Interesting Reading

I recently picked up a book called "Crime Novels - American Noir of the 1930s and 40s" from the Library of America (http://www.loa.org/) - a collection of 6 separate novels. Very interesting reading, especially because I'm generally a Science Fiction reader and don't read much other that data processing technical manuals.

What I find most interesting, though, is the description of the way people lived at that time. Switchboard operators for the apartment buildings. Most people taking taxi's from place to place, rather than driving their own cars. Lots of hard drinking (which my parents did when friends dropped by, much different from my three drinks per month). Overhead fans instead of air conditioning. In one novel, a dance marathon (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?).

I see the places they describe, in my minds eye, in black and white, though I realize that it's only television and movies coloring my inner vision. I also see my relatives in some of the situations - my folks when the scenes are placed in the city, my aunts and uncles when the scenes are West Texas or Southern California. It's funny, too, but I don't see myself in those scenes, though I've always thought that I'd like to have lived then.

The stories are also very inventive. There aren't any horrible scenes of violence (thank goodness, as that really turns me off); most of the stories turn on the interaction between characters and the situations they find themselves in. And there are a few really neat twists and turns in the stories - things I didn't see coming at all.

If you're not a reader of this type of novel - or if you are, but haven't read back into the novels written in the 30's and 40's - I'd suggest picking this book up and giving it a read.