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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xterra said:
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.
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Wrt shopping carts, I'm with Pratchett. Hunt them down and exterminate them.
 
Picked up The Cobra Event at a Little Free Library, by the guy who did The Hot Zone. I liked that one but did not like the writing style, thinking it was presented like a fifth-grader's book report. I'm hoping this one is better.
I also looked at a John Grisham one, but thought he was the author of the last book whose style I really hated, the "coffee" guy. (Turns out it was Tom Clancy -- coffee being mentioned on every other page.) So I flipped through the book, landed on a random page, and the first word that popped out at me was "coffee". Put it right back.
 
Peter and Wendy, J.M. Barrie
The classic children’s book about the boy who never grew up and his friend who is a girl/surrogate mother, this takes on more freight than its original author probably intended or his original audience suspected.

Before the novel, Peter Pan evolved in informal play narratives Barrie developed with the five sons of Llewellyn and Sylvia Davies. Their imaginary activities included scenarios of fights with pirates and Red Indians, and the leading figure was the boy adventurer Peter Pan. Later, Peter existed in stories collected in The Little White Bird (1902), the chapters about him revised and published separately as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), in which he seems to be part boy (or fairy) and part bird. He collects boys who become lost as babies ad do not want to grow up, takes care of them, and when they do begin to grow up, he kills them. However, when Barrie constructed a stage play the character took on his final nature.

And with further authorial fiddling, the play became the novel Peter and Wendy (1911). Barrie half-seriously complained that the plot was spoiled when he was forced to “let the ladies in.” These included Mrs. Darling, her daughter Wendy, and in Never-Never Land the native princess Tiger Lily. Barrie seems to mean that their presence forced him to make the play and the later novel less bloodthirsty and more sentimental.

Still, the body count stays high. In addition to Peter, the boy adventurer, Barrie created Captain James Hook, who shares with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver the honor of establishing many of the standard pirate tropes. There’s ironic humor aplenty, and the background is thoroughly British public-school. Hook, an alumnus of, probably Eton, is thoroughly evil and yet conducts himself with conscientious good form. Still, he suspects that his bo’s’n Smee has such good form that he does not even have to think about it, which may even make Smee eligible for the Pops. I had to look that up. It was an Etonian club of no more than sixteen boys at a time, noteworthy for their gentlemanly conduct.

The novel's plot, of course, sees Peter coming to the Darling house in London to find his missing shadow, accompanied by the fairy Tinker Bell. Wendy, the prepubescent (but just) daughter of the family sews his shadow back on, and then Peter takes her and her younger brothers John and Michael on a holiday to Neverland, where they meet the Lot Boys and have adventures, culminating in their killing almost all of the crew of Hook's piratate ship, the Jolly Roger, commandeering the ship, and sailing to London. Aterward, once a year, Peter returns to take Wendy to Neverland for spring cleaning, until he forgets, and then when Wendy is thirty and a mother, he takes her daughter, and still later her granddaughter. They seem interchangeable to Peter since he himself never ages.

The book chimes weirdly nowadays. As I wrote this, AI fretted that “Red Indian” is a racist term, but let’s face it, that’s the one Barrie uses. The Lost Boys cheerfully talk about the methods they have used to kill enemies and even try to murder Wendy when she first appears. Then again, not growing up seems a very mixed blessing, leaving Peter with nothing permanently to rely on and no possible character development. The girls Peter serially takes on adventures face the disappointment of his ultimately forgetting about and abandoning them. And children are still, as Barrie remarks, gay, and innocent, and heartless.
 
Just finished Spectacles: a Memoir by Sue Perkins.

Fairly well written and pretty amusing. All in all, not a bad light read.

Especially as it it was marked down from £7.99, in several steps, to £1.24 - our local WHSmith closes in 13 days time, everything must go!
 
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I have an acquaintance who has just (at the age of 33) become interested in reading, rather than watching movies or videos. His particular interest is horror novels, a genre with which I am totally unfamiliar. He said he recently read F. Paul Wilson's The Keep, and enjoyed it.

Please recommend your favorite novel and/or author in this genre, so I can give him a list.

Thanks.
 
E)verybody Always Tells, the 27th book in the Bobby Owen series, was written in 1950 so no longer really part of the Golden Age of detective fiction. I think the author struggled to place his plots in the rapidly changing post-war world, but this one isn't really oriented to any particular time period other than the odd mention of the housing shortage. However, the plotting and characterisation is very well done, similar to the earlier books

The plot hinges around an inventor, murdered while Bobby is actually in the house. All the suspects blame each other and some seem determined to interfere with the investigation but Bobby gets there in the end. The author's personal opposition to the death penalty (abolished in the UK in 1965) again influences the outcome, with the criminal escaping the hangman.
 
alfaniner said:
Picked up The Cobra Event at a Little Free Library, by the guy who did The Hot Zone. I liked that one but did not like the writing style, thinking it was presented like a fifth-grader's book report. I'm hoping this one is better.
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Yes, I'm about halfway through and unfortunately it's about like I expected. Written mostly in passive voice. ("There were books on the table", instead of something descriptive like "Books littered the table." or simplistic scenes like "She walked to the door. She went inside. She sat down. She opened her notebook.") And he has a quirk I noticed with another author that grated on me as well. Any character introduced, no matter how minor, gets a paragraph with name, age, height, weight, clothes, hair, and accoutrements. Every single one. Most of those descriptions don't even matter but the narrative (such as it is) just stops dead. It's like reading a MadLibs.
The progression of the story (virus outbreak) is OK, but he takes great delight in the most graphic details of sickness and autopsies and such, with colors and sound effects and such. Four times in one exam he brought up the smell of feces. (Not comments by the characters, btw.) It's graphic and disgusting. Up until this point I'd considered American Psycho to be the worst one I'd read for that, but that was done in such a manner as to appear... skillful and talented.
 
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xterra said:
I have an acquaintance who has just (at the age of 33) become interested in reading, rather than watching movies or videos. His particular interest is horror novels, a genre with which I am totally unfamiliar. He said he recently read F. Paul Wilson's The Keep, and enjoyed it.

Please recommend your favorite novel and/or author in this genre, so I can give him a list.

Thanks.
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Richard Laymon.
 
Penelope’s Last Song, Claire North
Having read Stephen Fry’s version of Homer’s Odyssey, I picked up this (actually the third volume in a Penelope trilogy, but essentially the conclusion of the Odyssey). Claire North is the pseudonym of Catherine Webb.

North’s perspective, as the title suggests, is centered on Penelope, the not-so-patient wife of Odysseus. Broadly speaking, the narrative follows Homer’s plot from the homecoming of Odysseus through to the epic’s climax, but with marked differences.

For one thing, the novel’s narrator is Athena, who works behind the scenes to make real life adhere to the epic that will be written. She’s a goddess and knows past, present, and future, so the point of view is truly omniscient. That poses a bit of a problem, because it distances the reader to an extent and also raises the question of what good is being a god or goddess anyway, if que sera, sera?

The familiar characters are here: Odysseus, weary of war and travel and not quite as sharp as his reputation suggests, Telemachus, his and Penelope’s son, still a callow youth of twenty, Penelope, who is smart and assertive and who has governed Ithaca and the Western Islands on her own these past twenty years, along with the Suitors, Eumaus the swineherd, and assorted other gods, goddesses, and secondary figures, not to forget Odysseus’ aged dog Argos, whose function is to recognize his master and immediately die of doggy joy.

However, the attempted climactic revenge of the slain Suitors’ families, which amounts to only a bit of the Odyssey’s final chapter, occupies way too much of the novel. The battle scenes are written as though they occur in cinematic slow motion. In the novel's drawn-out climax, Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus (with a small army consisting of both men and women) are besieged holed up in the farmhouse of old Laertes, former king and father of Odysseus. By the way, Laertes is a grumpy old guy, though still feisty. When it looks as if they’re all going to die, there’s—I won’t call it a deus ex machina ending, but leave it at that.

The feminist perspective is interesting. Penelope has an unusually close tie to the palace maids, and she doesn’t trust her feelings for Odysseus any longer, while he is inexperienced with expressing the emotions he feels for her. There’s also a flirtation between Penelope and a dashing prince of Egypt. All in all, Athena’s meddling is not the bold lightning-stroke of the epic, but more in the line of persuasion. Though the narrative stance put me off a bit, I did enjoy the different take.
 
xterra said:
I have an acquaintance who has just (at the age of 33) become interested in reading, rather than watching movies or videos. His particular interest is horror novels, a genre with which I am totally unfamiliar. He said he recently read F. Paul Wilson's The Keep, and enjoyed it.

Please recommend your favorite novel and/or author in this genre, so I can give him a list.

Thanks.
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I tend to think short story collections are a good way to start with a new author or genre.

Genre: Best Horror of the Year, edited by Ellen Datlow. Any year is fine. Datlow is one of the best Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror anthologists out there.

