Khadaji’s Whatcha Reading Thread - June 2021 edition

Cafe Society
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the book opens with discussions of how two rock stars relate to the Alamo – both stories that I, not a huge fan, hadn’t heard before. One was about Phil Collins and the huge collection of Alamo artifacts he’d collected (and which he wanted to donate to a new Alamo Museum). The other was about Ozzy Osbourne peeing on the Alamo and getting flak over it. He didn’t actually pee on the Alamo, but on the Cenotaph, the memorial statue outside it Apparently this is so common that someone wrote an article about it – “A Brief History of Peeing on the Alamo”

In any event, the problem with Collins’ Alamo collection is that its provenance is highly dubious, as an entire chapter of the book points out. It pisses Texas historians off that most of what they already have is carefully and tentatively identified (since they can’t really be sure), but Collins’ stuff would be labeled “knife belonging to Bowie” and the like, when its identity is even more suspect.

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I finished reading Who Is Maud Dixon?, the debut novel by Alexandra Andrews. Interesting plot with a real surprise at the end, well-written, and definitely a flawed protagonist.

Now I’m starting Hour of the Hunter by J.A. Jance.

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Finished Sun of Suns , by Karl Schroeder. It’s a fun space opera with wonderful world building. It works as a stand-alone, but it’s the first book in a trilogy, and I plan to read the rest of it.

Now I’m reading Strange Contagion: Inside the Surprising Science of Infectious Behaviors and Viral Emotions and What The Tell Us About Ourselves, by Lee Daniel Kravetz.

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Finished Allan’s Wife by H. Rider Haggard. I knew that he’d written several stories about Quatermain after King Solomon’s Mines (I’ve read several of them), but I didn’t realize quite how many he had written. This volume contained the title novella and three short stories. Haggard’s Quatermain stories can be either fantasy fiction or straightforward African Big Game Hunter fiction. In this case, the novella is fantasy, the rest were hunting stories. They’re kind of interesting, although it’s troubling to the modern soul that Quaterman kills so many elephants for the tusks alone (Quatermain claims to have more elephant kills than anyone else) and offs so many lions. His casual racism is troubling, too (although Haggard was arguably better than his contemporaries). The novella is more interesting, in that it has the character of Hendricka, a white woman who lost her parents at an early age and was raised by apes. Like them, she has incredible strength and can apparently speak to them in a quasi ape language – all of this over twenty years before Tarzan.

I’ve started Camille Flammarion’s Omega: The Last Days of the World, an apocalyptic novel by the astronomer and science popularizer in 1894. Interesting so far. Flammarion imagined that, in the future, observatories would be established at most of the highest peaks of the world (close, but not quite right) and that newspapers were unreliable because they distorted things in the name of selling more copies. Flammarion was so down on the topic one suspects he had a personal grievance against them (which, as an author, he might have):

On the side I’m reading Mark Edlitz’ The Lost Adventures of James Bond, which looks at screen treatments that were never filmed. I’m surprised at the names that were almost associated with the Bond franchise – Director John Landis, writer/director Nicholas Meyer, and others less well-known. Edlitz also looks at the “James Bond Jr.” animated series (which I hadn’t even heard of), Bond comics, Raymond Benson’s unproduced James Bond stage play (!), and other random items. I’m sort of amazed at the number of notable names that Edlitz interviewed for his book.

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I’m still reading David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb, a 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winner about the last days of the USSR. It’s mid-January 1991, Gorbachev is besieged on all sides, his reforms seem to have stalled, pro-independence activists in Lithuania have been attacked by Soviet troops, and many Russian liberals are already predicting the conservative coup attempt that will come that summer. It’s a generally interesting book, but sometimes a bit of a slog.

Over the weekend I started reading aloud The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi, the second in his terrific Old Man’s War military sf series, with my teenage son.

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Finished Strange Contagion: Inside the Surprising Science of Infectious Behaviors and Viral Emotions and What The Tell Us About Ourselves , by Lee Daniel Kravetz, which was okay.

Now I’m reading The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir, by Jennifer Ryan.

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Finished The World Beneath Their Feet: The British, the Americans, the Nazis and the Mountaineering Race to Summit the Himalayas by Scott Ellsworth.

I rate this as the best book I’ve read all year. It covers an incredible amount of detail and tales that otherwise would be lost to the tide of history.

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i picked up and devoured half of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus last night. If you’re into current comic book-based movies, this is an important book. I’ll explain why later. (although plenty of Dopers undoubtedly know why already)

I was into comics when these came out around 1970, and was collecting back then, storing my comics in plastic bags. And I was a big fan of Kirby’s, mostly from The Fantastic Four, but also his other Marvel characters (especially Thor). I even got to meet him at the 1972 New York Comicon.

But I looked at his new stuff for DC and was tremendously underimpressed. I picked up the first New Gods and it just looked as if he was trying to recreate the world of Thor at his new employer’s, and not succeeding. The stuff he was doing with Jimmy Olsen seemed weird – bring back the 1940s Newsboy Legion? Gimme a break! Jimmy hanging out with a motorcycle gang? Trying to hard to be edgy and relevant. And I really lost it when he brought in Don Rickles. The Tomorrow People? Kirby is trying to do hippies, and is probably going to do them as badly as Bob Hope trying to appear “hip” in the movies he was making at the time. Mister Miracle? Really? An escape artist as super-hero? I bought a few issues of New Gods, but didn’t really get into it. (“Darkseid”? “Desaad”? Kirby always was heavy-handed with the names he came up with).

I have to admit, I liked it better when he stopped doing his “Fourth World” stuff and went to more traditional comics fare like Kamandi and The Demon . I bought those comics.

Fast forward to today. Kirby’s creativity and creations are fueling the current comic book movies. And he’s receiving little to no credit and recognition for this. But, especially if you’ve watched the Snyder Cut of Justice League, it’s all Kirby creations. The Mother Boxes are straight out of the first issue of The Tomorrow People. Darkseid is the big baddie that runs through all of the Fourth World comics, which share a common world and backstory. All of Kirby’s characters look as if they’re carved out of stone (even the women), but Darkseid is far and away the stoniest, and it fits him. Darkseid is, of course, the Power Behind the Villains in that movie. Desaad is his lieutenant, again, in the Snyder Justice League. And Steppenwolf is the minion of both of them, even though he’s powerful enough to take on the whole Justice League (and the Amazons and Atlanteans). The Parademons – the flocking army of flying things in that film – first show up in New Gods #1. The Justice League film, in fact, doesn’t much resemble the Justice League comics from the 1960s. But it definitely resembles the DC Kirby comics circa 1971.

And if you’re a Marvel fan, bear in mind that Thanos was basically 9and admittedly, by those responsible) a Marvel rip-off of Darkseid.

The comics, when read all together, across all the different titles, provide a more coherent story. Definitely worth it.

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Ahoy! New thread spotted on the horizon: Or maybe that’s just the West burning I see

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Finished The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir , by Jennifer Ryan, which was okay. I think someone should’ve told her to cut the part where she has an evacuee in an English country house stare at a wardrobe “as if it were a doorway to a better, happier place”.

Now I’m reading When Women Invented Television: The Untold Story of the Female Powerhouses Who Pioneered the Way We Watch Today, by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong.