Summer Reading…and Summer Movies

For a variety of reasons, this hasn’t exactly turned out to be the summer I envisioned. No, there haven’t been a lot of lazy days suitable for plopping tired feet in cool grass and getting lost in a page-turner, no time for digging toes aimlessly in sand packed hard by endless laps of white-green, bubbly-soft ocean foam that occasionally sprays the pages of a book, not even an afternoon sipping green tea and flipping pages amidst the traffic and noise of a sidewalk café. No matter, though. I have managed to find two books that—if this was a different summer—would make cameo appearances in each of these scenes.

The first, lent to me by a friend, tells the story of the Nazi occupation of the Channel Island of Guernsey during World War II. (Yes, I’m behind in my reading and just discovered this treasure that so many others enjoyed years ago, many in book groups.) Filled with colorful characters and a riveting story in a simpler time, when letter-writing was still an art (and a primary means of communication), the end of the page turning came all too quickly for me. If only there were more letters (and more time to read them) from Juliet, Sidney, Sophie, Amelia, Dawsey and the rest, I think I’d have kept turning pages indefinitely. Perhaps a movie will be forthcoming? I hope so…

I’ve written about the second book before (once here, and once here), but never actually read it. And, even though I’ve finished only 20-some of its 460+ pages (excluding the notes and the index), it, too, is already riveting, filled with colorful characters and, perhaps best of all, is a true-crime murder mystery. In this case, though, the mystery isn’t as much a whodunit as a how’d-they-solve-it, much of which remains to be revealed in the unread pages. And, although I find that the movie often isn’t nearly as good as the book, a fictionalized account of this story was made into a 1959 flick starring Orson Welles and E.G. Marshall. Hello, Netflix…

Plan B Saturday: Food, Family, Friends and Fun

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, my weekend plans fizzled at the end of last week. Lucky for me, I was able to salvage my Saturday and ended up having a great day filled with food, family, friends and fun.

First up on the agenda was tagging along on a gallery talk my sister was slated to give at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at 11:15 a.m. Only after I met up with my father in the Great Hall of the Met, however, did we learn from her that, unbeknownst even to her until a few minutes earlier, the tour had been canceled. Undaunted, she guided us deftly through the galleries, pointing out the 19th century paintings she’d prepared for the tour, as well as a few others that sparked our interest. We started with Edouard Manet’s Young Lady in 1866 and then compared it with Gustave Courbet’s Woman with a Parrot before moving on to admire the handiwork of Henri Fantin-Latour's floral paintings. A few galleries away, we compared this Madame Cezanne with this one, in which she seems to be saying, “Oy, Paul, another portrait?!…Enough already.” On our way out, we checked out a few Rembrandts (Did you know that Rembrandt was his first name and that his full name was Rembrandt van Rijn? I didn’t…) and Renoirs, including this one, all expertly explained by my sister.

Having absorbed enough culture for one day, we headed downtown on the bus to Koreatown, where we enjoyed lunch at Pho 32 & Shabu, grateful for warm, hearty soup on a cold day. Here's my dad enjoying his:
From there, we each headed home—my sister to Union Square, my father to New Jersey via Penn Station and me across town to Kips Bay.

A bit of reading for school, a welcome Shabbos nap, a quick change of clothes and I was off again, this time to meet some friends for an early dinner and perhaps a movie. Our tacos and fixin's at Cascabel Taqueria proved to be as yummy as my pho lunch, and The Blind Side was the perfect feel-good movie to round out out a really nice, feel-good kind of day.

So, although these weren’t my original plans, my Plan B Saturday was quite satisfying nonetheless—and maybe even better than what might have been.

Hmmm…who knows what next week will bring…