richardderus's eighth 2022 thread

April's beautiful, productive crabapple trees will pick up speed blooming all month long. Harvests, when they come, will be just as beautiful to look at:

...and, if you didn't know, these are the best fruits to use if you need something to "set up" before serving as they're superb producers of pectin when cooking.

For 2022, I state my goal of posting an average of 4 or 5 book reviews a week on my blog, for an annual total of 250. This year's total of ~200 (I need to do more to sync the data on my reads between my blog, Goodreads, and here this year for real) posts in 50 weeks of blogging shows it's doable. My *actual* blogged total for 2021 was 229.

I've long Pearl Ruled books I'm not enjoying, but making notes on Goodreads & LibraryThing about why I'm abandoning the read has been less successful. I gave up. I just didn't care about this goal, but I need to learn to because I *re*Pearl-Ruled five books after not remembering picking them up in the first place. What I've decided to do is have post >7 richardderus: be the Pearl-Rule Tracking post!

And now that I've gotten >6 richardderus: Burgoineing as a habit, I'm going to make a monthly blog-only post with my that-month's Burgoined books. It will appear the last Sunday of each month.



My Last Thread of 2009 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2010 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2011 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2012 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2013 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2014 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2015 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2016 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2017 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2018 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2019 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2020 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2021 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.

Reviews one through eight? Seek them thitherward.

Looking for nine through sixteen? Click that link!

Reviews seventeen up to twenty-six? You know what to do.

I know you think reviews twenty-seven to thirty-three are here...well, you're right, they are.

Seekest ye the reviews entitled thirty-four to thirty-eight? They anent just so.

I understand you're curious about thirty-nine to forty-seven. Go back there.

Longing to view reviews forty-eight to fifty-four? Advance towards the rear.

THIS THREAD'S REVIEW LINKS

055 The Other Man delivered, post 108.

056 The Darkest Game played fair, post 121.

057 The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali elucidated, post 151.

058 Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist touched me, post 162.

059 Young Mungo slayed, post 183.

060 Violets shocked, post 216.

061 The Sugared Game delighted, post 267.
–AND–
062 To Trust Man on His Oath worked, post 267.

063 Subtle Blood slammed, post 293.
–AND–
064 How Goes the World? misted me up, post 293.

I've decided to use BookRiot's 2022 Read Harder Challenge as a spice-me-up of meeting my reading goals. Since I'll post 225+ reviews (posts aren't the same as reviews posted, as some posts cover as many as four books!) on my blog this year *easily* I think I need to get a little more pushy. 225 reviews posted seems like a cheat as a goal since I'm on track for that now. I'm thinking 250...approximately 10% increase over this year's actual total.

This is the list:

1. Read a biography of an author you admire.


2. Read a book set in a bookstore.


3. Read any book from the Women’s Prize shortlist/longlist/winner list.


4. Read a book in any genre by a POC that’s about joy and not trauma.
   30 Things I Love About Myself FTW!


5. Read an anthology featuring diverse voices.


6. Read a nonfiction YA comic.
   The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks is illustrated and that'll have to do.


7. Read a romance where at least one of the protagonists is over 40.


8. Read a classic written by a POC.


9. Read the book that’s been on your TBR the longest.
   Central Station was awarded to me on NetGalley in 2016!


10. Read a political thriller by a marginalized author (BIPOC, or LGBTQIA+).


11. Read a book with an asexual and/or aromantic main character.


12. Read an entire poetry collection.


13. Read an adventure story by a BIPOC author.
    We Could Be Heroes did the business


14. Read a book whose movie or TV adaptation you’ve seen (but haven’t read the book).
    Against the Ice: The Classic Arctic Survival Story out on Netflix now...saved the book for me, no smallest doubt.


15. Read a new-to-you literary magazine (print or digital).


16. Read a book recommended by a friend with different reading tastes.


17. Read a memoir written by someone who is trans or nonbinary.
    High-Risk Homosexual! What a read.


18. Read a “Best _ Writing of the year” book for a topic and year of your choice.


19. Read a horror novel by a BIPOC author.


20. Read an award-winning book from the year you were born.


21. Read a queer retelling of a classic of the canon, fairytale, folklore, or myth.
    Briarley FTW! I can start 2022 with one task accomplished.


22. Read a history about a period you know little about.


23. Read a book by a disabled author.


24. Pick a challenge from any of the previous years’ challenges to repeat!
    I choose 2018: Read a mystery by a person of color who is also LGBTQ+
    

I liked all of them except the comic and I'm still looking for GNs that don't make me want to scream and barf, so it's a good challenge.

I'm wondering if, in lieu of setting a numerical goal for Burgoines (see >6 richardderus:), I could just agree with myself to use the technique on 3-stars-and-under reads about which I don't much care and count them as reviews here. I've decided that I'll post 'em & collate them in each thread's post #6. Then I'll just blog 'em in gangs, once a month on the last Sunday in the month...I dunno, but I read a lot of books I don't talk about because someone loved it & I loathed it or just didn't care much about it, or I simply have no useful response...it filled time, it failed to offend or delight me. Is that information useful to anyone? Would you care if I did that and gored your reading ox?

I suppose we shall find out.

2021's five-star or damn-near five-star reviews totaled 28, a marked decrease from last year's 46. Fewer authors saw their book launches rescheduled, but publishers still had to cancel many of their tours and events because COVID-19. The inflationary pressure that supply-chain issues are exerting causes a lot of economic drag on the market, though there is as of yet a lot less trouble than I expected getting tree-book copies of things.

My annual six-stars-of-five read is Cove (my book review), a perfect, spare, evocative story of the pain of existing when you genuinely can't process what is happening to you, around you, despite your best and most well-practiced efforts there is just no righting the boat. I cannot stress enough to you, this is the book you need to read in 2022. I can not forget this read. I refer to it in my head, I think about its stark, vividly limned images. I am so deeply glad Author Cynan wrote it. To quote myself from my review: "This is the book I wish The Old Man and the Sea had been, but was not."

In 2020, I posted over 215 reviews here. In 2022, my goals are:

to post 250 reviews on my blog

to post three-sentence Burgoines of books I don't either adore or despise

to complete at least 275 total reviews of all types

Most important to me again this year is to report on DRCs I don't care enough about to review at my usual level. I still don't want to keep just leaving them unacknowledged! There are publishers who want to see a solid, positive relationship between DRCs granted and reviews posted, and I do not blame them a bit.

Ask and ye shall receive! 'Nathan Burgoine's Twitter account hath taught me. See >6 richardderus: below. I just need to keep getting better about *applying* it!

I stole this from PC's thread in 2020. I like these prompts, so I've decided to re-do them every December!
***
1. Name any book you read at any time most recently that was published in the year you turned 18:
The Street Where I Live by Alan Jay Lerner (2010)
2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird
3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
St. Mary's and the Great Toilet Roll Crisis by Jodi Taylor
4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
Kohinoor: The Story of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond by William Dalrymple & Anita Anand because I lost interest
5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard...how easy it is to fail, to do the wrong thing
6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
Horseman: A Tale of Sleepy Hollow by Christina Henry...Sleepy Hollow's about 100mi from here
7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
Queer people's history and the Quaker resistance to slavery
8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard which I managed to get several LTers and tweeple to pick up *buffs nails*
9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
Briarley by Aster Glenn Gray, a gay WWII-set retelling of Beauty and the Beast, that I finished this week (and reviewed!)
10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy was a #The1976Club read, and was so disappointing that I went on to read The Malacia Tapestry by Brian W. Aldiss to cleanse my reading palate
11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
Aster Glenn Gray
12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
The Multiverse in Genevieve Cogman's Invisible Library series
13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
How to Catch a Vet; the Afghanistan War
14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
There isn't enough space for all the book-bullets y'all careless, inconsiderate-of-my-poverty fiends pepper me with (bold added for emphasis)
15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
The Toast of Time is part of The Chronicles of St Mary's by Jodi Taylor, so it involves the future, the past, and the Multiverse
16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson
17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
Ife-Iyoku, Tale of Imadeyunuagbon by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki
18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
Your Honor, it is my intention to assert my Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to any and all questions pursuing this subject
19. Who was the most recent dead author you read? And what year did they die?
Brian Aldiss, 2017
20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
good goddesses, I don't remember...Goodnight Moon to my daughter?— STET
21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
Officially it's part of the Jack Lennon series, though he barely even appears in it, so The Ghosts of Belfast via Stuart Neville gets the nod.
22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
The World Well Lost, ~28pp
23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
see #4. I just...quit caring.
24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
see #9
25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay by Marcus Rediker, art by David Lester

I liked Sandy's Bonus Question for the meme above, so I adopted it:

26. What is the title and year of the oldest book you have reviewed on LT in 2021? (modification in itals)
The Sleeping Car Murders by Sébastien Japrisot, 1962.

Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea of the read and not try to dig for more.

Think about using it yourselves!


APRIL 2022's BURGOINES

#24 The Lodger, That Summer titillated, post 243.

#23 The Boystown Prequels did the job, post 230.

#22 Bath Haus skeeved, post 217.

#21 The Human Front delighted, post 163.

#20 Vermilion worked, post 115.

The first two for April are linked here.

MARCH 2022's BURGOINES

The last one for March is linked here.

The first 4 in March are back-linked here.

***

FEBRUARY 2022's BURGOINES (through #12) are here.

***
JANUARY 2022's BURGOINES are here.

This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. I just didn't care about this goal as a separate goal, but I need to learn to because I *re*Pearl-Ruled five books this December just passed after not remembering picking them up in the first place. I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to really track my Pearl Rules!

As she says:

People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.

So this space will be each thread's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.

APRIL 2022's PEARL-RULES

The first one in April is linked here.

***

MARCH 2022's ONLY PEARL-RULE

1 March (officially) Central Station failed, post 103.

***

FEBRUARY 2022's PEARL-RULES are here.

***
JANUARY 2022's PEARL-RULES are here.

Now that I have placed my holds, you are free to comment as you will.

Happy new thread and new quarter, dear fellow.

Happy new thread, Richard dear!

Off to bed now, I stayed up a little waiting for your new thread to arrive ;-)

Sweet Thursday, Richard. Happy New Thread. Love the toppers! Especially since we had snow today. WTH!!

>8 richardderus: Thank you most kindly, PC...and, knowing how deeply dyed your Royalist Cheviot wool is, I grant you thread-long use of this crown:

*evil chortle*

>11 msf59: SNOW!! I'm sweating here, and you've got SNOW!!

...but climate change isn't real...yeesh

Thanks!

>10 FAMeulstee: *smooch* Thank you for staying up late, Anita, especially after I forgot to look for your Thursday traditional post. *shamefaced*

Hi Richard. Happy new thread. I totally bombed out on your last one so I am here (relatively) early this time! Not early enough for a crown but still in the double digits; I consider that a plus.

>14 jessibud2: Hi Shelley! It's not like March was a challenging month for you, so your absence will be counted against you for the foreseeable future. :-P

Hoping for a calmer April for you, and all of us.

Happy new thread, Richard!

>15 richardderus: - Ha!

>17 jessibud2: *smooch*

>16 figsfromthistle: Thanks, Anita! I'm already working (re-working in two cases) on reviews for April, so at least I'm off to a productive start. *smooch*

Happy new one! Those crab apple blossoms look great. We had plans to go see the cherry blossoms down by the Jefferson Memorial, but sadly, the plans fell through. Ah well, next year!

>19 drneutron: Thank you, RocketDoc! How frustrating to miss the cherry-blossom moment...but yes, next year will work, too.
***
Death Trick's author has died. R.I.P. RICHARD STEVENSON, reports The New York Times. I am very sad to learn that he is gone, as Don Strachey was essential to my delight in the early-80s gay-centered mystery publishing scene.

In the Aughties, Chad Allen's version of Don Strachey in three films gave me hope for a franchise in the medium...no such luck, hang it all.

But there were many, many happy hours spent devouring the novels. I'm sad their creator has gone ahead, but at 83, cancer would be too formidable a foe to stave off for very long.

Hello - I'm here :)

Happy new thread Richard!

>13 richardderus: You're sweating; I'm freezing - and we live only 50 miles or so apart as the crow flies. I think it may have more to do with our tolerances for heat/cold.

True story: When I lived in Los Angeles, whenever the temps dropped below, say, 50F, everyone would be wearing hats, scarves, mittens and winter coats. Well, a lot of us. I suppose there must have been some hearty souls who went around in regular jackets and no winter accoutrements, but it wasn't me.

>14 jessibud2: Very nice! I now need my purple shirts to be pressed so I can really make an impression.

Checking in on the new thread, RD. ((Hugs)) and **smooches**

>13 richardderus: >23 Storeetllr: What a difference only a few miles can make in the weather. You may have read about the pileup on I-81, in which six people were killed. Caused by a blinding snow squall. I live, according to Google Maps, less than 40 road miles from the site of that squall. But at my house, it was sunny and above freezing and free of precip.

Happy new thread, Richard.
April starts with the blossom on the plum tree, which looks lovely - and snow/hail yesterday. So who knows what crop of plums will be like this autumn.

Which is a perfect cue for my random snow related fact: in the UK it is more common to have snow at Easter than Christmas.

‘Morning, RDear, and happy new thread and Friday to you.

Coffee is being consumed, and I am heading out to the book sale in half an hour.

*smooch*

Wordle 286 3/6

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*chuckle*

>28 karenmarie: Hi Horrible! *smooch* I'm happy to see you while you're still conscious.

>27 Helenliz: Is it! Of course, anyone who watches QI knows that all rain in the UK begins as snow.

May the plums survive as intact as possible.

>26 weird_O: Weather is always weird, and spring is traditionally an unsettled time; but it was almost 70° yesterday and will be warm today, too.

>25 alcottacre: Thank you, Stasia, and a welcome *smooch*

>24 PaulCranswick: *chuckle*

>23 Storeetllr: Above 70° I'm testy; above 80° it's unwise to approach me without something cold and sweet to propitiate the evil troll that I become.

>22 humouress: Thank you, La Overkill!

>21 katiekrug: Hiya Katie! *smooch*

>29 richardderus: 3 for me as well. >:-)

>30 richardderus: Of course, anyone who watches QI knows that all rain in the UK begins as snow. Indeed. Even in August. *nods knowingly*

Happy new thread, compadre. Beautiful crabapple toppers. We have one in our backyard, and it’s getting ready to pop.

I live in a city where folks start breaking out the shorts when the temps hit the 40s. Hope you’re setting up for a good weekend.

>33 jnwelch: It's not unseasonable, or at least not too terribly unseasonable, today; yesterday was the nasty one, this is simply not pleasant. Sticky, thick air reminds me of why I left Texas.

I love crabapples, both blossom and fruits (if pickled). They're one of the few things that can convince me to eat turkey.

I am wholly with your shorts-breakin'-out compadres, Joe. I'm in them now, and trying not to sweat through my t-shirt. Bleurgh!

Happy new thread Richard!

>35 swynn: Thank you, Steve!

The trees in bloom are lovely! Happy new thread!

>37 thornton37814: Thank you, Lori, and I so agree...the kind of sight that makes me feel like the unsettled, muddy, dank weather is worth it.

Well...almost worth it.

Happy New Thread!

>39 ArlieS: Thanks Arlie, and a happy Spring (that's the current season, in case you need a refresher)!

Happy new thread, RDear. Dropping off nearly weekend smooches.

I have printed out your "Three sentence review" description and pegged it to the board over my desk.

Will be a help in writing on LT going forward.

Tip o' the hat to ye!

>42 magicians_nephew: I hope it does the trick for you, Jim, it's been hugely liberating for me.

*brim-tip*

>41 MickyFine: Thank you, Micky! Have a lovely Spring weekend!

Happy New Thread Richard my dear friend.

^I know, you are really, really excited RD! Enjoy, my friend and make sure you share some of your favorites. 😁

Well it looks like you're finally back to normal Richard, at least Wi-Fi wise.

>46 brenzi: Hi Bonnie! Nope...just extra-lucky with the weather. I'm actually still using the hotspot but unlike the usual, it's been foggy and that means other signals haven't been able to interfere with the hotspot. So all down to good fortune, but I will gladly take it.

