You Again?

So, here I am again, after a bit of an absence.  I switched gears a bit and decided I did not want to write a blog post on each and every book that I have been reading, opting instead to post reviews on Goodreads -- where I am sure you are all just rabidly enjoying every little nuanced thought I have on a particular novel.  My idea was that I would use this to write about "everything else."  Suffice to say, I have not had much of "Everything Else" to write about lately.  I recently started a new job and "Everything Else" was kind of tossed aside for a while.

But alas, I am back.  And although I just posted a wonderful review on Different Seasons, I felt the urge to write more about books in general.  I've spent a good portion of the year reading Stephen King novels.  My idea was to read everything he has published, in the order he's published them.  Because I cannot stand the thought of devoting so much time to one author (he's not the only one out there, you know), my method of madness has been to read two or three novels of Mr. King's, than move on to one or two other works before revisiting King again.  While living in New York City, I started a habit of devoting time to reading, at a minimum, three classic novels a year.  You know, those books you were supposed to read in high school but never did.

In order to tackle this habit, or goal, a few ground rules had to be set up.  First, why three?  Usually its been more than three books, but three is minimum.  Why is that?  Second, should the size of the book matter?  Thirdly, and most importantly, what is the definition of a classic?

The first two questions are more personal questions that pertain to my idiomatic goal.  First, three just seemed like a round number.  If I recall the moment I decided to pursue educational endeavor, it was May or June, and I realized that if I were going to begin reading classics, it had to be an attainable goal.  The first one I read was The Last of the Mohicans and I remember it taking a bit to slog through it, so three seemed to be the attainable number at that time.  Since then, its been on average five classics a year, but three remains my goal.

The second question, which pertains a bit to the first question, is whether or not the length of the book should matter.  If I were to pick up, say, War and Peace, should that effect my goal of three books a year?  If I were to tackle O, Pioneer by Willa Cather (which comes in at an astounding 208 pages), should I bump the goal up to more books?  To answer these questions, length should not matter.  Three is such a miniscule number that, even if I decided to read Les Miserables, War and Peace, and Gone With the Wind all in the same year, I should be able to do it with no problem.  And there was never a maximum number of books to read, so why should I care if I pick up a book that is barely 200 pages.  That just means the more the merrier.

Before I answer my third question, and the main question of this blog, I want to touch back on the beginning of the post.  I've been reading quite a bit this year.  More, I feel, than I usually do.  According to Goodreads, I've read 28 books thus far -- two of which were George R. R. Martin books and another The Stand, all three of which were thousands of pages.  As the calender changed from June to July to August, I realized on afternoon as I skimmed over my bookshelf that I had not read one classic this year.  Which lead me to pick up Jude the Obscure.  I followed that depressing tome with The Magnificent Ambersons.  So two down, at least one more to go before the end of the year.  I am looking at The Woman in White as my next adventure into the past, but keeping with the macabre theme of Stephen King that I have been absorbing over the past nine months, I may just try and tackle Dracula again.  I remember when I was 12 trying to read it and my mind just could not wrap itself around the Gothic style of writing.

As I finished The Magnificent Ambersons and moved back on with Stephen King, I began to think and wonder, Why am I doing this?  I have no assignments due.  I am no longer in school, so there is no professor slapping a ruler on the desk and demanding that I read these authors long passed.  Why do I feel this necessary urge to read classics when perfectly good books are being released every week for my consumption?  And these mental queries of mine lead to the ultimate query, What is a Classic?

I asked a friend, "How do you define a classic?"  Their response was "A classic is a book in the public domain."  For those who may not be familiar with the term, a book in the public domain is a work which the intellectual property rights have either expired or have been forfeited.  Which means, the work is deemed public property.  Have you ever wondered why certain books are significantly cheaper to buy than others?  Why certain printers sell books by Charles Dickens for $4.95, and a book of the same length by Stephen King for $8.99?  For the Charles Dickens book, all you are paying is for the cost of materials and distribution (and a slight markup so that the printer can make a profit).  For the Stephen King book, you are paying author royalties and marketing costs to Stephen King and his publisher, as well as materials and distribution (and a slight mark up).

In the United States, a book becomes part of the public domain at varying times, depending on what the laws were at the time of publication.  A good example of this discrepancy would be the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.  This Side of Paradise, which was first published in 1920, is part of the public domain because any copyright protection it had has expired.  The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, is still protected by copyright laws, because after 1923 a copyright law was put in place protecting it for 95 years.  So, in the year 2020, The Great Gatsby will enter the public domain.

