Richardderus thread 12 for 2012

My 2012 NEW books ticker:




Previous reviews:

Book 1...thread two.
Books 2 & 3...thread three.
Book 4...thread four.
Books 5 & 6...thread five.
Books 7-10...thread six.
Books 11-24...thread seven.
Books 25-31...thread eight.
Books 32-34...thread nine.
Books 35 & 36...thread ten.
Books 37-42...thread 11.

My 2012 ORPHANED books ticker:




Books are reviewed in post:

43. An Ordinary Decent Criminal...#19.

44. Tall Tales with Short Cocks...#26.

Well-loved book from my past: Islandia...#50.

45. The Teapot Dome Scandal...57.

Pearl Ruled: Case Histories...#70.

46. Covehithe...#142.

47. Mythago Wood...#143.

48. The Homecoming Party...#151.

49. Season of Migration to the North...#160.

50. London's Overthrow...#165.

51. EDITORIAL: Bizarro Press Edition...#174.

52. Erasure...#205.

53. THE GALAXIE AND OTHER RIDES: Stories...#216.

I'm here..no matter how reserved you think you are..

pffft

RD just checking in on number 12

>4 jdthloue:, 5 WOW y'all're quick! I haven't even got the curtains up!

Yes...me be Fast

make sure you're decent when the curtain rises

;-}

Hey bro

Just catching up

As for white is for witching the witch is the new cliche all over the fiction shelf.Good books about witches or about Wicca are scarce.

Let it be noted, I've decided I'm going to post something - anything- just so you KNOW that I constantly check in to your threads, but good grief, how's an old lady s'posed to keep up with all this chatter????

>7 jdthloue: Ha! *smooch*

>8 magicians_nephew: Good books about Wicca and witches are indeed scarce, and with the trend you point out getting stronger, I suspect the dearth will only grow.

I just don't think the grafting of some "spooky" stuff onto a mediocre story will do anyone any good. *sigh*

>9 tututhefirst: Hence my own use of "*smooch*" and "drive-by hug"...I was here, I see you, I pay attention, but I don't have anything interesting to say.

Social noises. I want people I visit to know I was there, even when I don't have a contribution to make that'll shake the trees.

*smooch* *drive-by hug from a distance in case you have any straight razors around*

Heh!

>Social noises. I want people I visit to know I was there, even when I don't have a contribution to make that'll shake the trees.

I should consider doing that. Of all the threads I read I probably only post on a very miniscule percentage of them. :(

Speaking of which...HI RICHARD! *Smooches and drive-by hugs*

Hi Richard:)

*makes social noises* Happy new thread, Richard!

Your threads will fill up even quicker now. I'm here almost daily, but only post when I believe I have sth to say.

OH! And to think I could have made "social noises" before you even got those wonderful May Day posters up! And I just quietly moved on, waiting for you to be able to decorate your place in peace and quiet. Well! Next time, I'll know what to do.

{{hugs for all}}

'Morning, RD! *smooches, gentle pats, and enthusiastic hugs*

*waves socially*

Review: 43 of seventy-five

Title: AN ORDINARY DECENT CRIMINAL

Author: MICHAEL VAN ROOY

Rating: 2.5* of five (p107)

The Book Report: Monty Haaviko is an ODC...an ordinary decent criminal. A robber, con man, drug addict salt-of-the-earth criminal, not one of your scumbag terrorist pedophile types. He's decided, now that he's got a wife and kid, that staying straight and off the drugs is the way to go.

Ever thought about how hard that'd be? It's hard. Monty finds that out when some bad men invade his home and threaten his family, and he kills them. Hell, I'd kill 'em too, and the cops would do their duty, arrest me, and the legal system would make frowny faces at me, and before too terribly long my life would go on in its accustomed dullness.

Monty's, well, maybe not so much. The cops beat him really bad, the criminals start hunting him, and his family is in danger the entire time. Why, all of a sudden, is everyone down on his narrow ass? What did he do? And how many more ways are we going to parallel Jack Reacher?

My Review: Which is why I gave up on p107. The late Mr. van Rooy wrote nice sentences, and plotted well, but frankly I'm not the biggest fan of ODC fiction, and reading someone else's take on a character I find only mildly entertaining isn't the best use of my eyeblinks.

With each word I jabbed a little harder into Robillard's eye and then I stopped and headed up the stairs. At the top I booked it down the alley, stopping for a second to open the hood and tear a handful of wires loose from Sandra's car. A few alleys over, I wiped down the three guns on a piece of canvas sticking out of a garbage can and dropped them one at a time into trash cans and down sewer gratings.

On the bus home I wondered about Shirley Holmes.

That's as far as I read. That's as good as any of the writing got. That's not bad, but it's not making my needle point north, and frankly (or barbraly, depending on your mood) that is what needs to happen these days for me not to abandon ship and search for the next high down a different alley.

>13 Ape: Hi Stephen!

>14 calm: Hi calm!

>15 Deern: Hi Nathalie!

>16 maggie1944: I wish I knew where I could get a copy to frame of the first May Day poster. It's beautiful!

>17 karenmarie: *smooch* for dear Horrible

>18 kidzdoc: Hi Darryl!

just stopping by to make social noises and take a pass on #43. {{==noises==}}

>21 tututhefirst: Hi Tina! Good call on #43. I'm intensely pleased not to have it on my plate anymore.

Social noise here, as opposed to an asocial noise like I make when I eat chili-cheese fries and drink beer...

Hi Richard,
Another low star-rater huh? Shame, but at least you've got a nice new thread now, and I see the curtains are up now too. Cosy :)

Hi Richard. I found your new thread. You need a 4.5+ star read sometime soon, I think.

Review: 44 of seventy-five

Title: TALL TALES WITH SHORT COCKS

Author: VARIOUS

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Report: Nine short to middlin'-long tales covering most of the bases in that latest attempt by the young to épater le bourgeois (aka their parents and the dreary little yup-yups who act the way their parents do) that goes by the label “bizarro.”

Srsly y'all we did this in the 60s and 70s. Never heard of R. Crumb? Heavy Metal magazine, with its torture porn comics? But I digress, and uninterestingly.

My Review: My pervy old man-ness was instantly snagged by this title. Well, really, anyone who has read my reviews and commentary should not be surprised by that. So what the hell, download to Kindle for three bucks, why not?

Heh.

Arthur Graham's piece Zeitgeist made the burned-by-TV guy in me chortle way more than is seemly in a graybearded grandfather of three. It gave me a giant happy and fulfilled a revenge fantasy. Good on ya, AG!

Regressive caused actual physical pain from (self-directed) laughter. Mr. Rowark...we will have words...not many of them will be nice. Some of them will have only four letters. The good news is that at least one of them will be “love.”

I Am A Whale was cute, and amusing, but “prose poetry”? Blank verse, more like, and a little of that goes a LOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNG way.

In the Flesh is billed as “steampunk noir,” though I'm more down with noir than with steampunk as a descriptor. This piece, though, makes me want to read more by John McNee because it's got that...something...there's an imagination at work here, overtime perhaps in this work, but with some bitch-slapping editing, this one's a breakout author waiting to happen.

The other tales in the collection are just fine. They don't rise to the level of my call-outs, in my never-very-humble opinion, but believe me when I tell you that I never once wanted one of them to be over sooner than it was, and with bizarro, that is *really going some.

That's why I recommend the book to the reader with a hankerin' to go over the line, over the top, and out of bounds. Fuddies will duddy over the worty dirds, and the squeamish will squirm until their squirmers are sore; they probably won't pick the book up; and I say that is a darn shame, because these writers aren't out to SHOCK! SCANDALIZE! OFFEND! you, they are telling you old stories from a new angle, and doing it with a verve and an attitude that is, dear goddesses only know, refreshing and invigorating. One day, this will be the ground from which the midcentury Stephen King will rise. Read it now. We're still gonna be around. Best to get used to it now....

Since I needed to return it to the library today (whoops), I went on and wrote my review of YA paranormal comedy The Gates, and posted it in my thread...#195.

How the heck did I lose you :(

I'm here! You are a hard thread to keep up with!

star ratings creeping up, good....keep it up :)

>23 drneutron: Hi Jim!

>24 LovingLit: Well, something better's comin' up...oh, I see you saw (#30)!

>25 EBT1002: Howdeeee! xoxo

>28 mckait: Well, no matter, here you are. *smooch*

>29 ChelleBearss: Hi Chelle!

I still need to get my reviews caught up...Mythago Wood has waited more than a month! ::headdesk::

clicking through......................

Hi Tina!

Title of your most recent cracks me up. :-)

Yeah, me too, Ellen!

whatcha doin' awake in the darkest of the night?
tsk tsk.

I know why I was, but?

'Morning once again, RD! Have a light and fluffy day.

XO Horrible

>37 mckait: Hurting. It got better. It comes and goes.

No, he isn't, and I don't know when he is. I won't know until it happens, and there isn't anything more I can do to make it happen than I have already done.

>38 karenmarie: Hiya Horrible!

Sorry to hear about more hurting ... wishing you some pain free time.

Definitely looking forward to what you think of Mythago Wood.

So glad to have found you. Hope I don't lose you again. I always enjoy reading your comments/reviews.

>40 calm: Thanks, calm! Expect a lot of fanboy gush from my Mythago Wood review.

>41 millhold: Glad to be found! Thank you for saying so.

I've reviewed House of Sand and Fog at last. It's in my orphaned books thread...post #202.

Sounds good to me - you've read enough bad books recently:( Loved your House of Sand and Fog review

Thank you again, m'dear!

>39 richardderus: ARGH and dammit :(

>44 richardderus: I just saw this one on facebook, its great isnt it?

>47 LovingLit: It makes me smile every time I see it, Megan. I listened to my newly converted friend tell me about how much she now understood that jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeezussssssssssssssssssss wanted her to hate fags, and how that meant we could never speak again, and so on and so on. She stopped talking after a while.

I'd been busy on the other end of the phone. I said, "Matthew 7, verse 1: Judge not, that ye be not judged."

And hung up.

True enough, we haven't spoken in 15 years, but I assure you I feel no lack and regret no absence.

I said "Matthew 7, verse 1: Judge not, that ye be not judged."

Amen! Amazing how many folks seem to miss that verse entirely. And it's such an important one.

