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I mentioned the classic Western Shane a few weeks ago. Here's another Western I picked up in Greenfield, Massachusetts at the World Eye Bookshop. Although an author new to me, Ralph Cotton has written over 30 Westerns. Summers' Horses follows Will Summers, a horse-trader, as he chases the men who stole the seven animals, six horses and a mule, he was leading through the Colorado Territory. Will is accompanied by a big spotted dog that came as part of a trade. The two brothers who stole the horses and mule, Dow and Tom “Cat Tracker” Bendigo, are sons of the rich and powerful Warton Bendigo who pretty much does what he wants. The only law in the area, a sheriff in nearby Wakely, is on Bendigo's payroll or at least too intimidated to stand up to him.

I'm quite partial to Westerns, though I may be in the minority: they are easily the smallest genre section in any library or bookstore I've visited, in spite of the popularity of Country music and films about cowboys. Generally television shows about cowboys don't appeal to me, but I did enjoy Deadwood from a few years ago. Aside from the excellent acting and writing, the show appealed to me in the way it looked at how people behaved in the absence of the usual institutions that enforce society's rules, such as law officers and ministers. The show also examined, over the course of several seasons, how the rough frontier settlement evolved a set of rules for itself and worked out how to enforce them.

I think this theme makes up a large part of what I like about Westerns: in the unsettled territories where there is no commonly accepted authority to enforce a social structure, people have only their own personal code of honor to fall back on. And that code gets tested by running up against others with very different ideas of right and wrong, whether they be Native American tribes, outlaw gangs, or arrogant, greedy ranchers. Armchair theorizing won't get you very far.

This book held my attention. The action is fast-paced, not thriller-fast, but relentless if a bit heavier on shootouts and ambushes than I'd like. I tend to prefer more characterization and description. Cotton does a good job with the rare bits of description:

Evening shadows leaned long out of the west by the time he reached the turn toward the watering hole. The dog had gone on ahead of him and disappeared a half hour earlier. But now he saw the dog coming back through the wavering heat. He watched him lope along toward him at a much slower pace until he finally slowed to a walk, his head lowered, his tongue lolling.

More descriptive bits would give a better sense of the place and add to the texture of the story. More characterization would help too. I never really got a sense of the main character. It may be that Will Summers has been thoroughly introduced to readers already in some of those 30+ books, but there's not enough here for me to form an idea about him. The most intriguing character for me is Vera Dalton, an ex-prostitute who's been studying with the town doctor, learning how to treat injuries and illnesses. Only a minor character, but the space between her ambition and her experience quivers with possibility.

I might try one of the earlier books to see if I can fill in some of the gaps, but certainly if you're looking for an exciting Western with lots of action, give this one a try.

For fans of this series, I only have to say “Lee Childs” or simply “Reacher”. That's all you need to know.

When I pick up one of these immensely popular books, I know that nothing more will get done until I've turned the last page. In this 2010 addition to the series, Jack Reacher has caught a ride on a tour bus that skids off a remote South Dakota highway during the beginning of a blizzard. With his customary competence, Reacher plants flares outside, administers first aid to the elderly tourists, and works with the driver trying to get the bus started again so that they don't freeze to death. Andrew Peterson, a local policeman, arrives and arranges for transport to the nearby town of Bolton, a small town that used to be a lot smaller before a prison was built there. Reacher notices some odd things on the way into town, but we overhear Peterson and his boss, Chief Holland, discussing Reacher, asking, “‘Is he the guy?'”

One of the things that I think must be difficult with a series is to continue creating plausible scenarios where the protagonist can encounter murder or other mayhem. This problem is why a mystery series is often based on a policeman or private detective: their business is crime. Otherwise you have a little old lady in a small village where an extraordinary number of murders seem to occur. The television series Murder, She Wrote ran into the same obstacle with its version of Miss Marple, retired teacher and mystery writer Jessica Fletcher, stumbling over multiple bodies in tiny Cabot Cove, Maine. As a workaround, Jessica was often sent off on author tours that make today's authors green with jealousy, and even moved her to New York City for a while to teach a class.

