Six Degrees of Separation: From Butter to Tales from the Café

 

The Six Degrees of Separation meme is hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest. The idea behind the meme is to start with a book and use common points between two books to end up with links to six books, forming a chain. The common points may be obvious, like a word in the title or a shared theme, or more personal. Every month Kate provides the title of a book as the starting point.

The starting book this month is Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki. Just based on the subtitle, I want to read it. It is described at Amazon as: "A highly fresh and original novel following a journalist in contemporary Japan as she investigates a serial killer convicted of luring wealthy men in with her cooking classes only to seduce, murder, and rob them, and a gripping exploration of misogyny, obsession, and the pleasures and pressures of food." That sounds pretty interesting.

1st degree:

Another Japanese mystery that focuses on a serial killer is The Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Sōji Shimada. I have not read that one but my husband has, and I may read his copy someday. That book has also been described as a locked-room mystery.

2nd degree:

My next link is to a book by Japanese author Keigo Higashino. Malice features one of Higashino's series characters, Detective Kyoichiro Kaga. A best-selling novelist is found murdered in his locked office, inside his locked house. However, in this book the focus is less on solving the locked-room problem than on the relationships between the dead man and the suspects, and the motive behind the killing. 

3rd degree:

I recently read Newcomer, another mystery by Higashino which also featured police detective Kyoichiro Kaga. This one has a very different structure and mood. A woman who has recently moved to the Nihonbashi area of Tokyo has been murdered in her apartment, and it appears that she knew her murderer. Each chapter features a location at which Kaga interviews various witnesses or suspects who can give him information leading to the solution of a crime in the neighborhood. Information is doled out bit by bit as a picture of the murder and the circumstances surrounding it are revealed. 

4th degree:

For my fourth book I will stay with Japan and Japanese authors, but move to another genre. The Cat Who Saved Books by Sōsuke Natsukawa is a fantasy about a cat and a boy who is left alone after his grandfather dies. This is another one my husband has read, and I will read it soonish, since it is a book about books.

5th degree:

The previous book leads me to another Japanese novel about a cat, The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa. The cat and a man take a journey together. That is all I know about the story and all I want to know before I read it. 

6th degree:

Next I am featuring a book about travelling, but this time it is a book about time travel. Tales from the Café by Toshikazu Kawaguchi is about a café in Tokyo which has been serving a special coffee for more than one hundred years. Visitors to the café can also take advantage of a special service; they can travel back in time under specific conditions. This is the second in a series of books about time travel in a Japanese café; I read the first one and I enjoyed it very much. This one is on my list of 20 Books of Summer.

I did not travel very far in my Six Degrees for June. I stayed in Japan. But I did cover various genres. Have you read any of these books? 

If you did this month's Six Degrees, where did your list take you?

The next Six Degrees will be on July 6th, 2024 and the starting book will be Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos (translated by Michael Hoffman), which won the 2024 International Booker Prize.

Newcomer: Keigo Higashino

 

I enjoy reading Japanese mysteries. My favorite Japanese author is Keigo Higashino, who has written two mystery series in addition to some standalone novels. This book is the second book featuring Detective Kyoichiro Kaga that has been translated to English.

Each of the books by Higashino that I have read is very different. He definitely does not follow a formula. In Malice, the first book in English to feature Detective Kaga, the story was more focused on characters and relationships. This book, Newcomer, seems at first to be a more straightforward police procedural. A woman who has recently moved to the Nihonbashi area of Tokyo has been murdered in her apartment, and it appears that she knew her murderer. Detective Kaga spends a lot of time visiting various locations, mostly small businesses, near her home to gather clues about her activities before she was murdered.

Each chapter features a location at which Kaga interviews various prospective witnesses or suspects, and each chapter reads almost like a self-contained short story. The reader doesn't know much about the murder and the victim until about a third of the way through the book. Information is doled out bit by bit as a picture of the murder and the circumstances surrounding it are revealed. For a while this method of introducing the crime and the characters related to it annoyed me a bit, and it seemed like a simplistic way of telling the story. But as the relationships between all these shops and people come together, the complexity of the story is revealed. 

