Friday, January 20, 2017

In the Dead of Winter, Embrace 'Nordic Noir'

January, that month of bleak and often icy landscapes, should help you appreciate the 'Nordic Noir' mystery writers of Scandinavia. Many American readers immediately think of Swedish writer Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series, but there are many other excellent mystery and crime fiction authors from Sweden, Norway, Finland and even Iceland, and 2016 saw a number of notable novels. For those who like dark and disturbing, there's The Crow Girl, a tale originally published as three separate volumes in Sweden, by Erik Axl Sund (nom de plume of a writing duo). Police detective Jeanette Kihlberg and psychologist Sofia Zetterlund are trying to crack the case of the sadistic Crow Girl, who is capturing and torturing children around the city of Stockholm and who seems to have a strange connection to a mental patient that Zetterlund is treating. In neighboring Norway, Gunnar Staalesen offers Where Roses Never Die, the 19th in a series whose private detective character Varg Veum is actually honored by a statue in the city of Bergen, where he fictionally operates. Now Veum, suffering from alcoholism and haunted by past failures, is seeking redemption by helping a mother find out what happened to her three-year-old daughter, who disappeared nearly 25 years earlier, so the statute of limitations on justice is about to run out. Also from Norway is The Bird Tribunal by Agnes Ravatn, a mystery with an isolated, wild setting and Gothic overtones. Allis Hagtorn answers an ad for a caregiver to Sigurd Bagge, a surly and secretive character who seems more in need of companionship than care. As Allis timidly sets out to impress him, she also becomes curious about what happened to his wife--leading to rising dread with hints of the supernatural. Let's not forget about Finland. In Dark As My Heart, author Antti Tuomainen's protagonist Aleksi Kivi is a 33-year-old man obsessed by the disappearance of his mother two decades earlier when she went out on a date and never returned. So he manages to get a job working on the estate of Henrik Saarinen, a wealthy man his mother had dated, and gains his trust. But the nearer he gets to the truth, the closer he gets to losing sane perspective. For more 2016 Nordic Noir fare, check out http://www.crimefictionlover.com/2016/12/top-10-nordic-noir-novels-of-2016/

Friday, January 13, 2017

Honor Martin Luther King With Thoughtful Reads

This year I'm paying a little more attention to January's Martin Luther King Day, both grateful for how far we've come since Dr. King's death and aware of how many problems remain. My children were introduced to King's story in public school, but I come from a white generation burdened by miseducation about race that is not necessarily remedied by actual participation in desegregation and civil rights struggles. Luckily, there are three Pulitzer Prize-winning histories that address both America's racial history and Dr. King's legacy: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon, which examines indentured servitude and neo-slavery in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, overturning the idea that the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery in America; The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Kilbanoff, which explores the role of black and white journalists in changing public sentiment towards the Civil Rights movement (how will today's journalists and fake news purveyors perform?); and Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 by Taylor Branch, portraits of both King's rise to greatness and an American society of turmoil and transformation. But what about the continuing challenges of racism and inequality? Perhaps the next required reading is the 2016 book Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., which presents his passionate argument against the fallacy of a "post-racial society" and explores the current state of the black community, including the politically charged issues of institutional racism and the Black Lives Matter movement. For more suggested reading on Dr. King's legacy: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/the-read-down/11-books-to-help-you-understand-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-s-legacy-in-2016

Friday, January 6, 2017

2017 Reading Resolutions to Broaden the Mind

It's time to make resolutions for 2017 and for me that includes reading that might help me think more clearly about some of the contentious issues of 2016's bitter presidential campaign. I'll start with the touchy subject of race. If you haven't read Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me — a best seller, National Book Award winner, and Pulitzer finalist — put it on your list. In a personal and literary exploration of America's racial history, written in the form of a letter to his adolescent son, Coates shares what it means to be black in America, from the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through revelations from Howard University, Civil War battlefields, Chicago's South Side and even Paris. If you prefer fiction, a 2016 National Book Award winner, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, also has something new to say about America's racial sins via an imaginary tale of slaves fleeing north on a literal underground railroad — complete with locomotives, boxcars and conductors. Another book of cultural revelation is Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, a Yale Law School graduate who grew up in a poor Rust Belt town. Vance offers a personal analysis of white working-class America in crisis through his family's story and his own experience of growing up amid social, regional and class decline. This book may help the baffled to understand the appeal of Donald Trump's presidential campaign to these "forgotten" men and women. What about terrorism? Put Karan Mahajan's The Association of Small Bombs, also a finalist for the National Book Award, on your reading resolution list. The 2016 novel opens with a Kashmiri terrorist attack in a Delhi market and follows the lives of those affected, including Deepa and Vikas Khurana, whose young sons are killed, and the boys’ injured Muslim friend Mansoor, who grows up to flirt with political radicalism. It's a book ­that forces American readers to care about the toll of terror even when it comes to a place they may see as alien and violent, to understand, and even like, people for whom terrorism exerts an appeal, and to realize the complexity of Muslim politics and grievances beyond "radical Islam" bashing. In the end, Mahajan reveals the terrible truth that, to quote The New York Times review, "nothing recovers from a bomb — not our humanity, our politics or even our faith." For ideas from The New York Times' 10 best books of 2016, see http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/books/review/best-books.html