Mar 06 2002
Rude awakening
What could be a ruder awakening than the shrill, hateful voice of the alarm clock (a necessary evil, or evil necessity, if there ever was one)? A cat leaping from the floor onto the bed at 2:00 a.m. and landing with all her weight, reinforced by velocity, on your relaxed, sleeping, and unsuspecting tummy muscles, is what. I can completely understand now why Houdini died of being punched in the gut before he had a chance to fortify his muscles against the assault. Damn. There’s a physics lesson I could have done without.
John and I have swapped obsessions this week. He lent me the stupidly named, yet incredibly gripping Disturbia by the brilliant and erudite Christopher Fowler. The story is set in London, a place Fowler obviously not only knows well, but loves well, and the ancient city is as much of a character as its lower class, would-be journalist protagonist, Vince. Vince gets caught spying on a secret, very upper-class, and murderous society, and to avoid being killed by the society’s members, has to solve 10 London-related riddles in the space of a single winter night. I couldn’t wait to get home and read the next installment, and the ending was both shocking and satisfying. This one screams movie. Bad news, though: seems you can only get it in the UK.
I lent John what is possibly my favorite book ever, Mikal Gilmore’s Shot in the Heart. Mikal is the infamous Gary Gilmore’s little brother, and his unflinching look at hs family’s doomed, damaged history, leading with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy to Gary’s execution, is brilliant and deeply moving. When I first read it, I carried it from room to room so I could get in a few more sentences, and it stayed with me for weeks after reading it. One of the saddest and most brilliantly written books I have ever read. It has cast its spell over John, too, who also can’t wait to get home and read more of it. Yet we would probably never have read these books if it weren’t the other. I think that’s kind of cool.
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