Audiobook Recommendation: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

You don't have to look far to find fabulously positive reviews of David Mitchell's 2010 novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. (If you buy the paperback edition, they're all over the cover and take up the first several pages of text.) The Guardian loved it, as did the New York Times (twice) and nearly every other major paper. The review that interested me most, though, was a very brief one, in AudioFile magazine, about the audiobook version. The first sentence is as follows: "This utterly original and wildly satisfying new novel gets such a dazzling performance here that you are torn between wanting to know how it ends and hoping it never does."

Well, I was intrigued! As it happens, I already owned a copy of Jacob de Zoet, thanks to my friend Derick, who sent me a copy earlier this summer. He'd borrowed Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten, years ago, and when he was housesitting here in January, he read what is supposed to be Mitchell's masterpiece, Cloud Atlas. My own history with Mitchell is mixed. I enjoyed Ghostwritten (read on the train from Varanasi to Delhi in 2002) but never made it through the first section of Cloud Atlas. I am determined to be more patient and try it again, though, especially after Jacob de Zoet (which, apparently in some circles, is considered lesser Mitchell.)

There are many other places to read about the plot and themes of this novel. The thumbnail version is that it's set at the turn of the 19th Century in Japan, where the tiny island of Dejima in the bay of Nagasaki is the only point of contact between Shogun Japan and the rest of the world. Dejima serves as a trading outpost between the Dutch East India Company and Japan, and the Dutch merchants who live there are confined to the island. Enter Jacob de Zoet, a pious and upright young clerk, come to make his fortune so he can return home and marry his sweetheart. At first, Jacob is prized for his honesty, and then not so much. Betrayed by the Chief Resident who at first welcomes his attempts to straighten out years of corrupt dealings, then rejects them when he begins to enjoy the fruits of corruption himself, Jacob is left on Dejima when the chief leaves, demoted and seemingly destined to serve as the whipping post for the weaselly colleague who was promoted above him. But during his time in Dejima, Jacob has fallen rather hopelessly in love with Aibagawa Orito, a midwife given special dispensation to study on Dejima with the Dutch Dr. Marinus. Orito is bright and talented but disfigured by a burn to her cheek, making her seemingly unmarriageable.

In the second section of the book, Jacob is nearly absent, as the focus shifts to a sinister mountain shrine/nunnery where Orito has been brought (against her will) after her father's death. The narration of the story shifts between an attempt to rescue Orito and life in the house of sisters at the shrine.

The third section of the book returns to Dejima but also to the British frigate Phoebus and to its gouty, mourning captain. (It was at this point that I felt like I'd been flung, briefly and happily, into a cousin of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels.)

My temptation is to natter happily on about the plot, but that's not the point of this. I have no doubt that I would have enjoyed reading the book version, but I loved listening to the audio book version. Fat historical novels, when narrated well, turn out to be intensely pleasurable as audio books. The length and breadth mean that you can settle into the story in a different way. I learned that with the Patrick O'Brian books and again with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Both Patrick Tull (Patrick O'Brian) and Simon Prebble ( Jonathan Strange) are wonderful narrators, and Jonathan Aris, much younger than either, is a fabulous successor to them. I will not quibble that all the Dutch residents have (various) British accents. That the accents are so well done and the narration so seamless is enough. Paula Wilcox narrates Orito's sections, also very, very well.

The book started a bit slowly (for me), and it takes some time to learn the lay of the land, with the plethora of characters--Dutch and Japanese both--to become familiar with. But I felt that I was in good hands with both narrators, and as the book progressed and the plot thickened, it became hard to stop listening. I handed the CDs off to my friend Darnell once I was done, and soon thereafter, I received an email from his wife, my friend Leanna, which said the following: "D was so taken up with finishing Jacob DeZ that he refused all conversation last night and retreated to his chair, where he sat with headphone clamped on, absolutely rapt."

I'm not sure that there's higher praise than that. As for me, it's been weeks since I finished, and I still find myself thinking about it. I think of the plot twists, but I also think of the melancholy but satisfying final pages when Mitchell wraps up his story in the only way the novel reasonably could have ended. I spent 19 hours listening to Jonathan Aris and Paula Wilcox tell me the story of Jacob de Zoet and Aibagawa Orito and the rest, and it still wasn't quite enough. Better, of course, to end wanting more, but a bit sad all the same.

For more on Jacob DeZoet and on David Mitchell, here are a few links:

An article about Mitchell in the New York Times Magazine shortly before Jacob de Zoet came out.

This review in The Millions was one of my favorites.

The Written Nerd is a new blog to me (and one, it turns out that is now defunct), but I quite enjoyed her review as well.

The Return of Corduroy Mansions!

Just a quickie here to report that the third installment of Alexander McCall Smith's Corduroy Mansions series--this one titled "A Conspiracy of Friends"--started THIS WEEK! The past two years, I didn't hear about it until it was well underway. This year, though, my plan is to listen to it as a true serial novel, 1 episode a day, 5 days a week until mid-December.

Of course, four episodes have been broadcast already and I haven't listened to any of them yet, but still. At least I only have 4 episodes to catch up on rather than 40.

On the main Corduroy Mansions page on the Telegraph website you can find links to the audio downloads as well as the page links, if you want to read rather than listen. (You can also download the episodes as podcasts on iTunes.) There's also an interview with Alexander McCall Smith and other Corduroy Mansions-related links.

I have to admit, I don't like Corduroy Mansions quite as much as I like the 44 Scotland Street series, if only because there's not a character quite as endearing as Bertie, the bedraggled 6 year old prodigy, nor as odious as Irene, Bertie's overbearing mother (though Oedipus Snark, the awful MP, comes close). Still, I love the idea of a serial novel and I love the idea of little snippets of a story to take me through the fall. And so Corduroy Mansions, book three, here I come.

p.s. I wrote about Corduroy Mansions, book one, in November 2008 and Corduroy Mansions, book two, in November 2009. I have to admit that it is only because I "liked" Corduroy Mansions on Facebook that I am writing about part three in September rather than in November. Facebook does have its uses, I'll admit. (I wouldn't have gotten so many happy birthday messages without it, for one!)

p.p.s. The book version of the first Corduroy Mansions book came out in the U.S. this summer and was reviewed in, among other places, The Washington Post, and on NPR.

A few things

So, it turns out that if I blog every day in May, it means I don't blog at all in July. Hmm.

