Khadaji’s Whatcha Reading Thread - October 2024 edition

Cafe Society
,
1

2024 is three quarters in the can, Spooky season starts tomorrow… except my city seems to be a bit excitable shall we say, many residents have already decorated their yards and porches. I have my ghosts hanging on the porch and one on the front door. I will get William, my skelly, out this week, I thought perhaps I’d have him out in the yard “watering” the dead lawn. :laughing:

Currently, I am reading:

On Kindle The Sheep Dragon by L.G; Estella, the 2nd collection of shortish stories involving their Uncontentional Heroes.

Audio:
I am nearing finished with Partners in Crime by Agatha Christie. It’s her second work featuring Tommy & Tuppence Beresford. It’s a fun read, a bit dated in places but most of the stories are humorous and much lighter than her Poirot books. I am enjoying it quite a lot.

Print: The Thursday Club Murders by Richard Osman. I’m not very far into it, but the constant changing of POVs has already gotten on my nerves.

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: 30 days had September…

3

Finished reading Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning – impressively researched history of racism in the US, going back to obscure and overlooked colonial roots and re-evaluating practically everything since with its lens that dissects everything into three viewpoints – Racist, Assimilationist, and Anti-Racist. Most historical figures of note, especially white ones (but a surprisingly large number of black voices) fall into the first two categories. I find some of Kendi’s pronouncements unbelievable, especially the pop culture ones (I can’t buy that Tarzan was created, or even mainly accepted, as a consolation prize for Jack Johnson’s winning the heavyweight title, for instance). But well worth the read.

Now I’m onto Sidney Kravitz’ unabridged translation of Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island. I usually read at least one Verne novel every summer, but my Verne reading has extended over several months this year. I’m reading this one because I stumbled across a copy in a used book store, and I’d wanted to read this translation for a long time (I’ve read more than one other translation).

One of the things I find puzzling is the insistence of many modern critics that Ver ne is unjustly characterized as a writer of Science Fiction, and in particular as “The Father of Science Fiction”. Some have said that The Mysterious Island itseldfis not science fiction. This is absurd, given that throughout the novel the castaways’ benefactor is the owner and commander of a submarine craft with capabilities far beyond those of similar vessels of the the time Verne wrote. (And who is able to grant his boons precisely because he has this wonderful boat) Furthermore, the novel is suffused with examples of the use and exploitation of science, technology, and scientific reasoning. The meticulous description of how Cyrus Grant determines their longitude, how he produced nitroglycerin using primitive materials, the many details of their survival (technologically beyond their inspiration, Robinson Crusoe) all show a concern for and interest in science and technology that alone pretty much qualify this as a work of science fiction.

As for the mocking way “father of science fiction” is put in quotes, Verne is clearly the exemplar of the science fiction author, taking scientific and technical knowledge, often obscure, but well researched, and extrapolating and using it as an essential part of his stories. It doesn’t matter that not everything he writes is science fiction, or that he was wrong in many cases, or that he occasionally stretches the facts in order to allow his story to proceed. Science fiction authors all do that to this day. Nor is his position one that was adventitiously seized upon – Verne was the example and founder as viewed by writers and publishers ever since his lifetimne. Hugo Gernsback included an engraving of Verne’s tombstone at the front of every issue of Amazing Stories, and frequently republished his work. Verne was the standard that was held before the SF community, and that was emulated. Whether modern critics like it or not, Verne was the Father of Science Fiction, and iy doesn’t diminish his other writing to say so.

On audio, I;'m getting to the end of The Skeptics Guide to the Universe by Steven Novella and the other hosts of the podcast of that name. Longer than I expected, with lots of stuff I’m already familiar with (I’ve been a skeptic from way back and a longtime reader of The Skeptical Inquirer) . Interesting.

4

Yay, @DZedNConfused , thank you for the new thread!

I started this morning on The One by John Marrs. It’s about people who send their DNA to a company that matches them to their soul mates. It’s very interesting to think what the consequences of that would be. John Marrs usually does have a good premise for his books, but his prose is weak (IMO). I’ll stick with this a little longer, see if it improves.

5

I LOVED it. It was one of my favorite books, but yeah you have to get into it a bit.
( I liked it so much I have it in multiple formats :laughing: )

6

Okay, good! Thanks for the extra incentive. :slight_smile:

7

Just finished “Shakespeare - the Man who Pays the Rent” by Judi Dench. Fantastic, and highly recommended to anyone interested in an actor’s life and craft. Also a very detailed but no nonsense approach to Shakespeare.

Just started - “Inside the Apple - a Streetwise History of New York City” by Michelle Nevius and James Nevius. A pedestrian’s eye view of NYC, complete with 14 walking tours. So far, at least, I’m using the exploration of NYC as a motivation to get my daily 10,000 steps in.

On the top of Mount Toberead - “Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill - Alexander Hamilton’s Old Harlem Neighborhood Through the Centuries” by Davida Siwisa James, and “My Heart is a Chainsaw” by Stephen Graham Jones.

Oh, and while I’m still sworn to secrecy, I’m one of the first readers of a friend’s soon to be published book on the craft of being a singing actor in opera…

8

Finished Damn You, Entropy: 1,001 of the Greatest Science Fiction Quotes, edited by Guy P. Harrison, which I liked, and When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi, which is well-written.

Next up: Alfred Hitchcock’s Supernatural Tales of Terror and Suspense, edited by Henri Veit, and Navigational Entanglements, a science fiction novel by Aliette de Bodard.

9

Thank you, really enjoyed that one.

10

I finished Cocktails & Chloroform by Kelley Armstrong. This is a novella the comes between the 2nd & 3rd books in her Rip in Time series. I enjoyed it a lot. It was fast paced, had some good banter and the feeling of dread at the turning point was well done.

11

Finished Alfred Hitchcock’s Supernatural Tales of Terror and Suspense, edited by Henri Veit, of which I thought “Miss Pinkerton’s Apocalypse” by Muriel Spark was the best (although to be fair there wasn’t any terror and suspense in it), and Navigational Entanglements, a science fiction novel (or possibly novella) by Aliette de Bodard, which.I enjoyed for its worldbuilding.

Next up: Presence: The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other, by Ben Alderson-Day, PhD.

12

Finished The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Now on audio I’ reading Ray Bradbury’s I Sing the Body Electric. Although I think I’ve read several of the stories, I don’t think I’ve ever read the whole collection before.

I’m now almost halfway through The Mysterious Island. Good translation.

Yesterday we went to The Avenue Victor Hugo bookstore’s third going-out-of-business sale, where the books were all $1 apiece. The Avenue Victor Hugo started out on Newbury Street, near Mass. Ave in Boston back in the 1970s. It was a great little bookshop with a mix of new and used books. And the SF magazine Galileo came out of there. I left Boston for two grad schools, and when I came back ten years later the bookstore was still there. But instead of having a lot of space it was now carved up into many narrow corridors of bookcase crammed with books, with lots of unusual things. I added considerably to my Jules Verne and Judge Dee collections, but also picked up copies of Jack Chalker’s Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck, the Harvard Lampoon’s Alligator (their spot-on parody of James Bond novels, right down to the cover art) and their “Playboy” parody. Then in the Great Used Book Store Purge of circa 2000, when most of Boston’s vast number of used book stores closed because of competition from the Internet, the Avenue Victor Hugo went down, too. That was their first Going Out of Business Sale
Cut to a few years ago. The original owner re-opened the store, but now in Lee, New Hampshire, rather than the streets of Back Bay Boston. They had lots of great stuff (including issues of Galileo). But it didn’t last long. After only a few years in operation, he closed it down about a year ago or so. I picked up, among other things, an almost complete set of the first edition of the Richard F. Burton translation of The Arabian Nights. (It was missing one volume, which I already had a copy of). That was the second going out of business sale.
Out of the blue, he announced another sale to get rid of most of his remaining stock, with all books going for a buck. So bright and early yesterday morning Pepper Mill and I went to see what we could find. It was packed even at opening, with people parking along side streets…
I picked up several things that I’ll be reading over the next several weeks.

Three of the more interesting items were copies of The Best of Playboy, The Playboy Annual, and The Third Playboy Annual. These are three hardcover books published following the first three years of Playboy’s publication, and featuring what they considered “the best” of the articles features, and cartoons. No photo spreads, though, so you don’t get to see that famous Marilyn Monroe calender pinup. It’s an interesting look at the start of the magazine. There are stories by Ray Bradbury and Robert Sheckley. Jack Cole and Jack Davis are represented, but not any of the more familiar Playboy cartoonists (Gahan Wilson, B. Kliban, , etc.) Virgil “VIP” Partch has three collections – he was big in other magazines, but stopped doing magazine cartoons to concentrate on syndicated strips. There’s no Leroy Neiman Femlin on the Party Jokes pages, and, in fact, no Neiman images for the first couple of years. He started doing little images for the page, but they hadn’t yet evolved into his iconic imp dressed only in stockings, long gloves, and high heels.
The jokes and the limericks are there, but surprisingly restrained. They were still using circumspect language, rather than the more unexpurgated prose they used in later years.

