Dorian in a Blue Dress

Sitting here reading in the sun while a dangerous hurricane is slowly moving toward Florida and the Southeastern coast. Back where I lived until three years ago, they’re either sitting in traffic, a hot car running low on gas, or closed up inside the darkness caused by storm shutters.

My friend, back in the old neighborhood, is ready to face the storm. She’s probably fairly safe—somewhat inland with shallow water and barrier islands to brunt the power of the storm—but her fear is that she won’t be able to recharge her Nook if the power is out. I’m thinking a small hand-cranked unit to generate power for our digital devices might be a good thing to have.

I have spent almost a week after a storm knocked out the power and you really begin to miss things like air conditioning, not to mention lights and fully charged cell phones.

But I need to get back to catching up on all those mysteries and detective stories I missed through the years. This one is Ezekiel “Easy” Porterhouse Rawlins and I’m gonna have fun.

Did you see the reading suggests for August? Here is a list, just in case.

08-01-19 – Cult X — Fuminori Nakamura
08-02-19 – The Octopus Museum — Brenda Shaughnessy
08-03-19 – This Storm — James Elroy
08-04-19 – City of Girls — Elizabeth Gilbert
08-05-19 – Loudermilk — Lucy Ives
08-06-19 – White — Brett Easton Ellis
08-07-19 – Frida Kahlo — Gerry Souter
08-08-19 – Infinite Powers — Steven Strogatz
08-09-19 – The Corpse Came Calling — Brett Halliday
08-10-19 – Big sky — Kate Atkinson
08-11-19 – The Arabs: A History — Eugene Rogan
08-12-19 – The Transmigration of Bodies —Yuri Herrera
08-13-19 – The Changeling — Victor LaValle
08-14-19 – 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded — Jon Savage
08-15-19 – On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous — Ocean Vuong
08-16-19 – The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack — H. M. Naqvi
08-17-19 – Piers Plowman: A Modern Verse Translation — William Langland
08-18-19 – The Shape of the Ruins — Juan Gabriel Vasquez
08-19-19 – The Old Drift — Namwali Serpell
08-20-19 – Bloody Seoul — Sonia Patel
08-21-19 – Love in the Rice Fields — Macario Pineda
08-22-19 – Three Comrades: A Novel — Erich Maria Remarque
08-23-19 – Recursion — Blake Crouch
08-24-19 – How Art Made the World — Nigel Spivey
08-25-19 – Lady In the Lake — Laura Lippman
08-26-19 – The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro — Antonio Tabucchi
08-27-19 – The Big Book of Irony — Jon Winokur
08-28-19 – When Gadgets Betray Us: The Dark Side of Our Infatuation With New Technologies — Robert Vamosi
08-29-19 – Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives — John Sutherland
08-30-19 – Spell It Out: The Singular Story of English Spelling — David Crystal
08-31-19 – Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics — Carl Halpern