3 Things I Like This Week – July 10

1) The Cork O’Connor Series by William Kent Krueger

I listen to a lot of audio books, and one of my favorite things to do is find a fiction series, ideally with 10+ titles and mow through them. I especially like thrillers, mysteries, and police procedurals. A lot of longer fiction series are, in all honesty, poor literature. They are pulp fiction, dime store novel kind of stuff. Some are so bad I can’t make it through at all (here’s looking at you, David Baldacci). So when I find a series that is both a fun thriller/mystery series and is well written it’s great. William Kent Krueger has provided just such a series with the Cork O’Connor novels. He is better known for his wonderful stand-alone novels, each of which is moving and gripping and literarily exceptional. He is a story teller par excellence. This ongoing series of novels is set in Northern Minnesota (be still my heart) and centers on a sheriff-turned-private-detective named Corcoran O’Connor who is part Irish and part Anishinaabe. Using all the same rich storytelling skills, Krueger develops plots and builds characters—including the whole O’Connor family—while also scratching the reader’s itch for action and intrigue and suspense. He is wise to the setting and cultures of Northern Minnesota, and those play key roles in the stories too. If you are fan of the Longmire novels by Craig Johnson or the Mike Bowditch novels by Paul Doiron, these will be right up your reading alley. They are gripping, smart, and delightfully developed over 20+ books. I could hardly recommend a series more highly for summer reading.

2) Watermelon

Sometimes one just needs to say the obvious things: watermelon is delicious. It doesn’t need PR. It’s not as if I am introducing it to anyone as a new and novel discovery. No, we all have memories of digging into a slice of watermelon on a hot day as a child and having the juice run down our arms. Maybe we participated in seed spitting contests with friends or cousins. At some point someone nearly convinced us that swallowing the seeds would lead to growing watermelons in our bellies. And now that we are grown we’re less messy, less gullible, and do less expectorating–but watermelon is still a practically perfect summer fruit. And on top of all this, the proliferation of seedless watermelons might be a genetic mishap, but it is a consumer benefit and I’m not mad about it.

3) Disposable Fly Traps

We have a wonderful neighbor–one of the most gracious, kind, hospitable people you could ever meet. She has chickens, and she is generous with the fruits of their labors too, regularly sharing fresh eggs with us. But in this fallen world, this cursed orb on which we live, with chickens come flies. And these flies would rather live in my house than in my neighbor’s chicken coop, it seems. During the warmer months it can be a real nuisance, so last year I set out to find deterrants, and these traps are a quite effective one. Now, you won’t want to hang them in a place where you regularly hang out (a porch, a deck, etc.) because they attract flies and they smell vaguely like an outhouse or a three day old dead squirrel. Apparently that’s what flies go in for. But if you can hang them away from human olfactory senses, within days you will have collected hundreds and and hundreds of dead flies who otherwise would be swarming the castle of your kitchen. It is satisfyingly disgusting.