Streaming Recommendations
Streaming Recommendations
A few weeks ago, I watched a TCM rebroadcast of Robert Osborne’s 2014 interview with Academy Award-winning actress Eva Marie Saint, whose career began in 1947, when she was twenty-three years old and, at eight-eight, was still acting. Her intelligence, warmth, candor, and openness were extraordinary, and I enjoyed every minute of it. It’s available to stream on YouTube.
One of her most famous films is Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest in which she stars opposite Cary Grant Released in 1959, it is widely known as one of the best films ever made I’d seen and enjoyed the film two or three times over the years; Saint’s comments about it and the clips I saw interspersed with her interview made me want to see it again, and I’m very glad I did. It was suspenseful, beautifully written, directed, and acted, and totally absorbing. Hitchcock’s screenwriter was Ernest Lehman, whose dialogue is superb. North by Northwest is available to stream on Amazon Prime, YouTube, and other streaming platforms.
A few weeks before, I decided to watch another movie I’d seen and liked, Moonstruck, starring Cher and Nicholas Cage, directed by Normal Jewison, and written by John Patrick Shanley. Released in 1987, Moonstruck is a romantic comedy like no other, and I relished every minute of it. Like North by Northwest, the writing, directing, and acting are flawless Moonstruck is available to stream on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and other streaming platforms.
After laughing my way through Moonstruck, I was ready to see a drama, and I chose the 1989 film My Left Foot, a true story based on the autobiography by Irish artist and writer Christy Brown, who had cerebral palsy.
Thinking about the film, which was directed by Jim Sheridan and adapted from Brown’s autobiography by Sheridan and Shane Connaughton, I found myself recalling moments of Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance as Brown, who could only control the movement of the toes on his left foot and nevertheless achieved what he did.
I also remembered liking Brenda Fricker’s performance as Brown’s mother. Seeing the film again, however, I was blown away by Brown’s complex, challenging, and inspiring story and the way Day-Lewis and Fricker brought it to life. Not surprisingly, both of them won Academy Awards, Day-Lewis for Best Actor and Fricker for Best Supporting Actress. My Left Foot is available to stream on Amazon Prime, Paramount+, MGM+, and other streaming platforms.
The other night, following a friend’s recommendation, I saw the 2023 film She Came to Me, written and directed by Leslie Miller and starring Peter Dinklage, Anne Hathaway, and Marisa Tomei. The story Leslie Miller has crafted is unusual, involving, and surprising; her direction is outstanding, and the acting is remarkable.
One of the choices Miller made that impressed me the most is that she cast Dinklage, who is a dwarf and gained worldwide fame for his role in Game of Thrones, to play the male lead, a composer in the midst of a creative crisis whose size is never mentioned. The role could have been played by any good actor in his forties or fifties; Dinklage’s talent makes him the perfect choice. Hathaway’s and Tomei’s talent make them the perfect choices for their highly contrasting, distinctive roles, too. She Came to Me is available to stream on Amazon Prime, Hulu, Apple TV, Disney+, and other streaming platforms.
Another film on my recommended list is Rustin, directed by George C. Wolfe, written by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black, and starring Colman Domingo. Rustin is the true story of Bayard Rustin, an out gay African Amerian who worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. to achieve Civil Rights non-violently and, among other accomplishments, was instrumental in organizing the 1963 March on Washington. Throughout his decades as an advocate, Rustin had to combat homophobia as well as racism, and the film’s dramatization of this is powerful and moving. Rustin is available to stream on Netflix.
Last night I watched Clint Eastwood’s film Gran Torino, which I’d seen it in 2008 when it was released, and it touched me deeply. Its treatment of its themes—bigotry and grieving over a lost loved one—involved me from beginning to end. Eastwood’s work as an actor and director is flawless. The rest of the cast’s performances are first-rate, too. If you’re in the mood for an emotional experience, see it tonight on Amazon Prime, HBO MAX, Apple TV, or one of the other streaming platforms on which it’s available!
