I've started to enjoy reading mysteries as well as watching them on Netflix. Rather than review yet another hunt for a serial killer, I'll mention a novelist I recently discovered: Stuart Turton. Strangely, I started by reading his second novel, and I'm planning on reading his first soon. The second novel, The Devil and Dark Water, was very well-written. It's sort of a historical novel, being set in the 1600s. It's sortof a nautical novel since most of the action takes place on a ship -- specifically a Dutch cargo ship. It's sortof a locked room mystery since there's murder on a ship where no one can get on or off. It defies mystery conventions in some ways even as it follows them in others. Defiance: the murder happens well into the story. Follows: the mystery features a famous detective.  But most of the action involves the famous detective's assistant. There is an unexpected twist, which is to be expected in any well-written mystery, but the twist defies conventions in its own right. To avoid spoiling the surprise, I will not write more.

 One of the surprises about my retirement life is that I am not reading as much as I thought I would. Prior to retirement, I imagined that I would read perhaps 4 or 5 books a week. The rate turns out to be much lower. I've also become much more selective. I'm not reading just any old thing. There needs to be a reason for reading it.

But the reason can be as simple as entertainment. Based upon a published review, I decided to read Search: A Memoir with Recipes by Dana Louise Potowsky: A Novel by Michelle Huneven. Compared with some of the grand space operas I like to read (think The Expanse -- review forthcoming), this is a small story. Rather than covering the fate of mankind as it expands beyond our solar system, this story -- told in first person by a restaurant reviewer for a local paper -- covers the search for a new minister for a Unitarian Universalist (UU) church in southern California. 

Being a lapsed UU myself, the novel provides many moments of amused recognition. The following quote strikes me as particularly typical:

"I contributed two articles I'd published in the Times: one was about my writing group's bouillabaisse. (One person made the fish stock -- the bouilla -- and everyone else brought a pound of seafood -- the baisse. Since we were UUs, no two people brought the same thing, making it a 'delicious union of diversity.'"

As I've already said, it is a small story and the stakes are small except that they are big for the search committee members and for their congregation. I won't reveal how the search turns out, but I will say that I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading this little novel.

 The recent passing of the comedian Gilbert Gottfried brings to mind his memorable appearance in The Aristocrats. In case you don't know, The Aristocrats is a documentary film. But the subject of the documentary is unlike any other documentary I've ever seen. It's a documentary about a joke . The joke was apparently well-known in the community of professional comedians and widely known as "The Aristocrats," but I believe it was relatively unknown outside of that community at least until that film came out. Released in 2005, the main creator of the film was Penn Jillette (yes, THAT Penn -- the magician). I enjoyed the film so much when I watched it at the now-departed Tivoli Theater in Kansas City that I bought the DVD. My wife, on the other hand, was sick to her stomach and disgusted when she watched it with me. You see, the joke is probably the most disgusting dirty joke ever told. And Gilbert Gottfried's telling is the dirtiest one of all. And it's what I thought about when I learned that he had died.