Ron's 2014 booklog - one more time around

LibraryThing has done wonders for my enjoyment of reading. I've been here almost 5 years now and joined the 75'ers last year after 3 years with the 50 group. 2013 was the first year I read 75 books that I am aware of since I hadn't counted how many books I was reading in a great many years. I read a variety of things but tend towards science fiction for the majority, but I enjoy mysteries, historical fiction and other things as well.

My 2013 thread is here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/147345

My 2014 reading will probably be similar.

I try to write a mini review of every book I read - they are more impressions and reminders than strict reviews.

My one goal for 2014 is books off the shelf. I did a lot of that in 2013.

I like the start of a book reading year. I've been looking through my books picking out some to read in the coming months, finding and remembering old friends in a box or on a shelf. I thought I was going to start off with a Shelby Foote novel but Jack Finney jumped up and said "me me me." So I think Jack will start me off with Time and Again

There is a topic I plan to read in 2014. August 2014 marks the hundredth anniversary of the start of the war to end all wars. I'll be wanting to do a multi-year read on books related to the first World War. I already have several in mind.

and off we go ...

Welcome back! There's a lot of interest in WWI, given the centenary. I wouldn't be surprised if some group reads pop up this year.

Thanks for the welcome Jim. As it was last year at this time the 75ers get pretty overwhelming about now and it takes a while to get reoriented.

I was going to wait until later in the year to hit the WWI stuff but the more I thought about it the more it seemed like a good topic to address sooner and over a couple years. In year's past I have read a fair bit of non-fiction on WWI so I was looking to read some fiction now as well. One of my first thoughts was to re-read "A Farewell To Arms" which I first read nearly 25 years ago when I was in a Hemingway phase.

I have set aside a number of possibles and picked up a few extra books this past year with the war and times in mind. Some of them are Mark Helprin's "A Soldier of the Great War," Ken Follett's "Fall of Giants," Anne Perry's series that begins with "No Graves As Yet," Yeates' "Winged Victory," Joseph Boyden's "Three Day Road," and Faulks' "Birdsong." Maybe even Lawrence of Arabia's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom." There is of course no shortage of great books on and about and around the Great War.

Last year I intended to read a book or two to mark the 60 years since the cessation of hostilities in Korea (when my father and father-in-law were in the service) and never did it. I'm going to fit one or two in this year I hope. I think it is important that society remembers these events and their significance ... and then there is the Civil War Sesquicentennial ...

I may try to do the American Author challenge. There are a couple authors on the list I would really rather not read so I may do a bit of substitution. There are a number of other group reads going on such as Iain Banks' Culture series that are oh so tempting. We shall see, we shall see. I'll try and fit a Willa Cather in here for January. Only books off the shelf for the American Authors for me. I'll have to think on this a bit more.

-Ron

Hey, Ron, glad you are back for another year! I did the ROOTs group last year (as well as 75ers), and it definitely helped me increase my off-the-shelf reading. I look forward to following your thread again!

Thanks Karen. I'll watch for yours as well.

I'll probably read less science fiction this year (fewer of the magazines) in favor of other things. I need to squeeze in some of the Japanese I have come to enjoy so much also. At least one Murakami in 2014 and others.

Looking forward to your WW1 fiction! I am in the middle of Three Day Road right now, and it is fantastic. The depictions of trench warfare and of the effects of morphine addiction are very gruesome, but I am enjoying it nonetheless.

Hi Cait. I just picked up Three Day Road very recently and have been looking forward to it. I plan on reading it early in 2014.

At the risk of overcommitting, I've decided to join in on the American Authors challenge with a few substitutions and focusing on shorter works. Focusing on books off the shelf for 2014, here is what I have come up with so far as a tentative list:

January - Willa Cather "My Mortal Enemy" completed 1/5/14
February - William Faulkner "Old Man" (a short novel) completed 2/6/2014
March - Cormac McCarthy - substitute Ray Bradbury Dandelion Wine completed 3/20/14
April - Toni Morrison - skipped
May - Eudora Welty - A Curtain of Green: and Other Stories completed 5/19/14
June - Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan completed 6/23/14
July - Mark Twain -probably Pudd'nhead Wilson postponed
August - Philip Roth - skip - tried a story and bailed. Have never cared for him
September - James Baldwin - plan to skip
October - Edith Wharton undecided - probably Ethan Fromme or The Old Maid or both
November - John Updike - The Centaur I read about one fourth before giving up
December - Larry Watson Montana 1948

I'll update this list as I read through the year.

edit June 23rd: I'm holding off on further reading in this challenge for the time being. There is a lot of other material I want to read this year. I'm gaining little satisfaction from what I have been reading. I'll still probably do a couple of the intended

I started reading this New Year's Eve and fell asleep on the couch. I am such a party animal. New Year's day and today however I read with enthusiasm ( the morning coffee at Starbucks had nothing to do with it...)

1. Time and Again by Jack Finney, finished January 2, 2014, 4+ stars


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This story was published in 1970 and feels about that old in writing style. This could almost have been written yesterday however. Finney is famous for writing this novel as well as the earlier "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". This is nominally a science fiction novel. The old fashioned term "scientific romance" works better for me. There's a time travel trick in here. A trick kinda like the film "Somewhere In Time". Otherwise this is more of an historical fiction piece of New York in 1882 as well as a bit of the author's present of 1969-1970. So if you want a feel for New York, here it is. In fact this is a bit of a love affair with 1882 New York, all pretty at first and then the reality smacks you hard.

I had a little trouble buying into the premise, and the story I thought rather slow at first, but once the story got going I was caught up in it. By the time I was about a quarter way through I realized I was really enjoying it and it just got better. Something of a mystery and romance. Some nice twists and turns. There are also a number of illustrations which I thought added greatly to the adventure in time. Towards the end the story became very exciting and a real page-turner.

There is a sequel to this which I will read very soon.

Recommended

This book was sitting without a review on LT. I needed to fix that, even tho with a slight one ...

2. Those Who Watch by Robert Silverberg, finished January 4, 2014, 3 stars


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This story was published in 1967 and it looks ahead to the future of 1982 when an alien spacecraft with three observers suffers engine failure and crashes to earth. The aliens bail out over New Mexico and are separated and badly injured. Each alien finds shelter with a different human. I found myself very interested in each of the storylines. Silverberg was only looking 15 years ahead at the time, but his speculations on 1982 United States are pretty wide of the mark. That gives the modern reader a chuckle or three but doesn't interfere with the story. I enjoyed this but it is a rather forgettable story for the most part.

The following book is for the American Author challenge. If I have any chance for squeezing this in over the year I'm going to mostly be doing shorter works. I'm glad I read this as I am unsure if I have read Willa Cather before now. It was also an off the shelf read.

3. My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather, finished January 5, 2014, 3 1/2 - 4 stars


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This is a short novel/novella from the 1920's. The language and storytelling was beautiful. This turns out to be a rather sad story, eventually throwing ice water on running away for romantic love. We see parts of the life of Myra Henshawe and her husband Oswald through the eyes of young Nellie. Nellie is 15 when she first meets Myra at 45. Nellie has heard family stories, the stuff of legend, of the young Myra and is rather surprised at the reality. Myra seems to be rather quickly moving from nice to not so nice. Myra ends up living a broken life, having given up an inheritance to marry the man she loved. That isn't how it begins, but that is how it ends. Interesting set of characters and very descriptive scenes made this very much worth reading, but as I said, rather sad by the end.

Cather is quite a writer.

This book ended up having a tie-in to my planned reading on WWI this year. Although it takes about 100 pages to get there, one of the plot elements concerns the prelude to and start of the war.

4. From Time to Time by Jack Finney, finished January 8, 2014, 3 stars


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This is the sequel to Finney's story "Time and Again" and was published in 1995, 25 years after the original and shortly before his death. It is set with the present being 3 or 4 years later than the prior book's 1970. When I started to read this I completely got sucked in and thought it was even better than the first. Unfortunately what seemed like an excellent story soon lost steam and went astray by the middle of the book. There is some excellent intrigue in here including bits involving the Titanic, a mysterious operative or two, some good bits on early aviators, and the New York Theater and Vaudeville scene of 1912, so I don't want to really knock the book, but some of it such as the theater stuff goes on too long. One of the strengths from the first book that is missing here is the romance that developed between two of the principal characters.

The characters and setup in the opening pages here showed a lot of promise. History was getting reset and some people were noticing. Some are investigating what is going on in their small way. One old gentlemen has dual memories concerning the Titanic. He has extraordinarily vivid memories of skipping a day of school and being at the dock with his father as The Titanic came into New York and the passengers disembarking. Yet, he also knows the ship sunk. These characters then disappeared from the story. I wanted more of them. We see an important event from the first book that was reset, get reset again (slightly confusing). The book didn't quite start sinking like the Titanic; more like it was adrift without quite enough steam. A big idea within this book is that World War One was avoided - it didn't happen according to some evidence in the story but then it did because someone travelled back in time and changed something.

I would not recommend that this book be read as a standalone. It could be ... but so much groundwork was established in the first novel "Time and Again" that this book would come across as much weaker without that background.

An enjoyable book, but as I have noted, just not up to par with the first. The end was OK and seemed to leave the door open for another sequel.

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5. Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 37, No. 12 (December 2013) edited by Sheila Williams, finished January 9, 2014, 2 1/2 stars


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I'll just briefly address the story content of the issue, which consists of three novelettes and five short stories. Overall I mildly liked this issue for the variety of stories and some good ones, but it is a mixed bag with some very weak ones. I expect better. The stories are:

• Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters • by Henry Lien
• Dignity • by Jay O'Connell
• The Fitter • by Timons Esaias
• Vox ex Machina • by William Preston
• Bloom • by Gregory Norman Bossert
• Grainers • by R. Neube
• Frog Watch • by Nancy Kress
• Entangled • by Ian R. MacLeod

There is a small bit of offbeat humor/charm to Henry Lien's sword and kung-fu fighting on ice skates yarn “Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters.”

"Make me die of laughing!"
"Piss me off to death!"

OK, that was it. Well, not true. There's a funny bit at the end too. Unfortunately it wasn't enough to make me really like this legendary story of a bullying, snotty uber-obnoxious stuck-up teen sent to a very strange reform school.

Jay O’Connell's "Dignity" followed and shows us a scary future. If you don't think about what is going on it is mildly amusing as the young girl Melissa works hard to outwit her parents and do something she is not supposed to. I thought it was very well written and in only a few pages it really made vivid a scary future of haves vs. "the hopeless." This was a good one.

An amusing satirical piece on aliens enhancing the sale of women's underwear is about all I'll say about "The Fitter" by Timons Esaias.

For me, “Vox ex Machina,” by William Preston really failed to deliver an interesting story when it started with such potential. A flight attendant finds the head of a robot or android left in an overhead compartment of a plane. This could have gone somewhere but it didn't.

I think Greg Bossert's "Bloom" is the standout piece in the issue. Set on an alien planet a man and two women find themselves caught out at night amidst an alien growth that could violently consume them within seconds. The tension of this situation is handled well as they hope for a slight chance of rescue before the dawn comes.

R. Neube’s “Grainers” is told in an unusual manner - we switch back and forth between two first person characters that a time or two had me wondering who was who and what was what. It isn't a bad story but I didn't really warm to it - a refugee ship has sent a false signal that they need immediate rescue and the real reason is to con the rescuer out of some goods. I picked up some "Firefly" vibes.

I enjoyed "Frog Watch” by Nancy Kress. A young woman who is trying to recover from the death of her husband has semi-isolated herself by moving to a swampy rural area. She lives in a one room cabin and reads books from the library in town. More importantly, she monitors five types of frogs in the swamp for Frog Watch. This was an activity she had done with her husband but she has rededicated herself to the effort of documenting the population declines and deformities that are taking place worldwide. Her reports show far healthier and active populations of all kinds of frogs. Things get very weird when she tries to meet her neighbor.

I'm not quite sure what to make of Ian MacLeod’s “Entangled.” The premise was really preposterous to me once I started to understand what had supposedly happened to the world, now post-collapse from a viral encephalitic plague that had entangled people's minds into something vaguely like a hive mind, but not. Martha, our late middle-aged protagonist is different, unaffected by this because of a brain injury suffered earlier in life. There is however a very interesting story within this dystopian setting as Martha tries to find and make her way in this world, alone amongst the communal humanity around her. A good story.

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6. Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 37, No. 1 (January 2013) edited by Sheila Williams, finished January 10, 2014, 2 1/2 stars


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Sheila Williams opens the issue with an essay "Poet of Mars" reflecting on the recent death of Ray Bradbury and all he meant to her and the world as an inspiration. Robert Silverberg has an extended essay on the relationship between established and up and coming writers, in particular John Cheever and John Updike as he begins the piece. I found it pretty interesting. There are also other columns, a couple poems and book reviews.

Six stories represent the fiction content of the issue, two novelettes and four short stories. I liked that the sound of two of the titles struck me as Bradburyish: "They Shall Salt the Earth With Seeds of Glass" and "The Family Rocket." Coincidence? Overall I thought this was a weak issue. The stories are:

They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass • by Alaya Dawn Johnson
The Family Rocket • by James Van Pelt
Over There • by Will McIntosh
Mithridates, He Died Old • by Nancy Kress
The Legend of Troop 13 • by Kit Reed
Hotel • by Suzanne Palmer

Some brief comments:

"They Shall Salt the Earth With Seeds of Glass" by Alaya Dawn Johnson is a story to really get involved in. The topic will be controversial for some readers. Earth is under the boot heel of a very alien alien invasion. The sister of the narrator wants/needs an abortion which they cannot obtain in the village where they live. (The aliens seem to target Doctors and healers among their random nastiness) After an excellent set up, the story follows the sisters' journey away in which they are captured by the alien's drones and later liberated by resistance fighters. There is much more depth to the story than this brief overview. Despite some big picture things not making a lot of sense, I thought the story was well told. I could see this one developed into a novel.

"The Family Rocket" by James Van Pelt is a short story I didn't care for. Mildly interesting idea with an extremely unreliable narrator that spoils whatever enjoyment there might have been.

Whoa. Will McIntosh's "Over There" is a wildly different story. Three students are doing an experiment which splits reality in half apparently. The story itself splits in two with two columns to the page simultaneously relating what is happening in each side of the split world. Each side is cognizant of the other, seeing and feeling both sides at once. Ai-yee I think my head started to explode. Despite trying hard I had trouble keeping track of the two stories. I just could not keep them straight and characters were dying on one side or the other. The story comes to an end but it doesn't have a finish. Very strange. For me the experiment didn't work - for others it might.

"Mithridates, He Died Old" by Nancy Kress had some mild interest for me. Margaret has been run over by a car and apparently suffered severe brain damage that has left her in a coma and more or less without hope. She is given an experimental drug that rebuilds connections. It also seems to have a strong effect on memories and as the drug goes to work she revisits events in her past as a mother and teacher where she has perhaps made some poor decisions and she is able to confront things and see alternatives. She wakes up at the end.

"The Legend of Troop 13" by Kit Reed is not a science fiction story. I think it tries to be a funny horror story, but it is neither funny or horrific. I'd just call it stupid. A real dud.

As a general rule I dislike "funny" mixed with my science fiction. I just don't think it works very well. I've certainly read some that has, but most fall flat for me like the "Legend of Troop 13" story. Suzanne Palmer goes for humorous science fiction in "Hotel" and this time the comedy more or less works. I'll never be a fan of this sub-genre but the spy vs. spy vs. spy vs. spy vs. the Martian cops in a Martian hotel where it seems everyone wants to kill somebody had some entertainment value.

For the moment I'm working on getting a batch of these Asimov's read.

7. Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 37, No. 2 (February 2013) edited by Sheila Williams, finished January 13, 2014, 3 1/2 stars


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Sheila Williams writes an enjoyable essay on the "Perils of Time Travel." I also really enjoyed Robert Silverberg's essay on "Looking For Atlantis" and the native peoples of the Canary Islands, the "Gaunches." He has me convinced that they are/were likely the last remnants of Cro-Magnon man. There are also three poems, other columns, and interesting book reviews.

I thought this was a better than average issue, especially with the good non-fiction content this month. For fiction, it has a novella, a novelette and four short stories. The stories are:

And Then Some • novelette by Matthew Hughes
The New Guys Always Work Overtime • shortstory by David Erik Nelson
Outbound from Put-In-Bay • shortstory by M. Bennardo
The Golden Age of Story • shortstory by Robert Reed
Best of All Possible Worlds • shortstory by John Chu
The Weight of the Sunrise • novella by Vylar Kaftan

Some brief comments on the stories:

“And Then Some” is I think the first story I have read by Matthew Hughes. I'll be looking forward to reading more by him. This is a planetary space opera novelette that caught my interest from the start and did not falter. Erm Kaslo is a deputized operative who comes to the planet Cheddle. He contacts the local police who have no interest in helping him arrest the man he is seeking. Instead the stun him and he awakens in a prison camp. Erm is very resourceful and the story goes on from there. Very enjoyable.

I'm not sure what to make of “The New Guys Always Work Overtime” by David Erik Nelson. Factories in the future bring workers from the past through a time portal to work for minimum wage. For one day only. I didn't like it at first and then I did. It started funny and then got very serious.

M. Bennardo's “Outbound from Put-in-Bay” seems to be an alternate history piece with the underlying divergance occurring about 100 years ago when a new ice age began with a vengeance. The United States has fractured, Canada has joined with the UK, and the action centers on what was once Lake Erie but is now just a minor remnant. Smuggling is the main occupation it seems since there is an oppresive export tax from Canada. A very strong female main character and narrator gives us a view on this dystopian landscape. Very well done.

“The Golden Age of Story” is by Robert Reed. I've read quite a few of his stories over the years. He is incredibly prolific. I generally like them although some get just a bit too strange for me. This one is almost in the "too strange" category. Very inventive idea for a story of 5 chained stories within, but for me it wasn't successful. Or maybe I just really dislike liars.

John Chu's “Best of All Possible Worlds” seems aimed at a niche audience those who love science fiction AND musicals - in this case the operetta "Candide." I suppose if you had seen Leonard Bernstein put it on nearly half a century ago or played in a high school musical you might squee with delight. Otherwise, there is some interesting stuff in here but it did not make any sense to me. Since I couldn't understand why the strangeness was happening this story was a definite miss for me.

By far the outstanding piece for me in this issue was the novella “The Weight of the Sunrise” by Vylar Kaftan. What a tale. This is an alternate history story that reimagines the Incas. It is a story told by an old man to his grandson, recounting an experience that began in 1806. I found it very immersive and well told. In this story the Incan Empire was not conquered and vanquished by the spanish; they persevered and rebuilt their empire over two hundred years. Yet they still suffer from smallpox. Americans come with a smallpox vaccine which they offer to trade - the price of the trade is very high. The old man telling this story was the translator for the Incan God-Emperor to the American delegation. An excellent story.

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8. Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 37, No. 3 (March 2013) edited by Sheila Williams, finished January 15, 2014, 2+ stars


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Several columns and poems as usual in each issue and book reviews as well. The story content is one novella, two novelettes and three short stories.

Uncertainty • novelette by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Brother Swine • shortstory by Garrett Ashley
Needlework • shortstory by Lavie Tidhar
Monday's Monk • novelette by Jason Sanford
Pitching Old Mars • shortstory by Michael Cassutt
Feral Moon • novella by Alexander Jablokov

Two of these stories are very good. The rest were not. Brief comments on the fiction:

The lead-off story, “Uncertainty” by KKR is a time travel story. WWII Nazis. Atom Bomb. I didn't expect to like it but it was so well done that I did. No effort is spent on the reality of time travel in the story. It is a given and the story works on that basis as an agent from the future pokes around.

I didn't care for “Brother Swine” by Garrett Ashley. It was a short story that went on too long. I'm guessing it is set in a near future dystopia. Folks are barely surviving with little to eat. There is also a far away war going on. Life seems completely hopeless. The central business in this story is that everyone who dies, at war or at home is reincarnated as a creature or another person. The creatures if they can, after reincarnation return to their families. The story, for me, was pointless.

“Needlework” by Lavie Tidhar was another short story that I thought pointless. I hate to be harsh, but this is a mish mash of scenes with not much story. Two earthlings dream of a life among the planets that is no better than what they have and maybe worse?

Then we have “Monday’s Monk” by Jason Sanford. This is an excellent novelette. It is the story of a monk in future Thailand, who performs funeral rites for people who have been killed and are being burned for having nanos within them, which can regenerate the person if not completely destroyed. The story open at a very difficult funeral. I liked it a lot.

“Pitching Old Mars” by Michael Cassutt ... very short ... pitching (and failing) an idea about movies of an imaginary old Mars. A total dud for me.

“Feral Moon” by Alexander Jablokov's "Feral Moon" is the novella in the issue, about a war on Phobos. I found it quite uninteresting and I didn't like it.

9. Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 37, No. 4 & 5 April/May 2013 edited by Sheila Williams, finished January 19, 2014, 3 - 3 1/2 stars


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A nice big double issue, a fistful of reading. A novella, 4 novelettes, and 5 short stories along with a bunch of poems and several columns. Kind of a cool cover for Neal Asher's novella "The Other Gun".