 I asked my friend if they considered The Great Gatsby a classic.  Unequivocally, the answer was yes.  I told them its not in the public domain.  When they did not believe me, I looked it up on my smartphone and showed them (which is also when I read the information on Copyright Laws -- the link I am basing my information on is here http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm )

I wish the answer for what makes a book a classic were so easy as public domain.  But, alas, it is not.  If Penguin releases a book with one of their iconic black covers, slaps the word "Classic" after Penguin, is that the only qualification?  What about the Modern Library, and their line of classics.  If they print it and call it a classic, does that automatically make the book a classic?  Or is it the Barnes and Noble collection of classics?  If you look at each and every list, all three seem to publish the same books and all three slap the classic label on each title.  But someone had to tell them what a classic was.  My curiosity wonders just how a book earns the label of becoming a classic.


Someone somewhere must have made a list as to what constitutes a classic.  If I were writing a dissertation for a college course, I would break down my argument into categories as to what I felt were the labels that each book must fall under to be considered a classic -- labels like morality, effective use of language, accolades, themes, and what influence it may have had.  But you also have to take into consideration what literary canon the book or story comes from -- what may be a classic in Japan, Western readers may have never heard of, and vice versa.


Before I go any further, and dig myself an incredibly deep hole that I cannot hope to dig myself out of in one blog, I will give you what I think makes a classic: are people still reading it?  More importantly, are they still enjoying it, years after its been published? As an employee in the publishing industry, I can tell you that a company like Penguin or Barnes and Noble would not publish a book if no one was buying it.  So people must be picking up copies of Gargantua and Pantagruel for them to keep printing it (though I took no pleasure from reading that particular piece of so-called classic literature).  But, you may ask yourself, maybe they are printing these books because college professors are requiring students to read them as a bit of torture.  Which may be the case, but I know, with Penguin's collection especially, they are all well done editions on fairly nice paper stock.  Which means they are investing money into printing these books, which means more than just a few college courses are requiring them.  People are reading these books, so by extension, they must be enjoying them.

I have to admit, I tried to cheat a bit on my reading goal.  I did not want to read Jude the Obscure when I picked it up.  I did not want to read The Magnificent Ambersons.  But I did not want to cheat myself.  So I picked up those books and tackled them quickly, wanting to move on to the next book.  (I have to admit that I enjoyed both books immensely for reasons that will be touched on later, and that I am glad I read them.)

I realized as I was tumbling along towards the end of 2012 that of the 20+ books I have devoured this year, none of them were quite in that category of being considered a classic.  That is what lead me to this line of thinking.  I have read the older Stephen King novels, considered classics in the field of horror.  And that was what got me to question just what makes a classic.  Carrie, Stephen King's first novel, will soon be forty years old.  People are still reading it and enjoying it.  Is it because he is still alive and pumping out novels that it does not quite fall under the heading of a "Classic?"  Does that mean the author has to be deceased for a book to become a "Classic?"  I am going to say yes -- or at the very least, retired from writing.  I throw that last bit in because Catcher in the Rye (a book which I thoroughly hate and despise despite its label of being a classic) was considered a classic years before Salinger actually passed away.  But he had not written anything in many years; he was no longer contributing to his own canon of work, so thus his book became a classic.

I think that this is a fair definition of a classic -- are readers, like you and I, still reading and enjoying a book by an author who no longer writes books, either because they have chosen not to or because they have passed away.  The book itself should be at least ___ years old, showing that it has stood the so-called Test of Time (feel free to add your own length of time to what you would begin to consider a classic).  The only binding rule is that the author can no longer be contributing to his or her own canon of work.

Thus, Stephen King's books do not fall under my definition of classic, because he is still building his canon of work.  The sequel to The Shining is due out next year.  But, an author like Harper Lee, who is still living, has not written any novels since To Kill a Mockingbird.  I think we can all agree that particular work is definitely a classic.

Obviously my definition has some flaws that people will try to argue.  What about Fahrenheit 451, which was considered a classic long before Ray Bradbury's death . . . and he was writing until the day he died.  Obviously there are exceptions to the rules, but I think my definition is on pretty solid ground.  And that is the definition I will use in the future when considering my reading choices.

So why do I read classics?  If no professor is hanging over my head, threatening me with a demerit if I do not read a passage from John Milton and write a 5 page essay on that passage, what is my motivation.  As a former history and English major, classics serve two purposes for me on a personal level.  The English major in me, the lover of words and reading, enjoys the great lyrical writing of the past.  Todays books are written in a frenetic pace, always keeping the action going and forgetting the enjoyable things like setting and characterization, because modern humans (modern Americans, specifically) do not have the attention spans to read paragraphs with indelible prose.  In the classics, stories took time to develop, settings were described, and characters described.  I have a fairly vivid image in my mind for what Jude looked like as he wandered around the great university city of Christminster.  I can imagine what the schools and churches looked like, with their towers of granite and naves of marble.

