letters and sodas: booknotes

Once again, Emily Gravett slays me with the combination of cleverness plus rabbits. This book is amazing, from the endpapers on, and it’s full of so many smart and hilarious details. At its most basic level, the premise is simple: it’s a visual representation of Fibonacci’s Rabbit Problem. If you need a refresher, it’s nicely summed up like this by Dr Ron Knott:

Suppose a newly-born pair of rabbits, one male, one female, are put in a field. Rabbits are able to mate at the age of one month so that at the end of its second month a female can produce another pair of rabbits. Suppose that our rabbits never die and that the female always produces one new pair (one male, one female) every month from the second month on. The puzzle that Fibonacci posed was…

How many pairs will there be in one year?

Gravett isn’t just concerned about the numbers, though: she shows the rabbits themselves, a whole rabbit society stuck playing by Fibonacci’s rules (one of which is that no rabbits can leave the field) and what the consequences of rapid population growth are. But putting it that way doesn’t quite get across the playfulness of the whole thing. The book’s set up as a calendar, where each month is described as some variation on “The Rabbit Problem”—so January, with just one rabbit in the field (Gravett starts at the very beginning of Fibonacci’s sequence, rather than starting with two bunnies right away as described above) is “The Lonely Rabbit Problem.” February, with two rabbits, is “The Cold Rabbit Problem,” and so on. Throughout, the calendar is layered with art and hand-lettered words and more: February includes a list of “Ways to stay warm” (“Knit a sweater, Hop, Think warm thoughts, Snuggle up”); August includes a reminder to “Buy sunscreen.” And there are fold-out or pop-out elements, too: an invitation, a faux knitting pattern, a bunny-authored/edited newspaper, a cookbook full of rabbit-focused recipes involving carrots. And oh, the bunnies themselves. They’re wonderful: big-eyed, pink-nosed, hilariously expressive even when the field starts getting crowded.

And did I mention it’s really really funny? The faux knitting pattern (for an orange-and-white bunny-eared sweater) includes things like: “Tension: There will probably be a lot” and a list of abbreviations that includes things like “ht = have a cup of tea” in addition to the expected “k = knit” and “p = purl.” The rabbit newspaper includes an article on the problem of boredom plaguing the field, and says that “younger rabbits are taking up vandalism and gamboling to fill their days.” Gamboling! Ha!

Meanwhile, it’s January 14th, and this is the last of the three library books I’d had checked out since before December 31st. Which means that it’s now time to turn my attention to my own shelves, since I’m trying to stick to the rules of the TBR Double Dare between now and April. No more exceptions. Here goes!

Books that are “writerly” or self-consciously “literary” in certain ways really appeal to me, and part of what I enjoyed about Jamrach’s Menagerie is that writerly charm. First, there’s the prose: it’s lush, detailed, descriptive, full of place, of weather, of sound, of slants of light. It’s beautiful (though there are also, you should be warned, stretches where it’s vivid but unlovely, stomach-turning, even). Then there’s the self-consciousness of the narrative as story: it’s partly just that it’s narrated in the first person, but it’s more than that, too: Jaffy Brown, our narrator, is concerned with the process of telling his story, and also with what kind of a story it is, and what kind of a story life in general is, if one can generalize.

