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Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category

Joe Jack Talcum (PhilaMOCA, Philadelphia, PA, February 7, 2024) [KEVIN McDONALD]

Posted in Joe Jack Talcum, Kevin McDonald, Philadelphia, PA, PhilaMOCA, Scott Thompson, The Dead Milkmen, The Kids in the Hall on February 7, 2024| Leave a Comment »

[ATTENDED: February 7, 2024] Joe Jack Talcum

I was so excited to hear about  this show as soon as it was announced.  When Scott Thompson came to PhilamMOCA in 2022 I completely missed it until after it had happened.  So I was psyched to get in on this before it sold out (and a second show was added, but without a musical opener).

I didn’t know who the musical opener was going to be until day of the show where I saw it was Joe Jack Talcum from the Dead Milkmen!  I had somehow thought it might be someone from Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, although it makes 100% more sense that it was a local Philly fella.

I have never seen The Dead Milkmen even though I’ve been a fan forever.  I’ve also never seen Joe Jack in any context, so this proved to be a fun, if simple introduction.

He sounded much the same–slightly off-key and really into his songs.  He played acoustic guitar and harmonica and he sang five Dead Milkmen songs and 1 original.

I recognized the first song which was from the final Dead Milkmen album that I seriously listened to.  It made me want to relisten to the album. (more…)

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Nina Simon–Mother-Daughter Murder Night (2023) [audiobook 2023]

Posted in Audiobooks, Funny (ha ha), Gilmore Girls, Jane Oppenheimer, Murder, Mysteries, Mystery, Nina Simon, Violence on January 27, 2024| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: December 2024] Mother-Daughter Murder Night

This was described as Gilmore Girls meets mystery novel.

And while I want to be clear that in no way was it Gilmore Girls related, it had a Gilmore Girls vibe.  Three generations of women living together (out of necessity) working together to solve a mystery.

The grandmother is Lana Rubicon (terrible name).  She has created a real estate empire.  I enjoy that she is a strong and powerful woman who had been pushed down but fought back and built her own fortune.  But she’s also cold and distant–especially to her daughter, Beth.

The plot moves on when Lana is diagnosed with cancer and has to move in with Beth and Beth’s daughter.

Like Gilmore Girls, Beth was impregnated when she was a teenager.  She decided to keep the baby and move out.  But she moved into a property that Lana owned in a waterfront community.

Lana thinks she’ll be back home pretty quickly but she winds up in worse shape and needs to be there for a a lot longer than she imagined.  Beth and Lana are quite antagonistic.  But Lana and Beth’s daughter Jack get along pretty well. (more…)

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Peng Shepard–The Cartographers (2022) [audiobook 2022]

Posted in Adventure, Audiobooks,  Brittany Pressley,  Jason Culp,  Karen Chilton,  Nancy Wu,  Neil Hellegers,  Ron Butler, Death, Emily Woo Zeller, Huh?, Magic, Maps, Morality, Murder, Mystery, Peng Shepard, Supernatural, Violence on January 20, 2024| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: January 2024] The Cartographers

This book came on a recommended list and WOW did it sound great.

In fact, after the first few chapters, I was telling my wife about the great premise.  But I was already warning her about the irritating characters.  And, as the story went on, the premise got even better, but the characters got even more and more annoying.

And the repetitions in the book were endless.  She kept repeating herself.  She was saying the same thing over and over again.  Perhaps in a slightly different way.  But then she would circle back and confirm the repetitions.  So by the end of a chapter you had read the same thing two or three times.  And then she might repeat it once more.

The book grew so annoying that I almost didn’t bother finishing it (as many people on Goodreads said).  But I hate not finishing things, so I did something that I never do.  I sped up my audio book.

I’m not sure if I found the characters especially dull because of their actions or because of Emily Woo Zeller the audiobook narrator.  But holy cow, this book dragged on.  By the end of the book I had moved the audio speed up to 1.8x and for Emily Woo Zeller, it did not make it hard to follow (some of the other narrators were too sped up at that speed).  

