Trashy book review !!!

 Yes, we all pretend to read "good" books, ones with thought, substance, intelligence.  But often I read trashy novels because they are entertaining and we all need some entertainment now and then.  Or all the time. I read a lot of reviews, in the New York Times, Washington Post, Goodreads, yada yada.  I have no idea where I read the review of this book and it doesn't matter but it ended up on my library list and curb-side pick up at libraries is now a thing, so there it was, in my hands.

"The Guest List" by Lucy Foley isn't too trashy but just trashy enough. It's well written and well paced. The twists and turns in the plot are enough to make your head spin around like Regan's in "The Exorcist."  But rest assured, there is no devil possession in this book.  All the evil comes from the characters.

Six different characters narrate interlocking chapters.  We know from the outset there's going to be a murder, we just don't know who dies and who does the killing. Each of the six have motives and means. It's a crap-shoot until the last couple of pages. And therein lies the entire skeleton of this novel. 

The location is a remote, creepy, dark and gloomy small island off of the mainland of Ireland. The event is a very well-produced and very expensive wedding. The cast of characters includes bride, groom, best man, maid of honor, caterer, a plus-one and lots of other random people who could be killers or just hangers on. 

A storm comes in unexpectedly, wind and rain and loss of power !!!!  A body is found !!!  Bloody clothes !!!

You can read this book in two days, that's how unsubstantial it is.  But I am not saying it's a crappy book, it's just a trashy novel that you can leave on the bus or on the beach and not miss it.  Pretty close to the end a wise reader can almost figure out the last of the twisty plot devices but since the person who gets killed isn't very likable, it's a bit poetic finding out the who, why, where and when of the killing.

Don't buy this book.  Get it from the library or a used book store. But for a beach read, or a book to get you through a couple of Covid days of going nowhere, it's fine.

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Virus, heat, fire and sadness

It's been a while since I have put pen to paper here. Or fingers to keys. These days are either full of angst, anger, sadness and fear or they are full of nothing. Some days it's a struggle to not go back to bed, pull up the blanket and sleep.  Sleep until November and if the election goes bad, sleep again and never get up. 

There is too much happening right now that is out of our control. It's not just Covid and the incredible heat wave we have had, not just the social unrest over Black Lives Matter, not just the fires that are threatening my daughter's house as I type this.  It's all of that and more:  fear of four more years of Trump, fear of getting sick, the unrelenting unemployment, our impotence in all of the above and the uncertainty of what is going to happen in a week or a month or three months.  Never have I felt so powerless as I do now.

I have read books, watched movies, baked. I do have some things to share. But right now, at 10:00 pm on this Tuesday night, while I am guessing the R.N.C. is finishing up its fucking campaign rhetoric, while the hills in historic redwood sanctuaries are burning, while families I know are trying to hold it together with one half of their income demolished,  while our country continues to be split apart because of disastrously inept leadership and while my belief in my country continues to erode, there is nothing but sadness in front of me.  It is very, very difficult, right now, at this moment, to find goodness in our world. 

I will try to find it again tomorrow.  Good night. And good luck.

Two new books for your reading pleasure

 My reading activity since March 17th has had its ups and downs and stalls.  At first I was delighted with all the time I had on my hands to read for hours.  I read several books on my shelf and my sister Kate sent me a box of books from her shelves and I read those.  Having always wanted unlimited reading time, I was quite happy. Well, I was happy for a few weeks.  Then came the Brain Fog: inability to concentrate, lack of interest in anything, mental and physical restlessness.  The only books I could read were old detective/private eye novels. Downloading books onto my phone became a real thing for me (something I hated previous to the Covid invasion) and I reverted to old-school authors:  John D. MacDonald (The Travis McGee series) and Robert B. Parker (Spenser series) and even James M. Cain (what's with the middle initials, guys?) and his noir classics like "Double Indemnity."  Those I could read on my phone and they got me over the Brain Fog months of this Sheltering in Place situation.

Now my reading abilities have returned!  While I will continue to read old detective novels, the thrill of reading a really good book has given me a new lease on my reading life.

