Category Archives: Novels

A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal

A Map of Tulsa is a novel by Benjamin Lytal. It has been all the rage lately so hey I had to read it. It is about a guy Jim Praley and a girl Adrienne Booker. They both grew up in Tulsa but didn’t know each other until Praley comes back to town after a year of college.

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They meet at a party and end up going to Cain’s Ballroom and eventually have a sort of relationship. Jim pursues her hard and she give him the old flamethrower and ice cold treatment which of course guys just love.

Tulsa Highrise

Adrienne Booker is an heiress who lives in the penthouse apartment of her family’s oil company office building. She doesn’t go to college she spends her time painting oil paintings and being a very cool and distant person. Jim buys her a gun and shoots a few windows out at her studio and like any good Okie girl she falls in love with Jim and they live together in the penthouse. Jim eventually goes back to college and they fall apart and then in the second part of the book Adrienne has a bad accident and Jim comes back to Tulsa.

Penthouse 2

So anyway, the book is about men and women, growing up or not growing up and the changes that occur with people and between people, loss, and how you just can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Generally I’m not much into literary novels and I’ll freely admit that probably means that I’m not very smart but, I need strong characters and for something to happen. In this book the dramatic events happen to the characters, not caused by them, but the aftermath has to be dealt with and analyzed by the characters so they come across as being fairly passive. Somehow it worked for me.

The city of Tulsa plays into it also as Lytal’s Tulsa is a town where everybody has a place and knows almost everybody else and nobody is anonymous. That’s about right. I’ve lived in big cities and small towns and Tulsa is the biggest small town that I’ve ever seen. I guarantee you that two randomTulsa residents who have lived in town longer than a couple years will discover within 15 minutes multiple mutual acquaintances. I’ve never seen anything like it. Somehow Lytal, a Tulsa native captured that sense of everybody being tied together in the book.

So anyways I’ll give the book four stars out of five.

Ken Follett’s “Fall of Giants”

I just finished Ken Follett’s “Fall of Giants” and loved it. It is an extensively researched historical novel covering the period from just before World War I to just after. It covers five families spanning from Russia to  Germany to Wales and America. It covers not just World War I but also the Russian Revolution and Woman’s Suffrage with subplots involving a rapidly changing society including an unraveling Edwardian society in England. (Not all country gentleman were as nice as Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey.)

The characters are strong, believable and most important for guys like me they are different from one another. There is Earl Fitzherbert who owns a bunch of land, much of which, is underlain by coal from which he earns a fortune of royalty by others mining it. His Earlness likes to take advantage of the female help in the house and rather resents it when they are so rude as to get pregnant.  His sister Maud, an outspoken advocate for woman’s suffrage and others.

The book is HUGE but moves along very rapidly has just about anything you want, romance, horrific war scenes, rousing labor union speeches, hangings of cheeky Russian peasants, firing squads, glamorous dinner parties, starvation, good sex scenes, bad sex scenes, international intrigue and spying. This book has it all.

Follett makes the whole thing hang together with some great writing. I loved this book. Get it, read it.

The book is expensive, $30for the hardback, $20 for the Kindle version. Check your library. I got mine downloaded on my Kindle from our local library for free. It was supposed to self destruct after two weeks but it didn’t.

The sequel “Winter of the World” came out last September. You can bet that I’m reading it. I’m thinking I might even spring for the $20 for the Kindle version.

Five stars out of five for me.

The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy The Kid by J. Michael Orenduff

The Pot Thief who Studied Billy the Kid is J. Michael Orenduff’s sixth book in his Pot Thief series starring Hubert Schuze a pottery store owner in Albuquerque’s Old Town. Hubert, or Hubie to his friends buys and sells native American pots for his business. He also supplements his inventory by digging pots up from various sites that he knows about in the wilds of New Mexico. The Federal Government doesn’t really approve of this method of inventory supplementation but that is okay with Hubie because he doesn’t really approve of everything the Federal Government does either. He also makes copies of pots for sale in his store. He is very good at making the copies look old. He never lies to a customer, he doesn’t really volunteer much of anything either.

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(Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa)

Hubie often ends up in the middle of mysteries. In this book he finds himself digging for pots in a remote cliff dwelling. Instead of a pot he finds a human hand. A hand with a hole in it. That is kind of a revolting development for sure but things get worse when he finds out that somebody has driven off his vehicle and he has to walk a long ways back to civilization. So, its like, who is the dead person, who stranded Hubie out int he middle of nowhere and why?

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(Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa)

So Hubie immediately starts attacking the problem at happy hour drinking margaritas at a local watering hole with Susannah Inchaustigui a basque perpetual student at the University of New Mexico. He always discusses his situations with her at happy hour. If you love happy hours, you’ll love this book just for their repartee. After discussing the situation Hubie and Susannah have quite the adventure solving the mystery.

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(Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa)

Hubie and Susannah check out quite a bit of New Mexican remote areas and talk to Curanderas and other rural characters and of course they finally solve the mystery and get their man.

If you love New Mexico and the southwest and a good mystery you’ll love this book. I’ve read the whole series and am quite the fan. I give it four stars out of five.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

What if you could go back in time somehow, would you do it? What about if you could go back and time and change history by preventing an assassination, specifically John F. Kennedy’s murder on November 22, 1963? Would things be better or worse now if you did that? Would the Vietnam War been averted? What if you couldn’t go back to any day you wanted, you had to go back to 1958 and bide your time until 1963?

You know something, five years is a long time to be biding time, and you would have to eat. You couldn’t take your 2012 money back in time, that would raise a few eyebrows wouldn’t it? You would have to get a job to earn some money to eat and have a place to sleep. Of course, you could make some spectacularly successful bets on horses and sports in general.

Five years is a long enough time that you might meet somebody and fall in love. You might like your new life. What then? Would you want to return to the present day?

You might also find out that maybe the past doesn’t want to be changed. It’s obdurate.

This might be Stephen King’s best novel. It’s huge, it takes a while to read. But I loved it.

Five stars out of five.

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