Well, I must say Kerry Greenwood's Murder on the Ballarat Train is a fun little cozy mystery that has a kick to it.  You sort of expect cozies to be all refined and uppercrust but still low key action-wise, and whilst Phryne Fisher is refined, she's also intelligent, very independent and extremely gutsy.  It's 1928 and she's quite the modern woman in all senses of the word.  This is one cozy mystery that juxtaposes the lush with the gritty and the heroine quite happily has thrown off the shackles of her parent's Victorian society in favor of a more adventurous lifestyle (both in and outside of the boudoir). 

Quite a while ago I read the first Phryne Fisher novel, Cocaine Blues.  Although I can't quite recall the mystery or solution, Phryne has always stayed with me.  I should really go back and skim for more of the details, but what I do remember is that she was raised in England in a family with no money but with the right pedigree.  She eventually comes into an inheritance and decides to try her luck as a lady detective in Melbourne, so off she goes.  She's got a taste for the lavish lifestyle, has the most divine wardrobe, drives a Hispano-Suiza, yet having grown up poor means she she knows how the other half lives and remains sympathetic to those less well off.  Phryne reminds me a lot of another "Honourable", Daisy Dalrymple, though the Phryne Fisher mysteries are decidedly edgier.  I like them equally well.  Phryne is more street smart than Daisy and likely to find herself in more unsavory situations, but she can always take care of herself.         

I like a heroine who in the opening chapter reaches inside her handbag and grabs a .32 Beretta!

"The clasp of the handbag seemed impossibly complex, and finally, swearing under her breath and gasping for air, she tore it open with her teeth, extracted her Beretta .32 with which she always traveled, and waveringly took aim.  She squeezed off a shot that broke the window."

Moments later she proceeds to pull the cord to stop a moving train--something she had always wanted to do.  What started out as a simple trip to Ballarat ends in death.  There might have been more than one victim in the chloroform-filled first class car had it not been for the quick thinking of Phyrne.  There's one person missing from the traincar, an elderly lady who had been traveling with her daughter, whose body is found later laying by the tracks.  The mystery isn't just who killed the woman and why but also how they managed to dump the body without being seen.  Things become murkier when a young girl is found alone in the station having traveled by herself and with no clear memory of the events or her own identity.  She's obviously a victim of trauma and locked away in her mind is the face of a killer.   

To be honest the mystery isn't especially difficult to figure out or surprising when the murderer is revealed, but the great fun of the novel is Phryne herself.  She's a larger than life sort of character.  As I was reading I had pictured in my mind an actress from the early days of Hollywood like Louise Brooks and all the action happening as in a 1930s black and white film with all these wonderful scenes on a fast moving train.  It's the atmosphere of the story that is so entertaining.  Phryne really could be a Flapper, leading a decadent life in the "Roaring Twenties" and getting herself involved in murder.  Even the secondary characters are fun--Dot, her loyal maid; Bert and Cec, owners and proprietors of a taxi service and great friends of Phyrne (willing to do a little dirty work if necessary, though don't worry they're the good guys); and Detective-Inspector Robinson who has a high regard for Phryne and her detective business.  I'm hoping to get more of a taste of life Down Under since I believe the bulk of the stories are set in Melbourne and other parts of Australia.  I don't read Australian authors as often as I should, so I'm hoping she writes more about the culture and society.         

I was halfway through Murder on the Ballarat Train when I discovered it wasn't the second in the series but the third.  I prefer reading mystery series in order, though it didn't seem to matter in this case.  Now I'll go back to Flying too High to fill in the gap.  Phyrne might be a little too strong a character or independent-minded for some readers, but I get a kick out of her and will keep reading through the series.  The stories are quick, fluffy reads and just the thing when you want a taste of the high life ca. 1928!

It's really too soon to be thinking about reading plans for next year, but I find myself doing so anyway.  Mostly I want to have very few plans and just see where my reading takes me, but there are a few things I would like to do next year.  One of them, and I've already mentioned this, is read more challenging books than I normally do.  I think on the whole I read pretty good books, but I get in lots of comfort reads and fluffy sorts of books, too.  I probably won't stray too far from my norm, but I'd like to read a few books that stretch my mind a bit.  Either they can be award winners, or more likely books that in some way are experimental.  Experimental is sort of a scary word for me when it comes to books, but I think I sometimes make things harder than they really are.  Experimental to me means the author may try new things with narrative or language or have something unusual with form.  I'm not quite sure what I'm looking for, but I have a few books in mind that might work well.

