Yeah, there were no national chains in my town when I was a little kid.  Pizza Hut came in maybe late grade school or early junior high...so say '78 or '79.  By the time I was in high school I think there was a Burger King, a McDonalds and a Kentucky Fried Chicken.  But I mostly didn't eat at any of them.  There were far better local burger and pizza places.  I think we did run to Pizza Hut now and then for lunch in very late junior high and in high school (after we had drivers licenses).  Because the personal pan pizzas were pretty cheap and they weren't super good about getting them to us in ten minutes so they were frequently free.  Once they stopped doing that we were  back to the local burger joint or one of the local convenience stores if we left school for lunch.  

As I said, I never set foot in a McDonalds until I went to one with a buddy in college.  

Harriet the Spy
Louise Fitzhugh, 1964

This apparently beloved children’s classic passed me by when I was the right age to read it – and I don’t even recall that any of my elementary school chums had read it (nor do I think our school library even had it on the shelves). So when I saw that the English-language section of a local library had it, I decided to check it out and rectify this gap in my kids’ lit reading. And … it’s pretty interesting, but nothing more. To those who may not be familiar, the basic story centers around an 11 year-old girl named Harriet, who lives with her upper middle-class parents in a townhouse in Manhattan. The household also consists, initially, of Harriet’s nanny, ‘Ole’ Golly, as well as a cook. Harriet always carries around a notebook in which she meticulously logs all of her daily experiences, which includes her ‘spying’ activities – she basically eavesdrops on a number of households in her neighborhood, mostly peeping through windows, although in one case she sneaks into wealthy middle-aged woman’s house several times to be able to see what she does in her bedroom all day (!)

Things eventually take a turn for the worse for Harriet when a) her nanny, who is the only adult to do any actual parenting in Harriet’s life, gets married and quits her job, and b) Harriet’s classmates get a hold of her notebook and read some of the none-too-flattering things she’s written about most of them.

Based on the reviews I’ve read at sites like Amazon and Goo Dreads, I see that people seem to either love or hate this book. I suppose I fall more into the latter category, in that my impressions were largely negative. Even so, I did appreciate many aspects of the story, like the way it portrayed oblivious upper middle-class parents, which is rather subversive. It’s also a very frank and unvarnished portrayal of the way children perceive and interact with the world. And I liked the illustrations, which were also done by Fitzhugh. However, I just found Harriet’s ‘spying,’ which was downright stalkerish behavior, and the fact that it’s never really addressed, rather troubling.

Fletch And The Widow Bradley by Gregory McDonald

Fletch has really goofed.  Assigned to do a small business piece he includes current quotes from a man who has been dead for two years.  The newspaper is embarrassed and Fletch ends up fired.  Of course Fletch can't let this mystery go, because he took the quotes from memos provided to him by an officer of the company.  So Fletch criss-crosses the country (and Mexico) trying to figure out why a dead man is writing memos and maybe get his job back as a reporter.  And Fletch finances this with a large amount of money that he found in a wallet.  He's been trying to track down the owner, but has been very unsuccessful.  

Wait...how can Fletch be fired when he hasn't been a reporter for the last couple books?  Well this is a prequel.  So there's that.  The mystery was probably a fairly big deal in 1980, and maybe it wasn't as self-evident then as it is now.  But I figured it out maybe 1/3 of the way through the book.  The secondary mystery of the wallet is really just a McGuffin.  This was okay.  I liked it maybe a bit better than Fletch's Fortune.  But McDonald just hasn't been able to recapture the magic of that first novel.  

The Greatest Summer in Baseball History
by John Rosengren

This was a decent book with a deceptive title. the book isn't really about 1973 or how baseball changed, but rather followed a few of the storylines of 1973... Hank Aaron pursuit of the home run record.... George Steinbrenner's first year as owner.... Orlando Cepeda as the first full time DH (though will little discussion of how it changed the game past the obvious), The crazy exploits of the As and Reggie Jackson, and the Mets season.. both their improbable pennant run and the sad last year of Willie Mays' career.

I would have assumed the author was a New Yorker if the book said he was from Minnesota.. the book was extremely focused on New York. The stuff about The As was nothing that isn't better described in other places.... same with the trials Hank Aaron faced.

The other striking thing was that for a book that seems to be a re-release/re-packaging, there were ALOT of typos.

The stuff about Orlando Cepeda was pretty neat, and I didn't really know all that much about Steinbrenner's pre-baseball life, so those parts were good.

Futureland
Walter Mosley, 2001

As the sub-title in the image above indicates, i.e., “nine stories of an imminent future,” this is a short story collection (although the penultimate one is a novella); however, they are thematically and sometimes even narratively connected (i.e., characters from one story often make cameo appearances in others) and the book is best read as a single unit, like a sort of disjointed novel. The chronological setting of the stories ranges from the late 2020s to the mid-2050s, and the future envisioned by Mosley is pretty bleak, with a few tech monopolies dominating not only the world economy but politics as well, since even small countries can be purchased by corporations. Writing in 2001, when the internet was still in a pretty nascent stage, Mosley made some pretty accurate, or at least close-to-home, predictions, such as corporations insisting on “on-site, controlled labor force,” despite the promise of work-at-home possibilities that were apparent even back then. Also, the use of surveillance technology to monitor every second of an employee’s workday, so that even a minor pause to glance out a window (insofar as the workplace has one) can lead to pay getting docked.
Another situation that had unsettling echoes due to the recent ‘controversy’ at the Olympics in Paris involved a woman boxer who becomes world heavyweight champion – fighting men – as it is noted that she “was so proficient that many said she was actually a man trying to make it by pretending to be a woman.” In that story, “The Greatest,” said boxer agreed to appear on an X-rated late night talkshow and took off her clothes and insisted on a lingering close up shot of her privates so there would be no doubt.
The final two stories, the novella “En Masse” and “The Nig in Me,” which is a sort of devastating epilogue, also deal with the theme of pandemics and a genetically-modified virus that targets people of a specific ‘racial’ make-up. Again, troubling and often disturbingly topical stuff...

Latest read, finally getting somewhere with my prose reading again...



Mucho Mojo by Joe R. Lansdale, the second in the Hap and Leonard series. I enjoyed this, and it was a nice change of pace from a lot of the stuff I had been reading, but I think I enjoyed the first book in the series more. I'll continue with the series after a bit, I need to get book 3 from the library but I have a few other books borrowed I want to finish first. If I had to point to the one thing why I enjoyed this one less than the first is that the plot revolved around a ritual serial killer (or killers) and that's just a not a trope I usually enjoy reading about (or watching). So I liked the writing, I like the characters, I just wasn't into the core of the plot this time around as much as I was in Savage Season. I am hoping future volumes revolve around different types of crimes rather than circling the serial killer trope again.

-M

I've read it as well, it was a holiday gift last year, and it definitely brings the nostalgia. I definitely had my fair share of this stuff as a kid and fit right in that age group.

What it reminded me of a bit was that, yeah, it was largely junk at face value, but as a kid it was more what your imagination brought that made it fun. And in era without the Internet (heck, we didn't even have a VCR or Atari system until I was a little older), the imagination was a powerful thing. Kids actually "played", that was the joy of toys cheap or otherwise.

That said, of course looking back at some of this stuff it is pretty funny the way they tried to brand stuff as you mentioned. Definitely a little "off the beaten path" theme here and a fun book indeed.