Bogota Man Rescues Trashed Books. Shares Them with Community.

A Bogota trash man at work (not Mr. Gutierrez)

Ready for another great story about how one avid reader, in this case a man with an especially huge heart, can impact the lives of hundreds of poor children?

Well, let me introduce you to 53-year-old Jose Gutierrez, a garbage truck driver in Bogota, Columbia.  Gutierrez, himself an avid reader of the classic authors and more current literary fiction, just could not stand to see the books he found on his route through the wealthier areas of the city to be destroyed.  He took them home instead...and according to this U.S. News report, he starting sharing them with the kids in his neighborhood.

He says books are luxuries for boys and girls in low-income neighborhoods such as his, with new reading material at bookstores too expensive. There are 19 public libraries in Bogota, a city of 8.5 million, but tend to be located far away from poorer areas.

"This should be in all neighborhoods, on each corner of every neighborhood, in all the towns, in all departments, and all the rural areas," says Gutierrez. "Books are our salvation and that is what Colombia needs."

20,000 books and counting.  Readers are, indeed, very special people.  (By the way, I see that Anne Rice has taken to calling avid readers "People of the Page."  I smile every time I see that.

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Book Trailer of the Week: "Hollow Man" by Mark Pryor

I have no idea what Hollow Man is about, and Mark Pryor is not an author I'm familiar with...but I really like the book trailer to publicize the novel that Mr. Pryor has put together with a lot of help from his children.  

Well done, guys.

I've said it often, but this one reminds me again of the power of a very short book trailer to place a book I would have otherwise never have heard of of.  I may still never actually read it, but if I spot it in a bookstore, I will most certainly take a longer look at it than I would have before watching the trailer.  And that is what book trailers are all about, really.

The Fourth Watcher

Fans of the Poke Rafferty series will, of course, know that The Fourth Watcher (2008) was Timothy Hallinan’s second entry into the series.  As the novel opens, Poke has decided that his new family (Rose, the former bar girl he hopes to marry, and Miaow, the little girl he plucked off the streets of Bangkok for her own good) is the most important thing in the world to him.  He wants to abandon the travel book series he’s been writing so that the three of them can settle comfortably into a stable lifestyle.  

If only her were so lucky.

Rose and her business partner Peachy are finally having a bit of success with the maid service they run using former bar girls as cleaning crews.  By now, with the help of Poke’s investment into the business, Rose and Peachy have given several young women the opportunity to leave the sordid lifestyle associated with Thailand’s sex trade industry.  But now, the business has inadvertently become linked to what appears to be a North Korean counterfeiting ring – an operation that takes no prisoners.

And then things really get complicated.  Two people from Poke’s past, one of whom he didn’t even know existed, come into his world just when he can least afford the distraction.  Poke already has an American Secret Service man after him who would love nothing better than to lock him up for a good long time; now he has to deal with a reunion that will prove to be as dangerously deadly as anything he has ever faced in his life.  He and Arthit, the Thai policeman who is Poke’s best friend in the world, are going to have to scramble if they are going to save the lives of those closest to them.   

The real strength of the Poke Rafferty series is Hallinan’s well-developed recurring characters.  Poke, Rose, Miaow, and Arthit all come with emotional baggage of their own but they meld into a unit that offers each of them exactly the emotional support, love, and friendship they need to finally make something good of their lives.  It won’t be easy, but let it be known that they are still doing fine some five books (and counting, I hope) after The Fourth Watcher.

That said, because I have read the series out of order, I can also tell you that the books get even better as the series ages.  This one emphasizes the “thriller” aspect of the plot to the point that it becomes a bit overcomplicated in the end.  I prefer more “literary” thrillers (yes, I believe there is such a thing), and that’s exactly the direction Hallinan, over time, moves the Poke Rafferty series.  Don’t miss ‘em.

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Have you read a good t-shirt lately?

A Farewell to Arms

I saw someone wearing this A Farewell to Arms t-shirt yesterday and it was such an eye-catcher that I had to ask about it.  As it turns out, there are a bunch of shirts in the series, all of them using thousands of words from literary classics as background for the illustrations featured on the shirts.  The back of the shirt is solid text from the Hemingway classic.  From even a slight distance, it appears to be a gray t-hirt, but get a little closer and...boom!   You realize what you are looking at.  

Click here to reach the Litograph website where you can see the whole collection of shirts - and lots of other bookish things for sale.

I imagine that most of the shirts on offer will be best appreciated by women, but there are plenty of choices for guys, too.  Hemingway is well represented, for instance, and others, such as The Jungle (by Upton Sinclair) that men will feel comfortable wearing.

