Papa Jim (Jim53) reads in 2024

Hello all,

I decided I'd like to join y'all for this year. I have interacted with a few of you over my time on LT, much of which I've spent in the Green Dragon. I took a peek at some of your journals from the previous year and liked what I saw, so here I am. Note that I have no quibbles with the GD or its wonderful residents; I'm just looking to broaden my scope a bit. I guess I should provide more about me in the introductions thread.

I have read an awful lot of genre fiction over the last couple of years, and one of my goals for 2024 is to read more general fiction, more nonfiction, and even a bit more poetry. I don't have any numerical targets in mind; sometimes real life intrudes on reading time, and I generally welcome the intrusions, except when they're of the medical variety, which have become a bit more common in recent years.

Anyway, I'm delighted to be here, and look forward to keeping up with as many of you as I can, and hearing from you as often as you like!

Books completed in 2024

1. The Lincoln Highway
2. The Art of Jazz: A Visual History
3. Salvage the Bones
4. The Book of Atrix Wolfe
5. Psalms of My People
6. Master Slave Husband Wife
7. The Princess and the Goblin
8. A Trail Through Time
9. One Wrong Word
10. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
11. The Hunter
12. Demon Copperhead
13. No Time like the Past
14. White Teeth
15. Bad to the Bone
16. Eastbound
17. The Pollutant Speaks
18. Since We Fell
19. Atlas of Middle Earth
20. Anxious People
21. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
22. I Have Some Questions for You
23. Lies, Damned Lies, and History
24. The Hoboken Chicken Emergency
25. Lord Valentine's Castle
26. A Murmuration of Starlings

This is the middle of the year.

27. The Woman from Uruguay
28. And the Rest Is History
29. The Brides of the High Hills
30. The Silkworm
31. An Argumentation of Historians
32. Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent
33. Going to Meet the Man
34. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
35. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
36. Hope for the Best
37. Plan for the Worst
38. The Man Who Died Twice
39. Meditations on Middle Earth
40. Killers of a Certain Age
41. City Made of Words
42. The Bullet that Missed
43. Mycroft Holmes
44. Rockin' Around the Chickadee
45. The Last Devil to Die
46. We Three Queens
47. A Delicate Storm
48. The Mountains Wild

Further notes:

I have developed interests in better understanding a couple of areas: cosmology and jazz. I have some exposure to both, especially to listening to jazz, but I want to know more about each. So those are definite candidates for the nonfiction list. I am, as always, grateful for suggestions.

I have a number of mystery series with which I try to keep up, including those by Julia Spencer-Fleming, Deborah Crombie, Ellen Crosby, Katy Munger, Louise Penny. I'm currently caught up and eagerly awaiting their next volumes. Interesting that they're all women. I'm sure there are some men writing similarly excellent mysteries.

Welcome to CR. I’m curious what you directions you go with your reading.

Hi, Jim, happy new year. If jazz is your jam, you'll want to connect with baswood, kidzdoc and rocketjk in here, that's that topic covered!

Welcome, Jim, and it sounds like you're going to fit right in to our little group. In addition to the jazz heads that Lola mentioned above, we also have a dedicated Poetry thread in Club Read, where folks are sharing poetry and encouraging others (like me) to try more of it.

All that Jazz welcome

>6 labfs39: Thanks for stopping by, Lisa. I'm another who needs to be encouraged in that direction.

I finished The Lincoln Highway and ended up being somewhat disappointed. Much of the story was kinda fun; I particularly enjoyed the boxcar section. Among the characters, I liked Billy, Sally, and Ulysses a lot. My main problem was with the ending. I'll put my concerns behind spoiler tags.

Throughout the book, Emmett has been developing a sense of ethics and personal responsibility (he actually had a good start on this early in the book). He appears to abandon this in his final treatment of Duchess. He sets up a Schrodinger's cat scenario, where we don't know if Duchess is alive or dead till we open the box and see (at least that was how I read it), but in doing so he is ducking the responsibility for his actions.

It occurred to me that Towles might be treating Duchess as a sort of Gollum, as a dark part of Emmett who must be sacrificed for Emmett to free himself of his criminal past and potential criminal future, but I don't see enough support for this approach throughout the novel. I think Emmett heeded the advice that he needed to separate from Duchess and he couldn't come up with a better way to do it. In my mind, it is a big step backward for him ethically.

I'm not feeling that I successfully understood what Towles was up to overall, and especially with the ending.

I won't add it to my list, but I spent a couple of hours (well, more like 90 minutes) perusing my monthly copy of the ACBL Journal. The American Contract Bridge League is the governing body for duplicate bridge in clubs and tournaments here in the US. I live a little too far from a club to play regularly these days; I organized and taught a group in our 55+ community and we play an enjoyable weekly game, although it's far from the same thing. The Journal keeps me in touch with developments in the game and occasionally provides material that I can use with my group.

>9 Jim53: I haven't picked up Lincoln Highway, despite liking Gentleman in Moscow, because there seems to be almost universal disappointment in it.

>10 Jim53: I have started a separate list for short stories. Jerry/rocketj reads and reports on all manner of magazines. Reading is reading, right?

>11 labfs39: absotively posilutely.

Chuckle :-)

>9 Jim53: well, maybe the next book will be better.
>10 Jim53: whoa, you are now the most serious bridge player I’ve met. Very interesting. (I don’t even know how to play.)

>9 Jim53: I couldn't remember the ending so I had a look. I'll put my thoughts behind spoiler tags.

I'll start by saying I didn't like Duchess and I did like Emmett which definitely colours how I feel about the ending. What Emmett did to Duchess seems particularly cruel, however as I see it Emmett wanted to protect Billy at all costs, but promised Billy he wouldn't hurt Duchess any more than he had. Hence the ending was the only solution he could think of to do both.

For me the question became how much would you compromise yourself to save/protect people you love?

I can see why people would be disappoined if they read this expecting Gentleman in Moscow or even Rules Of Civility.

Welcome Jim! I too would like to learn more about jazz or blues, but have yet to read the few books on my TBR. What would be really fun would be a book with music to listen to on the side!

And speaking of playing cards, I just got back from a visit with family. We don't play bridge, but enjoy 500, pinochle (with Dad's navy rules), and hand & foot. Anyone else out there play?

In my family, we played canasta.

>16 markon: >17 labfs39: I learned canasta, along with hand and foot, this past summer. We have some very dedicated players in our community, and I join when I can, mostly for the socializing.

>16 markon: I agree, a book with CD would be a great combination!

I've got several books going at the moment:

The Art of Jazz: A Visual History is a coffee-table type book with a lot of images and quite a bit of information as well. I've just started it and will probably progress slowly through the eras. It's interesting to see how thoroughly things like sheet music were decorated in the earliest years of jazz, and how they emphasized the dances for which each piece was appropriate. I'll report more after I've gotten further.

I just started Salvage the Bones after loving Sing, Unburied, Sing. The opening, which describes preparation for a hurricane along with the birth of a litter of puppies, is quite evocative. She does a great job of filling in information about the family without providing a brain dump, and her description of Esch's reaction to Manny is quite poetic.

Finally, I've been spending most of my reading time in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's version of Faith and Practice, which describes how Friends' meetings work. I'm working with my wife to deliver a series of sessions about Quakerism, how various aspects of it work, and how members and attenders can think about taking on various roles. Our meeting, like many others, has a lot of older members, and we need to help newer folks envision themselves in leadership roles in the not-too-distant future.

I grew up in Philly. I live in Cape May now.

Stopping by after your visit to me, to see what you get up to in your thread! I didn't read The Lincoln Highway because I was a weirdo who didn't like A Gentleman in Moscow much, but I do know that lots of people who did like it seemed disappointed by The Lincoln Highway.

Enjoy your reading, I look forward to following along.

>19 Jim53: I've added two additional books to my Wishlist, which is now growing too fast. I guess I will have to stop looking at the other members I am following.

Welcome to CR! Look forward to tagging along with your reading.

Jim since you actually have been educated about postmodernism, I thought I would ask you a question as follows.

Can you explain to a non-educated literary reader how to recognize 'understandable' postmodern versus 'not-understandable' postmodern books?

I find that I have read 44 'postmodern' books and some of them were all-time favorites, and some were not enjoyable.

For example, one of my most favorite books is The Name of the Roseby Umberto Eco. Not every reader tagged that book as such but many did.

Another book Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami had me struggling after about mid-way through the book, and I loved the beginning, but finally dropped it with what I couldn't comprehend.

Is there some sort of postmodern books which can be sub-categorized? My list of 44 such books seem to have different degrees of postmodernism, but I don't know how to differentiate them. Or is this a crazy question like asking how to separate fiction into subcategories?

>19 Jim53: Faith and Practice
I used to have this, as I attended the Central Philadelphia Friends Meeting for a few years. I left Philadelphia in 2009, and have since lapsed entirely.

>24 JoeB1934: I am only educated in French literature but I know you are very interested in this term, so will try to answer the part about the apparent inconsistency in tagging books as “post modern”. I leave the rest to jim53

Joe, the Wikipedia entry has quite a good summary of the.meanings of post modern. It gives three categorizations of the term. One is just the date the book or visual art form was created - “ Postmodernity is understood as a historical period from the mid-1960s to the present.”

This may account for some descriptions of literature that you describe as “understandable” as opposed to “non-understandable”. The other definitions that would fit your non-understandable are well described in the wiki pages here.

>26 kjuliff: Thanks very much for this reference!

>24 JoeB1934: >26 kjuliff: The beginning of the wikipedia article matches closely with the way my class described postmodern literature forty-some years ago. We saw it as characterized by the unreliable narrator and metafictive and reflexive techniques; these were chosen to bring into question traditional notions of truth, focusing instead on individuals' experiences of the world and the views that emerge from them. The text is "open," to be performed by the reader, not consumed according to fixed rules; the rules for understanding it might actually be embedded within the work, and multiple possible interpretations are assumed. Postmodern fiction is sometimes said to mirror the way science developed in the twentieth century: everything we thought was true turned out to be, if not completely wrong, imprecise. Space and time are no longer absolutes? Aaaack!

In addition to Calvino, we studied Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), DeLillo's White Noise, Pale Fire, something by one of the Powerses, whom I have trouble keeping straight, and several other novelists whose names I've forgotten, as well as theorists such as Barthes and Foucault.

There are people who use "postmodern" to refer to anything that has been produced since the period called Modern, but that's definitely not how I use the term. People also group magical realism under postmodernism. I can see a sort of legitimacy in that: even if the narrator is reliable and the work is not metafictive, the blending of fantasy with realism has a certain view of reality that seems consistent with postmodernism.

As to how to determine which postmodern works are more or less confusing, I really don't know, other than maybe to read some reviews or ask people who have read them. I personally find Calvino relatively straightforward, and have more difficulty with Murakami. As they say, YMMV.

>21 ursula: Glad to see you here. Wouldn't it be boring if we all liked the same stuff?

>23 AlisonY: Thanks and welcome to my particular piece of CR.

>25 qebo: As with reading, not everyone finds meaning in the same things. Thanks for stopping by.

>26 kjuliff: Welcome and thanks for helping out. I've had a very busy real world lately so I haven't been around much.

I've found that none of my current reads are working well for bedtime consumption, so I've started The Book of Atrix Wolfe for that purpose. I generally enjoy McKillip, and there was some discussion of this one in the Green Dragon during 4Q23. I'm a couple of chapters in and so far it looks good. I've been continuing to look at The Art of Jazz over lunch, and enjoying it, and moving a bit sluggishly through Salvage the Bones, due to my own schedule and not to the book.

My new ER book arrived today, so it will go into the mix soon. It's called Psalms of My People and looks intriguing.

