Beach Reads @ Puerto Vallarta

We just got back from two weeks in Puerto Vallarta with the Simmons.  To the right is the stack of books read between the two of us.

I'll talk about mine and then K. can tackle the rest.

The Breaks - Richard Price

I started this on the plane and finished it the first day at the pool at Villa del PalMar, just a short bus ride from the Malecon and downtown PV.  Price is one of my favorite authors, the best writer of dialogue I have ever seen.  This, I think, was his first book and you can tell.  Clockers, Freedomland, Lush Life, The Samaritan (to name a few) are worlds better, but this is still a fun read and you can see the beginnings of his mastery of telling a story primarily through dialogue.  It is a coming of age novel told in first person.  It doesn't have the gritty focus of Price's later works and very little of the tragic potential, but the speaker is a more street-wise Holden Caulfield who is MUCH more willing to talk about and engage in semi-graphic sex.

11/22/63 - Stephen King

I'm not a huge horror fan, but I certainly appreciate King's sentence crafting and mind boggling imagination, even though it ends up being a little too violent for my tastes.  This is his most recent novel and only the third one I've read by him.  To make a long story short, the main character is led to a portal that will transport him back from 2011 to 1958.  No matter how long one stays in the past, he discovers, only two minutes elapse upon returning to the present.  He decides to go back in order to stop Oswald from killing Kennedy and in the five years he spends waiting to intercede, we are given a nostalgic view of the late fifties/early sixties.  Some of the views have us longing for the past; others are too horrible to contemplate.  It is one of the most compelling books I've read in a long time.  It is nearly 900 pages long and I finished it in three long sessions under the scorching PV sun.

They Eat Puppies Don't They - Christopher Buckley

A hilarious satire of life in Washington.  Buckley is an equal-opportunity excoriator and no one escapes his scorn.  I don't think this is as funny as Supreme Courtship, another one well worth reading, but it does leave you with the conclusion that there is nothing in our nation's capital worth saving.

Founding Brothers - Joseph Ellis

This book was written twelve years ago, but has lost none of its immediacy.  Ellis, who wrote The American Sphynx (a great Jefferson bio) takes a look at the eight most prominent figures at the nation's founding (Washington, John and Abigail Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Burr, Madison, Franklin) and by focusing on six seminal moments (e.g. Hamilton and Burr's duel, Washington's farewell letter, the changing relationship of Adams and Jefferson) shows how these remarkable people managed to start a country founded on two paradoxical beliefs:  Federalism and Republicanism.  This is a great essay.

Unholy Night - Seth Grahame-Smith

I started this on the plane trip back and am currently three fourths into it; therefore, I'll let K. take over from here.

Katherine here.

I'm struggling a bit.  I stepped on what I believe were sea urchin spines, heroically cleaned out by my right thumb nail.  The scrubbing in a subsequent shower shoved those spines under my thumbnail.  I've been soaking it in salt water and watching spines crawl up towards the end of my nail from the holes they've dug lower down.  My once lovely (truly) right thumb nail is bruised and throbbing and swollen.  I won't discuss the three toes in similar situations (bottom of toes rather than top though and surprisingly far less painful).  The toes do not interfere with typing.  I'm letting you'll know I'll be pretty brief with my book stuff when I have so much more to say.  I'm not sure if this is good luck or bad luck.  You never know close up.

Here's what I read in PV.  It was great.  No tech.  Only books.

Back of Beyond and Force of Nature -   C. J. Box

C.J. Box is what I read instead of the Twilight Series.  He writes western semi-mysteries, semi-nature, books set in Wyoming.  Wyoming (specifically the Tetons and Yellowstone to a certain degree) are bliss, health, love, romance, friendship, nature, Zen and the godness of everything, and an island that is just J. and I and other special friends who understand this--they know who they are).  C. J. Box writes stuff that talks about Wyoming and sometimes the very places I've been in Wyoming (Tetons or otherwise) and it fills me with love and anticipation.  I have a stupid video about Grand Teton National Park where they show the cabins we stay at.  It's about time to get that puppy out.  Anyway, I read C.J Box with an open heart.  Here's a bit on each:

Back of Beyond was kind of a remake of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians only this time the elimination of the characters (or campers) takes place in the wilds of Yellowstone.  Cody Hoyt is a borderline alcoholic who solves the mystery and works to save his very cool son from death's door.  Not C. J.'s best stuff.  You have to love Wyoming for this one.

