Book reports
Mar. 12th, 2012 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icepixieI recently read Collen Mondor's The Map of My Dead Pilots: The Dangerous Game of Flying in Alaska, which caught my eye for two reasons: one, come on, that title is definitely arresting, and two, I will read practically anything about Alaska, and especially about bush flying. I blame Northern Exposure.
I would like to recommend this book, which is a memoir of the author's time working for a bush commuter/freight company in the 1990s, sprinkled with bits about the history of aviation in Alaska and what appears to be information from her graduate thesis on causes of aviation incidents in the bush. Unfortunately, the style didn't really work for me. It's too precious, too purposefully broken and incomplete, and overly-reflective without really giving enough information for the audience to join her in her reflection. I also didn't care for her conceit of pretending the pilots she worked with (and I assume interviewed for the book) and she were sitting around a table chatting about the events she was recounting in long, perfectly-formed sentences with just the right amount of slang, that no one except a character in a book would ever say.
However, there was one section that I found very affecting. It has nothing to do with flying, but it's perhaps the best part of the book, if in an awful way. Under the cut for length and subject matter (suicide):
I also read Fried Green Tomatoes recently, and it was a lot of fun. I've never seen the movie, so I went into it blind. I actually found myself just a smidge more interested in the scenes with Evelyn and Ninny in 1985 than the bulk of the narrative, if only because it seemed to spread the urban south of my childhood open for me to see again in the details Flagg chose to include, such as Evelyn shopping at a Piggly-Wiggly or the Tennessee-Alabama football game being on TV in the background of a scene.* The bulk of the story, set in the 1930s and a few years surrounding it, was also really good. I love stories about tiny, quirky communities and the weird people who live in them, so this was right up my alley. Idgie was fabulous. And there was canon femslash! I was not expecting that at all, but it was a happy surprise.
* Well, okay, not that football was ever on the TV when I was a kid or now, but trust me, UT football talk is always in the air out in public.
I would like to recommend this book, which is a memoir of the author's time working for a bush commuter/freight company in the 1990s, sprinkled with bits about the history of aviation in Alaska and what appears to be information from her graduate thesis on causes of aviation incidents in the bush. Unfortunately, the style didn't really work for me. It's too precious, too purposefully broken and incomplete, and overly-reflective without really giving enough information for the audience to join her in her reflection. I also didn't care for her conceit of pretending the pilots she worked with (and I assume interviewed for the book) and she were sitting around a table chatting about the events she was recounting in long, perfectly-formed sentences with just the right amount of slang, that no one except a character in a book would ever say.
However, there was one section that I found very affecting. It has nothing to do with flying, but it's perhaps the best part of the book, if in an awful way. Under the cut for length and subject matter (suicide):
Johnny Cart was the son of one of our agents in a village north of Fairbanks, a nice kid who used to come into Town every now and again with his parents. He sometimes met the planes in the village, and all of us knew him and his sister and liked them both. We never heard a bad thing about Johnny never had a hint of trouble or that he was looking for a reason to end it all. Then one night while his parents were watching TV, while his whole family was on the other side of the wall, he walked into his bedroom, picked up his gun, and blew himself away. Johnny was maybe sixteen when he died, and his mother fell into the kind of little pieces that never seem to go back together again....
His mother found God, and He showed her the way to go on living. That was what she told me the next time she came to Town. Johnny was in a better place now, she said, and we agreed because what else could we do? Maybe God was right; maybe anyplace was better than the end of the world he was living in.
But thinking about it that way, wrapping my head around Johnny's choice to take a chance on an unknown afterlife over another day at home made me realize that he and I were more alike than I was comfortable with. He just was running away too, except where he came from it wasn't so easy to go off to college or catch a big plane looking for adventure. In his world you got a gun and let it take you away because all the necessary planning and waiting and hoping for a different future was too damn hard. The gun was instant; the gun was best. And as frustrating as it was to see all those boys die over and over again, I could understand that longing to run away forever. For them the gun wasn't a bad thing; it was a golden ticket out of everything that broke their hearts. As wrong as it was, the gun was how Johnny and the other dead boys got to fly away.
That's why this will always be the saddest flying story I ever heard.
I also read Fried Green Tomatoes recently, and it was a lot of fun. I've never seen the movie, so I went into it blind. I actually found myself just a smidge more interested in the scenes with Evelyn and Ninny in 1985 than the bulk of the narrative, if only because it seemed to spread the urban south of my childhood open for me to see again in the details Flagg chose to include, such as Evelyn shopping at a Piggly-Wiggly or the Tennessee-Alabama football game being on TV in the background of a scene.* The bulk of the story, set in the 1930s and a few years surrounding it, was also really good. I love stories about tiny, quirky communities and the weird people who live in them, so this was right up my alley. Idgie was fabulous. And there was canon femslash! I was not expecting that at all, but it was a happy surprise.
* Well, okay, not that football was ever on the TV when I was a kid or now, but trust me, UT football talk is always in the air out in public.