The killer of these images in the book were television, and more recently, the internet.  Imagine, at the time Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain were writing, there was no television.  There was no air travel.  Farmers rarely left their farms and city dwellers never left the cities they were living in.  The only images they had were paintings and photographs.  If a person on a farm in Nebraska wanted to imagine what London might be like, they could read a Charles Dickens novel.  If someone living in a flat in London wanted to imagine what life was like in rural America, they could pick up Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn.  With the advent of the television, images of the world were readily available.  Readers did not need the over described settings that were hallmarks of the past authors.  A few sentences describing the weather and in what city the story took place were all most readers needed.  They knew what London looked like now, because they had seen Big Ben and the Palace on television.  And why should an author bother describing a place like London today, when all you have to do is hop on the computer and bring up a Google map.

And its not that today's authors are lazy.  I am sure they would love to write long prose describing the nooks and crannys of a London flat that their main character inhabits, if only for the joy of describing a setting.  But if it has nothing to do with moving the plot forward, or no way of tying in with a later plot development other than being a place for the action to take place, editors will cut it out because a reader does not want to waste time reading about a 2 room flat in the West End.

Stephen King describes a pretty horrific scene in his novel 'Salem's Lot that has to do with rats.  In the early part of the book, he describes the proliferation of rats at the local dump.  But that's the last you hear of the rats, because the editor asked him to cut out the later scene because he felt it would be too much, even for a Stephen King book.  King wrote that he was asked all the time about the rats.  People assumed it was just setting an eerie mood for the rest of the book.  Many people thought it was superfluous to have the dump scenes in the book at all.  They did not want the mood set for them . . . they wanted to dive straight into the mud and blood and guts of a good old fashioned vampire book.  No one wants the build up anymore.  People actually seem to be personally offended in this day and age if an author describes something a certain way.  "That's not how I wanted to imagine it," readers say.  So reading a classic, for me, is like harkening back to the days before their was television, when it was up to the author to tell you how a place or person was supposed to look. 

The history major in me loves the classics because they are a snapshot in time.  If you are reading a book about the history of Victorian London, that's all well and good.  But to read a Charles Dickens book or a Thomas Hardy book, you have a mental image of what life was actually like for a normal person living during these years.  As with most novels, many of the themes may be over exaggerated by the author as they are trying to shove their point home, but the ideas are still there.  Jude the Obscure, at its root, is a book about a couple living together out of wedlock.  Thomas Hardy, subtlety, is attacking what he believes to be the hypocrisy of the church, the asinine attitude toward marriage, and the inequality of the sexes.  Its one thing to read a non-fiction book telling you these things existed and its quite another to read a novel that shows how these things existed, written by an author as he was living through these times, without the taint of hindsight. The Magnificent Ambersons, written before World War I, describes the growth of a city and with the growth, the dirt and filth and overcrowding that comes with it, and how the popularity of the automobile influenced this growth.  It was fascinating to read, because once again, here was an author, living during these times, writing a book condemning growth and overpopulation as it was happening around him.

Classics are worth the time to read, if you are willing to put in the effort.  If you are able to lose yourself in them, and keep most of your 21st century biases out of the equation, I promise you a fruitful and enjoyable time.

Changing Tactics

Man, it's been awhile.  I have to get better at this.  Since last we spoke, I have been a reading machine.  The last book I wrote about, way back when, was Storm of Swords, the third installment of the Song of Ice and Fire series.  Since that epic marathon read was complete, I switched back to my hero's work, Stephen King.  Strange hero, yes, but hey, the man knows how to spin a yarn.


Listed, in order of completion, are the books I have read over the past six or so weeks:

Rage, by Richard Bachman (AKA Stephen King)
Night Shift (Short Stories), by Stephen King
The Stand, Complete and Uncut, by Stephen King
The Long Walk, by Richard Bachman (AKA Stephen King)
The Dead Zone, by Stephen King
Firestarter, by Stephen King
Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

and currently 300 pages into World Without End, by Ken Follett


Yes, I know, I went on a bit of a Stephen King binge.  I decided one evening a few months back to read everything he's written in order that he wrote it.  But, I find there is only so many books by one author that a person can read in a row before that person needs a break.

So I decided to stop at Firestarter, because for me personally, that opened up a new chapter in the Stephen King lexicon.  What chapter could that be?  Well, Firestarter was the first book that Stephen King published after my birth.  I was born on September 3, 1980.  Firestarter was released in hardcover on September 29, 1980.

