What I'm reading *

I've always read. While growing up, reading was a refuge when I found life too unpleasant or stressful. Consequently I've bought a lot of books over time as well.

 
Now that I'm no longer in the rich corporate phase of my life I've rediscovered the library. Dayton's library may be maligned by some but is still a great resource. One type of book I like to read is gay fiction and I was surprised to see a lot of it in the Dayton library's catalog. Plus you can even ask them to buy particular titles, and they will!

Below you can see the five most recent books either that I'm reading or that I've acquired. You can search my books, or you can see all my books. Also my classes page has links back to this page for the books for each class.

ISBN: 0375423486

Date
ISBN
 Title Author
Class
2007-06-18 0375423486 Fellow Travelers Mallon, Thomas  
  I'd never heard of Thomas Mallon before hearing about this book, one that apparently fits in with Mallon's other works of historical fiction, in which he sets a story he's created amongst actual events. In this case the story is a gay love story of sorts, and it's set in 1950s Washington in the midst of McCarthyism at its height. The book's title, Fellow Travelers, is a term often applied to Communist sympathizers, who were of course Joe McCarthy's primary target, but in this case the term applies more to the novel's protagonist, Hawkins Fuller, a WASPy State Department employee, and his Irish Catholic congressional staffer lover Tim Laughlin, examples of a secondary target of McCarthy's. Mallon does a good job of setting the tone of early 1950s America, and his characters are conveniently but realistically placed to position us amongst the players in the politics of the Army/McCarthy Hearings and subsequent events. I was quickly engrossed by the story, feeling sympathy primarily for Laughlin because of his conflictedness over his Catholicism and his growing love for Fuller. The last third of the novel, after the main activity both with McCarthy's hearings and between Laughlin and Fuller had subsided, I found less compelling, but even so, by the end of the novel I had some sympathy also for Fuller, a product of his culture and times.

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