The 5 Ingredient College Cookbook by Pamela Ellgen

Recommended to me by a friend, this is not a only cookbook that offers recipes with a limited number of ingredients, but  offers recipes suitable for both weekday dinners and informal entertaining. I think it would be useful for a new cook.

There are recipes for some of my favorites: Pasta Puttanesca, Shrimp Scampi, and Gazpacho. I'm delighted to see that there are recipes for the superfoods avocado and sweet patato; Sweet Potato Fries with Chipotle Mayo and Creamy Avocado Toast. And there's lots of recipes I think I'd like to try: Southwestern Skillet, Watermelon, Feta and Tomato Salad, Ramen Noodle Soup (with chicken or vegetable stock, soy sauce and green onions), Tortilla Soup, Pizza Margherita, Lemon Chicken, Shredded Chicken Street Tacos, Italian Sausage and Pepper Skillet, Steak Fajitas and Creamy Cheese Casserole, lots of vegetable recipes, recipes for black and red chili, and a recipe for ratatouille with chicken.

There are dessert recipes too, including a recipe for chocolate cake and another for blueberry crumble.

What's helpful and interesting is that this shortish book (221 pages) offers advice throughout: information on the tools and pans you ought to have, staples you ought to have in your cabinet, how to make eggs (as well as wonderfully simple directions for making an omelette), recipes for salsa, hummus, trail mix, caesar salad dressing and other popular dressings made frequently.

There's a helpful glossary that defines braise, blanch, poach, saute and sear. , 

The small dimensions of the book, and the brief and breezy nature of the information it provides, suggests to me that this will be welcoming and accessible book for someone just starting to cook.

I

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Christmas in Connecticut, directed by Peter Godfrey (starring Barbara Stanwyck)

In Christmas in Connecticut, Stanwyck isn't a show girl on the run or a con artist, she's a writer. She's the Martha Stewart of the newspaper for which she works, headed by Sydney Greenstreet. Only .. it's all a fantasy: she can't cook, she doesn't have a farm in Connecticut, and for sure she doesn't have a baby - she's not even married!

This is a well-made film: entertaining, polished, and well-paced. Interestingly to me, the movie opens with the bombing of a Navy ship and two sailors attempting to survive in a life raft. There are two narrative threads that don't unite until the middle of the film: Stanwyck's scrappy reporter and the sailor who survived the torpedoing of his ship and spent his time in a lifeboat dreaming of good food. Dennis Morgan is the sailor.

I truly enjoyed this film but it's not a patch on Lady Eve or Great Ball of Fire.

Twentieth Century, directed by Howard Hawks

There's a lot to say about this film: Carole Lombard is wonderful, and in more muted performance than in My Man Godfrey or Mr. and Mrs. Smith. 

The plot is a cliche: the troubled Broadway play in rehearsal is hampered by an inexperienced actress. The eccentric director/producer manipulates her in a number of ways (ahem!) to coax a fine performance from her and they become an item. It's a classic Svengali story: a star is born!

He controls her, she resents his control and egotism, and they split up.

Three years later, the director is on the skids and finds himself on the very same train as his former protegee. She's become a big star in Hollywood and has a new romantic interest. He is determined to sign her to a new contract, and his efforts create a great deal of slapstick on the lurching train.

Here, in essence, Barrymore has the Lombard part: emotional, even hysterical, loud and frantic.

In a way, it's so timely. Both Barrymore and Lombard are brilliant; the end of the film seems to drag but when the director is down and out and decides to hitch his falling wagon to the fortunes of two Jewish Oberammergau actors I suffered whiplash. 

 An essay I found described this as the first screwball comedy (https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/20th_century.pdf).

Mr. and Mrs. Smith, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

I was so surprised to discover that this screwball comedy starring Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery, with a script by Norman Krasna (he wrote The Devil and Miss Jones), had been directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery are a bickering couple - in the extreme. When they argue, they have a rule that neither one of them can leave the bedroom until they've made up. As the film opens, they are resolving their latest blow-up: this one lasted three days. (The gossip about this in the kitchen is priceless.)

An official from a faraway town arrives at Montgomery's office to inform him that due to a boundary dispute, his marriage to Lombard three years earlier is not legal or binding. Of course, it seems like a minor matter: easy enough to just get married again.

The official then drops by the couple's apartment, where Lombard is being visited by her mother, just to visit. It comes out that the reason that he's in town is to inform the couple that their marriage was not legal and is not binding.

Lombard's mother is upset and tells Lombard that this is going to be a big problem. Lombard's unconcerned and tells her mother that her husband will tell her what happened and propose to her before the evening's out. In fact, when Montgomery invites her to go for dinner that evening, Lombard is convinced that he's arranged for them to get married that very evening.

When that doesn't happen, there are some very hurt feelings -- Lombard throws Montgomery out -- and hijinks ensue. Lombard is wonderful here, but the pace of film drags after a little while. To me, the back and forth between the battling spouses goes on just a little too long, and after its escalating intensity, the resolution seems abrupt and insufficiently motivated. It suprised me a little bit, because this screenplay is by Norman Krasna, who also wrote the screenplay for the Devil and Miss Jones, a screenplay that seemed perfectly paced.

The Devil and Miss Jones, directed by Sam Wood

I really enjoyed this film; having watched a handful of classic films it seems to me one of the best. It stars Jean Arthur, who is new to me but was obviously a wonderful actress. She's so charming in this film.

It's not quite a "Depression Era" film, having been made in 1941, but its concerns seem to be those of the Depression.

Charles Coburn plays a domineering businessman who is determined to foil an attempt by retail clerks at one of his stores to unionize. Dissatisfied with the private detectives who have been tasked with infiltrating and destroying the nascent union, he declares he'll do this job himself.

Hired as a shoe department salesman, he's quite lousy at it and he's quite uncomfortable. Edmund Gwenn, utterly unrecognizable as Santa from Miracle on 34th Street, plays his supercilious and unforgiving boss, Mr. Hooper. This is part of what's so wonderful about this film: great acting and lots of charm. 

