Steve's (swynn) thread for 2024

I'm Steve, 55, a technical services librarian at a medium-sized public university. I live in Missouri with my wife, son, mother and my running partner Buddy. This is my 14th year with the 75ers.

My reading follows my whims, but is heaviest with science fiction and fantasy. I also read mysteries, thrillers, and horror. I don't read enough non-fiction, but when I do it covers a range of subjects including history, language, popular science, unpopular mathematics, running, library science, and shiny stuff.

I'm usually reading at least three books:
(1) something on the Kindle app, which I read whenever I'm standing in line or when the lights are off;
(2) a paperback, usually from my own shelves, which I read while walking Buddy; and
(3) something borrowed from the library, of which there is usually a larger stack than I can reasonably expect to finish and which I call "The Tower of Due." Here's what it looks like now:

Projects

(A) The DAWs

For several years now, I've been reading through the catalog of DAW, the first American imprint exclusively devoted to science fiction & fantasy publishing. It launched in 1972 under the editorship of Donald A. Wollheim (hence the name), and continues today, publishing new books at a rate faster than I'm catching up. Last year I read 14; this year I hope to aim for about one a week but realistically I think I can get 30.

DAWs so far: 0
Next up: Walkers on the Sky by David J. Lake

(B) Bestsellers

For the last few years, Liz (lyzard) and I have been reading through American bestsellers at a rate of one per month. I stayed caught up to Liz through most of 2023, though I fell behind in the home stretch and am currently one month behind.
Bestsellers so far: 0
Next Up: Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley

(C) Banned in Boston

Another project I've been co-reading with Liz is a list of books that were "banned in Boston."

Banned in Boston so far: 0
Next up: Twilight by Eduard Keyserling

(D) RC2Me

Inspired by other LTers who have "book-a-year" lists going back to their birthdate, or to 1900, or earlier, I've set myself a goal of reading at least one book published each year since Robinson Crusoe in 1719. My list is full from the late 19th century forward, but is increasingly spotty the farther back you get from about 1880. I want to read at least one book a month on this project, generally but not strictly moving forward from 1719. Currently I'm in the 1720's and here's what I have so far for that decade:

1720 Love in Excess by Eliza Haywood
1721 The Life of Madam de Beaumont by Penelope Aubin
1722 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
1723 Lasselia by Eliza Haywood
1724 The Masqueraders by Eliza Haywood
1725 Fantomina by Eliza Haywood
1726 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (In Progress)

My 2024 reads:

1. The Mystery of the Talking Skull by Robert Arthur

** The Perry Rhodan Post **

Perry Rhodans so far: 0
Next Up: #225 Rendezvous im Weltall by Kurt Mahr

For those who have never encountered it: Perry Rhodan is the hero of a weekly German science-fiction serial that is marketed as the world's largest science fiction series. I don't know whether that claim is true -- no doubt it depends on how one measures "large." Measured by words in print, PR has few if any competitors, certainly neither the Star Wars nor Star Trek franchises, which are relatively puny. A few years ago in All of the Marvels, Douglas Wolk stated without proof that the Marvel superhero comic books, regarded collectively as a single continuous story, comprise the longest work of fiction ever created. I am 100% certain that he didn't run the numbers on Perry Rhodan before making this claim. The main series has been continuously published since September 1961 in weekly novella-length adventures. The current issue is number 3255. The English translations of these episodes ran to about 100 pages per, so we're talking about a story 325,000 pages long and growing. And that's just the main series. Besides the main series there have been over 400 standalone paperback novels, not to mention spinoffs (the spinoff series Atlan ran for 850 episodes), reboots (the reboot series Perry Rhodan NEO appears biweekly and is currently in its 321st episode), miniseries, video games, comic books, and one comically awful movie.

* Why am I reading this?

I first encountered the series as an exchange student to West Germany in 1986. I fell in love with everything about the series: the complicated backstory, the cheesy plots, the lurid covers, even the cheap newsprint. At that time I had access only to the latest issues and random back issues as I discovered them at flea markets so plots were frequently opaque to me, which actually added to the series's appeal. A couple of years ago I discovered that digitized back issues could be bought in packages online: I started from issue number 1, and all of that love came back.

So my reasons for reading are multiple and personal. It's about nostalgia, maintaining language skills, and feeding my inner middle-schooler. I wouldn't necessarily recommend the series except in small doses for curiosity's sake. But neither will I apologize: I love this crap even (maybe especially) when Perry Rhodan is an asshole. Which, actually, is most of the time.

* The Story So Far

Each episode is a standalone story, but the narrative is organized into story arcs, mostly running to 50 or 100 episodes. The arcs are usually separated by significant chronological gaps, which serve the marketing function of making the beginning of a story arc a good entry point for new readers.

Episodes 1-49: The Third Power (1971-1984)

The series begins with the first manned lunar mission in 1971. On the moon, Perry Rhodan and his crew discover a foundered spacecraft of the Arkonide Empire. In exchange for medical assistance, the Arkonides provide Rhodan with revolutionary technology. On his return to Earth, Rhodan eliminates cold-war hostilities, establishes a Terran government capable of dealing with extraterrestrial threats, builds bases through the solar system, and assembles a team of superpowered mutants (*ahem* predating the X-Men by two years). He also meets IT, a disembodied benevolent superintelligence that offers Perry and other Terrans some perspective and an anti-aging treatment.

Episodes 50-99: Atlan and Arkon (2040-2045)

The Terrans face multiple threats: the powerful interplanetary Arkonide Empire; the "Springers," a society of galactic merchants; the "Aras," a race of unscrupulous physicans, and the Druuf, invaders from a parallel universe that temporarily overlaps ours. Perry also meets Atlan, a practically immortal Arkonide who has been living on Earth since prehistory waiting for an opportunity to go home.

Episodes 100-149: The Posbis (2102-2112)

A united Terran/Arkonide empire faces new challenges. First, Terrans discover Arkon's progenitors the Akons, who regard both Arkonides and Terrans as inferiors. Then, the Milky Way galaxy is attacked by two extragalactic invaders: the Posbis, machine/biological hybrids hostile to all biological life; and the Laurins, invisible warriors hostile to the Posbis and anyone else who gets in their way.

Episodes 150-199: The Second Empire (2326-2329)

The superintelligence IT flees the galaxy in order to avoid some looming danger. Since it will no longer offer the anti-aging treatment for the foreseeable future, IT scatters 25 immortality devices around the Milky Way galaxy. The search for the immortality devices brings Terrans into contact with two new threats: Schreckworms, whose ravenous fast-reproducing larvae can eat a planet smooth as a billiard ball within weeks; and the Blues, rulers of a second interplanetary empire on the "east side" of the galaxy who are allied with the Schreckworms. Following a war with the Blues, Perry Rhodan is kidnapped by a would-be usurper from a Terran colony world. In his absence, the uneasy peace with the Blues and Akons deteriorate and the alliance with Arkon falls apart.

Episodes 200-299: Masters of the Island (2400-2406)

Searching for the lost planet Kahalo near the galaxy's center, Terran astronauts discover a configuration of six stars that function as a transporter to a twin-sun solar system located deep in interstellar space between the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies. After surviving a series of challenges and traps, the Terrans encounter Maahks, a race of Andromedan warriors who very nearly conquered the Milky Way galaxy thousands of years ago before being defeated by the Arkonides in a closely-fought war. Now the Maahks are back and Perry Rhodan's problem. Worse, they seem to be following orders from the even more powerful "Masters of the Island"

The Perry Rhodan update

The last Perry Rhodan Update brought us up to volume 204. In this update (including episodes published August and September 1965) The Terrans try to return home from the twin-sun system, but instead they are diverted to Horror, a tiered world full of traps and peril.

