Category: Literature

At the Yolo County Library recently I came across a 1969 title from Michael Crichton called “Zero Cool.”

Some interesting facts about Michael Crichton…

1. He was 6’9″.
2. He died at age 66 of lymphoma.
3. He got an M.D. from Harvard Medical School.
4. He left medicine shortly thereafter to write full time.
5. His first bestseller was The Andromeda Strain. He went on to collaborrate with Steven Spielberg on the Jurrasic Park movies. He also originated TV’s medical drama “ER.”
6. Before all that, he financed his medical education by writing mysteries and thrillers under a pseudonym. He even won an Edgar Award, but never told the docs at Harvard when he went down to New York to accept it.

“Zero Cool” is a thriller about a newly minted physician who goes to Spain to present a paper at a medical conference, but ends up getting tangled in a web of international intrigue over stolen gemstones hidden – at autopsy – inside the thoracic cavity of a dead man. Not your typical thriller plotline, but you can see how Crichton’s personal history worms its way into his fiction.

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With all that in mind, I was delighted to recieve the following from a family member who saved one of my old dot-matrix-printed missives from 1991, the year our second child was born. It came with the comment “You do have a way with words.  🙂  ”  Thanks, Sue!

Bonus T-rex cartoon.

In keeping with our poetic theme from yesterday, today you get more (cow) poetry, along with a good definition for “rebounds,” as well as a Neanderthal spelling bee. Enjoy.

A bonus retirement meme for my golf buddies currently on a Mediterranean pleasure cruise. Hope you are having fun.

A poem from my childhood on this the first day of Spring.

Spring is sprung

The grass is rizz

I wonder where the posies is?

Alright, truth to tell:  By this time of year the birds have already eaten all the orange berries from the pyracantha bush outside my window. And the snow has already mostly melted. But on this first day of Spring here at 6200′ above sea level, there are no posies in sight.

And yes this post is for all you coastal elites with your pretty-in-pink cherry blossom photos and Spring-smug demeanor. We should all be so lucky, in spite of any poem from my childhood. And BTW, congrats to me on getting my first post published on “The view from my window” – here.

Happy Spring Equinox, y’all!

Came across a new FB group that tickled my fancy: “There is NO way that is MUTCD-compliant.”  In case you wondered about the acronym:   MUTCD means “Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices.”

From their site:

A post recently had comments locked for this reason. I started with the intention of removing the inappropriate comments, but it was a lost cause.

Posting of traffic control devices with a political implication (such as rainbow crosswalks, blue center lines, politician names added to stops signs, and so on) is fine. But please keep discussion to the traffic control device and its impact, and resist the temptation to take political pot shots.

 

The following by Mary Oliver is one of her better efforts. I sometimes find her poetry a bit precious for my taste, but this one’s a keeper. I do have a small quibble, however. Bears are hungriest not in autumn but in spring, after winter hibernation has taken its toll. In autumn, if they’ve done a proper job all summer, they’re getting fat and sleepy – just sayin’…

When death comes

like the hungry bear in autumn;

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;

when death comes

like the measle-pox;

when death comes

like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:

what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower; as common

as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,

tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

More on bears…

 

Bonus Art Appreciation Visual

 

Last but not least…

Bear with me. This may come off sounding a little convoluted. But there’s a point and I’ll get to it eventually. Today’s joint Words of the Day (WOTD) are “FOMO” and “OG.” Which are acronyms that stand for “Fear of Missing Out” and “Original Gangster,” respectively. What the…? Like I said, bear with me. It will all come clear by the end. Hopefully it will be worth the wait. But remember: The joy is in the journey. I think maybe I read that in a blog somewhere?

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This here is a blog, right? And that would make me, for lack of a better term, a blogger. So imagine my consternation yesterday upon receiving in my inbox the following email from my Alma Mater, specifically from the editor of my University’s Alumni Magazine, announcing the online release of their Winter 2024 issue.