The Other Gun • novella by Neal Asher
Through Your Eyes • shortstory by Linda Nagata
Writing in the Margins • novelette by Joel Richards
Gray Wings • shortstory by Karl Bunker
Julian of Earth • novelette by Colin P. Davies
The Wall • shortstory by Naomi Kritzer
Spider God and the Periodic Table • novelette by Alan Wall
Distant Like Stars • shortstory by Leah Cypess
The Oracle • shortstory by Ken Liu
Warlord • novelette by Tom Purdom

I like Neal Asher's stories. They are fun space opera. “The Other Gun” is set in his Polity universe and a little knowledge of that setting adds to the story I think, but not necessary since Asher slips in clues or explanations of all you need to know. This story has bits of action interspersed with a lot of description of stuff in this future universe. The story is nominally about searching for pieces of an ancient weapon called a farcaster, but the fun in the story is the characters and the quest which yields an unexpected but satisfying ending. Readers who enjoy this story will likely enjoy Asher's other work and vice-versa.

Linda Nagata's “Through Your Eyes” may click with readers who just cannot wait for their own google glass. This story seems all about showing off possible near future tech, but gets serious with issues about individual freedoms and rights and the War Machine. I didn't really like it much however.

I think my problem with “Writing in the Margins” by Joel Richards is that I couldn't buy the premise that some new process in the near future lets us tap into the memories of past lives and in fact pull them out onto a video recorder. Just too outlandish. As a result I couldn't go with the rather long and otherwise interesting story that played out.

I had a problem with the next story, “Gray Wings” by Karl Bunker, as well. I don't find it believable that people (in the nearish future at least) are going to be able to be bioengineered into growing wings so they can fly off on races across continents. And do overnight nano repairs that heal skin piercing leg breaks. That said, efforts are made to make it believable and this managed to be a rather touching short story that interested me.

I enjoyed “Julian of Earth” by Colin P. Davies. A man on a colonial planet gives tours and tells the legend of Julian. When a documentary crew comes to record this story and see the sites, hidden truths come to light. I thought the characters in this were well done for a novelette and I enjoyed it.

Naomi Kritzer's "The Wall" was a short and enjoyable time travel story. Maggie is at college and gets repeated visits from her much older future self "Meg" encouraging her to travel to Berlin because the Berlin Wall is going to come down. Little life suggestions are tossed in here and there as well. Eventually Maggie goes despite not being able to afford it and we find out why she needed to go in this nice little tale.

I liked “Spider God and the Periodic Table” by Alan Wall until the end, and it was an end that went on forever. A scientific murder mystery with a dusting of X-Files. Two scientists designing and patenting deadly weapons die mysteriously. The story played along fairly well but the end was unexpectedly strange and for me an incomprehensible gobbledygook letdown. Turned this into the weakest story.

“Distant like the Stars" by Leah Cypress was a mildly interesting short story about doors that can transport you instantly somewhere else. As a young child Leah opens a door in her house that leads to Jerusalem for example. She is one of a gifted few who can open these doors.

Another odd premise in Ken Liu's “The Oracle.” Some people get to see a minute of their lives in the future. People who see a criminal event are pre-judged. People react in many different ways to their glimpse of a defining moment. I liked this story.

Tom Purdom’s “Warlord” is a followup to two earlier stories that I haven't read. It felt a lot like jumping in to the middle of a novel. Otherwise it was a modestly entertaining military space opera piece about an unusual alliance in war. I liked it.

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10. Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 37, No. 6 (June 2013) edited by Sheila Williams, finished January 21, 2014, 2 1/2 stars


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Several columns, essays, poems and book reviews. I thought this was a weak issue. The fiction story content is:

The Fountain • novelette by G. David Nordley
Skylight • novelette by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Hypervigilant • shortstory by Eric Del Carlo
A Love Song Concerning His Vineyard • shortstory by Megan Arkenberg
Precious Mental • The Great Ship Universe • novella by Robert Reed

I found G. David Nordley's "The Fountain" quite interesting and entertaining. An insect-like race with a hive-Queen comes to earth on a diplomatic mission. We experience the story from the visitor's point of view. There are threats out in the universe. Will Earth help? I liked this story.

KKR's "The Skylight" was interesting, but not much of a story. A young girl is left at the gates of an Assassin's Guild. She's taken in but rebels against killing.

I think I have a bias against stories that involve psychic abilities. However, "Hypervigilant" by Eric Del Carlo didn't seem too far of a stretch. It was an OK story about a "Vigil", a sort of empath who can usually detect when someone is about to go postal. The story started well, but I thought it fizzled out towards the end.

Megan Arkenberg's "A Love Song Concerning His Vineyard" was very odd and confused to me. Was there a point to this? I didn't care for it.

Robert Reed has another "Great Ship" novella here, "Precious Mental." I've read quite a few of Reed's stories and they are hit or miss with me. The Great Ship stories seem to be more miss (for me). I think fans of the Great Ship stories will probably enjoy this. Hidden identity, kidnapping, mysteries of the immortals and all that. I found it interesting. It was readable, unlike some, but I'm just not much of a fan of these stories. Maybe I've missed the great ones.

I'm glad to see you're doing the AAC, Ron.

Thanks for the note Linda. The AAC is a great excuse to dip into the classics. However, I feel like I've overcommitted myself to several reads this year but I'm going to give it a try. I really enjoyed the Cather I read (My Mortal Enemy).

I've dedicated some extra reading time to this month and I'm marathoning through these Asimov's at the moment so I can vote in the Reader's Poll for 2013. Three more to go.

11. Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 37, No. 7 (July 2013) edited by Sheila Williams, finished January 23, 2014, 3+ stars


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Several columns (including an "In Memoriam: Steven Utley: 1948-2013,") essays, poems and book reviews. Overall not a bad issue with a couple better stories to balance the weak ones. The fiction story content is four novelettes and three short stories:

Haplotype 1402 • shortstory by Ted Kosmatka
The Art of Homecoming • novelette by Carrie Vaughn
Blair's War • shortstory by Ian Watson
Yubba Vines • novelette by Rudy Rucker and Paul Di Filippo
What is a Warrior Without His Wounds? • novelette by Gray Rinehart
Today's Friends • shortstory by David J. Schwartz
At Palomar • novelette by Rick Wilber

“Haplotype 1402" by Ted Kosmatka is the first story. A survivalist post-apocalyptic drama with only a few people resistant to a nasty bacteria. Nathan tries to stay moral in an amoral world. Interesting short piece.

Carrie Vaughn's “The Art of Homecoming” I found to be an unexpectedly touching story. This is a rather quiet story. Wendy is "Major Daring" on the security team of the interstellar diplomatic corps and is responsible for a major incident. Her Captain recommends some time off when Wendy insists on resigning or retiring. But she is a very skilled officer who is too valuable to let go. She decides to spend a month with her sister who is a farmer on the planet Ariana. Wendy finds she loves the rural life her sister has and must decide where her own future lies. This is very well written and I liked it a lot.

"Blair's War" by Ian Watson was really an odd one for me. It is described as an alternate history piece, set in England in 1937 and concerning Basque refugee children. There's really not much story to this and furthermore it was quite uninteresting.

“Yubba Vines” by Rudy Rucker and Paul Di Filippo is really an odd story. The intro blurb cites 'mastery of "gnarly transrealism' as if that tells me diddly. 'Gonzo ribofunk' is also in the blurb description which really tells me a lot more. So, the intro had me wary and the story is certainly offbeat, but it wasn't a whack job and I found the adventure of Cammy and Bengt and the strange diner with the fabulous food rather amusing.

“What Is a Warrior Without His Wounds?” is a novelette by Gray Rinehart. I have mixed feelings about this one. I thought the story was very good and well told, but the mad scientist mind transfer procedure just was not believable.

“Today’s Friends” really creeped me out. When I finished I worried I would have nightmares for a week. David J Schwartz has really finely crafted a short story about the after effects of an alien invasion by the Greys. They play with people's minds, make them act like puppets, make birds sing til they burst. They don't like sound, but they like music. This story is really worth reading.

“At Palomar” by Rick Wilber for me was a muddled story at first, flipping constantly through multiple timelines. It settles a bit towards the end with our "hero" trying to fix some of the timelines in which the Nazi's and Japanese were victors in WWII (The Germans via submarine set off atomic bombs in New York and Boston in one scenario we flip through). Good guys here are the bad guys there, maybe, who knows as we flip through the parallel universes. The key to all of this was Moe Berg. The story was OK, good only in parts, and I liked "Uncertainty," a novelette by Kristine Kathryn Rusch from the March 2013 issue, that touched on Moe Berg much better.

12. Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 37, No. 8 (August 2013) edited by Sheila Williams, finished January 24, 2014, 2 1/2 stars


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Robert Silverberg's monthly column is a reflection on re-reading Clifford Simak's classic novel "City". He really makes me want to re-read the book myself. He notes that one should not be put off by the simple, somewhat nostalgic beginning of the story. He finishes his essay with this: "The world in which we live today was born in the grim years of WWII and the atomic explosions that concluded it. Reading City once again, I see it still as one of the finest works of science fiction of its period, a haunting fantasy that is still capable of speaking to us today."

There are several other columns, poems and book reviews. The book column by Paul Di Filippo this time, seemed more interesting than usual with the books it covered and discussion. The story fiction is represented by a novella, three novelettes and one short story. There are, for me, a couple of weak stories here, and KKR's big novella in this issue isn't one of her better ones from my view. There is some good reading here, though.

• Rereading Simak • essay by Robert Silverberg
• Stone to Stone, Blood to Blood • novelette by Gwendolyn Clare
• Arlington • novelette by Jack Skillingstead
• The Ex-Corporal • shortstory by Leah Thomas
• Lost Wax • novelette by Gregory Norman Bossert
• The Application of Hope • Diving Universe • novella by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Some brief comments on the stories:

I thought "Stone to Stone, Blood to Blood," was an excellent novelette by Gwendolyn Clare. This is rather too complex to be described briefly. It is a story about two boys, one of whom (Duyi) is half brother to an older sister who is the regent of the planet. They each are the only ones who possess an ability that is of great value to the planet. The regent has had another boy (Feng) bonded to her half-brother as a companion/guard but their relationship grows so that they consider each other as brothers. Duyi wishes to escape and Feng battles/balances his duty and friendship to aid and protect his "brother." I really liked this.

“Arlington,” by Jack Skillingstead, is another good story. A teen-aged boy on a long solo flight gets lost over the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State in a fog bank and a strange cloud he flies into is a gate to an alternate reality. The story jumps back and forth between 1982 when this happened and 2012 when he is 46 years old and dying. There is also a brief but important event in 1997. There are curious things in the world he lands in, and when he escapes back through the cloud things are better but still wrong. I found the story quite intriguing as he tries yet again to get back to his real version of Earth before dying.

“The Ex-Corporal,” by Leah Thomas is a sad story as a young girl and her brother try to take care of their father who has developed epilepsy. When he has a seizure a soldier who is dying, the ex-corporal, transfers into the father's body and the time he stays varies. Things go downhill as time goes on.

Gregory Norman Bossert's "Lost Wax" was much too complex for a novelette. I didn't want to struggle to try and understand what was going on and quickly lost interest.

The novella, “The Application of Hope,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, was another disappointment. This is we are told part of KKR's "Diving Universe." We are given a lot of backstory here which seemed to disrupt the story too much. And again, I was confused with what some of the stuff was all about, probably since I have not read previous stories in this series. Although this is long it felt like an extract from a novel, and I didn't really get caught up in this. The space war going on here didn't interest me and I'll probably avoid these stories in the future.

13. Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 37, No. 9 (September 2013) edited by Sheila Williams, finished January 26, 2014, 3+ stars


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I think this was a better than usual issue, not really strong, but it is competent and the opening story is good as are several other ones. Besides the usual columns and several poems we have three novelettes and five short stories. The story fiction content is:

The Discovered Country • novelette by Ian R. MacLeod
What We Ourselves Are Not • shortstory by Leah Cypess
The Unparallel'd Death-Defying Feats of Astoundio, Escape Artist Extraordinaire • novelette by Ian Creasey
As Yet Untitled • shortstory by James Sallis
A Stranger from a Foreign Ship • shortstory by Tom Purdom
That Universe We Both Dreamed Of • shortstory by Jay O'Connell
What Changes You, What Takes You Away • shortstory by Dominica Phetteplace
A Hole in the Ether • novelette by Benjamin Crowell

Brief comments:

“The Discovered Country” by Ian R MacLeod is about life after life, for those rich enough to pay for it. Pretty good story.

Leah Cypess had an interesting idea for “What We Ourselves Are Not” but I didn't really like how it played out. What it does do is raise some interesting questions about culture and technology.

The story with the very long title, “The Unparallel’d Death-Defying Feats of Astoundio, Escape Artist Extraordinaire” by Ian Creasey, was entertaining but a relatively minor piece. Astoundio is an escape artist in a future of immortals and his latest attempt will be to escape from a black hole.

James Sallis' very short and slightly humorous piece “As Yet Untitled” is a bit confusing to me. On the surface an actor (stage actor? film? both? anything? actor even?) who has been doing "Iain Shore" science fiction works has been told he now does westerns. So we follow him for a few minutes in his new western. That is it, in total. OK?

“A Stranger From a Foreign Ship” is a man with a talent in Tom Purdom's intriguing noirish story. Gerdom travels from port to port and takes jobs to extract information from "targets." He has a unique ability in that he can switch minds with people and he does this for a few minutes to rifle through a person's memories to find whatever information his client wants. On the current job he tails a young woman named Arly and is supposed to get credit card and account data and passwords from her memory. He has a bit if difficulty when he does this with her, hitting a wall of fear. Interestingly, the victim switches into the mind of their pursuer Gerdom as he invades the target mind. I liked how this one played out. Pretty well done.

“The Universe We Both Dreamed Of" by Jay O’Connell is an enjoyable short story. Aliens come to Earth and don't attack, subdue, take over or other nasty stuff. They come to talk to people. As the story says ... "It had been five years, maybe thirty million interviews, and nothing much seemed to have changed."

Now it was Joel's turn to have a visitation from an alien. He calls the visitor Zena and the interview is a test. I liked the story. It was probably my favorite.

“What Changes You, What Takes You Away” by Dominica Phetteplace is a riff on Flowers for Algernon. Although the story itself says it is more Rats of NIMH than Algernon.

"A Hole in the Ether” is by Benjamin Crowell. The story is dedicated to Ray Bradbury. That's a clue. The story is a little bit of a modern take on Fahrenheit 451. It is about a future where it seems a police state enforces perpetual copyright such that one can't seem to own a single book - esp. digitally. Mind altering or Death penalty enforcement. Not a happy world to live in. So this is a cautionary tale. A little bit extreme, a little scary and I thought it was very good.

This finishes up my reading of Asimov's for the time being. I've gotten a full dose of science fiction for a while, so on to other things ...

14. Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 37 , Nos. 10 & 11 (October/November 2013) edited by Sheila Williams, finished January 30, 2014, 3 1/2 stars


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A big double issue of stories, and one of the best issues of the year despite a couple stories that didn't work at all for me. There are 6 novelettes and 7 short stories as well as quite a few poems and various columns and essays. The story fiction is:

The Time Travel Club • novelette by Charlie Jane Anders
Memories of Earth • shortstory by Neal Asher
When the Rain Comes • shortstory by Ian McHugh
Grounded • novelette by Meg Pontecorvo
Adventures in Cognitive Homogamy: A Love Story • shortstory by Paul Di Filippo
A Very Small Dispensation • shortstory by Sheila Finch
Waiting for Medusa • shortstory by Jack Dann
Quantum Orpheus, at the Light Cone's Apex • novelette by Igor Teper
No Others are Genuine • novelette by Gregory Frost
The Wildfires of Antarctica • shortstory by Alan DeNiro
Deep Diving • novelette by Joel Richards
Within These Well-Scrubbed Walls • shortstory by Ian Creasey
Encounter on Starbase Kappa • Diving Universe • novelette by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Brief comments:

Charlie Jane Anders's Asimov debut "The Time Travel Club" is mostly a story about an odd group of friends. Honestly I got bored - this didn't do much for me. I think this is an example of the sort of stories that just aren't a good match for me as a reader.

"Memories of Earth" by Neal Asher is a short interesting piece that feels longer since so much seems to be packed into this. The reader is almost immediately thrown into the action where a terra-forming team comes under attack. Less than half the crew survive and the guy in charge who seems to have been a rather superhuman cyborg has been badly damaged. He and some crew continue to work at building an earth-like place as he slowly dies. Pretty good story.

"When the Rain Comes" is kind of a cool little story of those left behind when others went to the stars. Those left remember with song and stories. I'm not sure the environment these people are in makes sense, but given that this is pretty short Ian McHugh did a good job with this in only a few pages.

I thought I might get an overload of adolescent rebellion when I first started "Grounded" by Meg Pontecorvo, but the angst was pretty appropriate. I'm not quite sure how Xam tells us this story, but she does so in a first person narrative. I think she's in middle school, and her Mom really embarrasses her with paranoia about some strange stuff going on. Mom is not really paranoid - just being Mom - as the schools have quarantine buses for taking the kids home and so on. Xam's mom walks around in an enviro suit and expects Xam to do so as well. When they get home they go through a decontamination procedure so the funny stuff has been going on for a while obviously. We miss the backstory here, just jumping in with all these petals falling from the sky. Enjoyable story for what it is.

“Adventures in Cognitive Homogamy: A Love Story” is by Paul Di Filippo. This is a moment in time of the ever travelling "Handsome Kioga Matson." The first few pages kind of put me off and did little to interest me. I found myself skimming and eventually skipped the last few pages of the story.

In “A Very Small Dispensation,” Sheila Finch spins a tale about little Patty Reed of the Donner party and perhaps why death did not stop for her during that harsh winter. The story isn't exactly true to history, and we are never told it was the Donner Party, although it is obvious. Nevertheless, an interesting story is told and the end the end is done well, not really knowing what will happen. I liked it.

Do you know what love is? Sure I know. A boy loves his dog. In this update and homage to Harlan Ellison, Jack Dann gives us a different, modern take on "A Boy and His Dog". His story "Waiting for Medusa" is much much grittier if my memory is right, and not exactly the same story. It goes a liitle too far to the dark side for fiction I expect from Asimov's, but I thought it was well done. Then end bothered me, as I'm sure it was supposed to.

In “Quantum Orpheus, at the Light Cone’s Apex” by Igor Teper, Abe discovers that a quantum computer he has been programming to assist with a deep space probe project is becoming sentient. There is another story within this where Abe reconnects with his estranged daughter to assist him with ideas for helping the computer develop. The two parts progress. I thought this was an excellent story.

I would call "No Others are Genuine" by Gregory Frost a horror story, set in the days of the Edison wax cylinder player. A young boy has a crush on a resident of the boarding house he lives in with his mother. He spends time with her at a music store where she works. This is all well written and had my interest from the start. It was one of my favorite stories in this issue. However, I think it would probably fit better in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, instead of Asimov's.

In the future of "The Wildfires of Antarctica," a short story by Alan DeNiro, art is something different than it is now. This again felt like a horror story, but it is clearly a science fiction horror story about something that is really creepy.

Joel Richards's "Deep Diving" is set in the far future aboard a starship. There's a lot of stuff packed into this story about a sort of mind reader who becomes part of a murder investigation and more. Who the murderer was, was rather surprising to me and made the story that much more interesting. Pretty good here.

"Within These Well-Scrubbed Walls" is a good story by Ian Creasey. A man deals with the loss of his mother and finds something unexpected among his mother's and his own childhood possessions.

"Encounter on Starbase Kappa" is a companion piece to the story "The Application of Hope" by KKR that appeared in the August 2013 issue of Asimov's. In the prior story a ship had disappeared. Here we find out what happened to it. I felt this was a stronger story than "The Application of Hope." The Captain and his crew are lost in several ways and Captain Cooper works to get back on track.

Hello!

I really appreciate the magazine reviews you've given above. I imagine that it takes a non-trivial amount of time to come up with ~thoughtful reviews for so many different stories, but I think it really benefits LT to have such reviews available. Also, I'm surprised that more members don't subscribe to Asimov's SF... I enjoy perusing these from time to time when I can find back issues at the used book store in the hopes of finding new, interesting authors.

Finally, good luck with reading boatloads of Japanese authors! Japanese literature/fiction is absolutely my favorite. It makes me really happy when I find other people who share the appreciation. Do you have any favorite Japanese authors/works?

Thanks for the note Andrew. The reviews of short stories in Asimov's or anthologies do take some time. I enjoy doing it as a memory keeper for me, but I really wanted to get reviews up for these that have none. I find the reviews on LT so helpful for me as a reader, whether in people's threads or with the work itself, that I really enjoy putting some of my own thoughts on here. I wish more folks did it. I like reading impressions of books as much as anything. The ones that go into great detail can be spoilers.

I always liked finding back issues in the shops. It is a great way to find new authors.

I enjoy exploring Japanese literature - I haven't read enough of any one author to claim a favorite, but I'd give a nod to Haruki Murakami as a reliable modern author, who is nevertheless a sort of romantic blend of Japanese and western sensibilities. Who are your favorites?

It has been a while since I read a Nevil Shute story. I would almost call him one of my favorite authors. Everyone knows "On the Beach" of course but my interest grew in the early 80's after I saw the PBS mini-series "A Town Like Alice" and I started to read a few of his novels. I liked every one I read. He was reasonably prolific as an author and there are still many of his stories that I have not read. This was one of them and it really puts me into the mood to read/re-read some more.

