Yes, I have ants in my cabin. At 5:30 the sun—already fierce—slams against the side of the cabin and pours through the window, scattering rainbows from Kate’s prisms across the walls. Within seconds, the ants begin to trickle from the corner of the roofline over my desk. Carpenter ants, as I know by the pile of debris and the swarm of flying ants on that really hot day, their lacy wings such a contrast to their hard black bodies. No matter how interesting, though, they are destructive and will have to go.

Mostly they don’t interfere with me as they scatter across the roof ledge and down the wall, though watching them take over the space is a little disturbing, and of course I have to brush them off the desk before they get to the laptop with its warm, inviting hum. I try to adopt Thoreau’s let’s-live-together philosophy towards them till the exterminator comes. It helps that they disappear at night, withdrawing with the sun’s warmth, bustling back to their nest. Some things that don’t bother me during the day really creep me out at night.

I figure that being in a cabin means welcoming the wildlife. I’ve gotten used to my 3 a.m. caller: some large animal that comes crashing down the hill, rustling leaves and breaking branches, to drink noisily from the pond. Not sure what my nocturnal visitor is, a raccoon perhaps or a fisher cat. I encourage spiders because they help to keep the ant population down.

I pulled this book from the library hoping it would also help. It’s very short, less than 150 pages even including multiple appendices, and the acknowledgement to Orkin right up front made me a bit wary. But the prose is just what I want from this kind of book: simple and straightforward. One of the things I learned is that ants are predators of other insects such as bedbugs and the chiggers that made my childhood a misery. I wondered why they seemed to have disappeared. Now if only the ants would eat all the deer ticks . . .

Some of the introductory material about different types of ants and their habits was interesting, but unfortunately was repeated several times throughout the book, as was other information and advice. I assume the repetition was included because readers are expected to dip into the book here and there, not read it straight through as I did.

I enjoyed reading more about the way they organise their colonies. I knew about ants being a superorganism, but there were details here about the ways different kinds of ants choose their queens and how some actually enslave other ants. Thoreau used ants in a fable about war, but there are certainly other comparisons to be drawn or pondered.

In the end, I didn’t learn any new tricks to discourage ants—the advice boiled down to keep the place clean and call an exterminator—but I was left thinking about different forms of social organisation.

Cornwell seems to be a popular mystery author with a long-running series featuring Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist who also has a law degree. I like a good mystery, so I thought I’d check her out. I first tried Isle of Dogs which is not one of her Kay Scarpetta books. I guess it was supposed to be humorous, but I found it boring and abandoned it after a couple of chapters.

Then I tried this book. Here, Dr. Scarpetta (she’s not the kind of character you call Kay) goes to Black Mountain, North Carolina, to investigate the sexual assault and murder of Emily Steiner, an 11-year-old girl. Black Mountain is said to be near Asheville, touted by Eric Weiner in The Geography of Bliss and ABC’s 20/20 as the happiest place in the U.S. Cornwell does not do much with this contrast other than occasionally mentioning that people in a small town believe the crimes they see on tv happen elsewhere and will never affect their town.

Complicating Scarpetta’s investigation are her relations with two co-workers: Pete Marino, a detective from Richmond, VA, and FBI Unit Chief Benton Wesley. Emotional undercurrents that had apparently been explored more fully in earlier books made the opening chapters of this book somewhat baffling for me. Scarpetta’s niece Lucy also complicates the story. Taking her aunt as a role model, Lucy has been working on a classified project at Quantico but lands in emotional and professional problems which may or may not be related to the case in North Carolina.

The investigation initially focuses on Temple Gault, a serial murderer whom Scarpetta has encountered in the past. Apparently assuming that readers would be familiar with the earlier books, Cornwell provides only the briefest outline of their earlier interaction. Similarly, Marino and Wesley are barely sketched in and did not come alive for me. Lucy is characterized a little better, as are Lucy’s mother and grandmother. I would have said that Scarpetta’s sister and mother are drawn too broadly to be realistic had I not had similar conversations with my own mother and one of my sisters. Still, there is little subtlety or shading in any of these characters.

