richardderus's ninth 2020 thread

Today, 27 May, is Rachel Carson's birthday.

Rachel Carson, circa 1962

Silent Spring wasn't Rachel Carson's first book.


All of these were published between 1940 and 1962, when Silent Spring burst onto the scene fully researched, fact-checked, and ready to take on the gargantuan corporate machine steadily poisoning the Earth we depend on for its shareholders to profit from. I don't need to tell you that her legacy is under siege now, as the greediest and lowest of humanity have united behind the banner of "own the libtard cucks" to worsen the entire planet's ability to support the very species they belong to. The stupid, it buuurrrnnns...and burns, and burns. Carson stood up to the forces uninterested in the health of anything but their bottom lines. Her many, many successors, in many, many disciplines, are fighting ever harder to retain some few of the gains she made.

I'll leave you with this evidence that anti-science buffoonery is the preserve of petty, right-wing kakistocratic morons elected by people who shouldn't be allowed to reproduce:

Democratic Senator Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland had intended to submit a resolution celebrating Carson for her "legacy of scientific rigor coupled with poetic sensibility" on the 100th anniversary of her birth. The resolution was blocked by Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who said that "The junk science and stigma surrounding DDT—the cheapest and most effective insecticide on the planet—have finally been jettisoned."

This right-wing moron was elected to the Senate of the United States of America. How we got to this pass, celebrating ignorance and denigrating facts and science, is beyond my ability to comprehend.

In 2020, I wanted to post 10 book reviews a month on my blog. I already read a book every other day, as this year's total of 155 (a lot of individual stories don't have entries in the LT database so I didn't post them here; guess I should do more to sync the data this year) reads shows; so it was doable, and I've done better than that in the past. Regrettably, there's no way I'll even approach that goal now.

I've Pearl Ruled books I'm not enjoying, but making notes on Goodreads & LibraryThing about why I'm abandoning the read has been less successful.







My Last Thread of 2018 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.

My Last Thread of 2019 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.

Reviews 1 through 3 are thataway.

Reviews 4 through 8 reside thitherward.

Reviews 9 through 11 are back here.

Reviews 12 through 20 existen allá.

Reviews 21 through 24? Go here!.

Review 25 in all its lonely splendor is back yonder.

Reviews 26 through 40 are doin' it for themselves.

Reviews 41-46, plus a Pearl Rule can be seen elsewhere.

THIS THREAD'S REVIEW LINKS

47 The Listener and Other Stories is an ongoing review, post 89.

48 Derelict deals with a major downer of a 1953 story, post 99.

49 Robot Visions (The Robot Series) takes the opening essay of a book as its text, post 101.

50 Nightfall is my very, very favorite Asimov story of all time, post 102.

51 Time and Time Again is a strangely unaffecting story, post 109.

52 Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk made me mist over on my second reading, post 124.

53 The Sacrament surprised me with its emotional wallop, post 190.

54 Hickory Dickory Dock was perfectly fine, post 206.

55 Agatha Christie's Poirot: Hickory Dickory Dock however, was not...post 206.

56 Joe was amazing, post 207.

57 Dumb Witness was a decent Poirot, post 217.

58 Agatha Christie's Poirot: Dumb Witness made more sense, post 217.

59 Peril at End House is vintage Poirot but not Premier Cru, post 223.

60 Agatha Christie's Poirot: Peril at End House lost a half-star for a niggling plot hole, post 223.

61 Murder in Mesopotamia was a thumping good read, post 232.

62 Agatha Christie's Poirot: Murder in Mesopotamia was a thumping good watch, post 232.

63 Appointment with Death is one of Poirot's Middle Eastern adventures, post 261.

64 Agatha Christie's Poirot: Appointment with Death kept the motive and crime but ditched the rest, post 261.

65 Cat Among the Pigeons was a late Poirot with all that means, post 268.

66 Agatha Christie's Poirot: Cat Among the Pigeons didn't film very well, post 268.

67 Death in the Clouds was my last Poirot for a while, post 283.

68 Agatha Christie's Poirot: Death in the Clouds did its usual clean-up job on the messy cast of the novel, post 283.

2019 was a *stellar* reading year! For the first time ever, I had two six-stars-of-five reads: Black Light: Stories, a debut story collection that gave me so much pleasure I read it twice (ever rarer occurrence that), and the wrenching, gutting agony of Heart Berries, a memoir of such honesty and such vulnerability that I was a wreck after I finished it. I went back and forth a dozen times, first Author Parsons was the sixer, then Author Mailhot; neither book could possibly "win" for long because I couldn't get either book out of my mind.

I handed out 34 5- or damn-near-5-star reviews out of 155 reviewed books; that's 22% and that is a LOT. Many, even most of these (10+) were for short stories, for end-of-beloved-series novels, or for story collections. But hold on to something heavy: TWO, yes that's t-w-o dos due deux zwei два were...POETRY COLLECTIONS. Sarah Tolmie's The Art of Dying and the late Frank Stanford's collected poems, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford. Both were peak reading experiences. Another was cultural monadnock George Takei's graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy, which could not be more important for young people today to absorb.

What a beautiful year it was, to bring so many delights to my door. I hope, greedy thing that I am, that 2020 will repeat this performance. For all of us, really...honest! I didn't just add that on the end of this summing-up to make it sound less solipsistic.

In 2020, I wanted to post 10 book reviews a month on my blog. As of 9 May, I haven't posted nearly enough to make the year-long goal! There are a few mitigating factors (a mild COVID-19 infection is one), but I don't think the deficit's recoverable. Even so, I still read a story every other day, as 2019's total of 155 (a lot of individual stories don't have entries in the LT database so I didn't post them here; guess I should do more to sync the data this year) reads shows; so it's doable, and I've done better than that in the past.

I will do better at Pearl Ruling books I'm not enjoying with notes on Goodreads & LibraryThing about why I'm abandoning the read.

...and that's me done. My reports will continue to be quarterly, the day after the end of the quarter.
1Q20. Twenty-six reads done (two reviews TK), three posted on my blog, or 10% of the goal I set myself. Bad performance. Really bad.

I re-read the four Murderbot novellas by Martha Wells, and loved them just as much as when I first read them. Because Network Effect is coming in May, YAY!!, it felt like time at last to put down some thoughts about them on my poor, neglected blog. Murderbot is a delightfully antisocial being and I am honestly more impressed by Author Wells's beautiful and deft worldbuilding than I am by the lit'ry stylings of many a crowed-over Next Big Thing.

But this quarter's surprise and joy is reserved for a Smashwords COVID-19 sale find, a freebie I completely accidentally stumbled upon: A Justified State by Iain Kelly, a Scottish television editor about whom I had not heard a peep and from whom I expected not a lot.

He overdelivered on my expectations. This could be a six-stars-of-five read; I have a long way to go, so no decisions yet, but this medium-term futuristic dystopian thriller set in a nightmarish Soylent Green-ish Glasgow is $2.99 and cheap at twice the price. Do your distracted self a favor and get sucked in to Author Kelly's hellish world...ours seems paradisical!

I really hadn't considered doing this until recently...tracking my Pulitzer Prize in Fiction winners read, and Booker Prize winners read might actually prove useful to me in planning my reading.

1918 HIS FAMILY - Ernest Poole **
1919 THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS - Booth Tarkington *
1921 THE AGE OF INNOCENCE - Edith Wharton *
1922 ALICE ADAMS - Booth Tarkington **
1923 ONE OF OURS - Willa Cather **
1924 THE ABLE MCLAUGHLINS - Margaret Wilson
1925 SO BIG - Edna Ferber *
1926 ARROWSMITH - Sinclair Lewis (Declined) *
1927 EARLY AUTUMN - Louis Bromfield
1928 THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY - Thornton Wilder *
1929 SCARLET SISTER MARY - Julia Peterkin
1930 LAUGHING BOY - Oliver Lafarge
1931 YEARS OF GRACE - Margaret Ayer Barnes
1932 THE GOOD EARTH - Pearl Buck *
1933 THE STORE - Thomas Sigismund Stribling
1934 LAMB IN HIS BOSOM - Caroline Miller
1935 NOW IN NOVEMBER - Josephine Winslow Johnson
1936 HONEY IN THE HORN - Harold L Davis
1937 GONE WITH THE WIND - Margaret Mitchell *
1938 THE LATE GEORGE APLEY - John Phillips Marquand
1939 THE YEARLING - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings *
1940 THE GRAPES OF WRATH - John Steinbeck *
1942 IN THIS OUR LIFE - Ellen Glasgow *
1943 DRAGON'S TEETH - Upton Sinclair
1944 JOURNEY IN THE DARK - Martin Flavin
1945 A BELL FOR ADANO - John Hersey *
1947 ALL THE KING'S MEN - Robert Penn Warren *
1948 TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC - James Michener
1949 GUARD OF HONOR - James Gould Cozzens
1950 THE WAY WEST - A.B. Guthrie
1951 THE TOWN - Conrad Richter
1952 THE CAINE MUTINY - Herman Wouk
1953 THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA - Ernest Hemingway *
1955 A FABLE - William Faulkner *
1956 ANDERSONVILLE - McKinlay Kantor *
1958 A DEATH IN THE FAMILY - James Agee *
1959 THE TRAVELS OF JAIMIE McPHEETERS - Robert Lewis Taylor
1960 ADVISE AND CONSENT - Allen Drury *
1961 TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD - Harper Lee *
1962 THE EDGE OF SADNESS - Edwin O'Connor
1963 THE REIVERS - William Faulkner *
1965 THE KEEPERS OF THE HOUSE - Shirley Ann Grau
1966 THE COLLECTED STORIES OF KATHERINE ANNE PORTER - Katherine Anne Porter
1967 THE FIXER - Bernard Malamud
1968 THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER - William Styron *
1969 HOUSE MADE OF DAWN - N Scott Momaday
1970 THE COLLECTED STORIES OF JEAN STAFFORD - Jean Stafford
1972 ANGLE OF REPOSE - Wallace Stegner *
1973 THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER - Eudora Welty *
1975 THE KILLER ANGELS - Jeff Shaara *
1976 HUMBOLDT'S GIFT - Saul Bellow *
1978 ELBOW ROOM - James Alan McPherson
1979 THE STORIES OF JOHN CHEEVER - John Cheever *
1980 THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG - Norman Mailer *
1981 A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES - John Kennedy Toole *
1982 RABBIT IS RICH - John Updike *
1983 THE COLOR PURPLE - Alice Walker *
1984 IRONWEED - William Kennedy *
1985 FOREIGN AFFAIRS - Alison Lurie
1986 LONESOME DOVE - Larry McMurtry *
1987 A SUMMONS TO MEMPHIS - Peter Taylor
1988 BELOVED - Toni Morrison *
1989 BREATHING LESSONS - Anne Tyler
1990 THE MAMBO KINGS PLAY SONGS OF LOVE - Oscar Hijuelos *
1991 RABBIT AT REST - John Updike *
1992 A THOUSAND ACRES - Jane Smiley *
1993 A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN - Robert Olen Butler *
1994 THE SHIPPING NEWS - E Annie Proulx *
1995 THE STONE DIARIES - Carol Shields
1996 INDEPENDENCE DAY - Richard Ford
1997 MARTIN DRESSLER - Steven Millhauser
1998 AMERICAN PASTORAL - Philip Roth
1999 THE HOURS - Michael Cunningham
2000 INTERPRETER OF MALADIES - Jumpha Lahiri
2001 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY - Michael Chabon
2002 EMPIRE FALLS - Richard Russo
2003 MIDDLESEX - Jeffrey Eugenides *
2004 THE KNOWN WORLD - Edward P. Jones
2005 GILEAD - Marilynne Robinson
2006 MARCH - Geraldine Brooks
2007 THE ROAD - Cormac McCarthy
2008 THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO - Junot Diaz *
2009 OLIVE KITTERIDGE - Elizabeth Strout
2010 TINKERS - Paul Harding
2011 A VISIT FROM THE GOOD SQUAD - Jennifer Egan
2013 ORPHAN MASTER'S SON - Adam Johnson
2014 THE GOLDFINCH - Donna Tartt
2015 ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE - Anthony Doerr **
2016 THE SYMPATHIZER - Viet Thanh Nguyen **
2017 THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD - Colson Whitehead **
2018 LESS - Andrew Sean Greer *
2019 THE OVERSTORY - Richard Powers *

Links are to my reviews
* Read, but not reviewed
** Owned, but not read

Every winner of the Booker Prize since its inception in 1969

1969: P. H. Newby, Something to Answer For
1970: Bernice Rubens, The Elected Member
1970: J. G. Farrell, Troubles ** (awarded in 2010 as the Lost Man Booker Prize) -
1971: V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State
1972: John Berger, G.
1973: J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur
1974: Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist ... and Stanley Middleton, Holiday
1975: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust
1976: David Storey, Saville
1977: Paul Scott, Staying On
1978: Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea *
1979: Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore
1980: William Golding, Rites of Passage
1981: Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children *
1982: Thomas Keneally, Schindler's Ark
1983: J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K
1984: Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac *
1985: Keri Hulme, The Bone People **
1986: Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils
1987: Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger *
1988: Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda *
1989: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day *
1990: A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance *
1991: Ben Okri, The Famished Road
1992: Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient * ... and Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger
1993: Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
1994: James Kelman, How late it was, how late
1995: Pat Barker, The Ghost Road *
1996: Graham Swift, Last Orders
1997: Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
1998: Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
1999: J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
2000: Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin *
2001: Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang *
2002: Yann Martel, Life of Pi
2003: DBC Pierre, Vernon God Little **
2004: Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty *
2005: John Banville, The Sea
2006: Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
2007: Anne Enright, The Gathering
2008: Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
2009: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
2010: Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question *
2011: Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending **
2012: Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
2013: Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
2014: Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
2015: Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings *
2016: Paul Beatty, The Sellout
2017: George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo *
2018: Anna Burns, Milkman
2019: Margaret Atwood, The Testaments, and Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other

Links are to my reviews
* Read, but not reviewed
** Owned, but not read

Shamelessly nicked from Paul Cranswick: LIT HUB'S 50 CHUNKSTERS & {HIS} 20 ALTERNATIVES

These are the 50 Literary Hub Must Read Chunksters:

1. The Overstory by Richard Powers READ; maybe squeaked to 3*
2. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin owned
3. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco read; probably didn't *understand*, though...4.5*
4. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee READ; absolutely loved by the end, though it was a slow process...4*
5. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell READ & WATCHED; I'm just not a Mitchell fan for some reason...3*
6. The Witch Elm by Tana French
7. The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
8. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr owned
9. Little, Big by John Crowley READ; impressive book, found it immersive and luxurious...4*
10. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides READ; another one of those guys whose work blends into one amorphous, self-satisfied, clever-clever wodge...2.5*
11. The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
12. Possession by A.S. Byatt READ; a bit humid for me...3*
13. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel READ; it's not to my taste...3*
14. The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee
15. The Secret History by Donna Tartt READ; oh dear...3*
16. The Parisian : A Novel ???
17. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie REARL RULED; she doesn't like men and I don't interact with women who don't like men this deeply
18. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters READ; gorgeous...4.5*
19. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami READ; disliked...2.5*
20. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
21. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie READ; loved...4.5*
22. American Gods by Neil Gaiman READ; one day I'll read a Gaiman "novel" with an actual ending, and a character arc that makes sense to me as an arc, but that wasn't this read...3* because I don't wanna hear y'all's mouths
23. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay by Michael Chabon READ; I really don't like superhero BS at all...2*
24. The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu
25. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen READ; ***LOATHED*** 0.125*
26. Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
27. A Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava
28. An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears READ; a bit dry, quite erudite, but lacking in involving storytelling...3*
29. A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James READ; failed to grok, need to read again
30. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson owned
31. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe READ; disliked...3* because it's deeply influential and that deserves respect
32. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara REARL RULED; I just can not with this book.
33. Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin READ; thoroughly enjoyed, recommend you read it, too...4*
34. JR by William Gaddis
35. Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko READ; of its time, and not really as good as it is portrayed as being...2.5*
36. Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon READ; loved! 4*
37. Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany READ; but ya know what, 40 years of accretion means I need to re-read it
38. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett READ; should be called "The Book of the Rapist" yech! 3* for its incredibly interesting architectural stuff
39. The Stand by Stephen King READ; blew my mind c. 1979 but how the hell could I ever read it again?!
40. Underworld by Don DeLillo READ; absolutely totally completely adored...4*
41. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton READ; glorious gorgeous delicious...5*
42. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke READ & WATCHED; loved both versions...5*
43. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
44. 2666 by Roberto Bolano READ; someone someday needs to explain why this is amazing, I thought it was competent and decent and waaayyyy too long...2.5*
45. Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra READ & WATCHED; thoroughly immersive, fascinating, but a very very big ask...3.5*
46. Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann READ; genius. 5*
47. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace READ; contemptible man writes despicable story, loathed...0.125*
48. Parallel Stories by Peter Nadas
49. Women and Men by Joseph McElroy
50. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth READ; stunning, bleak, very challenging...4.5*

& PC's Alternative 20

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (1995) 624 pp READ; another big ask but it is so worth the sadness and woe you will experience because it is sui generis...5*
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (2001) 544 pp READ; I don't remember it, but I remember liking it
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (2005) 720 pp READ; dire...2*
The Far Pavilions by MM Kaye (1978) 960 pp READ; every woman in my life c. 1979 was carrying on about it, so I read it and, welllllll...longest romance novel ever...3*
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess (1980) 656 pp READ; *fascinating* story, compelling writing, read soonest! 5*
White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000) 560 pp REARL RULED; not to my taste
The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman (1982) 896 pp
Saville by David Storey (1976) 560 pp
To Serve Them All My Days by RF Delderfield (1972) 672 pp READ; Mama's favorite book ever, I think, since she read three copies to pieces; I liked it fine...3* based on forty-five year old memories
Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres (1994) 533 pp READ & WATCHED; pleasant...3*
Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth (1992) 640 pp
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks (1993) 528 pp READ; nice enough, I suppose...3*
Sophie's Choice by William Styron (1979) 656 pp READ & WATCHED; never, never, never again in life...5*
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (2008) 544 pp READ; but damned if I remember a single thing about it!
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (1998) 626 pp READ; its colonialism, heteronormativity, and religiosity enraged me so I couldn't enjoy the story...2.5*
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving (1989) 656 pp READ; I know why y'all like it, but I don't...3*
The Singapore Grip by JG Farrell (1978) 704 pp
Magician by Raymond E Feist (1982) 864 pp
The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy (1986) 672 pp READ; wish I hadn't...3*
A Chain of Voices by Andre Brink (1982) 512 pp

I've read 34 of the 50 list; 14 of PC's 20. 48 out of 70 = 69, a very high D that, since I'm grading myself on a 5-point curve, gets me to a scant C-minus. MUCH room for improvement!

