The book is the first in the Archy McNally series. Archy is the one-man investigations unit in his father’s law firm, handling discreet investigations for Palm Beach’s wealthy locals. One of their clients has been robbed, but she doesn’t want everyone to know. She just wants her stamps back.
What I Liked
Archy is a great character, and I love his interactions with the various members of high society or their associated entourages. Many people COULD have stolen the stamps, we see a red herring or two plus lots of little sub-stories to confuse the narrative. Most of the sub-characters are decent, if not extensively developed. And we get to meet his on-again / off-again paramour, Consuela in addition to the client’s self-absorbed children and a gay family friend.
What I Didn’t Like
There’s a red herring early on, yet nobody seems to follow up on it hardly. They should at least be ruling it out. Or talking to the people to see if they have any insights, but nada. Secondly, there’s an odd love triangle in the middle with very little to argue for the supposed outcome they all agree is the reality. And third, a giant “surprise” at the end is just simply odd. It should challenge Archy’s sense of morality, but he blithely brushes it off. It’s consistent with some of his behaviour, but it would have been nice to see him wrestle with it.
I mentioned that I restarted C&P for the fourth time (third time from the absolute beginning, hmm, that means it was likely my fifth time reading, depending on how I count, but I digress). I just pressed my way through two really interesting scenes, one where he gets a letter from his mother, and a second while he is out walking while thinking about the letter. Needless to say, since I’m talking about the plot…spoiler alert!
For the letter, it is fascinating to see the stream of consciousness of another person (the mother) trying to explain what has happened in her daughter’s life (his sister). They have been sending him money as the male in the family and he was struggling, even though they themselves don’t have much. His sister was working in a house, the husband made a serious pass at her which was declined, the wife found out and blamed the girl, huge scandal for several weeks, and then the truth came out — with the wife realizing it was all the husband, the girl had resisted repeatedly and was not encouraging him but had no other job to go to, so couldn’t just quit, etc. The beauty of the letter is unrivalled. It has nuggets galore to think about and ponder…how the mother describes the daughter’s new suitor who has proposed marriage, the idea of the would-be husband that it is better to have a wife who will see the marriage as a saving act to rescue her from poverty rather than a wife who takes him for granted (there are TONS of refs to power imbalances in the letter, with assumptions all around), how the sister has reacted, etc.
And then while he’s walking, we get to see HIS interpretation or almost translation of what his mother has said. His mother and sister are happy, but he suspects it is all terrible, and should be stopped. The man’s designs, the family’s need, it is all a tragedy, and he should be the hero, not the new husband. Again, entirely in his head as he concocts huge scenarios based on the flimsiest of lines in the letter.
But as he walks, he is distracted coming upon a young woman, a girl by his standards, around 16, who is clearly drunk and in a state of disarray for her clothing. He deduces that she has been fed liquor to become intoxicated and then raped (“deceived by a ruffian”), and she is still incredibly drunk, going on about how some quite forward man “wouldn’t let her alone”. She is practically passed out on a bench at one point. He wants to help her, and suspects another passerby of ill intent, that he will take advantage of her too. So he calls a cop, gives him money to help her get home, gets the police involved, accuses the other man of ill intent (a proxy perhaps for his own desires that man always suspects others of having), and then the woman leaves with the police in tow. At which point, the narrator starts to wonder if he should have gotten involved at all, and why did he give away money to help her when he needed it himself? He even yells at the police for getting involved. It’s a bit of a wild ride for a scene.
Yet what strikes me most about these two scenes is that from my previous reading, I had the timeline for them completely different in my mind. I estimated they took place after the titular “crime” that is still to come. This is the third time I’ve read this opening section (0-15%) and yet because of the fits and starts previously, I couldn’t even keep the order of events correct in the timeline. Odd, that.
Anyway, another 5% out of the way at lunch this week. Onward!
About 8 years ago, I think, I decided I wanted to read more of the classics of literature. Some were a little more accessible like Dracula; some were a little denser, like Crime and Punishment.
And generally speaking, somewhere around age 42 or 43, I finally turned the page so to speak on my reading habits, where I recognized that life is too short to be reading books I don’t enjoy. Obviously, I’ll never read every book ever written, and my TBR pile just for mysteries will likely outlast me. But if I’m enjoying it, I do tend to stick with it to the end.
Crime and Punishment is challenging me. That’s not surprising, it challenges everyone. The length, the prose, the subject matter is not light reading for most. Add in the translation from Russian and well, it’s at the top of many people’s list of the most challenging book they have attempted. Not necessarily the most challenging book ever, just of the ones they’ve attempted. Many of the really challenging ones from classic lit are rarified items for anyone to attempt or finish. But C&P is enduring. Lots of people read it at university, some read it in high school. And it remains to this day a frequent if not actually popular choice.
