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Reading Slothfully
I was told in elementary school that I only could read at half the speed for success in college. Oh well, one benefit of slow reading is you get to live with the characters a longer period of time. I read in a vain attempt to better understand people. At my other homes, I'm known as a spouse, pop, guy in the choir, physical chemist, computer/web dilettante and child-care provider. In theory, I'm a published author, if you consider stuff like Quenching Cross Sections for Electronic Energy Transfer Reactions Between Metastable Argon Atoms and Noble Gases and Small Molecules to count as publications. I've strewn dozens of such fascinating things to the winds.
Currently reading
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
The Spirit of the Border
Ramona the Brave (Ramona, #3)
The Underground Man (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
Delilah of the Snows
Mrs. Miniver
Betsy-Tacy Treasury (P.S.)
A Christmas Carol
The Way Some People Die
Envy of Angels
Fearless Jones
Last summer I read through the last three of the Easy Rawlins books by Walter Mosley. Apparently, Mosley has had second thoughts and has resuscitated Easy, but the new book isn't yet available on kindle. So, I figured why not try a different Mosley series, the one featuring Fearless Jones. This is the first of them in which we are introduced to the narrator, Paris Minton, a second-hand book seller who is in the business primarily because he gets to sit around all day reading books, and his friend Fearless Jones, an army-trained killer, who has a strong sense of honor, but who keeps getting into scrapes of one kind and another, and who seems always to enmesh poor Paris in his trials.This book was fast-paced and interesting. It was set in 1954, and has much to say about the problems of racism. I think that might be one of my primary interests in reading Mosley, he's an acute observer of the problems and effects of racism. Basically, he is opening up a mostly unknown world to me despite my having been brought up in Baltimore before the Civil Rights era (believe it or not, I never knew about slavery in my home state until I read Frederick Douglass a few years ago. WTF?).
I found the story itself a bit convoluted and am not sure it makes a whole lot of sense, we have Nazis, Israeli spies, crooked cops, ambitions and wanton young women, crooked store-front preachers, etc. all involved in essentially the same scam. Whatever, Paris and Fearless eventually survive repeated attempts to kill them and more-or-less figure out the reasons they kept coming across dead bodies.
