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

First Sentences

“General Phillip H. Sheridan sat motionless atop his horse as the summer sun beat down upon him.” Sean Mirski, We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and Rise of the American Colossus. 

“My name is Lila Macapagal and my life has become a rom-com cliché.” Mia P. Manansala, Arsenic and Adobo. 

“Sometimes your body is someone else’s haunted house.” Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. 

“I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first—among all the things that have vanished from the island.” Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police. 

“On the morning of August 2, 1973, from his summer cottage in Goose Prairie, Washington, Justice William O. Douglas set in motion one of the strangest proceedings in the history of the United States Supreme Court.” Stephen Vladeck, The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic. 

“They crested the hill to see the winter sun hovering on the far horizon, a wide vista of pale grey hills and leafless woodland ahead and the dark ribbon of a river threading the valley floor below.” Christobel Kent, A Murder in Tuscany. 

“There was once a doe that was portal through time.” Sinclair McKay, The Hidden History of Code-Breaking: The Secret World of Cyphers, Uncrackable Codes, and Elusive Encryptions. 

“It was ten years since Mrs. Bradley had been at the institution known as Shafton.” Gladys Mitchell, When Last I Died. 

“Far below the walkway that circled the top of the Cook County courthouse, Chicago spread itself out beneath Mathias Schaefer, an ordinary fireman in the most fire-prone city in the world.” Scott W. Berg, The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and the War for a City’s Soul. 

“Bunky Millerman caught me from behind on the first day of Woody Wilson’s little escapade in Vera Cruz.” Robert Olen Butler, The Hot Country. 

“Yes, I do have a Texas connection, but, as we’d say in the Midwest, where I grew up, not so’s you’d know it.” Calvin Trillin, Trillin on Texas. 

“On a warm midsummer’s evening just before the end of the last century, in a book-lined lawyers’ office in the pretty town of Kent, Connecticut, I handed over a check for a moderate sum in dollars to a second-generation Sicilian-American, a plumber named Cesare, who lived in the Bronx but who had driven up in the lush New England countryside especially for the formalities of this day.” Simon Winchester, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World. 

“His green-and-vermillion topknot was as colorful as a parrot’s, and in Colleton County’s courtroom that afternoon, with its stripped-down modern light oak benches and pale navy carpet, a cherryhead parrot couldn’t have looked much more exotic than this Michael Czarnecki.” Margaret Maron, Bootlegger’s Daughter: A Deborah Knott Mystery.