Prosfilaes's reading plans for 2010

Reading 75 books in a year isn't that hard for me, but I'd like to explore some more complex reading this year. Finish Nokto de la Galaksia Fervojo by Miyazawa Kenji, for one, even if it does mean going sentence by sentence and word by word with dictionary in hand. I'd like to add some of the Ancient Greek, Latin, Russian and older English literature I have around. It seems like whenever I try to start something not in prose, like most of those plays, it daunts me. Medea, the Homeric Hymns, Oblomov, The Way of the World, various anthologies of Chekov, etc.

In a different dimension, perhaps I should take more care to finish the anthologies I've been reading. Isaac Asimov presents the Great SF stories: 9 and friends, as well as Great Horror Stories: Tales by Stoker, Poe, Lovecraft and Others probably deserve reading in whole.

Of course, a number of these books are going to be light-reading mysteries and science fiction, and that's not really a bad thing.

Welcome to the group!

I have Oblomov set aside to read this year as well.

Welcome! Nice set of books you've got going!

I started with something easy but classic: A Study in Scarlet. It does show that Arthur Conan Doyle was not at his best in the novel form, and really does spend too long in Utah rambling about what led up to this. On the other hand, it's a good introduction to Holmes, and was the source of several quotations of his I've seen cited several times, and showed how Holmes and Watson got together. An introduction by Ed McBain was interesting, ranting on about Holmes's abuse of the police; more of an appendage to McBain's stories than Doyle's, though.

#2: The Mystery of Flight 427 was something I picked up from the public library. It was a mildly interesting documentary on a perplexing crash of a 737, but it wasn't something I fell I need to permanently to my personal library.

A Study in Scarlet was the first book I read this year! My thoughts were similar to yours, though I also enjoyed the book quite a bit. I plan on reading the rest of Doyle's stories about Sherlock Holmes this year.

#3: The Norby Chronicles was a book I'd read as a child, and having a wait, but not in the mood for critical thought, I bought and read this last night. (It was originally published as two books, and it's two separate stories, but I'm not going to split a 184 page book.) It wasn't exactly what I was remembering; Ing the Ingrate is about as subtle a villain as Ming the Merciless, and less realistic. And least the first book had a coherent plot; the second bounced around through time-space with no other controls than what the plot demanded. I do seem to remember that some of the later ones were better, but I don't trust the recollection.

#4: The Best of Weird Tales: 1923 is an anthology of stories published in Weird Tales in its first year, 1923. I really need to write up my review, but there were some really good stories. I'm curious if the restrictions that there be at least one story from each issue and no more than one story from each author hurt. For some reason, supernatural horror doesn't daunt me; the natural horror is much more terrifying. Also, I don't get Lovecraft; his story in this volume, Dagon, was one of my least favorite in the volume. Oooo-kay, so you've found this very creepy and non-descript monument on a non-descript but creepy island, and then you see this non-descript but creepy creature come up to. Great.

#5: Loyalty in Death is one of a long series of books by J. D. Robb starring Eve Dallas in a sci-fi mystery with heavy romance elements. They fall quite a bit short of being great literature, and there were a few points where I had to stop because it was preposterous. (If the Pentagon was blown up and 8,000 killed, an event referred to by "Arlington", Eve Dallas may be uneducated enough to not to recognize "Arlington", but everyone else would have.) But they're generally fun, even if this wasn't one of the best.

(Are you getting the impression that the classic literature I listed in my first post is not really a mainstay of my reading? I'm going to have to willfully switch out some of my reading list if I'm going to get to any of it.)

#9: I agree that the 'In Death' series is not great literature, but that does not stop me from loving the series!

Book #6: Freefall, by William Hoffer, was pulled off the library shelves at the same time as #2 was. It's a book about the Gimli glider; when the 767 first came out, at the insistence of the Canadian government, Air Canada ordered them in metric (a decision the Canadian government came down hard on them for), and when a plane had fuel gauge problems, they didn't know properly how to calculate how much fuel was in the plane. So in the middle of Canada, the plane runs out of fuel, and only some hotshot piloting manages to bring it down safely. Naturally, so long as Air Canada was in charge of the situation, they blamed the people involved, but a governmental investigation cleared them of blame and blamed poor procedures and instructions of Air Canada. That's really a summary of the disaster, rather than the book; the book spent much time on the lives of the passengers and the flight attendants and less on the details of the disaster.

