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| Harry Potter with his owl Hedgwig |
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| We have started watching the Harry Potter sequence from the start. I don’t know if we’ll finish. |
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| A snowy owl once strayed from its Arctic habitat and spent some time in our part of Michigan. |
Sunday afternoon we watched “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” — which of course we have watched before. It’s one of several prequels to the Harry Potter story as you no doubt are aware. Its author, J.K.Rowling, has an uncanny ability to make me think of current events. As I watched, I had a creepy feeling that the eerie evil character Grindelwald was very familiar right now.
Yes, I placed Grindelwald’s face: he looks like British right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos who was taken into custody by ICE and deported last Friday from the US to the United Kingdom. The reason for his expulsion was that he had overstayed his visa while engaging in very visible right-wing political activities. He was a writer for the far-right Breitbart website, and was proud of using language that was racist and that denigrated women, Muslims, and transgender people. Good riddance!
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| Left: Grindelwald. Right: Yiannopoulos. |
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| A Niffler |
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| A Bowtruckle |
“In honor of Native American Heritage Month, today's Doodle celebrates the kayak, a narrow watercraft originally created by Arctic tribes 5,000 years ago.”
“This Doodle was illustrated by Inuit Nunangat guest artist, Natashia Allakariallak.”
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| On our trip to Alaska in 2013, we watched a bear fishing while we were in a kayak. |
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| Watching a kayak demo in Greenland in 2022. The Inuit of Greenland contributed much to the development of kayaking. |
“Cephalopods are an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Because our most recent common ancestor was so simple and lies so far back, cephalopods are an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.” (p. 9)
“Later … an integrated perspective on the world arises and a more definite sense of self. We then reach something closer to consciousness. I don’t see that as a single definite step. Instead, I see “consciousness” as a mixed-up and overused but useful term for forms of subjective experience that are unified and coherent in various ways. Here, too, it is likely that experience of this kind arose several times on different evolutionary paths: from white noise, through old and simple forms of experience, to consciousness.” (p. 97)
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| A Niffler |
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| A Bowtruckle |
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| A nice short story by Silvia Moreno Garcia. Although I usually am not a fan of this genre, I enjoy her work. As suggested by the cover, there’s a wolf in the story. |
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| I’m always vowing to read Sci-Fi, but I never really like it. |
The last sentence of the book: “ We go forth to find this city’s singer, and hopefully to hear the greatness of its birthing song.” — From N. K. Jemisin "The City Born Great"
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| The Running Grave |
“While Robin was in Kensington, Strike was back in the Denmark Street office, eating his second Chinese meal in two weeks, this time a takeaway. He was finding the last stone to go before hitting his target weight very hard to shift, and while he supposed a nutritionist might tell him the reappearance of takeaways and pub food in his diet might have something to do with that, the lure of sweet and sour chicken and fried rice had proved too strong for him this evening.” (p. 767)
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| From the Food Network: A Black Light Cocktail (source) |
My neighbors have started decorating their houses and lawns for Halloween, and everywhere I shop has Halloween candy. It’s time to think about the holiday, so I’ve been trying to make a list of classic literature for Halloween reading. Here are my favorites. I’ve read them all, mostly more than once, and enjoyed them, though some of them frightened me!
I'm really not inclined to write much about this book. It's the sixth in a series of which I liked the first four, with reservations about one that was too violent. What I wrote about the fifth book, in a review titled A Very Long Book, wasn't very positive: I mentioned my sense that Troubled Blood, book number five, was much too long and involved.
I liked The Ink Black Heart even less, and the plot and characters -- while sometimes pretty well-portrayed -- are really getting less interesting than in the earlier books. The long relationship of the two main characters, Cormoran Strike and his detective agency partner Robin Ellacot continues throughout this book. After five years they are still pretty much in the same place they started, and at this point I am losing patience and losing interest.
I suspect that many of the situations, character flaws, bad motives, pettiness, internet trolling, male chauvinism and violence, name-calling, nastiness, and other similar parts of the novel are payback for the internet abuse that J.K.Rowling has recently endured. I do feel sorry for her for being castigated in such nasty ways, but I didn't really want to share all this agony.
