"Books A Plenty"

 I often become a fan of a particular author and compulsively read nearly every book the author has written. Helen Fielding, John Grisham, James Alexander Thom, Walter Mosely, C.S. Forester, James Michener, Ernest Hemingway, Pearl Buck, Lawrence Durrell, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen are among the authors whose works I have plowed through like a man obsessed.

Whenever I think of Michener, Hemingway or Buck, I think back to about thirty-five years ago when I was in the Navy and spent a year and an half on the USS Brownson. This World War II-vintage destroyer was homeported out of Newport, Rhode Island. I served as a Radioman II Class and had plenty of time to read during the shifts of 12-hours-on and 12-hours-off. The ship’s library, which occupied a small corner in the mess hall, was, for some reason or another, mostly stocked with books by Michener, Hemingway, and Buck.

On a four-month cruise of the Mediterranean and North Atlantic I read every book in the library’s collection by those authors. I can remember reading Buck’s books on China while in the Mediterranean. When the ship was docked in the harbor at Naples, Italy, I read “The Good Earth”. The plight of the Chinese farmers she wrote about caused my heart to ache as I sat in the early mornings on the quiet bridge of the ship and looked over the magnificent harbor, where in the distance I could see wisps of smoke trailing from the peak of Mount Vesuvius.

By the time the ship was in the North Atlantic, I was reading Michener. In Liverpool, England, I was reading “Hawaii” and visiting the bars and dancehalls frequented five years earlier by the “Beatles”.

From Copenhagen back to Newport, I was enthralled with the simple writing style of Hemingway. I could personally identify with this man as he had made my home state of Idaho his permanent residence. I had visited the house in Ketchem where he had killed himself with a shotgun just a few years earlier.

My most recent reading obsession has been with the author, Sandra Dallas, a mystery writer. I got hooked on her when I read “Persian Pickle Club”. This book is about a quilting club in Kansas during the Great Depression. The ladies meet once a week to sew and visit. They are a support group for each other during illness, childbirth and bad times. When the body of the husband of one of the members is found buried in a shallow grave in a field outside of town, murder is suspected. One of the quilters, who thinks of herself as a writer, wants to write about the event for a Kansas City newspaper. Her fellow quilters refuse to help.

Other books of equal interest by Sandra Dallas include “The Diary of Mattie Spenser”, “Buster Midnight’s Café”, “Alice’s Tulips”, and “The Chili Queen”. Her latest book, “New Mercies” has had too many reserves placed on it for me to get my hands on it. I may have to wait until winter to read this book. By then it will surely be off the Library’s reserve list.