>45 msf59: *gag*

>44 johnsimpson: Thank you, John! Happy Spring.

>40 richardderus: It can be hard to tell, even in this part of California. We really just have wet season and dry season.

>48 ArlieS: Ain't that the truth. My father grew up in Venice Beach.

Have a wonderful weekend, RD, wifi woes notwithstanding.

((HUgs)) and **smooches**

>45 msf59: *settling in with the popcorn*

Happy new thread, Richard! I love the crabapple tree topper. There was a crabapple tree outside my bedroom window in my childhood home, and I used to love the profusion of blossoms every year. Sorry to hear the wifi woes continue.

'Morning, RDear, and happy Saturday to you.

Yesterday was pretty good, book sale wise. I was only tired, not exhausted, too. Today will be shorter, and I'll bring at least 2 bags of books that I snagged yesterday home. I'll probably find more, too. In fact, the books will be left out AFTER the sale ends and before the Library closes. So, after Dav and I do the money thing, I'll probably just go look for more books, since I'll be cashiering all day. And I'll pay for them or not pay for them, depending. :)

>53 karenmarie: Oh good, Horrible! Your endurance is getting greater and greater. Only two bags (so far)? Were the pickings slim or are you exercising unnerving restraint?

>52 bell7: Hi Mary! Thanks! Oh, lovely memory...it's one of my favorite things about crabapples, their exuberance and generosity. It doesn't hurt that I grew up eating them pickled, so knew what they were all about.

>51 humouress: *chuckle*

>50 alcottacre: *smooch*

Ahem.
Wordle 287 2/6

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V V V satisfying!

>55 richardderus: In awe!

>45 msf59: Hahahaha. Did you forget whose thread you were posting on, Mark?

>55 richardderus: Ahem, too! I'm more than V V V satisfied in light of my many near misses lately.
Wordle 287 2/6

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Good afternoon, Richard! The crabapple on our walk has just stopped blooming, and we will miss the delectable scent. Wisteria is nice if you can catch a tiny whiff on the wind, but that's about the only nose-pleaser I can think of until cape jasmine bloom in late May or early June.

Read and post in comfort and joy!

OH! I just glanced out the window in time to see MY EAGLE soar past and alight in a treetop a block away. Wow!

>1 richardderus: My grandmother used to make the most heavenly crab apple jelly.

>57 LizzieD: Jealous of YOUR EAGLE.

I have seen a pair of raptors which seem to nest fairly close by on and off but not near enough for me to identify and I haven't seen any for a while.

>59 humouress: I too am jealous of her eagle!

I hope you find and identify the raptors.

>58 ArlieS: I love the pickled the best, but jelly is very tasty, too. Almost tastes like the flowers smell.

>57 LizzieD: Wisteria frightens me too much to enjoy its smell. It's a half-step behind kudzu in my pantheon of botanical terrorists to flee at a rapid clip.

Jasmine can get there, for sure. But it's easier to control than wisteria...and NOTHING controls kudzu!

*smooch*

>56 Storeetllr: Oh, don't kid yourself, Mary...that *shudder* poetry reference was a definite stab at my emotional kidneys!

*smooch*

>55 richardderus: >57 LizzieD: Me, too!

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And this helped ease the pain of near-misses and, (sob!) total misses. And today’s word is a pretty cool word!

Karen O

>61 klobrien2: Congratulations! I'm glad it made your day, too, Karen O.

It was a strange choice of word. I think readers were the most likely ones to get it. It does make one feel vindicated for the total-miss times, doesn't it.

>45 msf59: Yay! & >47 richardderus: Hahaha

>57 LizzieD: Crab apple blossoms, wisteria, cape jasmine and eagles soaring overhead - I want to go and stay with Peggy.

Have a great weekend, dear fellow, dust the Armitage off and remember that there is a tiny smidgeon of poultry that you actually do like.

>63 PaulCranswick: Ramadan Mubarak, PC, and fie on all things poeticall!

>1 richardderus: Spring!! Happy newish thread, Richard!

>65 Copperskye: Hi Joanne!! Thank you for stopping by...I'm hoping to get real wifi back soon, I'll cme pay a visit and see what's new with you.

When I was growing up we made lots of crab apple jelly and I always wondered why. It was expensive to make because it took huge amounts of sugar. I always ranked it right up there with rhubarb and gooseberries. If it takes that much sugar to make it edible it just makes you scream - WHY?

>64 richardderus: Thank you, RD. I just cut my own hair and made Erni's day as she seems to think it is the funniest thing that she has seen this year. It'll wipe the smile off her face when she goes in my bathroom and finds the wreckage left there! One very bad habit I got into during these lockdowns was cutting my own hair (and then have Erni/Belle touch up to make me look slightly less villainous.

Wordle 288 5/6

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Because I tried FEVER before FEWER. Oh well.

>68 PaulCranswick: Heh...Cleaning up hair is No Fun At All.

>67 benitastrnad: Since the tang's what I like about it, I do not have an answer for you.

>70 richardderus: She took pity on me and tidied up the hair a bit but I do look like the last of the Mohicans. By the way I did clear up my own hair.

>69 richardderus: re: spoiler I did the same!

Happy Sunday, Richard. I had a good day yesterday- birds in the AM, Jack in the PM, with some book time in between. I hope your weekend is going well.

>73 msf59: It's been just fine, thanks Mark. I'm glad you're getting in your Jackson time! Birds too, though if it came to a trade-off I bet I know which one would go. Bye-bye, Birdie!

>72 bell7: I was SO IRKED by that!! Illogical, of course, they're both perfectly valid words. Still...grrrr

>71 PaulCranswick: You cleaned up *most* of it. This is hair...three passes minimum.

I had a friend in here who used to buzz my hair for me. I covered the floor in an old sheet, wadded it up when he was done, and chucked it right out. Still took two more corner-and-cranny trips!

‘Morning, RD, and happy Sunday to you.

>54 richardderus: I ended up with another bag, acquired before the sale ended. With three bags in tow, I had our book sale team Richard help me get them to the car. And I paid for every book except the two free ones I was entitled to for being a volunteer on sale days. And yes, my endurance was better than I thought it would be, thanks to the treadmill.

>55 richardderus: Jealous.

>69 richardderus: My mistake, too, RD. It also took me 5.

*smooch*

>75 karenmarie: Hey, it was only the one extra, so I call that restrained. It's the endurance bonus that makes the whole effort so cool! You lasted two solid hard-working days in a row without falling out, and that's just the best news ever.

It really makes no rational sense for me to be irked by their choice of one of those words over the other, but here we are....

*smooch*

I get the LitHub newsletter, as I've mentioned before. Today is the 695th anniversary of Petrarch's obsessive LUUUV for a little teenaged chit, Laura. This sonnet commemorates April 6, 1327, immortalizing it in Sonnet III:

III.
Wherein he chides love that could wound him on a holy day (Good Friday)
(Trans. by Joseph Auslander, 1932)

It was the morning of that blessèd day
Whereon the Sun in pity veiled his glare
For the Lord’s agony, that, unaware, I fell a captive,
Lady, to the sway
Of your swift eyes: that seemed no time to stay
The strokes of Love: I stepped into the snare
Secure, with no suspicion: then and there
I found my cue in man’s most tragic play.
Love caught me naked to his shaft, his sheaf,
The entrance for his ambush and surprise
Against the heart wide open through the eyes,
The constant gate and fountain of my grief:
How craven so to strike me stricken so,
Yet from you fully armed conceal his bow!
***
This...is what y'all coo and oooh and fuss over? I am so very not built to appreciate poetry, if this is what the good stuff looks like. I think it's boring and pointless and not a little creepy.

I am with you, Richard. I am not built to appreciate poetry either, although I did like Spoon River Anthology which I read recently.

Sunday ((hugs)) and **smooches**

>78 alcottacre: Hi Stasia! Happy Sunday! *smooch*

I endured Spoon River Anthology when I badly wanted to get in a poet's pants. It *almost* put me off him.

>77 richardderus: Or this selection from The 32 Most Iconic Poems in the English Language (here), described thus:

Bishop’s much loved and much discussed ode to loss, which Claudia Roth Pierpont called “a triumph of control, understatement, wit. Even of self-mockery, in the poetically pushed rhyme word “vaster,” and the ladylike, pinkies-up “shan’t.” An exceedingly rare mention of her mother—as a woman who once owned a watch. A continent standing in for losses larger than itself.”

One Art
BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
***
What? What makes this any better than a high-school child's maunderings? I can not detect this, this numinous something y'all think is there in this stuff. It just annoys and bores me.

Happy Sunday, Richard. What beautiful trees up top!

>80 AMQS: Hi Anne! Thank you...aren't they spectacular bloomers? The sheer volume of energy they expend to create such a spectacle is humbling to me. Such beauty!

Hiya, RDear, and happy Monday to you!

>76 richardderus: Yes, I was pleasantly surprised at how un-exhausted I was at the end of each day. I won’t go to the Senior Center today as I’m going to prepare cash/checks for deposit, visit friend Louise, and go to the chiropractor at her farther-away office. Since this office is close to a thrift shop I haven’t gone to in 2 years, as a reward to myself I might stop at there after the visit with her.

>77 richardderus: I do love some poetry, but my taste is frozen from my early 20s. e.e. cummings, Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, some Walt Whitman, some of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Others, too, that I can’t remember offhand. I took to writing poetry in my junior/senior years of high school, saved my efforts in a yellow folder, and made the mistake of showing it to Jenna. She still chortles over one poem in particular, which I will NOT share here as it would haunt me forever.

*smooch*

>1 richardderus: Love the tree vibe you've got going for toppers. It's hard to believe, last time I was "here", it was thread #6. I think.

I had a great trip to Vancouver Island and saw family! And walked on beaches, often in sunshine, not the famous spring drizzles. Read copiously in the evenings and discovered fluffy chick lit that I never thought I'd enjoy (Central Park Pact series by Lauren Layne, sassy, smart women) but it was just the thing for the time.

Wordle 289 4/6

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This one seemed like the perfect time to unleash the double-consonant kraken, but no they went for the W-card instead: SHALL then SHAWL.

>83 SandyAMcPherson: Hi Sandy! The right read for the right moment is all it takes. I don't think I'm going to get that with the current crop...Vermilion, Young Mungo, The Lodger, That Summer...somehow are just not quite my mood's match. Good reads, in their various fashions, but perfect fits no.

Happy you're about! *smooch*

>82 karenmarie: Happy Monday, Horrible! Have fun doing responsible-big-lady stuff. It seems to me that you're not falling behind the fitness goals even if you don't go a-treadmilling. This is a higher level of busy for your body than ordinary...get back on the machine later in the week guiltlessly.

I love your sweet innocence...handing hand grenades to your kid, then being surprised she lobs them at you! *smooch*

((Hugs)) and **smooches** for today, RD. Hoping that the wifi issue is finally resolved!

>86 alcottacre: Supposedly today, Stasia, and I surely hope so. I need to post some reviews!

*smooch*

>82 karenmarie: Haha! Like you, I wrote "poetry" when I was in my late teens/early 20s. Cringe-worthy stuff that I would never show anyone else, although I have saved some of it. Hmm, perhaps now's a good time to go through my memento box and get rid of it so my daughter will retain some small bit of respect for me after I'm gone.

Hi, Richard!

>84 richardderus: I was getting worried about the number of words I could find with the same first 3 letters. I had musical notation and a small house before coming to the right answer, in 5.

>84 richardderus: Same as you! I tried a stem in guess 3 prior to the right answer in 4.

Wordle 289 4/6

⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨
🟨⬜🟩⬜⬜
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I am eying the crabapple trees for sale at Walmart and Kroger--I plan to put in at least one. But today I am drawing up scale models of all my garden and flower beds as I start planning where to put everything. I have indoor seedlings under lights, outdoor winter sown seedlings, perennials I bought last week at the greenhouse, and a whole carload of native plants I will be picking up on the 21st from the Dyck Arboretum, so figuring out what goes where with what sunlight, watering preferences, and sizes is going on at the moment.

And I have my high school poetry in a bin in the basement too. Some cringeworthy, others not so much.

>90 ronincats: I wrote my last non-class-assignment poetry in 1973. It is long, long vanished. The class-assignment poetry is, too.

I'm gobsmacked at your gardening mojo! I'm also very happy to hear you'll be crabapple-ing your garden. They're so beautiful as they bloom, and we all know how I covet their scrummy fruits in fall.

Sneaky Wordle today, no? I'm glad to see you out and about! *smooch*

>89 Helenliz: It's the pattern-maker in all of us that enjoys this game. I go through some permutations after the first words...always AEONS for me...shows its results. I so enjoy it! A delightful morning ritual.

>88 Storeetllr: Hail, Mary! *smooch*

Happy newish thread, Richard. What's the excuse for the wifi this time?

Morning, Richard. It continues to be damp and cool here. Sighs...I will be indoors today. First the Rehab Center and then books in the PM. I hope your week is off to a good start.

>79 richardderus: Actually, I like this poem.

Hiya, RD! Happy Tuesday to you. Yes, Jenna had a fine old time with my poetry.

My book club will be meeting for the first time since March 2020. Different day, different time, snacks instead of dinners... perhaps even every other month instead of every month. It's all up in the air, and I need to come up with my choice for the group to read in the coming year. It has to be something I haven't read either.

*smooch*

Wordle 290 5/6

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I was a little surprised my fourth try was actually considered a word! NATTY I was sure of but then I tried NATCH and it was a word! Note that down, NATAL Wordlers.

>94 karenmarie: Hi Horrible! Tuesday's upon us...tomorrow will mark two weeks wifiless. My phone's woes are much better now that I've learned the power-wash trick. It does mean reinstalling apps, which winnows them down to the absolute minimum...no more "handy, but not necessary" ones!

Good luck figuring out your book for the club. Make it a doozy!

>93 msf59: It's not better, not worse, so I'm callin' it good enough, Mark. Have a great time with the rehab critters! Books, well...we know that'll work.

Millions love that poem, yet I can't see why it's anything special. It...bores me, honestly.

>92 Familyhistorian: Thank you, Meg. I don't think they're bothering with an excuse.

>95 richardderus:

I would also have guessed "not a word," so I ran to the OED to see if there were uses I was unaware of. (SPOILER: in the OED there are *always* uses I was unaware of.) Thought I'd share:


natch, n. 1
1. An incision, a nick, a groove; a notch. Now rare
2. Ceramics. A projection and corresponding notch by which two complementary sections of a pottery mould are held together.

OED also has the slang meaning, with the earliest documented use in the 1945 reference work (I kid you not) "Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary"

>97 swynn: I had no idea of the "acceptable" definitions at all! Never once heard them or knew to wonder if they existed. Your 1945 citation made me chuckle....

Happy Tuesday's reads!

This is an excellent starter list for QUILTBAG reading:
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/g39598614/best-books-by-lgbtq-writer...
You Exist Too Much is a 6*-of-five read for me, ACE: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex is a 4* read, Memorial: A Novel got 4*, High-Risk Homosexual got 4.5*...you get the drift, it's a list to be trusted.

Congratulations to Author Alameddine! THE WRONG END OF THE TELESCOPE took home the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction!
See the announcement here!

>96 richardderus: TWO WEEKS?!?!?!?! Is it out for staff as well? That's a crime against humanity that is.

>100 richardderus: Wonderful! I am going to have to get a copy of that one especially as I loved his An Unnecessary Woman so much!

‘Morning, RDear. Happiest of Wednesdays to you.

>96 richardderus: Two weeks. Are they saying anything about why or when? And, power-wash trick? Do tell.

I chose The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem simply because the world is awash in books written by and about Israel and Israelis and I wanted one by a Palestinian writer. It was a BB from @ursula. I hope you consider it a ‘doozy’.

*smooch*

Wordle 291 6/6

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SIX!! It took me SIX TRIES to get this basic word that I use every single solitary day of my adult life!!

...but I got it.

>103 karenmarie: ummm...smoochling...that touchstone wants looking at, for sure. Heh.

When you get a phone all loaded up with apps, there comes a time when at least one of them will go bad somehow. If you have enough of them, it can be miserable to figure out which one it is. There exists a button marked "Restore phone to factory settings" which colloquially is called "powerwashing" it.

Rob also told me to lean the phone against my little tiny bedside fan to cool it while using it as a hotspot. The battery overheating is probably the source of some of the weird signal interruptions I was experiencing.

Since I finally, in exasperation, growled aloud about this situation, I haven't had a single trouble that Rob couldn't explain how to fix. And, mirabile dictu, he praised me for following his instructions in finding the powerwash button and for asking about the continuing signal interruptions! Said it made him feel like I saw him as my equal, which is always an issue in intergenerational relationships.

Maybe being upset is a good thing, or maybe being mad at this place for its ridiculously slow and/or negligent response is not necessary. Rob feels more like a partner, I feel deeply grateful to him and even more delighted to know the source of this problem is fixable.

Naaah. They're still negligent and shitty people.

>102 alcottacre: I hope you'll love it, Stasia. It's a different kind of a book, though, so don't expect him to do the same-old same-old.

>101 AuntieClio: If it was, I wouldn't know. They're instructed to lie directly and/or by omission. "Privacy" taken to its illogical extreme.

>100 richardderus: I now have this one on hold at my local library and hope to have it in my hot little hands soon!

Happy Wednesday, RD! I am still poxing your wifi woes even though it is proving to be ineffective.

((Hugs)) and **smooches**

Thank you for explaining *powerwashing*. You don't want to know what I was picturing in my little non-techy imagination... ;-)

055 The Other Man by Farhad J. Dadyburjor

Real Rating: 4.25* of five, because I feel charitable despite getting NINE W-BOMBS splattered on my hems like chamberpots tossed out a medieval window

FINALIST FOR THE 34th LAMMY AWARD—BEST GAY ROMANCE! Winners announced 11 June 2022.

The Publisher Says: A heartwarming and transporting romantic comedy about finding happy ever after on your own terms.

Heir to his father’s Mumbai business empire, Ved Mehra has money, looks, and status. He is also living as a closeted gay man. Thirty-eight, lonely, still reeling from a breakup, and under pressure from his exasperated mother, Ved agrees to an arranged marriage. He regrettably now faces a doomed future with the perfectly lovely Disha Kapoor.

Then Ved’s world is turned upside down when he meets Carlos Silva, an American on a business trip in India.

As preparations for his wedding get into full swing, Ved finds himself drawn into a relationship he could never have imagined―and ready to take a bold step. Ved is ready to embrace who he is and declare his true feelings regardless of family expectations and staunch traditions. But with his engagement party just days away, and with so much at risk, Ved will have to fight for what he wants―if it’s not too late to get it.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is nothing quite so satisfying to me as to read something where, since the conventions of the genre are well-established and I'm deeply familiar with them, the Rules get a good, solid workout. It really looked like something was just going to happen in the established and expected (in the book's world) way, and I'd've been reading a different book than the one I thought I was getting.

This did not occur. That is a Good Thing.

There's always a HEA (Happily Ever After) in a romance novel, or in a rom-com. They aren't always clearly signaled from the beginning. Usually, after a long time reading them, one gets a feeling for what's coming up. The thing that makes this a better version of the genres (they're not identical, romances and rom-coms) is that I got the real and genuine interiority of the main man.

He was well aware how people viewed homosexuality in this country—as if it were a disease that could be cured like any other. He would become the object of ridicule at work, and he could imagine all too easily the way Mum’s friends would sneer about his “abnormality” behind his back, offering their sympathies to Dolly while secretly relishing the downfall of the once-mighty Mehra name.
–and–
Carlos clearly believed Ved was different, but Ved wasn’t so sure. Ved had once been the one to smile at Akshay like that, with his whole face open, with such trust. Ved had done that from this very seat at this very table. Now, the roles were reversed. In this scenario, Ved was Akshay. And that terrified him.

The point-of-view character is, in the best versions of the genres, developed beyond the absolute minimum. In Dadyburjor's book, the repeal of Section 377, a British Colonial law against consensual gay sex between men, provides the backdrop for the gradual awakening of the main man to his responsibilities as a societal actor. His long-brewing confrontation with himself, his internalized need to Please and to fit in, tracks with the Indian Supreme Court's decision to overturn this legacy of obtuse and cruel Britishness. This places the book's action as taking place around 6 September 2018, when the decision to strike down the law was formally issued.

As framing devices for coming-out narratives go, it's awfully hard to beat that one! It isn't exactly harped on, American audiences without much interest in the fate of their fellow men in other countries aren't going to get smacked with it everywhere, but there is enough to make the turning points clear to someone who has paid attention.

Ved, our main man, is really the opposite of a cinnamon roll...maybe a kale salad, like the one he eats *convulsive retch* during the dark, pre-coming-out days?...he not only deserves his suffering but is let off lightly by the author for his unconscionable acts of lying by omission and commission. He's eaten alive by self-loathing and guilt? Good! He merits these feelings! His actions towards both his gal-pal/fiancée and his belovèd Carlos are reprehensible indeed. Yes yes yes he's trying to please everyone else and not being in the least bit honest in it. That's part of the character's journey...and part of the framing device's demands. The point of Ved coming out at all was to be, legally and finally, a gay man in a country that stopped making it possible for sleazy, evil people to victimize him. (Go watch the 1961 film Victim if you want to see what specifically could happen to a man like Ved without the repeal of Section 377. It is not all that pleasant, he said with his best clipped English tones.)

But this is all in service of A Redemption. The redemption comes after the main man is out, after he takes his lumps and makes his obeisances to the ones his dishonesty hurt. It does indeed work, for this particular reader, as a romance novel for that reason. I wouldn't call it a rom-com, as I've seen others do. I don't find lying and hiding amusing anymore...once I might've, since I used to laugh my socks off at Absolutely Fabulous (am now unable to watch even a full episode).

Ved makes as good as anyone can for the harm he's caused. That merits some sort of reward. But we don't see it...the engagement party that he's just caused to crash and burn was a few days, like two or three!, away when he said "NO" and we see NONE of the carnage? Why do I feel so cheated of some good, meaty melodrama? And Disha, the woman he was engaged to, wasn't any monadnock of probity, either, yet she gets nothing, absolutely nothing! of a reckoning for her lying? Hm. I get the constraints of romance-novel length but a balance could've been struck, couldn't it?

So no, no fives from me. But I must say that I completely understand the inclusion of the book on the Lammy Awards list of bests of 2021. It deserves, in my never-remotely-humble opinion, the win. The originality of the framing device, its careful use so as not to be intrusive to audiences who *sigh* just don't care but still present enough to make the timeline clear, gets big kudos. The main man's journey from child-man to man is satisfyingly real. The ending is indeed happy, and that was exactly what the entire exercise promised.

Promise: kept. Pleasure: had.

>100 richardderus: I saw your review of The Wrong End of the Telescope somewhere on the various places you post, LOL and its definitely a BB for me. Thanks!

>109 mahsdad: I am delighted to know, Jeff! Enjoy the read when it comes to the top of the pile.

>107 jessibud2: I never would've bothered had someone not asked, Shelley, so if you want to know something please ask me. I'll always be glad to explain (hopefully without the entirely-too-common curled lip one senses from tech-savvy "explainers").

>106 alcottacre: Keep at it, sweetiedarling, we can never predict what will unjam the logs. *smooch*

Ugh to the ongoing wifi woes, but glad to hear Rob helped with your phone in the meantime. Happy Wednesday! *smooch*

>111 bell7: Thanks, smoochling, it really makes a difference to my mood to be back closer to normal.

Happy Wednesday, Richard. Glad they are sorting out your WI-Fi woes. Hope to see you back to full-strength. Hooray for The Wrong End of the Telescope. I just warbled loud and clear over his novel An Unnecessary Woman so this one is firmly on the list. I will circle back and check out your review of Telescope. I did see you gave it 5 stars.

I loved An Unnecessary Woman and will get to The Wrong End of the Telescope at some point Richard and appreciate your warbling about it.

Burgoine #20

Vermilion (Valentine & Lovelace Mystery #1) by Nathan Aldyne

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A dead young hustler is found on the lawn of a queer-baiting legislator. Boston's political and queer communities are up in arms about the matter, and police are bent on finding the killer—fast. Best friends Daniel Valentine and Clarisse Lovelace team up and hit the streets of Boston. Through a sinister underworld of bars and baths, bondage and blackmail, they're out to solve a very bizarre murder.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Four w-bombs. It was 1981 and there was no need to torment me from beyond the grave! It was a tough enough year as it was.

Anyway. First, read this:

"I tell you, Lieutenant: twenty-five years ago, it was straight men that got me into trouble, and ten years ago, it was straight men that got me put in jail. It was a fag that got me out of jail and it was a fag that made sure I got a decent job. I got nothing against 'em. I'm not a fag, but I know what they know"—he gestured just as {the Lieutenant} had, with a cocked head—"that straight men are just trouble."
–and–
"...Wednesday night is dollar night and every queen in town with four quarters to her name shows up...that lobby emptied out like they were showing Dark Victory across the street...I'm not afraid of {the Lieutenant} for that, because I can take care of myself, and the time is past somebody like him can come in and push me around just because I'm gay. No judge in town would listen to him for more than five minutes. But like I say, it's the hassle. I don't like having to carry around {his lawyer's} card in my wallet all the time, and I certainly don't like the man coming around flashing his badge."

That, mes vieux, is the way we talked in 1979 when this story is set. It was pre-AIDS and the second quotes are from a bath-house attendant, though it's not like the institution of anonymous semi-public sex has vanished from the landscape (see: Bath Haus)) it is a lot less prominent. A lot of things I thought were in the past, like homophobic politicians trying to keep QUILTBAG people down, aren't. But we have fought and fought and fought since the mid-nineteenth century to keep straight people out of our business and away from our basic rights to exist, to speak, to love and marry...so we just need to keep a-doin' it.

What this book does, by coming out again in the Twenties, is to educate the Millennials on the fact that the Boomers were just horny guys, too. The pop-culture references...Mamie Van Doren, Veronica Lake the afghan hound, handkerchief codes, smoking!! boozing!!, calling men who dress up as ladies "drags" and "a drag," the über-fey hairdresser whose professional name, nay entire beauty shop!, takes its names and inspiration from Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (which is what we called it then)...are going to be challenging for anyone under 50. My Young Gentleman Caller was...confused...a lot, and kept asking "But WHY is it funny?" So, well, audience defined.

But if it's in your frames of reference, if you're just a weentsy tidge nostalgic one reading day, pick this up and try it.

"Honey, I just got a pistol fired at my face!" She shoved the leather envelope under her arm. "In the immortal words of Mildred Pierce, 'Let's get stinko!'"

Let's!

It's $1.99 at the Kindle store: Follow the non-affiliate link!

>105 richardderus: Touchstone fixed. Thanks. Glad you and Rob are creating a more equal-footing partnership through cell phone stuff. *smile*

Thanks for the explanation of powerwashing. I keep fewer and fewer apps on my cell phone as time goes by and use some AMC apps to help clean it up in addition to cleaning cache and etc. with standard android apps.

>116 karenmarie: I'm glad you were so quick to fix it, but it *was* funny....

We're always on a see-saw about power. He feels, understandably, at a disadvantage and can sometimes make comments that are very cutting to redress it. As we're getting into the groove of things, it's so much easier to discuss things and work out what would be better than whatever wasn't so great.

Useful Info Я Me! *smooch*

>114 brenzi:, >113 msf59: I'm glad y'all both liked the review! Happy Wednesday.

>104 richardderus: Took me SIX tries too, and such a common word!
Have you tried Antiworldle yet?

Happy Thursday, Richard dear!

>104 richardderus: I was glad my 6th try was the answer.
Today's Wordle went easier.

Sorry the wifi woes continue, glad about the silver lining in your relation with Rob :-)

>104 richardderus: I got quite lucky. I got it in 2. You can credit my cats. I asked them what I should use as my first word. It gave me the first letter and a vowel. It also eliminated three letters that are used quite often with the first letter. I really could think of no other word that would fit except what it ended up being after that since I knew where that vowel did not go.

056 The Darkest Game by Joseph Schneider

Real Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Bad things happen every day. No one knows this better than LAPD Detective Tully Jarsdel. He also knows that bad things often go unpunished—all it takes is a glance at his dusty stack of cold cases to see that time is kind to sinners.

A museum curator is found shot point-blank, his home torn apart. It's the sort of random crime destined to fester in an evidence locker. But it's a case tailor-made for the academic turned detective—he can't leave any question unanswered. In pursuit of an untouchable killer, Jarsdel soon uncovers a web of fraud and corruption that leads him to sunny Catalina Island, Hollywood's bygone playground. There, nothing is as it should be: the past is ever-present, and Jarsdel unwittingly finds himself embroiled in a widespread conspiracy. While reckoning with a dark legacy, he'll exhume long-buried secrets of LA's troubled past and with it, deadly consequences.

A searing mystery from critically acclaimed author Joseph Schneider, The Darkest Game is a story about dread, greed, and anguish; how it spreads like rot, and how one detective struggles to keep it at bay.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There are a lot of things wrong with starting a series with Book Three. I am usually very twitchy about this topic. I would, after having read this book, have felt much better had I had the history between the two leads. As it was, in medias res with them as a bickering old couple (not in the sexual sense), I was able to enjoy the story for itself. I still wish I'd had their history to hand in my brain's filing system, though.

The mystery itself got announced in a fairly usual way: Someone not obviously murder-worthy is found in a trashed home...there's just enough off about the situation to make the Odd Badge-wearing Couple poke more into the dead guy...and thus a very thorough policing job, one that proceeds without undue haste, uncovers some very rotten doins in both past and present that merit a lot of trouble being heaped on people more accustomed to doing the heaping. And, to be sure, they try their goddamnedest to do that heaping again. Tully, having "disappointed" his professor parents by *shudder* becoming a cop in LAPD, isn't likely to let a little thing like Official Disapproval stand in his way of a successful solution. Morales? He's along for the ride, an always-complaining partner-in-crime (solving) with more to gain by staying with the insufferable Tully than moving on. Plus he's not exactly easygoing hisownself.

Tully's abandoned life of being another Professor Doctor Jarsdel has, it is to be noted, equipped him with far more information than the typical cop. It didn't give him his powers of observation, however, and those are the key characteristics that get Tully into enough hot water that he gets quite viciously attacked...twice...and, the second time, he's almost killed from it.

Not only do both he and Morales survive, the second attack...and the murder of their chief suspect...coalesce into a picture of the actual murderer and the real motive for the entire sad affair. It was very, very well-handled, I thoroughly enjoyed Tully's snobby references to things others do not catch or care about, and still thought, "why hasn't friendly fire taken this oh-so-superior guy out?" Because he may grate on the ordinary people around him, but he gets the job done where most of them are honest enough to admit that they might very well not have done.

If you liked watching Endeavour on the TV, or liked the Gervase Fen series or the Nero Wolfe series, these stories will likely scratch the itch well. He's not as arch as Fen or as august as Morse, but Jarsdel will definitely be well-placed on your radar.

I spent most of my life in Texas, but was born in California to a native Californian, a man from Venice Beach. We visited Catalina Island many times, and I've seen the Huntington Museum that forms part of this mystery...but the main thing to know about the settings is that they are there to evoke moods and emotions in the reader. Yes, you'll recognize the places if you've been there or live there, but essentially these aren't used to make it impossible to "get" the full extent of the mystery the way some London- or Paris-set stories are. Like having read the first two entries in the series, it would add something to know what's what, but it isn't in any way *crucial* for you to have done so.

Wordle 292 5/6

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This one was weird: After my starters, AEONS & MIRTH, I chose BORAX, CORAL, then finally FORAY. Thank goodness for the middle letter being in the proper place!

Hiya, RDear!

>121 richardderus: I’ve just added the first book in the series to my wish list. I always love a book set in SoCal.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

>123 karenmarie: Hey there, Horrible! I think you'll enjoy the series. I haven't read the first one but the author's adept enough at writing, and the plot's well-enough constructed, that I don't think you're in danger of deep disappointment.

