TYING UP THE “NOTS”

How many pages in a book do you read before you decide to quit? Friend Jerry stops after the first page if she doesn’t want to read the writing. She gives books I recommend twenty pages before she decides, once again, that our tastes differ. Years ago, a friend with whom I exchanged books noted that I must have liked a book if the first coffee stain did not appear until page 50.

Now I usually stop at 50 pages if I don‘t like a book, but I kept reading to page 273 (of 511 pages) in John Connelly’s The Unquiet because it was a mystery set in Maine with (I think) a series P.I., Charlie Parker, based in Portland and a NYTimes Bestseller to boot. Surely Roseledge Books should have this. But of the idea of Maine, there was no there there (with apologies to Gertrude Stein on Oakland, CA). Characters are Mainers in name only and the Maine terrain reads like a guidebook embellished by a visit, e.g. the breakfast crowd in The Porthole in Portland or the visit to Supermax in Warren. So Roseledge Books will not have this as a “Maine” book, but maybe I ought to have it as a mystery just to enjoy the argument with a reader who differs.

Fig. #20. This is not Maine, but Charlie lives within a camera’s eye of Mt. Rainier (Seattle), he takes a great picture, and he does include a little big water.

Roseledge Books will not have April Smith’s North of Montana. The book was okay, but not special enough to spend time reading about her or Los Angeles. (Montana of the title is an avenue in Los Angeles. I really like the real Montana. Where are you Jamie Lee Harrison?) FBI agent Ana Grey was compared [by NYT Book Review] to Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, and I’m not that wild about Ms. Millhone either. Maybe it’s the evidence presented in the cases; I like obscure records and aberrant flow of information. Thanks to my sister’s introduction, Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch has LA covered for me, but few Roseledge Books readers ask for Pacific Ocean seaport reads, though if I have them, they sometimes buy them, e.g. Paul Gauguin’s Letters from the South Seas, Captain Bligh’s Log of the HMS Bounty 1787-1789, Dana Stabenow’s Midnight Come Again, an Alaskan crabbing mystery.