SALT LAKE CITY — One good thing about the pandemic: For all the things it does restrict, it also throws a nice spotlight on the simple pleasures it doesn’t.
Books, for instance.
There has been no lockdown on books.
Granted, with bookstores and libraries closed, actual physical books have been harder to come by. But with the internet, e-books and Amazon, where there’s a will there’s a way.
This is a shoutout to books for all the places they have taken us the past couple of months when we couldn’t go anywhere.
My first pandemic book was the last one I checked out from the library before the lockdown began: “Columbus, the Four Voyages,” by Laurence Bergreen.
In “The Four Voyages,” we learn that Christopher Columbus made four trips to the New World between 1492 and 1504 — and on none of them did he know where he was.
He remained convinced to his last breath that he was walking the coastline in China — because that’s where he said he was going and that’s where he wanted to be.
In essence, Columbus was the first developer in the Western Hemisphere, and if developers have a bad rap, he’s the one who got it started. The natives he didn’t massacre or turn into slaves got sick with European illnesses — with no social distancing in place or treatment of any kind. There were a million native people living on Hispaniola (Haiti) when Columbus and his men arrived. Twenty years later, there were 32,000. Read this book and you will not be throwing Columbus Day parties anytime soon.
Next I found an e-book on the iPad my brother left laying around my house: “Testimony,” by Scott Turow.
Since writing “Presumed Innocent,” one of the great legal thrillers ever, Turow has written 10 novels trying to replicate it. This, too, falls short, but it’s a high standard to try and meet and “Testimony,” about a lawyer who investigates war crimes in Bosnia, is a good enough read I didn’t quit on it.
Next came an email from the Park City Library inviting one and all to click on a link and read its 2020 One Book One Community selection called “Deep Creek,” by Pam Houston.
Houston once lived in Park City while she was attending the University of Utah. She subsequently became a successful author who bought a 120-acre ranch at 9,000 feet elevation in Creede, Colorado. “Deep Creek” is about how the ranch has shaped her life.
Pam Houston is one of those authors so talented that you find yourself rereading paragraphs and even entire pages because you can’t believe someone can write that well — and then you go back and read it again and realize, yep, someone can write that well.
I loved her memoir — until I hated it, finally done in by one too many the-planet-is-being-destroyed environmental lectures — from a woman whose idea of conservation is to regularly commute six hours — one way — from her ranch to the Denver airport to travel the world teaching writing seminars.
After starting, and then putting down, an e-copy of “The End of October,” by Lawrence Wright, a novel about a fictional pandemic (sorry, too much, too soon), I received notice from the library that they were reopening for curbside delivery and my sanitized copy of “American Dirt,” by Jeanine Cummins, was ready to be picked up.
In “American Dirt,” Cummins tells a fictional story about a Mexican woman who watches as her extended family, including her journalist husband, is killed by a drug cartel, and then takes off on the run with her 8-year-old son because there’s a hit out on them, too.
What unfolds is a glimpse into the life of migrants as they stream toward el norte and the USA.
Whatever your views on immigration, you can’t come away from reading “American Dirt” without attaching a heart to these migrants.
Upon its release in February, “American Dirt” became embroiled in controversy as critics lambasted Cummins — an American citizen who has partial Latino heritage (her grandmother immigrated from Puerto Rico) — for resorting to stereotypes in her portrayal of migrants, drug dealers and lawlessness in general south of the border. It got so heated that her book tour was canceled even before the virus could shut it down.
My opinion: I think the Latino writers who are leading the criticism are mad because they didn’t write it. I haven’t read a novel as compelling or as powerful in a long time. And I didn’t have to go anywhere or violate anyone’s personal space in order to enjoy it.
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