My replacement Idaho book, Emily Ruskovich’s Idaho, is much better than the previous selection. The writing isn’t pretentious and the characters are actually interesting. There’s a character with early-onset dementia, which my mother had, but it’s not bothering me as much as I feared because his dementia manifests differently than mom’s.
I’m also reading Morning Star, the third book in Pierce Brown’s Red Rising Saga. I had to put it down for a minute because one of my favorite characters just got killed.
I tossed A Sunny Place for Shady People Mariana Enriquez back to the library after three stories. The first one was very good, I liked it a lot. The second used the Elisa Lam tragedy as a coat rack to hang a story about drug addiction on and then had the nerve to not even do anything with every plot line, choosing just to sensationalize poor Elisa and then stop. The third story was some sort of demon possesion maybe, we don’t know the story again just stopped as the main character was transforming without giving any answers or even saying anything about the horrific rape in the beginning. It was very tabloid level of ick.
I finally finished the complete Chronicles of Narnia on audio. I’d only read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe before this. The collection is great, with readings by Kenneth Branaugh, Michael York, Lynn Redgrave, Patrick Stewart, and others. The stories are well-told, with interesting twists and surprisingly dark sequences for a children’s book. Lewis claims he wasn;t writing “allegory”, saying that it didn’t meet the technical definition, but talking about this in ordinary speech, this is allegory – to be true to Lewis’ claim you’ve got to give a long-winded explanation in place of that single useful word (as Lewis does). Aslan in Jesus, and The King Across the Water is God the Father, and Aslan’s Realm is Heaven. If you’re not a wholly committed Christian, when Lewis pulls out his religion it can make you uneasy. But, then again, it makes you uneasy when he goes religious in his science-fiction trilogy Perelandra, too.
In hard-copy, I’m still re-reading the old Lancer L. Sprague deCamp and Lin Carter Conan books. I’ve re-read Conan the Buccaneer and Conan of the Isles and am now starting Conan the Avenger, which is by Bjorn Nyberg, edited by deCamp. I still wonder how a Scandinavian fan of the Conan books managed to write this piece of fanfic (in English, not his native tongue) and get it published. It originally appeared as “The Return of Conan” in a Gnome Press hardcover in 1957, and deCamp eagerly accepted it as part of the paperback series, probably because it padded out the series and filled in the gap after The Hour of the Dragon/Conan the Conqueror, which was chronologically Robert E. Howard’s last Conan adventure. (DeCamp eventually added a volume of short stories as Conan of Aquilonia in 1977 and Conan of the Isles in 1968). The volume Conan the Avenger also contains a slim portion of Robert E. Howard’s essay “The Hyborian Age”, the first part of which appeared in the volume Conan. This little piece could as easily have been kept with that first part. I suspect the only reason they split it off and published it here was so that they could legitimately slap Howard’s name on the book, where it would add to sales. Nyberg wrote a couple of short Conan stories, which appeared in magazines and later in the Conan collections Conan the Swordsman and Sagas of Conan. I’ve read them, but can’t recall anything about them.
I’ve also been re-reading bits from books I’ve read before on my tablet, finishing up Moe Howard’s autobiographical I Stooged to Conquer, which seems to differ slightly from its earlier publication as Moe Howard and the Three Stooges.
Finished The Lost Story, by Meg Shaffer. I enjoyed the first third of the book, while the fate of the two teens was a mystery. Once the mystery was revealed, however, the book felt derivative and heavy-handed in a way that didn’t work for me at all.
Finished Speaking in Tongues, by J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimopulos, which is a book about linguistics and is okay, but was too short to go into much detail; and The Skies of Pern by Anne McCaffrey, meh.
Now I’m reading Father of the Bride of Frankenstein by Daniel M. Kimmel, and Punctilious Punctuation: Telling Tales With and of Those Jots and Tittles , and the Horrifying Story of Why the Period Goes Inside the Quotation Marks, by Ian Randal Strock.
I finished Departure 37 by Scott Carson (aka Michael Koryta). One of the best books I’ll read this year. I was a little confused at times, and I see by looking at the other Goodreads reviews that I’m not alone in that, but that’s time travel for ya.
I’m on the road. I read Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper in one sitting on a long airline flight. In spite of my being a big Twain fan, I’d never read this one before (or seen any movie adaptation)
I’m also re-reading my old non-Robert E, Howard Conan novels, most of which I never read after the first time. I’ve gone through Conan the Buccaneer and Conan of the Isles, and am now grinding through Conan the Avenger.
I find this one intriguing for a reason aside from the contents. The first publication in 1968 featured a Frank Frazetta painting on the cover that made Conan look like a brainless troglodyte
They evidently decided it didn’t look that great. Frazetta redrew the image circa 1980:
Ace books evidently felt so, to, and in 1989 replaced it with a painting by Blas Gallego that is completely different:
Finished Father of the Bride of Frankenstein by Daniel M. Kimmel, meh (although I enjoy the title) and Punctilious Punctuation: Telling Tales With and of Those Jots and Tittles , and the Horrifying Story of Why the Period Goes Inside the Quotation Marks, by Ian Randal Strock, which is interesting if you are interested in that subject.
