Category Archives: books

Will Harry Hole Stop Drinking? – Jo Nesbo’s crime novels

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Jo_Nesbo©Arvid_Stridhphoto by Arvid Stridh

Jo Nesbo has lightened my long, flu-ridden winter. I received 7 of his Harry Hole detective novels for Christmas and his thriller The Headhunters.

Jo Nesbo is Norwegian and so his first name is not actually pronounced Joe but rather Yu, if you can imagine pursing your mouth Norwegian-style. His detective’s name, Harry Hole,  is an embarrassment to Harry when he goes to Australia in The Bat, so he tells people it is pronounced Holy. In Norwegian, it actually sounds more like Whoole, with a short ‘e’ sound accented at the end. Having said that, I have read it as plain Harry Hole in 5 novels and suffered no ill effects.

Nesbo’s CV implies he is a Renaissance man – musician, songwriter, economist and author. His band is called Di Dirre, which means, Those Guys, and is successful in Norway. He worked for many years as a stockbroker, but he doesn’t need to anymore. His latest novel The Phantom is a bestseller in England, Sweden and Germany. The Headhunters has been made into a movie and NBC is going to release the pilot of a series for I Am Victor. His novels have been translated into every conceivable language. The English translator is Don Bartlett.

Nesbo’s detective, Harry Hole works for the Oslo police department and, as one reviewer says of The Phantom, Oslo itself is like a second main character. All of the novels have its map at the front, so that the reader has some idea of where Harry is when he is wandering the streets, the names of which an English speaker will be unable to pronounce. If I were dropped off at Oslo’s central railway station, I could find my way to police headquarters at this point.

Nesbo regards Harry as quintessentially Norwegian – a man of few words with a dark sense of humour who prefers to work alone. Harry doesn’t care much what rules he breaks and tends to disregard his superiors when they make rules to rein him in. He is not, to use Nesbo’s words, a moral superman. Far from it. His work has all but destroyed him. There was that car accident in which his young assistant died. The question of who was driving haunts Harry. And two other partners have been murdered. Harry  deals with the ghosts that visit him in nightmares by drinking. He easily outstrips Ian Rankin’s Rebus and Henning Mankell’s Wallender as a booze artist. And my spies tell me that he adds hard drugs to his addictions in The Phantom, which I have not yet read.

I don’t like stories about drunkenness. I find them tiresome, so I got impatient with The Bat when Harry, after a serious emotional blow, goes on a long bender. I was glad when he went back on the wagon, falling off only briefly from time to time.

Nesbo says that character is more important to him than story. Nevertheless, his books are carefully plotted and often take sudden unexpected turns. More than once I have been only two thirds of the way through and thought that the murderer had been uncovered. Then, lo and behold, something altogether new, and sometimes quite bizarre develops.

The main question Nesbo is trying to answer is whether Harry will make the right moral choice or more generally, whether characters will save their immortal soul. Nesbo has a gift of showing us the mind of his villains, at times, so we come to care about the state of their souls. And, at least in one case, Harry shows more mercy than vengeance.

There is an ongoing narrative of Harry’s life, professionally, in relation to his department and personally, in his relationship with Rakel and her son, Oleg. I read the books slightly out of order because I went by the date of publication of the English translation rather than the original Norwegian publication date. I would have preferred to read them in order. The person who assembled the collection for my Christmas gift, suggested I start with The Redbreast because The Bat, which was published earlier, is not, in her opinion, as strong. I can see her point.

I liked The Redeemer (2005) best so far because of the decisions Harry makes in it are unusual and satisfying to me. I liked The Red Breast (2000), which deals with the division in Norway during World War II, when some people, like Nesbo’s mother worked in the Resistance, and some like his father, fought for the Nazis and how this past impacts on neo-naziism in the present. Nemesis (2002) is about a bank robbery, which becomes a murder, or is it the other way around, and it has Nesbo’s trademark twists and turns. The Devil’s Star (2003) lead me to say as I finished it that it was the product of a diseased mind, by which I guess I meant that it was creepy. The Snowman (2007) is brilliantly plotted, but now snowmen as well as waterbeds creep me out. I am reading the stand-alone thriller (i.e. not a Harry Hole book) The Headhunters at present and I still have The Leopard as well as The Phantom on the shelf, waiting to be read.

