richardderus's fourteenth 2022 thread

Mexican Palo Verde tree. With sufficient rains, these weirdos bloom about now.

These pretty flowers grow near thorns to keep pollen to its preferred pollinators.

This is the usual look of palo verde trees, sort of naked and greenish and Jurassic. They have chlorophyll in their bark so they don't expose leaves, which transpire quite a lot, to the desert icks.

For 2022, I state my goal of posting an average of 4 or 5 book reviews a week on my blog, for an annual total of 250. This year's total of ~200 (I need to do more to sync the data on my reads between my blog, Goodreads, and here this year for real) posts in 50 weeks of blogging shows it's doable. My *actual* blogged total for 2021 was 229.

I've long Pearl Ruled books I'm not enjoying, but making notes on Goodreads & LibraryThing about why I'm abandoning the read has been less successful. I gave up. I just didn't care about this goal, but I need to learn to because I *re*Pearl-Ruled five books after not remembering picking them up in the first place. What I've decided to do is have post >7 richardderus: be the Pearl-Rule Tracking post!

And now that I've gotten >3 richardderus: Burgoineing as a habit, I'm going to make a monthly blog-only post with my that-month's Burgoined books. It will appear the last Sunday of each month.



My Last Thread of 2009 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2010 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2011 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2012 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2013 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2014 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2015 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2016 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2017 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2018 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2019 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2020 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2021 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.

Reviews one through eight? Seek them thitherward.

Looking for nine through sixteen? Click that link!

Reviews seventeen up to twenty-six? You know what to do.

I know you think reviews twenty-seven to thirty-three are here...well, you're right, they are.

Seekest ye the reviews entitled thirty-four to thirty-eight? They anent just so.

I understand you're curious about thirty-nine to forty-seven. Go back there.

Longing to view reviews forty-eight to fifty-four? Advance towards the rear.

The reviews numberèd fifty-five through sixty-four are por detrás.

Sixty-five, -six, and -seven, eh? Seekest thou in arrears.

Sixty-eight up to seventy-four aren't hard to find by using that link.

There are reviews numbered seventy-five through ninety, you know. This post links you to them.

Ninety-one through one hundred ten? Try that link, it'll sort you out.

111 through 131? Go back there.

THIS THREAD'S REVIEW LINKS

132 FREEZING ORDER: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath infuriated, post 34.

133 PUTIN'S TROLLS: On the Frontlines of Russia's Information War Against the World outraged, post 36.

134 What Moves the Dead thrilled, post 81.

135 The Draper Touch: The High Life and High Style of Dorothy Draper delighted, post 135.

136 Our Wives Under the Sea enchanted, post 173.

137 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow pleased, post 202.

138 Nazi Wives: The Women at the Top of Hitler's Germany revolted, post 234.

139 The Vanishing Sky chugged, post 236.

140 The Hidden Keys satiated, post 261.

141 Write to Die happened, post 262.

142 Flying Solo: A Novel worked well, post 276.

Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea of the read and not try to dig for more.

Think about using it yourselves!




JULY 2022's BURGOINES

Burgoine #51, Any Other World Will Do, in post 245.

Burgoine #50, A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings, in post 243.

Burgoine #49, The Last, in post 221.

Burgoine #48, Vanity in Dust (Crowns & Ash #1), in post 216.

Burgoine #47, Outlawed, in post 213.

Burgoine #46, The Day I Died, in post 212.

Burgoine #45, Afro Puffs Are the Antennae of the Universe, in post 197.

Burgoine #44, Remarkably Bright Creatures, in post 109.

#37 through #43, are linked in this post here.

JUNE 2022's BURGOINES

#37 through #43, are linked in this post here.

#36 is in thread twelve, post 279.

***

MAY 2022's BURGOINES

#34 and #35 are linked in this post here.

#31 through 33 stay linked right here.

***

APRIL 2022's BURGOINES

#25 through 30 are backlinked here.

#20 through 24 are backlinked in this post.

The first two for April are linked here.

MARCH 2022's BURGOINES

The last one for March is linked here.

The first 4 in March are back-linked here.

***

FEBRUARY 2022's BURGOINES (through #12) are linked here.

***
JANUARY 2022's BURGOINES are linked here.

This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. I just didn't care about this goal as a separate goal, but I need to learn to because I *re*Pearl-Ruled five books this December just passed after not remembering picking them up in the first place. I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to really track my Pearl Rules!

As she says:

People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.

So this space will be each thread's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.



JUNE & JULY 2022's PEARL-RULES

It took until the 20th but some have shown up which is still really *weird* but also quite lovely.

Pearl Rule #35, Kingdom Ascent (Tempest of Bravoure #1), is in post 220.

Pearl Rule #34, You'll Always Be White To Me: A Memoir, is in post 217.

Pearl Rule #33, The Poptart Manifesto, is in post 214.

***

MAY 2022's PEARL-RULES

#32 is linked in this post right here.

#31 is linked here.

***

APRIL 2022's PEARL-RULES are backlinked here: post 75.

The first one in April is linked here.

***

MARCH 2022's ONLY PEARL-RULE

It's linked in right here.

***

FEBRUARY 2022's PEARL-RULES are here.

***
JANUARY 2022's PEARL-RULES are here.

I've decided to use BookRiot's 2022 Read Harder Challenge as a spice-me-up of meeting my reading goals. Since I'll post 225+ reviews (posts aren't the same as reviews posted, as some posts cover as many as four books!) on my blog this year *easily* I think I need to get a little more pushy. I've set 288 reviews as the new goal.

This is the list:

1. Read a biography of an author you admire.


2. Read a book set in a bookstore.


3. Read any book from the Women’s Prize shortlist/longlist/winner list.


4. Read a book in any genre by a POC that’s about joy and not trauma.
   30 Things I Love About Myself FTW!


5. Read an anthology featuring diverse voices.


6. Read a nonfiction YA comic.
   The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks is illustrated and that'll have to do.


7. Read a romance where at least one of the protagonists is over 40.

Flying Solo is close enough.

8. Read a classic written by a POC.


9. Read the book that’s been on your TBR the longest.
   Central Station was awarded to me on NetGalley in 2016!


10. Read a political thriller by a marginalized author (BIPOC, or LGBTQIA+).
    The Fourth Courier, though sadly not a supergood read


11. Read a book with an asexual and/or aromantic main character.


12. Read an entire poetry collection.


13. Read an adventure story by a BIPOC author.
    We Could Be Heroes did the business


14. Read a book whose movie or TV adaptation you’ve seen (but haven’t read the book).
    Against the Ice: The Classic Arctic Survival Story out on Netflix now...saved the book for me, no smallest doubt.


15. Read a new-to-you literary magazine (print or digital).


16. Read a book recommended by a friend with different reading tastes.


17. Read a memoir written by someone who is trans or nonbinary.
    High-Risk Homosexual! What a read.


18. Read a “Best _ Writing of the year” book for a topic and year of your choice.


19. Read a horror novel by a BIPOC author.
    Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda is just flat terrifying!


20. Read an award-winning book from the year you were born.


21. Read a queer retelling of a classic of the canon, fairytale, folklore, or myth.
    Briarley FTW! I can start 2022 with one task accomplished.


22. Read a history about a period you know little about.
    The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R. chilled me with its January 6th parallels only 90 years earlier.


23. Read a book by a disabled author.


24. Pick a challenge from any of the previous years’ challenges to repeat!
    I choose 2018: Read a mystery by a person of color who is also LGBTQ+
    

I liked all of them except the comic and I'm still looking for GNs that don't make me want to scream and barf, so it's a good challenge.

I'm wondering if, in lieu of setting a numerical goal for Burgoines (see >6 richardderus:), I could just agree with myself to use the technique on 3-stars-and-under reads about which I don't much care and count them as reviews here. I've decided that I'll post 'em & collate them in each thread's post #6. Then I'll just blog 'em in gangs, once a month on the last Sunday in the month...I dunno, but I read a lot of books I don't talk about because someone loved it & I loathed it or just didn't care much about it, or I simply have no useful response...it filled time, it failed to offend or delight me. Is that information useful to anyone? Would you care if I did that and gored your reading ox?

I suppose we shall find out.

I stole this from PC's thread in 2020. I like these prompts, so I've decided to re-do them every December!
***
1. Name any book you read at any time most recently that was published in the year you turned 18:
The Street Where I Live by Alan Jay Lerner (2010)
2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird
3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
St. Mary's and the Great Toilet Roll Crisis by Jodi Taylor
4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
Kohinoor: The Story of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond by William Dalrymple & Anita Anand because I lost interest
5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard...how easy it is to fail, to do the wrong thing
6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
Horseman: A Tale of Sleepy Hollow by Christina Henry...Sleepy Hollow's about 100mi from here
7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
Queer people's history and the Quaker resistance to slavery
8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard which I managed to get several LTers and tweeple to pick up *buffs nails*
9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
Briarley by Aster Glenn Gray, a gay WWII-set retelling of Beauty and the Beast, that I finished this week (and reviewed!)
10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy was a #The1976Club read, and was so disappointing that I went on to read The Malacia Tapestry by Brian W. Aldiss to cleanse my reading palate
11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
Aster Glenn Gray
12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
The Multiverse in Genevieve Cogman's Invisible Library series
13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
How to Catch a Vet; the Afghanistan War
14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
There isn't enough space for all the book-bullets y'all careless, inconsiderate-of-my-poverty fiends pepper me with (bold added for emphasis)
15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
The Toast of Time is part of The Chronicles of St Mary's by Jodi Taylor, so it involves the future, the past, and the Multiverse
16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson
17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
Ife-Iyoku, Tale of Imadeyunuagbon by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki
18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
Your Honor, it is my intention to assert my Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to any and all questions pursuing this subject
19. Who was the most recent dead author you read? And what year did they die?
Brian Aldiss, 2017
20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
good goddesses, I don't remember...Goodnight Moon to my daughter?— STET
21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
Officially it's part of the Jack Lennon series, though he barely even appears in it, so The Ghosts of Belfast via Stuart Neville gets the nod.
22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
The World Well Lost, ~28pp
23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
see #4. I just...quit caring.
24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
see #9
25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay by Marcus Rediker, art by David Lester

I liked Sandy's Bonus Question for the meme above, so I adopted it:

26. What is the title and year of the oldest book you have reviewed on LT in 2021? (modification in itals)
The Sleeping Car Murders by Sébastien Japrisot, 1962.

2021's five-star or damn-near five-star reviews totaled 28, a marked decrease from last year's 46. Fewer authors saw their book launches rescheduled, but publishers still had to cancel many of their tours and events because COVID-19. The inflationary pressure that supply-chain issues are exerting causes a lot of economic drag on the market, though there is as of yet a lot less trouble than I expected getting tree-book copies of things.

My annual six-stars-of-five read is Cove (my book review), a perfect, spare, evocative story of the pain of existing when you genuinely can't process what is happening to you, around you, despite your best and most well-practiced efforts there is just no righting the boat. I cannot stress enough to you, this is the book you need to read in 2022. I can not forget this read. I refer to it in my head, I think about its stark, vividly limned images. I am so deeply glad Author Cynan wrote it. To quote myself from my review: "This is the book I wish The Old Man and the Sea had been, but was not."

In 2020, I posted over 215 reviews here. In 2022, my goals are:

to post 250 reviews on my blog

to post three-sentence Burgoines of books I don't either adore or despise

to complete at least 275 total reviews of all types

Most important to me again this year is to report on DRCs I don't care enough about to review at my usual level. I still don't want to keep just leaving them unacknowledged! There are publishers who want to see a solid, positive relationship between DRCs granted and reviews posted, and I do not blame them a bit. To 1 June 2022, I've posted 136 reviews of all types on my blog. That makes an annual total of 275 requiring only 139 more posts (almost exactly the same amount!), and a goal of 288 seem attainable.

Ask and ye shall receive! 'Nathan Burgoine's Twitter account hath taught me. See >3 richardderus: above. I just need to keep getting better about *applying* it, being less prolix and more productive!

I've made a tentative plan for reviews to write this month, since I've got eleven posts to make:

For July, from NetGalley

The Grand Illusion by Eoin Dempsey
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Upgrade by Blake Crouch
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Gun Barons: The Weapons That Transformed America and the Men Who Invented Them by John Bainbridge Jr. — pairing with Denial

For July, from Edelweiss+

Putin's Trolls: On the Frontlines of Russia's Information War Against the World by Jessikka Aro
The Bride of Almond Tree by Robert Hillman
The Lisbon Syndrome by Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles
Invasion of the Spirit People by Juan Pablo Villalobos
Denial: How We Hide, Ignore, and Explain Away Problems by Jared Del Rosso — pairing with Gun Barons
When Time Is Short: Finding Our Way in the Anthropocene by Timothy Beal
***
Okay, it's y'all's turn!

Hi! Happy new thread! Love the topper tree, thorns and all.

>9 Storeetllr: Hiya Mary! You're first:

*smooch*

>10 richardderus: First time first! Yay me.

Happy new thread, Richard dear!

>1 richardderus: Never heard of this palo verde tree. It looks lovely and odd, obvious prepared for long dry periods.

((Hugs)) and **smooches** for your new thread, RD.

Have a wonderful day!

>13 alcottacre: Thanks, Stasia, I'm glad you're here.

>12 FAMeulstee: I'm always amazed at nature's adaptations to different climates. The idea that a tree could live in those places!! *gobsmacked*

>11 Storeetllr: Ha! Well, now you know.

I have a feeling the palo verde bloom and my sinuses would not get along.

Sweet Thursday, Richard. Happy New thread! Love the Mexican Palo Verde tree, especially the thorny flowers. Just having a chill afternoon with the books.

Happy new thread, Richard!

>17 figsfromthistle: Thank you, Anita!

>16 msf59: Hiya Mark, we're having the same day. I'm amazed at how much Nature invests in finding ways to survive in every single niche on the planet.

>15 thornton37814: They grow so far from Humanity, Lori, and in such an inimical-to-people climate, that I doubt there's much of their pollen around!

Happy new thread.
Never heard of the tree you've selected, Richard. How interesting. The chlorophyll in their bark is massively inventive and practical. The dry tree image does look a bit like a dead tree covered in lichen.

>19 Helenliz: I can well imagine it's new to you, Helen, no place on the whole of the British Isles could support its lifeway. I imagine some parts of Extremadura in Spain might come close to the Sonoran Desert's levels of dryness, but again can't think of a reason for its importation there.

It's the chlorophyll-bearing bark that makes me shake my head in wonder...can't afford leaves, too much moisture loss, and yet there is still a way! Astonishing.

Happy new one, RD!

Pretty tree (at least blooming) up in >1 richardderus:.

>21 katiekrug: Thanks, Katie...yeah, flowering it's a lovely thing before it reverts to scrubby ugly crappyness.

*smooch*

Happy new thread, Richard!

>1 richardderus: What a fascinating tree - I have never heard of it, and love that it has such unique adaptations.

>23 bell7: Very glad you're finding it interesting. I'm endlessly fascinated by the subject of Nature!

Happy new one dear fellow.

>8 richardderus: I have been watching out for the Armfield book arriving on the shores and I will be very interested to see whether you think it passes muster.

>25 PaulCranswick: Thanks, PC. I'm not sure the Armfield will pass muster, if the thirty pages I read are indicative.

Once again twice in a day, although this time across threads.

Happy new thread, RDear.

*smooch*

>27 karenmarie: Thank you, smoochling, and rest comfortably on your laurels.

Hiyah, Richard! Happy new one!

>29 drneutron: How do, Doc, and thanks!

Happy new one, Richard. Re your topper, from a distance I thought it was a forsythia. Ha! Not likely!

Happy New Thread

>32 ArlieS: Hi Arlie, thanks for the good wishes.

