Month: November 2020

So I needed something to read, something easy. Plus I’m a David Fincher fan. Who isn’t? So I decided to read Gone Girl and released Flynn can write. I knew nothing about her. I figure she was one of those pop corn book writers. One of those writers who can crank out mysteries once a year. Nope. She only has three and the depth of character she’s creating with Gone Girl within 15% of this book impressed me (i.e. makes me jealous).

So I downloaded her book Sharp Objects to listen to on my walks…what I hope are my walks. I had my wife take some pictures of me for my Amazon and Facebook pages….and I need to walk…and eat less. So Gillian Flynn will help me through that I hope also.

I’ve recently given up on Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Henry James’ A Turn of the Screw. Look, there are only so many hours in a day. And the older you get, the more valuable those hours become to you.

What am I reading now? Well, the days have been getting darker, both literally and figurately so I needed lighter fair. So I’m reading I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane because I was thinking of writing another of my Jake Gibb stories and I’m also reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe because I never have.

This isn’t my first time reading Faulkner. I’m reading As I Lay Dying now. It’s not one of the hard ones, as if there should be a hard novel. It’s twenties century American English. I’m a twentieth century American English speaker. He was a southern. I am half ‘southern’ and spent a good deal of time ‘down there’. It should come to me easy enough.

But I still need to consult Cliff’s Notes online to ‘get it’. I don’t think that makes me a rube or functionally illiterate. I’ve read older novels from other cultures and enjoyed them. I’ve read dense text books and philosophy and understood them. Maybe Faulkner is just b.s.?