I haven't read any reviews of this novel, so I don't know if anyone else shares my chagrin at missing the humor, skillful observation of human relations, great characterizations, and overall delightfulness of J.K.Rowling at her best.
Review © 2022 mae sander
Recently, I've been reading sequels from a variety of mystery authors. Writing a full review post of every sequel seems a bit redundant, but here's a quick report on some recent ones. As I often do, I'm notably interested in the way these authors use food to tell their stories.
"You drink mugi-cha, don’t you?” My hostess poured cool barley tea for me into a dark earthen-ware cup. (p. 41).
Or another occasion when she slept at a friend's house:
"She showed me a thermos of green tea and a tiered basket filled with pickled vegetables and onigiri, fresh rice balls stuffed with pickled plums that I loved. I must have smelled them when she walked in and woke me up." (p. 166).
If anything, I liked the second in the series better than the first one. I'm surely expecting to read more!
Black's Murder in Belleville is the second detective tale in the Aimee Leduc series (published in 2000). It's every bit as over-the-top violent and exciting as the first in the series, maybe more so. By the end of the first chapter, Aimee has been a witness to a fatal car bombing, has picked up the survivor (a friend who had phoned her for help), stolen a moped, dragged her injured friend onto the moped, and avoided an unknown but clearly evil-intending pursuer. She rides the moped down the steps of a Metro station, with her friend somehow on her back, avoids the enemy, and gets away. That's just the first chapter. Oh, yes, she also is always dressed perfectly for every scene.
Not much more about this that I would want to say. Lots of bad guys! Really bad ones! Will I read another? Probably. Will I read all 20 of them? Probably not.
"Becca digs her heels into the ground, stares at her beef casserole and refuses to get pulled in. If they want to act like idiots, that’s their problem; they can fix it themselves."(p. 427).
"A heavy girl with her back to me looked like she was lashing into her food, but over her shoulder I caught a full plate of chicken pie chopped into tiny perfect squares, getting tinier with each vicious cut." (pp. 232-233).
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| Another book that found me because it was in a Little Free Library! |
"This is not the story of my marriage; I have said that I cannot write the story of my marriage. But sometimes I think about what first husbands know. I married William when I was twenty years old. I wanted to cook him meals. I bought a magazine that had fancy recipes, and I gathered the ingredients. William passed through the kitchen one evening and looked at what was in the frying pan on the stove, then he came through the kitchen again. "Button," he said, "what's this?" I said it was garlic. I said the recipe called for a clove of garlic to be sautéed in olive oil. With gentleness he explained that this was a bulb of garlic, and that it needed to be peeled and opened into the cloves. I can picture the unpeeled big bulb of garlic now -- so clearly -- sitting in the middle of the olive oil in the frying pan." (p. 172-173)
"We know this wine as champagne. François and Barbe-Nicole would have called it just vin mousseux— sparkling wine. It wasn’t regularly called champagne even in France until the 1860s, when it had all become big business. What is most surprising is how different champagne looked and tasted at the end of the eighteenth century. It would have been virtually unrecognizable to most of us." (p. 25).A remarkable woman, a workaholic to the end of her life:
"Years later, the traveler Robert Tomes remembered 'Madame Clicquot [as] a dwarfish, withered old woman of eighty-nine years, whose whole soul was in business, scanning over each day to her last the ledger of the commercial house to which she had given her name." (p. 160).This book is labeled by amazon.com as an "oenobiography" -- a wonderful word! Remember, the prefix oeno- means wine! As in oenophile, a lover of wine. Or my made-up word oenophony, a wine poseur.
"In 1945, Himes' novel If He Hollers Let Him Go was published — both his first, and the first in the vein of what some contemporaries would deride as protest novels. And they were. Himes never soft-pedaled his disdain for the systemic racism of the day or for black integrationists, whom he referred to as 'whining beggars.'" (source)If He Hollers is a very powerful book. As I read, I was amazed at how well it holds up to the test of time, how completely Himes' sentiments about racism and alienation are in tune with the attitudes and problems our society, sadly, continues to harbor. Its almost unbearable to read it and know that we are in fact losing the tiny advances that we may have made for a while.