Another problem with a series is maintaining suspense. Every reader has to know that the main character is not going to die, in spite of all the wretched and dangerous situations he or she is subjected to. One way to keep readers worried is to allow beloved side characters to be killed, as J.K. Rowling did in the Harry Potter series. I haven't figured out what other tricks terrific writers like Nevada Barr, Ian Rankin, and Laura Lippman use to send us breathlessly racing through story after story, fearing for the hero's safety. Any suggestions? Add them in the Comments section below.

A countdown clock is a rather obvious way to add suspense to a story, but seems fresh in Lee Childs's hands. On my first reading, I believed that the author only referred to the clock once in a while. However, going through the book again, I see that he hits that refrain often, sometimes several times in a chapter. I guess I was too absorbed in the story to register the steady tick, a credit to the writing because I am easily annoyed by such things. Suspense is also built in this story by the various mysteries, the danger to people we come to care about, and the well-spaced action scenes. Too, Childs's famously short sentences keep the suspense and the pace buzzing, while being completely appropriate for the voice of this laconic hero.

Of course it's hard to worry about Reacher when he is so capable of taking care of himself. Some reviewers have compared Reacher to Philip Marlowe. He is a big man, six-five, skilled with firearms and his own hands. A former MP, he could have ended up Chief of Staff if he'd had a more compliant nature. Instead, he was booted out of the military after a legendary bust-up with a senior officer. For years now, he has stayed on the move, retaining no possessions, even buying serviceable new clothes every few days and disposing of the old.

Reacher doesn't make me think of Marlowe; he makes me think of Shane. He comes to town, recognises the threat, and does what others don't have the ability or the guts to do. Then he leaves.

No wonder I love these books.

Selected by one of my book clubs, this is not a book I would normally read, although I like science fiction. First published in 1996, one of the parallel storylines takes place twenty years later (which is not too far off from where we are now), when a young engineer in Puerto Rico intercepts signals from a distant planet that are recognisably music. The news is leaked and the world blazes with curiosity about this new culture. While the U.N. dithers, the Jesuits—famous for their explorers and first contacts with civilisations—put together a mission to that planet to learn about the culture that produced such remarkable music. The mission includes the engineer who first discovered the signal (Jimmy), a husband and wife team who bring engineering and medical skills respectively (George and Anne), an artificial intelligence expert who excels in capturing knowledge (Sofia) and four Jesuit priests, with piloting, music, naturalist, and linguistic skills (D.W., Alan, Marc, and Emilio). The second of the parallel storylines takes place in 2059-2060 when the single survivor of that mission, Emilio, the young priest who is a genius with languages, returns severely traumatised, and the Jesuits try to draw the story out of him.

People who impose their religion on others have always made me uncomfortable, hence my reluctance to continue with a book about an evangelistic mission. However, I was seduced by the characters. Each one came so alive for me and seemed so much like people I know, that I couldn't help reading on. I adore these characters. And much to my relief, once they land on the planet, it becomes clear that they only want to learn about the alien culture, not convert it.

However, and not unexpectedly to one who has had Star Trek's Prime Directive drummed into her over multiple seasons and series, quite aside from all those Psychology and Anthropology courses, they cannot help but affect the culture they have come to observe. With, I should add, tragic consequences for everyone. As someone in my book club pointed out: there are always unintended consequences.

The details of the alien cultures (for there are more than one) are meticulously worked out and completely believable. Also, these details are presented in such a natural way that I never felt I was getting an information dump. Truly, this is a well-written book. All the more my disappointment when, about halfway through, the characters become subordinate to the plot. I understand that the machinations must work out, but I missed these characters that I had become so fond of. For example, the first death is wrenching, but after that the others are presented almost casually. I know that is true: the first death is the one you never get over, but I loved these characters and wanted the chance to mourn them.

I understand that there is a sequel: Children of God. I do not know yet if I will read it, even as I reiterate that this first novel from Russell is a remarkable accomplishment.

Although I've met Margaret Mullins, I've read little of her poetry. Therefore, I was thrilled to see this new chapbook from Finishing Line Press. Inside the striking cover resides a set of poems that look at the charms and tragedy of daily life and the “deeper forces” that “churn below.”

For example, “Elizabeth Kenny Polio Institute 1953” captures “one quicksilver moment” when a roomful of adolescent girls in iron lungs joke about where they are off to that evening. The poem captures the scene, the humor, and the bittersweet camaraderie of the girls in their metal prisons.

Mullins uses musical images and instruments, as in “Thanksgiving Dinner”, describing a family as though it were an orchestra:

The conductor raises his carving knife,

nods to the concertmaster who nods back,

and the Grazioso Symphony begins.

Music is apparent, too, in her word choices. She lures us in with deceptively simple lines such as these from “Metamorphosis”:

He was a brilliant, angry, funny man

who had always hated cats.

Plain language, to be sure, but it pushes me to read on, creating irresistible movement. At the same time, succinct and beautiful descriptions bring scenes to life, such as this from “Genevieve's Snowman”:

Years from now, tall and elegant

in soft leather gloves

and a vintage black fedora,

she'll see the fading photograph,

colors melting to sepia.

I can almost feel those gloves, see that sepia photo. Some of the poems are about family life, remembering her father and grandfather, capturing the humor and delight of grandchildren. She writes of an imaginative child who, when she comes in:

dropping a trail

of dolls, books, and mittens,

a dozen invisible characters

come with her:

The child leaves with her “giraffe backpack bumping along”. In other strong, visual poems, Mullins writes of the joys of mature love and the rewards of long-worked gardens. I hope to see many more collections of her poetry.

Okay, this is embarrassing to admit, but I picked up this book at the library book sale simply because I liked the cover. Because, just to be clear, I liked the colors used on the cover. They match my bedroom. Such an admission is almost as bad as revealing that when I first started buying wine, I chose bottles based on how pretty their labels were. But these days I'm no longer a novice oenophile, or bibliophile for that matter.

Much to my surprise, this big novel about Emma, Queen of Saxon England, is a good read. It opens in 1002, when Emma, thirteen-year-old sister of Richard, Duke of Normandy, arrives in England for her arranged marriage to the 34-year-old king, Aethelred (“the Unready” if you recall your history), and ends in 1042. It was interesting to recall that the first half of the book covers the same time frame as the Murasaki book, on the other side of the world.

This is Emma's story, her growth from a shy, scared girl into a competent, confidant queen.

I was interested in following Emma's thoughts about and participation in the continuing struggles over the crown of England, not just between Saxon and Dane, but the shifting alliances, the hesitation to invoke outright civil war, the treachery inspired by a lust for power. She recognises how seductive that lust can be. Speaking with Edmund, Aethelred's second son, she compares it to syphilis:

“It is a sorry fact . . . that wealthy and powerful men possess a driving need to acquire more of what they have already got. Corruption in a man is an insidious disease . . . the fire takes hold and consumes him from the inside out.”

But she herself is not immune. She enjoys exercising what power she has as queen, power that increases as Aethelred ages and declines. At first she needs it, to protect herself against her abusive husband. Later, she resolves to use it to protect her people, the English people whom she has grown to care for. She says she has become more English than the English. She also respects the fact that it is her duty as queen to protect her people, even if Aethelred seems to shirk his role as protector at every opportunity.

The chapters are quite short, only three or four pages and encompassing only a single scene, so they seem to fly by. If I have any complaint, it is that sometimes we whiz along from year to year, with only a single chapter/scene for each. It is far more satisfying when we pause for several of these short chapters in a row to follow out a story line.

I like that the cast of characters is fairly stable, given that it is a long book, even if few approach the depth and complexity of Emma's characterisation. Aethelred and his sons, the treacherous Eadric Streona, and the Danish invaders Swein and his son Cnut are well-drawn.

There is much death; the living conditions and brutal punishments of Saxon England would have ensured that, even without the near-constant warfare. But there is also honor and love and an attempt to understand what makes a life worth living.

This popular book, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize along with many other awards, was my book club's selection for this month. It's a highly experimental book, moving back and forth in time and introducing new characters with each chapter. Since we rarely return to any of the characters from the previous chapters, Egan's challenge to herself is to create a cohesive narrative out of these fragments.

