The mood for fall reading is dark and mysterious. If there is humour, it should be black.

CASE HISTORIES and HUMAN CROQUET — Kate Atkinson

I am a great fan of Kate Atkinson. Her first novel, “Behind the Scenes at the British Museum,” made a profound impression on me. I love her wit, her way with words, her startling imagery, and her odd characters, who always, at least in part, remind me of someone I’ve observed.

I am working my way through the rest of her books: lately “Case Histories,” a mystery, and “Human Croquet,” her second novel.

Atkinson’s books absolutely require a second reading. They are so full of complex detail that I can’t imagine anyone not having to go back and reread to pick up pieces they didn’t fully “get” the first time around — and this is not just for her three mysteries, but for her novels as well. I am sure she must draw an enormous diagram, all links and arrows, on the wall when beginning a book.

In “Case Histories,” naturally enough, there are three case histories brought to Jackson Brodie’s attention. (Brodie is a former police officer turned private detective. ) Some of the links between cases are obvious to the reader: others aren’t. Even Brodie isn’t fully informed, as some of the characters have lives (and chapters) entirely their own. The majority of the puzzle gets satisfyingly filled in by the end, though some things are left ambiguous. But the joy of “Case Histories” is in the prose as much as in the plot: wildly imagined, bizarre and convoluted, effortlessly flowing:

Amelia envisaged that between York and the royal-infested Scottish Highlands there was a grimy wasteland of derelict cranes and abandoned mills and betrayed, yet still staunch, people. Oh and moorland, of course, vast tracts of brooding landscape under lowering skies, and across this heath strode brooding, lowering men intent on reaching their ancestral houses, where they were going to fling open doors and castigate orphaned, yet resolute, governesses.

Reading Atkinson, you can imagine having drinks with a funny, brilliant friend who is relating a story in her typical manic style, with many parenthetical asides, each with enough material for another story.

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“Human Croquet” starts out weirdly and becomes weirder as the book progresses. It begins at the beginning of the world. The passing of aeons is dealt with rapidly and then, in Shakespearean times, we hear the story of a family, a house and a tree.

Next, we are in the same area in the 1960s, in the teenage life of Isobel Fairfax. Isobel’s life has been turned upside down by mysterious losses: the permanent loss of her mother and the temporary loss of her father, so her life is full of the unexplained and — perhaps as a result — she has a powerful imagination. However, things are about to get more odd still as Isobel starts to move in and out of alternate realities. Her world feels strange and dreamlike:

I pull out a deck-chair and join him in the twilight garden. The rooks are coming home late, hurtling on their rag wings toward the Lady Oak, racing the night, caw-caw-caw. Maybe they’re afraid of being transformed into something else if they don’t get back to the tree in time, before the sun dips below the horizon that saucers blackly beyond the tree. Perhaps they’re frightened of shifting into human shape.

I couldn’t put it down. There are questions left unanswered at the end: it’s up to the reader to choose which of many paths is the likeliest one to explain Isobel’s experiences..

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THE THREE INCESTUOUS SISTERS — Audrey Niffenegger

I saw Audrey Niffenegger at this year’s Vancouver Writers’ Festival. I’d read her first novel, “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” but I wasn’t prepared for her dramatic presence and the discovery that in addition to being a writer she is an artist and a creator of handmade books. She showed some images from her visual novel The Three Incestuous Sisters and I was immediately hooked by her dark imagination.

The text is minimal and you have to see the images (all aquatints) to follow the story. Audrey Niffenegger says:

When I try to explain The Three Incestuous Sisters to someone who hasn’t seen it, I tell them to imagine a silent film made from Japanese prints, a melodrama of sibling rivalry, a silent opera that features women with very long hair and a flying green boy. I never try to explain what it means; you can find that out for yourself.

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NO GREAT MISCHIEF — Alistair MacLeod

I had great expectations of this book. MacLeod is a highly respected, prize-winning (Impac) author who writes about history, family and community. “No Great Mischief” follows the family of the Clann Calum Ruagh through their childhood in Cape Breton and their adult lives working as miners on Ontario, with flashbacks to earlier times and some parts of the story set in the present day.

Although I was expecting to enjoy this book, somehow I just didn’t. The repetition that others have found poetic, I found just repetitive; the italicized Gaelic phrases on every page stopped the flow of my reading. I could see the beauty of the writing and the poignancy of the story, but dispassionately and at a distance. I found the history passages intrusive and the whole thing was too slow for my mood. In my book club, we were evenly split, with half of us absolutely loving the book (“poetic,” “elegiac,” “full of contrasts”) and the rest finding it mildly to exceedingly annoying.

