Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  It's the second day of winter here in the Northern Hemisphere, the start of summer down in the Southern, so let's see what odd things I've found hitting the thrift stores.

Now, a programming note.  We're moving down south sometime in the Spring, so I'll be shopping less.  So maybe some more highlights of what I'm weeding and depositing in Little Free Libraries.

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Let's start with one of the oddest novels I've ever encountered.  Dominick Dunne was for many years essentially a cultural correspondent for Vanity Fair; he was the kind of guy who knew people who knew people.  So his decision to write a decidedly weird novel about his covering the OJ Simpson murder trial, one where he was very clear about how we all knew Simpson was guilty but where he was very sympathetic to the Simpson family, is such an interesting thing.  But then he starts intersecting the novel with one of the other strange murder cases of the 1990s....to the point where he's killed by Andrew Cunanan.  It's an odd, melancholy novel that I highly recommend for a weird alternate take on the OJ trial that also delves interestingly deeply into the intersection of that trial and LA celebrity culture.

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I'm pleasantly surprised to find that Fredrick Forsyth is still alive!  He's now 83 and I can totally recommend this, Eye Of The Needle [edit: that's Ken Follett] and The Dogs Of War.  He writes thrillers that are smart and tense and sometimes just a little but weird.  This one is about the smartest assassin in the world, the Jackal, and his assignment to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle (oddly, I don't remember why; destablizating France, maybe?).  But the whole point of this novel is a bevy of organizations uniting to take down an assassin who none of them is quite sure even exists, much less knows who it is.  It's a fantastic, taught thriller that also has a great 1973 adaptation.  (Please ignore the dull Bruce Willis version.)

Oh hey, Day Of The Jackal is on Criterion Channel right now!  As well as being available for rent and purchase at the usual places.

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Now this was a pleasant find.  I only saw a bit of Tanner '88 back when HBO ran it in 1988, an odd mockumentary of political campaigns that mixed in with the ongoing Presidential campaign of that year as Democrats tried to get in to fix the last 8 terrible years.  It's both satirical and funny and has so many political figures of the time who are getting the joke. (And frankly, glancing at the list of people who show up in this, I was surprised that not one has passed away outside of George HW Bush; Bob Dole is still with us at 98, Gary Hart is around and Kitty and Mike Dukakis are here in their 80s.). 

Hey, it's all streaming on HBO Max!  It's totally worth your time.

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I'm a sucker for The Library Of America books and collections and this is one where weeding I'm reminded that I've never read a bunch of it.  It is very deliberately a '50s collection, so very male and very serious men in serious white coats.  Maybe next week I'll highlight some anthologies I have that are much more diverse and fun.  But still, this has a few high highlights.  Robert Heinlein's Double Star is a weirdly funny novel about an actor hired to be the double for a famous Martian politician.  Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination is a classic about a teleporting man driven by a desire for revenge.  And then there is the stone-cold classic of Richard Matheson's Shrinking Man.  I talked about the movie version a few weeks ago and I'm totally going to re-read that this week.

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Hey look, it's Tony D'Amico!  One of my favorite Simpsons characters, voiced beautifully by Joe Mantegna for many, many years now.  Say, where is the pretzel money?

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Finally, my recommendation of the week.  The Power Of The Dog is Jane Campion's first film in 12 years and it's a magnificent piece of work about brotherhood and guilt and toxic masculinity, with a quartet of actors bouncing against each other that is Benedict Cumberbatch, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemmons.  It's so, so worth your time if you have Netflix.