Peachy Reads

I really wanted to like this novel. I’ve been captivated by the Scandinavian thriller phenom that has put authors like Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, and Lars Kepler on international bestseller lists and the top of public library circulation logs. Jo Nesbø is a Norwegian crime writer whose police inspector Harry Hole (last name is two syllables) is an interesting character. Jo Nesbø has now written seven novels with Harry Hole, and while I may have missed some of the background to characters and context in the series by jumping in with The Snowman , the main difficulty I had seemed to be with the English translation. When a novel “feels” like it’s been translated from a foreign language, then there’s an issue with the translation. I felt that the novel was a slow-starter, and I think much of this has to do with the rough translation. Sometimes it was fine, other times it was so clunky it felt like an unedited term paper. I tried to collect some examples of weird translator errors whic...

Snakes alive! Judging from the cover of this memoir, you might guess you were in for a book-length swampy herpetological tour… which is not actually the case. It’s mostly the story of a father-son road trip, the attempt of a grown man to peel the layers away from his aging father to see why he was so “out there,” so unconventional, such an enigma in his life growing up. His father was a naturalist of sorts, and one of his lifetime passions (it's a passion when you can barely eke a living out of it) was surveying the surviving numbers of the endangered copperbelly water snake in remote areas in southern Michigan. After living through his father's substance abuse, a messy divorce, and a childhood salvaged by the more reliable care (and income) of his teacher mother, the author approaches his father later in life to try to understand him better and repair their tattered relationship. He meets him in his former swampy stomping grounds, where he gets an idea and a reluctant apprecia...