I read all the time. Really. All the time. But I read the most during the twelve-hour overnight shift I work at my job at a residential school for mentally ill kids from Sunday night to Monday morning. Sometimes I watch DVDs, (I made it through the complete Sopranos and I'm working on Twin Peaks), but lately I've just felt like reading. So what was in my (heavy) backpack this week? For starters, Treating Personality Disorders in Children and Adolescents, which is waaaay too relevant to my work right now and which I'm slowly working my way through. It seems like psychiatrists are pretty eager to diagnose teenagers with, say, Borderline Personality Disorder (because really, what teenager doesn't seem to have BPD?) whereas there is no consensus on diagnosing young people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder or anything of the sort. That's probably good for kids overall, but it doesn't meet my particular needs at the moment.
I read a bit of Arnaldur Indridason's The Draining Lake, which is the latest in my series of Scandinavian/Icelandic crime novels. Indridason is one of my favorites--his Jar City was a great book with a creative plot which was also turned into an extremely atmospheric movie (I was really confused reading the book until I realized that I'd already seen the somewhat different movie). The Draining Lake seems to be (in my mind) the best kind of crime fiction--a novel that is both a detective procedural and legitimate historical fiction--in this case a study of the Cold War era in which Icelandic students studied in communist East Germany. Totally fascinating on all fronts.
I finished Johan Theorin's Echoes from the Dead, which is one of the most atmospheric works of Scandinavian crime fiction I've read in a while. This is a book I picked out without the help of my favorite local crime fiction guru, so I wasn't quite sure if it would meet my standards, but it exceeded them by far. It's an interesting premise--you know from the beginning that the missing child is not going to be found, and it turns out to be more the story of the local black sheep--but that story is fascinating, and Theorin's writing style is lovely, even in translation. My only minor complaint about the book is that everything wraps up a bit too neatly in the last five pages, but that flaw is endemic to the genre. Regardless, I'll be reading Theorin's next book...probably within the next week.
I also read almost the entirety of March Violets, the first in Philip Kerr's "Berlin Noir" trilogy. This was another pick without the help of my crime fiction guru, and it was a big leap for me, from Scandinavian crime fiction to German crime/historical fiction. I've always been fascinated by Wiemar and Nazi Germany, however, so it wasn't that much of a stretch. Kerr somehow manages to make feasible a scenario in which a PI totally opposed to the Third Reich is recruited by Goering himself. It's a different kind of historical fiction, one in which giants of history are shrunk to their proper size and held responsible for their all-too-human failings, which ultimately makes it more believable than one might originally anticipate. I'm looking forward to the next two novels in the trilogy, although I'm not sure if I'll buy more of Kerr's novel's after that.
Finally, Sunday night I was also carrying Walter Kirn's Up in the Air--the movie adaptation of which I had just seen and loved, and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, because try though I might, I can't let go of the nineteenth (or in this case early twentieth) century. I didn't read more than a few pages of either of these books, but it's always helpful to have a couple of totally different novels around when you're trying to stay awake from eleven p.m. to seven a.m. I'm hoping that Kirn's book is as good as the movie was, although I wonder if it might not suffer from the lack of George Clooney's deadpan humor, which I don't think I've ever given enough credit before. It might be one of those rare cases where the movie was better than the book, but I'll give it a try.
I just received a really exciting import in the mail, and I can't wait to make some headway in it. So for next time, more Philip Kerr, the next Theorin, the conclusion of the Indridason, and, ta dah, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the third and final Stieg Larsson novel.
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