The Fora: A Higher Education Community

Per the discussion in the suggestion forum, I'm going to start trying to split threads that get too long on a regular basis, to see if that makes them a little more accessible to new members and lurkers. The previous thread is here (https://thefora.org/index.php?topic=50.0), for your reference.

Otherwise, I'll simply quote the last post and let you all have at it:

Quote from: ergative on June 17, 2023, 04:42:01 AMI just finished an advance copy of Alix E Harrow's new book, Starling house, and I loved it. Mysterious old house in a blighted town contains secrets known only to its mysterious caretaker. Young woman who's mastered the art of cheating and stealing to look after her brother and wants only to keep him safe and get him out of a miserable hard life takes a job as a housekeeper at the house, and learns the secrets. Beautifully character work, wonderful sentient haunted house with opinions, very touching set of revelations. I've liked everything Harrow writes.

Thank you Parasaurolophus for tending the threads.
I read another Adrian Tchaivkovsky--The Tiger and the Wolf. It's part of his fantasy oeuvre. Although it was interesting, I found there were too many descriptions of fight scenes, and I don't know if I'll continue with the series--at least not at full price on kindle. I think my favorites so far are Shards of Earth, Cage of Souls, and Doors of Eden.
I have also been enjoying Swedish crime novelist Asa Larsson.

I am probably two-thirds through Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway's 'The Big Myth', an excellent, highly scholarly treatment of how corporate propagandists convinced Americans to buy into 'market fundamentalism' and 'hate government'.

Fear Strikes Out, by Jim Piersall, with Al Hirschberg.  Jim Piersall was a promising young baseball pro in the 1950s whose career was derailed for a time by a major psychotic episode.  Upon his recovery, he was persuaded to write this pioneering memoir as a way of encouraging others dealing with similar problems.  At the time it was still almost unprecedented for a public figure to be so open about mental illness.  The book soon became a major motion picture starring Anthony Perkins and Karl Malden.  By an odd coincidence, I found both a vintage paperback edition of the book and a DVD of the movie in two completely separate places earlier this year.

How do they compare?  The movie, taken as a movie, is not a bad picture.  As an adaptation of a true story it makes the usual hopeless Hollywood hash of things.  It's a travesty that bears little resemblance to the actual story.  The real Jim Piersall suffered from bipolar disorder, doubtless aggravated by a high-pressure environment.  He recovered through a combination of electroconvulsive therapy, early lithium treatments, a strongly-held Catholic faith, and a lot of help from family and others who cared about him.  The Tony Perkins version suffers from vaguely Freudian issues with a misguided, excessively harsh father.  There's little mention of his medical treatments, and none whatsoever about his faith.  There's little about his mother's own struggles with chronic depression.  You'd never gather from the movie that the rookie player's manic antics on the field endeared him to fans while annoying his colleagues.  The real Jim Piersall reportedly disowned the movie due to the way it made his dad into a bad guy.

The book is an admirably straightforward--with none of the affected style that characterizes so many more recent memoirs--account of a young man who cracks under heavy pressure when he finds his own mind rebelling against him.  And then recovers with good medical treatment, strong faith in God, and a great deal of love and understanding.  Reading it reminds me to be grateful for the understanding and support I've received when my own brain has gotten sick.  Piersall's experiences must have been so much harder to get through.

Piersall's troubles didn't end there.  Bipolar disorder seldom goes away forever.  It has a way of making both the sufferer and those close to that person miserable for a long time to come.  My ex-wife had a family history of it, and manifested symptoms of it--which would go a long way toward explaining her erratic and abusive behavior.  Piersall continued to have lesser "episodes" that got him into trouble with his bosses and colleagues, and ended up being married three times.  But he had a largely successful career in baseball and sportscasting, lived to a ripe old age, and is still remembered for courage in the face of adversity.

I haven't posted about my reads in a bit!

Finished from the library: Dark Rise by P.C. Pacat
YA fantasy novel set in 1821 London. It was ok.

Current read from the library: After Anne: A Novel of Lucy Maud Montgomery's Life by Logan Steiner
New novel about Lucy M. Montgomery becoming a best selling novelist and the joys and challenges she faced in her personal life. I read and own many of Montgomery's novels (series and individual books) and short story collections.

June:

Jeff VanderMeer - Annihilation: Ugh. Hated this. It's insufferable. If I wanted to watch Lost again, I'd just do that. But that's all this is. It's all pretense and pretension, with no substance undergirding it. What makes spooky and mysterious stuff work is having some kind of underlying substance or rationale; this, however, is transparently empty. It's written to be obscurantist and thus is meant to scream "DEEP! SO DEEP!", but there's just nothing to see. I won't read the other two, but I'll wager that basically nothing is elucidated. Because, like Lost, there's nothing to elucidate. It's just unplanned, surface-level nothing meant to fool you into thinking you're in the presence of greatness. Also, the characters are cardboard cutouts identified solely by their functional role/occupation. I wouldn't have minded--I might even have thought it an interesting choice--if the occupations in question had made any sense. But no, they're cartoonized versions of "psychologist", "scout", "biologist", etc. which bear no resemblance to what those occupations actually look like in real life. The psychologist hypnotizes people? Give me a break. Better yet, go do some research, VanderMeer.

Alastair Reynolds - Eversion: Coincidentally, this is very much like Children of Memory, and came out shortly before it. I think it's a more successful version, actually; I was much more interested in the strangely intersecting adventures of Doctor Coade.

Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska - Hunting for Dinosaurs: A pretty gripping account of the Polish-Mongolian expeditions of 1963-5 to the Gobi Desert. I like expedition reports like this one. Interestingly, there's a photo of a 1920s Soviet theropod mount (Tarbosaurus bataar) which isn't dragging its tail. The angle makes it hard to see, but it looks a good chunk of the way towards having the correct posture. The art for each chapter is stylized and kind of strange and haunting--loved it. I had thought, initially, that the book would cover the expeditions of 1971-3 and the discovery of the famous "fighting dinosaurs" fossil but, alas, it doesn't.

Eric Nicol - A Herd of Yaks: Apparently, he was a Canadian humorist. I've never heard of him. I picked it up from a free shelf, to give to a friend who likes this sort of thing. The essays were occasionally mildly amusing. But totally forgettable.

Phillip Manning - Grave Secrets of Dinosaurs: Soft Tissues, Hard Science: A National Geographic book, which helps to make sense of the punny/sensationalist title. It's an account of the Hadrosaur mummy discovered in the early aughts. It was fine and interesting, although it features some entirely uncritical (and wrong) references to Greek and Roman dinosaur finds (you know... the griffin was a protoceratops sort of thing. BS, I'm afraid) and commits itself to some unfortunate but understandable theses (e.g. the Stevens-Parrish view of sauropod neck posture). On the whole, it felt somewhat rushed, and Manning has done a so-so job of explaining things. Not a bad first popular science book, but there was room for improvement (including frequent typos). It just goes to show, really, how far ahead of the game Mark Witton is--and he's a big one for typos, too!

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Lords of Uncreation: A fitting conclusion to the trilogy. I enjoyed it very much--just as much as its predecessors, I think.

Quote from: Morden on June 21, 2023, 03:46:21 PMI read another Adrian Tchaivkovsky--The Tiger and the Wolf. It's part of his fantasy oeuvre. Although it was interesting, I found there were too many descriptions of fight scenes, and I don't know if I'll continue with the series--at least not at full price on kindle. I think my favorites so far are Shards of Earth, Cage of Souls, and Doors of Eden.
I have also been enjoying Swedish crime novelist Asa Larsson.

I'm just reading that one now! I'll report on it in a month, but so far I'm pleasantly surprised. Have you read his killer space maze novella, Walking to Aldebaran? That's a fun one.

On Doors of Eden, are you familiar with Terry Pratchett's and Stephen Baxter's The Long Earth series? It's quite a similar concept, so you might enjoy it. Although personally, I confess that I didn't, although I very much wanted to--I hate Stephen Baxter, he's insufferable, and I think he makes a real hash of it. The Pratchett parts are good, though.

Hi Para, I completed the Tiger and Wolf trilogy--still too much hand/claw to hand/claw combat, but worth it overall. For a while I was worried that the plague people would turn out to be regular Europeans, but they weren't. I thought the ending was very interesting.
I enjoyed the Expert System's Brother/Expert System's Champion novellas--they reminded me a lot of "golden age" stories, without the sexism. I'll keep an eye out for Walking to Aldebaran.

I haven't read any Terry Pratchett, well, except for his work with Gaiman in Good Omens (which I enjoyed, but I enjoy most of Gaiman's novels (though not his graphic novels). What Pratchett would you recommend to start with?

I also read Chakraborty's City of Brass, Wheeler's The Killing Fog and Bordugo's Shadow and Bone--none of which made me want to continue with the series. In each case, a young woman with mysterious powers struggles with her destiny (and love).

QuoteJeff VanderMeer - Annihilation: Ugh. Hated this. It's insufferable. If I wanted to watch Lost again, I'd just do that. But that's all this is. It's all pretense and pretension, with no substance undergirding it. What makes spooky and mysterious stuff work is having some kind of underlying substance or rationale; this, however, is transparently empty. It's written to be obscurantist and thus is meant to scream "DEEP! SO DEEP!", but there's just nothing to see. I won't read the other two, but I'll wager that basically nothing is elucidated. Because, like Lost, there's nothing to elucidate. It's just unplanned, surface-level nothing meant to fool you into thinking you're in the presence of greatness. Also, the characters are cardboard cutouts identified solely by their functional role/occupation. I wouldn't have minded--I might even have thought it an interesting choice--if the occupations in question had made any sense. But no, they're cartoonized versions of "psychologist", "scout", "biologist", etc. which bear no resemblance to what those occupations actually look like in real life. The psychologist hypnotizes people? Give me a break. Better yet, go do some research, VanderMeer.

I read the Southern Reach trilogy a couple years ago (it came in a three pack), and for the life of me, I cannot remember the conclusion, but I don't think I want to reread.

Quote from: Morden on July 04, 2023, 02:16:02 PMI haven't read any Terry Pratchett, well, except for his work with Gaiman in Good Omens (which I enjoyed, but I enjoy most of Gaiman's novels (though not his graphic novels). What Pratchett would you recommend to start with?
 

I think you can start pretty much anywhere in the Discworld series, without it mattering much. You just have to remember that it's satire, and keep an eye on your European history. My favourite is probably Mort (it's Gaiman's favourite too, as I recall), but at a guess, you might also enjoy starting with Monstrous Regiment.

Tau Zero, by Poul Anderson.  Finally had a chance to read this one, after many years of knowing it only by reputation.  It's about a spacecraft sent to colonize a (relatively) close star by traveling at a large fraction of the speed of light.  The craft gets stuck accelerating out of control.  As it gets closer and closer to the speed of light, relativistic time-dilation effects become so extreme that the crew find themselves in danger of reaching the literal end of the universe.

This is considered something of a "hard" science fiction classic, by an author noted for his efforts to stay on top of real-life science.  The manner in which Anderson sends his characters off on a fantastic journey across the whole cosmos, while respecting actual science--as it was known at the time, at least--is impressive.  One might suspect him of trying to top the 1968 movie 2001:  A Space Odyssey, were it not for the fact that he published a shorter version of the story in 1967.  The characterizations are perhaps not as impressive as the science. 

Kon-Tiki, by Thor Heyerdahl.  Thor Heyerdahl spent some time in Polynesia, got to know some of the natives there and their language and lore, and became convinced that their culture had a lot in common with the cultures of ancient America.  Heyerdahl developed a theory that the Polynesians' ancestors had largely migrated from the Americas using ocean-going rafts, not from Asia. 

In the late 1940s he and several fellow adventurers set out to test this theory by building a big raft of balsa logs using bygone Peruvian methods and trying to sail it to Polynesia.  They actually made it.  Heyerdahl admitted that this didn't prove his theory, but suggested that it enhanced its plausibility.  He went on to do some valuable research into the origins of the giant stone figures of Easter Island.

Mainstream experts on Polynesian history and culture by and large never accepted Heyerdahl's theory of Polynesian origins.  Recent ancestral DNA studies have pretty definitely busted it.  Although...one study has found what could be a trace of South American DNA in the genome of some islanders.  Assuming that the results are right--and that's evidently hard to determine, given the way the science keeps developing--then perhaps Heyerdahl's theory has a small kernel of truth to it.

Crackpot theory though it may have been, Kon-Tiki is a great true-life adventure story.  Heyerdahl is an engaging writer, although, like so many of his generation, he portrays the various peoples he visits in a way that now comes across as patronizing.  The book is also a reminder of a lost era when one could sail the ocean and encounter both abundant fish and no trace of human activity wherever one went.  More recent sailors on such voyages have found fewer fish, and plastic trash floating everywhere.

A mass-market paperback copy of Heyerdahl's adventure bestseller was among the assortment of donated paperbacks in my mother's classroom when she taught high school.  I was only a kid then--she didn't move to teaching college until I had gone to college myself--and my brother and I often found ourselves having to go to the high school and hang around her classroom while she took care of her endless work chores after school let out.  I ended up reading quite an assortment of grown-up science fiction and nonfiction there.  Recently I got hold of a copy of Kon-Tiki (salvaged from our local high school's discards, oddly enough) and read through the whole thing.  I recognized quite a few passages and photographs from forty-plus years ago.  Heyerdahl is still a great read.

On the Map:  A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks, by Simon Garfield.  Even readers who like history might sometimes think that the history of cartography sounds a bit...dry.  Not the way Simon Garfield addresses it!  The book gives us an engaging tour through ancient and medieval ideas of the world, the rise of modern geography and cartography, the origins of travel and tourist maps, treasure maps, the cut-throat world of map dealing (Who knew?), and the imagined geographies of literature and video games.  It's fascinating stuff.  Makes me want to see what else the author has written.


The Golden Cat, by Max Brand.  I've seen Max Brand's name on westerns since I was a kid.  His name was right up there with Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour.  Not being a western reader, I had never read anything by Max Brand.  I decided to give this item from a batch of library discards a try for curiosity's sake.

It's something of a genre mash-up--a locked room thriller with a western setting.  On the case is a six-gun-toting sheriff who also knows a thing or two about evidence and detective work.  I suspect it may have been an unsold mystery story that the author thriftily retooled into a saleable western.  Not your regular western, and not the best mystery story I've ever seen.  It's at least an interesting literary curio.

A mention of a character listening to a Victrola record player dates the story from sometime after 1905.  Probably more like 1910.  That's about as late as a story with an "Old West" setting can possibly be credibly set.

"Max Brand" was an interesting character in his own right.  He was a pen name of one Frederick Schiller Faust.  Faust was a well-educated writer who reportedly dreamed of publishing epic poetry.  There was unfortunately no market for that when he started publishing in the 1910s.  He instead turned his skills to making himself one of the most popular and prolific writers of the pulp era.  He published under a pen name because he wanted to save his real name for his occasional volumes of little-read poetry.  "Max Brand" wrote just about everything in addition to westerns.  After westerns, he's best remembered as the creator of Dr. Kildare for the movies.

The westerns, which he is said to have had little regard for, brought in enough money to live for a time in a villa in Tuscany.  No doubt he found inspiration for his poetry in that setting.  Living the dream in sunny Tuscany came to an end when the U.S. and Italy broke off diplomatic relations in World War II.  Faust returned to Italy a couple of years later as a war correspondent.  He was killed in action.  "Max Brand" lives on even now in reprints as a profitable brand (so to speak) in publishing.

Blue Skies by TC Boyle. Very much a climate apocalypse novel, with a bit of social media critique thrown in. Two of the main characters are "influencers" and are both unlikeable. Generally the plot is both depressing and no one ends up looking good, even the climate activists. Still, Boyle is good at keeping the plot going, and he has a nice way of switching backwards and forwards in time, and ending scenes at unusual points. As someone who feels pessimistic about the future of humans, reading this accentuated my feelings while I was reading it.

Just finished Nova by Samuel Delaney. I read a profile of him in The New Yorker and my local bookstore had his books so thought I'd give it a try.

I think I need to reread it for the details and symbols, as I was more focused this time on keeping up with the plot and characters.

 

From the library: A Kidnapped West: the Tragedy of Central Europe by Milan Kundera, translated by Linda Asher and Edmund White (NF)

Slim tome--it's Kundera's early non-fiction work.

Before I forget, here was July:

Martin J.S. Rudwick - Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World: An in-depth survey of the first thirty-ish years of palaeoart by a historian and philosopher of science. It's pretty comprehensive, impressive, and informative, even if this isn't really the most interesting period in palaeoart (in many respects, however, it's one of the weirder ones).

Lilian Brown - I Married a Dinosaur: Picked this up because I was looking for some kind of narrative report on Barnum Brown's digs. It's written by his (second) wife, about their work in India (mostly). It's a fun read, although it's much more a travelogue than an after-action-report, so I was left wanting rather more bones than I got. Also worth noting that Brown presents a completely fictional account of her meeting and marrying Brown (she'd been pursuing him for years, but here writes that they met on the boat to India when she left convent school).

Robert T. Bakker - Raptor Red: The story of a year in a Utahraptor's life, told from her perspective. It's reminiscent of Riley Black's Last Days of the Dinosaurs. Bakker is a competent fiction writer, but Black is better, I think (and Bakker better on the non-fiction side). The story is compelling and does a good job of mobilizing one's emotions, and investing the reader in the story, but there are so many anachronisms in the descriptions that it's a little distracting. (Avoiding those is a serious challenge, of course, and I don't mind that Bakker couldn't always. But he absolutely should have nixed the giraffe comparison he makes in the first few pages!)

Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Tiger and the Wolf: Prehistoric shapeshifters. This is the story of a young girl who doesn't quite fit in her home tribe, and her attempts to just be left alone. I put off reading this series because it didn't sound too promising (shapeshifters is just asking for boring D&D campaigns or cookie-cutter fantasy/gothic), but I was wrong. It's great, and highly reminiscent of Riddley Walker. It's an interesting world, and one which I suspect is not quite as it seems.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Bear and the Serpent: A fun sequel to The Tiger and the Wolf, this one has more than a whiff of Alfred the Great. A lot more fighting, as Morden said above, though somewhat curiously it's pretty much all single combat. I don't mind that, but it's a sharp contrast from all the running in the first.

Hi everyone,
Para, I recommend the third installment of the Echoes of the Fall series: The Hyena and the Hawk. Tchaikovsky really does seem to finish off his series nicely.
I've been reading Cherryh's Foreigner series--here is someone who doesn't finish off her series. I think #22 is coming out this fall (7 trilogies and counting). I have enjoyed the books, but I find the earlier ones more satisfying in part because of the pace. How many books do you need to describe a fictional year?
I also read David Brin's The Postman, a dystopian novel written in the 1990s. Apparently it was made into a movie with Kevin Costner. The premise is interesting--a drifter finds a postman's bag and winds up taking on the role in post-Apocalyptic America, but the writing seemed a little flat to me.
And I just started a Birder Murder mystery by Steve Burrows. It's too early to tell yet if it's a series I'll want to continue with.

Quote from: Morden on August 07, 2023, 03:06:53 PMHi everyone,
Para, I recommend the third installment of the Echoes of the Fall series: The Hyena and the Hawk. Tchaikovsky really does seem to finish off his series nicely.
I've been reading Cherryh's Foreigner series--here is someone who doesn't finish off her series. I think #22 is coming out this fall (7 trilogies and counting). I have enjoyed the books, but I find the earlier ones more satisfying in part because of the pace. How many books do you need to describe a fictional year?
I also read David Brin's The Postman, a dystopian novel written in the 1990s. Apparently it was made into a movie with Kevin Costner. The premise is interesting--a drifter finds a postman's bag and winds up taking on the role in post-Apocalyptic America, but the writing seemed a little flat to me.
And I just started a Birder Murder mystery by Steve Burrows. It's too early to tell yet if it's a series I'll want to continue with.

Have you read any of Brin's other books? I also thought The Postman had a neat premise but felt flat.  But I've read two others of his (unfortunately, I think I reviewed them in more detail on the old site) that I thought were great: The Practice Effect, Kiln People.  The first one is a really fun (and funny) adventure into a land where some laws of physics are different, leading to various consequences.  The latter is a bit more serious but centers on the ability to make clay copies of oneself to perform different types of tasks.  One type is a good learner, one might be more suited to errands.  Their memories can be incorporated back to the human if not too much time has passed so that there isn't much divergence in their experiences.  It brings up a lot of ideas including about the "lives" these copies lead and was IMO surprisingly moving.  Anyway, these are very brief recaps, but I think these books also have really interesting premises but deliver much better.  I'm sure opinions are mixed, of course, but I figured I'd mention them in case you hadn't checked them out (can't remember if we've already discussed them).  They are some of my favorite books, I think.

Quote from: Morden on August 07, 2023, 03:06:53 PMHi everyone,
Para, I recommend the third installment of the Echoes of the Fall series: The Hyena and the Hawk. Tchaikovsky really does seem to finish off his series nicely.

I'm 3/4 through! :)

World Fire:  The Culture of Fire on Earth, by Stephen J. Pyne.  Pyne's thesis is the generally well-documented idea that, for most of prehistory and history, most cultures around the world have used deliberately-set fires to manage their landscapes.  Hunter-gatherers burn to improve their hunting and gathering.  Pastoralists burn to stimulate the growth of pasture and keep it clear of unwanted woody plants.  Early agriculturists practice slash-and-burn.  Cultures in Europe and East Asia were historically the exception in practicing intensive agriculture and forestry, and trying to eliminate fire for the most part.  European and European-descended colonists exported this model to large regions where it was previously not practiced.  In North America we also developed a concept of fire-free "wilderness" in which humans weren't allowed to live.

But fire is a part of nature, and can't be banished from the landscape altogether.  Modern fire suppression has led to fewer fires, but bigger ones when the accumulated fuel loads do finally catch fire.  The results have often not been good.  It's an interesting story, vividly told.  Maybe sometimes too vividly--Pyne gets carried away with clever rhetorical allusions and such.  The book could have been shorter without losing much.

