Those who know me I do two things with books.
The first thing, and perhaps sadly, is I mine ’em. That’s one of the main things I do for a living, to a large degree. I take spiritual books and I dig through them looking for little bits of gold I can pull out, polish a bit, and put in my own writings, sermons, essays, books, whatever. The need is endless. Fortunately, so is the source. I’m like a perpetual graduate student always looking for the good pull quote.
Then, there are the books I read. The types of which have shrunk and shrunk, and are today pretty much only murder mysteries. I have a fairly strict set of rules for what I read. I have little interest in the suspense genre, for instance. I don’t like lots of gore, much prefer the murders to take place decently off stage. Although I’ll put of with some if it furthers the plot and the writing is good. And that’s the other thing, the writing has to be half way decent. Although I sometimes get annoyed when the writing strives too hard to be literature.
Beyond that I like a little sugar-coated learning along the ritual way to the murder’s resolution. My first favorites tended to be clerics solving murders where I got a taste of somebody’s religion. This gradually slipped into historical stuff. Probably my favorite all time is Laurie R. King. Great stuff, she writes.
But I do have infatuations, which I feel compelled to share with all and sundry…
And my latest is Nevada Barr. Now Jan has been offering me her books for a very long time. She would say, “James, you’re going to like ’em.” But it felt too much like she was saying they’d be good for me. So, even though I’ve had the first of her “Anna Pigeon” novels on the bedside table for ages, and ages, it was only out of desperation, having run out of anything else I wanted that didn’t involve studying that I finally, finally picked up Track of the Cat. (the link is to Amazon, but don’t forget this one has been around for a while and you should have no trouble picking up a used copy at your local paperback exchange…)
What a hoot.
I’m at page 84 and had to stop and run here to throw up what appears to be a typical Nevada Barr quote. The protagonist, who is a Park Ranger is told by her shrink sister:
“Take my professional word for it: everybody’s got ten good reasons to do away with everybody else. It’s just nobody knows how. Do ‘how.'”
(I know, I know, that I like this line so much reveals way too much about the inner workings of my brain…)
Try it. You’ll like it…
Not kill. Read.
(With some of my friends one should be clear about these things…)
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