Thursday, January 20, 2022

Five Decembers, by James Kestrel

   It snowed on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and I curled up on the couch with a cup of hot tea and a good book.  Life was good.  

  James Kestrel's Five Decembers is a crime novel like no others -- it's the experience of a police detective trapped in Japan during WWII, having been wrongfully arrested in Hong Kong the night before the Japanese invaded.  The detective, Joe McGrady, was in Hong Kong investigating a murder in Honolulu whose trail led through Wake Island as he pursued a mysterious killer with an unknown motive.

  At some point while I was reading this, I realized how easily I get lost in books.  Hours pass without noticing as the rest of the world fades from focus.  Books grant that in a way so few other things do -- the ability to forget everything else and become immersed in a fictional narrative world, where characters drawn from someone's imagination suddenly become the most important thing and their fate hangs in the balance between chapters.  Just one more chapter, I tell myself for the 15th time.  

  I'd love to write like that one day, because it seems like such a wondrous gift to be able to give to people, especially in a world so stressful, so demanding.  If you can give someone liberation for an afternoon, for a day, that seems like a good thing.  

  

No comments: