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Read two notable books lately:
(1) The Other Side of Silence, a Bernie Gunther novel by Philip Kerr. It is I think the 10th in the series, and usually such a lengthy series is a bad sign - the author gets lazy and formulaic, and the quality drops off.
I’m happy to say I didn’t find this the case with this one. I totally enjoyed it: it was a book made of pure awesome as far as I was concerned. Set initially a decade after the war (with flashbacks to the war years), Bernie gets sucked into a web of blackmail, spying, revenge and murder, all through playing Bridge with an elderly Somerset Maugham.
Read it in one sitting, only to discover it was 4 in the AM and I had work the next day - it’s been a while since I’ve done that.
(2) Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, by Neil Shubin. One of the best popular science books it’s been my pleasure to read.
Devil’s diary.
Very interesting read about rosenberg’s rise in the nazi party and his journal. Kempner found it in Germany, used it for the trials then sent it and bunches of documents to his home in Pennsylvania.
While we were upcountry these past few days for the Thai New Year, I finished Wolves of the Calla, volume 5 of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Very good. My understanding is he left off with volume 4 until that accident he had, getting run over by a minivan, prompted him to finish the series while he was still alive. (George RR Martin, please take note.)
I also read Djibouti, Elmore Leonard’s final novel, published three years before his 2013 death. An Oscar-winning maker of documentaries and her right-hand man decide to do a doc on piracy off the Horn of Africa and stumble upon a terrorist plot. It was so-so, definitely not among Leonard’s better works. Okay in a pinch.
Now it’s back to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series with volume 6: Song of Susannah.
Slowly making my way through A Memory of Whiteness by Kim Stanley Robinson. I read it back in the 80s when it came out but haven’t read it since. In a future solar system, much as described in his later books, the new Master of the Holywelkin Orchestra sets out with it on a tour of the outer planets and their various colonies. The orchestra is a massive glass tree-like structure he can climb inside of and play an entire orchestra of instruments himself using an array of keyboards, etc. which control all the instruments set in the branches and twists of the construction.
It was designed by an eminent physicist over a century before, and has an ardent fan base willing to follow it around on it’s occasional concert tours. It seems to contain secrets, new and old, and conspiracies and schemers also follow in it’s trail…
KSR signed my copy years ago and described it on the flyleaf as ‘my strange child’. I tend to agree! It’s interesting seeing the similarities and differences in his mid-80s vision of our colonising of the solar system with his later work. The moving city on Mercury has it’s genesis here, for instance, although it appears in a couple of his later books as well.
Other books read include the insipid Weighing Shadows by Lisa Goldstein and the much more fun Arkwright by Allen Steele. Also a re-read (after a couple of decades) of Dover Beach by Richard Bowker.
Also enjoyed Golem and the Jinni–but I’m mainly replying because I finished Lovecraft Country about an hour ago. I didn’t recognize the title, just picked it up on a whim at the library because I’d read Bad Monkeys by the same author years ago, and had no idea what it was about. I read it partly as an exploration of how to deal with the appalling politics of otherwise great writers, and partly as a great set of stories. So much fun!
A few weeks ago I read City of Stairs. It suffered for being read immediately after the phenomenal The Traitor Baru Cormorant: the books share a similar plot (basic spoiler for both books below)a young woman with a bureaucratic job description, serving an empire, comes to a colony to deal with potential rebellion, and while City of Stairs was quite good, I kept comparing it unfavorably to Baru Cormorant. Still, I’ll check out City of Blades next time I’m at the library.
I also began a read-aloud for my third graders: Rain, Reign. It’s about a fifth grade girl with high-functioning autism, and my awesome school librarian and friend recommended it. Sheesh. The dog doesn’t die, but it may as well be one of those The Dog Dies children’s books that teaches a Very Important Lesson by making things just suck ass for the kid. I wish I’d had time to read the whole thing before starting it as a read-aloud; it’ll be fine, but it won’t be fun.
