Finished Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys. Very good. A prequel of sorts to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Rhys took a minor character from Bronte’s book, Mr. Rochester’s mad first wife whom he married as a young man in Jamaica and who must now be kept locked away, and detailed her early life in the West Indies. Set in the 1830s just after Britain abolished slavery throughout the empire. I’ve not read Jane Eyre, but apparently that’s not necessary, as this novel stands on its own. Rhys, a native of Dominica, was most active in the 1920s and 1930s, when she was one of the expat crowd in Paris, but she published Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966.
Next up is Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather.
I finally finished the weighty one-volume tome of To Green Angel Tower. It’s a great book and a great series, don’t get me wrong, but it had a bad case of needing to get on with it. I don’t need to hear how every single group of people the series follows finds out every single piece of crucial information.
Other than that, I really liked Simon and Miriamele. They acted like real teenagers maturing on a quest and not Epic Heroes from the get-go.
How was it? I’m a sucker for series where people progress through the military ranks, like Hornblower and Honor Harrington, and I was a big Poul Anderson fan decades ago, but I somehow missed this series.
The first one was OK. It wasn’t really “like Hornblower”, except in featuring an ensign in the space navy who gets to see action and deal with diplomatic issues as well. He’s not the introspective loner of Forester’s books. That said, the firstr book was an interesting read. I haven’t read any ofg the others. I’d known of Flandry when he showed up (with Anderson’s permi8ssion) in Bertram Chandler’s The Dark Dimension (and it’s been so long since I read that that I couldn’t tell you about it).
I was on a business trip and got a lot of reading of books I picked up done. I finished Toni Kelner’s The Skeleton Takes a Bow – a good second book in her mystery series. I read Raymond F. Jones’ Syn. Jones is the guy who wrote This Island Earth, from which I cribbed by Dopername. TIE is much better than you’d think from the film. This effort, Syn, is pretty lame, though. It has the feel of a contractual obligation book, or one written because he needed the money. I figured out the concept in the first couple of pages, and kept hoping that he was cleverer than it at first appeared, and that he’d throw in some twist, but he didn’t.
I read Swords Against Tomorrow, the title of which looks like an attempt to cash in on Fritz Leiber’s fantasy books (Swords against Death was, in fact, released about the same time). But there’s no needc to use such a similar title. The book is an anthology that actually contains a Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser story, as wel as ones from Poul Anderson (again!), John Jakes, an old Leigh Brackett, and what was a new one from Lin Carter thatr he clearly hoped would be the start of a new series about Kellory, the Warrior Without a SWord. As far as I can tell (and a visit to isfdb confirms), though, he never wrote another story about the character.
I also started Curt Siodmak’s Sklyport, his 1959 novel about a space station. It’s interesting, because back in the 1930s, before he emigrated to Hollywood (and wrote screen stories and screenplays for Universal, including The Wolfman), he had written the script for F.P. 1 Doesn’t answer, about Floating Platform #1, a waystation in the mid-Atlantic with hotels and stores that would enable the short-range aircraft of the day to provide flights across the Atlantic. It was a clever idea that was overtaken by technology – pretty soon there were airplanes capable of carrying passengers on commercial overseas flightys ac ross the Atlantic.
In Akyport he basically tried to do the same thing with space travel, providing a space station that could be used not only as a waystation to outer space, but also for transportation to and from the earth. It’s amazing to me that one guy could write two such similar stories about waystations that seem so far apart in tewchnological requirement, and less than 256 years apart.
The thing is, the Space Station wasn’t exactly a new idea. It had been pushed by von Braun and that crowd for years, and Siodmak undoubtedly stole much of the design from them, such as it’s being a large roating donut to provide artificial gravity. Unfortunately, Siodmak got an awful lot of hgis science and technology wrong, even considering when the book was written. I’m only halfway though, but I’m curious to see how it ends. But this appears to be another case where Siodmak was overtaken by reality – we never did build a rotating whjeel space station, the uses he suggests for point-to-point travel on the earth with a stopover in space never happened - it’s much easier and cheaper to travel within the atmosphere. Aside from one hardcover and one paperback publication in the US, and two foreign editions, the book was never republished. This paperback edition I’m reading from1961 was its last appearance.
I’m almost done with Mike Nelson’s Death Rat! by Michael J. Nelson of MST3K and Rifftrax fame. It’s his only novel and while it’s a worthwhile effort, it’s clear his strength is really in nonfiction.
