THE SINGING SANDS

This was the last of Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant mysteries, published posthumously in 1952, and it ended up being my favorite—surpassing The Daughter of Time, which, although it appeals heavily to the historical nerd in me, is really just a playful curiosity in the Grant canon; the stakes are a lot higher here. Like Daughter, The Singing Sands has Grant on sick leave from his Scotland Yard job, but this time his illness is mental, not physical: he’s had a nervous breakdown and is traveling to Scotland to recuperate at his cousin’s house when, naturally, he stumbles across a murder. Although he struggles not to get involved, of course he can’t resist the temptation to sleuth for long. I’m always a sucker for a reluctant hero, but Tey takes it farther than the usual “one final heist” trope. What’s interesting about this book is how very introspective it is; the real focus is on Grant’s emotional state, with the mystery existing primarily as his means of redemption—large portions of the story don’t relate directly to the crime-solving plot at all. Alan Grant is a complex, intelligent character, and it’s a pleasure to watch his mind at work. It’s pointless to mourn what might have been, but I can’t help wondering what would have happened to him if Elizabeth Mackintosh (Tey was a pen name) hadn’t died of cancer at age 55. I’m definitely sad to have come to the end of this series and Tey’s limited yet oh-so-pleasing oeuvre.

A SINGLE MAN

I saw the movie when it came out (yay, Colin Firth) and thought it was beautiful, but it never occurred to me to seek out the book it was based on until I was perusing the rare book exhibit at the Huntington Library (where we are members) a couple of months ago, and one of the rotating displays happened to feature the first page of Christopher Isherwood’s original manuscript. A and I stood there and read it, then turned to each other and said, “This is really good.” I promptly went home and put the book on hold at the library, and I was not disappointed. Both daring and restrained, transcendent and simple, this slim stream-of-consciousness story of a day in the life of George—a middle-aged British professor grieving the sudden death of his partner—is a singular achievement. Not only is it a milestone in gay literature, but it also captures its time and place so well (Southern California in the early 1960s) that I’m surprised it doesn’t appear more often alongside the usual suspects (Raymond Chandler, John Fante) on lists of great L.A. novels. Although the film admirably captures the tone of the book, I was surprised to find that the actual events varied significantly; director Tom Ford added a lot of original touches that are not strictly true to the book, but are so much in keeping with its sensibility that I almost can’t say which version I liked better (a rarity in comparing book-to-screen adaptations). Both are gorgeous, absorbing, and moving.

Here are the first two paragraphs that caught my attention at the Huntington that day:

Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognised I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it had expected to find itself; what’s called at home.

But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder; one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labelled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until—later or sooner—perhaps—no, not perhaps—quite certainly: It will come.

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

There was so much buzz about this book when it came out earlier this year that I assume you know all about it already, but just in case: Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old black working-class woman who died agonizingly of cervical cancer in Baltimore in 1951. Before her death, without her knowledge, doctors at Johns Hopkins took a sample of cancerous cells from her tumor and ended up using them as the source for the first-ever line of human cells that could survive and grow in a laboratory culture. Her cells, christened HeLa, spread across the globe, becoming the go-to resource for medical research, from testing the polio vaccine to being shot into space. For a long time, Lacks’s husband and children had no idea any of this was happening, and few members of the scientific community or the public knew the truth about where the cells came from. In her painstakingly researched book, Rebecca Skloot sets the record straight, providing the full story of Henrietta Lacks, her cells’ massive contributions to science, and her family’s struggle to discover and understand what really happened to their mother.

I tend to avoid trendy books, at least until the buzz dies down and I can get a better sense of their enduring value, mostly just to save myself some time—I would read almost every book I could get my hands on if given the opportunity, but life is only so long and I already have a to-be-read list that approaches 100 items, so I need to be judicious sometimes. Immortal Life sounded interesting to me, but so do a lot of nonfiction books, and then where do you stop? Luckily, I met someone at a party who had just listened to it as an audiobook and highly recommended it. Of course! This was the perfect solution for me, since I could still get the content without having to devote precious reading time to it. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a huge audiobook fan, but I do better with the nonfiction ones because I’m already conditioned to listening to factual content on NPR, and the books just feel like long news stories. And Immortal Life was an absolutely riveting listen, like a 10-hour episode of This American Life. I listened to it everywhere I drove for the next few weeks, not just on my daily commute but on my way to friends’ houses or while running errands. Lacks’s story is amazing, and Skloot tells it with intelligence, sensitivity, restraint, and grace, particularly as she details her interactions with the surviving members of the family and her rollercoaster friendship with Lacks’s daughter, Rebecca. The book is informative, entertaining, and moving, an addictive mixture of biography, medical history and ethics, science, race and class issues, and investigative reporting. I highly recommend it, whether in paper or audio form. It’s so good, it would have been well worth my precious reading time.

