Yet More Books

Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland
I first read Girlfriend in a Coma a few decades ago. It's a weird book. For a few years, I've been wanting to re-read it, as I'm now much closer to the target audience. Douglas Coupland is the man who literally named Generation-X, and he very much writes for them. While I'm not Gen-X (but NOT millennial, either!), I am now the age that Gen-Xers were when this book was written. The story follows a group of high school friends, particularly Richard whose girlfriend Karen (spoiler alert!) goes into a coma. The story is one of the main characters drifting through life rather aimlessly, until, well, the world ends. Rather than a story of seeing what the world is like without them in it, they get to see what they are like without the world around them. This is one of those books that tries to Say Something About Life. In the end, I don't think it succeeds as well as it wanted to, or at least, it didn't Say Something to me. But it does try, and that was why I was interested in reading the book again as an adult.

Dragon Teeth by Michael Crichton
Hmmm, a Michael Crichton book with a dinosaur skull on the cover. But this one is about cowboys and Indians. William Johnson is a rich college kid from Philadelphia in the 1870s who signs up to go fossil hunting for the summer with a college professor. Along the way runs into some trouble with his professor, the competition, women, Indians, gold miners, gun-slingers and just about everyone else. (Who else could there be?) The story is written as though it were true, complete with entries from Johnson's journal and things like that, though it is a novel. (Says so on the cover!) While there are a number of characters in the book who were real, and the story accurately represents the general situation of the times, the main character and his specific adventure is pure fiction. But, its a fun cowboy book, and probably one of Crichton's last, since he died ten years ago.

The Orphan Keeper by Camron Wright
This is the (generally) true story of a boy who was born in India in the 1970s, and then when we was about 8 was kidnapped, sent to an orphanage and then adopted by an American family, who of course had no idea that he wasn't really an orphan. Over the years he has to learn to deal with being an Indian kid in 1980s Utah and then later learning to embrace his Indian-ness, too. The story is very compelling, and I stayed up way too late each night trying to get through. It was fascinating to put yourself in the place of a kid dropped off in America that doesn't speak the language or understand what these crazy people are doing. (Sleeping in beds? Eating cereal for breakfast?) Some details were changed or simplified to make things flow, and the location was anonymized (is that a word?) to make it generically western american, rather than Mormon and Utah County. (But you can stop the signs if you know what to look for.) You should read this book, and as a reminder, you should read another book by Camron Wright, The Rent Collector, even more.