The hardest part of writing a series must be deciding how much to explain what has happened in past books and when to present it. Here, not enough information was given at the right time, for me anyway. Yet, such explanations can be overdone. I had to give up reading Martha Grimes’s books because I got tired of the arm sticking out of the rubble memory. The best examples of weaving in earlier information that I’ve read are the Harry Potter books. One could also choose to make the books of a series stand alone a bit more, keeping the amount of necessary earlier information to a minimum, as P. D. James does. Another difficult factor in writing a series is the progression of the characters’ lives. I have sometimes found that reading books out of order has meant that I already know important plot points in the earlier books when I get to them.

Back to Cornwell’s book, if the setting and characterization are not detailed enough, the plot is almost too complex, with many different subplots and much traveling back and forth between more than half a dozen East Coast towns and cities. Some promising plot threads are dropped with perhaps only a sentence to tie them off at the end. The identity and motivation of the murderer seemed obvious to me early on but I was willing to play along with the red herrings. The forensic detail is interesting, as are the descriptions of the FBI research projects. As always, these are only my opinions, and while I probably will not seek out any more of Cornwell’s books, I’m sure many others will.

James has said that ideas for her books begin with a setting. Here the setting is a small (fictional) island off the coast of Cornwall that has been turned into a resort for people of distinction—politicians, writers, diplomats—who need a break from the stresses of their lives. Combe Island offers a secure environment—visitors do not bring their bodyguards—and options for solitude or society.

The island calmed and enchanted me as well, with its crashing tides and cliff walks, its rustic chapel and stone cottages. And of course its lighthouse, no longer in service but maintained as an historical site. James deftly brushes in allusions and connotations, not only of lighthouses but of small islands: treasure islands, self-contained paradises, embattled outposts threatened by the sea.

Commander Dalgleish, in his role as leader of the Special Investigation Squad, is asked to look into a suspicious death on Combe Island. Abandoning his plans for a weekend with Emma Laverham, Dalgleish rounds up his team—DI Kate Miskin and Sergeant Benton-Smith—and heads out.

James is one of my favorite authors. She understands how government works and Scotland Yard. Her stories are well-plotted, with the right amounts of suspense and baffling turns. Her writing is simply amazing: intelligent, forthright, engaging, and at times profoundly moving. Best of all, she has created characters with subtle shadings who grow even more complex in each installment of her long-running series. She gives us just enough of their personal lives to make them interesting, but never so much that it interferes with the story. Here, the denizens of the island are fully drawn as well, their fears and routines, their needs and desires, their histories and dreams.

As I was reading, I couldn’t help but think of The Book of Ebenezer LePage with its Guernsey setting and memorable depiction of daily life on the island. As he described, World War II brought the end of Guernsey’s centuries-long isolation and the loss of their unique culture, overwhelmed by tourism and television. Isolation, though, is not always a good thing. I wondered if the isolation of Combe Island in James’s book made it easier for the people there to slip the bonds of society’s rules and expectations, if perhaps something taboo like murder could there come to seem a natural solution.

It is hard to believe James is 88. She has lost none of her power as a writer, her confident prose contrasting sharply with Elizabeth Smart’s struggles (described in the last entry). I was first attracted to her books by their intelligence, but have come to treasure every aspect of them. This is a worthy addition to the series.

I liked this later book much better than By Grand Central Station if only because its view of the world is much closer to mine. The prose is still poetic and cut up into short sections, but together they make up a mosaic that—for me, at least—was much more intelligible and satisfying than the earlier book.

I read it in conjunction with On the Side of the Angels the second volume of her journals and, as before, found much that is lifted from her journals and woven into the book. In one entry, too, she talks about organizing Rogues and why she put the pieces in the order she did; I confess that this helped me better appreciate the book’s structure.

