Today is a Halloween freebie so I am making a list of the top ten musicians to listen to while reading that might also put you to sleep.
Diana Krall
My husband turned me on to Diana Krall and I used to play her music to help calm my son when he was a baby and to help him fall asleep. We listened to Diana up until he was probably 5 or 6 to fall asleep and he said the other day that he has a type of Pavloveyn response to her music because no matter where he is and hears it, he immediately wants a nap. I can say the same thing because one time The Husband and I were in Barnes and Noble (many years ago because we have not been to one in probably a decade) and Diana came on. I immediately looked at the comfy chair I was standing next to and considered a nap.
2. Frank Sinatra
The best album of his to listen to for reading or dreaming is The Wee Small Hours
3. Nat King Cole
Just about any Nat King Cole album will do but I love any of his albums with a lot of ballads on them for this purpose
4. Miles Davis
Kind of Blue is a good album choice for this one
5. Harry Connick Jr
Harry has some peppier albums so I stick with his more mellow tunes but one of my favorite albums of his is Red Light, Blue Light
6. Alison Krauss
You’re either going to relax or cry listening to her.
7. Rachael & Vilaray
A recent duo for me suggested to me by The Husband
8. Michael Buble
Don’t listen to his fast stuff or you will have to get up and dance and sing because his music just makes people happy. Stick to the smooth, easy going songs or albums.
9. JJ Heller
I don’t remember how I discovered JJ Heller but I listened to her lullaby album to help Little Miss sleep and now when I hear songs from the album I burst into tears remembering those wonderful days of naptime with a newborn, infant, and toddler, cuddling and just connecting as JJ’s music played in the background.
I always imagine that heaven will just be full of those moments – reliving those special times with our children and loved ones over and over again.
10, Vince Gill
Specifically his box set These Days. This is another set of albums I listened to when The Boy was little. I love the jazz album for sleeping/reading and just every other album for anytime listening. I combined him and Allison for this clip — love this song.
Bonus:
Elliot James Reay
I discovered this guy while looking up these videos so I am adding him as bonus.
So how about you? Do you like to listen to music while you read? What are your go to genres or musicians? (I’d also add classical music to this list, personally, but didn’t choose any to share this time around. Maybe a future list!)
I’ve been reading through the original Nancy Drew books, which, as many of us now know, were written by around 28 ghost writers. These first books I am reading, though, were written by Mildren Benson using outlines given to her by either Edward Stratemeyer or his daughter Harriet Stratemeyer Adams.
The Secret of Red Gate Farm is number six in the original series and was first released in 1931 with some rewrites of it done in 1961 by Adams.
In this book we find Nancy caught up in a mystery that starts on a train while she and her friends George (female George) and Bess are coming home from a shopping trip.
Let’s start with the summary: “Nancy and her friends, Bess and George, meet Joanne Byrd on a train ride home. Joanne lives at Red Gate Farm with her grandmother, but if they do not raise enough money to pay the mortgage, they will soon lose the farm! Nancy, Bess, and George decide to stay at Red Gate for a week as paying customers. Soon, they learn about the strange group of people who rent a cave on the property. They describe themselves as a nature cult called the Black Snake Colony.”
Nancy Drew books are written simplistically in many ways but the storylines are not light by any means. There are subjects of abuse, criminal underworlds, abandonment, parental loss and many other hard-hitting issues.
This one was no exception. A young woman goes to the city to look for work because her grandmother is going to sell the family farm because they are losing money. While there she meets Nancy and almost gets caught up in a gambling ring of some sort when she interviews for the job and the interviewer is super, super creepy. I’ve watched too many movies and written up too many stories for newspapers so I imagined all the horrible things that would happen to this girl and Nancy while reading these scenes. It made me a bit lightheaded, but since it is a Nancy Drew book I knew things would turn out okay in the end.
Nancy decides she and her friends will go with the young girl back to her farm and pay to stay at the farm while also encouraging others to do the same. Nancy’s idea is like an early Airbnb. People can rent rooms at the farm and this will help the farm owners pay off their dept.
While there Nancy and her friends notice people in the woods, wearing all white, and dancing in the moonlight. This doesn’t seem like your everyday farming community activity so they ask Joanne’s grandmother what that is all about. The woman says she’s renting her land to a group of people to help avoid selling the farm but she doesn’t really know what they are doing up there. Can we say “RED FLAG”?
