pileofgreybooks: a book ring

For whatever reason I love this hard boiled, gin/whisky & laudanum soaked, blood simple murder mystery enough to name it among my favorites.
It is about an investigator known only by the moniker the continental op who is trying to clean up the corruption in a town named Personville (aka Poisonville) by it’s denizens. It is full of great lines like:
“Don Willsson’s gone to sit on the right hand of God, if God don’t mind looking at bullet holes.’ ‘Who shot him?’ I asked. The gray man scratched the back of his neck and said: ‘Somebody with a gun”. And others: “Are you married?’ ‘Don’t start that.’ ‘Then you are?’ ‘No’ “I’ll bet your wife’s glad of it.”
I don’t really like murder mysteries, normally, but this one built so many of the clichés and uses them so well making them fun--in a kind of twisted late 1920’s gangland kind of way. It is comfort food--a blue plate special for my soul.

You may or may not know this, but I am always suspicious of coming of age novels. Not that there's anything wrong with them in theory, but I've felt that at times people use the "coming of age" genre a little too often, giving them license to wander the pages pointlessly and have sloppy editing choices. I don't keep this suspicion from reading them, however; the novel was about Mennonites and a very dear friend sent this to me all the way from that distant land called Canada, so I had two very good reasons to try this one on. The pace of the novel was slow to me at first, but I found myself falling in with the flow later on and enjoying the ride. There was a lot of negativity about Mennonites in it, which annoyed me a little. I mean, there's a lot to be desired, but goodness! But the story was set in a very small town, so a lot of cultish things can happen there which is more or less nonexistant in other places. The pastor of a nameless Mennonite church recently gave a sermon stating that the priesthood of believers concept with regards to church leadership wasn't valid, and that anyone who disagreed with said leadership was "of the devil." So, maybe the narrator, Nomi (I love her name) wasn't so off the mark. The father, Ray, is a desperate loving character who slowly sells all the family's furniture--by far the best drawn one in this work. I don't understand Nomi very well, but she's 16--and who can really understand 16 year olds--I didn't even understand them at that age. The mother (who, not to give away too much, is excommunicated aka shunned from the Mennonite church) is a bit mystical, but she has gone missing, which makes her more of a dream to Nomi than reality. The reason her mother is shunned is only revealed in the final pages of the book, in a little too quick tying up the knots sort of way, that makes sense in some ways but not in others.

This is just to say that I found a used copy of Maus II and it was wonderful in that horribly sad sort of way. If only I could draw; I could see myself getting into graphic novels.