It's also a timely story, for reasons that are all too obvious in these years of ever-more-catastrophic fires around the world.  Global climate change, which Pyne, writing in 1995, didn't spend too much time on, has resulted in fires that he probably didn't even dream about at that time.  Preventive fire management to head off catastrophic blazes is now theoretically best practice in most places now.  In practice nobody wants to see it happen in their back yards, it's potentially dangerous and hard to get right, and the awful fires we're seeing now leave little attention to spare for that sort of prevention.  Environmentalists would like to create forests in which nothing ever burns again, the better to sequester more carbon.  The world just doesn't work that way.  And it's getting to where we can't control fire anymore, no matter how hard we try.

From the library: Canary Girls by Jennifer Chiaverini
During WWI, a group of young women go to work in an arsenal outside London.

Quote from: ab_grp on August 07, 2023, 04:09:02 PMHave you read any of Brin's other books? I also thought The Postman had a neat premise but felt flat.  But I've read two others of his (unfortunately, I think I reviewed them in more detail on the old site) that I thought were great: The Practice Effect, Kiln People.

Thank you for the recommendation. I will look for those books.
I just read two books by Arkady Martine, a historian turned sci-fi novelist. A Memory Called Empire is sort of a murder mystery/political thriller set in the Teixcalaan galactic empire, and A Desolation Called Peace is a first contact novel. Both were very enjoyable.
I also read Steve Burrow's A Siege of Bitterns. A reluctant Canadian detective (he'd rather be birding) moves to the salt marshes of Norfolk. It was also very good, so I have picked up another birder murder mystery

London:  A Biography, by Peter Ackroyd.  This is a humongous study of the city from earliest times through the end of the 20th century.  It's largely thematic, with dozens of chapters on the city's streets, sights, smells, assorted aspects of its culture, the city's now-buried rivers, and much, much more.  It amounts to a huge collection of antiquarian data of the sort that goes at least back to John Stow's famous Elizabethan survey of London. 

Ackroyd has obviously done a formidable amount of research.  I suspect that a lot of the facts he relates may be tall tales that nobody now can prove or disprove for certain.  To the extent that there is a thesis here, it seems to be that London is a fundamentally pagan, unruly place that resists efforts to tame it and reduce it to a plan.  Collections of historical stuff like this are always fascinating, although the sheer size can make it into something of a slog to get through.  I read it in pieces over a period of months.

The Hollywood Posse:  The Story of a Gallant Band of Horsemen Who Made Movie History, by Diana Serra Cary.  The author was a child film star in the silent days under the name of "Baby Peggy."  She lived to be over a hundred, and was thus the very last surviving silent film star.  I saw a most interesting documentary on her on TCM some years back.

In later life she wrote a number of insider books on Hollywood's history.  This one is about the real-life cowboys who became Hollywood stuntmen and mounted extras in the silent days and throughout Hollywood's studio "Golden Age."  Her father was one of them.  Again, I can't help wondering whether there are some tall tales here, but there's no denying that those movie cowboys included some genuinely colorful and daredevil characters.  If Cary is to be believed, they apparently talked in real life much as cowboys in old westerns talked.

The Hollywood cowboy old guard was passing away by the 1950s.  Some of them spent their later working years in appropriate roles at Disneyland.  Cary's father apparently liked to watch old Hopalong Cassidy westerns on TV because he recognized all the guys who did the stunts.  For all Hollywood's reputation for wealth and glamor, it's evident that most of the uncredited talent--stunt riders, extras, etc.--had a hardscrabble life during the 1920s and 1930s. 

And of course those movie stunts were dangerous.  Nowadays pretty much all the derring-do onscreen is CGI animation hacked out by hordes of people sitting at computers (Although movie sets can still occasionally be hazardous--just as Alec Baldwin).  It's both impressive and sobering to recall, whenever one watches a really old movie, that real human beings were really out there risking their lives.

The Beauty Trials by Dhonielle Clayton (YA)
Latest and 3rd installment in the "Belles" series. The novel has a new lead character although characters from the previous 2 books make an appearance.

Getting Out of Saigon:  How a 27-Year-Old American Banker Saved 113 Vietnamese Civilians, by Ralph White.  In the spring of 1975 South Vietnam was collapsing.  Saigon was about to fall.  Chase Manhattan Bank sent the author to Saigon to close out its branch there before the North Vietnamese Army rolled in.  He was also tasked with helping to evacuate senior Vietnamese staff members who would likely face punishment as bourgeois enemies of the people if they didn't flee. 

Between staffers and their immediate family members, White found himself responsible for well over a hundred people.  The U.S. Ambassador, rather like the administration of many a failing college, was refusing to face reality and kept hoping the tide would turn rather than facilitate the evacuation.  Fortunately some of the Ambassador's staff were running a major evacuation effort behind his back.  White learned about this effort, and was able to use it to get the people he was responsible for out in what turned out to be just the nick of time.

As White tells it, it's quite a wild-and-wooly story.  He portrays himself running around Saigon in the last days carrying a bunch of cash and a concealed weapon, gathering information and doing deals like some kind of movie spy.  The frequent verbatim reconstructions of almost half-century-old conversations and some of the incidents give the impression that the story may well have grown in the telling.  Then again...the broad outline of it is very much a matter of record, and White does seem to have gone to some lengths to track down surviving participants to double-check some things.  Whatever inaccuracies there may be due to the passage of time and the vagaries of memory, this is clearly an extraordinary true-life story.

From the library: The Virginian by Owen Wister
First published in 1902, the novel remains a classic. It's been adapted as a movie several times and provided inspiration for the long running TV series from 1962-71.
I'm reading the Penguin Classics edition.

Quote from: apl68 on August 25, 2023, 08:14:06 AMGetting Out of Saigon:  How a 27-Year-Old American Banker Saved 113 Vietnamese Civilians, by Ralph White. 

[. . .]

You might like The Last Battle: The Mayaguez Incident and the End of the Vietnam War, by Ralph Wetterhahn.

I recently read And Finally, by Henry Marsh, a British retired neurosurgeon diagnosed with prostate cancer. I thought some chapters more profound than others, but it's a short book and was good enough for me to request one of his earlier books from the public library.

I listened to Meryl Streep performing the new Ann Patchett novel, Tom Lake. Also listened to Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. Both novels have adult women looking back on their lives and families. Patchett is a better writer, and being about theatre, it is quite high culture. Maybe it helps to know "Our Town" which plays a central role in the story (and I have not seen it). The book was enjoyable but rather safe, even conservative. Garmus was more ambitious but also more didactic and clumsy. It is very focused on 1960s feminism and the repressive culture. It's already been made into a series for Apple TV, and it reads like it was designed to be made into a TV show. But it was also provocative and memorable.

I've been reading Ann Leckie (sci fi Ancillary series & Provenance) recently. And I've been thinking about the power of pronouns. One of the dominant cultures, the Radch, has a language that doesn't signal gender; Leckie uses female pronouns/referents for all. And I imagine all of them as female--even when they are also described elsewhere as brother or grandfather.

In continuing my "Sword and Sorcery" theme, I picked up the audio book of Conan The Cimmerian Barbarian: The Complete Weird Tales Omnibus.  It is a complete collection of the original works by Robert Howard, arranged chronologically with a biographical and critical introduction to each tale.  There isn't a coherent overarching story (these were originally published as stand-alone tales in magazines in the 30's and 40's), and about halfway through, I ran out of steam.  Now, in between other books, I listen to a Conan tale for fun.  And they are fun, exciting adventures, but not (at least yet) anything approaching great literature.

Altered Carbon and Broken Angels by Richard K Morgan¹, which are the first two books in the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy.  The first is a Blade Runner-esque dystopian future story about humans who, when killed, or damaged beyond use, have their consciousness 'resleeved' into a different body.  The fist body is a murder-mystery, and the second is a futuristic alien artifact Indiana Jones type adventure.  Both deal with issues of personality, biological and psychological determinism (if you change sleeves, which parts of you remain?), and the dangers of technology.  I just learned that the first book is now a Netflix series.

I just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy (now, a Major Motion Picture! Well, in 2009).  A very stark, bleak, story of a father and son trekking across a post-apocalyptic world.  Very beautifully written, but so thin on exposition that the end felt like "Wow! That was great!  Wait, but what happened??"  This is my first book by McCarthy.  I am interested in more by him.

¹ Also write the "A Land Fit for Heroes" series I previously read and greatly enjoyed (The Steel Remains, The Cold Commands  and The Dark Defiles)

Quote from: FishProf on August 30, 2023, 11:33:17 AMIn continuing my "Sword and Sorcery" theme, I picked up the audio book of Conan The Cimmerian Barbarian: The Complete Weird Tales Omnibus. 
[. . .]

You might like the works of Harold Lamb, who wrote both fiction and non-fiction. Here is an overview of some of his pulp magazine tales: Khlit the Cossack (https://www.howardandrewjones.com/sword-and-sorcery/heroes-of-the-steppes-the-historicals-of-harold-lamb). His histories of the Crusades and people like Genghis Khan are quite good.

Quote from: spork on August 30, 2023, 01:34:47 PM

Quote from: FishProf on August 30, 2023, 11:33:17 AMIn continuing my "Sword and Sorcery" theme, I picked up the audio book of Conan The Cimmerian Barbarian: The Complete Weird Tales Omnibus. 
[. . .]

You might like the works of Harold Lamb, who wrote both fiction and non-fiction. Here is an overview of some of his pulp magazine tales: Khlit the Cossack (https://www.howardandrewjones.com/sword-and-sorcery/heroes-of-the-steppes-the-historicals-of-harold-lamb). His histories of the Crusades and people like Genghis Khan are quite good.

Thanks for the tip!

From the library: The Mystery of Dunvegan Castle by T.L. (Tendai) Huchu
New and #3 in the "Edinburgh Nights" series

Structures:  Or Why Things Don't Fall Down, by J.E. Gordon.  This is a highly accessible introduction to the principles behind structural engineering.  The author explains the forces that act on all sorts of structures and materials, whether man-made or in nature, including living structures like trees and blood vessels.  It's a very interesting and readable book, with lots of understandable diagrams and other illustrations. 

Structures has dated somewhat since it was first published in the 1970s, but it's still informative.  Don't hold the fact that Elon Musk is reportedly a fan of it against it. 


Salvage, by Roger Vercel.  This is the story of a French captain of a seagoing salvage tugboat.  The first two-thirds of the novel deal with his crew's efforts to salvage a Greek freighter in distress whose captain and crew prove worse than uncooperative.  The final third abruptly shifts to more of a focus on the captain's domestic issues.  It's a fast-moving and intermittently gripping tale.  The English translation of the French original, entitled Remorques, gives the descriptions and dialog a kind of 1930s British hard-boiled quality.  The author evidently did not think very highly at all of Greeks.

I found this 1936 edition last year for three bucks at a used book place in Fort Smith.  It's one of those hole-in-the-wall bookstores where you can find an amazing variety of random, borderline-junk books.  You can make some interesting discoveries in places like that.  I see from searching online that Vercel's novel was made into a movie in France starring Jean Gabin.  It had the misfortune to be completed during the Occupation.  After the war it was apparently released in the U.S. under the title Stormy Waters.  I'm now curious about that movie.

Just finished "Strange Sally Diamond" by Liz Nugent. It has strong echoes of "Room" by Emma Donoghue, but goes off in a different direction.

