Ratking by Michael Dibdin

Ratking is the first novel the British writer Michael Dibdin wrote about Aurelio Zen, the Venetian-born Roman detective with an unfortunate reputation for integrity. This novel was published in the U.S. in 1988. It won the Gold Dagger award in that year.

Dibdin taught in Perugia for four years; that seems to be where he got the inspiration to set this novel in Perugia.

Several of his novels have been made into a detective series starring Rufus Sewell that is being shown on Masterpiece Theatre here (Vendetta, Cabal and Ratking). The series is quite stylish (Sewell is always wearing sunglasses and a dark suit with a skinny tie, making him a dour and intimidating reminder of Marcello Mastroianno), with great music. Sewell's stillness reminds me of that old bromide: "If you want to get someone's attention, just whisper."

In Ratking, an influential man pulls some strings to get officials at the Ministry of the Interior to look into a kidnapping case that has been dragging on for months. Kidnapping is a growth industry and the police are stretched pretty thin, so Enrico Mancini calls on Aurelio Zen. Zen is surprised to be sent to Perugia; ever since he became obsessed with the death of a colleague working on the Aldo Moro kidnapping case (1978), he had been removed from active duty and had labored in the career desert “Housekeeping” section of the Interior Ministry, an internal exile.

Zen recognizes what he’s up against from the very beginning. He has a police driver who, he guesses, is reporting on his movements and actions to the higher-ups in Rome. He’s resented by the Perugian cops, who make it clear that he’s not welcome, and by the investigating judge, who has a grand, and Zen thinks, unlikely conspiracy theory, and by the victim’s family, who are not cooperating with the authorities and don’t want Zen either.

Before he’s been in Perugia 24 hours, he’s been insulted by the local police, invited to a disastrous dinner with the kidnap victim’s family, and learned that the family attorney who’s been acting as a go-between for the family with the kidnappers has been shot. He knows he’s in a weak position and will have to tread very carefully.

Meanwhile, there are lovely little bits of local color. The restauranteur who bemoans the current interest in dieting, which he says is ruining the restaurant business (that which the Huns, Goths, and Turks could not do, dieting is doing).

Eating is a central metaphor. An ambitious man with stomach problems cannot eat because of his condition but as a child was always hungry, wishing he were as big as his brother. When Zen’s neglected American girlfriend comes to visit him in Perugia, the picnic she plans proves to be a disaster, auguring a sad denouement. When she breaks up with him, he fears what’s coming because he’s astounded to learn that she plans to feed him “American-style” hamburgers from a packet.

A late train inspires an agitated discussion of whether the culture of the North or the South is superior, and whether Italian lack of concern with train timetables is a priceless national treasure. Zen often thinks of his father, who died in the Second World War, and his childhood in Venice. He remembers that Perugia’s warren of streets perched on a hilltop grew out of a need for defence, as did the founding of his home city, Venice, on islands in a lagoon.

Despite Zen’s care, events quickly spiral out of control. He finally resorts to colorful ruses to bring his investigation to a close.

Zen is a detective who’s outwardly placid and hard to provoke and a pretty good political player but whose ongoing sense of sorrow about the early death of his father, his grief over losing his American girlfriend, and his clever playacting as a detective makes him a little more interesting and this story a little more thrilling than your average English country house mystery.

The significance of the title is explained by Bartocci, the magistrate:

“.. The condition of this conspiracy is that we’re all part of it,” Bartocci retorted. “It’s like a ratking.”

“A what?”

“A ratking. Do you know what that is?”

Zen shrugged. “The king rat, I suppose. The dominant animal in the pack.”

Bartocci shook his head. “That’s what everyone thinks. But they’re wrong. A ratking is something that happens when too many rats have to live in too small a space under too much pressure. Their tails become entwined and the more they strain and stretch to free themselves the tighter grows the knot binding them, until at last it becomes a solid mass of embedded tissue. And the creature thus formed, as many as thirty rats tied together by the tail, is called a ratking. You wouldn’t expect such a living contradiction to survive, would you? That’s the most amazing thing of all. Most of the ratkings that are discovered, in the plaster of old houses or beneath the floorboards of a barn, are healthy and flourishing..