Maybe one day I will try it again, and this time I will know what frame of mind I should be in to get the most out of it.

I am subscribed to an email newsletter from the fashion-and-beauty magazine LouLou (no idea how I got signed up; perhaps a friend thought I needed some help).

I occasionally look at the newsletters, but usually find the fashion advice incomprehensible and the “looks” recommended mystifying, so I view them as more for amusement value than useful information.

Here is an example: the answer to the question I know you are asking yourselves: How do I wear harem pants to my holiday party without emphasizing my bust?

It’s fortunate that the answer (to this and other burning questions) is there, complete with shopping details.

The answer is basically “Wear a simple top [now why didn't I think of that?] and [of course] a pair of killer heels to elongate your silhouette.”

Caffè Artigiano, with multiple locations in the Lower Mainland, has a wonderfully well thought-out design. It’s elegant, welcoming, and stylish and it carries through all aspects of their interior and exterior. I love these outside signs:

and everything else is in harmony: the colours, the furniture, the lighting, and the rest of the signage. Imagine my horror last week when I drove past the one on Hastings Street in Burnaby and saw this abomination over the entrance:

I slammed on the brakes and came close to having an accident. Some would see this as overreacting to a change of typeface, but, while I have nothing against Helvetica — an excellent typeface with many appropriate uses — you can probably see how the stark, blocky, white on black sign when I was expecting the usual Renaissance red and gold and sensual curves was a bit of a shock.

I suffered every day for a week, wondering what was going on. Under new management, maybe? But why would they mess with a good thing?

The story ends happily: it appears it was a temporary aberration. The day before Hallowe’en, new illuminated signs went up. My design sensitivities are soothed.

My bone density, as measured from this heel, is in the green range! That means I currently do not have osteoporosis, which is good news for a woman of a certain age like myself.

A friend told me about the BC Generations project. Over four years, the project aims to collect information and biospecimens (sounds exciting, but it just means blood and urine samples) from 40,000 people in British Columbia.

The idea is to collect data that will help researchers understand how genetics, lifestyle,  and environment contribute to diseases like cancer. Well, why not? I thought. It may help my children and their children. It may help people I’m not related to. I made an appointment.

I went to the Gordon Leslie Diamond Centre on Laurel at 12th Avenue, a bright, two-year-old building. These things are important to me: I find it depressing to attend medical appointments in dingy old buildings. Okay, perhaps it’s a shallow attitude, but it makes a difference when attendance is optional.

Staff were friendly and professional. The computer program being used was fast and well-designed. You answer questions about your and your family’s medical history, and questions about food intake, caffeine and alcohol habits, etc. You get to take home the measurements done at your appointment (lung function, body mass index, waist measurement, bone density, etc.), with a guide showing the healthy range.

When you go through the permission form, you find out that the study will be keeping records on participants for the next 25 years. It’s a little sobering to wonder what my record will show in 25 years’ time.

I consoled myself for those thoughts with a delicious grilled tomato and bocconcini panino from the café on the main floor (one serving of vegetables, one serving of dairy products, two servings of grain products (not whole-grain, though).

I love this video. I love the music, the lyrics, the light, the way the singer sways gently and lovingly with his guitar, and the fifties Mediterranean wedding scene.

I first heard the tantalizingly different Paolo Nutini on the radio, singing High Hopes. I couldn’t imagine what he would look like: there was a warble in his voice that made me think he might be old; the accent was hard to pin down; the song started with a hint of Amazing Grace, and continued as a sort of reggae ballad.

When you first see him, it’s hard to reconcile his sound with his appearance and his appearance with his name (his father, as you might guess, is of Italian descent but the family has lived in Scotland for generations).

Paolo Nutini is 22. He is from Paisley, near Glasgow. His voice is odd, really: that warble and a croakiness, but it works. After listening to Nutini singing Candy a few times, it seems like all aspects of him meld perfectly into a distinctive whole. And he seems to throw himself, heart and soul, into making music without worrying too much about crafting a consistent image.

He’s a talented songwriter who performs a lot of his own material, with influences from folk to blues to ballads to ragtime. His recent album, Sunny Side Up, defines the word eclectic.

