What is Ken Kuhlken reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Ken Kuhlken, author of The Good Know Nothing.

His entry begins:

Recently I was preparing for a brief vacation during which I might get some reading time. As the vacation would cost plenty without buying books for it, I downloaded free kindle versions of a few classics I had read years ago. The one I'm reading now is Hardy's Tess of the d'Ubervilles.

Early on, I found the wealth of description tried my patience, but since the descriptions were vivid and often witty, I persevered, occasionally wondering if I'd made a bad choice to reread the novel, the suspense of which didn't hold me because I remembered the ending.
Then I notice a theme that drives the novel, which changed my whole outlook. After all, suspense isn't everything.

Here's my attempt to explain the theme:

Tess, in her simplicity and natural innocence, comes from a culture still rooted in an earlier time, when the Christian story and its literal interpretations hadn't yet been called into question by...[read on]

About The Good Know Nothing, from the publisher:

During the summer of 1936, destitute farmers from the Dust Bowl swarm into California, and an old friend brings police detective Tom Hickey a manuscript, a clue to the mystery of his father Charlie’s long-ago disappearance. Tom chooses to risk losing his job and family to follow this lead. Even his oldest friend and mentor, retired cop Leo Weiss, opposes Tom’s decision. Why so passionately?

Tom lures the novelist B. Traven to a meeting on Catalina and accuses him of manuscript-theft and homicide. Traven replies that the Sundance Kid, having escaped from his reputed death in Bolivia, killed Charlie. Tom crosses the desert to Tucson, tracking the person or ghost of the legendary outlaw, and meets a young Dust Bowl refugee intent on avenging the enslavement of his sister by an L.A. cop on temporary border duty in Yuma. Tom frees the sister, delivers the boy’s revenge, and becomes a fugitive, wanted for felony assault by the L.A.P.D., his now former employer.

What he learns in Tucson sends Tom up against powerful newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst. He hopes to enlist Leo, but instead Leo offers evidence that Tom’s father was a criminal. For Tom and his sister, both victims of Charlie’s wife, their crazy mother, what now?

This is the final chapter in the Hickey saga that ranges across the 1900s, the California Century.

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--Marshal Zeringue