I didn't mean to take a summer break, but I guess I did. It's not that I have a great excuse either, although I'd like to blame it on the heat and humidity sucking all coherent thought from my brain. The next post I'd planned to write was the second part of my summer reading series . . . except that I haven't read much this summer. I did listen to the two most recent Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes mysteries, The Language of Bees and The God of the Hive, as well as the very charming Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. I liked The God of the Hive more than The Language of Bees, but they are all part of one story, so you really need to read/listen to both. Just yesterday, I gave in to peer pressure--or popular reading pressure, or something--and began the audio book of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. (So far, so good.)

Meanwhile, I'm not sure what to do with all my previously ambitious summer reading plans, which have gone by the wayside for reasons I can't quite understand. Last summer, I was sick for most of my break and thus needed ample amounts of comfort reading--my summer reading consisted almost entirely of a re-read of the entire Harry Potter series and nearly all of Noel Streatfeild's "Shoes" books. This summer, I feel just fine, but all the books I'd lined up to read have remained unread. Still, I have a few more weeks before I go back to work, so there's still some time. A library copy of Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists, which received staggeringly positive reviews in the New York Times Book Review AND the daily NYT a few months ago, is now in my hands, so that's first on the list. I also have a library copy of Josh Kilmer-Purcell's The Bucolic Plague, which also received a good NYT review (especially the bit where the reviewer was laughing so hard while reading it on the train that her seatmate demanded that she read aloud the bit that was so funny). And Emily, just returned from a few weeks in the UK, is going to lend me her copy of One Day, which she devoured, she said, and which seems ideal summer reading for someone who hasn't read much this summer.

One thing I've done while not reading (and not cooking much of anything) is spend several days up at Lonesome Lake Hut, near Franconia, NH. (The photo above is a view of Franconia Ridge in the clouds from the hut.) Lonesome Lake is one of the 8 mountain huts run by the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC), which are run as "full-service" huts in the summer, meaning that guests can stay overnight and are fed breakfast and dinner. The huts are run by mostly college-age hut "croos," and many years ago, I aspired to be one. Alas, my hut career was cut short by a terribly timed broken leg (just days before I was supposed to head up to Mizpah Spring hut for the summer). My consolation prize, after a miserable summer, was getting to be the fall caretaker at Lonesome Lake. The hut is less than 2 miles from the road, making it a relatively easy hike for someone with a still gimpy leg. As the caretaker, I didn't have to cook for anyone, but I kept the hut tidy, greeted guests and attempted not to clock the guest who kept putting his feet in the oven with a cast iron frying pan. (Yes, it was cold, but still.)

This time, Alex, his friend Charlie Kellogg and I went in for about 48 hours, while the croo got to go off on a joint set of days off. (Usually, they go one at a time.) The hut was thankfully not full, and while there were moments of stress--the vast quantities of leftover lasagna, the sound of my pan of gingerbread hitting the floor--it was mostly lots of fun. (For a view of our trip, with an emphasis on flora, fauna and cool underwater photos of the lake, see Alex's rather exhaustive blog post here.)

One highlight for me was baking bread two days in a row and remembering how easy it is, even with no Kitchen Aid mixer dough hook in sight. Another was an unexpected reunion with a friend of a friend. It took us about 17 seconds to make the connection that had met at her wedding 5 years ago. She was there with her family, and we gabbed happily whenever we had a moment. Even more heartening was the message she sent after she came home, that her family liked us better than the actual croo (who were there their second night at the hut). I was quite tickled by that.

Still, hut crooing is definitely not a job for the middle-aged. There was not a single chair with a back on it in the entire hut, and I could feel it. I also felt terrible having to tell day trippers who were up that it cost about $100 a person, not $100 a room, to stay there. Yikes.

On the way home, Alex and I stopped at Slick's for ice cream. Things to know if you ever happen to be near Woodsville, NH, and in the mood for ice cream.

1. The ice cream is delicious. Alex and I both got Grapenut (hard to find outside of NH, so I always feel compelled to get it when it's around), but there were a number of other tempting flavors.
   
2. The servings are GARGANTUAN. A small is 3 scoops (for $1.75!). A large is 5. Be prepared. Although it wasn't explicitly listed, they will make "baby" cones, which seemed to be a more reasonable 2 scoops. I think if you have an actual baby with you, you might have to ask for a newborn cone.

I have no idea when I'll get back to Woodsville, but I'm already thinking about my next visit to Slick's.

In the meantime, there's always my local ice cream joint, Mt. Tom's, and even closer to home, my own ice cream maker, as yet unused this summer. That will definitely need to be remedied.

And now that the heat has abated a bit, I've made tentative forays back into my kitchen. I feel like I spent most of July consuming nothing but fresh lime sodas made with ginger simple syrup (highly recommended!). But in the past week or two, I've made eggplant and summer vegetable gratin and my first peach-blueberry crumble of the summer. The plan is to have another recipe, heavy on summer vegetables, up here soon.

Til then, keep your fingers crossed that my tomatoes--so far looking unblemished and plentiful--stay healthy long enough to give me the boatloads of tomatoes I will then grumble about. I hope to be so lucky.

Tarquin Hall's The Case of the Missing Servant

When I saw the novel The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall at the library, I was torn. Obviously, I like mysteries and I like books set in India, but still, the concept made me nervous, partly because I feel slightly protective about books written about India--I want them to be good, and I worry that they might not be. It turns out that I had no reason at all to worry about this one. Hall has written an extremely entertaining novel, and his knowledge of India, and the way that tradition and modernity mingle and contradict each other, is extensive. He's also great with details and dialogue both; he has the rhythms and peculiarities of Indian-English sentences down perfectly.

Hall's detective is Vish Puri, proprietor of the Most Private Investigators, Ltd. Puri--known as Chubby to his family and friends--is a plump, rumpled, middle-aged Punjabi with a penchant for pakoras and a soft spot for safari suits and nicknames. (His assistants are known only as Handbrake, Face Cream and Flush.) Much of his business is taken up with routine matrimonial investigations, but when an honest (and seemingly innocent) Jaipur lawyer is accused of the murder of one of his housemaids, Puri takes the case.

While I enjoyed the mystery part of the story, I almost enjoyed more the details, especially of how Puri runs his business. I can't exactly say how realistic it is, but after reading/listening to many mysteries where the private investigator doesn't engage in anything wilder than a snack-food fueled stake out or the occasional car chase, I loved the complexity of Puri's operations. I love the idea, for example, that in his office (above Bahrisons book shop in Khan Market, where I've bought many books over the years) is a room with 9 phone lines, devoted solely to incoming calls from cases. Tending to the lines is a member of an amateur dramatic society from Greater Kailash who enjoys the job because it gives her time to knit in between answering the phones in different voices and (supposedly) from different locations. In another scene, Puri meets the proprietor of one of Delhi's most comprehensive costume shops. The old man outfits Puri as a Sikh, complete with turban and whiskers, but also supplies costumes for some of his assistants, including a fake mangled hand for one posing as a beggar.

