WHAT is the last thing you finished reading? Images of America: Fenway Park, various authors.
WHAT are you reading now? The Innovaters, Walter Isaacson; Fenway 1912, Glenn Stout; and Cold Wind, CJ box.
WHAT are you reading next? I’m focusing my attention on Isaacson because we’re discussing the book in class on Thursday, and then after that I’ll probably finish Cold Wind because I’m at third of the way through it despite saying I was going to resist Joe Pickett until I was done with class.
Today’s prompt from Long & Short Reviews is “favorite comfort foods”. Chili would be number one, of course: when it’s fall or winter I can eat chili all day long. Sweet potatoes are another favorite, as is blackberry cobbler. Fried okra and fried green tomatoes are summer go-tos, though the green tomatoes need to be cooked right out of the garden: out of season FGT’s do not fly.
On a side note, I am in Birmingham today, having driven here last night to attend a screening of a documentary series about totalitarianism in Eastern Europe based in part on Rod Dreher’s book, Live Not by Lies. I’m going to do a proper write-up about it, but I’m writing this at 10 pm on Tuesday night and will be spending a full day tomorrow with the ladyfriend, visiting botanical gardens and American Village and all sorts of fun things, so I will probably be tardy in replying to comments.
I’ve read three previous entries in the Images of America cities, but this is the first that takes me out of state, deep into the heart of Yankeedom: Boston’s own Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox. Fenway is the oldest continually-operating major league ballpark in the nation, though Birmingham’s Rickwood Field (older by two years) is used by a minor-league team at least once a year when the Barons play a game there in honor of their Negro League namesakes. As a Red Sox fan I’m familiar with Fenway, of course, despite having never been: it features prominently in my gallery of rotating PC wallpapers, and has had a lock on my Pixel’s wallpaper for two years. Even so, this slim photo-history of the park served up surprise after surprise. I had no idea that Fenway was used by the Boston Braves (later the Atlanta Braves), as well, or that it hosted numerous football teams, including the Patriots as well as another set of Boston Braves who later became the Washington Redskins. A soccer club also called Fenway home for a few seasons. Evidently the mid-century fad of building stadiums that could accommodate multiple sports was not sui generis. Fenway has been renovated several times over the last century, of course, the most notable alteration being the arrival of the “Green Monster”. There were other changes I’d forgotten about or never heard of, like the removal of a grassy mound in one corner of the field that was known as “Duffy’s Cliff” because of an outfielder’s ability to race up it in pursuit of hit balls. There are a lot of player shots here, both posed and in-game action. One interesting one is Babe Ruth being carried off the field in his Yankee colors, having succumbed to muscle cramps, and another of two Red Sox players during World War 2 visiting their team on leave and watching the Sox beat the Yankees while in full Army uniform. I have a full history of Fenway I’m going to read next.
Today’s TTT is about DNF’s, but I don’t DNF that often and am going to share the last ten books I ordered a Kindle preview for, instead. But first, the Tuesday tease!
“Please remove your weapon. Civilized people don’t eat breakfast wearing guns.”
COLD WIND, CJ Box
However, during the visit she began to suspect that her husband’s friendship with Augusta went beyond the fraternal, especially after he lay on a sofa and asked them both to take turns kissing him. The marriage started to unravel. THE INNOVATORS, Walter Isaacson.
Cavalry: A Global History, Jeremy Black
India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia, Srinath Raghavan
Semiosis, Sue Burke. I….don’t even remember what inspired this one. It’s a SF title about humans settling on another planet and having to contend with plant intelligence. Possibly linked to that book on plant intelligence I read a few weeks back.
A Burning: A Novel. Megha Majumdar. Not sure where this one came from. A novel about social stratification and political violence in India.
Growth of the Soil, Knut Hamsun. I forget what inspired this one, too, but Wikipedia says it’s about a man repulsed by modernity and drawn toward primitivism, so I’d lay odds it was inspired by Kingsnorth.
Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression, Alan Brinkey.