I have enjoyed every mystery by Keigo Higashino that I have read. I was rereading my reviews of his books, and I realized that I have never given my husband credit for introducing me to this writer (and many other Japanese mystery authors). He has been appreciative of Japanese mysteries for years, and now I share his enthusiasm.

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Publisher:   Minotaur Books, 2018 (orig. pub. 2001)
Translator:  Giles Murray
Length:       342 pages
Format:       Hardcover
Series:        Kyoichiro Kaga
Setting:       Tokyo, Japan
Genre:        Police Procedural
Source:       Borrowed from my husband.

Short Story Wednesday: Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

 

I have recently read several stories from Birds of America by Lorrie Moore. Initially I had a hard time getting into the stories in this book. Some of them were very difficult to read and relate to. I read the first five, was mostly confused, enjoyed a couple of them, then took a break.

When I came back to the book, I skipped two stories that had some relationship to Christmas ("Charades" and "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens") and read the next two stories. I liked both of them. How did that happen? Did I just get used to her style? I think all of the stories I have read have elements of sadness and deal with relationships, but these two I really liked.

"Beautiful Grade" 

Bill is taking his 24-year-old girlfriend to a New Year's Eve party. Bill is about 50 and he is very conscious that his friends are talking about the age difference in his newish relationship. He is a college professor and she was his student when they first got together. Now that she is not his student he can be more open about it. 

This quote describes the people at the party: 

There is Albert, with his videos; Albert's old friend Brigitte, a Berlin-born political scientist; Stanley Mix, off every other semester to fly to Japan and study the zoological effects of radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Stanley's wife, Roberta, a travel agent and obsessive tabulator of Stanley's frequent flyer miles (Bill has often admired her posters: STEP BACK IN TIME, COME TO ARGENTINA says the one on her door); Lina, a pretty visiting Serb teaching in Slavic Studies; and Lina's doctor husband, Jack, a Texan who five years ago in Yugoslavia put Dallas dirt under the laboring Lina's hospital bed so that his son could be "born on Texan soil." ("But the boy is a total sairb" Lina says of her son, rolling her lovely r's. "Just don't tell Jack.")

The party is at Albert's; he has just successfully divorced his third wife. He serves a meal; they talk, and all the while Bill is thinking about these people, dinner parties from the past, his attraction to Lina, his insecurities. 

My favorite part: at midnight, they all have a spoonful of black-eyed peas as the first thing they eat on January 1st. This is a southern tradition to ensure good luck year. 

"What You Want to Do Fine"

This story had a lot of humor, and I enjoyed that. Two gay men set off on a road trip, from Indiana all the way to New Orleans. Their backgrounds are very different. Mack paints houses; Quilty is blind with a seeing eye dog and has a legal practice. On the trip they visit a lot of cemeteries and play Trivial Pursuit at the motel. They eat hush puppies and catfish when they get into the deep south. They argue about petty subjects and try to figure out if they should stay together. 

Favorite quote: "He may have been blind and a recovering drinker, but with the help of his secretary, Martha, he had worked up a decent legal practice and did not give his services away for free. Good barter, however, he liked. It made life easier for a blind man. He was, after all, a practical person. Beneath all his eccentricities, he possessed a streak of pragmatism so sharp and deep that others mistook it for sanity."

The Warden: Anthony Trollope

 

I was excited when The Warden by Anthony Trollope was selected for my Classics Club Spin result. I had read nothing by Trollope and I was eager to try his writing. It took me a while to get used to the style but in the end it was a big success for me. 

This description of The Warden is from Goodreads:

The Warden centers on Mr. Harding, a clergyman of great personal integrity who is nevertheless in possession of an income from a charity far in excess of the sum devoted to the purposes of the foundation. On discovering this, young John Bold turns his reforming zeal to exposing what he regards as an abuse of privilege, despite the fact that he is in love with Mr. Harding's daughter Eleanor. It was a highly topical novel (a case regarding the misapplication of church funds was the scandalous subject of contemporary debate), but like other great Victorian novelists, Trollope uses the specific case to explore and illuminate the universal complexities of human motivation and social morality.