15. The Breaking Wave by Nevil Shute, finished February 3, 2014, 4 stars


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This is a good to excellent story. It is certainly more melancholy than any other descriptive word I can think of. This story begins in the early 1950's but it really is about the lingering effects of WWII. Alan Duncan had returned to Australia after the war but was still too young he thought to settle. He left again after 2 years and now returns to his family ranching operation 5 years later. He was severely injured in the war, but has come to terms with it, the amputation of both his feet.

When he returns there is a mystery to solve at the ranch because of the death of a maid who has been there a year and who has appeared to have committed suicide, which no one can understand why. The story is rather complex in some ways with Shute inserting observations about the war and post-war periods and the story is told heavily in flashbacks by Alan. Shute's descriptions of landscapes and people and the settings are really well done and set you solidly in the times. The build up in England to Overlord is done in a small way quite well within the bigger story.

The original title of this book as published outside the United States and Canada was "Requiem for a Wren" which is a much better title than "The Breaking Wave."

The novel opens with an excerpt from a poem, an epigraph, that sets the tone for this novel incredibly well. It is an excerpt from "The Triumph of Time" by the English poet A(lgernon) C(harles) Swinburne.

I shall never be friends again with roses;
I shall loathe sweet tunes, where a note grown strong
Relents and recoils, and climbs and closes,
As a wave of the sea turned back by song.
There are sounds where the soul's delight takes fire,
Face to face with its own desire;
A delight that rebels, a desire that reposes;
I shall hate sweet music my whole life long.

The pulse of war and passion of wonder,
The heavens that murmur, the sounds that shine,
The stars that sing and the loves that thunder,
The music burning at heart like wine,
An armed archangel whose hands raise up
All senses mixed in the spirit's cup
Till flesh and spirit are molten in sunder —
These things are over, and no more mine.

Recomended

I'm intrigued! I've never heard of or read Nevil Shute. Which should I read, On the Beach or A Town Like Alice?

I'd start with A Town Like Alice Karen. It should be readily available in many libraries.

I'll add it to the list, thanks

I loved A Town Like Alice, both the PBS series and the book. I should read more Shute. On the Beach falls into a category of story I simply can't read, however.

Jeez, after stopping by our local library and finding zero Nevil Shute books, I stopped by our biggest library in the area and they had 2 Nevil Shute books on the shelf. I checked the multi-county catalog and was rather amazed that there is only one copy of "A Town Like Alice" in the system (although they do have 2 audiobooks of it.) This makes me really really sad. Our libraries the last couple years seem to have been doing large purges of books. I don't really see the point of having tons of empty shelf space at the cost of classic books.

Karen, "On the Beach" is one of the classic end of the world as we know it books, written in the late 50's.

I am a total sucker for post-apocalyptic novels, so I might try Beach instead of Alice as an intro to Shute.

I have to say that Shute's "The Breaking Wave" really put me into a funk for a couple days. So melancholy and sad it truly colored my mood and I had trouble thinking of what book to read next. I wanted something "happy" and nothing looked happy. So William Faulkner was probably not the best choice for my next story, but he was. As far as I can recall I never read a Faulkner novel before. I have read a short story or two such as "Two Soldiers" which I remember liking well enough. I could never get very far into "The Sound and the Fury." So here is the February author for the American Author challenge.

16. Old Man by William Faulkner, finished February 6, 2014, 3+ stars


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Oh lordy. "Old Man" is not going to make me a Faulkner fan. He starts off, on page one, with one of my big pet peeves. The neverending sentence. Like the yard that went on forever. I had to go back just now and count the words in the second sentence of this novel ... 309 words. I didn't count twice so don't quote me. 309 words is mortal sin territory for me. My brain doesn't read that way. Of course, this would not be the only sentence to run on a bit. Did we mention paragraphs? No, we won't. This story did, however, soon come to fascinate me. Reading this is hard work in a few places. Still, I can admire this book - it is a good story. The prose isn"t toooo dense, but at times I was re-reading sentences. For a short novel this is a powerful work. But it is a roiling work and I'm not going to try and describe it. That can be left to scholars. Honestly, though, the prose is too much for me.

So then I went here: http://faulkner.lib.virginia.edu/display/wfaudio16_1 and listened for about half an hour to Mr Faulkner himself read quickly from the end of the story to a Freshman English class in May 1957. He then fields questions from them. So Faulkner tells us that this story is the conterpoint to another. He wrote a chapter of one story and then he wrote a chapter of this story. The people in this story do the exact opposite of the other story. The two stories were originally together in "The Wild Palms". Alternating chapters.

Mr Faulkner points out that it is NOT "The Old Man". In his words: "No. It's—it's not "The Old Man," it's "Old Man." That's what the—the Negroes along the river call the river. They never call it the Mississippi nor the river. It's just Old Man. And this had to have some title and so that struck me as being a good title for it. That refers simply to the river.

The extra background from the Q&A with Faulkner added a lot. But since I don't have the point to counterpoint to ...

The story itself is set in May 1927, with a massive flooding of the Mississippi river.

A lot of Faulkner's work wasn't published the way he wanted it originally. Nevertheless, I think "Old Man" works just fine by itself. And I always hear Paul Robeson singing "Old Man River" when I read it.

Robeson's "Old Man River" went thru my head a few times too Linda, at the start of the journey. I really felt sorry for "Tall convict" ... it was the world at war around and upon him and beyond his control. All he wanted was to get straight back to Parchman farm. And he never got a fair shake. I was tempted to re-read the story when I finished. It is supposed to be one of the easier Faulkner's I think and still it got away from me a few times. When he would hear the big wave coming in particular. And the people he encountered on the river seriously confused me.

It sounded to me like Faulkner liked having "Old Man" as a story by itself. I suspect I would handle this less well with more story.

Hey Ron, thought I'd stop by your thread and say hello. Looks like you've got a lot of fun reading under your belt already this year. Those Asimov magazines look like fun. I'm reading an old science fiction pulp anthology you'd probably enjoy: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume from 1957.

Hi Jerry
I've been in a reading burst this year to the neglect of many other things! It won't last but for now I'm really enjoying it. I often really enjoy those old anthologies. I have a couple of the Judith Merril's from later years that I picked up at a friends of the library sale a year or two ago, but I haven't read them yet.

The Nevil Shute & Faulkner stories had really put me in a melancholy mood. This proved to be an excellent antidote.

17. Down to a Soundless Sea by Thomas Steinbeck, finished February 12, 2014, 3 1/2 stars


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I first happened upon this book about 10 years ago when I visited the Steinbeck Center in Salinas. It was newly published at the time. The Steinbeck Center celebrates the life work of Thomas's father John. We have visited there several times. What struck me as most unusual was that this was the first published work of John's eldest son Thomas. The author's note that introduces the book intrigued me, as of course did the family heritage. How could I not read this? When I first got the book I think I only read a couple of the stories. Now, finally, I have read (and re-read) all of them.

Roughly, Thomas set out to record stories that had been told on the central coast of California, principally around Big Sur and Monterey. I can see now that this was a prelude to his novel In The Shadow of the Cypress that I read last year. These short, medium and novella length stories are all interesting stories. They are like family legends and tall tales of people that were passed down and Thomas built them out into stories on paper. They read as if a storyteller was telling them to you. After many decades, or in the case of the first story, 140 years or so, variations in the tales, embellishments and such would be natural. Everyone who told the same story would tell a different version. In Thomas's words: "... I have invariably shown a shameless propensity for the most entertaining and morally illustrative narratives. But I also respect the underlying accuracy of detailed facts, and for those I have gratefully depended upon the dedicated research of qualified regional historians." Steinbeck comes from a family of storytellers with a tradition that he now continues.

So the downside here is that some of these stories didn't really spring fully from Thomas's imagination. The upside is that he took family and other stories and told them pretty well. They are very well written, full of imagery and really take you back to a place and time that has gone. The story of the young "wool gatherer" John Steinbeck on the Sur coast in 1920 was quite entertaining, as was the tale of Doc Roberts and his adventures in doctoring the inhabitants scattered across Big Sur in "An Unbecoming Grace." I also really enjoyed the longer story "Blind Luck" about a shanghaied young man, Chapel Lodge, who finds where he really belongs in life. I thought it might be my favorite story in this book of very good stories. That's it though - these are all very good stories. I decided, though, that the excellent novella, "Sing Fat and the Imperial Duchess of Woo" was my favorite in this collection. I enjoyed all of them, although somewhat strangely I thought the very first story was the weakest of the lot.

The seven stories here are: The Night Guide, The Wool Gatherer, Blind Luck, An Unbecoming Grace, The Dark Watcher, Blighted Cargo, and Sing Fat and the Imperial Duchess of Woo.

Recommended

We were down visiting my daughter in Monterey about 3 months ago. Here are a few pics from the area where some of these stories are set. In fact, there is a small map at the front of the book that shows Point Lobos and Whaler's Cove and the site of the Chinese fishing village. The first of these are taken at Whaler's Cove and coincidently I was standing at the approximate site of the Chinese fishing village.


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Nice pics!

Thanks Jim. The story I mentioned "Blind Luck" includes a lengthy segment based on the true story of the wreck of the steamship Los Angeles near Pt Sur in 1894. The man on watch (during a bad storm) changed the course the experienced captain had set and moved the ship closer to shore just south a ways from where I took those photos. He wanted to find calmer water past the kelp beds which are plentiful there (and which the egret is walking on). Instead he impaled the ship on rocks just below the surface and the ship sunk within minutes. As you can see from my photos it is a very rocky area. I just looked and found this archive of the news story: http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=LAH18940423.2.2#

Hey, Ron, I'm not sure you would like Code Name Verity, it might be too girly, and the war details are probably all old news for you. But I'm not sure...

Karen, I think you are right. I took a glance at Verity at the library a week or so ago and thought it might be too girly for me. It sounded a bit like a modern voice as well, but that was just from browsing a few passages. Guess I'll stick with my Nevil Shute!

Whew, glad you dodged it, then!

De-lurking here to say, oh, what wonderful photos! Thanks for sharing them!

Thank you Amber!

2/17 eta: Haven't been able to decide what to read next. Picked up and put down several. Will now try to get started on the 2014 challenge Vorkosigan Group Read with the first book Shards of Honor.

I read the following story thanks to the 2014 Category challenge for a year long group read of this series. http://www.librarything.com/topic/160914

I have read several novels and stories in this series previously but not the first stories, of which this is the first.

18. Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold, finished February 19, 2014, 4 stars


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This was a very enjoyable space opera type science fiction story. I'd like to call it a planetary romance but it is a little bigger than that. I enjoyed the first third to half of this story the most. After that it seemed to get a little disjointed and felt like stuff had been cut out. Which apparently it had. The narrative seemed to lose some of the tightness as well. Still very readable but there are jumps here and there. I'd rate this book higher except for the weak parts.

So I'm complaining about a story that I enjoyed very much and that gave birth to a long running series. Hmmm. In any event, this meeting of Cordelia Naismith and Aral Vorkosigan was a very good tale. I'll be reading more.

Honestly, it is very coincidental my reading and finishing this book with the movie coming out. I picked it up a while ago and my wife had just finished reading it. I gave it a go since Robert Harris is an author I enjoy and I had recently read and enjoyed Imperium among others. So I have great timing with this enjoyable story.

19. Pompeii: A Novel by Robert Harris, finished February 21, 2014, 3 1/2 stars


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Harris is a reliable writer who I can count on for a good story. Pompeii does not disappoint. This was published in 2003 and tells us stories of people beginning two days prior to the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in AD 79. It is however, primarily the story of one man and his experiences. The book starts off a little slow as an Aquarius and aqueduct engineer, Marcus Attilius, searches for water in the midst of a severe drought, but the story picks up considerably. We know of course how the big story ends. What we have here are smaller stories, woven around Attilius's investigation of what is suddenly going wrong with the aqueduct that has very recently come under his responsibility. He is the latest of several generations of engineers who have been building and caring for the Roman aqueducts. I also really liked the portrayal of Pliny in this book.

A nice history lesson woven into this tale. Once this got going, it turned into a real page turner that was very hard to put down. I have a few minor quibbles with the book that bothered me a little, but I won't detail them since I suspect they vary by reader.

20. The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura, finished February 26, 2014, 2 - 2 1/2 stars


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I'm rather lukewarm at best on this one. A mildly interesting book that was first published in 1906. My edition was published in 2005 and includes a forward and afterward by Hounsai Genshitsu Sen which is almost as interesting as the book itself, and invaluable in helping to understand this book. The book is a bit of a history lesson on tea and Japanese culture and ways of thought. More about the Japanese way of thinking and appreciation for certain arts than anything else. When it was published Japan was just embarking on a path that was not enlightened. It is impossible for me to not think about what was to come. I was hoping for a bit of enlightenment, but came away unimpressed. Not recommended.

Tomorrow, the 27th is my 5 year Thingaversary.

Google's search logo celebrates John Steinbeck today, on his 112th birthday.

I have a vague recollection of having read Harris's Fatherland long ago, but don't recall what I thought of his writing. Pompeii sounds like a good escape into historical fiction.

Linda, I really enjoyed Pompeii, as did my wife. There are a few quirks to it but overall I thought it was well written and really brought the decadent times to life. It seemed like a few modernisms crept in, but not too much. Harris did a good job with Imperium and Cicero, but the focus there was politics. This is one I enjoyed for the story and I learned a lot about Roman aqueducts. The end part of the book where Vesuvius erupts and Pompeii is buried is described in rather exquisite detail from several observers including Pliny the Elder. It was the best part of the book, but it was built up to it very well which is what helped make the end so effective. For historical fiction I think this is a pretty good one. I really kind of bonded with the aqueduct engineer.

Happy Thingaversary today, Ron!

Oh, I skipped right over that bit of information! Happy Thingaversary. Hope you're out buying books.

Thanks Richard and Linda. I resisted the urge to go on a celebratory spree to Barnes and Noble and Half Price Books. I have too many "friends" waiting on the shelves already I keep telling myself. And our big friends of the library sale should be coming soon which I can almost never resist ...

Anyway, I'm very happy to have found LibraryThing and been here the last five years. It has had a huge impact on my reading and enjoyment.

Happy belated thingaversary!

I have a couple of Harris' books on my shelves but haven't read them yet...

Thanks Amber. I enjoy Harris. Give him a try.

21. After Dark by Haruki Murakami, finished March 5, 2014, 3 - 3 1/2 stars


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The book has a familiar Murakami feel at the open. We meet two of our characters in a Tokyo Denny's restaurant late at night where two people who briefly met 2 years before intersect. We get the usual touches of western music - in this case Percy Faith, Martin Denny and Burt Bacharach are playing quietly in the background and obscure jazz pops into the conversation. Music pops up throughout the novel. The talk between the two people seems awkwardly real. We follow the girl, Mari, through the night as she stays out rather than going home and of course interesting things happen. At the start of each chapter a clock face tells us the time and we begin a few minutes before midnight and the story ends a few minutes before 7. And the end feels like the beginning of another story that for me at least I wish I could read.

Parts of the story are told from the viewpoint of an imaginary camera that moves around scenes as if we were in a movie. This is a very surreal parallel story that alternates with many chapters that is about Mari's sister Eri. This was the lesser part of the novel for me but there is still something interesting in the oddity. Not one of Murakami's major works, but it was still worth reading and an unusual look at another place and people. As I've said before, I have yet to read a bad Murakami book.

I read the following story for the 2014 Category challenge for a year long group read of this series. http://www.librarything.com/topic/160914

22. Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold, finished March 10, 2014, 3 - 3 1/2 stars


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Conflicting feelings about this book make it kind of tough to rate. I liked this story, and it pulled me right in, one with science in the science fiction, but I found myself bothered by the rather cartoonish portrayal of the creepy bad company and scientist/engineer Van Atta, etc. Our "hero" Leo Graf is a likeable fellow and easy to sympathize with. Van Atta is a former student of Leo Graf who has more or less gone over to the dark side. He was probably always on the dark side.

Without spoiling things I want to give credit for one great bit of writing. The sequence wherein those who had lived their entire lives in space first encounter planet side gravity was great. I had grown so used to the weightless movement that when gravity showed up it was totally alien to me too and I so sympathized with the reactions of the characters. Really well done.

I enjoyed the greater part of the book although the end disappointed me a little.

23. Godbody by Theodore Sturgeon, finished March 16, 2014, 3 1/2 stars


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It would be an understatement to say that this novel is something completely different than my usual science fiction reading. Sturgeon was one of the great but somewhat underappreciated masters of science fiction writing. He tended to go where few if any others went. Godbody is his last novel, published posthumously in 1986.

Robert Heinlein writes a lengthy introduction to this work (in itself full of all sorts of interesting information), and he seems to consider it Sturgeon's greatest or at the least among them. He anticipates the varied reactions to come from readers and I will quote his words here: "Some readers will feel it is XXX-rated pornography. They will have plenty to go on. Others will see it as a tender, gentle love story. They'll be right." Heinlein goes on from there with descriptions of reactions and then answers them. He covers all the bases ... and he's right.

This is the story of the coming of a Christ-like figure. Some are going to find this sacrilegious, blasphemous and offensive. The story pushes boundaries and buttons. But Heinlein is right. It is not just XXX. It is a tender love story and a look at the insides of relationships and thoughts. The story is told in a very interesting way. Each chapter is a first person viewpoint from 8 different major characters, and then a final chapter. It is very well done and probably not easy to do. There is one basic message of this book that is summed up in a few words of a famous song by the Beatles. Those words are: "All You need is love. Love is all you need." And that is the message to us from Godbody.

I'm glad to have read this. I'd recommend it to any fan of sturgeon's work and to those who like provocative science fiction. Don't read this though if you'll be offended by very explicit sex.

24. Retro Pulp Tales anthology edited by Joe R. Lansdale, finished March 18, 2014, 3 1/2 stars


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Editor Joe R Lansdale writes in his introduction: "compelling stories, that's what people want, and that's what the writers in this book have given you." He told the writers to embrace the pulp tradition. Write something that is like it is before 1960 and that has the restrictions of those times. Part of me loves this book. Twelve writers and twelve stories have done some pretty good storytelling. Each story comes with an introduction by the writer that let's the reader know where the story is coming from. I was unfamiliar with many of the writers before reading this. They tend towards slightly creepy horror stories in various ways.

I won't detail each story; most of these are interesting and/or fun and I'll just mention a few. There are a couple of superior tales in the collection. Two of them open and close the anthology. A couple stories don't really stick to the editor's request, most notably "Alien Love at Zero Break" by Melissa Mia Hall which is a gushing Gidget book and movie love fest and it was one of the only two stories in the collection I disliked. The other story I didn't care for (and didn't even finish) was Kim Newman's "Clubland Heroes." I wasn't fond of the style of it, but the real problem for me was that the story was apparently from a series by the author and required a lot of background knowledge that I didn't have. These are otherwise fun stories to read and my rating gives them an extra 1/2 star just for that. They are fairly diverse.

"Devil Wings Over France" by James Reasoner opens the anthology and was a WWI Air Fighter story twined with some mild horror and evil German experiment stuff. This is not highbrow literature, but it IS good storytelling. Chet Williamson's piece "From The Back Pages" was real-life-this-can't-be-true creepy. F. Paul Wilson does a fabulous channeling of "Yellow Menace/Yellow Peril" pulp stories in "Sex Slaves of the Dragon Tong" which gets my award for best title in the issue. It is a yarn set in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1938 and for me was one of the several standout stories and possibly my favorite of the collection. There are "guest" appearances in this story that add to the fun. "Summer" by Al Sarrantonio was a pretty good homage to Ray Bradbury at the start but sputtered out a bit. The final story by Norman Partridge, "Carrion" was another that vies for the "best in the collection" award. The author credits Robert E Howard for inspiration but this is really Partridge's gem.

When I finished this I wanted more. Not this very moment though. I read these stories over a couple weeks. Too much candy and boogeymen might rot my brain. There is a sequel to this anthology that I plan to read. For anyone into good pulp fiction this is worth a look.

25. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, finished March 20, 2014, 4 1/2 stars


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I was afraid at first that I had outgrown the Bradbury magic that let me enjoy his stories so much in my teens and early 20's. This starts off a little too far over the top, but I rather quickly got sucked in to that summer of 1928 in small town Illinois and the way it was for a 12 year old boy discovering the world, life and death. It was the small things in here that I really liked.

There truly is magic in the writing in this book. Let yourself fall into it.

eta: I've been thinking about this book the past few busy days and re-read a few sections this morning. It really is a lovely book.

>54 RBeffa: No wonder Heinlein likes it - it sounds very Stranger in a Strange Land like...

It has been ages since I read Stranger in a Strange Land (and I'm one who didn't care for it all that much). Not fresh in my mind, but I don't think there is any real similarity. I don't think Sturgeon would want there to be either. This is a shorter, simpler and much less complicated story than Stranger. Despite the title there is very little Godbody in it - it is about how each character was affected and transformed (or not) by Godbody. The end of the story is very Christ-like.

>58 RBeffa: I'm just thinking of the sex stuff (there's plenty of that in Stranger) and the Christ-like ending, which is certainly there in Stranger, too. I liked the Heinlein, but it isn't my favorite of the Hugo winners so far (I'm making my way through the list from the beginning).

The odd thing about Godbody is that we have no idea who he is or where he came from. He appears on the edge of the town naked. I don't think he ever puts a stitch of clothes on. He comes across as a bit of a simpleton hick, but he touches people, transforms them and truths are revealed. and then he is killed and as he dies he says something like "so soon this time?" ...