Well-loved books from my past

Title: ISLANDIA

Author: AUSTIN TAPPAN WRIGHT

Rating: 5 very nostalgic stars out of five

The Book Report: John Lang, Harvard '10, meets Dorn...that's all, just Dorn, a red-skinned Islandian noble, during their college years. Lang likes the quiet, self-possessed man, and Dorn likes Lang's accepting nature. Friendship blossoms, Dorn spends holidays with Lang at his tart spinster aunt's farm doing hard labor and teaching Lang Islandian.

Graduation comes, Dorn goes, and Lang has no real idea what the hell to do with himself. Lang's rich businessman uncle suggests that Lang apply to be US Consul to Islandia, since he's one of the very few non-native speakers of the language. Islandia isn't a major power, isolated on the Karain semi-continent, south of Africa and projecting towards Antarctica. Its society has been closed for generations, as Japan's was, and like Japan, Islandia is now under great pressure to open itself up for trade with the Western world. Lang's uncle thinks that, since his nephew speaks the language and is already friends with one of the isolationist leaders (Dorn), he's got the “in” to work on opening the country up to American trade first. Strings are pulled, arrangements are made, a young lady-friend is left with promises to write often, and (150pp in) our story commences.

What a story! Lang and Dorn are, from the moment they see each other again, back to being the closest possible friends, despite their wide difference of opinion on the subject of trade and intercourse between their countries. Speaking of intercourse, Dorn's sister Dorna captures Lang's virginal fancy, plays with him, and then upon realizing Lang is falling for her for real, she tells him no...she's set to be queen. And she marries Alwin, the king. This will be important later.

Lang's job brings him more and more into conflict with his heart, as he comes to know and love with a fierce and befuddled passion the good and noble people, the beautiful and bounteous land, and the startlingly unrepressed and unreligious culture of Islandia. Lang ultimately finds himself in a position where he must decide between being himself, his full, awakened self, his Islandian self, and fight the invading armies seeking to subjugate Islandia, or being the US Consul.

Even though it means the US, in fact the whole world, will be forced out of Islandia again, even though it means the other Islandian girl he's fallen in love with (and lost that pesky virginity to), Hytha, will be lost to him forever, he fights with his friends for the country he loves, and he leaves it knowing he's done the only possible honorable and honest thing.

Back in the US, Mary, the young lady-friend he's corresponded with these years, and he take up again, and get married. Lang thinks, “oh well, I've had my fun, I've done the right thing” and settles into soul-killing ennui and horribly depressing severing from the world and the people he truly loves.

Remember Alwin the king marrying Lang's buddy's sister? Alwin, knowing Lang's actions and understanding Lang's love for Dorna, Islandia, and life lived in harmony with nature, grants Lang and his wife land and citizenship as thanks for Lang's battle service and his heart-gift to Alwin's family by marriage. Off go Lang and Mary! And what an adjustment it proves to be...never easy to remake yourself, and still less easy to do so for someone else's happiness...but, as in the best stories, Lang and Marya (as she's called now, all women's names ending in an “a”) struggle and goof up and make hideous blunders, and immerse themselves into their new, and beautiful, and deeply loved home.


My Review: Wright, a lawyer by trade, wrote Islandia over the course of decades. He filled notebooks and sketchpads, created histories and historians, plays and playwrights, a religion without a god, a full and vibrant and heart-hurtingly beautiful culture, and used Lang's entry into this rich and lively...I'd say living, but clearly it's not...ethos to explore the ways in which his fantasy world was superior to the early 20th century American culture he lived in.

After Wright died in a car crash in 1931, his Islandia was dormant until an accidental discovery by Mark Saxton, a young editor at Farrar and Rinehart (we now call them Farrar Straus and Giroux), led to the publication of some 1020 pages of the trove in 1942. The marketing stuff for the book touted the fact that, since you couldn't take your European vacation this year, you should go to Islandia!

It worked. Major bestseller. It was the Infinite Jest of the 1940s...whacking great block of a book that *everyone* had to have on the coffee table, but few people read all the way through.

I found a copy in the brand new Old Quarry branch of the Austin Public Library in 1973. The dust jacket was a topographical map with the title in lower case italic type, all of it in shades of ochre and brown. I picked it up, read a few lines, and was never the same boy again.

An honest and ethical culture! No stupid gawd-stories! Free love! People who felt so real to me, a world that was so beautifully complete, that I just *knew* I'd find it all someday.

I never have, but I've never entirely lost hope that I will. (Foolish old man to dream like that.)

In the intervening forty(ish) years, I've given away a dozen copies. I've read the book all the way through only twice, but have gone back to read parts so many times that the copy I had disintegrated. I haven't replaced it because I'm pondering whether to look for a decent copy of the 1942 edition...and dreading the likelihood that I simply can't hold the book in my painful hands anymore. It is a loss so painful that I dread making the experiment, and so do nothing. Some things it's better not to know.

Islandian culture is what a truly happy planet would follow. Islandian customs make sense, because they flow organically from the logical, happiness-seeking ethos that pervades Islandia. Now that I know, thanks to the marvelous book The Swerve, what Epicureanism is, I think I know now what Wright based his world-building on: What if a genuinely Epicurean people existed, and lived their lives and governed themselves, according to Epicurean principles?

There is an Islandian custom called tanrydoon. It means that, in the course of life, there are people one meets whose essential being is so in tune with our own, whose presence in our life is so necessary, that the person becomes a kind of family. A room in one's home is prepared. The room is designed to suit the tastes of the more-than-friend, the furnishings and the colors and the items in the room all relate to the person's family and achievements. The more-than-friend is brought to their new home place, and in true Islandian fashion, the existence of this space is taken as proof that the claims of tanrydoon are in place: One can never be barred from the home-place, one can never be so lost or so alone that the certainty of welcome and acceptance is withdrawn or abrogated without the most appalling provocation.

Dorn offers Lang tanrydoon. Lang has a home-place, a family claim, a harbor and haven...despite the fact that Dorn fights everything Lang's job stands for. It doesn't matter...Dorn loves Lang, needs his friendship and his companionship, and makes him understand that his place among the Dorns is always his.

I thought then, and I think now, that this is the most beautiful, the most moving, the most fulfilling passage in the book, and a cultural notion that should be encouraged in our solipsistic, anomie-ridden place and time. How much less hatred there would be if such an idea was encouraged and enacted.

This book is, to me, what Lord of the Rings is to others: A vision of a complete world that, if the Universe was properly run, would be accessible to us mere mortal humans.

What a wonderful place to return to - that book that means so much to one's spiritual well-being.

Smooches, Padre.

>49 tymfos: So many cafeteria christians don't see lip service to this tenet as the huge failing that it is.

>51 London_StJ: *smooch* I so love the book. It makes me feel so sad that I can't physically enjoy it anymore.

OH dear me Im behind.. Sigh.. ~~~Waves~~~ N ~~~Smooches~~~ just trying to catch up and say hello along the way...

Glad to see you, Monica!

That, is the longest review I have ever, read (on LT).
Giving away a dozen-ish copies says it all! Were the receivers of such a special gift as taken with the book as you must have hoped?

Only two ever said anything about it to me. I suspect the others didn't read much of it...one returned it to the bookstore, where I found it again. (It was the only copy they had, it was on sale, and all the tags were still on it.)

After that, I stopped giving copies away.

Review: 45 of seventy-five

Title: THE TEAPOT DOME SCANDAL

Author: LATON MCCARTNEY

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Book Report: Big Oil bought the election of 1920 for Sen. Warren G. Harding of Ohio, because he was amenable to giving away huge amounts of money to the oil companies, including using American power in Mexico to undo the Mexican nationalization of the oil companies' assets there. Part of the payoff to the oil interests was assigning leases worth about $100 million (in 1920 dollars...well north of a billion now) in the US Navy's strategic petroleum reserve in several locations.

Including Teapot Dome, Wyoming.

It all unraveled, the leases were voided, and thanks to a crusading Montana populist Sen. Tom Walsh, several really rich and really corrupt men spent some token time in jail.

Despite his proven knowledge of the transactions, Harding's vice-president was re-elected in 1924 (Harding died in 1923, some suspect at Mrs. Harding's hand, so he would never have to testify before the Walsh Committee).

Oh for the good old days.

My Review: This book was published in 2008, an election year. I do not think this was an accident. The GOP, a sink of depravity and greed since the Taft Administration, did not need any help losing that election...the fact that the sitting vice-president didn't run as the candidate tells you all you need to know there, the GOP knew what was coming and wanted someone else to take the blame for it...but this book, about a conspiracy of evil, greedy GOP pols, their money-men, and the full intent to defraud We-the-People for private wealth, was still well-timed.

Lest any stupid damnfool conservative start mooing about bias, I rush to report that the author does not say the words I've said. The author reports the facts as history has them. The Committee reports, the papers of all parties concerned, all extant documentary evidence, was used in a careful reconstruction of the actual events that led to the Teapot Dome Scandal, as we've come to call it.

The fact that the documentary evidence makes the conservatives look like evil, greedy bastard mo-fos is just a bonus. Embrace the demon within, GOP/Tea Party supporters! Align yourselves with those who think nothing of splashing out millions to buy the votes and influence the course of the river of money that flows from any government into their own pockets, with the minimum of trickle-down into the Public Good.

Do it openly, and in full knowledge of what kind of rotten sleazebags you're supporting...they've never been any different. Read this book and see why.

'waves' as I pass thru in thread back reading mode ...... interesting book title up there :)

#58....Tutu's momma didn't raise no dummies......I ain't that stupid!

>56 richardderus: see, I couldnt stand that. To give away a copy of something so special to me and have it mistreated. Grrrr

>59 roundballnz: The Teapot Dome Scandal? It was interesting, but the title's more descriptive than anything else...still,

>60 tututhefirst: But isn't that the cutest widdle puppums woobzy woobzy woo ever?!

>61 LovingLit: It hurt my feelings, and the man I gave it to, when confronted with the evidence (I rebought the book), shrugged and said, "You really thought I'd read that?"

I've made worse mistakes in my life, but not that many.

>62 richardderus: I was referring to one a little further back - not to worry I have been tardy in my visitations (they are for good reasoning) ....

Good Morning rd... hope you are feeling better today...
maybe it was a one day cold threat?

Deb talked to Adam last night.. he implied ( or she inferred, anyway) something that
seems to confirm my suspicion...

hmm

Wonder what will happen.

>63 roundballnz: Glad to see you, Alex, whenever you're here!

>64 mckait: You aren't wrong in your inference, m'dear. It makes too much sense.

Feeling gritty-eyed, achy, and grumpy. Not being able to get decent exercise is turning me into a constant sickie.

