Michael Sims (1)Recensioni

Not as good as I had hoped.

I am familiar with Charlotte's Web, but didn't know anything about the author. This talks about his love of animals and spiders. It covers his life and some of his time at the New Yorker. He spent a lot of time researching spiders before writing Charlotte's Web.

I’ve always been curious about Thoreau. I grew up near Concord and our school field trips included a jaunt to Walden Pond, now encircled by much ‘civilization’. We were brought up to think his essay “On Civil Disobedience” was some brilliant treatise, rather than an argument he shouldn’t have to pay his poll tax.
This book includes lots of little morsels of information gleaned from letters right down to how he cooked bread but really, what is it all for? I wanted to know why he decided to hang out in the woods (though those woods were really in a friend’s backyard- he was supported all his life by people and this is what makes his refusal to pay tax so enraging.)(though he did pay the highway tax because ‘he used the highways’. Absolutely no idea of funding the greater good in this man.)
All I have been able to glean from these scattered bits of bread (not compiled in any sensible way, either temporally or by subject) is that he pretty well did whatever he wanted and everyone else fed and looked after him. Not inspiring.
It was interesting to read that his father was a pencil manufacturer and the struggles that were had with making good pencils. Good honest labour that Henry joined in on occasionally (presumably when he couldn’t get out of it).
These bits and pieces of information are utterly forgettable in the way they have been arranged.
Thoreau died of Tuberculosis, as did much of his family, again an interesting nugget with which nothing was done.
The author says he wrote much of this book holding the hand of his dying mother and typing one handed. I wish he had spent the time fully with his mother (and his young child). This added nothing to my understanding of a complex and slightly bizarre man.

I recently picked up this anthology again after a hiatus of three years and finished reading it over a weekend. To be honest I can’t really explain why I had lost interest midway through it the first-time round, because this is a highly readable anthology of vampire tales.

The book’s subtitle – A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories – gives a good indication of what lies buried between its covers. I’m not too sure, however, whether it is helpful to describe the works within as “Victorian”, which suggests that the stories are exclusively by English authors of (more or less) the 19th Century. Although the Victorian era is the main source for the material in this anthology, editor Michael Sims casts his net much wider. He starts, for instance with two accounts of purportedly real-life vampiric manifestations, by 18th Century French authors Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d’Argens and Antoine Augustin Calmet. There follow Lord Byron’s “The End of My Journey” and Polidori’s “The Vampire”, generally considered the prototypes of English vampire fiction. Again, they precede the Victorian era. On the other hand, M.R. James’s classic story “Count Magnus” and Alice and Claude Askew’s “Aylmer Vance and the Vampire” are probably too late to be considered “Victorian”.

Alongside British authors, Sims includes works by Continental (Johann Ludwig Tieck, Gautier, Aleksei Tolstoy) and American (Mary E. Wilkins Freeman) authors. For greater variety, the anthology also features “vampires” of a figurative nature – indeed, whilst all tales feature the supernatural, some of the ‘monsters’ within are not always of the bloodsucking type.

As for this being a “connoisseur’s collection”, I would say that this is a fair description. Editor Michael Sims cannily mixes the familiar with unfamiliar, with works by established authors of horror fiction (Bram Stoker, M.R. James) sitting alongside lesser-known pieces – such as an extract from Emily Gerard’s retellings of Transylvanian lore, which would exert a marked influence on Stoker’s Dracula. This should make this volume attractive both to newcomers to the genre and to more seasoned vampire buffs. A foreword to the collection and a brief biographical introduction to each story completes a captivating anthology.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2019/12/dracula-connoisseurs-collection-victo...

I appreciated reading this focused biography of EB. The author's research went beyond merely reading White's essays and stories and this effort shows through.

One question I would have liked to have had answered was this: why didn't Charlotte's Web win the Newbery for that year?

Not as good as I had hoped.

I really enjoyed listening to this collection. It was the perfect kickoff to my fall reading. Like all collections there are stories that you like and some that you love. That is a matter of personal choice. The narrator was good. If you are looking for some good stories for Halloween without the sex and guts that so many books have now, give this a try. I always suggest getting a sample from the electric version, and listening to a sample of narration, if you are uncertain a book is for you.