I hope not, anyway, seeing as it was me who put it on there.... *smooch*

>120 thornton37814: I will never, under any circumstances, credit...them...with any positive thing. Satanic plotting? Indubitably! Contemptuous malice? Unquestionably! But something to increase the world's ever-dwindling supply of joy? Quite simply impossible to believe, credit, or even occur.

>119 FAMeulstee: Hi Anita! Thanks for the well-wishes. I'm at least still capable of getting online and staying there for more than a minute or two. Rob helped me figure that out, too...he's the one who asked what the weather was like when I was having such trouble, and figured out that fog actually helps my hotspot stay connected. (It's foggy today, too!)

Thursday *smooch*

>118 ronincats: I'm at least in good company, if still mildly chafed.

Antiwordle? No. Just...no.

>122 richardderus: My fur boys weren't around to help on this one, but I still got it in 3. It was a difficult word. However, it was the only thing I could come up with after my second guess.

>115 richardderus: I was going to tell an anecdote about Carol Doda but realized I had remembered the wrong buxom blonde. Columbus Street just ain't the same.

>122 richardderus: Moi aussi; the same two words at 4 and 5 (but in reverse order). I got natal in 3 but the last couple of days have taken me the full 6 tries allotted.

>127 humouress: I relate to the sense of frustration; but, as I've said, you're getting them so it's all good!

>126 AuntieClio: LOLOL no, not quite. *chuckle*

>125 thornton37814: I found it rough because it's a word I don't like and try to avoid using as often as I can...which is almost always, unless I want to show my dislike of something.

>121 richardderus: Good catchy review, so added to my TBR list.
Your touchstone needs checking, though that isn't a dire thing. Found that i t was too new for my library so filled in a 'recommend title'.

>129 SandyAMcPherson: Hiya Comrade! Thanks for the alert, fixed it...the title was published on Tuesday, so I'm not reeling from shock that the library's not possessed of it...permaybehaps the first one? One Day You'll Burn is the title. (Touchstone is correct this time!)

>130 richardderus: yes, the PL has the first two. I was rather taken with #3, however and I was sure the PL folks would have it on order (like they have pre-ordered the latest CS Harris, When Blood Lies). I'm in a queue for the WBL book is shelved/available in the system.
Apparently I'm 5th and they're processing it now, whatever time that takes. Not like I'm short of promising reading material.

Are you back on Wifi at home now? Such a p.i.t.a. for you to keep losing the service.

Happy Friday! *Smooch*

Happy Friday, Richard. It seems like your WiFi is working smoothly. It is Jackson Day, so I will be heading over there shortly. Still waiting on Spring to arrive. Sighs....

Wordle 293 4/6

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Four...my standard result. 3.5% ahead of three, the next most-common for me.

Good morning, RD! Happy Friday to you.

I'm on my first cup of coffee, have nothing major to do today except supervise my house cleaner for 3.5 hours, and can read and putter as I please after a very busy week. I finalized the figures for the book sale and we netted over $5K.

>134 richardderus: I got it in 4, too. I lost my stats when my laptop died - speaking of which, it arrived back here two days ago ready to start using again after I get it back to where it was. My new stats are mostly 5s. Sigh.

*smooch*

>135 karenmarie: Happy Friday, Horrible! I'm *gobsmacked*...$5K! That's excellent!!

I'm so sorry about your stats. I wish I had something comforting to offer. But having your laptop back is a very, very, very good thing to take the sting out of its loss.

>133 msf59: Thanks, Mark, and a Happy Friday back at'cha.

>133 msf59:, >131 SandyAMcPherson: No, not WiFi, it's my phone as hotspot. The way Rob explained to me to set the phone up has ended the problem I was having of getting kicked off all the time.

I must growl at the management again today...good reminder!

>132 bell7: Thank you, Mary me lurve! I can't believe you found a second to come by here what with your extra-packed weekend starting with today's events...I feel honored.

>131 SandyAMcPherson: Your PL goes all-in on the mystery section, clearly. I don't know if you noticed my last-year's good mystery-series discovery featuring Irish solicitor Ben O'Keeffe? Death at Whitewater Church was the first one. Got 4* from me! The fifth one's coming out this November in the US, but might already be out there: The Body Falls. Constable has them in the Commonwealth, IIRC.

>136 richardderus: Re the Inishowen series... I made a note of that in my LT folder and probably from your recommendations, except I didn't note where the BB originated.
Well of Ice is as far as our PL catalogue lists the series. I decided to start, since I do love a good mystery, and requested book 1.
Thanks for the reminder!

>121 richardderus: Well, my local library does not have that one and I need another series to read like I need another hole in my head, but I am adding the first book in the series to the BlackHole anyway. Thanks for bringing the series to my attention, RD - I think.

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

>138 alcottacre: I think you'll enjoy them, Stasia, the characters are very appealing in their chemistry and the story in this one is satisfyingly complicated.

>137 SandyAMcPherson: Heh...retroactive book-bulleting! I have added a new life skill.

>136 richardderus: >137 SandyAMcPherson: Hmm, I'm feeling in need of a new mystery series so off to the library to see if I can find #1. Also, re >131 SandyAMcPherson:, I'm on hold for a digital copy of When Blood Lies, so thanks for the heads-up!

So, RD, just so you know, I avoid coming to your thread until after I've solved (or not) the Wordle of the Day. Then, sometimes I get busy and forget to visit, and, when I remember (sometimes the next day) (or the next), you're dozens of posts further on. So annoying. I have GOT to start eating more fish. (Brain food. So they say.)

>140 Storeetllr: Hiya Mary! Well, when you're here, you're here...I'm happy whenever that occurs.

And ATM there are, um, extenuating irritations to endure, so no worries! I don't take attendance. *smooch*

>108 richardderus: That one piqued my interest and, as predicted, The Other Man, is on order at my library.

>142 Familyhistorian: Yay! I hope you'll enjoy the read, Meg.

Wordle 294 4/6

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I chose STAID before STAIR or it'd be three. *sigh*

Up early...lots of weird dreams! Dragons scorching churches and werewolves slaughtering christians fleeing them and angels dive-bombing mosques...I apparently am planning an apocalypse. Wonder if I could get a movie deal.

Last time I read about the Arian Controversy of 381 before I fall asleep!

'Morning, Rdear, and happy Saturday to you.

>144 richardderus: I got one of my rare 3s.

>145 richardderus: Yikes to the weird apocalyptic dreams.

*smooch*

>146 karenmarie: Ha! I was just at yours saying about my score. The dreams were very very weird. I've got to get some better-planned reading for pre-sleep, it seems.

Saturday *smooch*

I Wordled in 5 today...

Saturday *smooch*!

>148 katiekrug: Considering the number of permutations possible on that one, five's a damn good score.

*smooch*

057 The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali by Uzma Aslam Khan

$12.50 SALE ebook editions, available now ONLY at the Publisher's site!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Nomi and Zee are Local Borns—their father a convict condemned by the British to the Andaman Islands, their mother shipped off with him. The islands are an inhospitable place, despite their surreal beauty. In this unreliable world, the children have their friend Aye, the pet hen Priya and the distracted love of their parents to shore them up from one day to the next. Meanwhile, within the walls of the prison, Prisoner 218 D wages a war on her jailers with only her body and her memory.

When war descends upon this overlooked outpost of Empire, the British are forced out and the Japanese move in. Soon the first shot is fired and Zee is forced to flee, leaving Nomi and the other islanders to contend with a new malice. The islands—and the seas surrounding them—become a battlefield, resulting in tragedy for some and a brittle kind of freedom for others, who find themselves increasingly entangled in a mesh of alliances and betrayals.

Ambitiously imagined and hauntingly alive, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali writes into being the interwoven stories of people caught in the vortex of history, powerless yet with powers of their own: of bravery and wonder, empathy and endurance. Uzma Aslam Khan’s extraordinary new novel is an unflinching and lyrical page-turner, an epic telling of a largely forgotten chapter in the history of the subcontinent.

THIS REVIEW HAS MANY LINKS TO INFORMATIONAL RESOURCES ON MY WEBSITE.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

“Have you noticed that when men want freedom, the conversation is about the nature of action, violence or non-violence? But when women want freedom, the conversation is about the nature of women, natural or unnatural?”
–and–
Somewhere in the great sky beyond this sky of planes was a star made entirely of words. And on the star lived as many different kinds of words as birds in all the skies, fish in all the seas, and clay patterns in all the hands of adoring women. Some words were cautious as the crabs nesting on the beach. Others, bold as the giant hornbills prattling in the trees. Then there were those that made no sound, but were equally fearless, folding their arms and waiting for her to sit on their lap. The prisoner who was no longer a prisoner was gathering all these many words to herself and would speak them, if there were but someone to listen, even a little.

The reason to read, or not to read, this story is there in those quotes. There are adults imprisoned in this story, adults whose sufferings are inflicted on bodies as well as souls; their children are, revoltingly but oddly mercifully, imprisoned with them in a soul-warping hothouse of rage and mistrust...but with their loving (if distracted) parents. These strands are braided throughout this intense, powerful, experiential read.

The bones of the story...a political prison on the Andaman Islands during WWII is attacked by the Japanese, slaughter is heaped on torture, and through it all a family makes a life amid the death...are unfamiliar to most of us in the US. The existence of the Andamans, those odd and liminal boundary markers between marine biomes and cultural fault lines between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, is probably unfamiliar even to geographically savvy folk here. Unless, of course, they're familiar with that idiotic spiritual imperialist who got himself murdered by the North Sentinelese isolationists. (Got what he deserved, in my never-remotely humble opinion.) These islands are very charged with an intense and irresistible energy for storytellers. Author Khan is the one who should be trusted to tell you the saga of their restless spirits.

I can't really imagine it's a spoiler to reveal that the British Raj wasn't too terribly popular with quite a lot of the people they ruled. If you haven't heard of the Mahatma, take a quick peek at Wikipedia and then come back. He wasn't alone; he didn't work in isolation; and he wasn't the first freedom fighter on the Indian subcontinent. The parents in this story are, like the Mahatma, resisters of British imperial rule of India. For their beliefs and the actions they inspired them to take, they're imprisoned in the Cellular Jail. This hellscape was built after the 1857 Indian Rebellion exploded the political-prisoner population the British detained.

History lesson aside, though it's very much not an aside but a central part of the experience of this read, the story Author Khan tells us is a deeply personal one. Nomi Ali, a Muslim child, is brought up with her brother in the Cellular Jail's ambit...and, odd as it sounds, it's...just a childhood. An abnormal one to the reader. Nomi doesn't really process this...she experiences the pains of growing up as the child of adults who are distracted, whose attention doesn't center on her or her needs. The awfulness an adult reader barely needs to infer, it feels so pervasive to us, isn't her issue. She feels alone. Her life isn't, in her observation, very important or even all that interesting. So she finds companionship and she comes of age in this stew of people who have only one thing in common: the colonial oppressors want them kept away from their homes enough to isolate them thoroughly. In the ordinary course of her life, Nomi wouldn't have encountered a Burmese person, or lived in a place with an Indigenous population older than her own ancestors, or been directly in the path of the Japanese army as they swept through South Asia.

Brutal as the British were as jailers, the Japanese arrived to add much more misery...need I remind anyone of the "comfort women" and their heinous sufferings?...to the existing awfulness. For Nomi, though, this is...life. She gets on with the task of being alive and growing up.

It is for that reason that I kept reading this chronicle in multiple voices of the horrors of war in a colonial setting. I was not taken with the author's choice to spread her narrative over multiple points of view and multiple strands of time. It was an extra call on my attention, an extra demand to retain details, that seemed to me to be unnecessary to make the larger point. Author Khan was asking that I invest in many lives, but shallowly; had I been given a choice, I would've invested in Nomi very deeply, and her story would still have enabled the deep interrogation of the immorality of colonialism and its inevitable offshoot, war.

I would not in any way recommend that you shy away from reading this story. I want it to be part of all of our mental furniture, to fix itself in the legendarium of World War II. The urgency and the passion of Author Khan's storytelling voice will woo resistant readers into investing in a painful read, I honestly believe, and the story told is one of such tremendous relevance and urgency in 2022. We're witnessing analogous events unfold in Xinjiang. We're watching in horror as Mariupol and Kramatorsk see vile crimes against children, therefore against the future of humanity itself, perpetrated by invaders bent on territorial occupation. We aren't entitled to remain ignorant of the ways that impacts those who suffer it.

But it's entirely too much to doomscroll the day away, to surrender to a helpless wretchedness. So turn, as I always have and recommend that you do too, to the past perfect, the completed action that explains and illuminates the present. This novel will give you furniture to rest your unanchored anguish and rage on. Nomi, and the characters around her, will afford us in our privileged isolation from the physical realities of war, a trellis to grow the vines of empathy into maturity. I hope they will root strongly in you, and bloom flowers of yellow and blue tolerance and understanding.

Understanding the experience of war, as THE MIRACULOUS TRUE HISTORY OF NOMI ALI affords you the opportunity to do, might lead to more compassionate actions in one's own sphere of reality. This true story, told as a novel, gives you the chance to think through the consequences of inattention and indifference.

>150 richardderus: Right!?!

>150 richardderus: *roflmao*

Though personally, I drink *both* coffee and green tea. Also white tea, and sometimes black.

>153 ArlieS: Arlie...really...such, such unseemly confessions! *tsk* I shall not hold it against you (publicly) that you consume camellia-shrub trimmings, but to broadcast it...!

>152 Storeetllr: Awomen, Sister Mary!

>150 richardderus: tea heee. *Snort*.

>155 Caroline_McElwee: *hands Caro a box of tissues*

I think you meant "tea HEAVE" didn't you?

>150 richardderus: hahahahaha YES
I do drink tea later in the day, but nothing beats a fully caffeinated cup of morning coffee.

>157 bell7: But Mary! Surely not *gag* green tea! *shudder*

Nastier even than the regular stuff, green tea.

>150 richardderus: LOL!
Well, I do need coffee first thing in the morning.
But I must confess after breakfast I do have a pot of green tea... Doing it since I read somewhere green tea might help against depression. So after weaning of my anti-depressant, I started drinking green tea. Didn't like it at first, but got used to it over time. No depressions since, it might be coincidence, but I rather keep it this way, not taking any chances!

Happy Sunday, Richard. As expected, I had a great meet up with our favorite Cafe proprietor yesterday. I sooooo wish we could include other LTers on these entertaining outings. I hope to spend a lot more time today with In the Distance. Glad to hear you loved it.

058 Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Flamethrowers meets Let the Great World Spin in this debut novel set amid the heated conflict of Seattle's 1999 WTO protests.

On a rainy, cold day in November, young Victor—a boyish, scrappy world traveler who's run away from home—sets out to sell marijuana to the 50,000 anti-globalization protestors gathered in the streets. It quickly becomes clear that the throng determined to shut the city down—from environmentalists to teamsters to anarchists—are testing the patience of the police, and what started as a peaceful protest is threatening to erupt into violence.

Over the course of one life-altering afternoon, the lives of seven people will change forever: foremost among them police chief Bishop, the estranged father Victor hasn't seen in three years, two protestors struggling to stay true to their non-violent principles as the day descends into chaos, two police officers in the street, and the coolly elegant financial minister from Sri Lanka whose life, as well as his country's fate, hinges on getting through the angry crowd, out of jail, and to his meeting with the president of the United States.

In this raw and breathtaking novel, Yapa marries a deep rage with a deep humanity, and in doing so casts an unflinching eye on the nature and limits of compassion.

A LOVELY SURPRISE GIFT. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

Doing something, he had discovered, anything, however small, that contributed to your meaningfulness of self and surroundings—well, that was the trick. That was the trick to not feel like shit.
–and–
What is the function of the heart, if not to convince the blood to stay moving with the limits where it belongs, to stay at home.
Stay at home, stay at home, stay at home.

But restless thing that it is, your blood, it leaps into the world.
–and–
...{T}hey learned that courage is not the ability to face your fear, heroically, once, but is the strength to do it day after day. Night after night. Faith without end. Love without border.

What the 1999 WTO Protests taught the reactionaries around the world was that there was nothing they could do to win the hearts of the people. They set about controlling their bodies instead. As Author Yapa put it, "...how deep the darkness of the heart which longs for control," and there it is out in the open. The hearts of a few demand that the world obey them, obey their darkness, and submit to external control.