>31 jessibud2: Ha! Forsythias would curl up and die 500mi before the first palo verde would deign to show its Jurassic self.

132 FREEZING ORDER: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath by Bill Browder

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Following his explosive New York Times bestseller Red Notice, Bill Browder returns with another gripping thriller chronicling how he became Vladimir Putin’s number one enemy by exposing Putin’s campaign to steal and launder hundreds of billions of dollars and kill anyone who stands in his way.

When Bill Browder’s young Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was beaten to death in a Moscow jail, Browder made it his life’s mission to go after his killers and make sure they faced justice. The first step of that mission was to uncover who was behind the $230 million tax refund scheme that Magnitsky was killed over. As Browder and his team tracked the money as it flowed out of Russia through the Baltics and Cyprus and on to Western Europe and the Americas, they were shocked to discover that Vladimir Putin himself was a beneficiary of the crime.

As law enforcement agencies began freezing the money, Putin retaliated. He and his cronies set up honey traps, hired process servers to chase Browder through cities, murdered more of his Russian allies, and enlisted some of the top lawyers and politicians in America to bring him down. Putin will stop at nothing to protect his money. As Freezing Order reveals, it was Browder’s campaign to expose Putin’s corruption that prompted Russia’s intervention in the 2016 US presidential election.

At once a financial caper, an international adventure, and a passionate plea for justice, Freezing Order is a stirring morality tale about how one man can take on one of the most ruthless villains in the world—and win.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR SERVICES! WE NEED THEM AND THEY NEED US TO SURVIVE.

My Review: In the pantheon of moral crusaders, Bill Browder's the least likely figure I've found to date. He's on a personal and quixotic quest to shut down Putin's money-laundering pipeline to the Western banks who are hiding (it transpires as a result of investigations tied to Browder's own) about a trillion dollars...that is $1 000 000 000 000...for him and his kleptocratic cronies.

And you wonder why the Ukrainian war is still going on...what better way to distract the West and provide his own people with a Cause, Russianness or Russification call it what you will, to rally behind him to fight!

There are laws in numerous Western countries, called collectively "Magnitsky laws," that trace their passage to Browder's jihad against Putin for the crime of ordering the death (in a very nasty way) of Russian clean-government activist and Browder's Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. These financial-crimes laws empower governments to freeze assets owned by people or entities not based in the country doing the freezing's legal jurisdiction.

You can see this would cause someone with a trillion...a trillion!...stolen dollars some little anxiety. It's led to many murders and attempted murders. It's been clearly documented (the book has astoundingly detailed source material citations). It's led to many acts of cybercrime and harassment (see review below) against those trying to stop the actual stealing and killing.

In the end, I am not so much glad that I read this book as I am grateful to it, and to Author Browder, for showing me that people who live in a principled way and advertise their intentions clearly can, and do, effect change for the better.

But honestly, I can not remember a time I've been this furious for this long at the existence and the power wielded by Putin supporters and apologists.

It's already been an annoying morning. I'm pretty sure I've got some kind of target on my head for the Divine Seagull to crap all over me some more, too.

Oh well, none of it's worse than irritating.

133 PUTIN'S TROLLS: On the Frontlines of Russia's Information War Against the World by Jessikka Aro

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this courageous and unflinching book, award-winning journalist Jessikka Aro interweaves her own dramatic story as a target of Russian social media propaganda with accounts from many internationally known critics of the Kremlin, who share their own stories of being targeted by Russia’s multifaceted cyber warfare campaigns. As Jessikka began to investigate the impact of the Kremlin’s troll operations outside of Russia, she learned that private citizens in many other countries were being victimized by Kremlin-designed information campaigns. These actions were frequently conducted through an organized “troll factory” led by Russia’s security and intelligence apparatus, using unregulated social media platforms including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Many of the disinformation campaigns were centered around the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent occupation of the Crimean Peninsula.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

By the time of my forced departure, I had endured a two-and-a half-year campaign of death threats and libelous news articles. Online hate sites had brainwashed even some of my friends, turning them into enemies. These same sites portrayed me as a criminal, a liar, and mentally ill. Anonymous users suggested various methods of killing myself. One stranger proposed that I hang myself, while another recommended a 'Russian suicide': someone would push me under the metro, but in a manner staged as self-inflicted. A third individual wished that someone would put a “bullet in the whore’s head, Russian style.” Each time I opened my laptop, or glanced at my phone, I was forced to read snuff fantasies about me produced on an assembly-line scale. I was afraid that the psychological violence would at any minute spill out of the internet into the physical world...I had become the target of such vitriol for one reason only: I was a journalist investigating Russian social media information warfare.

It is chilling to read this book in close temporal connection to Bill Browder's unnervingly personal account of the strains and hazards he and his fellow anti-Putin activists underwent in their ongoing campaign against state-committed murders and actions designed to silence opposition to their kleptocratic agenda.

Jessikka Aro was awarded a 2019 International Women of Courage Award by the US State Department. This was rescinded by the administration then in power...could this be because the Russian asset "leading" it was not about to let his friend Little Vladdy Pu-Pu be discommoded by recognition of his thuggishness getting praise from our government? We may never know. Our grandchildren might.

It's enough to gag a maggot.

Anyway, I didn't start this read calm, cool, and collected, but outraged and indignant. None of those emotional realities calmed under the influence of Author Aro's story. It's as infuriating as you can possibly imagine. Then multiply by ten thousand...read Browder's book, too. These are two people, individuals, trying to hold a world "leader" accountable for civil and criminal violations of international law. They've been subjected to horrific amounts of stress and malicious targeted activity. They've never, ever stopped being at the forefront of the anti-Putin infowars, either.

All the respect in the world to both Author Aro and Author Browder. Standing up for years under the onslaught of the troll factory run by a state leader can not have been easy.

Wordle 384 4/6

⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜
⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Had I not flurbled #3, I'd've seen this one in 3. AEONS, MIRTH, POISE, VOICE

Happy Friday, Richard. Getting ready to head out and start my Jackson day. Both Putin books look powerful and disturbing.

>38 msf59: That they are, Mark...one on a personal level, so upsetting; one on the world stage, and involving our country's ongoing nightmare, so INFURIATING.

Have a lovely time with Jackson today!

‘Morning, RDear, and happy Friday to you, although I’m sorry to already read that you’re the target for the Divine Seagull.

>34 richardderus: and >36 richardderus: A non-LT friend of mine, who knows a US Senator, recently reported a conversation with said Senator that the war in Ukraine is still going on for a variety of behind-the-scenes reasons, not the least of which are Putin’s access to and control of nukes and, my words here, Putin being a f***ing nut job.

Unfortunately, nukes are now pervasive and controlling how the world responds to despots and religious fanatics, and I am looking at you, too, Israel.

“gag a maggot” is a favorite phrase of mine. And just yesterday another non-LT friend of mine reported a small, half-a-grain-of-long-grained-rice sized jumping maggot at her house. She’s freaked out and disgusted, but the idea of an uncatchable leaping maggot lead to much hilarity when I talked with Jenna yesterday afternoon. She immediately looked for jumping maggots on YouTube and found several highly entertaining videos, which I was also able to find. We watched them simultaneously – she on her cell phone and me here on my computer. Simple pleasures for simple minds...

*smooch* from your simple-minded Horrible

Your latest reads fall under the category of important works I'm glad are out there, but I won't be reading 'em, in the interest of keeping my blood pressure and stress levels in healthy range.

Friday *smooches*

>41 bell7: I'm so glad you won't be reading them, Mary, I value your brain as it is without a cerebrovascular infarct robbing us of you.

*smooch*

>40 karenmarie: I'm pretty sure you are the one who put "gag a maggot" in my arsenal of disgust, Horrible. Such is my memory anyway. I am glad I had it to reach for with this particular book. I'm appalled at the fetid reek that new information wafts off that horrible administration even yet. Probably for decades to come, given secrecy laws put in place to prevent We-The-People from knowing what's been done to us while the lynchable are still living.

Anyway. Simple-pleasure time. Happy weekend! *smooch*

>34 richardderus: & >36 richardderus: Putin is a shit-stick and I hope he comes to a sticky end, RD.

Great and impassioned reviews dear fellow. I don't see many people outside of Tucker Carlson with a good word for the regime he has tight in his Vodka-soaked fingers.

>43 PaulCranswick: Thank you most kindly, PC. There are, I am saddened to say, plenty of less visible supporters of Little Vladdy Pu-Pu all over Washington, and within the Gang of Psychos.

I myownself am holding out hope that the universe will deliver him and his kleptocratic oligarchy to an October-Revolution level ouster.

Hi Richard, Happy New Thread dear friend.

>45 johnsimpson: Hi there, John! I'm glad to see you here.

Happy new thread, Richard. Such aggravating and concerning books you chose to start this thread.

>34 richardderus: I am on the waitlist for that one at the library. Glad it was a 4.5 * read for you!

Happy weekending

‘Morning, RD, and happy Saturday to you.

>42 richardderus: while the lynchable are still living. I’d like the Democratic senior to live for a while longer, but some of the Gang of Psychos…

*smooch*

Wordle 385 5/6

🟨🟨⬜⬜🟨
🟩🟨🟨⬜⬜
🟩⬜🟨⬜🟨
🟩🟩🟨⬜🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
...oookaaay... AEONS, SEALS, SCARE, STAGE, STEAD

>49 karenmarie: Heh. I don't share your kindly bent, as I am sure you'll be surprised to learn.

Saturday *smooch*

>48 figsfromthistle: I'd say "enjoy it" but...well...anyway, I hope it educates and informs and outrages.

Have a lovely weekend, Anita!

>47 Familyhistorian: A little light reading, you know. Something pleasingly frothy and fluffy. *snort*

Are you home yet, Meg?

>50 richardderus: I felt better about today's.
Wordle 385 3/6

🟨⬜🟨⬜⬜
🟨⬜🟩⬜🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

>52 Helenliz: An impressive effort, Helen!

>34 richardderus: >36 richardderus: Both are BBs, but I doubt I'll be able to read them anytime soon. Just your reviews have raised my blood pressure; I shudder to think what would happen should I read the actual books. (Hospital here I come?) But, I put both on my TBR list.

>35 richardderus: I hope the rest of your day goes better.

>40 karenmarie: >42 richardderus: Gag-a-maggot is my go-to for disgust too.

>44 richardderus: I myownself am holding out hope that the universe will deliver him and his kleptocratic oligarchy to an October-Revolution level ouster.

Hear! Hear!

Got today's Wordle in 3, due to my usual first two "throwaway" words: adieu & story. The next came easily.

>34 richardderus: Adding that one to the BlackHole. It sounds like an important book that I need to read!

>36 richardderus: That one too!

Have a super Saturday, RD. ((Hugs)) and **smooches** for the day.

Happy new thread, Richard!

Some interesting reading lately, but I'm happy just seeing what you thought of them. My sister isn't too impressed with the word choices for Wordle lately.

>44 richardderus: & >54 Storeetllr: I see little sign of the Russian people ousting him, but there would be more hope if his inner sanctum develop a different policy or the Oligarchs who have personally been hobbled in London turn on him en masse.

I really don't see the long game on sanctions being effective against a people so used to suffering. Surely somebody has to be brave enough to go there and talk an end to this conflict.

>57 PaulCranswick: There is no talking to True Believers, PC. The inner circle aren't Believers in anything except greed, and the sanctions aren't really anything more than cosmetic as affects the Russians...they're meant to make it uncomfortable for the oligarchs.

The whole 45 aberrant abomination and the Brexit debacle are connected to Little Vladdy Pu-Pu not wanting banking secrecy to be breached in the places he's hidden his pilf.

>56 humouress: Wordle is, I'm quite sure, being operated by a cabal of evil women with hate in their hearts for all of HuMANity.

There. I've said it.

>55 alcottacre: Thanks, Stasia! *smooch*

>54 Storeetllr: I'm not sure it will...my roomie might have the Pox. (Monkey-) I'm awaiting developments.

>58 richardderus: (Darn. You've found us out.)

>59 humouress:
***
>36 richardderus: Jessikka Aro liked my review! *preen*

ETA size!

I can't read about Putin. I just can't.

5 tries for Wordle for me too. I flirted with the idea of a first word that included a D but dismissed it.

Happy New Thread! Off to see how much Norman Lock is in your library.

*smooch* for the weekend's cool turning of pages.

>61 LizzieD: Hi Peggy! I totally get it, I don't think it's necessary for all of us to read the story of how and why we got here right now, today. Just don't forget how much it matters to know why things are happening. It's surprising to realize how much less helpless one feels when the "why" is answered.

I rejected that "d" word too...didn't want it to be the answer, glad it wasn't!

I've reviewed the first three of his American Novels, have #4 on Kindle.

*smooch*

>58 richardderus: Sorry to read your roomie might have Monkey Pox, Richard dear. I hope you can stay away from it!

>63 FAMeulstee: Not likely, I'm afraid...too small a space...but maybe there's another cause. I sure hope so.

>64 richardderus: Keeping my fingers crossed that it is something else!

>65 FAMeulstee: *smooch*

>64 richardderus: Oh, I thought you were joking about monkey pox. How did you ..? ... never mind. I'm sure it's something else.

‘Morning, RDear, and happy Sunday to you.

>58 richardderus: *studiously ignores the accusation of a cabal of evil women choosing Wordle words*

First reading of roomie maybe having the Pox made me think, of course, of The Pox. However, I’m sorry to hear this, especially as it might directly threaten your own dear, acerbic self.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

Happy Sunday, Richard. It has been an absolutely gorgeous weekend in Chicagoland and my books have been treating me well too. All good here, my friend.

>69 msf59: Yay for good weekends! I'm glad your knees survived your Jack-day floor exercises.

>68 karenmarie: "Acerbic"! Moi, le nonpareil des douceurs?! Just because I correctly identified the Cabal of Evil behind Wordle's wretched word choices? Faugh! Pshaw!

*smooch*

>67 humouress: Not me...my roommate. I make no inquiries into "how"s only "if." I'm still hoping against hope it's dermatological, which I can't catch.

Wordle 386 3/6

⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
This one was a gimme. AEONS, MIRTH, BERTH

Happy Sunday Richard! The Catch-22 quote is fitting. 😱 I also like the nickname "Vladdy Pu-Pu." Lol My dad always calls him "Putain," which is French for "prostitute."

>73 The_Hibernator: That's a terrible calumny, Rachel! Shame, shame on your father! Imagine calling into question the honor of honest sex workers by comparing that, that, being to them.

It's a scary thing to know that it's well-known, this thing that 45 and his scumbag army do, and it still works. *shudder*

>71 richardderus: I can see why you said your two opening words worked for you, Richard.

I’m even further away from home now as I’m Edinburgh and have a few days left here yet.

>75 Familyhistorian: Edinburgh! What a fabulous city. Of course you're going to the National Museum to see those Viking chess pieces, right?

Well, enjoy your trip there and get home safe.

>72 richardderus: - It's eerie how some authors seem able to predict the future.

(and in my pessimistic opinion, the man will never see a day in jail, if he gets charged or convicted at all. He is teflon man and that in itself is a crime)

:-(

>34 richardderus: >36 richardderus:
Putin inspires more rage in me than even Trump did. A true tyrant if ever there was one. I can't imagine how anyone could have the courage to investigate these things, knowing that they'd be targeted in terrifying ways!

‘Morning, RD, and the best of Mondays to you.

>70 richardderus: Oh, you can be sweet, no doubt, softie that you are. But you also have sharp claws, fortunately not directed against me. Faugh AND Pshaw. I feel honored.

>72 richardderus: I read Catch 22 a bazillion years ago and was gobsmacked by it, of course. I'm not sure I could ever re-read it, even though it's on shelf R11 in the Retreat, lurking, just waiting.

