In which Keith reads some books: Year 2 (2024)

(Just copying this first post from the Introductions topic...)

Hello!

Grew up in northern Vermont, went to school in St. Louis and Ann Arbor, now retired in Los Angeles after 31 years with the LA Public Library.

I read a lot of genre fiction, and have particular soft spots for time travel stories and locked room mysteries. My non-genre reading doesn't usually get too literary, but I might pick up one or two "serious" novels a year. In nonfiction, I mostly read about entertainment (film/TV, music, theater), LGBT issues and history, and political/Presidential/Supreme Court history.

But there are very few subjects or genres that I avoid entirely. I don't really do horror, I suppose, and I stay far away from right-wing political tracts.

This is my second year in Club Read, and it already feels like my LT "home." Much of my reading this year, though, will be driven by a different group, the Category Challenge, where I'm attempting to complete 5 different CATs/KITs (Alpha, SFF, Mystery, History, and Calendar) and the BingoDog. That's a total of 99 CAT/KIT/Dog spots to fill, and I read 50-60 books a year, so I have had great fun over the last month scouring through my TBR lists for books that fill multiple spots.

And I hope to squeeze in some reading from my major ongoing never-to-be-finished reading project -- award-nominated short SF. I hope to continue slowly making my way through the SF history, via the various "year's best" volumes and other anthologies. But I'm also going to start hopping around in that history with less strict focus on chronology, most likely by picking up best-of collections from some of the major authors in the field.

I'll have a thread of my own over in Category Challenge where I'll keep track of my progress on those challenges, but my reviews of what I read will live on my thread here in CR.

Happy reading to all!

That sounds ambitious, Keith! Anyway, happy retirement and happy reading to you!

Good luck with your category challenge and happy reading in 2024.

Keith, I'll be especially interested in comments on the short science fiction you read. Hope you have a great reading year.

Welcome back to Club Read 2024, Keith! Always nice to have a fellow New Englander in the group. Where in Vermont are you from? I lived in Norwich for a while back in the 1990s.

>5 labfs39: I grew up in Albany, which is in the middle of Orleans County. It's not really on the way to anywhere, so the only reason you'd ever find yourself there is if that's specifically where you were going. And since there's nothing touristy there, you were probably never there. As Robert Goolrick said of the small town in one of his novels, it's the kind of town that has only one of everything it has, and lots of things it doesn't even have one of.

>6 KeithChaffee: LOL, the same could be said for Limerick, Maine where I grew up, and where I recently moved back. It has grown some over the intervening decades, but still skews more toward the things it doesn't have one of than the things it does.

Happy reading in 2024! looking forward to what books and stories you share

Wish you a great reading year, Keith.

1: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu

(BingoDog: re-read a favorite; AlphaKit: Y; CalendarCat: Yu was born in January)

I first read this book shortly after it was published in 2010, and my thoughts about it haven't changed much since then. So I can't really improve on what I wrote (in another forum) then:

This lovely novel starts off well enough, as a pleasantly smart-alecky story about a time-machine repairman (who also happens to be named Charles Yu); between clients (to the extent that "between" means anything when you live in a time machine), he travels from place/time to place/time searching for his missing father. There are, eventually, the obligatory time travel paradoxes, one of which involves the future Charles handing the present Charles a book and telling him that it contains all the answers. The book, of course, is Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

And if the book were just that, it would be an amusing diversion. But while you're not looking, the novel sneaks up on you and becomes a poignant, melancholy meditation on memory -- which is, after all, its own sort of time machine -- and its cousins, nostalgia and regret.

The writing is a joy to read, and often caught me off guard with the beauty of its insights. I love, for instance, this paragraph:

Hitting the peak of your life's trajectory is not the painful part. The painful day comes earlier, comes before things start going downhill, comes when things are still good, still pretty good, still just fine. It comes when you think you are still on your way up, but you can feel that the velocity isn't there anymore, the push behind you is gone, it's all inertia from here, it's all coasting, it's all momentum, and there will be more, there will be higher days, but for the first time, it's in sight. The top. The best day of your life. There it is. Not as high as you thought it was going to be, and earlier in your life, and also closer to where you are now, startling in its closeness. That there's a ceiling to this, there's a cap, there's a best-case scenario and you are living it right now. To see that look in your parents' faces at the dinner table at ten, and not recognize it, then to see it again at eighteen and recognize it as something to recognize, and then to see it at twenty-five and to recognize it for what it is.

This is a marvelous little jewel of a book.

That’s a haunting quote. Sounds like a fun first book.

sounds like a book Id want to read

>10 KeithChaffee: That sounds really interesting. Good luck with your challenges.

2: The Civil War of Amos Abernathy, Michael Leali

(BingoDog: epistolary; AlphaKit: A; HistoryCat: American Wars and Conflicts)

Juvenile fiction, aimed at middle schoolers.

Amos is a junior volunteer at the Local History Park, doing a variety of late 19th-century re-enactments for park visitors. As the novel opens, he's 12, and dealing with a major crush on Ben, a new volunteer at the park. That leads him to wonder what life would have been like for LGBT+ people in the era of the park.

His research leads him to the story of Albert D. J. Cashier, a Civil War soldier (an actual historical figure, not created for this book) who would probably be identified in modern terms as a trans man. When the park decides to retire one of its older exhibits, Amos decides that Albert's story should be the basis for a new exhibit on the lives of LGBT+ and other overlooked people in the post-Civil War era.

The novel alternates time frames and narrative styles. In one frame, Amos is narrating the events of his 8th-grade year in his journal, in the form of letters that he writes to Albert. It's a turbulent year. There's lots of drama in his relationship with Ben (the course of true crush never did run smooth), a new boyfriend for his widowed mother, a variety of turmoil at the history park, and Amos's increasing awareness of the injustice in the world, both past and present.

Those letters alternate with Amos's first-person narration of the events on the climactic day, the park's annual recreation of the local Civil War battle. We're told throughout these chapters that Amos is planning something big for the end of the day. I could do without the narrative coyness -- never been a fan of authors who keep talking about The Big Important Thing without telling us what The Big Important Thing IS -- but Leali does do a fine job of showing us how important it is to Amos and how nervous he is about it; there's some real tension building in that half of the story.

Leali also excels in creating characters. Amos is immensely likeable, smart for his age without being cloyingly precocious; Ben, despite spending significant parts of the novel offstage, is sharply enough drawn when he does appear that he remains vivid even when he's present only in Amos's thoughts. The supporting characters have enough personality that some of them could carry stories of their own; I'd enjoy a book about Amos's best friend, Chloe, who aspires to be the history park's first Black and first female blacksmith.

And when we get to the Big Important Thing that the novel has been building toward, it works. What Amos and his friends are doing, and the courage it takes to do it, brings real emotional heft to the final pages.

There are big ideas here, presented in a way that will be informative for the book's target audience without feeling medicinally educational or didactic. A fine book, smart and charming.

Looks like your reading year is off to a good start! Both books sound good, I’m interested in the first one.

>14 KeithChaffee: This sounds good and my local library has copies, so on to the wishlist it goes.

I'll be happy to follow your reading again this year, and as >4 markon: particularly interested in the short fiction you read.

3: Guilty Creatures, edited by Martin Edwards

(BingoDog: fewer than 100 copies in LT libraries; currently 38; MysteryKit: short stories)

Another collection in the British Library Crime Classics series, this one collecting stories involving animals.

Not the strongest collection in the series, but there are a couple of memorable stories. "The Courtyard of the Fly" by Vincent Cornier has a clever solution, and "The Hornet's Nest" by Christianna Brand is an entertaining variation on a classic Agatha Christie idea. "Pit of Screams" by Garnett Radcliffe is more of an anecdote than a story, but it does build an effectively creepy atmosphere.

I was happy to see a wider range of animals than the expected cats and dogs, either of which could probably fill a volume of their own. In addition to flies and hornets, we get stories involving a horse, a monkey, slugs, earthworms, and a variety of birds.

4: The Incomplete Enchanter, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt

(BingoDog: book with an ugly cover; SFFKit: epic fantasy)

The first two in a series of five novellas written by de Camp and Pratt. Titles of the available collections can get complicated, so here's the quick overview (and I'm not even going to try to sort out the correct touchstones for the different volumes):

The Incomplete Enchanter (1941) includes "The Roaring Trumpet" and "The Mathematics of Magic." The Castle of Iron (1950) is a novel-length expansion of a novella originally published in 1941. Those three stories were collected in 1975 as The Compleat Enchanter. The remaining stories, "Wall of Serpents" (1953) and "The Green Magicians" (1954) were collected in 1960 as Wall of Serpents. All five are gathered The Complete Compleat Enchanter (1989).

After Pratt's death in 1956, de Camp was reluctant to continue the series, believing that he could not recreate the collaborative magic on his own. He was eventually persuaded to return to the series in the 1990s, when he wrote two additional stories and allowed several other authors to write stories, some of them based on his outlines. Those stories are gathered in two collections, The Enchanter Reborn (1992) and The Exotic Enchanter (1995). One additional story by Lawrence Watt-Evans appears in a 2005 anthology of stories written in tribute to de Camp. There is no single-volume collection of the entire series.

So what are all of these stories? They are the adventures of Harold Shea, a psychologist journeying into various fictional and mythological worlds of fantasy, where he finds that his logical mind isn't always helpful. In this volume, he travels into the worlds of Norse mythology ("The Roaring Trumpet") and Spenser's The Faerie Queene ("The Mathematics of Magic").

I chose to pick up this particular combination of stories because these are the two stories included in my master list of award-nominated SF stories; both are Retro Hugo nominated novellas. I went in knowing that this sort of fantasy is not my cuppa, and these stories in particular are very much not written for someone who's not into fantasy. De Camp and Pratt do not spend a lot of time on exposition about the worlds to which Harold and his colleagues travel; it is assumed that the reader comes in with a basic knowledge of Norse mythology and Spenser's poem.

I could sort of stumble through the Norse story with my Marvel Comics level of knowledge. I at least know who Odin, Thor, and Loki are, and have some vague sense of Ragnarok as an apocalyptic event. But by the time the third or fourth different set of giants show up, all of them with indistinguishable Nordic names (the letter "j" pops up in so many places where the letter "j" has no business being...), I was floundering. And I know nothing about Spenser, so most of that story was incomprehensible to me.

If you like this sort of thing, though, I think you might enjoy these stories. The prose is a touch old-fashioned, but doesn't have the heavy clumsiness that you often find in SF and fantasy of this era. And in the chapters set in our world, the banter among Harold and his colleagues zips along with a crisp energy that made me understand why some critics refer to these tales as "screwball fantasy."

Even when I was lost about the story in the fantasy worlds, I could tell that certain plot points or bits of dialogue would be funny or poignant or ominous if only I had the knowledge to appreciate them.

So I'm left with a weird critical reaction: I think these are probably good stories, even if I don't have the background to appreciate or enjoy them.

>19 KeithChaffee: well, not for me, but i liked reading your history of this and about your experience.

and that is one hell of an ugly cover, chosen wisely

>21 cindydavid4: That cover looks like something my daughter would like; she’s all into skulls and eyes falling out. Not my cup of tea.

Enjoyed your review of The Incomplete Enchanter The novella based on the faerie Queen appeals. I usually enjoy books by L Sprague de Camp so I will find a copy of this.

