fauxklore | First Quarter 2024

We’ve gotten through the first three months of the year, so it’s time for a quarterly update.

Books: I got through 15 books in January through March.

Nell Painter, Old in Art School. I don’t remember who recommended this to me, but I talked one of my book clubs into it. The idea of a woman retiring from a prestigious academic career (as a historian) and enrolling in art school was interesting. She wrestled with how the art world saw age, femaleness, and blackness. She also has to deal with aging parents and a history book she was writing. She claimed she was doing this for fun, but it didn’t seem very enjoyable.
Dick Francis, 10 Lb. Penalty. This novel is about a young man whose father has him leave horse racing to help with a political campaign that turns dangerously violent. The father wins his campaign and the son goes off to university and a career on the business side of horse racing. There’s an evil man trying to manipulate a lot of politicians and a sleazy reporter who stirs up dirt. Overall, this is a typical Dick Francis novel - violent, but absorbing.
Len Kruger, Bad Questions. I probably wouldn’t have read this tween boy coming of age novel if Len weren’t a friend of mine. The plot involves a boy whose father dies by suicide, resulting in his mother relocating them to another neighborhood. A former teacher offers to help him put a hex on some people. Then two of those people on the hex list die in a car crash … Overall, reasonably good reading.
Richard Russo, Straight Man. This novel, set in a small college in rural Pennsylvania, is mildly humorous. The funniest bit involves the chairman of the English department threatening to kill a duck every day until his budget demands are met. Unfortunately, he’s such an asshole that I found this book irritating and was ready to throw it into the Potomac.
Craig Rice and Ed McBain, The April Robin Murder. McBain is, of course, best known for writing the 87th Precinct police procedurals. Craig Rice wrote screwball comedic mysteries. This book from 1958 leans towards the latter as two young men show up in Hollywood planning to make it rich in the film industry. They get scammed right off and then a murder occurs in the house they may or may not actually own. This isn’t at all plausible but it is amusing and very entertaining. It also has this wonderful zeugma: “She was blond and slender and delicate-looking and extremely gorgeous and she didn’t look a day over thirty-two. The pearl -handled revolver in the fist of the gentleman with her didn’t look a caliber over .32.”
Bob Payne, Escape Clauses. This is a collection of travel stories, mostly focused on islands. The destinations include the Maldives, Bora Bora, Robinson Crusoe Island, Martinique, both the Arctic and Antarctic, Greece, and others. Many of these trips were paid for by Conde Nast Travel, where he was a contributing editor. I generally prefer more focused narratives, but this was entertaining enough.
Mary Janice Davidson, Sleeping With the Fishes. Fred is a mermaid. But she’s allergic to seafood and gets seasick on boats. When the High Prince of the Black Sea shows up, she’s torn between him and a marine biologist she works with at the New England Aquarium. They set out to investigate contamination in Boston Harbor. There’s also a very steamy side plot involving her boss and her best friend. Trashy in the very best way.
Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry. Wow! I loved this book about a woman dealing with sexism in science in the 1950’s and 1960’s. She gets involved with another chemist and they adopt the greatest dog ever. He dies and she discovers she is pregnant, which leads to her getting fired. Eventually, she finds a new career hosting a cooking show and using that to teach chemistry lessons. I admit some of it is implausible, but I loved the characters (for the most part) and I highly recommend this book.
Dick Frances, Wild Horses. Thomas Lyon is directing a film, based on a real life death twenty odd years earlier. What does this have to do with a deathbed confession by a family friend? And who has attacked the movie’s star and tried for Thomas with unusual swords? As usual, there is lots of action (some of it horse-related) and lots of violence. Also, since this is a Dick Frances novel, it’s a good read. I’d gladly go to see the finished movie if it existed.
Isaac Asimov, Murder at the ABA. This was a surprisingly dull mystery, set at a booksellers’ convention. Asimov himself plays a role but the actual fictional detective is another writer as his stand-in. The murder doesn’t happen until 80 or so pages in and the motive is unconvincing. And I really did not care at all about the detective’s opinions of every woman he meets along the way. Don’t bother slogging through this.
Osa Johnson, I Married Adventure. Osa was a teenager when she married Martin Johnson and it wasn’t long before they set off to the South Pacific to photograph “cannibals” and, later on, exotic animals. They made films of African animals (with the help of large numbers of porters), which brought them some success, but not much money. This was an interesting read and reiterated my desire to visit the Osa and Martin Johnson Safari Museum in Kansas.
Susan Vreeland, Clara and Mr. Tiffany. This is a novel based on the life (and letters) of Clara Driscoll, who played a critical role in the design of the famous Tiffany glass lamps. Having seen several of the lamps at the New York Historical Society, I was intrigued by the back story, including Mr. Tiffany’s refusal to employ married women. The book also touched on questions about the lives of immigrant women and on the labor movement. I enjoyed the insight into the lives of late 19th / early 20th century women in New York. Recommended.
Laura Lippman, AnotherThing to Fall. Laura Lippman’s mysteries have a strong sense of place, with that place being Baltimore. In this one, she also uses her knowledge of television production (via her husband) as Tess Monaghan is hired as a bodyguard / babysitter for a young actress. When a young woman on the production team is murdered, Tess uncovers a complex (albeit implausible) story. A good read.
Rory Stewart, The Places In Between. Stewart walked across Afghanistan (from Herat to Kabul) in 2002. This was a physically challenging and dangerous journey, in which he was dependent on a number of contacts to help him. He acquired a dog along the way, which didn’t make the trip any easier. Nor did the limits of his language skills. In general, this was interesting and scary and definitely not a trip anyone would want to copy. There are some interesting places and people along the way, but interesting isn’t always a good thing.
Mary Janice Davidson, A Wolf After My Own Heart Lila Kai has bought a house in an odd community - but how was she to know that her neighbors were shifters? Some of the characters work for the Interspecies Placement Agency, charged with protecting orphaned or displaced shifter children, including a particularly adorable werebear who insists her father could not have been killed in a plane crash because he has called her. There’s also a romance story, with just about the right level of steaminess to it. Overall, this is fun, despite some darker back stories.

Movies: Only one movie this quarter.

You Can Call Me Bill. This is a pretty weird movie, essentially an extended interview with William Shatner. It’s pretty much a stream of consciousness monologue about Shatner’s attempts to balance the jobs he needs to survive financially against his more serious ambitions. His philosophic musings, including a long section on his desire to become a tree after he dies, are more unexpected. I was surprised about how little he said about his personal life. And I don’t think his ability to make fun of himself came through. (If you’ve never seen it, I particularly recommend the movie Free Enterprise.) Still, there was a good mix of film clips along with the monologue and I think most fans of Star Trek (and his other work) will want to see this.

Goals:

I haven’t made any specific plans for circumventing the globe going westward, but I have ideas. Probably around late October.

I’ve got a tentative plan for one national park and ideas about others.

I’ve made no progress on genealogy email archives.

I’ve read 15 books, so I am behind the curve on getting to at least 80.

Hmm, re: my bedroom, does glaring at the clutter count?

I’m between 1/2 and 2/3 done with one afghan. This is not as minimal an amount of progress as it might seem, because I have other afghans in various states of progress.

I have not yet located my parents’ slides.

I have a reasonably good plan for one AAA ballpark and reasonable tentative plans for two others.

I have not been very regular about getting much exercise, sigh.

It would probably help if I looked at my goals more than every three months.