My honey and I did a library run a couple days ago, to stock up on reading matter. This is generally a joint affair that fills a Topo Designs bag. Not so this time. My sweetheart stayed in the car. It’s not that he’s given up reading. It’s just that he’s stuck in a book. An Elizabeth George. And, worse than that, it’s part of the Thomas Lynley series.
Those familiar with George know that she goes on at length. According to a Google search, she averages four hundred to six hundred pages per book, with her Lynley books running longer. George is an excellent and popular writer, and we especially enjoy the characters in the Lynley series. We the reading public therefore continue to dip our noses into George’s prose. We just exercise care when we read one of her books in bed, lest we doze off while doing so and drop the tomes on our faces, flattening said noses.
My sweetheart reports he’s more than halfway through A Slowly Dying Cause, demonstrating by closing the book around his bookmark and holding it up for me to see. Then he went back to reading and dozed off. Fortunately, he’s sitting up.
Before he explained that he was stuck in an Elizabeth George, I’d been ready for more reading matter. I prowled the house looking for something I hadn’t read and found a copy of The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat. The novel was published in 1951, and our copy of it probably dated from the first paperback edition.
Paperbacks are not built for the long haul. Ours still had all its component parts, but that was more a matter of habit than of structural integrity. The edges of the front cover were disintegrating. The back cover had separated from the rest of the volume and taken some of the back matter with it. A signature in the center had broken free of the spine. When you turned the pages, they tended to tear.
Monsarrat wrote a compelling work. I’m glad to have read it. But my experience of the book will remain tied up to the logistics of holding it together till the end, with more back matter and additional signatures jumping ship whenever they could. When Monsarrat, his characters, and I coasted to the end, the form of the once-proud book had become but a memory, one best consigned to the recycle bin.
Wednesday afternoon, Cindy and I attended an orchestra concert. Our friend Rhonda plays in the orchestra, and my friend Dan Long conducts it, the whole group making music, as Dan says, “just for the fun of it which, when you think about it, is what all music is about.” Dan’s one of those people that everyone knows, and we all say of him, “Isn’t he wonderful?” He looked around at the full-house audience and announced that he knew almost everyone there.
As the orchestra is a shoestring-budget operation, there are no printed programs for these concerts. Dan talks the audience through what’s coming up. At the outset, he said we’d be hearing music by three English composers. We listened to works by William Boyce, Gustav Holtz, and Edward Elgar, and a few speedy audience members got up to leave.
What Dan meant to say was that we’d begin with the English pieces and go on from there. There was lots left to come, including a couple vocal pieces for which a fifty-voice choir joined the orchestra. What a treat. If the orchestra continues to collaborate with the choir, Dan may need a larger venue. What a good problem to have.
On the way home from French class today, I learned something new about Michigan. Our local NPR station was interviewing a professor at Michigan State University about ongoing research there. On potatoes. It seems that Michigan is the premier state for potato-chip potatoes. Chances are, when you crunch down on a potato chip, you’re taking a bite of Pure Michigan.
The folks at MSU are looking into breeding the perfect chip potato. So far, they’ve developed five good candidates: Manistee, Mackinaw, Petoskey, Huron Chipper, and Blueberry. Part of the challenge of producing chips is that chips are made year-round, but potatoes are only harvested once a year. Potatoes need to grow well and store well, in addition to having what it takes to make light, crisp chips.
Our friend Cory doesn’t require his chips to be light and crisp. He prefers the black chips. He and I agree on one aspect of potatoes, though: no matter what you do to it, it’s hard to go wrong with a potato.
1 May 2026