Bonking

Who uses it: Endurance athletes
What it means: Sudden, dramatic fatigue caused by the depletion of stored carbohydrates (glycogen) in the body. Also known as "hitting the wall."
How you can use it: When you're spent.

I've gotten a lot done this week, but still have two things to tick off my to-do list before I can say the week's work is finished. This morning I'm driving down to Boston to confer with one of my clients, so it's possible that these last two items won't get done until tomorrow. I'm tempted to cancel this morning's trip on the grounds that I've bonked, but it wouldn't be fair to my client.

The latest Gaslight production, Jake's Women, opened last night in Hallowell, with myself on lights and sound. I'm not crazy about the script, which is Neil Simon's version of "8 1/2," but live theater is important to the soul. If you live in the area, come see the play this weekend or next; if you live somewhere else, catch a live performance somewhere near you. It's not as if there's anything good at the movies.

What I Read This Week

Jason Starr, Lights Out. This is the book, due out in September, that will vault Jason Starr into the top ranks of "literary" crime writers, with George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane and Richard Price. Ryan Rossetti and Jake Thomas were high school baseball stars, friends and rivals from the same Brooklyn neighborhood. Ten years later, Jake's a superstar and Ryan's painting houses for ten bucks an hour -- but Ryan's dating Jake's long-suffering fiancee. Jake comes back to Brooklyn for what's supposed to be a triumphant homecoming, but nothing goes the way he'd planned. Angry and compassionate, funny and bleak. Well done.

Kerry Greenwood, Murder in Montparnasse. Robert Rosenwald of Poisoned Pen Press raved about this series at BEA, and was nice enough to send me a copy of this, the first to be released in the U.S. Phryne Fisher is a wealthy young Englishwoman transplanted to Sydney, Australia after the Great War; she's a true independent, determined to live by her own standards and take care of her friends. In this outing, she searches for a missing racing heiress and hunts for a killer who may be tied to her wartime years in Paris. Phryne is just as charming as advertised, and this series would be great for fans of Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs books.

A. J. Hill, Under Pressure: The Final Voyage of Submarine S-Five. Take a moment to think about the fact that people went down in submarines in the days before voice radio communication. This is the true story of a 1920 submarine disaster that everyone, miraculously, survived, thanks to the leadership of the submarine's captain, Charles M. "Savvy" Cooke. Savvy Cooke appears to have been one of the models for the character of Pug Henry in Herman Wouk's Winds of War, and I'd like to read a longer biography of him.