This & That: TV, Books, etc.

Here's some stuff:

• David Simon (the Wire) has a new series coming out for HBO. "Treme," which takes its title from an area in New Orleans, is a post-Katrina-themed drama that chronicles the rebuilding of the city through the eyes of local musicians. I don't have cable so if it is successful I won't see it until the DVD comes out. I watched the first three seasons of The Wire on DVD but I haven't seen the last two yet. I didn't want to watch Season 4 until Season 5 was out on DVD. I just haven't gotten around to watching them yet.
  

• Lindsey Davis has a new book coming out in May: Alexandria. It is #19 in her Marcus Didius Falco series and Falco will travel to ... Alexandria. For those of you who have never read this series, I can't recommend it enough. The recurring detective/investigator character, Marcus Didius Falco, is a gumshoe detective who lives in the ancient Roman Empire during the reign of the Emperor Vespasian (for whom the Vespasian Amphitheater is named by whom the Flavian amphitheater was built, although you may know it as the Colosseum.) Falco and his wife Helena Justina (the daughter of a Senator) are as delightful a couple as Nick and Nora Charles. Here is the synopsis:

  In first century A.D. Rome, during the reign of Vespasian, Marcus Didius Falco works as a private “informer,” often for the emperor, ferreting out hidden truths and bringing villains to ground. But even informers take vacations with their wives, so in A.D. 77, Falco and his wife, Helena Justina, with others in tow, travel to Alexandria, Egypt. But they aren’t there long before Falco finds himself in the midst of nefarious doings—when the Librarian of the great library is found dead, under suspicious circumstances. Falco quickly finds himself on the trail of dodgy doings, malfeasance, deadly professional rivalry, more bodies and the lowest of the low—book thieves! As the bodies pile up, it’s up to Falco to untangle this horrible mess and restore order to a disordered universe.

• I found an interesting blog today via BookNinja. It's called Seen Reading and it is "literary voyeurism". Toronto based blogger Julie Wilson came up with the idea: She spots someone reading a book and she jots down a description of the person and the name of the book. She guesstimates how far the person has gotten in the book (for instance, 50 pages in) and she goes to a bookstore, finds the book, opens it up to about where the person was and copies down a passage. She then posts that passage on her blog along with something she imagines. OK, that doesn't describe it very well so click the link and look. And here's a video interview (and btw I'm really impressed by how spotless the Toronto subway is):