So This Is Where Forrestal Cashed In His Chips.

Ok, this isn't the most memorable line from Raiders of the Lost Ark (in the Book Club edition I read, a 1981 novel by Campbell Black adapted from the screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan based on the story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman), but it sets up Indiana Jones as the man to be reckoned with if you want to find something that nobody else can. I couldn't resist picking it up at Minot Public Library's one-day book sale a few weeks ago; it's not THAT different from the movie but it relies way more on description, telling and not showing, and it's fun. Lately I need to read stuff that's fun.


That's what worries me.


Yet I am relieved by scenes like last night after I picked up the kids from Robert and Sharon's. It turned out yesterday was library day for Sarah's fifth grade class and she checked out a Carl Hiaasen book and she was especially enthused about the story. So much so that Jeffrey wanted to check it out himself, yet he chose another book by the same author instead and they're ready to get going on them after -- or maybe during -- school today. And today is Sarah's first day practicing with clarinet in the Longfellow Elementary School band. I can't wait to hear how that turns out!

Oh, and R that I started yesterday with stood for Raiders of the Lost Ark.


S stands for Station Eleven (ISBN 9780804172448) by Emily St. John Mandel, an unexpected dystopian novel that begins with the death of an actor playing King Lear from what turns out to be the Georgia Flu. The disease comes in on a flight from Moscow and spreads rapidly throughout the world, so twenty years after the actor's death the narrator Kirsten Raymonde who was eight at the time of the outbreak is part of the Traveling Symphony of actors and musicians in what used to be the northeast United States. And most of the characters from the beginning of this time-jumping tale

-- but the jumping back and forth shouldn't bother you --

we readers find out what happens to them at the end, and that the story of "Station Eleven" an in-novel graphic novel started by one of the main characters parallels their own. I especially love the touch of Star Trek: Voyager in this; on the front wagon of the Traveling Symphony and tattooed on Kirsten's arm is this quote: "Because survival is insufficient" from the episode "Collective" where the USS Voyager encountered a damaged Borg cube and finds several assimilated children beginning to recover their individuality, a Borg no-no.


Resistance is NOT futile.


David