Haydninvienna (Richard) finds intelligent life in the universe

I thought after 260 posts it was time for a new thread, especially since it’s now spring (not that you’d guess, if you looked outside), and my birthday and that of my LT namesake have come and gone. But what to call it? Fortunately one of Mrs H’s birthday presents to me was a copy of Intelligent Life in the Universe, by Iosef Shklovskii and Carl Sagan. I had a copy donkeys years ago that has gone missing. Just in case you don’t know the story, Shklovskii published a book called Universe, Life, Mind in the Soviet Union in the early sixties. He and Sagan had come into contact when Sagan sent him a preprint of a paper called “Direct Contact among Galactic Civilizations by Relativistic Interstellar Spaceflight”. Shklovskii incorporated parts of the paper in his then-forthcoming book. Sagan contacted him again and suggested that they collaborate on an enlarged English edition, which they did. They never met in person (during the collaboration, at least) and the collaboration was done entirely by post. (Just imagine, a world without email.) In the text, Sagan’s interpolations are carefully marked off from the translated text, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. In the course of the collaboration, Sagan added quite a lot of new material. The result is, I think, a classic of what I will call speculative non-fiction, like the book by Arik Kershenbaum that I posted about a couple of weeks ago.

Shklovskii was an interesting character. His autobiography was called Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon. I had that once too. My hazy memory of it says that he calculated that using the official statistics, the amount of vodka produced in the Soviet Union would stretch all the way to the moon. His intent was to ridicule the statistics, but it got him into trouble for making the Soviet citizens look like a bunch of alcoholics. (Having said which, I remember that on our one and only visit to Russia, we had lunch, in a group of course, in a Russian pancake place. The lunch was good but everyone got a shot of vodka, including both my very-under-18 daughters.)

I won’t sully the pure environment of the Pub by passing on the story of the terrible crime that Shklovskii got away with in the grounds of the house where Stalin was born.

Happy New Thread!

>1 haydninvienna: I do hope that crime was what I suspect that it was.

>3 -pilgrim-: It related to an early-morning breakfast of pierogi that were perhaps not as fresh as they ought to have been, and the consequences. I hope I didn’t invent it —I can’t find anything on the net to verify it and I no longer have the book.

>2 pgmcc: Thanks Peter!

Clam, if you happen to read this would you please use your new superpowers to get rid of the intrusive “for” in the topic?

>4 haydninvienna: Happy to oblige, and happy new thread!

>4 haydninvienna: Thanks Clam!

Intelligent Life in the Universe By I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan: the science may be looking out of date (for example, speculations about the idea of detecting extrasolar planets: as of 1 April just past, Wikipedia says, there are 4,704 confirmed exoplanets, and a few of them have even been photographed), but this is still a mind-blowing book, even for me wot’s been reading SFF for 60-odd years. Mind-blowing because they take it all so calmly! Dyson spheres using the entire energy output of a star. Constructing artificial beings specially fitted for long interstellar journeys at relativistic speeds. The very idea that our fallible civilisation might last for millions of years. Even more, the idea that the topic in its title is a legitimate scientific enquiry.

ETA one idea that Shklovskii and Sagan didn’t consider: planets not bound to a star, so-called rogue planets. About 30 are known, but there might be billions of them. There are speculations as to ways that such a planet, without a star to warm it, might stay warm enough to have liquid water on its surface.

Oh dear, Amazon is at it again. They have a mildly annoying habit of recommending books that I’ve already bought from them (for example Carlo Rovelli’s books, most of which I have), but occasionally they hit the jackpot. Latest is one of Rovelli’s books that I don’t have: Anaximander, about the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. But they also recommended The Knowledge Machine by Michael Strevens. I bought this as well on the strength of a comment in the foreword, which I read on “Look Inside”, to the effect that while the pre-Socratics, Aristotle and the likes of Pliny and Lucretius might have speculated about “the way things are” (I have a translation of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura with that as its title), they didn’t have any way of testing who was right. Now we can write books with titles like Dreams of a Final Theory.

Edited to fix the Latin.

I seem to have a theme going here. Incidentally, the Oxfordshire library system online catalogue reports that it has a copy of Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon, and I’ve just placed a reservation for it.

Since #8 I have read Dreams of a Final Theory, The Knowledge Machine (which takes issue with some bits of Dreams ...), and Anaximander, all of which seem to agree at least on science being valuable, even if The Knowledge Machine gets a bit snarky about some of its social aspects. But as you may have noticed, I sometimes go for poetry, and actually started The Way Things Are (Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, in Rolfe Humphries’ translation). Fascinating—Lucretius writes confidently about “the way things are”, but never a suggestion of an experiment. It’s all based on reason and the authority of Epicurus, who of course relied on reason and observation also.

I’ve so far read 2 of Lucretius’s 5 books. It’s slower going than fiction or even Carlo Rovelli, and doesn’t generally have the knock-your-socks-off impact of English lyric poetry, but I thought this was pretty good:

..the gods
Must, by their nature, take delight in peace,
Forever calm, serene, forever far
From our affairs, beyond all pain, beyond
All danger, in their own resources strong,
Having no need of us at all, above
Wrath or propitiation.

Epicurus, and Lucretius after him, held that the gods existed but were unconcerned with humans. I wish I could read the Latin, but it’s a bit late now.

>10 haydninvienna: Have you read How to Read a Latin Poem If You Can't Read Latin Yet by William Fitzgerald?

It is not, as it sounds, yet another "quick and dirty" introduction to Latin; it is a literary criticism that gives you an understanding of the structure of Latin poetry.

>11 -pilgrim-: You may have winged me. I see there’s a chapter on (or partly on) Lucretius, fetchingly titled “Science Fiction”.

A little example of synchronicity: a while back I read Ann Patty’s Living with a Dead Language, about her study of Latin in retirement. She makes particular mention of Lucretius, and as far as I can remember mentions no other poets.

>12 haydninvienna:
A little example of synchronicity:

I will not take up your thread with a recent bit of synchronicity I experienced. If interested you can find it here.

>7 haydninvienna: Might be a bullet right there. Will probably go audio on this one if possible.

Well, that book does not appear to exist on my part of the planet! Not to borrow as an ebook nor to buy as an audio.

Edited to add: I can buy a used softcover version for $300 US. Ha ha...

>14 clamairy: I got the UK paperback, which is easier to find here and much, much cheaper. Downside is that it’s not a great production job—small type, narrow margins and a tight binding. Did the job though. I’m seeing used HB copies on Amazon for £170 or so.

Packing for Mars by Mary Roach.

My library reservation of Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon came in. By golly, he tells some good stories (including the one about the terrible crime at Stalin’s birthplace). Heartily recommended if you can find a copy—it sells for ridiculous prices on Amazon.

You may have noticed that I have a thing for flying machines. I also have a study with an attic window that looks out in the general direction of Bicester Heritage airfield. Earlier this afternoon I was working hard (or possibly hardly working) and I heard an aviation noise and looked out. I thought, funny, that looks like an old Harvard (or T-6 Texan or SNJ for USians). A quick check of Flightradar24 provide that that was indeed what it was. A 77-year-old (older than I am!) former US Navy SNJ trainer registered on the UK civil registry.

>19 -pilgrim-: What a wonderful view!

>18 haydninvienna: Nice sighting!

>18 haydninvienna: Nice - I love the sound of those Harvard engines! Sounds like you have a perfect view, as long as it doesn't distract you too much.

>19 -pilgrim-: >20 Karlstar: >21 NorthernStar: Thanks all. I’d never actually seen a Harvard before but they have distinctive features like the shape of the tail fin.

Later in the evening the sound of an antique piston engine sent me outside again. It was a biplane, and I think it was a Boeing-Stearman 17 (thanks again, Flightradar24). I see biplanes from time to time—there is or was a Tiger Moth based there, and a Bücker biplane of some sort. I’ve seen a Tiger fairly recently. The Tiger is the easiest of all biplanes to recognise, and I grew up under the circuit of Archerfield Aerodrome near Brisbane, which in the 50s and 60s was home to a lot of small aircraft.

Bicester airfield used to be home to a gliding club, which I think has moved. A while back there were plans to redevelop the airfield for housing, but that plan seems to have been shelved. The airfield is supposed to be the best preserved pre-WW2 RAF airfield (still has the original hangars and control tower), and I think English Heritage might have got involved. It’s now being run by a crowd calling itself Bicester Heritage, and it is making a business out of vintage aircraft and cars. I’ve told the story before of being there when a Mustang landed.

>22 haydninvienna: In my Vancouver days I often went for Sunday brunch down to a little airfield called Delta Air Park. It had grass runways, and a great collection of elderly and homebuilt aircraft. There was a Harvard based there, and a couple of biplanes.

>22 haydninvienna: My best plane sighting was a close encounter with B-29 'Fifi', at less than 250 feet in the air, broadside to us as it came down for a landing at an airport less than 1/4 mile away. Not sure how I kept the car on the road, actually. The sight of it passing 'almost' right in front of us at not much more than rooftop height was incredible. It was flying in for a weekend airshow and we just were in the right place at the right time as it arrived.

Back in the 1950s the RAAF used to do air shows over Brisbane. I can remember, as a child, watching a group of Mustangs “attacking” a Lincoln bomber over our house.

>23 NorthernStar: Seems like your Delta Air Park and Bicester Heritage are doing much the same stuff.

>25 haydninvienna: "I can remember, as a child, watching a group of Mustangs “attacking” a Lincoln bomber over our house."

I regularly get a similar type of show in my backyard from the resident falcons and crows, (crows are jerks).

The saga of the aircraft spotting continues. This afternoon (a working day for me) I've seen 2 Tiger Moths together, and then a Tiger and what had to be a Boeing-Stearman PT-17 together. I've never seen a PT-17 before except (maybe) on the occasion mentioned in #18, but c'mon now--a biplane with pre-WW2 US stars (with the red dot in the centre) under its wings?

>27 haydninvienna: That seems to be a very interesting airfield. More so for you, who know what you are seeing.

>28 MrsLee: Back in Doha I very rarely saw a small aircraft. Now I’m seeing lots of them, and the older ones are much more fun. I wonder if the owner of the Tiger gives joy-flights.

But I also wonder what will happen if one of those fragile old ladies has an engine failure on takeoff. The airfield is just across a busy street from a densely populated suburb. The airfield is about 3 miles from the centre of Bicester, and when the airfield was first developed there would have been open farmland in between.

>29 haydninvienna: Glide to a landing, one would hope! Those are some great sightings!

Libraries in Oxfordshire open, and an afternoon off without any chores requested by Mrs H, so I got to go to the library again, woohoo! Prize of the day: A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages edited by Fimi & Higgins.

>31 haydninvienna: I am certainly looking forward to your review of that.