>19 KeithChaffee: Sounds interesting! I have even less knowledge of Norse mythology than you have, but I tend to have a high tolerance to not understanding what’s going on in a book. I’ve never read anything by Sprague de Camp, I think.

5: The Vanished Birds, Simon Jimenez

(BingoDog: POC author; RandomKit: Early Birds)

The lives of three people -- a starship captain, an engineer, and a mysterious boy who does not speak -- are gradually woven together in Jimenez's debut novel. And I do mean "gradually;" while the connections between the characters become obvious fairly quickly, they travel in separate plotlines for most of the book.

It's not until the final act that their arcs really converge. And when they do, they clomp their way into a hamfisted "capitalism bad" tale that lacks subtlety; the new technology that the Evil Capitalists introduce is literally driven by the blood of their victim.

Jimenez's pacing is erratic. The climax of the book is abruptly rushed, and it feels even more so after we've slogged through other parts of the story that dragged on well beyond the moment where the point had been made and my attention was wandering.

His supporting characters are unusually thin and poorly developed. I never did understand, for instance, the motives for the villainous act that sets up the third act of the novel, because that character does nothing in the preceding chapters except lurk silently in the background being obviously evil for no particular reason.

On the other hand, some of Jimenez's writing is lovely to read; the first chapter of the novel could stand alone as a fine short story. And I enjoyed the way that music is used as a central part of the plot.

Mixed feelings on this one, but overall, mildly diasppointed.

I don’t like the sound of that, but enjoyed review.

>26 dchaikin: Thanks. It's the hardest kind of book to say anything about, the one that doesn't provoke a strong reaction in either direction. There's always plenty to say about a book you love, and who doesn't love the chance to rummage through the trunk of invective for a precisely calibrated zinger when you hate a book? But the "meh" book, the one that isn't vile but doesn't quite work? That's a challenge.

>27 KeithChaffee: and who doesn't love the chance to rummage through the trunk of invective for a precisely calibrated zinger when you hate a book?

I love it! Nicely put

Yes, loved the zinger line! 🙂 Yeah, it’s tricky sometimes. I don’t like reviewing books written by someone I know. I also hate when i read a great book and can’t quite explain how it works.

>29 dchaikin: I don't think I've picked up any such books since I've been at LT -- not like I'm hobnobbing with the literati all the time, y'know -- but my standard policy on books by people is that I will note having read them, if only for the sake of having my list be complete, but I don't comment beyond that.

6: Mislaid in Parts Half-Known, Seanan McGuire

(BingoDog: published in year ending in 24)

When I read the previous volume in this series last year, I commented that it felt like half a book, ending at the point where the main story was just about to start. And that's exactly what was going on, because here's the second half of Antsy's story.

It is, I'm afraid, a somewhat disjointed story, as a large group of students at the Home for Wayward Children go on a drawn-out quest, spending a chapter or two in each of a long series of other worlds, with nothing terribly interesting happening in most of them.

Some of those students reach what seems to be the end of their stories, the cumulative effect of which is to suggest that the series itself is nearing its end. That effect is strengthened by the frequent hints that the next book will finally give us the full story of the school's founder. But all of those little mini-climaxes feel like a distraction from the fact that the ending of Antsy's story wasn't really interesting enough to make a book in its own right.

Had these two books been published as the single novel that they actually are, instead of as two novellas, it would have felt more cohesive and complete than either of the existing books does on its own. But we still would have been left with the fact that what happens to Antsy in this world, the horrific events that lead her to escape through a door in the first place, is by far the most dramatically compelling part of her story. The world to which she travels is the least interesting in the series, and much of what happens to her there is simply a different form of the abuse she suffered in the "real" world.

And -- I suppose this might be considered a mild spoiler -- when she does get to return to her fantasy world, it's not to fulfill any desires of her own, it's to serve for the rest of her life as a caretaker and protector of other abused people. That's a noble calling, certainly, but it's a rather glum suggestion that an abused person isn't entitled to a free and fulfilling life of their own; their highest purpose can only be to continue to live a life dominated by the endless cycle of abuse.

Collectively, these two books are a huge letdown from the rest of this series. If the end really is coming, I will be crossing my fingers that it brings a return to form.

Too bad Keith. Interesting thoughtful review

DNF: The Biggest Bluff, Maria Konnikova. A "my year of" book. Konnikova, a psychologist who's never played poker before -- she doesn't even know how many cards are in a deck -- recruits a World Series of Poker champion to teach her the game, with an eye towards playing in the WSOP herself. Not a bad or an unreadable book; just wasn't clicking for me. The psychology/poker balance leaned more heavily towards the psychology than I was interested in.

>25 KeithChaffee: Sorry but I can’t help myself - three people -- a starship captain, an engineer, and a mysterious boy walk into a pub …

>31 KeithChaffee: Hi Keith. This is the third Seanan McGuire mention I've seen on Club Read, and it's only January. A sign? It does become difficult to sustain a series over time, perhaps McGuire is running into that particular fatigue.

>35 rv1988: It’s a series with a very devoted following. I’m not surprised that there would be multiple CR folks eager to read the new book as soon as it became available.

The Antsy story is clearly a very personal one for McGuire, and I think the problems I had with the story may just be a matter of the author finding it harder to get sufficient critical distance from this particular piece of work.

7: The Past Through Tomorrow, Robert A. Heinlein

(BingoDog: book from similar LT library; shared w/parasolofdoom)

Early in his career, Heinlein published a series of about two dozen stories that made up his "Future History," stories drawn from his imagining of how American history might play out over the next two hundred years or so. Those stories are collected in this volume.

It's a solid collection of 1940s SF, and entirely reflective of Heinlein's principal themes. His characters are hyper-competent, with significant emphasis placed throughout on the importance of being able to manage whatever crisis might arise, ideally without relying on others. There is a general wariness of government, religion, and other instutitions; the overall political vibe is a (relatively) sane version of libertarianism.

It is mildly distracting to modern eyes that Heinlein's male characters cannot seem to look at a woman without spending a few moments thinking about how lovely she is (and they are all lovely, just as his men are all manly and good-looking), but that's a problem of the era, and not specific to Heinlein. And his women are allowed to be just as competent as his men, and to rise to levels of significant power and responsibility. (His attitudes about sex and gender relationships wouldn't get really weird until later in his career, when they make some of his late novels very hard to get through.)

Those attitudes aside, Heinlein was a damned good genre writer. His stories are well constructed and efficiently told. His prose is never particularly memorable, but neither is it filled with the overwrought purple prose that often plagues early SF; it's clean, crisp, and functional. His characters lean towards a certain type, but there is enough variety that you wouldn't mistake the leading characters of (for instance) "Requiem," "Misfit," and "Methuselah's Children" for one another.

Half a dozen of these stories were eventually nominated for Retro Hugo awards, five of them from the single year of 1941. Those six can be divided into three pairs. "The Man Who Sold the Moon" and "Requiem" are about the life and death of the businessman who singlehandedly creates a space program to fulfill his childhood fantasies of going to the moon. "If This Goes On--" imagines a rebellion against the theocracy that has taken over American government; "Coventry" focuses on some of the changes the rebels make to government after the theocracy is defeated. "The Roads Must Roll" and "Blowups Happen" aren't quite so neatly tied together, but both are at least partly about the potential of labor disputes to disrupt society.

There aren't many writers of any genre from this era whose work is all still readily available, and still read by modern readers. At the peak of his career, Heinlein dominated the world of SF as few have ever done, and that domination was fully deserved.

Never read Heinlein, although reviews pop up here. Certainly sounds like you really enjoyed this. I enjoyed getting your perspective on him.

I'm still catching up on everyone's threads here and I've enjoyed reading your reviews.

>10 KeithChaffee: I've had the Charles Yu book on my to read list for a while but have never got round to it. Good to see a positive review of it, sounds like it's worthwhile.

>37 KeithChaffee: I used to really like Heinlein's Future History stories. It's been a while since I read anything by him. Sometimes I feel like getting back to his books, but I worry about hitting something like Farnham's Freehold again.

>39 valkyrdeath: Farnham's Freehold is one of the few Heinlein novels I haven't read (*). I went through a completist phase on him when I was an undergrad, and kept up with him through those dreadful last few novels. That's right, I have read The Cat Who Walks Through Walls; I have read To Sail Beyond the Sunset, people, and lived to tell the tale!

(* -- And after a quick look at the Wikipedia plot summary, I think I will let it remain unread. Good god, that sounds horrifying, and I can imagine exactly how Heinlein would make it even worse.)

I look forward to hearing what you think of the Yu if you get around to it.

>40 KeithChaffee: I was doing a completionist read through all the Heinlein works I could get hold of myself back then, but that one brought it to a halt for a while. It was horrendous. Aside from the obvious things from the Wikipedia page, the main character was also one of the most repulsive "heroes" of any book I've read, a man who threatens to shoot his own son if he doesn't agree to unquestioningly obey every order he's given.

Oh, my. I had to investigate Farnham's Freehold after reading your comments; and it seems that the LT reviewer who wrote simply, "A steaming pustule of racism & misogyny masquerading as a novella" just about sums it up. The only Heinlein I've read, Stranger in a Strange Land was decades ago, and I found it interesting.

>38 dchaikin: door into summer is my absolute fav of his

My first Heinlein was Have Space Suit -- Will Travel, which I read when I was 9 or 10. Haven't re-read it in at least 20 years, but I'll always have a soft spot for it.

>37 KeithChaffee: Great review of The Past Through Tomorrow, and I agree with your views on Heinlein's early works vs his later ones.

>10 KeithChaffee: I must have overlooked this excellent review in the early flurry of too many Jan. posts. I've heard of it (I love the title), but somehow hadn't realized he also wrote Interior Chinatown which I loved. Onto the wishlist it goes!

> Nice overview of Heinlein's output.

Your reviews are always interesting and >19 KeithChaffee: that is indeed an ugly cover!

8: They Died in Vain, Jim Huang, editor

In 2000, the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association published 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century, a reader's guide to mystery novels. The books and authors in that volume were all reasonably well known. For this follow-up volume, published two years later, IMBA members were asked to recommend their favorite "overlooked, underappreciated, and forgotten" books. Huang's only criteria in gathering their responses were that no author would be represented more than once, and no bestsellers were allowed.

(Huang returned to this well at least once more. The 2006 Mystery Muses collects similar recommendations from mystery authors, and it is now on its way to my local branch library.)

This book contains 103 short essays -- one or two pages each -- in which booksellers recommend a favorite book that even mystery fans might have somehow missed. The essays are well written, and as one might expect from booksellers, they do a fine job of teasing the story, placing each book in its proper sub-genre, and in many cases, summarizing the author's career beyond the recommended book.

It is in the nature of a book like this that you may have trouble finding some of these books. Huang notes in his introduction that 53 of the 103 books are out of print, and some of those were only a few years old at the time. (And that was in 2002; one imagines that even more of them are OP by now.) But I am lucky enough to have a large urban public library where I can find a copy of most of these books, and I was pleasantly surprised at how many of them have been reissued as e-books.

Did I need to read this book? No, I did not. With a Libby wishlist that's already several hundred titles long -- far longer than I can ever possibly finish, especially since publishers are so thoughtless as to keep publishing new books instead of letting us get caught up on our TBR piles -- I didn't need to be teased with 103 possible new books to read. But I enjoyed the tease very much, and there are eighteen more books on that wishlist than there were last week.

