Check Out "Good Reads," A Literary Website

In 2012, I recommended Good Reads to Facebook friend Robert Penn, a writer. He responded, "Thanks for the invite to Good Reads. What is it?"

A few days later, I described Good Reads to him via Facebook as "a website where people rate, recommend, and review books. It's a good place to learn about books you would  otherwise not be aware of. I've already rated several books, giving most four out of five stars. For instance, James Baldwin's 'Giovanni's Room' I gave, if memory serves, four stars. I plan to write short reviews of other books I've read. I hope that answers your question. I also hope you'll decide to join up. If you do, let me know what your experience was like." I don't know if he ever visited the site but I would recommend it to others.

It's been a while since I've posted on Good Reads brief excerpts of reviews I wrote for the Lambda Book Report. (There may be one or two from the Gay and Lesbian Review and the Manhattan Tribune as well.)

I intend to resume posting on the site other book reviews as well as rate books and see what others have posted about books that have piqued my interest.

One book I'm thinking of reviewing is a mystery I recently finished reading. The book, Better Late Than Never by Jenn McKinlay (Berkley Prime Crime/Penguin Random House, 2016), focuses on the 20-year-old unsolved  murder of a popular high school teacher in a small Connecticut town. A book she checked out of the library at the time of her death is returned during the library's first annual fine amnesty day. Was the killer responsible for returning the book? Lindsey Norris, the library director/amateur sleuth, intends to find out.

Today Is National Ice Cream Day! Enjoy!

Guess what?! Today is National Ice Cream Day, the day for celebrating my favorite frozen dessert. During today's heatwave, eating a dish or cone or pint of ice cream of your favorite flavor would be a wonderful way to cool off. (Vanilla is my favorite flavor.)

Hollywood Honesty

From among some old newspaper and magazine clippings, I came across this quote that appeared in a brief news item in TV Guide (December 10, 1988) about actor Scott Valentine, who was a cast member of NBC's Family Ties.

In the article he stated that "Men run the studios and the networks, and that makes it easy to be a white male in this world."

More than thirty years later, people in Hollywood are still talking about the lack of racial and gender diversity, especially behind the camera and in the executive suites.

Finding A Book By Teju Cole

The short story "Modern Girls" is by the Nigerian writer Teju Cole and is set in a girls's school in Nigeria in the early 1970s.

After hearing it read on public radio's Selected Shorts in September 2015, I included his name among the writers I should read.

But it wasn't until a little more than six months ago, after leaving my ophthalmologist's office, that it was my good fortune to find, on top of a garbage bin, a copy of one of his books, Known and Strange Things (Random House, 2016). It was the first book of his that I have encountered.

I haven't read it yet. But I intend to. Perhaps I should put it on my summer or fall reading list.

Cole, it should be noted, was a recipient of a United States Artists grant. USA is a nonprofit organization that since 2006, reported Vogue magazine, in 2017, has given "unrestricted grants of $50,000 to individual artists who...use traditional methods and unexpected approaches to speak to a vast range of experience." Cole has also received several awards including the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Known and Strange Things is described on the back cover as "[p]ersuasive and provocative, erudite yet accessible...."

Wishing To Be A Centenarian

I would like to be a centenarian like the Delany sisters, Sadie and Bessie, of Having Our Say book and television movie fame, who lived well past a hundred. (The Delany sisters, now deceased, were the aunts of science fiction writer Samuel Delany.) Living such a long life would enable me to accomplish more of my goals. But, as Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, longevity has its place.

If I do live to see my one hundredth birthday, I want to be a spry and alert one hundred, not one unable to put one foot in front of the other or who doesn't know day from night.