Upside Ann

 "Are you hopeful?" "I'm willing to see what will happen," I replied.  "But I'm not sure it can work." "That is a very sad truth,"  I said.  "I can't be sure of anything.  I know only what I feel." "Then you are ahead of the pack." "Whatever the pack is, if I am ahead of it, then that's another sad truth, " I admitted.

 It was like a scene from a nature documentary, one where wolves hunted down besuited bastards of the wild frontier. Gotta love the alliteration......  This is the second book of the (at current count) nine book Dublin Trilogy.  Second, unless you count some shorter story that details how Bunny met Maggie which I didn't read so don't know.  I believe, however, that not knowing does not make one bit of difference in appreciating this tale.  What I do recommend and I'll be doing it next book is making a list on paper of ALL the damned surnames that begin with M.  Fuck.  I was definitely lost somewhere around page 200. But, I made it through.  And, unsurprisingly, so did Bunny and Paul and Bridgit .... and Maggie.

When they were kids Barry Dodds had told him that when he'd knocked his grada's body over at the wake, it was like being buied under a dozen frozen turkeys.  Mind you, he had also told Paul that groping a woman's breast felt like squeezing a roast chicken.  Come to think of it, that kid had a werd obsession with poultry. Quick paced. Economical. Cinematic. Very, very funny.   Paul has "one of those faces", the kind of face that everybody recognizes as someone they know/knew.  He's doing his best to scam his deceased Aunt so her estate will continue to give him a very meager allowance.  He cannnot have a job.  He cannot be in trouble with the law.  He has to do 6 hours a week in volunteer work.  Mess up and all the money that remains goes to a home for wayward donkeys.  I have not actually ruined anything for you here.  This is funny, yes, but it is just a tiny bit of backstory.  You WILL still enjoy the book - and we can all ho...

Despite the brevity of this work, it is quite a short story, I walked away with multiple connections that felt significant.  And a desire to explore other works by this author.  This is always a welcome outcome.  When they were arrested, the boy and the girl claimed that they had spent the night inside, but the indignant guards swore that such a thing was impossible because they patrolled the premises tirelessly.  Furthermore, they security camera picked up everything down to a person's inner most secret thoughts. Being locked in a museum - yep- very romantic - though in my experience - no wedding dress nor naked "boy"- much more PG rated than the night this couple enjoyed.  Of course, we didn't spend the entire night locked in the museum.  Yeah, but stll, no wedding gown. He didn't get modern art; he preferred bucolic landscapes with cows. LOL.  When I took my first teaching job, at Urbana University, the psychologist I replaced was "interesting"....

Delightful! Good fun!  Thumb's up!  Second book in Jasper FFord's Thursday Next series.    First meet the Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat - formerly known, prior to the movement of county boundaries, as the Cheshire Cat.  He is the librarian for Jurisfiction.                The Cat's eyes opened wide and the grin fell from his face.  He looked up and down the corridor for a few moments and then inquired:       "Me?"       I stifled a laugh.        "I don't see any others."        "Ah!" replied the Cat, giving me another broad grin.  "That's because you have a temporary form of cat blindness ."   "I'm not sure I've heard of that."                "It's quite common," he replied airily, licking a paw and stroking his whiskers.  "I suppose you have heard of kni...

 I found these notes from a book I read in 2023.  I am not sure how or when this person was peering over my shoulder.  I do not recall their shadow.  And while I remember the title, I don't think I remember these passages.  Haunting.  As a Ghost Club should be.                     The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson 2018                                  Read 10-17-23   In the hallway of a hospital two hundred miles from my childhood home.   I stood cradling the most precious object I would ever hold—a child I already loved more than he would ever be capable of loving me back—as scared as I’d ever been.   It wasn’t the fear I’d known as a boy: that onrushing smash-cut terror of a monster leaping from a closet.    This was the gnawing fear of possibility, the ...

  The paint at the fence shakes her head from too many horse thoughts rattling around in there and Cassidy shakes his head just the same, trying to get a rise out of her.  She's smart enough it works sometimes. Not this time She's looking past Cassidy. He turns, stands slow, dropping his bowl and Jo's both. "Holy shit," he says, having to move side to side to stay standing, from the dogs rushing this spilled lunch. He doesn't care about it anymore. Spread out behind him, just down the slope from the camper, are probably eighty, ninety elk.  Maybe a hundred. They're all looking right back at him, not a single tail flicking, not one eye blinking. Cassidy swallows hard, wishing more than anything for his rifle. The name he was born with wasn't Cassidy Thinks Twice, even though that's what he's doing now -- Where's my gun, where's my gun?-- but Cassidy Sees Elk. Names are stupid, though. Pretty soon he won't even ...