You might be wondering what the title of the blog is referring to.  Earlier today, I reintroduced myself to Goodreads.  Its a website focused on books, kind of like a Facebook for Readers.  It has been a solid two years since I really got on an explored the site, and I have to admit that it seems to have become a much better and easier site to navigate.  So I am making the decision to transfer all my book reviews to that site.  I will continue to blog about various things, for those that like to read the dribble of a young man with a little too much time on his hands.  Maybe I'll write about sports, or television reviews (though I don't tend to watch much television), or the nature of man.  Or maybe I'll write about my adventures in Genealogy.

So if you want to keep up with my book reviews, feel free to come on over to Goodreads and look for James Peavler.  If you like reading everything else that might go on in this brain of mine, stay here for any and all future installments.

Short and Sweet

I'll try to keep this one short and sweet.

I hate reading books that are a series.  Well, check that.  Hate is a strong word.  I despise series.  Yet, I read a great many books that are part of a series.  My rule to this is that I do not normally start a book until the last book has been published and I can sit and read it all the way through without being thoroughly annoyed when there is a cliff hanger ending or that feeling of wanting more and not being able to have it.

I sat and read all seven Harry Potter books, beginning to end, in about a three week time period a few years ago.  I loved them.  And I do not have that annoyed feeling of wondering what will happen next.  I did not have to wait a year or two between each book.  I did not have to go back and skim over the previous book to remind myself what had happened before picking up the next book.

The quandary I face today is that I have hungrily devoured the first three book of the Song of Ice and Fire series, and I am having a hard time restraining myself from picking up the fourth book, which will inevitably lead me to the fifth book -- only to leave me what?  Hanging?  Annoyed?  Frustrated? And the worst part of this is that George R. R. Martin is a notoriously SLOOOOWWWW writer.  Game of Thrones was published in 1996.  Clash of Kings and Storm of Swords came along fairly quickly, published in 1999 and 2000, respectively.  The fourth book, and the one I am currently hesitant about picking up and starting, A Feast for Crows, was not published until 2005.  The last published volume, A Dance with Dragons, came out just recently in 2011.

At his current rate, Martin won't finish and release the sixth book (of the planned seven books) until 2016 or 2017.  If I pick up the fourth and fifth book now and plow through them, will I be thoroughly annoyed and angry and have to let that anger and annoyance stew for 5+ years?

Inevitably, I am going to read the remaining published books.  Inevitably, I am going to be angered and annoyed.  And this will serve as a reminder to myself never to pick up another series again until all planned books have been published.

Just to Clarify . . .

So I seemed to have opened up a Pandora's Box with my last post.  What I started out writing was about my love affair with westerns in my youth.  Off hand comments about John Wayne seem to have upset a few people who took the time to read my diatribe.  Let me clarify my position from a few days ago.

I loved John Wayne, and still love John Wayne and his movies.  He is an iconic American.  He made great movies.  But, his movies became somewhat campy in the mid-sixties almost through to the end of his life.  His best movies were made in the 40's and 50's, movies like The Searchers, Sands of Iwo Jima, Red River, Fort Apache, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon . . .  the list could go on and on.  Can any of you name a truly great movie he made in the last part of the Sixties or the Seventies?  He made two horrible detective movies, Brannigan and McQ, which was a ploy of the studios to try and piggy back on the success of the Dirty Harry films (which John Wayne wanted to star in, but the producers felt he was too old to play the character, and subsequently gave it to Clint Eastwood).  Obviously there were exceptions -- The Cowboys come to mind -- but most of the movies he made towards the end of his career would have been mostly forgettable movies, if they had not starred John Wayne.  Although I have been chastising his work in the Seventies, in my opinion, he did find redemption at the end . . .

His final two films, Rooster Cogburn and The Shootist, were two of the best of his career.  The banter between he and Katherine Hepburn, who wanted to work with John Wayne in atleast one film before either of them retired, is the stuff of celluloid legend.  The Shootist, John Wayne's final film, was a good bye film.  Contrary to popular belief, John Wayne did not know he had cancer while filming the movie.  He had undergone procedures in 1964 that removed his lung, and was declared cancer free a few years later.

His character was that of a dying gunfighter, diagnosed with an incurable cancer.  Instead of withering away and dying a slow and painful death, he decides to go out on his own terms.  There was a line in the film that has always stuck with me since the first time I heard it as a kid.  John Wayne, gasping for breath after shooting a man who tried to sneak into his room, tells the character, played by Lauren Bacall, "I'm a dying man, afraid of the dark."

John Wayne died before I was born, so when I first saw the movie, I had the knowledge that this was his last movie, and that he would be gone just three years after filming this scene.  I felt, as I was watching him utter these words, that he was not acting.  To me, it was one of those eerie moments on a movie screen, the moment when John Wayne was reluctantly telling the world goodbye.