Several reviews I read compared this to Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels, and it's true that both feature charming detectives in exotic locales. But in Puri, Tarquin Hall has created an endearing detective all his own. If the comparison gets him a wider readership, then I'm all for it, but the book is entertaining enough on its own not to need any coattails.

As with most mysteries, I listened to this one as an audio book, and I thought that Sam Dastor did a fabulous job narrating. Some of his inflections were so spot on that I thought of all of my various Delhi friends who speak exactly like that. The paper copy of the book, however, contains a glossary, which apparently includes definitions of all of the yummy food that Puri eats throughout the novel. (I don't know, however, if it includes all the Hindi swears that are in the book. I was pleased that I recognized at least a few. )

The next book in the series comes out in just a few weeks--The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing--and I'm already looking forward to it. I'll be happy to be back in Vish Puri's Delhi--in which I see enough of my Delhi to make me homesick--anytime.

The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag: The Return of Flavia deLuce

In my year-end roundup of books last December, I created a special category for Alan Bradley's first Flavia deLuce mystery, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: "Best Audio Book I haven't finished listening to yet." A lame category title, admittedly, but I didn't want Bradley's first novel to go unrecognized (by me, at least). By the time I did finish it, in January 2010, I knew it would go on my best of the year list.

Bradley is a Canadian in his 70s, and Flavia is an 11-year-old chemistry fiend living in a dilapidated manor house called Buckshaw in Britain in 1950. No matter. In Flavia, Bradley has created a quirky and engaging narrator. At home, her father the philatelist is busy with his stamps, and her sisters are busy looking at themselves in the mirror (Feely) or burying their noses in a book (Daffy), and Flavia and her trusty bicycle Gladys are left to roam the lanes and fields around Bishop's Lacey at their leisure.

In the first book, the murder at the center of the story happens in Buckshaw's own cucumber patch. In the second, The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag, the murder is a just a bit farther afield. One day, while mooning around the graveyard at the church, pretending to be dead, Flavia comes across a beautiful woman weeping. Her name is Nialla, and she is puppeteer's assistant (and mistress) to Rupert Porson, of Porson's Puppets, whose van has broken down in Bishop's Lacey. At the urging of the vicar, Rupert and Nialla agree to perform several shows of "Jack and the Beanstalk" while their van is being fixed; Rupert, alas, does not survive both performances. From there, the story takes off, expanding to include, among other things, a secret crop grown in the midst of Gibbet Wood, the tragic death of a little boy some years earlier, and the story of a German POW who ended up in England because of his love of the Bronte sisters. Most of the main characters from the previous novel remain--Flavia's father and sisters as well as Dogger and Mrs. Mullet, who work for them at Buckshaw, along with Inspector Hewitt, with whom Flavia had previously tangled--but Bradley has expanded the circle outward so that we meet more of the residents of Bishop's Lacey--Gordon and Grace Inglesby, still mourning their lost son, Robin; Dieter Schranz, the handsome, Bronte-loving POW; land girl, Sally Straw; the absent-minded vicar and his battle-axe of a wife; and the spinster sisters who own the local tearoom, with its silver samovar named Peter the Great. And Flavia, as always, is at the center of it all.

Flavia may not always be the most plausible narrator, but she is always entertaining. I'm not sure I always believe that she's 11, but Bradley still walks the line gracefully, of what Flavia might or might not know. When she talks about Madame Bovary being one of her favorite books, it is because of the accurate portrayal of death by arsenic poisoning in the final scenes. At the same time, she feels the need to ask Dogger what "having an affair entails" because she's not quite sure of the specifics. I agree with the Material Witness blog review that one of the great joys of the first book was the sheer unexpectedness of Flavia as the narrator. The second book lacks the element of surprise, it's true, but that doesn't mean that Flavia still isnt' great company, whether she's in her chemistry lab devising a means to torment her sisters (who torment her in even crueler, though non-chemical, ways) or cozying up to various townspeople in order to wheedle information out of them or riding Gladys all over the countryside. Bradley has said that he would like to keep Flavia at 11, rather than having her age, and it's true that her status as a child allows her a freedom she would lack were she a teenager--not just the freedom to move around at will but also the ability to get away with snooping in a way that someone older couldn't. (At one point, when caught in the undertaker's back room, inspecting a dead body in a coffin for marks, Flavia pretends that she's been praying for his departed soul . . . and the undertaker believes her.)

Bradley is under contract to write 4 more Flavia deLuce novels, all of them, he says, dealing with some bygone aspect of British life. This second one shows that the first one was definitely not a fluke, and I'm only sad that we'll have to wait til next year for the third.

One final thing I should add; as with the first, I listened to this as an audio book, and it really works beautifully. Jayne Entwhistle is an excellent narrator, and the few small things that irritated me about her reading in the first book are mostly gone. (In that one, I thought, occasionally, that she made Flavia sound a bit smarmy sometimes, when Flavia was, admittedly, gloating over something or other. That's much reduced in this one.) Entwhistle flings herself into the role of Flavia with abandon, and it's a testament to both her narration and Bradley's skill as an author that Flavia comes to such mischievous, sparkling life. I think now that my best books of 2010 will have to expand to give Alan Bradley his very own category.

Year-End Book Roundup

Back in May, I posted about my favorite books of the first 5 months of 2009. (You can find that list here: Sunday Book Recommendations, though I'll include a cheat sheet for those too lazy to click the link):

The Post-Birthday World, by Lionel Shriver (serious novel)
Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri (short stories)
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, by Elizabeth McCracken (memoir)
The Family Man, by Elinor Lipman (light novel)

I still stand by those four books, but now that my reading year is just about over, I wanted to add a few more. They don't exactly fit into the same categories as the first four--it turns out that Jhumpa Lahiri's book of short stories was the only one I read this year. (That seems wrong, somehow, but so be it.) I'd also like to note that this is purposely not a Best Books list. (The fact of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi turning up on so many year-end Best lists shows how subjective the whole thing is.) These were just the books I enjoyed the most, whatever their category.

Memoir: What I Thought I Knew, by Alice Eve Cohen. This actually is an interesting companion to Elizabeth McCracken's memoir. But while McCracken's is the story of a child lost, Cohen's is the story of a child found. At 44, after being told she's infertile and in menopause, Cohen discovers that she's 6 months pregnant. Her story of her ambivalence about her high-risk pregnancy--and the daughter it produced--is brief but deftly told and moving.