The first lines of the book are like a spell being cast, like a fairy tale, the kind of sentences that made me want to curl up and settle in and not move for a good long while. Jaffy starts his story thus: “I was born twice. First in a wooden room that jutted over the black water of the Thames, and then again eight years later in the Highway, when the tiger took me in his mouth and everything truly began” (2). (The crazy thing, by the way, is that this incredible image, an escaped tiger taking a boy in its mouth in a busy London road—and the boy living—is drawn from fact: I learned this from this post over at Buried in Print; the Doubleday American edition of the book unfortunately omits the Acknowledgments section that the Canongate UK edition apparently had.) So: we see Jaffy as a child, a poor boy in London in the latter half of the 1800s. We see the filth and industry of Bermondsey (the tanning factory, the sludgy river), but loveliness too: the “air over the river though was full of sound and rain”; a ship is “a vision of beauty: a great wonder, a tall and noble three-masted clipper bringing tea from India, bearing down upon the Pool of London, where a hundred ships lay resting like pure-bred horses getting groomed, renewed, readied, soothed and calmed for the great sea trial to come” (4). We see the tiger: Jaffy’s out running an errand one day when a tiger appears in the street. He pats its nose; it knocks him over and picks him up. The tiger’s owner, Charles Jamrach, frees Jaffy, cages the tiger, brings Jaffy home, smooths things over. He takes Jaffy to see the whole menagerie, when he’s up for it, then offers him a job. Jaffy works at the menagerie for several years: he’s good with the animals, and likes them, and likes their wildness.

Then comes greater adventure still: Jamrach is commissioned to acquire a “dragon” for a wealthy customer; Jaffy’s friend Tim, who works in Jamrach’s menagerie too, is invited to go along with Jamrach’s friend/associate Dan Rymer, who catches many of the exotic creatures Jamrach sells. Jaffy, of course, decides he’s got to go, too. And so they all ship out on a whaling ship the wealthy customer owns, Dan and Tim and Jaffy, Dan an experienced sailor and Tim and Jaffy learning. It’s a quest; it’s an adventure; everything is possibility: in the Azores, Jaffy sees the world that isn’t London, and realizes how much world there is: I loved this bit, the expansiveness of it:

I don’t have to go home, I thought. I can go anywhere. The world’s endless. I could live here. I could live anywhere. It doesn’t have to be the Highway and the river and Spoony’s and Meng’s. I could live on a mountain. In a jungle. Where it’s all flowers. Miles of distance and nothing sure and nothing the same. (82)

The ship makes its way to Indonesia; the dragon, it turns out, is a Komodo dragon, no fire-breathing thing but a beast to be reckoned with nevertheless. And then what started as an adventure turns into a survival story, or maybe a cautionary tale: “If there is anything to be learned from my story perhaps it is this: never go to sea with a madman,” says Jaffy, at one point (175). There are calamities; there’s a storm. Things get gruesome; things get desperate. Jaffy nearly goes mad, or does go mad, a bit; everyone does. But Jaffy makes it back to London—we know this from the start; he’s telling the story from London—and though he’s traumatized, he eventually finds himself a home, a place, a calling. And the story, or life? It’s everything, it’s a muddle, it’s random: “There are turnings and twistings, a tangle of wool that needs sorting out and winding into a ball, but I ain’t doing it. It’s broth, all sorts thrown in and floating, the things that don’t fit, lost things, offshoots” (284). It’s what you make, or don’t, or it’s what’s given, and what you make or don’t of that:

“A hand is dealt,” he said. “You take it”
I felt I ought to speak: “And that is my duty?”
“It is.” (278)

It’s May 1873, and Charles Lenox, now 42, is pretty settled as a member of Parliament, and not really an active detective any longer. When this book starts, he’s in Plymouth, about to set sail on a ship called the Lucy, on a trip with two purposes. Publicly, he’s traveling as an emissary from the Queen, and he’s going to Egypt to visit the Suez Canal and meet with the Ismail the Magnificent. But he has a covert mission, too, to meet up with a French informer to find out how much the French know about British intelligence activities in France (five British spies have recently been killed) and to learn if the French are moving towards starting a war. But the intrigue of Lenox’s trip starts well before he ever reaches Egypt: on his first night on board, the ship’s 2nd lieutenant is murdered. Naturally, Lenox finds himself acting as detective, trying to solve the crime as he tries, too, to learn his way around the ship and around naval life.