>49 KeithChaffee: I had to chuckle at your last paragraph

>50 labfs39: hee really, Im not a mystery reader but I must admit it has me curious. this is what we are discussing on the Avid Reader thread, can I share it with them?

Sure. That conversation is what led me to the book. Someone mentioned the "Forgotten Books" website, and They Died in Vain is one of the resources listed there.

>52 KeithChaffee: hee so the circle of books continues.....:)

>52 KeithChaffee: dangerous place here. Glad you got away with only 18 more.

>49 KeithChaffee: - I can see that as being dangerous, Keith. I think adding only 18 is showing remarkable restraint.

9: Tinseltown, William J. Mann

(MysteryCat: true unsolved mysteries; CalendarCat: the book's murder happened in February; BingoDog: read a CAT)

William Desmond Taylor was a leading film director of the silent era, with almost 60 films to his credit. He was murdered on February 1, 1922, shot in his home, a crime that remains officially unsolved. Mann lays out the events leading up to the murder, follows its aftermath, and offers his theory as to who committed the murder.

There were a wide range of suspects to choose from, and attention was focused at various times on three young actresses, each resorting to a variety of desperate measures -- some less legal than others -- to keep her career alive, and each with a host of unsavory friends, family members, and criminal associates.

The murder came at a bad time for Hollywood, which was still reeling from a variety of scandals, most notably the ongoing series of trials in the Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle case. "Hollywood" had become shorthand among the nation's conservative activists for moral depravity. (The "Moms for Liberty" have always been with us in one form or another.)

The largest of the studios in the young film industry was Famous Players-Lasky, run by Adolph Zukor. Given the size of the studio, it's not surprising that a lot of the scandals involved Famous Players actors and directors, and each new scandal only made Zukor more desperate to hush up the bad news for fear that it would lead the "church ladies" of the era to push for official censorship of the industry. Eventually, that fear led Zukor and his colleagues in the industry to offer Will Hays a position as a sort of internal watchdog; if the industry had to be regulated, went the logic, better that it should be regulated by someone they might have at least some control over.

The Zukor/Hays/studio machinations half of the story was the most interesting part of the book. The actual murder was just a sad, seamy story of desperate, pathetic people struggling to survive in an industry that finds them disposable. And Mann's narration of the events surrounding the murder mixes titillation -- "ooh, look -- sex! drugs! murrrrrrrder!" -- with Puritanical scolding -- "aren't you the naughty one for being so titillated by this horrible tragedy!". That's not an unusual combination in true crime. Mann's style reminded me so much of a typical Dateline NBC story that it was hard to get the voice of Dateline's Keith Morrison out of my head as I read.

To be sure, it's extremely readable. Mann knows how to tell a story, and he keeps his large cast of characters from becoming overwhelming. As he jumps from one bit of the story to another, I was never at a loss to remember who each person was; even the low-level guys who could easily blur into Thug 1, Thug 2, Thug 3... maintain their individual identities.

As for Mann's proposed solution to the murder, it's certainly plausible, but I don't find Mann's evidence nearly as conclusive as he claims it to be.

I am not a big true crime reader, and probably wouldn't have picked this up were it not for the category challenges. But even though I found the smirky titillation offputting, I did enjoy the Hollywood history part of the book, and I admired the skill which which Mann lays out a complex narrative.

>56 KeithChaffee: sounds fun. The dateline comment made me smile.

>37 KeithChaffee: good review.

>43 cindydavid4: I remember that I liked it.

A few years ago I stumbled upon someone's almost pristine collection of early Heinlein, bought it, and I've read a lot of the books. I really enjoyed Double Star, and Tunnel in the Sky got a solid 4 stars from me. Others that made the better than average list were Time for the Stars, The Menace From Earth, and The Green Hills of Earth.

I loved Stranger in a Strange Land, I Will Fear No Evil, The Number of the Beast, and Friday as a young adult/adult reader. I managed to get through The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, but by then I was done with Lazarus Long's sexual escapades stories. I have no interest in rereading any of them. I read and despised Job on its initial release, and I wasn't a religious person, it was that bad.

But when I decided to reread Friday I discovered that I still loved the character. The rest of Heinlein's later books don't interest me, but many of his earlier works are worth reading. And I recently reread Friday, again.

I like several of your favorites, but for some reason, Citizen of the Galaxy has always been my favorite Heinlein. I've never quite figured out why - I like culture clash (and there's several bits), I like competent characters who aren't swell-headed about it - but somehow that particular story just clicked for me, more than I would have expected.

>56 KeithChaffee: Great review. This line in particularly stood out, because it feels very accurate for so much true crime:

Mann's narration of the events surrounding the murder mixes titillation -- "ooh, look -- sex! drugs! murrrrrrrder!" -- with Puritanical scolding -- "aren't you the naughty one for being so titillated by this horrible tragedy!". That's not an unusual combination in true crime.

10: Mystery Muses, edited by Jim Huang and Austin Lugar

Very much in the mold of Huang's They Died in Vain collection, which I talked about a few posts back, but each of the changes works to make this a less interesting book. This time, 100 authors have been asked for short commentary on the classic mystery that inspired them to be mystery writers.

Shifting from obscure books to classics means that the books covered are more familiar, and the commentary less surprising. Does any mystery reader really need two more pages of thoughts on "The Tell-Tale Heart" or And Then There Were None?

And changing the commenters from booksellers to authors is deadly for two reasons. First, recommending books and making them sound appealing to potential readers is what booksellers do; they have to be good at it. Get the customer to buy the book, and you stay in business. Authors, at least the authors gathered here, haven't spent much time developing that skill.

Second, most of these authors aren't all that interested in talking about the books they're ostensibly talking about. Those books are merely vehicles for them to plug their own books. The book becomes a long series of "if you liked classic novel X, then let me tell me you why you're going to love my books."

I suppose this book might be of some use to a reader looking to take their first steps into the mystery genre. Even if the recommendations aren't all that well written, they'd at least take from it a list of 100 worthwhile books, and maybe get just enough information about each to pick a good starting point.

They Died in Vain is a joyful meeting of a giant book club in which every member can't wait to tell you about their favorite book; Mystery Muses is a droning series of self-promoting commercials.

>61 KeithChaffee: any books added to your list? I’ll pass on this one.

>62 dchaikin: No, no additions to Mount TBR this time.

11: Shambling Towards Hiroshima, James Morrow

(SFFKit: critters and creatures; BingoDog: three-word title: SF awards: 2010 Hugo/Nebula/Locus novella nominee, Sturgeon winner)

Goofy alternate history set at the end of WWII. The Germans have surrendered, and the US military is grappling with whether or not to drop nuclear weapons on Japan to end the war for good.

Morrow imagines that in addition to the Manhattan Project, the US has also been working on a second ultimate weapon: giant, fire-breathing, bipedal, killer lizards. Godzillas, for lack of a better word, though several years ahead of the creation of that character.

The threat of nukes hasn't gotten the Japanese to surrender, so, maybe a demonstration of the havoc one of these creatures could wreak on a small coastal city will do the trick. And since you can't very well demonstrate that with a real monster and a real city, the demo will require a scale model of a city and an actor in a lizard suit. But if the demo is to really scare the Japanese, the actor must be able to convince them that he really is a miniature version of the giant killer, and not just a guy in a lizard suit.

And that is where our narrator, Syms Thorley, enters the picture. After years of playing various deformed mutants and horrible creatures in C-level monster movies, no one shambles quite like Syms Thorley, making him the perfect choice to don the lizard suit and destroy the model town.

Thorley tells the story of the Knickerbocker Project, in which the military pulls out all the stops to make its demonstration a success. Actual Hollywood figures of the era become minor characters --Willis O'Brien on special effects, James Whale as director. The demo even gets its own orchestral score from Franz Waxman.

It's a silly concept, and Morrow dives headlong into the goofiness, milking laughs from Thorley's bungling attempts to keep the project a secret from the film studio where he's currently filming yet another Frankenstein knockoff, his girlfriend's apparent lizard fetish, and the comedy of errors that is the actual demonstration.

A shift in the final pages to a darker, more serious tone doesn't work, bringing the story to an end that's heavier than it can carry. But until those last few pages, this was a loopy lark.

They died in Vain is the one to go for - thanks for that I can't resist those sort of books

12: Mrs. Jeffries and the Midwinter Murders, Emily Brightwell

(HistoryKit: Georgian/Regency/Victorian Britain; BingoDog: author is 65+; Brightwell was 73 when the book was published)

Fortieth volume in a long-running series.

Mrs. Hepzibah Jeffries is the housekeeper for London police inspector Gerald Witherspoon, and although he doesn't know it, she plays a large part in his unusual success rate at solving murder cases.

When Witherspoon gets a new case, Mrs. Jeffries begins her regular meetings with the household staff (joined by a few friends from the neighborhood), and they use their contacts among other household employees, local shopkeepers, and a few local criminals to gather information. They pass their knowledge on to Constable Barnes, Witherspoon's Watson-esque sidekick, who makes sure that Witherspoon follows up on any promising leads. When Witherspoon returns home each night, it is his custom to talk about the day's work with Mrs. Jeffries over a glass or two of sherry, so she's getting all of the information from the official investigation, helping to shape her own unofficial inquiries.

That's a clever way to structure a mystery, giving us a wide variety of characters at every class level in a very class-conscious society. It also means that at virtually every moment, the reader actually does know more than any individual person working on the investigation. We have the chance, if we are clever enough, to put together what Witherspoon and the police have learned with what Mrs. Jeffries and her friends have learned well before either of those groups get the complete picture.

The mystery in this particular installment involves the death of a wealthy businesswoman, strangled to death in a locked room with the sash of her husband's dressing gown. There's the usual array of suspects -- her two adult stepchildren, who despise her; her best friend, living with them while renovations are done on her own home; and her American nephew, an Episcopal priest doing research at the British Library.

Those characters are nicely drawn, and Brightwell makes good use of the limited number of pages each one gets to flesh them out. While Mrs. Jeffries' large crew of fellow investigators feel a little thinner as characters, I imagine that over the course of the preceding 39 volumes, their backstories have been laid out in bits and pieces; the reader who's been with the series from the beginning probably doesn't need as many details about those characters in any given book.

Similarly, there is a minor subplot in this volume -- something about a disgraced and disliked former police officer whose unexpeced return to the force is expected to cause problems for Witherspoon -- that didn't mean much to me, but it's blended into the story well enough that it was never too distracting when it popped up.

And yet, for all of its obvious strengths, I don't plan to return to this series. It's a nice book, a highly competent book, and I can understand why it would have a devoted enough following to last as long as it has. It didn't push my particular buttons hard enough to push it from "that was pleasant" to "I need more of that," but I can easily imagine plenty of readers who would adore it.

I had never heard of this series or this author until about a week ago, and wound up reading it only because of my decision to dive so deeply into the category challenges this year. A book that I had expected to read this month got knocked off the list at the last minute, which required some scrambling to find books to meet the February challenges that it would have filled. This was the book that kept the literary Jenga tower from collapsing.

>66 KeithChaffee: This was the book that kept the literary Jenga tower from collapsing.


Great image. The challenges seem to be a nice way to mix up your reading.