Reading Recommendations
I recently worked with two authors of memoirs, and an author of a fantasy novel. Since each author is unique, every experience is unique, and because I choose projects I find interesting and worthwhile, I enjoy the process.
Regardless of how busy I am during the day, I put aside time at night to read novels, non-fiction, short stories, and poetry, and I have recommendations in all four genres.
My first is the novel James by Percival Everett, who wrote Erasure, the novel on which the film American Fiction is based. James is a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the slave, Jim, who runs away from his owner who wants to sell him, and joins Huck, a boy who runs away from his brutal father on a raft on the Mississippi River.
James is brilliantly conceived and executed, and I admired every word. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I don’t like spoilers, so I’m not going to include any here. Just take my word for it, James is well worth reading.
I also recommend Everett’s short story “In Medias Res” in the Winter 2023 Yale Review. “In Medias Res” is distinctive in its take on a noir plot and narrative style. As a fan of noir novels and an admirer of Everett’s writing, I loved it.
I recommend the following short stories as well. Some are haunting, others are disturbing and provocative, all of them engaged me and held my attention.
“Bridling” by Nadia Davids, “Reading” by Devon Geyelin, “Renovation” by Chin-Sun Lee, “Very Good Subjects” by Ani Cooney, and “The Statute of Limitations” by Jane Delury, in the Fall 2023 Georgia Review.
“Winner” by Ling Ma, in the Winter 2023 Yale Review.
“No Fury” by Jane Walton, “Prolonged Exposure” by Lacey Jones, “The Tornado” by K-Ming Cha, “Bus to Saigon” by Brian Ma, “If I Tell You This is Fiction,” by Jenny Lecce, “Where Are the Littles?” by Kathleen Postma, “Thin Air” by Aria Beth Sloss,” and “Entropy” by Melissa Yancy in the Fall 2024 Kenyon Review;
“Rosaura at Dawn” by Daniel Saldana Paris and “A Mild Irreversible Form of Enlightenment” by Anna DeForest in the Spring 2024 Yale Review.
“Last Time We Spoke” by Lydi Conklin in the Summer 2024 Yale Review, and
“The Hadal Zone” by Annie Proulx in the July 8 & 15 New Yorker.
My favorite nonfiction that I read this summer is I Wonder as I Wander, the second volume of distinguished poet Langston Hughes’s autobiography. Published in 1955 when he was fifty-four, its primary focus is his earlier experiences as an African American child and young adult living and traveling in the United States and other countries. It includes his memories of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and early ‘30s when the arts flourished until the 1929 stock market crash devastated America, especially Black and other minority communities, as well as the rest of the world.
The most fascinating part of the book to me was Hughes’s trip to the Union of Socialist Soviet Republic in 1932 and 1933. The U.S.S.R. brought him there as part of a group of African Americans to make a film, “Negro Life,” about the injustices Black people faced in America.
When the government decided not to make the film, Hughes remained in the U.S.S.R. to see it from one end to the other. The experiences he writes about, especially the improved opportunities for Black and other poor people after the Bolshevik Revolution, are enlightening.
My wife, actress and author Cynthia Hoppenfeld, introduced me to Hughes’s work when she recommended The Weary Blues, an impactful collection of his poems about racism, ragtime, jazz, Harlem, the South, Africa, and people in his life. Published in 1925when Hughes was twenty-four, it won awards that enabled him to complete his college education. The sensitivity, insight, and beauty of the poems is remarkable, and, like Cynthia, I highly recommend it.
Books I’ve Read During the Pandemic
In the last few months, I’ve read several books that I highly recommend.
The first is Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel by African American author Zora Neil Hurston. I heard about it on a PBS series The Great American Read when Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African Research at Harvard University and an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, recommended it. I like and respect Gates from years of watching Finding Your Roots, a PBS series on which, as host and producer, he traces the genealogy and genetics of well-known people in various fields with fascinating results. Given my respect for Gates, I immediately ordered a copy of Hurston’s book.
