I didn’t get much writing work done last week, so I caught up a little bit this weekend. I have a fairly lengthy to-do list beside my home computer that covers deadlines through April. Somewhere soon I also expect to receive the editorial response on the project I’ve been working on these past couple of months, so I might have to forego some of the projects. I really want to get a story into the MWA anthology submissions, and I have a good idea, but only a few weeks to get something ready, so that’s one that might not make the cut.
My most imminent deadlines are for Cemetery Dance. I have a column and a book review due on Thursday. I have the column mostly finished and have a good start on the book review, but it’s going to require quite a bit more work to whip it into shape.
I read John Grisham’s The Associate this weekend. It’s easy to tell that Grisham is trying to recapture the heady glory of The Firm, and he heads in the right direction but doesn’t quite pull it off. The novel is about a Yale law graduate who is blackmailed into taking a job at a huge Manhattan law firm so that he can reveal insider secrets about a massive lawsuit between two companies involved in a Pentagon contract bid dispute. The lawyer had planned to spend a few years doing immigration law before considering the leap to one of the big enterprises. He turns out to be a resourceful guy, mostly because he’s read a lot of spy thrillers, and he figures out ways to defeat his constant surveillance. However, the book doesn’t have the same energy or dynamics as The Firm. A problem with several of Grisham’s recent books is that you never get the feeling the protagonist will fail, so it’s all an exercise in seeing how he will succeed. There were times in The Firm when it seemed like the protagonist was caught between several rocks and the hardest of places.
We watched the 2008 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited this weekend. It’s set in pre-war England and is told from the point of view of an unprivileged young man who goes to Oxford and falls in with a wealthy young man who is both gay and alcoholic. Brideshead is the family home, and the family is Catholic, a fact that directs most of the choices made in the movie. Though the young man has a brief fling with the son, it’s his sister Julia who he falls in love with, but his lack of position, their different religious upbringings and the manipulativeness of the matriarch (played by Emma Thompson) thwart them. Michael Gambon plays the patriarch, who has decamped from Brideshead and now lives in Venice. Not a bad costume drama, but the final scene is a little mixed up, especially because they either underplayed or skirted around a character development from the original Waugh novel.
The team that was eliminated on Amazing Race this week came as no surprise. I think that even if they hadn’t come in last, they might have suffered a penalty because the woman took a car ride back to the gondola landing after she got hopelessly lost coming down the mountain. The teams’ personalities are starting to show through. I am sort of rooting for the older couple, even though they haven’t distinguished themselves beyond the middle of the pack so far. There aren’t any teams that I dislike, though I think the blondes are destined to self-destruct before long. From the previews, though, it looks like one team loses their money and passports, something that spelled the end for a strongly contending team last season.
