The Reluctant Fisherman

Eternal Lovecraft, by Jim Turner and others. Years ago, during that summer when my brother was trying to teach me to love fishing as much as he did (trying is correct—it was a failed enterprise), I started carrying along a book for those inevitable moments when I became bored. At some point that summer, those books became books by H. P. Lovecraft. And so I was deep into At The Mountain of Madness when my brother caught a fourteen pound carp (ugghh!) and I suffered his anger when I wouldn’t just drop the book and help him land the monster. I read The Call of Cthulhu along the banks of a Mississippi River levee with the sun burning my neck and the chill of the story in my mind. Strangely enough, I remember The Doom That Came To Sarnath not just because of the doom, but because my brother was using bacon to catch crayfish and crayfish to catch catfish. It was a raw and real lesson on the circle of life in more ways than one. This book was hiding in the stacks of our local public library and so I grabbed it, thinking it was a collection of Lovecraft’s stories. I was wrong. Instead, it’s a collection of people writing on Lovecraftian (yes, a real word, according to editor Jim Turner) themes. In other words, people trying to write fiction like Lovecraft wrote fiction. Having made that discovery, I expected disappointment, but the collection is rather strong so far. It includes stories by Harlan Ellison, Stephen King, Ron Goulart, and others.

Something Like An Autobiography, by Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa falls into that category of people whose lives are almost as famous as their art (okay, maybe not in the United States, but certainly in Japan). Kurosawa directed some of greatest movies ever made, including Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo (all ranked among the top 250 movies every made at IMDB—for what that’s worth). Something Like An Autobiography is a collection of vignettes, pulled from the memory of Kurosawa, written with visual power and arranged with care and beauty until they come to resemble a series of scenes from one of his movies.

The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingslover. I’m reading this book because my wife thinks I need to start reading books by people who are still alive. I’ve not read Kingslover before and so far (I’m fifty pages into it) its seems a bit over-written. Still, I’ll reserve final judgment until I’ve finished the book.