Trawling Through The Thrift Stores With Joseph Finn

Happy Thursday!  For all of our USA readers, happy Thanksgiving and I hope it's a good one for you.  

Before we get to the thrift stores, let's all do my Thanksgiving tradition and listen to the best holiday song ever!

Now, on to the random nonsense I picked up this last week.

Linda Holmes is an NPR writer and podcaster who I've been reading and listening to for nigh-on close to 20 years now, ever since she was recapping TV for Television Without Pity.  So I was quite excited when I found out that she was writing her first novel, and hoo boy I was happy to run across another copy of this last week.   It's a lovely novel about a woman dealing with the recent death of her husband who falls for a major league pitcher who's come to town to get away from the media after he fell prey to a case of the yips (a weird malady that occasionally strikes pitchers who simply lose their skills, sometimes in the middle of a game; Steve Blass, for instance, has talked about how insane and frustrating it feels when this part of you simply stops working and nobody knows why).    This is a damn good little novel about Maine and baseball and love.

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Ah, the glory days of Pocket Books and their non-canon Star Trek novels.  There's a lot of schlock in these, but Diane Duane (an Irish author who usually writes quite well-regarded YA novels) put a lot of work into hers, coming up with stuff that once in a while would end up in the actual canon for the TV shows and movies.  This one is more of a toss-off story, where McCoy ends up commanding the Enterprise after Kirk disappears after giving McCoy command for an hour as a joke.  It's a fun little romp; Duane is really good at writing the Doctor's sardonic humor and casual grouching.

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I forget if this is Shirley Temple's last movie before she went off to other things, including an odd career in the US diplomatic corps (she was, for instance, the second-to-last ambassador to Czechoslovakia).  But even if it isn't, this was part of her gradually being done with Hollywood, her teenage roles never finding the success that she had as a child actress.  Which is too bad, because I've always had a liking for this fun bit of romantic fluff (which actually won the Oscar for Sheldon).  Also, this is one of those DVD editions that includes the Lux Radio Theater production of the script, always a fun little bit. 

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For some reason, I didn't have a copy of this, a bummer because I love John Scalzi's work; he writes stuff that could be considered a descendent of Heinlein, but better and without Heinlein's weird...quirks.  A lot of his work takes place in what he calls the Old Man's War universe, but this is a standalone about a diplomatic crisis over a sheep breed called Android's Dream, as Earth stands off against their sponsor for a galactic federation of species (a species that Earth generally can't stand both for being jerks and also for the feeling that they're sitting at the kids table).   But this is a LOT funnier than I'm making it sounds, with jokes all over the place about competing bureaucracies, whether cloned meat is kosher and how Quaker Oats somehow over the centuries had absorbed AOL and become the premier information provider for most of the planet.   It's a ton of fun.

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Octave E. Butler, who's been gone for about a decade now, is probably best known for her novel Kindred.  But she wrote a bunch of other work that should be better remembered, like this series about people surviving the slow disintegration of the USA and searching for a better, kinder way to treat each other and the planet, and whether it's responsible to colonize other world and export our BS to the universe.  It's a lovely novel, but also horrifying because Butler has no time for being kind to the reader about what a USA led by a maniac with no morals or ethics, but who pretends to and infects other people with his madness.  Gee, I wonder why that felt relevant recently.  It's pretty much, like Butler's work in general, a masterpiece.