In her reader's guide she says:

I began A Visit from the Goon Squad without a clear plan, following my own curiosity from one character and situation to the next. My guiding rules were only these: 1) Each chapter had to be about a different person. 2) Each chapter had to have a different mood and tone and approach. 3) Each chapter had to stand completely on its own. This last was especially important; since I ask readers to start over repeatedly in A Visit from the Goon Squad, it seemed the least I could do was provide a total experience each time.

In other words, you can read this book without making a single connection between any two chapters. They were written—and published—as individual pieces, apart from the book as a whole.

My book club was split fairly evenly between those who enjoyed the book a lot and those who disliked it. While I appreciated Egan's wit and inventiveness—one surprisingly effective chapter is done entirely in PowerPoint slides—I had to count myself among the ones who didn't enjoy it.

Partly my lack of enjoyment was due to the constant switching to new characters. I found it hard to care about characters, however vividly drawn, who disappeared a few pages later. The writing is great. I loved the first chapter where Sasha lifts a wallet in the ladies room of the Lassimo Hotel. And the story of Dolly, aka La Doll, a publicist and cultural barometer, was hilarious, if sad. But the repeated jolting kept me from getting into the book.

The other part that made me actively dislike the book was the theme. One character says, “‘Time's a goon, right?'” And indeed, all of the characters are roughed up if not killed by time, by the lives they fall into. You're a sad, confused child and then life goes downhill from there. Several different characters end up saying, “‘I feel like everything is ending.'” Or they have to come to terms with “‘the unspeakable knowledge that everything is lost.'” As several folks in my book club said, it made for a very depressing read.

I guess I'm just a Pollyanna at heart. Life gets better all the time, that's what I think.

Still, as I say, I'm in the minority! The book is tremendously popular and successful, and many people are hugely enthusiastic about it. Just because the book is not my cup of tea doesn't mean that you won't enjoy it. Use the comments section below to let me know what you thought about the book.

Very little is known about Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji. Genji, completed probably in 1021, is often considered to be the first novel, and while there is some question as to whether Murasaki herself wrote all of the chapters, she is generally celebrated as the author. The story goes that she was inspired to write the Genji stories by gazing at the full moon during a religious retreat to Ishiyama Temple.

However, far more likely is the scenario Dalby dreams up for this fictionalized biography: a young Murasaki, giggling with her best friend and dreaming of one day serving at court (however unlikely the possibility), makes up stories about a handsome, romantic prince. As she grows older, she adapts the stories to her better understanding of men and women and what goes on between them.

When she becomes a widow with a young child, she is unexpectedly called to court to serve the new Empress Shoshi, primarily because of her now-popular Genji stories. Aware of the political plotting of the regent, Shoshi's father, and learning all too quickly about the barbs, boredom and bounties of court life, she once again revises her stories to add these realistic details.

The book is almost a case study in how to write historical fiction. Dalby takes the few known facts, some surviving fragments of Murasaki's diary and poetry, and research into the Heian period to create an engrossing and believable story. She also uses—though sparingly—some of the events from the Genji stories themselves. Not one for one: that would be too crass. Instead, she creates some scenes and events that a writer such as Murasaki could have transmuted into those stories.

What an astute strategy! While there are some fiction writers producing slightly concealed autobiography, most writers these days create a character by throwing aspects of multiple people into the blender: this characteristic, that prejudice, these dreams, those handicaps. So Murasaki's writing life rang as true as her friendships and romances.

With this book I truly felt as though I was entering a different world every time I picked it up. Dalby has provided an exquisitely detailed view of life in the early 11th century. She has also included bits of Murasaki's diary and all of her surviving poetry. Men and women of the time carried on courtships and conversations using waka, which today we call tanka. Some of the most intriguing sections are these conversations, but always the short five-line poems grow seamlessly out of the scene:

Lifting my head to look out at the dawning day, I saw a family of waterbirds playing on the lake as if they hadn't a care in the world. Then it struck me that to an outside observer they may look as though they were enjoying life, but in fact they must often suffer, too.

How can I view the birds on the water with indifference? Like them, I float through a sad, uncertain world.

I recommend reading this book when you have the time to sink into it. I so enjoyed my immersion in Murasaki's world and aesthetic that I was sad when the book ended.

