Ron's Adventures in Time and Space in 2015

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It is always fun to make reading plans at the beginning of a year. It is about the closest I ever come to "resolutions." History teaches me that my plans don't always play out. Last year I overcommitted, at least mentally, to too many planned reads. This year I'll minimize it.

I do have a goal though and that is to seriously read books off the shelf. It isn't a new goal and I've been doing pretty well at it. This year I want to excel at it. There are a number of books that I do want to read this year that I don't own. Whenever possible I'll get them from a library. Last year I picked up way too many books that I have yet to read or even think about. I did balance that a fair bit by sending off quite a few bags and boxes of books to the friends of the library. Many of these were ones I had read long ago and had no intention of ever re-reading and I just had to let them go to make space for the new ones. There was also a fair share of books I had picked up that looked interesting at some point in time but the truth was I was never likely to read them. So away they went.

The American (AAC) and British (BAC) Author challenges look very good this year. On the shelf I have unread books by quite a few of the authors so I may join in on some of the reads. There is also a Hillerman Chee/Leaphorn mixed with a Walt Longmire series project read that I am going to do at least in part. Some work on past projects as well.

I went a bit overboard on the science fiction reads last year. I'll still be reading them but I fully intend to move the balance to include more mysteries and historical fiction with a sprinkling of non-fiction and some literary classics. I'm also overdue on some fantasy reading. 75 books is definitely my goal for 2015 and I will be disappointed if I don't exceed it. I'll be trying a few more audiobooks as well.

Here's my 2014 thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/162945 but 2015 is upon us ...

So time to blast off with adventures in time and space ...

Welcome back!

Welcome back Ron. I look forward to seeing what you read this year.

Thanks for the greets Jim and Matthew. I'll be checking back in and updating the top of my thread for the new year launch and trying to drop stars on some of the new threads. The beginning of the year is pretty overwhelming here, but hard to complain about such a happy place.

>5 xymon81: >6 laytonwoman3rd: Thanks for the New Year's wishes! Good wishes for you also and some happy reading adventures in the new year.

Happy New Year, Ron!

So, do you think you'll get back to Bujold and the Vorkosigan series this year? You really should give Barrayar a try--one of her best books and the continuation of the story from Shards of Honor.

Thanks Amber and Roni.

Roni, I am really planning to read a couple Bujold's this year. In fact I have Barrayar sitting in a short pile of three books that I have set out to be part of my first reads of 2015. I started it last year and got distracted for who knows why before I got very far so I'll start all over with it.

I have several books in progress at the moment. I don't know why I do that sometimes. Almost done with one of them.

The adventure begins with a trip through time. Our destination: Paris and eastern Europe, 1938. Sidetrips abound.

I started this a few days after Christmas but wasn't in the mood for this or any book it seemed. Glad I picked it right back up. Despite having started a Carson McCullers book that is excellent I went back to this one and got hooked. This was my New Year's day read and I finished it up this morning.

1. Kingdom of Shadows by Alan Furst, finished January 2, 2015, 3 1/2 - 4 stars (Library book)


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Nicholas Morath was a soldier in the first world war, a cavalry officer who almost lost his legs and bears the scars from it, and as the story opens, he is a Hungarian ex-pat living the relative good life in Paris with an Argentine love interest. He is owner of an advertising business through his uncle Count Polyni, a Hungarian diplomat in Paris, and will eventually receive an inheritance from him. He apparently has enough money to live very well if not extremely well. Their former homelands were partitioned up from the old Austro-Hungarian empire after WWI. His mother and sister still live in Budapest, Hungary. The story opens in 1938 and Hitler and his war machine have already been making the opening moves of WWII and getting worse. Morath aids his Uncle and things get increasingly "scary" for lack of a more descriptive term as Hitler and Nazi aggression escalate.

The novel is like a series of short stories, loosely connected. The plus side of this is an array of interesting characters, intrigue and situations and "atmosphere". The downside is meeting somewhat interesting characters and then they are gone, as if they were the guest star of the week in a TV series. The chapter titles themselves clue you into this structure, although I didn't realize that at first. "In the Garden of the Baroness Frei," "Von Schleban's Whore," "Night Train to Budapest," and "Intermarium" are the parts, and there are side stories within those. This story structure ended up working very well and things do get tidied up by the end. The history in here is very good and was really worth the read. I had grown quite fond of Nicholas Morath by the end of the story. This was my first Furst. groan. I'll certainly read more by him in the future. Interesting time in history that I'm not terribly familiar with. Overall, a very good book.

Thumbed your review of Kingdom of Shadows, Ron. This sounds like a decent place to start with Furst. I have one of his other novels, but it's No. 3 in a series, and for that reason I haven't attempted to read it yet.

Thanks Linda. I was hesitant at first to start a book in the middle of a series (I think this is #6), but I don't think this is a series in the usual sense. I think it is more a collection of related books. I was a little unsure of this story at the start, but it slowly and then quickly sucked me in as I got used to the unusual places and names and the forces threatening to overwhelm them. I also feel like I learned a lot as a bonus. This was a good one.

Tentative books for the coming weeks are "The Blessing Way" by Tony Hillerman, "Barrayar" by Lois McMaster Bujold, and something by Kazuo Ishiguro for the British authors 2015 challenge (BAC). I am currently reading "The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter" by Carson McCullers for the American Authors challenge.

I'm not planning any serious attention to the BAC - I have a handful of books on the shelf to choose from among the 26 proposed authors. I might do Daphne DuMaurier in March, certainly Graham Greene in August, and maybe David Mitchell for October and PG Wodehouse for December. I'll watch for a few of the other authors at the library sales or see what they have on the shelf to check out.

The Hillerman is part of a project read (here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/185185) for Navajo mystery and Walt Longmire. I hope to give every Hillerman on the list a read over the year and at least one of Craig Johnson's Longmire novels. The full list for the project is:

January - The Blessing Way finished 1/16/15
February - The Cold Dish finished 2/23/15
March - Dance Hall of the Dead finished March 23, 2015
April - Death Without Company finished May 1, 2015
May - Listening Woman
June - Kindness Goes Unpunished skip
July - People of Darkness
August - Another Man's Moccasins skip
September - The Dark Wind
October - The Dark Horse skip
November - The Ghostway
December - Junkyard Dogs skip

As a carryover project from 2014 I plan to continue to read several novels from Lois McMaster Bujold in the Vorkosigan series. The prior thread for that read is here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/160914 and the 2015 continuation thread is here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/185168

read so far:

Barrayar finished 1/19/15

planned:
Cetaganda
Ethan of Athos
Labyrinth
Borders of Infinity

For The American Author challenge my reading so far has been:
January - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers finished 1/16/15
February - The Lesson of the Master Henry James finished 2/18/15
March - substitute for Richard Ford: In My Father's House by Ernest J Gaines finished 3/18/15
Richard Ford: Canada finished Dec 31, 2015
April - Tracks Louise Erdrich finished March 31, 2015
May - Sinclair Lewis- Kingsblood Royal finished May 5, 2015
June - Wallace Stegner Angle of Repose finished June 19, 2015
July - Ursula K. Le Guin Rocannon's World finished July 1, 2015, Planet of Exile finished July 3, 2015, City of Illusions finished July 23, 2015
August - Larry McMurtry - Streets of Laredo finished August 8, 2015
September - Flannery O' Connor- A Good Man Is Hard To Find finished Sept 25, 2015
October - Ray Bradbury- read The October Country, Farewell Summer, Summer Morning Summer Night and others through the month
November - Barbara Kingsolver- Homeland and other stories finished Nov 20, 2015
December - E.L. Doctorow- The March finished Nov 30, 2015 Homer and Langley finished Dec 4, 2015

AAC Tribute author: Where You Once Belonged by Kent Haruf, finished June 26, 2015

For the British Author Challenge I will only be doing some.
The author list is:

January : Penelope Lively & Kazuo Ishiguro
February : Sarah Waters & Evelyn Waugh
March : Daphne Du Maurier & China Mieville
April : Angela Carter & W. Somerset Maugham
May : Margaret Drabble & Martin Amis
June : Beryl Bainbridge & Anthony Burgess
July: Virginia Woolf and B. S. Johnson
August: Iris Murdoch and Graham Greene
September: Andrea Levy and Salman Rushdie
October: Helen Dunmore and David Mitchell
November: Muriel Spark and William Boyd
December Hilary Mantel and P. G. Wodehouse

My reading is:
March - Rule Brittania by Daphne du Maurier in a Virago edition, finished March 10, 2015
April : Up at the Villa by W. Somerset Maugham finished Apr 1, 2015
April: The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter finished Apr 4, 2015
May: The Garrick Year by Margaret Drabble finished May 16, 2015
June : Every Man For Himself by Beryl Bainbridge & The Muse Anthony Burgess finished June 4, 2015
August : Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene finished August 11, 2015
October : possibly David Mitchell
November : The Blue Afternoon William Boyd finished Nov 5, 2015

There's always a chance to go back and fill in for ones I skipped but I suspect that other reading may prevent that.

Hello, Ron! I'm dropping off a star, looking forward to seeing what you think of Barrayer. I've loved LMB's works, so it's always fun to read other people's thoughts on them.

>15 archerygirl: Thanks Kathy for dropping by. I'm itching to get to Barrayar. It will be my first science fiction adventure of the year but I have a few others to work on first.

The next adventure was to Navajo country, 1960's in a book first published in 1970.

2. The Blessing Way by Tony Hillerman, finished January 6, 2015, 2 1/2+ stars (Book off the shelf, pre-2009)


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The first of Hillerman's Joe Leaphorn books. I've read later books in the series that I enjoyed more than this one. I really like the Leaphorn character here, "blue policeman" from Law and Order and his interactions with the Navajo people but elements of the storytelling here interfered with my enjoyment of the story. Several characters here are really well done and a couple not, one exceedingly so. We are given most of the mystery up front and follow along to see if the characters can figure it out. The reader gets a few surprises also.

Despite wanting to cut back on book buying I can't help myself sometimes. I grabbed these from the Friends of the Library's books for sale nook at our library. I spied all sorts of authors for the AAC and BAC challenges as well as an aussie one. and I even restrained myself. I'm sure I'll do another visit soon ...

I seem to have the same issue, but it looks like a nice haul. My library has a take and give a book section by the door. Yesterday I took four.

>18 xymon81: our recycling center where I take our bottles and cans has a cart like that.

We have a book sale nook AND a take one/leave one rotating unit at our branch library. One has to be VERY careful walking past there...the point of a library is BORROWING, or so I keep telling myself. (You're going to love Homer and Langley, I think.)

>20 laytonwoman3rd: I'm a little leery of Homer & Langley given the very mixed reviews it gets. I had mentally planned to find a copy of The March for the AAC read - there are copies at the library available ... but now it may be H&L for year's end. Hoarding rather scares me. I hold on to too many books, that is for sure, but having seen and known true hoarders it gives me a bit of the shivers. Doctorow has not failed me in the past however.

I can understand the shivers, Ron. It's a scary affliction. I think Doctorow did an amazing job of getting inside the people, Homer, particularly, and letting us see them instead of their mounds of stuff.

Another travel in time to November 1940, the Black Sea, Southeastern Europe

This one wasn't a planned read. I made a stab at two other books first and bailed on both. Going back to the library I looked on the shelf and found the novel that follows "Kingdom of Shadows," the first book I read this year.

3. Blood of Victory by Alan Furst, finished January 13, 2015, 3 1/2 stars (Library book)


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This novel by Furst follows his "Kingdom of Shadows," a book I very much enjoyed. It jumps ahead from the last novel to November 24, 1940 and it is primarily set in the countries that border the Black Sea. The Germans have already taken Paris and this book is much more overtly a spy thriller than the last. New set of primary characters, all interesting, and for me a somewhat surprising appearance of a character from the prior novel that we thought was possibly dead. We learn there was much more to him then previously thought. The story revolves in various ways around a somewhat renowned but minor Russian writer from Odessa, I. A. Serabin, an émigré living initially in Paris and other places and how he is drawn into the war. After an incident he realizes he must make a decision to either fight or flee and he chooses to aid the British in an undercover role through a surprising contact.

The objective here is to stop the flow of the "Blood of Victory," which is oil and specifically Roumanian oil to Germany. Although this was an interesting read dripping with atmosphere set in some far off and unusual places, it didn't really pull me in quite like "Kingdom of Shadows" did. Still, this was a very suspenseful book, with some exciting heart racing scenes. I'll certainly be reading more from Furst.

another adventure in time, this one to a milltown in Georgia, 1940.

I read this for the American Author challenge as the January selection. I picked this up 6 or 7 years ago with every intention of reading it, but it kept getting pushed around on one of the TBR shelves and not gotten to. Then I was going to read it as a substitution for the 2014 challenge, but that didn't happen. Well, I'm glad I did read this masterwork now. It sure gave me some feelings of melancholy in a number of places.

4. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, finished January 16, 2015, 4+ stars (Book off the shelf, pre-2009)


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A deceptively simple book about the loneliness of the human condition. Perseverance against the hard realities of life. Acceptance or simply realization that some things are not the way one wants. Still we try. Generosity and caring where one would not expect it. I am really impressed with this book. It boggles my mind that this is a first novel from someone so young. Started writing this at 19 and published at 23. Yikes. A rare talent. The writing in many places in here is a treasure. There are passages throughout the novel that are just a pleasure to read - little bits of insight into the human condition or descriptions of things such as the joys of discovering how to create music. I started reading this novel with a huge amount of enthusiasm, but my zest tapered off some. I think it was partly because of the sadness and melancholy I associated with numerous characters, but also simply that I think that the book was drawn out a little too long. I read this over the span of about two weeks.

Many books are called classics. This is the genuine article. A book off the shelf and a challenge read. I'm happy.

I was overdue for a space adventure. This was an excellent one where I stepped back into a series read I was working on last year. I'll be continuing to read from this series over the course of the year.

5. Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold, finished January 19, 2015, 4 stars (Book off the shelf, 2014)


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This novel follows Shards of Honor which I read last year and is a continuation of the romantic adventure that began there. This is very much a woman's science fiction novel told pretty much the entire way from inside the head and from the eyes of Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan. We get a lot of history and backstory for characters who make later appearances in the series of novels. The two stories together are a great pair of planetary romances with quite a few interesting characters and plot twists and adventures. I thought the story was a little slow to start but once it took off, it really took off, and then it REALLY took off.

I like that this book is in the library of the International Space Station!

And deservedly so!

>26 ronincats: Roni, it just tickles me thinking about this book circling our planet. I'm going to miss Cordelia.

6. Infamy : the shocking story of the Japanese American internment in World War II by Richard Reeves, finished January 22, 2015, 4 1/2 stars (Early Reviewer book, 2015)


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This is really an outstanding book that I received through the Early Reviewers program. Books like this matter more than most. The time in 20th century American History when we had our own concentration camps was pretty well buried if not overtly hidden. No one talked about it. I was more than a little surprised to discover later in life that the small town I grew up in had a detention center from 1942-1946. As a child I wondered about the odd Quonset Huts near the archery range that were pretty much all that remained but had no idea until I discovered their history decades later. Perhaps much of younger America first learned of the internment of Japanese Americans in middle school reading "Farewell To Manzanar" which was published in 1973 and is one of the most well known books on the subject.

Reeves' book seems exceptionally well researched and tries to summarize and help us come to terms with how this happened in America. He lets us see from both sides of the barbed wire. I learned a lot from this book. I can recommend this book to any reader with even a casual interest in the subject. It deserves a wider audience than that, however. This is an important book. Perhaps the people who should read it are those who are entirely unaware of what can and did happen in America. I think one of the best points Reeves makes is found in his introduction, which I will quote here:

"The story of the "Japanese Internment," as it is usually called, is a tale of the best and worst in America. I learned, I think, that what pushes America forward and expands our liberty is not the old Anglo-Saxon Protestant views of the Founders, but the almost blind faith of each wave of immigrants-including the ones we put behind barbed wire. The Germans. The Irish. The Italians. The Jews. The Chinese. The Japanese. The latinos. The South Asians. The African-Americans. We are not only a nation of immigrants. We are a nation made by immigrants, foreigners who were needed for their labor and skills and faith-but were often hated because they were not like us until they were us."

I like that line "because they were not like us until they were us."

Reading this book I got angry. Very angry. This story is frightening, detailing how quickly racism, fear, and increasingly greed created a hysteria that spread from the West Coast. There are some true villains in this story, some big, some small. Reeves does an excellent job with some surprising examples (Dr. Seuss?!) of the spread of the poison sentiment. This is a very sad time in American History when the constitutional rights of American citizens were completely ignored. We move through each stage of the internment, and see the valuable service that many Japanese Americans still performed in military intelligence and the armed forces. In the end we have an epilogue and see the remorse that came to so many of the perps, perhaps most poignantly that of a weeping Chief Justice Earl Warren. We see the ugly side of America and Americans.

When I started reading this I did not want to put it down. It is that kind of book. Recommended.

That one sounds like a powerful read - thanks for the excellent review, Ron!

>29 scaifea: It is a powerful read Amber. Not one I'm going to forget. I think I will explore some additional books on the subject this year.

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This next book I picked up new very recently. I saw it for sale, had some vague memories of it supposedly being literate and very good, and so we had a go. A trip in time a little ways forward.

7. Lost Everything by Brian Francis Slattery, finished January 27, 2015, 2 stars (acquired 2015)


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Well, I suppose I asked for it. When I see the word "literary" appended to science-fiction I know I'm unlikely to get a conventional story. I'm not going to spend the effort to try and explain this novel because I really didn't care for it. Dislike isn't the proper word - didn't care about the characters or what was going on was what I felt. It sounded interesting and there are a couple, just a couple, good reviews here on Librarything that attempt to explain this and what it is like. They do a pretty good job. I was intrigued enough to give it a try just based on the blurbs and a casual look-see - a near-future story set in the Susquehanna River Valley. This is one of those books where there is some lovely, beautiful imagery all over the place. I just couldn't enjoy it. Instead I would think things like, oh that is clever or vivid or whatever but who cares about all this? Is there a story or anything approaching a real plot here? A small part of me is reminded of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" - in that it is very stylish but who wants to read something THIS bleak?

I'm going to take a short reading break - lots going on in real life. I'll probably think about this book a fair bit because it does get inside your head. Maybe I'll write some more sensible comments later. Or not.

ETA: I did go back and read over some parts. Doing so reminded me of the things that bugged me while I read it. It isn't just one thing. To discuss the things that bugged me would be spoilery and I don't want to spoil. I will say that the frequent lapses in conventional grammar threw me off. The odd narrator threw me off as part of the storytelling. When I repeatedly wonder who is saying something, is it the narrator, a character, are they even saying something? Maybe they are thinking this? Maybe they are thinking the other person is thinking this? Maybe they are just whatever ... Well, I won't belabor the point. The storytelling is unconventional.

Hmmm...well the setting intrigues me. I have yet to read a really fine novel set in the Susquehanna River Valley, although people have tried. It's too bad, because it IS so lovely hereabouts. That said, naturally I'm not too keen on a novel that destroys it all, and doesn't tell a compelling story either.

Linda, I have the sense that you might like this more than I did. You would probably recognize all sorts of stuff that is just a name to me. This is a sort of mark twainy thing too - a long journey on a new big muddy. This isn't your Susquehanna tho - this is after many decades of global warming and superstorms have reshaped things a lot. And the next big one is coming. I sorta skimmed some parts that I should probably go back and read. It undoubtedly deserves more than a dismal two star rating. Maybe you'd like me to mail it to you?

I'd be happy to give it a home, Ron. I don't read a lot of dystopian stuff, but I am definitely intrigued by this one, and would give it a try. Hurricane Agnes tried to destroy this valley over 40 years ago; I wonder if that's what gave the author this idea. I'll pm my address, and thanks!

I've been thinking a little about how I rate books. The stars rating. Once in a while I probably rate it compared to another book by the same author or a similar story, especially if it is part of a series. What I think I usually do however is a two part thing ... I rate it against itself. Even for a relatively "good" book if I think there are things that should have been done better or things that I think were done badly I am going to downgrade my rating. If I find things that really shine my mental clicker will let it trump a few rough spots. I find myself doing this especially when I feel there is internal inconsistency in the writing of a book - where there are parts where the author is really getting it right and then I see parts where they don't.

The other part of the rating is my own personal reaction to the story. Did I like it? Did the book pull me in? Did I admire the writing and storytelling? Did it thrill me or really turn me off? Did the writer completely fail with the ending?

I know I mentally rate and evaluate books as I read them. This tendency has certainly grown as I've gotten older. When I was young I would virtually always finish a book - it had to be dreadful for me to bail. I bail out more easily as I have built up my own reading history and realize I do not want to waste time on books I don't like. There are so many books out there ...

All of these things sort of come together usually by the end of a book.

Rod McKuen has just passed away. Makes me very sad.

>34 RBeffa: Hi Ron, have you seen the Rule of 50? I came across it while rambling about through the 75er group threads. There is a thread for it here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/185486
But essentially "If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit. Since that number gets smaller and smaller as we get older and older, our big reward is that when we turn 100, we can judge a book by its cover!"

>36 evilmoose: Yes! The Pearl rule I think it is. I heard about it here also and altho I don't strictly apply it (I could cut loose at 40!) I do agree with the sentiment of it.

winter in Northern California is very strange this year. There has been no measurable rain the entire month of January in San Francisco and most of the Bay Area. I don't think this has happened before in recorded history. I have a dwarf apple tree that has been blooming for 2-3 weeks. Boy is that tree confused. The daffodils have come up and a few are blooming. We had good rains before January so the ground got a good soak but our drought continues without snow in the mountains. Not good. Here are two photos from the garden this morning. Daffys and the flower stalk of an aoenium succulent.

>36 evilmoose: I have not heard of that rule. The completionist is me say though to stick it out unless a dire circumstance.

>39 xymon81: I had never heard of the Pearl rule before Librarything. I too was a stickler for finishing a book. Before a few years ago I literally almost never abandoned a book. If I had to I would plug away in small bits over many months. This isn't quite as bad as it sounds because I think I was much pickier about which books I started. Sticking with books pays off at times and a few books that I almost gave up on years ago turned out to be among my all-time favorites, so I always had that to egg me on. Librarything and all the voracious readers here encouraged me to try a lot of books and authors I would be unaware of or would skip over. SO, a lot of books I would have pre-screened out I gave a chance. Found some good ones and also found some that were not at all my style. The books that were clearly not a match made it rather easy to start bailing on them, and once I was on that slippery slope I relaxed a little. I still feel a little guilty about dumping a book, particularly when I don't think it is a "bad" book.

Haven't had much time to read, but currently I am working, slowly, on two books: HG Wells' "The Invisible Man" which I have never read before and am finding rather enchanting; the other is Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot See which clocks in at a bit over 500 pages and will take me a while. I hadn't planned to read that one now but it showed up at the Library after a long hold time and I must try to get it done in the next couple weeks. It got a rave review in our San Francisco Chronicle and was on many best books of the year lists for 2014. From what I have read so far I can see why. Beautiful writing. I have already found myself re-reading portions I had read the day before because they are so incredibly rich. The chances that this does not land on my own best reads of the year I'd rate as slim to none.

Friends of the Library sale coming up. I'll try to be good.

About to finish tonight I hope the most excellent book by Anthony Doerr. All The Light We Cannot See deserves all the praise.

In my experience you can either go to a library sale, or you can be good. You can't do both. Let me know if I'm wrong!

Sales are hit or miss. Sometimes there is a lot of stuff to drool over and it is impossible to be good, other times when there are lots of maybes I can go either way. I've picked up a lot of books lately so I certainly don't need any more maybes. I will keep my eyes open for the American and British author challenges and if I spy something that looks OK I'll probably pick them up. Part of the fun of friends of the library sales is the surprise factor of finding completely unexpected things.

In truth though you are right. Going and being good are mutually exclusive!

>42 laytonwoman3rd: Ha! I agree with this.

Hi, Ron!

Hi Amber. Thanks for stopping by.

At the book sale I was very bad. My only defense is I could have been worse. There were so many interesting books that I passed up lots of maybe material. I found several books that really made me happy such as the English paperbacks of Nevil Shute in excellent condition. I was happy to find Doctorow's The March and Sansom's Dominion and lots of mysteries. Twenty books is several months more on the TBR stack.

Yup, that's a haul, all right. The Shutes look unread, and I see a Virago edition there!

>46 laytonwoman3rd: I thought it might be you who was a fan of Elizabeth Taylor. I know you like the Virago editions which are rare birds in these parts. Anyway I had it in the back of my mind to try a Taylor one day and there was Angel and into the bag she went. One of the Shute's is lightly read but the other two appear unread.

I had put back several books just before I decided enough was enough yesterday including several prospects for the AAC such as Henry James and Richard Ford that I should probably have kept but I do have a James on hand and Ford is readily available on the library shelves. I'm not sure I like him but friends have spoken highly of his writing.

I'm not sure how you'll feel about Elizabeth Taylor. I'll be very interested to hear when you get around to reading Angel.

Oh, lovely haul, Ron! I'm slightly jealous of that Oxford Classics find...

>49 scaifea: I was pleased to find the Oxford Hardy. I read a bunch of his stuff in the early 80's after seeing the Nastassja Kinski version of Tess. I keep threatening a re-read of my favorites and this nice edition will spur me on. I hope.

8. All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, finished February 15, 2015, 5 stars (Library book)


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This is a brilliant book. At 530 pages it is not quite a doorstopper and yet I didn't want to let go. I lingered in the latter part of the novel, not wanting to finish. Finding my eyes almost welling up with tears at times. The writing is 5 star beautiful. It is told in an unconventional manner, moving back and forth in time and filling in pieces along the way to let the reader see how we got to where we are. The beginning is the end, although not quite. It is the story of a young boy in Germany before World War II and a younger girl in Paris, and what the war does to them and how these two people are linked by events vastly out of their control. There are a number of other characters who are very important to the story and well fleshed out as partners to the journey of our two primaries.

I doubt I will read a better book this year. I hope a few come close. I feel like reading this brilliant book again right now but I think I will let it rest for a year or two and do it again. I don't want to spoil this story with details in this short review.

So many positive reviews of this one; I love a long book that you don't want to be finished with. That experience takes me right back to my school days, when the bigger the book on the shelf, the more likely I was to take it out of the library.

Yep, I think at this point it must go on the wishlist - thanks for the review, Ron!

>52 laytonwoman3rd: >53 scaifea: Even though I heap praise on it and give it my rare 5 star rating it isn't a perfect book. The lyric quality to the writing seems to fade towards the end of the novel as things get wrapped up. Some readers may be disappointed a little with the end although I thought it was fine (although sad), if a little drawn out. I have to be very slightly spoilery to say that while most everything is wrapped up with characters at the end, there is a collaborator who needed his comeuppance and he is one whose fate is unknown. I would have been satisfied to have him hanging from a gallows pole.

pretty awesome book and although I thought about knocking off half a star for a few things I think it deserves the best rating overall. Some books fade from memory rather quickly. This one will not.

Here's a question for anyone passing through ...

How often does a book you read make reference to another book and make you want to read the other book?

In the book I just finished, Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot See a Jules Verne novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, is read within the book by a young girl and plays a part in the story. The small excerpts that appeared and the repeated mentions and discussions of the story made me want to read it with them! I picked up a lovely edition of the novel a couple years ago and I am going to try and read it by year's end. I read it when I was young although I don't recall precisely when and probably saw the Disney film a number of times including once in a theater. I'm looking forward to the adventure.

This has happened to me a few times with fiction--no specific examples pop into my head right now. More often with non-fiction where one book frequently leads to another.

>56 laytonwoman3rd: I am sure it has happened several times with me also (with fiction) but I couldn't think of examples either.

>55 RBeffa: The entire reason I finally read Three Men in a Boat is because To Say Nothing of the Dog skirts around and through it so much that it inspired me.

>58 archerygirl: There you go!

A coincidence that you mention this book because yesterday I was wondering where my copy is. I do not have it in my catalog of books and yet I know I have it somewhere. It IS possible I gave it away but I doubt it. I keep thinking I have all the books I read or have in my catalog and time and again one comes up missing.

>56 laytonwoman3rd: So in the car on the way home, after posting this at work, I was listening to the audio of Brideshead Revisited and there was mention of Huxley's Antic Hay, which is something I have thought of reading.

>60 laytonwoman3rd: It seems like it should happen more often than one remembers. Just mentioning a book within a story probably wouldn't make me want to read it.

meanwhile back at the ranch, or in this case across the pond and back to the late 19th century is where our adventure takes us. My book for the February American Author challenge ...

9. The Lesson of the Master by Henry James, finished February 18, 2015, 3 1/2 - 4 stars (Book off the shelf, 2010)

This short novel charmed me. A nice change of pace. It's sensibilities are quite dated but what should one expect for 1888? What it has to say about writers and their creations is probably timeless. James likes to use twenty words where two might do but I suppose that is part of the charm. I think the older author (The Master) really plays a trick on the younger author in the story, but perhaps his advice was sincere to an extent. I think that is all I need to say.

My 6th Thingaversary is in a few days. Despite the custom I have no plans to go out or online and have a book buying party. I've already bought a year's worth of books it feels like and Feb isn't even over yet.

10. The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson, finished February 23, 2015, 3+ stars (Book off the shelf, 2012)


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My quick impression: This started out a little rough, then got quite good, then went into a weak end game.

