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I’m typing and deleting and retyping ideas here as I reach for an analogy to suit this book. It is one part I Am the Cheese, Robert Cormier’s shocking novel of a boy’s series of psychological . . . revelations? But the other part, I’m not sure of — I think Ishiguro is going for the measured feeling of a detective novel, the kind of detached logician embodied by Sherlock Holmes but also represented by wave after wave of Poirots and Lynleys and Morses and alikes over the years.

Ishiguro does not succeed with this book. It is a little too baffling to be fully realized or sucked into, the tone too antiseptic, the narrator too unreliable. Christopher Banks, a British expat raised in Shanghai until the disappearance of both of his parents, becomes a successful and somewhat famous detective in London before deciding he needs to return to Shanghai and find his parents after many years have passed. He doggedly insists they are still alive after twenty years and even more bafflingly is convinced he is going to play a huge role in preventing the involvement of China and Japan in both the Sino-Japanese War and the impending Second World War.

In the meantime, he has somewhat adopted a young orphan girl, and has a skittering ongoing friendship with an orphaned adult woman in London. These two characters are supposed to bear significance but are only outlined and hinted at, and they end up acting as tools for Christopher’s various instincts and strange beliefs about his life and his mission as a detective. I will not say more because the events are confusing enough to read for yourself, let alone to have spoiled in advance by a review.

I don’t know, as usual, Ishiguro writes beautifully and I found the book compelling if not that rewarding. Will it stay with me the way the other three books I’ve read have? No. And in fact, it feels like a rehash of the tone of Remains of the Day mixed with the political subtexts of both Remains and Artist of the Floating World. The raw materials of Ishiguro’s story are exciting and fresh — he purports to write “international novels,” and does so, repeatedly, more successfully than any author I can think of — but something about When We Were Orphans made me feel uncomfortable and dissatisfied. And Christopher Banks absolutely made my skin crawl.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

This is a fun, fast little book about English and some of its requisite quirks. I liked the title when I spotted it at some thrift store or book sale, and Richard Lederer is a pretty famous wordplayer with a fair passel of cachet on these matters.

I was expecting more of a simple list-like book of examples of usage or something like that, but Lederer writes in essay form about some positive and negative attributes of the English language. He offers up many examples of the phenomena he describes and draws conclusions about, for instance, the way English accepts words from all other languages and absorbs them into common usage.

He makes some recommendations for writing, too, promoting both poetry and effective, simple language:

Here is a sound rule: Use small, old words where you can. If a long word says just what you want to say, do not fear to use it. But know that our tongue is rich in crisp, brisk, swift, short words. Make them the spine and the heart of what you speak and write. Short words are like fast friends. They will not let you down.

The part I liked best was when Lederer commented on which words derive from which languages — Anglo-Saxon terms are typically brief, French terms more gestural or figurative, and Latin or Greek terms more precise. Think about fear, terror, and trepidation, or ask, question, and interrogate.

Lederer devotes the last dozen or so pages of the book to a series of notable quotations about language and words, some from writers I’ve never heard of. My favorite of these is from Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle:

The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.

Words are subject to trendiness and overuse the same as any fashion or food or occupation. To look at language both as a fresh, living organism and one of humankind’s most deeply rooted histories takes a big-picture view that we sometimes lose in an era when new (absurd) words crop up every day and more and more people fall out of love with high-quality writing and communication.

What we construct with words can feel new forever — Carlyle’s line still zings even from the 1800s, and even if Shakespeare’s language trips you up sometimes, his turns of phrase are often timeless.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

Jonathan Franzen follows the people who covertly enforce Cyprus’s policy against trapping songbirds in a July 26 New Yorker feature. Apparently songbirds are the unofficial national delicacy of Cyprus, which I also did not know is a Communist state. The island is beginning to stand out as a bit backwards-looking in the cerebral and modern world of the E.U., hence the policy, which bans practices like using prepared sticks covered in sticky sap or electronic recordings of birds to lure others.

Looking at the picture of hundreds of tiny birds lined up ready to be eaten is pretty sickening. Listen, Cyprus, couldn’t you find a larger food animal, one you could trap without leaving it stuck to something and beating itself to death trying to escape? It’s really cruel. Everyone knows I have a natural affinity toward tiny island nations but you’re pushing it.

Franzen follows a couple of Cypriots who belong to an organization called CABS — the Committee Against Bird Slaughter. They get into some trouble when two locals assault the CABS members, and Franzen and another outsider run as fast as they can until Franzen has an absurdly lucky break:

Heyd continued to retreat, which seemed to me a good idea. When I saw him look back and go pale and break into a dead run, I panicked too. [...]

I saw Heyd running on up through a large garden, speaking to a middle-aged man, and then, looking frightened, continuing to run. I walked up to the garden’s owner and tried to explain the situation, but he spoke only Greek. Seeming at once concerned and suspicious, he fetched his daughter, who was able to tell me, in English, that I’d blundered into the yard of the district director of Greenpeace. She gave me water and two plates of cookies and told my story to her father, who responded with one angry word. “Barbarians!” the daughter translated.

