richardderus's tenth 2021 thread

The weird fictioneer and conservationist ROBERT AICKMAN is this final-thread-of-Pride Month 2021's tutelary spirit.

His queerness was rather more nudged-and-winked about than acknowledged; his wife was a vastly energetic and deeply closeted Lesbian, Edith Ray Gregorson, called "Ray" by all and sundry.

His eerie, atmospheric stories have made him a lasting, if unsplashy, reputation among ghost/eerie-story aficionados and earned him favorable comparisons to M.R. James among others. His late novel The Late Breakfasters has been reissued by queer-centric Valancourt Books; and no less a cultural monadnock than NYRB Classics issued a lovely selection of stories, Compulsory Games, a few years ago.

My present excitement for him stems from the small UK press And Other Stories becoming the trade publishers of his unpublished-until-2020 novel, Go Back at Once. I've received a DRC of it, read it at one sitting, and can not WAIT until y'all can read it too...11 January 2022. My review? Ehhh, Halloween Week? Maybe then.

I'm delighted to introduce, laddies and gentlewomen, my new spirit animal:
The Fucktopus.

**********************
In 2021, I stated a goal of posting 15 book reviews a month on my blog. This year's total of 180 (there are a lot of individual stories that don't have entries in the LT database so I didn't post them here; I need to do more to sync the data this year) reads shows it's doable, and I've done better than that in the past.

I've long Pearl Ruled books I'm not enjoying, but making notes on Goodreads & LibraryThing about why I'm abandoning the read has been less successful. I give up. I just don't care about this goal, so out it goes.




My Last Thread of 2009 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2010 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2011 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2012 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2013 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2014 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2015 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2016 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2017 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2018 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2019 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2020 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.

First five reviews? 1st 2021 thread..

Reviews 6 all the way through 25 can be viewed in the thread to which I have posted a link at left.

The 26th through 36th reviews occupy thread three.

37th through 44th reviews belong where they are.

Reviews 45 through 58 are listed here.

Reviews 59 through 65 present themselves in that spot.

Reviews 66 through 75 reside in this thread.

Reviews 76 through 98? Seek them before this.

Reviews 99 through 110 remain becalmèd thitherward.

THIS THREAD'S REVIEW LINKS

111 The Dictionary of Lost Words pleased, post 14.

112 A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking triumphed!, post 16.

113 Nonbinary: A Memoir intrigued, post 63.

114 When the Sparrow Falls engaged, post 108.

115 The Narcissism of Small Differences engaged, post 119.

116 Big Dark Hole: Stories was an ER review, post 131.

117 Hollow Kingdom delighted!, post 136.

118 Give My Love to the Savages: Stories pleased, post 158.

119 Appleseed: A Novel delighted, post 174.

120 Blind Spots: Why Students Fail and the Science That Can Save Them enraged, post 198.

121 The Plot gruntled, post 230.

122 Cosplayers: Gender and Identity delighted, post 272.

123 Migrations slapped, post 293.

2020's five-star or damn-near five-star reviews totaled 46. Almost half were short stories and/or series reads. While a lot of authors saw their book launches rescheduled, publishers canceled their tours, and everyone was hugely distracted by the nightmare of COVID-19 (I had it, you do not want it), no one can fault the astoundingly wonderful literature we got this year. My own annual six-stars-of-five read was Zaina Arafat's extraordinary debut novel YOU EXIST TOO MUCH (review lives here), a thirtysomething Palestinian woman telling me my life, my family, my very experience of relationships of all sorts. I cannot stress enough to you, this is the book you need to read in 2021. A sixtysomething man is here, in your email/feed, saying: This is the power. This is the glory. The writing I look for, the read I long to find, and all of it delivered in a young woman's debut novel. This is as good an omen for the Great Conjunction's power being bent to the positive outcomes as any I've seen.

In 2020, I posted over 180 reviews here. In 2021, my goals are: –to post 180 reviews on my blog
–to post at least 99 three-sentence Burgoines
–to complete at least 190 total reviews

Most important to me is to report on DRCs I don't care enough about to review at my usual level. I don't want to keep just leaving them unacknowledged. There are publishers who want to see a solid, positive relationship between DRCs granted and reviews posted, and I do not blame them a bit.

Ask and ye shall receive! Nathan Burgoine's Twitter account hath taught me. See >7 richardderus: below.

I stole this from PC's thread. I like these prompts!
***
1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:
Faggots by Larry Kramer
2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream by Michael Wood
3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
Wasps' Nest by Agatha Christie
4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
The Perfect Fascist by Victoria de Grazia; paper book of 512pp, can't hold it...hands too feeble now
5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump
6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
The Trump book; set in Queens and the Hamptons, so just down the road a piece
7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
The last successful rebellion on US soil and caffeine
8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
The Only Good Indians, a horror novel that's really, really good
9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
Restored, a Regency-era romantic historical novel about men in their 40s seizing their second chance at luuuv
10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
Potiki, which Kerry Aluf gave me; led me to read The Uncle's Story by Witi Ihimaera
11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
P. Djeli Clark
12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
Hawaii and PNW
13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
The Fighting Bunch; WWII
14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
There isn't enough space for all the book-bullets y'all careless, inconsiderate-of-my-poverty fiends pepper me with
15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
Mammoths of the Great Plains by Eleanor Arnason
16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky by David Connerley Nahm
17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
Red Heir by Lisa Henry
18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
please don't ask me this
19. Who was the most recent dead author you read? And what year did they die?
Agatha Christie, 1976
20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
good goddesses, I don't remember...Goodnight Moon to my daughter?
21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
Poirot by Dame Ags
22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
The World Well Lost, ~28pp
23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
Lon Chaney Speaks, because I really, really don't like comic books
24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
see #23
25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
see #23
I liked Sandy's Bonus Question for the meme above, so I adopted it:

26. What is the title and year of the oldest book you have reviewed on LT in 2020? (modification in itals)
The Sittaford Mystery by Dame Aggie, 1931.

I really hadn't considered doing this until recently...tracking my Pulitzer Prize in Fiction winners read, and Booker Prize winners read might actually prove useful to me in planning my reading.

1918 HIS FAMILY - Ernest Poole **
1919 THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS - Booth Tarkington *
1921 THE AGE OF INNOCENCE - Edith Wharton *
1922 ALICE ADAMS - Booth Tarkington **
1923 ONE OF OURS - Willa Cather **
1924 THE ABLE MCLAUGHLINS - Margaret Wilson
1925 SO BIG - Edna Ferber *
1926 ARROWSMITH - Sinclair Lewis (Declined) *
1927 EARLY AUTUMN - Louis Bromfield
1928 THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY - Thornton Wilder *
1929 SCARLET SISTER MARY - Julia Peterkin
1930 LAUGHING BOY - Oliver Lafarge
1931 YEARS OF GRACE - Margaret Ayer Barnes
1932 THE GOOD EARTH - Pearl Buck *
1933 THE STORE - Thomas Sigismund Stribling
1934 LAMB IN HIS BOSOM - Caroline Miller
1935 NOW IN NOVEMBER - Josephine Winslow Johnson
1936 HONEY IN THE HORN - Harold L Davis
1937 GONE WITH THE WIND - Margaret Mitchell *
1938 THE LATE GEORGE APLEY - John Phillips Marquand
1939 THE YEARLING - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings *
1940 THE GRAPES OF WRATH - John Steinbeck *
1942 IN THIS OUR LIFE - Ellen Glasgow *
1943 DRAGON'S TEETH - Upton Sinclair
1944 JOURNEY IN THE DARK - Martin Flavin
1945 A BELL FOR ADANO - John Hersey *
1947 ALL THE KING'S MEN - Robert Penn Warren *
1948 TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC - James Michener
1949 GUARD OF HONOR - James Gould Cozzens
1950 THE WAY WEST - A.B. Guthrie
1951 THE TOWN - Conrad Richter
1952 THE CAINE MUTINY - Herman Wouk
1953 THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA - Ernest Hemingway *
1955 A FABLE - William Faulkner *
1956 ANDERSONVILLE - McKinlay Kantor *
1958 A DEATH IN THE FAMILY - James Agee *
1959 THE TRAVELS OF JAIMIE McPHEETERS - Robert Lewis Taylor
1960 ADVISE AND CONSENT - Allen Drury *
1961 TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD - Harper Lee *
1962 THE EDGE OF SADNESS - Edwin O'Connor
1963 THE REIVERS - William Faulkner *
1965 THE KEEPERS OF THE HOUSE - Shirley Ann Grau
1966 THE COLLECTED STORIES OF KATHERINE ANNE PORTER - Katherine Anne Porter
1967 THE FIXER - Bernard Malamud
1968 THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER - William Styron *
1969 HOUSE MADE OF DAWN - N Scott Momaday
1970 THE COLLECTED STORIES OF JEAN STAFFORD - Jean Stafford
1972 ANGLE OF REPOSE - Wallace Stegner *
1973 THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER - Eudora Welty *
1975 THE KILLER ANGELS - Jeff Shaara *
1976 HUMBOLDT'S GIFT - Saul Bellow *
1978 ELBOW ROOM - James Alan McPherson
1979 THE STORIES OF JOHN CHEEVER - John Cheever *
1980 THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG - Norman Mailer *
1981 A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES - John Kennedy Toole *
1982 RABBIT IS RICH - John Updike *
1983 THE COLOR PURPLE - Alice Walker *
1984 IRONWEED - William Kennedy *
1985 FOREIGN AFFAIRS - Alison Lurie
1986 LONESOME DOVE - Larry McMurtry *
1987 A SUMMONS TO MEMPHIS - Peter Taylor
1988 BELOVED - Toni Morrison *
1989 BREATHING LESSONS - Anne Tyler
1990 THE MAMBO KINGS PLAY SONGS OF LOVE - Oscar Hijuelos *
1991 RABBIT AT REST - John Updike *
1992 A THOUSAND ACRES - Jane Smiley *
1993 A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN - Robert Olen Butler *
1994 THE SHIPPING NEWS - E Annie Proulx *
1995 THE STONE DIARIES - Carol Shields
1996 INDEPENDENCE DAY - Richard Ford
1997 MARTIN DRESSLER - Steven Millhauser
1998 AMERICAN PASTORAL - Philip Roth
1999 THE HOURS - Michael Cunningham
2000 INTERPRETER OF MALADIES - Jumpha Lahiri
2001 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY - Michael Chabon
2002 EMPIRE FALLS - Richard Russo
2003 MIDDLESEX - Jeffrey Eugenides *
2004 THE KNOWN WORLD - Edward P. Jones
2005 GILEAD - Marilynne Robinson
2006 MARCH - Geraldine Brooks
2007 THE ROAD - Cormac McCarthy
2008 THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO - Junot Diaz *
2009 OLIVE KITTERIDGE - Elizabeth Strout
2010 TINKERS - Paul Harding**
2011 A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD - Jennifer Egan
2013 ORPHAN MASTER'S SON - Adam Johnson
2014 THE GOLDFINCH - Donna Tartt
2015 ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE - Anthony Doerr **
2016 THE SYMPATHIZER - Viet Thanh Nguyen **
2017 THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD - Colson Whitehead **
2018 LESS - Andrew Sean Greer
2019 THE OVERSTORY - Richard Powers
2020 THE NICKEL BOYS - Colson Whitehead

Links are to my reviews
* Read, but not reviewed
** Owned, but not read

Every winner of the Booker Prize since its inception in 1969

1969: P. H. Newby, Something to Answer For
1970: Bernice Rubens, The Elected Member
1970: J. G. Farrell, Troubles ** (awarded in 2010 as the Lost Man Booker Prize) -
1971: V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State
1972: John Berger, G.
1973: J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur
1974: Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist ... and Stanley Middleton, Holiday
1975: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust
1976: David Storey, Saville
1977: Paul Scott, Staying On
1978: Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea *
1979: Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore
1980: William Golding, Rites of Passage
1981: Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children *
1982: Thomas Keneally, Schindler's Ark
1983: J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K
1984: Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac *
1985: Keri Hulme, The Bone People **
1986: Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils
1987: Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger *
1988: Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda *
1989: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day *
1990: A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance *
1991: Ben Okri, The Famished Road
1992: Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient * ... and Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger
1993: Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
1994: James Kelman, How late it was, how late
1995: Pat Barker, The Ghost Road *
1996: Graham Swift, Last Orders
1997: Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
1998: Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
1999: J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
2000: Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin *
2001: Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang *
2002: Yann Martel, Life of Pi
2003: DBC Pierre, Vernon God Little **
2004: Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty *
2005: John Banville, The Sea
2006: Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
2007: Anne Enright, The Gathering
2008: Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
2009: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
2010: Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question *
2011: Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending **
2012: Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
2013: Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
2014: Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
2015: Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings *
2016: Paul Beatty, The Sellout
2017: George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
2018: Anna Burns, Milkman
2019: Margaret Atwood, The Testaments, and Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other
2020: Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain

Links are to my reviews
* Read, but not reviewed
** Owned, but not read

Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think's important and not try to dig for more.

Think about using it yourselves!

Beginning to feel messiah-ish; so the next one is yours.

OK! Unsaved is me.

>9 weird_O: You, Sir Weird-o, have claimed first place in the posting derby!


Welcome; my thread is yours to enjoy.

Bill beat me to it, RD.

Happy new thread, dear fellow.

Here I am, wishing you a happy new thread!

>12 karenmarie: Hiya Horrible! *smooch* Thanks for turning up again so soon after your Sunday-coffee wishes from last thread.

Doesn't this look neato-mosquito?

>11 PaulCranswick: Hey there, PC! I'm amazed, if I'm honest, at how speedy all y'all are. I'm just not feelin' it today, so I'm impressed that others are.

111 The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this remarkable debut based on actual events, as a team of male scholars compiles the first Oxford English Dictionary, one of their daughters decides to collect the "objectionable" words they omit.

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the "Scriptorium," a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word "bondmaid" flutters to the floor. She rescues the slip, and when she learns that the word means slave-girl, she withholds it from the OED and begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.

As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women's and common folks' experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.

Set during the height of the women's suffrage movement with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men.

Based on actual events and combed from author Pip Williams's experience delving into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary, this highly original novel is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM MY COUNTY'S LIBRARY SYSTEM. USE YOUR LIBRARY, FOLKS! THEY NEED US!

My Review: First, read his:

Some words are more than letters on a page, don't you think? They have shape and texture. They are like bullets, full of energy, and when you give one breath you can feel its sharp edge against your lip.
–and–
I often wondered what kind of slip I would be written on if I was a word. Something too long, certainly. Probably the wrong colour. A scrap of paper that didn't quite fit. I worried that perhaps I would never find my place in the pigeon-holes at all.
–and–
A vulgar word, well placed and said with just enough vigour, can express far more than its polite equivalent.

There is an immense gulf between thoughts and words...Esme, as a girl in the almost-all-male world of dictionary-obsessed dad Harry, discovers again and again that the ideas we robe in words aren't seen by those who hear them as we've made them in our minds. The factual world of making the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) presided over by Dr. James Murray is expanded to include a fictional word-mad girl-child whose run-ins with lying adults, oblivious adults, and peers without her ruling passion for The Words We Use are the meat of this delicious, if difficult to deal with at times, novel. Esme Nicholl does not spend her life the way Dr. Murray's typically Victorian daughters do. Her days are spent being educated at school; her afternoons with the men at the Scriptorium as they collate and pigeonhole and excise the tens of thousands of definitions and attestations through usage that arrive in Dr. Murray's home/workhouse from around the world. Careless dropping or deliberate deletion, it makes no never-mind to young Esme. She re-homes them in her treasure-chest, under a housemaid's bed, their shared secret.

The dropped words, Esme notices as her life gives her more analytical tools, are often words commonly used by, among, and about women and their activities. Her world is coming for her, bent on controlling her and bending her to its will. Her Godmother Edith, a factual person really nicknamed Ditte, is a very unconventional woman and a prolific contributor the OED. She's acted as a co-parent, in a limited way, to Esme; yet she fails her when Esme desperately needs her simply because Ditte doesn't live in Oxford, let alone in daily contact with Esme.

“Dr. Murray said you and Beth were proflitic contributors,” I said, with some authority.

“Prolific,” Ditte corrected.

“Is that a nice thing to be?”

“It means we have collected a lot of words and quotations for Dr. Murray’s dictionary, and I’m sure he meant it as a compliment.”

The relationship is pretty tidily encapsulated there. Older mentor, not quite understanding the mentee but giving great guidance anyway; just not quite what was really needed. The words for things are centered; the denotations are generously given, while the connotations are left more or less to Esme's maturing brain to construct as best she can. She is, after all, equipped with well-designed tools...but no manuals to train their user in their best use.

In her word-collecting fever, Esme amasses much raw data, many denotations. Her goal for it remains unfocused until she realizes that the words' connotations give her the needed feminist perspective: she and her half of humanity are doomed to be controlled until they can participate in life as political actors instead of passive observers. Yes, she discovers Feminism and becomes a suffragette. And uses her life-long capacity to work with words to give sharp focus to her purpose.

If war could change the nature of men, it would surely change the nature of words.
–and–
“Words change over time, you see. The way they look, the way they sound; sometimes even their meaning changes. They have their own history.”

Something I wish people who fuss over neologisms and redefinitions would process. Things are growing or dying. There is no stasis in natural systems, and no homeostasis doesn't count...it is a finely balanced state but predicated on constant shifts and changes that must support a larger whole's proper, healthy functioning. Just like language...the words are always tip-tilting, reconfiguring themselves, shedding pieces and adding others; but the language as a whole lives and thrives and, broadly, remains the same. Only different.
It struck me that we are never fully at ease when we are aware of another's gaze. Perhaps we are never fully ourselves. In the desire to please or impress, to persuade or dominate, our movements become conscious, our features set.

That snapshot effect, the mask of Persona slid over a person's face, is what Esme is resisting as she rescues rejected and deleted words from the magisterial OED. Her women's words are the ones men most need, and are supremely reluctant, to hear. Esme's project, fictional of course, is the titular dictionary, with words like "menstruation" (simply too earthy and shuddersome for the frail little men making the OED) to "knackered" because it's vulgar and ugly when a more refined person could say "exhausted" or "listless." Esme thinks "bollocks to that" and spends her adulthood on the many pieces that must be moved around and reconfigured to make a society that can even properly think about a way to include women as adult beings.

And herein the reason I don't give this book a five-star warble of ecstasy...the passage of time. It doesn't. I'm herky-jerkyed into different stages of Esme and the world's life but the setting remains...internal. It's The Esme Show, instead of Truman; she's the star and no doubt. But there's a degree of alienation in that. Thank goodness there are so many dates to open chapters! Too bad they don't mean more. It's certainly true that we, in our daily rounds, don't think carefully about where the screens in the piston of our french-press coffeepot come from, or how and when to clean or replace them. But some sense of Esme's adjustments to the world around her, since her project is to effect true change upon it, would've helped me grasp the maturation parts of time's passage. I felt the lack of that connection keenly.

Esme's relationships were also a bit troubling to read for this reason. Lizzie, her female exemplar in residence, was a lower-class girl whose best hopes weren't as high as she's actually risen by working for the Murrays and becoming Esme's comadre. By rights she should be a dead young worn-out whore. So the way the privileged miss and the rough serving girl should practically leap off the page at me, right?

“Me needlework will always be here,” she said. “I see this and I feel…well, I don’t know the word. Like I’ll always be here.”

“Permanent,” I said. “And the rest of the time?”

“I feel like a dandelion just before the wind blows.”
–and–
My mother was like a word with a thousand slips. Lizzie’s mother was like a word with only two, barely enough to be counted. And I had treated one as if it were superfluous to need.

It's really the fate of most of us...we vanish into nothingness as soon as we assume room temperature. Ephemeral as life is, what I found wantimg in those perfectly lovely passages was the solidity of Life beating Esme with her own responsibility to and for the older but more vulnerable on a practical life-level woman.

Still and all, I'm so pleased that I read this wonderful story. I think it could have made more of an impact on me had some stylistic choices been made differently; that is always the way with making art, no one can create something as powerful and fully realized as this book is without making choices that won't work for everyone. I felt very strongly the aura of choices and decisions affirmatively, consideredly made at every turn. This is in no way a slapdash or ill-made work of fiction. Its real and its fictional characters are treated with equal gravitas. That the factual characters take up less screen time is a decision that the author and editor clearly planned carefully and executed deftly. I can offer no more heartfelt recommendation than "read this book soon." I *could* have, if certain other, less distancing, choices had been made, turned obnoxious pest and shouted at you to get the book NOW read it on the Jitney or in the Admiral's Club but just GET IT!!

But really, does it get that much better than this?

I thought about all the words I’d collected from Mabel and from Lizzie and from other women: women who gutted fish or cut cloth or cleaned the ladies’ public convenience on Magdalen Street. They spoke their minds in words that suited them, and were reverent as I wrote their words on slips. These slips were precious to me, and I hid them in the trunk to keep them safe. But from what? Did I fear they would be scrutinised and found deficient? Or were those fears I had for myself? I never dreamed the givers had any hopes for their words beyond my slips, but it was suddenly clear that no one but me would ever read them. The women’s names, so carefully written, would never be set in type. Their words and their names would be lost as soon as I began to forget them. My Dictionary of Lost Words was no better than the grille in the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons: it hid what should be seen and silenced what should be heard.

Pip Williams: I salute you for writing a grown-up book for real, passionate readers.

Happy new thread!
Excellent thread topper, most informative.
>14 richardderus: well that does sound worth exploring. Adding it to the list.

112 A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Fourteen-year-old Mona isn't like the wizards charged with defending the city. She can't control lightning or speak to water. Her familiar is a sourdough starter and her magic only works on bread. She has a comfortable life in her aunt's bakery making gingerbread men dance.

But Mona's life is turned upside down when she finds a dead body on the bakery floor. An assassin is stalking the streets of Mona's city, preying on magic folk, and it appears that Mona is his next target. And in an embattled city suddenly bereft of wizards, the assassin may be the least of Mona's worries...

I USED MY LIBRARY TO PROCURE THIS BOOK...THEN I WENT OUT AND BOUGHT ONE. A YA NOVEL ABOUT A TEEN. AND IT ***just*** WON A LOCUS AWARD!!

My Review: First, read this:

Nobody said anything to me, and they didn’t exactly stare, but they knew I was there, and I knew that they knew, and they knew that I knew that they knew, all in a creepy, crackling tangle of mutual awareness.
–and–
“You didn’t fail,” I said. “They wouldn’t let you succeed. It’s different.”
–and–
When you're different, even just a little different, even in a way that people can't see, you like to know that people in power won't judge you for it.

What I'd like you to know is that I cherry-picked those lines for their content, not their felicity of construction or their stand-out euphony. That should give you an idea of the quality of Author Ursula Vernon's (pseudonymously known as Kingfisher) prose overall.

Why would a grouchy old fuffertut like me buy a (Kindlesale, to be fair) copy of a library book he's already read? Because he plans to re-read it. Yep...I want to have it so that I won't need to fuss my drawers procuring it when I am most in need of a laughing, weeping, cheering-my-fool-lungs-out read that doesn't have the effrontery to wink at me or let me know it's clever-clever. Story gets told, ideas get presented, world gets saved, and just keep the sourdough starter firmly in place or it'll get weird ideas.

Simple enough, surely.

>15 Helenliz: Thank you most kindly, Helen, and Aickman's star is one I want to burnish. I'm hoping that his conservation efforts and his eerie, not-quite-ordinary normal-world storytelling will synergize and lead masses of folk to his literary door.

I'll be very surprised if you don't greatly enjoy the pleasures of The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Happy new thread, Richard.

>14 richardderus: - I am on a long waiting list at the library for this one. To be precise, I am currently #332 of 382 waiting for 50 copies in the system. It may be awhile....

Happy New Thread, Richard!

I forget whether you're a fan of the Ruth Galloway mysteries - the newest comes out in 2 days.

>19 jnwelch: Thank you most kindly, Joe! I am not a fan of that series, no. I wanted to be...it simply was not on the cards. Makes me a little wistful.

>18 jessibud2: Thanks, Shelley. Oh, yeah...with fifty copies you can probably expect at least six weeks of waiting. I hope you'll enjoy it when your turn comes!

Happy new thread!

>2 richardderus: I still call that the Fuckofftopus.

>14 richardderus: I now have that in the works TBR - that is I've put a library hold on it.

>16 richardderus: I'm rather fond of it too.

Happy new one, RD!

>14 richardderus: - This one is on my library list...

>22 katiekrug: Thanks, Katie! I'm confident that your response to the read will include pleasure-centered vocabulary words.

>21 quondame: Ha! You and I agree on a Genre-Fiction's merits! There's a black hole out there somewhere that's even now reversing its spin.

Thanks, and may this weirdness recur.

>14 richardderus: Great review of The Dictionary of Lost Words Richard. (I’ve now realised that I was getting this one completely mixed up with The Liars Dictionary.) And A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking looks fun too. I’d heard of this one, but I thought it was ‘barking’ not ‘baking’, which also gave me a slightly confused idea of what it might be about. I need to concentrate more. I’ve added both to the holiday reading list, as we are going away in a couple of weeks time and I need some new books for my kindle. Four adults plus dog in the (not very big) car so packing space will be at a premium.

>23 richardderus: Piffle. There are a number of books, genre and other, which have similar at least relative ranks in our book hierarchies. Our wild enthusiasms do have certain differences, as is only seemly. Or not, seemly, that is.

>25 quondame: *smooch*

>24 SandDune: Thank you most kindly, Rhian! I am sure you'll get a big kick out of Defensive Barking LOLOL because it's simply gonzo-straight-ahead fun with magic.

Plus it's cheap on the Kindle, so packing it will be a doddle.

We now have a new mental-health diagnosis that describes your slight befuddlement: "Triple-A Double-D", courtesy of Karen.

Kinda missed most of your last thread. Oops!! But I am here today. : )

>14 richardderus: This one is already in my (growing) pile. I think I need to learn how to read faster!! LOL

On behalf of Public Libraries everywhere (but mostly this one), may I say thank you for your enthusiastic promotion of what we offer.

>28 laytonwoman3rd: *bows*

>27 Berly: Hiya Berly-boo! Shyeah, like reading faster isn't the glory we all retire into when the Gabriel's Horn blatts in our ear at last...no way would that evil wench of a god let us have it before.

Happy new thread, Richard dear!

>14 richardderus: I found The Dictionary of Lost Words in translation at the e-library. Maybe I can add it to the July list, or else there is always a next month.

Happy Sunday, Richard. Happy New Thread! It looks like several of my LT buddies have enjoyed The Dictionary of Lost Words. I may have to give it a shot.

>31 msf59: Thanks, Mark, and happy week-ahead's reads. I think you'll like it fine, whenever its turn comes. Lovely things, libraries, they don't throw much away. We more often than not have the luxury of time getting stuff from them.

>30 FAMeulstee: Thank you, Anita! I'm delighted that Lost Words has already hit the Dutch market. I hope you'll enjoy it when it bobs to the top of your list.

>14 richardderus: what a thought provoking review of The Dictionary of Lost Words Richard. I, my own self, was able to award it the full five stars but I see your point about stasis and actually thought about it when I was getting towards the end of the book but I just decided it was such a glorious novel I succumbed to its mighty appeal. With no regrets I might add.

Happy new thread, Richard.

I am dodging book bullets in slow motion; that is, I'm ducking behind my TBR pile for shelter but I don't yet know if I will be hit. There's a fair probability.