Authors with good short story collections:
  • Stephen King
  • Joe Hill
  • John Langan
  • Laird Barron
  • Thomas Ligotti
If your friend insists on jumping right into more novels, I recommend:
  • Salem's Lot, by Stephen King
  • Come Closer, by Sara Gran
  • The Lesser Dead, by Christopher Buehlman
  • The Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins
  • Ship of Fools, by Richard Paul Russo (not to be confused with other books of the same name)
 
(This review may contain spoilers. No tree nuts, though)

Carmilla, Sheridan le Fanu
Published twenty-five years before Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the novella that used many literary tropes of vampire fiction was Carmilla, by the Irish writer Sheridan le Fanu (the name was originally O’le Fanu before they changed it).https://internationalskeptics.com/forums/#_edn1

The story centers on a retired British officer and his beautiful buxom blonde, blue-eyed eighteen-year-old daughter, who reside as did so many of their nationality and class, in a mouldy, crumbling, spider-webby schloss in Styria[ii], where the little family lives quite happily apart from the fact that neither of them has anyone to talk to within a radius of twenty miles.[iii]

The daughter, Laura, is lonely. Her best friend is the distant Bertha Spielsdorf, whose uncle General Spielsdorf is a former war comrade of Laura’s father. They are super friendly families and see each other for a couple of days once a year. Then one year, the year Laura turns eighteen, Spielsdorf sends a note to the effect that his niece has just died of a wasting illness that left her drained, so their visit will not take place. Immediately thereafter, a noblewoman’s carriage has a flat horse right spang in front of the front door of the schloss,[iv] and from the overturned carriage issues a noblewoman whose name nobody bothers to ask. She inquires whether the British officer, who must look a soft touch, will look after her own beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter for a little while, as she herself must be off on a journey of life or death. The military simp agrees, and Carmilla moves into the schloss for three months.

Laura, the narrator of all the story that is not told as a story-within-a -story, describes a lovely time, each hour seeing the two nubile young girls snuggle, stroke each other, exchange languorous kisses, and lord knows what all. As the days pass, in the countryside all around the schloss young women start dropping dead like flies in a Raid commercial, completely drained of blood. Laura herself begins to languish.

Eventually she and Carmilla recall a dream they both had at the age of twelve of each other, embracing and weltering in blood. And their bond grows ever deeper. Before a crisis arrives, alarmed at his daughter’s strange wasting sickness, Laura’s father leaves Carmilla sleeping in her bed (she never gets up until sunsest) and takes his daughter off to visit General Spielsdorf, where they see a painting of a gal who shore-nuff resembles Carmilla (it is a portrait of a vampire) and they learn that the whole area has been plagued for many decades by Identical-looking vampires variously named Mircalla, Marcilla, McRalli, and so on.[v]

One man declares Carmilla is a vampire and tries to behead her, but misses. Then another fellow appears, who is the lineal descendant of a vampire hunter who pursued the original Carmilla long long ago, and there is a climax.

Laura escapes with her life, but she languishes, because bloodsucker or not, Carmilla was her lover, and she misses the girl’s mouth.

This may strike one as giving away too many secrets. Really, for its time Carmilla was something fresh and new. Ironically, many of its elements now seem dated. For this reader, though, the big problem is characterization. The characters are so slow on the uptake and the action of “I love you the most,” “No, I love YOU the most” becomes monotonous. I have nothing against lesbian vampires, but at the least they should not be boring.



https://internationalskeptics.com/forums/#_ednref1 This is not true. But if it were, Le Fanu would have changed it because he was would have been shy about being hailed in the street: “O’le Fanu!” would have had Irishmen looking around for charging toros.
[ii] That’s an area in central Austria, characterized by a variety of breathtaking vistas and flocks of bloodsucking vampires.
[iii] The whole story comes from the memoirs of Dr. Hesselius, the first occult detective in British fiction. He doesn’t tell us the last names of Laura and her father. I like to imagine the surname is Mussey, and that the father is Brigadier General Noah Mussey and his daughter is Laura Mussey. Don’t quote me on that.
[iv] The same accident happens all the time in vampire fiction. Horse with a busted leg, carriage with a wheel off, car with a flat, whatever, It’s one of the tropiest tropes. Transylvania probably has road signs reading MOVE DAMAGED VEHICLE TO CASTLE DOOR. AH-HA-HA!
[v] Anagram names are another tropey trope trope. See “Your teeth sure look healthy Mr. Alucard!” A Harry Potter version might be Miss Lucy Brokodious.
 
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I am currently reading the book 'walking with dinosaurs'. It is the book that accompanies the BBC series. I also have the DVD boxed set.
The series is fascinating and brings the stories of dinosaurs to life. It is awesome to think of what was happening on this earth over 65 million years ago.
 
A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle
The first Sherlock Holmes story, this tale was commissioned for the same Christmas annual that also selected The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Doyle and Wilde made an odd pairing, but both stories opened possibilities for their authors.

The plot of Study, narrated by Dr. John H. Watson, begins with the short account of his experiences in the Afghan wars, culminating when he was wounded at the Battle of Maiwand. Discharged from the army, mending from his wound and illness, Watson needs a housemate and finds one in the eccentric student at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, Sherlock Holmes. The two young men rent a net apartment at 221-B Baker Street, and history is made.

