Khadaji’s Whatcha Reading Thread - May 2025 edition

Cafe Society
,
1

I’m early, but I’m here and there’s no guarantee I’ll remember to return tomorrow or Wednesday. My schnoodle, who in spite of sounding like an exotic form of pasta, is in fact a dog named Fish… a dog reminding me that it is dinnertime. Forgive me any typos it is difficult typing with a snout in your face and a paw on your hand.

The Fish in question

So Whatcha all Readin?

Audiobook:
Reread of PS. I Spook You by S.E. Harmon. Not my favorite in the series but there was some info I missed the first time.

Kindle:
Knowing You by E.M. Lindsey. Cute M/M book about an overworked, under appreciated man and his nanny.

Print:
When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi. I suspect any fans of his solid SF books won’t like it but I’ve only read his more recent goofier stuff. I’m enjoying all the cheese mayhem.

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.

2

Last Month: New books!!!

3

I’m taking a detour from Leviathan Wakes because I stumbled across a recent (2023) translation by Jeffrey Angles of Shigeru Kayama’s novels Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, which I just learned about. The novels are both pretty short, so this won’t be much of a detour.

At first glance, the stories appear to be the original ones upon which the movies were based. But searching for them on the internet (chiefly Wikizilla, although other sites, as well) turns up that both are designatred “novelizations”, based on the movies, rather than vice versa. The pre-history of these is complicated. Evidently Kayama, a Japanese science fiction writer, who wrote about mutated animals and large unknown sea creatures, was approached by director Ishiro Honda for precisely that reason. Honda wanted a story for his monster movie, which other sources tell me was inspired by Ray Harryhausen’s Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Both movies are about huge prehistoric monsters raised (somehow) by atomic testing, and who wreak havoc on cities. Honda wanted to use stop-motion animation, but time and his budget wouldn’t allow it, so he went with a “man in a suit”, but done pretty nicely with an undercranked camera, a lot of night scenes, a lot more matt paintings than I realized (until I saw the Criterion Films version, with its special features), and shooting at night to obscure the suit’s deficiencies.

Sp Kayama was the original author, spurred on by Honda, right? Well, maybe. But Wikizilla also says that Kayama had previously written another novelization with the same story. This one was a novelization of Nippon Broadcasting System’s radio drama Monster Godzilla , broadcast presumably in 1954, with a script by Sango Nagase. So is Nagase the REAL author of Godzilla?

According to the site below, Monster Godzilla was broadcast eleven times between July 17 and September 2 1954. The script by by Satoshi Tatsuno, but “arranged by” Sango Nagase, a detective writer. (One is reminded of the way that the original screenplay for King Kong was written by best-selling detective writer Edgar Wallace. Nobody remembers this today, but it was a major selling point for the film.). But this same site calls Shigeru Kayama the “original author”.

So maybe Kayama, approached by Honda, took his ideas about mutated sea life and the outline of Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and fashioned them into a story that was adapted for radio by Tatsuno and Nagase, but both the radio drama and the film were novelized by Kayama, who wrote the original story.

Wikipe4dia claims that the idea originally came not from Honda, but from producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, who was inspired by The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and the Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon) incident (which was very clearly part of the inspiration), and who wrote the initial treatment. It was he who hired Kayama to write the story. Honda was not the first director approached, but he was the first to accept the assignment. Honda co-wrote the screenplay with Takeo Murata.

Interesting stuff. So it appears that Kayama was not the originator of the ideas, but, prompted by the producer, or possibly the director, or both, turned out the original form of the story of Godzilla. I haven’t finished it yet, but it appears likely that the radio script differed somewhat from the novel, which differed from the final film.

More fun confusion:

4

I just finished When Among Crows, a spare, bleak modern fantasy based on Slavic folklore. It’s not mind-blowing, but it’s pretty damn good.

