July 7, 2023: Friday Recommendations
Daily Diary, Day 1041:
It has been a usual Friday, in that I did about an hour cleaning upstairs, and several loads of laundry. Currently the people from the landscaping company are removing old damaged stone and concrete in the front of the house as they wait for the last load of stones to be delivered. 50 years have started destroying the cement that held up the stones about 2 feet, and this entails pounding, drilling, sanding…very very loud. My husband has taken the dog out for second walk early to avoid, I am writing this post, rather than working on the story for similar reason.
I have phone call scheduled for this afternoon, and a walk, but that’s all, so I do hope to get some fiction writing done at some point.
I can’t believe it’s been almost a month since I did my last recommendations post, saying I was going to do it twice a month! Could be that once a month is more realistic. I realize this is more of a review of what I have been watching, reading, listening to, but I am only including things that I can recommend, so I am not mentioning the audiobooks, books, etc that I decided not to finish. In short, I am following the “if you can’t say anything nice” about something, to not say anything at all.
TV watching: My husband spent most of the month continuing to watch old episodes of Columbo, but he has just shifted over to rewatching Lie to Me (about a company run by a man who uses his ability to interpret body language and facial detection to spot lies). I liked this show, so I may suggest he shift to having it be something we watch in the evenings. We also continued to watch Seinfeld, but I confess now that we are on Season 4 I am getting a little tired of it, so it may be time for a break. The past week we have been watching the last season of Graham Norton's talk show that we somehow missed. I think this is the only “talk show” we have ever watched consistently, and we quite enjoy it. Perhaps this is because we watch so much British TV that we often are more familiar with the actors from those shows than American actors!
Apropos of British shows, we finished watching the charming British comedy the Café, and we are on season two of Clatterford (Jam and Jerusalem for British audience). This show was written by Jennifer Saunders, and she is a part of a hilarious ensemble cast that includes Dawn French (Saunders and French wrote Absolutely Fabulous, which some of you may remember.) Both the Café and Clatterford are incredibly heart-warming, and I would put them both up with The Detectorists, as some of our favorite shows.
We have been watching an odd mix of movies on Max (the old HBO) that came up in a New York Times 50 best films on Max list, including the Verdict (Paul Newman), Burn after Reading (Coen Brothers spy comedy), Cleo from 5 to 7 (a French New Wave film). There are lots of great movies on this list, but we concentrated on the ones we hadn’t seen or hadn’t seen in decades.
Listening: This past month I haven’t been listening to podcasts, but have continued to listen to audiobooks. I finished listening to the Anne Cleeves, Vera mystery, called the Glass Room, some of the short stories on an anthology by Ursula Le Guin, called the Found and the Lost, and I just completed Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs mystery, An Incomplete Revenge, which was excellent. Not sure what I will start next.
I have also been listening to some Lizzo, Miley Cyrus, Judy Collins, Crosby Stills and Nash, Nina Simone, Patti Smith, Simon and Garfunkel, and the Neville Brothers, oh and yesterday, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, but that was when I was writing, the others were for walking. My listening is much more eclectic than my reading or tv watching!
Reading: One thing I did this past month is get all caught up with my magazines (New Yorker, Discover, Science News, New Science), and I am trying very hard to keep caught up. Otherwise, I finished the Albert Campion mystery, Death of a Ghost and have just started the anthology, The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2022.
As usual, I hope some of these recommendations give you some ideas for your own recreational activities, and, I would love to hear from you what shows or books are currently entertaining you!
Hi, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series.
If you have received this newsletter reflecting on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, it is either because you subscribed or someone forwarded it to you. If you are in the latter camp, and want to subscribe, just click on this handy button.