Shelf Life

Written by Terry Weyna Wednesday, 13 August 2008 18:29

Columns - Terry Weyna

I am all about books.

I've been a reader since that magic moment in first grade when I made the connection between the marks on the page and the words they represented. It can't really have happened in a lightning flash like that, can it? Yet that's how I remember it, as if one second I didn't know how to read and the next moment I could read everything. And I did, from every book in the classroom to old science fiction anthologies found in back bedrooms of relatives' homes while my parents visited. My fondest childhood memories involve climbing a tree to a platform high above the world where I could spend hours reading, or riding my bike to the library and picking out a stack of new books to devour.

The book collecting bug didn't bite me until I was older, but when it did, it bit hard. I chose my first apartment because it had a wall on which I could install bookshelves. I bought my first condo because it was a loft with a 62' long wall that would be ideal for built-in bookcases. And now my husband and I live with something like 12,000 books — the total number is as yet unreckoned, though I'm working on cataloging everything through LibraryThing — stuffed in 44 overflowing bookcases, five closets, and many cabinets.

My husband and I are a match made in heaven, assuming that Jorge Luis Borges is right and heaven is a kind of library. He is an English professor and writer. I practice law part-time, but my heart lies with my books — reading, writing, reviewing and scholarship. We spend many hours in our adjacent studies, occasionally calling out to each other about a particularly lovely line or piece of literary news we've just seen on the internet.

We're always egging each other on to order this new book or that one:

"I heard Ethan Canin interviewed on NPR, and I think we need his new book, America America. Powell's has only one signed copy left."

"Did you buy yourself that new Emily Dickinson biography yet?"

"Elizabeth Bear has another new book coming out. Should I go ahead and order it?"

And so our library constantly grows. My husband has taken to bending the laws of physics (we call it "folding space") in order to find room for all the books.

There is one big difference in the way my husband and I read. He always has his critical facility engaged. He can't dive into a book and become fully engulfed, surrounded by it as one is surrounded by the cool water of a swimming pool on a hot day, wholly isolated from the world. He has trained himself (to a fault) to read with a sharp eye out at all times. I, on the other hand, splash in with abandon and lose myself entirely. And I tend to default to enjoyment while I'm submerged. It's not that I'm uncritical; it's that I'm mostly able to suspend judgment until I'm finished with the book. It's the rare book that I'll set down before I've read the whole thing. Then I can say, for instance, as with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, "That was quite a plot, but it's badly written," or with Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader, "A charming book, nicely put together." Or I can say much, much more, at great length, as I tend to do in my blog, Reading the Leaves.

And I read everything. I've always thought that if I picked a genre and stuck to it, my life would be a lot easier. I like mysteries, especially legal thrillers, despite being a member of the legal profession myself. I'm a big science fiction, fantasy and horror fan, and especially enjoy the hybrids between science fiction, fantasy and horror known variously as The New Weird, interstitial fiction, or slipstream. I like biography, history, science, religion, literary criticism, books about books, politics — you name it, there's probably a book about it somewhere in this house. I rarely go anywhere without a book. I just plain love books.

What I plan to do here each week is talk about what I've been thinking about and reading lately, the latest news in the book world, and a few good books. This week I've got a decent summer mystery for you: Peter Abrahams' Delusion.

Abrahams has written 18 crime novels, but this is the first of his I've come across. He says his genre influences are Graham Greene and Ross MacDonald, but it seems to me that his style is all his own. He draws characters well, creates a menacing atmosphere with apparent ease, and has a smooth voice that lets the story practically tell itself.

Delusion is fundamentally about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. We all tend to find it remarkable that we can't trust our own eyes, or at least our own memories, especially in times of stress."I'll never forget that face as long as I live," we think, and, as jurors, we believe witnesses who use those words and give the dramatic testimony: "He did it! The man sitting right there!" But have you ever actually tried to remember details about someone you saw for just a few seconds, even if there was something particularly memorable about the encounter? If you have 12 eyewitnesses to an accident, you'll often have 12 different descriptions of a witness, including varying accounts of race, height, hair color and facial hair.

Nell Jarreau misidentified the killer of her fiancé twenty years ago. No one would likely have ever found out, except that Hurricane Bernardine swept through the Louisiana coastal town in which the murder took place and turned up a missing piece of evidence that cleared the man who was imprisoned for the murder. That same hurricane killed the police officer who had had possession of the evidence all that time, so no one knows why the evidence was hidden. Still, the evidence is persuasive enough to cause the court to release the prisoner. Now the man whom Nell still thinks killed her lover and the father of her child is free. And her husband, the police officer who helped put that man in prison and who was the partner of the man who held the missing evidence, is explaining nothing.

That isn't all that's wrong. Nell's daughter has suddenly dropped out of college and come home, but come home angry — especially at her stepfather. She is suddenly extremely curious about the birth father she never knew (Nell was pregnant when her fiancé was murdered), and certain that her mother has kept news of him away from her. She seems persuaded that her stepfather had something to do with her father's murder. She keeps making dark allusions to Shakespeare's Hamlet, until she has even her mother suspecting that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

It doesn't help that Clay, Nell's husband, is acting strangely as well. What had been a good marriage all these years is suddenly shaky, and Nell doesn't know why. With a reporter nosing around into what happened 20 years ago and trying to find the real murderer, the former prisoner forming a sort of friendship with Nell's daughter and her boyfriend, and Nell herself trying to remember what really happened, life is suddenly far more uncertain — and far more dangerous.

The pieces all fit together nicely, if a little too soon for the experienced mystery reader. Abrahams is a good plotter and an adequate writer, and Delusion is perfect for a summer afternoon in the hammock.

Terry Weyna is a part-time lawyer and full-time reader living in Northern California. She reads and reviews contemporary fiction, non-fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror and mysteries — basically anything that stands still long enough — for various outlets, including Reading the Leaves (her blog), Strange Horizons, and The New York Review of Science Fiction. Books for review should be sent to her at 2033 Ralston Avenue, #154, Belmont, California 94002-1737.

< Prev