Congrats on yesterday’s 3. I got it in 3 today.

*smooch*

>79 karenmarie: Monday, Monday...can we trust that day? I'm not Wordling yet, still charging up the caffeine banks. I wonder how many it'll take today....

Catch-22's not a book I think of when I think, "I need a comfort read." I think of it when I think of formative reads, for sure; it's a before-and-after moment in my life, and I can't ever think of the title without the phrase's meaning occurring to me.

*smooch*

>78 LovingLit: Some people Do The Right Thing no matter the consequences. I admire them immensely. I am not, to my eternal self-disappointment, one of them.

>77 jessibud2: HOW?! How is that scum made of Teflon? I can not comprehend why he isn't already rotting underneath a penitentiary in some fetid jungle somewhere. I've never wanted him assassinated, rather eternally in a cell with three violent offenders who were personally harmed by something he did. We can quietly pardon them after they do privately what, in a properly ordered world, should've already been done on a gibbet.

(I think Horrible was right...sharp claws are out!)

134 What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning author of The Twisted Ones comes a gripping and atmospheric retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's classic "The Fall of the House of Usher."

When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania.

What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.

Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I've marked this as a story with "transgender representation," and although that is a way of seeing Alex Easton I don't know of it's one ka would approve of. I could simply be another American man committing a dreadful solecism in kan opinion. Oh well.

Now. On to the bad, awful, hideous, nightmarish stuff.

You've most likely read "The Fall of the House of Usher" at some point in your school career/teenaged glooms. (Not-Americans even know about this story, and I understand it's popular among Poe's French-speaking admirers.) So did T. Kingfisher, and did she have questions after reading it! Wowee toledo.

Alex Easton, our narrator-cum-PoV person, has a strangely English name and a uniquely different cultural outlook. Ka was born female and swore into the life of a soldier, an ungendered occupation among kan fellow countrymen. I suspect it wasn't uncommon for warrior societies to have permeable gender boundaries given that not all man-plumbed persons are suited to soldiering and not all woman-plumbed persons are suitable to motherhood. Those being the basic occupations of the sexes for much of human history, it would surprise me greatly if most didn't have some kind or sort of accommodation to this reality. I believe the warrior graves with female bodies in them discovered all over Europe and Asia are an indicator of this.

Easton, as ka is known to the Usher siblings ka knew in distant childhood and youth, has at last emerged from soldiering...one senses unwillingly...now that peace has returned. A letter from kan friend Madeline Usher brings ka at the trot: "Roderick thinks I am dying." For one thing, bonds that old...and ka was Roderick's commander during the war, to boot...can't be gainsaid. Off ka, and kan batman Angus, and kan horse Hob (all well-sketched characters of great sensitivity in their portrayal) trot to the Ushers' ancestral home in neighboring Ruravia (!) to Do What Needs Doing.

Thus the nightmare begins. Ka finds Roderick a wisp, Madeline a cold shell of her former lovely self, and Roderick's American friend Denton...whose soldiering was done in the Civil War, in a medical tent. Despite kan poor opinion of Americans, this earns him a degree of latitude for being gauche and unfamiliar with how to treat sworn soldiers like ka. (That little pronoun, in kan Gallacian language, is used for both sexes of sworn soldiers. Tidily solves the vexed problem of gendered soldiery.) Alex finds Denton, and the English language, adequate but frustratingly unsophisticated, leading to kan delightful outburst, "Damnable English language—more words than anybody can be expected to keep track of, and then they use the same one for about three different things."

I relate, my soul sibling Alex. I so so relate.

I don't think it helps anything to recapitulate "The Fall of the House of Usher." I am aware that some people haven't read it, though honestly I find that easier to conceptualize than to understand. Let's just say that the mycohorror subgenre that's come into being and has fetidly overgrown the various horror and adjacent literary fields...Annihilation and its siblings, The Girl with All the Gifts, on and on...have been gazumped (from German gesumpf, tossed into a swamp) by T. Kingfisher's lighter, brighter touch and inimitable ability to slosh humor over a rankly rotting, unnaturally ambulating, little-white-hyphae-shedding Object of Horror, and not have the results resemble a desecrated grave.

I loved the read. I think most people I know would at the very least like it. And, fellow old-enough-to-remember souls, I think Denton the American is a call-out to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I can't prove it...the author doesn't mention it in her self-deprecating endnotes...but I found myself humming "Denton, Denton/you've got no pretensions" every time he hove into view.

...wait...what are those little white...EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Wordle 387 4/6

🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Well, I'm Adam. AEONS, MIRTH, MADLY, MADAM

>82 richardderus: I also got it in four ATONE, BRAID, LAUDS, and finally in a "what word has a different place for a D and the only vowel is A?" guess of frustration came up with MADAM but I just as easily could've gotten an X/6.

>83 bell7: It's so interesting to me how people got to the same answer! I'm probably more interested in that than I am in the puzzle itself at this point.

>72 richardderus: LOVE IT!!

Morning, Richard. Good review of What Moves the Dead. I will add it to my cumbersome list. I love the author's last name too.

>81 richardderus: *This* from the author of A Wizard's Guide to Defense Baking? I must find out ...

Interlibrary-requested and on its way.

(Oh also: Happy new thread!)

>86 swynn: Thanks for the thread-wishes, Steve! And yep...that is the same pen puttin' that out, the woman behind the Dragonbreath series of MG novels too. It's fascinating to see her breadth of creative imagination.

>85 msf59: Thank you, Mark, and may you thrill to its many story-hyphae invading your cerebral cortex. She chose her pseudonym well, didn't she? I think the image it calls forth in most of us is of the magically beautiful bird.

We *know* these tricks! We *know* what the tricksters are doing! Why does it still work?!?

Just dropping off two of your favourite things, Richard.

>88 humouress: Oh yay.
***

Just a little dissonant to this old cisqueer white male.

>89 richardderus: For what it's worth, I checked The Violence Project's web site & the actual statistic is that 98% of the sample they studied were "male" (no race specified). And considering that the vast majority of mass shootings are gang-related.....well, draw your own conclusions.

That violence has always been a predominantly male issue isn't news, but it's best to be accurate - and memes rarely are.

The Violence Project's data aren't counting the same things. As to accuracy, well...that argument is meant to be a trip-wire to slow down reality's unwelcome intrusion, like "I'm confused."

No you're not. And no, it's not inaccurate.

>89 richardderus: Of course. "We" want more violence, as well as more misery and despair, probably so as to please our God and His human representatives.

And as for men - to become a "real man" (TM) one must commit both murder and rape. Anyone else is a wuss.

(Yes, I'm being sarcastic. Also not intending to impugn the faith of anyone who worships a God that doesn't demand, tolerate, or commit evil, even if they call their God by the same name used by others whose God is self-evidently demonic.)

>72 richardderus: I cannot stand to even look at pictures of him. I have (on my laptop, which I am not using currently) an app that makes pictures of him into kittens. I know you do not like cats, but kittens are infinitely better to look at than he is!

>81 richardderus: Still have not read any Kingfisher and really need to. Thanks for the reminder, RD.

Happy Monday! Stay away from monkey pox. ((Hugs)) and **smooches**

>93 alcottacre: It's a tossup (as in what one does to one's cookies) for me between...them...and that.

Start with A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking! This one won't likely appeal to you too awful terrible much.

>92 ArlieS: That "them" is the them I least want to please.

An amazing memory surfaced while reading this story, What Should A Queer Children's Book Do?, in The New Yorker...the writer mentioned “...The Story of Ferdinand, written by Munro Leaf and illustrated by Robert Lawson...Ferdinand is a bull who famously refuses to participate in the bullfights, preferring “to sit just quietly and smell the flowers”.

My father read that book to me a lot when I was small. He told me how much he admired Ferdinand for being himself when everyone wanted him to go into the ring and be a "real bull." My mother and one of my sisters called it "the sissy-faggy book."

Of course!

>91 richardderus: I'm assuming your claim to accuracy is in referrence to criticizing taking rights away from women, which is legit, but the lead-in is....not.

>93 alcottacre: The mind boggles. Wait … wait …



Okay, got it.

‘Morning, RDear. Happy Tuesday to you.

>81 richardderus: Well, I just bought the lovely hardcover edition, using Amazon Visa card credit, so paid $0.00. It’s funny that you mention T. Kingfisher, because Peggy said in a comment to me this morning that she, T. Kingfisher, is from my town – Pittsboro, NC. Peggy and I have apparently discussed her before, but I have no memory of it. And so, because of Peggy’s comment and your review, I’m getting my first T. Kingfisher. Thank you. So here’s a question – is reading Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher required reading first? I have three copies of it on my shelves, and it's only a short story.

>89 richardderus: A valid question. I will not start hyperventilating because of this topic.

>95 richardderus: Oh my goodness. A voice of reason in your otherwise toxic home environment. Sigh. Sissy-faggy. Hateful.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

>98 karenmarie: ...and it came from my father of all people. He was so utterly cowed by my mother's rage that I am shocked to realize he was capable of such an insurgency.

Read the story, though it's not necessary to understand the action. It merely adds a soupçon of added meaning in a few places. Ursula Vernon/"T. Kingfisher" was inspired by the story and some of the vocabulary gets re-used.

>97 humouress: ...my eyes...my eyes...

>96 ChrisG1: We'll need to agree to disagree.

Wordle 388 3/6

⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
⬜🟩⬜🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
After staring at the four letters I had right for at least 5min, it emerged as from itself. AEONS, MIRTH, NIGHT

Buenos dias, Senor Wordle,

I love the title Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking. I'm enjoying woman of Light by the Sabrina and Corina author. I pasted Adriana's Boston Globe review of it on my thread.

Great summery flora up top. I hope your summer has some mild weather and is treating you well,

I have not Wordled in weeks. I keep being off by one letter and guessing the wrong words and I just got annoyed. But have fun!! ; )

Love, your favorite mad woman.

Oh, I'm so glad you made it here before the butterfly-net brigade arrives to haul you into protective custody! *smooch*

I got lucky yesterday on Wordle. On the first try, I had two letters in the wrong places at the end. I moved them in reverse order to the front and added some letters and got the word. So two for yesterday; five the day before (and a lot of friends didn't get the word); and four the day before that (another day when a lot of people were getting it in five or six).

'Morning, Rdear. Happy middle-of-the-work-week-that-we're-retired-from.

I got Wordle in 3 today, so once again am doing a little happy dance.

*smooch*

Morning, Richard! Wordle took me five today, including a silly guess that kept a right-letter-wrong-place where it was. Oops.

Happy mid week! >100 richardderus: Nice!

Morning, Richard. Happy Wednesday. Meeting my birding buddies this AM. Our lovely weather continues. I am currently enjoying Gillespie and I. I see that you were fond of it too.

Burgoine #44

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors--until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR SERVICES! THEY'RE ALREADY PAID FOR.

My Review: Yes, it was a sentimental Festival of Tearjerking. I enjoyed it immensely. And you probably would, too.

Wordle 389 4/6

🟨⬜⬜🟩⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩🟩🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Good gravy! AEONS, MIRTH, FLANK, BLAND

>108 msf59: Happy Humpday, Mark, and enjoy the birds. I remain eager to hear what your thoughts end up being about Gillespie and I.

>107 figsfromthistle: Hi Anita, and thanks! *smooch*

>106 bell7: Oh, the dreaded flurble. I hate when I do that! Still, 5 is not at all bad. Enjoy the doggos.

>105 karenmarie: Yay for 3!

*fires up voodoo-dolly cauldron*

I'm so pleased you're succeeding!

*sculpts very carefully*

Lovely, lovely, lovely!

*recalls Federalist 27 isn't up yet*

*sigh* So, have a delicious, my dear. *smooch*

>104 thornton37814: Two's are unicorns around here. I'm surprised, anymore, when I get a 3. It's turned into 4-land, and I'm still pleased with it. The puzzle continues to offer me pattern-recognition practice and I value that.

>109 richardderus: - I'm glad you enjoyed the read!

>112 katiekrug: I did, I did. Your warbles did the trick well! Perfect summertime library book.

>109 richardderus: I probably would. Added to the BlackHole.

((Hugs)) and **smooches** for today

>114 alcottacre: Oh my, yes indeed Stasia. I think it'll keep your pages a-fannin'.

*smooch*

>81 richardderus: Intriguing! I know I read House of Usher, because I read ALL of Poe's works, but I don't remember it at all. I'll have to see if I can get the Kingfisher novel.

>91 richardderus: Hear! Hear!

>93 alcottacre: May I know the name of that app so I can get it, Stasia? Because I can't stand looking at Ketchup Boy's face either.

>110 richardderus: Same for me:
Wordle 389 4/6

⬜🟩⬜🟨⬜
⬜🟩🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

>109 richardderus: I recently finished Remarkably Bright Creatures, too, and loved it. One of those books I really hated to put down.

>110 richardderus: >117 thornton37814: Four for me, too, today.

>118 Copperskye:, >117 thornton37814: Lots of us in 4-land today, Joanne. It's a good, solid result, innit.

>118 Copperskye: I'm not surprised that most of us liked Remarkably Bright Creatures! A fun read.

>116 Storeetllr: I expect your library system will have What Moves the Dead, Mary. The author's a big name after all.

*smooch*

>117 thornton37814:, >118 Copperskye:, >119 richardderus: Indeed - me too!

Just to let you know RD, that your threads have already had more than 4,000 posts this year. Well done dear fellow for keeping such a thought provoking place open to your pals. x

Smooches for Thursday!!

Happy Thursday, Richard dear!

I failed Wordle today :'(
My last guess had all the right letters out of order.

‘Morning, RDear. Happy Thursday to you.

>109 richardderus: If anybody in our group of 75ers would read a book about a detective octopus it would be you. I’ll pass, but give you points for Marcellus.

>111 richardderus: I’ve listened to Federalist No 28, after having posted about No 27 yesterday. I need to post 28 now, too.

*smooch*

Guess I'm heavy handed this morning.

another *smooch* 'cuz smooches and affection are so necessary.

Thursday *smooch*

>125 bell7: Thanks, Mary, *smooch* right back.

>124 karenmarie: Well, more is more, and that's almost always better than less...in fact almost anything is better than Less...but I digress.

>123 karenmarie: I heard about it from Katie, Horrible, so she gets the full measure of approbation. I don't think you'd dislike the read but I won't make a case for you getting one.

I'll be over directly to see what the Federalists have to offer this morning.

*smooch*

>122 FAMeulstee: Oh heck, Anita, I'm sorry about the skunking. But I'll make sure to spread some happiness this Thursday in your honor.

>121 Berly: Hiya Berly-boo! *smooch*

>120 PaulCranswick: 4,000 posts! Well, that's a milestone indeed. Thanks for your statistical report! You know they are always fun for me. Stats are fascinating lenses to look at data through.

NY State's all nervous about monkeypox but I'm not anymore. Roomie has dermatological complaints not viral ones.

My relief is immense.

Sweet Thursday, Richard. We are enjoying a beautiful stretch of weather here in Chicagoland. I originally thought, probably due to the subject matter, that Gillespie and I would be a slow read but I am flying through it. I could be close to the halfway point by the end of the day.

Wordle 390 5/6

⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩🟨⬜⬜
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Well...what can I say. Better'n 6. AEONS, MIRTH, RIVER, GIVER, LIVER

>129 msf59: I know, right?! It's nothing at all like you think it will be, and in the best possible way.

Happy nice-summer day!

>126 richardderus: Phew.
>130 richardderus:. Took me 6 goes, 3 of which were guessing the middle letter...

>132 Helenliz: I know, right?! I am *so*relieved*!

It's amazing how tough it can be to see past the first pass of guesses when working on word puzzles. Happy Thursday, Helen.