In addition to that craziness, there is also a man trying to buy the rest of the farm but the grandmother is trying to push him off until she sees if other options work to raise some money.
Despite the simple and fairly innocent way the Nancy Drew books are written, this one was a little creepy for me because of the cult angle.
Even with the simple writing, the dark subject matter leaked through and left me a little unsettled part of the time. People wearing white robes, dancing weirdly in the moonlight? Shudder!
Then Nancy and her friends decide to infiltrate the group at one point and I swear I was about to faint from the tension.
Nancy Drew books might be written simply but their plots still hold together well in my opinion.
Either Stratemeyer or Mildred had quite an imagination.
Have you read this one in the series yet or before?
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.
The beginning of this week the weather was beautiful which led my dad to decide to take my kids for a hike along the old railroad tracks near his house two days in a row. I stayed back at my parents and helped my mom with cleaning the house.
The kids enjoyed walking the path where the train tracks used to be and my dad told them the history of where the station was and where the trains traveled. He also talked to Little Miss about where the old French mill used to be along the creek.
Zooma The Wonder Dog also loved the trip. She and Little Miss splashed in the creek and looked for fish, but didn’t see any.
The kids took some photos:
Two days later our little town was placed under a water boil advisory when there was a water main break. This made cooking and washing dishes a challenge, but we managed – not without complaint from me. The advisory was lifted on Friday, thankfully.
Last week I wrote a bit about our family’s cats over the years and barely scratched the surface of all the cats we’ve had over the years. I’ve decided I’m going to sit down one day this week and write about all the cats I can remember us having. Cats have such interesting personalities and each one seems to be different.
Mom and Dad’s cat Molly.
I also hope to write a blog post in the next month or so about the letters we have between my great-grea-grandfather and his brothers and mother that were written during the Civil War. They are very interesting.
What I/we’ve been Reading
The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood and The Anne of Green Gables Devotional by Rachel Dodge
Murder Handcrafted by Isabella Alan, which I have been sharing the wrong title of for a couple of weeks. So this one was good but also annoying. First, I didn’t know it was the last book in the series until I read some reviews. Second, there were some super weird typo and consistency issues that really threw me out of the story. I was surprised to see this because the book was published by Random House Publishing.
I really shouldn’t have been surprised because I’ve seen some errors like this before in Amanda Flowers’ books and Isabella Alan and Amand Flowers are the same person. There are so many books out by Amanda that I feel like they are trying to push them out way too fast and therefore letting quality slide.
Now, as someone who is independently published and has a lot of errors in her book as well, I’m not trying to act superior. I’m just surprised because so many readers are so negative about independently published books because of their supposed lack of quality but I am seeing that lack across the board in publishing right now.
In some ways I think the production of books needs to slow down and focus on quality over quantity. There are just too many rushed books out there.
All of this said I did enjoy the story of the book. I was, however, really annoyed to find out this was the last book in the series and she did not wrap up the love story between the main character very well (I mean they were still together so I guess that’s good at least) and left the storylines of other characters hanging. I still enjoy the stories and her writing, though, so this doesn’t mean I won’t read further books by her. Just not for a while.
I need to take a break from mysteries for a bit so I am going to try either Miracle in a Season by Sarah Loudin Thomas or Finding Lady Enderly by Joanna Davidson Politano
I haven’t read either of these authors before.
I decided to put The Cat Who Brought Down the House by Lilian Jackson Braun aside for now since I learned it was one of the later books in the series. I read one or two of those and they weren’t as good, and I think it might have been because Lilian was quite old by then and others may have been writing them or she was, and they just weren’t as good.
The Husband is reading Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.
Little Miss is reading Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone. At night we are sometimes reading The Four Story Mistake. During the school days we are reading Johnny Tremaine.
The Boy is listening to an audiobook – Tales From The Gas Station Part Four.
What We watched/are Watching
Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown. This was my first time watching this one and I found it very interesting. It sent me down a rabbit hole of reading the real story of John Brown and Queen Victoria.
For Comfy, Cozy Cinema with Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs, I watched Dial M for Murder. If you want to join in on our movie marathon posts for the rest of October and November you can follow the list here:
You don’t have to blog about them if you watch them but if you do write a blog post about your impression about the movies, we will be adding a link up at the end of our posts.
