It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

My mind starts to wander every year as spring approaches, so I'm not surprised that I've had a hard time focusing on Book Chase this week.  I guess what did catch me by surprise is that it happened earlier this year than normal - blame it on the exceptionally warm winter we've had here, I suppose.  

Even with the horrible news that we've lost both Harper Lee and Umberto Eco in the last several days, I could not force myself to sit down and mark those losses for the record here.  I think I'm starting to feel beaten down by the kind of news cycle I see every day from the mainstream media.  Television, radio, and newspaper editors seem to believe that if a potential story is not bad news, politically divisive news, or about some half-brained, self-crowned celebrity, then we don't need to hear about it.  After a while all that negativity wears a person down.

When that happens, I turn to books for escape, but I don't want Book Chase to evolve into just the place where I post book reviews.  I want to talk about all things book related.  I suppose the good news is that I'm easily reaching the goals I've set for number of pages read each day and number of books finished per week.  And I have almost a dozen book reviews in the can that with one final editing will be ready for posting here.  

But now baseball season has started - and I love baseball at every level.  I've been known to pull over and watch Little League games if I drive by one of the parks and see cars in the parking lot.  I watch my grandson play 40 or 50 middle school games a year, and I support the local high school team.  I drive to College Station (90 minutes each way) to watch Texas A&M home games or down inside Loop 610 (45 minutes each way on a good day) to watch the Rice Owls play.  I make several Astros game a season.  In other words, I have it bad.  

And there are only 24 hours in a day.  As much as I love this time of year, I can't imagine how I got it all done before I retired last May.  The lesson?  Time is precious; make the most of it.

Honky Tonk Samurai

I’ve done it again – started reading a well established crime fiction series with its most current book, well after the long histories of the main characters have been firmly planted in the minds of longtime series fans.  This time I did it with Joe Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard books about two East Texas good old boys (one white and one black) who somehow manage to survive whatever violent mishap their collective lack of good sense gets them into.  But as it turns out, Honky Tonk Samurai is not a bad book for uninitiated Hap and Leonard fans to begin with because it reunites the boys with several colorful characters from their past – and Lansdale kindly provides a short back-story for each of them. 

Hap and Leonard haven’t exactly been getting rich working in a small town private detective agency, but when the agency owner decides to sell out so that he can become the town’s new police chief, they are left with two choices: become unemployed or find a way to buy the agency from the new cop.  Luckily for them, Hap’s girlfriend, who is unhappy with her nursing job, decides to use her savings to buy herself a career change.  Now Hap and Leonard have a new boss.

The agency’s first customer might be an old woman who can barely make it up the stairs to their office, but as soon as she opens her mouth, Hap and Leonard know that she is a fighter.  In language that shocks even Leonard at times, the old woman explains that she wants the pair to find her granddaughter, a young woman who several years earlier disappeared along with the $50,000 she stole from her grandmother.  She suggests that they begin their search at the upscale classic car dealership that her granddaughter was working at when she disappeared.

Boy, what a can-of-worms that would turn out to be. 

Author Joe R. Lansdale

Let’s just say that some car dealers sell more than cars from their showroom floor, and because they really don’t want the whole world to know about it, snoopers have to be silenced.  Before they know it, Hap and Leonard are outnumbered, outgunned, and hiding from a family of crazy hit men whose terrifyingly creative hits put them in a league all their own.  If Hap and Leonard are to survive their first case, it’s time for them to call in the troops.

One of the benefits of coming to a fictional series late in its run is that, if the book clicks, the reader ends up with a whole pile of books to add to the TBR list.  And that is exactly what’s happened to me with Honky Tonk Samurai.  I plan to spend a lot more time with Hap and Leonard…and their friends.

(Review copy provided by publisher)

Pat Conroy and Me - and You

Don’t for a minute kid yourself.  Avid readers have a personal relationship (albeit a one-sided one) with the authors they read over several decades.  Sometimes we know more about the lives of our favorites, and what makes them tick, than we do about most friends we see in the real world.  The best writers reveal themselves to us over time, layer by layer, in their work and we often see ourselves reflected in their words.  A true kinship develops, a strong bond that can last a lifetime – theirs and ours. 

For me, Pat Conroy is one of those special people even though I came to know his work only when I stumbled upon a paperback copy of The Prince of Tides in 1987.  I may have been slow coming to Pat Conroy’s fiction, but I can still remember the excitement I felt while reading that novel.  I knew – immediately – that Pat Conroy was going to be someone whose work I would read and re-read for the rest of my life.  I was so excited about the book that I did something I had never done before; I started talking to friends and relatives about it.  I even purchased 15 copies of the paperback and handed them out as little Christmas presents that year.  But the funny thing?  I’m as excited to get a new Pat Conroy novel or memoir in my hands today as I was on that day almost three decades ago.

Now I hear that Pat Conroy is fighting pancreatic cancer but promises to complete the novel he’s currently working on.  And I hurt for my literary friend and wish I could tell him how much he has meant to me for the last 28 years.  I wish I could tell him how many people around the world are rooting for him as he endures what comes next in his life.  I wish I could tell him just how much he has contributed to our understanding of human nature and the world we live in.