First, I'm first?

edited to add: Happy new thread, RD! Happy Wednesday!

>6 karenmarie: That you are, Horrible! Happy first-place trophy!

*smooch*

Happy new thread, Richard!

Happy New Thread, Richard!

Happy new thread!

And another new thread! Happy, happy....

>8 harrygbutler: Thanks, Harry!

>9 ronincats: *smooch*

>10 drneutron: Thank you, Jim!

>11 katiekrug: Heh...they did all kinda bunch up, didn't they?

Happy New Thread, Richard.

Happy new thread Richard! Thumb for the thread topper.

>13 Matke: Thank you, Gail! *smooch*

>14 humouress: Thanks, Nina, she's my favorite dead 113-year-old.

Well, it's certainly my day for weirdness: Someone sent me a food package...of Cheetos (10 family-sized bags), BBQ flavored Fritos (5 bags), and Ruffles potato chips (jalapeno lime).
Y'all...I don't smoke pot. I never did. So fess up: who's goofin' on me?

Now I want snacks....

>17 katiekrug: Come'n'git it! You can have all you want.

>15 richardderus: Erm ... *hesitates* how many do you know?

>18 richardderus: - Not gonna do it. I've been very good about eating healthy lately. Must not sabotage myself!

Happy New Thread!

You have interesting friends, Richard. Cheetos, Fritos and Ruffles sounds like a particularly weird pre-adolescent garage band.

Cheers to your new thread!

Chips/crisps? Weird delivery from unknown parts.

Rachel Carson, a brilliant woman with insights so far ahead of her time that she was denigrated and belittled. I'm happy to see her as your topper.
And yeah, you have such a great turn of words in describing Tom Coburn and the Republican-dominated Senate: "the preserve of petty, right-wing kakistocratic morons elected by people who shouldn't be allowed to reproduce".
(I'm repeating this opinion here, to emphasise how important it is to recognise its validity).

Good on ya, Richard. And take care, ya hear?

>19 humouress: Good heavens! Dora Maar! Katharine Hepburn! William Steig! Astrid Lindgren! Frida Kahlo! The list, she goes on....

>20 katiekrug: *chuckle* I won't tempt you further.

*munches another Cheeto*

>21 mahsdad: Thanks, Jeff!

>22 Storeetllr: Or just bizarro acquaintances. Anyway, I am all set for the Stoners' Ball.

>23 SandyAMcPherson: Ha, thank you Sandy, for the phrase-making compliment. As for Carson being belittled and denigrated, well, she was a woman so that hardly marked her out in those times.

Or these times if we're even a little bit honest.

Happy new one Richard!

Happy new thread Richard my dear friend.

Happy new thread, Richard dear!

>25 figsfromthistle: Thank you, Canadanita!

>26 johnsimpson: Thanks, John!

>27 FAMeulstee: Thank you, Anita! *smooch*

First, happy new thread.


This right-wing moron was elected to the Senate of the United States of America. How we got to this pass, celebrating ignorance and denigrating facts and science, is beyond my ability to comprehend.

Well, look at the White House. There's your answer. Nothing more need be said. It's to weep for...

I first read Silent Spring when I was in high school. Terrifying stuff. I also own a lovely little book called The Sense of Wonder which has her words set to illustrate colour and black and white photos by Charles Pratt. It's truly lovely. Eons before online anything (also, probably when I was in high school), I had read a review of this and wanted it and an aunt of mine managed to order it for me and gave it to me as a birthday present.

I also own but have not yet read, a doorstopper of a book called Always, Rachel, a book of her letters. Weighing in at over 500 pages, I will get to it one day but not in the near future, if my current pace and concentration are any gage.

Thank you for the lovely tribute to her, above.

Happy Wednesday, Richard! Happy New Thread! Can you believe I have not read Silent Spring? I know, that is a bit embarrassing to admit to. I should remedy that glaring oversight.

Happy new thread, Richard! That's... an interesting mix of food flavors, and I hope it's to your liking. I'm a bit of a plain Jane myself and only like regular potato chips. Wednesday *smooches*

Happy new one, RD.

>16 richardderus: Didn't send the ruffles but you can save 'em for me!

Happy new thread!

>1 richardderus: We were told, we were warned, still we persisted. Until we didn't.
We are always willing to refute what we don't want to hear and we are even happier to get behind someone else doin' the refutin'.

>16 richardderus: You'd think from our out of control snack stash that we were major pot-heads, when it would be harder to find a more dull and sober lot. Cheetos, plain and jalapeno, Ruffles, Lay's BBQ chips, peanut butter pretzels, malt balls, Boston baked beans, Finnish licorice, gum drops (the spice drops were finished off eventually), Fritos, Cheezits. Oh, and the 5lb bag of Good-and-Plenty.

All hail a new thread.

From the last thread, RD, what brand/model of noise-cancelling headphone do you have? They seem kinda spendy and I don't want to buy and be disappointed.

Happy new one, Richard. Such strange snacks they send you no wonder you what to get them off your hands. I prefer plain ruffles myself.

>24 richardderus: >19 humouress: Do you know them personally or as ghosts?

My younger son would be (more than) willing to help you out with those crisps; he could probably munch through them in about five minutes. We are just now getting the kids to try on their school uniforms since he goes back next week but his brother will be home learning for another couple of weeks. Fortunately, they still fit (though they may have to breathe a bit shallowly for the first few days).

'Morning, RD!

>16 richardderus: Not me, RD. I like plain potato chips, plain Fritos, and plain crispy Cheetos. Seeing a theme here? Bill went to the grocery store to buy soda for himself and 1 measly package of baby cucumbers for me and came home with $77 worth of stuff. Sigh.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

I'll take ALL the lime and jalopeno chips. With a little sour cream dip, if you've got that.

>29 jessibud2: The problem is old. We're an anti-intellectual country, as a rule, and the truth is it's never been different here.

Enjoy the Carson correspondence! Her relationship with Mrs. Freeman was very interesting.

>30 msf59: Hey Mark! It's been a couple of dank, foggy days. Blech. But I'll take it over the blasting, battering heat of summer yet to come.

>31 bell7: Hi Mary! No, not to my liking per se. But I've been unsure of where my next meal was coming from so I won't just toss them into the trash. So the staff will get the goodies!

>32 PaulCranswick: *chuckle* Get your time machine out, PC, and go back to yesterday then they're yours.

>33 quondame: Hi Susan! My belly is rumbling in sympathetic indigestion over that hoard. Ow.

>34 weird_O: Hi Bill! Ave atque vale to you too.

I have the Sony WH1000XM3 Bluetooth Wireless Noise Canceling Headphones, model WH-1000XM3, and can attest to the noise-cancelling feature being everything they said it would be. The Bluetooth doesn't work with my Chromebooks. That's annoying as hell. But there's a headphone jack, so even that was solved.

Happy new thread Richard and yay for Rachel Carson!

As an ex-Sooner I can confirm that "petty, right-wing kakistocratic moron" is an accurate description of the late Tom Coburn. He recently passed of prostate cancer -- on which I have two observations: first, that cancer is an awful diagnosis that I would not even wish on Tom Coburn, and second that Coburn's god apparently lacks my scruples but has a certain sense of poetic justice. Also that Coburn wasn't even the worst of the lot, since Jim Inhofe is still in the Senate.

>35 Familyhistorian: Hi Meg! Happy to see you here. It won't be a problem unloading them, I'm sure, as most folks love them.

I offended my Young Gentleman Caller, Rob, most grievously by asking...just asking!...him if he'd sent this stuff to me as a joke. He was outraged! His job in a Brooklyn restaurant kitchen has made him into a wee touch of a food snob. Some very fancy apologizing later, he was mollified and reassured that I didn't think he'd actually *purchase* such, such dreck.

>36 humouress: ...and the difference would be...?

Heh, the waist-expanding nature of these "foods" is legendary. I find myself unwilling to resume my status as the Michelin Man's kid brother, so I don't partake much.

>37 karenmarie: I have no real issue with the flavorings, it's just all part of the fake-foodness of them. I don't think eating this stuff on the regular is in my future.

>38 laytonwoman3rd: I have sour cream, and in fact could whomp you up a nice salsa crema, Linda3rd. Which has already transpired. Hence the absence of that particular bag....

>41 swynn: Hi Steve! Coburn couldn't have died a more appropriate death. Pity it wasn't sooner.

And may Inhofe suffer an even worse fate as soon as is physically possible. (I do not share your lingering scruples where these evil, horrible people are concerned. If possible I'd send all these GOP morons into privately-run prisons there to be confined in solitary until the end of their horrible, vile, evil days.)

>43 richardderus: Well, thanks for saving me from myself.

>44 laytonwoman3rd: I live to serve.

*smooch*

Hey, Richard. I'm glad I'm not having snacks showing up at my door from a mystery source. It's hard enough resisting them without that. I could live on cookies and chips, including oddball chips like lime and jalapeno. (Don't tell Rob!) I was going to say now I instead live on flavored air and celery, but that's not true. With Madame MBH's help, I eat very well indeed, just mostly snackless. In my bachelor days one of my nicknames was Mr. Snack, so you can tell this has been a big change in direction as my metabolism slowed down.

>46 jnwelch: My freshman year of high school, I *lived* on Screaming Yellow Zonkers!, exclam in original, instead of cafeteria food. I got sick of them. I got very very sick of them. I never lost my taste for burgers, but I never had much of a taste for potato chips...a Fritos boy from the off...or fries dipped in mayo/keppich/hot sauce (Mama called it "Russian Tabasco"). So my junk food addiction is a burger and fries and NO THANKS on the colas, diet or regular. Got a lime rickey? a Cel-Ray tonic? good! A sugar bomb? Not for me, thanks though. (Reese's cups excepted. I want them all. NOW.)

So while I'll eventually eat some of these, it's not likely I'll do much damage before they go out of date. Hence the staff-sharing part of the plan. I still don't eat like a normal Murrikin. Pretty much life-long, that.

How weird it is to have so many options open to us, to be able to specialize so precisely, in our food choices! 200 years ago we'd be munching turnips and wondering if the mutton was good for another meal, and damned glad to have any of it.

I made an *awful* mistake. I started reading Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You're So Tired. It's really interesting, and since Rob is no longer working until 3am in the restaurant (they've gone to curbside pickup and super-local delivery), he's been sleeping at weird hours. Hence, of course, I am too. When I fall asleep on our Skype/Zoom/Hangout calls, he reads and listens to me snore. ...?...

So this title arrived, a discarded library book that to my eyes had never even been opened, and I am so over my head it's not even funny. I have to read pages and paras three or four times to be sure I really get it. I need to understand what's happening to my YGC, at least a bit, to see if there's something to be done to adjust this problem so he doesn't feel more depressed and isolated than is unavoidable.

>47 richardderus: When I was in high school, my daily lunch allowance would buy (in lieu of the "nutritious" hot lunch provided in the cafeteria) fries with cheese or gravy and a glass of soda at the Star Diner a block from school (oh, we were allowed to leave the school grounds and go "over town" at lunch time, with proper parental permission on file) OR a one-dip sundae with topping of choice and a glass of water (free) at the Sweet Shoppe three blocks from school. So guess how often I ate in the caff?

>49 laytonwoman3rd: I'm goin' with "never." I didn't either!

>49 laytonwoman3rd: >50 richardderus: Alas, not only was leaving campus - just outside the military base on which we lived with a monitored gate for access, and a long walk to the main street of the nowhere town outside - not an option, but I was provided with lunch 4 days out of 5. On the 5th day I mashed my BBQ chips onto the burger for flavor. I still like pickles and BBQ chips on my burgers, though the burgers are generally much better than the inspiration.

I learned something new today! Silent Spring wasn't Rachel Carson's first book? Cool.
And, udderly depressing that her legacy, so hard fought for, is being degraded. Sometimes I hate people.

>51 quondame: Pickles and smooshed BBQ chips on a burger make a wonderful tangy zesty saucelike topping. I just don't much want the chips qua chips. And, TBH, these jalapeño lime chips would make me much happier mooshed up with the piggles.

>52 LovingLit: It wasn't; I agree; and I only hate people while I'm not under a general anesthetic.

>53 richardderus: The sentiment is probably why some of us lament not being able to go to bars. For myself, a book that does not rub my nose in people being people works as a general anesthetic. The Mystic Masseur wasn't that book. Neither was The Casual Vacancy. Sometimes I can read such books and appreciate them, but they'll never get a top rating from me.

>54 quondame: You are the proverbial tough room, Susan. Your ratings are parsimonious to the point to pain, so something getting 4 or more stars out of you generally indicated a textonic plate (no I didn't typo I neologized) has shifted!

>55 richardderus: Well, except for what I like! Cute.

Sweet Thursday, Richard. Nothing to report on the birding front but I am enjoying my current reads. We have a nice cool down for the weekend too. Take a break from this muggy stuff.

>56 quondame: Yes, all 2.125 books per year. *smooch*

>57 msf59: It's still sticky and foggy here, but I'm hopeful the weekend won't be. Read hearty!

>50 richardderus: Well, once in a while I did. Even at 16 I couldn't live on french fries and ice cream. The mac and cheese and hamburgers weren't dreadful in the cafeteria. Hot turkey sandwiches were OK. Pizza was dreadful, as was the greasy spaghetti and the creamed ground beef on instant mashed potatoes. I don't remember much else.

>58 richardderus: Wait, what!? is a positive rating, and I've given out over 10 's and an in the last two months alone. I also read dreck. Sturgeons Law and all.

'Morning, RD!

>53 richardderus: Potato chips are always a lovely addition to a sandwich or hamburger. And yes to dill pickle chips on hamburgers, too. Bill went to the grocery store yesterday to pick up soda for him and cucumbers for me and ended up with $77 worth of groceries (sigh and eye roll), including two bags of regular salted potato chips.

I just found a recipe for brioche hamburger buns and might actually make it today.

*smooch*

All this “food” talk! Goodness.

I do like plain kettle cooked potato chips and Fritos. Those childhood indiscriminate days are long, long gone, for which I’m grateful.

>47 richardderus: Yes, our regular food choices have expanded in interesting ways, haven’t they?

Have a wonderful Friday heading into a great weekend, Richard.

>59 laytonwoman3rd: Being raised in Texas, I was given the option of eating their Tex-Mex enchiladas twice a month, with Spanish rice and refritos. That I was there for! I preferred the DQ burgers from down the block, so those were once-a-week treats. Other than that, I made and brought my own.

>60 quondame: ...out of over a hundred...

>61 karenmarie: Howdy do, Horrible! Brioche buns? That might be glorious or could be weird, so I'm eager to hear how it went.

*smooch*

>62 Matke: "Food" is right, Gail. Chips aren't food, they're luxury items. Cheetos aren't even that!

Happy weekend, dear lady.

I've just come out of my weekly therapy meeting. I then checked Twitter and Facebook.

I'm vacationing from social media today so I don't become suicidally depressed. The slide into an armed civil war has begun and the horror that is Trump will try to use it to cling to his illegitimately obtained power.

I can't.

I’m off FB until after the election and I’ve been off Twitter for weeks.

I can’t, and I won’t. Books for me.

Isn't this current turmoil exactly what Steve Bannon wanted to bring about? He was tossed aside early on in Drumph's presidential scam, but is he still an influence?

>65 Matke: That's almost where I am...but today is the horizon I set for myself. Tomorrow I'll revisit the decision.

>66 weird_O: Yes, it is; yes, he is via his evil henchrat Stephen Miller.

This makes me feel a kind of seasick horror that I assume the proverbial "good German" felt as her country slid into Nazism.

>63 richardderus: I ended up taking a too-long nap and will have to make them tomorrow or Sunday. The nap was lovely, though...

>68 karenmarie: Brioche waits for no woman, it seems...but a long nap on a day like today sounds like an excellent plan.

>61 karenmarie: After years of getting aghast looks for adding chips to burgers, I feel I've found my tribe. I also used to put regular chips on tuna sandwiches, but now I eat them with Salt & Vinegar chips on the side and to scoop up the bits that fall out of the Italian bread I use for sandwiches. I don't seem to be able to get out of Mitsuwa, the local Japanese chain market, for less than $70, but that's because sushi.

Glad to see you are cruising through the threads again. : )

Not talking politics. Nope. : (

>70 quondame: On the occasions I court the gout attack that accompanies my eating of fish, I'll happily eat an albacore sammy with jalapeño chips and pickled beets.

