Lovely wedding dresses that are not white.
Infertility and a psychic.
A food writers idyllic English cottage.
St. Rita’s traveling bookstore.
19 things you didn’t know your iPhone could do.
Just Watched:The Thursday Murder Club Helen Mirren, Celia Imrie, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley is the dream cast for the film rendition of the popular book series (although I must confess that I thought Fiona Shaw would have been an excellent Elizabeth). If, like me, you have enjoyed reading the books about a group of old age pensioners who solve cold cases for fun and then become embroiled in a real life case of their own, it is nothing short of a delight to see these people come to life. Having said that, the film falls a wee bit short. It’s a little goofy, where I would have much preferred a slightly more earnest, several episode series, with more detail and complexity. But, I, alas, do not get to make such decisions. Regardless, it is lighthearted and playful and fun, and solidly grounded by the brilliance of its cast and I await the second installment with bated breath. If you haven’t read the books, what on earth are you waiting for, they are excellent.
Just Read: Hummingbird Salamander Jeff VanderMeer Jane Smith, a corporate security consultant somewhere in the Pacific NW, is one day handed an envelope by a coffee shop barista. It contains a storage unit key, which in turn contains a box with an extinct taxidermied hummingbird and a short note from an ecoterrorist named Silvina, with clues leading to a taxidermied salamander. Jane becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of Silvina, and the meaning of the hummingbird and salamander, causing her life to unravel at warp speed and putting herself and her husband and daughter in danger, as she wades into the perilous world of bio-terrorism and illegal wildlife trafficking. It is part mystery, part espionage, part eco-thriller and part “oh-my-god-is-this-what- the-end -of- the-world-looks-like?” written in a clipped, no-nonsense style reminiscent of a hard-boiled detective story. I am not a sci-fi reader (at all) but Vandermeer’s books are so beautifully weird, so brightly crisp within the dark, alienated worlds he creates that I find myself enjoying them immensely. Granted, this is not a book that’s easy to get into — it’s cryptic and confusing and you have to be OK with reading in the dark until the plot exposes itself. But, slowly, the pieces fall into place and you find yourself standing alone in a wild world, filled with a foreboding sense of urgency to reach the conclusion. And to give you a little insight into what this world might look like, here’s a direct quote —“Impossible to tell how fast society was collapsing because history had been riddled through with disinformation and reality was composed of half-fictions and full-on paranoid conspiracy theories.” Scarily familiar?