Ready for adventure? Pull up your favourite chair
We can't all go on great adventures but we can read about them. Heart racing high-octane and a happy place for many of us, you find your next fuelinjected foray into the fields of battle, espionage, danger, heroism and even history rewritten. You'll be over the waves, under the radar, up mountains, outside the law, beyond help, dicing with danger, battling monsters, rescuing the stricken, flying through flack, laying mines, playing political parlourgames, conning Congress, kidnapping commandos clashing with conquistadors and crossing swords with Crusaders . . . and all from the safety of your favourite chair. Just as well, I say, as most of us have been stuck in said favourite chair for too long recently.
I have to admit that modern action adventure fiction is not my cup of tea. I do love high fantasy adventure but despite having suspense, thriller and action adventure books in our library at home growing up, I have never read any. However, in the spirit of trying something new, I am giving it
a go. My venture into the romance genre, after years of avoidance, was successful, so this should be a breeze.
Having done some research I noticed that in a Goodreads list Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness was in the top 50 books. I read the book in my 20s and enjoyed Apocalypse Now, the film which was loosely based on the novella. For some though, myself included, this type of fiction might be a tad too much at the moment as we witness the awful reality of war and humanitarian crisis.
My instinct is that Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels are THE one series I must read. It's a crime that as a librarian I have never read a Lee Child book (gasp). Reacher has become one of the mainstays of the action and adventure genre because he's a nearlyperfect thriller character: physically imposing, intelligent, deeply moral, and free. I can just hear the movie voice over, ‘He's the sort of man men should be afraid of and women swoon over.'
The phenomenal success of the Jack Reacher books — the 20-plus bestsellers, the 100 million copies sold, the admirers ranging from Margaret Drabble to Bill Clinton — have done nothing to disturb Child's basic rule. “What is the purpose of fiction?” he asked in his nonfiction book, The Hero (2019). “To give people what they don't get in real life.”
Therefore, this Easter weekend I'm starting at the very beginning with Killing Floor. With 26 books in the series, I may never leave that favourite chair.