Loads to read before I sleep, Loads to read before I sleep

Title: New Math is Murder

Author: Jo-Ann Lamon Reccoppa

I got the copy of the book on an online ebook site Pixel of Ink. I don't follow the rule "Don't judge the book by its cover". Nice cover pages do attract me a lot. I have a lot of unread books in my Kindle, but this book's cover page tempted me to read this.

The book falls in mystery genre bit a bit of funny statements thrown in here and there. The story revolves around the life of Colleen Caruso, a journalist who has a lot of problems in her personal life. Her husband who has an extra marital affair is about to divorce her without leaving much of finance for sustaining. She writes low profile columns on the paper like some restaurant reviews, memorial or fundraiser events for a living.

One day she decides to go on a jog and trips over a dead body which happens to be that of Colleen's daughter, Sara's algebra teacher Jason Whitley. This adds more trouble to her life. What happens later is a complete mysterious detective adventure for Colleen when her newspaper editor Ken Rhodes asks her to cover up the story on a regular basis in order to get more advertisers and readers for the newspaper.

During this assignment, she goes through a lot of trouble herself when she gets hit in a supermarket, her car sinks by the bay, her house is burglarized. Little does she know that her life is in danger too. At some point she plans to give up writing about the column in the newspaper but gets back to do it to prove someone innocent which is revealed in the middle of the book.

The suspects of the story are the Jason Whitley's colleagues in the school who are competing for the award they are nominated for the best teacher category, his wife, his ex-lover, principal of the school, his current lover. There are totally 3 extra marital affairs which made me wonder about the sanctity of marriage. Also strange thing is that all the teachers including the principal of the school were from the same batch in the same school which was a little too much to comprehend.

But it was totally a page-turner.  There is also an unspoken friendship/relationship between Ken Rhodes and Colleen Caruso about which nothing much has been explored in this part of the series. The climax also came as a bit of surprise not for the killer but for the reason behind the murder. Saying more about the book would be revealing too much. Its a cozy weekend read. I would definitely want to read another book of the author if it comes up any time soon.

Ratings: 3/5 (Liked it)

Title: Can’t and Won’t
Author: Lydia Davis

I had read a review of the Davis’ recent book in Reader’s Digest April 2014 edition where the reviewer was all high praises for Lydia Davis and there was a special mention of the above mentioned book saying its a collection of short stories. That is when I picked up this book and started reading it.

Once I started, the first 5-6 pages I kept on turning back and forth because I couldn’t quite relate to the chapters there. So I went back to the first page and started reading it again. And that is when I realized that each page/chapter that I was seeing was a whole new different short story. After that I was totally amused and smitten. The stories in this book are all short stories which are either a sentence long, a page long or just comprise of 2-3 sentences. There are a few long “short” stories considering the length of the story the author writes. The language used is very rich and you can’t flicker your mind to wander off because either you may never get back to the story again or the story would have already been over by then.The formation of sentences are intriguing, interesting and not that easy. She talks of mundane things yet makes it seem very interesting. before you search for more and want more from the story, the author knows when to pull back.

One of my favorite stories is called “The Chair” where the author is trying to guess the relationship status of a middle-aged lady in the Prayer Room whether she is a married woman(ruled out because she cant find a Mr. with the same last Name), widow(ruled out because she isn’t sad). It ends with she must be looking out for a partner as she can see the red dye of the hair smeared on the chair from behind. It sounds much better in her words than my explanation. Another favorite of mine is “Bloomington” which reads, “Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before.” But the best of all stories is the author goes on an on about irrelevant things trying to connect a lot of people with lot of things in one single paragraph and then she says “Oh, we writers may think we invent too much — but reality is worse every time!”. I personally felt it was very profound and witty at the same time.

But I have a few qualms about the book. The stories are written as “dream” and “story from Flaubert”. The ones mentioned as dreams are really boring and pointless. It is like reading Davis’s night diary which I personally wasn’t very interested in. Are they are normal things which probably each one of us would have dreamt off but trying to create a short story out of it was very uninteresting. the 13 stories from Flaubert were formed from material found in letters written by Gustave Flaubert, most of them to his friend and lover Louise Colet , during the period in which he was working on Madame Bovary(mentioned in the Appendix). These stories are derived from his letters and combination of two or more letters blended with figment of Lydia’s imagination. These are quite good.

Given a chance, I would probably never read a short story collection again from the same author if its about her dreams. Else will surely try to read. May be next time I would want to read about her “not ‘this’ short stories/novels if she comes up. Overall the book was creative and one of its kinds. I had never before read anything like that.

Ratings: 3.5/5 (I liked it but could have been better without the dreams)