As a reader, I don’t like knowing much about a novel before I read it, I’m annoyed when reviews contain spoilers that give away plot points or lessen the pleasure of gaining insight into a character as I read. So, I’m going to follow the edict of Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who famously said, “Less is more.” All I’ll tell you about Their Eyes Were Watching God is that it takes place in Florida in the first decade of the twentieth century, it’s about the life of African American Janie Crawford, and it’s one of the most emotionally involving, revelatory, and surprising novels I’ve ever read. I hope that’s enough of a recommendation that you’ll take a chance to read it.
Another book I hope you’ll read is The First Man by Albert Camus. Many years ago, I read his novel The Stranger and his long essay The Myth of Sisyphus. Unlike these books, The First Man is not a work of existential philosophy; it is Camus’s autobiographical novel about his early life growing up in poverty in French Algeria. All I’ll tell you beyond that is that the book is engrossing and inspiring, and that Camus never got to complete it. The draft he was working on was found in the trunk of his car after he was killed in a traffic accident in 1960. Thirty-five years later, his daughter decided to publish it along with his notes. I learned from the notes that Camus had planned to continue refining it, but as a reader I found every page so involving that, as with Their Eyes Were Watching God, I felt privileged to read it.
Practicing Yoga at Home
I’ve been practicing yoga 3 to 5 days a week for over 22 years. Until March 2020, I went to 90-minute classes and had many wonderful teachers. The teachers would always tell us we should do a home practice as well, but I almost never did, and when I did, I practiced for only 5 or 10 minutes. Frankly, I lacked the discipline to do more on my own.
Going to class suited me perfectly: a teacher chose the poses (asanas), gave instructions and corrections, and provided the opportunity for my practice to be substantial. Of course, it was up to me to make it substantial, and being who I am–a man who tends to ruminate on issues (often writing and editing issues) that I feel I need to resolve as soon as possible–my mind would wander. The 90 minutes gave me time to let it wander, observe it wandering, gradually stop it from wandering, and focus my attention–or at least 70-80 percent of it–on whatever pose I was doing. At the end of every class, I felt lighter, more relaxed, more present than I felt at the beginning.
Then came the pandemic. By the end of that March, I was no longer comfortable going to class, and, with deep regret, I stopped. But having experienced yoga’s profound benefits for so many years, I knew I had to continue practicing. After 2 decades of hearing that I should do a home practice, this meant I would start doing one. And I knew it couldn’t be for just 5 or 10 minutes; I vowed that even though I’d never come close to it in the past, my home practice would be at least an hour.
I soon realized it was impossible for me to do a Zoom class; I couldn’t place my computer anywhere near the space I needed to clear for my practice. Clearing it was a challenge in itself: I had to move my computer table and other furniture to make room for my yoga mat, props, blankets, and me. Once I figured out how to do this, I was surprised to find that I enjoyed planning the home practice that I would conduct for myself. I was fortunate that 2 generous teachers I’d studied with talked with me on the phone and gave me guidance about adjustments I could make for poses that were problematic for me.
With their input, I planned sequences of poses in which some were strenuous and some were restorative, and I began an afternoon home practice, using a digital timer. Hearing a “beep, beep, beep” when poses ended wasn’t the same as hearing teachers telling me it was time to get out of poses, nor did the beeper remind me, as teachers always did, how to get out of the poses properly. Now that was up to me, just as it was up to me to get into poses properly, and to focus my attention on the parts of my body that I needed to work with in order to do the poses properly and experience maximum benefits.
Now my home yoga practice is part of my everyday life, and I look forward to it. I can’t say that my mind doesn’t wander at home as it did in class, but when it does, I observe it, I bring my attention back to the pose, and focus on the parts of my body that I need to fully engage and the ways I need to engage them to really do the pose. It’s challenging, and I don’t always succeed at practicing with 100 percent commitment, but I continue working on it, and I continue improving.
I find that developing the discipline to do my home practice regularly, to do the strenuous poses strenuously and the restorative poses so that they restore my body and truly calm my mind has made me far more aware as a yoga practitioner than I ever was before.