Spring has kept me busy with cleaning projects and gardening. Haven't read more than the newspaper this past week and not even all of that. Still have lots of chores for the weekend, but today however is a much needed rain day so I hope to make some inroads on Ken Follett's Jackdaws. I really like the start of it and in years past I have enjoyed his thrillers and historical fiction. This looks like a good one. WWII French resistance tale with a gutsy woman protagonist.

It's good to hear about spring projects, even if it will be another month before we can do much in that way around here. A little yard clean-up was on the schedule for today, but I'm not sure the temperature is going up to near 60, as was promised. At nearly 11:00 a.m., it's still barely 38 degrees out there. *sigh* I guess I'll just have to read!

More to do here than I should contemplate Linda! Spring is springing. It is 65 here at 9:30 this morning. I've barely read 50 pages if that this past week. Out at the nursery getting a few flowers to brighten up things and also a few veges and herbs. My tomato seedlings are about ready to go into the ground and I need to work some more on the vege beds today. Here is a pic of the view over my back fence I took a few days ago as well as a couple I took along the shoreline. The hills have gone from brown to green seemingly overnight. Plus a flower from the garden. well, two.

Spring is an energizer!
The view from the hill

along the shoreline

the strait with the bridges in the distance

roses are bursting


There is work to do observes my helper.

Beautiful pics!!

Wow, beautiful!

Stunning views....gorgeous kitty. (I know all about that sort of help!)

glad you all enjoyed the pictures. the views are at their best this time of year when the air is clean and fresh and the colors and green hills shout out. Most of the year the hills are quite brown when the grasses die.

hard to get back into shape for spring gardening. I'm getting too old!

anyway, I set aside Jackdaws in favor of a different sort of mystery. I will get back to it before long because I was enjoyin it very much but some books from the library have tempted me.

26. Covenant With Hell by Priscilla Royal, finished April 7, 2014, 3 - 3 1/2 stars


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Medieval mysteries are not my normal reading area. I've read very few and had mixed feelings. All the angst about sin and the church tends to wear me out. This book, however I found very enjoyable because of the interesting relationship and respect between the two main characters, Prioress Eleanor and Brother Thomas. This book is the tenth in a series and I read several of the first books in the series a number of years ago. None recently however and this book feels like it would hold up very well as a standalone book to someone unfamiliar with the series. This book is outside the setting of the prior books I had read. There are a few references to past events which I was unfamiliar with but I didn't think it interfered with my enjoyment of the story.

I thought the book had a bit of a slow start but I think it was mostly me getting used to the setting and setup for the story. Solving the mystery part of the story (the suspicious death of a young nun) was handled well. I think I'll be reading some of the earlier stories in this series over time.

27. The Door into Summer by Robert Heinlein, finished April 18, 2014, 2 - 2 1/2 stars


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These last few years I have been trying to mix in and read (and in some cases re-read) old-fashioned science fiction adventure stories and especially some of Robert Heinlein's books. His so-called "juveniles" are reliably entertaining. The Door into Summer tells a sorta fun story with a big bonus for cat lovers that I am sure I would have enjoyed as a teen-ager, although not so much now. The story is from 1957, telling of the future in 1970 and 2000 and of course things are wildly wrong with predictions, but who cares.

Most of the time Heinlein runs a story along at a good pace that is easy to read, but that was not the case here. Easy to read, yes, most of the time, but erratic and I found the narrative voice rather annoying. I don't think this is anywhere near the quality of his better stories of the era and it even gets boring in parts such as when he goes on and on for pages about how he is building a household robot out of off the shelf parts, or designing other things. There is also kind of a creepy twist at the end, at least to modern sensibilities. I suspect it was supposed to be cute like "I'm my own grandpa" cute. It probably was 57 years ago. So even though I loved Pete the cat in this book, this story disappointed. The good parts can't make up for the weak sections. Can't recommend this one compared to other, better, Heinlein stories.

28. World of Trouble The Last Policeman Book III by Ben H Winters, finished April 23, 2014, 3 1/2 stars


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I have been looking forward to the conclusion of the Last Policeman Trilogy. I really enjoyed the first book in the series; the second one not so much, though it was still interesting and had a strong finish. The scenario has been that an asteroid was approaching earth on a probable collision course. As the probability increased, society fell apart. New police officer and then Detective Henry "Hank" Palace was one of the very few people who coped and stayed on the job. His job was what he had been working for and wanted. In a way it was his own personal bucket list item, which much of society went off to do as the months counted down. Others committed suicide or joined cults or just disappeared. Hank stays on the job and tries to solve a few crimes. He especially wants to know what has happened to his sister Nico, who has now disappeared.

There's a noirish atmosphere to these books. I think it adds to the story. Where have all the people gone? We have empty lonesome cities and towns as the doomsday approaches. The people have to go somewhere. Where are they? So we have the dark, moody, empty atmosphere but when I think about it I just can't buy how we got there. Society has been collapsing. Yeah I get that. But everyone is not out on a cruise or hiking the Appalachian trail or laying at the beach or going Rambo or looking for the high school sweetheart that got away. Some have just disappeared. Only a few, it seems, are on an improbable mission to save the world from the asteroid collision, and Hank thinks his sister has joined up with them.

Book three opens a couple of months and 800 plus miles later from book 2 as Hank tries to track where his sister might hove gone or what has happened. That seems to be his mission, his reason to be, though he still stays "The Last Policeman," "retired" and no longer on a regular beat. This story bounces around back and forth in time a bit over a few weeks. After an intro, the story starts 6 days before the expected asteroid impact date, but we move back and forward several times. This allows a broader story to be told but for me almost completely diffused the impending catastrophe.

Hank tells us about the goings on of people and cities across the country. How he would know this I do not know; he says he hears rumors and for a time after the radio, television and internet were gone there was Ham radio. There may be vast underground cities being built and so on. And of course he has seen the towns coping in various ways he has gone through in between our books to get where he is from where he was. But we the reader don't see these people. We see instead a single crazy lady in an old store, cigarette butts left behind and empty police stations. Hank has acquired a good sidekick, Cortez, for the endgame of his journey. He still has his dog, Houdini, but he's worn out from the travels.

I don't think there would be any point to read this novel as a standalone, although you could. One should read this after the first two. Otherwise you are going to be fairly ignorant about almost everything, although bits do get filled in as you read to remind you of what we have seen earlier.

Ben Winters writes in a very readable style that I liked. I was hoping for a strong finish to the series, something that would help me understand the goings on and satisfy me that the journey through these books was worth taking. I don't feel like I completely got that strong finish, although this third book and the series is a good story with mysteries and I do like how the book ends. I still like Hank a lot. I like how he persevered in the face of everything. This was an interesting read, but not one I would call one of those "must read" ones. It was however worth my time and the series is worth a read. This is a different take on "the end of the world as we know it" theme. Primarily a crime and detective mystery story - not science fiction really, although it is. Bonus points for mixing the genres and coming up with something unique. I'm curious if the series might be extended.

I received an advanced uncorrected proof copy via the LibraryThing early reviewers program.

That series sounds fun, I've added it to my list, thanks.

I hope you like the Last Policeman Karen.

DNF Marsbound by Joe Haldeman.

I tried. and I tried. Very boring. First of a three part series. Yuck.

29. Jackdaws by Ken Follett, finished May 1, 2014, 4 stars


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This was a very fine WWII espionage story. Although interesting, the early part of the novel is a little slow after starting with a bang, but it is worth getting through that. The story starts on May 28th, 1944, less than 2 weeks before D-day. The French resistance with British undercover agents, some in deep cover, are trying to disrupt German communications which is seen by both sides as critical to the success or failure of the invasion. The book starts with a failed attempt to destroy a telephone exchange. With only days before the invasion a second attempt is planned, this time with an all-women force of cast-offs and third string agents who had been washed out of training. Time is of the essence, however, and a rushed operation is put together.

I can't say I bonded much with the characters in this story - in particular the lead agent "Flick" who does come across as a real person. I did however get very drawn into this story as everything played out. It is a rather harsh and desperate time for all involved. Overall I found the portrayal of all the main characters pretty vivid and well done, and liked how they were developed through the story, with the Germans really done well. Getting inside the head of one of these guys, a German Army officer, Dieter, was spooky. I hate to admit that he was the most interesting character in the sense that he was really brought to life and I could understand who he was and his motivations.

There are some elements in the story (Nazi torture in particular) that might bother or upset some people. I enjoyed this a lot, and it is well written and it just makes it up to the level of an excellent book for me.

I think this is loosely based on a true story.

After the intensity and grit of Jackdaws I really felt the need for some lighter reading. This worked surprisingly well.

30. The Martian War by Gabriel Mesta, finished May 6, 2014, 4 stars


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This book is something of an homage to H. G. Wells. We meet him in school in 1884 with his professor T.H. Huxley who we learn is about to retire. They spend an evening on a cold London rooftop to watch a Leonid meteor shower. With Mars in the sky Wells speculates with his professor about life arising there. Herbert is living on the edge, nutritionally, and wears paper thin clothes not suitable for the event and comes down with a nasty fever. In his fever dreams is born the images and some ideas of "War of the Worlds".

I had very modest, if any(!), expectations for this book and it really surprised me how readable and enjoyable it was. It is a mix of reality and a lot of fiction to not give us an historical fiction of how Wells created "War of the Worlds", but a very mashed-up imagined idea of maybe the way that it should have happened. What we find is that Wells stories of the Martians and Dr. Moreau, cavorite and other things may have not been entirely products of his imagination.

This book was very enjoyable and a lot of fun. Sometimes I need to suspend my disbelief and let imagination run. Written in something of a Victorian style, some people will probably hate this book but as a 60 year old teenager I found this alternative history extremely entertaining.

The author's name, Gabriel Mesta, is a pseudonym for Kevin J. Anderson. This 2005 novel has recently been reissued under the author's actual name.

31. No Graves As Yet: A Novel (World War I) by Anne Perry, finished May 12, 2014, 2 - 2 1/2 stars


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This novel is the first in a series and one I have been planning to read for some time. I want to fit in some WWI related fiction and non-fiction in this and the next couple years. Generally speaking I enjoy Anne Perry's mystery novels, but sometimes they disappoint. This one, unexpectedly, did. I can't quite pin down why this didn't gel for me, but I have some ideas. I didn't latch onto the main characters and I know that is part of the reason. I liked several of the portrayals of secondary characters however. The book seemed much too stretched out and even almost boring at times. One of the main characters is a former minister and now professor and he has a lot of long drawn out angst over things. Everyone is way too overwrought, scenes seem over-dramatized
and over-written. Nearly every conversation seemed to have the anxiety level amped to 11. The story begins when four adult children lose their parents in a single motorcar accident. But was it an accident?

This book takes place beginning in the summer before the outbreak of hostilities and it ends when war is declared. There is a missing document, supposedly one that would rock the world if revealed. An interesting look at English life at the dawn of war, despite the weakness of the storytelling (and the story itself). This just did not strike me as well written compared to other Perry novels I have read. It isn't a bad book, but not a very good one I think. The book picked up a little towards the end, but the ending I thought was rather unsatisfying. Despite this I think I'll give the second book in the series a try as that seems to be where the direct WWI stuff happens.

reading Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf to honor his memory. I first read this when I was in my teens. Never 'loved' the book like so many did, including my mom, but liked it and know that it was an important one. I did love the movie adaptation of it. Farley Mowat, May 12, 1921 – May 6, 2014.

We'll see how my older self reacts.

Not a writer per se, but Malik Bendjelloul, the director of the documentary "Searching For Sugarman" has died at age 36. The news is here, among many places: http://www.freep.com/article/20140513/ENT01/305130187/Malik-Bendjelloul-dies-sea...

The story of Rodriguez (Sugarman) is rather personal to me as I was one of those looking for Sugarman when the www was new. Here I am looking for Rodriguez in 1996: https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!search/rebeffa%7Csort:date%7Cspell:false...

32. Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat, finished May 14, 2014, 4+ stars


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A very entertaining (and slightly frightening) look at how Canadian bureaucracy sends Farley as a young biologist off into the true northern wilderness to spend perhaps one to two years alone studying wolves. From the supplies they send with him you know they expect him to report that wolves are bad bad bad and you should kill kill kill them all so the hunters can have their caribou. Farley expects to find what he has been told he will find, the "Big Bad Wolf." Instead, very quickly, he finds something different.

Farley's time there is transformative. You could say he goes native a bit. His observations, research and studies were ground breaking.

This is absolutely a book worth reading 50 years after it first came out.

Next up. Andy Weir's The Martian

>77 RBeffa: I thought it was excellent, as well! A genre-transcender, for sure. I've recommended it to many people over the years.

Karen, I am so glad I re-read Never Cry Wolf. This was a book my parents treasured long ago. The image of the hardback on the bookshelf from my childhood has strangely stuck in my brain. I can't recall exactly when I first read it, but it had to be late teens or early 20's. At the time I was considering being a biologist - mammalogist like Farley. Took courses in college (my first major was Wildlife & Fisheries Biology) before switching gears a bit.

The book didn't inspire me then - it probably spooked me if anything! But I did like it. I seem to be able to appreciate it much more now. I can see it for what it was at the time. I almost gave this my rare 5 stars.

>77 RBeffa: That one's gone onto my wishlist now. I have another of Mowat's books, but have never read him. I know exactly what you mean about having the image of books from my parents shelves firmly printed on my brain. We didn't have a lot of books, by my current standards, and some of them were the dreaded Readers' Digest Condensed books, but I'll bet I can still name 20 or 30 titles from those shelves.

Linda, we probably had half a dozen of the Readers Digest books. As a result I have an odd affection for them, since we too didn't have all that many books and any book then was a potential treasure. Many of the stories I had zero interest in but I read some anyway and was on occasion pleasantly surprised. I'm not sure I own a single condensed one now.

33. The Martian by Andy Weir, finished May 16, 2014, 4+ stars


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For me, this was a very enjoyable read. As soon as I started reading it, I read for several hours straight and only stopped because I was trying to stay awake way past my bedtime. I went to sleep thinking about it and couldn't wait for the next day to come to start reading again. Books like that are rare for me.

Some people won't like this one. Much of the book, esp the beginning is told in a diary log style of an astronaut marooned on Mars because of an accident. It would seem to be a hopeless situation but our man Mark is a terribly innovative resourceful engineer and botanist and this is his story. He also has this rather dark but not overly fatalistic sense of humor. I'm rating this a touch higher than I might have otherwise because I really enjoyed reading this. Even when one can recognize some minor faults, if a story is well told it gets you over the little bumps smoothly. This is a very positive, life affirming book. It will make a great movie someday if someone like Tom Hanks embraces it. Almost the entire time I read this I had actor Ron Livingston in my mind's eye as our lost astronaut.

This will be one of my favorite reads of the year along with Never Cry Wolf.

If the F word offends you, don't read this. Mark uses it liberally to describe his situation.

Glad you liked it! I did too. I was really impressed with the technical accuracy and how well he describes how NASA works.

34. Hegira by Greg Bear, finished May 17, 2014, 3 stars


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I went into this book with low to zero expectations. That proved to be a good strategy because the rather slow start and getting to know the people and world took a little patience. This is a very early novel, possibly the first for Greg Bear. My copy of the book shows it was originally written in 1979 and revised in 1987. I read quite a bit of Greg Bear in the 1980's and a smattering in later years but never this one.

I was quite satisfied with the book by the end. This is not a book to reveal plot points in a review since it would potentially completely spoil the read for the reader. The story takes place on a world where all of human history is inscribed on huge obelisks erected across the world which the populace strive to read and learn from. Society seems to be in something like a mixed 17th-mid 20th century level. At the very beginning we see a Christ cult that flagellates itself and so on trying to achieve enlightenment since the story of "This Heisos Kristos - or Yesu as we knew him - is mentioned on all the Obelisks I have ever known and his story is always the same." We follow the journey several men are taking across their immense world in an attempt to learn what it is all about.

The biggest complaint one can have is that the book feels a little derivative of other science fiction but that is hardly new. It just seems a little more obvious here, but it is put together in an interesting way and I enjoyed the book.

Time for a minor stab at the American Author challenge and I'll nibble on A Curtain of Green: and Other Stories by Eudora Welty.

>83 drneutron: Jim, I was rather hesitant to read The Martian. It seemed like it had way too much fanboy/fangirl gushing going on. When I read about it (and when it was an early reviewer giveaway) I got a little more interested. Then I read some mainstream very positive reviews in the book sections of our local papers including The San Francisco Chronicle ( http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Science-fiction-and-fantasy-books-5377987.ph... )early last month I decided to get going on it and got it from the library. Glad I did.

Here's one for the May American Author challenge

35. A Curtain of Green: and Other Stories by Eudora Welty, finished May 19, 2014, 3+ stars


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I believe this is Eudora Welty's first collection of short stories, first published in 1941. Quite a few stories here with a very wide range. I like the writing a lot. There are many great observations within these stories. Some were rather bizarre, and there seems an excess of simple-minded folk. The bizarre strangeness effect was rather cumulative as I read through these stories. Every one seems to have a touch of strange about it. A few of the stories were to me rather uninteresting things in and of themselves, but there were sparkling bits of language and settings within them nonetheless.

The culture depicted within these pages is utterly alien to me, a California boy. I'm removed from both time and place. That must be at least partly a fault of my own (lack of) experiences. Some of the situations are universal of course, although not the presentation here, and I was just repeatedly struck by the oddness of some of this.

So the two-bit summary: Great writing, strange quirky stories. Worth a read but not really my cuppa tea.

added thoughts: I don't want my comments above to sound as harsh as they probably do. Some of the writing in these stories is entrancing and amazing and there are sentences and passages throughout the stories that delight. The writing and language in almost all these stories is at the five star level. It is amazing that this was her first batch of stories.

36. The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2 edited by Gordon Van Gelder, finished May 30, 2014, 4 - 4 i/2 stars


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This is an excellent collection of short fiction. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction began publication in 1949 and this new book published in 2014 marks the 65th anniversary year. We have 27 stories in this collection first published in the magazine between October 1952 and May/June 2011. Most if not all of these stories have already appeared in collections or anthologies (including ones from the magazine itself) over the years, or Year's Best collections, but that does not diminish the significance of them first appearing in the magazine, but rather validates it. Editor Gordon Van Gelder in his foreword says his nickname for the collection is "F&SF's Greatest Hits, Volume 2." The nickname is appropriate. Many of these stories can be considered the "best of the best" from prior collections and recognition. I also found the introduction to this collection, written by Michael Dirda to be quite informative. This is an excellent way to bring older stories to the attention of newer readers.

Since I am a longtime reader of science fiction, including the magazine at times, I have previously read a number of the stories over the years, a bit more than half, although none very recently with the exception of Robert Silverberg's "Sundance". Some of these stories are "classics" with a capital C. I remember being stunned when I first read Lucius Shepard's "Salvador" in 1984. I had just begun a subscription to the magazine that year after a number of years of haphazard reading and eagerly read each issue as they arrived. I never expected something like Salvador. It is also one of his very first published stories. I can also remember being entranced by Zenna Henderson's fantasy story "The Anything Box" when I first read it as a young teen in the 60's. Although there are a number of science fiction classics included here, such as Harlan Ellison's "Jeffty is Five" (another one of those which once read is never forgotten), there are also many smaller classics from across the years.

So having said that, I think the collection gets off to a slow start. If the first stories disappoint stick with it. I wouldn't call all of the stories in this collection "Greatest Hits" and a few surprised me for having been included, especially the second story, although they are all interesting in one way or another. Just like with music, different songs, different stories will resonate differently with the audience. I think I would have dropped a couple of the early stories to include a few more from mid to later years. I can think of some excellent F&SF stories not included in either Vol 1 or 2 of the "Very Best" that could comfortably sit in here and deserve to be rescued from the obscurity of old magazine pages, stories that I don't think have been collected or anthologized much, if at all. I suppose I will have to wait for future volumes if the series continues.

I'll mention just a couple of the perhaps less well known minor classics included in the collection. The third story here, "The Country of the Kind" by Damon Knight from 1956 kicks the collection into gear. It is a sad and disturbing story that doesn't soon leave one's memory. Sad. Disturbing. There are no better words for this story. I first read it years ago in Gardner Dozois's "Modern Classics of Science Fiction" anthology which also includes Lucius Shepard's "Salvador". "Salvador" came out at at time when Central America seemed to be in a constant civil war or revolutionary state. The ground pounding near-future warriors gave us a dark look at what could evolve, and the dark echoes of Vietnam from a decade earlier ring through the story as well. Robert Sheckley's "The Prize Peril" is scarily prescient of reality TV and is perhaps only one final step removed from where it is today. And it was published in 1958!

There are many other excellent stories in the collection, such as the alternate history tale "The Lincoln Train" by Maureen McHugh. Ken Lui's multiple award winning short piece from 2011, the newest in the collection, is "The Paper Menagerie." Something of a tearjerker. Rather than talk about more of the stories I'll just suggest that the prospective reader discover them.

Good anthologies seem to be a rare breed these days, though they once were a staple of the genre. All in all this collection is an excellent overview of the span of F&SF and a testament to the importance that the magazine has held in the field. I enjoyed reading these stories a few at a time and then thinking about them. As Michael Dirda says at the end of his introduction, "To this day, Fantasy and Science Fiction remains, like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or The Paris Review, one of the great fiction magazines of modern American Literature."

