We have returned to hot and humid Florida and that means late afternoon trips to the pool, an occasional film, catching up on our favorite TV series, and more reading. It’s too hot to linger outdoors!
CINEMA
We went to see Indignation on Labor Day afternoon and the audience was all seniors with a few exceptions. Perhaps because the film is set in the early 1950’s or this audience is familiar with Philip Roth’s work. In any case, this story of Marcus, a young Jewish guy who leaves New Jersey and his father’s butcher shop for a small college in Ohio, has some surprising twists and turns. At first, I thought it would be just a classic young love story—unsophisticated boy meets beautiful, worldly girl, becomes enamored of her, and then she dumps him. Instead, you have a much more complex situation involving sex that Marcus finds confusing and somewhat troubling and encounters with a dean who invents issues where there are none. The pace is measured and almost deliberate until the final coup de grace.
TV
We’re working through our backlog of recorded programs. We plowed through several Midsomer Murders 2-parters (some really weird), finished the last (really the end, sigh) of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, and have started Dancing on the Edge. This series is set in early 1930’s London and concerns a group of rich sophisticates, some of whom actually work, and their jazz band leader friend, Louis Lester, who is black. A murder in the fancy Imperial Hotel sets the press abuzz and unsettles Music Magazine co-editor Stanley and his friends.
We missed the first episode, but got engaged quite easily with the second one. Viewers will recognize Stanley, played by Matthew Goode, as Mr. Talbot from Downton Abbey.
BOOKS
Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave
I thought Cleave’s first novel, Little Bee, was superb and I found Incendiary compelling. Gold, about two Olympic competitors, was good, but not outstanding, and seemed to be geared toward a more commercial market. His latest, Everyone Brave is Forgiven, is set during the Second World War, and concerns the evolving relationships between four protagonists: Mary, who signs up for the war and is assigned to an elementary school and later works with problem children not evacuated; Hilda, her best friend; Tom, superintendent of schools and Mary’s boss and later fiancé; and Alistair, an art conservator who enlists as a regular soldier and experiences the brutality of life on the front.
Mary and Hilda ultimately become ambulance drivers rescuing people whose streets have been bombed during the Blitz. All four are privileged individuals. Their initial view of the war as something of a short-lived lark is challenged and molded by the carnage they witness. The tone of the novel is both ironic and off-putting (probably deliberately so) and while the seeds of the novel came from real events in the author’s family, I didn’t feel it totally came together. Nonetheless, for those of you who are wondering, I did finish it!
La Rose by Louise Erdrich
I’ve had mixed success with Erdrich’s novels. Some I’ve admired and enjoyed like The Round House; others have left me indifferent. I was prepared to like her newest novel, La Rose, and the opening chapters were intriguing. In a hunting accident, a man shoots and kills his neighbor’s young son so he and his wife give their son to be raised by the bereaved parents. I read 120 pages or about a third of the book, but eventually realized I didn’t care much for most of the characters and was tired of being bogged down in the minutiae of their daily lives. Ergo, I abandoned the book. I take some comfort in the fact that blogger Deb of The Book Stop included it in a short list of books she also didn’t finish.
BOOKS ON PAPER
As someone who appreciates the tactile quality of paperbacks and hardbacks, I was pleased to learn that paper books are read more often than e-books. This from an article in the New York Times print edition (get that emphasis) of Sept. 5 entitled, “The Internet Hasn’t Won…”
Cover photo © JWFarrington; other images colored by her (some rights reserved)
