I finished reading The Book of Strange New Things this morning, sitting in bed for an hour and a half because I didn't need to get up, and it is one of those books that draws you in deeper and tighter as you read - in some respects. One of the other of those respects is the letters that the protagonist, Peter - a missionary on a far off planet- and his wife, Beatrice, left back on a social disintegrating earth of buffeted by the effects of global warming, exchange are written as those characters may have written - so there's no literary beauty, there are even typos, and they are the inadequate scribblings of two people trying to communicate across a vast distance. It makes them something that I read quickly, speed read, skim, like you do an article that doesn't interest you much, but you do need to get the gist of the story, you do need to take it all in. It's curiously unsatisfying, but necessary for the book as a who;e - the rest of the writing is clear and satisfying by contrast, striking in its building up of the incidental and the important, compelling in both description and narrative. It has no answers though. I thought that it might have, that it might produce some new and illuminating perspective from which I could learn new and strange things.
It's been a day like that. Now I'm watching Bridge of Spies, and taking breaks from it to have snacks, with writing this, even play games of Hearthstone, in the way that you can't if you are watching with somebody else. Bridge of Spies is satisfying, it's moral dilemmas are clear and distinct, and the lawyer defending the Russian spy is straight up and honorable, unwilling to break his client confidentiality to satisfy the CIA, he is decided that if he is to represent this client, he will not compromise the values, rules and the Constitution. It's well photographed, the steely blues and rain of the spy movie, the warm ochres of home scenes sit well on the eye.
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