‘Pin Picks: A Perfect Ten

Obviously, we’re going to find a wonderful book for a commenter, but I’d like to take a moment to tell everyone that my three current literary jams are, in zero particular order: D.T. Max’s Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (sadly, depression is contagious via the written word while great genius is … not), Zadie Smith’s NW, and Marie Rutkoski’s The Shadow Society, a hot new YA book I’m gulping in review copy form almost as we speak. It’s gonna go somewhere, you heard it here first!

Now, on to the unique stylings of our very own WrestletheThistles, whose consonant-y handle reminds me of “he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.” But we’re not going to recommend Stephen King’s It unless we see strong corroborating evidence (it’s great, though! You should read it, but not while high.) Well, WrestletheThistles, what are your three favorite books?

1. The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins — Okay, I’m guessing that It is now off the table. But we DO have trickery and twists and old-timey-ness and mystery and intrigue and royalty! ‘Pinners do love them some Wilkie Collins. Wouldn’t it have pleased him to know that a bunch of young women on the internet would appreciate him, over a century hence? I mean, he was pretty progressive, what with having poly relationships and living in sin with ladies and enjoying recreational opiates and railing against injustice. He could have had a Tumblr! Moving on.

2. The Golden Gate, Vikram Seth — As promised, I have now purchased this book, having not previously read it, and am hoping for the best. I do love Pushkin, poetry, and San Francisco yuppies, so am more than cautiously optimistic. Is A Suitable Boy as good as everyone says?

3. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett — Yep-yep-yep-yep-yep-uh-huh-uh-huh, we’ve got it. It’s not hard-boiled, like The Maltese Falcon, but it’s retro as all-get-out, and you’re gonna love it. Let’s talk about Hammett first, though. Obviously, he is a Total Genius Person, but he also had a long-term thing with Lillian Hellman, who feuded with Mary McCarthy, who was married to Edmund Wilson, of which relationship Louis Menand once said: “The marriage to McCarthy was a mistake that neither side wanted to be first to admit. When they fought, he would retreat into his study and lock the door; she would set piles of paper on fire and try to push them under it.” So, really, maybe it’s better not to be involved with other writers. Let’s all fall in love with chefs, instead. Daniel Humm is married, so pick someone else.

The book! The book is Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers.

I was actually a Gaudy Night newbie before we started the whole process; my Sayers began and ended with The Nine Tailors, which is great, even if it involves sixteen thousand paragraphs on the mechanics of bell-ringing. Gaudy Night is another of her Lord Peter Wimsey novels, which provides our weird Stephen King connection for the week, because in Apt Pupil the aging Nazi is described as resembling Lord Peter. Boom.

The nice thing about Gaudy Night, apart from all of the things, is that you really don’t need to know Harriet Vane or Lord Peter from a hole in the ground to love it. It’s mystery, and class, and ladies, and education, and TWISTS, and all of you should make yourself a nice cup of tea and acquire a cat and a wing chair of some kind (is a wing chair like a club chair? does it need to have nail studs?) and tuck in. Love. Oh, and there is absolutely no reason to take my word for it, because the legendary Jo Walton has weighed in here.