New Jersey, 1976

Party at Cindy’s:

Ten, twelve guys: who were they? Cindy had rounded up a bunch of Greg’s pals for her cheerleader girlfriends. Preppy white boys from Princeton. Older, richer. Nineteen was older. They would have better pot and their own cars. Strangers. Nobody I knew, which should have been a relief. A dozen guys who hadn’t heard I was a fag. But that was almost worse. Because now I would have to watch them find out.

— “American graffiti” from the john weir story collection your nostalgia is killing me

Sequoia Nagamatsu, Ugly Crying

Dear Clara,

It’s strange to think I’ve started to build a life in the same place I saw as your escape from home.

— how high we go in the dark, by sequoia nagamatsu, p26

In the opening pages of How High We Go In the Dark, a father goes to the remote scientific station in Siberia where his daughter met her end, vowing to complete his daughter’s work. Going through her things, he finds her journal and writes, on the interior cover, in big, bold letters: YOU WERE RIGHT.

Heart breaks into a million little pieces.

Worlds Collide: Still The Locked Room

Ruth and Nelson are about to break every rule in the covid lockdown book (while Nelson’s wife is away in Blackpool, spending the lockdown with her diabetic mom). What is wrong with self? She was so quick to condemn Bojo for breaking lockdown social distancing protocol, but she’s cheering this new development in the Ruth/Nelson saga.

Back to the book: Nelson comes over (conveniently after Kate, eleven has gone to bed).

Ruth goes into the kitchen to heat up the sauce and put the water on for more pasta. Flint follows, complaining loudly, probably about Nelson. She placates him with more gourmet cat food and pours two glasses of wine. When she comes back into the sitting room, Nelson is reading the back cover of Kate’s copy of The Hunger Games.

— the locked room, pp. 184 – 185

It is not all lemony fluff, however. Ruth notes that Nelson “turns on the television — without asking — and seems mesmerised by some football programme . . . It’s not even a recent match. There’s no live football, or any other sport, because of the pandemic.”

Ruth, you can thank your lucky stars it was Michelle, not you, living with Nelson all these years!

Stay tuned.

Sentence of the Day: Solace

She felt a spike of affection for him, angsty little spacer that he was.

— Eyes of the void, p. 180

IS Idris Telemmier an angsty little spacer? Yes, yes he is.

There isn’t as much action in Book 2 of The Final Architecture, but self still loves the universe and the characters Adrian Tchaikovsky has created.

Stay tuned.

Sentence of the Day: HUNGER

Why Sam (the MC) is so sad:

In the old days, if you had just a little money, you could make a phone call and, thirty minutes later, there would be Papa John’s bringing you a giant pizza.

— Hunger, A Gone Novel, p. 88

Gotta Love DCI Harry Nelson

DCI Harry Nelson comes barging into Dr. Ruth Galloway’s little Italian idyll. In true Nelson fashion, he gets upset at Ruth, and boards a plane.

Ruth and Shona are at a sidewalk café in some picturesque Italian town when “a grey Fiat comes through the archway, going far too fast. For a moment it looks as if it’s going to plough through the tables outside the café, but then it comes to an abrupt halt by the church. Two men get out of the car . . . ‘Dad! shouts Kate.”

To add to the frisson of the moment, Nelson’s brought Cathbad along, and Cathbad is in full Druid mode, “wearing a purple cloak that gleams in the sunlight.”

YEEEEESSS! If you’re going to chase after your Baby Mama in Italy (leaving your pregnant wife at home while a deranged killer is on the loose), go whole hog and bring along a Druid.

Do not be feeling too bad for Michelle, Nelson’s wife, because no sooner has Nelson left for the airport than she gives her ten-years-younger lover a call and he drops everything and drives 100 miles, from Essex to King’s Lynn, and they have fun times in Nelson’s bed (Michelle is pregnant, but that apparently doesn’t get in the way at all), and afterwards she even lets Tim take a shower in Nelson’s bathroom.

