Khadaji's Whatcha Readin' thread -- October 2017 Edition

Cafe Society
1

Halloween is in the air! Anybody have any reading trditions for this month. I try to read a Bradbury book each October. I do need to reread Something Wicked this Way Comes again. I read it back in the 80s but I don’t remember it…

However, in the spirit of the times, I am reading the 3rd Eric Carter novel Hungry Ghosts by Stephen Blackmore. Eric is who Harry Dresden wishes he could be. :wink:

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.

2

Last month’s thread: Like leaves in the wind, September is gone.

3

Almost halfway through Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Very good but it loses something after having read Ron Chernow’s biographies of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington so soon before, because she is not the writer he is, not by a long shot.

4

True dat.

I’m enjoying Alan Dean Foster’s sf novel Icerigger, which I last read in high school, about a nothing-in-common group of starliner passengers who crash-land on an arctic world. I’m also listening to an audiobook of Clouds of Witness, Dorothy L. Sayers’s 1926 detective novel featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. His older brother, the Duke of Denver, is accused of murder, and Lord Peter comes to believe the Duke is willing to take the fall for the crime to protect someone else. Frightfully British upper-crusty stuff.

5

I don’t know what my problem is right now, but I’m picking an awful lot of books lately that I either (a) love, or (b) don’t like so much that I abandon them without finishing.

The two books that I abandoned:

  1. Damned by Chuck Palahniuk. Admittedly, I was sort of expecting this one. I used to be a huge Chuck Palahniuk fan, but about ten years ago, after I couldn’t stand either Rant or Snuff, I stopped reading his books for a while. I went into this book knowing that it was written in 2011, and that his last good book (in my opinion) had come out in 2005, so there was a good chance that I would not like this one as well. And indeed, the book lacked a story. It had a premise (girl dies and goes to hell), but no real plot or story.

  2. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. This book was referenced in some of the synopses to other books I read. You know, like it would say “In the style of Diane Setterfield, you’ll love this cozy read!” or something like that, and I figured The Thirteenth Tale had to be pretty damn good if it was considered the gold standard for its genre. And omg, it wasn’t. It wasn’t at all. It was creepy. The main character has this book fetish where she talks about, like, the world ceasing to exist at promptly 8:00 PM, and that books were her childhood and her life and her everything. And let me tell you, I love books about as much as anyone you’ll ever meet, but that was creepy to read.

And then on the flip side, I read Behind Closed Doors, and I was absolutely glued to the story. I normally read a fiction book and a nonfiction book simultaneously, but this book was so engaging that every time I found a spare moment I kept coming back to this story.

6

I used to read Bradbury’s “The Halloween Tree” every year around this time, I’ll have to look around for it.

7

I reread Witch on a Motorcycle, by Marian Frances, a kid’s book I’ve enjoyed since I was a kid, every October.

Just finished Empire of Ivory, Naomi Novik’s fourth Temeraire novel. Well written, but I don’t like it when books end on cliffhangers.

Next: A Touch of Greatness, by C.W. Anderson.

8

I just finished A. Merritt’s Seven Footprints to Satan, something I’ve wanted to read for a long time. It’s well-written, but a bit of a letdown.

Now I’m reading Oxford University Press’ The Vampyr, an edition of Polidori’s story that effectively launched the literary vampire story into the modern world. I’ve read it before more than once, but this is a heavily footnoted edition with lots of supporting material, and several other macabre stories from the magazines of the period.

9

Just finished Sayers’s Clouds of Witness, which I enjoyed. The murder trial in the House of Lords at the end was particularly interesting. I’ve now begun an audiobook of Patrick O’Brian’s 1972 novel Post Captain, second in his Aubrey/Maturin series.

10

I just finished So, Anyway, by John Cleese. I was excited to find it at a used book store,. but though interesting, it dealt only with his life up to the forming of the Pythons, which was what I wanted to read about.

