Joe’s Book Club: Chapter 47, It’s Not Black Friday

Today’s Post by Joe Farace

“It’s deja vu all over again.”—Yogi Berra

I love being a writer. I love writing these posts and especially love writing books, even though it’s been a long time since my last one. Why is that? You can read my response to a reader who asked that very question here.

I had a deja vu experience on eBay the other day where i spend too much time looking for film cameras (that I can’t afford.) Every now and then I get a hankering to buy a Canon EOS film camera so I can use all the EF lenses I already own with a film camera, instead of my FD mount lenses that are designed for Canon’s A-series film-based SLRs. So here I was, looking at photographs of a Canon EOS Elan 7E and the seller has a image of all of the accessories he’s including in the package and lo-and-behold there’s a copy of the Magic Lantern Guide to the Canon EOS 7/7E that I co-wrote with Artur Landt. The photo of the book cover on Amazon is the German language edition, which doesn’t have my name and that Mr, Landt alone wrote. If you look on eBay for a used copy of the book, it’s the US edition with my name on the cover. If you have or want to acquire an Elan 7 or 7E, I think it’s a pretty useful book—it’s one of my best sellers–and most times you can pick up a clean used copy of the book for around ten bucks.

Books in Play

The book I am currently reading is Michael Connelly’s latest novel, Resurrection Walk. It will be book number 61 in my “Books Read in 2023″ list. The cover says that it’s a Lincoln Lawyer” book but so far—and I’m only about one-thirds through the book—Harry Bosch is the leading character and Renee Ballard makes a brief appearance too. So Connelly is dragging out all of his stock characters and, if you already are a fan of His novels, I think that’s a good thing. If you’re not. it really doesn’t matter because it’s all good either way.

I want to interject a word about the Lincoln Lawyer movie here. I haven’t seen the TV series because I don’t subscribe to Netflix and don’t anticipate doing so in the future. Since Michael Connelly is involved in it, much as he was for the Bosch series on Prime TV, I expect it’s worth watching. The movie, on the other hand, is OK unless you’re a fan of the books because you won’t like how the screenplay played fast and loose with the stories and characters, although Matthew McConaughey, as the Lincoln Lawyer, was great. Hollywood did the same thing with the Clint Eastwood film based on Connelly’s book  Blood Work, so much so that he wrote a sequel, Darkness More Than Night, where he directly criticizes the film. That sequel and the Blood Work book are both great reads. 

Much like Arthur Conan Doyle who tossed Sherlock Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls (it’s a real place, by the way) to his (apparent) death, Connelly painted himself into a literary corner when he gave Harry Bosch cancer, which they sort of beat to death on the TV series. Now, he’s brought Mickey Haller aka The Lincoln Lawyer into the plot line who has gotten Harry into a UCLA experimental drug treatment that may or may not cure him, depending on whether Connelly is as sick of the character as Doyle was of Holmes. That’s not a spoiler if you’re a Bosch fan, you already know some of this stuff. The book is about Haller’s wish to go down the Resurrection Walk and help free innocent people who are wrongly imprisoned. So far it’s peak Michael Connelly and that’s a good thing.

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