Books I didn't want to put down

Last week, I gave examples of books that were slow reads because the plot or characters filled me with dread or too much emotion to feel all at once. This week, I've got a short list of books I choose to read slowly because I wanted them to last or because the writing was dense or well-crafted and I wanted to savor the words of the page.

Funny I would use the word "savor" and then start the list with a Stephen King book.

In this time of pandemic, The Stand is on a lot of "must read" or must avoid" lists these days because the book is about a "super flu" which kills so many people that society collapses. I think King writes best about situations or experiences which touch him personally. I wonder if the rubella scare is a childhood memory for him. All I know is that he could see  how fearful an epidemic would be when others did not. In the same way that the television show "The Walking Dead" focuses on the goodies as well as the baddies, The Stand has a good assortment of decent people who become braver, stronger, and more loyal to one another as the world gets scarier. 



Connie Willis' Blackout has one of my favorite qualities in a novel from a series: one can start with it and then read earlier books as prequels That element is boosted because of the plot line, in which time travel is a big factor. 

Anything with decent time-travel technology or science works for me. Add in history (especially British history) and a cast of characters I can differentiate from one another and I'm totally in.

This next item is a two-fer because I once owned the H. G. Wells paperback sci-fi "double feature": The Time Machine / The War of the Worlds.

Time-travel stories, as I've said, are a favorite with me. And Wells helped me, early in my reading life, to see fiction as metaphor. When the people hide in a church from the invading Martians, only to be saved by micro-biology, even twelve-year-old me could see that these stories were about more than monsters from space and future tech. And Wells always made me wonder what was going to happen next, without dramatic cliff-hanger b.s. If I wanted to overload this list with Wells novels, i would also have added The Food of the Gods. The movie was ridiculous, but the book is pretty good -- and suspenseful in a quiet way that really builds.  



Dickens The Uncommercial Traveller has such a boring title, but it makes for great reading, even great re-reading. Before the telephone and UPS and the internet, most of the people on British trains were salesmen who had to go personally to visit clients. These "commercial travellers" were not people to observe everything around them, but rather highly-focused businessmen, or fatigued, footsore passengers wishing they could finish the eastern route and go home. But Charles Dickens was traveling by choice, or if by necessity, at a slower pace with only a two-hour lecture to deliver a couple of times per week. Thus he describes in detail the people he sees, the rooms where he stays, and the meals he eats. It's not Proustian minutiae which Dickens records, but an exact accounting of the daily life of his time. I brought the audio version of this with me the last time i took Amtrak from Boston to Cleveland, and it was excellent company.

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Starting next week, I begin a series of posts with thumbnail portraits of authors who've written in the fiction genre called "The Weird."

Garbo

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