After an uneven start laid on a little thick, I thought Craig Johnson had done a very good job in elevating the suspense, broadening the character development of just about everyone, adding local color especially with the Cheyenne, casting suspicion all over the place .. in other words, writing a good mystery/suspense story and one that was a little different. I'm not a fan of guns so all the "gun worship" in the novel was a bit wasted on me. The mystical stuff on the mountain added some color and started well, but I thought it went on a little too long as well as strangely. Without being more than a little bit spoilery I thought the story fell off from there when Longmire came down the mountain trail through the blizzard with Esper. When he went back up we suddenly lose an entire scene - half a chapter worth perhaps and everyone wakes up in the hospital. That bothered me quite a bit. Finding their bones next spring might have been more believable. Moreso when I thought about how could anyone get up there and not see the "Tuff 1" truck coming down the mountain road? We had been told a number of times about how they drove for miles and saw no other vehicles. So I think someone might notice the Tuff1 Mazda making the great escape. If the reader can even accept that. I saw it coming, I'm sure everyone did, but wished it hadn't come. That part of the story failed me.

I noticed a few glitches in the storytelling. The conversations were hard to follow more than a few times, esp between Henry and Longmire - I'd read and re-read trying to figure who was talking and even what they were meaning. Not always successfully. Sometimes it was in the colorful expressions ... for example on pg 198 "I was looking forward to our next meeting like Grant did Gettysburg" I'd never heard that before. Probably no one has. Grant never did Gettysburg. Grant was busy elsewhere (Vicksburg I think). Gen. George Meade led the Union against Lee at Gettysburg. I suppose if he had written "looking forward to our next meeting like Longstreet did Gettysburg" there might have been even more puzzled readers. Or maybe not. At least it would be accurate.

Am I being nitpicky? Maybe a little, but Johnson writes this with snarkiness all over the place and although it made for some funny scenes it might have been dialed down a notch for my enjoyment. On the plus side, I like how the small town atmosphere makes anyone's business everyone's business. I think the writing improved a lot from the beginning of the book. I like a story that drops in bits of history here and there. I also like Longmire's relationship with Henry - feels like a real friendship and a modern update of the Lone Ranger and Tonto. (I mean that in a good way). Henry Standing Bear is my favorite character.

I was disappointed with the end. It is not quite a Dues ex machina. To use and slightly mangle a cultural reference like the author loves to do, I'll say "it came out of the sky, landed just a little south of Moline. Jody fell out of his tractor, couldn't believe what he seen." So I give it a 3 star rating. With a bullet.

The moral of the story? Perhaps all of this could have been avoided if justice had been applied a little fairer in the first place. Bailiff, whack his pee pee.

an adventure in time, destination 1890's England

11. The Invisible Man by H G Wells, finished February 26, 2015, 3+ stars, (acquired in 2015)


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When this story began I was rather sympathetic to the Invisible Man, and enjoyed the story which was written in 1897. Stories this old are apt to improve one's vocabulary and bring back expressions probably heard from my grandparents. The tale took an unexpected twist for me, and my sympathy for a scientist who perhaps didn't realize the consequences of his actions was dashed. Instead we find we have a story of a sociopath, a man who seems to have been mad at the world from his college years. We can distill this down to "mad scientist" I believe.

>55 RBeffa: This definitely happens to me - although, like others, it's hard to think of examples. Authors like Haruki Murakami who are always referencing music make me want to hunt down and listen to the music too. I'm looking forward to reading All the light we cannot see.

>63 RBeffa: Iiiiinteresting. One of those "classics" I have never read, and ought to.

>64 evilmoose: Murakami does that to me every book!

>65 laytonwoman3rd: I had never read it before either Linda. My daughter wanted to read it and I picked up an old paperback a month ago (in the literature classics of the library friends book nook sale) and went hmmm maybe I should read this.

and thanks to facebook I saw this, this morning
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So I was wondering what to read next and I received a message this morning that Station Eleven had come into the library based on my hold. When I put a hold many many months ago I was place seventy something for the available copies. I'll see if this one lives up to the hype.

Today is my 6th Thingaversary. LibraryThing has certainly enriched my enjoyment of books. Me and the Thing go way back. Here I am with my son almost exactly 20 years ago on a late February day in 1995. I tell ya, "It's clobberin' time."

Happy Thingaversary!

Leonard Nimoy has just died. I am not happy. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/arts/television/leonard-nimoy-spock-of-star-tr...

Happy Thingaversary, Ron. Yes, I'm sad too.

>69 RBeffa: The universe is bereft.

>71 laytonwoman3rd: Yup.

>70 ronincats: >71 laytonwoman3rd: >72 drneutron: The universe is certainly bereft. The world will not be right without Spock/Nimoy. I'm going to have to fit in some unplanned reads ... some Star Trek novels, and rewatch a couple films.

12. Station Eleven: A novel by Emily St. John Mandel, finished February 27, 2015, 2 1/2 - 3 stars. (Library book)


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I realize that the appreciation of fiction is subjective, but I don't know if it applies more to certain genres. This novel which is only a few months old has received a lot of praise. Although dystopian fiction, even if we scratch off all the zombie apocalypses, has been something of a deluge in books and film in recent years, the release of new stories shows no signs of letting up. It has been popular for a long time and I've read quite a bit of it over the years. I say this because after a while there can be a sameness to it and when I read a story in this genre I want to see what a new story has to tell me, or how it will interest or entertain me or engage me.

Engage me. That may be the biggest thing. I don't mind being a passive reader, but I enjoy a story, any story, much more when I am pulled into it. "Station Eleven" didn't engage me. When the story began there was a character, a paramedic in training who attempts to save the life of an actor who has a heart attack on stage. He interested me. I thought we would follow him into what was rapidly looking to be the flu pandemic to end all flu pandemics. We were quickly introduced to a growing cast of characters, and moved back in time many decades to earlier periods in their lives and then back to the future to see how these various lives were connected. We also see, just a little, what has become of the world near Lake Michigan after 99.99% or so of the population is gone. I say just a little because we get just a little. The majority of the story is about the lives of various characters before the pandemic told in a very non-linear fashion.

Unfortunately the majority of these characters were of little interest to me. Also. having a whack job "preacher" of a doomsday cult is something that has been covered countless times before and I was not interested. So as I read, I was a passive only mildly interested observer. The parts of interest were pretty overwhelmed, for me (we are being subjective here), by a lot of uninteresting stuff. I can speculate that for readers who have read little of this sort of fiction it might seem interesting, but for me, no.

The book is written fairly well - I didn't get lost in conversations or focus and it clearly attempts to write with some literary style, but style can't trump the lack of substance, or at least not get you very far. The majority of characters in the book are drawn very sketchily and I didn't get a real image of them in my mind, nor have any ability to distinguish some of them. There are some primary characters that we do get a better look at. However ... with the exception of two, these characters are uninteresting. I think most people will enjoy this story whether they like dystopian fiction or not. I consider this an OK read, an OK story. No reason to get excited. I have no idea what the fuss is all about.
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I'll try and read this one next or very soon
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yes very sad about mr spock.

>67 RBeffa: Happy Belated Thingaversary!

>75 thornton37814: Thanks!

Well I gave Diane Duane's Spock's World a try. Made it almost to the 50 page mark and was thoroughly bored with it. The novel may very well get better but I pretty much couldn't care to keep plodding on. I've only read a few Star Trek novels, and I've enjoyed the ones I have read, but this fell very flat for me. I remember what a big deal it was when this novel came out in 1988 - it was the first hardback Star Trek novel and it made the bestseller lists for a while. Anyway, the book felt very dated. Deleting from my library, sending it back to the friends of the library to resell and moving on.

According to my daughter, lycomayflower, (who is the most informed Trekker in my universe), Spock's World is important in the canon because it set out the history of Vulcan. I have never been tempted to read any Star Trek novels myself, much to her despair. I do, however, take co-credit (along with her Dad) for badgering her to "just take a look at these old Star Trek episodes....I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy them" when she was a sprout.

>77 laytonwoman3rd: I should perhaps have been more patient with Spock's World. It started off kind of cutely. I think it may be set just after the first Vjer movie. Kirk was taking a vacation in Ireland and being the secret star of a pub where he sips irish whiskey (he apparently has no taste for guinness, shame him). It didn't really feel like Kirk, but not terribly off. The locals had convinced Kirk he had irish heritage, not scots. The area was apparently "thick with Kirks". What started to really bother me as the story started and the enterprise was in the midst of a refurb and stocking up on earth was all the technobabble. The author was trying to explain everything with nonsense. Remembering that this was published in hardback in 1988 we had to have the latest tech - we still have data tapes but we have a BBS for the crew and sysops! Kirk reviews the posts to get the feel of the crew and what the gossip is. groan. I stopped just getting to the Vulcan chapters which seem to alternate with the Enterprise ones and gave serious thought to only reading the Vulcan chapters. The author had really put me off my feed however and I bailed.

I kind of love when strange synchronicities arise in reading and life. A few months ago, late 2014, I read Ivan Doig's memoir of his very early years with his mother and family primarily during WW2. The book was Heart Earth which should probably be read by any Doig fan. Anyway, the focus was on his mother but others were included and periodically through the story entries from letters or ship's log of his Uncle Wally who was serving on the Destroyer "Ault" in the Pacific are inserted. This was one of the ways Doig connected the people back home to the war that had taken so many from their friends and family away. These little bits really began to affect me while reading. I think the last entry like this was from the log of the Ault describing the kamikaze attack on the carrier "Bunker Hill" beside the Ault. This was a devastating attack that took many lives and nearly sunk the huge carrier during the battle of Okinawa. I later watched films that have been put on youtube from Smithsonian and elsewhere showing this very attack. The connection to what I had just read then was somewhat indescribable. Haunting maybe.

Then in January I read the book about the Japanese internment in the United States and even though what happened was a true tragedy, I could also understand how it could happen with the war hysteria after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

We live near Mare Island, a closed Naval shipyard with a long history and when visiting a few weeks ago we visited a ship. Near the end of WW2 about 130 special small gunboats, LCS series called Mighty Midgets, were built to provide support for landings in the Philippines and eventually for the invasion of Japan. When the kamikazes began late in the war (essentially because virtually the entire Japanese navy had been sunk and rather than surrender Japan fought the estimated 1500 warships with suicide planes and suicide boats. The zeroes were particularly deadly and the statistics of their success against ships was something I was previously unaware of. The very last gunboat was brought to Mare Island by a veterans group several years ago and has been restored and cared for and is available to visit. Here are a few photos I took a couple weeks ago:






The gunboats did most of their work at Okinawa, providing support for the landings and soon they were an integral defense for the fleet against kamikazes. I've wanted to learn more about Okinawa and a few days ago happened by chance upon a very recent book by Peter Deutermann Sentinels of Fire. I had no idea how connected this book was going to be. It is about a destroyer at Okinawa, just like Uncle Wally's Ault from Doig's book and what they had to go through. The destroyer is part of a radar picket line with a small LCS gunboat and they are the first line and extremely vulnerable. Right away the gunboat is obliterated by a kamikaze and having just visited the LCS-102 on Mare Island I knew exactly what the boat was. Deutermann's book really brings to life the absolutely unbelievable things the navy had to face and live, and die from.

13. Sentinels of Fire by P. T. Deutermann, finished March 6, 2015, 3 1/2+ stars, acquired in 2015


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This is a gripping story set during the Spring of 1945 and the Battle for Okinawa. This is the navy side of the battle and the story is focused on a destroyer, the fictional USS Malloy and the deadly months it served picket duty. Picket duty was a line of radar equipped ships whose purpose was to provide early warning for the seemingly endless kamikaze planes and baka rocket planes that suicided against the US ships. They also had to worry about submarines. The picket ships were a focus by Japanese planes because if they were gone the large waves of Japanese zeroes and bombers could better surprise and attack the navy ships supporting the invasion of Okinawa.

Although this is a fictional story it is written around very real events. We follow an executive officer newly assigned to the Malloy, meet the crew and see what they faced. This really brought the reality of war in the Pacific to life for me.

>79 RBeffa: Very interesting, Ron. I have Heart Earth in the TBR stacks somewhere. I'm a big fan of Doig's fiction.

Heart Earth is certainly worth a read Linda, esp for a Doig fan. It is an odd memoir tho. It is called a memoir but really it is more fiction than memoir, in my opinion. Doig was about 5-6 years of age for most of the book. Obviously he is not going to have vivid memories of all the goings on. He has reconstructed things using a cache of letters bequeathed to him by Uncle Wally that brought the mother he lost at 6 years of age to life for him. So he recreates the time. Overall it works very well and gives us an interesting portrait of (mostly) rural life during WW2.

Now you're REALLY making me want to read it...

I chose this book to read to coincide with the March British Author challenge. (I'll most likely skip the American Author challenge this month) I've never read du Maurier before and picked up a lovely looking Virago Modern Classics edition of this novel along with several other Viragos last year. This particular book seems to have been a poor choice, but I'll give the author another try sometime in the future.

14. Rule Britannia by Daphne du Maurier, finished March 10, 2015, 2 stars, acquired in 2014


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Daphne du Maurier's final novel is an odd one. I hope it was intended as a satirical farce, but somehow I doubt it. I perhaps might have understood it better if I knew more about British politics in 1972. This is clearly an anti-American piece, but it doesn't exactly regard greater Britain all that highly either. It strikes me as an odd tirade by a cranky old woman telling a story about another exceedingly cranky eccentric old actress who lives life like she has never left the stage and goes Mao (as in chairman) to foment a rebellion. There is some rather surprising bits of casual racism in here that I find bizarre even for 1972 when this was published. Calling a young black boy a "darkie" ... Really? Jeez. Anyway I think I probably speed read through some of the parts once I decided the book was failing me. The Americans are invited to invade Britain to form the YouSuck coalition ... I mean the USUK coalition and the American plan is to turn everything into theme parks to solve the unemployment problem. Maybe this should be shelved with "The Mouse That Roared." Actually, that's an insult to the Mouse. Sheesh, I guess America really has a worse image problem than I thought.

The intro to the Virago edition was informative and probably helped me understand the book the little that I did. I'm a little undecided how to rate this. I decided on 2 stars because for me it was less than what I consider an average good read. However, it IS well written - just that the story is rather off. And I did enjoy reading parts of it much more than my short review suggests. In a word, I was disappointed.

ETA: I feel like I've been reading a lot of "dark" stuff lately. It certainly wasn't intentional. I'm going to have to dig through the books for something "happy". Not sure what.

>84 RBeffa: When you want to return to DuMaurier, I recommend The House on the Strand. It's been years since I read it, but as I recall it, it might be more to your liking.

>85 laytonwoman3rd: That does look interesting Linda. The first couple reviews really praise it. (I thought Rule Britannia sounded good too tho!).

Time for an adventure in space, the final frontier. These are the voyages ...

15. Star Trek 6 adapted by James Blish, finished March 12, 2015, 2 1/2 stars, acquired in 2012


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This paperback was published in 1972 and contains 6 short stories of roughly 25 pages each plus a preface by Blish. Four of the stories are from the third and final season of the original Star Trek series and 2 are from the second season. These aired originally on television between 1967-1969. I was hoping for some light entertainment and this fit the bill. The stories all list the original screenwriters. From my rather dated memory of the episodes they also feel pretty authentic. The six stories included here are:

The Savage Curtain
The Lights of Zetar
The Apple
By Any Other Name
The Cloud Minders
The Mark of Gideon

In the preface Blish includes a rather entertaining letter received from a Captain Kirk serving in Vietnam. The outfit has gone to rather great lengths to personalize themselves along Star Trek lines. They fight as "The Enterprise." Trekkers were clearly a force to be reckoned with long ago. It has been quite a long while since I have watched any episodes of the original series and the stories in this book only brought forth vague memories of them, with the exception of "The Apple." That story is the one where a supercomputer "Vaal" runs a planet that at first glance resembles the garden of Eden. There is a small group of humans who feed Vaal. I recall the episode as one of the really lame ones but it doesn't come off too badly as a story. These really seemed like some of the lesser episodes from the series. Nevertheless they were enjoyable on a basic light entertainment level and I enjoyed reading them.

It was fun and I'll have to do another soon.

>79 RBeffa: Neat photos of the gunboat. Very interesting.

>88 Oberon: Thanks Oberon. One of the interesting things I have learned is that the gunboats could drop their anchors offshore and then run themselves up on the beaches to fight close in to cover and support the landing craft for the soldiers and the soldiers on the beaches. When done they used the winch on the rear of the boat to pull themselves back to sea.

>89 RBeffa: Wow. That sounds extremely risky. I would think that very few of those ships would still be around.

>90 Oberon: The LCS 102 is the very last one.

Spring is springing early this year in the Bay Area.

And now for something completely different.

16. The Unexpected: 11 strange stories (Pyramid Books) edited by Leo Marguilies, finished March 14, 2015, 3 1/2 stars, acquired in 2014 I think


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This collection of supernatural stories was first published in 1961. What caught my eye was that every one of the 11 stories was first published in the magazine "Weird Tales" between 1939 and 1951. The authors are almost all top notch talent with a couple obscure but excellent ones such as Margaret St. Clair. Overall this was a very good batch of tales. The stories are:

Introduction • (1961) • essay by Leo Margulies
The Professor's Teddy Bear • (1948) • shortstory by Theodore Sturgeon
Legal Rites • (1950) • novelette by Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl
The Strange Island of Dr. Nork • (1949) • novelette by Robert Bloch
Mrs. Hawk • (1950) • shortstory by Margaret St. Clair
The Handler • (1947) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
The Automatic Pistol • (1940) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
The Unwanted • (1951) • shortstory by Mary Elizabeth Counselman
The Valley Was Still • (1939) • shortstory by Manly Wade Wellman
The Scrawny One • (1949) • shortstory by Anthony Boucher
Come and Go Mad • (1949) • novelette by Fredric Brown
The Big Shot • (1949) • shortstory by Eric Frank Russell

The blurbs on the cover and inside the book promise the unexpected. The stories are over 60 years old and they show their age in the way the stories are told and their settings, but otherwise hold up well to time. One thing they share is a propensity to drop really big and often rather obscure or uncommon words here and there. It must have been an art in it's day. "But this time something made him turn slowly from the window, almost as though he never again expected to see that chiaroscuro of an early afternoon." Ha! "I will give lectures to young things about human destiny and the metempsychosis of Plato."

I thought the first story by Sturgeon "The Professor's Teddy Bear" was genuinely creepy and got this collection off to a good start . Unfortunately the long short story that followed, "Legal Rites" seemed too drawn out and told unevenly as it plodded along to a clever ending. It sort of beat a clever idea to death. The remaining stories varied, with the creepy ones I think holding up the best. Block disappointed. "Mrs. Hawk" by St. Clair is a well done short but disturbing modern retelling of the Circe myth. Bradbury's creepy "The Handler" about a creepy little man who ran a mortuary might make your skin crawl but it suffered from a wonky ending. Leiber's "The Automatic Pistol" set in the days of Prohibition is a nice little piece about a gun having it's revenge. I was reminded of how much I enjoyed Leiber's stories earlier in my life. Of the remaining stories "The Unwanted" was one of my favorite stories in the collection, about a census taker in the Alabama hills. Touching in a nice way, and like most all of these stories, with a little spooky or creepy twist. I also liked Manly Wade Wellman's tale set during the Civil War. My favorite story in the collection was also the longest, "Come and Go Mad" by Frederic Brown. Can't describe it without giving too much away, but it starts with a reporter asked to consider a tough assignment that becomes very personal.

Something completely different again. My personal substitution for the March American Author challenge

17. In My Father's House by Ernest J Gaines, finished March 18, 2015, 4 stars, acquired in 2015


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Gaines is perhaps best known for writing "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" and "A Lesson Before Dying." Like most writers he has written a few more than "the famous ones." Gaines came of age in rural Louisiana and also the town I have lived in for the last 27+ years, moving here at 15. He became a reader and a writer here in Vallejo, California. This town once had a lovely Carnegie library and there Gaines, in his own words, has said he "started reading and reading and reading." A very interesting talk can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1dRr5-rw0w Just before the 3 minute mark he talks about first being allowed to go to the library in Vallejo. (In Louisiana libraries were for whites only). The entire piece is about 20 minutes and I found it wonderfully instructive. Gaines says, if I were a book, what would I be? Maybe Don Quixote.

His works however reflect the south and Louisiana where he also lived and which formed him and where he wants to make a difference. That is where he found what he needed to write about. Louisiana.

In My Father's house is set in a smallish Louisiana town in 1970 (with two Baptist and one Catholic church). The Rev Phillip Martin of one of the Baptist churches is a strong civil rights leader, but he is forced to face his past when the angry young man who calls himself Richard X comes to town. The mysterious Richard X is the Reverend Martin's son from a troubled youth. The Reverend has a past he has tried to put behind him, but it haunts him and it has followed him. I thought that complex circumstances and character relationships were handled well here at times, especially in the early part of the novel, but the happenings become disjointed and sometimes difficult to follow and understand as the book progresses. Some of the writing, perhaps most, is very direct. Other times not so easy to keep things straight for me. Things do not get tied up neatly by the end and we don't really have answers. The last quarter or so of the book is a bit frustrating in fact, and probably keeps this from being called a "great book", but we do have a good book. It is certainly American literature.

Well worth the read and I will be reading more of Gaines novels. I may write a little more on this after I digest the story a bit. The problem with discussing some books is the usual one - I would have to discuss plot elements that would spoil the story for most readers. I do think there are some problems with the novel.

I really enjoyed Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men, and A Lesson Before Dying. I have In My Father's House, but haven't read it yet. A good choice for the AAC.

>95 laytonwoman3rd: I have those two on my TBR mountain and look forward to them. Gaines would be an excellent choice for Mark to include in a future AAC year. This will probably be my only substitution. I'm not sure In My Father's House is a 4 star book but I bumped it up from 3 1/2 because I think it made a good effort (for a 1978 book) to paint a portrait of a troubled black man who was trying to be a leader of men in 1970 following the JFK-RFK-MLK assassinations. The primary character's troubled past extended well past youth however and we actually see very little of it. The glimpses we get are both good and bad things. It was mostly about a failure to take responsibility for a woman he loved and the children he begat. Neither blacks or whites are painted pretty here.

I kept thinking about Gaines' novel. When I realized that it had zero reviews here on LT I figured I better cobble something together so I posted a review using my thoughts above and modifying and expanding them. I re-read a few bits last night and thought more on the book and I decided to myself that what I initially thought of as faults of the novel were more likely intentional. I think Gaines is not trying to give answers here. He is showing the reader a dilemma and causing one to think about it. I was a little angry with the main character at the end of the first reading and I don't want to say why because I would need to be spoilery. But I think Gaines was also angry at him, or at the very least he wants us to see the situation and realize there are fundamental problems with black society that need resolution and you can't just wish it away with God or other ways.

The end is still a hard end to take and I'm not sure we the readers got enough of a reason to see the end as it was delivered.

My wife wanted to see a special exhibit at our local museum today so we visited this afternoon. There I discovered a surprise, the original dedication plaque for our Carnegie Library (completed and dedicated in 1904). That is the library where Ernest Gaines sat down and read and read and read as a teenager.

Back to the Tony Hillerman group read, this is the March selection

18. Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman, finished March 23, 2015, 3+ stars, acquired before 2009


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This is the second in Hillerman's Joe Leaphorn series and was first published in 1973. It is a stronger book than the first book, "The Blessing Way." In the first book Leaphorn was almost a secondary character, whereas here he is clearly in the front and we follow his investigation into the disappearance of two youths - one probably dead and the other either the guilty party or hiding for fear of losing his life also. In fact it struck me how different Leaphorn was in each book - perhaps Hillerman decided to make him a stronger character and a different one. In any event, other than the name, they seemed like different characters. There is a nice anthropological element to this story that I liked. There is an underlying current of Zuni vs. Navajo cultural differences and resentment. As far as the mystery goes I'm not sure I can give it high marks. The reason is that by the time page 50 came around I already decided who was responsible for the murder and more or less why. I don't try to puzzle out mysteries as a general rule so it must have been pretty obvious. The ending is a little bothersome and caused me to dislike Leaphorn a bit, or maybe I was just disappointed in him. Overall an OK read.

I know I read one of Hillerman's novels years ago (before LT), but I can't remember which one. I'm fairly sure not the first or second in the series, because Jim Chee was in it, and he doesn't appear for a while. I seem to recall feeling I was coming into the middle of something and never quite catching on. Are you going to read more?

>100 laytonwoman3rd: Hi Linda - the group read is for the first 6 Leaphorn/Chee books this year (one every other month) and I am going to try and stick with it. I read one or two of the much later Hillerman's (there are 18 Leaphorn/Chee alone) books years ago - it took me a while to figure out which, but the first I read was The First Eagle when it was new and the pub date on that was 1998. I can't recall which of the others I read. I "Really Liked" First Eagle but for unknown reasons never read much more of Hillerman. My wife on the other hand loved the series so we have every Leaphorn/Chee book and she has read all or almost all.

I'm going to stick with the series for now. I have a sense I would have enjoyed these more if I had read them 20 or so years ago.

Adventures in space ...

19. The Best of Leigh Brackett by Leigh Brackett, finished March 28, 2015, 3 1/2 - 4 stars, acquired in 2009

My wife found this book for me several years ago after I had mentioned Ms. Brackett and a story or two of hers I had read long ago. I didn't realize quite how good this collection would turn out to be. There is a literary quality to the writing that shines through even when the stories themselves are rather preposterous. These are all shorter works, most seem novella length, and Brackett wrote these during the golden age of science fiction pulps. There was a period in my life when I loved reading stuff like this and which I have mostly outgrown. It was still fun to read these. Here's a listing of the stories and the dates:

The Jewel of Bas • (1944) • novelette
The Vanishing Venusians • (1945) • novelette
The Veil of Astellar • (1944) • novelette
The Moon That Vanished • (1948) • novelette
Enchantress of Venus • Eric John Stark • (1949) • novella
The Woman from Altair • (1951) • novelette
The Last Days of Shandakor • (1952) • novelette
Shannach - The Last • (1952) • novella
The Tweener • (1955) • shortstory
The Queer Ones • (1957) • novelette

This book was one of a series published by the Science Fiction Book club in the 1970's as "Best of", putting together some excellent collections in the process. Del Rey soon after published paperback versions of these collections with different cover artwork. I doubt I would have ever read a single one of these stories without this collection. The book includes an excellent introduction by Edmond Hamilton (Leigh Brackett's husband) as well as a very good afterword by Brackett. The collection was published in July 1977, just in the nick of time. Hamilton would pass away in January 1977 before this reached print. Brackett would die too young soon after from cancer in March 1978. Despite being married for 30+ years and both being writers they had never officially collaborated on a story. Brackett was active a number of years as a screenwriter on some very big movies; I recently watched the John Wayne-Robert Mitchum flick "El Dorado" in the midst of reading this book and in the opening credits saw "screenplay by Leigh Brackett." You'll also find her credited on the second Star Wars film "The Empire Strikes Back.

Hamilton reveals in the introduction (dated July 7, 1976) that they had finally written a story together (to be published the following year) for Harlan Ellison's anthology "Last Dangerous Visions." The story was titled "Stark and the Star Kings". Ellison's notorious and infamous final anthology was never published. The story would possibly have never been published at all but it somehow managed to appear in a combined omnibus of Brackett and Hamilton in 2005. The intro also notes that after writing some of these stories Brackett collaborated with William Faulkner on the screenplay for "The Big Sleep" with Humphrey Bogart. Her husband opines that one of the stories in here has a very Bogart character in it and he doesn't think it a coincidence.

I didn't read these stories all at once. I spread several of them out in between other books over many months. I enjoyed each of these stories, even the somewhat weaker ones. The writing, in my opinion, is very good for the era. On the other hand, these old science fantasies aren't really the sort of stories I want to gulp down. Despite being written by a woman, these stories tend to portray women in a very old fashioned way, nurturing women or femme fatale sorts, inherently fragile with fainting and screams and such. There are a few strong female characters that don't fit these types scattered throughout but they are not the norm.

A few comments:

When I started the first story, 'The Jewel of Bas' I briefly thought I had stepped into some cutesy fantasy - but the story drew me in and although I thought it stretched out, it is one of the better ones. Most of these stories have interesting well developed characters and they vary quite a bit. I'd recommend this as one of the better examples of older science fiction for those who enjoy reading that era. These stories at their core are fun adventure stories. Although they have science fictional and/or fantasy settings many could just as easily be westerns or mysteries or horror stories or crime potboilers or other fictions with a few changes to settings and storyline.

I generally like to name at least a favorite story or two from collections such as this, but sometimes that isn't the easiest thing to do if there isn't a real standout. I think "The Veil of Astellar" from the Spring 1944 issue of "Thrilling Wonder Stories" is one of those favorites. It is told in such an old-fashioned way, and it reveals itself slowly for what it is. I think this might be the story with the Bogart character that Hamilton referred to in the introduction. Inventive story!

Another favorite of the collection is "Enchantress of Venus." The writing here is very good and the imagery wonderfully vivid. The story opens with Stark crossing the Red Sea of Venus, a gaseous sea that metal boats can float on and his destination is Shuruun. There is much attention to detail in the storytelling. Stark goes there to find a friend, but the piratical closed society hides secrets and Stark is captured to become a slave. There is a nasty ruling class and Stark very quickly finds out. Eventually he becomes a pawn in a power play of the elite but not an entirely unwilling pawn. This is something of a dark story, and I thought it didn't quite live up to the initial promise. I don't believe I have read one of Brackett's "Stark" stories before. I will have to try more of them. He's an interesting character.