>128 richardderus: That is already spreading a lot of happiness this Thursday, Richard dear, relieved with you!

135 The Draper Touch: The High Life and High Style of Dorothy Draper by Carleton Varney

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A must have for those fascinated with the history of the interior design business as well as the history of New York City, where Draper lived and designed some of her most famous projects such as the Carlyle Hotel–Features personal and archival photographs by fashion and society photographers Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton and André Kertész whose images were published in the 1920s in Vogue magazine–Insightful texts are based on interviews with Draper's family, former staff of the company and the author's personal memories of Dorothy Draper who was referred to as the 'Duchess of Decorating'–Extensive appendices that include never-before-seen Draper documents

Designer and interior decorator Dorothy Draper's color-filled life story is one of high society, money, gossip, and throughout it all, reinvention. Carleton Varney has owned and directed Dorothy Draper & Company, Inc., for almost 60 years. He worked with Mrs. Draper at the end of her illustrious career, and wrote the only biography of her life, The Draper Touch: The High Life and High Style of Dorothy Draper, in 1988. In the book, Varney sets the scene and defines the milieu that Draper was born into in 1889 and from which she escaped to become one of America's leaders in design—a true visionary entrepreneur.

Thirty-three years later, Shannongrove Press is releasing this deluxe edition of The Draper Touch. With a new foreword by Varney, newly found photographs, recently discovered historical documents from a private collection, and archival ephemera from Draper's family, this beautiful tome reveals Draper's fascinating journey and the real stories behind her ground-breaking work.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Carleton Varney's name is now more recognizable than Mrs. Draper's is. At an earlier time, Mrs. Draper was IT in the world of fashionable design.

What mostly matters in looking at this book isn't familiarity with Mrs. Draper but an openness to learning about the essential skills of design and, frankly, all of life: Decide what you want and go get it. So simple! Except when it comes to doing it. Mrs. Draper was born with every material advantage a person could have. Her doom, in the ancient Celtic sense, was to be a frivolous ornament to a man's life. That might be what Society had in mind, but Mrs. Draper begged to differ, and when circumstances forced her hand she strode forward (a very, very tall person for any era, over six feet!) to meet the world on her own terms.

The design of this book is, unsurprisingly, the reason it exists. It's lush and luxurious. Dorothy Draper lived in a time before color photography was common...she died in 1969 at almost 80...so most of what we see isn't twenty-first century Technicolor Architectural Digest stuff that we're so accustomed to. But to counterbalance that, look at that list of famous early-twentieth-century photographers! These are beautiful images...though there are not a lot of room portraits, so get that out of your expectations early. Instead we have something more intimate, more revealing than the lady's public aesthetic: Portraits, snapshots, items that truly reflect Mrs. Draper herself, not only her work but her world.

You might well have read something of Carleton Varney's work before, being as he's a columnist and an author of long standing. His style is breezily companionable and approachable. He doesn't pull his focus to show Mrs. Draper, or her clients, only in soft lights...but he soft-pedals that drama that no doubt occurred all too often, without ever ignoring it. Big personalities make big enemies, after all, so pretending she was universally loved...well. It's not like Author Varney isn't offering a bouquet of vintage cabbage roses and a box of pâtisserie from Fauchon, he simply does so without dishonest concealment.

I saw this book and was instantly transported to my past. Mama was a Draper devotee, and I read her books...Decorating is Fun! and Entertaining is Fun!, now republished by Shannongrove Press...when a teenaged faggot. How much they influenced my mother was very clear, I only had to look around our house to see the myriad Draper touches. I never had a white wall in my home! Although there was entirely too much pink for my taste, thanks to Draper...a color I still abominate.

This read was a delight, a way to re-experience pleasant formative memories, and a very informative look at the life of a rare woman of business, boss of many men, in an era when they were uncommon entities indeed.

>134 FAMeulstee: Thanks, Anita, I'm pretty relieved. I've had chicken pox and been vaccinated against smallpox, but this one appears to be sneakier than those. I'm glad not to be stewing in the darn stuff!

I was wondering what happened with the monkey pox scare. Glad Old Stuff got the all-clear!

>128 richardderus: Yay!

>109 richardderus: >118 Copperskye: >123 karenmarie: Crikey! How'd I miss Burgoine review #44? Sounds absolutely like something Richard would read. Me too! Hope my library has it.

>139 Storeetllr: I'm always adding to posts >2 richardderus: >3 richardderus: >4 richardderus: when you want to check for new reviews, Mary. Katie's pleased croonings snagged me...I really could not resist borrowing that book.

>138 ArlieS:, >137 katiekrug: YAY indeed!! I'm so pleased. Well, not that he has whatever dermatological thing but that it's not monkeypox. I do not like to think of having anything as wretched as chicken pox ever, ever, ever again! It's been 53 years and I still recall that horror.

>126 richardderus: Good news! GOOD NEWS!!!!! Sorry about his skin problems, but they don't have to be your problem. That makes up for another Wordle 5. In fact, you may call me "Fiver." *sigh*

Off to do lunch.

*smooch*

Months ago, I took a BB from you for Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?, and I finally got it on audio from the library. I've only listened to one chapter so far, but I love it. So thank you!!

>142 katiekrug: Oh yay, it finally came in! I was glad that one hit you because it's just so...so...itself, in a way you're susceptible to.

>141 LizzieD: Well, Fiveski darlin, we're multiplyin' fast we are.

I hope lunch is/was scrummy. I'm not feelin' foodie so I'll probably just have applesauce and fresh blueberries for "dinner" since it's too blinkin' hot.

The book about Draper looks like a good. On my long way home now.

>144 Familyhistorian: Hi Meg! Safe travel and happy homecoming. The Draper book is only in hardcover and costs $100. *gasp*

‘Morning, RDear. Happy Friday to you.

>128 richardderus: Whew! I’m glad OS’s complaints are dermatological. No Monkeypox for you.

>143 richardderus: I'm not feelin' foodie. Not to be confused with the dreadful earworm

Be Careful.

You’ve been warned.

Feelin’ Groovy.

*smooch*

>116 Storeetllr: Mary, the app is called “Make America Kittens Again.”

>135 richardderus: I have never heard of either Carleton Varney or Dorothy Draper, which just goes to show how much I know about fashionable design - absolutely nothing (and I am happy that way!)

Happy Friday, RD! ((Hugs)) and **smooches** for today

Happy Friday, Richard!

*smooch*

Wordle 391 5/6

⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Alphabetitis is frustrating. AEONS, MIRTH, PECKY, LEDGE, WEDGE

Happy Friday, Richard. It is Jackson day. Somehow, I will muddle through...

>150 msf59: Oh dear, Mark, how awful of Bree to make you watch your grandchild! The nerve of the woman. I hope you're preparing your rebellion.

>148 figsfromthistle: Thanks, Anita, the same back at'cha.

>147 alcottacre: ...and here I thought you'd be the first to go drop $100 on the book...

>146 karenmarie: That earworm was the very thing I was humming to myself as I typed that sentence. Beat you to it, Horrible!

*smooch*

I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.—Iris Murdoch in The Message to the Planet

>147 alcottacre: Thanks!

I want this on my tombstone.

Curiosity has wrongly, by those with a vested interest in ignorance and their own revealed truths, been traduced and eternally characterized as a dangerous felicide, but you, dearest of dear, dear readers, know that Curiosity lights the way to glory.

Let us put it another way: the lack of curiosity is the Dementor that sucks all hope, joy, possibility, and beauty out of the world. The dull torpid acedia that does not care to find out, that has no hunger and thirst for input, understanding, and connection will desert-ify the human landscape and land our descendants squarely in the soup.

Elegantly said, Forethought-writer Stephen Fry.

Boo!

>155 ronincats:

Wordle 392 4/6

⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜
🟨⬜🟨⬜⬜
🟩🟩⬜⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
It was a good one. AEONS, MIRTH, ROCKY, ROOMY

‘Morning, RD! Happy weekend day to you.

>151 richardderus: Whew! Glad I didn’t give that earworm cootie.

>154 richardderus: *blinks* Good old Stephen Fry. All I can think of for mine is ‘Mother, Reader, Wife’.

>157 richardderus: 4’s good, 3’s better… just sayin’.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

>158 karenmarie: I don't actually want a grave, so I'm only funnin' but once the medical students are finished with the leftover meat and the school cremates the remains, I'll have a ceramic urn or something with that painted in it to get poured into.

I shall Loftily Ignore the bait you've so shockingly dragged before me.

*smooch*

Wordle 393 4/6

🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
🟨🟩⬜⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
It most certainly was. AEONS, MIRTH, CADDY, WACKY

'Morning, RDear. Happy Sunday to you.

>159 richardderus: I'm rather old school on what I want done with my remains. I want to be buried and have a headstone - although a pine or biodegradable casket (new thought! who knew!) rather than an expensive, wood and brass with satin casket is my preference. I've registered to donate my organs/eyes if they're suitable.

Today it took 5. Grumble.

*smooch*

>161 karenmarie: Hey Horrible, happy Sunday.

We buried Mama in a beautiful cloth-covered biodegradable box. She wanted, at the end of her life, to be buried which was a huge change from her previous desire to be cremated. Dunno what prompted the change.

Still and all, I'm sure the medical students will still need corpses to practice on by ~2035. And they can harvest whatever's useful before then.

Morning, RD!

>163 katiekrug: How d'ye do, Katie...have a lovely prep-for-vacay Sunday! *smooch*

Happy Sunday, Mr. D. Love the quote from Stephen Fry. I’ve been wondering about Remarkable Bright Creatures; good to see your thumbs-up.

A bargain book ($1.99) today is Library of the Unwritten, which I remember you liked, right?

I’m embarked on the Throne of Glass series and enjoying it. Hope you’ve been having a good weekend.

>165 jnwelch: Happy Sunday back, Dr. W. Didn't you just find the best example of my dearly doted-on fantasy novels? I think you read some of those Elena Ferrante Neapolitan novels, and liked them...did you see that all 5 of them are on Kindlesale for $1.99?
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B079MDD33J/
Even *I*, who didn't like the first one, had to get on that!

>145 richardderus: My library has a copy of The Draper Touch published in 1988.

As much as I like tromping around graveyards and reading the stones (hazards of being a family historian) my family tradition is cremation. That probably comes from generations living in London where they ran out of burial plots eons ago.

Happy Sunday, Richard. I am enjoying a lazy book-filled day. Zipping through Gillespie and I. Deep into the trial now. All good here.

>168 msf59: Hi Mark! Oh, the trial...the trial...how glad I am you're getting this delight into your eyeholes at last.

>167 Familyhistorian: It's mostly the same...there are a VERY few new stories, none of them earth-shatteringly good, and some things have more back-up than before. Not worth $100 to discover!

Do any graveyards offer cenotaphs near you?

Assuming any part of me is salvageable, they can have it and welcome. I plan on being cremated and then thrown out for composting. Frankly you could throw me out with the rubbish, I wont know or care by that point.

I've only been to one burial, my grandma. I was stood on the side of the grave while they lowered the coffin and, as is the way of things, the thought that spun through my head was "I do hope someone's going to get that brass out of there, that's a waste".

Happy Monday. It's supposed to be scorchio here today/tomorrow.

Hiya, RDear, and happy Monday to you.

I woke up early to try to get the final financial reporting done for last fiscal year for the Friends of the Library Board meeting today. At least I have coffee, the promise of lunch out with the Branch Librarian after the meeting, and then grocery shopping with Jenna. Busy, but fulfilling.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

>171 karenmarie: Monday fog-shrouded orisons, Horrible. It sounds like the kind of busy day that means something, so that's good.

>170 Helenliz: An English guy I know is on vacation in Aberystwyth RN and, since he's tweeting non-stop about the heat, I've learned that y'all're getting a Saharan jet stream, you lucky, lucky sods. Boo hiss climate change.

I only care about the leavings leaving as little impact as possible on the planet, so being useful before they chuck out the rest seems like the way to go. There is, in a few states, a human composting process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LJSEZ_pl3Y

New York isn't one, I'm sad to say.

136 Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Leah is changed. Months earlier, she left for a routine expedition, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night.

As Miri searches for answers, desperate to understand what happened below the water, she must face the possibility that the woman she loves is slipping from her grasp.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

The space around us is a claw half grasped, holding tight without quite crushing, and I wish, in the idle way I always wish these days, that I felt more confident in my ability to breathe.
–and–
I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left.
–and–
Her tone is perfectly reasonable, even kind. Beneath it, however, there is little enough in the way of feeling, a chilly blank where the rest of her voice, as I know it, should be.

Don't think for a moment that this is ever an easy book to read. It's not long, only 240pp, or probably 85,000 to 90,000 words. It's a supremely effective exercise in lovely phrase-making that adds up to an eerie atmospheric story of two women in a marriage based on so many broken places and invisibly tiny hooks on long, thin, almost undetectable filaments that intertwine with the other's reaching filaments...no telling whose reach in, whose reach out, the effect still mimics velcro for the soul.

I used to think it was vital to know things, to feel safe in the learning and recounting of facts. I used to think it was possible to know enough to escape from the panic of not knowing, but I realize now that you can never learn enough to protect yourself, not really.

I felt my impatience with Miri, the wife on land, wax and wane several times during the read...in life I'd find Miri intolerable...and I found Leah more and more relatable, as the quote above could've been ripped out of my mind and prettied up some to be Leah's voice. I understood these two women being together, and I understood why Author Armfield introduced a new Leah-like character to be active for Miri the passive, the sea-like all-absorbing heatless Miri. I understood...but I didn't love.

Too much of what happened reminded me of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, possibly more the filmed version than the book. Too many things left off, dangling conversations like the one in the ancient Simon & Garfunkel song. The eerieness of it is very close to ennui at times, Leah speaks of exhaustion that feels bottomless and that unfortunately is what I took away from this read.

But oh my goddesses, the beautiful phrases. The beautiful, beautiful phrases, the concepts caught in their gem facets, oh my goddesses. Give me that all day long. I promise I won't complain a peep about the "plot".

I feel much the same way as Helen in >170 Helenliz: about my remains. I'm dead. Who cares?

I'm assuming you have a similarly dreary morning where you are, RD, though sometimes I am surprised how different our weather can be...

>174 katiekrug: Hiya Katie...dreary, foggy, icky morning indeed. Blech.

You're dead. But the planet isn't...and the problem is what we do with you when you're dead has a lot of impact on the planet long-term. Claim to be Jewish at least! You have to remain un-chemically treated and planted in a simple box within three days.

Happy new week, RD! ((Hugs)) and **smooches**

>176 alcottacre: Hi Stasia! *smooch*

Wordle 394 4/6

⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Getting annoyed got me a 4 instead of a 6 for once! AEONS, MIRTH, BLOCK, FLOCK

Holá Riccardo!

>179 humouress: ¡la Señá Supervillainess!

Nita Prose's fun little romp that Florence Pugh is set to star in: The Maid is only $2.99 on Kindle! https://smile.amazon.com/Maid-Novel-Nita-Prose-ebook/dp/B091Y4KGFH/

I got my 4 somewhat differently
Wordle 394 4/6

⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟩⬜🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Good Monday morning, Richard! Or, I guess, good afternoon now. I was up early, dealing with another flood, this time from rain washing into my kitchen. I swear, I'll never get away from these water problems!

Anyway, interesting convo about what to do with the body after one dies. Me, I'm going to leave it up to my daughter, as my take on it is that it's those left behind who are impacted by this issue. (I'm with Helenliz: I'll be dead, so I won't care. Though I agree with you that it matters to the planet. My daughter and I have discussed various options. I'm an organ donor, and I wouldn't mind being a medical cadaver, assuming they'd want my dried up old crone corpse, and then composted, but ultimately I'm inclined to opt for cremation and burying the ashes in the garden. Or at sea. Though that may not be best for the sea. I suppose this is something I should research. And then my loved ones get together for a bon voyage party aka memorial and drink to my life and whatever good (I hope) I've done.)

