Bang on a Horse

This week, the blog practically wrote itself.  Two things happened today that have me fixated on thinking about books.  (One glimpse of the inside of my house would convince you of the timeliness of the topic.)

First, I wrote a letter to the author of a book I had just finished reading, something that I rarely do.  Titan Tales, by Major John Womack, is an autobiography spanning the two years he spent as one of the commanders of a Titan II missile silo in Arkansas.  While I originally bought the book in preparation for an upcoming tour of the last surviving Titan missile silo, located outside of Tucson, I quickly discovered that the author and I have so much in common that I felt compelled to write him.

Womack wrote about living in a small southern town in the early sixties—something I could relate to.  He was a navigator on the B-58 Hustler, a plane I could remember flying so low over my schoolyard that we could catch a faint whiff of kerosene.  After he retired from the Air Force, Womack taught college, retired from that, and writes an interesting blog.  As I said, we have a lot in common.

Compared to the rest of the books mentioned here, Womack's book was a real pleasure to read.

The second event was one of those anonymous posts on Facebook that are so strangely compelling, labeled, "The 100 hardest to read books of all time".  Of course, the list is composed so that the reader will be pleased to discover that he has read quite a few, so that he can proudly share that information. 

A few of the books on the list were indeed difficult to slog through, such as 100 Years of Solitude.  Evidently, no one really likes that book.  I know this for a fact since I used to assign it to students to read, every one of whom complained bitterly.  I recently found my copy, leafed through it, and for the life of me cannot remember why I once liked the book.  Yes, it is a great example of magical realism.  No, I can’t really remember why that was important.  I apologize to my former students.

Both incidents, as I said, got me to thinking about books—Specifically, books I had not enjoyed reading.

Forty years ago, I worked for Bantam Books, where I was overpaid to do an easy job.  Mostly, I drove around Texas and talked to the owners of bookstores about books we were publishing.  A minor part of my job was to read books and guesstimate how they would appeal to the readers in my state.  By now, the statute of limitations has worn off and I can probably get away with using names and book titles. 

One of the bestselling authors the company represented was Barbara Cartland, who churned out a never ending series of Victorian bodice rippers, each one ending with a passionate—but chastely demure—kiss.  The company published a couple of her books a month, each so concretely formulaic that I suspect the company kept a database of locations and character names to keep from publishing the same book twice by accident.  Not that it would really matter, as I suspect the average reader of such drivel could have cycled endlessly through about a dozen volumes without ever noticing the repetition. 

Keeping track of her publications was quite a job, since Cartland had set two world records.  Not only had she published the most books in a single year, she held the record for the most published books in a lifetime.  As a matter of fact, even though she passed away in 2000, she left behind so many unused manuscripts that she is still publishing a dozen books a year.   She currently has sold over two billion copies of some 750 odd volumes.  The Forest Service should name her Public Enemy Number 1 for the sheer number of trees she has needlessly murdered.

Bantam wanted me to read a few of them, so I'd be familiar with her work, although I have no idea why.  Even though every bookstore sold them, not once did any store manager ask a single question about her.  I suspect that the average store owner was just about as embarrassed about selling her books as I was. 

I really tried to read one of her books and. I think I managed to read the first two or three pages and the very last page of about a dozen of them.  It was actually kind of difficult to tell the volumes apart, since not only were the contents nearly identical, but every volume featured an oil painting by the same artist, Frances Marshall, on its cover. 

Bantam encouraged us to write a single page book review for every book we read.  Since I was in marketing, they were more interested in how I thought the book would sell rather than my views on the literary efforts of the author.  For Barbara Cartland, I turned in a one-page undated letter of resignation.  In a separate note, I informed my boss that if he absolutely had to have me review the book, he could just fill in the date on my letter.  He never replied.

There was another book that I also really tried to read, but found it absolutely impossible to finish.  Watership Down by Richard Adams was (lucky for me) not published by Bantam, but one of the editors was curious as to whether I thought the book would sell in Texas.  I must have started reading that book a dozen times and never made it past about page fifty.  I literally could not read it on a salary.

If you are not familiar with the book—and I sincerely hope not— it deals with a group of clairvoyant rabbits living in Southern England.  (Even Barbara Cartland kept to people.)  It was all hop, hop, fluffy, love, bunny, hop…and then I would fall asleep.  I was terribly tempted to shoot the book, then mail it back to the editor, but I was afraid he might use that Cartland letter.  Instead, I just told him the book would sell a lot better back east than in the Southwest...Which it did.

And then there were the Louis L’Amour books.  Don’t get me wrong—these were good stories.  The problem was that I told the publishers that I could read them in a couple of weeks—a promise that they promptly held me to.  When I foolishly opened my mouth, I had believed there were a couple of dozen such books, of which I had already read about half.  I was wrong.  I spent the next month reading FORTY-EIGHT Westerns.  In a row.  That is more than one a day, seven days a week.  I think reading that many westerns that fast can raise your cholesterol.

If you look up Louis L’Amour in the Wikipedia, it will tell you that the author wrote both Westerns and historical fiction.  I heard L'Amour talk about that once and, according to him, if a story took place east of the Mississippi, it was called historical fiction, but if the story was set west of the river, it was a Western. 

Whether they are Westerns or historical fiction, I can tell you that if you read enough of them—all at once—they blur together into Bang On a Horse! 

Which, as I think back on it, is still a much better story than a clairvoyant bunny.