Organizational psychologist Dr. J. Richard Hackman discusses conflict in PBS’s outstanding miniseries This Emotional Life. He laments that people wonder too often what life would be like if we could neutralize all conflicts:

Number one, not possible. Number two, it’d be a bad idea even if it were possible, because it is in the conflict that we really capture the difference of perspective that is the reason for having a group in the first place.

I laughed at this sort of orange-yellow-brown yarn I picked up in a grab bag somewhere. Its makers describe it as “antique gold,” and I kept it around in hopes I’d someday need to make a vintage-looking Cowardly Lion costume or something. Then by chance it fell into the big yarn bin next to this color I like terribly, what you’d probably call a raspberry — a deep, rich pink that could maybe not even be pink anymore.

HARMONIOUS COMPLEMENTARY SITUATION.

For visual interest I’m using a slightly off white and a nice neutral charcoal gray as well. It’s a basic feather-and-fan pattern which lends it the wavy shape. Do not adjust your television set.

p.s. Yes, that is a gold sweater clip holding my side spare yarns together — it is a family hand-me-down from my mom or one of her sisters, and I feel strongly that this new use outside of sweaters honors them all.

It’s official at this point that I’m going to become a raving Ishiguro fan, an espouser to strangers, and I will not be afraid to make a fool of myself about it. I love this man’s writing. The two books I read before this were strong, connective stories of people experiencing realizations in their recognizably ordinary lives. Never Let Me Go is as strong if not moreso, with an alternative-history-via-science-fiction twist that I feared would feel gimmicky. It absolutely does not.

Narrator Kathy opens in the present and offers her story in bits and pieces, framed in hindsight. She and her two closest friends at boarding school grew up in great secrecy and in unique circumstances. They are shaped by those circumstances in symbolic ways that come out more concretely than the average schoolday scars. Ishiguro’s use of this extended metaphor reminded me of another of my most favorite romantic science fictions: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (It also reminded me of the much more lightweight movie TiMER, which is worth checking out even though it’s a more traditional romantic comedy.)

In Eternal Sunshine, Michel Gondry showed us what could happen if we got to act out a prevalent, latent relationship fantasy: What if I could completely wipe out an entire memory of a person, to alleviate the unrelenting pain the memory causes me? Would the resulting holes in my mind outweigh the desired numbness?

Spoiler alert. Turn back now. But seriously, read this book.

Ishiguro offers Kathy and the man she loves the distant chance to win back a few good healthy years after being kept apart in their youth. On paper this sounds like a late-in-life cliche but Kathy and Tommy are barely 30 and unwitting participants in an imaginative Nuclear Age-spawned program to clone people and harvest their organs over time. Crueler still, each “donor” is kept alive and as healthy as possible through donations of two, three, or four vital organs, adding an increased element of mystery and unpredictability to any romantic feelings.

Kathy and Tommy feel the impending doom and pressing of the passage of time everyone else feels, but for them more than almost anyone it is literal. At 31, Kathy is an exception because she hasn’t yet been asked to make her first donation, and one of Ishiguro’s great unanswered questions in the book is why anyone is selected at any time. The unanswered questions are a great coup because they illustrate how seamlessly Ishiguro works this fantastical notion into his story.

It isn’t a novel about clones or organ donation. It isn’t a novel about the politics of postwar England or the science involved or even of the ethics of cloning. Instead, it is a classy, beautiful novel about a handful of special children and the adults they become, with the same feelings of missed opportunity and potential that everyone has. As in Remains of the Day and An Artist of the Floating World, Ishiguro’s first-person narrator reveals big meaty everythings in the course of her plain memories of school and what came after. She is a pleasure to learn about and relate to.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

From a chapter entitled “In Praise of English”:

One reason English has accumulated such a vast word hoard is that it is the most hospitable and democratic language that has ever existed. English has never rejected a word because of its race, creed, or national origin.

From Richard Lederer’s The Miracle of Language.

Sweet Sophie girl is mine for a few days. My goodness!

I don’t know, Sue Grafton.

By now, you and I are tight, and you know I’m sold on the Kinsey Millhone mysteries. I love them, and also you, and mysteries in general, and stories about strong women in general.

So I’m going to level with you: I did not like this one. I really did not like it at all, and I feel a little bad about it, but it is the only true misstep in the series so far. There were way too many characters I could barely keep straight, way too many similar-looking conversations with strangers at the bar, way too many shoutouts to a past life that I did not feel I knew enough about to care about.

My review isn’t long because I don’t have much to say. Grafton writes my most consistent favorite books to pick up anytime, when I’m tired of reading something more challenging or can’t get into another book. This time I could barely get through it and found myself feeling annoyed by the idea of bringing it with me to read.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

Very warm feet are considered a direct consequence of dog-under-desk. Exhibit A: