Building on the brand awareness of the Printers Row Lit Fest (which is fun, I admit, a literary extravaganza of authors, publishers, bookstores and readers), the Trib has launched the Printers Row Journal, a “weekly collection of smart and accessible literary reviews, fiction, author interviews and commentary” paired with some live and online events.  The print version comes out weekly and will be delivered with my Sunday Tribune.

Of course I subscribed. I’m a book nut, an early adopter, and have enough income that 99 bucks is no big deal.  (It’s only $99 since we subscribe to the newspaper, it’s $149 for anybody who doesn’t.)

In one way, it’s an awesome opportunity – a weekly print publication all about books, with a bit of a Chicago slant.  The Printers Row brand is a positive connection.  I like the publishing perspective, the columnists and the reviews.  AND it includes original short fiction – so few places to get that these days, and maybe I could even get a story published.  (A gal can dream).  So, good.

But looking at it another way, the publishers have carved out the people who care about books and are socking it to them, big-time.  It’s the splinter-ization of publishing.  Imagine if the Trib covered sports a little bit in the paper, but you had to pay more to get the Sunday sports section!  Movies.  Opinion pages.  The triumvirate of Tribune advice columnists (don’t you take my Dear Amy).  Or heaven forfend, the funnies!   So maybe I, and my ilk, are making it easier to marginalize readers.  We’re a buncha chumps.

Still, I ponied up.  The paper pinky-swears that it is NOT cutting coverage in the regular Tribune.  This is all add-on content.  And since Elizabeth Taylor, Chris Jones, Rick Kogan, and my personal fave, Julia Keller are all contributing, I just hope they are all being given a big salary bump or are being paid by the piece for the new endeavor.

You can learn more about the offer here.  The preview issue is available for your perusal online and it includes an article by my neighbor Elizabeth Berg, a piece featuring Sara Paretsky, an article about Nicole Hollander of Sylvia fame, reviews, and some original fiction.   In trying to get used to the navigation system, I find myself grateful that it’s not online-only.  There’s lots of add-ons to make participation more engaging, and the Tribune seems a little confused about whether this is publishing venture or a membership community – the sizzle is about the community, but when it comes time to sell the steak, it’s all about the publication.

One note of amusement:  the preview edition of the Printers Row Journal includes a link to Olive, the software platform on which the publication is delivered.  Unfortunately, the home page sales pitch for Olive says “turn your old news into new revenue,” which kind of undercuts the Trib‘s preferred brand position. Of course, I immediately began to think of the myriad of ways that my own employer could use Olive to good advantage… which is good for Olive, but I can’t see the benefit for the Tribune.

I read the book, which is presented through a series of letters from Eva (Kevin’s mom) to Franklin (Kevin’s dad), with a growing feeling of dread.   Kevin’s abnormal behavior started young; if Eva is to be believed, at birth.  Genial Franklin is clueless and is much more likely to blame his wife, the neighbors, the teachers, other students at Kevin’s school, in fact, anyone at all rather than face reality.

With the arrival of baby #2, I was literally biting the skin off around my fingernails to relieve the tension.

Then Kevin takes up archery.  OMG.  How can this be a good idea?  Someone stop this train wreck!

I cannot begin to recount the aberrant behavior, Eva’s hand-wringing and worry, Franklin’s suspicions of his wife and is misplaced bonhomie towards his role-playing son.   Even more disturbing is the cat-and-mouse game that Kevin and Eva play.  Usually Kevin’s the cat, but not always.

It all leads to what you anticipate… and yet, it is so much worse than you expect.  That’s all I’ll say.  Very much worse.

Of course, Kevin goes to jail.  And Eva visits him there.  For she does not know – was Kevin born this way?  Or did she make him this way because she did not love him?  On the final page, Eva recounts -

“This is all I know.  That on the 11th of April, 1983, unto me a son was born, and I felt nothing.  Once again, the truth is always larger than what we make of it.  As that infant squirmed on my breast, from which he shrank in such distaste, I spurned him in return- he may have been a fifteenth my size, but it seemed fair at the time.  Since that moment we have fought one another with an unrelenting ferocity that I can almost admire.”

The film is getting 80% good reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and similar ratings on IMDB.com.   Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune gave it just two stars, summing it up as “The Bad Seed and How!”  Creepy, disturbing, and soulless are just some of the adjectives that are being applied to the movie.   Powerful, harrowing, magnetic are some of the adjectives applied to the book.

So here are my thoughts:  I don’t plan to see the movie.  I won’t recommend the book to my husband, who has limited patience for evil.  You might like it, though. It may have been painful to read, but it was fascinating.  Lionel Shriver has six previous novels and I’ll definitely be checking them out.