Happy Monday, RD!

>13 richardderus: Yes it does look neato-mosquito. That reminds me that I have a ceramic cone-filter dripper upstairs in the corner hutch. Haven’t used it for decades. Jenna will never use it as she doesn’t drink coffee (I know, heresy!), so I could probably just take it to the thrift shop.

>14 richardderus: Excellent review, and it’s now on my wish list.

>16 richardderus: Her familiar is a sourdough starter and her magic only works on bread. I love this sentence from the description.

Happy new thread, Richard!

I've got The Dictionary of Lost Words on hold already because of your and Joe's warbling. No idea when it might arrive, but I certainly will not be hurting for reading material in the meantime.

Happy new one, Richard!

>36 bell7: Thanks, Mary! I'm pretty sure you're not going to be reduced to reading the owner's manual for your toaster just yet...the wonder of working in a library!

I'm confident you'll enjoy the read when its turn at the top comes.

>35 karenmarie: Jenna's absence of the coffee-drinking gene is honestly puzzling to me. How can this have happened? Was there no pre-natal testing for it even offered to you? *sigh*

You will, I suspect, appreciate the sly humor and the inventive-girl narrative is a sure-fire crowd pleaser.

*smooch*

>37 drneutron: Thank you, Jim!

>34 humouress: Heh! Perfect...using the tottering tome-tower to protect you from...tome-escence.

>33 brenzi: It's a worthy, delicious read indeed, Bonnie. That issue...the emotional distancing that time-lessness imposes...simply refused to stop bothering me. Hence my decision to remove the otherwise-fully-merited star.

Happy New Thread!

>40 mahsdad: Thanks, Jeff!

Happy new one, Richard. And I've been hit with a BB for A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking. It had me at sourdough starter as familiar...

>42 MickyFine: Thanks, Micky...and are you in for a treat! So many chuckles...such a lovely, creative world...I loved it.

An interview with Murderbot's Mama: Martha Wells Speaks

"Wells: There are plans for a TV series, but it's still under development right now."

*squeeeeeeee*

>44 richardderus: ooooh!

Hi Richard, happy new thread dear friend.

>46 johnsimpson: Thank you, John! Happy July upcoming.

>45 bell7: I know, right?!

>44 richardderus: Oh goodie!

And the Seattle Kraken's must have been thinking of you or at least caused me to think of you ...

>48 quondame: Ha! Isn't that wonderful. Thanks, Susan. Made my afternoon.

>44 richardderus: Well, that is pretty cool news. Tailor-made for it, right?

>50 msf59:

>51 richardderus: - CityTV? That's a very local Toronto tv station!

>52 jessibud2: It's also the source for a whole lot of American-TV memes. I'm guessing because they don't do sweeps to be sure people aren't posting pieces of the US studios' IP unlike the studios; and when the studios see CityTv they know it's more trouble than it's worth to complain about what really are trivial things.

>53 richardderus: - OIC... ;-)

'Morning, RDear.

I slept in shifts and am a bit groggy, so don't have more than a happy Tuesday and a *smooch* for you.

A Tentacled American immigrant from Japan. A hair-receiving box called "hirado ware" apparently.

>55 karenmarie: Hi Horrible! *smooch*

It's just That Kind Of Day, is it. Relatable.

>54 jessibud2: :-)

Happy New Thread Richard (Turn my back on you for a MINUTE!)

Wondering if my Book Club would like to dig into The Dictionary of Lost Words

>58 magicians_nephew: Heh...the world moves ever faster, James.

I can't imagine a bookclub that wouldn't love it, to be honest.

>56 richardderus: It's got a good handle on it, but it stares so. I'm curious about the back side.

>60 quondame: I found no images of the back, so I can't satisfy that itch of curiousness.

>56 richardderus:

113 Nonbinary: A Memoir by Genesis P-Orridge

Rating: 4* of five

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There are no words for Genesis P-Orridge. Trans, genderqueer, non-binary; artist, musician, creator...or Creator. Not one of them can hope to do more than capture a slice of this astonishing being's self.

William S. Burroughs met them when they were twenty...he immediately posed them a life-long quest in a question:
"How do we short-circuit control?"

When William S. Burroughs asks you to solve a problem the first day you meet him, all of 20 to his rising-60, you have to know you are Someone. And Someone Genesis was, and became, and remained until their death from leukemia at seventy.

The entire review is posted at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud.

Hallo, RDear. Happy middle of the we-don't-work-anymore week.

I'm coffeeing and will be reading very soon, trying to sneak in one last book this month.

*smooch*

Stay cool!

>65 katiekrug: I plan to...and you, as well, since you've got new a/c.

>64 karenmarie: Hey there, Horrible, hope that coffee-n-reading is going splendidly. It's the middle of the who-cares-anyway for us, but it does actually improve my mood to know there's others beavering away at hopeless, pointless jobs while I'm tucked up in my lovely cave reading away.

Mean thing, ain't I.

>62 humouress: Ha! Perfect.

JUNE IN REVIEW, AND 2Q21'S FAVORITE READ

An excellent month, was June. I posted 52 reviews on my blog! Clearly not all of them were for books I read this month. That number is a mere fourteen. That makes 48 reads with reviews done in this quarter, not far off a book and review every other day as a pace. A total of 78 posted reviews left to get me to the 190 goal, five more than last year; that means 13 a month or three a week! I can do this.

Clearly not an awful pace to keep up. My favorite read of May JUNE was Nationalist Love, a truly scary and very moving, brash, garish, over-the-top story of two men falling in love and suffering the consequences for it in deeply homophobic and hag-ridden by right-wing stupidity Poland.

But by far my favorite read of 2Q21 was Natalie Zina Walschots's amazing and vibrant and brimming with the propulsive power of indignation supervillain tale, Hench. No other read came close.

>67 richardderus: - Glad you had such a good month and quarter!

I think in the second 'graph you mean your favorite read of June, not May?

>68 katiekrug: Yes, I'm sure I typed "June" and some evil gremliness retyped it as "May"...*I* wouldn't make such a silly error.

Of course not.

To quote their Holey Babble: Let their way be dark and slippery: and let the angel of the Lord persecute them.
Psalms 35:6
Prepare for persecution, gremlinesses!
(side note: isn't that just so edifying a thing to have in one's moral compass-setting text?)

You never cease to amaze me. xx

>72 katiekrug: *smooch*

‘Morning, RDear. I hope you enjoy another day of being tucked up in your lovely cave reading away.

>67 richardderus: Impressive. And now for the second half of not 2020!

>74 karenmarie: It truly isn't 2020 anymore, is it. What a gigantic relief that is!

Spend a lovely day, Horrible.

Happy new thread, Richard!

>14 richardderus: Someday-Swamp'd
>16 richardderus: This one is already on my list for this month. Looking forward to it.

>76 swynn: Hi Steve, and thank you...I suspect you'll get a few grins out of the Sourdough Familiar read.

Enjoy the rest of the week.

Sweet Thursday, Richard. I am loving Joe! This guy is a helluva writer. These are some dark, unsavory characters but I can't stop turning the pages. Have you read any other Brown, other than his big story collection?

A beautiful day in Chicagoland. And thanks for the bird audio app link. Some interesting info there.

>78 msf59: I've read Fay...such a deeply deeply disturbing book about the awful choices facing pretty women.

It's always beautifully told but what you're being told is so wrenching.

Just swinging by to say hi. And put Hench on the list...

Happy Friday, Richard!
I ment to wish you a happy day yesterday, but completely forgot.

Happy Friday, RD! It's raining unmentionable animals and dogs here and will be raining all day. I've got some Friends stuff to do in town, meeting up with the new Treasurer and all, then a quick visit to friend and neighbor Louise.

I hope you have a mah-ve-lus day.

*smooch*

I can't keep up with your thread. I think you are in a contest to write the longest reviews (one of the last reviews on the previous thread).

>16 richardderus: So do Wizards bake differently than the rest of us? or did they "Americanize" the recipes for those who aren't Wizards (at least, I assume they included recipes at the end)?

>83 thornton37814: Yes, wizards bake rather differently than the rest of us, given that their sourdough starter is sentient...so no, recipes aren't included since thee'n'me don't possess the proper stuff to replicate the results.

>82 karenmarie: I hope I do, too, Horrible. *smooch*

>81 FAMeulstee: Well, you remembered that you forgot, so that's okay. Happy weekend's reads, Anita!

>80 BekkaJo: Hench will delight you, Bekka...the Auditor will give you a big chuckle. Have a lovely!

I realise this makes no difference to those not a wage slave, but it's Friday afternoon, the weekend's here. Have a good one.

>85 Helenliz: *looks up from eating a grilled cheese with tomato*

...hmm? oh, yes, of course! have a lovely, um, "week-end" to you as well.

*now for a salad*

Mmmm grilled cheese and tomato sounds amazing right now. I'm craving Chinese and as it's rainy out and I'm heading home after the end of another dogsitting job, I think takeout is in my future tonight. Happy Friday, Richard, and may you have many good reads over the long weekend.

>87 bell7: It wasn't the most fascinating of grillèd cheeses but it hit the spot!

I'm finishing my review of my ER book, Big Dark Hole, so that's my real focus. Be well!

'Morning, RDear, and happy Saturday to you.

>86 richardderus: Yes to grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches!! That was lunch yesterday and will probably be lunch today, too, as I actually found some vine-ripened tomatoes at the grocery store that are not half bad. Yum, yum.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

>89 karenmarie: Then conditions are exactly right! Go forth and sandwich. They're a pleasure, are grilled cheeses, and greatly enhanced by *good* tomatoes.

Grilled Cheese and BACON.

Rye Bread lightly toasted..

Natures perfect food

Geez, RD. It appears you are having a quiet Saturday. Enjoy.

>92 weird_O: Unusually quiet indeed...well, it is the holiday weekend in North America as a whole.

>91 magicians_nephew: Haven't had bacon in ages! (Jewish owners, kosher food.) But yes, please!

>91 magicians_nephew: Sourdough here please. I do tuna melts too, but griddling the tuna salad is a bit of a mess.

Can't catch up.... That seems to be my current, permanent song. I do SO want both the Kingfisher and the Williams. Thank you for stellar reviews as usual!

If you want, I'll tell you sometime a bit about my wild cousin Dell and his best friend Dean who visited Wm. S. Burroughs. Dean told me that he was with him when he died.

Meanwhile, I wish you a celebratory Independence Day.

Happy Fourth of July, RD!

>93 richardderus: A bacon-less living situation. For decades I wouldn't have minded that as I didn’t eat any pork from 1974 until about 2005 or so. Now I’ll eat bacon and Neese’s Hot Sausage and ham once a year when Bill’s company gives us a Honey Baked Ham for Thanksgiving, which we don't bring out for Thanksgiving but make sandwiches of until it's gone.

There’s still one armed and desperate man loose in our extended neighborhood, so everything’s still locked and I’m still armed. What a world, what a world… However, I have had my first sips of coffee, so there’s that.

*smooch*

>96 karenmarie: Oh my gawd, Horrible! What the hell is up with this armed-and-dangerous thing! I have faith in you, know for sure you're capable of shooting someone threatening you, but this is a test too far, isn't it? How's Asheville sounding now? Like, is tomorrow too soon for the move?

*gnaws nails to the knuckle*

I'm resigned to the kosher, ie flavorless, diet they serve. I'm going to have to go back to being my own food provider when they re-open the dining room. Leaving the comfort of my space to be among the shouting, brawling Them? No.

>95 LizzieD: Dell and Dean sound like a hoot and a holler, Peggy, so yes please on the good stuff! *smooch*

>94 quondame: Rye or pumpernickel are my breads of choice for non-PBJ sandwiches, though sourdough is never unwelcome.

"At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.”

—FREDERICK DOUGLASS
on the 5th of July

Seldom not true; certainly not true now that we are beset by traitors within seeking to impose their vision for a dystopian country, world, by violent means while shouting their "rights" are being infringed.

CLUE: When only your rights are being infringed, they're not rights they're privileges. And they're being taken away.

I prefer my cheese non-melted right now, thank you.

>99 humouress: In y'all's climate how is any cheese other than Parmesan ever unmelted?

Hiya again - all four are captured and the gun's back in the gun safe. You can stop gnawing your nails to the knuckle. Back to our regularly scheduled programming of hanging out and vegging.

>101 karenmarie: Yay! I'm so relieved.

>100 richardderus: Good point :0)

>101 karenmarie: Thank goodness.

for this relief much thanks

>97 richardderus: The only good thing related to Mike's brother was the food served at his in-laws - kosher Persian and very very good. I really do like some of the kosher middle eastern places I've been to and a local deli has a killer chicken sandwich, but the institutional kosher I've experienced has been a crime against the palate.

>104 magicians_nephew: "Institutional" is the operative word there; no institutional food is precisely tasty. But allied to kosher's strictures, it's grim.

>103 humouress: :-)

Hi Richard, You have visited my thread so faithfully and I have been neglecting every thread but my own. And you know what has made me do so.

So I promise to come here as much as I can. Love and hugs!!

114 When the Sparrow Falls by Neil Sharpson

Real Rating: 4.1* of five

The Publisher Says: Life in the Caspian Republic has taught Agent Nikolai South two rules. Trust No One. And work just hard enough not to make enemies.

Here, in the last sanctuary for the dying embers of the human race in a world run by artificial intelligence, if you stray from the path - your life is forfeit. But when a Party propagandist is killed - and is discovered as a "machine" - he's given a new mission: chaperone the widow, Lily, who has arrived to claim her husband's remains.

But when South sees that she, the first "machine" ever allowed into the country, bears an uncanny resemblance to his late wife, he's thrown into a maelstrom of betrayal, murder, and conspiracy that may bring down the Republic for good.

