Reading Road Trip ... Colorado

I have never been to Colorado except in movies and books. I read Isabella Bird's wonderful A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains when I was in middle school and it sent me off on a binge of reading 
about women explorers. And of course, since Stephen King is one of my favorite authors, I checked into the Overlook Hotel in Sidewinder, Colorado when I read The Shining, and later, Doctor Sleep.

Isabella Bird

But most of what I've read about Colorado has to do with the Columbine high school shooting. (Interestingly, the high school massacre is not the first massacre in Columbine's history. In 1927, a union action went bad when police and coal miners clashed in what's become known as the Columbine Mine Massacre.)

I don't read a lot of true crime books. I'm not an avis follower of lurid criminal cases on TV. I will admit that the JonBenet Ramsey case intrigues me and I wish someone would explain how she got that strange first name.) I like watching homicide hunter because I enjoy Joe Kenda's character but also because I know that the crimes depicted on the show were solved and the person (or persons) responsible were brought to justice. As Kenda would say, "Justice. It works for me."

But Columbine was a whole new level of crime and at the time, the narrative around it seemed familiar. Misfit kids. Outcsts. Yadda-yadda-yadda. Except...that's not how it happened. Dave Cullen's book Columbine (see an excellent review by Jesse Kornbluth here) tells the real story and it will chill you. Dylan Klebold's mother Sue has done a TED talk about her son and his friend Eric, and watching that in conjunction with reading Columbine will make you want to weep. She. Had. No. Idea.

Brotherhood of the Wheel...something different in Urban Fantasy

I love urban fantasy, but lately it's felt pretty stale. How many leather-clad women in katanas can one genre support? And even as someone who writes the occasional vampire story I'm starting to get a little tired of bloodsuckers. And then I read R. S. Belcher's Brotherhood of the Wheel. It's got a really ugly cover that doesn't really convey "urban fantasy" but look past that and what you get is unexpected, original, satisfying and--I really hope--the beginning of a series.
Brotherhood of the Wheel sets up a world in which the tradition of the Templars is alive and well with a group of men and women who "live on the asphalt." They are protectors of the innocent, and they can "see" the signs of evil that others cannot. And from the exciting opening when a trucker and a gypsy cab driver help capture a serial killer and save his latest victim, the book is filled with action and myth and genuine emotion and actual horror. It also has tremendous world-building and humor. (Some of the humor is a tad whimsical for my taste but overall, I think this is a terrific book.)

Reading Road Trip ... Arkansas

I have seen some photographs of the Ozarks that make the state look breathtakingly beautiful. Unfortunately, I have never been to the Ozarks but I have driven though Little Rock. My sister and I were driving to California one December and we stopped there one night, not in the scenic part of town. We were so ready to leave the city that we got up before dawn the next day and headed out.
Charlaine Harris (author of the Sookie Stackhouse "True Blood" books) set her Lily Bard series in Shakeseare, Arkansas and they sound like a lot of fun. John Grisham's novel A Painted House (set in 1952 with a secret that involves migrant workers) takes place in Arkansas. So does Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Reading Road Trip...California

There is no one California when it comes to literary depictions of the state. The San Joaquin Valley was immortalized by John Steinbeck's books, including his masterwork The Grapes of Wrath) but Jack Finney's The Body-Snatchers was also set there, as was T. Jefferson Parker's Summer of Fear, and John Lescroart's Hard Evidence, and James Patterson's Third Degree.

Los Angeles is the city that spawned hard-boiled detective fiction, a sub-genre that's alive and well with writers like James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) and others who inhreited the mantle from Raymond Chandler. Further south, you find Don Winslow's Dawn Patrol, and om Wolfe's The Pump House Gang, and Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End. The first truly "Califonia" book I ever read was Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays, and then later, her books of essays about the place, The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Reading Road Trip ... Arizona

I've spent a lot of time in Arizona. I've been to the Tuscon Gem and Mineral show, I've been to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, which is an amazing place, especially if you're their for thier "Raptor Show." I've toured Biosphere 2 in Oracle, AZ and generally soaked up the sun in Phoenix. It's a red state, so I don't think I could live there, but I do like to visit it.

Three Arizona books stand out for me. one is Navajos Wear Nikes, a memoir by Jim Kristofic, who grew up on the reservation after his mother took a job working at a hospital there. He's an outsider--a white kid--but it's still an intriguing look at life on the reservation.

There's also Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, a nonlinear, multi-character novel that meanders from the US to Central America. The book was published in the 90s and the writer's treatment of gay characters (way too many of her villains are gay), but that sadly reflected the tenor of the times.

The book that's stayed with me the longest, though, is The Quartzite Trip, a novel about a school trip that goes very, very wrong that really gets teenage feelings right. There's a scene where a guy looks at a girl who's plagued by acne and as he sees her in the moonlight, he realizes what a beauty she is. It's incredibly tender. I can't believe this book is out of print. It's one I read, along with Red Sky at Morning, that made a deep impression on me and 36 years later, I can still remember the way it made me feel.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane ... a review

The Physic Book of Deliverence Dane by Katherine Howe

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A historian doing her mother a favor stumbles across a secret that changes her life.

Deliverance Dane was a “cunning woman” in the 17th century who failed to heal a child and became the subject of vicious gossip and accusations of witchcraft. Connie Goodwin is a Harvard-trained historian whose mother Grace sends her to Marblehead to clean out her grandmother’s house. While doing so, Connie runs across a reference to Deliverance that sends her on a quest to find the woman’s missing “book of physick,” her recipe of spells.

This dual time-frame story offers a somewhat different perspective on the Salem witch trials is much more interesting than the contemporary story. Connie isn’t as engaging a protagonist as Deliverance, and her academic search for the book of physick and the truth about Deliverance pales beside Deliverance’s own narrative. ture about some aspect of colonial life), but the stories being told here do not draw us in as much as they should.




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reading Road Trip...Alaska

When I was little, I was fascinated by the Iditarod race. (I even had a t-shirt that said, "Alaska, where men are men and women win the Iditarod.") So when I came across a mystery called Murder on the Iditarod Trail, I snapped it up. The author was Sue Henry, one of several women who have well-established Alaska-set mysteries. (Probably the best known is Diana Stabenow who writes the long-running Kate Sugak books.) Turns out there are a couple of other mystery writers who have made Alaska their stomping grounds. I'm a fan of John Straley (particularly his The Woman Who Married a Bear), and I intend to check out Christopher Lane's Inupiat mystery series.

For me, though, the quintessential Alaska book is John McPhee's Coming Into the Country. McPhee is widely known as a pioneer of "creative nonfiction" and I've been a fan of his since I read Oranges. His prose is cut-glass sharp but never pretentious. He's got books with titles so odd they suck you in, like The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed or The Curve of Binding Energy (a brilliant book about nukes) and his topics range from the geology of the West to a farmer's market (the title essay in Giving Good Weight).  One of his best books is La Place de la Concorde Swiss, which is about the Swiss Army and its role in society.Seriously. He will make you care about that.

Coming Into the Country is about both the land and the people on it and it's a grand colletion of personalities and observations. It made me want to visit Alaska more than ever before. Don't let that cover fool you (it looks like it was designed more for graphic impact than to give readers an idea of what's inside) and check it out if you're a fan of elegant writing and interesting subjects.