by bill | Sep 18, 2024 | Audio transmissions |
One of the many ongoing projects is to go back and clean up older entries on this site — fixing broken links, reposting missing images, etc. So far I have made it as far as 2009, when I got into the habit of posting short mixes of songs in alphabetical order. The original mp3s are long gone so I’ve been recreating them and putting them up on the indispensable Mixcloud. Some of them are just OK, but this one I like a lot:
If so inclined, you can see the original post with playlist here. In any case, have a lovely day.
by bill | Sep 3, 2024 | Read it in books |
Books Acquired:
The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Progress Made:
Sixty Stories, Donald Barthelme
Shogun, James Clavell
The Divine Invasion, Philip K. Dick
The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem
The Black Count, Tom Reiss
And So It Goes, Charles Shields
White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day, Richie Unterberger
Books Finished:
Take a Girl Like You, Kingsley Amis
The Beast Must Die, Nicholas Blake
When the Game Was War, Rich Cohen
I had high expectations for The Beast Must Die, which was recommended thusly by the “Read Like the Wind” column in the NYT magazine:
Murder mysteries tend to fall into either a whodunit or a howcatchem structure. The first is well-known. In the second, the perpetrator is revealed at the plot’s beginning and suspense arises from finding out if and how they’ll be apprehended. (Anyone who has seen an episode of Columbo will be familiar with the charms of a howcatchem.) This novel is a third entity: a fusion of the two.
And it mostly fulfilled them, being at once erudite and readable, playful and suspenseful. I was a little let down by the ending, but at 190 economical pages Beast felt worthwhile. Rereading the Times piece just now, I was reminded that Nicholas Blake is the pen name of Cecil Day-Lewis, Daniel’s father; I don’t know why knowing that makes me happy, but it does.
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