>71 Berly: It's a horrible problem now. We most urgently need to talk across so many divides in this world, and are ever less willing or able or both to do so.

>72 richardderus: And I was mislead into thinking it was red meat that was the culprit. Though diet doesn't really seem to be the cause, just an aggravating factor.

I'm realizing that even if I don't loose everything and die because of current politics, I still may not live to see brighter days. And I've got all the white privilege a fat old woman can have.

>73 quondame: Diet has a deeply overreported connection to the disorder. I had my first diagnosed attack at 21. No doctor would believe the presentation of symptoms, so they did a blood test and my uric acid was 14. (Normal, back then, was 6.)

So, no. Maybe someone normal whose symptoms showed up in his 50s or 60s wouldn't be triggered by iodine from fish and seafood. Me, not so much. Three weeks of *stellar* behavior and double-dosing my meds and I can eat some shrimp of a can of albacore. Otherwise, attack city here I come.

*I* won't live to see brighter days and I'm 60.

>73 quondame: I am so with you, in every way. I try to avoid the news but it seeps in and I’m more and more disheartened on a daily basis.

Hey, RD! I am watching some of this tear-gas footage from Minnesota and it is making me sad. I mixed up a Manhattan earlier and now I am following it with a beer. Still sad.

>75 Matke:, >76 msf59: It all starts to collapse with this kind of outrage responded to by tin-eared idiots in such a disgraceful way that the chasms can't be papered over anymore. Lucky us, we get to watch and then suffer for the evil done by the scum of the Earth.

Goody goody.

‘Morning, RD!

The eggs and butter are coming to room temp (again), I’m motivated.

>70 quondame: I love being part of the Burger Potato Chip Tribe, too. I love potato chips on tuna salad sandwiches, but not egg salad sandwiches.

>72 richardderus: I love pickled beets but have never thought about putting them on a sandwich.

>73 quondame: I'm realizing that even if I don't loose everything and die because of current politics, I still may not live to see brighter days. And I've got all the white privilege a fat old woman can have. That realization may be what’s been making me ‘meh’ for the last half week or so.

Pence putting property before people, DJT writing about THUGS (yay to Twitter, boo hiss to Facebook), and CNN reporters getting arrested for doing their jobs and not doing ANYTHING to provoke the police are all very sad making.

On the other hand, I have fresh hot black-no-sugar coffee, it’s a beautiful Carolina-blue sky day (until this afternoon when we expect storms) and there’s always the chance that Covid-19 might strike the WH…

>78 karenmarie: La reporte dans la brioche is with eagerness awaited.

Pickled beets on sammys is a lovely thing. I whirl up about a quarter-cup of 'em into fine purée and spread thinly on the bread, or if it's foona tish, I'll put the beet-chips directly on the salad. For some reason it's not particularly tasty or even pleasant to put chopped beets in the foona itself. Go know.

I pray for a white-supremacist-specific 100% lethal plague of some sort hourly.

>73 quondame: and >78 karenmarie: Yeah. I get that. The whole continent feels like something from a nightmare right now.
Yes, even here, north of the 49th.

>80 SandyAMcPherson: Heck yeah it feels like a nightmare. The plague ain't doin' nothin' good for us; the lowest scum the Earth can produce are taking it as empowerment to make decent people miserable; the response of the leadership of the world is, to put it mildly, inadequate.

Yeesh.

Read this, from The Secret by James Drought:

You have to conclude that your country has run amuck, that the people responsible are insane, that you can not trust your leaders, your President, your general, your parents, your friends, your neighbors, your co-workers, your police, your town, your state, your country, anymore because it is liable to turn upon you for no reason at all, except that for its own security it needs a scapegoat, any scapegoat including you, and there is no appeal possible.

Published in 1962.

Funny how there have always been people who could see through the scrim to the fake scenery behind.

Just dropping by to say hello. Hope the shingles have subsided. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

>83 figsfromthistle: Thank you, Anita! The acyclovir has left me with a just tiny little patch of rash, but an infection set it and I will now see a dermatologist next week for follow-up on that issue.

Afternoon, RD! I'm trying to stay off the computer, because I inevitably end up on FB and it throws me into a rage. Twitter works better for me, but I mostly check that on my phone. Anyway, finding other things to occupy myself and feeling much better :)

A work colleague/friend of mine (one of my Thursday HH people), just got diagnosed with shingles on Friday. She also got bit by a brown recluse spider a few days ago so not having a good week.

Hope your infection clears up soonest.

xx

>85 katiekrug: Hiya Katie, thanks for the infection-clearing wishes. Frankly, it's a minor, minor issue now thanks to the laws of physics. I shall say no more.

OMG that poor woman! What a crap time she's having! I feel so much less inclined to whine.

I've got to stay off both this weekend, I simply can't abide the way the war has begun. Unnecessary, ugly, mean-spirited; righteous rage egged into fury by vile, low, scum-of-the-earth racist fascist dirtbags.

Just...not today. Not yesterday. I don't hold out a lot of hope for tomorrow. The war can do without my eyes.

Well, the buttery brioche hamburger buns came out well, even if I do say so myself. Here are the four prettiest:

>87 karenmarie: They're gorgeous! I love the poppyseedery you've done.

Be there at seven. Got Tabasco or should I stop for some?

47 The Listener and Other Stories by Helen Hudson

Rating: 4.5* of five

I love discovering new-to-me writers. When my mother died in 1999, she had in her downsized library a large selection of midcentury writers whose oeuvres are largely forgotten today...Sloan Wilson, John P. Marquand, Harry Golden...many of which I've managed to retain over my own peregrinations.

Three of Miss Helen Hudson's books, this one, Tell the Time to None, and Meyer, Meyer, were there as well. There they sat ignored by me for literal decades. I paid them no mind but liked the Sixties aesthetic of their jackets. Then I was at a lovely, long-gone bookstore in Austin, Texas, browsing the bizarre and eclectic collection of modern, current, and antiquitous books its truly weird owner had accreted. There was a short-story anthology called New Voices, '64...and since a forty-year-old selection of "new voices" is bound to be fascinating, it came home with me.

Helen Hudson's story, A Bottle of Sherry to Dr. Polk, was in that anthology. I read it with complete pleasure, a real sense of knowing this main character and the support staff making her life possible, and the acerbic nature of the lady's humor (I speak both of author and character):

“...And where's Margaret Pier? I know she's not dead, even if she's almost as old as I am and twice as stubborn."

"She said she'd never set foot inside this house again. Not after what you said the last time."

"Did I say something dreadful?"

"You said blind Republicanism like hers was an inherited social disease, like syphilis. You said it. I heard you myself.”

My very own soul-mother, is Mrs. Pritchard. I love that and I love her and I realized that thank goodness I had the whole collection to read! I was chuffed. I was also mid-upheaval in my life, and the project of reading and reviewing the collection fell by the wayside. I added the book to my online catalogs in 2011 and found again the quote above, and another below, from Dr. Polk; what a delight! More personal-life upheavals followed in fairly short order; the read-n-review project got shelved (heh) again.

I follow a blog called Neglected Books and have since goodness-knows. I've found many a forgotten tome to enjoy, notably the now-well-known classic Missouri novel The Moonflower Vine that the blog helped rehabilitate. I have a list of amazing authors I'd thought of mentioning to Blogger Brad Bigelow over time, but never did for a huge variety of reasons. Well, I did it this year, and the author was Helen Hudson.

I'll explain more on my blog because space here's limited: go here.

The Listener couldn't be more 1967 (the year The Virginia Quarterly first published it) with its free association and celebration of analysis. Dr. Toye's enormous ears and absence of personality make him the caricature analyst, silent and open to the shrieks and moans of the needy. Then in comes a man with a seriously unexamined life; a man with hidden desires and a wife who bores him out of his mind; and Dr. Toye listens him into an early grave. The long dark night of Dr. Toye's soul has begun.

He spent his life in his house, downstairs during the day and upstairs at night, and never went out to lunch. For the truth was that he was happy only in his office, sitting upright behind his desk with a body stretched out on his couch and a voice talking just to him.

Born too soon, our Dr. Toye. He should be among us now.

Sunday Mourning

The Strange Testament of Michael Cassidy

The Hungry Eye

Send a Patrol Car to Spartanburg

Hermes' Beard

A Bottle of Sherry to Dr. Polk details the last moments of independence that a starchy matriarch, Mrs. George Pritchard (Emma), as she prepares...is prepared...to move into a nursing home since her advancing dementia will no longer allow her to be constantly supervised. She hasn't lost her self yet, though one can sense its inevitability:

“Frankie," she said softly, "do you know what my idea of heaven is? A place where the windows are always clean, and the people I want can always come to dinner.”

Her long-time day nurse receives the confidence with stoic, understated unhappiness; an older man with rather too much experience dealing with dementia-suffering souls, I was deeply and sadly affected by the story, by the sense that it gave me of Author Hudson's intimate knowledge of her material. I give it 5 stars

After Cortés

The Tenant

The Road to Kingswood

Strange Fare

An Appointment with Armstrong

Thy Servant

Hiya, Richard! Like you I’m off social media for a while. Too much is too much... Fortunately. LT doesn’t count. 😀

Link is up for the Sector General summer group read--check it out!

https://www.librarything.com/topic/320907

>90 drneutron: I just can't. This is the moment I've dreaded since 2016. So here I cower, afraid to watch the nightmare come true.

>91 ronincats: Duly marked!

My husband's nightly ritual usually involves lots of news, so I tend to do LT to enable me to be near him and ignore the news. Mostly it works. Last night I was sucked in because I have family in MN. I hate what happened to GF, but I also grieve for the damage done in the aftermath.

On the reading front, I just finished Stephen King's The Institute and I loved it. Course, I always like Stephen King. I have heard really good things about his latest collection of short stories. Might need to get my hands on that one, too.

Smooch!

Good morning, Richard. Perhaps a little salve for the troubled soul right now. This is a musical tribute to Rachel Carson, from today's edition of the Brain Pickings newsletter I subscribe to. Thought it might be appropriate given your topper theme this thread:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/05/27/thrush-song-paola-prestini-universe-in-...

>93 Berly: It's intolerable to me to listen to the reports of violence and rebellion in the cities. I am heartsick that righteous anger has curdled into murderous rage under the goads of the fascist scum.

Stephen King is a good escape.

>94 jessibud2: It's a lovely piece indeed, and so poignant and touching in its genesis. Thanks, Shelley.

'Morning, RDear!

I have Tabasco and Texas Pete. C'mon down!

I love poppy seeds and sesame seeds. I need to get some hulled sesame seeds (I only have organic unhulled in the house right now for salads) and use them on the next batch.

>96 karenmarie: I do so love the sesame seed bun. I have no idea why that little fillip of sweetnut taste is so welcome with the lovely yeastyness of bread.

Just dropping in a hug for the new thread. Wish I could make the world better.

48 Derelict by Alan E. Nourse

Rating: 3.5* of five

Read the free Kindle story and listen to the free audio on YouTube.

Nobody says anything, they growl or mutter or grate. Nothing's really far away, it's unthinkably far. How, as a matter of interest, does one "breathe impatiently"? I want to take the dead author's thesaurus away and clonk him with it.

It was 1953, but we already knew about physics then; grappling a ship moving at a substantial fraction of light speed as a stationary object? Oh nay nay nay. Mayhem. Carnage. Destruction.

And Brownie, the coded-by-50s-stereotypes-queer little wimpy engineer, versus the vicious thuggish mate? Yech. Noir stereotypes and not particularly well done...not like Peter Lorre and Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. The anti-Government paranoia and fascist security state? Close to home, and the grim reality of 2020 seems to me to be taking us down Nourse's grim future-history path.

The ending is really really really bleak. Really. So very grim. I hate the evil world of Nourse's last-ditch shouting against the Security State's inevitable horrors. I don't like the writing. I don't like the story. But I can't forget it.

>98 BekkaJo: Hi Bekka! *smooch*

I wish someone could make the world better. I don't think it's going to get better for some little while, though.

49 Robot Visions (The Robot Series) by Isaac Asimov

Rating: 4* of five

This collection of Asimov's deathless Robot series, shorter works that add up to a guiding vision of what Humanity strives for in the creation of a computerized mechanical slave class, starts with an essay entitled "The Robot Chronicles." As I assume most everyone reading Asimov in this day and time is reasonably familiar with the stories that make up the series, I'll confine my observations to the essay which is not otherwise available in print, though it exists on audio for your edification.

Asimov, a lecherous old hump with a *terrible* (richly deservedly so) reputation among female fandom, made some conceptual leaps in his career that have remained extremely relevant to the modern world. His centenary was this past second of January. His reputation is such that the jollifications in fandom were...muted. This is understandable, even laudable, but still regrettable. The Three Laws of Robotics, with which his essay deals in a way I did not expect, alone should guarantee his place on the podium of Authors of Merit. But as sensitivity and awareness and the need for all of us to do better now that we know better are in operation, there must needs be a period of desuetude for famous offenders against our new order.

Nothing will knock his contributions out of use. His name will, whether temporarily or permanently, be expunged from the common usage of the robotics conversation (or so I predict). But he remains the originator of the modern technical and social conception of the Robot.

This essay is a personal history of how and why and who and what led Isaac Asimov to develop the Laws, the concept of the robot that he adopted and adapted so thoroughly from Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R., and the enduring trope of the machine that longs to be human. (No, he was not the first to bring that idea to the table. Please spare me comments about Galatea and other inanimate objects of personification. They are all stipulated as predecessors to Asimov's creation and influences thereon, conscious or unconscious, herewith.) As a personal essay reflecting on Asimov's reasons for and responses to his robotics work, I found the half-hour or so of reading deeply pleasurable.

Not five-star's worth, though. I found a smugness, arguably earned, in his telling (retelling, more like, since he had given this text as talks over the years he was lionized) that is a fundamentally squicky emotion for me. I don't think anyone really intelligent is ever free of smugness. I also think it ill becomes the intelligent not to include some self-deprecation in their smugness, some overt and clear signal that they understand and are sorry for the feeling of irritation and annoyance their (however well-earned) expertise elicits in the hearer/reader. Asimov does not do that here...his response, for example, to the OFTEN brought charge that Roddenberry used Asimov's Bicentennial Man as source material for Lt. Cmdr. Data: "I didn't mind."

Aren't you kind.

Still, there it is. Along with being a handsy old letch he was an arrogant bastard. And a genius at some things (though not particularly at the *craft* of writing). And a light gone out too soon. He was a stripling of seventy-two when he died, and I for one would give a not-very-affordable decade off my life to hear what he'd have to say about the modern world.

If you don't want to read his Robot stories, listen to the essay on audio. But I think you'll want to read them once you do.

50 Nightfall by Isaac Asimov

Rating: 4.5* of five

I absolutely adore this story. It's my favorite Asimov story or book. I was delighted to learn that the ancient radio drama, X Minus One, recorded a half-hour dramatization of it. I just can't express the degree to which I love the Asimovian take on relativism's simultaneous necessity and vicissitudes are played out in a hugely amusing manner.

A planet inhabited by intelligent technological species that's lit by five stars is about to experience, for the first time in 2,500 years, a total absence of sunlight. All the suns will be in eclipse at the same time. And, quite naturally, a super-daffy religion has sprung up sometime in the past 2,500 years (that interval is not accidental) to predict The End of Days when this utter, total eclipse occurs. Then the psychologists start explaining what's going on; then there is the eclipse.

Let There Be Light.

Just marvelous! And as of the COVID-19 plague of 2020, eerily timely....

Interesting about Asimov. I love most of what I've read of his (including & expecially Nightfall) but had no idea he was such a creep. I also never knew T.S. Eliot was a creep either, tho, until recently. Different KIND of creep, but still. Not to mention another previously favorite author of the Darkover novels who, it turns out, was a super creep. I guess I can like their work without liking them, tho it does play into it, doesn't it.

>104 Storeetllr: It always colors my decisions about what to buy, though not always what to read. I'll never read Orson Scott Card because homophobia; I'll never *buy* an NK Jemisin book new because fan abuse. I will buy a used one, and read it; just none of my money will go into her pockets.

>105 richardderus: I know N.K. Jemisin has had some harsh things to say about the pitiful puppies, but hadn't come across other tales of her being bad to fans.

What? I swear, I must live in a cave. I haven't heard anything about Jemison acting like a jerk.

>106 quondame: Twitter was not my friend. I'd've preferred not to know.

>107 Storeetllr: It was on the Twitterverse, and no one has seen fit to blow it up because, well, why? Tear down a black woman?! A successful one?! Not now, not really necessary; just watch what you say.

I don't disagree so much as I know, from long years' bitter experience, that it's unwise to think that it will never be you. So off I go, detached from the center so outside the kill zone.

51 Time and Time Again by H. Beam Piper

Rating: 3.5* of five

The story of time's seriously powerful defense mechanism. That is a seriously major downer! But what the hell, it was a lot of fun and it had some sort of thought put into it...a deep dive into the handwavium jar, a solid sprinkle of cliché dust, and a heaping cup of cornballs.

Piper's take on time travel was not absurd from the point of view of the as-yet poorly understood physics of atomic power. A bomb, a dose of narcotics, a mind in deep mortal crisis...sure, he could travel back to his thirteenth birthday, why the heck not. Especially since his thirteenth birthday was Hiroshima Day, the sixth of August, 1945; and the mortal crisis is his death in the Battle of Buffalo (N.Y.) in 1975 in the fireball of a nuclear bomb.

Okay, okay, it's codswallop. It's implausible by 1947 standards. But the events of this wild day, this unprecedented day, are unimpeded and flow right as they should until the lad makes a fateful, Universe-changing difference in his dad's life. It works!