I am eager to begin my reading, rating and ranking.  This year, I have it on good authority that my reading and writing buddy Addy is going to do so, also.  You can find her here.

Here are the books I’ll be reading:

For Best Novel:

1. The Ranger by Ace Atkins (Penguin Group USA – G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
2. Gone by Mo Hayder (Grove/Atlantic – Atlantic Monthly Press)
3. The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino (Minotaur Books)
4. 1222 by Anne Holt (Simon & Schuster – Scribner)
5. Field Gray by Philip Kerr (Penguin Group USA – G.P. Putnam’s Sons – Marion Wood Books)

And for Best First Novel by an American Author:

1. Red on Red by Edward Conlon (Random House Publishing Group – Spiegel & Grau)
2. Last to Fold by David Duffy (Thomas Dunne Books)
3. All Cry Chaos by Leonard Rosen (The Permanent Press)
4. Bent Road by Lori Roy (Penguin Group USA – Dutton)
5. Purgatory Chasm by Steve Ulfelder (Minotaur Books – Thomas Dunne Books)

I am also giving serious thought to trying to dig up all the nominees for best short story.  I love short stories, love to read them, love to write them, am only mildly annoyed by the formulaic ones and am rarely struck speechless by the truly awesome.  You will note that half were published in either Hitchcock or Queen – I am somewhat embarrassed to admit I let my subscription lapse, but I got annoyed by the number of clever, tricky, historical, or otherwise uninspiring stories published.  Perhaps I’ll resubscribe.

1. “Marley’s Revolution” - Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine by John C. Boland (Dell Magazines)
2. “Tomorrow’s Dead” - Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine by David Dean (Dell Magazines)
3. “The Adakian Eagle” - Down These Strange Streets by Bradley Denton (Penguin Group USA – Ace Books)
4. “Lord John and the Plague of Zombies” - Down These Strange Streets by Diana Gabaldon (Penguin Group USA – Ace Books)
5. “The Case of Death and Honey” - A Study in Sherlock by Neil Gaiman (Random House Publishing Group – Bantam Books)
6. “The Man Who Took His Hat Off to the Driver of the Train” - Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine by Peter Turnbull (Dell Magazines)

This will be my third year blogging about the Edgars – you can see how I did in 2010 here and in 2011 here.  Superstitiously, I am determined to read them all in hard copy, not Kindle or iPad2 or iPhone or Nook… since I can only blame my Kindle for my performance in 2011.

It’s no news to anybody that Kinsey lives in an alternate universe, where the earth takes quite a bit longer to circle the sun than it does in ours.  Kinsey started out  in 1982 investigating the death of a divorce lawyer.  She was 32 then, cutting her hair with her nail scissors and living in jeans and sneakers.   Me?  I was 27.  As I recall, my hair was naturally golden, I had a truly terrible perm, and I was still trying to lose the weight from my first baby.  Kinsey was a full five years older then I was.

Flash forward to today. I sat down to read V is for Vengeance, the 22nd book in the series.  It is 2012 and I am (gulp) 57.  The hair?  Silver, not gold.  Still trying to lose the baby weight, though.  The baby’s 30.

Kinsey?  She’s 38.  Damn her.  She’s still wearing that all-purpose black polyester dress that only requires a shake to render it wrinkle-free.  She’s personally without wrinkles, as well, although she does get more than her fair share of black eyes and bruises – this outing, even a broken nose.  Of course, in the Grafton Universe, it’s only 1988.  Time goes very, very slowly there.  No cell phones.  No personal computers.  No Google.  Kinsey’s still looking things up in the reverse directory and knocking on doors.

The book is a good read, of course.  That goes without saying.  A little darker than usual, in my opinion.  Starts with a bit of a prologue – college kid thinks he’s a big-shot gambler, runs up a tab he can’t pay, and goons throw him off a roof.  Awk.  Who are these people?  You won’t really know everything you need to know for a couple of hundred pages.

In the meantime, Kinsey spies a shoplifter, ends up getting hired by the mysterious shoplifter’s heartbroken fiance after she supposedly commits suicide, picks around until she uncovers a bigger, more impactful crime.  In a separate plot thread, a mobster tries to deal with his big lunk of a stupidhead brother and falls in love with the lovely but sad wife of a cheating husband who owes him money.

Confused?  You won’t be.  Grafton keeps it all straight, you’ll follow her through all the twists and turns and there’s a surprise you don’t expect at the end.  It’s funny, with funny characters, but not over the top.   Definite thumbs up.

I don’t know what Sue Grafton will do when she gets to Z.  Start over with AA (bra size?  batteries?).  Or perhaps start in Greek:  Alpha is for Arrivederci  could be a multilingual hit.  She could start at 1; then again, Janet Evanovich might have that tied up.  In interviews and on her website, she declines to speculate.