Now I want to reread Stiff.

>183 Storeetllr: I hope someone's noodging Mary Roach about revising Stiff for this century. Her take on composting people would be fascinating.

*I* don't care about the meat, once I've dropped out of it; I very, very much do care that it does more good than harm since I've got 5 grands and a great-grand who aren't responsible for the shitty mess we've left them, but are going to have to figure out how to live in it.

Medical cadavers are useful near teaching hospitals. Contacting ScienceCare will net you some interesting facts.

>182 Helenliz: Interesting pattern, Helen. Care to share the words?

>184 richardderus: Interesting. Thanks! I registered.

>185 Storeetllr: *smooch*

I loved Stiff and would also like to see a revised edition. I finished Gillespie and I and enjoyed it very much. It could have used a little trimming but that is a minor quibble.

>187 msf59: Heh...almost nothing couldn't use a little trimming...people aren't always as succinct as they might be. I'm glad that, on balance, it was a good experience for you! Wasn't that trial a stitch?

>135 richardderus: Vale Carleton Varney: Little did I know, he died at age 85 the day my review appeared. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carleton_Varney

AUDIO, THENS, PROOF, FLOCK
The first 2 are my standard starter words.

Adding Stiff to the must read list.

Organ donor and then cremation please. But lots of books first and I'll re-read Stiff if she updates it! ; )

>191 Berly: Hiya Berly! I think that's a very responsible decision, since so many people need organs so badly. *smooch*

>190 Helenliz: We're all eager for Stiff, current or revised version!

'Morning, Rdear. Happy Tuesday to you.

Working on my second cup of coffee. Jenna came to say hi, is hanging out in the living room while it's still quiet. Bill's still sleeping, will come out and the TV will go on, and Jenna will probably retreat to my Retreat. She's already set up her PS4 up there and she can play games at a good volume without me hearing it in the Sunroom, which is directly underneath. Three people can rattle around here quite nicely, as it turns out.

*smooch*

>193 karenmarie: It's a good thing to know you're not going to be tempted too strongly into the -cide side of living together.

Rain sounds are the only way I survive TV noise from all angles. Luckily Old Stuff doesn't care much for anything beyond a few teams and the news. I still loathe the gorram thing.
***
Wordle 395 3/6

🟩⬜⬜🟨⬜
⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
This one was *easy*!

My god, RD, you send me down more rabbit holes than anybody else on LT, hands down.

Mariticide is the deliberate killing of one's husband.
Filicide is the deliberate killing by a parent of their own child.
Matricide is the deliberate killing of one's mother.
Uxoricide is the deliberate killing of one's wife.

That covers it for our household.

edited to add: No 29 is up.

>194 richardderus: Tempted to withhold my smooches over your smug 3 when I ended up with a 5 but I'll leave them anyway. *smooch*

Burgoine #45

Afro Puffs Are the Antennae of the Universe (The Brothers Jetstream Universe #2) by Zig Zag Claybourne

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: No one has time for your BS...but Captain Desiree Quicho and her crew of utter badasses surely don't. Got a universe to save. Again. Commandeer one piece of out-of-this-world tech and suddenly you have an evil billionaire and a corporate queenpin on your ass, factions scrabbling at the power grab to end all power grabs, and an ultimate AI bent on a rampage of healing.

All a captain wanted was a little chill time, a few tunes, and quality barbecue.

Woe to those blocking her groove.

Four women; One machine goddess; a Hellbilly, Saharan elves, the baddest Pacific Octopus this side of Atlantis... and Humanity's balance tilting toward its biggest unknown future.

THE AUTHOR GIFTED ONE TO ME. THANK YOU!!

My Review: I flat-out howled my way through this short, punchy, absolutely mad and manic story of what we all want to see...Right beating might...with women's place at the helm of the craft unquestioned, unfought-over, and unapologetically human. Which is to say, morally gray shading into gravity-well-colored. Even the Pacific Octopus.

Don't sit there staring, go buy a Kindlecopy for $4.99 and cheap at twice the price if you want a white-knuckle-speed trip through the Cosmos. (The link is a non-affiliate link.)

>196 MickyFine: You know you love me anyway. *smooch*

>195 karenmarie: I shall coddiwomple thitherward directly to view Federalist 29.

I live to serve, Horrible, if I didn't point you at the rabbit-holes how would you fill your innumerable waking hours? *smooch*

>130 richardderus: RIVER, GIVER LIVER...I feel your pain :O

>194 richardderus: I have my audio book and some bog ole headphones to combat my eldest's PS4 playing (which necessarily involves him yelling at/with his friends that he plays with).

>199 LovingLit: Headphones are a MUST for volume reduction. Mine are wearing out, though I've got a new set in-house for when they collapse irretrievably.

The guessing-game Wordles are the ones I love the least. Ifind that it's just tedious and pointless, like all chance-only pursuits.

>200 richardderus: The guessing-game Wordles are the ones I love the least. Today may not float your boat...
Fell right into my blind spot and a failed to complete in 6.

137 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

The Publisher Says: In this exhilarating novel by the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: When you're old, like me, you don't expect to follow middle-aged peoples' passions because you raised them so you know there's just stuff not shared between generations. One of those things is gaming. I've watched people get really passionate about the games they're playing and, frankly, wanted to yawn in their face. I do not see the appeal. But, knowing this was going to be the spine of the story, I was ready for that and factored my indifference out of the story's appeal.

Sadie had often reflected that sex and video games had a great deal in common. There were certain objectives that needed to be met. There were certain rules that shouldn't be broken. There was a correct combination of movements—button mashes, joystick pivots, keystrokes, commands—that made the whole thing work or not work. There was a pleasure to knowing you had played the game correctly and a release that came when you reached the next level. To be good at sex was to be good at the game of sex.

What we're left with is the childhood friend, I think most of us have had one, whose idea of a good time marches well with our own and whose ability to connect with our quiet places makes them invaluable and necessary companions. This is not to say they're romantic-partner material, and in some odd way I think that romantic facet, if present, actually works against this sort of long-term companionship. The relationship that Sam and Sadie take with them through their lives is that companionably silent, creatively clicking connection. It's a wonderful thing to find and, mirabile dictu, Author Zevin makes the force of it real, present, and never overplays her hand with it. A tremendously admirable and no doubt difficult achievement.

Why was it so hard for him to say he loved her even when she said it to him? He knew he loved her. People who felt far less for each other said "love" all the time, and it didn't mean a thing. And maybe that was the point. He more than loved Sadie Green. There needed to be another word for it.

–and–

To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won't hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love.

The hardest thing to admit to yourself is that you're the Bad Guy in someone else's fairy tale of life and love. Someone out there thinks of you with acute hurt and badly wounded feelings. Sam and Sadie are that to each other, as well as companionable besties. It's complicated, and it wouldn't do to spend time spoilering it, but suffice to say that the ability to betray, then to forgive yourself and seek forgiveness from the betrayed, is another very difficult thing to present in any believable way in fiction. Author Zevin does that, too.

"We work through our pain. That's what we do. We put the pain into the work, and the work becomes better. But you have to participate. You have to talk to me. You can't ignore me and our company and everything that came before."

It's a story about the depths of devotion to an idea, an ideal, and a cause in service of one's burning passion to make and be more than one is. It's a story about Love being, in the end, enough to make even failure less important. It's a story about Sam and Sadie making a life with each other: even though not spouses, they're necessary in each others' world because...well, because.

“I thought you were worried I was going to die," Sam said.

"No. You'll never die. And if you ever died, I'd just start the game again," Sadie said.

"Sam's dead. Put another quarter in the machine."

"Go back to the save point. Keep playing, and we'll win eventually.”

There it is, in that brief passage. That is what some connections offer, and what some of us luck into once or twice in a lifetime. It's precious beyond price and it's the heart of this loving story of the messy, cruel, angry thing we call life.

Why, then, have I given the read a mere four stars? Because I am, as noted above, old. It is not a story written for me, and so I am not as invested in it as I would be if I were 42 not 62. I expect that others will love the delicate and intricate love among all three main protagonists without the sense I had of being spoken around at the dinner table. It's a fate, like bed-wetting, that comes around again after being left behind in childhood. Hence the lack of a fifth, or fraction of a fifth, star. Still a story I'd encourage you to read. (With an agèd person caveat.)

>202 richardderus: I like what I've read by Zevin and was mildly interested in picking it up, but your review puts it more firmly on the TBR list. Interesting that you peg it as 42-62, since I'm younger than that and tend to think of serious gamers as slightly younger than me, but I know that's not entirely accurate. I'm also not much of a gamer, but I can enjoy watching someone who knows what they're doing play some games and appreciate the appeal of them.

‘Morning, RDear, and happy Wednesday to you.

>194 richardderus: Look at you slipping in a Firefly reference. It almost got past me. Damn. It might be time to watch again, especially now that we’re watching Castle.

>198 richardderus: I live to serve, Horrible, if I didn't point you at the rabbit-holes how would you fill your innumerable waking hours? *smooch* I do not know. It’s an endless void without duckduckgo and you.

>200 richardderus: Wireless earbuds, various soothing or white-noise sounds when the TV gets to be too much.

>202 richardderus: In our house my passion is books, Jenna’s is her PS4 and various games, and Bill’s is TV. Yesterday I got to hear how thrilling it was for Jenna to hook the beast up to my 55” 4K TV in the Retreat. I think her very old small not-very-smart TV will get donated somewhere soon. Even when she gets back on her feet, probably some time next year, I see a good TV in her future, courtesy of Mom and Dad. I’ve gotten past the judgment phase of the PS4. TV, not quite so much, but I’m working on it. When I’m not going down RD rabbit holes, that is.

*smooch*

Wordle 396 3/6

⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟨🟨🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Four correct and one in place = doddle. AEONS, MIRTH, TRITE

>205 karenmarie: Heavens above, Horrible, there's no thing on Earth less useful than a 55" 4K TV dedicated to your use! Let the lassie have it. You. Watching TV without Bill. *snort* The mind stretcheth not that wide.

Wednesday's horrors include humidex over 90° so I will not be tipping a toe out of my cave.

*smooch*

>203 bell7: The gamers I know are all 45 and under. That tracks since we bought them all sorts of electronic games as they grew, so I just subtracted 20 from my age and went with it. Nothing more calculated than that. I think, honestly, that you'll like but not love the read. So much depends on the game-world connection that, absent such, it's a good but not great story.

>201 Helenliz: Au contraire, Mme Helen. See >206 richardderus:!

>206 richardderus: Good job, Richard! It took me my usual 4 today.

>208 figsfromthistle: Thanks, Anita, it's really a doddle when you have 4/5 letters and only one word fits 'em.

*smooch*

>207 richardderus: Just for the record, I am a 64 year old gamer.

>210 ArlieS: You are, not for the first time, a rara avis among us domestic fowl.

Burgoine #46

The Day I Died by Lori Rader-Day

Real Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Anna Winger knows people better than they know themselves with only a glance—at their handwriting. Hired by companies seeking trustworthy employees and by the lovelorn hoping to find happiness, Anna likes to keep the real mess of other people’s lives at arm’s length and on paper. But when she is called to use her expertise on a ransom note left behind at a murder scene in the small town she and her son have recently moved to, the crime inevitably gets under Anna’s skin. Was the child kidnapped from his home by his own mother, trying to save him from his abusive father? Thirteen years ago, Anna did the same thing for her unborn son, now a troubled teen rebelling against the protected life she’s given him.

The local sheriff wants no part of Anna’s brand of hocus pocus, but he’ll do whatever it takes to bring his community and his office back under control. Anna is able to discern from the note that no one in the little boy’s family has been safe for a long time. And bringing him and his mother home could be the worst possible outcome for them.

A GIFT FROM A "FRIEND" WHOSE BIBLIOHOLISM RIVALS MY OWN. *FIST-SHAKE*

My Review: Domestic thrillers aren't always bad. This one is of the un-bad ilk. Anna's life hasn't been easy, or peaceful; it's been marred by violence from every man in it. Of course she has a son. But she's raised him in such a way that he's clear that interpersonal violence isn't an option.

So he runs away from her to find out why she's so het-up about this.

What happens, then, is an extended hunt for and unearthing of Anna's many wounds from source to cessation. Why I recommend it is Author Rader-Day's facility with characterization. I'm less enamored of her exposition and dialogue.

I turned in a slow circle, taking in the empty room. Something wasn't right. What was it? And then I saw. His backpack was missing from the table. "His backpack."

"What?"

"I don't know," I said. A shrill alarm began to ring in my ears, and I raised my voice to be heard over it. "I don't know."

"OK," Joe said. "Let's be calm. What about his backpack?"

"It's not on the table. It's always, always on the table." I thought of the pack's dense bulk, the thump it made when he set it down.

Now, let me be clear: This isn't bad writing. It's, um, uninspired, uninspiring writing IMO, but definitely not bad...the "pack" syllable repeated as often as it is, plosive and glottal and easy to hear, just works better as audio than visual. There is quite a bit of the writing that works as an ear-read or as film dialogue but not as visualization aid. It leaves me, the reader-as-cranial-filmmaker, without any room to decide things for myself. That's not my preference in reading. Hence my less-than-half-star over the base 3. Which, remember!, means "good!"

Burgoine #47

Outlawed by Anna North

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw.

The day of her wedding, 17 year old Ada's life looks good; she loves her husband, and she loves working as an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife. But after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, her survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows.

She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, a band of outlaws led by a preacher-turned-robber known to all as the Kid. Charismatic, grandiose, and mercurial, the Kid is determined to create a safe haven for outcast women. But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan that may get them all killed. And Ada must decide whether she's willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all.

Featuring an irresistibly no-nonsense, courageous, and determined heroine, Outlawed dusts off the myth of the old West and reignites the glimmering promise of the frontier with an entirely new set of feminist stakes. Anna North has crafted a pulse-racing, page-turning saga about the search for hope in the wake of death, and for truth in a climate of small-mindedness and fear.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Imaginative, inventive, and insolent prose telling the oft-told tale of good soul gone bad. It's not a new trope or even take...woman blamed for problems she can't control, runs away, lives her best life...but it's very well crafted and quite fun to read.

“The point is, you live like I did, you start being able to spot what makes some people sink and other people swim. There’s a quality, I don’t even know how to describe it—sometimes it looks like luck and sometimes it looks like skill and sometimes it doesn’t look like either one. But you have it, I saw it when I met you. You’ve made a lot of mistakes, but you’re a good bet. You’ll swim.”
–and–
“If they take you, keep your head up. Don't beg for your life. Don't confess to any sin. If you die without shame, the shame is all theirs.”

These women, cast out for failing to give birth, find their world is much bigger and much sweeter when they embrace freedom from expectations. Deeply, deeply relatable to this old queer gent.

Pearl Rule #33

The Poptart Manifesto by Rick Gualtieri

Rating: 2.5* of five, all for "Ajax"

The Publisher Says: What do umbrellas, mutants, dead plumbers, and of course Pop-Tarts have to do with each other? Nothing really. However, they're all things that the author thinks about...A LOT. Take a journey down this path and see how all of the above, plus a bunch of other topics, make their twisted sense to the author.

The Poptart Manifesto is 13 short stories of weird thoughts coupled with slightly out of the ordinary events that are sure to make you think. Or not. But they might, just might, give you a chuckle or two.

RECOMMENDED BY A FRIEND. I WANT THAT 99¢ BACK.

My Review: Tediously adolescent humor. Maybe I'm just an old picklepuss now, but I really expect more from someone whose SF series, The Tome of Bill, is best-selling and much beloved.