I thought I'd had a grizzle a while ago about how Amazon has a habit of recommending books that I already own. Fair enough except that quite often I own a recommended book because I bought it from them, so recommending it again seems fairly pointless. But this morning, I was in an online meeting with some of my colleagues and there was some (relevant) mention of the Greensill collapse. A number of large banks face substantial losses and there will be a big bill for the UK taxpayer (and, I gather, taxpayers in France and Germany as well). Swing round to my own email and what do I find? A recommendation for Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty.

>33 haydninvienna:
Amazon also recommends that I buy books that I have previously bought from them. In addition, like you, some Amazon recommendations appear to be very timely in relation to topics I have been discussing, sometimes discussing on the telephone rather than on an on-line channel.

Capital and Ideology is a book I acquired back in the good old days when one could enter and browse in a bookshop. I bought it in an idependent bookshop in Dublin. It was Books Upstairs. That being the case Amazon has no idea that I have this book, that is, no idea until now.

If my memory serves me correctly Books Upstairs is a bookshop you did not manage to visit on your last couple of visits.

>34 pgmcc: I have definitely been in Books Upstairs and bought from them (although I actually went downstairs—this is Dublin, after all). I bought The Rituals of Dinner by Margaret Visser, and The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington, at least.

I have Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which languishes on the TBR, but I may buy Capital and Ideology as well. I'll wander into Bicester and order it from Coles though. Gotta keep the indie going.

>32 -pilgrim-: I had a review of sorts typed but hadn't posted it, and then my computer updated and restarted overnight, so I lost the lot. In fact no great loss, because some of it was a bit tendentious and I've thought better of it.

The gist of it was, I wouldn't bother. The essay by Tolkien which gives the book its title is available in The Monsters and the Critics, along with 6 other essays. What Fimi & Higgins add is an introductory essay which is moderately interesting but inessential unless one intends to become part of the Tolkien research industry, and a variorum text of the essay itself. The essay was apparently revised a number of times but without changing anything significant about its ideas, and may have been delivered a second time, a possibility that Christopher Tolkien apparently mentions. I found the variorum text distracting to read. Fimi & Higgins also provide extensive notes, although I wonder a little why they thought it necessary to give notes explaining Tolkien's references to Esperanto. Quaintly they also explain a passing reference to "meccano" (sic).

The one useful thing it did do was, prompt me to order copies of The Monsters and the Critics and Tree and Leaf. My old copy of the latter is falling apart, and I don't have the former.

>35 haydninvienna: My TBR mountain contains Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Capital and Ideology, The Economics of Inequality and Chronicles: On Our Troubled Times. At least I have some initial chapters and my economist wife has delved into them a little more than I.

Have you read, The Society of Equals by Pierre Rosanvallon? It discusses the concept of equality since the French and American revolutions. It carries a warning about those demanding equality and in particular who the people are that they think should be equal.

>33 haydninvienna:, >37 pgmcc: You might not be that surprised that Thomas Piketty is on my list. Though I have yet to acquire one of his works I've read plenty in my morning paper, and on the internet.
One of my issues is being unsure which book I'd get the most out of.

Something a bit out of left field for me, one of the books I picked up from the library last Tuesday: The Sceptical Gardener by Ken Thompson. Although the subtitle, “The Thinking Person’s Guide to Good Gardening”, claims a bit too much, it’s still a rather charming collection of botanical and horticultural snippets of wisdom and trivia. The author was a botanist at the University of Sheffield, and is a gardener (so twice a colleague of our esteemed hfglen). Also, Thompson shows a proper appreciation of a favourite author of mine, the late Margaret Mahy.

>36 haydninvienna: OK, thanks Richard. Since I have a copy of The Monsters and the Critics I certainly won't bother.

You have saved me a purchase, since having read the essay was my motivation for interest in the book. I had been expecting an exploration of Tolkien's techniques in language creation. (You may have noticed that structures and evolution of languages is an interest of mine.)

And I heartily agree that The Monster and the Critics is excellent, and well worth re-reading.

Spitfire: The Biography by Jonathan Glancey. I read John Nichol’s Spitfire: A Very British Love Story a while ago and was hoping that Glancey’s book would be better. Well, maybe. Light on technical stuff except for rhapsodies over the Spitfire’s wing, but gives something like proper credit to Joseph Smith, who took over as designer after R J Mitchell’s death. No references that I noticed to loading the guns with “bullets”, but I wonder whether there is actually a place in Lincolnshire called “Dibgy”, and it also looks a bit odd to spell Air Vice-Marshal Ralph Sorley’s name as “Sorely” twice in the text and then get it right in the index. Still, even if it told me nothing much that I didn’t know already it was probably worth £2 to help keep the British Heart Foundation shop in business.

Apropos the conversation earlier in your thread I just received two e-mails from Amazon with recommendations. One was recommending Ken MacLeod's Restoration Game and contained the words, "Based on your recent activity, we thought you might be interested in this."

The other e-mail was recommending several Ken MacLeod books with Restoration Game at the top of the list.

The only recent activity I recall in relation to Restoration Game and Ken MacLeod was an exchange of posts on the Librarything Science Fiction Fans April reads thread.

Apart from that, I have all Ken MacLeod's books and bought them all from Amazon.

>42 pgmcc: I am currently reading Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee, which actually covers how Facebook, Google and Amazon collect and monetise personal data.

I am curious: do you and Richard have the "Personalise ads" settings on or off?

ETA: My guess is that you both have this set to "off" in Google (as I do) , and that is why Amazon is responding to your tracked "recent actions" info bundle, but not the data that is "personalised" by being attached to your Amazon account information.

>43 -pilgrim-: I don't do Facebook at all (except for Messenger), and I browse mostly in Firefox, which seems to block most tracking. I have to use Messenger because it's what my kids use, and if an ad pops up on it I hide the ad without telling it why, in the hope of making the personalisation less efficient. Since it apparently thinks I'm still in the Middle East, it may be working. The Amazon example is somewhat different—it was an email to me (so presumably Amazon knows who I am, and can tell what I've bought from it). The Piketty recommendation that came at an appropriate moment I'm prepared to regard as an instance of synchronicity.

Also, I seldom use Google for searches. I tend to use DuckDuckGo instead.

>44 haydninvienna: I also use DuckDuckGo for preference. But since I am using a mobile phone, Google owns my OS, and is therefore still collecting data on the websites that I access.

I left Facebook over a decade ago. I do not regret it. Still probably too late, though.

Another piece of synchronicity.

I ordered a copy of The meanings of the botanical names of trees, by an author with an oddly familiar name, because I’m interested in botanical Latin. Then I randomly came upon this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karpatiosorbus_admonitor, about a newly described species of whitebeam. “Admonitory” =“warning”, I think. It’s informally called the no-parking whitebeam, because when the type specimen was discovered it had a No Parking sign attached to it. Honestly, who writes this stuff?

>46 haydninvienna: Someone with a sense of humour? At least it made me laugh, and that has to be worth something ;-)

Touchstone didn’t work, so I fiddled with it a little and now it does. I don’t think our esteemed hfglen had anything to do with the no-parking whitebeam.

But I agree that it’s worth the laugh.

>48 haydninvienna: Indeed, until this evening I'd never heard of the no-parking whitebeam. But I have from time to time suggested vaguely similar names (unsuccessfully).

ETA: I hope you like Bernice's cartoons. I was delighted when the lady at Jacana accepted my idea of asking her to draw them.

Reading about how it was discovered made me think it was a bunch of students on a field trip thinking it would be a great prank to give it that name. The notes were probably drawn up in a pub at the end of the day and everyone was quite merry.

“Drink had been taken, M’laud.”

>49 hfglen: Hugh, If you approved of the cartoons, I have no doubt they will be excellent.

>50 pgmcc: Bit too literate a prank for “in the pub, on a field trip”, I think, Peter. As I recall, our field trip pranks tended to involve well-aged cow skulls and suchlike.

>51 haydninvienna: But where did you go to laugh about the well-aged cow skulls after you had placed them in the most inappropriate places you could think off?

>52 pgmcc: I remember that one such skull (christened “Merv”) was strapped to the front bumper of a bus. Where we went with it I have no idea.

Re the book with the oddly familiar author mentioned in >46 haydninvienna:: came home this morning after a shopping trip with Mrs H, and FedEx tracking told me that my package had been delivered and signed for. So where's the package then? No sign of it here, and the neighbour, who was home, disavowed any knowledge of it. So I went through the aggravating business of ringing FedEx customer support, with their excessively irritating "music" on hold, and was told that an investigation would begin (as in, we will ask the driver when he gets back tonight) and I would be told of the result tomorrow. Took me about 20 minutes on the phone, most of which was listening to the "music".

But wait! Who is that at the door? A fellow in a FedEx uniform with a parcel in his hand? He asked me who I was and I admitted that I was indeed the addressee, and I said "So this is the package that was signed for 2 hours ago?" He had the grace to apologise.



Anyway, the book What's in a name is a nicely turned out mini-dictionary of botanical Latin. And yes Hugh, the cartoons are cute, and the illustrations proper are pretty good too.

>54 haydninvienna: Good to hear your book eventually made it there. ;)

I've had the ' it's been reported as delivered but hasn't physically arrived yet ' thing happen before. It seems to be mostly a FedEx thing. I believe the driver will sometimes scan packages into the system before making their next delivery run, which is not a great idea and I'm sorry to hear that it seems to be continuing.

Amazon's track record, as terrible as it was when they first rolled out their own delivery service, has gotten much better, (at least around here), as they include within the digital delivery notice, a photo of where they left the item. This simple policy ensures that the delivery happens before they send out the notice, and has the added benefit of telling you where to look for a missing package, (hmmm... that's not my porch but it looks an awful lot like Fred's place - guess I'll go ask Fred how he's liking my new book).

>54 haydninvienna: Thank you for those kind words.

>56 hfglen: No worries. It’s a really good little book in all ways. I just wonder that you had the patience to compile it all. I was interested to see quite a few references to Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, who was a Big Cheese in the botany of Australia.

Just FYI, there’s a rule I live by, that no bit of random knowledge is ever wasted. As a child I used to read my mother’s garden books. Never really became a gardener, but I did get a decent familiarity with the look of binomial plant names. Fast forward to 1997 and I, as a legislative counsel, am drafting a huge quarantine notice that has in it a list of permitted seeds. The list is all binomial plant names and there’s 30-odd pages of it, in 9-point type, double columns. The text was originally supplied by the Quarantine Service, but I found I could proof-read it better than they could even though I never was a botanist. I just knew what the names should look like.

>55 ScoLgo: Never had a problem with an Amazon delivery.

>57 haydninvienna: Actually, it took about six weeks to assemble the MS (longer to arrange the rest!), and seemed more efficient than having a colleague breaking into my train of thought every ten minutes or so wanting the meaning of a name. But thank you anyway.

>54 haydninvienna: I had a look at the one purchase option on Amazon for Hugh's book and it is priced at, £292. I may have to wait for the Lottery win. :-)

>59 pgmcc: Wow. Um, I didn't pay that much. My copy came from a seller in South Africa. I must have bought the last one for a sensible price.