The Lucy, 200 feet long, with about 220 seamen and 25 officers on board, is a big enough boat, with room for clues and suspects a-plenty. But it’s also an enclosed space: evidence can be jettisoned from portholes, but all the men aboard are stuck aboard, making this a bit like a country-house mystery, except on water and in uniform. The combination of the boat’s novelty, to Lenox and the reader alike, plus the tenseness of its atmosphere after a murder, is pretty excellent, and makes this a satisfying read. I like, too, all the descriptions of the boat and the water and the sky: the last book by Charles Finch I read felt more plot-driven, while this one is back to feeling more atmospheric. There are passages like this, a description of the wardroom, where officers on board dine: it’s “a low-slung, long chamber at the stern of the ship with a row of very handsome curved windows, where lanterns swung gently from their moorings in the roof, casting a flickering light over the wineglasses and silver” (10). Or this, when Lenox first sees Port Said:

There were ships of every nation, Dutch flags, French ones, a dozen others, crowding the waters of the port. The air was black with steam, the docks frantic with action, and the sheer multitude of small craft on the water was overwhelming. In fact the water seemed more densely populated than the town. Men in skiffs went between all the larger ships, selling fresh fish and Egyptian delicacies. There were pleasure boats with prostitutes crowding their decks, official boats levying taxes and examining goods. (257)

I also quite liked the moments of charm and humor. There’s a brilliant game of Follow the Leader, an overnight storm that has all the sailors in surprisingly good moods, and some funny conversations that happen because Lenox doesn’t know a bowsprit from a bowline, so to speak. Lenox has left his former butler/current secretary, Graham, in London, but I love his assigned steward, a guy called McEwan who’s constantly munching on whatever food he can scrounge (a biscuit here, a chicken leg there) and always happily making Lenox eggs or toast and cup after cup of tea. One of the blurbs on the back cover of this book describes it as “Agatha Christie meets Patrick O’Brian,” which reminds me that I want to read some Patrick O’Brian—but not until after April 1! I’m glad that I put a hold on this at the library early enough for it to be an exception to my commitment to the TBR Double Dare.

Here it is, almost the end of the year. I may just read another book before the year’s out, but I doubt it, so here goes: I read 59 books this year—a number that includes a few picture books and also several kids’ books—which is less than I read last year, but I’m OK with that.

The breakdown:
Picture books: 3
Other kids’/YA books: 11
Fiction (for grown-ups): 33
Non-fiction: 6
Poetry: 6

Works in translation: 10

Favorites: The Cows by Lydia Davis. Seriously. So charming and smart. Nocturne by James Attlee, which was smart and blended the historical/cultural with the personal really nicely. Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier, who’s really funny and wonderfully enthusiastic. The whole “Melendy Quartet” by Elizabeth Enright—wonderful classic kids’ books that I somehow missed as a kid. White Teeth by Zadie Smith, which I’d been meaning to read for years and quite exceeded my expectations; really smart and more engaging than I’d thought it would be.

Re-reads: Just The Magicians by Lev Grossman, because I wanted to re-immerse myself in the book’s world before reading the sequel.

Books I expected to like way more than I actually did: The Lost Art of Walking, which was snarkier than I wanted it to be/full of lists that weren’t really that interesting/just not quite the book I wanted. Shopgirl, which I didn’t like nearly as much as I liked the movie.

In general: I had a whole bunch of single-author stretches this year, and I also read rather a lot of mysteries. In January I read Charles Finch’s first book featuring detective Charles Lenox, and in December I read the next three in that series. I read two of Alan Bradley’s mysteries featuring Flavia de Luce (though they were spaced out, one in April and the other in November). In June and July I read four consecutive Elizabeth Enright books. In August I didn’t read a single book that wasn’t either by Philip Pullman or by Lev Grossman. I’m not sure whether I was particularly in the mood for comfort reads this year or whether I just found myself picking up a lot of series and finishing them either because they were totally excellent (e.g. Enright) or because they were pretty good and I’m a completist (e.g. Finch)—probably a bit of both.

