No puzzle this week I could go all Joliet Jake and blame everything and everybody but I’d be lying, I’m just lazy. On a side note, when I cut and pasted that speech I watched a clip of the scene on to make sure the transcript was accurate, half the comments under the clip were people making digs at Trump or Biden. “Hurr durr he sounds like TFG” or “Derp derp he makes excuses like dementia Joe” … politics has ruined a whole lot of people.

On to book talk – Last week Mojo asked us if we prefer character driven or plot driven stories. I hadn’t really thought of that distinction before but in a similar vein I think of author as either ‘writing to tell a story’ or ‘telling a story to write.’ The former would be authors like Alistair McClean or Michael Crichton, guys who seemingly write for the express purpose of having their novels turned into movies. The later would include James Joyce and I assume Thomas Pynchon even though I’ve never made it through one of his books, Umberto Eco would also fall into this category, guys you can imagine parsing every word and phrase like Billy Crystal in Throw Momma From the Train.

Obviously most author fall somewhere in between the two extremes and some may even have written some books at one end of the spectrum and some books at the other end. Personally I prefer books closer to the “telling a story to write” end. I don’t mind simple action novels and some of the “wrote to become a move” books are very good, but I find a bit of cleaver writing now and again gives a book that extra something. It’s what makes Ken Bruen one of my favorite authors, while some of his novels have been movie-fied his style isn’t quite captured by these adaptations.

So what do you think? Quick and easy fluff or boring intellectual slogs, or somewhere in between, or maybe none of this makes any sense, In which case talk about whatever you want.

Reminder – Next week is What Are We Reading (WAWR) week, so send in your submissions to heybuddystopdoingthat@protonmail.com