The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism, John P. Clark
We Who Wrestle with God, Jordan Peterson
The Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich. A novel about a man who inspired native Americans to resist “Indian termination policies of the 1940s-1960s”.
Orthodox Worship: A Living Continuity with the Synagogue, the Temple, and the Early Church. Benjamin Williams
Warning: this review contains partial spoilers for Winterkill and Below Zero.
Joe Pickett is finally about to go home to Saddlestring after an exile in Baggs, where the governor sent him to keep a low profile – but there’s something odd going on on the mountain, and Joe wants to get to the bottom of it before he turns in his keys and it becomes someone else’s problem. During the investigation, Joe loses both of his horses and very nearly his life to a set of twins with the last name Grim, and despite barely getting away he wakes in a hospital to find that no one believes his story, especially the bit about seeing a young woman with the twins who matched the description of a missing Olympic athlete. There’s no dead horses on the mountain, no burned-out cabin, nothing to corroborate his report of the last few days. When Joe arrives home to Marybeth, she can see that look in his eye, his desire to return to the mountain with Nate and find the men who attacked him – and bring them to justice, western or otherwise. She begs him to resist the urge, though, for his family: their foster daughter April has returned, but after kidnapping and six years spent bouncing around an unofficial foster system, she’s not the girl she once was – even without puberty aggravating her hostility to those around her. Although Joe makes his promise, another mother arrives at his door weeping and asking for help: the missing Olympian is her daughter, and this is the first lead that’s surfaced in months. What’s more, the governor’s people heard Joe’s testimony and it’s brought up connections to a pair of brothers involved in a politically explosive issue a few years back, and he wants Joe to follow up. Fortunately, Joe is going up the mountain again with Nate, his fugitive outlaw buddy who is both a skilled outdoorsman and a man fearsome in combat.
Nowhere to Run is a return to the real outdoors action that Below Zero’s helicopter antics and power plant showdowns took us away from, putting Joe in such isolation that he’s often in a state of cold dread. Despite the claims of one local who caught sight of them, the men are not ‘Wendigos’, or malevolent spirits; they’re men, men who obviously know how to survive in the mountains despite the best attempts of Wyoming blizzards, encroaching hunters, and the most dangerous of them all: Government Men. Although Joe can appreciate someone wanting to be left alone, and earnestly working to achieve it, he’s the game warden, by gosh, and those men were fishing without a license and harvesting other people’s elk. (Also, they shot his horses, and even a cranky libertarian like myself would be out for blood.) Plus there’s the mystery of the woman, and Joe’s own desire to come back with his head held high. Joe is no Walker, Texas Ranger type fella: he’s an average Joe who’s a poor pistol shot and someone who has been on the losing end of a fight more than one occasions in these books. He doesn’t like waking up in a hospital room with a sneering sheriff mocking his story about two mountain men and a girl on the mountain, so pride joins duty to bring him into the dark forest and the rough slopes of the forest.
I don’t want to say too much about the plot because of spoilers, but the west’s attraction to people who want to drop out of society and escape the grasping fingers of The Man is well on display here. The brothers are even more intense in their hatred of the government than the survivalists of Winterkill: they embody the philosophy of VONU, or structuring one’s life to be ungovernable by dropping out of society all together. There’s some discussion of Ayn Rand in this, though it’s so cursory that I don’t think Box has read her, and it’s almost completely removed from the terror-twins. The drama is all around good here: the suspense & thriller aspects of it are on point, and I liked the conflict between Joe and Nate arising from their shared attitudes toward the state.
Okay, now I seriously need to commit to The Innovators because we’re discussing it in class Thursday. Fenway review will go up tomorrow, but I wanted Box to get all five of the “most recent posts” entries. Pretty sure that’s not happened since I binged the Series of Unfortunate Events back in 2009.
Quotes/Higlights:
He felt oddly disengaged, like he was watching a movie of a guy who looked a lot like him, but slower. It was as if it weren’t really him limping through the trees with holes in his leg and his best horse bleeding to death on the side of an unfamiliar mountain. Joe seemed to be floating above the treetops, between the crown of the pines and the sky, looking down at the man in the red shirt moving toward what any rational observer would view as certain death.
“The easiest way to eat crow is while it’s warm. The colder it gets, the harder it is to swaller.” Joe said, “It’s hard to believe the West was won with stupid sayings like that.”
“I feel like I died and went to heaven,” Farkus said. “I been hunting up here all my life just hoping to see something like this. D’you suppose she’s alone?” “Don’t let her see you,” Parnell said. “There’s something oddly sirenlike about this situation.” “Sirenlike?” Farkus said. “You talk in code, Parnell.” “Shut up, Dave,” Smith said. “You obviously don’t know your classics.”
“‘Murder’ is not the right word,” Coon interjected. “She was killed, yes. But it happened in a firefight at the Cline compound in the UP. There is some dispute whether she was killed by law enforcement or by her own family.” Nate said, “No, there isn’t.” He shook his head, said, “It always amuses me how a family home or small business suddenly becomes a ‘compound’ when you folks decide to attack it.”
Joe said, “You are a good man.” Coon smiled. “I’m a bad bureaucrat, though.” “That makes two of us.”
“Sheriff,” Joe said, “you’ve got an arrow sticking out of your butt.” “Why, thanks, Joe. I was wondering what it was bothering me back there.”
“We used to have a pretty good country. At least I think we did. Then something happened. It’s our fault ’cause we let it. We used to be a people who had a government,” he said, looking up, his eyes fierce again. “Now it’s the other way around.”
Warning: this review contains spoilers for Winterkill, #2 in the Joe Pickett series by CJ Box.
Joe Pickett is cooling his heels in the hind quarters of Wyoming, thanks to ….uh, well, let’s just say repeated acts of insubordination in pursuit of justice, like cold-cocking a petty traffic cop who was about to ruin a federal investigation by doing an extensive search of Joe’s truck (making him miss a one-in-a-lifetime contact with a confidential informant) and refusing to listen to reason. Joe’s staying busy, though, pursuing such miscreants like The Mad Archer, some nut who keeps going around shooting animals with a bow & arrow and leaving them to suffer. But then he gets a call from Marybeth: their daughter Sheridan is getting texts from…well, someone who died six years ago. Someone whose death haunts Joe and Marybeth to this day: their foster daughter April, who was kidnapped by her survivalist birth-mom and then killed when adrenaline-junky goonie boys with FBI badges decided to attack a community of anti-government types for camping for more than two weeks in a national park..Below Zero is an odd entry in the Pickett series, in part because it involves very little game-wardening: instead, when the texts between Sheridan and “April” indicate that she’s in the company of men who are committing a series of grievous crimes in the name of….uh, carbon….credits? …..Sheridan’s phone becomes a lynchpin that unites both Joe’s personal sense of duty with the state’s desire for justice vengeance, only with him trying to balance things so he knows more than they know so they don’t kill innocents in the pursuit of justice as the goonie boys are wont to do.
*sigh* Okay, so…..Below Zero has a title that has no connection to the plot whatsoever, a hook that is utterly compelling, and a general premise that performs about as well as a Ford Edsel. Imagine you have a Chicago criminal authority who, having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, decides he wants to do some good in the world, so he seeks out his estranged son who is an anti-CO2 jihadist and funds a road trip across America to …knock off people who are being very naughty and leaving Bigfoot-size carbon footprints, and he also takes a random girl he rescued from a brothel along. But since the girl is texting the daughter of a warden who is disturbed by the idea that his foster daughter he thought was dead is actually alive and riding shotgun for two criminals, the book turns into a big manhunt, culminating in helicopters and spray-and-pray-esque gunfights , along with the customary twist ending. The daughter connection is what makes this novel, because the criminals were both absurd and obnoxious, especially the jihadist who is such a whiny manchild I was hoping his father would go all Buford T. Justice on his petulant behind. I kept reading the book because the April premise was such a hook: otherwise, the criminals in this were completely ignnorable, positively absurd given Box’s previous abilities to deliver complex stories with criminals whose motives were understandable if not sympathetic. Still, I can’t deny that Box knows how to set and bait a hook, and the only reason I’m not reading the next one right now owes to graduate school.