11

Are Clothes Modern? An Essay on Contemporary Apparel by Bernard Rudovsky (1947)

Wikipedia mentions “he was a Ford, Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellow” as well as “He is best remembered today for a number of urbane books that still provide relevant design insight that is concealed in entertaining, subversive sarcasm.”

I’m getting towards the end of the book and “concealed in entertaining, subversive sarcasm” has become a full frontal assault with both cannons blazing:

“Imitation goods are only desirable in primitive society. The day the consumer learns discrimination, no sales campaign will help to sell the substitute. Yet even if there were enough good will among the manufacturers to remedy the misery of today’s clothing, the first sobering thought would go to the designer, so-called. This designer is about the most unhappy and unnecessary species of the day. He is uncreative by profession, unprepared for any task but copying, and unaware of the possibilities of his profession. There are practically no schools to give him an adequate training, because there are no adequate teachers. The designer lives on what he calls his inspiration — a good and wholesome word which, by common consent and abuse, was perverted into the contrary of its original meaning. Inspiration, as the designer understands it, is far from the sublime moment of spiritual communion with divinity; to him it simply means the copying of insignificant and meaningless details from past epochs or foreign countries, which he cements together into that pastiche called THE STYLE.”

and:

“The training of the new designer can be easily formulated; the difficulties arise when such program has to be reconciled with a mentality that is strongly opposed to serious study. The average man’s mind is averse to any mental burden; illiteracy and semi-illiteracy are almost valued as civic virtues. The educated individual is distrusted, or pitied as a social failure. The very first step in the direction of acquiring knowledge, the learning of languages, is to this day regarded as the exclusive task of non-English-speaking peoples. On the other hand, the majority of industrial professions require periods of instruction that can be counted in mere weeks or even days. No wonder that extensive learning is popularly regarded as a waste of time and, consequently, a loss of money.
Educational establishments suffer from this prejudice: Standards of learning are being lowered constantly to attract students, ft is not surprising, there fore, that selective systems are not favored and talent is not judged a high criterion of acceptance. The advocates of this state of things point out — quite rightly —that the possession of talent is irrelevant, that it has more drawbacks than advantages in life. The facts confirm such opinion. The most successful industrial designers are, as a rule, businessmen with no creative faculties of their own. Elizabeth Hawes, the voice in the wilderness, has no kind words for the American dress designers, to many of whom —the successful ones — she ascribes no artistic ability whatsoever.”

I’m probably going to seek a copy of Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-pedigreed Architecture (1964) next.

12

Finished A Touch of Greatness, by C.W. Anderson. Mini-biographies of a few dozen racehorses that just missed being called great or were great and weren’t called great. Not bad, but not as good as his later book Twenty Gallant Horses, which I loved as a kid, and which is basically the same type of thing, but with (mostly) different horses.

Now I’m reading Class Mom, by Laurie Gelman.

13

Finished Hungry Ghosts by Stephen Blackmoore and… what a disappointing conclusion it was.

Definitely not up to the quality of the prior two books, this one drags and sags in the middle. The ending was so underwhelming and anti-climatic, I had to page back to see if I’d accidentally slept through a couple chapters.

One of the reasons, I stopped reading High Fantasy was that everything had become a retread of Tolkien and was all set in English/Scottish/Irish mythology, so I was quite excited to see that this series used New World mythos and Aztecan gods… and then disappointingly did very little with the gods when they actually showed up. So many Urban Fantasy writers can’t seem to escape the “journey through the afterlife/hell/spirit world” trope and I should have been warned when Blackmoore made a special point of thanking Richard Kadrey in the acknowledgments. The best use of this trope is still the original, you have a long way to go to beat Dante, sir.

14

At the moment I am reading the beginning of the end end of the Comic series Invincible. The second to the last Trade Paperback.

15

I just started Mark Helprin’s new book, Paris in the Present Tense. I’m only about 50 pages in but the writing is (predictably) dazzling. Helprin can write eccentric old coots like nobody’s business!

