Fred and Valerie

I saw Monte Burke’s Sowbelly on the “Bargain” table at my local bookstore and, after reading the inside flap, decided to give it a read for the $5 cost. The book centers on the chase to break the 75-year-old largemouth bass world record and I had no idea that such a wonderful read awaited me!

Over and over again, Burke finds a way to keep the reader interested in the colorful cast of characters, while interweaving the feel-good story of the current record holder, George Perry. But, and maybe more importantly, Burke manages to keep all the characters straight in the reader’s mind by not complicating their relationships. He keeps it all simple, as it should be, and gives such a telling description of each that when you finally look at the pictures in the middle of the book, you feel like you’ve already viewed them.

I was really looking forward to reading John McPhee’s Assembling California, but I was a bit disappointed by the time I was finished. Overall, it’s a good book, but there’s far too much use of geological terms for the average reader to have a clue as to what’s going on.

Still, I trudged on and was glad I did because the little bits of the first 80% of the book I understood helped to make the full geological description of the 1989 Loma Prieta (San Fransisco) earthquake a wonderful read.