Or does it. Will it, in the end, make things worse? Can his dad shoulder the burden of his newly changed future alone, single-handed, without the returned adult mind of his son? And just to show that Piper did not have a crystal ball tucked somewhere safe, he predicted that in 1960 we would have a president who "sang in a nice tenor and was good to his wife"!

Yeah, no. But really, why spend money buying this when you could listen to the X Minus One radio drama for free on YouTube? It's much less irritating for being free.

‘Morning, RDear! Happy Monday to you. On a SF binge, eh?

>97 richardderus: I’ve loved sesame seeds ever since I was little and had my first taste of Roman Meal bread.

>99 richardderus: I’d never heard of this author. Turns out he was prolific. Your comment about breathing impatiently reminds me that I wrote this in my review of a ridiculous ER book, Midnight Fires by Nancy Means Wright: “Eva planted herself before him, arms around her belly, which was breathing heavily.” How does a belly breathe heavily?

>110 karenmarie: Hi Horrible, I found a cache of X Minus One radio dramas and discovered the way I can stay awake while someone's talking at me: actors! And since the vast majority of these stories were in the magazines of the era, a small amount of effort means I can read them and listen to them in close juxtaposition. That seems to help, too.

Breathing bellies are an interesting concept...makes me think of the centaur's digestion problem.

Anyway, have a lovely Monday of chore-ticking-offing!

Morning, RD! I hope your weather is as beautiful as ours, though if you are still on lockdown, I should shut up... ?

>112 katiekrug: We're on lockdown but, well...I snuck out yesterday to canoodle with Rob for a bit. It's the first time since his dad died that we've been together IRL. A half-hour hugging and breathing together did us both a world of good. He went on to his stepmother's house for Sunday dinner since he's no longer afraid of his dad.

She seems to be trying to mend fences with him. I don't trust her, or her motivations, but we shall see.

Happy newish thread!

Did you ever find out where the snacks came from?

Yay for Rob canoodling yesterday, yay for his going to his stepmother's. I hope it's true fence mending. What other reason might she have?

>114 ChelleBearss: Thanks, Chelle! No one's fessed up, and I'm disgusted to report that I'm eating the Cheetos. *shamefaced*

It might be better that I never find out, considering how likely I am to anathemize and heap contumely upon the rotten-sould perp at this point.

>115 karenmarie: I hope so too, but history suggests she wants to have another chance to scream gawd into him and make him straight. I got a terse text last night, "GRATEFUL 2 B HOME" and a heart-eyes emoji. Many possible reasons for the word "grateful" given where he went, but my disaster filter is clogging up.

>116 richardderus: Ha! You and I are very different! I would love if someone sent me a giant shipment of snacks

>107 Storeetllr: >108 richardderus: Ah, that explains it, then. My political twitter account has been suspended by Twitter for a response I tweeted to an ignorant tweet of Ann Coulter's in which I asked her to stop lying and called her a skank (they said it was "hateful conduct"), so I've been boycotting (mostly) Twitter with my other account (the one I follow you with) too. Because can you say hypocritically ironic? Or should that be ironically hypocritical? Seriously, between staying away from FB because Zuckerbug and now Twitter, the only social media site I spend any time on is LT. Which may be why I missed the dish on Jemison and managed to read/reread 26 books in May.

>117 ChelleBearss: But just think...the close-to-$100 that person spent sending me nutrition-free calories would've bought me more than enough books to give my puppy of a brain all the chew-toys it could possibly want.

>118 Storeetllr: Oh, it didn't happen this year, Mary, it was in 2019. I unfollowed Jemisin a year ago March, according to Unfollowers.

The double standard used to determine who gets sent to Twitterjail is, well...words fail me. I don't know a scathing, contemptuous epithet sulphrous enough to express my true level of withering revulsion.

This month's free ebook from University of Chicago Press, for 5 days:

https://press.uchicago.edu/books/freeEbook.html

Chicago has a long history of police violence. The starkest evidence is seen in the hundreds of recent cases of torture of suspects in custody—overwhelmingly African-American men. Our latest free e-book, available until noon on June 6, is The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence by Laurence Ralph. The book is based on ten years of interviews and archival research and takes the form of open letters to victims, witnesses, participants, activists, mayors, and police. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph traces institutional racism through law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us and lending a voice to those deceased.

Happy Tuesday, Richard. Back to the grind. HOT today, but I got my first haircut in 4 months. Yippee, I am no longer a hippy!! I am enjoying The Last Pirate of New York. Keep this one in mind.

>120 ronincats: That's depressing but very timely!

>121 msf59: Back to it, you smooth old son, and with a good audio it should be bearable. I'll keep my eye peeled for your report on piracy, so to speak.

I’m disheartened and, staring yesterday, a little frightened.

However, there’s always books and LT.

Mmm...Cheetos. I have banned them from my house, along with some other nutritional nightmares. But I fondly remember my days of orange-stained fingers and sodium overload.

So, are you “allowed” out into the immediate grounds? I value my balcony for the fresh air/sunshine, but here in Florida the restrictions have been eased. I’ve been so carefully avoiding the news that I’ve no idea what we’re supposed to do or why. I always wear a mask for grocery shopping and do still strictly limit my activity. I think that the libraries have opened for reserve pickups but I’m not sure.

52 Lillian Boxfish Takes A Walk by Kathleen Rooney

Rating: 4* of five

I have nothing important to add to the conversation about this book except to say that I loved Lillian enough to re-read this book (a thing I consciously avoid doing, too old to waste the eyeblinks when there are literally dozens of new books every week that I want to read). I am living the "ancient Chinese curse" (that's nothing of the sort) often translated as "May you live in interesting times," among other formulations. I was old enough to have my dinner ruined by Vietnam War body counts intoned gravely by Uncle Walter on the CBS Evening News. The inner-city uprisings in Newark, Detroit, Oakland, Watts..."Hey Hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"...and now the next skirmish in the unfinished US Civil War as my last full decade on Earth unfolds.

I needed Lillian's mentions of The Strand and her gentleman callers and R. H. Macy's and how much she hated admitting when her mother was right. I needed her to walk for me down streets I once loved so immoderately, wearing her deeply unfashionable top-quality mink as a slew of men I loved were dying in St. Vincent's (I was probably in one of their rooms at the time she was walking!), and to feel the full weight of memory. Sometimes it's death by crushing, sometimes a warm comforter on a cold, windy night.

So thank you, Author Rooney. I needed this story to help me see that the only way out is through, to face the storm like Lillian always did, and feel the lovely ache of days gone by but never disappeared.

'Morning, RD!

>124 richardderus: Excellent comments, straight from the heart. I, too, rated this book 4*. It's absolutely a book to be re-read and savored.

I'm a bit blech-y today, need to get my second mug of coffee and have some brekkie. Probably going to the PO to mail some stuff to Jenna and stop at the grocery store, masked and gloved.

>123 Matke: "Immediate grounds" LOL

This is not that kind of place, I fear. The grounds *chuckle* are two stretches of city sidewalk, a boardwalk (where the hoi polloi are not wearing masks!! no way am I going there), and a driveway. The breeze from the North Atlantic is bracing, though, and my window is open.

Books and denial will get me through the opening salvos of the Civil War.

>125 karenmarie: Thank you, Horrible, I appreciate your appreciation of my musings.

It's not a wildly glee-filling atmosphere, is it. I went onto Twitter...briefly...and logged onto Facebook to clear my messages. È finita la commedia for me on social media today. Errand easily, home safely. *smooch*

The Kindle edition of Just One Damned Thing After Another, the wonderful, delightful first book in the Chronicles of St Mary's, is only 99¢ TODAY!!

My rating was a solid 4* of five. Go see my review for the why and the wherefore.

"The president of this republic has deployed active-duty military on American soil in an attempt to crush American protesters exercising their rights under the First Amendment." – Jack Holmes, Politics editor of Esquire magazine

The Civil War has begun.

In The New Yorker, this piece (paywall; four free stories per month, this is worth using one of them) called "An Abuse of Sacred Symbols" has this very, very telling paragraph in it:

When protests gave way to violence over the weekend, police expanded the {White House's newly established} realm of isolation, sealing off Lafayette Park and pushing the public farther away.

This is appallingly bad PR and indicative of where this kakistocracy is heading.

Good morning, Richard. Great sci-fi and badly-behaving authors discussions. Your essay on Asimov's essay was a pleasure to read. I'm another one who didn't know about the Jemison fan abuse; I wonder whether she mended her ways after the Twitter criticism. Author misbehavior soiling their own books has been a problem forever, hasn't it. I was a big Knut Hamsun fan (particularly Hunger and Mysteries, but Pan and Victoria, too), and then I found out late in life he became a Nazi sympathizer. I still admire the books, but now with reservations and less enthusiasm.

Thanks for reminding me about Nightfall. I may have to re-read that gem.

'Morning, RD!

>128 richardderus: and >129 richardderus: Yup. And to brandish a Bible after having peaceful protesters cleared with tear gas. This man is becoming more and more dangerous.

On a happier note, I made brownies yesterday and sent some to Jenna in her 'care' package of TP, basmati rice, masks, and gloves.

Hooray for Lillian Boxfish! I am friends with Rooney on Good Reads. She used to write book reviews for the Chicago Tribune and lives here in the suburbs. Looking forward to her next book.

>130 jnwelch: I am so glad to see you out and about, Joe, and glad you enjoyed my pieces. I wish I didn't know of Jemisin's tactless response to an overeager fan's blundering thoughtlessness; but I can't say it affected me personally, so I don't want to blow it too far up. She didn't come out as a Trump supporter, after all.

Oh, by all means, you should re-read Nightfall! An antidote to the lunacy of today's world!

>131 karenmarie: Hey Horrible, the brownies will be quite a pleasant surprise among the necessities. Are there any left? Asking for an appetite....

>132 msf59: I just love that read, Mark, and am so pleased that she's a nice person as well as a good storyteller. (See Jemison/Hamsun chat above.)

The Second Civil War has been a long time coming.

And now it’s here.

I read. And you?

Oh yes. Do you have any sort of Porch/veranda sort of thing? How frustrating to be so close to Our Atlantic and not feel comfortable on the boardwalk.

2 quotes from AWAD (A Word A Day), yesterday and today, seem particularly apropos right now. Perhaps he chose them on purpose:

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

There is nothing more dangerous than a government of the many controlled by the few. -Lawrence Lessig, professor and political activist (b. 3 Jun 1961)

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people. -Cornel West, author and philosopher (b. 2 Jun 1953)

>134 Matke: It is indeed.

The boardwalk is our only porchy thing, and as long as the second-wave virus outbreak is still building, I ain't riskin' it. August gonna be bad.

>135 jessibud2: I love Lessig's clear-sightedness! And Dr. West is a fine thinker, and a role model for aspiring public intellectuals.
***
I read an excerpt from Why Do We Still Have An Electoral College?, An August title from Harvard UP:

In March of 1816, the possibility of electing the President through a national popular vote was formally raised in Congress for the first time. This noteworthy, if little noticed, event occurred in the midst of the Senate's consideration of an amendment resolution to require both presidential electors and members of the House to be chosen through district elections. That resolution, proposed in late February by Joseph Varnum of Massachusetts, was one of numerous district election amendments to come before Congress between 1813 and 1826. As we have seen, this was a period when many political leaders were actively seeking to reform and make nationally uniform the process of selecting presidential electors.

More than two hundred years this battle's been going on! Yikes!

>136 richardderus: I find the whole American electoral set-up very confusing. It always seems so skewed in terms of votes allotted to each college.

Canada has similar idiocy, so I am not criticising.
The small island province of Prince Edward Island (population less than 160,000) has 4 federal members of parliament. Written in stone because of the confirmation agreement in their joining the Dominion of Canada in 1873.

There are only three brownies left. I deliberately did not have one for brekkie. I had bacon and two slices of your delicious beer bread toasted with real butter and raspberry Simply Fruit. And coffee.

>137 SandyAMcPherson: It's confusing to most people here as well because the Electoral College has as many votes as there are members (term used advisedly, although properly) of the House of Representatives and the Senate. The formula used to derive that number requires the decennial Census results be apportioned into electoral districts within each state, and then the Representatives are elected using that data's redistricting; there are always two Senators for each state. After the 2016 Russian election put the traitorous Cheeto Benito in place, the different states have been passing laws binding their electors to vote in line with the state-wide majority vote-winner (which would've meant President Clinton would be in office now), but the movement hasn't quite made it over the hurdle of 270-plus electoral votes to guarantee that the overall vote-winner would be the next President.

I'll give you one guess who's opposed to that idea. Oh heck, call it a freebie: Little Vladdie Pu-Pu's president!

Anyway, it's got a lot of moving parts and, in theory, is more tamper-proof because of that but we all know that any time a system is complicated it's complicated to benefit the powerful.

>138 karenmarie: That beer bread is scrummy, ain't it! And your breakfast sounds delish.

Hi Richard, stopping by your new thread. Mystery snack food delivery, and interesting food discussion. My favorite "snack" food is pizza. There is a really good pizza place in the plaza where I grocery shop that sells pizza by the slice. It is amazing how often I can convince myself that I need a slice of pizza so that I don't binge shop (by being hungry) while shopping.

Glad to learn that your shingles are subsiding! Sorry to learn that you do not have a safe location for enjoying fresh air and sunshine.

>140 lkernagh: Hi Lori! They're basically gone. It's an infection under the place where they were that I'm going to have sawed open, drained, and then...dealt with? IDK how. I will guess an Rx.

In any event, I do NOT want those bastards back again in life!

>139 richardderus: Thanks for the semi-clear explanation. I still don't get why (for eg) Florida has so many electoral votes compared to, say, a more populous state.

>140 lkernagh: Hey Lori, which pizza place is that? I have never found good pizza in Victoria.

>141 richardderus:, I sure was happy for you that the shingles responded to the acyclovir. Hope the underlying infection also clears up PDQ.

>141 richardderus: That does not sound fun at all. When are you going in for this?

Happy you got some snuggle time with Rob. Definitely needed. Love Asimov! Well, at least his books.

Wishing you a happy Friday, no ambulances, and some sunshine. Smooch.

Morning, Richard! Happy Friday! Hoping you are still in the sack, after enjoying a very fine slumber. Fingers crossed.

>142 SandyAMcPherson: Hi Sandy! New York and Florida each have 29 electoral votes because each has about 20 million people living in it. The infection is on its last, wobbly legs, and an oral antibiotic will come for me today (so I'm told).

>143 Berly: I went yesterday, Berly-boo, and the good news is that my use of the silver-impregnated anti-infection foam pads that my knees got at the beginning of the year kept the residual infection down to the bare minimum for its survival. It's been cultured, and there's an antibiotic on its way here.

Looks more like thunderstorms than sunshine for a lot of the day, but those are okay with me since it means the rain comes.

>144 msf59: I slept late today! It felt wonderful. One more day for you, eh what, Birddude?

'Morning, RD!

I'm glad to hear that the infection is on its way out and a new oral antibiotic on its way in. And yay for sleeping late today.

We're got some rain and possibly some storms today, too.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

>146 karenmarie: Those blessèd few minutes after the storm...the clean, unhumid air...are glorious, aren't they.

I'm just delighted the shingles went away! That was *awful* and then to have that little place develop an infection, well, yechhh and yikes.

*smooch*

Sounds like today is a refreshing restart for you, Richard! Yay! We have heat and humidity here today but so far, it's just sunny out there.

>148 jessibud2: Thanks, Shelley, it does feel like someone hit the reset button. Now, on Monday, I'll go in to have another cyst removed before it can get ant ideas about causing trouble.

Morning, RD!

>150 katiekrug: Hey there, Katie, whass nuu?

>145 richardderus: >147 richardderus: That sounds quite awful. I am glad you will get the antibiotics soon and be on the way to recovery!!

>149 richardderus: Well, after Monday. LOL

>151 richardderus: - Nada.

>152 Berly: It's not a lot of fun, but it's being handled, and believe me that is what I care about at this point.

*smooch*

>153 katiekrug: Oh well, maybe the rains will wash something interesting your way. Or, of course, you could always join me in freaking out about the fact that the vilest, lowest "members" of society could very well impose their wrong-headed, spiritually impoverished, selfish and greedy will upon decent leftists and poor people.

I found my copy of Tigana, a fantasy novel that Caro/cameling gave me ten years ago and that I didn't care for, last night. (I was shuffling paperwork into a bin and it was in there before the paperwork.)

I am here to tell you, Broad Generalizationists, that testing your assumptions and assertions is a worthwhile endeavor: I'm already halfway through the reread! What a sly takedown of self-importance and arrogance! The greatest obstacle to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge, as someone famous once wrote; I need to have this inoculated under my corpus callosum so both sides of my brain can't avoid knowing it at the same time.

((Hugs)) and *smooches*, RD! Happy Friday!

I still remember the impact that Silent Spring had on me. Although I grew up an evangelical Christian - don't hate me - I have never bought into the mindset that we can destroy the earth just because mankind is at the top of the food chain. On the contrary, I have always believed that we are stewards of the earth, here to take care of it, not destroy it. OTOH, my father will argue upside and down that there is no climate change :( As you know, I have spent a lifetime trying to overcome the bigotry and straight jacketed mindset that I grew up with.

Sorry for getting off topic. Things are on my mind a lot these days.

>156 alcottacre: We don't get to choose our birth family, Stasia. What matters to the world, certainly to me, is what one does to amend, alter, escape the damage done from becoming the damage you do. And I've said it before of your faith: You're the REAL christian, not the awful people who tried to twist you into their awful, warped vision of what a person, a woman, should be.

There is no off-topic in here. There's what we're thinking about, struggling with, working on; the only time I'll stop someone from speaking is when the speech abuses me or my loved ones. Then it's belt up and get out.

>157 richardderus: Thank you, RD. I love you :) I needed that today.

My daughter, Beth, is living with an African American man, Shaquille. I love my daughter and am coming to love her partner, but their situation scares me, circumstances being what they are right now, so when I said things are on my mind a lot these days, you know where I am coming from. Beth is heading back to Phoenix with Shaquille tomorrow.

>158 alcottacre: Sometimes we need to hear from others what we won't tell ourselves.

Never forget, when you need a perspective check, I'm right here. You're a good and precious soul, and the world needs you and your daughters like you. *smooch*

'Morning, RDear.

>157 richardderus: You a font of wisdom, not meant snarkily at all. I've got some "Christian" relatives. Ugh. Thank goodness my agnostic dad refused to let us go to church. I do feel bad that my mom was prevented from doing what gave her comfort, but after us kids were grown up she eventually stood up to him and started going to church again. I've been in church exactly twice with my parents - the day my sister got married and the day I got married. I got married in a church to please Bill's family and it was a pleasant experience, but after going to that church 3 or 4 times after we got married, sans Bill, instead of being thanked for coming (and putting money in the collection plate) each time they only asked me "Where's Bill?" I figured if I wasn't of value to them without my husband, to heck with them.

>160 karenmarie: And that, m'dear, is what I'm talking about: "Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?"

People betray themselves in ways great and small. But never, ever, ever do they hide their real, honest selves forever (or even for very long). My other religious influence, Judaism, gave me the Yiddish proverb I live by: "Watch the feet. The mouth tells lies, the feet tell the truth." Wherever a person leaves footprints...like all over your face, "where's Bill" my lily-white one!...that's where they go and stay.

Happy Saturday, Richard. Gorgeous day here in the Midwest. Makes the work day a bit brighter. Are you still confined or can you get out for a stroll?

>162 msf59: Happy Saturday, Mark! It's foggy and dank, so I wouldn't want to stroll about today. But it's a pleasant time to hit the books for all that!

A good Saturday to you, Richard!

We’re having my idea of lovely Florida weather: intermittent rain, from gentle to Niagara combined with cool temps (for here). I know rainy days bring many people way down, but living under Florida’s relentless sun makes the rain a nice break.

Well. To be honest I’ve always loved the rain, even in dark, damp, dreary Massachusetts Novembers. So there’s that.

>155 richardderus: I’ve got Tigana somewhere on the e-readers. Thanks for the reminder to look it up!

May the weekend bless you.

>155 richardderus:, >164 Matke: Kind of a surprising coincidence seeing Tigana mentioned in this thread today!
I just posted some comments about the author's other fantasies in the Fionovar series. I haven't read Tigana since dirt was new.

>164 Matke: Hi Gail! If Florida, then unpleasant, has been my experience of its weather, its politics, and its architecture; but chacun à son goût.

I don't mind rain but fog (since disappeared) is a downer to me. The weekend can bless me if it has a mind to, but it's withholding any such thing so far. Since it's also withholding curses, I'll call it good.

>164 Matke:, >165 SandyAMcPherson: Tigana is a wonderful story to read at this moment.

Current mood.

>167 richardderus: So I see.

I like South Beach art deco architecture. And Key West.

>167 richardderus: Aww, sorry you feel that way, Richard dear.
Enough to choose from the works of Hieronymus Bosch ;-)

>168 humouress: Welcome to it! I only like the airports. And among them only the departure gates.

>169 FAMeulstee: The Last Judgment, no less.

Love all the support offered here. Once again, LT attracts the most amazing, wonderful people. And, Richard, thank you for making your thread so open and inviting.

>167 richardderus: And I am sorry you are in this mood. Pretty good picture you found though! : ) Smooch.

On a ramble through the threads. I'm going to change my middle name to Torpid. I did finish a book (Stalin's Ghost by Martin Cruz Smith) and I'm starting Cloud Atlas. Got a list of projects I want to do, and that's where the torpidity torpedoes any finger lifted above see level.

>165 SandyAMcPherson: dirt is always new

-- the ol Philosopher

>159 richardderus: Thank you, RD. I needed that hug!

>167 richardderus: Returning the ((hugs)) in the hope that you are doing better soon!

>173 magicians_nephew:, nah, some is very old. Australia for instance. Very poor soil structure now.

But I threw that in to see if anyone really reads my comments! I've made snarky little asides and rarely does anyone pick up on them. I think this is the first time I snuck (ha, lost my sneak) a silly-snark statement in here. I should have known some ol' eagle eye would catch it. Heh. It *is* RD's thread... one has to read it carefully and keep the Thesaurus at hand.

>175 SandyAMcPherson: 'Sneaked', woman, SNEAKED. If you're trying to skulk around, setting off alarm bells with bad grammar isn't going to help you.

I saw the dirt-statement and was amused. Did you want to be picked up on your snark? I can do that. :0)

>119 richardderus: Oy, when you think about it that way that is very true! Although, I still would have loved the snacks lol.

>155 richardderus: Glad to see you've given Tigana a second chance and that you are enjoying it more on round two. I remember reading it and loving it, although I couldn't tell you what it is about now. So thankful for LT to track or I would never remember these things!

Hope you have a lovely, book filled Sunday!

'Morning, RichardDear. I hope you're doing better than yesterday's >167 richardderus:.

>161 richardderus: "Watch the feet. The mouth tells lies, the feet tell the truth."

*smooch*

Yikes, that "little" infection became quite the hassle, but I'm glad it's being dealt with and hope the antibiotics do their job quickly. I'm glad Tigana is such a good read for you on its second chance. I still haven't read any books by Guy Gavriel Kay, but I shall hold off for now because they'd be an ILL request and we're still not getting delivery yet. It's not like I don't have enough to read (I think my bookshelves are glaring at me for neglecting them...).

>178 karenmarie: Yeah, me too! That didn’t look like a good day...

current mood
misfit, malformed, but climbing out of the dark hole

>171 Berly: I know you are, but what am I? *smooch*

>172 weird_O: Your superhero name is now "The Torpid_O"!

>173 magicians_nephew: It's both self-renewing and extremely ancient. We should all be like dirt.

>174 alcottacre: You're welcome, of course and as always. We all need lifting from time to time.

>175 SandyAMcPherson: "Read carefully with thesaurus handy" was a candidate for my first tattoo in 1979. I settled on the much less painful "&copyr; 19XX"

>176 humouress: "Snuck" is correct by the almighty diktat of Norma Loquendi. Oppose her power at your peril, Pedantic Pearlie.

>177 ChelleBearss: It truly was a case of "Right book, right moment" and no mistake! But I steadfastly refuse to take Caro's newly dangled bait, The Lions of Al-Rassan, under any circumstances! No! No more!

Who'm I kidding, I've already libraried it up.

>178 karenmarie: Ain't that one a gem? *smooch*

>179 bell7: Yeah, it's not a great time for me, Mary. Nor for the world we live in; nor for the people who have borne the brunt of the badness that inequality engenders. Always and without fail, a winner/loser system brings about its own ending as its virtues curdle into abuses.

>180 drneutron: But today is better!

The Lions of Al-Rassan is also excellent. But Tigana is still my favourite of his.

>183 richardderus: A friend of mine has In Love with Norma Loquendi, by William Safire. Otherwise I'd have not a clue who "Norma Loquendi" was (is).
Obvs going forward, I'll have to be more diligent and watch out for the grammar police!

>186 SandyAMcPherson: See that you do so.

:0)

>155 richardderus: Strange coincidence was that I took the book out at the same time and was toying with reading it this month too. Tigana it is then for me.

Keep your chin up dear fellow. For all the crap in the world you do have a strong body of people who care about you and constantly wish you well.

>155 richardderus: and >188 PaulCranswick: Isn't it quite surprising how many of us happened to be dipping into Guy Gabriel Kay just at this time?
I hope you have fun with this book, Paul.
While I have great memories of reading Tigana, I discovered the other day that the Fionavar Tapestries series didn't appeal anymore. I'm not going to seek out Tigana and ruin a good memory.

53 The Sacrament by Olaf Olafsson

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A young nun is sent by the Vatican to investigate allegations of misconduct at a Catholic school in Iceland. During her time there, on a gray winter’s day, a young student at the school watches the school’s headmaster, Father August Frans, fall to his death from the church tower.

Two decades later, the child—now a grown man, haunted by the past—calls the nun back to the scene of the crime. Seeking peace and calm in her twilight years at a convent in France, she has no choice to make a trip to Iceland again, a trip that brings her former visit, as well as her years as a young woman in Paris, powerfully and sometimes painfully to life. In Paris, she met an Icelandic girl who she has not seen since, but whose acquaintance changed her life, a relationship she relives all while reckoning with the mystery of August Franz’s death and the abuses of power that may have brought it on.

In The Sacrament, critically acclaimed novelist Olaf Olafsson looks deeply at the complexity of our past lives and selves; the faulty nature of memory; and the indelible mark left by the joys and traumas of youth. Affecting and beautifully observed, The Sacrament is both propulsively told and poignantly written—tinged with the tragedy of life’s regrets but also moved by the possibilities of redemption, a new work from a novelist who consistently surprises and challenges.

THIS WAS AN EBOOK BORROWED VIA OVERDRIVE.

My Review: Getting older, learning to live with the past, standing on the rocks of the walls you've crashed through and those you've tried to build, is a bear. You can't tell anyone younger what it means and anyone you know your own age not only knows but is busily trying to tidy the dust off their scratched, bloody feet.

When what you've seen, felt, done no longer matters to anyone but you...polite avowals of interest are never to be presumed upon...then Life can't take anything else from you and your fears just melt. Sad, isn't it, that the murder hornets whose wings only flap when they have a head of rage built up, never leave it. Their stings don't land; their rage grows. The worst has already happened, and a surprising number of people have learned from their own lives that the loud, angry buzz of Being Right heralds nothing but unpleasant tasting and smelling poison.

There is an amazing sweetness in indifference. Court it.

>190 richardderus: Ouch. Well, yes, but the savory of holding onto what matters to you, what has weight in your life, well, if it's not to be courted, because it's either there or not, isn't just a burden but also an anchor.

>181 richardderus: Love this!

The Sacrament sounds like a good one, RD. I was not familiar with Olafsson. Thanks for putting him on my radar.

>185 lunacat: Tigana is something I needed to be in this specific head-space to read. I'm glad that, instead of getting rid of it during my first coolness toward it (it was a gift from Caro, after all), I kept it to try again. Worked this time!

>186 SandyAMcPherson: Ha! That's a great title. My oldest sister was a linguist and I listened raptly as she disquisited on her new passion. The Grammar Police have no remit here. Solecise without timidity.

>187 humouress: *glower*

>167 richardderus: Oh no. I’m sorry you felt that way.

>181 richardderus: At least a bit better if still not good

>190 richardderus: Felled by yet another book bullet.

I hope this week finds you better. I’m fairly depressed about things. But who in their right mind wouldn’t be?

>188 PaulCranswick:, >189 SandyAMcPherson: It's a zeitgeisty thing, obvs. His undeniable skill as a writer is on excellent display in this one, and I'm generally uninterested towards or hostile to Phauntaisee and its Magjicqkal Sistemmes so I'm not easy to woo past the ::eyeroll:: point.

>191 quondame: Yeah, well, Growing Old Is Not for Sissies, is it. Many indignities are visited upon us and the compensatory perspective is, at times, cold comfort for lost illusions.

>192 msf59: I hope you'll enjoy the ride, Mark!

>194 Matke: Everyone with a functioning nervous system is anxious! Now that we're mid-revolution, it's going to be uncomfortable for a while.

'Morning, RD!

>190 richardderus: I read this book in February, really liked it, but only gave it 3 stars because it zipped back and forth in time without any hints of which part of Sister Johanna's life you were in until you'd read a bit of the chapter, which was off-putting. However, I really liked her, her personal trials and tribulations, and her ultimate goodness.

>194 Matke: I’m fairly depressed about things. But who in their right mind wouldn’t be? I'm feeling it, too, Gail.

*smooch*, RD, from your own Horrible

>196 karenmarie: That stylistic quirk didn't bother me much, for some reason. It felt more as though I was wandering around her life with her, and I'm used to that.

Her ultimate goodness was so necessary to sell the whole story, and I agree that it was quite successful.

>193 richardderus:, Thanks RD, :D
Mind you, I had to look up disquisited... heh. I gather that meant your sister expounded on her new enthusiasm (?).

>198 SandyAMcPherson: It was a long, multi-part presentation of her new knowledge, with room for questions along the way; that meant she wasn't expounding or expatiating on lingusitics, as the material was new to her therefore ad hoc in delivery.

She, and an unusually thorough third- and fourth-grade introduction to phonics, roots, stems, prefixes, and suffixes, are responsible for my besottedness with words and language.

>181 richardderus: I am glad to hear that you are climbing out of the dark hole, RD. I hope once you get out, you stay out! ((Hugs)) and *smooches*

Climb out and walk away from that dark hole. Smooch.

current mood
Required to perform spiffy obsequies for dead stepmother, lots of problems to resolve, wish I could have her back instead of a flock of sixty-five-plus vulturous women screaming at me.

>200 alcottacre:, >201 Berly: We shall see what's next. It seems that I've corked the bottle for now.

>190 richardderus: I think you liked it just slightly better than I did. I really enjoyed it though because I gave it 4 stars. I'm pretty stingy with 4.5 and 5 stars though.

>204 thornton37814: Permaybehaps it's also down to my being older than you are, those themes hitting me so much more solidly than they do someone not over 60. Often I think the major reason a book succeeds or fails is the audience it speaks to most clearly. This one is light on thrills, but long on introspection, and that's usually an older-skewing or teen-years success.

Anyway, we agree: It was a good read indeed!

54 Hickory Dickory Dock by Agatha Christie

Book Rating: 3* of five

I found this in my area's newly-reopened Little Free Library. It'll be going back there as soon as I muster the nous to go out onto the boardwalk *early* in the morning when it's not crowded with unmasked future plague victims.

This entry into Dame Agatha's nursery-rhyme titled mysteries (eg, A Pocket Full of Rye; One, Two, Buckle My Shoe) is only mildly related to the rhyme in question...the action centers on Hickory Street...and it's also a Poirot-lite tale. It does, unusually, feature Miss Lemon (the Ubersecretary with Major Filing Chops), previously only seen in short stories. Her family connection to the Hickory Street Ménage, the ickily-title Warden of the boarders being her sister, is the only entrée Poirot has to the case. In fact, it seems like an absurdly minor matter for Poirot to do more than merely acknowledge with a wintry little smile as Miss Lemon hands him her typo-riddled assignment.

Miss Lemon? Typos?!

And thus is Poirot engaged in what seems to be, but isn't, a wildly inappropriate chase after the thief of some boracic powder, a stethoscope, and some random weirdness like a single shoe. This is 1955's Dame Agatha, so there are quite a lot of baroque connections among the various players. Many of them, comme d'habitude, are ridiculously overdone...one boarder is a murder victim's unacknowledged child, oh really now!...but they serve to distract from the weird and fraught central relationship of killer and crime.

At the end, I was diverted, amused, and irritated in equal measures by the resolution. A corking Dame Agatha experience? Mm...on balance no, but made me seek out the forty-years-newer TV adaptation.

55 Agatha Christie's Poirot: Hickory Dickory Dock

TV Rating: 2.5* of five

The time period of ITV's Agatha Christie's Poirot stories is always the 1930s, with occasional flashbacks to earlier times. That results in a stupid, readily-avoided anachronism. One of the characters is an American studying in London on a Fulbright scholarship, which she says and Poirot repeats in ~1936...but the program wasn't founded until 1946. Why not make her a Rhodes scholar? She's female, of course, and that wasn't allowed in the 1930s, but at least the scholarships existed then! Anyway, why is such a throwaway moment even retained? She's studying in London. Nuff sed.

Since Dame Agatha loved to people her stage with scads of bodies, there was considerable pruning of the cast done and if we're honest to desirable dramatic effect. Also tidied away is the extraneous Scotland Yard man who is morphed into TV regular Chief Inspector Japp. This also works to make the series universe stronger, and does no violence to the Dame's detail-oriented clockwork. Another difference, and in my never-remotely humble opinion an improvement, is the streamlining of the major crime's motivation. Students smuggling drugs are always, always going to be suspected of such; but in the show it's diamonds, only diamonds, that they're smuggling and that would be so much less expected as to allow the ring to function longer and better.

But in the end, the episode did little with Miss Lemon and her sister, introduced to very little effect in both versions of the story and, in the already altered TV verion, still underused. I get it, she's not the star, but the show was in its sixth season! Give the lady some room to be. Now for the reasons I rate the show as mingily as I do: the director introduces a scene-wipe of a flippin' mouse scurrying through the walls and the clock of the hostel! THEN there's an *irritating* soundtrack of sweet itty soprano ladies singing "hickory dickory" at dramaticall moments. The title can't be changed, I get it, but the nursery rhyme connection made no sense in the book and even less in the episode.

Cheeseball Cornpone Junction called, they want their tropes back.

So, while I was diverted and mildly amused by the tale in both versions, it simply isn't top drawer in either version. More than good enough to read and watch, not necessary to experience again in either format.

56 Joe by Larry Brown

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Joe Ransom is a hard-drinking ex-con pushing fifty who just won’t slow down—not in his pickup, not with a gun, and certainly not with women. Gary Jones estimates his own age to be about fifteen. Born luckless, he is the son of a hopeless, homeless wandering family, and he’s desperate for a way out. When their paths cross, Joe offers him a chance just as his own chances have dwindled to almost nothing. Together they follow a twisting map to redemption—or ruin.

