Maeve Higgins, a comedian who grew up in Ireland but now lives in Brooklyn, delivers an entertaining series of pieces about her life and interests. “Lean on Me” shows how Higgins got through the Pandemic. “Bubbles and Planks” explores Higgins’ long struggle with depression. “New York, Fair or No Fair” starts with “One of three New Yorkers are immigrants.” (p. 177) Then Higgins goes on to celebrate the city she loves.

While Higgins includes plenty of humor in her stories, each of her essays tackles a serious topic. For example, the title of Maeve Higgins’ Tell Everyone On This Train I Love Them” comes from a tragic story:

“A man did a terrible thing on a train one: he attacked two teenage girls. This happened in Portland, Oregon, in 2017. He was a hight nationalist, and on of the girls was Black, the other in a hijab. Then there other men on th same trail did a beautiful thing: they stop up to the attacker and saved the girls. The attacker killed tow of those men with a knife and injured the third. One of men he killed was a gentle-looking twenty-three-year-old named Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche…. [A ] passenger told reporters afterward that he said, ‘Tell everyone on this train I love them.'” (p. 202)

Diane listens to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me on National Public Radio each week and Maeve Higgins is a frequent guest. Higgins may be funny at times, but she has a very Serious Side. GRADE: B+

Table of Contents:

Lean on Me 1

Bubbles and Planks 19

Good Acting 41

Misneach and Rumors of War 57

Situational Awareness 85

Death Tax 113

The Innocents 141

New York, Fair or No Fair 171

Notes and Acknowledgments 205

In 2001, the Homeless World Cup was established. Each year, 70 teams of homeless men and women from all over the planet compete for world-wide recognition and to display their skills at “The Beautiful Game” of soccer.

When I first started watching this movie, I was unsure if the Homeless World Cup was a Real Thing. At the end of the movie, the credits rolled and, yes, this yearly competition is a Real Thing. It has helped 1.2 million homeless people come out of the shadows to participate in this universal street soccer event.

How did I not know about it before this???

Bill Nighy plays the coach of the Homeless Soccer team from England. All of his team struggles with problems–gambling addiction, drug addiction, abuse, depression, anxiety issues–but Nighy manages to meld these misfits into a credible team. Nighy also reaches out to a young man who is living in his car, pretending NOT to be a homeless person. Vinny Walker (Michael Ward) has excellent soccer skills, but is not a team player. It takes all of Nighy’s persuasion to get Vinny to travel with the team to Italy for the competition.

Despite continuing problems, Nighy’s team becomes one you can root for as the reasons for each member’s homelessness is revealed. Yes, my eyes got misty a few times.

Director Thea Sharrock and Screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce capture the highs and lows of troubled people trying to excel at what might be a life-changing experience. The Beautiful Game is not your typical sports movie. I’m not a soccer fan, but I got a kick out of The Beautiful Game. GRADE: B+

I was a member of the Quality Paperback Book Club for a number of years. Back in 1995, the Quality Paperback Book Club offered this omnibus edition featuring three class Science Fiction novels: John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), I Am Legend (1955) by Richard Matheson, and Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint (1959).

I read The Day of the Triffids after I was freaked out by the 1962 film version. The British SF writers of that era specialized in catastrophic novels where the Earth was imperiled and The Day of the Triffids–with the horrific situation of most people in the world blinded by an apparent meteor shower and then an aggressive species of plant begins killing people–was enough to give me nightmares for months.

Yes, I Am Legend freaked me out, too! After the outbreak of a pandemic that has killed the rest of the human population and turned infected survivors into “vampires”.  Once again, I read the novel after seeing the 1964 movie, The Last Man on Earth. More movie versions followed:  The Omega Man (1971), and I Am Legend (2007). 

I read Time Out of Joint around 1960. I’d read plenty of Philip K. Dick short stories and loved the quirkiness of his Science Fiction. The title is a reference to Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. The line is uttered by Hamlet after being visited by his father’s ghost and learning that his uncle Claudius murdered his father:
“The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!/That ever I was born to set it right!” [I.V.211-2])

Ragle Gumm lives in the year 1959 in a quiet American town. His unusual profession consists of repeatedly winning the cash prize in a national newspaper contest called “Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next?”. But Gumm’s world starts to unravel as Philip K. Dick creates a world where nothing is as it seems. Paranoid, indeed!