Coming up in 2012: As previously mentioned, I’m taking the TBR Double Dare Challenge. Between January 1 and April 1, I’m going to try to read books exclusively from my own shelves, with the exception of three already-checked-out library books I have waiting for me (a picture book by Emily Gravett called The Rabbit Problem, A Burial at Sea by Charles Finch, which is another of the Charles Lenox mysteries, and Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch, which was on the Booker shortlist). I don’t have super-specific reading plans or goals, but I think it’ll be a good thing.

Recent acquisitions: That picture at the top of this post shows the new books/book-ish things I acquired over my Christmas vacation in Georgia. I’ve wanted the Postcards from Penguin box set (one hundred postcards, each one a Penguin cover) since it came out, but wouldn’t have bought it for myself. My mom and I were on the checkout line at Anthropologie and I spotted it and excitedly pointed out; she asked if I wanted it, and she very nicely bought it for me. The rest of the books here are all thrift store/Goodwill finds: I hadn’t heard of Living Dolls (subtitle: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life) but it caught my eye: I’m always looking for interesting/smart non-fiction. Then there’s Netherland, which I’ve heard about in various places, I think most recently when Elizabeth gave it 5 stars on Goodreads. Next is Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, which may be too full of God and Catholicism for me, but we shall see: it’s a first edition hardcover and it was too cheap to pass up. Merton went to Columbia and was part of the same literary society I joined (though it was a frat back in his day, rather than being co-ed), and I’ve been mildly curious about this book since my freshman year in college. Last is Craig Thompson’s Carnet de Voyage, a travelogue in graphic novel format that I’ve been meaning to read for ages. The four books I bought cost less than $10: there is something to be said for thrift-store shopping in suburbia!

I forget where I heard about this book, which made the Caldecott Honor list in 1999, but it seemed like a pleasing winter-time picture book, perhaps especially given our not-very-snowy-yet winter this year: we had an early slushy snow Halloween weekend, but haven’t had any since. Snow is set in a gray-skied town with a big central square and a crooked skyline of narrow houses with leaning chimneys. The town has at least two bookshops (Mother Goose Books and More Books), and it is winter in the town: winter, and it’s going to snow. The radio says it’s not going to snow, and the television says it’s not going to snow, but one little boy with a dog sees the first flake and is sure it’ll turn into something that sticks. All the grown-ups disagree, as grown-ups do (“It’s nothing,” or “It’ll melt”), but the boy, frolicking in the square with his dog long after the grown-ups have gone inside, is right: snow!

(cover image courtesy of the Macmillan website, which also has a few interior pages for you to look at)

The illustrations in this book are what I like best about it: those higgledy-piggledy houses, the varying grays and blue-grays of the watercolor skies, and of course the snowflakes themselves, dotting the sky like stars and then like more than stars, in more places than just the sky. “All snowflakes know is snow, and snow, and snow,” the text says at one point, and there it is, the logic of winter, snow piling on the ground and on grown-ups’ hats and coats, snow transforming the town into something magic.

The book opens with a fact: “In 1996 less than half of all American high school students had ever used the Internet.” And then we meet Josh and Emma, two high school students (he’s a sophomore, she’s a junior.) They’re neighbors, always have been, and were best friends as kids, though over the past 6 months they haven’t really been talking. But Josh’s mom sends him over with an AOL CD-ROM that his family doesn’t want, and Emma, whose dad just bought her a computer, installs it.

(In May 1996, I was in 8th grade. We’d had Prodigy at home a few years earlier, circa 1994, and eventually we switched to AOL. Ah, Prodigy. Remember those random letter/number screennames that were clustered together? My mom was lpft15a; I was lpft15b; when you went into a chat room you picked a different handle and I think for a while I was knibbles, after one of the 6th grade class pet guinea pigs. And oh, AOL: my first screenname was iluvharvey, Harvey being my favorite horse at the barn where I took riding lessons. I had an online penpal in Wales: I forget how we started talking, but I still remember his name and I remember that he sent me a letter on hotel stationery once when he and his family were on vacation in NYC.)

