Still Life, by Louise Penny

Saturday February 12, 2022

Put on your Sony ‘Discman’ and grab your palm pilot, because it's Louise Penny's first book featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache (read "Galonche") from 2006!

‘Life is change. If you aren’t growing and evolving you’re standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead. Most of these people are very immature. They lead “still” lives, waiting.’ (Myrna, page 140)

I would be very pleased if I wrote a book as good as this. It's charming fun with a bit of morality play blended in.

‘We choose our thoughts. We choose our perceptions. We choose our attitudes. We may not think so. We may not believe it, but we do. I absolutely know we do. I’ve seen enough evidence, time after time, tragedy after tragedy. Triumph after triumph. It’s about choice.’ (Gamache, page 80)

Stoic? Positive psychology? Right wing?

There's little sympathy for men's-rights-style whining:

"We’re not respected just by virtue of being English. It’s not the same thing. Do you have any idea how much our lives have changed in the last twenty years? All the rights we’ve lost?" (Ben Hadley, page 50)

I enjoyed the art world dalliance, which reminded me somewhat of the end of Vonnegut's Bluebeard. And Nichol! Who's never been Nichol? So awful! So fun to hate, and/or pity.

I collected things of varying degrees of Canadianness that I looked up. (Do compound bows have built-in triggers in Montreal?)

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