The book itself was an easy read, but it was long on human interest and short on hard data. We got the life stories of practically everyone on board the plane, stretching a story that could have been told in 100 pages to 250, and everything that happened after the plane landed was told in 13 page, mostly filled with the aftermath of the passengers, not the investigation. I tend to enjoy reading about the investigation and the technical details of disasters, not the human interest parts. I lost track of who was who at several points and would have had to backtrack if I cared.

I hope you enjoy your next read more than you did Freefall.

12> It's not that I didn't enjoy Freefall, so much as it wasn't written the way I would have wrote it. I've been grumpy recently, and that's coming through in my reviews. I've generally enjoyed this year's reading, even if it isn't showing upon this thread.

Book #7: The Early Asimov, by Isaac Asimov. Overall it was a thoroughly enjoyable work, but it's primarily for Asimov fans. It's his early works (that weren't anthologized elsewhere) with biographic information connecting them. The Robot stories, the Foundation stories, "Marooned on Vesta" and "Nightfall" were found excluded. I found "Friars of the Black Flame" not nearly as bad as reputed, but there were a number of others that were pretty bad. (Ending the story with "And it turns out the 'humans' were talking about Earth" is not a plot twist; it's expected and boring.) A lot of history here, with stories testing out the features of the settings of the Spacers and of Foundation. I couldn't even begin to justify it to someone without a dozen Asimov books under their belt, and thirsting for more, but if you do, you won't regret it.

Book #8: I went to Arisia this weekend, and had some time to wait shuttling back and forth. So I read a few books in the downtime.

In Nomine: Angelic Player's Guide was a reread of a book for the roleplaying game In Nomine. I really, really want to run this game, whether as a straight good vs. evil bash or angel and demon alike the suffering peons of tyrannical bosses.

Book #9: Seven Years of Highly Defective People, a collection of Dilbert comics, was bought and read during Arisia. Fluff, but amusing fluff.

Book #10: Spacepaw by Gordon Dickson was also bought at Arisia. It's a story about a man suddenly assigned to interface with a primitive bear people on a planet, and suddenly thrown into a situation where the head of the program is gone and he's being positioned to fight one on one with one of these huge beasts. It was a reread, and got instantly added to my short-list of must-keep books, the Top 500 collection.

Book #10.5: I'm not really going to count this, but I read Another Monster at the End of This Book in the supermarket today. I thought about buying it, but I couldn't justify it right now. Good book, if not nearly as good as the first one.

18- The first one is great! It's my husband's favorite (and mine) children's book! I laugh every time we open it. We don't even have kids...but we read it to other people's kids. :)
I agree that the 'sequel' isn't quite as good, although still cute.

Books #11 & #12: Ed McBain's The Pusher and Ten plus One. Both books in his 87th Precinct series and light reads. The first is a reread, which I didn't realize until I was already in it. The first was pretty good, the second was fair; I had a complaint that the officers were handed a clue that was obvious to me but they didn't bother checking, and the whole book was fairly depressing. I have a large part of Nero Wolfe, Hercule Poirot and the In Death series, but these are very distinct for any of those.

I'm in the process of reading Great Short Short Stories: Quick Reads by Great Writers and The Mammoth Book of Vintage Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1950s, but they're longer and both anthologies that I'm less likely to read at one gulp.

Book #13: Having read Spacepaw, I put Spacial Delivery (by Gordon R. Dickson) on order. It came in today and I started reading it walking from the post office. Unfortunately, the reviews on LT for those two books are correct; Spacepaw is basically the enlarged, rewritten version of Spacial Delivery.

Book #14: Dictionary Days by Ilan Stavans. I picked this one up from the library, and started reading while doing laundry (took homework along, but forgot the list of problems). So I finished it today.