“..What we’re dealing with is not a creature but a condition. The condition of being crucified to your fellows, squealing madly, biting, spitting, lashing out, yet somehow surviving, somehow even vilely flourishing! ..The ratking is self-regulating. It responds automatically and effectively to any threat. Each rat defends the interests of the others. The strength of each is the strength of all.”

Books read in 2010

I found a list I made last year of the books I'd read to date in 2010 (back in October or November, I think).

I'm surprised to see that I didn't blog about some of these books:

Heart and Soul
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish
Voice of the Violin/The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri
Evelina by Fanny Burney
Faceless Killers/The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Woman in White
March by Geraldine Brooks
The Men and the Girls by Joanna Trollope
Till You Hear From Me by Pearl Cleage

Let me start with Pearl Cleage's Till You Hear From Me. Pearl Cleage is an African-American writer and academic, currently living in Atlanta, and the author of What Looks like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (an Oprah Book Club book).

Till You Hear From Me is, I guess, a topical novel. The heroine is originally from the South; she's worked on the Obama campaign and she hopes to get a call from the White House offering her a position there. The days have turned into weeks and the weeks into months and she hasn't heard anything yet. Her father is a crusty old soul, separated from her mother, and currently, not really speaking to her, either. While she loves her father very much, and admires him, she's also more than a little angry at him for being bossy and unforgiving, among other things.

Suddenly, a friend of the family calls with an urgent request that our Ida rush home and look after her father, who may be losing his mind: he's embarrassed himself publicly by making some insulting remarks about Hispanics.

Ida reluctantly returns and, meets an attractive but duplicitous man, a childhood crush, who really means her some harm. Along her journey, Ida is reminded of the values she grew up with, the comforts of friends and family, and to trust herself that she is all right alone.

Even last year, the novel seemed a little dated and the situations contrived but I believe that Cleage aimed to make a point about black culture before and after the Obama election: that there is no reason to ignore the achievements of a past that was heroic because it was really dangerous and every reason to embrace the future with its promise both of opportunity and continuing challenges.

Skillful characterization and some of the storyteller's arts are not Cleage's strengths, but she has something to say and I respect that. More so because I agree with her message: she is reminding all of us not to forget the past but to embrace the future which can be much harder than it sounds.

March, by Geraldine Brooks, is a beautifully written novel, with strong and very thoughtful characterizations, and some violence.

It's the story of Mr. March, from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. To me, it's really the portrait of a marriage. And, the view of that marriage expressed by Mrs. March seemed to me to be a little too modern to be quite believable. However, it's not meant to be historical fiction.

Rumspringa: To Be or Not To Be Amish is a nonfiction account of the Old Amish practice in this country of letting young people do what they want -- whether it's drink, smoke, do drugs, have sex, go to live in the big city -- in order to give them a chance to decide whether they are ready to be baptized into the Amish community as adults. This period is also one in which some Amish use their freedom to look for a spouse. The Old Amish community is very unforgiving, on the whole, to adults who have transgressed the code of the community once they have been baptized, so making this decision is important and very difficult for some.

Without question, my favorite book last year was Evelina, by Fanny Burney. I read it with a friend who proclaimed it utterly charming, and I agree with her. Evelina's innocence is both comic and painful; her lack of romantic feeling is somewhat underwhelming; the characters who are meant to present to us how not to behave are drawn broadly, and are somewhat annoying. I also enjoyed the scenes of London life. Burney's work clearly influenced Austen, and may have been the single most important influence on Austen. What is most important to me about Evelina, however, is the beauty of the writing. For weeks after I read Evelina, my speech and my writing were affected. I could wish my writing were affected more.

Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh

Just finishing reading Delivering Happiness and I have to say that it satisfies two of my top criteria for a book I would recommend: it's a light read. I read it in two or three days. To me, that's definitely a plus. Another definite plus: It's only 246 pages long.

Hsieh talks about his childhood, education, and lifelong interest in both making money and avoiding things he doesn't like, whether it's working with people who don't get the company culture or practicing the violin. Arguably, that is a model for success: play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses. (See Daniel Pink's graphic novel, Johnny Bunko.)