Coming up, Fenway Pahk, because I did managed to read little nonfiction last week.
Terror in the deep woods! A hunter has been deliberately killed, then field-dressed like a deer. The gruesome sight makes Wyoming law enforcement realize that two prior ‘accidents’ may be connected, and Joe Pickett, Game Warden at Large, is asked by the governor to join the investigation, offering his knowledge of the land to the feds who are coming. Joe’s enemy, his boss, is fixated on the case, so much so that he welcomes Joe’s skills even if he despises Joe himself. During the early part of the investigation, though, several members of the party tracking and searching for evidence are killed, resulting in all hunting, fishing, and outdoor recreation being suspended in Wyoming. Considering that licenses and taxes from outdoors-oriented tourists are what pays the bills in Wyoming, panic and confusion erupt. The result is yet another excellent thriller from CJ Box, one that uses the killer’s point of view to build suspense and add to the drama.
At one point in this book, Joe visits his old mentor, the disgraced Vern, who looks at him and tells Joe that he’s changed: he’s gotten hard. Joe is definitely changing as a character, and well he should given how many years have gone by since the series began, and by what he’s endured. Joe is still morally square and stubborn about getting to the truth, but he’s seen so much violence and corruption — and has himself taken life — that his soul is getting grey-haired even if his skull isn’t, and his temper is more feisty, something we see several times here in his altercations with his boss. Of course, it’s unlocked by the sheer amount of stress he is under at the moment, what with being actively hunted by an anonymous madman, at the cost of a friend. Although the setup appears to be some eco-terrorist raging against hunters, it wouldn’t be a Pickett book without there being more to the store, and I liked the way Box misdirected readers through multiple angles.
I don’t usually post weekend reviews, but I’ve already read the sequel to this, so…move `em on, head `em up, cut `em out, Pick-ett! Hah!
These days when Joe Pickett is building fences, it’s on his wife’s mother’s husband’s ranch property, rather than for the State of Wyoming. Joe’s tendency to get into trouble pursuing the truth, coupled with the appointment of a vindictive weasel as Game and Fish’s new director, got him fired as game warden…..but Wyoming’s colorful new governor is on the horn with an offer that might get Joe back in the field. Something funny is going on in Yellowstone National Park: a lawyer just got off the hook there for murdering four people in an area, and the four victims were not randomly chosen. The park rangers aren’t moving at a brisk enough pace for the governor, and knowing Joe’s tendency to gnaw on a problem until he’s gotten to the bottom of it, the governor wants Joe to investigate — unofficially, mostly — on his behalf. Free Fire offers a lot to the reader, but the star is Yellowstone National Park itself,
So, about those murders and the lawyer getting off: turns out because of Yellowstone’s unusual legal history — it was constituted before the two states whose land it’s within were made states — there’s a small stretch of land where a jury cannot formed, and crimes can theoretically not be legally prosecuted. A lawyer, McCann, used that fact to kill four people, but he did so not out of mere sociopathy, but for some ‘underground’ scheming, shall we say. Although this book doesn’t get into deep emotional water like some previous books, it’s not just an action thriller: for Joe, Yellowstone is the source of old pain, being the site of his younger brother’s suicide. The wonder of Yellowstone, though — a place where the Earth itself is alive, shooting forth geysers and sending tremors underfoot — largely helps override the pain, as does the work itself. When Joe arrives, the park rangers are not happy to see him: they’re federal employees with little regard for state authorities, and they’re wary of the unconventional new governor, a folksy populist who is intent on leaving his own mark on the office. One of the rangers, though, takes to Joe, finding him a man very much like her husband. Over the course of two weeks, they get to be friends despite her wariness of his real mission (his cover is that he’s there to interview everyone and compile a summary report for the governor). She proves a useful ally, as does Joe’s mysterious friend Nate, the falconer with the shady past who is very much wanted by the government. As you might guess, Joe finds trouble — and he also finds someone unexpected from his past.
