I will give fatherland a go. Thank you.
Finished I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. It was entertaining, though I had trouble concentrating towards the end. That’s on me; I don’t have much focus right now.
I also skimmed through Catherine the Ghost, by Kathe Koja. If you’re a fan of Wuthering Heights, you’ll probably enjoy this as well.
Finished Prayers from the Ark & The Creatures’ Choir by Carmen Bernos de Gasztold, translated by Rumer Godden, of which “Prayer of the Goldfish” was the best poem, and Learwife, by JR Thorp, which was excellent.
Next up: Last Night, A Superhero Saved My Life: An All-Star Roster on the Caped Crusader That Changed Their Lives, edited by Leisa Mignogna, and Fortune’s Fantasy: 13 Excursions Into the Unexpected, by Ken Altabef.
Only one book in the past week and a half, and a short one at that: The Lightning Tree, by Patrick “I’ll never finish my trilogy goddammit” Rothfuss. Its title is really confusing: originally it was a short story, published as “The Lightning Tree” in 2014. Then it was expanded into a novella, published as The Narrow Road Between Desires in 2023. But I swear the copy I read and is on my bedroom floor right now is called The Lightning Tree–I’ll double check when I get home.
Anyway, it’s fine enough. There’s a weird bit in the middle where (minor spoiler) the protagonist pays a boy for the location where a pretty girl takes her bath in the river, then goes and spies on her, then apparently has sex with her because she asked the boy to sell her location to the protagonist, and it all comes across as more of Rothfuss’s sex fantasies in a way that I find a little creepy. But other than that bit, it was an entertaining enough novella.
I tried reading Rakesfall, in which the starting premise is that a bunch of dead children are watching a TV show about two magical children watching a TV show about the dead children, and then it gets weirder. It’s very good, but between the election and the hurricane, my life is way too stressful for that sort of meta experiment at the moment, so I put it down until later.
I finished The Secret Cases of Sherlock Holmes. The book has a very clever idea – have Holmes participate in solving some real-life crimes, beyond the Jack the Ripper case. It’s well-researched, but I was underwhelmed. Not enough of Doyle’s Holmes and his character there, although author Donald Thomas perseveres. I can’t exactly tell you why it doesn’t quite work, but , for whatever reason, it doesn’t.
Between this and Anthony Horowitz’ Holmes adventure The House of Silk, (which I recently read as an audiobook), I’ve been getting The Unexpurgated Holmes, where modern-day authors have Holmes involved with criminals of the sort Doyle would never write about. He suggested blackmail, extra-marital affairs, and illegitimacy, but never went further. In these recent books we get sodomy, sadism, pedophilia, and other sexual crimes that would have been apt subjects for real blackmail. It’s arguably more realistic and grittier, but I’m not sure it adds anything to Holmes.
On, now, to the John Mortimer collection Rumpole a la Carte (the title story of which I’ve already read, and seen dramatized on TV) . I’ve also picked up the DVD collection of the second season of Rumpole, so I’m getting lots of the character.
On audio I’ve finished Jungle Tales of Tarzan, and have been thinking quite a bit about Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and racism. I have objected to many of the examples of racism cited in the Tarzan books as cases of cherry-picking, but it’s pretty clear that Burroughs himself certainly had racist ideas and preconceptions - it shows in the way he describes the black villagers that Tarzan encounters. And Tarzan views all the blacks as enemies and terrorizes the village repeatedly. Of course, a villager killed his foster-mother Kala, but Tarzan does not seem to similarly treat all jungle predators.
Ibram X. Kendi accused Tarzan of being a case where a white author was showing that a white man could be a better jungle survivor than a black man, in essence being a better “ape-man” that a black man could be (and thus providing some sort of answer to Jack Johnson’s winning of the heavyweight title). I still don’t buy the thing about Jackson, but the following paragraph from “Tarzan and the Black Boy” in this collection gives me pause about the rest of that thought:
“Earth’s dominant race” makes his prejudices pretty clear (as does “dull, Negroid mind”), and in this passage we see that ERB really was arguing that blacks “lacked the divine spark which had permitted Tarzan, the white boy, to benefit by his training in the ways of the fierce jungle.” No wonder, to ERB’s mind, that there were no black Tarzans, despite there being plenty of chances of other Kalas adopting black babies. It makes you wonder how he felt about Mowgli.
I’m now re-reading Bob Woodward’s Peril on audio. Seemed appropriate at election time.
i started fatherland by harris last night. i have the fear index on the kindle.
fatherland is not kindled, i went to the b&n to get it. very dangerous. so many interesting books and things.
I was perusing some list of mysteries/thrillers (which I enjoy) and came across an author named S. A. Cosby. Anybody here read anything by him? The plot lines listed look intriguing.
Hope you love it, as I do!