Recent reads (in brief)

If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him, The Ballad of Frankie Silver, and The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, by Sharyn McCrumb.

An enjoyable trio of mysteries set in the rural, isolated Appalachians. I find myself more interested in the setting than in the characters or plots in these books. The isolated rural hill country of Appalachia is similar enough to the Ozarks that I can mentally conflate the two and feel some kind of personal connection. The snippets of old ballads and so forth that McCrumb includes also help.

On Beauty, by Zadie Smith.

This book was recommended to me by a family member. I enjoyed it, but I don't think it's likely to stick in my mind the way that some other books do. Is the reader actually supposed to like Howard Belsey? As nearly as I could tell he's simply an obnoxious, self-centered academic bore -- the kind of person I hope that I am not. His wife and children, and the rival academic with whom he squabbles throughout the course of the novel are moderately interesting, but still not people that I would have any particular desire to meet or know. What stick in my mind are a few minor, enjoyable vignettes, such as the younger son's comically useless effort to start a labor movement at his part-time retail job, and the poetry slam that the daughter's writing class attends.