Richard, I'm sorry you're feeling sickie! I hope for you an excellent book, whisking you away to some fantasy land where you are healthy, wealth, and happy!

I like your world better than mine, Karen44. Where do I get a visa?

Hah! Nice definition of democracy. We need a lion to lie down with that lamb.

Intriguing review of The Teapot Dome Scandal. I love your wide-ranging reading palate. Thumb in the teapot from me.

Thanks Joe! I'll read just about anything, it's true. Well, I won't read books on knitting.

Oh, and books by Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and their ilk. Or Michael Moore. I *agree* with him, and he makes me mad!

Pearl Ruled: CASE HISTORIES by KATE ATKINSON

Rating: 2* of five (p102)

First of the hugely popular Jackson Brodie series of mysteries set in Scotland, this book comes super-positively blurbed by Stephen King, recommended by site royalty, and could not possibly have left me more flat, uninterested, and even impatient.

"The rain's easing off," he said, and Caroline said, "Yes, I think it is." He stood up and escorted her outside. The dogs had been asleep and now made a great performance of welcoming Caroline's appearance, although she knew they couldn't care less really.

"Good-bye, then," John Burton said and shook her hand again. She felt a little flutter, something long dormant coming back to life. He climbed on his bike and cycled off,turning once to wave, an action that made him wobble ridiculously. She stood and watched him moving away from her, ignoring the overexcited dogs. She was in love. Just like that. How totally, utterly insane."

And that, laddies and gentlewomen, is where I said sayonara cookie monster. It's okay writing. The rubbish about the dogs is ridiculous, but the wave, the wobble, and the swoon are pretty good. But this is as good as it's gotten in 102pp. This is as much a wowee toledo as Uncle Pervy here has received.

Your story or your storytelling has to wow me more than this by p102, and as neither has, onto the scrap-heap of history with you. *briskly dusts hands*

'allo....


glitter-graphics.com

>62 richardderus: is that Robbie Williams? How com he has the word gout tattooed on him? Does he have it too? :)

RD
a wobble about to happen

and... a SWOON!!

Now.....I'm waving.....life's too short....on to more enjoyable (or at least edifying) reads!

>71 jdthloue: How adorable that GIF is!

>72 LovingLit: Who's Robbie Williams? I just saw the hawt guy with the cool tattoo.

>73 tututhefirst: So true, so true...I'm reading The Homecoming Party now and liking it.

He is quite purdy......, each to his own eh! :)

That would be *my* own, fer sure!!

I'd never heard of this guy Robbie Williams before, but what a biscuit he is!

***smooch***

;-}

Ah, as a non-reader of Case Histories, I take comfort in your Pearl (double Pearl) toss.

I dig the tattoo, although I'd prefer it on a curvier set of hips. ;)

>78 jdthloue: *smooch* back

>79 jnwelch: I simply could not make myself like the book. Just was not happening for me. *shrug* Maybe you will, when your time comes to read it.

>80 London_StJ: He's on the skinny side for my own tastes, but the 'tude totally makes up for it.

So what to read next?

The Homecoming Party...it's set in CM's mother's hometown in Italy.

hmm... enjoy!

Hugs and kisses and feel better vibes coming your way...

>84 mckait: So far it's really really fun.

>85 Matke: Thank you, my dear! I appreciate it. xo

yes yes, cool tattoo! And I dont say that very often :)

How cool about the link btwn CM and Abate's novel!! (btw, give her a hug from me)
I loved that book, but thought Between Two Seas was even more fabulous. If you haven't read that one yet, give it a shot.

Sorry about Atkinson's books; I really like them, but...

I think you're the first person I've known who has read Islandia. It got added to my Amazon shopping basket after reading about it somewhere else a little while ago -- probably in connection with my reading on nationalities, identities, imaginary worlds, etc. Of course, I know can't remember where... Anyway, it hasn't yet made it out of said basket, but I should check the library and see if it's lurking somewhere there.

Re Robbie Williams, check out this "Me and My Shadow"; it's sung with his oldest/closest friends.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YsHX65vvlo
Not Sinatra/Davis, but kinda fun.

ETA: new Imogen Robertson book not here yet, grump grump.

xo

*waving*

I'm off to finish reading The Case of the Missing Books, a worthless comic mystery set in Ireland which will result in my not wanting to read "cozy books" set in Ireland, or mysteries, for a while! Yuk. Stupid book, but I will finish it for my Book Group.

Then, I'll go back to Robert Caro's latest book about LBJ. Not to everyone's taste, but much more worthwhile that the vapid book mentioned above.

Hope your Sunday is swell!

>88 Chatterbox: Hug delivered, reciprocated. I'll look for Between Two Seas.

Well, hardly a surprise, that...Amazon UK relies on several steps to ship books over here, so I remain unsurprised when they don't arrive in a timely manner.

>89 mckait: *smooch* Hiya, sweetness! Happy Mothering Sunday!

>90 maggie1944: Ugh Karen44, that sounds like Satanic Torture 101. How much more do you really need to know after "worthless vapid Irish effluent?" I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it. Caro becons.

Morning RD- Terrific review of The Teapot Dome Scandal. I've never heard of this one and it's sounds like my cuppa. On the WL it goes.
Hope you have a nice Sunday. It's beautiful here.

Poor Maggie....may we all vote that those The Mobile Library Mysteries are some of the most insipid, blah and icky books every published....Please don't let them put you off "good" cozies.

Sorry RD to highjack your thread...

>92 msf59: Hi Mark! I think you'll really appreciate the Teapot Dome history...it's very thoroughgoing, yet still readable, and packed with some characters you normally have to read novels to encounter!

>93 tututhefirst: Hi Tina...that's not hijacking, you're commenting on thread topics. AAnd my gracious do these books get no love anywhere! I've never read a defense of them anywhere. I'll have to read one with an eye to loving it, just to be perverse.

Huge chuckle....ending with a HMMph!

Hello Richard!! Not able to catch up on your ridiculously prolific thread at this moment, but I do love you and I wanted you to know! xoxo

Islandia is one of TadAd's favorite books, too. I checked it out from the library on his warm recommendation, but that was back when I was still working, and I couldn't get to it even to start in the 3 weeks allowed. Now that I'm not working, I need to check it out again.

>96 Berly: KIMMERS!!! *smoochiesmoochsmooch* I'm just glad you can come to the party!

>97 ronincats: Three weeks isn't gonna be enough, Roni, it's a doorstop of a thing, and it's got the Victorian quality of taking its sweet time to get moving. But oh my dear, my dear, is there meat on these bones. See if you can get into those first 300pp. If so, paperbacks are on Amazon for about $10. If you're hooked the way I was, that's cheap; if you're mildly interested, there are probably better ways to spend your reading time, so back to liberry with it.

Yes, I remember a bit of talk about Islandia here in the group from a long while back. It's in my 'too many books' pile which I don't look at often enough. I listened to Case Histories and so had a different experience, I loved it because the narrator was great.

Re-the Robbie Williams pic, well, he has a pretty good voice.

Heh. Not a fan, then, Kerry?

I suspect the size of Islandia puts a lot of folks off. It's best read as several smaller novels, and with the understanding that its pace is magisterial.

Or maybe just left. I don't know...it meant a lot to me, so I'm not an impartial judge.

My son's mother just hung up. She called to sob in my ear about the past, the mistakes, the etc etc.

I deserve a medal for listening.

Yes you do. But in the absence, how about a virtual hug? *squeeze*

Thanks Crypto. Coming so soon after the 20th anniversary of BJ's death, it feels like gawd is using me for target practice.

Richard, really, I don't think you need to be so perverse as to actually read one of the The Mobile Library Mysteries to show us how "different" your opinions might be. Pshaw, dear boy, it would be a terrific waste of your time, in my very humble opinion. Your opinions are almost always completely unique and special and one of a kind, and that's why we love you so much, among many reasons.

Oh no, rd... I am so sorry.
xoxo

You need something cheerful to happen..soon.

Two more books on the old wishlist, RD! (Islandia and The Teapot Dome Scandal). You're a constant source of expense for me, you know.

Sending light and fluffy thoughts your way.

Hugs and smooches from your own Horrible

Chili cheese fries on us, RD. And plenty of peace and quiet.

>104 maggie1944: The voice of reason is always sweet in your mouth, Karen44. Now I shall go forth and read the first one Just Because.

>105 mckait: Winning the lottery would make things a lot better. Or finding out I'm the last survivor and will inherit a tontine from the 15th century now worth billions.

>106 karenmarie: *smooch* for my own dear Horrible

*lurking & enjoying*

>109 richardderus: Yes! LOL!

Agreed! Totally! Think I'll go make another cup.

>109 richardderus:. I knew there was a reason I loved you! Grab your mug and okole maluna

I know, y'all, it made me laugh out loud when I saw it, and just exactly expressed my feelings about today.

Still makes me grin.

Hi Richard. Happy Spring!



Thumbs up from me for your wonderful review of The Teapot Dome Scandal.

Hi Linda! Beautiful photo. Thanks for the thumbs up on my review!

There just might be something good to watch on network TV soon: A show based on The Republic of Pirates called Crossbones.

Hi RD,
Good news on the book front, the library had a brand new pretty copy of The Swerve so have nabbed it and am reading it as of now. Hooray. Good recommendation = rapid uptake :)

>117 richardderus: not OK, not funny, no like

>118 richardderus: yes, add sugar to the it, as in sugar keeps me busy till the coffee arrives, then the coffee keeps me busy until 5 o'clock WINE TIME :)

67 posts behind. Not pretending to catch up. Just starting fresh after my weekend in San Francisco.
117> Too messed up. Ugly, in fact.

#118 Like like like...

Hey, Richard, we had a big discussion of The Swerve in my real life book group last night. I enjoyed knowing in advance how interesting, and important, the book is. The fellow who was talking about it also really enjoyed reading the book!

You are my hero for today

Tuesday...

yay~

?

Soft, garden-friendly rain today. It's cool, the breeze keeps the rain from making the air dank, and the meadow-in-a-can is slurpin' the stuff up. My herbs have moved outside for the summer growing season, so soon I'll have OOODLES of fresh chives, marjoram, rosemary, dill, oregano, basil...I'm afraid the savory has crept under the dirt, so none of that (love it in panzanella salads and on beef). A new story idea has kidnapped my reading plans. I've got nine books on the topic coming from different liberries and am almost panting in eagerness to get reading! I'll be noodling for a year or so, while reading, and working on two others I've already been through this process with, and backfilling knowledge on a third (the Italian composer boys one I did for '11 NaNo).