Wonder what the neighbors think? Who cares what the neighbors think, it’s what self thinks that counts, and what she thinks is that Tim (who Nelson hired and invited to his house, which is how Tim met Michelle in the first place) is an absolute P.I.G.

But anyhoo. Back to Italy. Nelson offers to drive Ruth to Monte Cassino (which self thinks she will add to her bucket list).

“St. Benedict founded a hospital here,” says Ruth. “The oldest hospital in Europe. The oldest medical school in the world was nearby, in Salerno.”

Nelson does not seem interested in the Benedictine rule.

— The Dark Angel, p. 205

Fun times!

Stay tuned.

Fishing: Delia Owens, WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING

A tweak of the reading list, because the Katherine Addison novel is so short. So self is putting off reading it to prolong the pleasure of anticipation.

Besides, the movie adaptation of Where the Crawdads Sing is hitting movie theatres on her birthday. She’s got to finish reading it by then!

The improbable happens: Kya’s (usually drunk) father takes her fishing.

. . . she felt a tug, jerked her line, and raised a thick bream, flashing silver and blue. Pa leaned out and snatched it in the net, then sat back, slapping his knees and yahoo-ing like she’d never seen. She grinned wide and they looked into each other’s eyes, closing a circuit.

Before Pa strung it up, the bream flopped around in the boat bottom and Kya had to watch a distant string of pelicans, study the cloud forms, anything but look into dying fish eyes staring at a world without water, wide mouth sucking worthless air. But what it cost her and what it cost that fish was worth it to have this little shred of family.

— Where the Crawdads Sing, p. 55

Story # 3, The Faerie Thorn and Other Stories

Self was reading Story # 3, The Merrow of Murlough Bay, when big fat tears started rolling down her cheeks!

This is crazy! She hasn’t cried about a fairy tale since The Little Mermaid!

Each of the stories in this book, at least the three she has read so far, follow the same pattern: Goodness is terrifying, therefore it is spurned. And Talbot is a genius at showing suffering. Maybe it’s the mermaid thing — self doesn’t know. All she knows is that the suffering of the merrow Bright Blue, his “all-on-my-ownness,” his fear, was so real. There was a little bit of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go in there, if you must know.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

The Janus Stone: Tanya

Going at a snail’s pace through Book 2 of the Ruth Galloway series, self is enjoying it so much. The last book series she was into was The Expanse (nine books and a TV series), and that was two years ago.

Anyhoo, she is within closing distance of the end, and there’s an annoying policewoman named Tanya who is everything Dr. Ruth Galloway isn’t — young, fit, eager, callow — and she might be having a wee crush on her boss, DCI Harry Nelson, who also happens to be the object of Ruth Galloway’s (unrequited) affection. This series does have angst. Of course, Ruth Galloway doesn’t see her as a threat, and DCI Nelson is too obtuse to recognize Tanya as flirting.

“Sir?”

Tanya’s head appears around his office door. He tries to discourage the rest of her from joining it.

“What is it?”

“I’ve found Annabelle Spens’ dental records.”

This is different. His tiredness vanishes and he rearranges his face into something more welcoming.

“Good work, Tanya. Show me.”

Praise makes Tanya expansive. “Well, it was really you saying about there being some fancy dental work done. I thought, maybe they didn’t get it done locally. So I contacted the London School of Dentistry. They’ve been around since 1911, used to be at the London Hospital but it’s now part of St. Bartholomew’s. Anyway, they had her records. They faxed them over a few minutes ago.”

— The Janus Stone, pp. 259 – 260

The Leavers, p. 27: Angel

This novel is finally starting to pick up the pace.

• Daniel had known her since they were kids, but their long, insomniac phone calls had only started last spring, and for most of last year she had been his greatest consolation. Her sincerity was contagious, and he liked hearing about her friends and crushes, her plans for the summer, the classes she liked and the ones she didn’t, how living in the Midwest was calmer and quieter than Manhattan — sometimes the silence still spooked her — but God she would kill for a decent slice of pizza, a lamb shawarma in a pita.