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What book is everyone reading at the moment? Part 2.

ahhell said:
And that it was caused by the guy physically lifting the rod himself!
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I know! I first heard about it back in the late 70s when I was working at a commercial instrumentation and control seller who did a bunch of business both with Argonne and the INEL in Idaho. Everybody there told the story but frankly I never knew if I believed the part about the maintenance worker pulling the control rod out manually until decades later when I could read the documentation which became available on the internet.

The story of the clean-up is also both impressive and harrowing. It wasn't Chernobyl level of course, but those folks went all in to try to make sure they had everything contained.
 
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White Fang by Jack London (1906)

Well, I'm glad I was wise enough to skip the Introduction, coming back to it after I'd finished the book. It gave away the whole goddamn storyline, including the finale. That would have pissed me off to no end. I went into it completely cold, and was glad I did.
My impression upon finishing it was "They're never going to be able to make a movie from this!" due to the near-constant violence and cruelty, both among animals and humans to animals. Lots and lots of blood and injuries described. Imagine my surprise to find it's been made at least five times! I suppose some of those versions have been Disney-fied to make them palatable to viewers. I for one wouldn't care to see a movie that depicts most things in the book.
It's got a little dialogue at the start, then shifts perspective to the main animal's point-of-view and carries it on from there. The talk of "gods" (humans) gets a little tiresome, but I suppose one can only give a limited thought-vocabulary to a canine. Not bad, for a book written almost 100 years ago.
 
The Demon of Unrest, Erik Larson
Larson always provides a vivid popular history, as lively as a good novel, yet thoroughly and well researched. Most of this account is a day-by-day story of how the shelling and surrender of Fort Sumter occurred. Larson mentions that as he was in the middle of researching it, the January 6 insurrection occurred. With that in mind, The Demon of Unrest gives the reader unsettling moments of déjà vu.

The base line of secession included slavery, but also the historical fiction of Sir Walter Scott, a point made by Mark Twain (as Larson acknowledges in an end note). Enormously popular in the South, Scott's tales encouraged plantation owners to imagine themselves as knights in armor defending their castles and their ladies. A century after Scot's death, that concept echoed in the opening scroll of Gone With the Wind, which mentions "a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields . . . Knights and their Ladies Fair . . . Masters and Slaves." Southern gentleman played at a game of rings and heads, threading a series of hanging brass rings with a lance, then beheading a scarecrow with a saber. They dreamed of war as they did so. "Honor" became their idol

And honor could never be besmirched. A code duello dictated that a gentleman had to slaughter anyone, social superior, equal, or inferior, who dared to cast the least shadow on his good name. Larson introduces us to Southern firebrands eager for secession, thirsting for war, mad to create the sense that the South was, and deserved to be, in control of the continent. James Hammond had close relatives who were anti-slavery; not him. Yet his honor is dimmed by his being serially unfaithful to his wife, at one time with four of their nieces at once, later with a slave by whom he fathered numerous children. Edmund Ruffin, elderly, was a plantation owner who persuaded General Beauregard to let him fire the first Federal cannon that began the battle for Fort Sumter. He rode to the battlefield of Manassas astride a cannon, insisted on going to count his victims and lamented that they numbered only fifteen.

Meanwhile, caught in a net of doubts and worries, pestered by importunate office-seekers, a beleaguered Abraham Lincoln did his best merely to cope in the opening days of his presidency. For the rest of his life the sense that he had failed the U.S. soldiers who had staffed Sumter and the entire country through a paralysis brought on by conflicting advice, the ideological conflict of abolitionists and slavers, and the fractured society that seemed ardent to tear civilization apart.

The legacy of divisiveness and hatred still endures. The Demon of Unrest is not only a history of an American turning point. It is a cautionary tale.

Recommended.
 
