She shook her head. “You’d think after the first time I got shot at, or my hotel got shelled, or I saw the aftermath of a drone attack or market bombing, I’d never sign up again. When actually, that’s the reason I kept going back.”
Peter knew exactly what she meant.
The sun never shone so brightly as when somebody was trying to kill you.
After a moment, I heard footsteps, and the door was snatched open by the same skinny guy I’d seen enter. He no longer wore the jacket with his name on it, but I took a leap of faith. “Jimmy Lane?”
He stared at me, and I had time to study the face on his oversize head, acne scarred with a withered Fu Manchu and limp dark hair that slithered over his shoulders. Oddly, his body parts were all oversize—not only his head but also his hands and feet—almost as if he’d been assembled from parts that didn’t quite match. He had the look of somebody who had taken a lot of questionable chances in life and had paid for every single one of them in spades.
I hadn’t thought it was a particularly difficult question but asked again, this time mixing it up in an attempt to jog something loose. “Lane, Jimmy Lane?”
We share a long hug, and I apologize for being so moody lately.
“You’re a teenager. I’d have you committed if you weren’t.” She pecks me on the forehead and all is well in our house again. “I was thinking, you start school and your new job on Tuesday, so what would you say about getting a hotel and spending the weekend in New York City?”
“Are you serious?”
She frowns. “No, I enjoy getting your hopes up and crushing them. Of course I’m serious.”
Since he could barely afford water now, much less weed, Kenny hadn’t spoken with Terry in two years. He parked on West State Street in front of a few houses that almost looked habitable. He walked through the park toward the statue of John Roebling, where they’d agreed to meet.
Terry strolled toward him. He walked with a limp now and had gained at least fifty pounds. The gold front teeth were also new and they kicked up a spark of sun. “The famous Kenneth Lee, in the hood,” he said with a smile. They shook hands. “How’s your brother?”
“Married with a kid. Selling life insurance. We don’t talk much. How the hell have you stayed out of jail?” Kenny asked.
“Always run faster, man.”
“With the limp?”
“Ah, got shot in the ankle,” said Terry. “Never fixed up right. Still run faster than any piece of bacon in this slaughterhouse.”
Kenny wasn’t sure if it was the greatest use of slang he’d ever heard or the worst.
“…for all these reasons, singles are ten times as hard to find as LPs. And when the record is rare to start with, as in the case of Valerian…”
“It’s almost impossible to find.”
“Yes.” Nevada rolled over, leaning on her elbow and looking at me. “And yet,” she said. “And yet I don’t sense any hopelessness in your voice.”
“Don’t you?”
“Not even any fashionable cynicism.”
“Oh dear.”
“In fact what I sense, when you expound at such great length on just how fucking impossible it is to find this record of Valerian’s, is quiet confidence.”
I smiled in the darkness. She could see right through me. “That’s because | think I know someone who’s got a copy,” I said.
Then it comes, a torchlight being shone into the front of our car. I start sitting up showing my hands as the door gets opened.
“What the fuck are you doing on my drive?” The voice asks from behind the phone torch that’s shone in my face. I keep my hands where he can see them.
From his shadow he’s a big lump and he must have company.
“We were just leaving.” I say as he lowers the torch. My eyes adjust, I smile at him.
“Give me the car keys or I’ll introduce you to my favourite hammer.” As if to emphasise the point he shows the claw hammer he’s brandishing in his shovel sized hand.
“You’re the boss, mate, now here’s the keys and lets not get stupid.”I move to get the keys and then I hear Nines.
“Why don’t you shift your fucking heap of shit motor mate and let us leave?” Nines’ pistol is aimed at the guy who hadn’t noticed him move due to his concentration on me.
The chamber we’re in isn’t vast by the standards of vast. It’s perhaps twice the length, height and width of that common room at Penwyllt, but it feels cathedral-like to me. Lofty and aerial.
I sit on a hunk of rock and wait for Lloyd (grinning) and Burnett (muttering) to appear. We congratulate each other. Learn to keep our torch beams angled slightly away from each other’s eyes, so we can see each other without dazzling ourselves.
Water pools in places on the floor, but is nowhere more than a few inches deep. Somewhere there’s a drip of water against rock. A faint draught.
Burnett sits next to me, mixing blasphemy and old-fashioned cursing in a way that is both dully conventional but also pleasingly heartfelt and direct.
Lloyd bounces round like a puppy. Splashes to the end of the chamber. Points out that the passage continues on from there. Pokes around a rubble of loose rock along the chamber’s right hand edge, muttering to himself.
When he’s done, he trots back.