Rogues starts out in post-Blitz London, a bleak environment where people must count over their losses. And, indeed, this book is about loss: about growing old, trying to write in the face of waning powers. Smart’s journals are full of the difficulty of trying to start writing again in middle age, having spent the decades since By Grand Central Station working as a copyeditor and sometime journalist to support her four children.

In Rogues Smart writes, “The page is as white as my face after a night of weeping. It is as sterile as my devastated mind. All martyrdoms are in vain.” Her poems too—I was also reading her Collected Poems at the same time—talk of the difficulty of writing. One is even titled “Trying to Write”. But they are also full of the difficult joys of parenting and the small lessons learned from snails and bulbs in her garden.

These are struggles I know all too well, however much I berate myself for insufficient self-discipline, for spending too much of myself on the day-to-day pleasure: that first cup of tea in the morning, watching the birds at the feeder, or taking a walk through this astonishing world where lilacs and dogwoods are blooming again, surprised all over again by their extravagant ebullience.

I thought about Tillie Olson’s Silences which discusses the silences in women’s lives, the long stretches when they do not write or paint or whatever because they are busy with children and home-making. I swore that wouldn’t happen to me but it did. How could it not? Now, like Smart, I struggle to find the words that once filled my head and hands. But I have the great joy of my children’s company and all the lessons they have taught me. I’m also delighted to see many of my friends, their children grown, taking up (or retaking) some form of art: painting or writing, viola or piano.

I hate it that we have to learn these lessons all over again, every generation. And saddened that, for all our work in the 1970s and since, for all our progress, this is one riddle we have not solved: how to do the best for our beloved children, as we so desperately desire, and not lose the vocations and avocations that seem intrinsic to our very selves. Although perhaps they are only postponed, and that is not so bad. At least these days most of us live long enough to embark on a second life once the children are grown. For Smart, having to care for two of her grandchildren, that second life seemed far too short.

This is the first of two volumes of her journals, from 1933-1941, up to the point where she has written By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept the impressionistic novel/memoir for which she is most known. More a series of prose poems than a narrative, By Grand Central Station takes the reader inside the tumult of her affair with George Barker. She fell in love with him through reading his poetry, not realising at first that he was married. As the book opens, she is waiting to meet Barker and his wife for the first time, having sent them money to come to the U.S.

I first read By Grand Central Station in the late 1970s when I was a single mother, struggling to raise my children with no child support, and have to confess I was impatient with all the emotional drama. Look out, I remember thinking, or you’re going to end up raising kids on your own. In fact, that is exactly what happened to Smart. She went on to have four children with Barker, as he alternated his time between her and his wife.

I enjoyed it more this time around, caught up in the lush prose, the images tumbling over each other. I liked the humor that punctured her swollen prose, like the title with its reference to biblical grief twisted into—for me—an image of a bag lady huddling in a corner of that lobby in New York. She grounds her fanciful passages with the details of daily life: meals, swimming pools, rattlesnakes and spiders.

I kept going back trying to analyse how she strung the images together, how she structured the book, how she achieved her effects. But every time I ended up enthralled again and just reading, immersed in the flow. By reading Necessary Secrets at the same time, though, I could see how she used her journals in writing the book.

Smart kept several journals concurrently. Sometimes separately, sometimes jumbled together, she recorded her daily activities, lists of books she had read or wanted to read, quotations, conversations with herself, images to remember. Writers keep journals for a variety of reasons. Some, like me, need to write things out in order to understand them, in order to think them through. Others use their journals as workshop, i.e., a place for writing exercises. Some use them as a catch-all for ideas and images that may be useful someday. Others, like Smart, simply need to record things and then later go back and troll through them for input to their writing. (I’m grateful to Kathleen Flenniken for sending me a compilation of responses to her question as to why poets keep notebooks).

There are great chunks of her notebooks in By Grand Central Station and I enjoyed seeing how she blended them in and filled them out. Writers are predators, for sure, ready to steal anything from our lives to enhance the writing. The other interesting thing about Necessary Secrets was seeing her style develop over the years, enabling me to better appreciate the full-bore gush of it in By Grand Central Station with its unrepentant emotions and its comedic tragedy.