To retrace and head back to the basis of this blog, mainly books, I have to say that I have had a fairly voracious reading habit the past few months.  After finishing Dead Man's Walk (which I highly recommend to fans of books, not just fans of the western), I decided to take a break from westerns for awhile and went back to Westeros.  I flew through A Storm of Swords, the third book in the Song of Ice and Fire series, better known to everyone as Game of Thrones.

Once again, wow.  Just wow . . . just when you think you might know where the story is going, something happens (usually someones unexpected death) and you are left saying to yourself, "What the f . . .?"

I've been watching the second season on HBO.  It's been true to the books as well as a television series can be to a 1000+ page book, and it has been quite enjoyable.  I even ordered the graphic novel of the first book and am anxiously awaiting its arrival.  I am finding it a fascinating study in the different forms of media that the same story can take.  And I see, from what Amazon is suggesting for me, that even more media is out there for consumption for those who are obsessed with the land of Westeros.  There is a board game, a cookbook of food inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire, CD's of music inspired by the books, books on the philosophy and logic of the stories, satire books and videos . . . the only thing that seems to missing is action figures of the characters.  I don't know about you, but I'd love a little action figure of Peter Dinklage to adorn my desktop.

And with that, I will leave you for the day, an image of a Peter Dinklage action figure in your mind.  How do you picture his action figure looking?  Is he wielding an axe?  Is he dressed in armor, or a red and gold cloak of House Lannister draped over his every day wear?  Or does he come with a glass of wine?

It's Been Nearly Two Months!

Wow, I am a horrible blogger!  Its not like I don't have anything to say.  I guess I am just being lazy and a bit antisocial lately.  Logging onto a computer means checking email; checking email means interacting with people; interacting with people means . . . well, talking to people. Ew, who wants to do that.

Anyway, I think I am a bit out of that funk, as this blog would attest to.  I am back on a computer, back to talking to people, back to the human race.  Hell, I am sitting in a Starbucks in Santa Rosa, CA, inside a Barnes and Noble bookstore writing this.  Surrounded by people.  It's a bit refreshing.

What have I been up to the past two months of solitude?  I haven't really been antisocial -- that was my attempt at sounding cool, like some introverted, J.D. Salinger-type author who can only take a moment or two to acknowledge people before burying my head back in the sand and hoping people forget me while I work on the next great American novel.  

I spent a week in New York City at the end of March.  It had been well over a year since I visited the Big City.  It welcomed me a last gasp bitter chill of winter.  I was caught walking between Ninth Ave and Seventh Ave in a rainstorm of epic proportions at 1am and spent the remaining days fighting the onset of a savage cold.  I was in town for a dear friend's nuptials.  It was a beautiful, 1920's themed wedding and offered me an opportunity to dress like a snappy gentleman.  One of the guest told me I looked like a gangster on Boardwalk Empire, which I gladly accepted as the highest of compliments.  

I'd be lying if I said that I did not miss New York City, even just a little.  There was a sort of ease at being able to hop on a train and go where you needed to go.  There was a comfort at knowing that no matter what you needed, you could find in the City if you just took a few moments to look.  I needed a nice fedora for the wedding.  I had something specific in mind.  I had hunted around the Bay Area in a fruitless search.  When I arrived in New York, I got my handy dandy smartphone out, went on Yelp, typed in Fedora, and twenty places popped up, from second hand thrift stores to vintage clothing.  One, near the bottom of the list, was a shop on Fifth Ave near the Empire State Building that specialized in hats.  I found the perfect hat, at an incredibly perfect price.  As I walked out of the store with my giant hat box in hand, I thought to myself, "Only in New York City."

Because I went mid-week, many of my friends and former colleagues were toiling away in their offices, so I had quite a bit of spare time on my hands.  In all that time, I whittled away the hours by doing what I like to do best.  I read.  

Thinking back my previous blog, where I talked about my relationship with Stephen King and how it was born in my wee youth, it got my mind on a nostalgic road, reminiscing on what I used to read as a child and a teen.  I grew up in a household that owned every John Wayne movie available on VHS.  My grandmother had shelves full of VHS tapes that she had recorded John Wayne movies on.  When one would come on AMC, she would pop a tape in and press record and meticulously pause the recording when a commercial would interrupt the movie.  Then, whenever she felt like watching Hatari, Hondo, or True Grit, she could just find the VHS, pop it in and press play.

Occasionally, she would record a non-John Wayne movie.  I remember one evening I was watching a movie called The Ox-Bow Incident and about half way through the movie, I asked her, "Where's John Wayne?"

She looked at me a bit confused, and said, "John Wayne isn't in this movie.  His name is Henry Fonda."