Now that the Google car has been to our neighbourhood, we can — almost — see our house on Google Street View. For some reason, the view switches over half a block when you get to our cross street. But all these little glitches will get worked out eventually.

The whole thing is sort of cool and sort of worrying at the same time. Fortunately, our provincial Information and Privacy Commissioner, David Loukidelis, is on it.

My daughter and her friends have been captured walking down a nearby road,  their faces obscured; our car has been spotted, with the licence plate ditto. But people are clearly identifiable to their friends and families: it takes more than blurring features to make people unrecognizable. I am taking a wait and see approach before I decide whether I like it or hate it.

I know that I really like the sentiments expressed by letter writer Roger Barany in the weekend Vancouver Sun:

How was I supposed to know Google’s sneaky street crew would come unannounced to sweep my block, snap my filthy car sitting outside my residence and post the image on its planet-wide social mapping site? When picture day is coming, can’t they send an advance note, the way my kid’s school does, so I can jazz up my crate a bit? When’s retake day?

The sky changes so rapidly on these early mornings; it’s like a kaleidoscope. You have to keep watching or you’ll miss something.

Photos by Iona.

The artwork called “Making Visible the Invisible: What the Community is Reading” is composed of six LCD screens that run above the reference desk on the fifth floor of the Seattle Public Library.

George Legrady, a professor of interactive media at the University of California, Santa Barbara, created the artwork. It’s powered by three computers that use library data of material checked out within the past hour. The installation interprets the data and displays it in four visualizations:

• VITAL STATISTICS: running totals from various categories of materials checked out
• FLOATING TITLES: the titles of materials checked out (book titles are red; titles of other materials are green), with the position on the screen determined by the Dewey Decimal number
• DEWEY DOT MATRIX RAIN: titles appear on the screen at their Dewey location or float down the screen like rain
• KEYWORD MAP ATTACK: keywords of checked-out titles, as in the photo of one of the screens, above. Colour and positioning are determined by their Dewey number.

Lately, there has been an epidemic, a flood, of misused words where the correct ones sound the same as the wrong ones. Some of the more entertaining errors I’ve noted this week are:

“the teaming rain”
“with baited breath”
“take a sneak peak”

— which conjure up some wonderful images!

Of course, there is the usual “stationary” where “stationery” is meant; “principle” and “principal” are used interchangeably; and “palette,” “palate,” and “pallet” are routinely confused.

Even if people use the ubiquitous spell checking functions provided with word processing software, errors may go undetected if the writers are not  thoughtful about the meaning of their communications. So we need a homonym detector. I propose ContextCheck as a suitable name. Please, software developers: step forward and save the language.

For the last few years, I have been searching for The Whimsical Piglet. Written by Hilda Boswell, published in London, England, in 1948, it was a favourite book from my childhood. I remembered that Septimus was so called because he was the seventh son of a seventh son and that he was musical.

Some childhood memories are  surprisingly powerful, even when they are fragmentary. A wistful phrase or two from The Whimsical Piglet would occasionally dance on the edge of my memory: a house “tucked away amongst the hills;” the “music of the wind and the rain.” I regretted the loss of the book but didn’t ever expect to find a copy.

A few years ago, I realized that with the existence of Abebooks, BookFinder, Amazon, eBay, and so on, there was a good chance I might be able to find one. It took a couple of years before an entry showed up on Abebooks. I immediately sent off for it, hardly flinching at the exorbitant price for a book described as:

No date listed, probably 1948 therefore the First Edition (printed in accordance with economy standards). Original grey cloth boards with green titling to front, minus the dustwrapper … Black and white illustrations illuminate each page, plus 5 full colour plates. The boards are grubby with small tear top of the spine; rear hinge pulled but pages intact; neat inscription inside … page 35, closed tear and corner creased plus one other crease …

The condition didn’t matter. This might be my last chance to find the book.

It arrived earlier than I expected. Opening the package was exciting. The book was smaller than I’d remembered, but the grey cover and green titling were immediately familiar and the text and illustrations revived more of those half memories.  I had forgotten the verse:

The seventh child of a seventh child
Is not the same as others;
He’s whimsical and odd at times,
And different from his brothers.

I had forgotten that “Septimus became famous throughout the countryside, even beyond the hills that encircled his little world, and even to the hills beyond those hills.”

And here I am, removed far beyond the hills where I grew up and removed by quite a few decades as well. How amazing that I can reach back in time and conjure up an artefact from my early life. What a magical time we live in.