Trawling Through The Thrift Stores - by Joseph Finn

  Welcome back, everyone!  This weeks 5 is an eclectic combination of murder, heroism and (literal) tripe.   So let's get started.

Ordinarily, Nora Roberts isn't especially my thing.  I respect the hell out her for her work ethic and her standing up for author rights, but her romance novels just are not my usual deal.  But then a few years ago I discovered that she has this odd little cop series under another name, set in the late 2050's in New York City, and it's almost surprisingly good and touching while also having hardcore cop stuff.  This is book 40 in the series (she is up to 51 as of this month) and the saga of Eve Dallas and her husband Roarke is one I'm so weirdly invested in.

As a gamer, I'm a PS4 guy and I also try to be economical about it (seriously, games cost around $60, and for the amount of time you get out of them, that's not a ripoff).  So finding a Madden (the NFL video game franchise from only 2 years ago) for only $2 was a hell of a deal.  Plus, a game mode that includes voice work by Mahershala Ali?  Yes, thank you.

I'm a big fan of the Arrowverse series, going all the way back to the first series of Arrow.  Greg Berlanti has done a fantastic job in building this interconnected world of superheroes, but oddly you don't see many of them on thrift store shelves yet.  So I was quite happy to see the first season of this really charming Supergirl show appear on a shelf today.  (And if you've never seen an episode, Melissa Benoist is so, so charming as Kara Danvers.)

Now here we have a movie herson of a novel I found fascinating and terrifying, about a post-apocalyptic world filled with humans convinced everyone else has become a zombie and that there are a few children who are immune to catching the zombie virus, and really want to figure out how.  Which, of course, means losing our own humanity for the supposed Greater Good.  I've never seen this movie version but really, Glenn Close as the head of the project makes me want to see what they're working with here.

Now this is my weird vintage find of the week.  A 1965 edition of a book originally published in 1934, widely considered the codification of French cuisine, this novel has all sorts of bonkers food.  Would you like to make foie gras mousse?  Spiny lobster?  Calf's liver loaf?  Maybe salmis of pheasant?  This book has all sorts of things that almost no one makes any more completely covered.  Hell, I just flipped randomly and found a recipe for sheep's tongues.  I love, love old cookbooks for this sort of thing.  (Seriously, one day I will do an entry on '50s cookbooks and their love of gelatin.)  I mean hell, there are some dishes in here I want to take to my local butcher (yeah, I have one) and ask them, "Can you do this cut?"