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
The Chequer Board
It seems that Jackie Turner is having medical problems. From time to time he passes out, cold. It's related to a medical problem he picked up in the war some ten years previously when he got shrapnel embedded in his brain. He had spent quite some time recovering from the wound in hospital in Cornwall. But his ward was actually a prison ward. Jackie had made some sketchy deals while in the military. Another of his mates, Duggie Brent, had murdered a man in a fight over a woman. A third, Flag Officer Morgan was just there because there was no place else for him. He didn't need to be imprisoned. The fourth was an American, Dave Lesurier, who was African American and was charged by his southern, white officers with rape, because he was "walking out" with a white, British woman, Grace Trefussis. Well, anyway, to help with his recovery, the other people in Jackie's ward were tasked with reading and talking to him. Over time, he developed quite a fondness for them all. So, when Jackie is told that he likely has only a year to live, he decides to go on an investigating tour to see what happened to his mates from the prison hospital.
It's quite an interesting tale. Morgan had been shot down in Burma and eventually took up residence there and married a Burmese woman. Duggie Brent eventually became a butcher in Cornwall. Dave Lesurier stayed on in Cornwall and eventually married Grace Trefussis, the woman he was accused of having raped.
There was quite some meditation on racism in this book. It seems that there was a group of African-American troops in Cornwall who got along just fine with the local population until a bunch of white American troops were deployed to the region. Then problems arose. Then too, people in Britain couldn't imagine that Morgan had voluntarily taken up with a Burmese woman, and figured he was a brain-damaged beach comber.