Coburn's stony path is eased by the compassion of two female clerks in his department, Jean Arthur and Spring Byington. Unfortunately, Jean Arthur is also in love with the union's organizer.

Jean Arthur and Spring Byington soften the hard-heartedness of Coburn, and by the time he gets his hands on the list of employees willing to join the union, he's ready to negotiate to improve conditions at the store. The movie ends with Coburn's marriage and Byington and a celebratory cruise to Hawaii for the staff of the entire store. Just thinking about it makes me laugh.

Unfaithfully Yours by Preston Sturges

I've just been watching the Criterion Collection edition of Unfaithfully Yours and it's all just so delightful. I watched the introduction with Terry Jones, and am so glad I did. I think it helped me to enjoy the film. And, the fact that Jones' cat walks in front of him just as he is finishing up the interview, as if to say, "I want my part of this conversation!" sets just the right tone. Jones enthusiastically points out that there's lot of language, beautifully delivered, and that in general, the pace is snappy. There's also an interview with Sturges' widow, Sandy Sturges, who has lots to say about the story of how the picture got made and the inspiration for the screenplay. It's all very lovely.

 As Jones points out, some of the two slapstick sequences in the film don't necessarily fully work. I hardly noticed the first one; I had a "respectful" attitude about the second. In Jones' comments, he mentions that "slapstick" was not a speciality of Harrison's; when I watched it the second time, I found myself admiring because now I saw it as something hard. 

What makes this film engrossing is the idea: a jealous man who cannot accept that his beautiful wife loves him faithfully, and all the complications that come with it - and incongruities. The tailor he meets who's a bit of a philosopher; the private detective he meets who essentially says, "I am your biggest fan" and means it; the broken English and brilliant metaphor of Lionel Stander's character, who I think refers to the members of the orchestra as "meatheads." I loved Rex Harrison in Major Barbara and I love him here. There's something masterful in the way that he delivers dialogue; something wicked in that glint in his eye. 

About the orchestra: I read that Sturges was not a fan of classical music. This surprised me a little bit because I so loved the way he filmed the orchestra. I don't quite know how to express it. I guess I'd say he makes the orchestra seem like a football team or an assembly line. They're stripped of their glamour, wearing street dress, but their synchronization seems very impressive, their intensity workmanlike rather than exalted. Of course, it reminded me of Peter Schikele's Beethoven's Fifth (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzXoVo16pTg). There's a little bit of comic business about the cymbals that I love: it's simple, it's modest but it seems to work.

I knew nothing about Linda Darnell before seeing this film and still know very little but here she was wonderful, really inspired.

 

 

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

I thought it would be fun to see this movie, based on the novel of the same name, because I really loved the novel. It was fun. I really loved this movie. It was very faithful to the novel (the screenplay was written by the novel's author, Jesse Andrews). Not perfectly faithful .. but details don't matter. But it was different, and for me, richer, to see the story with someone else's images. 

One of the things I loved about the movie was that it captured the humor of the book.  The film parodies that Greg makes with his friend Earl are just hilarious. I laughed out loud several times .. and that's unusual. 

One of the things that I loved about the book was that it was anti-dramatic. There's another, better word for what I mean but I can't think of it now. Greg does not fall in love with Rachel, who has leukemia. Greg does not want to be Rachel's friend, and certainly not just because she has a life-threatening illness. Greg flat-out refuses to befriend Rachel until he is coerced by his mother. (Greg's personal approach to surviving high school is just not getting involved with it, or its cliques, or its individuals.) At one point, Greg lashes out at Rachel in blind fury, completely reactive and completely insensitive to Rachel's pain. In other words, it's so much more like real life than books like these often are. And Greg doesn't have a brilliant career as a filmmaker, either.

 

 

New TBR

Sort of a very tentative TBR list 

(have long meant to read)

 

A fine Brush on Ivory by Richard Jenkyns

A Gentleman of Moscow

(YA)

 

The Hate U Give

To All the Boys

 

All That I Can Fix

Simon vs. The Homosapiens Agenda

 

If I Stay

 

Will Grayson, Will Grayson

 

One of Us is Lying

 

Dear Life, You Suck

 

Walkable City Jeff Speck

 

Right of Way Angie Schmitt

 

Belinda - Maria Edgeworth

 

 

Columbus by Kogonada

I loved this film. It has all the things I love: libraries, architecture, the Midwest. It captures the wonderful incongruity of modernist architecture set in a small Indiana town with its weed trees,  chain link fences and abandoned farmers' stalls. I loved it. The plot was minimal, but life affirming. The amount of silence in this film was daring. 

The film is set in Columbus, Indiana, a city of 40,000 people that is a living museum of modernist architecture.

https://columbus.in.us/columbus-the-movie/

 

Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

I had never heard of this book, or the film it was made into ("Love, Simon"). I asked a bookstore clerk for some recommendations and this was one of them. The blurb on the front that read, "The love child of John Green and Rainbow Rowell" sold me. In many ways, I think that's pretty accurate description. This book is a fast, easy read and quite suspenseful as the plot develops.

Simon's a teen in an Atlanta suburb. He's a junior, and he's funny, and talented at entertaining his family with his sense of humor. He's gay, and no one knows he's gay.

And he's having an email correspondence/flirtation with one of his classmates. They're feeling each other out and getting to know each other. Neither of them knows who the other one is: they only know that they both attend the same high school as they met on a high school chatboard.  

Early in the story, a guy named Martin sidles up to Simon and lets him know that he'd left his email open in the library, and now Martin knows that Simon is gay and is having some kind of online relationship with another gay teen whose name is "Blue." And it's not just that Martin knows; Martin knows that Simon is not out and he wants to control Simon and force Simon to include Martin in his social circle, so that Martin can get close to Abby, one of Simon's friends.

Simon's shocked, disgusted and terrified. He's not ready to come out, and he's not ready to betray his friend Blue. He knows Blue's not ready to come out and disclosure could be really devastating for him.

