Airplane reading

Last week I was supposed to fulfill one of my New Year's resolutions to take a trip somewhere other than Indiana. But unfortunately my plan to head to Denver didn't quite work out the way I had intended it to and I ended up flying straight home to California after my friend's wedding in Indy.

But the condensed trip still helped me make some progress on another resolution. Though I get a little stressed out by air travel - the packing, getting their early enough to make it through security screening, worrying about catching connected flights - the one plus to spending hours in airports, on runways and on planes is that it offers plenty of time to read.

When I travel, I try to bring a mix of reading materials - a couple New Yorkers, which are always plentiful in my house, a lighter magazine like People and a book or two. I rarely get through all the reading materials, but it's nice to have options. This time around, I was low on People magazines since I read those at the gym so I packed two copies of the New Yorker and a random book I found in my room. See part of what prompted resolution No. 1 to read 10 books this year is that I have a cardboard box full of them in my room - gifts from Christmas and birthdays over the last couple of years. I grabbed one out of the box that seemed like it would be light reading and stuffed it into my carry on bag.

When I got through security at the airport, I pulled the book out to kill sometime and that's when I realized it was going to be bad. "A Version of the Truth" is written by two authors, Jennifer Kaufmann and Karen Mack. Now, call me conventional, but I prefer my novels to have just one author and one voice. The pair wrote another book together and I wonder what their process was. Did they trade off chapters? Or did one write the first draft and then the other go through it, adding to it.

The book was not very well-written and it wasn't all that entertaining. But it did offer a break from the in-depth articles in the New Yorker. So I kept reading it. It's one of those books I would have put down after a couple chapters if I had picked it up at home. But being as I had about 12 hours in airplanes and a few more in airports, I kept chugging through it.

The book is about Cassie Shaw who is a 30-something widow who is glad her mean, alcoholic husband died three years earlier. Now it's really hard to find a character sympathetic who wishes her husband dead and then is actually glad when he dies. Even if he was a jerk, she should have had some more complicated feelings than just being happy about it. Cassie doesn't have much going for her. She barely finished high school. She lives with her mom, who is kooky as can be, and she doesn't have a paying job.

She suddenly decides to take things into her own hands - but not by any self-improvement, higher education means. She just lies on a job application and says she has a college degree. She gets hired in the psych department of a college. The more time she spends around the college, she begins to want more out of life - like nice clothes and a good-looking boyfriend. But she is still in the woe-is-me mode for most of the book and it gets old really fast.

The actions of the characters is not believable and a lot of their behavior is inconsistent. The most annoying thing in the book is Sam, Cassie's African gray parrot who not only talks, but seems to converse with Cassie as well as any guests she has. Her conversations with the bird were just one step too much for me. But I nearly finished the book while I was traveling. I only had two chapters to go when I arrived home so I figured I might as well finish it to its very predictable conclusion.

Hopefully the next book I read for the resolution will be better.