I seem to have been jumping around in my reading: France, Guernsey, Quebec, England, Maryland, Iran. With this book, I return to France, specifically to the southwestern rural uplands with their limestone outcroppings, sheep pastures, and vineyards. Merwin’s poetry is among the best that I’ve read, so I was curious to see how he would handle these three stories. The answer is: beautifully.

“Foie Gras” circles around the tale of Fatty the Count and his love of that delicacy. Merwin paints a rich portrait of the people and customs of the area. Rumors, relationships, and robbery blend together to create a memorable cast of characters. I was reminded of Flaubert and—more recently—Nemerovski in their joyfully affectionate look at the absurdity of their countrymen and women.

“Shepherds” uses the narrator’s work in restoring a vegetable garden and his interactions with his neighbors to illustrate the region’s change in the 1960s to factory farming. The local shepherds are persuaded, bullied, and coerced into replacing their stone barns with larger corrugated metal barns where the sheep could be kept all the time and given commercial feed instead of being allowed to graze for free in the pastureland. Corruption and graft in the local government—but I’m getting carried away. In fact, the tone is more nostalgic than outraged. This gentle story brims with evocative descriptions of fields bordered by walnut trees, ancient stone fences with little huts built into them for shepherds, neighbors helping each other out. Well, that’s not entirely right either. For every luminous sunset, there is a clear-eyed description of a neighborhood feud or a house with all its furnishings left to rot while the heirs fight over it. Beautiful and provocative at the same time, the story captures what it is to be human in society and in this beautiful world.

“Blackbird’s Summer” at first seemed to ramble, somewhat in the way that the main character is often on the move, showing a local spring to the priest, delivering wine to his customers, visiting neighbors, helping his daughter and her husband in the hotel. Gradually, however, I came to respect the nuanced image of Blackbird that was being built through all these interactions and reflections. He begins to pick through the contents of the old house, down the road from the hotel: old account books, crocheted bedspreads, wooden kneading troughs. His thoughts of the past are reinforced by talks with his customers, those who are prospering and those whose fortunes are fading. And he begins to wonder who would be willing to carry on his wine business, since his son-in-law is a milk-drinker and his only grandchild still an infant and a girl at that.

Merwin’s language is simply gorgeous. And his insights into these flawed and endearing characters are devastating. Their stories are enlivened by humor and a sense of the past—the Occupation, the 1914 War, even Napoleon cast their shadows over the present. The many tales of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and the concern for the children’s legacy brings out the sense of nostalgia, of an ancient way of life slipping away.

I have learned not to trust books that trumpet their bestseller status on the cover and have pages and pages of glowing endorsements. More often than not, these books disappoint me, perhaps because my expectations have been raised by all the hype. Some are real stinkers: I couldn’t get past the first 50 pages of our last month’s book club pick Lempriere’s Dictionary with its frenetically jumping point of view and lack of any discernable plot. Desai’s book was this month’s book club pick and, while not a stinker, it has serious flaws that would have made me abandon it if I were just reading it for my own pleasure.

Certainly the language is often gorgeous. The lush descriptions of the house and garden in Kalimpong, in the Himalayas, drew me into the story. The details of the lives in the house—the leather-bound National Geographic magazines, the scorpions in the woodpile—were brilliant.

The inhabitants are Sai, her grandfather (a retired judge), and the cook (whose son Biju has emigrated to New York). Sai’s isolation among the artifacts of the past is broken by regular trips to the village, where she is tutored by one of two sisters who have retired to the village, and visits from Gyan, a young man who has been brought on to tutor Sai in mathematics and science.

How Sai came to live with her grandfather nine years earlier is one problematic area: too many threads are left dangling. The judge disowned his daughter when she married, but apparently paid Sai’s school fees after his daughter and her husband were killed. Then when for some unstated reason, the fees are not being paid, the school decides to send Sai to her listed next of kin, her grandfather. Did he stop paying the fees? Why? Why did he pay them in the first place if he had disowned his daughter? It seems as though this section was not thought out completely.