Hsieh also talks about his lifelong interest in having fun, whether it's playing a practical joke on his boss or organizing a really great party.

At times, I wondered if the culture of Zappos, with its emphasis on practical jokes, fun and weird stunts (bald and blue, for instance) and its organizing of social fun and personal growth for its employees, was a conscious or unconscious effort to recreate the tribal feeling of college.

This book contains encouragement, it says, for folks who want to revolutionize the culture of their companies. (When it comes to customer service, I certainly agree that there is a need for a revolution.) I also think that writing this book was another inexpensive way to promote the company and I went on the Zappos website after reading the book.

The book is organized into three sections. "Profits" talks about his childhood button-making business, college, and the creation and sale of LinkExchange (when Hsieh was 24), and the beginning of Zappos.

"Profits and Passion" talks about the struggles to grow Zappos to the point where it was profitable, and the mistakes Hsieh and his co-workers made and the lessons they learned. In the aftermath of the dot com implosion and 9/11, Hsieh slashed his marketing budget and to grow his business, began to emphasize selling more to existing customers rather than trying to attract new customers. This led to the decision to open their own warehouse and to emphasize customer service to win loyalty from customers.

"Profits, Passion and Purpose" talks about the sale of Zappos to Amazon and incidentally discusses the importance of having a board and investors who are "on board" with the company culture and its goals and objectives. Hsieh undertook speaking engagements at conferences to help promote the Zappos brand and discovered along the way that there were folks who passionately interested in applying some of Hsieh's management techniques in their own practices, at their own companies. In his description of the announcement of the sale to Amazon to his employees he said:

"It wasn't just about the Kindle or the bonus. Those were just .. bonuses .. The moment signified far more than that. The unified energy and emotion of everyone in the room was not just about my own personal happiness, and not just about the happiness of Zappos employees. We were about much more than just profits and passion. Collectively, this marked the beginning of the next leg of our journey to help change the world."

And, I think that if Zappos continues to grow, Hsieh's model does have the potential will change the world -- to persuade managers that company culture matters -- if Zappos can prove that its success will outlast that of say, Borders.


You should read this book if:

1. You enjoy reading memoirs by successful businesspeople.

2. You enjoy reading leadership books because you hope to learn something that will help you in your own career.

3. You are interested in justifying your existing concern for excellent customer service.

4. You are interested in justifying your existing concern for treating employees well.

5. You are interested in motivation.

6. You are a big fan of Zappos and/or Tony Hsieh.

One of the things that struck me after reading the book was that although Hsieh talked frequently about giving excellent customer service and empowering Zappos' staff to provide it, he didn't talk in much detail about how to do it. He does talk about the fact that you could order an item with rush delivery by midnight and find the item on your doorstep by 8 am the following morning. I can't argue with the excellence of that; he explains that the warehouse is run in such a way that when the order comes in, the picker goes to get it immediately, rather than waiting for orders to collect (which would be more efficient, and cheaper, but would cause customers to wait longer for their items).

This question interests me because I used Zappos twice. I ordered a pair of shoes and when they arrived they were the wrong pair of shoes. I called customer service; they offered to pay for the return of the wrong shoes and invited me to order again. When the new shoes came, they were exactly like the first pair of shoes -- and not the shoes I had ordered. Then I was done. Financially, I was whole. I hadn't paid for shipping. But I'd spent time packing up the shoes and returning them and I'd spent time on the phone with the customer service rep who had not solved my problem. I actually see that as an important function of customer service representatives.

It came up in another context in my reading, recently. In Tom Peters' recent book, The Little Big Things: 163 ways to pursue excellence, he tells a story of an American equipment manufacturer who sold factory equipment to a company in China when trade with China had just opened up. The client reported that the equipment didn't work. Staff members from the American company got on a plane and went to China to fix the problem. They went to great lengths to fix the problem; they apologized for the problem; and they maintained their relationship with their client.

Perhaps these two authors are defining what "customer service" is differently; I'm more comfortable with Tom Peters' ideas.

If you wanted to learn how to teach your own staff to give excellent customer service, you wouldn't get that information by reading this book.

