A Week of Reading at Half-Speed

During the last week, my time has been almost totally consumed by the logistics of arranging for my father to be moved from a rehabilitation center (where he is being treated for a broken hip) to a facility that can offer him the kind of care that he will need for at least the next several months. 

Consequently, I haven't done a whole lot of reading of tree-books, e-books, or even audiobooks. I listened to two hours of the audiobook version of Peter Robinson's Past Reason Hated a couple of days ago only to realize later that not a single thought made its way to my brain, so I had to re-read all of those pages via an e-book copy of the book I have on hand. I have no idea what I was thinking for those two hours of listening to the book, but reading them in the e-book one day later made it obvious to me that the audiobook had turned into some kind of white noise as I packed. 

Every day is still filled with some combination of phone calls, video calls, and physically packing up dad's old residence in preparation for his impending move. I'm really hoping that once he's in place next week, things will get back closer to whatever has become the frustrating new normal we've all faced for the last eight weeks or so. I miss reading! Reading less than 20 pages a day is driving me nuts - and playing havoc with my planned-review schedule. 

Surprisingly, though, the 386 pages I've read in the last week did result in two completed books (and a little progress on the Peter Robinson title) because most of the pages I read came during the second halves of both books. Now, I need to find the time and energy to review the books before I forget too many of the details to do the job properly. I thoroughly enjoyed both of them, and different as they are, it was easy to get back into their plots despite the few number of pages I could work into my day. 

My Sister the Serial Killer is a story of sibling-rivalry set in Nigeria in which the older, less attractive, sister finds herself helping her younger, stunning, sister dispose of the bodies of her victims. The older girl has to decide where family loyalty ends - if it does. In West Mills is set in a black community in North Carolina. It begins in the 1940s and ends near the present day as it tracks a core group of characters whose lives intertwine in surprising ways during  all those decades. Of the two books, I especially recommend In West Mills.

I, John Kennedy Toole - Kent Carroll and Jodee Blanco

By now, most fiction readers know who John Kennedy Toole was and at least a little about the failed struggle he went through to get his novel A Confederacy of Dunces published. They know that the book did not get published in Toole’s lifetime – and that Toole took his own life. They know that his mother took up the struggle to get the book published after Toole’s suicide, and that with the help of people like Walker Percy and Kent Carroll she finally got that done. And, they know that A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction when it was finally published in 1980. These, though, are just the barest of facts about John Kennedy Toole and the prize-winning novel that even today has somewhat of a cult following. What most of us still wonder about is what would drive such a young, talented writer to so deep a despair that he would choose to end his life over continuing to try to interest a publishing house in his work. The man was only thirty-one, after all, when he asphyxiated himself on that deserted backroad near Biloxi, Mississippi.

Now, Kent Carroll (the same Kent Carroll who was so instrumental in getting the book published in the first place) and Jodee Blanco offer their own well-researched insights into the John Kennedy Toole story. I, John Kennedy Toole is billed on its cover as “A Novel Based on a True Story,” and that is exactly how the novel reads. Much of it reads more like a biography than it does a fictional account of Toole’s life, complete with historical references to remind the reader of exactly what was going on in the real world during each of the specific years of Toole’s life being explored at the moment. Too, dialogue between characters is rather limited, with most of it occurring in the second half of the novel, further giving the book its biographical feel.

That the authors chose to use this form to tell Toole’s story is both the good news and the bad news. On the one hand, fiction allows the authors to speculate about what was really going on inside Toole’s head to a degree and a depth that no biography would have allowed them to do. On the other, so much specific biographical information is included, complete with dates, names, locations, and the like, that the reader is left unsure as to where the facts end and the fiction begins. Even the fictional reporter who investigates Toole’s life some twenty-five years or so after his book’s publication, is not completely sure when people are lying to him or just struggling with their personal memories of significant events in Toole’s life.

John Kennedy Toole

What is particularly interesting in I, John Kennedy Toole is the authors’ speculation that Toole’s mental state allowed him to see Ignatius J. Reilly, the obese loudmouth main character from Dunces, as a real person. The fictional Toole often argues loudly in public with the demanding, obnoxious Ignatius, and even feels that he has let the man down by not being able to present his story to the larger world. Especially often on the final road trip that would end with Toole’s suicide were the two verbally at each other’s throats. That Toole suffered from some combination of paranoia, depression, and perhaps schizophrenia seems likely, and the authors take full advantage of that state of mind to explain his short life.

