Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

A friend sent me a list of authors and asked me if I knew them since he had heard they were good. I did not, and I was reminded that as a reader, it is sometimes discouraging to learn how many worthwhile books and writers there are. I have been finding it true with mysteries. A few years ago, the Center for Fiction moved into a new building in my neighborhood. It used to be the Mercantile Library located in midtown Manhattan. It’s a subscription library that also supports writers by awarding fellowships and awards. I took out a membership not because I couldn’t find enough to read but to support culture in my neighborhood. Among other things, the CFF is known for its collection of mysteries which they house separately in a rather spooky basement with motion-detector lights that seem to take a bit too long to come on. Before I go, I do internet searches for things like “best mysteries” or “best mysteries of the 1950s”. The CFF won’t have all of them, but they always have some. Whenever I pluck one off the dungeon shelves, I see hundreds of other series I have never heard of. Recently I adopted the practice of taking the classic I was looking for and then taking something from an unknown-to-me mystery author. Often the unknowns have been quite good. E.g, I had never heard of Christobel Kent, but her A Murder in Tuscany held my attention. I realize, however, that even though a book might be unknown to me, that does not mean that it is unknown to others. I had some time to kill waiting for the car to be serviced and went into a coffee shop. The sweet young twenty-something who got me my latte saw that I was carrying Kent’s book and said, “That is excellent.” I consider that yet another startling New York moment. Perhaps it is just Gothamist chauvinism, but I doubt that it would have happened in most other places.

Expectations for home life vary wildly among us. My cardiologist sold the family home a while ago but has now bought a smaller home in the same community. He is an avid golfer, but he said that he was no longer a member of a country club. He said that he had been a member while his kids grew up, and he was lucky. The club was only a few blocks from his home and, therefore, he did not have to install a swimming pool.

Have you ever noticed that when the carton has a screw top, the milk costs a lot more?

I watched Dune: Part One on Netflix so that I might be up to speed if I saw the recent Dune release at my local theater. I enjoyed Part One and I found that I would like to dress like the movie’s characters. I was amused that even though these people of the future have tools and weapons beyond our ken, they still have hand-to-hand combat with knives and swords. As I watched the movie with its royal-type succession issues, seers, overlords, and evildoers, I was reminded again of how much humanity desires myths. However, even though I watched the movie closely, I am not sure that it gave me a leg up on the second part since I had little idea of what was going on.

Notable factoids: Robert Putnam with Shaylan Romney Garrett write in The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (2020) that the colonial era was not as religiously observant as American myths would have it. At the time of the Revolution only twenty percent of the population were members of a religious body, and only thirty-four percent were by 1850. However, the 1940s through the 1960s was a time of exceptional religious observance. The authors note that as late as the mid-1960s, religiously observant Americans, both black and white, were more likely to be Democrats than Republicans.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

I frequent a library that has moved into a new building in my neighborhood. It is in fact one of the oldest lending libraries in New York City. Although it has modern novels (the library is now called The Center for Fiction and does not house non-fiction), I become intrigued by older books when I browse the open stacks. Often there will be a series by an author whom I have never heard of, and I wonder whether I should have. Today while looking for a classic mystery, The Detective by Roderick Thorp, I saw eight or ten shelved books that immediately struck me as from another era. The author listed on their spines, or in this case I perhaps should say authoress, was Mrs. Belloc Lowndes. I never heard of her. My three minutes of internet research after I got home revealed that her younger brother was Hilaire Belloc, whose name I had seen before but is another person I have never read. She was born in London in 1868 and died in 1947. During those 79 years, she published more than forty novels and also biographies, memoirs, and plays. Most of the novels were mysteries, which, according to one source, are “well-plotted.” Several of her books were made into movies including her most popular book, published in 1912, The Lodger, based on Jack the Ripper. That book was also made into an opera after she died. Has anyone read a book by this author? Should I? If I go back to the library to take out one of the three dozen of her books it has, I will have to remember the library’s shelving system. Belloc was not the first name of the author. She wrote as Mrs. Marie Belloc Lowndes. Doesn’t that mean that the book should be shelved in the B’s?  I did happen on a book by Mario Vargas Llosa, and it was in the V’s. But Belloc Lowndes’s books were placed in the L’s.

Ron DeSantis says he wants the United States to be like Florida. He doesn’t mention that Florida’s homicide rate is higher than New York City’s.

The Wisconsin woman with a second home in Yucatan volunteered at a Mexican library, which functioned as a daycare center after the grade school finished its day. Suzette, laden with pictures of Whitefish Bay in January, was off to explain snow to the kids. I wondered how that could be done with those who had never experienced any temperature below forty-seven degrees.

Before packing for a trip, I try on pants and shorts I plan to bring. I have learned that the closet where I store them often shrinks them. However, on my last trip I did not try on my swimming trunks before leaving. I found that the back of the dresser where they had been pushed had sprung them out.

The spouse, to my amazement, brought shoes she had not broken in on our recent trip. Soon we were all looking without success for corn pads for her sore toes. The spouse decided there were none in Yucatan because the locals all wore flip flops, which she cannot wear.

A good thing about alligators: Sometimes, but not often enough, they eat little, yapping dogs.

Have you ever wondered how much dogs contribute to pollution, food shortages, and global warming? They do, of course.

I hope that you have someone in your life who makes you feel like sunshine on a cloudy day.