None of the seven PoV characters in this story are without that darkness. They're all on trajectories that will not allow then to remain unbruised and unbattered by life, and more particularly by the awfulness of demanding economic justice from those whose entire way of life, whose whole sense of self, is rooted in and branches from their hoarded wealth. There are those whose one need in this life is to deny others what they want and/or need (preferably both) so they can Win, they can be seen to be Right because they've won! Then there are those whose one need in this life is to take away what it is they've decided is unfairly denied to others:

They wanted to tear down the borders, to make a leap into a kind of love that would be like living inside a new human skin, wanted to dream themselves into a life they did not yet know. He heard them in the streets saying, “Another world is possible,” and beneath his ribs broken and healed and twice broken and healed and thrice broken and healed, he shuddered and thought, God help us. We are mad with hope. Here we come.
–and–
Tiresome people, but he knew it was only human nature to believe it best to ignore suffering, to focus on your own good fortune. The human survival mechanism: to say your prayers, thank your gods, and hold your breath when you passed the slums. The sweet poison of privelege, wasn't it? To think blindness a preferable condition.

And neither side of this divide sees the grim and angry reality: They're one coin. Heads, tails, maybe they're aesthetically distinct but they're one zero-sum-game playing piece of a coin. It would be funny if it weren't so tragic.

The central spine of the book, for this reader, is the story of Bishop and Victor...father and son, estranged, and truly, absolutely the same man, the same wounded-by-loss, blinded-by-love man. Just as sad as father-and-son estrangements always are. Just as inevitable as the voice of experience being unable to be the ears of acceptance that a rudderless, shallow-drafted dinghy of a boy needs to find a channel in the rough storms he can't avoid:

“What we require of others so that we may live our lives of easy convenience. Dad, there are people who work all day every day for thirty years assembling the three wires that make a microwave timer beep. What are we supposed to think of this? How do they survive it? Why do we ask them to?”
–and–
“Son, how easily an open heart can be poisoned, how quickly love becomes the seeds of rage. Life wrecks the living.”

Singing the same song, different verses, and different keys...the minor key of youthful wounds, the major key of adult scars.

What you need to know is that Author Yapa wrote a polyphonic poem, a written kōan to the concept of connection and belonging. What you want to read needs to be story of discovering yourself in many places, seeing your wounds and worlds across gulfs of experience and of time as you seek out the hand, the heart, the warm and welcoming shoulder to shelter and comfort you:

It was 1999 in America, he had traveled the world for three years, looking for what he didn’t know, and now here he found himself: absolutely allergic to belief, nineteen years old, and totally alone.
–and–
And yet there he was, his son, looking and smiling through his half-opened eyes, not a look of concern, but as if he understood in some way, the sometime knowledge of what this is, the knowledge of the whole ugly beautiful thing, the knowledge of the courage it takes to move into fear and to fuck up and to go on living, knowing that sometimes it is two people alone and some small kindness between them that is not even called family, or forgiveness, but might be what some, on the good days, call love.

Good days or bad, that is its name: Love. There are strands to this too-short, too-scattered narrative that seek their love, that clutch their illusions of love; but in this father, whose son is not his flesh and blood but is his, and this son, whose world refuses to stop hurting and whose heart can't make itself heard yet, there is a beautiful, complete love of like-minded men.

If that's a story you need to read, as I did, then get this into your hands at once.

Wordle 295 4/6

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Four is outstripping three as my most-common guess by an increasingly unclosable gap.

Burgoine #21

The Human Front (PM's Outspoken Authors #10) by Ken MacLeod

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of a Prometheus and Sidewise Award, this science fiction novella is a comedic and biting commentary on capitalism and an exploration of technological singularity in a posthuman civilization. As a world war rages on without an emerging victor, the story follows John Matheson, an idealistic teenage Scottish guerilla warrior who must change his tactics and alliances with the arrival of an alien species. This alternate history and poignant political satire flips hero types and expectations, delivering a lively tale of adventure—as dramatic and thought provoking as it is funny. Also included is an interview with the author and two essays that relate his poignant views on social philosophies.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: What a hoot...what a ride! I can't imagine how the author works in the past and still makes a future worth dreaming about. He's just better at it than the other guys from the 1970s & 1980s.

This alternate history novella, with a few explanatory notes following, gives the reader a real workout. There are a few points where I was sure I understood what he was doing...and was I ever wrong. When he decided to show me the real deal, I thought I was a bit dim for not getting it. Still love being off the beam, when we get to go this way. If you're in the mood for a read that doesn't mean what you think it means, you could do worse but not a lot better.

>161 msf59: Hiya Mark! Happy Sunday...I wish we could all do a big ol' 75er meetup somewhere. It would be worth the pain of traveling for me!

In the Distance was the first I'd read by him and, well, whatever he writes I want to see!

>161 msf59: Hiya Mark! Happy Sunday. Wouldn't it be fun if we could do a big ol' 75er meetup someday? The future hasn't happened, so I dunno, maybe....

In the Distance was a really, really pleasurable book. I can't wait to get into his new one!

>159 FAMeulstee: Happy Sunday, Anita! You know, caffeine is a psychoactive drug and specific against depression...and coffee tastes good....

*smooch*

>166 richardderus: I drink at least 5 large cups of coffee, Richard dear, so that part is taken care of too ;-)

>167 FAMeulstee: And that, my dear old friend, is exactly where caffeine reaches psychoactive saturation! Five normal coffee cups = 30 ounces/885ml, and that's where it begins to act as an antidepressant. I drink 34 ounces per day, a whisper over a liter. Works like a charm, or has since I started making it a point to do it daily in 2016.
***
Y'all! The Guardian's latest fun-facts-about-books article is about how they smell: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/07/the-smell-of-old-books-science-lib...
I know most all the seriously bookish sorts who hang out here are sniffers, but I hadn't ever so much as considered the practice might be this wide-spread!

>168 richardderus: My coffee intake hasn't changed in over 40 years, I only stopped adding milk and sugar about ten years ago. The cups we use are 0,25 liter (250 ml), it is filtered coffee, mainly Robusta mixed with a little bit of Arabica, using about 20 gram coffee per cup. No idea how many ounces that makes ;-)

>169 FAMeulstee: Well, as the total of 1.25L is over 885ml, we can be sure it's over the psychoactive threshold. I still milk my morning coffee but I've never sugared it. Sweet bevvies aren't my first choice.

>170 richardderus: I loved sweets, until my weight got way out of hand, nearing 100 kg. That was because of my thyroid, my body kept more and more fluids, but I didn't know back then. So I quitted all sugar for some years, only lost 3 kg. Still take almost no sweets, only when we are on vacation and when we visit elsewhere. After getting my thyroid right, I lost nearly 20 kg, without any change in diet.

My coffee intake sadly didn't keep depression away... So that is where the green tea entered my life ;-)

>171 FAMeulstee: I suppose it's the fact that you're drinking the terrible stuff that does the job. "Please, please don't hurt me anymore!" beg your taste-buds, and thus you become less depressed because you aren't increasing your *shudder* green-tea intake.

>164 richardderus: And he scores! One more for my ever growing TBR, even if it's a novella rather than a full novel.

>171 FAMeulstee: >172 richardderus: AFAICT neither coffee nor green tea is helping my tendency to depression - I have prescription drugs for that, and also find exercise helpful - but coffee in particular functions as a pleasant thing to start my day off right. But never black (shudder); I insist it requires cream to be drinkable - much to the horror of my housemate.

>172 richardderus: ROFLOL! The stuff does also contains caffeine, a little less than coffee...
But hey, it works, and I am very thankful it does!!

Won't speak of the terrible stuff anymore, Richard dear, promise.

>174 FAMeulstee: Won't speak of the terrible stuff anymore, Richard dear, promise.

*whew*

>173 ArlieS: Oh, it would never, ever be a cure I'd recommend to someone, Arlie. Prescription drugs got me onto an even keel...years of thyroid meds helped me stay there...then I discovered that, after giving up the idea that I could wake up without coffee, I felt **much** better if I drank my entire french press's contents instead of making it last two days. Helped stabilize me, but did not get me there.

...wait...what?! You're not utterly unable to resist a father/son love story?! I am shocked, shocked! to learn this.

That entire series is one I'd strongly encourage you to go shop around!

>170 richardderus: & >171 FAMeulstee: I have never been a one to milk or sugar in my coffee but it does mean that one needs to buy good quality coffee.

>170 richardderus: & >171 FAMeulstee:
I always had cream in my coffee and then the pandemic came. I taught myself to drink my coffee black. Two years later and I rarely indulge with cream. I am also a tea drinker. I try to drink green tea because of its antioxidant properties but I drink both green and black tea. I do like black tea with milk, but will drink it without. I do NOT use sugar in either tea or coffee. Never have.

>177 benitastrnad: It's perfectly possible to drink coffee black, but I'm not a cream-using drinker either. Full-fat milk. It helps my wonky digestive system with the acids inherent in french-press coffee preparation.

>176 PaulCranswick: I remember when I could afford good coffee, and that was always best drunk black for me. Not affordable now, but really, I can't say I miss it enough to want to spend what it costs.

>150 richardderus: *snort*.
I tried drinking green tea, but the only ones I found I could drink with any degree of enjoyment were those with flavour, particularly the citrus ones. Then I gave up trying to get used to it and drink Rooibos, mint, or fruit teas instead.
I have 1 cup of coffee a day, and I'm not about to give that up in a hurry. Just the 1 black decaf coffee. Not too strong a roast, so it's not got that intense bitter edge. I get it from a small roaster that's near a friend of mine. Thank goodness for online ordering & shipment - otherwise I'd have to visit Tony far more often than I do >;-)

Hi RD!

But..but.. I thought I posted here yesterday.

>150 richardderus: Tea in the morning only works for me if I’m sick enough to not appreciate coffee. Then it has to be 2 teabags of Constant Comment with 3 teaspoons of sugar. Green tea doesn’t appeal to me at all.

>151 richardderus: Thanks, but no thanks. That doesn’t surprise you, though, doesn’t it?

>162 richardderus: 0 for 2… I do realize it’s me not the novels. I’m currently reading a thriller and a true crime book. I’ve also started The Code Breaker, How to Be Champion, Run with the Horsemen, My Name is Red, Consider the Lobster, and a few others on my Kindle.

>164 richardderus: Ah, ha! You got finally me. Onto the wish list it goes.

>165 richardderus: Wouldn’t that be lovely, a huge 75ers meet up!

>168 richardderus: I’ve been keeping the doors to the Library closed in recent months, and when I go in there, the lovely smell of books caresses me.

>170 richardderus: In the summer of 1972, after my first year of college, I worked for a small mfg company in SoCal, American Kleaner Manufacturing Company. It made steam cleaners and had lucrative contracts with the US Navy. I was a heavy milk-and-sugar coffee drinker, because that’s what Mom and Dad did to their coffee. One day at work we were either out of creamer or sugar. I tried it with what we had, found it disgusting, tried it black, and that’s the start of my drinking coffee black, no sugar.

I got Wordle in 3 today. *smile*

*smooch* from your own Horrible

Just a quick breeze-through to wish you a good Monday!

Wordle 296 4/6

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It too me staring at the next-to-last letter for a solid minute, unable to imagine...then *wham* it hit me! Four ain't bad.

059 Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A story of queer love and working-class families, Young Mungo is the brilliant second novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain.

Douglas Stuart's first novel Shuggie Bain, winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, is one of the most successful literary debuts of the century so far. Published or forthcoming in forty territories, it has sold more than one million copies worldwide. Now Stuart returns with Young Mungo, his extraordinary second novel. Both a page-turner and literary tour de force, it is a vivid portrayal of working-class life and a deeply moving and highly suspenseful story of the dangerous first love of two young men.

Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars—Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic—and they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Yet against all odds, they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. As they fall in love, they dream of finding somewhere they belong, while Mungo works hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his big brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. And when several months later Mungo's mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to try to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future.

Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism and giving full voice to people rarely acknowledged in the literary world, Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the divisions of sectarianism, the violence faced by many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I want to address something that's been bothering me a lot to start off this review:

There. I've said it. I stand by it. Adjust your seatbelts, laddies and gentlewomen, and listen up.

Mungo's a teenager with a truly evil, selfish alcoholic mother, a violent, should-be-imprisoned brother, and a sweet but misguided, loving but naïve sister, and a serious tic gifted to him by his unaddressed, undiagnosed neurodivergence. His life isn't one tiny bit of fun, and unlike Shuggie in Author Stuart's first book, he doesn't have a love object in his entire life. He loves his sister and she loves him, but that's a little like the lame helping the halt. Shuggie was entirely absorbed in loving his mother, but Mungo seldom sees his and when he does, it's usually better for him not to spend much time in her toxic terrible black hole of a presence. Being a neurodivergent person, Mungo fixates on his too-young, too-broken mother for whatever guideposts she can offer; she sucks the whole of his lovingkindness down like her genuine love, fortified wine, and gives none back. So he knows, at least seems to know, she isn't a model he can follow. His sister does the best she can to fill the kindness void, but she's barely older than Mungo by the calendar. She's gotten out of a bad jam, and come to know she can't live in this world...meaning she has to leave Mungo behind. Hamish? All Hamish does, all he knows, is rage and violence. There will be nothing else left in Mungo's life...no other emotional reality.

This, then, isn't Shuggie Redux. Stop pretending it is. Yes, it's set in deindustrializing Glasgow. Yes, it takes place in the working class parts of that world. Alcoholic parent, abusive sibling, all there...but the meat of this story is Mungo, and therefore this story could not be less like the family that slips away from Shuggie, that he just...loses...no fault of his own. The one good thing, as he tells himself (and with which I agree) is that he has is the love he bears for and gets from the Catholic boy who lives near him: James. James, son of a cancer-taken mother, an oil-rig worker father, and in love with Mungo. Who, need I mention, loves James right back. They explore their teenaged awkward bodies, they try to figure out the HUGE new emotions, and they face up to the impossibility of being openly gay in their world. Hamish? He'll kill Mungo; James's father's already had a go at killing him for it. James, older by almost a year, is the one who has to bear the public brunt of their inevitable discovery...Mungo just can't.

Not to say Mungo's not hapless and helpless. He's simply clueless, he lacks a kind of inner compass that warns a person away from impulsive action. In the end, it causes a world of trouble for him, and all of it is his mother's fault. She wants to be alone, to get her funtimes with a new man, so off she packs Mungo (freshly beaten by Hamish for the James-loving faggot that he is) off with...strangers, basically. And that goes epically badly for Mungo. He can think of nothing, no way out of his terrible situation. He's got nothing except what he's seen, what's surrounded him his whole life when Life, the great existential crisis that is Life, crashes down on him. That it is a test is clear; how he responds to the test isn't obviously the way he would have even a day before it came upon him. Mungo makes his whole life anew when he absolutely can do nothing except react, respond to the great crisis.

It is harsh, ugly, and frightening, and it comes from events so hideous that I was sure I would lose my rag and start screaming incoherently at the Kindle. And it was, in this reader's angry, bitter judgment, the only and the best way he could have behaved. It was a boy, cooked in a bath of rage, becoming the only man that bath dissolved the fatty, weakening childness off of him to be.

There is a scene at the very end of the book, a moment, a thing we're not expecting. It is, of course, Author Stuart's last word. He wrote this book, this harsh and unyielding and rageful story, the way he wrote Shuggie Bain: without mercy. It was the perfect ending. And this was the best way he could possibly have followed that book up: darkness has shadows, too.

Happy morning. Coffee at hand. Gearing up to venture into a hotbed of the Confederacy, Lexington, VA. A commiseration and reunion with my sister. Ta-ta.

>184 weird_O: Have a wonderful trip, Bill!

>181 drneutron: Hey Doc! Happy you're here. Enjoy this week of plenty.

>180 karenmarie: No...not that I saw, anyway...maybe you read through? It's not like you have nothing else to command your attention right now.

It took me 4, and might've been an X, but inspiration hit. The pattern just...appeared.

I don't care for creamers, either powdered or liquified. Cream's too heavy, too textured, to make it something I want to consume every day, and creamers emulate that quality.

