The Nature of Things

I found myself grinning and sometimes chuckling my way through this tale of a serial killer in Lagos. Does that make me a bad person? The description of the book on Goodreads is: " Satire meets slasher in this short, darkly funny hand grenade of a novel about a Nigerian woman whose younger sister has a very inconvenient habit of killing her boyfriends." That pretty succinctly sums it up. But it is actually much more than that. It is, at its heart, a story about family dynamics and loyalty. It is a cleverly written satire, full of dark humor and social commentary that is elegantly disguised. But, basically, it is the story of the love and devotion of two sisters. We see things from the point of view of Korede. She is a nurse and a neat freak and she seems to lead a fairly normal life. She is well thought of on her job at the hospital in Lagos and is in line to be named head nurse. She has a crush on a young doctor called Tade and she hopes that he will notice her and realize t...

Welcome to Bloom Day in my zone 9a garden near Houston, Texas. If you visited here on December Bloom Day , you'll find that most of what I have to show you today are the same plants that were in bloom then. We haven't had any below freezing temperatures since then, so the garden is much the same. In fact, we haven't had any below freezing temperatures since early November, just before that month's Bloom Day . Our winter so far has been quite mild with our nighttime low temperatures usually in the 40s F, occasionally falling into the high 30s. What we have had is rain and plenty of it. Heavy rainfalls of two to four inches have been fairly common, leaving my yard in a bit of a soggy mess and giving me a good excuse to stay inside and read. But pruning time is fast approaching; time to prune those fruit trees and vines and many of my shrubs, including the roses. So, soon I'll have to don my Wellies and slog my way out to  do my duty. Some gardening chores just can...

Lee Child is now up to number 23 in his Jack Reacher saga. I've previously read four of the books, the first three plus number 14. I'm never going to read the other eighteen in order to get to Past Tense , so I've utterly given up on my rule of reading series books in order. Life is too short. But I'd heard some good things about this latest one and I needed a non-demanding read as a palate cleanser so I decided to go with it. As in all the books (I guess), we find Jack Reacher on the road and on the move. This time he's starting out in Maine and his destination is San Diego, but on a whim, he decides to go through Laconia, New Hampshire. The town was where his father was born and grew up and he's never seen it. He researches the town records, with help from a city employee, to find where the Reachers might have lived and heads out to find the site and walk the ground where his forebears lived. Meantime, in another part of the county, a young Canadian couple is ...

I've featured this poem here before but it has been almost five years. Time to bring it out again. It seems appropriate for this moment. The story is this: Two neighbors - in New England, naturally - meet at a given time to repair the stone wall between their two properties. The wall may have been damaged by the freezing and thawing of the ground underneath it or the damage might have been done by thoughtless hunters, but now there are gaps that need to be mended.  As the two talk, we see two philosophies about walls. One neighbor opines,  "Good fences make good neighbours." But the other asks a very pertinent question:  "Why   do they make good neighbours?" And he goes on:    Before I built a wall I'd ask to know      What I was walling in or walling out,      And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, but there's no persuading his neighbor.   Mending Wall by Robert Frost Som...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : Over the past week, I've had a small flock of 15-20 Purple Finches feeding at my front yard bird feeder. (I've not been able to get a usable picture of them so I stole this one from the internet.) Most of my birds have been adult females or immature birds and they look like the bird on the left. There have also been a couple of the colorful males, like the one on the right. Purple Finches are uncommon visitors to my yard. In most winters, they likely do not get this far south, so it is a real treat when they do show up and I'm going to keep trying to get some good pictures to mark the occasion. *~*~*~* The strange high-pitched sounds that American diplomats in Cuba have complained about have turned out to be made by crickets , most likely the Indies short-tailed cricket, according to an analysis of a recording of the sounds. This, of course, still does not necessarily explain the range of symptoms including he...

Nuruddin Farah is a celebrated Somali novelist who is often mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He frequently writes about the effects and costs of terrorism in today's world and when he does, he speaks from personal experience. His sister, who was a nutritionist working for UNICEF, was murdered along with at least 20 others in a bomb attack by the Taliban on a restaurant in Kabul 2014. Despite his fame in the literary world, I was unacquainted with him before reading this book. I saw a review of it several weeks ago and was fascinated. I immediately added it to my reading queue. Farah's protagonists here are far away from the centers of terrorism in the 21st century. They are an expatriate Somali couple, Mugdi and Gacalo, living in Oslo. Mugdi had been an ambassador for Somalia in Norway back when Somalia was a recognizable and organized country. When the country tore itself apart in civil war and descended into chaos, they became part of the Somali di...

John Rebus is now pushing 70 and has been retired from Scotland's Lothian and Borders Police for several years. He's been retired so long that the Lothian and Borders Police no longer exists; it's now Police Scotland. But all of his former colleagues are now a part of this "new" police force, and it's not really true that Rebus is retired. Being a detective is his life and he won't retire until that final exit music plays and he draws his last breath. He keeps his hand in because his former colleagues, especially his former partner and protege, Siobhan Clarke, often call on him for his expertise regarding Edinburgh crime and criminals and for his memories regarding particular cases that he worked in the past. And that's where this story begins. Some teenage boys messing around in the woods come upon a rusted out car hidden under brush. In the boot of the car is a skeleton. Police are called and the skeleton is finally identified as that of a private in...