Winners and Losers

True to my intentions, I've taken a few days largely off writing and tried to just relax and do some reading. I've even engaged in a little TV/Movie action. I caught a few more episodes of The Office, watched some Frasier and Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns, and watched Hell's Kitchen. Last night I rented the movie The Losers, and I have to say I enjoyed it quite a lot. I've never read the comic book series it is based on, and it looked at first glance very much like an A-Team kind of set-up, but I liked the characters and the action was satisfyingly over-the-top. I don't know the names of the actors but among the characters we had the woman who played Uhuru on the new Trek, the guy who played the "Comedian" on Watchmen, and the guy who played Johnny Torch on The Fantastic Four, all of whom I like as characters. The villain was Jason Patric, who gave a pretty good performance as a totally conscienceless but sometimes blackly humorous evil CIA operative.

In reading, I started Hunt at the Well of Eternity, by our own James Reasoner, and am enjoying it muchly. I'm reading a collection of Loren Eiseley's poetry called The Innocent Assassins, which is, in general, not as good as his prose essays. I also started Flash Forward by Robert J. Sawyer and am liking it. I was hooked on the TV show before it was cancelled and the book so far is pretty close in many ways to the show.



I finished Ed Gorman's Harlot's Moon, which was very good, and Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying, which I liked a lot although I don't know if I'd consider it among the world's fifty best mysteries ever. I also read an enjoyable western by a fellow named Gary Addis, who I've mentioned in this blog before. I've copied my review from Goodreads below:

"Lance Jolley is a gunman. He's been shaped by childhood and by the harsh environment of the American Civil War into a hard man who can react with volcanic violence when he's pushed. And he's not adverse to trading on his gun rep.

But Jolley has a moral center and never forgets a friend. When the son of a friend is harassed into a gunfight that the young lad can't win, Jolley sets the range on fire as he rides for vengeance. Once more his enemies will learn not to push Lance Jolley, or those he cares about.

I just finished reading this for Kindle, which is the only way it's available at the moment. This is Gary Addis's first novel, I believe, although he's been published in nonfiction and fiction multiple times. It's a very good story, well written and strongly visual. There are flashbacks to the Civil War that are gut wrenching in their realism.

Good stuff, and I hope we see more of Lance Jolley."


Until next time, keep the word side up!
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