Today would have been my aunt and uncle's 44th anniversary, so I called Uncle Jim just to tell him I was thinking about him. He sounds well, but needs to get out of Wyoming to a lower altitude.

I take fits of realizing that time's a-wasting, that I can't read every book in the world, that there are so many books, so little time, and that not all books are worth my time and trouble. The sad chronicle of my attempts to reduce the number of books in the house is chronicled here. It's pretty much a lost cause: when I started trying to get rid of at least as many books as I brought in, I had cleaned the cookbook shelves, but it's gone down regularly every year, as I find new bookstores or book sales. By the end of 1993 I was 132 books behind, then it was 243, 472, 691, 827 and 875 at the end of the following years. Why, then, would I decide that 8 books I had passed onto Roni were keepers after all and re-add them to the stacks? That's because I decided the books about Charlie Resnick, by John Harvey, were just too good to read only once.

In October of 1997 I went to Bouchercon in Monterey. It was great fun and I got to meet a lot of authors and attend a lot of panels. Of the 47 books I got there, I've read 21. (Fortunately, I DID like John Cuddy and Jeremiah Healy!) One book, a freebie, was Lonely Hearts by John Harvey. On Sunday, they showed most of the BBC movie and I was quite interested. I started to read it when I got home, liked it, but got sidetracked and forgot it... till this spring, when I was at Book Passage and saw a number of others. "Oh, yeah," I thought, "I should read that and then I can read these others." I went home and looked out LONELY HEARTS and read it, and loved it. Then we went back to Marin, and they only had ONE of the sequels! Well, once I whimpered, they did find another, but there I was, stuck in the middle of a series, and no books to read! I had to visit Amazon.com to get them, and even amazon.co.uk for one. But, ha ha, I now have the whole series. Harvey moved out of Nottingham and can't write accurately about it any more, so there are only 10 books in the series, and I've been holding onto Last Rites as a special treat. I really do NOT want to have read the last one. Maybe I'll just have to start at the beginning again.

The books are very intense. You really get wrapped up in the lives of the detective squad that works around Charlie Resnick. While they aren't overwhelmingly gloomy, they are dark and need concentration, and reading more than a couple at a time would be far too depressing. Charlie himself is a lonesome man. His wife left him some time ago, and he lives with 4 cats, his jazz CDs and records, and a lot of sandwich makings. Charlie lives on sandwiches, and invariably he wears them. He's rumpled and awkward, and a Very Nice Man. He cares about the detectives under him and worries about them. We, too, learn to care about them. The ending of one book was so shocking I was reeling for days. In another, the one character I've disliked since the beginning has something happen to him, and I find I care for him, and worry about him.

I'd passed all but the last two on to Roni, but I kept thinking about them, and decided that they're going to stay here, I'll have to cut back somewhere else.

Some of us don't need a good book!