More to Come Soon!

I'm afraid I've been remiss in posting to my blog these last couple of weeks.  I have a pretty good excuse: I was on vacation, and busy with traveling, so I wasn't able to do much reading, except for a couple of mysteries which I may discuss later.

I've returned to work this week, however, which means bus rides and reading.  I'm still working on River Horse.  Mr. Heat-Moon and his pilot are now traveling down the Ohio River, sometimes through locks and dams, past a variety of towns and cities where they encounter interesting places and people.

I'll write more about this book this coming weekend.  So stay tuned!

Dispatches from Nikawa

Well, it turns out that River Horse is a very interesting book! It's a travelogue of sorts, being the chronicle of William Least Heat-Moon's journey across America by watercraft (mainly his C-dory he has named Nikawa, an Osage word meaning river-horse).  He starts at the mouth of the Hudson River and ends at the mouth of the Columbia River, staying on rivers the whole way except for two places where he portages his C-dory for some miles, in New York and in the Rocky Mountains.

So far I've read about the Hudson River, the Erie Canal, Lake Erie, and the Allegheny River. The author describes the trip down (or up) each waterway, bringing in history and geography about the river and the surrounding areas. The first surprise I got was that the Erie Canal is still open, although no longer being used for commercial shipping.  There were interesting descriptions of how the locks work and what the towns along the way look like.

I was also surprised to learn that Lake Erie was rough sailing.  Heat-Moon and his pilot had such a tough time going across it, in fact, that they decided to get out of it sooner than they had planned.  The reason, apparently, is its relative shallowness, along with the winds that rake across it constantly.

As someone used to traveling by car or plane or train, I was struck by the different perspective one gets from a watercraft--seeing the backsides of towns, as it were.  And also striking was the realization that the country is no longer set up for water transport as it was long ago; the car has taken over as our means of getting from one place to the next, and all the commerce is geared toward attracting motor-vehicle-borne travelers.  I would imagine that in the old days, billboards and other signs could be found just outside a town, but facing the river!

Heat-Moon gives us all the details of the trip, from the technical aspects of sailing through locks to his more poetically-expressed thoughts about what he sees.  He's a man who loves words, so he uses plenty of them, yet I never get the sense that his prose is wordy in the pejorative sense. And since I love words too, I don't mind!

Next is the Ohio, which is a long river with many towns and cities along the way. Should be interesting!  Stay tuned for more dispatches from Nikawa.

From Murder Mysteries to Nature's Mysteries

I finished Body Work this week and while it did have a slow start, it picked up after a while and I got involved in the plot and some of the characters, once they were finally introduced.  It remained a plot that had trouble hanging together, though.  Loose ends were finally tied up, but by then my interest in those plot segments had waned.  I would recommend this book only to dedicated mystery readers.

So now I have to choose a new book, and I'm thinking about River Horse, by William Least Heat-Moon.  All the current talk of rivers and flooding has got me interested in reading about them.  River Horse: The Logbook of a Boat Across America chronicles a journey the author took from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, all by river.  I bought the book quite a while ago, and have been wanting to find the time to read it.  But now it seems I have run out of excuses. The book's not short, though: 528 pages. Perhaps that's what discouraged me from reading it before; like Jackie Robinson, the daunting heft of River Horse kept it on the shelf all these years.

But no more.  River Horse will fall like the others, and I will be better for it.  And so, I hope, will you!

Who Killed Nadia? Who Cares?

Well, I finally finished Jackie Robinson, and I now know why Arnold Rampersad's biography was more than 500 pages.  Jackie Robinson lived life to the fullest.  It seems there wasn't a day in the man's life that wasn't dedicated to some higher purpose, despite the many setbacks and sorrows he experienced in his 53 years.  And though impulsive, outspoken and quick to anger, Robinson was an admirable man, I think.  I'm very glad I got a chance to learn about him and refresh my memory of the twentieth century and especially of the civil rights movement and all the people who were involved, for good or ill.  Jackie Robinson was there at the center of it all, even in his final years when his health deteriorated and he struggled just to get around.  I would recommend this biography highly, but if you read it, be prepared for the full meal deal!

I've now moved on to another murder mystery, Body Work, by Sara Paretsky, famous for her detective character, V.I. Warshawski. (Kathleen Turner plays her in a 1991 film by that name: V.I. Warshawski.)

Victoria Warshawski is a private investigator of the old-school, hard-boiled detective variety.  I haven't read many books in this series (I think this is the second), so I don't know much of the character's history, but I remember liking the one I did read, as well as another Paretsky novel (Bleeding Kansas) that wasn't a Warshawski installment and wasn't a mystery per se. 

This time, though, I'm not so sure.  The plot of Body Work seems a bit complicated and so far I'm finding it cumbersome and hard to get into.  As any mystery fiction reader knows, a good mystery should above all be gripping.  If the writer keeps me dawdling along, unable to understand who the people are or why I should care about what happens to them, I won't enjoy the book as much as one that has me hooked from the start.

I'm afraid Body Work is shaping up to be of the non-gripping variety.  The plot centers on a murdered artist who paints pictures on the nearly nude body of another artist, a woman who sits on stage in a bar and invites customers to paint on her.  Both murdered woman and body artist are unpleasant characters, and I find myself not caring much about them.  In fact, all the characters I've met so far, suspect or no, are unappealing, including the P.I. herself.  She's been hired to find out what she can about the accused murderer of Nadia (the dead artist), but she's pretty crabby about it.  The police's only suspect is an Iraq veteran suffering from PTSD.  His father, V.I.'s client, thinks he's innocent, but Victoria is not so sure. Though I'm 1/3 the way through the book, neither she nor the readers have learned much about her client (she hasn't even interviewed him yet), but he might turn out to be the most sympathetic character of the bunch.

It seems that the writer is leaning a bit heavily on the titillation factor of the nude artist, hoping that will keep her reader's attention, but I find it a bit distracting, especially when we keep returning to the bar and the body artist's rather boring act night after night.  All the people we meet there are hostile and I want to stop hearing about them or find out a little more quickly whether or not they're involved in the crime.

Nevertheless, I'll plug along and maybe finally get interested in who killed Nadia and why.  I'll let you know how it's going in my next post.