On page 152, Hsieh mentions again that Zappos' customer service orientation was developed as a way to build buzz -- word of mouth -- to compensate for the advertising and marketing they just couldn't afford:

What's the best way to build brand for the long term?

In a word: culture.

At Zappos, our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff -- like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand, or passionate employees and customers -- will happen naturally on its own.

Hsieh does provide a revealing email exchange between a customer service representative and a customer that suggests that part of providing excellent customer service is actually acting like a salesman: flattering the customer's ego, being responsive to the customer's concerns, and even mirroring their behavior.

Hsieh touts the ability of his employees to offer free shipping as a perk to win and keep customer loyalty. He said that offering free shipping was expensive but it was, in his view, a marketing investment. I believe that that's true, actually, but think that simply providing folks with the shoes that they want and need is also central and he doesn't explicitly talk about that.

This book was published in 2009 and I'd love to read an update of the company's history to date. I've read that Hsieh "bought" the company back from Amazon. (Amazon's purchase was something between a merger and a sale; Zappos' investors were paid with Amazon stock.)

Hsieh talks about his company's culture, which includes treating customers, vendors, and employees well, as a key ingredient to its success. He presents part of the book as a call to arms, encouraging others to learn from his example and use these lessons in their own businesses, existing or yet to be born. I think that another real purpose of this book is to continue to promote the Zappos brand. Now it's not so much about the product but about the company's culture.

To me, that's not bad. A lot of people, including myself, are excited about behaving in ethical and transparent manner and still having success in the form of profits. Company culture is often neglected - rarely discussed and instead intuited by employees, and not always in a way that serves management and stockholders well. And I strongly agree with Hsieh on his exhortation to recognize your employees early and often, by saying things like "Thank you" and "you did a great job" publicly.

Here's a list of the Zappos core values, taken from their website:

Zappos Family Core Values

As we grow as a company, it has become more and more important to explicitly define the core values from which we develop our culture, our brand, and our business strategies. These are the ten core values that we live by:

Deliver WOW Through Service
Embrace and Drive Change
Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
Pursue Growth and Learning
Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
Do More With Less
Be Passionate and Determined
Be Humble

My comment is that it's pretty hard to argue with these values; they seem self-evidently good. I find myself thinking that some of these "core values" help to "incentivize" (sorry!) employees with fun and acceptance rather than money, and I see that if you can succeed in doing that you can create greater stability for your company and avoid always using money to motivate your employees. If you're a fan of Daniel Pink's work Drive, you'll probably agree with him that money is not the only motivator. I continue to puzzle over the value of "weirdness," and I wonder if its virtue is that it fosters acceptance.

What I've been reading lately

I haven't quite succeeded in finishing Too Close to the Falls although I did sneak ahead and read, what was for me, a hair-raising final chapter.

When I start a new book before finishing an old one, there's a good chance I'll never get back to the old one. I'll say this: there are at least three wonderful chapters and a variety of things I find remarkable about this childhood.

I'm currently reading Delivering Happiness by the CEO of Zappos. It's a really fun read and I'm about halfway through having begun it yesterday.

I'm also just finishing up listening to SuperFreakonomics which was very entertaining. Before that, I listened to Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. I really enjoyed listening to that book, much more than any other audiobook.

Before that, I listened to a little of Daniel Pink's Drive, and I hope to get back to that soon.

The Shape of Water and the Voice of the Violin by Andrea Camilleri

I read both of these books last year and never got around to blogging about them. I got started on these when I browsed the remainder table at Borders and found Voice of the Violin there for only $4; I'd heard of Camilleri's series before, from a serious fan, and I loved the cover which seemed to convey that white Mediterranean sun particular to Italy (whoever the artist is who is creating the covers for this series in translation, he or she has my thanks -- the covers are wonderful).

I actually read Voice of the Violin first although it is the third or fourth book in the Inspector Montalbano series; it inspired me, however, to want to read The Shape of Water the first (and I found the enigmatic title increased my interest). I did enjoy it more than Voice of the Violin and I think that's because what I enjoy in a mystery is everything but the mystery and there's plenty of characterization, local color, and history to entertain me in the first novel.

