Being that I enjoy reading both types of books that you mentioned, suggestions of "ethnic" mysteries would be wonderful.
Sigh... When I was a child, my father used to beat me if I forgot the title, the author and the detailed plot of any book I'd read, so I tried to remember. But...
a) at an early age, my memory was *much better* than it is now.
b) at 10, I had a shorter list of "books read" to remember than I do at 54.
c) at 12, I was able to convince my father that any future beatings -- for whatever reason -- would be detrimental to *his* health, and he stopped. Whereupon I reverted to my preferential method of "remembering" -- a general impression (was I spell-bound and for how long, and why. Or why not).
So, now, it's all one big soup-pot, with an occasional chunk of something recognisable floating up to the surface <g> When I read something super, I report it here before I forget it, with the book at the keyboard to give all the details. But 1 week later it joins the "pot", where it keeps "cooking" till it's all one mush. After 2-3 weeks, all my memory of "books read" is "passive" -- I can still *recognise* the name of the author (more readily if I enjoyed a previous one); sometimes the title will ring a bell (faintly). Reading a few pages at random helps; some names I almost-remember not because I enjoyed the book, but because it was awful, and "badly written" can be detected in such spot-checking.
Most of the books I read come from the library and go back there -- I don't buy all that many -- so I have nothing to help me jog the memory.
"Bangkok 8" (Thailand, Buddhist world) was really an excellent mystery. Stuart Kaminsky's series on Porfiry Rostnikov (USSR, both before and after its "decomposition") is very good -- though somewhat uneven. I read (last month, that's why it's still "chunks" and not "soup" <g>) as many of those as were in the library, and the only one I remember "better" (also as being better) is the "Cold Red Sunrise" (Or, possibly, "Red Cold Sunrise". Or something like that <g>). There's a *wonderful* series of *historical* mysteries (Japan, 16th? c), written by a Korean-American with an Anglosaxon surname (starts with an R; could be Rawlins, maybe?). The only *title* in the series I remember is "Black Moth" -- somewhere in the middle of the series (I think). Though the series is uniformly good, the first two (three?) books have Japanese words for titles, and that was more than I could remember for 5 minutes. There's one, I think, with "concubine" somewhere in the title :) If I come accross any of those books, I know immediately that they belong together and whether I've read that particular one or not, but I cannot dredge the details from my memory.
Actually, "soup" memory isn't all that bad; it allows me to read the same book more than once and still enjoy it :) I remember having read it but almost never "who'd done it"...
----- Tamara P Duvall Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
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