Time for a Change

porter sculpture garden 011Do you ever just feel it, that change is coming? You’re not even sure what it is yet, but the air vibrates with it. You raise your head and sniff into the wind, like an excited hound about to hunt.

My husband pointed out you could also be a rabbit sniffing danger, but he doesn’t like change.

Anyway, it’s not just my sporty new short haircut. It’s not that our town is getting a new manager and a few of the paradigms that boxed small businesses in may have shifted. Something big is on the wind. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve owned a bookstore long enough to know when the books are restless. They sense it too.

You think this is fey jesting? Surely you’ve read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series with its amazing live libraries and orangutan librarian. L-space: where things are bigger inside than out, and hide more secrets than Horatio ever dreamed of ignoring.

Days of Awe and Wonder are seasonal for Jewish people, but an unexamined life at any time is not worth living. Maybe I’m just taking stock of what works and what doesn’t, how many simultaneous thirsty threads are sucking from the 24 allocated hours of the given day, and which ones need to go.

I don’t know. But on this first day of the autumnal months, the books are restless, and so am I.

The Monday Book

Jack’s guest Monday review (on Tuesday – just) –

Ian Rankin – The Rebus Series

Not so much a book review, as an author review this week –

I’m not usually one for novels, preferring biographies and memoirs for the most part. But I do have just a few novelists I like and one of those is Rankin. I hasten to add that it’s not that I like every book he’s written, but the Rebus series do stand out, in my opinion.

It’s probably because both Rankin and his character have their roots in West Fife (my home territory) but are resident in Edinburgh (a place I know well). In the series Rebus frequently revisits Fife and the Edinburgh that forms the backdrop to most of the books is very lovingly and accurately portrayed.

The books are well written, full of believable characters and with plots that grip you to the last page. This is noir detective with a Scots accent and firmly in the world of Philip Marlowe.

The Edinburgh he describes is a mixture of the historic center after dark and the run-down housing schemes on the outskirts. His plots are always relevant to the times and clearly involve  a lot of careful research.

Rebus is a complex guy with a troubled personal life, who is looked on with suspicion by most of his colleagues and especially by his superiors. During the course of the series he moves from being a regular working cop to the branch that deals with internal matters such as bribery and collusion with criminals and gangs.

All the books except the last one have been made into TV dramas, with half being done by the BBC and the other half by ITV. The casts were different for each series and, although presenting contrasting interpretations, both were excellent.

I have read other novels by Rankin that were not part of the Rebus series and didn’t find them as compelling I’m afraid.