2 writers

Two writers who meant a lot to me when I was growing up died recently; a few links to mark their passing.

Farley Mowat died at the age of 92. Here is a wonderful appreciation by Dorian Stuber. Both Never Cry Wolf and The Dog Who Wouldn't Be were very important to me (though as Dorian says in his post, the books of Gerald Durrell were probably more influential the long run - I too was a child who imagined a future as a sort of hybrid of Durrell and Jane Goodall, and spent untold hours cleaning out the cages of rabbits, guinea-pigs, snakes, lizards, etc. in the school science room!). Two things that have always stuck with me: the claim (possibly fabricated) that Mowat peed around the perimeter of his camp in order to mark it as his territory; and the wonderful cover for the edition of The Dog Who Wouldn't Be that lived at my grandparents' house in London.


Also: Mary Stewart dies age 97. Both the thrillers and the Merlin novels were among my absolute favorites when I was ten or eleven - I have read them all about a million times (again, they were on the shelf at my grandmother's house in London, I reread the whole set every two years when we visited).

Prosthesis

We really are living in a great age of prosthetics (it is one of my favorite things about doing the New York City Triathlon, too, which is otherwise a rather overpriced and crowded and hot race, that you see so many young fast athletes racing on prosthetic legs). (FT site registration required.)

(Photo credit: Takao Ochi for the FT)

This picture makes me think of my mild prejudice against most performance art - given the possibilities of avant-garde musical performance, why wouldn't you be a musician instead? You get all the potentially good parts of performance art plus music....

Writing from Cayman. I made it here safely, only as so often the case at the cost of a minor lung ailment! No exercise this weekend, accordingly & unfortunately, but it is still very nice to be here, even with massive pile of work and lungs like creaky bellows. Light reading along the route: Mark Billingham, From the Dead (not actually a new book and rather inferior to the usual Thorne standard, which may explain why it wasn't published in the US at the time); Victor Gischler, The Deputy (enjoyable gonzo noir, slightly under-proofread); James S. A. Corey, The Butcher of Anderson Station. Just now dug in on the first installment of one of my favorite books from childhood, one of the best value-for-money (re)reading opportunities on the internet!