       

Perry Rhodan 205: Die Wächter von Andromeda = The Guardian of Andromeda
Perry's team have finally located a control station that they believe can reverse the direction of the transporter that brought them to the twin-sun system. But first they mustface a robot army, a time-dimensional displacement trap, and an Andromedan battleship. And even then, the Guardian of Andromeda may not let them go back home ....

Perry Rhodan 206: Die Schrecken der Hohlwelt = Terrors of the Hollow World
Perry and the crew of the CREST II hoped finally to return to the Milky Way Galaxy. But the Guardian of Andromeda redirected their transport beam. Instead of arriving home they arrive in rapid orbit around a glowing energy core at the center of a hollow world. Adventures follow, including encounters with power-sucking light creatures and hostile ghosts with mechano-hypnotic mind control powers. They christen the hollow world, "Horror."

Perry Rhodan 207: Die 73. Eiszeit = The 73rd Ice Age
Trapped inside Horror, the crew of the CREST II discover that the planet is composed of four concentric shells, each level containing its own world with deadly traps for invaders. On the first level, they encounter two warring nations, one of which rendera the CREST powerless and turns the battlefield into a deep-freeze. The crew is reduced to manually dragging the CREST outside the effective range of the enemy's power-suppression field.

Perry Rhodan 208: Die blauen Herrscher = The Blue Lords
The next level of Horror is ruled by the godlike "Blue Lords" who founder the CREST II with a gravity attack. Perry and a small team escape and work with a local underground movement to strike back.

Perry Rhodan 209: Im Banne der Scheintöter = In the Thrall of the Pseudodead
The CREST crew proceed to the next level of the tiered world Horror, where they find an atomic wasteland inhabited by little yellow teddy-bear creatures who can telepathically project emotions. They soon overwhelm the crew with feelings of well-being and contentment; only Gucky, Icho Tolot, and Melbar Kasom remain immune, and must find a way to get the mission back on track.

New Year's read:



1) The Mystery of the Talking Skull by Robert Arthur
Date: 1968

Eleventh in the Three Investigators mystery series. In this one Jupiter, Pete, and Bob buy an old trunk at an auction. The trunk turns out to have belonged to a traveling magician, and among its contents are the titular "talking skull" (which was the magician's trademark trick), and a letter with clues pointing to a hidden treasure. It's not one of the series' best -- too many points that stretch believability but it's fast and fun as always.

Okay, it's y'all's

Happy reading in 2024, Steve!

Welcome back, Steve!

>8 FAMeulstee: Thanks Anita
>9 drneutron: Thanks, Jim!

Happy new year Steve. I look forward to following your reads for the year.

Happy new year, Steve.

Happy New Year, Steve.

Happy New Year and happy new thread, Steve.
And thank you for many wonderful memories of a great time.
A friend collected Perry Rhodan and as a teenager I borrowed my first 1,000 issues from him. (not all at once😉).

Happy New Year, Steve!

Happy to see you back, Steve!

>11 fairywings:
>12 PaulCranswick:
>13 BLBera:
>14 SirThomas:
>16 ronincats:
>17 MickyFine:

Thanks for the welcome, Adrienne & Paul & Beth & Thomas (yay for Perry Rhodan love!) & Roni & Micky

You got me with Bang Bang Bodhisattva from last 2023 thread. Great 2024 reading ahead, Steve!

>19 richardderus: Hope you like it, Richard! (And happy 2024 reading to you too.)

I also hope to wrap up 2023 reporting very soon so I can get started on 2024.

Well, the 2023 reporting isn't moving as swiftly as I'd hoped -- I have twenty more titles to go, and when I sit down I only comment on a few titles, sometimes because of books where I can't remember what I wanted to say.

I don't know whether this is following my better judgment or ignoring it, but I'm going to comment on 2024 books while they're still fresh in my mind. Even when I don't have much to say, as with this one:



2) Rolling in the Deep by Mira Grant
Date: 2015

My mother spent the holidays with my older brother in Michigan. I ear-read this while driving to pick her up. It filled the time just fine, though for me the setup was too long and the mayhem too short.

>21 swynn: She tends, across all her pseudonyms, to do exactly that thing, and it finds no home in my heart.

3) Deism in Enlightenment England by Jeffrey Wigelsworth
Date: 2009

This is the read that motivates my decision to start writing about 2024 reads. Because I want to get down what I'm thinking while I'm still thinking it.

See, last year I read John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious after Penelope Aubin recommended it by describing Toland's work as "abominable." I recognized Toland as an English deist, but my knowledge of deism is mostly limited on what I learned in high school and college history courses. In school I learned that the deists were sort-of atheists who believed that God set the world in motion and then walked away: God (or at least one god) exists, but isn't around and needn't trouble you.

So I was suprised to find that Christianity Not Mysterious -- by reputation *the* seminal work of English deism -- was very interested in the Bible and Christianity, contained very close readings of Christian scriptures, and imagined a God who is very alive and present. It barely seemed scandalous to me at all, aside from strong anticlerical content.

Clearly I was missing something, and I hoped this book would tell me what I was missing. I think it did, though it was more academic than I needed. Here are some of my takeaways.

* Wigelsworth's academic argument responds to a view of deists as antiestablishment radicals. In Wigelsworth's view, English deists are actually proestablishment and relatively conservative. This distinguishes English deism from French deism, which Wigelsworth describes as more radical but doesn't elaborate. English deists were more conservative: they didn't want to attack the government or the church, they wanted to *participate* in it. Toland spent his career pursuing public appointments that were open only to members of the Church of England. Toland's theological writings - Christianity not Mysterious in particular - were not intended to attack Christianity but to demonstrate that his views were compatible with it.

* It's often said deists believe that "God started the universe then walked away." But that's not accurate: the distinguishing feature of deist theology has to do with God's *power*, not His presence. Wigelsworth distinguishes two competing ideas about divine power: (1) potentia absoluta, or absolute power, which holds that God is able to do anything He likes (except maybe for logical contradictions like creating a rock so heavy He cannot lift it); and (2) potentia ordinata, or ordained power, which holds that God's power is constrained by a framework which He Himself has established. The first idea allows God to do what He likes when He likes, and is not obliged to be predictable or meaningful. To the deists, that implied a God too wilful and capricious for an Enlightenment universe, which increasingly seemed predictable and explicable. The deists did not think that God wound the universe like a clock then left it lying around: they thought He *designed* the clock as a demonstration that He is the sort of God who designs this sort of clock. If He doesn't intervene, then perhaps it's because he designed the clock well enough that it doesn't need constant fiddling.

* From the church's perspective, the conflict between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata means that Toland's attack on the clergy is also an attack on God's power.

* It is impossible to disentangle church and state in Enlightenment England. When you have a head of state who is also head of the church, then anyone who challenges the clergy's power also challenges the crown. This is true even when -- and this is not hypothetical, so I do mean "when" and not "if" -- the challenger *wears* the crown. This was a Big Deal, big in a way that that is difficult for this 21st-century American to grasp. Wars were fought. Factions formed. Wigelsworth lays them out: the Whigs, the Tories, the churches high and low, the dissenters, the loyalists, the nonjurors. The differences and rivalries sometimes read the the tribes of a YA fantasy. With Christianity not Mysterious, Toland hoped to push the Church of England to build a larger tent, but he overestimated his persuasive talents. (Sort of a theme in his biography, BTW.) Instead of making himself an admired public intellectual, he sabotaged his career and endangered his life.

* A bonus here is Wigelsworth's exploration of how deists responded to Isaac Newton's work. Apparently, many historians see deists as hostile to Newton. But this is not the case. Even though Newton himself was in camp potentia absoluta, his scientific work could be read as lending support to camp potentia ordinata. This fact was not lost on deists, and though deists disagreed with Newton on some points they praised and engaged with his science.

