Thursday, July 12, 2013
Back to my routine. How wonderful. Got up at 4:30, hit the gym, wrote, organized, zoned from 7-4, picked up Alice at 4:50, had dinner, bed at 10.
Wrote a review of Deliverance on Goodreads:
I was driving with my uncle through the California desert on my way to Arizona when we passed by a used bookstore in the middle of nowhere. We stopped and looked through shelves upon shelves of old books for a good 30 minutes. I was in search of something to add to my collection, something worth owning to remember the great road trip my uncle and I were on. After 35 minutes, I finally found a hardback of this book with the dust jacket ripped and worn from decades of shelf-life. There was no price inside, so I was charged $2.50 on July 6, 2013, half the original $5.95 back in 1970. Like most of us, I'd seen the movie but had never read the book. The film is iconic and deservedly so. Burt Reynolds was never better, Jon Voight was in his prime, and Ned Beatty, bless his soul, would have brought Shakespeare to tears with his unforgettable pig squealing. The good news is the book does not disappoint. At all. It's a guy's book from cover to cover, meaning it's all about guys doing guy things, joking, flexing and competing with nature--in this case a mighty river--and losing badly. Written in first person and broken into five succinct chapters (Before, September 14-16, After), James Dickey nails so much about the way guys behave in just 278 pages. And when I say nail, I mean Hemingway nail, right through to the very core of guy-think, which I'm guessing hasn't really changed much in the last few thousand years. These men are normal, fearful, stupid, cocky, brave and ultimately survivors of the great dark force of universal indifference toward guys going down an untamed backwoods river in canoes. They come out of their ordeal fully alive (save Drew), and so did I upon reaching the final page. The beginning is a little too poetic for my taste (Dickey was a poet, after all), but once those two toothless goons (whose faces spun in many directions) appear, the entire novel takes on a cinematic efficiency that trumps poetic writing in favor of damn smooth storytelling. The film faithfully captures what was always there in the novel. It's a classic for a reason, banjo duelin' and all, and my newly acquired hardback of this classic 20th Century novel turned that quirky, out-of-the-way bookstore into a star moment on my wonderful four-day road trip with my dear uncle.
Back to my routine. How wonderful. Got up at 4:30, hit the gym, wrote, organized, zoned from 7-4, picked up Alice at 4:50, had dinner, bed at 10.
Wrote a review of Deliverance on Goodreads:
I was driving with my uncle through the California desert on my way to Arizona when we passed by a used bookstore in the middle of nowhere. We stopped and looked through shelves upon shelves of old books for a good 30 minutes. I was in search of something to add to my collection, something worth owning to remember the great road trip my uncle and I were on. After 35 minutes, I finally found a hardback of this book with the dust jacket ripped and worn from decades of shelf-life. There was no price inside, so I was charged $2.50 on July 6, 2013, half the original $5.95 back in 1970. Like most of us, I'd seen the movie but had never read the book. The film is iconic and deservedly so. Burt Reynolds was never better, Jon Voight was in his prime, and Ned Beatty, bless his soul, would have brought Shakespeare to tears with his unforgettable pig squealing. The good news is the book does not disappoint. At all. It's a guy's book from cover to cover, meaning it's all about guys doing guy things, joking, flexing and competing with nature--in this case a mighty river--and losing badly. Written in first person and broken into five succinct chapters (Before, September 14-16, After), James Dickey nails so much about the way guys behave in just 278 pages. And when I say nail, I mean Hemingway nail, right through to the very core of guy-think, which I'm guessing hasn't really changed much in the last few thousand years. These men are normal, fearful, stupid, cocky, brave and ultimately survivors of the great dark force of universal indifference toward guys going down an untamed backwoods river in canoes. They come out of their ordeal fully alive (save Drew), and so did I upon reaching the final page. The beginning is a little too poetic for my taste (Dickey was a poet, after all), but once those two toothless goons (whose faces spun in many directions) appear, the entire novel takes on a cinematic efficiency that trumps poetic writing in favor of damn smooth storytelling. The film faithfully captures what was always there in the novel. It's a classic for a reason, banjo duelin' and all, and my newly acquired hardback of this classic 20th Century novel turned that quirky, out-of-the-way bookstore into a star moment on my wonderful four-day road trip with my dear uncle.
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