Dear Reader, Blogs, remember those? So evanescent, so bygone, so early two-thousands. However. Something I read on a lit blog 20 years ago has me preoccupied and galvanized in this young year. A commenter responding to some post that’s itself lost to memory reckoned that her average reading pace was two books a month. She punched that average, her age, and her life expectancy into a calculator. The number it spat out was 520, the number if books she still had time to read. ******** Yikes. That few? At the time I was quite a bit younger than the commenter, with a good chance to read more than that. Still, her number haunted me, stark and finite. Whatever my number, it was certainly also finite. I needed to get in gear and start devouring books by the stack. Alas, the reality over these two decades has been that I find myself reading less, not more. Reader, it pains and shames me to admit that the book habit, once one of the very ways I defined myself, has been, more and more, not my habit. How could this be? Once upon a time, I was an English graduate student. Before that a junior book editor. Once upon a time, I had a younger person’s eyesight. Once upon a time, I commuted by train for many blissfully solitary minutes a day. Hardest of all to own up to: I didn’t have a smartphone stocked with ready distractions. ******** Thus, a New Year’s resolution. Though I have never been a resolutions person, for all of the standard reasons: Arbitrary. Predictable. Disingenuous. Self-punishing. Reading more books seems to skirt those categories. Plus it’s fun. My goal is one a week. With slim tomes heavily represented. January brought The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Call for the Dead by John le Carré (out of their intended order). Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (taut and bleak). And now Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire (good, but no Transit of Venus). A friend who is a resolutions person has advised that the key is to keep going even when I fall off the pace. So far, so good. As you delve into the newly available Winter/24 University of Chicago Magazine, happy reading from a happy reader. And if you’ve ever made a New Year’s resolution of the literary kind, tell us about it at [email protected]. Best wishes, Laura Demanski, AM’94

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“So evanescent, so bygone, so early two-thousands?” What the…? I guess for me, Old Gangster that I am, “early 2000’s” is actually pretty up-to-date. C’mon, I was already 42 years old way back in 2000, so I’m no spring chicken – then or now.

As for the pace of my reading addiction? Well, let’s just say that one book a week is plenty ambitious, let alone two. Hell, my wife usually reads ten different books at once. But that’s another post for another day. I guess the bottom line for me is that some people have much more FOMO than others. More power to ’em, I say. Oh, and also this: RELAX, guys!

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The deeper point lurking in the substrata under all the angsty FOMO is this: Beware the Casual Myopia of the Relatively Recent. That is to say, when looking backwards over time, stuff that happened yesterday or last week not only looms larger in our rear-view mirror than stuff from the dim mists of the distant past, but it tends to put our eyes a bit out of focus. And that’s not only a shame, it’s dangerous – especially while driving at night – because it skews our vision. And it makes us susceptible to all sorts of short-sighted assumptions.

Do you doubt it? Well, read on if you dare. And try not to run into anything while you’re doing it.

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My grandparents were born in a time before radio. My parents were born in a time before TV. And I was born before the Internet came to be. So, when a thirty-or-forty-something alumni-magazine editor says “Blogging is passé,” I say: “So what?” Hey, we weren’t born yesterday, sister. Best to get over our Casual Myopia of the Relatively Recent and expand our horizons to include the Big Tent. And that, dear Editor, includes OG-bloggers, like me.

Or, to cite another example: There was a time when paper newsprint was a revolutionary innovation. Think Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and Ben Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanac.” Or hell, go even further back and think Johannes Guttenberg’s printing press and the King James Bible for that matter.

There was also once a time when Walter Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley were the sole sources of evening news in most American living rooms. Nowadays, we pick our news sources off a drop-down menu according to our pre-existing biases. And whether that’s an advance or a regression I leave it to you to determine.

But my main point is this: Technology marches onward without waiting for any of us to keep pace. Is it any wonder that Instagram and TikTok and YouTube have supplanted older forms of infotainment? That doesn’t mean reading hard-copy books or news flies out the window, any more than it means that blogging is passé. It just means we now have a bigger menu to choose from. And more noise to contend with.

The only constant is change, and the pace is picking up. But also, at the same time, be careful to watch out for the Casual Myopia of the Relatively Recent. Because there can be more than one obstacle at any single time in our forward-leaning path to the bright future: Word to the wise; ignore it at your peril.