1. If on a Winters Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino
2. Goldberg Variations, Gabriel Josipovici
3. Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker
4. The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald
5. Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf
6. Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges
7. Flaubert's Parrot, Julian Barnes
8. The French Lieutenant's Women, John Fowles
9. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
10. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, David Foster Wallace
11. Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar
12. 2666, Roberto Bolano
13. Black Spring, Henry Miller         

I'm sort of excited about the prospect of doing this, but strange as it sounds I'm a little afraid, too.  I'm afraid I'll either be totally lost (my greatest fear in some cases, and why I avoid authors on occasion) and won't "get it" or maybe worse, I'll find I don't like this sort of book.   I don't consider myself a reader of a lot of highbrow literature, but I like to think I can read it, enjoy it and understand it.  Then again I sometimes think I worry about these things too much and shouldn't put labels on books and just enjoy whatever I do read--wherever it happens to land on the literary spectrum.  In any case I bet if I do pick one of these to read and do a little shout out someone else in the blogosphere will either have read the book and can offer advice or might be persuaded to read along.  

On a side note, I just realized I have only one woman author on my list.  When I was thinking about this earlier I was just jotting down random titles that came to mind.  Surely there must be loads of women who would fit this category.  Any suggestions?

Although I'm technically not supposed to be buying books at the moment, I do have a few new ones to share.  These three are thanks to a gift card.  I did go over a bit as I opted for the free shipping rather than staying under my limit and only buying two.  If I'm going to spend money I'd rather it go towards a book rather than postage.  The top book was a total impulse buy however, as I looking for something relatively inexpensive to fill out my order.  I was also in a very "thriller-ish" mood, so it seemed good at the time.  Has anyone ever read Vena Cork before?  Thorn is her first novel.  The Guardian called it "A compelling dark-hued psychological thriller" and The Times said "One of those rare and energetic books you can't put down yet don't want to end".  There's a new Persephone Classic out, The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett.  Yay, and I didn't even have to send to the UK for it.  I wish I could get regular Persephone editions over here as well.  And as I enjoyed Joshua Zeitz's Flapper so much (am working on a post about it now), I wanted a follow up read.  Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties by Marion Meade sounds interesting.  The author discusses Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Edna Ferber.  If I wasn't trying to catch up on  my end of the year reading, at least one of these books would be on my night stand right now!  And do you see the Bas Bleu catalog on the bottom?  I'm looking forward to seeing what's new and adding more books to my wishlist!

I've had a few new review copies show up recently, too.  More vacation reading perhaps?  I've been curious about Nobel Prize Winner, Herta Muller, and now I have a copy of The Passport to try.  As this one is less than 100 pages I will definitely be reading it on my break.  I'm not at all familiar with Juan Carlos Onetti.  A Brief Life was published in 1950, and Onetti is considered "one of the great Latin American writers of the twentieth century".  Born in Uruguay he lived in Spain.  I don't think I've read any South American authors, so I'm looking forward to this.  Carlos Fuentes called Onetti's novels "the coner stones of our modernity".  And last but not least, Thomas Fleming's The Intimate Loves of the Founding Fathers was all set to be my next read until Louisa May Alcott came along.  I've plans to read this for the Women Unbound reading challenge, so I'll get to it eventually.

I do so love new (at least new to me) books.  And after reading Litlove's post, I'm not going to feel an ounce of guilt for them.

I've started reading Harriet Reisen's Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, and right from the start she's caught my attention.  How can you not appreciate an author who on the first page writes:

"Like so many other girls, I fell under the spell of Louisa may Alcott when my mother presented Little Women to me as if it were the key to a magic kingdom.  I was taken into Louisa's story so completely that a book with covers and pages has no place in my memory of the experience.  While I was there, by my mother's decree, my life was suspended."

The passage actually gave me shivers.  I love the idea of a story being so wonderful and captivating that it transcends the physical, a book with pages, and the reader literally falls into the story and becomes part of its world.  Those are always the best books and it's not every read that achieves that completeness.

I don't actually remember when I first read Little Women.  I think I must have read an abridged version or some sort of junior reader, as it seems I always knew the story, but I don't have a recollection of being swept up in its pages.  I read it properly just a few years ago and enjoyed it immensely, but I think it probably works its magic best on a younger, fresher reader.  Of course this is not to say I didn't appreciate it very much, as I did and have been curious about the woman who wrote it.  I decided now's the time to read  biography--in anticipation of the documentary airing next month.   

It seems Reisen has long wanted to make a film about Louisa May Alcott.  She's spent more than twenty years reading Alcott's work and researching her life and finally got together the funding for her project.  The book is a result of her work and seems to have been written in conjunction with the making of the film.  I've only just started reading, and my teaser is from the first chapter as Reisen introduces the reader to Louisa's mother and father.  I find her father, Bronson, especially interesting.  He had only a rudimentary education, but but worked hard to educate himself.  "They (Bronson and his cousin William) assembled their own library of stray books hoarded by relatives, now and then scraping together enough money to purchase a volume."  Imagine scraping money together to buy "A volume".  I'm feeling especially fortunate at the moment.    

My teaser, however, is about the school Bronson worked at and the innovations he tried.