"The Adventure of the Red Circle," Arthur Conan Doyle
A novelette rather than a novel, this restrained Sherlock Holmes story finds Holmes and Watson drawn into a curious case by a landlady who rented a room to a strangely reclusive tenant, who thereafter never once appears before nor even speaks to his landlady. Inclined to refuse the dull case, Holmes gets pulled into a case involving ciphers, an internationally wanted criminal, and a murder. Not nearly as startling or adventurous as the incident of the Baskerville hound, this still gives the reader a sense of Holmes's methodical methods and of the Holmes/Watson partnership.
 
The House of Godwinsson, the 25th book in the Bobby Owen series by E R Punshon. As much as I enjoyed the earlier books, this felt weak, rushed and contrived. Set in post-war London, Bobby seems to spend all of his time getting into avoidable fisticuffs (and getting shot at), and the very simple plot was secondary to all the bruises.

I was so disappointed that I decided to start anew with Patricia Wentworth's* Miss Silver mysteries, so read the first three: Grey Mask, The Case is Closed and Lonesome Road.
There was nine years between the publication of Grey Mask in 1928 and The Case is Closed in 1937, the intervening years being when Wentworth published the four book Benbow Smith series and ten other standalone full length mysteries, and the improvement in plot and character development reflects her greater experience.

Grey Mask is a standard secret society type mystery (much like Agatha Christie's Seven Dials Mystery which was published the year after Grey Mask) with masked villains, secret meetings, jewel robberies and a plot to murder a beautiful young heiress.

The Case is Closed explores the re-investigation into the case of a man apparently murdered by his nephew. Miss Silver finds the clues that were overlooked or misinterpreted in the original investigation, and the whole thing culminates in a violent showdown in a Glasgow tenement.

In Lonesome Road, a rich woman with a number of disgruntled, greedy family members living in her house (and on her money) receives poison pen letters which escalate to attempts on her life. Are they real, a cover for a much darker plot, or something else? I am sure that I have read another Golden Age book with a similar ending involving a dark cottage and an uncovered well, but it's just out of my memory's reach.

I will draw a veil over House of Godwinsson, and move swiftly on to the 26th Bobby Owen book So Many Doors.

*Patricia Wentworth wrote 69 Golden Age mystery books as well as four historical romance novels. By rights her work should be at least as famous as Agatha Christie's - especially given the fact that the dates of publication suggest that Christie got some plot and character ideas from Wentworth.
 
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The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got that Way, Bill Bryson
Bryson brings his usual breezy but info-packed approach to the history and future (if any) of English. He very swiftly deals with the question of why we even have languages, spends more time on the remote antecedents of English (Germanic) and then takes us through the development of the language.

Anglo-Saxon or Old English wasn't really Anglo, nor was it yet English, but it was on its way. He takes us through Old, Middle (Chaucerian era), and Modern English, telling us how different languages (especially Danish and later French) strongly influenced our language and pointing out how remarkably the verb structure, declensions, and linguistic gender of English simplified themselves. In later years, speakers of English ruthlessly pillaged other languages for new words, mutilated them sometimes, and crammed them right in there with the rest of the estimated 600,000 to 750,000 words that make up our vocabulary. That is unusually large. Many other languages get along with only two hundred thousand or so, and the French now have, I don't remember how many, but they all sound like ong.

Of course, Bryson must discuss the differences between American and British English, having a great time naming all of the barbaric Americanisms that really are Britishisms, having been current during the Colonial Period so the colonists could bring them over with their luggage. I really liked his discussion of dialects—Britain has more than we do, though we cover more of the landscape. There are more linguistic differences between the spoken dialects of a Glaswegian dustman and an Oxford don than between Southern Plantation and Midwestern American speakers. Heck, we can even communicate with most Canadians….

Essays on slang, the evolution of obscenities, and other concerns also are entertaining, and the book winds up with a fun discussion of linguistic play and a brief foray into fears that soon enough the British and Americans will no longer be able to understand each other. That worry was first expressed in 1705. We're still working on it, though.

Very enjoyable.
 
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Odyssey: The Greek Myths Reimagined, Stephen Fry

Not a translation, not a paraphrase, Odyssey is a version of the Homeric epic with a modern tone but a classical Greek setting and plot, plus voluminous notes to explain the significance of various terms, settings, actions, and characters by the mellifluous Stephen Fry.

