My latest reads and listens...

It's been longer than I'd like so, probably a good time to review some of the things I've read or heard lately. Let's see...

I partook a bit of Raymond Chandler for the first time ever -- heard Elliot Gould read The Big Sleep. While the entire style seems dated, it's quite clear Chandler was a master. I understand now why Chandler fans are so faithful. Clearly he launched an entire genre and style. I don't always like having the image of an actor in my mind while I hear a character voice -- as I think it can take over the imaginative nature of a storyline too much. But Gould made an excellent Marlowe!

Just finished reading Grann's Lost City of Z in which he recounts Fawcett's fateful search for El Dorado in the Amazon in 1925 -- and parallels the journey with one of his own. Usually I eat books like this alive -- and did with this one after a slow start. It called to mind a book I read recently about the Gardner museum theft (The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser) in the 1990s. Much like the Fawcett mystery, the unsolved theft of several very valuable paintings has taken on almost mythic status and fostered the creation of dozens of obsessive amateur detectives. The Gardner phenomenon has taken a modern-day version of the Fawcett trail with, I understand online networks of information sharers exchanging ideas and clues.

Might be interesting to read about how an incident seems to pass over into the kind of viral sleuthing behavior that each of these seemed to have spawned. Surely there are lots of unsolved mysteries and crimes that might capture the public's attention? Why have these done so and the the amazing extent that they have? Is there something about the perceived attainability of answers?

Either way, Z was a great read and it makes me want to go back and revisit Peter Fleming's Brazilian Adventure. Grann mentions Fleming's book and his attempt to track down Fawcett in the 20s, although I seem to recall Fleming -- that would brother of Ian -- using the rescue idea as little more than pretense for a great adventure.