I recently read Camino Island and Camino Winds by John Grisham, which comprise his Camino series. In many ways, these books are both beautifully and realistically written, with many startling and wrenching plot twists to keep you involved from beginning to end. However, unlike The Rooster Bar and Skipping Christmas, the plots often involve offputting and frankly sleazy events on the parts of the characters that are regrettable and difficult to read. Much of this involves the sex lives of the characters, who often are publishers and hack writers who jump into bed with each other at a moment's notice and who chronicle these events in their own books for their own sick pleasure. These moments are bizarre and upsetting, and make these books difficult to read. The characters are also criminal, greedy, profane, and murderous, which makes them additionally difficult to relate to. For this reason, these are definitely some tough, tough books. Interestingly, there is also a fictitious drug mentioned in Camino Winds mentioned in the context of one of the character's books, and I have seen fictitious drugs and drugs in general mentioned in a number of other works of fiction lately. Is this a reference to a previous book, such as Brave New World, or is it a recent fad in publishing lately to refer to fictitious drugs? Whatever the reason, it seems regrettable that such a theme be explored so routinely in publishing, with drugs and drug abuse in and of itself being a debatable topic in the field of entertainment. By and large, however, I did enjoy the realism and excitement offered in these books and regard them as worth reading. However, I may need to take a break from John Grisham in the near future.
