Read The Fifth Heart, by Dan Simmons. The same author who wrote the Hyperion Cantos, an impressive creation of a completely alien universe! A winner of both Hugo and Locus Awards. Alas, this book does not belong to the same category. Based on an attractive premise of Henry James meeting Sherlock Holmes, it peters out after a few pages, with no-one at the wheel. The paradox of a famous author meeting a famous character is abandoned after a few pages, Henry James is endlessly wondering about his own writing and position in society, his American friends are all conveniently famous, since they re-enact real characters like John Hay, private secretary of Abraham Lincoln, or the historian Henry Adams. Each new (historical) character comes with a biography complete enough to become a Wikipedia page, just as the geography of each place they visit. The attempt of Henry James at sleuthing is ridiculous and the investigations of both a possible crime (on Adams’s wife, Clover, instead of a suicide) and an anarchist nationwide plot run by… Prof Moriarty are unconvincing. In addition, I find the overall tone of the book highly reactionary and racist, with a fairly long, terrifying, quote from Charles Pearson—unrelated with Karl and Egon—, which could have been intentional to reflect the epoch. But the revisionist approach to the Haymarket massacre adopted by Holmes cannot be seen as such.
Cooked more veg curries and less buckwheat galettes, as my sugar levels went up from the last test! Possibly connected with my intensity training over the period… Still worth trying to cut on high glucose foods! On the home front, I also spent a long morning replacing (and cursing) the (cheap plastic) switch of my vacuum cleaner, despite the guidance of DIY videos where every step seemed so smooth and easy!
Watched the 1995 Western The Quick and the Dead that I found terrible and artificial, despite the collection of famous or soon-famous actors. And a few minutes of two TV Japanese series, SPEC and Silent Truth, not to be continued! As well as skimmed through 96 minutes, a very soapy and un-believable Taiwanese version of Bullet Train Explosion. And listened repeatedly to the guitar adaptation of the Goldberg Variations by Thibaut Garcia & Antoine Morinière, which I first heard on the French Public Radio, France Inter. The pair thought of the project during COVID and had two identical guitars designed and built from the same rosewood tree for the variations. (I have at least six versions of the Goldberg Variations at home, which I discovered via Glenn Gould’s latest interpretation. I remember most fondly driving through Ontario in May 1986, on my way to Ottawa from West Lafayette, and hitting by chance a Canadian radio channel broadcasting the entirety of the 1956 frantic version! As a coïncidence, I found out today—again listening to France Inter and Sophie Marceau—that Thomas Bernhard wrote a novel, Der Untergeher, involving Glenn Gould as one of the characters.)
Xi'an's Og 