No, not one of those misses strikes me as odd. Honestly, I don't know if The Human Front is one I'd recommend to you...pretty, um, SFnal. Well...you're the doctor. *smooch*

>179 Helenliz: Decaf? Do you experience sleep disturbance from caffeine?

Rooibos is an interesting flavor, one I think of as an acquired taste. Funny thing about acquired tastes, I usually acquire them immediately...rooibos is oddly comforting for a tisane.

>182 richardderus: it took me five, having the first and penultimate letters right and knowing there was a U in there somewhere before it finally came together and made sense.

Green tea is fine when I need a hot drink though not my absolute favorite and it's far too easy to over steep it. My preferred choice is Trader Joe's chai.

>186 bell7: There's nothing like a direct path to this word, at least for people I know. Re spoiler, yep...that's a dead giveaway.

Chai's just a tasty sweet treat, if there's tea in it I can't taste it. I don't generally care for sweet drinks much, but that's one I won't automatically turn down.

>185 richardderus: I can't tolerate caffeine. Nausea, jitters and heart palpitations all result from a nice strong cup of coffee. And while I might love the coffee, I don't love the after effects. >:-(
I think it might be my body's revenge for the amount I used to drink in my university years. I had a percolator that got put on twice a day (if not more).

The green tea experiment was trying to find something hot to drink that had lower caffeine so that I could drink 5/8 cups of it a day. I didn't like it enough for that. Rooibos is an acquired taste, I would agree. Dedicated tea drinkers tend to not like it. As an only occasional tea drinker, I acquired that taste quite quickly.

Wordled in 5 - I must have stared at it after guess 4 for a few minutes before it came to me.

I Wordled in 6 - shameful!

I can't see the image in your review of the new Douglas Stuart, and I feel like I'm missing something important.

>188 Helenliz: Oh my gosh! That's an awful result. Caffeine is something I find so very useful that the idea of not being able to have it is painful!

What is it, one wonders, that causes a particular taste to be harder for some to acquire than others? Like that chemical in brussels sprouts and coffee, or in cilantro, that some people can taste but most can't. Not every divisive flavor seems to have a unique chemical signature. Or so it seems now...who knows what future research will reveal?
***
"Our current cultural conversation around spoilers remains frustratingly stuck in the same gear it has been for decades now: Spoilers are bad, and we should not have to hear them. That conversation reduces stories only to their most shocking plot points. Too often, it is only interested in binary questions around which characters live or die. I’ve argued at length in the past that modern spoilerphobia, while understandable, is fundamentally antithetical to the discussion of art, as well as a historical anomaly in terms of how we consume stories."

From this interesting Vox article by Emily St. James.

>189 katiekrug: Oh dear! Yes, it's important, so I've re-made the link...can you see it now?

Six was not out of the question for me today...I was saved by having a blinding flash of inspiration. It isn't a word I use very often, so I wasn't going to just come up with it.

Yep, I can see it now!

>183 richardderus: I know I will read this RD, but not for a while. I am glad it matched the debut, second books can be tricky, or maybe he wrote it first, and decided to publish his second book first!

>183 richardderus: Oh your review managed to convince me this was not a re-run of Shuggie Bain, despite what sound like some similar themes. I didn't *love* Shuggie Bain. I felt it was ok - some excellent strengths but an unremitting unlovely darkness too that did not work for me.

Your review suggests that the darkness will be just as unremitting and yet your words have intrigued me. I am not sure yet if I will read this book, but if I do it will be because I saw it here first.

>150 richardderus: But for those of us who like green tea and not coffee, this is a non-issue :)

>151 richardderus: Adding that one to BlackHole. Thanks for the review and recommendation!

>162 richardderus: That one is going into the BlackHole as well.

>164 richardderus: And that one!

>183 richardderus: And that one too. *sigh*

Have a wonderful week, RD!

>195 alcottacre: "Those of us"? Implying that you believe yourself not to be an abnormal freakish outlier? mmm hmmm

I'm four for four today!! Yay!! Honestly though, I really don't think The Human Front will appeal too terribly much to you. Permaybehaps if they can ILL it for you, but I don't think buying it would be a good investment for your shelves.

*smooch*

>194 sirfurboy: Oh, thank you Stephen, those words mean a lot to me. I am not sure it would be a book for you, honestly, but I know at least you would pick it up prepared for what you would find.

>193 Caroline_McElwee: I wondered about that, Caro, if he maybe thought this book would be too much for the book-buying public and wrote Shuggie to, erm, present his themes and settings without the violence at such a high setting. No matter. They are separate stories, they share a world with their creator, but they are not the same.

In case you were wondering.

>192 katiekrug: Good! I hope you see why I was so insistent that you see it.

>185 richardderus: Rooibos just doesn't work for me; I'm not sure why. But I've tried it often enough that I'm pretty sure I won't acquire a taste for it with even more exposure.

>197 ArlieS: As we've noted before...not everything is for everyone, and thank goodness there's not a single reason in the world to try to acquire a taste for something you don't like.

>183 richardderus: Sounds like a solid second novel by Douglas Stuart, Richard dear.
The Dutch translation came out four days ago. I will wait for a library copy.

Hopelessly behind! But happy Monday with a smooch.

>200 Berly: Hiya Berly-boo! *smooch*

>199 FAMeulstee: It really was, Anita. I hope the folk before you get the pages fanned fast.

Happy Tuesday!

It's sunny here today. Hope it's nice weather where you are as well!

As for great tea, I bought some mocha tea. No matter what I do, the powder won't dissolve so I have given up. I just stick to my regular teas and have my cup of coffee in the morning.

Excellent review of Young Mungo, Richard. Shuggie Bain was a 5-star read for me and I am on the library list for Mungo although my other half is also interested so we might just buy a copy.

Great reviews of both Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist & Young Mungo. I also really enjoyed the former novel and can't wait to read Stuart's latest. He sure has made a splash in our literary world, right?

Wordle 297 4/6

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I thought it's either ROACH or ROYAL. *sigh* It wasn't ROACH.

Morning, RD! It's National Grilled Cheese Day - celebrate well.

Wordle 297 3/6

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Sheer luck, of course.

>206 katiekrug: I asked the kitchen for a grilled cheese...no go. *sigh*

Happy Tuesday, Wordlemeister!

>204 msf59: Hiya Mark! Happy Tuesday. I think you'll really resonate with Young Mungo. It's so bleak, so incredibly sad...and so wonderfully beautiful, just like you'd expect from one of his books.

Be prepared: There are Glaswegian words that you need to figure out in context. They aren't, um, "subtitled" if you will, there's no glossary (though I think one wouldn't be a bad idea).

I recommended Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist to Ellen a few years ago and, while looking for the review I would've sworn I wrote to sell her on the idea, couldn't find it. *sigh* So...I wrote another one.

>203 lauralkeet: Thank you most kindly, Laura...and since you're both interested, I strongly recommend the purchase. I don't think I'll ever read the book again, but I do think I need to own one. Weird, that impulse, isn't it? "No, I won't read you but you need to be on my shelf."

>202 figsfromthistle: ...mocha...tea...two things I dislike in one! What a dreadful invention.

It's dank, warmish, and plain ol' bleeeccchhh outside. I'm glad there's nothing I need to do today! Spend Tuesday splendidly.

‘Morning, RDear. I wish you a good day.

>183 richardderus: I was never tempted to read Shuggie Bain and I’m not tempted to read this one. I did read parts of your review, though.

>205 richardderus: I also got it in 4.

*smooch*

>208 karenmarie: Hiya Horrible, I'm quite sure you're correctly avoiding the Stuart stories. I doubt you'd enjoy the experience of reading either one.

*smooch*

Soul sibling!
"...I continue to be a longtime abuser of the em-dash...It’s like the piano’s damper pedal; it gives the mind such a sense of velocity and permission—and results in total unintelligibility. I cull them in the end, the little pests. I had to tweeze a dozen from the paragraph above."
This interview with The Oxonian made me shiver with delight: Someone else knows my struggles! (And yes, I know a lot of y'all wish I used those tweezers of hers more freely.)

>196 richardderus: Nope, not implying. Stating as fact, I am abnormal - because I know nobody knew that before.

((Hugs)) and **smooches**, RD

>211 alcottacre: You...you ARE?! ...
...
...my pearls, my pearls

*smooch*

Happy Tyr’s Day, Richard. (Who knew he was the god for today?)

I’e got a “frequent user” emdash card. I’d probably use it more than periods and commas if it wouldn’t annoy the hell out of people. Or maybe that’s a reason to do it?

>213 jnwelch: Tyr's Day orisons, Joe, from your fellow emdasher. Relearning the HTML codes for things, something I really haven't had any call to use in decades, has been a boon since I hate the bastard emdash "--" beyond my ability to coherently express.

>214 richardderus:. I know what you mean -reprehensible.

060 Violets by Shin Kyung-sook

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: We join San in 1970s rural South Korea, a young girl ostracised from her community. She meets a girl called Namae, and they become friends until one afternoon changes everything. Following a moment of physical intimacy in a minari field, Namae violently rejects San, setting her on a troubling path of quashed desire and isolation.

We next meet San, aged twenty-two, as she starts a job in a flower shop. There, we are introduced to a colourful cast of characters, including the shop's mute owner, the other florist Su-ae, and the customers that include a sexually aggressive businessman and a photographer, who San develops an obsession for. Throughout, San's moment with Namae lingers in the back of her mind.

A story of desire and violence about a young woman who everyone forgot, VIOLETS is a captivating and sensual read, full of tragedy and beauty.

I RECEIVED MY DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This translation from the Korean joins a widening stream of Korean-culture transplants...Squid Game, Minari, this author's previously translated novel Please Look After Mom...making their roots into American pop-cultural soil.

If you've yet to explore the trickle, start now before it's a flood. I think it's wonderful because English-language monoglot culture gets stale and boring and all alike if we don't seek out fresh infusions of talent and stories. And, like all the best translations, this story's timelessness is rendered in prose that could very easily have been first created in English...none of the occasional signals of awkwardly trying to explicate something that one word in the translated language would convey whole and entire. That is a fine achievement indeed, probably helped along by the fact that things like "minari" aren't quite as furrin as they would've been in 2011, when Please Look After Mom was published.

What happens in this story is not particularly new or unusual. A girl is born to unfit parents:

In a house with shut doors, a mother closes her eyes as the baby’s grandmother offers her the newborn. The mother knows what will happen now. An uncelebrated girl. The infant accepts her mother’s closed eyes in lieu of a loving caress, perhaps having intuited her fate from the womb, and does not bother crying. The sound of the monsoon fills the house. Underneath the porch, a dog curls its legs into itself. Can the baby hear the sound of the rain? She’s about to fall asleep in her grandmother’s hands. That same night, her father gives his daughter’s face only a cursory glance.

Thus does another unwanted girl enter the world that won't ever bother to see her, really even to look at her. She's just...there. Her father never bothers to return; her mother never bothers with her at all, constantly seeking a man to care for her. (To be fair, an ordinary Korean woman's opportunities a generation ago weren't plentiful, and San's mother wasn't exceptional.)

Her mother. San thinks about her from time to time.

If she had begged her to stay, in front of that carefully prepared food, would she have listened? Why had San never once tried to hold her back? Wherever it was that her mother went, she never forgot to send her daughter money for school until San graduated.

The last time San had seen her mother was when she was a freshman in high school.

Children of addicts, the world over, tell versions of this same story. In this case, San's mother is addicted to men. She can't live without a man taking care of her, and she sacrifices the daughter she didn't want to get what she does want.

Author Shin isn't solely criticizing the mother. She is critiquing the social organization, the patriarchy, that privileges men and their desires over women and their needs so completely, so thoroughly, that the women are hollow and meaningless without a man. It is repulsive and it is reprehensible, and much abuse and violence simply are borne by the women because what option do they have? What other choice can they make? In San's case, she is so hollowed out by the complete absence of love from her mother (or anyone else) that she enacts the form of love she knows: rejection follows violence, as it must.

There is nothing forgiving in San. She forgives nothing, she is forgiven nothing, throughout the book. She is alone, she feels lonely of it (or so we infer...I don't know that she would be able to articulate the unmoored, disconnected reality that lonely people all share). For this, among other, reasons, this is a hard story to read. If you have ever been truly, down-to-the-bone lonely, this might be a triggering read for you. I haven't run across too many reads with this hyperconcentrated focus on loneliness, or too many with more success in rendering an emotional state into prose.

A stranger to every single person in the crowd, San finds herself blocking the sidewalk as people swerve to avoid her. Even if a carnival were to break out around her, the vacant expression on her face looks entrenched enough to persist.

Because she knows nothing of love, loving, being loved, San sees nothing except the one moment when everything changed, when the one love she thought she had was denied and made nothing. Not even attempting to find her former home nets San anything, she sees not the fields of minari she grew up among, where her life irrevocably emptied out and flowed away from her, but careful rectilinear plots of...something not minari. She has no roots. She feels no kinship.

Nothing happened this past summer. Only that, in the hot sun from time to time, a brief thought would appear and disappear around me. That thought was closer to me than any of the flowers in the shop. Even as I tried to capture the thought on paper, the heat would exhaust me and I'd give up. There were plenty of things I gave up, using the heat as an excuse. Which means I spent this past summer repeatedly deciding to do things and then giving up on them. As if my life were an exhibition of how good I am at giving up. It was that kind of summer.

It was that kind of life. It won't end well, it didn't begin well or go on well; that much we know. There's nothing hopeful in this story. Women like San aren't ever anyone's focus...her job in the flower shop working with and for Su-ae notwithstanding. She receives the desperate, genuine love of Su-ae as...nothing. San is fixated on emptiness...her only friend abandoned her!...and on men she does not want. She needs their love. She doesn't want it. She decided long ago that love wasn't something she could have, feel, receive, give. And so when it's offered to her she...doesn't see it. She does see the want of one man, she feels the desperate pull of another man on her attention, and gets nothing but unwanted results.

Every attempt to resist is met with his greater strength. In a moment, her head begins to droop.

She's released onto the street.
Her mind is completely taken over, her body a husk. No one seems to take note of the loneliness she carries. Just some woman in the crowd, unaware that her top is undone. A more observant person might have noticed her cheek slightly swollen from having been punched, the thin lines of her face a touch asymmetrical because of it. Someone might see her pale face and think, How could anyone ever look so pale....

A life of being unwanted, invisible, and it comes down to a final indignity. San is raped. Her hollowness filled at last with the violence that is all she can accept. It isn't in her to accept the reality of her situation, being unloved and unwanted, then seek out change. That's simply impossible. She leaves safety, courts rejection, and seeks oblivion.

Leaving behind only the tiniest of wakes...the end of the story of Oh San is a poignant piece of mythologizing that fit so poorly onto the rest of the story that I was forced by honest anger and sincere disdain for its sentimentality to whack a star off my rating. After a night's sleep where I dreamed of the photographer and San:

Violets. They bloom everywhere, making them seem more like weeds than proper flowers. San takes a closer look at them. Their little green leaves are small, their purple blossoms tiny. Before she came to the flower shop, she knew them as swallow flowers. Memories of entangling two swallow flower stems together and pulling them apart— one side was bound to snap. Whoever’s stem didn’t was the winner. She forgot what the prizes were, but she’d played the game many times. They did it with broadleaf plantains; they did it with foxtails.

The man keeps pressing the shutter and mumbling something discontentedly. “What’s so pretty about these flowers? Such nonsense.” His disappointment is so palpable, it makes her apologetic.

...I realized that his arc needed an end, too. I might not like that end, but I would've felt cheated (if not right away, then after my irritation with the whole ending subsided) had it not been there. So back came a half-star, though I confess with some grumbling on my part.

I think this small, powerful story deserves your eyeblinks. I think we should all resolve to notice the Oh Sans of this world, to extend a welcome to the table of them, to recognize their living presence instead of making them ghosts before they die.

Wordle 298 3/6

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Just...weird. I was sure it wasn't what it was. But I'll happily accept the three!

