First Quarter 2021 Round up

Blogging continues, though it isn’t clear if anyone is even looking at what I post.

Hits are wa-a-y down.  Where is everybody?

Obviously, the posts are better than ever ( : – ) ), so what’s going on?

Is this pandemic related?  Is this something to do with global politics, e.g., blocking in China or EU? Or maybe changes in WordPress reporting.  I dunno.

Band Names

As always, I noted some Dave Barry tribute band names, taken from real scientific and technical publictions.

Stochastic Parrots
Neanderthal ears
The Laschamps Excursion (Pronounced Las Champs, or in SoCal, LA’s Champs)
The Chicxulub Impactors  (Or just Impactor)

Books Reviewed

Fiction

Smoke by Joe Ide
Milk Fed by Melissa Broder
A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes
Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler
Trio by William Boyd
Outlawed by Anna North
Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams
Tropic of Stupid by Tim Dorsey
The Sun Collective by Charles Baxter
Aphasia by Mauro Javier Cárdenas
The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem
Deadly Education by Naomi Novik
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino by Julián Herbert

Non-fiction

The Light Ages by Seb Falk
Kindred by Rebecca Wragg Sykes
The Last Million by David Nasaw
New Money by Lana Swartz
Extraterrestrial by Avi Loeb

Book Review: “Trio” by William Boyd

Trio by William Boyd

This story unwinds around the production of a movie in Bristol in the summer 1968.  Sixty eight was a helluva year, but it was also a gloriously silly and shallow time in many ways.  And making a movie is a frothy, silly thing in any age.  In any case, these people have a lot of their own personal problems, so the massive events can go hang.

I’m not sure who, exactly, is the titular “trio”, because there are a dozen key characters here, all intertwined and struggling.  Heck, one woman is balancing her own “trio” of boy friends, for better or worse.

Anyway, not that important.

The important theme here is that everyone here has secrets and hidden lives.  This makes some of the conflicts and troubles all the sadder, because we know their secret selves.  Many of these folks would be a whole lot happier if they just tried to be true to who they really want to be, not to what others want them to be.

So.

Things happen, people make decisions, good and bad.  Some come to bad ends, some just keep going on, and some seem to discover how to be happy.

There isn’t really very much of the history of 1968 here. War, dissent, violence, rock and roll, and social upheaval are distant, faint echoes. In fact, most of the characters seem unaware and unaffected by the big historic events happening around the world.

One historic thing Boyd does actually deal with is a description of the great gay liberation, and specifically the disorienting suddenness that legality brought to older, necessarily closeted folks.  It made me smile and even laugh a little.  It’s such a marvelous metaphor for the whole period: the joy and incomprehension of sudden liberation.  Things that were utterly impossible, suddenly came true.  The younger men take to it naturally, as if it could never be otherwise; while the the older men are hit with a yawning, “now what?” moment.

Altogether, a pleasant enough read.

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1. William Boyd, Trio, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.

 

Sunday Book Reviews