turns around slowly Waitadarnminute…You there! Yes YOU! Aren’t you October trying to sneak out the door?! What do you think this month is??? A ding, dong, dash?
Seriously, how is October over and 2024 nearly over? Where did the year go? peers at her Kindle Well I did read 40+ books and about 10 audiobooks, so I guess the year hung around a bit.
So Whatcha Readin?
I started Fever by Jordan L Hawk. Horror and romance, I hope, in gold rush of 1897.
Waiting for my Libby list to explode,I have 5 audiobooks that say 2 weeks wait…
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.
I am rereading a classic I last read probably 30 years ago.
I’m amazed how little of it I remember.
(It’s the only Brunner in my collection I’ve read only once. Sheep and Zanzibar were favorites, read several times. Not sure why I never revisited Shockwave, it’s pretty excellent so far.)
Finished Last Night, A Superhero Saved My Life: An All-Star Roster on the Caped Crusader That Changed Their Lives, edited by Leisa Mignogna (who wrote the best essay in that collection, “The Hero I Needed”), and Fortune’s Fantasy: 13 Excursions Into the Unexpected, by Ken Altabef, which was one of the better story collections I’ve read this year. “The Khoroshov Gambit” was the best one in it.
Now I’m reading A Man Called Spade by Dashiell Hammett (the three short stories he wrote about that character), and The Return of the Guinea Fowl: An Autobiographical Novel of a Liberian Doctor, by Henry Nehemiah Cooper, M.D., with Izetta Roberts Cooper, Dawn Cooper Barnes, Ph.D., and Kyra E. Hicks.
A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America James Tejani
The book is mostly about the bureaucratic and legal wrangling to secure ownership of the coastline where the port of Los Angeles was later built. You might think that that would make for a fairly boring book…and you’d be right.
Also, there aren’t really any maps, so if you are not very familiar with the geography of California, you’ll be confused.
Finished A Man Called Spade by Dashiell Hammett (the three short stories he wrote about that character) of which the best was “Too Many Have Lived”, and The Return of the Guinea Fowl: An Autobiographical Novel of a Liberian Doctor, by Henry Nehemiah Cooper, M.D., with Izetta Roberts Cooper, Dawn Cooper Barnes, Ph.D., and Kyra E. Hicks, which was interesting.
Now I’m reading Unwillingly to Earth, a science fiction novel by Pauline Ashwell.
Finished Different Seasons, Stephen King’s 1982 short-story collection. Four novellas, each one excellent. Two were made into movies. “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” became Dude, Where’s My Car? Oh, wait, no, make that The Shawshank Redemption. “The Body” became Stand By Me.
Have started The Waiting, the newest from Michael Connelly, another Renee Ballard/Harry Bosch joint, but also featuring Bosch’s daughter Maddie, a promising young patrol officer. I feel Connelly may be setting her up to take over the narrative at some point in the future, what with Bosch’s ongoing battle with cancer an ongoing theme. I have no idea if that’s what Connelly does have in mind, and I don’t know that Bosch won’t live many more years, so if anyone happens to know if he dies in this book, please don’t tell me. No spoilers please.
I’m finishing up John Mortimer’s Rumpole a la Carte, then it’s on to another from my stack./
On audio, I’m halfway through David Crockett: The Lion of the West by Michael Wallis, a very good biography of the man who didn’t call himself “Davy”, with up-to-date information (well, up to the 2012 publication date) about Crockett, including new findings. A very good read.
Neither Follow Her Home by Steph Cha (semi-Chandleresque detective fiction set in modern L.A.) nor A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (the life and times of some college buddies in NYC) passed my 50-page rule, despite good reviews. Both boring IMHO.
I finished The Wager by David Grann, a pretty interesting true tale about a 1741 British naval shipwreck and its very unpleasant aftermath. I see it’s already been optioned for a movie.
Also recently finished Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea. Lots of great stories about her acting career and her enduring love of Shakespeare - most of the audiobook isn’t in her voice until the very end, but I still really enjoyed it. At times it’s a bit too cutesy, even twee, but not too much to stomach.
I’m almost three-quarters of the way through The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel, her second novel. Not her best, but still worth a read, about a young man trying to leave his family of minor criminals and have a respectable career built on a whopper of a lie.
I’ve started reading Harold Lamb’s Marching Sands – a “Lost Race”-type novel that was republished as part of Sam Moscowitz’ “Classics of Science Fiction” series in 1974. I’d read Lamb’s Genghis Khan not long ago and liked it. That was more typical of Lamb’s output – a biography of an Asian ruler. Lamb published a lot of such biographies, histories, and fiction, maintaining that most books ignored everything but European and post-Colonial American history.
So I was surprised when one of his characters – a leading character, stating the basics of the story, not a minor character spouting an eccentric viewpoint – say to the leader of the expedition they are sending to Central Asia:
And he’s implying that this is a good thing.
It is, I suppose, possible that Lamb is setting up this character and his beliefs as a foil that will be taught better in the course of the book, but I doubt it. I suspect this reflects Lamb’s own views, and it troubles me that a man so sympathetic to non-white people and history could nevertheless have so heavy a bias it says that “whites” were “dominant” twice in that short excerpt.
I seem to be running into the pervasive bedrock belief in white supremacy an awful lot in my recent reading – not only Harold Lamb, but also Edgar Rice Burroughs’ explicit statement that blacks lacked the creative and intelligent spark that Tarzan had (quote in last month’s “Whatcha reading”). Also Sax Rohmer’s stories of the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu (I read The Hand of Fu Manchu recently as an audio book), and even the book about David Crockett, who was a slave owner in addition to an Indian fighter. It was Crockett who was seen as the example of Manifest Destiny, even if he never preached it or even heard the term.