Shortly after I began my home practice, I reread BKS Iyengar’s Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom. Although I’d read it before–I bought the book in 2013 when it was published and Iyengar came to Los Angeles and spoke at UCLA and at the Institute where I took classes–it was as if I were reading it for the first time. His learned insight into yoga, his love of yoga, and the beautiful way in which he wrote about the asanas and the evolutionary spiritual journey we take when we practice with awareness inspired me and informs my daily practice.
I practice Iyengar yoga, a school of Hatha yoga, but Light on Life isn’t just about Iyengar yoga; it’s about the principles and philosophy of yoga, and if you practice any type of yoga, I believe that reading Light on Life will enrich your practice as it has enriched mine.
I hope that in the new year I will be comfortable going to classes again. In the meantime, it’s a blessing that I’ve finally found out why my teachers always recommended doing a home practice and that I’m experiencing its benefits.
Some of My Favorite Classic Novels
I love reading novels. Well-written novels take hold of my imagination and immerse me in the characters and the world that the novelist creates. Sometimes I’m so involved with those people—fully developed characters have all the reality of people—and that particular world that I don’t want to put the novel down; I want to keep reading until I get to the end, and when I reach the end, often I wish that the novel were longer so that I wouldn’t have to leave the fictional reality that I’ve found so compelling.
Although I read some contemporary fiction in college, most of the novels I loved while I was in school were classics, written long before I was born. My enjoyment of classic novels has continued, and today I alternate between reading contemporary novels and reading classics. Continue reading
Music, Music, Music
Listening to music is one of my great pleasures.
As a kid, I enjoyed early rock ‘n’ rollers like Elvis Presley (I especially loved “Heartbreak Hotel”), Buddy Holly, Big Bopper, Bill Haley & his Comets, and the Platters, and pop artists my parents listened to, including Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Doris Day. My parents bought the original cast recording of My Fair Lady, and that introduced me to Broadway scores. Soon we were also listening to West Side Story, Music Man, and Bye Bye Birdie.
I never felt I had to choose one type of music over others; I liked them all. At that time, songs from Broadway musicals were routinely recorded by pop, R & B, and even rock ‘n’ roll artists: Not only did Nat King Cole and Dean Martin sing “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” from My Fair Lady, so did Marvin Gaye—and on their album “Meet the Beatles!,” along with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “All I Got to Do,” the Beatles sang “Till There Was You” from The Music Man. The first time my sister, Wendy, played the album for me, I became a Beatles fan.
By the time I went to college, I also loved listening to folk artists, especially recent Nobel Prize-winner Bob Dylan, who became my idol. “Blowin’ in the Wind” was an anthem to me and to many others of my generation, with its haunting melody and poignant lyrics asking when, if ever, would we finally see the end of war and the end of racism, questions that we are still asking today. Every song Dylan recorded, whether about social issues (“The Times They Are a Changin’,” “Chimes of Freedom”) or love (“All I Really Want to Do”) or breaking up (“It Ain’t Me, Babe,” Don’t Think Twice,”) hit home, and I couldn’t wait to buy and listen to each new record (yes, vinyl!).
I also liked Motown. I loved listening to Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, and Aretha Franklin, one of the most powerful singers I’ve ever heard.
Musically speaking, college was an ear-opener for me. I’d never listened to classical music before and suddenly I started hearing it all the time. My friends in the dorm left their doors open while they played recordings of music composed by people whose names I knew but whose work was unfamiliar to me: Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Brahms. There were also pieces by composers I’d never heard of: Bartok, Mahler, Ives, Hindemith. I loved the beauty of the music, the rich sounds of the instruments, and the mastery of the musicians.
In college I was also introduced to jazz pianists Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, and Mose Allison, each with a distinctive style of playing (and Mose Allison with a unique and recognizable singing style, too), to saxophonists Ben Webster and Charlie Parker, and trumpet player Miles Davis, each of whom also had a unique style that I enjoyed tremendously.
Since my college days I’ve continued listening to rock, jazz, and pop vocalists, singer-songwriters, and bands. Besides those I’ve already mentioned, my favorites include Art Tatum, Stanley Turrentine, Oscar Petersen, Stephane Grappelli, Billie Holliday, Barbara Cook, Rosemary Clooney, Nina Simone, Etta James, Tony Bennett, Leonard Cohen, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, James Taylor, Kris Kristofferson, Carly Simon, Simon & Garfunkel, Paul Simon (solo), Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, The Eagles, and Elizabeth and the Catapult.
