#458 The Rifleman- Craig Davidson

#458 The Rifleman- Craig Davidson

There’s a certain type of father that gets banned from attending his son’s little league athletics. Usually it’s one of two things: an over-bearing loud attitude that puts too much pressure on the kid, or public intoxication. Hank Mikan was guilty of both. He wanted his son Jason to be the next great basketball shooter, a rifleman. He would drill him until late at night when the neighbors began complaining about the noise.

Now as Jason is about to get college offers, Hank is barely a part of his life, and not by choice. He is one step away from being a homeless drunk. He is an embarrassment for Jason who wants nothing to do with him. He has made him hate the thing he is best at. The only thing his son has in common with him is basketball. When you get rid of that, what happens?

Rating: 7-7-8-7 Total= 29

#150 Eveline- James Joyce

#150 Eveline- James Joyce

Joyce is the literary pride and shame of Ireland. He is also one of the main reasons I became an avid reader. Picking up a dusty copy of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man while I was myself was a young man, stoked a fire I was unaware burned inside me. I understood little of that book my first read through (and probably not much more now). But seeing that reading could be more than just an entertaining way to spend an afternoon, could be a tool for sharpening your brain, a key to unlocking parts of yourself that lay hidden to the pale light of mundane pursuits—was a revelation.

Eveline is not the dark, thick style of Portrait or Ulysses, but it is no less an important piece of art. While his novels are on the denser, cerebral side, his short stories like the ones found in The Dubliners, are fluid and soulful; The kind of sober, earth-born feel that can only come from the Emerald Isle.

This is a story about change, growth and about home. Eveline is a young lass, about to be married. Her mother has passed and her drunken father doesn’t seem geared towards raising her or her two brothers, so she becomes a surrogate mother, and the target of her father's anger. “Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father’s violence.”

She longs for change, but she struggles with it as well: “It was hard work—a hard life—but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.”

Though they are pains, and hardships, and crosses to bear…they are her pains, hardships, and crosses.

Rating: 10-8-9-10 Total= 37