I finished reading Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum, who performed the first solo circumnavigation of the globe. It was a breezy little story and his writing was fairly humorous and self-deprecating. Looking back on it, the scenes where he hangs around with young children seem a bit creepy considering he was convicted of indecent exposure to a child 10 years later. The descriptions of bloodthirsty savages and the one-time use of negro dialect seemed pretty awkward by modern standards as well.
I started reading Jewel’s memoir this weekend (Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story), and wow. I highly recommend it. Since it’s a celebrity memoir, I was mentally grouping it in the celebrity memoir category: kind of fluffy reading for when you don’t want to think too much. I should have known better, considering Jewel’s song-writing abilities. First of all, the woman has a knack for writing. She can certainly write good lyrics, but I wasn’t sure whether being a good song-writer would transfer into being a good memoirist. It does – she knows how to tell a good story. But more importantly, this book has so much soul and substance to it. It’s much more emotionally gratifying to read than your typical celebrity memoir would be.
On the more light-hearted side of things, I also downloaded The Fairest of Them All by Carolyn Turgeon, which is a fairy-tale retelling, except that it combines the story of Rapunzel with the story of Snow White. It’s rather whimsical, but Turgeon writes beautifully, and I enjoy what little I’ve read so far.
I finished Conversations with Kennedy by Ben Bradlee, which was the next best thing to hanging out after hours with JFK himself. He was wittier and better company than anyone running for his job this year, as far as I’m concerned.
I’m also still enjoying Randall Munroe’s What If?, a collection of XKCD columns, although he dodges some questions that would probably yield interesting answers. I’m about halfway through the audiobook of David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers (read by the author himself in his wonderfully plummy voice), and will soon be starting another history, Michael McGerr’s A Fierce Discontent, a well-reviewed book about the Progressive movement in the U.S.
Just finished Hap & Leonard, a collection of short scraps about Lansdale’s two best characters. Decent, though some of it has been published before and as I read it straight through, I got tired of constantly hearing about Leonard’s cookies and Brett’s toenails.
Started this morning on Carter & Lovecraft, by Jonathan L. Howard, who doesn’t seem to know how to write a bad book. A detective, a bookstore, and Cthulhu? Yes please.
OOOO!!!
I finished Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch yesterday. Very good read, well paced, though the twist didn’t surprise me. I actually expected it.
At one point, Lesley was and in all honesty, maybe still is, my number one suspect for the Faceless Man
That will be a big benefit of living in the US again – the nonfiction selection is pretty dismal over here. Hit or miss. I’ve found a lot of McCullough here in the past, but it’s always the luck of the draw. His books in particular seem to come and go. The fiction selection is decent, I’ve seen a big improvement since the 1980s, but there are lots of areas in nonfiction I just can’t find in Thailand. I guess I could order something through Amazon, but I’m one of those Luddites who have yet to do that, plus you never know when a Customs official is going to get a wild hair up his ass and try to extort a big duty on it before releasing it.
I read The Lost Ones by “Ian Cameron” (pen name of Donald G. Payne), which was filmed by Disney as The Island at the Top of the World back in 1974. I’ve never seen the film, but now I’;m curious. The novel was set in a then-contemporary 1960, but the Disney Folk rewrote it as a Victorian Jules Verne-esque steampunk adventure, replacing the helicopter or airplane with a fantastic balloon.
Totally coincidentally, I stumbled across a copy of Jules Verne’s The Lighthouse at the End of the World (no relation to the above, except in the title). I’d read the book before, but my earlier reading was a translation of the version published by Verne’s son MIchel after Jules’ death, and MIchel has become notorious for adding things to his father’s work. The version I just read is part of the recent trend of new translations based directly on Jules Verne’s work alone, stripped of his son’s additions.
Actually, this volume supports a belief I’ve had for a long time, which is that Michel has been getting a bum rap all these years. Most of his alterations are to the advantage of the novel – he corrects his father’s apparently dyslexic confusions of direction, removes needless duplication, and adds needed (but missing) information. The older Verne himself said that he rewrote extensively after getting proofs back from Hetzel, apparently regarding his initial version as a rough draft, frequently not merely correcting things but adding entire sections. It’;s not that surprising that his son should do the same (he adds an entire section to this book, apparently feeling it needed the extra tension). It makes it easier to understand why Michel ended up adding six chapters to The Meteor Hunt – he felt that he was carrying on his father’s styl;e. But when he wrote The Barsac Mission, taking only background and suggestion from his father’s work, and practically creating the novel out of whole cloth, he certainly went too far.