(As a trivial but amusing aside, I was surprised to learn, during a chapter on the history of cell culturing, that Bill Cosby’s “Chicken Heart” routine, which I listened to over and over again on the record player as a kid, was based on a real radio show about a chicken heart that ate New York City, which was in turn based on a real quack scientist who claimed to be keeping chicken heart cells alive in culture. You can’t make this stuff up, apparently.)

THE NIGHT BOOKMOBILE

Audrey Niffenegger is best known as the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife (which I love), but she’s also a visual artist who has written and illustrated several graphic novels. This one is more like a picture book for adults, clocking in at just 40 pages, with large full-color art and simple, spare text. The plot is both enchanting and haunting: a woman walking alone in Chicago at night stumbles across a bookmobile that contains every item she’s ever read, even cereal boxes (my favorite detail is that in the books she never finished, all the pages are blank after the point at which she stopped reading). In the morning, the bookmobile departs, but she’s become obsessed with it and spends the rest of her life searching for it. She encounters it only twice more over the course of many years, both times with life-changing results.

This story resonated deeply with me, as I assume it should for any dedicated book lover; it captures the fascinating power that books hold over those who read them—their pleasures (you are made of sterner stuff than I if you don’t think the night bookmobile sounds like the supercoolest thing ever), but also their perils (the prevailing tone is dark, particularly the ending). The book took about 10 minutes to read, but its spooky loveliness will stay with me for a long time. I was excited to read in the afterword that Niffenegger plans to make it the first volume of a larger project called “The Library.”

THE PENDERWICKS AT POINT MOUETTE

As I’ve mentioned in passing before, I loved Jeanne Birdsall’s two previous Penderwicks books, The Penderwicks and The Penderwicks on Gardham Street, and this one was every bit as adorable. Cozy but not cloying, old-fashioned without being out-of-touch, and gentle but never boring, all the stories about the smart, lively, prickly, closely knit Penderwick sisters are instant classics. I want to load this description with words like “sweet” and “cute” and “adorable,” but don’t get the wrong idea; there’s nothing forced or precious here. As lovable as they are, the Penderwicks are realistic characters: intellectual but not overly precocious, just as interested in soccer as in books, quirky but not neurotic, nice but not saintly…and sometimes downright cranky. In this installment, watchful eldest sister Rosalind departs for a much-needed vacation from her duties, leaving hot-tempered Skye as the reluctant and often frantic OAP (Oldest Available Penderwick) as she and her two younger sisters—dreamy writer Jane and shy little Batty, who quite frankly steals any scene in which she appears—their friend Jeffrey, and their aunt Claire head up to a cottage on the coast of Maine. This book combines two of my favorite kid’s-book tropes, the Warm Large Family and the Idyllic Summer Vacation, into a very unique, funny, and even moving tale. I’ve read that Birdsall has planned this as a five-book series, and although I’m thrilled that there are two new Penderwicks books in my future, part of me is thinking, Only five? I could quite happily read about the Penderwicks until they are old and gray.

DIRK GENTLY’S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY

I’ve loved The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels since high school, so I’m not sure why it never occurred to me to check out any other books Douglas Adams may have written until I saw Dirk Gently mentioned in glowing terms at Bookshelves of Doom. And, duh, I really liked it—as of course I would, since it involves both time travel and a quirky private detective, two of my favorite literary elements, handled with Adams’s signature wit. (There are also ghosts, cats, pizza, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to sweeten the deal.) It will take repeated readings for Dirk Gently to rival Hitchhiker’s Guide in my affections, but with a book this fun, the prospect is hardly a chore. In the meantime, I’ve laid hold of the sequel, and I’m crossing my fingers that the forthcoming BBC show will be a worthy adaptation...and comes to the U.S. soon.

SWIMMING IN THE STENO POOL

Given its subtitle, A Retro Guide to Making It in the Office, and its cheeky vintage-art cover, one might be forgiven for assuming that is just another one of the heaps of lightweight hipster nostalgia books that began to flood the market in the early 2000s, when reviving/celebrating/satirizing midcentury culture and design became all the rage. That is, if one didn’t happen to know that Lynn Peril is one of the sharpest, wittiest feminist cultural historians around. As the author of the sadly defunct zine Mystery Date, the books Pink Think and College Girls, and the “Museum of Femorabilia” column in Bust magazine, she specializes in examining the ways in which women’s identities were portrayed and constructed through pop culture—advertising, advice books, etc.—throughout the twentieth century. She continues this effort in Steno Pool, exploring the history of that much maligned, celebrated, and even fetishized figure, the secretary: a topic near to her heart because, it turns out, she is one.

I picked up this book mainly because I loved Peril’s previous two and it seemed like good retro fun. I was not surprised to be so interested and entertained, but I was a bit taken aback by how much it resonated with me. A history of secretaries is by proxy a partial history of women in the modern white-collar workforce (since it was one of the few jobs outside the home that was socially acceptable for women—at least, single women; there is an entire chapter on the additional obstacles, including outright firing, faced by working married women—and remains female-dominated today), and as an office worker myself, I connected with it quite personally. The story is both empowering (working girls, yay!) and depressing (sexism, boo!); even if you think you know it—typing and dictation, groping and harassment, the glass ceiling and making coffee—seeing it all laid out with Peril’s stringent analysis is informative. So much of the material she quotes might seem hilariously antiquated and irrelevant if she didn’t do such a good job of demonstrating how systematically it reflected complex social norms that still resonate today. I’ll resist launching a rant, but much of the book inspires a healthy sense of outrage, though it’s leavened by amusing factoids and Peril’s wry humor. This is a natural follow-up to College Girls and a good companion to one of my other favorite twentieth-century histories, Betsy Israel’s Bachelor Girls. Not to mention a great reminder of how fortunate I am to have a job that values me and doesn’t limit or discriminate against me, which is useful to think about when I’m dragging myself reluctantly out of bed on a Monday morning.

TROUBLING A STAR

In Madeleine L’Engle’s final Austin family book (which takes place during the school year directly following the momentous summer of A Ring of Endless Light but was published 14 years later), Vicky travels to Antarctica to visit Adam Eddington, who is working at a research station, and becomes embroiled in international intrigue. The setting is interesting and I especially like that L’Engle makes use of the fictional South American nation of Vespugia that she created for A Swiftly Tilting Planet, but overall I found it a bit dull. The story is mostly travelogue, without either the excitement of Arm of the Starfish or the coming-of-age introspection of The Moon by Night. The good-vs.-evil struggle feels low-stakes and tacked on, the conclusion unsatisfying, probably because Vicky has very little agency; she’s just on a tour, and the big climax is that she gets stranded on an iceberg by the bad guys and then…waits to be rescued by the good guys? I didn’t see much continuity between this Vicky and the passionate dreamer of A Ring of Endless Light, and it seemed especially weird that there was absolutely no reference whatsoever to recent discovery that she can communicate telepathically with dolphins. I’m just saying, if I discover I can talk to dolphins one summer, and I find myself on a boat in the Antarctic a few months later, I might try conversing with a seal or a whale or something, especially when in peril, but it doesn’t even cross Vicky’s mind. Devoid of that mystical wacky awesomeness, Troubling a Star feels flat.

MRS. AMES

Another one of the fab Bloomsbury Group vintage reprints, and this one by E.F. Benson, author of the fab Mapp & Lucia series. A match made in heaven? I think so! Mrs. Ames starts out seeming very familiar, set as it is in the small town of Riseborough, which the reader may be forgiven for confusing with Riseholme, the setting of the first two Lucia books. In Riseborough, as in Riseholme and Tilling, dwell a great many upper-middle-class people with too much time on their hands, and thus nothing better to do than to pry into the business of their neighbors and endlessly jockey for social supremacy. As always, Benson documents their infighting with affectionate but wicked wit; here’s my favorite line, the initial description of Mrs. Ames herself, the town’s queen bee:

In appearance she was like a small, good-looking toad in half-mourning; or, to state the comparison with greater precision, she was small for a woman, but good-looking for a toad.

