Q is for Quarry by Sue Grafton

In this installment of the "alphabet mystery" series, Kinsey Millhone is hired by two ex-cops who want to solve an eighteen-year old murder. The book is based on an actual unsolved murder in the part of California where Grafton lives part-time. I'm not sure why but this book didn't immediately suck me in the way the others in this series have done. Partly it was because I had all these other distracting books sitting on the shelf, but it also seemed like the book started out very slowly due to the encumbrance of the two retired police detectives that Millhone is working with - they're both suffering from ill health, along with a healthy dose of self-destructive behaviour, and they come off as rather pathetic. The story sort of plods along at first as the trio trace down the few leads that they have in the case, and doesn't really pick up until our fiesty heroine manages to shake off her sick partners and sets out to get to the bottom of the mystery. Eventually, of course, she figures it out, and the story builds up to the trademark tense climax as Millhone confronts the guilty party.

My mum has promised to bring the next book in this series when she visits me again, so I will have to occupy myself in the meantime by checking out some of those long-ignored books on the shelf I mentioned yesterday.

My personal library...?!

Yesterday after several hours of studying, I needed a break and decided to weed out and reorganize our entire book collection. Two hours later I found myself with one bookshelf unit entirely devoted to books I have bought or borrowed and not yet read. I hadn't realized that I had quite so many books in this category... the middle shelf in the unit has a double row of paperbacks since I needed the bottom shelf for photo albums and yearbooks and old issues of the Star Trek Communicator.

Someone tell me to stop using the library and for goodness sake, to stop buying more books until I've worked my way through some of these.

What's "literally" on my shelf 

The Kalahari Typing School for Men by Alexander McCall Smith

In the fourth installment of the "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" series, Mma Ramotswe helps a man make peace with a mistake in his past, her assistant, Mma Makutsi, starts her own business and experiences her first romance and Mr J. L. B. Matekoni, Mma Ramotswe's fiance, recovers from his bout of depression to resume managing his garage.

This was another nice quick read and, though this book felt a tad formulaic, a satisfying story. There is something soothing about the simple lives and unchanging natures of the characters, the touch of wry humor, and Mma Ramotswe's musings about the "old Botswana morality" that she believes should guide everyone's behaviour.

Now I really must ignore the stack of novels sitting on my bookshelf and focus on my philosophy textbook.

Other books I've read by this author:
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
Tears of the Giraffe
Morality for Beautiful Girls
Portuguese Irregular Verbs

The Sea Road by Margaret Elphinstone

Oh, my goodness. Where do I start? I loved this book. It was quite marvellously immersive... one of those books that just pulls you in, making everything and everyone around you disappear so that you need to come up for air every now and again to make sure you're still part of the real world. I picked it up this morning to add it to my "on the shelf" list for the blog template, then started reading and next thing I know it's 8 pm. Where did my day go?

This novel is the story of Gudrid of Iceland, who lived a thousand years ago and accompanied one of the Norse expeditions to North America. She is credited with giving birth to the first European born on North American soil, was married to a brother of Leif Eriksson and comes alive in this novel as a hardy, pragmatic, independent woman. The novel itself is actually set in Rome, where Gudrid, as an old widow, has come for a final pilgrimage and meets Agnar, a young priest who has been asked to transcribe her remarkable story of travel "beyond the world" to what we think of as North America (archeological evidence seems to indicate that the settlement's location was in Newfoundland). Most of the story is told by Gudrid to Agnar, the silent transcriber, with occasional entertaining asides as she talks to him about their "present" lives in Rome and about her wish to return to Iceland before her death. This is punctuated by evocative third-person descriptions of specific moments, memories of Gudrid's life.

I have no idea how factually based this book is, but that hardly matters... what matters is the vivid beauty of the writing, the way that Margaret Elphinstone made this woman come alive and made her experiences, so different from my own, seem familiar. Go, read this book! And be sure to let me know what you thought of it.