The other narrators were Ron Butler, Nancy Wu, Jason Culp, Brittany Pressley, Karen Chilton and Neil Hellegers.  It was a little hard to tell when a new narrator came in, because they mostly seemed to be telling the story from different points of view.  But sometimes the main narrator narrated their parts as well. 

So the premise of the story (and I hope this isn’t a spoiler) is that if a map is made with an error (intentional or not), whatever is on that map actually exists–but only if you have that map.  I mean, this is an amazing premise.  And it is based on a real event. (more…)

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Anthony Horowitz–The House of Silk : A Sherlock Holmes Novel (2011) [audiobook 2011]

Posted in Adventure, Anthony Horowitz, Arthur Conan Doyle, Audiobooks, Death, Derek Jacobi, Morality, Murder, Mystery, Pedophilia, Religion, Sherlock Holmes, Violence on January 8, 2024| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: January 2024] The House of Silk

I’ve been really enjoying some various Anthony Horowitz adult books.  I particularly enjoyed his Hawthorne and Horowitz books.

I had noticed that House of Silk seemed to be a really Big, Important book for hi, but I didn’t really know why.  When it went on sale at my audiobook supplier, I grabbed it.  That’s when I discovered it was a Sherlock Holmes story.

I went through a brief phase where I was reading as many Holmes stories as a I could.  But it has been a while since I read one.

In no way can I compare this story to an Arthur Conan Doyle story, nor do I think you are supposed to (even though this is an authorized part of the series).  I can’t quite imagine the pressure that one must feel in Horowitz’ situation.  There is no way he was going to please people by doing this.  I also don’t know anything about his fondness for Holmes.  I assume it must be great, but who knows.

The fun setup for this story is that Watson has written this book but has asked that it not be opened for 100 years because the information contained within is quite damaging to some important people in English society.

And so, although this story is set at some time during Holmes’ tenure as a detective, it’s not his “final” case or anything like that.

The story is fairly convoluted (it is a Holmes story, after all), but it actually has two mysteries intertwined.

It opens with Edmund Carstairs coming to Sherlock for help.  He is an art dealer and when a group of valuable paintings were shipped to America, they were robbed/destroyed  in a train robbery.  The culprits were actually after money on the train, but they still cost the art dealer a fortune.  He hired a man in America to round up the thieves who were known as the flat cap gang.  The Gang is headed by two Irishmen, the O’Donoghue twins.  During the investigation, one of the twins is killed.  Carstairs is convinced that the surviving twin, Keelon O’Donoghue has come to kill him. (more…)

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Rivka Galchen–“Who Will Fight with Me?” (New Yorker, October 3, 2022)

Posted in Babies, Calvin Trillin, Death, Essays, Funny (strange), New Yorker, Parenting, Rivka Galchen on January 6, 2024| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK:

[READ: January 4, 2024] “Who Will Fight with Me?”

Rivka Galchen was one of the writers whose essays and stories in the New Yorker I made sure that I read.  This essay is a non-fiction piece about her father.

I enjoyed the very first line:

Recovering from a happy childhood can take a long time.

It made me think about how we seem to glamorize hard upbringing–college essays are based on overcoming hardship.  People love to complain about their parents and how tough they had it as kids.  But isn’t it wonderful to have had a happy childhood?  Isn’t that what parents strive to give their children?

I had a happy childhood and I am nothing but grateful for it. (more…)

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Nicole Krauss–“Shelter” (New Yorker, October 3, 2022)

Posted in Hotels, Humiliation, Israel, Marriage Trouble, New Yorker, Nicole Krauss, Pregnancy, Short Story on January 5, 2024| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK:

[READ: January 4, 2024] “Shelter”

I wasn’t taken with this story.  The middle part of it was really interesting but I felt like the opening and ending were rather flat.

Cohen is in Tel Aviv.  He is a very smart man who helped to build a company that a bigger company liked enough to buy out.  But since then he hasn’t really done anything creative.

In fact most of his life seems to be settling.

In Tel Aviv he sees a young woman who is very pregnant. He wants to talk to her because she reminds him of his wife when she was very pregnant several decades ago.  But he doesn’t talk to her.  And his wife is cheating on him (with a heart doctor). (more…)

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Caleb Crain–“Easter” (New Yorker, September 26, 2022)

Posted in Caleb Crain, Death, Drugs, New York City, New Yorker, Short Story on January 4, 2024| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK:

[READ: January 2, 2024] “Easter”

This story follows two events in Jacob’s life.

