Andrew McCall Smith A TIME OF LOVE AND TARTAN

 

A book in the 44 Scotland Street series from 2018

This guy pops out books like an AK 47.   We are back with Domenica and Angus and all our friends like Pat and Bruce, Matthew and his triplets, Big Lou, and of course Bertie and his parents--Bruce and Irene. Irene is the marvelous mother who decides that men are overrated and decides to go off to get a PhD with her apparent lover while Bertie's dad quits his job as a government statistician. The book was so  appealing that I reread it in its entirety before I discovered that I had read it in 2018 when it first came out.

It is filled with local color, rib tickling humor, sly cultural observations about art, history, philosophy, literature, music, and poetry. You name it.  McCall Smith seems to have been to every nook and cranny in Scotland and read every book published since the beginning of printing. And he remembers them well enough to bring them to bear on his delightful characters and their foibles and troubles. Among other things, he takes on the loss of civility, women’s rights, bureaucracy, and the general lack of kindness to others. I liked it seven years ago and it still passes muster. A joy to read and a joy to re-read. There is a bon mot on every page e.g. “The truth then dawned . . . . that everything was finite and that what was taken for granted had actually been paid for by years of work for somebody whom one would never know, and who might never have been able to enjoy any of it anyway.”

 

Thorns, Lust, and Glory by Estelle Paranque

 

With a sub-title of “The Betrayal of Anne Boleyn, this book goes over the well-known conflict between the English King Henry VIII and the Pope. I knew the basics from my previous knowledge of English history and my familiarity with some of the fictional treatments of the struggle in The Royal Gambit and The Lion in Winter.  Paranque’s book concentrates on Anne’s French connections and the secondary struggle of Henry with his French counterpart Francis 1^st.

Lots of names of minor courtiers are mixed in with the well-known personages like Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell. I guess it told me more than I needed or wanted to know about the circumstances leading to Anne’s beheading in a courtyard at the Tower of London on May 19,1536.  

I give it 2 out of 5

A review of Wolf Pack by C J Box

 

C.J. Box is a Wyoming native and he has been hunting and fishing his entire life. He has written eighteen mystery thrillers that feature Joe Pickett, -a Wyoming game warden.  

In this book, Pickett is faced with an assassination group called the Wolf Pack that carries out hits for a drug cartel and a mysterious local with no discoverable past, who is flying a drone that has stampeded local animals. The case becomes personal when he discovers that his teenage daughter is dating the man’s teenage son. The FBI enters the picture and tries to keep Pickett from investigating the man further while the connections between the so-called Wolf Pack assassinations and the mystery man start to become apparent. The action tends to go back and forth between the pastoral countryside and the brutal killings by the Wolf Pack.

The book is nicely paced, but once you get used to his method of alteration of violence with calm, it does become pretty predictable. I figured out that the man with no background was in the Witness Protection program before our detective got to it. From there on it was clear that the four killers would have to meet Pickett and friends in a bloody conclusion. 

I enjoyed the background nature descriptions a lot because on a trip to the west years ago, we drove through the Big Horn mountains and were inspired by their rugged beauty.  If all of Box’s books are like this one they will be competently written and appealing perhaps primarily to male readers who are drawn to old style cowboy westerns in the more modern west.

On the other hand, If you don’t have a hankering for senseless killing and graphic violence, you might want to stay in the “Cozy Mystery” section of your local Barnes and Noble. The book is organized chronologically and each section begins with a literary quote about wolves. I liked the final one the best since it was from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.

Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, a universal wolf,.

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce a universal prey,

And last eat up himself.   

The Late Show by Michael Connelly

 

Connelly, Michael The Late Show Review

THE LATE SHOW is Connelly’s 30^th book and it introduces a new lead character--a woman named Renee Ballard. One thing you can count on is that Mr. Connelly will give you a solid ride. He knows the back streets of Hollywood and his police procedures backwards and forwards. You can also count on the fact that his lead character pushes the edges of the rules, but not so far as to become unbelievable.

Ballard has been relegated to the so called “Late Show” as a penalty for resisting the advances of a senior officer. Overnight cases are often small-time and routine and she does these happily, but when large cases do appear she goes after them like a bloodhound in heat. Her juices start to flow when faced with a trans man is assaulted and left for dead in a parking lot. Before she has time to take a breath comes a vicious shooting of several people in a night club. 

