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.