>60 haydninvienna: I read an article once about the flaws in Amazon's pricing algorithm that often gave rise to ridiculous prices based on demand and customer views of the items concerned. I thought they had sorted it out. It would appear not.

>59 pgmcc: WHAAAATTTT!! That's daylight robbery! Also, about 75 times the original list price. (Stray thought: I wonder if SANBI bookshop -- sanbibookshop@sanbi.org.za -- still has a copy. Might be worth an e-mail.)

ETA Peter, if they have one at a reasonable price for you, the only thing stopping me volunteering to autograph it for you is that I'm in Durban and the bookshop's in Pretoria, somewhat over 600 km away.

>59 pgmcc: It's only $864.56 on the USA Amazon.com site. Oh, and they want $3.99 for shipping.

>63 ScoLgo: €3.99 for shipping. They must be kidding. Outrageous.

I really must have bought the second last one. Amazon UK has one copy now, the one Peter found.

>63 ScoLgo: Only?? ONLY!?!?!? That's a cool 150 times the original list price, from 17 years ago. Hang on, people, this is a small book that was designed as little more than a bit of botanical fluff (but factually accurate).

Just to add to the pile-on about Hugh’s book, I gleaned this bit of ?trivia from it:

Quisqualis—ultimately from the Malay name udani, which Rumphius (1627-1702) rendered as hoedanig (Dutch = how, what), and then translated into Latin; the Dutch stage is expressive of his surprise at the variability of these plants (Quisqualis indica, Rangoon creeper).

Alas,Wikipedia tells me that it’s now Combretum indicum.

ETA my mother had one, of which she was quite proud. Picture here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combretum_indicum#/media/File:Combretum_indicum_01...

>66 hfglen: I see quite a bit of this with used book sales on Amazon, (and other sites too if I'm being fair). If the number of copies are limited, the price will sometimes be astronomical. Looking at eBay: no copies show up. Biblio and Abe Books both list 'Snookerybooks' in South Africa offering your book for $25.00 plus shipping. The shipping charges on both sites are slightly more than the book price so landed price (to the USA) ends up just north of $50.00. Much more reasonable than the better part of a thousand clams!

I also think unethical sellers may be listing at exorbitant prices hoping that someone will mistakenly (drunkenly?) click on 'Buy'. That would be a big 'oops!' to wake up to, eh?

>64 pgmcc: Right? The shipping charge is like adding insult to injury.

>69 ScoLgo: That's much better! We may even tempt Peter with that.

>66 hfglen: Congrats on having such a high priced item on Amazon? :)

>70 hfglen: "We may even tempt Peter with that."

I don't know why, but that made me think of this Gary Larson cartoon...

>59 pgmcc:, I, too, checked it out on Amazon yesterday. I don't think the price in Canadian $ was as high as what >63 ScoLgo: found, (but still ridiculously high, sorry hfglen) so all the interest may be increasing the price. Do you think we can get it over $1,000?

>73 NorthernStar: FWIW, the whole Glen family thinks Amazon's price is absurd, ridiculous, outrageous ... and any other similar word you wish to add. No cause for apology!

>72 ScoLgo:
I certainly feel like that cat.

LoL!

Went into Oxford for lunch and shopping with Laura today. She gave me my Christmas and birthday presents, which included:
Soap and Water and Common Sense by Dr Bonnie Henry
Lying for Money by Dan Davies (which I think I’ll put into the professional library)—both of those were on my Amazon wish list;
And I bought:
Pale Rider by Laura Spinney (about the 1918 flu pandemic—are we seeing a theme here?); and
The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep By H G Parry—an impulse buy on account of the eye-catching title.

>66 hfglen: I just hope you get some royalties if someone buys that treasure!

An afternoon in Cardiff with my daughter Katherine and her partner Eddie included a visit to Troutmark Books (highly recommended). The visit got me Selected Plays by Christopher Fry—5 plays, including The Lady’s Not for Burning, which I’ve rhapsodised about before, and 4 others that I’ve not read. Or not till now, anyway, since I’ve just read A Phoenix too Frequent: the language is just as rich and gorgeous, and with the farcical plot there’s the same dark undercurrent.

The visit also produced Vathek, by William Beckford; The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan; Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim; Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb; and yet another copy of Four Quartets by T S Eliot. (I have at least one other copy of just Four Quartets, and Eliot’s Collected Poems as well.) I read about half of Vathek on the train home. There’s been a fair bit said about Vathek on LT recently, since it’s apparently one of the “1001 Books to Read Before You Die”, but nothing in the GD. But it’s certainly fantasy, and should be right at home here.

>78 haydninvienna: I have a copy of the Gutenberg version; oddly it's not (yet) available on StandardeBooks.org although Khaled and The Shaving of Shagpat are. I read it many years ago in a paperback edition; I recall it as a typical Gothick in an Arabian Nights setting instead of wilderness Europe.

>78 haydninvienna:
I read Vathek about three years ago. I would agree it could be considered fantasy. It accompanies Castle of Otranto and Nightmare Abbey in a Gothic collection by Wordsworth. Generally considered part of the Gothic world but I consider most, if not all, genres to be fluid. I have more to say on genre classification but not when I am typing on a phone.

>79 Maddz: “... Gothick in an Arabian Nights setting ...”: yes, exactly.

>80 pgmcc: It belongs with The Castle of Otranto, I think, but Nightmare Abbey? If we mean the one by Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey is a comedy, which The Castle of Otranto is not. Or so I understand anyway. I don’t pretend to know much about Gothick, but general knowledge tells me that Walpole intended The Castle ... to be taken seriously. Still, Peacock was ridiculing the whole idea of Gothick, so maybe they do belong together. I actually have read Nightmare Abbey, although it’s not my favourite Peacock.

>77 MrsLee: Not a brass farthing. Nor a USAnian penny. It's now an after-market sale.

>82 hfglen: Rats. I was afraid of that.

I've mentioned the Five Books website a few times. One of their recent interviews, "Space Travel and Science Fiction Books", is with Professor Christopher Mason, who

... is a geneticist and computational biologist who has been a Principal Investigator and Co-investigator of seven NASA missions and projects. He is Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, with affiliate appointments at the Meyer Cancer Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School, and the Consortium for Space Genetics at Harvard Medical School.

The interview transcript contains the statement "The best science fiction is heavy on science and light on fiction". Not everyone would agree, perhaps. But it's still an interesting interview, with a good deal of reference to Commander Scott Kelly, who has racked up a total of 520 days in space (and to my surprise isn't even close to the top of the list for Most Time in Space). What makes Kelly interesting for this purpose though is that he has an identical twin brother, so there's lots of scope for investigation of the genetic effects of spaceflight. As usual, it's plugging a book by the interviewee (The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds), which I think I might buy. The idea of re-engineering the human genome to survive better in space is a pretty common SFF idea, but here (said he hopefully) there might be some science to go along with it.

ETA I did buy it.

>82 hfglen: >83 MrsLee: Well, I tried. Sorry, Hugh.

>85 haydninvienna: No worries; I'm highly chuffed that you read the book!

Some time ago I posted about the Extinguished Countries Project. They were planning a book about the Republic of Venice. I don't think I mentioned that I had subscribed for a copy in their Indiegogo campaign. The book has now arrived: Republic of Venice by Giovanni Vale, and I have to say that I'm impressed. A thoroughly professional job, good illustrations and maps and decently printed right up to the standard of most tourist guidebooks, which is what this is."EXTINGUISHED COUNTRIES is the first series of travel books dedicated to countries that no longer exist ...", now published by Paper Boat Stories (it says here) in Zagreb. I hope their future productions keep up the standard.
The cover:

>88 Busifer: Boom!!! A direct BB hit. The combination of travel guide and history checks all boxes!

>88 Busifer: You can buy it from the Extinguished Countries Project website. They talk confidently of more books. I hope they succeed.

ETA No, I have no personal or commercial interest. I really do hope they succeed, and they’ve made a pretty decent start.

>89 haydninvienna: I'm negotiating payment, as we speak *grin*

Another foray into Bicester to collect The Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford, a BB from somebody (I forget who) in one of the groups I lurk in. This is a new printing by Penguin of the seven novels. Inside on the flyleaf I find this:

In this book are some expressions and depictions of prejudices that were commonplace in British society at the time it was written. These prejudices were wrong then and are wrong today. We are printing the novel as it was originally published because to make changes would be the same as pretending these prejudices never existed.

Well, that's one way to handle the issue, and probably a franker way than that of the publisher of the Dr Seuss books, which has apparently simply let at least one book go out of print because it is now regarded as offensive.

>91 haydninvienna: A sensible approach. It does not try to change history.

>88 Busifer: >89 haydninvienna: I agree, this looks very interesting.

>92 pgmcc: I have the feeling that this is a template message that might be appearing in a lot of reprints. Penguin wins both ways—expresses disapproval of the attitudes but does not annoy the sticklers for an accurate text.

>94 haydninvienna: I do hope this is the way this kind of thing is handled going forward.

>91 haydninvienna: >92 pgmcc: Indeed sensible, and like >95 clamairy: says I hope this way will become more common.

Taking a sharp turn in another direction (particularly if any of you recall my affection for the Boeing 747), my latest acquisition is The Tiger Moth Story, by Alan Bramson. I suppose this has something to do with watching the old lady through my study window—she was back again yesterday.

Cover: .

The Tiger Moth Story hardly needs a description. Pretty good, and rather less given to rhapsodising than some books on famous aeroplanes, although plenty of people could find reasons to do so about the Tiger. On the other hand Spitfire People (library book) does get a bit rhapsodical at times. British aviation writers seem unable to avoid it on the Spitfire. At least it gives some short biographies on some of the other people who mattered, such as Joe Smith, who took over as Chief Designer after R J Mitchell died; the test pilots “Mutt” Summers, Jeffrey Quill and Alex Henshaw; and the Royal Air Force people who made sure that the Spitfire got adopted and then flown.

Finally another library book: The Story of the British and their Weather—a slightly misleading title, in that the book is a series of essays about extreme weather events in the British Isles. But not bad, a bit overwritten in places, but made me realise that the weather of the British Isles isn’t just cloudy and grey; sometimes it’s stormy, and occasionally it’s hot and dry. (That’s actually unfair. It’s a very pleasant summer evening and Mrs H and I are sitting in our conservatory watching the swallows in the evening sky.)

Back to the 747 for a moment: here's a Flightradar24 blog post on Lufthansa's 747s. Do I have 747 plans? You bet (well, aspirations at least). I've flown Lufthansa long haul a few times and enjoyed the experience.

>99 haydninvienna: I have always liked and admired the 747 but unfortunately I have never flown in one. When I have travelled long haul* I have been on an Airbus.

*US; Ghana. I am afraid I have never crossed the equator. You probably consider my long haul trips a mere Sunday drive in the country.

