Three Beautiful Things 01-29-2025: Wagering in Memory of Don Knott, The Pain of Reading *Columbine*, I Finished the Leah Sottile Booklist

1. Buff swung by the house around 8:45 this morning and we piled into the Camry, picked up Ed in Kingston, picked up Darren in Post Falls, and then we dashed to the Spokane Tribal Casino to make wagers on the Super Bowl at the Caesars Sportsbook.

I had decided when Philadelphia won the NFC title that I would lay a bet down on them in memory of Don Knott. He was an avid Eagles fan. 

And I did. 

So, no matter what, win or lose, it was fun to imagine having Don right there with me as I paid my money and put my ticket in my wallet. 

After making our wagers, the four of us spun reels for a while and returned home in the early afternoon. 

2. Dave Cullen's book Columbine is a painful book in countless ways. It's painful to read about Eric Harris's psychothapy and Dylan Klebold's profound misery. It's painful to dread the massacre any reader knows they would carry out. It's painful to read the details of the attack. It's painful to read the horror so many people experienced in the school, painful to read the grief, anger, and disorientation families of deceased and surviving victims felt and expressed, painful to read the way law enforcement covered up and lied about their mistakes and failures, painful to read the distress the writer Dave Cullen endured working on this book for ten years, painful to read about the cruelty the Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's parents endured, and, there's more, but I'll end by saying it was painful to read how this attack inspired and continues to inspire others and painful to read how difficult these attacks are to prevent. 

3. Back in July, I read Leah Sottile's Substack article about the NYTime's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.

The list inspired Sottile to make a much shorter list of her own, a list that filled in some gaps in the NYTimes list, especially by calling more attention to true crime books, books written by women, with some attention to Pacific Northwest women writers, and books by some of Sotille's favorite writers that the NYTimes did not include.

I now have read the entire list of books Leah Sottile published in July.

I had read one of the books previously, Jess Walter's The Cold Millions. 

I dived into the other thirteen books over the next six months and read seven other books from outside the list during that time just to change things up a bit. 

Minus Cold Millions, here's the list -- in the random order Sotille listed them, not in the order I read them:

Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family by Jess Walter

The Cassandra by Sharma Shields

Fire Season by Leyna Krow

Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder and a Woman's Search for Justice In Indian Country by Sierra  

    Crane Murdoch

Lone Wolf: Eric Rudolph, Murder, Myth and the Pursuit of an American Outlaw by           

     Maryanne Vollers

Columbine by Dave Cullen

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and Japanese Pyche by Haruki Murakmi

American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombings by Lou Michel                   

      and Dan Herbeck

Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker

For now, I'll say that every one of these books upset me, challenged my thinking, chipped away at the naivety I have left, and opened up fresh possibilities for what can happen in a story, whether fiction or non-fiction. 

Several of these books tap into dreamscapes, visions, and other ways of experiencing reality through magic realism. 

Three of the books focus on Indian reservation life.

Seven of them tell the story of multiple killings.

All but Murakami's book explore dark aspects of life in the USA.Murakami explores dark aspects of Japanese culture. 

In turn, some of these books explore the deadly consequences when competing views people hold of what the USA is or should be come into violent collision with each other. 

I'm going to close this by borrowing and fiddling with a favorite passage Mark Van Doren wrote about Shakespeare's works.

No one of the books on Leah Sottile's list tells the whole truth, nor do all of these books taken together, nor could the whole truth be told had she listed ten thousand books. 

But the piece of truth each book deals with is eloquent and seems to be all. 

(That's the end of Mark Van Doren.)

That is the pleasure of reading a book that digs deep into a subject. 

We learn more, but paradoxically, we seem to know less. 

The deeper a writer goes into the complexities of, say, Ruby Ridge, Columbine, murder in the North Dakota oil fields, the Long Island murders, Indian Reservation life, slavery, and the other subjects covered in these books, the more mysterious these things become and the more any final truth about these events eludes us. 

It's this elusiveness that keeps me reading.