Mostly logistics today, like laundry. It took all day to catch up, but I didn't finish reading “The Great Train Robbery”. It's fascinating in the descriptions of attitudes at the time, which still persist. Examples: that poverty exists because of immoral behavior, and that criminals are a social class.
The author writes that historically only about 5% of crimes are reported and of those only about 15 to 20% are ever solved. In other passages he elaborates on the situation to the present, but here he totally fails to draw the connection: don't report anything to the police unless you yourself are 100% clean and know that for 100% certain. The authorities, of course, have nobody to thank but themselves for this caution, and the author may have done some good by pointing this out.
I'm also plodding through “To the White Sea”, but how that book ever got into print mystifies me. Typical passage, “I should've looked right, but what good would that do, so I would have looked left, but that wasn't any good either”. It's about to become the third book I've never finished.
[Author's note: “The Great Train Robbery” by Michael Crichton concerns the original back in 1855 and not the Bigg’s affair of the 1960s. He's up to his usual deep research, but this book is even better as it is nonfiction. The author has to stick to a known plot and can't inject Hollywood roles with an eye to movie rights, although the lady “Miriam's” part could be expanded should the box office so demand. The book is published by Dell, New York, New York, 1975.
The other two books which I started and not finished are Hemingway's “The Sun Also Rises” and L. M. Alcott’s “Little Women”. Don't underestimate my determination here because I've actually made it through Dean Koontz and Daniel Steele. But I could not finish those two books. Then again, if somebody like Michael Jackson can have a hit song, then somebody like Hemingway can write a bestseller.]