BURGOINE REVIEW #22

Bath Haus by P.J. Vernon

Real Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Oliver Park, a recovering addict from Indiana, finally has everything he ever wanted: sobriety and a loving, wealthy partner in Nathan, a prominent DC trauma surgeon. Despite their difference in age and disparate backgrounds, they've made a perfect life together. With everything to lose, Oliver shouldn't be visiting Haus, a gay bathhouse. But through the entrance he goes, and it's a line crossed. Inside, he follows a man into a private room, and it's the final line. Whatever happens next, Nathan can never know. But then, everything goes wrong, terribly wrong, and Oliver barely escapes with his life.

He races home in full-blown terror as the hand-shaped bruise grows dark on his neck. The truth will destroy Nathan and everything they have together, so Oliver does the thing he used to do so well: he lies.

What follows is a classic runaway-train narrative, full of the exquisite escalations, edge-of-your-seat thrills, and oh-my-god twists. P. J. Vernon's Bath Haus is a scintillating thriller with an emotional punch, perfect for readers curious for their next must-read novel.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE LIBRARY. PLEASE USE THOSE LIBRARIES!

My Review: I love flawed gay protagonists! They don't come more flawed than Oliver. What he did, how he did it, all truly contemptible. Why? Lower still. By the end of the story, he is the sort of creepy little loser it's easy to hate.

Nathan, well...he's a rotten-souled chip off the old block. He does nothing for anyone but himself. He is a walking, talking scion of White Privilege, and not worth the powder it would take to blow him up.

Why I kept going despite serious problems with the book is simple: the pace picked up after about the 40% mark. It got so involving I couldn't stop. But I g will say this, I wouldn't have been kind about the whole thing if Tillie had not been okay.

Borrow it from the library. Not a book you'll want to re-read.

I was infuriated and appalled to discover that my nemesis, who must not be named, hit my review of a favorite book of mine with a copyright strike (claiming to my blog-host that the review I posted was not mine to post, but theirs)...in the context of finding out that my library system didn't renew the ebook license on any of Kimmery Martin's titles!!

It's been an irritating day. I can't fix the library thing but I did fix my blog and FINALLY posted my review of The Antidote for Everything here, too. What a good read that was...I forgot to notice the w-bombs she dropped all over me, I was so absorbed!

>212 richardderus: I am sure you will recover from the shock soon, RD.

>216 richardderus: Well, if I can get hold of it, the book will have my eye blinks.

>218 richardderus: I think I will give that one a pass.

>219 richardderus: Sorry to hear that you are having an irritating day and do hope it gets better.

((Hugs)) and **smooches**

>220 alcottacre: Thanks for the well-wishes, Stasia, it will all iron itself out as the day goes by or it will utterly crush me, destroy my will to live, and create a vacuum where my soul was.

Yes, give that one a pass; it's brand-spankin' new, so it might not make it into y'all's system without some pushing; and no, I think the shock to my system is simply too, too powerful.

Adieu, ma vieille amie. I go to my final rest. *le smooch*

>215 jnwelch: *chuckle*

Hiya RDear! Happy Wednesday to you. Wordle almost got me, but I guessed right at word 6.

>216 richardderus: Beautiful review. I agree that I should read more widely, but I do hate the word ‘should’ and have been avoiding ‘shoulds’ as often as I can for many years now.

>218 richardderus: Nope. Sorry.

>219 richardderus: I’m sorry your shall-not-be-named nemesis attacked you. I’m glad things are under control, although I’m sure you wish you had the time back that you had to spend getting everything back under control.

>222 karenmarie: Oh dear...I've made Violets sound like an eat-your-minari book and I really didn't want to! It's not like it's a painful read, though the story is raw and emotional. The translator's done a terrific job. But, well...there's no need to force yourself to do anything, is there. We ain't in school no more.

As to Bath Haus...very, very much not a book for you. Ma'at is violated every which way.

They are a gift that keeps on giving. But there are ways to defang most all attacks, especially ones based on lies.

*smooch*

>219 richardderus: Jeebus. H. Crutch.!!! What fool would take on the role of your nemesis?! Personally, I'd rather owe money to the mob than piss you off. I pity the fool, indeed. And by 'pity' I mean I totally want to know how they are destroyed and if they cried.

>224 SomeGuyInVirginia: Heh. Well, sometimes the gods do the work, and this is one of those times.

Happily.

*smooch*

Just wanted to let you know I finished The Wrong End of the Telescope a few minutes ago. I do not rank it as highly as you did, but I am still giving it 4.25 stars. I preferred An Unnecessary Woman, I think, because I could relate more to the main character. Still, thank you for recommending it to me! I think Alameddine is going to be one of those "I must read everything he writes" authors for me.

Happy Thursday, Richard dear!

>225 richardderus: Happy the gods were on your side.

Wordle 299 4/6

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I thought, "it's MINED or MINCE so I'll try {third choice} first."
Darn.

>227 FAMeulstee: So far. One never knows with gods. They change their minds and make other plans and then you're below where you started. Nothing good lasts forever.

Happy Thursday, Anita! *smooch*

>226 alcottacre: It's not the same book at all, but it has Alameddine's great, spacious, loving heart in it...I think that's the thing we're both resonating to!

*smooch*

Burgoine #23

The Boystown Prequels: Two Nick Nowak Novellas by Marshall Thornton

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Lambda award-winning Boystown Mystery series follows the cases of former police officer turned private investigator Nick Nowak. Set in Chicago during the early 1980s, Nowak is haunted by his abrupt departure from the CPD and the end of his relationship with librarian Daniel Laverty. The Boystown Prequels includes:

Little Boy Dead
Former Chicago police officer turned private investigator, Nick Nowak is haunted by a traumatic break-up and his abrupt departure from the department after being gay-bashed. It's fall 1979 and Nick has just received his P.I. license but has no clients. Short on funds, he takes a temporary job as a driver for Film Fest Chicago. In a very short time, Nick deals with stalking fans, a crowd of protesters, and a critic’s stolen wallet that leads to murder.

Little Boy Afraid
It’s winter 1980, private investigator Nick Nowak gets one of his first jobs working for an openly-gay senate candidate. Allan Grimley has been receiving death threats, a lot of them, and it’s Nick’s job to keep him alive until the election. As he protects Grimley from increasing dangers, his friendship with bartender Ross deepens.

Both stories have been sold previously.

My Review: An exercise in nostalgia. I was totally sucked in by the idea of something set at the end of the Carter era, the last gasp of good government in the USA before the vile plutocrats distracted the stupid with a religious revival meeting and the leftists with pointless internecine-fighting nonsense.

Nick Nowak doesn't care about that, he cares about rent and gas for his Duster:

...and a man in his bed who will go away in (ideally before) the morning. He's coping with the serious problem of post-Outing shunning, a Polish Catholic family of cops whose lives he's ruined by daring not to conform, a new career as a private investigator that means he intersects with them and their like-minded bigots a lot, and an empty place in his life where his boyfriend (who buggered right off rather than deal with him anymore) once was.

These novellas are quite sexually explicit, and deeply unsafe for straight readers. Younger readers (than I am, say under 50) won't necessarily feel comfortable with Vaseline and barebacking. The stories they're telling are to my taste...Nick will gladly ignore your power stance, or use it to aim a solid kick to your boys if you try to cow him...so it was a few hours pleasantly spent.

‘Morning, RDear!

>228 richardderus: I bombed on Wordle. No excuses, just no brain.

>230 richardderus: No thank you, my dear, but I love the pic of the Duster.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

>231 karenmarie: Hiya Horrible, it is indeed morning. I'm just not sure I care for that fact....

Sorry about your streak ending. It's so irksome to simply not have any electricity when you go to flip the switch on your brain, isn't it.

The Thornton series is definitely one you should avoid. You'd get nothing out of it! Glad you enjoyed the excursion into Plymouth-ness. *smooch*

^Do I see a Duster up there? I remember those from my teen years.

Sweet Thursday, Richard. I hit the trails for a short time this AM and it was windy and chilly. I then warmed up quickly by spending some time with Jack for a few hours. If this kid can't brighten your day, nothing will.

>234 richardderus: Indeed you do spy that tragically brown 1974 Duster, Mark.

I'm glad it's a brighter day for Jack's influence! I'm not grandbabied up, but I'm warm and entertained by From the Abyss. Broster's weird fictions are...deeply weird.

Hi, Richard - Amazon's giving away 10 Kindle books today. Here's the link to Joe's thread where I saw the news. I thought you might be interested. https://www.librarything.com/topic/340698#7812770

>235 Storeetllr: Thank you, Mary! I've got eight of 'em. The Other Man was a fun read! *smooch*

I have: The Ardent Swarm
North to Paradise
An Eye for an Eye
The Easy Life in Kamusari
To the Sky Kingdom
Where the Desert Meets the Sea
Mother Dear: A Thriller

Yay!

Mine are:

A Puma Year
An Eye for an Eye (great minds)
To the Sky Kingdom (ditto)
The Other Man (not a big fan of romance, except maybe Heyer-esque, but why not give it a whirl?)
The Caiman (for my granddaughter)
The Ardent Swarm (bees!)
Mother Dear (terrible title; interesting blurb)

I love the title Where the Desert Meets the Sea, but the subject matter didn't grab me. Maybe I'll get it anyway; I won't always be in this odd and unsettled state of mind where little appeals (I hope).

ETA I got Where the Desert Meets the Sea, and now I will never get that song from Frozen 1 out of my mind.

I picked up The Other Man and An Eye for an Eye.

I think I failed to stop by here earlier, so belated Thursday smooch. x

*smooch*

>234 richardderus: Back in the day, my first Pinto was that color. Yes, I had more than one...

Hiya, RDear. Happy Friday.

>232 richardderus: I got it in 5 today.

>240 drneutron: Bill’s grandparents had a Ford dealership in Mooresville, NC from the 1920s to the 1960s and sold it to a former employee who gave them and Bill’s mama deals for the rest of their lives. This translated into a brand new Ford Pinto station wagon for Bill from his grandmother in the 1970s. It was Bill’s last Pinto, but we are still mostly a Ford family – when Jenna had her accident in March we didn’t have much choice at the local Ford dealership in these Covid used car times and they gave us a great deal on a used 2016 Kia Forte.

*smooch*

Wordle 300 6/6

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Waaay too many options for those three letters in those specific positions. Really glad my streak is alive!

Burgoine 24

The Lodger, That Summer by Levi Huxton

Real Rating: 3.5* of five, rounded up for asking better questions than one could expect.

FINALIST FOR THE 34th LAMMY AWARD—BEST LGBTQ EROTICA! Winners announced 11 June 2022.

The Publisher Says: It’s a hot summer Down Under and everyone’s got sex on the mind.

Eighteen year-old James has had a tough year. Having lost his mum to cancer and fought through grief to finish high school, he’s now got secret desires to contend with.

It’s Christmas in Sydney, and he’s ready to cast his worries aside for the summer holidays, a time of poolside parties, bush walks and ocean swims. But who is the seductive young man who’s moved into the spare room?

In this steamy coming-of-age novel, James and the men around him discover transformative new desires with the power to up-end lives or, possibly, unlock a brighter future.

My Review: Definitely not straight people safe. We're well and truly into the erotica shelf of the shop, all of it making itself useful despite flinging revolting w-bombs everywhere.

If the Star Trek mantra, "infinite diversity in infinite combinations," is meaningful to you, this story will please and possibly surprise you. There are minor inconsistent details...ages...but honestly it's just not worth getting into a swivet about.

Pleasant diversion. Give it a whirl.

>241 karenmarie: Hey there, Horrible! I think Kia, owned by Hyundai, is somehow partnered up with Ford on a global level. I don't pay a lot of attention anymore, I stopped driving and caring at about the same time.

All-6 *smooch*

>240 drneutron: Pintos! Plural!! EEEK

Did your parents drive Corvairs? How are you even alive?!

>239 ronincats: *smooch* back

>238 katiekrug: Hiya Katie, happy you're here!

>238 katiekrug:, >237 Storeetllr: The Other Man is a decent little story (see >108 richardderus:) but it's not one I'd've shoved at either of y'all. I think the cultural adornments will make you both take more interest than the same story told in, say, Boston would. And the romance is very sweet...low steam...which will, I think, make the main appeal (the story of a man almost 40 coming out) more appealing.

Who among us doesn't relate to our true selves going into eclipse to please someone else?

>237 Storeetllr: Mother Dear: A Thriller is an awful title. I hope like hell it's not an awful read!

*smooches* all around

Happy Friday *smooches* and hopes for a lovely weekend.

>242 richardderus: I got it in three, but considering the possible permutations it was sheer luck.

>246 bell7: Hi Mary! I'm glad you got lucky...I felt lucky to get it at all. It's an easy combination to use up all one's tries without getting anything at all in return!

Nope, no luck on the loveliness of the weekend, there's Religion in the air. *sigh* Ten days of it, to be precise.

>235 Storeetllr: Sadly, none of them grabbed me. But thanks for posting.

>236 richardderus: Nice haul!

Happy weekend wishes sent your way!

Happy Saturday, Richard. Getting birding & Jackson time in lately. The only thing taking a slight hit is the books but I will get on board. Have a great weekend.

Trying to catch up here.

>242 richardderus: Yesterday's Wordle was definitely a challenge. A lot of friends didn't get it at all. I managed to get it in 5, but mainly because I'd exhausted many of the letters in my first three guesses. The fourth one was where I got down to one letter missing, and I didn't have nearly as many options remaining because of how far off I'd been with my first word.

'Morning, RD, and happy Saturday to you.

Coffee, a bit of Friends stuff but not much, reading, and etc.

I'm still liking my unexpected-because-it's-contemporary-fiction The Adults and hope to finish it this weekend.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

Wordle 301 5/6

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*chuckle* Would've been 4 if I'd chosen CHEEK before CHEEP but it's Easter!

>252 karenmarie: Good Saturday morning, Horrible dear heart. I'm so glad something has surprised you! It's a sad day when we can't experience surprise in a happy way doing this thing we love so much.

*smooch*

>251 thornton37814: Hi Lori! See >253 richardderus: I relate to that.

>250 msf59: I know how you feel, Mark. It feels sometimes like there's just nothing like enough time to fit all the life we want in.

Onward to the bookcase!

>249 figsfromthistle: Thank you, Anita, the same wishes heartily returned from the East.

>248 ArlieS: :-)

Happy long weekend smooches, RDear!

>255 MickyFine: Glad you're doing the long-weekend thing, Micky, and happy holiday (whichever one you're celebrating).

Wordle 302 6/6

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Another glad-to-see-it "Phew."
AEONS, ALERT, AGLEE, ADDLE,APPLE,AMPLE

>257 richardderus: Happy Sunday, Richard dear!
Wordle 302 5/6

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I was glad to find it in five ANGST, ADIEU, PEACH, APPLE, AMPLE

Happy Sunday to you, RDear.

>257 richardderus: It took me 6, too, but a very different 6. Phew for sure.

Hi, Richard. Just passing through, but it's enjoyable here. And I didn't catch a single bb. Yay!

>260 weird_O: Hi there, Your Weirdness. I'll take the absence of book-bullet-shaped holes in your budget as a spur to goad me to ever-greater heights of effort.

>259 karenmarie: It was a bear today! Funny how all our paths to get to the same place are so different.

*smooch*

>258 FAMeulstee: I'm particularly impressed with your selections, Anita. I'd never have chosen PEACH but it would've clued me in to the key letter to solve in fewer than 6!

Happy Sunday to you! *smooch*

>219 richardderus: yikes, that is ...harsh.

>277 richardderus: those ones are a pain! I got mine in 3 today, the first time in ages. I get a lot of 5s these days, and they are simply 'meh', and move on.

>262 LovingLit: Hiya Megan! It's fucking dishonest, and a big fat lie on top of it. It is, however, over. No one can use it against me again.

You're on 303, right? PC just did tat one in six, so now I'm eager to get there & see where I fall on the scale!

My most-common Wordle score is still four. I'm in single digits on the sixes, I'm happy to report.

Wordle 303 6/6

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Something I clearly lack. *grr*

"In A Perfect World" by Irish surreal artist, Jimmy Lawlor

I want to visit that world, it looks amazingly fun.

Good morning, RDear. Happy Monday to you.

Are you still wifi-less? I may have missed an Announcement upstream about its return.

