Happy Thursday, everyone! Baseball is back as the owners kind of conceded on actually paying players a bit more, bike weather is back and here at Casa De Finn we're catching up on some TV like Star Trek: Discovery (AKA, we're seriously doing this silly Galactic Barrier stuff?). But on to the thrift stores!
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On April 19, 1986, someone set the Los Angeles Public Library on fire. From this incident, Susan Orleans spins a tale of the LA public library system, the efforts to contain the extensive fire, who might have set the fire in the first place and what a library really means to a community (and in this case, many communities). This is one I've read already and its a fantastic take on the subject. There are diversions into research, help lines, what actually happens when a book burns; it's a really interesting book for anyone who loves books and what they mean.
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Scott Smith is an interesting novelist who seems to have fallen off the map; in a few years he published both A Simple Plan and The Ruins and both were made into well-regarded movies and yet hasn't published a novel since then. It's not like he's disappeared; he has written a few screenplays since then, but as for novels, nothing yet.
But anyway, his two novels are gems. One is the tale of a group of friends who find a bag of money in the woods and how it tears them apart, The other is about a group of friends who find some ruins, ignore the obvious warnings and, well, there's some very different tearing them apart. Of the four (the two novels and two films) this is the one I've not experienced and I should fix that pretty soon.
The Ruins is streaming on HBO Max and Cinemax Go.
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Another in a "I've read a lot of their work but not this," we have the novel Dandelion Wine from Ray Bradbury. originally published in 1957. Oddly, I don't know anything about it! I assume it has his signature lyricism and compassion, and that's about it.
Fun connection though; when Susan Orlean was looking to experiment with how a book burns, she used the obvious choice: a copy of Fahrenheit 451.
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Hey, did you know Wong Kar Wai made a loose sequel to his masterpiece In The Mood For Love? That's apparently loosely science fiction? With Tony Leung, Zhang Ziyi and Maggie Cheung? Oh yeah, this might be something I'll watch this weekend. (Frankly, if this disc works. It appears to be all-regions, but you never know on this sort of thing.)
2046 is weirdly not streaming anywhere at the moment! It is available on DVD by itself but for the blu-ray it's only available on Criterion's World of Wong Kar Wai set.
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