WHEN THE SPARROW FALLS illuminates authoritarianism, complicity, and identity in the digital age, in a page turning, darkly-funny, frightening and touching story that recalls Philip K. Dick, John le Carré and Kurt Vonnegut in equal measure.

I RECEIVED MY DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

Nominally, the currency of the Caspian Republic is the moneta, but in truth the coin of the nation was fear. Whoever could inspire fear was rich, whoever lived in fear was poor.
–and–
For a writer's work to be circulated amongst the upper levels of the party was usually the precursor to them coming down with a rather permanent case of writer's block, but not this time. {He} was offered a position in The Truth (then viewed as a rather out of touch and elitist organ), and asked to bring his rough, authentic, working-class voice to the paper's readers, who were left with nothing to do but wonder what they had done to deserve it.

You know already where you are. You'd be stupid or frankly insentient if you didn't recognize the various totalitarian régimes of our present century. Here's what you don't know in the first few chapters of this extraordinarily exciting tale: You will not be leaving the Caspian Republic until events have reached their logical limits. Until then, settle in and surrender your schedule and your other plans.

I would love to spoil the bejabbers out of this read. It is almost painful not to. I want someone to kvell over the ending with; I want someone to be full of the rat's-nest of emotions with me...and not one soul I know can be!

I understand the feelings expressed at the ending of the book so very much better now.

When you send your request in to the bookery of your choice for this story, I think you should know that the author's purpose in writing it was to rob you of any sense of actual control over your life and the world around you. But it will, in fact, be okay. I can't tell you why but let's just say Epicurus's famous formulation of the Problem of Evil:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

Well-trodden tracks lead through this thicket. The response from the god-addled is, "She has Her Reasons, which Reason knoweth not," or something similar to that. In fact the story contains that very argument, put in the mouth of a deeply important figure. (It is only resolvable for the goddists by their huffy assumption that you, o skeptic, are nowhere near as smart as you think you are; and for the bare-faced atheists by using the same argument in reverse.) But what if there *is* a solution....

It was the face beneath mine on the beach when she had been pulled from the ocean and my breath had not been enough.

What, indeed.

Spending a day immersed in the Caspian Republic is a pleasure I'm deeply glad to inform you is exactly what this rather somber, for me at least, holiday required. I needed morally complex characters, ones whose simplest expressions of self are free of embarrassing innocence and unmarred by mawkish candor. I needed to be with my fellow hideously betrayed and painfully reassembled, then betrayed again...and again...and again...bitter, disappointed, unable to imagine what trust would even look like, romantics. They teem in the totalitarian terrors of the Caspian Republic. I needed to feel that my brain's energy was fully and unremittingly drawn down to understand the convolutions of the story's moral landscape.

"Everyone's soul is unique...{a}nd just as your body is built with the protein and calcium and iron you consume every day, your soul is built with words. The words you read, and the words you hear. The soul consumes words, and then it expresses itself through them in a way that is unique to that soul."

Success!

Love will always fuck you up; and the ways in which love fucks you up are truly epic in this story. Thee and me, fellow QUILTBAGgers, are presented on these pages as people of complexity and subtlety. There's really no sex of any sort; it's alluded to and it's very much part of the proceedings, but nobody gets down to business. In exchange, lesbians' love is utterly unremarkable. Men's love is less present; but it does come, when it shows up, as a moment of bathos and facetious secretiveness ("...what did he do?" Your husband, unless I completely misread the subtext, isn't particularly respectful from a cishet man no matter that it's amusingly phrased). Oh well...can't really expect otherwise, given the two men involved. There was absolutely no way on Earth I'd've picked those guys out as my fellows, gotta hand that to Author Sharpson!

So half-a-star gone for the three w-bombs dropped on my innocent, unsuspecting head; another half-star for being sniggeringly dismissive of the only gay male couple in the entire book.

But leaving the read, the ending, well...that has to put some luster back on the read...it's a delight, if a marred and flawed delight, of a read. It gives a reader a rare treat: Reading about grown people, the adult end of the room, is a rapturous and infrequently encountered pleasure in the YA-heavy lists of SF/F publishers. A novel of ideas, one that examines the cracks and the broken places in Love and Trust, one that asks you to spend more than just the usual amount of energy on the read deserves a warm and delighted welcome, louder and stronger for the fact that it's the first...hopefully in a long line.

But seriously. No more w-verbing. It's gross.

>107 connie53: Hi Connie! Welcome, and don't worry about visiting. You're always welcome and when you can't be here, well...I know where you are, so we won't lose track of each other!

*smooch*

>109 richardderus: Thank you, Richard

So another typical RD review (>108 richardderus:). Excellent. I've been hit.

I'm temporarily lost in some books about books that I borrowed from a friend yesterday. The hits keep coming.

>111 weird_O: My aim is true, apparently.

>110 connie53: :-)

>98 richardderus: Amen.

>108 richardderus: I'll be on the lookout for When the Sparrow Falls. Love and trust goes different directions in The Hidden Palace, but then djinn and golems have different imperatives.

>114 quondame: Yes, golems aren't notably attuned to air-spirits, are they? What with being earthly, earthy sorts.

>113 kidzdoc: Hiya Doc! Happy to see you here!

'Morning, RDear, and happy Tuesday to you.

>108 richardderus: Excellent review. Not actually my cuppa, but damn, my dear, you do write beautifully!

*smooch*

Just stopping in to wish you a happy Tuesday *smooch*

>117 bell7: Thanks, Mary my dear.

>116 karenmarie: *blush*

You're too kind, you are.

*smooch*

115 The Narcissism of Small Differences by Michael Zadoorian

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A hilarious and poignant novel about growing up, buying in, selling out, and the death of irony.

Joe Keen and Ana Urbanek have been a couple for a long time, with all the requisite lulls and temptations, yet they remain unmarried and without children, contrary to their Midwestern values (and parents’ wishes). Now on the cusp of forty, they are both working at jobs that they’re not even sure they believe in anymore, but with significantly varying returns. Ana is successful, Joe is floundering—both in limbo, caught somewhere between mainstream and alternative culture, sincerity and irony, achievement and arrested development.

Set against the backdrop of bottomed-out 2009 Detroit, a once-great American city now in transition, part decaying and part striving to be reborn, The Narcissism of Small Differences is the story of an aging creative class, doomed to ask the questions: Is it possible to outgrow irony? Does not having children make you one? Is there even such a thing as selling out anymore?

More than a comedy of manners, The Narcissism of Small Differences is a comedy of compromise: the financial compromises we make to feed ourselves; the moral compromises that justify our questionable actions; the everyday compromises we all make just to survive in the world. Yet it’s also about the consequences of those compromises— and the people we become because of them—in our quest for a life that is our own and no one else’s. (less)

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: I think Author Zadoorian's Detroitophilia needed this book to come to a head...

It was a way for gray-flannel types to shed their inhibitions, go native, and get weird—uninhibited boozing, semierotic dancing to faux-exotic music, gaudy flowered shirts, sticky finger foods, unclad maiden flesh, and phallic tiki idols. At one point, Detroit had three Polynesian palaces, but when the city started bleeding honkies after the '67 race riot, all of them eventually closed.
–and–
Should you be going to tiki parties in your forties? Was it possible to maintain ironic distance for that long, or should you have outgrown it by then? How long before you needed an irony supplement?

Joe is an urban explorer, a man whose purpose in life is looking for something to look at; this isn't a tremendously profitable career, but he freelances as a local-music critic and spelunks the abandoned spaces of the city as his avocation. He has no mortgage and no kids, just a partner of over a decade, Ana. They're living an intentional life, but that ain't free. So Ana, his squeeze, makes the bills...in advertising, in a dead and dying city, that takes skill and luck which she abounds in.

And then, as it always will, Life happens. The two of them are wearing on each other. The thing about stasis is, no matter if it's tolerable or not, it has to end. Things in life are growing or dying:

“Truth like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.”
–and–
When is it going to end, this worshiping of ephemera? How long will our generation be obsessed with the past, with stuff that barely meant anything when it happened, that’s remembered only because it’s old or bad or weird or kooky?

There's nothing like the world for knocking your corners off...just sucks when the chunks go flying into those closest to you.

"You drop names and make references. You talk about songs, but rarely does a song speak to you. You laugh at cleverness because you recognize it's supposed to be funny, not because it is funny. You know about things for the sake of knowing about them, because you think you're supposed to, because you're afraid of being left out, not because they interest you. You're a dilettante, a potterer. You simply stopped trying to be anything more."
–and–
"It looks different through the lens, doesn't it?" {Joe's friend} said {to him}.
"I don't know why. It just makes more sense this way. It's easier to take in."
"Uh-huh. Sometimes what I'm looking at is too intense for me to understand without a filter, a way to view it. The camera helps." Brendan leveled his camera...and squeezed off a shot.
"Why is this so magnificent? What's wrong with us?"
"I told you...The verity of decay."

If Ana had wanted a sullen teenager, she would've had a kid...but here she is with a fractured man-child who resents her for winning their bread and whose friends are nasty pieces of White Male Privilege...Transphobia: one-half star off. N-word and repeated misogynistic bullshit use by white character: one-half star off. Yes, it's set in 2009...yes, it's not like these are people whose sophistication is meant to hold them up as examples. But this is ugliness and prejudice, and it doesn't get treated as such.

But the story is about more than that. It's about what it means to be You at last. These are forty-year-olds doing what the middle-aged literary characters of US while privilege are supposed to do: Reflecting on the emptiness of a life of getting and spending. And coming to terms with what they really, in fact, want from The System. Ana's decisions are less crowd-sourced...her one obvious friend isn't who she thought she was at exactly the wrong moment...than Joe's, but considering the caliber of his friends that's a good thing.

I found the story...exasperating. I found the dramatis personae...uncongenial. I found the ending...condign.

Hey, Richard. I am back. We had a nice weekend in the UP, but it was dreadfully hot. I still got some birding in, though, so I was in my glory. I hope you had a good weekend too.

>120 msf59: How adorable! Thanks! I'm pretty sure some stuff must've happened but...well...nothing I too terribly much cared about.

'Morning, RDear, and happy Wednesday.

Half a cup of coffee already consumed, reading and puttering and a bit of Friends stuff on tap for today.

>119 richardderus: Another excellent interview of a book I probably won't read, but not because it's in a genre that I don't hold close; rather, because it's about a subject that currently doesn't interest me. Daughter's too young to be in this situation, I'm too old to be in this situation. However, as frequently occurs here, I had to look up a word - condign - and now know how to use it.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

>108 richardderus: nice review Richard - added to the list

Curse you Red Baron!!!!!

>119 richardderus: Hmmm, I think I can safely skip that one, though as always your review is an excellent analysis of the story.

>125 bell7: I think you certainly can. You'd be rolling your eyes so hard you'd see every fold of your brain. These are people you'd find nothing whatever to talk about with!

>124 magicians_nephew: *chuckle* My aim is true.

>123 karenmarie: Well now, see? Even reading about things you care less than nothing for will teach a person an interesting new word!

I learned it in a 1970s SF novel about a dwarf who follows a time-traveling Candide whose title has utterly escaped my memory. The rescuer figure says of the dwarf that his ending will be swift and condign. Slidin' up on fifty years later, that is my one memorable take-away from the silly thing.

Happy Thursday, Richard dear.

I hope to finish Anniversaries today,

>127 FAMeulstee: How great to have reached the double-75! Congratulations!
***
I watch this YouTube channel that's all book reviews, called "Better Than Food." The guy who runs it, Clifford that is, told me about this: I always buy books in Ammy Marketplace from Goodwills around the country because of course I do. Clifford's channel got this sponsorship thing where if you sign up at goodwillbooks.com and enter the code BETTERTHANFOOD you get 15% off your order FOR ONE WEEK FROM TODAY 7/8/21 and they always ship media mail free...so they don't pay Ammy's Marketplace cut and that makes me even happier than recycled books from them, plus Clifford (who looks like a saluki dog!) gets a kickback and it's GOODWILL so it makes the world a brighter place.

Just thought you'd all like to know.

>128 richardderus: Thank you, Richard dear!

'Morning, RD! Happy Friday to you. Looks like it's your turn with Elsa. Hope she leaves quickly.

>128 richardderus: I've done a bit of searching but frankly have bought so many books and received so many books lately that I'm not as enthusiastic as I might be otherwise. However, I will persevere...15% off and free shipping are a great incentive.

*smooch*

116 BIG DARK HOLE: Stories by Jeffrey Ford

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A Jeffrey Ford story may start out in the innocuous and routine world of college teaching or evenings on a porch with your wife. But inevitably the weird comes crashing in. Maybe it’s an unexpected light in a dark and uninhabited house, maybe it’s a drainage tunnel that some poor kid is suddenly compelled to explore. Maybe there’s a monkey in the woods or an angel that you’ll need to fight if you want to gain tenure. Big Dark Hole is about those big, dark holes that we find ourselves once in a while and maybe, too, the big dark holes that exist inside of us.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA LIBRARYTHING'S EARLY REVIEWERS. THANK YOU.

My Review: Dudebro Jeffrey Ford voice on full Technicolor display...if you've never read Ford's stories, you're either going to hate the hell out of that voice from giddy-up to whoa, in which case give the collection a miss; or you're going to see the voice as its own contiunuing character, the kind-of career-long Rod Serling of the author's imaginitive universe. I liked the voice from my first encounter and if you don't, bail instantly.

These aren't Horror Stories, they're atmospheric tales of strange and uncongruent realities that look a lot like consensus reality. As is the statutory requirement for story-collection reviews on my blog, I herewith employ the Bryce Method of giving a line or two and a rating to each of the fifteen included stories individually.

>130 karenmarie: Hey Horrible! Just left you a hummingbird photo from the Audubon contest...amazing what the photographers catch each year.

*smooch*

>129 FAMeulstee: I read your review of Anniversaries and was *almost* tempted...but 1500+ pages, well, no. Romain Rolland reading was a long time ago, when I had the stamina to read Jean-Cristophe in French....