The Nugent novel is good, with strong psychological themes. I liked it, but also found it a bit annoying. It had a bit too much of a horror feel to it. The evil actions were certainly portrayed with a banality that was striking.

Liu Cixin: The Three-Body Problem; The Dark Forest; Death's End.
I haven't read any Chinese Sci-fi before, so I don't know if this is a different aesthetic. But I found these books odd. They were enjoyable enough that I kept going, but the pace was very different--excruciatingly slow in parts and yet at an enormous scale. There was also a lot of exposition, and I didn't really care about any of the characters. So I'm trying to figure out why I kept going for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I was curious about his (really bleak) vision of the universe. I heard that Netflix is going to adapt the Three-Body Problem: I cannot imagine how that would work.

Just finished Libra by Don DeLillo.  Never had much interest in serious fiction.  Then read White Noise and  and DeLillo changed my mind.  Gradually working my way through his oeuvre.  Read Silence this spring. Now on Zero K with Underworld on deck. Looking forward to all of it.

I finished the Takashi Kovacs Trilogy (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies) (audiobooks), which I mentioned earlier in the thread (on 30 August 2023, 14:33:17 if you care).

The third book has a different narrator which was really jarring for the first half of the book.  The third book was yet another take on the world, with a different style, and an entirely new cast of characters (except the Protagonist). 

I really enjoyed this series, but there were loose ends that I wanted the author to tie up.  I felt the same way about his "A Land Fit for Heroes" series, so maybe that's just him. 

August:


Lilian Brown - Bring 'Em Back Petrified: Another adventure travelogue from Barnum Brown's wife. This one features a lot more fossil hunting, making it more satisfying (although I'll still just end up buying some account drawn from his field notes at some point). She's a skilled writer, so it's fun. This time they're in Guatemala, and mostly stay in place. Plenty of casual racism in there, and some behaviour that is hard to believe they thought was okay, like a half-hearted attempt to take a child for their own. She keeps up the pretence that she and Barnum met at sea on the way to India.

Suzanne Collins - Catching Fire: A solid sequel. The Games are the best part, and I wasn't so keen on the rebellion arc that took over the last act. That's basically what I was expecting, however. It doesn't really lend itself to a sequel/trilogy, otherwise. Still, it was good fun.

Suzanne Collins - Mockingjay: I'm simultaneously of two minds about this one. On the one hand, it features no Games at all, just the rebellion stuff, so it's automatically less interesting. And the more I learn about Panem, the less the logistics make sense--to say nothing of the war itself and the tactics on the ground. None of that makes any sense. For one thing, why the fuck would they defend the city with 'pods'? For another, where the hell are all the force fields? And the character development doesn't really make all that much sense (e.g. Finnick). But whatever, that's no big deal, really. On the other hand, none of that is what this book is about; what it's about is PTSD. And on that front, Collins does something very clever and very brave: she keeps presenting narrative threads that look like they're building towards something, usually of the bog-standard action hero type. And then they fizzle out, and you're left with people being used and discarded, and left to wrestle with their trauma so that they can build up to the next action hero thread, which fizzles out and... etc. I imagine this didn't play all that well with the fans. Or maybe it went over everyone's heads. But it's really quite clever, and well executed.

Harry Turtledove - Herbig-Haro: Just a short story, set several hundred years after the one about the aliens who have FTL but invade Earth with muskets. I liked it very much. On the strength of these stories, I'd like to read some longer-form scifi from him, though I still am not very interested in his alternate history novels.

Becky Chambers - The Galaxy, and the Ground Within: This is the last of her Wayfarers books. It's good, as they all are; Chambers writes well, and it's an enjoyable read. But man, this is all-in on the "hopepunk" schtick, and as a result it's really just infuriatingly mundane. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, and enjoyed reading it, but... I dunno. I guess nothing really measures up to A Closed and Common Orbit.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Hyena and the Hawk: A fitting conclusion to the trilogy. I had more thoughts at the time, but I took so long to write this up that I've mostly forgotten now, unless someone says something that jogs something loose. As before, the organized group-fighting/warfare doesn't make great sense, but that's not such a big deal. This series does a lot of neat things, and does them in an unusual way. It was cool.

Quote from: Morden on September 12, 2023, 08:10:33 AMLiu Cixin: The Three-Body Problem; The Dark Forest; Death's End.
I haven't read any Chinese Sci-fi before, so I don't know if this is a different aesthetic. But I found these books odd. They were enjoyable enough that I kept going, but the pace was very different--excruciatingly slow in parts and yet at an enormous scale. There was also a lot of exposition, and I didn't really care about any of the characters. So I'm trying to figure out why I kept going for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I was curious about his (really bleak) vision of the universe. I heard that Netflix is going to adapt the Three-Body Problem: I cannot imagine how that would work.

Yeah, I read The Three-Body Problem a few years ago. My report is lost on the old forum somewhere, but it was basically "meh".

The State Must Provide:  Why American Colleges Have Always Been Unequal--And How to Set Them Right, by Adam Harris.  Mainly this is a history of how American higher education became racially segregated, how it was legally integrated, and how a high proportion of black students nonetheless still have little choice but to go to HCBUs--which are often still scandalously underfunded.  Harris tells an ugly story in a straightforward manner, without recourse to a lot of rhetorical excess and intersectional jargon.  He also shows an understanding of the complexity of many of the historical actors' motivations.  If more Black Studies work would just go ahead and tell the story like this, the necessary message would get out without making the whole idea of Black Studies suspect and vulnerable to attack by opportunistic politicians in so many quarters.

And it is a heartbreaking story about one of many ways in which black Americans were reduced to second class (at best) citizens for no better reason than caste.  One of the saddest stories is about how Berea College in Kentucky offered racially integrated education back in the 1800s, only to end up forbidden to do so by later segregationist legislation.  Berea College founder John G. Fee is quoted as justifying racially integrated education by reminding people that the New Testament says plainly that God "Hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth."  In other words, there is no Scriptural justification for segregation and treating some races as "higher" than others.  The segregationists were violating the scriptures that they professed to follow, and refused to listen when people like Fee called them on it.

Harris only chokes toward the end, when he describes the need to boost funding for HCBUs as a matter of "reparations."  He had done so well at avoiding the jargon up to that point!  It would really have been better to make the case that state-funded HCBUs need to be better funded as part of an effort to correct problems and inequities in the here-and-now.  "Reparations" draws resistance in that it sounds so much like punishing people today for things done in the past, before living memory.

Regarding the under-funding of HCBUs--a friend of mine in grad school who I kept in touch with for some years got a teaching job at an HCBU.  Fresh from grad school at an R1 university, he tried assigning his students to do one-page annotated bibliographies on historical topics of their choice.  He was startled to learn that the school's library had such limited resources that for most historical topics an assignment to write a one-page annotated bibliography had essentially one right answer....

The Centre: A Novel by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi.

Stunning debut. High brow but also visceral. Largely about language and culture. A highlight of the year so far.

Science Fictions:  How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth, by Stuart Ritchie.  Ritchie here examines the evidence that a disturbingly high percentage of scientific research has been undermined by the assorted issues mentioned in the subtitle.  He describes some of the perverse incentives that lead to this--publish-or-perish, conflicts of interest, political biases, etc.--and ways to fix the problem by dealing with the perverse incentives, reforming some aspects of academic publishing, and providing for greater transparency regarding data.

It's a hugely important subject.  We hear all the rhetoric about the need to "follow science," but it can be honestly hard to persuade members of the public to do so when many scientists themselves have done so much to undermine public trust in their own disciplines.  Unfortunately we live in a world where virtually all of our institutions have done much to squander public trust in them.  Scientific disciplines are no exception (Nor, sadly, are some libraries and library professional associations).  A healthy society needs to be able to trust its institutions, and for that they need to police themselves in order to remain trustworthy.  This goes for all sorts of institutions--governments, schools, colleges, churches, and scientific disciplines.  Scientists have no more business than anybody else pretending that they somehow are above the human tendency to act in a less-than-trustworthy manner if they aren't careful.

The Typhoon, by Melchior Lengyel, adapted by J.W. McConaughy.  This is a 1912 novelization of a 1909 play.  It's a murder thriller.  A Japanese scholar, working undercover as part of a subversive Japanese network in the U.S., jeopardizes his team's mission when he lets himself be seduced by a Western adventuress and murders her in a jealous rage.  A junior member of the team volunteers to make a false confession and take the punishment for the crime.  Will they get away with it?

The author was a Hungarian playwright who later went to Hollywood.  He had a hand in film classics like Ninotchka.  The xenophobia in this early work toward the scheming Japanese is thoroughly cringe-worthy today--though around 1941 it would have looked awfully prescient.  It must be said that Lengyel does not dehumanize the Japanese.  The story is told mostly from their point of view, as they struggle melodramatically with the tension between emotion and stern duty to country.  The Japanese are treated more sympathetically here than the Germans in any number of World War II thrillers.  Most of the story's white characters don't come out looking any too well either.

Publisher ads in the back indicate that this was one of publisher Grossett & Dunlap's series of "Dramatized Novels."  It's illustrated with vintage black and white photos of a production of the play.  At least some of the players appear to have been actual Asians.  All in all, this is quite a bizarre historical curio.



The Land of Deepening Shadow:  Germany At War, by D. Thomas Curtin.  Another historical curiosity.  Curtin was an American journalist with extensive experience in Germany.  He covered the early years of World War I as a neutral journalist.  By early 1917, when he was writing this--it probably went to press right around the time the U.S. was declaring war--he had become seriously disillusioned with Germany and its leaders.  There's a pronounced bias against Germany here, and a lot of speculation that always assumes the worst about Germany.

It can't, however, be written off as mere wartime propaganda.  Much of what Curtin says about wartime Germany's ruthless suspension of civil liberties, shortages of food and materials, and failures to develop an equitable rationing system, is confirmed by modern histories of the German home front.  This makes me ready to credit Curtin's overall portrayal of wartime Germany, within the limits of the author's perspective, as essentially truthful.  Contemporary accounts such as this of major historical events often hold a lot of historical interest.  I stumbled across a 106-year-old printed copy; it's also available at Project Gutenberg.

Finally read Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser (1996). I had started before but put it down. This time I listened to the audiobook. Interesting as an historical novel depicting NYC in the early 20th century. Less successful as a tale of existential despair and the emptiness of rampant capitalism, though it had its moments.

Started: The White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear
I'm reading the Barnes & Noble special edition with an afterward by the author.
In 1947, Elinor White is living in the English countryside when she's pulled back into her previous work of spy craft. The story alternates between Elinor's work during war time years and 1947. This novel isn't part of the popular Maisie Dobbs series.

Trash, mostly, including Baldacci's "Novel of the Month,"  In "Simply Lies," where there were echoes of Mark Twain in a couple of places, but nothing came of them.  Time for me to get some guys to help me whitewash a fence.  Then navigate the Mississippi.

After listening to a bunch of people wax poetic about Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, I finally got round to reading it/them.  I thought it was fine, but hardly world altering.  Perhaps I had already ingested the key parts in the summaries and citations I'd already read.