Free Fire was quite different from the other books in this series, though no less a page turner. I liked the dramatic change of scenery, and learning about the geology — and biology! — that makes Yellowstone such a unique park. It looks like from the premise of the next book that Joe Pickett, Secret Agent Man, will continue riding for the colorful governor, so I’m looking forward to that.
“This is Mormon country,” Toomer said. “No bars.” “Mormons drink,” she said. “Especially if there’s just one of them. I’ve seen ’em go at it at Rocky’s. If there’s two, they watch each other and neither one will drink. It cracks me up.” “That’s what they always say in elk camp,” Toomer said, laughing with loud guffaws. “If a Mormon comes and he’s alone, hide the whiskey!”
(I’ve heard a different version of this: always invite two Baptists go to fishing with you unless you want one of them to drink all your beer.)
Saddlestring is a small town with a lot of big fish. One of those big fish, Opal Scarlett, has just been thrown in a river — or at least that’s what the sobbing drunk fisherman who threw her in the river claims. She’d been declaring that anyone using the river to transit her property had to pay a toll, state law be damned, and had recently strung up some wire to put that into effect, with ….ah, unfortunate neck consequences. Problem is with Opal Scarlett bein’ dead, that means there’s going to be a struggle for power between her two eldest sons, Arlen and Hank. (There’s also Wyatt, but in this redneck recreation of the splitting of the Carolingian Empire, he’s definitely the Lothar that no one but Carolingian historians remembers.) The Scarletts are major factors in the society of Saddlestring, and in the slow-brewing war for who inherits, every businessman and woman in town has to make their choice whose livery to wear: Arlen or Hank’s. Arlen is the prim and proper businessman whose charm belies the malice underneath, while Hank is….well, up front about being a mean cuss who will do what he wants to get what he wants. Joe Pickett is being sucked into this brewing Shakspearean drama by both the fact that his wife has a growing business that both brothers want to hire, and the fact that both brothers are trying to use state offices like the warden’s to wage lawfare against the other. Unfortunately, he also has a crazy man obsessed with vengeance who wants to ruin Joe, not merely kill him. Add to this equation a new boss who hates Joe and wants to make him miserable and the result is a compelling if infuriating story that results in the potential for a total sea change.
There’s a growing sense of entrapment in this book as Joe’s five years in the town begin to bear fruit that acts against him. A lot of the men who knew his character and worked with it even as they were up to skulduggery are now in prison, or dead; they’ve been replaced by bureaucrats who know nothing of the real world, only their statistics and pivot tables. These politicos and paper-pushers have no use and negative regard for a man who lives in the field and actually makes decisions for which he’s accountable like Joe, and as our game warden tries to figure out how to avoid getting his department trapped in a domestic business war and defend his family against a stalker who does crazy thing like leaving elk heads outside his home or firing into the windows, he finds that his superiors in the agency are just as hateful of him as whomever is terrorizing his family. We start seeing that other Joe, then, the man who despite his shooting deficiencies and tendencies to get beat up by thus, burns with vengeance for justice and can get real western real quick. Joe is aware of this tendency in himself and tries to guard against it, but when his family is threatened the gentle warden turns angry cowboy, not even trying to guard his tongue when talking to his new ‘boss’, who is just as hatable as the bureaucrat in Winterkill despite the fact that his only power lies in the state he bends the knee to: the actual man could be beaten up by an angry middle-schooler. At least the Winterkill villain had charisma and malignant energy, this cretin is more like Garanin in Chernobyl: a revolting weasel whose only power is the state’s. Picture Dolores Umbridge with a pocket protector and a calculator.
As with the previous book, I’m ranging far and wide away from the book’s happenings because I don’t want to give away the plot. Suffice to say there are direct connections to the first two books, as the stalker blames Joe for the death of his brother and a young child: he’s not a sociopath, since he definitely feels emotions and such, but he’s definitely off his rocker and calculating enough to be scary. The climax happens with a terrific drought-ending gully-washer that poses a challenge for Joe and the other law enforcers, and creates several scenes that add to the creepifying and scary experience. Definitely looking forward to continuing! (Though, I do need to incorporate some nonfiction because it’s Opening Day and it’s the middle of the month and I haven’t read anything for the Science Survey…….)
