On the long flights to and from Germany, I read Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth. It is the latest book of the Hogarth Project, which publishes Shakespeare’s works as interpreted by best selling and acclaimed novelists of the today. Nesbo is a Norweigan thriller writer and so his Macbeth is set a dreary city in Scotland in probably the 1980s. It is still a story of how ambition for power can corrupt and lead to madness and death. Instead of Macbeth as a king of Inverness, he is going for the chief police commissioner and the office of mayor. There is a lot of murder, action, drugs and eventually insanity. I have not read any of Nesbo’s detective novels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=17&v=uh5zUIKnmI8
The book was definitely a page-turner, although some of the plot points were really far-fetched for me. I would recommend the book as it made me reflect on what the drive for power can do to people. I often gain some vocabulary words or ideas from books and they are below:
- Tithonos – This is a character from Greek mythology. He was the human lover of the goddess of the dawn, Eos. She asks Zeus to grant him immortality, which he does. However, she forgets to ask for eternal youth as well and poor Tithonos ends up a bag of bones as an old man in bed, but he cannot die.
- blond plaits – an older term for braids
- pillion rider – a British term for a seat on the back of a motorcycle
- quay – pronounced like “key”, a stone or metal platform projecting into a body of water and used for the loading and unloading of ships
- a ruddy, porcine face – pronounced “poor sign” and means resembling a pig
- bollard – post on a ship or quay where a boat can be secured; also posts to block motorized transport
- casino croupier – another word for dealer
The British rock band Queen has always been pretty high on the Kralovec family playlist. We were excited to see the new movie, Bohemian Rhapsody last night. We went to the IMAX theatre and were not disappointed. A very entertaining movie with the best part being, of course, the music! My takeaway was a simple one, Queen used the idea of audience participation to gain popularity. A simple, but brilliant idea. Audiences need something to do during a concert, more than marveling at the technical skill of the musicians and Queen were masters of getting people to participate in the music. The culmination of this idea and of the movie was Queen’s set during Live Aid back in 1985. I remember the day, a hot July summer afternoon before I went off to college. I rode my bicycle back from cutting lawns with my dad for our 30+ clients that summer and watched the concert on television. I highly recommend going to see the movie in a theatre with great sound!
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