Good Thursday, everyone! We're back in Chicago after a trip out east to check out the new house and see the various improvements (and deal with various small issues with appliances; who thinks leaving a drain hose for the washing machine out of the pipe leading outdoors was a good idea?) But enough of home improvement stuff; let's look at the thrift store finds from this week!
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Ah, baseball. Currently, in the US major leagues form, still embroiled in a lockout by owners who don't want to give up even a sliver of their profits to the players who actually do all the work that results in their profits. But hey, I found these baseball novels to pass the time! The Kid Comes Back is a post-WWII novel about a soldier coming back with his war injuries to try to get back into the game, while Dean Duffy is about a high school star whose arm has failed him and is contemplating what to do next. I always find baseball to be the most mythic of US sports, and I'm a sucker for these sort of narratives.
Dean Duffy reminded me of this delightful novel from a couple of years ago, by NPR podcaster Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over. In this case, it's about a former Yankees pitcher who gets a terrible case of the yips (where his skills just abandon him for no reason, something that does occasionally happen to ball players) and retires to Maine to clear his head. It's a lovely, charming novel about baseball and grief and romance and I can't wait for her second novel, which is due this summer.
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Ah, the joys of discovering movies you didn't know at all existed and that doesn't even have a Rotten Tomatoes score. Deborah Kay Unger is an actress I'm not terribly familiar with outside of Crash (the excellent Cronenberg movie, not the perfectly decent Oscar winner) but I liked her in that and I'm curious about this, apparently about a small boy in 1960s small-town Florida living with his single mother.
Things That Hang From Trees is...well, it's not streaming anywhere. No purchase or rent options at all. (I was honestly surprised just now to find my library system has three copies of it.)
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An Emily Blunt and Colin Firth movie I've never heard of! Per wiki, Arthur Newman is a 2012 movie about "a former professional golfer who fakes his own death and assumes a new identity in order to escape his life of failure." Sounds cheery! Got mixed reviews at the time, but I'm always curious to see work by either of these actors.
Arthur Newman is streaming on Hoopla and also on Tubi and Shout Factory and on Vudu and Pluto TV with ads.
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