Two novels recently released:

"The Cactus League" by Emily Nemens is a story about minor league baseball players and coaches and owners, but it is so much more than that. It is also about the geology of Arizona, about gambling, relationships, greed and goodness.  Plus baseball!  Some of us are missing the baseball season this year and getting to read about spring training (albeit fictionalized) helps. This is Nemens first novel and I am often disappointed in first novels because of their cliched over-writing. This one, however, is worth a read.

"The Glass Hotel" by Emily St. John Mandel follows her brilliant and quirky novel "Station Eleven" from several years ago.  This novel is so good but rather difficult to describe without giving too much away.  The characters draw you in even if you don't really like some of them.  The plot does not follow along linearly, it jumps around a bit which can feel gimmicky in mediocre writers but St. John Mandel is anything but mediocre.  There is flat-out greed and love of money at play in this story as well as the search for the meaning of life in small, measured ways.  Betrayal, redemption, selfishness and generosity:  all are represented here.  As I read this book, I kept thinking of the William Faulkner quote: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."  That is definitely true in "The Glass Hotel."  One cannot count on the dead being dead but that doesn't mean they come back to life.  You'll have to read this novel to see what I mean.  I hated for it to end and I look forward to reading it again.

Finally, I am listening to a book on CDs as I drive aimlessly around these days.  Simon Winchester is one of my favorite non-fiction authors ("The Professor and the Madman" is one of his early books, about the creation of the Oxford Dictionary and you should read it if you haven't) and he often writes about geology and the formation of our physical world. This book I am listening to is "A Crack in the Edge of the World" about the April 1906 San Francisco earthquake but it is about more than just that earthquake. It is a look at plate tectonics, fault lines, geological makeup of the world and so much more.  Way better than trashy detective novels, fascinating and educational at the same time!

The next book on my list is the first in a series by Louise Penny.  I have read several of her Inspector Gamache novels but have never read the first one, "Still Life."  I will start that one today along with a book by Michael Lewis, "Liar's Poker" about the Stock Market in the 1980's.  I will report back on those......  keep reading!

Movie: "Margin Call" on Netflix

 When depressed, let's watch a movie about the beginning of the collapse of the economy in 2008!  Right? How about that to lift one's spirit!  "Margin Call" is basically a 24 hour look at Lehman Brothers Bank and its fail in a spiral pretty much unparalleled in economic history to that point. ("To that point" is relevant because who the fuck knows what is going to happen to rival that economic failure in the months to come.  Just saying....)

The premise of the movie is simple:  employees at a large, highly capitalized bank get laid off and one of them had an inkling of how deeply leveraged the bank was.  That guy left notes about that leveraged position and another person found those notes, and yada, yada, so it goes.  It gets chased  up to the owners who pretend to be shocked but who sort of knew it was happening all along. Keep in mind that this was happening in 2008 and banks were selling, reselling and re-reselling home mortgages as quickly as they could, just to make money.  In truth, they were selling crap. They were selling mortgages for less than the house was worth and they (the banks) were selling them over and over for small percentages to other banks and lending companies with no guarantees and finally that scam collapsed.  That's how Lehman Brothers died.  

OK, I digressed. There is a bit of suspense here, waiting for the dick-head owners to figure out how to make the most money in one day before the Stock Market knows they are fucked, and for the already fired employees to figure out how to get the biggest parachutes when they leave and for the viewing audience to feel some sort of resolution of all of it. Hell, we lived through that Great Recession nightmare, we want to see retribution!  

But that doesn't happen. Nevertheless, it's a good movie and worth watching.  On that same  note, in case you are interested in how the Great Recession came to be and all that financial stuff,  read "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis. It's written in laymen terms but does a good job explaining the global mortgage crisis, how people made tons of money off of those mortgages and how it led to the 2008 fail of banks and stock brokerage houses.

But back to the movie:  it's good.  Good characters, good actors, a solid film.  It won't make you happy but since it doesn't have Trump in it, it won't make you sad either.  And you might learn something.  Or not. Or just go watch "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark" which is so much more uplifting and not sad at all. And also free on Netflix. 

