Hostile Books

 We've all had them, the books we just couldn't pick up. For whatever reason, it's a book everyone says you have to read that you just can't get through. Sometimes, you give them another try. Why's this a bestseller? Why is this a classic? 

I've run into it with Russian novels. I've found them hard to read in print. Then a friend of mine, who knew a Russian speaker and an actual Russian, said they don't really translate well. So I listened to Crime and Punishment on audio. Made a huge difference.

But what of books you just couldn't finish no matter what? I went through a list of classics that included Don Quixote and The Magic Mountain. It also included a book that gets highly praised: Portrait of a Lady. 

The book begins with Henry James doing his own literary criticism. Um...Aren't you supposed to let other people do the critiques? But Henry just had to provide a few pages reviewing his own book. Okay, fair enough. Stephen King sticks this stuff at the end of his because who wants to read the author's self-indulgent prattle? So I skipped it and moved on to the novel proper.

I'm aware books written before 1900 have a slower pace than those written since World War II. Hemingway made his reputation trimming the fat from his prose almost to the point where you wish he'd put words back in. (That said, The Sun Also Rises, Farewell to Arms, and To Have and Have Not are masterpieces. Fight me.)

But Henry James spends twenty-five pages where bankers spend the whole time looking down on the common folk. By Page 10, I'm wondering why I'm supposed to be reading this. By Page 20, I hate everyone on the page so far. By Page 25, I throw the book across the room. 

But wait. This is a classic. Hey, I slogged through Moby Dick, and I'm glad I did. That story is imprinted on modern storytelling. It's in the DNA of two Star Trek movies. (First Contact is explicit about it when Lily yells at Picard. "Captain Ahab has to go fight his whale!")

So I did like I did with Crime and Punishment. I went audio. Now, I know there are people who think audio is cheating. Since they're wrong, I'm going to ignore that. Anyway, I made it a little farther before I realized the William James was the smarter brother. Without him, Freud's cigar would just be a cigar. (Wait...Freud did say that. Um...He'd have never invented his famous slip?) I not only hated the bankers, but the titular lady did nothing for me, either. I felt like my time was being wasted. 

I'd gone through this before. In high school, we had to read The Scarlet Letter. Also in high school, we read the Cliff's Notes to The Scarlet Letter because most of us hated that book. No Moby Dick. No Tom Sawyer, by America's greatest writer. We did somehow manage Tale of Two Cities. But The Scarlet Letter? By about halfway through the book, I was praying time travelers would gift the local indigenous tribe with a small thermonuclear device, maybe a neutron bomb. Now, let me qualify this by saying Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of America's greatest short story writers. That said, I don't like this one. But I love Stephen King, and I'm still angry about Cell.

 Currently, I have one book I've attempted to read over the years with little success on audio. When The Bonfire of the Vanities came out, I attempted to read it. Again, like The Scarlet Letter and Portrait of a Lady, I had to wade through characters I'd generally avoid in real life. Both times I attempted to read it, all I took away before I put the book down was that New York in 1985 was a miserable place to live. Wolfe's other famous book, The Right Stuff, had that can-do, go fever zeitgeist of the early space program. The Mercury Seven were fun to be around even at their worst. The only thing missing was Yuri Gagarin, who'd have fit right in with them.

I'm attempting Bonfire on audio. I think part of the problem is the inciting incident comes about 15% into the narrative. The paperback listed on Amazon is 702 words, so about 108 pages or so. The average novel is around 300 pages, so by page 100, we all know the characters and several major events have happened. It doesn't help the book as an early eighties Rolling Stone hip vibe, something I have even less patience with now than I did at the age of 20. I'm sticking with it, mainly because I listen to it in 100-page sips. I still don't like the people in this book, but eight years of Game of Thrones and five seasons of Succession have awakened my inner schadenfreude when these people manage to screw themselves.

 

Six Degrees of Separation... or Less

I am constantly fascinated about how few steps it takes to connect between people.  For example:  

June 23, 1993 - Lorena Bobbit got fed up with being abused by her husband John Wayne Bobbitt and cut off his dick with a Ginzu carving knife (turns out Ginzu knives really were as sharp as they were sold to be - truth in advertising lives!).  