They are placed concurrently often with no discernable change in the narrative.  And that makes sense since Jacob is stoned for most of it.

Jacob had driven from Houston to Galveston to visit Stu. Stu was a college friend.  They had gotten stoned together but never just the two of them–always in a group.  So Jacob was a little nervous.

But they quickly got stoned and all was well.

The other story was a few days earlier when he flew from Harvard to Texas to be with his family for Easter break.  They were all going to stay with Jacob’s grandparents.  Jacob’s grandfather had been a doctor and often self-medicated.  He also medicated his wife.  But since he was no longer practicing, his prescriptions were not always safe. (more…)

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Ben Okri–“The Secret Source” (New Yorker, September 19, 2022)

Posted in Ben Okri, Death, Dystopia, Mind control, New Yorker, Short Story, Water on January 3, 2024| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK:

[READ: January 2, 2024] “The Secret Source”

This story is set in a dystopian future.

It began a little broadly but soon it was made clear that something was wrong with the world’s water.

There wasn’t enough of it and everyone had to ration the water–fifteen minutes per day per household.

And then one day the main character Fisher noticed that the water was viscous and almost a little slimy.  Clearly someone (the government?) was putting something in the water?

This explained why everyone–from the opposition party to comedians seemed so compliant, so passive these days.  If the water was tainted…  they must do something.  But who could they trust?

No one, clearly. (more…)

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Joan Silber–“Evolution” (New Yorker, September 12, 2022)

Posted in Death, Hitchhiking, Joan Silber, New York City, New Yorker, Sex, Sexism, Short Story, Tiny Desk Concert on January 2, 2024| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK:

[READ: January 2, 2024] “Evolution”

I used to read a New Yorker story every week.  And then life caught up with me.   I haven’t read them in a while, but after reading the Short Story Advent Calendar, I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed reading a short story, so I grabbed a handful of magazines from my unread stack (1 resolution for 2024 is to read all the magazines in this enormous pile) and started with this one.

I didn’t love this story probably because it started as one thing and turned into something else (evolution much?).

Set in 1974, the story opens wit Cara dancing on a fire escape in New York City.  She slipped and broke her leg.  She has a terrible memory of the hospital and a guy who had been sitting with a friend but who just left him there. (more…)

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Jenni Keer–No. 23 Burlington Square (2023) [audiobook 2023]

Posted in Audiobooks, Death, Jenni Keer, Lucy Scott, Romance, Violence on January 1, 2024| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: January 2024] No. 23 Burlington Square

I’m not sure why I listened to this book.  There was a recommendation that if I liked a certain author I would like this.  But I can’t find that recommendation now and can’t for the life of me think of what I like that this would have been compared to.

I thought it was a mystery novel but it isn’t (well, there’s a mystery in it, but it’s not a mystery novel).  I also thought that maybe it was the audio book reader, Lucy Scott.  But I hadn’t listened to her before either.

But the reasons for reading it are irrelevant.  And I’m really glad I took a chance on it.

The book starts off with us meeting a young widow, Mercy.  It in 1927 and she is interviewing for a room at No. 23 Burlington Square.  The landlady is Agnes Humphries, a woman who says what is on her mind, but is never mean, just truthful.

Mercy seems like a great candidate and Agnes’ cat likes her.  But instead, she decides to give the room to her niece Clara.  It’s quite a surprise that we barely see Mercy again–only when Clara runs into her later.

Clara is a wild woman, going out to parties after 10PM, which is when Agnes wants everyone in bed.  She is wealthy and beautiful and borderline insufferable.

Until she meets the downstairs neighbor Jemima Smith.  She is a young wife with three children and a fourth on the way. Jemima’s husband is an ass. He makes the money but he spends it on drink and other nonsense.  And he’s mad at Jemima that she can’t give him a boy.

Jemima is a stern feminist–prickly with the rich and foolish Clara until she realizes that Clara is actually making a change for the better. (more…)

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