Out of the Deep I Cry, Julia Spencer-Flemming

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I am currently binge-reading Spencer-Fleming's Clare Ferguson/Russ Van Alstyne mysteries. At book 6 I started buying them because I couldn't get them from the library fast enough.

"Out of the Deep I Cry" is book 3 and possibly my favorite so far, although I continue to be blown away. One of the things I appreciate is that Spencer-Fleming reinvents her structure from novel to novel. Book 3 jumps backwards and forwards in time, book 4 is structured by the Episcopal daily order of service, book 6 is organized into the church's yearly calendar, etc.

Here's why Spencer-Fleming is brilliant. She is a pro with foreshadowing and unexpected chapter-ending twists, which make her mysteries un-put-down-able. She has moments of surprising beauty [from "To Darkness and to Death"]:

[Clare] hiked over a rotting log, crushing coffee-brown pulp and meaty fungus beneath her boots. The smell, rich and wet, mingled with the odor of pine sap. A flash of movement caught her eye, and she whirled, just in time to see a gray fox vanish like smoke into the earth.

and moments of completely relatable ordinariness:

Clare slipped inside, closing the door with a careless kick and sinking into one of the old wooden chairs she had purchased in an attempt to warm up her all-white, straight-out-of-the-box kitchen. She sat for a moment, listening tot he silence.

I love the kicking the door shut, because it's a detail a writer wouldn't have an obvious reason to use ("Clare opened the door and went inside"), but it queues the emotional backdrop for the scene coming up and at the same time gives Clare such "oh yeah I've done that" humanity.

Mostly I love the depths, the rawness, but with such sensitivity, with such moments of grace [from "All Mortal Flesh"]:

     Suddenly, a black bubble of grief rose up out of his chest and he let out a barking sob. Clare took one hand off the wheel and held it out to him. He clutched it in a bone-cracking grip, his chest heaving as he fought to regain some control.
     "Jesus," he said, when he could speak again. "Jesus Christ. I'm losing my mind."
     Clare shook her head. Her eyes were wet, too, although from sympathy or from the pain where he was grinding her knuckles together, he couldn't tell. He released her hand.
     "You're not losing your mind. Grief makes us all crazy at times. You read those Kubler-Ross theories and you think grief has all these recognizable levels, like going through school. Once you pass all the tests, you get to leave. But day to day, moment to moment, grief is more like..."
     "Losing your mind?"
     "Yeah."

And these are characters who are fundamentally trying to help other people, whether that's in the capacity of chief of police or Episcopal priest. They are the ones going toward the disaster when everybody else is trying to get out, and they ask each other, "What can I do to help?" "What do you need?" Their identity as helpers and leaders is the foundation of their partnership - it is impossible not to care deeply about these characters.

A Share in Death, Deborah Crombie

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British cozy mystery, the kind where there are 10 suspects, each with a quirk or secret, but otherwise interchangeable. I always think I will like these because I grew up reading Agatha Christies, but I find they feel emotionally hollow to me now and I'm gravitating toward procedurals. I suspect it has something to do with one's vision of evil or general sense of life as upbeat or somber.

This is the first in Crombie's Kincaid series, and therefore possibly not representative. I never emotionally invested in the detective (despite his catchy name), I think because I didn't see what he cared about, apart from solving the case, although again, that partly goes with the sub-genre territory. What impressed me most was reading the back and finding out Crombie is originally from Texas. I would never have guessed that from her thoroughly English village setting.

The Rule of Four, Caldwell & Thomason

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The concept of the book - the decoding of secret ciphers in a little known Renaissance text - sounded very Da Vinci Code to me, and I almost took a pass on it, not being a fan of conspiracy theory-type suspense, but I ended up totally enjoying every minute of this book!

If you are looking for a murder mystery, that thread is minor, but there's so much else that's brilliant and heartfelt in this intellectual head-trip of a book which skips backwards and forwards in the telling.

From Chapter 24:

"In a world where half the villagers always lie and half of them always tell the truth; where the hare never catches the tortoise because the distance between them shrinks by a never-collapsing infinity of halves; where the fox can never be left on the same bank of the river as the hen, or the hen on the same bank as the grain, because with perfect regularity the one will consume the other, and nothing you can do will prevent it: in that world, everything is sensible but the premise. A riddle is a castle built on air, perfectly habitable if you don't look down...."

November 8, 2016 feels like it needs its own marker.

Unitarian minister Theodore Parker wrote in 1853:

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/15/arc-of-universe/

Martin Luther King Jr. more famously summarized Parker's thought as “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

It is also worth rereading King's "I Have a Dream" in its entirety:
I Have a Dream

In the Bleak Midwinter, Julia Spencer-Fleming

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This is the first in Spencer-Fleming's Clare Fergusson & Russ Van Alstyne murder mystery series set in rural New York state. Clare is an Episcopal priest with a background as an Army helicopter pilot. Russ is the local Chief of Police, also with a military background. What she's captured brilliantly is that both positions (minister and detective) are 'set apart': helping professions in which the real people can easily disappear behind the job title.

I was initially dubious. The first chapters felt sensational (abandoned baby, dead teenage girl, incest!) and forced - characters conveniently volunteer and inquire into each other's backstories - but I got sucked in halfway through, and absolutely hooked by about 2/3rd to 3/4. That's a long way to go before getting bitten by the bug, but it does make you reach right away for the next book in the series! I believe there are 8 books out currently.

Spencer-Fleming has a terrific eye for detail, sounds, and smells, that make the world of the book feel real, but I think her outstanding quality is the way she writes in scenes of non-physical intimacy that powerfully bind her characters together: cooking dinner, shared humor, trading stories and hobbies; just knowing there's someone you can be yourself around, who will come looking for you when you are lost.

Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich

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The full title is "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America." It should be required reading in college. Or high school. Ehrenreich, a journalist, describes in three sections her experiences as a waitress, as a maid, and a retail clerk, plus other assorted jobs along the way as she attempts to live within her earnings. This is seriously a case of walking a mile in someone else's shoes....

Even though the book is getting dated (2001), it's a snapshot of what it's like to work in a minimum wage job and try to survive. It was an eye-opener to me to realize one of the huge problems is rent. Some of the people she meets are caught living in low-end weekly rate motel rooms because they can't set aside enough to be able to pay a first month's deposit on an apartment that would be cheaper in the long run. Others solve the problem by sharing single-sized living space with other people. Some live out of their cars.

These are not people who are poor because they are unemployed. Many have a job, one and a half or even two full-time jobs. Working poverty, as Ehrenreich shows in her own experience and through the people she meets and informally interviews, is not just a case of belt-tightening, but life in a state of crisis. If you care at all about issues of social justice, you need to read this book or one like it.