I thought she was joking.  "John Wayne is in every western."  I told her confidentially.

She laughed.  I sat and watched that movie all the way through, wondering when John Wayne was going to make an appearance.  If you know the story of The Ox-Bow Incident, you know its about a mass mob trying to lynch a man.  As the string him up and he hands a letter to Henry Fonda to deliver to his wife, I knew that this was the moment John Wayne would come riding in and save the man and shame the mob.  But he did not.  In my young mind, I found that the fact that John Wayne had not come in and saved the day more devastating than the fact that an innocent man had been lynched.

After reading a couple of Stephen King novels, Cujo was the first, followed by Cycle of the Werewolf (which I picked up because it had pictures in it!) I decided that I was in a bit over my head with these types of books.  The Lonesome Dove miniseries was a huge hit around this time, and surrounded by a family obsessed with westerns, I picked up my first Louis L'Amour novel.  I can't remember which one to save my life, but I know in the following years, I probably read nearly all of his novels, as well as Lonesome Dove books, Max Brand, and Zane Grey.  After I read my father's stash of westerns, I borrowed books from my uncle. Once I had gone through what he had, I borrowed from my grandmother.  Although many of the books were formulaic, I loved them.  I guess I felt about westerns as a spinster feels about Harlequin romances.  There was a world beyond my reach, a world I wanted to live in and could not, so I escaped into the books and movies.

I recently picked up Westword the Tide by Louis L'Amour.  I do not remember ever reading it as a kid. But I realized that as I picked up other books that I know I read, I don't remember them.  I think as a 10 year old kid, or an 11 year old or even older, I may have been reading all these books, but not actually absorbing what I was reading.  I wanted to read everything as quick as possible and move on to the next one.  So, although I may or may not have read many of these books as a kid, it's like reading something new all over again.

Specifically talking about Westword the Tide, I have to admit it was quite a struggle to read.  It was Louis L'Amour's first published novel (1950), and the story focuses on a wagon train heading west from Deadwood, South Dakota, into Montana.  One of the organizers may or may not have nefarious plans of killing and robbing all the members of the wagon train and only the main character seems to see the bad guy for who he truly is.  And all the while, the good guy and the bad guy are nearly coming to blows over a woman they both have fallen in love with.

It's a typical western, formulaic and to the point.  Yet I found the book difficult to read.  I usually will power through a book, despite how bad I feel it is.  But this one was difficult.  I put it down numerous times, not wanting to finish it, only to have it look back at me from its perch on the bookshelf, mocking me in a way for giving up on it.  I finished it . . . and was not surprised by how it ended.

I found the second book Louis L'Amour published, The Riders of High Rock, but could not convince myself to attempt to read it.  Instead, I picked up Larry McMurtry's Dead Man's Walk, his "first"novel of his Lonesome Dove Series, though it was the third novel he wrote in the series.  It was a thousand times better than Westword the Tide, not formulaic in any way other than its about Texas Rangers and they are dealing with Indians.  But making an appearance is the daughter of a Scottish noble, stranded at a leper colony in New Mexico.  I don't remember a Louis L'Amour character at a leper colony, or John Wayne playing a Scottish Noble (though he did have an unfortunate turn playing Genghis Khan in a horrible movie called The Conquerer).

Has my love affair with the western, a genre I lovingly recall from youth, became jaded with age?  I still enjoy a good John Wayne western, but even that was shaken recently by the Coen Brother's re-imagining of True Grit.  It's so much better on nearly every level than the John Wayne version (which John Wayne won his only Oscar for Best Actor) that watching his performance in that film is almost laughable.  He was playing his old stand by, drunken ornery cowboy with a heart of gold routine.  I had a conversation with someone recently about why I thought the Coen Brother's version was better, and when I commented on John Wayne being a comedic character compared to Jeff Bridges' incredible portrayal, the man I was speaking with looked ready to strike me.   I had blasphemed against John Wayne . . . how dare I!  I backtracked a bit on my comment, and said what I meant was I disliked Kim Darby and Glen Campbell in the movie, but John Wayne was able to carry the film despite them.  This seemed to appease him and saved me the trouble of trying to see through a blackened and swollen eye.

Nevertheless, what I found exciting as a child and teenager, I now find boring and (dare I say) trite.  I moved on from Westerns for now, but plan on revisiting them in the near future.  For now I will say ado, and hope to see you soon.

Stephen King and I

I promised at the end of my last post that I would write the next day. Obviously I got a bit sidetracked. It's been about ten days since my last post, but who's really counting?