The story that followed, "The Woman From Altair," was a very different piece where a spacer returns from Altair with something like a war bride/trophy wife combo and it turns out that nothing is as it seems. I really enjoyed this one.

Brackett is very good at story beginnings. "The Last Days of Shandakor" is one of the middling stories I'd say, a dying race of Mars story, but still it pulls you right into it from the start. Here's how it begins: "He came alone into the wineshop, wrapped in a dark red cloak, with the cowl drawn over his head. He stood for a moment by the doorway and one of the slim dark predatory women who live in those places went to him, with a silvery chiming from the little bells that were almost all she wore."

"Shannach - The Last" was probably my least favorite story. Kind of a twisted tale set on Mercury with an ancient intelligence controlling a colony of stranded humans. "The Tweener" and "The Queer Ones" that finish the collection are very different types of stories than the earlier adventure stories. No more planetary adventures and romance here. Fear and paranoia is an element in several of the stories, but the prime one in "The Tweener." Uncle Fred brings back a small rabbit-like mammal from Mars - the kids name him John Carter. John Carter of Mars. Cute. Is John Carter harmless? "The Queer Ones" is a queer one, confusing at first, set around a small Appalachian area. X-files precursor.

Overall very good stuff.

Getting a small early start on the April American Author challenge this morning with Louise Erdrich. Chose Tracks and I was happy to discover that it deals with Ojibwe cultural beliefs in 1912. This will be a wonderful (I hope) pairing with Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden that I read last year. If I remember right, the Aunt in Three Day Road was an Oji-Cree and I immediately recognize similar cultural elements.

ETA: and I find myself losing interest in this rapidly. Something is not right. Don't like the structure of this.

Adventure in time to 100 years ago

This one was for the April American Author Challenge.

20. Tracks by Louise Erdrich, finished March 31, 2015, 3 stars, acquired in 2015 for the AAC


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I have very mixed feelings over 'Tracks'. I nibbled on one of Erdrich's books about 4-5 years ago and it didn't catch my interest. I can't recall why. I figured I'd give this early book of hers a try for the AAC.

This is primarily set over the years 1912-1919 and paints an unflattering portrait of a Chippewa community that is slowly losing it's identity and land for a variety of reasons. Initially this caught my interest, but that interest started fading. Then the story would pick up. Then it would turn me off. I persisted in reading, honestly so I could see what it was all for. Although the topic was potentially interesting I think what doesn't work for me is the manner of storytelling. We switch back and forth between two often unreliable narrators, mostly viewing other characters, but focused around one woman. The problem here is that unless something very specific was happening to the individual narrator I frequently could detect no difference between how each related the information, even though they were very different sorts of people. Both narrators would be in the same place and at times I'd challenge anyone to detect a difference in voice between the world wise and weary old man or the young insane ascetic nun wannabee. I also question some of the elements included in here, seemingly for titillation or shock. There is some bizarre behavior and happenings and this is a pretty sad story.

This comes in as an OK read for me - I wouldn't really recommend it.

---------------------------------------------

So this wraps up the first quarter of the year, and with 20 books done I'm on track to reach 75. My pace of reading varies so we'll see how it goes. Overall I'm fairly pleased with my reading thus far. Several really good books towards the start of the year. My "challenge" reading has been mixed. I've really enjoyed the WWII era books I've read this year and I plan to read more. I want to squeeze in a few more science fiction too.

Favorite books of the first quarter, more or less in order:

fiction:
All The Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr
In My Father's House - Ernest Gaines
Kingdom of Shadows - Alan Furst
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
Sentinels of Fire - P T Deutermann
Barrayar - Lois McMaster Bujold

non-fiction:
Infamy : the shocking story of the Japanese American internment in World War II by Richard Reeves

Anthology/Collection:
The Best of Leigh Brackett - Leigh Brackett

The following short novel is for the April British Author Challenge, a trip through time to perhaps the very late 1930's or 1940 and the place is Florence, Italy. I've read and enjoyed some of Maugham's short stories over the years but I think this is the first longer work of his I have read. I'm adding him to my mental "I should read more" list.

21. Up At The Villa by W. Somerset Maugham, finished April 1, 2015, 3 1/2 - 4 stars, acquired in 2015 for the BAC


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I found Maugham's short novel to be a delight. Very well written, witty dialogue with characters who come to life on the page; what more could one ask for?

Mary Panton was widowed a year before in England. She is young, just 30, and has been spending several months getting herself rested and mentally restored in Florence at the small villa of an acquaintance. An older friend, Sir Edgar Swift, has been in love with her since Mary was a teen and he proposes marriage before he must leave for 2-3 days. He has just been offered the Governorship of Bengal and he would, despite being nearly 25 years older, very much like Mary to join him as his wife in India. Mary has just enough income from her late husband to get by. She knows she should marry for position and companionship this second time around; not for love like the first time. Sir Edgar would give her security and place.

We are told repeatedly by characters that Mary Panton is an uncommon beauty. It has been her chief asset in life and she is well aware of it. She does not however seem "stuck up." She knows her looks are a valuable asset just like having a particular skill or aptitude might be. She goes to a dinner that she had planned to attend with Sir Edgar, at his urging, and with a revolver in her purse as he insisted since he fears for road robbers and such outside of Florence. She really would have preferred to stay at her villa and dine alone. She has promised Sir Edgar an answer upon his return in three days and she really wants to decide what to do. But she goes and the dinner starts off well, and the dialogue is fun to read. I won't tell any more of the story.

Life unexpectedly gets very complicated and wild for Mary. I found this an excellent read - a real exciting page turner that moves along at quite a clip. Recommended.

Excellent review of the Maugham, which is not one I've heard of. If I ever get finished with my MARCH challenge (DuMaurier's Julius, which I'm finding problematic), I plan to read Of Human Bondage, which I think I read back in high school.

>106 laytonwoman3rd: I couldn't recall if I had read Of Human Bondage before and concluded I had not. I know I've seen a film version or two in the distant past which I think is what gave me a slight familiarity when looking at the story line. I skipped it for the read because I didn't want to commit to a 600 pg novel. I thought I might try shorter works by both the BAC selectees for the month. I don't think I have ever heard of Angela Carter. I'm about halfway+ thru The Bloody Chamber and rolling my eyes with it a bit.

I don't seem to have Of Human Bondage catalogued but I am pretty positive I have an old penguin edition of it. I swear (almost) that books I have catalogued somehow drop out - perhaps things glitch when I enter them and I don't catch it. I don't know but several times in the past few months I have come across books I was pretty positive should be in my LibraryThing catalogue but were not. It has been a puzzle.

I've had that happen to me, too, with books I was sure I had entered. Not often enough to be certain whether it's just me, or some sort of gremlin in the code.

>108 laytonwoman3rd: I'm thinking there is a gremlin in there.

The following story collection is also for the April British Author Challenge. I have never read (and probably been unaware of) Angela Carter before reading this and had no expectations.

22. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter, finished April 4, 2015, 3 - 3 1/2 stars, library book for the BAC


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I enjoyed most of these stories. It seems that Angela Carter wanted to bring a few of Grimm's fairytales (and a few other tales I am unfamiliar with) to an adult audience with this collection of ten stories. The retelling of "Bluebeard" in "The Bloody Chamber" certainly sets the tone for this collection. I do have a minor pet-peeve and that is that I get annoyed with over-hyphenating words by a writer. You know, where everything is ill-spelt and deep-buttoned and calf-bound and the ill-lit still-room and the ill-defined fear. Ms Carter uses it a bit too-much in this first story.

A couple tales are told more than once, versions of Beauty and the Beast and Red Riding Hood among them.

Several stories in here have moments that get a little wild and over the top, with little journeys into eroticism. There's a real sense that this is a sensual view from a woman's perspective. Several times we venture into bad romance novel lingo. She loves to toss a shocker in your face too. The prose does get a bit purple, maybe a little too purple, which I think knocked half a star off my rating. I felt the author was trying too hard at times.

I didn't realize until reading this that Carter is the author of "The Company of Wolves", which is included, that was made into a film with Angela Lansbury about thirty years ago. She's also the screenwriter for the film. It is a rather short story here, not quite 12 pages. This is one of the Red Riding Hood adaptations.

My favorite story of the bunch was the rather irreverent and inventive Puss in Boots.

Some people might like this a lot. For me, just a good OK.

I'm doing a happy dance. Just saw that a new Dr Siri novel by Colin Cotterill comes out next month.

http://sohopress.com/books/six-and-a-half-deadly-sins/

Dial me back 40 years ... Robert Silverberg is someone who I would considerer one of my favorite science fiction authors if I have to pick a few. I don't like everything he has written, and he has had such a long career that there is a vast amount of his books and stories I have never read. But in my little universe of reading I have liked some of his material a lot at various times in my life. I read little of him for almost a decade I think, starting in the early 70's, since his stories became much less common and there were a lot of other books out there waiting to be read. So this is one from that time that I missed and came across a couple years ago.

23. The Feast of St. Dionysus by Robert Silverberg, finished April 7, 2015, 2 1/2 - 3 stars, acquired in 2013


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This is a collection of 3 novelettes and 2 novellas including the title story. The 5 stories are:

The Feast of St. Dionysus
Schwartz Between the Galaxies
Trips
In the House of Double Minds
This is the Road

First published in 1975, my edition was published in 1979 and includes a lengthy introduction from Silverberg dated August 1978. What is notable is that Silverberg says that he thinks this is the last short fiction he would likely write. He hadn't written any in 5 years (The Schwartz story written in 1973 had been his last) and had no plans to do more - he enjoyed writing novels much more (and they paid much better also). This small collection of longer short fiction could have been the last he did, but he did return to the form in late 1980 at the request of Omni magazine. He must have re-sparked because I read a lot of his short fiction in magazines in the 1980's and although he was never as prolific as in his young days, the stories were of rather high quality and certainly kept my interest and looking for more of them. It would become in my view Silverberg's second era of great writing. Now, Silverberg has turned 80 this year and has pretty much given up writing fiction for the last decade. He writes a monthly magazine column and does a few other things, editing and introductions to compilations and reissues.

But back to this collection. I didn't think this was all that great. Tends towards psychological and angsty science fiction. The title story that opens is the longest and I never knew quite what to make of it. There are two parts to this story of the survivor of a NASA Mars expedition that ended badly and it was a like/not-like story for me. As the sole survivor from the trip he suffers from a tremendous amount of guilt, although he was completely without fault for what befell his crewmates. This part of the story is interesting. He tries to find some sort of peace and answers and falls into a very odd religious cult that worships wine, wrestling, Jesus and Dionysus. Vision quests on wine fueled bodies. Wine, wine and more wine. and more wine. and more wine. I couldn't tell what was really happening and what might have been inside the mind of the main character and throughout almost the entire story I thought it was going to end very badly. It didn't, although I don't understand how it
ended. The dread that I felt was inevitable really colored my reading of the story. I'd say I didn't like this one.

Part of my problem with these stories is that the early 70's were a very experimental time in science fiction - the new wave was still washing over the genre. Silverberg had been a very traditional author when he started in the 50's. He grew a lot when he was writing novels in the late 60's and beyond, blending some of the new with the old. In these stories he doesn't get real wacky as some of the stuff was, but he clearly was pushing himself to expand with some of his concepts.

"Schwartz Between the Galaxies" was interesting and one of the better stories. It proposes that a hundred years later the cultures and peoples of the planet have homogenized. An anthropologist has nothing to study, but he develops a theory that makes him famous and continuously travels the planet giving lectures. Still he yearns for difference and daydreams of a life in the stars with many alien cultures that becomes more real for him the reality. He begins to lose his grip on reality in a big way.

"Trips" was very trippy. Very stream of consciousness for most of it, with the result that it felt extremely dated. The idea in it was interesting, a man travelling between alternate realities finding the world and life he lived varying in degrees, mostly major and at least one barely different. It was soooo trippy I got bored and didn't like most of it, Despite saying that, there is nothing completely lousy in this collection and there is at least one pretty good story here. That story for me was "In the House of Double Minds" which posits a future where each year for a hundred years 12 talented 10 year olds are given a surgery to sever the connection between the lobes of the brain. For some of them extreme talents can emerge. The story is told from the viewpoint of a young woman who wanted to have the surgery but was ineligible and chose to serve the project as a teacher for the children. The creepiness of the story put me off, but Silverberg does a good job explaining and exploring what might happen. The experimental mode of storytelling was thankfully absent here.

"This Is the Road" also was better than the average here, and told in a conventional non-experimental manner. It is a novella of the far future where mutants are the norm and this is of course a "road story," an adventure, as a group of mutants travel ahead of a menace called "The Teeth." The mutants aren't "deformed" people as some stories portray them. There are entirely new breeds (classes in the story) of humans with all sorts of variations. I think it says somewhere in the story that mankind had changed the world, and the changed world then changed mankind. A bit of a sad story but full of intricate details such as the carriage they travel on and how they travel. Some people will like it a lot. This story of all of them has the most memorable characters and will be the one to stick in my memory.

Overall this was a sub-par collection for my tastes. I think there is much better Silverberg out there. I think Silverberg made a good decision to step away from shorter stories at this point in time.

Sad to learn this evening that Ivan Doig has passed away Thursday. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/11/books/ivan-doig-author-who-lived-the-western-l...

An adventure in time. I love trying a new series that exceeds my expectations. My wife picked up a couple of the later book in this series about a year ago (there are now 20 of them and this series appears to have finished in 2010). I started browsing one of them and it really piqued my interest. Rather than jumping in late I decided to hunt down the earlier books in the series to read first. In February I found the first ones.

24. Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis, finished April 20, 2015, 3 1/2 - 4 stars, acquired in 2015


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Silver Pigs is the first in a now 20 book detective fiction series. This one is set in Rome and Roman Britain in 70-71 A.D. The blurb on the back says "Sam Spade in a Toga" and the story is now about 25 years old having been published in 1989. For a first published novel it is remarkably good and caught my interest from the first page. Sam Spade in a Toga is in fact a bit of what it is about but the attention to detail and a romantic element that powers much of the latter part of the story really make this more than simply a detective novel set in early Rome and Britain.

Silver Pigs refer to ingots mined and produced in Britain that are made of silver and lead ore. There is a bunch of intrigue (and murder) concerning the manufacture and transport of this resource. Frankly, I found the stories of the characters and family relationships (and there are quite a few) much more intriguing. Our detective (known as an "informer" in Roman times) is Marcus Didius Falco. He's a rather hardened guy with a good heart. There are a few bits in here to reward the careful reader that I can't spoil by mentioning. I really enjoyed the romance side of the story as it was rather unexpected even if obvious in hindsight. There is some good verbal sparring between Marcus and others, friends and foe. Altogether just a very enjoyable read and I will be reading more in this series.

>51 RBeffa: So, All The light We Cannot See which I read in Feb and which I expect to be my book of the year has just won the Pulitzer prize in fiction.

>114 RBeffa: That always feels good, doesn't it? When a book that you really loved gets that sort of recognition?

>115 scaifea: Amber, sometimes I really feel out of synch with what is popular in fiction. All The Light has gotten heaps of praise but I've also read some criticism of it too. I thought it was one of the better books I've read in recent years - one that really grabbed me and was well written. For once I synched up with the experts. So, yes it feels good to know I got one right!

I've been quiet on your very busy thread but I love to browse it. Thanks for dropping by here.

I find a downside of reading as much as I do is that sometimes I just can't get as excited about a very good book as others do, because I feel like I've read it or another story much like it, before, and either the other one was truly better done, or it just impressed me and now an equally well-written book along the same lines doesn't have the advantage of being "first" with me. None of this is to say I intend to stop reading so much... in case you were worried. I always celebrate when someone finds a book that hits the spot, whether it would do it for me or not.

>117 laytonwoman3rd: I'm sure that has something to do with it sometimes. It was how I felt about the current dystopian darling "Station Eleven". It felt like pieces being rearranged that I had read many times before in various form (and often better as you say, they got there first). Revisiting things isn't necessarily a negative. Silver Pigs that I just finished has a lot of elements of an old noirish detective story in it, esp the main player, but I found it refreshing nonetheless.

I like this: "I always celebrate when someone finds a book that hits the spot, whether it would do it for me or not."

I think I have become more critical in most reading as I've gotten older and read more and more. I don't know if that is fair or not - it is what it is. I still can get excited about books and that is what counts.

>116 RBeffa: I feel the same way - if you were to follow the pattern of my reading, you'd likely find that I read 'old' books more than current ones (besides Newbery winners and other current kids' books, which I do tend to keep up with for some reason or other...), so I agree that it's a bit of a reading rush when something I've read is currently popular (and this hardly ever happens, although I do have a pile of recently-published books sitting on the shelf behind me that I received as Christmas presents...).
And thanks for visiting my thread! Whether you post or not, you're always welcome! I'm always lurking round here, although I may not always pipe up and post.

>117 laytonwoman3rd: & >118 RBeffa: I agree with Linda - it's always nice to see someone get excited about a particular book, whether I've read and loved it, read and didn't love it, or never even heard of it. That's one of the (many) reasons that Mark's thread is so delightful - that guy gets so giddy about books!

I still get pretty excited and giddy myself about a very good book, and I'm glad for that. I credit my faulty memory for that. I've read lots, but I don't remember details very well...

I'm a modest fan of John Scalzi's books and I seem to have turned my wife into a bigger fan. I was going to pass on this recent work of his, but my wife picked it up at the library and devoured it. She said it was the funnest read she's had in a long while and handed it to me a couple days ago. She couldn't wait for me to finish the book so we could talk about it, and constantly checked my progress which I found pretty amusing. "Are you at the Navaho res yet ...?"

An adventure in time to the near future with this thriller/mystery/police procedural/science fiction novel.

25. Lock In by John Scalzi, finished April 24, 2015, 3 1/2+ stars, library book


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I didn't try to figure out how far into the near future this novel is set. Everything feels a lot like 2015 with a few very big exceptions. Driverless cars with manual drivability are the norm. That may be here sooner than we think. Lets call this maybe 40 years from now.

The premise of this novel didn't sound wildly appealing to me. A worldwide meningitis like flu has been around for perhaps 20-25 years. It killed a fair number of people, it changed the brains of a fair number of people. People still catch it every year, but not a whole lot. What happens to some people is that they become locked in to their bodies. Their brains are still fully functional but their bodies are unresponsive.

I'm a bit too analytical of a person to accept all the stuff going on here without a huge dose of "suspension of disbelief." That turned out to be OK because the real charm of this novel is the main characters. There are plenty of unaddressed issues in the stories and loose ends, but the heart of the story is a newly minted FBI agent and his partner. That carried me through everything, along with a number of interesting additional characters.

I think there is some allegory going on here for race, sexual issues, the disabled, but my wife didn't pick up on that aspect really. It isn't front and center in your face very much but I think it is there.

I seem to be reading an awful lot of World War II related books this year.

26. The distant shore, a story of the sea by Jan de Hartog, finished April 28, 2015, 3 1/2+ stars, acquired in 2014


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I found a little treasure here late last year. This is an older novel from the early 50's. LT says it is in Ernest Hemingway's legacy library. Cool, I say.

This reads almost like two novels - the book has two parts - "War" and "Peace". It is a first-person narrative of the life and adventures of an unnamed dutchman who has escaped occupied Holland and arrived in England "early in the war", as he says. Perhaps early 1941? I sensed a Hemingway style to some of this. The first part feels very much like a true to life war memoir. The dutchman has sea experience, 8 years including on a harbor tugboat and not yet 30 years of age, and yet upon arrival in London he is commissioned and assigned as Captain to a much different sort of tug then he had known before, a sea rescue tugboat, and he is assigned to dangerous operations to go to sea and save ships that the Nazis have torpedoed. The U-boats lie in wait for rescue ships so that they can shoot at them also. Or else planes strafe the rescue boats. Our Captain's story covers his experiences that begin in southwest England in the heavily bombed Westport. There's a strange romantic twist to the story as well. The war does crazy things to people's emotions and the end of the first part of the novel is quite heartbreaking.

The book is slow paced, which suits me fine. There are a few gripping action scenes early in the novel with a palpable fear of death as well but mostly it is the actions of the people before and after the missions, in reaction. I think this style when done well lets you get a better view of characters and their surroundings. This is more about the effect of fear and war on people, rather than on the war itself. Our dutchman quickly changes.

The second half of this story, "Peace," is much longer and covers the period after the Americans have entered the war for just a few pages and then jumps ahead to after the war. We then follow the Skipper and his search for meaning and personal peace. We see some of the characters after the war. Despite continuing characters the two parts of the novel have a very different sense about them, although I still get that Hemingway vibe here and there. Like soldiers after just about any war, life is different and not always easy. Some quickly adapt, some do not, some wonder just what they have fought for. The Skipper feels lost. He begins to reconnect and build a new life when he starts visitng some old shipmates to see what they have become, but it isn't satisfying. He seeks a different life around the French coast on the Mediterranean trying to find peace, and when we get to the end of the novel it feels like it is about to start another new story once again. Perhaps a personal peace can be found.

There is a poem near the start of the story that the Captain finds scribbled on the wall above his bunk:

There is an old belief
that on some distant shore
far from despair and grief
old friends shall meet once more.

As friends and companions fall away I found this especially poignant, both then and in real life now.

I looked up the author and found his obituary.

JAN DE HARTOG, 88, author and playwright, died on September 22, 2002, in Houston, Texas. He was born in 1914 in Haarlem, Holland, to a Calvinist minister and his wife, a member of the Wider Quaker Fellowship. At the age of 10, Jan ran away to sea and became cabin boy on a fishing boat on the Zuyder Zee until his father had him brought home. Two years later he ran away to sea again, this time on a steamer to the Baltic, once more to be returned home. As a teenager, de Hartog attended Amsterdam Naval College until he was ejected with the words, "This school is not for pirates." He returned to sea on an ocean-going tug, and started writing. In 1940, "Hollands Glorie" was published just as the Germans invaded Holland and became enormously popular as a symbol of Dutch resistance. De Hartog himself joined the Dutch underground and helped smuggle Jewish babies into safe haven, but had to go into hiding in an old people's home in Amsterdam. While there, he wrote his famous play "The Fourposter"; the manuscript was hidden in the matron's linen closet until the war's end. De Hartog made a dramatic escape through Occupied Europe; he was shot in the legs while crossing the Pyrenees, en route to Gibraltar and a flight to England. An international writing career between the U.S.and Europe followed and he became well known both for his books about the sea and for his epic Quaker trilogy, "The Peaceable Kingdom" (for which he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature). Several of his books were turned into movies such as "The Key," with William Holden and Sophie Loren. Motivated by the spirit of the Quakers and his wife, Marjorie, de Hartog became as known for his activism as for his writing. While in Houston as a writer-in-residence at the University of Houston in 1962, Jan and Marjorie became aware of the horrific conditions at the old Jefferson Davis Hospital, which primarily served the black community. Aided by the local Quaker Meeting, they organized a brigade of trained volunteer orderlies and nurses' aides, and de Hartog wrote "The Hospital," which became an international sensation, and resulted in extensive reform. The de Hartogs continued to work as a team in both writing and service. They worked with the Quakers to bring to the U.S. children orphaned by the Vietnamese War, and themselves adopted two Korean sisters. The de Hartogs have lived in Houston since their return in the early '90s. De Hartog's final novel was "The Outer Buoy" (1994), in which his longstanding literary counterpart, Captain Harinxma, finally sails beyond the "outer buoy," the last buoy encountered before the open sea, de Hartog's vision for death. De Hartog once ministered in Quaker meeting about that vision, quoting a poem he saw scratched in a naval bunk in Bristol during the war: There is an old belief That on some distant shore Far from despair and grief Old friends shall meet once more. He is survived by his wife, Marjorie; his children Sylvia, Arnold, Nicholas, Catherine, Eva, and Julia, and 14 grandchildren.

After reading this I decided that my suspicion that the story here is likely based in part on true events in the author's life was a good guess, but is a heavily fictionalized account I'm sure, moreso than Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms." This isn't a quick read but I am very glad I read it and I will read more of de Hartog.

I believe I had a copy of The Peaceable Kingdom back in my Book-of-the-Month Club days. I don't recall whether I read it or not, but I think I lent it to my grandmother, who would have made a good Quaker.

>122 laytonwoman3rd: I used to see that novel all the time when I was younger and I am pretty sure my mom had a copy of it. I don't have it and don't recall seeing it for a very long time. In a week, one of our nearby libraries is having their semi-annual bag of books sale by the Friends where everything you can fit in a paper bag for $5 is yours. I'm going to be scouting out some of the authors that have been getting on my radar and maybe pick up a few more for the AAC and BAC challenge.

Just finished up the 2nd Longmire novel, Death Without Company by Craig Johnson. I may/should put together a few thoughts about it.

27. Death Without Company by Craig Johnson, finished May 1, 2015, 3 1/2+ stars, library book


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Death Without Company is the second book in Craig Johnson's "Longmire" series and I liked it better than "The Cold Dish," the first entry in the series. Improvements: The snarky style humor is dialed down a notch and the character of the foul-mouthed deputy is broadened a bit. We still get a sense of humor. I think the "woo-woo" mysticism and dream sequences are also a little better here, though they still bother me a bit. Downside: I thought a budding romance in the first novel was well done, but in the second it seemed to be included almost as an afterthought - it started off intriguing and then really fell by the side. The other downside to me is having Longmire, not a young man, be a bit too much of a superman.

The mystery in here is intriguing, but what really is the charm of the books are the characters and setting. This novel really builds off the characters we met in the first novel, adds a couple new ones and broadens the depth a lot, especially with the former sheriff Lucian Connelly. The people here have some pretty interesting pasts. The rural nature of the Wyoming country is brought to life vividly.

I listened to nearly half the story as an audiobook, but the pace was a little too slow for me and without close focus on listening I felt like I was missing a few bits. I ended up re-reading most of what I had listened to with a paper copy and finished the novel up that way. The narration of the audiobook is well done, I'm just not a good audiobooker I think. I read here there and everywhere.

Thanks for the review of Death Without Company. I just started it last night after finishing The Cold Dish about a week ago. I agree, the "charm" of the books are the characters and the setting. I live on the East Coast now after having been born and raised in the Bay Area. I had thought little about the Plaines until reading Kent Hanuf's books a couple of years ago. Looking forward his new/last one and well as the books by Ivan Doig

>126 RBeffa: I am sure you'll enjoy it. I've lived in the Bay Area my whole life and the bulk of my travels have been in California but nearly 30 years ago I did travel through Montana and Wyoming and the land is very different there, the towns are very different with their own character and interesting things and it has lasted in my memory quite strongly through the years. I was there in the summer though and Death Without Company is set in December (about a month after Cold Dish) and it paints a very different picture of life than I saw.

Thanks for the note

I've never read Sinclair Lewis before, as far as I can recall. Since he is the May American Author Challenge, I gave him a whirl.

28. Kingsblood Royal by Sinclair Lewis, finished May 5, 2015, 2 - 2 1/2 stars, library book for the AAC


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I can't recall the last time I read a farce or satire that slapped so hard, right from the start. I enjoyed the book to a certain extent, and rolled my eyes numerous times, but the lampooning here turns it up to eleven. I do think it went on too long and things were laid on very thick. The points would have been made and this would have been quite serviceable at a shorter length. It got a little boring.

This was published in 1947 and I think it is set in 1944 when it opens. Neil Kingsblood works at a bank following a term in the service where he was badly injured fighting in Italy. The fictional town of Grand Republic Michigan where he resides is a war industry town and although I wouldn't say Kingsblood is regarded as a local hero, he is referred to with respect as "Captain Kingsblood". He is a handsome man admired for who he is, and he has married above his class (before WW2) in what seems to be a very class conscious environment. His wife and four year old daughter benefit with him from Kingsblood's well-off in-laws and they live in a neighborhood that he would not be able to afford on his bank teller salary. He is not long back from the war and is reasonably ambitious.

Kingsblood does some family history research at the prompting of his father to find the "king's blood" connection to Henry VIII. They could be the legitimate royal family of England maybe! Capt Kingsblood instead discovers when given the name of a several times great supposed ancestor, that he is 1/32 black and at least that amount of Chippewa Indian. Kingsblood has some perhaps typical for the time racial views - all men are equal but some are more equal than others comes to my mind, to riff on 'Animal Farm'. He views blacks as inferior whereas he may have had some more liberal views beforehand. Still, there are all sorts of hierarchies of this white blood is better than that white blood, and here he was thinking he had the good white blood although there is that French bit supposedly, and now he is tainted with black. Indian blood he could live with, but black blood throws him into despair. The historian points out to him that in many states just "one drop" of negro blood renders him black. (I felt at times like I was watching an old silent movie with all the overacting going on)

Well, the story is a satire in the extreme. Just about every form of class and racial prejudice and crazy ideas that you can think of gets a sendup here. The story starts with the high class New Yorkers looking down on the hicks who live in Michigan. They contrast grain elevators with their glorious Empire State. Nothing is spared.