Kirkus, back in 1991 when they hated everything, said this of the book: "...Brown...pares his prose close to the bone, stripping away the slightest hint of sociology or regional color. This is white trash, lumpen fiction with a vengeance, and a vision of angelic desolation."

My Review: Selected as the May 2020 Moderator's Choice in the On the Southern Literary Trail Goodreads group, this is the novel that solidified Larry Brown's place in Grit Lit/Hick Lit's pantheon. He was a major talent; his short stories will, I think, be anthologized and lionized for a long time to come. He started out as a writer known for them; and I think that, like Hemingway, they will be his lasting contribution to Southern Literature's grittier edge.

This is not to denigrate or diminish his accomplishment in this, his most accessible novel:

The road lay long and black ahead of them and the heat was coming now through the thin soles of their shoes. There were young beans pushing up from the dry brown fields, tiny rows of green sprigs that stretched away in the distance.

You know where you are; you know who you're with; you're not going for a madeleine with Proust. This is poverty, this is heat, this is misery on an epic scale but never ever looked at...it's witnessed, it's so real and so present that there is just not one doubt about its honesty. Heat and poverty are characters in this scene so cinematically framed. The people are, in fact, incidental if not ornamental. They exist as morality-play embodiments of Poverty, and they continue to do so throughout the book.

Is that a flaw? Is honest appraisal and presentation of reality ever a flaw?

“That boy,” he said. “I’ve done him ever favor I could. Some folks you can’t do nothing with. Just sorry. God knows I’ve done plenty of drinking and stuff in my time, but I be damn if I ever tried to cheat anybody out of any money.”

Is that a speech delivered to make an author's point, or is it the vox populi, the distilled belief of the Average Man that he is in fact average, the proper measure of a man's worth? It's certainly a refutation of the three-hundred-year-old moralism vox populi, vox dei! There is no god in this book, there is no numinous or immanent quality to anything. The landscape is hot, dry, miserable; the people are dumb, violent, miserable; the vox regis or deorum is notable only for its absence.

Also notably absent here are women's voices. They exist to bear children and beatings. They are adversaries to what low, animal joys men can find in sex (more akin to rape, in my opinion) and beer. Children are the punishment women inflict on men (as men see it) for the fleeting pleasure of the rut. The idea of pleasure is, in general, absent from this world. It is a place where no one at all ever makes even a feint at a genuine smile.

What redeems this read from being a complete, utter, suicidal-depression-inducing downer? Joe Ransom. Drunken convict that he is, awful father he may be, but to Gary Jones he is Jesus freshly down from the cross. Gary's sperm donor is a memorable...a matchless, actually...portrait of the kind of person I, in my damned close to infinite privilege, have never interacted with. He pimps out his prepubescent daughter. He does nothing of value to anyone, not even himself:

“She don’t like to be around anybody drinkin, don’t even like to smell it. I drink and I like to drink. That’s it.”

That's the least-offensive thing the man utters in this book. Probably in the whole of life. His son, his who-knows-how decent and good-souled son, makes him feel more worthless than he already does; not, however, as worthless as he actually is.

Gary goes to work for Joe on a county work crew. Joe, ex-con bad dad Joe, shines like a savior to him, modeling the astounding heights of not-stealing, of not-beating while being a man. Gary's life changes because he sees a possibility he never saw before. As events unfold, that possibility is embodied in a redemptive act of startling generosity, of genuine salvation.

And Joe chooses to save, not his own flesh and blood, but someone whose life trajectory makes Joe's own fucked-up life look like my wealth and privilege by comparison. If not for Larry Brown, I doubt I'd've made a second's time for these men.

Isn't this what fiction's meant to do? To make us, all of us really but especially the most shockingly privileged among us, pause and allow The Other to take unsentimental shape in our emotions?

Larry Brown did this to me, for me, and I am deeply grateful to him for it.

Oooh, I have this one on my Kindle!

Good afternoon, RD!

>206 richardderus: I know this one as Hickory Dickory Death.

*smooch*

>90 drneutron: The Sacrament looks like a good 'un. But would they really send a young inexperienced nun to investigate such allegations? Or listen to a word she said about them?

Never been an Agatha Christie fan - reading her is like eating too much shortbread

Oh I'm not a fan of shortbread either

>208 katiekrug: I hope you'll give it a shot, Katie, it's such a worthwhile read. (You mean Joe, don't you?)

>209 karenmarie: Okay, Death, Dock...both are its title in different places.

It was a perfectly fine read that I'll never bother with again.

>210 magicians_nephew: It is, Jim, a very very good read indeed. Dame Aggie isn't for everyone, and it's not like reading this one not that one will change your opinion.

Oh, Tigana! Not sure if it or The Lions of al-Rassan is my favorite Kay. Glad Tigana is working for you second time around.

I hope your current mood has improved. {{{hugs}}}

>211 richardderus: - Yes, sorry, I was referring to Joe :)

>212 Storeetllr: Tigana just suits the moment so perfectly, it's hard to find a dissenting voice.

It is a mood, they pass. Not quickly sometimes, but they do.

>213 katiekrug: Oh good! A cheery little bagatelle it ain't, but a damn fine read it is.

>203 richardderus: Here's hoping that the bottle stays corked, at least for a bit!

>215 alcottacre: Your keyboard, the goddesses' inbox. *smooch*

57 Dumb Witness by Agatha Christie

Rating: 3.5* of five

It's all a bit silly, really; the entire plot hangs on the fact that a rather too easily manipulated old spinster (what a creepy word that is in today's world!) would not come right out and say.what.she.meant. Her leeching relatives need her money and she is so very inconsiderate as to decline to die. Without help, that is.

She gets the help. Poirot, to whom she had appealed for protection but who didn't receive her plea until too late, arrives at her former home pretending to consider buying it. He solves the crime, of course, but the fact is nothing much happens as a result except the direct killer commits suicide. (Others had the idea of helping the tenaciously alive old dear to assume room temperature, but for a variety of reasons that frankly made my eyes roll so hard I saw my brain, didn't.)

Honestly, I think this is why the story is narrated by Hastings. It is just too slight a structure to bear the direct involvement of Poirot. Best filtered through the deactivated charcoal of Hastings' brain. I gave the story as high a rating as I did because I love Bob the dog and his manic energy. The greedy relatives are bog-standard, uninteresting selfishness machines. (This has direct relevance to my own life the past few days.)

But all in all, it was a good idea to read it right now, and Overdrive saved me having to buy it. I'd tell anyone who's already a Poirotian to read it without concern for being disappointed.

58 Agatha Christie's Poirot: Dumb Witness (TV episode)

Rating: 4* of five

The episode is considerably changed in ways that organize events more lucidly. Poirot and Hastings arrive in a *completely* different part of England, the Lake District, and one of the characters is an old chum of Hastings' from the Army. Charles the Chum is *far* more interesting in the TV version! Some very of-its-time marital drama is also significantly less tedious in the adaptation, becoming a meaty matter of genuine and necessary relevance to the story instead of mealymouth whining. The murderer doesn't commit suicide. And dear me, didn't Bob just get a different ending! Instead of going home with Poirot (!!), he is rehomed with some deeply ditzy spiritualists whose presence in the story becomes thereby a matter more than convenient to the plot.

On the whole, I prefer the filmed version. Both have charms and both have flaws. I'll plump for the modern take on marriage every time.

Happy Wednesday, Richard. I have been meaning to read Joe forever and I have a copy on shelf too. I also snagged Tiny Love: Stories at a past ALA. maybe, I can get to both of those this year.

>218 msf59: I can vouch for both, Mark. The early death of Larry Brown deprived us of a terrific voice in grit lit.

'Morning, RDear, and happy Humpday to you.

>217 richardderus: Poirotian. I love all her detective series except Tuppence and Tommy. In line with my being a Janeite, maybe I’m an Agathaite.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

Coming by for today's *smooches* and ((hugs))

>220 karenmarie: Hey there Horrible! I agree about the series...those two irk me something fierce. Agathetians are anathemizing us even as I type, I'm sure. *shrug*

>221 alcottacre: Hi Stasia! *smooch* I'm so glad the last Cromwell book was a success for you. I didn't get tangled in his web for some reason.

59 Peril at End House by Agatha Christie

Rating: 3.5* of five

The sparkle of Dame Agatha's writing and the verve of her plotting in her absolute peak years, the 1930s, is a sheer joy to read. Poirot and Hastings, on their way to Cornwall's fleshpots, meet Miss Nick Buckley. She is a lovely local landowner, a bit short of the ready (to borrow Sir Plum's locution for Bertie Wooster) but possessed of a glorious ramshackle seaside house. She inveigles Poirot and Hastings into her world to help her deal with mysterious attempts on her life. Since she has no money, no prospects of getting any, and a mortgaged house, who's trying to kill her and why?

The plot hinges on a shared family name, a unique coincidence that could not be foreseen, and a cold and calculating soul looking out for Number One. Nothing is quite as simple as the surface suggests; the threads of the subplots do gum up the works a bit; but in the end, there is a happy resolution and ma'at is maintained. No one profits from their crimes. No one suffers injustice. There is a single example of the Old Boy's Network in action, and that wasn't quite so nice. But it's the chain of coincidence that bugs me the most. It's clearly intentional, and I suppose you could argue that the coincidences are seized upon by the ruthless killer as a further example of astute quick thinking in service of one's own survival. Maybe a bit like The Usual Suspects with Our Kind of People.

Still. Not quite the top drawer, Dame Agatha.

60 Agatha Christie's Poirot: Peril at End House

Rating: 3* of five

Pretty faithful to the novel; it was the first full-novel adaptation, so permaybehaps they didn't feel they had earned the right to divagate too far from home base. A couple characters are tidied away in service of television pacing. It is an improvement, and in one case...Miss Buckley's childhood pal Freddie Rice's character...takes her from an object of pity to a tacky broad with the fate of one. There are no huge holes left by the pruning *except* the one that, having read the library's Kindle book just before rewatching the show, I noticed for the first time. It's really not huge, but it absolutely drove me as mad as the armhole of my sweater losing its serging and rubbing my armpit. No way to get fully comfy after that. Nick Buckley sits with Poirot and Hastings on their hotel's terrace; she bats away a wasp from her face, complaining of how brazen the beasts are; Poirot finds, after she's left, that her forgotten hat has a hole in the brim whereupon he finds a bullet that was shot at her.

BY WHOM?!?

Never addressed again. In the book, it's Freddie's awful husbeast who does the shooting at Miss Buckley but he's been handwaved away! Boo hiss careless writers!

Still, it took me reading then watching back-to-back to catch it, so maybe it wasn't that bad.

Yes it was. The half-star stays gone.

>223 richardderus: Sort of proof that the book always beats the film, right?

I may be something of an Agathaite - even though I loved the dramatized Sleeping Murder it boggled me that there was any mystery as to who the murderer was once the possibility of murder was raised.

>224 PaulCranswick: No; see >217 richardderus: for the countervailing argument. It's not always as simple as tat, as what is in this our life?

>225 quondame: That's one of the head-scratchers, all right; Elephants Can Remember is another. But pobody's nerfect, are they.

Sweet Thursday, RD. I'm enjoying the Agatha-Poirot book and tv reviews. I've always loved the PGW phrase "a bit short of the ready."

I hope the doctor's visit goes okay, my friend!

>227 jnwelch: Thanks, Joe! I'm glad I thought of borrowing the Kindlebooks to read while/after watching, so the two can be fairly assessed as a whole.

>228 katiekrug: Excision of a nasty cyst, then stitches, so it's sore now. I won't die from it, fer sher. *smooch*

Hello darling. I had to fly several times a year when I was in college, because I went to college in the middle of no flipping place, and I always chose an Agatha Christie novel to read in the air, and I always always chose an Agatha Christie from the 30s. My God, what invented wonder!

>230 SomeGuyInVirginia: Sweetiedarling! I do so understand, that tedious time in the air can't be better wiled away than in Dame Ag's company.

Spend a lovely weekend ahead, won't you?

61 Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie

Rating: 4* of five

Narrated by the mildly stupid Nurse Amy Leatheran, this Poirot from 1936 is a complete farrago. The crime hinges on a circumstance that is, frankly, absurd. But you know what? This is a thumping good read.

You need to know that, if you look under the following spoiler tag, there will be absolutely no point in reading the book. Unless one has an unusually bad memory, the first time one enters into sexual congress with a person not resident in one's own head—good, bad, or indifferent—is vividly clear for the rest of one's life. And you want me to believe that Mrs. Leidner didn't look at Dr. Leidner's, um, equipment and think, "hey there boys!"? Especially since we're readily told that she's had no other men in marriage, which codes at the time "no sex."

So no, not credible. Not even a little bit. We do have a seriously sick case of stalking on our hands. We do have "love" curdled into obsession. We do have antiquities theft...a problem quite pressing in the Mesopotamia of today...we do have lots of drug use. We do not have any of Christie's longueurs of style that curse later efforts, that can make the later Poirots feel as though one is reading pastiche. We have a bracing, heady draft of prime-of-life Dame Agatha that draws heavily on her time as Lady Mallowan, wife of an archaeologist. She observes so clearly and sees so much and is unbelievably economical with her verbiage.

I'm so glad I had three and a half hours in the waiting room to read the Overdrive-borrowed Kindlebook!

62 Agatha Christie's Poirot: Murder in Mesopotamia

Rating: 4* of five

Hastings gets chucked into the proceedings. Drug use is not treated as lightly as Christie did, resulting in a final solution much more unpleasant than the books. Poirot meets the victim while alive, and learns her Dark Secret (weird first marriage) from her own lips. He is part of the atmosphere, going into the dig to meet with a suspect, which isn't in the book. Antiquities theft, on the other hand, is sort of hand-waved away. No serious action is taken.

But really now...we're led to believe that Countess Vera Rossakoff telegraphs Poirot from Baghdad and he picks up sticks and comes to this hot, dusty, yucky place?! She's nowhere in the book, I assure you, because Dame Ags wouldn't've done such a foolish thing. Even in a story predicated on such a ridiculous premise.

Still. Pretty pictures, Poirot as he was Divinely Ordained to Be (read: Played by David Suchet), and a very satisfyingly absurd climactic scene. Fun, fun, fun.

>231 richardderus:. Only if you promise to think of me, and only in a filthy way.

Richard. I just read your review of Murder in Mesopotamia.

It's brilliant. These are the tangential reminders of why I value your friendship so very highly.

^Happy Friday, RD! Despite Mr. Crumb's bleak forecast, it should be a pretty nice day in the Midwest! How are those books treating you?

Murder in Mesopotamia is my favourite Christie because my grandfather worked with Malloran on some of his digs for many years and is referred to briefly in Agatha Christie’s autobiography, so it feels like a book of hers I’m almost linked with.

As an aside, he was also an author of books in Mesopotamia if you wanted to look him up - HWF Saggs, they’re outdated now but quite accessible reads nonetheless.

>233 SomeGuyInVirginia: Try and stop me, you devil you.

>234 msf59: Ha! Well, R. Crumb was never a sunny sort, but his gloomy view of humanity has never seemed more à propos than it is now.

>235 lunacat: How wonderful to have that sense of connection to the proceedings! I think the "Near Eastern" Poirots are very nearly perfect exercises in pure Christie style. She seemed to come alive when she was breathing dust and walking on potsherds.

I shall look for some of Saggs' work, and thank you for the pointer! Information may become outdated, but a clear picture of the ethos of the past is always interesting and often valuable. Thanks for dropping in!

Happy Friday!

Thanks, Anita, same to you. *smooch*

'Morning, RD! I somehow didn't actually post a greeting yesterday even though I KNOW I started one.

>232 richardderus: I like your combining a book review with a movie review. I wrote this on my thread earlier this morning in response to your mentioning Murder in Mesopotamia: I loved Murder in Mesopotamia. A lot of the detail is derived from Christie’s going on archaeological digs with her second husband Sir Max Mallowan. In addition to her autobiography, she wrote a memoir/travel book about going on digs with him called Come Tell Me How You Lived which I really enjoyed. It may be fangirling, though, as it reeks of white privilege and a naïve view of the world.

>239 karenmarie: Oh, it's all right, Horrible. Of course I know you're busy and won't always be able to make time for me.

No, no, it's nothing. My allergies are fierce is all. *sniff*

I loved Come, Tell Me How You Live as well, but ye gawds does it reek of privilege! She'd never ever say such a thing to the Welsh miners.

Do extra smooches and apologies help? I wouldn't want your allergies to get so bad that tears actually start falling.

I'm happily surprised that you've read Come Tell Me How You Lived. I didn't read it until 2017 although it's been on my shelves since way before 2007, when joined LT and cataloged it.

>241 karenmarie: *mollified grumble*

My sister had a bookstore in Austin in the 1970s, was a mystery nut, and wanted me to catch the bug, too. Mama liked other writers more than the Beldame (the first play on words I made that got a full-bellied laugh out of my sister) but she and I read the memoir with glee in 1977 when a mass-market edition came out.

