Monthly Archives: June 2009

Tuesday’s Meme Things: Traveling down Zzyzx Road, finding loot and trivia

Posted on June 30, 2009 by | 11 Comments

Back to our regularly scheduled program, where I participate each Tuesday in book blogging meme activities:

tuesdaywhereareyouIt’s Tuesday … Where are You as hosted by raidergirl3:

This Tuesday, I’m with private detective Harry Bosch and FBI agent Rachel Walling on ZZyzx Road near Las Vegas as they are investigating the murders of six men in The Narrows by Michael Connelly. Bosch’s investigation, at first, is into the death of former FBI agent, Terry McCaleb, who apparently died of a heart attack. However, as Bosch starts to investigate, threads from his case cross with threads from the FBI investigation into the murder of the six men. The common thread: a serial killer known as The Poet, a former FBI head agent himself named Robert Backus.

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teasertuesdays3 Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading, with the rules pretty simple:  Grab your current read, open to a random page, share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page, BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!), and then share the author too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers! I’m going to cheat just slightly on this and share two teaser sentences from a random page of my next read:

Parker studied them one by one, trying to decide. He crossed off the horsy nymphomaniac right away; when the armored car guards came in here for coffee and danish, that one would spend too much time thinking about their sex organs to wonder about the money they were guarding.

The book is The Man With The Getaway Face by Richard Stark, one of many pseudonyms for the writer Donald E. Westlake, whom I’ve only recently discovered thanks to my brother-in-law, Warren. For more on Westlake and Stark, see this post I wrote about them.

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library-lootfriday-finds

Next up, I’m combining Library Loot hosted by Eva and Marg and Friday Finds also hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. The first focuses on books that you’ve checked out from the library; the second, books that you’ve come across that you want to read.

I would have had a picture to go with this but my wife took her camera with her today, so no picture.

So from the library, here’s what I got for this coming week:

  • The Narrows by Michael Connelly, as previously mentioned.
  • The Express, a movie about Ernie Davis, the first African-American to be awarded the Heisman Trophy. For me, the interest arose since he was from Elmira, N.Y., which is about 60 miles away from where I live.
  • The Visitor, a movie that, in short, is about a man who returns to his NYC apartment to find two people living in it and the relationship that develops between him and the couple. For more on the movie, visit the site (click on the link).
  • Milk, for which Sean Penn won a Best Leading Actor Oscar last year for his portrayal as the gay activist Harvey Milk and Dustin Black won a Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen Oscar.

I already watched The Express and can say that yes, it was another one of those football movies, but it was very well-done, and I highly recommend it.

As for my Friday Finds, I’m going to mention a few books that my brother-in-law loaned me this past weekend, including the previously mentioned The Man With The Getaway Face.

The others are:

  • another Parker novel by Richard Stark, The Outfit.
  • Lemons Never Lie, another Stark novel.
  • The Cutie by Westlake.
  • Gun Monkeys by Victor Gischler, which was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel when it came out in 2001.

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Last but not least is this week’s Weekly Geeks, where this week’s theme is trivia…

…since I’ve been talking about Donald E. Westlake and Michael Connelly, I’ll present a little trivia about them both. Try not to Google if you can.

  1. Name a movie for which Westlake wrote a screenplay.
  2. Name a movie inspired by one of his books.
  3. Name one of Connelly’s book that was made into a movie.
  4. Name the actor who starred in the movie.
  5. And a relatively simple one, name the newspaper for which Connelly wrote before he became a successful crime author.

Already, I spied one of the more interesting takes on this week’s Weekly Geeks theme as done by Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise. Her subject: Agatha Christie, of course.

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Sunday Shout-Out #21: Ann’s Rants, HBDC Virtual Road Trip continues & new in my reader

Posted on June 28, 2009 by | Comments Off

shout out 21

This week’s Sunday Shout-Out goes to Ann @ Ann’s Rants, another one of those bloggers that I discovered over at Humorbloggers dot com. Yep, one of those.

She began this blog back in October 2008. Why? Well, as she said it then in that first post, “My ovaries keep demanding I conceive something, so I thought my brain might distract them a bit if I got creative enough. Only time will tell.”

She also said she hoped her blog would provide “parents a moment of shared commiseration, compassion and hopefully humor.” It has done all of that, especially on the humor side, even as a non-parent.

One of her regular features is Free Association Friday. Other than that, pretty much anything goes and does.

This week, though, she is having a series of guest posts from man bloggers, including myself, for a week she is calling Man’s Rants. I can’t tell you when mine will be posted, but who cares? All of the posts ought to be a lot of fun to read.

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Like last week, another place I’m going to tell you to go, and no, don’t worry I’m not going to be mean and say something unkind either this week, is the the Humor Bloggers dot com Virtual Road Trip.

Last weekend began in Portland, Oregon with VE @ VE’s Fantastical Nonsense for two parts: One and Two.

The trip continued in Manitoba, Canada with Venom @ Venom, Secret and Lies on Thursday and thus far, as of Saturday night, she has had two more parts: Two and Three.

To see where the tour goes this week, check out the schedule here.

