"You can't just go around breaking people's legs like some Mafioso fairy godmother"

First of all, apologies for taking so long to get this update out.  After getting back from vacation it took more time than expected to get back into the swing of things.  And a friend won a free happy hour, so there's that.

My copy of Coyote Blue has some questions in the back meant for a reading group to discuss and I figured I would use one of their jumping off points.  A quick note that this will go over events that happen all through the book so there will be spoilers.

Discuss morality in the course of the book.  After the Coyote has disrupted Sam's life, he goes about "making things right" in various ways -- for instance, by getting Sam's home back by breaking Josh Spagnola's legs and helping to blackmail Aaron Aaron.  Is he really doing right to Sam by doing wrong to others? (114)

The basic trickster archetype, as described by Wikipedia where I obviously do most of my last minute research, "plays tricks or otherwise disobeys normal rules and conventional behavior" and the coyote is especially seen as a trickster in Native American culture.  If Coyote had spent more of his time acting more like Cinderella's fairy godmother he wouldn't have been a trickster and honestly the story would have been far less interesting.  Of course breaking the security guard Spagnola's legs to get Sam back into his condo complex isn't moral behavior.  He did it to help Sam, but this is also not a case of naive good intentions.  In this broken leg case, Coyote very deliberately went through Sam's Rolodex to make sure Lonnie got Josh's address and he knew Lonnie would attach Josh in some way.  He operates in an "ends justify the means" way, as long as those means entertain him and this tone permeates the rest of the book.  You end up cheering on Coyote and his bad behavior and, morally reprehensible or not, you want him to help out Sam by stealing his car and selling to get money to play craps.  Alright, so I don't really know how that helped Sam but it was funny.

Coyote Blue wasn't my favorite of the Moore books I've read, but I would absolutely recommend.

Title quote from page 145

Moore, Christopher,  Coyote Blue. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York.  1994.
"Trickster". Wikipedia. 6/11/10 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickster

For a guy that maintains a low profile, you've built quite a litle snowball of resentment

Sorry for the delay in postings.  I'm out of town so it's a bit harder to get to a computer with enough time to make an update, so this will probably be a quick one.

I just started my next book, Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore.  So far for this blog this is the first book I'm reading for the first time while blogging about it.  All of the others have been re-reads and to be honest, the next few after this will be re-reads as well.

As with all of the other Moore books I've read, this one has pulled me in right away.  I find myself thinking "I'll just read to the end of this chapter and then I'll put it down" for 3 or 4 chapters before I finally listen to myself.  It has Moore's typical wit and humor and I found myself laughing aloud while reading, which was a bit awkward as I was in public.  Luckily my boyfriend was reading another Moore book at the time, Lamb, so he was laughing just as much.  If I'm going to look crazy, at least I have another lunatic with me.

Early in the book Sam, the salesmen without an identity of his own, going through his morning routine and "congratulating himself for single-handedly saving the planet just by getting up in the morning" (67).  His list of morning good deeds includes:

- Washing his hair with shampoo never put in a bunny's eyes & 10% of the profits go to saving the whales
-Lathered with shaving cream free of CFCs
-Ate fertile eggs laid by sexually satisfied chickens
-Ate muffins made with pesticide-free grain, so no eagle-egg shells were weakened
-Cooked in margarine free of tropical oils, thus preserving the rain forest
-Milk comes in a carton made of recycled paper and from a small family farm
-Coffee went to help educate the children of a poor peasant farmer named Juan Valdez

Even with all the earth saving and good deeds he's completed before 10am, he hasn't set foot on unpaved ground in the last 2 years.  (67)

Sam has been hiding his true identity as a Native American from the Crow tribe for the last 20 years and I like this exaggeration of how in touch he still is with the earth and keeping it safe and yet is so far removed from it he doesn't realize he's hardly seen anything natural in his trips from his office to his condo.  He's completely removed from who he was yet he doesn't, at this point, have any remorse for this. Until his spirit guide, Coyote Blue starts showing up.  As the trickster coyote he simultaneously helps Sam and causes trouble at every turn. Moore's humor leads you into a story that is much deeper than you may initially assume, and by the time you realize it, you're hooked. 

I'll probably look at the trickster more in a different entry when I've read a little more of the book and maybe when I have some more time to write. 

Title quote from page 68

Moore, Christopher,  Coyote Blue. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York.  1994.