As I said at the beginning I think this goes on too long. The point is gotten across well but I would have slimmed this novel down by a 4th, and the author is really teetering with the absurd finale. Still, this all "works" in a way, because it hits all kinds of truth buttons. The novel is at it's best when it shows the reader how black people live and what they must live with in the supposedly unsegregated North. There are some poignant moments here. 1947 is well before my time so I can't know how it was then, but we have all seen class and racial prejudice, and we see it everyday with a U.S. President who was a white mother and a black father, as well as the class and racial strife across America.

Interesting read, but I wouldn't really recommend it. An odd book. This didn't make me a Sinclair Lewis fan, but I am glad to have sampled him.

Today was the day one of our local friends of the library had their semi-annual bag of books sale where whatever you can fit inside a paper grocery sized bag costs you $5. I wasn't going to go since the last thing I need right now is more books for the TBR, but I went along with my wife and sister-IL. They didn't have to drag me. So I filled my bag and added a couple to my wife's bag and ended up with 25 more books. I think I'm nuts. A couple of these books I'm happy to have and a couple are for the BAC challenge, but most were the sorts where 'll give it a try one day. or not. And a couple were just top of the bag ones. Even then we didn't really fill two bags but we have plenty to keep us busy. So I'm not overly excited with great finds but I did get a few interesting ones. This is what I got:

The Second World War by John Keegan
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor
The razor's edge by W. Somerset Maugham
The burglar on the prowl by Lawrence Block
The burrowers beneath by Brian Lumley
Kasserine : the battlefield slaughter of american troops by Rommel's afrika korps by Charles Whiting
Changer of worlds by David Weber
The immortality option by James P. Hogan
Waiting for Sunrise: A Novel by William Boyd
The female man by Joanna Russ
The Maltese falcon by Dashiell Hammett
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
The mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Wizard by Trade: Summer Knight / Death Masks (The Dresden Files, Nos. 4-5) by Jim Butcher
Gettysburg: The Final Fury by Bruce Catton
The Pearl Harbor Story by William Rice
The terra-cotta dog by Andrea Camilleri
The eyes of the overworld by Jack Vance
The last battle by Cornelius Ryan
Swan song by Robert R. McCammon
The Two Worlds (Giants) by James P. Hogan
The legend of Bagger Vance : golf and the game of life by Steven Pressfield
A question of belief by Donna Leon

I did enjoy Death Without Company and am looking forward to the next one. Longmire is getting to feel like an old friend.

And we never need a rationalization to buy more books. Just places to put them. And you did get some good ones there. I'd be interested in what you think of The Pearl Harbor Story. I am working on my genealogy - my father was at Pearl on the morning of the attack. He was not injured but he passed away many years ago. I'm now trying to reconstruct.

>129 catarina1: The Pearl Harbor Story appears to be a book (a booklet really) that is sold at the Arizona memorial by the memorial association. It has photos and information about each of the ships that were present during the attack. It seems like something good to read while visiting. Not an in-depth look at the battle.

I'm looking forward to more Longmire stories also.

-------------------------------

I've picked up some recent issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and haven't read a one. They are rather hefty sized issues these days, coming out bi-monthly.

29. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction March/April 2015 (No. 718) edited by C. C. Finlay, finished May 10, 2015, 2 1/2 - 3 stars, acquired in 2015


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After an eighteen year run as editor of F&SF, Gordon Van Gelder hands off with this issue to C.C. Finlay. Finlay did a guest editor issue back in 2014 that I have not read. This is his first official issue at the helm. In general this magazine has maintained a very high quality over the decades although I have not been reading it very much in recent years. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

There are twelve stories in this digest, along with several book and film review columns and editorials. I was unfamiliar with most of the authors. I'm not going to recap/review each story, just a few comments. Overall this issue didn't knock me out and I thought there were several rather 'meh' in newspeak, and one I actually disliked. This is partly a side effect of offering a variety of material.

The stories included:

• Things Worth Knowing • shortstory by Jay O'Connell
• La Héron • shortstory by Charlotte Ashley
• This Is the Way the Universe Ends: with a Bang • shortstory by Brian Dolton
• What Has Passed Shall In Kinder Light Appear • chinese novella by Bao Shu, translated by Ken Liu
• Last Transaction • shortstory by Nik Constantine
• Little Girls in Bone Museums • shortstory by Sadie Bruce
• A Small Diversion On the Road to Hell • shortstory by Jonathan L. Howard
• How to Masquerade as a Human Before the Invasion • shortstory by Jenn Reese
• A Residence for Friendless Ladies • novelette by Alice Sola Kim
• The Mantis Tattoo • novelette by Paul M. Berger
• A User's Guide to Increments of Time • shortstory by Kat Howard
• Bilingual • shortstory by Henry Lien

The first three stories were quite varied and each offered something interesting. OK reading. "La Héron" was probably my favorite of the first three stories - it is pure fantasy with some very unlikely dueling partners and opponents. Think Three Musketeers meets the tricky faerie folk.

The cover story and centerpiece of the issue is "What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear" by Bao Shu. This is a Chinese novella, translated into English. I like being exposed to foreign science fiction, but I am afraid that in this case varied cultural specific references are going to be lost on non-Chinese and also younger readers. The story is potentially intriguing however. It is set in a different reality where time hits a point and then one midnight it starts to run backwards. There is an interesting little story woven into this. People's lives don't run backwards - you still grow up. But the years and progress run backwards. This is spoilery, a little, but from the viewpoint of our focus character he never lived prior history but his parents would certainly notice the backward repetition of events. So would numerous other people not the least of which are the major figures of the era. So although it could have been interesting, the schizoid nature of this backwardness just failed me and kept me from liking the story a lot. Which was a bummer for me because I did like the story.

The remaining stories seem to mostly lean towards odd and creepy. A couple I would not consider either fantasy or science fiction and I didn't care for them. However, "The Mantis Tattoo" was probably my favorite story here. It is a kind of fable painted against a time when humans and Neanderthal-like peoples both lived. It gets a little brutal but I can't say it isn't appropriate. "Little Girls in Bone Museums" is a well written story but I rather intensely disliked the almost celebration of twisted body issues. I don't understand why people, young or old, have a desire to disfigure themselves - it is rather outside my realm of understanding - and this story did not help me understand it at all. It almost seemed to admire self-disfiguration. In that sense I found it very creepy.

Thanks for letting me know.

>128 RBeffa: Nice book haul.

The haul

That's a lovely edition of Jude the Obscure--Everyman's Library, right? Fingersmith was fun, and a Virago edition of Mrs. Palfrey! lots of good WWII stuff----you done real good!.

>134 laytonwoman3rd: The Hardy Jude the Obscure is indeed the Everyman edition - and it is a beautiful book. I always love having the built in bookmark. I was so happy to find it. Fingersmith looks fun and it is a Virago also. Big read tho. Plenty to keep me occupied. Real life is keeping me plenty busy at the moment. All I want to do is read! With the continuing California drought we let our lawns go late last year and I am in the middle of a re-landscaping project putting in raised beds where the front lawn once was and planting various succulents and other things. It lets me be creative but it is a lot of work. Actually pretty fun.

I picked this book up last month to read as my May selection for the British Author Challenge.

30. The Garrick Year by Margaret Drabble, finished May 16, 2015, 3 1/2 - 4 stars, acquired in 2015 for the BAC





I liked books that get me interested on the very first page as this one did. This isn't the sort of book I would typically like, but I was unfamiliar with the author and this novel is a good shorter length for a sample. My penguin edition ran 172 pages.

My preference is for stories with likeable characters. We don't get that here. What we get is excellent writing and very sharp observations of a woman with two young children who is married to an actor. She is our narrator and this begins as a look back to when she was forced to leave London where she was launching a career of her own and taken to the country for a theater job that her husband badly wants for his own career. Our narrator, Emma, establishes herself on the first page of the novel as a sharp wit and observer, and we soon (remembering this is from Emma's view) get a pretty unsympathetic opinion about husband David. We see that Emma and David's style of dealing with each other is set from the first time they have a conversation. It is a contest and game for the two of them.

The narrator's voice feels very authentic, it is so well written. My entire time reading this I felt like I was inside of Emma's head looking at herself and the world around her. There are a few parts that felt a little tedious, but I think that would be expected in such a navel-gazing opus like this.

The end is a little unsatisfying, maybe a little weak in the wrap up. The story ran out of steam despite several events in the final pages. I can picture the author saying "Let's get this done."

I was really surprised to see that this was first published in 1964. It has a modern feel, although at first glance the somewhat "obedient wife" bit does feel dated to the early 60's. Or maybe not, because she has little choice it seems when her husband springs the move on her and the situation of moving away for a job for one partner in a relationship happens as much today as 50 years ago.

I'll read more of Drabble when I want a biting look at something! I very much enjoyed reading this one. Recommended.

>135 RBeffa: I visited in DC on Friday with a good friend from years ago who now lives just outside of San Diego. And she was saying that when she gets home she has an appointment with someone who is going to plan to take out her present lawn and plant succulents. That must be quite prevalent in California these days. There is an article on the front page of today's NY Times about the drought and its connection to Gov Edmund G Brown's policies. I haven't read it yet, having just finished the Travel section and Book Review, my priorities.

Good review of The Garrick Year. I have a copy of it on the TBR. I have to get to it someday. I haven't read any Drabble for quite a while.

Our front lawn was never huge - less than 300 sq feet. With the drought this is the year I said goodbye to it. I have been having a lot of fun since finding succulents to fill raised beds. Have a long way to go but this is the progress so far this year. I'm using my vege garden frames to build raised beds. Eventually I will fill all this in with cobble and small stone along with pavers. In the meantime I have fun planting.

Your new garden is very nice and I'm glad that you are enjoying re-designing it. But I'm not sure I would be willing to give up my day lilies and hosta. I recall a trip back to California once probably in the late 70's when I was just amazed at how brown everything was. All the hills in the distance down the peninsula were so brown - this was after living on the East Coast for just a few years.

>139 catarina1: The late 70's were a terrible drought time. In general California goes brown in the summertime. All our rolling hills go brown. Very normal. We are going brown now. Not good. There had been hope that El Nino would bring us a very wet year but it didn't happen. Maybe next year.

I had the opposite reaction when I flew back to Virginia in the 80's. I couldn't believe all the green.

Oh, what a lovely start to your new lawn! I love the succulents!

>141 scaifea: The pictures don't really catch the prettiness of some of the succulents unfortunately. I have some other beds in progress too.
----------------

The 1980's saw something of a romance with Africa. I believe it all started, at least in the public eye, with a 1981 broadcast of the PBS mini-series "The Flame Trees of Thika" starring Hayley Mills and based on the memoir written by Elspeth Huxley. The following year my future wife and I set off on a dream vacation to the South Pacific and spent two weeks on Bora Bora and Moorea. This may sound funny, but one of my goals was to find flame trees. Flame trees, or poinciana, do indeed grow on some of the polynesian islands and I was more than happy to find them growing and blooming in that long ago March 1982. There were some beautiful ones and it just seemed the perfect thing to meld Kenya and British East Africa to French Polynesia in my silly young mind.

"Flame Trees of Thika" certainly set me off on a reading binge of colonial african books. I remember being a little disappointed with the Huxley book vs the mini-series. I think the TV show is much better. I picked up additional books by Huxley, and I read "Out of Africa" by Isak Dineeson which was a stunning movie and remains one of my favorite movies of all time. Locally here in the SF Bay Area, a small press re-published Beryl Markham's "West with the Night" in the early 80's. I bought this in Berkeley at a book store called "Black Oak Books" the moment I learned of it I think. Our local PBS station KQED had a documentary on Beryl and "West With the Night" called "World Without Walls" and there we got to meet Beryl on screen, still living in her 80's, and hear more of her story and life. Then later in the decade was a film based on Beryl's story called "A Shadow on the Sun." I ate it all up. Mary Lovell published a biography of Beryl "Straight On Til Morning". I ate it up. As if that weren't enough for me, science fiction writer Mike Resnick started writing some short stories in the late 80's based on the Kikuyu, the native tribe where Elspeth Huxley grew up and which play a large part in "The Flame Trees of Thika." These stories are Kikuyu in the future, on another planet even, and there ended up being ten of the short stories and I loved it. And then the 80's ended.

There would still of course be some stories and films in the later years about Kenya, East Africa, colonial Africa, but the real flourish seemed to have been in the 80's. So, when I saw on early reviewer's that a new book on Beryl Markham was coming out by Paula McClain, "Circling the Sun," I was a happy guy, and even happier when I won an ARC. I'm going to read that next and hope to pair it with a re-read of "West With The Night." It has been roughly 30 years since I first read it, but I remember it as very lyrical and a great book. I hope my expectations are not too high for the new book by Paula McLain.

Meanwhile, here are the Flame Trees of Moorea, March 1982.

>142 RBeffa: I was right there with all the African romance, Ron. The Flame Trees of Thika was such a splendid production, and I loved West With the Night, although I did not see the documentary you mentioned, and I thought the biography of Beryl Markham went into too much detail, as biographies sometimes do, so I did not finish it. I also loved book and movie of Out of Africa, and let's not forget Born Free and Daktari!

>143 laytonwoman3rd: I too remember being a bit disappointed with Lovell's biography. Now that I think of it, I might not have finished it either, or at least started skimming. I didn't pick up Lovell's other books, although I did pick up Splendid Outcast: Beryl Markham's African Stories which Lovell put together about the time of Markham's death.

>143 laytonwoman3rd: I'm such a closet Born Free fan that when Virginia McKenna's autobiography came out a couple years ago I ordered it from her. I'm one of two LT members with The Life in My Years . I've only browsed it but liked what I read. I always admired her as an actress and have seen most of her films.

while dropping some donation books off at the library today I was surprised to find that author Anne Perry is coming to speak there next week.

I've just finished Paula McLain's Circling The Sun. For about the first half I was enjoying the book tremendously, even if I found a few niggling faults prickling me. Then the story itself became rather bothersome. I can't quite wrap my head around it yet, although I do know the things that bothered me. Beryl Markham was a very complex person, and I was pulled into this fictionalized first person account of a part of her life. Beryl created a lot of problems for herself and it becomes exceedingly hard at points to feel sympathy for her. I think too much time on the book was spent on her misadventures and not enough on both her time as an aviator and as a renowned horse trainer. I sort of feel a little set up in that the beginning of the book presents us with her moment when she begins her trans-Atlantic flight and then the story goes back to when she was about 4 years old and moves forward from there, only to return to aviation very near the end of the book.

People familiar with characters from "Out of Africa" and Markham's own "West With the Night" will get special enjoyment meeting them again here and spending time with them. I certainly did. But the book is more than a little unbalanced. It is like a near 5 star book paired with a bare 3 star one. I really liked so much of this book and I want to figure out what sort of went wrong for me.

This was an early reviewers book and I need (and want) to write a proper review for it. I'm just going to have to ruminate on it a bit.

31. Circling The Sun by Paula McLain, finished May 26, 2015, 3 1/2 - 4 stars, acquired in 2015 as an ER ARC





I received an ARC through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. The ARC itself is a handsome book, the sort one would expect from a high end trade paperback. I must say that a nicely laid out book enhances the reading experience for me as a reader.

Before I put together a formal ER review I'm going to make some comments, some semi-random thoughts, probably a little spoilery, which may or may not make it into my final review. First off, this is a very good book, one that I am glad to have read. "Circling the Sun" is what I would call in modern lingo, a re-boot of "West With The Night," Markham's own memoir. It certainly makes the material accessible to a modern reader. The story here is a first person narrative told by Beryl Markham. It works exceedingly well that way, especially in the first part of the novel, but one must remember that this is fiction, historical fiction. For those of us who have read Isak Dinesen's novels and short stories, such as "Out of Africa" and read other books set in British East Africa shortly after the start of the 20th century, through the 1930's, the settings and many of the characters in this new book are going to be familiar. They will probably be even more familiar if one has seen the movies and films and mini-series set there. Markham, of course, is our primary character here, but just as much is Kenya itself. Kenya and how it is brought to life here, reinforced by what one may have read or seen before, is what is going to make or break this story for the reader. In my case it made it.

I more or less devoured the first half of the novel. Where it started to bother me was when young Beryl Clutterbuck, at 16 years of age, got married. Circumstances beyond her control pushed her into accepting a marriage proposal that was quickly recognized as a bad decision. If one reads this novel one will have one's own opinion, but the author never let me understand why this marriage was not ended by divorce or even annulment, and very quickly. It has devastating effects on Beryl and her friends. The young girl and woman that the reader loves in the first half of the book slowly becomes someone that for me was hard to understand in regards to choices she made. I realize that this is part of who Beryl was, but I as the reader did not gain understanding. After her marriage we really began to get insight into how Beryl became a trainer, way ahead of her time, but then this promising part of the novel falls by the wayside. Instead we begin a phase of "society" stuff that for the most part quickly becomes uninteresting. I started getting annoyed with the story telling and irked every time the expression "she pulled a face" or some variation was repeatedly thrown at the reader. That term really does not wear well especially the many times it meant nothing.

Still, even as the story continued, there were parts of the story I was really drawn to and enjoyed. The relationship with Karen Blixen (Isak Dineson) and Denys Finch Hatton is brought to life here, just as one would hope. Aviation unfortunately gets pretty short shrift. We get an excellent prologue and the subject doesn't really reappear until towards the end of the book to complete the little circle of this novel. By this point the story seemed to be recovering it's legs and getting more interesting again anyhow and led to a satisfying conclusion. But ... but ... I wouldn't have minded going further.

Wonderful review, Ron!

>149 scaifea: Thank you Amber. I still haven't mentally finalized a review. I'm having a little war in my brain about whether I am judging the author or Beryl (or both). I'm leaning towards both. So much of the book flows well, that for me the glitches tickle my brain. In the early part of the book I really got a feel for who Beryl was and where she was coming from. By the middle I wasn't getting that understanding any more. I could observe her actions but despite some mild attempts the author wasn't letting me understand them. I'm going to go back and read earlier material by Beryl herself and others and perhaps I'll settle it in my mind one day.

The good part of this is it is a book that really pulled me into another place and got my brain really thinking. So many books one reads are like passing through towns and after you've left they don't stay with you. Then once in a while you find a place that catches your fancy.

I've decided that my initial reaction to "Circling the Sun" was a little harsh, but is indeed my reaction. There are some things about the storytelling that bother me here and there. A few things I wanted to know, a couple things that didn't seem quite right including what I think was a glaring error with Beryl and her injured horse, and a few bits of the storyline that I think detracted from the book. Beryl Markham was by no means a simple person. In reference to her "West With the Night," using wikipedia as a source I find that Ernest Hemingway said this:

"Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? ...She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book."

I don't think we see anything in "Circling the Sun" that would rate a high-grade bitch rating for Beryl or anything close. Does that mean the author soft-balled us with this book, or that the bad side of Beryl came later? This novel only covers the early part of Beryl's life and I'm inclined to believe that the abrasive side came later.

So I've toned down my initial review maybe a little and adding a few new thoughts and am posting it to the book. I don't think fans of this sort of story will be disappointed reading this when it comes out soon. Incorporating these thoughts, here is my final review.

31. Circling The Sun by Paula McLain, finished May 26, 2015, 3 1/2 stars, acquired in 2015 as an ER ARC





I received an ARC through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. The ARC itself is a handsome book, the sort one would expect from a high end trade paperback. I must say that a nicely laid out book enhances the reading experience for me as a reader.

First off, this is a good book, one that I am glad to have read. "Circling the Sun" is what I would call in modern lingo something of a re-boot of "West With The Night," Markham's own memoir. It certainly makes the material accessible to a modern reader. The story here is a first person narrative told by Beryl Markham. It works exceedingly well that way, especially in the
first part of the novel, but one must remember that this is fiction, historical fiction. For those of us who have read Isak Dinesen's novels and short stories, such as "Out of Africa" and read other books set in British East Africa shortly after the start of the 20th century, through the 1930's, the settings and many of the characters in this new book are going to be familiar. They will probably be even more familiar if one has seen the movies and films and mini-series set there. Markham, of course, is our primary character here, but the country, Kenya itself, is just as important of a character. Kenya and how it is brought to life here, reinforced by what one may have read or seen before, is what is going to make or break this story for the reader. In my case it made it. Kenya the country however is something different than the Kenya of the mostly British ex-pat society, much of which is pretty insular and unpleasant to put it mildly. Not all, there are some good people in here, but plenty that are not. If that part of Kenya overpowers the reader then the book might not succeed very well.

I more or less devoured the first half of the novel. Where it started to bother me was when young Beryl Clutterbuck, at 16 years of age, got married. Circumstances beyond her control pushed her into accepting a marriage proposal that was quickly recognized as a bad decision. If one reads this novel one will have one's own opinion, but the author never let me understand why this marriage was not ended by divorce or even annulment, and very quickly. It has devastating effects on Beryl and her friends. The young girl and woman that the reader loves in the first half of the book slowly becomes someone that for me was hard to understand in regards to choices she made. I realize that this is part of who Beryl was, but I as the reader did not gain understanding. After her marriage we really began to get insight into how Beryl became a trainer, way ahead of her time, but then this promising part of the novel falls by the wayside for a while. Instead we begin a phase of "society" stuff that for the most part quickly becomes uninteresting. Not a complete loss here, because elements of this with Denys Finch Hatton and Berkeley Cole I thought were pretty well done and added to the story.

Still, even as the story continued, there were parts of the story I was really drawn to and enjoyed. The relationship with Karen Blixen (Isak Dineson) and Denis Finch Hatton is brought to life here, just as one would hope. Aviation unfortunately gets pretty short shrift. We get an excellent prologue and the subject doesn't really reappear until towards the end of the book to complete the little circle of this novel. By this point the story seemed to have recovered it's legs a bit and was more interesting again in places and we do get led to a satisfying conclusion. But ... I wouldn't have minded going further.

There are some things about the storytelling that bother me here and there. A few things I wanted to know, a couple things that didn't seem quite right including what I think was a glaring error with Beryl and her injured horse, something I can't imagine any horsewoman doing, and a few bits of the storyline that I think detracted from the book. Beryl Markham was by no means a simple person. In reference to her "West With the Night," using wikipedia as a source I find that Ernest Hemingway said this:

"Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? ...She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book."

I don't think we see anything in "Circling the Sun" that would rate a high-grade bitch rating for Beryl or anything close. Does that mean the author soft-balled us with this book, or that the bad side of Beryl came later? This novel only covers the early part of Beryl's life and I'm inclined to believe that the abrasive side that Hemingway refers to came later. However, I found it increasingly hard to be sympathetic towards Beryl as the story progressed. She's reckless and selfish and I guess she got into situations for survival but also some entirely of her own making and that doesn't make it pleasant. She was perhaps one of those people who will not allow themselves to be happy.

I read Markham's West With The Night many years ago and I plan to return to it one day and see how these two stories mesh.

Overall I have mixed feelings about "Circling the Sun." In the last few chapters we begin to get to Beryl the aviatrix, the one we saw very briefly in the prologue, and as I noted, I feel rather strongly that we the readers got shorted on the aviation with only a few pages and when I thought about it I realized I didn't have a good feel from this why Beryl flew west with the night. Was she flying away from everything she had been? Perhaps.

I was glad to find this at a recent library book remainder sale to continue my recent interest in the Battle for Okinawa. This is a non-fiction book, although written more as a story in many parts.

32. Okinawa The Last Battle of World War II by Robert Leckie, finished June 1, 2015, 1 1/2 - 2 stars, acquired in 2015


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Robert Leckie was a marine in the Pacific during WWII. He has written a number of books, perhaps most notably "Helmet on My Pillow," a WWII personal memoir which served as one of the primary references for the HBO 2010 mini-series "The Pacific." He died in 2001 so would not know that his material would have renewed and important life given to it. As I learned from reading PT Deutermann's "Sentinels of Fire," the kamikaze was a devastatingly effective weapon of war against the American fleet in the final months of WWII. We see that in this book also, although Deutermann did a much better job of explaining it and how it was done.

This was published in 1995, the 50th anniversary of the Okinawa campaign which began in April 1945. America lost her President, FDR that month, after this battle had begun. There are interesting stories in here, . Again and again when reading these books I am struck by the senseless death that comes, but also by the unbelievable bravery of soldiers. Correspondents also. Ernie Pyle died here. The casualties on both sides were terrible.

The book didn't engage me the way I want books to do. There's a lot of set-up here in the book before the actual battle itself and some of it seemed only marginally relevant, if at all. The writing style was uneven and distracted me, annoyed me a little, sometimes a lot. The author's hatred for the Japanese is so thick it is difficult to believe. If this were written as a propaganda piece in April 1945 I might understand it, but 50 years later? I felt like Leckie was still fighting this war 50 years after it was finished. Bothersome were other different things, lingo, acronyms, choice of wording, scene setting, highly opinionated views and what felt like lecturing to the reader. I got bored numerous times.

There were a selection of photos included, rather random but interesting. Something I found extremely strange however is that there is not a single map in the book.

There's an interesting epilogue to the story which discusses the value of Okinawa and the still continuing debate over the use of atomic weapons in August 1945. Although there was some good information in the book, the storytelling is so poor I would not recommend this. To be fair there are some parts in here that I thought were pretty good, but overall I disliked this and found it to be a disappointing book.

Excellent review of Circling the Sun, Ron. I've given it a thumb up, and it deserves several more. I enjoyed West with the Night very much, and probably won't read the novel, but clearly it gave you a lot of food for thought. I do have McLain's The Paris Wife on hand, and after I've read that, and decided how I feel about her as an author, I may reconsider the Markham novel.

>153 laytonwoman3rd: thanks Linda. Since you enjoy the African romance period of the early 20th century I think it would be a mistake to pass this one up when it arrives on the new book shelf at the local library. McLain is a good writer, actually an excellent one. I have The Paris Wife on hand as well. I'm a Hemingway fan and I've been meaning to read it but it just gets pushed along the shelf. I'm more eager to read it now seeing the quality of McLain's writing.

I left out tons of stuff from the book and I was a little nitpicky. That happens when there is something you really like and the small faults distract. I pretty much didn't say anything specific about the best parts of the book. You may recall her childhood native companion who became the man Ruta. He was her friend throughout life I believe and he is well done here and an important part that the story weaves around. The early relationship (and later) with her father is also very well done. There's much more in here than I recall from West With the Night.

When I started writing the review there were a number of very short several sentence reviews of the ER book. I thought it deserved a lot more. So I tried a bit. Looking through the reviews I see several good ones that touch on different aspects of the novel. Hopefully my review helps round out the picture. This book will certainly be one I remember unlike many stories that fade quickly. And it has reawakened my interest in reading stories set in that period. Not that I need one single more thing to read!

One of the authors for the June British Author Challenge is Beryl Bainbridge. I've never read her before and possibly never even heard of her. I've kept my eyes open for some of the AAC and BAC authors and stumbled across this a few months ago. Seeing as it is about the voyage of the Titanic and came out a year before the famous film I thought I'd give it a whirl. And the name Beryl, what a coincidence. The other BAC author is Anthony Burgess. I don't have any novels of his but I do have a short story, The Muse in an anthology so I'm reading that one. Here's my BAC two-fer.

33a. The Muse by Anthony Burgess, finished June 1, 2015, 2 1/2 stars, acquired many years ago

This short story by Burgess dates to the 60's and may have been first published in The Hudson Review, Spring 1968. It was collected in several anthologies thereafter. Here we have a future literary historian with the ability to travel through time and space and he goes back to check out Shakespeare. I won't pretend to understand the scientific gobbledygook tossed around here, I don't think one is supposed to. It's rather bad science fiction when it does it like that. Burgess is just using this as a device to get our near future fellow and his scientific machine and driver to deliver him to London, but time in this story isn't fixed, and when you go across space and time you will likely get some pushback and where you go is an alternate history time similar to ours but sometimes with big differences. This is entertaining in a mild sort of way, but a little too strange. like eyeballs on women's breasts strange. This might be the only science fiction short story Burgess wrote. That might be a blessing.

33b. Every Man For Himself by Beryl Bainbridge, finished June 4, 2015, 3 stars, acquired in 2015 for the BAC

The blurb on the cover reads: "It is difficult to imagine a more engrossing account of (The Titanic) than this one." -New York Times Book Review. OK you set the hook, now reel me in. Knowing absolutely nothing about the author, but seeing the back cover say she has been nominated four times for the Booker Prize and the cover proclaims across the top "Winner of the Whitbread Award for Best Novel," I figured chances were I was going to be into something good.

The short prologue was intriguing. The story itself starting on the first page, I'm not sure what to make of it. It is definitely not my usual sort of thing. There is some sort of charm though to all the vapidness on display, all the checking of names, the odd birds of society frittering about. Despite my initial impression I did slowly get drawn in to observing this collection of strange people. Most I didn't like but one, or perhaps two, were just interesting enough to follow along. Getting to shortly before midnight on April 14, 1912, for the last chapter, 40 or so pages with at most two hours to go is curiously still under exciting for much of it. There you have it. Not really recommended. I think I need to go read that Walter Lord novel. Or watch Gaelic Storm in the steerage entertain while Kate and Leonardo have an adventure. Something.

Oh, it was a quick read. It has that going for it. And it really isn't a bore.

Titanic interest piqued and wishing for a little more, I pulled out this book, a 50th anniversary edition that I picked up this past year. I remember reading this story as a pre-teen, probably about 6th grade. It most likely was a scholastic book club one, or maybe a Bantam paperback. Could even have been abridged, but this isn't a terribly long non-fiction book. Beryl Brainbridge's book primarily focuses on people before the crash. Few details of the actual event are included. This book begins 37 seconds before the berg is struck.

