Mid-Month Wrap Up - Jan 2025

It is January 15, which is as close to the middle of the month as we can get in a month with 31 days. I've finished 3 books so far this month. Let's review.

Colton Gentry's Third Act by Jeff Zentner - You already know what I went through to get my hands on this book. I have loved everything I read by Zentner. This was his first adult novel. A lot of people were side-eyeing this because it was a romance book written by a man. I was side-eyeing it because it was about a country singer. I hate country music. At the beginning of this book, a very drunk Colton Gentry (up and coming country music singer) goes on a tirade, on stage, in front of thousands of country music fans, about guns. His best friend had recently been murdered on stage at a music festival where a gunman opened fire. That didn't matter to the people in the audience who booed him off the stage, the country music star he was opening for, or his record company. He was immediately fired. Then his pop music star wife left him for a hockey player. Colton moved back home to his mother's house to lick his wounds and try to keep from turning to alcohol. What do you know? His high school girlfriend also has moved back to town and owns a fancy restaurant.

This was interesting because the entire story is told from Colton's perspective. Zentner has written from a female perspective in his YA novels, and romance books are usually told from the female perspective. Country music, people from small towns in Kentucky, and alcoholism are all toxic masculinity coded. Colton should have been a huge jerk. And sometimes he's a bit of a jerk. But with a look into his inner monologue we find out that he has big emotions that he has to figure out how to act on without alienating the few people he still has on his side. I though it was great.

Cat + Gamer, Vol. 6 by Wataru Nadatani - We continue the story of the office lady in Japan who plays video games and has cats. Nothing earth shattering happens. It's just regular cat antics, like, one of the cats gets a bath and suddenly the other cat doesn't recognize him. He smells different. The owner decides to try to wear the cats out with playing, but they aren't interested. Until it's time to go to bed. You know. The usual. The thing that makes me keep coming back is the adorable drawings of the kitties.

Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles by John Mack Faragher - You know that I have read Dodge City and Tombstone, which were mostly about the Earp brothers, but also about lawlessness in western towns. Those stories ain't got nothin' on Los Angeles in the 1800s. This book starts in the 1840s when California was run by Mexico and populated by Natives, Mexicans, Californios (people of Mexican descent who were born in California), and white folks from the US looking for land or gold. Even then, there wasn't really any way to enforce the laws, so people handled everything with their guns. After the US took California from Mexico, the whites got involved with the situation and suddenly Mexicans were also being discriminated against. Then smallpox hit and nearly wiped out the Native Americans. Suddenly there isn't anyone to do the labor. Men who spent all week working fields or cattle or gold digging would spend the weekend at the bars and brothels and somebody would get offended. When a murder occurred, if the courts didn't come to a decision fast enough, or came to the "wrong" decision, the townspeople would just storm the jail, snatch up the defendant, and hang him. Vigilante justice was rampant. In 1875, it all came to a head when two warring Chinese gangs got into a shooting match. When white marshals went in to arrest them, one got killed and two more injured. Then it was on. The gang members all disappeared out the backs of their buildings, leaving their servants and employees cowering in fright. The white mobs didn't care if they were involved or not, they just grabbed up whichever Chinese guys they could find and hung them. It was a massacre. I feel like this history says a lot about how some folks in L.A. still hold by this theory of justice. See: Watts riots, and Rodney King riots. I enjoyed learning about this time in history in a place I generally like to read about. I don't want to live there, but I like to read about it.

I was wordy today! If you're still here, leave a comment.