The key relationship in Toole’s life was the one between him and his dominating mother, a relationship that likely exacerbated, at least in part, Toole’s depression problems. If it were not for the efforts of Toole’s mother, his masterpiece would have never been published; that is beyond doubt. That the woman is a very flawed heroine is also beyond doubt, and the authors make that point very clearly in their novel.

Bottom Line: I, John Kennedy Toole is a well-researched novel that fans of Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces will want to read, if for no other reason than their desire to learn  more about what drove the author to such a level of despair. The concept of the novel is a good one, but at times this one can read more like a dry biography than as the fictional account of a doomed man’s life that it is. Still, it is worth the effort, and I recommend it to anyone interested in John Kennedy Toole’s story.

Blood: A Memoir - Allison Moorer

On the day that their estranged father shot and killed their mother on the front lawn of their little Alabama house before doing the same to himself, Allison Moorer was just fourteen years old and her sister, Shelby Lynne, was almost eighteen. What happened on that August 12, 1986, morning may not define their lives, but it forever changed who they were and who they would become. Allison Moorer’s Blood: A Memoir is their story.

           

“There are parts of a heart that can never heal once they are broken. There is no glue that will hold.” (Allison Moorer, page 14)

Blood is Allison Moorer’s book of memories, and as such, it is told from her point-of-view, but one of the book’s most touching parts is the short “Foreword” written by her older sister, Shelby. Shelby has also written about her parents and their marriage but she says that she “always wondered where Sissy was in it.” She realized that each of them always had their own memories about living with their parents, but that in her memories Allison is always “in the background.” Now having read her sister’s book, Shelby knows exactly where Allison was all those years ago:

            “While I was trying to protect Mama and watch our failing parents’ every move, Sissy was there scared, worried, alone, suffering, and I never knew it. She was there hanging back, hanging tough, watching, observing, worrying, testing the waters of her world, waiting…We were together.”

There is no doubt that the sisters know where each other are now. They are best friends, bonded forever by what they endured and experienced as children. Somehow, even though they can never forgive their father for taking their mother from them when she was only 41, neither of them hate the man. Instead, they hate what he did.

Allison Moorer’s father was an alcoholic who felt that he had married the most beautiful woman in the world. And he was a jealous man, one convinced that there was a man “around every corner” who wanted nothing more out of life than to steal his wife away from him. He wanted, and he had because his wife couldn’t stop him from taking it from her, the authority to “approve her every action.” But according to Moorer, although never diagnosed as such, her father may have had other issues. She almost hopes he was bipolar, schizophrenic, or suffering some other kind of borderline personality disorder because she does not want to believe that it could have been just plain old “meanness” that made him “erase” her mother the way that he did.

Allison Moorer and Shelby Lynne may have survived the trauma of their teen years, but they did not come out of the experience whole. They are, and will always be, emotionally scarred by the actions of the first male role model in their lives, an impatient, angry man who was disappointed in himself and his failure to earn an independent living for his family. Moorer recalls how, “He always seemed to have something on his mind. I was always careful about what I said around him. I never wanted to bother him and risk him directing his anger at me.” As the older sister, it seems Shelby was not so fortunate, and she was more often struck by their father. One of the saddest segments of Blood is the barely-two-pages-long one titled “What happens when you hit your daughter” detailing how a daughter’s personality will forever be changed for the worse by an abusive father who strikes her – especially when it comes to how she deals with every man with whom she will have any kind of relationship for the rest of her life. Those two pages are among the most difficult to read pages I’ve ever encountered in my life.

Bottom Line: Allison Moorer and Shelby Lynne are lucky to have had music in their lives to help them through the most difficult days of their childhood and their adulthood. Both women have enjoyed successful music careers - although Shelby seems to struggle to see it that way sometimes - in the music industry, but even their music is influenced by the childhood trauma they suffered. Blood tells the story of two remarkably strong women who are always there for each other, two women determined not to repeat the all too common mistakes of their parents. They are trying to break the cycle for good.

Colson Whitehead Wins 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Congratulations to Colson Whitehead for winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the second time in the last four years. 

This time around it's for The Nickel Boys, a novel about a Jim Crow era reformatory that was a living hell for many of the boys sent there for minor crimes. In 2017, Whitehead won the same prize for his imaginative take on the Civil War underground railroad that helped so many slaves find freedom north of the Mason-Dixon line. The best thing about the underground railroad in Whitehead's The Underground Railroad  is that it really was a railroad...and it was really underground.

Covid-19 Journal - Week 8 Begins

Well, another week is in the books. Good, bad, or indifferent, at least we have another one behind us. Whether or not that really means we are any closer to the end of this pandemic-induced shutdown is something that I doubt anyone really knows. In fact, I've read conflicting news articles all morning - often from the same source - and I'm more confused than ever. 