>28 Jim53: Interesting, Jim. I don't think I read a lot that falls into the post-modernist category. Would Dora Bruder or HHhH count, being quite metafictional?

>28 Jim53: I’m unclear as to how you define post modern. Personally I’m not really concerned as to how to classify books written since the fifties, but Joe is, and I understand why. He’s not interested in books that make no sense to him, and I thought the Wiki link was quite good in giving three definitions.

I suspect that in the future the defining of book modes from 1950 to say 2050 will differ, as it’s hard to give a name to a genre when you are living at the time of its creation.

>28 Jim53: just wanted to say I found this post helpful and interesting. Thanks.

>31 labfs39: I'm not familiar with either of those books, Lisa. (Do you recommend them?) I read the descriptions, and it sounds as if the story in Dora Bruder is one of searching for the truth about Dora and her disappearance. Does it question the nature of knowledge and truth? That's a pretty essential characteristic of the novels that I studied as postmodern texts. I can't tell enough from the description of HHhH to comment on it. I couldn't help giggling as I thought of Dora the Explorer with one title and Hubert Horatio Humphrey with the other.

>32 kjuliff: I agree that it's hard to give a name to what's happening now. That was part of the tentativeness we experienced in the class I took: we couldn't really look back and see how something had turned out, what emerged from it, etc. I think the characteristics I described in my first paragraph above are as good a description of postmodern novels as I can come up with without doing more work that I want to.

>24 JoeB1934: I'm guessing that you might have an easier time with books that are called postmodern specifically because of when they were published than because they question the whole idea of the knowability of truth. But you might not have been after just easier reads. If I'm misunderstanding what you were after, I'd be glad to hear more (heck, I'd be glad to hear more regardless).

>33 dchaikin: You're welcome, Dan, and thanks for your comment!

I have been doing some analysis of the 44 books I have in my library, about 21 I have read and 22 that are in my TBR list. I think when I complete this analysis in light of what has been discussed here I will have a much better understanding about my personal reading preferences. I have posted my interest in this subject on several threads, but I will put some conclusions on this one.

The first paragraph provided by Jim53 was especially helpful. The statement: The text is "open," to be performed by the reader, not consumed according to fixed rules Definitely is NOT what I am looking for as a reader. For one thing, I believe the author sets up the reader for an interpretation.

I read a lot of mysteries, including literary mysteries and I never waste time trying to predict 'who did it' because the author has all sorts of devices to hide the real culprit. I am more interested in the process which leads to resolution of the mystery.

From what I am hearing about postmodernism this isn't what I should do with a postmodern book.

My efforts will focus on the books I have read that are labelled postmodern to help me understand why I liked some more than others.

>31 labfs39: Hope I'm not being too pushy and intruding, and I'm no expert on post-modernism, but having followed the post-modernism discussion going on now on a couple of threads, and skimming the Wiki article, I'd say HHhH is definitely post-modern, Lisa. It plays with history, there's a lot of authorial intrusions, and as I recall some metafictional stuff going on. I don't have a totally clear memory of the book, but it was definitely not a straight forward narrative, and the author is playing games with the reader.

Welcome to Club Read Jim. I'm enjoying your thread, and looking forward to following your reading this year.

This postmodernism discussion is interesting. I honestly don't think I've thought much about what is or what isn't, but it's fun to turn the definition over in my mind, especially with books I've read (mostly Calvino, whom I always found really accessible).

I've completed my second book of the year, Alyn Shipton's The Art of Jazz: A Visual History. Here's what I wrote in my review:

In this coffee-table sized book, Shipton shows the development of the images associated with jazz music: from posters and sheet-music cover sheets in the earliest years of the twentieth century to record and CD cover images throughout the years. He identifies artists who were jazz fans and created paintings affected by the music, including Paul Mondrian, George Wettling, Norman Lewis, William T. Williams, and S. Neil Fujita. As jazz became freer and more complex, many album covers reflected this change, using more abstract and impressionistic images.

There are hundreds of illustrations in well produced color. Shipton provides us with a history of jazz as a frame in which to hang all these images, which range from early photographs to beautiful art. I personally remember numerous wildly creative album covers from Miles Davis (especially Bitches Brew) and Wynton Marsalis (several featuring artwork by Romare Bearden). The historical material is not comprehensive, but it definitely gives us a solid skeleton on which to hang the artistic material.

Shipton is a well known jazz critic in the UK, and he has written several books about individual artists and groups. I'll be keeping an eye out for them.

Great review of The Art of Jazz, Jim. I love the images on the album covers from the 1950s and 1960s, particularly the close up photographs on the Blue Note albums, but also the abstract art painting on the cover of Mingus Ah Um. I see that the Free Library of Philadelphia has it, so I'll borrow and read it soon.

>38 Jim53: Now I buy mainly Cd's I miss the art of LP covers.

>38 Jim53: I also enjoyed your review very much. Approaching jazz history via the art associated with it is a very interesting concept, especially if done well, as this book clearly was.

" . . . Wynton Marsalis (several featuring artwork by Romare Bearden).

I don't know if Shipton mentions it, but Wynton's brother, Branford, actually has an album of jazz impressions of Bearden's art, Romare Bearden Revealed.
https://www.branfordmarsalis.com/albums/romare-bearden-revealed

>38 Jim53:

Synchronicity! I just got that last week, and (not related when I was shopping) a monograph on Bearden.

I bought Shipton's book after admiring The jazz loft project : photographs and tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965 and wanting more in that vein...

>39 kidzdoc: >40 baswood: >41 rocketjk: >42 LolaWalser: Thanks for all your comments. If any of you read it, I'll be interested in your reactions.

Jerry, thanks for the pointer to Branford's album. I hadn't heard of it. He used to live fairly close to us when he was in a community on the north side of Durham and we were on the eastern edge. I never did see him in concert while we were there. We mostly just saw whoever was playing at Duke with John Brown.

I've been struggling to give Salvage the Bones the review that it deserves. It was a truly wonderful read. It occurred to me finally that there are a lot of reviews out there already, and I'm not writing a thesis, so I'll just spit out my reactions ;-)

Ward tells the story of the Batiste family, a poor black family living in coastal Mississippi in the days leading up to, and through, Hurricane Katrina (2005). Father Claude is an unemployed alcoholic; his wife died in birthing their fourth child, Claude Junior, now eight. His siblings are Randall, Skeetah, and Esch. Esch is a fifteen-year-old girl, who has a serious crush on Manny, one of Skeetah's friends; she serves as our narrator. Esch is a mythology buff and seems a bit obsessed with the story of Jason and Medea.

Skeetah's obsession is his dog, China, who gives birth to her first litter of puppies in the novel's opening pages. She is a fighting dog, and one of the novel's key scenes is a fight between China and Rico, the father of her litter.

Esch discovers early in the novel that she is pregnant; she spends a good bit of time focused on dealing with the challenges of her condition and concealing it from everyone. This colors her description of all the events in the story.

Ward's writing is superb throughout. She paints vivid pictures of the area where the characters live, and of several characters, particularly Esch and Skeetah. Esch's descriptions of her feelings are poetic and heartbreaking. I was really angry at Manny for a lot of the book.

A few observations and questions:

There are no competent or effective parents depicted in any detail. The teenagers are very much on their own.

What is Esch's given name? It means "ash" in German. She is strong and isolated, perhaps like a tree; not only is she the only female in her family, it appears that all her peers are boys too. She tells the story but for the most part does not drive the action herself; she observes.

Esch tells us that she began having sex because it was easier to let the boys do what they wanted than to deny them. Does she have a reputation that makes it more difficult to have girl friends? Is her explanation a hypothesis put forth by Ward as to why so many teens get pregnant?

Esch is fascinated with the Jason and Medea story and identifies strongly with Medea. We find out near the end of the book that Skeetah, the brother to whom she is the closest, is named Jason. Does this initiate her interest in the story? Does her obsession with the story reflect any unconscious perceptions or desires regarding her brother?

The dogfight is integral to the story, not tacked on for sensationalism. If you can deal with such a scene, I recommend the book highly.

I was underwhelmed by The Book of Atrix Wolfe. I usually enjoy McKillip, sometimes quite a bit, but this one fell kinda flat. The main character is Talis, a prince in a land where a terrible feat of magic ended a siege twenty years ago. He has studied wizardry for a couple of years and is called home by his brother the king. He brings along a book that he found before leaving the school, which was written by the old and powerful mage, Atrix Wolfe. Talis finds that all the spells in it go wrong. He ends up wandering in a magical forest contained in the woods nearing his family's castle. Atrix Wolfe ends up involved in searching for him, even as Talis is searching for Atrix Wolfe.

The story seems to be focused on how much harm can be done when people don't tell other people what they need to know. I thought of Albus Dumbledore repeatedly telling Harry Potter, "Oh, I haven't told you about that." The individual characters were not as well developed as McKillip usually does, although Atrix Wolfe is pretty well drawn. The story of his magical creation and his relationship to is seemed to me to owe a lot to A Wizard of Earthsea. I might have enjoyed it more had I read it in larger chunks, rather than a couple of chapters each night, but I don't think that would fix all the issues.

>44 Jim53: Despite your qualified preface, your review of Salvage the Bones was perfect for me: a quick recap but more about your reactions and thoughts. Thanks!

>44 Jim53: yeah, I agree with Lisa, you told it well. I've been thinking about this one a while, but never seem to get to it.

Great review of Salvage the Bones, Jim. Your review was a pleasant reminder of that book.

>48 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl. I read Sing, Unburied, Sing first, because my daughter-in-law raved about it, and loved that too. I need to find time for Where the Line Bleeds, but I fear it won't be soon.

I'm still working on my ER book, Psalms of My People. It's requiring a bit of deciphering, but overall I'm quite impressed so far. I hope to wrap it up in the next couple of days.

Psalms required a bit too much focus to bring to a couple of recent medical appointments, so I grabbed an oldie, Peter Beagle's The Folk of the Air, for those occasions and have carried it over for my librocubicular time. It tells the story of a fellow who returns after ten years to the California town where he went to college; he gets involved with a group of medieval reenactors and discovers there is more going on than one might suspect. I'm enjoying getting back to it, although there are a few things that annoy me a bit more than they did before.

>49 Jim53: Thank you for introducing me to a marvelous new word: librocubicular! I love it and am off to be a librocubicularist now.

>50 labfs39: When I retired I got myself a set of business cards that list my profession as Librocubicularist. There are certainly a lot of us around.

>44 Jim53: hi Jim. I'm new to CR and a fellow librocubicularist. Really enjoyed your review of Salvage the Bones. We were just talking about Jason and Medea on the poetry thread.

Oh my! Librocubicularist describes me to a T!

>52 rv1988: Hi Rasdhar, welcome and thanks for your comment. I'm new in CR also, although I've been on LT for 17 years.

>53 arubabookwoman: I suspect there are a lot of us here.

It's time for my first record of the month. Each month I plan to note some music that is new to me, or that I've been listening to a lot lately. For January I've chosen Julian "Cannonball" Adderley's "Something Else," from 1958. It was his only record issued by the famous Blue Note label. I picked it up from the library and put it into the player in my car, and my immediate reaction was, "Wow, Nat sounds different!" Nat Adderley, Julian's brother, was his usual cornet player, but on this record, as I discovered, the trumpet seat was filled by Miles Davis. It might have been Miles's last gig as a sideman, I'm not sure. At the time, Cannonball was playing alto in Davis's first great quintet; they would issue "Milestones" that same year, and the amazing "Kind of Blue" the following year.