* One of the most interesting and difficult sections for me addressed a scientific disagreement that Toland had with Newton, and is especially ironic in view of the deists' reputation for believing that God set the world in motion. Because we find Toland arguing that God didn't even do that. Famously, Newton (like Aristotle) held that the Universe required a "prime mover." Toland, however, proposed that matter is "self-moving": God created matter with a property of motion so that His intervention is not even required to launch it. I can't quite see what Toland hoped to gain by this: for me, this doesn't eliminate a supernatural act but only abstracts it a bit. However, it does demonstrate Toland's impulse to offer natural explanations for mysterious events.

Not having read the works Wigelsworth responds to, I don't feel qualified to judge his argument. So I can't one recommends or discommend the book except to say that I had questions and it supplied answers. It sometimes wandered too far into the weeds for my nonspecialist perspective, but I feel I have a better understanding of the English deists and their world, which is what I wanted.

>22 richardderus: My response to her work is by and large more lukewarm than I wish it were. I do like the "Wayward Children" series, though, and am looking forward to reading the newest.

>23 swynn: Excellent review!

Me, an academic: "Wigelsworth" *giggles*

>25 scaifea: Now, Amber, "Wigelsworth" is a respectable name with a distinguished history.

Also, it's fun to say. *giggle*

I'm behind on threads, and only just saw Katie's (katiekrug) note that Julia (rosalita) has passed.

I met Julia several times for meetups in Iowa City and once in Rochester, Minnesota. I loved her company and her participation here on LT. So, summing up in a manner I think she'd approve:

fuck

I'll miss her.

>27 swynn: - A good summation, Steve. You are not alone.

>27 swynn: I am just so glad that someone got the news, and she did not just *vanish*. This way we can all mourn our own Julias.

4) Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley
Date: 1991

I am probably not the best person to ask how I liked Scarlett because I'm not the best person to ask how I liked Gone With the Wind. (I didn't., and liked it worse on rereading.)

But I was sort of curious: GWtW depends so heavily on its characters' racism and a "Lost Cause" mythology that was already awkward in 1991 and by now has shot past awkward and arrived at enraging or embarrassing depending on how much slack you want to cut Margaret Mitchell. In 1991 Alexandra Ripley could hardly praise the Klan's glorious exploits, and certainly couldn't toss N-bombs as if they were a term of affection. Even if she tried, her publisher would have shut that right down. But once you take out the Confederacy's great White heritage, what's left of Gone With the Wind? What in the world would Ripley right about?

Ireland, I guess.

After the events of Gone With the Wind we have Scarlett pining for Rhett, at long last realizing that he is the man she truly loves. But Rhett recognizes (correctly, I think) that Scarlett is not capable of love but rather only a powerful but temporary desire for things she has learned she can't have. (Though let's not give Rhett too much credit for insight. After all, he married her.) Rhett is willing to grant Scarlett a divorce but not to initiate one because he is trying to rebuild his reputation among his family in Charleston. The determined Scarlett goes to Charleston, where she squats with Rhett's in-laws daring him to ignore her. But while in Charleston she also meets some of her father's Irish family and is charmed by their generosity and lack of restraint. Several plot points later, Scarlett sails for Ireland where she hopes to see the ancestral lands her father had to abandon decades ago when he came to the U.S. There she meets more family, buys an Irish plantation, goes to balls, and pines for Rhett whenever she stops to think about him.

If this sounds appealing to you then perhaps you'll be delighted to hear that it runs for over 800 pages. It doesn't appeal to me, but it still runs for over 800 pages. For me it's even worse than Gone With the Wind and for less interesting reasons. Despite Margaret Mitchell's numerous flaws, she did know how to turn a phrase. Ripley hails from a younger school of writing which teaches that prose should never call attention to itself. Her writing is fine and moves along like a bestseller should but without Mitchell's vocabulary and diction. And while I'm glad that Ripley chose not to expand on Mitchell's Lost Cause propaganda, she also doesn't replace it with any similarly compelling theme, leaving the narrative directionless and bland by comparison. Even when she ships Scarlett safely off to Ireland, Ripley has Scarlett both-sidesing the landlord/tenant conflicts in an exasperating exercise of having nothing to say.

But it's probably worth repeating that I didn't like the book Scarlett was supposed to evoke, so I was bound to miss its charms. Others have responded differently. I remember working the service desk of a public library when it came out back in 1991 and hearing a range of opinions from disgusted disappointment to enthusiasm about having had the opportunity to spend 800 more pages with beloved characters. Those are valid responses of course, though mine is Do Not Recommend.

This was the bestselling book in the U.S. in 1991.

>30 swynn: Oh gosh, I haven't thought about that book since high school, when I excitedly read it, straight off the publishing press. I had read GwtW when I was in 6th grade and adored it, so I was super jazzed about this one. And now I can't remember a single detail about it, although I think I loved it at the time. I suspect I'd have very different feelings about it now, and they'd probably come closer to yours...

>30 swynn: Kudos for sticking with this, Steve. I couldn't get back the first couple of chapters.

>27 swynn: Yes, Julia will be missed.

I got halfway through Gone with the Wind about 20 years ago, and can't say you're inspiring me to attempt revisiting it, or reading Scarlett. Hope your next book is better.

>30 swynn: yeeeccchhh

I suppose there is some virtue in your perseverance but it strikes me as masochism, TBH.

>31 scaifea: Funny you should say that -- I had almost exactly the same response, mutatis mutandis, to your review of Lord Foul's Bane a while ago.

I think there's much to admire in Gone With the Wind, especially its undermining preconceptions of what a heroine of that time should do and be. Mitchell's Scarlett can plow a field, defend her home, and balance a ledger. You'd think such a character would risk steering into Mary Sue territory -- but Scarlett's complicated and mismanaged emotional life makes her anything but. I admire the character even when I want to throttle her, which is from the moment she is introduced. Provoking that response is writerly magic, so I'm sympathetic to Mitchell's admirers, especially those with mixed-but-on-balance-positive feelings. I feel like I understand its appeal, but I first read GWTW at a moment when I was both attuned to, and also unwilling to overlook, other qualities.

For readers who just want the romance between Scarlett and Rhett to go on, I think I see how Scarlett might fill the void; but that was never appealing to me.

Anyway, here's to our tastes growing along with us. (And belated thanks for warning me away from a Stephen R. Donaldson reread.)

>32 BLBera: I sympathize with bailing early on this one. Actually, I was very tempted to stop at the first sentence: "This will be over soon, and then I can go home to Tara."

I mean, what possesses an author to start an 800-page book with "This will be over soon ..."? Your readers who are looking forward to the book don't want to hear it, and the others can tell you're lying.

>33 bell7: I got halfway through Gone with the Wind about 20 years ago, and can't say you're inspiring me to attempt revisiting it, or reading Scarlett.

I do not apologize for this.

>34 richardderus: We're almost done. Liz and I have agreed to stop with 1994.

The logic was that there was a change in the way bestsellers were calculated that makes the results less interesting after that point, and that we started with the bestseller for 1895, so reading through 1994 gives us an even hundred years of bestsellers.

When Liz first proposed the stopping point I thought I'd keep reading up to the present day just for completeness' sake. But yeah, it is starting to feel like I'm forcing myself to read books I've already been offered and chose to reject. When I'd never heard of a book from nineteen-diggity-something, then even the clunkers were interesting in some way -- an insight into popular trends or something. But I remember 1991 pretty well, thanks, and there is not even an historical interest in me for Scarlett.

I've peeked ahead, and I think the worst is behind us now.


1992's bestseller is a Stephen King book. I usually have mixed feelings about King's work, but this is one is less than 400 pages so I am optimistic that he keeps the rambling under control.
1993's is a short book which I've already read. It doesn't have a great reputation, but I thought it was both not great and also not all *that* bad, so I'm curious how I'll feel about a reread. Even if I hate it this time around, at least it's short.
1994's is John Grisham's entry at the top of the list. My experience with Grisham's books is that they're fine to read once, and this is one I haven't read yet. So, okay. But this one also begins a ten-year run of John Grisham topping the annual list, interrupted only by Tim LaHaye and Dan Brown. I don't feel enthusiastic about a Grisham-per-month project. And I've already said more than I care to about LaHaye just by mentioning his name.