>67 labfs39: They certainly are leading me to books I probably wouldn't otherwise have picked up. The HistoryKit, in particular. I'm already fairly sure I won't repeat the complete challenge immersion again next year, but I'm learning a lot from the experience.

13: Hid from Our Eyes, Julia Spencer-Fleming

(AlphaKit: E and F)

9th in the Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne series.

One of the interesting things about this series is that it began as contemporary and is slowly becoming a series of period pieces. When the first volume was published in 2002, it was set in roughly the then-present day. As years have passed between books, each of which is set no more than a few months after the last one, the series has slipped out of sync with real time. This book, published in 2020, is set in 2005.

Our principal characters are Clare Fergusson, mililary helicopter pilot turned Episcopal priest, and Russ Van Alstyne, police chief in Millers Kill, a small town in upstate New York. In this book, they're only recently married, and still learning how to juggle two careers with their infant son.

The central mystery is the death of a young woman, found lying on a remote back road wearing an expensive party dress, with no visible signs of foul play. That triggers painful memories for local law enforcement, because similar young women were found dead in the same spot, wearing similar clothing, in both 1952 and 1972, and neither murder was ever solved.

For Russ, the memories are especially difficult. In 1972, he was just returned from Vietnam when he discovered the body, and he was one of the principal suspects. Charges were never filed, and the police chief at the time was ultimately convinced that he wasn't the killer, but he was never formally cleared. And the prospect that this murder might also go unsolved is troubling because of an upcoming vote that could disband the Millers Kill Police Department and return policing duties for the area to the state police.

Meanwhile, Clare (who takes more of a back seat for most of this installment in the series) is offered an opportunity to take on an intern, a seminary student who will help to reduce her workload while learning about the duties of a priest. Clare's superiors aren't entirely unselfish in offering her this assistance; she's the only priest in the area who's liberal enough to accept a trans woman as an intern.

Spencer-Fleming cuts back and forth among the three murder investigations very effectively, and the lead officers on the earlier cases are sharply drawn characters, especially given the limited number of pages she has to work with for each of them. There are also effective subplots for a couple of the other officers on the (current) Millers Kill police force, one of which leads to the novel's coda, setting up the next volume.

This is one of the best series going, and I am always happy to see a new Spencer-Fleming novel. Don't know how it took me so long to get around to reading this one, but I'm glad I finally got to it; it's a terrific book.

I really do enjoy your reviews, even when it’s not my kind of book. Great review

>70 dchaikin: Thank you!

14: Sleep With Slander, Dolores Hitchens

(RandomKit: rescue/escape; BingoDog: set in a city)

Originally published in 1960, this is the second of Hitchens's two novels featuring Los Angeles private eye Jim Sader.

Sader is hired by Hale Gibbings, a prominent architect, who asks him to find the grandson he forced his unwed daughter to give up for adoption five years ago. Gibbings has recently received an anonymous letter telling him that the boy's adoptive parents have died, and that the child is being badly abused by the people who have taken him in. Gibbings certainly doesn't want to take the child into his own family, because that would be more socially embarrassing than he could handle. But even if it's only to confirm or disprove the abuse, he wants the child found.

The story Hitchens spins from that premise isn't breaking any new ground in private eye novels, even by 1960 standards, but it's entertaining. Suspects and supporting players are given enough depth to be more than merely functional; there's an appropriate level of tension and peril; and Sader is a sturdy enough, albeit somewhat bland, central character.

For those averse to child-in-peril stories, the only scene in the book in which we actually see any abuse is a brief prologue of 2 or 3 pages which focuses more on his terror than on the violence. It's not gratuitous, and given the ambiguity that is a part of private eye stories -- Is the client telling the truth? Is the danger real? -- I think that scene is essential to ground the reader in the fact that there really is a child at risk.

Hitchens published more than 40 novels, under a variety of pseudonyms, between 1938 and 1973. Based solely on this book, I wouldn't argue that she's been unjustly forgotten by history. But it's a modestly entertaining, thoroughly professional book, and I can understand why she was as successful as she was in her time.

>72 KeithChaffee: Very interesting review. I don't think I've ever heard of Hitchens before. I'll give this a try.

15: You Only Call When You're in Trouble, Stephen McCauley

We follow three members of a family, each at a moment of crisis.

Dorothy has spent thirty years bouncing from one potential career to another, all of them eventually fizzling out. Now she's tied herself to a self-help author, with whom she plans to open a wellness/retreat center in Woodstock, New York. Yes, that Woodstock, and Dorothy is the sort who can unironically tell people how excited she is to have gotten "back to the garden."

As part of her journey to personal bettermen, Dorothy has decided to finally tell her daughter Cecily the truth about her (Cecily's) father, a bombshell that Cecily may not have time to deal with right now. She's a college professor, currently on leave while she waits for the final report of an investigation into sexual harassment charges brought against her by a student.

As they always have, both Dorothy and Cecily turn for support to Tom, who is Dorothy's brother and Cecily's uncle. He's an architect facing both personal and professional chaos: His boyfriend has just walked out, and a client has cancelled plans to build the project that he hoped would be the climax of his career. That cancellation may push him into an unwanted early retirement.

This sort of family/relationship drama is comfortable territory for McCauley. The tone is lightly comic, filled with wry observations and witty dialogue. Elinor Lipman would be a good comparison, though McCauley's humor is gentler and less rollicking.

This novel feels a bit more aimless than normal for McCauley. The plotlines never quite take off; the coincidental connections among the characters feel more unlikely, more strained than usual. And one major plotline is left dangling at the end, annoyingly unresolved.

So this isn't McCauley at his very best. But his strengths -- the precision of his character sketches, the sharpness of the dialogue, the crisp social observations -- are sufficiently present to make the novel a pleasant read, if not a truly memorable one.

16: Cocktails with George and Martha, Philip Gefter

(BingoDog: person's name in title)

A "making of" history of the film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

Gefter begins with a quick bio of playwright Edward Albee and a summary of his pre-Woolf career, and moves on to the play's Broadway success before diving into the heart of the book, the film version.

The central characters, and frequent antagonists, are director Mike Nichols and screenwriter/producer Ernest Lehman. Nichols was an unexpected choice; at this point in his career, he was known as a comic performer and a stage director of light comedy. He'd never directed a movie, and he'd never tackled material as serious or as demanding as Woolf.

But he knew what he wanted, and fought Lehman on the issues that mattered most to him -- making the movie in black and white; sticking as closely to Albee's words as possible, which meant cutting away anything Lehman had added and not cutting the oaths and obscenities.

He was working with his good friends Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the lead roles. Like everyone else, he worried that Taylor was too young to play Martha, and might not be up to the challenge. (Casting Taylor, he complained, was "like asking a chocolate milkshake to do the work of a double martini.") It was by far the most demanding role she's ever attempted, and even a more accomplished dramatic actress of her age would find it difficult to understand the disillusionment and frustration that can come after decades of marriage.

Gefter's history of the movie is entertaining. Much of it has been covered elsewhere (I would point you to Mark Harris's superb biography of Mike Nichols), but it's useful to have all of the different perspectives in one place.

I am always particularly fascinated by might-have-been casting details, so I enjoyed learning that Albee's producers hoped for Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda for the original Broadway production, and that Albee's dream pairing for the film was Bette Davis and James Mason. (Hepburn turned down the play, saying that she wasn't a good enough actress. Fonda's agent never even sent him script, thinking it was too vulgar for him; Fonda was furious when he found out, and later said that never getting to play George was one of the major disappointments of his career. Davis was apparently told, or at least believed, that she was going to make the movie, and was crushed when it went to Taylor.)

Gefter is on less solid ground in his commentary on the play as a commentary on the challenges and meaning of marriage in general. It's rarely a good idea to attempt to use an author's work as a psychoanalytic tool, and Gefter is working far too hard to find connections and correspondences between Albee's play and Albee's life.

Skim the psycho-commentary; enjoy the tick-tock.

Fantastic and fascinating review. I wonder, does one to have read Woolf to enjoy the show?

>76 dchaikin: No. The play has nothing to do with Virginia Woolf or her work, though Albee did obtain permission from Leonard Woolf, Virginia's widower, to use her name in the title. I don't think Leonard would have had any grounds to stop Albee from using the name even if he'd wanted to, but Albee wanted to extend the courtesy of asking, and Leonard had no objection. One of the plays's characters sings the words "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" to the tune of "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush" (because "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" would have been too expensive to use); the phrase becomes a metaphorical reference to the unknown terrors of the world and of life itself.

The play really is brilliant, and Nichols's film is a fine representation of it. He managed to keep the screenplay very close to Albee's play script. The film is set in one room; the movie leaves that room for a visit to a local tavern, and Albee once joked that Lehman's contribution to the script was limited to the stage directions "they go to the roadhouse" and "they return from the roadhouse."

And as worried as everyone was about Liz Taylor, through a combination of her own hard work and Nichols's genius as a director, she gave a magnificent performance (as did the rest of the cast -- Burton, George Segal, and Sandy Dennis), and her Academy Award was genuinely deserved. The movie's definitely worth seeing.

>77 KeithChaffee: I did not realize that Hepburn and Fomda were considered for those roles. Hepburn would have been great, despite what she said (would have been fun for her to play it with Peter O'toole, after the Lion in Winter) but Taylor and Burton were wonderful

I remember seeing the movie when I was really young and it scared me seeing these adults so angry. Was a while before I was able to relate to it..

>77 KeithChaffee: thanks! Hopefully I will hunt this down and find time to watch it.

As part of my odyssey through award-nominated short SF, I'll be reading a variety of individual stories from anthologies and collections that I probably won't read all of, so I'm borrowing rocketjk's useful notion of "between books" reading to report periodically on those. For this year, at last, these will probably be end-of-the-month reading, once I've finished reading the books that will complete my various category challenges for the month. I picked up five stories this month, all from the early 2000s:

"Mom and Dad at the Home Front," Sherwood Smith -- 2002 Nebula short story nominee
"Five British Dinosaurs," Michael Swanwick -- 2003 BSFA short fiction nominee
"The Best Christmas Ever," James Patrick Kelly -- 2005 Hugo short story nominee
"The Voluntary State," Christopher Rowe -- 2005 Hugo/Nebula novelette nominee; Sturgeon nominee
"The Lost Pilgrim," Gene Wolfe -- 2005 Sturgeon nominee

I liked the shorter works the best. Smith's is a sweet variation on the portal fantasy, in which a group of siblings pay visits to a magical kingdom, looking at the story from the parents' point of view. (A distant cousin to, and possible tiny influence on, Seanan Maguire's Wayward Children stories?)

Swanwick gives us five brief vignettes, tinged with absurdism, of encounters between Brits and dinosaurs. Kelly's story is about the robots who desperately try to provide a life worth living for the last man on Earth.

I confess to floundering a bit through the two longer stories. That's not unusual for Wolfe, who is somewhat notorious for being on the complex and obscure end of the scale; this one seems to be about a time traveler who is aiming for the Pilgrims and winds up instead among the ancient Greeks.

Rowe's story is part of a longer series, and might be a bit clearer if I'd read more of them. (Though perhaps not; it is the first story in the series, so I'm not missing any essential background.) It's an alternate history?/distant future? in which a small group of Kentucky guerrillas attempt to free their Tennessee neighbors from the robot overlord/governor who is controlling their thoughts.