On Nov. 14 we will be watching Chocolat as a group watch. We will be pushing play together at the same time and then chatting about the movie in our Discord group (The Dames), which you can join for free now here: https://discord.com/invite/J7qQ36Uf
On my own I watched The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (original with Danny Kaye) this weekend and really enjoyed it. I loved the music and Danny Kaye’s performance overall. I watched an episode of the first season of Only Murders In The Building as well last week. I am really enjoying it and it’s hard not to binge watch it but I’m trying to wait for my husband to be home to watch it with me.
What I’m Writing
I am getting much closer to the end of the third Gladwynn book.
I released the description this past week, if you are curious:
Now it’s your turn. What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
This is a blog link-up where we not only allow you to share your past posts but we encourage it. So share away!
This week our temps were beautiful where I live in the beginning of the week. Last night they dropped 20 degrees, reminding us yet again we are in autumn. So I am under a blanket as I putting the finishing touches on my blog post.
This is a hard post to read but it is a very important read to understand what really happened in N.C. and why that area was hit so fast and that it is even worse than what the news has shown (which honestly is very little in my opinion). Keep this family in your prayers.
I’m so glad you are here and participating in our weekly link-up of family-friendly, fun, educational, interesting, crafty, fashionable, and whatever else posts. I hope you’ll tell your followers about our post (feel free to copy and paste the graphic) and visit the blogs in the link-up.
Now it is your turn to link up your favorite posts. They can be fashion, lifestyle, DIY, food, etc. All we ask is that they be family friendly. You can link up posts from last week or even from years ago. You can share up to three links each week.
We are always looking for additional hosts so let us know if you want to help out and we are also looking for more links from fashion bloggers so let your fashion bloggers know!
This week we watched Dial M for Murder (1954), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
This was a great follow up to Rear Window and I’m so glad Erin suggested both of these. I’ve been wanting to watch Dial M for Murder for years but just never got around to it with all the other great movies out there to watch.
Now that I’ve watched it, I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite Hitchcock movie of all time but I really did enjoy it. In some ways I thought things fell together a little too easily at points in this movie but the way they fell into place made me enjoy it – if that makes any sense. It might not make sense if you haven’t watched the movie but if you have then you probably know what I mean.
Here we have another Hitchcock movie with one of his favorite actresses, Grace Kelly. The movie also stars Ray Milland and Robert Cummings.
Dial M for Murder, based on a very popular play and screenplay by Frederick Knott, was made before Rear Window but both movies released at the same time. It was this movie that made Hitchcock decide he wanted Kelly for Rear Window.
First a little bit about the plot of the film. Tony Wendice is a retired professional British tennis player who is married to his socialite wife, Margot, who has had an affair in the past with American crime-fiction writer Mark Halliday.
Margot doesn’t think Tony knows about the affair. She burned all the letters she received from Mark when she broke it off with him. All the letters except one. She kept that one in her handbag and though we are never definitely sure what was in the letter, we know it was something that meant a lot to her.
Mark has now come to London for a visit and wants to see both Margot and Tony. They are set to go out to a performance together that night but Tony bails at the last minute and tells them to go on without him and have some fun.
Tony’s eagerness to stay home is what first clued me in that something a bit criminal was about to go down and go down it does.
Tony blackmails a former college classmate to kill Margot. Tony jokes with Mark later when he and Margot come home about how he, Mark, would know more about how to murder a person since he’s a crime writer.
Margo suggests that he and Tony write a book together after Mark is looking through all their clippings of all they did while Tony was a tennis pro and suggests Mark write a book.
“Yes, Mark, will you provide me with the perfect murder?” Tony asks.
Mark quips back, that his books focus less on the detecting and more on the crime itself. “I usually put myself in the criminal’s shoes and then ask what do I do next.”
Mark laughs and says he thinks he can plan a murder on his own but knows that in real life mistakes can be made. It’s not the same as it is in the book, he reminds Tony.
Tony is cocky though. He seems to think he’s a murder-planning master.
Foreshadow much?