Meanwhile, there's lots of stuff going on around him: his older sister has gone away to college and now she seems to have a secret boyfriend; his younger sister, always quite but always a comforting presence, seems to be gone all the time now. His two oldest friends, Nick and Leah, are his safe haven. He knows that whenever he spends time with them, he can just be. But something has changed: Leah has a major crush on Nick that is not requited; Nick is interested in Abby. Leah is often just .. miserable.

Then rehearsals for the winter musical, Oliver!, begin and everyone's thrown together is awkward ways. Simon thinks he's falling in love with Blue, but he has no idea who Blue is.

This book got so much love from so many places. It got a starred review from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly, which also named it a "Best Book." Jennifer Niven, whose All the Bright Places I loved, gave it a blurb. Amazon named it the YA Book of the Year. And it was on the longlist for a bunch of prizes: the National Book Award, YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association) Best Book for Teens Award, and the UK Literary Association Book Award.

Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

I've just finished Agnes Grey, and I'm a little confused or bemused or both. 

The first part of this book seems to be an expose of the social status of governesses and the second part a departure, a rather conventional romance. 

I find myself wondering at Charlotte Bronte's rejection of Austen: Agnes Grey seems to embrace romance, like Austen, and more so than either Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. 

I'm struck by how absolutely without redeeming qualities Rosalie seems to be; and, especially, how cruel she is to take up seducing Mr. Weston and preventing Agnes from seeing him; it seems completely obvious to me that she intends to hurt Agnes. And Agnes is so demure. Perhaps a little too demure for my taste. Her anxiety about the things she says to Mr. Weston is very touching and relatable. 

There is a passage, which I failed to note, where Agnes says that she is touched and delighted by Mr. Weston speaking to her as an equal, and this passage seems to me to echo that famous passage in Jane Eyre - which was, presumably, written later. 

I enjoyed the dramatic tension as Agnes longed for Mr. Weston to propose. I was relieved when it ended. I wondered why he waited so long. And, I enjoyed the novel as a whole and continue to marvel at Anne Bronte's mastery of the form. It amazes me that each of the sisters was so very accomplished in their debut novels. I haven't read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, but I assume that it expresses more of Anne's true feelings.

Garnethill by Denise Mina

I really enjoyed Garnethill by Denise Mina. The thing I enjoyed most about it was the local color, the descriptions of streets and neighborhoods in Glasgow. The other thing that really impressed me was the sheer originality of the plot. And the sense I had that Mina had used the format of the mystery novel to convey something she felt she'd learned about mental illness, sexual assualt, and both the mental health care system and society's attitudes toward mental health.

Maureen O'Donnell has only been out of an asylum, where she was treated for severe depression, for four months. She's dating a counselor from the outpatient clinic where she's having therapy - although he's not her therapist. She's just reached the point where she feels this relationship has run its course. The next night, she goes out for drinks with an old friend, and, having had too much to drink, comes home and goes straight to bed. In the morning, she is deeply shocked to discover that her lover has been murdered in the living room of her apartment. She didn't notice when she came in the night before because she went straight to bed and didn't enter that room.

Everything about this is terrible. The sensational nature of the crime has attracted the interest of the newspapers and reporters besiege her at work. She found the body and she's being treated for mental illness, so she's the police's first idea about a suspect for the murders. Her own mother and her lover's mother, a politician, also think she's the culprit. She sets out to do what seems impossible: conduct her own investigation and find the real culprit.

It starts with a rumor but she begins to gather evidence that there are a number of vulnerable mental health patients that may have sexually assaulted by a staff member. She speculates that this situation may be the cause of her lover's murder; perhaps he was killed to prevent him from revealing the identity of the attacker.

A scene I really enjoyed was a meeting Maureen has with her brother in a chipper. The chipper is so perfectly described that you can not only picture it but feel the whole atmosphere of discussing a difficult topic in the least conducive environment.

Garnethill is the first novel in a trilogy. Garnethill earned the Crime Writers' Association John Creasey Dagger Award for best first crime novel. I think it was deserved.

 

11/19/2020: If you're interested in Denise Mina, or think you might be, I recommend this clip of Mina in conversation with Jane Casey at this year's Dublin Book Festival, talking about Tartan Noir, describing Glasgow, writing crime fiction vs. writing true crime, society's construct of women's mental illness, the value of awards, writing crime fiction as a feminist act, and Mina's latest novel, The Less Dead.

The MurderOne Festival @ DBF Denise Mina in conversation with Jane Casey

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqQEeF--vMA

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

I recently read Northanger Abbey with an online book group that's part of the Bonnets at Dawn Facebook page.

I read all the Austen novels when I was in college, but I've very much enjoyed rereading Persuasion and Northanger Abbey.

Rereading Northanger Abbey was kind of a revelation. The thing that I enjoyed the most was also the thing that surprised me most: Northanger Abbey is a comedy. All the novels are comedies, but this one is among the most light-hearted. Austen presents its heroine as an average woman of marriageable age, which means that she, like her peers, is mad for Gothic novels. The tone of the novel throughout is satirical but in a kind-hearted way, and funny. Although I really disliked the character of John Thorpe and found his company oppressive, a lot about him was funny. His love of gossip is the device by which the plot turns.

 

 Austen wrote Northanger Abbey at a time when the novels of Ann Radcliffe, especially The Mysteries of Udolpho, were wildly popular. In fact, in Austen's novel, the heroine, Catherine Morland, and her friend, Isabella Thorpe, are both readers of The Mysteries of Udolpho. The Monk, published in 1796, is also discussed by John Thorpe in the novel. John Thorpe is Catherine Morland's false suitor, the man who is interested in her but in whom she has not interest, who is less attractive than the hero, possibly morally deficient, and who is not destined to win the heroine. The fact that he is enthusiastic about The Monk and recommends it to Catherine is a sign that Austen does not hold The Monk in high regard.

