{"id":14,"date":"2008-02-10T18:54:03","date_gmt":"2008-02-10T23:54:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/?p=14"},"modified":"2008-02-28T22:30:12","modified_gmt":"2008-02-29T03:30:12","slug":"search-books-coming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/?p=14","title":{"rendered":"SEARCH BOOKS COMING"},"content":{"rendered":"

Okay, I\u2019ll admit it. Jar City<\/em> is slow going. Well written, just unintriguing. Maybe I\u2019ve watched too much Law and Order<\/em> and I already live among Scandinavians, but this police procedural with its \u201cpainful inevitability\u201d 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 \u201cnew,\u201d and the ratio of new to not new favors not new.<\/p>\n

One very good point: Inspector Erlander is a reader. From p.17:
\n\u201cEventually, [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.
\nHe continued reading where he\u2019d left off in the story called \u201cLives Lost on Mosfellsheidi\u201d and he was soon in a relentless blizzard that froze young men to death.\u201d<\/p>\n

Good grief. I\u2019m still hoping for new nuggets about the Irish\/Viking question, sailors\u2019 interests, and, most recently, sheep\/yarn life for a knitter friend who is planning another sheep trip.<\/p>\n

Nugget reading requires some attention, so I shouldn\u2019t read Jar City<\/em> only at bedtime, but I\u2019ve begun a different book for mid-day adventures — and I think it is a big time, very exciting, winner.<\/p>\n

Damrosch, David. The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh.<\/em> New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2006.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a search book, that is, the search matters more than the finding. I love search books. My favorite is probably Nicholas Clapp\u2019s The Road to Ubar,<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

Clapp, Nicholas. The Road to Ubar.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I took a course in Sumerian, the dead language of ancient Iraq, called Sumer, had a great, good time, and learned that history doesn\u2019t change much. Fifty-five hundred years ago, Sumer (Iraq) and Elam (Iran) were fighting over water. Today it\u2019s oil. What are we doing there? But I digress.<\/p>\n

To p. 9, the Damrosch book is promising. My only problem, so far, is figuring out how it fits with Roseledge Books, but it\u2019s still early days. The Road to Ubar<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Okay, I\u2019ll admit it. Jar City is slow going. Well written, just unintriguing. Maybe I\u2019ve watched too much Law and Order and I already live among Scandinavians, but this police procedural with its \u201cpainful inevitability\u201d addresses crimes, criminals, victims, police, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9,1,6,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}