Xi'an's Og

Read a very light space-opera novel, (The Belt) Entanglement, by G.M. Kilby, with shallow characters, shallow plot with an unlikely McGuffin (a uniquely advanced quantum computer, even 20y later) and implausible rescue episodes (incl. one where a character punctures their spacesuit to recover from a broken propulsion thruster!). This book stands million years away from monuments of the genre, like Arthur C. Clarke‘s, Isaac Asimov‘s, Orson Scott Card‘s, Frank Herbert‘s or, to cite more recent writers, Iain Banks‘s, ‘sJohn Scalzi‘s, Becky Chambers‘s… I will most certainly not become entangled in the sequels! And am contemplating with glee attacking recent purchases and gifts, like Tasmyn Muir’s Nona the Ninth, Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field (Book of dust finale), and Florent Chavouet‘s Tokyo Sanpo (to revive memories of March’s visit to Edo!), discovered while attending an exhibit on Studio Ghibli’s Isao Takahata at Maison du Japon .

Brought back several litres of Andalusian olive oil from Sevilla! And made fresh green pici over the turn of the year, with spinach replacing water in the dough (following a recipe posted on the food weekly of France Inter), as well as three different dishes from the same batch of Norman scallops.

Watched Wake Up Dead Man, by Ryan Johnson, the third instalment of Benoît Blanc’s investigations. Which is rather fun, the more because Daniel Craig is visibly having fun playing a Southerner detective and over-doing his accent, while leaving a large chunk of the stage to other actors, like Josh O’Connor playing the junior, soul-searching priest. The plot itself is light and somewhat irrelevant (if with a wink to old classics of closed room murders, conveniently appearing in a Book Club list, if missing Gaston Leroux’s Mystère de la chambre jaune, as well as to Hitchcok’s Vertigo with a dolly zoom effect at the most dramatic instant), while the suspicion revolving among all characters is worth watching. Also tried a few episodes Just a bit Espers (ちょっとだけエスパー), a Japanese TV series on a group of almost ordinary persons with limited ExtraSensory PERception. The characters are nice but the plot is very weak, the resort to time travel all too common to this type of stories, the resolutions to the episodic challenges embarrassingly cringy, and the part of the story where a new employee (Bunty) has to play along being married to another (Shiki) who genuinely believes they are married is quite uncomfortable, to say the least…