I received an advance review copy of this forthcoming collection (July 2014) from the Goodreads First Reads program.

The included stories are:

"The Third Level" by Jack Finney
"The Cosmic Charge Account" aka "The Cosmic Expense Account" by C. M. Kornbluth
"The Country of the Kind" by Damon Knight
"The Anything Box" by Zenna Henderson
"The Prize of Peril" by Robert Sheckley
"---All You Zombies---" by Robert A. Heinlein
"A Kind of Artistry" by Brian W Aldiss
"Green Magic" by Jack Vance
"Narrow Valley" by R. A. Lafferty
"Sundance" by Robert Silverberg
"Attack of the Giant Baby" by Kit Reed
"The Hundredth Dove" by Jane Yolen
"Jeffty Is Five" by Harlan Ellison
"Salvador" by Lucius Shepard
"The Aliens Who Knew, I mean, Everything" by George Alec Effinger
"Rat" by J. P. Kelly
"The Friendship Light" by Gene Wolfe
"The Bone Woman" by Charles de Lint
"The Lincoln Train" by Maureen F. McHugh
"Maneki Neko" by Bruce Sterling
"Winemaster" by Robert Reed
"Suicide Coast" by M. John Harrison
"Have Not Have" by Geoff Ryman
"The People of Sand and Slag" by Paolo Bacigalupi
"Echo" by Elizabeth Hand
"The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates" by Stephen King
"The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu

37. The Kassa Gambit by M.C. Planck, finished June 5, 2014, 2 - 2 1/2 stars


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The first time I saw "The Kassa Gambit" it was displayed on a bookshelf at my library. Without looking further than the cover it looked like it might be a Russian or German WWII in winter thriller. It isn't. I don't recall where I later read about the book, but it was a generally favorable review and when I saw the book at the used shop recently I picked it up. I'm pretty disappointed with it. More accurately I just didn't connect with it very well. On the (potentially) plus side this is an old-fashioned style rag-tag crew on a freighter adventure in space (opera). As the story plays out there is an interesting mystery to solve and the story idea itself is generally good. There are some interesting (and not), quirky characters in here, but many are poorly developed. On the downside, the manner of telling the story and the dialogue and the instant romance here I found a little irksome at times. The politics and fascist paranoia element of "The League" and the double agent angle just didn't appeal to me much, but the story did slowly gather some momentum.

Overall the story was interesting enough to keep me reading and not bail out, but this falls on the very low end of a OK read for me. The latter half of the book is better than the start. Can't recommend this one since for me at least there is a lot better out there to read.

I've been in something of a book funk since my last read. In fact I think it began with that read. I started on a mystery that didn't catch my interest so I set it aside and tackled Kate Atkinson's recent Life After Life which has garnered a lot of praise. I read a few pages. Set it down. Read a few more the next day. Set it down. Read some more and as I approached spitting distance of 50 pages I decided I had close to zero interest in the characters and story and it was time for Pearl's rule. I hate doing that. I'm sure this book must turn into something great. My sister-in-law swears every book by Atkinson is good and worth reading. But it wasn't for me.

So the funk hit me. It seemed like everything I looked at wouldn't catch my interest. I would read a few pages of something and set it aside. I looked at Mark Twain for the American Author challenge and could not raise even a shred of interest. I was afraid to tackle something I "really" wanted to read for fear my mood was a contagion that would spoil anything. So I gave books a rest for a couple days.

Last night I decided maybe I needed a comfort food old book. Some old favorite to re-read or something similar. Some pablum. Maybe a little more than that. I looked at a few. Flipped a few pages. Then I decided, OK, how about John Wyndham's "Day of the Triffids?" Nothing like an end of the world novel to life my spirits! One of the scariest movies I ever saw as a kid and a very good BBC mini-series some years ago but I had never read the book although I like all the other Wyndham books I've read over the years.

Success! I was hooked on the first page. I was hooked on the first sentence. I love this opening: "When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere."

This story is told and written in such an easy to read, engaging style So I devoured a bunch of the book and Stella got her groove back. This is easily going to be a four star book for me. Taking a look at LT this morning I see it has earned a lot of praise and there is a great discussion from a group read some years ago. I stopped reading all the praise when I found Richard Derus gushing all over it. Rock on. Who woulda thunk it? Here is a great group read thread if anyone is interested: http://www.librarything.com/topic/48716

Glad you conquered the funk, Ron. I really hate when that happens. I don't read much science fiction, but once in a while one of the classics does appeal to me. I'm going to put Day of the Triffids on my "tentative" pile. I sounds like I might enjoy it--I'll be looking forward to your full review when you've finished.

I had similar feelings as you to both Life After Life and Day of the Triffids.

I doubt there is a thing I could say about Triffids that hasn't already been said. I still have a ways to go before I finish. I think this was a rather mainstream book when first published in 1951 (and a condensed version serialized in Collier's magazine it says at the front of the book). Most science fiction from that era has little literary merit, although some does. (Wyndham, a Brit, was certainly one of the better writers.) It was more about the idea and telling a story. This book is more like a near future story in London, a sort of horror story with the world gone wrong from probable genetic modification and Star Wars space platform (Star Wars space as in Ronnie Raygun not Jedi Knights). I keep thinking to myself, wow this was really published in 1951?

It is told very well. Perhaps not a "great" book, but a very good one. I'll try and finish it in the next couple days. It isn't a long novel.

ETA: Book funks for me are sometimes related to "real life" and I know this one is. One of the dearest friends of my entire life has ALS and it has really saddened me. Part of me is dying with her disease.

38. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham, finished June 18, 2014, 3 1/2 - 4 stars


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I suspect there isn't anything new I can say in a review of Wyndham's "The Day of the Triffids" that hasn't already been said in the 120+ reviews already here on LT. I'm not about to read through them looking for some new point to be made. My reviews are primarily written for me as remembrances anyway. I can clearly see that the vast majority of readers have rated this as 4 to 5 stars. That is pretty impressive.

I picked up my rather tattered 30 year old paperback 3 months ago at our local library's book sale. My 1983 edition proclaims right there on the cover: "Hailed as the greatest science-fiction masterpiece of our time." Hmmmm I've been aware of Wyndham as a writer for a very long time. I read his 1968 novel "Chocky" when it was brand new and it was one of the earliest science fiction novels I remember reading as a teenager. I still have my copy. I've read a few more of his stories since then. I can't recall ever being disappointed and I usually remember who disappointed me as a reader! Triffids is a 1951 novel first serialized in Collier's magazine and was adapted into a 1963 movie and more recent BBC productions. Reading the novel I can see that some changes were made for the film. In the film, as I recall, the triffids were plants grown from alien spores that arrived on earth in a meteor shower which blinds everyone who looks at it. Alien invasion time. In the book the narrator, who is giving us his personal record, tells us that the origin of the triffids isn't precisely known, but they would seem to most likely be the result of genetic engineering carried out by the Soviets and the triffids were created and farmed to supply an oil that is superior to just about any other oil known. The end of the world begins when seeds are stolen and smuggled out of Russia and scattered on the winds across the world. Then everyone watches the sky to see a lightshow as the earth supposedly passes through the debris trail of a comet.

Triffids are sort of a family legend. In the mid 60's my family was going on one of our yearly camping trips. When we three kids were roused from bed in the wee hours to get ready and then wait, we entertained ourselves by watching the much after midnight movies on TV. On that night in the early hours was "Day of the Triffids." We had never seen it. It scared the chit out of us. So after watching some of the movie we piled into the station wagon and headed off to Lake Tahoe. As dawn was breaking in the mountains and in the early light we started seeing these huge plants scattered here and there in fields along the roadside. My brother and I started shouting "Triffids" "Triffids" with the result that our baby sister was quickly scared to death and reduced to tears. I'm pretty positive she still hasn't forgiven me. Years later on another visit to the area I decided that what we had been seeing were cow parsnips which tower much higher than an average person. Those cow parsnips will always be triffids to me.

Wait a minute - I'm supposed to be talking about a book here. OK.

Civilization collapses. It collapses because nearly everyone on the planet is blinded. The eventual attack of the Triffids happens after and there is virtually no one able to stop them. But the remnants of humanity try to fight back.

Wyndham is a good writer, and the book is written in a kind of conversational style of writing that I find easy to read and that I like. The story is told by our main protagonist, a biologist who has survived the day, and the days and the years of the triffids. His is a unique story and his name is Bill Masen. The novel surprisingly has a few modern sensibilities to it. There really are only a handful of characters, and one of them is a pretty strong woman, Josella Playton.

The book has a very powerful beginning that really pulls the reader into the story and grabs your interest. One of the other strengths in the book is the examination of the fragility of modern society and the human condition and how quickly it can unravel, and the consequences of that. Most people seem to completely give up. Some don't, and there are various ideas about how humans and humanity can survive and hopefully fight back and rebuild. There's a near constant thread of optimism in here.

There were a few things that bothered me and I think even a casual reader couldn't help notice. It was entirely too coincidental that the Triffids decided that it was time to break out and attack humanity the very morning after the blinding of the population. The survivors, after years of dealing with the Triffids and still not understanding them wonder about that too. In retrospect I can see this as the man-created evil was just biding time and waiting for the chance for payback. I also found it bizarre while reading that the hot water, electricity, gas for stoves were completely gone the morning after. There is also the rather strange appearance of a devastating plague only a few days after the initial event. We are told there is no radio or television (no electricity). Other than a plot device I must wonder why. These odd things caused me to wonder if the whole business wasn't some plot gone wrong by a nefarious country or organization. We do get a bit more information by the end, some guesses, but not enough. I also found it bizarre that society collapsed and people leaped from windows within hours of being blinded. No one knew if it was permanent or why. It was pretty illogical to me and started bothering me, not immediately, but as I read and reflected on this quick and utter collapse of everything.

In sum, I wouldn't call this the greatest science-fiction masterpiece of our time. I don't think I'd even call it great, but it is certainly good. The end isn't really an end. It is a seminal early entry in apocalyptic fiction and deserves extra points for that.

One more thing. There are apparently two versions of the novel. There is the original British version and there is the Americanized version. The Americanized version changes words here and there but more importantly, chunks of the story are chopped out or abbreviated. I read the chopped version unknowingly. This is really irritating and according to one website about 12% of the original story is missing. Perhaps some of the "explaining" got the axe.

Good caution about the condensed American version...if I seek it out, I will try to find the original. And I love your family Triffid story ... see, you DID have something to add! My grown daughter still turns lights on immediately upon entering a dark room, (and I think she looks in closets, just to be sure) because she was scared by the possibility of "grues" when she was quite young. Computer geeks will recognize those as monsters that pop out and kill you in the dark in Zork, one of the earliest interactive games.

>94 laytonwoman3rd:
Although I was something of a computer geek I never took to those text adventure games. I needed something more like a traditional strategy game. I did play Star Trek on the mainframe back in '74-75 however.

39. The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness, finished June 21, 2014, 2 1/2 stars


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The Crane Wife is an old Japanese folk tale that many people have probably heard even if they don't immediately recognize it.

The Crane Wife was also a rather brilliant song and album by The Decemberists released late in 2006 that was one of my favorite albums of that time.

The epigraph to Ness's recent novel is so:

And all the stars were crashing round
As I laid eyes on what I'd found.

The Decemberists

In "The Crane Wife" Patrick Ness puts a modern spin on the old folk tale. This story starts off OK, and the old tale in modern trappings is immediately recognizable. But it veers somewhere else rather quickly, grabs some other things and later becomes rather surreal. As a genre this is probably magical realism. The storytelling is a little strange from the start, and I'd almost call it an odd sort of didactic at times. Ness seems to want to shove our nose in an odd assortment of things. Repeatedly. I stayed with the story when we entered the strange parts even as I wondered why we were there. And I liked some of those strange parts too. But I also got irritated.

The story is more than a single one, more than a simple one; it is parallel stories told in parts that the reader must put together somewhere down the line. As such, initially, it isn't the easiest read, although it is easy to read, per se. I admire what I think Ness is trying to do here but this ends up being a book I should have liked and enjoyed a lot more than I do. There are some good bits in here but they usually didn't add up to become great bits. I didn't glom on to the characters either. Mostly unlikeable. But sometimes here the story 'does' work and really catches my interest.

It isn't often that I can or do write a review without saying anything specific about the story itself. It is intentional here. I've liked this author a lot in the past but I was disappointed here.

I can't see that title (The Crane Wife) without now thinking of the Decemberists. Love that group.

heck, I even misspelled their name! Decemberists! I'll have to fix that above. Amber, I was quite surprised (and delighted) that Ness gave a nod to the song and group.

40. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, finished June 23, 2014, 3 stars


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Nothing says June like Kurt Vonnegut. How's that for a pile of BS? I decided a few years ago when I was cataloguing my books on LT that I didn't need to read or re-read any more Vonnegut. Been there, done that. I gave away several of my books of his only holding on to two. I read him in my late teens and twenties. He was one of those like/not-like authors. But even when I was not liking I was generally shocked or tweaked enough to feel that even though I was slapped all around I hadn't been abused too much. June however has Vonnegut for the American author challenge. OK, here we go. My first edition Dell paperback from 1966 of the 1959 novel, Vonnegut's second novel, hereby gets a read. A re-read, but I could scarcely remember a thing about it other than this vague gonzo adventure impression.

After reading this I don't know quite what to say. Some people may call this science fiction because they don't know what else to call it. I wouldn't. It's a whack job and the reader is the one getting whacked. I like some a little, I dislike some a lot. What else is new? Vonnegut wasn't like anybody else. This is a smart book. I'm impressed. It is also absurd and ridiculous and rather insane. Like listening to an old drunk rail against the world. But Vonnegut wasn't an old drunk when he wrote this.

What is this story about? What is the point of this rage against the machine of life, of religion, of society? Some people say the whole point of the story is contained in a line very near the end of the book. Some people also look at a Mark Rothko painting and find the meaning of life or something. I don't think so. In general I rarely had a clue as to what was going on with this story.

I think I've had enough Vonnegut for quite a while longer.

ETA: I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone, even those people who think Douglas Adams is the cat's meow.

41. Nebula Award Stories Four anthology edited by Poul Anderson, finished June 26, 2014, 2 1/2 stars


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I read a paperback edition of a December 1969 hardback edition. This features three of the 1968 Nebula Awards winners plus three runners-up in the Novella, Novelette and Short Story categories. The novel winner, Alexei Panshin's "Rite of Passage" I read in October 2012. It is a book in itself and not included.

This book is a time machine back to 1968-1969. In addition to the stories there is long introduction by Poul Anderson that acknowledges the new wave has been upon them but rambles a bit and includes a rather controversial defense of the old guard. Anderson took some flak for it and apparently later apologized that he had gone too far with his remark that science fiction was more interested in things other "than in the neuroses of some sniveling fagot."

There is a very lengthy foreword by college English professor Willis E. McNelly "The Science Fiction Novel of 1968" that discusses the major novels of the year including the winner by Panshin, which underwhelmed him compared to others he thought more deserving, but is also a detailed commentary on the state of the genre and writers. At the end of the collection is a lengthy "In Memorium" section where important writers and editors who had passed on in the preceding year+ are remembered by a wide variety of people.

The stories here are mixed; I expected better. The contents are as follows (adapted from ISFDB):

vii • Introduction (Nebula Award Stories 4) • (1969) • essay by Poul Anderson
• xiii • Foreword: The Science Fiction Novel in 1968 • (1969) • essay by Willis E. McNelly
• 1 • Mother to the World • (1968) • novelette by Richard Wilson (Hugo nominee and Nebula winner)
• 38 • The Dance of the Changer and the Three • (1968) • shortstory by Terry Carr (Hugo and Nebula nominee)
• 53 • The Planners • (1968) • shortstory by Kate Wilhelm (Nebula winner)
• 68 • Sword Game • (1968) • shortstory by H. H. Hollis (Nebula nominee)
• 77 • The Listeners • (1968) • novelette by James E. Gunn (Nebula nominee)
• 105 • Dragonrider • (1967) • novella by Anne McCaffrey (Hugo nominee and Nebula winner)
• 219 • In Memoriam essay by Poul Anderson
• 219 • In Memoriam - Anthony Boucher • (1969) • essay by J. Francis McComas
• 220 • In Memoriam - Rosel George Brown • (1969) • essay by Daniel F. Galouye
• 221 • In Memoriam - Bernard I. Kahn • (1969) • essay by by John W. Campbell
• 221 • In Memoriam - Groff Conklin • (1969) • essay by Isaac Asimov
• 222 • In Memoriam - Anna Kavan • (1969) • essay by Brian W. Aldiss
• 223 • In Memoriam - Gerald Kersh • (1969) • essay by Harlan Ellison
• 224 • In Memoriam - Edison Marshall • (1969) • essay by Alva Rogers
• 224 • In Memoriam - Frank Owen • (1969) • essay by Emil Petaja
• 225 • In Memoriam - Mervyn Peake • (1969) • essay by Michael Moorcock
• 225 • In Memoriam - Stuart Palmer • (1969) • essay by Karen Anderson
• 226 • In Memoriam - Arthur Sellings • (1969) • essay by John Carnell (as by Ted Carnell)
• 227 • In Memoriam - A. A. Wyn • (1969) • essay by Donald A. Wollheim
• 227 • In Memoriam - Harl Vincent • (1969) • essay by Forrest J. Ackerman

The first story here, Richard Wilson's "Mother to the World" ended up being one of the better, and maybe best story in this collection. One of those last man and woman on earth stories, but an interesting one. Terry Carr's "The Dance of the Changer and the Three" is very good at giving us some alien aliens. Gunn's "The Listeners" is also pretty good at capturing a small moment of a SETI project. "The Planners," the short story by Kate Wilhelm unimpressed me. Moody new wave type - it didn't seem the least bit special. Hollis's "Sword Game" was trying very hard to be hip and relevant to the 60's. It does have a clever construct, but ugh, It has not aged well. McCaffrey's Dragonrider takes up fully half the book. It and the novella "Weyr Search" would be joined together to create the novel "Dragonflight" the first in the long running Dragonriders of Pern series. This is a mixture of fantasy and science fiction. I can't say that I enjoyed it like I knew I did when I first read this forty or so years ago, but it was OK. A good example for me of the memory of something being better than the actual upon revisiting.

42. Nebula Award Stories 8 anthology edited by Isaac Asimov, finished June 29, 2014, 4 stars


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After a somewhat disappointing Nebula 4 (1968) read, Nebula 8 (1972) is a vast improvement. The 3 winners and 5 runners-up provide some solid reading here. Missing is LeGuin's "The Word For World is Forest" which took the Hugo that year for best novella, although it placed third for the Nebula. I remind myself that the "Science Fiction Writers of America" choose and vote for the Nebulas as opposed to the general reader and fan rabble that is a member of the World Conventions each year that gets to vote for the Hugo. Between the two awards each year most of the very good ones get at least nominated but the "best" each year is always a bit of a gamble. So here are the contents (from ISFDB):

ix • Introduction: So Why Aren't We Rich? (1973) • essay by Isaac Asimov
3 • A Meeting With Medusa • (1971) • novella Nebula winner by Arthur C. Clarke
50 • Shaffery Among the Immortals • (1972) • short story by Frederik Pohl
67 • Patron of the Arts • (1972) • novelette by William Rotsler
90 • When It Changed • (1972) • short story Nebula winner by Joanna Russ
100 • On the Downhill Side • (1972) • short story by Harlan Ellison
117 • The Fifth Head of Cerberus • (1972) • novella by Gene Wolfe
181 • When We Went to See the End of the World • (1972) • shortstory by Robert Silverberg
191 • Goat Song • (1972) • novelette Nebula winner by Poul Anderson

Notable among the stories to me were:

Clarke's "A Meeting With Medusa" starts this off very well with a hard science fiction tale of the first manned exploration of Jupiter and the surprising discovery of Jovian life forms. I really liked this one. I've read this story at least once before but long ago so that it was fresh to me. There is a lot of action and excitement in this one. Something that popped out at me was Clarke using the "Prime Directive" and first contact rules when the aliens are encountered and deemed possibly intelligent. As far as I know, the Prime Directive originated in the Star Trek TV series just a few years before this novella.

Russ's "When It Changed" is a powerful story about an all female society that has lived and survived without men for 600 years after a plague that left no men alive. And then men return. I have read this before and was pleased to revisit. Very deserving of the Nebula Award for short story.

In his introduction to Gene Wolfe's now classic "The Fifth Head of Cerebus," Asimov notes that it lost the Nebula by a hair to the Clarke story. I liked Clarke's story but I think this one is superior. Once I started reading I could scarcely put it down. To discuss the story itself would be to really spoil the pleasure in reading it. Broadly it is a future colonial society not on earth. Two brothers are kept apart from almost everything and everyone, but slowly as the years go by they are exposed to more and mysteries are revealed. They have a tutor from whom they learn much in early years. Interesting story.

I didn't really care for Silverberg's "When We Went To See The End of the World." I found each of the other stories interesting, with the singular exception of Pohl's "Shaffery Among the Immortals."