The main problem with the book is structural. Within the first few pages we get the mandatory in media res scene of seemingly-irrational violence erupting into their quiet, inwardly-focused lives: McEwan’s favorite jump-start for a plot. But Desai then abandons her plot for 200 pages of static backstory, slowly filling in the backgrounds for Sai, her dead parents, the judge, the cook, his son, and so on. When she finally picks up the story again—did I say it was 200 boring pages later?—she also picks up the pace and the last section of the book is excellent. Desai’s insights about revolution and identity, about immigration and dreams, family and the loss of the past are woven into the story of Sai’s affair with Gyan and the fate of her family and friends during the Gorkha insurgency.

Usually I dislike too many changes of point of view, but here Desai handles the switch between Kalimong and New York very well, keeping the different settings in separate chapters. The interspersed chapters about Biju’s rather predictable life as an immigrant without a green card are short and add another dimension to the concerns of the people back in Kalimpong. In fact, all of the chapters are short and cut up into even shorter segments.

As it turned out, everyone else in my book club was still mired in those 200 pages, though several said they were enjoying them and not bored at all. I ended up enjoying the book and was glad I finished it. Still, if Desai had only shortened those 200 pages to perhaps 30 pages of backstory and integrated the backstory better, this would have been a truly excellent book.

I haven’t yet seen the film based on this graphic novel, a memoir of growing up in Iran during the turbulent 1980s. The book opens a year after the Islamic Revolution, with the ten-year-old and her classmates being told they must wear a veil at school. It is hard to write about political situations without becoming mired in outraged diatribes, yet Satrapi succeeds brilliantly. What is so effective here is that she stays in the child’s viewpoint. Hence, we see the girls using the required veils as monster masks or tying them together to make a jump rope.

Satrapi maintains that viewpoint as the child becomes a teenager and the family’s freedom gradually becomes more restricted. I was particularly curious about how her adolescent rebellion would play out in the context of the larger cultural revolution, and I was not disappointed. Swinging between patriotic fervor during the war with Iraq and horror at the gold keys “to heaven” given to young boys, the young woman’s reactions to her world struck me as deeply felt and emotionally honest. Satrapi’s art, although crude, does an okay job of conveying the emotional content. Some of the most effective panels are the occasional abstract ones.

The question I’m left with at the end of the day, though, is: does it work? And I have to answer: sort of. Parts of it are quite moving and others give a sense of the mingled ordinariness of daily life and shock of terrible events. Yet, for me, the inherent superficiality of the graphic novel format prevented me from full emotional participation in the story.

Don’t get me wrong—I like graphic novels, and I think it an especially appropriate format for this story from a child’s point of view. However, now I would like to read a story of women in post-revolution Iran that fully engages me with descriptions of place and nuanced characters. I didn’t get that from the oddly popular Reading Lolita in Tehran either. Despite its bizarre best-seller status, I found that book lacking in content. I’d hoped to learn more about the young women, and felt betrayed by finding out that the author had used composite characters. Only the mini-lectures about the books were interesting.

I recommend Persepolis as an excellent start at conveying the reality of life in post-Revolution Iran. If it left me hungry for more, that’s not such a bad thing.

This is a good story. In some ways, it was the perfect reading experience: I was carried away into the world of the story, caught up in the characters’ concerns. With some books (including most mysteries) the adrenaline kicks in and has me racing for the end, but with this book each scene drew me on, gently, ineluctably. There was just enough description to enable me to visualise everything without the descriptive passages overpowering the action. The characters seemed like people I knew, and the point of view moved between them in a natural way that did not disrupt the story. And it wasn’t until I finished the last page that I began to consider the larger implications of what I had read.