Shamelessly stolen from Gail, who snagged it from Kimmers.
This is a sort of game/challenge from Pop Sugar. They claim the average reader will have read only 6 of these.
I’m at 93, plus two half-thumbs for series not completed, nor likely to be...and explain why the complete works of Shakespeare doesn't include Hamlet? And why please is the Chronicles of Narnia not inclusive of The Lion? Oh well, their game their rules.
1. Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen 👍
2 The Lord of the Rings -JRR Tolkien 👍
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte👍
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling 👍
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 👍
6 The Bible - The Torah ***One or both?
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 👍
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 👍
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 👍
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 👍
11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott👍
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 👍
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 👍
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 👍
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 👍
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulkner 👍
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger 👍
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger 👍
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot👍
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 👍
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald👍
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens 👍
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 1/2👍
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 👍
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 👍
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck👍
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll👍
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 👍
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 👍
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 👍
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis 👍
34 Emma - Jane Austen👍
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen 👍
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis 👍
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 👍
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 👍
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden 👍
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne 👍
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell 👍
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown 👍
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 👍
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney👍
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins 👍
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 👍
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood 👍
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding 👍
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan 👍
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel 👍
52 Dune - Frank Herbert 👍
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 👍
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 👍
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth 👍
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón👍
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens 👍
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 👍
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon👍
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 👍
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck 👍
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 👍
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt 👍
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 👍
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas 👍
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac 👍
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy 👍
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - HelenFielding 👍
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie 👍
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville 👍
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker 👍
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 👍
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson 👍
75 Ulysses - James Joyce 👍
76 The Inferno - Dante 👍
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola 👍
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 👍
80 Possession - AS Byatt 👍
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens👍
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell👍
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker 👍
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro👍
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert 👍
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry 👍
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White 👍
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 👍
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid BLYTON 1/2👍
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad 👍
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Eupery 👍
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks 👍
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams 👍
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole 👍
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Aleandre Dumas 👍
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare 👍
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 👍
100 Gaudy Night - Dorothy Sayers 👍

>223 richardderus: Perfect:
“Maybe The Usual Suspects with Our Kind of People.” Spot on, Richard.

>243 richardderus: Ah, I love a list! I have a (very) few of these on a Probable Reads list, but there are some where it’s just, “Nope. No way. And that would be a hard no.”

I hope you’re healing apace from the cyst excision. I think often after the first day, just the removal is such a relief that the patient is a happy person. I hope it works that way for you.

And may this be the start of an excellent and relaxing weekend, Dear Boy.

>244 Matke: Thank you for the kind wishes! I can report that The Day After rots and stinks. My chest hurts (there was extensive curettage far into the area, owieowow), the stitches itch, I can't lift anything heavier than 5lb, my energy is near zero...I could go on but I'm losing the will to live with this wallowing.

Rob is eager to see the scar when the stitches come out, little weirdo.

I am sleeping longer, though, which actually is nice.

*smooch* I'm happy you came by!

>243 richardderus: I just saw this on Gail's thread and am happy to report that I’ve read 46 and am currently reading Moby Dick. I’ve abandoned 6 and have another 33 on my shelves. One of the abandoned ones, Emma, will get read this year.

>243 richardderus: - 44 for me, but it's a dumb list for the reasons you mention about including a series, plus parts of the series as stand-alones.

I am cranky today, so.....

>243 richardderus: 49, but agree with Katie even if I'm not cranky today. Our temps are finally back down in the 70s for a high, which is a huge relief after several days in the 90s (with no air conditioning, mind). Sending you quick healing whammies!

>246 karenmarie: 85 all told is damned fine! Emma is, IMNRHO, the sloggiest Austen read. You're so good about being patient with your reads that I'm not worried for its fate.

>247 katiekrug: Still nursing that post-virtual happy hour head, hm? And this "average of six" figure gets pretty suspect when the serieses are not counted individually. Seven Potter books are SEVEN reads not ONE! The Complete Works of Shakespeare? Thirty-seven plays, 154 sonnets...how come that's "one"?

*grumble* this excision hurts more today than yesterday, so I'm right there with ya on the Cranky Files.

>248 ronincats: Glad you're not cranky yet still agree, Roni! *smooch* for the whammies

Sorry you have such reasons to be grump. I'm just grumpy for the sake of it this week. I am really really tired of the House of York. The Sunne in Splendour goes from taking itself ever so seriously to romantic trash and then tries to go back to serious, and my brain is like "let me at the Internet to vent."

>250 quondame: The annoyances of book-whiplash are real and unpleasant, Susan, so your grump is completely understandable.

At least it's *healing* pain, not "infection running rampant" pain. There's some (cold) comfort in that.

>243 richardderus: >247 katiekrug:, et al. Yeah it might be a dumb list, but I've still read less than half of it. :)

>202 richardderus: if only you were pooping gold as well...

>243 richardderus: They claim the average reader will have read only 6 of these
humph. There's nothing average about this group!!! I have read: 42

>243 richardderus: Like Megan said ^, very few average readers here. I have read 44

>252 mahsdad: I can't stand this nonsensical thing! I'm fixing it and reposting it below.

Shamelessly stolen from Gail, who snagged it from Kimmers.
This is a sort of game/challenge from Pop Sugar. They claim the average reader will have read only 6 of these.
I’m about done with this iteration where they don't explain why the complete works of Shakespeare doesn't include Hamlet? And why please is the Chronicles of Narnia not inclusive of The Lion? So. I fixed it. There's no Shakespeare or Conan Doyle because I'm not typin' all those titles. Series books are done by title for the whole series. I took out "The Bible - The Torah" because they aren't the same thing, and what about the Koran, and what if some weirdo's read all three? Feel free to use theirs, or my improved one, as suits you.
NEW AND REVISED

1. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
👍

2. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams
👍

3. Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams
👍

4. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - Douglas Adams
👍

5. Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams
👍

6. Watership Down - Richard Adams
👍

7. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom


8. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
👍

9. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
👍

10. Emma - Jane Austen
👍

11. Persuasion - Jane Austen
👍

12. Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen
👍

13. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
👍

14. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
👍

15. The Enchanted Wood - Enid Blyton


16. The Magic Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton
👍

17. The Folk of the Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton


18. Up the Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton


19. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
👍

20. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
👍

21. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
👍

22. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
👍

23. Possession - A.S. Byatt
👍

24. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
👍

25. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
👍

26. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
👍

27. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
👍

28. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
👍

29. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
👍

30. The Paradiso - Dante
👍

31. The Purgatorio - Dante
👍

32. The Inferno - Dante
👍

33. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
👍

34. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
👍

35. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
👍

36. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
👍

37. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
👍

38. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens


39. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
👍

40. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
👍

41. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
👍

42. The Three Musketeers - Aleandre Dumas
👍

43. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
👍

44. Middlemarch - George Eliot
👍

45. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulkner
👍

46. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
👍

47. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
👍

48. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
👍

49. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel García Márquez
👍

50. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
👍

51. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
👍

52. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
👍

53. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
👍

54. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
👍

55. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon
👍

56. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy


57. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
👍

58. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
👍

59. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
👍

60. Dune - Frank Herbert
👍

61. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
👍

62. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
👍

63. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
👍

64. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
👍

65. Ulysses - James Joyce
👍

66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
👍

67. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
👍

68. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
👍

69. Prince Caspian - C.S. Lewis
👍

70. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader - C.S. Lewis
👍

71. The Silver Chair - C.S. Lewis
👍

72. The Horse and His Boy - C.S. Lewis
👍

73. The Magician's Nephew - C.S. Lewis
👍

74. The Last Battle - C.S. Lewis
👍

75. Atonement - Ian McEwan
👍

76. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
👍

77. Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
👍

78. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
👍

79. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
👍

80. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
👍

81. Anne of Green Gables - Lucy Maud Montgomery
👍

82. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
👍

83. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
👍

84. The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
👍

85. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
👍

86. Animal Farm - George Orwell
👍

87. The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials #1) - Philip Pullman
👍

88. The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials #2) - Philip Pullman
👍

89. The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials #3) - Philip Pullman
👍

90. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome


91. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's/Philosopher's Stone - J.K. Rowling
👍

92. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - J.K. Rowling
👍

93. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J.K. Rowling
👍

94. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - J.K. Rowling
👍

95. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - J.K. Rowling
👍

96. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling
👍

97. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling
👍

98. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
👍

99. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
👍

100. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
👍

101. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
👍

102. Gaudy Night - Dorothy Sayers
👍

103. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
👍

104. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
👍

105. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute


106. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
👍

107. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
👍

108. Dracula - Bram Stoker
👍

109. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
👍

110. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
👍

111. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
👍

112. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - J.R.R. Tolkien
👍

113. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - J.R.R. Tolkien
👍

114. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - J.R.R. Tolkien
👍

115. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
👍

116. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
1/2👍

117. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
👍

118. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
👍

119. Charlotte's Web - E.B. White
👍

120. Germinal - Emile Zola
👍

"There I fixed it"

>253 LovingLit: Heh, no thanks, that sounds painful. See below, BTW, for a closer approximation to a real count.

>254 FAMeulstee: Hi Anita! Happy to see you around here.

>256 mahsdad: Heh.

>255 richardderus:

Using your new list, I have read:

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
👍
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams

Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - Douglas Adams

Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams

Watership Down - Richard Adams

The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
👍
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

Emma - Jane Austen
👍
Persuasion - Jane Austen
👍
Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen
👍
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
👍
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

The Enchanted Wood - Enid Blyton

The Magic Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton

The Folk of the Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton

Up the Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
👍
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
👍
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
👍
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
👍
Possession - A.S. Byatt

The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
👍
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
👍
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
👍
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
👍
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
👍
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
👍
The Paradiso - Dante

The Purgatorio - Dante

The Inferno - Dante

Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

Bleak House - Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
👍
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
👍
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
👍
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
👍
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
👍
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
👍
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

The Three Musketeers - Aleandre Dumas

Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
👍
Middlemarch - George Eliot

Birdsong - Sebastian Faulkner

Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding

The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
👍
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel García Márquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez

Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
👍
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon
👍
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - I really don't like Hardy...

Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
👍
Dune - Frank Herbert

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
👍
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - tried to and didn't like it

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
👍
Ulysses - James Joyce

On The Road - Jack Kerouac
👍
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
👍
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
👍
Prince Caspian - C.S. Lewis
👍
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader - C.S. Lewis
👍
The Silver Chair - C.S. Lewis
👍
The Horse and His Boy - C.S. Lewis
👍
The Magician's Nephew - C.S. Lewis
👍
The Last Battle - C.S. Lewis
👍
Atonement - Ian McEwan
👍
Life of Pi - Yann Martel

Moby-Dick - Herman Melville

Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
👍
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

Anne of Green Gables - Lucy Maud Montgomery
👍
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
👍
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

Animal Farm - George Orwell
👍
The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials #1) - Philip Pullman
👍
The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials #2) - Philip Pullman
👍
The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials #3) - Philip Pullman
👍
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's/Philosopher's Stone - J.K. Rowling
👍
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - J.K. Rowling
👍
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J.K. Rowling
👍
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - J.K. Rowling
👍
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - J.K. Rowling
👍
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling
👍
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling
👍
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
👍
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
👍
Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

Gaudy Night - Dorothy Sayers

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
👍
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
👍
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
👍
Dracula - Bram Stoker
👍
The Secret History - Donna Tartt

Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
👍
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - J.R.R. Tolkien
👍
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - J.R.R. Tolkien
👍
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - J.R.R. Tolkien
👍
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

The Color Purple - Alice Walker

Charlotte's Web - E.B. White
👍
Germinal - Emile Zola

64 by my count (I think? My brain is not up to snuff tonight), and I have read the Bible too, though not the Torah or Koran. I'm okay with this total, as there are some classics on that list still on my TBR list, and others I have no interest in reading whatsoever.

65 of the new list!

>258 bell7: I get 65...either way, it's a gracious plenty out of 120. There are some that, frankly, I wonder why I read. I would never read many of them again.

>259 ronincats: That's still a goodly number to have read, Roni. *smooch*

63 Appointment with Death by Agatha Christie

Rating: 3.25* of five

I'll say more later, but whee dawggie did this rotten old bat's death fix the world!
***
LATER

One of Poirot's most arrogant cases, this one stems from a remark casually overheard by our snoopy sleuth: "You do see, don't you, that she's got to be killed?" spoken by American tourist Raymond Boynton to his sister Carol. The "she" in the sentence is their stepmother, an evil, sadistic harpy, as we learn later. Mrs. Boynton is a foul person whose abusive behavior towards her stepchildren is reminiscent of her premarital career as a prison warden. (Which is a whole other kettle of fish that, well, kudos to Dame Agatha for bringing it up no matter how tangentially.)

But the vile old bitch dies on a side trip from their holiday base in Jerusalem, at that time in the British Empire's control. While in a touring party, Mrs. Boynton and company meet Lady Westholme, charming English willful woman who was once an M.P. It is then, when La Westholme hoves into her view, that Mrs. Boynton utters a cryptic and menacing line: "I never forget. Remember that. I’ve never forgotten anything – not an action, not a name, not a face…."

The problem I have with this story is the cruelty of Mrs. Boynton to her family, her stepchildren and her own daughter (most inaptly named Ginevra, like any 1910s American mother would name her child such a foreign-sounding thing! Geneva, yes, but GINEVRA? Ha!), and the very, very dated "psychology" Christie lards into the tale via the French psychologist inexplicably on scene to explain why the Boynton woman has been able to keep control of these adults. Not to say it's badly written, really, though I do get a little tired of Ma Christie's use of foreigner-English. It's just that it's aged poorly and there is so damned *much* of it.

And Poirot's arrogance: He decides, after the murdered woman is brought from Petra to his holiday destination visit to Col. Carbury, that by no more than interviewing the people in the holiday party he will solve the crime. But Mrs. Boynton wasn't, to all appearances, murdered...she just died of heart failure. But no, Poirot's little grey cells must be let out to run! Secrets must be revealed, The Truth must be discovered, and hang the consequences! (Which will, you know Poirot knows, be dire.)

Dire they are: More death (this time really unnecessary and quite horrible in its reason), a hideous boil of a family lanced and drained of a lifetime's accumulation of rotten, stinking emotional and physical abuse. Humiliation and misery for all! What a marvelous story to set in the so-called Holy Land, the source of millennia of misery, death, humiliation, and evil!

Can't fault Dame Ags for apt choices even if they aren't terribly subtle. And no one's going to convince me that they weren't both deliberate and calculated...too much evidence in her ouevre of her dislike for religion.

64 Agatha Christie's Poirot: Appointment with Death

Rating: 3.5* of five

Can't deal with child abuse, just can not. I also don't much enjoy the steady Catholicking of Poirot that Suchet began about this time, especially since this book was so bitterly anti-Catholic! He makes such a smug little speech to camera at the end of the show about Almighty God and I was ready to urp.

Now...about what survived...the awfulness of La Boynton, the identity and fate of the murderer, and several names. The major problem for me was that the child abuse was so well filmed, although one never sees the acts one does hear them, like the camera is one of the children not being tortured. It's effective.

TOO effective. I hated it.

The motives for the murder remaining the same, well, almost the same don't bother me. It's the nature of the beast in a murder mystery for the cracks to show. But the vileness of the victim and the condign death she endures don't make for easier watching. Families aren't safe, happy havens for all of us. But this family, its unique and terrible pathology, are ripe for fictional exploration. I don't think the screenplay does violence to the spirit of Nemesis that animates the book, that vengeful and dreadful goddess of retribution for the crime of hubris. In our secular age, that crime is no longer against the gods but against the Norm, the Way Things Should Be, ma'at. Lady Boynton, as she is in the show, has committed modern hubris on every conceivable subject: Her family's fate, her actions in the financial markets, her husband's bizarre search for the head of John the Baptist. Ah yes, that freshly invented husband: Played by the delight that is Tim Curry, he is a bluff'n'hearty old sod, obsessed with his Grail-quest to the exclusion of all other considerations...son, stepchildren, anything except the cash-cow of Lady Boynton and his digs for the damned white whale of a skull. It's a great pity that, after delivering a blistering character assessment of Poirot's need to furtle in the family linen-drawers, he essentially vanishes when his quest proves hollow. In the book, the same idea was served directly to Poirot by a now-disappeared character. The substance is the same: "can't you just leave it? She was evil, she's dead, let the living enjoy their lives at last."

Characters are invented, disappeared, renamed, repurposed; standard stuff, really, but the story...dreadful harpy rules all about her with great cruelty, gets come-uppance...remains. I rate it slightly higher than its book source material because it is very beautiful to look at. And Tim Curry, stout though he'd become by then, is still great fun to watch as he not so much chews but demolishes the scenery in his irrepressible aliveness.

I don't particularly recommend the story to you in either version. Child abuse is a crime, and now is punished as one. This is a societal change I approve of most heartily.

>260 richardderus: Atonement is the one I'd ditch first. I can find some value all the ones I've read and believe there to be value all the others I've heard of. What should I avoid?

>262 quondame: Well, Starless, I'd tell you to avoid Thomas Hardy like he gots the cooties; burn any copy of any- and everything Kerouac you come across in your home; flee the scene of Mistry's book; bury the Niffenegger, the Hosseini, and ol' Moby-Dick under the patio with Jimmy Hoffa. Oh, and risk an Enid Blyton only if you have an epipen handy, you'll be right waspish by para 2.

>243 richardderus: Good grief!? Where on earth would the "They" persons say the average reader would have read only 6?

How did "they" determine what qualifies as an "average" reader?
Many of those titles were required reading in grade school and first-year English Lit classes at University/college.

I'm so strongly inclined to read fantasy and mysteries these past couple decades that I was shocked to count titles I have read and find I can claim at least 43.

I don't remember how many of Shakespeare's and Dicken's works I've read so other than the really obvious ones I remember for sure, I may possibly have read even more. And I am definitely not a classics type reader!!