The mystery involves a corpse discovered in a vacant house, a middle-aged man who turns out to be Enoch Drebber of Cleveland, Ohio (identified by business cards found on the body). Scotland Yard detectives Lestrade and Gregson are stymied, and Holmes lends a brain. His observations and deductions quickly uncover secrets the official detectives completely miss. Just when the murderer—the double murderer by then, he having killed Drebber's partner in crime Stangerson—has been clapped in manacles, we become privy to a story even Holmes does not hear in detail.

We flash back twenty years and find ourselves in the Utah desert, where a wagon-train guide and a toddler girl are the last survivors of a calamitous trek. On the verge of death, they are rescued by the Mormons on their way to set up their own religious community in the wilds of the west. A melodramatic tale within the tale unfolds, in which the guide is forced to join the Church of Latter-Day Saints, the girl grows up and is coveted by two sanctimonious but irreligious Mormons, who turn out to be a younger Drebber and Stangerson. When they force her into marriage and kill her adoptive father, her secret beau swears revenge. Surprise, he becomes the nemesis and eventual slayer of Drebber and Stangerson.

Watson takes up again and wraps up the story. It's amusing—there's a sly wit at work—and works as a detective story in a landmark sort of way, setting the pattern for decades to come. The old story holds up and is a fast and entertaining read.
 
"The two young men rent a net apartment at 221-B Baker Street, and history is made."

Read "a neat apartment." Edit isn't working for me.
 
The Golden Dagger, book 28 in the Bobby Owen series. A mysterious phone call is received at Scotland Yard, claiming that a murder has been committed in a country house. The call is traced to a public phone box, in which is found the bloodstained Cellini dagger of the title. At first inclined to brush this off as a hoax, Bobby heads off to investigate and discovers that the dagger is an heirloom, usually on display at the country house. There's no body or trace of a murder, but there is an intriguing cast of characters, including the aristocratic owner of the dagger, his soi-disant actress daughter and several of her suitors, his overbearing sister and her henpecked husband, a missing play-reader, a missing author, the author's secretary who is rarely found without a hatchet in her hand, and a mysterious housemaid.

Eventually a body is found hidden in the woods, and a complicated plot which partly turns on a faked painting and a missing hat ends on a gothic horror note as several people, including the murderer, become lost in a blanketing fog and two are attacked.

There are a few nods to the time period - 1951- and once again, the murderer escapes the gallows but doesn't escape justice.

On to the next book The Secret Search. I haven't finished this yet but was fascinated by one of the ways Bobby considers to find a missing girl who arrives in England from Canada and promptly vanishes without trace - as meat rationing is still in force, he suggests consulting with butchers in the area where she might be, to determine if any of the regular customers have a guest with no ration card!
 
Spektator said:
"The two young men rent a net apartment at 221-B Baker Street, and history is made."

Read "a neat apartment." Edit isn't working for me.
Click to expand...
Until Holmes fills it with his chemisty equipment and loads of dusty papers. Oh, and shoots holes in the wall - in the form of 'VR'.

But that may be in later stories...
 
I am halfway through Sissel-Jo Gazan's detective novel The Dinosaur Feather (GoodReads). It's a Danish novel by a Danish author, but I'm reading it in English because I couldn't get the Danish version on Kindle.
The evolution of birds takes up a large part of the book, so it's the perfect gift for that creationist friend of yours who really needs to understand the other side of the 'controversy'. You can always use the excuse that you thought it was just a thriller, something like Jurassic Park.
 
Agatha said:
The Golden Dagger, book 28 in the Bobby Owen series. A mysterious phone call is received at Scotland Yard, claiming that a murder has been committed in a country house. The call is traced to a public phone box, in which is found the bloodstained Cellini dagger of the title. At first inclined to brush this off as a hoax, Bobby heads off to investigate and discovers that the dagger is an heirloom, usually on display at the country house. There's no body or trace of a murder, but there is an intriguing cast of characters, including the aristocratic owner of the dagger, his soi-disant actress daughter and several of her suitors, his overbearing sister and her henpecked husband, a missing play-reader, a missing author, the author's secretary who is rarely found without a hatchet in her hand, and a mysterious housemaid.

Eventually a body is found hidden in the woods, and a complicated plot which partly turns on a faked painting and a missing hat ends on a gothic horror note as several people, including the murderer, become lost in a blanketing fog and two are attacked.

There are a few nods to the time period - 1951- and once again, the murderer escapes the gallows but doesn't escape justice.

On to the next book The Secret Search. I haven't finished this yet but was fascinated by one of the ways Bobby considers to find a missing girl who arrives in England from Canada and promptly vanishes without trace - as meat rationing is still in force, he suggests consulting with butchers in the area where she might be, to determine if any of the regular customers have a guest with no ration card!
Click to expand...
I'm taking a break from Bobby, reading the Thane & Moss series ATM.
 
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