34. A Night To Remember by Walter Lord, finished June 7, 2015, 3 1/2 stars, acquired in 2014


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This is perhaps the definitive account of the sinking of the Titanic. It was published in 1955 after a number of years in progress by the author as he interviewed and corresponded with as many survivors and families that he could. Rather than a historical fiction re-creation, this book is based on actual words spoken, testimony at hearings, letters and other documentation. Nothing is made up here. The 50th Ann edition has a nice introduction by author Nathan Philbrick which is informative to the casual Titanic fan. Walter Lord's own foreword, the deck drawings and all the data included at the end such as passenger lists for each class, are all interesting. I do wish there had been a few more drawings so one can better visualize the decks and room arrangements, but nowadays those things can be found rather easily on the internet.

I liked this book. It is well written for the style, but does include minor details about various things to give one a sense of the times and the event. (I didn't really need to know all the variations of how people dressed for the disaster, yet these are things that the survivors apparently remembered in detail. More interesting were the things left behind.)You learn what happened and how the survivors were rescued. The rescue part including what could have happened and why it didn't is very interesting. One can easily see there should have been more survivors.

It still seems unbelievable that this accident happened. I guess that is why people get obsessed with this.

-----

For the June selection for the American Author Challenge I've picked Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose. This novel has nine parts. I read the first part and one or two others perhaps 15-20 years ago. I had bought the book as a gift for my mother-in-law. She was a fan of Stegner. I read bits of it while I visited. I inherited this back in 2010 with the spine faded from sitting in the bookshelf in her kitchen nook for many years. The opening chapter of the novel has particular meaning to me. It is set in and around the small town of Grass Valley, Calif. I'm not sure many stories are set there. My parents moved to Grass Valley shortly after I graduated from college. The timing proved to be an odd thing, because it disconnected me from the place I had lived for twenty some years. But it was a new adventure for my parents, a new home with horses and goats and critters aplenty. A seven acre gentleman's farm that they built up and loved. Grass Valley is where my mom is buried, and her parents (my grandparents.)

I'm going to read this over the course of the month. I've already started on it and affirming my past recollection it is very slow paced to the point of approaching sleep inducing. Reading a chapter or two in between other books I hope to finish it. It is a long book.

Here's my sis and I, Grass Valley late 70's

Still reading (and enjoying) Stegner's Angle of Repose but I broke away for a little science fiction and fantasy ...

35. 3 To The Highest Power edited by William F Nolan, finished June 10, 2015, 3+ stars, acquired in 2010

My copy is an Avon paperback from February 1968 that includes three novelettes. Back in 1968 this would have been a very handy book because the editor has included an index (bibliography) for each author detailing their fantasy and science fiction stories and novels and when and where they were published up through 1967 in the case of Ray Bradbury. He also writes a very nice, sometimes respectful, sometimes funny multi-page introduction for each author and story. Books can work as time machines and this one took me back to the late 40's 50's and 60's. The included stories are:

The Lost City of Mars • (1967) • novelette by Ray Bradbury originally published in Playboy
One Foot and the Grave • (1949) • novelette by Theodore Sturgeon originally published in Weird Tales
The Marginal Man • (1958) • novelette by Chad Oliver originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

Several hours of enjoyment here. Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon of course are giants in the field. I was unfamiliar with Chad Oliver but in checking I see I have some of his stories in magazines and anthologies, primarily shorter stories in the 1950's.

I was initially quite interested in Bradbury's story because it is described as an extension of The Martian Chronicles. The story hasn't aged terribly well after 47 years. It was readable and it has all the elements and styling of a Bradbury tale, but it didn't quite make the jump to very good.

Sturgeon's piece is also recognizably his sort of thing - a darkish fantasy that is really a little twisted. The start had me momentarily off balance until I remembered that this was Sturgeon and of course it was going to be weird with "a touch of strange." Enjoyable in a warped way. If you have a fear of cloven hooves going click click you might beware. The eternities old war between good and evil rages on.

Chad Oliver's story I enjoyed most of all. Besides being a writer, he was an anthropologist, and the novella here is an anthropological science fiction story. On a world many light years away a survey ship lands with two men. It is a first contact and the hunting society they expected to find there is something very different. I felt like I was exploring and seeing this as the spacemen did and shared their wonder as the story played out. Quite enjoyable.

36. Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement, finished June 16, 2015, 3 1/2 - 4 stars, acquired many years ago


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I've had an itch to read some classic science fiction. Reading old SF novels can be a little hit or miss. Sometimes I choose a random oldie, but I chose this one expecting it to be a hit (it has an excellent reputation) and got a hit. This novel is as old as me, and seems to have held up better. Hal Clement was an author who I didn't read when I was younger. No particular reason, but I was certainly aware of him. I really enjoyed his novel Cycle of Fire that I read a few years ago. On the strength of this one I'll be reading more.

This is hard science fiction in the sense of the subject, but I found the story very readable most of the time. It gets a little engineering heavy in spots, but never too much, and the world building of life on an unusual methane planet with hugely different gravities across the surface, and the interaction between humans and the little intelligent centipede-like critters who live on this heavy planet just had me very interested. I was never the least bit bored reading this. Earthmen have limitations on the planet and they need to recover an expensive probe from an area they cannot go. Thus they recruit some locals for the adventure. We are repeatedly made aware that the very helpful locals have something else on the agenda.

The writing is a little clunky here and there and a bit of that I might attribute to style 60 years ago. Still, this gets a high rating by me for classics in the genre.

I hope these comments don't disappoint rabid Stegner fans. I stayed up very late last night plowing through and wrapped this up in the morning hours. I'm not sure if I'll post this as a formal review. I may add more thoughts or delete some. I kind of zoned out falling asleep in one of the later chapters and should probably re-read a little, but I wanted to get the book FINISHED!

eta: I've rewritten my review a bit and have replaced my prior comments with what appears below.

37. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, finished June 19, 2015, 3 - 3 1/2 stars, acquired in 2010


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A crippled, prematurely old man (we learn later in the book he is 58) goes in search of history, maybe trying to find meaning in his broken life, his history in the sense of "where did I come from?" via the life of his grandmother (and to a lesser extent his grandfather) who lived in the cabin/house in which he now resides with great assistance from a childhood friend, Ada, who now is his attendant. Ada's daughter Shelly Rasmussen soon arrives on the scene to become his research assistant for several months. Shelly is a 20ish 1970 liberated woman. Lyman Ward might be described as a little cantankerous, but really he just wants to be independent to the extent that he can as long as possible. Residing in a nursing home or assisted living is not an appealing alternative to him.

This story begins in Grass Valley on April 12, 1970. The story begins slow, little happens and we meet our narrator and slowly get drawn into the story he is researching. Obviously he knows a lot of it already but he wants to assemble it into a history. The story deserves attention and is wonderfully written. A story about a seemingly cantankerous old man researching his grandmother doesn't exactly shout "action" and once I got that firmly in my mind I allowed myself to enjoy this more.

The telling of the story moves back and forth from past to present, because even as we are immersed in the past our narrator will interject something, usually towards the end of a subchapter or to begin a new subchapter to throw us out of the bubble. I guess it served as some sort of reminder or frame of reference but it got to bugging me. Moreso because the interjections tended to be rather pointless sometimes.

As someone who has really enjoyed researching and discovering family history I had an interest in the author and narrator's idea and quest. The story is a worthwhile read because of the author's skill with words and the unusual person we slowly find in his grandmother's papers. I was familiar with a number of the locations from my own life and family history and that was added bonus points for me. Stegner would drop a line into the narrative and I would knowingly nod my head at how true it was. Somewhere near the middle of the book Stegner lets us know what the story is about - the 19th century story that is. This isn't a history of mining or the west or a family history per se ... it is the story of a marriage and about how two dissimilar people made it through life together and often not.

Despite the plusses I could never really "love" this novel. There is an overall nearly unrelenting depressing element to it. I really didn't like the narrator Lyman Ford at the start of the novel, although I grew a bit more tolerant of him as the story progressed. I also didn't really care for (although I found her interesting as a character) his grandmother, the primary subject of the novel. Lyman's grandfather Oliver, on the other hand, I liked a lot most of the time and for some reason I think Lyman Ford wants it that way. The story really is slow and depressing however, as dreams fall by the wayside and life does not go the way one wishes. Lyman's grandfather always seems to be paving the way for someone else and doing the hard work that enriches others but never himself or his family. The story seems to have been constructed around a real treasure trove of correspondence of real people, which makes this a rather unusual bit of historical fiction.

I have other quibbles with the book. Annoyances probably only to me. For example, the writing in this is really lovely most of the time, but Stegner throws me for a loop now and then with strange expressions or points of view.

As I was reading this I kept wondering, how much of this is fiction and how much of this is truth. There is apparently a fair amount of continuing controversy over this novel. Rather simple google searches will turn up critical articles in the LA Times and many discussions over "Angle of Repose". There are discussions of plagiarism because Stegner uses long pieces of letters written by a real woman and her correspondents in the story. Not excerpts but whole letters sometimes of many pages. I wouldn't call this plagiarism, but I'm not an expert. I will say that within this novel the "real" letters were just about my favorite parts of the story and it is a little unsettling to discover that these may have been slightly edited or modified by Stegner but they are truthfully the writings of another person. The family of the woman had given Stegner permission and access to the historical material but Stegner seems to have stepped beyond the understanding.

Another thing that bothered me was that we only see grandfather Oliver's failures early in life. There is a very brief piece at the end that celebrates his success as a rose breeder in his old age, but we see nothing of his success later in life running the mine in Grass Valley. It gets a very casual treatment compared to the detailed damning treatment he is given with earlier endeavors.

I also feel that the contemporary (1970) story is my least favorite part of the novel and my overall enjoyment of this book was affected by that. I can understand people praising this book to the heavens and others being bored senseless. Both elements are in this novel. To me this is a 5 star book wedded to a 3 star one. I know the things that really irritated me. I suspect many of them are intentionally in there. I was looking for a strong end to redeem the weaker aspects, to justify this long journey we had taken together and I thought I was getting it at the end of the novel but it failed. The modern story that frames our journey into the past just didn't work for me - and yet it is integral to the examination of the past so I do not have any easy answers on how I would "fix" it. The narrator is clearly railing against the 60's. As a teen in the 60's I saw my grandparents feel very much like Lyman Ward. They were nearly his exact age and were very perturbed by all the tearing down and throwing away of societal conventions.

Stegner has created a most unusual work with "Angle of Repose" and I am glad to have read it. 3 - 3 1/2 stars

I'm just going to wait until I've finished my review before reading yours, Ron. Your first paragraph suggests we may have had a similar reaction.

Hi, Ron! Am new to 75 and just browsing the boards. Really like the succulents and the idea that one must "evolve" and make the best use of what we have. For the most part, I believe watering flowers to be a "waste", especially if one pays for water. However, I do water tomato plants, if needed, and we have had enough rain. As we have a shallow well, I do conserve whenever I can.

I am also one who like to research family history. I believe I have tracked my paternal ancestors to the Mayflower. I have to get several more documentations for confirmation, though.

>160 laytonwoman3rd: I'm looking forward to your review and comments Linda. Angle of Repose, perhaps partly since it is such a long work, has really been stuck in my head and left me with something like a dreary feeling. Not into reading for a couple days after that one. I need a pick me up book although I found something at the library that I plan to read next.

>161 Tess_W: Thanks for dropping by Tess, and the comments. Having a lawn play area was important when the kids were little, and the cats loved it also, but not so important now. I've really been having fun with the succulents and have now made 6 raised beds and put in a path - still lots of work to do but it has been fun.

Well, I've reviewed Angle of Repose now, Ron. We had many of the same quibbles with it, I see. Oddly, though, you enjoyed the "real" letters, and I found them tedious.

>163 laytonwoman3rd: I found the letters quite tedious towards the end of the book. In the beginning it made the story feel very real. Then Stegner got carried away with it. I left quite a bit out of my review because I didn't want to get into spoilerville and it already got much too long. I thought the first half of the book to be much better than the 2nd half - and Stegner uses the letters extensively later on. I'm fairly unsatisfied with how it seemed to lose something towards the end and the dream sequence sorta ticked me off. I'll read your review now. I think I'm going to read Haruf next.

Forget the books. Let's go out and play ...



My kitty is a character

>165 RBeffa: I LOVE that picture! And Haruf is a great idea. (That dream sequence was the worst...WTH???)

38. Where You Once Belonged by Kent Haruf, finished June 26, 2015, 4 stars, acquired in 2014


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Well written story that is told kind of slowly. The story of Jack Burdette, small town sports star who runs a little on the wild side but doesn't seem like a bad sort at all. Seems like just about everyone likes him. Except the sheriff. When he went off very briefly to college he went from being the big fish in a little pond to a smaller fish in a big pond. Things didn't work out so he joined the Army and two years later he returned to the small town of Holt where he had grown up. He could be the big well-liked fish in the pond again. Life went on.

We know from the first page of the story that something really bad happened with the town and Jack eight years before the telling of this tale. After the first few pages we flash way back in time to when Jack started first grade. The story is told by a man who was once his friend and is now the newspaper editor of the small town weekly paper. Much of the story is about the townspeople of Holt, and this editor, our narrator, Pat Arbuckle. Don't quote me on that name. It may have been mentioned in pieces only once or twice.

This is a short novel and it never lost my attention. Good but not great stuff. I can't figure the moral of the story though. It is a story about misplaced trust. The long blurb on the back cover misled me. I would call it at the very least hyperbole.

There's another blurb on the back cover credited to the Denver Post: "Where You Once Belonged speaks with the authenticity of ... Hemingway and Faulkner." I certainly got a Hemingway vibe from this, especially in the latter half of the book. The ending was very unexpected. I'm not sure what I was expecting but I did not see the end coming. This is all a little twisty.

39. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, finished June 30, 2015, 3 - 3 1/2 stars, acquired in 2014


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There is a real charm to this 1959 spooky psychological tale of horror. Hill House has a sad family history and it is very oddly built. A Dr. Montague wants to investigate it, since that is what he likes to do. He invites quite a few people to come stay at Hill House, which he has rented. Some respond. Even fewer show up. In fact, other than a nephew of the owner, only two young women show up. The scary stuff is fairly mild, but enough to creep you out if you are so inclined. Elements of the story will seem rather familiar to a modern audience. Since this is the early somewhat seminal stuff I don't think it can be a cliché - rather it is the prototype that inspired many imitators I would bet. The attention to small details in this is really rather superb and sets the story up nicely and continues to reward the reader. The characters are done very well, especially the two central women of the story Eleanor and Theodora. The nephew of the owner of the house, Luke, is a lesser but still important character.

Eleanor Vance is seriously in need of an adventure, an escape from the real world that she has been dealing with, and a selfish domineering older sister and brother-in-law who you want to give a good slap to, even if they are well meaning in some ways. Eleanor rebels and responding to a call that both attracts and repels, she journeys to Hill House. She wants to run away when she arrives, and yet something keeps her there. We listen in on Eleanor's internal dialogue and after a bit I began to think she was at least a little unbalanced or crazy, or at least a little warped and lacking in self esteem. She's breaking out of her old bubble coming to Hill House, and that should be a good thing. It isn't though as she seems destined to be possessed in a way by the evil presence of the house. Theodora is less well known to us. She seems a bit of a free spirit, flighty, prone to mood changes, and yet she and Eleanor bond when first meeting.

If one has an inkling for an old-fashioned but very well done haunted house story I can certainly recommend this. Not a long novel but I read it slow to take it all in. My internal "sense of justice" meter didn't like the ending, but it was effective. Who says a haunted house plays fair? I knew this was made into a movie long ago but didn't realize until I was half done that this is also the story for the 1999 film starring Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luke Wilson, which explains why I kept having this vague feeling I had read the book before. The story was familiar from watching the movie on Netflix last year. duh.

I liked the old movie better than the more recent one; somehow it was easier to "buy" the haunted house in the original because of the time setting, I think.

>169 laytonwoman3rd: After reading this I'm really inclined to rewatch both films to see how true to the story they were. I will say that Luke Wilson and Catherine Zeta-Jones seem like perfect picks for the characters in the book. In fact once I realized this their faces instantly became my mental image of the characters! The Dr. in the book does not suggest Liam Neeson to my mind at all.

I agree on the time setting Linda.

I don't read spooky stories, or "horror," very often. The Haunting of Hill House is a highly regarded oldie that I don't think I have read before even though it was so familiar. This one will wrap up the first half of the year for me.

>167 RBeffa: Thanks for the review. I picked up a copy of this one a short while ago at a used book sale. I have read two of his books and loved them. And I still have two that are unread, not including the new one. I'm trying to resist reading them in order to make them last for a while, knowing that there will be no more.

Oh, I absolutely *love* The Haunting of Hill House! And the movie (the original) is the scariest film I've ever watched.

>172 scaifea: Amber, I was just looking at a couple of the other reviews of the book and a short one comments that it was more creepy than scary. I would agree with that I think. I'd also agree with the comment that this is really about a severe psychological problem already within Eleanor and the reader only slowly becomes aware of it. It is certainly a spooky story! I found the intrusion of the Dr.'s wife and companion towards the end of the book a little bothersome. For me it disrupted the building suspense of the story and added little. (The part that it added that I liked was when Eleanor overhears Mrs. Montague chatting in the kitchen with Mrs. Dudley who appears very normal behind the closed door.) I was also hoping that Mr Dudley the gatekeeper would reappear in some important manner but he vanished after the start of the story.

>171 catarina1: That was actually my first book by Kent Haruf! I remember nibbling on Plainsong sometime back and it not grabbing me. I even donated my copy to the Friends of the Library. sigh. I'm thinking that was a mistake and I will have to read the rest of his small output of books as time goes by.

>173 RBeffa: Admittedly it has been a long while since I've either read or watched this one, but the thing that sticks out in my mind about the book is that repeated "Journeys end in lovers meeting." *shudders* Very creepy indeed. The movie, for me, was amazingly well done in how the shots were framed, putting the actors off to one side and showcasing, subtly, some feature of the house itself. My eyes kept straying from the actor to the house, waiting for something to move, which never did happen, of course, and that's the beauty and terror of the movie: nothing ever actually *happens*. The tension is unbearable and delicious.

>175 scaifea: Yes that was creepy. It kept the reader thinking this was not going to end well. Which it didn't.

40. Rocannon's World by Ursula K. Le Guin, finished July 1, 2015, 3 - 3 1/2 stars, acquired many years ago


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This story is just shy of 50 years old (first published in 1966) and is Ursula Le Guin's first published novel. It is a
science-fiction novel with a generous helping of fantasy trappings. I read this when I was young and remember little more than liking it a lot. I did read the short story a few years ago that serves as the prologue to this novel to give me a taste of it.

So my re-read that felt like a first read of a minor classic turned out well. The fantasy trappings complete with lords, ladies, swords, winged horses, ruined castles, dying bloodlines, lost inheritances, little dwarf peoples and so on is rather thick here. However, the pieces do add up to give me the reader an adventure and journey and it was pretty well done. This is a "good yarn" and I liked it quite well.

Rocannon is a space ethnologist who becomes the central character when he is marooned on the planet and it appears that an inter-planetary war and rebellion has begun. He sets out on, let's call it "A Heroic Quest" with an assorted group of natives.

I did like this well enough that I've set myself a goal to read/re-read at least a few more of the books in this loosely connected series that includes some major multiple award winning works such as "The Left Hand of Darkness," "The Dispossessed," and "The Word for World is Forest" among others.

I thought I'd dive right in to Le Guin's second novel also published in 1966 and found myself disappointed. Le Guin has been a hit or miss writer for me in the past. This one missed.

41. Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin, finished July 3, 2015, 2 - 2 1/2 stars, acquired in 2009


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"Planet of Exile" follows Le Guin's "Rocannon's World," both published in 1966. I found myself disappointed with this story in comparison to the prior novel. The two stories are not directly related - different planets, different peoples and a completely unrelated story although there is a mention of Rocannon in here. Where they are similar from my view is that both books have a sort of anthropological or ethnographic sense to them. A documentation of peoples and cultures and customs and their interactions with others. This is true through most of Le Guin's fiction that I have read. Planet of Exile is still a science fiction story but also has some of the elements that one expects from fantasy novels, but different from what we saw in Rocannon's World.

I found this a weaker story and I also found the writing bothersome in some ways. Le Guin was getting a little too twee here. Rocannon's World was a page turner in many parts. This one was more of a page plodder. Rocannon's World I felt invested in the characters and I cared about what happened to each and every one. Not so here with Planet of Exile.

Looking at other reviewer's comments I see that I am not alone in finding a problem with characters in this novel and I second the comment made: "Awkwardly written at first (I found the first chapter almost unreadable), but it eases up as it gets going." Even though the story and writing improved, the rough start really colored my appreciation for what the author was trying to explore and the story never really got my interest.

I wouldn't recommend this novel to the casual reader, but OK for those exploring Le Guin in more depth.
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eta 7/5: I nibbled on Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" to see if I should give it a go for the July British Author challenge. It just wasn't something I wanted to read.

eta 7/14: I spent about 25+ pages on Le Guin's "Left Hand of Darkness", an introduction by the author plus the first chapter. I was not enjoying it at all. Not something I want to read and so I'm not. Deleting from my catalog.

I've been looking forward to reading another of P.T. Deutermann's WWII novels after enjoying his book on the destroyers at Okinawa in Sentinels of Fire. This one has many excellent moments also, and nearly as good.

42. Pacific Glory by P. T. Deutermann, finished July 8, 2015, 3 1/2+ stars, acquired in 2015


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This book touches base with a number of significant moments during WWII in the pacific from a naval operations viewpoint. I learned a lot and had knowledge reinforced, but this isn't a true story so certain events were fictionalized as one might expect. The action scenes in here were remarkably vivid and the hell that was Guadalcanal couldn't have been clearer. The other engagements were equally vivid.

There is quite a bit of interpersonal relationship material within the story, a couple love stories, interactions between captains, XO's and crew. For the most part this is handled well, with the exception of one thing within the story that felt out of character/place. A number of scenes are set at Pearl Harbor but the Dec 7th event itself is not.

The author keeps the tension high throughout the story. The final battle sequence near Leyte Gulf is really intense. Thankfully we get some warm down pages before the story is done. I also really enjoyed the author's notes that followed.

43. Six and a Half Deadly Sins by Colin Cotterill, finished July 12, 2015, 3+ stars, library book


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I've been anticipating having another visit with Dr. Siri Paiboun. This is the tenth book in the series and there hasn't been a dud yet, although this felt a bit like a tired horse here and I think the series has run it's course for me. The novel starts with events from December 25, 1978. As noted in the first sentence of the story several events happened that day which will have significance to the story at hand. To the world at large the most significant event was that Vietnam invaded Cambodia. One of the most enjoyable things about these books is that the reader gets a small history lesson interwoven with a mystery.

Cotterill "reminds" the reader about several familiar characters, so that if a person picked this up as their first Dr. Siri mystery they wouldn't be lost. Cotterill tries to keep things fresh. There are some deaths near the northern border of Laos that might be from chinese road workers. The police have been sent to investigate, but the objective is to avoid an international incident. Dr. Siri has retired and has no official or semi-official capacity, but he is bored and the story starts off with him trying to wrangle a way to get north. He has received a very strange parcel in the mail that he begins to think might be related. Phosy the local police detective is already up there and things do not look good.

The author keeps us guessing. We get a wrap up, and the book ends rather mysteriously. I liked it, but I think this was my least favorite Siri novel.

I found this book on the free cart at our local recycling center. One of those random surprises and now that it is finished it will be going back out into the wild for someone else to discover and enjoy.

44. The Deep Range by Arthur C. Clarke, finished July 16, 2015, 3 1/2+ stars, acquired in 2015


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This oldie of Clarke's dates back to 1957. I really enjoyed it. I decided to read it when I looked at the credits page and it said, among many other things: "All the characters in this story are fictitious except the giant grouper in Chapter Three." The author's note sets the story 75 years from today (1957 + 75 = 2032) although the cover says "a thrilling novel of life under the sea one hundred years from now." So I think we can take this as a 25 year story arc. Perhaps not quite that long as we read it.

I found this to be a really interesting story of a possible future. The Big Idea here is that in the future rather than cattle ranches we have wardens and whale farms. The wardens liken themselves as modern shepherds of their flocks and have powerful mini-subs that they patrol with in addition to extensive resources to coordinate with. The sea in this future through various farming and management supplies the food for earth's population. Really interesting stuff going on in here and within this story. One must remember that this came out when the ocean was seen as the new frontier and Cousteau was cutting edge and there were great unknowns out there. There still are great unknowns in the oceans.

There's no "woo-woo" stuff in here until towards the end and I thought that little bit of it was unnecessary. The vast majority of the story is all reasonable (if overly optimistic) extrapolation of the future from a 1957 viewpoint. (multi-generation colonies on Mars in 2032 would fall into the overly optimistic side). Very enjoyable old-fashioned storytelling.

All the interesting ocean stuff is wrapped around the training and following the career of a troubled man who finds new meaning in life after personal tragedy by becoming one of the sea wardens. I'm not too sure whale farming would fly with the public in modern society, especially perhaps where killer whales are hunted as nasty predators of the flocks. This novel imagines a very healthy ocean. There's a bit of Jules Verne and Cousteau and even a little Moby Dick literally mixed in here to help give a sense of wonder to the oceans. Fun stuff that I would truly have loved as a young teenager and can still appreciate now.

>178 RBeffa: I've started reading Le Guin's 3rd novel, City of Illusions and liking it much more than the prior one. This one will round out her first trilogy of books. The Fantasy trappings that decorated the first novel and lingered in the 2nd seem to have been shed and this comes across as a more straightforward dystopian novel of a future earth. It builds on things mentioned in the 2nd novel about the planets and civilizations that had resulted from Earth's colonization of space losing touch with each other and being left on their own. Now we find out why. I can't say that I am crazy about some of Le Guin's pet "themes" such as telepathic humans, for lack of a better description, but the story here so far (about 1/4 done) interested me from the start. This contrasts sharply with the book that follows this,The Left Hand of Darkness which I quickly abandoned as a re-read .

As a personal item, City of Illusions is undoubtedly my oldest unread book. I purchased this at a used bookstore I frequented when I lived near Stanford in 1976. It got packed away in a box in 1987 for a house move along with many other paperbacks most of which I had read and which I rarely looked into until I joined LibraryThing. Once I got the bug to catalog all my books I went through these old boxes and there it was.

>180 RBeffa: I've seen that Dr. Siri at the library but didn't pick it up because I'm back on the third book in the series - just trying to spread them out so that they last longer. I didn't know that it was the tenth of the series though - I would imagine that it is quite difficult for an author to keep the quality of the writing up through so many books but I do like the character of Dr. Siri. thanks for the review.

>183 catarina1: They should definitely be read in order. I skipped ahead once and regretted it. They can each be read on their own, but reading in order is the best way to appreciate the story arc.

I thought I'd try Ursula LeGuin's third novel and was surprised to find I probably liked this one best of the initial trilogy.

45. City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin, finished July 23, 2015, 3 1/2 stars, acquired long ago


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"City of Illusions" follows Le Guin's "Planet of Exile." This is almost like two different books patched together. I really liked the first half of the book. It is set in a dystopian future of earth, at least 1,000 years in the future and probably several thousand. Human settlements are small and widely scattered. There are reasons for this which the reader is told, but we really don't understand. Much of history has been lost. Much has been preserved. Some of it may be not a true history. There is a big mystery here. The first half of the book is primarily a journey across the North American continent of the future and how it has reverted and the odd settlements and peoples that live sparsely across it. We follow a man named Falk who is in search of his own personal history in the far west. Exactly where I was never sure. Somewhere past the Rockies and before California. California is no more, apparently now only remnant islands with flooded valleys post-earthquake. The second half of the book takes place after Falk arrives at the place he sought, "Es Toch."

I was caught off guard by what is revealed in the second half of the novel. I as the reader certainly knew something was up and we are given clues, but the big reveal still surprised me more than it should have. Although I enjoyed the latter half of the book and liked how it tied in to elements of the preceding novel, it didn't really have my interest like the early part of the novel did. Still, overall I liked this story and appreciate how the first three novels fit together here. They are each very different.

Brand new just published this month doorstopper of a book clocking in just over 700 pages and I set my sights and read it all. Typically I read several stories from each year's book but almost never get back to them to finish.

46. The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois, finished July 31, 2015, 3 1/2 stars, library book


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For the best stories of 2014 Dozois has selected 36 works, primarily short stories, but several longer works and novellas. Dozois has been doing this a long time and his tastes in recent science fiction don't always jive with mine. I have not read a full collection for several years so it was an accomplishment for me to get this one done. As always Dozois finds a lot of stories from everywhere that I would certainly miss in my reading. I read very little new science fiction from 2014 and these stories thus were new to me.

With this many stories there are of course some that I think were weaker or that I really did not connect with. I don't think there is a single "lousy" story in here, but there were a few too many I disliked or found boring. Then there were a couple like Alastair Reynolds' story which was good until it wasn't and clearly he has no respect for Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics." What did impress me was the overall quality of most of the stories in this collection. What was missing for me were the "WOW" stories. Stories that sort of rock my world, or at least my perception of it. There are lots of good thought provoking stories in here, ones that get you looking at modern society and the world a little differently, and that is what generally is so good about science fiction through the years. But I was missing the wow factor.