13

I just saw the Twilight Zone episode this evening. Well, not for the first time, of course, but I was just talking about it and describing the story to someone, and here it crops up again.
[Twilight Zone theme]

14

Finished The Town and the City, by Jack Kerouac. His first novel, ahead of his second one, On the Road. Like all of Kerouac’s works, it is somewhat autobiographical. The novel follows the Martin family in the 1930s and '40s including young Peter Martin, a fictionalized version of Kerouac himself. The town is the fictional Galloway, Massachusetts, representing the author’s real-life hometown of Lowell, while the city is New York of the early Beat Generation days. Very good.

Have started Different Seasons, by Stephen King, his 1982 short-story collection. Among the stories is “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” and no prizes for guessing which movie was based on it. Another book picked up in the Talk Story Bookstore on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, America’s westernmost book shop.

15

This got off to a slow start (I don’t care for romance stories), but got quite a bit better when things started to happen. A lot of things I didn’t see coming!
Started yesterday on After Oz, by Gordon McAlpine. It’s the story of what happened to Dorothy after she returned to Kansas. Really good so far.

16

Finished Strangers On A Train by Patricia Highsmith. A pretty good read about two murders, although it was more about the psyches of the murderers rather than their actions. Still, more entertaining than I expected from a novel written two years before I was born (it was published in 1951).

Next up, I’m going to try another ‘old’ novel, On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I’ve never read it; we’ll see how it goes.

17

YAY! Glad you liked it! I like some romances and these were some REALLY wild romances.

18

I’ve been working on The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee for the last month. It’s very good, it’s just taking me so long because it’s a long and information-dense book. I’m impressed with the author’s ability to weave the facts into an interesting story, rather than just a dry recitation of history.

I’m also reading The Dollhouse by Fiona Davis, a dual timeline narrative that takes place at the Barbizon Hotel in New York in the 1950s and modern day. I adore dual timeline as a genre, and all of Davis’s novels are excellent (at least the ones I’ve read so far), so I’m enjoying this one as well.

On audio book, I’m listening to The Accomplice by Lisa Lutz. This one is decent, but not exceptional. It follows the lives of two friends who seem to be the common denominator in several murders over the years. I would call it more of a mystery than a thriller, as the relationship between the main characters is unusual and we’re only gradually seeing how this relationship came to be.

19

Finished Presence: The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other, by Ben Alderson-Day, PhD, which was somewhat interesting.

Now I’m reading Visiting Tom: A Man, A Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace, by Michael Perry.

20

I’m surprised and a little horrified to realize I never posted in the September thread. Mea culpa! Since I last posted, I’ve finished these books:

The Runaway Jury by John Grisham, a fun, clever, engaging legal thriller. A sequestered juror in a big tobacco company’s product-liability trial turns out to have an agenda of his own, and a helper on the outside. The Dustin Hoffman/Gene Hackman/John Cusack movie made it a lawsuit about guns, but I prefer the book’s approach.

So We Read On by Maureen Corrigan, a bibliophile’s (and NPR book editor’s) rhapsody about why F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby truly is The Great American Novel. The author includes a joint mini-bio of F. Scott and Zelda, and lots of interesting info on the inspirations for and the writing of the book, its tepid initial reception, its later rediscovery (in part due to wide circulation as an Armed Services Edition during WWII) and its enduring hold on American culture.

Warplane by Hal Sundt is a pretty good discussion of the planning, design, construction, deployment and service history of the A-10 Warthog ground-attack plane of the U.S. Air Force. It could’ve been better edited, and I noticed some minor factual errors, but it’s still worth a read.

Elleander Morning by Jerry Yulsman is an alternate-timeline novel of a world in which World War II was never fought, thanks to the courage and reality-bending determination of a beautiful young woman. A quick, entertaining read but with one whopper of a plot hole.

The Morningside by Tea Obreht is a novel about a tough-as-nails refugee mother and her awkward preteen daughter in a half-drowned city that sounds a lot like a near-future NYC, although it’s never actually named. The book is very slow in getting started and I almost gave up on it, but I’m glad I didn’t. Still not nearly as good as Obreht’s previous book, the masterful, extraordinary Inland, however.