Magicians Nephew Reads

Hello to all my fellow book-a-philes!

I met some of you at Richards b-day party and hope to get to know some of you on this electronic salon as well.

I read a lot but I belong to two book groups so I read to keep up with them. And I re-read old books (Does that count?) and I read and I read and I read. Cereal boxes too. Do they count?

Waving an e-hello to my friend and best babboo Ffortsa who helped me get online to this thing

JIM! Welcome!!! Great to have you here, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you're reading!

Jim!!! Glad to see you joining in the fun!

Welcome Jim, from another Jim!

Interesting that the New York Times best seller list now differentiates between "hard" books and e-books.

My Sweet Baboo gave me a Kindle last year and it has become the repository for books I enjoy reading, can pick up in the middle and enjoy, and can put down and go on with my life as needed.

So I've stocked the pond with a bunch of Lawrence Block as follows:

1). The Burglar who Liked to Quote Kipling
2). The Burglar Who Painted like Mondrian
3). The Burglar in the Library

Three sometimes very funny books about Bernie Rhodenbarr the bookseller thief who solves crimes mostly so they won't be pinned on him.

And along side of that

4). Even the Wicked
5). Dance at the Slaughterhouse
6). Walk among the Tombstones.

Three VERY dark walks on the mean streets of New York with Block's other detective Matthew Scudder.

This dude can write.

Going to catch up with you all on this challenge thing

7). The Mote in Gods Eye

There is science fiction and there is science fiction.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote "The Mote in Gods Eye" and knowing those two you can bet your boots the science is right.

But make a note: when they talk about meeting a strange alien race, they're talking about us.

The "moties" are territorial, sex driven and trapped on a single planet in an endless cycle of overpopulation, mass death and painful struggle and rebirth. Sound Familiar?

It's a LONG book they love their technology and they take forever to get the ball rolling. Then the ball explodes all over the place.

Biggest science fiction drawback - these boys can't create a character to save their lives. But when the character is a whole living species and they make it real for you - that isn’t bad either.

uh-oh. My cover will soon be blown. I should have picked a different screen name - do you think people would have made fun of me?

8). The Age of Wonder

I hate how we are taught science in schools. The History of Science is filled with great stories of very human people making mistakes and somehoe carrying on.

This is a lovely graceful book and really well written about the explosion of scientific knowledge in the late 18th century. Ballooning, comet watching, exploring Africa.

The Book is subtitled "The Beauty and Terror of Science" and you get a lot of that. But very human stories of very human people. Highly recommended.

9). The Postmistress

Someone explained to Sarah Blake that there are no "Postmistesses" in the United State Postal Service - all officers male or female are called "PostMaster" Works for me.

I picked this up because I have a big interest in Edward R Murrow and this book is partially about a woman who worked with him in London during World War II.

But the parallel narratives don't really work and the ending seemed pasted together hastily.

A good read but instantly forgettable.

10). Fathers and Children Yes the book originally known as Fathers and Sons by Turgenev.

Read it in my Tuesday night Book Group.

Sort of left me cold.

Can see what he's up to but I think for me at least the moment for this book has past.

11). The House in Paris

This was my first introduction to Elizabeth Bowen and it was a very pleasurable one.

Two children meet in a house in Paris. Both are on journeys from here to there. One is waiting for a train one is waiting for his mother who he has never met.

Out of this comes a moody cynical story about sex and destiny.

She is playing with time like Doctor Who and I suspect sometimes she is deliberately slowing the story down but it's all right with me.

And the story is chock full of glittering lines that make you stop and gasp. This lady can write.

I'm told she has written a batch of short stories and I'm told they're pretty good. If I read short stories that would be my next stop.

Nice to meet a new author and read a complex and fascinating book

12). I shouldn't even be doing this

Bob Newhart is a funny man. I can listen to him for hours.

This is a book of his comedy routines mashed up into a sort of memoir. It's oK but what's funny on the stage is not always funny on the page.

Title comes from a bit. Guy is having an affair and is in bed with the Other Woman. "Kiss me Kiss me" she gasps.
"I shouldn't even be doing this" is the punch line.

I tell all my friends that if you want to understand the Stock Market (where I toil in humble obscurity) you have to real Michael Lewis' Liars Poker.

