Finished Nova , by Samuel R. Delany, which I enjoyed.
Now I’m reading I’m Sorry…Love, Your Husband: Honest, Hilarious Stories From a Father of Three Who Made All the Mistakes (And Made Up for Them), by Clint Edwards
Finished I’m Sorry…Love, Your Husband: Honest, Hilarious Stories From a Father of Three Who Made All the Mistakes (And Made Up for Them) , by Clint Edwards. Meh.
Started Rules of the Road, a YA novel by Joan Bauer.
Finished: Grantville Gazette III, edited by Eric Flint (reread)
Reading: 1634: The Ram Rebellion, by Eric Flint with Virginia DeMarce (reread)
Next: The Danish Scheme, by Herb Sakalaucks (reread)
I’m about a quarter of the way into it, and really digging it. Some differences from the miniseries but not too many. You don’t have to know chess to get into it, either.
Also just zipped through Pyramid (1975) by David Macaulay; it’s one of his great, well-illustrated, layperson-friendly books about designing and building big things. I learned a lot and now respect the ancient Egyptians more than ever. Highly recommended.
Finished The Auctioneer. It was quite a decent little horror novel, but I’m glad I had the chance to read most of it in one sitting because I don’t know if I could have picked it up again day after day as events spiraled down into despair. I couldn’t help but think of the auctioneer as Trump, and the deputies as MAGAts…
Finished Rules of the Road , a YA novel by Joan Bauer, which I enjoyed.
Now I’m reading A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order, by Judith Flanders.
I started this morning on The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion, as recommended by @Elendil_s_Heir. Funny and light; I’m liking it!
Ah, good! I think it’d make a great movie, with the right cast.
I read two good books recently (well, one was 63 pages, so maybe it’d be more accurate to call it a short story or novella).
The first was Kitty Goes to Washington, the second in a series about a young female werewolf who goes public with her identity, creating a call-in radio show to frankly discuss the existence of werewolves and other supposedly mythical creatures. Both this and the author’s first book were fantastic!
The other was A Sincere Warning About the Entity in Your Home by Jason Arnopp. I had high hopes for this story. I very much enjoyed Arnopp’s full-length novel, The Last Days of Jack Sparks, but Arnopp is a horror writer, and the horror genre is traditionally better suited for short stories than full-length novels. The story was creative, with the perfect level of creepiness: not enough to keep you up at night, but enough to keep you glued to the pages.
That Arnopp stuff looks good! Unfortunately my library doesn’t have it. I’ll just have to keep an eye out in future.
Finished: The Danish Scheme , by Herb Sakalaucks (reread)
Now Reading: 1635: The Dreeson Incident, by Eric Flint and Virginia DeMarce
Next: 1635: A Parcel of Rogues, by Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis (reread)
Finished A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order , by Judith Flanders, which was okay. I was interested to discover that some of the earliest versions of a card catalog were written on the backs of playing cards, which used to be blank.
Now I’m reading Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, by Philip K. Dick.
I’m about halfway through Clive Leatherdale’s Dracula Unearthed. It’s an annotated version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I’ve read four other annotated editions of Dracula – Leonard Wolf’s The Annotated Dracula, his updated version, The Essential Dracula, Leslie Klinger’s The New Annotated Dracula, and the Writer’s Digest annotated Dracula. Leatherdale is clearly the best of the lot overall. He has more notations than anyone else, and the number of words in his annotations themselves approach the length of the novel. Leatherdale is the only annotater who seems to have consulted Stoker’s notes, and Klinger, by his own admission, relies heavily on Leatherdale.
Leatherdale points out every inconsistency and mistake in the book, as well as throwing light on the actions of the characters. You could quickly get discouraged reading these, because it makes the work seem ill-plotted and ill-conceived. But Leatherdale undertook this work as a labor of love – he’s clearly entranced by the novel, as if the King Vampire held him in his hypnotic gaze.
Reading the novel with his notes really brings out how altogether weird the novel is, and how far removed it is from even the most faithful of adaptations. I think we carry in our minds the version of the story related in the 1931 or 1992 films, or (if we were lucky enough) the Deane and Balderston stage version. Some people might have foremost in their minds one of the other interpretations. But every version pares down the too many characters, or streamlines the action or the setting. Re-reading the original novel, especially with every detail pointed out, makes you really see it and take notice of the odd twists and turns of the plot.