For Smolt, I've been reading Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey (1st book in the Dragonriders of Pern series(es).  I loved the books as a youngster and Smolt is really into the story as well.  There are a few parts I didn't remember that don't sit so well with me now (the main characters have sex/relationships because their dragons do, and there is some ruminations on whether that constitutes rape or not, but only in passing).  The male protagonist sure likes to shake the female protagonist whenever he's angry.  Not so cool nowadays (maybe less of an issue in 1968, I wasn't around to know).  I expect Smolt will want to continue the series.

The Talisman, by Walter Scott.  It's the story of a Scottish knight who served in the Third Crusade.  The presence in a major role of King Richard "the Lionhearted" makes this something of a prequel of the earlier Ivanhoe.  As with Ivanhoe, though not to the same extent, we see a theme of characters in a tribal culture trying to rise above their prejudices.  Crusaders and their foes are depicted as finding common ground in their shared culture of chivalry, with its recognition of respect for worthy foes and limitations on warrior violence.

Scott portrays the Crusader protagonists, fairly enough, as people most of us wouldn't want to meet today.  For all that they profess their Christian faith, they are prideful barbarian warrior-nobles who show very limited acquaintance with such New Testament virtues as humility and compassion.  Their Muslim opposite numbers tend to come off looking pretty well.  Saladin in particular ends up looking like quite the Renaissance man.  This makes Scott something of a forerunner of the standard modern practice of drawing invidious comparisons between the Crusaders at their worst and the Middle Eastern Muslims at their rare best.  There are a few cringe-worthy descriptions of black African slaves--the Muslim world was already in the Middle Ages developing a strong connection between black Africans and slavery, which they would subsequently export, along with vast numbers of enslaved black Africans, to the West.  Scott also sadly depicts a pair of dwarfs more as grotesque curiosities than as human beings.

I didn't enjoy The Talisman nearly as much as Ivanhoe.  It's still quite a readable and intriguing historical novel.  You can see why Scott is still recognized as a master of the historical novel form that he did so much to pioneer.  I read a copy from a 1970s leather-bound collectible edition published by the Easton Press that I found for a very reasonable price awhile back.  It's a beautifully produced book, nicely illustrated with etchings.

I first learned of the existence of this title many years ago when I met a fellow grad student with the given name of Talisman.  Her father was apparently a big fan of Scott.  I last saw her sometime after she finished earning her PhD--and was considering giving up on what was already a chronically poor job market.  Seeing a fellow student who was better and more successful at grad school than I was in such a situation contributed to my decision to cut my losses and drop out ABD.

The Deconstructionists, by Dana Milbank. Little that I didn't remember, but laid out well with copious citations.

A Yank in the R.A.R., by Harlan Thomas.  There was a fairly well-known World War II-era movie by this title starring Tyrone Power and Betty Grable.  This is the book it was based on.  It must have been quite popular in its day, as it was turned into a major motion picture shortly after its release.  I read a vintage 1942 reprint of it by Triangle Books, a popular publisher of cheap cloth-bound editions of successful fiction.  The book jacket lists still-remembered titles by such still-remembered authors as Daphne du Maurier, Earle Stanley Garner, and Max Brand.

There were actual American volunteers serving in the Royal Air Force before Pearl Harbor.  It's doubtful any of them had a career much like what we see here.  The protagonist joins the RAF on impulse to impress his girlfriend, is flying bombers over Germany within a few weeks, narrowly survives being shot down, and days later is flying a fighter over Dunkirk.  Then he gets the girl.  After all that, one supposes he really deserves it.

The dialog and characterizations are as sloppy and silly as the plot.  It's at best mediocre pulp-magazine quality stuff.  The book was hacked out in such a hurry that the cover artist couldn't even put the right aircraft on the book jacket--we see a twin-seater Bolton-Paul Defiant fighting over Dunkirk, not a Spitfire or Hurricane.  Rather than keep this in my small collection of vintage books, I think I'll put it in a Little Free Library and let some fan of so-bad-it's-good fiction have a try at it.

September (I was busier than usual, so just a small haul):


Suzanne Collins - The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: The Hunger Games prequel focused on the rise of President Snow. Thematically, much closer to Mockingjay than the other two novels--it's dark, sad, haunting, and wrongfooting. It's also basically two novels slightly abridged and rolled into one; I think the pacing would have been better served by two. This isn't the story of a bad guy being bad, or of a good person being corrupted; it's the story of a self-centred child fed a steady diet of imperial and elite cultural (e.g. family honour, etc.) propaganda, and the cascade of increasingly worse choices he makes. You,ll recognize incel formation all the way through. He's clearly a sociopath, but just as clearly didn't need to end up that way (not all sociopaths are monsters, after all!); it's just that his actions end up reinforcing that path. The writing here works well because he's constantly presented with off-ramps which can counterbalance his nascent sociopathy, but doesn't end up taking them--right up until the end. As with Mockingjay, I had some quibbles, but I was left thinking about it for days and days afterward, and feeling haunted.

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - This Is How You Lose the Time War: Pretentious twaddle; scifi for those whose snobbery sees them prefer Literature to scifi/call scifi 'speculative fiction'. You've seen this time travel plot better executed by many, many authors, perhaps most recently by Adrian Tchaikovsky in One Day All This Will Be Yours. Read that instead.

HJCS Scholars - Paleoart Predictions: Some elementary school children were provided with skeletal drawings and asked to reconstruct the creature they belonged to. A cute little self-published volume, although I'd have liked it better if they had seen the skeletal but not been able to draw over it! I was looking forward to rather more speculative creatures.

Greer Stothers - Kaleidoscope of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life: Their colors and patterns explained: Stothers is a fab artist (I have one of her riso prints), and this is a superb book. It's mostly a picture book on what we know about the coloration of dinosaurs and other extinct animals--including sections on various kinds of paleolithic drawings, living fossils, and mediaeval bestiaries. Light on text, but superbly illustrated in her signature style. It's a visual treat, and unsurprisingly the hatchling likes it very much (though I got it for myself, not him!). A lovely piece for the collection.

Quote from: Parasaurolophus on October 15, 2023, 10:02:58 AMSeptember (I was busier than usual, so just a small haul):

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - This Is How You Lose the Time War: Pretentious twaddle; scifi for those whose snobbery sees them prefer Literature to scifi/call scifi 'speculative fiction'. You've seen this time travel plot better executed by many, many authors, perhaps most recently by Adrian Tchaikovsky in One Day All This Will Be Yours. Read that instead.

I'm going to push back gently against the alleged "snobbery" of those who refer to sf as speculative fiction. The term was pushed by science fiction authors who were trying to expand the type of fiction that magazine editor/publisher types would publish, as well as to get more money per word. Not snobbery at all.

But a question- I've never read The Hunger Games or Twilight. The Twilight thing is admittedly a somewhat hypocritical manifestation of snobbery (I thoroughly enjoyed the True Blood series), but The Hunger Games deal is more a feeling that I won't be able to buy in to the super kids aspect of it. Thoughts?

I dunno, it seems to me like that appeal only works because it hinges on snobbery--and when I read what people like Atwood have to say on the subject, I feel confirmed in my assessment! But I wouldn't want to die on that hill.

I heartily recommend the first Hunger Games book. I don't think it's too childish at all--it's rather closer in spirit to [ii]Lord of the Flies[/I] or White Fang, and I think adult readers are better rewarded than teens. The prequel and the third novel are, I think, largely over the heads of teens (and probably most adult readers too), but really rather interesting. They're ambitious projects, and the execution is mostly adequate to the task, though not phenomenal.

So, yeah. Read the first one, for sure. You'll see the teen lit threads, but they're not a problem--and actually, you'll have a better and more lectorally interesting/rewarding perspective on them (specifically,the love triangle) than teens do.

"Speculative fiction" is a little like "graphic novel."  Sometimes the way it is used in place of a term like "science fiction" or "comics" does raise a suspicion of pretension or snobbery.  But they're both fairly mainstream terms, embraced their respective communities.

Assorted Adrian Tchaikovsky, including some (but not all) of the Apt series (He really does like bugs, doesn't he?) and some of his novellas.
Gareth Powell: Stars and Bones
--75 years in the future, aliens have exiled the human race from Earth for the good of the planet; humans then encounter another alien being.
I haven't read any of Powell's work before. The premise was interesting, the writing OK, but I am getting tired of books where different chapters are told from the perspective of different characters. Is this a larger trend? (sparked perhaps by the success of the Corey Expanse series?) It just seems sloppy to me, and you wind up with characters who could be really interesting, but who just get to give their bit of exposition and then fade out. Even Ann Leckie does it in Translation State.
Terry Pratchett: Mort--it's cute, and you can certainly see his influence on Gaiman. I also started (but didn't finish) Elly Griffith's mystery Bleeding Heart Yard--where the sophomore university students are described reading Terry Pratchett. Mort did seem like something I would have enjoyed a lot more earlier. And Griffith's novel is another example of the each chapter has a different narrator style--which might be why I stopped.

Quote from: Morden on October 17, 2023, 09:54:43 AMAssorted Adrian Tchaikovsky, including some (but not all) of the Apt series (He really does like bugs, doesn't he?) and some of his novellas.

He really, really likes bugs.

QuoteI am getting tired of books where different chapters are told from the perspective of different characters. Is this a larger trend? (sparked perhaps by the success of the Corey Expanse series?) It just seems sloppy to me, and you wind up with characters who could be really interesting, but who just get to give their bit of exposition and then fade out. Even Ann Leckie does it in Translation State.

I'm sure it's been around for ages and ages and ages, but I do think it became extra popular once people discovered George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire (i.e. "Game of Thrones," for the uninitiated). (Robert Jordan did it for his enormous cast of characters in The Wheel of Time, but I think it was Martin's popularity that made it so.) I don't mind it, really, but it's hard to pull off well, and often the story just isn't complicated or extensive enough to merit it.

The Lost Prince by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1915)
This children's novel is new to me.
I've read and own her three best known novels (The Little Princess, The Secret Garden, and Little Lord Fauntleroy).

The Last Fort, by Elizabeth Coatsworth.  It's an historical novel for younger readers about a young French colonist from Quebec who, in the aftermath of the British occupation of Quebec in 1763, heads for the Illinois region where there remains a French trading post that the British have not yet occupied.  He has a series of adventures along the way.  Elizabeth Coatsworth was a highly regarded historical novelist back around mid-century.  I read some of her work growing up during the 1970s.  I didn't read this one back in the day, but do recall a classmate doing a report on it.  It's a pretty well-written historical tale, but its sympathetic portrayal of colonists of European origin wouldn't pass muster today.  French-Canadian readers might also object to the way the protagonist eventually decides that maybe the hated English speakers aren't really so bad after all.


Also reading a collection of Arthur Conan Doyle's lesser-known short stories.  Readable enough, without being some of his better work.  He wrote a lot of forgettable potboiler stuff.  Also a scholarly work on the experience of Germany in 1945, as the nation moved from final, catastrophic defeat to trying to get back on its feet under foreign occupation.  For all that they brought it upon themselves by following wicked leaders, it's impossible not to sympathize with what the German people went through when their efforts to conquer their neighbors finally went down in flames. 