Next up: The Naturalist Society, by Carrie Vaughn. Late nineteenth-century naturalists, if Linnaean taxonomy allowed you to do magic. Supremely goofy premise played straight. So far I’m enjoying it quite a bit, and I know my bird-nerd daughter is going to freaking love it, unless the author accidentally describes European ring-necked pigeons in an area where there are only Australian ring-necked pigeons, in which case I’ll be hearing about it for years.

5

Schnoodlefish! :heart_eyes:

Continuing the Saint of Steel series, I’m up to #3, Paladin’s Hope.

6

I have one of those as well.. (actually I am one of those, do NOT get me started on Braveheart)

Floppy Fish today, can’t seem to get comfortable.

7

I am reading a comic series called Time Before Time. I had bought the first volume long ago and when I was looking through my Kindle for something new I picked it up and turns out I really liked it and bought the other five volumes.

It’s a about a guy who worked for crime syndicate that smuggles things and people across time. Stuff goes south and he ends up on the run. It’s interesting so far and plays a lot of games with time travel.

8

I just finished When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi. It was… different, instead of the standard story of character X and Character Y teaming up to do action Z, it was a book of reactions to action Z ie the moon suddenly becoming cheese (or an organic matrix as NASA termed it). I can see why a lot of readers didn’t care for it. I liked it a lot, but I’m a weirdo anyyway.

9

Sounds weird but fun. I love most of Scalzi’s books, so I’m sure I’ll read it sometime.

I finished the audiobook of The Final Solution by Michael Chabon, about an elderly detective (almost certainly Sherlock Holmes, although never mentioned by name) in retirement, beekeeping upon the Sussex Downs in July 1944 and drawn into a murder case which seems to have espionage and Holocaust implications. I usually don’t mind ambiguity in a work of fiction, but this was a bit too ambiguous on a number of key points. Not Chabon’s best work.

Now I’m enjoying Scott Turow’s 2010 sequel to Presumed Innocent, which has the unimaginative title of Innocent. Set 21 years after the first book, it’s fun to see what’s become of most of the characters and how their paths cross once again in another homicide investigation hitting much too close to home for former DA - now appellate judge and state supreme court candidate - Rusty Sabich, the main character of the first book.

I’ve set aside Mark Twain’s fictionalized autobiography Life on the Mississippi for the moment, but will be getting back to it by and by.

10

I still have another paladin book on hand, but I don’t like to start new fiction on Fridays because my reading time isn’t guaranteed on weekends. So I’m filling in the cracks by skimming Tribe of Mentors: short life advice from the best in the world by Timothy Ferriss. This is a book from 2017 compiled of famous people’s answers to questions such as “what item purchased for $100 or less has an impact in your life?”, “If you had a billboard, what would it say?”, etc. Some of it has aged like milk, i.e., the guy who talked about how great Elon Musk is. I wonder if he still thinks that. And Neil Gaiman talking about going to yoga classes without his wife, hmmm. Anyway, I’m not yet finding it inspiring as it is no doubt meant to be, but it’s interesting.

11

Finished Den of Iniquity by J.A. Jance. It was okay, except there were a lot of really convenient coincidences that allowed the Hero to solve the crime and catch the Bad Guy (who, in this case, was a woman.) Jance has written a ton of books; I may or may not read any more of his works.

Next up: Battle Mountain by C.J. Box

12

The fun stayed throughout the book, and the premise was handled really well. If what I described above–plus a queer romance–sounds fun to you, it’s recommended!

Last night I noped out of The Return of Ellie Black, a thriller about a teenage girl who shows up two years after disappearing. I thought it’d be fine, but I didn’t figure on detailed scenes set in

the rapey cult into which she was abducted

and after the first of those scenes I remembered that I was reading for pleasure, and this wasn’t it.

I just read some spoilers about the big twist at the end. It sounds dumb. I’m glad I noped out.

13

In print I’m reading The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullogh, an ambitious selection it’s wordy! And Latin names! But it’s amply researched and prepped for the uninitiated of early Rome. I am a fan of the HBO series Rome, and I wanted to explore its history and characters in greater depth. I am enjoying it so far the exploits of Gaius Marius, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the politics and intrigues. I’ll be reading this one all summer I can tell.

