Across Five Aprils: 4/ 5 Stars This is another Civil War book, and another Civil War book taking place in the midwest, that I read as a kid. I grew up in the South and thought about the Civil War a LOT. It happens. Anyway, like Rifles for Watie mentioned in the previous one, this focuses on the western theater of the war but still deals a lot with the news from the East. This becomes a kind of interesting conceit, where our main character […]
Tom Ripley, no relation to Ellen Ripley
In this sequel to the first novel The Talented Mr. Ripley we find Tom Ripley still living off those checks from Dickie Greenleaf, now married, and embroiled in an art forgery scandal. What’s always funny to me about criminals is that too often, while there’s money to be made and all that, the amount of work required in order to make their enterprises work is equal to or greater than the return on investment of their enterprises. So the lengths that Tom Ripley must go to […]
Oh? Friend?
Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
When Harry Potter 7 came out in bookstores, my brother, his wife, and I all went to the midnight release and bought three copies. We each spent the next few days reading it the same room at individual paces. Someone made a joke about a line where Harry and Ron are talking about their wands. And we sort of made out of context jokes like that for the next 3 days. This book had the same effect on me, except I definitely think this time […]
An elegant novel about love in an oppressive time
What I like about Oscar season (now many months removed from us) is that I get to know books that I had never known existed until I see them made into movies. And then I introduce myself to authors and ideas that I enjoy. Patricia Highsmith’s elegant novel The Price of Salt, adapted to the film Carol was one such example. I still haven’t see the movie yet, but I’m very much looking forward to seeing how it turned out. Find out why I give […]
they discern/what equilibrium they can recover
Well, it’s not like Cate Blanchett would choose to star in the adaptation of a bad Patricia Highsmith novel. I haven’t actually seen the film, but the trailers and still photographs project a certain sort of aesthetic that I found intriguing–rich colours, gleaming cocktails, and soft lights; crisp coral lipstick on a smile that says come hither and f**k off. This is the first novel of Highsmith’s that I’ve read; as Val McDermid points out on the cover of my edition, it has “the drive […]
You could never get away with this in 2016, that’s for sure
I saw the film version of The Talented Mr. Ripley in theaters in 1999. I remember very little, other than one of the gorgeous leads (Jude Law or Matt Damon) spends some time in a bathtub and you can kind of see his junk for a second. I had no idea that it was based on the first of a series of books written in the 1950s. A pretty good book, too, although it features neither Jude Law or Matt Damon. The book starts when our protagonist, Tom Ripley, […]