>132 richardderus: I love epic reads, Richard dear.

This is my top 5 of best books I have ever read, and only one is just under 1000 pages.
1. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman (959 pages)
2. Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson (1596 pages)
3. Menselijke voorwaarden by Junpei Gomikawa (1429 pages) original Japanese, no English translation
4. The Thibaults by Roger Martin du Gard (862 and 1038 pages)
5. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1242 pages)

Looking at the list I realise they are also all about war.

>133 FAMeulstee: Ooohhh, Life and Fate is on my Kindle and I really should get to it...it's at the top of many lists and is the book for which the man's most famous.

You've clearly got a taste for the epic, indeed!

>134 richardderus: I might re-read Life and Fate next year.

117 Hollow Kingdom by Kira Buxton

Rating: 4.5* of five (a group read in Goodreads' Apocalypse Whenever group)

I was utterly enchanted when I read this book while I had COVID. I'm a corvidophile, so S.T. and I were always likely to be besties. Still, the narrative voice was a real pleasure to read and the idea of the book carried me from start to finish...not like a lot of fun, funny ideas that kinda...slack off...after a while. Nope. There was a central idea, what happened has happened and now what? and the whole story explored that central idea. Still, I was tempted to round down my rating for a few slightly slow spots...but in the end, it works too well to do that.

A book I urge on others. I think, sometimes, they wish I wouldn't. But I still will.

Hmmm, thinking about ordering a copy of Compulsory Games, partly because NYRB edition and partly because Aikman sounds interesting. How do you think his stories would land for me?

>136 richardderus: YAY! I am so glad you read and enjoyed that one! I read it during the pandemic and was also utterly enchanted. That crow was a narrator who has stayed with me. Of course, I also recognized some of the neighborhoods -- I used to live near Blue Dog Park -- (and I wondered if the author wasn't counting on that kind of geographical sentimentality just a wee bit too much) but even apart from that, I loved it.

>133 FAMeulstee: I have this illusion that once I retire I will more willingly dig into 900+ page tomes. I don't avoid them altogether now, but pretty darn close. But if reading time feels less precious, I would like to give myself permission to dedicate that number of hours to something really brilliant.

I'm now off for a weekend of wine-tasting with friends. See you next week!

>137 EBT1002: Hiya Ellen! Hm...well...about Compulsory Games...let me quote you the first line from "Wood":

So my niece, Elinor, has given me one of those weather houses, where the woman comes out when it is likely to be fine, and the man when it is going to rain!

I think you can see why *I* like it, but can you read twenty-five pages of that narrator and be amused, bemused, then unsettled, then actually shocked? I say yes, but you know you best.

I read it a second time just now because of the group read but it was a COVID book for me as well. I just love ShitTurd!

>135 FAMeulstee: Hmmm...permaybehaps we can co-ordinate. 2022 is around the blasted corner!

>138 richardderus: I will wait for your call, Richard dear.
And if you don't call I will plan it for December 2022.

>136 richardderus: Hooray for Hollow Kingdom! I am so glad you read it and loved it, Richard. A few of us here, did the same a couple years ago, (summer of '19). Such a pleasant surprise.

Thanks for sharing the Audubon photo winners. Incredible stuff.

>140 msf59: It was past time to get SOMEthing said, it's true.

They're AMAZING and talented, but it's the patience I admire most.

>139 FAMeulstee: Okay!

‘Morning, RD!

>132 richardderus: Thanks for the hummingbird photo. We don’t have Anna’s here, alas, but I did see them in SoCal in 2017. I’m also thrilled at all the other photographs.

>136 richardderus: I read this in November of 2019 and also gave it 4.5 stars. S.T. is an absolute marvel, and even though I’m not usually a dog person, I love Dennis.

>142 karenmarie: Saturday orisons, Horrible dear. I'm so glad you enjoyed the photo contest site! I was deeply impressed, as I told you, and am always happy when others are right there with me.

I loved ShitTurd, and while there are sad things that happen in the book, there are so many excellent ideas explored that I was willing to get past my vexations and irks. Sweet Dennis. *sigh*

*smooch*

>119 richardderus: 'tis true

You turn lovely phrases

>144 mckait: oh, you

Hallo, RDear.

Happy Sunday! I have coffee and books. I hope you have coffee and books.

*smooch*

>146 karenmarie: Happy Sunday, Horrible! I'm coffee'd and book'd and it's a perfect reading day...gloomy, glurky, not too hot.

*smooch*

>136 richardderus: I put Hollow Kingdom on a wish list or two back when Mark was warbling about it, but it has not yet come my way. I guess I have to take matters into my own hands and just buy the damned thing.

>148 weird_O: I should say so, Bill! You're not going to be sad about spending the spondulix. Such a fun ride!

Hollow Kingdom is one of the rare times I borrowed a copy from the Library. I'd like to get my own copy, but haven't made the effort yet.

>150 karenmarie: Eagle-eye that Friends sale! I wouldn't be surprised if the book shows up there this year, since it's two years old. And Feral Creatures is out on the 24th! (Of August.)

Ah, my favorite menace! I just re-ordered Feral Creatures. I accidentally ordered it non-Amazon Smile, cancelled it, and re-ordered it Amazon Smile.

>152 karenmarie: It's wise to support charity with one's purchases. Takes the sting out of supporting Bezos & Co.

Happy Sunday, Richard. Cool and wet here, so I am staying in with the books. Diary of a Young Naturalist is making perfect company.

>154 msf59: It's great to have exactly the right companion for the mood, isn't it? You've shown what the young man's capable of...no surprise you're so pleased to go with him.

Life and Fate is such a perfect book - long and busy but so super powerful and wonderful chock full of complex and fascinating characters.

Glad to see it made your best of list too Richard

Howdy-de-doo.
Family drama and so forth continues, but I'm back haunting threads and mouthing off when I don't admire an author's latest book.
I plan on a flurry of reviews, à la karenmarie's "lightning round" style.

I just jumped to the bottom here so if there's something I should really and truly page up to read, you'll sing out, no?

118 Give My Love to the Savages: Stories by Chris Stuck

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A provocative and raw debut collection of short fiction reminiscent of Junot Diaz’s Drown.

A Black man’s life, told in scenes—through every time he’s been called nigger. A Black son who visits his estranged white father in Los Angeles just as the ’92 riots begin. A Black Republican, coping with a skin disease that has turned him white, is forced to reconsider his life. A young Black man, fetishized by an older white woman he’s just met, is offered a strange and tempting proposal.

The nine tales in Give My Love to the Savages illuminate the multifaceted Black experience, exploring the thorny intersections of race, identity, and Black life through an extraordinary cast of characters. From the absurd to the starkly realistic, these stories take aim at the ironies and contradictions of the American racial experience. Chris Stuck traverses the dividing lines, and attempts to create meaning from them in unique and unusual ways. Each story considers a marker of our current culture, from uprisings and sly and not-so-sly racism, to Black fetishization and conservatism, to the obstacles placed in front of Black masculinity and Black and interracial relationships by society and circumstance.

Setting these stories across America, from Los Angeles, Phoenix and the Pacific Northwest, to New York and Washington, DC, to the suburbs and small Midwestern towns, Stuck uses place to expose the absurdity of race and the odd ways that Black people and white people converge and retreat, rub against and bump into one another.

Ultimately, Give My Love to the Savages is the story of America. With biting humor and careful honesty, Stuck riffs on the dichotomy of love and barbarity—the yin and yang of racial experience—and the difficult and uncertain terrain Black Americans must navigate in pursuit of their desires.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I seriously doubted that I'd get deeply enmeshed in this book because Race. Such a stupid, racist thought...and so untrue in the end. I feel vindicated in continuing to prosecute my ongoing battle against the ossification of my brain. Why, I even read another YA book recently and y'all *know* how much I don't like teenagers. Even gay ones.

But this collection, now, this is the stuff I think I'll find every time I try something fresh. I am so often disappointed...not always the author's fault...that, when I find writers like Author Stuck I'm a little wary. "Is this the only one? Can and/or will he do more, get even better?" I'm hoping he can, and will, because a writer who looks at the world from his oddball angle is a deep pleasure to read.

The blow-by-blow list is on my blog: https://tinyurl.com/d2mhutr

>157 SandyAMcPherson: Hi Sandy! Drama ≠ good, of course, but you're still managing to get things done so you're ahead of the game.

Any time you're wondering what's necessary to read on any given thread, visit post #2. This thread it's: https://www.librarything.com/topic/333258#7540528

>156 magicians_nephew: It's a big shock to me how few people have anything but the highest praise for the book! If there *are* naysayers, they're awfully quiet....

Great review of Give My Love to the Savages, Richard. I'll add it to my wish list.

>158 richardderus:
Why, I even read another YA book recently

>161 humouress: ...aaannnd I liked it, too!

>160 kidzdoc: Oh good, Doc! I think you'll get a kick out of it. And if you think "Lake No Negro" is a good story, please explain why. I don't think it needed to be in the collection, myownself.

Hmm, I couldn't find where you mentioned the tablet cases for Amazon Prime day, but I've found mine has an unintended benefit. I placed it in front of my Mac and over the course of time as I've dealt with hang nails and other fingertip issues my nail and cuticle nippers migrated on top of it and won't fall off - the magnets hold them in place! Too bad my glasses don't have the right metallic mix to stay where put.

>163 quondame: Enviably strong magnets, those! I haven't had any such luck.

Happy Tuesday, Richard!

Hiya, RD, and happy Tuesday to you. I've got a Friends book sale planning meeting this morning for the August sale of Children's books and AV, then grocery shopping, then trying to settle on a book. Non-fiction's under control with Ties that Bound from the U of Chicago Press sale, but I can't seem to settle on a fiction book right now.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

Happy Tuesday *smooches* to you, Richard.

>167 bell7: Thank you, Mary, and to you as well. Fun to see your latest progress photos!

>166 karenmarie: Hey Horrible, back at'cha. The meeting sounds pretty tedious to me, but meetings have always broken me out in hives. Enjoy getting things done, and the well-earned calm that comes after. The right novel will hit you soon, I feel sure.

>165 connie53: Thanks, Connie, and to you and Peet as well. A little less than a week to go before the surgery, so it's just survive until then.

Just sticking my head in now that I'm back home. Keep on keepin' on!

>169 katiekrug: *AAAHHH*

A GHOST A GHO...oh. Hiya Katie!

>168 richardderus: Yes, I know. I'm really calm about it. Peet's more nervous but understandably so. He's the person that has to be on the operating table. I'm the positive one in the family and Peet being a thorough negative person sees thousand things that can go wrong. I will tell him about all the good wishes.

>138 richardderus: I love that first line. Thanks!

Also adding Give My Love to the Savages: Stories to the wishlist.

>172 EBT1002: Oh good! It's really really really um, well, gay...like Aickman.

I think you'll like Stuck's book...but tomorrow's the day I think you should look into buying.

>171 connie53: Well, Connie, hard as it is for me personally not to collapse into deep pits of unbearable negativity, I know how much Peet needs to hear your good news. Even if he'd be the last to admit it.

119 Appleseed: A Novel by Matt Bell

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In the vein of Neal Stephenson and Jeff VanderMeer, an epic speculative novel from Young Lions Fiction Award–finalist Matt Bell, a breakout book that explores climate change, manifest destiny, humanity's unchecked exploitation of natural resources, and the small but powerful magic contained within every single apple.

In eighteenth-century Ohio, two brothers travel into the wooded frontier, planting apple orchards from which they plan to profit in the years to come. As they remake the wilderness in their own image, planning for a future of settlement and civilization, the long-held bonds and secrets between the two will be tested, fractured and broken—and possibly healed.

Fifty years from now, in the second half of the twenty-first century, climate change has ravaged the Earth. Having invested early in genetic engineering and food science, one company now owns all the world’s resources. But a growing resistance is working to redistribute both land and power—and in a pivotal moment for the future of humanity, one of the company’s original founders will return to headquarters, intending to destroy what he helped build.

A thousand years in the future, North America is covered by a massive sheet of ice. One lonely sentient being inhabits a tech station on top of the glacier—and in a daring and seemingly impossible quest, sets out to follow a homing beacon across the continent in the hopes of discovering the last remnant of civilization.

Hugely ambitious in scope and theme, Appleseed is the breakout novel from a writer “as self-assured as he is audacious” (NPR) who “may well have invented the pulse-pounding novel of ideas” (Jess Walter). Part speculative epic, part tech thriller, part reinvented fairy tale, Appleseed is an unforgettable meditation on climate change; corporate, civic, and familial responsibility; manifest destiny; and the myths and legends that sustain us all.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: When I read Author Bell's 2013 novel, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, it was a startling experience. Sadly, it came at almost exactly the same time as my epic emotional collapse so I've only recently reviewed it. Let me tell you now, in brief, why I think it was an extraordinarily good read: Myth-making never ceases, no culture is without its myths; that book was an exploration of The Couple Myth at length; and there is no better way to make myths than to put the most complete possible vocabulary of the day around them. Appleseed is a fuller exploration of this technique applied to Climate Change.

What myths are we exploring this time...is there a myth-set tale that this three-handed sonata plays on? Yes...the title's the first giveaway, there's a definite connection to the Johnny Appleseed myth made from John Chapman's actual life spent planting the American West with economically useful apple trees in advance of the settlers coming to Ohio (yes, that *was* the West then, surprising isn't it two hundred years on).

Nathaniel, older human brother of Chapman the faun, does the work of finding the way, avoiding the humans who would hurt or kill his behornèd brother of the golden eyes and hoofed legs. Chapman knows the land, even the land he's never been on. It is his nature. And we all know what happens to Nature, don't we. The greater glory of a christian god is costly, always and in all ways; do you wish to continue past the point of no return?