Reading thrillers is itself an addiction and I can hardly wait to get back to Harry. Will he ever stop drinking?

Richard III: evil or good

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In a previous post, “Richard III: lost and found” (115journals.com), I described the recent discovery of the bones RIchard III who was killed by Henry Tudor in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Henry then became Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch in England, followed in turn, by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. The question I promised to address at the end of my previous post was whether Richard deserved the reputation that has come down to us, citing Shakespeare’s play, on the one hand, and Josephine Tey’s novel, The Daughter of Time, on the other.

Shakespeare’s play Richard III was probably produced in 1594, during Elizabeth’s reign, over 100 years after Richard’s death. The playwright drew on Holinshed’s history which in its turn drew on Thomas More’s account of events. More was solidly in the Tudor camp, having served both Henry VII and Henry VIII. In any case, according to Tey’s research, More did not actually write the history of Richard that is attributed to him, but rather re-copied in his own hand an account actually written by one John Morton, a participant in events. This re-copied account was found in More’s papers after his execution and published as his own work. The Tudors -namely Henry VIII- repaid More’s service by beheading him.

Josephine Tey’s novel, The Daughter of Time, was published in 1951 and is not the first debunking of the evil Richard legend, which held that he was a usurper of the throne, guilty of fratricide and regicide, and a man without honour who proposed to marry his own niece. Other writers – Buck in the 17th century, Walpole in the 18th and Markham in the 19th – also contradicted that legend. Indeed there is something called the Rickardian Society devoted to that same task since 1924.

I came to love Shakespeare’s play when I saw Alec Guiness play the lead at Stratford, Ontario as a teenager. It was a brilliant portrayal of a villain who rejoiced in his villainy. Like all school children I had learned that Richard was the boogeyman who had killed the poor little princes (Edward V and his younger brother) in the Tower of London and it didn’t occur to me that might not be true.

I’m not sure when I first read The Daughter of Time, but it would have been probably 15 years or more after it was first published. A few days ago, I loaded it onto my Kindle and read it for the 3rd time. It is just not possible, for me at any rate, to keep its complex ideas in my head. The daughter of time, by the way, is truth.

Shakespeare’s play begins with a long monologue by Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who was depicted by Guiness as hunchbacked and twisted, drabbly dressed with greasy hair sticking out from under a red cap. He begins by asserting that he was
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up –
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them –
And yet, so skilled is he at seduction that by the end of the scene, he has talked Anne Neville into marrying him despite the fact that she began by hating him. She has good reason: Richard has murdered her husband, the Prince Of Wales, and her father-in-law, the deposed king, Henry VI, to secure the throne for his brother. Richard carries on throughout the play murdering his way to the top. He kills his brother, Clarence, who is next in birth-order to Edward IV, and therefore, an obstacle to Richard’s inheriting the throne. He pins the murder on Edward thereby accelerating his illness and when Edward dies, he imprisons his sons in the Tower of London. He kills the nobles who support the child Edward V although he (Richard) has been appointed Regent to rule until Edward is of age. He kills his wife, Anne Neville in a plan to marry his niece, Elizabeth. Then, infamously, he hires James Tyrell to kill the little princes by smothering them. When Richard’s horse is shot out from under him at the Battle of Bosworth Field, Henry of Richmond finishes him off and becomes Henry VII, the first Tudor king. Shakespeare counted Queen Elizabeth, Henry’s grand daughter as the chief patron of his theatre company, plenty of reason to seize on the dramatic possibilities of Richard’s villainy.

Now, even before we turn to Tey’s refutation of these charges, it is worth noting that Richard’s hired hands are supposed to have dispatched his brother the Duke of Clarence by drowning him in a butt of Malmsey, that is a large barrel of wine. This was actually a Cockney expression indicating that Clarence died of drink, although, in actual fact, he was executed for treason.

Josphine Tey’s novel is constructed like a mystery. The detective, Grant is lying flat in a hospital bed recovering from injuries sustained while he was chasing a suspect. To pass the time, he is trying to solve the riddle of whether Richard deserved the reputation that Shakespeare hung on him. He has the help of a “research worker”, Brent Carradine, who looks things up at the British Museum. Those were the quaint old days when sitting in a library was the only way to do such research. By this time, Grant has figured out that More’s account was highly suspect and not even his own. Curiously, even the historians who castigate Richard, have to admit that he was devoted to Edward IV throughout his life and that he was an admirable administrator, an excellent general, and a brave soldier. Yet they also picture him as suddenly becoming willing to wade through blood to get to the throne, even though he is already safely ensconced there as the Regent. Grant and his researcher decide to focus not on such accounts, but on actual documents from the time – accounts, letters, decrees, court records, legislation.