Dictionary Days is nominally about dictionaries, the back of the book making claims about the multilingual history of dictionaries and that's a subject that I am very interested in. So I read it, to discover that it's in a style I'm not fond of at all, the rambling, havering even, personal essay, with interjections of experimental literature. I don't really care about the troubles your friends had illegally immigrating to my country. I'm not really interested in a discussion you might have with Samuel Johnson if he were to show up at your house with his words written in quotes from his works. Mexican theater is also not on topic. He's a decent writer, but not enough to make me really enjoy these wild diversions.

As for dictionaries and language in general, there's a lot of meandering about the subject, including vague touching on the subject of obscenity (or even just the phrase "sexual intercourse") in dictionaries and multilingual definitions of love. It's interesting, but not solid. Given that he's the author of a dictionary of Spanglish, I would have thought he could have devoted one good section to the subject.

A couple errors did annoy me, and make me wonder what else might be found, though there was little enough to be concretely wrong about. The creation of Esperanto was described as mathematical, a term better used to describe Interlingua and friends which had mechanical aspects to their creation. (It is a big deal to some Esperantists, as the one of the values of Esperanto is the hand-crafted artistry that was put into it.) Another implied that the Normans had a hand in the language of Beowulf which predates them (and tosses in the Celts in the short list of influences on English, despite Celtic having a best a minor influence on the language.)

I'm sure that there's other, essay-loving people who would enjoy this book. It's well-enough written, if you don't mind the fact that it doesn't have a topic and is largely a stepping stone for the author to talk about his life and whatever else comes to mind.

I think I will pass on Dictionary Days and stick with Simon Winchester's The Meaning of Everything and The Professor and the Madman.

#23: I actually really liked Chasing the sun : dictionary makers and the dictionaries they made, by Jonathon Green, though it's probably the driest in some sense of all those books. Light on the biography, heavy on the history of the English dictionary.

#24: I will look for that one. Thanks for the recommendation.

Book 16: (Err, yes, I'm skipping a number. I'll find the time tonight to finish the review on the skipped book.) Stalking the Dragon, by Mike Resnick. This was a book I checked out of the library, and while it was dramatic enough to pull me through it, I kept thinking that I should put it down all the way through it.

An amusing enough book, and a decent enough mystery, but it annoyed from page 1 to the end. People in a fantasy universe still have to behave in a reasonable way for their universe. To pick on one chapter, in chapter 11, a store owner tries to sell a customer who wants one pound of hamburger 80,000 pounds of diplodocus. Why? No rational reason; apparently it was supposed to be funny. John Justin Mallory (the detective) then goes and threatens the shop owner for information, despite the fact he's supposed to be a contact and you reward contacts for bringing you information. At least you do if you want them to work for you again.

In fact, and this really stuck in my craw, John Justin Mallory threatens everyone he comes across, to the point of invading businesses with a cover charge by force. There's no persuasion or flattery; the one time it really fails, he calls on the Grundy as a threat. However realistic it may be in the setting, and I have a hard time believing that any cheap PI and his cat-girl could get away with it, it's sort of disturbing, especially as the book presents him as hero.

To top this off, the ending is anti-climatic; Mallory has to show Fluffy in the ring, and spends 15 pages in doing it without drama. An appendix full of random in-world stuff is tacked on, giving Resnick a chance to make cheap shots at Democrats and Obama in particular (and really what the hell?), finishing off with a four page bio that makes him out to be the greatest science-fiction author of all time.

#26: OK, I think I will give that one a pass. I really hope your next read is better for you!

Book 17: Witch High, edited by Denise Little, is a shared-world anthology centering around a high school in Salem, Massachusetts. Reading this book over lunch really ripped me out of a bad mood one day. I'm not going to take the time to review every story, but about the worst I could say is that a few of them were a little predictable. On the other hand, there was nothing in the running for a Hugo award, either.

The anthology as a whole got a few more complaints, though. They're all supposed to be set in the same world, but the editor apparently didn't bother to clean up points. Most notably, one story depends on a device that can detect the use of magic in a classroom, whereas the next implies that there's no trivial way to detect it. One story has a character who is the only one in her class not to get a familiar yet, when I can't remember another familiar in the whole book. The tone jumps around a lot--from very light boy-meets-girl to life-and-death action--which took a while to get used to, but I eventually accepted.

