Day Two Hundred and Fifty Four
The High Window Raymond Chandler Page: 656
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver’s Seat, The Only Problem Muriel Spark Page: 332
I feel like a domestic goddess today. I made my applesauce. Incidentally a bushel basket of apples makes a surprisingly small amount of applesauce. I only got four and a half pints out of that basket plus a pint of apple juice. In order to have a respectable amount of applesauce to show for my efforts I asked Jared to bring home a ladder and we are going back to pick the apples out of the top of the tree. Since they are bigger and less wormy up there tomorrow’s yield should be much higher.
Also on the domestic (goddess) front I started some elk meat curing for jerky. Jared and I are going backpacking this weekend, I had a roast sitting in the freezer and it seemed like a good idea. It’s kind of a lot of work but sooo worth it! Homemade jerky is much better tasting than the store bought stuff and at $16+ pound I’d rather make it.
I’ve plowed through four complete (though short) novels in the last two days. I find Raymond Chandler a curiously entertaining diversion. His creation of the private eye Philip Marlowe is sublime. I’ve read that his novels are the finest of hardboiled detective fiction but not being a reader of such I cannot determine if that is so. Suffice it to be that they are fine and enjoyable light fiction. Light in the sense that they don’t demand much of the intellect, not so light in subject matter. There are rather too many dead bodies lying around. I do very much enjoy the dialogue, it puts me in mind of this type of image
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I’m enjoying Muriel Spark’s novels and will write about them tomorrow after I finish the final one.