On Attempt #1, perhaps 8 years ago, I managed to get about 20% of the way into it. Attempt #2, a few years later, I continued from there and got another 5% or so. Attempt #3, about 2 years ago, I made it in fits and starts all the way to about 60%.
It’s not a bad book, but a page-turner it is not. It is really slow to read, with most of the story happening in the narrator’s head. A lot of time is spent while he wanders around the city, doing other things, with a stream of consciousness (before the term existed) and conversation with himself being the main output on the page. It sounds terrible, but it’s amazingly well done. It would be hard for anyone to read without recognizing themself in the thought pattern, if not the situation. For example, in the opening chapter, you see a youngish man, maybe 30 or so, it’s hard to tell, who has been at university, worked for a while, and now dealing with poverty. Much of the first 40% of the book is dealing with urban poverty, in fact, and how one’s mind reacts to it. As the book opens, he is going to do something that he finds morally repulsive, and so he tells himself that he can’t really do it, he isn’t that low (yet!), and that it is merely an intellectual exercise. It’s how he protects his psyche from reality. It IS happening, he IS going to do it, he just hasn’t sunk that low yet.
I had hoped that I would be able to restart at the 60% mark where I left off. I had just finished a much simpler fantasy tome, and saw it on my Kindle, taunting me. I do enjoy it, and I do want to finish it; it’s just slow going. So I flipped through until I found my last spot, but as I went, I saw a few parts that I wouldn’t have remembered if I hadn’t been flipping. Much of the first 60% is lost to me, too much time has passed. Reluctantly, I restarted the book at the beginning during lunch yesterday. I skimmed through the commentary at the start, some of the author’s life, etc. And then restarted the story.
Reading it this time has a bit of a different feel to it. He has been isolated from people for some time, not only in terms of just avoiding people, but also a bit of illness and social distancing. Sound familiar? Anyway, he’s pawning some jewellery while contemplating a more serious crime. Shortly thereafter, he goes into a tavern, which he is not used to doing, and after a bit of drink, he starts to feel better. He craves some company, and he gets it in the form of a drunk civil servant who shares a tale of woe (civil servant, married a widowed woman with kids, lost his job due to drinking, family fell on very hard times with daughter turning to prostitution, but he gets his job back so everything is right with the world for a week until the takes all the money and runs off to the tavern, sells his good clothes when he runs out of money, and now fears going home).
It’s a little heavy-handed for the drunk’s tale, as he debates if he is a bad person or simply a weak person who has done bad things. But it was a bit interesting that I did the “quick” flip-through to see where I had left off, before deciding to restart at the beginning. In one of the scenes I flipped to, that same character shows up somewhere around the 50% mark, and I confess, I had no memory from reading it previously that it was the same character. Only by happenstance of having re-read the other scene just before starting again where you meet him for the first time that I realized it was the same person. It confirmed that I was right to restart, I just wasn’t tracking the people well enough.
I will try to read it at lunch more regularly, and make it through to the end this time. Fingers crossed. With the opening commentary and the first few chapters, I’m officially at 10%. If I can manage 3% a day for the next month? Hope springs eternal, perhaps.
This is part of the “First Encyclopedia” series focusing on Space. It is aimed at young readers up to early middle grade. The book is high on pictures and low on text, with about 200 words on the universe, galaxies, the solar system, the Sun, the Earth and Moon, Mercury/Venus/Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, space exploration, satellites, and the International Space Station.
What I Liked
The section on galaxies includes the standard prose and big pics of the Milky Way, but it also incudes a pic of the Milky Way above mountains (a night landscape) and three break-out pics showing irregular galaxies (which looks more like a globular cluster, to be honest), a spiral galaxy, and an elliptical galaxy. They look a little closer to what you might see through a telescope than a big Hubble-quality deep dive, which is great. The section on stars is nicely done in terms of showing colours, mentioning if hot or cold, and magnitude (without getting into actual definitions of magnitude). The individual planetary sections are fine, nothing special, although Jupiter is better done than the rest, with good detail on the bands and storms.
What I Didn’t Like
The solar system section is a bit basic in terms of the overall composition of the solar system from the Sun all the way out to dwarf planet Pluto. It does include the asteroid belt, but more on structure would enhance the learning. I also found the section on the Sun really basic. However, I was the most disappointed with the section on the Moon. It shows basic phases, with real photos (not just sketches or artwork), but the photos are relatively terrible considering the quality of everything else. I have better photos with my smartphone and scope. Some of the overviews are dated, of course, no way around that, but under space exploration, they note the earth-based Keck telescopes; yet some of the photos IN the book are from Hubble, and it isn’t covered? It is mentioned in passing as part of the Satellite section.
The Bottom Line
A bit basic, but better than most for balance with some good sections
