What I've Read (sorta): Dead or Alive

My holiday tradition continued this past year, when the wife and I drove from DC to Kentucky for the holidays. To pass the long hours of driving through the Disneyland of Depression that we commonly know as West Virginia, we listened to a book on tape. We had lots of options this time around, but we settled on the new Tom Clancy novel, Dead or Alive. This was mainly because it was 22 hours long, which soaked up almost all of the drives to and from Kentucky.

I've never read a Tom Clancy book, only seen a couple of the Jack Ryan movies based on his books. Dead or Alive is apparently the 900th Jack Ryan novel (OK, it's not that many) but since I only know Ryan from the movies, it's weird to know he has since been president and has created some shadow military group that doesn't operate within the purview of the Pentagon and U.S. government. Sounds fishy, but what do I care? It's fiction.

The book hums along at a good pace, with plenty of characters to get to know, modern-day political issues dealt with, and a healthy heap of military excursions that involve men, guns, and men doing things with guns. I've since seen this book on a shelf in a bookstore, and considering it looks like it runs about 8,000 pages, I'm glad that I listened to it on tape to pass the time on the drive instead of wasting weeks reading it. I'll use the book as entertainment to keep me from falling asleep at the wheel, but when it comes to actual flipping pages and dedicated reading, I'll stick with my nonfiction, like what I've started reading now, Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln's Corpse.