Three Books -- A Conjoined Review

              

Like Nature, I abhor a vacuum. (A misuse of a metaphor if ever I misused one -- horror vacui is a postulate attributed to Aristotle: to wit, nature contains no vacuums because if there were a vacuum, the denser surrounding material would immediately fill it and it would no longer be a vacuum.)

All that to say, I hate to finish one book without another or two or three waiting in the wings. So I check books out of the library. I buy books at book stores. And I save them from the dumpster.

And how does this work out for me? Well, let me tell you.

I was in Barnes and Noble last month, gift certificate burning a hole in my pocket and a coupon in hand for a classic. Wuthering Heights was right on top of a stack of classics in the front of the store, wearing a beautiful olive, faux leather cover. I hadn't read it since high school, and, as I remembered, it was tragic and romantic and fixed Emily Brontë forever in my mind as the best writer of the Brontë sisters.

When next the opportunity to start a book presented itself, I started Wuthering Heights. Alas, I have passed the age where tragedy is synonymous with romance. Wuthering Heights is a litany of mental and physical cruelty against Heathcliff as a child and into young adulthood. By then he is so emotionally scarred, his humanity so disfigured, as to make his character as repulsive as the people who had mistreated him. 

Spoiler alert: Nothing ends well for poor Heathcliff.

I avidly read murder mysteries. Unlike Wuthering Heights, the dastardly deed is usually done and over in a few pages with the rest of the story devoted to bringing the miscreants to justice.

Luckily I was saved from reading the rest of  Wuthering Heights. I got an email that the third in Louise Penny's Chief Inspector Gamache series, The Cruelest Month, was waiting for me at the library.

But alas and alack. It seems I am not yet old enough to appreciate Ms. Penny's cozy mysteries. They are simply too cozy. I started the series, because several of my friends really enjoy her work. 

CBS Sunday Morning had a piece on Louise Penny (click here) just before I started The Cruelest Month. I very much enjoyed the interview with her. She is much more interesting than her characters. She said when she developed Chief Inspector Gamache's character, she wrote a man like she would like to marry.

I find the character altogether too perfect. Gamache never gets upset, or if he does, he doesn't show it. If I were to meet him, I would be sorely tempted to pinch his nose to see if I could get a rise out of him.

One thing I've got to say for Ms. Penny -- she employs the most creative methods of murder I have ever read. And another positive, her characters do not abuse children.

What am I reading now? Jodi Picault's House Rules, a book my daughter rescued, along with two bags full, from outside the dumpster near her home. (Her mother raised her right.)

I have not read Picault before, so we shall see.

So far my only complaint is that the book smells of tobacco smoke. I wonder what happened to the previous owner that all those books were discarded. They had had the books long enough that they should be so impregnated with the smoke. Do you suppose they died? Of lung cancer, maybe? Did they have a pet? What happened to it?

Can I get lung cancer from the book? Sort of second hand smoke once removed.

Ahhh. Mysteries everywhere.