"The Poptart Manifesto," the title story, is just tiresome as this weedy dweeb waxes lyrical about the Pop-Tart to his girlfriend. "Cork Quest" reminded me, as the narrator searches for a corkscrew across the whole of Manhattan, that straight guys were never weaned.

Seriously...breasts are there to feed babies (whether they're ever used that way or not). That's what they do. "Wedding Belles" was where I realized that, if things didn't turn around soon, I was gonna have to bail...guy shares room with hot girl, brags all over a wedding about it, and her boyfriend takes umbrage. Ha ha ha. "Ajax: Slayer of Trojans, Destroyer of Grease Stains" was better, a little redemption for the modest and the overlooked is always welcome. "The Epic Adventure of the Mighty Adventurers," however, swung the sledgehammer onto the last inch of the collection's coffin nail: Ready Player One meets Catcher in the Rye if written by P.J. O'Rourke. Tries for witty, achieves snarky.

I might've been less irked by the mismatch of my taste and the author's if he'd used a style sheet and hired a proofreader. "Then" ≠ "Than" ever.

Look at you on a review roll!! Smooch.

Burgoine #48

Vanity in Dust (Crowns & Ash #1) by Cheryl Low

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: In the Realm there are whispers. Whispers that the city used to be a different place. That before the Queen ruled there was a sky beyond the clouds and a world beyond their streets.

Vaun Dray Fen never knew that world. Born a prince without a purpose in a Realm ruled by lavish indulgence, unrelenting greed, and vicious hierarchy, he never knew a time before the Queen’s dust drugged the city. Everything is poisoned to distract and dull the senses, even the tea and pastries. And yet, after more than a century, his own magic is beginning to wake. The beautiful veneer of the Realm is cracking. Those who would defy the Queen turn their eyes to Vaun, and the dust saturating the Realm.

From the carnivorous pixies in the shadows to the wolves in the streets, Vaun thought he knew all the dangers of his city. But when whispers of treason bring down the fury of the Queen, he'll have to race to save the lives and souls of those he loves.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: As with all fantasy novels, there's a 50/50 chance I'll resonate to the story harmoniously enough to enjoy the read; odds got us to 60/40 for QUILTBAG themed stories and higher still if there's a bisexual man.

We stalled at 60/40 and never got going again. All the sex is implied; the point of the world's sexual fluidity is played as increasing the sensual options of these decadent people; and in the end, the male MC goes back to his hetero roots. So, disappointments all around. There's also a certain glacial pace issue. There's also a dearth of evidence that a professional proofreader saw the MS (eg, "sooth" ≠ "soothe" nor "horde" substituting for "hoard"), which honestly bothered me quite a lot. Still, a read I'm not sorry I made time for.

Pearl Rule #34

You'll Always Be White To Me: A Memoir by Garon Wade

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Three years in to Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war, an abandoned baby ends up in the adopted arms of a white American couple living in a Colombo home that doubles as a CIA safe house. They take him on an extraordinary journey around the globe as he’s launched into the diplomatic world of ambassadors, UN workers, and international schools.

Each summer he returns to the bayous of his parents’ small-town Louisiana, as exotic to him as the golden South African savannahs of his early childhood. He’s curious to know this America, a country he may someday be a part of. But with sincere love comes racism wrapped in the drawling sweetness of his grandparents’ good intentions.

Garon Wade’s transcendent memoir is an international coming-of-age story that explores how the heart of an orphan grew to love a world that didn’t always love him back. You’ll Always Be White To Me asks us who we are, what our common humanity is, and if it’s possible to look beyond our color and find our way there.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What a charmed life the author has led. He was likely going to be a casualty of the Sri Lankan civil war and had the incalculable good fortune to be whisked into a world of white American privilege by a pair of professional do-gooders. His parents were loving, kind, and above all good people. They prevented his life from descending into factional or sectarian strife; but more than that, they taught him what it means to be loved fully, deeply, and forgivingly.

I'm not going to read the whole book carefully because it's just too long. It needed to be 2/3 the size it is. Repetition of themes os still repetition and it's very, very repetitive. His life is interesting for its beginning, and relatable for his queerness marking him out as another kind of stranger among the people he's found himself...but that ain't NOTHIN' compared to the Sri Lankan cultural bias he'd've faced! (I know some Tamil queer men online and there's nothing quite like a religious-nut culture to hate its queers.)

Wow! You are up to 34 Pearl-ruled for the year!

>218 thornton37814: Sadly, I am. I would prefer not to have any but, realistically, there's a limit to how much time I can "afford" to spend on things I don't really enjoy.

>215 Berly: Hiya Berly-boo! I need to get the decks cleared for the political books I'll be crankin' out reviews for as the midterms approach.

Pearl Rule #35

Kingdom Ascent (Tempest of Bravoure #1) by Valena D'Angelis

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: We live brave. We die free.

Darkness has fallen upon the golden kingdom of Bravoure. Once the beacon of an alliance uniting four races, Bravoure is now under the oppression of an elven prince from beneath the surface. Not even the prophecy, the one that foretold his demise in the holy fires of the Dragonborn, was able to stop him.

Ahna, a runaway mage, rises above the decades of grief and returns to the fight, joining the united soldiers of the Resistance. Despite her origins, she is accepted by these brave heroes who will never let their differences stand in the way of freedom.

She and the rebels embark on a covert mission to save the kingdom, but the past and the secrets she keeps will soon come knocking, and Ahna will face her demons as she faces the false king.

Tempest of Bravoure: Kingdom Ascent is the first book of the Tempest of Bravoure series.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Much is made, in other reviews, of the maps that begin this book. I agree; there is nothing like a map to make me feel the author's made a serious investment in their secondary world. I was very glad this story started on such a high note.

Ahna soon came to feel like every other embittered heroine in every other fantasy novel I've tried to read over the years. Her Scooby-group of friends, Kairen and David (Kairen's husband), are the relief from Ahna's darkness. The secondary world's well-enough built but, unless you're a big fan of fantasy quest novels, this one's not likely to ring your soul like a bell.

For the fantasy-loving crew, this woman-authored, woman-led series will ring bells all over. There are two more as of now. It's only $2.99 on Kindle so the risk to your budget is low.

Burgoine #49

The Last by Hanna Jameson

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: For fans of high-concept thrillers such as Annihilation and The Girl with All the Gifts, this breathtaking dystopian psychological thriller follows an American academic stranded at a Swiss hotel as the world descends into nuclear war—along with twenty other survivors—who becomes obsessed with identifying a murderer in their midst after the body of a young girl is discovered in one of the hotel’s water tanks.

Jon thought he had all the time in the world to respond to his wife’s text message: I miss you so much. I feel bad about how we left it. Love you. But as he’s waiting in the lobby of the L’Hotel Sixieme in Switzerland after an academic conference, still mulling over how to respond to his wife, he receives a string of horrifying push notifications. Washington, DC has been hit with a nuclear bomb, then New York, then London, and finally Berlin. That’s all he knows before news outlets and social media goes black—and before the clouds on the horizon turn orange.

Now, two months later, there are twenty survivors holed up at the hotel, a place already tainted by its strange history of suicides and murders. Those who can’t bear to stay commit suicide or wander off into the woods. Jon and the others try to maintain some semblance of civilization. But when the water pressure disappears, and Jon and a crew of survivors investigate the hotel’s water tanks, they are shocked to discover the body of a young girl.

As supplies dwindle and tensions rise, Jon becomes obsessed with investigating the death of the little girl as a way to cling to his own humanity. Yet the real question remains: can he afford to lose his mind in this hotel, or should he take his chances in the outside world?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

“A lot of people confuse movement with progress," Dylan said. "I knew it was a bad idea but what were we gonna do, barricade them in? They weren't ready to face any kind of truth."

I leaned against the wall of the stairwell as Dylan got out his set of keys. The air in here was too thick, full of dust and last breaths. It stank. I hated the stairwell but of course the elevators weren't working anymore; hadn't worked for two months, not since that first day.”

–and–

The only meaning we might have left as a species—indeed, the only thing left that might matter, that might keep us motivated to get up in the morning—is in the small acts of human kindness we show one another, and in my compulsion to be helpful, useful, to keep things moving forward, I've mostly forgotten to be kind.

There aren't a lot of things more important than kindness. There are a lot of things more important than busyness. And it is on those two poles that Author Jameson hangs her The Last Policeman-meets-Fire on the Island multi-suspect crime story, one taking place in a post-apocalyptic Switzerland largely insulated from the nuclear fallout all around.

Jon, our American PoV narrator, is making his way in the pre-apocalypse world by staying busy and making himself useful. This means he doesn't spend the time with his (possibly now-dead) family that he should...so busy securing their future that he fails to be present today. The apocalypse, in The Fall, is a good old-fashioned nuclear one. That feels dated in 2022 but it was 2018 when the book came out, different times indeed. In any case, the fancy conference Jon's at saves his life, and that of twenty others. But what does that win us? A murder. And Jon, the busyness addict, uses his clawing need to stay active, to make stuff happen, to fix it! (Spoiler: He can't fix the victim's lack of life, which is what should matter most to everyone.)

While I get totally the desire to ratchet up the stakes in a story, this one's got built-in stakes that are unbeatable. If one is going to use murder to make things more tense, the motive had best be surprising and compelling. This one fell short on both metrics. But the honest and searching moral inventories that Author Jameson puts the characters through makes up for a lot of that. The propulsive writing wasn't matched, though, by a solid pace because of that shortfall. Where I expected to be utterly and deeply involved, I was instead a very interested bystander.

Pearl Rule #36

The Murder of Jeremy Brookes by Tony McFadden

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: McGinnis Investigations has been operating a small but successful shop in Campbelltown, an hour south of Sydney, for over a decade. Business has been what you’d expect in a sort of rough town in a sort of rough country, with an ever increasing circle of rough and tumble clients spreading the word that Dan McGinnis’ team could get the job done, but only above board.

Nothing shady, nothing illegal, frequently successful and frequently just skirting the line.

But nothing could prepare Dan McGinnis for the depths he would plumb when a wealthy Sydney surgeon visits his office and asks him to investigate her husband’s murder. Her husband, Jeremy Brookes, was legal counsel for the owner of a right-wing media empire.

The police say he was killed during a mugging gone bad. She thinks it was a targeted attack.

Crossing powerful media types, the real killer and two other cases that seem to be connected drag Dan and his team into the darker side of politics, money and corruption.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What I hoped for: Inspector Hal Challis, Garry Disher's sleuth. What I got: Jimm Juree, Colin Cotterill's second, less successful, sleuth.

I expected the F-word, I expected the Aussie slang, I expected the sexism (the sleuth's an honest man yet never forget he's also an ex-footballer). I didn't expect the typos, the casual-to-the-point-of-caricature minor characters' characterization, or the very progressive political loathing for fake-news purveying hypercapitalists.

While I'm pleased by that last one, and resigned to the first three, the other two dragged a sure-fire four-star read down to three stars. I'm honestly gutted by this. I love Australian fiction. I look for it to be atmospheric. When I am balked by fixable failures, I am cranky. So here's me, cranky.

The Kindle edition is $3.99 but I recommend ordering the free sample before committing to the purchase.

You're reviewing up a storm, Richard. I'm surprised you found time to Wordle!

Happy Thursday, Richard dear!

You are pouring reviews. I should write a few, but not today, as I have my half year check at the dentist.

‘Morning, RDear! Happiest of Thursdays to you.

>211 richardderus: The first BB I ever got here on LT was from you, the month after I joined LT, November 2007. It’s Rara Avis, of course, you having mentioned the phrase just now and reminding me of it. I still haven’t read it, but it’s there, just waiting for the right time.

Congrats on the reviews, Burgoine reviews, and the Pearl Ruled books. Nothing grabbed me enough to want to pursue it, frankly, but it's nice to see you use your words... *smile*

And, of course, *smooch* after bragging on my Wordle 3.

Sweet Thursday, Richard. Excellent review of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I am old too but not that OLD!! I sure don't feel 62, soon to be 63. I have Jackson day today. Here is hoping, that it all goes smoothly. Bree said he was a bit of a monster yesterday. Hard to believe, right?

>197 richardderus: Adding that one to the BlackHole, Richard. Thanks for the recommention!

>202 richardderus: I have read and enjoy Zevin's work in the past, so that one goes into the BlackHole too.

((Hugs)) and **smooches**

Have a thunderous Thursday!

Wordle 397 4/6

🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨
🟩⬜🟨🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
I flurbled guess #3 or I'd've gotten it then. AEONS, MIRTH, ACIDY, APHID

>227 alcottacre: Hi Stasia and thanks for the thunderation...not a cloud in my sky, though. Just sticky and hot. Ick!

I hope you'll enjoy the reads!

>226 msf59: He's teething, Mark, of course he has monster days. It's always a fun thing to have bine pain!

You'll enjoy yourself, you know you will. Being old means enjoying things in a more complex way than before, after all, not simply losing enjoyment. That's usually depression.

>225 karenmarie: Different Rara Avis, Horrible. I still remember how much I loved Doña Soraida!

I'm still busy clearing out things I didn't love but didn't hate, and the very few I disliked. This hasn't been a bad year for disliking books, thank goodness.

>224 FAMeulstee: Hi Anita! Thank you for the Thursday wishes. I'm pretty sure that the dentist will cause enough anxiety to make reviewing impossible.

>223 Familyhistorian: First things first, Meg. Can't ignore the stretches before one exercises and expect good results, after all.

Afternoon, Mr. Derus. Thanks for stopping by my place to check up on me. I can report today that I am feeling much better. Got a lot of stuff to do, but I think just now that I feel ready to take on a chore or two. I don't want to be forced back a step by some unforeseen evil.

You certainly have tapped out an epic volume of reviews. Yaahhh!

>230 weird_O: Morning, Bill. I'm pleased you're recovering as well as possible...it's a mystery, this illness, and that we have a vaccine at all is astonishing to me. Now we do the hard part: Live with it.

More reviews tomorrow, and some more over the weekend. I've been struck with logorrhea. *shrug* Makes up for 2015, when I wrote ZERO reviews.

>229 richardderus: Survived the visit to the dentist, Richard dear, she only had to remove a bit of tartar.
The planned x-rays showed no problems at all :-)
And taking a bit of diazepam kept me tranquil, so Frank had to do the driving.

Wordle 398 4/6

⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨
⬜⬜🟨🟨⬜
🟩🟩⬜🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Huh! AEONS, MIRTH, TRUST, TRYST

138 Nazi Wives: The Women at the Top of Hitler's Germany by James Wyllie

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, Hess, Bormann—names synonymous with power and influence in the Third Reich. Perhaps less familiar are Carin, Emmy, Magda, Margarete, Lina, Ilse and Gerda...

These are the women behind these infamous men—complex individuals with distinctive personalities who, as they fell under Hitler's spell, were drawn deeper and deeper into a perverse version of reality.

In Nazi Wives James Wyllie skilfully interweaves their stories, exploring their roles in detail for the first time against a backdrop of the rise and fall of Nazism and in the context of the aftermath, notable for the resolute lack of contrition from those wives who survived.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review:

When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail,
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

–Rudyard Kipling, "The Female of the Species"

We're not supposed to notice things like this in the time of "Believe Women"...yes, of course, if they're telling the truth, but always, always LISTEN to women with open minds...but the women in this book were not exemplars of twenty-first century womanhood's new (!) course. They were awful, racist, anti-semitic, and deeply spoiled people, as one would expect.

Ilse, Carin, Emmy, Gerda, Eva, Margaret, Lina, and Magda married men who ran the worst, most heinous government of the twentieth century. They knew, either from direct evidence or from the unavoidable lessons of sheer propinquity, the kind of men they were married to, and they acquiesced at the minimum and ably assisted in other cases (thinking of Magda Goebbels most especially) in forming and maintaining the ethos of the Reich.