>80 KeithChaffee: I have tried various ways to add in short stories to my reading diet, but none of the methods (Serial Reader, between books, nighttime reading) seem to last long enough to become habit. I need to keep at it.

>81 labfs39: I think one of the psychological barriers for me is that if I'm not reading an entire collection or anthology, it almost doesn't feel like reading because I can't add anything to the list of books completed. So doing it in chunks of five or six or ten, even if they're all coming from different volumes, and reporting them as a batch of "between" reading, at least gives me a way to report/record the reading, even if it doesn't tick the book counter up a notch.

>82 KeithChaffee: "So doing it in chunks of five or six or ten, even if they're all coming from different volumes, and reporting them as a batch of "between" reading, at least gives me a way to report/record the reading, even if it doesn't tick the book counter up a notch."

This is what I do, too, as most of you know. I enjoy the slow progression through the volumes, keeping track to myself when I finish a story how many more there are to go before I can add a "Finished!" next to the entry when I post a "between books" notation.

17: Ice, Amy Brady

(BingoDog: features water; HistoryCat: science and medicine)

Brady hopscotches her way through the history of ice in the United States, from the earliest attempts to deliver ice to the tropics to current research into making more energy-efficient refrigerators. The book is divided into four broad thematic sections -- early history, food & drink, sports, and the future.

The obvious topics are here -- quick histories of ice cream, figure skating, and ice sculpting; Zambonis and curling; iced tea and the first man-made ice maker. But you'll also get a report on the possible use of ice as a cancer treatment, and a marvelous chapter on Frederick Tudor, the "Ice King" who turned ice into a business at the beginning of the 19th century.

The style is breezy and accessible, in the vein of Mary Roach though lacking Roach's whimsy and humor. Like Roach, Brady has a knack for finding the telling anecdote or the strangely unanswerable question (we still can't really explain, for instance, why ice is slippery), and she's skilled at using researchers to put human faces on potentially abstract topics.

Interesting 🤔 my feet got colder just reading your review.

have you read frozen thames? If not, highly recommended (series of short stories about the people on the ice when the river freeze)

“we still can't really explain, for instance, why ice is slippery” - wait, really?

>87 dchaikin: Really. There are problems and gaps with all of the attempted explanations we’ve tried. Some of the answers that seem to make sense at near-freezing temps fall apart when it gets really cold.

>88 KeithChaffee: how, well, unexpected. (My 1st thought was, it must melt a little. But then (ok, as I processed through all those fail videos i watch on fb or whatnot) it did occur to that it probably doesn’t always melt a little…)

>89 dchaikin: That’s some of the explanation, at least some of the time. But figure skaters, hockey players, etc. are moving fast enough that the ice doesn’t have time to melt beneath them (at least, not enough to explain slipperiness) before they’re gone from that spot.

18: A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine

(SFFKit: space opera)

This is a top-notch political thriller, all the more remarkable for being a first novel.

When a small mining station receives an urgent request from the Teixcalaanli Empire to send a new ambassador, they send Mahit Dzmare. Mahit is less well prepared for the job than she should be. It's been fifteen years since her predecessor updated his imago -- a brain implant containing his consciousness -- and she hasn't been given enough time to fully integrate his memories and personality into her own psyche.

Upon arrival, she finds that the previous ambassador is dead, and though no one will say so officially, probably murdered. That shock snaps her already tenuous imago connection to his memories, and Mahit is left to make her way through Teixcalaan on her own. She's been assigned a Teixcalaanli liaison to help her acclimate to her new postion, but how much trust can she place in one of the Empire's bureaucrats, especially in a moment of political instability?

Martine gives us an exciting story, vivid characters, and a fascinating world. Teixcalaan is a society in which politics and literature are inseparable; political statements are made in poetry, packed with symbolic references and allusions to the great political poetry of the past. A Teixcalaanli diplomat practically needs a degree in literature.

It's a world so fully developed that even the background details raise intriguing questions that you want to see addressed in another book, and you know that Martine has already thought about them and has answers to all of those questions.

One of the nice things about coming to the book a few years behind everyone else is that I don't have to wait two years to read the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace. Both books won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and were nominated for the Nebula Award. Now I just have to figure out when I can squeeze it into my reading calendar.

oh our rl book group read that and I loveedit. I have not read the sequel, and I think theres actually a number 3 at this point, eventually Ill get to it

I don't see a third one yet. Martine published a novella in 2023 (Rose/House), but it's not part of the Teixcalaan series.

ok thanks

>91 KeithChaffee: Lovely review. I've been meaning to try his work, this might finally push me to start.

>95 rv1988: I look forward to hearing what you think. (Martine is a “she.”)

19: The Midnight Hour, Elly Griffiths

(AlphaDog: H; MysteryKit: historical mystery)

#6 in the Brighton Mysteries series.

I don't often dive into a mystery series midway through, and I think this one was particularly ill suited to mid-series entry. It's a sprawling series, ranging from 1950 in the first volume to 1965 in this one, with a large and growing cast of characters. The two protagonists from the first books are supporting players here, and a dense history of relationships has built up among the characters. While I could follow the basic mystery plot easily enough, I was missing a lot of character details and backstory that would have made the background part of the novel more interesting.

The series is set in Brighton, England, where Emma Holmes and Samantha Collins have recently opened a private detective agency. Emma is a former police officer, now married to Brighton police superintendent (and her former boss) Edgar Stephens. Edgar consults occasionally with his friend, Max, an actor and former magician; the two of them served during WWII as part of a team using magic and stagecraft to conduct special operations.

And at the Brighton police department, we also follow the investigation of WDC Meg Connolly. That's "Woman Detective Constable," female officers being such a novelty in 1965 that it needed to be called out in their job title.

The case they're all investigating is the murder of Bert Billington, a faded actor from the 30s/40s "variety circuit" -- roughly equivalent to American vaudeville shows -- who has become a moderately successful producer/impresario. He's been poisoned, and the principal suspect is his wife, Verity Malone, who was once a popular singer.

There are plenty of other suspects. Bert and Verity have three sons, one of whom is a heartthrob movie idol currently filming a Dracula picture with Max; there's a former housekeeper to be questioned; and Bert has a long list of disappointed showbiz rivals, jilted mistresses, and illegitimate children who might have motive.

The parallel investigations into the murder by the team of Holmes and Collins and by the Brighton police get rather muddy. It's hard to keep track of who knows what and which information has been shared with whom. (By contrast, see the Emily Brightwell novel I read last month for a demonstration of how to do this well.) With the exception of Verity, the suspects and supporting characters feel unusually flat and lifeless. And when the culprit is finally nabbed, the reveal feels entirely out of left field, mostly because a crucial piece of evidence that leads to their identification hadn't been shared with the reader.

I'm sure I'd have enjoyed this book more if I'd read previous volumes and was more at home with the characters and their history. But even that would not have made up for the blandness of the characters and the drab, mechanical way that Griffiths moves them through the story.

>96 KeithChaffee: Oops! Thanks for the correction.

>97 KeithChaffee: Great review. I see what you mean about jumping into a series midway. Have you read her other series (Ruth Galloway)? I had the same feeling as you did. It started off interesting enough, but the characters were, as you said, bland and lifeless.

>98 rv1988: No, this is the first of her books I've read. I gather that the early volumes in the series focus mostly on the "Magic Men" who use stagecraft and magic to solve crimes, which interested me. The reason I chose this volume is that I needed an H for this month's AlphaDog letters.

>97 KeithChaffee: While your review leads me to think it'll probably not be very good, the magic aspect still makes me tempted to check out the first book of the series out of curiosity.

20: Win Some, Lose Some, Mike Resnick

(AlphaKit: R; CalendarCat: author's birthday; BingoDog: short stories; award-nominated short SF: 30 stories)

From 1989 to 2012, there were only three years in which Resnick didn't have a piece of short fiction on the Hugo ballot. All 30 of his nominated stories -- more fiction nominations than any other author (*) -- are collected here, each with a pair of introductory comments from Resnick and one of his fellow SF authors, an all-star roster that begins with Gardner Dozois, Nancy Kress, Harry Turtledove, and Connie Willis.

(* -- Resnick had seven additional nominations in the categories of Best Editor and Best Related Work, a category for non-fiction about SF -- criticism, history, biography, etc. There are a few editors with more total nominations, but Resnick is the most-nominated author.)

The first half of the book is dominated by Resnick's interest in African history and culture. We get ten of the stories from his Kirinyaga series, set on a terraformed colony world planned as a Utopian society adhering strictly to the traditional customs and lifestyle of Kenya's Kikuyu people. The stories are narrated by the tribe's mundumugu -- witch doctor -- and collectively, they tell the story of his gradual understanding that no utopia can be sustained for very long.

Africa also pops up in two of Resnick's alternate history stories, "Bully!", in which Teddy Roosevelt attempts to decolonize (sort of) the Belgian Congo, and "Mwalimu in the Squared Circle," set during the 1970s Uganda-Tanzania war. (Teddy makes a second appearance in this book, solving the Jack the Ripper case in "Redchapel.")

In the second half of the book, Resnick's focus turns towards domestic relationships, with several stories featuring sad men with dead or dying wives.

A few quick words on each of the five stories that won the awards for which they were nominated:

"Kirinyaga" -- the first story in this series, in which Koriba's adherence to Kikuyu customs draws unwanted attention from the organization that manages the group of colonies of which Kirinyaga is a part.

"The Manamouki" -- Koriba is challenged by a new colonist, a young woman from Earth who objects to the colony's old-fashioned gender roles.

"Seven Years of Olduvai Gorge" -- for my money, the story most likely to endure. A look at the past and (possible) future of humanity, as seen by a group of alien archaeologists .

"The 43 Antarean Dynasties" -- A tour guide longs for his world's glorious past as he copes with ignorant human tourists; "the ugly American" on an intergalactic scale.

"Travels with My Cats" -- A man's fascination with an obscure old book leads to an unlikely romance.

That story is a good example of Resnick's skill for finding new twists on familiar SF themes. You've read stories about magic shops that seem to vanish and reappear at random, and stories about Frankenstein and his monster, but "Alastair Baffle's Emporium of Wonders" and "The Bride of Frankenstein" revitalize those ideas.

I would single out three other stories that I particularly liked. "For I Have Touched the Sky" is my favorite of the Kirinyaga stories; as is common in the series, it's a story in which Koriba's rigid adherence to tradition has disastrous results. "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" is an ending-world-famine story that keeps zigzagging into unexpected territory; "Down Memory Lane" is the best of the ailing-wife stories, a look at how far one man will go to avoid losing his wife to dementia.

Two of his five award-winning stories feature non-human protagonists, a bit unexpected because on the whole, Resnick is relatively uninterested in the alien. His focus is on people, and his stories are more emotional than most in the genre. If you are at all prone to tears or misty eyes, this collection is likely to take you there at least once.

I suspect that were he beginning his career today, Resnick's interest in Africa would be dismissed as cultural appropriation. I have no particular expertise, but Resnick seems to me in these stories to be always respectful, and to have done his homework; even where Korabi's values and traditions differ most dramatically from contemporary America, Resnick's presentation of those traditions is never unkind or condescending.

Resnick's prose is never flashy, but always well crafted and a pleasure to read. Characters are given depth and personality, even in the shortest stories; plots are clever and thoughtful. He comfortably handles a wide range of style and tone, from the safari adventure story "Hunting the Snark" to the rom-com-ish "Distant Replay."

