Friday Foray
Literary humor from pinterest.com:
Headline from nypost.com: “Trump admin will boost Gulf of America oil production by 100K barrels a day under new drilling policy.” May it be so.
Headline from newsmax.com: “DOGE Saves $1B in Latest Slashing of Contracts, Grants.” Yay!
Among today’s celebrations, it’s National Hairball Awareness Day. Now you know.
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Wouldn’t it be interesting to eavesdrop on a Trump-Putin phone call these days?
Born in London, Kate Weinberg studied English at Oxford and creative writing at East Anglia. She has worked as a slush pile reader, bookshop assistant, journalist and ghost writer. Her debut novel, The Truants, published in 2020 when she was 44, recently came my way. Although billed as a mystery along the lines of Agatha Christie, it is only marginally so, for which I am grateful, nothing against the revered master of the genre. It is told from the point of view of a female just entering an unrenowned college. She bonds with three other students, one of whom is in his mid-twenties and has been a journalist in South Africa. He and a professor in her early 40s, who teaches a class on Christie, are the focal points. Both use and abuse people in their orbit, causing chaos. The protagonist is also guilty of betrayal. Although I admire the book overall, one aspect annoyed me: it is set in 2012 and the highly intelligent narrator relies on males for birth control. Although it is certainly not out of the realm of possibility, the author does not supply an explanation. Even a single sentence might have sufficed. The title refers to the professor’s lone book, a highly successful novel, and to “…people who in different ways and for different reasons, vanish in their lives…” That quote is from an interview included in the large paperback edition. Weinberg has a great gift for metaphor. Here are two examples: “Would guilt keep surfacing in our relationships, like blood seeping through a bandage?” And: “My stomach, already tight, dropped like someone had just cut the cables on a lift.” I also liked this thought: “Living in a world in which everything makes sense, but meant nothing. A life in which, afraid of the fire, I had put it out altogether.” The prose and dialogue are solid. The 311 pages read like a lot less. Only a bit of the UK usage is puzzling. 2000+ users at Amazon have rated The Truants, forging to a consensus of 3.9 on a scale of five. I’ll go with three. Her second novel, There’s Nothing Wrong with Her, was published in 2024. She is a mom of two living in London. Photo from Google Images:
The Anti-Inflation Book Shop enjoyed the calm before the storm. My thanks to the young mom who donated a large cache of books, a blend of kids, fiction and non. Here’s what sold: two classical CDs, a pair of slippers donated by my Constant Benefactress; The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton; Chicken Soup for the Soul of America: Stories to Heal the Heart of Our Nation by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen; three hardcovers in Russian. My thanks to the buyers.
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