Next: Fancies and Goodnights, a story collection by John Collier, and Curtain Going Up! The Story of Katharine Cornell, by Gladys Malvern.
Finished it. I’d say it’s grimly, scarily accurate in its broad outlines, but I noticed several relatively minor errors, which made me wonder what other (bigger?) errors I may have missed. Still recommended for anyone interested in national security and military affairs.
On a much lighter note, I recently zipped through three other short books:
What If? 2 by Randall Munroe has lots of well-thought-through answers to absurd hypotheticals ranging from filling the Solar System with soup, to how many people it would take to actually build Rome in a day, to how you might slide on a pole from the Moon to Earth, etc. Lots of fun.
I also re-read King Ottokar’s Sceptre by Hergé, a 1947 Balkan adventure which was, as a kid, the first Tintin book I ever read, and The Red Sea Sharks, a 1958 Tintin story, costarring the irascible Capt. Haddock, in which they and Tintin’s dog Snowy take on slave traders in the Middle East. I’ve always enjoyed Hergé’s beautifully-detailed drawings and engaging stories.
My current audiobook is Hotel by Arthur Hailey, a 1965 big novel about a once-grand New Orleans hotel which has seen better days. There are several intertwining plot threads: the hotel’s owner considers selling it, a cat burglar plies his trade, some drunken frat boys almost commit a gang rape, an ambitious assistant manager is flattered to be wooed by two different women, a posh British couple tries to cover up a terrible crime, and racial integration finally comes knocking.
I’ve been silently following along the Whatcha Reading threads for ideas on what to read for a while now, so I figure I’m at least somewhat obligated to share my reading journey.
I just finished The Moon Pool (The Moon Pool (Dr. Goodwin #1) by A. Merritt | Goodreads) by Abraham Merritt. I’m a slow reader already, and it was an even slower read than normal for me. I wouldn’t recommend reading it just for the joy of it - but if you are interested in the history of lost world novels and/or the books that were the inspiration for Dungeons and Dragons, it’s pretty enlightening.
Next up is Cugel’s Saga by Jack Vance (I’ve already read The Eyes of the Overworld). If you couldn’t have guessed, I’m currently dipping my toes into Appendix N ( Appendix N - Wikipedia )…
Still on a Stephen King streak but with a slight detour. All copies of the next book in the Holly Gibney series were checked out from my local libraries. So I’m reading 11/22/63.
This is one of King’s big books. I’m a hundred and fifty pages in and the story is only starting.
I liked 11/22/63 a lot. Two friends of mine who are very well-versed on JFK’s assassination also say that King, aided by a researcher, did his homework and got the facts right.
The long version of The Moon Pool features the first appearance I am aware of of a very popular item – the hand-held ray gun.
Prior to this, “ray guns” were large devices – more “ray cannons” that required fixed mounting and several people to operate. Think of H.G. Wells’ “Martian heat ray”, or the Disintegrator Beams used in Edison’s Conquest of Mars (the pro-Earth sequel to Wells by Garrett P. Serviss, and the fist work to use the term “disintegrator”) or the other early ray weapons. They were all big, unwieldy weapons. The Evil Queen in The Moon Pool had a hand-held conical weapon that produced a lethal ray. It even showed up on the cover of a 1948 reprint of the story:
Unfortunately, the idea wasn’t immediately followed up by anyone else, and it remained for the comic strip hero Buck Rogers to introduce the hand-held ray gun to wide pop culture. It helped that the Daisy company (noted for its “BB” guns”) started producing toys of the XZ-38 Disintegrator pistol in 1935
(The novel Armageddon 2419 AD by Philip Francis Nowlan that inspired the comic strip featured those “ray cannons”, but not hand-held ray guns)
I finally finished Book 3 of the Expanse science fiction series, Abbaddon’s Gate.
It was
Everything about that book was so well-constructed. Theme, characterization, plot, big splashy sci-fi ideas. I really think James SA Corey is going to be remembered along with Bujold and Heinlein and Asimov and all those others.
I’m not sure what to read next. I have about 600 options. I was thinking about this dark romance called Priest that I read about in the New York Times.
All settled into Bangkok. Read Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History’s Greatest Screwups, by the actor Ed Helms. Connected to his podcast of the same theme. I’d never heard of the podcast, I’m not really a podcast fan, but the book was good. Covered the 1950s through the 2000s and even included the January 2018 Hawaii false missile alert, which we were there for. A sequel is reportedly in the works. Hope so.
Have started Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History, by Erik Larson. About the September 1900 hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas, killing 8000.
I finished Coffin Moon, which I enjoyed very much. I think there’s room for a sequel, and if he writes one I’ll read it.
Started today on Play Nice, by Rachel Harrison. Harrison writes horror-lite, and this one’s about a haunted house. It’s okay. I hate the protagonist, but I think you’re supposed to.
