TBR Pile

Also, check out Maureen Corrigan’s review of Heart the Lover, the new novel from Lily King, about a young love triangle. As Corrigan puts it, “If you've ever lived through such a moment you'll appreciate how King renders the all of it: the banality of visitors' small talk; the unreal sense of melodrama, the sporadic awareness that a deadline for final conversations is approaching.”

Mailbag!

Last week we talked about Charles Portis’ True Grit, and where have all the contemporary Westerns gone. Here’s some of what you had to say:

Alicia M. wrote: “All too often, Western stories made Mexicans and Native folks the enemies and just entirely erased Chinese-American history and Black history. These books offer a reorientation: The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James follows Mexican bandidos and tackles border politics, intergenerational trauma, and the legacies of racism and colonialism. The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin spins a revenge odyssey for a Chinese-American assassin who sets out to rescue his kidnapped wife. Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke is contemporary police procedural, but featuring the first Black Texas Ranger.”

Simon T. wrote: “Why is Portis' shallow book True Grit celebrated? The most striking thing about the book is its celebration of Quantrill's Raiders, a falsified 'Lost Cause' mythology that was carried through in both movie versions. The propagandistic celebration of Quantrill, a murderous, pro-slavery ‘raider’ from Missouri who slaughtered abolitionists in Kansas, is a stain on Western literature. The mythology is downstream culturally from the 'Lost Cause' fiction works of the Jim Crow era, spun up in books and movies like True Grit and other narrative fiction that poses Confederates, and the recruits they duped into the service of slavery, as either noble knights and ladies or ‘rebels’ and American heroes-against-the-odds. The 'revenge' narrative that has served to drive plots for centuries can't save the ignorable True Grit novel and movies.”

Barbara C. wrote in about C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett series: “Try reading a few of them , they really are not straight Western, they each have an intriguing crime mystery going on and some national interest stories sometimes regarding politics, the FBI, etc. The Pickett family that the books all include is the hook that keeps people coming back I think so there are several different story lines going in each book.”

See you next week!

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