It's Solstice Day!

Happy solstice day!  

Depending on whether you're in the northern or southern hemisphere, today marks either the shortest or longest day of the year for you.  For your entertainment, here are some fun facts about the solstices.

Movies -- A Recap -- Part XLVI -- Movies I Didn't Finish (or Wish I Hadn't)

S warned me about The Lighthouse, but there are a lot of movies that I enjoy which he does not.  I thought this might be the case for this film, but it turns out that it was not.  This is a slow, plodding, dull, overly indulgent film in which absolutely nothing happens.  At least not as far as I watched it; I didn't finish it.

 

Sightseers was not my bag.  The plot: a boyfriend and girlfriend head off on a road trip. In a fit of anger, the girlfriend kills the woman she caught kissing the boyfriend.  It gets worse from there. It's best redeeming quality is the cute dog.

I like Danny Glover, and Waffle Street was okay.  After the 2008 market crash, a former hedge fund manager, disgraced and looking for redemption, gets a job working the overnight shift at a chicken-and-waffles joint.  It's on this list because S and I started watching it; we got about halfway in, looked at each other, and said, "I think I've seen this before."  I think this is one of the curses of watching so many streaming movies.  When movies were in theaters and you made a point to go see them, there were advertising posters and trailers on TV, they were harder to forget.  This one, unfortunately, was sufficiently forgettable the first time that we had to start it again to know we had seen it already.

The Girl With All the Gifts started out promising, but it just turned into a weird zombie movie.  Unless you're a zombie-genre completist, skip it. 

Loads of smart TVs these days have some number of free channels, and when we were traveling recently we spent some time perusing the free channels at one of our hotels.  We picked a rom-com called No Postage Necessary, but it was so terrible and predictable that we abandoned the effort shortly after it began. 

I'm perpetually looking for a good murder mystery, but The Alpines wasn't one.  That's all I've got for you there.

What I Read -- The Exchange

I've been reading loads of mysteries lately trying to find something compelling (that wotd reviers love and editors hate), distracting, something I wanted to race to the end of.  I finally found it in that old stalwart, John Grisham.

I picked up a copy of The Exchange at one of those little free libraries. I had a couple of books to leave there, and grabbed this one in, well, in exchange (ha). 

A couple of things to be clear about.  First, this is not the "sequel" to the firm that it may at first seem like it will be.  It boasts the same main character, Mitch McDeere, supported by his ever-patient wife, Abby (now a cookbook editor and hostage negotiator), but the throughlines really end there.  Second, as that last sentence illustrates, the machinations that get us through the story, with Mitch's cookbook-editor-from-Kentucky wife as the centerpiece in $100-million-dollar hostage negotiations are simply ludicrous. 

But that's the magic of someone like Grisham.  The story can be a completely insane, unbelievable, never-gonna-happen disaster scenario, but the pages just keep turning, regardless of how completely bonkers it all is.  And that is what I have been looking for.

What I Read -- Silence of the Chagos

The second in my trio of books about Mauritius - that fantastic but little-known Indian Ocean Island off the east coast of Africa - was Silence of the Chagos, by Shenaz Patel.  Silence fictionalizes the real-life forcible relocation of the Chagossian people after the political gamesmanship which earned Mauritius its independence.

Part of the deal was that the fifty-six tiny islands that make up the Chagos archipelago would remain part of the British empire, officially becoming one of the British Indian Ocean Territories (BIOT). The British insisted on keeping it because the Americans wanted to put a military base there (which we did; it's called Diego Garcia), and in return we would give the Brits a steep discount on some missiles they were buying from us.  But the land needed to be uninhibited for our base to be installed.  Thus began the removals, first by tricks and promises, later by threat and force.

Silence is told through two characters. Charlesia came to Mauritius in the first wave, because she was told her husband needed medical care that couldn't be provided in Chagos.  Then they simply refused to return her and her family to their home.  Désiré came later.  His mother had been pregnant when she was given one hour to pack her and her family's belongings and get on a ship if she wanted to survive.  Désiré was born on the boat on the way to Mauritius.  They each, in their own way, lament the loss of their homeland and try to find ways to return, or at least make some peace with their memories.

It's a pretty sad story.

What I Read -- History of Thailand

S and I had a little time to kill recently, and there was a sailing program we wanted to participate in in Thailand.  So off we went!

S knows I like to read about places we're going, so he got me a copy of History of Thailand: A Captivating Guide to the Thai People and Their History.  Because of our short turnaround time, I skipped to the chapters beginning in WWII, but then backtracked a bit because it turns out there had been a big revolution in Thailand in 1932 which ended 700 years of rule by the monarch.

Since WWII, the country has been in near-constant turmoil, a pendulum swinging from advanced democratic reforms to authoritarian military rule (albeit one that still has a monarch and now also has a parliament). As a people and as a government, they just can't seem to find a balance between those two extremes.

