I’ve been reading a lot lately, and one book that I’m still working through, One for the Books by Joe Queenan, sits right up there with Tony Reinke’s Lit! as one of the best books on reading I’ve come across. While I still hold firmly to Reinke’s idea of finishing at least 100-pages-minus-your-age before giving up on any given book, I think I also need to balance that rule with Queenan’s sentiment on page 71: “Every second spent reading mediocre books is time that could be spent reading great ones.”

A quick perusal of the 600+ books I’ve reviewed on this site (so far) will tell you that I’ve spent many seconds reading mediocre books. I’ve even finished some of them. But it’s coming to the point now where I’ve got to make a choice. Of the many, many books on my Kindle and in my library here in the States—not to mention the hundreds more I have back overseas—I’ll be able to read only a chunk of them before I die—and far fewer good ones, if I keep getting distracted by oddball fare like Fast Company by Marco Page.

Now, this book’s very oddball-ness is what drew me to it in the first place. I do like to spice up my reading occasionally with unexpected stories, and old fiction can sometimes supply it. I’m not often drawn to mystery novels, but this pocket-sized book published in 1938 about a rare-book dealer who’s suddenly caught up in a murder investigation appealed to me.

The book itself was designed to fit in a soldier’s pocket, and for $0.03 a kindly reader could actually have the publisher send a copy overseas (or so advertises the back cover). I didn’t know it at the time, but the story too was designed to appeal to the soldier at war, that grungy fella distant from his doll and needing something coarse to chew on as he smokes a couple packs while out on weekend leave. This story fits that bill.

There were a number of things, though, that made me finally put it down a few pages shy of 63. I gave up on this one mainly because of the characters’ communication styles and the coarse language.

I’ve read books published in the 20s and 30s, but none have contained the over-the-top period-feel of New York City that this book has. It reminds me of Clive Cussler’s Isaac Bell series set in the 1900s and 1910s. The characters’ speech in Bell’s world are so exaggeratedly Roaring Twenties, it feels almost like a mockery. I got the same sense here.

I’ve quit before on other books due to communication styles, though the one that stands out keenly in my memory is Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous (BTW — I don’t often write about books I put down; only when I feel like I’ve a good reason to share). Watching Guys and Dolls for a couple of hours, I find the language cutesy. Anticipating another 150 pages of Fast Company, though….I find the prospect just plain annoying.

While the communication style was annoying, the blasphemy was the actual kicker for me. I’ll be honest: I was surprised to see such bold language tossed around in a book so old. I thought that perhaps James Clavell or Robert Ludlum were the fellas who popularized cursing Christ’s name so regularly in fiction, and that in the 1960s. Guess I haven’t read enough smutty books in my time—not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I was kind of hoping to enjoy this mystery involving a rare-book collector and murder, but it’s a minimal longing I’ll have to let pass. Oh well. On to something better.

©2020 E.T.