John Wayne Bobbitt, with his newly reattached penis* formed a band, The Severed Parts, which went nowhere, and appeared in two adult films, John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut and Frankenpenis. 

*And watching newscasters around the world trying to say the word "penis" on prime-time news in the 1990s was one of the main hilarities of that simpler time - now, of course, 'Anything Goes'.

In 2003, Bobbitt proved that he was one of the world's slowest learners when he was arrested for battery on his new wife.  And he hired an entertainment lawyer, Paul A. Erickson, who booked him on a worldwide "Love Hurts" media tour.

Paul A. Erickson highlights:  Ran Pat Buchanan's Presidential campaign in 1992, and advised Mitt Romney in his Presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012.  In 2016 - he claimed he was on the Trump Presidential transition team. He also sent an email during the 2016 NRA convention to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump with the subtle subject: "Kremlin Connection".

Also in 2016 - Was successfully sexpionaged by Russian "gun rights advocate": 

Maria Butina -  Red sparrow financed by Russian billionaires Alexander Torshin and Konstantin Nikolayev, both friends of Putin, to create a "pro-gun" organization whose chief purpose was to infiltrate Russian opposition groups and, later, the NRA. She succeeded in doing both.  LINK 

2015 - Invited to the South Dakota TARS (Teenage Republicans) Camp in the Black Hills by Dusty Johnson then working for Vantage Point Solutions in Mitchell, SD:  

Johnson raved about her and introduced her to everyone he could, especially in the NRA...  

In December, 2015 then-NRA Vice President (later President) Pete Brownell and former NRA President David Keene went to Moscow with Maria Butina, Torshin, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.  BTW, Butina and Torshin were made life-time members of the NRA.  

2016 - She did what any good Russian agent in a spy novel would do: She sexpionaged Paul Erickson and lived with him for the next to years, but... [sob]

"But this relationship does not represent a strong tie to the United States because Butina appears to treat it as simply a necessary aspect of her activities. For example, on at least one occasion, Butina offered an individual other than U.S. Person 1 [Erickson] sex in exchange for a position within a special interest organization. Further, in papers seized by the FBI, Butina complained about living with U.S. Person 1 [Erickson] and expressed disdain for continuing to cohabitate with U.S. Person 1 [Erickson]." Dakota Free Press

2018 - Butina pled guilty to to infiltrate the US conservative movement as an agent for the Kremlin and to working with Erickson to forge bonds with NRA officials and conservative leaders while under the direction of Torshin. 

2019 - Butina was released from prison, and returned to Russia where she was welcomed as a hero by Vladimir Putin.

Where are they now?

(in alphabetical order)

John Wayne Bobbitt is currently living quietly in Florida, and has been married and divorced 3 times since that fateful night.  Hope springs eternal.  

Maria Butina is a deputy of the Russian Duma, and sits on the Committee on International Affairs as well as the Commission on Investigation of Foreign Interference in Domestic Affairs of Russia.  And if that doesn't make you laugh, nothing will.

Paul A. Erickson - 2019 - Tried and convicted for an oil development scheme and wire fraud and money laundering for Compass Care, a senior living company he founded.  In 2021 - Went to prison for same and was pardoned by President Trump on his last full day in office, January 19, 2021.  

According to AI and my own exhaustive search - like D-Day in "Animal House" - his current whereabouts are unknown.

Dusty Johnson is South Dakota's sole US House Representative, and lost his bid this May to replace Larry Rhoden as Governor of South Dakota. His future is unknown.  

Anyway, from John Wayne Bobbitt to Vladimir Putin in way less than six steps… you can't make this stuff up.

Moonlight Mile

 

My sis sent me a copy of Lehane’s Moonlight Mile, which for some reason I hadn’t read, and although it’s a very good book, it left me for some reason unsatisfied, and I can’t quite put my finger on why.  I might have been asking it to be a different book than it was. 

Moonlight Mile came out in 2010, which means after The Given Day, the first of the Coughlin trilogy, and before Live by Night, the second novel, which picks up Joe Coughlin’s story as a Florida bootlegger.  Moonlight Mile is the last of the Kenzie/Gennaro series, so far, and it’s also a sequel to Gone, Baby, Gone, published twelve years earlier.  I had the nagging feeling Moonlight Mile was kind of an orphan. 

I mean Lehane no offense, but of course if it were me, and he made a similar comment about something of mine, it would get my back up.  We can’t know what impels a writer. 

In any case, we’re revisiting unfinished business.  Gone, Baby, Gone ends on an ambiguous and very uncertain note.  Moonlight Mile is, quite explicitly, a reading of that moral temperature.  I can’t say much about the plot, which takes off at right angles from Gone, Baby, Gone – not without giving too much away, if you’re unfamiliar with the previous book.  We are back in the world of human trafficking, heartless as before, although not quite as horrific.  And maybe the stakes simply don’t seem as high.  There was an edge of nausea in Gone, Baby, Gone that’s just not present, here.  A sense of the absolute is missing. 

It’s not too much to say that evil itself has often been Lehane’s theme.  Sometimes it’s frighteningly specific, and sometimes it’s a planetary influence, felt but unseen - Mystic River makes your skin crawl on both counts.  It may be an odd complaint, but Moonlight Mile didn’t creep me out enough. 

They Must Suffer!

I had every intention to run a column today about my favorite books that I've read in the second quarter of this year. What they are. Why I loved 'em. But sometimes life gets in the way--or rather, the lack of sleep does. 

Last night, I didn't sleep one wink, and my two remaining brain cells are rebelling. Could I pick some great books to mention? Sure. Could I say why they're fab? Not in any coherent fashion. So instead, I am rerunning a column from 2018 about the importance of being mean to your characters. I hope it helps.

But first, my favorite book of the second quarter? The Book Witch by Meg Shaffer. It's part fantasy, part mystery, part romance, part adventure, and it is all wonderful. I don't have it in me to go into detail right now about why it's wonderful, but if you love books, I feel confident you'll agree with me. So, check it out. Trust me.

And now ...

They Must Suffer!

Authors in the mystery community are generally known for being nice folks. Helpful, welcoming, even pleasant. But when it comes to their work, successful writers are mean. They have to be.

An author who likes her characters too much might be inclined to make things easy for them. The sleuth quickly finds the killer. She's never in any real danger. In fact, there's no murder at all in the story or book. Just an attempted murder, but the sleuth's best friend pulls through just fine.

These scenarios may be all well and good in Happily Ever After Land. But in Crime Land, they result in a book without tension that's probably going to be way too short. That's why editors often tell mystery authors to make their characters suffer.

Yet that can be easier said than done. If you're basing a character on someone you don't like, then you might have a grand time writing every punch, broken bone, and funeral. But not every character can be based on an enemy. And sometimes characters seem to plead from the page, "Don't do that to me."

It's happened to me. I once started writing a certain story. I had a great first page, and then I got stuck. No matter how I tried to write the next several sentences, they didn't work. So I walked away from the computer. Sometimes I find a break can help a writing logjam. But not this time. In the end, I found I simply couldn't write the story I'd planned because, you see, that plan had included the death of a cat. And I just couldn't do it.

Don't do it!

The publication I was aiming the story for would have been fine with a story that included a dead animal. But I wasn't fine with it. And I knew my regular readers wouldn't like it either. Sure animals die in real life, and sometimes they die in fiction too. But those deaths should be key to the story. The Yearling wouldn't work if the deer didn't die. And Old Yeller needed the dog to die too.

But not all stories need animal jeopardy. And that's the key question: is it necessary? In the story I was writing about the cat it wasn't, and I knew it in my gut, even if I didn't know it in my head at first. That's why I couldn't bring myself to write the story as planned. Instead, with the help of a friend, I found another way to make the story work, one without any harm to animals.

