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Monday, June 6, 2005
Ready Or Not
The sun came up today as usual but I wasn't ready. Last night was one of my up all night reading orgies. I probably could have gone to sleep at around 7:00A.M. but Pork Chop had other ideas, so I got up and took her for a walk.
Yow! It was like walking out into a steam bath. We had not gone a block before I dripped with sweat,,,running down my face, fogging up my glasses. I had to take my glasses off. Looking at the forecast I read that the temperature is already 88 degrees Fahrenheit but feels like ninety. Seems that we have come into a real down-south hot spell. That's good. My tomatoes will ripen more quickly. Today I ate the first one for breakfast.
Anyway back to the book orgy. Last night I read Stephen Hunter's new one, Havana, about the time of gangsters running casinos, the rule of Fulgencio Batista, Castro's early stumbles into leadership, the South American Catholic attitude toward religion as something done in church, having nothing to do with daily life. The whole book was just a bath in trash and corruption, but somehow, also, it was a lot of fun. The rhetoric went completely over the top, shamelessly sensational. I have to admit that I enjoyed it, finished it about midnight. In a way it was like reading a book by a little kid, the hectic pace of disaster piled upon disaster just seemed like something an adult would be embarrassed to write. Of course, Stephen Hunter is anything but embarrassed. He cranks this stuff out all the time and his fans love it. He also writes for The Washington Post and has a Pulitzer Prize to his credit, so he's good at what he does. I felt that this author has a wonderful time writing, lets his imagination run amuck and enjoys the vicarious adventures he creates for the reader.
Then I started to read the new Douglas Preston book, The Codex. Here was another wild and unlikely adventure, this time in the jungles of Honduras in search of Mayan tombs and temples to loot. All the cliches are in there; machete-fighting with an anaconda to save a fellow adventurer, overwhelming insect infestation, hostile Indian tribes with poison-tipped arrows, lives miraculously saved with herbal rememdies harvested in the jungle, cruelly irresponsible American corporations. Yes, it was a cliche-fest, but it, too, was fun, from the man rescued as he hung by his fingernails from a rotten vine bridge a mile above the jungle river to the man rescued after being entombed in a Mayan temple for a month. Douglas Preston writes alone, but he more commonly teams with Lincoln Childs to write mad, desperate, horrorific adventures the latest of which, Brimstone, I read recently and found highly entertaining.
On the one hand if I were the talented person I am not, and if I wrote stories such as these, I might not admit it to my nearest and dearest. Books like this probably don't qualify as literature. They're stories. They're a cheap, safe trip to another place and an improbably exciting time. On the other hand, I'd feel like a public benefactor. Very few people could survive such adventures, would ever undertake them in real life. It's great fun, though, to live these hair-breadth episodes through the pages of a book. Last night I shot it out with gangsters in the steamy, crime-ridden streets of old Havana and then I survived a month in the jungles of Honduras. And now I'm tired.
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