Now he has written a sequel of sorts

13. The Big Short about the most recent crisis and about the handful of people who stood on the sideline shouting "But the Emperor has nothing on!".

The first book is a comedy, the second book is a tragedy. Both are must reads.

If you don't understand how sub-prime mortgages brought down the economy, this is the book to read.

Taking a break from reading David Foster Wallace's broom of the system which I am finding VERY heavy sledding I downloaded to the good old Kindle some old favorites from Rex Stout.

14. The Silent Speaker
15. The Rubber Band
16. The League of Frightened Men

Of course this is the wonderful Nero Wolfe and the even more wonderful Archie Goodwin sleuthing the color streets of New York City and environs.

I'm right up there with the people who think Archie is Huck Finn's great grandson; his cynical pragmatism and general worldly acceptance is just quietly grand.

The puzzle is the least of your worries - just sit right back and enjoy. I did.

Should you count books that bored the living shoe polish out of you?

For a book group I read David Foster Wallace's

17). Broom of the System which is a VERY early book by a very talented novelist.

But this is the first novel about his college days and who was cool at the school and who wasn't.

I love Fitzgerald but can rarely bring myself to read This Side of Paradise which is HIS first book.

NOT recommended.

Should you count books that bored the living shoe polish out of you?

You should count them twice!

Finished

18) Snow Country a moody little Japanese novel. You really have to downshift to read books like this - as the man in Waiting for Godot says "Nobody comes nobody goes it's awful!

In 1930's Japan a man rich bored and married (but I repeat myself) goes up to the north country to stay in a hot springs spa and screw around. He meets a down at the heels geisha/ prostitute who falls in love with him and has her heart broken while the violins play and the nature symbolism erupts like a volcano under the "Bambi" set. Where does the labor of unrequited love get its reward? Not here.

Some lovely little passages - the book is very episodic having been written over a space of a decade but very still and distanced. I liked the author's The Master of Go but this one left me - no pun intended - cold

I am way behind on your thread, Jim, but popping by to say that I am glad you and Judy made it safely back from your trip!

I think I will give Snow Country a pass. I also liked The Master of Go.

19). Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

Read for a Book Group. Harmless warm romance novel vibe with some Afterschool special tolerance lecture stirred in.

That makes it sound like I didn't like it and I did. It's a nice little time travel to a mythical England of little Agatha Christie villages with roses round the door and comic Vicars and doddering Lords.

Oh pooh! I thought it was lovely.

#20: I am with you, Judy!

Historians love to play the what-if game.

During World War II America allied herself with one genocidal, racist madman (Joseph Stalin) in order to rid the world of another one ( A. Hitler). It was the great genius of Franklin Roosevelt to keep the coalition together and focused on beating the Nazis, in spite of terrific pressure not to.

So Phillip Kerr who wrote the wonderful atmospheric Berlin Noir triligy, returns to the scene of the crime with

20) Hitler's Peace

The Nazis know the war is going badly in 1943 and leak news of Soviet atrocities in Poland hoping to break up the alliance and perhaps allow a negotiated end of the war peace. It's a fascinating book and Kerr knows his history and his Germany, but I don't really buy into the premise. Yes we left Stalin in place after the war but would we have left HITLER in place? I don't know. And if Hitler had been left in place would news of the camps leak out, or remain war propaganda horror stories?

Scenes of Hitler negotiating with Stalin and Roosevelt behind closed doors at the Teheran "Big Three" conference makes FDR out to be the same sort of ruthless cynical bastard that Stalin and Hitler were, and I don't quite buy THAT either.

I enjoyed the book mostly. But read Berlin Noir first as that is better.

Back to the Bat-Thing Robin!

I can see where Judy uses LT as a respite from work. I usually enjoy my work but today is dragging.

(21) Death in Venice I knew Isaac Asimov VERY slightly and thought that his early stories and books were wonderful and that he was a delightfully charming and modest man.

And then he left his first wife and married his shrink and Janet told him he was ISAAC ASIMOV!!!!! and it really changed him and not for the better.

Somewhere along the way someone told Thomas Mann he was Thomas Mann and he should jolly well write like it.

So he does.

