I don't get it. Albert Camus claimed The Postman Always Rings Twice as an influence on The Stranger. This is another of those Modern Library Great Books that leaves me totally cold. I understand why, fr'instance, someone would think Deliverance is an important Usan novel. I do. I don't think it's as important or as great as To Kill a Mockingbird, but I can see its import.
James M. Cain's appeal eludes me. Because Dalton recommended him, I read Double Indemnity and two others of almost the exact same plot in one volume. I disappointed him when I found them boring. I think "Mildred Pierce" is a great movie and I'd still like to read it. But why Postman is all that and a bag of chips, I don't get.
In Postman, I could get past the misogyny to understand that the denouement is a masterwork of plotting. I couldn't get past the insurance stuff, because while he hadn't yet written Double Indemnity, why did he write it, since it's all here? Great plot twist or not, still I don't understand why Cain is anything more than a hack.
I've only read Maltese Falcon of Dashiel Hammett, and I expect calling him a hack just because he wrote detective stories is unfair. It might be genre prejudice, but I don't understand how any mystery or detective story can be Great Literature.
Huh. And I read Camus's The Fall in the same class as Maltese Falcon. I loved The Fall, much more than I had The Stranger four years before. I liked Falcon okay, but would I have without Humphrey Bogart?
It turned out that the two wall lamps we bought were too big to hang in a pair, and even just one over the length of the couch looked wrong, on either side or centered. So we hung one over an end, and it's wonderful. Its finish matches that of the overhead perfectly and even its finial complements the overhead's. A wall lamp with a 40-watt bulb instead of an overhead, however dimmed, is such an improvement, making the room cozier, not casting a yellow glare on the rug, being a reading lamp.
I know we need stuff on the walls. Another reason a pair of lamps wasn't as good a solution is that it meant the wall couldn't accommodate a painting or print.
I also don't like having three colors of accessory on the couch. I have no design sense, it's true. Yet another accessory with olive, blue, and plum in it? Or everything in one color? I lean toward the latter.