As he explains in an afterword, he had planned to write the book during the pandemic, but suffered from lethargy and an inability to concentrate for a time. No matter, it's good to have the book now. Fry does not strictly follow the plot line of The Odyssey, but tracks off into sidelines now and then, including the fatal homecoming of Agamemnon and the rough homegoing of Aeneas. He begins with the Greek names for the gods, then shifts to the Roman ones in order to point out how the Greek deities served as templates, but the Romans had slightly blurred perceptions. Thus the Greek Ares is s belligerent but cowardly war god, but Mars is a stern and ultra-heroic god of combat; Athena is a powerful goddess of wisdom and war, but Venus is weaker and softer.

Odyssey does re-tell the Homeric story, though. Its language is modern and—this is Stephen Fry—witty, pointing out absurdities now and then, presenting small tragedies in a sympathetic yet not bathetic tone, and keeping up the action. I think students would enjoy this version of the story, yet I would as a teacher also want them to read a good poetic translation to get the flavor.

Summing up: I liked Stephen Fry's wry, entertaining style and take on the material. Recommend
 
Over the last month, I've been reading every Sherlock Holmes novel I can find and also read them in the correct order. I got almost all of them from a free e-book site, Project Gutenberg. It mostly lets you download kindle copies of novels that are in the public domain, like Moby Dick, La Divina Commedia, War and Peace, etc. etc.

Anyway. the latest one that I was able to get a hold of was Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula. It's part of the The Classified Dossier Series by Christian Klaver (Thank you to whomever suggested this series to me), and the author does a reasonable job in making it fit in with the rest of the Holmes stories, except this one not only turn Bram Stoker's classic novel on it's head, but it also turns Dracula into one of the good guys.

That may seem implausible, but the author does a pretty good in making it even slightly plausible, but the one twist that I didn't see coming (and didn't really like) was...


Dr. Watson's wife (Mary) being turned into a vampire, and in turn, turning the good doctor into one also, but it's never explained how Holmes is able to talk their land lady (Mrs. Hudson) in supplying them with a gallon of blood every day.

Of course, we all know who shows up in the end...

I'm giving this four-out-of-five stars, even with all the crazy twist and turns.


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Terminal List

Had no idea it's now a TV series, too. Was just looking for some kind of action thriller beach read that wasn't just straight trash. This is decently-written, maybe a little on the verbose side. But I'm really picky about that. Other readers may not notice.

The story is basically Death Wish, if Charles Bronson's character is a Navy SEAL, and the people responsible for the deaths of his family are part of a big ol' conspiracy. Fairly straightforward 'righteous undead gets even with those that sent him to hell' story. Reasonable mix of ultraviolence and introspection.

Not quite as good as Lee Child at his best. Waaay better than Lee Child when he's phoning it in. Don't read if you're not into US military protagonists who are obviously written to be on the right side of history, at home and abroad. It's not preachy right wing, but it's also not full of progressive agonizing about clicking foreheads in the middle east.
 
AmyStrange said:
Over the last month, I've been reading every Sherlock Holmes novel I can find and also read them in the correct order. I got almost all of them from a free e-book site, Project Gutenberg. It mostly lets you download kindle copies of novels that are in the public domain, like Moby Dick, La Divina Commedia, War and Peace, etc. etc.

Anyway. the latest one that I was able to get a hold of was Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula. It's part of the The Classified Dossier Series by Christian Klaver (Thank you to whomever suggested this series to me), and the author does a reasonable job in making it fit in with the rest of the Holmes stories, except this one not only turn Bram Stoker's classic novel on it's head, but it also turns Dracula into one of the good guys.

That may seem implausible, but the author does a pretty good in making it even slightly plausible, but the one twist that I didn't see coming (and didn't really like) was...


