Rome

March 30, 2021 Peace and Good, I hope your Holy Week is going well. Just this morning the city of Rome cancelled the red zone for a while (until Holy Saturday). When you went out in the street, you had to have a written form where you were going and what you were doing. The weather is getting better. Spring has arrived, but it is still quite cool. I will be leaving for the States this Thursday and spend time in Ellicott City until I am able to get my vaccine and do a couple of visits to the doctors and dentist. I am flying out Lufthansa. I have already gotten three reminders to have my covid test before I get to the airport. Germany has closed down entry to anyone who has not gotten it. We are meeting in our definitory meeting. We will finish sometime tomorrow afternoon. I have finished some reading: Ice by Ed McBain This is one of the Ed McBain detective novels about a police headquarters and the detectives who work there. There is a series of murders committed with the same gun, and there seem to be connections with a cocaine ring. The story is very well done. Red Rain by Dean Koontz This is one of the novellas in the Nameless series. Nameless is a man who works for an unknown operation that tries to determine the truth of murders which are true evil. In this case, he finds an arsonist and his accomplices and sets them against each other. The story is well done. The Mercy of Snakes by Dean Koontz This is the fifth of the Nameless series. He is an avenger for those whose connections to people in power are protected and who do evil things against others. This issue deals with a doctor who owns a five star elderly facility. He hires a detective to discover those who have a relative who wouldn’t mind if the resident were to die early. He and his nurse/lover then kill that person and he get a share of the inheritance. Typical of the series, Nameless is able to engineer a falling out between the co-conspirators. Photographing the Dead by Dean Koontz This is an episode in a series called the Nameless series of an operative who seeks revenge upon notoriously evil characters. In this case, it is a rich young man who likes to kill anonymously simply for the joy of the kill. Koontz is a very, very good author. The History of Spain by Joyce Salisbury This is a Teaching Company course on Spain from ancient times to the present. The professor is good, but I found that she felt that the ancients, the Muslims and Jewish people were fine, while her treatment of Christianity is not all that good. Nevertheless, it is a good account, including many of the cultural elements of Spanish culture. Classics of American Literature by Arnold Weinstein This is a very, very long series from the Teaching Company by a literary critic from the time of the early republic up to the present. Some of the insights of the professor were quite interesting, others were very, very odd, almost as if they were the personal pet peeves of the author. There were 84 episodes in the series. Have a good Triduum. Shalom fr. Jude