Epistolary Novel: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. Okay, admittedly this is the only epistolary novel I've read in recent years. But still, I wasn't sure how to categorize it otherwise. This book was a bestseller and has been written about a gazillion times. For that reason, I avoided it. Until I didn't, and I ended up really enjoying it. Despite the twee title, the book itself isn't twee. In her first and only novel, Mary Ann Shaffer manages to write about a serious topic--the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands during World War II--with a very light touch. (Shaffer, sadly, got sick while she was writing the book and died before it was published. Her niece, Annie Barrows, a writer herself, finished it for her.) As letters fly back and forth between the main character, a journalist named Juliet, and her newfound friends on Guernsey, it's hard not to be taken in by their growing friendship. This year's lesson in, "occasionally good books do end up being bestsellers."











Mysteries: The Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries by Louise Penny

Louise Penny's mysteries were one of my great discoveries a few years back. Usually with mystery series, by the time I discover them, the series is well established, and I have to go way back and start at the beginning. I found Louise Penny's first novel, Still Life, on the new fiction shelf at the library, some time after it had first been published but before the next book was out. That's given me the opportunity to follow Louise Penny's burgeoning mystery writing career with great pleasure. It's not just that Penny seems to be a lovely person; she's also a good writer. In Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, she's created a detective of depth and charm, and in Three Pines, the rural Quebec village where most of the books are set, she's created a place I'd like to move to immediately except for the rather unsettling frequency of murders that happen there. Penny's characters are quirky and flawed and compelling, and the mysteries solid.

I haven't liked all five of them equally, but I very much enjoyed both that came out this year, A Rule Against Murder and The Brutal Telling, with the latter especially strong. I'm delighted that Louise Penny seems to have garnered both critical and commercial acclaim for her work, and I'm looking forward to more of the lovely Gamache and more of that idyllic but murder-ridden village, Three Pines.

Novel both light and serious: This is Where I Leave You, by Jonathan Tropper. Although I had read and enjoyed one of Tropper's earlier novels, it hadn't prepared me for how much pleasure I would get from Tropper's latest. This was a book that had me snorting inappropriately in various public places as I read it--the library, the waiting room at the garage--but had a serious undertone that serves as ballast for the levity. The novel's narrator, Judd Foxman, is recently separated from his wife--who, he learns in a particularly unfortunate way, has been sleeping with his boss for months--when he finds out that his ill father has died and that the father's last wish (despite being an atheist) was for his whole family to sit shiva for him for the full 7 days. The Foxman family is exquisitely dysfunctional, and their forced togetherness is a perfect set up for the novel. There are too many good parts to name; just read it.

Best Audio Book I haven't finished listening to yet: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley. Okay, so that's not really much of a category, but I wanted to make sure I wrote about this one, even though I'm only about halfway through it. Bradley is a 70 year old Canadian who'd never been to England until after he'd written this novel, yet his narrator is 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, who lives at Buckshaw, a stately house in the British countryside. Flavia is precocious, in love with chemistry, a bane to her older sisters and determined to solve the mystery of how a dead man (with the villainly name of Horace Bonepenny) ends up in their cucumber patch. She's a wonderful narrator, and I loved his story (in an interview) about how he was actually writing a different book when "Flavia walked onto the page . . . and simply hijacked the story." Wisely, Bradley stopped writing the other book and gave Flavia her due. The narrator of the audio book, Jayne Entwhistle, has a quirky and interesting (though occasionally annoying) voice that seems just perfect for Flavia and all her eccentricities. This is the first of a series, and it's one I'm looking forward to.

So, that's my list for the year, a year that featured a rather significant amount of re-reading of beloved childhood books (which I think jacked up my overall number of books read, which still came in under 100, including audio books--a bit of a disappointment). But it will soon be a new year, and my reading slate will be clean again. I look forward to whatever literary discoveries 2010 has for all of us. Happy New Year!

Corduroy Mansions, Part II

Somehow, I managed to miss this entirely, but the ever prolific Alexander McCall Smith is writing a sequel to his delightful Corduroy Mansions, first published online in daily installments in the British newspaper The Telegraph last year. (I'm wondering if I should add more frequent perusal of British newspapers to the too many things I already read online.) This one is called The Dog Who Came in from the Cold, which must mean that Freddie de la Hay, the temporarily vegetarian Pimlico terrier that William the wine merchant adopts, is back.

I wrote about the first volume of Corduroy Mansions here, last November. Alexander McCall Smith is so astonishingly productive--he seems to write a new volume for all three of his other series every year--I'm not sure why I didn't assume he'd write a sequel to this as well, especially because the ending of the first book wasn't really an ending. (AMS likes ending with a party and a toast--he's done this with several of the volumes in the 44 Scotland Street series as well--and it's true that the party and the toast help distract you from the fact that there's no real resolution to anything.)

As with the first volume, there are multiple ways to access the new book. You can read it on the Telegraph site linked above. You can sign up to have each daily installment sent directly to your email address (though I'm assuming you'd have to read the already-published installments on the site). My preference, obvious given my love of audio books, is to download the podcast of the novel, narrated by the excellent Andrew Sachs.

If you missed the first volume and aren't yet sure you want to commit, Alexander McCall Smith has kindly provided a brief summary, to let you know what you're in for. His books are light but smart and always entertaining, and this one is no different.

Meanwhile, if you'll excuse me, I have 46 chapters to download . . .

An Audio Book for a Very, Very, Very Long Car Ride

Earlier this week, I finished listening to the only audio book I'd listened to since August. It's not that I hadn't been listening to audio books much in that time. It was that this one was very, very, very, very long. 26 discs long, to be precise, and 32 hours of reading.

The book was Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, originally published in 2004. I bought it soon after it came out, but it had been sitting on my shelf, unread, for almost 5 years. Then, this summer, I took it out. I had a bout of flu in July, right after my summer break started (what timing), and during the first week, when I wasn't good for much of anything, I re-read the whole Harry Potter series, needing something both familiar and engaging. (It totally holds up when read as one very long story. I would read it that way again, assuming another block of time that hopefully doesn't involve the flu--it certainly helped with the not remembering many of the pertinent details that happened while waiting two years for the next book.)