Northanger Abbey is a satire on the Gothic novel. There's nothing sensational (except Catherine's youthful imaginings) in the novel; in fact, when Henry Tilney, Catherine's host and chief romantic interest, attempts to convince her that her Gothic novel-inspired suspicions of his father are fantasy, he asks her to consider that she is living in England (rather than the Italy of the Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk) where, Tilney presumes, the rule of law and difficulty of keeping anything secret in the small towns of the English countryside make it unlikely that a murder could be kept secret for years.

Northanger Abbey opens in Bath, where Catherine is visiting as a guest of her well-to-do neighbors, the Allens. She meets Henry Tilney at the Assembly Rooms, a Bath institution that offered programming: dances, concerts, educational lectures, and concerts. The real purpose of the Assembly Rooms was, like the opera, to provide a place where one could see and be seen, where young women could display themselves and young men could meet them.

When Catherine meets Henry Tilney, she finds him charming. He certainly has plenty of conversation! In a world without raves and 501 jeans, conversation was a very important part of the courting process, so no little thing. But to modern sensibilities, Henry Tilney seems like a mansplainer, a patronizing, condescending, know-it-all.

What was so lovely about this "read-along" and discussion was that it was the consensus of most readers that while Henry started out as a rather predictable and annoying mansplainer, he grew to respect Catherine's values, intelligence, and sincerity. This new view of Henry Tilney catapulted him from being low in my estimation amongst Austen romantic heroes to exceeding Captain Wentworth to take the crown.

As a fan of Fanny Burney's Evelina, I'd like to point out that while Northanger Abbey is very different from Evelina, it share the same essential plot: a young, innocent girl enters society and has a number of misadventures where she makes a number of socially awkward mistakes and violates the rules of polite society with which she is unfamiliar. In both tales, virtue triumphs.

 

A Completing of the Watsons by Rose Servitova

I loved this "feel-good" novel and recommend it highly. I read it by flashlight during a power outage and was grateful for the way its lively plot, dialogue and humor held my interest.

As I read it, I found myself ruminating on what it is that I love about Jane Austen's work. It's the humor and satire, the elegance of her style, the values and yes, the happy endings.

A Completing of the Watsons supplies all these things.

The Watsons, a fragment begun and abandoned by Jane Austen while she was living in Bath, has a real humdinger of a plot. Like Mansfield Park, there's more than a little edge to it as Emma, a young woman raised by her wealthy aunt and uncle, suffers a reversal in fortune and must return to the family home. There her three sisters are engaged in a hunt for husbands as their dying father has no money or property to leave them - and they talk about it constantly, adding to the atmosphere of gloom.

Emma's change in fortune has occurred because when her mother died when Emma was just six, she was given to her aunt and uncle to raise and was presumed by her family to be the intended heiress of her uncle's estate, Claperton Park. Her uncle has recently died, however, without making any financial provision for her and her aunt has remarried to an Irish captain who did not want Emma to continue living with them.

Given a good education, she's a little bit too refined for the modest situation in which she finds herself now living. As the book opens, she is meeting the eldest of her sisters, Elizabeth, for the first time in 14 years.

At the first ball she attends after moving to Stanton, she meets a man she is immediately drawn to, Mr. Howard, a vicar. But she is also spotted by the stand-offish and socially awkward Lord Osborne. Lord Osborne never dances; his disdain for balls and dancing reminds me of Mr. Darcy. Lord Osborne immediately wishes to be introduced to her, and while that does not happen, he begins a campaign of courtship of Emma which she finds, while not welcome, certainly makes her life more eventful.

What I love about Rose Servitova's writing is her humor, her writing style, her delight in the foibles of human beings, and her fidelity to the language, manners and concerns of the Regency period.

I find myself wondering if Austen abandoned The Watsons because the dilemma Emma faces was just too close to Austen's own.

There are many elements here which remind me of other novels. Of course, Lord Osborne reminds me of Mr. Darcy. The discussion of lady novelists reminds me of the many discussions of books and reading in Northanger Abbey. Emma's status as a dependent, with an uncertain future, reminds me of Fanny in Mansfield Park. There is a passing reference to Box Hill, which, of course, reminded me of Emma - not to mention the sad hypochondria of Mr. Watson, reminiscent of Mr. Woodhouse in Emma and Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. The close friendship Emma and Elizabeth form in this novel reminds of Lizzie and Jane in Pride and Prejudice. The somewhat frosty relationship Emma and Elizabeth have with their other two sisters, Penelope and Margaret, also reminds of Kitty and Lydia from the same novel.

The Killing of the Tinkers by Ken Bruen

The Killing of the Tinkers fulfilled and confounded my expectations all at once. As I expected, it was so funny, charming and satisfying. On the other hand, I kept finding myself surprised: surprised that Jack has returned from London and his experience there earns about a paragraph. (After all, he ended up in Ladbroke Grove, not Battersea.)

Jack Taylor is surprising in so many ways. His greatest aspiration is to drink as much as he wants and just keep reading. His wife unexpectedly turns up (A wife? Did you know he had a wife? I didn't know he had a wife) and disappears again before the end of the chapter, leaving behind beautiful boots so exceptional that their virtues must be extolled at regular intervals.

Jack's perfected hedonism, and his reading connoiseurship, does not seem to interfere with his detective work (or perhaps it does). He's been approached by the head of clans, Sweeper, to find out who has been killing young tinker men. His search for the culprit finally ends in a way that I found surprising -- and it's nagged at me ever since finishing the novel. That's the kind of guy Jack Taylor is - surprising, offering you the truly unexpected, some might say, shocking.

Jack's reading diary alone is worth the price of admission. Jack's the kind of detective who believes that when his powers of deduction lag, it's time to read the greats: Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain, George Pelecanos, believing that they inspire his mystery-solving powers to come forth.. 

This book is short, snappily written, and hugely entertaining.

TBR: Garnethill by Denise Mina & Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

Reading Garnethill by Denise Mina. I haven't felt much like reading lately, but I'm finding that I really am enjoying this book. I was quite surprised to discover that it's more than 20 years old - the clue was that the library copy I'm reading is quite well-loved.