"At last Bronson landed a teaching job at the Cheshire public school.  Eagerly he set out to overturn education as he had known it.  He transformed the Spartan schoolroom along Athenian lines, dignifying his students as he added backs to the uncomfortable benches, improved the lighting and heating, and provided individual slates for writing, paying for it all himself.  He banished rote learning and memorization that suffocated curiosity, and avoided corporal punishment in favor of more respectful forms of social organization, including an honor system.  He elicited his pupils' opinions, guiding their discussions along Socratic lines, posing questions rather than imparting facts."

The educational system was quite different than how we know it now, wasn't it?  Bronson seems a fascinating individual, but why do I think the Alcott's lives were on the tumultuous side?  I'm not as familiar with Louisa's story or the Transcendentalists or the life stories of any of the other authors working at that time in New England for that matter (what little I learned in high school has long since faded away).  I'm hoping this will be a good introduction to this period and I feel another reading tangent coming on.  First, though, I'm off to read about Louisa May Alcott!

I decided not to depend on Santa to bring me a copy of Minnie's Room: The Peacetime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, which was my hope  after I finished reading the Wartime Stories.  Santa can be pretty generous, but that doesn't always include ordering books from the UK.  The next best thing is borrowing a library copy.  This is yet another marvelous collection of more slice of life stories, where Panter-Downes turns a keen and perceptive eye once again towards British middle-class life, which was irrevocably changed in the aftermath of World War II.  I've read a smattering now of Mollie Panter-Downes's fiction, which is very revealing.  She's so adept at portraying her characters honestly, blemishes and all, whilst still making them believable and sympathetic.  Granted she writes about that class of people she knows best, but she does it so well you can't fault her.  It's put very nicely in the introduction.

"The stories in Minnie's Room have a subtle, very English depth of observation: they are revealing of their time but also suggestive and funny, beautifully written explorations of the response to change, and of loneliness, loss and self-deception."

A few facts I've learned which are good to keep in mind: these ten stories were written for the New Yorker between 1947 and 1965.  She wrote (I believe) exclusively for the New Yorker--literally hundreds of columns, short stories and poems over the course of her life.  The stories of Minnie's Room came after her beautifully rendered novel, One Fine Day, which subtly evokes an England amidst great change.  It's a natural progression that these stories continue to tell that story.  The period after the war was known as "The Age of Austerity".  The war may have been over but rationing was still in place.  "The Labour Government was seeking to build its 'New Jerusalem': in a few short months it laid the foundation for the Welfare State, set up the National Health Service and brought coal, electricity, gas, and railways into public ownership."  The middle class bore the cost of most of these changes.  Their taxes were at about the same rate as during wartime.  Life as they knew it was changing for better or worse, and it is this Britain Panter-Downes writes about.

It's impossible to discuss the stories in any great detail in one short post, but I'd like to mention a few of my favorites.  The titular story, "Minnie's Room" is about an "ugly Londoner" who had worked as a cook for one family for over 25 years.  If by her 45th birthday she hadn't married, she planned to quit and get a room of her own and enjoy her remaining years independently.  Of course the family, consisting of parents and a spinster daughter, can't understand why she would leave such a lovely home.

'Damn it! exploded Mr Sothern.  'We ought to be life enough for her!  She oughtn't to need anything else.'

Who could they possibly find to take her very capable place?  She fills her small room overlooking a "green cloud of a lime tree" with inexpensive seconds and cast offs and thinks of the lovely smell that will fill her room from the tree.  What's most poignant is the spinster daughter has feelings of envy upon visiting her, well knowing this is an independence she's not likely to see in her situation, so you wonder who's benefiting and who's losing out in the end.         

In "I'll Blow Your House Down" a young widow must prepare her house for sale after the unexpected death of her husband.  Taking her little daughters to live with her own parents she faces a life she hadn't planned.  The prospective buyers of her home see only an empty house that they can reshape and mold into something that will be unrecognizable to her. 

"I shall go back and corner Mr Wolfe, she thought, and say that I have changed my mind.  I cannot sell to those people.  The trees, the grass, the white house at her back, all seemed to make their separate thin cries of of protest at being abandoned to the Dentons."

It's the Denton's sweet little old dog who sits happily with her in the yard that she imagined taking over her house--"grey, shadowy , fitting quietly into the picture without disturbing a single line."  In the end she makes the only choice she has open to her as someone who needs the money now that she's alone.  

Although there's a sad air of finality that hangs over so many of these stories, my favorite is one that's quite wistful.  Is there such a thing as a coming of age short story?  Perhaps one where knowledge is gained through the simplest of actions.  In "What the Wild Waves are Saying?" two young cousins spend their annual summer holidays taking in the famous country air along the coast.  Every year the hotel is filled with the same faithful visitors.  This year promises excitement however, with the addition of newlyweds.