"Something Else" is a real all-star jam, also featuring Art Blakey on drums, who is his usual groovin' self. Sam Jones keeps the pace wonderfully on bass. If there was a disappointment for me, it was Hank Jones's piano; I think the leaders just didn't leave a lot of space for him. Much of my prior exposure to Adderley was a couple of live albums that featured the agile and sprightly Victor Feldman on piano.

I would not describe this album as modal: the solos seem to stay within a chorded structure. However, the personnel play with assurance and a fair amount of freedom. If you typically like the mainstream jazz from this period, particularly Miles's, I think you would enjoy "Something Else."

>55 Jim53: Yes YES YESSSS!!! "Somethin' Else" is one of my 20 favorite albums, as each cut on it is top notch.

I did like Hank Jones' solos on "Autumn Leaves", which I can hear note for note in my head, especially the sultry second one.

>55 Jim53: not really a jazz person, but this appeals. I’ll try to check it out.

>55 Jim53: Oh, I remember listen to Something Else at the house of a friend whose dad loved jazz, and would play us his albums (and CDs, and cassettes). Wonderful notes. I will re-listen to it today. I see it is the wonderful Art Blakey on drums, too.

There are so many great Cannonball Adderley albums, but Somethin' Else is one of the best and certainly one of the most accessible. One of my other favorites was actually recorded with Cannonball's brother, Nat, the trumpet player, listed as session leader. The album was called In the Bag. It was recorded in New Orleans in 1962 and featured The Adderley Brothers and bassist Sam Jones along with a trio of young local musicians, two of whom would go on to become extremely influential players: drummer James Black and pianist Ellis Marsalis (yes, father of Wynton and Branford). The third was tenor saxophonist Nat Perrilliat, a player who by all accounts had a load of potential but died young. I got to interview Nat Adderley once, and he spoke very highly of Perrilliat's talent. This album was later released as The Adderley Brothers in New Orleans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Bag_(album)

Personal side note: I knew both Black and Marsalis during my radio days in New Orleans in the 1980s, and produced a radio series on jazz history that Marsalis hosted, so this album has some sentimental component for me, but nevertheless, it is a gem.

Glory days, oh they pass you by . . .

>55 Jim53: Something Else is an album that has passed me by. I need to listen to it especially as there is a ten minute version of Autumn leaves. Last week I was playing a duo with my pianist friend over at his house and we usually do Autumn Leaves.

>49 Jim53: Psalms of my people sounds intriguing. My library owns one copy, so it's going on my reading list, though I have no idea when I'll get to it.

>55 Jim53:, >56 kidzdoc:, >59 rocketjk: With recommendations from you Darryl, and Jerry, I'll have to check this out. Plus I'm reading some jazz history this year.

>56 kidzdoc: I'd love to hear about the other 19 over a root beer or whatever you drink these days!

>59 rocketjk: That sounds fascinating. My son, who was a student at Tulane when Katrina came through, spent some time working on a new music center names for Marsalis Sr.

>60 baswood: The version of Autumn Leaves on Something Else is wonderful IMHO.

>61 markon: "it'll go on my reading list, though I have no idea when I'll get to it." I seem to be saying that or some equivalent a couple of times a day recently.

lenny duncan's Psalms of My People is a creative, emphatic declaration that Black people need a new living scripture, that provided by hip-hop lyrics. They contend that hip-hop is the Holy Spirit at work, a message from the Creator. They do not"prove" this by logical argument; rather, they provide example after example of lyrics that describe and clarify the truth of the life that Black Americans face.
I have made a point of listening to a sampling of these songs, from Lauryn Hill to Kendrick Lamar to the Notorious B.I.G. I am not at all qualified by my life experience to understand very much of what duncan is saying, but his book has opened my eyes to things I had never seen, and helped me to find some hip-hop music a little less opaque.

>64 Jim53: my daughter adores Lauryn Hill. She played some for me and I couldn’t make out anything appealing to me. But i’ll try again sometime. She has good taste.

>65 dchaikin: The first place I remember encountering Ms. Hill was in the second Sister Act movie. She plays Rita, the lead singer of the choir at the end. I've been listening to "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" CD, which is considered quite wonderful, and I'm beginning to see why. I'm taking a little longer at the moment with Kendrick Lamar, although I'm getting glimpses of what people like in his music. He intrigues me because he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Damn.

I've been reading The Princess and the Goblin at bedtime. It's an oldie that I hadn't looked at in many, many years. It has survived pretty well.

Real life has been busy and stressful lately, so I haven't done much reading or posting. This week I finished Master Slave Husband Wife, which was a book club book. I don't seem to have enjoyed or appreciated it as much as my neighbors or a lot of folks on here. It tells a wonderful story, of the creative 1848 escape of a couple who were enslaved in Macon, GA. The young woman, who was very light-skinned (the daughter of the owner), passed as an ill white man of higher class, while her husband posed as her devoted slave. The story of their escape to Philadelphia and then Boston is quite good. The author put us in both characters' heads as they faced the perils of the journey. This took up about the first third of the book.

The remainder of the book is a very dry documentary, with no insights into the couple's states of mind, thoughts, or feelings, but lots of name-dropping. We slog after them from Philly to Boston, stay there for a while meeting with numerous folks involved in the abolitionist movement, and then travel further. We read about slave catchers, senators from both North and South who support the Fugitive Slave Act, and those who fight them. We are introduced very superficially to Frederick Douglas and some of his contemporaries. Had I not been reading it for the book club, I would not have finished it.

>67 Jim53: 1st 1/3 sounds terrific. Perhaps the rest is padding?

>67 Jim53: Huh, I wonder why the change in style part way through? I hope you are well, and that things become less stressful.

>68 dchaikin: >69 labfs39: I think Woo was very concerned with presenting a true story in every way she could. William Craft (the husband) left a partial journal of their escape; Woo might have felt justified in citing the thoughts and emotions that he described, and not have had a comparable source for the latter parts of the story. The journal would have to have been dictated or written later, since William and Ellen could not read or write at the time of the escape. Also, some of the later scenes in Woo's book were focused on other figures, whose mindsets would not have been available to the author. I (sort of) understand why she wrote it as she did; I just didn't enjoy it.

>69 labfs39: Thanks, Lisa! I'm hopeful.

I read The Princess and the Goblin at bedtime for a week or so. It's definitely a younger child's book, and of an older style, not really one I could get into and enjoy. But that's OK, it did the job. I won't be going on to The Princess and Curdie any time soon.

A Trail through Time was a bit of a departure from the formula Taylor used in the first few books of this series. The opening situation is based on a significant twist at the end of the previous book, so I won't reveal it here and spoil the earlier book. Professor Maxwell and her gang face some different sorts of challenges from the usual ones of visiting historical scenes, getting into trouble, and having to make sure not to change anything. I enjoyed it better that a lot of things I've been reading.

I took a look at A World on the Wing, based on a mention that I saw here; I apologize for not remembering whose. I read the prologue and first chapter. I was interested, but not enough to put it ahead of several other things in the queue. I might go back to it.

I put holds over recent months on several books that I saw praised here (plus one other), each of which had a different number of copies and holds, and I thought it safe to hope that they would become available on a somewhat staggered schedule. Silly me. Over the course of two days I received notices that Prophet Song, The Bee Sting (which almost required a forklift), North Woods, and One Wrong Word were available. I was tempted to start with my buddy Hank (we met at Malice Domestic about eight years ago and have stayed in touch), but something about Prophet Song sounded too fabulous to wait for, so I started it last night. So far I am blown away by the quality of the storytelling, and I'm looking forward to getting back to it.

>73 Jim53: This has happened to me so in Libby, at least you can defer to a later date and not lose your number 1 position on the book. Can You do that?

>73 Jim53: That is a well-known fact about library holds. It doesn't matter that you've reserved a book with a copy available, one not yet published and one with 47 holds. The rule is that they will all come in within a few days of each other.

>74 JoeB1934: Not at my library. Libby is just an interface. How it manages holds should depend on the library/libraries you are a member of.

>74 JoeB1934: I haven't asked about that. I'm still a hardcopy kind of guy. I generally do what I did this time, which is to pick them up, decide which to read first, see if I can renew any of the others as the due date approaches, and be sure to take a look through all of them before bringing them back to see if I want to get back on the list.

>75 RidgewayGirl: Yeah, I should have remembered the rule, but it's been a while, and I'm sometimes foolishly optimistic. At least for three weeks I've got lots of choices.

>73 Jim53: Ooph, several big ones there. I have Prophet Song and although I'm eager to read it, I've been waiting until I felt mentally fortified.

I’m so happy you’re reading and into PS. Funny about the library holds. I used to play with library hold system, putting holds dormant and releasing one at a time, without losing my place in line. So eventually i was next for whichever book i chose. (These were all audio, but you could do the same with paper copies.)

>72 Jim53: The Chronicles of St Mary's were my comfort reads in 2020 when I read 10 of them between March and September. The disadvantage to doing this was that I caught up!

I read the Time Police series as well which makes up for having to wait between books.

I've decided to put Prophet Song away for a bit. It's brilliantly told, but the intensity and bleakness are a bit too much for me at the moment. I had the same experience with Mare of Eastwood, a video series that I had checked out of the library. Eastwood is very close to here, and Kate Winslet was wonderful as a worn-down detective, but it was just a bit too bleak. I'm going to find myself something a bit lighter.

>81 Jim53: I have put off reading Prophet Song for the same reason. I'm waiting for the moment I have lots of fortitude.

>81 Jim53: I found Eastwood pretty insulting to the people in that area.

>67 Jim53: I just finished Master Slave Husband Wife and really enjoyed it - all the way to the end. I was glad the author didn't focus so much on the more famous people the Crafts interacted with (like Frederick Douglass) because I think they might have gotten lost or overshadowed otherwise. I also found the last half interesting because while I've read/heard about other escapes by enslaved people, I think "what happens next" is often neglected. Anyway, just wanted to throw my two cents in! I'm enjoying your thread!

>55 Jim53: Catching up with your thread! I listened to the album and liked it. I should listen more than once, but anyway I’m not a music expert so I wouldn’t have much to say about it. But I was surprised, listening to Autumn Leaves, to find out that it’s based on the famous song by Prévert and Kosma. I looked it up on my streaming service and found dozens of covers. I had no idea this song had become a jazz standard. Also, Wikipedia says that the music is based on a song by Jules Massenet written in 1876. And there is a song by the famous French artist Serge Gainsbourg that refers to this song based on another song. I’m getting dizzy! Anyway, I had fun making my own little playlist of various versions.

>64 Jim53: I'm going to try listening to the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and if I want more information, the library has this book: She begat this: 20 years of the miseducation of Lauryn Hill.

Hope you are feeling better and less stressed.

I won't be around tomorrow, so it's time for February's album of the month. I'm going with Big Big Love by Michael Franti and Spearhead. My library system has a tough time figuring out where to put their music; thy have a few under rap, a couple under pop, and even one under folk. Big Big Love, issued in 2023, also adds a touch of reggae to a few songs. The album is pretty typical of their stuff: a lot of it is quite exuberant. This is probably not even their best album (for that I might nominate Follow Your Heart), but it's the latest, and I just recently got hold of it and have been listening to it a lot on the way back and forth to/from my parents' place in Maryland. Here is a link to one of the songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPmXp9IyXEQ

Part of the stress lately has had to do with getting my parents moved. We finally got that done, although there are still a bunch of loose ends to attend to. After three trips in a week and a half, I'll wait another week to go down again. The move was both an utter disaster and smoother than expected. Today was the first day my back has eased up on screaming at me, which is a wonderful feeling. I've been zipping through One Wrong Word and it's a lot of fun; typical Hank, which means a large WTF quotient throughout. I'm developing an idea of what's going on, but based on prior experience, I suspect she's got something else up her sleeve. It needs to go back Wednesday, so I'm charging through it.