I read all three of these novels in my teens so it was fun to revisit them. Are you familiar with these “paranoid” SF novels? GRADE: A (for all three novels)

“The series contained 15 volumes. The first five were released on 21 June 1994, and concentrated mostly on music issued between 1977 and 1981, with a few tracks from 1982. (Despite the “New Wave Hits of the ’80s” subtitle, Volume 1 actually contains no tracks from the 1980s; tracks from 1980 and later begin appearing midway through Volume 2.) Volumes 6–10 were issued on 18 October 1994, and mostly featured songs from 1982, spilling a little into 1983. The last five volumes were issued on 20 June 1995, and featured songs covering 1983 to 1985. Additional themed volumes—New Wave Dance Hits, New Wave Women,^[ New Wave Halloween, and New Wave Christmas—came out in subsequent years. Rhino Records discontinued the series, due to rights issues and with no plans to re-release them. Many of the songs in the series are mastered from the 7-inch single masters. The series includes some songs making their first CD appearance (in some rare cases, their only CD appearance).”–Wikipedia

I have several Rhino compilation CDs, but I found these two volumes and I’m now debating whether to buy the other 13 volumes. Maybe you can help me make that decision by evaluating these two CDs.

I like Volume 5 a bit better than Volume 6. Volume 5 has that ear worm “867-5309/Jenny” by Tommy Tutone and Frank & Moon Unit Zappa’s “Valley Girl.” But, I could do without Toni Basil’s “Mickey.”

Volume 6 has ABC’s “The Look of Love (Part I)” and Men at Work’s “Who Can It Be Now.” I can do without Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” Do you remember these songs from the 1980s? And favorites here? GRADE: B (for both)

TRACK LIST:

aa

“During the year or so while this particular book was occupying my headspace, I went through several life-altering experiences. A close relative died of cancer. A good friend died of cancer. I myself nearly died of cancer….

Those omens suggest that it’s time to step away from the Cthulhu Casebooks and more broadly from Sherlock Holmes. It’s time to look elsewhere, try new things, seek new challenges…” (p. 508)

I’ve read and enjoyed James Lovegrove’s Cthulhu Casebooks (you can read my reviews here and here and here) but from Lovegrove’s Afterward above, Sherlock Holmes and the Highgate Horrors (2023) looks like the end of the series. And, although Lovegrove has written over a dozen other, more conventional, Sherlock Holmes pastiches, it looks like the end of that series, too.

It’s a pity that Lovegrove is leaving Sherlock Holmes and Watson to other writers. Sherlock Holmes and the Highgate Horrors presents a series of fascinating, interconnected stories where the aliens of Yuggoth (aka, Pluto) begin their insidious infiltration of Earth. Lovegrove brings Irene Adler into these adventure stories where she plays key roles in the action.

A crashed alien space ship, mysterious fungi, visits to Yuggoth, bizarre occurrences (including the Walking Dead), the Necronomicon, and the threat of alien invasion pervade the stories in Sherlock Holmes and the Highgate Horrors. If James Lovegrove is truly stepping away from the Cthulhu Casebooks, these are fine tales to wrap up the series. GRADE: B+

At 3:18 P.M. the temperature dropped about 10 degrees and it was like someone hit the dimmer switch. Within a few seconds the sunlight was gone, the streetlights came on, and it was eerie feeling being plunged into midnight. In the distance there was a 360 degree “sunset” surrounding the eclipse darkness.

The darkness lasted three minutes and then things started to lighten up. Clouds finally cleared and Diane and I were able to view the eclipse with our Solar Eclipse glasses on. It will be many years before another Solar Eclipse shows up in Western NY so we’re happy we experienced this rare event!

Around 3:18 Eastern Time, the moon will block the sun and Totality will be achieved. Western NY is on the Path of Totality and a million visitors are filling all the local hotels and Airbnbs. Patrick and Katie drove home to experience this event (the next Solar Eclipse is 20 years from now). We also have my niece from Virginia, her husband, and her two kids (3 and six months) staying in our Guest Room. We have our approved Solar Eclipse glasses so we are ready for the Big Moment.

