Reading Road Trip ... Connecticut

Speaking of Columbine, Wally Lamb's book inspired by the event, The Hour I First Believed, is set in Connecticut.  I have not read that book although I have read She's Come Undone and I Know This Much is True. (The latter also takes place in Connecticut.) The last two books were featured on Oprah's Book Club and sold a bajillion copies. I found Lamb's books well-written but damn depressing.

Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives (set in Connecticut0 was much more to my taste. I saw the movie before I read the book and the virtual lobotomizing of the Paula Prentiss character scared the bejezus out of me. According to Wikipedia, Levin based the town of Stepford on Wilton, Connecticut, where he'd lived in the 60s. This is my favorite of Levin's books. I like it more than his most popular work, Rosemary's Baby.

Probably my favorite book set in Connecticut is The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Witch was my gateway to the historical romances by Victoria Holt and Phyllis A. Whitney, which I devoured as a teenager.
Speare. It was written in 1958 and I don't think it's been out of print since. It was probably the first "historical novel" I ever read, and i loved the heroine Kit Tyler, a smart and independent young woman who triumphs in love and life. I loved that her full name was "Katherine," like mine. (I have a cousin Katherine who goes by Kit, which I always thought was sooooo cool.) I'm pretty sure that Witch was the gateway book that led me to the historical romances of Victoria Holt and Phyllis A. Whitney and Mary Stewart, which I devoured when I was a teenager. (And they in turn led me to historical mysteris and after that, there was no turning back.

A Weekend Drabble

 I misread a "call for submissions" notice and created this Drabble (a story in exactly 100 words) for a market that doesn't actually exist. But I kind of like it anyway. So here it is. SHATTERED GLASS

 This is why you can’t have nice things, Alice scolded herself as she picked up the shards of the vase she’d just broken. She knew the voice in her head was not her own but belonged to her stepmother, but even so, it hurt.

Alice was a big girl and her bulk made her clumsy. She knew that. Her stepmother didn’t need to be such a bitch about it. But then, she was a bitch about everything. Even about the color of the tulips Alice had brought her. So, Alice had whacked her over the head with the vase.

Oops!

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.