Not one of the women who survived WWII ever expressed regret or remorse for her, or her husband's, actions. These women were prototypical, stereotypical Mean Girls. They reveled in their luxurious lifestyle, they shut down whatever empathy they possessed when confronted with anything that challenged their world, and most especially in the case of Magda Goebbels (who went so far as to murder her children when defeat was inevitable) showed no obvious signs of possessing a conscience.

That made the read kind of revolting on some levels and deeply upsetting on others. I wasn't aware of the facts presented by Author Wyllie. In many ways I wish I still wasn't! But the truth is, the authorial choice to refer to the men by their surnames and the women only by their first names made teasing apart which horrible woman was attached to what vile man more complicated than it needed to be. This is also a function of the organizational principle used, that of dealing with the entire pack of wolves as a whole. I found myself flipping around, looking to connect (eg, Gerda Bormann's, the most often) strands. Gerda was far and away the woman I found least interesting, coming across to me as a Stepford wife without much to recommend her in either positive or negative ways.

All that said, the organizational longueurs are the source of the rating but the informational content earns the author and the book my recommendation. I'm glad someone has, at long last, foregrounded the role that women played in the Third Reich, at the highest levels, in setting, supporting, and even exemplifying the worst of an awful regime.

>232 FAMeulstee: Hiya Anita! I'm delighted you're tooth-problem-less. And, well, what it takes is what it takes to get your trip not to be a disaster.

139 The Vanishing Sky by L. Annette Binder

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: For readers of Warlight and The Invisible Bridge, an intimate, harrowing story about a family of German citizens during World War II.

In 1945, as the war in Germany nears its violent end, the Huber family is not yet free of its dangers or its insidious demands. Etta, a mother from a small, rural town, has two sons serving their home country: her elder, Max, on the Eastern front, and her younger, Georg, at a school for Hitler Youth. When Max returns from the front, Etta quickly realizes that something is not right-he is thin, almost ghostly, and behaving very strangely. Etta strives to protect him from the Nazi rule, even as her husband, Josef, becomes more nationalistic and impervious to Max's condition. Meanwhile, miles away, her younger son Georg has taken his fate into his own hands, deserting his young class of battle-bound soldiers to set off on a long and perilous journey home.

The Vanishing Sky is a World War II novel as seen through a German lens, a story of the irreparable damage of war on the home front, and one family's participation-involuntary, unseen, or direct-in a dangerous regime. Drawing inspiration from her own father's time in the Hitler Youth, L. Annette Binder has crafted a spellbinding novel about the daring choices we make for country and for family.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

“You’ve got to do the right thing. You’ve got to use your mind,” she said. “That’s what the real God wants. People should do the right thing but they never do.”

–and–

They should have hung their heads, but people didn’t feel shame anymore. They lied and after a while they believed the lies they told, and this is how it went.

–and–

“He’s not coming back,” Ushi pushed her cup aside. “People leave and they don’t come back. My Jens is gone and my Jürgen, too.” Her voice quavered. “They’ve wrecked the world, these men, and still they’re not done. They’d take the sky if they could. They’d take the air we breathe, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.”

The Stockholm Syndrome of an entire nation, an entire class of people, is the shocking subject of this novel based on the facts as the author knows them surrounding her own family's WWII experience.

Etta Huber is frantic, as what wife of a dementia-suffering husband (Josef) trying to get into the war wouldn't be; as what mother of a returned soldier (Max) suffering from what we would call PTSD wouldn't be; as what loving, protective mother of a young teenager (Georg) caught up in a vision of glamour obfuscating the war's reality wouldn't be. The situation with Max is, of course, the one she's got the most emotional room for. No sane recruiter would take her retired-schoolteacher husband whose grasp of reality is deficient to wield a weapon, surely? Max, the bright and shining boy who left, is gone forever and here in his place is...a burden, frankly. In a time when the food-growing region the Hubers live in is getting less and less well-fed, another mouth isn't a joy...then Georg is sent to the Eastern front, which destroyed his brother Max, to dig defenses in what everyone knows is a vain effort to stop Allied tanks attacking German troops.

Etta isn't coping well with any of this. What she doesn't know is that she's got a stronger boy in Georg than she thought. He's been unable to believe the nonsense he's been fed in the Hitler Youth. He's fallen in love with one of the other boys, which (since this is simply unthinkable and impossible for Hitler Youths) has formed a strong resistant core in him. He ends up deserting before the boys get to the front, and walks home. Through war-torn Germany. On his own.

Max's horrors are always with him, and his behaviors worry his Mutti. Of course, he was always the odd kid:

Even when he was little Max had a way of fixing his eyes on her and asking questions that had no easy answers or no answers at all. "Mutti?" he'd asked her once when he was only six, "where do birds go to die? I see birds every day and never a dead one. Where do they go then?" and Etta could only shake her head at her boy, who thought of such things.

"They go someplace nice," she told him, "where it's quiet and the cats won't find them and the wolves and foxes neither. That's why we don't see them. They go to bird heaven." He looked at her a long while and then he nodded, satisfied with her response. It made sense that birds could find their way to heaven. They flew beneath it every day. It would only take a breeze to bear them up and through the gates, only a breeze and they were gone.

Much like Max himself disappears, vanishes from his loving mother's ability to care for him...forever. It's one of many heartbreaks in Etta's world.

What a world it was. She, and her other bog-standard German neighbors, have noticed there are people disappearing. Most of them simply note this fact without a lot of interest, but note it they do. The rare German whose instinct is to help in whatever small way she can the disappearing ones, is fighting a losing battle as we-the-readers know. But the fact is no one, inside or outside Germany, knew what was going on in the camps where the disappeared went. It wasn't good...but it was factually unknown until after the war. This novel is set *during* the war, and the author presents the unease of the people with the ever-increasing evidence of their leadership's lies and obfuscations.

In the end, what earned this book a mere shade over three stars was its overly slow pace. Many things were dwelt on that could've been done away with or been less of a focus. The voices of the Germans are, on the other hand, exactly how the German folk I knew in my life sounded: Formal, deliberate, and slightly obscured behind any words they did say. This doesn't mean it was always fun to read their ponderous utterances. But it was the purpose of the author to tell a family story. I expected it to have more of that feel to it. Instead it became a deeply personal historical account of the agonies of your way of life's death.

Good gravy, you've been busy! 😀

>234 richardderus: That's a perspective I'm not familiar with, though I had gathered that Magda Goebbels was a piece of work. I'll have to pick it up.

>238 swynn: She was a calculating, amoral person. Her actions, in the context of what was inevitably going to happen to herself and her kids, were logical if cold. And the others were, well, Mean Girls one and all. It's actually quite interesting.

>237 drneutron: I got some pep in my step from somewhere! I feel very productive, for sure. ("Like a bad cough," I can hear my mother saying....)

Just waving RD. I've been grazing but not commenting for a bit.

>240 Caroline_McElwee: Hi Caro!

>234 richardderus: Well, you got me with this one. Especially inasmuch as we here in the States have our own set of Mean Girls, some of whom aren't even married to the top males but are top all on their own. If you know who I mean.

I got today's in 3, due to my first two words and the fact there aren't a lot of words that have y as the only vowel.

Have a lovely Friday and try to keep cool, my friend, though I imagine it's not quite as unbearably (relatively speaking) hot down there on the boardwalk as it is up here in the hills.

Burgoine #50

A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings by Helen Jukes

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Entering her thirties, Helen Jukes feels trapped in an urban grind of office politics and temporary addresses – disconnected, stressed. Struggling to settle into her latest job and home in Oxford, she realises she needs to effect a change if she’s to create a meaningful life for herself, one that can accommodate comfort and labour and love. Then friends give her the gift of a colony of honeybees – according to folklore, bees freely given bring luck—and Helen embarks on her first full year of beekeeping. But what does it mean to ‘keep’ wild creatures? In learning about the bees, what can she learn of herself? And can travelling inside the hive free her outside it?

As Helen grapples with her role in the delicate, awe-inspiring ecosystem of the hive, the very act of keeping seems to open up new perspectives, deepen friendships old and new, and make her world come alive. A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings is at once a fascinating exploration of the honeybee and the hive, the practices of honey-gathering and the history of our observation of bees; and a beautifully wrought meditation on responsibility and care, on vulnerability and trust, on forging bonds and breaking new ground.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: After getting a new, longed-for position, Author Jukes finds that wanting and having are not the same sensation.

I sometimes think that life must be a bit like tessellation for some people. You take one shape and fit it to the next and they sit comfortably together – you don’t mind a bit of repetition because it’s what makes the pattern form. Life is not like tessellation for me. Sometimes the shapes don’t fit, or I don’t fit into them, or I’m looking at the patterns but they don’t feel real or right to me.

It's a key realization, and it leads to her keeping a beehive as a means to create value and meaning in her world.

A lot of people have compared the book to H is for Hawk, which read I very much did not like. It felt deeply hypocritical to me to read of someone's love for a wild thing as they're describing how they un-wilded it. Author Jukes does not un-wild her bees, as that's been done millennia ago. And her possession of a colony evokes some very good meditative thinking in her:

Here I am pondering impermanence, having just tasked myself with the responsibility of keeping something—with sustaining it. A colony is not a book or an archivable object and you can’t hold it in a glass cabinet or on a shelf. It is live and shifting and if this one doesn’t take to our little rectangular space it’ll be put of here faster than you can say swarm.

What makes the book less than a four-star, upper-heap read is that it's too long for how short it is. Cut some chapters, bring the philosophizing to some conclusions earlier for example and don't repeat the same ruminations, and there'd be another star up there. As it stands I can't agree with myself to overlook this to grow it over three-and-a-half smiling stars.

>242 Storeetllr: Hiya Mary! You got a good break on Wordle for sure.

We're not anywhere near as bad as y'all, for sure, but it's still 90°. I'm huddled in front of the A/C!

"Enjoy" the read, me lurve.

Burgoine #51

Any Other World Will Do by Alex Lubertozzi

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: In a chance encounter on the overnight train from Paris to Barcelona, Vikram Bhat stumbles across a promising new recruit.

Miles Townsend, an 18-year-old kid running away from a past he’d just as soon forget, is drawn to the older Indian man, dazzled by Barcelona, and smitten with the Hotel Kashmir’s bartender, Anna de Wit, a Surinamese grad student with a genius for languages and Vikram’s first recruit.

Miles and Anna have no idea they’re being recruited. They have no idea that Vikram is neither an Indian nor a man, or that he’s a few thousand light-years from home. He has a lot of secrets, it turns out. But he means well. When a series of bad decisions reveals the fact that Vikram isn’t the only one light-years from home—and this other one does not mean well—Miles and Anna become unwitting ambassadors to Vikram’s world, a place where the locals haven’t got their shit together any better than the people of Earth.

A unique coming-of-age story, Any Other World Will Do is inventive, irreverent science fiction, a wry commentary on the primal urge to flee our troubles and the romantic way we remember the journey.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The problem with writing SF when you don't read it is that you rehash clichés that just won't fly anymore. Not to mention that the twenty-first century climate is such that having a literal alien masquerading as a South Asian and getting away with it is...troubling.

The other planet, the one that isn't Earth, to which the two kids are persuaded to travel, is a stock reimagining of Earth-plus-some-stuff. This is not in and of itself a bad thing. After all, is Earthlings are to survive on it, and if the Tonshu natives are going to travel here and survive, they need to be similar. But the 2020s don't really support serious (message-driven, not purely brain candy) SF with mysterious instantaneous transportation between planets.

The writing isn't awful. It isn't good, either. It's unfortunate that reviews of glowing, gasping praise for it lead one to expect a better-than-average reading experience that is not available. That said, I finished it, so clearly it wasn't dreadful. For the Kindle price, not-dreadful isn't all that bad a bargain.

>233 richardderus: I had a very similar path today to also get it in four.

>245 richardderus: Meh, I'll pass on this one. I've gotten pickier about writing style over the years so not awful but not good doesn't really appeal.

>233 richardderus: I got today's in 3. The vowels did it.

I haven't done the puzzle for today, but I got the last two in 4. >247 Familyhistorian: I was about to guess the word it ended up being on the third try, but I thought of a word with "u" as the vowel--the only one I hadn't used. I tried it first, but I knew what to put there on the fourth try--especially when the word I tried gave me an additional letter that was in the real word. I knew where to make it fit in the real word.

Happy Saturday, Richard. It is going to be a HOT one here today, so other than going on a library run, I am staying at home with a few chores and lots of book time. Have a good weekend, my friend.

Good Morning, Richard! You are turning into a thinking, feeling, reading machine. Wow!
>234 richardderus:, >236 richardderus: Both of these are BBs, but I just can't read WWII right now. I've been giving Remote Sympathy a half-hearted go, and it's good enough for me to finish. It just gives me a hard time right now.

Worlde in four again. I like this territory a LOT better than five, six, or skunk!

Stay cool this weekend and enjoy your books!

Wordle 399 3/6

⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
I stared and I stared and I stared. AEONS, MIRTH, MIDGE

>250 LizzieD: Good morning, Peggy! I only quibble with "turning" in that sentence...I think the turning was done a long time ago.

I'm indoors. It's not endurable for me out there! I know enough about how I respond to heat to know that I shouldn't plan to go outside.

Sometimes a book's one you want to read...but not today...for all sorts of reasons. They'll still be around when you're ready to read them. If you decide you aren't ready ever, no harm no foul. *smooch*

>249 msf59: Hey there Birddude! I hope you're disfruting the Tree of Story happily and coolly as it swelters.

>248 thornton37814: Hi Lori, that word you tried? I am not likely ever to use it, as it's in short supply over here.

>247 Familyhistorian: The vowels are so important to identify, Meg. I can't figure much out if I don't get a fix on them, even moreso their position. My starting words use four of five and that fifth one emerges if none of the other four get used, so I don't worry my pretty little head about it.

>246 bell7: Heh! I concur, Mary: if someone tells me "oh, the story's fine but the writing..." I skip gaily past the tome in question. I've read every story there is. You best be tellin' it good to get my positive attention!

'Morning, RDear.

I'm doing three of my favorite things - hanging out with Jenna, drinking coffee, and playing on LT.

Lunch out in a while, then the dinner/birthday/anniversary party.

*smooch*

>254 karenmarie: Hi Horrible, happy Saturday to all y'all.

*smooch*

>252 richardderus: LOL

>251 richardderus: that was a good win! The TRYST wordle was a winner for me too, I was a little bit proud to get that :)

>257 LovingLit: Yeah, that one was really a tough call...usin' up all the vowels already, New York Times?

>256 thornton37814:

It was a good wordle day for me as well!

>259 figsfromthistle: I didn't get this one easily, today.

Wordle 400 5/6

⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
⬜🟨🟨⬜🟨
⬜🟩🟨🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

140 The Hidden Keys (Quincunx #4) by André Alexis

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Parkdale’s Green Dolphin is a bar of ill repute, and it is there that Tancred Palmieri, a thief with elegant and erudite tastes, meets Willow Azarian, an aging heroin addict. She reveals to Tancred that her very wealthy father has recently passed away, leaving each of his five children a mysterious object that provides one clue to the whereabouts of a large inheritance. Willow enlists Tancred to steal these objects from her siblings and help her solve the puzzle.

A Japanese screen, a painting that plays music, a bottle of aquavit, a framed poem and a model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater: Tancred is lured in to this beguiling quest, and even though Willow dies before the puzzle is solved, he presses on.

