Reading Non-List Books at a Breath-Taking Speed

Not since the summer I discovered Nancy Drew have I read a book a day. Almost at that pace now, but unfortunately, most of them are not worth the time and effort of writing up a Slackers' review. Over the past couple of days, I finished three that merit some critique.

At one of the Slackers urging to read books set in Portland Oregon, I read Lis Wiehl's Hand of Fate. I probably never should have taken it out of the library when I skimmed through the endorsements, all from provocative radio talk show hosts. Wiehl, herself in the business, has pandered her murder mystery in the best Time/Warner conglomerate style. Sure these guys live for generating hate mail, any kind of mail ups their salaries. But the reader has no sympathy for Fate's demise and the three female leads are as indistinguishable as the Sex in the City trio. The one time I got interested was at the mention of the store Oh Baby which I thought might be developed into a subplot, perhaps on cross-dressing male radio talent. But alas, this wonderful store where I purchased my favorite lilac slip was merely a throw away line -- or another attempt to get local support behind the book.

Next I picked up a book that itself had local anchors for me: mentioning the area malls and newspaper. This mystery, Never Look Back by Linwood Barclay, was much, much better, driving me to pick up two more of this author's books at the library this afternoon. Set in a town that harkens of Glens Falls, Barclay weaves a complicated story of a falsely accused reporter whose newspaper has replaced on-site coverage of town meetings by feeding You Tube coverage to India, who is battling attempts to privatize the near-by prison, whose four-year-old is kidnapped twice and whose wife's disappearance makes the detective focus on the reporter as the lead suspect. Lots of twists and turns deftly handled if not summarily and oddly tied up at the conclusion.

Finally, to pose for my face-to-face book club as a serious reader, I decided to reserve a couple more Gabriel Garcia Marquez books after advocating that the group read something life-changing like One Hundred Years of Solitude. In less than two hours, I finished Memories of My Melancholy Whores.written when Gabito was 77 and almost 20 years after Love in the Time of Cholera. Although I haven't read LITTOC, I watch it on DVD periodically. It is one of the most romantic stories I know. And MOMMW repeats its major theme of all-consuming love happening only once in a lifetime, here at the end of the hero's life not at its start, and that all other therapeutic sex can be counted and recorded much like changes in weight or blood pressure. As GGM writes: "Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love."

It is also a wonderful self-assessment on aging. To quote at length: "... I confronted my inner self for the first time as my ninetieth year went by. I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people's time."

The other theme that recurs from LITTOC is the hero's writing love-lorn articles (letters) that resonate with the community at large. Those thought in the story appeal to all ages, but the novel is best at portraying love and lust in that part of the population thought not to still be engaged in thinking about it, let alone physically dealing with its issues.

By the way, in case I forgot to mention it, I also read a recently published biography of GGM in the years leading up to One Hundred Years of Solitude. It does take some of the mystery out of the novel because it tracks the historical events that inspired his reworking and personalization; but it was written by a true believer, one who read OHYOS at one no-stop sitting. And I thought I was quick with three days (but then again, I slept).