Let me tell you a story -- a young seven-year-old boy, his hair a sandy blond shag that has not seen a pair of scissors in a few months, was walking through a Salvation Army with his mother on a late summer day. His mother told him to look through the books and pick one out while she perused the lightly worn clothing and furniture. The young boy is digging through the children's books, the heavy covers of Dr. Seuss bent with use, the cover of Sarah Boynton's Hippos Go Berserk! unfortunately torn so much that the boy tosses it aside with disgust. All the Berenstein Bears books he owned already and has read through them more times than he cares to count. Children's books are just becoming too boring for him.

He takes the opportunity to dig through the adult shelf, pulling down books with strange titles like The Mammoth Hunters, The Name of the Rose, . . . and the Ladies of the Club, and an entire shelf devoted to some lady named Danielle Steel. A book with a yellow jacket catches his eye. He pulls the musty smelling hardcover off the shelf and immediately the image on the jacket catches his attention. It's a picture of a dog's snarling muzzle, salvia dripping menacingly from its jowls. The title is a simple single word, which the young boy does not understand. Cujo.

The boy is intrigued. He opens the book up, skims the pages expecting to see pictures. All books have pictures, right? There has to be more pictures of the dog. What kind of dog is it? Why does it look mad on the jacket? What is a cujo?

But there are no pictures. Only black words typed on slightly yellowing pages, the first fifty or so slightly water damaged, as if someone had been reading it too close to the river and dropped it in the water for a split second before scrambling after it. The boy turns to the first page, and is immediately and unequivocally sucked in . . . Once Upon a Time (many of his books started like that -- this must be some sort of fairy tale book about a dog, he thinks). Not so long ago, a monster came to the small town of Castle Rock, Maine. He killed a waitress named . . . IT is a fairy tale!!!

The boy slammed the book shut, ran to his mother and announced, "I want this book." His mother gave it a cursory glance and asked, "It looks like a big book. Will you be able to read it?"

"Of course," the boy replied, "It's about a dog. See?" He pointed at the image on the jacket. His mother gave it another quick glance, did not say anything and handed him a couple of dollars. "Here you go. Give this to the lady at the register. Tell her you're buying the book."

That night the boy sat down in bed, and his life was forever changed.

As you've probably figured out, the little boy was me. I don't know what my mother was thinking. I very seriously doubt she had ever heard of Cujo, or Stephen King, which was why she let me buy that book. Although I no longer have a copy of that particular book, I found the image to the right online, and this is exactly what I showed her that day. Whether my hands were somehow covering the image, or she just glanced at it, I don't know. All I know is that Cujo was the first adult novel I ever read and I have been hooked on books ever since. This is the reason I have developed a soft spot in my heart for Stephen King. You never forget you're first. I cannot remember just how many of his books I have read. I am guessing that over the course of the past 24 years (of active adult reading), I think I have read nearly all of them.

When I (re-)started this blog, I began by reading Carrie, his first novel published in 1974. I then moved on to 'salem's Lot (1975) and finished that in short order. I figured what the hell, why not read another one, and since I am reading them in order, I picked up a copy of The Shining (1977). I finished The Shining less than two hours ago, and needless to say I am a little creeped out. It's one book I had never read. I remember watching the Stanley Kubrick movie (Herrrrrrrreee's Johnny!) when I was somewhere around ten or eleven years old. As creepy as Jack Nicholson was in that film, it was the twin girls and the blood pouring out of the elevator that had scared me the most. For those reasons, I was hesitant to ever pick up the book.

I guess I was lucky enough to attend a pretty progressive high school. In the school library, nearly everyone of Stephen King's novels was available to check out. All through high school, instead of reading The Grapes of Wrath or Romeo and Juliet, or whatever great work of literature that I was supposed to read, I was checking out Stephen King books and reading them, as well as historical fiction novels like John Jakes' Kent Family Chronicles. The funny thing is, I earned my Bachelor's of Art in Literature, and a second Bachelor's in History. If you were to look at my high school grades, I consistently earned C's and D's in History and English. I was in my own world, reading what interested me, and ignored what the school felt I needed to learn. I did the bare minium to get by.

The Shining stood on the shelf of the school library, untouched by me because of some fear of creepy kids and bloody elevators and redrum. It was not until I was a 31 year old adult that I was able to tackle the book. As usual, the book is always better than the movie. Without giving too much away to those of you who have not read it, the book does not feature creepy twin girls, it does not have an elevator full of blood, and the novel is centered around a five-year-old boy, not his father as in the movie.

The book did not disappoint in the least. I loved it and regret not reading it earlier in life. For those of you that have watched the Stanley Kubrick movie, and loved it (despite what I believe was the miscasting of Shelley Duvall), I suggest strongly that you read the book. The story in the movie is so different from the story in the book that even if you think you know what is coming, you will more than likely be wrong.