43. Sutton by J.R. Moehringer, finished July 6, 2014, about 4 stars


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An imaginative story, almost entirely fictitious, of the bank robber Willie Sutton and why he robbed banks. hint: It wasn't exactly because that's where the money was. The story is quite sympathetic to Sutton, and sanitized I'm sure, and a good story. However I dislike the artsy McCarthyesque desire not to use punctuation with dialog. It spoils my reading experience. When I am constantly distracted with: is he saying this? is he thinking this? who is saying this? is this a description of something or is he talking about it? well, just doesn't work for me no matter how good an author may think he is doing it. After a while I caught the rhythm of the style and it was easier to read but it still would lose me now and then and throw me out of the story while I re-read lines trying to figure things out.

Still, the story itself is very interesting and I enjoyed it. It is a compelling read and after a while one gets used to the lack of punctuation. One has to throw oneself back in time to Christmas Eve 1969 and Willie Sutton being given a pardon and release from Attica Correctional Facility in New York. There are, I think, a few anachronisms and glitches that poked me a little while reading. Willie rides around town on Christmas day with a photographer and reporter and as they visit places we get Willie's backstory. Willie has been a big book reader in prison and he knows a lot. He also has his own rich history. He seems unaware of changes in society in the 17 years he has been in prison, which could be expected, but curiously well aware of others. And, when Willie uses an expression like "same old same old" which I am pretty positive I had never heard by 1969. I scratched my head a little. At least Willie doesn't say "back in the day." OK, I'm nitpicking a little. But Willie steals a Chrysler, zooms away in the Chevy, then gets out of the Chrysler. Some magic there.

It's a really good story. It takes a while to get going, but once it does it is quite good. I was a little disappointed with the end game after the enjoyable trip to get there.

eta: Actually, I was a lot disappointed with the ending. We know that Willie doesn't tell a story the same way once, but the end makes one think that the entire story we have read is a complete delusion. I think the author overplayed his hand to give us a surprise at the end. And that surprise makes no sense even if we buy into the delusion. Willie's final reaction to Kate's reveal implied to me that he was accepting what she was saying. Then, to me, Kate herself makes it clear it wasn't a delusion despite what she says because she finishes up with oh Willie oh. What I just wrote in this paragraph won't make sense to anyone who hasn't read the novel. But when you do, think about that.

And the end after the end just made no sense to me. So I still give the story 4 stars. It could have had the moon though with just a bit of spit and shine.

Crap, I didn't notice that about the car. (See what I meant about getting lost in the story?) Great review, Ron. I'm sorry the style threw you off, though. The expressions did bother me a little. It has to be really hard to leave 45 years of technology and slang behind when setting a book in a past that your readers will remember, but you, the author, do not. I have admired Sue Grafton's ability to keep her characters firmly in the pre-cell phone era without making too many obvious boo-boos. But at least she was an adult back then.

Perhaps the car thing got fixed in the paperback version from my library hardcover? I felt at times I was reading the story like a copy editor because I had to pay closer attention to the writing because of the punctuation. The author seemed to make an effort to put elements of the respective times into the story. I think he just needed a sharper and older editor. I didn't mention it above because it would be completely spoilery, but the thing with Bess at the end and the elopement is a pile of poop. I realize that nothing Willie ever says is the truth, just some version of it or a time refined make believe, but really, that was stupid at the end. I also don't understand about the mermaids. Did I zone out at some point in the book? What was up with the mermaids at the end?

Half the year is gone. whew. I haven't been real terrible about reading books off the shelf this year (ones I owned before 2014) but I've been pretty terrible with getting a lot of new ones. Really terrible. My reading pace for the first half was great - 42 through June, but I picked up way more than that and have only read a couple of the new ones. Oh well, I have my work cut out for me.

Here's a pic of one of my to-read shelves. This is the scifi and fantasy shelf. Except there's a slim Steinbeck sitting in there I see. You can't tell probably but this shelf is double stacked.


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You could read Of Mice and Men in a jiffy...I like to slip a short book with a powerful punch into the list from time to time. It makes me feel very satisfied on a lot of levels!

A nice compact novel or novella can sure hit the spot sometimes.

44. The Quiet American by Graham Greene, finished July 11, 2014, 4 stars


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Graham Greene seems to bring a bit of dislike for Americans and the rise of American power to the table here. He doesn't exactly paint anyone pretty though. We see the decline of French and British class and Imperialism as an underlying factor also, perhaps. This is a powerful novel, very atmospheric, set in Vietnam in the early 50's. I think this story plays out on several levels, several layers, but I'm not going to try and peel the onion skin. When the story begins we soon find out that the Quiet American is dead. Then we get the story from when he first arrived. After the book was finished I kept thinking back on the story. More than anything I kept wondering how America could have gotten involved in the Vietnam War. Recommended.

The edition I read is a lovely Penguin deluxe edition for the 1904-2004 Centennial. There is an informative introduction to the book in this edition by Robert Stone.

>107 RBeffa: That's one that I've wanted to read for a good long while and just haven't yet. Now that I know there's a Penguin Deluxe Edition, though, it's likely to move up the list a bit...

>108 scaifea:
I have several of these deluxe editions Amber. The higher quality paper and special finish and informative introductions add something to the reading experience.

45. Dauntless by Jack Campbell, finished July 15, 2014, 2+ stars


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The first in a six book series about a far future space war between two human civilizations, The Syndics and The Alliance. Our hero here is John Geary, who has become a legend known as "Black Jack Geary" while he drifted unfound in an escape pod for a century after fighting what became a legendary cover for a retreat. The creation of this legend seems rather lame but I suspect that The Alliance was badly in need of heroes for the battles ahead. The hero worship in here is laid on rather thick. Make that double thick.

The story is pretty slow moving and the writing comes off as rather "pedestrian" and unexciting, with the exception of the two battle sequences. The characters struck me as rather extraordinarily stilted. I cut the author some slack since we know this is the first book in a series and there is a lot of background to fill in. Still, I expected a lot better, but a few parts of the story are rather good. For the most part though we get a lot of stupid and improbable behavior and a lot of posturing characters. In fact, it is almost cartoonish. The main character's internal monologue also was laid on thick and I felt was repetitive and excessive. When the initial battle does begin it is well done and quite exciting, building off of the slow stuff we read through to get there. But it was such a small part of the book and then we get back to the slow stuff. There are a lot of tedious explanations in here. Then with the major battle of the book at the end the novel races towards it and the reader is bombarded (in a good way) with the tactics and command decisions.

I don't read much that might be called military science fiction so I don't know how this compares to other books like that. I suspect there are better ones out there from the little I have read. As far as space opera goes, there is a lot of better space opera out there to spend your reading hours on. I'll give the next book a try soon to see how the series progresses. This book reads like the first couple chapters in a much larger novel. To put it another way, much of this book seems like an introduction and set-up for a bigger story.

I read another book by Jack Campbell that I liked a lot, the recent "The Last Full Measure." This doesn't seem like it was written by the same person at all. I'm rather surprised at the high average rating this book has (3.83 stars as I write this).

Have not been reading this past week although I have been doing a bit of audiobook listening.

Recapping the first half of the year, I think Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine" may have been my most enjoyable read. Hard to say though. Not a perfect book by any means but it had so many delicious moments in it as well as a few creepy scary ones. My aging memory tells me that it was one of his best. I need to read a little more Bradbury this year if I can.

There have been several other very good reads this year, starting off with my first book, "Time and Again" by Jack Finney. I also really enjoyed Nevil Shute's "The Breaking Wave," and even though I only rated 3 1/2 stars for Robert Harris' "Pompeii," it too was an excellent book and the story and images in my mind have remained very strong in memory. A very good book. I did really enjoy "Never Cry Wolf," but I'm not thinking of it now as a "great read". My most recent great reads were Andy Weir's "The Martian," and "Sutton." I should probably put Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" on that list as well, but I think it falls short just a bit.

No book has knocked it out of the park for me this year.

I'm not including story collections even though there have been some good ones.

I've decided to bail on reading any further in Anne Perry's WWI series even though reviews imply the series gets a lot better. "No Graves As Yet" just didn't get me very interested at all.

I really need to dedicate myself to off the shelf reads for the foreseeable future.

46. The Girl With all the Gifts by M.R. Carey, finished July 31, 2014, 3 1/2 stars


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I received a copy of this book for review through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

I was really looking forward to reading this story. I'd seen a lot of positive buzz about this new book, and since I tend to like apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic fiction I had some high expectations from the little information about it I did have. I made an effort not to read any reviews or details of the story since too much information can sometimes spoil a good read. As a result I was unaware until reading that although this is a post-apocalyptic tale it is also essentially a zombie novel. Unfortunately I am not a fan of zombie stories. I was expecting something dystopian more along the lines of an amped up "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Nevertheless, I pretty much enjoyed the first quarter of the book. The story focuses on Melanie who is the brightest of a group of children confined to a school/enclosure/army base of some sort who learn about the world outside the walls that they cannot see. The story is a little familiar but different enough to hold one's interest. We learn that there is something wrong with Melanie and the other children and yet we also know they are children and we sympathize with their plight. Melanie's teacher Miss Justineau is also a sympathetic character and helps carry the story. I wasn't too thrilled with the Nazi type concentration camp aspects and crazy experiment stuff however. For me the story didn't get better and the early promise of this book never carried through.

People who enjoy zombie fight stuff would probably enjoy this more. I was reminded a little of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" primarily because of the bleakness and essentially hopeless situation.

8/4 ETA: I was thinking back on this book and thought I was a little harsh and that it deserved an extra half star to 3 1/2. The story is written very well in the sense that some of the language actually has a literary quality to it. It surprised me a few times with some well written passages.

Today I took a selfie. My last day at 60. Tomorrow I put myself on the ice flow I think.


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Happy Birthday, then! (Don't even think about that ice floe---there are still too many books to read.)

>122 RBeffa: Oh, fantastic photo! And Happy Birthday!

OK no ice. even tho I had the igloo just packed with classics. We'll do Chinese lunch instead.

Thanks for the birthday wishes Linda and Amber.

Turning 61 wasn't so bad after all and the ice floe trip wasn't needed. I wouldn't have minded the cool, though, with these warm summer days. My wife and I had a lovely lunch starting with mu shu pork and then two lunch entrees. I had chicken and veges and Melanie had the lemon chicken, both with some fired rice, a small salad and some hot and sour soup. Major yum. I got three new Hawaiian shirts to replace my aging and well worn ones. Plus my book haul at the library sale made for a good day Thursday.

Currenty started on a re-read of Wells' Time Machine.

Here's some snaps of our lunch


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Oof, that meal looks delicious! I'm happy to hear that you had such a great birthday!

47. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, finished August 10, 2014, 4 stars


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The Time Machine is one of the earliest books I can recall owning and must be one of the earliest novels I have ever read. I had only the haziest remembrance of the actual story or even of that first movie with Yvette Mimieux and Rod Taylor. I remember Eloi and Morlocks are the earthlings of the far future, I thought, and that is about it. My recent discovery that Stephen Baxter wrote a multiple award winning sequel, "The Time Ships," told in Wells original style prompted me to return to the original story first. I'll read "The Time Ships" soon.

So is "The Time Machine" a great book? It is, especially when you consider that it was written in pieces before 1895 when it saw the final form. The style of the story will not be for everyone. Expressions and language and style are quite different from modern writings and can put one off a bit, and is not the easiest of reading at the start. Not difficult however. The beginning of the novel is much like the beginning of the 1979 film "Time after Time" where HG Wells hosts a dinner party.

The Time Traveler tells his story at a subsequent dinner when he returns from his journey to the far future and the sunset of mankind. Wells has many interesting observations and I had to repeatedly remind myself of when this was written. I enjoyed the story a lot.

That food looks wonderful. And I was craving Chinese food even before I stopped by here....I wonder what I'm having for lunch? Hmmmm... Also, your wife is lovely (don't tell her I put her second to the food!)

>119 laytonwoman3rd: thank you Linda. Melanie has been my sweetie since we met in 1978. It was more food than we could eat at one sitting so we enjoyed the leftovers that evening. The next day we were hungry for more but have managed to hold off. So many tempting things on the menu.

in book news:
I really enjoyed Wells' The Time Machine even if it felt too short compared to my age old memory. It was a good re-read. Started on Steven Baxter's The Time Ships last night, just a bit of it, and it is pretty darn good. The prologue revisits the last pages of Wells' original novel, but from the perspective of the Time Traveler rather than the Writer (presumed to be H G himself). We flow right into the events at the end of the Time Machine where the Time Traveler seemingly has disappeared into time. I'm impressed. Time Ships came out 100 years after Wells' 1895 novel and Baxter made a strong effort (at the beginning anyway) to be very true to the style and sensibilities of the original work. Time Ships must be three times the length of the original though so I suspect I am in for a good ride. Already at the beginning Baxter veers off with surprises such as the many worlds theory and the introduction of a mysterious watcher.

I have another book or two I should finish up before diving headlong into this, but it is hard to resist. I'm curious to see how Weena, the Eloi girl/woman is handled with respect to the Traveler. In the original Wells danced around any physical relationship although I strongly suspected one. She kissed on him and slept with him but he presented her more as a pet cat.

48. The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter, finished August 19, 2014, 3 - 3 1/2 stars


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Baxter's "The Time Ships" is a direct sequel to H. G. Well's "The Time Machine." We meet the Time Traveler just before the events at the end of Wells' book, and the story heads off from there. Initially I was very excited about this story. Baxter does a very good job of capturing the style of Wells' writing and the viewpoint character from "The Time Machine." However I found myself bogging down several times in some extended sequences that I would have preferred to be much shorter. Baxter presents us a reasonably good story extrapolation with a lot of traveling, visiting and paradoxes and a lot of scientific theory exposition. Simply put I think the book is much too long - it must be about four times the length of Well's original novel and I don't think it needed to be (My paperback is 520 pgs plus 12 for the prologue and author's note). Baxter gives us a lot of stuff to look at and think about, enough that this moves pretty far into what I would consider "hard" science fiction. Unfortunately I didn't find some of it all that intriguing or amazing. Lots of gobbledygook. So much promise and I came away underwhelmed. I do think that much of the spirit of the original work was captured.

There are some good moments too. The novel is divided into six parts of varying length. In the second half of the book there is an extended part titled "The Palaeocene Sea" that is probably my favorite sequence of the book. It does a good job with the characters showing different sides of themselves in a setting far in the past. Despite my complaints about some parts carrying on too long and being repetitive, I didn't think this was and it could have gone on even longer. With the next time jump though it was played out well.

General fiction readers can really enjoy Wells "The Time Machine", but I doubt anyone other than a dedicated science fiction reader could appreciate this sequel. I don't really want to bash this as I believe it was a noble effort. There is a lot of stuff to ooh and aah about, and to think about. I do think that reading Wells' novel first is a must, and being familiar with some of his other works which are subtly incorporated adds to the enjoyment. If you loved Wells' original, give this a try.

Last Sunday morning at about 3:20 we were awoken to the sound (a roar) of an earthquake. My waking thought was that an airplane or something had hit the house as there was this roar and the bed was violently shaking and things were crashing down from shelves. The Napa quake had struck just a few miles outside of town. We knew it was a bad one. Somehow the house appears to have come through whole and little was actually broken. Every picture was askew and some books and things had spilled out and some old pottery had shattered but we were fine and though the cats were hiding under the bed they were too. Life goes on.

There is a lot of damage in the area. Two of the three post offices are closed and there has been damage to a number of historic buildings in the area. The saddest thing to my wife and I was when we visited a cemetery a few days ago and found may of the monuments toppled and some shattered. It never crossed our mind somehow and it just shocked us. When you see someone's grave marker from 1903 in pieces it affects you.

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early in the year (and many years) I really enjoyed planning out some reading for the year. Sometimes though I just want to be random and read what catches my eye, either on my bookshelf, the bookshop or library. I'm really in a random mood and I rather randomly decided to read this beat up old paperback I picked up at a library sale in May.

49. New Tales of Space and Time by Raymond J Healy, finished August 29, 2014, 3+ stars


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First published in 1951, this was something of a groundbreaking collection of stories. As Anthony Boucher points out in his introduction, until this book all the anthologies being published were collections of stories from magazines. The collections were being increasingly duplicative and he also thought that many of the stories being reprinted never should have been. Bottom scraping. This was the first of a new type with all original stories. It begins with stories by Bradbury and Asimov and ends with a true classic of the genre, one that stretched the boundaries a bit, the dystopian religious tale of "The Quest for Saint Aquin." These stories are clearly from an earlier era, but most are still quite enjoyable. This was a worthwhile collection to read, more for curiosity's sake, despite a couple stinkers.

The included stories are:

xi • Introduction (New Tales of Space and Time) • (1951) • essay by Anthony Boucher
1 • Here There Be Tygers • (1951) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
16 • "In a Good Cause—" • (1951) • novelette by Isaac Asimov
44 • Tolliver's Travels • (1951) • novelette by Frank Fenton and Joseph Petracca
67 • Bettyann • (1951) • novelette by Kris Neville
113 • Little Anton • (1951) • novelette by Reginald Bretnor
143 • Status Quondam • (1951) • novelette by P. Schuyler Miller
170 • B + M - Planet 4 • (1951) • novelette by Gerald Heard
197 • You Can't Say That • (1951) • novelette by Cleve Cartmill
222 • Fulfillment • (1951) • novelette by A. E. van Vogt
253 • The Quest for Saint Aquin • (1951) • novelette by Anthony Boucher

Bradbury's opening story is kind of neat. It is an allegorical piece, an ecological tale, of a sentient planet like Eden. Remind yourself this was written in 1951. If you're like me a Star Trek episode from the 60's will probably come to mind. I've read this story before in one of Bradbury's collections, but it had been a pretty long time ago.

I'm lukewarm at best on Asimov's story. To me, this isn't one of his excellent ones, although it is interesting. There are many factions of humanity, not united. We view this as one faction idealistic, one faction practical, embodied by two men, friends in youth, that can't seem to unite against what is an alien common enemy. I never felt any tension in this story. At the end we are supposed to see that neither side was entirely right or wrong - both views were needed. Isn't politics almost always that way?

I was unfamiliar with the authors of "Tolliver's Travels." A wiki check reveals that Frank Fenton was a pretty successful screenwriter but only wrote a very few stories. Joseph Petracca was also a successful screenwriter with a number of stories. Science fiction pieces were not their usual territory. This is actually pretty good. A modestly successful but not wealthy man (a screenwriter of course) wants the world to be a better place. He is frustrated with society. He goes out for his weekly round of golf but his golf buddies have dumped him and started early. He pairs up with this little older man who has been a member of the club for a while but not anyone's friend. He doesn't play "serious" golf so is a bit of an outcast. Sounds like a totally blah premise but the story is not blah. What happens may be a drunken dream after hitting the bar a little too hard or it may be something else entirely.

I've probably read a little Kris Neville in the past. "Bettyann" was a nice surprise. It was apparently later updated and expanded into a longer work, but this is the original novelette, almost novella length. An interesting story of an alien child left behind and raised as a human. A very good story that was one of my favorites in the collection.

"Little Anton" was an atrocious bit of punning and far worse. NOT funny. The less said the better.

I know P. Schuyler Miller from many years of book reviews for Analog magazine that I was grateful for as a teenager. An enormous help for figuring out what was the good stuff to be on the lookout for. Before and during those years (he died in 1974) however he was a popular science fiction writer of the Golden Age and I have read very little of his short story output. "Status Quondam" was an entertaining time travel piece about a man who daydreams about how great it would be to live in the Age of Pericles rather than the modern world of "Big Business, Big Government, Big War, and little men" as the intro to the story describes it. He gets his wish through the invention of an acquaintance and finds himself under the Aegean sun 2400 years earlier. This story from 1951 was one of the last he wrote before focusing on being a book reviewer. An enjoyable piece of historical fiction, although it stumbles badly towards the end.

"B + M - Planet 4" by Gerald Heard may have appeared nowhere else but in this anthology. I certainly hope so. The explanation for all those flying saucers is giant bees from another planet. Seriously. Heard may or may not have been a popular author in his time, although he wrote little science fiction. That's probably a good thing. He seems to be one of those out there on the edge authors. Wikipedia notes him as a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous so he must have not been all wacky. This story just seemed too silly for me to enjoy. The writing also hit me as awful and I could not slog through this to finish it. Yuck.

Cleve Cartmill's story "You Can't Say That" was an OK enough read. Post war dystopia with a twist. Felt incomplete and had no resolution. Better was finding out that this author was the guy behind "The Cartmil Affair" in WWII with his description of the atomic bomb. Rather fascinating. http://boingboing.net/2008/01/20/science-fiction-writ-3.html

I thought Van Vogt's "Fulfillment" was a very cool story about machine intelligence. I had no idea where it was going and wished this story was longer than it was. The story begins with a lone machine inhabiting the earth in the far future. It appears to be stranded there but suddenly an opportunity to escape presents itself. There's a cool twist to the story which I should have seen but did not. Van Vogt's stories are hit or miss with me and this was a hit.

Yours is the first personal account of the earthquake I have seen, Ron. I'm glad there was no serious damage done to your home. It is sobering to see headstones toppled in a cemetery, for whatever reason. We have visited graves of my husband's ancestors who died in the 18th century, and found some stones lying on the ground, and others split by trees that have grown magnificently since the stones were put in place...it makes you want to do something. I'm glad there have been no significant aftershocks, and that apparently the quake wasn't the harbinger of something more serious.

Cemeteries are interesting as the older ones have many places where the markers are simply gone. One never knows if there ever was one. One spot I saw had some markers kind of tumbled under a huge bunch of bushes. They have had a slow tumble obviously as the years went by. To see so many all at once fallen and broken was a shock.

