My Winter of Summer Reading

I was just clipping right along with my 2010 reading as noted previously.  A fairly good mix of novel, memoir, art & history.  I've always been a supporter of the 'summer reading' concept.  You know, the lighter fair that works on a beach chair in between busy summer activities--if one presupposes 'summer' & sunny relaxation have arrived!


That train of thought suggests that serious reads are best tackled in the darker, colder times of year. Usually I concur, but I didn't follow that track this year.  Maybe because we were so late starting summer this year, or maybe because I had actually accomplished much of my 'summer reading' in the spring.  In any case, I've been in another land and time for a few months that I thought I would share a little.

In the late spring, I accidentally segued into the 1960's--most of it making my mind go tilt because it required dusting off some old memory boxes that had been fairly successfully locked away.  It seemed to have started with the library's reading project featuring Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" (which I would  highly recommend, by the way).  Nick remembered reading that book for a high school class--but the book & the author were new to me--sorry I missed him the first time he entered our house.  In the midst of the book, PBS did a special on the anniversary of the My Lai disaster, and there was Tim O'Brien as a talking head... weird coincidence.

A shotgun of 60's revisiting happened in quick succession:  "My Detachment" by Tracy Kidder (anything he writes is well worth it...), "If I Die in a Combat Zone" by Tim O'Brien, & then Kathryn Stockett's "The Help" (excellent novel I would recommend).  I thought I was gonna have to check into a rehab facility to get me back into real time, but fortunately I was on a wait list for Tim O'Brien's next requested book.
Hard to explain. Those books put you right back into the time: music, smells, events--which aren't good things necessarily--along with the emotion, frustration, fear, etc. --which aren't necessarily bad things, either. Except now I'm an adult & that gut-wrenching, visceral remembering of 'feeling' from that time can be seductive.  Kind of the putting-you-finger-in-the-light-socket seductive, if you know what I mean.  Okay, step away from the sixties, now ma'am.

So I shook my head, shook off the deja vu, and threw myself into some fast fiction--back to summer reading.  When those books were returned, though, on the next excursion to the library--two more hand grenades jump into my bag:  the "Bill of Wrongs" by M. Ivins (previously mentioned) and Russ Baker's "Family of Secrets".  If you sing the old Sesame Street song, "three of these things belong together, three of these things are kind of the same...", there is certainly a connection with these two books--topics, players, Texas journalists, etc.  Also, both books allow you to digest a certain number of pages before you have to slam the book shut, toss out the expletive-deleted under your breath and go do something else while your gut settles down again.  In contrast to each other, however, Molly's book is a fast, occasionally gallows-humor, cynical satire item (which I love)--extremely sharp torture but it's over soon.

Russ Baker's 500 page tome, "Family of Secrets", on the other hand,  is a dense-pack of factoids telling a century of tales regarding "the Bush dynasty, America's invisible government, and the hidden history of the last fifty years."   It is a slow slog and a treasure trove of the trifecta of money/resources, covert activities, and power/politics.  One of Baker's colleagues suggested naming the book "Everything You Thought You Knew is Wrong", which I think is perfect.  Each page is packed with head-tilting info that reads like a fantasy nightmare, a bad high--this can't be true, right?  This is just a laundry list of innuendo & coincidences--that's at about page 100.
By about page 250 (ok I've passed the pictures at the centerfold...) I'm starting to feel more like Mel Gibson in "Conspiracy Theory".  I'm starting to enter into the den of believability & my palms are getting clammy--I don't think I can keep doing this. In this nightmare, some villains I've loved to hate for decades actually become victims of the dark side they've helped to create--that can't be right, can it?...but I read on.  Too late I figure out it would have been best to read with a white board close at hand with names & fish-bone diagrams to try to keep it all straight...

By about page 350 or so, it truly becomes a labor of love to finish the thing rather than follow the urge to get as far away from the jaws of the shark-book as possible.  But I finished it.  Every last page.  It's not a book I can love, but one I can respect. And I celebrate the tenacity of Russ Baker & the obsessive hunt for connecting the dots that in the end is investigative journalism.  I don't necessarily buy all of the connectivity of power & wealth as plotted & sinister--but the book succeeded in making me ask (repeatedly) why did I/do I believe that is how things came down?  Is my ('our') version really an urban myth that I've held tightly to all of my life?  Is the deeper, smarter version of fooling the electorate really this deep and dark?

My mind has most definitely gone tilt in a big, big way, and this time it's not just the grief & music & peace/love/dope revisited.  This time the frame those banners hung on is under the lens.  And then every event since then.  That's a good thing--but playing some old Jefferson Airplane & Peter, Paul & Mary won't help with this.  Nor will a twelve-day with a couple of two day follow-ups.

I'm most definitely taking a book-break back to some summer reading fair--at least briefly.  But I will also be following Russ Baker's blog, WhoWhatWhy. along with some others that I know will keep asking the hard questions.  Thanks, Mr. Baker...but now I gotta get the shark-book back to the library.  It's overdue--and someone might be watching.