Portrait of a forger

The Forgery of Venus is a thriller about the highly-profitable crime of art forgery. It's also a smart exploration of what it's like to be an artist in America today. That's a lot to pack into one 300-page novel, but trust me: Michael Gruber makes it all fascinating.

The book's narrator is Chaz Wilmot, a tremendously talented painter whose father was a renowned Norman-Rockwell-type illustrator. Chaz knows that realistic artists like his father get no respect in the art world. He also knows that he cannot be a stylish postmodern artist. "I used to think I'd been born out of my proper era," says Chaz. "I mean, it'd be like a major league pitcher being born in 1500. His ability to throw a small ball at a hundred miles an hour through any sector of an arbitrary rectangle is totally unsalable." Similarly, Chaz's ability to create ravishing portraits in the style of the Old Masters has no value to the 20th century New York art establishment.

Chaz's struggle for artistic authenticity leads him to become a forger. In his neurotic world, creating a magnificent fake is more honest than producing what he knows art galleries will pay for. It also leads to other things: experiments with drugs designed to enhance creativity; the hallucinatory (or is it?) conviction that he is 17th century Spanish master Diego Velazquez, at least some of the time; and a paranoid breakdown in which he wonders if he's gone mad, or if someone wants to make him think so. And one lovely, mysterious nude portrait.

The Forgery of Venus is tantalizing and totally original. Give it a try!

Summer Reading fun at your library

As Newport Library's staff and volunteers get ready for our 23rd annual Summer Reading programs, we are reminded that this library tradition continues to be a vital part of summer for so many families. Whether it is the pre-schooler eager to be read to, the brand new reader stoked about earning a library t-shirt, the veteran 4th grader adding to his library t-shirt collection or the teenager planning how she will use her gift certificates from local businesses, the library has programs to fit all ages of youngsters. For a list of those programs and information about how they work, check out our Summer Reading page.

Sleepless . . . at the end of the world

Park is a cop, a new father, a madly-in-love husband. But he just can't sleep-- and neither can 10% of the world's population, including his wife, Rose. The baby is crying and crying-- but can she sleep?-- or does she too, have the disease?

It's July 2010, and plague is remaking the world. Something that refolds the proteins in the brain, something related to Mad Cow disease and fatal familial insomnia. Civilization seems to be falling apart in tiny, subdued pieces, barely ameliorated by the controlled substance DR33M33R, which allows the desperately suffering to rest, just for a little while. Park's assignment is to determine if DR33M3R is being stolen and sold on the black market, but he uncovers more than he was meant to.

Where did the plague come from? Who's profiting? And how can he leave his Sleepless wife alone with the baby, when she spends her days in a confusion of waking dreams?

Sleepless by Charlie Huston is an apocalyptic fantasy, where the world is not quite ending but becoming something other, where fantasy gaming, the refuge of the Sleepless, has attained the value of art, and where a killer may be your baby's best hope. The book has some of the flavor of a cyberpunk novel, with a dark, edgy and technophiliac lyricism, but it also holds a beautiful story of love and sacrifice.

I have not yet read Huston's previous popular work The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, but I plan to. Both it and Sleepless are available in our catalog.

A Final Exam

Anax has spent her life studying for this moment: she faces a grueling three-day Examination which will determine whether she is to become a member of the ruling Academy. Genesis, a slim, intelligent science fiction novel by Bernard Beckett, tells the story of her Examination: the questions she is asked, the answers she gives, and the judgment that she faces when it is all over. In this way, the story of her civilization is also told: the way one society ended and another began, all because of the actions of one man, Adam Forde. Was Forde a very great hero or a despicable villain? And why do the Examiners keep returning to that question?

The Examination format makes this book highly suspenseful: will Anax pass the test? And what will that really mean? Like most good works of science fiction, it also raises all sorts of thought-provoking questions. The Examination reveals much about who Anax is, and who the Examiners think she ought to be.

That's an awfully vague summary -- sorry about that -- but it's best if this wonderful little book reveals its own secrets. If you like clever and well-written sci-fi, or if this review has intrigued you, pick up Genesis.

