Finished You’re Not Lost if You Can Still See the Truck: The Further Adventures of America’s Everyman Outdoorsman, by Bill Heavey. It’s a collection of essays, mostly from Field & Stream magazine. They’re in chronological order, and at first they were “meh” at best, but over the years, his writing really improved and I wound up enjoying the book.
Now I’m reading Conned Again, Watson: Cautionary Tales of Logic, Math, and Probability, by Colin Bruce.
Started today on The Singularity Trap by Dennis E. Taylor. I loved his Bobiverse books, but this one’s not taking off as I’d hoped. I’ll persevere a bit further.
Having finished the above books, I’ve started reading Treasure by Clive Cussler (from back when he was writing all by himself, without a bevy of co-authors).
On audio, I’m reading The Lincoln Myth by Steve Berry. I’d already read his stand-alone The Amber Room, but this is the first of his Cotton Malone* novels I’ve read.
I’m perturbed. Berry is supposed to be a historian, and he does indeed bring in a great deal of historical information, but he also spends a lot of time making the case that
a.) Lincoln has been mythologized (which I agree with)
b.) Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free all the slaves, and he spoke about saving the Union as his highest priority (True, but a LOT of people have re-iterated this in recent years)
c.) The Civil War wasn’t about slavery, but about cementing the Union and preventing secession. The Northerners , aside from abolitionists (maybe) didn’t even LIKE black people (I worry when a historian starts saying this. No northern sympathy for the slaves? Then why all the uproar about the Fugitive Slave Act? Who kept the Underground Railroad going? What about all those diaries quoted by Ken Burns and others about how they were fighting against slavery?)
d.) Northern interests desperately needed to keep the tariffs and taxes on cotton going, because otherwise the federal income would dry up. (Really? With all that Northern manufacturing going? That didn’t contribute taxes to the government?)
e.) Lincoln created the idea of an indissoluble Union, which prior to him didn’t exist (somebody shoulda told Daniel Webster, so he wouldn’t have made his “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable” speech. Or Andrew Jackson’s “Our Federal Union – It Must be Preserved” toast.)
I realize that writers are allowed to put questionable arguments into the mouths of their characters, especially if this is what motivates them, but Perry appears to actually be buying into these.
What surprised me even more is that most of this isn’t about Lincoln, but about something dating back to Washington, and even more about Mormon (LDS) church history, especially the latter. Didn’t see that coming. One thing I’ll give Perry is that, unlike a lot of thrillers and mysteries involving Utah and the Mormons, he gets most of his history and geography straight. out-of-state writers have been screwing up Utah geography ever since Arthur Conan Doyle’s a Study in Scarlet (the first Sherlock Holmes novel) has the Saints approaching Salt Lake City by traveling across The Great Alkali Plain (the Salt Desert). The Salt Desert is to the West of Salt Lake City – the Mormon pioneers came down Emigration Canyon on the East of the city. I suspect Doyle just loved the imagery, but it’s completely wrong.
I suspect this book, which makes officials in the LDS church out to be Bad Guys, isn’t very popular in Salt Lake.
*What is it with Thriller/mystery writers and the weird names they give their heroes and associates? This book gives us Cotton Malone (who sounds like a cross between Cotton Mather and a Dashiell Hammett detective) and his girlfriend Cassiopeia Vitt. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child gave us Special Agent Aloysius Xingu Lens Pendergast and his companion Constance Greene. His Evil Twin brother is *Diogenes Dagrepont Bernoulli Pendergast *. Do we owe this all to Doyle’s Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes?
I finally plowed my way through The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston (of Agent Pendergast fame). This book is nonfiction however, and its subject is the hunt for a serial killer that plagued Tuscany during the 1970s and 80s.
In my opinion Preston wasted his time writing the book. Since it’s a true story, it’s very messy. No one knows exactly when the murders began or why they ended, the cast of characters is huge and confusing (there’s at least a dozen nominees for who the Monster was), the intricacy and corruption of the Italian legal system is outrageously over the top, and the story just slowly fizzles out towards the end. Upon finishing the book I felt very little other than frustration.
Luckily there’s a new Preston/Child novel out there, and I have it on reserve at the library. I’m sure it will be much more entertaining than reality ever could be.
You’re right to be skeptical of the book, for the reasons you state, but most Federal revenue in the early 1860s came from tariffs imposed on imported goods. Northern manufacturing, as such, didn’t put a penny into Uncle Sam’s pocket.
Pfft, you might be surprised, I suspect they burn it regularly in Provo…
Finished Conned Again, Watson: Cautionary Tales of Logic, Math, and Probability, by Colin Bruce. Meh.
Now I’m reading Bunch of Amateurs: Insides America’s Hidden World of Inventors, Tinkerers, and Job Creators, by Jack Hitt.
Finished Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson last night. Loved the first three quarters but found the ending a bit flat. Not a bad book though and I’ll give him another try next time I go to the library.
I am reading, appropriately enough, The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. I picked up a copy last month when we were at the WWI museum in Kansas City, but had to finish up a couple of other books I was in the middle of first.
I’m reading history set a bit earlier, David McCullough’s latest book, The Pioneers. It’s about the establishment of Marietta and the early settlement of the Ohio Territory in the 1780s. Not his best, but worth a read. I agree with the critics who say that the Indians get short shrift.
