My life and my brain have calmed enough that, for the first time in a long time, I was able to finish reading a book. I’d picked up a dozen or so in the last year, but either they were uninteresting (a lot of titles about adolescent angst…what’s up with that?) or I found them annoying (like this one). After so many failed attempts among the offerings of current fiction, I decided to try something that wasn’t waiting in my TBR pile.
The question was: What?
Fate intervened, and tossed a title my way. Bang the Drum Slowly is a title I’d been aware of, but never read. I am not a big sports fan — oh, I watch the Seahawks and I enjoy a baseball game, but I don’t follow any of it — so Mark Harris’s book about a mediocre catcher who is diagnosed with Hodgkin’s during a pennant race wasn’t high on my list. But a stray mention of it as a prime example of mid-20th century fiction caught my eye, and I figured, what the hell, give it a chance. It couldn’t be worse than some of the others I’d started this year.
What I found was something I did not expect: a unique voice and structure. Well, unique in my reading experience, anyway.
Unraveling Time
Desert Wind
Ploughman's Son
Ploughman King
The Year the Cloud Fell
The Spirit of Thunder
Shadow of the Storm
The Cry of the Wind
Beneath a Wounded Sky
Cryptogenesis: A Memoir
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 