What I Did on My Summer Vacation.

At some point my plan was to read only crime novels while on the vacation cruise I just returned from. Then a slew of library holds suddenly appeared just before I left. So I ended up bringing Nick Tosches' King of the Jews, Javier Marias' Your Face Tomorrow Vol. 1: Fever and Spear instead, Julian Rubinstein's Ballad of the Whiskey Robber with me instead. A week later, I'd slowly finished the Tosches, I'm still crawling through the Marias, and I stare across the room longingly at the Rubinstein. I was constantly irritated by King of the Jews, the mosaic biography of gangster Arnold Rothstein, history of late 19th and early 20th century New York and analysis of ancient Hebrew . It's a fine book, which picks up steam as you proceed through it (and the further you get, the further it delves into Rothstein's life), but it wasn't the book I wanted to be reading. I was looking for gritty, erudite and straight-forward -- I only got half of those three. (I've undersold here the very oblique structure of the book -- and that's because it's one of those rare books that is hard to enjoy but still makes you want to pick up the author's other works.) Marias, as I've said before, is an author who makes the slow read as entertaining as it is necessary. You have to readjust yourself when you pick up on of his books -- prepare yourself for paragraphs that go on for pages and sentences that take up half a page. The depth of each thought allows you to lose yourself more completely.

Oh, and I swam with the stingrays.