In grand Luciaesque fashion, Mrs. Ames soon faces a contender to her throne, her younger, new-to-town cousin Mrs. Evans, and a series of competitive parties and other social maneuvers ensues. But in the Mapp & Lucia books, feelings (except perhaps jealousy and pride) rarely run very deeply, with romantic relationships absent, irrelevant, or considered downright gauche. Mrs. Ames ventures into more emotional territory when Mr. Ames becomes increasingly infatuated with Mrs. Evans, and Mrs. Ames finds she minds this very much. At first, the situation seems comical and harmless, as Mr. Ames makes a mild fool of himself and Mrs. Ames makes failed attempts to recapture his attention by dying her hair and using anti-wrinkle creams; there is nothing Benson does better than exploit the foibles of his characters to hilarious if uncomfortable effect, like an early-1900s version of The Office. But as the relationship between Mr. Ames and Mrs. Evans (who is bored and unfulfilled, “an unexploded shell, liable to blow to bits both itself and any who handled her”) grows more serious, Mrs. Ames finds herself reassessing both her marriage and her life. All comes right in the end, but there’s much more poignancy and self-discovery in this story (as well as an interesting semi-sympathetic, but occasionally derisive portrayal of the women’s suffrage movement) than the cover blurb led me to expect. (“A clever, laughable little satire in the author’s lightest and happiest mood,” said the Time Literary Supplement on its publication in 1912, which is either a severe case of missing the point completely or a reflection of the fact that Benson was best known for writing ghost stories, in comparison to which this is no doubt light and happy, before he started the Mapp & Lucia series 10 years later.)

There is more pathos and a sharper edge to the humor here, and I found the story moving, even sad. It’s not as charming and lovable as Mapp & Lucia, but it’s just as clever and entertaining, and a good demonstration of Benson’s range as a writer. I just wish I could find more books by him! My library only has some collections of his ghost stories, a few of his nonfiction works, and Dodo, the book that apparently first made him a sensation (it seems to be a darker satire about a ruthless social climber). I may have to check out Dodo by default, though I’d prefer something more cheerful.

I LOVE IT WHEN YOU TALK RETRO

As I predicted, I checked out another Ralph Keyes book on language, and also as predicted, it quickly verged on language-book exhaustion—or, possibly, this one wasn’t quite as good a read as Euphemania. Subtitled Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech, this one deals with what Keyes calls “retrotalk”: allusions to past phenomena that still exist as artifacts in our language today. It’s an interesting concept, one that was first introduced to me as a teenager when my much-younger cousin asked me why we say “roll down the window” and I realized he’d never seen a car without automatic windows (!), and which is increasingly a topic among my peers as we get older, especially for my friends who are college professors and repeatedly shocked by the pop-culture references their students don’t understand. And I certainly learned a lot from this book (although I can’t remember any examples off the top of my head), particularly about older and more obscure phrase origins.

However, my problem with it was twofold: (1) The book doesn’t flow as well as Euphemania; it contains less high-level analysis and so often reads like lists of words and their origins organized in paragraph form. Admittedly, Keyes acknowledges this in his introduction, noting that it can be dipped into rather than read straight through, but I was reading it straight through, and at times it felt scattershot and tedious. Part of the tedium also stemmed from the fact that (2) the book is so broad-focused that at times it laps over into simply being an elementary history of the United States. I know there are plenty of people who don’t know what Watergate or the Cuban missile crisis are, but couldn’t they just look it up online or in an encyclopedia? Do we really need to explain them here? Isn’t anything considered common knowledge anymore? I wish Keyes had focused on some of the more obscure concepts and left the basic ones alone. Keyes does argue that there are plenty of people who don’t know the basic ones, and that someday most people won’t remember them, the way there are already many people who don’t remember pay phones, but that doesn’t make it any less dull to read sections that amount to “once upon a time, there were these things called record players, and here is the associated terminology.” This book would make an excellent primer on cultural references for non-Americans, the young, and anyone else who’d like to brush up them (I know post-WWII history always got serious short shrift in my schooling; I happened to learn most of it from a childhood spent reading Doonesbury, my former job as an editor of middle-grade history books, and a personal fascination with the era), but to me it was only of mild interest.