I love libraries. One of my earliest memories was going to the Ocean Beach Public Library, possibly still in a stroller, so my young mother could feed her reading addiction with old musty novels from the 1930s and 1940s … wait, they wouldn’t have been old and musty then but rather new and shiny. After the library we would do a little shopping on Newport and maybe have a cherry coke.
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders belongs to the popular Japanese honkaku, “orthodox” or “authentic”, subgenre of murder mysteries. Unlike psychological thrillers, honkaku books focus on plotting and clues. The reader is not deceived by the author but actively drawn into the writing and encouraged to participate in the solving of the mystery. These “pure” mysteries also stay away from social criticism, drawing their inspiration from writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe, whose works inspired the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in Britain, and with whom Shimada has been compared for the complexity of his plots and the elegance of their solutions.
Ever since I left home and pursued life and literature on my own I have kept lists: lists on paper, lists in notebooks, list on index cards, list in crude computer programs, lists in sophisticated computer programs, lists at various online list sites, lists at my own online sites, lists surrounding a weblog, weblogs surrounding lists, lists in the cloud. lists in my head. Echoing the old unix cliché: YALs.
I am always looking for interesting or intriguing books to read and I of course add them to Yet Another List. Although I may search all over the internet or scan (electronically) the stacks at several libraries, or even poke around in my own bookshelves, nowadays I generally spot new titles from sources such as Amazon. the NYT book pages, NYRB, Atomic Books, or even noticing them in the reading list of anothher online book reader or reviewer.
Believe me, the availability of reading suggestions is overwhelming.
Paul recently commented after reading my latest Monthly Reading Pool:
I have challenged myself to read a book from each shelf in the fiction section. … My goal is to pick at least one book from each shelf, and to do 2 shelves each trip (that way I can still get books on my regular reading list). … There are some obvious flaws in my plan (the library devotes 6 complete shelves to James Patterson).
Now I have exposed various systems for selecting my monthly reading list through the years, most recently various schemes to transfer my reading from paper and ink books to digital reading with easier to read font sizes. I have also forced the inclusion of a few “real” books in an effort to reduce the large numbers of books I had to move and find bookshelves for at my new home.
Notice that these systems are mostly concerned with storage space, failing eyesight, and the inevitable onset of death.