I was thinking that I would change the focus of this blog, call it My Year with Stephen King, and logically the next story in the progression of Stephen King's career is a title he published in 1977 called Rage. Never heard of it, you may say. It would not be a surprise. He published it under his pseudonym Richard Bachmann, and he has since requested that it be taken out of print. It is Stephen King's only piece of written fiction that is out of print.

I will take a break from Stephen King, for now, while I track down this elusive story. I am switching gears, to a non-fiction yarn called A Crack in the Edge of the World. Written by Simon Winchester, at it's center is the devastation of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, with a good bit of tectonics thrown in for good measure.

So until next time, Thank You, and Good Night

It's Been a Few Weeks

Sorry, it's been a few weeks since last I was able to post. I was sick -- if it was not one thing, it was another. So what have I been up to since last we spoke? Genealogy and Stephen King.

About a year ago, I was tooling around on the internet, and remembered Ancestry.com. I was a member quite a few years ago, but lost interest for awhile in the whole genealogy thing. I ran into some dead ends and tripped over a few false leads. I continued to receive emails from them, those spammy type emails begging you to sign back up . . . hurry now, and you'll receive a two week free membership . . . then it became a month. What finally got me was three free months. So I signed up, and after a week or so of browsing and filling that family tree, I eventually lost interest again. Forgot about it, until the three months was up and I got an email from Capital One, letting me know there was a charge on my card for a bit of money. I checked my statement, and realized that with the three free months of Ancestry membership, I had also signed up for a one year membership (15 months for the price of 12!).

So over the past few months, I've dawdled here and there, digging through census records and public trees and tracing back family as far as the 1600's in Massachusetts. But something strangely incredible happened a few weeks back. I recieved a message through Ancestry from a woman named Natalie, in Woodland, CA. Woodland is located directly north of Davis, CA, and to the northwest of Sacramento. I-5 runs through the center of town.

Natalie is a photographer in Woodland, and was looking through photos in an antique store when she stumbled upon a photo of a Wilbur Francis Peavler. She very kindly mailed me the photo, which I have posted to the right. There were two gentlemen by the name of Wilbur Francis Peavler: Senior (my great-grandfather) and Junior (grandfather). After a minor bit of investigation, I came to the conclusion that this is a photo of Senior. Lightly written in pencil on the back is his full name, the cost of the photo (which was $1), his age (4 months) and Aunt Belle.

Aunt Belle seems to be the mystery. I can find no record of either of his parents having a sibling named Belle, or Isabelle, or any other variation of Belle. This has opened up a new chapter in my search and I have been spending free time digging through the Ancestry website.

In other news, I finished Carrie. The book was much better than the movie, filling in the blanks of her mother's insanity and the overall death toll was much higher. 4 out of 5 stars is my rating, as much for its entertainment value as for the thoughts it conjured while I was reading it. Its a quick, demented read about a young girl snapping.

It's interesting to think about Carrie from a modern perspective. Keep in mind, this was Stephen King's first published novel, released in 1974. In our overcharged society where any instance of school bullying is met with severe punishment, when everyone is so sensitive to the idea of school shootings and teenagers snapping, I could not help but wonder if Carrie would ever see the light of day in today's publishing world. If a young struggling English teacher at a Maine high school tried to publish a book today about a young bullied girl snapping and killing everyone at her high school prom, would that teacher be praised as a "modern master of horror" or would he be suspended without pay pending a psychological analysis? The opening scenes deal with menstruation in a high school shower. That teachers would be accused of being a pervert and chased out of town on a rail.

Carrie is one of the most challenged books in America. On a list of 100 books which was compiled by the American Library Association of the books that have faced the most challenges since 1990, a list that includes works such as Catcher in the Rye, the Harry Potter series, and American Psycho (as well as Cujo, another Stephen King work that I will be touching on in tomorrow's edition), Carrie was ranked as the 77th most Challenged book. The ALA compiled this list of books as part of Banned Books Week, and the books are ranked by the number of official challenges each title has faced in regards to being removed from library shelves.

So I ask again, if Stephen King were a young, thirty-something English teacher today, in the year 2012, would he be able to publish a book like Carrie? I honestly do not think a book like Carrie would see the light of day today.

Sticking with my old friend Stephen King, I decided to pick up, and have since, completed reading 'salem's Lot, Stephen King's second published novel, and his ode to vampire classics of the past. This is a real vampire book, there are no glittery vampires, no "vegetarian" vampires, no vampires living amongst humans and having crazy vampire sex. It's blood and gore and stays true to vampire lore. Catholic priests fighting with holy water, men driving wooden stakes through hearts, Van Helsing references -- all that was once good about the vampire genre.

But I will save that until tomorrow, good friends.