Recommendations That Don't Have Anything To Do With Broadway

I'm back at Sweeney Todd again. What can I say? The show is still great. But I'm getting a little tired of it. And next week? I'm back at Sweeney Todd - again.

Last night, I started reading Deadwood by Pete Dexter because last week, at Jon's recommendation, I read Paris Trout by the same author and now I want to read all of his books.
Paris Trout is about a white man who has to deal with the guilt of having killed a young black girl and then getting away with it. It's chilling and reads like a true crime novel. The characters are very real. And everybody speaks just like you imagine they should in the early 20th century racially divided South.

Deadwood is about an over-the-hill Wild Bill Hickock and the woman who lusts after him, Calamity Jane. I just started and so far I'm enjoying it. Pete Dexter's gift with dialogue makes this book as authentic as Paris Trout. Everyone speaks like you'd expect people would have been speaking on a wagon train headed out to the wild west.

I also read a book called A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer. I bought that one at the Barnes and Noble over by Lincoln Center because I needed something to keep me occupied one night while I was working at Lion King. Lord knows Lion King wasn't up to the job of keeping me entertained. I was hoping the book might last me through the long Saturday night shift but I ended up finishing it in about 2 hours. That left me with nothingto do for the rest of my shift except dream about the party I was going to later that evening.

Anyway, A Child Called It is the true story of Dave Pelzer's abusive childhood which was deemed the third worst case of child abuse out of 38,000 cases of child abuse in California. The book was hard to read yet I couldn't put it down. Thank goodness Dave Pelzer opened with the story of his rescue because it ended up making his story just a little bit easier to bear. You wouldn't believe what this man's mother did to him. It's appalling.