May We Suggest....Anne Perry

Anne Perry (born Juliet Marion Hulme in Blackheath London on 28 October 1938) is an English author of historical detective fiction. Ironically, Perry was convicted of the murder of her friend's mother in 1954. The daughter of Dr. Henry Hulme, an English physicist, Perry (then known as Juliet Hulme) was diagnosed with tuberculosis as a child and sent to the Caribbean and South Africa in hopes that a warmer climate would improve her health. She rejoined her family when her father took a position as Rector of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand when she was 13.

Together with her school friend Pauline Parker, Hulme murdered Parker's mother, Honora Rieper,^[2] in June 1954. Hulme's parents were in the process of separating, and she was supposed to go to South Africa to stay with a relative. The two teenage girls, who had created a rich fantasy life together did not want to be separated. They had hoped to go to England with Hulme's father after the divorce.

On 22 June 1954, the girls took Honora Rieper for a walk in Victoria Park in their hometown of Christchurch. On an isolated path, Hulme dropped an ornamental stone so that Ms. Rieper would lean over to retrieve it. At that point, Parker had planned to hit her mother with half a brick wrapped in a stocking. The girls presumed that would kill the woman. Instead, it took 45 frenzied blows from both girls to finally kill Honora Rieper. The brutality of the crime has contributed to its notoriety. Parker and Hulme stood trial in 1954, and were found guilty. As they were too young to be considered for the death penalty under New Zealand law at the time, they were convicted and sentenced to prison. They were released separately some five years later. A condition of their release was that they were never to meet or contact each other again. These events formed the basis for the 1994 film Heavenly Creatures.

After being released from prison, Hulme returned to England. For a period she lived in the United States, where she joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1968. She later settled a Scottish village where she lived with her mother. Her father went on to a distinguished scientific career, heading the British hydrogen bomb programme.

Hulme took the name Anne Perry, the latter being her stepfather's surname. Her first novel, The Cater Street Hangman, was published under this name in 1979. Her works generally fall into one of several categories of genre fiction, including historical murder mysteries and detective fiction. Many of them feature a number of recurring characters, most importantly Thomas Pitt, who appeared in her first novel, and amnesiac private investigator William Monk, who first appeared in her 1990 novel The Face of a Stranger. As of 2003 she had published 47 novels, and several collections of short stories.

Her works and series include:

Featuring William Monk

1. The Face of a Stranger (1990)
2. A Dangerous Mourning (1991)
3. Defend and Betray (1992)
4. A Sudden, Fearful Death (1993)
5. The Sins of the Wolf (1994)
6. Cain His Brother (1995)
7. Weighed in the Balance (1996)
8. The Silent Cry (1997)
9. A Breach of Promise (alt. title: Whited Sepulchres) (1997)
10. The Twisted Root (1999)
11. Slaves of Obsession (alt. title: Slaves and Obsession) (2000)
12. A Funeral in Blue (2001)
13. Death of a Stranger (2002)
14. The Shifting Tide (2004)
15. Dark Assassin (2006)
16. Execution Dock (2009)
17. Acceptable Loss (August 30, 2011)
18. A Sunless Sea (TBA)

Featuring Thomas Pitt

1. The Cater Street Hangman (1979)
2. Callander Square (1980)
3. Paragon Walk (1981)
4. Resurrection Row (1981)
5. Rutland Place (1983)
6. Bluegate Fields (1984)
7. Death in the Devil's Acre (1985)
8. Cardington Crescent (1987)
9. Silence in Hanover Close (1988)
10. Bethlehem Road (1990)
11. Highgate Rise (1991)
12. Belgrave Square (1992)
13. Farrier's Lane (1993)
14. The Hyde Park Headsman (1994)
15. Traitors Gate (1995)
16. Pentecost Alley (1996)
17. Ashworth Hall (1997)
18. Brunswick Gardens (1998)
19. Bedford Square (1999)
20. Half Moon Street (1998)
21. The Whitechapel Conspiracy (2001)
22. Southampton Row (2002)
23. Seven Dials (2003)
24. Long Spoon Lane (2005)
25. Buckingham Palace Gardens (2008)
26. Treason at Lisson Grove (2011)
27. Dorchester Terrace (2012)

The Christmas stories

• A Christmas Journey (2003)
• A Christmas Visitor (2004)
• A Christmas Guest (2005)
• A Christmas Secret (2006)
• A Christmas Beginning (2007)
• A Christmas Grace (2008)
• A Christmas Promise (2009)
• A Christmas Odyssey (2010)
• A Christmas Homecoming (October 25, 2011)

Fantasy

1. Tathea (1999)
2. Come Armageddon (2001)

[edit]Other books

• The One Thing More (2000)
• A Dish Taken Cold (2001)
• Death by Horoscope (2001, short stories by various authors)
• Much Ado About Murder (2002, short stories by various authors)
• Death By Dickens (2004, short stories by various authors)
• I'd Kill For That (2004, one novel written by multiple authors)
• Letters From The Highlands (2004)
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Biblical Mystery Stories (2005, short stories by various authors)
• Heroes (Most Wanted) (2007)
• The Sheen on the Silk: A Novel (2010)

"The Wisdom of Insecurity" by Alan W. Watts

I’m sure most self-help authors owe a lot to this thin, little book. First published in 1951, The Wisdom of Insecurity begins with Alan W. Watts describing the anxious pace of life—and the futility of this anxiety. I found it surprising to realize he was describing the world 60 years ago. Maybe it’s comforting to realize the past wasn’t much rosier than today. Watts attacks a lot of modern life in the first chapter, but this is important, because the rest of the book proposes a new way of thinking.

