Finished The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England, by Dan Jones. Very good. Covering 245 years from Henry II’s wresting of the throne in 1154 to Richard II’s deposition in 1399. It was an often-violent period that shaped the foundations of the England and Britain we know today. Interestingly, no one during the period used the term Plantagenet, that came years afterward. Henry II’s father, Geoffrey count of Anjou, who was never king of England himself, did call himself Geoffrey Plantagenet, and that was where the term did finally originate. The word refers to a type of bright yellow flowering plant. Jones is a good writer.
Next up will be Jones’ follow-up book, The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors. But that will have to wait, as I am having shoulder surgery this Friday and may be a bit out of it for a few days. I want to be able to remember what I’ve read.
I did also finish the first volume, “My Father Bleeds History,” of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. Also very good. I wish I had not waited so long to get to it. I’ll probably do the second volume, “And Here My Troubles Began,” before surgery.
Finished Newton’s Wake , by Ken MacLeod, which was okay. I think I would’ve enjoyed it more if it had stayed with the main character’s POV, rather than switching among several.
Read Virtue Signaling and Other Heresies: Selected Writings from Whatever 2013-2018, by John Scalzi, which was okay.
Now I’m reading The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger.
Finished The Hidden Palace. It was very well-written and immersive; it drew me in and wiped out reality while I was reading it. A lovely experience, though it didn’t quite live up to the first book.
Next up, some non-fiction (which never distracts me as much as I’d like it to), Gory Details: Adventures from the dark side of science, by Erika Engelhaupt. Interesting subject, but off to a slow start. It took me almost fifty pages to say “EW!”
In the chapter about whether your pets would eat your dead body was the tale of a woman who predeceased her golden hamster. They found that the little bugger had torn off the soft bits of her face and used them to make a cozy nest in a drawer. Can you imagine being the one to open that up?
Ulf, A God in Ruins is actually a semi-sequel to Life After Life, I believe. Haven’t read A God, but I recall from a review that the lead character is the brother of the lead character of Life.
I’m taking a break from Atkinson’s Case Histories for the moment.
Over the weekend, I zipped through Patrick O’Brian’s The Wine-Dark Sea, the 16th of his Napoleonic sea adventure saga. Capt. Aubrey and Dr. Maturin of the frigate Surprise end up in Peru, where the latter has a secret mission to foment rebellion against the Spanish colonial government. I’d have preferred more scenes out at sea than ashore, and don’t think it’s O’Brian’s best, but it was worthwhile.
Just started an audiobook of Goldfinger by Ian Fleming, as I read my way through the James Bond series. It’s read by Hugh Bonneville (Lord Grantham from Downtown Abbey), who does a pretty good job.
Finished Drawing Fire: The Editorial Cartoons of Bill Mauldin , by Bill Mauldin. My favorite of his cartoons features his iconic WWII soldiers Willie and Joe face down in the mud while bullets zipped inches above their heads. The caption read: “I can’t git no lower, Willie. Me buttons is in the way.”
Now I’m reading The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History, by Nathalia Holt.
Six days on from surgery and I still don’t feel like reading again. But the pain last weekend has reduced to a dull ache, albeit persistent enough to keep me from focusing on what I’m reading as well as to keep me from reading very long. It is very uncomfortable for me now but nothing unexpected. I did, however, finish the second volume, “And Here My Troubles Began,” of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. The word Maus is of course German for “mouse” and pronounced the same way. Spiegelman details his father’s experiences as a Jew in pre-war Poland and in Auschwitz. The Jews are all drawn as mice, Germans as cats. An excellent read and well deserving of the awards it has received. I regret having waited so long to read it but am glad I finally did.
I started and then quickly gave up on Martin Dressler. About 45 pages in I started wondering if there was a point to the endless lists of items common in late nineteenth-century New York, so I checked a few Goodreads reviews. According to them it never gets any better so it’s on the “return to library” pile.
To cleanse my palate I’ve started my yearly re-read of Foucault’s Pendulum. Although I did miss last year. I blame it on being 2020.
I think my favorite Mauldin quote, also from a cartoon showing Willie and Joe under enemy fire, has one of them saying, “I feel like a fugitive from th’ law of averages.”
Finished The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History , by Nathalia Holt, which I enjoyed. When Walt Disney was on his way to check on the progress of Bambi, someone would announce to the animators, “Man is in the forest!” (A line from the movie.)
Now I’m reading Who Killed the Fonz?, a mystery by James Boice.
I’ve been on vacation, and, as usual, got a lot of reading done.
Finished Neal Thompson’s A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe it or Not” Ripley. A very good book. I used to read the paperback collections of Ripley’s stuff, and even his first book (which isn’t all cartoons). After reading the book, I’ve come to the conclusion that Robert Heinlein was a fan – I can see several places where he drew inspiration from Ripley’s cartoons and assertions.
Folies-Bergere by Paul Derval, who for a long time owned and ran the Folies. It’s weird to think that he was doing that before World War I (the book came out in the 1950s). Maurice Chevalier – a long-time headliner at the Folies – wrote the introduction, and there’s a photo of him as a very young man in the book. There’s a lot about Josephine Baker, which isn’t surprising, and a section on a pre-cinema Charlie Chaplin, who, Derval claims, appropriated the cane and shoes used by another performer at the Folies and made it part of his signature act. The other performers named must have been well-known at the time, but they’re unknown to me. The book (like the Folies itself) is something of a tease – promising pages of photographs. But almost none are of the famed nude performers. Derval is curiously reserved, and writes in circumlocultions, so you have to figure out what he’s talking about. The one racy statement I found probably got in because the slang was sufficiently obscure. Derval writes about the famed Le Petomane without actually saying what his act consisted of, which is a mean feat.
The Archipelago on Fire by Jules Verne. I already read The Floating Island recently, but I’d already read another translation of that, so I needed a book I hadn’t read for my usual summer fix of Verne. L’Archipel en feu is an 1884 novel set during the Greek war for independence in 1827. It’s a very short work, and it has a French hero. An interesting read.
One of the interesting things I learned is that Greek villages at the time were forbidden by the Turkish overlords from having metal bells, so they used a simander, a wooden bell. I can’t find “Simander” on the internet, but I did find simantron, which seems to be the same thing. As I expected, it’s a block of wood struck on the end with a hammer, much like the priimitive alarm used in the film The Seven Samurai, where the village is too poor to own a metal bell.
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars – not any of Burroughs’ books onhis first hero, but a collection of the run of the John Carter comic book series from DC comics’ Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Weird Worlds, which was scripted by Marv Wolfman and drawn by several artists. (The comic book series also featured adaptations of Carson of Venus and David Innes in Pellucidar, scripted and drawn by others). I owned several of the comics, but never did read the entire series, so I was glad to get them all together in one place in chronological order. When I’d read them initially, I hadn’t yet read Burroughs’ original novels. When I finally did, I was confused. There were incidents in the comic that had no counterpart in Burroughs’ novels. Wolfman evidently wrote extra material to “flesh out” the storiesw, although you’d think that A Princess of Mars and THe Gods of Mars would have enough material in them to support the series. Wolfman went on to script the John Carter of Mars comic book for Marvel several years later.
The Hawkman Archives Volume 1 – written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Joe Kubert (who was drawing Tarzan for DC comics at the same time Edgar Rice Burroughs Weird Worlds was running John Carter). This volume contains the Silver Age Hawkman stories from The Brave and the Bold and Mystery in Space, before he got his own comic book. Fox had written the Golden Age Hawkman stories, in which archaeologist Carter Hall becomes the superhero. In the Silver Age reboot, Hawkman is a humanoid alien named Katar Hol who, with his wife Shayera, becomes the team of Hawkman and Hawkgirl. I actually have several of these issues (including the first one, one of the first comics I bought), but not all of them, and it’s interesting to see the whole series in order. Fox had a library of data, and worked a lot of scientific esoterica into his stories. But to keep his stories visually interesting (and to keep Katar Hol from winning to easily), he and Hawkgirl deliberately use antique weapons to fight their human and non-human foes. So you’ll see them carrying maces and lances into battle.
My complaint is that several of the stories were originally linked with other stories in the same issue, but they only print the Hawkman stories, so you lose part of what was going on. I also have to admit that a lot of the scientific gee-whizzery that impressed me as a kid ends up being kinda stupid and falling flat when I re-read this as an adult. Gee – comic books are puerile. Who woulda thunk it?
I Alone can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker – Of the several books chronicling the end of Trump’s term, I chose this one because several reviewers – including folks here at the Dope Board – recommended it as the most damning and eye-opening. I’m about halfway through the book (which is faster read than Jules Verne or Paul Derval) and haven’t hit anything eye-opening yet. It’s mostly stuff that I recall, with a few behind-the-scenes unexpurgated comments by those involved. But it’s ot terribly surprising. Yet. I applaud Leonnig and Rucker’s research skills and their ability to get insiders talk. And I’m amazed at the depth and detail described. If I’d been an insider, I’d have forgotten most of this stuff.
I’m currently reading Falling by T.J. Newman, a novel about a plane hijacking. There’s been a lot of hype about this book. I hope it will get better, but so far it’s just okay.
So I’m not going to be able to finish the trilogy this month. That was an unrealistic target. Maybe because I’m so used to reading detective novels at a quick pace that I forgot that sci-fi isn’t something that you can just zip through. I completed Red Mars a couple of days ago and started Green Mars today. Enjoyable but I need something else to give me my fix of fast paced mystery. So I read alongside it a book called The Woman In Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware. It’s the second book of hers I’ve read following last month’s The Turn of the Key. This one I don’t think is as good but only because I think there is too much unnecessary dialogue about two-thirds of the way in which dragged the story on. It picked up again for a thrilling climax but the book was longer than it had to be.
I still liked the premise of the plot and the way she writes her characters as all quiet conniving in their own way but also very fragile. I love mystery books where an entire cast of characters come across potentially villainous yet vulnerable at the same time since it keeps an aura of suspense and distrust.
I started that, never having read anything else by Weir. Is it just me, or is he terrible at prose and dialogue? I couldn’t make it more than a couple of chapters in.
Recent reads:
Mañanaland, a middle-grade novel about a boy who helps refugees escape a tyrranical government. It’s ostensibly set in Mexico, but never makes that claim or establishes a clear location, so it reads a bit like fantasy in that respect. Lovely.
Bacchanal, set in a 1930s carnival with demons. I wanted to like this more than I did.
The Councillor, a political fantasy about a scholar raised to a position of importance once the magic-hating emperor dies. It was fine, but some of the twists were so telegraphed that the only twist was the main character being surprised by them. “You mean…he’s gay?!?!?” about a character who’s clearly gay during the first scene he’s in. The author’s note mentions her interest in gender, but it came across as a very superficial interest.
Now I’m reading Winter’s Orbit, which is so far much more fun, and shows a much more interesting take on gender. Again, I think there’s a big reveal coming that I’m not supposed to know, but here it feels less like a twist and more like foreshadowing.