Okay, I’ll admit it. Jar City is slow going. Well written, just unintriguing. Maybe I’ve watched too much Law and Order and I already live among Scandinavians, but this police procedural with its “painful inevitability” addresses crimes, criminals, victims, police, and bureaucrats and, so far, sums to ordinary. This makes it lifelike, I know, which is good, but I want more “new,” and the ratio of new to not new favors not new.
One very good point: Inspector Erlander is a reader. From p.17:
“Eventually, [Inspector Erlendur] picked up the book he was reading, which lay open on a table beside the chair. It was from one of his favourite series, describing ordeals and fatalities in the wilderness.
He continued reading where he’d left off in the story called “Lives Lost on Mosfellsheidi” and he was soon in a relentless blizzard that froze young men to death.”
Good grief. I’m still hoping for new nuggets about the Irish/Viking question, sailors’ interests, and, most recently, sheep/yarn life for a knitter friend who is planning another sheep trip.
Nugget reading requires some attention, so I shouldn’t read Jar City only at bedtime, but I’ve begun a different book for mid-day adventures — and I think it is a big time, very exciting, winner.
Damrosch, David. The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2006.
This is a search book, that is, the search matters more than the finding. I love search books. My favorite is probably Nicholas Clapp’s The Road to Ubar, a search for an ancient city in the empty quarter of the Arabian desert, but this new book continues my efforts to learn about the Near East.
Clapp, Nicholas. The Road to Ubar.
I took a course in Sumerian, the dead language of ancient Iraq, called Sumer, had a great, good time, and learned that history doesn’t change much. Fifty-five hundred years ago, Sumer (Iraq) and Elam (Iran) were fighting over water. Today it’s oil. What are we doing there? But I digress.
To p. 9, the Damrosch book is promising. My only problem, so far, is figuring out how it fits with Roseledge Books, but it’s still early days. The Road to Ubar unexpectedly came up at a summer birthday dinner in Maine. Two of us had read and loved it, and another knew he was missing out. This has to be a classic instance of Tenants Harbor demand, and, ta da, Roseledge Books had its reason for carrying a (mostly) desert adventure.