Consider Lucy Westenra’s death. The poor airhead has been victimized by Dracula for weeks, both at Whitby and London, and has had four blood transfusions. Van Helsing and Dr. Seward have been fighting madly to keep her alive and to keep Dracula away, but he keeps thwarting them. Finally, she simply loses too much blood. But she doesn’t simply expire from extreme anemia. When she goes, there’s an orgy of death. Berserker, the wolf who escaped from the Hyde Park Zoo (with Dracula’s connivance) has burst through the window of the room*, giving Dracula a means of entry. Lucy’s mother, who is terminally ill, falls on Lucy after grabbing for her protective garland of garlic, striking Lucy’s head with hers. The mother falls dead, and Lucy is dizzy and disoriented and helpless for Dracula to attack. That same night, the father of her fiancee, Arthur Holmwood, also dies. It’s also about this time that Mr. Hawkins, Jonathan Harker’s employer (and something of a surrogate father) also dies. That’s a lot of coincidental deaths, and only one directly due to a vampire attack.
Not only that, but two of those who die had recently changed their wills. The older Mrs. Westenra gave all her belongings not to Lucy, the sole surviving family member, but to Arthur! And they aren’t even married yet! If the wedding got called off, Lucy would have been destitute. And Mr. Hawkins left all of his belongings to Harker! It’s a pretty extraordinary series of events. The inheritances are necessary, in a way, in order to keep the plot moving along, but you have the impression that a more skilled writer wouldn’t have needed so many coincidences in order to do so. I can’t think of a single play, TV adaptation, or movie version of Dracula that has any of this in it.
*which is on the second floor. How the wolf got up there isn’t explained.
Ladder? Ramp? Balloon? Trampoline? Antigrav collar…?
Finished Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said , by Philip K. Dick. Not one of his better works, and the plot focuses on one of the least interesting ideas in the book.
Now I’m reading The Sporting Horse: In Pursuit of Equine Excellence, by Nicola Jane Swinney.
Vienna Secrets: A Max Liebermann Mystery Frank Tallis
A procedural set in Vienna around 1900, with a psychiatrist and police officer duo investigating a series of grisly decapitations.
I quite enjoyed this book. The actual mystery isn’t that interesting, but the strong characters and their interactions, plus the overall milieu of Vienna at that time, make for enjoyable reading.
Well, Drac could’ve thrown him up there (he’s extremely strong). Or there could be a easily-accessible balcony that even a wolf could walk onto. The point is, Stoker just doesn’t say.
I suspect he simply forgot that the window was actually on the second floor.
I’m reading Off the Edge by Carolyn Crane, a romantic thriller that leans hard into thriller. The writing is exceptional. It’s the best writing I’ve seen in this genre. While the “woman on the run from abusive ex” storyline is done to death, the author puts a nice spin on it by also making him an arms dealer. But the thing that makes the book really stand out is that the hero is an expert in linguistics who tracks the bad guys through his intensive analysis of how they speak. The dialog is sparkling with all these clever tidbits of linguistic phenomena. And another thing I love about it is that the connection the leads have is very specific, poignant and believable.
The only thing I’ve having a hard time with is the brutality. I prefer heavy action in my romance but the realism of the prose makes certain scenes hard to handle. It’s genuinely scary stuff and there are a few disturbing images that will haunt my dreams forever.
Finished The Sporting Horse: In Pursuit of Equine Excellence , by Nicola Jane Swinney. It’s a coffee table book, with stunning photos by Bob Langrish. I enjoyed it.
Now I’m reading Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor, which is SF.
I finished The Angel of the Crows, by Katherine Addison. You know that burning question you’ve always had–“What if Sherlock Holmes had wings?”–but never had an answer to? Well, now you do: it’s this book.
If it were only a new set of Holmian mysteries, only with vampires and angels and werewolves and the like, I’d have enjoyed it pretty well. As it was, in places it was a straight-up retelling of the old Holmes mysteries. The plots–and, crucially, solutions to the mysteries–were so similar that I kept asking myself whether this book really needed to be written.
Addison is a great writer, and I really enjoyed The Goblin Emperor. This one was a little disappointing, but other folks may love it more than I did.
Then I started a new Wild Cards novel, Deuces Down. This is a series of suphero anthologies with a bunch of different contributors who I think are real-life friends doing this project as a lark/hustle thing. Daniel Abraham is a superlative author (half of the Expanse Series James SA Corey pseudonym), and I’ve enjoyed previous entries in this series. But the main author in this one writes in mindnumbing detail about baseball games, calling every pitch and out and error and ball and Christ almighty who cares, and the only saving grace of these passages is that they’re not passages where a boss is sexually harassing an employee and he’s the good guy who we’re supposed to be rooting for. Where it’s not tedious, it’s actively ugly. Not gonna finish this one.
I’ve started Jane Unlimited, at my 12yo daughter’s recommendation. It’s very good, and I have no idea where it’s going.