Sometimes it all gets too much. Sometimes you just need to get away. And since, for the second year running, we've just had to cancel a holiday/vacation I was really, really looking forward to (family health issues – you don't want to know; I wish I didn't have to), take a guess where I go when I need to escape.
Anyone who knows me at all will have no difficulty with that little conundrum. I head straight for my bookshelves. Specifically, the ones in the corner behind the table, designated the To Be Read shelves. Every single one of the books on those shelves is guaranteed to take me somewhere else: somewhere, and maybe somewhen, other than the here and now.
And I think the ones I like best are the ones which transport me to a place I've never been, maybe never will go, into a way of life so different from anything close and familiar that it almost feels as if I'd taken a holiday/vacation there. Usually with murder included, but hey, what's life without a little excitement? So, as part of my 2017 resolution to introduce new people to books I've read, here's a small selection of the places and alternative lives I've escaped into recently.
A group of islands called Shetland lies off the northern tip of the UK; you'd think it was a calm, easy-going rural community, the kind of place you can leave your front door unlocked and the keys in the ignition of your car without fear of loss or damage. But if you take note of the way Ann Cleeves and Marsali Taylor describe it, you tread carefully and trust no one.
I'm not sure which of them started it, but they both have unputdownable series in progress. Ann Cleeves's DI Jimmy Perez is the islands' senior cop, and in each of the seven books in the series he seems to trip over at least one body, sometimes more. In the latest, Cold Earth, nature delivers the victim right at his feet, when the wettest winter in memory culminates in a landslip. Marsali Taylor's yachtswoman Cass Lynch isn't a cop at all, but bodies seem to turn up in her life remarkably often: in Ghosts of the Vikings at a country house about to be the venue of an opera recital. Both these authors bring Shetland to vivid life: its bleak beauty, characterful cottages, open spaces and wild sea, even the oil terminal and busy airport, form a background that makes the reader, this one anyway, feel she's there, with the wind in her hair and an occasional glorious sunrise.
Anything by Tony Hillerman is probably a bit of a cheat when it comes to transporting me to new places, because I've visited New Mexico, stayed in the real-life Window Rock, driven past the Shiprock, marvelled at the red rock formations and revelled in the little bits of Diné and Hopi life I've been allowed to find. But I love his books because they take me back there, and let me into a world I've always found to be touched with magic. My most recent taste of it was The Shape Shifter; Hillerman takes an image from Diné mythology and gives it a down-to-earth spin, and I loved every sentence.
Michael Farris Smith's Desperation Road took me to Mississippi, a part of the USA I haven't visited. The book gripped me, and I cared what became of his characters, but if I'm honest he didn't make me want to jump on the next plane. His small-town Mississippi was a dismal place, peopled with unhappy folk and others I wouldn't want to meet. But I suppose even that serves a purpose: it shows me that sometimes what's close to home is preferable to what an author has to show me.
Likewise A Life to Kill, the latest case for Matthew Hall's maverick coroner Jenny Cooper. Jenny was investigating a death in the military, and that's a world I've never had the smallest desire to explore. But the book also took me for the first time into the world of a coroner – and I had no idea how fascinating it could be. I thought the job was paperwork at a desk; in fact it's part detective, part investigative journalist, with a slice of grief counsellor and storyteller thrown in for good measure. Great stuff, and I'm looking forward to more, though maybe in a different environment.
That's a few of the places I've escaped to recently. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going exploring again. It never ceases to amaze me where you can go just by opening a book.
Recent Comments