Martha Tod Dudman in Bangor on Feb. 16

Martha Tod Dudman will read from, discuss, and sign copies of her new book, Black Olives, on Saturday, February 16th, at 2 o'clock at the Bangor Public Library. Dudman is the author of Expecting to Fly and Augusta, Gone. She lives in Maine.

BookMarc's has copies available for sale now and will have them at the event.

Welcome To Duma Key

Stephen King's new novel, Duma Key, is here!

It's been garnering favorable reviews in, for instance, the New York Times and Kirkus, and already has its own entry in the online knowledge base, Wikipedia. Here's some of the cover art from King's own site.

It's A Mystery

by Ed Barrett

A Murder Mystery Set In Portland

Some of my favorite mysteries are my favorites because of their location. I grew up in Cleveland in the same neighborhood as Milan Jacovich, Les Roberts’ main character, and take great pleasure in recognizing places I know and finding locations that Roberts has changed. The same goes for J.A. Jance’s Joanna Brady series, set in Cochise County Arizona, near where I went to school. (If you’re interested in mysteries in a particular location, check out stopyourekillingme.com which offers a location index by the character’s home base.)

Maine has its own authors and characters. Sarah Graves’ Jacobia Triptree lives in what seems to be Maine’s murder capital – Eastport. And Gerry Boyle’s series featuring reporter Jack McMorrow is set in Central Maine, reflecting his roots as a reporter for a Waterville newspaper. (By the way, part of one of his novels is set in Bangor where he, unfortunately, gets our geography wrong.)

Recently, I stumbled across Playing God: A Joe Burgess Mystery by Kate Flora. Not only is this mystery set in Portland (Maine, not Oregon), but the author is a former Maine Assistant Attorney General, although now, unfortunately, she’s become a flatlander in Massachusetts. With her knowledge of Maine’s criminal justice system and of the City of Portland, this is a must read for Maine’s mystery fans.

On a cold and snowy winter’s night, Dr. Steven Pleasant, who the story reveals is anything but, is found dead in his car in a “compromising” position. The main investigator, Joe Burgess, is a veteran Portland cop – and an introspective one at that. While Joe has seen it all, and often struggles against the depression this brings, he soldiers on. As he investigates, he contacts a range of characters – from the victim’s self-protecting physician partners to a prostitute Burgess has known and tried to help for years. Other suspects include the doctor’s wife and ex-wife and patients who the doctor has failed over the years. Joe’s own ties to the victim complicate and further stir the pot.

This gripping story will keep you awake and turning pages at night, and it will introduce you to a real and complex character whose struggles and demons will further stoke your interest.

Flora is also the author of a series featuring Thea Kozak, a strong-willed and independent educational consultant in Boston. This series has ties to Maine through Thea’s romantic interest – Maine State Police Detective Andre Lemieux. In spite of her best efforts, Thea repeatedly finds herself involved in murders, taking on her family-assigned role of the fixer. An enjoyable series, although not as “noir” as Playing God.

Per the author’s web-site, Flora is currently working on her second Joe Burgess novel. The following are available in the Thea Kozak series:

Chosen for Death (1994)
Death in a Funhouse Mirror (1995)
Death at the Wheel (1996)
An Educated Death (1997)
Death in Paradise (1998)
Liberty or Death (2003)
Stalking Death (2006)

What Are You Reading These Days?

by Marc Berlin

An old favorite. A reading group I belong to decided to choose the latest round of books on the basis of the question: what book would you recommend to others as a lifetime must-read? Not just a personal favorite or a guilty pleasure but a book you can both recommend and happily defend as your choice. My choice was echoed by another member of the group; we both said in almost unison: W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.

Maugham is an author that critics and academics like to scorn and readers like to read. He considered himself just a storyteller, as if there was room for anything else in the novel besides storytelling, and famously rated himself as among the very best of the second rate novelists. His detractors hastened to agree but I do not. It is true that Maugham wrote a great deal during his long life (ninety plus years) and some of it now seems dated, cranky and narrow but in the best of his works – short stories too numerous to name; the wonderful autobiography-meditation, The Summing Up; the travel book, Gentleman in the Parlor; the novels, Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale, Moon and Sixpence and the aforementioned The Razor’s Edge – it has always seemed to me that he created a world and a way of viewing that world that has been equaled by few writers.

Maugham always makes the art of expressing oneself seem so effortless that it always takes me a moment to realize the complexity of what is being expressed. This time, I said to myself as I once again opened my much read copy of Razor’s Edge, I will focus on how he accomplishes the magic trick, but alas, after fifty pages, Maugham’s gift of indirection (storytelling) has me looking just where he wants me to look, and once again I’ve missed the effort and am left with the artistry.

All right, you say, but what’s the book about? You know, after reading it five or six times I can only say: it’s about life. I guess I’ll have to read it once more.

Oh, and the book group loved the book, even those readers who feel that reading fiction is a punishment inflicted by liberals who mostly live in New York City. I didn’t say, "I told you so" to the group, but I’m saying it now.

What Are You Reading These Days

by Marc Berlin

My wife once commented that Maine has four seasons, each characterized by a question: Winter: “Cold enough for you, yet?” Fall: “Got your deer yet?” or, for many, “Got your wood in yet?” Spring: “Started your seeds yet?” and Summer: “Got your boat in yet?”

