{"id":144,"date":"2006-02-27T16:58:00","date_gmt":"2006-02-27T16:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading2\/?p=144"},"modified":"2006-02-27T16:58:00","modified_gmt":"2006-02-27T16:58:00","slug":"appointment-in-samarra-by-john-ohara","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/2006\/02\/appointment-in-samarra-by-john-ohara.html","title":{"rendered":"Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara"},"content":{"rendered":"

Appointment in Samarra<\/a> comes from the 100 Best list. As with a lot of the books on the 100 Best list, I saw value in it but not so much that I understood its placement there. As I’ve said before, I think a lot of the books on that list were ground-breaking at the time, making them important but not necessarily great in the modern context.<\/p>\n

Appointment in Samarra starts with the story from which the title is pulled, which is good because I’d never heard it before. It means unavoidable fate, essentially. The story starts slowly as we’re introduced to some side characters. Odd, but some people seem to think the story is really about them. After that, we finally get to the main character who’s about to start on the journey towards his unvoidable fate, although a lot of what happens seems pretty avoidable if he’d only sober up.<\/p>\n

Situations that slide inevitably from bad to worse have always been the stuff of nightmares for me. (Literally. I dream about fender benders that end up in riots and so on.) And this book did a pretty good job presenting that nightmarish atmosphere, where the characters feel like events are happening without their control.<\/p>\n

What struck me as not so accurate in the book was that this series of events just happened to start and to slide at that moment. The hero drinks too much on a regular basis and has other issues that didn’t suddenly develop that evening. He starts everything out by doing something stupid because it occurs to him to do it and he continues doing stupider things as the book progresses. But why would he do something stupid that particular night if he’s got a lifetime of drinking while remaining socially acceptable behind him?<\/p>\n

Still, if you accept that he did this thing on the spur of the moment, then the rest of it flows nicely along from there to a satisfying (not happy, but inevitable) conclusion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Appointment in Samarra comes from the 100 Best list. As with a lot of the books on the 100 Best list, I saw value in it but not so much that I understood its placement there. As I’ve said before, I think a lot of the books on that list were ground-breaking at the time, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-100-best","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}