There's nothing experimental or avant-garde here. Resnick wrote straight-down-the-middle mainstream SF, and wrote it as well as anyone of his generation. A fine collection of his best work.

>101 KeithChaffee: ok I have not heard of him at all, very interested in his interest in African culture. "If you are at all prone to tears or misty eyes, this collection is likely to take you there at least once." Looks good!

>102 cindydavid4: If the Africa stuff particularly interests you, and you're not sure you want to dive into a 600-page collection, you might start with Kirinyaga, which collects just the stories from that series.

>101 KeithChaffee: I hadn’t heard of this writer either. The collection is available as part of my Kobo subscription, so I have added it to my books.

I've read some Resnick, not recently - I've gotten the collection from the library, should be interesting.

21: American Hippo, Sarah Gailey

(RandomKit: World Wildlife Day)

In the early twentieth century, the Congress of our great nation debated a glorious plan to resolve a meat shortage in America. The idea was this: import hippos and raise them in Louisiana's bayous. The hippos would eat the ruinously invasive water hyacinth; the American people would eat the hippos; everyone would go home happy. Well, except the hippos. They'd go home eaten.

...

Reader, this is an actual, literal thing that almost happened.

That's from Gailey's prologue, and from this actual, literal thing, she has spun an alternate history story that's half Western, half heist/caper movie.

Gailey has pushed the events back in time by about half a century; her timeline appendix explains that President Buchanan signed the Hippo Bill in 1857, and the first ranches were opened later that year. Alas, in 1858, about 90 hippos escaped from a ranch, and for years after that, the area surrounding the lower Mississipi River was plagued by feral killer hippos.

The events of these two linked novellas aren't precisely dated, but it's long enough after the hippo escape that the government is ready to take drastic action to solve the feral hippo problem. The action they take is to hire Winslow Remington Houndstooth (yes, really -- Winslow Remington Houndstooth!) to assemble a team -- in modern heist parlance, we could even call it a crew -- to rid the Mississippi of its feral hippos. "River of Teeth" (a 2018 Hugo-nominated novella) tells the story of that mission; "Taste of Marrow" follows the characters through its aftermath.

Taken strictly as a goofy Western heist, this isn't bad. The action set pieces are effective, and the feral hippos are a sufficiently menacing threat; Winslow's crew are a lively bunch, and they deliver reasonably well on the banter. But the social milieu in which this book takes place is so very much NOT late 19th-century Louisiana that it's hard to focus on the actual story.

It's never entirely clear, for instance, whether the Civil War took place in this version of the US; Gailey suggests that it did in her timeline, sort of. She mentions that Lincoln's 1861 inaugural includes a promise to solve the hippo problem, but "unfortunately, some things came up."

The lack of racial tension from every character in the book would argue otherwise. Winslow's crew is multiracial and multi-gender, and no one -- even the obvious villains -- bats an eye at the Black and Latina members of the group.

Even more glaring, everyone is completely comfortable with the sexual diversity of the team. Winslow is bisexual. Con artist Archie is a woman who occasionally dresses and makes herself up as a man -- not only when it's necessary for a con, but sometimes just for the sheer recreational pleasure of it. Explosives expert Hero is Black and non-binary, and everyone refers to them using they/them pronouns as if that were a routine thing. In the late 19th century. In the deep South.

Certainly, bisexual and cross-dressing and non-binary people existed in that era, as they always have. But they weren't so casually visible, because being visible would have meant violence, ostracism, and in most cases, death. And if you're going to give me a version of America that's close enough to ours to have Presidents Buchanan, Lincoln, and Johnson, then you are obliged to explain a difference of this magnitude.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of an American society that's completely over its sexual/racial hysteria. But we don't have that society now, and we certainly didn't have it 150 years ago. And Gailey's choice to write as if we did is incredibly distracting, constantly pulling the reader out of her historical era. Maybe these characters would be able to have these relationships, with this level of openness and comfort, in 2170. They couldn't have in 1870, and the la-di-dah glibness with which Gailey ignores that fact ruined the story for me.

>106 KeithChaffee: Yes it can be extremely off putting when an author gets the culture and social setting so wrong, even if the book is meant to be a comical send up.

However what I want to know: is Hippo meat good to eat?

>107 baswood: Apparently, yes. It is said to be closest to beef in taste and texture, and not particularly gamy. There are African tribes for whom hippo was once a regular part of the diet. But it is currently illegal in all of the countries where they live to hunt hippos.

Then there's the time the military decided to import camels to be in the south west. It did not go well. inlands feature them in its story

I just read Hi, Jolly! by Jim Kjelgaard about the camels, from the POV of one of the Arab men (Hajj Ali) who came to escort and care for them. He had some complications, both before and after...but it's a good story and interesting info on the camels and how and why they weren't accepted. It's also a kid's story, about an amazingly good camel and the boy/man who partnered it - reminds me of King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry.

oh yeah thats another one I read but couldnt remember the title

22: Swords and Deviltry, Fritz Leiber

Between 1939 and 1988, Leiber wrote about three dozen stories and a novel featuring Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, a barbarian and a thief who travel together through the sword-and-sorcery world of Newhon. Those stories were eventually collected in the 7-volume "Swords" series, of which this is the first.

It opens with a brief introductory vignette, and this is how Leiber first presents his characters:

In Lankhmar on one murky night, if we can believe the runic books of Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, there met for the first time those two dubious heroes and whimsical scoundrels, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Fafhrd's origins were easy to perceive in his near seven-foot height and limber-looking ranginess, his hammered ornaments and huge longsword: he was clearly a barbarian from the Cold Waste north even of the Eight Cities and the Trollstep Mountains. The Mouser's antecedents were more cryptic and hardly to be deduced from his childlike stature, gray garb, mouseskin hood shadowing flat swart face, and deceptively dainty rapier; but somewhere about him was the suggestion of cities and the south, the dark streets and also the sun-drenched spaces. As the twain eyed each other challengingly through the murky fog lit indirectly by distant torches, they were already dimly aware that they were two long-sundered, matching fragments of a greater hero and that each had found a comrade who would outlast a thousand quests and a lifetime -- or a hundred lifetimes -- of adventuring.

Clearly, we are not in the Asimovian world of invisible narrators and transparent prose; that is a lot of style. I think of this kind of writing as "cheesecake language;" a small slice of it can be absolutely delightful, but if you take in too much in a single sitting, you're going to get a little queasy.

Beyond that brief vignette, this book contains three stories, one to introduce us to each character and one to tell the story of their first meeting. "The Snow Women" is set in Fafhrd's northern village; he is a 17-year-old caught up in a passionate romance with a visiting actress, and longing desperately to see the "civilized" world to the south. "The Unholy Grail" (1963 Hugo short story nominee) introduces the Mouser as he rescues a fair damsel from her cruel father, the Duke. And they meet in "Ill Met in Lankhmar" (1970 Hugo/Nebula novella winner) when they independently attempt to re-steal the same newly stolen goods from members of the Thieves' Guild.

"Lankhmar" is by far the best of the three, a lively comic heist caper. While it's written relatively late in the series, it makes a fine introduction to the characters. They come vividly to life as individuals, and the relationship between them is instantly understood.

There is a plot turn that I feel obliged to mention, even though it's a bit of a spoiler. The women the two men meet in their opening solo tales both die in "Lankhmar." It's impossible, of course, to know what Leiber was thinking when he made this choice, but coming to the story a half-century later, it feels a bit defensive. If you're going to spend fifty years writing a series about two male best friends who travel the world together, then by god you'd better give each of them a tragic love story to explain why neither of them ever shows much interest in settling down to romance and family, or people might think they're (gasp!) homosexual!

A few more of the Fafhrd/Mouser stories will pop up on my SF awards journey. This sort of fantasy isn't generally my cup of tea, and I wouldn't want to read another full book of this prose all at once, but as an occasional story or two, I can imagine enjoying more of this quite a lot.

>112 KeithChaffee: I recently read his 1951 novel Gather, Darkness which was a mixture of sword and sorcery and science fiction. I am not sure I would want to venture into the world of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser too often.

The March "between books" report is a short one, with just two stories:

"Red as Blood," Tanith Lee -- 1980 Nebula short story nominee
"Slow Communication," Dominique Dickey -- 2023 Sturgeon nominee

"Red as Blood" is a Snow White riff with a layer of explicit religion thrown in; the stepmother/witch (they're the same woman in this version) believes the Snow White character to be a demon. Prose is far too florid for my taste, but it does create a very precise mood.

"Slow Communication" is one of about 20 stories from my SF awards list that I can most easily access as a podcast episode, so I listened to it instead of reading it. I am decidedly not an audiobook person -- even as a child, as soon as I could read for myself, I didn't want to be read to -- so this is not my favorite way of taking in fiction, but we completists must suffer for our devotion! It's an OK story, though I wouldn't have thought it particularly deserving of awards. The main character is 17-year-old Darla, who's preparing to take part in a centuries-old family ritual, and without giving too much away, today turned out to be a particularly appropriate day to listen to this one.

On to the April challenges!

>106 KeithChaffee: You had me at "feral killer hippos". This sounds like so much fun, even keeping in mind your reservations about the author's worldbuilding.
>112 KeithChaffee: This sounds very interesting. I've never read the author before. On my list!

>115 rv1988: There are certainly a lot of options, and genres, to explore with Leiber, and he was highly regarded in most of them. He received the Lifetime Achievement awards from both the World Fantasy Convention and the Horror Writers Association, and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. His most enduring novels are Conjure Wife, The Big Time, and Our Lady of Darkness, which are horror, SF, and fantasy, respectively.

23: The Regional Office Is Under Attack!, Manuel Gonzales

(AlphaKit: O and U; BingoDog: warriors or mercenaries)

Somewhere in New York, in an underground lair beneath a highly exclusive travel agency that serves as its cover, there is an organization known as The Regional Office. Most of the travel agency employees don't know it's there, and certainly don't know what their employer's real business is.

But if you happen to make your way from the Morrison World Travel Concern to a particular elevator, you will be taken nearly a mile underground, and when the elevator doors open, you will see written on the wall:

The Regional Office: uniquely positioned to Empower and Strengthen otherwise troubled or at-risk Young Women to act as a Barrier of last resort between the survival of the Planet and the amassing Forces of Darkness that Threaten, at nearly every turn, to Destroy It.

Yes, it's another top-secret organization of secret agents, all of them female, devoted to saving the world from an array of horrifying (and, it is suggested, probably supernatural) threats. And it is at the Regional Office that Gonzales begins his story, very much in medias res, as a team of agents -- again, all women -- prepares to attack and (they hope) to destroy the Office.

It's a structurally complicated book. We begin with two central characters. Rose is heading the assault team, and Sarah is forced to rally her co-workers in defense, a task for which she is only partially prepared. Not only do we alternate between those two points of view, but we are also alternating for each of them between the day of the attack and flashback chapters which fill in their backstories.

And the first third of the book, when the focus is on the attack itself, is terrific stuff. Rose and Sarah are vivid characters, and Gonzales writes action scenes that mix thrills and comedy in unexpected ways. An "interlude" chapter called "The Hostage Situation" is a particular delight, following a half-dozen of the men who work in the travel agency and have somehow gotten caught up in a battle they cannot begin to make sense of.