Andrea Camilleri, the author of these books, intrigues me as well and that is part of the fondness that I feel for the novels: he was born in 1925, and success of the kind that he enjoys now came relatively late to him -- he published the first of the Inspector Montalbano novels, The Shape of Water, in 1994. Although he had had some success as a serious novelist, I'm going to guess that the reason for the great popularity of the first novel were some sly observations about Sicilian life, love and politics, much discussion of delicious food, a good ear for local slang and a detective, who, like the best detectives, is deeply feeling.

The Shape of Water starts with the discovery of the body of a local politician in a compromising position by two local garbagemen down at the town dump. No one except the Inspector is interested in solving this crime; the coroner rules the death natural rather than criminal. Along the way we learn a great deal about Sicily and its garbage, which I enjoyed hugely. I think there's a kind of bumptious quality to this book missing in Voice of the Violin. (I'm happy to report that the bad guys get theirs.)

Voice of the Violin is another murder mystery that opens with a traffic accident caused by Montalbano's irrepressibly goofy police driver. The failure of the other owner in the accident to respond to the note Montalbano leaves behind arouses his suspicion and he very shortly discovers a murder. The dead woman's friends and family constitute a very motley and somewhat surprising crew: the widower, who knew of and countenanced the victim's infidelities (or did he?); her lover, an attractive man from out of town. The solution to the mystery comes about through inspiration as improbable as any in a Sherlock Holmes story.

According to the Kent District Library's database, "What's Next?" (kdl.org, from Kent, Michigan), Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano novels in English are as follows:

Inspector Montalbano series
1. The shape of water - CAMILLERI, ANDREA
2. The terra-cotta dog - CAMILLERI, ANDREA
3. The snack thief - CAMILLERI, ANDREA
4. Voice of the violin - CAMILLERI, ANDREA
5. Excursion to Tindari - CAMILLERI, ANDREA
6. The smell of the night - CAMILLERI, ANDREA
7. Rounding the mark - CAMILLERI, ANDREA
8. The patience of the spider - CAMILLERI, ANDREA
9. The paper moon - CAMILLERI, ANDREA
10. August heat - CAMILLERI, ANDREA
11. The wings of the sphinx - CAMILLERI, ANDREA
12. The track of sand - CAMILLERI, ANDREA
13. The potter's field - CAMILLERI, ANDREA

What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell

Some readers were no doubt disappointed in this collection of articles first published in the New Yorker. I feel something close to astonishment by how interesting and entertaining I find some of these pieces, even though I’ve read many of them before.

I love Gladwell for all the reasons that he's been so celebrated: he’s a wonderful storyteller, with a nose for interesting stories that can appeal to a wide variety of people. Most of all, I love his work because, so often, he turns received wisdom on its head (e.g., gut instinct is actually reading facial expressions) or points out that the Emperor is wearing no clothes (job interviews are really about finding that spark of chemistry, a “de-sexualized date,” and are poor predictors of employee performance).

My favorite pieces are:

"True Colors: Hair Dye and The Hidden History of Postwar America?” which takes us into a past in which immigrant women used hair color as part of their assimilation into American culture and the successful selling of that and other products to women as their ticket to success;

“Cesar Milan: The Movements of Mastery,” for its insightful portrait of Milan and most importantly, for what the article contains about the messages we send through our physical movements and how adept dogs are at reading them;

and

“Most Likely to Succeed:

How do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job?” in which Gladwell shows us a little bit of the difference between a good teacher and a bad one, explains why the stakes are so high and then goes on to explain that it’s very hard to predict who will be a good teacher and suggests that young teachers be hired as apprentice/trainees, heavily mentored, and that tenure not be granted automatically. When I first read this article, I was stunned by its audacity but I see now that teacher training is moving in this direction.

Some additional thoughts:

I'm now on a non-fiction reading jag (or, perhaps, a non-fiction listening jag, as I've been listening to Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, Jane's Fame, Drive by Daniel Pink, and Superfreakonomics by Stephen Leavitt and Steven Dubner on compact disc); also a few months ago, I watched the documentary Waiting for Superman.

Some time later, I was asked by someone about the merit of Waiting for Superman, and I said I liked it, and tried to tell this guy something about it -- as I attempted to summarize the movie, I saw that while the movie is a really affecting story, what it was really saying was that the quality of many of our urban schools is just appallingly, unacceptably bad. It occurred to me for the first time that perhaps the filmmaker was saying that the quality of teaching was unacceptably low, and I wondered if I agreed with that.

I have felt in the past that teachers were incorrectly blamed for the poor performance of their students; that the single most important predictor of academic performance is the socioeconomic status of students' parents. After thinking about what Gladwell says about the many factors that contribute to the success of individuals (success isn't all that individual), what Leavitt and Dubner say about changes to the teaching professional since 1960 (as more professional fields have opened to women, teaching has become a less attractive choice at the same time that the wages of teachers, relative to those of other professionals with similar amounts of education, have dropped markedly) have made me realize that while it may be entirely true that the socioeconomic status of parents being the single most accurate predictor of student success is entirely true, that doesn't mean that other factors can't affect the outcome or that they haven't affected outcomes.

Perhaps it is true that the quality of teaching has dropped over the past few decades and that, in those same few decades, middle-class parents have stepped forward to provide enrichment activities on weekends and over the summer.

I do accept Gladwell's premise that some teachers are better than others; I think I wasn't fully convinced that differences in the quality of teaching could make such a difference until I was told that in Depression, a job teaching school was a good job, stable and secure in a horrible economy and as a result, some very bright and very well educated people entered public education and stayed there, not to mention the bright and capable women who remained there in part because there were not many other professional choices. Ultimately, as Gladwell points out in his piece on the difficulties of predicting performance, it's not intelligence, or education, or kindness, or "loving people," as young people used to say in job interviews, that makes a good teacher but some combination of qualities and perhaps good training and supervision. I would love to see a longitudinal study of new teachers. What's the difference between a teacher who lasts only one year, who lasts three years, and another who lasts ten years? What causes a teacher who lasts for ten years to leave the profession? I'd love to know.

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: the last career guide you’ll ever need by Daniel H. Pink and with art by Rob Ten Pas.

This is a manga-inspired graphic novel that is shelved with the career guides, and quite rightly - it's a useful book. I love it.

What I love about is its accessibility. It’s non-threatening, non-challenging, highly entertaining and has some real, but easy-to-understand wisdom to convey.

Johnny Bunko is what I think of as a low-level functionary. He’s so much like me at a younger age. He’s miserable in his job and his status at the bottom of the totem pole isn’t helping.

Saddled with another assignment that will mean another all-nighter for him, he says, “I can’t believe I have to re-check the numbers on every one of these statements .. what am I doing here? I’m bored .. I’m uninspired .. I feel like I’m wasting my life .. there has to be a better way!” (Is this beginning to sound like an info-mercial?)

He snaps open his chopsticks to begin eating his take-out sushi, a supernatural creature appears, floating in the air.

She says her name is Diana, and she’s a cross between Pippi Longstocking and Ariel. She’s got some news for Johnny: “The problem is, when it comes to work, you’re as clueless as a cucumber.” She tells Johnny she will appear each time he snaps open one of the six pairs of chopsticks he picked up at the sushi place down the street; each time she visits him, she’ll teach him one career lesson. Along the way, she offers him some advice that will help him in the here and now; part of the fun of the story is that, with Diana’s help, Johnny does get a plum (but tough) assignment: that’s how he learns about making excellent mistakes.

Lesson one: There is no plan.

Life is too complicated for that; things change, sometimes very rapidly.

While there is no plan, you still need to make smart career choices. You can choose to do something for instrumental reasons, because you hope it will lead to something else; or, you can do something for fundamental reasons, because you enjoy it or finding it fundamentally valuable. These folks usually make decisions that work better for them.

This naturally leads to lesson two:

2. Think strengths, not weaknesses.

Instead of trying to make yourself into something you’re not, make career choices that play to your strengths.

3. It’s not about you.

To be successful, you have to serve your client. Well. As an employee, your client is your boss. Make her (or him) look good. Help your teammates to succeed.

