I read Kirk Demaris’ Mail Order Mysteries: Real Stuff from Old Comic Book Ads, an absolutely essential book. Demaris apparently actually ordered a lot of those old things from ads in the back of comic books and kept them (in pretty good shape). This book has the original ads and the actual item side-by side. The “actual size submarine” (made of cardboard), the masks in the back of Famous Monsters of Filmland (which actually do look like the pictures, although really badly painted), the “100 army men in a footlocker” (extremely flat figures of soldiers), and so on, including the “X-Ray Glasses” (I wrote about these in my own book). To top it off, the printing on the book cover is partially in glow-in-the-dark ink. The back cover has a glow in the dark skull! You NEED this book!
http://www.amazon.com/Mail-Order-Mysteries-Real-Stuff-Comic/dp/160887026X
I read Murray Leinster’s The Duplicators and Philip E. High’s No Truce with Terra. I never heard of Price, and could tell he was British by the way his characters acted. Leinster’s book is interesting, and I’ll post a discussion later on the Board. It makes an interesting companion piece to his internet-predicting A Logic named Joe (Baen books, in fact, published both stories together in a Leinster anthology a decade ago). An old Ace Double that I “inherited” recently.
Since I have to read a Jules Verne novel every summer, I’m re-reading The Barsac Mission (in the form of two Ace paperbacks from 1968 – Into the Niger Bend and The City in the Sahara). When I read these earlier it was with a gap of a couple of years between – the books were out of print by the early 1980s, and so I didn’t get to finish until I stumbled across a used copy of the second volume. The book is actually by Jules’ son, Michel, who published his own work under his father’s name after Jules Verne died. Verne scholar hate him for this, and for altering his father’s work. But I think Michel deserves more credit. He was willing to be more adventurous and extrapolating in his science fiction. He seems to have been the first person to use a Tractor Beam in science fiction (in the chapters he added to The Meteor Hunt). In this book, he has flying machines as a major plot element (only shortly after the Wrights flew) and has the first instance I know of someone using a radio to call for help. Pretty forward-0looking stuff that people were excited to give the older Verne credit for, but disdain in the son. (Michel actually did base the book on notes and bits of two novels his father had started, although I suspect the science fiction stuff was Michel’s own – Jules Verne’s later works tended to de-emphasize science fiction, concentrating on geography and interesting cultures). If only Michel hadn’t put his father’s name on his works, I’d be happier with him. On the other hand, I suspect that The Barsac Mission by Michel Verne never would’ve been reprinted in paperback in 1968.
Finally, and certainly not least, I’m reading the Koran. I’ve read it three times in the past forty years, and I keep forgetting what I’ve read. Worse, the only translation I’ve read (the Dawood translation published by Penguin Books) is woefully short on footnotes, and this is a work that desperately needs a LOT of footnotes if it’s to be of any use to a non-Muslim American. There is so much history and theology that is not explained in the work, knowledge of which is taken for granted, that you lose much if it’s not explained. I’ve read the Pelican Ne Testament commentaries and the Anchor Bible commentaries (and others) – these books dissect the writings one line at a time, and explain the heck out of them. I needed something similar for the case of the Koran.
I finally found a copy of such a book a couple of weeks ago. It’s awesomely thick, has the text in English and the original Arabic, and a lengthy screed of explanation in tiny type below. But I’m not just reading this text – I’m reading the Dawood translation and four other translations I’ve picked up over the years (I actually have more translations of the Koran in my house than I do of the Bible, I’m surprised to find). Simply having different translations helps enormously in understanding obscure passages – sometimes the translators err on the side of poetry over comprehensibility, and my aim is to understand, rather than to have gorgeous text. The thick commented copy actually takes one of my other commented translations to task over its interpretation of the text at one point.
This will be slow going. It’s bedside reading, and I’m not even through the second surah yet. (“The Cow”, in the traditional order. It’s the longest in the book)