It quickly becomes clear that  Richard’s rule of 18 months was not only orderly but progressive, the people being granted such things as the right to bail and freedom from intimidation as jurors. Richard dealt with those charged with treason in an even-handed way returning confiscated property, for example, to the family to be administered. In the light of future events, when the Lancasters and their Woodville allies rose against him, he would have been better to be a tyrant. Yet he seems to have been a decent fellow who was popular with the people.

The research In The Daughter of Time turns up information that, just as Richard is planning Edward V’s coronation, one Bishop Stillingham announces that he had presided over a marriage of Edward IV  to   another woman prior his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. As a result, Edward V is deemed illegitimate and the throne passes to Richard.

In the matter of the princes in the Tower, It is true that Richard sent them to live there. It was a royal residence at that time and to live there was not a punishment unless you were in the dungeons. The princes were not. They lived royally as their mother did once she came out of hiding and they were taught by their tutor. Their sisters attended events at Richard’s court and the mother, Elizabeth Woodville, accepted a pension from the man historians say is her sons’ murderer.

After he killed Richard, Henry VII moved to get an act of Attainder, declaring Richard was never entitled to be king, but in the posthumous charges, there is no mention that Richard has murdered his nephews. Indeed there is no mention of them again in any documents until James Tyrell is charged with their murders 20 years later and executed. True they have vanished. The documents that the research worker uncovers indicate that Tyrell is granted a general pardon by Henry in early June 1486 and another one a month later. What has he done during that time that makes the second pardon necessary? Shortly thereafter, Henry makes him Constable of Guisnes and Tyrell goes to live there near Calais. (England still had sovereignty over part of what is now France.)

Why would Henry want the princes dead? He has married their older sister and set about restoring her legitimacy, but if she is legitimate, so are her brothers and they have a much more lawful, hereditary claim to the throne than Henry. The researcher in Tey’s novel finds an abundance of evidence that Henry also eliminated anyone else who stood in Edward IV’s line, including Clarence’s son, whom Richard had made his own heir. Henry VIII carries on executing those who seem to threaten the Tudor claim to the throne.

Shakespeare’s Richard is a brilliant portrayal of an evil person who rejoices in his evil and his final end while tragic, is richly deserved. Tey’s Richard, the more historically accurate one, in my opinion, is an altogether more honourable fellow; moreover, apart from one shoulder being higher than the other, he does not seem to have been disfigured.  I regret that Richard’s reputation has been thus sullied for the past 500 years.

The Life of Pi and Spoilers

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As I said in my post on Downton Abbey, I never mind spoilers. Knowing how a story ends doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of it. Rather the opposite. But I know not everyone shares that point of view and, whereas, I didn’t actually say how season 3 of Downton Abbey is going to end (115journals.com), I am going to tell how The Life of Pi ends. Here be spoilers!

I read Yann Martell’s novel, The Life of Pi, shortly after it was published, probably  in 2002, the year it won the Man Booker prize. It wasn’t an easy book for me. I found the suspense hard to take: 227 days in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger! And the long sojourn on the island that turned carnivorous at night tired me out. But it was the ending that left me gobsmacked.

I was lured into seeing the movie by the main ad image – a young man in white at one end of a boat facing a huge tiger at the other (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454876/) – and the fact that it was directed by Ang Lee who had made Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And, I suppose, some chauvinism. Yann Martel is Canadian like me.

Pi of the title is Piscine Molitar Patel, a boy living in Pondicherry, a city in French India, who was named bizarrely after a swimming pool in France, and who was, naturally enough, known as Pissing by the other boys until he took matters into his own hands. He memorized pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, 3.14159 – , to many of its infinite digits and demonstrated his mastery while explaining to one class after another that henceforward, he was to be called Pi.

He spends his childhood, which apart from the teasing, seems idyllic, hanging around in his father’s small zoo and exploring the major religions, Hindu, Christian and Muslim. By the time political and economic changes uproot his family, he has practised all three. His family is en route to Canada on a Japanese ship, some of their animals in the hold, when the ship hits a vicious storm and sinks. Pi finds himself in a life boat with a zebra with a broken leg, an orangutan and a hyena. The hyena soon dispatches the zebra and the orangutan and has set its sights on Pi, when suddenly, a Bengal tiger rushes out from under the tarp and kills it.

What made me think that I was up to watching that action in 3D?

Of course it was very beautiful, even the underwater scenes when the storm was in full fury were beautiful. The more peaceful zoo scenes at the beginning were exquisite. The flowers practically tickled my nose. The tiger was just amazing, huge and vivid, but very loud and scarey. I felt a little like I had when I saw my first movie, The Wizard of Oz, when I was 6. I had to be taken to the restroom and assured it was just pretend.

In fact, we know from the beginning that Pi survives because middle-aged Pi is telling his story to a writer. Pi assures him that his story will make him (the writer) believe in God. Now this in one of those devices that doesn’t work well with me. It reminds me of Marlowe in Heart of Darkness saying that he is going to tell a story that will change the listeners. Just hearing about Kurtz and the evil he did up the Congo River will do the job. What the heck? I was a little more convinced when I read the critics who talked about cannibalism (the king must die sort) and after I saw it visually in Apocalypse Now. Mostly, I just say, “Okay, I believe you or I’ll suspend my disbelief.”

So Pi recounts how he conditioned the tiger- Richard Parker is his name- using a whistle and seasickness. Eventually, Richard Parker puts up with having Pi on the lifeboat and is glad of what Pi catches and feeds him. Pi, himself, eats canned biscuits from the well-stocked larder. The stay on the flesh-eating island seemed mercifully shortened in the film and eventually after 227 days, Pi and Richard Parker wash up on a beach in Mexico. Richard Parker walks off into the jungle without a parting glance, to Pi’s dismay.

While he is recovering in hospital, two investigators from the Japanese shipping company come to interview him to try to find out why the ship sank. He tells them his story. When they seem disbelieving, he tells them another story.

In this story, the ship’s nasty cook is on the lifeboat with Pi as well as a Japanese sailor with a broken leg and eventually Pi’s mother, Gita. The cook kills the wounded sailor and uses his flesh as bait and food. Then he kills Gita. Clearly, Pi is next and so Pi attacks the cook while he is sleeping and finishes him off.

The Japanese interpret the animal story as follows: the zebra is the sailor, the orangutan is Pi’s mother, the hyena is the cook, and the tiger? why of course, Pi himself or the savage part of him that made it possible to survive.

Pi asks which story they prefer and they reply the animal one.

My sister had asked me the same question a few weeks earlier, although she asked which one I believed. I made the same answer. But really, I meant only that I liked it better. In fact, it is much more likely that the other story was true.

Pi believed that in extremis, God answered his prayers and sent visions, schools of flying fish and edible islands, with nasty side-effects, to save him. It is a beautiful way to see things. And it may be true. It may be that an exterior divine force gets us through what the world throws at us. And/or it may be that we each have our inner Bengal tiger that roars fiercely to life when we are in dire straits.

http://screenrant.com/life-of-pi-movie-ending-spoilers/2/

The Fortunate Fall: a further exploration

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Recently, I posted “The Fortunate Fall: change the future in a blink” and that led me to think about the fortunate fall in general.

“Felix culpa”is the Latin for “happy fault” or fortunate fall has its origin in Roman Catholic theology. The fall of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the garden of Eden was interpreted theologically as the source of original sin, but good came out of this loss of innocence. Without it, humanity would not have the hope of redemption. In particular, according to the church, we would not have the salvation of Jesus Christ.

In Paradise Lost, the 17th century poem by John Milton, explores this idea  beginning:

Of Mans First Disobedience and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the world, and all our woe,
With Loss of Eden, til one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing heavenly Muse…

He and his Muse continue singing for 12 “books” and 200 pages in my barely worn, but 50 year-old, university text. First, of course, Satan has to revolt and refuse to submit to the will of God, falling with his host of rebel angels to land at last in the burning lake of hell. He consoles himself that
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
He gets his revenge by seducing Eve, convincing her to eat of the forbidden tree and she, of course, gives the apple to Adam.

