Summer and long flights give me the opportunity to read. I took advantage of my free time to do some pleasure reading as well as professional reading.
The West Iron County, Michigan librarians set me up with a new digital media service called Hoopla. My first book borrowed was Stephen King’s latest collection of short stories, “You Like it Darker” I always get swept away with his story telling and it is easy to continue swiping pages to find out how the story will end. I especially like two previously unpublished stories, Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream and Two Talented Bastids. I don’t believe in the supernatural but really enjoy King’s exploration of all things other worldly.
One of my guilty pleasures is true crime and crime novels. Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows is set in glamorous and seedy Los Angeles and is an “LA Noir” crime genre. The two main characters work for a firm that protects the reputation of rich people and organizations when scandal hits. They do this by having public relations and communications experts, friendly contacts in the media, high-powered lawyers, security guards (thugs), former police detectives, etc.
The first character is Mae Pruett who is a publicist and assists Hollywood movie stars, politicians, business moguls, etc. The second character is Chris, an ex-cop who is used as “muscle” to intimidate and physically harm people. Both of them struggle with their conscience because they protect immoral people and most of their work for the company is cover-up and deceit. I can tell Jordan Harper has lived in Los Angeles a long time as he describes in great detail the ambition people have to become rich and famous. He pulls from the news in that there are characters similar to Harvey Weinstein and Jeffery Epstein. It was a page-turner and I was not pleased with the ending, but from an interview I heard with the author, this will be the first in a series of books set in Los Angeles.
Some quotes from the book:
- “Don’t worry about the truth. It’s not that the truth isn’t important. It just doesn’t matter. A lie that is never believed by anyone can still have power – if it gives people permission to do what they want to do anyway…Give them horror or give them heartstrings. Nothing else sticks.”
- “She learned how much of our lives is just stories we tell one another, or ourselves.”
- “Real power comes from generating profit for other people.”
The library apps gives me access to great magazines as well as great books. I was fascinated by Dexter Filkin’s reporting from northern Israel and Lebanon “Will Hezbollah and Go To War?” I also listened to Terry Gross interview Filkin on NPR’s Fresh Air. My main takeaway is it is amazing that Hezbollah has so much freedom and power to act seemingly without Lebanese government control. They are funded by Iran and do Iran’s bidding. Their aims are to destroy Israel and start an Islamic Caliphate in the region. Putting it in my context, it would be like a foreign country, say Canada, funding a militia in my state of Michigan whose aim is to destroy Ohio and set an ultra-Christian government instead of our representative democracy. They would not last very long. The national guard, police organizations and maybe in national armed forces would be called in to put them down. Not so in Lebanon. Filkin fears their actions will lead to an all-out war in the region that will destroy both Lebanon and Israel. It was interesting that he mentioned there is a big portion of Lebanese that oppose them.
It is also odd to an American that towns and villages in some countries can be all Christian or all Islamic. In Lebanon, Israel avoided airstrikes on Christian villages, nestled among Shiite villages. We do have pockets of Arabs and other Middle East nationalities in cities in the US, but they are always mixed with others. It reminded me of travelling through North Macedonia this past spring. We would come upon either Orthodox Christian villages or Islamic villages. You could tell immediately by either the towers of a mosque or a big cross above the town in the hills. In the American west, they usually have the name of the town in the hills above. Only in Bethlehem, Pennsylvannia is there a lighted cross, but I think that is just for tourists as part of the Christmas theme and acknowledging the history of the founding of city, rather than a statement that this is a Christian town. I hope the war does not escalate for everyone involved.
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