Up front, I didn't read all the stories; there are 22 stories in this collection, and I didn't have time to read the whole thing, so this review only represents a small percentage of them.

But, of the stories I read, none of them were bad. In fact, they were all uniformly excellent and I'm looking forward to reading more of the collection at a later date.

Quick thoughts about each of the stories I read:

The Secret Cell by William E. Burton - The story itself is not only great, but so is its backstory: Burton, the author, wrote it in 1837, before Poe wrote what is widely regarded to be the first detective story, Murders in the Rue Morgue. He wrote it for the magazine he himself founded, The Gentleman's Magazine, and the editor he hired was a certain Edgar Allan Poe (who published Rue in 1841. While Dupin's standing as the first genius detective is safe, it's likely Poe read this story; whether or not it served as an inspiration can only be guessed at. But it's a fun story with strong writing, lots of detective legwork, fisticuffs, disguises, abductions, nuns, asylums and hidden rooms.

On Duty with Inspector Field by Charles Dickens - Dickens and I are fair weather friends at best, but for downright vivid descriptions of poverty-stricken Victorian London, I'm not sure you could find better. Not really much of a plot to this one at all - just a 'tour' through the dregs of London in the middle of the night as the police go about their rounds. This story does not disprove my suspicions that Dickens was paid by the word.

The Diary of Anne Rodway by Wilkie Collins - As the title suggests, this story takes the form of diary entries, but the narrative is very smooth. There's a real mystery here and it's engaging, but the solution felt somewhat abrupt and the coincidences verging on supernatural (a device, I'm guessing, Collins enjoyed using).

You Are Not Human, Monsieur D'Artagnan by Alexandre Dumas, pere - This is an except from the final Three Musketeers book, The Vicomte de Bragelonne, but it feels fairly complete as it stands alone, even to a reader for whom the general story of the Three Musketeers comes strictly from the movies and popular culture. In this short piece D'Artagnan plays the part of Sherlock Holmes as he uses sharp observations, empirical evidence and genius detecting to shed light on a shooting.

The Dead Witness; or, The Bush Waterhole by W.W. (Mary Fortune) - I didn't set out to read this one, but as I was flipping through, a mention of Australia caught my eye, so I stopped. Turns out this is the first known detective story ever written by a woman. Fortune was a prolific writer in Australia, although sexism being what it was, she was forced to write under a pseudonym kept so tight a secret that no one knew Mary Fortune was W.W. until decades after her death. Her life was not a happy one, but it was not for want of talent if this story is any judge. It's a short one, but it's vivid and well written and the end, while a bit fantastic, is also deliciously grotesque.

The Assassin's Natal Autograph by Mark Twain - Another except, this one from Puddin' Head Wilson. This one is slightly harder to follow, as there are characters named that are obviously important, but missing any backstory at all, but in most aspects it works really well. It's Twain, so the setting (a courtroom) is full of detail and suspense; the focus of the scene is the power of fingerprints and the denouement, even without the backstory is climatic.

The Stolen Cigar-Case by Bret Harte - Another one that caught my eye, this time because I saw "Sherlock Holmes" in the introduction. This is a parody of the Greatest Detective of all time, as well as a parody of his long suffering Watson. It started off hilarious - laugh out loud funny - but by midway, it felt a bit hateful. Parodies are supposed to mock, but reading this one gets the impression that Harte really hated Watson and Holmes both.

An Intangible Clue by Anna Katherine Green - The author of the first known detective novel by a woman (Mary Fortune, above, wrote only short stories) and the author of The Leavenworth Case, this was my first introduction to her work and Miss Violet Strange. I hope it won't be my last; Miss Strange has claims to Sherlockian abilities in her own right, and I found the story both intricate and slyly funny. The mystery itself was complete enough, but I was left wanting more when it came to Miss Strange and her mysterious employer.

If you're a fan of the old-style detective stories, I don't think you can go wrong with this collection. They just don't write them like they used to.

I read this for BookLikes-opoly and completed a total of 202 pages.½

Great fun. Some really amusing stories, a few less so, many with a surprisingly modern sensibility.

Arthur Conan Doyle is most renowned as the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, the astute, determined and steadfast London detective whose many solved cases contribute to what we now consider the mystery genre in its infancy. Doyle's inspiration for his famously analytical protagonist came not from his own imagination but instead from a respected medical professor he studied under in Edinburgh. In this biography, author Michael Sims illustrates Doyle's life before and after his "Sherlock" fame.

I thought I initially heard about this book on the SYMHC podcast, but I'm not finding the episode now to confirm. It was interesting to learn of Doyle's background and of his desire to become a writer despite having been educated as a physician. There was one scene in which I took exception to Sims' choice of phrase, when he declared that "Arthur delivered at home their first child" — doctor notwithstanding, I'm pretty sure we know who did all of the work. Amusing side note: When the categories were released for Read Harder 2022 and the first one was "a biography of an author you admire," I was already in the middle of this book. I'm unsure about the term "admire," since I knew nothing about Doyle personally or as a writer, but I suppose I admire or respect him about as much as I do any other author, so SCORE!

I recently picked up this anthology again after a hiatus of three years and finished reading it over a weekend. To be honest I can’t really explain why I had lost interest midway through it the first-time round, because this is a highly readable anthology of vampire tales.

The book’s subtitle – A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories – gives a good indication of what lies buried between its covers. I’m not too sure, however, whether it is helpful to describe the works within as “Victorian”, which suggests that the stories are exclusively by English authors of (more or less) the 19th Century. Although the Victorian era is the main source for the material in this anthology, editor Michael Sims casts his net much wider. He starts, for instance with two accounts of purportedly real-life vampiric manifestations, by 18th Century French authors Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d’Argens and Antoine Augustin Calmet. There follow Lord Byron’s “The End of My Journey” and Polidori’s “The Vampire”, generally considered the prototypes of English vampire fiction. Again, they precede the Victorian era. On the other hand, M.R. James’s classic story “Count Magnus” and Alice and Claude Askew’s “Aylmer Vance and the Vampire” are probably too late to be considered “Victorian”.

Alongside British authors, Sims includes works by Continental (Johann Ludwig Tieck, Gautier, Aleksei Tolstoy) and American (Mary E. Wilkins Freeman) authors. For greater variety, the anthology also features “vampires” of a figurative nature – indeed, whilst all tales feature the supernatural, some of the ‘monsters’ within are not always of the bloodsucking type.

As for this being a “connoisseur’s collection”, I would say that this is a fair description. Editor Michael Sims cannily mixes the familiar with unfamiliar, with works by established authors of horror fiction (Bram Stoker, M.R. James) sitting alongside lesser-known pieces – such as an extract from Emily Gerard’s retellings of Transylvanian lore, which would exert a marked influence on Stoker’s Dracula. This should make this volume attractive both to newcomers to the genre and to more seasoned vampire buffs. A foreword to the collection and a brief biographical introduction to each story completes a captivating anthology.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2019/12/dracula-connoisseurs-collection-victo...

Rather too much detail on the influences prompting Doyle to invent the Holmes character - sometimes interesting - Riding a bicycle for two with wife Touie, who caught the train home from their outing!

Elwyn Brooks White was born into a wealthy family in Mount Vernon, N.Y. in 1899. The family lived on a small farm where E. B. (Andy) showed, even as a small child, a fascination with nature that remained throughout his life and became the basis of much of his writing including Charlotte's Web, published in 1952.

White had been a professional writer for decades before writing this book that has been loved by children and adults alike all over the world. Sims tells all of White's story though including his writing as a child, his years as a writer and contributing editor at the The New Yorker and other books he authored and co-authored. His personal life is well told too, particularly his relationship with his wife Katherine Angell, who was also at The New Yorker in it's early days.½

With his signature blend of science, history and mythology, Michael Sims journeys through time exploring the celestial events that form our day. He offers an explanation of what these events meant to humans even before we had the science to explain the why. Delightful read.½

This is an interesting biography / history of Conan Doyle’s life as a young man. The reader learns of the people and events that influenced and inspired him when he created his most famous character: Sherlock Holmes. There was the professor in medical school who had trained himself to keenly observe a patient’s demeanor, clothing, and general appearance and from those observable “clues” infer the man’s occupation, background, and even marital status. And there were the writings of Edgar Allen Poe, Wilkie Collins, Emile Gaboriau and others, on whose foundations Doyle built his own style.