4. Persistence trumps talent.

(Boy, was I relieved when I read that one.) Or, as Woody Allen put it, “Eighty percent of success in life is just showing up.” (At least I understand that one: I’ve never understood “Hope is the thing with feathers” but I believe it’s true.)

5. Make excellent mistakes.

We all make mistakes. But some people are so afraid of making mistakes that they allow their fear and insecurity to prevent them from expressing themselves, using their creativity to solve problems, and, frankly, living.

Diana asks Johnny to look up his last name in the dictionary. Bunko is a verb and its definition is “make a mistake from which the benefits of what you’ve learned exceed the costs of the screw-up.”

6. Leave an imprint.

Diana again: “Truly successful people deploy them (the other career lessons) in the service of something larger than themselves.”

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

I am raving about this book, primarily because it combines originality with great writing skill and sharply drawn characters -- and because I picked it up to divert myself for five minutes only to put it down again after I'd read the whole book four hours later (with tears rolling down my cheeks because I was very moved by the love of Oliver Ott for his dog). To me, this book has it all - brevity, great style, great characters - and, it's set in Rome!

A group of colorful characters put out an American-language newspaper in Rome. The book deals with each character in turn, giving each one their own chapter. You don't realize that you're interested in a character until you've read their chapter, after which you feel you could not do without it.

Two folks have told me that their favorite character was the Italian woman who is the paper's most passionate reader. Reading the paper is, for her, an elaborate and carefully observed ritual. She alone gives the paper the respect it really deserves.

Women do not come off well in this novel. (I know the author will do a better job, next time.) I felt entirely rewarded for my devotion by Oliver Ott's devotion to his Schopenhauer.

SPOILER ALERT: If you love dogs, even other people's dogs, you might prefer to skip the second half of the chapter about Oliver Ott.

The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbo

I was interested in this novel because a librarian I know is promoting Nesbo as the author to read after you've read the Millenium trilogy by Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.).

Nesbo's mysteries (in addition to working as a musician, he writes a children's series) are a series featuring a police detective with possibly the best name ever: Harry Hole.

The Harry Hole series is: The Redbreast, Nemesis, The Devil's Star, The Redeemer, and The Snowman. I think there are two earlier novels, Bat Man and Cockroaches, that have not yet been translated into English. (Bat Man is available in German as Der Fledermausmann.) Usually, I feel that it's important to read the first work in a series, if only because there's so much exposition about the character and the character's background that you miss if you pick up a book later in the series. In this case, I started in the middle, and it may have affected how I perceive the novel.

Harry Hole is a very sympathetic, if troubled, character. He's described as an alcoholic and unstable by his police colleagues. When the first in what turns out to be a series of killings takes place, Harry's commander is chagrined when he discovers that, because everyone else is out on vacation except for his star detective, Tom Waaler, he'll have to call on Harry even though Harry's been out on "vacation" that his boss is pretty sure is one long, long bender.

Like so many detectives, Harry is haunted. He's haunted by the loss of his mother and his sister and by the death of a female colleague, and these feelings are reawakened by the stress he feels as a result of his breakup with Rakel.

Harry has been a drinker for a long time, however. He knows where all the bars in town are; one of his favorites has the delightful name of Underwater.

Besides trying to solve the murder, trying to get Rakel back (harder for Harry because wooing isn't really on his radar), and coping with his night terror, Harry's got another major problem: his colleague, Tom Waaler, is someone he suspects of involvement in the death of his colleague and now he has to work closely with him. If he wants to keep his job. Being a detective is pretty important to Harry Hole, but he's not sure if it worth the price if working with Tom Waaler is part of that price.

The geography of Oslo, and its history, turns out to be important factors in the story. As is so frequently the case, there's a Nazi in the story although his role is not a large one. If you're put off by foreign names, foreign words and foreign place names, especially, this is not the novel for you. If you're game, however, or know Oslo, you'll enjoy the map provided.

Usually, police procedurals do not interest me very much but I will say that Harry's attempts to put together the minimal clues at his disposal not only were creative but really engaged my interest.

I appreciate mysteries very often for their setting and description and The Devil's Star kept my interest by including some interesting facts about pentagrams, diamonds, and the history of building techniques in Oslo.