But when I was done with Harry, I still was in the mood for something long and engaging and having to do with magic, and there was Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell on my shelf. I took it out and read a chapter, then had an AHA moment when I realized it would probably be a good book to listen to as an audio book. This was confirmed when I went to the library and happened to run into Darnell, husband of my friend Leanna. He saw the audiobook in my hands and asked if I were going to listen to it. I said I was. I asked if he knew about it. He said he'd listened to it. I asked if he liked it. He paused for a moment, and then said, slowly, "I loved it." He went on to say that just seeing it in my hands made him want to listen to it again. This impressed me, especially given the sheer length of it. When I saw Leanna a few weeks later, it turns out that soon thereafter, Darnell had foisted the book upon her over a long weekend, and she had read it as well. (We both appreciated the coincidence, since we could then talk about it with the details still fresh. Although because Leanna had read it over one long weekend, and I was listening over the course of several months, it meant that she had finished while I had just come to the part, about halfway through, when Jonathan Strange had dabbled in black magic while in Portugal serving as Lord Wellington's personal magician.)

Jonathan Strange is, as I suspected, a very good book to listen to, and Simon Prebble is an excellent narrator. Listening to it is something of a commitment. It is, as I may have mentioned, long. It meanders. And for the first several hundred pages, it's kind of hard to see where it's going, given the slow pace, the digressions, the footnotes. Yes, there are footnotes. I've read several reviews saying that this book wouldn't work on tape for first time readers because of the footnotes, but I disagree. They seem a bit of a distraction, at first, but as the story progresses, they make more and more sense and are often both interesting and entertaining in their own right. (I did consult the paper copy of my book several times to double check and re-read things, but I was tempted to read ahead, and I wanted to let Simon Prebble finish reading, so I had to restrain myself.)

But what is the book about, you might ask. It's a historical novel and a magical novel, or at least a novel with magic in it, and a novel about friendship and rivalry. It's also a very well written novel. It's set in the first part of the 19th century, during the Napoleonic wars (the same time period of my beloved Patrick O'Brian novels). Magic, which had once flourished in England, is no longer practiced but only discussed (at length) by "theoretical magicians." And then the first practical magician in memory appears, fussy and selfish Gilbert Norrell who can enchant the statues in York Cathedral so that they can talk and conjure up ships made of rain to form a blockade against the French. Then, a quarter of the way into book, appears Jonathan Strange, young, brash and bold, who has no intention of becoming a magician until a tramp sleeping under a hedge tells him it is his destiny. Strange becomes Norrell's pupil and friend and eventually his rival and enemy. There are other main characters--noble Stephen Black, butler to politician Sir Walter Pole, a "nameless slave" and, eventually, a king; Norrell's mysterious and compelling servant Childermass; and especially the Faerie king, known only as "The Man With the Thistledown Hair," summoned by Norrell to assist in raising Sir Walter's fiancee from the dead, whose role becomes more evident--and frightening--as the book progresses. There is also one character whose presence hovers throughout the book, but whom we only catch a glimpse of towards the very end--John Uskglass, the Raven King, whose magic ruled England for centuries, the man whom Norrell fears and Strange admires to the point of obsession.

This is not a book with many women characters, unfortunately. There is Lady Pole, the first victim of the Man With the Thistledown Hair, whom we only see glimpses of in her natural and unenchanted state, and Arabella Strange, Jonathan's wife, who is at risk of becoming another. I wish there were more. And it's interesting to me that neither Strange or Norrell is particularly sympathetic. As a result, this isn't an emotionally demanding book, although the last two hundred pages are gripping, the plot racing ahead and much more being at stake.

It's not a perfect book, though few are. It could be shorter and tighter, without losing anything; it could perhaps not meander quite as much. But it is a testament to Susanna Clarke and Simon Prebble that I listened to it patiently and with great enjoyment, through car trips to New Hampshire and Cape Cod and Boston, to and from work, in my kitchen while chopping onions, at the gym while doing leg presses, day after day, week after week, I listened. And when it was over, I was a little bit sad, and I wondered, as others of Susanna Clarke's fans have been wondering for the past 5 years, when she's going to write a sequel.

On Audio Books: Part II (Light Literary)

I didn't mean for it to be five months since I last wrote about audio books, but that seems to be what's happened. Given that I need daily blogging topics for another couple of weeks (not that I'm counting) I thought it was past time for another installment. In my first installment, I wrote about mysteries, which make up the majority of books I listen to. Now, I'm going to write about the lighter end of literary (or literary-ish) novels I've enjoyed.

However, before I do that, I've realized that there's a glaring omission in my mystery post. I can't believe that I forgot to write about Laurie R. King and her two sets of mysteries, almost all of which I've listened to over the past few years.

Her Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series begins with The Beekeeper's Apprentice and goes on for 8 more books, the most recent called The Language of Bees. I haven't listened to the last one (it's just out), and I couldn't make it through The Moor, but I quite enjoyed the rest of them. Her premise is that upon retiring to Sussex to keep bees, Sherlock Holmes meets Mary Russell, a young (extremely young) recently orphaned heiress, who is very sharp and also a feminist. That first meeting, eventually, leads to marriage and continued detection. Though the series is slightly uneven, these definitely should be read from the beginning. I'd say my favorites are the first one and then the sort of connected O Jerusalem and Justice Hall, one set in the Middle East and one mostly in a large manor house in Britain. All are narrated by Jenny Sterlin.

The Kate Martinelli series, on the other hand, is set in contemporary San Francisco and features a lesbian detective as its main character. The first book in the series, A Grave Talent, might be the best, but it's a series worth reading after that as well. King hasn't been as prolific with these as with the Russell/Holmes books; there are five in all, and the last one, The Art of Detection, has a Sherlock Holmes sub-plot that annoyed some readers. (I wasn't bothered by it.) These are read by Alyssa Bresnahan.

Okay, that's it for the mysteries, for the moment at least. On to the light literary types.

• Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons:I write this with some trepidation--this was one of the first books I listened to, probably at least ten years ago, and I listened on tape. I can't promise that it's available on CD or as an mp3 download, though I certainly hope it is. While I quite enjoyed the 1996 movie version (and the not-yet-glamorous Kate Beckinsale), the book is even funnier. I adored listening to it even though it made me snort at the gym and incur strange looks from fellow exercisers. Anna Massey is the perfect narrator for the material. Just writing this is making me want to listen to it again.

• Snobs by Julian Fellowes. Fellowes won an Oscar for his screenplay for Gosford Park, so he knows his upper class Brits very well. Snobs is his first novel and is the tale of a lovely middle class girl who marries into the aristocracy and then, maybe, regrets it. It's set in the 1990s but doesn't always seem like it. I probably would have enjoyed reading it, but I liked listening even more. Richard Morant narrates.

• Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. This is one that might have annoyed me had I read it, but somehow the four years of prep school that Sittenfeld's main character, Lee Fiora, goes through were pretty compelling to listen to. That said, I have no desire to read (or listen to) Sittenfeld's Laura Bush novel, American Wife.