OOOOH now that's exciting news!

So it really is TUESDAY! YAY! for you :)

>119 LovingLit: Oh boy oh boy I cannot wait to hear what you have to say about The Swerve! It's such an important book to me, now, since it gave me a name for my weirdness and an identity I can thrust at the missionary a-holes who clutter up my neighborhood and will NOT stop trying to xianise me.

>120 EBT1002: Too ugly indeed. No, no need to read all 67. I'll mark your pop quiz as a zero and we'll move on.

>121 BekkaJo: Heh. Figured you would, Mum. *smooch*

>122 maggie1944: Hiya Karen44! *blush* Me no hero...but I'm glad you got something out of the review! I will bet most people who read The Swerve get some degree of the same wow experience...at least I hope they do!

>123 mckait:, 125 *smooch* It's Tuesday?! AND it's the 15th! Almost halfway through 2012! *eep*

Ok, ok, ok. I just grabbed The Swerve for the Nook to take with me on my little trip to the San Juan Islands. I should have some reading time, I'm sure. I know I sound as if someone twisted my arm, which no one did! I just have become unavoidably curious. My bad, or maybe, my good. We shall see.......

Truly, I do not think you'll regret reading it. All joking aside, it's a very interesting look at an important subject.

>126 richardderus: liking it a lot so far, want to ditch the book club book about a German feminist that i feel compelled to read but havent even started yet, and read The Swerve all day til I finish it. It resonates with me already.

Hi RD- Just swinging through to say hi. I love the coffee posters, especially the 1st one, (which I first saw on your G.R. comments) It fits perfectly.

>129 LovingLit: Oh dearie me, a German feminist, now doesn't *that* sound grisly....

>130 msf59: Thanks, Mark!

The Gruesome Twosome won't be here this weekend! *confetti toss* I will be spared the Festival of Codependence until...

...next Wednesday, when they're coming for a five days. Yay.

#119 -- so what's the word that you acquired from The Swerve? (humanist??)

Imogen has arrived, or rather, her book has. I shall attempt to read before the holiday weekend, so I can onpass it...

Humanist mmm hmmm never heard that one before *duhhhrrrrrr*

Not the word, but the *actual* meaning of Epicurean was new to me. I've never known any but the calumnious church corruption of meaning. Hearing what ol' Epicurus actually meant to impart to the world, well, that's me right there.

I do so love to have a simple descriptor for a complex constellation of ideas, especially since I've spent ~35yrs thinking I'd gone for the cafeteria plan at the philosophy desk when actually I plumped for Epicurus Plan A.

OOO OOO Goody!!!! (this last re: Imogen, I feel compelled to add, fearing my sanity might be questioned elsewise)

sanity??? bwahahaha.

aha, Epicurean. Well, having read about the Stoics, the Epicureans came into it, too, so...

Much to do today. .

sigh . .

Do try to stay out of trouble :)

131 cracked me up. I think it captures too many of us.....

Your garden sounds lovely. Ours is not so far along yet, but the beans are about 3" tall. It doesn't appear that it's going to be a very good year for peas. We'll buy our tomato plants at the Bradner Plant Sale this Sunday and hope for a good year for them!

>135 Chatterbox: Well, at least leave me a fig leaf! *Pretend* you think I'm sane!

I was more familiar with the Stoic philosophy because of interest in and reading about Hadrian, that follower of Epictetus. Epicurus just whizzed past me, leaving no more trace than a proper name to root the adjective in.

>136 mckait: Hope it's a good, productive day, dearest.

>137 EBT1002: My herb garden is the only one I influence. The garden garden is all the Divine Miss. She makes sure there are lots of useless flowers and such-like.

Love #131 Richard ... so true:)

Hope you are having a good day.

*smooches* to you, dear Richard. The Swerve is due on my doorstep tomorrow! Callooh! Callay!

>139 calm: Isn't it hilarious? Glad to see you!

>140 karenmarie: *paces impatiently waiting for UPS to deliver the goods*

Review: 46 of seventy-five

Title: COVEHITHE

Author: CHINA MIEVILLE

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Report: Eerie doins on the North Sea coast of England, to do with the detritus of the petrochemical rape of the planet. The Day of Reckoning has come, in true China Miéville fashion, from the single least anticipated quarter.

My Review: Shovelmonkey1, that minx, recommended this Miévilleiciousness to me. It and its implications will prevent me from sleeping tonight. It's scary, for one, but I can sleep through nerves. It's envy-inducingly wonderfully written, but I've slept through many an envious snit (my boyfriend is 20, I *live* in an envious snit).

So what is the cause of the sleeplessness? Read this:

In the glow of the thing's own flame they saw edificial flanks, the concrete and rust of them, the iron of the pylon barnacled, shaggy with benthic growth now lank gelatinous bunting.

Take away the gorgeous words, the sonorous Lovecraftian cadence, the magnificently eerie picture it paints in the imagination of the reader, and one is left with:

HOW THE HELL DID HE THINK OF IT?!? WHERE DID HE FIND THE IDEA FOR THIS AMAZING TALE?!?

I hate China Miéville. I mean, serious full-on envy-born volcanically hot hatred. I labor and sweat over simple little oft-told tales, and he dashes off effortlessly, for a **NEWSPAPER**, what to him is a mere bagatelle, a piffling little entertainment, and would represent for me a quantum leap in talent and imagination.

I hope he has, or gets, shingles.

(Note that, since this is an online short story, the title is a link and not a touchstone, since I don't know how to manually add a single story.)

Review: 47 of seventy-five

Title: MYTHAGO WOOD

Author: ROBERT HOLDSTOCK

Rating: 5 thrilled stars of five

The Book Report: Go look at Jeffrey's review on GoodReads. I'll never be able to improve on that.

My Review: I have to add a few points to it, though.

The mythopoetic roots of the story are clear, and the entire experience of reading the tale is one of immersion into a vivified version of The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work. Jung's brilliant conceptualization of "The Collective Unconscious" provides the underpinnings of Ryhope Wood, of course, but man-alive does Holdstock do the magisterial idea justice with his fabulation and his enrobement of the ideas in perfectly chosen words.

I don't like that the book is called "fantasy" fiction, since it has none of the horrible cliche crapola that identifies fantasy in my mind. It's mythic fiction. It uses, and reuses, and synthesizes, the myths that support all the ideas you and I have about the world. This is a profoundly creative book, and should not be lumped in with ninety-three volume series books about teenaged girls with Special Gifts and serious badass 'tudes.

This is literature, not writing.

Great story Richard thanks for the link. I like your review as well:)

There are a couple of copies on LT but it looks like they were added manually. So I would just do a normal manual add.

Edit to add - and your Mythago Wood review came up as I was posting - another great review Richard:)

>144 calm: Thank you, calm! I really enjoyed the story. It's just...oh how petty it sounds...infuriating to me how the man's imagination located this image, which won't leave me now that it's in my head!

*grumble*

Glad you liked Mythago Wood's tribute. I hope you'll look into the book.

I've already read it:)

Good reviews, Richard. I like Mieville, although I don't have an e-reader. Mythago Wood is new to me, and I'll look for it.

Good. I don't like the Mieville I have read, so I do not have to go and read that one, cause I
don't like short stories either. That's under Rule # 17 in the Book of reading Do's and Don't Havtas
Published in 1864 by Just Cause Press. Author Unknown.

Looks like I should dust off the copy of Mythago Wood I got hold of a couple of years ago and read it. Must read more Miéville too.

I've added The Swerve to the tbr pile.

Happy Wednesday to you!

Review: 48 of seventy-five

Title: THE HOMECOMING PARTY

Author: CARMINE ABATE
Translator: ANTONY SHUGAAR

Rating: 2* of five

The Book Report: Childhood in poverty-stricken Calabrian town. Son of a father who works in the coal mines of northern France. Half-brother of a Child of Shame his father brings home. Boy to a dog of noble heart, who survives a wild boar attack.

Oh save me please from this childhood of painful partings and painful reunions and painful illnesses and painful convalescences and painful this and painful that and painful the other goddamned thing.

My Review: Published in Italy when the author was 50, in 2004, this book feels as self-important as any roman à clef does. It lays to rest the childhood demons and frustrations of a boy whose father was forced, in the post-war horror of ruin and starvation that was Italy, to go away to find work. It also illuminates a world that, I suspect, is disappearing: That of the Arbëreshë, Albanian Orthodox emigrants fleeing Ottoman oppression, once a minority within a minority in Italy. (Southern Italians aren't terribly highly regarded by the economic elite in the North, and the Arbëreshë are all Calabrian or Sicilian. Hard to get more Southern than that.) I suspect that modern life's media saturation has done for Italy what it's done for the US, which is smoothed out the most dramatic differences in language as more and more people grow up on TV and not stories told by meemaw and poohpoppy.

That would account for the Italian reviews of the book mentioning its “linguistic vibrancy”--Italian, like French, isn't a very open to innovation language, preferring to hive off dialects the way English produces slang. At any rate, I found myself hearing my old and beloved friend Nina as I read along, she who was born in another (Sicilian) town called “Hora” which is simply the word for “our place.” I loved listening to Nina's stories about Hora, and I loved eating the dishes her mama made and she learned not to cook for her Napolitani in-laws and I was endlessly fascinated by the cultural gulf between the Arbëreshë and the Italians and the Americans. Which accounts for both stars, since I found the author's tale about as boring as anything I've ever read in my 52 years of life, which I could feel drawing to a close as yet another dreary anecdote would fail to push the plot, of which if you were wondering there is little sign, in any sort of active direction. I didn't read this in Italian, but the translation is regularly referred to as masterful, and so I assume it's faithful to the original. In which case, I offer one comment on the writing: Pfui.

God, I am sick of childhood, and I thought before this it was just teenhood. Nope. I don't want to read any more books whose focus is on anyone who can't legally drink or vote. If you feel like wallowing in the angst of a boy who doesn't need Clearasil yet, this is a book for you. If you didn't have a Nina in your life to share stories of the Arbëreshë, this book could very well be a revelation to you. I can't in good conscience recommend it, but I won't stand here making the “toxic waste biohazard flee flee for your very life dear goddesses what are you still doing here” face.

Barely.

>146 calm: Oh good!

>147 jnwelch: The title is a link to the short story on the web, no ereader needed, so just clicketyclick quick sticks and read that bad boy.

