11/21/2006

Reading One Bullet Away, the Making of a Marine Officer, by Nathaniel C. Fick, who majored in classics at Dartmouth and then, instead of become an investment banker like his friends, went on to join the Marines. It's a good book, the reader said, remarking that Fick is a natural storyteller.

Another good book he's read recently--Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts, by the award winning author, Julian Rubinstein.

His favorite book--Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut. When I asked him what it was about he said this--nothing! The narrator spends a lot of time explaining things to someone with no knowledge of the planet earth...things like "what a squirel is," which, when evaluating the content of a book, amounts to that--nothing.

We talked about how you can tell a lot about a person by the books they read (am not quite sure what conclusions he drew from my Jesuit science fiction novel), he told me about how, when he was staying at a ranchstyle hostel in Guatemala, he saw a woman reading Still Life With Woodpecker, a book he was reading himself. They hit it off and spent a week backpacking together.