The Jupiter Myth is yet another Marcus Didius Falco mystery,
and it follows directly upon The Body in the Bathhouse. That
book left Falco and his family in Britain; his wife’s uncle Hilaris is the Roman
procurator in Londinium, and the current book takes place while Falco and
company are visiting Hilaris prior to returning to Rome. All is well and
good, and then a crony of King Togidubnus turns up dead in
a Londinium wineshop. The crony wasn’t supposed to be in Londinium; he
wasn’t even supposed to be in Britain, having been banished by Togidubnus
some weeks prior; but he and the king grew up together, and Togidubnus is
going to want to know who killed him. Falco having worked well with the
king in the past, he’s naturally dragooned to find out.

I don’t have much to say about this one, but I enjoyed it.

Which reminds me, I was on jury duty this week, and I feel cheated. I was told to call in on Sunday and see if they needed me to come in on Monday. They didn’t. They told me to call in on Monday evening.

Monday evening I called in and was told to call in on Tuesday.

Tuesday evening I called in and was told to call in on Wednesday.

Wednesday evening I called in and was told to be at the Jury Assembly Room on the fifth floor of what used to be called the Criminal Courts Building at 7:45 AM.

I was there at 7:35 AM; I’m like that. I sat outside the Jury Assembly Room until they opened it up, reading Mad Hatter’s Holiday by Peter Lovesey. When they opened the doors I went in, found a comfortable sit, and continued reading. They had the usual orientation song and dance, with a certain amount of paperwork, and I finished the book. I took Nevil Shute’s Lonely Road out of my backpack and continued reading. They called for a panel; it was pre-qualified for a 20 day trial. JPL only pays for 10 days, so I knew they weren’t even going to call my name.

Eventually it was lunch time. I took out my lunch, and continued to read while eating it. (They gave us a break for lunch, but walking around downtown Los Angeles by myself isn’t my idea of a good time.)

About halfway through the afternoon I finished Lonely Road (a real tear-jerker) and began reading Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde. They called another panel around 3:30; I wasn’t called, and went on reading. Around 4:15, they let us go home. That was it. We were done. Maybe they’d summon us next year.

Now, it’s nice that I don’t need to drive downtown any more. And I’ve certainly got more than enough to get done without missing work for a week or two. But if you’ve read this far I’m sure you’ll agree that it was a dead loss as from a blogging point-of-view. Oh, well.

We’ve had something of a trifecta this evening; our three older kids have all whoopsed their cookies at least once. Amazingly, it’s not from eating too much candy either. Mary’s not likely to have any trouble, but I’m concerned that Jane and I might soon make it five of a kind.

And here I was hoping for a quiet weekend….

Lileks’ previous book, The Gallery of Regrettable Food, nearly
caused me to disgrace myself in a public bookstore. When I heard that
Lileks’ next book (an examination of the most egregious interior design
of the 1970’s) was available, I made for the closest bookstore eftsoons
and right speedily.

And I brought it home, and read it, and laughed far too much, according to
Jane. So later on we sat down together and leafed through it, and we
both laughed too much.

Lileks’ basic shtick, if you’re not familiar with it, is to take
day-to-day images from past decades and ask, “What were they thinking?”
A lot of fun comes in the way he answers that question. You can see it
at work on his website; dig down
until you find the Gallery of Regrettable Food pages for a sample.

Anyway, he’s in fine form here, and I’d honestly like to quote large
swaths of the text to you. It wouldn’t be fair to do that, though, so
I’ll settle for descriptions of three living rooms:

If you had a persistent rash, this would be a good room;
you’d look right at home.

Said of a room where the couch, the wallpaper, and the
drapes all have the same extremely busy pattern: Surrounded and
outgunned, the lamp and the pillow held out as long as they could.

Said of a room where everything was done in
Bright Primary Colors: This room was designed for a blind blues
singer, so that he could hear the furniture.

I’ll probably be giving away at least one copy of this book sometime in
December.

Our new daughter is getting bigger and more mobile and cuter and more interesting, and consequently is becoming more of threat to our older girl, who has begun engaging in a variety of interesting behaviors designed to get her equal time with Mommy and Daddy. The solution to that, of course, is to punish said behaviors–and give her a little extra TLC at other times.

So tonight I took Anne out on a date. We went to Carls, Jr., where she didn’t eat much of her food because she was too excited, and then we went to a local bookstore, where I got her a pink book with princesses in it. Four princesses, to be exact, each with her own wardrobe, color scheme, and accessories, and just enough of a plot to justify examining each of them in detail. Oddly, none of the princesses were named “Barbie”.

