Been reading a lot of things
1.) West of the Sun by Edgar Pangborn. I finally got around to reading his novel Davy last year (I highly recommend it), but had never seen any of his other works until I stumbled across this. A small colonizing party (too small, I’d think, but apparently the energy requirements for transportation were too high to send more) to a distant world goes somewhat awry and the handful of colonists have to deal with some lethal wildlife and two intelligent species. Very well done, and much better than J. Holly Hunter’s The Green Planet, which I read last year, and has similarities.
2.) Dark Money by Jane Moyer – a 2016 book about the sources of radical right funding, going into detail about the Koch brother, Scaife, Olin, and others. Not really dated, since the past ain’t changing. But it’s surprising to read a book like this today and realize that it only mentions Trump only three times.
3.) The Queen of Zamba by L. Sprague de Camp – I thought I’d read this before, but apparently not. It’s de Camp’s take on stories like Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, “done right” (i.e. – no magical teleportation, and the science is accurate). Frankly, not as interesting as Burroughs, but worth the reading. The volume also includes the related story Perpetual Motion
I’ve also dipped into used copies of the Loeb Classical editions of the works of Lucian and Seneca and Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey to satisfy my classics jones.
For Christmas I got A Field Guide to Monsters by Dave Elliott. This is a weird little book. It’s obviously a put–together-quickly-to-make-a-few-bucks gift book devoted to monsters fro the movies, but Elliott doesn’t only include big blockbuster monsters. There are a lot of obscure monsters from cheap movies of the 1950s, 60s, amd70s that I really wouldn’t expect to find here, like Attack of the Crab Monsters, Atom Age Vampire, The Reptile, Black Scorpion, The Wasp Woman, and others, with the details and dates given correctly. But there are almost no aliens, and he includes a number of ordinary (if psycho) human beings, like Hannibal; Lector and Norman Bates. But what really gets me is that he makes a number of ludicrously blatant errors that seem inconsistent with someone who cares about the year that The Incredible Shrinking Man was released. More than once he says that creatures from Ray Harryhausen’s Clash of the Titans (1981) are from Jason and the Argonauts (1964). He misspells “Cerberus” as “Cerebus” (and illustrates it with a picture of Dioskilos from Clash of the Titans – which only has two heads, not three). He spells “Beetlejuice” and “Betelgeuse”, which is the name of the star, but not the demon (and the poster is depicted right there, with its spelling). He says the movie The Lost Boys came out in 2000, but it was 1987. I realize that I’m being a nit-picking pedant, but this is obviously a book by nit-picking pedants for nit-picking pedants. And, oh yes, the book has no copyright date on its copyright page, or anywhere else.
I’ve received as gifts or picked up or borrowed the following, for upcoming weeks
The Annotated American Gods Neil Gaiman, of course, with notes by Leslie Klinger
Second Act Trouble by Steven Suskin – a collection of musicals that bombed on Broadway. It contains Richard Rodgers’ Rex (which I saw, and which prompted a friend to loan me this), but, curiously, not Carrie.
With a Mind to Kill by Anthony Horowitz – the third James Bond book from Horowitz. He’s done a good job with the character, and is the only one since John Gardner and Raymond Benson to write at least three Bond books.
On audio I’ve been listening to:
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
and a number of Lincoln and Childs’ Agent Pendergast novels:
Brimstone
Dance of Death
Book of the Dead
Fever Dream
and, next up:
Cold Vengeance
These are the “Diogenes trilogy” and two of the “Helen Trilogy”, which I hadn’t read on audiodisc because my library didn’t have them, so I had to go afield to find copies.
I’ve also listed to Dirk Cussler’s latest, The Devil’s Sea, continuing the Dirk Pitt series his father started. All of these audio books (except the Sherlock Holmes) are my “Guilty Pleasures”. I know they’re ludicrously cheap fiction (if the authors don’t do something that makes you say “Oh, come ON” at least once, they haven’t done their job), but I can’t resist.