You just paste in the copy from your blog, or link to your blog feed, and it gives you a nifty piece of art. Here’s the wordle for yesterday’s post (a wrap-up of reviews).

And I did another one, for my 12-27 reviews (relatively recent, random!)

You can play around with the shape, the font, and the color. Here’s my final one, for the review of Elizabeth Berg’s Once Upon a Time.

It’s kinda fun.  Check it out here.

1.  Two books by William Landay – Mission Flats and The Strangler – get a “worth reading” thumbs up from me.  I reviewed his Defending Jacob here.  (Loved it.)  Both previous books are crime fiction.  Mission Flats features a long-ago crime, a dead DA, and complex protagonist Ben Truman.  The Strangler focuses on the three Daley brothers – one a prosecutor, one a crooked cop, and one a burglar.  Add a serial killer, and this family drama turns especially dark.

2.  Reed Farrel Coleman’s Hurt Machine.  I loved Reed at Bouchercon – he was on a couple of panels and I found him to be rollicking and funny.  His new PI Moe Prager mystery was available at the OPPL so I snagged it.  Gotta say – not my fave.  Moe’s facing cancer and gets roped into trying to solve a mystery on behalf of his ex-wife.  It’s getting good reviews elsewhere, though, so take my lack of enthusiasm with a grain of salt.   Perhaps I need to start at book #1, not #7?

3.  Michael Harvey‘s We All Fall Down.  I love Michael Harvey’s main character, Michael Kelly, and especially liked the personal side of his stories in The Chicago Way and The Fifth Floor.   The new book features Kelly, too, but casts him in a story of bioterrorism.  A bit of a jolt… kind of like when Linwood Barclay moved from funny mysteries (such as Bad Move) to thrillers.  Again, not a fave, but well-written as always.

4.  So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman.  OMG.  If you prefer mysteries that march through the plot in a linear fashion, revealing a couple of clues per chapter until the protagonist is triumphant in the final scene, this book will drive you nuts.   Hoffman takes a small-town story with a not-so-unusual mystery – the disappearance of a pretty waitress – and weaves it into a mesmerizing tale of horror and revenge as a form of civil disobedience.   At one point, you’re pretty sure that something bad is going to happen to somebody you like… and the suspense is killing you.  The characters are compelling.  Clear your weekend, because you won’t want to put it down.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 9,400 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

I must admit, I have been amazed at the number of visits my blog has generated, and also taken a bit aback by how many visits Harry Potter is responsible for.   It is nice to see, however, that there are other pages that are also popular.   Most disappointing is the fact that I don’t get many comments – in fact, with 181 blog posts, I have only 148 comments.  I wrote about the lonely life of a blogger here back in 2010.  A lot of bloggers do giveaways to get comments… not ready to go there, seems a little desperate.

I know that book lovers account for lot of Literary Lunchbox drop-ins, especially mystery fans.  Edgar frenzy continues to account for many, many visits in the weeks between the nominee announcements in January and the Edgar ceremony in April – and I must admit, it’s a fun time for me.  2010 was a time of triumph, 2011 abject humiliation – who knows what 2012 will hold?

Facebook, Linked In, She Writes all account for a goodly number of visits – friends, colleagues, other writers follow the link to my blog when I have a new post.  I have several subscribers (Thank you!  Love you!).  But Google is the biggest source, which tells me that when people are out there looking for book reviews, they find me.  Or if they want to read about writing, they find me.  That’s cool.

The End of the Wasp Season by Denise Mina:  Mina’s a Scottish crime writer with a psychological bent.  I love her series about journalist Paddy Meehan, which are a thick stew of family ties, misguided loyalty, and criminal undertaking.  The End of the Wasp Season features Detective Inspector Alex Morrow in a twisty tale of crime and family tragedy.  You see it all coming, but are fascinated anyway.   Well worth reading.

Headhunters by Jo Nesbo:  I liked Nesbo’s Harry Hole series and reviewed Nemesis here.  Alas, I cannot say the same for Headhunters.  Meant to be darkly humorous, I found it to be an unpleasant story of a criminal who works as a highly successful executive recruiter by day and rips off his clients by night.  He’s shocked to realize that the latest executive he’s recruiting is his wife’s lover.  I bailed on the book when he’s being chased by even worse bad guys than he is, hides in an outhouse, and is shat upon by his wife’s lover.   Farvel, Jo.

A Death in Summer by Benjamin Black:  This was on Julia Keller’s top books of 2011 , and reading her write-up reminded me how much I enjoyed his previous work featuring Quirke and Hackett, Elegy for April.  Once again, the writing is keen and lovely, the characters well-drawn, and the relationships are interesting.  The only down side for me was the cliche upon which the plot turned – evil, self-centered  rich man has a charity involving small children in orphanages.  How surprising is it that perversity is at the heart of his murder?  Still, it was a quick, engrossing read.