When my two boys were this age we came home with books like Diggers and Dumptrucks. I looked for Slippers and Shoes, but Dorling-Kindersley doesn’t publish anything like that. Pity.

I came home with a few gems for myself, too: James Lilek’s new book, Interior Desecrations, the second volume in the Complete Peanuts series, and two more of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels, of which more anon. I’ll give you a bit of preview, though: Lileks rocks.

It was just three-and-a-half years ago that I first made the acquaintance
of Marcus Didius Falco, informer-for-hire and occasional agent for
Emperor Vespasian. And you know how it is when you discover a new
author–you start looking for excuses to visit every bookstore in town
in hopes that they’ll have some volume you’ve not yet devoured.
By October of 2001 I’d read all eleven of the Falco books then available
(you can find the reviews on our Lindsey Davis page). And
then, sadly, I sat down to wait until the next book was published.

And here we are, precisely three years later, and finally, at long last,
amazingly, I have a new Marcus Didius Falco book to review. What
happened? Did Lindsey Davis take a sabbatical? Was she in a horrible
accident? Did I simply grow tired of good old Marcus? In fact, the
answer is “None of the above.”

The plain and simple truth is, the publisher did me wrong. Yes, it’s
entirely the fault of Mysterious Press that the Foothills have been
Falco-less for so long.

You know how it is when you walk into a bookstore and discover that
there’s a new book by a favorite author and you get excited and
then you realize that it’s a trade paperback and all the ones you’ve
bought to date have been mass-market paperbacks and you really don’t
want to spend the extra money just to get a trade paperback that won’t
fit on the shelf with the others and so you decide to wait until the
mass-marker edition comes out? And so you put the trade paperback down
and try to erase it from your mind so that you won’t pine unduly in the
meantime.

You know how that is? Sure, you do. It’s probably happened to you
a dozen or more times.

But what if the book in question is never published as a mass-market
paperback? What happens if the wily publisher discovers that Marco Didius
Falco sells just as well–or better!–in trade format, and just goes on
publishing new books in the series every so often, and only ever in trade
format? And then hides them away with the hardcovers so that (not being
one to buy murder mysteries in hardcover) you never see them again after
their initial release?

What happens is you go for three years without reading any of them, that’s
what happens. Until one day you stumble upon them, lurking shamelessly
in plain site with the hardcovers. And then you have to catch up.

That’s what happens. And it’s all the publishers fault.

(But what about the book, you ask? Oh, the book was great. I read it on
the way home from New Orleans, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Vespasian
sends Falco to Britain to see why a public building project is overrunning
its budget. And for reasons too complex to go into here, he’s
accompanied by his wife Helena, his sister Maia, his two daughters, their
ineffectual and snooty nursemaid, and Helena’s two brothers-in-law. A
foul time is had by all, especially by the older brother and the snooty
nursemaid, the murderer is caught, and all ends happily. More or less.)

So Jane and I went out on a date, as we sometimes do, and we went to a
bookstore as we usually do on a date, and we found a new Discworld novel
as we all too seldom do, and Jane got to drive home so I could start
reading it to her, as we invariably do when we find a new Discworld novel
at the bookstore whilst on a date.

As long time readers know, the city of Ankh-Morpork is ruled by the
Patrician, a (reasonably) benevolent despot named Lord Vetinari.
Lord Vetinari is a practical man; he’s willing to adopt unusual methods
to keep his city working smoothly. Early in his tenure, for example,
there was a terrible problem with thievery in Ankh-Morpork; Vetinari
retaliated by giving the previously shadowy Thieve’s Guild equal standing
with the other craft guilds–and then establishing an official schedule
of rates and fees. Pay your Thieve’s Guild fee regularly, and the
Thieve’s Guild will ensure that you remain untroubled by burglars while at
home or by thieves while out and about. They’d better, or the Patrician
will have words for them. Of course, the new scheme led to the near
destruction of Ankh-Morpork’s Night Watch, a situation that has required
a considerable amount of the Patrician’s time (and many of Pratchett’s
books) to put right.

In this book, Vetinari turns his attention to the telecommunications
industry, as it were. The Discworld’s most recent technological
development is the “klacks”, a kind of telegraph system based on optical
semaphores and line-of-sight relays by operators sitting in klacks
towers. In recent books it has even been possible to send klacks messages
all the way across the continent to the distant city of Genua, some
three-thousand miles away, via the towers of the Grand Trunk.

But the klacks is a newcomer to Ankh-Morpork; long before the waving
flags and flashing lights spread across the land there was the
Penny Post and the Ankh-Morpork Post Office. But the Post Office has
fallen on hard times; indeed, it’s been decades since the last mail
delivery. It’s time for that to change, decides Vetinari; it only
remains to find the right man to take on the job.