Overall, I gave it a 3.5. An entertaining set of fiction.

Book 18: I'm getting a little behind in my books, but I read these two on the 18th, during a trip out of time. (All the interesting stuff is in Boston, but that's an hour in and an hour back, so plenty of good reading time.)

Federation World, by James White is pretty similar in style to his Surgeon General books, though set in a completely different world where races are being contacted and the civilized members taken to this Dyson Sphere. The protagonists are on the edge; they don't want to live their lives in a utopia, so they're sent out to investigate other species and bring them to this world. It's basically a collection of three novellas. It's decent science fiction, though nothing world-shaking. Nice distinct aliens, as always. One thing that struck me after I finished the story is that this is one of very very few science fiction stories I've read where humans are nothing special; we don't run everything, we aren't the wolflings, we aren't the smartest, wisest, most violent, most willful, we just are one of many. The style hides this some, since it's written third-person limited from a human, and none of their (all-alien) bosses get any screen time, but it's there.

Book 19: The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union was bought and read the same night. It's an interesting little history, that I'll probably have to review because the current LT review is not only terse but has a a wrong thrust IMO.

The Ghost is about an engineer named Peter Palchinsky. Apparently Peter Palchinsky was all for revolution, but demanded that manufacturing and construction needed to take the human element of the worker into account, and that things should be designed before being built. (It's interesting that one of the repeated complaints I've read from computer programmers is that their bosses want them to skip the design phase and start coding immediately.) Apparently he was a good enough engineer to survive not only the Tsar but Lenin and the early Bolshevik days (he wasn't a huge fan of the Bolsheviks) but then ran into Stalin with a complete lack of the political sensibilities that would allow him to survive such an encounter. The author ties this into several of the engineering projects, like the White Sea Canal, where Stalin threw man-power and human lives (100,000, by some estimates) to produce as fast as possible a canal that has always been nearly completely useless.

I'm skeptical of some of the connections drawn here, but the heart of the book is in the biography and engineering stories, and they do shine through. Some mind-boggling facts jump out; in 1986, most of the members of the Politburo had engineering educations, but engineers had to take 3 non-technical classes: political economy (i.e. the Marxist stages of history), dialectic materialism, and the history of the Communist Party. I do feel that more explanation about why so few people were interested in studying engineering, if it was the road to political power it seemed to be.

Book 20: I'm going to say a bit less here than I want to, but I don't have time to be more expansive; maybe I'll come back to it. Today I finished Kedrigern in Wanderland by John Morressy. This was a fluke; I saw the title, and, being a huge Alice in Wonderland fan, picked it up. It doesn't have anything to do with Alice besides riffing off the name, but it looked interesting, so I gave it a chance. This is the type of fantasy that needs to make constant silly references to fairy tales, but it does work, providing a constant stream of dramatic tension and humor. It's not going on my classics list, but I will chase down its predecessors and sequels. I could really see this working with Arthur Rackham illustrations.

I've never tried Morressy's fantasy novels, although I do like his sf ones, the Sternverein series.

I've pulled Rex Stout's Red Threads out of my currently reading pile; I've started it, but I keep stopping for long enough to lose my place, and it's not something I really have any reason to push myself to read.

Book 21: Okay, so keeping this up is sort of falling apart. I read Sweet Silver Blues (Garrett, P.I.), a nice hardboiled PI fantasy novel, and immediately chased down the next one. An awesome book.

Book 22: Big Jack is another one of the In Death novels, though for historical reasons it's named differently. A pretty decent novel. There was one part at the end that stood out; we have a hostage scene about to start; the reader knows this though the hostage doesn't. All of a sudden the hostage, a complete dick from what little we've seen of him, starts showing his human side. It's not unbelievable, nor out of character, but it did stop my reading for a second, because it was necessary for maximal effect for that character to be humanized, and so the fact that he was at the last moment humanized struck me as a little artificial.

#34: I read that one last year and really enjoyed it - I still have not managed to get to number 2 yet.

#35: Big Jack was originally the second part of the Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb collaboration Remember When. If you want the entire story, you need to read it.

