Khadaji's Whatcha Readin' thread -- June 2018 Edition

Cafe Society
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Here we go, June Sumer up North, winter Down Under. … and probably Siberia too.

So here I am reeling from Averngers Infinity War and thinking I need some nice, vacuous, potato chip romance or something to wake my poor heart back up… so manga it is!

What’s on your plate for June? Light, heavy, philosophical? Graphic Novels?

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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 honor.

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May you rained a lot…

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A little over 80% through The Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer. Gee, I wonder how it’s going to end!

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I picked up two Edgar Rice Burroughs novels. By chance, they’re the only two historical novels he wrote. I’m starting with The Outlaw of Torn. From the cover, I thought this was some medieval barbarian epic. It’s actually Burroughs’ second published work, which came out before his first Tarzan story, and is surprisingly knowledgeable about a period of English history I know little about – the time of Henry III. I suspect that, had Tarzan and the Martian novels not been so successful, in some alternate universe we’d have a slew of historical novels by Burroughs.
The other is I Am a Barbarian, set in Caligula’s Rome. It wasn’t published until 1967, although he wrote it in the 1940s.

My wife just finished reading Martha Hall Kelly’s Lilac Girls, which would be a significant change of pace.

On audio I’m reading Jill Jonnes’ Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Light the World, a very well-researched and -written history of the early days of electricity, with plenty of details I was unaware of.

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Finally got Anne Hillerman’s Cave of Bones off the library waiting list.

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I’ve just finished Carter and Lovecraft and its sequel After the End of the World. Definitely read them in order–I got the second first, not realizing it was in a series, and was baffled until I found the first and read it.

Amazing, life-changing fiction? Nope. But they’re pretty fun pastiches of Lovecraftian horror set in modern times and with modern sensibilities, starring Lovecraft’s granddaughter and the grandson of one of Lovecraft’s protagonists. Worth a light summer read.

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I found a copy of Curt Siodmak’s “Donovan’s Brain” in a little free library box the other day. It’s one of those science fiction books that’s probably more referenced than actually read, so I figured I’d give it a try. It’s…somewhat oddly written. It’s like a cross of Citizen Kane and a gothic novel with a “there are things man was not meant to know” subtext.

For those not familiar with this light romp, it’s the story of a scientist who is obsessed with studying the processes of the brain. By happenstance, he is called to the scene of a horrific plane crash where he attempts unsuccessfully to save the life of Donovan, an extremely wealthy (and, as it turns out, unpleasant) businessman. Failing to save the man’s life and figuring “waste not, want not”, the protagonist removes Donovan’s brain and preserves it in a flask, keeping it alive. In trying to figure out how to communicate with the brain, he decides on telepathy and ups the brain’s power supply by feeding it multi-vitamins and stuff. The side-effect being that the brain now starts taking over his mind and forcing him to carry out Donovan’s evil agenda. So far, all pretty straightforward and believable in a 1940’s SF sort of way.

Despite this solid foundation, there are some strange things about the novel. Obviously the 1940’s science is pretty dated and the doctor seems to have less idea of how a brain works than I do an iPhone. But the real problem are the characters who come straight from B movie casting. None are even slightly believable. At best, they are caricatures. The protagonist is a sociopath – a man interested only in his science, to whom other human beings are of complete insignificance. Donovan is, or was, a monster of a human being who brooked no interference or lack of control. The protagonist’s wife (a saint, who he barely acknowledges) and his assistant appear as ciphers; they act to serve as foils for the protagonist’s philosophy of science and fulfill needful roles in the plot, but their motivations are a mystery. Why do they stay and help such an unlikable man with such a dubious enterprise?

Anyway, the plot grinds on and Donovan attempts to fulfill his dying goal (oh yeah, he was dying before the plane crash, so you figure he’d be grateful to be living in a flask). It turns out to be a really stupid goal – this heartless monster of a man is trying to rectify the one wrong he will admit committing by doing some good for the family of a man he drove to suicide. If doing that requires, say, murder, bribery, or corruption, that’s not really a problem. And disembodied telepathic brains don’t really have to worry about the po-po, so it’s all good.

So the brain controls the protagonist with his attitude vacillating from “eh, you have to make some sacrifices for science” to “well, I appear to be inhabiting a living hell. That sucks.” The protagonist’s scientific detachment makes it hard to feel any real gothic horror. A ruthless, cruel monster has taken over your brain and is controlling your actions? How can you tell? Cause you weren’t doing so hot even before that.

Then, for no reason, five months go by. It’s now May. Things come to a head (ha), the brain is defeated, and there are signs that our protagonist has learned a valuable lesson about Messing With Things Best Left to God. Another five months go by and it’s now June. The reader begins to wonder who edited this thing. The protagonist has now reconciled with his wife and admitted that he has discovered a scientific truth which is apparently that you shouldn’t preserve human brains and turn them into telepathic monsters until humans have evolved to be good. The lesson that maybe if you start with monsters than you end up with monsters seems to have escaped him.

