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ENLARGE
SOUNDINGS
Kirk Robertson
This is Father's Day weekend and the City's free in-the-park concert with Louisiana's Red Stick Ramblers tomorrow night will provide a good opportunity to get together with family and friends to enjoy and evening of music. The concert will start at 7:30 PM on the Centennial Stage in Oats Park and the Churchill Arts Council's popular Art Bar will be open following the performance. For more information, you can call CAC at 423-1440.
This Sunday is also the first day of Summer and the quasi-official start of what has become known as the Summer reading season. Several people around town have asked me for recommendations for a good Summer book.
Summer reading has become distinguished from regular reading by the association of Summer with vacation time; the supposition that there might be a little time off, a little time to kick back and be entertained. While our ceaselessly connected-to-everything lives often preclude time off from anything, a good page-turner just might provide some temporary flight into someone else's world.
Mystery/thrillers, whodunits with good yarns, well-told tales are a staple of the Summer reading season and I'd like to suggest two examples of the genre to those who've asked.
The first is Denis Johnson's “Nobody Move” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) which was originally serialized in Playboy. It is entirely different from his National Book Award winning “Tree of Smoke” both in terms of content and length.
This slim crime novel, very much in the noir mode, will have you burning through the pages. Set in California's Great Central Valley, it follows Jimmy Luntz—Hawaiian shirt-wearing, chain-smoking, former barbershop quartet singer and compulsive gambler—in his attempts to escape the loan sharks hot on his trail.
He gets embroiled with Anita Disilvera, a hard-drinking local temptress and off they go running from the bad guys and their own personal demons. What makes this transcend the tropes and conceits of the genre is Johnson's ability to create compelling characters in sexy, smart, terse wise-cracking prose. Lean, mean and pulp fiction indeed.
This Sunday is also the first day of Summer and the quasi-official start of what has become known as the Summer reading season. Several people around town have asked me for recommendations for a good Summer book.
Summer reading has become distinguished from regular reading by the association of Summer with vacation time; the supposition that there might be a little time off, a little time to kick back and be entertained. While our ceaselessly connected-to-everything lives often preclude time off from anything, a good page-turner just might provide some temporary flight into someone else's world.
Mystery/thrillers, whodunits with good yarns, well-told tales are a staple of the Summer reading season and I'd like to suggest two examples of the genre to those who've asked.
The first is Denis Johnson's “Nobody Move” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) which was originally serialized in Playboy. It is entirely different from his National Book Award winning “Tree of Smoke” both in terms of content and length.
This slim crime novel, very much in the noir mode, will have you burning through the pages. Set in California's Great Central Valley, it follows Jimmy Luntz—Hawaiian shirt-wearing, chain-smoking, former barbershop quartet singer and compulsive gambler—in his attempts to escape the loan sharks hot on his trail.
He gets embroiled with Anita Disilvera, a hard-drinking local temptress and off they go running from the bad guys and their own personal demons. What makes this transcend the tropes and conceits of the genre is Johnson's ability to create compelling characters in sexy, smart, terse wise-cracking prose. Lean, mean and pulp fiction indeed.
The other suggested title is “Gone Tomorrow” (Delacorte), the thirteenth Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child. What makes the Reacher series work is that Child, like Johnson, crafts a character—grounded in reality, observant of everyone and everything around him—that you actually care about, maybe even root for as he untangles the threads of plot after plot.
This one is set in contemporary New York where Reacher, riding a late-night uptown 6 train, spots what he thinks is a suicide bomber in his car. At least she fits all the telltale signs identified by Israeli intelligence; after all “they're nervous. By definition first-timers.”
She's not; but she does end up dead and Reacher becomes of interest to the NYPD and subsequently the FBI, a crew of thugs hired by a beautiful Ukrainian woman, and a wannbe US Senator with a complicated past. Everyone is lying to everyone else about everything.
Child brings you along as Reacher unravels the threads of these competing narratives, with an amazing eye for the salient detail of the everyday. The pages fly by in a non-stop plunge toward the inevitable showdown and you can't wait for Reacher to get there.
This one is set in contemporary New York where Reacher, riding a late-night uptown 6 train, spots what he thinks is a suicide bomber in his car. At least she fits all the telltale signs identified by Israeli intelligence; after all “they're nervous. By definition first-timers.”
She's not; but she does end up dead and Reacher becomes of interest to the NYPD and subsequently the FBI, a crew of thugs hired by a beautiful Ukrainian woman, and a wannbe US Senator with a complicated past. Everyone is lying to everyone else about everything.
Child brings you along as Reacher unravels the threads of these competing narratives, with an amazing eye for the salient detail of the everyday. The pages fly by in a non-stop plunge toward the inevitable showdown and you can't wait for Reacher to get there.