Dr. Watson's wife (Mary) being turned into a vampire, and in turn, turning the good doctor into one also, but it's never explained how Holmes is able to talk their land lady (Mrs. Hudson) in supplying them with a gallon of blood every day.

Of course, we all know who shows up in the end...

I'm giving this four-out-of-five stars, even with all the crazy twist and turns.


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Saberhagen did a couple of crossover Holmes/Dracula books and there's Estleman's The Adventures of the Sanguinary Count.
 
Agatha said:
The House of Godwinsson, the 25th book in the Bobby Owen series by E R Punshon. As much as I enjoyed the earlier books, this felt weak, rushed and contrived. Set in post-war London, Bobby seems to spend all of his time getting into avoidable fisticuffs (and getting shot at), and the very simple plot was secondary to all the bruises.
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I'm starting Suspects - Nine.
 
There is also Sherlock Holmes vs Count Dracula, by Loren D. Estleman, as well as Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds, by Manly Wade Wellman. I plan to write Sherlock Holmes and the Quest for the Pequod, in which a widowed sperm whale wants Holmes to track down "the one-legged man."
 
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Safe-Keeper said:
So I finished Braiding Sweetgrass, and to be honest I found it a bit too long-winded for me. Interesting read for sure and did make me think, but got a little bit too samey in the long run and could possibly have been shorter. YMMV, of course.
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I have just been given this book! My daughter and I regularly swap the paperbacks we've bought in charity shops before donating them back to the shops, and this was in the bag she dropped off this week.
catsmate said:
I'm starting Suspects - Nine.
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I really admired the plotting in this one. And the window into a vanished world where a hat told one so much about a person.

I'm still reading So Many Doors but I've had so little time this week to read, it's all I can do to squeeze half a chapter between other stuff.
 
Spektator said:
There is also Sherlock Holmes vs Count Dracula, by Loren D. Estleman, as well as Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds, by Manly Wade Wellman. I plan to write Sherlock Holmes and the Quest for the Pequod, in which a widowed sperm whale wants Holmes to track down "the one-legged man."
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Thank you. It's actually on my list, but first I've got to check out Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Hyde from the Classified Dossier series.


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My plans for this evening got cancelled so I managed to finish So Many Doors. It's a definite return to form after the disappointment of House of Godwinsson; the plotting is well done and the characters believable. Bobby doesn't get into any punch-ups and only gets shot at once. The title comes from a quotation of John Fletcher - Death hath so many doors to let out life.

One of Bobby and Olive's neighbours asks Bobby to look into the disappearance of their daughter, which Bobby is reluctant to do since they want the enquiry to be done unofficially. However, as there's a rumour she was seen at a house used as an unlicensed gambling den in the company of a man who was previously acquitted of murder but suspected in two other disappearances of young women, he decides to visit the house - only to find enormous quantities of blood, no body, and a report of a car leaving the scene at speed. Officialdom now involved, he discovers that someone has pawned the missing girl's jewellery, and someone else is in possession of her bloody handbag.

The action heads to Cornwall and the investigation ends messily and violently.
 
Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas, by Jennifer Raff, 2022. The topic is the ancient peopling of the continents, and most particularly, the timing of this. For many years, the consensus among archaeologists was that the earliest this could have happened was about 12,000 years ago. Genetic research has been one of the fields of research that is challenging this. Raff explores the evidence, and also the changing of attitudes toward the research. If you are interested in early American archaeology, you'll probably like this book – despite some parts that I, at least, found cringe-worthy.

Not long ago, I read The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America, by Julian Montague, 2023, a revised edition of the original 1990s work. It's described as "a taxonomy we didn't know we needed for identifying and cataloging stray shopping carts [...]." Montague's photography brings artistry to what is usually considered a part of urban blight. If you are amused by whimsy, this work might entertain you.
 
catsmate said:
FYI, there is an abbreviated BBCaudioplay adaption of Estleman's Holmes & Dracula book on YouTube.
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I love it. Unfortunately, with my bad hearing and easy distractibility, I can't do audiobooks, but thanks for the suggestion. I might listen to it later anyway.


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