Book Review: The Dog Who Knew Too Much by Spencer Quinn

Title: The Dog Who Knew Too Much
Author: Spencer Quinn
Series: A Chet and Bernie Mystery #4
Release Date: September 6th, 2011
Publisher: Atria Books

The fourth entry in the irresistible New York Times bestselling mystery series featuring canine narrator Chet and his human companion Bernie—"the coolest human/pooch duo this side of Wallace and Gromit" (Kirkus Reviews), marks a triumphant return in a tale that's full of surprises. Bernie is invited to give the keynote speech at the Great Western Private Eye Convention, but it's Chet that the bigshot P.I. in charge has secret plans for. Meanwhile Chet and Bernie are hired to find a kid who has gone missing from a wilderness camp in the high country. The boy's mother thinks the boy's father—her ex—has snatched the boy, but Chet makes a find that sends the case in a new and dangerous direction. As if that weren't enough, matters get complicated at home when a stray puppy that looks suspiciously like Chet shows up. Affairs of the heart collide with a job that's never been tougher, requiring our two intrepid sleuths to depend on each other as never before. The Dog Who Knew Too Much is classic Spencer Quinn, offering page-turning entertainment that's not just for dog-lovers.

I've been meaning to read Chet and Bernie Mystery books but never had the opportunity, until I got book #4 of the series from Simon and Schuster Galley Grab. I  had heard great things about it, and it didn't disappointed me.

The Dog Who Knew Too Much continues the story of Chet, a dog, and Bernie, his human. They work together as private investigators and in this case, they have to found a missing boy. The mother think it's her ex-husband fault, but the case take an awful direction when Bernie is sent to prison and Chet is left alone!

I simply loved Chet. He's the narrator and is totally cute. Yes, he's a dog, and the narrator. I had a smile all the time while reading him, the way he saw things as a dog was just hilarious!

"Do you feel that breeze? Where's that breeze coming from?!? Oh, it's my tail!"

"Sometimes human pat you without knowing they're doing it. This had the feeling of one of those, as thought the hand was acting on its own. Nothing crazy about that: my tail does the same thing."

The story is the typical mystery that begins with a missing child and ends with drugs dealers and dog  robbery. I'd say it's a cozy mystery because Chet is a lovely and fun character, but at the same time Bernie is very serious.

Overall, I loved The Dog Who Knew Too Much! I wish I'd have read the first three books before reading this one, but it wasn't necessary to understand the story. Chet is my new favorite character, and if you are a dog lover, I think you will love him too!

More about this book at www.chetthedog.com, Goodreads, Amazon, The Book Depository.

Beauty is in the Eye of the Bookholder

Quick post today, since I'm supposedly going to spend the day getting to grips with the conference paper I need to present next week. (Incidentally - anybody going to the Popular Imagination and the Dawn of Modernism conference in London?) So, something shallow and frivolous to make up for that... have you ever bought a book solely, absolutely solely, because of how it looked?

I have.



I was in Eastgate Bookshop in Warwick (which is rather brilliant, by the way) and spotted a little shelf of King Penguins. They're all beautiful on the outside, and a little drab on the inside. I couldn't leave behind this:





Am I interested in the English Tradition in Design? Very slightly. Moreso than I am in Ballooning, which is the other King Penguin I toyed with buying. But above all other criteria, couldn't resist that William Morris-esque cover, to say nothing of the beautiful feel of the book in my hands. So, thanks William Grimmond, who apparently designed the cover based on a design made by Eva Crofts for Donald Brothers, Dundee. 65 years after you created that cover, you indirectly helped me add an entirely unnecessary book to my library.



But, was it not William Morris himself who instructed us to have nothing in our house that we do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful? The same, dear readers, applies to books... doesn't it?

In My Mailbox

In My Mailbox is a weekly bookish meme hosted @ The Story Siren

This week I got:

A Night to Surrender (Spindle Cove #1) by Tessa Dare

Fairy Bad Day by Amanda Ashby

From NetGalley:

By Grace Possessed (The Three Graces #2) by Jennifer Blake

What did you get this week?

Song for a Sunday

Since summer has decided to slip into September, here's a cheery little track called 'Dress and Tie' by Charlene Kaye, featuring Darren Criss aka Blaine off Glee, if that means anything to you. I think they were at music school together, or something.







Happy weekend!

The Pitts

After having been in Oxford for nearly seven years, today (or, by the time you read this, yesterday) I finally got around to visiting the Pitt-Rivers Museum. Their website describes the collection as being anthropology and world archeology - but it would be as true to describe it as 'stuff'.





There is a mind-boggling assortment of objects in the collection, which covers one main floor and two galleries above it. They are grouped in categories such as 'Humans Depicted in Art' or 'Treatment of Dead Enemies' - there are cases devoted solely to zithers; to model canoes; to beads used as currency... and so on and so on. Within these cases everything is jumbled together - objects from all periods and countries. It's rather overwhelming - and a wonderful, dizzying experience.





There isn't much description - this isn't one of those museums which has six panels of writing for every artefact. When information is supplied, often it is delightfully vague, on little handwritten tags which, as often as not, forget to mention anything so quotidian as the century of origin (see above).