Book 23: Storm Front by Jim Butcher is a reread. I just got the most recent paperback (for my collection; I read the hardback from the library) and decided to reread the first in the series. It's a long series to reread everything before reading the next one to come out, but there are people in my family who do things like that. It's a good book, but it became more mature and well-rounded later in the series.

Oh, and I did go ahead and buy Hot Rocks. One of entirely too many books sitting around; "It would be great to buy books if you could also buy the time to read them" and all that.

Book 24: Target Practice by Rex Stout is a collection of early short stories by Rex Stout. I bought it mainly to scan pieces for Wikisource or Project Gutenberg; I expected it to be comparable to the Early Asimov, in having a lot of pieces by an author still struggling to find his voice and getting the skills of writing down. I was knocked down by the experience of reading it; The Pay Yeoman is one of the greatest stories I've ever read, IMO, and if I ever produce my own "Greatest Short Stories Ever" anthology, it will sit beside de Maupassant's Diamond Necklace and Poe's Cast of the Amontillado.

Book 25: Holiday in Death by J. D. Robb. I don't know what I can say; it's a pretty typical member of the series. As frequent, I skimmed some of the sex scenes, but it did have some very nice Peabody-Dallas scenes. I'm sort of amused (SPOILER) to find that it's one of the most positive depictions of incest I've seen outside of Heinlein. There's also a few things that I wished were cleaned up at the end; I still don't understand why the villain swung both ways.

Book 26: A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine is very different from most of the other stuff I've read. All about practical Stoicism in modern life, it left me with a lot to chew on, and is definitely going to deserve a reread at some point.

Book 2x.x; I gnawed on Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman; I'm not going to count it, since it was more of a random read of sections augmented by past reading, but a very nice book to have around in any case.

#38: I will have to look for Target Practice. I read my first Rex Stout book last year so I am definitely up for more.

Book 27: I found Creation in Death for $3 new at CVS, so I bought it. I had it read it before, but now that I had my own copy, I had to reread it. A pretty good book.

I'm stuck in the middle of many books; I've read short stories out of The World's Greatest Short Stories and The World Turned Upside Down, I'm working my way through Johano kaj Silvio (only a step above Dick and Jane, but I still have to look up every fifth word), and I've started the introductions on The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder and The Clouds. (As for the last, I figured I ought to try that classic literature at some point. The introduction seems to presume more knowledge of Ancient Greek politics than I have, though.)

Oh, and Book 26.5: How to Train Your Dragon: Gobber's Guide to Battling Dragons. I'm a sucker for a good bestiary of mythic creatures. It's definitely aimed at a young audience--maybe ten to twenty words a page for a 24 page book--but it's fun nonetheless.

#40: I am a huge fan of the In Death series, so I will congratulate you on your latest acquisition :)

Brief updates:

Book 28: Ceremony in Death by J.D. Robb (used from Amazon)
Book 29: The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes Nice stories, but the Final Problem doesn't really work, no matter what you think of killing off Sherlock Holmes. I'm tempted to try and write it as an incidental death story, where SH goes down in the process of confronting the villain.
Book 30: Kindred In Death (bought new at work; I'm only buying the paperbacks new, not the hardbacks.) This was a lot more disturbing than other In Death novels, though I'm not sure why. Maybe because the first death is to a young innocent girl, cruelly deceived and sadistically tortured, and there's nothing of the insane artistry that so many of the villains of In Death books suffer from.

Still working on the Clouds. It's not that long, but it's going to take some dedication to get through. It feels like he specifically took pokes at everyone in the crowd, a crowd that's been dead for a couple millenia, and comes off as very parochial for classic literature.

Book 31: Bitter Gold Hearts by Glen Cook. Not enough Tinnie, both in the book and in her response upon coming back.

#43: There's another series to which I need return. I read the first book and then never read any others although I own several. Thanks for the reminder.

Book 32: The Clouds by Aristophanes, Arrowsmith translation. It was interesting, but the comedy was a bit local, and it felt like most of the notes were "okay, so this is what the Greek actually said, as opposed to my translation."