I wish I could tell him how much we love him.

Pat Conroy

on Monday

Hey out there,

I celebrated my 70th birthday in October and realized that I’ve spent my whole writing life trying to find out who I am and I don’t believe I’ve even come close. It was in Beaufort in sight of a river’s sinuous turn, and the movements of its dolphin-proud tides that I began to discover myself and where my life began at fifteen.

I have recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. With the help of the wonderful people at M.D. Anderson I intend to fight it hard. I am grateful to all my beloved readers, my friends and my family for their prayers. I owe you a novel and I intend to deliver it.

Much love,
Pat Conroy

My publisher, Nan A. Talese, will forward mail
Pat Conroy
c/o Doubleday, 1745 Broadway, 13th floor, New York, NY 10019
DDAYPub@randomhouse.com

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Lit Up: One Reporter, Three Schools, and Twenty-Four Books That Can Change Lives

In a world where music, books, and movies are often free - and always instantly available - do they have any real value to consumers?  When books lose their physical presence in favor of a bunch of electronic blips that can be accessed on a variety of hand-held devices, do they any longer seem real?  Do they lose their aura of timelessness and their influence on the lives of readers?  Is a culture so in thrall to its electronic technology even capable of producing serious readers anymore?

David Denby knows the importance of "reading seriously," and feels strongly that if "literature matters less to young people than it once did, we are all in trouble."  But how, he wonders, can an appetite for a lifetime of serious reading be created in a society so heavily dominated by technology that both provides and encourages instant gratification?  Denby believes that age fifteen is both a "danger spot and a sweet spot" when it comes to creating lifelong readers - you grab them then, or you risk losing them forever - so he decided to spend time in three East Coast high schools to see what was happening there for himself.

In each instance, Denby's plan was to observe students and teachers in the classroom, reading the assigned books with the class but keeping his mouth shut during discussions - only speaking with students and teachers after or before classes.  As he puts it, he "wanted to see if readers could be born - what happens when a nonreader becomes a reader."  Over a two-year span, Denby would spend most of his time at Beacon, a magnet high school in Manhattan, but he also visited James Hillhouse High School, an inner-city school in New Haven, and a high school in a wealthy New York suburb of Mamaroneck. 

To outsiders, it might appear that these three schools have little in common.  Hillhouse, despite its close proximity to Yale University, serves a largely at-risk population of low-income African-American students.  Beacon's students, on the other hand, have to compete to join its student body, and the parents in Mamaroneck pay a cost rivaling that of college tuition for the privilege of having their children attend Mamaroneck High School.  But what the schools do have in common is the most important thing of all: the kind of dedicated, enthusiastic English teacher capable of making a lasting difference in the lives of their students.

Denby found teachers who challenged their students by assigning reading that was "too hard for them," books that would force them to search for answers within themselves.  He found teachers who never gave up on a student, teachers who managed to reach even those who flippantly proclaimed their status as nonreaders out loud at the beginning of the school year.  Denby was happy (and, I believe, relieved) to find that serious readers are still being born in America's classrooms.  The question now is how we as parents, grandparents, and educators make sure that every high school has an English teacher like Beacon's Sean Leon and his Hillhouse and Mamaroneck counterparts.  If we want to remain a nation of “serious readers,” we have to find a way to make it happen.

Why We Write About Ourselves - and Others Read What We Write

I am hopelessly hooked on reading memoirs...memoirs of authors, actors, singers, politicians, addicts, and the most ordinary human beings in the world willing to tell me their story.  Over the last several years, I have filled shelves with my favorite memoirs, and I continue to read 15 or 20 new ones a year.  It has gotten so bad that I find myself wanting to read not just memoirs, but books about memoirs and those who write them.  

A fascinating aspect of memoirs is how often one leads directly to another.  It is often the case that the author's family, friends, and associates are hurt, humiliated, and angered by what they read.  Either they do not remember the incidents being recounted, they remember those incidents very differently from what they read, or they never intended for anyone else to learn of them in the first place.  And what memoirist is not going to be tempted to tell the rest of us all about it?  That's probably why one of my favorite 2015 books was Mary Karr's The Art of Memoir (reviewed last November) in which Karr shares more than writing tips and techniques, she also speaks of the reaction to her books that her mother and sister had - and how their feelings changed over time.

And now I see that Meredith Maran has a new book called Why We Write About Ourselves, and I know I won't be able to resist anything with that title for very long - so here I go again.

The two videos shown below feature Maran's Why We Write About Ourselves and Karr's The Art of Memoir.  

Movies for Readers: The Revenant

I love it when a worthy book is given new life by a movie adaptation, and  that's exactly what's happening right now for Michael Punke's 2002 novel, The Revenant.  I confess that I've neither seen the movie nor read the book, but both are on my To-Do list.

I can, however, tell you that I've been hearing good things about the movie since it opened several weeks ago, and that it appears to be doing quite well in theaters (and if the number of copies of the novel I've been seeing in bookstores lately is any indication, so is the book).  The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter, and Forrest Goodluck...and almost zero women. 




Movies for Readers No. 17