So once more an evil book has seduced me away from another…
I startedA Bloody Field by Shrewsbury by Dame Edith Pargeter this morning. But I had to return Echo Park to the library and while I was innocently standing to close to the new books rack The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishigura leapt out and ATTACKED me! Forcing me to take it home…
sigh Par for the course…
I’m binge-reading Louise Penny’s Thee Pines Mysteries. I think there are about 12 of them (I’m on book 7) and some are better than others, but I am positively addicted to these characters. I haven’t had so much fun in a crabby, quirky, fictional village since before they cancelled Doc Martin. 
I started Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis a few days ago. It’s very thought-provoking and mostly well-written (I noted the phrase “as we shall see” or similar being used multiple times in the first chapter) so far. The author is best known for the 1995 book Bowling Alone, about behaviour change in American communities, and the corresponding social impacts.
There’s an element of nostalgia and traditionalism running through the prose, as well as a faint sense of being scolded for not maintaining the societal norms of the prevailing generation. Perhaps this is a reasonable conclusion?
I’d definitely recommend this book to those who work with children. It’s sometimes too easy for we, the privileged, to forget what kinds of challenges poor kids face. Much of the book takes the form of transcribed interviews, which can be heartbreaking. It portrays both rich and poor kids as naive, unaware of the existence of kids on the other side of the spectrum, and how their lives differ from one another.
Not nostalgia, but a recognition that the Sexual Revolution has been devastating for people at the BOTTOM of the social ladder, far less so for those at the top.
Well-to-do, college educated people still tend to marry before having kids. Oh, they may spend years fooling around, may shack up several times before finally settling down, but they still tend to raise kids in two-parent households. They take their time getting around to forming stable, monogamous households, but they eventually form them.
You’d THINK an educated Mom who had held responsible, lucrative jobs wouldn’t be so insistent on having a faithful mate who takes fatherhood seriously… but she is. She has the resources to raise a child alone, but usually DOESN’T. She wants a reliable, stable, monogamous partner.
Conversely, a Mom with a high school diploma (or less) doesn’t see her boyfriends as necessary or even desirable members of the household. Her kids won’t grow up in a home with a father who’s married to their mother. Her kids will end up living with their mother alone or with a series of their Mom’s boyfriends.
Agreed. Putnam’s point here is that fatherhood is becoming a voluntary role, and that committed and financially stable men are more at liberty to prioritize it.
Sad day my fellow readers Terry Pratchet has died. I guess Snuff really was his goodbye to Vimes.
I finished The Keeper of Lost Causes: The First Department Q Novel by Jussi Adler-Olsen. And I’m now on my 3rd of these Department Q books. I’m enjoying them. Dept Q is a newly formed Copenhagen dept for special or cold cases. I find the characters to be quite humorous, although some of the cases are a little gruesome for me.
If you’re not all Trolloped out, I’d recommend Phineas Finn as well; the other books of his I read, I could take or leave.
Halfway though The Serpent of Venice.
Finished Clive Cussler’s Fire Ice on audio. That exhausts my current library’s collection of Cussler audio. I started Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. I needed something with intellectual heft after all that Cussler.
I recently read this collection as well & really enjoyed it! I’m slowly working my way up to Martin’s masterwork (partly because I want to wait til GoT is done!) - having read “Sandkings” back when it was published in Omni, then recently getting into his Wild Cards shared universe series.
Haviland Tuf, a deceptively mild-mannered space trader finds himself in possession of the last seedship of the legendary Ecological Engineering Corps. He assists those in need (while being handsomely compensated) with cloned animals or plants. However, “those in need” often get more than they bargained for…
It’s a very entertaining read - I found myself rooting for Tuf throughout his adventures, and seeing those who tried to take advantage of his assistance get their comeuppance. The universe building (both the seedship and the worlds Tuf visits) is top-notch and the characters are engaging, Tuf himself and Tolly Mune especially.
If Martin ever re-visits Tuf’s universe, I’ll be eager to read the results!
I’m also almost finished with Starlight Detectives: How Astronomers, Inventors, and Eccentrics Discovered the Modern Universe by Alan Hirshfeld. Recommended by **dorjan **, my own very amateur interest in astronomy made this worth checking out of the local library.
Hershfeld takes us back to the 19th century (and occasionally, the tail of the 18th), when men of education, money and leisure were instrumental in making scientific discoveries and progress, and how the addition of photography and spectroscopy to traditional observation sparked the new field of astrophysics.
Not only does he provide background on the development of both reflector and refractor telescopes, but gives a history of photography as it relates to astronomical observations, from the first use of daguerreotypes to dry plate technology. Hershfeld also discusses the development of the spectroscope and how its use allowed not only for chemical analysis of the Sun and stars, but also for studying the Doppler effect to examine the speed of stars relative to the Earth.
In addition, Hershfeld also provides a look into the lives of the men (and occasional woman) whose efforts made this new field possible. Among the individuals highlighted were William Bond, originally a clockmaker whose home observatory earned him an (albeit unpaid) position at Harvard, and with his son discovered Hyperion, one of Saturn’s moons. We also meet John and Henry Draper, a father and son team who were trailblazers of astrophotography and spectroscopy. I was particularly intrigued to learn about Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff - and how their partnership helped develop the science of spectral analysis. He also touches on some of the professional rivalries and finagling - the story of George Ellery Hale and how he was involved in the founding both the Yerkes Observatory and Mount Wilson Observatory was rather interesting!
Hershfeld also recognizes some of the women who made contributions to the discipline, including Maria Mitchell, Annie Cannon and Williamina Stevens Fleming. If anyone can recommend a good “women in astronomy” overview, I’d be interested!
