#6: R is for Ricochet, Sue Grafton

Huh, looking over my previous blogs, I see that I forgot to blog this one. (Hopefully I haven't forgotten any others.) Well, it's been at least a month since I finished it and I don't remember it terribly well...Kinsey is hired by an older gentleman to pick up his daughter from jail and watch over her the first few days and help her readjust. Okay, now that I'm thinking about it, it's coming back.

Anyway, can't go wrong with Sue Grafton. This is the third or fourth one I've read in the series -- I don't seek them out, and instead read them when they come to me. (My dad gave me this one; I bought another one in a used bookstore on the tiny island of Paros, Greece; etc.) But they're always enjoyable, and isn't that what matters?

#8: Killing Mr. Griffin, Lois Duncan

I finished this one last week, pretty quickly. It was good but not great - which is not so surprising, considering it was written for pre-teens. I was crazy about Lois Duncan's books when I was that age and was curious to see how I would feel about my childhood favorites now (I picked up Madeline L'Engel's A Ring of Endless Light and put it down just as quickly; I have high hopes for the Sweet Valley High series, the books that taught me about boyfriends and sex and bad girls, that I plan to pick up next).

Anyway, the most interesting thing was realizing how much my life had changed. Killing Mr. Griffin is set in Albuquerque, a city that was as foreign to me as Algiers when I was a kid (although perhaps just as dusty). I had no conception of it, I'm sure. And as an adult, I've lived in Santa Fe, just an hour north. It was just so strange to read the book and be able to picture the Sandias, knowing that as a kid I had no idea that one day I would be able to do that. No doubt this is more than Lois Duncan ever intended for her book, but it was an interesting trip down memory lane nonetheless. Moving on...

Next up: Raymond Khoury's The Sanctuary. I'm somewhere around page 50 right now. It's not great -- the language is a little overwrought -- but maybe it will go quickly and perhaps even improve.

#7: The Man Who was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton

I've had this book sitting on my shelf for some time; a long time, in fact, as it was recommended to me last summer. But I won't be passing the recommendation along. It was interesting -- Chesterton uses some imaginative imagery, but it's very much written in 1908-style (the year it was penned) and it's a bit like talking to you great-great aunt...for hours.

The premise of the book is fantastic: A young detective infiltrates a secret society of anarchists, each one who's taken the name of a day of the week. The detective becomes Thursday and has to unravel the big plot. But the book is really just this philosophical meditation and I figured out the twist - at least, I think it was supposed to be a twist - pretty easily.

But I have to praise such lines as these: "He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape." I love it, it just captures the image of the person so randomly and so uniquely.

The best part though, was the book itself. The physical book, I mean. The one I have from the library is a worn-out volume from 1958, and some past reader kindly left notes in it to help future comprehension. But even better, she clearly didn't love the book either and thoughtfully changed/crossed out certain lines. It made me laugh pretty hard. At the bottom of one page, she added this piece of dialogue "Now, do you see how "sneeky" girls can be? Next time let's watch our step!" And no, I did not misspell "sneaky" or add the quotes.

Next up: Curious about whether I would still like the books from my childhood, I picked up Lois Duncan's Killing Mr. Griffin.