Happy to report that I read most of this book and the one previous in a manner befitting the books: outside, by sunlight and nary a screen involved.
WHAT have you finished reading recently? Out of Range, CJ Box and In Plain Sight, CJ Box..
WHAT are you reading now? About to start Free Fire, CJ Box.
WHAT are you reading next? Images of America: Fenway Park, presumably followed by Blood Trail, CJ Box.
And now, favorite podcasts! I used to listen to podcasts a lot more than I do now, in part because I had more free time and in part because it was easier. Since Google killed their podcasts service, I haven’t found a service I like more: at the moment I’m trying to use audible for podcasts, since it can stay synced between my phone/car and computer.
(1) The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. This is easily the podcast I’ve listened to consistently for the longest, beginning in about 2006. It’s a panel show about science news and skepticism that’s generally entertaining, especially when they do segments like “Science or Fiction” where, a la Says You!, the panelists have to listen to several different ‘news stories’ and then decide which one is the real one.
(2)EconTalk. In 2011, I decided I wanted to find podcasts by an economist, a doctor, and a lawyer to understand related news through their lens. I was successful in finding EconTalk and Lawyer2Lawyer, though I’ve only continued listening to EconTalk. Over time, EconTalk has shifted much more toward being about human flourishing than discussing the economics of potato chips or a survey of Hayek’s work, and he features a lot of book dicussions. Over the years he’s introduced me to authors like Tyler Cowen, Gary Taubes, and Nassim Taleb. I’ve loved his books, too, especiallyThe Invisible Heart and How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life. Unfortunately, since he moved to Israel his audio quality with guests has diminished, so I don’t listen to him as much as I used to.
(3)The Tom Woods Show. I’m not entirely sure how I found Tom’s podcast: it would have been back in 2013 or so, I think. It’s a 30 minute weekday show that tends to be pretty mixed in its topics: history, economics, and libertarian politics predominate, but Tom has been known to include interviews with authors on science fiction and politics, for instance, or updates on regulations and the auto market. Woods’ show has introduced me to some of my favorite authors and speakers, like Brad Birzer and Scott Horton.
(4)Scott Horton. Speaking of the devil: Scott has been doing foreign policy and world affairs interviews for over two decades, with thousands of interviews. I encountered Scott on the Tom Woods show, of course, then later began listening to his interviews directly. I’ve found him extremely useful for understanding global affairs, and I’m enough of a booster that I contributed to his Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terror kickstarter. His latest book is on the Russo-Ukraine war, a complete history from the fall of the USSR til now.
(5) The Rest is Historywith Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. This and Tom Woods are the shows I listen to most consistently: these guys are not only fun every single episode, but they shuffle their content a bit to keep things fresh. They might do two episodes on the French Revolution, then shift to popular culture during WW2, then back to the French.
(6)Ologies, with Ali Ward. Another fun one, this features interviews with scientists about their specialities, which can include everything from porcupines to butts. One of my best friends who is a biologist and a chronic podcast-listener introduced me to this one.
(7) AstronomyCast. Another one I’ve been listening to forever.
(8) Discerning Hearts — various. Discerning Hearts is less a podcast than a portal for a lot of Catholic podcasts; the problem is a lot of them tend to be short-runs. Discerning Hearts is where I found Joseph Pearce, via his Great Works of Modern Western Literature show, and another one I listen to from time to time is Inside the Pages, another literary-discussion based show.
I think that’s about it for podcasts — these days a lot of what I listen to as far as interviews or lectures comes from youtube, since I can search for hosts and guests there still.
