However, I bought A Dark-Adapted Eye at the book sale last year, in the faint hope that Barbara Vine would pull through after all, and then, because the hope was quite faint, I ignored the book I had bought for a year and a half. Until…what? Can you guess? Can you guess the point at which all this changed?

THAT IS RIGHT. UNTIL I INSTITUTED MY TBR SHELF.

I just cannot overstate how thrilled I am with the TBR shelf. I have read so many books from it. It’s bizarre! These are all books I owned and was interested in reading, and yet somehow having them out in general population never caused me to read them. Isolate them on their own shelf, and I’m tearing through them like nobody’s business. I’m making a speed sound effect right now, vvvvvvwwwww, to illustrate how speedily I’ve been reading my TBR books since instituting my TBR shelf.

I know. This is riveting. It would be impossible for anybody to get sick of hearing about my TBR shelf and its extraordinary efficacy. But this alleges to be a book blog, not a TBR shelf blog, so okay. I will talk about the book. I know y’all will find it boring, but don’t worry, I’m sure I will mention the TBR shelf again soon.

A Dark-Adapted Eye is about a woman called Faith who is contacted by a writer, Daniel Stewart, who wants to write a book about her long-dead aunts, Vera Hillyard and Eden Pearmain, the subjects of a pretty scandalous murder case in their time. Uncertain of whether she should help, Faith nevertheless begins to explore her own memory, and that of her surviving family members, to get to the bottom of what happened many years ago between Vera and Eden.

How greatly I enjoyed this book! I am revising my opinion of Barbara Vine back upward to get-from-library-author, though I still have no very good opinion of Ruth Rendell. For one thing, the book starts by telling the end and leaves a number of things about the middle ambiguous. It sets up little mini-mysteries and solves them or else keeps setting the stage to solving them. And then at the very end, when you think everything has been explained, it tosses in one of those last-minute things to remind you that you are not as smart as you think you are. Thus rendering the ending of the book all ambiguous. An ambiguous ending is glorious, glorious.

In addition to the pleasing structure of this book, it was very pleasingly written. When I was reading, I was aware of the mechanical pleasure of reading it. The language was lovely. The book was delicately, elegantly structured, doling out its revelations as if the reader already knew them and was just waiting to be reminded.

Other reviews:

Books and Cooks
My Love Affair with Books
BooksPlease

Tell me if I missed yours! Or if you are dying to hear more about my TBR shelf and how useful it is in making me read books I own and want to read.

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I shouldn’t get my hopes up. I should be very calm and relaxed. I shall probably go to the library tomorrow, get sixteen of Ruth Rendell’s books, and find I don’t like a single other one of them.

I liked Anna’s Book.  I read it because I keep hearing everyone going on about Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine.  So the last time I was at the library I went to the Barbara Vine section, as I like that name better, and got Anna’s Book because my sister is called Anna.  And it was quite good.  A most satisfying mystery.  I read the end but didn’t catch exactly everything, and I felt clever about noticing that Hansine was on her period.  That’s right.  I can recognize old-timey euphemisms for menstruation.

Anna’s Book is about a woman called Anna (Asta actually, but they changed it for some reason when the book came to the U.S.) who came to England as a Danish immigrant before the first World War, and she kept diaries.  And ages and ages later her diaries got really famous and published, and a mean person wrote a letter to Anna’s oldest daughter, Swanny, to tell her that Swanny was not really Anna’s daughter.  And the book goes back and forth, with excerpts from the diaries and bits about what Swanny did, and bits about what Swanny’s niece Ann did to find out what was what.  Very much with the good structure.

I like these nice tidy mysteries.  Not just because I like to have things squared away neatly, but also because books are fun when they have intricate plots that come together well.  Holes was really good about this, and so was Special Topics in Calamity Physics.  And I liked them both.  And, actually, The Chosen, which was a totally different kind of book.

I finished up Anna’s Book and I looked up Ruth Rendell on the internet and do you know how many novels she’s written, DO YOU KNOW?

You probably don’t know.  I will tell you.

FIFTY-SIX.

And I’ve only read one of them.  Oh, and also, she’s written another one that will be released in November, and another one again (called The BIrthday Present) that’s getting released in March of next year.  That one, The Birthday Present, will be her fifty-eighth book.  This almost shows that it was meant for her to be my next big thing, because my birthday is May 7th (five seven), and the book’s called The Birthday Present.

Actually, she’s British.  So it works out perfectly.  In Britain my birthday is May 8th.  I was born quite late at night on the 7th of May, in America, which means rather early in the morning on the 8th of May, in Britain.  Voila.  The Birthday Present and its number are Signs.  I shall check out and read loads of her other books and it will be exactly like when we went camping and I read all of Elizabeth Peters’ books for the first time.  And I need that kind of cheering-up because my big sister just moved away.

(I’ve gotten a lot of play out of this May 7th-May 8th America-Britain thing.  My mum thought of it when I was away in England.  It is also the means by which I claim that my confirmation name saint has her feast day on my birthday, because she’s British.  Though in fact that doesn’t work at all, because I’m Catholic, and her Catholic feast day is May 13th, not May 8th.  But whatever.  It’s close enough for government work.)

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