I’m about a hundred pages into Edmund Morris’s Colonel Roosevelt, about Theodore Roosevelt’s post-White House years. Good stuff. He really captures T.R.'s energy, wide interests and outsize personality, and the complacency and political blindness of the European powers in the years just before World War I.
I’m also reading a collection of scripts from Joss Whedon’s all-too-short-lived sf TV series Firefly, and wishing it had run much longer.
Khadaji was one of the earlier members of the 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; and he started these monthly book threads. Sadly, he passed away in January 2013, and we decided to rename these monthly threads in his honour.
Just finished Part 4, “Sadie and the General,” before logging on. Tomorrow I’ll pick up on Part 5, “11/22/63.”
Again, this is an excellent book. But at the risk of being fanwanked again, I have to say some of the Texas stuff has me cringing. However, I don’t think this is Stephen King’s fault. At the front of the book, where the copyright and other publishing info are located, it says this copy is an “export edition.” It would seem the publisher has been monkeying around with some of the text to make it more palatable to a British readership. I myself am a reformed Texan. I grew up in Texas. I spent 24 years in Texas. And I feel certain that even today, no self-respecting Texan would call a “fuck” a “shag” and certainly not in the early 1960s. And I guarantee that in the entire history of this universe, no low-class, trailer-trash Texas slut (Ivy Templeton in Fort Worth) would call cigarettes “fags.” And I am not sure I ever heard of Boxing Day before coming to Thailand and remain doubtful that even if it is East Texas and not my familiar West Texas, they’d be observing it there in 1962.
Fortunately, these occurrences are few and far between. I’ve seen this practice with some of John Grisham’s books that were published in London. It’s not taking away from the enjoyment of the book, but it gives me an odd feeling of disconnect whenever I come across it.
Since my last update (almost a month ago), I finished both The Magicians (book one of Lev Grossman’s Magicians Trilogy) and The Julian Chapter (a Kindle Single add-on to the book Wonder). Both were very good.
I’m currently about 60% through The Magician King, which is book two of the trilogy. I wasn’t sure about it when I started, but I’m enjoying it a lot more than I expected to. I now fully expect to move on to book three (The Magician’s Land) when I’m done.
THEN I plan to finally read 11/22/63. And possibly also Revival.
I read Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. I had hopes for it at the beginning: it’s the first gothic novel so I was expecting creepiness and strange doings. Well, there were strange doings. The evil lord’s son is killed by a giant helmet falling on him on the second page. Then there’s some wicked scheming and escaping maidens and mysterious peasants and then I have absolutely no clue what was going on. I ended up skimming the last four chapters in a five-chapter book. All I got was that there’s a priest who’s actually the father of the mysterious peasant, and the evil lord wasn’t really the ruler of the land he was ruling, and the daughter got stabbed by her father for some reason I don’t really know or care why and then the mysterious peasant became the new lord of the manor and married the escaping maiden and was miserable for the rest of his life because he really loved the stabbed daughter.
Over the break, maxthevool and I drove to LA and back, so, as we often do, we listened to an audio book. Well, we tried. I insisted he turn it off after an hour and a half.
The book was “The Paper Magician” and my complaint was, as usual, poor sense of place. Is it just me, or does this drive any other readers batty? If you’re from fucking Utah, and you’re maybe not very good at research, and you haven’t read and internalized a huuuuge amount of British fiction, consider NOT setting your book in period England, even with a poorly drawn and unconvincing “alternate timeline” handwave. Some of the errors were trifling in and of themselves, but they just compounded over time. The American narrator also didn’t help.
I am reading Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, which I am enjoying; it’s a long but quick read. It reminds me of one of my all-time favorites, The Time Traveler’s Wife, in that it’s a science fictiony premise, but focuses more on emotions and relationships than on adventurous plot developments (although the very first chapter foreshadows some change in that). The main character keeps being reborn (in the same time and place) every time she dies, and although she doesn’t have conscious memories of her previous lives, she gets intuitive feelings that enable her to avoid mistakes she has made previously.
Previously I read Stephen King’s* Bag of Bones*, which I didn’t rush through like I usually do a King novel, possibly just because I am getting King fatigue after reading a lot of him all year. It started much slower than his stuff usually does, and I thought it might actually be the King that I could recommend to my squeamish wife. But then things heated up as they usually do…final verdict on recommendation to Mrs. Fish: oh hell no! Wondering if I want to rush out and buy Revival or wait a while…
Katharine Tree released (supposedly) the last Settlement book, Before I Sleep. I read that. Her stuff is to my taste, but I have some funny feelings about where the characters went, in this one. Would be interested in hearing opinions if anyone else reads these.
I am now back to slogging my way through the latest Outlander book, Written In My Own Heart’s Blood, as if I mean it. I am afraid that this one hasn’t kept my attention very well… there are a long list of things Gabaldon does that don’t keep my attention, and this book spends a lot of time on all of them. Also, it is badly edited. Typos, non sequiturs, and breaks in continuity abound. Still… I love me some Jamie and Claire. And also some Ian and Rachel.
I tried to read The Call Of The Wild. I got one page in before I thought, wait, is this book written from the point of view of a dog? I can’t do that. Sorry. Next…
Contemplating re-reading Far From The Madding Crowd, in anticipation of the movie release this spring. It has been a long time since I made it through a Victorian novel, so I am afraid. I have many fond memories of reading them in my 20s. I am afraid that I’ve gotten too crotchety for it, in my 30s.
I am reading the Pulitzer prize winning novel Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Stout. It’s a series of interconnected stories. I am not always one for modern fiction as I find it often leaves me cold but this is quite good: warm, humane, insightful and slyly amusing.
LavenderBlue, Since you like Olive Kitteridge I’m betting you’d like Juliet in August by Diane Warren as well. In fact, I liked it better. It also consists of the stories of several people in a small town. The author does a wonderful job of bringing the characters to life.
I’m excited that my e-copy of The Life We Bury by Allen Eskins came in today. I’d gotten about two thirds of the way through a few weeks ago when it had to go back to the library. Here, at least, you can’t extend your time with e-books. I guess because they only have a limited amount of them. So I had to get on the waiting list to get it back.
It’s about a college student who has to do a story about someone’s life for one of his classes. He winds up at a nursing home interviewing a man who had been convicted of the rape and murder of a young girl 30 years before. He was only let out of prison to go to the nursing home because he was dying of cancer. The student, with the help of his neighbor, puts the pieces together and concludes that the man didn’t do it and he sets off on finding who did. This is while he has to deal with his alcoholic mother and autistic brother. Eskins has a thoughtful and touching way of writing. I’m going to put this on my Must Read Again list.
Nah, you get used to this sort of thing. Like I said, it does not take away from the enjoyment of the story. The occurrences are few and far between – in this case, four times noted in the 575 pages I’ve read so far, so it’s not like they’re all sounding like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. But one has to wonder why they feel the need to do it at all. Would the Brits really be confused if someone said “smokes” instead of “fags”? And does Stephen King and other writers know they do it? I don’t think I would give permission for something like this if it were my book.
I’ve heard of this happening quite a bit, but in reverse. Americanizing popular British books by taking out all the “pavements” “lifts” and “car parks.” The first two Harry Potters were quite heavily edited, presumably to aid younger readers, up to and including the title of the first one.
To me, the worst is reading a book set in a foreign country and having the currency referred to as “dollars.”