>100 pgmcc: I wouldn't be so rude, Peter. Longest I've ever done though is Sydney to Doha (7,687 miles) on Qatar Airways in 2019 (Boeing 777). Longest 747 would have been Los Angeles to Brisbane on Qantas (7,162 miles). Longest on Lufthansa was Frankfurt to Vancouver (5,024 miles) but that was on an Airbus A340.

Yes, I do keep a spreadsheet. Why do you ask?

>101 haydninvienna: LOL!

Couple more library books.

First one is The Hidden Half by Michael Blastland. Fascinating. I sum this up in a sentence: when are things that are the same not the same? Blastland begins the book with an arresting story, of the "marmorkrebs" or marbled crayfish. This is a new species that has appeared within the last few years. In a consignment of aquarium specimens, a single female crayfish appeared that proved to be capable of producing fertile eggs without the assistance of a male crayfish. The progeny of that female crayfish now number in the millions*, and because there was only one mother they are all genetically identical. But: if you look at a group of the offspring they are all different in small or large ways—different patterns, different sizes, different behaviour. So the researchers got investigating, rearing batches of marbled crayfish in aquariums under as near identical conditions as possible (even, apparently, to having the same person look at them at the same time every day). And still the crayfish were different.Why are dozens of genetically identical crayfish, reared under identical conditions (so the same in both "nature" and "nurture") different? Blastland's message is, don't be deluded looking for patterns; there is an irreducible level of randomness in the universe. Yes, I do remember Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Next one is Calculating the Cosmos, by the omnipresent Ian Stewart. This is a kind of counterpoint to the Blastland book—Stewart is looking for pattens in the universe, and of course finding them, but the patterns are not always what you expect. Lots of references to chaotic orbits, and a slightly more open discussion of the alternatives to dark matter and dark energy as a way of making the cosmos work than you generally get in pop-science books.

At the moment I'm in the middle of Jacob's Room is Full of Books by Susan Hill. Not bad: in one sense, pity it's a library book, or else I would have been doing a lot of writing in it. She has some good things to say about books, writers, and the writing life, and the English countryside. This is the second book in a series that began with Howards End is on the Landing, which I may have to seek out. One passage that I would have marked is the description of the Duke of Windsor after his funeral, and what a weak, ineffectual ass he was. It reminded me of a comment that I saw somewhere to the effect that the British people owed Mrs Simpson a great debt of gratitude, because she had saved them from being ruled by an idiot.

* no information on whether they are edible.

Yet another library book, and I have now actually ordered it from Amazon: Dancing by the Light of the Moon, which is both a guide the learning poetry by heart, and speaking it aloud, and a collection of suitable poems. I have to admit that Gyles Brandreth’s selection here is about as good for the purpose as you’re likely to get, even if among the winter poems he should have included (but didn’t) Coleridge’s poem “Frost at Midnight”, which contains what is for my money the single most magical line in all of English poetry:

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Yes, I know I’ve quoted it before. I love it that much.

But I have to pass this on as well, in these COVID times:

Wine—dining Down: 18 April 2020
Living under lockdown can be fraught
And teaching tetchy kids can leave one taut
This morning though I’m feeling rather fine
The tonic could have been that breakfast wine

The children are an energetic bunch
Confined inside they tend to bite and punch
I like to stop behaviour of this kind
But wine at lunch time leaves me less inclined

At best of times the bath routine and bed
Are daily tasks that I approach with dread
By contrast I am floating on cloud nine
That bottle with my tea was quite sublime

So punctuated (or not). It’s by Marianne Duane, who seems to have been at the furlough Merlot a bit.

ETA another poem by Marianne Duane, from a small anthology dealing with cider:

The Wonderful Thing about Apples
The wonderful thing about apples
Is that they are a versatile fruit
You can bake them or stew them
For health and nutrition
Or simply get pissed as a newt.

EA to correct a misattribution. The poem “Wine-dining Down: 18 April 2020” is by Mark Graham, not Marianne Duane. Whoops.

>97 haydninvienna: "A must-read classic". Now that's a bit of a stretch, but I have to admit I'm really tempted by that one.

>105 Karlstar: And it’s actually not the only book about the Tiger either. I agree that that description is a bit of a stretch, but it’s a decent book all the same.

Just started Howards End is on the Landing, by Susan Hill, and found this: “… infernal systems on websites where it is possible to log your own library …”. Cheek!

Pondering whether to have another rant about the decay of proof-reading. The cause is a book I picked up from the library yesterday: The Map and the Clock, edited by Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke, billed as "A Laureate's Choice of the Poetry of Britain and Ireland". It's published by Faber and Faber, who have been in the business of publishing poetry for decades (T S Eliot was an editor there). Nicely produced up to a point, "textual illustrations" beginning each section, 669 pages of selections and an introduction by Ms Duffy (and edited in July 2023 to add that Ms Duffy was Poet Laureate of the UK between 2009 and 2019). So all in all, this book is a Big Deal. I find some unfamiliar but good things in the first few pages I turn, and then I look up "Coleridge" in the index to see whether "Frost at Midnight" is there. And it is! So I turn to the page and start reading, and I find this:

With a wild pleasure, falling on mine car
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!

See it?

I'm very sure Coleridge didn't write "car", and a quick online search (too lazy to find one of the printed copies, of which I have several) indeed shows that the word should be "ear". But if a major publisher can't properly proofread a book of this apparent significance, what hope is there? (Goes off to wander among the ruins of civilisation in sackcloth and ashes.)

But Faber: I probably would have bought a copy of this book (and its companion: Ms Duffy has edited at least one more "Laureate's Choice" anthology for the same publisher), but now I probably won't.

>108 haydninvienna: Are you sure that poem isn't about a coal miner when coal just drops into his mine car? :)

Please, rant away!

>109 Karlstar: I wouldn’t have bothered, except for the bits I mentioned—it’s by Faber and Faber; it’s a Laureate’s Choice; and it’s got up to look like it’s a Big Deal.

Plus it was that poem. See post #104.

I hang out on Ask.Metafilter a bit, and yesterday someone posted a question asking for books to renew their faith in humanity. The scary thing is, I own quite a few of the non-fiction ones mentioned, especially the 2 books by Steven Pinker—scary because surely there can't be so few hopeful books! I have the one by Rutger Bregman (Humankind: A Hopeful History), but have not read it yet. Must fix that.

>111 haydninvienna: 50 flippen brilliant South Africans
Jan Smuts - unafraid of Greatness
Louis Botha: a man apart

for starters.

>112 hfglen: You might have got a hit with the first one at least, Hugh. I had a look at the table of contents on Amazon, and there are few surprises, although I think including Winston Churchill is a bit near the edge. Come to think of it, I must see if there is a decent biography of Alfred Deakin (early Prime Minister and Attorney-General of Australia) in print. Given the quality of the current Australian lot, I think some refreshment is needed.

Took a short break from intelligent life in the universe on finding a couple of reprints of classic detective stories in the Bicester library. The first one I’ve read was Inspector French’s Greatest Case, by Freeman Wills Crofts. Crofts was a founder of the Detection Club, along with G K Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie. Sorry, but the main thing I took away from this book was how much better Sayers and Chesterton were as writers. (I don’t know Christie well enough to comment on her.) Crofts’ prose is clunky and the story isn’t good enough to make up for it.

I may have been a bit harsh on Freeman Wills Crofts. Not denying that the writing is clunky (and we get a bit too much of what a splendid fellow Inspector French is), but the book works in its own way as a record of an investigation rather than as a puzzle. After all, once we get to the apparent suicide on the ferry, it's hard not to guess what's been going on. I like that French isn't a genius or even unusually lucky, and that he gets to the answer by patient police work, and occasionally expounding to his long-suffering wife, who actually provides him with a significant inspiration.

Back to “intelligent life in the universe”: Small Creatures Such as We by Sacha Sagan. I posted previously about an Ask.Metafilter thread on books to make you feel better about humanity (https://ask.metafilter.com/355834/Books-to-renew-my-faith-in-humanity) and this was one of the recommendations. Good call, so far anyway. Sacha is Carl’s daughter, and there’s quite a bit about Carl in there. But the book stands up on its own, about celebration, beauty and the value of ritual.

Mrs H was watching me read and said that it looked interesting. I held up the cover to show the author’s name and said “Carl’s daughter.” She understood, knowing of my admiration for Carl Sagan.

Two more that might just do for you:
Billy Connolly's Route 66
Library Cat : observations of a thinking cat

Been a bit quiet lately. Mrs H and I are in Ayr in Scotland, and she is finding the heat (!) very trying. (It’s about 28 degrees outside, a really gorgeous day, but she doesn’t handle heat well.) The wifi in our hotel room is a bit flaky but I had to say something about the library book I was reading before we left Bicester.

This was Miraculous Mysteries, a British Library Crime Classic, a collection of short stories containing “impossible murders” (except that some stories have no actual murder—and despite the subtitle, not necessarily even any actual crime). There are stories by quite a few of the luminaries of the classic detective story, including Conan Doyle, R Austin Freeman and G K Chesterton. Many of them rely on infernal engines of the kind that almost did for Indiana Jones and test our credulity more than a bit. The Conan Doyle story even manages a disappearing train (and although it’s not a Holmes story there’s a hat-tip to the line about “when you have eliminated the impossible …”). The ones that involve ingenious traps I found, not exactly tedious, but unmemorable. There’s one by Michael Innes that seems to be only a build-up to Appleby’s pun in the last line.

The best stories in the book are the last three, respectively by “Edmund Crispin”, Dorothy L Sayers, and Margery Allingham. The Crispin story has Professor Gervase Fen and a disappearing train driver—the train remains firmly in its place. This story is no more implausible than any other who-dun-it, which is, I think, a good thing. The Sayers story I thought the best in the book, and interesting because the crime story is sort of incidental to a bit of a character study of Lord Peter Wimsey.

The setup is that in a mood of great high spirits immediately after the birth of his and Harriet’s first child, Peter encounters a bobby in the street outside Wimsey’s London house. The bobby is actually off duty but is wandering the streets, very depressed because he has apparently seen the aftermath of a serious crime, has reported it to his sergeant, has been disbelieved because the story is all wrong and the evidence has disappeared, and the sergeant has accused the bobby of being drunk on duty. So Peter, in his high spirits, invites the bobby in and they sink a couple of bottles of Peter’s champagne together. And of course in the morning Peter solves the mystery, vindicating the bobby’s good standing with the sergeant.

The last story, by Margery Allingham, has Mr Campion in it. A young married couple has apparently disappeared in classic Marie Celeste fashion—teapot still warm on the breakfast table, and so on—when a family member pops in at 7:30 or so one morning. After some poking around, Mr Campion makes a suggestion as to what has happened, which of course proves to be correct. His reason? “I just don’t care for relatives who pop in at seven thirty in the morning.”

118 "seems to be only a build-up to Appleby’s pun in the last line"
Sounds like Isaac Asimov's ultra-short short stories, which were effectively of the shaggy-dog variety leading up to an excruciating pun.

