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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
Devil in a Blue Dress
This is the first of the Easy Rawlings books, it seems. I started the series somewhere down the line, and then pretty much read to the end. So, I decided I should begin in at the beginning. It's around 1948 or so, and Easy has just got out of the Army. He’s living in Los Angeles and just got laid off from a job at an aircraft factory. He needs money because he bought a house and needs to come up with mortgage payments. A sort of friend, who runs a bar suggests Easy do some work for a white man, DeWitt Albright. It seems that DeWitt wants a young woman found, one Daphne Monet. Allegedly, Albright wants Easy to find Daphne for a Mr. Todd Carter, a politically connected tycoon of some sort. But there might be more going on.
Well, some seemingly peripheral folks end up dead and Easy is shaken down by the cops, trying to pin something on him. He does find Ms. Monet, but she is a young woman running from some demons in her past. Easy’s violent best friend, Raymond Alexander, aka Mouse, sidles up from Houston and gets involved. And so forth. It’s a pretty engaging yarn. Perhaps too much sex and drinking for this elderly, repressed Calvinist, but that’s pretty much unavoidable these days, unless one is into Amish romances (who knew there was such a thing?).
