What I'm Reading: 'The Sourtoe Cocktail Club'

If I've triggered this damn thing to autopost at the proper time (8 a.m. Mountain, Wednesday, September 14th), I should, at this very moment, be sitting (or perhaps lying down) in a wonderful old hotel in Fort Benton, Montana, reading this extraordinary book by Ron Franscell:

I started The Sourtoe Cocktail Club about 10 days ago, but because of several factors — a vacation, my own projects, vast swaths of time lost to Facebook — I've been making incremental progress on it. But you know what? That's good. Because this book, at least over the first 100 pages or so, is so damned good, so damned thought-provoking, so damned deeply felt that I really don't want the experience to end.

The title is clever and on-point enough; Franscell and his son, Matt, set out for the Arctic a few years back in search of a bar where the drink specialty has a mummified human toe at the bottom of the glass. It's the sort of title that is sure to attract attention, and that's part of the game in bookselling. A big, hairy part of the game.

But you know what? The title doesn't come close. This book should be called Life, The Whole Of It.

Franscell has written an unusually intimate, penetrating book about fathers and sons and how to get out in front of generations of screwed-up relationships. It's a road book, a heart book, a deconstruction of many lives. It's some of the most absorbing reading I've done in a long, long time.

Just read it.

You can whet your appetite here, with the book trailer: