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Reading Slothfully
I was told in elementary school that I only could read at half the speed for success in college. Oh well, one benefit of slow reading is you get to live with the characters a longer period of time. I read in a vain attempt to better understand people. At my other homes, I'm known as a spouse, pop, guy in the choir, physical chemist, computer/web dilettante and child-care provider. In theory, I'm a published author, if you consider stuff like Quenching Cross Sections for Electronic Energy Transfer Reactions Between Metastable Argon Atoms and Noble Gases and Small Molecules to count as publications. I've strewn dozens of such fascinating things to the winds.
Currently reading
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
The Spirit of the Border
Ramona the Brave (Ramona, #3)
The Underground Man (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
Delilah of the Snows
Mrs. Miniver
Betsy-Tacy Treasury (P.S.)
A Christmas Carol
The Way Some People Die
Envy of Angels
The Knife Slipped
Well, I thought to get some Perry Mason from the library in kindle. This was the first Erle Stanley Gardner I'd found. BUT...it's not Perry Mason!!! It seems that Gardner, under a pseudonym wrote a series of hard-boiled detective books featuring a young runt of a detective, Donald Lam, who worked for a large, coarse woman named Bertha Cool, who constantly refers to herself in third person. But this particular book, was never published at the time it was written, 1939. It only saw the light of day in 2016. The lurid, pulp-fiction cover has nothing to do with the book. Other than that, the book's ok. Mrs. Atterby brings her daughter, Mrs. Edith Cunner, to Bertha Cool's agency to dig up dirt on Edith's husband, Eben, who is pretty obviously being unfaithful. Bertha assigns Donald to the case. Along the way, they discover there's much political corruption involved in the shenanigans of Eben, aka Arthur Gell. Bertha decides she'd like to get in on the graft, cut herself a slice of cake, so to speak. But in the cake cutting, the knife slipped, and Bertha didn't get her much desired big pay day. But, they do finger the killer...sort of. It was a fairly cute story, and I'd likely read another if the library decides to carry any from this series in kindle format.