A few years ago, writer Christine Stewart led a workshop on applying the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi to the writing of poetry, wabi-sabi being the appreciation of the beauty of unfinished or transient things. I thought of that workshop while reading this book, which looks like a collection of fragments of poetry and prose. However, brought together these scraps create an ever-changing collage, one where there is space for the reader's imagination. I read this deeply moving book three times and interpreted much of it differently each time.

Hahn uses two Japanese forms for the poems in this book: tanka and zuihitsu. Most poets are familiar with tanka, though here Hahn presents them as a single line. Zuihitsu has no Western equivalent. It has been translated as “following the brush” or “stray notes expressing random thoughts”. It is the form used by Sei Shonagon in The Pillow Book, with her lists and random diary entries. Hahn intersperses thoughts and reminiscences with lists and emails and question-and-answer sessions. While they appear to be prose, there is no doubt that in their ambiguity and resonance these fragments are indeed poetry.

It takes a lot of guts to give your book the same title as one of the most famous books of poetry, Basho's famous travel journal. Basho wrote in a form called Haibun which combines short journal prose pieces with haiku. Yet for all these traditional forms and nods to antiquity, this is a thoroughly modern book. The ancient and modern elements create a dialogue between them that affects the meaning of each. Similarly the two poetic forms work with and against each other to lift everything to another level.

This is a gutsy book in other ways, too. Hahn bares herself in these pages as she departs a marriage and tries to balance the demands of lovers and children against those of the work. Referring to the classic Japanese symbol of transience, she writes:

The brown branches, the pink moments.

I was at a loss.

Was marriage my imagination? I look at photos of cheery tanned profiles from little family vacations and cannot know what I was thinking.

Hahn also plays with language, employing puns as associations: “pomegranate, poppy, pod—”. She says “I love words that confuse—” like “canon/cannon/cannot”. The disconnection, the stumble in the space between the so-similar words possesses the reader with its ambiguity. I want poems that unsettle me.

Far from the former husband, this rain-soaked marsh is where I know a downpour will last. And the lover's breadth.

In poetry I look for what Robert Bly calls “leaping poetry”, works with space in them, that make you feel like the earth has given way beneath your feet. Here the fragmentary nature and the energy of the work provide a particularly rich experience.

This mesmerizing 1993 novel revolves around two nineteenth-century women. An actual historical figure, Mary Ellen Pleasant is a free black woman, a business owner and an abolitionist. A fictional character, Annie Christmas, is a mulatto who walks away from a privileged life in Jamaica to fight slavery. The two women meet in 1858 at a speech by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper on “The Education and the Elevation of the Colored Race” where Annie speaks up against the notion of the Talented Tenth, saying that all people deserve respect. Mary Ellen takes her to dinner at a restaurant named Free Enterprise which becomes the locus of an abolitionist group planning a war of independence to begin the following year.

The only name connected with that war that lives in common memory today is John Brown, so this story becomes a potent reminder of all the people who worked for that cause.

Freedom and its absence are found in many forms. We also meet a white society woman, Alice Hooper, who invites Mary Ellen to a fancy dinner. Alice herself is encased by society's norms, as is her cousin Clover Hooper, who is a photographer. One of the first portrait photographers, Clover is also an historical person, a wealthy socialite from Boston who married Henry Adams and is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C. In this story, she and Alice visit Civil War battlefields.

The book actually begins in 1920 when Annie is living alone, deep in the bayou. When she wants company she sneaks into the nearby Carville leper colony where the women convene to share their stories. Annie's closest friend is Rachel DeSouza who is assumed to have leprosy although she has no external symptoms simply because she is a Jew from Suriname. “The Surinamese strain flourished especially among Jews and Maroons.” Rachel tell of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, that symbolic year for Americans. I remember visiting a ruined synagogue in Toledo and thinking about the uprising there and about the consequences of the expulsion, not only for the Spanish Jews but for Spain itself.

