Book Roundup

I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading lately, so I thought I’d let you know some of the books I’ve read recently and what I’m reading now.

The “Prey” series by John Sandford

While talking on Instant Messenger with Easy about a month or so back, he recommended this series of police thrillers to me. He said that the main character Lucas Davenport, was “kind of a womanizer”, and he thought I’d enjoy reading them.

He was right. The books are fast-paced with intricate plots mainly involving serial murderers. The psychological angle is played, as Sandford takes the reader inside the heads of the killers.

He was also right about the “womanizer” part; Davenport even called himself a libertine in “Mind Prey”. Unfortunately, Sandford eventually marries him off in one of the more recent installments, taking off most of the edge the character had in the earlier books.

I read all fifteen books currently available in less than month. A new one comes out in May. Can’t wait to read it.

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St. Dale by Sharyn McCrumb

In the author’s note, McCrumb said, "I wanted to do a book on the canonization of a secular figure - a Canterbury Tales with a modern saint..."

She was inspired to write this book after noting the wide outpouring of grief from a variety of sources in response to the untimely death of Dale Earnhardt in 2001.

The book is the account of a memorial bus tour of various racetracks important to Earnhardt’s career. During the course of the tour, we see inside the lives of the passengers in turn, who come from all walks of life, the common thread among them being their interest in Earnhardt. The tour is led by a down-and-out racer trying to get back into racing and is less than enthusiastic about the job he has taken.

McCrumb did her research, the NASCAR trivia she sprinkled throughout the book is accurate, and she does a fair job portraying the Earnhardt fan phenomenon, saying he attracted people who admired individualism because he always did things his way.

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The Casanova Complex by Peter Trachtenberg

Someone once recommended this book to me, telling me I’d see myself in its pages. While on a visit to a used bookstore awhile back, I saw the book on the shelf and said, “What the hell,” and decided to finally read it.

The book was written in the 1980s, at the height of the 12-Step self-help craze, when pop psychology books were seeing “codependency” behind every bush, asserting that ninety-six percent of all families were dysfunctional.

This book fit that mold precisely. It is a study of male libertines, whom the author called “Casanovas”, and identified himself as a “recovering Casanova”. He profiles six different types of Casanovas, whom he called hitters, drifters, romantics, nesters, jugglers, and tomcats.

The book is overly dramatic, written with a heavy hand of Freudian psychoanalytic psychobabble. Trachtenberg asserted that though the six types differed in their approaches to non monogamous sex, that they were all “sick” and had all come from dysfunctional families, outlining the form such families took in one chapter.

I got the strong impression that the author was leaning heavily on anecdotal evidence, drawing closely from his own experiences, and not any extensive research.

Though I saw bits of myself here and there in the various profiles, there wasn’t any one of the six types that was a real match. Nor did I come from a dysfunctional family -- I didn’t have an absent father, nor a shrewish mother.

Sometimes, though, a cigar is just a cigar, and some people are “Casanovas” simply because they like frequency and variety in their sex lives, not because they had a bad childhood. Trachtenberg admits as much at the end of the book when he wrote what amounted to a disclaimer:

“I am reluctant -- really unable -- to say what kind of sexual behavior is morally appropriate…I don’t doubt that some men and women legitimately prefer to lead active sex lives with many different partners…I wouldn’t want this book used as an argument for forced chastity or monogamy or as a nostalgic manifesto for the sexual mores of the 1950s…There is no such thing as a single code of righteous conduct in matters of the heart. A sexual ethic is something that each of us must choose for himself or herself, forging it through repeated trial and error, pleasure and heartache.”

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What’s the Matter With Kansas by Thomas Frank

I’m reading this book now and haven’t gotten too far into it yet. I bought the book after reading the following blurb on the flyleaf, as it addresses question I’ve always had about why some unlikely people vote Republican.

“Frank, a native Kansan and onetime Republican, seeks to answer some broader American riddles: Why do so many of us vote against our economic interests? Where’s the outrage at corporate manipulators? And whatever happened to middle-American progressivism? The questions are urgent as well as provocative. Frank answers them by examining pop conservatism—the bestsellers, the radio talk shows, the vicious political combat—and showing how our long culture wars have left us with an electorate far more concerned with their leaders’ “values” and down-home qualities than with their stands on hard questions of policy.”

It’s pretty good so far, but I’ve not read enough of it yet to write a review.

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In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honore

This book is a criticism of our society’s increasingly fast paced lifestyle, how we’ve gone from hectic to frantic, resulting in people enjoying life less. It sounded interesting, so it is now on my “to be read stack”.