Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph J. Finn

Happy Thursday!  Best of luck to everyone south of us; Richmond is getting some wind from the north edge of Ian and we'll get the rain as well, but we're nothing like anything down in Florida.  (And as always, you can help by donating money to the Red Cross, which is equipped to deal with these sorts of things.) 

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This is one that's not a new addition but I've been shelving things and I wanted to highlight what I think might be the best Superman book ever published, albeit one that is not mainstream Superman.  Superman: Secret Identity is a four issue limited series by Kurt Busiek and Stuart Immonen about a kid, Clark Kent, a perfectly normal child in Kansas whose parents have the unfortunate sense of humor to name him Clark in a world where Superman is, like here, just a fictional character.

Until the day Clark wakes up on a camping trip and finds himself floating in mid-air.

The whole series follow Clark over the next 50+ years as he comes to terms with his powers, hiding himself from a government that may want to dissect him and later comes to terms with him...and yes, falls in love with a woman named Lois (who in one of the best scenes of the books is introduced to him as a stupid co-worker joke and she's just as annoyed about the whole thing as he is). 

 It's a really lovely book that I recommend to everyone; Busiek is obviously having a delight at playing with the Superman tropes if they happened in a more real world (there's no Luthor here, sorry).  It's ripe for an animated adaptation and with how successful DC has been with those over the last decade I'm surprised there hasn't been one.

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They have their fans, but I've somehow never warmed to the Angelina Jolie Tomb Raider movies.  They're perfectly fine, but they always have this sheen of '90s action movie slickness that just never quite works for me in this context.  But this version, based on the most recent (and absolutely excellent) Tomb Raider games is much more my style, with Alicia Vikander being a damn good protagonist in a movie all about decoding puzzles, running from dangers, climbing walls and dealing with Walton Goggins as a treasure hunter and being everything you want from a Walton Goggins villain.   We're still supposedly getting a sequel to this in the next few years and I'm all for it.  It's directed by Norwegian director Roar Uthaug (and isn't that a great name?) and I keep meaning to dig into his previous movies, since it looks like he's very good at directing disaster movies.

Tomb Raider is currently on Fubo and DirecTV and available for rent and sale at all the usual places.

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I freely admit I could be a lot better about 20th century literature.  I've read a lot of Golden Age science fiction, which sometimes means I've glided past of bunch mid-20th century authors (and I wasted a lot of time on Hemingway).  So once in a whole I will grab a random Penguin paperback, just because it's from 1961, the blurbs on it are find of fascinating.  And then I glance at the cover credit, because I like this illustration and I find it's by a Len Deighton, a name that triggers something in my brain.  Deighton is still alive at 93 and is best know for, among many things like writing cookbooks and history texts, being a spy novelist, probably best know for The IPCRESS File.  I simply had no idea that he was also an illustrator!  (According to Wiki, he designed the first cover for On The Road in the UK, but we won't hold that against him.)

I absolutely want a collection of his cooking illustrations.

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My recommendation of the week is Blonde, the Andrew Dominik adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' novel about Norma Jeane and Marilyn Monroe.  It's very good to keep this clear, that this is a novel about two personas, not a straight biopic; I honestly think a lot of the griping about this movie is in regarding it as a biopic, which it is not.  It's, like Dominik's previous The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, much more about mythology, ones that are imposed on us and ones that we create.  I think it's a great piece of work, but one that people are going to be arguing about for months.  Not everyone is going to love this, but I think it's a great piece of work about stories and the horror of expectations and very sympathetic and compassionate to both Norma and Marilyn.

Blonde is streaming on Netflix.