In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Originally published January 1966 by Random House
Source: this one is mine

Publisher's Summary:
On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.

Five years, four months and twenty-nine days later, on April 14, 1965, Richard Eugene Hickock, aged thirty-three, and Perry Edward Smith, aged thirty-six, were hanged for the crime on a gallows in a warehouse in the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas.

History of the Book:
When The New York Times published a piece about the murders in November, 1959, Capote was interested enough to investigate the murders. Capote brought his  friend Harper Lee ( To Kill a Mockingbird) to help gain the confidence of the locals in Kansas. After the criminals were found, tried, and convicted, Capote conducted personal interviews with both Smith and Hickock.

In Cold Blood was first published as a four-part serial in The New Yorker before it was published as a novel. Capote insisted throughout his life that every word of the book was fact but, over the years, many people have disputed this. Capote may not have been the first to write a non-fiction novel but it certainly seems to have changed the way we think about them.


My Thoughts:
In Cold Blood is Omaha's 2013 selection for a community read. It's a book that's been on my nightstand for a long time, a book I felt like I "should" read. For some reason, though, it just never seemed to be the right time to pick it up. Until everyone else was reading it. Now I'm looking forward to discussing it with others, Capote's writing style, the way he portrayed two cold-blooded killers as complex humans, the veracity of the details.

I'm not hung up with whether or not every bit of what Capote wrote as fact is, actually, fact. But then, I'm not reading it in 1966 believing it to be a complete work of nonfiction. I'm far more interested in the way Capote portrayed Holcomb, Kansas, its denizens and their reactions to the crime.

'The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them."

I'm more interested in the relationship between the two killers, their relationships with their families and the impact those relationships had on both men, and the way Capote takes the reader deep into Smith's and Hickok's minds. Smith, in particularly, comes off as both a sympathetic and heartless person who, despite his hard-scrabble life, might still have made something of himself but chose not to, preferring instead to play the victim. It's rare to read a book, fiction or nonfiction, where the "bad guys" are so nuanced.

Richard "Dick" Hickok and Perry Smith

These days we have grown hardened to crime; it takes a lot to shock us collectively. If the Clutter murders occurred in 2013, it would make the national news for about one day and then disappear in the wake of a more heinous crime. But it would still stun and terrify a community as small and isolated as Holcomb and that may be one of the reasons this story still resonates with so many readers more than fifty years after it happened.

Banned Books:
The book was banned for a time in Savannah, Georgia when a parent complained about the sex, violence and profanity but the ban was reversed when other parents complained. In 2011, when a Los Angeles-area Advanced Placement English teacher tried to add the book to her curriculum, it was again challenged for the same reasons but the school board ultimately approved its use.

I had planned to read this one a little more slowly but when Sheila of Book Journey had to move up her annual Banned Book Week coverage, I decided to read this one sooner so I could help start to get the word out early about banned books. The official Banned Book Week is next week but to get yourself fired about to read a book for that week, check out more of the posts at Book Journey!

Life: It Goes On - September 15

 It's grey, it's cool, and it's rainy here this morning - woohoo! Just the kind of day to curl up and read. I had such a productive day yesterday that I'm going to take some time today to do just that.

It's a sad day in Husker Nation. Unless you're like me and a) are able to get over the football game when the game is done and/or b) cheer for all Husker teams in which case you're happy because the volleyball team won it's third match in as many days last night. Go ladies! We are a particularly superstitious lot here, though, and next week there will be some tweaking of Husker gnome placement and a change in which Husker gear we're wearing. Because, yes, we really can influence the outcome of the game!

Here's What I'm:

Arcangelo Corelli

Listening To: Arcangelo Corelli's 12 Concerti Grossi Opus 6 this morning. My dad raised us on classical music, particularly on Sunday mornings.

Watching: Sports and not much more.

Reading: I'll finish Truman Capote's In Cold Blood by tomorrow then I'll start Marisha Pessl's Night Film on my Nook.

Making: Pasta sauce with herbs and tomatoes from the garden to freeze, breakfast burritos which I wrapped and tossed in the fridge for quick breakfasts, and variations on the traditional S'more. Those were a big hit with the young people that were at my house for a fire the other night! I'm still looking for a good alternative to graham crackers but we found quite a lot of good alternatives to plain chocolate bars.

Planning: I've got some furniture I want to get painted today if the weather cooperates. If not, I'm going to start working on Christmas gifts.

Grateful for: The rain; it's been so dry here the past few weeks.

Loving: Miss H finally having her driver's license. Except for the fact that now I have one more thing to worry about when I hear sirens nearby!

Thinking: I might just break out a can of pumpkin this week. Pinterest, you evil creation, you've broken me down with all of your pumpkin recipes!

