Monday, Monday

 Megan begins her book tour today. She gets in Detroit on Friday but just for a day. Hoping we get a decent turnout for her. 

Saw two movies this week. THE LIFE OF CHUCK, which I didn't think much of and it hit a little too close to home for comfort.The other was a restoration of THE ANNIHILATION OF FISH with James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave. The sound was poor and we struggled to hear it. But it seemed like a nice enough film about old age. 

Ate out way too much this week: Mexican, Turkish, Thai, Thai. I don't dare stand on the scale. 

Reading THE INVISIBLE LIFE OF ADDIE LARUE for a book group. It is very thick. It certainly seems like people like it so maybe I will too.  

Watching DUSTER (Max) STICK (Apple) and OUTRAGEOUS (BritBox) but nothing that really thrills me. I find myself watching compilations of various themes on You tube a lot. FOr instance, the best dancing sequences, the best crime stories. They are inserting anti-abortion commercials in some of them.  

Very hot here. Hope it doesn't last long. 

What are you doing lately?  

FFB: A JUDGMENT IN STONE, RUTH RENDELL

 

I think I have probably read all of Rendell and seldom been let down. And that is quite a lot of books. This may be her best (imho). 

"Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write." That is the first line and the boiling center of this thoroughly frightening novel. Eunice and her religion fanatic friend, Joan, spur each other on and almost all of it stems from Eunice"s illiteracy. How even the sight of books terrifies her and fills her with hate. It's hard to imagine someone could finish even a few years of school without getting found out, but you still hear such stories from time to time. The cleverness of fooling people speaks to a certain kind of intelligence. So illiteracy must be partly something else. 

Short Story Wednesday 2 Wednesday's Child, Yiyun Li

 Incorporating her own story about the death of her two sons, this story is about a mother who loses her only child when the fifteen year old lies down on a train track. Traveling in the Netherlands, she recalls her mother's cruelty to her after that death and how her failure to form a relationship with her mother may have contributed to her daughter's death. 

Li has a new book out about her double death. It was reviewed last week in the NYT Book Review.  This collection was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 

George Kelley 

Jerry House 

Short Story Wednesday

Lots of your favorite mystery writers on tee shirts at TEEPUBLIC. 

This is mine.  

I will collect your links.  

Monday, Monday

 

 The movie was not without interest, but the central character just couldn't hold my attention. And Pedro Pascal seemed much less interesting than on The Last of Us. Chris Evans was the best thing about it.

On TV, I watched the original The Four Seasons, and I remembered it as better although I admired the ordinariness of its cast. 

Finished Mornings Without Mii, that last third about the cat's death was tough. Reading Wild Dark Shore, Charlotte McConaghy-terrific writing although the whole book is about the earth dying. Getting a theme here? 

Jane Harper's The Survivors on Netflix is good enough over 6 episodes, but it sure seems like no one ever comes out of the water in Tasmania. 

Boy, I sure sound surly this morning. And the topper: 

We had a murder-suicide in our building but it's never been in the newspaper. I guess what's the point of a story like that when no court case will come out of it. Still..He lived next door to me when I first moved in and he was always slamming doors and shouting so it's not surprising. 

What about you?  

FFB: LABRAVA, Elmore Leonard

 

Although LaBrava certainly plays a major part in this Florida-based mystery, the story belongs to Jean, a former Hollywood B actress who LaBrava falls for. Some shady types are giving her a hard time and Jean and LaBrava and the third member of their triumvirate, Maurice, outsmart them. The crackling dialog never crackled better. This is one of his few books (OUT OF SIGHT, UP IN HONEY'S ROOM) where a woman so dominated the action. Leonard certainly gets pleasure out of describing Jean. I don't know if this is my favorite Leonard (maybe Freaky Deaky or Get Shorty) but it's a fine one. 

Short Story Wednesday "The Richest Babysitter in the World" Curtis Sittenfeld

 

Curtis Sittenfeld likes to write stories and novels that intersect with real people-celebrities that is-- and she is often good at it. In "The Richest Babysitter in the World" from SHOW DON'T TELL, a college student is hired by a couple to care for their young child in the hours that the wife is working on her dissertation. Very little happens in this story although the writing is lucid and we find out by the end that the couple are stand ins for the Bezos. Although I liked the story, I did not find any compelling reason to write it-unless perhaps Sittenfeld did babysit for the Bezos'. There is a brief examination of the problems of using a service like Amazon-and the realization that in society today it is hard not to. Also an examination of how he treats his employees as contrasted to how they treated her. (Bezos' wife is a philanthropist and you can see that tendency in how she treats the babysitter compared to him)  I don't mind stories where nothing happens, but this took that pretty far. The story originally appeared in THE ATLANTIC.

George Kelley 

Kevin Tipple 

TracyK 

Todd Mason 

Richard Horton 

Jerry House 

Casual Debris 

Monday, Monday

Not much to report. I am finally recovered from Covid. Went to a strange play about Jorge Borges today. But other than that I read (La Brava by Elmore Leonard and Mornings Without Mii (Mayumi Inaba) and watched "Oh, so much TV." 

DEPARTMENT Q, PERNILLA (Netflix) and rewatched ABSENCE of MALICE). I know there was a lot more TV but forgetting what. 

What about you?