I have decided that Liz's logic for our exit ramp is airtight.

>38 swynn: Thank goodness this wind-down will be close to painless, Steve. The amount of energy you have put into it is admirable, if quixotic.

My next read comes with an intro, and the intro comes with a warning: I gush. If you'd like to skip, then the comments about the book are in the next post. This post is about language learning in the Internet age. (TLDR: I dig it.)

I've been using the Duolingo language-learning app for French "lessons" for awhile, but last fall I decided that really, Spanish was the non-English language I'm most likely ever to find useful. So I switched my Duolingo lessons to Spanish. Very quickly, the Spanish practice wrapped itself around my ADHD brain the way things sometimes do. Usually I have to moderate such obsessions, but this time the impulse seemed beneficial, so I rode it.

And y'all, language learning in 2024 is very different from language learning when you and I went to school. In 2024 I can stream films with Spanish soundtracks and/or subtitles. I can listen to Spanish podcasts and access transcripts for them. I can listen to Spanish radio in the Radio Garden app. With apps like HelloWorld or Italki I can reach out to native Spanish speakers: on Italki I have a weekly conversation with a Spanish tutor living in Venezuela.

These tools aren't news to some visitors, I'm sure, but the point is this. When I learned German back in the 1980s, I started in a high school classroom where the German resources available to me were (1) the teacher and (2) the textbook. I didn't really learn German until I was immersed in it as a foreign exchange student. Today, the information landscape is such that I can almost create my own immersion experience anywhere. This amazes me. Hence, gushing.

Even more to the point: I can buy a Spanish book on Kindle and, when needed, have Google translate it for me sentence by sentence. I am flabbergasted to report that Google Translate is actually pretty good for this. I did not think I would ever say that in my lifetime, and I am delighted to be wrong.

I have multiple complaints about the 21st century information landscape, but for language learning give me this please.

Anyway, here is my first book read in Spanish. I think it is not yet available in English translation.



5) Nía by Patricia Reimóndez Prieto
Date: 2022

Mara lives in a world plagued by famine and war. Mara's hunger drives her into the Oak Forest, a green oasis ruled by La Señora del Bosque, a powerful dryad who kills any human who steps inside. But Mara's determination and persistence charm the Lady of the Forest so that the dryad hesitates to finish the impetuous young human. Their relationship matches desperation with curiosity, but it turns into a friendship, then into something that responds to famine and war.

This won the 2023 Premio Ignotus (sort of a Hugo for the Spanish-language market) in the best short novel category. It's a lovely parable, a queer retelling of Beauty and the Beast without the creepy Stockholm syndrome. I liked it much. That may be my sense of accomplishment speaking, but I don't think it's only that.

>37 swynn: I do not apologize for this.
Please don't! 😂

>41 swynn: congrats on reading it in Spanish! That's a fantastic accomplishment.

Wow, Steve, you've read more books in Spanish this year than I have, and I am fluent.

>41 swynn: That is great! I love hearing about your language experience.

Congratulations on reading a book in Spanish. I took Spanish for 6 years in junior high and high school and 2 years in college, so I was fairly advanced. I have let it go over the years, but I think if I just refresh my vocabulary, much of it might come back (verb tenses, word order, masc/fem., grammar etc.). But I've always wanted to learn French, as I find it a beautiful language to listen to. So I started Duo Lingo French about two weeks ago. I'm finding it very difficult to pronounce (and Duo Lingo does not help by giving you guidelines about what the usual sounds for vowels are, and what parts of words are usually silent, or where the accent usually is etc). Even beyond lapsing into English pronunciation, I often lapse into Spanish pronunciation for the French words. I'm starting to think I'm going to have to be satisfied with maybe just learning to read French.
And just last night I had the brilliant idea (which I see you've already thought of) of watching movies in French, of which I have access to many on the Criterion channel. So I will keep at it and maybe in a year or two I will be able to report reading a book in French.

>42 bell7: Thanks!

>43 BLBera: I did not know that you spoke Spanish, Beth. What ways do you maintain your skills? Favorite websites/podcasts?

>44 arubabookwoman: I agree that Duolingo does some things really well but also has some important gaps. One of its weaknesses is fine-tuning pronunciation -- its speech recognition is impressive but still has acres of room for improvement, kind of like the Google Translate of ten years ago. For pronunciation I've found the Italki language tutor extremely helpful.

I'm probably not getting enough conversation practice, but I feel that for a learning speaker it's more important to understand than to be understood. I'm still training my ear to hear the language as it is (rapidly) spoken, and movies, podcasts and Radio Garden get a lot of my attention.

Well, I speak it when I get the chance. Last year I read ONE book in Spanish, and I think I will try to do more reading this year.

I'm using Duolingo to learn Spanish, too. I decided to do so because we have a regular patron who speaks only Spanish, and non of us knew it, and I wanted her to know that someone in the library could communicate with her. She's trying to learn English as well, so we help each other out. It's a hoot.

>46 BLBera: I'll watch your thread for suggestions.

>47 scaifea: So cool that you're doing that for her.

Any Duolingo users: My user name on Duolingo is IchoTolottian. Follow me if you like, and I'll follow back.

Your username brings back good memories to me, Steve-os.

>48 swynn: Friended, mi amigo!

>49 SirThomas: I need to do a PR update soon ...

>50 scaifea: Followed back amiga!

Ello how art thou Steve?

Welcome Owl! Doing well. Yourself?

>53 swynn: Started a woman's once-a- month thing so not so well

>54 Owltherian: Sorry to hear that. Hoping you have a good book and a chance to relax with it.

>55 swynn: I hope so, i have book club in a few minutes and I'm gonna be reading a book or two.

6) The Devil's Pocketbook by Ross Jeffery
Date: 2023

My favorite thing about this book is that it introduced me to the term "devil's pocketbook," a name for the egg cases of chondrichthyans like sharks and skates. ("Chondrichthyans" is a new-to-me word and I'm not yet tired of saying it.) Go search These very cool things are also called "mermaid's purses", and if this is the first you've heard of them go search YouTube for "mermaid's purse":

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mermaids+purse

The book? Oh, it's okay: it's about a young couple dealing with grief over the loss of their infant child. They discover a very large devil's pocketbook/mermaid's purse, from which hatches a human-looking child. This is a horror story, so the child is in fact a monster child who feeds on grief and spends the book tormenting the couple. The body horror was more extreme than my taste runs these days, but the author has built his career on gore so that's no criticism. If you like this kind of thing I expect you'll like it. But chondrichthyan egg cases? Those are universally brilliant.

7) DAW #223: Walkers on the Sky by David J. Lake
Date: 1976

The world has three levels: (1) a Netherworld, thick with flora, fauna and dense atmosphere; (2) a Middle World whose inhabitants live on a transparent, membrane-like force field stretched across the sky; and (3) an Upper World where the gods live. Sig is a young man of the Middle World who sets out for a career aboard the ships that sail the sky but who is betrayed and sold to slavers. Adventures follow, culminating in an escape followed by a descent to the Netherworld. But Sig's arrival in the Netherworld occurs just as the slavers plan to raid it for slaves and plunder. Sig organizes defenses and counterattacks in both the Netherworld and the Middle World, and learns much about history, both his world's and his own, in the process. The world-building is fun but the plot is stock, the characters are weak, and the story is full of wince-able moments.

8) Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby
Date: 2021

It's a noir thriller about two fathers of murdered gay sons, who never accepted their sons while they were alive but come together to avenge their deaths. It's a gut-wrenching mix of introspection and violence about two flawed men who become better men while being very bad men. En route it ponders more difficult issues than you can count: prejudice, privilege, sex, gender, race, fatherhood, manhood, and more, but never forgets that its first job is to be a noir thriller. I liked it much.

