What Have I Read Lately?

Well, if you really want to know.....

Yep, after seeing the movie, I decided to reread the book for the first time since high school.  Fitzgerald certainly had an elegant way of writing.  His lavish descriptions of Gatsby's parties and a list of all the people who attended them were fun reading, and the story of the guy that everyone loves, until he gets down on his luck, is an age old one.  Not sure either movie version I've seen - Robert Redford and Leo DiCaprio - does do the novel justice.  An interesting read if you've never read it, and I am glad that I have read it again after experiencing life for going on sixty-two years.  Not sure if I'll ever read it a third time, though.

A new Lincoln Rhyme novel is always one to which to look forward, and this newest one is no exception.  Deaver has a way to come up with plot twists and cliffhangers (at least three in this one alone) unlike almost any other best selling author.  However, the almost super human powers of Rhyme and his partner/lover Amelia Sachs is becoming pretty formulaic in these stories.  Not enough to make me swear off of them and not read the next one, which is probably at least two more years away, though.  If you haven't read the Deaver/Rhyme novels, you should, but don't start with this one.  The very first one was "The Bone Collector".  Start with that one or some of the other earlier ones.  

I will say, though, that "Kill Room" deals with some issues very much in the news today.  Things like personal privacy, abuses of personal liberties under the mantle of "patriotism", and the use of drones in warfare.  Deaver does not come down on one side or the other, but how he lays it all out is thought provoking to say the least.

I finally got around to reading this Steve Blass autobiography that was published last year.  If you are Blass fan and a Pirate fan, you will like it.  If you don't like Steve Blass, then don't bother reading it.  Blass deals very candidly with the control issues  that ended his career, as well as with some issues in his personal life and marriage that could not have been easy to put out there for all the world to read about.  (You should know that one very salacious rumor that has been circulating for years about the Blass marriage is NOT true.)  The most interesting parts of such sports biographies, to me at least, are the parts that talk about the player in the years after the playing days are over, and this one was no exception.

One thing Blass says, and he says it a couple of times in the book, I found very good.  In discussing all of his control problems, he mentioned that whenever someone offered a suggestion on how to fix it, he would try it because "I don't want to be sitting on my porch when I'm 85 years old and think 'maybe THAT would have worked if I only tried it.' " And he offered that same bit of advice to other players over the years. It's not a bad way to look at life, if you ask me.

It's Movie and Book Review Time!

My week with The Arts....

We went to see "The Great Gatsby" yesterday.  Remembering the, shall we say, unique way director Baz Luhrmann did "Moulin Rouge" a few years back, I was expecting something different with this version of Gatsby, and that's what we got, at least for the first hour or so of the movie.  In that first hour, we got a full sensory overload of over the top CGI shots of New York City and of the legendary parties thrown by Jay Gatsby of West Egg.  After that, though, Luhrmann toned it down and went for more straight story telling.

Now it has been over forty years since I have read "The Great Gatsby", but I recall loving it when it was a high school assignment.  I found it interesting that a number of reviews of this movie stated that the reason none of the film versions of the Fitzgerald novel, and this is the fourth one, have been any good is because, while they tell the story, they fail to capture the elegance of Fitzgerald's writing.  That could well be, but forty years is too great a distance for me to make an informed judgement in that regard.  Perhaps I need to put it on my summer reading list.

I don't rate this a great movie.  I'd say it's worth seeing if you ever read the book, even if it was forty years ago, and Leo DiCaprio was very good in it, as he is in anything that he does.

Our neighbor lent me the above 2002 book, "When the Smoke Clears" by Post-Gazette staff photographer Steve Mellon.  In it, Mellon visits five American cities that have all fallen on hard economic times due to the decline of the industries (steel, textile manufacturing, coal, and the auto industry) that sustained their economies since the 19th century.  It is kind of a stark book, and it made me realize how lucky I was to have had a good education and good jobs throughout my 35 years in the work force.

I'm not sure if the book is in print, but it is no doubt available at your local library.  Kind of a sobering read.