Book #13

What follows is a twin posting from my booklist, where I've set for myself the goal of watching less television, and attempting to read 100 books in a year (October 1, 2003-September 30, 2004).

Somebody e-mailed me to say that I was sacrificing quality in the name of quantity.

I'll say this: it's a concern. But I'm not going out of my way to read anything shorter or particulary easy (though my first 12 books may not reflect that...I'm in a light stage right now).

I'll amend my mission statement to say: If work, actual social life, or high quality of written word get in my way, 100 books will have to fall to the wayside.

Now, #13:

Dennis Covington
Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia
1994

(Reading the 1995 Penguin books printing)

I started this one about a year ago, and put it down after getting 20 pages in, and promptly lost it for a little while. Actually, it got buried in the detritus of my existance (largely made up of old Wal-Mart Receipts). I didn't find it until a month later, and by then I'd moved on to other things.

So, I re-started it tonight. Got about 80 pages in. So far, I'm fairly impressed. Going by my mother's side, I'm just a couple or three generations out of the Appalachian mountains, myself. It's interesting because:

So far, Covington's classified snakehandling as a response to a world a lot of the rural folks didn't understand. It's an All-American microcosmic view of the agrarian society's struggle to acclimate itself to the industrial, and later, mechanized, and even now, the digital age.

It's fundamentalist at its roots, as snakehandlers draw inspiration from a line of scripture where it says the true believers will be shown to be the ones to handle the serpents, to drink poison without dying and to show healing powers by the laying on of hands.

And since Covington's story begins in Northeast Alabama, a little more than an hour's drive from Riceville, I vaguely remember a lot of the early incidents Covington describes, as far as court trials and snakebite incidents.

I should finish it this weekend.