The Last Human:  A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans, by Esteban Sarmiento, et. al.  Most popular treatments I've seen about human evolution tell a pretty simple and straightforward tale.  First, there was Australopithecus--basically a chimpanzee that walked upright.  Then Homo Habilis, who could use very simple stone tools and had a bit more brain capacity with which to figure them out.  Then Homo Erectus, about our size and shape, with enough brains to use (but maybe not make) fire.  Then Neanderthal Man, who was our direct ancestor...or maybe just a close cousin?...or maybe a sub-species of ourselves who interbred with early modern humans?  The conventional wisdom on Neanderthal seemed to change every decade or two.  And then, finally, fully modern humans.

The Last Human makes it clear that the story was a lot messier than that.  It's a kind of field guide to hominidae of the past.  First, a clutch of maybe-hominids from a couple million years back.  The scantness of the fossil record found so far makes it hard to tell which were actually hominids, and even exactly how many species there were.  Then we had several--exactly how many is still debated--of species of Australopithecus.  And several others, like Paranthropus Robustus that have gone back and forth on being considered Austrolopithecines. 

Then Homo Habilis and some other maybe-related hominids.  Then some very early Asian members of the genus Homo, including "Peking Man"--whose only known remains disappeared in shipment during World War II--and the dwarf Homo Floriensis, aka "the Hobbit," whose discovery some years back made everybody's jaws drop.  Then several more genus members, including Homo Erectus, and the Neanderthals, whom Sarmiento says probably had speech and the beginnings of culture, but were not our ancestors.  No mention here of the Denisovans, who are the latest wrinkle in the hominid story.

There were anywhere up to half a dozen or so hominids alive on this Earth at the same time for long stretches of prehistory.  And so much about them is still being debated, as new finds are being made and new methods turned to the evaluation of what we already have.  I guess it's another example of how the more we learn the less we know.  Which happens a lot in science.  It's kind of how science works--in answering questions, more questions come to light.

At any rate, it's a fascinating field of study, and Sarmiento and company give a good idea of its sheer complexity.  There are many full-color photos of elaborate, imaginative, but scientifically grounded (on the basis of current evidence) reconstructions of these earlier hominids.  The study of human origins and other prehistoric life will no doubt remain fascinating as long as new finds keep being made, and data keeps being crunched in new ways.  No wonder some scientists seem to love working in the field.

Quote from: hmaria1609 on October 21, 2023, 08:59:16 AMThe Lost Prince by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1915)
This children's novel is new to me.
I've read and own her three best known novels (The Little Princess, The Secret Garden, and Little Lord Fauntleroy).

I love The Lost Prince! Such a cool and intriguing scenario — how I yearned to be a secret messenger traveling through Europe.

Also it's interesting that one of the main characters is disabled, which is rare for the period. (Also true of another of my favorites, Diana Maria Mullock Craik's The Little Lame Prince.)

Quote from: Hegemony on October 26, 2023, 06:09:47 PMI love The Lost Prince! Such a cool and intriguing scenario — how I yearned to be a secret messenger traveling through Europe.

Also it's interesting that one of the main characters is disabled, which is rare for the period. (Also true of another of my favorites, Diana Maria Mullock Craik's The Little Lame Prince.)

I wish the Rat's given name had been used more in the novel. He tells Marco (the lead character) early on his name is Jem Ratcliffe. I forgot to mention I read the paperback Aladdin Classics edition (https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Lost-Prince/Frances-Hodgson-Burnett/The-Frances-Hodgson-Burnett-Essential-Collection/9781665931625) from Simon & Schuster.

Cherryh's (and Fancher now) Defiance--the new installment of the Foreigner series. The story continues (ever so slowly). Fans of the series will buy it, but there's really nothing new, and I can't imagine new readers being drawn into it.
Okorafor's Binti novellas--I enjoyed these a lot because of the juxtaposition of math-based technology and Himba culture.
Scalzi's Kaiju's Preservation Society and Redshirts--fun and light.

Stormfront, the first book of the Dresden files.  Harry Dresden is a Wizard/PI.  It is sort of fantasy meets noir fiction meets hard boiled detective fiction.   If Mickey Spillane and Harry Potter had an unintended offspring.

It was a fun read.  The world building has been fun, but there are MANY books in the series (17 at last check) so I expect more to come. 

From the library: Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City by Katie J. Wells et al. (NF)
How Uber successfully made it in DC despite strong push back by city leadership.

Quote from: Morden on October 30, 2023, 08:25:45 AMCherryh's (and Fancher now) Defiance--the new installment of the Foreigner series. The story continues (ever so slowly). Fans of the series will buy it, but there's really nothing new, and I can't imagine new readers being drawn into it.
Okorafor's Binti novellas--I enjoyed these a lot because of the juxtaposition of math-based technology and Himba culture.
Scalzi's Kaiju's Preservation Society and Redshirts--fun and light.

Funny you should mention that...



October:

Charles Gallenkamp - Dragon Hunter: Roy Chapman Andrews and the Central Asiatic Expeditions: A biography of RCA. It seemed fairly comprehensive, and it's got the kind of detail I like (i.e. lots of excavating fossils, and organizing excavation expeditions). But man, is Gallenkamp a fanboy, or what. Also, he sounds like an old man writing about his idol (I gather he was kind of old when he wrote it, so that makes sense). He's incapable of saying a bad thing about his hero, so he just handwaves it all away, when the reality seems to have been that RCA was a real piece of work�. The lack of any critical distance is frustrating, and it also means that the portrayal here is pretty incomplete; we hear almost nothing of his wives, or of his children. We're told about tensions in the marriage caused by RCA's extended absences, but not really shown anything--and certainly not shown anything of how RCA was affected by it all. And the contempt that's heaped on Chinese and Mongolian authorities concerned about having their scientific treasures pillaged... wow. There's no distance at all there between RCA's views and Gallenkamp's.

China Miéville - The City and the City: I picked this up on a free shelf five or so years ago, and never got around to reading it, mostly because I'm not a big fan of Miéville's. But this is easily the best of his books I've read--it's weird and ambitious, and doesn't make a ton of sense when you think about the details, but it's really an admirable effort. Basically, it's a noir detective story set in two cities which are superimposed upon one another, but where everyone living in one city has to studiously pretend that everything in the other city (which, to be clear, exists all around them) doesn't exist. It was well worth reading. A bit weird to be reading it as the war in Palestine started up, though; it basically seems like the cities in question are analogues for Israel/Palestine.

Frank Herbert - Dune: I've had it since I was thirteen, but only just decided to give it a go. It's surprisingly good for 1960s scifi, actually. The quality of the writing clearly sets it apart from the rest (apart from Le Guin, of course), and the scope of the story is ambitious in a way that other works from that period just aren't. It's not always successful--indeed, the plot moves too quickly in sections, and would have been better served by another novel or three. But that's okay. The gender politics are regressive, but not too bad for the period. The characters are also pretty much empty vessels, however, which is too bad. I definitely see the similarities between the Fremen and Robert Jordan's Aiel, but the thing is, the Aiel are all real people, whereas the Fremen are just deux (dei?) ex machinae. I'll stick to The Wheel of Time, which is just better, but I'm glad to have read it. I doubt I'll ever pick up the sequels.

John Scalzi - Redshirts: Saw this on the free shelf and grabbed it. For anyone who hasn't read it: basically, the Star Trek redshirts figure out they're expendable redshirts and try to do something about it. It was loads of fun, although I would have liked more redshirt adventures, and could have done without the POV epilogues. On the whole, I'd say it's more fun before the part in the show where they have to go fix things. I would have preferred a wholly in-world resolution. But whatever, it was fun!

Quote from: Parasaurolophus on November 03, 2023, 09:43:27 PMChina Miéville - The City and the City: I picked this up on a free shelf five or so years ago, and never got around to reading it, mostly because I'm not a big fan of Miéville's. But this is easily the best of his books I've read--it's weird and ambitious, and doesn't make a ton of sense when you think about the details, but it's really an admirable effort. Basically, it's a noir detective story set in two cities which are superimposed upon one another, but where everyone living in one city has to studiously pretend that everything in the other city (which, to be clear, exists all around them) doesn't exist. It was well worth reading. A bit weird to be reading it as the war in Palestine started up, though; it basically seems like the cities in question are analogues for Israel/Palestine.

Frank Herbert - Dune: I've had it since I was thirteen, but only just decided to give it a go. It's surprisingly good for 1960s scifi, actually. The quality of the writing clearly sets it apart from the rest (apart from Le Guin, of course), and the scope of the story is ambitious in a way that other works from that period just aren't. It's not always successful--indeed, the plot moves too quickly in sections, and would have been better served by another novel or three. But that's okay. The gender politics are regressive, but not too bad for the period. The characters are also pretty much empty vessels, however, which is too bad. I definitely see the similarities between the Fremen and Robert Jordan's Aiel, but the thing is, the Aiel are all real people, whereas the Fremen are just deux (dei?) ex machinae. I'll stick to The Wheel of Time, which is just better, but I'm glad to have read it. I doubt I'll ever pick up the sequels.

John Scalzi - Redshirts: Saw this on the free shelf and grabbed it. For anyone who hasn't read it: basically, the Star Trek redshirts figure out they're expendable redshirts and try to do something about it. It was loads of fun, although I would have liked more redshirt adventures, and could have done without the POV epilogues. On the whole, I'd say it's more fun before the part in the show where they have to go fix things. I would have preferred a wholly in-world resolution. But whatever, it was fun!

I haven't read any of Scalzi's more serious sci fi. I'm on a waiting list at the library. I picked out a Mieville while I am waiting, but I can't remember which one. I enjoyed the Dune series as a teenager, but haven't gone back to it since. I think I stopped at God-emperor of Dune, and there might be more now.

I recently enjoyed Emma Newman's four Planetfall books: a dying Earth with an extreme contrast between rich and poor (often indentured) and a colony on a mysterious planet with an alien city/entity. Each novel has a central mystery or secret that the reader is trying to figure out, but the main characters, settings, and secrets are different. They can be read as stand-alone novels, but I would start with the first, Planetfall. Unfortunately, Newman has said she won't write other books in the series because publishers aren't interested.

I've also been reading Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy.

Started from the library: Jane and the Final Mystery by Stephanie Barron
The final and #15 installment in the "Jane Austen Mystery" series.
In spring 1817, Jane is in Winchester as her health is declining. A student is discovered dead at Winchester College, and the teenage son of Jane's friend is accused of the murder of his fellow student. There was some shady things going at the College, and Jane is determined to clear the teen's name.

I discovered this series about Jane Austen as an amateur sleuth in college and have read each installment as it was published. It's been worthwhile!

Quote from: hmaria1609 on November 06, 2023, 02:43:25 PMStarted from the library: Jane and the Final Mystery by Stephanie Barron
The final and #15 installment in the "Jane Austen Mystery" series.
In spring 1817, Jane is in Winchester as her health is declining. A student is discovered dead at Winchester College, and the teenage son of Jane's friend is accused of the murder of his fellow student. There was some shady things going at the College, and Jane is determined to clear the teen's name.

I discovered this series about Jane Austen as an amateur sleuth in college and have read each installment as it was published. It's been worthwhile!

Cool! I love Jane Austen's novels, and I love cozy mysteries. I'll need to give those a try.

Quote from: Larimar on November 06, 2023, 04:13:44 PMCool! I love Jane Austen's novels, and I love cozy mysteries. I'll need to give those a try.

