4th Quarter 2024 - Books, Movies, Goals

There’s a friends-locked entry just before this one. But, yes, I am far far behind.

Books:

Just 5 books this quarter, largely because I had spent a lot of time trying to go through saved magazines. I also went to the Moby Dick Marathon in San Francisco, but I’ve read that book several times before, so didn’t think I needed to write about it again.

1. Miriam Toews, Fight Night. This tells the story of a 9 year od girl, living in Toronto with her pregnant mother and her grandmother. On a trip to visit cousins in California, the grandmother falls while dancing and ends up in the same hospital where the mother is giving birth. I normally like quirky characters, but this book had nothing but quirks to it. The person who suggested it to the Crones and Tomes book club described it as humorous, butI didn’t find it particularly funny.
   
   
2. Amos Towles, The Lincoln Highway. Emmett Watson is released from a juvenile work farm in Nebraska when his father dies. He joins his younger brother, Billy, as they plan a trip to California to start a business and look for their mother who had left the family long ago. Two other boys from the work farm show up, steal their car, and set off to pursue their own goals. I liked the early parts of this book, especially because of a book of legends that Billy is hooked on. But the last 60 or so pages are a mess - unnecessarily violent and not really following the rest of the story.
   
   
3. Sarah Bewley, Burning Eden. The author is wpadmirer and this was her first mystery. On the plus side, the background (a small town in Central Florida) was interesting and I liked the main characters (a local sheriff who is also trying to deal with wildfires and a doctor who suffers from aphasia after being attacked at a previous job. However, I had some qualms about some characters having similar names, e.g. Bud and Buddy, which I found confusing. And the plot was a bit too convoluted at the end. I’ll still probably read more in the series, if I ever make it through enough of my backlog.
   
   
4. Janet Gleeson, The Arcanum. This book chronicles the development of European porcelain, starting from a German alchemist in Meissen and continuing to rivalries in other European cities. It started out rather slowly, but grew more interesting as it went on.
   
   
5. Jovial Bob Stine, 101 School Cafeteria Jokes. This is a collection of jokes for kids. I’m sure I would have found several of these hysterically funny when I was eight or nine, but they don’t work for me in my mid-60’s.
   
   

Movies:

Two movies this quarter.

1. Small Things Like These: I saw this because a friend wanted to. This movie has to do with the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, which were run by various orders of nuns, ostensibly to help “fallen women,” typically unwed mothers. This particular movie is focused on a coal dealer who discovers one of the girls from a laundry hiding in a shed and tries to help her, which leads to threats to keep his own daughters out of the Catholic school they run. It’s an interesting movie, but depressing. In addition, the ending is deliberately ambiguous. It is, however, well acted, particularly by Cillian Murphy.
   
   
2. A Real Pain: Two cousins, whose grandmother was a Shoah survivor, take a trip to Poland to honor her history. We quickly discover that their relationship is more complicated than it seems. Kieran Culkin won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar his role in this and I felt that was well deserved. In fact, the gentleman with whom I’m conducting the world’s longest running brief meaningless fling predicted that when we saw it. It probably helped that some aspects of the movie mirrored some of my experiences from my trip to Poland with my mother several years ago. Recommended, particularly for 2G and 3G descendants of survivors.
   

Goals: Basically, I got pretty much nothing accomplished this quarter. There will be further details on that in my 2024 Year in Review, coming soonish.