Gentlemen Prefer Blondes a novel

I am continuing in my urge this summer to read old books! I just finished a Miss Marple by Agatha Christie called The Moving Finger. The book takes its name from verse 51 of Edward FitzGerald's translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
And that I think refers to the Book of Daniel where Belshazzar because of past bad behavior see the writing on the wall:
a mysterious sentence mene mene tekel upharsin, which defied all attempts at interpretation. Still, their natural denotations of weights and measures were superficially meaningless: "two minas, a shekel and two parts.". In the verb form, they were: mene, to number; tekel, to weigh; upharsin, to divide - literally "numbered, weighed, divided".

When the Hebrew Daniel was called in, he read and interpreted the words. His free choice of interpretation and decoding revealed the menacing subtext: "Thou art weighed in the balance and art found wanting".

Anyway Miss Marple comes into this mystery and points the moving finger and the murderer is caught!

I am also reading Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos which has of course been made into two movies, one staring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes began as a series of short sketches published in Harper's Bazaar. Known as the "Lorelei" stories, they were satires on the state of sexual relations that only vaguely alluded to sexual intimacy; the magazine's circulation quadrupled overnight.
The heroine of the stories, Lorelei Lee, was a bold, ambitious flapper, who was much more concerned with collecting expensive baubles from her conquests than any marriage licenses, as well as being a shrewd woman of loose morals and high self-esteem.











Anita Loos







This is written in a journal form and is laugh out loud funny! I am really enjoying it and reading slowly to savor it and make it last, as it is just a little book. This was published the same year as The Great Gatsby but there is no tragedy in these stories!

Lovely Summer time Reading...
Talk to you later,
Lynda

Fate keeps on happening.
Lorelie Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes