm very conscious of the fact that all I can do is throw the words out there and hope that gentle readers will interpret them, if not necessarily in the way I intended, at least in a way that is meaningful to them. I know only too well from my own reading that coming off a spectacular book can doom an okay one, just as a tired or cranky mood can keep even a great novel from catching my interest. Playwrights, on the other hand, have the advantage of an intermediary: actors who interpret their words for the audience. As a writer of prose, I have to find ways to bring those cues—sardonic looks, pratfalls, etc.—into the text. Similarly, without set and costume designers to create the visual space, I have to incorporate those descriptions without slowing the story down too much. I once heard Timothy Findley—one of my favorite authors—talk about how his early acting career had taught him about dramatic structure and pacing. I need to think more about what the theater has to teach prose writers.

I'm a big fan of Kate Atkinson's writing (I've blogged about Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Case Histories), so my expectations were high when I picked up this new novel.

Since the action described in Case Histories, Jackson Brodie has used his inheritance to retire from his job as a private detective and purchase an estate in France. As this novel starts, he and his sometime girlfriend, Julia, are in Edinburgh where she has a part in one of the festival offerings. As Jackson leaves Julia's venue, he witnesses a fender-bender that escalates into road rage. Murder is narrowly avoided by the reluctant action of a bystander who, shocked out of his native timidity, throws his briefcase at the giant wielding a baseball bat.

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I am not a fan of novels where the point of view jumps around. Here, chapters alternate between Jackson, Martin (the bystander), Paul (the victim in the accident), Gloria (another bystander, wife of builder who puts up acres of shoddy homes), Louise (a recently promoted Detective Inspector), Archie (Louise's teenaged son), Richard (a friend of a friend of Martin), and Sophia (a maid who cleans Martin's home). There's a crazy Russian woman too, but I don't think there's a chapter from her point of view. I could be wrong.

At least we stay with one point of view for the entire chapter (and it's always a close third person, not first person), but the end result is almost as confusing as that list suggests. What saves it is that the core of the story sticks with Jackson, Louise, Gloria, and Martin. And, of course, Atkinson's writing skill. Still, I found this novel hard going, especially the first few chapters when we get biographies of each of the main characters. I never did get them all sorted out, but had to keep going back to remind myself of which family background went with which character.

Just to be clear, a poor Atkinson novel is still pretty darn good. I liked the way Atkinson explores Brodie's feelings, as an ex-policeman, when he finds himself on the wrong side of the interview table. On the other hand, the truly horrible excerpts from Martin's cozy crime novels bothered me. Impossible to believe novels so poorly written could be as successful as the story claimed, and this broad satire made it hard to take the story's crimes as seriously as we are clearly meant to. The occasionally satirical tone also jarred against the description of Louise's agonising struggles as the single mother of a 14-year-old boy.

It's easy to find fault. I admire Atkinson for trying a different form and for writing what, despite its defects, is still a good read.

Another long drive, but I delayed starting on this audio book. Overcast as the day was, its October colors still thrilled me, orange and yellow leaves vying with the still-green grass, the dried-up cornfields. At first I listened to Kate Rusby and David Francey, but then turned off the music and listened to the shushing of tires on asphalt. I drove through countryside that rucked up close and then fell away, past farms tucked into dales and towns dwarfed by the high sweep of the valleys they hid in. As the mountains closed in around me, I felt comforted, though for what I do not know.

Sometimes I feel that I just can’t take another story, whether it’s a book or a song or a film. I don’t want to meet new characters or hear about their problems. I don’t want to make the emotional effort to enter their lives. I’ve heard Lynda Barry talk about how we need stories, need them for our emotional health. And I agree. I do. But sometimes I need a break. I just need to be in my own head for a while.

Finally, though, after about five hours and with another five to go, I was ready for the trip to be over and switched on this book to make the time go faster. It was a good choice. For many years I’ve enjoyed Robinson’s series of police procedurals featuring Alan Banks, a Yorkshire DCI. One of the advantages of a series, for me, is knowing some of the characters already, making it easier to slip into the story.