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As for FOMO? Um, sorry, can’t help you with that one. Maybe try some old-school therapy? Hey, take it from an OG-psychotherapist and blogger like me: In the grand scheme of things, it probably wouldn’t hurt.

A mnemonic ode to January by Brian Bilston. And remember, it’ll be February before you know it. For all the good it’ll do ya.

If you – like me – notoriously wait until the last minute to do your Christmas shopping… and if you – like me – have a lot of people on your gift list who are voracious readers… then this may be just the post for you. Well, at least if you like reading thrillers, that is.

The NYT has compiled their list of “Best Thrillers of 2023,” here. I am pleased to say that the name “John Grisham” appears nowhere therein. If you – like me – are always looking for new authors of fresh thriller fiction, then I’d say you’ve come to the right place. Best of all? Amazon will ship a book anywhere. And if you’re lucky, it might even arrive by the 25th, so don’t delay, time’s a wastin’… because a good thriller waits for no man. Or woman either, for that matter.

This year’s best thrillers come in various shades of suspense, dread and wonder. But each leads the reader down a twisty path toward an unknown destination.

Let’s begin with Daniel Kraus’s wholly original, almost obscenely entertaining WHALEFALL (MTV Books, 336 pp., $27.99), which concerns the efforts of a hapless 17-year-old named Jay Gardiner to escape from a most improbable prison.

Jay’s father, Mitt, a legendary diver and mean drunk, recently drowned himself off the coast of Monterey, Calif., suffering from terminal cancer. But when Jay tries to help his grieving family by recovering his father’s remains, he is slurped up by a passing whale, becoming an unexpected side dish to the whale’s main meal of giant squid.

As he fights his way out, Jay has in his arsenal an hour’s worth of oxygen and a lifetime of lessons, on whales as well as humans, imparted to him by his dad. Kraus, the author of numerous science fiction and fantasy novels — and, with Guillermo del Toro, of the novel version of the film “The Shape of Water” — infuses his prose with a scientist’s rigor and a poet’s sensibility.

You won’t meet a more tortured or resourceful hero this year. And you won’t meet a nobler or more surprising whale, either.

I loved The Shape of Water. Might have to try this one.

Everyone needs a good legal thriller for Christmas. This year, it’s Martin Clark’s excellent THE PLINKO BOUNCE (Rare Bird Books, 270 pp., $28), set in rural Virginia and starring a straight-shooting public defender named Andy Hughes. As the book begins, Andy is gearing up to take on a final case before starting a fancy new job at a big law firm.

His client, a violent ex-con accused of murdering a woman in a drug-fueled frenzy, is obviously guilty. But Andy is too conscientious to provide anything other than a top-notch defense, and he finds major holes in the prosecution’s case. The courtroom scenes are authoritative — Clark, the author of several previous novels, is a retired Virginia circuit court judge — and compelling in a pleasingly unflashy way. Readers will feel they’re in good hands.

They might also think they know what’s coming, but they don’t. As Clark explains, a “Plinko bounce” refers to the unpredictable behavior of the plastic disks dropped into a giant vertical peg board in a game on “The Price Is Right.” But this is not a game, and when the bounce happens, it’s truly shocking.

There’s no thriller like a legal thriller. Especially when the author is someone other than Grisham. Another good possibility.

Many of us have been unnerved to find out how ubiquitous facial-recognition technology is at places like airports. If one thing is clear from reading Anthony McCarten’s high-octane GOING ZERO (Harper, 295 pp., $30), it’s that we have no clue how much of our private lives we’ve already given up.

The book begins when a megalomaniacal tech bazillionaire named Cy Baxter, an evil amalgam of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, recruits 10 people to test the Fusion Initiative, a state-of-the-art surveillance system he’s devised with the U.S. government.

The volunteers are competing to evade the system for an entire month; anyone who remains un-found gets $3 million. But one by one, they go down, puny adversaries for the formidable arsenal of drones, cameras, virtual-reality devices, satellites, A.I.-enhanced research techniques and other technologies brought to bear against them.

