Best Reads of 2010, Part 2

Elizabeth Zelvin

Going down the list I started last week, here are more of my personal favorites and why.

I’ve admired and enjoyed SJ Rozan’s work since reading her Edgar winner, Winter and Night, which put her on the short list of writers whose work I went out and bought in toto after the first dose. Last year’s Shanghai Moon got a lot of praise and attention, and I enjoyed it, but the one I loved was the new one, On the Line (2010).

Rozan’s books alternate the first-person point of view of her two interconnected PI protagonists, Bill Smith and Lydia Chin. That’s alternating books, not alternating chapters. If you ask me which of the two is my favorite, I’d say Lydia Chin—spunky female protagonist, of course I love her. Rozan herself says she first created Bill Smith as the quintessential world-weary but honorable tough American PI, and that when she needed another one, she deliberately came up with his antithesis. Thinking of this, I was wondering what, if anything, made Bill special, why I wouldn’t find another tough-guy PI boring. On the Line reminded me.

Bill is tough, but it’s a purely functional toughness: he can turn on the violence when needed, but he doesn’t revel in it. He’s decent, sensitive, and very smart—a quality I prize in fictional characters when it’s accompanied by heart. The cleverness with which he unravels the villain’s clues is impressive. And his motive is impeccable: Lydia’s in trouble, and he really, really cares about her. I’ve been on Bill’s side all along in the potential romance between these two. Lydia has good cultural reasons for pushing him away: the parental pressure on Asian American young people not to diversify when it comes to love is authentic. But I’m a romantic, at least as a reader. I’ve been wanting Lydia, or rather, Rozan, to unbend and give poor Bill a break.

Rozan’s prose, which doesn’t waste a word or suffer a weak verb to live, has always been a delight. On the Line had this quality, and in addition, the writing struck me as less literary, more immediate, than in any of her previous work. This serves both the pace of the narrative and the tech aspect of the story, which I hardly know whether to call theme, setting, or texture. I hope it’s not a spoiler to say the requisite chase scene takes place on Twitter, a fresh and brilliant twist that I thoroughly enjoyed.

That’s the last of the 2010 novels that sank in deep enough to make my list. I love Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone, but I preferred Locked In (2009), which I read last January, to the more recent Coming Back. Like Lois McMaster Bujold in Cryoburn (see last week’s blog), Muller made sure longtime readers got a glimpse of all their favorite characters, but unlike Bujold, she didn’t pull it off in Coming Back. I found the new book slight, and I suspect readers new to Sharon and her family and friends wondered what all the fuss, ie Muller’s reputation, was about. Locked In, on the other hand, was a real mystery with a fresh plot device—McCone’s medical condition, in which she can think clearly but not move or speak—and plenty of opportunity to display this beloved character’s intelligence and determination.

Best Reads of 2010

Elizabeth Zelvin

This is the time when we get to tally up and share with others our favorite reads of the preceding year. This year, I started making my list way back in January 2010, when I was still reading a few of the highly praised mysteries of 2009. I’ve been adding to it and winnowing it throughout 2010, and I think I’ve distilled it to the handful of books I absolutely loved reading. In one case, I got the hardcover by a favorite author the day it was published, read it straight through, then turned back to the beginning and read the whole thing again with equal relish. In another, a book and author I came upon by chance, I thought it was so exceptional that I devoted a whole blog to it.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about readers in my years in the mystery community, it’s that every individual’s taste is different. You may hate the books I love, and vice versa. My own husband and I are yin and yang in this regard. Even with the narrow range of books that we may both pick up—a certain kind of high-quality historical and fantasy fiction—I get bored if the battles go on too long, while he gets bored if the relationships and feelings go on too long. (Same with movies, but that’s another story.) But my list is my list, and I want to write about why I think these particular books are so wonderful.

As I said, I wrote a whole blog about Michael Gruber’s The Book of Air and Shadows (2007), so I’ll repeat here only that it had all three elements of great novel writing: storytelling, writing, and characterization.

The same can be said of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Cryoburn (2010), the long-awaited new volume of the Vorkosigan saga, which I insist in including on my mystery list because one aspect of Bujold’s genius is the deft mixing of genres. Cryoburn is science fiction, mystery, galactic political thriller, and immensely satisfying character-driven novel all at once. Miles Vorkosigan and his family and friends are the kind of people readers like me fall in love with, wish they could meet and befriend, and hunger to hear more about. They are endearing, smart, and funny—intensely real, achingly delicious. I can read about characters like these till the cows come home, over and over.

Margaret Maron’s Christmas Mourning (2010), and her Judge Deborah Knott series in general, shares that characteristic, at a less intense and charismatic level, of endearing characters, of a world of family and friends that the reader would be delighted to belong to. Every time the Knotts sit around playing music, I wish I had been born into a family that did that. In this one, the mystery is neatly done and the personal elements enough to satisfy someone like me who (dare I admit this?) is really reading the book primarily for the relationships.