In the bookstore we only have one season and one question: “What are you reading these days?” We often ask regular customers this question as they browse our shelves of commingled new and used books and in return we are often asked the same question.

So what am I reading these days?

Highcastle by Stanislaw Lem is a memoir written in the same speculative, inquisitive and utterly engaging manner as this great Polish writer’s science fiction novels and short stories. Lem looks back on his younger self with the same mixture of amusement and bafflement that he turned on his space explorer Pirx the Pilot and his constructor robots. Best known in this country for his classic novel Solaris, Lem liked to take a philosophical problem and treat it as a world to be explored rather than solved and so here in his memoir he poses the question of what made him at the earliest of ages so curious and then has some fun wandering through the remembered land of his childhood, introducing us to his family and schoolmates, and speculating on the unreliability of memory. The fun ends as it must with the rumblings of the Nazi war machine at Polish border.

Sun and Shadow by Ake Edwardson is a mystery featuring Sweden’s youngest chief inspector, Erik Winter. Winter must solve a brutal and apparently motiveless double murder while dealing with a series of changes in his personal life that threaten to undermine his cool, dispassionate crime-solving style. The Christmas season in urban Sweden turns out to be not very different from Christmas in cities throughout the world.

Seeking Whom He May Devour by Fred Vargas is a French mystery featuring France's strangest chief inspector, Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. Adamsberg is brilliant and intuitive but often hopeless when dealing with the everyday matters of police-work. He is also in love with and afraid to commit to the beautiful, disturbed, plumber and songwriter, Camille. The mystery begins with the killing of sheep by wolves but soon a women’s throat is slashed and thus begin a seemingly random series of homicides throughout rural France. The populace wish to blame the brutal murders on the wolves but Adamsberg believes something else is going on. And Camille is in a relationship with a Canadian scientist who is studying and tracking wolves.

A River City Almanac

The River In Question
By Colby Quid

It is said that Portugese explorer Estevan Gomez was the first European to give Maine's largest river a name. Sailing up a wide river off the coast of Maine in June of 1525, he declared the river the Rio de las Gamas, or Deer River, apparently after many a sighting of Odocoileus virginianus.

This raises the question of what the river had been called for the several millennia before Gomez-come-lately sailed a mere half millennium past. For an answer, I turned to that venerable source, Indian Place Names of the Penobscot Valley and the Maine Coast by Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, first published in 1941. Despite six decades of advances in the linguistic sciences, this book continues to hold its own as a meticulously researched source.

The first chapter deals with the naming of the river. It appears the Indians chose descriptive names for sections of the river that may have served as "travel advisories" for those who would navigate it. Thus, the word "penobscot," by which the entire river is known today, and which, according to Eckstorm, means "at the descending rock," was applied only to the stretch between Old Town and Bangor, where there is roughly ten miles of falls in close succession. From Bangor to Bucksport, Eckstorm says, the river was known as Pemtegwatook, "wide river," a name that was familiar to Champlain.

There are many names for points along the banks namimg alewife fisheries, eel-weir shallows, and slippery ledges – and one that warns travellers of an abode of unfriendly spirits – all up and down the river from the bay to the tributaries of the West Branch.

I cross by foot over this river nearly every day of my life and consider that I am, like the water that flows through it, a part of a stream that runs through time, pulled forward by a force I cannot resist and buffeted by forces beyond my ken. I often feel I share a soul with this river. And when I pass by Fannie's home in Brewer, which in her lifetime was a place of hospitality to the Native people she studied and loved deeply but without sentimentality, I hope that I, too, share some bit of brotherhood with all the other lives that have shared a soul with this river in the long stream of history that has run parallel along it.

When I'm Between Books

I'm between books and the ice is out and the fish are biting
By Marc Berlin

Spring in Maine not only heralds our famous mud season but also signals the opening of our rivers and lakes to canoes, kayaks and yes, fishing. Tradition holds that the first salmon caught on the Penobscot River be delivered to the current President of the United States. Scarcity of salmon and a determined catch and release policy has doomed this tradition, but fishermen can still be found at the various salmon pools above the Bangor Waterworks. Fishing, and especially fly fishing, becomes the topic of conversation in certain circles.

Single-mindedness can define certain fisher-folk during a Maine Spring so it was fun to revisit David James Duncan' classic romp The River Why. Here an obsession for fishing is a metaphor for every bit of philosophical lure a bait box can hold. It's as if Tom Jones decided to join Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair for a wild ride on the fast moving, rock strewn river called: the meaning of life.

Gus Orviston, scion of a world famous fly fisherman and an equally renowned bait fisherwoman, grows up believing that fishing is life but, alas, one day he has cause to question whether, in fact, there might be more to life than fishing. An engaging group of neighbors, local children and a visiting sage with the name of Titus and dog named Descartes all try to answer Gus' questions by using Indian lore, storytelling, and a rambunctious sense of life.
If, like yours truly, you prefer to do your fishing from a living room armchair, David Duncan's book will provide a great deal of pleasure and few bug bites. It's a keeper.