Also on hoopla, I’m casually listening to a collection of fairy tales called Vasilisa the Wise written and read by Kate Forsyth. She has a charming accent and a few speech quirks that have plagued her since childhood. She struggles with R’s and L’s and apparently is a stutterer. I like old fairy tales and she hs curated and edited several stories for this book.

An ebook I just started called Queen of the Courtesans by Barbara White. Delves into the life of a young girl from Bath England, Fanny Murray who survived life in a brothel to later become a famous courtesan embroiled in scandal.

Also listening to The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett. I wanted a spooky mystery. It reminds me of something I’d hear on Radio Classics but it’s a bit crude in it’s description of certain characters of color.
It’s giving me dark shadows kind of vibe.

14

Still reading Howdunit: A Masterclass in Crime Writing by Members of the Detection Club, edited by Martin Edwards.

Finished The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which was good, and The Reinvented Detective: Tales of Futuristic Crimes & Mysteries Beyond Time, edited by Cat Rambo and Jennifer Brozek, of which the best story was EJ Delaney’s “Color Me Dead”.

Next up: Sharks Don’t Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist, by Jasmin Graham, and The Citadel of the Autarch, by Gene Wolfe.

15

Just finished Whisper in the Wind by Luke Arnold. The fourth book in his Fetch Phillips Novels, it just came out in the US a few days ago. The books are, more or less, noir fantasy. Set in a world where magic ended in a catastrophic event less than a decade in the past, the main character is a man for hire who tries to help people who were once magical, but badly damaged and hobbled by the sudden loss of magic. The setting is a thinly disguised parable of environmental collapse, but the characters, especially the protagonist, are complex and well-written. The books, especially this most recent one, are fairly political, and incredibly salient to present conditions. The audiobook is narrated by the author. He’s an Australian actor, and does quite a good job of it. Highly recommend.

16

I’ve finished Shigeru Kayama’s Godzilla/Godzilla Raids Again. It isn’t what I’d originally hoped for , which was something like Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s short stories upon which Akira Kurasawa’s classic Rashomon was based. I thought that maybe there was some sort of kaiju novel that was severely changed to fit into the idea of Atomic Bomb/Beasy from 20,000 Fathoms story. No such luck. These books are best described as novelizations written after the scripts had been written. And they’re YA novelizations, at that. The translation by Jeffrey Angles (apparently the first time these have been translated into English) are kind of jarring, too. They use a lot of post-1955 expressions and slang, which pulls you out of the time period. I suppose he was trying to give a contemporary English translation to give a sense of what the novels would have felt like to Japanese teenagers reading them in 1955, but I don’t think it works.

As I noted previously, the basic screen story was conceived by Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, who passed it on to Kayama to flesh out. It wasn’t director Inoshiro Honda’s idea, as I’d been told through the years. He wasn’t even the first choice for director. Then Honda and his second director wrote the actual script, which didn’t follow Kayama’s treatment closely. It was also passed on to another writing team that wrote a radio play, to help promote the movie. Kayama wrote novelizations of the radio play and the movie.

As with any good novelization, it adds details not in the film. When Gojira emerges above the mountain on Odo Island, he has a cow in his mouth. He then eats a woman, and threatens Emiko. Dr. Serizawa, he of the Oxygen Destroyer, not only has one eye, but he hides it under long hair, which isn’t in the film.

Godzilla Raids Again pretty much follows the plot of the film I grew up watching as Gigantis the Fire Monster. (It had a different US distributor than the first film). I didn’t encounter the title “Godzilla Raids Again” until the film emerged on VHS tapes. Like someone who wrote an internet site on the film, I thought the new title had been made up recently – but it turns out that it’s the official title, as old as the movie. I checked several internet sources.

I hate the title.
i guarantee it was made up by the US distributor – no Japanese official came up with what amounts to a bad pun. “Godzilla Raids Again” echoes “Godzilla Rides Again”, which suggests an image of Godzilla riding on an oversized horse. Or maybe Anguirus, his opponent in the film.