>119 hfglen: I seem to recall that Arthur C Clarke was known to do this too—I remember that in one of his short stories a star cruiser of the US Space Force encountered a black hole and the only identifiable debris was “one star-mangled spanner”.

Just been up to Glasgow on the train and visited the Voltaire and Rousseau Bookshop. This is a secondhand bookshop of the kind you thought was extinct—crammed tight with books organised in that there are shelf labels but what’s on the shelf has only minimal connection with the label; books piled on the floor; and so on. It would fit right in in Hay-on-Wye. No sign of either Voltaire or Rousseau but perhaps I needed to have looked a bit harder. I found a couple of things though, one of them a collection of critical views of Gerard Manley Hopkins including a quotation from Charles Williams’ introduction to the Collected Poems of 1930. Another was a complete edition of the poems of A S J Tessimond, who wrote a poem that was in one of my school anthologies and has stuck with me ever since:

Cats no less liquid than their shadows
Offer no angles to the wind.
They slip, diminished, neat through loopholes
Less than themselves; will not be pinned

To rules or routes for journeys; counter
Attack with non-resistance; twist
Enticing through the curving fingers
And leave an angered empty fist.
They wait obsequious as darkness
Quick to retire, quick to return;
Admit no aim or ethics; flatter
With reservations; will not learn

To answer to their names; are seldom
Truly owned till shot or skinned.
Cats no less liquid than their shadows
Offer no angles to the wind.

The bookshop sounds like something out of a dream. And I loved that poem until I hit the "shot or skinned" bit! That phrase has not aged well.

>122 clamairy: Tessimond is pretty obscure now, never having been part of the literary mainstream. According to the introduction, he wasn’t a cat lover or a lover of any kind of animal. But isn’t the first couplet magnificent, just considered as a description? Good enough that it’s stuck with me for, at a rough calculation, 57 years.

>123 haydninvienna: Yes, 98% of it is wonderful. 🐈‍⬛

>121 haydninvienna:
It is a long time since I was in a bookshop like that. I do not know of any like that now.

I am no lover of poetry generally, but I like that one.

>118 haydninvienna: >121 haydninvienna: Sounds like a great trip!

>122 clamairy: There is a bookshop in Washington DC near a large weekend outdoor market that is just like that. Books in every room up to the ceiling, books on the stairs, books in the bathrooms, books in the basement.

>126 Karlstar: Sounds wonderful.

I'm very partial to The Book Barn in Niantic, CT. I've only been there once for a Green Dragon meetup, but I plan to go back. It's dangerous... https://www.bookbarnniantic.com/explore-the-store

We took a day trip to Bellingham, WA a couple of months ago and stumbled upon Henderson Books. Quite the place. I could easily have spent the entire day there. I am no facebooker but for those who have an account, their FB page might be worth a peek.

>125 pgmcc: My favourite bookshop like that seems to have been killed by the lockdowns. It is now listed as "permanently closed".

ETA: When I was able to visit regularly (every month or so), we had reached the stage where the owner used to put aside books that he thought I might want, and produce then when I greeted him.

It is a pity that I never had the chance to explain why I stopped coming.

>121 haydninvienna: Whenever I get to Glasgow again I will have to make a pilgrimage to Voltaire and Rousseau. It sounds fantastic! Love the cat poem too.

>130 Sakerfalcon: I'm hoping that the Glasgow bid succeeds for Worldcon in 2024. Paul and I both took early-bird memberships at Dublin...

>131 Maddz: I am right there with you.

>121 haydninvienna: It's an easy walk from the Kelvinbridge subway station. There's another shop called thistle books close by, but I didn't try that one.

>131 Maddz:, >132 pgmcc: Future Green Dragon meet-up?

>134 Sakerfalcon: That sounds like a plan.

>134 Sakerfalcon: Oh yes...

I’m in. Anytime when travel restrictions are lifted. I. Am. Serious.

>137 Bookmarque: Scotland will also give you tremendous photography opportunities, both city-scape and landscape. I can imagine your adding a few days to travel north of Glasgow. It would be well worth your while.

Back to the books, momentarily.

I've picked up 3 of Sarah Caudwell's "Hilary Tamar" mysteries (there are only 4, and the Oxfordshire library system seems to have 3 of them). Hilary Tamar is a Professor of Mediaeval Law at the fictitious St George's College, Oxford. He/she (gender is never specified) has an association with a group of junior barristers at 62 New Square chambers (also fictitious) at Lincoln's Inn (not fictitious). With Hilary as the principal investigator, they investigate various murders in a way that I cannot imagine any real barrister of Lincoln's Inn would ever do. I have now read 2 of them: Thus Was Adonis Murdered and The Shortest Way to Hades. I still have The Sirens Sang of Murder to go. The books are told partly by Professor Tamar in first person, and partly by one or another of the barristers in improbably long letters (the books predate the age of mobile phones and the internet).

I'm really not sure what to make of these. Justice Robert Bork of the US Supreme Court apparently thought they were wonderful. But for me Hilary Tamar sounds rather too much like I imagine Jeeves would, if Jeeves were a senior academic and not a servant. (Or, as my master solicitor once said to me, he/she writes like a judge.) The juniors sometimes sound like Bertie Wooster. I've seen the wit and lightness of touch praised. Well, I suppose so. The murders happen offstage and there is no significant violence (although Professor Tamar comes close to getting his/her throat cut in The Shortest Way to Hades). The actual working-out of the plots is well enough done, although after the sheltered life I've led, I find some of the situations a little too outrageous to be real. But I suppose that's fiction.

>139 haydninvienna: I never read beyond the first in that series. It didn't appeal to me for the same reasons you listed. To be honest, I never realized there was a question about gender. Possibly it would have been more interesting if I had, but it isn't interesting enough for me to read another one.

>140 MrsLee: Out of curiosity, which gender did you assume?

>140 MrsLee: I’ve seen the books praised on LT before but don’t remember where. The reminder that Professor Tamar’s gender is left open came from Wikipedia. And >141 -pilgrim-: although you didn’t ask the question of me, I haven’t formed any clear idea whether Prof T is a he or a she, and in the end decided it didn’t matter. All the barristers are gendered explicitly.

>141 -pilgrim-: It's been a very long time, but I think I thought female. Can't tell you why though. All that is left in my memory is that the book was unsatisfactory to me and I wasn't going to try another.

>142 haydninvienna: I didn't ask your opinion because you had noted that it could be either.
I was curious because MrsLee had said that she had not realised that the gender was not given, and so I wondered what has given her a specific impression of gender for a character with a unisex name.

Another book from the Bicester library: The Bookseller’s Tale by Martin Latham, who is or was the manager of Waterstone’s Canterbury branch. This is about our relationship with books, and it is a very, very dangerous book. Serious risk of your wishlist exploding and you spending all your hard-earned cash on travelling to obscure bookshops and libraries. On page 3 he has a story about A S Byatt coming into the shop in Canterbury to buy one of Pterry’s titles, and saying how she loved them but couldn’t be seen buying them in London.

Also lots of stories about people who write in the margins, and I was rather horrified to find that it is or was common, when old books were re-bound, to trim the margins to remove all the marginalia, or even worse to bleach the marginalia out.

And yet another: I Shot the Buddha by Colin Cotterill. This is one of a series about Dr Siri Paiboun, a coroner in Laos under the Pathet Lao. I’d heard of them around LT but never encountered them in the wild. Much better than Professor Tamar, even if I did have trouble keeping the names straight. Not quite your standard crime novel though, even apart from the exotic setting. There’s spirit possession and Dr Siri has the ability to travel between the worlds. Cotterill warns you that “For those of you who like your mysteries dull and earthly, this is not the tome for you.”. Fair enough.

>144 -pilgrim-: it is possible that I assumed female because although I know men can carry the name of Hilary, I have only known a female with that name. Gender neutral names are not a novelty to me, since mine is such, but certain names such as Leslie, Hilary and Marion are a rarity for men in the areas I have lived. One's mind tends to jump to the familiar if there is nothing to direct it otherwise.

Written on the Body by Jeannette Winterson was about a person having an affair with a married woman. The name and gender of the person was never revealed. The emotional roller-coaster the person experienced was very well presented.

>147 MrsLee: So it was a frequency response, rather than anything in the character's behaviour?
Fair enough. I have known 1 Marion (male) and 1 Marian (female), 2 Leslies (male) and 1 Lesley (female) but no Hilarys, so I was trying to work what made me expect male - whether there was an eminent Hilary with a relevant career path, perhaps? But Sir Hilary Beckles is all I can up with...
I thought if I asked without explaining at the time, then if it was a similar mental association for you then the question would trigger it again.

>145 haydninvienna: Oh, you might have scored a hit with that one. Except it is not available to borrow as an ebook. I will have to do some more snooping.

Got that PT-17 doing aerobatics outside my window again ...

>151 haydninvienna: I don't and it makes me sad!

And in other other news: Mrs H and I are in London for our first Prom this year. (City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra with Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducting, playing symphonies by Ruth Gipps, Thomas Adès and Brahms. Fabulous.) We went into a restaurant just around the corner for dinner and the waitress spilt a beer and I got splashed a little. No big deal and we laughed it off but she was extremely embarrassed. Went back this morning for breakfast and she’s behind the bar. First thing she said when she saw us was “Hey, it’s the gentleman I spilt beer on”! Never mind, the food was good (and by London standards not outrageously expensive) even though the service had its moments.

Second Prom! This one was the Philharmonia Orchestra with Paavo Järvi conducting, and Víkingur Ólafsson playing the Bach F minor keyboard concerto and the Mozart piano concerto no. 24. Fabulously good. Then to Prokofiev "Classical" symphony and the Shostakovich 9th. Sounds like a rather weird program but it actually worked well. My only problem was that I was right up in the "gods" at the top of the Albert Hall, and the acoustics seem to do funny things up there, like I was hearing some of the notes twice. I replayed the concert on the BBC iPlayer and it was perfectly fine from their recording position.

I have my third Prom early in September, the Bach St Matthew Passion. I originally had a seat (Mrs H won't go to this one) up in the same area, but I'm kind of funny about the St Matthew Passion, so yesterday morning I looked at the website again and sprang ₤40 for a seat down in the stalls.

I'm glad you are getting to go to some of the Proms. I probably won't this year, although St Matthew Passion is tempting.

>155 Sakerfalcon: If you feel like the Passion might be a good idea (and I agree that it should be), better decide soon—there's not many decent places left.

I'm not sure what to make of this. Because I have an occasional need to open plastic bags while I'm not at home, I ordered a little gadget from Amazon. The gadget is a teardrop-shaped plastic oval with a small ceramic point at the tip—"small" meaning about 0.5 mm high, if that. While I was working an hour or so ago, and our cleaning lady Becky was here, I heard Becky talking to someone at the front door. Didn't pay a great deal of notice, but it was my little cutter being delivered. Becky had to sign for it and state her age. I know there's laws here about knife crime, and that I can't publicly carry a blade more than a certain length*, but having to sign for a ceramic point less than a millimetre high is a bit over the top.

