layla | That Wednesday reading meme again

… I claim Internet connection issues for not doing this the last couple of weeks. Yeah. That’s it. Totally.

What I’m reading
Gone by Jonathan Kellerman. This is from my pile of Random Cheap Paperbacks to be read and probably returned to the used bookstore for credit. So far, it’s entertaining but not memorable. I’ve read a few others in this series (the Alex Delaware books) and for some reason I keep being less than enthralled — they’re entertaining books, and I like the main characters (child psychologist Alex and his police-officer best friend Milo) but the books often leave me feeling a trifle unsettled and unsatisfied in a way I can’t quite define. One thing I’m enjoying about this book so far, though, is that it keeps you guessing about what the actual mystery is; you can’t even tell from the first few chapters who the victims are and how the book’s going to shape up, which is fun.

What I just finished
Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West by Deanne Stillman. This was a fascinating read, a horse-centric history of the mustang in the U.S. If I had one big complaint with this book, it’s that it’s very clearly written from a white, majority-culture perspective, which becomes particularly intrusive in the chapters that deal with the (devastating and horrible) conflict with the indigenous people in the U.S. It’s not that the author is unsympathetic, but she’s just kind of … oblivious, like the way that Custer’s Last Stand gets nearly an entire chapter with Custer’s life story told in great detail, whereas Wounded Knee amounts to a few paragraphs. It’s not an overt “Custer is awesome”, it’s just … something about the way that the book spotlights the individual diaries and letters of white settlers and cowboys and so forth (when it isn’t focused on the horses), while leaving out the Native perspective except in a “… and then the Cheyenne did this” kind of way, emphasizing the individuality of its white “protagonists” and the sameness of the Native ones. On the other hand, it’s full of interesting little historical tidbits from all over, and the horse stuff is great — especially the chapters on the modern-day conflict between mustangs and ranchers, something I knew almost nothing about. (And I also learned that the Bureau of Land Management rounds up wild mustangs and auctions them online for super cheap. The ethics of it are complicated, but it’s still a very interesting thing to know!)

What I’m reading next
Uh … not sure. Probably something else from the Random Paperback pile.

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