Some of the other classical composers whose works I’ve come to love are Liszt, Vivaldi, Paganini, Verdi, Puccini, Elgar, Copland, Gershwin, and Bernstein. My friend Tony Koltz introduced me to some contemporary classical composers whose work I like, too, including John Adams, Steven Reich, Osvaldo Goijov, and Frederic Rzewski.
Please write and tell me who your favorite recording artists and composers are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hinduism, the Old Testament, and the Oversoul
In “Picasso Was Right,” I quoted Picasso’s beautifully articulated observation that “the purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life from our souls.” After writing that blog, I found myself continuing to think about Picasso’s words, and that led me to think about what we mean when we talk about having a soul.
Of course, not everyone believes that human beings have souls. By definition, the soul is immortal. Some people believe we exist only as long as our physical bodies do, that each life starts with birth and ends with death. To believe that we have a soul, we have to believe there is a part of each of us that we cannot perceive through our senses and that has eternal life.
I am Jewish, and while I was growing up I never heard a rabbi, my parents, or other family members talk about the soul and eternal life. I learned the Ten Commandments and about loving strangers—foreigners—as myself. I also learned that it is important to live an ethical life.
My religious and familial education taught me that we should be compassionate and ethical because God is pleased when we treat other human beings respectfully and compassionately and displeased if we don’t. I’m not an expert on Jewish theology, so I don’t know if the soul is part of Jewish doctrine; I know only that I was never taught about it.
Yet as far back as I can remember, I knew the word soul and understood it to describe an immortal, invisible part of us that religious people believe in. I also knew that the soul is connected to God. Somehow it seemed true to me that each of us has a soul, even though no one had ever formally addressed the subject with me.
The first time I remember discussing the soul was in high school when we studied transcendentalism and read a poem and an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalism, our teacher explained, was a philosophy that emphasized going beyond the physical world we generally think of as the “real world” and using our intuition to find spiritual truth. Emerson put it this way: “What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
The poem we read was “Brahma,” named after the Hindu god of creation:
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
Emerson’s poem expresses his belief in the immortality of the soul—that death is not really death (“If the red slayer think he slays, /Or if the slain think he is slain, /They know not well the subtle ways / I keep, and pass, and turn again”). It also expresses his belief in the unity of all things, even those that to our earthly perception appear to be opposites (shame and blame, the slayer and the slain, far or forgot and near, shadow and sunlight).
Emerson’s essay “The Over-Soul” defines the oversoul as the spirit that connects the soul of each of us to all other souls and to God. Although the term oversoul isn’t mentioned in “Brahma,” the concept is intrinsic to the poem’s meaning because it is the oversoul that unites all and everything and, like the individual souls it unites, it is eternal. The poem is written in the voice of this eternal unity.
From the moment I read “Brahma” and “The Over-Soul,” they spoke to me. I found Emerson’s writing inspiring. I loved the language of the poem and felt Emerson was expressing what I’d always felt: that there is something beyond the material world that we can see, touch, taste, smell, and hear. Just as in my childhood I’d felt that each of us has a soul, on learning about the concept of the oversoul I felt that there is a spirit connecting all of us to each other and to God.
Indeed, I believe that the existence of the oversoul is the spiritual basis for the Old Testament’s instruction to love strangers as ourselves. Leviticus says we (the Jewish people) must do this because we were strangers—foreigners—in Egypt. This shared experience should make us kind and empathetic to all strangers. But the reason we need to love strangers as ourselves is not only because we have been strangers and know the need for kindness and empathy; we must love strangers as ourselves because on the deepest level we are part of each other: “Love the stranger as yourself” because the stranger is yourself.
What Is Success?
