I am deep into the longest book I’ve read in years. My Kindle tells me I’m 54% through it after more than a week of work. Figured I better get to the books I read before I started it so I don’t totally forget what they were about.
Italian Ways – Tim Parks
Hmmm, a book about taking trains in Italy. That is interesting. Because, you see, we will be riding on trains in Italy in about six weeks.
But more on that next month.
I’m not sure how helpful this book will be in our adventures. The author, an Englishman who has lived in Italy for over 40 years, details his journeys across the Italian peninsula on the country’s trains, which are loaded with idiosyncrasies that often defy logic. I say it won’t be super helpful to our journey because his focus is on the more traditional commuter trains that connect Italian cities. He, for example, commutes from Verona to Milan for work a couple times each week. He does spend some time on the newer, high speed, Frecciarossa trains that we will be using. But those, with their reserved seats and more smoothed out experience, lack some of the local color the commuter trains offer.
Still, it was interesting background on a service that is vital to so many Italians. And I’m sure, despite our higher-end experience, we will run into some of the craziness that is central to Italian train culture.
Heat 2 – Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner
As I mentioned in last month’s media post, I watched the original Heat in advance of reading the sequel that Michael Mann wrote during the Covid lockdown. Re-watching the movie was helpful, but not entirely vital.
The book jumps around in time, from the late 1980s to 2000, showing how the crew of the movie came together and had a formative experience in the late 80s, to how Val Kilmer’s character, Chris Shiherlis, the only surviving member of the crew in the movie, carves out a new life.
It was a bit hard to read the book with the images of the movie characters in your head. Many of them translate just fine. The one I had trouble with, though, was Neil McCauley, played by Robert De Nero in the movie. In the late ‘80s part of the book, he comes across much less cold and closed off than De Nero’s portrayal. Which makes sense; there is a moment in that part of the book which totally explains why his character is so emotionally distant. But it was hard for me to image De Nero playing that softer, earlier version of Neil.
Otherwise the book is solid. Not great. Don Winslow is one of the blurbing authors on the back jacket and I couldn’t help but think he would have made the same story better. But it was a relatively quick read, so not a waste of time by any measure.