I love fictional detectives. They are so tough and clever. Of all the tough and clever detectives out there, Philip Marlow is the toughest and the cleverest. I mean, check out this description:

“I need a man good-looking enough to pick up a dame who has a sense of class, but he’s got to be tough enough to swap punches with a power shovel. I need a guy who can act like a bar lizard and backchat like Fred Allen, only better, and get hit on the head with a beer truck and think some cutie in the leg-line topped him with a breadstick”

“It’s a cinch,” I said. “You need the New York Yankees, Robert Donat, and the Yacht Club Boys.”

“You might do,” Anna said. (From Trouble is My Business)

Wowza! I mean, what a dreamboat!

I fell in love with Raymond Chandler’s detective when I was in high school. When I was in college I would use the above description as a stand in for what I was looking for in a man. And I named my couldn’t-be-killed houseplant Marlow in the great Shamus’s honor.

I was actually disappointed when I finally saw The Big Sleep because I didn’t think Humphrey Bogart was handsome enough to play the part! I mean, Humphrey Bogart can’t swamp punches with a power shovel.

In addition to being a dreamboat, Philip Marlow is also pretty great at solving mysteries, recovering stolen property, and finding lost dames.

If you have never read Raymond Chandler before, I recommend starting with the short story collection, Trouble is My Business. Then you have to read The Big Sleep, because it’s the famous one and it’s really good. And then, now that you are fully in love with both Philip Marlow and Raymond Chandler, you read The Long Goodbye which is a perfect detective novel.

I got a kindle last Christmas. It was a surprise gift. I didn’t ask for one, and I was not completely sold on e-readers anyway. I liked books! Real books! With pretty covers and that distinct, un-reproduceable smell (I’ve smelled those “old book” perfumes, and they do not smell like books). But, I gave it a go, and I have to say, I read more in 2012 because of my kindle.

The kindle allowed me to indulge in big reading binges in a way buying books from my local indie bookseller, or even the library could not. I could tear through a series in a weekend or even a day (The Hunger Games), I could read an entire author’s backlist in a month (Laura Lippman, hurry up and write something new!), and I could read the hot-book everyone was talking about and I wanted desperately but my local shop was sold out and the library wait list was too long and I had to read it RIGHT NOW (Wild, by Cheryl Strayed). So, all in all, I found e-reading to be pretty great.

My favorite book binge of 2012 was the Harry Bosch series by Michael Connelly. On New Year’s day (playing with my new reading machine) Amazon told me I might like “The Drop.” I downloaded, read it, loved it, and by the end of January I had read the entire Harry Bosch oeuvre. Some of them were better than others, some had higher body counts, or better villains, or better lovers. But as a whole, the series is pretty steady, dependable, thrilling fare. 

There are so many good books out there I did not get around to reading in 2012, so I put them on my “i really want to read this list” which I then emailed to my husband, with this disclaimer: “I put a lot on here, so that you have options (i know you like those) and so that I will still be surprised. There are also a lot of books out there that are not on this list, that I would also love to read. so go nuts.”

• Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
  Blacksad Volume 1
  This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
  One Soul by Ray Fawkes
  Why be Happy When You Can Be Normal? By Jeanette Winterson
  Are you My Mother? By Allison Bechdel
  Dear Life by Alice Munro
  The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt
  This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Holmes
  How Should A Person Be by Shiela Heti
  The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers
  Why does the World Exist by Jim Holt
  Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler w/ Maira Kalman
  The Expendable Man by Dorothy B Hughes
  Louise Amended by Louise Krug
  The Round House by Louise Erdrich
  Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchet
  Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Greely
  The Marriage Plot by Jeffry Eugenides
  Train Dreams by Denis Johnson