On Screen On Page: October 5, 2024
Trees, art, medical missteps, abandoned places, tennis, Everest, 2 x nuclear energy
Onto my Shopping List
A young screenwriter/author in my hometown, Gabriel Bergmoser, seemingly glided past me, and I didn’t read his first two novels. His latest, The Hitchhiker, published a couple of months ago, is a cat-and-mouse thriller that appeals.
Art remains a mystery to me. Should I read Bianca Bosker’s Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See? Six months old by now.
Trees remain a mystery to me. Should I read Amy Stewart’s The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession?
Christopher Brown has an interesting Substack newsletter. HIs book A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places came out a fortnight ago.
Vivienne by Emmalea Russo has critics talking.
A fascinating book on historical mistakes the U.S. medical profession has made (and is still making) was recently published. Marty Makary’s Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.
Nobody’s Hero by M. W. Craven, will be published next week. I love Craven’s Tilly and Poe murder mystery series but I found his first Ben Koenig book, Fearless, to be a rather over-grisly Jack Reacher clone. I guess that means I won’t buy this one but I thought I should include it here, given the many enthusiastic blurbs it has received.
Geraldine Brooks is such a fine stylist and deep writer, that I feel compelled to consider Memorial Days: A Memoir, even though it covers the sudden death of her husband and I’m tired of grief memoirs.
Debora Levy’s August Blue was my intro to this rather abstruse writer and I enjoyed it far more than I expected, even if I didn’t quite understand the plot. The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies comes out in November.
Apparently a Nobel Prize candidate, Yoko Tawada is two books into a weird dystopian trilogy that sounds fascinating. Suggested in the Stars next week?
Also imminent is House of Bone and Rain by Gabino Iglesias, apparently a mix of horror and thriller and coming of age tale, and the reviews are rave.
At the end of this month, Ali Smith’s Gliff arrives. She’s an author I’ve only read once and I loved it but have never gone back. This dystopian novel beckons.
Ducking in and out of streamers (hey, you simply can’t subscribe to them all) often dictates your viewing. Back on Binge (HBO) for two months, I’m tempted to view the Australian legal drama, The Twelve.
Onto Bedside Table
Two starkly opposed books grabbed my attention. I must read both. The Power of Nuclear: The Rise, Fall and Return of Our Mightiest Energy Source by Marco Visscher (to be published in early November) and Nuclear is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change by M. V. Ramana (it came out in late July).
Pam and I watched the 1980 Wimbledon final between Borg and McEnroe during our honeymoon. It features on one of the three episodes of the BBC doco, Gods of Tennis. We’d decided against watching the series because of overload but have now come back to it.
Extreme mountain climbing movies can freak me out but we decided to watch Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa. Fabulous.
Trying to understand what is variously labelled as “the extinction crisis” or the “biodiversity crisis” is tough. I’m interested in the fifteen species of Cranes as harbingers of full extinction, but a new book, Before They Vanish: Saving Nature's Populations — and Ourselves by Paul R. Ehrlich, Gerardo Ceballos, & Rodolfo Dirzo, argues it’s not the final expunging of a last creature that counts but overall numbers and vitality of species. It sounds fascinating, so I shell out quite a bit of money for an ebook.
Into Reject Bin
It had to happen. After all these years. I’m not going to read the latest Michael Conney mystery, The Waiting. Yes, he’s marvelous, but the sense of movement across his books has diminished and of the three series, the Renee Ballard ones are the least compelling.
Jo Hamya’s The Hypocrite.
Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo.
Jami Attenberg’s A Reason to See You Again.
Lou Berney’s Double Barrel Bluff just doesn’t seem to be my kind of plot, even though I love the author’s style.