Hanging in There

Two of the many self-tamed Sandhill Cranes in Kensington MetroPark.
This is an iPhone photo taken from a few feet away from the bird.

Len’s photo of a Wilson’s Snipe, a normally shy marsh bird that was out in the open in the late afternoon.
This photo was taken with a telephoto lens — the snipe aren’t as bold as the cranes!
And yes, snipe are real birds as well as the subject of 200 years of practical jokes.

Not much consolation for this week’s debacle, but beauties of nature are probably our best hope.

A Good Read by Louise Erdrich

The Mighty Red is a long book full of rich details, and typically of Louise Erdrich’s books, also full of historic and cultural background: just the right amount to make it interesting, though. The book’s focus is on farming, especially all the issues and challenges of raising sugar beets in North Dakota, and especially on the extreme dangers of pesticides. One of many lists in the minds of the farmers whose lives are being affected: “Dual Magnum. Roundup. Warrant. Outlook. Chloroacetamide. Betamix. Ethofumesate. UpBeet. Gramoxone.” (p. 220) At the end, two of the farmers (both having been harmed long ago by their work and exposure) are talking and one summarizes their lives: ‘Nobody ever said farming was easy.” (p. 369)

I enjoyed the food descriptions — one of my favorite parts about good books about ‘real” people. Here are three of them:

A favorite food of the mother and daughter, Crystal and Kismet, whose stories are at the center of the book: “Crystal put a pot of water on to boil and peeled some carrots. She’d boil the carrots in salt water, mash them up with fried garlic and onions, add some basil, oregano, a can of tomatoes, a few spoonfuls of tomato paste, red pepper flakes, a dash of cinnamon. Voilà. Sauce. They almost never ate meat because meat, even misery meat, cost more than carrots.” (p. 208)

Another passage about Kismet and her mother-in-law: “Winnie and Kismet drove over late in the afternoon with two versions of potato salad. Winnie swore by her mother’s warm potato salad, made with red potatoes, a dressing of white vinegar, bacon fat, bacon bits, parsley, salt, pepper, sugar. Kismet swore by her mother’s recipe: golden potatoes, parsley, sliced boiled eggs, chopped onions, and a dressing of mayonnaise, oil, vinegar, yellow mustard, salt, pepper, and cayenne. Paprika to decorate. The bowls were covered with Saran wrap.” (p. 235)

And a description of lunch-making by a landlady in an oil-field area: “Janice did not prepare just any lunch. Cold pop swaddled in Ziplocs of ice when it was hot. Hot chocolate and coffee in a thermos when it was cold. Sandwiches with cheese, heavy on the meats, the lettuce kept separate and crisp. The bread thick and soft. Squares of cake in a Tupperware box, a dozen boiled eggs, cookies. Sliced apples with lemon squeezed over them and cinnamon sugar to dip them in. Peeled oranges, baby carrots, ranch dip. Home-canned pickles. Janice was a goddess.” (p. 269)

To me, these descriptions and many others are indicative of the author’s eye for the details of her characters lives, and the way she uses these details to show character. I also loved this description about a bookseller who is another key character:

“One of the best things about selling old books was going through them before they went onto the shelves. She tried not to buy marked-up or underlined books, but there were other ways books were personalized. People kept or left things in books—quotes, clippings, often about the author, letters that arrived while they were reading the book, bills they didn’t want to pay, foil gum wrappers, bookmarks from now-closed bookstores, funny drawings from their children, dry autumn leaves, grocery lists, complaints. She stored these scraps in a manila envelope marked Ephemera. From another time, another place, the bits had come into her hands. Some were personal. A bookmark made from dried yarrow flowers arranged between pieces of clear packing tape had kept the reader’s place in Rosemary’s Baby. Later, when she looked it up, she found that yarrow was a banishing herb against evil. In a copy of The Aspern Papers, she’d found a lock of dark brown hair.” (p. 319)

As usual, I  haven’t written a review of this book — lots of those have already been published. I’ve just tried to show you some reasons why I enjoyed the book.

A Murder Mystery

Everyone in my Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson is what I would call a meta-mystery. I view a book as meta when the text constantly talks about how it’s a text and self-consciously over-shares what the author is doing. In this example, Stevenson begins with a list of rules for writing a mystery, which originated with a writer named Knox, a member of a famous mystery writer’s club. (For nonfiction details and the original of these rules, which I looked up, see Ronald Knox: 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction.)

The fictitious narrator then comments throughout the book about his writing decisions, his writing methods, his choices about Knox’s rules, and the comparison of his mystery to those of other writers, like Agatha Christie. The narrator himself is deeply involved with the mystery at hand; that is, with several murders from the past and present, while telling the story. I assume that this is all fiction — and that all of Stevenson’s family members have not actually killed someone. Making things even more meta, the narrator also talks about the reader, specifically about how he’s sure you are reading an e-book, not a paper book.

All this digressive stuff works ok but gets tedious. It begins in the Prologue, when the narrator explains that he himself is a professional writer of advice to writers — and thus has his own rules about how to write a mystery, going back to the basics of Agatha Christie and all that. He promises to make it all come out correctly according to his rules, and lists the chapters where he describes various victims’ dead bodies: “I promise that’s the truth, unless your Kindle or whatever device you have mucks with the pages. There is only one plot hole you could drive a truck through. I tend to spoil things. There are no sex scenes.” (p. 2)

Here are a couple more meta passages, then I’m done:

“Police officers in these books, while being Last Resorts or Only Hopes, can also have character traits such as By The Book or Screw The Rules.” (p. 103)

 

“A lot has happened, so I thought I’d jump in here with a quick recap. I know: it’s a bit weird. But I want us all to be on the same page. (Figuratively: I know you bought the e-book.) If you’re confident in your cognitive abilities, you can skip ahead. Books like this generally tease out the backstory of an ensemble of reprobates, lock them in a singular location, and then present a body that can be linked to parts of each player’s backstory as possible motive. I’ll try that.” (p. 105)

“In a mystery like this one, there are clues in every word—hell, in every piece of punctuation. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, think about the device in your hands. If a killer is ever revealed and your ‘percentage read’ isn’t at least in the high eighties, they cannot be the real killer; there is simply too much of the book still to be read.” (p. 231 or 62%)

“On the other hand, suspicious as I was of Gavin, it’s simply unfair to introduce the killer this far past the midpoint. Knox would have me drawn and quartered—that’s his first rule. And, reader, your ‘percentage read’ should tell you there is just too much to go.” (p. 282) 

The only classic mystery trope Stevenson seems to miss is describing food, but I guess he’s afraid of being accused of coziness. He does mention instances when the characters eat. The sequence of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners contributes to the passage of time as is usual in classic detective fiction. Here’s a sort of anti-food breakfast description as an example of his writing: “I joined the line, shuffling past the bain-maries, and filled my plate. The bacon was untouched, assumedly because people were confronting their own mortality and avoiding saturated fats.” (p. 60)

If you like this sort of wink-wink-nudge-nudge writing, I recommend this book. Although the actual suspense and plotting are pretty good, it’s too precious for my taste. 

On TV

Watched the first two episodes of The Marlow Murder Club, Season 2.
It’s ok, not great, but we’ll keep watching.

New York Times Cooking

We have been using many recipes from the New York Times cooking archives. I believe between the two of us, Len and I have tried something like 50 of the recipes, which number over 22,000, they say. We figure we have a few hundred years left to get through the ones that appeal to us. Here are some of the recipes that we have liked:

 

Blog post and original photos © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Deb’s Sunday Salon and Eileen’s Saturday Critters