The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly

I didn't mean to read this book in just two days - two days in which I was also incredibly busy with other things as well. In fact, after the intensity of Jane Eyre I sort of thought I'd take it easy for a while. But I'm alone on a business trip and I need something to do with myself when waiting in restaurants, so there it was. And once I started this one, I couldn't stop. I didn't mean to stay up late into the night reading it to the end, but kept ignoring my own resolve to put it down and go to bed. In the end, I lay there in the quiet dark of an unfamiliar hotel room in a nearly-empty building in a foreign country, thoroughly creeped out and hardly daring to close my eyes for sleep. There were a number of times when this one nearly jumped the rails into horrible, no good, very bad cliche, but each time the author did the unexpected, turning it around and running off in a totally new direction. I always like it when detectives go down the wrong path - nothing is more boring to me than the "lucky" detective who goes from one astounding intuitive leap to another until the thrilling conclusion - and so this was right up my alley. Each time the detective(s) took a wrong turn, I was absolutely certain that the author was going to keep going, and was thoroughly satisfied with each abrupt pull of the reigns. The repetitive use of the title within the context of the story was irritating, and there were a couple of coincidences that were a little too, well, coincidental, but the whole package was a good enough to hardly justify quibbling. I'm a little afraid by how much I am beginning to like Harry. I can't tell if the author likes him too much, or whether he can be trusted to do the needful. I like to think that he's not so in love with his creation that he won't be able to make him suffer in future volumes. It's no fun if Harry's not struggling through twelve different kinds of trouble and angst. At this point, I'm most annoyed that it'll be at least four weeks until I get my hands on another Bosch, having only packed this one and the previous for this trip. I had no idea I'd whip through them so quickly. Blast.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

I am so in love with Jane Eyre that I'm not even sure I can be rational about it. I don't know that I can begin to explain why. All I can say with certainty is that I've never loved a book more, and that I have an almost-overwhelming desire to rip it into tiny pieces and study them endlessly. I want to devour the details, to consume them and make them part of me. Yes, it does sound a lot like obsession. When I turned the last page, it was all I could do to stop myself from flipping back to the front and starting over again. If it hadn't been the middle of the night, following a 300-page sprint to the end, I just might have done so. My experience of it was similar to seeing the film "The Color Purple". No matter how many times I see that movie, I begin weeping about 10 minutes into the show, and I don't stop until after the credits roll. In this case, I was in tears on the first page (at "she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy, little children") and hardly stopped for the next six hundred. I wept in public, on the bus and in restaurants. I wept even more in private, nearly wearing out my contact lenses with salt. I can't explain why I responded so viscerally to Jane. I wonder how many other women do the same, but I suspect it's a lot of us. Unlike many of the other classics of literature I've read, I was immediately thankful for the wealth of scholarship out there on this book, and can't wait to dig into it. I want to understand Jane, Mr. Rochester, St John, and all the others. I want to study them, to know them, to breathe them in over and over. My biggest regret is that I made it through so many years of my life without ever reading this novel. As with some of the other classic works I've (finally!) discovered in the past year, I know this one will go on the perpetual re-reading stack.

The Black Ice by Michael Connelly

I liked this book slightly less than the first Bosch novel, but still enjoyed it much more than most. The supporting characters on this one were perhaps even richer than the last, but some elements of the plot (especially anything relating to bulls and bullfighting) were considerably less engaging. One thing I liked about the first book was that it was believable. There were surprises, and bad guys masquerading as good and all that, but it didn't stray too far outside the boundaries of believability in the name of a good story. In addition to amping up the characters, this one also amped up the plot, and I personally found the bigger, more epic story to be less enjoyable. Harry needs to stay in his own backyard and deal with the day-to-day soul-crushing work of defending the city against the forces of entropy, vice, and our worst natures. If he has too big a canvas, there's too much opportunity to make a significant impact on the world, and that's not what Harry's about for me. He's about finding justice for single individuals, not the whole world. That's not to say that I won't keep working through the Bosch backlog though. I enjoy Connelly more than any other contemporary genre writer I've found in many years.