“X Rides Again”, in turn seems to originate with Max Brand’s 1930 Western novel Destry Rides Again, which was almost immediately turned into a serious western film starring Tom Mix. Seven years later another film of that name, but a very different plot (it was a comedy) was released. It starred Jimmy Stewart. The first film inspired a 1937 Warner Brothers cartoon Egghead Rides Again

“You all remember when Egghead rode the first time, don’t you?” asked Joe Adamson in his book Tex Avery – King of Cartoons The joke is that, of course, he didn’t. This cartoon marked the first appearance of Egghead, the proto-Elmer Fudd, who was purportedly based on comedian Joe Penner.

It’s appropriate that Egghead Rides Again isn’t a sequel, because neither is Destry Rides Again, in any form. The novel (and the film) introduce the character of Destry.

In short, “[name] Rides Again” isn’t supposed to be a sequel title, and in its first three uses it wasn’t. Later on people used it as a sequel title (Herbie Rides Again, Ernest Rides Again, The Magic School Bus Rides Again). It seems to have been used as early as 1939, though, with The Lone Ranger Rides Again, which was a serial sequel to Th Lone Ranger.

He must not have gotten the memo.

In any event, the original Japanese title translates as Godzilla’s Counterattack. It would’ve been perfectly reasonable to title the sequel Godzilla Returns or The Return of Godzilla, or even that old Hollywood standby, The Son of Godzilla, since the Godzilla in this movie clearly wasn’t the same one as i the original film – he got dissolved by Serizawa’a “Oxygen Destroyer” and liquefied, filling Tokyo Bay with what was essentially Godzilla Soup.

If they’d called it “Son of Godzilla” we might have been spared all of that stuff with Minilla and Godzooky

I’ve picked up a copy of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe anthology And Four to Go for breaks from Leviathan Wakes.

On audio I’ve interrupted Twain’s autobiography to read Fire Strike, in the Clive Cussler “Oregon Files” series. Mike Maden wrote this one.

17

Disturbing

The Next Civil War
far too relevant and NOW. Author maintains it is actually underway and nought to be done about it. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

While I continue with the entire GofT cycle.
and
Off genre for me The Land of the Beautiful Dead which is reminding me of GofT .
Some pretty graphic sex :scream:
Dystopian and then some.

18

I read a lot of what my kid brings home from the library (or gets as gifts, or selects at the bookstore when he goes with his grandmother). He’s turned into my #1 source of book recommendations and I like to say we have our own book club (and Dad’s not in it!). My son is 11.

So I’m actually really enjoying the Stuart Gibbs SPY SCHOOL series. I just finished number 7 (British Invasion), and have 8 (Revolution) on hold through my library’s Libby service. Sure, it’s completely over-the-top cartoony ridiculous, and the main characters are 13-15 years old with some supporting roles from adults, but it’s also just a fun series to turn your brain off to and enjoy the ride.

And one bad guy is named Dane Brammage and it makes me giggle every time.

I’m about to start a picture mystery book in the “Timmi Tobbson” series. For younger readers, I’m sure it won’t be great, but I like solving the puzzles.

I read regulatory guidance and compliance reports all day. I don’t want to think!

19

Midnight at the Pera Palace Charles King

A history of Istanbul from the end of World War to the 1950s. A quite comprehensive and lengthy book, it covers music, the arts, the role of women, as well as politics and battles.

Well-researched and well- written.

20

A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue by Dean Jobb. It’s a biography of Arthur Barry, who was a jewel thief in the 1920’s.

The book is well written and Barry seems like an interesting figure. But the problem is there doesn’t seem to be a narrative which justifies a book on this subject. I’m about a third of the way through it, and so far it’s an account of Barry committing one crime after another.

And, yes, before anybody points it out, I understand that this is a work of non-fiction and real life doesn’t necessarily provide storylines. But I wonder if Jobb made the right decision in choosing Barry as the subject of a biography.