Pontius (Ponty) Feeb is laid off from his job, wrecks his car, and is evicted from his apartment within the same week. After seeing all the action-adventure books both fiction and non- at the bookstore, he decides to write his own cheap action-adventure novel and make a million dollars. His story is about a man in 1865 Minnesota who battles a six-foot long rat in a gold mine. It’s a great story, but he can’t sell it because he doesn’t look like the kind of guy who writes thrilling adventure novels. Enter Jack Ryback, a struggling actor who works at a fast-food chain with Ponty. He does look like what the publishers are expecting, so Ponty sends him out to sell the novel. Their scheme works except for one minor detail: the publisher is marketing the story as nonfiction. Jack and Ponty then travel to Holey, MN (the setting of the novel) to enlist the aid of the natives.
Meanwhile [DEL]Garrison Keillor[/DEL] Gus Bromstad, bestselling author of folksy tales, enlists the help of the Den Institut Dansk to take down Jack Ryback because Death Rat! has been nominated for a Major Award ahead of Gus’ most recent folksy tale. He also calls in a few favors from his friend the governor, [DEL]Jesse Ventura[/DEL] Bart Hertzog as backup. Then, just to complicate things, funk superstar [DEL]Prince[/DEL] King Leo is inspired by the book to stage a revival at the Holey mine.
It’s almost as good as the wacky novels of Carl Hiassen and Dave Barry, but it lacks a certain something. I think it’s Gus. He’s a little *too *over-the-top.
Just finished Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, in two volumes, by John Lloyd Stephens.
It is an account of an American who, hearing accounts about the existence of ruined cities in central america in the 1830s, decides to head out and see if he can find them in the 1840s. He gets a diplomatic accreditation from President Buchanan and sets out, with his artist-friend Catherwood, to see if he can find the government of central america, and the fabled ruined cites. He finds the ruins, but not the government …
I owned it for years just for the famous illustrations of Catherwood (which I think have never been surpassed).
However, it is a rollicking good read: Stephens and Catherwood get caught up in the revolutions going on in central america, suffer horribly in wandering unprepared through the near-wilderness looking for ruins, and end up “buying” Copan for $50! All along the way you get Stephens’ commentary on the trip, which reveals as much about America in the 1840s as it does about central america (for example, Stephens’ astonishment that, in Belize, Blacks are treated the same as Whites - to his credit, he notes that this is a glimpse of a possible future for his own country).
Above all, there are the ruins, which are illustrated so well by Catherwood’s genius. While there had been earlier reports, none were so complete or so convincing; serious central american archaeology really begins with this work … I took it with me recently when I was visiting Palenque in Chiapas.
Highly recommended for anyone who is interested in Mayan achaeology, the history of central america, or simply in a “real life” Indiana Jones ‘discovering’ lost cities (yes, of course he didn’t actually ‘discover’ them, as the locals already knew - but he popularized that knowlege. Often, the locals viewed the ruins with comparative indifference).
Still enjoying Edmund Morris’s Colonel Roosevelt, about T.R.'s post-White House years. I’m up to the 1912 campaign; T.R. and his former BFF, the incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft, are bashing each other with great abandon. It got pretty ugly. A good cartoon from the time: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/For_Auld_Lang_Syne_-_Leonard_Raven-Hill.jpg
Finished The Secret Servant by Daniel Silva. It was a page turner, very good read. Silva is improving as an author both in crafting his story and in his willingness to show both sides of the issue, instead of the black/white-Jewish/Arab approach he had in the first couple of books. It feels like he’s finally accepting that the problems of the Middle East are quite that simple.
I started Malcolm Lowry’s ***Under The Volcano ***over a year ago (I remember posting about it then), got bored with it, and let it fall to the bottom of the book pile on my Kindle.
I finally finished it, just as a formality. I hated every page of it, and don’t recommend it to anyone.
Still working on Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset, and will be done in a day or so.
After hearing about it on the Dope, I read Bear by Marian Engel.
I enjoyed it while I was reading it and left it with positive feelings. I couldn’t have cared less about the bear sex parts. As time has gone on, though, I am increasingly irritated by the book.
I think it’s because none of it feels real. The bear doesn’t act like a real bear. His relationship with the protagonist isn’t real. Neither is he a good fairy-tale bear; Engel makes much of his un-human-ness, his blank gaze, his eventual danger to the protagonist. I wish she had made up her mind whether the bear would be one or the other.
The kiss of death, though, is the protagonist. She is unmoored from human company in a very un-real way. Because we’re given no explanation of why–only thrown into her failures as an adult–we have to assume she’s pathological. So I don’t want to be her, I don’t admire her, and I don’t want to be her friend. She isn’t an interesting person. She’s a dully unpleasant one.
I think where Engel went wrong was projecting her own heartache–divorced and clinically depressed with two small children–onto a character who hadn’t engaged with life at all. Marian had real problems. Lou is a self-absorbed sulker.
Or the albatross around my neck. <ObMontyPython> Albatroooossss!
