Speaking of book clubs, (I don't know what the next one will be), but I did want to say I thought of the Joy Luck Club when I saw Crazy Rich Asians last week. It had many of the same themes: you look Chinese on the outside but you aren't, you're American, and so on. Also you'll never be good enough.
It was very interesting and very well acted, all beautiful people, and some really standout stars, I really enjoyed it and I also really wished it had been shorter: it could have benefited from some editing, about 1/2 hour's worth. But that doesn't take away from the performances and the general dazzle.
Another interesting thing is that they showed a mahjong game. I was so interested to see one played, they did use some of the tiles I do in the online version but there the similarity stops. It looked fascinating. I can hear the clicks now. I worked one summer of my senior high school year at one of the resorts in the Catskill Mountains, and late at night when everybody had gone to bed, the Chinese cooks would sit out in the dark playing mahjong, never talking, very serious. But I never actually saw the board of one being played till this movie---very interesting.
I'm reading an odd book called Serpents in Eden: Countryside Crimes (British Library Crime Classics). Despite having come out in paperback in 2016, it's a compendium of old mystery stories, largely unknown and/ or forgotten, by famous authors, and some never published dealing with crime in small English villages. The first one was by Arthur Conan Dolyle, and was quite good, the second less so, because by now I think we know all the tropes and the solutions. The third one I've just started is by C. K. Chesterton, he of the Father Brown series, whose other works were eclipsed by his Father Brown work, and so one is presented here.
I love the little author biographies presented at the first of each selection, I really like it so far, tho the prose style is a LONG way from our modern mystery writers. Am also rereading Relic because I alternate rereading Reliquary (my favorite) or Relic (too much gore for me really) every summer and have also started Beast by the man who wrote Jaws, Peter Benchley.
Benchley is a wonderful writer, and a staunch advocate of saving the oceans (see his beautiful website and comments) and respect for the creatures in the seas. I want on a Benchley jag a few years ago and read them all, and I really enjoyed Beast, and hope to see if it's as good as I remembered. People scoffed at his fiction thriller Beast until one washed up after his death, and nobody knew what it was, and since then several, each larger than the first, have appeared. I always wished he had lived to see himself vindicated, but he knew or surmised they existed, or he would not have written the book.
Nice, escapist reading for this long hot summer. But just a nip yesterday of Fall in the air!
Jonathan, and Bellamarie, are you going to get the new Ma'am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret book? It looks amazing, such an interesting writing concept, and what an interesting character. I think anybody who has watched The Crown will want to try it.