This book opens on a Greek island where Banks is on an extended leave, recovering from a traumatic case and an abortive love affair. I like Banks’s gruffness and his blend of practicality and knight errantry. I remember feeling his baffled distress in an earlier book when, their children grown and gone, his wife left him. That was two years before the time of this book, years whose ordeals have damaged him further. Now, he’s created a life of sorts for himself on the island and considers staying on, taking early retirement.

However, when bones are found in a field near where he grew up in Peterborough, he realises that he has to go back to England. The bones turn out to be the remains of his close friend, Graham, whose disappearance during the summer they were sixteen has cast a shadow over Banks’s adult life. Banks heads for his parents’ house as he tries to work out how to help with the investigation without stepping on the toes of the local constabulary.

At the same time, Annie Cabbot, Banks’s former inamorata, is working a missing persons case, a fifteen-year-old boy who has vanished after buying some books in town. The boy’s mother and stepfather are minor celebrities, a model and football star, and they are convinced that he has not simply run away. As the case accelerates, Banks is drawn in even as he continues to follow the investigation into the death of his boyhood friend.

Listening, perhaps not paying close enough attention, I sometimes got confused as to which case was being discussed. Usually this happened at the start of a chapter, when I had to stop and think which lost boy was which, but it was only for a minute. The various puzzles work themselves out in believable ways. I liked the pace of the incremental revelations and found the ending quite satisfactory. Some of the characters turn out to be unexpectedly complex. And Annie’s twists and turns, alternately questioning herself and moving out bravely, make me feel I know her. I hope to see more of her in future installments. Best of all, the book kept me so preoccupied that the time flew by, both the remainder of that day’s journey and most of the return journey a few days later.

A few weeks ago, I danced briefly with a man who took my breath away. It wasn't that he was good-looking; he was a big man, heavy-set, bald and goateed. Big like a football player, muscle-heavy, full of controlled power and light on his feet, like those football players on Dancing with the Stars. What left me breathless was the way he took care of me as his partner.

Many of the men I encounter when dancing tend to fling me about, adding improvised moves that don't quite fit the music, twisting my wrist in an attempt to get me to add extra twirls. Granted, I've become a more conservative dancer as I've gotten older. And I know they don't know their own strength and just want to include me in the fun they are having as they abandon themselves to the music. Still, I sometimes feel a bit mauled by the end of the evening.

However, this man seemed to sense what moves worked for me, reading my body's intentions through his fingertips before even I was aware of them. Completely in control of his own movements, he synchronised our figures perfectly to the phrasing of the music, making sure always that I was in the right place at the right time. He placed my hand just so and led me firmly but gently through the dance. I wanted to take him home with me and never let him go.

Now, I normally don't much like being led, Little Miss Independence that I am. And big men sometimes make me nervous. It's a power thing. But on that dance floor I didn't feel controlled. I felt respected, an equal despite our obvious disparities. It's a subtle distinction—between being taken care of and controlled—but makes all the difference.

I picked up this first book in the series by Lee Child featuring Jack Reacher, and it grabbed me right from the first simple sentence. Having recently left the Army, Reacher is exploring the U.S. he never knew as a military brat when he is arrested for murder in a small, Georgia town. At first only concerned with clearing his name, his own stake in the matter is abruptly raised, and he sets out to untangle the whole corrupt scheme.

With this smart, fast-paced thriller I again felt myself in the hands of an expert, someone who knows his own power, when to restrain it and when to use it. I was going to say “unleash” but that never happens. There's control here always, the author's control reflected in Reacher's actions and reactions, each carefully weighed and dispensed, even as the mounting suspense threatens to drive the story wild. Hard to believe this is a first novel. The plot is complex, and all of the characters, even the minor thugs, vividly drawn. And the conclusion more than satisfying.