With so many good to better stories in here I am only going to mention a few of my favorites. I thought Ken Liu's near future novella "The Regular," a noirish story of an unusual detective on the trail of a serial killer was above the average. There are a lot of good details in this crime story. Peter Watts short piece "The Colonel" feels like the opening chapter or two of a novel I would love to read. All sorts of stuff dropped in here that could be takeoff points. Michael Swanwick's "Passage of Earth" about big worms from outer space was strange and disturbing and creepy and although I can't say I "liked it" it will certainly be one that will stay with me. Ellen Klages' short piece was a very touching one about an 11 year old girl on the morning the generation ship leaves earth and she goes out early before dawn to touch and remember all the little things.

I found Mary Anne Mohanraj's "Communion" quite original and touching and interesting. Nancy Kress's novella "Yesterday's Kin" closes out the collection and takes a relatively large chunk of the volume. Kress seems to do well with novella length stories and I liked this one a lot mixing family dynamics, politics, evolutionary genetics and first contact. Good stuff and a good way to end the "Year's Best." This was my favorite story in the book and I wish there had been more stories like this.

>181 RBeffa: Oh, I loved The Deep Range when I found it in my high school library as a freshman! That library also had a decent selection of Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein and Simak as well, a veritable banquet compared to my small town public library which had exactly two science fiction books before someone donated the entire works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (in hardback) during my 5th grade year.

>187 ronincats: Roni, "The Deep Range" was really a surprise for me. I don't think I have ever come across it before. As I noted I imagined I would have loved this when I was young, as you did. A good library (and librarians choosing good books) makes such a huge difference to young readers. I discovered Burroughs through two good friends when I was in 7th grade. THEY were my libraries for a while - one buddy's stepdad had this big collection of Ace novels that I was so in love with and got to borrow a couple now and then. Most of my allowance soon started getting eaten up buying paperbacks of Burroughs as Ballantine reissued them.

An adventure in time back to about the early 1890's in the American West. This is my selection for the August American Author Challenge. A rather long novel but easy reading. I've picked up the DVD's of the miniseries from the library and will watch it shortly.

47. Streets of Laredo by Larry McMurtry, finished August 8, 2015, 3 1/2 - 4 stars, book off the shelf acquired long ago


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Streets of Laredo is billed as the sequel to Lonesome Dove one of the finest novels I have ever read which was turned into one of the finest television series ever made. I've wanted to read this followup novel for a long while and finally I have. Initially I was put off a bit by elements presented at the beginning of the story, and it colored my reading for a short while. The strength of McMurtry's storytelling pulled me in however. To be brief, this story is set close to 20 years after Lonesome Dove ends and is probably in the mid 1890's. Events and characters during the twenty year gap are given short shrift and what little we are told is rather disturbing because they were rather important elements of the first novel and it feels like they have been tossed aside. It felt like there was another complete book there waiting to be told, but the author doesn't want to tell us that story so he tosses off a few sentences here and there and opens with a rather unexpected arrangement. As I said I did get over it after a while.

Streets contains a couple story arcs. There is a lot of grief, pain and worse in this novel with some really bad 'bad guys' and which carries a melancholy air throughout. This is sad and dark, and the violence is everywhere and seems especially towards women in here. It is rather disturbing, perhaps moreso because it is handed out so matter-of-factly. The new and developing characters are sometimes interesting, sometimes a bore. I suppose it isn't fair to expect it, but the magic that came together in Lonesome Dove didn't happen for me here. This is still excellent storytelling and it turns out to be a good but unhappy story that surprisingly manages a little bit of a happy ending, although McMurtry does his best to throw a downer even on that. Those who want a synopsis of the story can find a reasonably good one on wikipedia, although it will be spoilersville. I wish I could rate this novel higher, because it is well written. Unfortunately it is such a dark thing and I leave it feeling very sad. Mad slasher horror flicks are happier than the darkness and horror here. I feel bruised and beaten down by this book.

I had a go at The Streets of Laredo miniseries on DVD. I watched maybe 45 minutes of it. What I did see was very true to the book I just read, with many scenes and dialogue straight from the novel with only some minor changes to the story. It struck me as incredibly blah after reading the novel so I stopped watching.

This book is for the August British Author challenge. It cheered me up after Streets of Laredo.

48. Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene, finished August 11, 2015, 3+ stars, book off the shelf acquired long ago


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Most of the Graham Greene I have read over the years has been serious stuff. Monsignor Quixote by contrast is a sometimes delightful, sometimes serious little story that very gently pokes at things. Serious, but told in a somewhat comic way. Our modern Man of La Mancha sets off with Sancho in Spain, circa 1980. He doesn't dream the impossible dream. He's not sure where he's going. Various places flit through his mind. Father Quixote, newly appointed a Monsignor, sets off perhaps to find himself, rediscover his beliefs and faith and have some interesting conversations with his companion Sancho. Some of the conversations work better than others that get a little tedious, with it mostly being communism vs the Catholic Church, or elements of faith and belief, but overall, "Good stuff."

49. Ancient of Days by Michael Bishop, finished August 23, 2015, 1 1/2 stars, book off the shelf acquired long ago

Honestly this novel treaded pretty close to awful at times. Back in the 1980's there was a lot of attention paid to early humans, Neanderthals, speculations on ancient human history, protohumans, and books like Clan of the Cave Bear and a few of the sequels were wildly popular. There was the movie Iceman, and other novels such as Reindeer Moon and ones whose titles don't quickly come to mind. This novel speculates that an ancient species of pre-human (or human) was still in the world, something along the line of Homo Habilis, going along for perhaps 2 million years past their presumed extinction unchanged. The story begins with a woman in Georgia finding this strange gargoyle-like creature in her pecan orchard. They fall in love. They make a baby. Really.

There's much more to the story than this of course.

I'm not quite sure now what I was expecting. The novel is, however, very far from whatever I thought might be there. There is some interesting stuff in here, thoughts about society and prejudice, and a few bits are mildly entertaining, but so much of this story just feels so unbelievably wrong with a cast of characters that are almost universally unlikeable that I really felt let down as a reader. The book has three parts. It goes from bad to worse. Not recommended.

The book was first published in 1985.

50. Chain of Attack by Gene DeWeese, finished August 25, 2015, 2 1/2 stars, book off the shelf acquired in 2013


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This novel is #32 in the Pocket Book series of Star Trek novels, and was first published in February 1987. The characters we know from the TV series and films seem to be presented pretty well - no one acting in ways to make the reader groan. The jerk of the week here is a Dr. Jason Crandall who is perhaps the most unbelievable thing in a book that has a rather interesting situation to be resolved. The Enterprise finds itself in a far away galaxy unable to return home and in the midst of what appears to be a never-ending war between two humanoid species. Everywhere the Enterprise looks they find destroyed worlds and then they themselves are attacked.

These books aren't high literature and no one expects that. You read these for a bit of fun and there is enough excitement and twists here to keep things interesting, even though I had a rather intense dislike for the evil Dr. Crandall. This novel would have been a better story if everything concerning Dr. Crandall had been excised. His story arc adds nothing to the book and distracts from the larger story.

I have not read many of these Trek novels, but this one seems OK. I did enjoy this adventure with some old friends.

51. The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka, finished August 27, 2015, 2 1/2 stars, acquired in 2015

This is a recent short novel about Japanese picture brides coming to San Francisco at some undefined time in the early 20th century (1910's most likely.) It is told in a very artistic manner that initially I found refreshing until I realized the entire story was going to be told like this. We have eight vignettes at different points in time and place of the women/girls from Japan. To me the strongest chapter was the first with the passage across the ocean from Japan to California with a collection of hopes, dreams and fears. The story does not have individual characters to follow through time. There is always a collective "We" with the occasional mention of names, but not anything like a "normal" continuity. As I said the method of storytelling was initially refreshing, but for me ultimately unsatisfying. I am sure other readers may have different reactions. The story is also much darker than I expected. This is the 20th century after all, with all the plusses and minuses that go along with that and we spend a lot of time on the dark side.

I didn't like the story but I can admire the skill that created it. There's an odd cadence to much of the writing and while reading this it was almost like a rhythmic chanting of the sentences.

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52. Death Has a Small Voice by Frances and Richard Lockridge, finished August 29, 2015, 3 stars, acquired in 2015


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This novel was first published in 1953. My Avon 35 cent paperback edition has a real pulpy cover and is one of the later entries in the Mr. and Mrs. North detective mystery series. This story is fairly well written and the tension starts on the first pages. We open with the thoughts of a blackmailer going round and round in his head as he walks the streets of New York thinking about his score.

Detective fiction has never been my go-to genre but I enjoy one now and then. This one is really an old-fashioned 50's style tale but probably a notch above the usual. Pulp fiction on the mild side. I must confess that the North's Siamese cats in the story increased my "like." The circumstances that make up all the little pieces of the story are certainly evidence to this reader that 62 years have passed since the story first appeared. I'll also confess to finding a certain charm to the storytelling.

Reading this is a little like watching an old black and white B movie. Mrs. North receives a Dictaphone type record in the mail and upon listening to it hears what she thinks is murder. She soon is aware when listening that someone is after that recording, and now her. The mystery deepens, spreads out, pieces of the puzzle start fitting together. I try and figure out whodunit and if there are red herrings. I think this is a story that would have been more enjoyable 50-60 years ago since I kept getting distracted by the differences between the 50's and more recent times, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

I didn't really figure out the mystery mostly because we get introduced to a bunch of characters who aren't terribly well defined and then we go on with the story leaving almost all of them behind. When the reveal came I was like, which one was he? Oh, he's the one I thought who did it (seemed kind of obvious). My fault I think.

>193 RBeffa: I have a different pulpy paperback from 1953, as well as a hardcover book club edition of Death Has a Small Voice. I don't have any reading dates entered, but I remember this Lockridge title very well. Some of them hold up better than others, but the Norths are always a treat for me...martinis and Martini (and Sherry and Gin)...you have to love 'em! The stolen manuscript full of thinly disguised potential murderers is a common motif that may have been fresher 60 years ago, but it's still being used, in The Silkworm, for example, which I just read this summer. Hmmmm....I wonder if Rowling a/k/a Galbraith read the Lockridges??

>194 laytonwoman3rd: It is a memorable story Linda but I found myself vaguely unsatisfied at the end. I thought the manuscript missing at the publisher's office a red herring at first. We don't get told that all the copies are missing until nearly the very end and then of course it is obvious who dunnit. And then only at the very end after it is all over are we told that the manuscript really skewers the killer and would ruin his career in every way. The "Loot" and sgt. sidekick were a little too minimalist for me. I enjoyed reading the entire thing though.

>195 RBeffa: My love for the Lockridge mystery series (there are two, which sometimes intersect, plus a few outliers) probably has its roots in the fact that I discovered them when I was 13 or 14 years old, and have made a project of collecting every single one. I do find I still enjoy reading them, mostly for the characters of Pam and Jerry North, and Inspector Heimrich of the NY State Police. There's also the New York of the 1940's and '50's, which is a character too. The Algonquin!

>196 laytonwoman3rd: Stories that we encounter and really like when we are young seem to engender a permanent affection for them. Some stories I am a little afraid to re-read for fear of ruining the memory. Still, I was thinking after all the Lonesome Dove love on the AAC thread that I really need to do re-reads of my very favorite books over the years.

53. Orbit 8 edited by Damon Knight, finished September 3, 2015, 3 stars, acquired in 2012


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Orbit was an anthology series that ran for about a dozen years from the mid 60's to the mid 70's. A total of 19 volumes appeared, simply numbered Orbit 1, Orbit 2 ... Orbit 19. Each edition presented stories newly written for the collection. I read a number of these when I was younger and sought them out as a source of new and interesting stories. They are primarily science fiction and some I would consider mainstream, or lightly fantasy, and spooky/horror, and they now serve as little time capsules of the sorts of stories being written in those years. You would get some edgy, experimental stuff in these collections but generally you could count on finding some fairly high quality stories to reward the patient reader.

Orbit 8 was published in 1971 and contains 14 original stories, all from 1970. Some of the authors are famous and a number of them I don't recall ever hearing of before. These are the included stories:

• Horse of Air • shortstory by Gardner Dozois
• One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty • shortstory by Harlan Ellison
• Rite of Spring • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• The Bystander • shortstory by Thom Lee Wharton
• All Pieces of a River Shore • shortstory by R. A. Lafferty
• Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee • shortstory by Gene Wolfe
• Tablets of Stone • shortstory by Liz Hufford
• Starscape with Frieze of Dreams • shortstory by Robert F. Young
• The Book • shortstory by Robert E. Margroff and Andrew J. Offutt
• Inside • shortstory by Carol Carr
• Right Off the Map • shortstory by Pip Winn
• The Weather on the Sun • novelette by Ted Thomas
• The Chinese Boxes • shortstory by Graham Charnock
• A Method Bit in "B" • shortstory by Gene Wolfe
• Interurban Queen • shortstory by R. A. Lafferty
• The Encounter • novelette by Kate Wilhelm

Some of the included stories here are very good, and some are just plain awful, and a number as you would expect fall into that middle "OK" zone. I won't go over each story. The good ones make it worth reading through this anthology, and as I note, you get a little tme capsule of what was in writer's minds (and an editor) circa 1970.

One of the best tales here, Gardner Dozois' Nebula nominated story "Horse of Air" opens the collection. It is a very disturbing look at a future world gone to ruin. A future very close to 1970. A man sealed in a small apartment in a tower building "for his protection" watches the world around him, powerless to do a thing. We quickly realize the state of the man's mind and also realize he is not a nice person.

Another very good story follows, Harlan Ellison's "One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty." I've read this story long ago I think (in a Year's Best collection), and it was also made into an episode of the 1980's reboot of "The Twilight Zone." This is a time travel story where a man, Gus, goes to a house he lived in 35 years before in Ohio, and standing in his old backyard late at night rather mysteriously goes back in time ... to try and give his younger self some help. It is nostalgic and sentimental and a little sad. Possibly my favorite story here.

I really don't like to disrespect stories because they represent an author's hard work. Avram Davidson has been dead for over 20 years, however, so there's no possible chance for hurt feelings when I say that the strange folk tale that is the "Rite of Spring" had me cringing a little in its six page journey. The strange farmer wife in this fairytale saying "Done and done and Bradstreet." Really? Yikes. Bad fantasy. On the other hand the Editor obviously liked the story so others may too. I also disliked Gene Wolfe's disturbing "Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee." It wasn't the story content as much as the odd storytelling and odder name-dropping within the story. Confusing effete way of writing that put me off quickly. The puzzle of Kittee was just dropped there also. This, to me, seems like the germ of a larger story that wasn't allowed to grow and be polished. Later we get another Wolfe, "A Method Bit in "B"" that I did like, an interesting, clever (and short) story. That "B" is as in a B-movie, and this is detective fiction twisted this way and that.

I'm not a big fan of R. A. Lafferty, but I really liked "All Pieces of a River Shore" which vies with the Ellison story as possibly my favorite in this collection. This is also one of the longest stories, and is about a "rich Indian" named Leo Nation who collects things and his latest passion spooks the hell out of him and a friend. He has begun to collect picture reels from 18th century carnivals and as he finds and examines them he begins to believe that certain ones are many thousands of years old, showing the Mississippi River shore and creatures long extinct that were probably around at the time of the last ice age. These 15,000 year old images and the details they seem to contain really spook him. I think Lafferty could have expanded this to novella length and elaborated on things hinted at, but it works well as it is.

I rather liked Carol Carr's small piece "Inside." A woman in a mysterious house surrounded by mist eventually discovers she is dead. I also enjoyed Pip Winn's "Right Off the Map," a cute little piece set in a bleak future where a man discovers a place hidden from "civilization."

Kate Wilhelm's Nebula nominated "The Encounter" was an unusual wrap up for the stories, a psychological-suspense thriller type that didn't seem to fit with the other stories. I didn't care for it.

The misses among these stories, and there are several, really keep me from giving this anthology a higher overall rating. Thom Lee Wharton's story, like Kate Wilhelm's, didn't fit into this collection in the slightest and I am really puzzled why it was included. It was one of the weaker stories also. Nevertheless there are some very good stories that were a pleasure to read and get the brain thinking about things. 4 star stories, some of them. Several of the stories I didn't discuss were interesting stories with provocative ideas. I'd recommend this to fans of science fiction's history.

I've had 5 or 6 books "in progress" at various times this past month+, and it's time to get some of them completed.

This novel was published the month I was born, in 1953. I think it has held up quite well for the age of it, whereas I have doubts about myself ...

54. Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke, finished September 4, 2015, 3 1/2 stars, picked up at the recycling center free cart

This was first published in 1953, but I was unaware until now that Clarke revised the beginning of the novel in 1989 for this revised edition released in 1990. It is only a new two and a half pages at the beginning, and Clarke spends more than that in a rather wandering introduction he wrote in July 1989. It seems a little surprising that this book was never made into a movie, although it was optioned early on and as Clarke writes: "and since then has passed through innumerable hands and has been adapted by countless script writers." Clarke notes that the mini-series "V" pretty much captures Chapter 2 of Childhood's End. After all this time the story is finally being filmed in 2015 for a television mini-series.

So, the story of Childhood's End begins with the arrival of a huge fleet of spacecraft that appear above the major cities of the planet worldwide. They are a benign appearing peaceful presence and their goal seems to be to unify the peoples of earth and end conflict. For the first years one of the visitors will speak only to the Secretary-General of the United Nations and no one, including the Secretary, actually sees the aliens.

The directions the story took and developments within this surprised me. It would be unfair to potential readers to discuss the plot, but I will say that the story is about the end of mankind on earth in a quite surprising way. There's a little bit of woo-woo in here that I could do without, but Clarke had a "Big Idea" and he more or less handled it successfully. The title says it all.

I'm glad I read this. The middle section of the book drags but becomes very important to how the story goes. Unlike many classics of science fiction this does not feel very dated. It could happen today.

55. Island in time : the Point Reyes Peninsula by Harold Gilliam, finished September 12, 2015, 3 stars, acquired in 2012


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This book was published in 1962 to help raise awareness of the Point Reyes seashore area north of San Francisco. The idea of a National Seashore park had been languishing for many decades. It became a reality when President John F. Kennedy signed the law to create the first west coast national seashore on September 13, 1962. I suspect this book came out a little too late to influence public sentiment one way or another. I frankly found the book somewhat disappointing. The Point Reyes area has been one of my favorite places in California since I was a young teen and was lucky enough to have two science teachers in high school who took us on field trips to the area so we could experience it. There's a natural beauty there and a wealth of bird species and interesting plants and seashore life and hugely interesting geologic stuff. There is also a rich native American history to the area. It is a place I love and have visited many times and taken my children to visit and learn.

So the book ... It focuses on just a few topics and spends way too much time on things like where Sir Francis Drake may have landed to be the first Englishman to set foot on the soil of North America. There are a large number of full page "artsy" style black and white photos of the coast that I found blah. There are also some good photos too, but not enough. Aside from the lengthy discussion of Sir Francis Drake and other early explorers, there are half a dozen or so small discussions of the birds in the area, shipwrecks, weather, etc. and a more lengthy discussion on the geology. Nothing here in great depth but enough to whet potential interests. I did learn a few things, but knowing the area there is an awful lot that isn't discussed at all, or with only a slight mention. In sum I'd say that this book does not do justice to a special place on earth.

56. A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor, finished September 25, 2015, 3 1/2 stars, acquired in 2012


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A very unusual group of ten stories from the rural southern United States which seem to be set in the 1940's. This is universally dark stuff, probably what people call southern gothic, but it is borderline horror stories in some of it. Certainly dark tales where almost all the characters are completely unlikable and most are mean. I'm very glad to have read it but it isn't the sort of stuff I want to read in other than small doses. Perverse morality plays, some of it. These stories drip with the prejudices of their characters. O'Connor loves twisted endings, so after a few of these I was wondering what the twisty thing was going to turn out to be. I wasn't a good guesser even when I was half right.

The ten stories are:

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find"
"The River"
"The Life You Save May Be Your Own"
"A Stroke of Good Fortune"
"A Temple of the Holy Ghost"
"The Artificial Nigger"
"A Circle in the Fire"
"A Late Encounter with the Enemy"
"Good Country People"
"The Displaced Person"

The story that will probably never unstick itself from my memory is the title story, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." When the character you appreciate most in a story is a completely cold-blooded killer you know something is twisted! Actually, quite a few things will probably stick in my memory. "Good Country People" is one of those extra twisted ending stories. O'Connor leads us along by the nose so we and the characters expect certain things to happen, but the twisted O'Connor is just playing the reader.

*waves cast--one more week!*

So, whatcha been reading this week? *waves*

>202 ronincats: a toothache and then the dreaded ROOT CANAL have rather dampened my reading energy. Back to the dentist tomorrow. fingers crossed. I've also been spending a little too much time on Ancestry/DNA lately, but it is a lot of fun even if it is a huge time sink.

I've finished one up this evening however.

This is for the American Author Challenge for October. I plan to read at least one more Bradbury collection or novel as well, maybe two! I prefer Bradbury's later stories such as Frost & Fire, Foghorn, and so many more over these early tales which are good but not really the sorts I prefer to read. Fahrenheit 451 was never a favorite of mine either - it is just that some Bradbury I love and some I don't.

57. The October Country by Ray Bradbury, finished October 5, 2015, 3 - 3 1/2 stars, acquired long ago


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This is a collection of many of Ray Bradbury's earliest stories, primarily from the period 1943-1947. Fifteen of the Nineteen stories here were included in Bradbury's first published collection "Dark Carnival" from 1947, which had a total of 27 short stories. The author notes that some have been rewritten for the current collection. These stories as a whole perhaps tend to be darker than later stories from Bradbury, but they are unmistakably his themes and style. In the introduction to the collection the author notes: "For my later readers, THE OCTOBER COUNTRY will present a side of my writing that is probably unfamiliar to them, and a type of story that I have rarely done since 1946."

There are some genuine classic tales in here, and even if you have never read Bradbury you might recognize a story or two that have been adapted for television. Older readers who watched Alfred Hitchcock Presents will have never forgotten the story of Charlie and "The Jar" that he bought from the carnival. Great idea for a story. The opener "The Dwarf" struck me that way as well - great idea - I thought it was really well done until we ran into the end where it muddied. These stories don't fit into a little box by type. There are mainstream stories, bits of supernatural, macabre type ones, bits of the fantastic, some creepy ones, some but not much that is overtly horror (but done stylishly), quite a few with weird aspects to them. One or two are even lighthearted and a little funny, such as "Uncle Einar". I don't think there is any science fiction here.

Bradbury builds his stories around little truths of life. I enjoyed this collection. I think there are better collections of Bradbury's short fiction but this wasn't a bad place to visit. I think the main problem that I had with a number of stories was the ending. Bradbury would build something up within a story and the end would be a mush, or a disappointment. There are plenty of better stories to get one over the weaker seeming ones.

There is a kind of precursor story in here for Dandelion Wine. It is called "The Man Upstairs" and features Douglas Spaulding living in his grandparent's rooming house in 1927 when a strange man comes to rent a room. The strange man is some kind of vampire, so we are not rally talking Dandelion Wine here. I liked this one. It dates to 1947, well before the writing of most of the short stories incorporated into Dandelion Wine in the mid 50's.

Oooh, root canal. Not the best time to be had, I know. Hoping you feel better soon.

Face pain (toothache, sinus pain, headache behind the eyes) is the one thing that will assuredly interfere with my reading. I've never had a root canal, but the mere thought makes me want to put a hot washcloth on my face! Hope you don't have too many more visits til you're done with that misery. Are you making headway with your Ancestry research?

>204 scaifea: >205 laytonwoman3rd: I've survived the dentist visits. I know it could have been a lot worse. I've had a bad allergy/sinus year so when this started I thought it was possibly a sinus infection. Just a lot of undefined pressure and discomfort. When I had my checkup a while ago nothing was seen on XRAYS and an antibiotic cleared it up - but then it came back a couple months later and this time the Xrays did show something - and so I ended up with a root canal. Bad luck and it could have been a lot worse. now I'm pain free and I feel like this dark cloud has lifted.

Linda, 20 years ago my mother-in-law's enthusiastic family history research prompted me to start. I used her computer at first and then we got our own in 1995 just as online was becoming more available and the internet was developing. For about half a dozen years I had some very fruitful research - there was tons of info available and lots of message boards and newsgroups and mailing lists sharing information. I connected with a lot of good people and distant relations and had a lot of fun. My m-i-l was a pro at it and taught me a lot of proper techniques of research at the library. Then 9/11 and identity theft crackdowns and a lot of info that had been freely available began to disappear. Ancestry began buying up public stuff and shutting things down. I had come to a lot of dead ends, even though I had also gotten a ton of great history and information and contacts. I really had done very little the past decade - I'd look around now and then and add a few bits.

The growth in DNA research and the easy availability at low cost for everybody is something of a game changer. There are a number of places that do it with different emphasis, plus places like GEDMatch where different services can come together and share data. Ireland has published their 1901 and 1911 census records for all to see and research online and tons of cemetery records in the US are opening up via find-a-grave and Ireland has a big cemetery preservation and documentation project going on. For the moment at least it has become a very productive time for me to expand on my prior research. The DNA has confirmed a number of things and already given me one great breakthrough that will keep me busy for quite a while. I find it stimulating and a lot of fun. My love of history fits right in to it. My wife and I did the DNA tests a few months ago. Ancestry has added a lot of info and I rejoined them after a long absence a couple months ago. Together with the DNA leads I'm having fun with it. The DNA info at present does leave something to be desired. Telling me I'm 43% British Isles and 40% Irish for example does not tell me something I didn't already know. It is not very good at finding the small bits or even some of the bigger bits. My great grandfather Beffa came from Switzerland. Ancestry doesn't identify that even tho my Swiss ancestors go back centuries and many generations. People can be frustrated. What it is good at is identifying who you share DNA segments with, and how close of a relationship. That is where the fun starts.

Bradbury is a great read for October. Last year I read A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny (with illustrations by Gahan Wilson!!!) for the first time and really enjoyed that--have you read it?

>207 ronincats: I haven't heard of that one Roni. VERY October. The October Country has a number of interesting drawings that reminded me a little of Gahan Wilson. Just a little. The b& w line drawings in October Country, not quite one for each story are by Joe Mugnaini. He's very Bradbury - just google him to see his stuff!

>206 RBeffa: With the exception of the mother-in-law component, your genealogy research history is very much like mine. I had such a wonderful time in the 90's searching on-line. I'll never forget the day my daughter called me at work---she came home from high school and picked up our mail, as usual---to tell me I had a letter from Slovakia. This was a response to a blind contact I had made, who turned out to be a distant cousin, still living on the homestead my great-grandfather left to come to this country in the late 1800's. My brother still lives on the property our great-grandfather settled on here. You just can't make this stuff up. I haven't done the DNA thing yet, because, like you, I know pretty well where most of my ancestors came from. But who knows what else I may find in the future.

58. Farewell Summer by Ray Bradbury, finished October 10, 2015, 2 1/2 stars, acquired in 2011


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Doug here doesn't want to grow up. He's clearly got Peter Pan issues. And he doesn't seem to mind killing people or hurting them to forever stay a boy.

This is the direct sequel to Bradbury's classic "Dandelion Wine" which I (re)read a year and a half ago. There is a mean streak up the back of this book is the best way I can say it. I suppose we can ascribe this to the young Doug Spaulding entering puberty. I don't know. Here and there are some of Bradbury's usual quiet insights into things but the overall tone of this book and the rather strange end to it put me off. I didn't care for this. Simple as that.

Bradbury has an interesting afterword.

------------

I started reading "Summer Morning, Summer Night" which is a collection of stories related to Dandelion Wine (and I assume Farewell Summer).

59. Summer Morning, Summer Night by Ray Bradbury, finished October 12, 2015, 3 1/2 - 4 stars, acquired in 2012


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This is a very fine collection of "Green Town" stories published in 2010. They are either set within the framework of the town familiar from "Dandelion Wine", or at least give the appearance of it. About half of the stories were previously published in various collections and places, but are being brought together here thematically for the first time. The latter half of the book are previously unpublished short stories. Many of these aren't even really stories - they are little moments (one or two paragraphs in length sometimes) that may have been cut out of or never fit into "Dandelion Wine" or "Farewell Summer." As such this is rather an oddity. Think of some of these later pieces as deleted scenes on a DVD!

My favorite story in the collection, of many good ones, was "All On A Summer's Night". This story was first published in January 1950, and is a sweet story about a young Douglas Spaulding who adores a librarian who lives in his grandparent's rooming house. She has introduced him to so many people ... Robert Frost, Longfellow, Whitman, Poe and when the 4th of July comes around he does something very nice for her.

I found this interesting and think it could be enjoyed by anyone, but would probably tickle those the most who have already read and enjoyed Dandelion Wine.

My Bradbury October is turning into a marathon. This is for the American Author Challenge for October.

60. We'll Always Have Paris by Ray Bradbury, finished October 13, 2015, barely 2 1/2 stars, library book


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One of Bradbury's final books, released in 2009. This is a broad collection of subjects, primarily mainstream in my opinion, and the flyleaf says it is a new collection of never-before-published stories. In his brief introduction Bradbury states,after discussing the first story: "The other stories, one by one, came to me throughout my life - from a very young age through my middle and later years. Every one of them has been a passion."

