Sunday Salon

 

Book-ish

A post on the new biography of Lou Reed by Will Hermes. The skinny: if you like Lou Reed, you'll probably be interested in the biography. If not, not...

That sent me to rereading Delmore Schwartz, who was Reed's teacher when he was an undergraduate. One of Schwartz's poems here.

Then Rebecca Solnit's most recent Orwell's Roses. Pretty great, I thought. 

I read (The third time? I think.) Rex Stout's Fer-de-Lance, the first Nero Wolfe mystery, because...does one really need a reason? It was there. I could blog about it, but I've already finished that challenge. It's a good one.

Two novellas from my list of novella candidates. They should get their own post soon.

Where I Am

This guy showed up. (It doesn't look like the same hawk as previously.) We have seen hawks with their pigeon kills in the back yard before, but lately they've been peaceable enough...though this one doesn't seem to be underfed. (Does the photo make me look fat? Yes, yes, it does!)

But!...The Horror!

The Toronto Public Library has been hit by a ransomware attack, and the website has been down for two weeks (as of tomorrow). 

Library branches are open, but my local branch is quite small and was originally built as a children's library. The books I want almost never come from there, but I go to the website and request they're sent to my local branch. Under normal circumstances that works beautifully. But now I'm not likely to go hunt them down elsewhere, and, in any case, I don't have any clue where to find them without the website. (TPL has a lot of branches.) So I'm limited to the books I have.

For myself, I'm not too worried about the data breach. I'm good about passwords, and my PIN for the library is different from every other PIN. My address and phone number wouldn't be that hard to come by anyway, and if they can figure out how to monetize the knowledge that I read a lot of books, well, God bless... It's the fact I can't get more books that's driving me nuts.

The poop on the Internets is it's some outfit calling itself Black Basta. They're shadowy, of course, that's the point, but they seem to be Russian and quite possibly state-adjacent. Not that I didn't already have enough reasons to dislike Putin, but if now he (or his minions) have taken down my library, it's...time for Regime Change!

But it's the rare cloud that doesn't have at least a little silver on the inside... 😉 I read the New York Times via the library. The way it works for us is that you get a three day subscription, and then you have to renew. Maybe you can renew and maybe you get an 'All of your institution's passes are currently in use. Try again later' message. I can play Wordle without the NYT subscription, but I can't use the WordleBot to find out how my guesses stacked up unless I'm connected. But with everything frozen in place at TPL, my three-day subscription has now lasted two weeks. The Other Reader and various friends are locked out of the newspaper, but the WordleBot (and any of the awful news I want...hmm) I can get to.

Hope your week has been good. (And your library is working!) 

Sunday Salon

 

Book-ish

Two posts last week: a review of a Dutch mystery from 1975 by Janwillem van de Wetering--pretty good, but not amazing--and a poem by Charlotte Mew. (Approved by Thomas Hardy!)

There were some books for the #1962Club.

Upcoming: November is a blogger's busy season. I hope to participate in Nonfiction November, Novellas in November, and Margaret Atwood Reading Month. But what will I read? I dunno... I've got several non-fiction books from the library in a pile by my reading chair, and one of them is short. I should read them!

In any case, I've made a list of my year's reading in non-fiction and novellas and should post that soon.

The Classics Club spin result means I will also be reading Boccaccio's Decameron in the near future.

Quote

"When one's time is as brief as mine is, it is far better to gawk than write."

-Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, on his first visit to London

As good an excuse as I've ever heard for not writing a letter. 😉

Where I Am

'Tis the colorful season!

The city planted this Freeman Maple in our front yard maybe ten years ago. It always puts on a spectacular show. But I'm afraid most of those leaves fell in a rainstorm on Thursday morning, and were then raked up on Saturday...

I saw this on the way to the grocery store the other day:

An inflatable skeleton unicorn! With a happy pumpkin, and a rainbow mane. Not very scary, but you just know there's some happy six-year-old girl in that house. But it occurred to me the unicorn could be multi-use: Gay Pride Day, Día de los Muertos, and if the Grateful Dead ever came to town again, it would be simply perfect. But, in any case, it's just the thing to wish you a Happy Halloween!

Sunday Salon

Book-ish

Two golden age mysteries on the blog: C. King Daly's Obelists at Sea, which began a series, and the second collection of stories in H. C. Bailey's Reggie Fortune series, Mr. Fortune's Practice.

I signed up for the most recent Classics Club spin. What will it be?