But a lone volunteer, a Boston librarian — “single, childless, nearsighted” — manages to elude the system. And then the book cranks into a new gear, as we learn who this remarkable woman is, what she really wants and the lengths she is prepared to go to get it. “Privacy is passé,” Baxter says. That’s his opinion.

Gotta love it when the librarian outwits a tech bazillionaire. I’m definitely down for this one, because who doesn’t enjoy seeing Musk/Zuckerberg/Bezos get their comeuppance?

As you begin Sally Hepworth’s sly psychological puzzle THE SOULMATE (St. Martin’s, 327 pp., $28.99), please understand that what you’re seeing in the first few chapters is only part of the story, a sleight of hand perpetrated by the author. The book opens simply enough, with Pippa Gerard watching her husband, Gabe, try to talk a woman out of throwing herself over the cliff outside their house, a notorious spot for suicides.

But why does Gabe seem to be reaching toward the distressed woman — something he had been instructed never to do — as she teeters on the edge, then falls? And why, if Pippa loves her husband as much as she claims, did she once take an online survey called “Is Your Partner a Sociopath?” Hepworth metes out her information slowly and expertly, adding new ingredients to the pot so that instead of the simple broth with which we started we end up with a five-course dinner.

The dead woman, Amanda, narrates some of the chapters from beyond the grave. She wants to make something clear. “Unlike the scores of people who have come to this spot before me,” she says, “I did not come here to die.”

 

Hmmmm… “Is Your Partner a Sociopath?” Who among us hasn’t wondered exactly this?  Color me intrigued.

Watching two diabolical women try to outsmart each other while maintaining their placid facades in the library where they work is only one of the many pleasures of Laura Sims’s deliciously unsettling HOW CAN I HELP YOU (Putnam, 240 pp., $27). The book begins with Margo, an outwardly cheerful librarian with a big secret: In her previous job, she was a nurse with a knack for murdering her patients.

With her fake name and new identity, she seems to have gotten away with it. But she can’t escape her insatiable hunger for killing. And with the arrival of a new research librarian, a failed novelist named Patricia who suspects that Margo is hiding something and that it might make a great subject for her next book, Margo’s tenuous grip on sanity begins to slip away.

It’s no coincidence that both women admire Shirley Jackson’s “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” with its subversive belief that even murderous psychopaths deserve our sympathy, or at least our understanding. But is there room in the library — or, for that matter, in the world in general — for both Margo and Patricia? Probably not.

Another librarian story, but this one sounds more anti-hero than hero: Nurse Ratched meets Failed Novelist.  Sounds delicious.

Anyone who has yet to discover the particular genius of Mick Herron, author of the darkly hilarious “Slow Horses” espionage novels, is in for a serious treat. His latest book, THE SECRET HOURS (Soho Crime, 384 pp., $27.95), isn’t part of the series but exists in its larger universe — featuring some familiar characters and providing a jaw-dropping back story for one of them.

The book begins with a bravura action sequence set in the English countryside. Who knew that a rotting badger carcass could be such a useful weapon? It’s unclear how this harrowing chase through a bunch of fields and back roads fits in with the rest of the story, but tuck it away in your mind, because Herron will return to it later.

We then switch to London, where an unnamed former prime minister of dubious morals — hello, Boris Johnson! — has spitefully set up a far-reaching inquiry into historical wrongdoing at MI5, Britain’s domestic security service. It’s a deadly dull exercise until suddenly one of its members receives a classified case file about a botched operation and subsequent cover-up dating back to 1994 Berlin, and everything changes.

As always, Herron is at his best when he’s laying bare the amusing petty rivalries and elaborate machinations of bureaucrats and spies. It’s not necessary to read any of his other books before reading this one, but once you start, you’ll want to read them all.

Part of a spy series set in England: Can you say “James Bond,” boys and girls? All this and Boris Johnson too? Can’t miss!

In no particular order, the three best things I’ve seen this week.

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say,

is that I love the world — E.B. White.