"Grand-mère was sitting in a chair in the communal living room, sun brushing her right shoulder, the rest of her in dusk. When I was a child, my favorite thing was to bake with her. She taught me how to make pain d’amande and challah; dripping the melted butter over the braided loaf is one of my sweetest memories. I still bake the cookies, often when I’m feeling a little lonely; the intoxicating aroma of almonds and butter never fails to lift my spirits. It hurt to see Grand so small, so pulled inward, so vacant. I wondered if the large woman who made potato latkes so rich and crisp they melted and crunched in your mouth at the same time, who beat the pants off her friends at the poker table, who loved her family with a fierceness that was scary at times, was somewhere inside this tiny husk of a woman. If she still existed at all." (p. 66).
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| Strike and Ellacott as the BBC casts them. |
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| Lethal White: published last Tuesday. |
He hung up and returned to the office where Robin was opening and sorting mail. When he told her the upshot of the conversation, she Googled Pratt’s for him.
“I didn’t think places like this still existed,” she said in disbelief, after a minute’s reading off the monitor.
“Places like what?”
“It’s a gentleman’s club… very Tory… no women allowed, except as guests of club members at lunchtime… and ‘to avoid confusion,’” Robin read from the Wikipedia page, “‘all male staff members are called George.’”
“What if they hire a woman?”
“Apparently they did in the eighties,” said Robin, her expression midway between amusement and disapproval. “They called her Georgina.” (Kindle Locations 1465-1471).When he gets to Pratt's (which I Googled too!) he's shown to a dining room by a motherly woman. Through a pass-through he can see a chef carving cold roast beef, and around him:
Here was the very antithesis of the smart restaurants where Strike tailed errant husbands and wives, where the lighting was chosen to complement glass and granite, and sharp-tongued restaurant critics sat like stylish vultures on uncomfortable modern chairs. Pratt’s was dimly lit. Brass picture lights dotted walls papered in dark red, which was largely obscured by stuffed fish in glass cases, hunting prints and political cartoons. In a blue and white tiled niche along one side of the room sat an ancient iron stove. The china plates, the threadbare carpet, the table bearing its homely load of ketchup and mustard all contributed to an ambience of cozy informality, as though a bunch of aristocratic boys had dragged all the things they liked about the grown-up world— its games, its drink and its trophies— down into the basement where Nanny would dole out smiles, comfort and praise." (Kindle Locations 1519-1525).His client, Chiswell, a cabinet minister, arrives, a bit late of course:
Once they were seated at the table, which had a stiff, snowy-white tablecloth ... Georgina brought them thick slices of cold roast beef and boiled potatoes. It was English nursery food, plain and unfussy, and none the worse for it. Only when the stewardess had left them in peace, in the dim dining room full of oil paintings and more dead fish, did Chiswell speak again. (Kindle Locations 1552-1555).Throughout most of the novel, Strike drinks coffee and beer, eats bacon or deep-fried food -- or tries to abstain in order to control his weight -- and joins friends for Chinese takeout food or a curry. Or this:
Having left in plenty of time, Strike made a detour to a handy McDonald’s for an Egg McMuffin and a large coffee, which he consumed at an unwiped table, surrounded by other early Saturday risers. A young man with a boil on the back of his neck was reading the Independent right ahead of Strike.... (Kindle Locations 5068-5071).But the wonderfully named (and completely not made-up) Pratt's sets the scene for the novel where Strike and Robin have to deal with many unbearable aristocrats and their vast sense of entitlement. In fact, everything in the book revolves around how their entitlement forms their attitudes and leads them to the crimes that are being detected. In the Harry Potter books, there are wizard families with the same sense of overpowering aristocratic superiority to the more common wizards. Rowling really knows how to use her powers of observation on these rather deficient human specimens, and it makes for very good reading!
The ancient Greek gods live among us, continuing their ancient rivalries and pettiness and breeding with mortals. As in the legends, their half-blood offspring have the potential to become heroic figures in the continuing struggles among the various gods, but first they have to come to terms with their unusual identity. That's the premise of Rick Riordan's very popular kids' series about Percy Jackson, full name, Perseus.