But back to Josh and Emma: Emma installs AOL, logs on, and gets the expected “Welcome!” voice. But then something weird happens, though Emma doesn’t quite yet realize just how weird it is: A “bright light flashes across the screen. A small white box with a blue border pops up, asking me to re-enter my email and password” (9). When she does, everything freezes for a bit, but then she sees a new page: “It has a blue banner running across the top that says “Facebook.” A column down the center of the screen is labeled “News Feed” and under that are tiny photos of people I don’t recognize. Each photo is followed by a brief statement.” (ibid.) And then Emma sees … herself, thirty-something and married, Emma Nelson Jones. She freaks out, and asks Josh to come back over, and they look at the page together, trying to figure out what the heck it is. At first he thinks it’s a webpage Emma herself has made, some mockup of something for some school assignment, but she swears it’s not. So … what is it? Is it a prank? Or is it really, somehow, a website from the future?

And if it is a website from the future, what are Emma and Josh going to find out about themselves? As they keep looking at it, they realize that each day the future-selves they see are a bit different: Emma’s sure it’s the Butterfly Effect, tiny things she does each day building into ripples that change the future. If that’s true, then, can she cause bigger ripples to change her future more drastically? The glimpses she sees of herself at age thirty-one don’t make it seem like she’s too happy. What can she do to change that?

This book is totally fun, and a really quick read. It’s told in chapters alternating between Josh’s viewpoint and Emma’s, and it’s a mix of standard YA plot lines (school, parties, crushes) and the whole Facebook/future question. It’s sometimes a bit over-the-top in its scene-setting: within the first 10 pages we get references to Friends, scrunchies, Dave Matthews Band, the Macarena, and Alanis Morissette; at one point one guy says he wanted to get a beeper, but his dad won’t buy one for him because “he thinks only doctors and drug dealers need one” (98). OK, I get it, it’s 1996. But I liked the story and the characters enough to not really mind. And while the characters each learn various things about themselves and life, the lessons of the book (living in the present, figuring out who you are and what you want) weren’t too heavy-handed.

Sleight is disorienting at first: entering the world of the book means picking up its vocabulary, the vocabulary of an imagined form of art called sleight that’s part acrobatics, part dance, but something else entirely. One character, early in the book, says sleight is “beyond anything it may have come from. Or out of”: she goes on to say that “at several points during a sleight performance—you’ve got epiphany” (9). More concretely, sleight troupes, which all have nine women and three men, work with “architectures,” which are flexible frameworks—glass or fiberglass tubes strung together by fishing wire—shapes that encourage certain movements, shapes that link to other shapes in shifting forms. Sleight is about two sisters, both sleightists: Clef and Lark Scrye, who’ve been estranged for several years. Sleight is also about the art itself, and about a director named West who reunites the sisters to make his greatest work; by extension it’s about art in general, or maybe more about performance-based art in particular: it’s about bodies and space and discipline. It’s about more than that, too: ambition and motivation and desire, and art’s relation to its subject matter and its audience, and family, and connections between people. It’s sometimes almost-frustratingly abstract, not-entirely-articulated; it’s got touches of magic that never get explained away, or explained at all. But mostly it’s delicious and engrossing, and the kind of book I don’t want to say too much about. I like Clef and Lark, their resonances and differences. Here’s Clef, on why she performs:

I think I sleight because I always have. My mother sent my sister Lark and me, I guess for poise, and I was good. And when you are good and a girl at something, you stay with it—maybe for all the goodgirl words that come. Goodgirl words like do more, keep on, further—instead of the other goodgirl words—the if-you-are-you-will words—be nice and softer and you-don’t-like-fire-do-you? In sleight there was less of that so more of me, until there was less. (11)