By the way, RD, sending healing wishes for your continued sage of owies. I hope the being able to sleep compensates you a little.

And to answer >262 quondame:, Susan, as RD suggests, don't waste your time with Far From The Madding Crowd. I enjoyed the epic movie when it came out (4 hours! with an intermission). Years later, I couldn't even get through half the book. The cinematography was so sweepingly gorgeous, I guess the book didn't stand a chance.

>263 richardderus: Well, that eliminates a good deal. Permaybehaps you should apply a 👎 to the pernicious ones.

>264 SandyAMcPherson: There was a survey done by the American Booksellers Association of the US population some time last decade that grouped people into classes of readers. Most never read a book after high school. Some read as many four books a year. A few read a book a month, and then there are the superreaders like us. Tiny, tiny minority, probably about 0.5% if the population...but that's still over a million US citizens.

>265 SandyAMcPherson: Thanks for the kind wishes, Sandy.

>266 quondame: Oh HELL no. There are certain vile persons who don't fancy my expressing opinions and come shrieking into my threads behaving very very badly. I do not wish to excite their rage.

65 Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie

Rating: 3.5* of five

I borrowed this from my local library via Overdrive. It's wonderful how easy that is...if you ask a librarian for help and don't try to follow the written instructions which aren't ever for your device or version.

Meadowbank School is so very progressive and forward-thinking that its fame has reached Ramat, a sheikdom somewhere near Aden. The Princess Shaista, heiress presumptive to the throne, is deemed well-served to go there for her education to be completed. It is deemed safer than the sheikdom as it undergoes an anti-royal revolution.

A murder occurs that, frankly, is long overdue...the PE sadist, I mean teacher, is shot through the heart (a fate I heartily wished on so many of my PE teachers I've lost count)...but that isn't obviously connected to anything. The fun begins as level-headed Miss Upjohn, daughter of a former spy Mrs. Upjohn, gets curious about what the heck is going on when one busy night sees the Princess kidnapped and another teacher murdered in the Sports Pavilion. Two murders and a kidnapping! A *gift* to an intelligent, intrepid, and pretty bored pubescent girl. She even drags her friend Jennifer, whose recent trip Abroad was actually to Ramat to visit her uncle (a friend of the deposed sheik's), into the sleuthing.

The girls are in competition with the police, and little do they know that one of their suspects (the hunky gardener) is a spy sent to monitor the kidnapped Princess and that's why the man's suddenly very furtive and sneaks off so much. The action gets going, of course, but so far it hasn't jumped the shark in illogic. That happens when Poirot is bookhorned into the plot for no apparent reason, starts asking off-the-wall questions about young girls' knees (it's explained in the end but it's still squicky since it comes out of literally nowhere), and generally knitting the intricate afghan of the crimes without having seen a pattern.

The murders are all done because the international situation is in flux. Like 1959 (year it was published) in fact, the Middle East aka the world's hotspot was full of revolutionaries trying to unseat undemocratic absolute monarchs and grab their wealth for the people. In this case, the wealth was flawless rubies and they fit into a surprisingly small space. Many ruthless parties wanted the prize, people lost their lives to the greed of others, and Christie's point was...revolutions are bad? people are greedy? murder is a bad solution to almost all problems? I don't know, and I don't think she did either.

What the hell was Poirot doing in this book anyway? Julia Upjohn, or the policeman, or even the hunky spy-cum-gardener could've done everything Poirot did and the book would've been the better for it. Christie's spy-novel fetish wasn't her best use of her powers, and this book suffers from her Cold-War-itis plus her need to pander to the book-buying public with a Poirot novel. The result is decidedly substandard in both areas.

But oh my heck...the descriptions, the gorgeously wicked turns of phrase, the intricacy of the interconnections make it a cut above the best of a lesser writer's ouevre.

66 Agatha Christie's Poirot: Cat Among the Pigeons

Rating: 3* of five

As is the ordinary case, a lot changes as a result of a Christie novel being translated to the screen. In this case, as the novels always take place in contemporary time while the shows are all in the 1930s, more than the usual number of changes occur.

There are next-to-no scenes including the secret services, unlike the novel. I am happy to report that hunky spy-cum-gardener Adam survives, and is played by the quite easy-on-the-eyes Adam Croasdell. His role, however, is more to be tailed by Upjohn and Jennifer, and I suspect those two would've wanted to follow him around anyway. No scenes play out in Egypt; the revolution deprives the sheik of his life differently; some of the business surrounding the jewels is significantly altered. As usual, the cast is slimmed down, and to my mind (again as usual) to good dramatic effect. The entrée of Poirot is utterly, totally changed: He's a friend of the headmistress of Meadowbank and substitutes for the Lord Mayor of Somewhere in the presentation of a sports prize. Poirot. A sports prize. To adolescent girls.

Yeah, right. Oh, and then the headmistress asks him...the greatest detective in the world, as he syas repeatedly in his career!...to look over the school's staff to help her decide who she should appoint as her successor! AND HE AGREES!!

Yeah! Right!

Anyway, there he is mise en scène when the first murder occurs. It's still the PE sadist, I mean teacher, but her fate is decidedly more delicious: she's run through with a javelin! I was inordinately pleased by that. She's made out to be a truly vile person, instead of a merely quotidian PE sadist. I mean teacher. The other murders all unfold in different ways as well, and the motivations are altered...strengthened...to match. Since hunky dude isn't allowed much spying stuff to do, he gets a romantic interest...which doesn't turn out so well...but the killer and the motive remain from the book. Poirot, since he's obviously the star, is placed in charge of the disposition of the jewels, and he does something that would get literally anyone else in the world tossed under the prison and forgotten forever.

It truly was an eyerolling experience to see what the writers had to do to make the character Poirot central to this middling spy thriller. It was, as always, quite pretty to look at, but a load of codswallop in every other way.

Good morning, RichardDear! I hope you're doing better today.

>263 richardderus: I’d take credit for the 2 of the Chronicles of Narnia books, 7 Harry Potters and the 3 Pullmans, but lose points since you’ve broken out LotR. I’ve read 4 of the 6 Hardys on my shelves and didn’t read them for school. I’m not sure I could go back to them, but won’t get rid of them yet. I have On the Road but it hasn’t called out to me, inherited a copy of A Fine Balance from my in-laws and so far only keep it for sentimental reasons. I liked The Traveler’s Wife although I might not like it now. I’m going to cull A Thousand Splendid Suns because I’ll never read it. Moby-Dick may end up under the patio with Hoffa, but I don’t think so. You took away the Bible, which I call the Jewish Bible/Christian Bible cover to cover in 2017.

>267 richardderus: Even when I seriously disagree with you, RD, I believe I keep it courteous and simply say ATD. I know you've been attacked on your own threads and have blocked some members. It's a good feature that I'd never felt compelled to use before now - I've been following the SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 threads (there are now 8 of them) in the Pro and Con group and have blocked 3 trolls. It's actually very good for my blood pressure.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

>269 karenmarie: I don't think you'll enjoy A Fine Balance...it's a wonderful book, but it's pretty unremitting in its gloom and that just isn't where anyone I know is right now. You will never, ever miss the Hosseini. T.D.US. On the Road is one you should've read by age 20 or it's simply intolerable. The Torah isn't the "Jewish Bible" it's an entirely different animal. It includes parts of the Christian Old Testament but really does not stop there.

As to our ATD moments, they are always uncombative. Others have not been as polite. Hence blocking them. It does help, but I still want a way to prevent them from seeing my profile, any of my threads, or anything I post. These are mentally ill people and their attention is beyond unwelcome, as their behavior is outside all social norms and I do not wish to have anything I say or do under their scrutiny ever.

Oh, I knew the Torah isn't the Jewish Bible - I'm strictly talking about what Christians call the Old Testament.

I agree about not being willing to even have blockees see ANYTHING about you, but the PTB won't go there, I think. From a programming AND slowing down threads perspective, it would be a nightmare.

>271 karenmarie: Only in a perfect world.

Sigh.

In case anyone wonders if the mentally ill persecutors aren't surveilling constantly, go look at this comment posted on Goodreads today: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3389664646?comment=211476124#comment_21147...

I've screenshotted the comment, and the sock puppet created to make it; these are not normal people.

On the Road is one you should've read by age 20 or it's simply intolerable.

There's a lot of truth to that, I think. I remember reading it in college (I was... 23, I think, final year of undergrad). I liked the first half and then it just got old real quick, and I spent the second half thinking he was probably on drugs while he wrote it. I've never felt a desire to go back and read it again either.

>273 richardderus: *blinks* Huh. I have to say, one of the things I'm really glad about is that LT *doesn't* have a comments-on-reviews feature.

>243 richardderus: >255 richardderus: I believe I saw this list long ago and pondered on the same inanities that you and others have. I do think your revisions are meritorious. I'm fighting the knee-jerk urge to plow down your list and check off those books I've read or merely possess.

>267 richardderus: >273 richardderus: Well gosh, putrid crazy on a book forum. Such an effort expose itself as a vile idiot, wasting it's substance on coming up with self-condemning userids.

>274 bell7: Add to that Look Homeward, Angel and A Confederacy of Dunces and so many other laddy-me-buck classics...it's a great thing to have an older guide through the thickets of litrachure like I did!

>275 weird_O: I can't believe the list that still circulates isn't even in alphabetical order! Most readers I know are *really* sensitive to suchlike untidinesses.

>274 bell7:, >276 quondame: It's been a decade! A DECADE! And still happens! The sheer waste of energy is mind-boggling.

>243 richardderus: I stole it from you. I am at 84 on the list, so I guess we are both above average. Good on us!

I did not use the later lists because I had already copied and pasted to my thread when I discovered them and I did not feel like going back and doing it over again, lol.

((Hugs)) and *smooches* and hopes for a happy weekend, RD!

>278 alcottacre: Thanks, Stasia, and for you as well! *smooch*

>207 richardderus: There's one for the swamp.

I've read an even 60 of the expanded list, though I have pretended to have read a few others for the sake of class discussions.

>280 swynn: Excellent! Glad I could book-bullet you so worthily.

Half that list is quite something. There's a lot on there that, if I were starting my literary voyage today, I'd snortingly dismiss.

I've been sure as anything that I've read a particular book, then sample from it and realize I've only ever glossed it for a class or something similar.

‘Morning, RD, and happy Sunday to you.

>273 richardderus: I know there are more than a few LTers who are also on GoodReads, but even the idea of trying to maintain a presence on both websites exhausts me.

67 Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie

Rating: 3.5* of five

Not too bad. Not her best, not as bad as many later efforts. But this is one of the most bizarrely satisfying comeuppance crimes I've read from Dame Agatha's pen. I will have more to say but after a nice long sleep. Dratted Overdrive! It went down and, when it came back up, had lost my place in the book. *grumble* So I finished it just after midnight.

Before I was so rudely interrupted...the French police had just found the murder victim's just-revealed daughter Anne Morisot's body on the Boulogne boat train...so what's next, M. Poirot? The heiress to a fortune, however ill-got (loan sharking is ill-got gains in my book), is dead! Now who benefits? In other words, find the husband she married so hastily a month ago.

It is this trend, this way of progressing...we need to find this, this will break the case! ONOZ more questions instead...that makes reading Dame Agatha's books fun. The smudge on the horizon with birds circling it is land for the shipwrecked to stand on! No, it's the North Pacific Gyre...no, it's a mirage. She's a wicked old auntie, our Dame is, and she reveled in this misdirection while she could still construct it. (Late-career dementia means the end of most of this kind of fun.)

Here, in this 1935 book, the players and the played are all in intricate interlocking orbits, with plenty of greed and rage and regret fueling the proceedings. One of the dramatis personae is a killer (a particularly cold and calculating one, it turns out), but is that crime any more heinous than the willful and malicious ruin of the life, the very identity central to a person's presentation of self? Murder without death...blackmail is vile, the secrets that it battens on are almost always so much less so than the blackmail is. Lady Horbury, a nasty superficial baggage, has stolen bluff, hearty Lord Horbury's future; the loan shark blackmailing her into paying the vig has compounded the crime, since her ruin will of necessity be his ruin as well.

But then the uglier and uglier cruelties the murdered loan shark has committed come suppurating up, involving children and caregivers and a whole world of ruin. Her murder, by the son-in-law she didn't know she had and who would murder the daughter she abandoned, but to whom she willed her entire fortune...why exactly? was diabolically clever and would never work in real life. One is still delighted by her death. The manner of it, on a flight between Paris and London, well! Extra piquant. Especially delicious is Poirot attempting to recreate a murder by (hilariously undersized) blowpipe on the plane...the so-self-important little grey cellarer acting the fool in this public place, so perfect (and proves this was an impossible means). And, in my never-remotely humble opinion, early warning signs of just how extremely sick Dame Ags was getting of her arrogant, high-handed Belgian detective.

I'm there, too. This is it for me, at least for a while. I can't deal with Poirot's smugly superior attitude again. Some time away from each other is required, and since he exists in books, he won't care and I will probably return, refreshed and emboldened, to an unchanged Poirot.

Agatha Christie's Poirot: Death in the Clouds

Rating: 3.5* of five

Absolutely hilarious! Many anachronisms...the plane that features in the show, a 1940s DC-3, is understandable because there are no extant planes of the type in the book; less so is the café in 1935 London using Wedgwood bone china of the Colonnade Black pattern introduced the same year I was...but what the hell, it looked really pretty.

Inspector Japp, that flâneur and bon vivant, is in Paris assisting Poirot and lording it over the Parisian gendarmerie? C'mon! Japp doesn't know how important l’heure du déjeuner is, what a bidet is (see the filmed version of Hickory Dickory Dock), still less how the Byzantine French justice system works, and the French inspector is calmly going to let him run roughshod over his dignity? No. But it does make for a better episode of the show. No need to build a character for a single use, Japp will be showing up again anyway.

And that blowpipe scene? Suchet should've won awards for it. Side-splitting. I watched this episode with my Young Gentleman Caller and he made me pause the scene twice so he could get the laughs out.

There are some of the usual rebrandings of characters...Jane Grey, now a stewardess, finally makes sense in the story...though has some pretty tremendous superpowers as she gets Poirot a seat (Lord Horbury's abandoned one, which is never explained) at Fred Perry's final match! Where he scrapes acquaintance with both Dr. Gale and Lady Horbury, present though previously built up to be uninterested in tennis while the snit-throwing Lord Horbury dotes on it. It's not as though any of this is new.

But again, my fatigue he overtakes me and I retire from the watching of the Poirot films. I am sated. Perhaps my appetite she will return to me after a fast? We shall see.

>282 karenmarie: Hi Horrible, happy Sunday back. I'm active both places for a decade now, and honestly it's nowhere near as much work for me as it seems to be for most others. Maybe I'm doing one or both wrong?

Enjoy the loveliness of a day where no one expects anything of you.

Good morning, Richard! I hope today finds you feeling better and enjoying yourself as much as possible.

>263 richardderus: I read this in my mid-teens, and with the exaggerated emotions of those years, I was convinced that Mrs. Boynton was an unwitting and very much blown up portrait of my own mother.

Of course that was an over-the-top reaction, but so very satisfying to myself at 15. Late I realized that Mrs. B. was a flaming horror whose motives were mostly about cruelty and domination, so very different from Mother’s problems.

Even with that more mature realistic understanding, this remains one of my favorite Christie books. And oddly enough, my oldest read it about 20 years later at about the same age, and had exactly the same reaction. Which says something, I guess.

>273 richardderus: That’s sickening. I’ve never been as persecuted as you have, but someone in another venue decided to pursue me for no reason other than that I liked a member that he hated (again, no discernible reason). And they never, ever give it up or let it go. It’s an icky, frightening feeling to realize that there’s such unreasoning and vile hatred out there. I’m so sorry this happened to you yet again.

>285 Matke: Mrs. Boynton will remind any adolescent of Mother because Mother is All-Pervasive in an adolescent's life. Rebellion and individuation, not synonymous but closely related, stem from that pervasiveness.

I can't really think of a better way to individuate, but it's a damned unpleasant process. Adolescence is HELL and I wouldn't go through it again for all the money on the planet. Adult-strength emotions, no perspective...UGH

Thanks re: online events. Same perp, well actually group of them, so it's not like it's ever stopped. I didn't hate these mentally ill persons until they collectively decided to target me and abuse me. Now I pity and despise them. Imagine being so morally bankrupt that all you can think to do regarding someone you dislike is hound them with the aim of being hurtful and hateful.

So sad. Disgusting and sad and pathetic.

>255 richardderus: well that's a thumbs up for you then!

I have always been drawn to LT for its relative kindness, so far as online forums go.
On that point, here is some for you, *mwa*.

>287 LovingLit: Very true, Megan, by and large it's superior to most places I can think of online.

*smooch* for my upgethumbing.

ţ ç ş

Happy Sunday, Richard! Gorgeous day here in the Midwest, plus I birded in the morning and spent time with the books in the P.M. I would say that is a perfect day.

Glad you are having a good time with the Dame Christie catalog. I have only read a handful. Bad Warbler?

Hiya Mark! It was a glorious day here as well. Such perfect, perfect sunny breezy cool days are all too rare, so I went out to enjoy them--double masked.

Dame Ags and I are on a break as of now. I'm starting to hate Poirot. That's sub-optimal, so I'm giving it a rest.

I've been loving your Christie reviews greatly, Richard (and flagging your gnat on Goodreads), so thank you!

>291 ronincats: Thanks, Roni. That sock puppet's deleted now.

I've enjoyed the Christie project, but it's time to do something else or I'll start speaking like Suchet. I don't think anyone wants me to refer to myself in the third person every time I speak.

New thread is open here.