Khadaji’s Whatcha Reading Thread - May 2024 edition

Cafe Society
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May is upon us. Spring is here for the Northern Hemisphere, winter down south. My favorite parts of spring are the explosion of green, new flowers, and clear blue skies over the mountains… and my least favorite is weeding the flower beds. sigh

So whatcha all readin’?

On Kindle: Rook by T. K. Elbridge. I thought this was going to simply be a whodunnit in a somewhat SF setting. But nope, it’s political corruption, helicopters, crooked sheriffs, rich boys learning to be deal with problems and a ghost… eventually I think he’ll get back to the murder, we’ll see.

On audio: The Winds Twelve QUarters by Ursula K. LeGuin. I had read this back in the early 80s, so I was pretty excited when my book club picked it for this month. I am discovering things that hadn’t clicked before and discovering I remember the most random stuff. about the different stories.

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.

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Last month: Get the link right, Kris, sheesh!

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Recent Reads:
Winter’s Gifts, the latest in Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series. It’s about Kimberley, the FBI agent who helped series hero Peter Grant out a few books ago. She’s sent to Wisconsin in the winter to find out what happened to a former FBI agent which leads into a battle with zombie animal spirits. Kimberley got on my nerves in her initial outing because she’s too Jesusy but she toned it down quite a bit for this book.

Second Place by Rachel Cusk. Overwritten pretentious crap.

The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry. Everyone I know who read this book loved it. Even the guy at the bookstore who sold it to me loved it. I did not. It’s okay, but I didn’t like the ending. Not nearly as good as her next book, Melmoth.

The Initiate, the first book in Louise Cooper’s Time Master trilogy. I read the second book in the trilogy probably thirty-five years ago when I found it on my sister’s shelf. I didn’t have a single clue what was going on because I didn’t start at the beginning (and I was about eight or nine), but my sister only had the second book. It took me decades, but I tracked down the whole series. I liked the first book and am looking forward to more of Tarod’s wickedness.

Currently Reading:
The Outcast, the aforementioned second book in the series. I get it now.

The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav. I knew a lot more about quantum physics than I thought I did.

Drinking Gourd, book 14 in Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January series. I read this one before, but one thing the pandemic taught me is how to use the interlibrary loan system so this time I can read all the books in the series, not just the ones at my local library. I’m picking up on a lot more backstory that way.

Joyous Discovery of the Day: I found the most recent Benjamin January book, The Nubian’s Curse, on the new arrivals shelf at my local library. :smiley: I wont’ have to ILL it when I get to the end of the series so far.

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I need to figure that one out. I am or was, I admit I haven’t inquired recently, on the outs with our county library and the online library for my state has “gaps” when it gets to older books. (What self respecting library doesn’t have Ursula K. LeGuin on it’s shelves?!)

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Started today on A Haunting in the Arctic by C.J. Cooke. A story in two timelines, one about a woman taken prisoner on a whaling ship, the other about a woman exploring the wreck of that ship on an Icelandic beach. Really good so far, if it pans out I’ll be picking up this author’s other stuff.

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Finished Eric Flint’s 1632 and enjoyed it thoroughly. Niot in a hurry to read the 33 (!!) sequels, though.

On to a book that’s been sitting on my shelf forever – The Man from U.N.C.L.E. – The Vampire Affair by David McDaniel. I looked McDaniel up. He wrote several Man from UNCLE tie-ins and one Prisoner tie-in, one novel, several short stories, then died at the uncomfortably young age of 38. Too bad. The book’s pretty good. He shows that he’s read his background material (including Doyle’s The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire and Verne’s Carpathian Castle. And McDaniel reportedly wanted the title to be “The Carpathian Vampire Affair”, but was overruled.

After that, back to my guilty pleasure, Clive Cussler’s Shock Wave

On audio, I’m re-listening to Cussler’s The Solomon Curse. I gotta get another audiobook for my commute.

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IMHO only 1633 is nearly as good as 1632, after that they go from good, to tolerable, to meh, to frankly bad pretty quickly.
I would recommend 1633, and then trying the other sequels if there’s nothing better and not expecting too much.

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Finished The Oppenheimer Alternative by Robert J. Sawyer. Not recommended.

Now I’m reading Mammoths at the Gates, by Nghi Vo. It’s nominated for this year’s Best Novella Hugo.