But as the book goes on, Gonzales keeps piling on characters and backstories and complications -- as if all of the flashbacks weren't enough, there's eventually a flashforward to ten years later -- and it all begins to crumble under its own weight.

Gonzales has done a thorough and complex job of world-building. He hints at characters and story lines which could make marvelous books in their own right. I would happily read a novel about Oyemi and Mr. Niles founding the Regional Office, or about Henry's work as the head of recruitment, or a collection of stories about the Office's great operatives and their most daring missions.

The problem is that Gonzales has tried to stuff all of those stories into one book, which gives none of them the room they need to breathe. Everything feels rushed and incomplete; things that ought to be entire chapters are crammed into single sentences.

And with insufficient time to tell any of the stories he wants to tell within his particular fictional corner of the world, Gonzales can't pay any attention at all to the world outside the Regional Office. Does the greater world know of all the threats from which the Office's operatives have saved it? Who was fighting off those threats before the Office? What connection, if any, does the Office have to the world's governments? Without a broader context, the Regional Office feels too hermetically sealed and insulated from reality, and that winds up reducing the stakes. Who's going to know about, or care about, whether the attack on the Office succeeds or fails? How is the world going to be changed by the result?

To be sure, there are worse authorial sins than too much ambition. Better a writer should attempt too much than be content to lazily coast on formulaic tropes and formulas. And even as the storytelling and plotting get more and more convoluted, Gonzales's prose is always fun to read. I will be curious to see what he does next, and I hope that he will learn a bit of restraint to go along with his unbridled energy and creativity.

>117 KeithChaffee: I'd wondered about that book. I really enjoyed his book of short stories and it sounds like he might be better just tackling one great idea at a time.

At the beginning of this reading year, I decided to attempt a massive dive into the Category Challenges. At the beginning of my thread in that group, I said this:

It remains to be seen whether I'll find this an entertaining way to structure my reading, or whether I'll be frustrated by May over all of the other books I'd like to read and haven't gotten to because they don't fit any category. But it will be an interesting experiment.

And it turns out it only took until April for the frustration to kick in.

So, I'm backing off a bit from the mega-dive into the Cats and Kits. I'm leaving CalendarCat, HistoryCat, and RandomKit behind; I will continue to work on AlphaKit, MysteryKit, SFFKit, and BingoDog.

The mega-dive meant that more than half of my monthly reading was stuff that I was reading to fill a challenge slot, and some of that was being read ONLY to fill a challenge, not because I was terribly interested in it. Cutting back means that even the challenge books will be books that I want to read, and I'll have time each month to read two or three books that don't fit any challenge at all.

I'm on the calendar to host a month in both CalendarCat and HistoryCat, and of course, I plan to keep to those commitments. But I have found that I need a little bit more room for spontaneity and random pleasure in my reading.

It was, indeed, an interesting experiment, and I've learned something about myself in the process. And who could want more from any experiment than that?

>119 KeithChaffee: the 'spontaneity and random pleasure ' is what has kept me from those challenges, I did do the classic one last year but that was enough. With RRT and RG and nonfiction and monthy authors I have enough challenges and in those I can pick and chose my invovlment so theres room for something I read for me

>119 KeithChaffee: I did the Asia Challenge two years ago and the Africa Challenge last year. They had different country challenges for each month. Although I'm glad I participated as I learned a LOT, I am very much enjoying my serendipitous reading this year.

>112 KeithChaffee: i was very charmed by the introduction of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

As much as structure my reading, I can’t take reading challenges. Something about following some external structure bothers me a lot.

>122 dchaikin: And yet you are the most structured reader I know!

Hee really! but his reads are not like our challenges here; they are his own, which works much better

>106 KeithChaffee: I can see why that didn't work for you. I would probably have trouble with the absence of bigotries in that setting, as well, but I can see why some queer people might appreciate being able to read a book like this without having to deal with or encounter it.

I've read one book by Sarah Gailey - Magic for Liars - and I quite enjoyed it. It's set in the modern day, and I don't remember encountering any of the issues that you described, though it's been a while.

24: Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties, Foster Hirsch

(BingoDog: only the title and author's name on the cover)

In a way, this is a nonfiction parallel to the Gonzales novel I just read. Both are attempting to do too many things, none of which can be fully developed in the limited space available.

The five sections of Hirsch's book are devoted to:

1. A quick history of each major studio during the 1950s.
   
2. The major changes facing the industry, both in technology (wide screen formats, 3-D) and in the types of movies being made (foreign and arthouse cinema, exploitation films, movies about race).
   
3. The McCarthy committee and the blacklist.
   
4. The winding down of careers for the stars of earlier decades and the rise of a new generation of actors.
   
5. A quick overview of each major film genre, whether on the decline (film noir, ancient-world epics) or on the rise (science fiction).
   

Any one of those could be the subject of a large book; most of them already have been. Heck, any of the chapters on individual studios could easily be expanded to book length. And all of them feel cramped here, even in a 640-page book.

Hirsch is at his best when he's talking about the movies themselves. He is remembering his own childhood at the cinema, and his youthful enthusiasm for some movies occasionally overwhelms his more maturely developed critical sense. But he is sharply aware of the ways in which the world has changed since the 1950s, and does a fine job of balancing awareness of (and cautionary notes about) the aspects of some movies that seem unenlightened by modern standards, with an insistence that we still have to be able to appreciate the technical and artistic merits of those movies. He argues that while we should certainly be aware of the sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. (and etc. and etc. and etc.) of older movies, we should not overly punish them for failing to live up to standards that did not apply when they were made.

As far as which movies get discussed, Hirsch is content mostly to skim the surface, focusing mostly on the acknowledged classics and only occasionally digging deeper in search of the unjustly forgotten or undervalued titles. That's a shame, because the few passages in which he does bring an obscurity to light are among the book's highlights, and I would have enjoyed more of them.

Ultimately, I can't recommend this one. There are better books available on virtually every subject Hirsch deals with, and you'd be better served by those longer and more focused examinations than by Hirsch's rapid-fire scattershot approach.

25: A Man Lay Dead, Ngaio Marsh

(MysteryKit: series)

First volume of 32 in Marsh's series about Scotland Yard's Roderick Alleyn. Originally published in 1934; the series ran until 1982.

Our setting is Frantock, the country estate of Sir Hubert Handesley, who is well known for his delightful week-end parties. Yes, "week-end;" that's how long ago the book was written. This time, he's invited a half-dozen guests to play the trendy new game of Murders, in which one guest is secretly chosen as the "murderer," who must "kill" another guest, with everyone else tasked to solve the "crime."

But when the lights go out and the gong is sounded to signal that the victim has been chosen and the game is afoot, the guests are horrified to discover that one of them has been killed for real. Enter Chief Inspector-Detective Alleyn, who sets about solving the murder with efficient charm and a dry sense of humor.

The prose is somewhat formal, but not at all stiff or stilted; if you didn't know it was 90 years old, it could pass pretty well for contemporary. The novel is relatively free of the era's toxic social attitudes. One of the female characters is very much a Fragile Flower, but others dead with the stress just as well as the men do, so her frailty comes across as an individual character choice rather than as a grand statement about gender roles writ large. If any particular group comes off poorly, it's Russians, but the book's Russian characters are, after all, involved in organized crime, and one doesn't expect members of such groups to be portrayed with much sympathy.

The plot gets a bit overstuffed in the final chapters, and Alleyn seems unusually willing to turn some of his suspects into assistant crime-solvers, giving them large and intricate roles in the denouement. But my goodness, this was a fun read, and I can easily understand why Marsh remains popular after all of these years. (I read this book in a 2011 edition from Felony & Mayhem Press, who reprinted the entire series.) I will certainly return to this series.

Another batch of between-book stories from the SF awards lists:

"The Piper's Son," Lewis Padgett -- 1946 Hugo novelette nominee
"Goldfish Bowl," Anson MacDonald (pseudonym of Robert A. Heinlein) -- 1943 Hugo novelette nominee
"First Contact," Murray Leinster -- 1946 Hugo novelette winner
"Killdozer!," Theodore Sturgeon -- 1945 Hugo novella winner

Sturgeon's story has a rather silly premise -- a small group of construction workers are trapped on a small island with a killer bulldozer -- but he justifies it as well as anyone can justify such a thing, and the story does a fine job of building tension.

The MacDonald/Heinlein story is minor Heinlein, asking "What if the aliens are so far advanced that they don't even see us as worth their bother?" with a ham-fisted goldfish metaphor.

Leinster's story holds up quite well. It's a particularly paranoid take on first contact, in which human and alien spaceship crews both fear that the other will take military advantage of whatever knowledge they might gain from the meeting, and the solution to that problem is clever.

My favorite of this bunch, though, is Padgett's post-nuclear-war story. Humanity wasn't wiped out by the bombs, but the mutations caused by the fallout have created a new race of telepaths, most of whom are trying very hard to blend in and not cause trouble with the large mass of non-telepaths, who fear and distrust them. It's a cautionary tale about the apparent inevitability of tribalism and resentment when people are divided into groups.

26: The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF, edited by Mike Ashley

(SFFKit: time travel)

2013 collection of 25 time travel stories. In his introduction, Ashley says that his focus was on recent fiction, mostly from within the last twenty years, and that he chose to focus on stories that had not been widely reprinted elsewhere. (If the "SF" in the title feels redundant to you, it's there to distinguish this from The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance.)

It's a strong batch of stories, and Ashley has done a smart job of gathering a variety of different approaches to the topic. You've got time loops, paradoxes, romances both happy and tragic, "protect the timeline" warriors, changes to historical timelines -- you name the time travel trope, and it's in here somewhere.

To pick out a few of my favorites:

"Time Gypsy," Ellen Klages -- a post-doctoral student is sent back forty years to find a lost research paper that will advance her field of study.

"Real Time," Lawrence Watt-Evans -- a taut, noir-ish "protect the timeline" miniature (only 5 pages long) with a beautifully sharp ending.

"In the Beginning, Nothing Lasts...," Mike Strahan -- living life in reverse does strange things to our idea of memory; a wrenching story involving abusive relationships.

"Palely Loitering," Christopher Priest -- set in the future, but the prose style is somewhat retro, vaguely Victorian, maybe? One of those Heinlein-esque stories in which the protagonist looks around at seven other people, only one of whom isn't himself, but this time it's a romance.

"Red Letter Day," Kristine Kathryn Rusch -- receiving a message from your future self is going to be an emotional event. NOT receiving one might be even harder.

The Klages and Priest stories are two of the nine SF award nominees in this book, and while I would never mistake award status for an infallible sign of quality, it at least suggests that these were stories that had a significant impact on the genre.

If you're going to read only one time travel anthology, this shouldn't be your first stop; that would be The Time Traveler's Almanac, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer. But this is a fine supplemental volume if you find yourself wanting more, and the two volumes share only four stories (the Klages and Rusch stories; Robert Silverberg's excellent romantic triangle "Needle in a Timestack," and David I. Masson's "Traveler's Rest," a time-war story that I thought was one of the few clunkers in either book).

