What I Am Currently Reading

 I haven't published much of anything regarding anything substantial because I haven't found much I want to spend a separate post on.  I have been trying to decompress from the previous school year, so I have been doing a lot of things in so-called real life.  I have, however, been reading a number of books.  I think I have mentioned I have a habit of reading multiple books at the same time.  

When I read a book, I typically read a chapter a day, and then when I get about 50 or so pages before the end, I will binge read until I am done.  Since I read almost exclusively non-fiction works, I often skip around rather than read it from beginning to end.

Last January, upon the death of convicted murderer and one-time producer Phil Spector, I bought this memoir written (with help, of course) by one of his ex-wives Ronnie Bennett Spector of The Ronettes fame.  I am almost finished with this book, and I found it highly readable and interesting.  Everybody knows Phil Spector was a weirdo with wild mood swings thanks to mental illness.  He did abuse Ronnie, but it was psychological and not physical.  She somehow got away from him and made a life for herself.  This book was first published in around 1990.  There are a lot of photographs included.

If you get a chance to find this book, it is a good one.

The other day, I received a copy of the book, The Phantom Prince, which of course is a book about the infamous serial killer Ted Bundy and written by a woman he was closely involved with before and perhaps right up to the time of the earliest known murders (early 1974 though earlier killings have been linked to him).  The book, written by a woman who goes by the pseud of "Elizabeth Kendall" plus some extra sections by her

daughter, Molly, was first published in 1982, when Bundy was still alive and awaiting execution on Florida's death row (he got executed in January of 1989 at the age of 41).  It has been updated since her story has been made into a documentary and she and her daughter have given interviews.  Elizabeth, which is her real first name, is now in her late seventies, about ten years older than yours truly.  I am about 50 pages into the book, which I am reading in chronological order. This book is also an easy read and is brief, so you are not bogged down with hundreds and hundreds of  pages of minutiae.  From what I have read so far, I recommend it.  It is something how you think you know a person you have been intimately involved with, but then you find that you never really knew that person at all.  You go back to the memory bank to find clues something is amiss, and then you feel horrible guilt because you didn't connect the dots.  The late Ann Rule was the same way.  She had worked alongside Bundy and liked him, and there were no signs at all at the time of anything being out of the ordinary.  I think this is the thing that is the most depressing about this case.  People who worked around him, who dated him, who lived with him, they didn't even know this man was ever capable of committing the atrocities he did.  The guilt these people have had to live with must be overwhelming, the stuff of nightmares.

There are a couple of other books I have started, but these two are the ones I am well into and will likely finish in the next couple of days.