Xenophon's Memorabilia of Socrates in a new translation by Martin Hammond:

"The trouble is, Socrates, that your habit is to ask questions to which more often than not you already know the answer."

Ha!

Also another translation of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, this one by Brian Hooker, the text used for the José Ferrer movie version.

"There's things in this world/A man does well to carry to extremes."

Currently reading Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Slave.

One More Quote

"Man is a pauper when it comes to reason, but is a millionaire of the emotions."

-Isaac Bashevis Singer

That's not actually from The Slave but from something else I was reading about Singer.

Around

This guy couldn't quite decide what to do about the pigeon at his feet; I think he's likely a juvenile, and was maybe thinking, heck, I'll just go for the suet feeder. (Just above him to the right.)

I think the pigeon was ill, though it did manage to get away later.

Sigh. There's an eclipse back there somewhere, though it was only ever going to be about 20% for us.

Hope you had a great week!

Sunday Salon

 

Book-ish

Bit of a lazy week on the blog. Posted a Sir John Suckling poem I've always thought amusing.

Reread Cyrano de Bergerac, the play by Edmond Rostand, plus some other things relating to Cyrano. Post on Cyrano soon? Maybe!

A couple of mysteries that will remain mysterious until they get their own post.

#1962Club

Kaggsy and Simon host a reading week devoted to a particular year; this year is 1962, and it starts in a week:

As usual, I've piled up a stack of books, not all of which I'll read...

The volume of Baldwin is for Another Country.

The two mysteries at the back--The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side and The Zebra-Striped Hearse--are ones I've read before, multiple times, and for the Christie in particular, I remember the solution quite well. Still for each of them, that book is one of my favorites by the author, and they could very well get reread one more time.

Are you planning on taking part? 

And...

Happy Thanksgiving! (to those for whom it's appropriate... 😉) There's turkey sausage pasta on the menu for tomorrow night, which isn't quite roasting a bird, but will have to do...

Sunday Salon

 

Book-ish

The second book, Sins for Father Knox, in Josef Škvorecky's Lt. Boruvka mystery series got a post on the blog. Good, a fun premise, but not as good as the first in the series.

A post with a couple of Emily Dickinson poems. 

While I was waiting for Rebecca Solnit's Orwell's Roses to arrive from the library, I read her earlier The Faraway Nearby of 2013. It's the third of her books I've read and I thought it was awfully good; it may have become my favorite. (Though River of Shadows is very good, too.) I started writing a long post before deciding I wasn't competent to do so... But it involves her mother's Alzheimers, Wile E. Coyote, Frankenstein, Iceland, and apricots. In what's not a very long book.

Orwell's Roses did finally arrive, so I should finish that soon, too. But I can see a binge coming on. Which others should I read?

Then I read the third Persis Wadia mystery, The Lost Man of Bombay, which came out last year. They're set in the early 1950s, and Persis, a Parsee, is the first female detective on the Bombay police force. Pretty entertaining, but the first one in the series remains the best, I think. The next is supposed to come out later this year or early next (Sources seems to differ) and I'm sure I'll read it when it's available. But in the meantime I was wondering about his other series, Baby Ganesh Detective Agency. Descriptions make it seem a little cutesy, but has anybody read it?

On an altogether more serious note...it's the week of the Nobel Prize announcement. (Well, probably. We'll learn tomorrow if they're delaying for a week.) I don't actually have a favorite for this year, but I'm always excited to hear what they pick.

Movies

Seeing The Widow Clicquot a couple of weeks ago reminded me of the Cyrano that came out in 2021. (Haley Bennett was the widow Clicquot in that movie; she plays Roxanne in Cyrano.)

It's Peter Dinklage who plays Cyrano, and that's what made me want to see the movie, but 2021 was still a tough time to see movies and we didn't.

Dinklage as the person who feels he can never win the beautiful girl is a natural, and I find Dinklage a pretty great actor. It might be surprising that he was good in duelling scenes, but not entirely: he pulled off the battle scenes in Game of Thrones very successfully. The duels in this are more balletic than the Battle of Blackwater Bay, but still. In fact the choreography in Cyrano was in general a delight. 

The movie originated in a musical and that was the problem, I thought. (In the introduction to his translation Anthony Burgess says, "I had always had my doubts about the musicalization of Cyrano de Bergerac.") The songs felt pretty unmemorable, and the two best songs were the poignant 'Wherever I Fall' by the soldiers in the battle, and the swaggering 'What I Deserve' by the villain-ish Duc de Guiche; in other words none of the songs of the principals, Cyrano, Roxanne, and Christian, were particularly interesting. They also took out some of the best lines. I'm sure Cyrano's great 'No thank you'/'Non merci' speech was shortened; the film also dropped Roxanne's great line near the end, "I never loved but one man in my life/Now I must lose him twice." [Anthony Burgess' translation.]