Apparently the collection was overhauled a few years ago - actually, I remember it happening. I recall how aghast people were that the disorganisation would have been firmly shaken into organisation, and that the Pitt-Rivers would have lost its charm. They needn't have worried. It's great fun to be able to open a discreet little drawer, and find a varied selection of globular flutes tucked away.



Unsurprisingly, I was drawn to the section on the history of writing and writing instruments - including something from 2500 BC. Here's a quick, slightly blurry snap of about a sixth of what they had on display in this area.





Although I have put off going for many years, and have learnt remarkably little today (except for the amazing coffins which are produced in Ghana - they had a special video about it) I would thoroughly recommend the Pitt-Rivers to any visitor to Oxford - simply because of its ingenious eccentricity. Each artefact in the collection (apparently about half a million) represents hours of human labour - to have them all gathered in one place creates an astonishing miscellany of humans and their infinite variety.



And speaking of eccentricity... I decided to experiment with my baking. These are ginger cupcakes with lime-flavoured icing. I love ginger and I love lime, and thought these flavours might well taste nice together: I think I was right! They certainly aren't aesthetically up to scratch (they all overflowed the cases, for one thing) but they're fun - and I think they'll prove worth trying again!





P.S. it's Our Vicar's Wife's birthday today - wish her a good one!

August Wrap Up + winner!

August is over. Wow, I can't believe it's already September! Anyway, this month was good for me. I found a good job and also read 9 books!

Sea by Heidi R. Kling

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

To Scotland, With Love by Karen Hawkins

SEALed Forever by Mary Daughtridge

A Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson

The Perfect Play by Jaci Burton

Good Girls Don't by Victoria Dahl

The Dog Who Knew Too Much by Spencer Quinn

Falling in Love with English Boys by Melissa Jensen

Also reviewed this month:

Fins are Forever by Tera Lynn Childs

Uncommon Criminals by Ally Carter

How to Abduct a Highland Lord by Karen Hawkins

The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf by Molly Harper

Dragon Bound by Thea Harrison

WINNER:

The winner of my +750 followers giveaway is Adele!

Congratulations! I'm sending you an email right now :)

Live Alone and Like It

I don't often talk that much about my DPhil research, because most of my time is spent reading books and articles that are either impossible to track down, or too prosaic to recommend. But after reading Marjorie Hillis' Live Alone and Like It (1936) for my upcoming chapter on childlessness and fantastic creation (oh yes) I thought I'd like to blog about it. But surely it would be too difficult to find? (thought I) So I Googled it, and it turns out that Virago reissued it in 2005 - and there are plenty of copies around, so I feel I can blog about it guiltlessly.



The book is non-fiction, and does what it says on the tin - it's a guide to the single girl. There were already rather more women than men in the UK before the First World War, but in the 1920s and '30s there were around two million 'surplus women', as they were labelled. The whole history of these women is detailed in Virginia Nicholson's Singled Out, which I've been reading for a while and will talk further about soon. I'm rather annoyed by the tacit assumption in both Nicholson's book and the contemporary guides that any single man could easily get married - I suspect life could be as difficult for bachelors as for spinsters - but certainly unmarried women proliferated at a rate higher than ever before in living memory.



I've read quite a few of these guides - some are maudlin, others are progressive, and everything in between. They agree on very little. The reason I wanted to write about Marjorie Hillis' Live Alone and Like It is because it is the most accessible for a modern audience. You don't need to be an unmarried woman in 1936 to find this a fascinating read, and what is more, a funny one. Hillis' tone is not hectoring or patronising, but quite witty and sensible. Whether or not you're on the look-out for a spouse, you might chuckle at this piece of advice:

But hobbies are anti-social now; modern men don't like to be sewn and knitted at; and the mere whisper that a girl collects prints, stamps, tropical fish or African art is, alas, likely to increase her solitude.

or this:

Clutter is now as out-of-date as modesty, and for just as good reasons.

or, without intending to cast aspersions against any bloggers (and glossing over my uninformed references to Gissing and Braddon yesterday), this:

Most people's minds are like ponds and need a constantly fresh stream of ideas in order not to get stagnant. The simplest way to accomplish this to is [sic] exchange your ideas (if any), with your friends and acquaintances, cribbing as many as possible from books, plays, and newspaper columns and passing them off as your own. Anyone who does this well is considered a brilliant conversationalist. If you do it extra well, you are a Wit.

There are sections on how to save money, how to furnish a home on a budget, and even what term to use to describe the unmarried woman (the term spinster is 'becoming rapidly extinct', apparently). Hillis also cheerfully lists the advantages of living alone, including this rather unlikely one, demonstrating how the times, they have a-changed:

You will be able to eat what, when, and where you please, even dinner served on a tray on the living-room couch - one of the higher forms of enjoyment which the masculine mind has not learned to appreciate.

All in all, there is quite a lot that still comforts or helps the single person - but for the most part Live Alone and Like It is an involving piece of social history, and also amusing in that wry, 1930s, almost Provincial Ladyesque manner. I found it useful for my research too, so that's a bonus. And I'll leave Hillis to offer the last piece of advice, as true now as it was in 1936:

For the truth is that if you’re interesting, you’ll have plenty of friends, and if you’re not, you won’t – unless you’re very, very rich.