As he tracks down the treasure, he must enlist the help of Alexander von Würfel, conceptual artist and taxidermist to the wealthy, and fend off Willow’s heroin dealers, a young albino named ‘Nigger’ Colby and his sidekick, Sigismund ‘Freud’ Luxemburg, a clubfooted psychopath, both of whom are eager to get their hands on this supposed pot of gold. And he must mislead Detective Daniel Mandelshtam, his most adored friend.

Inspired by a reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, The Hidden Keys questions what it means to be honourable, what it means to be faithful and what it means to sin.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm not sure how to tell you about this book. Let me tell you about honorable-thief Tancred:

Tancred was a tall and physically imposing black man, but he was also approachable. He could not sit anywhere for long without someone starting a conversation. This was, his friends liked to say, because his blue eyes were startling and his voice deep and avuncular. So, when he wanted to be alone without necessarily being alone, Tancred answered in French—his maternal tongue—when spoken to by strangers. Few who came into the Dolphin knew the language.

This, I believe, explains Author Alexis's project nicely. He makes a mythic figure, of prodigious endowments of soul and talent, and sets him down at a nexus of Toronto's many worlds. He then seems to stand back and let 'er rip. It feels to me as though Author Alexis more or less "took dictation" when writing this story, and its immediate predecessor Fifteen Dogs (which I read almost a decade ago). The less-than-propulsive pace and the slightly meandering sense of place are, in my observation, best explained by this reality of the creative process. A more plot-driven project, one that was constructed not discovered, wouldn't keep this:

The city had been built by people from innumerable elsewheres. It was a chaos of cultures ordered only by its long streets. It belonged to no one and never would, or maybe it was a million cities in one, unique to each of its inhabitants, belonging to whoever walked its streets.

But, in this structure of discovery, Tancred's observation goes a long way towards making it plain that we are on a quest that surpasses its material goals. Part of the manifestation of this is the quite long time frame of the story...there is time, between Tancred meeting the woman on whose behalf he goes on this quest for and the time he actually begins the quest, for him to suffer an acutely painful personal tragedy...and its, politely said, abrupt ending.

It's a sad, death-haunted quest. It's a life-affirming choice for Tancred to take it on. It's amazing how much fun it is to watch a character decide to give up a past of anti-social thievery and remain a thief, only pro-social now. It's a book with a lot of good aperçus, and a few moments where one wonders what the heck Author Alexis was thinking. Tancred isn't a traditional series-mystery sleuth. The two books featuring him I've read aren't really properly series mysteries. They're no less delightful for that. The puzzle set by, and for, Tancred's client is resolved neatly at the end. Permaybehaps a bit too neatly...the source of the missing star.

But the reason it's got four of 'em is down to moments like this:

“I believe God is an impediment to good. All those people acting in his name don’t bother to think their actions through. They’re incapable of good...No, that’s not right...There are any number of them who accidentally do good. ... What I mean is it’s more difficult to do good with God in the equation.”

Heady stuff, philosophically in my wheelhouse, and not the only example I could've chosen. Spoiled for choice gets a book a good rating.

141 Write to Die by Charles Rosenberg

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Hollywood’s latest blockbuster is all set to premiere—until a faded superstar claims the script was stolen from her. To defend the studio, in steps the Harold Firm, one of Los Angeles’s top entertainment litigation firms and as much a part of the glamorous scene as the studios themselves. As a newly minted partner, it’s Rory Calburton’s case, and his career, to win or lose.

But the seemingly tame civil trial turns lethal when Rory stumbles upon the strangled body of his client’s general counsel. And the ties that bind in Hollywood constrict even tighter when the founder of the Harold Firm is implicated in the murder. Rory is certain the plagiarism and murder cases are somehow connected, and with the help of new associate Sarah Gold—who’s just finished clerking for the chief justice—he’s determined to get answers. Will finding out who really wrote the script lead them to the mastermind of the real-life murder?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Sarah and Rory, a pair of overprivileged and overeducated entertainment lawyers, deny their hawt, sweet luuuv until they can't anymore. And then they solve a crime committed against people I could not work up enough spit to lob into their faces, still less piss on if they were on fire.

It makes it really hard to review a book when that's one's response.

The prose is prosaic, the story's not relatable because one doesn't relate to such dislikable souls. And there I was, flipping the Kindlepages...I needed to know why, not who, in this story. It was a satisfying why, so I felt my time was well-enough spent that I'm not after getting up a pitchfork parade to get Author Rosenberg. I was a lot less forgiving about The Trial and Execution of the Traitor George Washington, as you'll recall; but that was mostly pique at raised expectations being dashed. The fact is that Author Rosenberg's prose doesn't scintillate but it also doesn't obfuscate.

Easily the most effective use of his prose was the ruminations that Rory entertains as he's going through his legal maneuverings in the various trials he's involved in. Time in Rory's head is among my best memories of the read because he really thinks there in front of us. I am not a lawyer and am fascinated by the way that legal argument affects one's thought processes. It's a shoo-in, therefore, that the story will succeed for me on that level.

Sarah's "Impulse-control disorder" is where the wheels really come off for me. This person has a disorder that, in someone who was a Supreme Court Justice's clerk, would be *disastrous* and a disqualification from ever being considered for such a position. And how many Supreme Court Justices would hire such a person knowingly, as we're told Sarah was? Also, a private-investigator's license might also be unobtainable in California due to this diagnosis. If it isn't, I'm very worried.

So the read's not a hit, not a whiff, just a pleasant-enough way to spend a few wastable hours.

Hiya, RDear, and happy Sunday to you.

I got Wordle in 4, so am proud. It could have been a skunk, though, without the luck to guess the word.

Jenna and I will have brekkie in a bit, hang out for a bit, check out, have a bit of lunch since brekkie food here at the hotel is ... not wonderful... then head on home.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

>263 karenmarie: Hiya Horrible, happy Sunday, travel safe, and YAY for a good time with your old friends!

>261 richardderus: You got me—I’m going to give The Hidden Keys a look-see. Thanks!

Karen O

>265 klobrien2: ::nail-buff::

I expect it will appeal to you, Karen O. It's got the kind of intricate prose I see you resonate to. If you can find it in a library, I'd say get Fifteen Dogs as well.

Wordle 400 4/6

🟩⬜🟨⬜⬜
⬜🟨⬜🟨⬜
🟩🟨🟨⬜🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Wow, you've been a reviewing MACHINE! *smooch*

>267 ronincats: Hi Roni! We're all motivated by different things. Rob was poking through my Kindle library and asked why I hadn't reviewed a book we'd talked about. I said I didn't like it enough to spend that much time on it.

A long silence later, he said, "...but we talked about it for a half-hour, what do you mean you didn't like it that much?"

*bang* went my denial bubble, and I've cranked up the reviewing machine.

Bloody kid.

>266 richardderus: Found The Hidden Keys at my local library; had to go across the river--literally--to find Fifteen Dogs at a Minneapolis lib. Seems like I'll have a longish wait for both of them, but they'll get here eventually...

Thanks again!

Karen O

>269 klobrien2: Yay for an André Alexis binge to come!

>261 richardderus: I am glad you liked that one. I enjoy André's writing. i will add this one to my list.

Happy Sunday!

>271 figsfromthistle: Sunday orisons, Anita!

‘Morning, RDear. A very early happy Monday to you.

>268 richardderus: Sweet kid, who pays attention.

edited to add: No 30 is up.

*smooch*

>234 richardderus: Adding that one to the BlackHole. Thanks for the review and recommendation, Richard.

>261 richardderus: That one too!

Have a marvelous Monday, RD! ((Hugs)) and **smooches**

>274 alcottacre: I hope you'll try Fifteen Dogs as well as >261 richardderus:, Stasia, they really work well as a pair. I haven't read the first two of the five Tancred books and haven't felt either a lack or a call, so I'm thinking they're largely independent except for the main character.

Nazi Wives was notable, perhaps most notable, for being the first book I've read about the women of the Nazi elite. If others exist, I'm not familiar with them. And isn't it telling that a man wrote it.

Monday *smooch*

>273 karenmarie: He does indeed listen. It's really quite intoxicating! Happy Monday, Horrible. I'll pass by to visit shortly.

142 Flying Solo: A Novel by Linda Holmes

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A woman returns to her small Maine hometown, uncovering family secrets that take her on a journey of self-discovery and new love, in this warm and charming novel from the New York Times best-selling author of Evvie Drake Starts Over.

Smarting from her recently cancelled wedding and about to turn 40, Laurie Sassalyn returns to her Maine hometown of Calcasset to handle the estate of her great-aunt Dot, a spirited adventurer who lived to be 90. Along with boxes of Polaroids and pottery, a mysterious wooden duck shows up at the bottom of a cedar chest. Laurie’s curiosity is piqued, especially after she finds a love letter to the never-married Dot that ends with the line, “And anyway, if you’re ever desperate, there are always ducks, darling.”

Laurie is told that the duck has no financial value. But after it disappears under suspicious circumstances, she feels compelled to figure out why anyone would steal a wooden duck — and why Dot kept it hidden away in the first place. Suddenly Laurie finds herself swept up in a righteous caper that has her negotiating with antiques dealers and con artists, going on after-hours dates at the local library, and reconnecting with her oldest friend and first love. Desperate to uncover her great-aunt’s secrets, Laurie must reckon with her past, her future, and ultimately embrace her own vision of flying solo.

I CHECKED THIS OUT FROM THE LIBRARY. THANK GOODNESS THEY EXIST. BUYING EVERY BOOK I WANT TO READ WOULD BE RUINOUS!

My Review: There's something really wonderful about reading stories that center your own concerns. I'm older than most of these characters, younger than a few, but they're not just starting out, figuring out Life, for the first time. They're part of it, settled into it, and now...there needs to be More.

Laurie and Nick dated eons ago, fell out of touch, and now that Laurie's back in their hometown to settle up her Aunt Dot's estate, she's back in touch with Nick because...well, because she wants to be. Because he wants to be, too. They're grownups with crack-ups in their pasts. They're adult children of people they love and care for. They're professionals and they're nice people.

And they're still...again...relearning how to be...in love. With each other, with their wildly separate lives and their mutually exclusive homes. They are, in short, deeply relatable to me. This book came to me as a not-quite recommendation from a LibraryThing friend who read it and resonated to its companionate themes. I'm resonating to the, well, the desire to make a relationship work that has a lot of strange contours to it and that precludes cohabitation for the foreseeable future. But is still a full, fun, vibrant, living relationship. It's not that common to see this kind of thing in fiction, though I'm aware that it exists in reality.

What happens in the course of Nick and Laurie's rediscovery of each other is a story that weaves together the best of humanity...generous, kind, unselfish souls sharing gladly all that they're asked for, looking for ways to give even more...and the worst, the dishonest and selfish impulse to lie and cheat and steal. In the course of that element of the story being resolved, in a believable way, these two main charatcers go on the real voyage of discovery inside themselves and in relation to the many, many people in their orbit.

I found a lot to enjoy in this read. I laughed out loud at Author Holmes' trademark funny lines:

“...we were pretty much out of cabinet space between the actual dishes and the food dehydrator he had bought himself and then used to make jerky a total of two—as in ‘one, two’—times.”

“How was the jerky?”

“Wretched. It tasted like wet cigarettes. We could have used it to repel raccoons.”

–and–

“...But yes, she started doing senior synchronized swimming at the Sarasota Y recently. She’s going to be in a recital. The theme is Hooray for Hollywood.”

The sound Dot made was closer to a hoot than a laugh. “Good for her. Whatever it takes to get your legs over your head.”

Fun, funny stuff that totally makes sense to someone who lives in an assisted living facility, and regularly talks about it to someone who doesn't. Author Holmes never stints on the real-life elements of her stories, so far at least, and we should all pray to the Muses she never tries to.

The real-life stuff's not *all* fun, of course, and there's a lot of relatable material in that as well:

“This is just a gruesome job. I feel so bad, like a grave robber.”

{The reseller} nodded. “You are far from a grave robber. Remember, she had these things for as long as she needed them, and they probably brought her a lot of happiness. But they most likely won’t bring you any, so there’s not a lot to gain from your coming down hard on yourself because you want to let stuff go.”

–and–

“Nah. Believe me, you don’t want to get married if the marriage you’re going to have is not the same marriage as the one you’d like to have.”

It's not deathless prose that stuns with its lapidary gleam and brilliance; it's the way your smarter-than-you friend with the sense of humor talks sense into you when you're falling off of/under/for something. It's comfortable, comforting, and relatable in the best ways.

It's a book I'm glad I read by an author I'm glad is getting contracts. That's more than enough for me right this minute. It felt like a slightly selfish, wicked little gift I was giving myself, reading this pleasant tale about people like me with concerns I could relate to. Giving it a few hours made a whole bunch more of them more pleasant, and that's worth four starts and a thank you every day.

>276 richardderus: - Oh, I'm so pleased you found it worth the eye blinks :)

>277 katiekrug: It was a good read, and resonated with me quite strongly, so I'm counting it a resounding success! *smooch* for the good lead.

*preens*

>276 richardderus: THANK GOODNESS THEY EXIST. BUYING EVERY BOOK I WANT TO READ WOULD BE RUINOUS!

Ain't that the truth! I remember a rather memorable exchange with someone where they told me that they could see libraries being great for people with little money... and I thought, well, sure but... isn't it a great investment regardless? Imagine what it would cost if I bought every book I wanted to read *new*. When I think about the percentage of my property taxes that goes to support my library, my ROI is enormous.

Happy day to you, and hope the heat wave has broken!

>280 bell7: I honestly can't think of a better RoI in any tax I've ever paid. I'm going to keep sounding that trumpet until I get some sense others are listening!

*smooch*

Wordle 402 4/6

⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩
🟨🟩🟨🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Why, oh why, do I persist in making the "Wordling While Undercaffeinated" error. AEONS, MIRTH, NICHE, CINCH

Good Morning Richard! Good to see your undercaffeinated mind survived the Wordle!

'Morning, RDear. Happy Tuesday to you.

>282 richardderus: Four's not bad. It's what I got today, too.

In addition to books, what I love about our Library are the other resources - free computers available whenever the Library's open (20-25, I think), 3 genealogy computers with Ancestry, summer programs for children (we're having some live and some video this summer), and etc.

For those of you who use and love Libraries, find out of they have a Friends of the Library organization to augment what the county/state spend and either throw a little money their way or see how you can volunteer.

*smooch*

>284 karenmarie: I'm just shocked at myself for moving a letter from its correct place to an incorrect one! That was dimwitted of me.

>283 The_Hibernator: Hi Rachel! Happy to see you out and about. I'm pleased my undercaffeination didn't lead to even sillier slip-ups.

>284 karenmarie: - I have a button that says "I'm Library People". Yep :-)

Hi Richard!

>282 richardderus: Pfft. I had a vente latte and couldn't manage to get today's Wordle in less than 6. (I got all but the first letter and then had to go through the dreaded guessing game. By the time I got it (in 6), I was really annoyed. adIeu, story fIlCH, pINCH, wINCH, then the right word. Ugh.

ETA I LOVE the library!

I'm on first name terms with the library volunteers. I don't know where I'd be without a library; as a child, they were my key out of there. As an adult, I enthuse about them at every opportunity. And use mine very regularly.

>288 Storeetllr: Less said about today's the better. I lucked out.

>243 richardderus: I love the title, and the contents sound intriguing.

>261 richardderus: And that sounds like a charmingly odd series.

Into the Swamp with both of 'em!

>290 swynn: Yay! I've finally book-bulleted Steve! He's great at bobbing and weaving, so I feel accomplished now.

>289 Helenliz: I am unsurprised, Helen. You're far too sensible not to.

>288 Storeetllr: As well you should! *smooch*

>287 jessibud2: Hi Shelley!

The new thread's up, y'all.
https://www.librarything.com/topic/343132