I had gotten the impression that Trollope's writing was humorous but I failed to see the humor in this story at first. It seemed that all would end very sadly. How could the Warden, Mr. Harding, end up happy or contented when, even if legal proceedings excused him from guilt, he still felt like he had done wrong, although unknowingly, and certainly could not  continue to take the money that was not rightfully his?

As the story continued, it lightened up and I became immersed in it and did enjoy the humor of the situation. I loved the friendship between the Bishop and the Warden. I loathed the Archbishop (the Bishop's son) but enjoyed his relationship with his wife (Mr. Harding's oldest daughter). And I was happy with the ending.

I was at a disadvantage when reading this story, not truly being familiar with or understanding the positions and rankings in the Church of England. And even when I found explanations applicable to the time in which the book was written, they offered many options for how a position could be interpreted and acquired. I am sure I missed a lot of the satire, based on what I read in the notes at the end of this book. But I was able to get the basic themes and ideas.

I have left out so much about this story and how it was written. But the main takeaway is that it was a good read overall and I will be following up by reading more of Trollope's books. I have a copy of Barchester Towers, the second book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire, and I hope to read it before the end of 2024. It is almost 500 pages long, though, and The Warden was under 300 pages. 

-----------------------------

Publisher:   Oxford University Press, 1998 (orig. pub. 1855)
Length:      284 pages
Format:      Trade paperback

Series:       Chronicles of Barsetshire #1
Setting:      UK
Genre:        Literary fiction
Source:      I purchased my copy at the Planned Parenthood book sale in 2022.

It's Almost Time for 20 Books of Summer 2024

 

This is my ninth year of participating in the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge. The event is hosted by Cathy at 746 Books. 

The event is very flexible. You can go for 15 Books of Summer or 10 Books of Summer if 20 is more than you want to commit to. Check here for more about the challenge or to sign up.

This year, 20 Books of Summer starts June 1st and ends September 1st. One of the things I like about this challenge is that it goes for three months only. Some years I have read all 20 books from my list, sometimes not. 

Here are my 20 books...

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)

The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars by Maurice Dekobra (1925)

The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler (1943)

A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie (1964)

War Game by Anthony Price (1976; 205 pages)

In the Midst of Death by Lawrence Block (1976; 185 pages) 

Birdcage by Victor Canning (1978; 233 pages)

Skeleton-In-Waiting by Peter Dickinson (1989; 154 pages)

The White Lioness by Henning Mankell (1993; 440 pages) 

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi (2003; 153 pages)

Dark Fire by C. J. Sansom (2004; 500 pages)

The Dead Fathers Club by Matt Haig (2006; 336 pages)

A Symphony of Echoes by Jodi Taylor (2013; 327 pages)

A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny (2016; 389 pages)

A Cast of Falcons by Steve Burrows (2016; 384 pages)

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers (2016; 364 pages)

Tales from the Café by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (2017; 192 pages)

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler (2020; 178 pages)

Family Business by S. J. Rozan (2021; 288 pages)

The Lonely Hearts Book Club by Lucy Gilmore (2023; 352 pages)

Short Story Wednesday: "Runaway" by Alice Munro

Last night I spent the evening reading several short stories by Lorrie Moore. But this morning I heard that Alice Munro had died at 92, and I decided to read one of Munro's stories for my post this week instead. Luckily, I have several of her books of short stories, and the one I decided on was Runaway, published in 2004. I read the title story.

All of the stories in this collection are longer stories, usually between 35 to 45 pages in length.

In "Runaway," Carla and Clark run a stable for boarding horses; they also provide trail rides to campers nearby and riding lessons for children. They live in a mobile home on their land. One morning, Carla sees their nearest neighbor, Sylvia Jamieson, driving home from a trip to Greece. Carla is afraid of what will happen when Clark discovers that Sylvia is home. What happens after that is surprising and unexpected. The story is an interesting look at marriages and relationships.

I liked the story, but it was a little unsettling.

The next three stories in this book are about a single character, Juliet. I hope to read them soon.

I don't have a lot of experience with Alice Munro's stories, but overall, I have been impressed with those that I have read. She is a Canadian author, and the settings of her stories are usually in Canada, which is an added attraction for me. Last year I read a collection of her stories published in 2012, Dear Life. My comments on those stories are here and here.