>82 labfs39: Yeah, I'll need more fortitude too. But I'm definitely gonna give it another try; the writing is just fabulous.

>83 dianeham: I just watched one episode and a fragment of a second, so I didn't get much of an impression of most of the people. I'll keep an eye out for that if I go back to it. Thanks for your comment!

>84 japaul22: I'm glad you enjoyed the whole book. And thanks for the compliment! I've got some catching up to do on your thread and others.

>85 FlorenceArt: The playlist sounds like fun. The first couple of versions of the song that I heard were rather insipid, so I wasn't well disposed toward it, but since then I've heard some very good ones. This one is one of my favorites. I love the way Miles kicks it off.

>86 markon: Thanks for your good wishes. I'm making some progress. Getting my parents moved should help, although there are still a lot of loose ends. I need to listen to Ms. Hill some more, too.

Did your parents move closer to you?

>90 dianeham: Only by a few minutes. They moved from Rockville, MD to Silver Spring. They're in a more congenial, and less expensive, assisted living building.

I finished Hank Phillippi Ryan's One Wrong Word and wrote this review:

Ryan continues her string of excellent standalone suspense novels. Arden Ward works in a PR firm, managing crises for clients, but her boss has just told her that rather than lose a super-rich client, who has accused Arden of seducing her husband, he's firing her with two weeks' notice. He gives Arden one last client, to help her try to burnish her resume. The client, Cordelia, is the wife of a man who was found innocent of manslaughter when he hit a skateboarder in a parking garage. Her friends and her kids' classmates think he got off because he was rich and have shunned her and the kids.

I found Arden to be a well drawn and appealing character. As the story progresses, she realizes that she does not know enough about the case, and she comes to wonder whom she can trust. She has to add Investigator to her list of skills. She learns something mid-book that I knew had to be the proverbial gun on the mantelpiece, but I was wrong about the person it would shoot.

The ending seemed to leave open, maybe even suggest, that we might see Arden again at some point. That would be fun.

I've picked up another genre novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, because I enjoyed Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy so much last year. It's off to a good start.

Do you ever look at the books that LT recommends you borrow from other users? At times I've poked around and used this for reading ideas (you know, because I've only got about fifteen pages in my current list). The two most frequently listed books for me to borrow are Middlemarch and Rendezvous with Rama. I decided to give the Clarke a try; I couldn't remember if I had read it back in the day or not. It was, um, decidedly less than superb. I got a few chapters into it and didn't meet anyone that I would care about at all. I guess that was less of a goal for "classic SF." I remember enjoying The Mill on the Floss pretty well, so I suppose I'll try Middlemarch at some point, but not this week.

>93 Jim53: I think sometimes the LT algorithm picks books from series that readers may have in common. Most of the series I have in my collection are from my fantasy and sci-fi days roughly thirty years ago for most. So while the other member and I might have the series in common, it's not necessarily what I would recommend to a reader now. Plus I've found that sometimes the algorithm recommends books that I may have read put rated poorly. I get most of my recommendations by reading reviews by fellow Club Read members.

>94 labfs39: yeah, I think I've learned my lesson on that technique. Although I probably will get around to Middlemarch some day ;-)

I had trouble staying away from The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, even when it was time for bed or various chores. In a way, very little actually happens: the granddaughter of a king is summoned to the elevated city from which he rules, ostensibly to be considered as an heir. She finds out that life is much more complicated than she suspected, falls in love with a god, and learns all sorts of family secrets, but it takes her a while to determine whom she can and can't trust. The ending is creative and somewhat spectacular. I'm eager to get to the next book in the series, but I have some others to read first. It's pretty much a toss-up between this book and Salvage the Bones for my best read so far this year.

>93 Jim53: I don’t find the suggestions helpful on any site ever. 🙂 You would think Amazon and Audible would know i’m not a bestseller kind of reader.

>95 Jim53: i hope you were able to dodge some chores

There is an interesting list in this morning's NYT: 22 of the funniest novels since Catch-22

From this morning's NYT: 22 of the funniest novels since Catch-22

I was able to grab The Hunter from the library. It's a sequel to The Searcher, which I think I liked better than a lot of folks did. French eases into the story slowly and gently; none of the all-too-common plopping the reader into a developing crime scene at the start of the novel.

>96 dchaikin: Well, I managed to postpone a few ;-)

>97 Jim53: And I haven't read any of them. I was the vice-president of the (fictitious) "depressing books club" for a reason! Have you read any?

From the Times list, I've read Portnoy's Complaint, Tales of the City and The Sellout.

>98 Jim53: An interesting list. I've only read four of these: The Sellout (very good), Tales of the City (excellent), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (hated it), and The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ (hated it).

>100 labfs39: I've read Oscar Wao, which I liked better than rv1988 did, and The Sellout, which I liked a lot, but which several folks in my meetup group found puzzling. I'll be looking at reviews and your comments to decide which others to try. There are some other very funny novels that I've read, which I might include in such a list: Handling Sin, Garp, Freddy and Fredericka, A Confederacy of Dunces. Do any of y'all have any to add?

I'm halfway through The Hunter and enjoying it, although even with my expectation of her taking a while to ease into things, I'm getting a bit impatient. Various things seem to be coming to a head, so I think we'll see a quickening of the pace before long.

I'm also spending some quality reading time with the instructions for form 1040. (For those lucky enough not to know, form 1040 is the primary form used to calculate and pay income taxes in the US.)

The Hunter turned out very well, with steadily building tension leading to a mostly satisfactory resolution. Here is what I wrote in my review:

A farming community in rural Ireland is seduced when Johnny Reddy, a vagabond native, returns with a rich Englishman, who claims he expects to find gold there. Johnny's daughter Trey, 15, is disgusted with the community, whom she blames for her older brother's death. American immigrant Cal Hooper is settling in, developing a relationship with widow Lena Dunne, as well as with Trey, to whom he is teaching carpentry skills and mature judgment. Numerous locals give Johnny some money to get in on the gold scam. Unlike most modern mysteries, we don't get a dead body till the middle of the book, after we've spent some time getting to know Cal, Trey, Johnny, and various other characters. French does a marvelous job of building tension throughout; she provides a resolution that leaves questions open but satisfies the needs of the moment. The book rewards patience with a very good story. Four solid stars.

>105 Jim53: I really enjoyed this, too. French is an author I can rely on to tell a good story.

Coming in late, but A Far Cry from Kensington is terrific. But i’m an Oscar Wao fan too. 🙂 I would add Nabokov’s Pnin and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. And now i want to read Nora Ephron’s Heartburn.

>103 Jim53: I read The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel by Magdalena Zyzak earlier this year (reviewed on my thread) which is very funny but also rather dark. It's a comic novel set in a fictional Soviet country, pre-World War II. Not sure it would qualify for a 'best of' list but it did make me laugh at parts.

>105 Jim53: I have this waitlisted at the library; looking forward to reading it, especially after your review.

>107 dchaikin: I just got White Teeth from the library. Right now, though, I'm reading Demon Copperhead for our community book group. So far there are things I like about it and things I don't.

I've never tried Pnin but I loved Pale Fire, which I think we read in the class on postmodern lit that I mentioned above.

Good luck with Demon Copperhead. So far i haven’t been up to the task. 🙂 (but i really enjoyed David Copperfield)

>110 dchaikin: Interesting. I tried David Copperfield a couple of years ago and hated it. I didn't get very far at all. I found Demon Copperhead a fair amount of hard work, but ultimately worthwhile. My experience of it was no doubt colored by my being pretty sick for the last ten days. (It was apparently just a nasty cold, not Covid or flu or strep, but I'm very immunosuppressed, so getting better can take a while.) I finally finished it today. I'm not sure quite how to rate it--there were sections that flowed well, others that were quite a slog, etc.--but overall I think it's a four-star book. When I was in the middle, I told my wife that if I hadn't been reading it for our community book club, I wouldn't finish it.

Kingsolver does seem to have done her homework, or perhaps just paid attention, since she lives near where the book is set. She rightly notes that the mining companies made it tough for other types of businesses to flourish in the area, that poor communities suffer horribly from addiction, and that poor rural folks are the last group about whom it seems to be OK to make jokes.

Demon is an interesting and mostly tolerable character, although he did whine like Holden Caulfield a time or two. His desire to take responsibility for himself and to do the right thing, while not completely consistent, were pretty admirable. None of the other characters were quite as well drawn, although I did particularly like Agnes, who kind of served as a reflection of how well Demon was really doing. I'm glad that I read the book, and I'm looking forward to the discussion, although I know that a couple of folks are over the moon about the book and won't be interested in hearing about any flaws. That's what you get sometimes in a book club.

Now I'm looking forward to something more comfortable. Not sure what quite yet.

Sorry you've been sick, Jim. There are some terrible bugs going around in addition to the big three (covid, flu, rsv). I hope you're feeling 100% soon.

>112 labfs39: Thanks, Lisa! I'm not great yet but I'm finally improving. This getting older ain't for sissies.

I'm giving my brain a rest after Demon Copperhead with the next chronicle of St. Mary's, No Time like the Past. I liked the title of her list of characters: Dramatis Thingummy.

>111 Jim53: I hope you're feeling better now! Interesting comments on Demon Copperhead. It's been on my list for a long time, but I've been putting it off because it seems like it requires some hard work, as you said.

>111 Jim53: hope you’re feeling better. That was a terrific post on Demon Copperhead. You created more interest for me. I’m curious about your Dickens comment. Was is just Copperfield, or is it all Dickens you dislike?

Catching up here after a little hiatus—you've got some fun reading and listening here. I'll try to keep up a bit better, but I will say that my LP Club did The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill a year or so ago and it took me a bunch of listens to really get into the swing of it. I'm glad I did.

And >42 LolaWalser: isn't The jazz loft project : photographs and tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965 cool? I bought that for my husband years ago, but I'm the one who still goes back to it.

>114 rv1988: Thanks for your good wishes. I'm still not quite 100% but I'm much better and looking forward to a short trip this weekend. Hoping to meet the young woman who has been hanging around with our younger son.

>115 dchaikin: I definitely don't dislike all Dickens. I've read just a few, but I generally enjoyed A Tale of Two Cities (which I read for 9th grade, and appreciated more on a later reread), Bleak House (I found the interminable case pretty amusing), and Great Expectations. For a brief while in Raleigh I joined a group called Dickens Disciples, led by an NCSU prof (Go Wolfpack! Men's and women's teams in their respective Final Fours) who claimed that all the great works were written by one man. It wasn't interesting enough for me to take enough time from other things to participate much. I tried Copperfield last year and just couldn't get interested in it.

>116 lisapeet: Thanks for stopping by, Lisa. I too have had a hard time keeping up with everyone's threads along with my own reading. An LP club sounds really cool. Are you still doing it?

I realized that I forgot to post a CD of the month for March. As I mentioned on the Listening thread, I've been listening to a lot of Toshiko Akiyoshi lately, so I'll nominate her big band, The Toshiko Akiyoshi/Lew Tabackin Big Band (later the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra featuring Lew Tabackin). Tabackin was the band's principal soloist, on tenor sax and flute, although for me the band as a whole was more interesting. Akiyoshi wrote and arranged pieces that took advantage of the skills of some of the individual players in the band; many of the pieces were quite complex without being offputting. She drew on her Asian background, especially on the band's first couple of albums, Kogun and Long Yellow Road. I listen to a long mix of her stuff, but the one album I take most often in the car is a collection created by the NOVUS label (which I don't believe I've seen anywhere else) of highlights from her first three albums, which were on RCA in the mid-seventies. If anyone is interested in hearing the band, you could try any of these songs on youtube: Long Yellow Road, Interlude, Road Time Shuffle, Quadrille Anyone, and more.

