Books books books

It's been terribly hot this last week, so I've been reading stacks and stacks of things. (I think I'm making up for lack of reading material abroad.) Mostly mystery books - they do let you get away with quite pedestrian prose in mysteries, don't they?

But I did find a couple I quite liked: vivid characters, decent prose, and denouements that are both unexpected and believable. Often murder mystery authors warp their characters out of true to achieve a surprise finish, but in these books, the finish simply snaps these characters into focus.

First, Sam Eastland's Eye of the Red Tsar, partly - possibly mostly? - because I am disturbingly obsessed with Stalinist Russia and Eastland captures the atmosphere: interlocking layers of lies, the potential for sudden brutal violence. The violence remains mostly potential (Eastland is clearly not into gore for the sake of gore), but the potential always feels real - it's the first book in a series so you know the hero won't die, but everyone else might.

(Normally I'm not enthusiastic about books where "Anyone might die, man, it's totally gritty and realistic," but I make an exception for Stalinist Russia. You have to feel that in Stalinist Russia.)

And, on the opposite end of the grittiness scale: Charles Finch's A Beautiful Blue Death, which is set in London in 1865 and is composed entirely of awesome. Finch gets Victorian England - in particular, that no matter how static it appears to us, its inhabitants felt their world changing with bewildering speed.

Moreover, his characters are just very pleasant. Not all of them - this is a murder mystery, so of course we meet a number of obnoxious suspects - but the ones with whom we spend the most time are kind and tactful: the sort of people who investigate the death of their former housemaid and kick themselves when they realize that they have made the idiot policeman feel like a fool. They are those rare characters who are not only fun to read about, but would also be a pleasure to meet.

Also, I read a couple of books I've been meaning to read for years: Mary Poppins, which I quite like, and The Wizard of Oz, which unfortunately has suffered for the wait.

I can see how I would have loved Oz at eight, but reading it now I find the plotting - "This happened, and then this happened, and this other absolute non sequitur occurred, and no one had any particular emotional reaction to anything" - boring.

I think perhaps Oz is most useful as a window: children can fly through and tell much more exciting stories to themselves using it as a base.

A cat may look at a king

More photos from my Epic Travels. This may continue till Christmastime.

This one is from the Hagia Sophia, which first was a great cathedral (commissioned in the sixth century by the dread emperor Justinian), became a mosque after the fall of Constantinople, and at last became a museum after Ataturk's rise to power. (Here's a tip: if you ever wonder why something is as it is in Turkey, Ataturk is always a good answer.)



The cat, unimpressed by all this history, is having a nap at the foot of the minbar, far below the golden Byzantine mosaics.

And another, from the cistern beneath the city.



This would be the best set for a chase scene ever. The water splashing as our hero wades through - fish brushing against his legs (or water snakes, maybe; no, don't think about it) - is someone following him, or is that only an echo he hears? He's just carried out a daring heist from the Topkapi Palace, not so very far away, and who knows what will happen if he's caught...