The quake was a 6 or 6.1, which is a strong one esp since it was so close. A few days later we were awoken in the morning with another shake and rattle and it was a 3.9. Haven't felt any other aftershocks which have mostly occurred north of us.

50. The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins, finished September 3, 2014, 3 1/2 - 4 stars


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This 1971 crime novel is probably the most dialogue intense book I have ever read. The story is told through the conversations of a number of characters. Very stylish and very tight storytelling. I can see why this would be quickly adapted to a movie. It isn't a long novel but like a good film I felt like I got to know a few of the characters in the short time we spend with them. None of them are people you'd want to know. None of them are friends despite the title. They are all crime punks and someone is going down. These guys have a code, but it is mostly based on fear. Fear of what will happen to you if you give someone a bum deal or rat them out a little. Eddie gets a bum deal. This is good intense stuff and a must read for fans of the genre. I never saw the film but now I want to. I felt sorry for some of these guys, especially Eddie.

More Higgins reading planned in the future.

Two-thirds of the year gone and I am just on track for 75 with finishing #50. I do have two books in progress, but my reading has really slowed down the last couple months. Looking over the books read so far I think my favorite of the year is the one I read first, Jack Finney's Time and Again. I still need to get going on my WWI reading and I'm a failure at challenges.

I'm a little late getting round to here, but I just wanted to say that I'm so glad to hear that you and yours made it through the earthquake safely!

Thanks for stopping by Amber. We had another small quake this morning around 4 AM. It was a 3 I think. Big enough to wake you but not much to it. It was centered just about where the big one was last week. This is the third one that has woken us. Strange pattern of quakes.

>125 RBeffa: I think I remember the movie made from that book. Good cast.

>129 laytonwoman3rd: I feel like I should see the movie now. Always was a Mitchum fan.

51. The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist, finished September 5, 2014, 2 stars


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"The Unit" is a Swedish near future dystopia. How near? Near enough that everything could be yesterday, today or tomorrow from the look of everything about. Except for the social dystopia part. I tend to like good dystopian fiction. I like the part of this story that makes you think of society around you and relationships with friends, family and animals. Unfortunately the setting itself just didn't make any sense to me. I couldn't see how we could get from "here", our world, to "there", the brave new world of sorts in a relative heartbeat. The explanation given was quite minimal. I also, try as I might, couldn't figure out why we would even be "there" since as far as I could tell, it was not rational in this seemingly overmanaged rational "democracy". This unfortunately impacted my enjoyment of the story as I constantly kept thinking how irrational this was. There are many good insights within this story on the value of individuals. And on the human heart. But in the end, overall, this didn't work for me. I couldn't buy it. I really couldn't buy it. The premise is entirely irrational, the endgame perhaps even moreso and that is why this fails for me.

This novel gets a fair amount of praise but I can't recommend it.

ETA: I feel like I'm being really generous with the 2 stars.

Here is another early science fiction anthology that I picked up at a library sale this Spring. It is an old falling apart paperback from 1955 with a cool cover.

52. Possible Worlds of Science Fiction edited by Groff Conklin, finished September 8, 2014, 3 stars


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This anthology was first collected and published in 1951 gathering stories for my paperback edition from a variety of science fiction magazines from as early as the October 1939 issue of "Astounding Science Fiction" to the November 1950 issue of the same. Many of the authors are among the "giants" of the genre in the Golden Age. The stories and essays are:

• 5 • Part One: The Solar System • essay by Groff Conklin
• 7 • Enchanted Village • (1950) • shortstory by A. E. van Vogt
• 23 • Lilies of Life • (1945) • novelette by Malcolm Jameson
• 45 • Asleep in Armageddon • (1948) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury (variant of Perchance to Dream)
• 60 • Not Final! • (1941) • shortstory by Isaac Asimov
• 78 • The Pillows • (1950) • shortstory by Margaret St. Clair
• 91 • Part Two: The Galaxy • essay by Groff Conklin
• 93 • Propagandist • (1947) • shortstory by Murray Leinster
• 114 • In Value Deceived • (1950) • shortstory by H. B. Fyfe
• 126 • Space Rating • (1939) • shortstory by John Berryman
• 147 • Limiting Factor • (1949) • shortstory by Clifford D. Simak
• 163 • The Helping Hand • (1950) • novelette by Poul Anderson

The paperback version I read has ten stories extracted from the hardback edition which contains twenty-two stories. I don't think I've read any of these stories before. The cool cover art on my copy does not have the artist identified but it resembles the work of Richard Powers, an artist of the time that I like. There's a theme to the stories - the first five are planetary exploration type stories of our solar system and the second five are galactic tales. I thought this was a good collection for the time period.

Old science fiction stories just loved to end with a surprise twist. Enchanted Village got real twisted. Bill Jenner has been stranded on Mars, the pilot and sole survivor of the rocket that crashed into a Martian desert. As the ship came down he thought he had seen a shallow polar sea about 300 miles from where he landed. He sets out with his minimal food and water on a trek. This however is nothing like Andy Weir's recent "The Martian." Jenner treks and as his water supply is close to being out he climbs a peak and discovers a hidden valley within and what appears to be a small village. This strange irritating sound is in the air, coming and going. He explores the village and finds a sort of food but it burns his mouth and causes him to vomit. The liquid burns his skin. Clearly not meant for humans. The story progresses and he tries to adapt the mechanisms to provide something fit for humans. What happens is clearly a twisty ending (and a little silly) but unforgettable. Very fun old-time science fiction.

The second story, Malcolm Jameson's "Lilies of Life" was first published shortly before the author's death in 1945. This story is about Venus, and a viral plague of sorts from the planet has taken hold on earth and scientists try desperately to find a cure. The native inhabitants of Venus seemed mostly unaffected by the disease and the scientists wanted to know why. As they themselves fight the affliction from the virus, the scientists do find a cure, a most unusual symbiotic one, and this tale tells us how it was done. Very old-fashioned story straight out of the tradition of the first half of the twentieth century but done quite well. I enjoyed this.

I thought Bradbury's "Asleep in Armageddon" was a real dud. The asteroid belt is supposedly haunted by the ghosts of a greek or roman-type civilization that was destroyed long ago. I'd rate this a stinker. Asimov's "Not Final!" was better, but not by much. Published in 1941 it is quite dated. Earthmen have colonized Ganymede and have been in contact with Jovians and slowly established communications between the two. Suddenly the Jovians realized that the Earthmen are not Jovians also. They end communication with a threat. The bulk of the story concerns whether the Jovians could make good on their threat. The scientists on Ganymede believe the threat is very real but conclude it is not possible for the Jovians to leave their planet. We see that possibly this may not be true. The dated elements (growing tobacco on Ganymede for example) detract from the overall story. The characters are rather laughable as is the pseudo-scientific technobabble.

Margaret St. Clair's "The Pillows" wraps up the planetary tales. I've read a few of her stories in collections before and she is generally very good. Also largely forgotten as an author. She veers a little towards the creepy/horror side of things. This story is OK - it is dated in numerous ways like the others, but also has elements to it that redeem it. Aliens who are alien, this is set on Triton (a moon of Neptune). The ship's crew is there to mine for an artifact, the pillows. One crew member discovers, or surmises may be a better way to describe it, that the pillows are alive and intelligent and things will soon be going very badly for the Earth.

The clunky titled "Propagandist" by Leinster begins the far space stories. Man goes into space with his faithful companion, and the dog wags the tale. "Buck" prevents a war, more or less because he's a dog. Leinster wrote a lot of stories. Most of the ones I've read are pretty good and this one is too, if a bit cutesy.

Of the remaining stories, each was an enjoyable read. Fyfe's story was a funny trader story where each side of the exchange couldn't believe they got such a deal. Berryman's "Space Rating" involved an instructor/pilot and student/co-pilot evaluating and testing the skills of each other. Simak's "Limiting Factor" was about the discovery of a planet that was a computer. Lots of speculation and it got a little boring since nothing really happens. Poul Anderson's "The Helping Hand" was a longer one, a look at the effects in the far future of "foreign aid" where Earth helps or doesn't help other planetary cultures after a war. Anderson was a young new writer when this story was published.

Some people like to praise science fiction writers for their great vision and predicting the future. Reading these old stories would rather quickly make one aware of how much they got wrong.

Finally back to some of my planned reads. Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden was planned to coincide with the WWI centennial. So far this is looking like my best book of the year and may even earn that rare mark for me, 5 stars, unless it somehow flounders.

53. Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, finished September 11, 2014, 4 1/2 - 5 stars


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Wonderful book. Superb storytelling. When I begin some books, I can tell right from the start it is going to be a good book. This is one of those. The book has a powerful beginning that hooked me. Not very far in I had a sudden sense of where the story might end. I read something into one line of prose. I rarely rate a book 5 stars and I rarely read a book this good.

There are multiple stories here, woven together. The main story is about two James Bay Cree Indians who enlist in the Canadian Army and are sent to fight the Hun in WWI. Only one returns. The story moves back and forth between characters and in time from their youth to the war to after the war, as well as to earlier days of the Cree and the time of their Aunt who brings one of the young men home on the Three Day Road. The Aunt's life and early Canadian life in the greater James Bay - Moose Factory area is the other story woven into the story. The transitions were mostly very effective but a couple less so. I also thought the narrative stretched maybe a little too long towards the middle of the book. These are minor complaints about a great book. Highly recommended.

>133 RBeffa: And so another one goes on the wishlist.

I'll warn you Linda that Three Day Road is a sad one and the WWI scenes can be pretty graphic. I found it to be both that vivid portrayal of the horror that was the first world war as well as an insight into what happened to the native peoples of the Ontario area.

I picked this book up early this year after seeing books by Stabenow for years. I guess the cover caught my eye, and it is the first in a series and I got a little interested. My wife read it shortly after I got it and then proceeded to read many in the series. So I figured I'd give it a try.

54. A Cold Day For Murder by Dana Stabenow, finished September 14, 2014, 3 stars


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A reasonably interesting start to what is now a long murder mystery series set in Alaska. This first book in the series is from 1992. When I started on it I was slightly put off by a number of cultural references. I got the John Wayne one in the opening paragraph (the 1960 film North To Alaska) - the rest were lost on me. I guess I didn't watch the right TV shows or movies or read the same books. The one in the second paragraph references Sam Magee in the oven, so this, from Wikipedia: "The Cremation of Sam McGee is among the most famous of Robert W. Service's poems. It was published in 1907 in Songs of a Sourdough. (A "sourdough", in this sense, is a resident of the Yukon.(1) It concerns the cremation of a prospector who freezes to death near Lake Laberge,(2) (spelled "Lebarge" by Service), Yukon, Canada, as told by the man who cremates him. Whew

I read on through this and the story setup began to intrigue me. I know very little about Alaska, but now I know maybe a little more. This turned out to be a reasonably good mystery that clocks in around 200 pages, which is about perfect for me when I want a light read. A newly minted park ranger (with a congressman for a father) has gone missing as well as the investigator sent to find out what happened to him. Our "heroine" Kate Shugak is dispatched to unravel this. There arise some obvious suspects with motives, but of course that would be too simple. There's a complex web of relations and relationships. I just enjoyed the story and didn't try to figure it out so the conclusion was a real surprise for me. This isn't really my style of book though, so I probably won't read more in the series, but I might. I'm glad I gave this a try.

When I was a teen-ager Heinlein's stories were among my favorites. My small branch library managed to stock enough to keep me happy. It was a small library, long and narrow, wedged into a space in our shopping center. My mind's eye still pictures it very well since I spent many hours there. I seem to remember it took me nearly half an hour on my bike each way so I got my exercise in with my reading time. The science fiction books were on a set of shelves against the far back wall. I was always scouting them for new arrivals. These past few years I've been trying to read/re-read the early books (I wasn't a fan of Heinlein's later works for the most part). I'm surprised at how many there were that I never read - this is one of the books I don't think I read back then.

Rather appropriately, the copy I read is an old battered library book - I think a first edition from 1958, but it is really well used. The date due slip in the back shows that it was last due Feb 1 '85. It had only been checked out twice before in the 80's. I'll donate this back to the Friends of the Library and let someone else have fun rediscovering it.

55. Have Spacesuit Will Travel by Robert Heinlein, finished September 15, 2014, 3+ stars


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This was the last book that Heinlein wrote that is considered one of his juveniles. It is an adventure story for boys and girls - in this case our young Kip is a high school sophomore who wants to go to the moon. Soon he is a senior who has been studying very hard and graduating trying to figure out where he can go to college and how can he possibly afford it. Published in 1958 and certainly feeling like it, there is a lot of silly stuff in here. There is also some pretty good storytelling and some attempts to be scientific science fiction. It was a fun read. You can't take this the least bit seriously, so if you don't and instead pretend you are maybe 12 years old in 1958 this will ring your bell. Simply, Kip gets his wish to go to the moon in an extraordinary but very 50's way - he is kidnapped by an evil alien in a flying saucer and eventually travels to Pluto and 27 light years across the galaxy. He has some companions, also kidnapped, a young brilliant girl and something called The Mother Thing (!). The Mother Thing is one of the minor highlights of the book, if not the major one. She is described in one passage thus:

"The Mother Thing was the Mother Thing because she was. Around her you felt happy and safe and warm. You knew that if you skinned your knee and came bawling into the house, she would kiss it well and paint it with Merthiolate and everything would be all right."

I bet it has been a long time since you swabbed a skinned knee with Merthiolate. I had a good time with this. There is better Heinlein out there but fans of his early work will enjoy this.

Paladin, Paladin, where do you roam? Paladin, Paladin, far far from home

>134 laytonwoman3rd: Thanks, Ron. I'll have to pick my moment carefully for that one. I read Birdsong earlier this year, and that's enough of WWI horror for a while. But the native people involvement of Three Day Road recommends this one to me for whenever I feel I have the strength to revisit the trenches.

>137 RBeffa: Don't you love finding those old ex-library books with the cards still in them?

>138 laytonwoman3rd: Linda, I ran out and got Birdsong a couple years ago immediately after watching the BBC production with Eddie Redmayne. The show was so dark (but good) I was rather wary of diving into the book however and decided I needed to wait for the right time. It has been sitting on one of my "read soon" shelves ever since. Right now would be too soon I think after Three Day Road, but I do want to tackle a couple more WWI books before the end of the year. I've never read Tuchman's The Guns of August and I think that might be my next one on the Great War.

I do like finding the old check-out cards in ex-lib books. They aren't very common - normally it is just the empty pouch.

Oh, and about merthiolate ..we were a mercurochrome family. (Please, not the red stuff, Mom!) Both are now lost to us in their original formulas due to the mercury content, of course.

I could have written a book "confessions of a mercurochrome addict" when I was a kid. I dabbed that little glass rod on every owie that I got. paper cut, slivers, scrapes, pencil stabs, you name it. I swear that stuff was the best antiseptic. I wore the red-orange like a badge. Up until a few years ago I still had a bottle that I had used sparingly and only then did I discover I could buy no more. sigh I would use it today on the scrapes and cuts from gardening if I could!

56. A Plague of Pythons by Frederick Pohl, finished September 20, 2014, 3+ stars


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Sometimes I wonder why I continue to read "junky" science fiction books. This novel came out in 1965, almost 50 years ago. I think the main reason is that I like old-fashioned storytelling and sometimes I come across real surprises (good ones) such as this. For most of the book this really reads as a horror story of demonic possession - worldwide possession where almost anyone is at risk of being taken over at any time. The modern day equivalent of witch trials apparently have returned, with a twist. If possession is proven, you are not held accountable. If you are determined to be a hoaxer you are likely to be executed by firing squad the next day, after an immediate trial.

We follow the story of a man named Chandler who is on trial for his life for a viscous rape the day before at the antibiotics factory where he works. The populace does not believe he was possessed. He escapes being sentenced to death when the jury forewoman herself becomes possessed during the trial and declares him not guilty. There is an uproar and Chandler is branded and released outside of town. This all sounds a little crazy, and it is, but Pohl manages to write this in a way that lets the reader know how badly the madness has affected society. Civilization is clearly on the verge of complete collapse. No one knows if demons have invaded the world or some strange aliens or what.

Chandler jumps a train out of town and the real story begins. He is first captured (or recruited) by a semi-crazy group of people who have developed some unconventional ways to fight the possession but all hell quickly breaks loose there. Chandler eventually discovers the source of madness and we see what happens. This was a page turner for me. Not great literature but a story that had my attention.

Since reading Graham Greene's The Quiet American a couple months ago I have repeatedly had it return to my thoughts. I find myself now re-reading much of it. I rated it initially as 3 1/2-4 stars which I consider a good read, but I think now it was better than that and should be 4-4 1/2 stars. It really is an interesting book with a lot of aspects to it. I see myself returning to this one for re-reads. It is kind of haunting. Recommended for sure.

Before going too far in my re-read of Quiet American I decided to finish this off. Kind of a guilty pleasure that I enjoyed more than I should have. This is another of those books that feels like it could have been one of those Star Trek episodes to unravel the mysterious planet stories, without Kirk and crew of course, and written before ST. Stories like this just seem to come with the territory of mid 60's science fiction.

57. Transit by Edmund Cooper, finished September 22, 2014, 2 1/2 - 3 stars


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Another oldie, this 50 year old novel dates to 1964. I picked this up because I remembered liking some of Edmund Cooper's books when I was young but probably hadn't read a story by him in at least 35 years. He died in 1982. I got a slight laugh because the main character introduced in the first sentence, Richard Avery, is the pen-name that Cooper used later on several novels in the mid 70's.

So, was this worth the read? It was, mostly for the positive message, although the writing gets a bit overwrought now and then. Kind of typical for older fiction of any genre. We get some angst with a capital A. Everyone sits down and has a cigarette. Beyond that, it actually holds up well after 50 years and was better than I expected. Four humans (two men, two women) are abducted by aliens it seems or perhaps mad scientists they wonder (what else is new) and subject to a "survivor" type test by a computer and communicating via something that sounds exactly like a Teletype Model 33 teleprinter straight out of the cutting edge of the mid 60's. It is more or less a social experiment similar to what the TV shows such as LOST or even "The Prisoner" or the "reality" types do to see who and how one will survive. The story begins with and focuses on Richard Avery who is having a somewhat early mid-life crisis.

I was slightly surprised at the bit of sex in here. Science fiction was becoming more modern that way, even back in 1964. I think readers who like philosophical science fiction and searching for the meaning of life might enjoy this more than other readers. It is also one of those "resilience of the human spirit" types where we can see someone find strength that they didn't know they had, develop skills and perhaps even thrive as they rise to a challenge. That's the positive message part that I liked. In the end all is revealed.

It has been quite a while since I read me some Hemingway, and umpteen years since I read this one. This story for the most part has stayed with me although details got blurry. Time for a re-read for the WWI centennial.

58. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, finished October 4, 4 - 4 1/2 stars


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There is just something instantly recognizable about reading a Hemingway story. A paragraph or two on the first page and you know what you have. I regret not visiting with one of my longtime favorite authors more often this past decade. I wanted to re-read this one for the WWI centennial where it seemed to be an appropriate time. I had slightly forgotten Hemingway's occasional affection for the very long run-on sentence that almost goes on forever. More often they run on just a little, which is what I remember. For some reason it never bothered me much with Hemingway unlike others. Maybe it is just because his writing is so direct that I don't get lost along the way. Then of course there are the very short ones to help create what is distinctly Hemingway.

In any event I love this novel. I admire his skill at sliding things into sentences, where he talks about one thing but lets you see another. It is love in the time of war. It is a heartbreaker for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the end. There are quite a few passages in this book that I love to read and re-read. One can immerse oneself into this story. It is a fictionalized journalistic type of account of Hemingway in Italy in WWI. The Italian war was not the same trench warfare of Belgium and France that comes to mind when one thinks of the Great War. The shelling was very destructive and deadly in the mountains. The story begins early during the war and is set in the mountains where the Italian army fought the Austrians. Our narrator, Mr. Henry is an American, an ambulance worker. He meets a Scottish woman, Catherine Barkley. Catherine is a little crazy, but she loves Frederic Henry and he loves her even more. Much of the story takes place during Mr. Henry's hospital stay after he is severely injured. You can cry if you want to. I can see how some readers may not like reading this. I am not one of them. I think Hemingway is my Faulkner - he's not for everyone but for me he works.

I nibbled on a couple books but after the emotional intensity of "A Farewell To Arms" I couldn't seem to find something that clicked. Eventually I settled on the following book that I picked up a couple months ago.

59. Deathwatch by Robb White, finished October 18, no "normal" star rating, but about 3 stars


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When I was young I read and really enjoyed several of Robb White's books. "The Survivor" was a special favorite that I read when I was about 14, but I also enjoyed stories such as "Up Periscope." I happened upon "Deathwatch" a couple months ago and excitedly picked it up at the used shop, even though the subject matter on the back cover didn't sound like something I would like very much.

Well, it turned out I was right about the subject matter. I really did not enjoy a story about a relentlessly evil man changing his hunting target from bighorn sheep to the young college kid who was his guide in the desert. The story was pretty well written and I read this because I wanted to see how it played out. I would never read this again though. The ending was a little unexpected (and I didn't care for it).

