Thursday, July 31, 2025
Time: 7:42 A.M.
Song: Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise
Artist: The Avett Brothers
Mode of Consumption: Listening to MP3s on the way to work.
Link to song: https://open.spotify.com/track/7Kho44itYaCQZvZQVV2SLW?si=b5b9a42eb80442cb
I finished Wally Lamb’s “The Hour I First
Believed” this morning, taking time to read the Afterword and Author Notes
while riding the exercise bike. It was the fourth book of Lamb’s that I’ve
read, and by far, this was the most challenging.
Coming in at 740
pages, this hard-cover tome was written in the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, and
included vivid details of the Columbine School massacre, allusions to 9/11,
Hurricane Katrina, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and pretty much every
other terrible thing that happened during that era.
The story is told
through an aging English teacher, whose nurse wife survives Columbine only to
get hooked on prescription pain killers and then kills a boy accidently while
driving under the influence.
There are discussions
of historical and current treatment of imprisoned women, the division of the
Civil War, dark family secrets, and more than I can or care to type.
I’ve been a fan of
Lamb’s novels, but I struggled with this one. The topics were heavy and as the
protagonist was bludgeoned by all these terrible events it was easy to sink
into the darkness with him. Maybe it just wasn’t the sort of book to read in
the summer.
It resolves somewhat
happily, but the lingering reminders of the events from that era only shed
light on how we’ve arrived at the current divide in this country. It’s hard to
grasp the hope provided at the end, when you see the country still suffering in
misery.
I picked a Flash Fiction
collection as my next read, and soon after, I had advanced in the NYC Midnight
Flash Fiction contest.
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