The Lighthouse at the End of the World was filmed under the more provocative title The Light at the End of the World in the 1971 with Yul Brynner and Kirk Douglas. They also had Samantha Eggar, although there’s no female role in the novel, either before or after Michel’s additions.
I stumbled across a wonderful book last weekend, which I’m not quite finished with yet – The James Bond Dossier by Kingsley Amis. It’s a lengthy essay on Ian Fleming’s literary character (it barely mentions the films), and is a very interesting take on it all, placing it in its time and in perspective. I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about this one before – I know that Amis wrote the first post-Fleming Bond novel, Colonel Sun, and under a pseudonym had written the very interesting The Book of Bond: or Every Man His Own 007, which poked fun at the details of the literary Bond (while celebrating them. The book is meticulously footnoted, for a humor book).
Finally, I’ve started Robert Irwin’s book The Arabian Nights: A Companion, a book that, among other things, unravels the complex and complicated history of where the book as we know it came from. It also goes through the various translations. Like most other modern commentators, Irwin doesn’t much care for Richard Burton’s translation, which I love. Irwin knows a helluva lot more than I know, or probably ever will know about the 1001 Nights, but it troubles me that he makes statements about the Burton translation that are demonstrably wrong (and I’m quite certain of this). It makes me suspect him of not being completely objective in this.
On audio, I’ve just finished Clive Cussler’s Eye of Heaven. It’s on to his book Piranha, and to the Deutsche Gramophone Guide to the Opera.
Honestly I think this series just keeps getting better. Can’t WAIT to read the next one - which annoyingly comes out two weeks later HERE than THERE. :mad:
I haz pre-order at Amazon 
And just ordered the next one after Broken Homes… title is not forthcoming in this tired brain :mad:
This is a great book. I eagerly await the film version.
Just finished ‘Fevre Dream’ by George R.R. Martin. I thought it was excellent. It’s a fresh, lightning paced take on the vampire genre. I’d recommend it to any horror or fantasy fan. 5 stars.
Next up: ‘The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer’, by Siddhartha Mukherjee.
Re-reading Samurai William by Giles Milton, a historical account of the first English person to reach Japan - his story was the factual basis for the novel Shogun.
The actual history is just as strange as the novel, maybe moreso.
No novelist would ever dare to invent characters like the perverse English captain who attempted to make his fortune by importing sixteenth century English porn to Japan (much to the puzzlement of the Japanese) and also seduce a Japanese lady by showing off an oil painting of a seductively nude woman he kept in his cabin - only to have her mistake the painting for a Madonna, and start praying in front of it because she was a secret Christian? 
I just read Doctor Ox’s Experiment, in the 1963 edition. I have at least two other copies of this, but this one is different. It’s like no other edition I know of.
It was published in 1963 by MacMillan, with an intro by Willy Ley, an afterword by Hubertus Strughold (that sounds like a pseudonym) and illustrations by William Pène du Bois.
The book is printed sideways. This Amazon page shows the cover, but if you click “Look Inside” it does NOT show you the present volume:
You place the binding TOWARD you and lift up the front of the book to give you the first page, which is actually two pages of the book, split horizontally by the binding. You read the entire book that way.
The only other book I’ve seen like that is a humor book, Bill Gates’ Personal Super-Secret Private Laptop, in which flipping the pages one by one looks like a laptop with changing screens
The Verne book is not a “new” (circa 1963) translation, although it has been updated from the 19th century original.
One of the all-time classics of fantasy. If you haven’t read it and are a fantasy fan, I highly suggest it. The main character is more than a bit of a git, but the rest is amazingly executed and vivid.
There’s a second trilogy (not coincidentally named The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant) which, while not quite on par with the first trilogy, is still pretty damned good. Donaldson’s history is also interesting and helps explain the plot.