60. The Big Wave by Pearl Buck, finished October 20, 2014, 3 1/2 stars


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This is a story for children, and a very quick read. I found it interesting. It deals with a natural disaster in Japan and how one lives after the loss of your family. Two young boys, close friends, live on the coast of Japan when a "big wave" comes. It gets a little emotional. It struck me as an excellent story for all ages, but especially for showing children about unexpected loss and the aftermath. Seems like a perfect book to read and share with children.

61. Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson, finished October 27, 2014, 3 1/2+ stars


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I'm not sure how I feel about this one, other than "I'm not sure." I like reading Wilson's stories because he is great with coming up with unique (to me) ideas. The stories however never seem to completely satisfy me. In this case there are several storylines and I didn't really care for some of the characters or their problems, and yet some I did, quite a bit. This was written in 2003 and it is a near future but not quite tomorrow story, almost a bit of a thriller in part. The book goes at a rather slow pace, which perhaps explains why this doesn't feel like a fast-paced thriller! That sounds silly, but that is partly how it feels, like a slow paced thriller. For a 2003 book Wilson does well looking at the near future with everyone downloading their entertainment to watch when they want and really dependent on their online access - most everything feels familiar. The "Big Idea" though is pretty advanced. The "REALLY Big Idea" that develops towards the end reminds me of other work by Wilson where he is trying to give us something beyond our comprehension. Despite this, the novel is really a relationship story - the characters here could be having their problems in a variety of settings.

A couple of elements that tweaked me a little while reading are resolved as the story progresses. One thing that I don't think was handled well was integrating the several viewpoint characters into one narrative. We would get so far and then jag back without necessarily knowing it to an earlier time with another character. This would only become apparent when the story caught up with a scene from someone else. It just didn't seem to be handled as well as I've read in many other stories. On the plus side there is some real strong characterization in here, esp the 11 year old girl who may be slightly autistic. She's different. I got a real sense of the world she lived in. Other good character portraits in here as well, including the girl's mother and a journalist. 4 stars for imagination and characterization. Less for the rest.

This weekend is "bag of books" sale at the friends of the library where you can fill a grocery bag full of books for $5. I often get carried away at these sales and pick up lots of maybes. I really look forward to this even though I don't need more books in the TBR mountain in the house!

meanwhile back at the ranch ....

another book from Robert Charles Wilson. I think I liked this one more than the last.

62. Burning Paradise by Robert Charles Wilson, finished November 6, 2014, 3 1/2 - 4 stars


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Wilson's most recent novel begins in November 2014, the month I read it and am writing this. As the flyleaf says: "Cassie Iverson, eighteen years old, lives in the United States in the year 2014 - but it's not our United States and it's not our 2014. Cassie's world has been more or less at peace since the Great Armistice of 1914. There was no World War II, no Great Depression. ... But Cassie knows the world isn't what it seems."

Cassie's world is now celebrating the centenary of the great peace. But what is the true cost and secret behind the peace? I found this to be a terribly interesting story. Scary and creepy as hell, too. Cassie has just graduated from high school and she and her younger brother Thomas have lived with her Aunt for 7 years following the murder of her parents and many of their friends and colleagues. They knew a secret about the world. Cassie and her Aunt know it too. Cassie, with her brother, must flee her refuge when she recognizes the identity of an agent accidently killed in a traffic accident outside her apartment. She knows the drill. You go to ground and you run. Her uncle Ethan Iverson has a parallel story here as well when he recognizes the approach of another agent. We meet other characters also, including a couple that have probably gone off the rails after discovering the secret. Plenty of surprises as the story unfolds, and it is told very well, although it felt a little drawn out at times.

The paranoia aspect was a plus. There is a 50's-ish as well as modern surveillance paranoia that in this case is well justified. You don't know who you can trust. I don't want to give it away. I'm tempted to go on a binge of the Robert Charles Wilson books I haven't read.

well, here is my catch from the $5 bag of books. 17 books and 4 comic books. Most of these were of the I'll give it a look types. I was very happy to find the seven hills of Rome book by John Maddox Roberts and several others such as Conrad Richter's The Sea of Grass.

That's a pretty fine haul for $5.

Wow, you've got some pretty great finds in there!

Thanks Linda and Amber. I also got a book on cactus and succulents which didn't make it into the picture. We are re-doing a small area of our yard with succulents and having some fun. We are having the strangest warm weather for November here and trying to take advantage of it by getting some plantings in before winter comes.

These library books sales are a lot of fun. They do this bag of books thing twice a year and I look forward to them to grab whatever strikes my fancy at the moment and also to look for hidden treasures. This one got a little too crowded after a short while. There was actually a lot of excellent books - modern fiction trades in particular like Olive Kitteridge that I could have picked up by the armful - but I've already got way too many TBR. I was really pleased with the Conrad Richter find. It has a lovely cover and appears to be a 1937 first? edition in excellent shape. There is a small inscription inside that is dated 1937 as the book is. I uploaded my cover into LT


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A couple of these are replacements for books I once had but lent away and have a desire to re-read such as the Hardy and Hemingway. I've never seen the large Jack London collection before - this has four less common novels in it as well as several collections of shorter fiction. I've scarcely read anything in it. So I'm happy and I got some fluff books as well!

My local library has a pretty great annual sale, too, and I usually go a little bit crazy at it. I love the Conrad Richter find!

The Richter is beautiful. I sometimes buy vintage books I have no real intention of reading, just because I love the way they were designed, or because they remind me of the editions my parents' bookshelves held when I was a kid learning to love reading.

After having a hold at the library for several months, way back in the queue, my ship finally came in and Murakami's recent Colorless tsukuru tazaki and his years of pilgrimage arrived. I eagerly started it but find myself a bit underwhelmed. I shall see how tonight's reading goes.

I jumped ahead from another book in mid-read to read the following when it came from the library.

63. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his years of pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami, finished November 17, 2014, 2 1/2 stars


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Disappointing

That's my one word review. I suppose it had to happen that I'd read a Murakami that I didn't really like. I may write a bit more after thinking about this a few days, but I don't think it is worth the effort. This is his latest book.

Oh, too bad...to look forward to a new book by a favorite author, and then have it fall flat. I have only read Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and I enjoyed it, but not quite enough to put him in the "favorite author" category. I do have Kafka on the Shore hanging around the shelves waiting its turn, though.

I posted these comments on the 75's group read thread for Murakami's latest but I decided to add them here as well for my own reference and remembrance.

Linda - I never read all of Kafka on the Shore so can't comment on it. I started on it several years ago and got a real life interruption that took me away from reading for a time and intend to get back to it someday. I did give it to my daughter tho as she was intrigued by my Murakami fandom and she read it and loved it. I think as of now she may have actually read more Murakami than me! She has really taken to him. She's about 3/4's thru the massive IQ84 as an audiobook and liking it. It is an over 40 hour commitment of time on that one. She listens mostly while on walks.

so my slight thoughts on Tazaki ...

I read very little literature outside of US/UK but I do enjoy Japanese literature. It exposes me to a different world view and way of seeing things and thinking about things. Haruki Murakami isn't quite a "favorite" author of mine but he is perilously close to it.

To me there were numerous things just plain wrong with his latest work. I didn't try to keep notes, but from out of the gate I didn't care for the story. There is or used to be those contests where you were supposed to write bad Hemingway. This felt like someone had won the contest to write bad Murakami. I have a slight thought that it is perhaps due to the translation. But I have no way of knowing that. There was much repetition in the novel. I kept thinking "you already told me this" repeatedly. There are strange viewpoint shifts some of which were clearly intentional and some of which just felt like sloppy writing. Parts of the novel do not suffer from these afflictions and are what I wish the whole book had been. For example the entire Finland sequence is wonderful. Reading some of the reviews and comments on LT I note that I am not alone in being bothered by disappearing characters and wondering why certain things were even in the story at all. Some people complain about "bad sex" in the novel. That may be a cultural difference - I don't know. I found it odd but it didn't really bother me as much as other people seem to be bothered. It did detract from the story I think. I also couldn't say that this was great or lovely writing because as often as not it wasn't. So mark this off as my least favorite Murakami.

ETA: Joe does a nice summary and had a positive response to the novel and his review which is worth reading is here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/179106#4816129

I started reading John Updike's The Centaur. A nod to this month's American Author challenge. My memory of greek mythology is so rusty hat I suspect I won't get the full benefit of the story. The writing here is quite stylized. For people who really love the use of language this would be a treat.

>159 RBeffa: I've had my eye on that one for a good while, but it sounds like I need to move it up the pile...

>160 scaifea: Amber, I'm not a fan of Updike's fiction that I have sampled, although I appreciated his non-fiction in the New Yorker a long time ago. My mother in law had a subscription forever and I would read them when we visited. The Centaur (a 1962 novel) is something I'm going to read at half speed or less. It isn't long - a bit over 220 pgs plus an index to dozens of (mythological) characters. The book does not seem to be all dense or elaborate prose but there is a lot of it that is worth spending time on rather than reading through. I flipped open the book and here is a sample from pg 12: "His eyes adjusting to the gloom, Caldwell saw heaped about him overturned fragments of automobiles, fragile and phantasmal, fenders like corpses of turtles, bristling engines like disembodied hearts. Hisses and angry thumps lived in the mottled air." ...

I like to take my time with books like this, re-reading passages, and I think this book actually demands it in a way.

>161 RBeffa: Oooh, I like it even more after that description and quote... I can't wait to hear what you think once your finished with it!

Just checking in. Life has been busy. I bailed on Updike's The Centaur. There is some lovely descriptive language in the book but the story is just too bizarre and I don't care for Updike's fetishes, for lack of a better word. I read perhaps the first quarter of the book, slowly and carefully but it is just plain weird. It is very surreal with a multitude of characters. I don't recommend it.

I found this book earlier this year at a recycle center. Boy was I pleased. I had been looking for it casually for some time. Our libraries have almost all of Doig's books and novels but they don't have this one. I had passed it up years ago and regretted it a small bit in the intervening years.

64. Heart Earth by Ivan Doig, finished November 29, 2014, 4 stars


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Very interesting memoir told in an interesting and unusual fashion. Ivan's mother died when he had just turned 6 years of age. As time moved on his memories of her were pretty dim. Much later in life he was bequeathed a collection of letters upon the death of his Uncle Wally. These were letters that his mother had written to her brother who served on a navy destroyer. Together with Ivan's own memories and historical knowledge he recreates and shows us the hardships of the early and WWII home-front life they went through.

This is a short book and a fairly quick read. I really liked this a lot. It stirs one's soul a bit. The language in here is kind of fun to chew on. I haven't read one of Doig's novels in a long time. I need to work on that.

COINCIDENCE!! We traveled to Virginia to visit our daughter and son-in-law the week before Thanksgiving, and I found a copy of Heart Earth on my nightstand in their guestroom...my daughter knows how much I enjoy Doig, and had come upon it in one of her bookstore sorties. I just added it to my catalog today. I'm glad to hear you enjoyed reading it!

You are pretty much assured of really liking this Linda if you like Doig. I stuck this on my "read soon" shelf when I picked it up but I have done a poor job on my "read soon" shelf this year - most are still there. The writing gets a little "twee" at times, but this is a good book.

65. Star Guard by Andre Norton, finished December 4, 2014, 3 stars


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Andre Norton was one of my favorite authors when I was a pre-teen and teenager. The small sized Ace paperbacks were among my favorite things to read. This one is an oldie from 1955 in a 1961 paperback edition.

I was a little slow to warm to the story of a young recruit just out of training who is sent on his first military mission. Earthmen are mercenaries for the galaxy - not by choice really, but they have been forced into that role by "Central Control" once humans first went into interstellar space. The focal point of of our story, young Kana Karr is a mixed race human whose identity bracelet marks him as Australian-Malay-Hawaiian, age eighteen. He's smart and observant and the team he is with makes some startling discoveries. This is clearly an adventure story aimed at younger boys, but it has a lot of intrigue in it which broadens the appeal. I don't think there is a single female character in the entire book despite this being written by a woman! That struck me as really strange. Norton does a really good job I think in describing the alien world the soldiers find themselves involved in. The cultural and political stuff wasn't exactly the clearest and the ending was abrupt and should have been handled better. There are one or two additional novels that follow from this story. I may read them.

Overall the story was interesting enough for me to read but I don't think if I had read this back when I was 13 or 14 or so I would have thought it one of Norton's better works. It does seem to have aged better than many other books I've read from the mid 50's. Still, I'm a little disappointed this wasn't better.

I need to get my butt in gear for reading before the holidays. I've got half a dozen partially read books sitting around plus one book I absolutely want to re-read before the end of the year. I discovered earlier this year I have been living a lie. Ok, I exaggerate. Living a reading lie.

In 1914 Tarzan of the Apes was published in book form for the first time (It had been serialized in a magazine since 1912). So I read that it was the 100th anniversary somewhere and said geez I should read it again. I first read it as near as I can recall now in 1965-1966 or so. I started reading some friends copies of the series and then set out and bought my own copies and read them all through. And read many of them again. The early books in the series were wonderful.

OK, I'll get to the point. I discovered that the Tarzan novels I read from Ballantine in the 60's were sanitized. Apparently sometime from 1963 or so forward publishers started editing and editing - I remember people being ticked off that The Hardy Boys series had been edited and revised to make them more PC but I had never heard that about Tarzan. Well, Tarzan got the treatment too, repeatedly apparently, and I never knew it. My edition of Tarzan was done in Sept 1966 and it is definitely edited. I picked up a cheapo Dover Thrift edition at the used shop cause it stated it was the 1914 edition and sure enough it is. (I discovered you can even buy the Dover Thrift edition for one slim dollar, brand new, on Amazon). So when I get around to reading Tarzan again (before this month is through!) I'll go back to 1914 and wallow in the awfulness of it all.

I think even the kindle editions are sanitized versions. So easy to rewrite history isn't it? There were apparently several revisions over time with various editors. A quick way to check if you have a sanitized version is to read Esmeralda's dialogue in the late middle of the book (chapter 18). Does it say: "Oh, Gaberelle, I want to die! " ... "Let me die, dear Lord, don't let me see that awful face again." or the original: "O Gaberelle, Ah wants to die! " ... "Lemme die, deah Lawd, but doan lemme see dat awrful face again. Whafer yo' sen de devil 'roun' after po ole Esmeralda? She ain't done nuffin' to nobody, Lawd; hones' she ain't. She's puffickly indecent, Lawd; yas'm, deed she is."

page 149 or thereabouts in many editions.

Part of the series of changes involves substituting the word "black" in various ways to something else, capitalizing negro as Negro, Negress ... removing various dialect type speech or completely gentrifying it. Apparently referring to someone as a german jew was viewed as anti-Semitic?

i mostly find this curious but it is also disconcerting on the level of "rewriting history." I have a couple early hardcovers in the series, but not the original Tarzan which seems to have been the most heavily edited. Likewise I have a handful of the early Ace PB's, but not the original Tarzan. This is a reference I've found, that I have only skimmed, altho I already found some things that differs from mine - which goes along with the multiple edits theory.

This goes to a pdf http://www.angelfire.com/zine2/erbville/censored.pdf

I need to catch up on some reviews. My reading is down a bit lately since I've been having a few visual problems with blurry vision. Decreases my reading time a fair bit. Visited the Dr. for a checkup and new prescription and discovered my problem is probably caused by the start of a cataract in my left eye. She assures me it is a natural consequence of getting older. I guess I've been lucky since a number of my friends and age contemporaries have had this happen and some with surgery. So probably won't hit that 75 goal this year but I'll have a few more by year's end. Instead of reading I've been buying more books. Yikes.

Finished this one a week ago or so. I've been wanting to squeeze in a few more re-reads of books I thought important and/or enjoyed years ago. This is one of them.

66. Behold The Man by Michael Moorcock, finished about December 11, 2014, 4 stars


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This short novel has been in my mental "best books I have read" for a long time. Originally this was a short novella that I read as a teenager. Some years later it was expanded and I read this present long novella/short novel in my early 20's. My overwhelming memory of it that it was a tremendously original time travel story as well as quite sacrilegious. Shockingly so in some ways. Looking at other LT reviews it seems that fellow readers were similarly hit with the "blasphemous" feeling encountering it in their youth.

On a re-read the story isn't quite so shocking. But for me this is 40 years removed from my first readings. It still is a stunning story that has held up surprisingly well, despite perhaps an overly large helping of psychological angst that plays a large part in the multiple storylines. Karl goes back in time to find the historical Jesus and see the Crucifixion. He gets his wish. Still an awesome story that remains on my "best" list.

My tentative top books for 2014 - not necessarily the very best books I read, when I think about it, and I excluded re-reads and story collections/anthologies from the list, but the ones that seem to have really stuck with me.

1 Three Day Road - Joseph Boyden
2 The Quiet American - Graham Greene
3 The Martian - Andy Weir
4 Sutton - J.R. Moehringer
5 Pompeii - Robert Harris
tie with
6 Time and Again - Jack Finney

ETA: I need an honorable mention at least for Ivan Doig's "Heart Earth". It contains some of the loveliest writing I read all year. The memoir itself never coalesced into a great book for me, but it was a very good one that I enjoyed reading. I didn't mention it in my original comments and probably should have. Doig uses photographs in part (along with his own memories and his mother's letters) to construct a story. He goes into great descriptive detail with some of the photos which he writes about as he looks at them. However, not a single photograph appears in the book. I really wished he had included some.

67. Trustee From The Toolroom by Nevil Shute, finished December 22, 2014, 3 - 3 1/2 stars


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I listen to audiobooks sometimes. This was one of those times. The "audible" book was read by Frank Muller and I thought it was done well, if a little dry. It is easy to listen to. The voices for different characters are also handled fine. This was Nevil Shute's final novel, finished before his death and left to his daughter to publish. Shute is one of my favorite authors. This one seems to be a favorite book among his readers, although I'd rate it as a lesser work. I have yet to read one I disliked. Shute wrote about twenty novels and I've only read about half of them, and most were long ago. I should have read this in the mid 80's after a trip to Tahiti had me temporarily seeking out novels set in the South Pacific. I don't know if I would have appreciated the book very much then, although I liked being familiar with the some of the names and locations of islands in the story.

I guess I'd say it is just a nice book that shows the good in people, and how it might surprise you a little. The beginning is a little slow and plodding. It is all about establishing characters and the set-up for what is to come. I had my doubts about the start, but the book gets markedly better with chapter two and improves.

Our titular character, Keith Stewart, the trustee from the toolroom, leaves his quiet life and goes on a very unexpected journey across the world. We meet some interesting characters and Keith meets friends he never knew he had and experiences the world. Bits of the story are, to me, a little tedious with an excess attention to detail (and this is in keeping with the detail oriented main character) but overall the story is a very good one as we follow Keith's journey from England to Polynesia to recover his niece's inheritance on a boat wreck crashed upon a remote reef. It seems odd to me to call something a kind novel, but that is the word that springs to my mind. There is something very warm and fuzzy nice about this book.

As an aside, it is always a plus to me to learn a little history about something, and that happened here. I didn't know that England had such restrictive policies on converting pounds into dollars at the time this was written (1960 or so). That fact, that England didn't want capital leaving the country, is integral to what happens in this story.

Happy Holidays, Ron!

Thank you Amber. Been a busy couple of weeks.

Merry Christmas, Ron.

>174 laytonwoman3rd: Thank you for the lovely photo and wishes Linda.

Last night before bed I started on what may be my final book for 2014 - new author for me, Irish author Adrian McKinty and the audiobook Falling Glass. Nice start to the story.

2014 is looking like a mish-mash of reading for me - a little too heavy on the science fiction I think, but that was what I seemed to be in the mood for. I enjoy looking over the books I've read and remembering favorites and also encountering a few where I can barely recall the story! I missed having a mystery/detective series like Cotterill's Dr. Siri books to dip into periodically. There are plenty of series I'm interested in so I just need to pick one of two and keep at it.

Once 2014 is all done I'll be at my 2015 thread here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/185134

Time for the year in review. After listening to about 45 minutes of an audiobook and reading a chapter in another I decided it was time for a short reading break. Netflix movies to catch up on, new music to listen to and chores here and there to keep me busy. I'll restart in the new year with some energy.

So this is it for 2014: The end of year total is 67. Not bad. Not a great reading year but a good one. Only one outstanding book for me, Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road. Well, make that two, because Graham Greene's The Quiet American is superb and haunts me. Quite a few other enjoyable ones. My top list I'll recap here:

1 Three Day Road - Joseph Boyden
2 The Quiet American - Graham Greene
3 The Martian - Andy Weir
4 Sutton - J.R. Moehringer
5 Pompeii - Robert Harris
tie with
6 Time and Again - Jack Finney

Besides these I really enjoyed Nevil Shute's audiobook version of Trustee From the Toolroom which is my final read of the year. My favorite list here were all excellent reads. I've picked up another Moehringer to read just yesterday, the highly regarded The Tender Bar. Looking forward to that this next year. Andy Weir's breakout The Martian was my favorite science fiction book for 2014. I enjoyed the slew of Science Fiction magazines I read at the start of the year. I'll be doing a few more of those. Re-reading HG Well's The Time Machine with Stephen Baxter's follow-up was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed re-reading Hemingway and will go for another next year. Follett's Jackdaws was also a great read and probably belongs on the best of the year list.

The 2014 American Author challenge just didn't gel for me. There were too many authors I either disliked or had no interest in reading more of. The proposed list for 2015 is much more to my liking. I'll discuss possible challenges more in my 2015 thread.

For 2015, new adventures in time and space can be found here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/185134

and so it goes ...