I get that translating from the German is not a waltz int der Wald but some translations are heavy sledding and some have the wit and fun of the original.

I mostly like this one though it slides off into self-parody at times.

Should have road signs every few pages "Nature Images Ahead".

A book to admire if not to love.

A couple of years ago I found a great book called April 1865 which took the last month of the American Civil War (The assassination and the surrender) and used that month as a lens to look at the whole war and at America in mid-century.

Now someone has come along and written a book called (22) 1861 and he has taken the same idea and really run with it.

So many books hurry through the last days of the Buchanan administration (our first gay president?) and the Fort Sumter mess to get to "the good stuff"

Well Adam Goodheart has got your good stuff right here. Stopping off to look at a young James Garfield, and the brave young Ellsworth, and some of the early skirmishes-not-yet-battles and some other great stories that are pretty much known only to historians.

Good old Benjamin Butler Democratic Party Hack turned General who decided that negro slaves were "contraband of war" which ducked the slavery questions but took slave labor away from the Confederacy.

Butler shows up later when he schedules a 4th of July ceremony where he plans to read aloud the Declaration of Independence - but this is called off when nobody can find a copy!

VERY highly recommended

All right already.
In "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown", Lucy sings

"Peter Rabbit is this stupid book
About this stupid rabbit
who steals vegetables from other people's gardens".

So sing with me now

23 "Following Polly is this stupid book
about this stupid airhead
who has comic misadventures in the City".

Murder mystery? Romantic Comedy? Semi autobiographical first novel?

Alice loses her job and decides for no particular good reason to start stalking her former classmate the highly successful Polly. Polly turns up dead. "Comic hilarity ensues". Not.

Not really very funny and not really very serious and not really a fair-to-the-reader murder mystery either.

Characters you've met before in other better books and the shadow of "Sex in the City" hovering over it all.

Always fun to read a book based in New York City and recall pleasant times in places the characters visit.

If Major Pettigrew's Last Stand is chick lit, this thing is Chick Lit Lite. (try saying that three times fast).

Major Pettigrew come back! All is forgiven.

The historian's curse. I was re-reading Barbara Tuchman's (24) The Zimmerman Telegram the other day and Judy had to ask me what the book was about.

Mostly it's about what a really lousy President Woodrow Wilson was and how "he kept us out of war" trying to go down in history as the great peacemaker.

Wilson refused to intervene in World War and let it drag on for years thinking that only a "peace between equals" could bring lasting peace to Europe.

The Germans of course would have done anything to keep America out of the war, up to and including inciting a war between America and Mexico and ringing in the Japanese to keep the Americans busy.

There's a Sid Caesar side to this also where you can almost hear the German Ambassador saying "You invade America, and we'll secretly help you, and you get to keep Texas".

Note that Wilson liked being at war with Mexico and sent troops there often for no especial good reason.

Note that idealism is a really terrible way to run a country.

The Zimmerman Telegram was the proof that Germany was meddling in Mexico, contrary to the Monroe Doctrine. Wilson couldn't ignore it. That along side of "unrestricted submarine warfare" is how we got into the war.

This book is really an extended footnote to Tuchman's The Guns of August which I'm also reading but she is such a sure footed story teller that you get carried along effortlessly.

Graceful elegant writing.

I love you reviews, they read like conversations and the Lucy song about that 'Following Polly' book made me laugh.

#24: I too enjoyed Jay Winik's April 1865. I will have to see about getting a copy of the Goodheart book.

I really love Lawrence Block. I've had the pleasure of meeting him and chatting with him a few times, and have been very entertained by his novels featureing the burgler-bookseller-detective Bernie Rhodenbarr and the ex-cop-ex alcoholic detective Matt Scudder.

Now Mr. Block and who can blame him is digging into his trunk and reissuing some early books from his pulp days.

One of them is

25 The Girl with the Long Green Heart and it's the kind of hardboiled caper novel that you might find as half of an Ace Double (Remember those?) or as a cheap paperback to pick up in the bus station.

It's a formula con-man story that takes a long time to set up the con and then winds down very quickly things blow up in the con man's face. (Quelle surprise!)

"I won't play the sap for you" Sam Spade snarled. The Con Man hero of this little book could have taken a lesson or two from Spade.

It's a workmanlike job but if it didn't have Lawrence Block's name on it you wouldn't think twice.

Sort of interesting to see early work from a man I admire but it's not much more than that.

Block did put this one out for 99 cents on Kindle so I've got no kick coming.

But "The Sting" it ain't

What do you say about 26 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

Starts out like "Tom Sawyer Part II" (was advertized as the story of "Tom Sawyer's Companion") and yet after a few chapters the author gets tired of Tom (as I do) and sends his young hero out into the world to see what he can see.

Twain seemed to collect stories like this (The feud, the "Nonesuch" and others) and places his compassionate and curiously non-judgemental hero in the middle of it all. Huck's curious mixture of naivte and world-weariness always strikes a chord with me. ('People can be so awfully cruel to one another").

The book is all about morality and ethics. Can society teach a young boy to do things he knows are wrong? Can a young boy do the thing he knows is right even though every fiber of his being says it's wrong?

The problem is the ending of course.

Tom Sawyer shows up again, and takes over, and the book just all goes galley west and hell for breakfast, as my aunts used to say.

This reading I missed any kind of farewell scene between Huck and Jim - what is with that? But when Tom shows up, Jim as a character is diminished, and the book just peters out.

There is another book called The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by a man named John Sayles.

Not sure I can recommend it. He puts in a lot of sex stuff, and Jim dies in the end trying to "escape". Another take on the character but I can't say an improvement.

But Huck calls me back every year. I knew a man who said he took August every year to re-read "Moby Dick". If I don't re-read "Huck" every now and again. I miss it.

See you on the raft.

What's a "Boy's Book"?

I can rememeber when people wouldn't publish a YA book with a female hero(ine) because "boys don't want to read about girls".

Now it seems that girls are the only ones reading and buying.

Which brings us to Horatio Hornblower. Amazon had a bunch of them on sale for Kindle and I stocked up. Great adventure, great nautical detail, a very human character in the lead and even a hint of sex and adultery. (Gasp!)

27 Beat to Quarters
28 Ship of the Line
29 Flying Colors

charts Hornblowers first "first rate" command and how he fought it and lost it and was captured by the French and made a daring hairsbreadth escape. The books gallop along and are wonderful about sailing and about fighting "The Corsican Tyrant" Napoleon.I've read and liked some of the Patrick O'Brian Audrey-Maturan novels, which are set in the same period and among a lot of the same places - but I read them mostly out of duty. They plod and twist and turn and they are so damned dreary and dark. Master and Commander for example.

But Good old Horny delights as much as he did when I was 12.

Splice the halyard. Man the yards!. I'm so there

I love time travel stories. Love them love them love them.

My favorites are both by Bob Heinlein by His Bootstraps and All you Zombies where he gets the time traveller so tangled up in his own shoes you think he'll never resolve it - and then he resolves it so elegantly and wonderfully.

And what about Ted Sturgeon's It Wasn 't Syzygy

Which bring us to
30 When You Reach Me a clever little YA book about a 12 year old girl who is obsessed with A Wrinkle in Time a book which strangely enough I never thought of as a time travel book.

Have to love a book where all the chapter headings are topics from the old "$25,000 Pyramid" game show.

But I give it a near miss. The characters are well drawn but not engaging, the '70's uptown Manhattan school yard settings not really clearly drawn.

The young girl hero has a voice of her own but Meg Murray she ain't.

But the time travel paradox she unwinds and then resolves is as they say worth the price of admission.

If you're a Wrinkle in Time fan you might take this one out for a spin.

Have you tried Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates? it's one of the best time travel books I've read.

You have had a streak of good reads recently, Jim!

>33 drneutron::

The reviews here look interesting, Doctor.

Adding it to the list.

31 is an oldie and a goodie Wuthering Heights is Emily Bronte's only published book and it seethes and broods like six seasons of a bad soap opera. One of the critics I read said that Heathcliff was the model for other "bad boys" in literature including Mister Hyde and even Frankenstein.

But it goes on and on - a ghost story told by an old woman around a kitchen fire. Lots of good stuff in here and the character of Heathcliff is mesmerizing.

But badly wants cutting though I can't think where.

A friend of mine in my Book Group suggested that Heathcliff and Cathy and Edgar reminded her of Tom and Daisy and Gatsby in "The Great you know". I like that.

Much better than the Classics Illustrated Comic I read of this back in High School

Wuthering Heights used to be our alarm code for "all's well". I am delighted to hear that it's better than the comic book. Delighted. Truly.

One has to only wonder what your alarm code was for "Run for your Lives!"

Sense and Sensibility ?

"Harlequin romance"

How fascinating and frustrating it is to sit in a book group listening to people rave about a book that really didn't do it for you.

32 Train Whistle Guitar is a book by an American Author who was totally new to me. So I got a copy and one for Judy and dived into it with gusto.

And came out on the other side sort of bemused.

Curious that said book group had just finished reading good old Huckleberry Finn so I had two novels written in Negro dialect to compare and contrast.

Murray knows him some small town Southern blackfolk, and the character portraits of the people are framed with dignity and grace and humor and love.

But that dialect! Sometimes it was effortless and wonderful, and sometimes it was like forcing small town black people to talk in Joycean stream of consciousness just to prove that you could.

And sometimes it was just inert and academic - pushing me away and calling attention to the cleverness of the author and distracting from the story.

The best part is the end I think where small town Scooter comes back from college and you see very subtly drawn the distance that he has come from the small town. The dialect of the people he meets contrasts so sharply with the studied formality of the narration and it is very moving indeed.

I am told this is book one of a quartet and I might pick up book two one day and see what's what.

But this one for me was reaching out for the Jesus bar of a highballin' freight and missing and falling heavy down in the dirt - twelve bar blues and all.

James McPherson wrote a totally knock your socks off book many years ago called Battle Cry of Freedom for the Oxford University Press.

Can't think that anybody outside of Shelby Foote could write a one volume history of the war and have time for economics, politics, military history social history and all of it relly really on target. (I'm no longer interested in any Civil War book that doesn't go back at least to 1830 to discuss the economics of slavery and how the south was being squeezed by the North step by step.

The problem is that every once in a while a new book comes out by McPherson and it seems like he went back and cut and pasted material from "Battle Cry" and made a new book out of it.

So
33 Tried by War is a book about Lincoln as military leader during the Civil War. But there really isn't much to say and not much new to say. Lincoln was unhappy with his generals and tried in the early days to make military policy, sometimes with good and sometimes with ill results.

This book like many others makes a goat out of General George McClellen, who was tasked with destroying Lee's army while simultaneously acting as the defense force for Washington DC. Not easy to do both at once.

And of course Grant and Sherman come in from the West and by and large Lincoln's military policy is to approve what they do and send congratulatory telegrams.

In The Sun Also Rises Hemingway's character Jake buys two newspapers about bullfighting and sighs "Whichever one he read first would ruin the other one".

I know how he feels.

Jim, the next book in Murray's series is The Spyglass Tree and it's available at Amazon.

RD I think I'm going to take your advice and read some of his (Murray's) non-fiction instead

Hi, Jim. I'm trying to catch up here and weeping because I missed Hornblower on sale for Kindle. I love those books, and my copies are mismatched and falling apart. That would have been good.......
I'm a great Connie Willis fan, so I think that her time travels from Doomsday Book through All Clear are top notch. I'll second the good Dr's recommendation for Tim Powers and The Anubis Gates too although that's not my favorite TP.
>38 magicians_nephew: & >39 richardderus: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Well I'm still here.

Belong to two book groups takes a lot out of one's time. Just finished The Moviegoer a few days ago and am now jumping belatedly into Brighton Rock

As for
34 The Moviegoer it's clever and probably was a good introduction to existentialism for a lot of American readers.

It's one of those days in the life of novels where the first person narrator runs around New Orleans and other southern parts trying to avoid dispair. There's a couple of girls in it too.

More than Wuthering Heights this book just felt dated - sixties dated which is probably the worst kind. And smug too. Doctor smug almost college senior smug. (And that's some world class smug)

Some good writing as the author adds rows to his knitting but you know what? So what.

I read it on Kindle and found myself highlighting passages (which is quite easy to do on the Kindle) but when I went back to them, the juice had gone out of them.