More deeply for #31, it struck me that arguably the worst villain in the book got away with the gold, scot-free. Unlike other books, it didn't seem to be because the author believed in them; it was more in a shit-happens manner. One can dismiss the expectation of righteous judgment as morality play, at least a small part of what I read for is an antidote to the real work, for a universe where everything comes together at the end, and the good rewarded and the bad punished.

Book 33: Everyday Stalinism: ordinary life in extraordinary times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, by Sheila Fitzpatrick. Rather dark story of life in Soviet Russia in the 1930s. It was a good book, but a touch messy, in that it didn't all seem to fit together well, and mixing the workers and the people at the top made it less clear what was going on.

The environment at the time was a lot of unplanned randomness; for a system based on five-year plans, there was a lot of waffling back and forth, and the frustration of working under a system where orders are given that are so secret they can't be relayed to the people who need to implement them, and people are left to interpret cryptic statements by Stalin and others at the top, as well as a system where the solution to something going wrong (no shoes for sale) is not look at the problems (not enough shoes being made, not being delivered to open stores, low-quality shoes, no legal second-hand market for used shoes), but to blame people wrecking the system.

#46: I already have that one in the BlackHole. Thanks for your input on the book.

#47: My reviews a bit schizoid, isn't it; it's not really clear what's about the book and what's about the world described in the book.

Book 34: The Draco Tavern by Larry Niven. I've read some of these stories in other collections, and had some very high expectations. The collection didn't quite meet them; there were too many merely good stories among the great for me to run out and immediately order a copy for my personal library. I think he was over-stretching the limits of the short-short bar vignette in some cases. But still, Larry Niven has written some of the best science fiction short stories ever, and a couple of these tight pieces might fit in that exalted category.

(Oh, and urrgh. The publisher's description says "a group of aliens who call Mars and its moon home"; do they not know where the heck Europa is?)

#48: The publisher's description says "a group of aliens who call Mars and its moon home"; do they not know where the heck Europa is?

They had their telescopes pointed the wrong direction that day :)

Book 35: Fat Ollie's Book. Not one of Ed McBain's best; it felt like he was trying to stretch his wings, as the 87th precinct must have been getting tiring after 50 books, but the audience didn't want a change in series. So we get Fat Ollie as the main character, but a all-around bigot and jerk gets tiring after a while, as does the book Ollie was writing which was included in whole in the text, and is about as clunky prose as you can find.

I dropped The Frumious Bandersnatch, because it was overdue at the library and also had Fat Ollie in it. It's nice to see that he might be getting some character, but I'm not really in the mood for more of him.

Then I picked up We the Underpeople, a collection of works by Cordwainer Smith, one of Baen's collections "we bought the rights dirt-cheap because there's only vague memories of these authors left, and we hope they're good memories, but we're not going to push our luck by stringing them out in a series of small books, instead cramming the best stuff into a couple volumes, each cheap 700 page paperbacks." In any case, I tackled the first story, The Dead Lady of Clown Town, and found it overwhelming, in a good sense. He writes as if writing from the future of what he's talking about, but not particularly a Western-style history--comments say that Smith's writing style was informed by his long history in and study of China--with a quick, easy way of painting the world in large strokes and a loose storytelling style, and a world that is both incredibly alien and incredibly human. It's amazing science fiction.

It is, however, something that I think needs to be read in metered doses. So I've put aside the physical volume for now. At 110 pages, it's not quite long enough for me to list as a separate book, given that it doesn't have any historical existence as an independent volume.

So, Book 36: Naked in Death. Purely brain candy, especially as it's a reread. Roarke disturbs me a bit in this one, even on reread; he's very invasive and forceful.

#51: I re-read the 'In Death' series with regularity since I love it. I have to make time for some BC every now and again :)

Book 37: H. P. Lovecraft: An Annotated Bibliography. This was an mildly interesting read; at some points I continued just to say I've done it. I wish he'd been more frequently about sorting chronologically instead of alphabetically; it would have helped patterns stand out more. In any case, an interesting view of the history of Lovecraft, with only fan interest until the 1940s, when August Derleth started published them, especially in US Armed Forces editions, with France and South America catching on in 50s, with Dutch, German, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish and Japanese anthologies coming out. Unfortunately, as Joshi admits, he couldn't check up on rumors that there was Japanese translations as early as the 40s, and rumors about translations behind the Iron Curtain were hard to check in 1980 (and still, for those without the language ability), though he does list a couple periodical translations for Romanian and Polish.