What I love most about Garnethill is the "local color"; the thing I love second-best is the feminism at the heart of the story.

Also on the list:

The One-in-A Million Boy by Monica Wood

A Completing of the Watsons by Rose Servitova

The Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

7/27/2020
Having finished Garnethill, I'm now reading Agnes Grey. This is the first time I've ever read Anne Bronte (her other novel is the The Tenant of Wildfell Hall). What strikes me first is just how different her style seems from that in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

Dead Certainty by Glenis Wilson

I have several wonderful things to read, but right now I'm reading Dead Certainty. When I began it, I wasn't sure that I would continue reading. The exposition seemed to me to move slowly; quite a few paragraphs seemed to be devoted to spiritual healing, which seemed off-topic for a horse racing novel; and the protagonist shared that he wasn't too interested in genealogy. Something about it seemed inauthentic. But I find I'm still reading it.

I have a relative who has enjoyed Dick Francis, the horse racing mystery writer, in the past. I was curious if there were other authors writing horse racing mysteries, thinking that a really good horse racing mystery might make a good gift. I went to my library's website, clicked on the Novelist database, and typed "horse racing mysteries" in the search box. I was surprised by the long list of titles that came up - 203. And the very first on the list was Dead Certainty by Glenis Wilson, so I put a hold on it and picked it up at my library's drive-through.(Another book on the list that looked interesting, and was owned by my library, was High Stakes: A Jack Doyle Mystery,

In a larger sense, I was looking for a horse racing mystery series writer, so I scrolled down the list to a title by Dick Francis called Wild Horses. Underneath the title, there was a link for "Title Read-alikes," that is, books very similar to Wild Horses. I clicked on another link, right beside the first one, "Author Read-alikes," because I wanted to find other authors writing horse race mysteries.

It was an interesting list: the very first author name on the list was Sam Llewellyn, who writes mysteries related to the sea, chosen because he also provides details about an intriguing milieu. The second author on the list was cited for mysteries set in the world of auto racing. The third author, Kit Ehrman, also writes about the world of horse racing. And, Glenis Wilson was on the list.

I notice that there are many reviews of Glenis Wilson's books on GoodReads, and that Dead Reckoning, the third in the Harry Radcliffe series, got a 4.44 rating, quite high for GoodReads where readers tend to be critical.

Now that I've finished Dead Certainty, I can't quite make up my mind about it. I wanted something light and suspenseful, and I think it was both. When I got to about page 75, it started to be much more suspenseful and I finished it in two days.

Harry Radcliffe is a jockey who takes a great spill, injuring his knee. Afterwards, he's not sure if he'll be able to race again, but certainly faces a long period of physical therapy rehabilitation. His boss suggests Harry, while he's recuperating, take on a special commission: ghost-writing the autobiography of a famously successful trainer who's now retiring. Harry writes a column for the local racing newspaper, but he think it's a stretch to take on penning a biography. Still, needs must - he needs the dosh.

Shortly after he begins work, a number of frightening things start happening: he's involved in a car crash with a horsebox, and an unknown person enters his kitchen in the middle of the night, splasing around petrol, and would have started a fire with Leo, Harry's formidable ginger tom.

Harry's scared and angry. He doesn't know who's out to get him. Does it have something to do with his accident? The book commission he's taken on?

Bodacious: The Shepherd Cat (A Charming Tale of an Extraordinary Cat) by Suzanna Crampton

This book is a memoir, told through the eyes of a farm cat, Bodacious. It's sweet, whimsical, and easy to read: you can pick it up long enough to read an anecdote in a few pages, put it down and easily pick it up again later. Author Suzanna Crampton is a farmer and animal lover in County Kilkenny, Ireland, where she raises Zwartbles sheep (a rare black breed with white patches on their faces, originally from The Netherlands).

Crampton is a social media sensation: she has accounts on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Here she offers many entertaining anecdotes about the history of her animals (many of them rescued, as Bodacious was).

Crampton is also a beautiful writer, a natural storyteller, using adjectives to paint a scene and describe her animals. 

I can well imagine that there are many readers who might not immediately see the appeal of a farm memoir. But Crampton has so much to say, and so many really interesting stories to tell. Her life has been full of incident, and she's had many careers, all of which add up to a really interesting book.

The many fans of All Creatures Great and Small will love this book, too. But its appeal is really broader than that because it's really an adventure story. It's Bodacious' story about his adventures on the farm, but it's also the story of how Suzanna took over a very small farm and made it work. I think this book will appeal to many people, and is a perfect gift, especially for friends and relatives who are recovering from illness.

She tells the story of how she came to adopt Bodacious, who was a street cat and was then knocking about a novelty toilet seat shop (how many stories feature a novelty toilet seat shop?). And it's the story of the pony Marco Polo, an incredibly feisty sojourner who escaped the dog food factory, was rescued by a farmer, and adopted by Crampton.  I have many favorite stories from this book, but I find something special in Crampton's account of visiting with a hornbill. Crampton recounts her experience encountering exotic animals in Indonesia where she worked for a wildlife charity. Bodacious explains:

     "The Shepherd loves birds and often tells me the story of her favorite breakfast companion in Southeast Asia, a hornbill. (Incidentally, I'd like to mention that my egg-makers (chickens) originated in Asia. Wild egg-makers came from rain-forests and were the first to be domesticated and bred. They became the many varieties of egg-maker that we have today.)  While the Shepherd was working for a wildlife charity in Southeast Asia, one of her jobs was to make a photographic record of the exercises that were needed to rehabilitate baby orangutans who had been taken into captivity ..and were crippled from having been fed incorrect foods in human homes. This rehabilitation center was in Indonesia on the island of Java. It was essentially a kind of gentle physiotherapy for these poor primates. 
     "Every morning at breakfast The Shepherd's companion was a beautiful strange-looking jungle bird called a hornbill.. a young male Knobbed Hornbill, sporting a black feathered body, which he held in an upright way, much like the Indian Runner duck ..
     "He would sit on the table while she ate breakfast and would ask for some of her fruit salad of grapes, mangoes, and freshly picked bananas. This clever hornbill knew a soft touch when he saw one. The animal-loving Shepherd caved in so easily. She fed him one piece of fruit at a time from her bowl until he'd had his fill. After he'd taken the last piece he would clasp it in his magnificent beak and swallow it. Then he would toss his head, regurgitate the morsel of fruit unblemished and, with another small toss of his head, thoughtfully place the grape or piece of mango between the outmost tips of his ungainly beak to give it back to the Shepherd. She had to accept politely his regurgitated gift. Once the gift had been accepted, the hornbill would then grasp her hand gently in his large beak and hold it while she finished the rest of her breakfast one-handed. Once finished, she would stroke the back of the hornbill's soft feathery head."