Here's the complete list from the author's website:
https://francinemathews.com/stephanie-barron-books/jane-austen-mysteries/ (https://francinemathews.com/stephanie-barron-books/jane-austen-mysteries/)
Enjoy!
I checked out the books from the library over the years. The covers on the earlier books were well-illustrated and I liked them better than the later ones in the series.

I forgot to say that I also started Arkady Martinez's A Memory Called Empire, but found it unreadable and gave up.

Quote from: FishProf on October 30, 2023, 11:52:15 AMStormfront, the first book of the Dresden files.  Harry Dresden is a Wizard/PI.  It is sort of fantasy meets noir fiction meets hard boiled detective fiction.   If Mickey Spillane and Harry Potter had an unintended offspring.

It was a fun read.  The world building has been fun, but there are MANY books in the series (17 at last check) so I expect more to come. 

The novels get so much better in quality — I noticed a huge shift around book 4. I hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Energy:  A Human History, by Richard Rhodes.  An overview of how humans have gone from being limited to whatever technology could be powered by burning wood or human and animal muscle effort to the use of first coal, then petroleum and electricity and nuclear power.  The advance of technology has been inseparable from advances in the use of energy. 

There's a lot here on how steam power was developed, how the petroleum industry arose (with a look at lighting technologies like whale oil and turpentine "burning fluid" along the way), how electricity was pioneered and adopted, etc.  There's also some detail about the rise of nuclear power.  I had already read about most of these in other places.  Rhodes pulls it all together nicely, and has details that I had not seen before.  He really seems to know his stuff.

Unfortunately, every energy source has its dangers, shortcomings, and environmental impacts.  Rhodes says something about these as well.  As our energy sources have become more and more powerful, their global environmental impacts have grown as well.  And have come to pose truly dire threats to our future. 

Rhodes opines in later chapters that renewables like wind and solar are all very well, but are far too low-calorie to meet global civilization's needs and continue the all-important advance of progress.  He champions natural gas, which is at least a less-destructive fossil fuel, and nuclear power, which he points out has gotten a much worse rap than it statistically deserves.  I'm inclined to agree with him on both of these judgements.  Where I part company with Rhodes is his sanguine expectation that the continued onward march of science and technology will deliver us, if only we put our trust in them.  To which I can only say, as others have said before, that denial is not merely a river in Egypt.

The Kingdom of Slender Swords, by Hallie Erminie Rives.  This 1910 book is a thoroughly bizarre combination of travelogue of exotic late-Meiji-Era Japan and romance novel.  With a stiff dose of 1930s Saturday morning serial-style science fiction adventure.  The heroine is an American lady who comes to Japan and becomes involved in a romantic triangle.  The obvious hero of it is an American diplomat.

Meanwhile, a Western mad scientist has invented some kind of nuclear death-ray device.  He plans to use it to zap a couple of foreign battleships in Japan for a goodwill visit.  His hope is to start a world war, to punish the world for refusing to recognize his genius, and to somehow make a killing in the global stock market.  Fortunately the hero also happens to be an amateur aviation pioneer.  He saves the day by swooping down in his experimental airplane.  The villain perishes at the hands of an angry mob, the heroine and hero get each other in the end, and the heroine finds her long-lost father just in time to be at his deathbed.

The travelogue part of the book is actually pretty good.  The author knew her stuff by virtue of spending time in Japan with her American diplomat husband.  She is unfortunately remembered mainly for an earlier novel that sympathetically portrayed mob action in the American South, and in this one portrays the Japanese in a way that would not pass muster today on "Orientalist" grounds.  However, she is actually fairly respectful toward the Japanese.  Unlike in other stories of the era, this does not depict scheming "Yellow Perils."  The Japanese here are innocent of any wrongful intent--the villainy is all the work of a crackpot Westerner.  Those looking for subtext might even see the mad scientist as an allegory for fear-mongering Yellow Peril sensationalists seeking to stir up needless trouble with a friendly Japan.

But that would be taking the story more seriously than it deserves.  Quaint though the plot and characterization might be, there is something modern in its wacky genre-mashup quality.  I could almost see this adapted into a Hollywood steampunk blockbuster.  I could easily see it turned into an anime.  Readers who are fans of anime/manga, and have a tolerance for dated prose, might want to check this out.  I have a hard copy I stumbled across--odd finds like this are why I give forgotten old books a chance now and then--but the text can easily be found at Project Gutenberg.

When Books Went to War:  The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II, by Molly Guptill Manning.  In the pre-video age of the 1940s reading was a very popular pastime.  When the U.S. went to war after Pearl Harbor, librarians, communities, and the U.S. government went to impressive lengths to give the military's greatly expanded service personnel good reading for their moments of down time.  This is the story of those efforts.  Many librarians did their bit for the war effort by helping out with it.

The military ended up printing millions of copies of hundreds of titles in special "Armed Services Editions" meant just for the troops.  Titles included recent bestsellers, quite a variety of genre fiction, some classics, and some nonfiction.  Covers made a point of proclaiming that these were not abridged versions.  The troops got their books uncut, and few of the titles were wartime propaganda pieces.

Armed Services Editions can be recognized by their distinctive format.  They were unusually short, wide paperbacks, with two short columns of print on each page.  The format was carefully sized to fit within a large pocket on a service uniform.  It was also ingeniously designed so that books could be printed in pairs on presses normally meant to print magazines like Reader's Digest, with minimum waste of rationed paper.

Evidently some G.I.s brought some of the books home as souvenirs.  Since first reading Manning's book a few years ago, I've seen several vintage Armed Services Edition books in antique malls and used bookstores.  I've collected a couple of them.  The story behind them is a fascinating tale that Manning tells well.

Bedford Village, by Hervey Allen.  Hervey Allen was a noted American historical novelist of the 1930s-1940s.  He was best known for Anthony Adverse.  Bedford Village is the second part of a trilogy set on the frontier during the mid-1700s.  The protagonist was taken captive by Shawnee warriors, "adopted" by those who murdered his family, escaped, and, in this installment, joins a band of vengeance-minded frontier militia who are prepared to be as vicious as their enemies.  Which they demonstrate in one brutal chapter in particular.

They're still considered the book's heroes.  A more recent take on the period would, of course, make them the villains, amping up their villainy while glossing completely over the no less horrible atrocities committed by their Native enemies.  Apart from a couple of incidents of appalling violence, this isn't an action thriller.  Mainly it portrays life in the frontier settlement of the title.  Like a good historical novel, it gives a vivid portrayal of life in a bygone age.  If only the characters and author hadn't devoted so many pages to half-baked philosophizing....

My copy of Bedford Village is an Armed Services Edition.  According to Manning's helpful appendix in "When Books Went to War," reviewed above, the edition was published in September of 1945, only a year or so after the original civilian hardcover.  Reading this is what prompted me to re-read Manning's book. 

Finished from the library:
Murder Wears A Hidden Face by Rosemary Simpson
New and #8 in "A Gilded Age Mystery" series
New York, February 1891. Prudence and Geoffrey witness the murder of a prominent Chinese diplomat at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Their investigation takes them to Chinatown and learning about a culture unfamiliar to them. Finding the killer has international implications. Author's note follows the story.

Currently reading: These Feathered Flames by Alexandra Overy. The sequel and finale of the YA duet is This Cursed Crown. The duet has a Russian influence.

One of my friends likes to participate in Jolabokaflod and she's hinted that I'm gonna receive something by Jasper Fforde this holiday season.

Quote from: RatGuy on December 04, 2023, 03:35:03 PMOne of my friends likes to participate in

Quote from: RatGuy on December 04, 2023, 03:35:03 PMOne of my friends likes to participate in Jolabokaflod and she's hinted that I'm gonna receive something by Jasper Fforde this holiday season.

and she's hinted that I'm gonna receive something by Jasper Fforde this holiday season.

I read one of his "Tuesday Next" books.  Wild stuff.

I didn't know that there was a special Icelandic name for "giving books for Christmas."  It's just the normal thing in our family.  It's considered acceptable form among us to read them before you give them.  I've got less than two weeks to read my brother's Christmas present (which I bought right under his nose over the Thanksgiving holiday) before wrapping it and mailing it to him.

I just finished Stormbringer, Vol.2 of the Elric of Melnibone chronicles.  It included the only Elric novel from Michael Moorcock.  IF you want to see the origins of the Sword and Sorcery genre, this is an essential piece (along with the Conan books and the Lahnkmar (Fafhrd and Grey Mouser) books.

Fun reads, although a bit repetetive at times, and somewhat hard to follow when the time travel and multiverse plots lines get introduced.  The final novel was a satisfying end to the saga.

I have just begun Fool Moon, 2nd book in the Dresden files.  So far, it is already better than the debut novel.

Quote from: apl68 on December 05, 2023, 07:22:30 AMI didn't know that there was a special Icelandic name for "giving books for Christmas."  It's just the normal thing in our family.  It's considered acceptable form among us to read them before you give them.  I've got less than two weeks to read my brother's Christmas present (which I bought right under his nose over the Thanksgiving holiday) before wrapping it and mailing it to him.

She calls it "rehoming"

Quote from: apl68 on December 05, 2023, 07:22:30 AM

Quote from: RatGuy on December 04, 2023, 03:35:03 PMOne of my friends likes to participate in

Quote from: RatGuy on December 04, 2023, 03:35:03 PMOne of my friends likes to participate in Jolabokaflod and she's hinted that I'm gonna receive something by Jasper Fforde this holiday season.

and she's hinted that I'm gonna receive something by Jasper Fforde this holiday season.

I read one of his "Tuesday Next" books.  Wild stuff.

I didn't know that there was a special Icelandic name for "giving books for Christmas."  It's just the normal thing in our family.  It's considered acceptable form among us to read them before you give them.  I've got less than two weeks to read my brother's Christmas present (which I bought right under his nose over the Thanksgiving holiday) before wrapping it and mailing it to him.

Isn't the difference that, in Iceland, everyone is expected to start reading it immediately, so it becomes a group Christmas task?

Wellness, by Nathan Hill.

An Oprah Book Club pick, 600+ pages, well praised by literary luminaries. It's easy to see why -- it's both funny at times, and also is cultural analysis and critique. It has big themes. It's very clever.

I admired the book but also found it a bit tiresome. Overly long, self-indulgent, and ultimately rather conservative. I'm not sure whether the ending was heart-warming or sappy. I wasn't particularly convinced by the depiction of the traumatic events at the heart of the novel either.

Finished from the library: Annapolis, City on the Severn: A History by Jane W. McWilliams (NF)
Narrative history of Maryland's capital city with archival images and photos from 1650 to present day. I visited the city in Sept. and enjoyed walking through the historic district.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.  It was a very amusing a fun tale of an Angel and Demon (fallen angel) working to subvert/avert the aopocalypse b/c they have grown fond of living in the human world (with their supernatural bens, natch).

Now I need to add the series based on it to my watch list.

Quote from: FishProf on December 16, 2023, 03:23:06 PMGood Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.  It was a very amusing a fun tale of an Angel and Demon (fallen angel) working to subvert/avert the aopocalypse b/c they have grown fond of living in the human world (with their supernatural bens, natch).

