My friend Don and I love to listen to audio books when we are on long trips. I suggested that we download John LeCarre's latest novel, "A Legacy of Spies," since we binged out on MI-5 a few years ago. But the LeCarre has been a slog and is frankly just too complex to be appreciated when driving in seasonal traffic in southwest Florida. We found that we kept replaying sections over and over again to "get it."
Then we went to the movies and caught a preview of Jennifer Lawrence's new project, "Red Sparrow." Don is no fan of JLaw but he's half in love with Charlotte Rampling who also appears in the film. We decided to give the book a try and read it simultaneously. I was a bit surprised that the author, Jason Matthews, used his own name, since he was a highly placed CIA operative for over thirty years and participated in clandestine recruitment operations around the globe. The authenticity of the novel makes for a fast-paced read that, even with some gratuitous violence, fills the bill for escapist lit.
Appropriately enough, Russia is the villain in this book. The action centers around CIA agent Nathaniel Nash, who's been the handler for a highly placed mole in the Russian bureaucracy. MARBLE, the spy, is aging and worries that his days as an informer are numbered. He would like to retire but the U.S. can't afford to relinquish this font of information.
Dominika Egorova is a Russian ballet prodigy whose talent and beauty draws the ire of her rivals, resulting in a Tonya Harding type attack which halts her career. In a humiliating fall from grace, and to ensure that her widowed mother is supported, Dominika follows her uncle's advice and applies for the Sparrow program in which young women are trained in the art of seduction in order to elicit information for Russian intelligence services.
Matthews often allows his condescending opinions of Russian spycraft to leak through his narrative, a common fault of Americans to underestimate our rivals, and one that we've recently learned can be truly detrimental to democracy. But the author does proffer the interesting premise that Dominika was born with a neurological disorder called synesthesia which enables her to read body language, see auras, and excel at math and languages. Not satisfied with being a glorified prostitute, Dominika parlays her intuitive talents into government promotions that put her and Nash on a collision course.
Several secondary characters stand out in this thriller, both Russian and American, and trying to decipher who's the valuable mole was great fun. I'm not sure if Don or I figured it out first. But what some reviewers found to be a distraction we most delighted in. Each chapter centered around a meal. I thought it was a device of the author's to indicate that no matter how close one is to danger, even death, the urge to nurture our bodies and enliven our conversations around the sharing of food never slackens. At the end of each chapter the author shares the recipe for whatever was eaten by his characters. Even in a safe house, awaiting news of an operation, Dominika recreates her family's comfort foods.
"Red Sparrow" is the first in a trilogy. I moved on to other realms but Don is sticking with it and promises that I'll soon be having Chicken Kiev for dinner. The film will be released next week. It may not be as cerebral as LeCarre but it will keep you up past your bedtime.
That IS the question! For me, right now, at this time in my life, I have discovered that reading is less a pleasure and more of a chore because almost everything I read is for a deadline. This is a truly debilitating state of affairs for someone who, from the age of maybe seven or eight, has preferred books to just about anyone else's company. True confession. This winter I've read and written reviews for five books about Florida for my radio program (http://news.wgcu.org/programs/florida-book-page) only to find that the web page is woefully outdated.
Then there is the ultimate joy, writing for "Library Journal" as a way to advise collection development librarians where to spend their hard-earned cash and where to save it for another day. I've read and reviewed three novels for them since the beginning of the year.
Where, you might ask, does that leave reading for pleasure? And what happens if I read a book for said pleasure and find that it isn't worth sharing with you readers? Currently I'm so far behind the eight ball that I've seriously considered bringing this book blog to a close before it becomes obsolete. But then...I hear from one or two of you with encouraging words and I read a book like the latest in the Armand Gamache Three Pines series by Louise Penny and I have to weigh in, just in case there's someone out there who hasn't fallen in love with this outstanding collection - thirteen now - that truly eludes categorization. 
A New York Times book reviewer exclaimed, "Louise Penny wrote the book on escapist mysteries." What an outrageous put down cloaked in a compliment. There is nothing escapist about Penny's books. In fact she seems to delve deeper and deeper into the nuances of good and evil, black, white, and gray, with each entry in this stellar collection. And yes, you must read them in order! ("Still Life," 2005)
Inspector Armand Gamache may be at the titular heart of these novels but each secondary character is so fully drawn, so important to the fabric of the whole, that the death of one would diminish all. I listened to the latest book, "Glass Houses," and was treated to an interview with Penny at the end of the recording. Penny aficionados know that there is a great deal of sorrow behind these beautiful novels and it leaks through in the prose. There is something so poignant, so melancholy about the struggles of the characters that reflect the author's own issues with alcohol and the recent death of her beloved husband from complications of Alzheimer's disease.
The author has said that she views the fictional village of Three Pines, less than an hour from the Surete de Quebec where Gamache, along with his son-in-law Beauvoir, lead the province's crime fighting apparatus, as a refuge, a place called home. And it is truly one of the most delightful fictional villages of all time. My friend Cathy and I have said that, were it not so chilly, we would be happy to retire and die there. We each see ourselves as Myrna, the psychologist/book store owner, at least when we aren't closer to resembling the foul mouthed poet Ruth.
This entry in the series is exceptional. Penny has taken her hero, Gamache, and placed him in an untenable position. Established over the years as the epitome of honorability when all around him are failing, he now finds himself forced to use deception in a court of law, against all the beliefs he holds dear, in a gamble that will bring him accolades or prison. And he will take others down with him. Penny exhorts us to remember the bombing of Coventry or the Enola Gay. Terrible examples of times when those in power determined that the end justifies the mean. In this case she examines the opioid crisis, especially the increase in the trafficking of fentanyl. Escapist literature? I think not.