This would be terrible enough if we were only dealing with a virus that has the potential to kill millions of us and change our daily lives far into the future - if not forever. But it's not that simple. Instead, we also have to survive the meddling of those, be they cheap politicians or be they cheap businessmen, who are more interested in personal gain than they are in solving the devastating problems the world faces right now. I am fast losing faith in the world leaders tasked with getting us through this truly historical moment in our lives. Most of them, I suspect, will be harshly judged by future historians. 

On a personal note, I'm still trying to deal with my father's hospitalization via telephone and email. It's impossible to judge his recovery progress this way, of course, as all I can do is rely on the professionals I speak with every day. One way or another, I have to place him in a new care facility within the next eight or nine days. The clock is ticking, virus or no virus.

Virus Stats from Johns Hopkins:

In the last week,

Worldwide cases increased from 2,995,456 to 3,534,367,
United States cases from 968,203 to 1,161,804, and
Texas cases went from 24,968 with 651 deaths to 31,998 with 878 deaths.  (So Texas appears to have just had its worst week since this all started, and today is the day that our governor has set to start opening things up again. I hope that I'm not reporting a huge increase in Texas infections and deaths two or three weeks from now.)

Outside:

Our early summer weather has a tight grip on the area. We are reaching temperatures in the high eighties every day, occasionally pushing past ninety, with very little rain in the forecast as a change of pace. The walkers, even the children playing in the neighborhood streets, seem to have almost disappeared in the last week or so. We are down now to that core group of regular walkers and bike riders I was used to seeing before the stay-at-home orders were issued. I find this a bit curious, but maybe it's because some people are going back to work now instead of working from home. 

Reading/Watching/Listening to:

I'm about 90 pages into I, John Kennedy Toole now and I'm still not sure what to think of it. The book is supposed to be published tomorrow, so I haven't seen any reviews of it yet and don't know how others are reacting to it. It's a novel written in third person about the author of A Confederacy of Dunces, a man who killed himself before that Pulitzer Prize novel was ever published. It reads more like a biography than a novel, at least so far, and I'm afraid it will fall somewhere between untrustworthy biography and poorly presented novel. I suppose I'm disappointed because I was expecting so much from this one.

I'm about halfway through the audiobook version of My Sister, the Serial Killer and I'm still not entirely sure where this one is headed. I am, though, impressed that it's a lot more than the "serial killer thriller" that its title implies. Instead, it's as much about sibling rivalry as anything else. One sister is tall and ordinary looking, the other (the killer) is short and so beautiful that men can't keep themselves from staring at her. How long will the less attractive sister be willing to help her sister hide the bodies - especially when it appears that her doctor/employer might be her beautiful sister's next victim?

Despite already having a high stack of books on hand for reading and reviewing (and being way behind), I added two new ones at the end of last week. One of them is Run with the Wind, the second novel from 84-year-old Jim Cole, a fellow Texan I "accidentally" met in a Kroger store a few months ago. The oddity of that meeting is that Jim lives down in Victoria, about 150 miles from the store, and I live about 6 miles from it and seldom shop there. I enjoyed his first book, Never Cry Again, and I'm looking forward to this new  one - even though it will probably be sometime in June before I can get to it. 

I also added In West Mills to my stack because the library unexpectedly made it available to me as an e-book. Just yesterday, they were predicting that I would have it in approximately 4 weeks, so this one catches me by surprise. I haven't downloaded it yet, but I can only postpone the download for three days or I will lose it. This is the first real crack in my May reading schedule - that sure didn't take long. I've heard great things about this 2019 novel, so I don't want to squander the opportunity to read it now despite of the weird timing.

Netflix provided us with some good stuff last week, especially two of its own productions, a film called Marriage Story and a limited series titled Waco. The two are very different, but both of them pack strong emotional punches. Marriage Story is about the end of an almost decade-long marriage that neither party (especially the husband) really wants to see end. But circumstances dictate otherwise, so the two agree that if their marriage is to end it will be as amicable an experience for them and their young son as possible. And then the wife gets a lawyer. And then the husband gets a lawyer. And then it's no longer in their hands. The movie stars Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, and Adam Alda. It's brilliantly done. 

