Joining Kat and friends. Go see what the others are up to.

Knitting.

No new picture of the Big Brown Blob. It is still brown and blobby. I am knitting the handles now. It may be done and felted by next Wednesday. Stay tuned...

Reading.

sd

Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives by Mary Laura Philpott. I was expecting this to be a novel, but it turned out to be a collection of essays on fear and anxiety and optimism about keeping the author’s children safe as they grow. There is a turtle that hangs around their yard, and they call him Frank. This book was entirely enjoyable. 3.5★

sd

sd

sd

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial by Debra Cohen. I picked this out of the pile of library books by my bed, but after 20 or so pages decided it was not appealing to me, so I looked through the rest of the many, many books. None of them had the compelling atmosphere of Last Call. So I picked it up again. It is well over 400 pages and has taken me several nights of reading, and I am still not done. It starts in the early 1920s; I am up to the late 1930s. The writer must have been a fly on the wall during many of the scenes; I marvel at the research she must have done. The leading characters are John Gunther, Vincent “Jimmy” Shean, H.R. Knickerbocker, and Dorothy Thompson, all cub reporters as the book opens. In those tumultuous years between the wars, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi, and helped shape what Americans knew about the world. Along with the worldly reporting are intimate details about each one’s private life. 4★

Listening.

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead. As I was listening to this one I was doing other things and didn’t necessarily get the entire flow of the plot. But soon I was absorbed by the characters. Set in the early 1960s, this is the story of Ray Carney, his cousin Freddy, and a multitude of other small-time crooks. Whitehead takes us into the Harlem of that time and peoples it with upstanding citizens, more-or-less honest businessmen, and an assortment of shady characters. 4★

zx

sd

Watching.

as

China Beach. We are nearly done with season two; one season to go. This show was so well-done. It shows the various reactions the soldiers and nurses and Red Cross volunteers had to the war and the ways they chose to deal with the chaos and pain.

sd

sd

sd

sd

Suits. Haven’t watched this for a bit. Hotel Imperial is too good not to keep reading every night.