The Jungle

Middlemarch

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The number of choices is actually a little bit overwhelming - and the company also sells posters, tattoos, and totes - so take a look and see if any of them appeal to you.  They are not cheap, but if you read how they are produced (via a process that means they will never fade) one by one, the price makes more sense.

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Tenacity - And Why Books Need a "Cliffhanger" Alert

Seldom has a book irritated me as much as J.S. Law’s debut novel Tenacity.  And that is saying a lot, because over a lifetime of reading, I have been exposed to some real stinkers.  So what makes Tenacity stand out?

Well, how about this?  The thriller is intended to introduce a character that will continue on in a whole series of books about her exploits as an investigator in Britain’s Special Investigation Branch’s “Kill” Team.  In layman terms, that means that she is a homicide detective who works on cases involving military personnel.  Nothing wrong with that and, in fact, that is a proposition just different enough to intrigue readers who might be a bit bored with the more usual crime fiction environments out there.

But Danielle “Dan” Lewis, God bless her heart, is a slow learner.  The book opens with a bit of Dan’s backstory, a story in which her stubbornness and failure to trust her team enough to have someone provide backup for her almost got her killed.  Only her physical agility and a whole lot of luck allowed her to survive a physical confrontation with the serial killer she and her team were trying to identify.  But did she learn anything from that escapade…you know, maybe about making sure a backup is in place next time she goes snooping in an isolated place?  Apparently not, because Tenacity ends (if you can call it an ending – more on that in a minute) just about where it begins: with Dan Lewis fighting for her life, alone, in a desperate situation in which she has no right to expect that she will survive. 

Law does a good job in developing the Dan Lewis character.  Despite my low opinion of her common sense and ability to recognize death traps, I think I understand the character and what makes her do such stupid things.  The author even managed to give a little depth to two of the book’s side-characters, a couple of men who try desperately to protect her from herself but are so frustrated with her that they have just about had it.

Submariner and Author J.S. Law

Much of Tenacity takes place within the confines of a nuclear submarine in which Dan has inserted herself as the only female on board – with predictable results.  I enjoyed learning about  the day-to-day routines in that kind of environment and a little bit about what makes submariners tick.  They are a special breed, and Law, being one of them, knows what he is talking about and it all seems very real.  That is the real strength of Tenacity because the plot, although interesting, is not all that surprising.  But just when I was prepared to give the book a 3.5-star rating, I read the last few pages.  And exploded.

The book has no ending.  It just abruptly stops after setting up a cliffhanger that will presumably lead to Book Two of the Dan Lewis series.  No, no, no…that does not work.  I consider it less than honest to pull this stunt unless the publisher slaps a warning label on the book cover so that I can decide up front whether or not I want to invest five or six hours of my life in reading such a book.  This is the kind of literary misstep that, in my estimation, is worth at least a one-star deduction on any book.  Reader beware.

(Advance Reader’s Edition of the book provided by the publisher for review)

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Of Mice and Men

Hard as it might be to believe, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is part of the American Library Association’s “Most Challenged Books of the 21^st Century” list. Way too often, small-minded people manage to wrangle just enough political power to do harm to those wiser than themselves, as is the case with those who strive to keep Of Mice and Men out of public and school libraries.  They complain that the book is “anti-business” or that it condones euthanasia, or that it is filled with racial slurs and overtones.  God bless their little hearts.

The book was written in 1936 and it is very much a reflection of its author and his times, a period during which men were often driven to wandering the country, taking whatever work they could get to sustain themselves for another day.  Such was the case for George Milton and Lennie Small, two men who had known each other since childhood.  George has always looked out for his friend Lennie because the huge Lennie is too slow-witted to take care of himself.  George tells Lennie constantly how much easier his life would be without him having to worry about Lennie all the time but, truth be told, he would probably be lost without Lennie.

As the two approach the farm where they have found new work, George tells Lennie to keep his mouth closed, to let George do the talking until they have been accepted.  And even though Lennie “forgets” to do so, they manage to become part of the harvesting crew.  All goes well, and the crew bosses are especially impressed with Lennie’s strength and production, until Lennie starts to exhibit some of his peculiar ways.  Lennie is a giant who has no real conception of his own strength, and he is a man prone to panic – a lethal combination in a man Lennie’s size. 

Author John Steinbeck

Throw into the mix a previous misunderstanding between Lennie and a little girl that he and George are still running from, a batch of new puppies that Lennie too much loves to pet, and the boss’s pugnacious son and the son’s flirting wife, and you have all the makings of an inevitable tragedy.  And happen, it does.

Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men with a stage production of the story always in mind.  The book’s six chapters are grouped in pairs meant to be adaptable into a three-act play and, in fact, Of Mice and Men has enjoyed great success both on the stage and on the screen.

And there are still those out there who want to ban this wonderfully moving story.  Unbelievable. 

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