The Uncommon Reader, a novella about the intellectual awakening of the current monarch of Great Britain, is more than a slight confection with an appeal only to fans of the Royal Family. The book might seem like familiar territory to those familiar with Sue Townsend’s book about the Royals, The Queen and I (Townsend wrote the Adrian Mole books), and there’s certainly a resemblance: talented English writers turning their attention and working their humorous magic on a group of people who don’t seem to have a ironic bone in their bodies. But this book is a welcome call to subversive action: stop doing what people expect of you, says Bennett, and pick up a book for God’s sake. There’s still time and you can learn to become more than you are.

The Whiskey Rebels, By David Liss

The Whiskey Rebels opens in a dark alley. A man of dubious reputation has been set upon by enemies he may or may not deserve. Will he be humiliated — or worse, will he be killed by new enemies, and finally succumb to the fate he has courted since the days of his disgrace.

We are in David Liss country, familiar territory to readers of The Coffee Trader or A Conspiracy of Paper, and we’re happy to be here and eager for adventure.

What I just adore about David Liss is his ability to write fiction about things that I don’t understand, like commodities trading (Coffee Trader), the South Seas Bubble (A Conspiracy of Paper), deductive reasoning (C of P), and the Whiskey Rebellion and the Bank of America. As Liss’s characters undergo an education to the hard financial realities of life,  the reader is also granted and education — and a perspective.

The Whiskey Rebels is jammed with nuggets of wisdom as one of Liss’s most sympathetic female characters, Joan Maycott, makes observations about her country and her times: “We walked the cobbled streets of the new imperial capital [New York City], the rivers filled with forests of merchant-ship masts, yet we were surrounded by the untouched submlimity of nature. There could be nothing more American.”   She reads books on trade — and plans to write the American novel. As her husband-to-be observes in the first “Joan Maycott” section, “The American Novel, if it is to be honest, must be about money, not property. Money alone — base, unremarkable, corrupting money.” At times like this, The Whiskey Rebels touches on meta-novel status as Liss also gives up pointers on how to write through the actions of Joan Maycott, along with lessons on government and finance.

Liss’s other narrator, Ethan Saunders, is a flawed hero, so sunk in his own grief that he remains clueless about the suffering of others, including Leonides, Saunders’ young slave. As the novel progresses, it is easy to see why Leonides and Joan Maycott become important to each other even though we never witness a conversation between the two. That’s another Liss touch — the actions behind the scenes that are rendered subtly but honestly — no 11th hour revelations and deux ex machina  here to cheat the reader.

The only thing that keeps me from giving the book 5 stars is the writer’s tendancy to end chapters with “If I only knew then about the problems of the future” -style cliffhangers. I personally find them unnecessary and am pulled along with the story for its own sake.

To lovers of history, fiction,and strong characters, I recommend this book. Enjoy!

Thinging it in, phoning it in, daily litting it in

Do you Library Thing? Do you read Books in my Phone? How about a subscription with Daily Lit?

Library thing is a way-cool phenom for keeping it all together when it comes to one’s books (we joined forever and ever at the $50 dollar level), and we also bought the CueCat to make it easy to add books — although it’s pretty easy to add books without the CueCat because LibraryThing makes it soooo easy! I’m not very organized but I tell you what, It make me feel like more of a whole person to put all of our fiction together in one room. No, it’s not alphabetized yet (give me another years . . .) The best part  was getting closer to my husband’s book, really seeing what he likes by handling the books, one at a time.

Right now, I’m reading a Cory Doctorow novel, Little Brother, on my cell phone. Yes, I bought a Blackberry and pay the insane monthly fees so that I can have the Internet in my pocket, feel like I’m part of the club –  and also because even though I wear trifocals and need lots of light in order to read, the Blackberry screen is easy to read.

On my e-mail, I have a subscription to an old L. Frank Baum book of short stories from DailyLit. Serialized novels are nothing new. That’s how both Dickens and Thackery got popular. Indeed, American readers stood in the harbor in New York, calling to the incoming ships that carried the most recent London papers that carried the serialized version of the The Old Curiosity Shop, begging to know what happned to Little Nell. Nothing new under the sun, thank goodness!

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale. Walker Publishing Company, New York NY, 2008. 360 pp HB $24.95

If there were no Detective Jonathan Whicher, then a writer would have to invent him. This real-life Victorian detective is the father of all fictional practitioners of the art of detection. Like American gumshoes, he was of humble origins. Whicher’s father was a gardner and Whicher himself rose through the ranks to become a master of seeing through the disguises of criminals. He even enjoyed beating them at their own game, retrieving a stolen object from a band of thieves by employing the same ruse that they would have used to pass the valuable, unseen, from one man to the next. And due to social constraints, bungling locals, and a refusal to accept the unthinkable, Whicher’s career never quite recovered from the aftershocks of the Road Hill murder of 1860.

Summerscale, who wrote the award-winning Queen of Wale Cay has done more than her homework, and we readers are the lucky recipients of her clarity in writing and tenacity of research. The case was not a secret at the time, however much the middle-class family of the victim wished to remain in seclusion. From across the country, ordinary people wrote to the authorities and offered their solutions and interpretations. Crime reporting, according to Summerscale, was growing in popularity with the general rise of the press since the 1850s, and moral and religious leaders worried that the addiction to sensationalism would corrupt ordinary folk.

The author also provides historical analysis of the era, how the competition between British might and French ingenuity informed the public preoccupation with the success of Whicher — and why he was not forgiven for his “failure.” Summerscale also sheds light on word usage, like the origin of the word “clue” and the Victorian shades of meaning to words like “close.”

The modern reader almost gets lost in the procedurals, the discovery of clues, the contamination of the crime scene, the motives of all concerned — and then at the end, we are reminded of what happened, of what the victim suffered, and that some crimes will never quite rest, even if justice is one day served.

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