16

Done with Class Mom by Laurie Gelman. Can’t recommend it; cliches and logical flaws, etc.

Now I’m reading a much better book: Now We Are Six Hundred: A Collection of Time Lord Verse, by James Goss. It’s in the style of A. A. Milne.

17

I finished reading “Cheveley, or the Man of Honour” by Rosina Bulwer Lytton. A while back I was reading the Wikipedia article on the author Edward Bulwer-Lytton where I saw that his wife wrote the book in question as a personal attack on his character, politics and friends. Naturally that piqued my curiosity.

The book is about the angelic Lady de Clifford who is brutalised by her cruel philandering husband Lord de Clifford; meanwhile, the similarly angelic Marquis of Cheveley is in love with her, but since they cannot be together they do a lot of moping. The first chapter has Lord de Clifford injuring his wife’s arm. The second chapter is in the form of a letter from Cheveley to his love where he says “Your case is the second-most tragic marriage that I have ever heard of”, and then he goes on to describe in great detail (without mentioning any names, wink wink) the case of a woman who is married to a philandering famous author who threatens to cut off her financial support and to take her children away, etc.

It was interesting as a curiosity but it turned out to be not bad as a satirical attack on the perceived flaws of the Whigs and phony society in general. The writing style was a bit awkward in places (e.g. the author parenthetically explained some of her puns in case you missed the joke, and there was a great deal of reliance on quotations), but I thought it added a bit of charm that it was clearly written as a labour of love (or hate, I suppose).

18

Phew. Just finished Sleeping Beauties, by Owen and Stephen King. With my limited reading time, it took me two weeks!

Anyway. It passed the time, I didn’t love it. There were too many characters. I always wanted to know what happened next, but I didn’t spend any of my spare time thinking about it. Things didn’t tie up neatly at the end…that was a nice touch of realism, I thought.

19

I read Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind. It had a lot to do with the brain and how it works, and I’ve read loads of books on the subject, but what made this one unique is that an autistic savant wrote it, and he included some tricks on how to think. For example, he talked about learning numbers in a wider context. Just as a sequence of letters are easier to remember if you can form them into a sentence, so too are numbers easier to remember if you don’t see them as meaningless strings. He also gave tips for learning other languages, such as paying attention to prefixes and suffixes rather than trying to just memorize words individually. It was worth the read.

I also read The Hike by Drew Magary, which felt like it had the potential to be good but fell short. Admittedly, the book pulls from video game culture, and I don’t play video games so I wasn’t the target audience there. The premise was that a man set off on a hike, and got trapped in this alternate world with talking crabs and giants and men that have dog faces, among other things. He’s trying to escape that world and get back to his wife and kids. There were good parts, but there were other parts that seemed to lag. For example, the narrator spends ten years building a castle. There really wasn’t any need to have the narrator build a castle at all. And there are some maritime scenes that just seem thrown in to lengthen the narrative, but don’t seem to advance the either the plot or the personal development of the character. But there are also some exciting parts, some funny parts, and a cool ending.

My favorite of my most recent reads is Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra, which someone on this board mentioned. It’s written in the form of a standardized test, so there’s a lot of reader participation, as well as a bit of messing with the reader. It’s great, because despite the unorthodox format, the writer still managed to write something thought-provoking and engaging. He didn’t sacrifice story-telling for the sake of outrageous creativity (an error I think some overly ambitious writers fall prey to).

20

I’m about two-thirds through Patrick O’Brian’s Post Captain, which is good Napoleonic naval fun. Sometimes the dialogue (veddy, veddy Austenian) and descriptions of characters are so delightful I just laugh out loud. I’ve also begun Nor Crystal Tears by Alan Dean Foster, a 1982 sf novel about first contact between humanity and the Thranx, a peaceful insectoid race. It’s pretty good.