John lives in our near-term future, a recycler busily trying to undo the Works of Man that Chapman and Jonathan, in their innocence, believe to be Progress instead of progressive rot. He travels alone when we meet him...he is looking for his (female, of course) buddy/pal/squeeze because, well, humans need each other. His dystopia, an Amercan West (the one we know as such today) is tinder-dry, eczema-dotted with our dams and roads and ghosts of towns that he wants to render inoperable and irreparable. Needless to say, the corporate entity that actually, formally, owns the whole expanse doesn't like some rando ruining perfectly usable infrastructure. Especially now that all those pesky people aren't cluttering it up. The slow reveal of why John and his ex are doing what they're doing to re-wild the West is a piece of misdirection I can't quite bring myself to spoil...but suffice it to say the era of mythmaking about Man's Plenipotentiary Powers à la Sisyphus is not over yet.

And then there's C-433. This being lives many, many lives in our distant, glacier-scraped future. This way of live is enabled by spelunking the crevasses that always open in craters and reclaiming for reuse whatever materials from the time before are reclaimable. We're not-quite told that C-433 is a clone host for the consciousness of an earlier human...or maybe faun? note initial...and this iteration/incarnation is a risk-averse, therefore old, entity facing the reality that a scavenger doesn't produce anything so will, inevitably, pass from the scene. As a way of life it is severely limited.

But, in each of these story lines, there is a leitmotif, a through-line, that Author Bell resurfaces for your easter-egging pleasure. The Loom might be my favorite fictional technology ever; the uses of the scavenged materials, the most poignant. The apple...the choice that C-433 has to make...there are absolutely delightful connections made among these grace notes. The complexity of the read is one of its pleasures and I encourage you, like you would with any rich and calorific consumable, to go slowly...make it last. Think about it as you go to sleep, dream its scenes as you're processing its sweet, sonorous prose.

So why, if I'm practically crooning my pleasure in hopes of luring you to read it, am I rating it less than five full stars?

Because, while I as a lifelong inhabitant of this country appreciate its US-centered myth-making and its implicit acceptance that our (in)actions are largely responsible for this disaster, it feels wrong to simply dismiss with a cursory glance the planet-wide scale of it. Because there's a weird, unnecessary straight-man sex scene that jolts progress to a halt while we indulge y'all's ugly needs. Because the ending...while interesting...wasn't anything like the rest of the book so felt merged from a different FTP with middling success.

None of those things rise above the level of quibbles because the gestalt carries the day. There is such a beautiful tapestry woven of these lovely words. I've avoided quoting them to you because, well, which ones? Why those? Where's the perfect quote for this idea...this one, that one, no no the other one...and it got headachey trying to figure it out.

What didn't get headachey was this phrase, this simple phrase, that says everything the book and the future need you to know: "No matter what you do, there will never be more time left to act than there is now."

A call to arms, a fable of consequences, a myth of magisterial beauty and magical urgency.

Hallo, RDear, and happy Wednesday to you! Today is a Karen-alone-in-the-house day, replete with coffee, reading, and some Friends homework from yesterday's meeting.

The meeting was productive. Our webmaster did snarl when some folks started trying to figure out how to set tables up on August 6, the day before the sale, wasting the time of the 8 folks there who had no horse in the race. Besides, we don’t know exactly how many children’s books we have so don’t know how many tables we’ll need and therefore we’ll have to make a last-minute decision anyway. Jim doesn’t normally snarl, but it was fun to watch. I got in my licks about tally sheets when I was asked about them for the cashier’s tables, reminding them that they shut me down on what I wanted to do, so I came up with a handy-dandy “Sale – Discount – Net Sale” 8.5” x 11” paper, which I showed to them.

*smooch*

Hi Richard. Last night, I was catching up on the email newsletters I subscribe to, and came across this. But you know all this, I am sure, right? :-)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-sy-montgomery.html...

>174 richardderus: I did not purchase this one for the library collection - it was borderline, and science fiction/future stuff doesn't fly unless it's uber-popular (even Project Hail Mary sat on the new shelf for awhile). But you do make it sound good for one to eventually read myself. Fun fact: I'm distantly related to Johnny Appleseed, something like a 5th cousin 7x removed, I think.

>177 bell7: You yourownself are likely to like the book a good deal, Mary, so yes for you. Your patrons, welllll...not from the profile I've built of them. Too "out there" what with a faun and a functionally immortal transferred consciousness.

>176 jessibud2: Oh my, yes indeed! Sy Montgomery's The Soul of an Octopus is on my "no-you-may-NOT-borrow-that" shelf.

>175 karenmarie: Ha! The delicious "had you listened to me a year ago, you'd know..." speech. I'm so pleased for you that you had a chance to be ungracious!

Have a pleasant solitudinous solar cycle! *smooch*

>174 richardderus: - Great review! Not my usual reading fare, but you've made it irresistible. Off to the library website...

Hey, RD. I, too, enjoyed Hollow kingdom and S.T. She's got another S.T. story coming out in August, Feral Creatures.

The Soul of an Octopus was great. I wish more people would try it, although I wouldn't loan it out either.

>180 jnwelch: The library has it, Joe...offer to let them use your card if necessary, but lend it out? Oh nay nay nay.

I hope Author Buxton can keep it up! I'm braced for a let-down, though....

>179 katiekrug: I think you'll enjoy it, Katie, but it really is best read in chapters. The pace isn't cracking. The thing I dreaded most, Preaching, didn't happen; so I think you'll enjoy it as well. I got to retweet his appreciation tweet! He quote-tweeted my review link...about doubled the eyeballs on it.

>180 jnwelch: Oh, yeah! More S.T.!!

>182 drneutron: We can all agree that's a great idea, Doc. Almost anyone who's read it can't wait for more!

Happy Wednesday, Richard. Good review of Appleseed. I thought I had read his earlier book Scrapper but I need to double-check that. BTW- I did watch the film adaptation of Joe, the other night. I liked it. Cage was very good and so was the rest of the cast. Of course, it pales compared to the novel. Keeping that trend going, I intend to watch A Room With a View tonight.

>184 msf59: Oh great idea, Mark! Seeing Daniel Day-Lewis as Cecil Vyse is...well...he *inhabits* the chump! Such a terrific actor...as is, IMO, Cage (but only sometimes) and Joe is one of his better performances.

I've never read Scrapper. One day I'll have to. He does write his heart out.

I have a terrible case of the Julys. It's hot, it's humid, and there's entirely too much blasting, battering sunshine. I tried to read my really very good novel read, The Safety Net (a Montalbano!) and bounced; I tried to get into my non-fiction read, Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, and bounced; I tried a stupid romance, That Summer in Spain, and bounced.

Bleurgh.

>186 richardderus: Sorry the sun, and humidity are bothering you, Richard dear. It is bad when it keeps you from reading.
I wish we both could have nice cool summer weather with a brisky breeze all summer long... But sadly we will have to do with what we get.
Over here today wasn't bad, tomorrow wil be about the same, but then temps will rise again. At least I will be able to sleep, thanks to the a/c upstairs.
It is worse in the south of our country, lots of rain and rivers flooding :-(

>186 richardderus: I know exactly what you mean, and I hate it. On top of the weather, I've had a nasty cold for about 5 days, and it's disrupted whatever little routine I have. Happily, it's running its course, and I should be just fine to drive the lawn tractor back and forth, broiling that thing in my head that I call a brain.

Well, it could be worse...

I think.

Happy Thursday, Richard dear!

I looked at the weather forecast for your area. Sadly no better weather in sight for you.

Hiya, RD! Happy Thursday to you.

I hope you stop bouncing and can settle on something.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

-Harry Bliss

Sweet Thursday, Richard. Rain here, so it is keeping me indoors. Boo!

>191 msf59: Right here, Harry Bliss, riiight here.

Hiss boo hissss on that rain! I'd like some, but mostly for the plants.

>190 karenmarie: Hey Horrible. I'm thinking I've settled on The Library of the Unwritten...at least so far.

>189 FAMeulstee: It's the middle of July, so these are the weeks of yucky weather I expect every year. It doesn't stop me complaining about them...but they aren't unusual and so far don't show any signs of being worse than usual. May that trend continue, really for all of us....

>188 weird_O: Ecchh on the cold! I'm sorry, Bill, I know that's really just the least amount of fun possible. Any time, really, but summer is extra.

Feel better soon.

Dear Richard, I am caught up with this thread and the last. Your spirit animal suits you and I love it:)

And you got me! Not with The Dictionary of Lost Words because I had been got already but with A Wizard's Guide to Baking (what really got me was Ursula Vernon, who is very popular in my elementary school library), and Hollow Kingdom. So... thank you.

Hope it's a good week. Sorry you have the Julys. I am dreading the email from my principal announcing the back to school schedule. For me that's August 5. Ugh.

>119 richardderus: Condign. Condign.

Condign

Condign

Condign

Condign

Condign

I learned a new word!!!

>194 LovingLit: And it's really useful, too, especially in this depressing moral landscape. Enjoy trotting it out!

>193 AMQS: Hi Anne, happy to see you here! I'm quite pleased with my aim, given that they're all such terrific reads. You enjoy them, and that, erm, uuuhhh, school-return thing, too.

If such is a possibility.

I might need a few example sentences to practice on before I could trot it out with confidence :)

Hiya, RD! I hope The Library of the Unwritten works out. I think I'm going to start The Survivors. I don't know why I haven't picked up before now. It's been on my shelves since April 13.

Coffee is a wondrous thing.

*smooch*

120 Blind Spots: Why Students Fail and the Science That Can Save Them by Kimberly Nix Berens

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the United States, a majority of students graduate below proficiency in all academic subjects. Parents of struggling students feel overwhelmed and confused about how to help their children simply survive school, let alone succeed. Various school reform efforts have been tried and all have failed. But all hope is not lost. A science exists that allows children to learn as individuals even though at school they are educated in groups. One that avoids senseless labels that sentence children to lifetimes of failure and mediocrity.

Dr. Kimberly Berens and a team of scientists have spent the last 20 years perfecting a powerful system of instruction based on the learning, behavioral, and cognitive sciences that they call Fit Learning. This method of teaching has been proven to markedly improve how students understand and achieve, even for children who have been told they have learning disabilities or other disorders that interfere with their ability to learn.

Blind Spots reveals the history of our broken education system and shows that by using this teaching system in the classroom, we can unlock the vast potential hidden within every child.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER IN A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY MAGAZINE GIVEAWAY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is a class of non-fiction book, driven by an agenda (usually religious or economic), that breaks me out in giant urticaria. People who feel, intensely, that Their Way Is Correct, aren't usually interesting to me. When I received this book, I worried that the problem would be especially strong here because Dr. Berens is a proselytizer for an educational system of her own devising.

The problem sounds obvious, doesn't it....damn near inescapable, really. Not so fast....

Yes, there is a lot here that is self-promotional, and that does indeed make me very uncomfortable. I was willing to keep going because the issue Dr. Berens is attempting to fix is one about which I am passionate as well: EDUCATE MY GRANDCHILDREN don't teach them how to take a damn test. We have forty years of lousy learners whose reading skills are such that comic books and audiobooks and podcasts are literary genres. I am, frankly, appalled by this...you need someone to read a book to you? You need lovely art to look at to make all those dull words come alive?! Is there no silence for you, someone must always be talking, talking, talking? When do you ever *think*?

Such are my concerns...Dr. Berens doesn't address them, but she does address the sad and worsening situation that teachers and students are enmeshed in. The first four chapters of the book clock in at 108 pages. They are the case-making chapters, the ones where we're informed of how we got here. I found them depressing and hard to motivate myself to read because honestly, seeing what's happened to the young people I know, there is such an immense wrong that's been done to them in the name of education that I want to weep.

The establishment sets an arbitrary timeline that teachers and students are expected to follow. Thus, students spend a predetermined amount of time on a particular lesson, get tested on that lesson, receive a grade of some sort, and are pushed on to the next lesson—regardless of the grade received. Grades are viewed as an evaluation of the student, not an evaluation of instruction. Students are expected to raise their hands, sit quietly and attentively in class, and make good grades. When students fail to do these things, that failure is attributed to problems inherent in the student.
...I'm hoping that uncovering your blind spots regarding how learning actually occurs might be the tipping point {to cause action}. ... Educational practices should be based on how learning actually occurs, not on how the establishment believes learning occurs.

Having spent the preceding hundred-plus pages bringing the fallacies and unsupported assumptions to your attention, the next chapter (five, for the detail-oriented) explodes nine myths about learning:

1. All Kids Learn Differently


2. We Should Teach to A Child's Strengths


3. They're Just Not Ready Yet


4. They're Just Not Good at It


5. Curriculum Materials Must Capture Student Interest


6. It's All About Self-Esteem


7. But They're The Experts!


8. Learning and Behavioral Problems are Medical and Often Require Medication


9. It's All About the Brain

...that's pretty comprehensive, isn't it...and the simplest thing about it is the number of times you've nodded your head, and thought (or said out loud, don't front!) "yeah, _____ said that when..." you've interacted with The System. Any parent has, and has heard those very ideas expressed with great confidence. And, it turns out, surprisingly circular intellectual justifications. (That's those first four chapters I had to make myself read.)

Chapter five, then, is about preparing you for chapter six: The Solution. Isn't that a reassuring title? You've made me all verschmekeled about the problem, yes, but here is The Solution. Thirty pages of assertions that I myownself think sound like they can't miss...but, says the Voice of Doubt, what makes these ideas better than the ones we're living the failure of? Chapter seven: The Evidence.

Yep. The structure of the book is a well-designed version of the solution it presents. I'm borderline panicked at the middle-aged people who, during this pandemic, have taken no lessons away from their experience of being forced to be their kids' teachers except "teachers aren't paid enough" (which, true enough, they aren't). The way your own kid looks at you as you're trying to explain a lesson shouldn't fill you with dismay and embarrassment. It should make you goddamned good and mad. This is what school means to them! It's not (just) you, it's the bloody awful things we've done to kids for forty years and called education!