>59 swynn: Shawn is one helluva writer. This is, to date, my favorite of his books, the one I return to in my mind. I am so pleased that you enjoyed it.

>58 swynn: Ummm...no. Love the idea, though, it is not worth my limited supply of eyeblinks to go with a sustandard execution.

>60 richardderus: Good choice on the Lake. I've seen him referred to as an underappreciated author, but this one did not sell me on that perspective.

But the Cosby ... wow, yes. If the rest of his stuff is half as good as Razorblade Tears it's still going to be very good. I hope to get to Blacktop Wasteland soonish.

>59 swynn: And another BB!
Unfortunately my library doesn't have this book in stock, but I've reserved All the Sinners Bleed and My Darkest Prayer based on your review and am looking forward to it....

>62 SirThomas: I look forward to seeing your thoughts on the Cosby books, and hope to get to them myself sometime soon.

9) Half a King by Joe Abercrombie
Date: 2014

Prince Yarvi is the second son of a popular king. His older brother will inherit the throne, and Yarvi will enter the "The Ministry" whose exact nature isn't clear to me but siblinghood of priests/scholars/royal advisors seems to be the idea. But before Yarvi can take his vows, his father and brother are killed in battle. Yarvi rises to the throne but is promptly betrayed. The book chronicles his return from a presumed death through being sold as a galley slave, to daring escape and eventual vengeance. This was my first Abercrombie, but I'm aware of his reputation for violent stories and untrustworthy characters and I got pretty much what I expected. Mixed feelings overall. The betrayal-and-revenge plot here is pretty well-worn, and the "slavery builds strength and character" trope needs to be retired ASAP. Points for the final twist being not the one I expected but removed again for depending on an implausibly improbable coincidence. OTOH, Abercrombie writes this kind of thing really well. The pacing and characters are engaging, and goodness help me I'm looking forward to the next.

10) Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Date: 1726

I had read excerpts in high school and college, including (I think) all of Book 1 about Gulliver's voyage to Liliput, and selected bits from his visits to Brobdingnag and the land of the Houyhnhnm. But this was my first time reading though the whole thing. There's more necromancy than I expected, and a *lot* more scatalogical humor, of which there is enough to fill the kind of middle-grade joke book that would be banned in Florida. I can see why Liliput is the bit that seems to be excerpted the most, since it's the section with the closest thing to a plot. The rest of the book is heavy with commentary on government, with enough jokes to keep it amusing but not enough to explain why it was treated as a children's story when I was a kid: surely I was not the only child who lost interest quickly? Anyway, I'm at a better age now to appreciate it for what it is, and I laughed more than you might expect over a political satire 300 years out of date. I read the Norton Critical Edition, which has just enough and the right sort of footnotes.

>63 swynn: I read my first Cosby and I am thrilled.
Thank you for introducing this gorgeous author to me, Steve!

>66 SirThomas: Glad you liked it, Thomas! Some credit should go to Richard (rderus) too, because his review of Razorblade Tears helped convince me to move it from the Someday Swamp to the Tower of Due.

I now have Blacktop Wasteland in the Tower, and will probably read it in March.

11) Secondborn by Amy A. Bartol
Date: 2017

I picked this up as an Amazon First Read way back in 2017 so it's been sitting on my Kindle for awhile now. It's a YA dystopia set in a near-future world where first children have all the rights, second children become soldiers in an unending war against rebels, and third (and later) children are illegal. (I think; many words are spent on scaffolding for the birth-order-hierarchy, but a lot of it doesn't make sense to me.)

I'm not much a fan of YA dystopias, and this one collects my least favorite YA-dystopia tropes in one messy package. First person narration by a self-absorbed super-special teenage Mary Sue; 21st-century sensibilities in a world foreign to them; inconsistent world building that varies according to the scene. Not a fan, but then I'm not the target audience so YMMV.

12) In the Palace of Shadow and Joy by D.J. Butler
Date: 2020

First in author Butler's buddy-fantasy-adventure series "Indrajit and Fix," It's set in the kind of fantasy world whose rules aren't rigidly defined -- there are thousands of varieties of human and humanish races, and just about anything can happen. Indrajit is a poet, the designated carrier of his race's national epic. He is wandering the world while he composes his own stanza for the epic and searches for a successor. Fix is a former monk from an order devoted to trivial knowledge, who has been unlucky in love. In this one, Indrajit and Fix meet when they are both recruited by a risk-trader to protect a singer, Ilsa Without Peer, who has certain powers over men and, apparently, powerful enemies. There's much to enjoy here, including a rapid pace, a sense of humor, the dynamic between the two principals. It's driven by incident, sometimes a bit too testosteroney, but fun overall. Especially fun are the discussions of risk markets in the context of a pseudo-medieval fantasy. I'd read another.

13) Magic Rises by Ilona Andrews
Date: 2013

Sixth or seventh in the Kate Daniels urban fantasy series. In this one, Kate and Curran go to Europe. Curran has experience with the European packs, and knows them to be a dangerous Machiavellian hotbed of intrigue and assassination. But he has been invited to provide protection for a werewolf princess while the various tribes decide what to do with her -- or rather more importantly, her dowry. Curran recognizes the job offer as a trap, but cannot resist the offered compensation: he has been promised "panacea," a medicine that can prevent young shapeshifters from "going loup," a condition that requires them to be killed for the good of the pack. As predicted, the European assignment is a labyrinth of peril: their host turns out to be right-hand man to Kate's father (from whom she has been trying to hide), and Curran is the target of a campaign to marry him into a European pack. Worse, Curran seems to be falling for the temptation. It all builds to a mayhem-filled payoff, which is the sort of thing that appeals to me about the series. And I am enjoying the series, but this one feels overly contrived: the plot turns on multiple implausible coincidences, some of the drama feels forced, and my goodness I am so tired of extended relationship drama based on misunderstandings that could be resolved with a two-minute conversation. Still, I'm going to read the next so maybe I should stop complaining.

14) Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King
Date: 1992

This was the bestselling book in the U.S. in 1992. It's a thriller about a woman suspected of murdering her employer, presented in the form of a confession. Except the confession isn't that she murdered her boss - no, she didn't do *that* - but she *did* kill her husband several years ago, and it's time to come clean about it. There's a lot to like here, and I liked it better than most Stephen King novels. It's written in first-person and in dialect, which usually is a really bad idea, but the King keeps the dialect readable: "and" becomes "n", gerunds lose their terminal "g"s, and "wash" acquires a middle "r", but really after a few pages you barely notice. And the first-person perspectives added a level of interest while I pondered just how trustworthy was this clearly unreliable narrator. It also softens the annoyance I usually feel at King's digressions and repetitions: that is, after all, how people speak. I appreciated how Claiborne's story of injustice was not just a matter of an abusive husband, but also of the social systems that encouraged him -- the banker, for instance, who frankly admits that his institution's rules are different for man and for women. But mostly I appreciate the way King explores narratives of guilt: how Claiborne justifies her own actions in an internal narrative(s) and chooses her actions in order make them consistent with a particular narrative, but how different narratives are expected and deployed for law enforcement, for her neighbors, and for her children, (And also for the reader?) For me it's one of King's better novels: well-structured, under control, leaving room for ambiguity and interpretation, and still an engaging story.

Science fiction author Brian Stableford has died.

His first novel Cradle of the Sun appeared in 1969 as an Ace Double paired with Kenneth Bulmer's The Wizards of Senchuria. His last, "The Cthulhu Palimpsest" (no touchstone yet), was published this January.

Like most science fiction authors of his generation, he also produced a considerable body of shorter work. One of my favorites, his novella "Les fleurs du mal," was nominated for a Hugo. He was also active as an anthologist and

I came to Stableford's work late, as a result of the DAW project. I admire his "Star Pilot Grainger / Hooded Swan" series, whose pacifist hero was designed as a contrast to themes of glorified violence in other science fiction adventures.

