Dave's Fiction Warehouse

L ast Friday I was driving up I-95 to see my daughter and her girls in Virginia. Somewhere south of Savannah a gleaming red Mercedes coupe with New York plates swept by on my left. It was car to remember, even more so because there was an enormous cream-colored cat lounging the back window, calmly observing all the other northbound motorists. It seemed very relaxed for a cat doing around 90 on a freeway crowded with maniacs. My own experience with cats in cars is that they need to be confined and lightly sedated.  Then a few miles down the road I saw a man leaning on the guardrail by the southbound lanes, his hands cuffed behind him. He wore a green sweater and tan pants. He seemed to be appreciating the empty blue sky above the trees. The cop standing with him was smiling for some reason. The door to his cruiser was open but the flashers weren’t on. I thought: there’s a story I will never know. Just like the cat.  Normally you don’t see anything on I-95, beyond the grills of ...

E ver boycott a business because social media told you to? I’m referring to that 9-year-old pic (see above) of the over-fed Jimmy John’s guy sitting on the knee of an elephant he has just killed. The photo periodically makes the rounds on Facebook and Twitter. Outrage ensues. Yes, it is a disturbing image: A chunky American billionaire (wealth estimate from Forbes) demonstrating unseemly joy in the death of an elephant by his own hand. But we’re supposed to forgo cheap, albeit shitty sandwiches for that? Really? We’re communists now? Who among us has not slaughtered one, or several, of the planet’s most intelligent creatures purely for the Instagram rush? Unlike the Trump boys, at least he’s committed to serving cheap, albeit shitty sandwiches. But we do have to vote with our pocketbooks. Especially since the Russians prefer that our actual votes not be correctly tallied. It may be that boycotts are all we have left. I’ll certainly participate in anything I see online (which Narnia lio...

I participate in the Goodreads reading challenge mostly to keep track of the books I read in a calendar year. Why that’s important, I don’t know. At this point in life, I guess, I like to take note of the few challenges I can actually accomplish. Now that I’ve ruled out paddling around the world in a dugout canoe. My goal this year was 52 books: one a week. I achieved that today when I finished “The Furious Hours” by Casey Cep. Last year, my goal was 40 books — and because then I was showing off as a brash contender, a kid out of nowhere, I almost doubled it by finishing 79. This is how I roll: set the bar embarrassingly low, and then boast about clearing it with two feet of air. Lest anyone think I’m an intellectual, the kind of man who reads Nietzsche and Proust for fun, I should point out that my reading leans toward crime fiction, a genre in which the pages turn easier because the stories tend to be plot-driven. Also, they tend to be shorter. Although length can be deceptive. For e...