Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday everyone!  If anyone is celebrating one of the winter holidays, I hope you're having or have had a good one as we close out this garbage fire of a year.  So let's get to the finds I've run across recently!

John Dos Passos seems to have fallen out of the general consciousness these days, but from what I've read of his work I sincerely think he should be held up higher than his contemporaries like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.  I've always meant to read his magnum opus, the U.S.A trilogy, which is apparently a sprawling epic covering the USA in the middle of WWI and the attendant social changes (and hey, a pandemic).  This is the middle book in the trilogy, so now I just need to get the other two.

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Have I ever read any Cheever?  Hell no!  Should I have?  Probably!  Hence why I grabbed this massive paperback (seriously, it is almost 900 pages) and you could definitely use it as a doorstop.  This is the kind of thing I'll have on the bedside table for forever as I work through it a story at a time.

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There's a weird story as to why the official sequels to Night of the Living Dead, the ones directed by George Romero, do not use the "living dead" phrase.  It has to do with falling outs, Romero never copyrighting the movie properly, and led to Romero being able to use the concept of the movie but not certain parts of the title and marketing (which led to things like the first Romero sequel being titled Dawn of the Dead).  This is from the other line of sequels, which were decidedly more goofy as they went along; the 1985 movie that is loosely based on this novel is a straight-up comedy.  But hey, this cover is great and I'm here for that. 

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I'm already halfway through this novel about a woman dealing with the fallout of having been, as a child, forced into a charismatic cult by her mother in the British countryside.  It's freaking great and absolutely makes me want to read more by Rebecca Wait, who apparently has one that came out this year titled Our Fathers and one from 2013 with a title that I vaguely remember, The View On The Way Down.   She's terrific, going by this.

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Sure, I could pretend I've read a ton of Atwood, but, well...that would be a lie.  At this point I've read The Handmaid's Tale, The Testament and Cat's Eye.  Oh, and the first in her Oryx and Crake series.  So, essentially I've only read her science fiction work and one semi-autobiographical novel.  This appears to be from 1980, so it's interesting to see an Atwood novel where there is no mention in the blurbs or flaps about Handmaid's Tale, which we all know is going to be in the headline for her (hopefully long away) obits.  This looks to be more like Cat's Eye, which I'm down for because that novel is freaking fantastic.