* 3 inches, apparently.

>157 haydninvienna: That's ridiculous!

>158 Karlstar: I wouldn't go so far as "ridiculous", actually. "Comical" maybe. I imagine Amazon's logic is that if it has an edge it's a knife. Simpler than indulging in casuistry about whether a particular edged tool is legal or not. Thinks: I wonder what they do about chisels? Screwdrivers (which are certainly capable of being used as weapons)?

Current reading: not a lot. Like maddz, I've been in a bit of a slump. But I did read The Religious Case against Belief by James P Carse. This is not quite what the title suggests. Carse is an academic in the field of religious studies and his basic idea is that there is a distinction between a religion and a belief system. A religion has a communitas which is incessantly studying and debating its central mystery. A belief system has a central authority which is absolute. And that is as far as I'm going to go, partly because of Pub rules and partly because I have no stomach at all for controversy.

I read a few golden age mysteries a while back. Dorothy Sayers stands up still; Freeman Wills Crofts does not. But I was browsing the back pages of Ask.Metafilter and found this: https://ask.metafilter.com/299386/An-Annotated-Michael-Innes.
Well, there is an annotated Alice (by the late and sadly very much missed Martin Gardner) and an annotated Sherlock Holmes (by William S Baring-Gould). "Michael Innes" is probably not quite such a luminary as Lewis Carroll or Arthur Conan Doyle, but still, I read a few of them many years ago and at least one of them has left a trace: Lament for a Maker. If I'm remembering it correctly, it has a Scots laird who was prone to wandering the halls of his ancestral castle quoting the Scots poet William Dunbar (hence the title, which is that of one of Dunbar's poems*).

The Ask.Metafilter post mentions the book Myself and Michael Innes by J I M Stewart, who wrote novels under the pen-name "Michael Innes" as well as his own name. Stewart was an academic, successively at Leeds University, Adelaide University, Queen's University Belfast, and Christ Church, Oxford. He managed to write something like 40 novels over the course of his life, most of which are detective stories. So I bought a copy of Myself and Michael Innes: A Memoir and have now read (most of) it—I skipped the interpolated bits of previously unpublished writing.

As "verstegan" says in the Ask.Metafilter post, it's an odd book. It doesn't pretend to be a full autobiography. His wife appears only marginally, and his children hardly at all, although there are pictures. Nor do we learn much about his academic career. J R R Tolkien appears a couple of times—Tolkien apparently had something to do with Stewart getting his first academic job at Leeds, although Tolkien had left for Oxford before Stewart took up the job at Leeds; and of course they overlapped somewhat at Oxford although they were in different colleges. Other academics appear whose names might be familiar, such as F R Leavis. But most of the interesting stuff is about Innes' detective, Inspector Appleby, and why Stewart chose to write detective novels rather than "real" ones. Some interesting observations about the art of the detective story and the reasons why Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie are still regarded as masters of the form, despite their undistinguished prose.

As to the idea of an annotated Innes, I found 3 of them at the Bicester library this afternoon, none of which I've read. I'll flick through and see how much of the literary references I can pick up. I'm a little troubled by Stewart's own prose, which occasionally veers off into what Fowler calls "polysyllabic humour". Stewart wrote the last (I think) volume of the Oxford History of English Literature, of which C S Lewis wrote one of the earlier ones. If I can find a copy of Eight Modern Writers** by Stewart, it will be interesting to compare his prose with that of Lewis. I own 2 copies of the Lewis one.

ETA that I should have quoted this from the Wikipedia article about Stewart:

Julian Symons identified Innes as one of the "farceurs"—crime writers for whom the detective story was "an over-civilized joke with a frivolity which makes it a literary conversation piece with detection taking place on the side"—and described Innes's writing as being "rather in the manner of Peacock strained through or distorted by Aldous Huxley". His mysteries have also been described as combining "the elliptical introspection ... of a Jamesian character's speech, the intellectual precision of a Conradian description, and the amazing coincidences that mark any one of Hardy's plots".

I enjoy Peacock. We'll see.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lament_for_the_Makaris, with a link to the full text.

**The eight modern writers are Thomas Hardy, Henry James, G B Shaw, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, W B Yeats, James Joyce and D H Lawrence. The book was published in 1963.

>159 haydninvienna: "The philosophy department of the Cowley Motor Works"

Wasn't that one of Leavis'?

>160 Maddz: I’d say it was Leavis. Leavis didn’t have much time for Oxford—Stewart mentions that Leavis reviewed Eight Modern Writers as being “in the Oxford tradition”, and didn’t mean it as a compliment.

In the Albert Hall for the St Matthew Passion. More later but just wanted to say that the program for this performance is a small work of art in itself. In particular it has the text in both German and English, which you don’t always get.

>162 haydninvienna: Enjoy.

>163 pgmcc: Thanks Peter. I did, very much. And “Mache dich, mein Herze rein” got me between wind and water just like it does every time.

Sakerfalcon, did you end up going?

>165 Sakerfalcon: I didn't as choir practice has resumed and now there are so few of us I can't really miss a week even for St Matthew Passion. I'm glad you enjoyed it. And yes, I always appreciate when the parallel texts are given.

I see I haven’t been here for a bit. I’ve been reading Michael Innes, as I hinted above.

But first: one of the things I’ve learned to love late in life is choral music. KUSC plays Morten Lauridsen’s music quite a bit and I was just hearing a performance of his “Sure on this Shining Night”, which is a setting of a poem by James Agee. So of course I had to find a text. Here it is:

Sure on this shining night
Of star made shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.
The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.
Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wand'ring far
alone
Of shadows on the stars.

Pity it’s no longer true that high summer holds the earth, and we are now entering the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Beautiful all the same.

As to Michael Innes and Appleby, I’ve now read 4 of them, including the first, Death at the President’s Lodging, about a murder in a college of an un-named university which looks an awful lot like Oxford (and can’t be too far away—there is a bit of the action in which a number of nearby real small towns or villages are mentioned, including Bicester). My goodness, what an intensely complex plot! An actual murder, an actual burglary and at least three academic fellows each thinking another of them is the murderer and trying to throw suspicion where they think it ought to fall, giving inconsistent accounts to Appleby all of which are true. Incidentally, this was a kindle book, obviously set from a scanned and OCRed text, and there are a few obvious OCR artefacts.

Another is A Family Affair. Appleby, now retired, knighted, living in some style with his wife (who is of the lesser nobility—now where have I seen that, retired copper now knighted and marrying a titled lady—Innes got there before Pterry did) investigates a series of bizarre art frauds mostly for personal interest. Lady Appleby and younger son Bobby join in and play essential parts in the investigation. This one is memorable chiefly for its rather startling ending, almost as if Innes had painted himself into a corner and simply decided to have the fraudsters accidentally kill themselves rather than write a more fitting ending. I have no idea, though, what a more fitting ending might have looked like.

As to literary references: yes, there are rather a lot. I’m sort of flirting with the idea of an “annotated Appleby”, just for fun, although how many Appleby books and short stories are there? If I do, though, I’ll have to see if I can get hold of the Gollancz or Penguin versions, to make sure of a reliable text, and reliable page references.

>166 haydninvienna: I'll have to find a recording of the Lauridsen setting of Sure on this shining night. I'm familiar with the one by Samuel Barber which is just sublime. Thanks for the earworm!

>166 haydninvienna: I have to admit I don't know the Barber one. I'll look it up--pretty sure it's on iTunes.

KUSC is largely responsible for awakening my interest in choral music. They do a show from 0700 to 0900 Los Angeles time on Sunday (1500 to 1700 here, at the moment) called A Joyful Noise, which tends to run Lauridsen fairly often. KUSC is an offshoot of the University of Southern California, where Lauridsen is a professor. KUSC is easy to find on the net.

Just in case anyone is interested: a while back I mentioned the Extinguished Countries Project, and praised their first book (https://www.librarything.com/topic/331066#7522632). I had an email from them saying that the first print run of the book has sold out and they are reprinting it. Rightly so. If you're interested, check my post linked to above—there's a web reference there.

Sorry, just to save some clicking, the Extinguished Countries Project.

EATA that it’s the Italian version that’s sold out. I would still encourage you to look at the website, since they are now considering what the next one will be.

I'm being a bit quiet, aren't I?

Just to note that Steven Pinker has a new book: Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. Pinker is pretty much an auto-buy for me and I've ordered a copy from Coles bookshop in Bicester. Should have it tomorrow.

>170 haydninvienna: I have a couple of Pinker's books but have yet to get around to them.

>171 pgmcc: I have nearly all of Pinker's popular books (and have read all that I have). I know you have other reading stuff going on: I did buy The Bookbinder's Daughter.

-pilgrim- started her autumn topic with a poem by Carl Sandburg—interesting and less obvious than Keats' "Ode to Autumn". So just out of curiosity I went looking for other poems on autumn and found this:

Pleasant Sounds
The rustling of leaves under the feet in woods and under
hedges;
The crumpling of cat-ice and snow down wood-rides,
narrow lanes and every street causeway;
Rustling through a wood or rather rushing, while the wind
halloos in the oak-toop like thunder;
The rustle of birds' wings startled from their nests or flying
unseen into the bushes;
The whizzing of larger birds overhead in a wood, such as
crows, puddocks, buzzards;
The trample of robins and woodlarks on the brown leaves.
and the patter of squirrels on the green moss;
The fall of an acorn on the ground, the pattering of nuts on
the hazel branches as they fall from ripeness;
The flirt of the groundlark's wing from the stubbles –
how sweet such pictures on dewy mornings, when the
dew flashes from its brown feathers.
by John Clare

Interesting in how much it sounds like an early attempt at Hopkins's "sprung rhythm". Also, in his old age my mate Haydn wrote an oratorio called The Seasons, based on some of Clare's poetry.

ETA: Ack! Failing memory. Haydn's oratorio was based on The Seasons by James Thomson, not John Clare.

Here's another:
Plums

Gillian Clarke

When their time comes they fall
without wind, without rain.
They seep through the trees’ muslin
in a slow fermentation.

Daily the low sun warms them
in a late love that is sweeter
than summer. In bed at night
we hear heartbeat of fruitfall.

The secretive slugs crawl home
to the burst honeys, are found
in the morning mouth on mouth,
inseparable.

We spread patchwork counterpanes
for a clean catch. Baskets fill,
never before such harvest,
such a hunters’ moon burning

the hawthorns, drunk on syrups
that are richer by night
when spiders pitch
tents in the wet grass.

This morning the red sun
is opening like a rose
on our white wall, prints there
the fishbone shadow of a fern.

The early blackbirds fly
guilty from a dawn haul
of fallen fruit. We too
breakfast on sweetnesses.

Soon plum trees will be bone,
grown delicate with frost’s
formalities. Their black
angles will tear the snow.

I have to thank -pilgrim- for getting me looking for these. "Red sun ... opening like a rose"."Frost's formalities". (squeals like a kid with delight).

>172 haydninvienna: I hope you enjoy it.

>173 haydninvienna:, >174 haydninvienna: Nice finds.

>169 haydninvienna: I see you are determined to talk me into buying that one!

>177 Karlstar: Not just you. Everyone.

A while ago I was reading in the history of the Holy Roman Empire and the logistics of pre-modern warfare. Today I accidentally found an analysis of the siege of Minas Tirith in a series of blog posts by a military historian (link is to the first of 6 posts). The blog also discussed A Game of Thrones but I'm not much interested in that. TL/DR: the film sacrifices plausibility for cinematic effect, but Tolkien, as a reader of history and a former soldier, gets it mostly right.

>179 haydninvienna: I could hug you for that. Military history AND my favourite author combined. *squeeee*

>179 haydninvienna: A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry - thought I recognised the description! He's also done a series on A Game of Thrones (the TV series) with reference to the Dothraki, and is also looking at the various historical god-games.

Be warned - the site is a rabbit hole...

>179 haydninvienna: Thanks for that!!

>180 -pilgrim-: >182 Karlstar: always glad to help.

>181 Maddz: Rabbit hole? Yes, er, I noticed.

As noted elsewhere, Mrs H and I have been in Vienna for the last few days. It’s been somewhat of an adventure—the Hotel Ambassador is on Neuer Markt, which used to be an open square with a huge fountain in the middle. Neuer Markt is closed because it’s a building site—for a new underground railway station, we understand—and you can’t drive a taxi up to the front door of the Ambassador. The back door is on Kärntnerstrasse, a pedestrianised shopping precinct. So no taxis to either door. Our ride from the airport dropped us, without warning, about 200 metres away, leaving us—Mrs H with her limited mobility and me with several pieces of luggage—to struggle the rest of the way round the building site. The Ambassador appears to be half empty. It used to do one of the best hotel breakfasts I know of, but it’s now down to a severely limited full-service “buffet” of simple stuff. No lunch or dinner. OTOH, Café Mozart and Plachutta and all the coffee houses are still open so we haven’t starved.

Anyway, I’ve been out and about after Mrs H gets tired of shopping, and the celebrated grocery Julius Meinl is back in the Graben, so I’ve re-stocked on Powidl (look it up: fantastic on toast) and bought some books:*

Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson, which I'v had on my LT wishlist since forever
A Little History of Poetry by John Carey
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell (whose At the Existentialist Cafe I read and enjoyed a while ago)
Truth: A Brief History of Total Bullsh*t by Tom Phillips
(all from Shakespeare & Co), and
Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie from Frick am Graben.

The purchase of the last two may have been influenced by my current read, How to Make the World Add Up by Tim Harford. Tim is a British national treasure. One of my better memories is going to a book do in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, for Randall Munroe's book How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems, and finding that Tim was the emcee. The subtitle of Tim's new book is "Ten rules for thinking differently about numbers", and of course he delivers exactly that. You may remember a little book called How to Lie with Statistics, by Darrell Huff. Huff was an advertising man. Tim tells the story that Huff was once a sort of hero of his because Huff's book could be read as an exposé of the ways in which advertisers use and abuse statistics. Turns out though that Huff practised what he "preached"—he was one of the early practitioners of manufactured doubt about the statistical connection between smoking and lung cancer. Tim also adds some new bits (new to me anyway) to the account of Florence Nightingale's pioneering work as a statistician. All of course with Tim's exemplary clarity, wit and style. Highly recommended.

*ETA everything from here on: I started on the iPad and then realised that putting in a bunch of italics and so on would be easier to do the laptop.

>184 haydninvienna:
Sorry to hear about your 200m drop-off.

I second your appraisal of Tim Harford. I have How to Make the World Add Up on the Kindle awaiting attention. I have been a fan of the content of Darrell Huff's How to Lie with Statistics since I was at college. One thing that stands out in my memories of that book is the sign he described as being displayed in a pharmacy: "We dispense with accuracy!" I was not aware of his smoking and lung cancer deception. He must have been of a like mind as Hans Eysenck.

I also have At the Existentialist Cafe. Your comments reassure me that it will be a good read.

I was at a one-day conference in London in 2018. Tim Harford was the key-note speaker, and they cleverly kept him to the end so everyone would stay. His presentation was a wonderful experience. As you say, his wit is wonderful, and his comments are insightful and thought provoking. He is now on my buy-their-books-as-soon-as-they-are-pubished list.

>185 pgmcc: I remember Hans Eysenck also.

And on a sort of related topic: read the chart in the middle of this page: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/epidemics-infectious-disease-polio-flu-vacci... and weep for our stupidity. Human beings can be so brilliantly clever, and so crashingly stupid.

Just to get back to Mundania, we are now at an airport hotel for overnight because we are off at sparrow-chirp tomorrow. Getting out of Vienna, with foreknowledge of the problems, and help from the Ambassador's staff, was ever so much easier.

>186 haydninvienna:
Fascinating article. Thank you for sharing. The Smallpox write-up is particularly chilling.

I am of an age that I had primary school frieds who were in leg braces having had Polio. Thankfully we do not have that to deal with these days.

Safe flight home. I hope the ariport hotel is reasonably comfortable.

>187 pgmcc: Thanks Peter. I too remember children in leg braces, and my parents talking about whooping cough and diphtheria. Most doctors now have never seen a case of either.

In fact the airport hotel was quite comfortable, and it gave us one of the best lunches we had in Vienna (which is saying something).

>187 pgmcc: I was in primary school for both the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines. The former was administered by our GP, but for the latter a group came to the school. We kids were all lined up in the playground and they went along the lines squirting goo into the backs of our throats. Twice. Smallpox was every three years at the district surgeon's, and you got a yellow booklet you kept safe and had to show with a passport if you went to Swaziland or Lourenço Marques for a weekend. If you were really lucky and adventurous, and planned a trip to Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) or points north, you needed an entry in that booklet for yellow fever; the shot lasted -- still does AFAIK -- ten years. There was a lad in my class in high school who went around in leg braces on crutches because of polio.

>188 haydninvienna: Whooping cough was still on the go when I was a child. It was something our parents were always worrying we would get.

I am delighted the airport hotel was so good. My experience of airport hotels would not live up to that standard.

>189 hfglen:
We used to get our polio vaccine annually in primary school. It would be dropped onto a sugar-lump.

In 1988 I had to go to Ghana. I had to get my suite of shots and they were recorded in the little yellow booklet which I had to keep with my passport.

>189 hfglen: >191 pgmcc: Now it’s all in the cloud keyed to your passport, for Covid at least. We had to get vax certificates and I took copies with me everywhere—cafes and restaurants and the Belvedere asked for them. Serious masks as well. Coming back we had to fill in a passenger locator form on line and theoretically could have been required to produce a printed copy—might be difficult away from home! The passport hall at LHR T5 was full of signs warning you to be ready to produce passport, visa, vax cert and passenger locater form, but in fact we just showed our passports and that was all. I think the Border Force officer had it all on the screen in front of him.

And now we’ve done our Day 2 Covid tests. Order them on line, they get delivered by mail, you take samples by swab, and return by mail. The really remarkable thing about all this is that the infrastructure to deal with it has just sprung out of the ground. Not really, of course, but someone has been working awfully hard in the background to set all this in motion. BoJo and his lot did the smartest thing ever—basically looked pretty but got out of the way and let the professionals get on with it. God give thanks for the NHS.

>193 haydninvienna: Tests came back negative, just in case anyone was wondering. And I got my Covid booster yesterday afternoon. We are now thinking about a long-delayed trip to Australia. Quarantine is no longer required for those vaccinated, but the testing! We would have to have a PCR test (which cannot be self-administered) within 72 hours before departure; tests at (IIRC) 1 day and 7 days after arrival (in New South Wales, which is where we will go; the requirements for other States and Territories may be different); and then the 2 days after arrival tests similar to what we have just done. Tests in NSW are free; the ones done in the UK can cost up to £100 a go.

We might not have to quarantine in Oz, but I see we would have to self-isolate while waiting for the test results. Oh brother.

>194 haydninvienna: Ugh. Do you think we're ever going to get back to some kind of normal for international travel? :o( Or will I be too old to travel by the time that happens?

>195 clamairy: "too old to travel"

Limited by the airlines rather than your actual fitness, I think. When I was a student I knew an old gent who could out-walk and exhaust us young 'uns deep into his 80s. That surely gives clamairy a good half-century yet!

I am not comfortable sitting for hours at a time anymore. That's my biggest issue. Though I survived the flight from JFK to Hawaii and back two years ago. LOL

>195 clamairy: Goodness knows. I certainly don't. I can still sit for hours on end, though I may not enjoy it much.

>198 haydninvienna: I wish they could just fly me while I slept.

Latest acquisition (which I do not intend to read straight through): The Lawyer's Style Guide by Professor Peter Butt. My former colleague Manuel, who I've mentioned here before, used to work for Professor Butt at Sydney University Law School, and tells me that he went with Professor Butt and a few other of their colleagues to a resort in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, last weekend for a get-together. Apparently it was agreed that the book passes the "brick test".

>200 haydninvienna: The "brick text"?

>201 -pilgrim-: As being the size or mass of a brick.

>202 haydninvienna: And, like a brick, forms a firm foundation?

>203 -pilgrim-: Possibly for a very small house. Or a solid drafting technique.

In the November thread I mentioned the "kingly gift" that Katherine and Eddie gave me. Here's some pictures:
The box:

A random opening:

An illustration:


AND IT HAS AN INDEX! When did you last see a fantasy book with an index?

>205 haydninvienna: That is so beautiful! What does the Elvish along the page edges say?

>205 haydninvienna: Very nice!

>205 haydninvienna: Drool...!

>205 haydninvienna:
What >208 Maddz: said.

>206 20thEagle: I have to admit I wasn't even sure which way up to read it! But a quick check of the index (it has an index! I'm still marvelling at that!) tells me that the incident where Gandalf heats Bilbo's ring in his fire to reveal the writing on it is on page 50, and a look at the page shows me that the Elvish is indeed:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

>205 haydninvienna: What a treasure! Love the edging. Books like that are a pleasure to hold and feel, then you get to read them!

>205 haydninvienna: - lovely!

>205 haydninvienna: How beautiful! A kingly gift indeed.

>205 haydninvienna: What everybody else said. Enjoy it!

Been quiet for a few days and not reading, but in the Bicester library this afternoon I found The Nature of Middle-Earth, by J R R Tolkien, edited by Carl F Hostetter. It’s billed as “Late Writings on the Lands, Inhabitants and Metaphysics of Middle-Earth”. What it is, apparently, is a collection of digressions by Tolkien in his papers on linguistic matters. We’ll see.