Anyway – brain in a jar. Bad idea. Don’t try this at home kids.

Coolest and cleverest thing about the book is the recurrent phrase “Amidst the mists and coldest frosts, he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.”

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Great review, Finagle! :smiley: Thanks for taking the bullet for us; I would have picked that one up, too.

I just finished Stephen King’s newest, The Outsider. It was pretty much a police procedural with a supernatural perp, and could be considered an addition to the Mr. Mercedes trilogy because the character of Holly plays a large part. I didn’t find her quite as endearing this time round, no matter how often I was told to. I also had trouble remembering who the other characters were, because there were so many and I didn’t really care about them. I’ll stick this one on my shelf in the interest of (near) completion, and probably never read it again.

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That phrase was actually a diction exercise that existed long before the book. I suspect that Siodmak (who emigrated from Germany) encountered it in some book on English diction or something, and it stuck with him.

I read Siodmak’s book a couple of years ago. It’s been filmed three times, but I’ve only seen the most popuylar one, which starred the future Nancy Reagan. I sometime think maybe the movie gave her ideas.
Siodmak is one of those neglected figures who was writing science fiction and fantasy and also writing the movies. he had a huge influence on American culture that most people are probably unaware of. He’s the one responsible for most of the werewolf “Lore” everyone takes for granted (including that poem “Even a Man who goes to Church by day…”). It was his suggestion that lead to the first “Monster Crossover” film – Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (which he also wrote the script for). He wrote the novel and screenplay for F.P. 1 Does not Answer, about a floating platform in the North Atlantic that facilitated trans-atlantic flights in the time before airplanes could routinely fly so long a trip, and later wrote an early Space Station novel that elevated the idea to space. He wrote Donovan’s Brain, popularizing (although not creating) the meme of the Brain in the Aquarium. (I wrote a teemings article tracing the history of that idea, but it’s sadly no longer online). He’s the one who resurrected the notion that Vampires are Destroyed by Sunlight from the limbo it fell into after Nosferatu, using it in Son of Dracula and House of Frankenstein. He wrote Invisible Man screenplays and one abnout a TYransAtlantic Tunnel (another way around those short-airplane-hopping blues),Flying Saucers, Zombies, Amazonian monsters, and one truly wonderfully bad science fiction film, Riders to the Stars. (He also wrote the novelization)

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I’m almost done with the new Stephen King book, The Outsider. He sucks you in pretty quickly with an impossible paradox and then goes into vintage supernatural King.

Next I may give the Gentlemen Bastards trilogy another read. I read them last year and found them quite enjoyable. Still waiting for book 4…on Twitter the author wrote about his mental breakdown and his efforts to come back from that.

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Finished Jar Jar Binks Must Die, a book about science fiction movies. Not a bad intro, but not much here I haven’t seen before.

Just started Meet Your Baker: A Bakeshop Mystery by Ellie Alexander, a cozy.

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I simply can’t believe Khadaji has been dead for going on six years now. That’s crazy.

This ongoing thread always sparks my interest as a reader but damn…I think I may have heard of or read perhaps 3 out of a hundred books mentioned here. Seriously. I feel like I’m doing something wrong.

It’s strange to feel like an outsider in a thread about books, but I guess I do. I know that a few folks have engaged me on occasion, but still.

Maybe I just have a stupid persecution complex.

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Stopped by the library yesterday, and snapped up A War in Crimson Embers, the end to a trilogy started with A Crown for Cold Silver. Brutal, nasty, hilariously fun fantasy, a bit similar to Joe Abercrombie’s stuff. I’m enjoying the hell out of it, although I can’t remember half of what’s happened so far in the series.

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Last night I finished Dietland, which was good timing becausethe AMC series premiere is tomorrow. It was well-written and a more compelling read than I anticipated, but in the end I was left feeling kind of…meh. I’m a fat chick, but I’m definitely not 100% on board with the whole “fat is fabulous; it’s totally fine to eat/weigh/do whatever you want” message. And they weren’t subtle: the evil diet pill in the story is called Dabsitaf, which is “fat is bad” spelled backwards. I still plan to check out the TV show, just out of curiosity, but if it hews very closely to the book I probably won’t watch for long.

I started Borderline, thanks to Left Hand of Dorkness’s mention of the Arcadia series in last month’s thread. I only got a few pages in before I fell asleep, but I’m looking forward to reading more.

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Finished Meet Your Baker, by Ellie Alexander. Not recommended.

Just started Diamond Star, by Catherine Asaro.

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My two June books so far: The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse, and A Shilling for Candles, by Josephine Tey. Both are British novels from the 1930s.