The book was what it purported to be, and the writing was okay if a little bit repetitive with certain phrases.  (There's not a single listed author, but rather it's part of the "Captivating History" series.)  But it gave me the basic background I was looking for, and I appreciate that.  As with A Brief History of Indonesia, though,  I struggled with the names of historical figures.  Thai names tend to be quite long and are, obviously, foreign to me, making them difficult to remember. And since lots of these folks were repeatedly in and out of power over the years, I did a lot of flipping pages to see if this new guy was the same person who was in charge 5 years ago - and often he was.

In summary, it gets the job done, but not much else.

What I Read -- Born Lucky

I don't believe that I can fairly review this book.  It was written by an old friend of mine, so of course I love it and am incredibly proud of him for telling his story.  I never doubted that he would do great things despite the way he was treated, and I'm looking forward to whatever comes next for him. 

A Simple Act of Violence -- Take 2

Of the mysteries I've read lately looking for a keeper, this one was the most ambitious.

I like the use of multiple perspectives. The two stories start out disparate, and come together as the story moves along.  That was a nice feature.  Not quite an unreliable narrator, but the multiple voices remind you that things aren't always what they seem. 

I did have a few specific complaints during my reading experience. My biggest beef with the craft of his writing is the use of sentence fragments. One here or there is okay, but there were too many, especially closer to the beginning of the book. Maybe they were intended to push the plot along, because once it got going in its own right, there were fewer fragments. But mostly I just found it to be irritating.

There was also missing punctuation, and occasionally a missing word, typically at the end of paragraphs or chapters. This may have been a formatting issue in the publication of the ebook, but it's nevertheless distracting to read.

My biggest frustration, which is entirely my own fault for going into this reading experience blind, was how political this book was.  The backstory is historically political, with the implications running through to the present day.  I'm just not into politics right now, so I wasn't really there for that part of it which, unfortunately was the whole motivation for the "simple act of violence."  Something was lost on me there, but at least it was an engrossing race to the end of the story. 

What I'm Reading Now -- Tangerine

Back in 2021, S and I had planned a trip to Morocco for my birthday.  Unfortunately, about three weeks before we were supposed to leave, there was a big COVID resurgence in Morocco and they closed their borders to foreigners; they even arranged special flights for foreigners who were already there to get out of the country.

So we hurried up and made some other plans.  We found ourselves in Camden, Maine, for my birthday instead.  It's a small town, and in the week-plus that we were there, we did just about everything we could find to do.  One of the things we did -- and this is actually pretty typical of us -- was went shopping for used books.  Normally we do this at used book stores, but at the time we were there, the local public library was having a big used book sale, so we availed ourselves of their overstock.

One of the books I found was Tangerine, which is set in - you guessed it - Morocco.  It was obvious that I had to buy it, right?

I'm still working my way through my 2024 Reading Challenge, and I had selected Tangerine as my September choice: a book set in an intriguing city.  Specifically it's set in the city of Tangier.  So, here we go, finally trying to catch up on what is now more than a year overdue!

Three Day Road -- Take 2

I've had Three Day Road for a long time, probably 15 years.  I only finally read it because I had put it on my 2024 (yes, 2024!) Reading Challenge; it was my December selection: a book with a number in the title. I am sorry it took me so long to get to. 

Let me be clear, it's a dark read.  It's about war and addiction and trauma and loss and aloneness.  It doesn't, or perhaps really can't, do much to rehabilitate what occurred during World War I, but it does make a run at friendship and recovery and healing.

My reading experience has been pretty lacking in the Native American and First Peoples department.  I read Killers of the Flower Moon a few years ago, The Painted Drum, and The Light in the Forest way back in the early grades.  (I don't think The Indian in the Cupboard counts.)  I have a few others on my list: Braiding Sweetgrass and some more Louise Erdrich are high up there.

This all is a way of saying that I don't have much experience with writing about native peoples of the Americas, so I didn't quite know what to expect from Three Day Road.  And even now that I've read it, I'm certainly not qualified to judge the cultural aspects.  I can say, though, that the story is told from two points of view - there's "Nephew" Xavier, who goes off to fight in WWI with his best friend Elijah, and there's "Auntie" Niska, who stays back in the Canadian woods, living in the old way.  The difference in their two outlooks, experiences, and voices is appreciated as a novice to the subject.  More perspectives equal more information, and they both feel genuine and true to their respective characters.

The book opens with Auntie retrieving Xavier at the train station when he returns from war.  Elijah is not with him, and Xavier, who has lost a leg and been shot in the arm, is badly addicted to morphine. Auntie has no idea what has happened to him during the years he was away.  She doesn't know where Elijah is, and Xavier can't bear to think about it.  As the two of them leave the train station and she paddles them back towards home in her canoe, Xavier relives his wartime experiences in flashbacks.  To bring him back to her, Auntie tries to counter his dark daydreams and nightmares with stories from her childhood and his.  But the question remains: what happened to Elijah?  The answer comes out, but I don't want to spoil it for you. 

It took me a little while to get into this one, probably 50 pages, but once I got there, I was hooked.