ETA I’ve already spotted this:

… ere Arda ends the Eldalië on earth will have become as spirits invisible to mortal eyes, unless they will to be seen by some among Men into whose minds they may enter directly.

The almost-invisible beings that C S Lewis’s “Ransom” encounters on Mars were the eldils.

>215 haydninvienna: Ooh. That is a link I did not know about AT ALL.

>215 haydninvienna: ah, there’s no end to the musings of super nerds…

Popping by to say hello again to everyone.
Hello!

Still partway through moving house, so I’ve had a very tiring week. I’ve got today and tomorrow off work, which my partner does not, so I get to rest up a while :)

>217 TokenGingerKid:
Good to see you here again. I hope the house move is going well. The weather has not been the best for such an enterprise.

Looking forward to reading some you your own musings.

>217 TokenGingerKid: What Peter said.

>217 TokenGingerKid: Welcome back!

>217 TokenGingerKid: Welcome back!

>205 haydninvienna: That is gorgeous.

>217 TokenGingerKid: Welcome back! And we look forward to more activity.

Trip into Oxford with younger daughter Laura, who has featured here before. I had some time to kill beforehand so went into the British Heart Foundation shop and picked up Robert McCrum’s biography Wodehouse: A Life and Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott. I dipped into a bit of the latter, about the history of sugar-growing and the associated “blackbirding” (not quite slavery but nearly, of Pacific Islanders) in Queensland. (You can still find dark-skinned people in coastal Queensland with Melanesian rather than Aboriginal features.) ETA the two books together cost me the grand sum of £3.50.

In Oxford of course I went to Waterstones …

I’ll post a bit more about what I bought there, but I went in specifically looking for a particular book: Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson. One of the other threads I lurk in on LT is thorold’s threads in Club Read. Unusual man: I gather he is a retired Brit who lives in the Netherlands somewhere and reads copiously in at least four languages. I visit his threads with some awe and pick up suggestions from them. Dorling’s book is the latest. I think I’m now far enough away from Brexit that I can read about it, and it helps that BoJo got a major kick in the pants at a by-election yesterday.

I also bought N K Jemisin’s The City We Became, and hope to read it eventually …

But almost as soon as I stepped into the shop I saw Index, A History of the and knew I had to have it. Laura didn’t look at me too strangely—she is used to me doing this sort of thing. Good comment from the back of the jacket: “Master the use of the index and you have access to all knowledge.”

>223 haydninvienna:
Hi, Richard.

By coincidence I posted the image below on facebook recently. I think your post warrants the posting of it here.



I suspect Laura will appreciate it.

>224 pgmcc: Exactly so. Thanks Peter.

Little bit of mind-blowing from the book on indexes: a picture of the first ever printed page number in a book. Page numbering had to be invented.

>223 haydninvienna: I will be interested in what you make of Danny Dorling. The last book of his that I read was extremely poorly written (I thought), even though the subject matter was interesting.

>227 -pilgrim-: Might be a while before I get to it though. The TBR is even more banked up than usual. Just as a for-instance, the book I have beside me at the moment is The Next 500 Years by Christopher Mason, which I started back in May (see #84 above).

>223 haydninvienna: I was lucky enough to meet thorold on an LT meetup in Leiden some years ago. He is indeed a very pleasant and interesting fellow.

I hope you enjoy your new acquisitions!

A book that I haven’t actually read recently but found this afternoon after having thought I’d lost it: A Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn. The copy I have is of the Penguin Science Fiction edition from 1966, which is well on the way to losing its acidic battle with time (and the embrittlement of the glue). I read it and was vastly impressed by it 50+ years ago, but I’m not sure how well it would stand up today (although the LT reviews are quite positive). It has produced one permanent effect on me though: Beethoven’s “Waldstein Sonata” figures prominently and I’ve been a bit weird about the Waldstein ever since.

I did finish The Next 500 Years, mentioned in #228. Lots of gee-whiz stuff about manipulating the human genome (and those of other species), and some other tech stuff, but unless someone comes along to extend my lifespan by 500 years I’m not sure why I bothered. Competently enough done, but in the end meh.

ETA I dipped into A Message for Observers a bit—the concert scene, where the Waldstein takes centre stage (literally). Stands up OK. I wish Pangborn had written more about music.

And so this is Christmas Eve. It’s raining. I’m sitting in a big chair with McCrum’s biography of PGW beside me and thinking about getting out the port. Mrs H is in another chair with a Preston & Child thriller. Maybe I’m too lazy to go and get the port …? Anyway, a happy Christmas from us to those who celebrate it, and appropriate good wishes to those who don’t.

>231 haydninvienna: And a Happy Christmas right back to you and Mrs H!

>231 haydninvienna: Merry Christmas, to you and Mrs H. Ignore the rain and get the port. You know you want to.

Merry Christmas, all. I was just now putting out seed and mealworms for the birds and there was a hen blackbird on the paving. (The table where the feeders are is on a paved square about 12 feet each way.) I went out to fill the feeders and she just sat there watching me. She stayed within the paved area until I went inside. Didn’t come and socialise but didn’t seem to be afraid of me either.

>234 haydninvienna: Probably making sure no other bird sneaked in and scarfed up the mealworms. We usually get them sitting on the fence and when we go inside they fly down - Paul scatters some along the edge of the lawn. We had 7 on the lawn earlier this week (usually it’s 7 magpies).

Happy Christmas to all!

Merry Christmas to you and your family.

>236 Karlstar: to you and yours also, Jim.

We’ve had a good Christmas lunch at a local pub, and the pub has a Feline Overlord. I’ll post a picture later when I can struggle upstairs to the computer.

ETA:


Coincidentally, the pub is called the Lion. The waiter told us that the cat lives in one of the neighbouring houses, but just likes to treat the area round the pub ss part of his/her domain.

The cat definitely wanted to talk to me, and had no problem with having his/her picture taken.

And a Merry Christmas to you both.

>238 -pilgrim-: And to you.

>237 haydninvienna: You sure he/she wanted an amicable conversation? That pose looks like winding up for a smack in the kisser…

>240 Maddz: No, definitely amiable. Maybe the weather had something to do with it.

Finally started reading Robert McCrum's biography of P G Wodehouse. Good so far.

A couple of BBs just arrived courtesy of Amazon: first is How to Read a Latin Poem: If you Can't Read Latin yet, a BB from -pilgrim- a while back (see #11 above). Second is Scottish by Inclination by Barbara Henderson. This was discussed by Jackie_K in a thread in the 2021 ROOT Challenge (https://www.librarything.com/topic/333334#7690868). Henderson was born in Germany but moved to Scotland at the age of 19, married a Scot, settled, and became a successful children's writer (it says here). According to the back cover, Henderson discusses the experience of "belonging" and becoming no longer a foreigner. Quotation from the back cover: "Belonging, I am now convinced, can be a choice." I find this interesting and provocative as an Australian who has lived in England, Ireland, Qatar and now England again.

A belated Merry Christmas! I'm glad it was a good one.

Thanks Clam!

Just finished the McCrum biography of P G Wodehouse. Excellent. There’s never likely to be a fuller discussion of the “Berlin broadcasts”, and McCrum gives us a fully rounded, sympathetic view of a very private man, who was also (mostly) very good at presenting a particular image of himself. McCrum is also good on what a master of English prose Wodehouse was. I scored this in the British Heart Foundation bookshop for £1.50, and I’d call that a bargain.

I always recall my mother saying a lot of people didn't like it when he went to the US during the war and 'not doing his bit'. It was seen as 'bad form' on his part.

>245 Maddz: As McCrum tells it, the story of Wodehouse’s arrest by the German army in France, and the subsequent “Berlin broadcasts” unfolds with a kind of tragic inevitability. Given Wodehouse’s character, something of the sort was probably bound to happen.

In fact he didn't go to the US during the war--he spent the war interned as an enemy alien in France and Germany, and only moved permanently to the US in 1947. After the broadcasts, it was made known to him that it would be a very poor idea for him to return to the UK, where he could easily have been tried for treason, and given a guilty verdict could have been hanged (unlikely but possible). So he spent the rest of his life in the United States, and even became an American citizen in his old age.

Despite what I said in the December thread, I didn’t end up reading How to Read a Latin Poem… Instead, having bought the kindle version of The Salmon of Doubt, I am reading Douglas Adams’s introduction to PGW’s last book, Sunset at Blandings. Please if you buy this get the Penguin edition with Adams’s introduction.

Shakespeare? Milton? Keats? How can I possibly mention the author of Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin and Pigs Have Wings in the same breath as these men? He’s not serious!
He doesn’t need to be serious. He’s better than that. He’s up in the stratosphere of what the human mind can do, above tragedy and strenuous thought, where you will find Bach, Einstein, Mozart, Feynmann and Louis Armstrong, in the realms of pure, creative playfulness.

I bought The Salmon … because that passage was quoted in McCrum’s biography.

>247 haydninvienna: Oooo, that's like spooky super power to be able to hit people with book bullets when you haven't even read the book!

For what it may be worth (and I do realize you were reading them awhile back), the mysteries by Michael Innes do tend to be very complex. Personally, those I've read have largely been enjoyable by the literary allusions rather than as logic puzzles.

>248 MrsLee: TBF and give credit for markspersonship where due, it was actually a ricochet from one fired by -pilgrim-, as noted above.

Richard, wishing you a very happy 2022.

>245 Maddz:, >246 haydninvienna:

After reading about the case of Tokyo Rise, I am not so sure that hanging was so unlikely.

My father considered him a traitor and refused to have his books in the house, despite having greatly enjoyed his work pre-war.

Of course, with hindsight, that judgment was too harsh, given the circumstances.

But the Berlin broadcasts made a great impression at the time, and in the popular mind he was lumped together with "Lotd Haw Haw" (whose broadcasts were overtly treasonous) - and who was hanged.

>252 -pilgrim-: That was much the attitude of my mother's aunts. {I know for many years they wouldn't have anything Japanese-made (their only male descendent - my mother's cousin - was killed at Kohima). For some reason, this included cheap post-war biros.}

We had a few Wodehouse books in the house when I was growing up (my sister has them now), but I think they may have come via my father - he was the reader in the family.

I did circle back on How to Read a Latin Poem… and found it pretty interesting. I’m sure that anyone who had a decent school knowledge of Latin would get quite a bit more out of it than I did. I’m now completely convinced that I don’t have enough years left to learn Latin properly, but I now have some sense of how Latin works differently from English. Strange creatures, languages—they evolve, as all living things do. Only complaint I have about the book is that I would have liked more discussion of Lucretius. And that is my final read for 2021. Not a bad reading year—79 books including library books, and a few more started and unfinished. One unfinished one that I must get to soon is The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. Having loved The Night Circus, I’m expecting good things.

Happy new year, everybody. I’ll start a new thread as soon as I come up with a title.

>254 haydninvienna: Happy New Year, Richard.

May this be the year that we actually meet!

>255 -pilgrim-: Wish us both luck. At least the weather is better this morning—first blue sky for what seems like months.