So. Over the Holidays, the Youngest Member decided that sleeping was for suckers and losers, and he wasn’t going to do it anymore. He’s all better now, but for a week or more, it seemed to reconcile him to his fate if I lay down in the same room as him and read a book with my Best Reader’s little LED book light clip. Much of that time, to be sure, we were mome, and he was sleeping in his portable cage, although even when home in his very own crib, he demanded company.
One of those nights, when we were at the house of a friend, I was scrabbling around in the dark for a book, found the book I had been reading at my last visit and discovered that I had finished on that visit, and grabbed a Dick Francis, figuring that I could open it up in the middle and read for a chapter or so, amusing myself with moderate amusement and being present whilst the Youngest Member nodded off. That paperback was Straight, and I picked it up in a bit where the dead guy’s secretary was finding the hidden computer file, and after a while the Youngest Member fell asleep and I went down to join the grupps.
In the New Year, back home, at one point I was heading for a bath and thought perhaps I would read the book, you know, from the beginning, and see about it. Because, you see, I remember it as one of the weakest of the Dick Francis books. And the bit I was reading wasn’t so bad. So. I took it into the tub and read a good chunk of it whilst immersed in hot water, which really is my favorite way to read Dick Francis, and I kept reading it at bedtime, and when I was a trifle more than halfway through, I distinctly thought to myself why did I think this was a bad one?
By the time I finished it, though, I remembered. I thought it was a bad Dick Francis because it is a bad, bad book. That’s how it is. It’s about the ending, although really the ending is bad because the book utterly fails to provide any basis for a good ending. There are three villains, one of whom doesn’t turn up in the book at all, properly speaking, one of whom is let go anticlimactically, and the last of which is beaten when somebody comes up from behind and beats his head in. Whoo, hoo.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.