>148 mckait: Exemption granted due to stressful nature of applicant's life. *thwap*

>149 avatiakh: Oh do, do, Kerry! It's simply amazingly cool and so not like Phantaueeseeee billionologies. I like China's work, usually, but this really rocked my boat.

>150 Whisper1: LINDA! Hi!! Oh I cannot *wait* to hear what you have to say about The Swerve! *smooch* Glad to see you around here!

busy is you!

Jeremy's writing papers, the dog doesn't need walked, and I don't feel like cooking. TV is boring. Can't focus to read when sweetienubbins asks me questions every 20min or so. What to do? Catch up on reviews.

{/lurk}

smooch, smooch

{lurk}

>155 ronincats: Thanks, Roni!

order delivery or get a craving for cheerios?

Big Bang Theory is on at 6

Make cookies ( is that cooking?)

Consider crossing Niagara Falls on a string like the Wallenda chap?

Not hungry yet, and baking less likely than cooking; it's 82 and sticky.

Re: Big Bang Theory, exactly.

Scared of heights, have no sense of balance, and besides which I ain't wanna die!

Somehow I'm a zillion reviews behind all the time. Can it be that I read too much?

*bwaaaahaaaahaaaahaaaaaaaa*

or just review more than need be?

Review: 49 of seventy-five

Title: SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH

Author: TAYIB SALIH
Translator: DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Book Report: A young Sudanese man, away in England studying for a university degree, returns in some disgrace to his native Nile-side village to lick his wounds. Mustafa, the village Scheherezade, tells the amorous adventures that were his years in the then-colonial power of England. A tragedy occurs, and life isn't the same. Or is it? Will it be? The last three pages of the book are a breathtakingly lovely statement of that question.

My Review: Published in 1966, the English edition I read was translated and published in 1989. This book is hailed far and wide as THE post-colonial novel of east-west relations.

Okay. Whatever.

The Sudan has, since the book came out, imploded and become a colossally failed state. It makes me a lot less able to think about the world presented here as relevant to any kind of relations, except those of the past to the imagined present.

But gawddam is the translated text beautimous! The sentences are complex, and lovely, and the images painted across the canvas behind my eyes alternated between photorealistic idealized lacquered miniatures and Rothko-esque swathes of emotionally charged color. It sweeps the reader off his feet and plops him into the middle of a lot of sex scenery. That was the rub (!) for me, as I foreswore womenfolk as sex partners a number of years ago, and one would need to like the experience of heterosexual intercourse to appreciate fully (!) the salubriously salacious sexuality of Mustafa.

I kept wanting him to finish up already and talk about the good stuff.

Of which this is an example, from the end of the book:

I entered the water as naked as when my mother bore me. When I first touched the cold water I felt a shudder go through me, then the shudder was transformed into a sensation of wakefulness. The river was not in full spate as during the days of the flooding nor yet was it at its lowest level. … I left him talking and went out. I did not let him complete the story. … My feet led me to the river bank as the first glimmerings of dawn made their appearance in the east. I would dispel my rage by swimming.

Economical, evocative, and in the context of the tale being told, perfect as what they are...valediction.

>159 mckait: I'm finding that I need the reviews and the process of writing them more and more as an aide-memoir. There are books whose reviews I look at and think "..I read THAT?" for a minute or two before some line in the review uncorks the memory of it.

Hi RD- Wow, you've been one busy-ass camper over here! Churning out the books and reviews. I will check out the Mieville and the Mythago Wood book sounds very promising.

>162 mckait: Thanks, love!

>163 msf59: I think Mythago Wood will really appeal to you, Mark, it's so beautiful and evocative and yet has a very very dark edge to it.

Review: 50 of seventy-five

Title: LONDON'S OVERTHROW

Author: CHINA MIÉVILLE

Rating: 5* of five

The Book Report: An essay on economic justice, on political reality, and on a leftist's fears for a world slowly being strangled and dismembered by corporate efforts to change the game to phase out all control over and opposition to their eternal pursuit of more more more more more more more. Illustrated with Mr. M's own photos of London at night, the essay makes for some damned good and grim reading, though as always with His Chinaness, the sonority and especially the ubiety of his word choices and similes and metaphors makes the experience of reading the essay much like paying a visit to London yourownself.

My Review: There is a major sea-change happening in the world today. The corporate interests are making it ever more difficult for ordinary people to survive, still less make their own worlds better. There is some backlash from the tiny remnants of the left. What there is not is any assurance that the outcome will favor the majority. Read this:

London, buffeted by economic catastrophe, vastly reconfigured by a sporting jamboree of militarised corporate banality, jostling with social unrest, still reeling from riots. Apocalypse is less a cliché than a truism. This place is pre-something.

The Olympics are slated to cost taxpayers £9.3bn. In this time of ‘austerity’, youth clubs and libraries are expendable fripperies; this expenditure, though, is not negotiable. The uprisen young of London, participants in extraordinary riots that shook the country last summer, do the maths. ‘Because you want to host the Olympics, yeah,’ one participant told researchers, ‘so your country can look better and be there, we should suffer’.

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will celebrate her 60th year on the throne this year, and the Conservative government is making sure that the world she leaves for William to reign over (does anyone believe Charles will say yes to being king if his wife can't be queen?) is vastly worse for the average Briton than it was when Her Majesty ascended the throne:

The pay gap between the highest and lowest paid in the UK has grown faster than in any other developed country, spiking since 2005. In 2008, average income of the top 10 percent was 12 times that of the lowest. Their riches grow. We others are told to tighten belts. Tax rates for the wealthiest have dropped, even as the gap between the merely rich and the utterly wealthy has grown.

One of capitalism’s defences is the outrage-fatigue it engenders.

We’re approaching Victorian levels of inequality, and London’s more unequal than anywhere else in the country. Here, the richest 10 percent hold two thirds of all wealth, the poorest half, one 20th.

It isn't that there are no alternatives, it isn't that no one has another idea, it isn't that there are no voices crying shenanigans out there in the public sphere. Far from it. What there is most decidedly not is any ear turned even slightly away from the more more more more more me me me me me greed that finances government officials' elections and their cushy retirements:

We slump under sado-monetarism. There are other ways. For years Alan Freeman was an economist with the Greater London Authority, working with both mayors. He leans forward in his chair, explaining what’s wrong with London’s still-massive economy, and how to fix it. He bullet points. ‘Build two million homes ... Edufare in the place of workfare ... Invest in innovation. Quintuple government funding of R&D, extend R&D to the arts. ... Put growth back and (it’s easy to show) the tax coffers will overflow.’

But perish forbid that the tax coffers overflow, because then the Scum of the Earth might think they should get some of the swag. Can't have that! Those saggy-pantsed loud-music-listenin' dark skinned creeps better not get the idea that they're as good as old white men:

In 1998, Tony Blair ushered into being ASBOs, Antisocial Behaviour Orders. Sharp laws, the better for society, like Cronus, like a traumatised hamster, to eat its children. These startling civil orders criminalise legalbehaviour, individually, tailor-making offences. A 17-year-old is banned from swearing. Another told he could go to jail if he drops his trousers. A 19-year-old barred by law from playing football in the street.

Catastrophe generates the beasts it needs. In London, in the UK, the term ’feral youth’ is absolutely routine. Media and politicians deploy it without much controversy. As if such a spiteful, shocking, bestialising phrase does not disgrace every mouth from which it spills. Its utterance is not a diagnosis, but a symptom.

And this is how it is in London. It's worse in New York. As for the real America, the mind boggles and the spirit quails upon considering how clueless, how apathetic, and how pusillanimous the typical American is; he sees no need to protest, because 1) won't do any good, 2) things're fine like they are, we have enough to eat, still have the house, leave me in peace, and 3) goddam commie pinko fags from Jew York who needs them tellin' decent folks how to live.

This last is a quote. A quote, mind you. Someone I once thought of as a friendly acquaintance said this to me. She is not alone in her thoughts, though I'd hope others are less thoughtless in expressing them.

Then I watched Fox News, and that hope died. I wonder if my country's ideals will too.

3 a.m. again?