Enter the unfortunately named Moist von Lipwig. Moist is a con-man, and
a skillful one; it’s a sign of the improved status of the City Watch that
they were able to catch him at all–well, that and the sharp nose of
Lance-Constable Angua. But caught he has been, and Vetinari feels that a
fast-talking con-man is just what the Post Office needs to get back on its
feet. If Lipwig doesn’t want to take the job, of course, there’s always
the scaffold…and should he take the job and then decide to leave town
quietly, there’s always his “bodyguard,” a golem named Mr. Pipe, to fetch
him back.

Meanwhile, there’s something odd going on with the Grand Trunk. A new
company has taken it over, and suddenly it’s become much less reliable.
Line men having been dying with distressing regularity. And they say the
dead men’s names circulate forever in the overhead.

The book isn’t perfect; there’s at least one thread I wish Pratchett had
tied off neatly, and at one point there’s a catastrophe that works out a
little too conveniently for Mr. Lipwig. But on the whole, I’d say it
ranks up there with Pratchett’s best, and it’s definitely less serious
and more funny than the previous two Discworld novels,
Monstrous Regiment and Night Watch. So go read it.

This is a very odd book my sister gave me for my birthday, and as it’s
the first in a series I can see I’m going to have to find the sequels.

It’s sort of a murder mystery, and sort of a science fiction novel,
and sort of a thriller, and sort of a literary fantasy. It takes
place in an alternate universe where Literature is more highly
prized than in our own, a world where criminal fiends might reasonably
kidnap the original manuscript of, say, Charles Dickens’
Martin Chuzzlewit and hold it for ransom–and threaten
to kill the title character if their demands are not met.

Literary detective Thursday Next is detailed to find the Chuzzlewit
manuscript, and before she knows what’s what she’s entangled in
a web of intrigue surrounding general all-around-bad-guy
Acheron Hades, arch-criminal, seducer of college girls, and Thursday’s
one-time literature professor (she turned him down).

There’s a lot of high literary foolishness in this book, and a lot of
plain old ordinary foolishness as well, and I have to thank my sister
because it was a great way to be “unavoidably detained” for a few hours.
And I have to apologize to Craig Clarke, as he reviewed it for
Ex Libris Reviews
just last
February, and I didn’t go looking for it.

But I shall certainly go looking for its sequel,
Lost in a Good Book.

This interview with Neal Stephenson is worth reading even if you’re not a science fiction fan, if only for Stephenson’s take on the deep divide between genre and literary fiction (see question #2). Me, I’ll take Beowulf over Dante most days of the week.

I’m a fan of Lovesey’s Peter Diamond series, as is Deb English; but I’ve
recently discovered that Lovesey has also written a series
of mysteries set in Victorian England and involving a police sergeant
(later inspector) named Cribb. They are long out of print, at least here
in the United States, and I’d never seen any until a recent conference
brought me to New Orleans. The French Quarter has six or seven used book
shops, and I visited all but one of them (occult and new age stuff, not
my thing). And in those six or seven shops I located four of the Cribb
novels, of which this is the first.

The book’s a competently written mystery; had I been in the mood for a
mystery and picked it up at random, I’d not have been disappointed. But
Cribb isn’t particularly interesting, and Lovesey shows little of the
flair I’ve come to expect from his later books. (Great word, flair–I’m
not at all sure what it means in this context, except that Lovesey’s writing
has improved in the decades since 1970.)

The setting, on the other hand, is fascinating. It seems that footraces
of various kinds were popular in mid-Victorian England, and one kind in
particular–the Six-Day Go-As-You-Like, also known, gruesomely, as the
Six-Day Wobble. The rules are simple: the racers have six days to walk
or run as far as they can. That’s six contiguous 24-hour periods–there
are no mandated breaks. You can take a rest whenever you like, for as
long as you like, you can eat whatever you like (provided you have
someone to bring it to you), insecure in the knowledge that while you are
resting or eating that your competitors might still be wobbling along.

Six-Day Wobbles were usually held on the open road; this book concerns
a race held on a track in London’s Agricultural Hall. There are two
favorites, experienced “pedestrians” both, competing against each other
on an inner track, and a number of unproven riff-raff competing on the
outer track, and things look good for the race’s promoter until one of
the favorites collapses on the second day. Enter Sergeant Cribb and his
dogsbody Constable Thackery.

Bottom-line: not bad, and I’m quite curious to see if Cribb develops into
a more memorable character.