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Lest you think everything here is HBDC related, I do belong to two other online communities: Humor-Blogs.com and BlogStorm, where among those I have met are the authors of the following blogs that I’ve added to my reader this week:

Can o’ Whup-Ass

Mad Science

The Misadeventures of Derek Bowles

The Trials of a MadMan

Dead Rooster

No Cleaning Here

Both Stephanie @ No Cleaning Here and William McCamment @ Dead Rooster had been in my reader and on my blogrolls previously, but for one reason or another, were…uh…misplaced. Yeah, let’s call it that, but regardless now they’re back and I’m glad to have them back as part of the family here. :-)

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Rest In Peace…

Posted on June 26, 2009 by | Comments Off

I interrupt my regularly scheduled Flashback Friday to flashback to the events of yesterday, because I wouldn’t be a very good blogger if I didn’t blog about the events of yesterday, would I?

I had just dropped off my wife at work yesterday morning when I began to hear the first inkling of what would become a day that I would never forget.

And I’ll never forget where I was when it happened.

It shocked me to the core.

I wasn’t expecting it.

I mean, does anyone ever expect it?

Let me give you a hint to what I’m talking about:

Rusted out old muffler

Yep, you guessed it. My muffler was dragging on the road behind me, and I had to call the tow truck to get the car.

It was a tragedy of epic proportions. It’s not every day you lose a muffler.

It was a sad, sad day for me.

Luckily, today I’ve been hearing all kinds of music from this pop singer:

and seeing videos of this 1970s TV icon that are helping me get over my tragedy:

I might not have been able to pull through today if it weren’t for them. Thanks, Michael and Farrah, for the memories.

Humor-Blogs.com

Humor Bloggers

BlogStorm

Photo courtesy of compscigrad on Flickr

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Posted in Flashback Friday, Music, Unfinished rambling

Medicus by Ruth Downie

Posted on June 26, 2009 by | 3 Comments

Title: Medicus, A Novel of the Roman Empire
Author: Ruth Downie
Publication Year: 2006
Genre: Mystery
Count for Year: 15
Pages: 386

How I discovered

A friend of mine, John, actually was the one to discover this when at a bookstore. I believe the book might have been in the bargain bin. However, he thought it looked interesting because he had read a series set in ancient Rome by Stephen Saylor previously. Since he knew I also loved Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa series, he sent this to me along with the first four of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith. While I have yet to get to them (although my wife did and has now read everything up until the most recent one), I did get to this.

The setup

Roman Army medic Gaius Petreius Ruso has come to Britannia to make a fresh start. Within days he finds himself landed with a female corpse that nobody else wants to deal with, and a local slave girl who won’t talk to him. He’s also fallen foul of the dreaded hospital administrator at Deva (modern-day Chester), and a senior centurion wants to strangle him. The last thing he wants to do is investigate the murders of local barmaids – and naturally, his handsome and spectacularly lazy colleague Valens is no help at all.

Things can be tough on the edge of the Empire – not only for a civilised man, but for the women he seems fated to gather around him.

– a description of the book from Downie’s website

I was more than ready for this book based on the description from my friend John and also because I had loved Saylor’s series set in a similar time. For the most part, I was not disappointed as Downie wove a story that while not as good as Saylor’s yet definitely has the potential to become as good, although she will be hard pressed to be better than Saylor’s series, as it continues.

Unlike Saylor’s protagonist, Gordianus, who is hired in the first novel Roman Blood to be an investigator for Cicero, Downie’s protagonist Gaius Petreius Ruso is not an investigator. As the description above describes him, Ruso is an Army medic recently stationed in Brittania. However, when prostitutes from a local bar began getting killed, and the second spear, the man who should by rights do the investigation doesn’t, Ruso, in good conscience, has no choice but to investigate the murders.

In a subplot, Ruso also has no choice but to rescue an injured slave girl, Tilla, from the hands of her abusive owner — a device similar to one employed by Saylor with a slave girl with whom Gordianus falls in love and eventually marries.

I’ll be honest that I’m hard pressed to pull one section of the book as a sample of Downie’s writing. Nothing exactly stood out, because it all flowed together fairly seamlessly.

However, in a telephone conversation the other night with my friend John, he reminded me of the humor that Downie uses throughout her book. He said for him this short interaction Ruso had with a landlady where he was going to put up Tilla:

“Do you have mice?”

She frowned. “The girl is on a special diet?”

“I don’t mean on the menu. I mean running around. Wild mice.”

This is just one sample of the subtle humor that is found throughout the book and makes the book work.

One last note, like Saylor in his series, Downie here adds an author’s note to place the book in its historical context and like Saylor’s author’s notes, it fleshes out the details just enough to put the icing on the cake, as it were.

Of course, I’m not to give you any of those details. That would spoil the icing when you get there.

My final analysis: 4 out of 5, not because I didn’t think it was as good as it could be, but I think it will get better in the next few that Downie writes. In her defense, though, this was her first novel.

My rating system:

5- Classic, must read
4- Worth owning a copy
3- Worth picking up at library
2- Worth skimming at the bookstore
1- Worth being a doorstop

Book 2 of the series, Terra Incognita, is now available in paperback from Bloomsbury Press. For more information, click here. Book 3 of the series, Persona Non Grata, will be available in the U.S next month in hardcover: information here.

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