Not a total slacker

I did finish the amazing White Fang, by Jack London. That kind of wilderness book has never particularly appealed to me, but just out of the blue, I decided to read it on my iPod given that it was one of the 50 books I have on my iPod. I really liked it. It's real easy to forget that life is often a game of survival of the fittest. It is equally easy to forget how much we are shaped by our environment. This very entertaining story does just that.

I enjoyed the descriptions of life in the wild, where every day is a struggle for survival, and, to coin a cliche, there's a thin line between life and death. White Fang was the ultimate survivor, the ultimate man's best friend. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

On the other hand, there's Basketball Jones by E. Lynn Harris, was not quite what I expected. Call me naive. I didn't know that Harris is an openly gay writer, but that was pretty evident as the story unfolded. I bought the book because it came up on Audible.com as having rec'd very good reviews, and when I checked it out on Amazon, to get a broader range of reviews, the reviews were pretty good. And, it was on the New York Best Seller List. What the heck, right?

So was I right to believe the hype? Well, let's put it this way: it wasn't bad, but I figured out who was behind the blackmail plot pretty early into the story, which was one of the major twists in the plot. There was another fairly significant plot, but I most found the story rather fantastic. I'm sure there are professional athletes who have their lovers travel surreptitiously with them to away games and treat them as kept men, but I just have a hard time believing this story could happen. Again, maybe it's just that I have no insight into that community. In a sense, if I ignore that the story is about gay men, perhaps it becomes more believable, but even then, it's a little difficult.

It was a quick read, which is another way of saying a thin plot line. I guess that as I age, I get snobbier. Having had the gourmet 7 course meal of lots of good classics (A Passage to India; Crime and Punishment; The Brothers Karamazov), reading Basketball Jones is a little like dining at McDonald's.

I continue to listen to Tom Jones, and I guess I'll get back to reading The Appeal, as well as The Age of Innocence on my iPod. I've certainly got plenty to read.