Bone by Bone by Carol O’Connell:  I mentioned in this blog post that I chatted with a fellow reader on the el – she was reading Bone by Bone as we sat side by side, and I had The Chalk Girl in my backpack.   Upon further reflection, I realized that I had missed this standalone mystery and got it from the library.  Bone by Bone has a lot in common with    O’Connell’s series featuring Kathy Mallory, the former feral child cum detective savant:  quirky characters and a mystery rooted in the past.   Despite its somewhat convoluted plot, Bone by Bone is ultimately a more linear book than the Mallory books.  I’d give this one a middling thumbs up.

I picked up Once Upon a Time, There was You at the Book Table, my local independent bookstore.  As always with Berg, the book is beautifully written and in many ways, a pleasure to read.  It features interesting characters:  Long-divorced Irene and John, their 18-year-old daughter Sadie, her boyfriend Ron, and several other smaller characters, including a younger man with a thing for older women, especially Irene.

I laughed out loud in the scene where Irene talks her friend Valerie into taking off her clothes in a kind of 50-ish ladies version of “you show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”   That it happened in Irene’s kitchen – and that Sadie, of course, walks in on the duo – made it even funnier.

Other events in the book are not as funny.  The key plot device in the book is that Sadie, waiting for her perennially late boyfriend, gets into a car with a good-looking, friendly stranger, and ends up being menaced with a box cutter and locked in a shed.  The scary guy leaves her there, promising to return with a friend that Sadie is expected to be “very nice” to.

The scene where Sadie gets in the car is well-written, well-paced, and genuinely scary.   But Berg pulls her punches, figuring (I imagine) that her readership wouldn’t put up with rape, violence or murder – kidnapping and threats are scary enough.  The near-tragedy works fine to prod the various characters into action:  Irene and John flirt tentatively with revisiting their long-gone romance before John makes a mental commitment to his new love; Sadie marries her boyfriend Ron, who has his own reasons for making this commitment, and Irene steps up in her work life but keeps mostly intact her push-pull relationship with the opposite sex.

And maybe Berg is right to pull back.  I don’t know how much she thought about where to draw the line.  But I found the crime aspect of the story implausible -violently scary abduction, subsequent imprisonment, vague threats and abandonment, followed by miraculous rescue – and the obsessive focus on Sadie’s subsequent marriage irritating.

I suspect that Berg just couldn’t bring herself to rape Sadie, or beat her, or cut her with that box cutter, even though it would both be more credible and deepen the emotional impact of the story.   But what a story that would be, to have Irene, with her slightly saggy, petechiae-spotted skin, bantering caterer boss, long-time best friend, unresolved distrust of men (even the lovely younger guy!) yanked from her own small world of worries into one where bad stuff really does happen.  Where a daughter’s crisis isn’t a near-miss, but a tragedy, and the ensuing action isn’t fodder for your pre-existing obsessions about marriage but instead a real change in your world – a 180 degree change.

Berg’s strength isn’t plots, it’s people.  Her prose is lyrical and the small moments in the book can be fresh and very lovely.  She could have stayed in her sweet spot by using a different plot device to bring John and Irene together in Once Upon a Time, There Was You, skipping the kidnapping entirely.  Or she could have gone with the darker side and made a different book, that built on her strengths while deepening the psychological insights and emotional impact.  I would have really liked to read that book.

That’s why it was great to see that today’s Chicago Tribune includes a wrap-up by literary mavens Julia Keller and Elizabeth Taylor of the year’s “best reads.”  Twenty books – fiction, nonfiction, and even one graphic novel – to move the top of my reading list.

Not quite 20, though.  I had already added Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Marriage Plot to my list.  In fact, my husband is reading it now and I am anxiously pacing to get my mitts on it.

And I had already read, loved, and blogged here about Mo Hayder’s Gone.  So count my enthusiastic thumbs up on this novel, as another endorsement.

Both Keller and Taylor selected Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hedrickson for inclusion on their “recommended” lists, so although it’s nonfiction and I’m more of a fiction gal, I’ll probably head in that direction soon.  And Keller’s pick of A Death in Summer by Benjamin Black – and her description of it as a “gloomy and hypnotic mystery” is intriguing.  I read another Black book in 2010 and found it confusing at the end – you can read that blog post here – so a recommendation by Keller is encouraging me to try again.

Check out the full listing in the Tribune (go ahead!  Buy a copy if you don’t get it delivered!) or click here to see the article online.  For those of you who are still floundering for Christmas gifts, it’s way better than wandering, unmoored and confused, through Barnes and Noble.