In Book 12, Adam has a long conversation with the Archangel Michael before he is cast out to the east of Eden and learns more or less the whole history of humanity at least as the church sees it. Finally, Adam declares himself to be at peace, for something of great good will come out of his grievous error. He is about to be driven out of paradise by an angel bearing a flaming sword, but he seems quite convinced that, as Michael has told him, “thou shalt possess a Paradise within Thee, happier far”.

Juggling free will with the will of God proves to be an on-going theme in English literature. Theologians like St Augustine tell us that “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit evil to exist.”

That is one model for understanding the nature of life, but one which many of us may not find comes easily to us these days. Certainly, there is much evil in the world, much hardship and heartbreak. We struggle to come to terms with it. We cannot accept it as just random. We want to give our struggle with it meaning and significance.

Some of us conclude that we are paying karmic debt collected from deeds we have committed in this life or previous ones. This belief suggests that there is a natural law like gravity that makes it necessary to re-balance our moral selves by suffering what we have caused others to suffer, not as punishment, but as loving and necessary correction – a riff on the idea of “forgive them for they now not what they do”. Ah yes, now they do!

Another way to look at it is one that I prefer – at least at present. That is the idea that we are on a path of evolution here and what we are changing is our mind, our soul, our spirit. The hardship that we encounter is the instrument by which we progress. It is true that we can regress as well, but in general, our direction is a positive one. We are becoming more aware of oneness, for example, and connectedness. We are understanding that what we do as individuals affects others. We are becoming more empathetic. We are even beginning to see that God is not an autocratic, ancient of days who makes outrageous demands, but rather an indwelling loving essence. Which makes outrageous demands.

The poet Rumi uses the image of a tanner scouring the hide of an animal until it becomes a beautiful piece of leather to illustrate how the hardships of life render us more spiritual “Physically”, he says, “the world is grief, but within there are many kinds of laughing.”

Ruth Rendell’s The Saint Zita Society

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Ruth Rendell

Ruth Rendell, (aka Barbara Vine) the 82 year-old British novelist

Saint Zita, Ruth Rendell tells us, is the patron saint of servants. The Saint Zita Society is spearheaded by June, the 80 year-old companion to the Princess. June gets little or no respect and starts the society to improve working conditions on Hexam Place, an upscale London address. Attendance is never high, the chief draw being that meetings are held in the local pub, the Dugong. (You could look that word up in a myth dictionary.)

I would call it an ensemble novel because it has so many characters all more or less of equal importance. Only one of them, Rabia, the Muslim nursery maid to Thomas, a banker’s son, engages our sympathy. She has had a tragic history as mother and wife and she has attached herself to her charge with ferocity.

Two of the others fall into the doormat category: Thea, who rightly claims that she is not actually a servant, nonetheless, is admitted to the Society because she fulfills that role to her landlords, a gay couple planning a civil union ceremony and to the angry widow who lives in the first floor flat of the 3 flat house. She would qualify for sainthood herself if she wasn’t filled with furious resentment. The other pushover is Dr. Jefferson, Hexham’s resident paediatrician. The doctor does not, of course qualify as a member, nor do, the gay couple, the Princess or Lord and Lady Studley.

There are several drivers, Jimmy, Beacon and Henry, easily distinguishable by their differing morality and who they drive for – Dr. Jefferson, Mr Still and Lord Studly, respectively. They do not indulge in alcoholic beverages at the meetings, although some of them indulge in other vices on their own time.

Several people entertain the idea of marrying persons they do not love, but these plans don’t always pan out. In fact love gets a bad rap in this book, with the exception of Rabia’s love for baby Thomas.

There are those ready and willing to take advantage of the pliant nature of others, including the gay couple and the Still’s au pair, Montserrat, who lives in the Still’s house and collects a salary but apparently has no duties.

There are 2 nasty old girls, the afore-mentioned Mrs. Grieves and the Princess, although the Princess’s dog Gussie may have the inside edge on nastiness.

The novel is not a Whodunit nor even a Whydunit, nor even a Will-they catch-em. It’s inciting event is an accidental death, which gets mismanaged, so to say. There are, I hasten to add, additional, actual murders. A red-headed detective wanders ineffectually  into the drawing rooms and bedsits of Hexham Place. Nevertheless things get wrapped up nicely, including the St. Zita Society. No one is left out of this denouement. And there is a measure of what my history prof called natural justice in the end.

I read this book on my Kindle.