Certainly Crampton is an animal-lover, but, as this anecdote demonstrates, she has a very gentle spirit that is a huge part of her appeal.

Crampton organizes the book by chapters for each of the months of the year, and sprinkles it with farm lore and information about the value and practice of regenerative farming. Regenerative farming is, essentially, practices to preserve and enrich soil as a part of every-day farming practice. For Crampton, this includes spreading on her fields  a hay-and-dung mixture left when she cleans out the sheep sheds. It  also includes planting a variety of grasses and other plants to enrich the soil of her fields and to improve the diet of her sheep.


           

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

I've just finished Anne of Green Gables, a childhood classic, which I nevertheless never heard of until I was an adult. It's a wonderful book. Anne is delightfully precocious, full of wonderful speeches and emotion. I read it as part of an online read-along.

Montgomery is a wonderful writer, given to beautiful descriptions of nature.

"It was October again when Anne was ready to go back to school -- a glorious October, all red and gold, with mellow mornings when the valleys were filled with delicate mists as if the spirit of autumn had poured them in for the sun to drain -- amethyst, pearl, silver, rose, and smoke-blue. The dews were so heavy that the field glistened like cloth of silver and there were such heaps of rustling leaves in the hollows of many-stemmed woods to run crisply through. The Birch Path was a canopy of yellow and the ferns were sear and brown all along it. There was tang in the very air that inspired the hearts of small maidens tripping, unlike snails, swiftly and willingly to school; and it was jolly to be back again at the little brown desk beside Diana, with Ruby Gillis nodding across the aisle and Carrie Sloane winding up notes and Julia Bell passing a "chew" of gum down from the back seat."

Another example which struck me:

"Anne came dancing home in the purple winter twilight across the snowy places. Afar in the south-west was the great shimmering, pearl-like sparkle of an evening star in a sky that was pale golden and ethereal rose over gleaming white spaces and dark glens of spruce. The tinkles of sleigh-bells among the snowy hills came like elfin chimes through the frosty air, but their music was not sweeter than the song in Anne's heart and on her lips."


There's so much humor in the book. As a girl, Anne frequently gets into scrapes -- like the time she offers her friend Diana raspberry cordial only to discover later that it's really currant wine, and the time the minister and his wife come for dinner, the beautiful cake Anne has prepared tastes very unappetizing because the vanilla she put in it is really liniment. One of my favorite bits of humor is when Marilla tells Anne that the teacher Miss Stacy is organizing a preparation class for students who plan to take the entrance exam to get into Queen's College, and asks Anne is she would like to join the class:

"Oh, Marilla!" Anne straightened to her knees and clasped her hands. "It's been the dream of my life -- that is, for the last six months, ever since Ruby and Jane began to talk of studying for the entrance (exam)."

The Lighthouse by Robert Eggers

This film seems not to have made much of an impact on awards season, but there are so many ways in which it's a tour-de-force.

The sound design, the photography, and of course, the writing and acting. It's a film full of beautiful dialogue, with references to sea lore - "Old" reprimands "Young" for killing a gull, telling him that it's bad luck to kill a sea bird.

It's a psychological thriller, and I found it difficult to watch. I found that surprising, in a way. I've never really been a fan of horror, whether it's novels or films. But I really liked Hereditary and Get Out and I thought I should have felt the same way about The Lighthouse. The sense of claustrophobia induced by the film made me feel squeezed.

But the acting was so wonderful. In one of the features, the director said that Robert Pattinson said to him that he really only wanted to do really strange stories, and on that basis, Eggers offered the role of "Young" to him. Willem Dafoe said that the theatre shaped him, and the skills he developed there he was able to use here. And there was a perfect seamlessness to their performances. They really committed; it all seemed very real. This felt experimental, in the sense that the dialogue, the cinematography all contribute to an unreal, dreamlike feeling.

Motherless Brooklyn by Edward Norton

I wanted to love Motherless Brooklyn, and it is certainly true that in the beginning of the movie, I thought: this is watercolor fantasy for urban planners. Norton bought the rights to Jonathan Lethem's novel, which I haven't read, but seems to have changed the story to make it about Robert Moses.

Robert Moses is famous, and perhaps notorious figure. He had a very long career, and having worked in New York State government, became the most powerful figure in New York City development between the 1930s and the 1960s. He built parks, expressways, and bridges, and destroyed many working-class neighborhoods in order to build those structures. Jane Jacobs, famous for her influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, opposed him and helped turn the tide of public opinion against him. Moses represents destroying neighborhoods for the sake of providing movement for cars, prioritizing cars over public transit, and for a model of urban renewal that called for large-scale demolition for the sake of new building.


The character in the movie based on Moses is called Moses Randall (or Randolph) and is played by Alec Baldwin. The movie has a wonderful cast: Willem Dafoe, Cherry Jones, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. 

As the movie progressed, I felt that the quality of the plot, the dialogue, and the acting suffered. When the heritage of the character played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw was revealed, I found myself feeling that this had been done before, and better, in Chinatown.