So I reread I Shall Wear Midnight and then segued right into Wintersmith. (I know that’s out of order but I’ve read the first less often than the latter. And I had the most wonderful realization
THERE IS A TERRY PRATCHETT NOVEL THAT I HAVEN’T YET READ!!! Huzzah! I haven’t read Hat Full of Stars! I think I’m going to buy it and save it to read. I also have Slip of the Keyboard that I haven’t read yet too. That makes me seriously happy!
I haven’t quite picked up my next book. I may go back A Day in the Night of America. I never worked nights, but I did work a shift for a long time that I got out at 3 am and it was an interesting world.
Finished Rapture in Death by JD Robb, Where do I start? The wonderful Mary Sueness of the characters? The Mary Sue world they live in? The crazy science? The sex? Okay the sex… Good Lord woman was the husband NOT giving you any? FOUR sex scenes in the first 25 pages and that was BEFORE your moods were tinkered with…
Her world is so wonderfully Mary Sue, I spend more times tallying those than figuring out the mystery (which usually I have worked out well before the halfway point anyway) So guns are illegal, prostituition is not only legal but licensed, tobacco addicts get regular “anticancer” vaccinations, everyone has virtual reality toys… goodness WHEN do they find the time to kill each other?
And I still wonder that Eve can live in such rich surroundings, dress herself adequately, even to attend a party full of shakers and movers in book 4 but in book 21 has to be physically forced to dress up to interview a society matron… selective memory?
Checked out an e-book version of Stephen King’s Revival and pretty much zoomed thru it.
We follow Jaime Morton from his boyhood in a small New England town, where he first meets Charlie Jacobs. Rev Jacobs is the new minister in town; his hobby of tinkering with electric gadgets fascinates Jaime (as it would most young boys). This tinkering (which Jacob believes draws on forces greater than what we know) helps Jaime’s brother, Conrad recover from an injury, and starts the connection between Jaime and Jacobs. A tragedy in the Jacobs family drives the young minister away from town; but it’s not the last Jaime will see of Jacobs.
Jaime grows up, discovers a talent for guitar playing, and a taste for drugs. Just as he hits rock bottom, he encounters Jacobs once again - this time as a carnival huckster who has put his electrical tinkering to good (well… maybe not so good) use. Jacobs helps Jaime sober up, and in the process, creates a debt that Jaime later comes to regret. Jaime and Jacobs go their own ways; but the consequences of this reconnection reverberate across decades.
King knows his stuff when it comes to writing about addiction; Jamie’s descent and recovery (while not as evocative as that in Misery) ring true; as does Jacob’s own brand of addiction. While on the face of it, Jacobs was a bit of a stock character - man suffers tragedy and uses science to go where Man Should Not Go - King puts a lot of effort into making him someone for whom the reader can feel empathy, if not sympathy.
I’d never heard the term “fifth business” before - Jaime uses it when referring to the connection he and Jacobs had; being a Vonnegut fan myself, I saw it as more of a karass - being “linked in a cosmically significant manner” (especially considering the events of the climax of the novel).
Speaking of the climax, I actually thought the novel was going somewhere different, based on a offhand comment by Jacobs early in the novel:
Instead of Jacobs drawing on his “special electricity” to bring someone back from the dead, I thought he was going to try to go back in time to save his wife and son. Or more specifically - that he HAD already gone back in time, discovered he couldn’t change events, and was then trying to break out of the loop. Uncle Stevie went all Lovecraftian on us instead.
Overall, I enjoyed this novel quite a bit and will probably add it to my SK collection somewhere down the line.
A very pleasant surprise was “Orbital Decay” by Allen Steele, a writer I had never heard of. It is a bit dated, having been written in 1989 and being set in 2014 with mentions of Tandy computers and music (Steele is a Grateful Dead fan, as am I) on tape cassettes. Set on an orbiting space station under construction, think Star Wars meets The Caine Mutiny.
Finished Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather. A delightful book. In the 1850s, two cultivated French priests are assigned to Santa Fe in the New Mexico Territory, newly acquired by the US in the recent Mexican-American War. Their lives are followed until their deaths of old age later in the century. Based on a pair of real-life priests, although I think they were actually Belgian. I used to live in Albuquerque, and before that I’d spent a lot of time in northern New Mexico while living in West Texas, and this novel made me homesick.
And now some more Stephen King. Have started Salem’s Lot.
Ooo, hope you love it as much as I did! Ask me about Momson, Vt. when you’re past the first few chapters.
Just finished Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama (1973), a first-contact sf novel which wasn’t as good as all the hype I’ve heard over the years. Next up: John Scalzi’s The Human Division, the most recent of his Old Man’s War series of hard (but witty) military sf. I loves me some Scalzi.
King mentions Momson in the Prologue, in the newspaper article the as-yet unnamed man reads. I take it that’s a real place then? (No spoilers yet, please. I’m still early on. The Glick boy just disappeared in the woods.)
<ObMontyPython> Albatroooossss!