Providence never forgot him, even in his least hour.

Book 38: A Rumpole Christmas. From the library, unfortunately, but a good book.

#54: I like the Rumpole series. I loved the Leo McKern TV series as well.

I loved how Rumpole referred to his wife as "she who must be obeyed" and there was an upper crust woman with a wonderful Greek or Roman name which escapes me at the moment.

Did you know Rumpole got "she who must be obeyed" from H. Rider Haggard's She, about a eternally young, eternally beautiful goddess found by explorers in Africa?

#57: I did not know that! I always thought Rumpole stole it from our Richard :)

Book 39: The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books that Shaped the Cold War by John V. Fleming is a book about four tell-all books by ex-Communists and their impact in history. Darkness at Noon is Arthur Koestler's novelistic entry, and this section of the book was entirely unmemorable to me. (I will note that I read the last two sections first, which didn't seem problematic in practice; if it gets a re-read, which is not improbable, I'll read it from the start.) Out of the Night was Jan Valtin's "autobiography", heavily fictionalized at points. (I find it a touch frustrating that reviews keep calling Jan Valtin a thug; one assault conviction should not color your whole life. On the flip side, I think the author went a little easy on him on the fictional part, and failed to analyze his contemporary comparisons well. A Million Little Pieces got ripped to shreds because the last thing anyone needs is another fake "my life on drugs".) I Chose Freedom was the most honest memoir, by the only author who really comes clean in the historical view. Both Valtin and Chambers were spies who used a number of pseudonyms, and Koestler had some rather unsavory habits too, but Kravchenko seems to be a solid honest man. Witness by Whittaker Chambers was the last book, and I don't find myself putting as total a trust in Chambers over Hiss that the author did, after glancing at a couple other sources, but Fleming does show off his skill at literary analysis with Witness, connecting it to Dostovesky and T.S. Eliot.

Hi! I just found your thread. Some very good reading. I've added your book #2 to my reading list: I didn't realize that there was a book out about the Flight 427 crash. (I live in southwestern PA, so that is of interest to me!)

#60: It was a decent book; nothing I'd recommend to someone who otherwise didn't care about the subject, but a dramatic and detailed description if you are. Not dry.

Book 40: Vengeance in Death was another of the Eve Dallas books. Again, wonderful characterization and a driving story, but what non-corrupt police system is going to leave the lead detective on a case where her butler is the main suspect?

Book 41: Monster Hunter International was something I picked up from the library. It's cheesy pulp, and several times I thought about putting it down, but it does what it does so well. Our hero of the story starts the story by taking down a werewolf with a .357 and then his bare hands. He then joins Monster Hunter International, meets the girl of his dreams (who he gets in the end) and uses lots and lots of firepower and physical force against the forces trying to destroy the world. A automatic shotgun with grenade launcher and bayonet attachments features fairly prominently. (Personally, not being a gun nut, but being a nuke nut, I'm a little unhappy by the text not following up on that mention.) This is an orgy of violence; while silver is helpful to kill creatures, to take down a master vampire seems to take a few machine guns, a lot of napalm and a van fully loaded with gasoline and explosives. There's no serious underplot here, but he carries it off in the style of a Lethal Weapon or Fifth Element, keeping it going without ever slowing down. 700 pages was a bit long, but there's a lot of action in those 700 pages.

#62: what non-corrupt police system is going to leave the lead detective on a case where her butler is the main suspect?

Not one I can think of, but that still does not keep me from enjoying the book :) I love that series.

Book 55: Wasp by Eric Frank Russell is another piece of 50s science fiction. As the LT reviewer mentions, there's not much here that's really science fictional. Worse yet, there's nothing here that's really foreign, much less alien. The people literally are funny-colored humans, and not once do I get the feeling of the country being more than fascist America. The LT reviewer called it Japan, but Japanese culture is far more alien to me this this planet's.

#64: I am going to have to check that one out. The purple guy on the cover got me!