Books you should read now...and with the paragraphs to prove it!

There are a lot of things to do these days. In fact, too many things if you’re up to speed with everything that you’re supposed to be doing, going to, or want to go to. The only recourse, it seems, is not to. That might seem drastic but really if you’ve got a TV, DVD player, or Internet connection, chances are you’ll opt to stay home anyways. If you watch the news, then you’ll know that a lot of bad things are happening outside and it might be best to remain indoors until the next “breaking news” update.

But here’s a radical suggestion: stay at home but don’t turn on the TV or go online. In fact, read. Just read. No, don’t listen to music either while you’re reading. Do it in complete and utter silence. Okay, now, keep doing that (your eyes on the page, jumping from one word to the next, trying to follow a thread that the author’s woven between them) and maybe you’ll be a few pages in before you realize that you’re actually reading. At this point, decide whether it’s worth continuing to read the book. There’s no shame if you decide not to. Perhaps it’s not the time for you to read that one yet. Maybe you’re not in the proper state of mind to absorb what the writer is trying to tell you. “It’s me, not you,” you think. Move on. Pick up another book and try again.

If you need any more convincing, try this:

“If you are going to kill someone in a car, for example, when a sicario is a professional, he does not do it like an imitation sicario. Here is the car and the target is driving and you have to kill him. An imitator shoots up the whole car… bam bam bam bam… spitting bullets all over the place. When a real sicario works and has a target and the target is driving, he makes a tight circle with the bullets right here through the car door where it will hit the target near his heart, or here through the windshield where it will target in the head. This is the work of a sicario. The rest are imitators.”

From El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin, edited by Molly Molloy and Charles Bowden.

Gripping stuff — and as told by the man himself.

Here’s another:

“I quickly found that interrogation called for the same skills and approaches as those of a good case officer: developing rapport, personal trust, a bond between the two individuals, and, of course, manipulation, sometimes seen, more often performed behind affirmations of purity or altruism. Interrogation, done right, was intensely intimate, far more than I had anticipated. I found myself developing a strong personal relationship with CAPTUS, and liking him, a man we considered so implicated in the horrific business of al-Qa’ida that we had seen fit to kidnap him.”

From The Interrogator: An Education by Glenn L. Carle.

The author of that one was a CIA operative for 23 years and deals mostly with his interrogation of a “ghost detainee” believed to be a senior associate of Osama Bin Laden after 9/11.

Needless to say, those books demand to be read and finished. The only reason not to would be because, unlike most television, they are genuinely shocking at a time when it’s been agreed that “nothing’s shocking.” Certainly almost nothing from “the glass teat” or online can manage to do that for me, but these words certainly can. It might be good to listen to music right after, preferably something that will make you wanna dance or sing along. Make the world seem safe again, enough for you to think of venturing outdoors.

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Glenn L. Carle’s The Interrogator: An Education and El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin are available at Fully Booked.