Pleasant Living Magazine

Courtesy of Twice Told Tales in Gloucester, Virginia.

Visit Twice Told online.

The Black Cat, by Martha Grimes

Viking, $25.95

The indefatigable Superintendent Richard Jury returns to solve the murders of young, beautiful women who are expensive escorts. As the murders begin to mount, the only common thread seems to be their designer-shoe-clad feet. A heel print of a Manolo Blahnik shoe is found at the Black Cat Pub, the scene of the first murder. Jury knows its significance is paramount to solving the murders of the women who led such double lives. Old jealousies and obsessions are masterfully stirred to the surface where they congeal into a deadly scene of deceit and death.

Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld

Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, $9.95

World War I is in sight in this parallel world of Scott Westerfeld’s 1914 Europe. When Arch Duke Ferdinand and his wife are murdered, their son Alek is spirited to safety by the Duke’s loyal retainers. But safety is an illusion at best. Deryn Sharp is a new recruit of the British Air Service. In this world and at this time the fairer sex is barred from service and yet Deryn finds a place aboard the Leviathan, a whale of a dirigible, literally a whale. In this world the two sides of the conflict operate completely differently. The powers are divided into those that place their trust in Clanker machinery and motors and those that place their faith in the Darwinist creations, life forms as weapons. When the Leviathan is ordered on a secret mission, Alek’s and Deryn’s worlds collide. Fast paced and mesmerizing, the Leviathan series adds another star to the Steampunk panoply.

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, by Nicholas Carr

W.W. Norton & Co., $26.95

Why I want to retire to a simpler life is the subject of Carr’s treatise on our acclimation to the distracted world in which we live. His assertion that our evolution from multitasking hunter-gatherers to enlightened deep thinkers and then on to distracted, multitasking, modern-day Internet users is not just thought provoking; it could be construed as downright scary in the sense that we’re devolving into less than we have been. Is the pursuit of information really our next step? Or should we take the time to digest and draw conclusions; to wax philosophic and poetic? Do the benefits of shallow or narrow knowledge balance the loss of depth of understanding? Regardless of where you stand on this issue, Mr. Carr presents ideas that we as sentient humans must consider. A life of banalities or considerations?

The Calligrapher's Daughter, by Eugenia Kim

Henry Holt & Co., $16

At the outset of the Japanese occupation of Korea, a daughter is born to the calligrapher Han. She receives no name from her disappointed father and is known simply as “Baby” until she is five, when she names herself “Najin” after her mother’s home town. She struggles to frame her life to suit both her Confucian father as the dutiful child, and her Christian mother. This is also a story of everyday life in an environment that crumbles under Japanese oppression and the subsequent advent of World War II. Najin’s future is full of promise with diverse opportunities presented to her in the face of century’s old traditions held out to her, her story mirroring the history that develops for occupied Korea. The reader gains not only an understanding of the tumult of war-torn Korea but also the traditions that prevented the collapse of an enduring culture, phrased in prose so fluid it pours from the page.

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