• Anything by Tom Perotta. Admittedly, I've only listened to two of his novels--Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher--but they both definitely worked as audio books--the right combination of humor and plot, plus good narrators in both cases (George Wilson for Little Children and the (dreamy) Campbell Scott for The Abstinence Teacher.)

• Anything by Eleanor Lipman. I've been a fan of Eleanor Lipman's since I was in college and heard her read from her very first book of stories, Into Love and Out Again. (Now, she's local, and I'm always pleased to see her in the grocery store.) I've read all of her books except the very newest (which is waiting for me at the library as I write this), and I've listened to three or four of them as well. Lipman also has the humor/plot combination in her favor. I'd particularly recommend The Pursuit of Alice Thrift which was another that had me snorting at the gym to the slight alarm of those around me. Lipman reads this one herself and does an excellent job.
  

• Finally, for this installment, anything by Carl Hiaasen. I'd never read Hiaasen but took a book on CD out on a whim and was entertained enough to go find more. I listened to Basket Case, Sick Puppy, Skinny Dip, Stormy Weather and at least one more. It's a mistake to listen to too many at once--the tone is too similar and it can get wearying--but when he's funny, he's very funny. My favorite was probably Sick Puppy, but I didn't dislike any of them. (I haven't read the newest one.)

Next up is the Literary, Less Light Division, but that will have to wait for another day.

On Audio Books: Part I (Mysteries)

After my post on Corduroy Mansions a few weeks ago, Robin Aronson, over at Local or Express?, said she was interested in hearing more about audio books. (She envisions herself listening while knitting, which seems like a fine plan to me. I do sometimes listen while knitting, though I'm more likely to listen while in the car, at the gym or in the kitchen chopping vegetables.) There are many things I don't know much about or don't spend a lot of time thinking about--(to wit, Alex's question the other day while reading the Sunday NY Times: "If you were Obama, what would you do first?" Me, looking blankly at him, "I have no idea. That's why I don't want to be president.")--but, over the years, I've spent a lot of time thinking about--or at least listening to--audio books. (I realize that may make me sound rather shallow. Oh well.)

I re-discovered the pleasure of being read to in college, when I worked in the White Mountains for the Appalachian Mountain Club. One winter, I hiked up to visit a friend who was the winter caretaker at Carter Notch Hut, and I discovered that he was a regular listener of "The Radio Reader," a program out of Michigan State University. (Amazingly, the Web site says that it's been around in some form or another since 1936. That's longevity.) For the few days I was there, I listened with him to a bio of Katharine Hepburn. And the next year, when I was a hut caretaker myself, I made sure to find the station that carried "The Radio Reader" so I could listen again.

Some years later, in 1994, I was living in New Delhi. That was the year that the Internet really became a part of people's lives in the US, but it wasn't yet part of life in India. During the summer, monsoon season, most of my friends were away, and I spent a lot of time in my very hot apartment. (Why I was too stubborn to get an air conditioner--or even a swamp cooler--I can no longer recall.) I had a little shortwave radio, and I listened to it a lot that summer. You can imagine my excitement when I discovered "Off the Shelf," from the BBC World Service, a program like "The Radio Reader," where someone read a book in 15 or 30 minute installments. I have such a vivid image of myself lying on the floor of my bedroom, directly beneath the fan, wearing the (hussy) shorts and tank top I couldn't wear outside my apartment, listening to Rebecca over the course of many muggy evenings. (That it was an abridged version was the only thing I didn't like. When I started listening to books on tape a few years later, I listened to the unabridged version because it didn't feel like the shorter one counted.)

There's my segue to my list. I only listen to unabridged books, even for things that are really, really long, even if the author approved the cuts. So far, 12 years and counting, there have been no exceptions.

Another thing to pay attention to is the reader. These fall into categories. There are readers who make their livings reading audio books. There are actors (many, but not all, British) who also read audio books. And every once in awhile, a writer reads his or her own book. Generally, the professional readers and the actors do a better job, just because it's more of a performance (which turns out to kind of matter), but one true exception is Charles Frazier reading Cold Mountain. He's not a fancy reader, but listening to it really reminded me of how fundamental it is to have people tell us stories. (It's also a book I'm not sure I would have enjoyed reading, but I liked listening to it a lot.)

I've probably listened to hundreds of audio books over the past 12 years, so it would be hard to name them all. I do have some recommendations, though, and I can sort them, generally, by category. I'm going to start with mysteries, just because I listen to a lot of them. I like reading mysteries anyway, but one thing I learned early on is that I really need something with a plot, or at least a strong narrative. (While I might like to read ethereal, beautifully written meditations on love and loss, I do not like to listen to them. Give me a plot line any day.) I also like mysteries because usually they are written in series form, and that means that if you find a series you like, there will be lots of books to listen to.

So, if you're an audio book novice and like mysteries, here are a few to start with:

• Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti mysteries--set in Venice and featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, these are thoughtful, literate, well-written books. Brunetti is a wonderful character, as is his English professor/Henry James loving wife Paola. They will also make you hungry, as Brunetti is a serious eater who tries to make it home for lunch every day to eat whatever delights Paola has produced. I'm a fan, usually, of starting at the beginning, so even though the series gets better as it goes along, start with the first one, Death at La Fenice. The earlier books are read by Anna Fields (the stage name of Kate Fleming, who, very sadly, drowned in a freak storm a few years ago), and the later ones by David Colacci.

• Martha Grimes' Richard Jury series. I didn't follow my own rule with these and ended up listening to one of the later ones first. It's a long series, more than 20 books now, and the earliest ones aren't available on CD (or even tape, in some cases.) Still, listening to book number 17 made me want to go back and find the rest. It's possible to read these not in order (as I discovered), though it makes more sense if you do. Although Grimes is American, Jury is a Scotland Yard inspector, and he is often assisted in his investigations by his aristocratic friend Melrose Plant (officially an Earl til he gave up his title, though he still lives in serious comfort). The books are all named after pubs that play a role in each case. As in any long series, they're not all equally good, but Jury is always compelling, and Grimes is especially good at writing wise-beyond-their-years children (which is probably why they turn up in so many of her books). The earlier books are narrated by Davina Porter and the later ones by John Lee. (Both good readers, with a slight edge to Lee, I think.)

• I also recently listened to Martha Grimes' standalone mystery Foul Matter, set in the world of NY publishing, and it is very, very funny. Laugh out loud funny, especially if you know anything at all about how publishing works. Highly recommended.
  

