Happy Halloween — and a couple of recommendations

Hope you all have a happy Halloween tomorrow. (Yes, my parents had the coolest furniture ever.)

I'll be away from the blog for a couple of days. 

If you are looking for a fascinating book to read in this haunted season, I highly recommend Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters. At the end of the 19th century, and in the face of scorn from other scientists, William James — renowned Harvard professor of psychiatry — and a group of eminent scientists decide to study ghosts, spiritualism, and psychic phenomena in an empirical way. 

This is one of my all-time favorite works of nonfiction.

I also hope you'll listen to Crime and Science Radio on Saturday (10 AM Pacific, 1 PM Eastern, 5 PM GMT) -- our guest is forensic anthropologist Marilyn London.

What I'm Reading

Tim and I read together (and separately as well). We just finished Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, which we have read many times before. I never grow tired of it, even if there is always that point when I want Marianne to get over herself sooner than she does.

The books still in progress are appropriate for this haunted month.

We haven't read Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October as many times as Sense and Sensibility. I think this is our third or fourth time through it. We are better able to appreciate his skill with each reading. The humor still makes us laugh, the unsettling still unsettles, the anticipation of the next chapter remains. We notice something about the way it builds, the masterful hand at work. Like many other readers, we tackle it one chapter each night through the month.

New to us, but completely captivating and beautifully written is Peter V Brett's The Warded Man (first published in the U.K., as The Painted Man). This is the first book in the Demon Cycle Series.
I am grateful to my friend and talented author Lia Matera, who recommended The Warded Man so enthusiastically, I had to give it a try. Lia's brilliant. Give her books a try, too.


The lovely photo above was found on Morguefile, and is the work of GaborfromHungary, who kindly gave me permission to use it here.

A Saturday Evening Post: Why I Love Reading: Zelanzy's Night in the Lonesome October

The man had a strange way of regarding one's face, one's clothing, one's boots; and of listening.

As a watchdog, I could appreciate the mode of total attentiveness he assumed. It was not a normal human attitude.  It was as if his entire being were concentrated in the moment, sensitive to every scrap of intelligence our encounter furnished.  

—Snuff, a character in Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October, describing a meeting with the Great Detective. 

A fine, concise description of Sherlock Holmes, wouldn't you say? If it is Holmes. (Of course it is.)

Snuff is a watchdog. And more. As he tells us from the beginning:

I like being a watchdog better than what I was before [Jack] summoned me and gave me this job.

You'll have to read the book to figure out who Jack is, but I believe Zelzany's to be one of the freshest approaches to that legend, too.

My husband and I reread this book, a chapter each night, throughout this month. Max Gladstone wrote a fine appreciative post about it here.