I got the feeling from that intro that these stories were probably ones put away in a file after writing, that maybe weren't his best and didn't have a place to go. Like songwriters and musicians, though, sometimes really good songs were born between albums, or didn't fit with the style of others, and slipped away until collected at a later date. I was hoping to find some of the "hidden gem" stories in this collection that might be like that. There are a couple of good stories in here. However, for the most part many of these stories are rather mediocre and unmemorable, bits of fluff. Let's call them lesser tales from the master. Some needed more polish, some were never fleshed out, and some others just aren't remarkable. A few I disliked or wondered why they had been written. One story, "Arrival and Departure" was also in "Summer Morning, Summer Night," published at about the same time.

There is one story in here that is nominally science fiction. Two rockets go to Mars. That is all the science fiction in the story. What the story is really about is explorers far from home.

Overall this was weak and disappointing and barely an "OK."

I love Dandelion Wine and many other Bradbury works, but have had Farewell Summer on my nightstand for a number of years now for fear it would not live up to its predecessor.

>213 ronincats: Roni, If you read through or just glance at the reviews/ratings for Farewell Summer you will see that many people like it a lot. It rubbed me the wrong way, but perhaps it will work better for you. Give it a try. It isn't Dandelion Wine, however.

61. Marionettes, Inc. by Ray Bradbury, finished October 14, 2015, 3 1/2 stars, acquired in 2011


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I sing the body electric;
The armies of those I love engirth me,
and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them,
respond to them,
And discorrupt them,
and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Walt Whitman

Bradbury's famous story of the electric grandmother leads off this slim book. The novelette "I sing the Body Electric" is an old favorite of many Bradbury fans, including me. It had been a long time since I first read it. Like much of Bradbury's "science fiction" stories, the science fictional element is rather small. Bradbury gives you something that is clearly science fiction but the story itself is about people and relationships and love. This is a sweet story about how a family deals with the death of mother and wife to a young family. There are four other stories (including the title story) as well as a short "screen treatment" at the end (which is nothing remarkable, just interesting). The unified theme of these stories is robots which are very humanlike in attitude and behaviour, if not appearance.

As a bit of trivia, "I sing the body electric" was first written as a TV episode for tv series "Twilight Zone" and is apparently the only thing written by Bradbury that was used in the original series.

This book was a special edition put together to collect Bradbury's robot stories. There are some nice but small illustrations for each story plus a large watercolor on the inside that I believe was done by Bradbury.

Oh, I sing the body electric is a favorite of mine as well, although I own it in the eponymous collection of short stories.

I've read dandelion Wine now, and I really enjoyed it. So one of these days I will give Summer Morning, Summer Night a try. I especially want to read the one about Doug and the librarian...sounds perfect for most all of us around here!

My Bradbury binge for October continues ... I think I may have read this collection about 30 years ago. Certainly at least parts of it.

62. Long After Midnight by Ray Bradbury, finished October 16, 2015, 3 stars, acquired in the early 1980's


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The subtitle of this collection is "22 hauntings and celebrations." I suppose it is, but not much to celebrate. I would say it is about wishes also. Getting what you wished for isn't always good we are reminded (but sometimes it is.) These 22 stories were written between 1946 and 1976. The collection was first published in 1976 and 11 of the stories were published between 1971 and 1976. With only 2 stories from the early 60's and the rest from 1946-1954, there is a real time split in the collection between early stuff and contemporary (at publication). The stories are a broad mix of a lot of mainstream fiction, some zany stuff, horror/supernatural, science-fiction and surreal/fantasy. The zany stuff was entertaining at times, the angst-ridden modern material was really tiresome and it didn't seem like Bradbury.

Like many writers, Bradbury had a period early in his career where he produced a lot of really good work. Later Bradbury almost always suffers in comparison to his early great works. The later material in here, with a few exceptions seems much weaker, certainly different. Some of the early material isn't his best work either. Nevertheless of the 22 stories here perhaps 5 or so are very good stories (and come from across the years), and even the majority of lesser stories are OK, which leaves this reader with a mostly satisfied feeling at the end, but wishing it was better.

So, there is good and bad Bradbury in here, but mostly unmemorable. There were two "Green Town" stories that I had just read in "Summer Morning, Summer Night" as well as other Green Town stories including an early one from 1946, "One Timeless Spring" that I had not read before and that handles young Doug's first kiss pretty well, although I thought the first part of the story rather awful/weak. There is also an absolutely crazy Adolph Hitler story in here. My favorite stories or ones that I thought notable, included: "The Burning Man" (1976) which managed to create a pretty spooky bit of horror in a few pages without anything horrible actually happening on the page. "Long After Midnight" (1963) in some ways is the best story in the collection; it sure hits hard. "The October Game" (1948), a genuine horror story that I've read before. I must also give a nod to "The Better Part of Wisdom" (1976) for a sensitive, progressive handling of a homosexual relationship. I don't think it a great story, but a noteworthy one. There is also a story here, "The Messiah" (1973), which to me is a good add-on to "The Martian Chronicles" and I liked it. It is memorable enough that I recognized I had read it before, but when, I couldn't say. Must have been my first read of this collection long ago.

Bradbury October continues ... I've been holding back on re-reading what I consider the great stuff. This one was one of my favorite story collections. I know exactly where I was in Sacramento in 1976 when I picked this collection up to read before bed for the first time. My teen-age Martian Chronicle crush on Mr. B had probably faded a bit. I was ready for a serious romance and found it in a collection compiled for young boys, "R is for Rocket." How's that for silly? I already knew many of the stories, and re-reading them plus the others re-sparked the fire for a few years. There were several stories in here that gave me 4 and 5 star+ chills the first time: "The Fog Horn," "Frost and Fire," "A Sound of Thunder," and "Here There Be Tygers" among them. In the language of the time, they "blew my mind." I've re-read a story now and then over the years, but this was my first complete re-read since the Fall of 1976. How would it be ...?

Here is Ray's prologue:

When I was a boy in the Midwest I used to go out and look at the stars at night and wonder about them.
I guess every boy has done that.
When I wasn't looking at the stars, I was running in my old or my brand-new tennis shoes, on my way to
swing in a tree, swim in a lake, or delve in the town library to read about dinosaurs or Time Machines.
I guess every boy has done that, too.
This is a book about those stars and those tennis shoes. Mainly about the stars, because that is the way I
grew up, getting more and more involved with rockets and space as I moved toward my twelfth,
thirteenth, and fourteenth years.
Not that I have forgotten the tennis shoes and their powerful magic, as you will see in the last story
here, which I have included not because it concerns the Future, but because it gives you some sort of idea
of the kind of boy I was when I was looking at the stars and thinking of the Years Ahead.
Nor have I forgotten the dinosaurs that all boys love; they are here, too, along with a Machine that
travels back in Time to step on a butterfly.
This is a book then by a boy who grew up in a small Illinois town and lived to see the Space Age
arrive, as he hoped and dreamt it would.
I dedicate these stories to all boys who wonder about the Past, run swiftly in the Present, and have high
hopes for our Future.
The stars are yours, if you have the head, the hands, and the heart for them.
Ray Bradbury
Los Angeles
March 28, 1962

63. R is for Rocket by Ray Bradbury, finished October 18, 2015, 4 stars, acquired in 1976


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'R is for Rocket' is a collection of collections, primarily science fiction as one would expect by the title. Most of Bradbury's writing I would not call science fiction, but with this it is. All but two of the stories had previously appeared in other collections when they were brought together here in 1962. Think of this as Mr B's greatest hits for boys. and some girls. and who cares what your age is. When I first read this in 1976 I was already familiar with several of the stories from other collections, but reading what amounted to a collection of hits in one place put this one high on my favorites list. Re-reading it all these years later I am still amazed by some of these stories. They take me back just a little to that magic "sense of wonder" feeling one has as a youth.

Bradbury was rarely an idea man like perhaps Arthur C Clarke. He's a stylist. A fabulist. Many other things. He really can't be pigeonholed as a "type." Every story here isn't fabulous. The truth is that the science fiction feels very dated. Every story was written before there was a single satellite in space. There is even one in the middle ("The Exiles") I quite dislike. The collection begins a little weak frankly, but once it gets going, it goes. "The Rocket" is a sad but sweet tale that I had completely forgotten about and really enjoyed it. "The Fog Horn" is perhaps an even sadder story than I remembered. As a bit of trivia, the story, or a version of it, was first published in The Saturday Evening Post, June 23, 1951. The title then (and the subsequent very loose movie interpretation) was ... "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms."

The story that really knocked me out the first time I read this collection was "Frost and Fire." Re-reading this story I remembered a few of the essential elements but had forgotten most of the story. Honestly it doesn't carry quite the impact that it had long ago, but the central idea of it and how the story was done is still amazing. A 70 year old tale that still kicks butt.

I read "Here There Be Tygers" last year in an old anthology. It is a great story. Here's what I wrote then: "Bradbury's opening story is kind of neat. It is an allegorical piece, an ecological tale, of a sentient planet like Eden. Remind yourself this was written in 1951. If you're like me a Star Trek episode from the 60's will probably come to mind. "

The last two stories in the collection are extracts from Dandelion Wine.

In sum, reading this again was a bit of a disappointment. Something of an exercise in nostalgia. It didn't keep me from enjoying this a lot.

The included stories are:

1 • R Is for Rocket • (1943)
16 • The End of the Beginning • (1956)
21 • The Fog Horn • (1951)
29 • The Rocket • (1950)
39 • The Rocket Man • (1951)
50 • The Golden Apples of the Sun • (1953)
57 • A Sound of Thunder • (1952)
69 • The Long Rain • (1950)
83 • The Exiles • (1949)
97 • Here There Be Tygers • (1951)
110 • The Strawberry Window • (1955)
118 • The Dragon • (1955)
121 • The Gift • (1952)
124 • Frost and Fire • (1946) • novella
164 • Uncle Einar • (1947)
172 • The Time Machine • Dandelion Wine • (1955)
179 • The Sound of Summer Running • Dandelion Wine • (1956)

I continue to drink mass quantities of Bradbury for October. This is number 8. I'm shooting for 10 in October. Reading this much in such a short period of time I am realizing (more than I already was aware of) how much Bradbury recycled themes, elements, ideas and stories. For example, many of his stories mention rockets criss-crossing the skies, even though we never see a rocket up close (well, almost never) and are never told how they work. Bradbury uses these things like set decorations. Cars are frequently referred to as beetles whether in the near future or hundreds of years in the future. I don't think he is using the term to describe old VW bug type cars but rather he uses it as a generic word for any size car since beetles are sometimes two person things, or hearses and other times 17 wheelers. (why 17 I have no idea. I thought you need 18 wheels to roll). There are many many more things like this that repeat in his stories such as the use of certain songs.

He has put together most of his novels out of short stories, such as he did with Dandelion Wine. Despite saying this, Bradbury of course was no one-hit wonder. The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451 and more were milestones that most writers never have one of.

S is for Space comes after R is for Rocket. I've had this forever but don't think I ever read all the stories. I always enjoyed having collections like this on hand to pick up and read a short story when the mood struck. For a brief period of time I stuck an index card in books like this and marked off which (and sometimes when ) I read the stories. I'd marked off three of these read in 1980-1. I know I also read a story or two from here a couple years ago. Now we do it all ...

64. S is for Space by Ray Bradbury, finished October 21, 2015, 3 stars, acquired about 1980


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Bradbury starts this collection off with a rather interesting introduction. I could quote the whole thing since it is all
interesting, but I'll just pull out a few bits which tickled me:

"Jules Verne was my father."

"I lived up in the trees with Tarzan a good part of my life with my hero Edgar Rice Burroughs. When I swung down out of the foliage I asked for a toy typewriter during my twelfth year at Christmas. On this rattletrap machine I wrote my first John Carter, Warlord of Mars imitation sequels, ..."

"So here in this new collection of stories you will find not only S is for Space, but a series of subtitles that might well
read: D is for Dark, or T is for Terrifying, or D is for Delight. Here you will find just about every side of my nature and my life..."

- Ray Bradbury , December 1, 1965

The included stories are:

1 • Introduction (S Is for Space) • (1965)
3 • Chrysalis • (1946)
27 • Pillar of Fire • (1948)
69 • Zero Hour • (1947)
81 • The Man • (1949)
95 • Time in Thy Flight • (1953)
101 • The Pedestrian • (1951)
107 • Hail and Farewell • (1953)
117 • Invisible Boy • (1945)
127 • Come Into My Cellar • (1962) (aka Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!)
145 • The Million-Year Picnic • (1946)
157 • The Screaming Woman • (1951)
173 • The Smile • (1952)
179 • Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed • (1949) (aka The Naming of Names)
195 • The Trolley • (1955)
201 • The Flying Machine • (1953)
207 • Icarus Montgolfier Wright • (1956)

These stories are older ones of Bradbury's, but mostly written during his best years. As he indicated in his introduction, these stories are all over the place for subject and style. The majority of the stories to me were OK, with only a few duds or weak ones (such as "Pillar of Fire"). Some like the starter, "Chrysalis" had a really cool premise but then sort of frustrated me with the telling and an odd ending. I've had trouble with Bradbury endings before. "Pillar of Fire" begins so ridiculously that it was impossible to take it seriously. A man, a zombie I suppose, although he is referred to as a vampire here and there, arises from a grave, looks at his tombstone, then looks at the positions of the stars and declares the exact year 400 some years after his death and declares he's been re-born. Then he apparently decides he has to go kill everybody. Really. Sheesh. The crazy thing is, I kept reading the story despite it being so ridiculous. I guess my curiosity was piqued. Bradbury had some things to say about society in this story but it was built around a really stupid story.

There were enough interesting ideas and stories in the collection to make it a worthwhile read. I didn't think there were any "WOW" stories in this collection and the stories felt dated in many different ways, as does much of Bradbury in general. Several that I liked better than the others included "The Screaming Woman," and two set on Mars, "The Million Year Picnic," and "Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed." I liked "The Trolley" a lot and believe it is a chapter in Dandelion Wine.

There is a real dystopian spin on the majority of these stories. Bradbury is not optimistic about the future with Atomic Wars and oppressive societies. "The Smile" about a crowd destroying a famous painting as hate for the state of the world gone to ruin says a lot.

>218 RBeffa: Bradbury was pretty good at keeping stories in circulation. I see that several stories in this R Is for Rocket collection appeared in The Illustrated Man.

• The Rocket • (1950)
• The Rocket Man • (1951)
• The Long Rain • (1950)
• The Exiles • (1949)

edited to add... A couple of Illustrated Man stories appear in S Is for Space.

• Zero Hour • (1947)
• The Man • (1949)

Enjoying your Bradbury adventures, Ron. I must say I am pretty impressed how many reads you have done for the various challenges this year.

>220 weird_O: I've never noticed this to anything close to this extent with other authors.

>221 PaulCranswick: Thanks, Paul. My Bradbury October was a spur of the moment thing. I've been wanting to read/re-read Bradbury for quite some time, and once I started on the October AAC I just said to myself, what the heck, lets do a couple, and then I decided, OK, how much can I do if I work at it the whole month! I'm thinking now that I might do this again once in a while with other authors, although not quite to this extent. I can see myself doing a month of Steinbeck ...

Unfortunately that means that David Mitchell has sat on the table next to my reading chair this past month. He won't be a quick read (Thousand Autumns) but I'm going to try and squeeze him in before year's end for the BAC.

Next year, not so many challenges!

My Bradbury October continues ... this one is a little different. The danger in reading this is that I now have a list of authors who I would be happy to read more of one day. I'll keep my eye out for their books at library book sales and may find myself wandering in the stacks of the library itself.

65. Timeless Stories For Today and Tomorrow various authors, edited by Ray Bradbury, finished October 25, 2015, 3 1/2 - 4 stars, acquired long ago


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Ray Bradbury writes a lengthy introduction to this excellent anthology of stories he selected in 1951, and it includes a short one by himself that I just read in "S is for Space." It is an anthology of fantasy, with an emphasis on including stories by writers, some well known, that one would not normally associate with fantasy. As a result one finds in here stories by John Cheever, Christopher Isherwood, John Steinbeck, Shirley Jackson, Franz Kafka, Roald Dahl and many less familiar names. These are really a first rate batch of tales. I counted 26 stories, drawn from the pages of magazines such as "The New Yorker," "Cosmopolitan," "Harper's Magazine," "Esquire," "The Saturday Evening Post," and elsewhere. This proved to be a rather fun time travel trip to see things people were reading from the early 1930's to 1951. There is an excellent Franz Kafka tale in here, "The Penal Colony" which was published in English in 1941 but was first written in 1914. This is excellent storytelling with a real literary quality to most of it. There were only a couple of stories that I thought were just a little too silly or something.

There is a bit of what I consider mild science fiction mixed into the fantasy; sometimes the lines blur and we get science fantasy I suppose. A post-war dystopian future where civilization is completely gone doesn't seem like fantasy. A couple seem like straight mainstream fiction. I don't think there was a single story in this collection that I disliked, and the majority of these stories are sure to stir your mind up a little. These are interesting little tales! Bradbury did a great job as an editor. His own story, "The Pedestrian" is a short look at a dystopian-flavored future where a man goes walking at night.

A few highlights and interesting bits for me:

This anthology starts off very well with a story by Robert M. Coates, "The Hour After Westerly" which was first published in 'The New Yorker' in November 1947. This would be the perfect story for a mild Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode. A man starts off after work for a three hour drive back home. He's done the drive many times before and knows how long it takes and markers along the way, but he finds when checking his watch that this is taking much longer than it should and he clearly won't be home in time for dinner with the family at 7:30. At 7:30 he realizes he is still a good hour from home. He's lost an hour. Maybe he went off the wrong road without realizing it? Why doesn't he remember? Later trying to retrace his route on this drive things get even more unsettling. Did he stop at a bar and this was all a drunken blackout? Possible but not likely. So what happened? This has that subtle touch of strange about it that leaves one very unsettled by the end. Great little story.

What these stories share, regardless of subject, is good storytelling."The Laocoön Complex," a shortstory by J. C. Furnas is not one I would call a favorite but it was unusual and I liked it. Every time a man gets into a bathtub a 4 foot green snake appears as soon as he lays down. It goes down the drain, or he kills it, or captures it and takes it to a Doctor. A Psychiatrist sets up a bathtub in his office. The man lays down in it. Giant snake! Nothing seems to stop it from reappearing. Christopher Isherwood's piece, "I Am Waiting," is nothing terribly remarkable, but the story is told so well that it is a pleasure to read. It concerns a man who starts experiencing strange moments and comes to believe he is travelling forward in time just a little to events in his near future.

This is a terrific collection which I recommend. The full list of stories:

•vii • Introduction • (1951) • essay by Ray Bradbury
•1 • The Hour After Westerly • (1947) • shortstory by Robert M. Coates
•13 • Housing Problem • (1944) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner
•28 • The Portable Phonograph • (1941) • shortstory by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
•35 • None Before Me • (1949) • shortstory by Sidney Carroll
•46 • Putzi • (1935) • shortstory by Ludwig Bemelmans
•51 • The Demon Lover (AKA The Phantom Lover) • (1949) • shortstory by Shirley Jackson
•66 • Miss Winters and the Wind • (1946) • shortstory by Christine Noble Govan
•72 • Mr. Death and the Redheaded Woman (AKA The Rider on the Pale Horse)• (1950) • shortstory by Helen Eustis
•80 • Jeremy in the Wind • (1949) • shortstory by Nigel Kneale
•84 • The Glass Eye • (1944) • shortstory by John Keir Cross
•99 • Saint Katy the Virgin • (1938) • shortstory by John Steinbeck
•107 • Night Flight • (1944) • shortstory by Josephine Johnson
•113 • The Cocoon • (1946) • shortstory by John B. L. Goodwin
•130 • The Hand • (1947) • shortstory by Wessel Hyatt Smitter
•140 • The Sound Machine • (1949) • shortstory by Roald Dahl
•154 • The Laocoön Complex • (1937) • shortstory by J. C. Furnas
•165 • I Am Waiting • (1939) • shortstory by Christopher Isherwood
•174 • The Witnesses • (1944) • shortstory by William Sansom
•179 • The Enormous Radio • (1947) • shortstory by John Cheever
•190 • Heartburn • (1951) • shortstory by Hortense Calisher
•200 • The Supremacy of Uruguay • (1933) • shortstory by E. B. White
•204 • The Pedestrian • (1951) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
•208 • A Note for the Milkman • (1950) • shortstory by Sidney Carroll
•219 • The Eight Mistresses • (1937) • shortstory by Jean Hrolda
•225 • In the Penal Colony • (1919) • novelette by Franz Kafka
•252 • Inflexible Logic • (1940) • shortstory by Russell Maloney

I must say I have enjoyed doing this intensive Bradbury marathon. I am going to try this again a couple times, with either an author or maybe a theme. Probably just stick with an author. I could see myself ripping through a series of mysteries.

Another one of Ray Bradbury's classic collections. Several of the 22 stories overlap with other collections I have just read.

66. The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury, finished October 27, 2015, 3 - 3 1/2 stars, acquired in mid-late 70's


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When this collection of Bradbury's was first published in early 1953 it was made up almost entirely of recent short stories. Later collections recycled material from this collection as well as including older stories not previously collected. Most of these stories had appeared in recent major magazines of the era. Since I have recently read several of these stories such as "The Fog Horn," "The Pedestrian," and "A Sound of Thunder," the impact that this collection may have had on me as a fresh read was a little lessened I think. Nevertheless, this is very good storytelling by Bradbury at his peak. There are a couple weaker stories for my tastes, but overall this is one of Bradbury's best collections. There is a little bit of everything in here; a "Green Town" story that was later collected in "Summer Morning, Summer Night," as well as a story "The Wilderness" that was incorporated into the Martian Chronicles.

There is a 2014 book that includes a number of stories in addition to the original 22 stories from the original edition. (It looks like Golden Apples merged with R is for Rocket) My edition is the 1970 Bantam paperback. It has a nice pen and ink illusration for each story. The artist isn't identified, but it looks like the work of Joe Mugnaini who has illustarted other Bradbury books. I enjoyed looking at the illustrations both before and after the story to see what the artist was capturing.

A few comments. "The Fog Horn" is wonderful classic Bradbury. "The April Witch" came close to crossing the line of the creepy factor when a 19 year old girl is possessed by the spirit of another girl and does things she wouldn't otherwise have done. "The Wilderness" is a strange piece of the Martian Chronicles. The future equivalent of mail order brides to Mars. "Mars Needs Women!" Actually it is more than that. While reading it I was also struck by the thought, not for the first time, that some of Bradbury's stories might work best when read aloud, somewhat slowly. So, much of this story I read slowly, mouthing pssages as if I was reading it aloud in my head, and it gave me a very different feeling of the writing here ... a good feeling.

There were a couple oddball stories in here that I wasn't wild about, like "The Fruit At the Bottom of the Bowl" where a man goes looney tunes after murdering the man who is going to run off with his wife, and the odd "Invisible Boy." Both are mainstream stories, nothing fantasy or otherwise in them although "Invisible Boy" pretends there is magic. "The Murderer" is a rather smart prediction and observation on society's cell-phone mania (although in this case the phones are all on wrist-radios). In the story the everywhere people on their phones and piped in music drives a man to begin "murdering" the devices.

Bradbury shows what a master of the short form he can be with a story like "Embroidery." Three pages long, simple idea, and very powerful. Three women are on a porch working on their embroidery and talking and we see, waiting for 5 O'clock ... the reader listens and waits with them.

"A Sound of Thunder" is a classic tale that inspired the phrase "The Butterfly Effect."

Unfortunately there were several stories in the collection I disliked or didn't care for or quite understand what Bradbury was going for. It marred the shine of the stronger stories. Overall the collection was worth reading.

The included stories of the original collection are:

• The Fog Horn • (1951) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• The Pedestrian • (1951) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• The April Witch • (1952) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• The Wilderness • (1952) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl • (1948) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• Invisible Boy • (1945) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• The Flying Machine • (1953) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• The Murderer • (1953) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind • (1953) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• I See You Never • (1947) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• Embroidery • (1951) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• The Big Black and White Game • (1945) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• A Sound of Thunder • (1952) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• The Great Wide World Over There • (1952) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• Powerhouse • (1948) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• En La Noche • (1952) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• Sun and Shadow • (1953) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• The Meadow • (1953) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• The Garbage Collector • (1953) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• The Great Fire • (1949) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• Hail and Farewell • (1953) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• The Golden Apples of the Sun • (1953) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury

You certainly have done a wonderful job of separating out the chaff in Bradbury, Ron. This thread should be a permanent LT resource!

>225 laytonwoman3rd: Thank you Linda. I started reading a non-Bradbury book and the contrast was rather jarring. Like much of Bradbury's work it is a series of short stories adapted to be called a novel. I am really loving it but it was a very unintentional choice - it was something I have wanted to read for a while. Halfway through it I realized I really wanted to read one more Bradbury...

In this month's reads I have mostly avoided his most famous works - I plan now to work again on Bradbury another time - perhaps next October. Perhaps sooner. The Martian Chronicles has always been my favorite Bradbury. There are at least 3 major versions of Martian Chronicles. The 1950 version was revised substantially by Bradbury in 1997. Then there were one or two later editions that added additional Martian stories to the sequence of chronicles that Bradbury had originally put together. So I decided I was going to re-read my 1959 35cent paperback that I have had for 50 years. One of the earliest science fiction books I ever read it had a rather profound effect on me at the time. I re-read it a number of times, but not anytime recently - though I do read the first chapter every couple years since it is such beautiful poetry/prose.

I just looked here on LT and someone has written a fabulous review this month of Martian Chronicles that I couldn't begin to touch. When I finish this up before the month is out I'll just do a very minor write-up. Revisiting personal classics is such a strange feeling at times. I was in the 6th or 7th grade the first time I read Martian Chronicles and all of a sudden as I was reading parts of it last night I was that little kid again in my mind.

I'll find one of the later editions of Martian Chronicles to read when I continue my Bradbury mania in the future.

After my Bradbury October (with one more in progress), time to start moving on to new things and this was an excellent choice for something different. I've only read a little of Lawrence Block in years past and wanted to try more of him.

67. Hit Man by Lawrence Block, finished October 29, 2015, 3 1/2 - 4 stars, library book


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This is the first in a short series of crime fiction novels where we follow the "Hit Man" Keller. Stories and novels about assassins is not generally my "go-to" sub-genre. This book has ten episodes, ten short stories that come together to create a picture of our interesting character.

Keller goes about the business of being a killer so matter-of-factly that it is easy to not think of him as a bad guy, but just as a regular guy who has a job to do. Block writes this so well in a simple, yet obviously skilled manner. Improbably it works. Keller is something of a melancholy man with simple needs and daydreams. The story/stories themselves are about all the little things in his life as he goes about his business. He finds great inexpensive Mexican food in Roseburg, Oregon and happily starts working his way through their menu, daydreaming about the life the waitress is going to have with her new husband, the kind of house maybe they should get as a starter home, the kind of house he might like to have if he lived here ... He misses his dog "Soldier" he had as a kid. This is really sounding kind of silly when I write this, but it adds a charm to these stories that pulls you in, and you like Keller even as he puts into play the little pieces needed to carry out his hit on someone who seems like a very nice guy as well. So that's the first story and the additional stories just build off of this. These stories are full of surprise twists. By the end of the book Keller is thinking of retiring. However, he has re-sparked his childhood interest in stamp collecting and would not that be a great hobby instead of killing people, but the expense may just keep him working a little longer! I loved stamp collecting when I was younger and all the stamp stuff towards the end of the book was icing on the cake.

Bit by bit as we go through the stories (this never did feel like a regular novel) we learn more about Keller as he tries to learn about himself and why he is the way he is. Of the ten stories only one seemed "off," the ninth one. By off I mean not possible, involving a supposed Social Security scam.

I am most certainly going to be reading later books in this series, and sooner rather than later. I really like Keller and Block's down to earth matter of fact writing style for this. Very good stuff!

68. The Martian Chronicles original 1950 version by Ray Bradbury, finished October 31, 2015, 3 1/2 stars, acquired many years ago


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This novel like few others fired my imagination as a pre-teen young boy. The historical personal impact on me and science fiction gives this book an extra half star rating. I am a little saddened that the book does not live up to my memory of it, but the strong parts of this are still very good.

This is a sequence of stories; it is indeed "chronicles" of the arrival of earthmen on Mars, the slow colonization, and the simultaneous disappearance of native Martians. My 1959 35 cent bantam paperback is the original version of this imaginative work. There are later versions and perhaps I should read one some time. My version begins with January 1959 when Rocket Summer came to winter in Ohio. That one page first chapter is some of the finest stuff Bradbury ever wrote and my personal favorite over all these years.

The truth of the matter however is that this book is incredibly dated. It is firmly rooted in 1940's-1950 America. It had no vision at all of any societal change. None. Not a glimmer. Even the vanishing Martian societies are mid 20th century America. One of my pet peeves with older science fiction is when the astronauts land a rocket, step outside and pull a pack of cigarettes out for a smoke. It happens here. It is so ridiculous.

