11
Followers
23
Following
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
Lurking Shadows
Carroll John Daly is reputed to be the inventor of hard-boiled or noire crime fiction. He's not generally considered to be one of the masters of the genre—people like Raymond Chandler, James M. Caine or Dashiell Hammett—but he did precede them. So I figured I should check him out, and once I found a source of some of his out-of-copyright work on the internet, I did just that. This particular book is a novella, originally published in a pulp magazine. It's got everything one might expect in pulp fiction. Gangsters, drugs, opium dens run by sinister Chinese, double crossing, guns, knives, and of course, a beautiful heiress. Great literature this is not, but it's a fast, and good read.
