Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

Happy Thursday, everyone!  Sorry for the lateness, but I was dealing with...maybe being employed again?  Like, actually getting paid to work?  Imagine that!  So let's celebrate with the weird stuff I found this week.

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Oh, how I love a vintage reference book.  This is a 1973 reprint of a book originally published in 1953, with all sorts of fun stuff.  Tree planting!  Dealing with insect infestations!  The Zodiac (wait, what?)  Dishwashing!  I'm not actually mocking a lot of this, which is useful basic stuff, just that I do love seeing what has changed (for instance, the last-frost maps for the United States are obviously vastly different now).  And hell, there is a whole section on basic medical care and caring for the sick that is very useful looking.  

Unfortunately, it's still 1973 and pretty much any illustration of an in-home task like groceries and ironing are of course presented as the Woman of the House.  Besides that, a surprisingly useful little book.

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Sometimes, a joy of thrift stores how you run across a movie you've literally never heard of and you have to wonder is it because A) It kind of sucks and was dumped by the studio, B) I just completely missed it at the time (hey, it happens) or C) it's DTV and I was never meant to see it.  Like, how did I miss a William H. Macy-starring thriller with Bokeem Woodbine and the criminally underused Denise Richards (even though I maintain we all missed out on Richards having a good comic career; seriously, see Drop Dead Gorgeous and Tammy and the T-Rex, both of which she is funny as hell in)?  Written by David Mamet and directed by horror movie auteur Stuart Gordon?!?  Apparently based on a one-act play of Mamet's, it got mixed reviews at the time but this was definitely one I wasn't going to skip on.

(Currently streaming at Roku, Vudu and Tubi with ads; rentable at Amazon and Alamo for $1.99)

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Ah, T.C. Boyle.  I do so love his work, from The Road To Wellville to Drop City to his various collections of short stories (Greasy Lake & Other Stories, in particular, is a classic).   This was his third novel, from 1987, and one that for some reason I've never read.  Apparently the tale of several generations of a family in the Hudson River, I'm curious as to what he has going here.

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Hey, I remember when this came out!  It was about the murders in Los Angeles in the '80s that actor John Holmes was somehow involved with by...knowing the murderers?  Buying drugs from them?  Something like that.  I mean, besides Kate Bosworth, this is an intriguing cast (and on the back, also Christina Applegate, Carrie Fisher, Janeane Garofalo, Ted Levine, Faizon Love and Natasha Gregson Wagner).  That Richard Roeper quote doesn't give me a lot of hope, but hey, I'll give it a shot.

(Wonderland is streaming with ads on Peacock, and available for rent/sale on Redbox, Vudu and Microsoft's store, which still exists.)

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Finally, something I've actually read!  This is a fantastic novel about the attempted assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the brutal Nazi put in charge of occupied Czechoslovakia (the title refers to the phrase "Himmlers Hirn Hiesst Heydrich" or "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich," in reference to how Heydrich was considered the most dangerous and smartest man in Hitler's cabinet).  Britain inserted two operatives, one Czech and one Slovak, into Prague to plan and execute the assassination and this is a novelization of their attempt and how they mostly pulled it off.  It's a fantastic piece of work by French novelist Laurent Binet (and translated by Sam Taylor); some people complained that Binet inserted himself into the narrative and his experience in writing about this level of a monster, but I think it's an excellent technique that works really well here.