Sunday Reading Notes

I've been on a bit of a reading binge lately, mostly shorts. I devoured Needle magazine, loving that I had a story in with a group of writers whose work I've come to enjoy. Every story was a gem, but I'm going to just single out two.

I especially enjoyed Patti Abbott's story, "I am Madam X's Bodyguard". It wasn't what I've come to expect from Patti. Usually the plots of her stories carry me along, but with this one, it was the voice of the bodyguard. I loved the voice and how he told his story and I wouldn't mind reading another with this character in the lead.

Another story that just blew me away was Kent Gowran's ".44 Blues". I've never read any of Mr. Gowran's work but I'll be looking for more. He has a knack for writing a story that rips at your heart until it breaks in two. Nothing I expected to happen in this story of a man seeking revenge, did. And at the end I just wanted to take this character in my arms and tell him everything would be okay.

I've also been reading "Town Smokes" by Pinckney Benedict. The book is full of country stories that tug at the heartstrings or make you want to shake the characters until they come to their senses. In "Water Witch" Mr. Benedict made me feel the heat and frustration of a drought and the dark places sheer despair can take a person.

"All the Dead" took me on a journey with a young boy who was trying to make his mother happy, all the while knowing things weren't going to end well. And still, he kept going, kept trying to bring about that elusive happiness his mother needed from him.

I've also read several books, but I just want to mention one, "Bad Ground" by W. Dale Cramer. One piece of advice that all writers are given is to read and study how a writer works. To be truthful, I've never been able to actually see how a writer puts a novel together. For me, it's just one long story. And yes, we'll come back around to short stories.

First off, if I had realized this book was from a Christian press, I probably would have passed. Most of the Christian books I've read in the past kept beating you in the head with salvation, but this book managed to side-step that while still getting its message across. That was my first lesson. How to tell a story without preaching to your readers.

I also learned that just because you have a character whose nature is to curse, there are ways to work around it without using words like heck or darn. And truth be told, I didn't miss the foul language and the story didn't lose any of its sharpness or change the characters because of it. They were still tough as nails miners by their actions, not their words.

And last, I'd never seen a book put together quite like this one. It covered a year in the life of a seventeen year old boy who'd lost his mother and his journey to find an uncle he barely remembered. The chapters alternated between the boy's and the man's point of view, but each chapter was a short story complete in itself. I liked that. There were no cliffhanger chapter endings but you still wanted to go forward in the book to see what happened.

This is a book I would recommend to anyone. It fits into the Southern genre with the theme of male bonding, from working and hunting together and just plain surviving life, running through the entire book. The scenes in the mine are raw but with a humanity that shows you the beauty in the hard lives of these men.