Rules of Civility by Amor Towles is a delightful book about a year in the life of an intelligent, vivacious, young woman in 1938 NY. New Year’s Eve 1937 finds Katey Kontent and her friend Eve Ross in a second-rate jazz club to ring in the New Year. They bump into handsome banker Tinker Grey. The book tells the story of how those three lives intertwined over the next year against a backdrop of New York city in the late 1930s as the depression ends. The writing is wonderful, the characters are excellent, I can’t say enough good about this book.
I also finished a slew of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux books: Heaven’s Prisoners (#2), Black Cherry Blues (#3), A Morning for Flamingos (#4), A Stained White Radiance (#5), In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead (#6), Dixie City Jam (#7), and Burning Angel #8. I must confess to having a bit of a love/hate relationship with them. As other readers of this blog have noted Burke’s writing is excellent. He does a wonderful job of describing both the Louisiana bayous and countryside and Robicheaux’s interior life. I love the writing. I do however have an issue with the plotting. First, the “mystery” involved in many of the books I’ve read is of only secondary importance to the story, in many cases, its more of a “McGuffin” than an actual driver of plot. In the second place, Robicheaux’s actions and investigations don’t really drive the solution of the mystery, he basically spends the book beating up bad guys, either to invoke a reaction, or through lack of self-control, or getting beat up by bad guys. So the books aren’t narratively satisfying in the way that a Bosch or Jack Reacher novel are. But the writing is REALLY good. I will keep reading them for the writing, but I’ll get them from the library.
Recessional is the final novel from James Michener and involves a washed up Chicago doctor being hired to run an old-folks home in Florida. While driving from Chicago to Florida to take up his new job the doc comes across a multi-car pileup, rescues a young woman whose legs have been traumatically amputated. The rest of the book deals with Michener’s opinions on Living Wills, malpractice torts, aging, religious zealots, the AIDS crisis, and a host of other axes the author has to grind. I read it mainly because I was a big fan of Michener’s back in the day. This one hasn’t aged well.
Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 by Robert D. Matzen was a fluffy little book on Lombard’s death. In January 1942, on the way home from a War Bond Tour, TWA Flight 3, carrying Lombard and 21 others, flew into Mt. Potosi shortly after leaving a re-fueling stop in Las Vegas, NV. Apparently, the pilot made a navigational error which resulted in his flight level of 8000 ft intersecting with 8500 ft terrain, what the FAA calls CFIT (Controlled Flight Into Terrain). The book is presented in alternating chapters covering the flight, a biographical sketch of Lombard, and the investigation. It was good enough for what it was, but I was mainly interested in the investigation, so my interest could have been covered by the rather excellent Wikipedia page on TWA Flight 3.
The Day the World Came to Town by Jim Defede is the story of the aftermath of 911 when Gander Newfoundland (normal population 9600) received 38 aircraft carrying 6600 passengers when US Airspace was closed. The book tells, mainly through first person accounts from both passengers and locals, how the local population cared for the stranded passengers and is a wonderful and uplifting story. I was particularly interested because my wife is from Newfoundland and we had recently seen the Broadway musical based on the incident Come From Away.
96 for the year.
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