Those little relatable moments in the Matt Scudder books

[sholio]

I mentioned earlier that Lawrence Block is really good at nailing those little "I feel that feel" moments. This is a less emotional variant than the ones I was thinking of earlier, but it also strikes me as exactly the kind of thing I'm thinking of, those little moments that make it feel like the characters really inhabit their world. The protagonist is searching newspaper archives for information related to a case:

I didn't have to scan an entire paper, just the Metropolitan section where the local crime news was concentrated. The biggest time waster was the same one I always have in a library, which is a tendency to get sidetracked by something interesting that has nothing to do with what brought me there. Fortunately they don't carry comics in the Times. Otherwise I'd have had to wrestle with the temptation to wallow in months' worth of Doonesbury.

(from A Walk Among the Tombstones)

I feel that feel, Matt.

Comments

[ivyfic]

I once read every last-page mystery in back issues of Discover magazine on microfiche in my high school library.

[sholio]

Yeah, this is also the phenomenon that makes organizing my bookshelves next to impossible, at least without a high degree of mental discipline. XD

[chelseagirl]

Me, too.

[booksarelife]

I feel that feel so hard!! It probably would have taken me a lot less time to go through all of the letters between two people in the university archives that I was going through to see if they were relevant if I had actually skimmed and not gotten caught up in actually reading them and occasionally looking things up