Recently, I wrote about Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) in “Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hinduism, The Old Testament, and the Oversoul.” As I was straightening up my office to get ready for the new year, I came across a quote of Emerson’s about success that I’ve saved since I found it many years ago. Reading it again, I was struck by how wise and helpful his words about success are, and I wanted to share them.
Emerson defined success as
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the
affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure
the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
I have nothing to add except my admiration and appreciation.
Picasso Was Right
Pablo Picasso said that “the purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
When I read that quote, it immediately crystalized my experience of visual art. One of Cynthia’s and my friends has a beautiful collection of paintings and photographs on the walls of her home. Most of the time when we visit her, I glance at them as I pass by on my way from one room to another, and I’m pleased to see them, but when I take the time to look at them—really to see them and take them in—they have an uplifting effect on me. Their images and colors, their composition, the imagination and talent that the artists put into them, take me out of myself and, to use Picasso’s words, wash the dust of daily life off my soul.
That’s why I love going to art museums. I can walk into the museum thinking about my to-do list or an issue I’ve encountered in my writing or editing or worrying about a problem, and as I look at the art, I transcend whatever I’ve been thinking about and am transported to another place where, captured and captivated by the art, I experience inner peace. I find that a visit to an art museum for an hour or two is transformative, not just for the time that I spend there, but for hours after I’ve left.
I don’t like all art; I like art that is aesthetically appealing to me or intriguing and provocative, art that takes great skill to create and/or that comes from an original idea that I find worth thinking about. Often art that I like surprises me; often it moves and inspires me; often it makes me stand in front of it in awe of its beauty or thinking about what inspired the artist to create it and what meaning I see in it.
In 2015, Cynthia and I took my mother, who had just turned 93, to two art museums on two successive Saturdays. In the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, we saw paintings by Whistler, Gaugin, Braque, Picasso, and Van Gogh. In the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), we saw contemporary and ancient Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian art, and an incredible work by the late Chris Burden, who recreated a version of the dirigible originally built by Alberto Santos-Dumont in 1901. Santos-Dumon’s dirigible was the first one that worked, and it flew around the Eiffel Tower. Burden’s dirigible flew in a 60-foot orbit in the Resnick Pavilion at LACMA.
My mother loved seeing the paintings and photographs, and she especially loved watching Burden’s dirigible fly around the large space that seemed tailor-made for it. It was wonderful for Cynthia and me to see her joyful experience of the art. She walked slowly with her walker, stopping in front of each painting and photograph, taking her time to appreciate it. Often she stayed in front of a piece for a long time, letting it work its magic on her. Standing among the group of museumgoers in the Resnick Pavilion, she was entranced as she watched Burden’s dirigible in flight.
Afterwards, on both Saturdays, she told us how much she enjoyed seeing the art. Not weighed down by her everyday concerns and challenges, she glowed. Her smile as she thanked us for taking her to the museums was youthful and ageless. At 93, she embodied Picasso’s powerful observation that “the purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
Mystery Novels I Love
I love mystery novels. In fact, there are times that I put all other reading aside and read them compulsively, one after another, until I’m satiated. You might even say that I’m addicted to mysteries the way some people are addicted to chocolate or ice cream.
I’ve thought about why I like mysteries so much, and I’ve come up with a few answers. I like the puzzle aspect of a good mystery—trying to figure out who did it before the author reveals it. I start putting clues together from page one and feel a great sense of validation when I’m right about the solution and only a minor disappointment if I’m wrong. I also like the characters, world, and mood of well-written mysteries. Perhaps most of all, I like experiencing the suspense and, ultimately, the feeling that justice has triumphed when the villain is found out and punished (would that it were always so in life).
As with many other mystery buffs, my favorite classic mystery writer is Raymond Chandler. Chandler wrote seven-and-a-half novels that, along with the Sam Spade mysteries of his predecessor Dashiell Hammett, established the hard-boiled detective as a staple in mystery fiction. I’ve read all of Chandler’s novels several times, except Poodle Springs, his unfinished novel, which I read only once (it’s disappointing as well as unfinished; contemporary mystery writer Robert Parker has completed a version that’s been well received and that I’m looking forward to reading). Continue reading
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