June 2010

Matt Scudder used to be a cop. Then one day, during a shootout, his bullet ricocheted wrong—killed an eight-year-old girl. Now Matt's life is different. Bars, coffee, guilt. He's not a cop anymore, but people still call him when they need things solved. This is noir territory, raw and unflinching.

Fair warning: this is 100% about fishing. No metaphors here. Real fish, real rivers, real waders. My personal fishing experience? Limited. Caught one trout once in Norway. That's it. But Gierach writes about fly-fishing with the kind of obsessive detail that makes you want to grab a rod and head for the nearest stream.

According to reliable sources (I've been so buried in work lately I can't confirm anything myself), today is June 22, 2010. Which means what? This blog is four years old. Crazy, right? Four years of reading, writing, sharing. Still here. Still going.

Need an energy boost? Mozart's your answer. Monday June 21st, for the music festival, my choir performs Mozart's Requiem at 8 PM at the elementary school on rue Keller, Paris 11. We've been rehearsing for months. Come if you're around. It'll be good.

In crime fiction, the broken cop usually drinks. Whisky after whisky, blurring his way through cases. This book's hero? Addicted to sex instead. Seriously addicted. Every smile from a woman sends him spiraling. It's darker than it sounds. Chainas doesn't pull punches.

I've gotten into nature writing and I can't stop. Back to Montana again. In 1987, Rick Bass walked away from his career as a petroleum geologist. He moved to a remote valley in Montana. Winters there are brutal. He writes about surviving them, about isolation, about what happens when you strip everything away.

At eighteen, Lucy Gayheart is the most popular girl in Haverford, a small town in the Platte Valley. People love watching her walk briskly through town, chasing some dream. Or skating on the river. She's got that quality—always moving toward something just out of reach. Cather captures that restless energy perfectly.