It's not the first time something like that has happened to me. I once wrote a story called "Suffer the Little Children" (published in my collection, Don't Get Mad, Get Even). This is the first story of mine involving a female sheriff name Ellen Wescott. She's smart and honest and way different than I'd planned. Originally she was supposed to be a corrupt man. But as I was thinking through the plot during my planning stage, I heard that male sheriff say in my head, "Don't make me do that. I don't want to do that." Spooky, right?

Sometimes characters
just have to be nice

While part of me immediately responded, "too bad,"--he had to suffer--another part of me knew that when characters talk back like that, it's because my subconscious knows what I'm planning isn't going to work. Either it won't work for the readers, as with the cat I couldn't kill. Or it won't work for the plot, as was the case with this sheriff story. So my corrupt male sheriff became an honorable female sheriff, and large parts of the plot changed. My female sheriff faced obstacles, but she was a good person. That was a compromise my gut could live with.

Readers, I'd love to hear about stories and books you've enjoyed that involved a plot event you didn't love, yet you accepted it because you knew it was important to the story. And writers, I'd love to hear about times you couldn't bring yourself to write something. What was it? And why?

Fifty years since our first date

In a couple of days, on June 24, 2026, it will be the fiftieth anniversary of my first date with my husband, and I can't resist marking the occasion with a celebratory post. If you'd told us that evening that we were launching a fifty-year relationship, we'd have laughed our heads off.

We met at the Free Association, an anarchist free school on West 20th Street off Fifth Avenue long before that block's gentrification. After a few months of snappy banter and a couple of heated political disputes, he invited me out for a beer at Paula's, a lesbian bar on West 11th Street off Greenwich Avenue in the Village. Both places are long gone, but Paula's was resurrected briefly in the alternative New York of Lawrence Block's The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown (2022). As his character Bernie Rhodenbarr says, “There were guys who came there on a regular basis, and not to hit on lesbians. I guess they liked the atmosphere." We were so skeptical about the evening going well that we each invited a friend along.

We had little in common beyond our zest for political dialectic—the left’s fancy word for arguing at that time. And we both were readers. My favorite book was Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. I was also reading P.D. James, Ellis Peters, and Patricia Moyes. He was reading Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, and Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. By two years later, much had changed. In a poem titled “Insomnia,”* I wrote nostalgically about

. . . love among the leaflets and petitions
we had no place else to go
all we had then is gone
the strangeness, the friendships, the poverty
we have nothing left of that
except each other

Change is a constant in a fifty-year relationship. At the beginning, nobody thought we’d stay together, including us. Today, we’re still discovering unexpected ways in which we’re so different we’d be incompatible if we hadn’t also spent fifty years on working out how to get along. When we married, we talked about growing old together but didn't quite believe it would happen or could have imagined what it would be like. He’s retired and I’m in that liminal space between setting myself a rigorous standard of productivity and doing as much or as little as I like, happy as a bee knee deep in pollen.

He’s currently reading The Triangle of Power by Alexander Stubb, current president and former prime minister of Finland. I read a book a day or sometimes two in three days. Right now I’m particularly enjoying Sherry Thomas’s Lady Sherlock series, a riff on the Holmes canon that may be my favorite since Laurie King created Mary Russell. On our various electronic devices, I stream videos, mostly French and Korean series, also British and other English-language cop shows, rarely American. He hangs out online with global gaming friends he’s made over the years, listens to short story podcasts, and watches videos on art restoration, cooking, archaeology, and what’s going on in the world. I can’t get him to watch a movie with me, even on the rare occasion when it’s one I think we’d both enjoy. As I said, we’re different.

A lot of people ask us how we make it work. Certain aspects anyone can try at home (that’s the work). For the rest, you have to be lucky. You have to love each other (that’s the luck). It takes a lot of work, especially if you’re different: talking to each other; not always being right; letting go of expectations, including that you’ll agree on everything and do everything together. You can’t expect perfection. It doesn’t exist. You find that your beliefs and ways of doing things are not the absolutes you thought they were. What a liberating surprise, once you get used to the idea.