• Margaret Maron's Deborah Knott series. Set in fictional Colleton County, North Carolina and with a feisty judge as the main character. Very occasionally a bit sappy, but the main characters are solid, and the series is topical. CJ Critt narrates the whole series (now up to book 14). Start with the first, Bootlegger's Daughter.

• Years ago, when I first discovered Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody series, I was delighted. The author (whose real name is Barbara Mertz) has a degree in Egyptology, so it made sense that her main characters--the know-it-all Amelia Peabody and her dashing archeologist husband Emerson--were Egyptologists as well. The first few books in the series were quite charming, but as the series moved along, and the extended Emerson family grew larger, the series got more and more convoluted, and I had a hard time keeping track of what was going on.

• Audio books to the rescue. On a whim, I decided to listen to one of the later books, and all of a sudden it made sense. The narrator of all of the books is Barbara Rosenblat, who's a star in the world of audio books. Listen to the early books (the first is Crocodile on the Sandbank, in which the outspoken spinster Amelia annoys Radcliffe Emerson so much that he has no choice but to marry her) because they're fun, and if you listen to them in order, you may even be able to keep track of all of the Peabody-Emerson's many friends and relations.

• Barbara Rosenblat also narrates Peters' much shorter Vicky Bliss series. (Vicky is an art historian with a notorious art thief for a lover--only in fiction.) After a 14 year hiatus, Peters has just come out with the 6th Vicky Bliss novel called Laughter of the Dead Kings. (I'm waiting for it from the library, so I can't report how the series has weathered after such a long gap.) I listened to the first five in my early days of audio book listening, and I enjoyed all of them, but the fifth in the series, Night Train to Memphis, is particularly a hoot. (Don't expect a lot of realism, but they're fun to listen to.)

I'm going to end this installment here and write about other kinds of audio books another time.

Meanwhile, after listening to the first 60 installments of Corduroy Mansions all in a row, I'm now all caught up and have to listen to one episode at a time, like everyone else. A very different listening experience, but still interesting. But now I have all kinds of unanswered questions. What will Berthea say when she learns that Terence has bought a Porsche? What is Barbara going to do to get her revenge on the odious Oedipus Snark? Why did Freddie de la Hay (former sniffer dog at Heathrow Airport) get so excited about the painting in Eddie's wardrobe? We will all just have to wait to find out.

Corduroy Mansions (with brief notes on Sri Lanka)

I've been listening to audio books--first on tape, then on CD, now on my iPod--regularly for about 12 years now and have a good sense of what I like to listen to (which is not necessarily the same as what I might like to read). Over the years, there have been many series, and readers, I've enjoyed greatly, many of which, it turns out, are sort of old-school and British. There's the charming Ian Carmichael reading all of Dorothy Sayers Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, for one. He actually played Wimsey in a 70's BBC version of the books, but I liked listening to him read better, since he's great at doing all the voices. Another favorite is Prunella Scales reading EF Benson's Lucia series. (Actually, Geraldine McEwan, who played Lucia in the BBC version, reads a couple and Prunella Scales, who played Mapp, reads the others. They're both good, though I think I have a slight preference for Prunella Scales.) And, of course, I've already documented my love of Patrick Tull's performances of Patrick O'Brian's complete Aubrey/Maturin series.

A more recent find is all the various series of Alexander McCall Smith, famous initially for his No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books. I enjoyed reading the first few of those, but then, for some reason, I stopped reading them and started listening to his other series, which include Isabel Dalhousie/Sunday Philosophy Club series and the 44 Scotland Street Series. He originally started writing 44 Scotland Street as a serial novel in a Scottish newspaper--it involves many short chapters centering around the lives of a motley group of people who live at that address in Edinburgh. The short chapters translate particular well to audio, and they've been really fun to listen to. I am looking forward to the newest installment, The World According to Bertie, which was just published in the US. (Bertie is one of his best creations--a precocious six-year-old with a mother, Irene, who spouts Melanie Klein and forces Bertie to go to yoga and psychotherapy and Italian and saxophone lessons and who insists that he audition for the Edinburgh Teenage Orchestra, despite the fact that he is, after all, only six. Bertie getting left behind in Paris, on the Edinburgh Teenage Orchestra's tour, is one of the highlights of the previous book, Love Over Scotland.)

But all of this is a very long introduction. What I mean to say is that Alexander McCall Smith is writing yet another serial novel right at this very moment. This one, however, is an online novel. It's called Corduroy Mansions and is being published on the web site of the British Newspaper, The Telegraph. It's also available by podcast. I just discovered it and have downloaded the first 50 chapters, which are all that have been written so far. (He's writing a new chapter each weekday for 20 weeks, for a total of 100 chapters.) It's similar to Scotland Street, in that it involves the residents of the titular Corduroy Mansions, the nickname of a building in London. There's William the wine merchant and his feckless son, Eddie; the mysterious Sri Lankan, Mr. Wickramsinghe; the smarmy MP, Oedipus Snark (and his mother, Berthea, who is writing her son's unauthorized biography); a dog named Freddie de la Haye who's been trained to be a vegetarian and insist that he be buckled into a seatbelt in the back of cabs; and many others.

So far, it's been quite engaging and enjoyable. Plus, it's not too often that you get to listen to (or read) something that the author is still writing. McCall Smith says that he stays about 20 chapters ahead of the reader, which would make him about 3/4 of the way through now, while the readers are only halfway there. It's interesting to know that all of these threads of stories he's thrown out could be tied together in a multitude of ways and that the fates of the characters have not yet been decided. I have no idea where it's going--and I haven't even been introduced to all the characters yet, 20 + chapters in--but I'm certainly interested to find out.

On a separate (but related) note, when I was in Sri Lanka last January, I stayed for a few nights in the lovely city of Galle. (I stayed in the delightful Lady Hill Hotel, where I was treated like a VIP because my friend Sonia is a regular there. It was like she was a rock star or something. "You are the friend of Sonia Gomez?" people kept asking. Sonia laughed and laughed when I told her this.) I didn't spend as much time in Galle as I would have liked, mostly because there were beautiful beaches just a few miles down the coast, but it is charming little city. A few weeks after I was there, the Galle Literary Festival took place, and as it happens, Alexander McCall Smith was one of the participants. I knew this at the time because I saw his name on the poster, but he must have been influenced by his stay there because Galle keeps turning up in his books. Mr Wickramasinghe, one of the residents of Corduroy Mansions, is a native of Galle; and in the latest Isabel Dalhousie novel, The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday, which I also just listened to, Isabel's niece Kat goes off on a vacation to Sri Lanka and ends up in . . . Galle. Kat even specifically mentions Taprobane Island, this tiny island immediately off the coast of Weligama, south of Galle, where there's a beautiful villa, once owned by Paul Bowles, and now a very fancy hotel. At least he only had Kat have lunch there (which may or not be possible in real life); to stay overnight (which involves renting the whole place) costs $2200/night in Dec/Jan. Yikes.

