Oren, despite hating the first half, loved the latter part of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. I haven't read it, but I did pick up Hornby's About a Boy for the plane ride yesterday and loved it. When 300 pages fly by in about 2.5 hours, you know you've been grabbed. I've long left easy fiction simply because the habit was too costly (Hornby cost me $5 per hour of enjoyment), but with Amazon used, that's no longer so much of a consideration. And I do need to get out of this masochistic reading phase, where it either needs to be nonfiction or the sort of fiction that supposed to build character and open horizons. Enjoyment...not...bad.
Speaking of serious fiction though, I'm just about through Michael Shaara's novel of Gettysburg, Killer Angels. Reading it, you understand why the South is able venerate this war, why they worship those who fought it. It was a bad cause, but it managed to attract some impressive men. True, the North won, but they won ugly. And while the South lost, they did it beautifully. The North seems to have been a puddle of incompetence and idiocy, bureaucracy and bad decisions. The South? Larger than life men, separate from the Cause but duty-bound to battle it out. Underdogs who fought till the last inning without proper equipment and only lost by a few runs. Generals whose traits allow them to be venerated by non-racists because they, judged by the time, weren't very racist. if the North had had Lee and the South Meade and Hooker, not only would the war have been over quicker, but there wouldn't be the sort of timeless martyrs and heroes able to make the Cause such a mainstream, attractive obsession centuries down after defeat.
