Habitual Reader Profiles - Page 2

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	Name: Patrick Calhoun
	City & State: Columbia, South Carolina
	Vocation / Avocation: Poet

Why I'm a Habitual Reader:

Marvel Comics, the stories of Kim, Marco Polo and the Connecticut Yankee turned me into a habitual reader. Those books and the library my folks had of English literature, inspiration and poetry. My three sisters and I also had the luck to look at books illustrated by Rockwell Kent, Salvador Dali and Chagall. Another spark came from sermons and Sunday School. Old Testament tales, Jesus' parables -- also the bookend narratives (the Nativity and the Crucifixion) -- were imprinted on me.

My List of Ten: 10 Tasty Morsels

1. Snowcrash
Author: Neal Stephenson
Don't think much of sci-fi? You might give Snowcrash a shot. Very tight concept novel of the near future and wittily written. An example – Gated communities have set the tone for walled 'cities' that contain groups isolated on the basis of creed, color, common self-interest. Some cross these lines, (more literally, move through the alleys among them). Here comes one now, our protagonist, a pizza delivery man skateboarding to a stop before the ornate door to a wall that delimits a compound of gangsters. Snowcrash is a textured book, highly imaginative and plausibly layered on the present.

2. Our Game
Author: John LeCarre
Behold world poker game of bluffing, sneaking a look, sweaty hands; with every player knowing every other is wearing a big gun. No more Cold War, no guarantees. Raging adrenaline on the loose: who can stand the rising stakes? Whom can you trust? For how long? The locale in the Caucusus – so close to the Chechnya – that LeCarre has chosen, reminds the reader of how shaky the bridge is from a stable 50-year stand-off to a new era of lawless entrepreneuring.

3. The Wild Palms
Author: William Faulkner
Early Faulkner that has yet to find the mythical county in Mississippi. New Orleans is the venue, where a young couple is having its honeymoon during Prohibition. One cool detail, absinthe, a liqueur too rare to acquire, is faux: the recipe -- one part gin, one part paregoric. Yummmmm.

4. Mao II
Author: Don DeLillo
You're planted first thing in a stadium full of brides and bridegrooms, each pair dressed the same. A single hammering "I do." It gets weirder. Mao II is a more far-flung novel, while not as deep perhaps as White Noise, which has been crowned by critics. All the same, it carries more social criticism: a preference of mine.

5. Drop City
Author: T C Boyle
Riveting parallel stories in Alaska give you a virtual stomach ache from anxiety. In Plot A, a commune transfers to the Alaskan wilderness; they depend on the seemingly endless funds of a jovial member. Plot B involves a handy outdoorsman set on living off the Alaskan land; he begins to depend on the help of an apprentice. The stories tie in and unfold, or, better, unravel and tangle at the same time. Exterior and interior forces make events a matter of do-or-die. Skillfully written and plotted.

6. Los Alamos
Author: Joseph Kanon
We get a detailed fabrication of the lab of the real scientists and their spouses at Los Alamos, where the Atom Bomb was tested, built, and fired for the first time. Our protagonist has to dig into the lives of all base personnel to reveal a murderer. Mysterious, romantic, tightly wound: sheer pleasure. He also wrote the excellent book, set in about 1947 in Berlin, The Good German, a sparer book.

7. Bread and Jam for Frances
Author: Russell Hoban
Frances is snubbed by her brother badger when he and his male buddies create the 'all boys no girls club.' She responds with a similarly exclusive club. Dialogue is sharp, the plot all too human.

8. Love in the Time of Cholera
Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
An older couple of means follow a slowly running beat in the South. American wet season. Their napping love reawakens during the cholera plague. Birds' feathers, birds' calls, a cloud of heat, and an impossible luxury of flowers, compete for notice in the landscape in which the two live. The story comes from Garcia Marquez in his prime.

9. Alias Grace
Author: Margaret Atwood
Atwood fictionalizes a historical account of a murder that is put on a young woman of little intelligence. How she responds to the publicity, the loneliness and loathsome taunting, brings out sympathy and a sense of the cost of fate paid sometimes by an innocent. An investigator is determined to find the truths in Grace's life.

10. The Well of Lost Plots
Author: Jasper Fforde
This third and concluding volume in the comic Jane Eyre trilogy ends the mystery of the force that is interfering in a complicated literary world. Fforde designs a backstage for each work of fiction. Great characters are played by strong actors. Likewise, entities called ‘generics,’ who aren’t seasoned or skilled enough to carry off a complex part. Into this unusual but highly organized underworld, creeps murder: several major actors get murdered. There are plausible rumors that the ‘Heathcliffe’ star might be next: the novel could be devastated by his death. The continuing crisis draws in a special branch of the Government to shore up the scaffolding before the structure of fictional literature collapses.

Have you read any of these titles? Review one now.

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