I have read Vandemeers worked and liked it. Glad to hear there were just a few repeats in this one. Definitely worth seeking out ETA $2 on kindler. Im on it!

now reading the truth about weena which Im really liking it

Glad you're enjoying it! I look forward to hearing which stories you enjoyed most.

well I liked it, but was surprised the ending wasnt darker. Not that Im complaining about a happy ending, and it was interesting neverthe less

Ive read another take on time machine time shipsthat I thought very good; goes back to the dinosaurs and out to the far stretches of the universe.

I wonder if Try and Change the Past was the basis to one of my fave time travel novels this is how you lose the time wars as well as one day all this will be yours

thought scream quietly was good, and Darwins Suitcase unsettling; if there was time travel, those with agendas would be out after those they hate, hopefully the past really cannot be changed in time travel

more to come

>134 cindydavid4: "I wonder if Try and Change the Past was the basis to one of my fave time travel novels this is how you lose the time wars as well as one day all this will be yours"

There's probably at least an indirect connection. Leiber's Change War series in the 1950s was one of the earliest set of time-war stories. In a sense, that entire subgenre derives from, or is at least inspired by, Leiber's work.

Have you read the series? if so what did you think of it?

No, I haven’t.

ok, I may give it a shot

DNF: Raw Dog, Jamie Loftus.

I was expecting/hoping for a history of the hot dog and its place in American culture, and there was some of that here. (A chapter on the Nathan's 4th of July hot dog eating contest is the highlight of what I got through.) But mostly, this is a cross-country road trip, as Loftus and her unnamed boyfriend stop at every hot dog stand they can find.

Now, I like hot dogs, but they are not the most exciting food. It would take a gifted food writer to present 50 variations on "and then I ate another hot dog" and make them interesting. Loftus is not that food writer.

In fact, she's not a food writer at all. She's a TV writer and a stand-up comic, and this book is written with those rhythms, which are wearying at this length. There's a reason that the average stand-up set isn't 300 pages long.

>139 KeithChaffee: Ha, had to laugh at your review.

women on the brink of a catacysm was quite a wild ride and funny to boot. Looks like the author has her own collection of time travel stories bad timing I may try it

27: Crochet Stitch Dictionary, Sarah Hazell

(Bingo: area of specific knowledge)

Hazell presents 200 pattern stitches, organized in broad groups -- fans and shells, puffs and bobbles, spikes, etc. Each has a color photo of a swatch worked in that stitch and instructions, both in text and in symbol charts, with closeup photos of hands, hook, and yarn working key steps in the stitch. Where appropriate, she also includes advice on which types or colors of yarn are most suitable ("best in lighter colors in order not to lose stitch definition"), and the sort of projects the stitch is best suited for ("drapes well; would be effective for garments"). I have only two small problems with the book: The text is quite small and faint, and it's nearly impossible to make the book lie open so that you can easily refer to the pattern you're working. As a practical matter, probably easier to make a photocopy of the page you need and work from that.

As for "specific knowledge," I've been crocheting for nearly 50 years now, and I like to think I've gotten pretty good at it. As I have more time to crochet in retirement, I'm slowly beginning to be interested in designing, even if on a very basic level. Can I make myself a decent sweater that fits, for instance? So as I look through this collection of stitches, I find myself thinking, "that would make a pretty scarf" or "too lacy for me, but could be an interesting sweater for someone else." And I am now very curious about tackling beaded crochet, which I've never done. (Hmmm... I've been trying to figure out a way to translate the temperature blanket idea into a sweater; maybe a selection of lightweight beads in a range of colors would work?)

I feel slightly silly counting this as "reading a book." It's more of a reference source, heavy on photos and illustrations with limited text. But what the heck, it's a bunch of pages between covers and it's got an ISBN: it's a book.

>142 KeithChaffee: It's definitely a book. I never learned to crochet, although I can knit and cross-stitch, and tried quilting. There is something soothing about making something with my hands. I recently made a matching scarf set for my four year old niece and her stuffed lamb and a hat for my seven year old niece. It was the first time I had made anything in a long time.

used to embroider quite a bit, till my eyes got worse and it just got too hard. My aunt taught me how to knit when I was a kid, and I ended up making a very crooked itchy scarf so that ended that , and yeah a reference book is a book, count it!

>142 KeithChaffee: Of course it’s a book. Whenever I get interested in something, be it practical or intellectual, I have to read at least one book on the subject. Usually several. Even if these days, most of the information can be found on the net.

In a rare occurrence, I happen to be caught up with all of my regular podcasts, so my listening for today's walk around the neighborhood was a "between books" SF story in podcast form. Chaz Brenchley's "Terminal" (2008 BSFA nominee) isn't much of a story, really. It's more an exercise in world-building, the creation of a background against which an interesting story might be told. But as such, it held my interest well enough.

28: Death from a Top Hat, Clayton Rawson

(MysteryKit: Golden Age mysteries)

The first of four novels Rawson wrote between 1938 and 1942 featuring the amateur detective The Great Merlini, a stage magician who runs a magic shop in New York. He returned to the character for a dozen short stories over the next thirty years, most of them published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, many of them originally published without the solution as a contest for the readers.

The Merlini mysteries are usually built around some aspect of magic, and most of them are locked-room mysteries. In this one, the police turn to Merlini for advice when a magician is found strangled inside his locked apartment, hoping that he might explain how the killer could have left the room. Because magicians tend to hang out with other magicians -- can't talk shop and trade secrets with civilians, after all -- the field of suspects is made up of other magicians (with the odd mentalist and ventriloquist thrown in for good measure), and Merlini knows them all reasonably well.

I enjoyed this book a lot. The suspects are a colorful group; the relationship among Merlini, the policeman leading the investigation, and the reporter who stumbles across the body (and narrates the story) is entertaining; and the solution is clever. I have reservations about one specific aspect of the solution, which relies on an aspect of stagecraft that I think is largely hokum, and (even viewed in the most generous light) is far too unreliable for a would-be murderer to rely on, but that's a small objection.

And it is worth noting that this novel is significantly less plagued by awkward social attitudes and bigotry than many from this era. There aren't more than a half dozen moments in the book that are uncomfortable by modern standards, and even those are relatively mild. They are phrases that we wouldn't feel comfortable using today, but they aren't used with hostile or derogatory intent.

Almost all of Rawson's writing is in print today, including a separate series of stories about Don Diavolo, another magician, originally published under the name "Stuart Towne." I look forward to reading more of his work.

>129 KeithChaffee: I've just finished The Time Traveler's Almanac and Time Gypsy and Red Letter Day were two of the standout stories for me from that book too. I might consider tis for the future but I think I need a break from time travel for a while now.

>147 KeithChaffee: Noting this one, I'm always up for a mystery featuring a magician, especially a golden age one.

29: The Engines of God, Jack McDevitt

(SFFKit: archaeology)

First of eight novels featuring spaceship pilot Priscilla Hutchins, who usually winds up flying people to and from the exploration of various space artifacts.

This story is built largely around The Monuments, a group of about a dozen large carvings and statues found scattered throughout the galaxy. They are tens of thousands of years old, and we know practically nothing about who created them or why.

A group of archaeologists exploring the relics of the now-extinct civilization on the planet Quraqua are surprised to discover evidence that Quraqua may be connected to the making of the monuments. Investigating the newly uncovered sites could take years.

But they don't have years, because humanity, desperate to find a possible new home now that Earth is on the verge of being climate-changed to death (*), is about to start terraforming Quraqua, which will destroy the archeaological sites, and the companies responsible for that terraforming refuse to delay.

(* -- This novel was published in 1994, and is set in the early 23rd century; things have deteriorated so badly in only thirty years that McDevitt now looks wildly optimistic about how much time we'd have left before we completely trashed the planet.)

That conflict between archaeologists and terraformers could easily provide enough material for an entire novel. Here, it's only the beginning, as McDevitt spins the fallout into a much vaster story that takes place on and around multiple planets. The mystery of the Monuments is solved (at least partially) in a way that raises new questions and potential plotlines for later novels in the series.

If anything, the book is perhaps too overstuffed. Some of the action feels rushed -- the last act of the book is another "this could be a whole novel" sequence -- and McDevitt is so busy cramming plot into the book that the characters don't always get enough room to breathe.

I didn't enjoy this as much as McDevitt's other space archaeology series, featuring Alex Benedict, finder and seller of rare artifacts. But I liked it enough that I will eventually pick up the next Hutchins book to see where things go.

Huh. I didn't know there was one, let alone two, space archaeology series. I'll have to look for them.

30: Dictionary of Fine Distinctions, Eli Burnstein

There are a lot of almost-synonyms in English, words that are easily confused for one another. Presume and assume; venomous and poisonous; gully, gulch, and canyon; proverb, adage, and maxim -- Burnstein offers about 100 sets of such words and attempts to explain the precise differences between them.

Each entry is accompanied by what we will generously call "illustrations" by New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck, who appears to have outsourced the job to a talented 10-year-old. They take up a large amount of the pages, which are already pretty well padded with large type and generous margins. The result is a 208-page book that could be usefully condensed to a six-page appendix at the end of a more complete usage/grammar guide.

Not recommended.

31: Burn, Patrick Ness

(AlphaDog: N and P)

Alternate history/fantasy at the highest level.

Our setting is rural Washington in a 1957 very much like our own, where high-schooler Sarah Dewhurst is waiting with her father in a parking lot to meet the laborer he is hiring to clear some fields -- a dragon.

And that's the big "not our world" difference. Dragons and humanity co-exist, and they've been at peace for 200 years or so. It's a somewhat uneasy peace, and neither species much trusts the other, but there's not a recorded case of a dragon killing a human in centuries. (For a human to kill a dragon would require so precise a blow that it's not thought of as a practical possibility.)

Ness quickly sets up multiple plotlines, hopping from one POV character to another. Sarah's father warns her to stay away from the dragon, who he says cannot be trusted. At school and in their small village, she's dealing with racism -- her late mother was African-American, and her best friend is a Japanese-American boy who spent his early childhood in an internment camp -- especially from a viciously bigoted deputy sheriff.

Meanwhile, north of the Canadian border, a teenaged assassin is making his way to Sarah's town. He's being sent by the Believers, a dragon-worshipping cult; they believe that a great war is about to begin. It's not quite clear who Malcolm is meant to kill, or whether he thinks that killing will start the war or prevent it. He's being pursued by American Federal agents, one of them a former Believer, who are working in Canada without the knowledge of permission of the Canadian government.

The story takes a sharp detour midway through, adding even more characters and dialing the already apocalyptic stakes up a few notches. It's a wild narrative choice, and I spent most of the second half of the novel frantically turning the pages while thinking "how on earth is he making this work?"

Because he does make this work. The story is clever and thrilling, the characters are vivid and well-rounded (*), the mythology and backstory he creates for his dragons feels plausible, and it's all just great fun to read. Ness is realistic about the bigotry his diverse cast would face -- if anything, he's maybe downplaying it -- without turning the novel into OppressionFest '57.

(* -- The biggest exception in this regard is that deputy sheriff, who never quite rises above the level of cartoon bigot. He's a third-tier supporting player, so it's not a major problem, but he is noticably the weakest character in the book.)

Dragon fantasy is very much not my thing, so I went into this one with muted expectations, even though Ness is one of my favorite authors. I needn't have worried; this is some of his best work. Like most of Ness's novels, this is written for a YA audience, but there is enough depth and complexity to the story to keep adult readers entertained.

Ooh, I loved this book.

>152 KeithChaffee: You make this sound so interesting. I might have to check it out.