Have you ever witnessed an eclipse?

“Jack Kerouac produced the 320 pages of On the Road in three weeks, typing out fifteen pages per day on a thirty-six-yard-long roll of paper, while Marcel Proust wrote the more than 1.5 million words of In Search of Lost Time over the course of fourteen years…. Georges Simenon, who could finish a novel in just a month, wrote a whole one in twelve hours while sitting in the front window of a bookshop, on a bet. When Simenon died, it was thought he’d only published 192 novels, but his last well and testament reveals that the Belgian author had also written and published another 176 under twenty-seven different pseudonyms.” (p. 38-39)

Martin Solares, author of Don’t Send Flowers and The Black Minutes, discusses over a 100 novels and dozens of authors in How to Draw a Novel–although the doodles didn’t do much for me. Many of the books I’ve read like How to Draw a Novel center on “Major Writers” like Melville, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, James Joyce, Dickens, Tolstoy, Poe, and Carlos Fuentes. But Solares includes writers like Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Hammett, Chandler, and Patricia Highsmith.

“Highsmith wrote some of her best novels from the perspective of a con man: the astonishing Tom Ripley, a character used to committing the most disturbing frauds, but who also affords himself the luxury of helping out an old friend who’s fallen on hard times. With Ripley, Highsmith deepens her exploration of what it means to live in aa world of hypocrisy and convention. No one narrates the sea of lies more powerfully than Patrica bismuth.” (p. 97)

Martin Solares includes insights into writers and their work on every page of How to Draw a Novel. This slim book is worth its weight in gold! GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

The welcome mat — 1

Doubles cast in shades of night — 4

Into the fog — 15

The novel as automobile — 38

A theory of evolution — 48

Blind and so mysteriously reserved — 52

How to draw a novel — 59

Structure’s ghost — 78

A journey around a tale — 110

Novelesque excitement — 133

A method for measuring novelesque excitement — 136

Device with lions — 138

Insults and images — 144

Tool for writing a novel — 154

The character tree — 156

The myth of the perfect novel — 158

Bomb theory, or how to end it all — 160

What lives at the bottom of the lagoon — 168

Once upon a time — 174

My uncle and the tiger — 177

Acknowledgments — 185

Notes — 187

Selected bibliography — 192

In a recent email, Jeff Meyerson mentioned that he and Jackie got the new Covid-19 Booster shots at Costco. I had no idea the Booster shot was available! No notice, no advertising, no doctors talking about the importance of getting the Booster. Thank goodness for Jeff giving me a heads up!

I had to go to Rite-Aid to pick up a prescription. “Do you have the Covid Booster shot?” I asked the pharmacist. “The Booster shots just arrived today,” the pharmacist answered. “When can I get one?” I said. “Right now,” the pharmacist replied.

So I filled out the insurance forms and then was taken back to the shot room. The pharmacist jabbed me and put a band-aid on the shot site. “The CDC is now recommending two Covid Booster shots per year,” he told me. “The Fall shot will be an updated formulation to deal with new Covid mutation strains.”

Are you going to get the Covid Booster shot?

“Some writers’ names may ring the dimmest of bells of none at all, and perhaps lovers of such tales as these can make new friends, and significant ones, by learning here was those authors wrote.” —FOREWARD By Patricia Highsmith

I’ve had H. R. F. Keating’s Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books (1987) for decades. Keating takes a chronological approach to his list of the 100 best books in the genre. While Keating includes plenty of well known titles (mostly deserving inclusion), there are plenty of unfamiliar titles (at least, to me) like Death of My Aunt (1929) by C. H. B. Kitchin and The Last Best Friend (1967) by George Sims. I’m glad The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1971) by George V. Higgins made the cut. It’s one of my favorite crime novels. The same with Nobody’s Perfect (1977) by Donald E. Westlake.

How many of these books have you read? Any favorites here? GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

FOREWARD By Patricia Highsmith — 3

AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION By H. R.F. Keating — 8

PUBLISHER’S NOTE: The One-Hundred-and-First Choice — 201

INDEX — 213