
Hi all. Happy Easter weekend. I hope you have some fun plans ahead. I think we are pretty much chilling at home and might just hit some golf balls, yay. Yesterday we weeded out the garden beds. And now it looks like maybe a rainy weekend is here, so we’ll see. We could really use the moisture. We went out to dinner last night as a treat and on the way home we saw this moose by the side of the road. He sort of blends into the landscape eh? It’s always fun to see a moose and lucky too I think, though he seemed a bit scraggly — not sure if he was old or just losing his winter coat, or a bit lonely. We wished him well.
It must be the week of critters because a few days earlier we watched a red fox on our street for a while as he was carrying something in his mouth. We think it was part of a chicken, alas. Also a skunk was out last night and he sprayed something (luckily not our dogs), so it seems the critters are out and about as spring opens up here. And along the roadsides there are plenty of Richardson’s ground squirrels (often called prairie gophers) popping up that look a lot like prairie dogs but are a bit smaller. We do our best to weave and miss them when they run out on the roads, but they really like to flirt with danger.

Here is some more library loot that I picked up this past week, combined with earlier loot. When will I get to Eowyn Ivey’s new one? I’ve read her two other novels: The Snow Child and To the Bright Edge of the World and hope to get to this one sometime too.
And then there’s also Eric Puchner’s novel Dream State, which is about three close friends and a wedding of one of them in Montana. Apparently 117 others at the library are waiting for a copy of it — thanks to Oprah picking it for her book club. But I’m not sure I will be able to get to it this time around with all my others going on — it’s a longer yarn too. But I see that Anne Tyler’s short novel Three Days in June is also about a wedding. What is it about wedding plots these days? There’s also the popular The Wedding People by Alison Espach, which I plan to get to on audio sometime. We’ll all become experts on wedding plots soon enough.

And did you know that April 10 was the 100th anniversary of Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby, which came out April 10, 1925? Wow. I heard about it on a couple news programs recently and the New York Times did a pretty good podcast about the anniversary too. I’m a bit of a Fitzgerald fan and I last read Gatsby in May 2013 before the Baz Luhrmann movie with Leo DiCaprio came out of it. I’ve also read Fitzgerald’s debut novel This Side of Paradise and his last one Tender Is the Night. But Gatsby in 1925 was quite the literary landmark.
I think I will honor it by reading it again sometime later this year. And speaking of which, if you like literary anniversaries, 2025 marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth — she was born Dec. 16, 1775 in the village of Steventon in North Hampshire — so there are many festivities and readings to join in for her as well.

Meanwhile, I thought I should say something about Season 3 of The White Lotus, which we finished a while back. It was a pretty crazy season, right? LoL. For those who don’t know: it’s about a group of rich guests and a couple employees at a luxury resort in Thailand over a week’s time.
The show was in the news quite a bit and popular. And the finale killed off one of the characters and you have to wait to see who it is and who did it, so that is the main gist … along with getting to know the crazy characters, their problems, and what they partake in. One episode’s particularly weird drug-induced orgy-like party with two brothers has been endless fodder for talk. But overall Season 3 certainly provided a decent escape from everything else going on. And since Season 1 was set in Maui and Season 2 was in Sicily, Italy, and this latest season is in Thailand … I’m thinking maybe they should set the next season at a snowy ski resort next time. Maybe in the Alps? What do you think?
Now we are onto watching the final Season 3 of Bosch Legacy, which I am suspecting will set up the new protagonist cop detective Renée Ballard and her spinoff series coming later in the year. Yay! Constance at the blog Staircase Wit gave me a heads up about that. (She’s one of our Michael Connelly experts.) Only thing is Bosch star Titus Welliver says he will not be in the spinoff show but that Maggie Q as Renée Ballard is great. So we will see. I’m just psyched the series continues in some way and somehow.
Now I will leave you with a couple book reviews of what I finished a while back ago.
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad /Grove / 336 pages / 2024

4+ stars. Whoa, by the end I was thoroughly impressed by all that went into this novel, which I listened to as an audiobook, and seems to include the author’s heart and soul along with it. It’s essentially about an actress in London — Sonia Nasir from a Palestinian family — who after ending an affair goes to visit her sister Haneen in Haifa, Israel, who teaches at the university in Tel Aviv. Once there, Sonia meets the dynamic director Miriam Mansour who’s putting on an all-Palestinian Arabic-language production of Hamlet and eventually convinces Sonia to play Gertrude.
Much happens as Sonia begins to learn her lines and takes part in rehearsals for Hamlet with Miriam and the cast and as she begins crossing check points to spend time in the Palestinian city Ramallah. Things become politically charged and as opening night nears the theater troupe faces various hurdles to put on the production. Through it all, Sonia seems to undergo a period of self-discovery as she returns to her ancestral roots.
I found it a good eye-opener into the geography there, which I was following on maps, and Israeli-Palestinian issues, dating before the Oct. 7, 2023 attack. I was intrigued following Sonia’s journey and the production of Hamlet, and its meanings in light of everything were revealing. There were various layers to this novel that made it into a dynamo. I will be interested to see whatever Isabella Hammad writes next.
Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham / Hogarth / 272 pages / 2024

3 stars. There was some good writing throughout this novel … about David, a 24-year-old black man who comes to work on a senator’s race for the presidency, who is not named but seems like Barack Obama. Apparently before joining the campaign, David flunked out of a college after becoming a young father and involved with all that entails.
Yet the novel at the same time also felt episodic or like an essay on a variety of topics that David comes across on the campaign, or through the people he meets, or the recollections of his upbringing in a Pentecostal church that it didn’t come together fully for me as a story. The loose plot withered for me and I struggled greatly to stay engaged with it. I usually love political novels, but this one seemed to be that only peripherally. It seemed more interested in the detours it takes talking about religion, race, film and many other topics. So just be forewarned. It’s not exactly a campaign novel.
That’s all for now. What about you — have you read any of these novels listed above, or seen the TV shows, and if so, what did you think?