A year or so ago I heard an episode of Terry Gross's Fresh Air, from National Public Radio, in which Robert Caro talked about his award-winning biography of Moses, The Power Broker. Caro said that one source of his power was his ability to dig up dirt on his political opponents:

     'But all of a sudden, the key official, a lawyer for the council to Mayor [Robert] Wagner       changed  his mind, and wrote a letter saying Moses' route was good. So when I was talking to Moses I said, "What did you do to Henry Epstein?" And he said something like, "Oh we hit him with an ax." I said, "What do you mean?" And he said in their investigation they had found that he had a girlfriend. He was a married man but he had a longtime girlfriend. He said, "I said to Henry, you and this chum of yours. And Henry said, "She's not my chum." And Moses said, "Oh yes, Henry, she's your chum all right." So Moses said to me... "So Henry wrote his letter."'

Here's a link to that podcast: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/15/713413916/biographer-robert-caro-on-fame-power-and-working-to-uncover-the-truth

Absolutely Anything

Terry Jones passed away, and my library put up a very discreet display of Terry Jones items as they do when famous people die.

When I got there, all the materials were checked out except Absolutely Anything, a video that I'd never heard of .. with a front cover with a photo of Kate Beckinsale, Simon Pegg, and a dog wearing glasses.

None of this enticed me, but I reminded myself that everything at the library is free and one really ought to try new things, early and often.

I checked it out, and as I watched it I thought: "I know this story!" I thought it was Jesus and Satan in the desert, like in Paradise Lost, but now that I think about it, maybe it's the Book of Job. Anyway, I really loved it. The last 25% was a little bit weaker .. (endings are hard, or so I've heard), but just when I was getting quite worried the plot ended itself very happily. Later, I thought: is this an overlooked film, or is it the case that you are a sucker for a plot in which an affectionate, adorable dog saves mankind?

1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro

I wondered if I would like this book so soon after reading Will in the World. Well, I loved it, and I think I might enjoy reading it again. I read it last year.

It's an account of the plays of 1599, and what Shakespeare's world was like in 1599, with a great emphasis on the political events in London that year. In fact, this book is really "about" how political events affected Shakespeare's work and I found this account both entertaining and a great improvement to my understanding of the plays. Henry the V, As You Like It, and Julius Caesar were the plays Shakespeare wrote in 1599, and I enjoyed the discussion of Julius Caesar the most.

The book opens with a wonderful adventure story: Shakespeare and his fellow Globe shareholders take apart The Theatre, their playhouse just north of London's city limits, and carry it off to re-erect it as The Globe in Southwark. They'd lost their lease to the land on which The Theatre stood. They'd built the theatre, but anticipated trouble with the landlord over removing The Theatre building, so this was a covert operation.

Sadly, the book closes on a less festive note: with Essex's rebellion and execution. The queen was increasingly unpopular, in part because she would not name a successor, leaving everyone with a sense of uncertainty. Perhaps also because the very fact that she was so old meant that it was time for something new and the younger generation was impatient for something new to begin. Finally, there were exclusive licenses being given to favorites, and this caused resentment. The impression that I carried away was that Essex was all out of chances; without a court position he was broke. He'd lost favor when he was sent to Ireland and, in the eyes of many, bungled it. Shapiro's view is that Essex had a vision of service and gallantry that was outdated.

Shapiro discusses censorship in this period, and I found myself feeling surprised that Shakespeare never ran afoul of the censors. In fact, the character of Falstaff was first named for a censor; the name had to be changed and it was changed to Falstaff. In a sense, he did not get away with that - but I think Jonson was imprisoned more than once. How did that smart mouth Mr. Shakespeare get away with that? I guess he was just that popular.

Mr. Shapiro is a Shakespeare scholar who has made quite a few public appearances and presented a television show on the historical Shakespeare. You can find these on YouTube.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

I loved Normal People. It'd gotten a lot of publicity and praise, and made it onto the "best of" year-end book lists. It came in second in the general fiction category after Margaret Atwood's The Attachments (the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale) in the Goodreads Choice Awards for 2019.

"Don't tell Mam about this," he says. Marianne shakes her head. No, she agrees. But it wouldn't matter if she did tell her, not really. Denise decided a long time ago that it is acceptable for men to use aggression toward Marianne as a way of expressing themselves. As a child Marianne resisted, but now she simply detaches, as if it isn't any interest to her, which in a way it isn't. Denise considers this a symptom of her daughter's frigid and unlovable personality. She believes Marianne lacks "warmth," by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her. " (p. 68)
   
"Unable to form such straightforward views or express them with any force, Connell initially felt a sense of crushing inferiority to his fellow students, as if he had upgraded himself accidentally to an intellectual level far above his own, where he had to strain to make sense  of the most basic premises. .. One night the library started closing just as he reached the passage in Emma when it seems like Mr. Knightley is going to marry Harriet, and he had to close the book and walk home in a state of strange emotional agitation. He's amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that. It feels intellectually unserious to to concern himself with fictional people marrying each other. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it "the pleasure of being touched by great art." In those words it almost sounds sexual. And in a way, the feeling provoked in Connell when Mr. Knightley kisses Emma's hand is not completely asexual, though its relation to sexuality is not direct. It suggests to Connell that the same imagination that he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them."

"People in Dublin often mention the west of Ireland in this strange tone of voice, as if it's a foreign country, but one they consider themselves very knowledgeable about." (pp. 70-72) 

In the closing pages surprising but wonderful.

Normal People reminded me of Eleanor and Park, because in both novels the couples are seemingly misfits who have little in common with each other; the woman suffers emotional or physical abuse at home; and the relationship offers the woman emotional escape.


I looked up Normal People in Novelist because I wondered which other books would turn up on the Novelist "Read-Alikes" list for Normal People. (Novelist is a readers' advisory database subscribed to by many libraries for use by their staff and library users; it offers information about authors, lists of their work, book reviews, and finally "read-alike" lists: suggestions for new reading that fans of the book in question are likely to also like.) Eleanor and Park was not on the list much to my surprise.

