I finished Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. It’s the first thing of Butler’s that I’ve read. Very good and depressing, but ending on a note of hope.
I’ve picked up three very different books over the weekend
The Bounty Mutiny by William Bligh and Edward Christian – I’d read Bligh’s account under the title The Mutiny on Board H.M. S. Bounty back when I was in high school (so did my wife, to my surprise. These weren’t assigned books – we located these and read them on our own), but this volume contains records from the court martial and correspondence between Bligh and Edward Christian, Fletcher’s lawyer brother who defended his brother’s case nd reputation.
Shelter, Shacks, and Shanties by Dan Beard – Dan Beard was an illustrator (he did the first edition of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, among many others) and an expert on woodlore. He’s been called “The First Boy Scout” and has a sort of memorial in the complex at Bear Mountain State Park in New York. His many books on Scoutcraft and Woocraft are well worth reading.
Hauff’s Fairy Tales –by Wilhelm Hauff. Hauff, who died at the age of 24, was surprisingly prolific in his short life. His Fairy Tales are not collected, as the Brother Grimm tales were, but more like the bulk of Hans Christian Anderson’s – original creations using settings and motifs from existing stories. I picked this up as a bound book at a flea market.
On audio, I’ve found a complete edition of The Chronicles of Narnia. I’d never read more than The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, so I’ve been curious. This edition begins not with that story, as most collections I’ve seen do, but with The Magician’s Nephew, which is apparently the first chronologically.
Finished it. Disappointing, all in all. Wants to be funnier than it really is. I’d still like to see the movie adaptation, Mickey17, though, for comparison’s sake.
Just had a long weekend out of town and finished:
Stealing Time by Tilia Klebenov Jacobs and Norman Birnbach, a decent YA novel about a time-traveling young woman who helps her teenage future dad foil a jewel heist.
The Naval Siege of Japan 1945 by Brian Herder, a pretty good (if short) military history of WWII at sea in the Western Pacific in the final months of the war. I hadn’t realized how badly the US Navy and, to a much lesser extent, the Royal Navy pounded the Japanese home islands before V-E Day, including shelling targets along the coastline.
The Secret Files of Sherlock Holmes by June Thomson, long a favorite collection of Sherlockian pastiches. Thomson really captures Conan Doyle’s writing style and ingenious plots. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you’d never read any Conan Doyle and were given three of his Holmes stories and three of Thomson’s with the authors’ names concealed, I’d defy you to tell them apart.
I’m also about a third of the way through The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America by Jeffrey Rosen, a book about moral philosophy for patriotic, historically-minded laypeople. Rosen very engagingly shows how such ancient thinkers as Cicero, Pythagoras and Aristotle, as well as Enlightenment writers such as Montesquieu, Hume and Locke, influenced the American Framers. He argues that while the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” long predated the Declaration of Independence, “happiness” to Jefferson, Adams, Franklin et al. meant personal virtue - “as being good, rather than feeling good.”
I’ll have to look into this. I’ve read a huge number of Holmes pastiches, and my constant complaint is that almost none of them capture Doyle’s style. Most don’t even try. The closest I’ve come have been the stories by Adrian Conan Doyle (his son) and John Dickson Carr, collected as The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes. And I suspect it’s really due to Carr’s skill, rather than to Adrian’s inheritance.
I finished Dave Barry’s Class Clown, and think it was one of his better ones. I admit he’s put out some duds in his career, but he remains the only writer who can literally make me laugh out loud. No mean feat this week, when I’ve been in such a pissy mood! My favorite Dave Barry book is still his Book of Bad Songs, which I would run around recommending to anyone, but I think it really works best on people born between about 1960 and 1970.
Still reading Man With a Bull-Tongue Plow by Jesse Stuart. Finished Small Wonder: Essays, by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven Hopp, whose name isn’t on the title page but she acknowledges co-writing three of the essays with him originally. Meh. Also finished The Singularity Project by F. M. Busby, a science fiction novel. Not recommended.
Next up: Were-, an anthology edited by Patricia Bray and Joshua Palmatier, and Bird Talk: Hilariously Accurate Ways to Identify Birds by the Sounds They Make, by Becca Rowland.
Just finished The Infinite Sea and The Last Star, author Rick Yancey’s sequels to The Fifth Wave. Post apocalyptic novels that are a little ponderously written for my taste but fairly fun yarns nonetheless.
Note: it’s never stated explicitly but the rationale given for the aliens destroying mankind is simply because they are trying to prevent humans from trashing a perfectly nice planet.
I “think” I’m into the homestretch of Naomi Alderman’s The Future . I feel like she’s sort of lost the plot now. And I’m not sure what the purpose of the fundie cult is except to allow the author to ‘splain The Bible to us heathen tech users. Zhen is a good character though so I’ll plow on.
The Book of Bad Songs is one of the three funniest things ever written. I had to ask my mom about a lot of the songs the first time I heard it (I was born one decade too late to have heard them), but when Youtube came along I looked them up.
Dear god, he was not making any of it up, was he? I still refuse to listen to Captain & Tenille’s “Muskrat Love.” I heard the America version and that’s bad enough.
Still reading Man With a Bull-Tongue Plow by Jesse Stuart. Finished Were-, an anthology edited by Patricia Bray and Joshua Palmatier, of which the best was “The Whale” by Anneliese Belmond, and Bird Talk: Hilariously Accurate Ways to Identify Birds by the Sounds They Make, by Becca Rowland, which is funny and interesting.
Next up: Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand, by Jeff Chu, and Eagle and Empire, by Alan Smale.
Dorothy Parker’s review of A.A. Milne’s Give Me Yesterday and Mike Nelson’s Mind Over Matters, especially the essay where he runs over a yellow jacket nest with his lawn mower.
Finished Man With a Bull-Tongue Plow by Jesse Stuart, of which the best of the over 700 sonnets was number 432, about a man’s love for his wife as they are aging. Also Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand, by Jeff Chu, which was okay, and Eagle and Empire, by Alan Smale, which was excellent. It’s part of an alternate history where the Roman empire never fell and Native American culture developed some very interesting technology. In this, the concluding novel of the trilogy, the Mongol Khan empire shows up.
Next up: Trapped: The 2031 Journal of Otis Fitzmorgan by Bill Doyle, and The Masters of Medicine: Our Greatest Triumphs in the Race to Cure Humanity’s Deadliest Diseases, by Andrew Lam, M.D.
Oh nooooooo! < spits > Any chance you can listen to them in the proper order?