Dinner, a movie, old school

At one point, like what seems like years ago, we all thought "how cool would it be to have tons of free time and watch everything we ever wanted to watch on Netflix or Amazon or Hulu!"  Some of us also thought "how cool would it be to have tons of free time to read and read, no one interrupting us, nothing to do but read."  

And now here we are in the reality of that free time (well, some of us who are jobless actually do have that free time)  and what happens?  TV gets boring and even reading gets itchy.  Yes, we all know there are great documentaries out there that we can watch for free or for little money but do we watch them?  Or do we watch crap, like that really bad "Tiger King" series on Netflix?  Or re-runs of "Friends" and "Cheers" and the endless "Law and Order."

Let's talk about dinner.... every online cooking site for the past 4 months has been touting what to cook from the ingredients in your pantry.  Now that some of those sites realize that there is nothing left in your pantry they are reaching out farther afield and are trying to entice us to keep cooking. Who out there isn't tired of cooking?  Who out there doesn't long for a sit-down experience at a real restaurant?  I am not talking about an outdoor venue where the temperature is 95 degrees and you have a lame umbrella covering part of your table, the food is hot and already wilting when it is plunked down on your table and you are separated by 3 - 4 feet at most from  your fellow diner and no one is wearing a mask? That's not the dining experience I want. 

Yes, I know whining about all of the above is stupid and boring. 

Netflix has been trying to help by running a lot of old school movies and I just watched a couple that exited Netflix at the end of July. "Back to the Future" was a star of that line-up, at least for me.  It was released in 1984 which was so long ago.... I was working in San Bruno at a motorcycle dealership and one of the salesmen had just seen the movie and loved it.... a few days later I saw it and totally enjoyed it as well.  Seeing it again, 36 years later, it was still fun. But part of it is the comfort of seeing something that has no part of our current world, and thus seems safe and innocent.  "Back to the Future" was hopeful in a small way.  Our world today seems to have zero hope.

Ah, I don't want to seem so depressed. I made a great dinner tonight, pasta with raw tomato sauce.  Seeded a couple of really good tomatoes, chopped them and into a bowl they went with one smallish garlic clove, finely chopped, some chopped fresh basil, a small bit of chopped mint, one mild jalapeno pepper  salt, pepper, good olive oil and a very small dash of red wine vinegar.  Let that set for an hour or so, then tossed it with angel hair pasta.  Delicious.  With a glass or two or three of Graziano Barbera, made my TV viewing of "Oceans Thirteen" almost palpable. 
Old school still lives on.

more to follow.

OK, that's it.  Thank you for reading along. Here is what Cooper thinks of everything right now.

Yes, this is sort of cheating but still.....

I am giving you someone else's words today, as I randomly do.  Ian Frazier is a very good writer and this piece spoke to me so clearly that I must share it.  He has written mostly about travel so you must realize that I have read most of his work.  Right now, this day and every day, I long for a road trip: to the Eastern Sierras where the summer heat smells like sagebrush and wild trees, back to the Southern States where so much of our county's history was formed, to Death Valley with Tom to watch the rising sun over those sand dunes.  The long, straight roads through Wisconsin, the winding roads up the coast from Southern California, the wide-open roads of the wide-open lands of Montana.  I want all of them and I want them now.

Frazier mirrors my longing in this article.  I haven't been on that train in Russia nor have I eaten frozen kielbasa for breakfast but I did drive through a thunder-and-lightning storm from mid-Louisianna into Mississippi last spring (2019) and, like Frazier, felt "... a power that could squash you flat."  Road trips give you such a sense of place and of purpose, even if they are purposeless and meandering. They teach you so much that you never knew you didn't know, not just about the roads and counties and states and countries you are driving through but about yourself as well. Don't get me started, I could talk about road trips for hours.

Read this if you care to and enjoy it. And start planning your next adventure.

https://www.outsideonline.com/2415424/comfort-in-motion-traveling#close