December 14, 2007 -- Friday evening

Reading Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett. He said that Hammett wrote the book after quitting his job at Pinkerton's detective agency, where he was working in Butte, Montana. They were breaking up a mining strike and a union guy was brutally murdered, dragged behind a truck for miles. Hammett quit soon after the incident. Red Harvest is semi-autobiographical and draws on what he learned at Pinkerton's.

A favorite author--Thomas Pynchon. And, he likes all sorts of nonfiction, too, especially about Japan and the Japanese art movements after World War II. In Japan, after the war, there was an intense leftwing movement, but it was squelched. People lost a lot of hope.

He likes reading about how other cultures react to that sort of pressure--the squelching--and how people persevere.