So...do I think you should buy this book and read it? Yes. Yes, I do. I know you won't necessarily like the experience but the information makes me want to urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to read it and share it widely...parent, grandparent, or just citizen of the world these schoolchildren will make for you.

>197 karenmarie: Isn't caffeine the most ut? Gives us the stamina to get on with our serial-killer reading! Enjoy the day with Jane Harper.

So far, The Library of the Unwritten is a hoot and a holler. I'm really hopeful.

>196 LovingLit: "While many think the use of capital punishment to be condign, I regard it as an outrage and inexcusable abuse of the state's power."

"Jeffrey Epstein's rather convenient 'suicide' while in Federal custody seems to me, no matter how it was actually achieved, a condign punishment for the crimes he committed."

>174 richardderus: I have just put that one on hold at the library. You don't give out 4.75 stars without a good reason and I appreciated your articulation of the reasons for the quarter-star deduction, including the clarity that the associated quibbles did not come even close to ruining the gestalt.

By the way, I have All Systems Red waiting for me just as soon as I finish The Plot.

>200 EBT1002: Oh yay! I'm very hopeful that you'll love the read...and I know you'll adore All Systems Red!

I'm working on The Plot at the moment, too.

Monkeypox! There is no effective treatment. It lasts as much as a month, and in Africa, kills one in ten who get it. Respiratory droplets and close contact with secretions are the means of contracting it.

I may never take my mask off again!

>199 richardderus: excellent examples. I shall memorise them and pull them out at my next social gathering and see how they land ;)

'Morning, RDear! Happiest of Saturdays to you.

I couldn't start The Survivors, but it's just me, not the book - at least I think it's just me. Anyway, I heeded the siren call of Night Film by Marisha Pessl, and am at least past the first few pages.

>202 richardderus: I had started eating out after getting vaccinated. Since March 10, I've eaten out twice with Bill, once with Aunt Ann, once with high school friend Jan, once with former co-workers, once with a different co-worker and his wife, and we had vaccinated friends in the house two separate times. Now I'm re-thinking it. I still wear a mask at the PO, grocery store, pharmacy, Library (but not in the large meeting room), and thrift shop when I get a book hankering. What a world, what a world...

*smooch* from your own Horrible

Morning, Richard. Happy Saturday. Garage cleaning day ahead. At least the mild weather will help. Hooray for the Murderbot series!

>205 msf59: Ugh, garage-cleaning! The Worst. But the reward is it'll be years before you have to do it again!

>204 karenmarie: Hi Horrible...the mask thing is just too easy to do, there's no real downside, and multiple upsides. Out in the open I can't say I feel Exposed without one, but there's no chance I'll be wandering around any enclosed space without a mask anytime soon.

I hope Pessl works better than Harper did. The right key to spring the lock exists!

I enjoyed Hollow Kingdom when I read it a while ago and, thanks to your post about Feral Creatures, I checked out my library's website. They have it on order and I am #1 on the hold list! So thank you.

One of the books I currently have on the go is Hench, all good so far.

>207 Familyhistorian: Oh yay! First in line is great...enjoying the recommended read is even better. Happiness reigns.

Whew! All caught up here. I've read most of your fiction but the Salina library has an ebook version of Blind Spots so I will check that out. Still unpacking...

>209 ronincats: Have a good time with Blind Spots, Roni...I suspect it's nothing you don't know. It's still important to listen to the voices of those whose views are Out, I think.

I hope the unpacking goes smoothly, and you're able to get the house firmed up. *smooch* Thanks for coming by!

Happy Sunday, Richard. The garage/shed cleaning is mostly done and the truck can be safely parked but with mere inches to spare. A couple of tasks this morning and then book time.

>211 msf59: Ha! What a great cartoon...you've seen the one I left you, then. *snicker*

Happy happy, joy joy about the garage. If it fits, job's a good'un. So, free for back-to-books time, you're going with...?

'Morning, RD, and happy Sunday to you. I hope your day is a good'un. Night Film is working out for me, thank goodness. I always feel twitchy if I'm not reading something wonderful.

*smooch*

>213 karenmarie: Yay! I'm glad it's working out for you, then, since an antsy day isn't any fun at all to live through.
*smooch*
***

Quiet around these parts, isn't it?

Well, here I am again, to wish you a marvelous Monday. I've got a Friends Board meeting at 10 a.m. then home again home again jiggity-jig.

>214 richardderus: LOL

>215 karenmarie: ...summer lull...? Dunno. Anyway, have that Monday! Whatever it looks like. However it's done. Just "the Mondays" should stay home.

*smooch*

>217 karenmarie: Hiya Horrible! It's new books day...the floodgates are open wide.

Funnily enough, it's not the most exciting one of the month for me, and that surprises me. Publishers usually use this Tuesday to shove their best at us...that was last week, IMO.

Anyway, enjoy the Tuesdays.

>219 richardderus: Always love Gauld.

Just stopping by.

>220 BekkaJo: Hi there, Bekka, glad to see you in these echoing halls.
***
Hey look, everyone! Shuggie Bain's getting a book-sibling! Young Mungo comes out (!) in April 2022, according to Douglas Stuart.

>219 richardderus: That's very good! Hope you're keeping well and out of mischief (well mostly)

>222 Helenliz: Hi Helen! Yes, Gauld's lost nothing in the pandemic, has he?

I'm out of mischief, I swear. No mischief. Nope, none.

*eyes Zeus*

>223 richardderus: Here's hoping your restock is getting same day delivery.

>224 quondame: One area I've never ever experienced any lasting shortage, TBH.

>221 richardderus: That is good news and I'm glad that Stuart has more to tell. The danger with his last book being so obviously personal was that he might not have much more to say. I will await it with my usual impatience.

Give free rein to the mischief, dear fellow, wouldn't really want you to change!

>226 PaulCranswick: Hi PC, thanks for coming to see me. I'm very happy he's decided to publish it. The usual fate of the novel before the one that gets published is to hold down the bottom of a drawer somewhere. He's worked on Young Mungo for six years!

I so hope he's not done yet.

>221 richardderus: That is exiting news, Richard dear, I will look forward to (the Dutch translation of) Young Mungo.

'Morning, RDear.

Coffee, brekkie, errands. I hope to get some reading in this afternoon.

Are you getting any of the smoke from the wildfires out west? It's supposed to start showing up here today.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

121 The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he’s teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what’s left of his self-respect; he hasn’t written—let alone published—anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student, announces he doesn’t need Jake’s help because the plot of his book in progress is a sure thing, Jake is prepared to dismiss the boast as typical amateur narcissism. But then . . . he hears the plot.

Jake returns to the downward trajectory of his own career and braces himself for the supernova publication of Evan Parker’s first novel: but it never comes. When he discovers that his former student has died, presumably without ever completing his book, Jake does what any self-respecting writer would do with a story like that—a story that absolutely needs to be told.

In a few short years, all of Evan Parker’s predictions have come true, but Jake is the author enjoying the wave. He is wealthy, famous, praised and read all over the world. But at the height of his glorious new life, an e-mail arrives, the first salvo in a terrifying, anonymous campaign: You are a thief, it says.

As Jake struggles to understand his antagonist and hide the truth from his readers and his publishers, he begins to learn more about his late student, and what he discovers both amazes and terrifies him. Who was Evan Parker, and how did he get the idea for his “sure thing” of a novel? What is the real story behind the plot, and who stole it from whom?

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THOSE LIBRARIES! THEY NEED OUR PATRONAGE TO SURVIVE.

My Review: First, read this:

All he had ever wanted was to tell—in the best possible words, arranged in the best possible order—the stories inside him. He had been more than willing to do the apprenticeship and the work. He had been humble with his teachers and respectful of his peers. He had acceded to the editorial notes of his agent (when he’d had one) and bowed to the red pencil of his editor (when he’d had one) without complaint. He had supported the other writers he’d known and admired (even the ones he hadn’t particularly admired) by attending their readings and actually purchasing their books (in hardcover! at independent bookstores!) and he had acquitted himself as the best teacher, mentor, cheerleader, and editor that he’d known how to be, despite the (to be frank) utter hopelessness of most of the writing he was given to work with. And where had he arrived, for all of that? He was a deck attendant on the Titanic, moving the chairs around with fifteen ungifted prose writers while somehow persuading them that additional work would help them improve.

Then go here to read the rest of the review: https://tinyurl.com/ensdvhv2

There is an issue I daren't go into here for fear of angering the spoilerphobic. It is the reason I don't rate it more highly...but don't mistake that for a warn-off. The pages flew and the gasps were audible. A first-rate summer read.

>229 karenmarie: Hi Horrible! Happy Humpday. We've had some smoke, mostly it's colored the sunrises and -sets quite bloody. But there are some more impaired smokers who've noticed there's an extra weight on their breathing.

I just look at the Sun and think...oh great...

>228 FAMeulstee: Hi Anita! Yes, I'm very pleased with Stuart's announcement. I'm hoping he'll see a lot of success with this book, too. He's really got the writing talent to make a solid career, so I hope he'll manage it well.

Happy Wednesday!

>230 richardderus: - Great review! We felt much the same about the book, and I agree that the oh-so-amazing plot was kind of a let-down.

>229 karenmarie:, >231 richardderus: - It was weirdly hazy here yesterday and I was wondering if it could be the effects of the fires way out west...

>232 katiekrug: Morning, Katie...the haze got worse today, at least here it did, and yep that's the Western forests' corpses we're breathing in.

Particulate matter in the air during a respiratory plague year. Wow am I glad that I'm vaccinated. I'm not at all sympathetic to those who're unvaccinated and are, therefore, hugely more likely to get seriously ill and/or die.

But then again the only formal poetry I enjoy is the jeremiad.

Coolest dagger ever.

the only formal poetry I enjoy is the jeremiad.

Bing! How do you come up with these lines?

You saw, I'm sure, the vid clip of Dr. Fauci kicking Dr. Paul's butt. "If anyone is lying here, senator, it is you."

>235 weird_O: I adore Fauci...now...though I remember the Bad Old Days when he, um, wasn't quite with the program vis-à-vis AIDS.

>230 richardderus: The Plot sounds interesting - of course if Korelitz could have embedded the inevitably successful plot she could also have written it instead.....

In case this hadn't shown up on your FB feed:

>237 quondame: One has the feeling Author Korelitz structured her novel the way she did precisely so she could use the plot she whomped up without dying off mortification.

Not on FB anymore, someone pirated my account and I let them. Likewise Insta. I loathe that fuck Zuck so much that I'm almost grateful I can't access them anymore. I would never have worked up the head of steam to do it myownself.

That is glorious!!

Happy Wednesday, Richard. We had a nice bird outing this morning, enjoying the cooler day. The HEAT returns with a vengeance tomorrow, just in time for our quick trip to St. Louis, to attend a Cubs/Cards game. I think I am going to take a pass on The Plot. No one on LT has convinced me to give it a go.

>219 richardderus: LIKE!

>239 msf59: Heh, no reader doesn't love Tom Gauld's rationalizations!

I don't think you're missing all that much. You read Less and Ladder to the Sky, right? Bit like that story, only from the outside. It was fun, but there's only so many times one can read the same thing.

Ugh on Hot Louis! It is SOOOO humid there...but the game will keep you satisfied. Safe travels.

>236 richardderus: Goes to show that a person with a functioning brain can grow and improve over time.

>198 richardderus: Hi, Richard! *Blind Spots* is striking a symphony of chords with me. I would just ask how a teacher can teach what she doesn't know, and she doesn't know it because she herself received a lousy education.

Off to look at some of the other books!

I wish you a cool, pleasant weekend with a dollop of joy on the way.

Happy Thursday, Richard dear!

I just finished Shuggie Bain...

Hiya, RD! Happy Thursday to you.

>230 richardderus: Great and enticing review. I’m now 6th on the waiting list for it at the Library, will probably get it 6 months from now, and will have forgotten why I wanted it.

>238 richardderus: I’m still on FB but don’t use it. I only ever posted one time beyond likes and comments about other posts anyway. I’ve got a few friends who Messenger me, and that’s okay.

Our air quality is suffering with smoke/particulate matter from the western fires now, too.

*smooch*

>244 karenmarie: Quite a lot of people use FB the way you're describing, including me; people I don't see around anymore, and haven't bothered themselves to wonder where I've gone it would seem.

I hope you'll enjoy The Plot, with your expectations suitably adjusted by my deathless monadnock of the reviewer's art. Of course it will stick forever in your brain. Ahem.

Have a delightful day! *smooch*

>243 FAMeulstee: Oh, my, finished it...I can't wait to hear what you think of the read! I already know you enjoyed the story.

>242 LizzieD: Excellent, Peggy, that you resonate so fully with Blind Spots. I'm pretty impressed with her cogency. I'm at least hopeful that one or another of the others I've reviewed will hit you in the sweet spot.

BOO!

>246 humouress: Ha! That's excellent, Nina. "Be big and blue," she commanded her eight sub-brains.

And they were.

>245 richardderus: I'll probably write my thoughts down tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. I already gave a bit, as you saw on my thread.

Saw this and thought of you.

Little guy (18 in including the tentacles), found at about 650m down along the Phoenix Islands in the Pacific north of Samoa

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=200987851942761

Thought you'd enjoy it.

>249 mahsdad: I might have enjoyed it, but we'll never know. I can't access FB after getting my profile hacked and I decided to do nothing about it.

>248 FAMeulstee: Really, Anita, I think you nailed it in that one sentence...it's perfect.

>250 richardderus: Oh my bad. It was a cut down version to just the cute little cephalopod, but here's the YT clip that contains it.

https://youtu.be/KSviMhUUZxw

>251 mahsdad: That's GORGEOUS! Lovely, lovely, lovely. Thanks!

