The Best of Us - Joyce Maynard

Wow, what a memoir.  Joyce Maynard is a fiction author, who bares herself in writing this story about her life.  Primarily is a book about her great love.  How when she was 58, she met the love of her life Jim, and how they both found a great joy in being together and enjoying life.  They enjoyed music, travelling, driving and just spending their time together.    Then a year after getting married, Jim is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The second part of the memoir is pretty daunting, as Joyce and Jim try to decide what treatments to pursue and whose advice they should follow.  They seek out other sufferers and survivors to find out what worked for them and meet people for advice and support, watching most eventually die of this horrid disease.

I could have carried on reading for so much longer, as Joyce opened up on her life, but the story did eventually have to end.  I didn't cry, but just felt in awe of reading this book, which felt like reading one big private love letter. 5/5

The Stars Are Fire - Anita Shreve

The author is a favorite of mine, and I looked forward to reading her new novel.  She has a good skill of being able to draw the reader into the world of late 1940s Maine.  Grace is a young mother of two, and pregnant with another when  huge fires surround their small seaside town.  As her husband has gone to help fight the fires she is left with her best friend  to try and save her young family.

Not the happiest if stories to read, Grace has a fairly tough life where she suffers a lot of sorrow and worries, it does give a snapshot of what life must have been like for a lot of women in that era. 4/5

Finding Gobi - Dion Leonard

This is a story that I had seen on both the news and 60 minutes and also read about on several news sites.  In 2016, while on an endurance race through the Gobi Desert, runner Dion Leonard finds himself joined by a little stray dog that stays by his side through hours of running in the heat, over sand dunes and roads.

When the race ends, Dion realizes that he has a real connection with the wee pup he calls Gobi and sets about to see if he can get her taken back to his home in Scotland.  Things are not quite so simple though, and the story reinforces your faith in most people (of course there are a few crazy and dangerous ones too).

So all in all, a good little man and dog story.  5/5

Music Monday - The Whole of the Moon - The Waterboys

Gosh this one reminds me of living in London in the mid nineties, so long ago now.  Me walking around crowded streets and on the tube listening non stop on my walkman, and then when I had saved some pounds I got a discman.  I might have to get some more tunes to put on my ipod now.  I wonder what will come next?  How will the kids be listening to music in twenty years time?

The Bright Hour - Nina Riggs

What a beautiful book.  The author Nina Riggs writes so smoothly about the challenges that are thrown at her.  First her most loved mother dies, then her son is diagnosed with diabetes and then her own journey with Breast cancer.  Only in her thirties and with two young sons, she is able to open up and bring us close into her world.  I have a soft spot for such memoirs, and this one reinforces my affection for such books. 5/5

Snatched

My niece and I had a big day out.  Shopping, eating and seeing IT at the movies.  We then got pricey hipster chips and came home to have a feast on the couch.  We thought  a comedy might stop us having nightmares about clowns.

The premise is pretty simple.  Amy Schumer plays the usual dizzy version of herself, while Goldie Hawn plays her more serious worry wart mother.  After a boyfriend break up, Amy is forced into taking her mother on a holiday to Ecuador.   After meeting a handsome young man, the ladies find themselves abducted.   Hilarious hijinks are meant to ensue, but we found ourselves bored and chit chatted throughout.

We didn't have nightmares about scary clowns or aging comedians with two much filler.  2/5

IT

We went to the cinema this afternoon to see IT.  I couldn't remember if I had read the book when it came out.  I won't retell the story, except to say that primarily about a group of bullied youngsters in the small town of Derry.   As well as being abused by the local bullies, all of the kids are being tormented by the spooky clown that terrorizes the local children.

I didn't find it too scary, although there were quite a few jump off your seat scares for the folks seated around us.  I did enjoy the goonies/stand by me friendship theme running throughout the story.  4/5

The Little Theatre By The Sea - Rosanna Ley

Faye has finished her interior degree course and with no job to go to accepts her good friends offer of house sitting in the beautiful Sardinia.   Whilst there she is asked to help out with the little local theatre that has been deserted for decades, and is in need of a renovation.

This is a gentle slow novel and although it didn't offer any surprises it did keep me entertained.   3/5.

Need You Dead - Peter James

Reading the latest Roy Grace novel is always exciting.  You know someone will die, Roy will talk about his family, his dog and his late goldfish (gone but not forgotten), there will be a few suspects and the team will come together to solve the crime, usually after a chase and then at the end there will be a slight twist, something to keep you coming back for more.  Already I am looking forward to the next adventure. 4/5

Music Monday - Haim - Falling

I can't stop listening to Haim at the moment.   Lots of the songs our my soundtrack on the way to work.

A Date For Mad Mary

It was a bit of a quiet weekend in the city with plenty of spring rain.  Good for the gardens, but we are all a bit over it.  I would have preferred to see Victoria and Abdul, but that wasn't going to work out.  So we went to see this one, a movie none of us knew about.