To e-Read or not to e-Read

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This week, I read another pronouncement by a Book Lover that he, bibliophile that he is, would never consider reading an e-book, he being Joe Queenan, who has written a memoir One for the Books. Robert Fulford, critic for the National Post calls the memoir “a funny, fractious and ecstatic book about his (Queenan’s) life as an obsessive reader.”

Queenan spends 2 hours a day reading and claims to have read 6,000 books since he was 7 when he began reading to escape his violent, alcoholic father and emotionally distant, manic-depressive mother.

Well, good for you, Joe, and la-dee-da. Who hasn’t? Who didn’t? And I swear I have already given away that number of read books while still retaining a couple thousand more. You can see Joe has rubbed me the wrong way and I haven’t read his book yet, but I intend to enjoy it nevertheless.

In addition, Fulford reports that Queenan refuses to read any book in which the character attends private school, including Catcher in the Rye, self-actualization books, books described as “luminous” and he considers To Kill a Mockingbird a historically suspect novel about Just the Nicest White Man Ever. That is not the end of the list of what he will not read.

Queenan enjoys the sensual experience of the book as object, the feel of it in his hands, the visual impression of print on paper, the smell, the memories evoked of where and when he got it.

Fulford, himself, recounts the 3 life rules he taught his daughters: 1. never fold down a page, 2. never leave a book open face down, 3. never leave the house without a book.

Once we have enjoyed the irony of the fact these are supposed to primary life rules, we can evaluate them. Number 3 is – it goes without saying – undeniably a prime directive. You can endure the interminable waits that transit companies, airlines, hospitals, doctors, and city hall throw at you with your mind buried in a book. Today I watched a young woman walking up from the main bus route reading every step of the way. And I have a friend who got a ticket for reading in a traffic jam. Well, they weren’t going anywhere!

Personally, I do not regard books as sacred. They are too important.

I do not turn down corners except in dire emergencies. Having said that, dire emergencies do arise, times when the bookmark has vanished and there are no available sales slips, transit tokens and certainly no dollar bills, here in the Great White North, to make do as markers. Since many of the mysteries I read are 3rd or 4th hand or more, I spend time straightening other people’s dog-ears. I would never dog-ear a library book nor would I underline or write in one and more than once, I have wanted to hunt down someone who did. Their comments are without exception puerile. (Look that up, desecrator!)

My own books are a different question. I write on the back flyleaf reminding myself of ideas that struck me as interesting and noting the page number. I generally don’t underline but I might note a word at the top of the page to help me find the idea later. Of course, I read in the bathtub, although not in the shower. Of course, I read at my solitary table at home and in restaurants. Of course jam gets involved and grease, but never ketchup. I hate ketchup.

Once my young daughter came home indignant that her school librarian had told her that never, never, under any circumstances, should she read, even her own books, in the tub or at the table. Daughter and I just shook our heads in pity: librarian was not a true reader.

A true reader is omnivorous and will find books wherever possible -in discard bins, big box bookstores, second hand stores in mouldy basements and, of course, in e-readers. Even Robert Fulford, Queenan’s reviewer, confesses that he read One for the Books on his Kindle.

I have an old Kindle that my sister, Georgia, gave me. She has its twin. Mine is still in her name, so whatever book she buys also downloads to mine and vice versa. I bought Lee Child’s new book A Wanted Man and she also downloaded it. She did wait until I had finished; otherwise, we would have got confused. It would have automatically gone to the last page of whoever had used it last. Note to Lee Child: if I had bought the hardcover, I would have loaned it to her.

I love the Kindle for that reason and because I can hear about a book and have it in my hands in seconds. (Full disclosure: I have also published an e-book Never Tell: recovered memories of a daughter of the Knights Templar. See 115journals.com) So if I am snowed in or too sick to go out, if I can’t get to sleep, if I need to consult a book I don’t have, I can find it easily on Amazon and download it. It all goes on Georgia’s charge card!

Apparently, it is now possible to download e-books from our library, but I haven’t got there yet.

I can’t write notes on the back flyleaf of an e-book. I can’t even keep a record of page numbers -there are no page numbers, just % of book read – and ideas, but I am dealing with 5 year-old technology and I’m betting other tablet users can. It is annoying to go back and search for a reference as I had to do when writing the post “Jack Reacher: a long way from Virginia”. But it was not impossible and was no doubt instrumental in building me new neural pathways, so necessary in one of such advanced years.