Encountering all this at the same time that Trump, the racist ignoramus, has captured the top office in the land (and by a wide margin) is a pretty depressing thing. Lamb wrote his book just over a century ago, and Rohmer and Burroughs much more recently than that.
Finished Unwillingly to Earth, a science fiction novel by Pauline Ashwell. It was an enjoyable fix-up novel of four novelettes, of which the best was “Deadly Statistics”.
Now I’m reading Serendipity: A History of Accidental Culinary Discoveries, by Oscar Farinetti, translated by Barbara McGilvray.
The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet
Arthur Turrell
A concise survey of the current state of research on developing nuclear fusion as a power source. Although the joke is that fusion power is thirty years away and always will be, the author finds a lot of serious people who don’t get the joke and believe we are on the brink of developing a clean, efficient and safe power source.
I finished Fever by Jordan L. Hawk, horror among the gold fields of the 1890s gold rush. Creepy and the characters I guessed would die did indeed … well not exactly die, but are definitely not living anymore.
I finished Harold Lamb’s Marching Sands. Thoughts:
1.) I have no idea why Sam Moscowitz included this in a series of “Masters of Science Fiction”, or why L. Sprague de Camp also calls it Science Fiction in his intro. To me this looks like a pretty standard circa 1920 Adventure Novel set in Asia. The only unusual element is that it’s a hunt for a “Lost Race” – but there’s nothing impossible or implausible about this. No unusual Law of Nature or Super-Scientific discovery (like Radium Lamps). In my book, this ain’t science fiction.
2.0 The Bad Guys are Buddhists. And they’re n ot just Bad Guys who happen to be practicing Buddhists. They’re Bad Guys because they’re Buddhists. The only other set of novels I’m familiar with where Buddhist = Bad Guy is in Robert Hans van Gulik’s “Judge Dee” novels. And that’s because Dee is a strict Confucianist and prejudiced against Buddhists. I know some Buddhists – nice guys, and generally pacifists. Having Buddhists be the undoubted and clear villains because of their religion is as jarring as having Rastafarians being the Bad Guys in one of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. And Lamb doesn’t even say or suggest that this anti-Buddhist stance is the result of any sort of prejudice by the main characters (as Gulik does), He just treats it as a Fact of Life.
3.) Not only does the lead character see the discovery of a supposed dominant tribe of White Aryans in the middle of the Gobi as something that will disrupt our view of history and cause untold amounts of doubt and soul-searching among the Chinese and Japanese, all the white characters feels this way, and appear to be very happy about this. It makes you wonder if a young Harold Lamb was bullied by a gang of Chinese kids, and determined to get back at them, or something, It’s very weird.
I’m continuing my round of early 20th century Asia-based adventure novels with Talbot Mundy’s King – of the Khyber Rifles. I’ve wanted to read this for years. Hopefully, it won’t be as biased as the other works I’ve been reading.
On audio, I’m reading Clive Cussler’s Ghost Soldier – an Oregon Files Adventure. Cussler’s dead, of course, but he’s selling better than I am while alive. As I’ve said, he probably left a trunk full of rough outlines that collaborators will be drawing from for years. This one is written by Mike Maden, who wrote at least two other Oregon Files books (as well as several books in Tom Clancy’s series).
Reading Talbot Mundy’s King – of the Khyber Rifles (which is set in British-held India circa WWI) I have stumbled across the most fascinating word.
Thermantidote – The name is obviously derived from “therm” + “antidote”. It’s something to alleviate the heat. Mundy’s hero describes it as a fan placed in the window having wetted arms. It seems to be an early incarnation of the swamp cooler .
Looking it up online, I find that it has some interesting specific touches:
and
It appears to be a cousin to and improvement on the punkah, that human-driven fabric fan used in India, which I have seen depicted in paintings and period motion pictures.
I finally finished reading The West Passage, a very weird fantasy that reminded me of The Neverending Story and Perdido Street Station, if those novels starred flat characters that I absolutely didn’t care about going on a quest whose stakes were cliched and not remotely compelling. Damn I wanted to like that book, because the world was so interesting; but other than a great world, it had very little to recommend it.
Now I’m reading The Book of Elsewhere, a collaboration between Keanu Reeves and China Mieville. Interesting enough so far, but I don’t think it’s gonna make my “Best of” list.
I finished Framed by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey. Well, I didn’t actually finish, but I quit after reading 8 of the 10 stories that comprise the book.
It is one thing to read fictional accounts of innocent folks were falsely accused, tried, convicted, and served time for a crime they did not commit. It’s always a combination of overzealous and dishonest cops, prosecutors eager for a win in court, corrupt judges who are in cahoots with the LEO and DA offices, and incompetent or cowardly defense attorneys. And it is always uplifting to read about how these poor individuals were eventually exonerated and freed from prison.
However, it is quite another thing to read actual, true stories of innocent folks who were sent to prison for crimes they did not commit. From coerced confessions to coached eyewitnesses to jailhouse snitches, these stories illustrate the corruption that exists within our justice system. And not all of these stories have happy endings, as some of the subjects are still in prison, while others who have been freed struggle to hold a job or adjust to life in the real world. One of those who was exonerated and released from prison was denied any restitution payment, but then had back child-support withheld from his meager earnings for the rest of his life, because he couldn’t make those payments while incarcerated.
These stories are not uplifting in any sense, and they are quite depressing. And after last week, I don’t need any more depressing things in my life. Someday I may go back and finish reading this book. But I doubt it.