Book Club discussion

The other day, I was alone in my apartment. I had make dinner and put away my laundry and I was also planning on doing a bit of guitar. But I didn't really want to be alone with my thoughts as I made a simple dinner and did the laundry, so I decided to put on a netflix offering that I didn't need to pay to much attention to. I landed on Patriot Games.

Redhead by the Side of the Road is a book about banalities. It's a character book, in that it is a study of protagonist, Mica. Mica is a boring person who leads a boring life, and even inciting incidents in the book, are pretty banal unto themselves. But this doesn't mean that they are boring.

As I was cooking dinner and putting away my laundry, I was following along the plot to Patriot Games, but when an action sequence came along I would generally use that time to focus the least on what was happening on the screen. The action scenes were actually the most boring scenes of the movie because before the action began the results were already known.

Redhead by the side of the Road has no action scenes. Instead it's a short book about the subtle drift that occurs in life. The title of the book refers to a firehydrant that the protagonist, bleary eyed in the morning, regularly mistakes for a real person at first glance, before he can see it for what it really is. And that's essentially the journey of the book. Seeing a brief portrait of a characters life and seeing the mistakes a moment before the protagonist does.

But, for most people, this is what life is, and I think it is interesting to see these subtle shifts in stories, because in the stories as in real life, these subtle differences project to be widely different arcs over longer periods of time.