Maine 9/20/2009

Julie and I were invited to spend a couple days with an IBM friend from the sixties in East Blue Hill, Maine. There were actually a few others who lived in the town. This is their guest cottage which provided excellent comfort and accommodations.




These are our hosts, Connie and Ralph, on a tour of the Blue Hill harbor in Ralph's boat (one of only 105 of its type built in the Brooklin, Maine shipyard, the wooden boat capital).






The next day Julie and I drove over to Mt. Desert Island to tour around Acadia National Park. This is Northeast Harbor one of many that look alike to the untrained eye (mine).

We took a 12 mile hike (or was it a 1/2 mile) on Ship's Harbor nature trail to get an up close and personal view of the flora and fauna.




It was a relaxing mini vacation and Julie was able to visit five or six gift shops (all on plastic).

More books since September 4.

The Associate by John Grisham. This is a good story about a law school graduate who is blackmailed into joining a prestigious law firm to spy on another law firm. Fortunately there are no courtroom scenes.

The Body of David Hayes by Ridley Pearson. The author is always good for a "page-turner" and this one is that but it has too many twists and turns that distract from the story. It's not his best.

Nightlife by Thomas Perry. Catherine Hobbes is a Portland, OR detective trying to track a killer who changes identity seemingly at will. The killer kills only when it is inconvenient to let a paricular person live.

Killer Summer by Ridley Pearson. I lke Pearson even if he occasionally misses (see above). This one is the latest of his Killer series with Sun Valley sheriff Walt Fleming. Walt has to deal with all sorts of problems and distractions with family, love-life, FBI, etc. while trying to solve a crime.

Brimstone by Robert B. Parker. This the third and last of a western series (Appaloosa and Resolution) with Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch. These two know each other so well they can converse with one-word sentences. Everett is the narrator and he's like an old western Spenser (see below).

Chance by Robert B. Parker. I finished Brimstone during the first day of a three-day mini vacation in Maine so I picked Chance off the shelf of old paperbacks at our host's guest cabin and started reading. It was vaguely familiar but I've read so many of Parker's Spenser novels that I wasn't sure I'd read it. I didn't remember how it ended so I finished it. I went into my "Books Read" list and discovered that I read it last May.

A late-'30s-era London governess hired to work in the home of a high-profile nightclub chanteuse gets a taste of the good life when she is assigned the task of sorting out the singer's many unseemly affairs in a period comedy staring Frances McDormond.







A thirtysomething single mother whose boundless potential was squandered through a series of failed relationships and a misguided effort to help her younger sister succeed in life finds the fruits of her labors finally coming together.









When a young Vienna Music Conservatory student and aspiring composer accepts a job as a copyist for Ludwig von Beethoven, she soon finds her destiny forever interlinked with that of the legendary classical musician. This is rated R for sexuality...there is none, it's more of a comedy because Ed Harris is wild as Beethoven.

This is a complicated story of espionage in China during WWII. Director Ang Lee relieves some of the confusion with explicit pornography.

This movie tells the true-life story of Nathaniel Ayers, a former cello prodigy whose bouts with schizophrenia landed him on the streets after two years of schooling at Juilliard. Jamie Foxx does a great job of portraying one afflicted with schizophrenia.

Books read since September 4:
The Associate by John Grisham. About a Yale Law School graduate who gets blackmailed into joining a prestigious law firm so he can spy on them for another big law firm. If he doesn't a video of an undergraduate gang-bang will be published. Lots of other twists and turns.

The Body of David Hayes by Ridley Pearson. He's one of my favorites bu this one didn't quite make it. Same idea as The Associate only this time it's a video of a one night affair that would ruin the life, career,etc. of the wife of a well known detective on the Seattle PD will be published if she doesn't help steal $17million from her bank where she's an officer.

Julie and I had a fun weekend with Dave, Tina, Luke and Kajsa at the beach.

Julie took Luke to Baker Hill for a tour of the golf course.

Amy has a new venture with a blog, http://www.montanafortune.wordpress.com, which I hope is successful. I've never been fond of pyramid schemes but they work for some, I guess.

I read the following books since August 21:

When Will There be Good News? by Kate Atkinson (another UK writer). Atkinson’s latest novel is the third to feature Jackson Brodie, although the author says she “never thought of it as a trilogy. I just thought of it as three books with the same character moving on and evolving, I think, so that by the end of book three, Jackson is in a very different place to what he was at the beginning of book one.” And while Atkinson is herself moving on with her next project — an unrelated novel featuring two female characters at a murder mystery weekend — she does hope to return to Jackson Brodie one day. But for now she feels that the end of When Will There Be Good News? is a “good place to leave him, because he needs to recover, I think, from all kinds of things that have happened to him.”

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson. Joy is not the first emotion one would expect to feel while reading a long Swedish crime novel that deals with misogyny, sex trafficking, police corruption, and a handful of explicitly gruesome murders. Yet The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second novel in Stieg Larsson's internationally bestselling Millennium series, turns a reader inside out with a joy that can't be squashed, not even by the grim knowledge that the 50-year-old author died suddenly in 2004 after finishing three books and will publish no more.

Resolution by Robert B. Parker. A greedy saloon/hotel/bank owner threatens the coalition of local ranchers in the town of Resolution, pitching two honorable gunfighters, Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, into a make-shift war that'll challenge their friendship —and the violently shifting laws of the West.This is the second of a series of three (so far), the first being Appaloosa. Virgil and Everett are such good friends that they could finish each other's sentences or thoughts. Parker portrays the West as it probably was, there were no good guys and bad guys, everyone was, to some extent, bad.