How is it August already!! Where has this year gone? grumbles in old lady In my day summers took a long time to pass, now everything is so fast: fast food, fast fasshion, fast summers!
On the other hand, it hasn’t been as hot, so there’s that…
So Whatcha all readin?
Print: The Witches of Wenshar by Barbara Hambly. My poor 1980’s book club edition is just about ready to fll apart in my hands!
Kindle: Bullets and Butterflies by Maz Maddox. Sadly no dinosaur shifterss, vampires of fish in sight here…
Audio: The Passengers by John Marrs
Khadaji was one of the earlier members of SDMB, and he was well-known as a kindly person who always had something encouraging to say, particularly in the self-improvement threads. He was also a voracious, omnivorous reader, who started these threads 'way back in the Stone Age of 2005. Consequently, when he suddenly and quite unexpectedly passed away in January 2013, we decided to rename this thread in his honor and to keep his memory, if not his ghost, alive.
Print: Helen Razer, 2020, TOTAL PROPAGANDA: Basic Marxist Brainwashing for the Angry and the Young. A fun (!) introduction to Marxist ideas, from historical materialism to alienation and more. “Karl Marx was a white 19th century European dude who drank too much and probably got the cleaning lady knocked up. He was often in a very bad mood.”
Ebook: George Chesbro, 1985, The Beasts of Valhalla: A Mongo Mystery. The fourth book in Chesbro’s series about Dr. Robert Frederickson, aka Mongo the Magnificent, former dwarf circus performer, criminology professor, and private detective.“An August Sunday, so hot you couldn’t tell sweat from tears.”
Audio book: Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Good Omens. I suspect many Dopers will know of this book!
Somehow I missed Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? when it first appeared. Reading it now makes me glad. No better explanation of the Trump phenomenon exists, yet it was written in 2004. Frank saw the future in his present and everything he says about Kansas then applies to half the country today.
Weirdly similar in some ways is the new (well, 2021) Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain. Sanghera Sathnam, a child of Sikh immigrants, is also a newspaper reporter who looks at his country’s clouded history to explain current culture. The book is not a screed; although it contains epic horrors, Sathnam notes that everything is history has multiple layers with even the definition of “imperialism” subject to manipulation by all sides to bolster their case.
Just finished Going Zero by Anthony McCarten. It’s a thriller about ten citizens competing against a spyware company. If any can stay hidden for thirty days, they win three million dollars. Of course it gets more complicated than that, lots of twists and turns. A really good ride, one of the best books I’ve read this year. Some things were a mite implausible, but I had fun. One small complaint was with the editing: every now and then I’d run across an error like a misplaced apostrophe, or a car having “breaks” instead of brakes. This book deserved better.
I’m starting this a day early because I don’t want to add to the thread, only to have it ignored in a day.
Double or Nothing by Kim Sherwood – the latest authorized Bond novel actually has very little James Bond in it. He only shows up, sparingly, in flashbacks, and there’s a strong suggestion that he’s dead. The folks who own the Bond franchise say that they’re branching out, exploring the “double O universe”, which I think means that they want to freshen the franchise. Sherwood’s writing is excellent, suggesting rather than overtly stating, and often relying on the reader to either have obscure knowledge of things, or be able to dope it out. I was thinking that Sherwood – so far the only female author of Bond novels (if you discount Samantha Weinberg’s Miss Moneypenny books), the astonishingly young Ms. Sherwood nevertheless has either a fantastic imagination or deep research skills – or so I thought until I read the list of acknowledgments in the back. Lots of expertise went into this book. I recommend it, but be aware that you’re getting precious little James Bond.
The Shadow of Perseus by Claire Heywood. Several people recommended this book to me, undoubtedly because of my book Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon (which is almost a quarter of a century old! Damn!). It’s her follow-up to her debut novel Daughters of Sparta, and is another novel-based -on-myth by a classical scholar. In this one Heywood eliminates anything fantastic. There are no gods or monsters. The story is told from the points of view of the three women associated with the myth – Danae, Medusa, and Andromeda. She gives each a distinctly different voice and culture. Danae is a Greek princess who is impregnated nit by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold (after her imprisonment by her father to prevent such a pregnancy), but by the baker’s son Myron, who knows how to break into her cell. Medusa is part of a tribe of independent women who live apart, having suffered abuses from men. And Andromeda is not princess, but the tattooed daughter of a North African oasis-dweller who voluntarily submitted to an ordeal to save her people. Literally self-sacrificing.
And Perseus? He’s the Hero as Homicidal Maniac. Like John Cleese as Lancelot besieging Swamp Castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but without the humor. He’d rather stab first and ask questions later, and he dispatches at least four major characters. He’s not at all sympathetic or likable, coming across more like a religious fanatic than hero. Heywood tries to give psychological reasons for this, but they don’t, to my mind, explain how he became so extreme. She’s at her best exploring the inner lives of her female characters. Danae gets two big sections, coming back at the end to wrap it all up.
I haven’t yet finished A Prayer for Owen Meany, which I was working on last month (and am largely enjoying)–it’s mighty long, and it had to go back to the library. I am going to get it back soon and finish it, though.
In the meantime I read two novels that had a similar theme. In Donald Westlake’s The Hook, Bryce is a very successful novelist who can’t seem to put together a new book and is being hounded by his publisher as a result. Wayne is a novelist as well who didn’t make much of a splash with his first publications and is basically blocked out of the field now–no one will even take a look at his latest work, as he is “not a moneymaker.” What to do? Bryce and Wayne agree to have Wayne publish his novel under Bryce’s name for 50% of the proceeds. But there’s a codicil to the agreement, involving Bryce’s wife…
The other novel, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot, also deals with a novelist, Jake, who failed to make a splash. He is teaching a creative writing course when a jerk of a student tells him a plot that both the student and Jake think will be a surefire hit. When the student dies unexpectedly, Jake decides to write a novel using that plot. It is indeed a hit. But Jake feels guilty about appropriating the plot, and then someone starts sending him anonymous messages accusing him of being a plagiarist…
On the whole, I liked the Korelitz book much better than the Westlake one. I like Westlake’s Dortmunder novels, and he writes well, but this one falls flat. I’m not sure whether it’s that the characters aren’t well drawn, or whether the trouble is that they are perfectly well drawn and then start acting out of character because the plot requires them to do so, but I kept saying “He wouldn’t do this” and “Why would she say that?” I didn’t think much of the ending either. The Plot, in contrast, is also well written, and the, well, plot is very nicely executed, with many twists and turns–some of which I saw coming and some of which I didn’t. I did want to yell at Jake several times that plots cannot be copyrighted (this is discussed a couple of times in the text, to be fair) and that he is therefore in no meaningful sense a plagiarist. But on the whole, I liked it a lot.
Reading the Graphic Novel Eight Billion Genies which is exactly what it it says on the tin: suddenly, all at the same time, every person on Earth gets their own personal Genie who will grant them one wish.
The story focuses on a group of strangers who happen to all be in a particular bar on what becomes known as G Day. It’s really good so far. And it does in fact do a nice job of answering a lot of the questions you probably already started asking when you read the premise.
I enjoyed those immensely. I just finished Alistair Cooke’s “The American Home Front” where I discovered why Coke-a-cola ™ is now made with corn syrup instead of sugar, and Walter Lord’s “Incredible Victory” about the battle of Midway, where apart from broken codes, no one had any idea what was going on.
Still enjoying Kykuit, the Rockefeller Family Home by Ann Rockefeller Roberts, with photographs by Mary Louise Pierson, her daughter. It’s a beautifully-illustrated book about the Rockefeller estate, north of New York City, established by John D. himself. Someday I hope to visit there.
I’m making slow progress in Hell to Pay: Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947 by D.M. Giangreco, which has an argumentative tone that I don’t really appreciate, but it’s a relatively good supplement to Richard B. Frank’s Downfall.
About a third of the way through The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, a fascinating crime novel. Each of the well-drawn characters is interesting, and I find myself wanting to learn more about each of them. One is a beautiful but uneducated woman from a poor background who, for lack of any better options, agrees to pretend to be the wife of an apparently-successful investment advisor to the ultra-rich. She enjoys the luxurious lifestyle for awhile but senses that something is wrong.
A friend of mine read that and liked it a lot. It’s in my audiobook queue now.
I highly recommend Shattered Sword by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony P. Tully, a more recent book that makes extensive, and very illuminating, use of IJN records to debunk some of the more enduring “myths of Midway.”
My apologies, I didn’t see the thread.
In the future, if you start the new month, link it in the current month, That way I’ll see it and not duplicate it.
Some Japanese officers changed details of their story after they were released at the end of the war. I read a Midway book by one of the Japanese officers. It seems to me that the Japanese told the Americans what they thought the Americans wanted to hear.