Harry Mason tells the story of his grandparents, Edith and Edward Mason, as they return to the U.S. in 1936 after many years of living in England. Edward fancies himself a great businessman, but his factory in Manchester, England, has been declining for many years and he is finally being forced to bring his wife and two sons, Sebastien and Simon (Harry’s father), home to take up residence in the family estate he has inherited from his aunt: some acres and a house which has been left empty and unattended for years and is now filled with mold and fallen plaster.

The Retreat is located on Maryland’s eastern shore, and one of the great joys of this book is seeing how this cosmopolitan, yet unsophisticated family reacts to their first encounter with life in such a remote backwater and how they adjust over the course of time to life among the farmers, white and black, and the inbred owners of neighboring estates. Anyone who has been to the eastern shore will appreciate these descriptions of the life and landscape in the days before the Bay Bridge brought hordes of tourists and retirees.

I initially picked up the book because the opening scenes take place on the Normandie, a pre-World War II luxury liner which has been part of my personal mythology since staying in the Normandie Hotel in Puerto Rico in the 1990s. Yet I quickly became absorbed in the concerns of all the characters as they try to figure out how best to live their lives and accommodate each other. I forgot about the Normandie until I finished the book and found myself wondering about the remnants of the past, what is new and what we carry forward.

A most satisfying read, I highly recommend this book and will be looking for others by this author.

Elizabeth Goudge is one of my favorite authors, though some of her children’s books are a bit too sweet for my taste. Of her adult books, my favorites are The Scent of Water and the Damerosehay books, with their lovely descriptions and gentle wisdom. Of her YA (young adult) books, this one is my favorite, although The Little White Horse runs a close second.

When their father departs for a new posting in India, the four Linnet children are left with their grandmother and her companion, Miss Bolt, two elderly women whose autocratic ways do not go over well with the children. Nan, Robert, Timothy, and Betsy, ranging in ages from twelve to six, are most distressed at being abandoned by their father, their mother having died five years earlier. After a particularly difficult set-to with Grandmama and the Thunderbolt, the children run away, scrambling over the garden wall and trudging toward the setting sun.

Tiring, they spy a pony and cart outside of a pub and hop in. The pony sets off for home, fetching up at a dark house in a mysterious village. Investigating, they find a tall man with an owl on his shoulder, who turns out to be their Uncle Ambrose, a retired schoolteacher-turned-parson who professes to loathe children and all their ways. Yet he allows them to stay with him. Also resident is Ezra, who has pointed ears and cooks delightful meals for the children, despite having been left to walk home from the pub when the children “borrowed” the pony and cart. Adventures ensue, as the children get caught up in the tensions and tragedies of the village and its surroundings.

Part of why I love this story is simply the immersion in another world. Set in 1912, the way of life described in this story has a nostalgic tint, but it is far from the Merrie England stereotype. There’s a bit of The Fatal Englishman as Sebastian Faulks called it: amateur explorers and archeologists wandering off on adventures and getting lost. There’s the darkness that comes from village isolation, set against the power of intelligence, learning and the ability to love. And, of course, everything is lit by the lovely glow of that “long afternoon” of the pre-war years.

Another part is the children themselves. Goudge does children very well. They are neither sarcastic nor smarmy, neither too good nor too bad, simply real children. I can’t imagine how Goudge knows or remembers so well how children think and what they care about, but she does so brilliantly. I also like the way she describes the food at meals with such relish, whether it’s the tiny cakes for tea or the great fry-ups for breakfast. Goudge’s descriptions of places, especially gardens and houses, are quite wonderful. Something about the description of Nan’s little parlor, furnished for her by Ambrose, has stayed with me over the years.

Finally, I like the way the magic bits are handled: lightly, deftly. You can chalk them up to a child’s imagination or, if you like, believe that a cat can concertina into a huge monster and a handful of bees lead you to safety. I love the gentle allusions to legends about bees and fairy folk. This book is charming, not in an empty soap-bubble way like Brideshead’s Sebastian, but in the old sense of casting a spell on the reader, enchanting me again every time I read it.