The murderer was in the house

One morning in 1860, a three-year-old child went missing. His name was Saville Kent, and he was the youngest son of a prosperous family, living in a gracious English country home called Road Hill. By the time the morning was over, his body had been found, brutally murdered and thrust down the hole of an outhouse. The case was bungled by local policemen, and two weeks later a Scotland Yard detective was called in. The detective was Jack Whicher, and his investigation into the murder of Saville Kent exposed rottenness and madness in the bosom of this conventional English family.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is not a mystery novel, though you could be forgiven for thinking it sounds like one. The development of English mystery fiction - the country house with its prescribed number of suspects, the detective who comes in from outside to uncover its secrets - developed as a direct result of the public's fascination with the Road Hill case. The author, Kate Summerscale, argues that such seminal suspense novels as The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James were all directly influenced by the Road Hill murder.

I thought that this book was a bit padded. The author did a lot of research, and she seemed determined to include it all, whether it advanced her story or not. In spite of this, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a very interesting read, a good bet for both true crime junkies and connoisseurs of classic mystery fiction.

The Three (going on four) Trilogies of Robin Hobb

Fitz is a royal bastard-- no, not a big jerk, but the illegitimate offspring of a prince. In the first book of Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy, Assassin's Apprentice, he's desperately lonely boy, rejected by his father and left to be raised by the stable master. The one warm spot in his life is provided by his telepathic bond with animals, until the stable master finds out and punishes Fitz, with anger and disgust. Fitz has to look for friends and allies elsewhere; in the spymaster, the fool, and even the king. As a bastard dependent on the royal house for survival, he is always a pawn in the machinations of others. Learning to navigate those machinations without dying is an ongoing challenge.

Robin Hobb, who has also written as Megan Lindholm, writes fantasy novels characterized by rich, original world-building and complex character development. The Farseer Trilogy, The Liveship Traders Trilogy, the Tawny Man Trilogy, and the still-in-progress Rain Wild Chronicles take place in the same universe, in overlapping but drastically different cultures. She has a great sense of story and of history, winding the mythology and the past of her characters' worlds into a background narrative that gives greater depth and meaning to the ongoing plots.

I recommend you start with Fitz's story in the Farseer Trilogy, and then read all the other books she's written, possibly twice. I have been informed the newest book in the Rain Wild Chronicles is on order and coming soon!

(A postscript apology-- I had read something that implied that the Rain Wilds books would be a trilogy true to Hobb's pattern, but further research shows it to be complete in just two books.)

How to read the most popular book in the world

I wanted to read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.

I'm not alone. The book (and its sequels, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest) have been wildly popular here at the library; as of this writing, Dragon Tattoo has a waiting list with 54 people on it. I'm number 41.

So I bought a copy, which (when I'm finished with it) I will donate to the library. That'll bring the system's holdings up to nine copies of the book. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were more?

Sometime this year, the Newport Library plans to unveil a new program in which people who want an upcoming bestseller can donate the money for it - at a discounted price, usually about 35 percent off - and then they will be first in line for that title. We hope that this will be a popular way to put more books into more readers' hands; and until it comes into effect, patrons who just can't wait (like me) can always take the buy-and-donate route.

Now, let me talk about the book. Imagine an island with one bridge to the mainland. Imagine that the bridge was blocked for twenty-four hours by a jackknifed semi, and that during that twenty-four hours, a sixteen-year-old girl vanished from the island. Imagine that this occurred forty years ago. That's the mystery that disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist is hired to solve. His investigation brings him into contact with one of the most extraordinary characters you'll ever read about, Lisbeth Salander, a skinny twenty-four-year-old hacker with a photographic memory, an offputting demeanor, and a dragon tattoo. Mikael and Lisbeth's investigation into the disappearance of young Harriet Vanger leads them to a series of very ugly, hateful murders.

The book's mystery is suspenseful, and its exposure of decades-old secrets is gripping. Most of all, its characters are fascinating. One thing you'll come away with: do not get on the wrong side of the girl with the dragon tattoo.