15) Copo de Algodon by María García Esperón
Date: 2010

It's a juvenile historical based on the early life of Isabel Moctezuma: daughter to Moctezuma II, witness to the arrival of Hernán Cortés, and survivor of the Spanish Conquest. It's a story of conflict between incompatible cultures that, on the one side, practice human sacrifice, ritual cannibalism, and child marriage; and on the other, genocide. Grim themes for juvenile lit, and author García Esperón does not avoid them so it's remarkable that she also manages beauty and heartbreak which she does through spare language and simple rhetorical devices like repetition and parallel construction -- excellent for language learner me, but also more effective in this case than poetical acrobatics would have done.

"¡Copo de Algodón! ¡Flor Blanca!" -- dijo Moctezuma sosteniéndome en brazos --. "Aquí estás, mi hijita, mi collar de piedras finas, mi plumaje de quetzal, mi hechura humana, la nacida de mi. Tú eres mi sangre, mi color, en ti está mi imagen. Ahora recibe, escucha: vives, has nacido, y te ha enviado a la tierra el Señor Nuestro, el Dueño de Cerca y del Junto, el hacedor de la gente, el inventor de los hombres. Aquí en la tierra es lugar de mucho llanto, lugar donde se rinde el aliento, donde es bien conocida la amargura y el abatimiento. Oye bien, hijita mia, niñita mia: no es lugar de bienestar en la tierra, no hay alegría, no hay felicidad. Se dice que la tierra es lugar de alegría penosa, de alegría que punza ..."

"Flake of Cotton! White Flower!" - Moctezuma said, holding me in his arms --. "Here you are, my little daughter, my necklace of fine stones, my quetzal plumage, my human form, the one born to me. You are my blood, my color, in you is my image. Now receive, listen: you live, you have been born, and Our Lord has sent you to earth, the Owner of Near and Together, the maker of people, the inventor of men. Here on earth it is a place of much crying, a place where the breath gives out, where bitterness and despondency are well known. Listen well, my little daughter, my little girl: there is no place of well-being on earth, there is no joy, there is no happiness. It is said that the earth is a place of painful joy, of joy that stings...

That's as cheerful as it gets, but there is real affection behind the hard words, and the mix of affection, nostalgia, and morbid realities seem appropriate for the setting. Not a pleasant read, but a memorable one.

16) A Stranger in the Citadel by Tobias Buckell
Date: 2023

Here's a YA dystopia set in a future world where everyone's physical needs are met by universal fabricator machines. It's not entirely clear where the machines came from, but it is clear that they came with bargain that in return humans would give up weapons technology, fertility, and literacy. All but the most primitive weapons are banned, women must wean themselves off fabricator food in order to become pregnant, and all books and even writing are outlawed. Our heroine Lilith is a princess in a palace whose Duke has established control over one of the fabricators; when a traveling librarian wanders through the Duke's territory he is targeted for execution. Lilith saves the man from immediate death, only to see him condemned to a long and lingering execution. But she remains fascinated by the prisoner. Plot occurs, and soon Lilith and the librarian are on the run to other cities, other fabricators, and other revelations and perils.

I liked this pretty well. It avoids some of the cardinal sins of YA dystopias. The world-building exposition is rarely longer than it needs to be, telling us only exactly what we need to understand a scene. The protagonist is not smarter and stronger and superer than everyone else. She has large gaps in her understanding and abilities that lead to harsh consequence, leaving her a product of her experience (as opposed to a product of an author's self-insertion fantasies). The book contains its own natural ending, though it also leaves opportunities for further development. A sequel could happen but nobody should feel cheated if it doesn't. This leaves me characters I'd willingly spend more time with and a world I'd like to explore further -- and for me that's an increasingly rare response to YA dystopias.

17) DAW #224: Supermind by A.E. Van Vogt
Date: 1973

This is a fix-up of three stories by A.E. Van Vogt. I don't recognize any of the three, but Wikipedia identifies them as “Asylum”, “The Proxy Intelligence”, and “Research Alpha.”

In the first story a pair of space vampires plot to conquer the Earth while avoiding notice of the super-intelligent alien races appointed to watch over Earth. Their plot is foiled by a newspaper reporter and an alien girl.

In the second story, a space trucker who has always been of below-average intelligence has sudden insight about space vampires and their plot to take over a key research station.

In the third, a rogue scientist performs experiments designed to accelerate the evolution of human intelligence. He intends to test the serum and then destroy the subjects, but the test works too well on one of his subjects and she acquires a Lucy-like superbrain.

A.E. Van Vogt fix-ups are usually hot messes, and so is this one. They're marginally rewritten to have shared heroes and villains, but the shared continuity is forced and half-hearted. The stories have mutually incompatible rules for their various ideas, and come loaded with very white-male-1950s ideas about intelligence, race, and gender. On the other hand in this one you get space vampires and angry telekinetic brain-geniuses. This isn't one VV's better jobs, but on the other hand at least it's not Earth Factor X. Enjoy with caution.

Not my genre not my concern maybe, but I find the abstract for this paper interesting.

Post-Trump Masculinity in Popular Romance Novels

I suspect selection bias, but cheer the author's (Johanna Kluger, lecturer at the University of Bonn) findings:

"As I intend to show, in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election and the '#MeToo' movement, the new hero’s phenotype differs specifically in the expression of gendered power and sexuality. He is less forceful than his predecessors and places heavy emphasis on the heroine’s enthusiastic consent and pleasure."

Romance readers, have you noticed such a trend?

18) Leah Mordecai by Belle Kendrick Abbott
Date: 1875

Leah Mordecai is a young Jewish woman whose plans for the future are foiled by her hateful conniving stepmother, who sours Leah's relationship with her father and spoils her engagement to the handsome son of a rabbi. In desperation, Leah elopes with a Christian boy, and hardship follows. Leah's father disowns and cuts off all communication with her. Leah and her husband Le Grande find some brief happiness by moving to Cuba, but Le Grande is dragged back to South Carolina when he becomes a suspect in an unsolved murder. Leah follows Le Grande back to the states, but with no support from her family and now accompanied by an infant daughter, she moves from one misfortune to another. It all culminates in an excessively sentimental tragic scene.

It's a strange, unsatisfying historical melodrama with a complete set of period prejudices. The author, who was not Jewish, seems to be trying to present a sympathetic Jewish character without actually knowing anything about the Jewish experience. The Jewish characters are barely distinguishable from the Gentile ones, except in ways that fit Jewish stereotypes: the men are bankers or rabbis, and Leah is an exotic dark beauty. Other than that there's nothing particularly Jewish about the Mordecais. If Leah or her family have any spiritual or cultural celebrations: whether they observe Shabat or go to temple (or avoid temple), you'd never know from the text.

The text does recognize and seems to condemn prejudice about intermarriage, and the expressions of that prejudice are one of the novel's more interesting (if unsurprising) features: Leah's father raves that his daughter has "fled with a Christian dog" but LeGrande's mother is more concerned about Leah's social class: "How [Mother] did scold me!" Le Grande writes in his diary, "Said she would like to know if I had forgotten the blood that flowed in the Le Grande veins! If I were lost to family pride and honor so far as to mingle my blood with that of the old pawnbroker, Mordecai." Leah's friend Lizzie comments about Mrs. Le Grande, "All she knows or remembers of the Mordecais is, that the banker was once a poor, despised pawnbroker." Although Lizzie also judges that the Le Grandes aren't really all that Christian, which ought to be another barrier to marriage: "No; Leah, if I were advising a Jewess to marry a Gentile, which I am not doing, I would say, Select a man deeply rooted in religious principle, and clinging humbly to his Christian faith. Such a man would rarely, if ever, deceive or ill-use you." This is the bit that baffles me most, the opinion that Jews shouldn't marry Christians but if they do they should marry the most devout Christian they can find. (As for "Such a man would rarely deceive you", well, I'll just leave that there.) After the marriage, the Christians rush to forgive the misalliance and move on. Lizzie remains a friend, and Le Grande's father advises Leah's: "Mordecai, forgive her! Forgive her, as I shall forgive him; and now that it is done, let us make the best of it." But the elder Mordecai cannot forgive, until the tragic end. This is a snarl of prejudices, the untangling of which could occupy somebody's graduate thesis.

As evasive as Abbott is about the Mordecais religious practice, she is even more evasive about the setting. If you Google "Leah Mordecai" you'll find that it takes place in Charleston, South Carolina. Which is probably true: it's a port city in the "Palmetto State", with a view of a fort offshore. But "Charleston" doesn't appear in the text: instead Leah's hometown is identified as "Queen City" and the offshore fort is "Fort Defiance." This is puzzling, because "Queen City" is a nickname for Charlotte, and there is a "Fort Defiance" in South Carolina, but neither location fits the description in the text. Charleston it is, but why the distraction?

Its evasiveness, its cringey good intentions, its loose plot threads and its maudlin ending make it a difficult book to enjoy, or at least a difficult one to enjoy in this moment. But it's not without interesting points.

19) The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller
Date: 1992

This was the bestselling novel in the U.S. in 1993. It's actually a re-read for me because back in 1993 I worked the service desk of a public library and set a goal to read everything on the Bestseller list. I was no fan of romance -- still am not, I may have mentioned -- so the magic of low expectations may be working, but I liked this better than expected. I liked its direct language, its attention to detail, and especially its brevity. This time around I like it less: its excessive sentimentalism makes my eyes roll more than they did in my 20's, and there's something creepy about Waller's casting the female lead as an exotic foreign-born war bride surrounded by uneducated rumor-mongering provincials. I think I understand why it provokes a strong negative reaction from many readers, and if this were my first reading I might even share their view. But it's not and I don't. I still think it's a pretty good (and occasionally overwrought) story about longing and ephemeral connection. It's just a little more complicated now.

>77 swynn: OMG OMG OMG!!!

This was my paternal grandmothers life story, according to her! AND her on mothers, too! She told me all about how she read it three times before meeting my grandfather the Bavarian Catholic. Of course their port city was Minneapolis, then Venice, California, but still...had not heard of or thought about this book since she told me the story in ~1978. Cool! Thank you.

>76 swynn: Hmmm, I feel like that's been a trend in romance even before 2016 but it's an interesting argument.

>80 MickyFine: I suspsect this is correlation without causation, TBH.

>79 richardderus: Very cool! Obviously, it didn't do much for me, but it's very interesting that it resonated so strongly with your grand- and great-grandmother. Can I ask, did they identify with antisemitic discrimination, or the sense that their lives were being sabotaged and marriage seemed the only way out, or both,?

>80 MickyFine:
>81 richardderus:

Interesting. I'm completely an outsider, but my sense is that there is a market for a wider variety of tropes than there used to be. For readers who want a more forceful romantic lead, there's a whole genre of "alpha" romance, isn't there? Or do I misunderstand the label? The fact that the "alpha" label has emerged suggests to me that the market has maybe not so much moved but rather broadened for more variety in the kinds of relationships readers want. Is there anything to that impression?

20) A Rule Against Murder by Louise Penny
Date: 2009

Fourth in Penny's series featuring Quebec detective Armand Gamache.

In this one, Gamache and spouse are celebrating their anniversary at a forest resort. They happen to be visiting at the same time as a family reunion of an awful family with long-standing habits of mutual sabotage and petty resentments. It's a murder mystery so somebody turns up dead, but the more surprising -- and for the series' character development, enlightening -- turn of events is when Peter and Clara Morrow show up because the awful family is in fact Peter's.

It's another good entry in the series: Penny's mysteries strike me, as Simenon's so often do, not so much as mysteries but as stories about being human that just happen to involve murder. This one is about families and how they feed and fail us. It made me squirm repeatedly. I understand I'm in for a disappointment in the next entry, but I quite relished this one.

21) The Accidental Veterinarian
Date: 2019

I seem to have become the sort of reader for whom amusing animal stories are comfort reading. I'm not sure what that says about me so it's fortunate that I don't care. With this one, I expected a collections of odd vet stories, but there's actually a variety here, including insights into the business of veterinary practice, pet medical care 101 (including tips on pilling your cat and reading dog poop), and yes odd vet stories.

The pet stories were amusing as expected, but the stories about the dark side of being a vet were more enlightening. Takeaways include: the typical vet's finances are more complicated than you probably expect, and that vets have a disturbingly high suicide rate which the author attributes to multiple factors: veterinary medicine tends to attract sensitive souls and then rewards them with stress, financial challenges, day-to-day activities that don't match the reasons vets enter the profession, easy access to life-ending medication, and daily reminders that really it's a pretty easy way to go.

It's a weird mix of sobering and entertaining, and if the description sounds interesting then I recommend it.

>82 swynn: The antisemitism of the time and place was a huge burden on them all. It makes everything harder and enables hateful spiteful nastiness. The whole family suffered from the fallout.

>86 richardderus: Hate is ugly, and its effects last generations. Very sorry to hear about it.

>83 swynn: A Catholic boy marrying a Jewess was deeply shocking at the time. She agreed to raise her children Catholic...a thing my own mother flat refused to agree to... and that reality is absent from modern romantic reconstructions of period romance novels. So much of what we read in novels is really only loosely related to the events portrayed. And that's better than nothing. If someone writes an historical novel about the Lovings and does not use the N word all the time, it will be inauthentic sanitizer all over the hurtful reality of hate in the past.

>88 richardderus: It's a variety of that sanitization problem that bothered me with Leah Mordecai. From the book I got the sense that the worst discrimination Leah faced was the both-sides taboo against marrying Christians, and that Leah felt the taboo most strongly from her own Jewish family. As you know, antisemitism is much more pervasive than that, and demonstrated by the way author Abbot herself deploys various Jewish stereotypes, apparently oblivious to her own antisemitism. Of course, I'm reading in a world that has learned to be more attentive to cultural and religious biases but to me the book reads very much like the work of a non-Jew trying to imagine a Jewish experience and missing the mark widely. It's curious to me that the book would resonate with a reader facing a similar situation. That fact that it did, tells me there are nuances I'm missing -- or maybe there just weren't many alternative representations to compete.

>78 swynn: Great comments, Steve. I admit I read it when it first came out, and didn't like it, mostly for the reasons you stated. At least it was short.

>84 swynn: I enjoy Penny's books although her writing style has me grinding my teeth, but I love Three Pines and Gamache is SO likable.

>90 BLBera: I get it. For my part, I only picked it up because of the Bestseller project. Short of another project that demands completism I expect I'm done with it now, but it's nice to have the perspective of the second visit.

I am fond and growing fonder of the Three Pines series, especially due to Gamache.

22) Green Space, Green Time by Connie Barlow
Date: 1997

Late last year I read Ursula Goodenough's The Sacred Depths of Nature, a series of essays which proceed from the assumption that science can be a spiritual exercise and that the "Epic of Evolution" can serve as a religious narrative of creation. Goodenough's premise and execution resonated strongly with me, and this is a sort of follow-up to it. Author Barlow contemplates ways that a religion grounded in science might be realized. She does through a variety of formats: memoirs, transcripts of converations (real and imagined), even -- if I understand correctly -- through a sort of automatic writing. Over the course of the book she asks interesting questions that reflect her understanding of what religion does and should do. What should be the areas of concern for a science-based religion? What would be its texts? Its myths? Its ceremonies? What would be its values, and how would they be derived from doctrine? (Or would doctrine derive from value) Her answers are mostly speculative, and few (if any) are final, which appeals to Unitarian Universalist me. Some of her answers resonate with me, others don't, and sometimes her critics seem to have stronger points than she does. What I discover is that the idea of "religious naturalism" appeals to me most when it has the least structure. The rituals, hymns, and Gaia theology all feel to me like category errors to me, relating more to pagan approaches -- which I say respectfully -- than to the rationalism that tempts me in Goodenough.