Looking forward to: Book club this week with our extra guests as we discuss Lily Koppel's The Astronaut Wives Club. It's going to be a good discussion - my mom and I have already been talking about the writing.

Lit: What To Listen To?

Every Thursday, over the lunch hour, the library close to my office has their book sale. I make it a point to stop by once every couple of months to drop off books to donate and to see what I can pick up for $20. Generally, I try to pick up five new audio books; at just $2 a book, even when I'm paying for a book I already own in print, it's a bargain. This generally results in me driving around with several books in my car at a time. Until yesterday. Thursday. The day I could have stopped by the sale but didn't. Today I put in the last disc of the last book I've got in my car.

Now the question is do I do what I always used to do, listen to the news or music while I drive until next Thursday? I always enjoyed that and I must say I felt much more in the loop about what's going on in the world when I did that. Plus, the books at the library are, after all, only two bucks and I'm supporting a great cause.

Or do I load books onto my phone and start listening that way? And if I do that, where do I get my books from? I can get classics from Librivox for free but to get more current books, who should I pay? Who do you use? I'd like to use iTunes (since I do have a resident Apple genius to help!) but, dang, they are not cheap!

If I'm paying real prices for books, I definitely won't be paying a second time for books I already have on my shelves. So what do I want to pay for? I'm very tempted by Mary Russell's The Sparrow (as so marvelously sold to me by Andy of Estella's Revenge yesterday) or Cathleen Schine's Fin And Lady which I've been looking forward to for months. Do you have any recommendations for great books on audio that are well worth the price?

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Published November 2008 by Penguin Group
Narrated by Atossa Leoni
Source: I bought both of the copies of this one that I own - once again, I have it in both print and audio

Publisher's Summary:
Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them—in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul—they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation.  

My Thoughts:
Mariam is forced, as an fifteen-year-old, to marry forty-year-old Rasheed. It seems at first that life will be better than expected until Rasheed gradually begins to show his true colors, first by insisting that Mariam wear a burka when they're out in public. When she is unable to give him a son, the beatings begin and eighteen years after they marry, Rasheed takes another young wife. Laila has her own reasons for accepting Rasheed's offer of marriage. Even so, she is much less willing to take Rasheed's abuse than Mariam has been and Mariam slowly begins to come back to herself.

I really wanted to be emotionally caught up in this book; I really should have been caught up emotionally in this book. Mariam's and Laila's stories are heartbreaking, as is the story of what has happened to Afghanistan in the past three decades. War, abuse, constant fear - this should have been a book that kept me on edge but it just didn't. Perhaps it was the experience of listening to it (although the narration is really quite good and I think having the authentic voice added a lot to the story) while driving and not being able to be totally immersed. Still, if for no other reason than to learn a tremendous amount about life, particularly life as a woman, in a part of the world that never ceases to interest me, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a book worth reading.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
Published April 2007 by Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Narrator: Satya Bhabha
Source: I bought this one on audio

Publisher's Summary: 
At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with a suspicious, and possibly armed, American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful meeting. . .

Changez is living an immigrant’s dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by Underwood Samson, an elite firm that specializes in the “valuation” of companies ripe for acquisition. He thrives on the energy of New York and the intensity of his work, and his infatuation with regal Erica promises entrée into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore.

For a time, it seems as though nothing will stand in the way of Changez’s meteoric rise to personal and professional success. But in the wake of September 11, he finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and perhaps even love.  

My Thoughts:
There's been a nagging thought in the back of my mind lately, "I swear I finished a book I haven't written a review for yet." But there was no book sitting on my desk waiting for me to write its review so I pushed the thought aside. Suddenly, I remembered; I had yet to review this one, which I had already put into a bag to be donated back to my library. So frustrating because this one really impressed me and I don't even have a paper copy of the book to go back to refresh my mind.

If the book were a movie, it would be said that Hamid has torn down the fourth wall with his narration - the reader appears to be the unidentified American to whom Changez is telling his story. This could have been nothing more than a gimmick; instead it's a unique way to draw readers into the story and the tension Hamid is building to. It's particularly effective on audio.

I assumed that Changez was going to be turned to fundamentalism after having abuse heaped on him by angry Americans following the September 11 attacks. Instead Hamid makes Changez change much more gradual, less the result of an overt action than a culmination of the collapse of his relationship with Erica, disillusion with his work, and a loyalty to Pakistan. It's thought provoking; I often found myself wishing that I had a paper copy of the book so that I could take notes of especially interesting points and finding myself looking at things from a different point of view.

Hamid packs a lot into this short book including an ending that, literally, left me with my mouth hanging open as I was driving down the road. I highly recommend The Reluctant Fundamentalist.