Also on my list is Sara Paretsky’s latest, Body Work (2010). Paretsky, just named a Grand Master of Mystery Writers of America and the chief founding mother of Sisters in Crime, writes a protagonist, V.I. Warshawski, who is a different kind of smart from either Miles Vorkosigan or Judge Deborah and a more abrasive kind of endearing. I have to reread Paretsky’s books just to make sure I can follow the more brainy aspects of the plot, which often have to do with business or politics. I don’t exactly long to know V.I. personally, but I care about her and the circle of friends and supporters she’s gathered around herself. I admire her doggedness—she’s as persistent as, hmm, Rocky, in coming back after a knockout—I like the way she cares about her mother’s memory (and those last ruby glasses, or are we down to one?), and I adore her overt feminism. In the case of this new book, after reading the beginning, I settled into this meaty read with a sigh of satisfaction. Yes! Paretsky is still at the height of her powers; neither the tight plotting nor the development of this installment of the series character arc is going to let me down.

That’s not the whole list—more another time. What’s on your Best of 2010 list, and why?

My favorite reads in other genres

Elizabeth Zelvin

While mystery makes up the bulk of my reading for pleasure, I do pick up books in other genres now and then. Some of them are even among my all-time favorites. Very few of them are literary fiction—been there, done that as an undergraduate English major many years ago. Even fewer are commercial fiction, much of which is plot driven and lacking in character development for my taste. I don’t read hard science fiction or straight romance. So what’s left? Character-driven novels with elements of fantasy, speculative fiction (a term I prefer to “science fiction” because it’s about the “what if” of storytelling rather than the hardware), historical fiction, and yes, mystery and romance. Genre benders. Brilliantly written genre benders about characters I want to take home with me—same as my criteria for mysteries.

At the top of my list is Lois McMaster Bujold, author of the Vorkosigan saga. The books take place in a galactic setting, but they focus on the conflict between a science-fiction kind of universe and a planet that has recently emerged from a low-tech Time of Isolation, complete with horses and a feudal aristocracy. The stories are engrossing (several are mysteries), the world-building impressive, wit and ideas and moral dilemmas abound. And the characters—oh, the characters! Miles Vorkosigan and his friends and family are as real to me as any fictional characters I’ve ever encountered. My favorite book (in all genres, including literary fiction and classics) is A Civil Campaign. Bujold crosses galactic space opera with comedy of manners and comes up with a complex, intensely satisfying, and laugh-out-loud funny read. She dedicates the book to Jane, Charlotte, Georgette, and Dorothy—and I think Austen, Bronte, Heyer, and Sayers, once they adjusted to the premises of the genre, would all love it.

Another wonderful writer who takes a science-fiction premise and embeds it in a low-tech world is Sharon Shinn, whose Samaria books I reread almost as often as Bujold’s. Samaria is a world where humans are protected and guided by angels who perform their intercessions with the god Jovah through glorious singing. The first book, Archangel, reads like fantasy. But as the series unfolds, the reader gradually learns that things on Samaria are not what they seem. Each book is a stand-alone with different protagonists. Each displays Shinn’s utter mastery of the arc of story and romance. The conflict and resolution is sheer perfection every time. And the characters, both human and angel, with their vivid and distinctive personalities, have very real flaws, virtues, and dilemmas.

Kate Elliott is another writer whose first series, the Jaran books, is my favorite. Again, she takes a galactic premise—in this case, humans have been conquered by a mysterious and powerful alien race and have to live as a subject people—and pits it against a freshly imagined horse culture on a world so primitive that the Jaran don’t even know that inhabited planets and space travel exist. There’s a heroic romance in the first book, Jaran, and the sequels follow its protagonists and add others. Elliott turned to other projects after the fourth book, so long ago that at least one subplot has become outdated (as Internet addiction has emerged in our present). But I wish she’d go back to the Jaran universe. That alien race is still a mystery.

This is Part I of a series, as there are other authors I’d love to talk about: Sheri S. Tepper, Diana Gabaldon, and Dorothy Dunnett, among others. Who are your favorite non-mystery authors and series, and why?

Reading for Romance

Elizabeth Zelvin

I don’t write romance, but I read for it. No, I’m not confessing to a secret taste for bodice rippers. I read mostly mystery and some carefully chosen fantasy, SF, and historical novels. But what most of my favorites have in common, regardless of genre, is fully realized, endearing characters and meaningful relationships, especially though not exclusively romantic ones.

Looking first at my favorite mystery series, let’s take Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone books. I love Sharon, but I’ve never fully bought her relationship, now marriage, with Hy Ripinsky. My pick among those books is Broken Promise Land, when Sharon’s assistant, Rae Kelleher, falls in love with Sharon’s brother-in-law, country star Ricky Savage. Some of it is told from Rae’s point of view, and for me it evokes that achingly emotional phenomenon, falling in love. Now let’s take Margaret Maron’s Judge Deborah Knott series. Like Sharon, Deborah makes a series of wrong choices before she finds a keeper. In her case, it’s a guy she’s known her whole life, Deputy Sheriff Dwight Bryant. And what a delicious twist it is that she lets her inner pragmatist insist she’s settling for a marriage of convenience, while Dwight conceals the fact that he’s been in love with her for years.