>219 richardderus: I love love love this :)

>234 richardderus: I think my dad has one similar looking....he collected (bought/traded) a lot of cool stuff on his adventures to wild places in search of photographs.

>253 LovingLit: Oh, I hope you'll inherit it, then. Such a beautiful object.

>249 mahsdad: So serene. And beautiful.

>250 richardderus: I can see it, Richard, even though I don't have FB. It seems to be one of the ones you don't have to log in for.

>251 mahsdad: Blissful! Thanks for the link.

'Morning, RDear. Happy Friday to you.

*smooch*

>256 karenmarie: Thanks, Horrible! Same back at'cha. *smooch*

>255 humouress: Ah! But, since I *do* have FB, it remembers me and requires me to sign in...which I can no longer do, because the hacker changed my data. So all I get is an endless loop of "incorrect sign-in" etc

Devilish.

I'm ecstatic. Jimmy Fallon, all unknowing, has driven over 1,100 people a day to my blog by choosing The Plot! In fact, to keep myself on the top of the Googlecharts, I'm postponing my usual Friday post until Sunday. Greedy thing, ain't I.

>258 richardderus: Cool!

Hi Richard!

I love that you loved Hollow Kingdom. I read it early on and was thoroughly delighted by it. I'm looking forward to starting Feral Creatures.

I found The Plot to be entertaining as long as I didn't think about it too much. How thrilling for the author to have it chosen by Fallon!

Hope you have a happy Friday and an even better weekend!

>260 Copperskye: Hi Joanne! Happy to see you here. Yes, Kira Buxton's a really amazing talent to think up and execute a story I wanted but wasn't able to articulate to myself...unlike Author Hanff Korelitz, whose story is really familiar. It's told well, and it is flawlessly paced. But the truly unique part is the moral questioning he does, all the while understanding that he's put himself in a deeply questionable situation as he revels in the rewards.

Be well, safe, and unburnt. *smooch*

>259 drneutron: It really, really is...I appreciate Serendipity all the more. She done me a real good turn.
***
If you've never read it, PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK is a gorgeous work of literature and, at $1.99, is on super-duper Kindlesale:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01E6G6GWO
Then go watch the Amazon Prime filmed version, which quite frankly I prefer to the 1975 Peter Weir version. There's just too much story to fit comfortably into one 107-minute film.

>258 richardderus: - That's great! I didn't know Jimmy Fallon was doing a book club (I assume that's what he chose it for?).

>262 katiekrug: Neither me...here's his announcement of the choice.

My therapist snarked, "he really just doesn't strike me as a Reader, does he to you?" I got a chuckle out of it, since she's always reminding me of how elitism doesn't become one in the arts of interpersonal commerce.

ETA fix link

"As the figures and examples {in the} above {article} illustrate, the rise of streaming and its love of literature have not only influenced which books are read, taught, and studied by scholars; they have also started to mediate the form fiction takes even if it’s never adapted at all."

A piece in The Atlantic by English Professor Alexander Manshel efficiently and interestingly traces the feedback loop that's been so greatly amplified by Amazon Prime, Netflix, et alii making so many truly excellent literary adaptations. Among my favorites are Prime's The Expanse and Picnic at Hanging Rock; Netflix's The Queen's Gambit and Altered Carbon; Hulu's 11/22/63; Peacock's Brave New World...the list is long and only getting longer. There are so so many in the pipeline because the prestige of being adapted is worth a lot in increased credibility and sales, and the story-telling work is only improved by having high-quality prose to work with.

You get two free articles on their site, and this one is worth spending one of yours on: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/07/tv-adaptations-fiction/61944...

I'm normally happy when anyone organizes a book club (although the book choices can be looney) but I was surprised that Jimmy Fallon chose to do one. We'll see how it goes.

Another great review up there, buddy. I hope we're helping to rekindle interest in Mary Renault's books. I spent many hours entranced inside the worlds she created (or recreated).

Like Bill, I loved your line that the only formal poetry I enjoy is the jeremiad.

>265 jnwelch: Thank you most kindly for the compliment, Joe! I can't decide if there are too many or too few jeremiads being crafted in this moment so aptly yclept The Politics of Petulance: America in an Age of Immaturity.

I'm hoping La Renault never goes out of style among the serious readers of historical fiction. She had a magical touch, didn't she.

>263 richardderus: What!? JF seems to me to be a fellow awake on all suits. Is it that he doesn't have a sharp profile that would cause her to judge him less likely to read or that his capacity for hilarity is high? It's the class clowns that often are also the class intellectuals.

>267 quondame: I don't know much about him apart from his SNL days and his current tenure as Johnny Carson's locum tenens. He's a personable lad, and seems at the very least to be quick on the uptake. I've looked at his Tweet/IG post on the 21st about reading the beginning of the book.

But it is a bit hard to take someone who's never done anything serious seriously.

>268 richardderus: Comedy is very serious business. And that personable lad has developed many talents which not all of them do.

>261 richardderus: Okay, okay, you got me. I've added Picnic at Hanging Rock to my ever growing list of Kindle books that I might eventually, possibly, just might get to before the heat death of the universe. :)

And this also reminds me that I need to finish reading The Expanse, I've read 3 of them.

>270 mahsdad: It's well worth it, honest and truly. I don't think you will regret giving it Kindle-room when/if you *do* get around to reading it. And there's never a bad time to watch a Peter Weir film.

The Expanse books really didn't do it for me...I really dunno why. They should've. The story, however, is excellent.

>269 quondame: You know a lot more than I do, then.

122 Cosplayers: Gender and Identity by A. Luxx Mishou

Rating: 4* of five

Cosplay is fun. Cosplay is an art, an act of textual analysis, a performance, an investment, and an argument.

Best first lines of an academic text in my memory. We're off to the races, and a fine contest it will be. Will I emerge victorious over my own very limited and discomfort-laden notions of cosplay? (I still have trouble distinguishing it from LARPing.) Will the clarity and vigor of Luxx's prose allow my COVIDified attention span to take a back seat and follow her careful and well-cited and -founded discussions of the many aspects of cosplay?

Cosplay is a narrative site that represents intersections of fantasy and reality performed by real people in real spaces.

The appeal might not reach me; the importance of it definitely does. After reading this informative explanation of cosplay's community and its many, often uneasy, intersections with our cultural expecatations as well as Fandom in general, I think I'm far better equipped to begin asking better questions than I was before.

I have been Luxx's friend in the online world of LibraryThing for over a decade. I am mightily impressed with her scholarship, of course, but I also experience a friend's overwhelming delight in her accomplishment in this book: She has explained my elderly self to me by way of paths I never thought to take. In five concise chapters, Luxx has brought her readers to a state of informed readiness to learn. That she has done so in an enjoyable way is her gift.

>272 richardderus: Neat. I've been adjacent to ground zero cosplay development since my twenties at SF conventions and the masquerade contests and historical costume groups that spun off into the costume conventions in the 80s and 90s. Of course I've worn and made a number myself, though more in the historic niches than the character centered ones. The difference between the flavors of historic, vs LARP vs cosplay can easily be obscured by the similarities but within each they are real.

Hi Richard, just skimming and waving at you!

Returning your visit. Hmph.

I saw Picnic at Hanging Rock on sale for Kindle the other day. I think I finally decided not to get it--but only because I have been looking at how many unread Kindle books I already own--not to mention the tangible ones.

Happy Saturday, Richard. Thanks for keeping my thread warm, while we were in St. Louie. Back home now and will probably chill for the rest of the weekend. I appreciate the heads up on Man V. Nature. I had that collection on my list and now I am a proud owner. Yah!

>276 thornton37814: A very reasonable thought process...I am incapable of emulating it, so I simply nod and smile in agreement while wondering what that must feel like.

>275 humouress: ...and so deep into supervillainous hooliganism is she that the corruption must spread to the Tentacled Americans!

>274 connie53: Hiii Cooonnniiieee! shouted after the fast-receding Flying Dutchwoman.

>273 quondame: So I comprehend having read Luxx's monograph. I was shocked at the shallowness of my awareness, let alone information on, the various arenas of this activity.

>278 richardderus: Nothing and no-one is safe. You have been warned.

‘Morning, RDear. Happy Saturday to you.

>258 richardderus: Congrats on the blog traffic. I personally can’t stand Jimmy Fallon because I don’t have a single bone in my body that appreciates practical jokes. He turned me off a very long time ago with the Halloween candy pranks.

>261 richardderus: Drat. Click. New book.

>264 richardderus: Alas. We don’t subscribe to Hulu. 11/22/63 is one of my favorite books by King.

>272 richardderus: Cosplay and LARP. I’m completely lost and don’t mind staying so at this point.

a very cranky *smooch* from your own Horrible

>280 karenmarie: *there there, pat pat* This too shall pass. More coffee, Horrible?

Hulu runs a freebie if you'll put up with ads....

The blog's back to normal after reaching a high of 1500 views in one day. Heady stuff...notably absent are new followers, so I guess my wares didn't impress that much. Then again, there are more email subscribers so....

>279 humouress: ...as if I'd ever turn my back on a known supervillainess...

>277 msf59: Hi Mark! I'm glad you got the collection, it really looks like a perfect thematic match for your interests. I hope she's a good writer....

>278 richardderus: But I'm always coming back, Richard. I really want to thank you for your kind words on the Peet Story! I really appreciate that very much.

Delurking to say hiya and yup, read lots of this thread, managed to avoid the BBs and also, >280 karenmarie:, I can't stand Jimmy Fallon, either.

Forest fires now plaguing the prairie provinces with widespread smoke. And wouldn't you know it, to add to an outstandingly disaterous drought and increasing Coronavirus variants, a plague of locusts has arrived in Lethbridge (Alberta).

Oh yes, I am a source of sweetness and joy these days. My new name is Cassandra...

>283 SandyAMcPherson: Oh my...things're gettin' Biblical up there...

I'm just not interested in Fallon qua Fallon. He seems pleasant enough, having left his boyish-prankster age. *smooch* for fellow grumpster.

>282 connie53: It's hugely stressful to have your loved one in the hospital, Connie, as I very well know. I hope always to be supportive with my visits so I'm glad you're seeing that!

Luxx’s book is out! K. Gotta go get it…

>285 drneutron: You'll appreciate the cultural referents, I'm sure.

'Morning, RDear.

Iced, unsweetened tea for dinner last night woke me up about 1:40 and kept me up for 3 hours. Blerg. I should have known better.

*smooch*

>284 richardderus: "...things're gettin' Biblical up there..."
Precisely. I knew you'd appreciate that aspect.

>288 SandyAMcPherson: I'm sad to say I do, Sandy, and I wish you didn't have to.

>287 karenmarie: Hey Horrible! What the devil's wrong with you?! Tea after 5? "Oh, I'll have a diuretic with my caffeine, please." *tsk*

Well, you've survived your foolishness, so your reading can continue. That, at least, is a good thing. *smooch*

>272 richardderus: looking forward to reading the Cosplay book.

Just purchased tickets for the New York Comic Con which is hoping to be back LIVE and in person at the Javits Center in October.

Not even trying to catch up after a week away. I did like the Far Side Cartoon with the squid.

>261 richardderus: I read Picnic at Hanging Rock fairly recently, and was impressed!

Great news that the Fallon factor has upped your stats!

>291 LovingLit: Oohh, good! I was very impressed when I read it in the antediluvian times. Can you source the miniseries, permaybehaps from Australia? It is well worth watching.

He's a mensch in my book, is Fallon...1700 blog-views today, and thirty-one old reviews with two or so views meaning a few folks are clicking around sampling my wares. Here's to hoping I collect a few more email subscribers.

123 Migrations by J.L. Torres

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In J. L. Torres’s second story collection Migrations, the inaugural winner of the Tomás Rivera Book Prize, a “sucio” goes to an underground clinic for therapy to end his machista ways and is accidentally transitioned.

Ex-gangbangers gone straight deal with a troubled, gifted son drawn to the gangsta lifestyle promoted by an emerging music called hip-hop.

Dead and stuck “between somewhere and nowhere,” Roberto Clemente, the great Puerto Rican baseball icon, soon confronts the reason for his predicament.

These stories take us inside the lives of self-exiles, unhomed and unhinged people, estranged from loved ones, family, culture, and collective history.

Despite the effects of colonization of the body and mind, Puerto Ricans have survived beyond geography and form an integral part of the American mosaic.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Praise from Yxta Maya Murray? Say no more, send me the file! Very few authors need to worry about getting my attention who have previously gotten hers.

The author's receipt of the inaugural Tomás Rivera Book Prize is quite telling. As this isn't a Prize most of us will have encountered before, I'm going to reproduce the entire explanation offered at the LARB Books site (link is above):

The Tomás Rivera Book Prize is a unique partnership between the Los Angeles Review of Books and UC Riverside. Open to any author writing in English about the Chicanx/Latinx experience, the Rivera Book Prize is committed to the discovery and fostering of extraordinary writing by a first-time or early career author whose work examines the long and varied contributions of Chicanx/Latinx in the US. The Rivera Book Prize aims to provide a platform that showcases the emerging literary talent of the Chicanx/Latinx community, to cultivate the next generation of Chicanx/Latinx writers, and to continue the rich literary memory of Tomás Rivera, Chicano author, poet, activist, and educator. Known for his seminal collection of stories, …and the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Rivera was the first Latino Chancellor of the UC system and a champion of higher education and social justice. The Rivera Book Prize honors his legacy and his belief in the power of education, activism, and stories to change lives.

Very worthy goals, ones I'm happy to support. And as a big bonus, I found it easy and fun to do so here.

The story-by-story summaries live at my blog.

Good morning, Richard. Man, you make it tempting to read that Cosplay academic text. That's an extreme of fandom I've never quite wrapped my head around, although I've enjoyed the costumes.

Go forward into a bountiful week, mon frere.

>294 jnwelch: Hi Joe! The new thread's up so come visit.

denne bog er fantastisk