I don't usually read thrillers, being overly susceptible: as with this one, I too often find myself turning the last page, and the day somehow gone without my noticing. But this is a series I'll pursue. While I found the body count unnerving, there's no doubt that if I found myself in a life-threatening situation, I would want Jack Reacher by my side. I wonder if he can dance.

Last week I mentioned books that were excellent until it came to the ending. Here's one of them. Set in contemporary Bombay, this novel explores the relationship between a middle-class woman and her servant. Bhima is the center of the story: through her eyes we see what it is like to be poor and a woman in Bombay: the sights and smells of the slum where she lives with her granddaughter, the slights of working in a home where she has to use her own separate dish and utensils and is not allowed to sit anywhere but on the floor, the callous ease with which men trick and betray her.

This is no polemic. Umrigar's measured yet evocative language lays out Bhima's life without violins or trumpets in the background, no phony attempts to arouse easy sympathy or anger. The story alone is sufficient for that. I don’t know much about India, but I do know what it is to be a woman living in poverty. Umrigar gets it right: the small treats (an onion to dress up dinner), the refusal to be a part of your surroundings, the frantic if futile attempts at a better life for the children.

My book club agreed in our admiration for Bhima's strength, our outrage at the prejudice she encounters, and our heartache at the despair she feels looking at her pregnant granddaughter. One woman said she doubted that she herself would be able to be so strong, though of course you don't know what you're capable of until tried. Bhima's relationship with her employer, Sera, was the most interesting part of the story to us. The two women work together at the household chores and, as women do, talk about their families. Sera's neighbors warn her that she is asking for trouble by pampering her servant, but Sera cares for Bhima and struggles to negotiate this friendship that can never be a true friendship because of their inequality.

Umrigar's nuanced account of this relationship is perfect. It reminded me of Baltimore fifty years ago when many if not most middle-class white families had a maid or even two. At the time, there weren't many other employment opportunities for women of color, of course. A few years ago, a woman in a nursing home complained to me about how awful it was that young women were choosing not to go into domestic service. Why would they? I thought. She extolled the relationship she'd had with her maids, how generous she'd been to them, the way she could talk with them about things she couldn't talk about with her peers. “They were my best friends,” she said. I wanted to tell her that it was not that simple, but realised there wasn’t much point in arguing with someone so close to the end of her life. She has passed away now, or I would give her this book to read.

Umrigar sustains the excellence until the last few pages of the book, where she gives in to what seems to me a pasted-on ending, a phony epiphany. Members of my book club suggested it was from the need for closure or maybe for a Hollywood-happy ending. Some were glad for both, but others agreed that the trite ending disappointed after the complexity of the story.

Oh, and I also hated the prologue, which was a chunk of the ending copied and stuck in front of the story. I’ve mentioned before how much I hate this technique, which seems to have become only too common lately, as I mentioned in my blog about Water for Elephants. A very few authors are able to use a prologue effectively—Reginald Hill's Goodbye, Midnight comes to mind—but more often it signals that the author is incapable of creating sufficient suspense with the story itself and needs to trick you into reading the remainder of the book. Unnecessary in this case. The story would have been sufficient, and infinitely better without the prologue and the ending.

Kim sent me this book, so I knew it would be good. And it won the Booker prize last year (more reliable IMHO than the Pulitzer when it comes to identifying books I will like, but less reliable than the Governor General's Award). However, I have to say that I read the first couple of pages with a sigh. Another Irish family drama, I thought, not at all sure I could work up enough interest to get through it. I don't need another lesson in Irish misery: enclosures, potato famine, diaspora, Catholicism, poverty, alcoholism, suffocating families—yeah, yeah, yeah; I get it. Even as I sighed, though, I kept reading.

The cover blurbs compare Enright to any number of contemporary authors (ten, to be exact), but I disagree. In all my reading, I have rarely encountered a character as naked as Veronica, the narrator of this story. I seemed to recognise right off the truth in her voice.