My husband says that Hitchcock loved Grace Kelly for his movies and when I looked online that was indeed true. While I thought I had once read that Hitchcock had a strange obsession with Kelly, The Husband says it is more like he felt she was like his muse. That weird obsession thing was with another actress – Tippi Hedren.
To Hitchcock, Kelly was simply extremely beautiful and talented and he felt like there was no actress like her.
According to Offscreen.com, Hitchcock told Donald Spoto, who wrote his biography, that “The subtlety of Grace’s sexuality —her elegant sexiness— appealed to me. That may sound strange, but I think that Grace conveyed so much more sex than the average movie sexpot. With Grace, you had to find out – you had to discover it.”
Before concluding production on Dial M for Murder Hitchcock was already planning his next film – with Kelly in the lead. That next film was Rear Window.
Like Rear Window, Kelly wears some amazing outfits in this movie, by the way. The one that stands out for me is the red dress in the beginning. What a stunner.
I like what the writer on Offscreen said about the dress and the relationship of her outfits to scenes in the movie:
“Hitchcock starts the opening sequence at a breakfast table where Kelly is dressed demurely in a beige dressing gown; she reads a notice about the arrival of her lover on the Queen Mary; the ship arrives in dock; in seconds she is costumed in a red dress, embracing him in the flat where hours earlier she breakfasted with her supposedly unsuspecting husband. They are in the classic London flat but the picture presented is quite different as a result of clever writing, editing and colour coding. It also played on Hitchcock’s private perception of Kelly: he nicknamed her “the snow princess.”
I thought it was interesting that it was Cary Grant who told Hitchcock about the play version of Dial M for Murder, which debuted in 1952. Grant saw himself as the potential wife-killer, something Offscreen.com says Hitchcock always wanted Grant to play. Unfortunately Grant’s agents asked for way too much money so Hitchcock turned to Milland.
As a huge fan of Cary Grant I can honestly say I could see him playing the part Milland played, but Milland pulled it off in more dramatic fashion than I think Cary might have. Sometimes I have trouble seeing Cary in a dramatic role because even when I know he’s trying to be serious I think of his more playful movies and struggle to focus on him being the “bad guy.”
Milland, by the way, had won an Academy Award in 1945 for The Lost Weekend, so Hitchcock felt he was a good second pick.
Hitchcock chose not to change the play when he made the film and was quoted as saying this: “You buy a play for its construction. It’s the construction that makes it a hit. If you change that you’re ruining the very thing you bought. Just shoot the play.”
I thought this was ironic since he did change the endings of films that were based on novels he bought the rights to.
Have you ever seen this one? What did you think of it? Is it among your favorite Alfred Hitchcock films?
I was looking through a list of Alfred Hitchcock films the other day and I realized there are a ton I have never seen. I hope to make a marathon of his movies sometime soon.
Today’s topic is: How My Reading Habits Have Changed Over Time (submitted by Lydia @ https://lydiaschoch.com)
I don’t really know how to do this as a top ten list so I thought I’d just chat about it.
I started reading fiction fairly consistently when I was a kid and then even more when I was a teenager. When I was a “kid” – like under the age of 13 – I read books like the Little House series and the Chronicles of Narnia and sometimes I used a flashlight to finish a chapter because Mom had said I needed to go to bed and shut my light off but I didn’t want to go to bed yet.
I never read books quickly but I consistently had a book with me when I was a teenager. Back then I read mainly historical fiction and some clean/Christian romance. Now I read mainly mysteries – clean and cozy mainly.
In high school I got in trouble at least twice for reading in class. It’s not my fault my Roman-based epic was way more interesting than the football coach rambling about driver safety. Or a book from that same series (The Mark of the Lion series by Francine Rivers) was way more interesting than my history teacher who never really taught but mostly talked about football because he was the other football coach. Huh. Coincidence there? I think not.
I remember my mom came to a parent teacher conference, holding one of those books because we had picked it up at the local Christian bookstore (which only lasted about two years in our tiny community) and the teacher said, “Oh. Is that one of those books you got caught reading in class the other day?”
My mom, with her quick wit, said, “Yes, it probably is but it is based in history at least.”
I don’t think she meant that as a slam against that teacher but he was the one who used to start classes each year by holding up the text book and saying, “You can take this an use it to prop up a window.” Then he’d spend the rest of the year talking about who knows what from the front of the classroom with very little of it being actual history.