Won a boatload of awards way back when. Just not my cup of tea.

My lasting impression of The Moviegoer was, when I read it in 1998, that Walker Percy could write sentences with the best of 'em, but really did we need to have *this* story in *these* words?

I mellowed, but I left the experience liking the writer more than the book.

Finished with Brighton Rock yet?

Wish I could conjure up the ghost of Dashiell Hammett and let him read Brighton Rock. I think he would love it - and I think its portrayal of Brighton makes Hammett's idea of "mean streets" look like Disneyworld.

Pinkie and Wilmer the gunsel would have a few things to say to each other too, I imagine.

Agreed. Something much grittier about Brighton than LA. Or San Francisco. Or....

so:

35 Brighton Rock is Graham Greene in the shabby underworld of the Brighton race meeting circa 1934.

It's a grim dark picture of life as a series of dissapointments and humiliations, presided over by the Catholic Church.

"They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more."

Maybe not even for an instant.

Pinkie, a 17 year old gunsel and small time protection racket hoodlum, tries to avenge the death of his gang's leader, Kite, and finds himself killing and killing again to defend his place in the world.

Is Pinkie "evil"? Yes of course. He knows the difference between Good and Evil, knows Hell well (He's soaking in it) and does not expect to go to Heaven.

"I am in blood
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er."

Perhaps the one Shakespeare quote we don't get from the tedious and doomed Prewitt.

"Cans't thou minister to a mind diseased?"

Pinkie fascinates because his choices once you accept the premise are logical and direct as Macbeth. But in this the one I can't take my eyes off of is Ida, the blousy bloodhound who keeps on Pinkie's trail to the end. And Rose, Pinkie's girlfriend and later wife, who understands that she is damned (and understands why) perhaps even better than Pinkie does.

Imagine Graham Green choosing to become a Catholic when this is his view of the church.

Not a Yogi's Laff-a-lympics kind of book, but a good 'un all the same

'Tis a bit cheerless. But I suspect Greene joined the Cat'lics BECAUSE that's how he saw the Church, not in spite of it. Something grim and loveless and minatory would appeal to someone as depressed as I suspect he was.

Manic-depressive according to Wikipedia, and actually psychoanalized during his Oxford years. Since he lived from 1904 to 1991, I guess he found ways to cope.

Catholicism! Compared to the hell he lived, the hell they promised back then was a cake-walk.

I bless the pharmacologists who create and dispense the miracle drugs helping so many to cope with depression, manic or otherwise.

I have the feeling of that guy in the Greek Wars who ran the marathon - twice - and collapsed across the finish line gasping "Rejoice, we conquer".

You know - dead, but happy.

Which is another way of saying that last night I finished

36 Middlemarch the medium large doorstop of a book by Miss George Elliot.

Started out reminding me of Dickens, if Dickens was a woman and lived in the countryside and not in town.

But Dickens doesn’t do that – doesn’t write this way. Miss Mary Ann lets you in - and confides in you - in a way Dickens never does.

Reading it on Kindle I was forever stopping to admire authorial insights and authorial asides that were just - so - well - written. My!

Dickens roars from the podium - Eliot whispers in your ear.

She calls attention to herself in a way that I would find annoying except that it's not.

Soap Opera? Maybe. But a very high level understanding of people and how they interact. You find yourself taking sides again and again with people and sometimes surprising yourself by switching sides mid way.

Small town village life during the Regenty period. Doctors bankers orphans tradesmen pretty girls. (and does our Miss Mary Ann understand the workings of the female mind!) Fascinating.

The only drawback is that I read it under the gun for a book group meeting tonight. Want to put aside some time and go back and read it again.

"There is one art
No more no less
To do all things
With artlessness"

Well. After a deep dive like that you have to take a break. Where better than in a graveyard?

Neil Gaiman's
37 The Graveyard Book
quite self consciously recreates the story of Mowgli in The Jungle Book.

Here the orphan boy is named "Nobody" or Bod for short and is adopted not by jungle animals but by the ghosts and haunts of the local graveyard.

Still with me?

As in the Kipling it is a book of great wonders and sometimes great terrors - just like any childhood - and perhaps the defining coming-of-age story for our time.