Force of Nature is a Joe Pickett book.  Pickett is a game warden who always figures out the crime while at the same time championing a wide range of outdoor values, showing that living in Wyoming means living a life of contradictions.  Joe usually destroys a government vehicle, pisses off authority figures, figures out the crime while seeking and getting help from a wonderful cast of characters made up of family and honest friends.  This book details the background of long-time friend Nate Romanowki, a former military killer, now semi-native drop-out from society who happens to be one of the best falconers in the world.  Good looking too.   I love Nate.  The book is about him and all our imperfections and perfections and finding the bad guy.  9/11 too.  I loved the term "yarak"-- a falconry term meaning ready for a kill, for sex, for something primeval and natural.  Great escape book.

Sacre Blue - Christopher Moore

Magical Realism.  Ahhhhh.  A blue muse (a slave to man who makes the color blue in a way I shouldn't reveal here, but is quite erotic) inspires Impressionist artists as she inhabits and loves the models they paint.  She teaches them to see, to learn, to focus and oddly cannot create herself.  There's lots on the the history of the color blue, many Impressionist artists and the Paris of their time, and baking bread (always test the appropriate crunchiness of a loaf of French bread by whacking across the side of a young man's face).  Smart and funny.  Loved it.

Unholy Night - Seth Grahame-Smith

This is what might happen if the three Magi  in the new Testament were thieves and liars instead of kings.  Balthasar is our head thief  and we follow his history as the infamous outlaw--The Ghost of Antioch.  Balthasar is fixated on revenge and the search for a pendant, a pendant that defined him.  His encounter with his brother theives/kings Mary and Joseph, Herod, and Pontius Pilate are wonderful.  The book oddly made me believe in all sorts of things.  Don't want to say more.  Jim's in the middle.

The Sisters Brothers - Patrick deWitt

This is a grisly "picaresque" novel detailing the wanderings of two hired killers who finally go home to Mom.  They kill somebody about every five or six pages.  Wore me out.  The cover says it would be by Cormac McCarthy if Cormac McCarthy had a sense of humor.  Not quite.  There is no poetrty here.  No myth of space and quest against the gods.  No gathering of powers or friends or equipment (unless you count the toothbrush and minty tooth powder the narrator picks up early on).   I appreciate this book.  Not my current cup of tea.

The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco

I mean to write a whole post about this.  Not today.  This is an allegory lining up what an evil forger, Simonini, in the late 1800's in Paris did to history with his lies.  He created documents (from personal wills to documents that undermined governments and led men to deaths) and the documents were total lies.  The most important, the story about rabbis gathering in the Prague Cemetery and creating a plan to take over the world was based on bad storylines Simonini had read in books by Alexander Dumas and someone named Sue (lost his first name--sorry).  Conservative politicians buy the lies and start wars and spread the myth.  Liberal freedom fighters who championed Jewish rights ignored the myth of the Prague Cemetery because there were no facts.  The whole story lines up beautifully with how the lies on the internet become myth and no facts can deter some folks.  Consider how Congressman Mike Coffman questioned President Obama's citizenship and heart just last week.

It's important to note Eco is a history teacher and the stories he tells are real.  Only his narrator was fictional.  The timelines and sources are included in the appendix.  Hitler used the real Prague Cemetery documents to spur his Final Solution for the Jewish Population.  The parallels were frightening.

The book had two lines that I've thought about a lot.  The first came after a discussion of Descartes where the narrator changed the philosopher's famous lines to this: "I hate, therefore I am."  I've thought about that a lot.  I see it in a lot of people.  It is an interesting way to look at things for a bit.  The other echoing line is: "Hatred warms the heart."

Gods without Men - Hari Kunsru

Halfway done--I'll let you know.