The only thing I remember from his class is how he told us all not to mess around with pimples and other spots on our skin because his mom had one she didn’t get checked and it was cancer. I don’t know if she died from it or not but that unlocked a new fear for me.
In college I mainly read textbooks. I didn’t seem to have time for reading fiction. I started working full time my senior year of college and there was no time for reading. I was taking classes twice a week and working like 60 hours a week, sometimes seven days. That’s about the time I killed my thyroid and my mental health but I was young and stupid.
I don’t really remember picking many fiction books back up again until a few years ago when I really got back into reading again. When I had my kids I was working full time at newspapers or writing blog posts or completely immersed in photography and homeschooling while taking care of kids. I didn’t take a lot of time for myself or to escape the stress of life by reading fiction. I wish I had because it would have helped all the stress back then.
Now I always have a hard copy of a book and my Kindle in my purse or with me wherever I go. I may not always read the book but I have it with me “just in case.” Instead of watching TV or surfing online all the time, I now carve out time for reading, even on the days I think I don’t feel like reading. I’ll find that once I start reading, I get caught up in the story and I start to relax and forget about all the things I was stressed about. I think I recently heard that reading even 15 minutes a day can help a person relax and reset their emotional state. Something like that anyhow. I don’t know – just go with it and pretend I’m smart. *wink*
Now that I am reading more, I have gotten caught up more than once with feeling like I have to read what other people are reading instead of what I want to read. It’s crazy that even at my age I can be influenced by what is popular or talked about a lot or what others say I should or shouldn’t read. Luckily, I have pushed aside a lot of that in the last year and now I really am reading what I want to read.
Sure, I see recommendations and sometimes I take them but I don’t just read a book because a lot of people claim it is good. Yes, I have read books that I’ve seen recommended a few times, but I don’t feel like I have to anymore. I do it because the book actually interests me.
Honestly, I find myself leaning away from books that are heavily recommended more than I lean toward them. I’ve been burned more than once by books that were supposed to be so amazing and then turned out to be complete duds or pushed agendas or morals that didn’t fit with mine.
Becoming an independent author opened my eyes to the publishing world and how reviews can be bought, essentially, or reviewers can be swayed to give a book a good review because they either don’t want to be excluded from other advanced reader groups or because they don’t be the one to step out of line and say, “I didn’t like this book everyone else liked.”
Before this year I was susceptible to getting wrapped up in all those “BookTok” (not on TikTok though. What a nightmare that app is!) “Bookstagram” drama sessions about – well, everything about reading. This year, though, I couldn’t care less what some Bookstagrammer says I should or shouldn’t read or what I shouldn’t or shouldn’t say on social media.
I read books, I share about the ones I like, I move on. Life is way too short to be so dramatic about reading. Good grief. Reading is for leisure and enjoyment. There was a time when only the rich could read books and then it became so everyone could read books as long as they had a good education and were taught to read.
Now we teach children to read at a young age so the world is opened wide to them. They can learn so much from books – fiction and non-fiction. This can be a bad thing, of course, if the subject matter is not age appropriate but in the vast majority of cases being able to read is a wonderful thing.
Because reading is a gift, I don’t believe we should try to finish books that don’t bring us joy. I do not continue reading a book I am not connecting with. A couple of years ago I made way too many commitments to read books and review them without knowing what I was really getting into. This year I have been reading books because I want to.
I read a couple of books for author friends and ran into trouble because the books were okay but they simply weren’t for me. Then what do I do? I don’t want to keep reading the book simply because the person is a friend if it is taking the joy out of reading for me. That’s why I’m now deciding that if I do read a book by an author friend, I’m not going to tell them I am reading it in case I don’t enjoy it.
Life is too short to read books qw aren’t enjoying. This is something I’ve heard said in reading circles again and again and it is something that we readers need to heed more.
Sometimes I do break my own “rules”, though. I’m reading one right now that isn’t one I’d probably finish if it was just me reading for fun, but I’m reading it to review for a magazine. Just because the book isn’t really for me, doesn’t mean it won’t be for someone else. The fact I am pushing myself through this book, though, has made me decide I probably won’t be doing reviews for magazines anymore unless I have already read the book first and enjoyed it.