So while it was OK, José Ferrer and Gerard Depardieu have nothing to worry about. I think I would have preferred the same three actors (Peter Dinklage, Haley Bennett, Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) doing Rostand's actual text. 

Greek Salad

The farmer's market still has tomatoes; the oregano in the herb garden still has punch...

Hope you've had a great week!

Sunday Salon

 

I've left this til late, so being quick...

On the Blog

Two book posts on the blog last week (as advertised):

H. C. Bailey's Call Mr. Fortune

and

The Alexiad of Anna Comnena

Also a poem post: 'My Papa's Waltz' by Theodore Roethke.

I also finished Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery, one of the earliest locked-room mysteries (from 1892). This will get its own post pretty soon because it fits my Vintage Mystery Challenge.

Movies

That was somewhat less reading than I might have done otherwise because it was the Film Festival this past week in Toronto. The best movie we saw was the first one, They Shot The Piano Player, which I mentioned last Sunday. But there were a couple of other movies this week: 

The Widow Clicquot, about how Barbe-Nicole Clicquot (née Ponsardin) took over the Champagne house after her husband died in 1805. The movie was full of great French countryside shots, but a little romanticizing. Still now I want to read the book, by Tilar J. Mazzeo, which The Other Reader listened to when it came out fifteen years ago. Fortunately my library hasn't gotten rid of all of its copies.

Then a second heroic farmer movie, The Promised Land. (This theme wasn't actually planned.) Captain Ludwig Kahlen is going to farm the heath of central Jutland in Denmark, famously infertile soil. His secret? Potatoes! (They'll grow anywhere? I guess.) Mads Mikkelsen plays Kahlen, looking very grizzled and Danish. Not only does he have to fight the soil and the weather, but also a half-mad, sadistic local aristocrat. More beautiful (but desolate) scenery.

Lastly Close Your Eyes, from Spain. Miguel Garay was making a movie thirty years ago, when his lead actor disappeared. Murder, suicide, accident? It's also a tribute to the movie-making of yesteryear.

Cabin

There was a call for cabin interior shots, 😉which were surprisingly few in number. Still, one corner of the interior of the cabin:

The ladder leads up to the sleeping loft.

While I was looking through old photos, though...

The neighbours:

The view:

And what the heck! Think of it as our very own unicorn spa with misty forests and magical light. (From some volume of Phoebe and her Unicorn.)

The other thing that happened this week was cheesecake with blueberry sauce:

(We did stop at the farmstand on the way back from the cabin, where they just happened to have blueberries...)

Hope you had a great week!

Sunday Salon

A salon-ish bunch of chairs? Well, we were probably looking at the view, but notice the books piled at the side.

Where I Was

We are fortunate enough to own a primitive cabin in Northern Ontario. When we bought the land it was at the edge of Killarney Provincial Park; now it's completely surrounded by the park. You have to paddle in to get to it, and our only neighbours on the lake are two primitive backwoods campsites that folks canoe in to. 

People have cottages, cabins, or camps in Ontario. It's a cottage if you're actually close to Toronto. If you're north of the French River (as we are) it's known as a camp, so that's what we are.

A full view of our splendiferous residence:

The sort of thing we see in the neighbourhood:

Fleet week at the cabin:

That was from August & we had a friend up, so we used all the boats. One last attempt at Artsiness: 😉

Bookish

The camp is way off-grid. There's no cell phone coverage, and the power is supplied by those solar panels hanging off the front. All of which makes it a good place for uninterrupted reading and while we were up there last week, I did read a few books:

Rebecca Makkai/I Have Some Questions For You

Her most recent novel; it came out earlier this year. I have to say I wanted to like this better than I did. It's OK. A prep-school murder mystery, which sounded appealing. Makkai is connected to the Chicago area, important for me, though this story has been transferred to New Hampshire. I thought it skilled enough, but it felt programmatic. She wants to say something about the rush to judgment, Twitter mobs and the facile propensity to convict Black men, but then our protagonist does rush to judgment, and her judgment, about her former music teacher, is a little wrong, but is basically reaffirmed as correct. Hmmph.