 “I'm too old for change," she explained.  "I'm too old to pursue good health and new relationships.  The past breathes for me.  It is my life.  You are young, Dr. Scarpetta.  Someday you will see what it is like to look back.  You will find it inescapable.  You will find your personal history drawing you back into familiar rooms where, ironically, events occurred that set into motion your eventual estrangement from life.  You will find the hard furniture of heartbreak more comfortable and the people who failed you friendlier with time.  You will find yourself running back into the arms of the pain you once ran away from.  It is easier.  That's all I can say.  It is easier." I have started re-reading all of Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta novels.  I prefer these earlier works to her last one - which, ironically, is the one that pushed me into this journey.  Scarpetta, Marino, and Benton don't seem to really age....

 While I really enjoyed this novel- plenty of my favorite character, Nora Bonesteel, and a lovely man who makes his life enjoying nature and playing Daniel Boone for school kids- the quote I am sharing comes from Daniel Boone himself rather than Sharyn McCrumb.  (Many/most of her chapters open with a historic quote.) I can't say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.   Daniel Boone I cannot say that Daniel and I have much in common.  I'm far more hobbit-minded about adventures.  "Nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!"  And, anyone who knows me at all, knows not to get between me and dinner.  I have been moderately lost on multiple occasions.  Stayed on the bus too long early in my residence of Brisbane - thinking that once the bus reached the end of the line, I'd recognize my bus stop on the second go round...ONLY to learn this was the END OF THE DAY for the bus and it WAS NOT going back from w...

 I read this book when it was new.  Actually, I think I listened to it.  I vaguely remember listening to it while I drove from Ohio to New Jersey to see my godson and his parents.  Last year my friend, Tim, and I did a flurry of book exchanges and he sent this to me.  I didn't get to it.  Then, a couple weeks ago, I chose a sleek red book with a snazzy multicolored yarn ribbon as a blind date.  "Fantasy Fiction," it said.  "Come with me," I said. The Eyre Affair.  Obviously - the universe felt like I needed to revisit.  Actually, insisted upon it. Fford has created a marvelous universe where Special Ops agents investigate all sorts of wonderous criminal enterprises including temporal crimes, literary crimes, nursery crimes, vampires, etc.   In this, his first novel, he introduces Thursday Next, an agent in the literacy division, her dad who is a fugitive agent from the temporal division, her eccentric and brilliant inventor unc...

The setting of the most recent murder (Christmas eve! a timely read as it turned out) was a mental hospital/ insane asylum which had had a sketchy history for more than a hundred years... While I enjoy reading Cornwell, and I did enjoy this ride, I found the ending to be rushed.  I was not surprised to find Peanut to be important (spoiler) but the serial killer just came out of the blue.  That isn't really any fun.  I did find one line to be especially frightening...  (aside - why frightENing but lightNing?)  "Even laziness and reading too many novels could send people away for the rest of their days..."

 "I used to know him," Everett said on their way back to the car, pointing a curled finger at one of the headstones.  "He worked at the tannery out by the water tower.  Played the violin."  Becky looped her arm through his.  "Was he good?" "Better than me." "You play the violin?" "Nope," Everett said. The dead visit us in our dreams? Or do we just conjure them up out of grief or some other need and insert them into our subconscious.   "What was it like?" It took Mrs. Dodson a moment to answer. "I won't lie to you," she said with a shrug that was mostly performed with her thin brow, "dying was unpleasant.  But death? It's wonderful."

Months ago my auntie lent me a book she really enjoyed "Ghost Riders" by Sharyn McCrumb.  As a consequence, I decided "Hey, I think I'll read all of her ballad series" and requested this book from interlibrary loan.  This is the first book in the series and I really enjoyed the story.  It is a mystery...but unlike later books, it is totally free of ghosts.  Dead people ghosts, that is.  Much of the story focuses on ghosts of one's past as Martha is planning her class of 1966 twentieth class reunion and the recently arrived, formerly-famous folk singer Peggy Muryan seems to be harrassed, if not hanted, by her former boyfriend and singing partner who went missing in Vietnam almost that long ago. Two quotes:  They were not yet old enough to treasure acquaintances not for their own virtues, but just because they were people who remembered one's youth. Yes, I'm old enough.  I miss my family not only for who they were, but also for the part of myself they ...