My motto the rest of this year and next, therefore, is to read what I want and review it only if I want to.
I hope I can keep up with that because taking the pressure off something that should be done for enjoyment and relaxation is what I really need in my life right now.
How has what and how you read changed over the years?
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.
The leaves have almost all fallen off here in Pennsylvania which means it is time for leaf jumping for our youngest and maybe for our oldest too if the youngest can convince him to jump with her.
I don’t remember jumping in piles of leaves very often when I was younger but my kids have always loved it. Little Miss raked some leaves yesterday to get ready for more jumping today and as she raked, my parents’ cat, Molly, watched quietly from the porch. Looking at Molly I thought about how little I know about my parents’ current cats. My parents don’t seek out pets. Any cats my parents end up with were dropped off at the non-working barn on the property or wandered up from the neighbors who seem to refuse to spay or neuter.
Two cats, both now passed away, were mine/ours. When my parents first moved to my grandmother’s house when I was in college, our all-black at Zorro came with us. We had moved from my great-grandparent’s house across a little creek (over the creek and through the woods was how we got to grandma’s house) so I was worried Zorro would try to walk through the woods back to our old house, but, as far as I remember, he never did.
Between college and when I got married, I lived at that old house (built in the mid-1800s) and had a cat named Four that I rescued from my pet-hoarding mother-in-law’s house. The cat once belonged to my sister-in-law who adopted pets and got rid of them like she did old shoes. The cat was mostly gray but had a number 4 in orange in the gray for on the top of her head. When my sister-in-law had her, she peed on my ex-brother-in-law’s side of the bed because she hated him. I wish my sister-in-law had seen that as an omen since she didn’t see his drug use and abuse as one and remained with him for years until he cheated on her after baby number five.
My parents took Four in and when my aunt moved in she fell in love with Four.
Both Four and Zorro are gone now and I miss them terribly.
When I was in college someone dropped a cat off at my parents/grandmother’s house and I named the him before my parents and grandmother could even consider sending him to the shelter. I knew if I named him, it would be harder for them to get rid of him. I named him Leonardo after Leonardo DiCaprio because he was very popular at the time – Romeo and Juliet and Titanic had both come out that year.
Mom said there was no way she was going to go out on the back porch and yell “Leonardo!” but she did for the next several years, including one week when he went missing and we all thought he died somewhere. Instead, my dad went to the small granary where he stores lawn equipment and various other items and a skinny cat darted out and ran to the patio. Mom said, “Well, what cat is that? It’s not Leonardo. He’s too skinny.”
Poor fat Leonardo had been locked in the granary for almost a week and had lost a ton of weight.
I always wanted to pet Leonardo but he had no interest in letting me. In fact, the only one he would let pet him was my 88 year old grandmother who sat calmly in her chair on the deck to enjoy the sun. He would curl up next to her and she’d rub his head. She was not a animal person either. I never remember her ever having a pet when I grew up. Leonardo loved her though.
Anyhow, back to my parents’ current cats. They are Buzz, a gigantic, fluffy, orange beast who looks like a Main Coon, and Molly, a black and white polydactyl. I visit them once or twice a week but don’t know the cats well because they are usually hiding from Zooma The Wonder Dog when we visit which means I can’t sit and really learn about them. I’ve only managed to pet Molly once.
Buzz is almost feral, though, so I wouldn’t get to know him anyhow. My dad is the only one who can pet Buzz and the one Molly will come right up to. I think her tendency to run when we are there and her usual fear of us is why I was surprised she watched us in the yard yesterday. Zooma was even with us, which made it even more surprising. I think both Zooma’s smell and eyesight were broken because she never saw Molly or chased after her like she usually does.
By the way, none of the cats we’ve ever had have been able to be inside cats since my mom is actually very allergic to cats. They make her itch all over.
What I/we’ve been Reading
I am still reading The Case of the Innocent Husband by Deborah Sprinkle and Handcrafted Murder by Isabella Alan. I will finish The Case of the Innocent Husband this week.
I have put the Lilian Jackson Braun book on the backburner because I would really like to read The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood to see what it is like.
After that I would like to finish The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, which I recently started.
