Feeling Bookish

I worked in a library for many years. I love being surrounded by books, and I compulsively check out piles that I can't read in time for the due date. I also buy books which is a dumb thing to do but I'm a sucker for bookstores. I usually read two books at once which saves no time but gives me some variety.

Three books I checked out of the J-ville Library are due tomorrow. I'm happy to say I finished two of them. One was The Cat's Table by Michael Ondatje, a Sri Lankan writer who is best known for the the movie The English Patient. My favorite book by him though is Anil's Ghost, which takes place in Sri Lanka and is about the bloody civil war between the Tamils and the Sinhalese. The book was haunting and most likely won't be made into a movie. The Cat's Table is well-written, but not too compelling, which is why it took me weeks to slog through. That and the fact I was reading other, better books at the time.

I just finished Russell Bank's Lost Memory of Skin. I love this author and try to read everything by him. My first book was Rule of the Bone, about a young boy living in upstate New York who makes his way to Jamaica. It has something to do with pedophilia, too. Cloudsplitter, is a book about John Brown's family and the violence he wrought in his anti-slavery campaign. The Darling takes place in Liberia and the United States, features The Weathermen and Liberian President Charles Taylor. Turns out Taylor learned all he knew about violence and terrorism at the hands of the Weathermen. Then I read The Sweet Hereafter, which was made into a movie I never saw. As intense as this book was to read, I felt that I was being pummeled by everyday life, not something strange and willfully violent. The Reserve is one of his books that's the most tame, a love story with a bit of mystery, but nothing too morally complicated.

Back to Bank's newest book, about a 22-year old male, the Kid, who's serving his term for soliciting sex online with a 14-year old. There's no violence in this book, but there's plenty of sexual description. Child pornography and Sociology are the main themes, how our society encourages porn by making it a hot commodity, and then blames the victims. Some victims are of course blamable, but if you believe this book, no one will ever escape their criminality, even when their sentence is served, unless they live somewhere without an internet connection. You can tell Banks sympathizes with the main character because the convict loves animals, taking care of Iggy the iguana, Rosie the dog and Einstein the clipped-wing parrot. This makes Kid more human than many of the humans in the book.

I know you hate when I do this, but don't read this book unless you like grit, sex and sociological theory. It's the kind of book that a Conservative Republican would hate.

Now I travel back in time (70 B.E.) to Alice Hoffman's The Dovekeepers. I know I'm going to love this book.