10 January 2010
R is for Reading
Filed under reading
If readers of this space are wondering why I haven’t put together my best music of 2009 list yet, it’s because I’m still reviewing all the 2009 music I have. I was better last year at writing mini-reviews as the year went along so that when the year was ended all I had to do was review what I’d written, plus hurry up and listen to the late acquisitions. In 2009 I sorta let it all pile up, so I’ve had to go back and rediscover the older stuff and hurry up and listen to my later acquisitions. I don’t even know what’s currently in the lead for best album, ‘though it’s almost for sure it will be something stringy. The metal just wasn’t as good this year, and I didn’t get very much prog.
One day when I was an undergrad, my advisor at UH-Hilo asked me what I read when I wasn’t reading for my studies. The truth was that for most of the time when I was an English major, the only serious reading (that is, non-magazine, non-newspaper reading) I did was for my studies. During my downtime, whether that was the rare weekend when I didn’t have assigned reading pressing me down or summer vacations when I wasn’t taking classes, I tended not to read anything. There were a few books here and there, of course. In my first year in Hilo (the mostly non-social year) I somehow found time to read William Kennedy’s Ironweed, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Bernard Malamud’s The Natural. In the second year I read Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On (which, among these titles I’m listing here, is the one I’d call a must-read) and Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.
I mentioned some of these titles to my advisor. He asked me why I’d picked those books. I said it was because when I’d been at Manoa, I’d been in the Modern American Literature track (and the Creative Writing track) and now that I was somewhere that didn’t have those tracks, I thought I should seek some of those titles I wasn’t to be assigned as an English major at Hilo (and yes, I know Atwood’s not an American). That was part of it; the other part of it was just that I was really interested in those books. My advisor always listened closely to these conversations and in fact read Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses shortly after I first met him because I’d mentioned that it had been my favorite reading the previous year. When he later introduced me to his wife, he introduced me as “an admirer of Cormac McCarthy.”
He told me there was nothing wrong with my reading list, but asked if there was something else. “What else do you read,” he asked, “to disengage your brain from the scholarship and just for the love of reading?”
I had an answer, of course, but until he asked me this question, I didn’t know it was okay to admit it. “Baseball books,” I said. “I read lots and lots of baseball books.”
He seemed amused and impressed. I asked him what it was for him, not sure I wasn’t breaching protocol.
“Murder mysteries,” he said. “Smart ones and trashy ones.”
I later found out that other English professors read the same stuff. I had always respected murder mysteries but had never gotten into them as a genre, ‘though in ninth grade I’d read eight or nine of Gregory McDonald’s Fletch mysteries. So a few years later, when I was an English teacher and needed to get my face in some book that would take me away from being an English teacher, I went to the used bookstore. The shelves were laden with authors whose names I’d known forever and whose work I had shelved many times in my library job in ninth grade.
But when my eyes settled on A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton, I somehow just knew. I bought that book and its immediate sequel, B is for Burglar, and as insurance, two mysteries by Susan Conant, A New Leash on Death and Dead and Doggone. I enjoyed the heck out of both writers, but it was Grafton who really sank her claws into me.
I tend to read them in spurts. Four novels one summer, then a few years not reading Grafton at all, then six more the next summer, then a few more years of no Grafton. When I was first consumed by them, M is for Malice had yet to be published. Now I am on O is for Outlaw and she has just published U is for Undertow. I think if I time it right, I can be ready for the last novel when it is finally published.
The mysteries are good, but I think any fan of serial novels will tell you that it’s really about the characters. In Kinsey Milhone, Grafton has created a character who is likable and admirable while still bearing a few flaws. The supporting characters in her life, like her landlord, the owner of her neighborhood bar, her distant cousins, and a lieutenant in the local police department, give her world the depth and flavor that demand updates with each new novel, whether they are part of any given story or not.
Grafton’s style is fairly cinematic, as if it were written for episodic television, and she’s got a few flaws of her own. Still, she weaves a good story and she seems to strike a good balance between developing her characters and moving her stories along. Most of her novels are merely good. Some of them are very good.
I took a good couple of months to get through N is for Noose—which was quite good—because of work and NaNoWriMo and other stuff, and am now joyfully immersed in O is for Outlaw, which is one of the most interesting stories in the series so far. It makes me wish I had more time for reading, “all the time in the world,” as Burgess Meredith said in the best Twilight Zone of them all, but I’m kind of happy that I’ve been able to carve out some time each week anyway. The list of stuff I want to read next is getting long!
2010-01-10 :: me