I also found it interesting to learn of the publishing business in this era, and stunned to discover that Donan Doyle had to basically sell his copyright in order to get that first Holme’s mystery published.

I was a few months old when E. B. White's classic children's book Charlotte's Web was published. My First Grade teacher read the book aloud to my class. As a girl, I read it many times, and when our son was born I read it to him as well. And the older I become the more I realize the impact the story had on my life.

Knowing my esteem for the book, my son gifted me Michael's Sims book Charlotte's Web: E. B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic for Christmas. It was a lovely read, entertaining and enlightening.

White had a love of nature and animals. As a child, his family spent their summers in Maine, and in spite of his allergies, it was the highlight of the year. As an adult, he and his wife Katherine purchased a farm in Maine--with a view of Mount Cadalliac on Mt. Desert Isle across the water. My husband and I spent many summers camping at Acadia National Park! It is a beautiful area.

White admired the popular columnist Don Marquis who created the characters Archy--a cockroach--and Mehitible--a cat. White liked how Marquis kept his animal characters true to their nature while using them for social satire. Archy inspired the character of Charlotte.

I was a teen when I discovered Marquis on a friend's parent's bookshelf. I borrowed the book and later bought my own copy.

White's first children's book was the best-selling Stuart Little, illustrated by Garth Williams who was just beginning his career. Williams was established by the time he contributed his art to Charlotte's Web. He created beloved illustrations for Little Golden Books and authors like Margaret Wise Brown and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I enjoyed the details about White's writing process. He worked on the novel over a long period, carefully considering every aspect, even setting it aside for a year. He researched spiders in detail. He sketched his farm as a model. He thought carefully about what words Charlotte would spin into her web. White hated rats, and kept Templeton's nature intact without a personality change. Fern was a later addition.

Sims reproduces the text from the manuscripts with White's editing. I am always fascinated by seeing an author's edits and the development of a story.

White's name was also well known to me as it appears on The Elements of Style, which started as a pamphlet written by White's professor Strunk!

White's wife Katherine wrote a column on gardening, Onward and Upward in the Garden, which was published in a book form after her death--and which I had read upon its publication!

En los últimos años de la era victoriana, la opinión pública británica estaba fascinada —¡y preocupada!— por esa sospechosa figura conocida como la nueva mujer. Montaba en bicicleta, conducía esos peligrosos automóviles y no le gustaba en absoluto que le dijeran lo que tenía que hacer. También en la novela policiaca, estas mujeres rompían todas las reglas: en lugar de asistir a recepciones para tomar el té y conversar sobre las últimas tendencias de la moda, estas detectives pioneras preferían perseguir a un sospechoso bajo la espesa niebla de Londres, tomar ellas mismas las huellas dactilares a un cadáver o, incluso, cometer algún delito menor para así resolver un caso especialmente difícil.

Esta antología reúne por primera vez a las más grandes luchadoras contra el crimen de la época —y también a algunas selectas delincuentes—, como Loveday Brooke, Dorcas Dene o Lady Molly, predecesoras de las modernas damas del crimen. Relatos inteligentes, dinámicos y extremadamente divertidos, de mujeres que, por fortuna, se negaron a ocupar el estrecho lugar que la sociedad les tenía reservado.

So what did science fiction look like when modern science was still in its infancy? Michael Sims has put together a collection of 19th century short science fiction stories that illustrate not only the breadth and the creativity of the field prior to the turn of the 20th century, but also the creepy prescience of some of the writers (if not for strict scientific fact, then for topics that would remain scifi staples into the current day).

In this collection we find mechanical brides made to order, vicious monsters awaiting daring pilots in the upper levels of the atmosphere, superhuman senses, alternate dimensions, strange aliens, time travel, and apocalyptic plagues and disasters. The stories, which include samples from authors like Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, and Rudyard Kipling, range from chapter excerpts to short stories to stories fashioned so like news items that, War of the Worlds-style, many people accepted them as fact.

My biggest complaint is that for the bigger names in the collection, clearly selected for their name recognition to the larger public, Sims has largely chosen to include only bits of chapters from their most famous works. As someone who looks to these collections to find little known authors or stories, this was a bit frustrating. I would have preferred something a little more off the beaten path.

Fans of Victorian literature and scifi buffs should check this volume out. In these stories, we can see the seed of inspiration for a number of modern tales.

