The balm of the familiar

Rebecca Lee

Sometimes a book wins literary acclaim and may even become a bestseller because of its originality. We are drawn to the book because it is unlike anything we have ever read before. Yet, let's face it, mostly we choose books that have what Rebecca Lee calls "the balm of the familiar."

She makes this comment in her book How Words Get Good. "Readers know what they are getting, and that's the way they like it," she writes.

Most of us readers like the authors we like, and we are a little anxious about trying authors we have never read before. Further, we like characters who are familiar to us. Had Arthur Conan Doyle dropped Sherlock Holmes after one story, we would not have heard of him today. Doyle, in fact, tried to kill off Holmes, but the character's popularity forced the author to bring him back. Readers liked Sherlock Holmes more than they liked his creator.

Robert B. Parker may have died, but his detective, Spenser, lives on in novels written by other people. So it goes with James Bond and other characters. We like familiar characters. Their creators, it seems, are expendable.

An old man and his dog

So many plots are complicated, full of subplots, twists and turns. But sometimes simplicity works best, as in the case of When the Cranes Fly South (2025) by Lisa Ridzen.

The Swedish author gives us a simple and poignant story about an 89-year-old man with little left to live for other than his memories and Sisten, his elkhound, who sleeps next to him. His wife has dementia and no longer remembers him. He remembers her by keeping her scarf in a jar, opening it now and then to catch her scent.

Bo has always had anger issues, and he struggles to control it when Hans, his son, insists he must take Sisten away from him because he is no longer able to take proper care of the dog. As for Bo, he is taken care of by a series of caregivers who come in several times a day. They leave little notes about Bo and his care, which are interspersed between sections of the novel.

And that is pretty much it. Yet Ridzen writes with such power and sensitivity that readers will find this simple tale totally engrossing.

The best candy shop

Maya Angelou

"The best candy shop a child can be left alone in is the library." So said author Maya Angelou.

A memory that sticks with me through the decades is of a mother, a woman I knew, walking into a public library with her three children and carrying a large box full of books. While she fed the books into the book return, she released her children to find new books. Now and then a child would return with an armload of books and deposit them in the box, then go back to look for more books. Soon enough the box was full again, and the family left for home.

Years later, one of these children, a classmate of my son, became the class valedictorian. No surprise there.

To this family, the library truly was the "best candy shop" in the sense Maya Angelou spoke about. These children could take anything they wanted and all they wanted. They chose books galore to satisfy their own individual sweet tooth. They did not get fat. They got smart.

One bad turn

Nothing could stop her now. She was meant to succeed. Her task was holy.

Peter Robinson, The First Cut

Revenge is sweet, or so they say. But it can turn sour, as Peter Robinson shows in The First Cut (1990), written before his Inspector Banks series became so popular.

The story is about two young women, or so it first appears. Kirsten is a student slashed within an inch of her life when she goes out alone at night. Martha comes to Whitby, England, with murder on her mind. She aims to kill the so-called Student Slasher.

Soon enough it becomes clear to any reader that these are one and the same woman. Through hypnosis, Kirsten thinks she remembers enough about her assailant to find him and kill him. Unfortunately innocent men have to die first. Is one serial killer really better than another?

There are many ways this novel could have ended. Robinson chooses perhaps the simplest one. But is it the best one?

Booksellers versus book buyers

Jeff Deutsch

In his book In Praise of Good Bookstores, Jeff Deutsch lists some of the criteria necessary for a bookstore to be profitable. Here are the first three:

1. Nearly 20 percent of the inventory must consist of products other than books.

2. The books on the shelves must be mostly from the major presses.

3. Stores must leave books on their shelves no longer than four months.

Each of these may work in the favor of bookstores and their bottom line, yet each of them works against those who may actually be their best customers, people who buy lots of books.

Bookstores commonly sell coffee, pastries, greeting cards, magazines, calendars, gift items and a variety of other non-book products. I bought a cup of tea in a bookstore last week. For many stores, these sales keep them in business. But for those of us who go to bookstores to look at books, it often means going to the rear of the store to find what we are looking for.

The big presses publish most of the best sellers and the most famous authors. Yet serious readers are often frustrated when they cannot find less-promoted books by lesser known authors. You can order them, of course, if you know about them, but most of us prefer to hold a book in our hands before committing to buying it.

Even those who shop for books several times a month rarely see every book in the store. I, for example, rarely look at books on the bottom shelves simply because of the inconvenience. Thus it can easily take more than four months for a book to find its reader. Often I don't even hear about a book that sounds interesting until more than a year after it has been published. By then, finding it in a bookstore can be impossible. I must turn to Amazon or order the book from a store.

And so, the rules that make sense for bookstores don't make sense for some of their best customers.

The past catches up

Sometimes the past just won’t stay in the past. Such is the case in Megan Miranda’s 2020 thriller The Girl from Widow Hills.

Twenty years before little Arden Maynor was found in a storm drainage pipe after having gone missing in a storm several days before while sleepwalking. For 20 years she has been trying to escape all the hoopla.

Now with a new name, Olivia, and living in a new state, she tries to live a newlife working for a hospital. Then, sleepwalking once again, she discovers the body of the very man who rescued her those 20 years before. Who might have murdered him? Could she, unknowingly, be the killer?

The more things happen, including the disappearance and death of a friend, the more it seems what happened in Widow Hills is involved in what is happening now. But how is that possible?

Miranda keeps the suspense bubbling in this unconventional thriller. It is never entirely convincing that Olivia would try so hard to keep little Arden in the past, but once you accept that premise, the novel proves a good one.

Strangers become family

When David Baldacci writes a standalone novel, you can usually predict it will be very different from his series books. That is, there will probably be no spies, no assassins and no murderers.

And there you have Strangers in Time, his 2025 novel. But this does not mean the story lacks all the excitement of a typical Baldacci novel. It is just more PG rated.

The persistent German bombing of London during World War II destroyed families as well as buildings. Baldacci brings together three people left alone by the war, creating a new family out of perfect strangers.

These include Charlie,an orphan who must do whatever he can to survive, including theft; Molly, a girl from a wealthy family who returns from the country to find both parents missing; and Ignatius, a bookseller/air raid warden broken-hearted from the death of his wife.

A mystery or two surrounds each of these characters, but together they solve them all.