Sunday Sundries, 272

1. HBOTW [Human Being of the Week]: The young man at our local Acme (grocery store) who brings our online order out to our car each week with kindness, cheer, and alacrity! One of the unsung souls in this crisis ...

2. I finished one book this week, Deacon King Kong (2020), the latest novel by the gifted James McBride, who won the National Book Award for Fiction for his previous novel, The Good Lord Bird (2013), a novel about Hudson's own John Brown. McBride came to the Hudson Library and Historical Society on March 4, 2014--along with his jazz group! Played some music, did some reading aloud, talked with the audience. Pic shows Joyce with McBride--getting a book signed, talking about John Brown.

Anyway, Deacon King Kong ...  This is a rich story from 1969 in South Brooklyn and features a wide, even dazzling, array of characters. The "deacon" is the church title of a man everyone in the neighborhood knows as Sportcoat. A drunk with a kind heart. He has lost his wife and has never truly recovered (at times, though, he has conversations with her).

Sportcoat used to be the local baseball coach (and umpire in other games) and had a great reputation for both. One of his greatest stars, Deems, now 19, a kid with Major League talent, has abandoned baseball for drug-selling and has hardened as a result.

The novel begins when Sportcoat, drunk, walks up to him and shoots him.

And away we go. Before all is over we have hitmen, the Mob, some hilarious attempts by shooters to get Sportcoat, cops, characters from the local church (young and old and very old), and secrets, and on and on. With Love, Love, Love, as well.

It is a novel about redemption and hope, fear and change, and is deeply spiritual, as well.

I won't give away anymore of it. I'll just say that one of the main characters here is Surprise--often, we find out that things that happened have not happened in the way we thought they did.

3. Joyce and I are still trying to walk a mile every day--though we skipped a couple of the cold, unpleasant days this week.

4. I've been reviewing books for Kirkus Reviews since March 1999. And this week--something new. Because of the virus (and costs) I'll no longer be reviewing  what they call arc's (advance reading copies--pre-publication paperbacks that are not the final version of the text--but close). Instead, I'm now getting .pdf files of the text. I started reading the first one yesterday on my iPad, and, actually, I kind of like it. The principal reason? My eyesight has become more iffy in my latter days, and with the .pdf I can enlarge the text. It's also easier to hold and deal with. So, we'll see how it goes ...

5.Have you streamed Blood, a series on Acorn TV?

It features the main character from Line of Duty (Adrian Dunbar, who plays the police Superintendent)--but here he's playing a very different kind of man. ('Nuff said.) We're enjoying it, though when it gets too tense, I wimp out and go to a Netflix comedy. (In the pic below, Dunbar is the one in the foreground.)

6. We're enjoying the Netflix stand-up special by Ronny Chieng (whom some of you know from his role as a correspondent on The Daily Show). Some funny bits. (Link to some video.)

7. A sigh of relief this week when a King Arthur Flour order arrived (after a several-week delay). I use their bread flour to feed my sourdough starter each week (it produces a great texture), and I was running low--enough for maybe one more batch. Now I'm set for a couple of months!

8. Final Word--a word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers.

     - from wordsmith.org

nimrodize (NIM-ruh-dyz)

verb intr.: To behave like a tyrant.

ETYMOLOGY: Nimrod was a great-grandson of Noah’s, according to the Bible. He was a hunter and an evil tyrannical king. Earliest documented use: 1614.

USAGE:

“And for a crowne who would not Nimrodize.”

Christopher Brooke; The Complete Poems of Christopher Brooke; 1872.