Well, The Singularity Trap surprisingly did get better and really got its claws into me. I finished it this morning. The only problem I had with it is that it was harder sci-fi than I am accustomed to. The game theory talk and politics was losing me, but there was still enough plot to keep things rolling. Dennis E. Taylor remains firmly on the list of authors I will always pick up.
Finished Bunch of Amateurs: Insides America’s Hidden World of Inventors, Tinkerers, and Job Creators, by Jack Hitt, which I enjoyed. The subtitle’s somewhat misleading. It’s mostly about people challenging the established viewpoint or way of doing things. It’s about everything from (among other things) DIY telescopes to Kennewick Man to the 2005 “sightings” of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, which is the best chapter, in my opinion.
Started The Red-Hot Chili Cook-Off, by Carolyn Brown.
Finished David McCullough’s The Pioneers, an account of the founding of Marietta and the early settlement of the Ohio Country, from the 1780s to the Civil War. He discussed the prohibition of slavery, Indian treaties and wars, the development of river travel, and the Burr Conspiracy, among other issues. Mostly interesting, but not his best book.
Now I’m listening to an audiobook of Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert A. Heinlein (1947), his first YA novel. A Nobel-finalist astrophysicist and three teenage engineering nerds cobble together a rocket to go to the Moon after the astrophysicist’s employer declines to put any money into the venture, citing the $1.5 million projected cost as too damn much. That was a bookkeeping rounding error for Project Apollo! Heinlein also has a character say (paraphrased here), “Government will never pay to go to the Moon; whoever proposed it would be laughed out of the halls of Congress.” Heinlein was not always perfectly prescient, it seems.
I will get the new thread up today. Yesterday was a busy day and when I got home, I just collapsed and fell asleep.
Finished The Red-Hot Chili Cook-Off, by Carolyn Brown, which I enjoyed.
Now I’m reading And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings, by Madeleine L’Engle.
Done and done: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=881346
I often find myself grabbing two books that appear to be unrelated, and yetthen finding they have something in common. This month the library did it for me, by virtue of a hold coming up. The theme was “a marsh girl” and the books are The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne, and Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens.
Four stars to Marsh King’s Daughter, wich would have been five except for a plot hole. A woman has disguised her identity and nt even her husband knows that she’s the product of a man who kidnapped her teenaged mother and took her into the marsh and kept her captive for years. He was caught and imprisoned; now he’s broken free, and she knows he’s coming for her. But…he’s her father, he taught her everything she knows about the natural world, and she loves him. It may only be me who senses a plot hole here. The writing was very good and the story was engrossing.
Where the Crawdads Sing ought to have a trigger warning on it for excessive poetry. If I wanted bad poetry I would have checked out a poetry book, dammit! The marsh stuff is beautifully described, if you like a lot of description, and felt very authentic. The characters seemed like they had been lifted from various other books and they did not seem authentic. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that I get very annoyed when characters (note: as opposed to people) go around talking out loud to themselves, and even more so when they are quoting “one of her favorite Amanda Hamilton poems.” This one has been on the best-seller list for months so apparently people are quite hungry for cliches to read about. I mean, archetypes. Archetypes.
Marsh King’s Daughter is also somewhat thematically linked to another book I’ve just gotten, Conviction by Denise Mina, where a woman has assumed a new identity to conceal things in her past. But that’s a September read for me.
Stiletto, second novel in the Checquy[sup]*[/sup] Files, which started nearly 7 years ago with The Rook. I read The Rook not long after it came out, and only remember a little about it. He’s done a good job of filling in details you need for following the story and he follows different viewpoint characters, so you don’t need to have read the first one, but it helps a little for orientation and background.
If you’ve read any of the Laundry Files, you’ll probably like this. Stross writes with a more detailed SF-y feel, but with a similar blend of humor, bloodiness, and WTF-idness. About halfway through, and I’m really liking the fact that he’s making the “bad guys” sympathetic in a realistic way by contrasting their narratives about past conflicts with the “good guys”.
I just started Grit, which I picked up at the library due to a now years-old interview on The Art of Manliness podcast and a few recommendations from different sources. I remember feeling like luck/privilege got downplayed too much in the interview, so I’m interested in seeing how a book, with presumably more research and depth possible, will handle it. I’d like to believe the message, but I’ll tell you that someone who grew up with scientist parents and was able to attend Harvard for her undergrad degree opining about perseverance as a prerequisite for success makes me a bit dubious.[sup]†[/sup]
[sup]*[/sup]Pronounced /tʃɛki/; from heraldry: checked, chequered [pattern]. Even though I know buttloads of archaic words I had to look that one up.
[sup]†[/sup]Case in point: Me. It took me nearly 8 years to get just a BA because I had to work my way through school. My income was right at the poverty line that entire time. Spent several years being 1–2 paychecks away from being homeless or starving even while attending CC. Kind of hard to succeed even with both grit and brains when you don’t have enough economic resources to do much more than tread water. If I’d been able to attend Harvard, even with no other opportunities or support, I’m pretty damn sure I’d be making 3x more money and would have at least a Masters if not a PhD.
Oh God… that’s my book club’s choice for next month. Sounds like I’m going to be glad I got it as a freebie on Audible…
Please note that the September thread is open here: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=881346