Mort, Reaper Man, and Soul Music by Terry Pratchett

Death is not a person; he’s an anthropomorphic personification. And he’s pretty emo, if you ask me. In Mort Death takes an apprentice, and then a holiday. In Reaper Man Death has an existential crisis and takes a holiday. And in Soul Music Death’s granddaughter has an existential crisis while Death takes a holiday.

See, I needed to read Discworld while I was studying for finals, and while these books suffer grievously for the lack of Sam Vimes, I did come around eventually to be a Death convert. He likes kittens, you know.

But these weren’t quite the books I was expecting. They were funny, of course, if a bit drier than the Watch books I’m used to. And it’s not like the Watch books are all hilarity all the time, but the Death books are startlingly, well, sad sometimes. People die -- I mean duh, right? -- and sometimes it’s awful and often they really don’t want to go. My favorite of the lot was Reaper Man which was both hilarious and painfully melancholy. Because as Pratchett says, “you have to dance both. Otherwise you can’t dance either.”

Good winter reading, as it turns out.

Green River, Running Red by Ann Rule (2004)

And apparently the other thing I needed to be reading while studying for finals was a book about the man who raped and strangled (and often strangled and raped) over fifty women in Washington State.

This is an utterly fascinating story, unfortunately packaged by an annoying true crime author. I wanted to read about Gary Ridgeway not because he’s a killer, but because he’s such an odd specimen. I mean, from a profiling standpoint, he just doesn’t make sense. He was married happily for twenty years -- someone with his level of sociopathy simply should not have been able to achieve that. He went from killing at least forty women (and probably many, many more) over the span of two years to only a handful over two decades. That’s bizarre -- guys like him don’t stop, they spiral further and further out of control. And contrary to every expectation, he’s not actually that intelligent.

This book isn’t about that. It’s mostly about the victims, their families, and the cops on the twenty-year search for Ridgeway. Which is fine -- God knows they all deserve to have their stories told. I would have been happier if Rule didn’t so obviously focus on victims whose stories were particularly juicy or tragic, and gloss over the “boring” ones. Her factual recounting is interesting for its own sake, but that’s about all there is here -- her occasional attempts at psychological insight are laughably shallow. There’s just 'what' here, and no real 'why', though Rule does indulge in the utterly predictable pastime of blaming the mother. It’s always the mother’s fault, don’t you know. Jesus, okay, I’m not even going to get started on that.

Still an interesting book though, for what it is. For my money the most fascinating segment is the verbatim transcript of the interview where the police told Ridgeway’s wife just what her husband had been doing. The currents at play there, not obscured by Rule’s dramatics, are worth the price of admission. And I don’t mean that in the ghoulish way of peering in at the collapse of someone’s life, but in the fascinated way of seeing just how much she didn’t know a man she’d spent twenty years with. Except for that flickering sense you get that just maybe she really did.