Peachy Reads

It’s pretty damn easy to get to Hell. If you exceed 700 mutterings of the F-word, for example, you’re damned for eternity. If you honk your horn just one time over your lifetime allowance of 500, you’re damned (probably less in Switzerland). If you exceed your charitable allowance of urinating in a public swimming pool, you’re damned. Not to mention the obvious ways to get in— murder, suicide, genocide. Maddie is a thirteen-year-old girl (daughter of a Hollywood power couple that sounds an awful lot like Brangelina), who finds herself the newest resident “downunder,” and she’s not completely sure why. She decides to make the best of things though. Her backstory is revealed little by little, as she and her cohorts (who are a Hellish version of the Breakfast Club) plod their way across the Dandruff Desert and a wasteland made up of toenail clippings (just some of the topographic treats waiting for you in Hell). By the end of the story Maddie has the diabolical job of telemarketer, callin...

Peter Ackroyd wrote the ultimate Londonophile’s companion to the city with 2003’s London: The Biography , which was not a chronological history in the traditional sense but a rather fascinating thematic approach to all things London. Now he’s dug a little deeper (pun intended) and produced this volume that addresses the things that exist under London’s streets. Most people are familiar with the tube and maybe even Churchill’s Cabinet War Rooms, but there's so much more to be uncovered, so to speak. Graves, wells, hidden rivers, secret tunnels and air raid shelters, layers and layers of archeology—it’s really pretty fascinating. Just to illustrate how fascinating, have a look at the following excerpt, which chronicles the historical investigations that accompanied the extension of the Jubilee tube line when it pushed across the Thames and then towards Canary Wharf: [The Jubilee Line] travelled back 5,000 years. In the depths of the new system were uncovered pieces of Neolithic potte...

I don’t know why I have such a phobia of Dickens. There’s some hidden event in my schooling that turned me against him, and I can’t for the life of me think of what it is. My brother-in-law, on the other hand, is a Dickens enthusiast, maybe even a little bit of a Dickens fanatic. It is his eternal concern that I have yet to read any Dickens novel cover-to-cover (though truth be told I have read A Christmas Carol ). So, he gifted me Great Expectations, the graphic novel . Quite nice. I really rather enjoyed it, though even in this much condensed graphic form, there was a plethora of characters that were sometimes hard to keep track of. Luckily for me there was a two page spread of dramatis personae at the front of the book that was convenient to make reference to. It’s actually a good way to ease into the novel. Maybe I’ll do that some day.

A film crew and a cast of characters from the local village are marooned at Flavia de Luce’s tired old family mansion Buckshaw near Christmastime after a blizzard cuts them off from civilization. A murder occurs (surprise, surprise) and Flavia is once again racing ahead of (and running circles around) the inspector, finding clues that he never even knew to look for. It all sounds a little like a game of Clue (Was it Mrs. Peacock in the Library with the rope?) or a plot borrowed straight from Agatha Christie's playbook, in fact one of the characters comments on this very thing, saying something like “This is like an Agatha Christie novel.” As clichéd as the plotline is, it doesn’t really have a very satisfactory resolution, and I found myself less concerned with the murder and more interested in Flavia’s attempts to capture Father Christmas and set off a secret fireworks show from the roof of the treasure home for the enjoyment and edification of the local villagers. I still find th...

The final installment of the popular Kurt Wallander detective series follows Wallander to the end of his career. As he transitions from the loss of his father, his family focus shifts to his newly-born granddaughter and a renewed relationship with his daughter Linda. Worrisome episodes of forgetfulness, however, force him to confront his own mortality, and the sudden death of his once-beloved Baiba is a sign that his remaining years are precious. The disappearance of Linda’s “in-laws” (since she isn’t married to their son, what’s the proper term?) is the case that preoccupies Wallander in The Troubled Man . Their backstory takes in the complicated history of post-war Europe's Cold War politics, a suggestion of espionage, Olof Palme, the CIA... all culminating with the rash of submarine incursions into Swedish territorial waters from the 1980s that I remember so well. I was fascinated by Wallander’s last case, but also felt that the entrance into his final life stage was very compel...

Henrietta Lacks was the name of an African-American woman who died of a virulent form of cervical cancer in Baltimore in the early 1950s. What makes her case historically remarkable is that a colony of her cancerous cells were among the first human cells to thrive and multiply outside the body in a petri dish, making them a much sought-after commodity for lab experimentation and scientific discovery. For decades the cell line known as HeLa (for the first letters of her first and last name) made a huge positive impact on the development and advancement of cellular biology. On the flip side, partly due to its remarkable longevity and tenacity, HeLa contaminated other cell lines, ultimately compromising the integrity of experiments and responsible for the loss of millions of dollars in research money. Further controversy surrounds the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks’s cell line without the informed consent of her next of kin, and much of the book chronicles the author’s attempts to win th...