N.O. Pundit

Hindrocket's Reading Recs

I'm always on the lookout for smart folk's reading lists. Thomas Sowell provided a great nonfiction list at the beginning of the summer here. His recommendations largely tilt towards deprogramming the PC, liberal bias that pervades economics, racial issues, history.

Hindrocket provides a largely fiction list: Guilty Pleasures. I have already plowed through some of his recommendations, and will continue plowing.

One exquisite indulgence of mine (I would expect especially for young boys, and therefore certainly for all adult men) are the Louie Lamour Sackett Family westerns. I first stumbled across these in Liberia, West Africa, during my Peace Corps days in the mid-80s. One volunteer's house had long been designated the reading library for all the region's volunteers. Among the books were several dozen Sackett westerns.

Louie Lamour has passed on several years ago, and was an extremely smart person and accomplished historian. Like Hindrocket, he "read everything". The Sackett sagas portray little of his true intelligence (he is not a "fact-dropper") save for the verissimilitude of the cowboy and frontier life in each story: they are, simply put, "Harlequin westerns."

There really is just one story line: a Sackett gets in trouble (usually a case of mistaken identity or being framed for a crime); he gets word out to his kin; he nearly dies a dozen times waiting for his kin; just before certain death his kin arrive and save the day; the kin and the hero go have a drink (that the kin don't personally know the hero is immaterial; "we jes heard a Sackett was in trouble").

None of the Sackett westerns are worth a minute of your time. They don't improve you. They don't nurture your inner child. You could be doing many other more constructive and important things, like helping your wife rearrange the clutter in the attic. Just warning you.

Update 12/18/2004: Here is Thomas Sowell's Christmas list.

Update 12/20/2004: Still more recommendations from Glenn Reynolds.

Posted by nopundit at December 16, 2004 11:59 AM