The narrative is fractured, moving back and forth in time, sometimes with Annie, sometimes with Mary Ellen or other women. It is like the scrap of patchwork that Annie cherishes. Created by a slave out of bits and pieces snipped on the sly from rich people's clothing, it shows a lion holding a gun. Such a perfect way to tell the story of these two women whose lives have been buried by the “dominant paradigm” of John Brown's revolt, lives that have to be excavated and fitted together piece by piece. I can't remember when I was last so deeply involved in characters in a book. I breathed with these women, listened and walked with them.

Lillian Smith (1897-1966) was a writer of extraordinary power and an activist who refused the roles pushed on women of her time. Raised in Florida, she lived the rest of her life, aside from school in Baltimore and three years teaching in China, in rural Georgia. In her novels, essays, and lectures, she dissected her Southern culture and with clarity and passion laid bare the effects of segregation on both black and white. Her most famous novel is Strange Fruit inspired by Billie Holliday's rendition of that song. It raised a storm of protest on both sides of the issue and inspired future Civil Rights workers.

This collection of magazine articles, speeches, and letters from 1942 to her death is arranged in three parts. The first part specifically addresses the South and segregation, both her recommendations for change and her analysis of their necessity. The second part moves beyond the South, extending discussions of discrimination and racism to wider, related issues about what it mean to live together in a postwar world that is becoming more global even as it feels the new threat of nuclear obliteration. The pieces collected in the third part tackle gender issues, men's and women's roles and the cultural myths behind them.

I first heard of Lillian Smith 44 years ago when I met her sister, Esther Smith, then a college professor. Fresh from the riots following Martin Luther King's murder and working for change through the Civil Rights movement, I tore through Lillian Smith's books and have carried them with me ever since. I hesitated to read this collection, though these pieces were new to me, because I was afraid they would seem dated and, driven by her opposition to segregation, irrelevant in a time when integration is the law.

How wrong I was! These pieces speak directly to today, to the racism that may have been driven out of the buses and schools and lunch counters, but thrives in code words and hate-mongering rants on internet and television. Speaking of ideas fundamental to our civilization, such as that “every one in the community has a right to be protected from violence” and that each person has a right to speak freely and hold different beliefs (if they do not harm others), she says:

When men stop believing in these great ideas, when they silence their conscience and trample their reason, when they make their own image their god—or their economic or political beliefs their god—then we are in for trouble. For then, they hold even constitutional law cheap. They sneer at the high courts of their government; indeed, they say they obey only the laws they want to.

When this happens, the free people with their limitless potential for growth and for good will metamorphose into the mob.

I have rarely read a more cogent diagnosis of what is wrong with the U.S. today. She also says: “War is the human race's Number Two enemy. Number One enemy is the creeping, persisting, ever-widening dehumanization of man. This is the disease of which nuclear war may be the terminal symptom.”

And amid the current news stories of scandalous attempts to prevent people from voting, drug tests for welfare applicants, and the tide of testing that is drowning our schools, what could be more relevant than this reaction to the use of IQ tests as poll tests?

But the real answer to this talk of valid and invalid tests is that it simply does not matter. If you are morally civilized you treat people right regardless of their intelligence or their looks or their weakness or strength. You don't keep a crippled man from voting or riding the bus; you don't bar a poet from a restaurant because he is a genius and the rest of us are not; you don't cheat a child who can't count his money.

I have written about my dismay at seeing the old myth of Eve destroying Adam's paradise updated, so I was particularly interested in Smith's examination of the history of women's roles: from the fear of Eve's discerning gaze to the dichotomy of Madonna/bitch, Goddess of Mercy/Kali the Destroyer, Beatrice/witch. She suggests that in the age of reason, the dichotomy in the way women were viewed persisted but in the context of race. Also during the 19th century, she points out, came the new role that Ibsen wrote of: “the little girl, the woman who never grew up (and therefore could never dominate a man), the doll who lived in the doll house.” She writes movingly of the generation of women, more educated and skilled than any previous generation, who after World War II gave up their jobs and allowed themselves to be shut up in suburban boxes.

Certainly another reason why this book is so readable is Cliff's careful editing. The chronology within the subject groupings and the deletions to avoid redundancy enable the reader to follow the progress of Smith's thinking and feel the power of her arguments. These exhortations to treat one another humanely are directed at our reason. They may not convince the mob, but if we are morally civilized we will listen.