The Fourth Man by K.O. Dahl

What long haul this was to read. For months I would pick it up and have to put it down simply because I could not get up a head of steam. The book jacket producers get full points for making me feel like I was really missing the hottest thing in Scandanavian mystery if I did not read this immediately. I suppose it was the conceit--that a woman comes out of nowhere and seduces a seasoned police detective by breaking into his house and sitting around in her underwear in the dark--that never really rang true to me. By page 200, when the author finally reveals just what the police detective likes so much about the object of his affection, I could not restrain a snort of disbelief and a sneer of derision. This is male fantasy run amok. Nothing wrong with a little fantasy, but please give us a something to hang our disbelief on.

Go With Me by Castle Freeman

This slim volume is a timeless classic. It is almost entirely conversation, though occasionally the author slips in a descriptive phrase to focus our eye. We listen while several old men pass an afternoon with a case of beer in a ruined chair factory in rural Vermont. A couple of other people search for, and find, the town's local bad boy, providing the novel's only action scenes. There is nothing quite like this around, and if there were, this would still be one of the very best. Good any time of the year, this one bears rereading. While the setting is Vermont, it could just as easily have been Arkansas. The sentiments and the characters are as universal as the day is long.

The Lost City of Z by David Grann

What a great read. For really the first time I understood the fascination with the phrase 'armchair traveller.' In other circumstances, I always thought it was somewhat absurd to think that reading about a thing was as fun as doing it. In this case, it was a lot more fun to read about it than to do it. Pit vipers, swarms of biting insects, interminable wet, death by maggots...and in all of it, a frustrating mystery. At its heart, this is a story of the search for a magnificent civilization in the heart of the Amazon, with vast earthworks paralleled only by great cities on the European continent. This is a book to make you think about what man is: his determination, his understanding, his folly, his ego, and how some of us have these things in greater measure than others.

American Rust by Philipp Meyer

This is really a magnificent first novel. From the opening scenes, the lives Meyer has constructed hover on a knife's edge of disaster. Poor choices and bad decisions land his characters in nasty situations. Readers have a sense of the big picture only because of viewpoint shifts, but the author reveals his secrets slowly. It is with a sense of impending doom that we watch the story unfold to what we fully expect will be its dreadful conclusion.

This novel did not get nearly the attention it deserved when it was published in February this year. If I have any complaints at all it is merely that it contained more words than it needed. The characters are drawn with sensitivity and depth and the scenes have added details that crank the readers' sense of foreboding to high.

It is said that men don't read novels. If all novels were as good as this one, I think we'd see a lot more men among the converted. This should appeal to those lovers of the Palahniuk oeuvre, though I hate to limit his appeal. It is a man's novel like Black Flies (Shannon Burke, 2008) or The Dog Fighter (Bojanowski, 2005) are men's novels. They are firmly from a man's point of view, and internal, if not introspective.


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The Gamble by Thomas Ricks

Ricks has a thesis--you can guess it from the title--and he makes his point forcefully. It had always been my contention that the people of Iraq must be better served and the concept of sending troops out into small outposts in cities and towns to establish peaceful areas is intuitively convergent. The intent was to have peace for long enough that a political solution could arise.

In practice we have been arming former insurgents to keep them from fighting with us and Iraqi citizens. We have established an uneasy calm for a period, but the political process has not moved in the direction we had hoped. Instead, with more peaceful living conditions in the cities and towns, political positions appear to have regressed and entrenched rather than broadened and become more inclusive.

How it plays out is anybody's guess. What I liked about Ricks' work was obtaining a sense of the difficult choices facing commanders at the time Petraeus was writing the new counter-insurgency manual, the disconnect between Washington and Baghdad, a peek at what life must have been like for thinking beings, our soldiers, executing orders and living in Iraq. I think the editing on this work was magisterial, because the amount of information must have been overwhelming, yet the material is cut so that a clear narrative with a fresh perspective emerges. I appreciate the timeliness--I can't believe we are reading in such depth about events that occured so recently. Kudos to Ricks.

We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work by Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter is going to talk about peace in the Middle East until he dies. He is leaving books for us to use as a road map after he dies. But he'd rather we pay attention now because the situation for Palestinians is unbearable.

I am one who just didn't want to know about it. The conflict has gone on too long, and although on the face of it, it didn't seem fair that Palestinians had to move off land they'd lived on for generations, better minds than mine had made this solution. Or so I thought.

When I saw the television and newswire reporting showing Israeli retaliation for the the latest Palestinian "bombings" in late 2008, my fury was aroused. And I began to read. I realize now that I've always had a responsibility to be informed on this issue, and that better minds than mine had not been the only ones at work here, as usual.

The Collaborator of Bethlehem: An Omar Yussef Mystery by Matt Beynon Rees

Omar Yussef, a crusty grandfather, refuses to mind his own business. Friends run into trouble in Dehaisha, a refugee camp outside of Bethlehem, and he looks into the void.

This book is overwhelming in its pathos, and terrifying in its implications. This old schoolmaster, Omar Yussef, almost goes out of his way to avoid finding evidence of murder in Dehaisha, perpetrated, he believes, by a leader of the resistance. Instead he finds clues just lying about, ignored by the very people meant to serve the people and protect them from harm. His anger and fury come into focus as his family is threatened and blameless friends and colleagues are murdered.

I had not realized that "the gunmen" of the Palestinian resistance were so reviled from within, but it makes eminent sense. This is a novel, of course, but I think Matt Beynon Rees may be speaking to a larger truth here that is difficult to convey to those, like myself, who have turned their face from a conflict that rages with no end in sight, that doesn't make economic or political or humanitarian sense, and is sickening in its reveal of the baseness of human nature.

The author has painted a grim picture of life in the settlements. He is not unkind to Israelis who, in the one appearance they make in this volume, appear rational, albeit destructive. His main character is difficult to like, he is so full of bile at a system that gives him no peace but plenty of pain. But if we walk with him a short way, we begin to see what he sees, and it is indescribably sad.

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