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher via Goodreads Giveaways in exchange for an honest review.

Sims' capsule introductions to the various pieces included here are to the point and well done, and there are some excellent stories here, but quite a few not-so-great ones too. If you've any interest in the topic at all, you've likely read most of the good ones elsewhere, too, which doesn't help. Nor does the use of extracts from longer works here, which didn't work well at all for me. Overall, then, a bit of a miss with this one, I'm sorry to say.

This review and others posted over at my blog.

I thought this would be right up my alley, but I almost DNF’d it. I kept on because it’s a shorts collection, so I reminded myself that even if I wasn’t enjoying one story, something by a different author would be up next.

This collection was a mixed bag for me. Most of the stories I really liked were snippets from classic novels that I would like to read someday. There were a few other true short stories that I liked, but many I found boring and/or confusing.

Here are my highlights:

Dreams of Forgotten Alchemists (from Frankenstein) by Mary Shelley – I really need to just read the novel. Honestly, when the doctor was talking I was so bored, but then the monster showed up and started to plead his case for a chance at life and then the story ended! I don’t know if that’s only part of the novel or what part, or if it was edited (because in the little note it seemed like maybe this was the first draft? I can’t recall) but I needed more! It ended just as it started to pique my interest!

Man-Bats on the Moon by Richard Adams Locke – This read like a topography lesson of the moon. I couldn’t picture nearly anything and was so utterly lost. I wanted more man-bats and less physical descriptions of the moon. I couldn’t even tell you what it’s about.

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allen Poe – This was excellent and the first Poe I’ve read since high school. It deals with mesmerism and the living dead and it was gross and creepy and puzzling and I wanted more.

A Walk on the Bottom of the Sea (from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) by Jules Verne – Yet again, a reminder that I need to read the novel. This was a chapter or two while a team is under water (hence the title) exploring. Once more, just as it started to get good, it ended.

The Senator’s Daughter by Edward Page Mitchell – This was my favorite story in the collection! There’s plenty of future tech crammed into Victorian England surrounding a story about a man who cannot be with the girl he loves because he’s foreign. Mitchell dreamed up teleportation tubes, meals in pellet form, talk boxes and even cryo tubes! I wanted this to be a full-length novel.

A Horror of the Spirit (from Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde) by Robert Louis Stevenson – This didn’t intrigue me like I thought it would and I’m hoping because it’s another snippet of the novel and not because I won’t enjoy the novel if I ever get around to it.

A Wife Manufactured to Order by Alice W. Fuller – This was a little Stepford Wives-like tale, where a man gets a wife made to his liking (out of wax…ew) and all’s well and good until her boring complacency starts to drive him nuts. I liked the idea but the ending was so convenient that it was less believable than a living wax wife.

I passed this collection on to a friend and while I didn’t love it, there were a few stories that held my interest. Maybe I wasn’t in the right mindset to absorb Victorian sci-fi – it’s not always easy to plop down and read classical writing in the way it can be to read something more modern. It at least opened my eyes to the words of Edward Page Mitchell and I’m hoping I can get my hands on more from him. If you like Victorian stories and sci-fi, Frankenstein Dreams is at least worth borrowing from the library.

I received this book for free from Bloomsbury in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. All opinions in this post are my own.½

History of Conan Doyle ending with his reaching success with the Sherlock Holmes character. Heavy on interesting facts, light on creating the story of Conan Doyle. Significant detail about Doyle's father and his illness without any particular conclusion reached. Credit given to Professor Bell for the reasoned approach to detection. Credit also given to preceding fictional detective characters. The most fascinating aspect was Doyle's apparent need to be a successful popular writer.

A great book. Sims writes astonishingly well about the early life of AC Doyle, and the difficulty in getting published in the 1880s. He writes about all of the magazines and papers that were exploding on both sides of the Atlantic.

Some interesting aspects to this book, like similarity between Holmes and Doyle's professor, Bell. Surprised that there was no mention of Doyle killing of Holmes and then resurrecting him.

Writing was a bit simple but great bio of Thoreau. Put him in context of Emerson and Hawthorne for me as well as the issues of the times.

Charming book about the extraordinary life of the author of Charlotte's Web and all that went into crafting such a wonderful book. Guess what I'll be reading next?