tsk

~~~~Waves~~~~ as Monica comes out of Lurk Mode to say Hello.. RD... Hope all is well :)

Back to Hiding.. (aka Lurking ;)

Hi Kath, hi Monica! *smooches* all around!

I've written a fill-in review for an old book circle read, Memoirs of a Geisha, over in my Orphaned Reads thread...post #213.

Such lovely writing, I feel a little bit guilty about only giving it three stars.

High fiver for you - (Title: LONDON'S OVERTHROW

Author: CHINA MIÉVILLE) - brilliant!

Wish it were not so true.

"feral youth" OMG, how can any one use that term thoughtlessly,

Attention Must Be Paid

but but but

OK, I'm moving on.

Good grief....I can't leave you for longer than one minute....51 postss......social smoochies, enjoy whatever is buzzing your ever interesting thread.

Passing thru - Have a great weekend.....

*daily lurking & enjoying*

>169 maggie1944: Death of the Sales Culture...sad to be in on the end.

>170 tututhefirst: *smooch* back!

>171 roundballnz: Thanks, Alex!

Hallo, RD! I wish you a fun-filled and pain-free weekend.

BTW, I'm almost through with the preface (or introduction? I didn't bring the book to work) to The Swerve. It's not something to just breeze through, is it?

Review: 51 of seventy-five

Title: EDITORIAL

Author: ARTHUR GRAHAM

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Book Report: Did you ever wonder, standing there in front of your bookshelves, “Self,” you have to call yourself “Self” to make this work, “Self, what would happen if Virginia Woolf in full Orlando mode sat at a table with a bottle of Boodles and collaborated with Samuel Beckett and Bret Easton Ellis to rewrite Naked Lunch?”

You don't need to, actually, Arthur Graham did. He called the resulting...writings...Editorial: The Bizarro Press Edition.

My Review: I thought bizarro, the literary genre to which this novel (?) belongs, was juvenile, kinda like the showoffy po-mo nonsense that poseurs like Rick Moody and his unbearable Purple America or David Foster Wallace and his aptly titled but clearly misinterpreted Infinite Jest goof on pretentious literary snobbery, only not afraid to say Dirty Words or discuss Naughty Things.

And the years flow past, each of them as unremarkable as the next, as unnoticed as nanoseconds, in fact, not even long enough to contain anything noticeable – centuries just barely registered as moments in space/time. Soon the millennia are passing by at a modest rate of 47 per minute, and of course all manner of things noticeable and not-so-noticeable occur along the way (though most falling into the latter category). Naturally there come periods where lying is greatly rewarded, followed by periods where lying is greatly punished (our poor unlucky editor!), along with every other conceivable and inconceivable reversal and re-reversal of standards, and…

Wait, did anyone else just hear God yawn?

So I started reading this book, provided to me by its author in the Satanically twitchy, horribly inconvenient PDF format, without a lot of expectations. Short hits of bizarro, like poppers, can enhance the momentary pleasures of reading. More often than not, I'm fine with the literary equivalent of fast-food sex, the warm glow passes soon enough, but hey don't cry because it's over snigger because it happened, and this afternoon I was in a fast-foody sorta mood.

And slowly it dawned on me. This guy isn't pointlessly showoffily using the fashionable conventions to obscure what is otherwise a fairly average and not so terribly interesting tale (see the two titles I've chosen for whipping above). This guy is, in his vulgar, potty-mouthed way, making a point that might actually be worth thinking about, like about perspective and perception:

Florida was like a pathetic, flaccid cock unable to work it up. Meanwhile, Cuba sat waiting like a big, wet pussy, not even a hundred miles out.

Not an original thought, necessarily, but a thought presented in a way that cuts through the fog of ideology and politicking and associated foofaraw to present a multi-layered image that both defines and illuminates a geopolitical reality, while revolting the delicate and amusing the coarse. Well played, Mr. Graham!

At the end of the story comes the philosophical payload that you just knew, from word one, hadda be coming. The surprise to me was how succinct and unwrapped the payload was, a bareback mindfuck:

Then it hit him: On a long enough timeline, not only did all things become possible, they eventually became inevitable. … So, given that so much is happening every moment,
and given that the interpretations of each moment are as numerous and varied as the uncountable beings (sentient and “nonsentient”) experiencing them, and given that history repeats itself over and over again in seemingly infinite circular variations while at the same spontaneously generating and shifting from one species, paradigm, and reality to the next, and given that on a long enough timeline not only did all things become possible, but in fact became inevitable, then why couldn’t {his} client
have been everything AND everywhere all at ONCE?

At the quantum level, ladies and gentlemen, all times are now and all places are here. The same strings that vibrate to create rocks, vibrate to create thee and me. And this, I think since I didn't ask him, is what Graham's nonsensical tale of the weresnake destiny of humanity is more or less about.

Or not. Who cares. If you don't like the quotes, you'll hate the book, and won't buy it. I think you should anyway. Read it to keep your reading bowels from getting blocked.

Thumbed! how are ya?

What will you do with yourself this weekend?

Thanks for the thumb! I'm sure I don't need to warn you off attempting to read it.

What will I do with myself? READ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have to start researching the no-Queen-Victoria book, starting with The Trial of Queen Caroline and then Charlotte & Leopold. Sweetienubbins is visiting family Saturday. All all all alone *confetti toss*

Great! One can even get tired of cupcakes if you have them every day.

And... no, I won't be reading it :)

So true. And good. In that order.

You can't get tired of cupcakes beause they come in endless varieties. So I think what Kath is saying is that you shouldn't eat the same cupcake every day. I really don't think she should encourage you like that.

*smooch*
I love China and that short looks really good!

>181 Ape: Believe me, dearest, one can grow tired of *any*thing*.

>182 curlysue: OOO OOO you *need* to read it then!

it's an e reader no?

No, it's on the web, so any computer or phone'll get it...the title is a link to the website.

hmmmm
then maybe I will look into it
this weekend when I'm on my laptop :)

Oh, do!

I decided to tart up an old review of The Hours, a long-ago book circle read, over in my other thread...post #220.

That definitely is a must read for any China M fan ........

Back after a horrible work week with no time for LT - and the first thing I see here is Robbiiiiiiiiiieeee Williams! Back when he was still cute and good. And he has more of those nice tattoos. *sigh*
Well, I am happy for him if that straight marriage with kids really is what he needed to get rid of his various demons/addictions, but his latest albums were (insert swear word) and I can't support the guy anymore by buying his music or tickets for his incredible live concerts. I wish him a happy and drug-free long life.

Just bought "Editorial" (where is that touchstone??), how nice to find a recommended Kindle book amazon sells for less than 5 USD to people outside of the US.

I loved The Hours, but fully agree to if the clever-clever hadn't gotten in the way of the emotional core of the book. Still haven't seen the movie.

Morning RD- You have been a reading/reviewing machine lately. And it looks like several of these titles have been highly enjoyable. Perfect. Hope you have a great weekend.

Nothing to say here... just being sociable...

>189 roundballnz: It's on the web, Alex, no ereader needed...just follow the link!

>190 Deern: I know nothing of Gent. Sig. Williams except he's hawt and that, quite frankly, is enough for me! Glad you could get Editorial: Bizarro Press Edition...it's so weird...*smooch*

>191 msf59: Thanks Mark! I'm having a lovely, lovely solitary weekend. With Memorial Day coming up, everyone's schedules are mad. I, on the other hand, don't have one, so don't care!

Have a beautiful weekend.

>192 mckait: Morning, sweetness, have a danish.

Drive-by **wave & hug**

>175 richardderus: has piqued my interest...and even tickled my fancy a bit

;-)

>194 jdthloue: I don't think you'll be sorry you read it, Jude, it's pretty dang funny and also thought-provoking.

Thumbing your review of Editorial. And happily joining you in spending as much of my weekend reading as possible.

Thanks, Ellen! Enjoy your reading days.

If this does not make your blood boil and cause you to foam at the mouth from screaming for revolution, it is best that you never, ever tell me so::

Thank you for posting it! Yes, it makes me furious.

OH please, it isn't true, not really... right?

>199 maggie1944: I would expect no less from you.

>200 mckait: It's true. Nauseating, no?

sickening. WE pay for their error. Again.

To the tune of enough money to pay for food stamps. It makes me ill.

Review: 52 of seventy-five

Title: ERASURE

Author: PERCIVAL EVERETT

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Book Report: This is the publisher's back cover copy: “Thelonious "Monk" Ellison’s writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been "critically acclaimed." He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies—his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer’s, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father’s suicide seven years before.

In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins’s bestseller. He doesn’t intend for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is—under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh—and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel.”

My Review: Why am I giving this only two and a half stars? Because, in my world, books that have satirical aims should have sharp focus and clear line-of-sight on their target. I'm not clear on the target here: Modern Murrikin kulcher in general? Political Correctness and its idiotic unintended side effect of glamorizing substandard stuff? The sad fate of a critically acclaimed but commercially ignored writer? “All of the above” seems to be the answer Everett gives, and this is the source of my discontent. With that many targets in his sights, plus the plight of children of aging parents, plus the sibling dynamic in a family of high achievers...too much. Nothing gets enough time or attention.

It's a damn shame, too, because Everett can write his tuchus off, and should have spent his seed a wee tiny bit more carefully. In the ten years since the novel was first published, it has (sadly) not become less timely. So there's that going for it. But really, with all the terrific books there already are to read, why spend money and eyeblinks on an almost-good one?

Is that BP claim from our government? Our taxpayer money? If so, that is absolutely sickening.

It is indeed. And it is indeed. In that order.

Notice how the fiscally conservative folks are really good about calling for smaller government; until it is in their self interest to have some "welfare" pointed in their direction. Corporate welfare programs are huge compared to the piddling little welfare programs for individuals. oh, IMHO

No opinion about it, Karen44. Don't ever qualify statements of fact. Tax breaks are corporate welfare, and this one alone, this one and only one, is more than the food stamp program cost this year. So, multiply that by the number of tax breaks the gummint is handing to these motherfuckers and, well, there's every social program funded. Fully.

Pardon me, I must go puke now.

ummmm
Covehithe
where is the rest of it?!?
he needs to keep this short going!
augh china!

here's a recent follow-up on the BP thing, though we're now way past their tax deductions. i found a similar, more in-depth, and truly sickening piece in al-jazeera recently (http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2012/04/201241994425306140.html). don't read it if you're squeamish about what BP spill chemicals do to living things.

i'm fascinated and shocked, shocked, i say, that these kinds of info come almost exclusively from somewhere other than the US: agence france, al-jazeera, the guardian, australian news and the like.

Erasure sounds marvelous. i'm intrigued that you knock it down to 2.5 for not being on point and wonder if i might learn something from it.

more work for my thumb, heaven help me.

//eta it matters not whether i want to read it or no, it's available in audio only from the following 3 libraries: DE BIBLIOTHEEK HAARLEM EN OMSTREKEN, Médiathèque Valais MV-Martigny and Cobiss.SI - Izum Slovenian Union Catalog (COBIB/COBISS), Institute of Information Science in Slovenia. humph

>210 curlysue: I KNOW! Maybe if we send begging emails?