Very cool to see 11-seed NCState in the final four. (Making the acc look good). Clearly you have enjoyed some Dickens. Appreciate your comment and the perspective.

>117 Jim53: I'm glad that you're feeling better, Jim. Thankfully we'll have a dry, although cool, weekend in the Delaware Valley, so I hope that you have a nice visit with your youngest son and his friend.

Thanks for mentioning Toshiba Akiyoshi. She is someone who I've been meaning to listen to for several decades, but I've failed to do so. It's much easier to do so now, as I have a subscription to Spotify, so I'll make my business to start listening to her this month.

>119 dchaikin: It's particularly wonderful that they got there by beating Duke ;-)

I've started White Teeth and so far it's been up and down. I think I like it best when she focuses on the women rather than the men, but there have been a few comic gems in both cases. It will take me a while to get through it; darn RL is squeezing my reading time.

>122 Jim53: darn RL is squeezing my reading time I hate it when that happens :-)

Hope White Teeth is coming around for you. And RL is easier on your time.

>124 dchaikin: Thanks for your good thoughts, Dan. RL has gotten much worse. We thought my mother was about to die, but she has made a pretty good turnaround. She's in a very good rehab situation. However, I'm pretty sure she won't be able to return to the assisted-living facility where she was before going into the hospital. I've made several trips in the last month, to visit and to give my sister some relief. Now I'm leading the effort to find a new place where both she and my father can go. It's wearying. I keep reminding myself that there are many, many people who are experiencing much worse.

I did finish White Teeth, and I enjoyed parts of it quite a bit. Reading it in ten- and fifteen-minute chunks was not the best way to appreciate it, but it's been all I've been able to manage. I started The Broken Kingdoms but was having the same problem; I'll come back to it another time. I've been re-scanning J.A. Tyler's Tolkien Companion at bedtime; I may need to find another reread for daytimes till things settle down a bit.

>117 Jim53: I go to LP Club when I can, but the sessions are done from the library so they start at 5, and it's hard for me to disengage with work that early a lot of the time. But hope springs eternal.

>125 Jim53: That is exhausting. And trying to find a place when you aren't living locally is really hard.

>125 Jim53: I'm glad your mother is doing better. Good luck with the logistics of care for her and your father.

>127 RidgewayGirl: >128 labfs39: thanks for your good thoughts!

As I tell my wife when I'm running late, don't pay the ransom, I've escaped! I hate to have been absent all this time, but I really haven't felt up to posting. Things might be settling down now; we'll see.

After finishing White Teeth I needed a comfort read, and I picked up Katy Munger's Bad to the Bone. I knew Katy when we lived in Durham and got her to join our library mystery club a time or two when we read her books. This is one of her series of fun mysteries starring PI Casey Jones. I have already reread a few of these, but I didn't remember how this one went, so it seemed like a good choice, and it was. Those who like humorous (but not cozy) mysteries with bad-ass women might enjoy it, although it's hard to find her outside the Triangle area. It gave me some comfort and a chuckle at a time when I needed both.

Up above I mentioned Tyler's Tolkien Companion. I couldn't remember where some of the places mentioned were, or envision just how some areas were related to one another, so I checked out The Atlas of Middle Earth and had some fun going back and forth between the two. Aha! So that's why Lindon is mentioned as inland at one point and coastal at another! Etc. The atlas also has some good summaries of what was happening during the different ages and how events affected the geography.

It's nice to have you back and around on the threads, Jim. I hope things continue to improve for you, or at least maintain the status quo.

>131 labfs39: Thanks very much, Lisa. I think a pretty long period of status quo is what I'm expecting. The status is a good bit better than it was for a while, so this should be a less stressful time.

After re-exploring Middle Earth, I tried Eastbound, based on seeing it mentioned in a few threads here. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Its shortness enabled me to fit it between some of the more stressful parts of recent months. My only disappointment is that in the final couple of paragraphs, she seemed to abandon the subtlety that made the story so wonderful. By explicitly comparing the two travelers and their stories, she undid (for me) the wonderful work she had done in depicting their stories, different as they were in many respects, as remarkably similar in others. Oh well. Still a very enjoyable read.

After Eastbound, I tried The Pollutant Speaks, my most recent ER book. And quite probably my last, unless they happen to offer a new book by one of my favorite authors. There are so many books on my list, which grows almost daily from visiting all your threads, that I really don't need to try any more of these freebies.

Pollutant was one of those books that I was tempted to quit almost every time I picked it up, but I seemed to find some clever nuggets that kept me going. I finally tired of it enough to abandon it near the middle. Here is what I wrote in my review:

This is the sort of book I loved in high school. It contains echoes of Chip Delany and a phildickian atmosphere. Evans was a poet but lost his ability to write. His life is in danger, so he accepts an odd invitation to an off-world audition. The concepts are fascinating: a union of aliens, who communicate in a very complex combination of words and context, which the humans want to join.

Several of the locations are described pretty well. The invented names for future items are easy enough to figure out. Unfortunately, there just isn't enough to the characters to keep me interested. I went back and forth several times between "why am I still looking at this?" and "hmmm, this is better than I thought." Evans, the viewpoint character, mostly just goes where he's sent. He is better than his peers at recognizing how little we all know, but he doesn't do much with this nugget. If the author can make his characterizations as interesting as some of his other concepts, he will be one to watch.

>132 Jim53: I read Eastbound recently too. I really liked it, although I see what you mean about the ending.

>133 Jim53: I haven't seen many ER books that have even tempted me lately, but I had very good luck with my most recent pick, The Book Censor's Library, at least with the story. The physical book, an advance reading copy, was misprinted, but Abby contacted the publisher and they sent a non-ARC pronto.

>133 Jim53: >134 labfs39: Interesting about the Early Reviewers. I've had the same difficulty, made even worse by the fact that many of the publishing rights for books I might be interested in have not been worked out for Canada.

>134 labfs39: I noticed The Book Censor's Library in my public library last week. Sounds as if I might want to give it a try at some point. I'll look at your thread soon to see what you have to say about it. Glad to her that Abby took good care of you.

>135 SassyLassy: I've heard that from other international readers too. I hope some progress can happen.

After all that, I started Tiger Moon and was liking it quite well. Then we got to within a week of our book club meeting and my wife finally finished the book for that month, Anxious People, so I switched over to that and raced through it. I found the initial chapters, some of which were less that a page, pretty annoying, but I hung in and the book improved. It wasn't fabulous, but it flowed pretty well after he progressed to more "normal" or "usual" chapters. I found some of the characters pretty interesting, and the links he drew between some of them were nice. The discussion was better than it is sometimes.

I decided to turn the process around for the next month; as soon as I brought the book home, I said I wanted to read it first, and would leave her plenty of time. Cool. The book was The Mountain Sings, a multigenerational story of a family in North Vietnam, going back and forth between chapters told by a twelve-year-old girl and her grandmother. The story was quite interesting, but the style was terribly flat. I ended up giving it to my wife after about 100 pages, but not because I didn't want to read it any more.

Last year I injured my right shoulder (ironically, while doing physical therapy for my back). I got an x-ray, was told I have a lot of arthritis in the shoulder, and didn't do anything else about it. It began to hurt worse, so I went back and asked for an MRI, which I got, which showed that the uppermost muscle in the rotator cuff was not just torn, but completely separated from the joint. The orthopedist told me that he could operate, but the recovery period was long and unpleasant. Chats with a couple of neighbors corroborated this. So I tried having him give me a shot and doing PT for the shoulder. After six weeks, it was worse rather than better, so I scheduled surgery for early June. I would have liked to do it sooner, but I'm taking my wife to a mountain resort for her milestone birthday next week, and I decided I didn't want to wear a sling and be even more incapacitated during that trip. The surgery will be on the 17th, and that is the night when the book club is discussing The Mountain Sings. So I have a very good reason not to be there.

I'm amazed, by the way, at the complexity of the shoulder joint and the amount of redundancy that is built into its structure. We can move our arm in more ways than other appendages. I can still do a lot of things with the arm, although they hurt; I'm not sure whether that would be true for a comparable injury to any other joint.

I needed something easy to take on a trip to see my parents, so I picked What Could Possibly Go Wrong?, the sixth episode of the Chronicles of St. Mary's and their time-travelling historians. Dr. Maxwell, our viewpoint character, takes on a new challenge as the director of training, and introduced five new candidates to the rites and sacred mysteries of history as done at St. Mary's. The usual sorts of hijinks ensue, with a couple of very entertaining and suspenseful twists. This was IMHO one of the best volumes of the series.

I'm sorry that neither Anxious People nor The Mountain Sings worked for you. I loved them both, I should join your book club! Good luck with your shoulder surgery. Shoulder's are complex, but the surgeries they do now are quite amazing. I hope you are pain-free and with full ROM soon.

Good luck with your surgery, and I hope you enjoy that mountain resort beforehand.

I pray that your surgery is successful and free from complications, Jim. I can sympathize to a degree, as I have arthritis in my left rotator cuff after I tore the joint after a fall at home about 10 years ago. It's getting progressively worse, so I really need to at least start doing dedicated exercises to improve its function and decrease the pain from the arthritis.

>139 labfs39: >140 rocketjk: >141 kidzdoc: Thanks very much for your kind support!

>139 labfs39: Neither was terrible, but I've been in a strange place lately and finding it harder not to notice and focus on the flaws in what I'm reading. That should end now, though, because I've borrowed a copy of The Hoboken Chicken Emergency, to test whether it seems like a good fit for my eight-year-old grandson. Naturally I need to peruse it first to see if I think he can handle it. I'm just a little way in, but I'm finding it amusing.

Albums of the month.

For April (at which point I was too distracted to post anything) I've chosen Vasily Kalinnikov's Symphonies 1 and 2. These are his only published symphonies, and I find them mostly calming and relaxing. I often listen to some classical music (I generally prefer symphonic, but not always) while my wife fixes dinner, sort of keeping her company by reading close by without interfering with her work. I had this one in the CD player a lot, because we both enjoy it. Kalinnikov was largely influenced by Tchaikovsky, who helped him obtain a couple of conducting jobs. He died at 34 of tuberculosis, in a sanitarium in Yalta that also housed Chekhov and Gorky.

For May: Benny Carter is one of my favorite musicians. His is my favorite voice on alto sax, and I'm continually impressed with his abilities as composer, arranger, and assembler and leader of bands of various sizes. In 1962 he released a wonderful album called Further Definitions, and he followed up in 1966 with Additions to Further Definitions, another fine outing. As was typical in those days, the albums were pretty short. This enabled the folks at the Impulse! label to combine the two into a single CD in 1997. The music is pre-bop but enables Carter and a number of soloists to cut loose at various tempos. Highlights include Honeysuckle Rose, Crazy Rhythm, Prohibido, and two versions (one from each original album) of Doozy. I've been playing it in the car a lot and enjoying it as much as ever.

>143 Jim53: I have Carter's Further Definitions album in LP form. I agree that it's an album that's endlessly enjoyable.

>143 Jim53: Thanks for the Benny Carter recommendations, Jim; I'm almost completely unfamiliar with him. I'll listen to "Further Definitions" on Spotify soon, and buy the Impulse! CD if I like it.

>143 Jim53: I like your idea of album of the month quite a lot! May I borrow it, and start posting my own in my own thread? I may take it a step further and include movie of the month.

>146 janoorani24: Of course! Please do. A movie of the month sounds like fun too.