There are several stories within this sequence however that I really like a lot despite minor faults. They have a powerful effect on me as a reader. The majority of this book was originally published as short stories that could be read alone. Bradbury pulled them together here and added some narrative. It works well. Bradbury also continued to write stories set within these chronicles and I've read a number of those. In my mind I think of them as part of the Martian Chronicles.

Here is what my book has:

1 • January 1999: Rocket Summer • (1947)
2 • February 1999: Ylla • (1950)
14 • August 1999: The Summer Night • (1949)
16 • August 1999: The Earth Men • (1948)
31 • March 2000: The Taxpayer • (1950)
32 • April 2000: Third Expedition • (1948)
48 • June 2001: —And the Moon Be Still as Bright •(1948)
72 • August 2001: The Settlers • (1950)
73 • December 2001: The Green Morning • (1950)
78 • February 2002: The Locusts • (1950)
78 • August 2002: Night Meeting • (1950)
87 • October 2002: The Shore • (1950)
87 • February 2003: Interim • (1950)
88 • April 2003: The Musicians • (1950)
89 • June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air • (1950)
102 • 2004-2005: The Naming of Names • (1950)
103 • April 2005: Usher II • (1950)
118 • August 2005: The Old Ones • (1950)
119 • September 2005: The Martian • (1949)
131 • November 2005: The Luggage Store • (1950)
132 • November 2005: The Off Season • (1948)
144 • November 2005: The Watchers • (1945)
145 • December 2005: The Silent Towns • (1949)
155 • April 2026: The Long Years • (1948)
166 • August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains • (1950)
172 • October 2026: The Million-Year Picnic • (1946)

and here, to read aloud to yourself or others, slowly, softly, is rocket summer ...

January 1999 Rocket Summer

One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.

And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open. The heat pulsed among the cottages and bushes and children. The icicles dropped, shattering, to melt. The doors flew open. The windows flew up. The children worked off their wool clothes. The housewives shed their bear disguises. The snow dissolved and showed last summer's ancient green lawns.

Rocket summer. The words passed among the people in the open, airing houses. Rocket summer. The warm desert air changing the frost patterns on the windows, erasing the art work. The skis and sleds suddenly useless. The snow, falling from the cold sky upon the town, turned to a hot rain before it touched the ground.

Rocket summer. People leaned from their dripping porches and watched the reddening sky.

The rocket lay on the launching field, blowing out pink clouds of fire and oven heat. The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land....

This is for the November British Author challenge. I had not read William Boyd before. This one was good enough to make me want to read more. An adventure in time ...

69. The Blue Afternoon by William Boyd, finished November 5, 2015, 3 1/2 - 4 stars, acquired in 2015 for the BAC


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Unusual story told in three parts - first in Los Angeles, second, the largest part in Manila, and finally in Lisbon. A murder mystery and a love story. One of the main characters, Kay Fisher, is an architect and the story spends quite a bit of time trying to educate me on how and why this architect does what she does. This should have been interesting but that part of the story didn't interest me at all. What did interest me was the mystery surrounding an old man who appears and claims to be her father.

The characters here weren't likable for the most part and it was hard to be sympathetic. The reader as well as Kay keeps wondering if the old man is scamming her. He seems sincere but he is also extremely obtuse and not forthcoming with information. He seems to sucker Kay in by the somewhat devious way he has of getting her to do things. She gets surprised.

The central heart of the story is the middle where we move back in time to hear the old man's story. And he is the one telling it. The beginning of the book had me as a detached observer but once we went back to the Philippines in 1902 I was really pulled in. It represents 2/3 of the book and was really excellent historical fiction around events and a time and place that I was quite intrigued with and knew little about. At the end of the novel I was a little frustrated because we really don't know the truth of what happened and even though we the reader and Kay the daughter have been told a story it doesn't quite fit all the puzzle pieces together properly. I suspect some truths were not revealed and am still unsure of this all, and I suspect that was the author's intention. This gets a few points for atmosphere in 1936 Los Angeles and especially 1902 Manila. There is some interesting history written in here with the story about the American occupation of the Philippines. The descriptions of vivisection and surgical techniques and bodies really gets a little gruesome. Not for the faint of heart.

This was pretty good, but I thought the first part of the story was quite weak and unbelievable. It keeps me from rating this higher. The characters all have very unusual names - I don't know if this is a William Boyd thing or just particular to this book.

70. Wind/Pinball Two novels by Haruki Murakami, finished November 8, 2015, 2 stars, library book


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There is a new edition and translation out for Murakami's first two novels, together in one book. They are both short novels. "Hear The Wind Sing" and "Pinball 1973" are the two early efforts which Murakami describes as his kitchen table novels in his lengthy introduction. I found his discussion of his personal history and how he came to be inspired to write the books more interesting than the stories themselves.

The two are pretty bland things, and there isn't really much I can think to say about them. Familiar elements that we see put together much better in later novels by the author. Reading these I would never have expected anything great to come later from the author. I expected to find it interesting to read these first efforts by Murakami, but when I began "Hear The Wind Sing" I thought it pretty dreadful. In fact I wasn't even sure for a number of pages that I had even started the story. It read like Murakami ruminating on writing a novel. I persisted because I wanted to read these early works, but it took more than half the story before it gained any traction, and then when it seemed to get going it was over. I wouldn't blame anyone for having bailed out on this story. It all seemed rather pointless, a slice of time in someone's life.

Pinball started off like a pinball, banging around here and there with a bunch of nameless people and not going anywhere. It gets a little surreal and again we find the familiar elements of a Murakami story. I almost started skimming because I was bored, but I stuck with it because there are odd moments here and there that I liked. This story might have been marginally better than the first, thanks to the extra weirdness.

Recommended for people who like to read about characters whose lives revolve around smoking cigs and drinking beer. To me these two stories read like a parody of Murakami. Every writer has to start somewhere. They have "Write like Bad Hemingway" contests. These would get my vote in a "Write Bad Murakami" one. I feel like I'm being very generous rating this two stars.

71. Hit List by Lawrence Block, finished November 14, 2015, 2+ stars, library book


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I just read Lawrence Block's "Hit Man" collection of short stories two weeks ago and really enjoyed it. I expected this story (second in the series) to be equally entertaining but it fell far short. I have to believe that this novel was constructed/expanded out of a couple short stories because each chapter is repeating elements of the prior chapter(s) like maybe we had forgotten them in a few pages. There is just too much recapping and padding in here to qualify as a good read. The interesting story elements (such as one involving a painter) were overshadowed by long weak sections. The story starts off very slow on top of it all but a twist to this wherein the hunter might be the hunted adds a little interest. It just seems like a poorly written sloppy fix-up novel. I'll give the next book a try sometime as I like the character "Keller" in here and the first book of stories was quite entertaining.

I went rather cray cray after many months of resistance and bought nearly 30 books in two visits to the friends of the library book sale. One book I found just as we were about to leave, I could not believe it. Very rare science fiction book which has been my personal holy grail that I have been looking for for about 15+ years. I think only 500 copies were printed by a small press and I never thought I would ever see it.


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72. Homeland and other stories by Barbara Kingsolver, finished November 20, 2015, 3 stars, acquired in 2010


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This collection of stories made for interesting reading but I don't think they will stick with me at all. I seem to prefer Kingsolver's novels. I read these stories one at a time over the course of several weeks. They are rather gloomy or something like that and one at a time was manageable. Several stories underwhelmed me, and several I thought were very good, like the one about the woman and the mine strike.

Truly an adventure in space and time ...

73. Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds, finished November 24, 2015, 4 stars, book off the shelf, acquired in 2013


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Reynolds' stories have yet to disappoint me and this good-size collection of eight novellas and longer short stories kept my impression intact. The collection includes an afterword by the author to add some perspective, inspirations, clues and tidbits to the stories. The stories were written at various times over the author's career, including new ones, and are part of his future history series generally referred to as "Revelation Space." The first story is set on Mars about 200 hundred years from now and the final one, the title story, covers a vast period of time into the far future. The topics are really varied and for science fiction fans who like challenging, interesting stuff, this is good. This is the kind of harder-edged modern "space opera" that I like. This type of story is not for a casual reader - this is not Ray Bradbury on Mars or elsewhere. The science is challenging. In a way these stories create an episodic novel that covers a vast amount of time and space. The impact of the stories is cumulative. There is also a dark streak that runs through most of these stories.

The included stories are:

1 Great Wall of Mars • (2000) • novelette
52 Glacial • (2001) • novella
104 A Spy in Europa • (1997) • shortstory
128 Weather • (2006) • novella
186 Dilation Sleep • (1990) • shortstory
203 Grafenwelder's Bestiary • (2006) • novelette
252 Nightingale • (2006) • novella
326 Galactic North • (1999) • novelette
368 Afterword • (2006) • essay by Alastair Reynolds

Every story in this collection is interesting. "Great Wall of Mars" certainly starts this off very well and whet my appetite for more. The novella "Weather" probably had the strongest emotional effect on me, and I think I'll call it my favorite here. The one story I didn't much care for was "Grafenwelder's Bestiary" because it was too dark and macabre for my personal tastes. The longer length of most of the stories really allowed some nice world building and atmosphere. Although written at various times, the stories are related and presented in a chronological order. Reynolds "Afterword" explains much about the stories and setup and was really interesting to me. I've enjoyed just about everything I've read by Reynolds and I'm looking forward to reading much more from this author.

An adventure in time. Read just a little early, this is my selection for December for the American Author challenge.

74. The March by E. L. Doctorow, finished November 30, 2015, 3 1/2 stars, acquired in 2015 for the AAC


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Interesting piece of historical fiction - "The March" is Sherman's March through Georgia (Part One), South Carolina (Part Two) and North Carolina (Part Three).

For the most part I like how Doctorow crafted this story. It is fragmented (we don't follow some characters for long stretches) but it worked. There's maybe a bit of oddness to part of it, but emotionally it captured me. There is a rotating cast of main characters. I'd read a chapter, think about it, and then tackle the next. I've read a fair bit of Civil War history and a handful of Civil War fiction. Reading this novel let me see and think about Sherman's march in a way I probably never would have otherwise.

This novel doesn't rise to the "great" level, yet it seems that it could have because parts of it are magnificent. I liked the first half of the novel where we meet each of the characters in various situations. I became interested and invested in the story arc of several characters. However some of those disappeared and the playing out of the story in the second half just did not have the energy of the beginning of the book. In particular I thought the story of one of the primary characters, Pearl, was just odd. When I think about it, I was disappointed with the story arc of virtually every character, none moreso than a young Johnny Reb named Arly.

Slightly surprising to me, Sherman was my favorite character of the book and the only character who did not disappoint.

I may read another Doctorow before the year ends.

Doing a double for my selection for December for the American Author challenge.

75. Homer & Langley by E. L. Doctorow, finished December 4, 2015, 4 1/2 stars, acquired in 2015 for the AAC


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I loved this book. It is told in a very unconventional manner and it hooked me right from the start. Oh this is a sad book. Two brothers bound to one another who go through life despite their problems. I can't talk myself into 5 stars - Homer gets 5 stars but Langley only 4 because I never felt connected to Langley or quite understood him the way I did with Homer. The story is told by Homer so perhaps that is only natural, but also at about the 3/4 mark the story got a little extra strange.

I had some worries before reading this that it might be a little too creepy dealing with some renowned hoarders, even in a highly fictionalized form, but those worries became nothings.

If I had not read Anthony Doerr's All The Light You Cannot See at the beginning of the year I'd call this my favorite book of the year.

Wow, high praise. I've added it to my list, thanks for the review.

>237 karspeak: If I wrote/write a proper review for this I would probably include some criticisms. I do have some. I should probably rate this 4 stars but it succeeded in really pulling me into a strange place and so I bumped it up. But a few things bugged me, some minor and some bigger. Here's an example of one that bugged me, like listening to a great piece of music and all of a sudden a real off-key note hits. This may not makes sense, but the story of these two guys is interspersed with events through time, from WWI and the flu epidemic forward - these guys fictionally live much too long imo - but late in the book events get skewed. They are following the moon landings and one of the brothers creates a canvas depicting golf on the moon ... anyway, they then get a letter from someone they had tutored long ago - the letter comes from a nun helping the poor in the Belgian Congo. The Belgian Congo ceased in 1960 after a huge amount of turmoil and part of the continent wide independence movements of former colonies of European powers. There should not be a letter coming in the early 70's. And then they go on and get involved with a bunch of hippies and free love and folk music etc which could have happened in the 70's but would have been much more appropriate in the 60's I would think. Anyway, a little nitpick by me but since part of what Doctorow is giving us is an overview of 20th century events it really stuck out to me that he got something pretty wrong.

Congrats on 75!

>239 drneutron: Thanks Jim. I didn't get close to 75 last year so I am pleased to have gotten the magic # at the start of December. This has really been a reading year for me.

Congratulations on hitting 75, Ron! Homer & Langley was a good one to do it with, too. I also loved that book. Doctorow did play fast and loose with time in it, though. The Collyer brothers actually lived from the 1880’s to 1947, so they don't belong in the second half of the 20th century at all. Literary license...you've got to be really good to carry it that far, and I'll give Doctorow a pass on this one, because it was just such a good read.

Way to go on hitting the 75 book mark, Ron!

>241 laytonwoman3rd: I agree Linda. I gave Doctorow a pass on the minor quibbles because I enjoyed most of the book a lot.

And now a slightly premature look at my 2015 reading. I know I'll get a couple more books in but I pretty much feel like I've wrapped the year up for books.

I enjoy looking over my reading for the year. Since I've been counting, this is (I think) only the second time I passed 75 books. It is a good target for me because it causes me to push a little. First and foremost though is I want to enjoy what I am reading, and this is especially true the older I get - there are so many books out there that I just do not want to spend time with books that I don't care for in one way or another.

My favorite for 2015 is easy: Anthony Doerr's "All The Light We Cannot See" which I read in February (post #51) and which I gave my very rare 5 stars. I don't think of this as a great reading year because a lot of my reads fell into the average/OK or even disappointing range. I did make some discoveries though with writers new to me who I very much want to read more of and they will certain get some time from me in 2016. Among these are:

Alan Furst, who writes a historical fiction series around the events leading up to and including WWII, often in unconventional settings in greater Europe. I read two of his books this year and am a little annoyed with myself that I didn't read more. The two I read and enjoyed were "Kingdom of Shadows" my very first book read this year and "Blood of Victory."

P.T. Deutermann, and I read two of his books set during the Pacific during WWII. He has one more in the series that I want to get to in 2016.

I really enjoyed working on the American Author challenge in 2015. I read a book every month with only one substitution and felt it was a very successful challenge and result. I'm thinking maybe I'll do Richard Ford after all and make it a pure challenge success. However, for 2016 I am going to back off the challenges. I will probably read a few of the books in some months depending on my other readings and books that I have on hand, but I won't be making it a focus. I enjoyed trying some of the authors in the British Author Challenge also, even though I read many fewer of them. Still, I think William Boyd was a discovery for me and I want to try more from him. Some of the other authors I liked as well and intend to include in future reading.

Lindsey Davis, I enjoyed starting her "detective" fiction series set in Roman times beginning with "The Silver Pigs" and I really want to read more about Marcus Didius Falco and his adventures and romance.

My Bradbury October marathon was kinda crazy but it made me think about my reading. I feel like I got a much better picture of Bradbury by reading a bunch of his stories this way - it made me much more aware of his strengths and weaknesses. Although not quite so crazily I can see myself doing this again soon with other authors and maybe some series or companion books.

I'm planning to read more WWII fiction and non-fiction next year. I've been acquiring quite a few books about it and I want to make some headway on what I own already.

As always I'll be reading some science fiction. I seem to be getting more critical of it but I enjoy the escapism immensely, especially when combined with a good author.

I've really neglected reading my science fiction magazine digests the past year and more. I've read a story here and there, but hadn't sat down and read all the way through. I need to do some catching up.

76. Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 39, No. 1 (January 2015) edited by Sheila Williams, finished December 12, 2015, 2 1/2 stars





This issue contains 5 short stories, 2 poems, a novella and a novelette as well as the usual variety of essays and articles.

I found the non-fiction columns pretty uninteresting this month although I did like Paul De Filippo's book review column more than usual, especially his lengthy discussion on the passing of writer Lucius Shepard and his then recently published novel "Beautiful Blood." Shepard is an author I will greatly miss.

On the fiction side, the stories are:

The Unveiling • shortstory by Christopher Rowe
Hard Boot • poem by Trent Walters
Watergirl • novelette by Rudy Rucker and Marc Laidlaw
Ninety-Five Percent Safe • shortstory by Caroline M. Yoachim
Candy From Strangers • shortstory by Jay O'Connell
Butterflies • shortstory by Peter Wood
Songs in the Key of You • shortstory by Sarah Pinsker
Fromage de Lune • poem by Robert Borski
The Long Wait • novella by Allen M. Steele

Overall this added up to something I'd call disappointing and at the very low end of an OK read. I would really like to think there are better stories floating out in the ether that could be reined in for publication. Some brief comments:

"The Unveiling" starts the stories off well, although the story itself tilts a little at the end. Set on another planet that is not the most pleasant place (never-ending volcanic eruptions and pollution that would probably make early industrial England look good), we get a short bit about a working class hero, Tayne. Most of this story is from Tayne's viewpoint, but after an "event" we shift oddly to the future and I thought the ending unsatisfying. Still, I liked most of it.

The cover story "Watergirl" is like a time travel retro Hawaiian trip through valley Girl Fast Times tubular surfer dude land. I had enough of that decades ago, but if you are a reader who loves that stuff, well this may play well with you. I was bored frankly and stopped reading after about 5 or 6 pages. I'm sure I missed the good parts.

Jay O'Connell's "Candy From Strangers" was more than a little twisty. I've enjoyed his previous stories in Asimov's and this edgy bit is another good one. We at first think a good Samaritan, Morgan, with some high end net gear is saving a young woman from suicide in front of a train (he does save the woman) and we later learn that he had first hand experience and knew what he was saving her from. In this short story the two dance around each other and play a little tough. Good writing here I thought.

There's nothing really wrong with “Ninety-five Percent Safe” by Caroline Yoachim except that it reads like a very bland dystopian story aimed at 10-12 year olds about leaving nuclear wintered earth for a possibly better life in a space colony. The title reflects the odds that 5% of the people who set off from earth don't make it out the other side of the wormhole.

I found “Butterflies” by Peter Wood to be a real bit of fluff. It is intentionally a modern alt-history send-up of 1950's Giant Bug movies. I would have rather read something a bit more exciting. Maybe the giant butterfly could have given the boy a ride, or maybe the big dragonfly could have actually eaten something ... like our protagonist. Sigh. This was a real dud.

More stuff that seems aimed at pre-teens comes with “Songs in the Key of You” by Sarah Pinsker. The gadget of the day, if you can afford it, are musical bracelets with songs specifically written and recorded for the owner(s). I never quite got the concept, but your bracelet plays your song when you enter a room or building for example, to announce you. I can imagine this cacophony of sound would drive me insane in short order. The clever title of of this story of course plays with the title of a Stevie Wonder album from long ago which I doubt the average young reader would even know of. The story opens with some punky entitled drama queen bullies picking on a girl in the school cafeteria who can't afford the fancy stuff so she hums her own tunes. The story really isn't bad after the cliched start; I just expect something a lot better from the magazine.

The novella by Allen M Steele, “The Long Wait” saved the issue for me. This is kind of old-fashioned storytelling that he is good at. Big generation ship kind of stuff. Steele has written a lot of stories and I have rarely been disappointed by him. I've read quite a bit of his stuff in Asimov's over the years (parts of his Coyote sequence in particular) that I really enjoyed. He is one of my favorite science fiction authors. This is one of four related stories that are going to be released as a novel in 2016. In this segment of the story we follow the progress of the seed ship 'Galactique' from the viewpoint of a family on Earth - and the long wait is the increasing amount of time for communications to and from the ship as the journey progresses. This is really a coming of age story in part, because the tale is told as part of the life of a woman on earth who is born shortly after the launch of the ship and the story ends when the ship has arrived at the destination, and the young girl and woman who we grew to know well through the story is now much much older. More than this to the story obviously but I enjoyed it very much. Whet my appetite for more.

So out of 7 stories there were really only two that I thought rather good ... O'Connell's "Candy From Strangers" and Steele's "The Long Wait."

I think you've made me want to try the Marcus Didius Falco series. Somehow your original post about The Silver Pigs didn't register with me, but it sounds like something I would really enjoy. As if I needed to get hooked into another detective series...

>242 ronincats: Thanks Roni!

>246 laytonwoman3rd: Something about the way Davis writes about Rome and Falco and his adventures really clicked with me. My wife reads lots of mysteries and series like the Preston/Child Pendergast and James Rollins ones and I asked her to give Silver Pigs a try - she told me she didn't like Falco. She didn't read all that far but apparently his mild snarkiness put her off. Oh well, different reactions. I have started on the follow-up to Silver Pigs, Shadows in Bronze , and I've read part one, about 50 pages - I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Davis just drops all these little bits of info along the way with clever turns of phrase that mostly hit me the right way. I'm mad I didn't read this closer to Silver Pigs because it is a very direct sequel and starts right where Pigs lets off, but I'm not having much trouble getting back in. Like a good writer she drops just enough light recap into thoughts and conversations to remind an old reader or help someone starting the 2nd book fresh not feel lost. I think I said before that a blurb that it was "Sam Spade in a Toga" struck me as pretty accurate. I swear that the internal voice in my head for Falco is Humphrey Bogart most of the time.

ETA: I went to our Friends of the Library book sale this week and picked up a few things, as did my wife. Was surprised to discover that author Craig Johnson would be coming soon to have a talk. The notice said to bring any books you would like him to autograph to the talk and meeting. I read two of Johnson's books this year ... he is the author of the popular Longmire series.

This issue of Asimov's is a bit better than the preceding issue. Once again the final story is the highlight of the issue.

77. Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 39, No. 2 (February 2015) edited by Sheila Williams, finished December 18, 2015, 3 - 3 1/2

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This issue of the digest contains 2 short stories, 4 poems, a novella and 3 novelettes as well as the usual variety of essays and articles.

Among the columns this month, Robert Silverberg writes a lengthy piece about one hit wonders in science fiction, and in particular a lengthy talk about Wyman Guin's story "Beyond Bedlam." Although I recognized a number of one-hit wonders, a surprising number of them I don't believe I have ever heard about before. Several I did read though were absolutely high impact and important stories,

with "Flowers For Algernon" certainly the most recognizable to a wide audience. Peter Heck's book review column piqued my interest on a book and also confirmed my appreciation for a book I read earlier this year, Nancy Kress's Yesterday's Kin.

On the fiction side, the stories are:

• Rattlesnakes and Men • novelette by Michael Bishop
• Ghost Colors • shortstory by Derek Künsken
• No Decent Patrimony • novelette by Elizabeth Bear
• Red Legacy • novelette by Eneasz Brodski
• Forgiveness • shortstory by Leah Cypess
• On the Night of the Robo-Bulls and Zombie Dancers • novella by Nick Wolven

"Social" science fiction seems to be increasingly the driver of many stories, certainly in the recent ones I have read in Asimov's and elsewhere. Social is light on the science by my reading.

The first story here was a long unsatisfying odd tale about a place in Georgia that revolves in every way around rattlesnakes. I'm supposing this is alt-history, since the husband of the main character has recently returned from a tour of duty in a war in Australia fought with crossbows. This seems to be a world without guns, just so you don't miss the heavy-handed substitution of rattlesnake worship for gun worship in our society. I suppose as some sort of modern parable this conveys a message but I didn't care for this story. I don't consider this sort of story as science fiction at all and think it belongs in a different venue than "Asimov's Science Fiction".

Science fiction has a long history of crossing the border and playing with fantasy. Derek Künsken goes there with the exceptionally well written "Ghost Colors". A young man has inherited a haunting. Apparently they are fairly common in the near future world the author presents us with. Apparently you can sometimes get rid of them by gene therapy to make your DNA not look like you to the lost spirit. Unfortunately I didn't buy the crock despite the author trying to explain how it works ... mostly cause I don't buy all the haunted people in the first place. If you go along with spooks everywhere whispering to you and your friends then the story may make a bit of sense.

Despite all that complaining by me, I liked this story a lot because despite the trappings this is a very nicely laid out story of a recently divorced young man dealing with his family history and starting a new relationship. In that regard this story shines all over.

After two genre blending stories in a row Elizabeth Bear gives us a real science fiction tale with "No Decent Patrimony". We still blur the genres though as we get a murder mystery and more right from the start. Using a small stage she looks at the big consequences if a life extension treatment became a reality. Can you imagine members of Congress or shall we say Captains of Industry serving for a century and more and stifling change and hidden powers as well controlling society? We are seeing society and the world changing rather radically already and if one adds in life extension, and who controls it, this is an interesting topic. At the start I thought we could have a really interesting story here, but the information is primarily conveyed via a lengthy interview with the son of one of the elite. There is a not so surprising ending and the telling itself was a little too full of itself. I'd rate this as an OK.

Then we have "Red Legacy," the first published story by Eneasz Brodski, which is a Cold War tale that throws something into the mix that I would never have expected. The idea here which I'll try and roughly frame, is that perhaps Darwin's theory of evolution is an American excuse for cruelty and the Soviet researchers (and perhaps the British also) have pushed Darwin away and believe in the validity of Lamarck's theories on evolution via acquired characteristics. The Soviets are certain that the others ignore Lamarck's theories to their detriment and that the Soviets will breed ever greater generations. I'll readily admit that personally I once thought that Lamarck's ideas should not be totally dismissed - there is a sort of common sense about it that things could evolve in some ways within his ideas. So the story had an odd appeal to me! The Soviets pursue their research thinking that by causing something to change how they want (I don't want to be spoilery) they will be able to have this change passed on as an inherited characteristic.

Perhaps this is a little too grim to really get too enthusiastic over it, but I give it credit for a pretty novel idea. Worth the read for certain . I was interested from the first sentence and enjoyed this.

I see another "social science" fiction tale with "Forgiveness" by Leah Cypess. This one deals with new biotech that can sort of rehab criminals to the extent that they are no longer a danger to society for whatever crime they committed. Assuming it works.

This is teen-age drama, but not so bad. I'm beginning to think that the magazine is aiming for the middle school and slightly above crowd. Maybe they need a "Science Fiction for Tweeners" mag.

The perfectly awful title in big type on the cover is the novella by Nick Wolven, "On the Night of the Robo-Bulls and Zombie Dancers". For my taste this is the best piece of fiction in this issue. Future New York City. Edgy. Dark. Wage slaves who can never leave work. AI Quants run probabilities for Wall Street that no one understands. The oddball head of one trading firm sends one of his workers on a dark journey. The goal is to get to the one guy in New York who might know what is going on because it is not looking good. Not Escape From New York by any means. More like Joseph Conrad.

So out of six stories here I liked 3 of them. As always, other readers mileage with certainly vary. I'm feeling increasingly out of touch with pop science fiction.

To all my LT friends ...

>249 RBeffa: Love the photo!



For my Christmas/Hanukkah/Solstice/Holiday image this year (we are so diverse!), I've chosen this photograph by local photographer Mark Lenoce of the pier at Pacific Beach to express my holiday wishes to you: Peace on Earth and Good Will toward All!

>249 RBeffa: How lovely!



Merry Christmas to you and your family!

Have a lovely holiday

Thank you Paul, Linda and Roni.

I've set aside other reading and have been working on Richard Ford's Canada hoping to make a perfect completion of the American Author challenge. see >14 RBeffa: . I may not make it, finding myself busy with various things the last couple weeks of the year, but I do hope I squeeze it in.

One of the things I have been spending time on is an old hobby - family history research. And one thing I love is when real life intersects in an unexpected unplanned way with reading life. A month ago I read Doctorow's The March discussed here >235 RBeffa: which is a fictional story set within the true story of Sherman's Army 1864-1865 march through the south, finishing it up on November 30th (he is one of the Amer. Author challenge picks). Tonight I am working on family history and filling in some information on sidelines - in this case the husband and children of a multi-times great aunt who isn't in my direct ancestral line but she is a blood relation. Her husband is not. Her husband I discover, besides being a well regarded Doctor joined the Union Army in 1864 and was sent on Sherman's March! I have ancestors on both the Union and Confederate sides, but finding this was a nice serendipitous surprise, even if he isn't a blood relative. You can see his 1919 obituary here: http://www.carolyar.com/Illinois/Obits/Isaac%20Asbury.htm

I finished up Richard Ford's Canada and I will drop some comments here later about it as my final book of 2015. 78 books for the year is quite a success for me.

My 2016 thread may be found here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/208726

78. Canada by Richard Ford, finished December 31, 2015, 2 1/2 - 3 stars, acquired in 2015 for the AAC


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I'm having a tough time putting thoughts together about this book, my final read of 2015. It is told in 3 parts, with the first two of roughly equal length around 200 pages each, and a final short part that is more of an epilogue. The first half of the book I didn't really care for. The book is almost like 2 short novels stuck together. I really disliked the style that the first part of the book used to tell the story, this odd story of this family. It was so repetetive it felt like the 200 pages could have been shortened to about 40. I don't even want to get into what the story is about because I don't think the story was important. The second half of the book, odd in entirely different ways seems like a better book. I don't think it was because I got used to how the writer wrote, but that might be a slight bit of it. I think the book is intended to convey some philosophies on life and living and how we are and how we get there. Thinking back on the book I can appreciate it a little better in retrospect. While reading the book it was very slow going.