Mary is in her 20s and just out of prison for a violent attack.  She is to be a matron of honor at her best friends wedding, but needs to find a  date to be her plus one.  On line it is described as an Irish comedy but it is not roll around the floor funny and I would think it should be under the drama genre.

It was OK, and although we knew little about it we were entertained and a little surprised at how it ended.  3/5

Disaster Movies

Tonight after a disrupted nights sleep due to on call work, I sat down to relax and rewatch a movie I must have seen at least 5 times in the past - The Day After Tomorrow.    I have a soft spot for the old disaster movies, and I was trying to think why they appealed so much.  I guess that as a child growing up in the 1970s, our Saturday nights were filled with The Posiedan Adventure and the Towering Inferno, all impossibly long and boring with only 10 minutes of action at the end.   Modern movies with computer generated effects can get into it pretty early on, and we can get scene after scene off big cities, sinking, burning and cracking apart.

The formula for most of these movies is common for most of these movies:

• Some large landmark will be destroyed with sad music playing
• The main characters generally will survive the disaster, after several close calls of planes crashing, hanging off cliffs, sinking etc
• There will be a love interest, all quiet looks at the beginning and a lusty embrace at the end
• The baddie will get their  comeuppance at the end, and usually die in some gruesome way

Now being a middle aged lady, I seldom venture to the cinema to see such movies and are content to stream them for a cheaper price or wait until they are on free tv.  After watching the news lately with the two large hurricanes in the US and flooding in Asia, it seems that real life is far more extreme than the fiction we normally watch.  With hundreds of thousands of people affected and left hungry and homeless, I can't help but think I am lucky that we have not had such disasters here.  So I am thinking that the universal appeal of such movies, is that for all of us, we are just trying to survive and get through, and we all think about what we would do in the same circumstances.

The Lost Letter - Jillian Cantor

A good story that was easy to get lost in.  Told in two story lines, in 1989 when Kate's life is changing and she is dealing with her aging father who is losing his memory.   She is looking after his stamp collection and wonders about a fifty years old letter that was never sent.

In 1939 we meet Kristoff who is taken in by an Austrian stamp engraver and his young daughters.  With the Nazis approaching the Jewish family do not feel safe.

A unique spin  on a second world war novel.

4/5

Far From the Madding Crowd

A sunny spring day here turned a bit chilly by the late afternoon, so it was time to close the windows and doors and watch some of the movies and shows that have piled up unwatched.  Far From the Madding Crowd came out in 2015, but was one of those movies that I was too busy to go and watch at the cinema and with $17 ticket prices, it makes it a bargain to watch it home for $2.99 from the Apple store.

Based on the classic 1874 novel from Thomas Hardy that I had never read it was a glimpse into a genre that appeals to me.  The tale of a woman, in a world where it was difficult for her to have independence, status and choices, when being married usually meant losing her money and having to yield to her husband.  Bathsheba Everdene helps on her aunties farm, before she inherits her own estate (lucky girl).  She gets involved with three different men, who all fall in love with her instantly and who will she choose?

I always enjoy watching Carey Mulligan, and I loved the costumes, scenery and handsome men.  The story was a little flat for me - somehow the passion and love seemed a bit muted.  Still a 4/5.

The Late Show - Michael Connelly

Detective Renee Ballard prefers to work the night shifts in her LA department, away from all the others and giving her time to paddleboard during the day and finish off her jobs.  This is a new main character for the author, and I think he has done a great job of creating her, she came across real with enough flaws to develop several storylines, with of course a couple of traumatic back stories.  She seemed to be able to hold her own with the male detectives and is able to solve a major crime case.

I look forward to see where her next stories go. 4/5

Music Monday - Fly Me To The Moon

I watched this at the weekend- she is pretty amazing.  Angelina Jordan is from Norway and is only 10 years old.  This is her singing Fly Me to the Moon from the US TV show Little Big Shots.

What We Did On Our Holiday

Saturday night on the couch and I thought I would watch one of the $2.99 special movies on Apple TV.   What We Did On Our Holiday is a British movie with a simple premise.  Mum and Dad and three cute kids are driving to Scotland to visit their dad/grandad played by Billy Connelly who is celebrating a significant  birthday.

I won't give the whole plot away, Wikipedia can tell you the whole thing.   I really liked the middle portion, but felt beginning and end were a bit flat and boring.  Billy Connelly was especially good in his role and it never seemed like he was acting, more like just being a version of himself.  3/5

Spooks

I really liked the British drama Spooks when it originally aired about MI5, which had a great abundance of quality acting mixed with serious political storylines.  Sir Harry Pearce  (Peter Firth) returns to tie this story and adding Kitchen Harrington you think would be a winning formula.

A usual case of the old double cross and not knowing if our characters were working for the goodies or the baddies left me a little bored .  Like the Sex and the City movies, it felt like it was trying to recreate a period of time and place that had moved on.  2/5