It's rainy and cold, and I will be wearing a mock-T and my down jacket when I head out this morning. I don't always pay attention to the weather report and was unhappily surprised at the rain and return to cold weather today after a beautiful day yesterday.

*smooch*

edited to add: I got it in 4. *preens*

I want the dark chocolate, coffee, million-book library, and Ekornes stressless chair world.

061 The Sugared Game and 062 To Trust Man on His Oath by K.J. Charles

Real Rating: 4.5* of five, rounded down because even though we went alllllmost a whole MM romantic mystery without a single w-bomb splattering my Imperial aesthetic hems, there the bastard was

The Publisher Says: It's been two months since Will Darling saw Kim Secretan, and he doesn't expect to see him again. What do a rough and ready soldier-turned-bookseller and a disgraced shady aristocrat have to do with each other anyway?

But when Will encounters a face from the past in a disreputable nightclub, Kim turns up, as shifty, unreliable, and irresistible as ever. And before Will knows it, he's been dragged back into Kim's shadowy world of secrets, criminal conspiracies, and underhand dealings.

This time, though, things are underhanded even by Kim standards. This time, the danger is too close to home. And if Will and Kim can't find common ground against unseen enemies, they risk losing everything.

A 1920s m/m romance trilogy in the spirit of Golden Age pulp fiction.

MY YOUNG GENTLEMAN CALLER KNOWS TO BUY ME EVERY RELEASE FROM THIS AUTHOR. HE IS THE BEST.

My Review: I did not see the ending coming. It's very hard to fool someone who's been reading as long as I have about something this central to the story for two whole books. I am clearly a sociopath because, as the finale debuted in the theatre (note misspelling intentional) of my mind I, the audience, was on my (mental) feet shouting for more gore. Gore there is, be forewarned.

But oh how satisfyingly deployed.

In my review of Slippery Creatures, I commented that the story resembled Notorious (Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, Nazi spies) only with 1940s hunk Steve Cochran in the Bergman role. This time...well, wait for tomorrow.

Now...if you'd like to see the pictures and read the spoilers, go to Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud and enjoy!

Also, on the blog you'll find a short review of this book's coda, To Trust Man on His Oath. It is a major spoiler for this book, but it's important that one read it (free PDF on the author's site), and it is so short that even I read it on my computer. Trust me...there's information here one absolutely needs before reading Subtle Blood. Which I am doing this very minute.

>266 karenmarie: Monday orisons, Horrible my dear. I am using the phone as a hot spot still, and I begin to wonder if these sleazeballs are just not going to fix the wifi at all. Goddesses please bless the unlimited-data plan.

Ugh on the new weather! I'm in somewhat the same boat...it's 10° colder than it was on Saturday. Still within seasonable boundaries, but quite a change in a short time.

FOUR!! I can but dream, I do but aspire. Still: Streak is alive.

Sweetiedarling...you have a million-book library on Kindle, with public libraries and the Evil Empire...and an Ekornes chair merely requires the sacrifice of something frivolous, say your car or a kidney, to acquire. *smooch*

Why ANYone wants chocolate I will never comprehend. But you do you. Theobroma my hindquarters.

It is much colder down here yesterday and today, as well. It is a welcome change for me as I don't like the Southern summer and for the last 5 years or so, we have gone straight from winter's that act like spring to summer. This year we went from winter that act's like spring to summer and then back to spring. I like the spring, so hope that it stays for another week. Then it can get hot if it wants to.

>269 benitastrnad: You're more tolerant than I am...I don't live in the South so I don't want the South's weather. At all. Ever.

Well, the globe doesn't care what one species wants, still less one individual in the species. Dig we must.

>269 benitastrnad:
I can be tolerant. I have an indoor job. I have been in the South for almost 30 years now, and I have said from the beginning that if it weren't for bug spray and air conditioning that there wouldn't be a soul living in the South.

At least in the lowlands of the South. Maybe in Chattanooga but not in Tuscaloosa. Pesky mosquitoes.

>271 benitastrnad: Heh. Well, some hardy souls, permaybehaps, but not millions. Climate change, if our civilization is to survive it, is going to require different solutions to the a/c issue or we're doomed. Many, many heat pumps need to be installed.

We shall see.

>230 richardderus: Since the stories are "deeply unsafe for straight readers," I will give them a pass. I love the nostalgia of the Duster though.

>243 richardderus: Passing that one by too.

>265 richardderus: Can I go with you?

((Hugs)) and **smooches** and wishes for a wonderful week ahead, RD.

>273 alcottacre: Pack light, Stasia...Kindle only, no tree books...transportal reality is bitter expensive to reach.

I don't think I've got anything coming up, even, that I'd feel comfortable recommending to you. A good week to whiz past and save time!

The only result of taking sex education out of schools, and of refusing young people gender-affirming care, will be increased sexual child abuse within families and a rise in suicide rates among adolescents.

I was raised by a pedophile mother. I speak with the authority of survivorhood, and of one who's spent much time in therapy: There is nothing to recommend the right-wing "social agenda" except to those who prefer easy victims and dead deviants.

>275 richardderus: As a semi-right winger, I agree with you, Richard. Although I do believe sex education is better served by the parents doing their jobs and telling their children about sex, I do not believe that pulling sex education out of schools is the right thing to do. There is too much misinformation and misunderstanding. I do not want ANY easy victims, let alone dead deviants (I guess that is why I am only a semi-right winger).

>276 alcottacre: Well, Stasia, we can't mandate people do things at home that might conflict with their "beliefs" so it's down to the schools to do the things some people won't, can't, or don't want to.

We don't live in the 19th century, and there are precious few people even on the wrong/Right who will go full Amish, so it's down to public schools to pick up the ignorant idiots' slack.

I can't believe they still haven't fixed the wifi, Richard. Hopefully they'll do something about it soon. I made sure that I did Wordle today before I finished trawling through your thread. I think the words are getting harder.

>277 richardderus: I completely agree. My sex education consisted of my mother handing me a book and telling me to read it.

Really? Oh my. Sex ed in school is utterly excruciating, but crucial. We had a brilliant science teacher who didn't blush, didn't accept any nonsense and was kept the troublesome element in check. My parents also sidestepped the question and gave me a book, called, if memory serves Peter & Jane grow up. It was less than illuminating about anything other than the biology.

Fair warning; it's one of those Wordle days:

Wordle 304 6/6

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🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Phew

And since you are sending me my commission (though I haven't received the actual funds yet) I'll tell you that I had to resort to my tactic of trying to find words that used up potential letters to find the missing letters.

You are sending funds, right?

>281 humouress: Oh. I didn't think it was too bad.
Wordle 304 4/6

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Happy Tuesday!

Wordle was a tricky one today with many possibilities. Consider yourself warned ;)

Hiya, RDear, and happy Tuesday to you.

>275 richardderus: Agree 100%. I’d say of course, but there are those, even here in our favorite corner of LT, who may disagree.

>279 alcottacre: I had sex education in the fall of 1965 at Richard Henry Dana Junior High School in Hawthorne California, taught by Mr. Seymour Ziff. I remember pictures of male and female human bodies with all the appropriate bits, discussion about how babies were made, and etc. The only thing that now seems strange is that when they discussed menstruation the boys went into another room and discussed something else. Alas, I never thought to ask.

>281 humouress: and >282 Helenliz: I got it in 4, although it was one of those days of pulling out the spreadsheet and copying unused letters and available slots.

*smooch*

>282 Helenliz: >284 karenmarie:  

It was Streak-Breaker Day:
Wordle 304 X/6

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I am far, far from alone in my irritation, if Twitter is any guide!

>275 richardderus: I'm glad you got the help that you needed, and that experience would require your having gotten a great deal of help. I'm really sorry Richard, that's heartbreaking.

My at-home sex education consisted of reading the Godfather when I was about 11, and then pulling out a Boys and Girls Together encyclopedia to figure out what the hell was going on in the sex scene. I left both neatly stacked next to my reading chair that night, and I guess my parents put two and two together and the next day asked me if I had any questions. I was mortified and could only squeak out 'no!'. And that was my WASP bar mitzvah; after that I was a man.

>286 richardderus: God damn it! I hate streak-breaker day!

>285 humouress:, >284 karenmarie:, >282 Helenliz: I refer y'all to >286 richardderus:. No more need be said.

>284 karenmarie: The boys got information on testicles and foreskins. Doubt it would've gone down well in a mixed crowd.

My favorite moment was when this kid I really disliked, Eddie Bard, asked during open-floor hour (which only felt that way), "does it matter how big your ya-ya is?"

We *fell*out* for a solid five minutes, including the poor teacher. I don't remember who it was.

>283 figsfromthistle: Oops. I found out. >286 richardderus: tells the tale.

>283 figsfromthistle:, >278 Familyhistorian: Happy Tuesday it shall be, though. The guys are here wiring in a new wifi system and thank the goddesses for it. All hail, indeed, my poor little LG "smart"phone from 2017. He's survived, and with some coddling (bless you, Rob, for figuring it out for me!) done yeoman hotpot service. Now we'll see what the new system brings when it's connected. I'm hoping for Friday.

>288 SomeGuyInVirginia: Me. Fucking. TOO. *growl*

>287 SomeGuyInVirginia: Thanks, Larry. I wish Life had been different, but it wasn't. I was a very damaged soul my entire life, and until the memories surfaced when I was 28, wondered why...that is when I started therapy!

>287 SomeGuyInVirginia:, >284 karenmarie: AFTER, please note, the memories surfaced. Mama's big attack on me was that some hypnotist of a therapist planted this in my mind and I had to *snap out of it* and admit I was lying. So, Horrible, all those in the group who might disagree with >275 richardderus: are not required to change their minds in the face of evidence from a survivor, but are expressly warned not to bring their disagreement to this, or any other of my various, thread(s).

>281 humouress: The cheque is in the post.

...what...? Don't laugh so evilly!

>280 Helenliz: Really, it's only the biology that schools should teach at younger ages. It's later, say freshman year? age 14?, that we need to teach boys "NO MEANS NO" and "IT IS NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER ACCEPTABLE TO RAPE ANYONE. FULL STOP."

What y'all teach the girls I don't know, or care to. I myownself taught mine about the vulnerable anatomical point.

>279 alcottacre: Better than many ever got/get. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the issue of what a specific kid needs in terms of guidance, which is why parents should do the job, but they've shown how deeply inadequate they are with generations of rapists and victims to their "credit."

063 Subtle Blood and 064 How Goes the World by K.J. Charles

Rating: 5* of five

This is how you end a series...not with a whimper, but a loud, resounding bang.

The entire world could've finished exploding and I'd've ignored it. I needed to know how it ended. I needed the series to live up to the start. It did.

And there were plenty of surprises along the way. Enough that I could really go to town with the spoilers... but won't. (That does not apply to the author, I remind you; don't even think of reading How Goes the World until you're completely current with the entire universe she's created.)

Full review Wednesday at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud.

Happy Tuesday indeed, Richard, since they are wiring new Wi-fi! Sorry about the Wordle streak-breaking day. I hate the luck-of-the-draw ones.

I am nearly back to posting regular updates. I would like to blame the dogsitting, but it's really the combination of forcing my way through a rough book club book alternating with binge-watching This Is Us now that I have access to cable. But I do anticipate finishing the book today or tomorrow (I gotta, tomorrow is book club day) and getting a little more back to normal.

>294 bell7: Well, we'll see about the wifi. I've learned to accept the evidence of my eyes but await developments around here. I hope for the best, though.

Anyway. I'm sorry the book-club read isn't going more agreeably. I wish to high heaven that there could be some spidey sense that we, the biblioraptor class, could develop to let us know the bones of a ~meh~ read without experiencing it firsthand.

*smooch*

There are times when I am soooooo glad that I am close to retirement. Retirement means that I won't have to be a point person in the fight for access to library materials. It is a tiring job. The attacks on several different minority communities here in Alabama continue and this makes it so much more important for libraries to have materials of all kinds available to people. I find the attacks on library materials dealing with sex and sexual identity, Critical Race Theory, and those on people who just happen to be different, to be deeply disturbing. It is so exhausting - mentally and physically.

I am doing a major weeding of my collection of folk and fairy tales. I am removing books published before 2000 that have not been checked out in 5 years and sending them to our off-sight-storage facility. What I am noticing is that I removed almost ALL of the books that were from predominantly non white parts of the globe that fell into the selection criteria. I started asking myself why these good stories weren't being checked out. The only answer I can come up with, is that in this current year, the University of Alabama teacher education program has only 3 minority students enrolled. Students tend to gravitate to what they know and white western students want white western folk and fairy tales. It doesn't matter to them that we have minority students in our classrooms as students. We have GOT to get more teacher's in our classrooms who are from these minority groups!

I have been in education 30 years and I find this discouraging.

I'm going to jump in on the sex ed talk. My SIL teaches biology at the high school level and is straight up about talking about penises and vaginas in class. Most of it is centered around how animals reproduce but she doesn't shy away from being as graphic as necessary and answering her students' answers respectfully. She is amazing.

I didn't have any sex ed, except at the hands of my father. My mother was not a nurturing, protective person and so, like Richard, I grew up very damaged. A lot of which I am still trying to find and unwind even now. I wish I'd been handed a book.

It would be wonderful if parents were healthy and whole enough to teach their children they things they need to know to thrive in life, especially relationships with other people and sex. Alas, that doesn't exist for everyone so we delegate to the schools.

>286 richardderus: Oh noes!

>292 richardderus: When it came to my kids, I handed them the book to read - it was slim - and the next day we had Q&A. I did not want them to ever have to be embarrassed by something that is natural and that they needed to know about. I wanted them to know that they could come to me if they ever had any questions - and they did.

Happy Tuesday, RD. ((Hugs)) and **smooches** for the day.

>299 alcottacre: *smooch*

>298 Helenliz: Yes, sadly, it was a rotten creeping flop of a Wordle. *sigh*

>297 AuntieClio: Wouldn't it, though. What the world could look like!

>296 benitastrnad: That...is grim. Very darkly grim. But there in Alabackward I don't feel much surprise that no effort whatever is being made to make their outreach folks reach out to "minority" students.

Status quo. Which is its own kind of sickening.

>275 richardderus: Reading that makes me want to hug you tight.

Neither of my parents told me anything about sex or, you know, female stuff. I had to find it all out on my own. My grandma who was my favorite person when I was a kid just told me sex was nasty. I admit, I didn't find it so, but I never argued with her about it.

I'm disgusted about what is going on with respect to banning "sex education"(ANY reference to sexual orientation that isn't hetero) and "CRT" (ANY discussion of race) including with respect to history and, apparently, math in schools. It's like a third of Americans have lost all common sense, except, according to one essay I recently read by a historian Heather Cox Richardson, it's much more sinister than that.

It's time for a new thread!

>301 Storeetllr: I think, for a lot of people, sex *is* nasty in today's world because it's very, well...meaty. There's just no getting away from the body-ness of it, and the fucking religious nuts have been screaming their fool heads off about SHAME and GAWD and all that other falderol for a couple generations now. Stupid Victorians bought into it and we're still paying the cultural price...your twice-great grandmother had several abortions, most likely, as there was no remotest stigma attached to it until the religious nuts convinced people there was something wrong. The moment it became not-okay was called "the quickening" and I will bet you money that every woman who's been pregnant knows exactly when that is.

But anyway.

>275 richardderus: I am extremely sorry to hear that, and glad you got some help.

"The only result of taking sex education out of schools, and of refusing young people gender-affirming care, will be increased sexual child abuse within families and a rise in suicide rates among adolescents."

On a bad day, I think that certain Christians believe their deity intentionally creates people who can't be happy following the rules He imposes, and it's their job to please Him by starting the work of imposing their destined and eternal punishment.

But of course that would require consistency in their theology. They can easily believe their deity to be omnipotent, omniscient etc. without believing he created "those people""that way".

OTOH, it's harder to argue myself out of the idea that hurting others is a mitzvah in the theology they practice.

Not that this is unique to Christianity, or applicable to all those who identify as Christians. It's just that most of my personal experiences with religiously motivated/excused inhumanity have involved that particular label.

>296 benitastrnad: Have a virtual hug from afar.