I have found the quote- scribbled on a torn sheet of college ruled paper.  As Kevin reminds me, "the space is finite".  And, I do, in time, find the things I've lost.  Typically.  Except, you know, when I don't.    ...retrieved his Tandy 1400HR laptop from the trunk.  At nearly twelve pounds, it was a bit heavy to be a portable machine, at least compared to the latest technology, but Jay was used to it.  He liked the keyboard and the backlit screen and he couldn't see any point dropping a thousand bucks on a newer model just to save himself a few pounds of luggage.  He could write books on it, send faxes on it, and when he hooked it up to the telephone, he could access the world. Isn't that a trip?  Twelve pounds?  Faxes?  and can you hear that screech of connecting via phone to the world-wide-web??  

 My FIRST (though Kevin reminds me I did read King's ... Cycle of the Werewolf - but that was decades ago!!) - OK, so I start again - my FAVORITE werewolf novel!!!!!!!!!!!  Wheeee!!!!!!!!!!!  I so enjoyed my halloween romp with Jones' Gospel of Z that I perused his other novels at the Greenville Library (there were two).  This was fun.  Like Gospel of Z, Jones tells a story about a known monster (the zombie in "Z" and the werewolf in "Mongrels") but adding a fresh spin.  Maybe, I told you about the genius idea in Gospel of Z where the living are monitoring scavengers to find recently deceased persons so they can destroy the body BEFORE it turns?  If not, gosh, spoiler alert.  Guess I should have said that sooner.  Don't worry, it isn't a major moment in the plot.  Mongrels is a coming of age story about modern day, 2025ish werewolves.  These aren't the monsters of the old black-and-white Sunday afternoon watching tv movies.  ...

  Before drifting away entirely, he found himself reflecting--not for the first time--on the peculiarity of adults.  They took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job, the money, what the teacher will think if I can't get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends.  They are pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child.  There is no group therapy of psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach.  The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adultho...

 One of the greatest lies that humanity tells is that time produces wisdom. Oh, Ala will concede that time creates more opportunities for a person to become wise, but it's hardly a guarantee.  And for those who don't fear death as much as the average human being, wisdom is even harder to come by.  The short mortal lifespan makes the acquisition of wisdom feel urgent, like a survival skill; a long lifespan, by comparison, makes someone feel they have all the time in the world for a slow,  contemplative life...later.  This is the sequel to a book I read last year, "When Among Crows".  The characters in the story are either demon/monster type "people" or knights from a family who're pledged to kill them.  The challenge is that while the story takes place in Chicago, the monster world and label s are from a Slavic tradition.  It was really useful to keep a pad of paper and write down things like zmora = eats fear and w ieszczy = zombie. And she's alw...

 It was good to see death as a release and a beginning, rather than a tragedy.

 Time is a treacherous mistress.  In our youth it flows slow and deep; the days stretch out endlessly.  When we are children, a summer lasts for a century.  As we age, the flow of time speeds up.  Suddenly, a year vanishes with the snap of one's fingers.  How quickly time eludes us, how easily it tricks us. Would you be surprised to find a novel titled The Bewitching to be about witches?? There were a couple ghosts, too.  And, at least one monster- but it was really- no - no spoilers. I'm having a great Halloween season reading such stories.  First the short story "Eerie Basin  " - featuring a jenglot- a very unattractive Indonesian moster that will grant your wishes in exchange for sucking your blood - like a vampiric djinn.  (Upside- you can satisfy the jenglot by feeding it the blood of your enemies.)  I followed with this one.  Concurrently reading a ghost story (Ghost Riders by Sharon McCrumb) and a zombie anthology. ...

She was a small, angled sort of woman, the kind you'd look at and say, Now there's a woman with elbows. For everybody dead and gone, there is a next day for the rest of the world. We both agreed that there are things you know as a child you cannot know when you grow up, things you see, you can't see anymore.  I know, because I spent summers playing elves and fairies under a tree in my backyard, until the summer I went out there and could not understand how anyone could think an acorn was an elf.