I’m going to Jackson, I’m gonna mess around Yeah, I’m goin’ to Jackson Look out, Jackson town (Johnny Cash & June Carter — “Jackson”)
Tragedy has fallen on Wyoming’s department of Game and Fish, as one of their district game wardens has been found dead, victim of a very messy suicide. Joe is asked to cover the man’s job for a few weeks, and it’s as high-profile as it gets: Jackson Hole, a valley resort town with some of the highest home prices in all of Wyoming. It’s a place where rich people come to pretend to play cowboy, creating a little California-like enclave in rural Wyoming while driving out the locals through gentrification. Joe’s not a man to seek the spotlight, but he wouldn’t mind a change of scenery and some new faces after his prolonged struggles with the good ol’ boys club in Saddlestring. There is, however, his family to think about: not only does he not want to be more distant from them that his job already makes him, but there are some who genuinely hate Joe and might see hurting his family a path to hurting the warden. Still, duty impels, and so off he goes — to discover another case-closed that doesn’t close quite right for him, and another sheriff who doesn’t like a game warden asking questions with answers that have to be worked for. Out of Range weaves together a rural police drama with character & relationship drama, and was clearly written by someone who has raised a teenager or two. As with the last entry in this series, I finished this in two sittings: a long lunch, followed by an immediate “sit in the yard after work and read” session.
This being my fifth Box book in the last week or so, I took for granted that Joe would get to the bottom of the mystery — so while it was perfectly compelling on its own, I’ll confess to being more wrapped up in the emotional or relationship side of things. Joe’s marriage has been getting a little strained by their financial circumstances and Joe’s sense of duty. Being a game warden is not a nine to five job: depending on the season, Joe may never be home when there’s light enough to see, rising before the dawn and returning home late, sometimes with new injuries. Even so, it doesn’t pay quite enough for a family of four and two horses, and Marybeth has been working on the side to help balance the books. That would be a challenge in itself, but now Sheridan, the oldest daughter, is entering her terrible teens and is copping an attitude bigger than the Tetons. Marybeth so rarely sees Joe that she tells him him being gone fora few weeks won’t be all that noticable, and under that cloud of passive-aggressive gloom Joe departs for Jackson to wrangle bears and land developers and a woman who loves kayaking and is so striking that Joe feels guilty of infidelity just being in the same room with her. The distance makes communicating with Marybeth even more difficult, and on the few times he manages to catch her when she’s not working or arguing with Sheridan, their mutual exhaustion and Marybeth’s belief that Joe is living it up in a resort town don’t make for chicken-soup-and-quilts kinds of conversations. It would be easy, all too easy, to enjoy dinner conversation with someone who isn’t brooding and sniping — especially since the femme fatale is married to a man Joe is looking into as part of the job. He’s been asked to investigate the inexplicable suicide of his forebear, and there’s something strangely consistent about Jackson locals’ take on the warden: six months ago he started going off the rails. What happened six months ago and how could it take a man who was basically Joe Pickett in terms of temperament and character to the morgue, a trip preceded by chronic drunkenness and bar brawls?
Out of Range was another solid hit in this series, with the only disappointment being the loss of a character who was absolutely fascinating in conversation with Joe, and was used (in arguments with Joe) to illustrate Box’s ability to see different sides of the issue. That nuance and grasp of the complexity of both humans and issues like responsible land management or ethical food sourcing also plays into the relationship drama, since the reader knows that both Marybeth and Joe are good people who just struggling to connect for reasons of circumstance, like the weight of their responsibilities. Their own inner turmoil — blaming themselves, blaming the other, blaming themselves for blaming the other — is also well portrayed. On the brighter side, one nasty character who we’re familiar with at this point gets some nice comeuppance.
All around good stuff. Today’s Opening Day so I’m going to start a baseball book, but I forgot to bring it to work so more CJ Box it is. It will be interesting to see how far I go before I tire of game warden antics. Given that I’m attracted to this for many of the same reasons I’m drawn to Red Dead Redemption 2, and given that I haven’t gone a week without playing RDR2 since buying it,…..I may actually read every book in the series before summer, my joke to CK not withstanding!
Also, since I had this song in my head the entire time I was reading it, here you go:
Reading Freely 