I've lost track of which books I've mentioned out of those that I read. I picked up seven paperbacks at a recent library sale, along with six compact disks. The only book I've read so far is Dennis Lehane's Since We Fell, which was not one of his stronger efforts IMHO. I really like some of the Kenzie-Gennaro books, plus The Given Day and some of the standalones, but this one didn't do much for me.

I found a copy of I Have Some Questions For You sticking out from the shelf the last time I visited the library. I remembered seeing it mentioned by a couple of us and decided it was sticking itself out for me to pick up. I found it quite intriguing. Why on earth is the protagonist addressing one particular person as "you," especially since I can't tell how integral that person might be to the story? What will this particular author do with a "going back to the old stomping ground" story that sets it apart? Will she treat the mysterious circumstances as a mystery? What is the role of all the podcasting in the story? Etc. The descriptions of the narrator's high-school experiences were vividly rendered, and the reactions of former classmates many years later were quite interesting. Is the narrator a portrait of obsession, or just a very focused person? Does her unusual home situation tell us anything about her, or is it just a convenient way to provide for her kids? Overall it was quite a good read. Four stars. Now I want to read her other books.

I've read part of How to Listen to Jazz, and I might stick with it if there weren't all these other titles banging on the door. I enjoyed the first chapter, about starting with rhythm, though I have found the book as a whole rather dry. I might pick it up again later, or more likely, look for something else on a similar topic.

My bedtime book, Lies, Damned Lies, and History, is seeping over into daytime, so i'll probably go ahead and finish it before I pick up something else.

>148 Jim53: I Have Some Questions for You was not without its flaws, but it's certainly one that gives the reader a lot to think about. The person she's addressing throughout the book is her former teacher, the one involved with the student who was murdered.

If you haven't read anything else by her, I recommend The Great Believers, a novel about the AIDs epidemic and set in Chicago.

>150 RidgewayGirl: Thanks, Kay. I realized who "you" was (that sounds a bit off, doesn't it?), but I couldn't decide why she was addressing him rather than any of the other characters (I realize the fact you've put behind spoiler tags). Is it telling us something in particular about Bodie, that she has fixed on this particular person to address that way? Does it reflect whatever happened to her at college or later? An attitude she has about teacher ethics? A more significant relationship with the addressee than she has told us about? I couldn't come up with answers to all this, even at the end. Which is not a terrible thing in itself, but I'm certainly curious.

I have added The Great Believers to my list at the library.

>151 Jim53: Well, Bodie had been his favorite student. She adored and admired him. Having him turn out to be sexually coercive is a betrayal that affected her deeply.

>152 RidgewayGirl: Well put. For some reason I kept looking for more, but put like that it's enough.

I can't forget to mention that I polished off The Hoboken Chicken Emergency, which I picked up in the hope of interesting my grandson in it, but I think it wasn't fantastic enough. His reading is very focused on dragons at the moment.

I interrupted my reading of Moon Tiger to sneak in my book-club book (Anxious People), and now I'm finally getting back to it. I tried to pick it up at the bookmark, but I couldn't quite recapture the context, so I started over. Good decision. What a pleasure this is! Her talk of strata, as an image linking her life to world history, is just right. Many thanks to those of you who mentioned this book! I'm still progressing slowly because of travel; I hope to finish before my rotator cuff surgery a week from today.

Good luck with your surgery, Jim. I hope your recovery is swift and effective.

My shoulder surgery seems to have gone quite well on Monday. Right now I can't read much of anything due to the pain meds, whose dosage will probably go down after a follow-up visit during the coming week. I've been telling my neighbors and friends that the whole process has been less painful than I expected. Aha, they cackle, rubbing their hands with glee, just wait till you start PT!

I haven't been able to read much of anything yet; I guess that's part of the price of being relatively pain-free. I've tried a few easy-looking books, but no luck so far. I can't even stay with a movie. but I've started stockpiling some books for when I'm ready.

>156 Jim53: I'm glad to hear that your shoulder surgery went well. Good luck with the PT, and maybe some light plot-driven thrillers during recovery?

>156 Jim53: Good luck with your recovery!

>157 labfs39: >158 rv1988: Thanks very much for your good wishes. I had my follow-up visit with the surgeon today, and he told me that my recent symptoms are pretty common for someone in my, um, demographic (I said relax, you can say old, I'm not gonna get upset) after the amount and type of anesthesia they gave me, plus a nerve block. I've stopped taking the opiates in hopes of feeling clearer; from what I hear, I'll be glad to have them once I start PT on July 8.

I decided to reread an oldie and picked up Bob Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle. It has not improved with time. It kept me awake and got me through some periods when I wasn't good for much of anything else. I can't imagine going back to it again, and it was a quite old paperback, not in library-acceptable condition, so I threw it in the recycling.

>156 Jim53: Glad to hear it went well, nice rhyme there. :) I hope the recovery goes well too.

>160 Karlstar: Thanks, Jim. Great to see you here.

I zipped through A Murmuration of Starlings: The Collective Nouns of Animals and Birds, or rather, my wife and I took turns reading it to each other in a medical waiting room. I was underwhelmed. The one sort-of-new fact that I picked up was that the reason for developing many of these collective nouns was to describe hunting trips and their results.

I'm going somewhat slowly through A Woman from Uruguay. I'm enjoying it but tending to run out of gas every thirty pages or so. Fortunately it's quite short. I think my reading mojo is coming back a little.

Album of the month for June:

I've been listening to a good bit of hard bop, lately, which requires a little bit less mental participation on my part than some more ambitious jazz does. This has included several early-sixties albums by Hank Mobley, including Soul Station, Roll Call, Workout, and No Room for Squares. It's more like listening to some really good R&B than like listening to Miles or Herbie. Of all these, I'll pick Soul Station, which I've listened to the most because of the wonderful leadoff track, an Irving Berlin composition called Remember. This is the only session of this bunch that does not feature a second horn; while some of the others feature Freddie Hubbard or Lee Morgan on Trumpet, Soul Station is just Hank with a great rhythm section.

>162 Jim53: I love those old Hank Mobley albums. When it comes to hard bop, Horace Silver is my go-to, and I've got a Curtis Fuller album I'm nuts about as well. You can't go wrong with Soul Station, though!

Here's a summary of the first half of the year. (The list of titles is in >2 Jim53: if anyone cares to look.) I didn't read as much as I have in some years, but I'm pretty pleased with the quality. I read 26 books, but one was an audition for my grandson, so by leaving it out I have 25, which makes percentages and stuff much easier. My biggest goal was to find and read some very good non-genre fiction; I read seven such novels, for 28% of my reading. I think the best book in this category was Salvage the Bones. I read ten in the categories of fantasy and science fiction (40%), of which I'd say the best was The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Just four mysteries (16%), a dramatic lowering from prior years; the best was One Wrong Word. Only four nonfiction books, again 16%, of which my favorite was The Art of Jazz. No poetry yet, other than reading some Mary Oliver online, and poking through Sonnets from the Portuguese in search of passwords.

I often read books, particularly genre fiction, in series. There were only a few such books in 1H24. Salvage the Bones is part of Jesmyn Ward's series set in Bois Sauvage, LA. The Hunter is a sequel to French's The Searcher. My main series reading has been several books in Jodi Taylor's Chronicles of St. Mary's.

I've been reading, and not recording here, lots of articles on social-justice topics. As far as published books go, as far as I know, I have read just four so far this year by writers of color:
Salvage the Bones, White Teeth, Psalms of My People, and Master, Slave, Husband, Wife.

As for quality, I have not given any books five stars so far this year. I've given two books 4.5 stars: Salvage the Bones and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Looking back, I "agree" with myself that they were my best reads. There were eleven four-star books, so 13 of the 25, or 52%, were quite good. Some of the 3.5s were pretty good but didn't quite rise to what I call a four-star book; a couple were rather insipid. Overall, I'm quite pleased with the quality of my reading, and a lot of the credit goes to those from whom I've been taking book bullets all along, so I thank you very much.

>164 Jim53:

As far as published books go, as far as I know, I have read just four so far this year by writers of color

I'm pretty sure N. K. Jemisin is a POC.

>165 rhian_of_oz: of course. Thanks for catching that.

My first book completed in the second half of the year is The Woman from Uruguay, which tells the story of a man's one-day excursion to Montevideo to receive an advance from his publisher and meet back up with Guerra, a woman whom he met on his prior visit. He is quite infatuated with Guerra, and his whole focus on the trip is to see her again and bed her. His plans go awry quite terribly. There is a question about what role Guerra plays in his disaster, which I was glad to see the author did not resolve.

It was interesting, in the aftermath of his trip and all the fallout from it, to see the author say something to the effect that "I write to explain myself to myself." I poked around in the crowded and disorganized attic that is my memory for a long time before coming up with the book where I had seen a similar statement: it was Gene Wolfe's science-fiction classic The Fifth Head of Cerberus. Wolfe's narrator is a clone, and is obsessed with figuring out why his cloned family cannot rise above its current station in its society. I don't know if Wolfe's use of the statement was original, whether Mairal would have been familiar with Wolfe, whether they might have both picked it up from an older, common source, or what. For me, it made for a vivid linkage, which enriched Mairal's story considerably.

>163 rocketjk: I enjoy a lot of Silver as well. I've primarily seen Fuller as a sideman in a lot of different bands; the only recording I have with him as a leader is Pajama Tops, from a multi-artist compilation; I like it quite a bit. What is the Fuller album about which you're nuts?

>168 Jim53: Well, actually I have two Curtis Fuller albums I really like:

One is Smokin' on Mainstream Records with a group including Jimmy Heath, Cedar Walton and Billy Higgins


The other is The Magnificent Trombone of Curtis Fuller on Epic Records. Jimmy Garrison plays bass and there's some nice piano playing by Walter Bishop, Jr.


The first is the more cooking hard bop session. The second is more bluesy and mainstream.

The Curtis Fuller discography on Discogs is here: https://www.discogs.com/artist/257250-Curtis-Fuller. But the two listed are the only two I own.

>168 Jim53: cool, thanks, Jerry. I will keep my eyes and ears open for more Fuller.

I've started reading Medgar and Myrlie and it's quite captivating. I'm not as familiar with Evers as with other activists, so this should fill in a good hole in my awareness. It doesn't seem to be a bedtime book, though, so I'll need something else for that.

I've been indulging my interest in cosmology by watching a documentary featuring Brian Cox, called Wonders of the Solar System. I've watched the first of three disks. It's more oriented toward sensawunda than toward hard physics, but I'm finding it fun and looking forward to the next two disks. I did learn a few things I never knew or had forgotten, such as the relationship between solar wind and the earth's magnetosphere (coming together to form the aurora borealis), and the location of the Oort cloud. Cox is pretty good at the narrator role.

The second disk of Wonders of the Solar System grabbed me a lot less than the first. I have, however, found something new to reduce my reading time: a humorous series of mystery shows called New Tricks. As one might guess, the story involves a group of retired British cops who are pulled together to tackle old unsolved cases. I tried it because I saw a mention of it in an interview by Deborah Crombie, who is one of my favorite mystery writers. It's got just the mix of humor and mystery for my current circumstances and mindset.

The good thing about coming late to news of surgery is that by now you are surely well recovered. :) At least that's the hope!

>173 Jim53:

Oh I enjoyed New tricks. I'm a fan of quite a few old British shows, so I enjoyed seeing people like James Bolam or Denis Waterman still in action.

I've got a few books going at the moment: Medgar and Myrlie is a relatively easy read so far, but with my limited attention span, I'm not sticking with it for long periods. I started Green Frog, but I find myself feeling critical of the stories because they don't treat things the way novels do. Reading short stories is a skill I need to re-develop. At bedtime I've been reading another Jodi Taylor, And the Rest Is History, featuring the battle of Hastings and some brutal losses at St. Mary's. I might just finish it before returning to the others. It wouldn't be the first time.

ETA I've also got some others out from the library and awaiting my attention: The Brides of High Hill, The Silkworm, and The Bird Hotel. I might not get to all of them unless I can renew them all.

>173 Jim53: A favorite of mine for years and years. Also Deborah Crombie

>176 JoeB1934: Yes, Debs is fabulous. I'm waiting impatiently for her next. Also several others, including Julia Spencer-Fleming and SJ Rozan. At least I'll have Ellen Crosby's new Sophie Medina novel by next month.

I finished off And the Rest is History, which had a slightly different tone from some of the entries in this series. That's very good, as far as I'm concerned; I don't want to read a whole list of books that are very similar. This afternoon I read The Brides of High Hills, #5 in Nghi Vo's series of novellas The Singing Hills. Cleric Chih accompanies a young bride and her family to the estate of a wealthy old man who might want to marry her. There is a sense of tension throughout. This one took a darker turn than most of this series, but it was a very smooth and entertaining read.

>174 LolaWalser: Hi Lola! Thanks for stopping in. I've recovered to the point where I feel able to do all sorts of things that I'm not supposed to do yet ;-) Three more weeks and I can lose the sling. PT is currently focused on range of motion; we'll get to recovering strength later. I hope all is well with you!

I tried The Bird Hotel, based on Joe's description, but I became too impatient with it and have DNFed it. I have a couple additional interesting-looking books out from the library, but I think tomorrow I will start Wolf Hall.

>180 Jim53: I put off reading Wolf Hall for years, but ended up loving it and Bring Up the Bodies even more. I expected it to be slow, and, for someone who doesn't care much for Kings and Queens of England, boring. Surprise! I hope you can get into it.

>181 labfs39: I'm just a few chapters into Wolf Hall, but I'm finding it very evocative. I have to change my bedtime book, though; I was reading An Argumentation of Historians, in which the time-travelling historians visit Henry VIII. Fortunately there are lots of choices.

Glad to see another fan of the Singing Hills series. I just finished Mammoths at the gates.

I've enjoyed the beginning of Wolf Hall, but it hasn't kept me from keeping numerous books going all at once. I'm still reading Medgar and Myrlie, which is fascinating. I started The Silkworm for my bedtime book, because I enjoyed The Cuckoo's Calling; some of the details are quite gory and gross, so it's become more of a midday book than bedtime. I've been reading Judi Dench's Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, a bullet from my friend jillmwo, and enjoying it tremendously. It's a little too hard to put down to be a bedtime book.

I've also got some intrusions of real life into my reading time, some good, some less so. So I think Wolf Hall will wait a bit till we get through a few things.

>184 Jim53: A nice melange of books, Jim. I hope things settle down for you soon.

Just back from celebrating my Mom's 95th birthday. Lovely celebration. I ended up having to return Judi Dench and Medgar Evers to the library--someone, not realizing I wanted to renew them, had the audacity to place their own holds. So I've taken them back and put new holds on them. In the mean time I finished The Silkworm, which went on way too long. It did have a pretty positive, or at least neutral, transgender character in it, which made me wonder if JKR is softening her stance there, until I saw her chiming in on alleged transgender competitors at the Olympics. I think I'm done with that series.

Currently I'm finishing An Argumentation of Historians, which I had put aside due to probable confusion with Wolf Hall. Will I pick Wolf Hall back up next? Not sure yet.

I've been listening to a lot of Milt Jackson in the last five or six weeks. As is the case with other artists, it can be hard to pick out just one album to feature. I love Plenty Soul, Bebop, Reverence and Compassion, and his work with Oscar Peterson in the Very Tall Band. I'm going to chose Burning in the Woodhouse because it has several songs that I can listen to over and over again, including In the Woodhouse, A Bell for Bags, and They Can't Take That Away from Me. I like some other vibraphonists' work, including Gary Burton and Bobby Hutcherson, but IMHO Jackson is by far the best, with his focus on swing and varying beats and melodies.

I was curious about Jackson's nickname, "Bags." It seems to derive from bags under his eyes, which were apparent from early in his career. One source says that the name originated after friends watched Jackson go on a drinking binge after leaving the army. Another says that he was a pretty consistent late-night partier for much of his career, resulting in the bags under his eyes. Jackson seemed to embrace the nickname; one of his most famous songs is entitled "Bags' Groove," and he used it in a couple of album titles.

Two of my favorite album of Jackson's are Goodbye (with Hubert Laws) and Sunflower, both released by CTI. All in all, Hutcherson is my favorite vibes player, as my very favorite jazz sub-genre is the post-bop music exemplified by the classic Blue Note albums of the 50s & 60s. That's of course a "to each his/her/their own" proposition.

I got to interview Hutcherson several times, and also Burton once (that one was a phone interview) during my jazz journalism days. Even Lionel Hampton! But not Jackson, unfortunately.

>188 rocketjk: Jerry, do you have a favorite album or two of Hutcherson's? The only one I have is Oblique, which IMHO is kind of uneven.

I bet those interviews were fun!

>189 Jim53: Dialogue (which features Andrew Hill, one of my favorite pianists) and Stick Up! (Joe Henderson, Billy Higgins and McCoy Tyler), both on Blue Note are two of my favorite Hutcherson albums. I also have a fondness for "San Francisco," which is billed as Bobby Hutcherson featuring Harold Land. It's also a Blue Note release, probably not quite as good, or adventurous, as the first two I mentioned. Hutcherson and Land worked together quite a bit in SF in the 60s and 70s, a bit before my time in that city.

Some my favorite music of Hutcherson was his participation in an all-star band the San Francisco Jazz Festival (a.k.a. SFJAZZ) put together every year. The first iteration of that project was the subject of my one and only Down Beat Magazine feature story. The band was Josh Redman (tenor sax), Miguel Zenon (alto), Nicholas Payton (trumpet), Josh Roseman (trombone), Renee Roses (piano), Robert Hurst (bass) and Brian Blade (drums) and Hutcherson. Each of the musicians brought an original composition to teach the group, and then they also performed arrangemments of several Ornette Coleman compositions. (Each subsequent year they covered works by a different famous jazz composer.) The concerts were epic. This was somewhere around 20 years ago. Hutcherson was the veteran presence for what was otherwise a group of relatively young stars. For several weeks I sat in on their rehearsals and took notes on my laptop. I wrote the Down Beat article, and the SFJazz folks asked me to write the liner notes for the CD as well.* Glory days, oh they pass you by . . . They did this once a year (They may still be doing it), with a gradually evolving lineup of musicians.

I think Hutcherson was involved for three or four years. I interviewed him several times for that article, and also interviewed him again ahead of a duo concert he performed with pianist Ellis Marsalis. Hutcherson was a very, very kind man. Also thoughtful, intelligent and funny. Hutcherson was "only" an ensemble player for those SFJAZZ Collective recordings, rather than a group leader. I looked around on my hard drive and found the transcript of the interview I did with Hutcherson at the end of the group's initial run. I only have it on a word doc, but I could email it to you if you're interested (or to anyone else).

* The original release was a 3-CD set on the SFJazz label. Later they released it as a single CD on Nonesuch and replaced my liner notes with notes by Bob Blumenthal, a much more famous writer. (Well, I should just say a "famous writer," as I was never famous at all.) I understood the decision, but I would have appreciated at least a phone call letting me know ahead of time. C'est la vie!

>190 rocketjk: Thanks, I will keep an eye out for those.

Not much time to read these days. Lots of little trips, as well as some time-consuming commitments at meeting. I have been rereading UKL's The Winds Twelve Quarters, which has some excellent stories. "April in Paris," which she says is the first story she ever got paid for, is an old sentimental favorite of mine.

I forgot to mention that I got Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent back from the library after having to return it, and this time I cruised through it fairly quickly. It's absolutely delightful, with Judi Dench talking about the roles she has played in the various plays (an awful lot of the female roles), things she learned, fun things the actors did to one another, various directors, etc. I find myself very susceptible to her type of wit. One of my favorite books so far this year.

I helped our community book club to choose a couple of Percival Everett novels onto the list for the coming year. I have also moved from #134 to #8 on the list for James. I decided that to fully appreciate it, I need to have a much better recollection of Huck Finn than I currently do, so I've pulled out my old fifty-cent copy and have started it.

>193 Jim53: I want to do read Huck first as well, never having gotten all the way through it.

>194 labfs39: I put my ancient copy of Huck in my bag for a recent trip (my granddaughter was wonderful as Wednesday in the Adams Family musical, which I didn't know existed), and quickly realized that the print was way too small for me to read. Fortunately I had a couple of other books with me (below). When we returned I went to the library and looked at all the versions they had there, all of which had the tiny print. I had to put in a request for a Large-print copy, which has finally arrived and from the outside looks like a huge graphic novel. But the words are there, and so far I'm mostly enjoying it.

I remember someone liking the Dortmunder series of comic mysteries by Donald Westlake. I tried the first one, The Hot Rock, but I dropped it after the first caper. I tend to enjoy silly books for the most part, but this was an odd combination of silly and pretty dry, which didn't work well for me. So it goes.

Fortunately, I also had along a collection of James Baldwin short stories, Going to Meet the Man. I picked this up because I read somewhere that the best way to get started on Baldwin is with the story "Sonny's Blues." It is indeed a powerful story, with brilliant descriptions and exceptional language. I also read a couple other stories, including the title story and "Man Child." I would love to be able to take a class to study Baldwin, because I feel there is probably a lot more there than what I'm picking up on. I'll have to look around at the local colleges.

Another trip tomorrow, to visit my parents for the first time after putting my Mom into hospice care. I'm anxious to see how she is experiencing the whole process.

>195 Jim53: Congrats on your granddaughter's thespian success! I hear you about small print. It was one of the unforeseen benefits of my e-reader, being able to change font size. I hope you visit to see your mom goes well.

I finished off Huck Finn, and didn't enjoy or appreciate it as much as I had expected. On the one hand, we see Huck grow a bit from the guy who treats Jim with casual cruelty near the beginning of their journey (e.g., telling Jim that he had been with Jim on the raft all through a storm when he had been off in the canoe), to a young man struggling with what is right between treating Jim as property and as a human being. On the other hand, the side characters are a bit much. And a certain coincidence was way too much. At least now I'm better prepared for James. I've moved from #156 on the list to #4.

In the last couple of days I read Carlo Rovelli's Seven Brief lessons on Physics, to help me prepare for more astrophysics/cosmology. In my review I said:

A pleasant and informative surface-level view of various aspects of modern physics. He tries to be both clear and a bit mystical at the same time, and succeeds some of the time. A very interesting read; I would have liked about 50% more material on each topic.

Now I'll go find that additional material on each topic.

>198 Jim53: and succeeds some of the time

Oh, no. Not exactly a stellar recommendation.

>199 labfs39: Even though he doesn't always succeed at this, I found the book interesting and worthwhile. Usually a book will aim for either clarity or mysticism. In trying for both, Rovelli at least gives us the idea that the approaches are not completely at odds with one another. I'll be watching for other texts that are open to both approaches. Next up is Neil deGrasse Tyson's Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

My album for the month for August is Manhattan Transfer's The Offbeat of Avenues. My wife and I have enjoyed MT for many years and have seen them (I think) three times in concert. For those who aren't familiar, much of their repertoire consists of singing words to classic jazz tunes. This technique is known as "vocalese" and was pioneered, as far as I know, by Jon Hendricks ("The James Joyce of Jive") in the 1950s. This album comes after MT's biggest hits (such as they were), including their versions of Joe Zawinul's Birdland, Sonny Rollins's Airegin, and Jimmy Giuffre's Four Brothers. As their career progressed, they added more covers of contemporary songs. Offbeat is the first album on which band members wrote or co-wrote more than half the songs. The only instrumental tune to which they've added lyrics is Blues for Pablo, which Bill Evans wrote for Miles Davis.