Little Miss is reading Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone at night (I’m trying to convince her to also read it during the day. Not going so well.). Some nights she and I are reading The Four Story Mistake by Elizabeth Enright and during the school day we are reading Johnny Tremain which we are both enjoying. Last week we painted pumpkins while listening to it on Audible, but normally I read the book to her as part of our school day.
The Husband is reading Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.
The Boy and I will be starting The Hound of the Baskerville by Arthur Conan Doyle this week after suffering through Beowulf, which I actually just read the summary of. I’m not going to lie about that.
What We watched/are Watching
This past week I rewatched parts of Rear Window so I could write about it for my blog post and then I watched a lot of Murder She Wrote.
The Husband and I watched an episode of the new Frasier show as well. I started watching Only Murders in the Building now that we have a Hulu subscription and then made The Husband watch the first episode with me. We are hooked and I can’t promise I won’t watch more of the show without him since he often has night meetings and I am impatient to find out what happens.
I hope to watch some more old movies this week in addition to Dial M for Murder that I am watching for the Comfy, Cozy Cinema.
What I’m Writing
Still working on Gladwynn Grant Shakes the Family Tree and having fun.
Now it’s your turn. What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
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“Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence .” – Stella from Rear Window
Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I are watching Comfy, Cozy movies this September and October and this week we watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window – or rewatched for me.
Rear Window is one of Hitchcock’s more well-known and praised movies because of the intricacy of the story, the attention to detail, and the masterful storytelling that makes the viewer as desperate as the main character to find out what happens.
Laid up with a broken leg, our main character, photojournalist Jeff Jefferies (Jimmy Stewart) is stuck in a two-room apartment looking out on all his neighbors on the other side of his apartment complex.
It’s like he has a bunch of TV channels in each window to watch. There’s always something on. He uses a pair of binoculars to watch what they’re doing part of the time and part of the time he can see them with the naked eye.
There is a newlywed couple who are – ahem – getting to know each other; a couple who appear to be arguing; a woman who lowers her dog down to do his business in the little yard below each day; an athletic dancer who likes to stretch in front of her window; a lonely woman who eats her dinners alone; and many other characters for Jeff to watch.
One night he wakes up in his wheelchair, where he has been sitting for the whole movie, because he hears a scream and breaking class. He can’t figure out where the sounds came from and drifts back to sleep but later, when he wakes up again, he notices the one neighbor – the jewelry salesman who argued with his wife — acting very mysterious.
The neighbor in question, Lars Thorwald, (Raymond Burr) starts going in and out of his apartment with a suitcase. It’s around 2 a.m. when this starts at it’s pouring out. Jeff can’t figure out what that’s all about and struggles to stay awake to watch the man but finally succumbs to exhaustion.
I should mention that Jeff has a girlfriend, Lisa, (Grace Kelly) who is absolutely perfect, but he is making all kinds of excuses not to marry her and one of those excuses is that she won’t enjoy traveling with a journalist.
He tells his nurse (Thelma Ritter) and Lisa about it on their separate visits, but both seem to think he just has a bad case of cabin fever.
As he continues to ponder it all and notices that the man’s wife is no longer in the apartment, Jeff pulls out the zoom lens of his camera and watches the man cutting something up, putting it in bags, and carrying it out. Now he’s starting to really get antsy about what he’s witnessed. It isn’t until Lisa is over one night and he’s telling her what he thinks that she begins to get a little interest as well. What piques both their interest is how the man is tying up a trunk and removing the mattress from the room.
Soon the nurse, Stella, is also pulled in, and all three of them begin to speculate what really happened.
Before long Jeff has Stella and Lisa acting as willing spies for him to find out what really happened.
If you want suspense then this the right movie for you. It is one of Hitchcock’s most suspenseful and nail biting movies.
The movie is based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich. I read an essay online (the author of which I couldn’t find, but it did say it wasn’t AI) that said this movie didn’t attempt to copy the story but instead recreated the plot based on the idea of it.
I did find a summary of the story and the ending is different in some ways to the movie, but with the final outcome being the same.
This writer, as other critics, point out that one aspect of this film that makes it so brilliant is that the viewer knows as much as Jeff does during the movie. We, the viewer, are watching it all unfold as he is and are seeing it from his same vantage point. We aren’t taken into apartments where he isn’t or into scenes that he isn’t looking at from his window. We are a participant in the film, so to speak.
