A Long Winter's Book

 It was an odd winter here in Minnesota. We only had two significant snowfall events and about a week of arctic weather. The frozen tundra ain't what it used to be. 

Nonetheless, I had planned on catching up on my reading as I am wont to do. I guess I kinda caught up, but only in that I got through two of the books on the stack. Normally I'd have gone through a dozen, but these were a little different.

Dracula by Bram Stoker. One of the legendary horror stories of all time. Reading it was a struggle! It's not that it was so long, but rather it's difficult reading. You need to commit to Dracula. It's written as a series of letters and journal entries and the like, rather than a traditional book. 5-10 pages a night was about all my addled brain could manage. 

That being said, his approach was unique and the letters make the reader paint their own picture of what's happening. In writing, the phrase, "Show, don't tell," is very common. Don't tell me the castle and the old guy were creepy, show me how they were creepy. And he certainly did that. Greatest book ever? No. Worst book ever? Also no.

The Great Deluge by Douglas Brinkley is a non-fiction account of the Hurricane Katrina disaster of 2005. If you tried to make an epic disaster worse, they did. There was plenty of blame to go around for both political parties, and for local, state, and federal governments. I can only hope they've learned from the experience. 

I don't write non-fiction, but I still learned some things. I liked some of his descriptions of the toxic mess that the water became as it filled with chemicals, oil/gas, bodies, and mosquito larvae. Blech! What I wanted was to be more attached to a couple of people. In fiction, you want the reader to root for the hero. The Great Deluge had heroes, but it had just a little taste of 1,000 of them. I never really got to root for any one person, which is what sucks you into any book.

But I learned more about humanity. For all of the bad people in the story of Katrina, there are far more heroes. People who drove from far away states to help on their own. Reporters who shared stories the government needed to see even more than the public. Medical personnel who risked their lives to save their patients. Those parts of the story never got old. And they restored my faith in humanity.

It might be time for a nice Louis L'amour book.