As Veronica, middle child of a large Irish family (12 children, plus 7 miscarriages), prepares to bury her favorite brother Liam, she finds herself excavating an incident from their childhood when she and Liam spent a year at their grandparents’ house. Trying to work out cause and effect, she makes up stories starring her grandmother: maybe she was a prostitute; maybe a servant. Jumping back and forth from the present to a past which will never be past, Veronica teases out memories and family secrets, creates mosaics of meaning and tears them apart.

What Enright accomplishes here is to bind me into this complex family history without my realising it, a family history that feels so true that it may well have been my own. The narrative is presented in so piecemeal a fashion that its power takes me by surprise. We visit and revisit family legends—Liam throwing a knife at their mother; the two children waiting outside St. Ita’s hospital—in terse chapters bristling with short sentences. The story races along as though afraid of bogging down, the emotion all the more powerful for the attempt to outrun it.

I have never read such a true story about growing up in a large family, emotionally true. Granted mine had half as many children, but I recognised all of it: the alliances; the secrets; the little betrayals that later change lives; the difficult prickly love for these people you’d never, left to yourself, actually choose as lifelong companions. Veronica castigates her mother for having so many children, blames her grandmother for producing such a vague and helpless daughter. Kept awake by her squirrelly thoughts, Veronica walks through the sleeping house, soothed by the empty—finally empty!—rooms. It could be my story. Maybe it is.

I feared that Enright would fumble the ending. So many excellent books have awful endings, as though the author simply ran out of steam or plastered on a manufactured epiphany just to get it over with. But Enright doesn’t disappoint. Finally a terrific ending, one that has been earned by all that has come before; one that fits. So, sure, another Irish family drama, but one that seems the truest thing I’ve read all year. One that’s made me look to my own life, and yes, my family, from a different perspective.

And in the end, this is why we can have hundreds, thousands of books even if there are only—what is it they say?—seven basic plots. Good writers can make the oldest story new again.

First, a caveat: I know the author. I’ve danced with her, and she is a lovely dancer. But I had no idea that she could write so well. I bought a copy of the book mostly to be supportive, thinking that I would probably not understand half of it since I know so little about wine. However, it’s a terrific read. Easy to follow. Plenty of stories to provide context for the names.

The backbone of the book is the author’s quest to find out why wines are all starting to taste the same, why it is becoming difficult to find the delicate, subtle wines that she loves. Feiring sets out to visit vineyards and interview winemakers and scientists and anyone else who can shed light on the problem. What she discovers is an array of artificial additives and mechanisms that winemakers have started to use in order to impose a uniform taste on their wine. The science is clearly presented as are her reasons for disagreeing with their use.

Many of the chapters deal with a particular kind of wine—Syrah, Champagne, etc.—and her efforts to track down the vineyards producing the most authentic wine in order to understand what makes it so good. She lets the winemakers who refuse to adulterate their wine make their own case and clarifies anything too esoteric, explaining concepts like terroir and biodynamics in ways even I can grasp. Best of all, Feiring tells not just about the wines themselves, but the stories behind the wines: the families, the vineyards, the importers, the festivals. There is wine gossip here, and plenty of vivid characters.

I wasn’t sure about the love part. Too many people seem to think that women should only be allowed to write love stories. My feeling is that the author knows about wine; let her write about wine. However, she kept the love part to a minimum, often couched in humor, and integrated it amazingly well with the rest of the story.

The real joy of the book for me lies in the vivid descriptions: of the wine, yes, but even more so of the vineyards in winter, the texture of the soil; of the winemakers, skills handed down within families; of their gatherings in interviews, at tastings, and over long, drawn-out meals full of laughter. Feiring makes me want to drink more wine—better wine—and to search out some of the wines she praises. This is a book that will appeal to wine connoisseurs as well as to novices like myself.