*included in my first poetry collection, I Am the Daughter, and in a volume of Best Poems of 1980 (Monitor)

Dadication

Today is Father’s Day. While the focus is men, the country owes the holiday to women. Three in its earliest history and another four decades on are:

• 1908, Grace Golden Clayton organized a celebration following a West Virginia mining disaster that killed her father among many other men.
• 1909-1910, Sonora Smart Dodd initiated a companion to Mother’s Day in Spokane, Washington.
• 1911, Jane Addams, social reformer and suffrage activist, proposed a Chicago Father's Day.
• 1957, Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith chastised Congress for honoring one parent and ignoring the other for 40 years.

Despite their best efforts, it took nearly seven decades after Mother’s Day for a corresponding Dad’s day to become officially observed. At the presidential level,

• 1916, Woodrow Wilson spoke at Spokane’s Father’s Day festival organized by Dodd.
• 1924, Calvin Coolidge proposed a day for fathers amid strong opposition.
• 1966, Lyndon Johnson unofficially observed the holiday throughout his term.
• 1972, Richard Nixon signed recognition of Father's Day into law.
• 1977, Jimmy Carter issued Proclamation 4505 designating the 3^rd Sunday in June as the official holiday.

Leigh and (imaginary) offspring

Adaptive Adoption

Me, I have no children although a girl once ‘adopted’ me and still calls me ‘Dad’. We might share DNA: Like me, she’s a ruff, tuff, cream puff with a twisted sense of humor. She’s fearless and tender at the same time. That’s the closest I’ve come to fatherhood.

Gentleladies have asked why I have no children and I honestly answer that I never grew up enough. I orbit my personal planet in a cosmic haze of my own. A good companion might handle that, but can you imagine one, two, or three Mini-Me tots tugging her skirts and messing up my first grade teacher’s game of telephone as a lesson on gossip?

I’ve written about my Dad who embraced an amazing range of interests and was largely self-taught. At 6’4, he was a presence. Women and small children adored him. I still have anger issues surrounding his unnecessary death, an arrogant screw-up largely attributable to the Mayo. Nevertheless, I have good memories, especially when I was very young and learning at his proverbial knee. I count myself lucky.

Ain’t Got a Home

If you have a good father in your life, you are fortunate too. A sizable proportion of children have little or no male parenting in their lives. We owe it to our families to count our blessings.

And then there’s Clarence Frogman Henry who ain’t got no fodder, ain’t got no mudder, ain’t got no sister, not even a brudder. He’s a lonely frog, ain’t got a home.

Favorites, Genrewise

FYI, today's post is sort of a continuation of--or at least is related to--a SleuthSayers column I posted a month ago called It's Still a Mystery. The subject of that post was mystery-fiction subgenres, and the subject of today's post includes all kinds of genres and subgenres. This one came about because of a discussion I had last week with several of my relatives (actually my wife's relatives) about favorite movies. 

I have mentioned before at this blog that I love movies, and my discussion with our kinfolks went beyond overall favorites and into which movies are our favorites in different genres. (We focused more on movies than on written fiction because there was more common ground there--we were more likely to have seen the same movies than to have read the same novels or stories.)

So, for what it's worth, I came up with a list of my favorites, not only of mystery/crime movies but of movies across the board. Be aware, though, that in this case favorite does not always mean best. I do recognize the excellence and quality of films like Citizen Kane, Schindler's List, Rashomon, Sophie's Choice, Sunset Boulevard, and so on--but alas, those are not my favorites. My favorites are those I enjoyed the most, and that I find myself watching over and over again. (Yes, I do that, because I have all these on DVD--it's enough to run my wife crazy).

Having said that, here's my list. Please note that I've invented all kinds of subgenres to put them in, which was almost as much fun as picking the favorites.

