that night of softly falling rain

Bloody Game's season 2 has been a slog of a watch so I ended up starting Death and Other Details, which was on my list for a while but I forgot about it, and I'm missing Only Murders in the Building so it felt like the right time to check it out? Plus I ended up reading Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party at the same time, so I suppose I'm just in the mood.

I was actually just thinking that I love Only Murders for the characters and the setting, because the whodunits aren't that clever (season 3 being an exception for me, YMMV), and that in general, writing whodunits that can be pieced together satisfyingly is way harder than it looks! So starting Death and Other Details I'm already wincing that it opens with narration to "pay attention to details" because... we do. Murder mystery fans, I mean. Some cinematic/TV takes do the parsing out of details well (The Last of Sheila stands out to me) but it's hard to get us off-guard in a way that we're in on it instead of pulling the rug out.

Anyway Death and Other Details starts like traditional murder mystery but pulls away in the long form when the first two murders are solved by a confession, and there's a greater mystery underneath it that's also linked to a murder that happened before the show starts. Mandy Patinkin is the show's World's Greatest Detective, except the show actually belongs to his assistant/protege/client Imogene -- which I did think is a nice touch. The show does do a bunch of stuff well, including having interesting side characters that gain depth in the long form and some of whom could genuinely be the main characters of their own stories (Teddy and Leila in particular), the locked setting of a cruise ship is nice, and I did like the show's actual throughline which is that memory is flawed and can be difficult to rely on. Though on the flipside, digging through memory is what is used to "solve" the mystery, instead of detectiving (though Agatha Christie makes it look so EASY to combine the both).

( The show didn't stick the landing, though. Spoilers for everything. )

Not the Jules Verne novel, but the pop science book by David Whitehouse that has the subtitle The Remarkable Voyage of Scientific Discovery into the Heart of Our World. It's about what's inside planet Earth: crust, mantel, core, and all the fun stuff that happened to or happens because of these elements, i.e. earthquakes and volcanoes, continental drift, magnetic shielding, and so on. I got this book at a warehouse sale yeaaaars ago.

Fun topic! But the writing is unfortunately awkward. I've read enough pop science books by this point, sometimes in topics that are so far reaching (that book about time and time keeping, for example) yet have a certain flow that works to bring the reader bobbing along gently in the eddies of a topic even as it sometimes swerves in unexpected directions. The book makes attempts to do that, and uses the Jules Verne book as a signpost of sorts as it brings the reader "into" the planet layer by layer, but turns to various asides without warning (sometimes from one paragraph to the next underneath it) that are not brought back into the main narrative in a cohesive way, and the asides are sometimes too long for the actual point they concern the main topic -- especially true for asides of various scientists Whitehouse wants to highlight in the historical discoveries of earthscience. Also, author does not explain a lot of terms he should be explaining! I already know what declination is, for example, but it was harder still to follow certain descriptions, especially when it came to the movement within the mantel and how using seismographs to map the inside works. The author knows his stuff, but needs a better editor.

Anyway, planet earth is weird and has a dynamo inside that is one of the key factors leading the life on this planet. Also its way bigger and deeper than people usually think it is, and in many aspects we know less about it than we do about outer space.