For the hell of it, I am including two photos, one of the view from the roof of the Lady Hill and one of the lovely beach at Mirissa--one of the reasons I didn't spend as much time in Galle as Alexander McCall Smith did. I hope to return to Galle on another trip. In the meantime, I'm going to keep listening to Corduroy Mansions and encourage you to do the same!

Dreaming of Stephen Maturin

Many years ago--13, to be exact--I read an essay by Tamar Lewin in the New York Times called "Hooked on Boy Books." It was about her newfound obsession with Patrick O'Brian's long series of novels set mostly on British navy ships during the Napoleonic Wars--despite the fact that she had no interest whatsoever in British naval history.

At the time, I paid attention. The man who had broken my heart just a few months earlier had been a huge Patrick O'Brian fan, and even though he is long gone from the city and state where I last saw him, I can still see the novels--all with drawings of ships on the covers--lined up neatly on the top of the bookcase in his living room. Like Tamar Lewin, I had no interest in British naval history, but after reading her essay, and while still in mourning for my lost love, I read the first one, Master and Commander. I can't say that I was an instant fan. I liked it well enough, but I couldn't really see reading the whole series, which, at that point, totaled 17 books (and now totals 20 complete novels plus the beginning of the 21st). It seemed like too much of a commitment, more of a task than a pleasure.

A year or so later, though, I took a teaching job at a local college, and suddenly I had a 35-40 minute commute each way, 3 times a week. It only took one day of driving to realize I needed a diversion, and so I turned to books on tape, combing various local libraries for my supply. One day, I saw the second Patrick O'Brian novel--Post-Captain--and decided to try again. It was fortuitous because Post-Captain is O'Brian's "homage to Jane Austen," set mostly on land and the book in which the two main characters--bluff naval captain Jack Aubrey and physician/spy/ardent natural philosopher Stephen Maturin--meet the women they will eventually marry. It only took one drive, one way, for me to be hooked. I discovered that listening to the books made much more sense for me than reading them. There was enough plot to hold me, and if he went on a bit too long about mizzen topsails or main foretop-gallant sails or whatever, I could space out and tune back in when the plot picked up again.

Over the next 3 years, I listened to the first 10 in the series, all on tape and read by Richard Brown. But then life interfered. I went to India and came back and went to India again, and though every once in awhile, I thought of picking up book 11, I never did.

A few years ago, though, having graduated from books on tape to books on CD to books downloaded onto my iPod, which meant that I could listen to them more easily and not just in the car, I decided I wanted to finish the series. But when I went in search of Richard Brown's reading of book 11, I learned that there were multiple narrators of the books, and only one narrator, Patrick Tull, had narrated the entire series. At that point, it had been long enough that many of the details (not to mention major plot points) in the earlier books were fuzzy, so rather than starting halfway through with a new narrator, I decided to let Patrick Tull read me the entire series, from start to finish.

Since then, I've traveled with Jack and Stephen to Malta and Gibraltar, to Java and Peru and Botany Bay. I've been shipwrecked with them, both in the far south and on a tropical island, and taken prisoner, by the Americans and the French. I've worried through Jack's near ruin, through a false accusation of rigging the stock market, and Stephen's near ruin, through his addiction to the alcoholic tincture of laudanum. And it's true that I know more about life on a British naval ship and about the Napoleonic wars than I did before, but that's secondary for me. What keeps me going is the deep, contradictory friendship between the two main characters, who I know so well now and who know each other so well. I nod along as they tell familiar stories, tease each other (Stephen's frequent references to Jack's weight, Jack's continued amazement at Stephen's ability to fall in the water despite years of living on ships), console each other, play duets on their beloved violin and cello night after night in the cabin of the ship they're sailing, most often the "dear old Surprise," first introduced in book three.

In the last few weeks, I've even found myself dreaming of Stephen Maturin, twice now. (The second time, he was in a dream with Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia, and I really wish I could remember what happened.) Alex likes to say that I have a crush on him, which isn't exactly true, though I suppose if your girlfriend is going to be dreaming about other men, it's probably not a bad thing that the other man is a fictional character who lived several centuries ago. I will admit that I do sometimes find myself wanting to talk like Stephen, as read by Patrick Tull, with a slight Irish lilt. "Never in life," he likes to say, and "I would like that of all things."

As I've found myself proselytizing about the Aubrey/Maturin books these past few months, I've tried to explain what it is that draws me to these books, when the actual subject matter isn't what I'm really interested in. (In the same way that I enjoyed the "peace" parts of War and Peace much better than the war parts, I could easily live without the various fleet actions in O'Brian's books, except, that, of course, they're kind of the point.)

Mostly I think it's that, as adult readers, we don't get to follow the same characters very often. When I was a kid, many of my favorite books were series books, and there were series' that I read over and over again--The Little House on the Prairie books, the Betsy-Tacy books, Madeleine L'Engle's various series'. I loved the familiarity of the characters and the ability to watch their lives go on over time, to be able to return to them over and over again.

I miss that quality as a grown-up reader, and I'm always delighted when I find it. I'm a mystery reader, which helps, because that's where you find series most often, but I treasure it when I find the occasional literary writer who chooses to stick to the same characters. It's one of the reasons I love Barbara Trapido's books, that sense of a broad fictional universe I can see from multiple perspectives and over multiple books.

As I write this, I'm just finishing book 17, The Commodore, and book 18, The Yellow Admiral, is waiting on my iPod. I'm in a slight state of denial that the end is so close in sight. Patrick O'Brian died in 2000, several chapters into the 21st book, so there's no real ending, just an unfinished novel and legions of readers left without closure.

Since I haven't read any of the books since the first one, I don't own any of the books to dip into, and I can't quite see myself with the matched set with all the ships on the cover and diagrams of the sails on the inside flap. But I can see that, in a few years, when the details start to get a little fuzzy in my head, I might want to have Patrick Tull take me through the series again. And even though I'll know that Jack is reinstated to the Navy list after his near ruin, that Stephen will eventually marry the tempestuous Diana Villiers, that the dear old Surprise will be sold out of the service but bought by Stephen, it won't really matter. It will be a pleasure to return to that long ago concert in Port Mahon, in Minorca, where Stephen and Jack first sit next to each other (and insult each other to the extent that they nearly have a duel), when all their voyages and adventures are before them, and when they don't yet know what their future holds.