Movies:

Crime -- L.A. Confidential (1997) 

Science Fiction -- Aliens (1986)

Western -- Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Romance -- Casablanca (1942)

Horror -- The Thing (1982)

Comedy -- The Big Lebowski (1998)

Fantasy -- Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003)

Adventure -- Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Drama -- 12 Angry Men (1957)

War -- Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Sports -- The Natural (1984)

Swords & Sandals -- Gladiator (2000)

Traditional Mystery -- Knives Out (2019)

Horrific Mystery -- Psycho (1960)

Noir -- Double Indemnity (1944)

Neo-Noir -- Body Heat (1981) 

Gangsters -- The Godfather (1972)

Spies -- Goldfinger (1964)

Buddies -- Lethal Weapon (1987)

Serial Killer -- tie: Dirty Harry (1971) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Prison -- The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

Heist -- Die Hard (1988)

Con-game -- The Spanish Prisoner (1997)

Medical -- Medicine Man (1992)

Romantic Comedy -- Sleepless in Seattle (1993)

Romantic Crime -- Witness (1985)

Romantic Fantasy -- Always (1989)

SF Comedy -- Galaxy Quest (1999)

Western Comedy -- Blazing Saddles (1974)

Laugh-Out-Loud Comedy -- Airplane! (1980)

Musical Comedy -- A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1996)

Australian Western -- Quigley Down Under (1990)

Neo-Western -- No Country for Old Men (2007)

Time Travel -- Back to the Future (1985)

Time-travel Romance -- Somewhere in Time (1980)

Superheroes -- Superman, the Movie (1978)

Monsters -- Monsters (2010)

Futuristic -- Escape from New York (1981)

Creature Adventure -- tie: Jaws (1975) and Jusassic Park (1993)

Kids' Adventure -- Third Man on the Mountain (1959)

Coming-of-Age -- Stand by Me (1986)

Dogs -- Old Yeller (1957)

Horses -- The Black Stallion (1979)

Animated -- Dumbo (1941)

Christmas Movie -- It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

Journalism -- Broadcast News (1987)

Disasters -- The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

Alien Invasion -- Signs (2002)

Another note: It's probably obvious that many of the above picks are cross-genre and could fit into several different categories. Some, like the following, are so genre-mixed I couldn't decide where to put them. But they're still favorites:

The Man from Snowy River (1982) -- Australian Western romance

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) -- Southern courtroom-drama coming-of-age mystery

The Princess Bride (1987) -- Comedy fantasy adventure romance

To finish off this silliness, here are my favorite TV and cable/streaming series.

Weekly network TV series:

Crime -- Hill Street Blues (NBC)

Mystery -- Alfred Hitchcock Presents (CBS and NBC)

Western -- Have Gun Will Travel (CBS)

Neo-Western -- Justified (FX)

Western mini-series -- Lonesome Dove (CBS)

Science Fiction -- Star Trek (NBC)

SF/Fantasy -- The Twilight Zone (CBS)

Drama -- Lost (CBS)

Comedy -- Cheers (NBC)

Spies -- The Man from U.N.C.L.E (NBC)

Medical -- ER (NBC)

War -- Combat (ABC)

Cable/streaming series: 

Crime -- The Wire (HBO)

Mystery -- True Detective (HBO)

Western -- Deadwood (HBO)

Neo-Western -- 1923 (Paramount+)

Fantasy -- Game of Thrones (HBO)

Horror -- The Walking Dead (AMC)

Drama -- tie: Mad Men (AMC) and Landman (Paramount+)

Comedy -- Bad Monkey (Apple TV+)

Journalism -- The Newsroom (HBO)

War -- Band of Brothers (HBO)

Swords & Sandals -- Rome (HBO)

Spies -- Slow Horses (Apple TV+)

Gangsters -- The Sopranos (HBO)

I'm hoping all these might at least bring back some memories--they sure do for me. Another FYI: I'm well aware that I left out many movies that I love, like Pulp Fiction, Fargo, Shane, Chinatown, The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke, Forrest Gump, High Noon, Star Wars, Tombstone, Rocky, etc., and series like The West Wing, M*A*S*H*, Seinfeld, Frasier, Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, Better Call Saul, and Yellowstone, but I had to stop somewhere, and I wanted to try for only one entry per category. Just shoot me.

My question for you is, what are some of your favorites, for both the big and small screens, and which favorites of mine did you hate? (I won't be offended; anyone who admits that he loved Blazing Saddles and The Man from U.N.C.L.E is used to criticism. But hey, confession's good for the soul.)

Next time, I plan to stop playing and get back to the subject of writing. Stay cool!