The simplest idea I took away is to not let the past and future crowd out the present. “If I am so busy planning how to eat next week that I cannot fully enjoy what I am eating now, I will be in the same predicament when next week’s meals become ‘now.’ ” This may be an “obvious” idea, but entire lives can be built around preparing for a future that is never appreciated when it finally arrives.

A lot of Watts’ ideas are Eastern, though he reinterprets Christian ideas, too. I appreciated his distinction between belief and faith, where faith becomes the wiser choice. Before reading this book, I might have been guilty of using those two words interchangeably. Some books make me realize I know very little, while this one also tried to convince me of how little I can control; accepting both is a huge relief.

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Book review by David.

"The Long Goodbye" by Meghan O'Rourke

The Long Goodbye is a stirring memoir that recounts the grief one feels after the death of a mother. O’Rourke’s first-person voice communicates feelings of anguish that jump off the page, and her poetic writing style beautifully captures the enduring power of love and the overwhelming surge of emotions that surround the death of a loved one. Because her writing seems both refreshingly personal and wholly universal, I found myself wanting to audibly agree with her and underline several particularly good passages. The book belongs to the library, though, so I refrained.

The Long Goodbye is also about O’Rourke’s realization that the history and rituals of grief were still a mystery to her, even as she was experiencing her own grief. Therefore, she spent a lot of time reading scientific studies, novels, and poetry about bereavement in order to write The Long Goodbye. Her writing reflects that this act of seeking knowledge was in itself therapeutic. However, she ultimately discovers that there are very few accepted rituals that Americans still possess to communicate grief. For instance, we no longer dress entirely in black for months, and it’s certainly not acceptable to wail in public or be entirely truthful in our display of grief. Instead, suffering is sequestered. This is unsettling, and it left me with a lot to digest after finishing the book. Highly recommended.

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Book review by Rebecca.

May We Suggest...Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York. She grew up on her parents' farm, outside the town, and went to a one-room schoolhouse. Joyce enjoyed the natural environment of farm country, and displayed a precocious interest in books and writing. Although her parents had little education, they encouraged her ambitions. When, at age 14, her grandmother gave her first typewriter, she began consciously preparing herself, "writing novel after novel" throughout high school and college.

When she transferred to the high school in Lockport, she quickly distinguished herself as an excellent student. She contributed to her high school newspaper and won a scholarship to attend Syracuse University, where she majored in English. When she was only 19, she won the "college short story" contest sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine. Oates was valedictorian of her graduating class. After receiving her BA degree, she earned her Master's in a single year at the University of Wisconsin. While studying in Wisconsin she met Raymond Smith. The two were married after a three-month courtship.

In 1962, the couple settled in Detroit, Michigan. Joyce taught at the University of Detroit in the 1960s. The civil rights’ violent realities influenced much of her early fiction. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, was published when she was 28. Her novel received the National Book Award. In 1968, Joyce took a job at the University of Windsor in the Canadian province of Ontario. In the ten years that followed, Joyce Carol Oates published new books at the extraordinary rate of two or three per year, while teaching full-time. Many of her novels sold well. Despite some critical grumbling about her phenomenal productivity, Oates had become one of the most respected and honored writers in the United States though only in her thirties.

While still in Canada, Oates and her husband started a small press and began to publish a literary magazine, The Ontario Review. They continued these activities after 1978, when they moved to Princeton, New Jersey. Since 1978, Joyce Carol Oates has taught in the creative writing program at Princeton University. Her literary work continued. In the early 1980s, Oates surprised critics and readers with a series of novels, beginning with Bellefluer, in which she reinvented the conventions of Gothic fiction. Just as suddenly, she returned, at the end of the decade, to her familiar realistic ground with a series of ambitious family chronicles, including You Must Remember This, and Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart. The novels Solstice and Marya: A Life also date from this period. She used the materials of her family and childhood to create moving studies of the female experience.

In addition to her literary fiction, she has written a series of experimental suspense novels under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith. To date, Joyce Carol Oates has written 56 novels, over 30 collections of short stories, eight volumes of poetry, plays, innumerable essays and book reviews, as well as longer nonfiction works on literary subjects ranging from the poetry of Emily Dickinson and the fiction of Dostoyevsky and James Joyce, to studies of the gothic and horror genres, and on such non-literary subjects as the painter George Bellows and the boxer Mike Tyson. In 1996, Oates received the PEN/Malamud Award for "a lifetime of literary achievement." Today, Joyce Carol Oates continues to live and write in Princeton, New Jersey.

READ-A-LIKES

Margaret Atwood - Similar to Oates, Atwood is a prolific and versatile writer that delves into provocative issues such as feminism, families, relationships and politics. Try reading Alias Grace or The Year of the Flood: a novel.

Chris Bohjalian - Fans of Oates appreciate Bohjalian's provocative novels that deal with controversial topics and difficult situations. Readers should try Midwives or Secrets of Eden:a novel.

Doris Lessing - This acclaimed novelist is another good suggestion for fans of Oates. Her work addresses social, cultural and environmental issues at great length. Good novels to start with are The Golden Notebook or The Sweetest Dream.