Someone once told me, in a friend request on Facebook of all places, that one of her earliest memories of me was leaving the public library with my back pack stuffed full of books, to the point of overflowing, and myself carrying said back pack, and yet another pile of books that towered above me. She said I was about five or six?
So I guess you can say that my love for books and reading began very very early in life. It's something I am doing all I can to encourage in our daughter. Our first book we read together was The Hobbit, followed by J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. We have since gone through the first three books of Harry Potter, some of the Faerie Queene by Spenser, and we're now working on The Magician's Nephew (the first book of Narnia - not published order, but order of events) by C.S. Lewis.
Grad School taught me to read a book fast. And by fast I mean FAST. We did a book a week, books like Moby Dick, in a week.
So along with the speed reading, my voracious appetite for books, I can move pretty fast. 500 pages in a week? In a few days? And I am always on the hunt for a good book, or three to be reading.
So last week, I found myself in the position that comes to many readers. I had just finished some great books, and I found myself not knowing what else to read. I wandered through my library's shelves, when my eyes came upon two books I had read years ago, but enjoyed, and I thought, "I wonder if she has anything new out..." And of course she did. Then commenced the happy dance.
I speak of Laurie R. King. I can't tell you how many books she's written. She has a couple series she works on. She came to my attention because of her Mary Russell Series.
Set early 1900s, (that last book was set 1924?) she takes a well loved, revered, and almost sacred character of literature - Sherlock Holmes - and she gives him a female foil, a young American woman named Mary Russell, who is almost equal in wits (he has about twenty some odd years on her, so there's the experience card to be played there), and she marries them.
These are not romance stories. These are not bodice rippers to include famous characters just to make money. These books hold the integrity of Sherlock Holmes (being a Sherlockian myself). He sounds the way he should sound. He acts the way he should act. The writing style is a little more fluid and lush than Conan Doyle's work. She doesn't write in riddles, or monastic sparsity, or over romanticizing, or extreme description. She has developed Holmes and Russell so well and with such integrity, that you begin to take for granted that, yes of course, these things happened.
The stories are mysteries, ones that Doyle would be proud of. And it's none of the mysteries that keep the reader in the dark as well, making you feel stupid. As the stories are primarily told first person from Mary's point of view, you discover things as she does.
The first one, that I have yet to read, is called The Bee Keeper's Apprentice, which is a nod to Doyle. The epilogue on all of the canonical Sherlock Holmes material (even when you write to 221 B Baker Street London, like we did in eighth grade) says that Holmes retired and took up bee keeping in Sussex. It is there that King picks up the thread.
The ones I have read are The Moor; O Jerusalem; The Game; Locked Rooms. The last two books take place back to back withing days of one's end and the other's start.
(I am currently re-reading The Moor until I can get to the library to get some of the others our, perhaps even the first one! And even having read The Moor before, it still holds up. It still is a lovely piece of work, and one that I don't feel like I'm wasting my time revisiting.)
I have a whole list of other books that I've been reading/read, but I'm saving those up for another blog posting.
Feel free to send your favorites or currents to us, to endorse, or to warn against.. :)
"Home is where my books are."
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