Waco is a six-part miniseries about Branch Davidian leader David Koresh and his followers who died in that tragic fire near Waco back in 1993 during an FBI siege of their Mount Carmel compound. 78 of the faithful still in the compound, along with Koresh, died in the devastating fire although a few did escape the flames. Almost 30 of the victims were children, and more than a dozen of those were fathered by Koresh. The series is based on two books about the event, one written by a Koresh follower who jumped through a closed window to escape the flames, and the other written by an FBI hostage negotiator who worked so hard for two months to get Koresh to surrender everyone to authorities. From what I can tell, it's historically accurate to the event.



Listening To:

I've been listening to the pioneers of bluegrass music this week, those first generation artists who helped create a brand new genre of music that is still alive and well some seventy or eighty years later (depending on where you start counting). Hazel and Alice were two of those people, working class feminists who took on the bluegrass establishment by joining together to make their own music. Theirs was one of the very first bluegrass band to be led by women instead of men. Their voices blended beautifully together, and what they left behind is simply wonderful. 

In the Kitchen:

No improvements on the grocery or shopping front, I'm afraid. In fact, parts of the state are now seeing limits on the amount of beef or chicken that shoppers can purchase on any one trip to the grocery. Meat packing plants in other parts of the country are faced with high numbers of covid-19-infected workers, and that's starting to have an impact even on a beef-producing state like Texas. I haven't personally run into that yet, but my brother in Austin tells me that his grocery store limits a customer to two packages of beef or chicken, no matter the cut. 

The Outside World:

Texas is officially open. Well, it's open if businesses can figure out how to keep everyone "socially distanced" and limit customers to 25% of their pre-virus capacity. That sounds difficult, but I'm not expecting a real rush of customers to test that capacity limit right away anyhow, so maybe it's doable. Personally, I'm going to give this gradual opening thing at least a couple of weeks to see what kind of spike in virus infections comes of it before I venture out. I'm of the opinion that it's too early to do this, so I'll leave it to all the volunteers to get out there and see what happens to them and, ultimately, to our hospitals. 

Pale Kings and Princes - Robert B. Parker

Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series is the first detective series that really caught my imagination. The series began in 1973 with The Godwulf Manuscript, but I didn’t discover the books until 1983 when I spotted a paperback copy of Ceremony, the ninth Spenser novel, in a local bookstore. The good news, and probably the reason I got instantly stuck on the series, was that I had an eight-book Spenser backlist to explore, and I hurried to do just that. Then, over the next couple of decades, I had to wait for them to come trickling out one-by-one like everyone else.

By the time Parker died in 2010, he had written thirty-eight Spenser novels, but the series was still not complete. Two more completed Spenser novels were posthumously released, and the partially-completed Spenser book he was working on at the time of his death, Silent Night, was finished by his literary agent and published in 2013. In addition to these forty-one Spenser novels, Ace Atkins, author of the Quinn Colson series (a series I highly recommend), has added five more Spenser novels to the series. 1987’s Pale Kings and Princes is the fourteenth Spenser novel, about one-third of the way into the forty-one-book series.

Robert B. Parker

This time around, Spenser is hired by a newspaper to investigate the murder of one of its reporters who had been prying into the massive cocaine trade centered in Wheaton, Massachusetts, when he was killed. It doesn’t take Spenser long to get himself into the same predicament that got the reporter killed. Wheaton is under the thumb of a Columbian kingpin who will do anything to keep it that way and, with the help of the Wheaton cops, any threats to the Columbian, including people like Spenser, are usually quickly eliminated. Spenser, though, is as persistent as he his tough, and he doesn’t plan to go anywhere until he gets justice for the murdered reporter – even if he has to dispense that justice himself.  

According to Spenser, what he does best is annoy people enough to make them do things that lead him to more people to annoy. He puts it this way:

            “I don’t know what’s going on so I wander around and ask questions and annoy people and finally somebody says something or does something then I wander around and ask questions about that and annoy people and so on. Better than sitting up in a tree with a spyglass.”

However he does it, Spenser always gets answers. He’s really good at annoying people. And with a whole lot of help from Hawk, the huge black man who is also Spenser’s best friend, and Susan, the love of his life (at least to this point in the series), he will stay alive long enough to make the right people pay again this time. Spenser, Hawk, and Susan, different as they are from each other, make one hell of a team.

Bottom Line: Pale Kings and Princes cannot be said to be one of the stronger books in the Spenser series because the crime being investigated is a fairly standard one even for its day. But with the Spenser books, it’s not so much about the crime or mystery anyway. The real fun comes from watching Spenser, Hawk, and Susan work together as their relationships evolve over time. Susan is well represented in this one, Hawk not so much. And that’s a shame, because underusing Hawk is never a good thing. Just ask Spenser.