History, Science, and Mystery

As I thought I would, over the past two weeks I did read a library book about Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town: Where History and Literature Meet, by John E. Miller.  It took up the subject of how Laura had incorporated the history of the westward movement into her books, especially those set in DeSmet, South Dakota. The author compared her account of how people worked and played with actual accounts published in newspapers, diaries, letters and other sources of the time.  It was interesting to see that Laura was pretty accurate in her rendering of life during the pioneer and early settlement days.

I continue to read the Little House books with my mother. We're both enjoying hearing about Laura through her growing up years.  She's about to be married now, and the original series will end, though there are two other books we can read.  One deals with Almanzo's early years, Farmer Boy, and the other tells of the first four years of Laura and Almanzo's marriage, aptly titled The First Four Years.  The latter was never published during Laura's lifetime; it was written for an adult reader and is much shorter than the others (probably because unfinished).

Besides the non-fiction literary criticism book, last week I read some of the essays in the 2005 edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing, edited by Jonathan Weiner, who wrote The Beak of the Finch, one of my all time favorite science books (reviewed in this blog). I read a few of the articles so far, ranging from psychological testing to religion to gray-hat hackers to the dubious claims of supplements.  All were interesting and remarkably timely despite being eight years old.

This week I decided to take a break from the book of essays to begin the latest James Lee Burke mystery, Creole Belle.  Burke is one of my favorites, not only because he was my teacher once, but also because his main character, Dave Robicheaux, is so complex and so wonderfully articulate.  He has a tremendous vocabulary and a true philosopher's outlook, but most of what he thinks about life and the people around him remains in his thoughts; only we, the readers, are privy to his many astute observations.  Outwardly, he's the quintessential hard-boiled detective: tough, plain-spoken, canny, brooding, drawn to the dark side.  Inwardly, he's a shrewd observer of life and society, especially as it unfolds in New Orleans and southern Louisiana, his home and beat.  The juxtaposition makes for a fascinating character.

After this, I'm back to non-fiction, I think.  But we'll see what the next week brings.

Worth Dying For Worth Reading?

This week I read Lee Child's Worth Dying For, and though I enjoyed it while I was reading it, disturbing questions about it changed my ultimate judgement.  It turned out to be a story in the revenge genre.  People who are evil get their just deserts, delivered at the hands of the avenging angel from out of town, Jack Reacher.  And although I disapprove of vengeance and vigilantism, in fiction I can tolerate it to some extent because I know it's not real.  It also has to be well done.

It seems to me that a revenge story has to draw clear lines between good and evil.  The evil people need to be really evil so the avenger's actions make sense and are fully justified.  Otherwise the reader might start to wonder if a less lethal alternative might have worked just as well to stop the evildoer and bring him to justice in our courts.

Worth Dying For did not meet these criteria, in my opinion.  When I finished the book and all the bad people were dead, for some strange reason the writer chose not to show us the "unretouched photo" of their evil deeds, preferring to hint at the horror instead of describing it, demurring that the details were too ghastly to reveal.  This was a major mistake, I think, since it was necessary for us to "see" the horror so that when Reacher murders all the perpetrators, we would feel he was justified. 

Not only does he murder a number of baddies (with the help of a few of their victims), he also does it in a very cold, efficient, skillful way that does not show his outrage and anger at their inhuman actions over the course of twenty years. (I'm not revealing their deeds now because someone might want to read this book.) 

Added to that was the general implausibility of his campaign.  He starts out meddling in something he doesn't understand, then ends up getting caught by the bad guys and hurt a few times, mostly because of bad luck.  But then his luck turns and his foes are all themselves caught and fairly easily dispatched.  It's a bit anti-climactic by this time, really, because we can see they're no match for our hero.

At that point the book is not over, though, and what follows is as unbelievable as it is morally ambiguous.  Our hero, after littering the countryside with bodies (without the county sheriff finding out), then leaves his accomplices, the inhabitants of the little town, to clean up the mess, which they do without compunction or worrying about cops carting them off to jail. Apparently, we're to believe they get away with it.  But I thought, "Nah, I'm not buying that." 

That's not the way I want to feel at the end of a thriller/murder mystery novel; I want to feel that justice has triumphed and evildoers will answer to the law.  But lately I've noticed a trend in mysteries toward ambiguous endings and the lack of moral neatness. Perhaps it's what writers think readers want these days--hit-man heroes, high body counts and no reason to believe law enforcement will intervene or care.

I'm not one of those readers, obviously, so I can't recommend this book. And I won't be reading any more of Lee Child's novels, either.

After Worth Dying For, I was going to move to a non-fiction book, but I'd promised myself that I would devote the first week of every month to reading my magazines, which have been piling up for years unread.  So this week I've been reading American Heritage and Smithsonian. The American Heritage had several articles of interest; one of them involved the pre-Civil War panoramic daguerreotype of Cincinnati that has been restored and enhanced and is currently on display at the Cincinnati library. John and I went to see it there recently so the article was very timely for us.  There were other interesting articles that I won't describe here but if you look at the link you can see what they were.

Since last week was a short week, I'm going to devote a few more days to magazines before turning back to non-fiction books, this time Seabiscuit.

Join me next week!