Fractal Friday: Bubblegum

Book Review: The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld

New York City, 1909: Sigmund Freud has arrived, with Carl Jung in tow, to lecture at Clark University, which has sent budding psychoanalyst Stratham Younger to accompany its guest. Two sets of circumstances soon arise to dampen their enthusiasm. Someone starts attempting to sabotage not only the forthcoming English translation of Freud's work, but the entire standing of psychoanalysis. And someone is attacking beautiful young women.

The first victim is dead. The second is suffering the loss of both her voice and her memory. With Freud’s encouragement, Younger takes on Nora Acton as a patient and tries to uncover the memories repressed by her conscious mind. When the clues start pointing to one of the city’s most influential men, the analysts and the police alike will find a difficult job has become that much harder.

Between the time period, the setting, and the involvement of psychiatry, it’s impossible not to draw comparisons with The Alienist. Which is unfortunate, because I greatly preferred The Alienist.

Which is not to say that The Interpretation of Murder is a bad book. It has several good points, chief among them Detective Jimmy Littlemore. Dismissed by the coroner as an idiot, he does more work towards solving the case than all the shrinks combined. I liked him, and I liked watching him put the pieces together through hard work and simple logic. On the history of New York City and psychoanalysis it’s educational, which is a positive in my view even if it does read a bit like a textbook at times. (And even if, during my two years of high school psychology, I never thought much of psychoanalysis.) Younger, a Shakespeare fan, comes up with a new interpretation of Hamlet which has me itching to re-read the play. (No ... no ... must get TBR pile down to the top of the box first...) And the last 150 pages had me hooked.

The first 350 ... not so much. Younger's treatment of Nora is the only connection between the attacks and the analysts, yet the whole premise of the novel is to provide a fictional explanation for Freud’s dislike of America. It hops between too many viewpoints, including the omniscient history-lesson-dispensing one which seems to be talking from the present day. I didn’t warm up to any character other than Littlemore, and beyond intellectual curiosity didn’t much care about whodunnit. (The analysts were more concerned with the sabotage, and if multiple principle characters don’t care about something, why should the reader?)

And speaking of characters... I hate Rubenfeld’s way with women. There are only two of importance: Nora Acton is beautiful and neurotic, Clara Banwell is beautiful and manipulative. (In both cases, emphasis on the beautiful.) And that’s about the sum total of the characterisation of those two ladies. Not that the men were much better, but at least their stunning good looks - if they had any - weren’t described ad tedium. Or in the case of the attacks, ad nauseum. There are far too many adjectives lavished upon the beauty of the victims both during and after, and since the scenes aren’t from the perspective of any particular character, it feels as if it is the author who’s seeking to present these bound and tortured girls as objects of desire. The author being male just adds to the creepiness. If there had been much more of it, I couldn’t have continued reading.

Rating: C

Booking Through Thursday: Resolutions

Any New Year’s reading resolutions?

I have two:

1. Read more books than last year. I didn’t hit three figures last year, which by my standards is pretty pathetic.

2. Complete each and every reading challenge I sign up for.

Since my non-reading resolutions list includes “stop procrastinating” I might actually have a chance of success.

Teaser Tuesdays

TEASER TUESDAYS asks you to:

• Grab your current read.
  
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
  
• Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
  
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from - that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

“In my head it's perfect. We'll see how it flies on the ground.”

From Deliver Us from Evil by David Baldacci, p. 63.

New Year Wishes

Goodbye 2010, and hello 2011.

Normally this would be where I enumerate some worthy but overly-optimistic resolutions, like “review all books read” and “leave more comments”. Right now, though, there are just two things I want from 2011:

• For my aunt and her family in Rockhampton not to be flooded out when the Fitzroy River peaks.

• For my cousin and his family to have a home to go home to when the floodwaters recede enough for them to get back to Chinchilla.

When you have relatives facing natural disasters, fussing over books reviews seems a little trivial.

(Oh... and I would like no more huntsmen in my bedroom. I would say no more huntsmen anywhere near me ever again, but I think that really would be too optimistic.)

Edited to add: They’re all safe and dry!

I spotted this over at An Adventure in Reading complete with permission to borrow away. So I took the lazy option for my end-or-yer post and did exactly that!

Best Book: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows. Made me smile all the way through, and want to run off to an island somewhere.

Worst Book: The Quality of Mercy by Faye Kellerman. Heroine I wanted to slap? Check. Characters who made me wish I could disinfect my imagination? Check. Offensive portrayal of actual historical figure? Check. Distinct whiff of authorial axe-grinding? Check. Mental note to take it to second-hand book store at first opportunity? Check.

Most Disappointing Book: 2010 seems to have been my year for less-than-stellar reads. Most (or least) notable: White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi, The Pindar Diamond by Katie Hickman, and Rebels and Traitors by Lindsey Davis. Also, in a way, Into the Woods by Tana French. It is actually a good book; but I was so excited to discover that crime novel rarity - a male-female investigative pair who are just friends - that their decision to ruin a perfectly good working relationship by sleeping together sent the novel into a nosedive for me at that point.

Most Surprising Book: A Sense of the World by Jason Roberts. It’s a biography of James Holman, an adventurer who travelled all over the world in the early 1800s ... after going blind.

The Book Most Recommended to Others: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Best Series Discovered: Deanna Raybourn’s Lady Julia Grey series.

Favorite New Authors Discovered: Deanna Raybourn and Tana French. (Depsite the aforementioned nosedive.)

Most Hilarious Read: Notes from a Big Country by Bill Bryson.

Most Thrilling, Unputdownable Book: The Whole Truth by David Baldacci. I read most of it in one night because I HAD to find out what happened.

Most Anticipated Book: The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, The Dead Path by Stephen M. Irwin, and Guernsey again.

Favorite Cover: The Natural History of Unicorns by Chris Lavers.

Most Memorable Character: Nicolas Creel in The Whole Truth; everyone in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. (Can you tell how much I loved that book?)

Most Beautifully-Written Book: the Lambs of London by Peter Ackroyd.

Book That Had the Greatest Impact On You: I’m not really one for being affected by books. But Revolutions in the Earth by Stephen Baxter fuelled a stack of background for this year’s NaNo novel.

Book you Can't Believe you Waited Until 2010 to Read: Waverley by Sir Walter Scott. For someone who likes the classics I took a long time to get around to that one.

New Favorite Book Blog You Discovered: The Classics Circuit. Next year I must take part in one of their classics blog tours.

Favorite Review You Wrote: Not a great year for reviews ... okay, a pathetic year for reviews. Probably The Other Boleyn Girl was my favourite of the few.

Best Book Event You Participated in During 2010: Blog Post Bingo is always fun.

Best Bookish Discovery of 2010: Paradoxically, the discovery that reading fewer than 100 books in a year isn’t a total calamity.

New Author Challenge 2011

1 Jan - 31 Dec 2011

Woohoo! Literary Escapism is back up and I can sign up for that challenge I’ve been eyeing off. I seem to have encountered an unusually high rate of sub-par reads this year, so maybe trying some new things next year will improve matters.

(Or maybe not. It’s just occurred to me that most of those disappointments were authors I hadn’t read before.)

For reading challenges next year I’m working on the principle that it’s better to aim low and overshoot than aim high and fail (again...). So I’m going for 15 books by new-to-me authors in 2011. Not a terribly high proportion of my total reading, but non-fiction doesn’t count!