Now I need to add the series based on it to my watch list.

It is very good! Season 1 basically follows the book, but season 2 is brand new material (written by Neil Gaiman). They are working on season 3 now.

My friend gifted me Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. Our tastes diverge in just about every category, so it'll be an interesting journey for me. It's one of her all-time favorites, and she's asked for periodic updates.

North Woods by Daniel Mason. I hadn't read any of his books before, but I loved this one — beautifully written, thought provoking, and very satisfying.

I started reading Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile this week while my car was having an oil change. I'd seen the movie, and liked it, but hadn't read any Christie novels until now. So far it's pretty good. I plan to take it with me to my annual mammogram appointment this afternoon.

Quote from: Larimar on December 22, 2023, 09:22:50 AMI started reading Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile this week while my car was having an oil change. I'd seen the movie, and liked it, but hadn't read any Christie novels until now. So far it's pretty good. I plan to take it with me to my annual mammogram appointment this afternoon.

The David Suchet adaptation (for ITV) is fantastic. I can't stand the Branagh films, so if you liked it, I recommend that one instead!

Quote from: Parasaurolophus on December 22, 2023, 03:59:42 PM

Quote from: Larimar on December 22, 2023, 09:22:50 AMI started reading Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile this week while my car was having an oil change. I'd seen the movie, and liked it, but hadn't read any Christie novels until now. So far it's pretty good. I plan to take it with me to my annual mammogram appointment this afternoon.

The David Suchet adaptation (for ITV) is fantastic. I can't stand the Branagh films, so if you liked it, I recommend that one instead!

Another recommendation for the David Suchet adaptations. I watched about 10 minutes of one of the Branagh versions, and couldn't continue because he came across as a caricature rather than a character. I would also strongly recommend other Poirot novels as well as some of the Miss Marple ones. If you'd like to watch the Marple adaptations, do try the Joan Hickson ones. Despite the murders, Christie's novels are quite soothing.

To be continued below.

Speaking of detective fiction, today was my second visit to see the current exhibits at the Grolier Club, Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction (https://grolierclub.omeka.net/exhibits/show/whodunit) and The Best-Read Army in the World: the Power of the Written Word in World War II (https://grolierclub.omeka.net/exhibits/show/best-read-army/victory-books). You can see the displays and the description on their website--just click on the links above.

If you click on any of the topics on the right, you can see descriptions and also photos of some of the books on display. Here is the link to the section on War Years (https://grolierclub.omeka.net/exhibits/show/whodunit/the-war-years), where there were three of Christie's early editions on display.

My first visit to see these exhibits was specifically for the one on detective fiction, but I thought the Army books exhibit was far more interesting.

I watched the Miss Marple adaptations with Julia McKenzie and Geraldine McEwan on PBS. There were a few seasons starring both ladies as part of "Masterpiece Mystery" in the 2000s.

Thanks, everyone. I'm intrigued.

Quote from: Langue_doc on December 22, 2023, 04:51:43 PM

Quote from: Parasaurolophus on December 22, 2023, 03:59:42 PM

Quote from: Larimar on December 22, 2023, 09:22:50 AMI started reading Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile this week while my car was having an oil change. I'd seen the movie, and liked it, but hadn't read any Christie novels until now. So far it's pretty good. I plan to take it with me to my annual mammogram appointment this afternoon.

The David Suchet adaptation (for ITV) is fantastic. I can't stand the Branagh films, so if you liked it, I recommend that one instead!

Another recommendation for the David Suchet adaptations. I watched about 10 minutes of one of the Branagh versions, and couldn't continue because he came across as a caricature rather than a character. I would also strongly recommend other Poirot novels as well as some of the Miss Marple ones. If you'd like to watch the Marple adaptations, do try the Joan Hickson ones. Despite the murders, Christie's novels are quite soothing.

To be continued below.

Not a big mystery fan, but I have read a couple of the Poirot stories (Murder or Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express) and was favorably impressed.  I viewed the 1970s screen version of Murder on the Orient Express and liked it, and was going to watch the Branagh version.  But have heard so much bad word-of-mouth about that one that I decided to give it a miss.

Quote from: Langue_doc on December 22, 2023, 04:51:43 PM

Quote from: Parasaurolophus on December 22, 2023, 03:59:42 PM

Quote from: Larimar on December 22, 2023, 09:22:50 AMI started reading Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile this week while my car was having an oil change. I'd seen the movie, and liked it, but hadn't read any Christie novels until now. So far it's pretty good. I plan to take it with me to my annual mammogram appointment this afternoon.

The David Suchet adaptation (for ITV) is fantastic. I can't stand the Branagh films, so if you liked it, I recommend that one instead!

Another recommendation for the David Suchet adaptations. I watched about 10 minutes of one of the Branagh versions, and couldn't continue because he came across as a caricature rather than a character. I would also strongly recommend other Poirot novels as well as some of the Miss Marple ones. If you'd like to watch the Marple adaptations, do try the Joan Hickson ones. Despite the murders, Christie's novels are quite soothing.

To be continued below.

I'm so glad you agree! It feels like a rarity these days.

Quote from: apl68 on December 26, 2023, 09:00:40 AM

Quote from: Langue_doc on December 22, 2023, 04:51:43 PM

Quote from: Parasaurolophus on December 22, 2023, 03:59:42 PM

Quote from: Larimar on December 22, 2023, 09:22:50 AMI started reading Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile this week while my car was having an oil change. I'd seen the movie, and liked it, but hadn't read any Christie novels until now. So far it's pretty good. I plan to take it with me to my annual mammogram appointment this afternoon.

The David Suchet adaptation (for ITV) is fantastic. I can't stand the Branagh films, so if you liked it, I recommend that one instead!

Another recommendation for the David Suchet adaptations. I watched about 10 minutes of one of the Branagh versions, and couldn't continue because he came across as a caricature rather than a character. I would also strongly recommend other Poirot novels as well as some of the Miss Marple ones. If you'd like to watch the Marple adaptations, do try the Joan Hickson ones. Despite the murders, Christie's novels are quite soothing.

To be continued below.

Not a big mystery fan, but I have read a couple of the Poirot stories (Murder or Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express) and was favorably impressed.  I viewed the 1970s screen version of Murder on the Orient Express and liked it, and was going to watch the Branagh version.  But have heard so much bad word-of-mouth about that one that I decided to give it a miss.

Albert Finney's performance as Poirot is a travesty (and the clear inspiration for Branagh's--as it happens, Finney does a very shonky French accent instead of a Belgian, and Branagh can't even pronounce his character's own name). It's a shame, because the rest of the ensemble cast does a great job, and the adaptation would otherwise be a good one.

Here again, Suchet's ITV version leads the way, though it goes a bit overboard trying to make it dark and brooding.

Finney's Poirot does get hard to take during that long, long summation at the climax.

I'm another one who's seen "Murder on the Orient Express" with Sir David Suchet on "Masterpiece Mystery." It was feature length, originally broadcasted in 2010. Ahead of its broadcast, Sir David Suchet did a documentary about the real Orient Express. He rode in the engineer's seat and piloted the train for a short distance!

Here is the NYT article (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/movies/hercule-poirot-agatha-christie-kenneth-branagh.html) on the actors who played Poirot. Do read the comments several of which consider Branagh's performace to be quite awful. One of the comments notes that

QuoteBranagh does indeed step in manure in Orient Express, and then continues to wade thru it for the next two hours (4 when you add the new Nile)

As for the Miss Marple adaptations, I couldn't stomach more than ten to fifteen minutes of the Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie adaptations partly because they did not portray the character as represented in the numerous novels and short stories. The former also came across as smarmy, which was most unlike the dignified Miss Marple depicted by Christie. In addition, both series took several liberties with the plot. For me, Joan Hickson is the one and only Miss Marple. Here's an article on the best Miss Marples (https://britishperioddramas.com/lists/best-ever-miss-marple-actress-poll-results/).

Here is the link to the NYT article for non-subscribers:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/movies/hercule-poirot-agatha-christie-kenneth-branagh.html?mwgrp=c-dbar&unlocked_article_code=1.JE0.GPsl.QeiVJIi0RW7x&smid=url-share

Okay, I've fallen way far behind in my reporting. Here's November and December, and I'll get to January and February soonish.

November and December (2023):


Darren Naish – Ancient Sea Reptiles: Plesiosaurs, Ichthyosaurs, Mosasaurs, and More: Does what it says on the tin, in a very accessible and gorgeously-illustrated way. I now know loads about Mesozoic marine reptiles, whereas before I knew almost nothing. I'm particularly happy with the comparative illustration of turtle/leatherback shell development, because I've never quite understood the shell-rib connection. Now I do!

Bill Richardson – Dear Sad Goat: A Roundup of Truly Canadian Tales & Letters: This was my favourite program on CBC Radio One, once upon a time. This is a compendium of letters written in to the show. I picked it up years ago (when I first moved here, way back in 2017) but only just got around to reading it. It was mildly amusing. Very BC-centric.

James Herriot – The Lord God Made Them All: We've been reading it as a family for most of the year. We finally made it to the end. A few stories are just uproariously funny (especially at the beginning), the rest are comforting and fun. It's nice to read them alongside watching the new adaptation of All Creatures, too.

Halldór Laxness – Independent People: My partner's favourite novel (apart from Jane Austen's works, I imagine). I started reading it years and years and years ago, but didn't get far before turning to other stuff. This time, I couldn't put the train wreck down. It's gorgeously written, as always, but something of a painful read. Not much happens, and you wouldn't imagine that would be interesting, but it is. What's really cool, though, is that it's basically the anti-Atlas Shrugged. Like Rand's novel, it's about someone who wants to be fully independent from the government and totally self-reliant, independent from the rest of society. But Laxness shows us how truly fucked up that is, the misery it leads to, and the impossibility of being consistent about it. It's really a triumph of a novel.

Patrick Rothfuss – The Narrow Road Between Desires: A reworking of his short story, The Lightning Tree, in illustrated novella form. I haven't read the original, because I was saving it. But this is a real master stroke. Rothfuss's process doesn't produce much, but he is really good at being a really good writer. The fabulist element of the story is beautifully realized.

Ann Leckie – Translation State: A Radch-adjacent standalone novel about a juvenile Presger translator and an orphan who uses entertainment media as an emotional crutch (several months later, I now see this is cribbed from Murderbot). It was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it very much, even though my memories of the Radch novels is somewhat hazy at this point.

R.J. Barker – The Bone Ships: A new fantasy series basically about pirates, set in a waterworld where the main building material for boats is the bones of (aquatic) dragons—except they're all extinct. It's a pretty richly realized world, though with a few false steps that make no sense—e.g. those who've had a leg or foot amputated become cobblers, while hand/arm amputees become... tailors?! and at least one cartographer is blind. It was fun, if rather movie-inspired/angling for a film option.

R.J. Barker – Call of the Bone Ships: Much weaker than the first, though still fun. There are three main POV monologues which are very long and absolute trash.

R.J. Barker – The Bone Ship's Wake: A big improvement on the second, this definitively concludes the trilogy. It's a darker novel, less of a pirate romp. The darkness is realized so-so; I think it's actually darker than Barker realized, and it would have been nice if he had (some of his characters are very much transformed by events, and not for the better).