Highlights include Sassy, for which they won a grammy, Ten Minutes till the Savages Come, and my personal favorite, a World Apart, which is almost a solo for lead singer Janis Siegel. If you're not familiar with MT, this is a good example of their later career, when they had moved from mostly doing vocalese to recording their own compositions.

I decided to do a little more background before reading Tyson, so I grabbed 30-second universe. It covers a lot of topics (50) but is quite brief, devoting a page or two to each topic. There are also some one-page bios of significant contributors. I'm sticking with it in the hope that I'll pick up just enough tidbits about some topics that when I see them again I won't be starting from scratch. Plus knowing that the sections are predictably brief helps me fit them in at short times when I wouldn't make much progress on a novel.

At bedtime I've been reading another of Jodi Taylor's Chronicles of St. Mary's, Hope for the Best. I did not enjoy this one as much as the last few. The next one is titled Plan for the Worst, so I'm guessing they constitute a little duology within the series. I'm hoping it will return to the quality of some of the prior volumes.

Hello, friends. The last couple of months have been quite trying and hectic. After a month of hospice care, my mother died a couple of weeks ago. There is still a lot to do, and in spite of relief at the end of her suffering, I'm still feeling a lot of sadness.

Mom was a founding member and past president of the Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime, the national organization of (mostly female) mystery writers and fans. I wrote to their membership chair to tell them of Mom's death, and soon heard that members had been posting stories of her kindness on their group listserv. I also found out that some of the writers I know also knew Mom, but did not know that we were related.

As you might imagine, I have hd a tough time doing much reading. I will provide more details soon. I have found some comfort in reading mystery novels, and I think I will devote the rest of 2024 to catching up on a few more of those in Mom's honor.

I'm so sorry to hear of your loss, Jim. Thank you for giving us an update, as I was wondering how things were going. I think reading some books in her honor is a wonderful tribute. Did she have a particular favorite?

I'm sorry to hear about your mother's passing, Jim. Your decision to read mystery novels in her honor for the remainder of the year sounds like a nice tribute to her.

I am sorry for your loss. I hope that reading mystery books in her honor will be a comfort to you.

>205 labfs39: >206 kidzdoc: >207 WelshBookworm: Thank you all. Mom was a particular fan of classic mysteries, especially Dorothy Sayers, but also Agatha Christie and others. She did a couple of programs on the history of mystery at SinC and other conventions. I'm not much of a Christie fan, and I've read all of the Lord Peters; perhaps I'll reread Gaudy Night. Lately I've been reading more modern, fairly light mysteries, including Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club series, which I'm finding a lot of fun. I've also got Donna Andrews's new Meg Langslowe mystery, Rockin' Around the Chickadee, in the queue. That's one of Donna's more extreme bird puns.

When I attended Malice ten years ago, I was selected to play in a trivia game sponsored by the Jungle Red Writers, which include a couple of my favorites, Julia Spencer-Fleming and Deborah Crombie. I was on Rhys Bowen's team, and she gave me a copy of a compendium of her first three Lady Georgie novels, the mildly racily titled A Royal Threesome. This series is a little cozier than what I usually read, but months later, I read them while my wife and I dealt with her father's final illness and death, and they were fabulous comfort reads. I was very glad to have the opportunity to tell Rhys about that the following year. I have been loyal to the series, which is quite funny at times, and I've got the latest on hold at the library.

My condolences, Jim. That's a nice idea to read in her favourite genre.

>204 Jim53: I'm very sorry, condolences. How lovely that you'll read mystery novels in her honour. It is a beautiful way to pay tribute to her interests.

>209 LolaWalser: >210 rv1988: Thank you.

I've been reading not just mysteries, but mysteries with senior citizens in leading roles. Killers of a Certain Age features some sixtyish women who are former assassins, who must resume their past careers as they investigate who is trying to kill them. I've also read all four of Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club series, in which a group of octogenerians living in a senior village form a club to investigate past cases, and then get caught up in current cases too. Humor abounds, and we learn the foursome's characters pretty well. The fourth one, The Last Devil to Die, which I finished today, adds some quite poignant scenes and musings about life, death, and time.

I used to be a big fan of SF writer Gene Wolfe. I still think he's masterful, but I've read all his published works, and a good bit of lit crit about his writings, and I don't think about him much these days. I still want to reread An Evil Guest some time. I do reread his short story "La Befana" every year during advent.

One of the writers whom I've read because of my interest in Wolfe is Paul Park. A couple of months ago I picked up his collection of short stories called A City Made of Words. Each story is very different from the others and quite distinctive. I recalled having tried to read his tetralogy that begins with A Princess of Roumania back when I was working too many hours a week and didn't manage to give it the attention it required. So I managed to obtain a copy via ILL and spent a week or so working with it. It's a wonderful book, but not what I need or what I'm really capable of dealing with right now, so I'll bring it back. Maybe someday I'll go back to it, although there are plenty of other books that are easier to get hold of. My local librarian told me that they're glad to process ILL requests, but they cost the library over $30 aoiece (which includes some staff time, shipping, etc.). So I'll be judicious about using them.

I realize I owe you a couple of albums of the month. In October I leaned a lot on old favorites and listened several times to Digital Duke, a posthumous offering from an impressive collection of alumni and friends of the DE orchestra, led by his son Mercer. It offers solid, sometimes wonderful versions of a dozen Ellington classics. My favorite track is "Perdido," which really cooks. Norris Turney, Louie Bellson, Clark Terry, and Eddie Daniels are in great form, as is Branford Marsalis in a couple of relaxed, swinging solos on "Take the A Train" and "Cottontail."

For November, another oldie but goodie, Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil. Shorter was one of the most prolific and interesting jazz composers of the last sixty years. On this album, which adds some modal elements to a hard-bop approach, he's got a bunch of outstanding sidemen: Freddie Hubbard, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Elvin Jones, all of whom improve the record in a couple of ways. Every cut is wonderful, and the album bears plenty of re-listens (at least for me).

Another recent mystery was Mycroft Holmes, by the tallest author in my library. Kareem and his co-writer present Mycroft as a somewhat priggish, but brave and determined, older brother to the degenerate collegian Sherlock. He is also quite clever. A mysterious case, involving paranormal creatures attacking children, leads him to follow his fiancee to Trinidad, accompanied by his friend, the black tobacconist Cyrus Douglas, who is a much more interesting companion than Watson ever was. The plot becomes extremely complicated; Mycroft does well to deal with the consequences. There are a couple of sequels available, but I think I'll leave them for after I've looked at a lot of other mysteries. Three stars.

>213 Jim53: Yes!! Speak No Evil is possibly my all time favorite album—which is saying a lot—and "Infant Eyes" is definitely my favorite ballad. I'm listening to it again on Spotify now.

>213 Jim53: & >215 kidzdoc: Agreed. Speak No Evil is a great album. Most of the Blue Note albums of that era are such high quality, but the Shorter album is among the very best. I also love Andrew Hill's Blue Note albums from that time period.

>216 rocketjk: Yes, there are dozens of high quality and timeless albums that Blue Note Records released in the 1950s and 1960s, almost too many to name. I suppose that Andrew Lion's demand for excellence from his musicians had a lot to do with that, and we're all the richer for it.

I actually haven't listened to as much of Andrew Hill's work as I should have, but I do like Point of Departure, especially the opening composition, "Refuge."

>212 Jim53: That ILL costs your library so much is incredible. Shipping is at book rate, so unless a book is coming from overseas, it’s $25 in staff time. Either they are very slow, or very well paid! Fortunately one of my two local libraries is on the statewide system, so I can order any book in that system with a click. The other library has assured me that despite shipping costs, they are happy to do ILLs for me because it helps their stats to prove to the town they are worth the budget. Every once in a while, I make a small donation to help offset shipping.

>218 labfs39: Yes, I joked with her about the exorbitant salaries that librarians make. She was only slightly amused. Apparently they pay to use the ILL resource system, but of course that's not a marginal cost for an individual loan. I told her they should get cheaper tape for packaging. She wasn't really complaining about my making the requests, more commiserating about how much trouble they are.

>216 rocketjk: Oh, goody, another artist to track down and check out. Keep 'em coming!

ETA: I remember now that you mentioned Hill when we were discussing Bobby Hutcherson. I wasn't able to get that particular Hutcherson album, and I haven't found Hill's solo work, but I will keep looking.

>219 Jim53: The cost (and headache) for our library system is the van delivery service for in-state interlibrary loans. There was even a lawsuit about it over the summer, which shut down all ILL for the whole state. The only thing that could possibly cost more than the van service is USPS, lol.

I zipped through We Three Queens, the latest in Rhys Bowen's Royal Spyness series. It's more funny than anything; the murder doesn't happen till page 236 and really seems like an afterthought. Georgie and her husband Darcy are settling in very nicely with their new son, in the castle that her godfather Sir Hubert has made clear is theirs. First, Darcy is called to London to consult with Georgie's cousin David, aka King Edward. He asks the young couple to allow his intended, Wallis Simpson, to hide out with them for a bit from the press, as he tries to get Parliament to allow him to marry her, a divorcee. We know how that will turn out. Then Georgie's brother, a Scottish duke, comes by with his obnoxious wife and two kids, to look at schools for the elder child. The wife takes it upon herself to give Georgie all sorts of bad advice about raising her son. Finally, Sir Hubert, who has been in California, returns, bringing with him the cast and crew of a movie, whose director wants to film "just a few" outside shots at a real British castle. The whole thing becomes quite a slapstick farce and was quite entertaining. It was a great fit for my mood last week. Four stars.

Sounds like the kind of murder mystery i might like. Fun review

I brought home a few books that had been my mom's. I was surprised to find a couple of Catherine Coulter's FBI thrillers among them; that's not the sort of mystery that she liked. I suspect someone gave them to her. I had read a couple of this series before, so I decided to give at least one of them a try. I just finished Blindside, which was quite good, and a bit of a change of pace after Lady Georgie. The series features a couple of FBI investigative agents. In this one, the six-year-old son of a good friend of the couple is kidnapped from his home in Virginia and taken to a small town in eastern Tennessee. The local sheriff is a major player in the story. Nobody can figure out why the boy had been brought there. Eventually it's all worked out, and there is a bit of romance too.

The book begins before the kidnapping, with one agent working on a case where local math teachers are apparently being murdered by a serial killer. We totally lose sight of that case while the kidnapping happens and takes up 80% of the book. Near the end, the author apparently says, Oh yeah, I better wrap up the serial killer thing too. I'm not entirely sure why both story lines appear together, unless it's just to give us an intro to the main characters (in the ninth book of a series), or to satisfy a word count. This didn't detract from my enjoyment of the main story; it just seemed a little odd.

I zipped through a Canadian mystery, A Delicate Storm, which I chose because it's a sequel to Forty Words for Sorrow, which I liked pretty well back in 2017. It's a pretty well assembled story, and the resolution is interesting. I'm just not very fond of John Cardinal, the main protagonist. And in this case, the same is true for a lot of the other characters. I like Cardinal's partner, Lisa Delorme, but nobody else. Their police group has to work with the RCMP as well as an intelligence agency, and there is a lot of conflict between Cardinal and the other groups. Ah well, on to something else.