Yes it's a "children's" book - but it wowed my long past childhood self with its matter of fact tone and its fiercely memorable imagery.

The climactic confrontation with the Big Bad is probably the weakest part of the book - but that's true of the Kipling too.

Teach your children how to yell for help in the language of the night-ghouls - you won't be sorry.

Haunting. (sorry)

Rant of the day:

Why is it that "good books" that involve space travel or time travel are never called "Science Fiction"?

"Magical Realism"? Pfui!

Because serious novelists are afraid to be relegated to that pulp ghetto with the comic book readers clutching the copies of Wierd Tales with big bosomed women on the covers being carried off by dinosaurs. (I'm looking at You Gabriel Garcia Marquez).

Which leads us to

38 The Wooden Sea

a lovely little book passed along to me by my Sweet Babboo.

Small town police chief suddenly has his life turned around when a dead dog doesn't stay buried (or even dead) and past and future swirl around in dizzying array.

But this SOB can write! And his small town America and his small town characters will grab you and make you care about them even as he whirls them around the merry-go-round.

Half of me wishes for a sequel ; half of me likes it just fine just the way it ended.

Is this science fiction? Yes!

It it a really good read? Double yes!

I want to read it again.

Take me back to Crane's View.
Put a dead dog in the trunk of my car.
Give me a multi colored feather-that's-not-a-feather.

And I'm there.

Highly recommended

There's a NYC meetup scheduled for Dec. 26th! I put us in for it. Richard, Caro, a few others. DrNeutron even thought he might make it. The link should be on the wiki.

Another month and the hound of the book group villes nips at my heels.

The book du jour (and I suggested it) was

39 Frankenstein the fever dream of a child bride thrust perhaps to suddenly into the demands of the brute physicality of life.

Everybody knows the story - Victor F studies the black arts, raids the graveyards and the stockyards and creates (and then abandons) the great hulking, brutish ugly Creature.

The Creature (he is given no name) tries to learn and love and fit in, but can't because he's ugly and monstrous and alone. So alone.

But there's one last chance. If Victor will make him a bride he and she will go off in the wilds and no one will ever see them again. Victor promises to do this, and then half way through the process, destroys the "bride" and seals his doom. (It will not be the last bride destroyed in the story.)

The book is Gothic like nobody's business with everyone but especially Victor and the Creature declaiming long speeches about right and life and vengence.

You could make up a party game of reading aloud such speeches and asking people to guess - Victor or not Victor?

But this is grand story telling so pay attention. Note when she is talking about the duties of fathers toward children. Note that the book begins and ends with a child kneeling at the deathbed of a parent. Note the lovely framing of the letters from the sea captain who also wishes to explore the unknown, for the good of mankind and for his own greater glory.

Dated? Yes but sill alive with passion and fire and ice. You can see why this one has survived the decades since it was written.

Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;

Book Traffic Jam.

Reading Swann in Love for Book Group and enjoying the style and the craftsmanship without very much caring about any of the people. Possibly the translation? I've never read Proust before.

And I opened the well-reviewed Nixonland a few weeks ago and as a political junkie am now hooked on it. It's political analysis going back fifty years purporting to explain the fracturing of the body politic in modern day Washington. But right now I'm back in the 1960's watching Nixon gnash his teeth and plot his political resurrection.
Don't make the mistake of thinking it's an anti-Nixon book - the author is not shy about reporting the dirty tricks and outright frauds perpetrated by the Kennedy clan

AND yesterday I picked up a copy of Operation Mincemeat a new book about an old story. Some people will remember the movie "The Man who Never Was" about a daring and somewhat creepy World War II plot to fool the Germans about the invasion of Sicily by dropping a dead body with misleading documents off the coast of Spain.

Euan Montagu (the original project mastermind) wrote a book about it in the 50's (Which became a so-so movie) but was hampered in writing by the Official Secrets Act and had to leave some of the good parts out. Anyway that is sitting there with all the book parts left inand tempting me too.

And Suzanne's recommendation How to be a Rogue Trader book is on my Kindle and I have gotten a few pages in and am dying to get back to it.

Too many books! Too little time!

