ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

I have been sick and miserable all week with a crappy cold I caught recently, which has left me pretty exhausted, with little energy for my normal pursuits. Which is kind of sad, really, considering that my normal pursuits are pretty sedentary. Luckily, my boyfriend had just finished up Sara Paretsky’s new novel Bleeding Kansas and passed it on to me, since I’d been dying to read it ever since I first heard about it when Sara Paretsky was interviewed on our local NPR station a couple months ago. For anybody who listens to KCUR and knows its programming, she appeared on “Up To Date” by Steve Kraske. This is a complete aside, but I just wanted to comment that I find Steve Kraske a very annoying interviewer and that one time my boyfriend and I were pulled up next to him at a stoplight with our windows down and my boyfriend verbally abused him a little. I didn’t understand at the time, but I do now. Oh, how I do now.

The day she appeared, I was really irritated with Kraske because during the hour, he kept commenting that he wanted to take some calls and read some listener e-mails on the show. I think it would have been reasonable to expect that a lot of people would have wanted to participate on the show that day, because although Paretsky now lives in Chicago, she went to KU and actually lived in the same women’s dormitory that I did. So she is from the area. Kraske’s show begins at 11:00. I really wanted to get in on this, so as soon as I figured out who was on, I e-mailed him, at about 11:10. By noon, he had not taken a single call or read a single e-mail, and he had asked her a lot of dull questions, which of course she responded nicely to, because she is a gentlewoman with good manners. He runs his show like this every day. Oh, and I hate the way he cuts callers off when he decides they should be done talking. There is a right way and a wrong way to get people off the phones.

This was a really long “aside”. And anyway, I haven’t been listening to NPR lately anyway. Since this is an election year, I know that I won’t be able to stand it anymore by the time spring really rolls around, so I bought an online subscription to XM Radio and have been listening to the Ron and Fez show instead, which is more interesting than NPR. Sorry, Neal.

So anyway, it was a source of consolation to me this week that I finally got to read Bleeding Kansas. It was exactly what I needed to read, too. I loved it for several reasons. It is set outside Lawrence, KS, so it was interesting in the sense that one doesn’t often get to read a fiction book about someplace they’re extremely familiar with, especially when that place is rural Kansas. I found her portrayal very authentic, which is very nice considering how irritating I found the TV program “Jericho”, which was created by people who apparently learned about western Kansas from a book with no pictures, written in heiroglyphics. The book’s plot deals extensively with religious extremism, which was comforting to me given recent personal events in my life. When I say recent personal events, I am referring to the fact that I came out as an atheist a couple weeks ago, and it didn’t go over altogether well. I guess I would say that I’m a little biased in the book’s favor, because it was exactly the type of thing I needed to read at this point in my life. It was very emotionally satisfying to read a book where the main antagonists are these completely berserk Christian fundamentalists, the type of people you are comfortable being completely disgusted with. It felt great to read this and to feel that the author is on your side. The protagonists are Christian as well, it’s just that they are extremely liberal Christians, practically Unitarian, even. So I was able to get behind all the important characters, which I liked as well.

I liked that she wrote about Kansas, and Kansas history. Nobody writes about Kansas, any more than they write about Nebraska or Iowa, which is too bad really, considering how much more interesting Kansas is than those states. Not to knock them, but it’s not like those areas of the country were major focal points of American History. It was great to read a refreshing look at Kansas. The world at large thinks we’re religious lunatics who want to ban evolution and minorities. And hayseeds. People on the east coast barely understand that we have plumbing out here, for godsake. Anyway. Frankly, I’m crap for writing book reviews. I hated writing critical analyses in school, and I hate it now. Besides, I would rather have a conversation with someone else who read the book, rather than writing a bunch of hoity toity shit about its literary merit. Not everything I like to read has artistic or literary merit. But for what it’s worth, I thought Sara Paretsky’s newest book does. I loved it and I am going to go back and read her other books now. My boyfriend has given me his signed copy of Blacklist for starters.