The Wodehouse book (my first) is what I take to be typical of the Wooster/Jeeves novels, a quintessentially English farce with lots of misunderstandings, low-stakes blackmail and inept scheming at a country manor. And of course the implacable valet Jeeves saves the day in the end, most because everybody else is ridiculously stupid, including the narrator Bernie Wooster. Pretty funny stuff, but extremely dated and predictable.

Josephine Tey has a reputation as one of the better British “Golden Age” mystery writers, but I had never read any of her books either. I heard that she was less interested in writing challenging mysteries than presenting an absorbing story with well-developed characters, and that seems to be the case. Her Inspector Grant is a lot like Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn, which is a good thing. I found myself compelled to finish the book in just a few sittings, not so much to find out who the killer was, but to see how all the other story threads played out. A very entertaining read!

I think I’ll be reading as much Josephine Tey as I can find. As for P.G. Wodehouse, I enjoyed the one outing, but I think that’ll be quite enough.

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Hope not. You should know you’re always welcome here, FGIE.

I’m about a third of the way through Tom Clancy’s 1986 military technothriller Red Storm Rising, about a non-nuclear WWIII between NATO and the Warsaw Pact (spurred by the Soviet Union’s grab for Arab oil). Poor characterization but exciting battle scenes.

I’m also reading Bishop McIlvaine, Slavery, Britain & the Civil War by Richard W. Smith, about a top Episcopal clergyman who served as an unofficial ambassador for Lincoln during the Civil War. A bit dry but interesting, all in all.

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Welcome, FoieGrasIsEvil! Glad to have you here.

I’m currently reading The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster by Sarah Krasnostein. So far, it’s been more about the life of the cleaner herself than about the work she does. It’s still fascinating reading, but I’ve had to skim a bit, because I’m not up for reading about child abuse.

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Every one is welcome here! Snacks in the kitchen!

For me, the best part of this thread(s) is getting introduced to books, that otherwise, would never have crossed my radar. The Lockwood & Co and Rook serieses are two of my favorite series ever and I heard about them HERE!!

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I read Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal. It’s good, but it is a different book than I thought it would be based on its synopsis. The synopsis makes it sound as though the book talks about a bunch of different ways that animals can be intelligence, not using humans as a benchmark, but most of the book does use human behavior as a benchmark, investigating things like language complexity, tool usage, and theory of mind. I also did not know that the author was a primatologist, and that therefore there is a lot more research included about apes than there are about other species. (If ape is an accurate term, honestly, this book was written for someone who has a little more knowledge of primates than I do. The book would distinguish between bonobos, orangutans, chimpanzees, capuchin monkeys, etc. I had to do some Googling to keep up with the fine distinctions between some of the species mentioned.)

I read The Time Traveler’s Wife and was highly impressed. The book is not chronological. The time traveler’s wife may be 20 in one scene, then 6 years old in the next scene. The time traveler is even harder to keep track of, because the guy can actually visit himself in the past or future, so sometimes the same character is both a child and an adult in the same scene. And yet I had absolutely no trouble following along and knowing where I was in time and what was going on. Another impressive feat is that even though the book is over 500 pages long, the author maintained a good pace and kept me interested.

I read The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, an author I knew previously from his book The Talent Code. The Culture Code talks about what makes a company or group of people successful. I’ve heard people say that the key to success is hiring good employees, and this book sort of turns that idea on its head. Hiring decisions aren’t irrelevant, but the author provides some compelling examples where a change in leadership and vision has improved outcomes with the same group of people. It was a great book, the sort of book where I probably wouldn’t have figured out all the insights on my own, and yet once I read them, they just feel true on a gut level. The Talent Code was the same way, and I recommend both books.

Two that I’m almost done with:

Galileo’s Middle Finger by Alice Domurat Dreger. I like the author, but this isn’t her strongest work. She studies intersex conditions, and has written a book on hermaphoriditism, as well as one on conjoined twins. Her books explore some philosophical questions re. a person’s right to their bodies, because while a person having the right to do what they want with their bodies is, for the most part, pretty well respected in our culture, we make exceptions for babies where we feel that “of course they’d want a normalization procedure!” and provide one on their behalf. But in our quest to normalize babies, we don’t always fully understand the possible damage we could be doing to people’s bodies (for instance, losing sensation in the clitoris when performing a clitorectomy on an enlarged clitoris). I’d definitely recommend her other books.

Also almost done with Lindsay Ribar’s The Art of Wishing, about a girl who unwittingly stumbles upon a genie in her high school and becoming the genie’s master. I’m enjoying it, I think the author has a good feel for when to include more action, when to add to the mystery, when to reveal information, when to add romance, when to talk about the main character’s emotions, etc. I also think she does a good job of accurately portraying the way high schoolers talk and behave.