I'm thinking of holding up a liquor store so they'll put me in prison and I'll have time to read.

funny, my mother used to have the same fantasy. With your (and her) luck, you'd be assigned to the laundry.

40 Operation Mincemeat is the famous story of how British Intelligence dropped a corpse off the coast of Spain during World War II to try to convince the Spanish (and their German partners) that the Allies were going to invade Greece instead of Sicily.

The original planner of the op wrote a book called The Man Who Never Was in the fifties but because he wrote in the fifties the book is filled with elisions, omissions and downright lies, due in part to the Official Secrets Act and a desire not to blow cover of people still living.

It’s a very well researched book and catnip for the WW II history nut. The author even got into the history of the submarine crew that dropped the body off and the back story of the driver of the car that took the body to the submarine in Scotland - and there are some great stories to tell there too.

The older book made it sound easy: You get a stiff, dress it in British kit, attach a briefcase full of tasty secrets to its arm, and pitch it in the bay. The details given in the current book give a much better flavor of the difficulties of the matter.

The author is very good about how many times the operation almost failed (or could have failed) though misadventure or downright bad luck.

And the writer had access to German war records which gave a picture of the chain of command on the Nazi side and how the Germans and the Spanish came to be deceived.
(The author unearthed a lovely story of a Prussian officer, secretly anti-Nazi, who from his place in German Military Intelligence FWH strongly endorsed the false story and made sure it was brought to Hitler’s attention even though he almost certainly knew it was phony all along.)

But somehow the wealth of detail flattens out the story a little – your eye gets taken away sometimes from the main chance.

I enjoyed it – but it’s a book for the fan-boy and the specialist.

Recommend having Sir John Masterman’s The Double Cross System handy as a cross reference when you read it - unless you can remember who agent Garbo or agent Tricycle or agent Zigzag was without a crib.

mistletoe smooches!

And now you're all gonna think "well ol' Jim, he's just about lost his old marbles every darned one of 'em!"

Which statement I will not dispute.

But I'm reading

41 Nevada

which is a Graphic Novel / glorified comic book by Steve Gerber, the wonderful and more than slightly demented writer who gave us the Comic Book (NOT the movie) of "Howard the Duck".

But Steve was famous for missing deadlines and one legendary issue of "Howard" was just random notes and scraps that he gave the artist in desperation to try to make something out of. As a spoof of every absurd comic book battle of the century he wrote one short sequence where a Las Vegas Showgirl and her pet ostrich take on and defeat a floor lamp.

(See First Paragraph).

And ever after comic fans would come up to Steve and ask "When are you going to write more about the Las Vegas Showgirl and the Ostrich?" So finally he did.

The result is a comic book where a Las Vegas showgirl and her ostrich battle evil on Christmas day. It's wonderful and funny and gritty and real and I love every page of it. Hard to find long out of print and Steve god rest him has also missed (or met) his last deadline.

Sense? Logic? Continuity? It is to laugh, mes ami.

But lovely stuff for all that.

God Rest you Merry, everyone

Yes I do read comic books. I can still recall the memorable day in high school where in the space of a few hours an assistant principal (a) confiscated a half dozen comics books of mine and (b) presented me with the school award for creative writing.

41 The Ten Cent Plague is a very detailed book about comic books in the 1950's and how schools and governments tried to ban them as contributing to Communism and Juvenile Delinquency and Racial Equality and other bad bad bad things.

It's sure true that comic books in the '50's went through a gory phase - with no continuing characters to inspire loyalty the artists had to grab you with the cover - and the covers got gore-ier and gore-ier and the body count went up and up and up.

But OTOH EC's "Frontline Combat" was sensitive and aware about war and the effects war had on people, and Timely/Marvel’s "Lost Romance" was read by both boys and girls curious to understand how relationships worked amid much human frailty.

And out of this much creativity came. Black arists and female artists worked in comics and did good solid exciting work.

And Bill Gaines created "Mad".

This author is the guy who wrote Positively Fourth Street about Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and the folk scene and honestly he's no better than a workmanlike writer. But he’s a good solid researcher and he tells the story well.

People can still get angry about how easily kids were manipulated and how easily Constitutional rights could be casually set aside.

But heck - it was only comic books. Yeah.

Excuse me I have to go walk my ostrich.

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