‘OK? OK? You both all right? You’ve done well. That was a good crawl. Not as good as Ogof Daren Cilau, but still a good ’un. A really good ’un. Now, OK, take a break. Have a rest. I’ll get the sacks and we’ll set up base camp.’
I was tagged by Esther at Cozy with Books to tackle this Book Tag, which was awfully nice of her because this was a lot of fun to do. As far as I can tell, this tag originated over on the Booktube channel Tia and All the Books a few years ago.
Adaptation Snob: Do you always read the book before watching the film/TV show?
Almost always. Sometimes I watch a thing and then discover it’s an adaptation, which leads me to the source material—like Vagrant Queen or Justified. If there’s something I’m interested in, I’ll try to read the source material first, but I can’t always do that—I was able to with Stumptown and Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares. That’s actually what originally lead me to The Dresden Files, now that I think about it.
Occasionally, I’ll be interested in an upcoming adaptation and hold off on the source material, though. I knew Game of Thrones would have to tweak the source material—there’s just no way that it couldn’t. So I waited until after Season One to read any of it. I wanted the show to be able to exist in my mind aside from the book. I purposely didn’t want to be saying, “oh, that was different in the book” every few minutes. Then I was able to be able to put the books in a different mental category as I dove in. Basically, “Baelor” (Season 1, Episode 9) floored me.
That doesn’t happen often, though. Generally, I’m “book first” and maybe the other stuff later.
Format Snob: You can only choose 1 format in which to read books for the rest of your life. Which one do you choose: physical books, eBooks, or audiobooks?
The answer I want to give: Physical Books. There’s the history, the tradition, the paper, the smells, the weight of a book in your hands—the example of Samuel T. Cogley that got implanted in my brain at an early age…
Actual answer: If we’re talking the rest of my life, I’ve gotta go with eBooks. I only have so much space to store them (and I get hives thinking about downsizing what’s already there, as much as I should do that). But most importantly, my eyesight is getting worse and worse, and there’s only so much that medical science/my wallet can do for that. Eventually, reading a physical book is going to be more trouble than it’s worth. Resizing font size (and font) as needed is the best way to deal with that.
Ship Snob: Would you date or marry a non-reader?
I’d better not date a non-reader, my wife would not approve.
I guess the answer to this would depend on what you define as a reader. By the standards of book bloggers, I did not marry a reader (although she’s had a couple of atypical years where she did). By the standards of almost everyone else she and I know, I did.
The better question to ask is: would I marry someone who doesn’t support and indulge my reading/book hoarding and isn’t willing to put up with me talking about books and what I’m currently reading. And that would be a hard no. Thankfully, the love of my life isn’t that kind of person—in fact, she encourages and enables my addiction. It probably keeps me out of her hair.
Genre Snob: You have to ditch one genre – never to be read again for the rest of your life. Which one do you ditch?
That’s a no-brainer. Over the course of my life, I’ve only dabbled in Horror. I’ve appreciated most of those, but even the best of those haven’t made me say, “You know what? I need to read things like that.” Given a lot of what I read, that might seem odd to some people (and occasionally does to me, too), I can only shrug.
Uber Genre Snob: You can only choose to read from one genre for the rest of your life. Which genre do you choose?
I’m sure any reader of this blog for more than 2 weeks can sing along with this answer: Mystery/Detective/Crime Fiction. Every month and/or year, when I look at my stats, this genre accounts for at least a third of what I read. And that’s only because I ignore a lot of titles/authors*.
* I ignore a lot of titles/authors in other genres, too, due to time constraints.
I have to admit, it’s kind of a cheat to say that, though. A half-way decent (never mind really good) Crime Fiction Novelist can use any genre to produce their work—I’ve read Humorous Crime (Dave Barry’s stuff, or Ken Levine, or Duncan McMaster); Ghosts in Crime (Jo Perry’s Charlie and Rose books); Zombies in Crime (The King of Crows); Westerns (William DeAndra’s Lobo Blacke/Quinn Booker mysteries, Hockensmith’s Holmes on the Range books); SF Crime (The Stainless Steel Rat, The Caves of Steel); Crime in Fantasy Worlds (Dragon Precinct, Eddie LaCrosse books); YA Crime (Robert B. Parker wrote a couple; the Digby & Zoey books); the romance between Spenser and Susan, Kenzie and Gennarro, Elvis Cole and Lucy Chenier, and even the “when will they just admit what we’ve known since halfway through The Cuckoo’s Calling” of Cormoran and Robin beats just about every Romance novel I’ve ever read (Digby & Zoey, too, now that I’m thinking about it).