Sometimes an author fails to allow romance to triumph or draws the suspense out to my increasing frustration. I don’t think I’ve ever quite forgiven P.D. James for not letting Adam Dalgliesh get together with Cordelia Gray. And I wanted to shake Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, or perhaps her protagonist, Detective Inspector Bill Slider, for several books in a row as he shirked breaking with his irritating wife and committing to his delightful girlfriend.

Several years on the mystery lovers’ e-list DorothyL have taught me that I share my tastes across genres with quite a few other mystery readers. Even the ever-vigilant list moderators will allow members to post about Dorothy Dunnett and Diana Gabaldon. Both write mysteries, but it’s their more popular series, in both cases historicals with just a touch of woo-woo, that are so darn good. Dunnett’s Francis Crawford of Lymond and Gabaldon’s Jamie Fraser both figured prominently in a hugely enjoyable discussion on the list of which fictional characters DLers would happily go to bed with.

Tellingly, the list included Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan, who’s a terrific character and as much of a superhero as Lymond and Jamie, but not sexy and gorgeous like them. Miles is only four feet tall with a big head and a condition something like brittle bone disease—but he’s such a great guy that readers were ready to jump his bones. Virtually, of course. And it probably helps that we know how good he is in bed. The Vorkosigan books are science fiction by genre, though they often contain a mystery. My favorite, A Civil Campaign, does not. It doesn’t need one to carry the story: it’s the perfect cross between space opera and comedy of manners. And the romance between Miles and Ekaterin is very satisfying indeed. Bujold dedicates the book to Jane (Austen), Charlotte (Bronte), Dorothy (Sayers), and Georgette (Heyer), and I think she does her sources of inspiration proud.

Considering my tastes, you’d think I’d have a romance in my mystery, Death Will Get You Sober. But I don’t. My protagonist Bruce is too busy getting sober to fall in love, though he goes to bed once each with his ex-wife (whom readers will learn more about in a future book) and a witness. And if he did, both his sponsor and his best friend Jimmy would remind him that AA wisdom suggests no new relationships in the first year of sobriety. Bruce is one of those characters whose perch on the author’s shoulder is the driver’s seat. He won’t be hurried, and I can’t force him. In the second book, he has a romantic interlude, but it’s transitional for both partners. In the third, he’s attracted to a suspect, but it doesn’t work out. In book four, he meets someone who might become a girlfriend and a recurring character. But I don’t know for sure. He hasn’t told me yet.

So for now, I read for romance, but I don’t write it—yet.

Getting Lost in a Good Book

Elizabeth Zelvin

A few weeks back, Sandy Parshall used the expression “getting lost in a good book” in her blog post about the joys of suspenseful reading. It set off a train of association for me about how that happens and how it feels. As a mental health professional, I can tell you that the psychological phenomenon involved is dissociation. Getting lost in a book or movie, along with the long-distance driver’s road trance, is at the mild end of the same spectrum as dissociative identity disorder: the extreme condition that used to be called multiple personality. While it’s certainly not pathological, getting lost in a book produces the same effect of coming to with a jolt from a world that made the one you’re actually in vanish completely. There’s the same sense of having been somewhere else and having no idea how much time has passed.

Sandy also mentioned how sorry she is for people who miss this pleasure because they don’t read. A similar discussion was going on at the same time on DorothyL, triggered by some mystery writers’ experience of strangers—obviously not fans—who email or come up to them to announce that they only read non-fiction or that they only read the Bible. For me, it takes fiction—a story—to sweep me away that completely. My husband is a history buff and inveterate non-fiction reader. He’s always trying to involve me in his reading. He’ll chuckle aloud and say, “Listen to this!” as a preface to telling me some priceless tidbit about Napoleon or Frederick the Great. (When Death Will Get You Sober comes out, you’ll see I borrowed this trait for one of my characters.)

The standard answer to that or any other interruption in our house is, “Shush! I’m reading my bookie.” “Bookie” is our private baby talk for genre fiction, a novel on the light side of what the Brits call “a good read”—a story absorbing enough to sweep the reader away. It goes with teddy bears and cuddling up to read. My husband sometimes complains that it’s not fair to shush him, since I don’t always refrain from talking to him while he’s reading. But the truth is that he’s more willing to be interrupted when he’s reading serious history or something dense and weighty like a book by John McPhee. He’s absorbed, but not to the point of dissociation. I’ve noticed that when he lightens up enough to pick up a mystery, science fiction, or fantasy, he too says, “Shush! I’m reading my bookie.”

What lures me most intensely into an alternate world? While I read more mysteries than anything else, they were not the first books that sprang to mind. Historical fiction with endearing characters and a dollop of romance and fantasy can do it. I remember the pleasure of reading Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander for the first time. It utterly pulled me into the 18th century. Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond books take me just as thoroughly to the 16th century. Come to think of it, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan series, set in the galactic future and on an old-fashioned planet within it, does the same. The common elements are lovability and a touch of romance, combined with highly intelligent writing, brilliant characterization, and superb storytelling. Of course, there’s plenty of that in mystery too. I don’t want to come back from Judge Deborah Knott’s North Carolina or Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes’s England (and points east and west) either. So shush! I’m reading my bookie.