And Lark, on why she stopped:

“I quit because I was good, and when you’re good and a girl at something, you should be suspicious.”
“Of what?”
“Of what part of yourself you didn’t know you were selling.” (92)

At one point in this book, the fourth of Charles Finch’s mysteries featuring amateur detective Charles Lenox, one character brings another a stack of magazines full of crime stories. “It’s what I always read when I’m sick,” he says; “Somehow having a fever makes them even more exciting.” (271) This is about how I feel about mysteries – perfect for when I’m either sick (I’ve been getting over a cold this week) or frazzled or distracted. I’ve been on a Charles Finch/Charles Lenox spree lately, though after this one I feel like I might be ready for a break before I start reading the next one. Not that this one’s a bad book: it was pretty exciting, and while some keys to the solution of the mystery were obvious quite early in the story, there’s enough that isn’t quite wrapped up until the end to keep things interesting. As with the other books, the setting of 1860s London is pretty pleasing, though I found this book more action-driven and less atmospheric than some of the others in this series.

So, the plot: Charles Lenox has just come back from his honeymoon and the fall session of Parliament is about to start. He thinks he’s ready to move away from detection to his new career in politics, but when a case comes his way, he ends up not being able to let it go. He’s sitting at home one day when an acquaintance who’s also in Parliament shows up: it’s a man named Ludo Starling, and he tells Lenox that Freddie Clarke, a 19-year-old footman in the Starling household, has been bludgeoned to death in an alley behind the house. He asks Lenox if he’ll take on the case; Lenox at first wavers but then says he’ll have a look. And then, just a day or two later, Starling tells Lenox not to bother, actually, because Scotland Yard has everything in hand. But Lenox won’t be put off that easily: he’s collaborated with the Yard in the past and would be happy to do that again, and by now his curiosity is piqued. When he and his apprentice go to have a look at the scene of the crime, they find that Clarke seems not to have been a typical footman. He’s been reading Hegel, for one thing, and he has a fancy tailored suit in his closet. So Lenox and his apprentice keep on investigating, despite repeated requests from the Starling family to drop the matter. There’s intrigue and danger and violence, an arrest and a false confession, and all of it’s enough to make Lenox wonder if detecting isn’t more his vocation than politics is, after all.

The prose is sometimes cheesy—with a little too much emphasis on intrigue and danger, like the sentences below—

Though Lenox had a day full of meetings tomorrow to look forward too, he felt a slight pang. Was this as close as he would get, from now on? What about the midnight chase and the hot trail? Were they left to Dallington now?
Little did Lenox know how involved he would soon become, and how close to home danger would strike. (36-37)

but I still had fun with this book, and am still pretty pleased with this series.

It’s Christmas, 1866, and Charles Lenox, amateur detective, is enjoying the holiday with his brother, his brother’s wife and children, and his own betrothed, Lady Jane Grey. But the next day, Lenox reads in the papers of two murders: Winston Carruthers, a journalist/newspaper editor for a conservative paper, has been killed, as has Simon Pierce, who writes for and edits a liberal newspaper. Carruthers, we see, has been working on some kind of exposé, and it seems clear that the crimes are somehow linked. Though Lenox has plenty to do—his brother has recently approached him about running for Parliament—the lure of a case proves irresistible. This is especially true because something seems fishy to Lenox: Scotland Yard quickly makes an arrest and says they’ve solved the case, but Lenox isn’t so sure: it seems to him that the murders must have been arranged by a very rich man, and the man who’s been arrested is a commoner. That commoner dies in prison, and Scotland Yard arrests a rich man eventually, too, but it still doesn’t seem right to Lenox, or to his apprentice, Dallington, or to one of his friends at the Yard itself.