So it wasn't as rewarding as Goodenough's book in some ways, but it gave me many prompts to examine my own religious instincts and preferences, which was sort of the point.

23) DAW #225: The Jewel in the Skull by Michael Moorcock
Date: 1977 (originally published 1967)

First in Moorcock's series featuring Hawkmoon, a warrior in a post-apocalyptic pseudo-medieval Germany, fighting the evil empire of Granbretan. Loved this -- it's pulpy fantasy adventure that knows exactly what it's about. Looking forward to the next.

24) The Reform'd Coquet, Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady, and The Accomplish'd Rake by Mary Davys, ed. Mary Bowden.
Date: 1999, selections 1724-1727)

This is a collection of three novels by Mary Davys, an Irish writer who moved to England after the death of her schoolteacher husband in 1698. Apparently she hoped to make a living with her pen in London, but soon moved to York for reasons impossible to know, though editor Bowden suggests that a lower cost of living was almost certainly a factor. After a modestly successful production of her play The Northern Heiress in 1716 she returned to London but relocated again soon afterward, this time to Cambridge where she started a coffee-house serving students at the university. These novels all date from her time in Cambridge.

Spoilers follow.

The Reform'd Coquet (1724)
Amoranda is a young and beautiful orphan heiress overly fond of gentlemen's attentions. Her wise and rich uncle appoints Formator, an elderly warden, to guide her into adulthood. With Formator's help, Amoranda dodges physical, sexual, and financial ruin. In the end, having triumphed over plots to assault, seduce, and abduct Amoranda, Formator reveals himself to be a suitor in disguise: Alanthus, handsome, young, and wise -- and not at all creepy of course, which is all the evidence you need that 18th-century amatory fiction is weird.

Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady (published 1725, probably written 1718)
A Whig woman Berina and a Tory man Artander exchange letters. They begin with political sparring and self-praise of their platonic friendship, which makes its way gradually to declarations of love. There is much to admire here: the period politics and anecdotes are very interesting, especially for including political speech in a woman's voice. Bowden points out that the style is unusual, in that most epistolary novels consist of corresponents' recounting of shared experiences and that is not the case here: we know very little about Berina's and Artander's relationship prior to the first letter, and the last letters leave room for interpretation whether marriage impends. The letters focus on argument and wit. Allusions to contemporary drama and literature are numerous, and the prose is a class in the 18th century art of saying a thing by saying its opposite. For a reader interested in the period and in wordplay it is fascinating, and in my case Bowden's endnotes were critical to understand what was going on.

The Accomplish'd Rake (1727)
This starts from a similar place as The Reform'd Coquet, though gender-swapped, with a young and handsome heir who lacks the guiding hand of wise parents. After his father's death John Galliard's mother becomes morally unmoored. When he catches his mother in bed with the footman, Galliard sets out for London where he dives into available vices: drinking, gambling, whoring, cursing, running up debts, the usual. Near the nadir of his depravity, Galliard attempts to seduce Nancy, the daughter of a benefactor. When Nancy deflects his advances, Galliard drugs her and rapes her while she sleeps. Though he is aware that he has crossed a line, he continues his wicked ways for a couple of years until he hears Nancy has a son who looks suspiciously like John Galliard, though Nancy insists that not only can the boy not be Galliard's but that she has herself never been with a man. Still Galliard remains unrepentant until a bout of syphilis makes him rethink his life choices, at which point he marries Nancy. And that's a happy ending, which is evidence that 18th century amatory fiction is weird and sometimes nauseating. (Bowden observes that this subplot prefigures Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, which is a spoiler for me.) To Davys' credit, she makes clear that the ending is not a happy one for Nancy, though it seems to satisfy the men involved: Galliard gets a clean conscience, Nancy's father gets a family name restored, and her son gets an inheritance. And really as long as the men are happy then that's a happy ending right? Bowden reads satire here, and I want to think she's right.

The Accomplish'd Rake fills the 1727 slot for my project of reading one book per year since the publication of Robinson Crusoe.

>94 swynn: No need to read all 298,000 words of Clarissa now, you lucky dawg. Had I known this in 1979, I would still be Clarissaless. And likely have more hair. And be better looking. Maybe even richer.

>95 richardderus: I sort of feel like I should read it given the project, but it also sounds awful and my 1747 slot is already covered by Voltaire's Zadig. So yeah, with the warning about the rape plot probably maybe not. I suppose there's an outside chance that I'll like Pamela enough that I want to give it a go anyway, but that seems unlikely.

25) The Mystery of the Laughing Shadow by William Arden
Date: 1969

Twelfth in the "Three Investigators" series of juvenile mysteries. in this one the boys stumble upon a sinister plot to steal the lost treasure of a fictional Native American tribe. It's okay: the mystery is not especially mysterious, and the treatment of Native Americans hasn't aged well. Stories about marginalized groups, told with good intentions and flawed execution, are a recurring feature of this series. Still, it's the Three Investigators.

26) System Collapse by Mary Wells
Date: 2023

Yay Murderbot! It's all here again: the David-Goliath plot, Murderbot's enchanting misanthropy, the engaging banter, and the pacing of a thriller. I see no sign of this series wearing out its welcome.

27) The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday by Saad Z. Hossain
Date: 2023

The powerful djinn Melek Ahmar (the Lord of Tuesday) wakes from a Millennia-long sleep and sets out to re-establish his glory and its days. But the world is now a very different place thanks to climate change, AI, and technology able to produce the post-scarcity paradise that the gods always promised and rarely delivered. Melek teams up with a discontented Ghurka warrior to conquer a city ruled by AI where virtue is currency and everything is perfect. Perfect? Ha -- the Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday know better than that, even before they know the details.

>98 swynn: Yay! I'm hopeful that the TV adaptation will capture some of the magic.

>99 swynn: Hadn't heard of this one, and you make it sound like a fun read.

Glad to see you around!

>100 richardderus: Me too, though I'm not an Apple TV subscriber, so don't know when I'll get to find out.

>101 richardderus: It is fun, and short to. Also, it turns out to be the third in a series, so I'll have to go back and catch up on earlier entries.

Life has been weird, and very busy so I've not had as much time for leisure reading, and and haven't taken the time to catch up here. Hopefully soon, but realistically ,.. we'll see.

>98 swynn: Lucky you, I have to wait until March 2025 for the book to come out...
But there are one or two books to bridge the waiting time.

>103 SirThomas: Ah, waiting for translations.

I checked the German translations at Amazon.de, and was pleasantly surprised to see that they mostly get the titles right. The only mismatch is "Fugitive Telemetry" = "Übertragungsfehler" (Transmission Error) which isn't a bad substitute.

28 Apartment 16 by Adam Nevill
Date: 2010

It's a haunted house story set in a London apartment building, where a starving artist works as night watchman and is drawn to an abandoned and forbidden apartment that used to be occupied by Felix Hessen, a painter with ties to the occult. Meanwhile, a young American woman arrives in the building, having inherited another apartment left to her by her late aunt. The aunt was in Hessen's circle of acquaintances before his disappearance and was left emotionally scarred by the relationship. As a horror novel it's fine: it's creepy, moves along nicely, and veers into cosmic horror which appeals to me.

>104 swynn: German titles of English books are a long story that rarely has a happy ending.
The worst I've experienced so far was 'Ich mag mich irren, aber ich finde dich fabelhaft' (I may be wrong, but I think you're fabulous) for Young Man with a Horn, which has nothing to do with the book at all.

>105 swynn: This one is available in German - and the title fits too...

>105 swynn: Cosmic horror in London's real-estate market! Many more will approve in today's world than did fourteen years ago. Enjoy the next one as much as this one.

Yeah, that one sound good!