Crashed (Junior Bender #1) by Timothy Hallinan
- because Nancy Pearl included it among her "under the radar" reads for this summer, and I do like trying books not many people have read. Then again, this isn't really a reason why I liked the book. More like a reason why I'm inclined to like it, so...
- because the plot's tight and moves along quickly, and the writing's smooth and witty.
- because of who Junior Bender is--a crook (with a heart of gold, of course) who does detective work for other crooks. And in addition to being a career criminal, he's a career reader. Sold.
I highlighted a few sections. Read and see if you don't like him, or at least, how he spends is off-work days.
“It’s true. Like it or not, I’m a professional burglar.”
“You mean, like full-time?” She stretched the words out derisively.
“Well, you see, that’s one of the nice things about being a burglar. You only work a couple of times a month.”
“What do you do the rest of the time?”
“Read.”
...my three touchstone books. I had a fine-quality first edition of The Recognitions, complete with dust jacket, autographed by Gaddis himself, that had cost me fifteen hundred and was now worth about $ 10K, and a beautiful 1930 edition of Moby-Dick with illustrations by Rockwell Kent. My copy of The Dream of the Red Chamber was more prosaic, a five-volume set of Penguin Classic paperbacks in the extraordinary translation by David Hawkes, which he titled The Story of the Stone. I didn’t feel starved for human companionship, not when I had the enormous, tumultuous Chinese family in the Stone, especially the pampered and extravagantly romantic boy, Bao-Yu, who was born with a magical piece of jade in his mouth, and the two girls who love him.
“With all due respect to your wonderful degrees,” I said, “a lot of people come out of college too dumb to exhale. I gave myself a better education out of The Recognitions than any college on this coast, including Stanford, could have offered.”
"It’s roughly a thousand pages long, and it’s about everything in the world. But most of all, it’s about forgery and faith, and between those things you can crowd most of life... I got though the first hundred and fifty pages, writing all the time, and then I got every book I could get my hands on about the things Gaddis talks about in those pages.”
She had angled her head slightly to one side by way of demonstrating that I had her ear. “For example.”
“Spanish monasticism. The Gnostics. Authorship of the New Testament. The Flemish masters, especially van der Goes and van Eyck. The music of Pergolesi. Inherent vice— that’s the tendency of certain artistic materials to deteriorate over time, the way most frescoes eventually peel and chip. The Catholic Church’s use of fictitious martyrs to convey the faith. The international trade in art forgery. How to mix seventeenth-century pigments. Greenwich Village society in the early fifties. The spatial organization of triptychs. The symbolism of the elements in a painting of the annunciation— with your last name, that might interest you. And about fifty other things. And I had eight hundred fifty pages to go.”
I drained my wine, reached past her, and poured myself some more. She watched me, her mouth drawn in at the corners and her eyes on my hands.
“And this continued,” she finally said, “for how long?
“About five years..."
See? Makes me think of a career change. Well, not really. Um, maybe just a bit.
(My copy: Kindle edition, personally bought.)
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