My head is in kind of a weird place right now when it comes to reading.
I have a large stack of unread gun and hunting related books, including the PO Ackley biography and Ordnance Went Up Front, both on the basis of Hognose recommendations. (You know, I really miss Hognose.)
But I’m also trying to avoid burnout, so my rule is: one gun or hunting related book, then one book on a different subject. But then I get into a mode where what I have on hand isn’t something I’m in the mood to read, so I get stuck not reading anything except the Internet, causing my blood pressure to spike. Fortunately, I found a couple of books a week ago at Half-Price that I kind of enjoyed. (Also, fortunately, Half-Price is having a 20% off sale this weekend…)
I’m not sire why I didn’t read Papillon when I was young and impressionable. It was apparently a huge bestseller, so it should have shown up at garage sales (like a lot of other books I read at that age), or I should have seen it at the library. I can’t explain.
When I did finally get around to it, though, I had trouble putting it down. Henri Charrière is a great storyteller, and is well served by his translators. (June Wilson and Walter Michaels in the edition I read. Fact I did not know until I was looking at Wikipedia: the original English translation was by Patrick O’Brian. Yeah, “Master and Commander” O’Brian: before he became famous for those books, he was a well-regarded French translator.) And, let’s face it: Papillon is a really compelling adventure story about one man’s life in some of the worst prisons in the world and his drive to escape. This is exactly the kind of thing that should have appealed to me as a small boy.
And it still appeals to me today. Except for the Internet and some nagging little details that I found while I was looking up things on Wikipedia. It turns out that Papillon is maybe “10 percent true”, in the sense that these things actually happened to Charrière. The general consensus of opinion seems to be that Charrière incorporated things that he witnessed, but didn’t happen to him directly (the sharks and the little girl is a commonly cited example) and possibly elements from other works (specifically Rene Belbenoit’s Dry Guillotine).
I still want to see the movie, and read Charrière’s sequel, Banco (which either hasn’t attracted the same level of revisionist scholarship, or else sticks closer to Charrière’s actual post-prison exploits). But it is kind of depressing to discover that this grand adventure story is also, mostly, untrue.
I’ve written before about my fascination with the rabies virus, so you would expect Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus to push my buttons as well. And it did. I could have done with a little less “this is how the ancient Greeks and Romans treated rabies” and “rabies in popular culture” (especially the attempts to tie rabies and zombies together). But the chapters on things like Pasteur’s rabies research, contemporary treatment (turns out the Milwaukee protocol is more controversial than I thought) and rabies eradication on Bali (which also turns out to be more controversial and political than you’d expect) kept me hooked. And Rabid has the advantage of being an “economical” book: long enough to get everything in, but short enough to get through is an evening or a plane trip. Recommended.