James Huneker/Unicorns

Huneker was an American newspaper critic--mainly classical music and literature for the Philadelphia and New York papers--who died in 1922. I've read a bunch of his books and am maybe a bit obsessed. This one is from 1916, and is the last collection of essays that came out during his life. He reviews A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when it comes out. (That young James Joyce is a promising author--Dubliners was brilliant--and we expect great things of him in the future. Or so says Mr. Huneker.) Like any collection of incidental writings, it's uneven; there were several fine things, though: a couple of essays on J.-K. Huysmans; Huneker's first trip to Paris, where he went to study piano at the Conservatoire, and may have seen Franz Liszt; a trip up in an airplane.

Anita Brookner/Hotel du Lac

Won the Booker for 1984 and is pretty great. But you probably already knew that.

Anna Comnena/The Alexiad

H. C. Bailey/Call Mr. Fortune

Both of these are going to get their own post soon. The Alexiad is Byzantine history around 1100, and Call Mr. Fortune is six mystery short stories that came out in 1922, the first in the Reggie Fortune series.

R. C. Trevelyan/Thamyris

A short book on the state of poetry that came out in the 20s, though he doesn't cover the war poets (Wilfrid Owen, Sassoon, etc.). Trevelyan was a poet in his own right, and also did translations from Latin and Greek. (Some of which I think I've read in the past? Maybe.) He made me want to read more Robert Bridges.

The Huneker, Bailey, and Trevelyan can all be found on Project Gutenberg.

Movies

It's the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) this week; we usually manage to see a few movies and our first one was yesterday: They Shot The Piano Player. 

Pretty fun, with great music, though sad. It's documentary-ish, but done as stylish animation, and it's about Francisco Tenorio Junior, a Brazilian bossa nova pianist who was disappeared by the Argentine military in 1976, while Tenorio was on tour in Buenos Aires. Documentary-ish, I say, because there's a frame with Jeff Goldblum playing an imaginary New Yorker writer who gets involved in investigating the case. 

We'll see several more films this week during the festival.

Summer Challenges: The Report

I did pretty well on the Big Book of Summer challenge, with three:

Guy Gavriel Kay/The Last Light of the Sun

Olga Tokarczuk/The Books of Jacob

Eleanor Catton/Birnam Wood

I did about average (for me) on  Twenty Books of Summer challenge. I finished 27 books over the three months. (Yay!) I blogged about 17 books. (Hmm.) And of those 17 books, 11 were on my original list of 20 books. Which is about average for my ability to predict what it is I'm going to read... 😉

Hope you all had a great week!

Sunday Salon

Last Week

Two reviews on the blog: Robert Aickman's Go Back At Once and Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob. I finished Ivo Andrić's Omer Pasha Latas, but haven't yet reviewed it. But I will! Because it will cover Bosnia for the European Reading Challenge.

Foody

Somebody might have gone a little mad at the farmer's market fruit stand last week. (Plums, peaches, raspberries, watermelon!) We already had cherries, so something needed to be done with those:

And there were still strawberries available:

The arugula comes from the garden, and this is where I use that bottle of amazing aged balsamic vinegar we brought back from Italy. More of the same tonight. Darn!

Paris In July

...is almost over. But I'm in the middle of one more book. Will it be finished in time? The race is on. Watch this space...

Hope you had a great week!

Sunday Salon

 

Last Week

Read some books... 😉

Actually I haven't quite finished the Ivo Andrić, but I expect to soon. The Kobo is showing Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen, an obscure but interesting one. Now I need to write some blog posts! The Books of Jacob will be my second Big Book of Summer, and, at 965 pages, will certainly be the biggest.

To go with the one female Polish Nobel Prize winner I was reading, I posted the poem of another earlier in the week, Wisława Szymborska's 'The Onion'.

Last week my translation of Catullus 92 appeared in pixels here.

We were up north in Ontario at Killarney Provincial Park, where neither the phone nor the Internet could reach me. Which is nice! So, when not paddling around, it's a great spot for reading, enabling those long books.

If we time it right, we get lots and lots of blueberries:

This time we found enough for blueberry pancakes one morning but that was it. It had been a dry spring up north, which I suspect was the culprit. At least there had been no fires in that area.

Here's me trying to go all Monet...

After we got back we saw Umberto Eco: A Library of the World. "When I arrived thirty-five years ago, they were thirty-thousand. I have no more time to count them." That's books! Something to aspire to...