Since Ballard is a new character for Connelly, we do get a fair amount of personal background as she digs into the cases. It points to a difficult early life and a still troubled current one. She had an absent mother and a father who died in some kind of surfing incident and now spends a lot of time with her elderly grandmother and paddleboarding at the beach.

Needless to say, she gets the bad guys a bunch of twists and push-back from the higher-ups. I am intrigued enough to look for the second novel in the series. It is called DARK SACRED NIGHT and in it she gets together with Connelly’s iconic major character—Detective Harry Bosch.

I give it a 4 out of 5. 

 

Review of Where Madness Lies by Lyndsy Spence

 

Spence, Lyndsy.  Where Madness Lies

The sub-title of this waste of time book is The Double Life of Vivien Leigh. It chronicles her life and her bi-polar condition in an age when there was limited understanding of the disease and treatment was still bordering on the medieval. None of the characters around her come off as admirable. The entire book seems exploitative and tries to fill a niche that needs no further filling. Take a pass on it.

I give it a 1 out of 5.     

 

Book Recommendation--ALL THE BEAUTY IN THE WORLD BY Patrick Bringley

 

All the Beauty in the World (The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me) by Patrick Bringley

This little book by Mr. Patrick Bringley is what I call a sleeper. It is a short and pleasant read by a most unlikely author.  The title refers to the art contained in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the author is a man who worked there for ten years as a security guard.   My wife and I were members of Chicago’s Art Institute for many years and have visited most of the major galleries of Europe in our travels. In all those years we have never run across a book by one of the museum guards. 

Bringley takes the security guard job after his older brother dies of a deadly form of cancer. It could be penance or perhaps a search for peace, but it provides a suitable station for him to observe his fellows, the visitors, and of course the art itself. He glories in the fact that this kind of unskilled job attracts a huge variety of ages, skills, races, and religions, whereas a Manhattan lawyer’s office attracts abysmally similar types. He quotes one retiree saying, “It really isn’t a bad job.  Your feet hurt, but nothing else does.”

The visitors obviously also come from every corner of the world and he takes pleasure in finding meaning in them. He revels in observing the clothes people choose to wear and how they wear them. He finds interest in how they style their hair and how they hold the hands of a companion. He reflects on how some avoid his eye, how some have continuous questions, and how others express rapt attention or boredom.  He insists he takes no meaning from this but just the pleasure of noticing the huge span of reactions.

As the chapters progress, the Art becomes more central. His developing approach to it is deceptively simple. “The first step,” he says, “is to do nothing, to just watch.”  Art, “above all needs time to apprehend and a guard has all the time in the world.” Let the work perform its work on you. Over time certain pictures or objects grow on you, become more abundant, or as he says, they simply “won’t conclude.” Then you can absorb “the holiness of that moment.”  This does not mean you should look without knowing. Knowing develops from looking and each thing you learn about an artist and his work deepens your ability to look at it.   “Too many people think the museum is a place to learn about art, rather than from it.”

At the end of his ten years, having acquired along the way a wife and family, he recognizes that nature favors hardiness over simplicity and that his life of standing, observing, and learning must end. You can only watch and inhale so long.  Sooner or later you have to face the real world which is not nearly as orderly as a museum.

Loved this one.  I give it a 4.5 out of 5

 

 

The Spamalot Diaries by Eric Idle

 

Idle, Eric The Spamalot Diaries

When it rains it pours and when you have an accomplished wordsmith and musician who has just authored a Tony winning musical and it has been directed by Mike Nichols, you can count on it being entertaining. His personal diary during the creation of the musical Spamalot is a pleasant read for anyone familiar with the show, and also instructive for folks who are still in, retired from, or thinking of joining the theatre business.  As someone who was in the directing business once upon a time, I didn’t learn much new.  There was the “two block rule.” You never speak ill of your show within two blocks of the theatre as someone on the cast or crew or a friend of theirs might hear it and report it to others. Then there was a nice term I had never heard of before.  It was called the ‘Sitzprobe”.  According to Mr. Idle, it is a term in Opera and Musical Theatre that comes from German and means a special kind of “seated rehearsal.” It is where the singers sing for the first time with the orchestra and focuses on integrating the two groups and getting them balanced. 

If you are not at all familiar with the pattern of theatre rehearsal, this is a nice inside look at the real dirty work of rewrite and cut and even occasionally put back in changes that always occur along the way to an opening night. Idle is a talented and funny man. This humorous read goes fast and you will enjoy it. Give it a 3.5 out of five.