The whole side plot in this book about Lenox campaigning for Parliament in this book was sometimes charming, but sometimes way too twee. There’s kind of a lot of Lenox thinking about how noble it would be to serve his country by being in Parliament, and there’s also a lot of Lenox meeting the good sturdy small-town folks of the (fictional) village of Stirrington, farmers and publicans and grain merchants and so on. I thought the mystery itself was better than the non-mystery parts of the story. While some plot developments surprised me, the identity of the man truly responsible for the Fleet Street Murders is clear to the reader quite early in the book, much earlier than Lenox himself figures it out, which I actually think is a fine approach: the question for the reader isn’t “who did it?”; instead, the reader has a series of questions (like: the question of motive, the question of when/how Lenox will figure it out, and the question of what other bits of the story will get fleshed out as Lenox ties things together).

The September Society is the sequel to A Beautiful Blue Death, which I wrote about here; like the first book, it’s set in Victorian England and features a wealthy amateur detective, Charles Lenox. Also like the first one, it’s sometimes a little clunky and over-explanatory—I’m thinking particularly of an aside on the Reform Act of 1832, and also things like this, about the British in India: one character (presumably lower in rank than the other) makes a crack about the other being “curious,” i.e. nosy, and then we get this: “In another place this might have sounded rude, but being white was a great equalizer in that country, and these men were too intimate to maintain entirely the ceremonies of respect and rank that defined the British” (2). But the book has its strengths, too: I quite like Lenox and his circle, and wanted him to succeed, and didn’t want to put the book down once I got into it.

The story is set mostly in 1866 in London and Oxford, with a prologue set in India nineteen years earlier, and the plot centers on a mysterious group of ex-military men who call themselves The September Society. Something happened in India nineteen years before the start of the story, and whatever it was is having an impact on current events. Lenox gets involved when George Payson, a student at Lincoln College, Oxford disappears: his mother goes to meet him for tea as she always does, runs into him a bit early, and arranges to meet him at a restaurant: but he never shows. And when she goes to his rooms again, she finds a dead cat, stabbed with a letter opener that belonged to her dead husband, who, as it turns out, served in India nineteen years before. She asks Lenox to investigate, and Lenox soon finds out that a close friend of Payson’s, Bill Dabney, is also missing. It seems like the two might have fled together, but it’s not immediately clear where or why.

There’s pleasure in watching Lenox unravel (or fail to unravel) the various clues, but there’s still more pleasure in the book’s descriptions of Oxford, where Lenox himself also went to school (and where the author, Charles Finch, also studied). It’s great to see Lenox revisiting familiar pubs and alleys and meadows (and of course, the Bodleian), and we’re treated to descriptive passages like this:

A number of long, shallow punts were covered and locked on the banks of the river, past their season until spring, and the famous willow trees had begun to scatter their leaves across the water. The yellowish light of morning appeared over the dreaming spires that Lenox knew so well—Tom Tower at Christ Church, the shining dome of the Radcliffe Camera, the ridged flutes rising from the towers of All Souls. (29)

Or this, about a pub:

It was a low-ceilinged place that dated to the 1300s. (Still leaving it a few hundred years shy of being the city’s oldest continuous drinking establishment.) Once it had been a strong-cider bar, and then briefly a pub called the Spotted Cow, but even to the oldest gents at the stile it had always been and would always be the Turf, hidden away from all but those who really knew Oxford. The wood on the walls was darkened by smoke and time, though the beams holding the roof up were freshly painted white. There was a bar in the front room—above it was the famous first menu of the Turf, a wooden plank with DUCK OR GROUSE written on it—and another in the back room, just by a staircase leading to the rooms above. (31)

The mystery itself strains credulity, a bit, and I couldn’t decide whether having Lenox run into Gerard Manley Hopkins in the library was ridiculous/awesome or just ridiculous, but still, I had fun with this. I’ve been a bit frazzled lately—December always means a lot of busyness at work for me, tying up loose ends before the Christmas break, and this year it’s been compounded by apartment-hunting and a fair amount of accompanying dread—and this was just the kind of light reading I was in the mood for this weekend.