Rear Window was filmed on a budget of $1 million but pulled in $36 million and became the top grossing film of 1954.
According to the site, All The Right Movies, the original story was based on a high-profile murder case in 1924 in Sussex England where a man named Patrick Mahon — committed a crime – well, I won’t tell you what happened in case you haven’t seen Rear Window.
Stewart had already been in one Hitchcock movie before this one (Rope) and would film two others afterward – Vertigo and The Man Who Knew Too Much.
For this film he was anxious to work with Hitchcock and said he wouldn’t take a salary but would take part of the film’s profits, which I think worked out very well for him. While the two got along, there were also times they spoke very little to each other, according to other actors who worked with them.
Wendell Corey, who played Detective Doyle in the movie, said, “Jimmy and Hitch would communicate in unspoken glances, and Jimmy would give him a steely look if Hitch said something he didn’t like. The only direction I ever saw Jimmy take was ‘the scene feels tired’ – there was steel under all that mushiness.”
Corey wasn’t a fan of Stewart in some ways. He was a nice guy, he said, but claimed he was also very arrogant on the set of Rear Window.
Others didn’t apparently didn’t hold this assessment and to me I think it was Corey who had the arrogance issue.
I thought it was interesting that Stewart’s wife asked to be on set during the filming of this movie because of Grace Kelly. According to trivia on All The Right Movies, “Grace Kelly may have been a little too friendly for some people, though – especially James Stewart’s wife. In 1954, Kelly had a reputation for having affairs with her leading men and, after she told a magazine she thought Stewart was one of the most attractive men she’d ever met, Stewart’s wife, Gloria, insisted on being on the set every day to keep an eye on things.”
Rear Window was Stewart’s favorite film of those he worked on Hitchcock with.
“The wonderful thing about Rear Window is that so much of it is visual,” he said in an interview. “You really have to keep your eyes open in the film, because it’s a complicated thing. This was my favorite film to make with Hitch.”
One more piece of trivia that had me snickering was that Hitchcock made the bad guy in this film (Again, I’ll keep it quiet on who the real bad guy is) look and act like David Selznick who produced Rebecca with Hitchcock. Hitchcock said Selznick interfered so much on that film he disowned it. In Rear Window he got his revenge by making the guilty party look like the producer he couldn’t stand.
I love the trivia behind the making of movies, as you know if you’ve read any of my previous posts, so I could go on and on about it. I won’t though. Instead, I’ll point you over to Erin’s blog for her views on it:
Keeping with the Hitchcock and Grace Kelly movies, we will be switching up our movie lineup next week and watching Dial M For Murder. To explain why we are choosing to watch this instead of Murder by Death, I’ll refer to Erin’s well-written explanation, which she also shares on her blog today: https://crackercrumblife.com/2024/10/17/comfy-cozy-cinema-rear-window/
“We were originally going to watch a movie I chose, Murder by Death. I chose it because I read that it was funny and because it has Maggie Smith in it but I didn’t do much research on it other than that.
However, after doing some reading it looks like it could be considered problematic so we are going to scrap that one and trade it for Dial M for Murder instead. It is probably not a bad movie, but a movie that didn’t meet the goal of what was trying to be achieved – it was actually trying to shine a light on racism and homophobia, and no one mentions the ableism but I think I read that is in there too, that was prevalent in Hollywood and the world, but instead just looks like it is in fact all of those things itself.
Anyway, we decided to watch Dial M for Murder for Comfy Cozy Cinema, since we are trying to be cozy and snug with this fun movie watching challenge. I think both of us plan on watching Murder by Death at some point though, whether it is together or just on our own.”
Here is the rest of the full list of movies we are watching or have watched.
I’m also including a link to my blog posts up from this year’s Comfy, Cozy Cinema, at the top of the page under the heading Movie Impressions.
Before I close out for today, I wanted to mention that we did pick a winner for our Comfy, Cozy Giveaway – Yvonne – and she has been notified! Thank you to all of you who entered the giveaway, followed our blogs, Etsy and Substack and I hope you will stick around and have some fun with us as we write about books, movies, and our lives.
If you end up writing about Rear Window or any of the other movies we are watching, please feel free to link up with our linky. You can add a link to the link if it is open, even if it is for a different movie.