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Sleights of Mind, by Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde. I thought this was a very interesting book indeed! The authors are neuroscientists, and they have a deep interest in stage magic (and are magicians themselves). The book describes the different ways that magicians make use of how the brain works (or doesn’t work). How does a magic trick fool the eye? How does it fool the brain? How do magicians use what we know about human attention to fool the audience? The book gives explanations for how a bunch of tricks are done, complete with spoiler alerts, and I for one learned a lot. One nice thing: the authors are not just interested in describing what magicians can learn from neuroscientists, but also what neuroscientists can learn from magicians, which I hadn’t expected. Would recommend if you’re interested in brains or magic or both.

I also read Brandwashed, by Martin Lindstrom. A description of marketing techniques designed to make us all loyal consumers of specific products, written by a Danish marketing expert. It explains how companies use peer pressure, celebrity tie-ins, music, moods, vocabulary terms, and so on to get people to buy, buy, BUY. It’s informative, though I think I’ve read similar insights in other places, so I’m not sure how groundbreaking it is. It also feels very dated (among other things, Lindstrom predicts the onslaught of “influencers” in the last chapter)–the book was written in 2011, which is I guess a lifetime ago in terms of marketing techniques!

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Finished The Boys from Biloxi, by John Grisham. Two sons of immigrant families grow up as friends but ultimately find themselves on opposite sides of the law. Very good, his best in years.

Have started Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay.

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I read this book about a year ago. Totally agree with your assessment.

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I finished Rook by T.K. Eldridge. To my dismay, this is one of those"it ought to have been one long book but I’m padding it out to make a series" books. Almost nothing happened and most of the book was people sitting around making plans or unpacking things. I don’t think I care enough to go on with the series.

On the upside, I finished Wind’s Twelve Quarters by Ursula K LeGuin. Her writing style is not something I would actively seek out these days, to much narrative and not any real character development, but it was a nice change of pace and I enjoyed several of the stories. As usual, I am amused by what SF writers of the 50s, 60 and 70 overlooked in terms of technology. They were too consumed by the thought of space travel to envision a computer in everyone’s pocket that could out think the ones that put men on the moon in an eyeblink.

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Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay is an excellent book.

Finished Mammoths at the Gates, by Nghi Vo, which was very good.

Now I’m reading Benchmarks Concluded: F&SF “Books” Columns 1987-1993, by Algis Budrys. I’ve read the first three books in this four-book series, and he gives spoilers without alerts, so I went through the index first to be sure there weren’t going to be any books that I didn’t want spoilered.

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I finished Redeployment, Phil Klay’s 2014 collection of short stories about US Marines serving in Iraq during the worst days of the insurgency. Very powerful stuff. Klay, a Marine public affairs officer once deployed there, is quite a talented writer. The best story in it, I’d say, is “Prayer in the Furnace,” written from the perspective of a Catholic chaplain trying to help troops who are deeply troubled by what they’ve seen and done during the war, trying to keep the faith in a hellish place.

Now I’m listening to an audiobook of standup comic Gary Gulman’s memoir Misfit, which has alternating chapters about growing up in a small Massachusetts town in the 1980s, and dealing with his crippling depression and anxiety in the late 2010s. It’s a bit slow getting started, and he’s sometimes more annoying than funny, but overall I’m enjoying it.

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And now for something completely different–cleaning out the attic and found this in the giveaway pile. Decided I’d sit down and read it. Cherry Ames: Visiting Nurse: it’s for young teenage girls and was part of the Cherry Ames nursing series. This one dates from 1947, and it’s surprisingly decent. Written by Helen Wells, and apparently it really was, it describes how Cherry and her 5 BFFs from nursing school leave the “Middle West” for Greenwich Village and the romantic life of a Visiting Nurse. Actually, Cherry seems to be serving a function more like what I’d think of as a social worker who carries Band-Aids, but what do I know?

Most of the book describes how Cherry works to establish a settlement house as the hub of the community—catering to shut-ins, retirees, and the terminally cranky and bringing them into joyous contact with one another in a place where they can carry out and be recognized for their talents, be it painting, playwriting, architecture, or (frequently) culinary. Cherry’s efforts in this regard are a smashing success, of course.

The rest of the book describes how Cherry convinces a Miss Havisham wannabe to come out of recluseship and rejoin the world. I am partial to the frontispiece illustration, which is captioned “Cherry leaned closer, eager to hear the old woman’s story” but shows Cherry in something of a vampire pose with her eyes locked hungrily on the old lady’s neck.

As I said, for what it is it’s not bad at all. Reasonably well-written, generally avoiding racial and ethnic stereotyping (well, within the limitations of its time), occasional bits of humor, and though we always know what’s going to happen (the landlord is going to approve of the nurses painting all the furniture blue, the bus driver’s gruffitude is only an exterior pose and really he’s an old softy at heart, the boy with scarlet fever will recover) it’s a fun peek into a world that doesn’t exist any more, if indeed it ever did.

