Charles Finch

As I mentioned in an earlier post, A Beautiful Blue Death is on Library Journal's list of the Best Books of 2007, which is now online here. Only five mysteries made the list. For those who liked my book I would recommend another book on the list, A Treasury of Regrets by Susanne Alleyn. An excellent historical set in France after the revolution.

Excuse my long absence from this site - it's been a wonderful holiday season for me, and I certainly hope it has been for all of you too!

I meant to write at the time, but forgot, that Friday was the 96th anniversary of Roald Amundsen and his team becoming the first men to reach the true South Pole: December 14, 1911. Amundsen is my favorite polar explorer, though I must acknowledge that it's an inherited preference; my grandmother taught me to love him and Ernest Shackleton, and rather to scorn that great romantic hero, Robert Falcon Scott, for his quixotic stupidity.

Amundsen was supremely intelligent. He was the first explorer of Antarctica, for example, to use black tents, which both relieved his men's eyes and made the home base easier to spot. But he was daring as well, an attribute usually ascribed to Scott and Shackleton, those two quintessential Englishmen, and not to the Norwegian. When he learned that Nansen had already laid claim to the North Pole, Amundsen turned his ship 180 degrees and sailed south without telling anybody. His death, too, proved his courage; when two men came to his house to enlist his aid on a dangerous rescue mission, he turned the book he had been reading face down and stood up, ready to leave that instant. The plane they took disappeared, but for me, at any rate, his mortal acts live on.

I haven't started blogging about Arsenal Football Club here, because when I do I may never stop. But I have to share my exultation at their 1-0 victory over evil Chelsea this morning. Go on you gooners!

I read some or all of George Orwell's journals, essays, and letters every year, and it's always like talking with an old friend again. I've long thought it was a pity that he's remembered chiefly for 1984 and Animal Farm, both middling novels, while two astonishing memoirs, Down & Out in Paris and London and Homage to Catalonia, seem to recede in our collective memory all the time. As for his best essays, such as A Hanging, Boys' Weeklies, Charles Dickens, and the infinitely accurate and honest Such, Such Were the Joys, they stand for me with any essays in the history of our literature, on par with Montaigne and Voltaire. On a winter day here in New York, with a steady sleet falling, about the best advice I can give anybody is to find a warm spot indoors with one of his books.

A passage from a letter to his agent that I just read this morning and found funny:

"As to a pseudonym, a name I always used when tramping etc is P.S. Burton, but if you don't think this sounds a probable kind of name, what about

Kenneth Miles,
George Orwell,
H. Lewis Allways.

I rather favour George Orwell."

What a different literary landscape we might look back upon if he had been unfortunate enough to pick the name "H. Lewis Allways"!

I wrote about this before, but I thought I'd mention again that today's the day the large print edition of A Beautiful Blue Death comes out. You can buy it here or in bigger bookstores.

You can also now pre-order my second novel, The September Society, here - or just sneak a peak at the new cover, which I absolutely love.

At the moment I'm reading the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope's epic standalone The Way We Live Now for the second time. Trollope is a writer I find deeply comforting: unsurprising, conventional, fascinated with the mores of a very narrow world, often funny, always interesting, wry, and above all compassionate. He rarely condemns a character entirely, which for me is a sure sign of strength and humanity in a writer of the Victorian period, a condemnatory era. (Consider on the other hand Ralph Nickleby or Fagin.) And I've rarely had a more satisfying experience than first reading the Palliser novels. (Tolstoy was a fan, though he quite rightly found Trollope too conventional, and mentioned the Palliser books in Anna Karenina.)

People often call The Way We Live Now relevant or timely, and it's true - in poor, stupid Melmotte we find the various disgraced CEOs and political figures we've all grown so tired of. But I love it more for its less iconic characters; since I've become a writer, for instance, I've met more than one person like the manipulative but endearing Lady Carbury.

President Bush's recent press conference about the NIE findings on Iran contained as serious a lie as any he has told. At least credible people thought Iraq might have nuclear weapons, whatever the administration's fictions were in the build-up to that war. But for Bush to raise the specter of World War III in October, months after he knew Iran had halted its nuclear program, may be the most irresponsible act of the most irresponsible presidency in our country's history. As Joe Biden says, "I refuse to believe that. If that's true, he has the most incompetent staff in modern American history." Was it all just to live up to the flimsy, bullying rhetoric that set the precedent for that World War III speech: his absurd identification of an "Axis of Evil" in 2002?

We live in dark times, perhaps even more dangerous from within than without.

I think I was a little bit scornful of graphic novels when their surge in popularity began five or six years ago. But it's a sin for a writer - for anybody, in a way - to despair of or balk at change, and this year I made a particular effort to keep au courant with the genre. And I was happy to discover how wrong I was about them. In particular I would recommend two books to anybody: Adrian Tomine's meditative, recursive Shortcomings and Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds, set in Israel, which captures both how unsettled and banal life in a dangerous place must be.

Thank God that a few moments ago various newspapers were reporting that US intelligence has determined that Iran's nuclear weapons program "halted in 2003." This is good news on its own - the fewer nuclear weapons in the world the better, of course - but also geopolitically. Many of us who opposed the Iraq War were gravely concerned about the current administration's focus on Iran, especially given that Congress apparently no longer has to approve American wars. Dick Cheney's menacing, utterly moronic threat of "serious consequences" for Iran seemed a month and a half ago like a definite statement of intent. Between all the minatory screeds of Tom Tancredo and Rudy Giuliani, and Bush's second term failures (on Social Security, Hurricane Katrina, and a dozen smaller issues) it can be easy to forget that the most dangerous Republicans are still the ones with a key to the Situation Room.