Book #15: In Cold Blood

Title: In Cold Blood


Author: Truman Capote


When I was getting ready to watch the Oscars the other night, I realized that I hadn't seen any of the Best Picture nominees. Yeah, most of them were artsy films that came out at the end of the year and didn't show in my local Cinemark, but in the years BC (before children) I'm pretty sure that we would have made the effort to see at least some of them in the theater.


The good news is that most of them have either recently come to DVD or will be released in the next few weeks. Since I had never taken the opportunity to read In Cold Blood I decided to read it before Capote came to dvd, so I'd be an informed movie-watcher (yeah, I'm weird like that-- I'll almost never watch a movie based on a book if I haven't read the book first. That's why Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" short story has been sitting on my bedside table for at least a month, even though I know I'll be watching that one solo).


But I digress. As you've probably already discovered, I often base my book reviews on how quickly I read a book. If it engrosses me, I'll carry my book around with me and read whenever I'm not totally engrossed in something else. In Cold Blood is around 350 pages and I read it in a day and a half. And in that day and a half I was also getting four people ready to go on vacation for a week. So yeah, I liked it. I really liked it. I can understand why it's Cyl's favorite book. He does a great job getting into the heads and voices of the people involved in the murders. But since it has been almost two weeks (and two and a half books) since I read it, it's not really fresh enough in my memory to talk too much about it.


--originally published 3/17/06