BOOKS THREAD

No, I wouldn't buy it. But you're spot on, much of the Aykroyd/Belushi dynamic centred on Aykroyd's work as a writer which Belushi quickly lost interest in after his career took off during the SNL days and the last part of the book focuses on all those Aykroyd projects he was working on with Belushi in mind.

 

If Don Winslow is really retired from writing, City in Ruins, the final book in his Danny Ryan trilogy is a hell of a way to go out. Just a great capper to a terrific series.

 

It's frustrating that Winslow is retiring from writing so he can now focus on complaining about Trump on Twitter 24/7.

 

Read My Antonia for the fourth or fifth time. I maintain it is The Great American Novel.

Now onto The Sun Also rises which I read over 30 years ago. It’s great, but the characters are exhausting. Outside of the fishing trip, I couldn’t last one night with that crowd.

 

If you've read the Jane Harper Aussie-set books The Dry and its sequels, a movie based on the second book just came out. I went to it on Saturday and it included a Q&A with the writer-director as well as Eric Bana and Deborra-Lee Furness. It's called Force of Nature: The Dry 2. Awful title, good movie. The original movie, The Dry, came out in 2020 and I think kind of got lost in Covid but that was a good one too. They're pretty faithful to the books and there's a third one with the main character but Bana and the director were unsure if they'll adapt that one. Both the books and flicks are solid pieces of entertainment.

 

He’s an extremely rare case of actual TDS. His Twitter feed became unfollowable.

 

A heads up for eBook and graphic novel fans:

Humble Bundle has the entire Hellboy series and Mike Mignola's followup to Hellboy, B.P.R.D. -71 books in all- for 30.00 for a few more days. Two of their other book bundles are about to cycle out and with the latest season of The Boys about to drop on Amazon, it's a good bet you'll see a Boys bundle there in the near future.

 

Just read and loved "A Month in the Country" by J.L. Carr. It's a short novel that will especially hit home, I think, for people (like me) who are in their 50s, or above. It's about a key episode of early adulthood, as remembered by an older narrator.

 

Is it having a resurgence? Ordered it from library, long waiting list.

 

This is an oral history that traces Willie Nelson's Fourth of July picnic from its beginnings in 1973 to last year's event. The author talked to a lot of folks who were involved in all aspects of the picnic, from owners of the land where it took place to folks who played and others who attended. He didn't talk to Willie himself, which might have been a good thing, because, he told me, there's an aura around the picnic that Willie wants to preserve, and that might have been a bigger part of the story than the truth about the picnic itself.

The author was on a book tour, and I talked to him at Papa Joe's Saloon in Lorena, Texas, which is where Billy Joe Shaver - longtime friend of Willie's and a frequent picnic guest - shot a guy in the face one time.

The forward of the book is written by longtime Texas music writer Joe Nick Patoski, who wrote pretty much the definitive Willie bio. Patoski has a first-person story in the latest Texas Highways magazine about learning to surf at age 72.

Joe Bob says check out both the book and the surfing story.

 

Interesting. I sometimes listen to a book podcast called Backlisted, and several episodes ago they mentioned A Month in the Country as the perfect book to get the lapsed reader back into reading. Which is what turned me onto it. I don't think the podcast is popular enough on its own to cause a resurgence, but perhaps it was part of some domino effect.