(The books listed were Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi; One Day, by David Nicholls; The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBridge; Daniel Deronda by George Eliot; Purity by Jonathan Franzen; Skippy Dies by Paul Murray; The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud; Eileen by Ottesa Moshfegh; and The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.)

I like this excerpt from the review of Normal People that appeared in the Kirkus Reviews online:

"Rooney's  genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney  elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney  precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people  as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become. Absolutely enthralling. Read it."

Having done everything I can to avoid talking about what I think of the novel it is this: Like the Kirkus reviewer, I love the the psychological insight that permits Rooney to "articulate everything that's going on under the surface,"; I love that Marianne believes that Connell's love for her has "redeemed" her, giving the healing power of love a little shrine; I love that Rooney has captured the strange psychology of teenagers; I love that, to me, both Marianne and Connell are refreshingly surprising. Both Marianne and Connell are more, and very different from, what they seem. Asserting the healing power of love is in no way new; but Marianne and Connell's particularity and vulnerability means to me that Rooney has successfully reworked an old theme and made it fresh.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

As the title implies, this book is, among other things, a true crime story and a wonderfully written and entertaining one. Keefe said in one of his interviews that he worked hard on the structure. It permitted him to tell a story that was suspenseful, propulsive, sometimes amazing, but full of detail.  It provides context.

It begins with the story of Jean McConville, a Protestant woman who married a Catholic, and though a recent widow with ten children, was disappeared by the IRA. The story of what happened to her, after she was dragged from her apartment in front of her children, is the frame for the book.

It mostly focuses on four people: Brendan Hughes, an IRA commander, two women, Dolours and Marian Price, and the former leader of the Sinn Fein party and the leader of the IRA in Belfast, Gerry Adams.

It deals at length with all four of this figures. Hughes and the Price sisters made sacrifices as IRA soldiers that made the Good Friday Agreement a very bitter pill for them to swallow. Hughes specifically said that every death, civilian or paramilitary, was a worthless sacrifice.

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell

When I found out that my book club was reading this book, I was a little bit disappointed. I had really enjoyed reading Malcolm Gladwell's books in the past, but for me, the bloom was off the rose because I'd read an article online by two academics who criticized Gladwell's approach as incautious and misleading. The notion that I might have been misled had troubled me, and had dimmed my enthusiasm.

The book opens with Gladwell telling the story of Sandra Bland, an African-American woman who was arrested in a traffic stop in Texas, and unable to raise bail, hung herself in her cell about three days after she was arrested. Interestingly, Gladwell does not mention that Bland was unable to raise bail in this book. The fact that she was unable to raise bail has always troubled me, and I'm grateful that there's currently a trend to reduce bail for poor suspects in certain cases. Had Sandra Bland not been in jail for so many hours and days she might still be alive. That's not to take away from the analysis presented in the book; it's not directly relevant to Gladwell's thesis, which is about how often we rely on visual cues for assessing people we don't know and how often judgments based on visual cues are erroneous.


What I found as I continued to read was that this book, like Gladwell's others, is very entertaining. I read almost the entire book in one sitting, which really surprised me. And, Gladwell has modified his approach; this book has extensive footnotes.

Gladwell explains that an experiment in Kansas City indirectly led to setting the stage for Sandra Bland's arrest. Social scientists identified the blocks with the greatest number of criminal incidents. Patrol teams were assigned to these special blocks in one neighborhood, and asked to aggressively police, by which I mean that they were instructed to pull people over for small infractions of traffic laws and look for any evidence of other crimes. In these special areas, this strategy was successful. However, this practice of pulling people over for small infractions has been misapplied to neighborhoods that are not "hot spots" for crime and this is the context for Sandra Bland's arrest. The case of Sandra Bland is a complicated one, and Gladwell is not offering a policy prescription, but I infer from this case that police forces using this strategy in low-crime areas is inappropriate.

Two of the topics Gladwell discusses in presenting support for his theses are areas he's explored before: facial expressions (in Blink) and suicide (in The Tipping Point). In his discussion of facial expressions, Gladwell mentions Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals, which collected research from others and asserted that expressions of aggression, sorrow, etc., are universal. I'd read The Expression of the Emotions in college and loved it, and so was disappointed to learn that research has recently been done to show that abilities to read facial expressions are not universal. The research is complicated; as presented, the different results in an attempted replication of experiments may result from different methodology.

In The Tipping Point, Gladwell wrote of the "contagious" quality of suicide: that the suicide of one influences others. I accepted this as true, because I knew of a such case in my high school.

Here, Gladwell writes about the context of suicide. When San Francisco's authorities proposed creating a net or a barrier to prevent suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge, members of the public opposed the move, believing that potential suicides will find another way. Interestingly, Gladwell cites a case that shows this is not necessarily true. And he frames it in an interesting way, telling the story of the suicides of the poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

In the years in which the British used "town gas" in their stoves, which contained a large amount of deadly carbon monoxide, suicides like Sylvia Plath's, rates rose. After "town gas" was replaced with natural gas, which contained almost no carbon monoxide, suicide rates dropped. Gladwell found a second example of this phenomenon. Suicides like Anne Sexton's, where she closed the garage door and sat in her car while her garage filled with carbon monoxide, have dropped markedly since catalytic converters were introduced; catalytic converters emit a very small amount of carbon monoxide which is not lethal. Gladwell is saying that the ease with which a suicide can occur influences the individual. I find this fascinating; I wish I could easily learn whether scholars and researchers who study this topic agree with Gladwell's conclusion. (Here's an online article that does seem to agree with Gladwell's conclusion: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/03/trends-suicide). It certainly has policy implications; it suggests that it would not be a waste of time and money to create a barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge. I must note that Gladwell has been criticized for drawing false or misleading conclusions: https://archives.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_gladwellian_debate.php

Sandra Bland's experience was an example of what Gladwell calls mismatch, the misreading of visual (or behavioral) cues. It's relevant to the Sandra Bland case because the officer who arrested her reported that she was agitated and that he feared for his safety; it appears that he misread her anxiety as guilt.