Pilote's Blog. no. 8 - A little digression about beach reading

Beach and reading seem to go hand in hand.  Nobody can stay on a beach waiting to be fried to a crisp without a book, preferably a good one.  This trip was not successful in that department.  I should have really downloaded some good books on my Kobo but have been weirdly resistant to that technology, not usually so squeamish.  I guess I’m more of an old fashioned paper and ink girl, must get over that and fast.

Back to reading, finished Carol O’Connell’s The Chalk Girl, never read this author and would not recommend her.  I had to force myself to finish the book.  The heroine she created, Kate Mallory, has been favourably compared to Lisbeth Salinger, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  It’s a totally unjustified comparison.  Mallory is dead on the page, the author never succeeds in bringing her to life and takes great pains insisting on how weird and fierce she is but it never ignites,telling is not feeling. 

When we were in Havana I was able to score a book by Jeffry Deaver, The Twelfth Card, only picked that one because it was the biggest one on the shelf.  Read it, was not impressed. Totally preposterous beginning and it didn’t get much better the further along one got in the book. One thing which bugged me about the Deaver book.  In it he describes one of the characters as being Woody Allen like, therefore no great beauty.  Nevertheless, the author takes great pains to tell us, looks can be deceiving since this nebish looking man has been going out with a curvaceous, leggy bombshell blond.  I've read statements like that in far too many books. For men intelligence trumps everything else even bad breath and crappy looks (remember Jean-Paul Sartre, he was an ugly bastard if ever there was one).  I don't really care about that what I do care about is reading a sentence where a perfectly ordinary, plain but intellectually gifted woman, snags the male babe, I don't remember reading about that ever happening, silly I know but rubs me the wrong way.

 Lastly was stuck with Patricia Cornwell’s Southern Cross.  I can deal with this author when her stories feature Scarpetta, unfortunately this one did not.  Every single character screams STUPID on a big scale, including the chief of police.  Richmond, Virginia looks like a city inhabited by morons where nobody, it seems, has a credible name.  Most of the names were in this vein:  Bubba, Smoke, Weed, Muskrat,  Jeb, Roop, Twister (thankfully dead character), Smudge, Miss Sink and on and on it goes.  It’s meant to be satirical but satire is a hard genre to master, it requires subtlety and intelligence.  This author’s attempt just strikes me as dumb and boring, not a great addition to the literature “cannon”.   

Do remember a few great books from travel past in particular one called Mountains of the Moon about the great British explorer Sir Richard Burton, not to be confused with actor of the same name.  Bought the book in Panajachel, Guatemala, it was tattered and torn but turned out to be a phenomenal read so good in fact I wouldn’t mind reading it again.

This little digression was meant to impress upon future travelers the importance of good reading material.  I’m not going to get caught again, next time I’ll be more prepared.