my latest reading and viewing in 2023
Marching on...
March 6, 2023. Heat Lightning by John Sandford. 2008. 2nd in the Virgil Flowers series. Flowers is a jeans, cowboy boots, and band t-shirt wearing agent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I read in his time-line as I find the books available as digital loans from my local library. It's okay to not read them in order- Sandford drops enough details about the personal life of the protagonist to get a sense of where I am in the timeline. I still like the character. I didn't like the "shoot-em-up" on the banks of the Rainy River, (which serves as the border between Northern Minnesota and Ontario). It felt too much like the climax of an action movie.
March 17, 2023. The Calling is an 8 part limited series available on Amazon Prime. It's based on "The Missing File" (2011) by the Israeli writer Dror Mishani. Produced by some big Hollywood types, it is far more thoughtful, and careful with character development and plot than most American television. I would partly credit that to the main story arc happening over the course of 8 episodes, in the manner of the good British procedurals. I also have the sense the producers trusted the pacing of the source material. I would love to read this one, if I can find it.
NYPD Detective Avi Avraham is a devout Orthodox Jew, whose active faith helps him see the humanity in the people he investigates. His empathy, and interest in their inner lives helps people open themselves to him. He has a way of eliciting confessions from people have done wrong things that leaves them feeling grateful to release a burden. He displays an ability verging on the mystical, to place himself into the life situation of the victim of the crime he investigates. He likes to literally sit in the spaces where they live, meditate, and absorb on a less than conscious level, information about the person for whom he is pursuing justice. His approach made me think of the German phrase "sitzen leben" as used in Biblical studies. When I studied the Old Testament in seminary, we learned the importance of the circumstances in which a Bible story or saying was created. This detective seems to seek a deeper understanding of the "sitzen leben" of both the victim and the suspects.
March 18, 2023. James Patterson by James Patterson. (2022) I listened to the unabridged recording of this memoir, read by the author, the number one selling author in the world. He typically has multiple entries on any list of what is selling the most. He produces highly detailed outlines to farm out to a handful of co-author collaborators, many of whom have proven their abilities with their own solo work. I am less cynical about his "factory-style" approach to the business since hearing him speak about his working relationships with those authors. I admire the capacity he's developed to produce a detailed outline. I don't think I'm the first aspiring novelist to discover that a usable plot is crucial, and difficult to create.
I picked up two things to remember for my own work. Patterson approaches each scene with a clear intention for its meaning and ability to further the story. He also uses dialogue to move stories along, and make characters believable.
The third thing I noticed is that he relies on common vernacular. Part of what makes him a best-selling author is he does not write "above" the reading level of his audience.
March 19, 2023. Lockdown, by Laurie R. King. (2017) I’ve read all of King's Russell and Holmes series. In keeping with Baker Street tradition, she purports to have transcribed these stories from the journals of Mary Russell, the American-born woman who married Sherlock Holmes after he had all but retired from his work as a consulting detective. I love those books, in which Mary Russell is revealed to be an Oxford scholar of Judaism, allowing King to draw upon her own academic background, which includes a bachelor's degree in comparative religion and a masters in theology, for which she wrote a thesis on "Feminine Aspects of Yahweh".
Lockdown is a standalone suspense novel, set in contemporary times. If it wasn't King's work, I’d have returned the digital loan as soon as I realized it was going to be about a school shooting. I'm glad I stuck with it, despite the central action of the story. She made it readable with short chapters that bounced around in view point, setting, and chronology, to fill out pictures of many of the main figures in the drama, that were drawn with compassion and sensitivity. She also won me over by not painting the scenes of violence with strokes any more broad or garish than needed.
It was a story about humans I could imagine meeting, with lives and stories that nicely filled out sub-plots I wanted to follow. This kept me reading, even though I knew the book would inevitably climax with gunfire in a place full of vulnerable people whom I'd come to care about.
In the closing chapters, she employed an interesting technique that heightened the pace, and pulled me along. Very short chapters, from the points of view of key characters, that would close before finishing a sentence…
…that was picked up in the voice of the next character, in the next chapter.
March 21, 2023. 11.22.63 is an 8 episode mini-series from 2016 based on the science fiction novel by Stephen King. (2011) I read the original when it was first published. I admire King's craft as a writer, but don't enjoy the horror aspect of much of his work. His audio book "On Writing" is an inspiring listen to which I often return.
11.22.63 is about a recently divorced high school English teacher from small town Maine presented with the means to go back in time to 1960. The person who offers this chance is dying, and wants the teacher to take up his cause, which is to stay in the past, move to Texas, and based on their gathered knowledge of events, prevent the assassination of JFK.
In his memoir about writing King says he’s a "pantser", which means when he sits down to start a book he has a character and a situation, but no idea where things are headed. He says flying by the seat of his pants makes it a fun ride for him as the writer, and in this case, it works for the reader/viewer as well. The book as I remember it, and to some degree, the tv version, depend on us caring enough about the characters, to want to see what happens, even though we know that our hero is on a mission which has no real stakes. If JFK survives, it is not our timeline, not "our" JFK.
Except for some exterior shots in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, the series was filmed in Ontario. It was fun to see Hespeler, Guelph, Ayr, Hamilton and Dunnville filling in for locales in small town America.