I read The Name of the Rose back when it came out and liked it a lot. I was less fond of some of his other novels, and haven't read them all. What I've read of his non-fiction is egghead-y, but playful, and that's about how he was in the movie. He seems like a nice man, and his kids like him (so that's a good sign). And the movie has pictures of some truly fantastic libraries, mostly in Italy, but not entirely. You can see some of them at the end of trailer, but lots more in the movie.

Hope your week was good!

Sunday Salon

 

I've left this until late, so I guess it will be short...

Bookish

I finished John McGahern's Amongst Women, but only just before I had to return it to the library so no post. I thought it was very good. Briefly, Michael Moran has five children by his first wife who has passed away. He's married a second time. Sometimes he means well, but he's a skinflint and has a ferocious temper; he's managed to completely estrange his eldest son; his youngest, also a boy, is about to go, too. The three daughters in the middle have their lives' prospects limited by him. He fought in the Irish war for independence, and then on the 'wrong' side of the Irish civil war. It's left him estranged from society. Is that enough of an excuse?

Two posts on the blog last week. James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son from my Classics Club list. Though I had known Baldwin lived in Paris, I hadn't realized until I was well into the book that several of the essays in it described his experiences in Paris in the late 40s and early 50s so it also turned into my contribution to Paris in July. (Maybe I'll manage another; we'll see.)

I also finished Barbara Hamby's book of poems On the Street of Divine Love, and put up a poem from it here.

Those were two books I planned to read over the summer. As for that...

...Twenty Books of Summer list...

...so far I've read 11 books since the start of June. I'm on track, right? But from that list I created in May, I've read 5, which is...pretty good for me following a list? 😉 Also from the list, I'm about half-way through Georgi Gospodinov's Man Booker International-winning Time Shelter, and very much enjoying it.

Foodie

It's still strawberry season here (yay!) though not for much longer I suspect.

I made these lemon custard cups to show off the strawberries. I know I had a recipe for these somewhere, but could not find it, so I made it up as I went along. (More or less the NYT chocolate pots-de-creme recipe, just with lemon juice and zest instead of chocolate.) I overcooked them a bit as a consequence, but strawberries are very good at hiding cracks in your custard... 

How was your week?

Sunday Salon

 

The Salonnière invites you...

Books

I read Harini Nagendra's first mystery The Bangalore Detectives Club. Pretty fun! The characters were charming (except for the villains, of course...) and the setting was fascinating: 1920s Bangalore (Bangaluru). I'll read the next when my library gets it. (They're on order.)

Earlier this week on the blog a review of Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood. Enjoyable, though I still prefer The Luminaries.

A selection of rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam in the famous translation of Edward FitzGerald.

And another mystery, the classic The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey.

On The Stack

Let's take it from the top. That's:

Billy the Bunny.

Happy are the Clean of Heart, a Fr. Blackie Ryan mystery that I started while I had to wait around somewhere and should finish soon.

John McGahern's Amongst Women. A book I was going to read before our trip to Ireland, but it didn't get here in time. It's supposed to be a classic and so far I kind of think it is.

No progress whatsoever on James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son... 😉

But some progress on Barbara Hamby's On The Street of Divine Love.

The library also delivered Georgi Gospodinov's Time Shelter. It won the Booker International this year and there's no way I'll be able to renew it, so it needs to happen in the next couple of weeks. I've liked the others by him I've read. That will be Bulgaria for this year's European Reading Challenge.

Foody

It's strawberry season here!

How was your week?

Sunday Salon

 

One last salon-ish Ireland photo

On the Blog

Diligent week on the blog. I wrote up Cousin Bette, a book from my Classics Club list. Then I posted a Barbara Hamby poem I like, and last Biography of X, from my 20 Books of Summer list, which was OK, but I didn't like it as well as I hoped I would. 

I also finished Josephine Tey's classic mystery The Daughter of Time, which I should write up soon.

On the Stack

The library delivered Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood much faster than I thought it would. It's still popular and I'll have to read it soon. The same is true of The Bangalore Detectives Club by Harini Nagendra.

I think my next Classics Club book will be James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son. And I continue to make my way through Barbara Hamby's book of poetry.

Foody

It's asparagus season here! One of our favourite uses:

I first came across the idea of shaved asparagus pizza at Smitten Kitchen, but I've fancied it up a bit. She uses just cheese for the base, but I now do a garlic cream sauce. You see I've added some diced salami on half (for thems whats wants it... 😉). A slice of prosciutto works, too. To go all in, some shaved truffle pecorino is a treat, but that requires a trip to a special cheese store for me, and I didn't get there last week...

Hope you all had a great week!