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I hadn’t realized that Forrest J Ackerman shows up as a character in The Vampire Affair. Somehow that slipped Pepper Mill’s mind. Ackerman appeared the same year as a character in Philip Jose Farmer’s erotic Fantasy novel Image of the Beast. (If you don’;t know who he was, he was the self-styled “Number One Science Fiction Fan”, sometime author, SF agent, and later editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland. I got bto meet him and shake his hand (which was wearing his “Dracula ring” at the 50th anniversary WorldCon in Boston in 1989, where he wore a replica of the one he’d worn to the first WorldCon.)

Over the weekend I got my copy of Vice, Redemption, and the Distant Colony by Julkes Verne. It’s actually a set of three short pieces by Verne, translated into English for the first time and published in English a decade ago. I picked it up for the third piece in it – l’Etude, or The Fact-Finding Mission. The reason I was interested was that, way back when I was in grad school I picked up in a used book store a copy of an ace edition of one of the ten “Fitzroy” edition Verne novels, 1970 paperback reprintings of the ARCO Verne editions edited by I.O. Evans . The title was Into the Niger Bend, abnd I had never heard of it. I was sorely disappointed to find that it was only half the story. The other half was published by Ace under the title The City in the Sahara. The two together made up a single novel called The Barsac Mission. I finally found a copy in another used book store many years later.

It’s pretty heady and advanced stuff – The titular scientifically advanced city in the Sahara desert, helicopter/airplane hybrid flying machines, remote-controlled miniature flying drones, and a call for help using a radio. It turned out that almost all of it was actually the work of Verne;s son, Michel. He took the opening of a story his father had written and fleshed it out in his own fasion, then marketed it as a collaboration, although later publishers (like Ace) left Michel’s name off it.

Michel gets too much hate from Verne fans, I think. He was a talented writer, and often abandoned his father’s generally keeping to known facts and modest extrapolation to include much more advanced ideas. His chief flaw was in hijacking his father;s name, and in pointless rewriting. He added five unnecessary chapters to The Meteor Hunt, for instance, which don’t really add anything, but which do give us the first example I know of a “tractor beam”. He rewrote The Case of Wilhelm Storitz to set the novel a hundred years earlier, and did the same with The Danube Pilot.

So it wasn’t surprising that his altered version of The Barsac Mission was filled with gee-whiz devices. But I’ve long been curious about the Jules Verne original. This volume gives us that. There’s a completely different cast of characters and a different mission. It’s not a rescue mission, but one to determine if the French colony of Congo (Libreville) will have representation in the French government. There’s an Esperanto-advocating Russian diplomat and two comical French Parliament members. It appears likely that Verne gave up the book upon learning of the human rights abuses in Belgian Congo, and never picked it up again. Michel wisely shifted the location further north. I haven’t read much of it yet, and it’s been years since I re-read The Barsac mission, but I haven’t seen any overt borrowing of the original text.

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I have (and have read) all of the Cherry Ames nurse mystery books, including her book of “First Aid and Home Nursing”. Cherry Ames: Visiting Nurse is all right, but not one of my favorites. (Its immediate sequel, Cherry Ames: Cruise Nurse is probably the best mystery.) One scene features her and her friends having an exotic dinner–something called ravioli. Times change.

Finished Benchmarks Concluded: F&SF “Books” Columns 1987-1993, by Algis Budrys, which was okay.

Now I’m reading The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything, by Michio Kaku.

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Close, but you got the italics right: it’s pasta.

And only fifty cents apiece, too!!

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In keeping with the “classics” kick I’ve been on and off doing for the last couple of years, I reread The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie. It’s been at least 40 years since I read it… and I had not noticed the casual racism. It’s not bad and I realized it’s a product of the times but goodness there was the N word big as day right on my page!
On a less critical note, I have read far worse debut novels, this one was rather twisty and not everything was presented to the reader, but I enjoyed it once again.

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Finished A Haunting in the Arctic. It was decent, but seemed to drag out longer than necessary. Then when I went to my library site to look up the author’s other books, I realized I’d read one already and it had the same issue. So I decided not to pick up any more at this time.

Started this morning on Lost Man’s Lane by Scott Carson. Scott Carson is the nom de plume used by Michael Koryta when he writes stuff with a supernatural bent. I like all his books but prefer the spooky ones, so I feel this is a “can’t miss”.