>211 mirrordrum: I'm always unsurprised that US media outlets don't make much of this kind of information. It would be bad for the advertisers. Cannot endanger our sacred profits.

Thanks for the thumb!

>212 richardderus: cynic that i can be, i suspect it goes beyond 'bad for advertisers.' it's about the buyout (or sellout) of media to corporations or individuals with corporate agendas (agendae?). for example, in 2011, NYT sold its Regional Media Group to Warren Stephens, a Dole Republican who owns large chunks of Oklahoma Gas & Electric, Donrey Media Group, Alltel, and Bank of America. there have been other sales as well. search 'who own NYT' and you get all kinds of interesting stuff.

enough about that.

Sadly, it's the accounting law: when a company loses money, it can apply those losses to reduce its tax burden in future years. Same thing happened with the banks. There needs to be a distinction between being able to profit from your own stupidity/obliviousness/recklessness/criminality, and being able to use losses that are genuinely business related -- i.e. where a company hasn't pushed the envelope; rolled the dice & lost.

Sorry the Abate novel didn't work for you; while his other novel is significantly better (I loved it), it does follow a similar trajectory, with a boy growing to maturity and coming to understand his father's obsession. I thought the story was more distinctive in that case, but suspect if you are that averse to his language and the trope, best to avoid it.

#213 -- there is this pesky thing called "fiduciary duty". The NY Times is a publicly traded company that has an absolute legal duty to its investors to maximize its returns. That means if it decides to put a division of the paper up for sale and the highest bidder is someone like that, and they opted to take a lower bid from someone whose politics they might prefer, they'd be slammed on two different fronts: first of all, bias, secondly -- and more seriously -- they would be hit by shareholder lawsuits. The NYT is struggling to reorder its finances, and can't afford to risk that kind of stuff. Fiduciary duty is the nasty little secret out there -- and can also be a lovely rationalization for all kinds of behavior after the fact.

*activating decloaking device*

Hi, my dear Richard. Enjoying my trip through your mind. Mythago Wood sounds fascinating.

*cloaking device ON*

Review: 53 of seventy-five

Title: THE GALAXIE AND OTHER RIDES: Stories

Author: JOSIE SIGLER

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Book Report: A dozen stories of the searing pain that being alive is for many of us. The horrors of war? Nothing compared to the horrors of hatred. The joys of sex? Nothing compared to the life sentence of parenthood, the misery of loss and abandonment that always follow.

Winner of the Tartt First Fiction Award, this collection of slices of life—sliced by blunt knives from still-living flesh—collects Sigler's bleak, clear-eyed visions of life in these United States for the first time in book form. Some stories appeared in the cream of the small magazine crop, such as Roanoke Review, Silk Road, and Copper Nickel, all of which represent the diametric opposite of Reader's Digest. Stories, my friends, are alive and well in the hands of writers like Sigler. They are still doing what the best stories have always done: Gone somewhere, done something, and made the reader experience the going and doing, and emerge changed from the trip.

My Review: A tiller of literary soil broken generations ago by such realist-mythspinners as Erskine Caldwell and Carson McCullers, Sigler finds her angles and corners in a poverty-stricken stratum of America that grows steadily (according to the census). It makes her grim visions, so angry and so hopeless as to make one wish for literary cataracts, all the more important for those of us who can afford computers and have the education to know what to do with them, and with the books we come to this place to talk about, to read and heed. She's Donald Ray Pollock and Bonnie Jo Campbell's literary love-child. The boy in the trailer on the next lot is Wells Tower.

I have one cavil with the collection as a whole. The joke here is that the stories all involve particular car models, linking the tales with the decline and fall of the US auto industry. This feels forced to me, though I must admit that having a collection of stories organized around cars made my gearhead heart warm up. But in the end, the cars are integral to the stories about half the time, and integrated into a narrative spine not at all. It won't matter to most of y'all. It was only mildly disappointing to me.

Pay attention. Truths are told here, and we all benefit from that. Read Josie Sigler's work.

“Deep, Michigan (Caprice)”--what does it mean to be a misfit gayboy with friends who rape you? “Buddies” who abuse you? What does it mean not to have a place at any table? 4.5 stars

“My Last Horse (Mustang)”--a gift of healing horses marks one woman as different, and her life's work consumes her every moment. When love finds her, how can she make the compromises and adjustments love requires when lives are at stake? 5 stars

“Chicken (Comet)”--when there is no future, why pretend the present matters? 3 stars

“Woods (El Camino)”--what happens when one smart, determined young woman escapes grinding poverty, only to return when her Iraq war veteran brother finally dies? Can she find a way to fit the past into a future she wasn't allowed to dream of having? 4 stars

“Breakneck Road (Reliant)”--when a man walking home from the liquor store with his last dollar's worth of booze finds a baby in a box abandoned by the roadside, can he leave it to die? Is taking on a child when you can't find food money at the bottom of your bottle a ticket out of Hell, or a short trip to the grave? 4.5 stars

“The Johns (Chevelle Malibu)”--when your mother turns tricks for a living, what can possibly be the last straw that forces your childhood to end? 5 stars

“The Last Trees in River Rouge Weep for Carlotta Contadino (Galaxie)”--when you have nowhere to go, can you make home mean something by betraying your fellow bottom-dwellers to get what you want? 4 stars

“Even the Crocuses (Impala)”--when a good man bores you so bad that only a bad man will keep you afloat in your bottle, can you trust yourself not to give in and sink into the mud? 3 stars

“The Ride (Hog)”--what makes a good biker chick...toughness, or the fear that if you stop you'll never make it out? 3 stars

“Tether (Town & Country)”--what can a system designed to control and intimidate expect its victims to do if not rebel...even at the cost of their lives? 4 stars

“The Black Box (Falcon)”--the existential cry, “why?” answered with “why not?” 2.5 stars, weakest in the collection

“A Man is Not a Star (Silverado)”--what happens when a man, not very bright and not very educated, but a man with love and pride in his heart for all the things he's done to build a life for his wife and daughters, finds himself unwanted and unnecessary? One man's way out is unforgettable. But you'll want to. 5 stars, the star of this show.

>213 mirrordrum:, 214 Damn that constitution anyway! We're not allowed to pass bills of attainder. This is an instance where I'd ***LOVE*** to see some truly punitive legislation.

>215 MerryMary: HI!! Haven't seen you unlurk in ages! *smooch*

We are allowed to pass laws prohibiting certain things -- however incredibly difficult the process can be. We aren't allowed to make past behavior criminal, however... Which is kinda the point when radio talk show people kept pressing me to to say shouldn't we just throw those banking bums into jail. Well, charged with what, precisely?? There was no OWS taking to the streets in 1999, when Sandy Weill was challenging Glass Steagall. We allowed the bankers to shape the laws, and we have lived with the consequences. We should actually all thank JP Morgan; if anything has prevented banking reform from being gutted, it was that $2 bin to $4 bin trading loss.

looks like ive stepped in at an in to an intense moment here...best I return and read properly and make an informed comment.
Hi RD!!

Suz... nice laws we have here. Unless one is not a millionaire or billion dollar corporation.

hellordxo

Oh, Richard, you have made the Sigler book sound like it is a must read! I have told Amazon it should be a Kindle book, and maybe I'll run over to B&N and tell them it should be a Nook book, too. But, alas, they too are corporations which must look to profits!

Hope your day is filled with worthy reading materials, and plenty of fine foods and drinks!

Have a wonderful, day, RD!

>218 Chatterbox: *sigh* It's the past that I want to punish them for. "You know that $9.9bn you claimed on your taxes? Hand it over, in cash, right now, oh and BTW your entire global operation? Just so you know, we own it now kthxbye"

>219 LovingLit: Hi Megan!

>220 mckait: Hi there!

>221 maggie1944: I think the publisher is the one to convince re: Kindle. I'll go put in a word.

Mid-70s and sunshiney, quiet day reading, and since I'm the only one eating, it'll be sandwiches. Maybe chicken salad with lots of onion, since I don't have to please the onion-averse.

>222 karenmarie: Oh hello. Are you well? Or should I say "recovering from your recent bout with mental illness leading to a lack of appreciation for the Goddess, known to puny mortals as Virginia Woolf"?

But please do enjoy your day, however it is that such people as you are do enjoy their days.

I read Jacob's Room with high expectations and couldn't make head or tail out of it. After I finished it, the only feeling I was left with was "so, it is done?", not an aftertaste I generally associate with the writing of Gods or Goddesses. Maybe it is just me though.

>224 PiyushC: Yeup. Just you.

#225 Thought so, not even your goddesses are enough for me now, whatever will I do *wonders*

#223 harsh or joking? whew.

sailing through.....enjoy this luscious Sunday....I'm off to the deck to watch the tide recede and the gulls fight over clams......

>226 PiyushC: Amend your ways, of course. Fall into conformity with the Goddess.

It's simple!

>227 karenmarie: *smooch* as though I could be serious!

>228 tututhefirst: *waves at the SS Tina* Sounds delectable! Save a clam for me.

RD- Excellent review of the Sigler collection. Sounds fantastic. Just my cuppa. You got a big Thumb!

Thanks, Mark! I hope it lives up to my hype.

harking back to the BP thing. i know there were egregious errors, and not just b/c of Rachel Maddox but b/c i have friends who are engineers who were involved w/ the whole mess post hoc and know things amongst themselves to which the rest of us are not privy. still, we must keep in mind our own responsibilities.

it's all very well to rail against BP and Exxon et al, and i certainly do my share. we must also be mindful that everything that is made by, grown by, or delivered to us by humans supports and encourages drilling and makes us responsible parties. there are no innocent bystanders. as far as i'm concerned, i helped poison the gulf as surely as did BP.

i try to minimize my footprint, but the more i know about how things are made, the more i realize how large even my small footprint is.

mirrordrum, agree. I also do everything I can figure out to reduce my use of petroleum products and my impact on our Mother Earth, however; there is so much corporate responsibility for misinformation, bad information, propaganda, lies, and fraud that any thing I choose to do has the risk of being off mark.

I do however pay my taxes and I do not complain about paying my taxes. I do not try to avoid them because I believe I am responsible for what my government chooses to do and I vote so that I can express my desires responsible living.

BP is Multinational now. Not beholding to any one country. Who controls how it behaves? Who decides if avoiding taxes is responsible, legal, and moral?

The laws demand that the company put its shareholders interests first. Before the Earth. Before any community.

You can feel and act responsible for your part in poisoning the earth however if all you do is rail against corporate behavior it may not be enough.

It's a tough one, isn't it? We don't live in a society that makes it easy to revert to the way that our great-grandparents and their parents lived. And in many ways, we wouldn't want to. For instance, the pharmaceutical industry consumes lots of petroleum products and its byproducts and impact aren't exactly benign. But my great-grandmother died of appendicitis when my grandfather was only 2, leaving 5 young children who would never again live in the same house. So, it's hard to say that the drugs that made appendicitis not a nearly automatic death sentence are not a good thing -- but they come with a cost. The problem is that there's no impartial and infallible arbiter with 20-20 foresight to tell us when the cost will be too great, or alert us to unintended consequences.

