the rix mix

Fooling around with few  year-end music lists; best cocktail/tiki/exotica;  albums I've uploaded to You Tube in entirety;  a Henry Mancini list. But that's old stuff & I got stuff I haven't listened to yet & one more day to qualify for a 2011 list. Book Fav lists are impossible. I keep a list of every book I read, but I rarely add a  note to remind me of why I liked or didn't it. I   liked two period crime   novels  by Sandra  Scoppettone this year featuring a woman who takes over her boss' private eye business in NYC during WWII when he enlists  in the Army, where everyone speaks in stylized 40's movie dialogue. They were very entertaining & I thought they'd make great movies. The actors I imagined  in the lead, Marissa Tomei or Katy Sagal, are too old for it now. In The Last Gig & Sick Like That, Norman Green's P.I. Alessandra “Al” Martillo, took over her employer's agency in contemporary NYC when he was shot, but she's an entirely different kind of character;  dark, violent, street-tough, sexually driven but incapable of real intimacy. If I browse the list I can come up many crime novels I really  enjoyed, & few I disliked but finished anyway. I read True Grit for the first time. Although the newer film is  closer to the novel's spirit of Biblically-inspired vengeance-as-justice (a great American theme we still debate seriously),  & the character  of Rooster Cogburn,  the John Wayne version didn't seriously betray either one.