Areas of Unrest

10 July 2005 - Spirited Luxury

As a quick follow-up to last week, one can solve a logic puzzle a lot faster should one happen to actually notice the two clues on the second page.

The celebrity death of the week is Ed McBain. Which is just one of the several names he used (Evan Hunter being one of the other well-known ones), but it's the one he wrote the 87th Precinct novels under. Coincidentally, I've been rereading those lately and some of them are astonishingly good. All of them are fast-paced and absorbing, but not all feel as realistic as the best ones do. I've never cared for the Deaf Man, for example, because the whole super-villain concept is annoying. But a book like Calypso - now that's what a police novel can be.

I'll also mention briefly another bit of reading this week. I read the last Anne of Green Gables novel, Rilla of Ingleside, yesterday. It strikes me as entirely unreasonable that anybody is allowed to sell this book without an accompanying box of tissues. I realized that L.M. Montgomery had to deal with World War I in the series, but I wasn't quite prepared to sob my way through the last 70 or so pages. And they claim these are children's books! I haven't cried so much at a novel since I read S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders in 8th grade.

Reading the news should also make me cry, but it's less personal and, sadly, all too expected. I got a lift home on Thursday from a colleague who, listening to the radio in the morning, had been too spooked to take the metro. My sick joke was to speculate whether an orange alert means they'll run extra Orange Line trains.

But the newspaper did feature one amusing story this week. There was a piece in the International Herald Tribune on lava tubes. Apparently, the police on Maui ousted a woman who had set up a residence inside a lava tube. They'd tracked her down because of the marks on the lava made by her having dragged a four-poster bed to the lava tube. She said she was living there in search of spiritual fulfillment. Hmmm, living in what is essentially a cave, but sleeping on a four-poster bed. Now there's a spiritual aesthetic I could get behind.