Consortium of Seven: Year 2

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 ...

 Happy Thursday!  The leaves are falling, the snow is coming and no one responsible is going anywhere for Thanksgiving, sadly.  (Seriously people, stay home, wear a mask if you have to go out and care for your fellow humans.  Don't be one of those COVID-denying jerks.) Look, did I grab this from a Little Free Library mostly for the fantastic cover from 1972?  Absolutely.  Do I kind of want to read a little more Crichton, since I've only read Coma and I for a long time thought that was him, but is actually by Robin Cook?  (I mean, I read part of Crichton's stupid diatribe against the well-established truth of anthropogenic climate change, but that's terrible fiction and I want to read some of his good  fiction.)  Crichton to me has a bit of a fascinating career path, similar to Scott Turow in how he was a practicing doctor (where Turow was a lawyer) who wrote novels based on their respective professions (hence why Crichton ended up as on...

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  It's a bit of a weird week here in the States as we wait for the election results, but let's take a few moments out of the day and look at what I found while going through the thrift stores, Little Free Libraries and the like. Sadly, I didn't find this before Halloween last week.  It's weird, really, that somehow this is a Stephen King adaptation that I simply have never seen.  (And I have seen multiple entries in the Sometimes They Come Back  series.).   Sadly, this wasn't the full Shout! Factory edition, but a two pack without the special features, coupled with Carrie .   But still, now I have this and finally get around to seeing it soon. ________________________________________ Speaking of Stephen King, once in a while he'll put out a novella, often something that's not what you might think of as his usual style (for instance, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon ).  Elevation  definitely fits into this mode...

 Happy Thursday, everyone, and I'm hoping that you're having a pleasant week.  The US general election is ongoing (I voted a week ago) and if you are in the US I hope you already have or are getting ready to vote by Tuesday.  This is an important one  (even more than usual) and it's so important we all vote.  Now on to the random crap I found this week! Published just over a century ago, in 1919, this is the charming sequel to the wonderful Parnassus On Wheels , wherein Roger Mifflin was running a bookstore in a horse-drawn cart.  I'm an absolute sucker for bookstore novels and these are excellent examples with a good affection for the material and a lovely wit.  It's also a fun look at early-20th-century Brooklyn, with an added bonus of a darn good mystery. ________________________________________ Like last week, this two items are from an author who is apparently extremely well-regarded but of whom I have almost zero knowledge and definitely I've nev...

  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 h...