While some of the technical discussion got a bit tedious for my personal taste, Hershfeld’s writing was engaging overall, with a nice blend of biographic and historic detail. I definitely feel as if I learned something, and may pursue further reading regarding some of the men & women I was introduced to here.
I finished The Thief of Always, by Clive Barker. Although I am a horror fan, I’ve never had much use for Barker. (Too gory, and I saw Hellraiser long ago on a night when I was already not having a good time). I think he did a nice job on the illustrations, however, the book itself didn’t work well for me. First reason: gratuitous animal death. It wasn’t overly detailed, but ugly enough. Other than that, the tale didn’t have satisfactory internal logic to me. I don’t think the protagonist would have done the things he did, and when (hmm, how to put this without spoilers)… When the situation got bad enough, it started to get better for no real reason. It was as if Mr. Barker looked at his watch and said, “Well, I’ve done conflict and crisis, must be time for resolution.” I didn’t buy it.
Currently reading Her, by Harriet Lane. It’s about two women, very different types, but one is obsessed with the other for some sinister reason which I have not yet discovered.
I finished Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, but am going through a bunch of supplementary material at the end of the volume I read – a biography letters from Melville, critiques and essays. (Again, I never knew it was hyphenated.) It’s a classic, of course. While I’m no fan of whaling, it is a fascinating glimpse into the 19th-century world of whaling, of which Melville had been a part. I can well imagine the fascination with which the typical landlocked American of the time beheld this novel. No movies, no Internet, no TV, no nothin’ to show any high-seas adventures or teach anything about this mysterious animal called a whale.
This is one of those books my old History prof would tell us was “one of those books you have to read to be considered a human being.” I don’t think he mentioned Moby-Dick specifically, but I have no doubt it was on his list. The only one I recall now being on it was Don Quixote. A group of us meant to look him up and get this list of his, but then the semester ended and we blew it off, much to my regret today.
I just finished Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which is a beautiful and haunting novel of the world before and after an apocalyptic plague. The story is told in a non-linear fashion and the connection between the protagonists lies in an unpublished graphic novel called Station Eleven, which contains some eerie parallels to the story.
The customer reviews on this novel are decidedly mixed, probably because it is much more literary and less plot-oriented than the dystopian novels that are all the rage - which is a very good thing in my book as I am somewhat bored with the formulatic dystopian new world novels that are out lately - this one was a shining jewel, IMHO.
I also got my hands on a copy of Philip Kerr’s The Second Angel- an out of print dystopian novel that I loved when it was first released - about a heavily divided society in which most of the population fell victim to a chronic disease which can be cured with one transfusion of clean blood, but clean blood has become the currency of choice, out of reach of most of the population.
The book wasn’t quite as good as I remembered, probably because I knew what was going to happen - the plot is very action adventurish . But it’s a great book that I highly recommend to anyone that can find a copy.
I read this just last week and really enjoyed it. It reminded me in places of Earth Abides by George Stewart and Pat Murphy’s The City, Not long After. The way the characters’ interactions, both before and after the event, were teased out over the course of the book was part of what made it interesting…
Just finished The China Run (1948) by Neil Paterson, a short novel about his great-grandmother. Or so it seemed until people tried to research her life more fully and discovered the character was entirely fictitious! It was very well received at the time, with people all assuming it was the biography of a fairly remarkable woman making her way in the man’s world of seafaring…
Actually, while Melville’s first two books, Typee and Omoo, were popular because of their “peep” into Polynesian and sea-faring life, the much superior, complex, and serious Moby-Dick was a massive flop and critical failure. Less than 4,000 copies sold during Melville’s life and it was out of print when he died. He eventually abandoned fiction writing due to poor sales and was working as a civil servant. It was only in the 1920s and 1940s that a critical reevaluation led to Moby-Dick’s canonical status.
So, TLDR, few landlocked Americans would have read it because no one liked it at first.
There are some contemporary reviews as part of the supplementary materials including a couple from British newspapers. They were especially scathing.
I, too, am a huge fan of George R.R. Martin’s Tuf Voyaging. Ecological engineering, T-Rex cloning, psionic cats, mushroom wine, absolute power, biting sarcasm - what’s not to like? Martin has said he’d like to write more about Tuf someday, and I hope he will!
I recently finished Aliens: Colonial Marines Technical Manual by Lee Brimmicombe-Woode, which is worth a look for any fan of the movie Aliens, and (deep breath) Star Trek: Harlan Ellison’s ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’: The Original Teleplay, a graphic novel adapted by Scott and David Tipton and illustrated by J.K. Woodward. Interesting to see how different Ellison’s screenplay was from the as-aired ST episode, but the illustrations are surprisingly crude and amateurish. Some nice in-jokes, though (including a cameo appearance by Ellison himself).
Now reading Edmund Morris’s Colonel Roosevelt, about T.R.'s post-White House years, which is pretty good.
I Re-read The Last Coyote by Michael Connelly and enjoyed it immensely. Set in the months after The Northridge Quake of 1994, Detective Harry Bosch faces his most personal crime: the murder of his own prostitute mother in 1961.
Connelly is one of the few writers whom I would recommend without reservation. All of his books are terriffic. All of them. Period.
I liked it. I questioned a few plot devices but the overal was a tight well paced story.
Finished Christopher Moore’s The Serpent of Venice. It had some surprisingly silly lines near the end, which I can’t quote without giving away key plot elements (although the Jewish pirate’s lines, “Shabat Shalom, ye scurvy knaves,” were pretty typical). Now it’s back to Toni Kelner’s The Skeleton Takes a Bow, and re-reading, yet again Frankenstein, only this time with Percy Shelley’s additions and before the final edit that resulted in the 1818 edition…