*sigh* There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any gain without a loss. Never. It's a law, one that we're taught in school: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."

Immutable truth, whether discussing bodies in motion or evolution in action. We all collude in the rape of the planet, and sitting on my lap is my favorite proof of the benefits of this rape...powered by the electricity without which we would live the lives of those in 1860.

I don't have good answers, but I'm listening all the time.

> 235: I don't have good answers, but I'm listening all the time
Feel the same...

Try to catch up, but too far behind to read everything :-(

I hate BP.

>236 FAMeulstee: Hi Anita! Glad to see you!

>237 EBT1002: Them, yes, but honestly I detest all the profit whores without social consciences. Go read Covehithe...the link to the story on the web is in my review on this thread.

There was a TV show produced in which a family volunteered to live as if they were in 1850 or so, in London, or nearby. One result, which I thought was very interesting, was that all family members did a fair amount of complaining about how hard it was, without electricity, etc. but more telling: the producers could not find anyone willing to work as hard as a typical maid would have had to work. People would volunteer, put in a couple of 18 hour days, and then quit.

Yes, there are prices to be paid for our very convenient and more comfortable lives today.

The 1900 House recreated life as a Victorian middle-class family...harder than poverty is in the US or UK today, I bet!

Yes, Richard, you found it. A very interesting series. I remember the Mother being particularly put out over how difficult it was to wash her hair.

Sigh.

It might be good "required viewing" for the youff of todays.

A hot bath was a *luxury*! I truly cannot imagine wishing to live in those times.

I can not imagine wishing to live in those times, either, but I wonder if the "coming days" don't have some of those kinds of hardships lurking....

I know my budget could not sustain my current life style if the price of energy becomes very great; or the price of food, also, has potential to become huge.

OK, I'll go back to reading. This prognostication stuff is not for amateurs which I surely am.

I suspect you're right, Karen44, about the direction stuff is heading. I also suspect that it will suit the corporationstates down to the ground for that to be the case, since their masters won't suffer along with us.

How are you surviving the lynch mobs? You are becoming the Marathon Man! Funny, in my current story collection, there is a moment, at a Jewish elder Hostel, (did not know they had these) and someone is burning Nazi-related DVDS. Marathon Man was mentioned, along with all Ira Levin based films. The only movies spared were Grumpy Old Men and California Suite.

sigh. You are also probably right.

>245 msf59: So, you're reading about hell. I see.

>246 maggie1944: *smooch*

RD....I always have my brain exercised when I drop by....so much food for thought. Off to sleep.
{{{Smoochies}}}

>216 richardderus:. Duly noted and Wishlisted..and Thumbed

For the rest..i just woke up and am only on my firtst cuppa...No intelligence is expected for a while!

>248 tututhefirst: The conversation here tends to wander into quite unusual channels, for sure.

>249 jdthloue: Oh goody good! I think you'll love the Sigler. Drink up, we'll be here.

The Sigler sounds wonderful and depressing at the same time. But then, most of the books I really enjoy have that combination.

I agree that we are in for hard times of one kind or another, and that the austerity crowd will make things look more and more like Hooverville before they are finished. And that we all use more product than we are strictly entitled to if we just divided the world's values evenly across 7 billion people.

But I wouldn't want to live like a Chinese peasant or an India Dalet behind the Forever sign. I can cavil when I see people throwing plastic bags away or letting them get stuck in trees (grr); I can sell my car and only drive when there's no other way to get where I'm going; I can recycle and reuse until I'm blue. But living in New York means I'm going to use more than my fair share no matter what.

In some ways, Judy; in others, you're saving carbon emissions. You didn't,even when you owned one, use a car daily, and most of the tasks you need to accomplish are done on foot or bus or subway. Yes, food is trucked in, brought in by ship, etc etc. Yes, energy is made by burning fossil fuels. That's true across the whole continent, and in NYC one can at least *reduce* the trouble we cause our mother the earth.

OH Dear Richard, I am busy for a weekend and don't get a chance to get on LT and your thread is so full.. LOL.. ~~Waves~~ :)

Hi Monica! A lot has happened, it's true. It's usually pretty interesting around here. See you soon!

xo

>252 richardderus: Yes, I know. It would be perfect if I could have a garden and grow my own veggies. Maybe have a chicken (we had two when I was a kid).

And if I could live at approximately 79th Street and 6th Avenue, just above the Theater in the Park!

>255 mckait: *smooch*

>256 ffortsa: I love the image of a garden and chickens at 79th and 6th. I'll be giggling for hours about that. And you in a gingham apron and matching bonnet. Jim with a pitchfork and bib overalls.

I have to lie down now.

Oh The 1900 House!
I liked that show....what happened to it? it ran it's course?
now that should be a reality show on main stream TV not tucked away on PBS.
*sigh*

I'm quite sure Jim's grandfather did wear bib overalls and carry a pitchfork. He was a dairy farmer! When I get the slides scanned, I'll post a picture of our terrifying while leghorn from years ago.

:214. Years ago when I was still at Chase Manhattan I wrote a long paper for the American Institute of Banking that pointed out with historical detail that banks do not get regulated because the House of Representatives has a free afternoon.

Banks get regulated because bankers have been either (a) royally criminal or (b) royally stupid.

Can never quite forgive Clinton for signing off on the repeal of Glass Stegal.

Letting the mice loose in the washroom.

Or putting the wolves in charge of the henhouse. Or something equally stupid.

I fear we can't unring that bell. To unnerving to the "job-creators" whoever they are.

>143 richardderus:: do you have Lavondyss as well? It follows on from Mythago Wood. So neat to see an oldie goldie like this popping up in your reading.

Still catching up--back up to carry on.

>161 richardderus:: that's exactly why I review too.

>165 richardderus:: it's all breaking my heart right now. We're not much better up here, with the Harper government and the Quebec student riots.

>258 curlysue: Perish forbid! *IMAGINE* what, say, Fox could do to it!!

>259 ffortsa: I know a leghorn's a chicken, but I have the image of the hat stuck in my mind's eye:


>260 magicians_nephew: I know, me neither re: Clinton. Same problem I have with Obama and USA PATRIOT repeal.

>261 tiffin: Hi Tui! But gracious goodness me, y'all're starting from so much higher a point than us'n's here in the benighted world of Jesus Industries.

Oh, and Tui...I put up a review of Lavondyss yesterday over here.

aha! I felt the same way--at least I think I did. It's been decades since I read them. And what is this other thread that I didn't know about and just discovered?

It's my orphaned reviews thread. Stuff I'm not including in the 75 for one reason or another.

*smooch*

Good stuff there, Ricardo--I just read them all. I do love your descriptions!

>266 karenmarie: *smooch*

>267 tiffin: Thank you, Tui!

Maybe my new goal should be to keep "unread posts" under 30. Think?

#260 -- yes to all those points. Post 1929, it was thanks to Mr. Pecora that we got Glass Steagall and other regulations. Who is filling that role now?? And repeal looked like an easy/safe bet in the late 1990s -- after all, the banks had evolved such sophisticated risk management capabilities...

What is currently driving me somewhat demented is this new JOBS act. in the name of creating jobs, we have turned back some of the investor protections put into place 30 years ago curb rampant abuse -- once again, fraudsters will be able to solicit for funds using newspaper ads. And no one is squawking in outrage. Perhaps not akin to the repeal of G-S in terms of magnitude or impact, but those particular chickens -- Leghorns or not -- will come home to roost soon enough.

RD, I will have imogen for you on the weekend, OK? Won't see you tomorrow chez book circle. Work, and the fact that I realize that I simply can't read graphic novels. Literally, can't read 'em. Even with a magnifying glass, they are too "busy" for me, and I realize how much I love the fact that words themselves -- their shape and sound -- are enough to conjure up an image. Anyway...

Suzanne I suspect many in Book Circle will feel as you do about this "Graphic Novel".

I am not a fan of Graphic Novels either..
Maybe sensory overload is what me want to flee them, too?

sleeping in rd?

>269 EBT1002: I myownself find it almost impossible to open a thread with more than 10 unread messages. Too daunting. I'll whiz through with a drive-by comment and then try to keep up better.

I still lose people, though.

>270 Chatterbox: Oh them chickies is a-comin' and make no mistake, the fallout is a-gonna be *BIBLICAL* in its awfulness...fraud on a one-to-one level hurts people's feelings far more than abstract, impersonal corporate rape.

Kewl on Imogen! As for book circle, I think it's unlikely that I'll be coming back until after I get medical care. I can't make the drive in, and the train's worse. I'm getting a lot worse fairly quickly. Disability help from Gideon is urgent at this point. Working on how to achieve that....

>271 magicians_nephew: I suspect you're right, Jim. Have fun tonight!

>272 mckait: I can't help myself. I see all the girls as Veronica and all the boys as Richie Rich. It's an artform I do not resonate positively with, and I have tried multiple versions to be sure it wasn't just the particular title. It isn't. I don't like graphic novels until they make them into movies.

I myownself find it almost impossible to open a thread with more than 10 unread messages. Too daunting. I'll whiz through with a drive-by comment and then try to keep up better.

Perhaps we need to suggest LT institute a "mark all as read" button!!!

>274 tututhefirst: Oh dear, I fear the power of such a thing....

>274 tututhefirst: Yikes, then i'd think of LT, the same way i think of email (gak!)

I hope you figure something, regarding Disability help......i fear that you really need it...and i'm not being snarky. Just know that it requires one to sign away a good part of one's life...or independence, at least

**hugs**

Just ask G what it is that you need to do at your end and pledge to do it within a certain time frame. Really, this needs to be resolved, and it's all about logistics. No one is going to quarrel with the very evident fact that you qualify for disability. I think he's willing to do this, esp. as it helps both you & C, but he needs to be prodded and I think there are some things that he needs you to do. He'll grumble but he'll do it.

Jim, yes, it's not the usual fare for the group on a # of levels! It wld be an interesting discussion, but I simply haven't been able to read it, physically. I don't have the issue others do with print size or stuff, but I had never tried to read a graphic novel before and found it very "noisy". It has made me curious about the folks for whom this is so much the way to read that there is now a bookstore very near me that stocks only graphic novels (which is where I bought Watchmen.) But my column has to be written every day, and I usually don't even get started on it until 6:30 or 7, so.... I'm just glad I have a steady stream of income, touch wood, for as long as it lasts.

Speaking of which, time to head back to the salt mines.

>277 Chatterbox: That is true true true...I haven't had what it takes to call and listen to the grumbles. Lazy of me.



It scares me how little attention this gets.

I agree with Suz. Completely. Vehemently.

eta

and Strongly

eta

Emphatically

I really like graphic memoirs, like Persepolis, Blue Pills, and Fun Home, but I tend to be disappointed in 'comic books' unless the art is good. I consider the 'comic' art style to be that simplistic made-for-newspapers style similar to what you see above in post 278, but when there is a bit more depth to the imagery they can still be enjoyable to read. I liked Flight, Volume 3 for that reason alone.

I greatly despise that old 'superhero comic book' art style. I'm about to read Watchmen but I keep shuddering every time I look at the art. I truly hope I can overcome that because I've heard lots of good things...but...ICK! -.-

I, too, like Graphic Memoirs (I'll add Stitches to Stephen's list). It seems like a genre well-suited to honest exploration of personal experience.

>279 mckait: Yes dear.

>280 Ape:, 281 More for y'all,, then. For me, no more. Too much effort for too little story.

xo