Community Snob: Which genre do you think receives the most snobbery from the bookish community?
There’s part of me that wants to say anything that diverges from a progressive social worldview, no matter the motivation behind it. Buuuuut that’s a little too serious for this kind of thing.
I guess the snobbery would be directed to Romance (I might have unintentionally brushed against it above). At least in the circles that I find myself in. There’s talk about/appreciation for SF, Fantasy, Crime, Urban Fantasy—and YA versions of all of those. People will nod to classics and talk about some commercial literary fiction, and so on. Steampunk, Westerns, Non-Fiction of all sorts, too, make the occasional rounds. But almost nothing about Romance.
But I’m willing to bet that in Romance-heavy bookish communities, there’s a snobbery about other genres—and I’m betting the numbers in those Romance-leaning communities are pretty significant, so their snobbery is nothing to shrug off.
I took a writing class a few years ago from one of the more commercially/critically successful local authors, who all but said that SF/Fantasy/Crime Fiction were wastes of time and not worthy of his attention. He said this after I’d submitted one assignment that was SF (but before he read my piece). He gave begrudging compliments about it and even managed to give a suggestion or two that helped it.
Basically, if you look for snobbery somewhere you’re likely to find it. People are garbage.
Snobbery Recipient: Have you ever been snubbed for something that you have been reading or for reading in general?
(Curiously, most of the blog versions I’ve seen of this Tag don’t have this prompt, but it was part of the original, and I thought it’d be fun to think about)
First, this question reminded me of a bit from the late Bill Hicks. You’ve got to watch the first two minutes of this:
If you’re not in the mood to take 2 minutes of your time to watch that, here’s a version of it that I lifted from JR’S Free Thought Pages. But you should watch the original instead of reading—it’s far superior. His timing and his expressions are chef’s kiss worthy).
I was in Fyffe, Alabama last year. After the show, I went to a Waffle House. I’m not proud of it, I was hungry. And I’m eating, I’m alone and I’m reading a book, right? Waiter walks over to me:
“Hey, what you readin’ for?”
Is that like the weirdest $#!% question you’ve ever heard? Not what am I reading, but what am I reading … for.
“Well, $#!% damn it, you stumped me. Why do I read? Hmm … I guess I read for a lot of reasons, and the main one is … so I don’t end up being a $#!% waffle waiter.”
But then, this trucker in the next booth gets up, stands over me and goes:
“Well, looks like we got ourselves a reader.”
What the $#!% going on here? It’s not like I walked into a Klan rally in a Boy George outfit, $#!% damn it. It’s a book!
I remember in Middle School/High School, getting a little flack for non-required reading (especially when I was supposed to be doing homework)—but generally, that quickly switched to a compliment from whoever gave the flack. But in college and after? Yeah, either from reading “popular fiction” (okay, I remember one would-be intellectual in high school who did that), fiction in general, religious books, and so on. But generally, I tune that out and turn the page (literally). But occasionally, it still gets under my skin.
I remember Felicia Day saying somewhere that’s the best thing about an e-Reader, no one knows what you’re really reading—and if you’re reading trash, you can just fib and say you’re chewing through Proust or whatever. Maybe that counts as another vote for the eBook question earlier.
Conversely, reading something specifically or in general is a great way to invite the right kind of people to talk to you. As that meme says, it’s like having a book recommend people to you.
wow…I got carried away there, didn’t I?
As usual, I’m not tagging anyone in this—but I’d like to see what you all have to come up with. Although I will tag Esther to add that last prompt, “Snobbery Recipient,” to her post, I’m curious how she’d respond.
Michelle is in her swimsuit; a pair of goggles hang around he, neck, “Can we go in the pool?” she asks. Before Blair can answer Kenny enters. He’s wearing his swimsuit, too, but it’s on backward and his goggles are wrapped upside down around his forehead “We gotta go in the pool!”
“At least somebody came to party,” says Cat.
Martin takes a theatrical sip of his awful drink. “I’m on it,” he says. “Hon, hang with your friends. Michelle, Kenny, it’s cannonball time.” Michelle and Kenny cheer… Martin leaves to change into his suit while Cat throws grapes in the air from a giant fruit bowl for the twins to try to catch in their mouths.
“That’s kind of a choking hazard, Cat,” says Blair. “Oh, honey, don’t eat floor grapes.”
“Is your mommy always like this?” Cat asks the twins. She throws a grape up for herself, and it bounces off her nose.
This is a weekly bloghop hosted by Freda’s Voice.
Grab a book, any book.
